Ben Bernanke

While some would look at the surge in government spending in Q3 last year (ahead of the election) and subsequent plunge in Q4 as conspiratorial, CNBC's Rick Santelli takes a step slightly further back as he draws the analogy between the mystical monetary experimentation of Ben Bernanke and his horde of central bank cronies and the "bloodletting of leeching" of medieval medicine providers. The point being that if you were sick in the middle ages, leeches were applied; and if you returned weeks later (still sick), more leeches and blood-letting took place - with no lesson learned. The fact that we borrowed $300bn in Q4 and managed a dismally dire drop in GDP growth offers little hope as the world glares agog at the Dow Jones Industrial Average index while Bernanke, six years on from the start of the recession continues to apply the same medicine that has done nothing to resurrect our economy. In Rick's words, "Whatever you're doing; It isn't working!" and in fact the monetary support could potentially hurt the economy in the medium-term as debt piles up exponentially. An epic rant...

All this talk about some Super Cycle turn in the economy is putting the proverbial cart ahead of the horse.

Though economists might wish otherwise, economics is, at its core, behavioral. Modern economies are too complex to be reliably modeled; but put an economist in a powerful government job and provide levers that can be pulled to start the printing presses, set reserve requirements, fiddle with the Fed funds rate, expand the Fed’s balance sheet, and deliver indecipherable communiqués, and that economist will feel compelled to pull those levers. He or she, like a monkey with a typewriter, might even give us Shakespeare (or Adam Smith) on occasion. But mostly that economist will spout gibberish, a mélange of untested and potentially counterproductive measures that unleash all manner of unintended consequences.

We are in our sixth year since the US officially went into recession and yet, as CNBC's Rick Santelli notes, we are still in crisis management mode. Some argue that any day now, the Fed will begin to remove its mega liquidity pipe from the market but Rick exclaims in this wonderfully succinct clip that: "there is no expiration date on faulty illogical ideas," as he expects any Fed exit to be "very, very messy." Rick's dilemma is the seemingly paradoxical need for yet moar and bigger monetary policy crisis management by Ben Bernanke when day-after-day we are told by the very guests on his network that "stocks look great." At the end of the day, when the Fed decides to exit, they will not be able to put the liquidity 'toothpaste' back in the tube.

Employment is dead in the water because opportunities for organic expansion are few and the cost basis of doing business in the U.S. keep rising. That vise forces businesses large and small to reduce labor costs while boosting productivity. There is no other way to stay solvent in a post-bubble, over-capacity, over-indebted consumerist economy awash in too much of everything but energy, common sense and fiscal prudence.

Nearly two years ago, the hacktivist group Anonymous made waves around the fringes of financial media by announcing "Operation Empire State Rebelion" whose goal was to "engage in a relentless campaign of non-violent, peaceful, civil disobedience until Ben Bernanke steps down and the Primary Dealers within the Federal Reserve banking system be broken up and held accountable for rigging markets and destroying the global economy effective immediately." Needless to say nothing came out of it, and OperationESR was promptly forgotten as Anonymous had apparently met its match in the face of the Fed and the Primary Dealers. Now, in the aftermath of the Aaron Swartz suicide which has put the entire hacking community on high alert, Anonymous is back with yet another campaign, this one titled "Operation Last Resort", which was revealed to the public when Anonymous took control of the website for the the US Sentencing Commission for nearly one full day from Friday afternoon until Saturday evening, using it as a venue from which to distribute a massive 1.3 GB encrypted file titled Warhead-US-DOJ-LEA-2013.AES256 which may contain secret information sourced from the Department of Justice (hence the files contained are named after SCOTUS justices) and which Anonymous threatens to release unless massive reforms take place at the DOJ - reforms which will certainly never see the light of day, meaning Anonymous will have no choice but to make the contents of said file public.

It was rumored that the 2008 crisis hit the Queen of England particularly hard – over USD 40 million in stock market losses. This experience must have jilted something, as when The Queen was visiting the esteemed London School of Economics she asked the professor a rather “un-queen” like question – why did economists fail to predict the biggest global recession since the Great Depression? Speaking on behalf of economists, investment managers and mutual fund sales people everywhere, the professor responded that “at every stage, someone was relying on somebody else and everyone thought they were doing the right thing.“ In short, no one could have predicted the 2008 crash. Meanwhile, in the parallel universe called America, Ben Bernanke January 2013 The Queen was selling everyone the exact same story. If the famed London School of Economics and the Chairman and full committee of the US Federal Reserve were unable to predict the crisis, what hope does the World have with predicting future crises? In actual truth, and despite claims by the US Federal Reserve and the London School of Economics, many people accurately predicted the collapse of the US housing market and the subsequent collapse of the stock market. Fortunately, it doesn’t have to be that way. Accepting, understanding, and embracing the fact that today there are plenty of investment professionals who are willing to view the World objectively should be comforting.

While we doubt either Eye-Kaan or Ack Man will engage in open shootouts on the Las Vegas strip, we can't help but applaud when the "smartest guys in the room" openly talk shit about each other, such as what Ichan said about Ackman earlier on Bloomberg TV: "Look, it's no secret to the world and to Wall Street... I don't like Ackman. I have no respect for him and I don't like him and that's not a secret.... I wouldn't even say this, but it's no secret, I dislike the guy, I don't respect him." We get it, and we also get that the clear winner of Round 1 of Talking Smack is Eye-Kaan. We look look forward to the Ack Master's response with or without Titney Wilson chiming in.

Since Alan Greenspan became the Fed chairman in 1987, there has been a policy consensus on the primary role and effectiveness of monetary policy in cushioning an economic downturn and kicking it back to growth. Fiscal policy, due to the political difficulties in making meaningful changes, was relegated to a minor role in economic management. Staving off crisis and reviving growth still dominate today's conversation. The prima facie evidence is that the experiment has failed. The dominant voice in policy discussions is advocating more of the same. When a medicine isn't working, it could be the wrong one or the dosage isn't sufficient. The world is trying the latter. But, if the medicine is really wrong, more and more of the same will kill the patient one day. The global economy was a debt bubble, functioning on China over-borrowing and investing and the West over-borrowing and consuming. The dynamic came to an end when the debt crises exposed debt levels in the West as too high. The last source of debt growth, the U.S. government, is coming to an end, too, as politics forces it to reduce the deficit. Trying to bring back yesterday through monetary growth will eventually bring inflation, not growth.

While in some places crushing your currency is a badge of honor for every formerly independent central banker (and now merely an operative of the fourth branch of government), this appears to not be the case in Iran. Because after having done what western central bankers can only dream of, and destroying the Iranian real by so much it nearly led to the onset of hyperinflation in the troubled country (and inflating away all that sovereign debt, oh wait, wrong insolvent country), the governor of the nation's central bank, Mahmoud Bahmani, was summarily dismissed. And while the move is obviously politically motivated, and the reason given is that he ordered "illegal withdrawals of money from the banking system", or a process better known in the US as POMO, it is rather stunning how gaping the double standard is vis-a-vis central bankers around the world. Fear not Mahmoud - we are certain that Ben Bernanke will have a vice chairman spot open just for you, or at least a Vice President of Market Manipulation and Leaking on the Liberty 33 trading desk, if and when you manage to escape the clutches of Iran and make your way to the Marriner Eccles building. Now where is that Argo 2 - the Sequel film crew...

As the world's equity markets prepare to rally on the back of yet more central bank printing as Japan's Shinzo Abe takes the helm with a 2% inflation target and a central bank entirely in his pocket, The Telegraph's Ambrose Evans-Pritchard suggests a rather concerning analog for the last time a Japanese prime-minister attempted to salvage his deflation/depression strewn nation. The 1930s 'brilliant rescue' by Korekiyo Takahashi, who removed Japan from the Gold Standard, ran huge 'Keynesian' budget deficits intentionally, and compelled the Bank of Japan to monetize his debt until the economy was back on its feet managed to devalue the JPY by 60% (40% on a trade-weighted basis). Initially this led to exports rising dramatically and brief optical stability, but the repercussion is the unintended consequence (retaliation) that the world missed then and is missing now. Though the economy appeared to stabilize, the responses of other major exporting nations, implicitly losing in the game of world trade, caused Japan's policies to backfire, slowed growth and left a nation needing to chase its currency still lower - eventually leading to hyperinflation in Japan (and Takahashi's assassination). With no Martians to export to, why should we expect any difference this time? and how much easier (and quicker) are trade flows altered in the current world?

It’s all a money game on Wall Street.

Germany is now openly telling the Fed that it is done playing around. This will have severe consequences in the financial system.

Today at 4pm Eastern, Ben Bernanke, at the University of Michigan’s Ford School of Public Policy, will take live questions from Twitter for the first time as part of the Fed's new policy of openness. Of course, the policy won't be so open for him to answer if banks are actually using reserves as prop trading funding (as was the case with JP Morgan, and any other bank which realizes that when it comes to fungible cash, money is just 1s and 0s in a server somewhere). However, the filter may slip and at least one or two good questions may slip through. So please take this opportunity to submit any pressing questions you may have on the Fed's policy to pump the market to new stratospheric highs courtesy of $85 billion (for now) in monthly reserve injections into the Primary Dealers, by using the #fordschoolbernanke tag to your questions. For convenience, we have appended a twitter module below that captures all tweets with that querry.

The Central Bank of Ireland continues to be queried about the status of the Irish gold reserves. It has been reluctant to release information and said that it is “not obliged” to release information due to certain “rules and regulations”.  Ireland's finance minister, Michael Noonan, has also been asked about the country's gold vaulted at the Bank of England, such as whether the gold is held in allocated form with a bar list available and whether the gold is leased out into international markets. Answers are as of yet not forthcoming. The Sunday Independent, Ireland’s best selling Sunday broadsheet covered the story yesterday in an article (see news) published yesterday which is being widely shared on the internet and commented upon: Bankrupt Ireland owns six tonnes of gold, the bulk of which is held at the Bank of England, it has been revealed. The Central Bank of Ireland said the value of its gold holdings was €235m last time it checked. This represents just over 1 per cent of its total investments. A spokeswoman said the Central Bank was a party to the Washington Agreement on Gold, which recognised gold as an important element of global monetary reserves. She said the Central Bank had not entered into any lease arrangements regarding any of its gold but would not provide specific details of its storage arrangements with the Bank of England.