Fail

Anyone with any sense for global economic trends ought to be worried. The signs are everywhere of a serious deflationary crisis.

“The EPA was basically deceptive...It was incompetent and stupid for them to go up to that existing plug and try to remove it without knowing how much water was upstream and behind it... I just can’t believe they were so incompetent that they would go in there and attempt to do this - unplug the Gold King mine - without a backup plan."

There is an economic and financial trainwreck rumbling through the world economy. Namely, the Great China Ponzi. In all of economic history there has never been anything like it. It is only a matter of time before it ends in a spectacular collapse, leaving the global financial bubble of the last two decades in shambles. The resulting deflationary spiral will suck the global economy into its vortex. And Wall Street will go down for the count because this time the Fed will be utterly powerless to reverse the tide.

A week before The EPA disastrously leaked millions of gallons of toxic waste into The Animas River in Colorado, this letter to the editor was published in The Silverton Standard & The Miner local newspaper, authored by a retired geologist detailing verbatim, how EPA would foul the Animas River on purpose in order to secure superfund money...

Eventually it was bound to happen. The ever increasing ambiguous laws that allow the government to prosecute, or worse, simply negate all Constitutional protections of its citizens would come back to hang them.

Uncertainty should not bother you. We may not be able to forecast when a bridge will break, but we can identify which ones are faulty and poorly built. We can assess vulnerability. And today the financial bridges across the world are very vulnerable. Politicians prescribe ever larger doses of pain killer in the form of financial bailouts, which consists in curing debt with debt, like curing an addiction with an addiction, that is to say it is not a cure. This cycle will end, like it always does, spectacularly.

The Fed has basically borrowed from the future to improve today. The intention of Fed policy over the past 30 years has been to self-correct business cycles into a ‘steadier state’ by easing interest rates into weakness and hiking them into strength. Unfortunately, there is political-asymmetry between easing and hiking which has resulted in the stair-stepping of official interest rates down to the zero lower bound. Monetary policy has reached the practical limits of what it can do.  Thus, the multi-decade credit era is coming to an end... Bad companies should be allowed to fail.  Creative destruction is beneficial in the long run.

Too much of the commentary about the Greek crisis has focused on whether or not Greece should drop the euro and not enough on the structural problems arising out of decades of socialism. Meanwhile, the Greek government has borrowed more money than the Greek people can possibly repay, and debased money will not make this fact disappear. On the contrary, more easy money will cause even more harm. The best thing that Europe and Greece can do for itself right now is to confront some of the economic fallacies that have long driven the debate over Greece, the euro, austerity, and debt.

We are heading for a crisis that will be exponentially worse than 2008. The global Central Banks have literally bet the financial system that their theories will work.  They haven’t. 

Following last week's bad news for the economy (terrible ADP private payrolls, confirmed by a miss in the NFP) which also resulted in bad news for the market which suffered its worst week in years, many were focused on how the market would react to the latest battery of terrible economic news out of China which as we observed over the weekend reported abysmal trade data, and the worst plunge in Chinese factory prices in 6 years. We now know: the Shanghai Composite soared by 5%, rising to 3,928 and approaching the key 4000 level because the ongoing economic collapse led Pavlov's dog to believe that much more easing is coming from the country which as we showed last night has literally thrown the kitchen sink at stabilizing the plunge in stocks.

"The future is unknown and we are not dealing with markets that are free markets anymore...now we have government interventions everywhere. [But] in the last say twelve months, I have observed an increasing number of academics who are questioning monetary policies. That's why I think they will take the gold away and go back to some gold standard by revaluing the gold say from now $1000/oz to say $10,000 dollars. An individual should definitely own some physical gold. The bigger question is where should he store it? because... the failure of monetary policies will not be admitted by the professors that are at central banks, they will then go and blame someone else for it and then an easy target would be to blame it on people that own physical gold because - they can argue - well these are the ones that do take money out of circulation and then the velocity of money goes down - we have to take it away from them... That has happened in 1933 in the US."

"If Greece collapsed and Grexit would be tomorrow’s reality, we would lose 3-4 billion euros more or less at once. So I hope that the EU and euro zone, that in due course, we can face the facts and say enough is enough and that we must do something else."

“In spite of all the rhetoric, we will go deeper in debt, the Fed will print more money, and the value of the dollar will continue to plummet.” - Ron Paul

Never in history have the economic and political structures been so manipulated by those who are responsible for their safekeeping; never has so much been at stake, in so many countries, and facing collapse, all at the same time.

If GDP growth only averages 2.0% in the Second Half (which I think is likely), then 2015 growth will only be about 1.7% annually. Given that the Fed didn't raise rates in 2012, 2013, and 2014, when growth was well north of 2%, why would they do so now? Yet Wall Street and the media stubbornly cling to the notion that 3% growth and rate hikes are just around the corner. Old notions die hard, and this one has taken on a life of its own.