Corruption

• South China Sea tension mounts near Filipino shipwreck (Reuters)
• OECD cuts economic forecasts as eurozone drags on growth (FT)
• Switzerland frees banks to settle U.S. tax evasion cases (Reuters)
• U.S. Says Firm Laundered Billions (WSJ)... no, it's not HSBC, also: Free Corzine!
• Ardent conservative Bachmann to not seek re-election to Congress (Reuters)
• Russia faults U.S. over 'odious' Syria rights resolution (Reuters)

The recent collapse of a small commuter bridge in Washington has brought back memories of Minnesota. Back in August of 2007, the I-35W Mississippi bridge connecting the Downtown East and Marcy-Holmes neighborhoods plummeted to the river below like a Chinese-made sofa. Thirteen individuals lost their lives while 145 escaped with injury. The suddenness of the debacle was met with the blunt response system of the state. That is, politicians in Minnesota and elsewhere went before the public to decry the deteriorating condition of government infrastructure across the country. A flurry of taxpayer money dedicated to overhauling the nation’s bridges followed. Five years after millions in tax dollars were fleeced, allocated, and distributed to this new urgency, less than two dozen of the state’s 172 “structurally deficient” bridges have been made whole.

Corruption thrives when good people do nothing. Societies rebound when good people do something. Isn't it time to make democratic capitalism happen. Democratic capitalism is about worthwhile production and exchange by communities of people who give a damn. It is expressly not about either crony-driven concentration of wealth or government redistribution.

In this extensive interview, Bill explains why financial fraud is the most damaging type of fraud and also the hardest to prosecute. He also details how, through crony capitalism, it has become much more prevalent in our markets and political system. A warning: there's much revealed in this interview to make your blood boil. “When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it." - Frederic Bastiat

While some, we are sure, will view this brief clip as partisan showmanship by Representative Steve Pearce, the questions he asks Treasury Secretary should surely be responded to in some manner that is anything but the typical perfunctory shrug these matters normally garner. From Lew's apparent disbelief that the IRS Audits debacle was in any way 'political' to Lew's "waiting for the investigation' on Jon Corzine's misappropriation of funds, and finally to the "War on the Poor" that Pearce describes the current administration's policies (for the benefit of Wall Street); these few minutes are well worth some time as we 'remember' this weekend.

...understand the national threat that is our fragmented and perverted equity market microstructure that is driven by such esoteric order-types such a Post No Preference Blind Limit Order created through the buddy system of exchange/order volume producer.

"The world has taken on a “virtual reality” with no reference to what really is. This is the biggest market power play of smoke and mirrors in history. It is happening because the financial system is in a terminal state of broken."

Our country has entered a period of Crisis. We may or may not successfully navigate our way through the visible icebergs and more dangerous icebergs just below the surface. The similarities between the course of our country and the maiden voyage of the Titanic are eerily allegorical...

Concentrated power and wealth are intrinsically sociopathological by their very nature. We have long spoken of the dangers inherent to centralization of power and the extreme concentrations of wealth centralization inevitably creates. There is another danger of centralization: sociopaths/psychopaths excel in organizations that centralize power, and their ability to flatter, browbeat and manipulate others greases their climb to the top. In effect, centralization is tailor-made for sociopaths gaining power. Nothing infuriates a sociopath or a sociopathological organization more than the exposure of their sociopathology, and so those in power will stop at nothing to silence, discredit, criminalize or eliminate the heroic whistleblower.

The IRS routinely obtains information about how we earn a living, what investments we make, what we spend on ourselves and our families, and even what charitable and religious organizations we support. Starting next year, the IRS will be collecting personally identifiable health insurance information in order to ensure we are complying with Obamacare’s mandates. The current tax laws even give the IRS power to marginalize any educational, political, or even religious organizations whose goals, beliefs, and values are not favored by the current regime by denying those organizations “tax-free” status. This is the root of the latest scandal involving the IRS....  Considering the type of power the IRS excises over the American people, and the propensity of those who hold power to violate liberty, it is surprising we do not hear about more cases of politically-motivated IRS harassment. As the first US Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall said, “The power to tax is the power to destroy” — and who better to destroy than one’s political enemies? The very purpose of the IRS is to transfer wealth from one group to another while violating our liberties in the process, thus the only way Congress can protect our freedoms is to repeal the income tax and shutter the doors of the IRS once and for all.

• Mine union threatens to bring South Africa to 'standstill' (Reuters)
• Russia Raises Stakes in Syria (WSJ) - as reported here yesterday 
• Japan buys into US shale gas boom (FT)
• Bill Gates Retakes World’s Richest Title From Carlos Slim (BBG) - so he can afford a Tesla now?
• China Wages Rose Sharply in 2012 (WSJ)
• Regulators Target Exchanges As They Ready Record Fine (WSJ)
• Citi Takes Some Traders Off Bloomberg Chat Tool (WSJ)
• After Google, Amazon to be grilled on UK tax presence (Reuters)
• Apple CEO Cook to Propose Tax Reform for Offshore Cash (BBG)
• French, German politicians to pressure Google on tax (Reuters)
• Gold Bears Revived as Rout Resumes After Coin Rush (BBG)
• A stretched Samsung chases rival Apple's suppliers (Reuters)

Niall Ferguson recently remarked, "[Europe] is a politicial experiment gone wrong. The experiment was to see if Europeans could be forced into an even closer union - despite their wishes - by economic means, because the political means failed." In this brief clip, Lars Seier Christensen, co-CEO and co-founder of Saxo Bank, tells an audience at the Saxo #FXDebates in London that the eurozone will eventually break up as Brussels claims even more power from nation states. He warns investors that Cyprus was indeed a template for bail ins and that outright confiscatory wealth taxes, disguised as solidarity payments, could be used to raise funds. "The governments of Europe need money, and the private sector has it. It is as simple as that. Be very paranoid," he said, warning investors that the mattress may be a safer place to deposit money over the weekend than their bank accounts. "Frankly, it is a complete mess. And it is a mess that gets worse and worse every day," is how the outspoken truthiness begins, adding, "anyone with a rational view of the world now sees the currency collaboration as a historic failure that can lead to even further fatal consequences for Europe and the continent’s competitiveness vis-à-vis the rest of the world."

It was a decent run but all good things come to an end. We know China's growth is fading (even by their own official data) but below the surface data suggests things are a lot worse. Between this drop in growth and the rise in anti-corruption practices (that we discussed here) the imports of Swiss-made luxury watches has tubmled 24% in Q1 for the third quarter in a row of declines. "The corruption crackdown campaign is having a big effect on luxury watch sales, high-end watches are very common gifts and they are items that are quite conspicuous and associated as a sign of corruption." This follows the firing of Communist Party official Yang "Brother Watch" Dacai who posted images of himself wearing 11 luxury watches at different times. Two major luxury watch retailers are significantly underperforming while Swatch is improving as Hong Kong (the world's biggest importer of watches) slows dramatically. But have no fear, we are sure it will be a smooth transition.

Argentina's president Kirchner, a keen observer of recent events in Cyprus, has figured out a way to kill two birds with one stone, namely attempt to put an end to tax evasion, and fund the capex of the recently nationalized state oil company YPF (now that its former owner, Spainish Repsol, is less than keen to keep investing in its former Argentine subsidiary). To do that she will present the local tax-evading population (pretty much anyone with any disposable income and savings) with a simple choice: buy a 4% bond to fund YPF "growth" or go to prison.

There are signs that China's economy may have a short-term uptick but that shouldn't detract from what remains a poor long-term outlook.