Enron

Clearly all "bad" ideas are good again. Enron perfected the Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV) and was a master of off balance sheet guarantees. Guarantees with their own equity as collateral in many cases. SIV's are SPV's with leverage. The kind of "asset" that got Citi in huge trouble and almost took down the bank. SIV's had a special place in CDO hell, but I guess you can't keep a good idea down. Detachable insurance. So the EFSF would sell insurance that would come with a new issue bond but could be detached and sold separately? If that doesn't sound a lot like the evil enemy "CDS" than I don't know what does. The biggest detractors of CDS always seem to say it is like buying fire insurance on your neighbor's house. U never agreed with that analogy but this is definitely like buying fire insurance on a house that doesn't cover you in event of fire. The details will be interesting but they had better do as much with cash up front as possible because and ability to require cash in times of stress creates the contagion death spiral they are allegedly trying to prevent. Clearly everyone "gets it" now. What "it" is and how much damage "getting it" will cause remains to be seen.

Zero Hedge has the pleasure to bring its readers this extensive Q&A with one of the most prominent voices of "Austrian" economic sensibility, and foremost experts on capital markets and commodities: Diapason's Sean Corrigan, who has repeatedly graced our pages in the past and who always provides a much needed 'on the ground' perspective on his native Europe. Among the numerous topics discussed are the Eurozone, its collapse, its insolvent banks, and the EFSF as the Swiss Army Knife ex Machina; the 3rd year anniversary of Lehman's failure and what lessons have been learned (if any); how to fix the US economy; on Goldman's relentless attempts to intervene in, and define, US monetary policy; what the Fed's role should be (if any) in the economy and capital markets; his views on the Occupy Wall Street movement; his advice to an inexperienced 25 year old looking to make their way in the world; And lastly, the $64K question: what is the endgame. A fascinating must read.

We are still waiting to see the final form of the "Grand Plan" and what novel ways the EFSF guarantees will be applied to save the day. At the risk of sounding incredibly stupid, I have this feeling that Europe didn't actually work on any details until this past week, and Germany is suddenly realizing how bad the details are for them. Is it possible that some politicians got so caught in the moment of "saving Europe" and "fighting the speculators" that they kept promising more and more, without thinking whether they could or should deliver? You would like to think they didn't, but since none of the politicians are detail oriented, most of their contacts at investment banks are high level, former bankers, rather than traders, it is quite possible they didn't realize what they had agreed to. If some new EFSF is created, all of the future bargaining power in Europe will be shifted from France and Germany to PIIS. (it is a shame Ireland wasn't named Shamrock, it would make the acronym so much better).

While overnight markets are rocking based on continued speculation coming from some completely uncorroborated and unconfirmed source that Europe has just boldly gone where even Goldman's Abacus has not dared to go before courtesy of the ECB's acceptance of a CDO squared "Enron Special" SPV, Germany has once again made it very clear that not only will there not be any expansion in the EFSF in regular terms, but certainly not in structural ones. As Goldman's Dirk Schumacher makes it very clear, any attempts at imposing on Germany a fait accompli reality that has no bearing in actual reality (especially one that excludes the only relevant decision-maker in Europe) will be met with increasing protests from the entire German ruling class. According to Die Welt, the Free Democratic Party is threatening to vote against overhaul of EFSF if discussions about leveraging fund don’t stop. Goldman elaborates: "FDP and CSU not fond of further increase of EFSF. Leading figures from the FDP and the CSU, the Bavarian branch of the CDU, rejected any thoughts of a further increase of the EFSF (either directly or indirectly through leverage). FDP general secretary Lindner said that "the chancellor should make clear immediately that there is no change to the business model of the EFSF." So, yes, consider that an official denial of the Liesman rumor which as typical, has no confirmation anywhere else.

And now the political rags will really tear the American Jobs Act, ARRA and the administration, apart, because the Venn diagrams of Enron and Watergate just crossed and the point of intersection is called Solyndra. According to Reuters: "Solyndra LLC's chief executive and chief financial officer will invoke their Fifth Amendment rights and decline to answer any questions put to them at a Congressional hearing on Friday, according to letters from their attorneys obtained by Reuters." But, but, what do they have to hide? And how many times in the past has pleading the fifth not led to a prison sentence for someone? And, implicitly, and potentially, the commencement of impeachment hearings?

No, it's not some zombie Enron coming back from the graveyard behind Chapter 7 court. Nor is it the terrorizers. It is just some downed powerlines. However for anyone dumb enough to wish to take advantage of the chaos and immigrate: sorry, the border is running on backup generators.

For a perfect ending to a schizophrenic day we go to Reuters which has just reported that Goldman's CEO has hired high profile defense attorney Reid Weingarten. The market is not waiting to find out the details, and GS stock is tumbling. What has alos happened is that gold futures punched through $1900 for the first time ever. $2000 is the next target, and will likely be taken out within the week.

Why is printing money the best solution? Why isn't trying to pick up the pieces after some defaults, a better solution than printing. With stock futures down again already, and Jackson Hole coming up, you know we will hear Wall Street (and anyone caught long) clamoring for the Fed and ECB to PRINT more money. It seems to be the only "solution" to the debt burden too many countries are facing. I agree that it is the only way to avoid some defaults and some pain....So, we will get money printing. That to me, is dangerous, since we don't know what printing so much more money will do. It doesn't in any way, shape, or form address the root cause of the problem. It is hard to hedge (buy more gold?) and it potentially unleashes problems we haven't even contemplated. Hyper-inflation causes riots in countries where China bought land to produce food and gives them an excuse to enforce their rights by sending in troops? Maybe that is crazy, but in my defense, I am wearing my IG200 hat, not a tin foil hat. I am not sure what can or can't happen in a world where we decide that printing money is the best way out of our problems. So many bizarre things have come out of our alternative solutions, and few of them good, that we should spend more time thinking about accepting the default of the weak, and seeing what we can do with that.

I am confident in predicting we are about to have another Global Financial Crisis—I’m calling it The Sequel: Same movie, same players, same story. Only this time around—like all good sequels—the financial crisis we are about to experience is going to be bigger, longer, and uncut by bailouts. By the way, that is the key difference between 2008 and 2011: We’re not going to have a Hollywood Ending this time around. The governments of Europe and the United States, as well as their respective central banks, do not have any weapons to fight off this 2011 financial crisis, as they did in 2008, for the simple reason that they used them all up—they’re out of bullets, both monetarily and politically. So when The Sequel hits the big screen, there won’t be a Big Daddy Government deus ex machina to come save the day in the third act twist. When The Sequel hits, we’re on our own.

All you need to know.

Many deep dilemmas face investors of Gold & Silver. First and foremost we feel an urgent need to defend ourselves against a crippled corrupted USDollar. The level of debilitation cannot be adequately put in words, as it has lost perhaps 70% of its value just since 1980 when the Jackass entered the workforce after years at the university. The USEconomy cannot be rebuilt or sustained on bond fraud, debt auctions covered by the printing press, endless war, phony accounting, outsourced industry, home equity extractions, rigged financial markets, constant deception on economic recovery, falsified economic statistics, and pursuit of the next asset bubble. The end game is fast along, gaining traction as much as public attention. The remedies put in place to date have centered on additional currency debasement of all major currencies, extension of sovereign debt when its burden is already at a staggering level. The rescue of the bank assets, largely toxic from the bust in housing and mortgage, has resulted is widespread redemption of nearly worthless bonds or heavily impaired bonds. The consequence has been a rapid rise in the entire cost structure to the global economy, without the benefit of rising incomes.

The debt ceiling debate that has dominated the headlines over the past month has been thoroughly infused with a string of unfortunate misconceptions and a number of blatant deceptions. As a result, the entire process has been mostly hot air. While a recitation of all the errors would be better attempted by a novelist rather than a weekly columnist, I’ll offer my short list. 

The below is a letter I recently found in my "examiner friends" archives that I thought was worth sharing. This was written in 2005 by an anonymous former Federal Reserve examiner. As a former bank supervisor myself, the accuracy should challenge us all to pay more attention to those in the trenches doing the actual work (whether bank supervisors or in your own firm; management by walking around, as Tom Peters used to quip). To say the below is insightful is an understatement.

He had the unmitigated hubris to publish another piece of feeble hubristic trash in the WSJ at precisely the same time Citizen Murdoch was being castigated for his hubris and Goldman Sachs was reporting on the sorry quarterly result of it's...hubris.

While we may not make that much stuff in America any more, we can say that the nation's gigantic wealth inequality is totally Made in the U.S.A. Before we examine the data in some charts, I want to stipulate that great wealth in and of itself does not make a person an "enemy of the people" or threat to democracy. I confess to having generally lumped the top 1% of wealth holders into one category, something I have decided to stop doing, as this misses two critically important distinctions: 1. Not all wealth is created equally; 2. Wealth destroys democracy and free markets when it buys the machinery of governance. Much of the debate about wealth inequality focuses on whether the super-wealthy are "paying their fair share" of the nation's taxes. If we refer to point 2 above, we see that if the super-wealthy are allowed to buy the machinery of governance, then they will never allow themselves to be taxed like regular tax donkeys. In that sense, the debate over tax rates is pointless, because as long as the super-wealthy own the levers of Federal governance and regulation, then they will buy exclusions, loopholes, rebates, subsidies etc. which relieve them of whatever official tax rates have been passed for public consumption/propaganda purposes.