Janet Yellen

Even Hellicopter Ben would have balanced remarks.  However, Janet Yellen has taken dovishness to an all-time high or low dpending on your perspective.  

The Wall Street Journal's Jon Hilsenrath unleashed an instantaneous reaction to today's FOMC minutes and the message is clear - markets are much less uncertain than the Fed about the timing (sooner rather than later) of the first rate-hike. The minutes of the meeting, Hilsy notes, provide fresh evidence of an intensifying debate inside the central bank about when to respond to a surprisingly swift descent in the unemployment rate and rising consumer prices. The minutes appeared to reflect a slightly more aggressive stance than Ms. Yellen's testimony.

Good thing the Federal Reserve isn`t worried about inflation, another 2% rise is just noise.  But  when the Fed does start worrying about inflation, not only is it too late, it is 1970s too late!

Forget Hong Kong, London and New York: when it comes to the pinnacle in absolute real estate insanity - perhaps in all of history - look no further than James Bond's favorite gambling mecca, Monaco. It is in this tiny Riviera principality where we find the Tour Odeon, a double-skyscraper being built by Groupe Marzocco SAM near Monaco’s Mediterranean seafront, which will contain a 3,300 square-meter (35,500 square-foot) penthouse with a water slide connecting a dance floor to a circular open-air swimming pool. The description is nice, but it is the bottom line that is mindblowing: Bloomberg reports that the apartment may sell for more than 300 million euros ($400 million) when it goes on the market next year, French magazine Challenges reported. That would make it the world’s most expensive penthouse, according to broker Knight Frank LLP.

There is no reason rooted in the real world for today’s frothy stock market rally. In every single region of the planet, the post-crisis, central bank fueled expansion cycle - tepid as it was in the global aggregate - is faltering badly. So with the global expansion cycle faltering, profit ratios at all-time highs and PE multiples in the nose-bleed section of history - nearly 20X reported earnings for the S&P 500 - there is only one thing left for the Wall Street robots to do. Namely, vigorously buy the latest dip because the Fed has yet another new sheriff heading for Jackson Hole purportedly bearing dovish tidings. To wit, after 6 years of pinning money market rates to the economic floorboard at zero, Janet Yellen espies an economy still encumbered by “slack”, and will therefore be inclined to keep Wall Street gamblers in free money for a while longer.

So…the US economy is allegedly in recovery… the financial markets are fixed… and all is well in the world. But the Fed cannot risk raising interest rates to normal levels because Wall Street has over $12 trillion (more like over $100 trillion) in derivatives contracts that could blow up.

Going into this year’s Jackson Hole meeting, it does not appear to BofAML's Ethan Harris that the FOMC is leaning toward a policy change as in 2010, let alone on the verge of a big shift as in 2012. Instead, the Fed is in a bit of a limbo state as it waits for clear evidence that 1Q GDP was a fluke and convincing signs of stronger wages. With significant policy changes a long way off, and with the intense market focus on Jackson Hole, we expect the Fed Chair to try to say nothing interesting about the policy outlook.

The financial Globalists at the Bank for International Settlements have a strategic plan, make no mistake.....................

The Fed keeps moving their targets, and came up with this ‘slack in the labor force’ argument helped of course by Wall Street or should I say the Big Banks.....

A month ago, Carl Icahn told told CNBC that he was "very nervous" about US equity markets. Reflecting on Yellen's apparent cluelessness of the consequences of her actions, and fearful of the build of derivative positions, Icahn says he's "worried" because if Yellen does not understand the end-game then "there's no argument - you have to worry about the excesssive printing of money!" Today he follows up that warning with an op-ed that states "we are in a major asset bubble that continues to grow," supporting Stiglitz comments that "these very strong stock market prices are in a sense a symptom of the weak economy, not a symptom that we are about to have a strong recovery to our real economy."

In what is certainly a historic, and quite stunning, market first, not to mention prima facie evidence that Janet Yellen was right about the biotech (and not only) bubble, last week the equity markets experienced something that has not happened in decades: a biotech firm went public, traded for six days, only to announce Friday that it would void its IPO and won't issue shares after all, thanks to a key investor's failure to follow through on a commitment to buy stock. In other words, days after going public, yet another darling of the momo bubble mania du jour, decided to undo everything, and went back to being private (and soon: bankrupt).

Huh?

Now that even the Fed has admitted the BLS' nonfarm payroll and unemployment rate are meaningless due to the "noise" from a record number of workers dropping out of the labor force, Janet Yellen is left with one fallback "favorite" indicator, the JOLTS survey (Job Openings and Labor Turnover). It is here that something rather unexpected just happened, when moments ago the BLS reported that US employers reported a whopping 4671K job openings in the month of June, beating expectations of a 4.6MM print and well above the downward revised 4,577K in May. This was the highest openings print since February 2001, and one which suddenly puts the "hawkish" Janet Yellen back in play as it suggests that slack in the labor market, at least based on the number of job openings, has not only filled the gap, but it is now overflowing!

Fed Vice Chairman Stanley Fischer delivered his first speech on the global economy in Stockholm, Sweden yesterday. Fischer headed Israel’s central bank from 2005 through 2013 and is now number two at the Federal Reserve in the U.S. after Janet Yellen. Fischer’s comments that the U.S. is “preparing a proposal” for bail-ins is at odds with FDIC and Bank of England officials who have said that bail-in legislation could be used today and "I mean today ... "

Any Bond Idiot Can Buy into Fear, but they are Forced to Sell into ‘Good Times’!

This represents a tectonic shift in the financial markets. It does not mean that Central Banks will never engage in QE again. But it does show that they are increasingly aware that QE is no longer the “be all, end all” for monetary policy.