Fail

... Global Nuclear Catastrophe

Gretchen Morgenson has earned a Pulitzer-winning career from exposing abuse and conflicts of interest on Wall Street. In this interview, she confirms that there is indeed a second set of rules that our elite financial institutions enjoy, largely unfettered by the constraints that apply to the rest of us. Consequences for failure and fraud are very different under this second set of rules - in fact, they're practically rewarded.  Accountability, by all prudent measures, has become non-existent. The extraordinary measures the country deployed to deal with the great contraction in 2008 only served to exacerbate these imbalances. What's sorely needed now is a national dialogue on whether we're willing to allow this to continue. What benefits are we receiving by enabling these elite to enjoy such different standards? What type of system and rules might work better for our interests? Sadly, beyond the disorganized OWS outrage that has waned in visibility, there is no real cogent, organized public debate focused on this right now. A big reason is that Washington is actively avoiding such a dialogue. It was fundamentally complicit in creating the underlying factors resulting in the '08 collapse and it doesn't want brighter light helping the public understand that more clearly.

In an interview with Louis James, the inimitable Doug Casey throws cold water on those celebrating the economic recovery. "Get out your mower; it's time to cut down some green shoots again, and debunk a bit of the so-called recovery."

Dallas Fed Confirms that Big, Insolvent Banks Are Killing Our Economy ... and Democracy

Everyone who believes the government is "here to help disadvantaged people" needs to wake up and ask what kind of government we have when due process has been replaced with "legal" looting. R.T. reported the income in question on his 2006 Federal and Arizona tax return. Wouldn't common sense, not to mention common law, suggest that the state of California should be required to ask the citizen who now resided in another state if the income in question had been reported in that state? How about notifying the citizen of the state's claim and his/her rights to present facts relating to the state's claim? There was no due process. How can this be legal in a nation that is nominally governed by rule of law? First the state steals the $1,343 and authorizes its parasitic predatory bag-"person" Wells Fargo Bank to steal another $100 for handling the state's theft. A week or two later the citizen is notified of the theft as a fait accompli. Now the onus is on the law-abiding citizen to attempt to reclaim his own money from a distant, all-powerful Kafkaesque state agency. How can this be legal in a nation supposedly operating under rule of law? Let's be very clear about what happens here in America on a daily basis...

Yesterday, Ben Bernanke dedicated his entire first propaganda lecture to college student to the bashing of the gold standard. Of course, he has his prerogatives: he has to validate a crumbling monetary system and the legitimacy of the Fed, first to schoolchildrden and then to soon to be college grads encumbered in massive amounts of non-dischargeable student loans. While it is decidedly arguable that the gold standard may or may not have led to the first Great Depression, there is no debate at all that it was sheer modern monetary insanity and bubble blowing (by the very same professor!) that brought us to the verge of collapse in the Second Great Depression in 2008, which had nothing to do with the gold standard. And as usual there is always an other side to the story. Presenting that here today, is Antal Fekete with "The Gold Problem Revisited."

A "little" inflation will destroy capital, rob you of your savings, disrupt all of your long-term financial planning, create market instability, and leave you unprepared for retirement. You can protect yourself and you must. Here's how.

Wherein Tom Day of Sungard drops out of hyperspace just long enough to write the following missive on the PRMIA DC web rant soapbox and get a few hours sleeep.  Ode to Frank Partnoy. --  Chris

The surprising tale that I will attempt to pen in this blog entry has a very familiar cast of characters; the Obama Administration, the Housing Bubble, "Toxic Mortgages", and Too Big To Fail "TBTF" Banks among others. While the headline of TBTF banks in a $25bil mortgage settlement is known to many, the underlying details of the settlement are less known and quite appalling when you pull back the covers. The wounds on past and present homeowners are still fresh from the housing crisis. As Jonathan Laing points out in this weekend's Barron's cover story, "five million of the country's 76million mortgage holders have lost their homes to foreclosure or lender ordered short sales since 2006, and an estimated 14million more own more on their homes than their properties are currently worth. In all, some $7.4 trillion in homeowners' equity has been destroyed according to Mark Zandi..."

Yesterday I got my new iPad. Yeah, I bought one like millions of other suckers. Apple can take my dollars and recycle them buying treasury bills and so partially fund, at least for a short while, America’s unsustainable debt position. But really, I bought one to enjoy the twilight of the miraculous system of global trade. An iPad is the cumulative culmination of millions of hours of work, as well as resources and manufacturing processes across the globe. It incorporates tellurium, indium, cobalt, gallium, and manganese mined in Africa. Neodymium mined in China. Plastics forged out of Saudi Crude. Aluminium mined in Brazil. Memory manufactured in Korea, semiconductors forged in Germany, glass made in the United States. And gallons and gallons of oil to ship all the resources and components around the world, ’til they are finally assembled in China, and shipped once again around the world to the consumer. And of course, that manufacturing process stands upon the shoulders of centuries of scientific research, and years of product development, testing, and marketing. It is a huge mesh of processes.

Ye mangey Goldman Skunks!

We have long shown that "investors" whatever that term means in the New Normal - those gullible enough to put their money in Bennie Madoff, pardon Bennie Bernanke Asset Management? - have been not only reluctant to put their money into stocks, but despite week after week of artificial, low volume highs, driven entirely by Primary Dealers (and now European banks post the $1.3 trillion in LTROs, not to mention even foreign Central Banks recently buying high beta stocks) spiking the market ever higher courtesy of record reserves, but in fact continue to pull their cash out of the stock market with every thrust higher. Why, just last week another $1.4 billion in cash was pulled from domestic equity funds, nominal Dow 13,000 be damned. The truth is that the banks are desperate to start offloading their risk exposure to retail investors, and instead of selling, are furiously trying to send the market ever higher just to get that ever elusive "investor" back: just look at how much the market rose by last week, CNBC will say: do you really want to be out of this huge rally? Alas, the damage has been done: between the Great Financial Crisis, the Flash Crash, a massively corrupt regulator, rehypothecating assets that tend to vaporize with no consequences, and a central bank which effectively has admitted to running a Russell 2000 targeting ponzi scheme, the investor is gone. But what if? What if the retail herd does, despite everything, come back into stocks? After all the money is in bonds, or so the conventional wisdom states. What harm could happen if the 10 Year yield goes back from 2% to 3%, if the offset is another 100 S&P points. After all it is good for the velocity of money and all that - so says classical economic theory. Well, this may be one of those "be careful what you wish for." Because while investors have indeed park hundreds of billions out of stocks and into bonds, the real story is elsewhere. And the real story is the real elephant nobody wants to talk about. Presenting: America's combined cash hoard, which between total demand deposits, checkable deposits, savings deposits, and time deposits (source H.6), is at an all time high of $8.1 trillion.

Listen up you Muppets!!!!! I'm rehearsing from my Goldman Interview, applying for retail stock broker, pushing Apple inventory :-)

Following the latest temporary swoon in gold, the PM naysayers have once again crawled out of the woodwork, like a well tuned Swiss watch (made of 24K gold of course). Of course, they all crawl right back into their hole never to be heard of again until the next temporary drop and so on ad inf. Naturally, the latest incursion of "weak hand" gold longs is screaming bloody murder because the paper representation of the value of their hard, non-dilutable, physical gold is being slammed for one reason or another. Ironically, these same people tend to forget that the primary driver behind the value of gold is not for it to be replaced from paper into paper at some point in the future, but to provide the basis for a solid currency following the reset of a terminally unstable system, unstable precisely due to its reliance on infinitely dilutable currency, and as such any cheaper entry point is to be applauded. Yet it seems it is time for a refresh. Luckily, SocGen's Dylan Grice has coined just that with a brief explanation of "when to sell gold" which while having a modestly different view on the intrinsic value of gold, should provide some comfort to those for whom gold is not a speculative vehicle, but a true buy and hold investment for the future. And in this day and age of exponentially growing central bank balance sheets (chart), this should be everyone but the die hard CNBC fanatics. In brief: "Eventually, there will be a crisis of such magnitude that the political winds change direction, and become blustering gales forcing us onto the course of fiscal sustainability. Until it does, the temptation to inflate will remain, as will economists with spurious mathematical rationalisations as to why such inflation will make everything OK. Until it does, the outlook will remain favorable for gold. But eventually, majority opinion will accept the painful contractionary medicine because it will have to. That will be the  time to sell gold."

Yet another whistleblower has stepped up, this time one already known to the general public, and one that Zero Hedge covered just over a month ago: we refer to the case of former CBO worker, Lan T. Pham, who, as the WSJ described in early February, "alleges she was terminated [by the CBO] after 2½ months for sharing pessimistic outlooks for the banking and housing sectors in 2010" and who "alleges supervisors stifled opinions that contradicted economic fixes endorsed by some on Wall Street, including research from a Morgan Stanley economist who served as a CBO adviser." As we observed in February, "what is most troubling is if indeed the CBO is nothing but merely another front for Wall Street to work its propaganda magic on the administration. Because at the core of every policy are numbers, usually with dollar signs in front of them, numbers which have to make sense and have to be projected into the future, no matter how grossly laughable the resultant hockeystick." As it turns out, somewhat expectedly, the WSJ version of events was incomplete. There is much more to this very important story, one which has major implications over "impartial" policy decisionmaking, and as a result, Ms. Pham has approached Zero Hedge to share her full story with the public.