Great Depression

"Central banks alone cannot be relied upon to deliver all the policies necessary to achieve macroeconomic goals. Governments must also act and use the policy-making space provided by conventional and unconventional monetary policy measures. Failure to do so would be a serious error and would risk setting the stage for further economic disturbances and imbalances in the future."

The Fed needs to extricate itself from manipulating the financial markets. It needs to end backstopping market liquidity. It must never again print Trillions of new “money” out of thin air. Because so long as the marketplace perceives that the markets are "too big to fail", there will be speculative excess, major securities markets mispricings and Bubble fragilities. No one – average investor or sophisticated financial operator – has a clue as to the degree Fed policies have distorted asset prices.

"If only it was that easy to print our way out of a global crisis." 

These facts reveal the utter falsity of the propaganda drenched duplicitous data dumped by the BLS on behalf of vested interests who have captured our government and have an agenda requiring the public to be kept in the dark regarding their own dire financial situation. No matter how you slice the data, it reveals an absolute parallel to the situation during the Great Depression.

Governments and their central bank creations usurped market-based monetary and banking systems to serve the plundering purposes of kings, princes, parliaments, and special interest groups who all wanted to hold the magical hand of the monetary printing press. Print up money (or its digital substitutes and surrogates in more modern times) and you can have access to all the hard work of others without the reciprocal effort. The monetary social engineers' century-long legacy in the arena of money and banking has been the booms and busts of the business cycle. The time has come to end the tragic and disruptive reign of monetary central planning.

Having government control over the levers of the economy can have advantages. For example, by taking prompt action, the Chinese government was able to pull the economy out of the recession remarkably fast, basically by fire-housing the stimulus package that was equivalent to 12% GDP. That’s the advantage. The only problem is that these kinds of short-term advantages come with long-term, painful consequences.

With the world's central planners (and their status quo hugging cronies) calling for cash bans (and rather ironically helicopter money at the same time), the soaring costs of getting one's own money appears to be a quiet form of capital control creeping up on the distracted American public. As WSJ reports, the average cost for using an automated teller machine that isn’t tied to a customer’s bank rose to a record $4.52 per transaction (with average “out-of-network” cost tops $5 and can rise to as much as $8 in some places.)

The results from Portugal's elections are beginning to trickle in and according to exit polls, Coelho's coalition has prevailed. According to Bloomberg, the ruling coalition of Prime Minister Pedro Passos Coelho has won 38%-43% of vote and 108-116 seats.

Despite the arguably undemocratic, obfuscating nature of our nation’s campaign finance laws and the blatant corporatist agenda mandated by the Supreme Court, let’s attempt to break down the major sources of political spending so far in the 2016 presidential election. You may be surprised to find out who is donating money to your candidate — and how that contribution may affect future policy positions.

The unforeseen consequences of the advent of electric cars will reverberate much farther than the demise of dealerships and significant shifts in market share in the auto industry.

In a recent appearance before Congress, Deputy Attorney General Sally Quillian Yates declared that the US Department of Justice is going to ratchet up its prosecution of individuals employed in corporations as part of a larger push against “white collar crime.” Within the next year, we should expect to see mid-level business and finance executives doing “perp walks” in front of the news media, as federal prosecutors will charge them with various “economic crimes” in hopes that they will implicate their superiors. All of us by now know the drill and in a time of anemic economic growth complete with business failures, it won’t be hard to find scapegoats.

We call on central banks to abolish their zero interest rate policy (ZIRP) framework before more harm is done. In our assessment, ZIRP is bad for all stakeholders and may even lead to war.

Holding gold is simply recognition that the Fed’s actions over the last 30 years have potentially severe consequences that pose threats to the value of most financial assets, the almighty dollar and ultimately your clients’ purchasing power. Owning gold is in effect not only a short on the dollar and on the credibility of the Federal Reserve, but most importantly a one of a kind asset that protects wealth.

When will the “nothing is happening” crowd finally wake up?

And just like that Weimar 2.0 is born.