Reality

The mainstream view that central banks have suppressed tail risk is absurd and runs counter to common sense. Policy makers have done the opposite. Central banks have taken asset returns from the future and brought them to the present… they have taken tail risk from the present and shifted it into the future… that have turned private risk into public risk. The risk is not gone... do not fool yourself.

What if the U.S. had not invaded Iraq in 2003? How would things be different in the Middle East today? Was Iraq, in the words of presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, the "worst foreign policy blunder" in American history? Let's take a big-picture tour of the Middle East and try to answer those questions. But first, a request: after each paragraph that follows, could you make sure to add the question “What could possibly go wrong?”

Throughout the United States, Americans believe there is a “war on police.” A recent survey found 58% of Americans agree with this sentiment. A new, privately-funded billboard campaign hijacks the “Black Lives Matter” moniker to read “Blue Lives Matter,” highlighting powerful pushback from law enforcement sympathizers against activists. A deeper examination of the FBI's 2014 data, however, reveals that police are not only safe, but still running rampant in their liberal use of violence against the citizens they allegedly serve.

Given what the Japanese have been subjected to in the past two and a half years of QQE, it is nearly criminal to suggest they need only more of it. None of it has worked as promised and stated, so what might have changed? Absolutely nothing except the arrangement of qualifiers and excuses that litter the same shared central bank speech delivered over and over of late. Kuroda says “robust”, Yellen proclaims “strong”, and both only confirm they live not of this world’s economy.

The only certain outcome from the melodramatic debt ceiling fight over the next several days, is the following: the US is about to have a brand spanking new debt ceiling, one that should last it until March of 2017: $19,600,000,000,000.

From the bowels of Australia’s iron ore mines to the top of Dubai’s pointless 100 story office towers, the entire warp and woof of the global economy has been distorted and bloated by the central bank money printing spree of the last two decades, led by the red credit machines of Beijing. Everywhere economies have succumbed to over-building, over-consumption, over-financialization and endless dangerous, unstable speculation. Stated differently, China’s red capitalism is the new black swan. There is nothing rational, stable or sustainable about it.

"The basic assertion is the following: the U.S. economy is not showing signs of entering into recession, thus stocks are not at risk of falling into a sustained bear market. Unfortunately, this conclusion is not necessarily true. For history has shown on numerous occasions that you do not need to have an economic recession looming on the horizon to see U.S. stocks fall into a bear market."

Trump embodies the American zeitgeist, circa 2015 – its virtues, its vulgarity, its inchoate mixture of common sense and incoherence. You may not like Donald Trump, for any one of a number of reasons, but anti-interventionists have to give him some credit for opening up the presidential debate to a critique of US foreign policy that hasn’t been seen or heard since the Ron Paul campaign.

As John Kerry prepares to meet Sergei Lavrov in Vienna, Putin and Assad are drawing up plans to call for elections in Syria. The idea, of course, is that Assad will prevail in a landslide, allowing Moscow to claim that the people have spoken and the regime must rightfully be restored. 

Already, the big banks (the ones with the closest ties to the Federal Reserve) have begun turning away deposits OR charging them.

As always happens after shocking events like yesterday which "nobody could have possibly predicted", watching the Penguin gallery reel in its humiliation is absolutely worth the price of admission.

Gold can be useful as a hedge against inflation but it's been consistently so only in the long run.

We have ceased to live in a free market economy a long time ago. The only sector of the economy that has managed to remain relatively free in many ways is the technology sector, because it innovates so rapidly that it tends to stay a step or two ahead of politicians and the oligarchies giving them their orders. They simply cannot catch up quickly enough with regulating all these innovations to death. Lately technology has begun to invade the turf of a number of established service businesses... and that appears to be a problem for the crony 'capitalist' crowd.