Switzerland

After a 5 day tumbling streak, which saw Chinese stock plunge well over 20% and 17% in just the first three days of this week, overnight the Shanghai Composite was hanging by a thread (and threat) until the last hour of trading. In fact, this is what the SHCOMP looked like until the very end: Up 2.6%, up 1.2%, up 2.8%, up 0.6%, up 2%... down 0.2%. And then the cavalry came in: "Heavyweight stocks like banks and insurance companies helped pull up the index, and it’s possibly China Securities Finance entering the market again to shore up stocks," Central China Sec. strategist Zhang Gang told Bloomberg by phone. Net result: the Composite, having been red just shortly before the close, soared higher by 156 points or 5.4%, showing the US stock market just how it's down.

In spite of all the attention the nation has received in recent years, SCMP reports that thousands of so-called "politically exposed persons”, or PEPs - a category that includes heads of state and other top officials - hold Swiss bank accounts, a Swiss foreign ministry official said. But, perhaps not for much longer as Bern aims to finalize a law aimed at simplifying the process of freezing and unblocking such funds.

As asset bubbles are in the way of the Fed’s policy, a decline in stock prices removes the equity market bubble and enables the Fed to print more money and start the process up again. On the other hand, the stock market decline could indicate that the players in the market have comprehended that the stock market is an artificially inflated bubble that has no real basis. Once the psychology is destroyed, flight sets in.

The reason given by our rulers for suppressing cash is to keep society safe from terrorists, tax evaders, money launderers, drug cartels, and other villains real or imagined. The actual aim of the ?ood of laws restricting or even prohibiting the use of cash is to force the public to make payments through the financial system. This enables governments to expand their ability to spy on and keep track of their citizens’ most private financial dealings, in order to milk their citizens of every last dollar of tax payments that they claim are due.

At the risk of sounding like a broken record we'd like to say a bit more about economists' tendency to get their monetary history wrong; in particular, the common myths about the gold standard. If there's one monetary history topic that tends to get handled especially sloppily by monetary economists, not to mention other sorts, this is it. Sure, the gold standard was hardly perfect, and gold bugs themselves sometimes make silly claims about their favorite former monetary standard. But these things don't excuse the errors many economists commit in their eagerness to find fault with that "barbarous relic." The point, in other words, isn't to make a pitch for gold.  It's to make a pitch for something - anything - that's better than our present, lousy money.

"Evidence in support of Bernanke's view of the channels through which QE works is at best mixed. There is no work, to my knowledge, that establishes a link from QE to the ultimate goals of the Fed inflation and real economic activity. Indeed, casual evidence suggests that QE has been ineffective in increasing inflation."

It's human nature for us to want to keep our wealth close at hand. Trouble is, you have all your wealth in one jurisdiction, and should that jurisdiction find itself in an economic crisis, all that “diversification” will be seriously at risk. If we’re being really truthful with ourselves, governments pose a greater threat than the average thief, as they can steal legally. Much of the world has gone on a massive spending spree and has, in effect, used a credit card to do so. Soon, that bill will need to be paid and the jurisdictions that are in debt will unquestionably be revealed to be insolvent. The economic crisis, when it hits, will be sudden and will be devastating.

Perhaps at the margin, weak Japanese GDP - as it heads for a quintuple-dip recession - could be today's catalyst but both crude and copper prices are re-tumbling this morning, pressing cycle lows. The USDollar is drifting higher and dos not appear a major driver today. However, broadly speaking malinvestment-driven overcapacity and the collapse of fake credit-fueled demand continue to provide the backdrop for commodity carnage...

Most Americans have no idea that the U.S. corporate fraudulent government can legally lie to you every single day to get you to believe whatever they want you to believe and then turn around behind closed doors and laugh at you for believing their legal lies. Try telling that to most Americans and see how they look at you. This is another example of a hard-to-handle lie that is pushed on Americans every day; and the average working American has no time to truly wrap their heads around this stunning fact so they bury their heads in the sand instead, unwilling to look at the issue because they fear they won’t know what to do with the information.

All of this raises an interesting question about the future of the US dollar. Because if an economy as large and powerful as China’s has had to concede defeat, does this mean that “King Dollar” will rule forever? No chance.

"The future is unknown and we are not dealing with markets that are free markets anymore...now we have government interventions everywhere. [But] in the last say twelve months, I have observed an increasing number of academics who are questioning monetary policies. That's why I think they will take the gold away and go back to some gold standard by revaluing the gold say from now $1000/oz to say $10,000 dollars. An individual should definitely own some physical gold. The bigger question is where should he store it? because... the failure of monetary policies will not be admitted by the professors that are at central banks, they will then go and blame someone else for it and then an easy target would be to blame it on people that own physical gold because - they can argue - well these are the ones that do take money out of circulation and then the velocity of money goes down - we have to take it away from them... That has happened in 1933 in the US."

Aside from the socialist utopias of Greece and Venezuela, who else is on the default chopping block? The CDS heatmap below lays out all the countries which according to the market, are most likely to tell their creditors the money is gone... it's all gone.

The quest for perfection is man’s unattainable goal. Man can never be perfect if we are to believe the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes. Man is man’s wolf and all of that.

The SNB reported a record loss, but the real meaning and implication is not what most are claiming.  See why.

Earlier today, the SNB which is perhaps the most transparent hedge fund of all central banks and actually lays out its financial statements in a respectable manner every quarter, released its results for the second quarter (and first half) of 2015. The result: another absolutely epic loss, amounting to €50.1 billion ($51.8 billion) of which €47.2 billion on currency positions - a whopping 7% of Swiss GDP - meaning that in Q2 the SNB lost another €20 billion. This happened despite the SNB having invested 17%, or $94 billion, in foreign - mostly US -stocks.