Larry Summers

CFTC whistleblowers, JP Morgan silver short, Andrew McGuire, Gold Leasing, Robert Rubin, Larry Summers, Gibson's paradox and that sink in your kitchen

While everyone is focused on whether Mr. Burns, aka Larry Summers  will take over for Ben Bernanke (he won't), lots of peripheral resignations are flying around. the most recent one: that of the U.S. secretary of the $60-billion budget and 240,000 employees Department of Homeland Security - Janet Napolitano, who will be named the next president of the University of California system. As the LA Times reports, "nothing was pushing her out of Washington now, although the Senate’s recently approved compromise plan on immigration faces an uncertain fate in the Republican-controlled House." The good news: we await for UCLA to be promptly upgraded to AAA and issue bonds inside of the US.

• Greece's Economic Future 'Uncertain,' Creditors Say (WSJ)
• Secret Court's Redefinition of 'Relevant' Empowered Vast NSA Data-Gathering (WSJ)
• Thomson Reuters Halts Early Peeks At Consumer Data (WSJ)
• Larry Summers Circles as Fed Opening Looms (WSJ)
• S&P to Argue Puffery Defense in First Courtroom Test (BBG)
• Geithner joins top table of public speakers with lucrative appearances (FT)
• Losing $317 Billion Makes U.S. Debt Safer for Mizuho to HSBC (BBG)
• Pilot Error Eyed in San Francisco Plane Crash  (WSJ)
• Investment group sues U.S. over Fannie, Freddie bailout terms (Reuters)
• Egypt officials 'order closure of Islamist party HQ' (AFP)
• Heinz Kerry Transferred to Boston Hospital for Treatment (BBG) - a boating accident?

Overnight newsflow (which nowadays has zero impact on markets which only care what Ben Bernanke had for dinner) started in Japan where factory orders were reported to have risen the most since December 2011, retail sales climbed, the unemployment rate rose modestly, consumer prices stayed flat compared to a year ago, however real spending plunged -1.6% significantly below the market consensus forecast for +1.3% yoy, marking the first yoy decline in five months. This suggests that households are cutting utility costs more so than the level of increase in prices. By contrast, real spending on clothing and footwear grew sharply by 6.9% yoy (+0.6% in April) marking positive growth for a fourth consecutive month. Simply said, the Japanese reflation continues to be limited by the lack of wage growth even as utility and energy prices are exploding and limiting the potential for core inflation across the board.

Paul Fisher Head of Markets at the Bank of England told the economic worriers of the UK that the BoE would not pull the stoppers out on the economic stimulus plan in the UK and that the “macroeconomic outlook here is not as bright as in the US, therefore we are some way behind them in terms of return to anything like trend growth”. Has Mr. Fisher been to the US recently?

We recently asked:"are there really unpredictable market shocks or are investors paid not to care? To us, all signs point towards the next currency reset. We think monetary authorities are compulsively destroying the current global monetary system; they simply have no choice if they are to keep it afloat in the short term." With Bernanke not attending Jackson Hole, we think the choice for next Fed Chair may have profound economic implications, and that it would not require expertise in econometric modeling, credit policy management, and maintaining the public perception of economic stability. We think the next Fed Chairman will oversee a conversion of the global monetary regime. Neither growth nor austerity nor gloom of night will stay these currencies from their appointed devaluations. Bank balance sheets must be preserved; ergo sufficient inflation must be manufactured. We think the dull but persistent economic malaise amid increasingly aggressive monetary intervention policies will soon engender fear among the not-so-great washed – net savers. We think all should question whether we are 100% wrong. If not, then prudence dictates some allocation to properly held precious metals. (Presently, it is less than 1% of all global pensions.)

Brian Sack, he who held the fattest finger on the Fed's green buy button until Simon Potter and his young protege Kevin Henry stepped into those prodigious shoes, has landed a role at mega quant fund D.E.Shaw. As Reuters reports, the former head of the Fed's Market Group will be the co-Director of Global Economics. The fund, with its reputation for mathematical modeling and computer-driven trading over short-term horizons will, we are sure, benefit from Sack's empirical ability to stomp on the throat of the VIX and tinker with VWAPs, though we hope he lasts longer than Larry Summers did. Of course, this almost guarantees that former-D.E.Shaw alum Jeff Bezos' Amazon.com share price will continue to surge as its fundamental performance plunges. The Plunge Protection Team, it appears, is in strong demand, though we hope someone explains that maybe D.E.Shaw does have a MtM policy (and not unlimited balance sheet).

As I and many others have pointed out for years, unless you are a crony Wall Street welfare queen you can pretty much forget about any high level position in the Obama Administration.  Barack made that clear from day one when he decided to surround himself with two of the people at the core of the 2008 financial crisis, Larry Summers and Tim Geithner.  The trend is simply continuing with the current nominee for Treasury Secretary: Jack “Bailout Bonus” Lew.  The revolving door is institutionalized and at this point as reliable as a Swiss watch.

Judging by how the SkyNet formerly known as "the market" has been trading in the past three weeks (and years), one may get the impression the "smart money", hiding behind Bloomberg terminals for 9 hours each day, has gone full lunatic retard. Yet not even said Bloomberg terminals users are completely insane, as confirmed by a just released poll of Bloomberg Professional users, who were asked on their opinion for the two next probably Bernanke replacements: one Larry Summers, best known, together with Robert Rubin, Alan Greenspan and everyone in Congress and Senate over the past 30 years, for destroying the US economy, as well as one Janet Yellen, currently vice chair of the Fed, and almost certain replacement for the Chairsatan once his term expires in early 2014. The verdict: nay to both, but a resounding hell no to the man who destroyed the US banking system, then crushed the Harvard endowment, and finally brought the US consumer and economy to a state of complete ruin.

You've probably noticed the cookie-cutter format of most financial media "news": a few key "buzz words" (fiscal cliff, Bush tax cuts, etc.) are inserted into conventional contexts, and this is passed off as either "reporting" or "commentary" depending on the number of pundits sourced. Correspondent Frank M. kindly passed along a template that is "officially deny its existence" secret within the mainstream media. With this template, you could launch your own financial media channel, ready to compete with the big boys. Heck, you could hire some cheap overseas labor to make a few Skype calls to "the usual suspects," for-hire academics, hedge fund gurus, etc. and actually attribute the fluff to a real person.

Will Congress go over the fiscal cliff?  Yes, we've been going for decades, really since the social unrest of the 1970s. 

What's Obama going to say?

If you often wonder why ‘free market capitalism’ feels like it is failing despite universal assurances from economists and political pundits that it is working as intended, your intuition is correct. Free market capitalism has become a thing of the past. In truth free market capitalism has been replaced by something that is truly anti-free market and anti-capitalistic. The diversion operates in plain sight. Beginning sometime around 1970 the U.S. and most of the ‘free world’ have diverged from traditional “free market capitalism” to something different. Today the U.S. and much of the world’s economies are operating under what I call Monetary Fascism: a system where financial interests control the State for the advancement of the financial class. This is markedly different from traditional Fascism: a system where State and industry work together for the advancement of the State. Monetary Fascism was created and propagated through the Chicago School of Economics. Milton Friedman’s collective works constitute the foundation of Monetary Fascism. Today the financial and banking class enforces this ideology through the media and government with the same ruthlessness of the Church during the Dark Ages: to question is to be a heretic.   When asked in an interview what humanities’ future looked like, Eric Blair, better known as George Orwell, said “Imagine a boot smashing a human face forever.”

Meet the man, who many say (most of whom correctly) has been running pretty much everything from deep behind the scenes.

It should come as no surprise to anyone that major commercial banks manipulate Libor submissions for their own benefit. As Jefferies David Zervos writes this weekend, money-center commercial banks did not want the “truth” of market prices to determine their loan rates. Rather, they wanted an oligopolistically controlled subjective survey rate to be the basis for their lending businesses. When there are only 16 players – a “gentlemen’s agreement” is relatively easy to formulate. That is the way business has been transacted in the broader OTC lending markets for nearly 30 years. The most bizarre thing to come out of the Barclays scandal, Zervos goes on to say, is the attack on the Bank of England and Paul Tucker. Is it really a scandal that central bank officials tried to affect interest rates? Absolutely NOT! That’s what they do for a living. Central bankers try to influence rates directly and indirectly EVERY day. That is their job. Congresses and Parliaments have given central banks monopoly power in the printing of money and the management of interest rate policy. These same law makers did not endow 16 commercial banks with oligopoly power to collude on the rate setting process in their privately created, over the counter, publicly backstopped marketplaces.