Main Street

As more and more Fed speakers, talking heads, and status-quo-protectors talk of, beg for, and demand negative interest rates (NIRP), the mainstream is starting to wake up to the possibility of this farce coming to America. As Lacy Hunt tells Rick Santelli in the brief clip below, "the evidence is overwhelming that QE was more of a negative than positive," and warns the consequences of NIRP are dire (and The Fed has the tools to enginner it) as "to make it effective they would effectively have to call in the currency."

"Thanks to President Obama’s leadership and the determination and sacrifice of the American people, we’ve worked our way out of that ditch and put our economy on sounder footing. Now we have to keep going.

To prevent irresponsible behavior on Wall Street from ever again devastating Main Street, we need more accountability, tougher rules and stronger enforcement. I have a plan to build on the progress we’ve made under President Obama and do just that."

The US and world economies are drifting inexorably into the next recession owing to the deflationary collapse of commodities, capital spending and world trade. These are the inevitable “morning after” consequence of the 20-year global credit binge which has now reached its apogee. The apparent global boom during that period was actually a central bank driven excursion into the false economics of household borrowing to inflate consumption in the DM economies; and frenzied, uneconomic investing to inflate GDP in China and the EM. The common denominator was falsification of financial prices. By destroying honest price discovery in the financial markets, the world’s convoy of money-printing central banks led by the Fed elicited a huge excess of financialization relative to economic output.

If you don’t think financial markets have been utterly destroyed by central bank intrusion then how can you explain Friday’s 460 Dow point reversal higher after the post-NFP low? It was pure machine rage triggered by another implied “lower for longer” Fed policy signal. In short, we are now in an exceedingly dangerous phase of the central bank end game. They continue to pour gasoline on the first of financial speculation, yet smugly insist all is clear.

Q. Should somebody have gone to jail.

Bernanke: Yeah, yeah I think so. It would have been my preference to have more investigation of individual actions as obviously everything that went wrong, or was illegal, was done by some individial not by an abstract firm.

In business, the 80/20 rule states that 80% of your business will come from 20% of your customers. In an economy that is more than 2/3rds driven by consumption, such an imbalance of the "have" and "have not's" impedes real economic growth.

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.

The solution is not to let politicians redistribute the wealth from the rich to the poor. Crony capitalism must be replaced by true free market capitalism, practiced with integrity, fairness, principled conduct, intelligence, and high moral standards. Profits generated by corporations are not evil, but seeking profits at any cost to society is reckless, shortsighted and immoral. Capitalism without capital is destined for failure. When corporate CEOs, Wall Street bankers, and shady billionaires exercise undue influence over the financial, political and judicial systems, their short-term quarterly profit mindset and voracious appetite for riches override the best interests of the people and create a sick, warped, repressive society. Today our system is in the grasp of psychopaths whose hubris and myopic focus on enriching themselves will ultimately be their downfall.

Today's most popular hedge fund strategy among institutional investors globally is "Alternative Global Macro Funds". Also known as a “go anywhere” investment style, active managers employ opportunistic trading tactics across asset classes, financial instruments, and geographic regions. Like many liquid alts, global macro funds grew rapidly following the financial crisis as investors looked for strategies that could diversify their portfolios in the midst of volatility in the global marketplace and historically high sector correlations against the S&P 500, thereby improving their risk-return profiles. Ultimately, success in this classification resides in selecting the right active manager given the strategy’s wide dispersion of returns.

"Mainstream America with their 401Ks are in a similar pickle. Expecting 8-10% to pay for education, healthcare, retirement or simply taking an accustomed vacation, they won’t be doing much of it as long as short term yields are at zero. They are not so much in a pickle barrel as they are on a revolving spit, being slowly cooked alive while central bankers focus on their Taylor models and fight non-existent inflation."

Allegedly spotted on Sand Hill Road and the West Side Highway...

Last week was the watershed for central banking and for the illusion that the current disposition of things has a future. 

Main Street "doing God's work" for Wall Street...

One can’t help being left slack-jawed witnessing that the Fed has just publicly inserted itself into geopolitics via its monetary policy as de facto first responder/savior of all economies. Even if it puts U.S. savers, retirees, along with its economy in the back seat.

What the Fed really decided Thursday was to ride the zero-bound right smack into the next recession. When that calamity happens not too many months from now, the 28-year experiment in monetary central planning inaugurated by a desperate Alan Greenspan after Black Monday in October 1987 will come to an abrupt and merciful halt. Yellen and Co should be so lucky as to only face torches and pitch forks.