President Obama

There is one last irony in Bernanke's constant promotion of his powers to unleash QE. Having talked up the market for years with his promises/threats of QE, the market has priced in ever higher doses of QE, in effect bidding expectations of QE's effectiveness to the sky. Bernanke has lost the power to surprise the market. Having raised expectations to the sky, he must deliver something beyond the stratosphere to surprise the market. But he doesn't have anything capable of matching the absurd expectations he's inflated, never mind exceed them. The only surprise left is a negative one. Chairman Bernanke and his fellow doves will soon realize the consequences of over-promising and under-delivering. It works better the other way around, but now it's too late.

If 2011's Arab Spring was all about the propaganda "hope" of democracy (driven paradoxically by soaring global good prices as we predicted in early 2011 before the first Tunisian domino toppled), then 2012 Arab Fall, is all about the blowback to US policies and intervention in the region. And while we are amused by the media's narrative that an entire continent can suddenly come to arms against Pax Americana over a YouTube clip, we are confident that what some hate-mongering preacher has to say about Mohammed is about as relevant to what is happening in the Middle East today, as how the global economy performs impact the S&P. Absolutely none. What we do know is that the anti-American revulsion, which started on September 11 in Egypt and has since taken Libya and Yemen by storm, is spreading like wildfire. The NYT writes: 'Protests were also reported at American missions in Morocco, Sudan and Tunisia, where the police also fired tear gas to disperse crowds." It is only going to get far worse, as suddenly geopolitics, and the US response thereto, becomes the biggest issue in the presidential debate.

Back in January, Pulitzer winning journalist Chris Hedges sued President Obama and the recently passed National Defense Authorization Act, specifically challenging the legality of the Authorization for Use of Military Force or, the provision that authorizes military detention for people deemed to have "substantially supported" al Qaeda, the Taliban or "associated forces." Hedges called the president's action allowing indefinite detention, which was signed into law with little opposition from either party "unforgivable, unconstitutional and exceedingly dangerous." He attacked point blank the civil rights farce that is the neverending "war on terror" conducted by both parties, targetting whom exactly is unclear, but certainly attaining ever more intense retaliation from foreigners such as the furious attacks against the US consulates in Egypt and Libya. He asked  "why do U.S. citizens now need to be specifically singled out for military detention and denial of due process when under the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force the president can apparently find the legal cover to serve as judge, jury and executioner to assassinate U.S. citizens." A few months later, in May, U.S. District Judge Katherine Forrest ruled in favor of a temporary injunction blocking the enforcement of the authorization for military detention. Today, the war againt the true totalitarian terror won a decisive battle, when in a 112-opinion, Judge Forrest turned the temporary injunction, following an appeal by the totalitarian government from August 6, into a permanent one.

Moments ago it was Mitt Romney saying a bunch of canned, pre-election stuff. Now it is Obama's turn to say another bunch of canned, pre-election stuff. The sad thing is that for both the death of US civilans in the line of duty is an electoral gambit.

As President Obama doubles down on federal spending, he tells us these aren't the droids we're looking for

A few months ago when the new French socialist president gave details of his particular version of the "fairness doctrine" and said he would tax millionaires at 75%, we said that "we are rotating our secular long thesis away from Belgian caterers and into tax offshoring advisors, now that nobody in the 1% will pay any taxes ever again." While there was an element of hyperbole in the above statement, the implication was clear: France's richest will actively seek tax havens which don't seek to extract three quarters of their earnings, in the process depriving France (and other countries who adopt comparable surtaxes on the rich) of critical tax revenues. It took three months for this to be confirmed, and with a bang at that. The WSJ reports that Bernard Arnault, the CEO of LVMH, and the richest man in France, has decided to forego hollow Buffetian rhetoric that paying extra tax is one's sworn duty, and has sought Belgian citizenship.

Miracles of cosmetic surgery.

It’s easy to be pessimistic over the future prospects of liberty when major industrialized nations around the world are becoming increasingly rife with market intervention, police aggression, and fallacious economic reasoning.  The laissez faire ideal of a society where people should be allowed to flourish without the coercive impositions of the state is all but missing from mainstream debate.  In editorial pages and televised roundtable discussions, a government policy of “hands off” is now an unspeakable option.  It is presumed that lawmakers must step up to “do something” for the good of the people.  Thankfully, this deliberate false choice will slowly but surely bring the death of itself.   Illogical theories can only go on for so long before the push-back becomes too much to handle.  For those who desire liberty, it’s a joy that the statist economic policies of the Keynesians become even more irrational as the Great Recession drags on. The two following examples will illustrate this point.

Having operatied for years under ZIRP, and with the NIRP neutron bomb just around the corner, and already implemented in various European countries, one question remains: can banks be banks, i.e., can they make money, in a world in which borrowing short and lending long, no longer works, courtesy of ubiquitous and pervasive central planning which is now engaged solely and almost exclusively (the other central bank ventures being of course to keep FX rates and equities within an acceptable range) on the shape of the yield curve. Since 2009 our answer has been a resounding no. Today, Bill Gross speaks up as well, and his answer is even more distrubing: "If the dancing has slowed down, then the reason is not just an overweight partner. It’s that the price of money (be it in the form of a real interest rate, a quality risk spread, or both) is too low. Our entire finance-based monetary system – led by banks but typified by insurance companies, investment management firms and hedge funds as well – is based on an acceptable level of carry and the expectation of earning it. When credit is priced such that carry is no longer as profitable at a customary amount of leverage/risk, then the system will stall, list, or perhaps even tip over." Indeed, according to Gross central banks have now clearly sown the seeds of the entire financial system's own destruction. That he is right we have no doubt. The only question: how soon until he is proven right.

The heightening tension between the United States government and Iran’s is based off of the fallacious notion that nuclear weapons have a legitimate purpose outside of killing enormous amounts of people.  Yet they have no other real purpose in the end.  Governments possess nuclear weaponry because there is little recourse for state-sanctioned murder.  The millions of innocent lives that stand to be vanquished off the face of the Earth have little meaning to the power-tripping political elite.  So while the Iranian government’s pursuance of nuclear weapons should be condemned, the United States government, the Israeli government, and others capable of waging nuclear war are in no place to criticize.

In November 2008, President Barack Obama won the popular election for President by 9.5 million votes.  A burgeoning financial crisis and weakening economy helped his candidacy at the time, but four years on the sluggish pace of economic recovery is a headwind to his re-election.  Consider, for example, that there are currently 12.8 million people unemployed in the U.S., or that an estimated 8 million adults entered the SNAP (Food Stamp) program since November 2008 (total increase in enrollment: 15.6 million).  Presidential elections are won in the Electoral College, of course, so in today’s note ConvergEx's Nick Colas parses out this employment/food security economic stress for the key “Battleground” states.

Seven of the 8 swing states this election year are more economically stressed than the national average in terms of unemployment and/or food stamps, while 2 of the 3 states “leaning” toward Obama are worse off than the national average.  Romney, behind in the electoral vote count by most analysts’ figures, theoretically stands to gain from a weak national economy, but he’ll have to earn the vote of an estimated 4 million Americans in 14 key battleground states to have a shot at the White House.

The first shot in the fingerboning wars (a key step up from mere jawboning) has barely been fired following Draghi's earlier OpEd in Zeit (posted here in its entirety), when the Bundesbank already had its response ready for print in the form of yet another interview with its head, Jens Weidmann, who says nothing new or unexpected, but merely emphasizes that no matter how loud the chatter, how empty the promises, or how hollow the bluffing, Germany's response continues to be, especially after today's higher than expected inflation across the country, 9, 9 and once again, 9. Perhaps the most notable part of the interview is Weidmann's comparison between the ECB and the Fed, and why one is allowed to monetize bonds, while the other shouldn't be: "The Fed is not bailing out a cash-strapped country. It's also not distributing risks among the taxpayers of individual countries. It's purchasing bonds issued by a central government with an excellent credit rating. It doesn't touch Californian bonds or bonds from other US states. That's completely different from what we have in Europe....When the central banks of the euro zone purchase the sovereign bonds of individual countries, these bonds end up on the Eurosystem's balance sheet. Ultimately the taxpayers of all other countries have to take responsibility for this. In democracies, it's the parliaments that should decide on such a far-reaching collectivization of risks, and not the central banks." Of course, when the wealth of the status quo is at risk, such trivialities as democracies are promptly brushed by the sideline...

Political pressure, fake moral outrage, and ridicule.

Since the GOP presidential candidate still refuses to give any substantial details on how the republicans plan to grow the country, not to mention fund the budget deficit (even as various pageview hawking blogs concurrently try to give the impression that private equity prospectuses stamped with the "confidential" seal for purely regulatory reasons will somehow provide an insight into the Bain Capital CEO's taxpaying practices, confirming that "finance for the masses" may not be the best idea), those who wish to gain some insight into the actual workings of Romney's brain may have to resort with the following Op-Ed published overnight in the WSJ titled, "What I Learned at Bain Capital: My business experience taught me how to help companies grow—and what to do when trouble arises. When you see a problem, run toward it before the problem gets worse." Read it - it may well be the only public policy "prescription" out of the republican before the election.