None

Portugal is a country that I’ve always enjoyed, full of warm, welcoming people, excellent wine, and great weather. I came to Porto, the country’s second largest city of some 1.5 million, to get a sense of what’s been happening since the eurocalypse...

Katrina is still the best argument for self-reliance. Oh, no! Here comes FEMA.

The second Barclays announced its $450 million Libor settlement, it was all over - the lawyers smelled not only blood, but what may be the biggest plaintiff feeding frenzy of all time. Which is why it was only a matter of time: "State attorneys general are jumping into the widening scandal over whether banks tried to manipulate benchmark international lending rates, a move that could open a new front against the top global banks. A handful of state attorneys general said they are looking into whether they have jurisdiction over the banks, and are starting preliminary discussions to determine what kind of impact the conduct involving the Libor rate may have had in their states."

On occasion of the publication of his new gold report (read here), Ronald Stoeferle talked with financial journalist Lars Schall about fundamental gold topics such as: "financial repression"; market interventions; the oil-gold ratio;  the renaissance of gold in finance;  "Exeter’s Pyramid"; and what the true "value" of gold could actually look like. Via Matterhorn Asset Management.

This wouldn't be nearly as comical if it weren't for the fact that Frum is a distant cousin of none other than Paul Krugman

Josh Barro of Bloomberg has an interesting theory.  According to him, conservatives in modern day America have become so infatuated with the school of Austrian economics that they no longer listen to reason.  It is because of this diehard obsession that they reject all empirical evidence and refuse to change their favorable views of laissez faire capitalism following the financial crisis.  Basically, because the conservative movement is so smitten with the works of Ludwig von Mises and F.A. Hayek, they see no need to pose any intellectual challenge to the idea that the economy desperately needs to be guided along by an “always knows best” government; much like a parent to a child.  CNN and Newsweek contributor David Frum has jumped on board with Barro and levels the same critique of conservatives while complaining that not enough of them follow Milton Friedman anymore.

To put this as nicely as possible, Barro and Frum aren’t just incorrect; they have put their embarrassingly ignorant understandings of Austrian economics on full display for all to see.

We have discussed at length the need for the equity market to be significantly lower in order for Bernanke to step in with his munificence. Critically, this is less about the absolute level of the S&P 500 (though anyone expecting the Fed chairman to step in with the S&P 500 within a few percent of multi-year highs is dreaming) but, as Barry Knapp from Barclays notes - based on Bernanke's writings - additional monetary stimulus is a function of a significant drop in inflation expectations (as opposed to a shallow drop in the S&P 500). It is the risk of deflation that will trigger a policy reaction. Current conditions are not even close to levels that have warranted additional stimulus in the past - which we estimate to be a 2% 5Y5Y forward inflation breakeven rate. In order for that level to be triggered - based on the post-crisis relationship between equities and inflation expectations - the S&P 500 trailing earnings yield would need to rise over 8.2% implying an S&P 500 level near 1200. Tracking inflation expectations is critical to any NEW QE hope - and for now, there is none on the horizon, no matter how much everyone clamors for it.

Hmmm… Should we be impressed?

Wasendorf take note: step 1, become powerful governor and/or senator (editor of SFO magazine won't cut it); step 2, hire Blankfein's lawyer for key personnel who can throw you under the bus

UPDATE 2: Have no fear though since as recently as January 2012, the CFTC did not find any "material breaches of customer funds protection requirements" at FCMs (firms like PFGBest)

UPDATE 1: Account-holders may not be so surprised to find who is the custodian for the PFGBest FX accounts: none other than huge MFGlobal fans, JPMorgan!

Remember when the entire segregated account fiasco was supposedly fixed in the aftermath of the November 2011 MF Global bankruptcy, and where regulators: the CFTC, the SEC, the CME, and anyone you asked, swore up and down this would never happen again? Turns out that 7 months later, the spirit of MFG has struck again, only this time with one letter switched: it is now known as PFG, as we suggested first 3 hours ago when we broke the story.  From the just filed affidavit by Lauren Brinati who is working with the National Futures Association, which in turn has just filed notice prohibiting PFGBest from operating further, and freezing all of its accounts: "On July 9, 2012, NFA made inquiry with US Bank and learned that rather than the $225 million that PFG had reported as being on deposit at US Bank just days earlier, PFG had only approximately $5 million on deposit at U.S. Bank."  Translation: another $220 million segregated account pillage, in the vein of none other than Jon Corzine and MF Global.

The money has now officially vaporized.

Despite BoE's Tucker telling us this morning that there is no need to look at any other market but LIBOR, it appears the world has moved on from this debacle of indication of anything. As we pointed out here, the 'stability' of LIBOR given everything going on around it is incredulous (whether due to the ECB's crappy-collateral standards-based MROs or the Fed's FX swap lines - since unsecured interbank financing is now a relic of the pre-crisis 'trust' era). Furthermore, as we discussed yesterday, the machinations of the LIBOR market and calculations (which Peter Tchir delves deeply into below) suggest that this not the act of a lone assassin suggesting quite simply that complaining or suing Barclays is redundant - any Libor-related suits (from the public or the government/regulators) must sue all the submitters or it misses the critical facts of the manipulation.

Back in January, an article by Reuters' head financial blogger on the topic of the Greek bond restructuring, which effectively said that Greeks have all the leverage, prompted us to pen Subordination 101 (one of the year's most read posts on Zero Hedge), in which we patiently explained why his proposed blanket generalization was completely wrong, and why litigation arbitrage in covenant heavy UK-law bonds would be precisely the way to go into the Greek restructuring. 4 months later, those who listened to us made a 135% annualized return by getting taken out in Greek UK-law bonds at par, whereas those who listened to Reuters made, well nothing. What is amusing, is that such examples of pseudo-contrarian sophistry for the sake of making a statement, any statement, or better known in the media world as generating  "page views", no matter how ungrounded in financial fact, especially from recent Loeb award winners, is nothing new. To wit, we go back to May 29, 2008 where courtesy of the same author, in collaboration with another self-proclaimed Twitter pundit, we read "Defending Libor" in which the now Reutersian and his shoulder-chipped UK-based academic sidekick decide that, no Carrick Mollenkamp and Mark Whitehouse's then stunning and quite incendiary discoveries on Liebor are actually quite irrelevant, and are, to use the parlance of our times, a tempest in a teapot. His conclusion: "What the WSJ has done is come up with a marginally interesting intellectual conundrum: why is there a disconnect between CDS premia, on the one hand, and Libor spreads, on the other? But the way that the WSJ is reporting its findings they seem to think they’re uncovering a major scandal. They’re not." Actually, in retrospect, they are.

Last week it was the Fairness Distributor In Chief threatening China with WTO action over its unfair duties on US car imports. Before that it was Europe trying to protect its crumbling trade at all costs with its primary trade partner. Now, it is China's turn to retort to the world's beggars, and all those who just happen to ravenously import its iWares with the reckless abandon of a gadget junkie. FT reports: "Beijing has threatened swift retaliation against a range of European Union industries if Brussels presses ahead with an investigation into government subsidies granted to two Chinese telecoms equipment companies. The Chinese threat was delivered at a meeting with EU trade officials in Beijing late last month that was arranged at the behest of Chen Deming, China’s commerce minister, to try to defuse a brewing trade dispute that is straining commercial relations between the two sides. Instead, it collapsed into acrimony, with the Chinese warning their EU visitors that they would respond to any investigation of Huawei and ZTE Corp by probing subsidies granted to European agriculture, automotive, renewable energy and telecoms companies. “Put it this way: it’s not like they went for a beer after and watched football,” one person briefed on the meeting said." None of this is new: recall China Lays Out Conditions Under Which It Will Bail Out Europe; Does Not Want To Be Seen As "Source Of Dumb Money" in which  Li Daokui "added that Beijing might also ask European leaders to refrain from criticising China’s currency policy, a frequent source of tension with trade partners." Looks like we can scrap those "China bails out Europe" (ignore the fact that the Chinese economy itself is imploding for a second) rumor in perpetuity.

By now we can only hope (pun intended) that everyone has seen the David Einhorn chart showing the circularity of the European "summit-based" decisionmaking process - somewhat relevant since we have had 21 summits since 2008 and Europe has never been in a condition quite as bad as last week when a historic move by the ECB to lower the deposit rate to zero and the refi rate below the critical threshold of 1.00%... and nothing happened. (that's not quite true: JPM, Goldman and Blackrock all made it quite clear European money markets are now officially dead). However, as the following empirical analysis from Credit Suisse shows, the "Einhorn" chart is not just a conversation piece at cocktail parties: there is an actual trade pattern which has made traders lots of money, and which makes Eurocrats the best friends of not only Belgian caterers, but short-sellers everywhere: go long into a summit when the clueless algos read headlines and send risk soaring, only to short the inevitable fizzles days if not hours later.

Steve Forbes has a message for a nation dominated by increasingly short-term decisions made on Wall Street and in Washington D.C., and by ever greater economic, financial and currency instability.  As long as America continues moving away from sound money; away from sound financial and economic policies; and, ultimately, away from freedom, its future grows more dim.  The dot-com and housing bubbles followed by the 2008 financial crisis and the most severe economic decline since the Great Depression serve as powerful lessons.  A future of bigger government, higher taxes, more burdensome regulations, less consumer choice and more unrealistic government promises requires more and more Federal Reserve play money. Steve Forbes has a quintessentially American policy prescription rooted in American history.  The answer to America’s economic problems is—and has always been—new wealth creation.  New wealth creation doesn’t come from the government or from the Federal Reserve’s printing press.  New wealth creation is what happens naturally with stable money based on the gold standard, lower taxes on individuals, a simplified tax code, reduced bureaucracy and free markets.