Too Big To Fail

Following last week's macro fireworks, the coming week will be an absolute snoozer with virtually nothing on the calendar until Thursday's Initial claims, which is the key event of the week, as well as much Fed president jawboning again, including both good and bad cops talking QE4EVA either up or down. And with earnings season basically over, at least coffee consumption will be higher than average.

Think the revolving door for Morgan Stanley's diaspora of clutch interests goes only from the private sector outward, with the recent appointment of MS' darling Mary Jo White (who will promptly recuse herself in virtually all major cases involved her former clients at Debevoise for years to come) to head the SEC? Think again. Moments ago, Reuters reported that according to a memo sent internally today, Morgan Stanley has hired Michele Davis, "a public relations official and policy director who helped shape the Treasury Department's strategy during the financial crisis, to become global head of corporate affairs, according to a bank memo sent on Monday."

The man who is the chief advisor to the US Treasury on its debt funding and issuance strategy was just promoted to the rank of second most important person at the biggest commercial bank in the US by assets (of which it was $2.5 trillion), and second biggest commercial bank in the world. And soon, Jamie willing, Matt is set for his final promotion, whereby he will run two very different enterprises: JPMorgan Chase and, by indirect implication, United States, Inc.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how you take over the world.

It's time to go in for the kill. Buy as much physical Gold as you can.

As Cyprus has shown us, when push comes to shove, rule of law goes out the window. I fully expect that when things get really bad in the financial system the money grabs will come fast and furious. Foreign accounts, including possibly even Gold held aboard, will come under attack. Heck, the US got Switzerland to throw its 300-year-old banking secrecy out the window…

Shareholders Join Bankers, Economists, Financial Experts, Regulators and the American People In Calling for a Break Up of the Giant Banks

The enduring myth of the post-2008 era is that central-planning money printing and deficit spending would soon spark a self-sustaining recovery. Once consumers and businesses stepped up their own borrowing and spending, the central bank and state would then pare back money printing and deficit spending, as the increase in private-sector spending would fuel further borrowing and spending, i.e. become self-sustaining. The reality is the mythical self-sustaining recovery is the carrot dangled in front of a credulous public: though we're constantly reassured "we're almost there" (the promised land of self-sustaining recovery), the mythical recovery remains out of reach, no matter how much money is printed or borrowed and blown in fiscal stimulus. There are several key reasons for this.

QE "is not a Buzz Lightyear policy," Dallas Fed's Fisher explains to Bloomberg TV's Stephanie Ruhle, "this will not go on forever." He admits there are limits to their (and implicitly the ECB or BoJ) policies - "we just have to figure out what they are." The always outspoken fed head goes on to explain why he believes the Fed's policy should be "dialed back... Not go from wild turkey, the liquor by the way, to cold turkey; but certainly slowing it down now." The too-big-to-fail banks are absolutely gaining from a substantial cost-of-funding advantage (over smaller banks) with their implicit government guarantee and Fisher expresses disappointment in the reams of pages that constitute new regulation adding that he would prefer "a simple statement saying they understand there is no government guarantee... It could be written by a sixth grader," as Dodd-Frank "needs repair." His fears are exacerbated by Cyprus as he notes, "[in Cyprus] you have an economy that is held hostage by bank failure and institutions that are too big to fail. We cannot let that happen in the U.S. ever again and the American people will not tolerate it."

50% In Favor of Directly Breaking Them Up ... Many More In Favor of Stopping Artificial Support and Letting them Shrink On Their Own

Debt-serfdom and the dominance of Financial Power are two sides of the same coin. Let's be clear about three things: 1. Too Big to Fail financialization is the metastasizing cancer that has crippled democracy and capitalism; 2. Financialization feeds on expanding debt and cannot survive without it; and 3. Debt is serfdom. Debt is the mechanism of the Financial Powers' dominance and the chains of our serfdom. Eliminate debt and you eliminate the foundation of banks' power and the financial bondage of serfdom. Though it would dearly love to, the State cannot force anyone to take on debt except as taxpayers. We do not have to remain debt-serfs, nor accept our servitude as unavoidable or fated. Debt = serfdom. There is another way to live, frugally, with only short-term debts that are paid off in a few short years. We either accept the consumerist-narcissist debt-serf programming or reject it. We are neither victims nor bystanders. The choice is ours.

David Stockman’s New York Times Op-Ed has ruffled a lot of feathers. Paul Krugman dislikes it, saying Stockman sounds like a cranky old man, and criticising Stockman for throwing out a load of meaningless numbers that sound kind of scary, but are less scary in context. What Krugman overlooks is Stockman’s excellent criticism of crony capitalism, financialisation, systemic rot and Wall Street corruption of Washington, something Stockman has seen from the inside as part of the Reagan administration. There are plenty of other writers who have pointed to this problem of propping up casino finance, including myself. But very few of them are doing so on the pages of the New York Times. In the long run, I think it will become patently clear that throwing liquidity at the financial system won’t solve anything other than immediate liquidity concerns. The rot was too deep. The financial sector needed real reform in 2008. It still needs it today.

By manipulating the price of money through sustained and historically low interest rates, Greenspan and Bernanke created an era of asset mis-pricing that inevitably would need to correct.  And when market forces attempted to do so in 2008, Paulson et al hoodwinked the world into believing the repercussions would be so calamitous for all that the institutions responsible for the bad actions that instigated the problem needed to be rescued -- in full -- at all costs. David Stockman, former director of the OMB under President Reagan, lays out how we have devolved from a free market economy into a managed one that operates for the benefit of a privileged few.

With all the recent chatter about an overhaul and dismantling of Too Big To Fail banks (spoiler alert: it will never happen, but it will take a lot of theater before that is made quite clear) many can be excused for believing the balance of power has shifted away from the megabanks (and their tens of trillions in over the counter derivative "weapons of mass financial destruction" so ably facilitating the Stockholm Syndrome of global mutual assured destruction with each passing day) and in the favor of the people, represented by the legislative and the judicial. Last night we got a quick reminder that absolutely nothing has changed in the true lay of the land, that the adjusted golden rule is still in place (yes, the banks still have all the gold and set all the rules), and that banks are still the undisputed rulers of the land when U.S. District Judge Naomi Reice Buchwald agreed to dismiss claims that the 16 banks targeted by various LIBOR lawsuits broke federal antitrust laws. In so ruling, the potential cost to the banks from an adverse overall resolution would be crippled. The ruling also is likely to reduce the financial inventive for new plaintiffs to join investors, cities, lenders and other parties that have already filed lawsuits.  In brief, the banks won again just when it mattered, just when it seemed they may, for once, be on the defensive, and just when the concept of accountability and responsibility for years of conspiratorial and criminal collusion to manipulate a rate impacting hundreds of trillions of IR-sensitive instruments, was about to rear its ugly head. Because in the New Normal crime and punishment is simply a book by Dostoyevsky.

Reclaiming the Founding Fathers' Vision of Prosperity

Hopefully the memory of the new Eurogroup head, who in a one day lost more credibility than his admittedly lying predecessor Juncker ever had, will be jogged courtesy of this full transcript provided by Reuters and the FT of what he told two reporters - on the record - and for the whole world to read. Because, by now, we are confident everyone has had more than enough with watching the entire Eurozone rapidly and tragically turn itself into a complete and utter mythomaniac, kletpocratic circus.