David Rosenberg

Christina Romer is one of Obama's chief economic advisors. But she has absolutely no clue what to do about this crisis. Her recent letter defending the Administration's policies is just the usual hack political stuff one would expect from them. She is typical of the problems in Washington. She means well, but she is fabricating the truth in order to justify their actions. Their approach to using government power is one we should all be afraid of. She spells it out quite clearly.

The pace of withdrawing non-standard operations is a balancing act for all central banks that engaged in quantitative easing. If they proceed too quickly and too aggressively, they risk creating another global recession.

Yields are much lower today and are trending down again despite the significant upward yield trend back then. So is this a genuine early economic recovery, or a sign that the modern stock market tends to be a capital-gain seeking momentum machine with little regard for underlying fundamentals? Yes, interest rates are low, but they were back then too, and David Rosenberg suggests most current corporate bond yields are a lot more attractive than yields of the same companies' stocks.

Heck of a job, Larry, Tim and Ben...

Foreign Policy magazine has just come out with its list, “The FP Top 100 Global Thinkers." They rate the intellectual giants, the Big Thinkers, the Big Brains of our current world. It is the most pompous fluff piece that I have seen in, well, quite a while. It just brims with a lack of intellectual rigor, reason, and good scholarship. It is a kind of Parade magazine feel-good fluff that we see in many of these types of lists. And it is grist for my vitriolic mill. You will be sadly disappointed.

Questions for our Esteemed Chairman ...

David Rosenberg shares his response to Raymond James' Jeffrey Saut

"one way to value gold, therefore, is to ask at what gold price the value of outstanding central bank paper would be completely backed by gold. The US owns nearly 263m troy ounces of gold (the world's biggest holder) while the Fed's monetary base is $1.7 trillion. So the price of gold at which the US dollars would be fully gold-backed is currently around $6,300." - Dylan Grice, SocGen

Friedrich von Hayek might have thought so. Hayek worried that during times of crisis the government would assume so much control that it would eventually have a negative impact on the economy and eventually turn all the people into serfs. My hope it that through sites like Zero Hedge we can help wake people up and avoid such an undesirable fate.

This is aimed at those banking execs that believe that they will be better off hiding losses than taking them now and preempting the guaranteed higher losses to come in the future. Yes, the US is Japan - the "19 year" lost decade, redux!

A startling observation out of David Rosenberg is that with the current unemployment number (whatever it may be: 10.2%, 17.5%, 90%), even assuming an end to workforce outflows, there is a buffer equivalent to almost 11 million people, consisting of increased worker productivity and massive newly-created temporary positions, that can be drawn upon before even one person of those laid off recently, has to be rehired. This is disastrous for the Obama administration, especially at a time when it is actively speculating on Stimulus #2 in order to spur any kind of job creation ahead of mid-term elections.

"If the USA were to go back to a 40% ratio of gold reserves to money supply (using the monetary base), where it was a century ago when the Fed was first created, from 17% currently, that would equate to three years’ supply of bullion, and alone take the gold price up to $2,750/ounce, based again on our research on price sensitivities to central bank buying activity." - David Rosenberg

"One can almost see the stirrings of cyclical discontent within the market. Risk trades are
looking increasingly vulnerable and correlations are beginning to break down. Investors
should focus on the nominal quantities, which continue to wither on the vine." - Albert Edwards, SocGen

In our latest piece (within a series of analyses that detail both the technical and fundamental landscapes of gold, silver, copper, oil, the CRB (Commodity Index), the US Dollar, the EURO and the remaining major currencies of the G8 in relation to one another), we at Fibozachi present an initial look into the technical composition of gold.

When two months ago we discussed the IMF's selling of one eighth of its gold reserves of which as most know by know half was recently acquired by India, we came to the conclusion that the IMF's proposed naive and subjective purpose for this disposition which was framed as "safeguarding against disruption in the gold market" would instead end up with "rioting in goldbugland." Based on gold price action over the past 3 days, we have been so far correct. And the concern for the IMF (and all Central Banks as well) is that India's example will be promptly followed by China, Russia and other sovereigns who are seeking to flee from their dollar holdings courtesy of continued madman-like behaviour out of the 3rd sub-basement at the Federal Reserve where all the Heidelberger Druckmaschinen are kept.