Quantitative Easing

Despite the sputtering economy, despite report after report that indicates that global economies are slowing down, despite the historic amount of money printing that has done little to nothing to fix these issues, there are those out there who believe that the solution to all our problems is more of the same. More money printing.

Ali and Frazier, Laurel and Hardy, Mayweather and Pacquiao, Liesman and Santelli, and now Schiff and Maloney. Peter and Mike join clash of the titan-like to discuss their investment strategies and expose the charts the government doesn't want you to seeas "people like Bernanke are taken seriously still and the people that did predict [the crisis] are dismissed as lunatics half the time." The wide-reaching conversation covers everything from gold and stocks to The Fed and The Dollar - Bernanke "took the coward’s way out because all he did was exacerbate the problems to postpone the day of reckoning." The air is coming out of the bubble, they warn, "Bernanke and Greenspan have absolutely destroyed America. People don’t realize what is coming..."

There's Always Been Some Corruption in the U.S. ... But Never Like THIS

If U.S. equities feel brittle, they should. Yes, central bank liquidity from Japan and Europe may well push global equity markets higher.  But what we really need is a pullback – that classic 10% correction that flushes out weak hands, reestablishes the discipline of “Risk” in the “Risk-Return” equation, and shows capital markets how to do more than just follow central bank liquidity.  So watch June’s price action in U.S. stocks very carefully, because this process needs to start now.  The bull market that began in March 2009 is now an ancient bovine indeed.  After all, better 10% now than 20% or more later in the year.  The first is inconvenient.  The second is unwelcomed.

As has been noted frequently in the past, most of the business news posted by the mainstream media is a collection of economic fairy-tales which utterly pervert what is actually taking place, most particularly with respect to reporting on the Western bloc. Occasionally, however, we will get some sort of mild, pseudo-confession, which gives us just a glimpse of the economic carnage in these once-prosperous/once-affluent societies.

Will global QE carry on forever...the next month may give out some clues..will it be Junemaggedon after we had May-hem??

The Fed insists that Cinderella's carriage is forever golden, ignoring the increasingly obvious reality that the carriage is turning back into a pumpkin before our eyes. The Fed's magic was always a short-term fix, akin to over-fertilizing and over-poisoning our economy to create the illusion of massive growth in profits and stock, bond and home valuations. Now that the magic is wearing off, the reality is going to hit everyone who believed the fantasy of permanent asset bubbles especially hard.

What do we really know?

The Man in the Moon studies the pathology of Earth’s global economy and markets from a distance where there’s no gravitational pull towards empiricism or consensus. His findings: 1) the global economy is over-leveraged, fragile, stagnating, and increasingly centrally managed; 2) capital markets and asset performance have been captured by the perception of the ongoing value of money, and so; 3) unconventional investment analysis is prudent.

Bill Gross just revealed another aspect of trading in the new (or any) normal: one may get the direction and the timing with laser-like precision (as Gross did on his Bund trade), but if said trade is excecuted in a way where the inherent "coiled spring" volatility of the Gross-defined "new normal" blows up the trade structure, the losses will make one wish never to have had the correct idea in the first place.

A little over two years ago, in the middle of April 2013, there was a gold crash that came seemingly out of nowhere. Worse, for gold investors anyway, that crash was repeated just a few months later. Where gold had stood just shy of $1,800 an ounce at the start of QE3, those cascades had brought the metal price down to just $1,200. For many, especially orthodox economists, it heralded the end of the “fear trade” and meant, unambiguously, that the recovery had finally at long last arrived. However, gold price activity since QE3 has been a warning, and a big one, not cause for victory celebrations.

"The real disconnect lies in the failure of the economy to grow, as most people assumed that it would, after the Fed's quantitative easing and zero interest rates had supposedly worked their magic. But as I have said many times before, these policies act more as economic depressants than they do as stimulants. As long as these monetary policies persist, our economy will never return to the growth rates that would be considered healthy.... We prefer the ability to manipulate figures rather than allowing the figures to tell us things that we don't want to hear."

Some say that eliminating the welfare-warfare state and the fiat currency system that props it up will cause the people pain. The truth is the only people who will feel any long-term pain from returning to limited, constitutional government are the special interests that profit from the current system. A return to a true free-market economy will greatly improve the lives of the vast majority of Americans.

It’s not monetary easing, but the attitude of investors toward risk that distinguishes an overvalued market that continues higher from an overvalued market that is vulnerable to vertical losses. That window of vulnerability has been open for several months now, and the immediacy of our downside concerns would ease (despite obscene valuations) only if market internals and credit spreads were to shift back toward evidence of investor risk-seeking. Eventually, the final refuge of speculation is to abandon historically reliable measures wholesale, resting faith instead on the advent of some new era in which the old rules simply don’t apply.

Did you know that if you took every single penny away from everyone in the United States that it still would not be enough to pay off the national debt?  Today, the debt of the federal government exceeds $145,000 per household, and it is getting worse with each passing year. Many believe that if we paid it off a little bit at a time that we could eventually pay it all off, but as you will see below that isn’t going to work either.