Cognitive Dissonance

Tim Geithner outdoes himself this evening with three hypocritical, self-defecating-deceiving, and typically ignominious clips courtesy of his interview with Jeffrey Brown of PBS NewsHour. While we knew TurboTax was beyond him, the Treasury debacle-in-chief admits he doesn't understand how the debt limit has bubbled back up (seeing it as part of a partisan political agenda); admits that perhaps the NY Fed has a 'perception problem' with Jamie Dimon on the board; and his piece-de-resistance his cognitive dissonance erupts as he touts Obama's economic and jobs record: "look how well we are doing relative to any other major country". It seems the election cycle is well and truly upon us and revisionism and populism will once again trump sensibility and forthrightness.

As either taxpayers or long-term JPM investors, we should be more grateful than sorry about the JPM CIO Ina Drew.

Over the weekend it was announced that California’s large $9 billion budget deficit was no longer $9 billion but $16 billion.  Whoops.

Just because it is always amusing to watch the cognitive dissonance in the head of a permabull, here is Jim 'Soon to be head of the BOE... allegedly' O'Neill's latest missive to (what?) GSAM clients. Yes, the same O'Neill who week after week, letter after letter kept on saying that 2012 is nothing like 2011, finally being forced to admit that 2012 is, as we have been saying since January 1, nothing but 2011, as the central planners' script writers prove painfully worthless at coming up with anything original. That, of course, and that the lifelong ManU fan had to suffer the indignity of interCity rivals picking up the trophy this year after a miraculous come back win against QPR. Oh, the horror...

George Soros has been a busy man the last few days. Appearing at the INET Conference a number of times and penning detailed articles for the FT (and here at Project Syndicate) describing the terrible situation in which Europe finds itself - and furthermore offering a potential solution. Critically, he opines, the European crisis is complex since it is a vicious circle of competing crises: sovereign debt, balance of payments, banking, competitiveness, and structurally defective non-optimal currency union. The fact is 'we are very far from equilibrium...of the Maastricht criteria' with his very clear insight that the massive gap, or cognitive dissonance, between the 'official authorities' hope and the outside world who see how abnormal the situation is, is troublesome at best. Analogizing the periphery countries as third-world countries that are heavily indebted in a foreign currency (that they cannot print), his initial conclusion ends with the blunt statement that "the euro has really broken down" and the ensuing discussion of just what this means from both an economic and socially devastating perspective: the destruction of the common market and the European Union and how this will end in acrimonious recriminations with worse conflicts between European states than before.

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Do you think the US will always and forever be able to pay for our over-bloated military-industrial complex and our wars of choice? Do you think the federal housing agencies will always and forever be able to subsidize the real estate industry with money losing, non-economic mortgage loans? Do you think the government will always and forever be able to pay on the promises they've made regarding Social Security, Medicare and Medicade? Do you think the government will always and forever be able to extend debt-enslaving, subsidized student loans to anyone with a pulse? Do you think the fiat ponzi central planners at the Fed will always and forever be able to manipulate the Treasury curve to whatever levels the Oracles of Delphi decide? If you answer yes to the above, ask yourself this: how would all of these things be affected if the average interest rate paid by the US was to rise to 5%? At today's debt level of $15.6 trillion, the interest expense would be approximately $780 billion or about 35% of total government revenues. Welcome to the United States of Greece. Next stop, bankruptcy.

Watching pompous politicians, egotistical economists, arrogant investment geniuses, clueless media pundits, and self- proclaimed experts on the Great Depression predict an economic recovery and a return to normalcy would be amusing if it wasn’t so pathetic. Their lack of historical perspective does a huge disservice to the American people, as their failure to grasp the cyclical nature of history results in a broad misunderstanding of the Crisis the country is facing. The ruling class and opinion leaders are dominated by linear thinkers that believe the world progresses in a straight line. Despite all evidence of history clearly moving through cycles that repeat every eighty to one hundred years (a long human life), the present generations are always surprised by these turnings in history. I can guarantee you this country will not truly experience an economic recovery or progress for another fifteen to twenty years. If you think the last four years have been bad, you ain’t seen nothing yet. Hope is not an option. There is too much debt, too little cash-flow, too many promises, too many lies, too little common sense, too much mass delusion, too much corruption, too little trust, too much hate, too many weapons in the hands of too many crazies, and too few visionary leaders to not create an epic worldwide implosion. Too bad. We stand here in the year 2012 with no good options, only less worse options. Decades of foolishness, debt accumulation, and a materialistic feeding frenzy of delusion have left the world broke and out of options. And still our leaders accelerate the debt accumulation, while encouraging the masses to carry-on as if nothing has changed since 2008.

For today's definitive example of peak cognitive dissonance and self-delusion among those who determine the monetary fate of the world no less, look no further than the Dallas Fed's Dick Fisher, who just said the following according to Reuters:

• No one presently believes that the Fed is going to proceed with QE3

Funny considering earlier, we got this from Goldman's Bill Dudley:

• No decision yet on QE3, New York Fed's Dudley says

And that is why central planning always fails. Because a room of these terminally confused people sits down and determines the fate of the world based on their naive academic interpretation of what they perceive is reality.

• China cuts 2012 growth target to 7.5 percent, stability key (Reuters)
• Freom the Fed scribe himsef - Fed Takes a Break to Weigh Outlook (WSJ)
• Greek bond swap deal rests on knife-edge (FT)
• Lenders Stress Over Test Results (WSJ)
• China to Curb Auto Production Capacity, Promote New-Energy Car Development (Bloomberg)
• China military spending to top $100 billion in 2012, alarming neighbours (WaPo)
• Warning: A New Who's Who of Awful Times to Invest (Hussman)
• EU to push quota for women directors (FT)
• Romney Advances As Obama Gains (WSJ)
• Saudi Aramco Raises Oil Premium for April Sales to Asia, U.S.; Cuts Europe (Bloomberg)

I find it interesting that my daughter’s refund info suddenly showed up on the ‘Where’s My Refund?’ web site two days after the Treasury sold $35 Billion of Two Year Treasury bonds.

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.

Just like in the US, where we had our very own Treasury Secretary telling us there is "no risk" the US would get downgraded, about 3 months before America did in fact get downgraded, the cognitive dissonance between reality and fantasy is fully exposed today, this time in Europe. And whereas patriotic chauvinism has its good and bad sides, listening to politicians explain away how the impossible has just happened is always very amusing. Especially when translated by Google. Such as in this case, where we have grabbed the following article from Les Echos and dumped it into the modern version of the babel fish.

It seems everywhere we look, talking heads are arguing that they expect a positive resolution to the EU debacle and yet market positioning does not suggest this is the case at all. Of course we have seen snap-back rallies and sell-offs but the dissonance between the seeming consensus of unbridled optimism that European policy-makers 'get it' and the market's anxiety should be very worrisome - especially for the 'money-where-your-mouth-is' crowd. Morgan Stanley put it best recently as they noted their sense that most investors assume there will be some solution found (or put another way, very few assume that the alternative - a catastrophe of disorderly banking and sovereign defaults - is a base case) but few investors seem willing now to position for that benign outcome (most evidently seen in European Sovereign debt markets currently).

Deutsche's Jim Reid, like us, is less optimistic and notes the same disconnect as he argues that at this point: "Who can honestly say they know exactly what rescue plans the EU governments are still discussing...". Investors are rightly confused and we agree with Reid that we don't think there is any chance of a quick fix to all of this. Furthermore, we fear that any belief in a reversion to pre-crisis levels of sovereign risk on the back of a solution is a pipe-dream as it is clear that risk premia are embedded now (like skews in options prices post 1987) and it is far more likely that Europe stabilizes at much wider levels - more like other leveraged regions.

This systemic decline in sensitivity to central-bank/State interevention suggests the end-state of "extend and pretend" and "mark to fantasy" is drawing nearer, as the next round of stimulus, quantitative easing, bailouts, etc. will buy considerably less time for the Status Quo than the last fix. At some point, the announcement of a new bailout or Fed "fix" will boost spirits and markets for a few days rather than a few months. At the very end of this process, the announcement of the next "fix" will crash the credit and stock markets because participants will finally understand that the fixes are only floundering, last-ditch acts of desperation which have zero chance of actually working. In other words, neither Cognitive Dissonance nor Wishful Thinking have happy endings.