Reality

How many banks (and other companies) are doing the Enron thing? Many more than you would be led to believe, for now it's legal. Simple proof that this will end even prettier than Enron.

In an interview with Spanish newspapers that was published October 31st, U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon condemned U.S. President Barack Obama’s demand that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad be removed from office, and Moon said: “The future of Assad must be determined by the Syrian people." The U.N. Secretary General's detailed comments are implicitly blaming all of this - lots of blood and misery - on U.S. President Obama, and on the “many Western countries” who ally with him and have joined with him in demanding regime-change in Syria. Ban ki-Moon took a rare courageous position here: what he said was correct, though it’s virtually unmentionable in the West.

Late on Friday afternoon, after recording its biggest monthly points gain in history, the S&P500 unexpectedly took a surprising swoon lower to close trading well in the red. This chart may be the reason why.

"Russia and Iran have very similar objectives in that they both want to eject U.S. influence from Iraq. Any success that the militias have bolsters that goal."

The now immortal line spoken by Clint Eastwood as "Dirty Harry" (1971 Warner Bros.) has never fit as a descriptor these financial markets more so than it does today. For if you believe you’re investing as opposed to gambling? These markets are now poised to show everyone the difference.

Booms powered by credit, new markets and speculation are followed by busts as night follows day. This creates a very difficult test for every nation-state facing the inevitable bust: how does the leadership deal with the end of the boom? As the world is about to learn once again, the "fix" may make the next bust even more destructive.

In a somewhat shocking admission of its own un-omnipotence, or perhaps more of a C.Y.A. moment for the inevitable mean-reversion to reality, Reuters reports that San Francisco Fed President John Williams said Friday that low neutral interest rates are a warning sign of possible changes in the U.S. economy that the central bank does not fully understand. With Japan having been there for decades, and the rest of the developed world there for 6 years, suddenly, just weeks away from what The Fed would like the market to believe is the first rate hike in almost a decade, Williams decides now it is the time to admit the central planners might be missing a factor (and carefully demands better fiscal policy).

There’s a potential black swan event taking place in Turkey on Sunday and no one seems to care. That is, the media isn’t devoting nearly enough coverage to Turkish elections considering the impact the outcome will invariably have on the situation in Syria, on the fate of the lira, and on the Pentagon’s strategy with regard to embedding spec ops with the YPG.

It was 77 years ago this week that Orson Welles struck terror into the hearts of Americans with his live radio broadcast of the HG Wells classic War of the Worlds. What struck me while watching the PBS retrospective were the similarities between then and now. The gullibility of the masses, the power of fear, the overreaction by the media, busy bodies calling for the government to do something, and the effectiveness of propaganda are all commonalities between that Fourth Turning and today’s Fourth Turning.

"Now they can stand up and preach. People say this is democracy, but I don’t think it is democracy to let Nazis say what they want"...

Should the Fed actually hike in December (the statement explicitly mentioned the possibility), we think it’s highly likely to become a “one and done” that will be taken back shortly, similar to the BoJ’s handful of attempts to hike rates after the bursting of the 1980s bubble. We say this simply based on the economy’s actual performance. After all, it took only a minimal tightening of policy (the “tapering” of QE3) to induce a bust in the sector most exposed to capital malinvestment.

One of the greatest hoaxes ever perpetrated upon Americans at the time of its telling and which is still trumpeted to this very day is the notion that the U.S. Constitution contains within its framework mechanisms which limit its power. The “separation of powers,” where power is distributed among the three branches – legislative, executive, judicial – is supposedly the primary check on the federal government’s aggrandizement. This week, once again, this sacred held tenet of American political history has once again been disproved.

Most investors don’t take kindly to change. “The market” chooses to stay in the here and now; each human component vibrant and alert while the whole is passive and inert…like a herd of wildebeests, protected by its mass and collective wisdom that each one of them is statistically safe from lions as long as they stay together.

At least parts of the Fed all the way back in 1979 appreciated how Greenspan and Bernanke’s “global savings glut” was a joke. Rather than follow that inquiry to a useful line of policy, monetary officials instead just let it all go into the ether of, from their view, trivial history. But the true disaster lies not just in that intentional ignorance but rather how orthodox economists and policymakers were acutely aware there was “something” amiss about money especially by the 1990’s. Because these dots to connect were so close together the only reasonable conclusion for this discrepancy is ideology alone. Economists were so bent upon creating monetary “rules” by which to control the economy that they refused recognition of something so immense because it would disqualify their very effort.

"We expect the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia's general government fiscal deficit will increase to 16% of GDP in 2015, from 1.5% in 2014, primarily reflecting the sharp drop in oil prices. Hydrocarbons account for about 80% of Saudi Arabia's fiscal revenues."