Obama Administration

Those living in the dust bowl responded by doing more of what had failed rather than doing something different. Ours is a dust bowl economy.  In our economy, debt is the marginal field that has been plowed up for brief exploitation and profit. In response to the drought of income and collateral that supports debt, the Federal Reserve, Congress and the Obama administration have actively made the crisis worse by doing more of what failed spectacularly: encouraging more debt with zero-interest rate policy (ZIRP), massive "socialized" subsidies of housing and mortgages, and so on. When the present path cannot possibly lead to success, regardless of the labor and treasure poured into the effort, then risking the unknown by trying something different is the only way forward.

In 1936, the US government began circulating a series of pamphlets to explain its brand new Social Security program, plus the associated taxes. Initially, the Social Security tax was set at 2%. The government promised it would rise to 3% in 1949, with no additional increases EVER: "[F]inally, beginning in 1949. . . you and your employer will each pay 3 cents on each dollar you earn, up to $3,000 a year. That is the most you will ever pay." In 1949, the tax rose to 3% as scheduled. But it only took five years for the government to break its promise. Politicians routinely make bold promises about tax policy... and they almost always end up being lies. Perhaps most dangerously, politicians fail to understand that raising tax rates does NOT actually increase government tax revenue.

Secession:  Exploding Movement, Tempest In a Teapot … Or Something Else?

In the current Bernanke-Obama-Keynes toxic triangle (defined previously here) economy, blink too long and you will miss the latest bailout. While 4 years ago, it was America's M.A.D.-hostage taxpaying middle class that had no choice but to fund the trillions in direct Fed cash handouts and guarantees to bail out the banks, in the process saving and preserving the trillions in wealth for America's uber wealthy (the "1%") class, ever since then it has been the government's turn to rescue the country's lower and lower-middle classes (the "47%"), who, with no gun to their heads, decided to splurge during the height of the housing bubble (insurmountable mortgage payments and $0 down notwithstanding) and buy that aspirational McMansion that would make them so much more appealing in the eyes of the next door neighbor (who too could never afford their house in the first place). This has happened courtesy of a progressively more pervasive mortgage forgiveness plan, which has seen the total amount of debt funding a given home purchase shrink little by little each day. However, since there is no free lunch anywhere, certainly not when a bank's balance sheet is being impaired, like in 2008, someone is once again on the hook for this latest bailout. That someone, not surprisingly, is again America's middle class that lived within its means, that saved money while others splurged, and even put cash away for retirement, handing it over to various Pension investment vehicles.

Student debt has seemingly been the transmission channel of choice for pumping credit into the US economy for the last few years as the government addition of $1 trillion has done nothing but leave those under-55 with fewer and fewer jobs (especially above-minimum-wage jobs) while saddled with non-extinguishable debt. Of course, this 'pump' of credit has had the usual unintended 'inflationary' consequence of raising tuition prices (which as we noted this morning was the main driver of inflation in the UK overnight). So what would be fair? Cue: A Petition to "Provide University graduates the ability to trade their Diplomas back for 100% tuition refunds" The hope-driven (or hopelessness) push into higher education (and implicitly higher debt), in a nation where the marginal benefit of Calculus 101 over a strong right 'burger-flipping / coffee-machine-pressing' wrist is falling by the day, seems to warrant further societal protection. All that's needed is 25,000 signatures to move this forward.

The US Presidential election has ended and the market is beginning to return to reality. And reality is not pretty...

It’s a safe assumption to make that the reelection of Barack Hussein Obama to the office of the United States Presidency will be talked about for decades to come. Like Franklin Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln, and other “transformative” presidents before him, Obama will be praised for keeping the country together in the midst of economic difficulty. The lavishing has already begun with prominent voices on the left like Paul Krugman declaring the “new America” has made Obama their champion. Like most of what passes for accepted history, this is downright propaganda. The country as a whole wasn’t frightened over sudden change by throwing out the incumbent. It wasn’t a declaration of a new, more diverse America. There is a rational explanation for the President’s reelection which doesn’t invoke a deep or complex meaning. The only way to explain the outcome is in the simplest and direct prose: the moochers prevailed.

What the Heck Is Really Going On?

While markets are digesting the probabilities of a dramatic rise in taxes and cut in spending as we approach the fiscal cliff, it appears that behind-the-scenes there has been a secret plan that we can only imagine is designed to rocket-boost us over the cliff - new manned missions to the moon. As Space.com reports, NASA is serious about sending astronauts back to the moon's neighborhood and will likely unveil its ambitious plans soon now that President Barack Obama has been re-elected, experts say. They go on to comment that "The space agency has apparently been thinking about setting up a manned outpost beyond the moon's far side, both to establish a human presence in deep space and to build momentum toward a planned visit to an asteroid in 2025. The new plans have probably already been cleared with the Obama Administration but have been kept under wraps in case Republican candidate Mitt Romney won Tuesday night's (Nov. 6) presidential election." While the claims are that this will not increase the budget, we suspect out-of-this-world manned outposts cost a little more than the $17.7bn budgeted for NASA in 2013... someone is clearly eating space-cakes. Ironic really given our earlier post...

Starving a skinny man doesn't make him healthy, but then again neither does shoving 30lbs of food down his throat. When will TPTB start using their heads? As long as policy mistakes are made, contrarian profits can be made as well.

• Obama First Since FDR Re-Elected With 7.9% Joblessness (Bloomberg)
• China Party Meets to Anoint Next Leader (WSJ)
• Hu Sets China Income Target for Xi as Communists Gather (Bloomberg)
• Hu Jintao dashes hope for political reform (FT)
• Spain Sells $6 Billion Debt, Placing Longest Bond Since 2011 (Bloomberg)
• Japanese Politicians Move to Steer Away From Fiscal Cliff (Bloomberg)
• Hu says graft threatens state, party must stay in charge (Reuters)
• Weidmann in Defeat Still Influences ECB Bond-Buying Plan (Bloomberg)
• Spain Said to Consider Palace Sales to Raise Cash (Bloomberg)
• First-term headwinds look set to turn (FT)
• Focus Shifts to 'Fiscal Cliff' (WSJ)
• Obama Victory Paves Way to Continue Fed Policies (Hilsenrath)
• Swiss, Greeks Begin Talks on Tax Deal (WSJ)

Memo to the Arab World: Good news and bad news with the re-election of Barack Obama to the White House. The good news is that a victory by the Republican candidate Mitt Romney would have given Israel and its current leadership a free hand at continuing a policy of arrogance that will lead the region towards greater mayhem. On the other hand, with Obama in the Oval Office, don’t expect anything drastically different to happen in the Middle East in so far as US involvement goes. And if Obama’s acceptance speech is anything to judge by, where his only mention of anything related to foreign affairs was a reference to "freeing ourselves from foreign oil," it seems obvious that the Obama administration will want to focus on solving domestic issues. At the end of the day these are issues that matters most to the average American who would rather not have to worry about the Middle East and terrorism – that is until they come knocking at our doors as they did on September 11, 2001.

The very same problems that the world faced on November 5, 2012 remain in place. And we now know that those in power (Bernanke and Draghi) favor money printing over everything else. So the cost of living/ inflation will continue to rise and the world will lurch ever closer to the great debt implosion that will eventually take down the financial system.

Do not expect any changes to the trends of polarization and party non-conformists is the message from JPMorgan's CIO Michael Cembalest. As he explains moderates like Blue Dog Democrats and Rockefeller Republicans are now artifacts in the Natural History Museum, having given way to their more ideological offspring (through retirement or after having been beaten in primaries). If anything, Cembalest believes the House may become even more partisan after apparent losses by moderates in both parties. After a better than expected night for Democrats given Senate results, the fiscal cliff looms; With the status quo maintained, a divided government goes back to work to solve the Mutually Assured Fiscal Destruction problem. However, electoral results suggest the country is in no mood to address entitlement issues right now, will defer them to another day, and continue to shift towards a high-Federal debt economic model that bears some resemblance to Europe and Japan. In the 1950’s, the solution to 80% Federal debt was not taxation, austerity or inflation, but growth.

Few charts capture as effectively the shift in foreign demand for US Treasurys over the past 4 years, or under the Obama administration, as the following two, courtesy of the latest TBAC Q4 refunding presentation. They are quite self-explanatory.