Transparency

"There is room for improvement. But in general China’s GDP deflator hasn’t been underestimated, nor has GDP growth been overstated. Both objectively reflect the real situation."

Key highlights from the first day of Janet Yellen's testimony before Congress: " If the economy evolves as we expect, economic conditions likely would make it appropriate at some point this year to raise the federal funds rate target, thereby beginning to normalize the stance of monetary policy. Indeed, most participants in June projected that an increase in the federal funds target range would likely become appropriate before year-end. But let me emphasize again that these are projections based on the anticipated path of the economy, not statements of intent to raise rates at any particular time."

When last we checked in with Rep. Jeb Hensarling, the Chairman of the House Committee on Financial Services, he was in the process of learning a frustrating lesson about central bankers in the post-crisis world. Namely, that whatever pretension of accountability the position of Fed chair retained in the lead up to the crisis disappeared entirely when Ben Bernanke 'saved the world' from financial armageddon in 2008.

"I think that if Greece were to leave the Euro things would get very complicated for them... and this would create the same very unhealthy situation as we have in Argentina. Why? If people start storing value in a foreign currency, in this case Greeks using Euros, this will create a huge lack of transparency and affect normal trade flows and transactions. And we know that the parallel economy in Greece is already quite large the way it is. So imagine an exponential version of that. It would be a very difficult period for Greece."

There is nothing incrementally new or different to what we revealed earlier in the leaked Greek proposal (i.e., no actionable pension cuts, no debt "reprofiling") and as Bloomberg makes it all too clear in flashing red headlines:

GREEK GOVT PROPOSAL SIMILAR TO EU COMMISSION'S JUNE 26 PROPOSAL

... or the one which 61% of the Greek people said no to.

With just six days to go until the government begins Jade Helm 15, expect the rumor mill to come alive because as The Washington Post reports, the media will not be given access to the drills. 

In the wake of China's unprecedented attempt to rescue its collapsing equity markets, Deutsche Bank is out with a history lesson for Beijing where officials can learn some "sweet and sour" lessons from the crash of '87. 

Because when banning selling doesn’t work, the logical next step is to ban talking about selling...

Corruption has been the coveted jewel in everybody’s crown since antiquity. Aristotelian philosophy believed that everybody who had power could become corrupt.

"The growing size of the asset management industry may have increased the risk of liquidity illusion: market liquidity seems to be ample in normal times, but vanishes quickly during market stress. This liquidity may be artificial and less robust in the event of market turbulence." So what's the solution? Unfortunately there isn't one. Instead, fund managers are simply resorting to emergency liquidity lines with banks which is just another manifestation of using cheap cash to delay the Schumpeterian endgame scenario which, if ever allowed to play out, will finally purge capital markets, reset the system, and free the world from the nefarious clutches of central bankers gone mad with delusions of Keynesian grandeur.

Less than two weeks after Bank of China became the first Chinese bank to join the list of participants in the London gold auction, The Shanghai Gold Exchange confirms that a yuan-denominated gold fix will be in place by the end of 2015.

President Barack Obama in 2014 said Mr. Gruber was “some adviser who never worked on our staff.” And then there's this:

“Thank you for being an integral part of getting us to this historic moment,” according to Sept. 9, 2009 email to Mr. Gruber from Jeanne Lambrew, a top Obama administration health adviser who worked at HHS and the White House. In a November 2009 email, she called Mr. Gruber “our hero.”

Arguably, labor markets are stronger today than they have been in the past 20 years, but expectations of financial security for many of us are virtually non-existent. As ZH readers are no doubt aware, despite job numbers being “up” 280,000 last May, and average annual wages increasing 2.3 percent, Americans are still having a difficult time finding full-time work that pays a livable wage.

... the long-term deficit and debt that we have accumulated is unsustainable. We can't keep on just borrowing from China, or borrowing from other countries because part of it is, we have to pay interest on that debt. And that means that we're mortgaging our children's future with more and more debt, but what's also true is that at some point they're just going to get tired of buying our debt. And when that happens, we will really have to raise interest rates to be able to borrow...