In Reality, War Will Bring An End to the Petrodollar, and Impose Hardship on the Average American ...

Some basic suggestions for those who are seeking shelter from the coming storms of global financial crisis and recession.

The government now has another measure which under-reports inflation by accounting chicanery...

Gold has surged over $41 and silver over 70 cents to over $1,314 and $20.46 per ounce or 3% and 4.2% respectively as oil ticks higher on the tinder box that is Iraq ... Faber recently said how he will “never sell his gold”, he buys “more every month” and believes storing gold in Singapore is "safest”.

As he said all along "investors should have some exposure to gold" and Marc Faber has been adding recently as gold (and gold stocks) are so much cheaper than over-inflated stocks. Faber holds around 25% of his assets in gold becaquse he believes eventually the monetary policies of central banks will lead to a further loss of purchasing power in the value of paper money. The CNBC anchor is perturbed as the market is selling gold and buying stocks; to which Faber rebuffs; investors are shunning gold "because the media doesn't like gold, nobody at CNBC owns gold. Nobody at Bloomberg owns gold. Gold is being constantly talked down by the media, and Fed officials, and economists, who also don't own any gold. They're all stocked up in equities." "When people talk about people who are optimistic about gold, they call them 'gold bugs.' A bug is an insect. I don't call equity bulls 'cockroaches.' Do you understand? There is already a negative connotation with the expression of 'gold bug.'"

The Fed is now pre-occupied with an unanswerable and fanciful question, according to Jon Hilsenrath’s pre-meeting missive on the Fed’s current monetary policy “debate”. Figuratively estimating the number of angels which can dance on the head of a pin, Fed officials and economists suppose they can specify the the appropriate money market rate down to the decimal place for virtually all time to come... Of course, every one of these three magic numbers are perfectly arbitrary, academic and silly. Due to the structural failures of the US economy owing to decades of destructive Washington policies, the “unemployment rate” today is not remotely comparable to what was being measured in the 1950s and 1960s when today’s Keynesian theology with respect to the Phillips Curve, Okun’s Law and full-employment policy was being formulated.

Today's financial markets make a mockery out of sanity and logic. The difference between what SHOULD happen and what IS happening is perhaps the greatest it has been in our investing lifetimes. If you're perplexed, flummoxed, frustrated, stymied, enraged, bored, irritated, insulted, discouraged -- any or all of these -- by the ever-higher blind grinding of asset prices over the past several years, despite so many structural reasons for concern, you have good reason to be.

“Excessively low interest rates are inflationary because they mean that bonds, stocks, real estate and unincorporated businesses are capitalized at excessively high rates, and will fall in value even though the annual income they pay remains the same, if interest rates rise.” If interest rates were artificially low, it would follow that prevailing investment values are artificially high. I contend that they are, and you may or may not agree. Natural interest rates — free-range, organic, sustainable — are what we need. Hot-house interest rates — the government’s puny, genetically modified kind — are the ones we have.

As we pondered the new normal and the disappointed anchors on CNBC this evening noting that we did not hit S&P 2,000 or Dow 17,000 (but there's always tomorrow); two headlines crept across the Bloomberg feed that could not have been more perfectly timed representatives of the new normal record highs in stocks:

• *COVANTA CUTTING JOBS
• *COVANTA TO BOOST CASH DIV TO 25C-SHR FROM 18C, EST. 18C

Here's a tip for management: as a cost-cutting initiative, maybe don't spend 'cash' on buybacks at record highs and invest in productive assets, instead. Of course, that's silly-talk in the world where work is punished; as CVA's stock is jumping after-hours.

What if all the low-hanging fruit of outsourcing jobs and financialization have already been plucked by Corporate America?

A month ago we pointed out that with April US consumer savings plunging to levels not seen since Lehman, the only place where the tapped out consumer could find some purchasing power is by maxing out their credit cards. This is precisely what happened: moments ago the Fed released its April consumer credit report and it was a doozy: expected to print at $15.00 billion, down from a pre-revision $17.5 billion, the April total instead exploded to a whopping $26.85 billion. This was the fifth biggest surge in history, and was only surpassed by the 2010 "cash for clunkers" record, as well as previous one time outliers in 1998, 2001, and 2006.

The problem in representative democracy is that every instance of waste, graft, fraud and monopolistic racket is somebody's fat paycheck or government contract. Promising good governance guarantees a losing campaign for public office. To avoid the political pain that would result from trimming waste/fraud/ rackets, the state prints money to keep the swag flowing. Since the state can't create real wealth, it prints claims on wealth and passes off the paper as "money." The only thing that is infinite about the state is the hubris of those at the controls and the narrow self-interest of those at its capacious feeding trough.

Ahead of this Thursday's ECB meeting, speculation is rife about what Mario Draghi will announce, and as the following Nomura chart highlights most pundits are convinced that the most likely announcement is a cut in the refi and deposit rate with a probability of around 90%, an LTRO in distant third at 34%, and a full blown QE dead last with 10%. However, as SocGen predicts, which is rather aggressive in its assumptions expecting a negative deposit rate of -0.1%, a targeted LTRO to "boost lending to the private sector", and a "signal" of €300 billion in asset purchases, the bulk of this new-found liquidity will almost exclusively go to boost capital markets, and the wealth effect. As for the broader economy? "We do not expect the 5 June measures to deliver a significant impulse to the real economy."

The Keynesians have failed. Japan has proved it. It’s only a matter of time before the rest of the world… and the markets catch on.