New Normal

It's funny: nearly five years ago, when we first started, and said that the world is doomed to an endless cycle of bubble, financial crisis and currency collapse as long as the Fed is around, most people laughed: after all they had very serious reputations aligned with a broken and terminally disintegrating economic lie. With time some came to agree with our viewpoint, but most of the very serious people continued to laugh. Fast forward to last night when we read, in that very bastion of very serious opinions, the Financial Times, the following sentence: "The world is doomed to an endless cycle of bubble, financial crisis and currency collapse." By the way, the last phrase can be written in a simpler way: hyperinflation. But that's not all: when the FT sounds like the ZH, perhaps it is time to turn off the lights. To wit: "A stable international financial system has eluded the world since the end of the gold standard." Q.E.D.

Japanese finances are in a shambles and very soon investors are going to run screaming from the Yen and JGB markets.

Once again we ask (rhetorically of course), just what is it that the-powers-that-be mean when they discuss "inflation"? As we noted a year ago, while the "ZIRP is the answer to all" solution has led to a rise in the price of almost everything that matters (and doesn't for that matter); one 'cost' stands out among the others (whether under Bernanke or Greenspan) - in the past 3 decades there has been no other cost that comes even remotely close to matching the near hyperinflationary surge in college tuition and costs.

It seems "glitch" is rapidly becoming the new normal for our cloud-based world as last week's epic fail on the NASDARK (and Amazon's 30-minute 'dark' period) has now been followed up by a "glitch" at one of Amazon's data centers last night knocking out users of Vine, Instagram, and Netflix. While NASDAQ remains tight-lipped over the source of its glitch, Amazon has narrowed the search for the vindictive bug to a 'partial failure of a network device' in a northern Virgina data center. As The BBC reports, the problems began around 1600ET and continued for several hours. We await news from EUREX on what 'glitch' caused their systems to fail epically this morning also.

No matter how hard the Washington crowd tries to sell an economic recovery, inconvenient and contrary facts keep rearing up to shatter their mythmaking. Few people any longer believe the claims of declining unemployment or low inflation at least based on purchases they make. The fable of a housing recovery is now crumbling. The recession, declared over in June 2009, never ended. Some wonder how bad the recession/depression might have been had government not acted. Others worry that we will find out when the Fed tapers. For lack of a better term, the process the entire country is headed for is “Detroitification.” At this stage, the damage is done and cannot be undone quickly enough to avoid this crisis. Even if there were time, there is no way that politicians would willingly address the problem.

Russia may reinforce naval grouping in Mediterranean in response to U.S. buildup - expert http://t.co/gtOai0LqqU #Russia #interfax #news

— Interfax News (IFAX) (@IFAXnews) August 24, 2013

Curious how the US retail investor is reacting to the surprising inability to BTFATH? Bank of America explains how: by yanking the most cash from equity funds since November 2011.

Almost three years ago we warned of the consequence of the disincentives for the working man in the US at the lower-income level. Then, last November we noted the dismal fact that 'work is punished' in America for a large majority of the non-elites. And now, as the part-time new normal becomes more and more understood in the mainstream, we ask once again... If you could stay home and relax all day and actually make more money than you do at your current job, would you do it?

Schaeuble and Merkel have very recently confirmed what was leaked a month ago - that Greece will likely get yet another 'helping hand' aid program. Some have noted that this may be financed using EU funds instead of additional loans from EU-area countries (or the IMF) yet Merkel's comments (perhaps playing to her electioneering needs) appeared to dismiss this - prompting talk of a 'bail-in' based on the new normal 'template' applied to Cyprus. Greece has so far received two bailout packages totaling EUR240 billion (with about EUR22 billion still to be released) which is 130% of Greece's GDP (which stands at EUR186.2 billion) and while the thord package appears smaller (for now) at EUR10.9 billion (based on IMF funding gap forecasts), this covers only the period through 2015 (and we know how accurate the IMF has been in the past with its hockey-sticks). Greece remains  mired in the sixth year of a recession with more than 6 out of 10 young people unemployed.

The surge in Spanish (in fact broadly European) equity and bond markets of the last few weeks has been suspiciously one-way and based (seemingly) on the hopes-and-dreams of the world's liquidity-based marginal investor finding another new normal momentum 'clean shirt' to pile into. However, despite the uptick in some data in Europe, the structural problems remain entirely unfixed and nowhere is that more evident than in the chart below. As European stock and bond markets suffer their worst 2 days in 2 months, Spanish bad loans (after a very brief pause in the exponential surge that also provided hope that the worst was over) have re-surged to a new all-time record high. At 11.61% of total lending, bad loans are now at their highest since records began in 1962.

Gross: Today I feel less "GUARDED" than yesterday. Is the free press still free?

— PIMCO (@PIMCO) August 20, 2013

We can waste readers' time with the latest revelations about the NSA's espionage activities against Americans, highlighted fully in the following WaPo article "NSA broke privacy rules thousands of times per year, audit finds" whose title is sufficiently self-explanatory about how seriously the administration takes individual privacy, or we can just showcase the following cartoon which shows how the Miranda rights have been 'adjusted' for the New Normal...

Update: The entire spike has been fully retraced by the close of China

In the new normal where broad-based equity indices that represent the corporate health of entire nations in one bit-sized propaganda-plagued number, the fact that China's Shanghai Composite spiked instantaneously by 6.2% this evening will come as no surprise...Some large stocks (PetroChina and AgBank jumped as much as 10% before plunging back instantly to reality). While the Exchange is "investigating" the spike, their PR is currently saying that it is "operating normally" - 'new normally' we presume. Between today's gold and silver spikes, FX market volatility, and now Chinese stocks gapping wildly, it would appear something is afoot in the leveraged world of carry-trades (and instant illiquidity).

How is the Federal Reserve going to stem the deflationary tide with equity markets at their highs?

Freshly-minuted MBAs "are willing to sleep on a couch for a year or two, but they can't do it with the burden of student loans," is how on senior lecturer describes the entrepreneurial-spirit-sucking debt loads that college-leavers face in the new normal. Faced with mounting monthly payments, the WSJ reports that would-be-Bezos have little choice but to look for the steady paychecks that accompany a regular job. Recent surveys find that "the single largest inhibitor to entrepreneurship is the student loan" burden and it seems states are beginning to realize this growth-inhibiting reality. In order to tamp down ambition-busters such as "I would be a serial entrepreneur if it weren't for my student loans," California (and Rhode Island) are enacting legislation to reduce college costs and looking at the feasibility of temporary forbearance. While some see their student-loans as a motivator, it seems many more are forced down a different path due to the "real responsibilities."