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Despite Treasury being a few post-SFP weeks from stealing Mubarak's M.A.D. spotlight, TBAC minutes reveal just how it will crowd out the private sector permanently (Sack-Frost makes debut appearance).

Five years ago, when I showed up on the doorstep of Nouriel Roubini’s RGE Monitor, I was in the minority of macro economists who saw a financial tidal wave coming. For the rest of the world, including Wall Street’s financial analysts, Fed bankers, Politicians, or even Moses himself, none of them could see how the contagion from subprime loans could cascade into a systemic crisis. A crisis that would then expose larger problems that would eventually lead to a complete financial meltdown. Similar to the subprime loans and the subsequent credit crisis, we face a new tsunami of what on the surface appears to be of minor financial relevance, but what will be the final straw that breaks the camel’s back if not politically achieved. What it is is ownership and accountability, from a political standpoint, for ALL of the politically fueled economic decisions being made as well as their side effects. For investors, it would be a catastrophic misjudgment to not escalate these macro political views into the analysis of economic work. (This is starkly different then a political debate, but rather a true non-partisan skyview of policies and rhetoric and their overall effects on the psyche of the economy.) For a financial system that is running on the fumes of confidence, we need to properly analyze this new dynamic.

And so the tide rising all commodities keeps coming: rough rice has just passed its December 2009 high and is now at its highest since October 2008. When we predicted on Monday morning that "rice is next", little did we think that it would be up by 11% in 4 days. And with this important resistance level broken, it is smooth sailing to the next two resistance levels of $20 and $24. Of course, Bangladesh will be in flames long before any of those are hit. But a speculator has to eat, right. After all, none of this is Gen Ben's fault.

Want to know how to keep internet access when your government shuts it down? Then read this article from Patrick Miller and David Daw.

When last month we highlighted the FAO's periodic report which noted that food prices had surged to a fresh all time high, Zero Hedge first predicted that food riots were imminent. Fast forward 6 rioting countries and 2 revolutions later, to today when we get an update from the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization, where we read that, not surprisingly "the FAO Food Price Index (FFPI) rose for the seventh consecutive month, averaging 231 points in January 2011, up 3.4 percent from December 2010 and the highest (in both real and nominal terms) since the index has been backtracked in 1990." And while it is painfully obvious to anyone who shops for groceries, but not to Genocide Ben, nothing is ever obvious to him, here is Reuters' take on the numbers: "Up for the seventh month in a row, the closely
watched FAO Food Price Index touched its highest since records began in
1990, in nominal terms, and topped the high of 224.1 in June 2008,
during the food crisis of 2007/08." Yes, oil may not be at its all time highs from the summer of 2008, but food has already surpassed it.

New Jersey Governor Chris Christie said he doesn’t mind breaking promises to pensioners to close a $10.5 billion budget deficit -- even if they sue...

As part of its quarterly refunding statement issued earlier, the Treasury announced that it now expected to breach the debt ceiling "sometime between April 5, 2011 and May 31, 2011.  The modest change in
these estimated dates reflects an upward revision to projected receipts
and a projected downward revision to debt to be issued to government
trust funds." The tentative breach point has been pushed back by one week compared to the previous estimate of March 31, 2011 to May 16, 2011. Of course, these numbers incorporate the benefits of the wind down of the SFP program, discussed extensively previously on Zero Hedge, which we believe will provide a major (as in $195 billion over two months) liquidity boost for risk assets. As a reminder, as there was no 56 Day Cash Management Bill rolling auction today now that the Treasury is unwinding the SFP, tomorrow the market will see $25 billion in extra liquidity as an 8 week old bill matures and the proceeds are used by the PD to invest as they see fit. Back to the debt limit: when asked how much bigger the new debt ceiling should be, the Treasury left the ball in Congress' court:"We do not have a have particular figure that we
have put to Congress. That is their prerogative to offer that," Mary
Miller, Treasury assistant secretary for financial markets, told a news
conference. While not new, Reuters summarizes what will happen should Congress not succeed to raise the debt target number fairly well: "If Congress does not raise the limit in a timely
way, the government could be forced to scale back operations. A failure
to lift the limit could raise the specter of a first-ever U.S. debt
default and push up interest rates sharply." According to Zero Hedge estimates, Congress will end up raising the debt ceiling to $15.9 trillion from the current $14.3... a number which will need to be raised once again in January of 2012, at which point the entire debt "ceiling" farce can just be put aside.

One of the consequences of Meredith Whitney's recent prognostications that we could be facing hundreds of billions worth of municipal defaults, is that after tens of billions of investor capital have been pulled out of municipal funds, with last week seen record $5.8 billion in redemptions alone, virtually the bulk of this money has been recycled in the form of inflows into equity instruments. As such, it is surprising why so much energy is wasted to attempt to debunk Whitney's thesis: after all, she has done more to stimulate equity inflows than years of government/CNBC propaganda ever could. Yet one firm which certainly stands to lose should the ongoing muni redemption wave not moderate, is everybody's favorite PIMCO, which is oh so good at bashing the Fed and Satan Bernanke with one half of its mouth, while with the other investing tens if not hundreds of billions in federally subsidized Build America Bonds, which for the past month have been in free fall. It is therefore not surprising that as Charlie Gasparino points out, Bill Gross "has launched an all-out war to discredit Whitney’s research in an attempt to restore confidence in the $3 trillion municipal-bond market." Of course, this is nothing more than a good old-fashioned book talking campaign: Meredith, who after have failed to predict anything notable at her new venture, needs to return to her shock factor roots, and Gross, whose TRF fund, after seeing nearly two years of AUM increases in his flagship TRF, has been having a bit of a hard time recently, all due to the firm's huge municipal exposure.

There's no comparison between the Land of the Free and Egypt ... or is there?

Google's Android is now the undisputed top selling mobile OS in the world, unseating Research in Motion's Blackberry, Apple's iOS and Nokia's Symbian/MeeGo in record time. Being that Android is essentially a front end to Google's cloud services and apps, does this mean that Google now has (or soon will have) more application reach than Microsoft - the world's largest software company? Pretty good performance for a search engine, eh?

Our friends at The Forensic Factor have been busy. After exposing one after another alleged Chinese fraud reverse merger, and forcing management teams to address investors about numerous allegations of impropriety, the small research boutique has come out with a report exposing what it dubs "the most preposterous Chinese reverse merger yet." As usual, in a world of shady transatlantic backdoor dealings, and cash strapped US exchanges willing to list anyone and everyone, regardless of whether their financials are even remotely valid, we believe it is our duty (without intent to profit) to expose companies that may or may not be fraudulent, particularly now that it is obvious that the SEC is fully endorsing the ponzi scheme of US capital markets. Quote TFF: "after a deep dive into AutoChina (Nasdaq: AUTC), The Forensic Factor ("TFF") has concluded that AutoChina is potentially the most dangerous Chinese reverse merger that we have examined. As the AutoChina story gets exposed, we would expect a significant share decline of at least 50% and a material increase in the short interest (incredibly, less than 1% of the shares are short - a true rarity among the Chinese reverse mergers). TFF believes investors would be prudent to avoid AutoChina at all costs. At the same time, we implore regulators to protect the investing public and launch an investigation into AutoChina."

What could the ruler of Egypt’s turmoils possible have to do with the
need to takeover even more banks in western Europe and the potential
default of several members of the PIIGS group? Read on, my dear friend…

Readers will recall that three months ago I had reported that "something was happening" in the economy. After several years of ultra-bearish reporting, I said that at the very least the economy was not declining further. The GDP report tends to support this, but in final analysis it is much ado about not much. Here's why.

Over the last 30 years, the US has built up record debts on a personal, state, and national level. Consumers thought they were financially stable so long as they could cover the interest payments on their credit cards, states created program after program few if any of which they could afford, and the Federal Government issued $30-50 trillion in debt and liabilities (counting Social Security and Medicare).

There is a virtual media frenzy proclaiming the "Arab world's Berlin moment". I'm very skeptical but realize that no matter what outcome, developments in Egypt will have a profound effect on the global political landscape, economy and financial markets...