Janet Yellen

The last year or two has seen a deluge of Fed speakers pay lip-service to watching/monitoring/keeping-an-eye-on potential bubbles... but as yet having found none... That is all except one - Jeremy Stein - who explicitly called out high yield bonds as in a 'frothy' bubble last year... it appears he has grown weary of smashing his head against that wall...

• *FED SAYS STEIN SUBMITTED RESIGNATION LETTER TO OBAMA
• *YELLEN SAYS STEIN WAS 'AN INTELLECTUAL LEADER' ON FED BOARD

Stein plans to return to teaching at Harvard but in his resignation letter noted that more work is needed on the job market and that the financial market needs strengthening.

Surprise, surprise!

The Nikkei shot up last night because the Yen was weak and, best of all, Japan's $1.25Tn pension fund will be handing money to the Banksters to put into the stock market. 

Jim Rickards said that gold should remain an essential part of diversified portfolios and Mark Faber pointed out that the question should be “how could you NOT own gold?” Faber has said that he favors owning gold in fully allocated gold accounts in Singapore and Switzerland. 

Did Facebook really just buy a company at THESE Valuations?

Shockingly, the UK government will now be able to directly access taxpayers’ bank accounts, under little noticed measures announced in this month’s Budget speech. The significant HMRC legislation change was buried deep in the Budget document and comes amid preparations by the Bank of England for bail-ins.

First we had Jeab-Claude Juncker saying it's ok to lie to the people, then President Obama's poster-child for Obamacare who later discovered she was unable to get the healthcare she expected and now following Janet Yellen's apparently 'uber-dovish' "jobs are not plentful" sob story spech yesterday we have more governmental factual inaccuracies. As Bloomberg reports, in her first speech as Federal Reserve chair, Janet Yellen told the stories of three people who had trouble finding work to illustrate her concern about the unemployed -- omitting the fact that two had criminal records that might have influenced employers’ decisions on whether to hire them. As we commented yesterday, "it’s troubling when we have to assume that everything we hear from any politician or any central banker is being said for effect, not for the straightforward expression of an honest opinion."

• GM enters harsh spotlight as Congress hearings begin (Reuters)
• Facebook's Zuckerberg earns $3.3bn through share options (BBC)
• Sheryl Sandberg has sold more than half her stake in FaceBook (FT)
• Chinese Dragnet Entangles Family of Former Security Chief, Zhou Yongkang (WSJ)
• NHTSA chief: GM did not share critical information with U.S. agency (Reuters)
• Citigroup uncovered rogue trading in Mexico, fired two bond traders (Reuters)
• Corporate America’s overseas cash pile rises to $947bn (FT)
• Thai anti-government protester killed, rekindling political crisis (Reuters)
• China Milk Thirst Hands U.S. Dairies Record 2014 Profits (BBG)
• Caterpillar accused of ‘shifting’ profits (FT)
• New iPhone 6 screens to enter production as early as May (Reuters)

After ramping in overnight trading, following the spike in Japanese stocks following another batch of disappointing economic data out of the land of the rising sun and setting Abenomics which sent the USDJPY, and its derivative Nikkei225 surging, US equity futures have pared some of the gains in what now appears a daily phenomenon. Keep in mind, the pattern over the past 6 consecutive days has been to ramp stocks into the US open, followed by a determined fade all the way into the close, led by "growthy" stocks and what appears to be an ongoing unwind of a hedge fund basket by one or more entities. Could the entire market be pushed lower because one fund is unwinding (or liquidiating)? Normally we would say no, but with liquidity as non-existant as it is right now, nothing would surprise us any more.

Widening income disparity has been a feature of many advanced and developing economies for the past few years and has myriad investment implications. As we noted yesterday, the USA is at levels of income disparity not seen since the roaring 20s (and by some counts worse) but how does that stack up to the rest of the world? Fed fans will be proud to say that once again USA in Number 1... in global income inequality.

"The idea that stimulation, even if only in form but not reality, can be withdrawn without draconian economic results is simply false. Chair Yellen is truly dedicated to full employment and is going to go into shock over the next few short months at the divergence between her economic modeling, the behavioral economic projections and the degree of economic contraction in the US." The US (and world) economy are not growing. Ben Bernanke and his counterparts in other countries pumped like mad to hide the dysfunction. Flooding with liquidity did nothing to heal the distortions and made them worse.

As we noted earlier this week, the Fed is growing increasingly concerned of a bubble forming in the financial markets. Previously we noted that Janet Yellen was issued warnings regarding this.

"Either way you look at it, it's time for the Fed to stop inflating housing assets, and stop buying mortgages" is how Alex Pollock introduces the following live streamed event by AEI. With speakers such as Chris Whalen we suspect, as the moderator explains, they will explain why "financial markets never seem to grow smarter when it comes to real estate."

Let the fun begin.

The idea of “under-shooting inflation from below” is just ritual incantation. It provides the monetary central planners an excuse to keep the printing presses running red hot, but the true aim is not hard to see. After a 30 year rolling national LBO that has taken credit market debt outstanding to $59 trillion and to an off-the-charts leverage ratio of 3.5X national income, the American economy is saddled with $30 trillion of incremental household, business, financial and public debt compared to its historically sound leverage ratio of 1.5X GDP. We are at peak debt. Household, business and government balance sheets are tapped-out. The problem is not too little CPI inflation, but the unavoidability of a pay-back era of sustained debt deflation.