Ben Bernanke

Haven’t you ever sat there in hindsight, drinking history down retrospectively like an already-bad whisky that has been mixed with some equally worse soda and a couple of rocks thrown in for good measure and wondered what life would be like if this or that event hadn’t actually happened?

The serial bubbles of the 2000’s are nothing more than what was wrought of the 1920’s, in general. The monetary character of both is not coincidence, as the failures that bookend each of these ages induces the transformation: from monetary to fiscal and back to monetary again. That looks like progress and accountability, but in each it only leads to more extreme measures (relative to the last) to still achieve what Robert Owen and Karl Marx conceived more than a century and a half ago. That leads us to 2015 and what is certainly the ragged end of the eurodollar standard. The third socialist age was undone by August 2007, but that did not stop its proprietors of “eurodollar socialism” under the name “investor capitalism” from trying to rebuild and restore it to full capacity. The groundwork has already been laid, and it is exactly what you would expect given the history since 1907. There are no widespread details about a return to capitalism and sound money practices, only how to overcome the third installation of that timeless barrier thrown down in the collapse of each of the asset bubbles so far – value.

The similarities between today and the 1929 era suggest a massive crash could be appraoching.

Moments ago the Fed's latest Flow of Funds report confirmed what the Philly Fed noted recently (and what blogger and Citadel trader Ben Bernanke vehemently denies): that the Fed keeps making America's uber rich ever richer, when in the first quarter thanks mostly to yet another $1.1 trilion increase in the value of financial assets (read stock market), the asset holdings of US households (or at least a very small subsection of them) rose by $1.6 trillion to a record $99 trillion.

The current bubbles are so large and fragile that air is already coming out with rates still locked at zero. However, unlike prior bubbles that pricked in response to Fed rate hikes, the current bubble may be the first to burst without a pin. It appears the Fed fears this and will do everything it can to avoid any possible stress. That is why Fed officials will talk about raising rates, but keep coming up with excuses why they can’t. Larry Lindsey will be right that the markets will eventually force the Fed to raise rates even more abruptly if it waits too long to raise them on its own. But he grossly underestimates the magnitude of the rise and the severity of the crisis when that happens. It won’t just be the end of a raging party, but the beginning of the worst economic hangover this nation has yet experienced.

“I look at title lending as legalized car thievery,... What they want to do is get you into a loan where you just keep paying, paying, paying, and at the end of the day, they take your car.”

Our current money system began in 1971. It survived consumer price inflation of almost 14% a year in 1980. But Paul Volcker was already on the job, raising interest rates to bring inflation under control. And it survived the “credit crunch” of 2008-09. Ben Bernanke dropped the price of credit to almost zero, by slashing short-term interest rates and buying trillions of dollars of government bonds. But the next crisis could be very different…

When the "better than expected" jobs data came in, equity futures (alongside crude, precious metals, and bunds) promptly tumbled on fears the Fed rate hike, which many had expected would take place in September was pushed forward to July, or even the current month. However, starting with the market open, the E-mini has seen a relentless bid higher, and as of moments ago, it finally ticked into the green, covering nearly 17 points from the lows in less than an hour.

"...the 'Ice Age' of low rates and low growth for a long time – as predicted by many analysts and economists – won’t happen. Instead, a crisis will cause a crash on Wall Street. The banks will go broke. The credit system will seize up. People will line up at ATMs to get cash and the cash will quickly run out. This will provoke the authorities to go full central bank retard. They will flood the system with “money” of all sorts. The ice will melt into a tidal wave of hyperinflation."

Ali and Frazier, Laurel and Hardy, Mayweather and Pacquiao, Liesman and Santelli, and now Schiff and Maloney. Peter and Mike join clash of the titan-like to discuss their investment strategies and expose the charts the government doesn't want you to seeas "people like Bernanke are taken seriously still and the people that did predict [the crisis] are dismissed as lunatics half the time." The wide-reaching conversation covers everything from gold and stocks to The Fed and The Dollar - Bernanke "took the coward’s way out because all he did was exacerbate the problems to postpone the day of reckoning." The air is coming out of the bubble, they warn, "Bernanke and Greenspan have absolutely destroyed America. People don’t realize what is coming..."

“The US Congress is largely at fault for all that’s happening,” the former chairman of the Federal Reserve said in Hong Kong on Tuesday. What’s interesting here is the tendency for Americans to view the AIIB as something that was ultimately created by the US — even if only inadvertently.

At some point in the middle of the last century, economics of money shifted to economics of psychology. Abenomics is the perfect example of this faith-based policy. The Japanese economy, to any clear mind, took a huge turn for the worst under Abenomics yet its practitioners are still, somehow, given the final word on judging its performance, meaning that the mainstream still, somehow, subscribes to the religion.

One might be predisposed to thinking that monetary policies aimed explicitly at inflating prices for the assets most likely to be concentrated in the hands of the wealthy would have a high likelihood of exacerbating the wealth divide. Not so, says Ben Bernanke in a new blog post. "Certainly, inequality and lack of social mobility are issues of first-order significance for economic policy in general. Should they also be first-order considerations for the making of monetary policy? I have my doubts."

Having recently cut its estimate of US trend productivity growth to 1.5%, in a shocking move earlier today, Goldman admitted US trend growth is far less than previously speculated and lowered its long-term potential GDP. The bank says: "after adjusting for a drag from government sector productivity and incorporating an updated assessment of trend labor force growth, we now see long-run potential GDP growth at 1¾%, half a percentage point below our prior estimate." This is a huge deal as Goldman just recalibrated every single economic (i.e., inflation, employment) and financial (i.e., bond rates, leverage) equation by more than 20%, not to mention the amount of implied residual slack in the economy. In short, an absolutely massive amount!

"Today, six and a half years after the collapse of Lehman, there is a Bigger Short cooking. That Bigger Short is long-term claims on paper money, i.e., bonds."