Warsh

At the very crux of the financial crisis, former Fed governor Kevin Warsh notes, "experimental extreme monetary policy," had the "right risk-reward", but, he warns, in this excellent (and somewhat chilling) discussion at the Milken Institute, "we left a financial crisis more than for years ago." and since then the Fed has "over-promised and under-delivered." The Fed has "enabled" Washington to do nothing, since the politicians expect the same "rabbit out of the hat" rescue that occurred in the darkest days of the financial crisis. This means no growth strategies ("the mix of policies has to be right") will occur. Since the financial crisis, Washington has done its level best to focus on GDP in the next quarter, or perhaps the election, and precious little beyond that short-term horizon. Warsh concludes, "There Is No Plan B." The Fed has fewer degrees of freedom and the rest of Washington is not coming to the rescue; and furthermore "the ability of a central bank, exclusively, without the rest of Washington doing any bit of the task, to turn an economy from a modest recovery to a robust one is an experiment that is untested - and will not prove to be successful."

In the past months and right after implementing Quantitative Easing Unlimited Edition, the Fed began surfacing the idea that an exit strategy is at the door. With the latest releases of weak activity data worldwide, the idea was put back in the closet. However, a few analysts have already discussed the implications of the smoothest of all exit strategies: An exit without asset sales; a buy & hold exit. We have no doubt that as soon as allowed, the idea will resurface again. Underlying all official discussions is the notion that an exit strategy is a “stock”, rather than a flow problem, that the Fed can make decisions independently of the fiscal situation of the US and that international coordination can be ignored. This is logically inconsistent as we address below...

The net effect of QE4EVA is that on average, every business day in March will see the Fed effectively seed a new $4.25bn AUM investment firm whose sole goal is to buy, not sell, securities. Some of you have worked in asset management your entire careers.  You know how hard it is raise assets. Out of thin air, a new $4.25bn competitor is starting up each and every business day in March, courtesy of the good folks in the Marriner-Eccles building in DC. It must be hard to sit by and watch while the Fed creates a new $4.25bn competitor every business day where the sole goal of that money is to buy simply because a Princeton academic thinks it should.  The Princeton academic thinks stocks should be high, so they are.  The Princeton academic thinks bond yields should be low, so they are.  Period.  Of course this makes a mockery of those of you who actually try to understand fundamental value, but hey, the Princeton academic gets what the Princeton academic wants.  The devil take the hindmost. However, I do know that what the Fed is doing now is unsustainable and certainly unfair to those of us who actually work for a living.  And what is unsustainable and unfair in the long-run does not last.

Two and a half years ago, George Soros' former partner Stanley Druckenmiller closed shop when he shut down his iconic Duquesne Management, after generating 30% average annual returns since 1986. Some time later he raised many red flags by being one of the first "establishment" types to expose the Fed's take over of the market when he said in a rare May 2011 interview that "It's not a free market. It's not a clean market.... The market isn't saying anything about the future. It's saying there's a phony buyer of $19 billion of Treasurys a week." This was in the context of the constantly declining interest rates on an ever exploding US debt load. And while back then total debt was a "manageable" $14.3 trillion, as of today it is some $2.3 trillion higher moments ago printing at a fresh record high of $16.6 trillion, not surprisingly the phony buyer is still here only now he is buying not $19 billion by over $20 billion in total debt each week. But just like it was the relentless rise in the US debt that forced him out of his privacy in the public scene back then, so it was also the US debt that was also the topic of his rare CNBC appearance today (where he fiercely poked at all those other TV chatterbox pundits when he said "money managers should manage money and not go on shows like this") in the aftermath of his recent WSJ Op-Ed. There, he once again said what everyone knows but is scared to admit: "we have an entitlement problem."

Overnight, Frank Partnoy and Jesse Eisinger released an epic magnum opus titled "What's Inside America's Banks", in which they use over 9000 words, including spot on references to Wells Fargo, JPM, Andy Haldane, Kevin Warsh, Basel II, Basel III (whose regulatory framework is now 509 pages and includes a ridiculous 78 calculus equations to suggest that banks have to delever by some $3 trillion, which is why it will never pass) to give their answer: "Nobody knows." Of course, while this yeoman's effort may come as news to a broader cross-section of the population, is it well known by anyone who has even a passing interest in the loan-loss reserve release earnings generating black boxes formerly known as banks (which once upon a time made their money using Net Interest margin, and actually lending out money to make a profit), and now simply known as FDIC insured Bank Holding Company hedge funds. This also happens to be the second sentence in the lead paragraph of the story: "Sophisticated investors describe big banks as “black boxes” that may still be concealing enormous risks—the sort that could again take down the economy." So far so good, and again - not truly news. What however may come as news to none other than the author is that the first sentence of the lead-in: 'Some four years after the 2008 financial crisis, public trust in banks is as low as ever" is, sadly, wrong.

Presenting Dave Collum's now ubiquitous and all-encompassing annual review of markets and much, much more. From Baptists, Bankers, and Bootleggers to Capitalism, Corporate Debt, Government Corruption, and the Constitution, Dave provides a one-stop-shop summary of everything relevant this year (and how it will affect next year and beyond).

In “The Biggest Myth About the Fed,” David Beckworth, an assistant professor of economics at Western Kentucky University, suggests that the pessimists are wrong to be concerned about what Mr. Bernanke and Co. are up to. The notion that current benign market conditions are a reason for optimism sums up just how out of touch with reality most academic economists (and other alleged experts, including journalists-cum-forecasters who parrot this nonsense) are.

By this sort of logic:

• Mid-2005 was the right time to be optimistic on housing
• January-2007 was the right time to be optimistic on the banking sector
• The spring of 2007 was the right time to be optimistic on credit markets
• The fall of 2007 was the right time to be optimistic on global equity markets
• Mid-2008 was the right time to be optimistic on commodities
• This past September was the right time to be optimistic on technology stocks

Of course, we know how those all worked out (hint: not well).

Ex-Fed Governor Kevin Warsh provided much food for thought during his appearance on CNBC this morning. Over the course of the following clip, he addresses concerns from just how bad the reality of the global economy must have been for Bernanke and his merry men to have gone "all-in" aggressive - reflecting on this as a panic-like reaction during times now where we are not panicking, the ineffectiveness of QE3 "iPhone 5 will do more for the real economy than QE3", fears over how bad this could get as "there is a reason 'exit' is a four-letter word." Warsh notes the paradox of Bernanke "trying to pull a rabbit out of a hat' each time the economy loses control while calling for Washington to do more - as the politicians know "there's not much we need to do, Bernanke has our back." When asset prices are driven less by fundamentals and more by speeches and policies coming out of Washington, you're taking risks. "Risks are highest in the economy when measures of risk are he lowest"

On occasion of the publication of his new gold report (read here), Ronald Stoeferle talked with financial journalist Lars Schall about fundamental gold topics such as: "financial repression"; market interventions; the oil-gold ratio;  the renaissance of gold in finance;  "Exeter’s Pyramid"; and what the true "value" of gold could actually look like. Via Matterhorn Asset Management.

There is no free-lunch - especially if that lunch is liquidity-fueled - is how Gluskin-Sheff's David Rosenberg reminds us of the reality facing US markets this year and next. As (former Fed governor) Kevin Warsh noted in the WSJ "The 'fiscal cliff' in early 2013 - when government stimulus spending and tax relief are set to fall - is not misfortune. It is the inevitable result of policies that kick the can down the road." Between the jobs data and three months in a row of declining ISM orders/inventories it seems the key manufacturing sector of support for the economy may be quaking and add to that the deleveraging that is now recurring (consumer credit) and Rosenberg sees six rather sizable stumbling-blocks facing markets as we move forward. On this basis, the market as a whole is overpriced by more than 20%.

Sprott strategist John Embry has never been a fan of the existing financial system. Today, he makes that once again quite clear in this interview with Egon von Grayerz' Matterhorn Asset Management in which he says: "I think that the current financial system, as we know it, will be totally destroyed, probably sooner rather than later. The next system will require gold backing to have any legitimacy. This has happened many times in history." Needless to say, he proceeds to explain why a monetary system based on gold, one in which one, gasp, lives according to one's means, is better. Logically, he also explains why the status quo, whose insolvent welfare world has nearly a third of a quadrillion in the form of unfunded future liabilities, will never let this happen. Much more inside.

One of the salient questions asked of Bernanke by Congress relates to a Kevin Warsh oped in the WSJ, in which he said the following: "Private investors are crowded out of the market when the Fed shows up as a large and powerful bidder. As a result, the administration and Congress make tax and spending decisions—with huge implications for our standard of living—with heightened risks around future funding costs." This is arguably the question that dominates Fed policy making under the Operation Twist doctrine, in which the Fed buys up long-dated paper and sells Short dated (under 3 years), the second leg of which however is completely irrelevant, as the Fed has already guaranteed ZIRP until 2014, in essence confirming that Twist was nothing but a stealth QE3 as we have claimed all along, as the Fed's ZIRP4EVA policy effectively offsets any and all short-dated sales. Needless to say Bernanke's response was irrelevant. However, here is the most jarring statistic. As Barclays showed a few days back, under Twist, the Fed has monetized virtually all, and specifically 91% of all gross issuance in the 20-30 year maturity bucket. In other words, Warsh is absolutely spot on, and once again we are left with an artificial market in which it is only the Fed that defines the UST curve shape by molding the long end. What happens when Twist ends? Will the 30 Year collapse? What happens when there is no explicit back stop to the long end? Is this the reason why Bill Gross yesterday said that he fully expects much more check writing by the Fed for the next '12, 24, 36 months." And how can it not: we don't have a market of rational players any more - the entire market is merely one irrational player, whose biggest counterparty incidentally, the ECB, is beyond broke. Finally, what happens to the Fed's balance sheet when interest rates start rising? Holding a portfolio with a duration greater than it has ever been, the DV01 is currently well over $2 billion (i.e. a $2 billion loss on every basis point increase in rates). And rising.

GATA's Chris Powell speaks: "The speaker following me, George Clooney, will be able to tell you what it's like to be handsome, talented, rich, and famous. I could tell you what it's like not to be. But instead the conference has asked me to talk about gold, which at least might make you rich, or help you preserve some of whatever you've got. This opportunity is full of risk, because the gold market long has been manipulated by Western central banks to restrain the gold price. The Western central banks are slowly losing control of the market but they are not giving up easily. Why do Western central banks manipulate the gold market? The gold market is manipulated because, despite Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke's insistence to Congress a few weeks ago that gold is not money, just "tradition," gold is indeed a currency that competes brutally with government-issued currencies and helps determine not only the value of those currencies but also interest rates and the value of government bonds...."

We give Robert Zoellick 4 to 6 weeks before he follows Axel Weber, Kevin Warsh and the COO of one of the bankrupt GSEs (we forget his name) into the sunset. The reason? After breaking ranks with the Criminal Bank Cartel last year and calling for a return to the gold standard, the president of the World Bank has dared to be the first among the institutional elite to point out that the cotton in the emperor's clothes, were he to be clothed in the first place, would have surged by 100% in less than a year. According to AP: "World Bank President Robert Zoellick says global food prices have hit "dangerous levels" that could contribute to political instability, push millions of people into poverty and raise the cost of groceries." Not to worry. According to Fed VP Christine Cumming who spoke earlier somewhere, rising commodity costs merely indicate "stronger global demand." Oddly enough, it is this supposed demand for products that has forced 44 million people to enter "extreme poverty"... out of their own volition. We are  not sure, but something tells us the Fed's Cumming has a Ph.D.

And so, the departures will continue (following Warsh and Weber) until all dissent is eliminated. More if we get it, but it really doesn't matter. The greatest unsupervised ponzi wealth transfer has just been greenlighted.