Meltdown

By the Deceptive means of Misinformation and Manipulation of economic data the Federal Reserve has set the stage for broad based moral hazard. Through Distortions caused by Malpractice and Malfeasance, a raft of Unintended Consequences have now changed the economic and financial fabric of America likely forever. The Federal Reserve policies of Quantitative Easing and Negative real interest rates, across the entire yield curve, have been allowed to go on so long that Mispricing and Malinvestment has reached the level that markets are effectively Delusional. Markets have become Dysfunctional concerning the pricing of risk and risk adjusted valuations. Fund Managers can no longer use even the Fed's own Valuation Model which is openly acknowledged to be broken.

“The Government Has Bought Into the Notion that Too Big to Fail Is Too Big to Jail”

A.M. Kitco Metals Roundup: Gold Drops Below $1,700 Following another Mysterious Price Drop in Asian Trading

Gold set for dramatic correction: hedge fund manager

All the extraordinary measures deployed since 2008 to jumpstart the U.S. economy are one-offs: either they cannot be repeated or they have lost their effectiveness. As a result, we now have an extraordinarily fragile one-off economy that is dependent on "emergency" measures that cannot be withdrawn even as their utility in the real economy dwindles by the day. These two dynamics--declining effectiveness and unrepeatability--have created a uniquely fragile economy. Once you become dependent on extraordinary fiscal and monetary stimulus, withdrawing the stimulus will trigger a recessionary cascade. But continuing the stimulus cannot duplicate its initial effectiveness, as malinvestment and unintended consequences degrade the initial boost.

Own Physical Gold Now - While You Still Can!

“Farther from care than danger…”

The title above is a quote from Sir Thomas More’s classic, Utopia, describing a people’s overconfidence in their capacity for navigation given the compass for the first time.

Iceland went after the people who caused the crisis — the bankers who created and sold the junk products — and tried to shield the general population. But what Iceland did is not just emotionally satisfying. Iceland is recovering, while the rest of the Western world — which bailed out the bankers and left the general population to pay for the bankers’ excess — is not. Iceland’s approach is very much akin to what I have been advocating — write down the unsustainable debt, liquidate the junk corporations and banks that failed, disincentivise the behaviour that caused the crisis, and provide help to the ordinary individuals in the real economy (as opposed to phoney “stimulus” cash to campaign donors and big finance). And Iceland has snapped out of its depression. The rest of the West, where banks continue to behave exactly as they did prior to the crisis, not so much.

We find ourselves more amazed than ever at the ability of those in power to lie, misinform and obfuscate the truth, while millions of Americans willfully choose to be ignorant of the truth and yearn to be misled. It’s a match made in heaven. Acknowledging the truth of our society’s descent from a country of hard working, self-reliant, charitable, civic minded citizens into the abyss of entitled, dependent, greedy, materialistic consumers is unacceptable to the slave owners and the slaves. We can’t handle the truth because that would require critical thought, hard choices, sacrifice, and dealing with the reality of an unsustainable economic and societal model. It’s much easier to believe the big lies that allow us to sleep at night. The concept of lying to the masses and using propaganda techniques to manipulate and form public opinion really took hold in the 1920s and have been perfected by the powerful ruling elite that control the reins of finance, government and mass media. How many Americans are awake enough to handle the truth? Abraham Lincoln once said that he believed in the people and that if you told them the truth and gave them the cold hard facts they would meet any crisis. That may have been true in 1860, but not today.

If we had to summarize the global effort to reflate various debt and asset bubbles to "restart growth," we might say the Status Quo is pursuing opportunities of the past. However, as is becoming all too clear, pursuing opportunities of the past only speeds the dissolution of any Status Quo that depends on spent models of growth.

The Basel Committee on Banking Supervision is an exclusive and somewhat mysterious entity that issues banking guidelines for the world’s largest financial institutions. The Committee’s latest ‘framework’, is referred to as “Basel III”. The regulators have stubbornly held to the view that AAA-government securities constitute the bulk of those high quality assets, even as the rest of the financial world increasingly realizes they are anything but that. As banks move forward in their Basel III compliance efforts, they will be forced to buy ever-increasing amounts of AAA-rated government bonds to meet liquidity and capital ratios. Add to this the additional demand for bonds from governments themselves through various Quantitative Easing programs, and we may soon have a situation where government bond yields are so low that they simply make no sense to hold at all. This is where gold comes into play. If the Basel Committee decides to grant gold a favourable liquidity profile under its proposed Basel III framework, it will open the door for gold to compete with cash and government bonds on bank balance sheets – and provide banks with an asset that actually has the chance to appreciate. The world’s non-Western central banks have already embraced this concept with their foreign exchange reserves, which are vulnerable to erosion from ‘Central Planning’ printing programs. After all – if the banks are ultimately interested in restoring stability and confidence, they could do worse than holding an asset that has gone up by an average of 17% per year for the last 12 years and represented ‘sound money’ throughout history.

Currency wars are set to intensify as the US Senate is considering new sanctions against Iran that would prevent Iran getting paid for its natural resource exports in gold bullion. The new sanctions aimed at reducing global trade with Iran in the energy, shipping and precious metals sectors may soon be considered by the U.S. Senate as part of an annual defense policy bill, senators and aides said on Tuesday, according to Reuters. The sanctions would end "Turkey's game of gold for natural gas," Reuters reported a senior Senate aide as saying, referring to reports that Turkey has been paying for natural gas with gold due to sanctions rules. The legislation "would bring economic sanctions on Iran near de facto trade embargo levels with the hope of speeding up the date by which Iran's economy will collapse," the aide said. Last week Turkish Deputy Prime Minister Ali Babacan has revealed a critical detail about a widely discussed Turkey-Iran gold trade boom, disclosing that the Islamic republic was exporting gas to Turkey in exchange for payment in gold bullion. It is also reported that Iranians are buying Turkish gold with the Turkish Lira, which is deposited into their bank accounts in exchange for Turkey’s natural gas purchases, the deputy prime minister said at midnight Nov. 22 during a parliamentary session. Iran cannot transfer monetary payments to Iran in U.S. dollars due to U.S sanctions against the country’s alleged nuclear weapons program. Iran has been forced to shun the international financial system and the petrodollar as means of payment and turn to the international gold market to ensure it gets paid for its natural resources in order to prevent absolute economic collapse.

Catalonia's exit polls confirm over two-thirds of votes will go to pro-independence parties that will likely push for a referendum to break away from Spain, which the central government will challenge as unconstitutional. The more-populous-than-Denmark region is home to car factories and banks that generate one-fifth of Spain's economic wealth (larger than Portugal's). The incumbent, Artur Mas, has converted to a more radical separatist bias since huge street demonstrations in September showed the will of the people. As Reuters notes, growing Catalan separatism is a huge challenge for Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy, who is trying to bring down painfully high borrowing costs by persuading investors of Spain's fiscal and political stability. Critically, the exit polls suggest the dominance of separatist parties will mean a referendum for secession within two years - leaving us asking the simple question: who will buy any Spanish debt, even fully backstopped by the ECB, if there is a real risk that in under two years, 20% of Spanish GDP will simply pick up and leave.

For those still unsure why Spain PM Mariano Rajoy is fighting tooth and nail to avoid requesting an official activation of the ECB's SMP reincarnation: the OMT, which is a conditional bond buying program supposedly pari passu with the private market (but not really) here is an explanation. While Spain already requested, and received, a bailout of its banking system, which according to eronous analyses by firms such as Oliver Wyman will be at most €60 billion, and which according to others (such as us) will eventually end up costing orders of magnitude more once the green light for extortion is open for the New Normal modified vigilantes, said bailout would come with full conditions. Today we learn what a major condition of the first bank bailout tranche disbursement will be. It should come as no surprise to our readers- recall that in May when discussing the absolute lack of any actual austerity implementation we said, that "In fact, the epicenter of the current meltdown - Spanish banking - has seen only de-minimus headcount reduction over the past few years - so who is tightening their belts?" It seems someone at the Troika was paying attention, because as El Pais reported, European condition number 1 will be an epic bloodbath of pink slips come Monday, with Spanish banks expected to fire thousands of bank workers immediately and shut down 1,000 branches.

Markets initially sold off on Tuesday as Bernanke's speech gave no mention of further easing programs; but rebounded on his closing remarks, which the media latched on to, regarding optimism about economic growth in 2013. This was welcome news - as long as you don't think about it too much. With debt levels continuing to spiral higher, which acts as a governor on economic growth due to the debt service requirement, the question of a return of economic growth becomes much more cloudy. The problem for Bernanke comes down to his inability to provide realistic economic forecasts as the Federal Reserve faces a severe 'communications' challenge, which is the creation of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Imagine that following an FOMC meeting Bernanke stated:

"The policies and actions that we have implemented to date have done little to curb economic weakness. The economy is in much worse shape that we have previously communicated as the transmission system of Fed policy through the economy, and the financial markets, is obviously broken."

The immediate reaction to such a statement would be a complete meltdown of the financial markets.

Government Spends Tens of Trillions On Unnecessary, Harmful Projects … But Won’t Spend $100 Million to Prevent the Greatest Threat

What does the Fed's QE 3, a Spanish default, the systemic crisis in the EU and Lehman all have in common?