Main Street

All you need to read.

Watching your debates and speeches of late, it is clear that you are all (with possibly the exception of Ron Paul) missing the point and only continuing to widen the gap between the US Government and the American people.

The surprising tale that I will attempt to pen in this blog entry has a very familiar cast of characters; the Obama Administration, the Housing Bubble, "Toxic Mortgages", and Too Big To Fail "TBTF" Banks among others. While the headline of TBTF banks in a $25bil mortgage settlement is known to many, the underlying details of the settlement are less known and quite appalling when you pull back the covers. The wounds on past and present homeowners are still fresh from the housing crisis. As Jonathan Laing points out in this weekend's Barron's cover story, "five million of the country's 76million mortgage holders have lost their homes to foreclosure or lender ordered short sales since 2006, and an estimated 14million more own more on their homes than their properties are currently worth. In all, some $7.4 trillion in homeowners' equity has been destroyed according to Mark Zandi..."

 I believe Central Bank intervention is not a drug or “hit” for an addict. Instead, it is a cancer that has spread throughout the financial system’s psyche and which is killing the markets and Democratic capitalism.

Dear Mr. Dimon,

Why do you impugn your character and reputation by allowing your firm to engage in these immoral activities? Sure, the regulators have failed to assess you any meaningful punishments that would deter you from this conduct on a strict, short-term dollars and cents analysis. Every penny of earnings counts, I get it. But, sir, you do not strike me as someone who is trying to pump your company’s stock price for a quarter or two. You are the face of JPMorgan Chase and, I would assume, you plan on being there for a while. Why intentionally destroy any and all goodwill your firm has to make additional revenue that is mostly insignificant in the short-term and, quite possibly, deleterious in the long-term? The only reason I can think of is: because you can. And, that, sir is where hubris starts.

Picture a fireside, stone around the hearth, Christmas logs of sometime past, a blazing fire and embers glowing beneath them. Imagine a simple room, wood panels and the glow that is reflected from the light that danced upon their lacquered finish. There sat a man next to the fire who was not the Pastor of some church nor some litigator stirring the listeners for re-election but a man speaking to the country and for the betterment of the nation. This man was neither a saint nor a person enshrined with excessive humility and while an American, he stood for those higher principles upon which the foundation of this country rested. He had been elected and while it can honestly be said that he inherited the problems and was not their creator; he knew that the task at hand would be his greatest accomplishment or his worst failure. Yet he was not afraid; he hearkened to the task because he would give his hallowed spirit to overcome what must be defeated. He knew he would persevere because he must and that the demands of this nation’s forefathers had called him to the task at hand.

Bill Gross' monthly letters are always a fresh source of jovial imagery, although the bond king may have outdone himself in his latest monthly letter which collapses the principles of investing onto the football field: "My point about pigskin offense and defense is the perfect metaphor for the world of investing as well. Offensively minded risk takers in the markets have historically been the ones who have dominated the headlines and won the hearts of that beautiful gal (or handsome guy).... Canton, however, has an approximately equal number of defensive in addition to offensively positioned inductees, so there must be a universally acknowledged role for both sides of the scrimmage line. What fan can forget Mean Joe Greene, Deion Sanders or Mike Ditka? The old, now politically incorrect showtune laments that “you gotta be a football hero, to fall in love with a beautiful girl,” but football and any of life’s heroes can play on either side of the line, it seems." And it only gets better. While at its heart Gross' latest is merely yet another lamentation against the confines of the financially suppressive regime that arises from ZIRP and ends with what many expect is a whimper (when in reality they all forget to factor in the facility of hitting the CTRL+P keys as many times as necessary), the flourish of abandon this time around is palpable. We would not be surprised to soon see Gross hang up his offensive (and defensive) jersey, and sit back and enjoy the coming lunacy from a distance (but hopefully not before he allocates just a little to the Ron Paul SuperPAC).

Anyone Who Thinks that War Is Good For the Economy Has One Eye Covered ... And Is Only Looking At Half the Picture ...

It was a bad week for freedom loving people, but I believe there are enough patriots left in this country to change our course. We are being buried under a blizzard of lies on a daily basis. We have a choice. We can support the existing corrupt crony capitalist establishment (Obama & Romney) or we can declare war on lies, deceit and misinformation by rallying behind the only person who would truly attempt to reverse decades of corruption, sleaze, incompetence, bloat, debt accumulation, and a warped version of free market capitalism – Ron Paul. He is the only public figure willing to level with the American people and tell them the truth. Will we let the concept of truth fade out of the world? The choice is ours. 

“In our age there is no such thing as ‘keeping out of politics.’ All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia. The very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. Lies will pass into history.” –   George Orwell

While sounding just a tad preachy in his February newsletter, Bill Gross' latest summary piece on the economy, on the Fed's forray into infinite ZIRP, into maturity transformation, and the lack thereof, on the Fed's massive blunder in treating the liquidity trap, but most importantly on what the transition from a levering to delevering global economy means, is a must read. First: on the fatal flaw in the Fed's plan: "when rational or irrational fear persuades an investor to be more concerned about the return of her money than on her money then liquidity can be trapped in a mattress, a bank account or a five basis point Treasury bill. But that commonsensical observation is well known to Fed policymakers, economic historians and certainly citizens on Main Street." And secondly, here is why the party is over: "Where does credit go when it dies? It goes back to where it came from. It delevers, it slows and inhibits economic growth, and it turns economic theory upside down, ultimately challenging the wisdom of policymakers. We’ll all be making this up as we go along for what may seem like an eternity. A 30-50 year virtuous cycle of credit expansion which has produced outsize paranormal returns for financial assets – bonds, stocks, real estate and commodities alike – is now delevering because of excessive “risk” and the “price” of money at the zero-bound. We are witnessing the death of abundance and the borning of austerity, for what may be a long, long time." Yet most troubling is that even Gross, a long-time member of the status quo, now sees what has been obvious only to fringe blogs for years: "Recent central bank behavior, including that of the U.S. Fed, provides assurances that short and intermediate yields will not change, and therefore bond prices are not likely threatened on the downside. Still, zero-bound money may kill as opposed to create credit. Developed economies where these low yields reside may suffer accordingly. It may as well, induce inflationary distortions that give a rise to commodities and gold as store of value alternatives when there is little value left in paper." Let that sink in for a second, and let it further sink in what happens when $1.3 trillion Pimco decides to open a gold fund. Physical preferably...

"All markets trade their way to Perdition" is how TrimTabs' CEO Charles Biderman concludes a rather clear and factually full exposition of the reason we have gone up and the reality of why a drop is inevitable. Between the outsize number of investment vehicles relative to investable assets, the trend bias that every wealth manager seems stuck with that we will grow our way out of this mess (which Biderman suggests means a long-term rate of 5-10% GDP growth for the US - which seems obviously beyond our reach). He takes on the irony of the Wall Street vs Main Street arguments and warns of the inevitable plunge in the stock market (further believing that the winner of the next election is irrelevant given the cash vs special needs imbalance that exists). The US economy, if marked to market, is broke. Take home pay for all taxpayers is now only $6.2tn, down from $7tn at its peak in 07, and additionally we have created $5tn of new debt since the start of QE1 and owe a PV of $50tn in 'unfunded' liabilities leaving the future looking quite grim in his view. Perdition indeed appears to be looming given the Fed's far from sanguine view of reality.

In all, the President's speech was reminiscent of George Clooney’s in Ides of March. We’ve heard it all before, maybe with slightly different words: America lost 4 million jobs before I got here, and another 4 million before our policies went into effect, but in the last 12 months, we added 3 million job. We must reduce tax loopholes, and provide tax incentives to businesses that hire in America. We must reform taxes for the wealthy (though he signed an extension of Bush’s tax cuts.) We must train people for an apparent abundance of expert jobs. We need more clean energy initiatives.  We created regulations (big sigh of relief he didn’t use the word ‘sweeping’) to avoid fraudulent financial practices. We will help homeowners. Wall Street must ‘make up a trust deficit.”   Like Jamie Dimon cares. In other words, Obama gave Wall Street a pass, while waxing populace. Don’t get me wrong. I expected nothing different. I will continue to expect nothing different, when he gets a second term, given the lame field of contenders all around.

SOTU Post Mortem:

The best news possible: "Nothing will get done this year, or next year, or maybe even the year after that." Barack Hussein Obama
The worst news: Everything else.

Here is the text of President Barack Obama’s State of the Union Address as prepared for delivery at 9 p.m. ET. "Jobs" 33 vs. "Fat Cats" 0, Rich 3 vs Poor 1, Hope 2 vs Unicorns 0, Change 9 vs Tooth-Fairy 0, Mortgages 5 vs Apple 0, Main Street 1 vs Wall Street 3, China 4 vs Europe 1; DEBT CEILING 0

Those who depend on a strategy of pleading with central authorities to continue funding at old levels are doomed to disappointment--all systems follow an S-Curve of rapid expansion, stasis and decline. The Central State is no different. The solution is localism. By creating cheap housing with its own modest tax resources, then the village attracts young families, whose children will keep the village school from closing, and the commerce brought to the village and its post office will keep it above the "closure" threshold. Passively hoping that centralized concentrations of wealth and power will return to pre-eminence is a losing strategy, the equivalent of a cargo cult ritualistically hoping for a return to World War II-era bounty. Focusing local resources on obvious bootstrap solutions is the winning strategy, not just in the U.S. but globally.

Poor, poor Federal Reserve.