Salient

The market correction that begin in January appears to be subsiding, at least for the moment, as Yellen's recent testimony gave markets the promise of the continuation of Bernanke's legacy. With the markets back into rally mode, for the moment, this week's "Things To Ponder" focuses on some of the bigger issues concerning the effectiveness of QE, investing and "77 reasons you suck at managing money."

In the below video, we discuss the power of the lone dissenter to connect the dots of global economic disenfranchisement for billions of people worldwide.

A classicial economist... and Harvard professor... preaching to the world that one's money is not safe in the US banking system due to Ben Bernanke's actions? And putting his withdrawal slip where his mouth is and pulling $1 million out of Bank America? Say it isn't so...

The current Administration has taken on the "war on poverty" as its primary battle ground going into the mid-term elections later this year.  As NFIB's Bill Dunkleberg recently noted, "since it is an election year, the main theme will be addressing the disparities in income and wealth (i.e. tax the rich and increase welfare programs) rather than promoting policies that would create jobs and raise incomes in a growing economy. This year, policy will be all about votes." This isn't a new fight.  As Robert Rector stated recently - that particular war has been less than successful.

"Fifty years and $20 trillion later, LBJ's goal to help the poor become self-supporting has failed."

However, while the Administration will use the argument to garner votes in an election year, the most interesting aspect about the income inequality debate is that it is the very policies of the current Administration that is fueling the income shift. 

Dispassionate update on digital currencies.

... the most effective alpha-generating investment strategies are parasites. An alpha-generating strategy of the type I’m describing uses the market itself as its habitat. It’s not an investment strategy based on the fundamentals of this company or that company – the equivalent of a geographic habitat – but on the behaviors of market participants who are living their investment lives in that fundamentally-derived habitat. A parasitic strategy isn’t the only way to generate alpha – you can also be better suited for a particular investment environment (think warm-blooded animal versus cold-blooded animal as you go into an Ice Age) and generate alpha that way – but I believe that the investment strategies with the largest and most consistent “edge” are, in a very real sense, parasites.

Just over a year ago, in one simple graphic, we showed why Bridgewater, which currently manages around $150 billion, is the world's biggest hedge fund. Quite simply, its flagship $80 billion Pure Alpha strategy had generated a 16% annualized return since inception in 1991, with a modest 11% standard deviation - returns that even Bernie Madoff would be proud of.  And, true to form, according to various media reports, Pure Alpha's winning ways continued in 2013, when it generated a 5.25% return: certainly underperfoming the market but a respectable return nonetheless. However, Pure Alpha's smaller cousin, the $70 billion All Weather "beta" fund was a different matter in the past year. The fund, which touts itself as "the foundation of the "Risk Parity" movement", showed that in a centrally-planned market, even the best asset managers are hardly equipped to deal with what has largely become an irrational market, and ended the year down -3.9%.

"Paper and digital markets levitate, central banks pull out all the stops of their magical reality-tweaking machine to manipulate everything, accounting fraud pervades public and private enterprise, everything is mis-priced, all official statistics are lies of one kind or another, the regulating authorities sit on their hands, lost in raptures of online pornography (or dreams of future employment at Goldman Sachs), the news media sprinkles wishful-thinking propaganda about a mythical “recovery” and the “shale gas miracle” on a credulous public desperate to believe, the routine swindles of medicine get more cruel and blatant each month, a tiny cohort of financial vampire squids suck in all the nominal wealth of society, and everybody else is left whirling down the drain of posterity in a vortex of diminishing returns and scuttled expectations."

Key events in the week ahead with implications for early 2014.

Behold the Wealth Effect: according to the NY State comptroller, the average NYC banker made $360,700 in 2012. This is 5.2 more than the average non-financial job in the city (i.e., all other jobs).

In what is a staggering example of not only state meddling in the affairs of the "free press", but worse, sheer state idiocy, yesterday the WSJ posted an article on its website revealing that as many as 24 co-conspirators would be exposed shortly in the ongoing Libor manipulation scandal and divulging the names of various individuals on this list. What promptly followed was truly bizarre. As the WSJ reports shortly after posting the article, "a British judge ordered the Journal and David Enrich, the newspaper's European banking editor, to comply with a request by the U.K.'s Serious Fraud Office prohibiting the newspaper from publishing names of individuals not yet made public in the government's ongoing investigation into alleged manipulation of the London interbank offered rate, or Libor." This happened at 7:18 pm London time, after the original WSJ article had already hit the Internet.  What's worse: the names had already been made public, and through this statist intervention, it only assured that everyone would now read just who was on the list.

According to the latest data compiled by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, in 2010, just 1% of the population accounted for a whopping 21.4% of total health care expenditures with an annual mean expenditure of $87,570. Just below them, 5% of the population accounted for nearly 50% of all healthcare spending. Just as stunning is the "other" side: the lower 50 percent of the population ranked by their expenditures accounted for only 2.8% of the total for 2009 and 2010 respectively. Perhaps in addition to bashing the "1%" of wealth holders, a relatively straightforward and justified exercise in the current political climate, it is time for public attention to also turn to the chronic 1% (and 5%)-ers who are the primary issue when it comes to the debt-funding needed to preserve the US welfare state.

Here is Part Two of our exclusive interview with World Bank Whistleblower Karen Hudes in which I discuss with Ms. Hudes the need to end an immoral fractional reserve banking system that continually drains the wealth of citizens without their consent and without their knowledge.

Having recently acquired important stakes or out-right ownership of major Canadian energy firms, Chinese companies are now continuing their penetration of Canada's energy sector by targeting the juniors. In particular, the Saskatchewan-based producer Novus Energy announced this week its agreement to be acquired for $320 million by Yanchang Petroleum International Ltd. Novus is a junior oil and gas company that targets light oil resource plays in Western Canada. Its assets are concentrated in the Viking Formation, a lithological unit in central and eastern Alberta and adjacent west-central Saskatchewan, as well as in southeastern and east-central Saskatchewan. The Viking Formation is well delineated with low-risk reserves including large amounts of "original-oil-in-place". The company plans to employ improved horizontal drilling and multi-stage hydraulic fracturing in order to increase recovery and diminish development costs. The deal follows by five months the visit by Canadian Trade Minister Ed Fast to Beijing, where he officially confirmed that Ottawa would welcome further continued investment from Chinese energy companies, even after the US$15.1 billion acquisition of the oil-sands operator Nexen.