Janet Yellen

Having a rigged, distorted system that fakes being a market and makes a bunch of grifters a lot of money, is not how you build a functioning society.

One might conclude, when looking at the excessive attention ‘everyone’ paid yet again today to Janet Yellen and the Fed, waiting breathlessly to see if she utters the word ‘patience’, that those people who call themselves ‘investors’ are not even grifters, they’re nothing but yet another group of lazy bums waiting for government – and/or central bank – hand-outs.

Many analysts regard this as further evidence that the Fed is caught in a bind. What is yet to be appreciated by most analysts is that it is unlikely that the massively over-leveraged and debt-saturated financial system can weather increases in interest rates.

Monetary policy is putting the hurt on labor.

With a firm "no comment" Janet Yellen shied away from burstng the bubble in "extremely stretched" Biotech and Social Media stocks, but was forced to admit that "overall measures of equity valluations are on the high side." Then, rather oddly, she notes that The Fed sees unusually low spreads in corporate bond markets... which is odd since they have actually widened dramatically in the last year or so, perhaps signalling just how "high" valuations are in stocks...

Having created quite a storm with her statement, it is time for Fed Chair Janet Yellen's press conference to confirm that nothing's changed, USD strength is a 'net positive', there are no bubbles (apart from in bonds, which you should sell...), and any economic weakness/crash is merely transitory and weather-based...

Talk of raising interest rates introduces a new Fed conundrum. Over the last few months, Federal Reserve Board members have maintained a less dovish tone which implies the eventuality of rate hikes despite economic data which has been slowing rapidly.... A case can be made that, excluding 2008, the economy is weaker now than prior to the announcement of the previous QE actions and Operation Twist. Further confounding the Fed stance is inflation, which as measured by CPI is running lower than at any time since 2009. Additionally the strong dollar and global deflationary trends point to lower inflation and possibly deflation in the coming months.

The only news that matters to algos today is whether Janet Yellen will include the word "patient" in the FOMC statement as a hint of a June rate hike, even though the phrase "international developments" is far more important in a world in which everyone (such as the 25 or so central banks who have cut rates in the past 80 days) is now scrambling to export deflation to everyone else. And with carbon-based traders recuperating from St. Patrick's day, few will notice that the oil tumble continues as WTI touches new 6 year highs after yesterday's shocking 10MM+ API build, and is now openly eyeing a collapse into the $30s. Just as nobody will notice that even as futures in the US and European stocks are looking a little hungover ahead of the Fed and perhaps on the latest bout of anti-austerity out of Europe, the China levitation has gone full retard, with the SHCOMP up another 2.1% yesterday and now in full-blown parabolic mode as housing data confirms the Chinese housing bubble has truly burst, and as shadow bankers dump all their funds into stocks in hopes of making up for losses due to regulatory intervention.

All Good Things Must End... this may not be the end of the world exactly. But the end of the fiat money system President Nixon gave birth to in 1971... when he cut the dollar loose from gold. And it may feel like the end of the world, because of the social chaos it will provoke.

First it was Sam Zell, warning "it's very likely that something has to give here." Then George Soros upped his market hedge drastically, followed by Carl Icahn's "worry about excessive money printing," adding that he was "very nervous" about US equity markets. "Financial markets are euphoric," warned Stan Druckenmiller, warning that "market participants are pricing in hardly any risks," and Crispin Odey explained "there are consequences to CB actions," stating that "we have front-row seats to an imminent market shock." And now hedge fund manager Andy Redleaf (who predicted "there is going to be a panic in credit markets," in 2007) has come out with the most ominous of warnings yet among the billionaire crowd... "I think it is a truly scary time."

The transparent truthlessness of the Fed’s basic premises go far to explain the chasm between official policy and reality - though it does not explain the appetite for plain lying of the supposedly informed minority cohort of the public, the deciders among us in business, politics, and media. Within th enext few months (between "patient" removal, token rate hikes, and reversals to QE4), the Fed will be completely out of cred. This will be the biggest disaster of all, since the loss of faith in august institutions will rage through every polity in the advanced economies. Nobody will believe any longer in anything they say or do, and especially the value of the papers (or digits) they denominate as money.

Since Jeb Hensareling is opening a criminal probe into the Fed for leaking material, non-public information because Congress is “committed to holding the Federal Reserve accountable for its actions and omissions, and to ensuring transparency in its operations”, it is also time to finally hold none other than former Treasury Secretary and then-Fed Vice Chairman Tim Geithner criminally accountable for his actions.

Having recently explained why the stock market is extremely overvalued (in his own words by Fed-driven multiple expansion alone), Alan Greenspan - seemingly brimming over with the need to remedy his years of lies/mistruths with some uncomfortable truthiness - is now taking on the US Dollar ("it is not from a strong US economy but a weak rest of the world") and oil prices (America has a massive surplus of oil and there may soon be nowhere to store all of it, "we'll be lucky if we can get $40 for it.")

The inevitable death of the dollar may have been delayed. The reason is simply that the other three big economies of the world - Japan, China and Europe - are in even more disastrous condition. Worse still, their governments and central banks are actually more clueless than Washington, and are conducting policies that are flat out lunatic - meaning that their faltering economies will be facing even more destructive punishment from policy makers in the days ahead. The current malignant monetary regime does not merely imply that the Wall Street casino is a dangerous place for your money. No, it screams get out of harms’ way. Now!

Next week is all about the Fed, and the positioning or should I say De-Positioning will be taking place right up until the last minute of this all-important Fed Meeting.

In Q4 US household net worth jumped by $1.5 trillion to $82.9 trillion, driven by a rise in total assets to $97.1 trillion, even as the long awaited increase in "good debt", that of mortgage debt, remains elusive and Mortgage debt hasn't budged from $9.4 trillion in 8 quarters! This, even as the total US housing market is said to have kept rising. The biggest jump in Q4 assets was once again in financial assets, driven by a $492 billion increase in Corporate Equities as well as $323 billion added from Pension Funds. And as usual, financial assets remained at precisely 70% of total assets. Who benefits? Why America's richest of course.