Submitted by Ben Hunt via Salient Partners Epsilon Theory blog,
I figure not one Epsilon Theory reader in a thousand has seen “Suddenly, Last Summer”, but let me tell you … it’s got everything. Katherine Hepburn in a phenomenal performance as bizarro Aunt Vi. Elizabeth Taylor cavorting in the surf. Montgomery Clift. Lobotomies. Pedophilia. Cannibalism. Honestly, it’s kind of what you would expect if Gore Vidal took a Tennessee Williams script and just went gonzo with it. Which, in fact, is exactly what happened.
I found this quote, where Katherine Hepburn is
trying to convince Montgomery Clift to lobotomize Elizabeth Taylor so that she’d forget her former life and be less fearful and anxious … less volatile, in other words … to be an eerily apt description of what Central Bankers have tried to do with markets.
We endured an event last summer that, just as in the movie, ultimately brings all the mendacity out of the shadows and into the open. When Yellen declared last summer that the Fed had now firmly embraced a tightening bias, followed by the rest of the world declaring that they were doubling down on extraordinary monetary policy easing, the entire world was set on a path where all of the political fragmentation – all of the deep fissures within and between countries – would be inexorably revealed. Suddenly last summer, the mask of global monetary policy cooperation was ripped away, and the investment world will never be the same.

Monetary policy divergence manifests itself first in currencies, because currencies aren’t an asset class at all, but a political construction that represents and symbolizes monetary policy. Then the divergence manifests itself in those asset classes, like commodities, that have no internal dynamics or cash flows and are thus only slightly removed in their construction and meaning from however they’re priced in this currency or that. From there
the divergence spreads like a cancer (or like a cure for cancer, depending on your perspective) into commodity-sensitive real-world companies and national economies.
Eventually – and this is the Big Point – the divergence spreads into everything, everywhere. Some things will go up, and some things will go down. But the days of ALL financial assets inflating in lock-step … the days of everything, everywhere going up together … that’s over.
For a lot of active investment managers, this is great news.
For investors? Well, it’s a mixed bag. Certainly it’s a more difficult bag, where so many of the learned behaviors of the past five years that worked so well in an environment of monetary policy coordination will fail miserably in an environment of monetary policy competition. But it beats getting a lobotomy. I think. We’ll see.
So...BTFATH?
.... or BTFD. All depends on what vehicle you're looking at.
....or which way you are facing
I vote for the lobotomy..
all this crud just too hard to take.
2008 all over again
When the "click" gets their "buy signal", they'll deploy their free/cheap fiat reserve war chest and gobble up commodities & distressed assets.
Once they've blown their wad into the economy acquiring hard assets, they'll bide their time waiting on the wad to wend its way through the system,
picking up velocity, priming the pump---till the "sell signal" is given. Wax on , wax off. Riding the wave of credit boom manipulation through the ages.
Inflation & disinflation, the millstones used to grind our bones to make their bread.
what could possibly go wrong?
QE4, negative interest rates, bail-ins and a ban of physical cash?
Seriously...For investors? Well, it’s a mixed bag
Sorry but simply ridiculous conclusions...
For a slightly simpler correlation...but this isn't likely to end up a "mixed bag" for investors
http://econimica.blogspot.com/2015/06/0ne-simple-chart-explains-great.html
Pounding the real assets (commodities, things that are produced through labor) and pumping the ethereal (paper, faux production out of nothing).
I love this inverted reasoning of going from life and human sentiment to the realm of monetary and financial shenanigans.
We live in an upside down world. The larger angle of life becomes "lobotomised" into studying greed is good type narrow band thinking. The ethics of life are focussed in order to examine the ethics of material gain in market mechanisms which are skewed like southern mendacious mindsets of inbred culture.
Very quaint. But then the world is a stage and the market is a page of it. Tennessee Gekko.
Nothing is rigged, because everything is not nothing.
Liberty is a demand. Tyranny is submission..
Can you rig what has already been stolen?!
For the first time I can now see the value of banging rocks together.
Look out etrade baby your worth more in a real market
Freedom and liberty!
Here's Martha Davis & the Motels version: "Suddenly Last Summer"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sB7_xkQiLPw
I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy.
"...or like a cure for cancer, depending upon your perspective..."
I know persuasive writing requires some concessions, but that one is too much. It's a fucking cancer, growth where it shouldn't be for the wrong reasons, marching the patient towards death.
We had to kill the patient to save the cancer... Not the first time either.
This is one of the best articles that has been put up on ZH lately. It really gets at the heart of the issue.
People think the fiat currency is "money", which allows the owner of the monopoly on printing "money' to do no end of mischief. As long as people believe that pieces of paper are "money", monetary policy can be used to socially engineer desirable outcomes for the ruling class.
What happens when people are pushed out of the system due to lack of access to currency through slave work (what we call "jobs")? What happens when we pass the 100 million mark of people that have left the country (in terms of labor and trade, not physically) the Ruling Class has created, forced out by the attempt to create artificial scarcity? Sooner or later the loss of faith will be catastrophic to the State.
Despite what the US Oligarchy thinks, they cannot weather that storm.
According to this writer, physics and geology are "spurious."
The correlation is no accident, but the author has failed utterly to grasp their relationship.
Here is why gold prices are so low:
http://michaelekelley.com/2015/07/20/dear-fed-plz-raise-gold-price/
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-07-09/are-big-banks-using-derivatives-suppress-bullion-prices/
Here are some more signs of a coming recession.
http://michaelekelley.com/2015/05/29/mergers-and-acquisitions-set-record...
http://michaelekelley.com/2015/02/20/fed-warns-of-two-bubbles/
http://michaelekelley.com/2015/02/24/would-you-pay-39-more-than-asked/
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-07-27/when-will-we-ever-learn/
Here is how to prepare.
http://michaelekelley.com/2014/10/16/8-things-to-do-when-recession-happens/
Here is how to get your mind off this stuff.
http://michaelekelley.com/category/humor/
Good luck!