Janet Yellen

"The Federal Reserve signaled it was moving toward interest rate increases in the months ahead now that signs of a dip in economic activity early in the year are waning," Fed mouthpiece Jon Hilsenrath writes.

While Janet Yellen is hopelessly cornered (as explained yesterday, not hiking rates or worse doing even more QE, is the single "biggest risk to global equities" according to BofA as it would not only soak up even more liquidity and crush confidence in the economy, even worse than the Fed did hike rates and unleash the "Ghost of 1937") when it comes to monetary policy, one place where the Fed's desperate scramble to renormalize is distincly visible is in the FOMC statement itself.

Every Fed watcher’s favorite word these days is “lift-off”. As if the Fed’s first rate increase, whenever that comes to pass, is the ignition of some giant Saturn V rocket that will inexorably carry interest rates up, up, and away. Please. This is Narrative creation … really, Narrative abuse … of the first order. The next time you read or hear someone use the word “lift-off”, I’m begging you to remember Jim Mora’s classic press conference when he was asked about the Colts’ chances of making the play-offs, because it’s a dead ringer for what Janet Yellen is saying in her heart of hearts.

Pedro da Costa will be pleased (as should every other American who actually believes The Fed is NOT above the law) as Rep. Jeb Hensarling unleashes a damning letter to The Fed accusing them of "willful obstruction" in the Congressional leak probe. Hensarling and Duffy demand "immediate compliance" with the subpoena and see "no legal basis to withhold records from Congress." We are sure these 2 gentlemen will not be invited to the FOMC Press Conference either.

Haven’t you ever sat there in hindsight, drinking history down retrospectively like an already-bad whisky that has been mixed with some equally worse soda and a couple of rocks thrown in for good measure and wondered what life would be like if this or that event hadn’t actually happened?

"While most are focused on the risks around a withdrawal of liquidity, we believe the biggest hit to confidence could be the opposite: if another round of US QE is necessary to prop up the economy," BofAML says, suggesting the Fed is now cornered as raising rates risks destabilizing markets and QE4 risks betraying the futility of successive central bank interventions.

The Fed’s balance sheet grew eight times more rapidly than the economy during the last fourteen years. That’s just the inverse of the relationship that occurred back in the Golden Era. if you need any proof at all of this massive intrusion into the financial system isn’t working; the huge amount of money printing and balance sheet expansion; the unremitting financial repression and pegging of interest rates; look at that fundamental comparison. The only thing it’s really doing is simply inflating the serial bubble that ultimately reach unsustainable peaks and collapse. Hopefully on the third strike, the people who gave us these bubbles will be out.

After 27 years, honest price discovery has been destroyed, thereby reducing the nerve centers of capitalism - the money and capital markets - to little more than gambling casinos. Accordingly, speculative rent-seeking in the financial arena has replaced enterprenurial innovation and supply side investment and productivity as the modus operandi of the US economy. This has resulted in a severe diminution of main street growth and a massive redistribution of windfall wealth to the tiny share of households which own most of the financial assets. Warren Buffett’s $73 billion net worth is the poster boy for this untoward state of affairs. The massive and systematic falsification of asset prices which lies at the heart of this deformation of capitalism is a direct and unavoidable consequence of monetary central planning.

The similarities between today and the 1929 era suggest a massive crash could be appraoching.

We should not even want to rebuild the world as it was in the decade of the 2000’s because it was so unbelievably unstable, a fact revealed persistently in the nearly eight years since that peak. Economists and central bankers treated the Panic of 2008 and the Great Recession as if it were a temporary interruption in an otherwise healthy system, a cyclical problem that over time heals on its own. Most of them still, to this day, hold the same view and the world’s economy and financial system is paying the costs of doing so. The eurodollar economy is falling apart and no amount of orthodoxy can reverse it because the eurodollar economy is orthodoxy.

Financial markets in the United States and around the world are all waiting with “bated breath” for when the Federal Reserve modifies its “easy money” policy and starts to raise interest rates. No one, however, asks a simple question: Why is the American central bank in the interest rate setting business?

The Fed and other Central Banks not only don’t have a clue how to fix the problem, but that they actually have almost no incentive to do so. 

Central bankers have promised ad nauseum to keep rates low for long periods of time. And they have delivered. Their claim is that this helps the economy recover, but that is just a silly idea. What it does do is help create the illusion of a recovering economy. What we have is the financial system posing as the economy. And a vast majority of people falling for that sleight of hand. Now the central bankers come face to face with Hyman Minsky’s credo that ‘Stability Breeds Instability’. Ultra low rates (ZIRP) are not a natural phenomenon, and that must of necessity mean that they distort economies in ways that are inherently unpredictable. For central bankers, investors, politicians, everyone. That is the essence of what is being consistently denied, all the time.

Ali and Frazier, Laurel and Hardy, Mayweather and Pacquiao, Liesman and Santelli, and now Schiff and Maloney. Peter and Mike join clash of the titan-like to discuss their investment strategies and expose the charts the government doesn't want you to seeas "people like Bernanke are taken seriously still and the people that did predict [the crisis] are dismissed as lunatics half the time." The wide-reaching conversation covers everything from gold and stocks to The Fed and The Dollar - Bernanke "took the coward’s way out because all he did was exacerbate the problems to postpone the day of reckoning." The air is coming out of the bubble, they warn, "Bernanke and Greenspan have absolutely destroyed America. People don’t realize what is coming..."