Free Money

Last year, Senator Schumer (Democrat, N.Y.) famously told Fed chairman Ben Bernanke "You are the only game in town." Really, Senator? What about the real economy? Bernanke and the Fed's machinations are indeed the only game in town for the parasitic financiers, but unnoticed by the Senator, America's real economy is innovating away from the dead hand of the Fed and its toxic spew of free money to the predatory class. There's actually three games in town: the financier game the Fed is playing that will end in collapse, the Federal government's borrow-and-blow trillions of dollars game that will also end badly, and the real economy, where millions of people don't give a rat's rear-end about Bernanke's latest attempt to placate the financial Monster Id he has created.

In the years 2006 and 2007, the underlying stability of the global economy and the U.S. credit base in particular was experiencing intense scrutiny by alternative economic analysts. A crash was coming, it was coming soon, and most of our society was either too stupid to recognize the problem or too frightened to accept the reality they knew was just over the horizon. Why did 2008 creep up on so many people? Weren’t there plenty of economists out there “preaching to the choir” at that time? Weren’t there plenty of signals? Weren’t there plenty of practical conclusions being made about the future? And yet, the world was left stunned. The truth is, human beings have a nasty habit of ignoring the cold hard facts of the present in the hopes of using apathy as a magical elixir for future prosperity. They want to believe that disaster is a mindset, that it is a boogeyman under their bed that can be defeated through blind optimism. Collapse, from a historical perspective, seems to occur when the searchlights of the individual mind are dimmest, when the threat is the greatest, and when we are most comfortable in our ignorance.

No, last week’s jobs report was not “strong”. It was just another edition of the “born again” jobs scam that has been fueling the illusion of recovery during the entire post-crisis Bernanke Bubble. In short, the US economy is failing and the welfare state safety net is exploding. And that means that the true headwind in front of the allegedly “cheap” stock market is an insuperable fiscal crisis that will bring steadily higher taxes, lower spending and a gale-force of permanent anti-Keynesian austerity in the GDP accounts. And for that reason, the Fed’s strategy of printing money until the jobs market has returned to effective “full employment” is completely lunatic. The bottom-line is that Bernanke is printing money so that Uncle Sam can keep massively borrowing, and thereby fund a simulacrum of job growth in the HES Complex. Call it the Bed Pan Economy. When it finally crashes, Ben Bernanke will be more reviled than Herbert Hoover. And deservedly so.

We as a nation had an unparalleled, historic opportunity to set things right in the aftermath of the 2008 financial meltdown. Alas, we blew it. Instead of tearing down what had failed spectacularly, we chose to do more of what failed spectacularly: cartel-crony capitalism, centralized wealth and power and an expansion of our financialized debtocracy.

On the theory that you can milk a cow many times, but you can bleed it only once.

A wicked web of deceit, with just a good measure of theft and forgery thrown in for old time’s sake! Most of the time when we read about history, the biggest this or the fastest that related to the stock exchange it’s (so we are told) so that we don’t make the same mistakes twice and then some bull gets spun about how we need to learn from our mistakes

The wheels have come off the endless growth via expanding debt machine. Rising interest rates are the final blow to this agenda, and the political and financial classes have no Plan B. They are floundering, clueless, bereft of historical context, creativity and courage. Their failure of imagination is total, complete and catastrophic.

As excess reserves in Europe continue to fall, prompting some to claim this is positive since banks are "no longer hoarding cash," the reality of a dramatically deleveraging European financial system is far worse. As Goldman notes, lending to Non-Financial Corporations (NFCs) fell by a significant EUR17.2bn month-on-month (seasonally adjusted) in May (with a stunning 19.9% drop in Spain). Perhaps more worrisome, while NFCs have been seeing lower lending, households have been 'steady' for much of the last year - until now. Bank lending to households fell by EUR7.5bn in May. This marks the first material decline since July 2012. Simply put, the European economy (ad hoc economic data items aside) is mired in a grand deleveraging and since credit equals growth - and the ECB somewhat scuppered by a German election looming likely to hold down any free money handouts (and the fact that they cling to the OMT promise reality that is clearly not doing anything for the real economy) - with lending collapsing, growth is set to plunge further. As we noted previously, there is a simple mnemonic for the Keynesian world: credit creation = growth. More importantly, no credit creation = no growth. And that, in a nutshell is the entire problem with Europe.

People at the Fed are people in politics, who need to promote their allies and maintain their patronage networks. So perhaps it’s significant that the last two times the Fed tightened, it was in a President’s second term. It’s safer to anger an incumbent who is leaving, and dangerous to anger one who may have another six years in office. The party that lost the Presidency after one term, as a result of a crash in financial markets, would never forgive the Fed for its intervention. So if you are in the business of blowing up bubbles to win points with incumbents, and popping them at times when that is less of a concern, of course the President’s second term is when you do the popping. In this scenario, beliefs about an economic recovery play no role in motivating the tapering talk. It seems more likely that what’s really driving everything is the American electoral cycle. Well, what did we expect?

Extreme Developed Market (DM) monetary policy (read The Fed) has floated more than just US equity boats in the last few years. Foreign non-bank investors poured $1.1 trillion into Emerging Market (EM) debt between 2010 and 2012 as free money enabled massive carry trades and rehypothecation (with emerging Europe and Latam receiving the most flows and thus most vulnerable). Supply of cheap USD beget demand of EM (yieldy) debt which created a supply pull for EM corporate debt which is now causing major indigestion as the demand has almost instantly dried up due to Bernanke's promise to take the punchbowl away. From massive dislocations in USD- versus Peso-denominated Chilean bonds to spiking money-market rates in EM funds, the impact (and abruptness) of these colossal outflows has already hit ETFs and now there are signs that the carnage is leaking back into money-market funds (and implicitly that EM credit creation will crunch hurting growth) as their reaching for yield as European stress 'abated' brings back memories of breaking-the-buck and Lehman and as Goldman notes below, potentially "poses systemic risk to the financial system."

The Fed has created a Doomsday Machine. The Fed has nurtured moral hazard in every sector of the economy by unleashing an abundance of cheap credit and low interest mortgages; the implicit promise of "you can't lose because we have your back" has been extended from stocks to bonds (i.e. the explicit promise the Fed will keep rates near-zero forever) and real estate. An abundance based on the central bank spewing trillions of dollars of cheap credit and free money (quantitative easing) is artificial, and it has generated systemic moral hazard. This is a Doomsday Machine because the Fed cannot possibly backstop tens of trillions of dollars of bad bets on stocks, bonds and real estate. Its power is as illusory as the abundance it conjured. This loss of faith in key institutions cannot be fixed with more cheap credit or subsidized mortgages; delegitimization triggers a fatal decoherence in the entire Status Quo.

The initial knee-jerk reaction to QE3 and the extension into unlimited free money forever last September sent mortgage spreads dramatically lower and sparked a super-excited flood of cash into cheap-to-finance REO-to-rent housing markets. This created the faux-prosperity that even Bernanke is banking on in our housing markets now. However, that mortgage spread (the difference between 30Y mortgage rates and 10Y Treasury yields) compression slid wider from its initial move but had stabilized. Until, that is, Bernanke mentioned the 'Taper' word - at which point the mortgage market moved well beyond its pre-QE3 levels and things began to escalate. While Bernanke has done his best to convince us that the Fed will be here, the mortgage market seems to be a non-believer and even at $85 billion a month (across MBS and Treasuries) he has lost control of the mortgage market. As Bloomberg notes, the tone of Bernanke’s comments were "very assuring and soothing, but that’s like a mother telling her baby that she will be leaving in a very gentle voice," said one mortgage trader, adding "the baby will still have a fit."

One of the enduring analogies of the Federal Reserve's quantitative easing (QE) program is that the stock market is now addicted to this constant injection of free money. The aptness of this analogy has never been more apparent than now, as the market plummets on the mere rumor that the Fed will cut back its monthly injection of financial smack. (The analogy typically refers to crack cocaine, due to the state of delusional euphoria QE induces in the stock market. But the zombified state of the heroin addict is arguably the more accurate analogy of the U.S. stock market.)But like all highs based on addictive substances, the stock market high cannot be sustained without an increase in the drug. But there is a diminishing-return dynamic to ever higher doses of QE smack--the higher doses are no longer generating the same highs. The addict (the stock market) has become desensitized to the QE free money injections, and higher doses no longer generate the desired state of bullish euphoria. The more Ben talks about eventually decreasing the injection of financial smack, the more panicky the addict becomes.

A harbinger of things to come in other markets

It is immeasurably easier to digitally create claims on real-world assets than it is to create real-world assets. The Fed can digitally print a trillion dollars at no cost, but that doesn't mean the money flows into the real economy. Once again we are compelled to ask: cui bono, to whose benefit?