Kyle Bass

ECB head Mario Draghi made it clear where the real battle is taking place in the world this morning. When asked what form QE would take, his response was to the point... "On what sorts of assets should be included in QE... we discussed all assets BUT gold" and gold dropped, right on cue.

"Gold is the world’s most persistent bubble: 6,000 years old and going strong" - Citigroup's Willem Buiter.

Dear Willem, thank you for that valiant effort. After reading a few thousands words of shallow propaganda we understand your "confusion": our advice, if you want to understand what gold really is, read the following from Kyle Bass: "Buying gold is just buying a put against the idiocy of the political cycle. It's That Simple." Because if there is a bubble that is even bigger and longer than the "6000-year-old gold bubble" it is that of human corruption, greed, and idiocy. And that doesn't even include the stupidity of those who don't grasp this simple truth.

Stability is a myth yet it’s what we humans strive for...

Day after day, well-dressed talking heads are paraded on business media and proclaim how cheap Japan is, how Abenomics will work (he promise... if it doesn't we'll have to question everything we believe in), how GDP is backward-looking (so ignore it... and every other economic indicator), and how being long Japanese stocks (of course, hedged back to dollars because you don't want to take the currency risk that Abe is creating) is a "no brainer." The problem with that strategy is... in 2014, the JPY-hedged Japanese stock market investor in the US has not had a daily close in the green year-to-date and is down over 5% for the year... but it gets worse.

As Kyle Bass once eloquently noted, the brevity of financial memory is about two years; and nowhere is that more clear than in the explosive resurgence of demand for new subprime-mortgage-backed products. As Scotsman Guide reports, some subprime lenders are reporting strong investor appetite for the once-reviled mortgage products (for borrowers with credit scores as low as 500 and with debt-to-income (DTI) ratios as high as 50 percent). "It's out of control; it seems like there’s 10 times the amount of demand to buy this paper as there are borrowers that want the loans," said one lender. As Bass may have also said "proceed with caution."

Kuroda has fired the shot that looks likely to trigger the next phase of the crazy monetary experiment we’ve all been living in for the last five years. Unfortunately, the next phase is where things start to get nasty. Just because equity markets cheered the latest sugar rush he guaranteed them should not make smart investors lower their guard — quite the opposite, in fact. Colonel Kuroda has gone up-country into the Heart of Darkness, and all we can do is await the Apocalypse now.

Though, if history is anything to go by, it offers a potential for outsized returns

The trend is your friend... until it becomes a Venezuelan hyperinflation melt-up...

Because nothing says economic strength like nominal equity market gains... as Kyle Bass warned in the past - beware the 'nominal' stock market cheerleaders.

Following investors who came to prominence together with Kyle Bass after shorting the sub-prime market in 2007

The Japanese Yen's real effective exchange rate (REER) has collapsed to the weakest since 1982, according to Mitsubishi UFJ Morgan Stanley Securities. Simply put, REER is a trade-weighted measure of Yen strength (or weakness) against, in this case, 59 trading partners; and as the nation posts an unprecedented 27th straight month of trade deficits, Bloomberg reports MUFJ indicates "a structural shift" has taken place. As MUFJ chief FX strategist warns, "If the trade deficit doesn’t noticeably narrow from here, the yen’s real effective rate could fall to levels never seen before," and, ominously, "from a supply and demand perspective, yen selling for foreign currency by Japanese importers will just continue endlessly." And Japan becomes Venezuela...

It appears the "Fed is ending QE because the economy is recovering" narrative is failing (as the world wakes up to the fact that The Fed is being forced to exit due to having broken the markets). In the September FOMC meeting, Yellen put the final nail in the QE coffin by confirming the money-printing would end in October. This is what has happened since then...

Nouriel Roubini, Kyle Bass, Hugo Salinas Price, Charles Nenner, James Dines, Jim Rogers, David Stockman, Marc Faber, Jim Rickards, Paul Craig Roberts, Martin Armstrong, Larry Edelson, Gerald Celente and Others Warn of Wider War

With almost metronomic regularity, Japan will gush forth a headline proclaiming the ever-closer time when all the nation's retirees savings will be greatly rotated to the stock market and away from the nation's largest bond market in the world. This week was no exception; however, as Nikkei Asian Review reports, it appears the "all-talk" has turned to action...The Government Pension Investment Fund and other public pensions sold about 1.8 trillion yen ($17.4 billion) more in Japanese government bonds than they bought in the first three months of the year, fueling speculation that the GPIF may be rebalancing its portfolio sooner than expected. It seems rotating away from government bonds (which the GPIF has been worried about since 2011) into junk bonds and junk stocks is a far better use of 'wealth' - we can only imagine the GPIF risk models just got switch to '11'. As we explained last year, Japan's Plan B is not only not a panacea, but it is a House of Bonds Cards that would not survive an even modest gust of wind, and an even more modest contemplation into its true internal dynamics. We would urge Messrs Abe and Kuroda to come up with a fall back plan to the fall back plan before it, once again, becomes too late.

"There is a debt problem in America..." warns Lynette Khalfani-Coz (askthemoneycoach.com) in this brief CNBC interview, expanding in the huge debt loads from mortgaging cars to student debt that Americans soak up every day in ever greater amounts. And then Steve Liesman rolls in "debt is always pointed out as a negative thing, when in fact debt is the great bridge between working hard and playing hard in this country." Then Liesman really hangs himself, "this country has been built on consumer debt," he proudly states (as if it was some badge of honor) adding carefully that "too much of it is negative thing." - well Mr Liesman... one look at the current debt load might suggest that American consumers built that 'bridge to playing-hard' just a little too far. As Khalfani-Cox admirably retorts, "excessive debt levels are simply unsustainable... It is not the job of the consumer to play the role of financial hercules... why should we have to prop up the US economy?"