Federal Reserve

The task of the financial/political/media Status Quo is to convince Americans to overlook the abundant evidence of economic deterioration and focus on heavily juiced "evidence" of robust "growth." The game plan is this: if the Status Quo can convince you that the economy has righted itself and from here on in everything will get better and better, every day and in every way, then we will abandon financial rationality and start buying homes we can't afford on credit, cars we can't afford on credit and boatloads of stuff from China that we don't need on credit (of course looking cool is a "need," i.e. having an iPad to carry around). In other words, believing it is so will make it so. That is the essence of the campaign to stimulate "animal spirits" confidence: though the economy is actually tanking, if they can only convince us the Dow is moving to 15,000 and then on to 20,000, jobs are being created left and right and things are looking up everywhere, then the resulting piranha-like shopping-feeding-frenzy will create the expansion that is currently chimerical.

Now everybody's bank bashing, of course the reason to bash the banks is 4 years old, despite Bove-like analysis to the contrary. I will discuss this on CNBC for a FULL HOUR tomorrow from 12 pm to 1pm.

Busy day in the economic headlines arena, with Housing Start, Claims PPI and Philly Fed all on deck. Goldman summarizes the expectations and the upwardly biased consensus.

• Europe Demands More Greek Budget Controls in Bid to Forge Rescue (Bloomberg)
• Moody's Warns May Downgrade 17 Global Banks, Securities Firms (Reuters)
• Officials at Fed Split on More Bond Buys (Hilsenrath)
• Greek deal delays pressure periphery (Reuters)
• Talk, but No Action, to Break US Grip on World Bank Job (Reuters)
• Greek Rhetoric Turns Into Battle of Wills (FT)
• Greece Seeks Monday Bailout Deal, EU Questions Remain (Reuters)
• US Lawmakers Announce Payroll Tax-Cut Deal (Reuters)
• China Leader-In-Waiting Xi Woos and Warns US (Reuters)
• China's FDI falls 0.3% in Jan (Reuters)

Make no mistake, inflation is creeping into the system in a big way. And the Fed will not raise interest rates to fight it until it’s far too late. Debt levels are simply too high for the Federal Government and US corporations, particularly the large banks which the Fed has been doing everything it can to prop up.

It was a bad week for freedom loving people, but I believe there are enough patriots left in this country to change our course. We are being buried under a blizzard of lies on a daily basis. We have a choice. We can support the existing corrupt crony capitalist establishment (Obama & Romney) or we can declare war on lies, deceit and misinformation by rallying behind the only person who would truly attempt to reverse decades of corruption, sleaze, incompetence, bloat, debt accumulation, and a warped version of free market capitalism – Ron Paul. He is the only public figure willing to level with the American people and tell them the truth. Will we let the concept of truth fade out of the world? The choice is ours. 

“In our age there is no such thing as ‘keeping out of politics.’ All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia. The very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. Lies will pass into history.” –   George Orwell

A certain flavor of econometric model dominates conventional portfolio management and financial analysis. This model can be paraphrased thusly: seasonally adjusted economic data such as the unemployment rate and financially derived data such as forward earnings and price-earnings ratios are reliable guides to future economic growth and future stock prices....If this model is so accurate and reliable, why did it fail so completely in 2008 when a visibly imploding debt-bubble brought down the entire global economy and crashed stock valuations? Of the tens of thousands of fund managers and financial analysts who made their living off various iterations of this econometric model, how many correctly called the implosion in the economy and stock prices? How many articles in Barrons, BusinessWeek, The Economist or the Wall Street Journal correctly predicted the rollover of stocks and how low they would fall? Of the tens of thousands of managers and analysts, perhaps a few dozen got it right (and that is a guess--it may have been more like a handful). In any event, the number who got it right using any econometric model was statistical noise, i.e. random flecks of accuracy. The entire econometric model of relying on P-E ratios, forward earnings, the unemployment rate, etc. to predict future economic trends and future stock valuations was proven catastrophically inadequate. The problem is these models are detached from the actual drivers of growth and stock valuations.

These January jobs numbers make the Obama administration look good, at least relative to how it’s looked in the previous 12 months. However, they’re not reflecting as positively on two of Obama’s primary support groups: Wall Street and the US Federal Reserve.

A few weeks ago, some of the more naive media elements reported that Greece has "all the cards" in its negotiations with private creditors, a topic we had the pleasure of deconstructing in its entirety to its constituent flaws? Well, a day ahead of the February 15 Eurozone meeting at which Greece's fate is finally supposed to be settled, things appear to be quite amiss. As a reminder, a critical part of the Greek debt deal is the private sector's agreement to roll over existing holdings into new bonds, which as we learned may now see the 15 cent per bond sweetener into new EFSF debt reduced. According to the Handelsblatt, that is now off the table. Dow Jones summarizes: "Some central bankers expect that Greece will fail to enlist enough private investors in a voluntary debt restructuring to avoid a technical default, a German newspaper reported Tuesday.  Greece is likely to make its case for a voluntary debt swap after a meeting of euro group finance ministers Wednesday, the Handelsblatt newspaper says. The Greek government is seeking to lower its burden by EUR100 billion. Handelsblatt cites unnamed central bank sources as saying the country will fail to achieve that goal, leaving the government little choice but to make the write-down mandatory for investors holding out. Requiring investors to take a loss would prompt credit rating agencies to declare a debt default for Greece, an event with unforeseeable consequences for financial markets. The report doesn't specify whether its sources are with the European Central Bank or with the German Bundesbank. Neither bank would comment early Tuesday." Which of course is not news: after all even the rating agencies have long warned a Greek default is now inevitable, and a CDS trigger will follow. The only thing that there is massive confusion over is whether and how this event will impact everyone else, and whether it will lead to an explusion of Greece from the Eurozone. Optimism is that it is all priced in. So was Lehman.

• BOJ Adds to Monetary Easing After Contraction (Bloomberg)
• EU to punish Spain for deficits, inaction (Reuters)
• Obama, China's Xi to tread cautiously in White House talks (Reuters)
• Global suicide 2020: We can’t feed 10 billion (MarketWatch)
• Greece rushes to meet lender demands (Reuters)
• Obama Budget Sets Up Election-Year Tax Fight (Reuters)
• Foreign Outcry Over ‘Volcker Rule’ Plans (FT)
• Moody’s Shifts Outlook for UK and France (FT)
• France to Push On With Trading Tax (FT)

In a move that will surely shock, shock, the monetary purists out there, the Bank of Japan has just gone and done what we predicted back in May 2011, with the first of our "Hyprintspeed" series articles: "A Look At The BOJ's Current, And Future, Quantitative Easing" (the second one which discussed the imminent advent of the ¥1 quadrillion in total debt threshold was also fulfilled three weeks ago). So just what did the BOJ do? Why nothing short of join the ECB, the BOE, and the Fed (and don't get us started on those crack FX traders at the SNB) in electronically printing even more 1 and 0-based monetary equivalents (full statement here). From WSJ: "The Bank of Japan surprised markets Tuesday by implementing new easing policies and moving closer to an explicit price target, the latest sign of growing worries around the world about the ripple effects of the European debt crisis on the global economy. With interest rates already close to zero, the BOJ has relied in recent months on asset purchases to stimulate the economy. In Tuesday's meeting, the central bank expanded that plan by ¥10 trillion, or about $130 billion. The facility, which includes low-cost loans, is now worth about ¥65 trillion, or $844 billion." The rub however lies in the total Japanese GDP, which at last check was $6 trillion (give or take), and declining. Which means this announcement was the functional equivalent to a surprise $325 billion QE announced by the Fed. What is ironic is the market reaction: the BOJ expands its LSAP by 18% and the USDJPY moves by 30 pips. As for gold, not a peep: as if the market has now priced in that the world's central banks will dilute themselves to death. Unfortunately, it is only at death, and the failure of all status quo fiat paper, that the real value of the yellow metal, whose metallic nature continues to be suppressed via paper pathways, will truly shine.

It seems like it was only yesterday [technically it was September] that David Bianco "departed" his latest employee, Bank of America, where he landed following his "departure" from UBS back in 2007. Today, courtesy of Business Insider we learn that following an extended garden leave, or just a rather choppy job market, Bianco his finally found a new happy place: right in the cave of joy and happiness, also known as Deutsche Bank (aka the bank whose assets are about 80% of German GDP and which recently 'magically' recapitalized itself). Here he will be joined by the two other pillars of perspicacity - Binky Chadha and Joe LaVorgna. What to expect? Who knows - but lots of twisted humor is certainly in store. For the sake of simplicity we present some of the salient soundbites from Bianco and his colleagues over the past 5 years.

The reality is that the Fed is stuck in ZIRP and will never be able to leave it. In 2011, the US made $454 BILLION in interest payments. And that’s with interest rates at or near 0%. Things are only going to get worse. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the estimated interest that will be due on the US’s debt load by 2015 will be $533 billion: an amount equal to 1/3 of all federal income taxes collected that year (assuming of course that the current GDP growth projections are accurate...)

• Greek Parliament Backs Austerity as Rioters Burn Buildings (Bloomberg)
• China CIC Wary of EU Government Bond Investments (Reuters)
• Spain Unions Decry New Labor Rules (WSJ)
• China Tells Banks to Roll Over Loans (FT)
• We're Not Greece: Italian Prime Minister Monti (CNBC)
• Bernanke’s Labor Pessimism at Odds With U.S. Growth (Bloomberg)
• Obama Budget Seeks Funding for Trade Unit (Bloomberg)
• Obama's Election-Year Budget to Target Rich (Reuters)
• China May Need to Fine-Tune Policy This Quarter, Wen Says (Bloomberg)
• China’s Xi Seeks Second Front for U.S. Ties in Return to Iowa (Bloomberg)
• Why Greece and Portugal Ought to go Bankrupt (FT)

Here we present a history of the Fed in charts. As you’ll surely glean from the below — the Fed has degenerated from a by and large passive institution (dealing only in high-quality self-liquidating commercial paper and gold) to an active pursuant of junk, an enabler of wars, a ‘benevolent’ combatant of the depressions of its own creation, a central planner of employment & prices and of course a forgiving friend to inconvenient market follies.