New York City

Six centuries ago, when London and Paris were irrelevant, plague-infested backwaters, and New York City wasn’t even on the map, the greatest city in the world was Nanjing– the capital of the Great Ming. At the time, Nanjing was not only the most populous city on the planet, it was also the pinnacle of civilization. Art, science, technology, and commerce flourished in the Ming Dynasty’s liberalized economy, which constituted a full 31% of global GDP at the time. (By comparison, the US economy is roughly 25% of global GDP today…) Taxes were low, the currency was strong, and overseas trade thrived. For a time, Nanjing truly was the center of the world. Over the next several hundred years, the tide shifted. The Ming Dynasty fell, and power was transferred further west to the Ottoman Empire, and eventually to Europe which had finally emerged from the Dark Ages as the most advanced civilization on Earth... This phenomenon has lasted for several hundred years now… but as history has shown repeatedly, power centers frequently shift. The world is now witnessing yet another transition of power, this time from west to east, as the US-led western hierarchy suffocates within its own debt-laden Keynesian fiat bubble.

What a quarter! The Dow up 8% and enjoying a record quarter in terms of points — 994 of them to be exact and in percent terms, now just 7% off attaining a new all-time high. The S&P 500 surged 12% (and 3.1% for March; 28% from the October 2011 lows), which was the best performance since 1998. It seems so strange to draw comparisons to 1998, which was the infancy of the Internet revolution; a period of fiscal stability, 5% risk-free rates, sustained 4% real growth in the economy, strong housing markets, political stability, sub-5% unemployment, a stable and predictable central bank. And look at the composition of the rally. Apple soared 48% and accounted for nearly 20% of the appreciation in the S&P 500. But outside of Apple, what led the rally were the low-quality names that got so beat up last year, such as Bank of America bouncing 72% (it was the Dow's worst performer in 2011; financials in aggregate rose 22%). Sears Holdings have skyrocketed 108% this year even though the company doesn't expect to make money this year or next. What does that tell you? What it says is that this bull run was really more about pricing out a possible financial disaster coming out of Europe than anything that could really be described as positive on the global macroeconomic front. What is most fascinating is how the private client sector simply refuses to drink from the Fed liquidity spiked punch bowl, having been burnt by two central bank-induced bubbles separated less than a decade apart leaving David Rosenberg, of Gluskin Sheff, still rightly focused on benefiting from his long-term 3-D view of deleveraging, demographics, and deflation - as he notes US data is on notably shaky ground. This appears to have been very much a trader's rally as he reminds us that liquidity is not an antidote for fundamentals.

This chart tells millions of stories. That’s right: since 1984 (surely an appropriate year) while the elderly have grown their wealth in nominal terms, the young are much worse off both in inflation-adjusted terms, as well as nominal terms (pretty hard to believe given that the money supply has expanded eightfold in the intervening years). So why are the elderly doing over fifty times better than the young when they were only doing ten times better before? There is enough money to keep the economy flowing so long as there are opportunities for people to make themselves useful in a way that pays. With the crushing burden of overregulation and the problem of barriers to entry, these opportunities are often restricted to large corporations. These issues of youth unemployment and growing inequality between the generations are critically important. Unemployed and poor swathes of youth have a habit of creating volatility in response to restricted economic opportunity.

It appears we are, as a nation of desperately consuming investors, becoming increasingly cognitively dissonant. Charles Biderman, of TrimTabs, leaves the ominous clouds of the Bay Area for New York City and addresses our seemingly Pavlovian response for the third year in a row to a rising stock market (flooded with portfolio-rebalancing duration-destroying Central Bank money) as evidence that the real economy must be doing great. Of course, relying on tried and true facts such as real job growth and real wage growth and understanding the seasonally-abused-adjusted housing data realities, Biderman notes that the only money driving stocks up is corporate buybacks dominating selling pressure. While modestly bullish on these flows, he is growing more anxious. He sees insider selling surging (from 5:1 January to 14:1 February to 35:1 in March), there has been no new 'cash-takeovers' announced this month compared to $15bn per month last year, and the IPO pipeline is ramping up fast (supply will dominate demand) as the end of Operation Twist approaches removing yet another prop to the perceived reality of stocks.

For all the drama surrounding Wall Street bonuses in a year in which Wall Street profitability was cut in half to just $13.5 billion, the worst since the collapse and bailout of 2008 and 2009 (and compared to $27.6 billion in 2010 and $61.4 billion in 2009), one would think that the average banker would see zero bonus in 2011, or in some cases, especially if they worked at a Greek bank, be told to pay for the privilege of working. The truth is that according to official data from the NY City Comptroller, the average bonus dipped by just 13% in 2011, declining modestly from $138,940 to $121.150. In fact, while a number of large firms announced reductions in cash bonuses for 2011 (with several firms reporting reductions in the range of 20 to 30 percent), personal income tax collections indicate a smaller decline in the overall cash bonus pool. A big reason for this is deferred bonuses from prior years hitting this year's payroll and thus smoothing the impact. Still, bankers being forward looking people, are looking forward and probably not liking what they see. Yet while 2011 data for comprehensive pay is still not available, in 2010 the average salary rose by 16% to $361,180 as more firms shifted to a base-heavy comp structure. Indicatively, the average Wall Street salary is 5.5 times higher than the rest of the private sector at $66,100. And no matter how one feels about them, one thing is true: the New York economy would founder without taxes paid by bankers: "the securities industry in New York City accounted for 23.5 percent of all wages paid in the private sector despite accounting for only 5.3 percent of all private sector jobs" and more importantly, "each job created (or lost) in the securities industry leads to the creation (or loss) of almost two additional jobs in other industries in the City. OSC also estimates that each new Wall Street job creates one additional job elsewhere in New York State, mostly in the City’s suburbs." Hence - Wall Street's bonuses have become "Too Big Too Fall", as the entire economy of NY City and the state is now held captive by Wall Street's exorbitant bonuses.

Just how much moolah can the state extract from its residents?

Since nobody else has any interest in downtown NY real estate, Goldman's Bill Dudley, currently incidentally in charge of the New York Fed, has decided to step up. "The Federal Reserve Bank of New York (New York Fed) today announced that it has acquired the building at 33 Maiden Lane for $207.5 million from Merit US Real Estate Fund III, L.P. and established a new, wholly owned limited liability company called Maiden & Nassau LLC to serve as owner of the building. The acquisition provides a cost-effective, long-term alternative to the current practice of leasing space in this and other buildings and allows for greater control over maintenance, operation and security of the building." As a reminder, the 9th floor of 33 Liberty is where the ever elusive, but always present Plunge Protection Team, pardon the "markets group" at the Federal Reserve is housed (more here). And although in recent days it is no secret that the bulk of Fed open market stock order are routed via that one certain HFT powerhouse out of Chicago, it is always a good idea to keep all the market manipulating facilities under one roof. And so, the Fed now will have full domain over everything that transpires under its own roof. And since the building likely has an extended basement, it provides Dudley, and his muppet Ben Bernanke with a convenient location where to store the soon to be confiscated 107 tons of Greek gold.

President Obama was in town, fundraising.

Are we really in an economic recovery or is it a figment of the Fed's quantitative easing? This will be the biggest factor in the 2012 elections.

A scandal before construction has even started.

Bloomberg's Trish Regan (yes, she is no longer at CNBC), has just announced that the bank which earlier announced it is shutting down its catastrophic prop trading desk (at which point shreholders let out a sigh of relief), has proceeded with slashing banker pay by 30% for overall comp and some bonuses by as much as 70%. This follows earlier announcements by Bank of America and Morgan Stanley which earlier said they would limit cash bonuses to $150K for senior positions. At the end of the day, the biggest losers are secondary, non-financial New York jobs (supposedly there are some: rat exterminators; strippers; limo drivers; food spitters also known as waiters?) as each banker jobs indirectly supports up to 3 downstream jobs. In other words between layoffs and comp cutting, the immediate impact will likely be to leave New York City, which is the farthest point on the economic procyclical receiving end, with hundreds of thousands of layoffs. Which incidentally, to the bizarro crazy scientists at the BLS, means that initial claims are about to go negative (with the traditional upward revision in the following week).

It may be the worst possible job market for financial professionals in years but sometimes one has to draw the line. Like when moving across the Hudson river from Manhattan's One World Financial Center building to Jersey City - that may well be the only logical time when one is allowed to say: "I don't care about my bloated bonus or underserved compensation to buy the same stock that everyone else is buying. I quit." Not surprisingly 27 Fidelity employees have done just that. As the following notice from our favorite back-door website on New York's financial labor market shennanigans, the DOL's WARN site informs us, 27 Fidelity analysts have opted to to quit nobly, than to accept "relocation packages" which would involve the Geneva convention banned torture of having to reverse-PATH commute every day to Fidelity's new Jersey City office at newport Office Center Three. Oh well, it can't be such a bad job market after all. Incidentally for any and all unemployed ZH readers in Jersey City, this probably means that there are about 27 openings at the Fidelity office thereabouts.

Even American military and intelligence chiefs admit this ...

As of Q3 2011, the citizens of less than 20% of the countries involved in Nielsen's Global Consumer Confidence, Concerns, and Spending Intentions Survey were on average confident in their future economic confidence. Not surprisingly, Nic Colas of ConvergEx points out, six were in Asia, the least confident were in Eastern and Peripheral European nations, and furthermore overall global consumer confidence remains 9.3% below 2H 2006 (and 6.4% below Q4 2010) readings as the global economy still has a long way to get its 'mojo' back. Colas points to the fact that 'confidence is an essential lubricant of any capitalist-based system' and one of the key challenges that worst hit Europe (and other regions and nations) face is capital markets that are assessing the long shadow of the Financial Crisis of 2007-2008 and the ongoing European sovereign debt crisis impact on the world's Consumer Confidence.

Corporations are not people...