White House

With less than three months to go, the outcome of the November election remains highly uncertain. SocGen notes that, as always, economic performance over the coming months will be a key determinant of who wins and who loses. If the elections were held today, the most likely outcome would be a Republican win in both Congressional races and a Democratic win in the race for the White House. This means that any new significant legislation will almost certainly have to be a product of compromise. In this sense, we may very well be looking at a status quo in terms of bipartisanship and gridlock which have dominated Washington politics over the past few years. This would be bad news at a time when the country faces a number of serious challenges with significant long-term implications. From the economy to long-term fiscal health, and from the debt-ceiling to Housing, Healthcare, and Energy policy differences, the following provides a succinct review.

Reuters summarizes the key facts about the 42-year old House Budget Chair and potential future American vice president. Enclosed also select reactions from various individuals across the political spectrum to his nomination as well as a summary of his lifetime donors as well as those of Joe Biden.

When we wrote Part I of this paper in June 2009, the total U.S. public debt was just north of $10 trillion. Since then, that figure has increased by more than 50% to almost $16 trillion, thanks largely to unprecedented levels of government intervention. Once the exclusive domain of central bankers and policy makers, acronyms such as QE, LTRO, SMP, TWIST, TARP, TALF have found their way into the mainstream. With the aim of providing stimulus to the economy, central planners of all stripes have both increased spending and reduced taxes in most rich countries. But do these fiscal and monetary measures really increase economic activity or do they have other perverse effects?...  The politically favoured option of financial repression and negative real interest rates has important implications. Negative real interest rates are basically a thinly disguised tax on savers and a subsidy to profligate borrowers. By definition, taxes distort incentives and, as discussed earlier, discourage savings.... The current misconception that our economic salvation lies with more stimulus is both treacherous and self-defeating. As long as we continue down this path, the “solution” will continue to be the problem. There is no miracle cure to our current woes and recent proposals by central planners risk worsening the economic outlook for decades to come.

Scandal after scandal – but the Fed just doesn’t want to be audited. Period.

Back in April, when gas at the pump hit all time highs for that time of the year, and when the world was still hoping the euphoria from the LTRO would last (it didn't), Obama decided to implement his own centrally-planned vision of events in yet another market: crude. Recall: "now that Obama's uber-central planning mandate has proven completely powerless to redirect the flow of zero-cost money from acquiring real, as opposed to paper-based, assets (read crude), the Teleprompter in Chief will have a sit down with the nation at 11:10 am and in the latest sermon from the White House mound, will "confront" oil speculators once and for all. His plan: why encourage margin hikes of course - the same principle that crushed the spine of the gold and silver spike in 2011." Furthermore as part of his then adopted plan, Obama would "Give the Commodity Futures Trading Commission authority to increase the amount of money that a trader must put up to back a trading position. The administration officials said such authority could help limit disruptions in energy markets." Our conclusion was that "Obama is about to become the Margin Hiker-in-Chief." 4 months later, the MaHinC has fired the first warning shot. After all, while Obama would love to have 1600 on the S&P the day before the election, the last thing he would like is to also have the $150 in WTI that would necesssarily accompany it, and guarantee his reelection failure. Sure enough: the first attempt at disconnecting the hard asset market from the S&P has arrived, as the CME just hiked various Crude margins by about 3.7%.

All you need to know about the fiscal cliff which will savage the US economy in under 5 months, unless Congress finds a way to compromise at a time when animosity and polarization in congress is the worst it has ever been in history.

Putting our trust and faith in a few unelected bureaucrats and bankers, who use their obscene wealth to buy off politicians in writing the laws and regulations to favor them has proven to be a death knell for our country. The captured main stream media proclaims these men to be heroes and saviors of the world, when they are truly the villains in this episode. These are the men who unleashed the frenzy of Wall Street greed and pillaging by repealing Glass Steagall, blocking Brooksley Born’s efforts to regulate derivatives, encouraging mortgage fraud, not enforcing existing regulations, and creating speculative bubbles through excessively low interest rates and making it known they would bailout recklessness. They have created an overly complex tangled financial system so they could peddle propaganda to the math challenged American public without fear of being caught in their web of lies. Big government, big banks and big legislation like Dodd/Frank and Obamacare are designed to benefit the few at the expense of the many. The system has been captured by a plutocracy of self-serving men. They don’t care about you or your children. We are only given 80 years, or so, on this earth and our purpose should be to sustain our economic and political system in a balanced way, so our children and their children have a chance at a decent life. Do you trust that is the purpose of those in power today? Should we trust the jackals and grifters who got us into this mess, to get us out?   

Back in 2009 when the government sacrificed GM and Chrysler bondholders just so labor unions (read voters) can be made whole, the media, for various reasons, decided not to pursue the decision-making process that left some workers with their pensions wiped out, while others were made whole and suffered no losses (with a comparable lack of investigation being conducted as to the decisions that shuttered some Chrysler dealers, but left others operating, a topic Zero Hedge had some say over). In fact, as the Daily Caller reminds us "The White House and Treasury Department have consistently maintained that the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC) independently made the decision to terminate the 20,000 non-union Delphi workers’ pension plan...Former Treasury official Matthew Feldman and former White House auto czar Ron Bloom, both key members of the Presidential Task Force on the Auto Industry during the GM bailout, have testified under oath that the PBGC, not the administration, led the effort to terminate the non-union Delphi workers’ pension plan." Turns out they lied... Under oath.

"Who knew that the 24th electoral district in Chicago actually sits in Northwest Madrid?" That is how Art Cashin concludes his tangent into the president's pre-election tactics, which now apparently involve begging heads of sovereigns to accept bailouts from other sovereigns (coughgermanycough) just to boost one's reelection chances. Why? Because the one thing that could send the S&P ripping higher, however briefly, is what we have been discussing for the past week: namely the market finally getting the paradoxical catalyst that the market has already priced in - Spain admitting it is broke. And why would Obama be focused on a rising S&P, fiscal cliff after the election notwithstanding? The chart below should explain it.

American Officials Admit that the U.S. Is a Huge Sponsor of Terrorism

A year ago, the budget “deal” concocted between Mr Obama and his Congress was ballyhooing a “plan” to cut $US 1.2 TRILLION off annual budget deficits over a DECADE. Now, the projection for the 2012 budget is that the US government will add that amount to the funded debt of the US Treasury over ONE YEAR. This would be hilariously funny if it wasn’t so tragic. What is even funnier - and more tragic - is that the entire world is “depending” on the people who concoct this stuff.

Some odds and ends, plus a very scary report on China

When we started reading the LA Times article reporting that "the federal government has quietly been completing an audit of U.S. gold stored at the New York Fed" we couldn't help but wonder when the gotcha moment would appear. It was about 15 paragraphs in that we stumbled upon what we were waiting for: "The process involved about half a dozen employees of the Mint, the Treasury inspector general's office and the New York Fed. It was monitored by employees of the Government Accountability Office, Congress' investigative arm." In other words the Fed's gold is being audited... by the Treasury. Now our history may be a little rusty, but as far as we can remember, the last time the Fed was actually independent of the Treasury then-president Harry Truman fired not one but two Fed Chairmen including both Thomas McCabe as well as the man after whom the Fed's current residence is named: Marriner Eccles, culminating with the Fed-Treasury "Accord" of March 3, 1951 which effectively fused the two entities into one - a quasi independent branch of the US government, which would do the bidding of its "political", who in turn has always been merely a proxy for wherever the money came from (historically, and primarily, from Wall Street), which can pretend it is a "private bank" yet which is entirely subjugated to the crony interests funding US politicians (more on that below). But in a nutshell, the irony of the Treasury auditing the fed is like asking Libor Trade A to confirm that Libor Trader B was not only "fixing" the Libor rate correctly and accurately, but that there is no champagne involved for anyone who could misrepresent it the best within the cabal of manipulation in which the Nash Equilibrium was for everyone to commit fraud.

In addition to the compelling evidence that more active monetary and fiscal policy involvement did not produce beneficial results over the short run, three recent academic studies, though they differ in purpose and scope, all reach the conclusion that extremely high levels of governmental indebtedness diminish economic growth. In other words, deficit spending should not be called "stimulus" as is the overwhelming tendency by the media and many economic writers. Whereas government spending may have been linked to the concept of economic stimulus in distant periods, these studies demonstrate that such an assertion is unwarranted, and blatantly wrong in present circumstances. While officials argue that governmental action is required for political reasons and public anxiety, governments would be better off to admit that traditional tools only serve to compound existing problems.

A Fight Both Liberals and Conservatives Can Rally Around ...