Meltdown

In 2006, I invited the late General Bill Odom to address my Thursday Congressional luncheon group. Gen. Odom, a former NSA director, called the Iraq war “the greatest strategic disaster in American history," and told the surprised audience that he could not understand why Congress had not impeached the president for pushing this disaster on the United States. History continues to prove the General’s assessment absolutely correct.

Volume is well above average pro rata as US equity markets are stumbling notably this morning. Was retail sales' miss the final straw that broke the hope back? Or was it China's CNY vol, failed auction, warehouse probe, or Japan's dismal data and misery, or Iraq's reignition, or Ukraine, or Q1 GDP downgrades, or earnings outlook downward revisions, or flows? Since Mario Draghi promised the world and made everyone believe that's what he gave them, US equity markets have rolled over hard today and Dow Transports are now notably in the red as the former high-flier unbreakable trend looks set to follow Biotechs in the momo meltdown club...

In order to back the dollars now in circulation and on deposit -- about $2.7 trillion -- with the approximately 261 million ounces of gold believed to be held by the U.S. government, gold prices would have to rise as high as $10,000 an ounce. Who said gold is not money?

While we have become conditioned to accepting the morning meltdown in gold and silver prices that occurs with all too frequent visible-handedness around 8amET, this morning's mini melt-up is odd for 2 reasons: 1) It's Tuesday, which means sell everything that's not stocks; and 2) as we explained here and here, the unwind of the China CFDs could well lead to a notably higher gold (and silver) price as the forward hedges are lifted.

Timothy Geithner is likely to go down in American history as one of the most dangerous, destructive cronies to have ever wielded government power. The man is so completely and totally full of shit it’s almost impossible not to notice. The last thing we’d ever want to do in our free time is read a lengthy book filled with Geithner lies and propaganda, so we owe a large debt of gratitude to former Congressional staffer Matt Stoller for doing it for us. Stoller simply tears Geither apart limb from limb, detailing obvious lies about the financial crisis, and even more interestingly, Geithner’s bizarre bio, replete with mysterious and inexplicable promotions into positions of power..."Geithner is at heart a grifter, a petty con artist with the right manners and breeding to lie at the top echelons of American finance..."

The core strategy of central states and banks to fix the Global Financial Meltdown of 2008 was to buy time: take extraordinary emergency monetary and regulatory measures to save the parasitic too big to fail banking sector and the rest of the crony-capitalist Wall Street parasites, and initiate an unprecedented transfer of wealth from savers and Main Street to the banks and Wall Street via zero-interest rates and credit funneled to the very players who caused the crisis. The idea was that the system would "heal itself" if authorities simply "bought time" by saving the financial sector from its own predation. The terrible irony in the official strategy of "buying time so the financial system can heal itself" is the policies prohibit healing and guarantee the next financial crisis will be greater in magnitude than the last one.

Following Russia’s historic $400 billion natural gas supply deal with China last week, Japanese lawmakers are looking to revive efforts to tap into Russian natural gas supplies themselves.

You can smell this one coming a mile away... the ECB is now energetically trying to revive the a market for asset-backed commercial paper (ABCP) - the very kind of “toxic-waste” that allegedly nearly took down the financial system during the panic of September 2008. The ECB would have you believe that getting more “liquidity” into the bank loan market for such things as credit card advances, auto paper and small business loans will somehow cause Europe’s debt-besotted businesses and consumers to start borrowing again - thereby reversing the mild (and constructive) trend toward debt reduction that has caused euro area bank loans to decline by about 3% over the past year. What they are really up to, however, is money-printing and snookering the German sound money camp.

As the U.S. Greater Depression progresses, depicted most vividly in the collapse in the “civilian participation rate” (the number of people working in the economy) and the “velocity of money” (the heartbeat of the economy) - indicating an economy which is not merely in decline, but rather is being sucked downward in a terminal (and accelerating) death-spiral. There is another even more concerning statistic: U.S. “gasoline consumption” – as measured by the U.S. EIA itself – has plummeted by nearly 75%, from its all-time peak in July of 1998. A near-75% collapse in U.S. gasoline consumption has occurred in little more than 15 years... "recovery"

After the crisis, many expected that the blameworthy would be punished or at the least be required to return their ill-gotten gains—but they weren’t, and they didn’t. Many thought that those who were injured would be made whole, but most weren’t. And many hoped that there would be a restoration of the financial safety rules to ensure that industry leaders could no longer gamble the equity of their firms to the point of ruin. This didn’t happen, but it’s not too late. It is useful, then, to identify the persistent myths about the causes of the financial crisis and the resulting Dodd-Frank reform legislation and related implementation...."Plenty of people saw it coming, and said so. The problem wasn’t seeing, it was listening."

Four years and three prime ministers after Greece’s then premier, George Papandreou, requested an international bailout that slammed his nation with painful austerity (but saved the EU banks), Bloomberg notes that political instability still haunts Greece. Despite issuing bonds and GDP coming in slightly better than expected (still in recession/depression), former Prime Minister Costas Simitis of Pasok admits "The euro crisis seems to be over but its causes have not withered away," and if election polls are anything to go by, the fragile fraud that is a Greek recovery is set for problems Samaras' governing coalition as Syriza (the opposition that rejected the bailout terms) support soars and Pasok plunged to sixth place with just 5.5% support. In addition, retroactive taxes on gains are weighing on European bond markets (and Greek stocks).

The Wall Street Journal appears to be saving money by dispensing with journalists and using human drop boxes instead. Thus in the New York markets the “Hilsenramp” signal is already a well-known event which occurs at approximately 3pm on/during/after Fed meeting days, and is posted under the byline of “Jon Hilsenrath”. In simple packaged form it provides fast money speculators with a message from the B-Dud, otherwise known as William Dudley, President of the New York Fed, on why the Fed will back-up another run at still higher record highs. So today comes a drop box message with respect to ECB policy posted under the byline of “Brian Blackstone”.

Remember all of those credit card and loan offers you used to receive in the mail? Bad credit? No credit? No problem.  0% APR for the first six months. Free balance transfers. No money down. And my personal favorite– no credit check. These were all classic signs that the mother of all liquidity bubbles was upon us. Looking at the expansion of credit across the West, though, it’s happening again. Fool me twice, shame on me. But this is a worldwide phenomenon now.

The still-dominant consensus view that America’s economy is poised to single-handedly yank the world out of its lethargy is likely to be disappointed once again with the odds high that our economy will remain burdened by growth-inhibiting monetary policies. In addition, it will continue to be negatively impacted by various other impediments, including a populace that is increasingly under-employed, an unwieldy and inscrutable tax code, a Rube Goldberg-like healthcare system, an increasingly ossified infrastructure, and a regulatory apparatus that congests the lungs of our economy, small businesses... weaning the stock market off of casino capitalism promises to be anything but pain-free. But did any responsible adult really believe there would be no pay-back for all these years of the Fed’s force-fed gains? If you do, you probably also believe foie gras grows on trees.

The Mobile Creative credo: trust the network, not the corporation or the state.

The Mobile Creative class operates outside these two states of dependency. It also operates outside the conventional labor-management divide of Marxism and socialism. Since global capital is mobile, and the state enforces central banking and cartel pricing, the class of "owners" and the state are one entity. You either resist the entire state-cartel system or your resistance is nothing but meaningless gestures aimed at chimera.