Monetization

Every nation has a right to defend itself against attack – financial attack just as overt military attack. That is an essential element in the principle of self-determination. Greece, Spain, Portugal, Italy and other debtor countries have been under the same mode of attack that was waged by the IMF and its austerity doctrine that bankrupted Latin America from the 1970s onward. International law needs to be updated to recognize that finance has become the modern-day mode of warfare. Its objectives are the same: acquisition of land, raw materials and monopolies. A byproduct of this warfare has been to make today’s financial network so dysfunctional that nations need a financial Clean Slate.

"With the drastic fall in share prices recently, social stability is clearly at stake," Credit Suisse says. With the bubble now finished it is only a matter of time before all the 'nouveau riche' farmers and grandparents see all their paper profits wiped out and hopefully go silently into that good night without starting mass riots or a revolution.

Among all the mindless blather served up by the talking heads of bubblevision is the recurrent claim that “its all priced-in”. That is, there is no danger of a serious market correction because anything which might imply trouble ahead—-such as weak domestic growth, stalling world trade or Grexit——is already embodied in stock market prices. Yep, those soaring averages are already fully risk-adjusted! Nothing to see here, it will be argued. Today’s plunge is just another opportunity for those who get it to “buy-the-dip”. And they might well be right in the very short-run. But this time the outbreak of volatility is different. This time the dip buyers will be carried out on their shields.

The US Federal Reserve has been universally lauded for the apparent success of its extreme monetary policy of recent years. With key world stock markets near record highs, traders universally love the Fed’s zero-interest-rate and quantitative-easing campaigns. But this celebration is terribly premature. The full impact of these wildly-unprecedented policies won’t become apparent until they are fully normalized. The most-extreme monetary experiment by far in US history is just at half-time now, the fat lady hasn’t even taken the stage. The full normalization of ZIRP and QE is likely to be as negative for stock and bond prices as its ramping up proved positive for them.

The ECB has expanded the list of PSPP-eligible SSA bonds, setting the stage for more ECB QE and turning one more conspiracy "theory" into conspiracy "fact."

When it comes to Europe, Greece lost the blame game, and just like the Ukraine civil war last year, became an unwitting catalyst greenlighting Germany's concession to ECB QE, this time it may be Greece that launches the next step in the ECB's master plan: not just QE but more QE. This is precisely what Goldman's Franceso Garzarelli, co-head of macro and markets research, admitted earlier today in an interview on Bloomberg TV, when he said that the ECB "will have to go big" if the situation in Greece worsens and leads to wider peripheral bond yield spreads.

For a glimpse of what happens next, look no further than Sweden.

While China is rather proud of the fact that it hasn't yet implemented outright QE, Beijing has now put in place a bewildering hodge-podge of hastily construed easing measures that can't seem to get out of their own way.

Time for the musicians to learn the lessons that the video guys in Hollywood learned from them...

Greece, Europe and the world are being crucified on a cross of Keynesian central banking. The latter’s two-decade long deluge of money printing and ZIRP has generated a fantastic worldwide financial bubble, and one which has accrued to just a tiny slice of mankind. That much is blindingly evident, but there’s more and it’s worse. The present replay of high noon on Greece’s impossible mountain of debt clarifies an even greater evil. Namely, that the central bank printing presses have also utterly destroyed the fundamental requisite of fiscal democracy. To wit, in the modern world of massive, interventionist welfare states, fiscal governance desperately needs an honest bond market.

When and what will break the chains on gold by those seemingly omnipotent forces that so assuredly keep its price in check? In essence, the belief is (and I expect for most honest and impartial analysts this is true) that because there is potentially significant downside risk to a global monetary system built upon a currency to which gold represents the proverbial kryptonite (we’ll discuss why), there are checks in place within the system, to ensure that kryptonite doesn’t become too potent. The architects of the existing system would have been foolish not to implement checks on gold.

From the first rate hike by a Fed whose balance sheet as a % of GDP was nearly identical to the current one, to the start of World War II: less than three years.

Perhaps just to confirm that Coeure's infamous leak had nothing to with seasonality and everything to do with micromanaging Bund yields, in the latest ECB weekly report, we learned that after purchasing €13 billion in sovereign debt under its PSPP program, in the week ended June 12 this number dropped to just €10.6 billion, a 18% drop from the past week, and a 22% drop from a month ago. This was also the lowest weekly purchase amount since the first week of May.

An odd occurrence took place this past week in the “Land of Unicorns” aka Silicon Valley. The first of what was once described as the “future of social media” canary’s Twitter™, was suddenly struck by the “Where’s The Money” kingdom aka Wall Street. Suddenly, what was once the dulcet tones for acquiring investment capital “eyeballs to monetize” is now being answered by the investment crowd in a much more sobering tone of “Where’s the monetized money?!”