Transparency

As if we didn’t know it already! The Western world is the ultimate destination for corruption, pulling a swift one and swiping the valuables from the inside pocket of the guy’s pants standing in front of you as he keeps his beady eye on the economy.

With the Greeks facing up to their third (or 4th or 5th, who's counting anymoe anyway) bailout, proclaiming growth is just around the corner, that the crisis is behind them, and that slavery will solve European youth unemployment; we thought it both ironic and sad that, as Bloomberg's Niraj Shah notes, the European Commission today publishes its first anti-corruption report and finds Greece has the most corrupt public sector, according to Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index.

Just five years after President Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace prize (to much global amazement), Norwegian politicians have nominated none other than Edward Snowden for this year's award for contributing to transparency and global stability by exposing a U.S. surveillance program. As Reuters reports, Snowden’s "actions have in effect led to the reintroduction of trust and transparency as a leading principle in global security policies." Is this the Nobel's last best effort to regain some credibility?

The Fed tightens by a little (sorry, tapering - flow - is and always will be tightening): markets soar; Turkey tightens by a lot: markets soar. If only it was that easy everyone would tighten. Only it never is. Which is why as we just reported, the initial euphoria in Turkey is long gone and the Turkish Lira is basically at pre-announcement levels, only now the government has a furious, and loan-challenged population to deal with, not to mention an economy which has just ground to a halt. Anyway, good luck - other EMs already faded, including the ZAR which many are speculating could be the next Turkey, and certainly the USDJPY which sent futures soaring last night, only to fade all gains as well and bring equities down with it.

When facing a corrupt system, provide for yourself and your community those necessities that the system cannot or will not. Become independent from establishment-controlled paradigms. If you and your community do this, the system will have one of two choices: 1)  Admit that you do not need them anymore and fade into the fog of history, Or... 2)  Reveal its tyrannical nature in full and attempt to force you back into dependence. In either case, the citizenry gains the upper hand. We are hard-pressed to think of a better recent example of the non-participation principle in action than the rise of Mexican citizen militias in the Western state of Michoacan.

While Edward Snowden's legacy has already been felt in official, government circle most recently with Obama's amusing, if completely meaningless, theatrical reformation of the NSA (so wait, the Utah's superstasi spy center is now closed, right?), it is now the private sector's turn. Moments ago, Verizon - in what is hopefully the first such action of many - provided an extensive "Transparency Report" in which it disclosed the "number of subpoenas, orders, and warrants we received from law enforcement in the United States last year. We also received emergency requests and National Security Letters. The vast majority of these various types of demands relate to our consumer customers; we receive relatively few demands regarding our enterprise customers." So regular retail customers are being actively spied on, but corporations are safe. Good to know.

"Close relatives of China’s top leaders have held secretive offshore companies in tax havens that helped shroud the Communist elite’s wealth, a leaked cache of documents reveals" the ICIJ's latest offshore weawlth expose begins. In addition to the usual list of who, what, where, why and when, we learn that once again the two largest Swiss banks are about to be embroiled in yet another money laundering scandal, this time involving the parking of wealth belonging to China's aristocracy - including its princelings - in various Caribbean, mostly British Virgin Island, tax havens. What is notable, if not unexpected, is just how pervasive the parking of offshore capital has been, and confirms that it is not inflow of money that the PBOC has to be afraid of when its internationalizes the Yuan, it is the outflow that will be far more worrysome. But the biggest stunner is the sheer size of the wealth transfer: according to ICIJ estimate, up to $4 trillion in "untraced assets" may have left China since 2000. These are truly epic numbers.

Five years after the 2008 crisis hit, economies are more financialised than ever. If the politicians and regulators ever had any balls they have been amputated by the casino managers, under the anaesthesis of perceived self-interest. They have become the casino eunuchs. An apparent early consensus on the systemic problems of over financialisation has melted away into a misconceived search for ‘business as usual’.

In his 712-page tour de force, The Great Deformation, David Stockman dissects America’s descent into the present era of “bubble finance.” it’s hard to refute Stockman’s perspective on the Fed’s role in the housing bubble. But that won’t stop some from trying, and especially the many academic economists beholden to the Fed. Research papers have stealthily danced around the Fed’s culpability for our crappy economy, as we discussed here. More importantly, if Stockman is right about bubble finance, there’s more mayhem to come. Consider that denying failure and persisting with the same strategy are two sides of the same coin. Just as investors avoid the pain of admitting mistakes by holding onto losing positions, Fed officials who claim to have done little wrong are also more committed than ever to propping up asset markets with cheap money. For those concerned about another policy failure, a key question is:  “As of today, where do we stand with respect to bubbles and bubble finance?”

As India continues its anti-gold stance (and does nothing but drive the undergound smuggling business), China is continuing its opening of the world's biggest physical bullion market. As India's Economic Times reports, China has granted licenses to import gold to two foreign banks for the first time. "China is actually increasing its transparency," noted on analyst, allowing more banks to import gold could increase the supply of the metal into the country, easing local prices that are higher than in most Asian nations (premiums are currently about $15 an ounce over London prices, compared to less than $2 in Singapore and Hong Kong). They rose to a record high of $30 in April-May last year. "This is the first step that the regulators are taking to ensure that its gold futures contract in the free-trade zone can take off."

As a result of this, the financial sector remains rife with fraud and impossible to accurately value (how can you value a business that is lying about its balance sheet?).

While the Fed pays lip-service to its increased transparency, the volumes of caveats and wordsmithing we exposed last week continue to surge. The problem is becoming worse for the Fed and is showing up in the oddest correlation to the Fed Balance Sheet we have found yet. As Deutsche Bank's Thorsten Slok shows, as the 'unemployment rate' approaches the 6.5% 'threshold', FOMC statements have surged in their verbiosity. Simply put, as Slok quantifies, it is becoming more and more difficult for the Fed to explain (away) what it is doing (and more and more expensive). And another thing we can look forward to: when the Fed's balance sheet hits $1 quadrillion in a few short years, at the current pace of expansion the FOMC statement will be 25,000 words, or the equivalent of a 100 page book.

It has been commonplace to speak of central bank independence - as if it were both a reality and a necessity. Discussions of the Fed invariably refer to legislated independence and often to the famous 1951 Accord that apparently settled the matter. [1] While everyone recognizes the Congressionally-imposed dual mandate, the Fed has substantial discretion in its interpretation of the vague call for high employment and low inflation. It is, then, perhaps a good time to reexamine the thinking behind central bank independence. There are several related issues.

• First, can a central bank really be independent? In what sense? Political? Operational? Policy formation?
  
• Second, should a central bank be independent? In a democracy should monetary policy—purportedly as important as or even more important than fiscal policy—be unaccountable? Why?
• Finally, what are the potential problems faced if a central bank is not independent? Inflation? Insolvency?

Following a Washington reporter's request to the Navy to turn over documents related to the Navy Yard Shooting, a US Navy official mistakenly forwarded an internal email outlining instructions on exactly how to avoid his Freedom of Information request. As RT reports, hours after NBC's Scott Macfarlane's tweets on the matter went viral, the Navy "regretted the incident" and re-iterated its "commitment to transparency."

As the world prepares to comprehend, in their own recency-biased manner, the minutes of the most recent FOMC meeting, we thought it worth a reminder of just how Fed communications have ballooned in the past 20 years. The first statement, issued on Feb. 4, 1994, was a mere 99 words. December's 'most important FOMC statement ever' was a stunning (record) 867 words - and even so Jon Hilsenrath managed to interpret and write on it in 3 minutes. As we noted earlier, the minutes tend to be a platform for even greater 'communication' - and notably are not the actual minutes of the meeting but a prepared annotation of what the Fed wants the public to know about the meeting. Transparency and communications, it would appear, has been transformed from clarifying to endless caveat-ing.