Reserve Currency

Though the Fed is doing its best to mask its abject failure and lack of choices with public relations, the reality is it has no choice but to taper and eventually end its endless spew of credit and its unprecedented and destabilizing purchases of assets.

The multitudes of people, especially Americans, who view U.S. government activity in a negative light often make the mistake of attributing all corruption to some covert battle for global oil fields. In fact, the average leftist seems to believe that everything the establishment does somehow revolves around oil. This is a very simplistic and naïve view. A very real danger within energy markets is the undeniable threat that the U.S. dollar may soon lose its petrodollar status and, thus, Americans may lose the advantage of relatively low gas prices they have come to expect.  That is to say, the coming market crisis will have far more to do with the health of the dollar than the readiness of oil supply.

If you had fallen asleep at your desk recently due to the absolute lack of anything noteworthy happening, this past week should have woken you up. A massive upset in the Virginia primary dethroned House Majority Leader Eric Cantor which sent moderate Republicans scurrying to shore up their voting bases. Al-Queda backed forces, ISIS, have advanced through Iraq and are not closing in on Baghdad which has sent oil prices rocketing higher this past week. Lastly, the mainstream media was completely baffled by the "sea of red" on their monitors which caused one anchor to quip: "Wow...stocks really can go down."

This week’s news certainly WASN’T BORING.  Big events and small add up to unfolding CHAOS around the WORLD. This week’s subjects: American Empire on FIRE!,  Out on a LIMB: Credit Unions facing INSOLVECY,  Is rising indebtedness a sign of economic strength?,  Bond YIELDS continue to collapse as the race for yield INTENSIFIES,  George Orwell in Action, Showdown looming at the OK corral!,  Simply UNBELIEVABLE SOVEREIGN credit market action, PHANTOM GDP, Rare INDEED, Must watch video interview with Charles Nenner,European BANKING SYSTEM INSOLVECY

In order to back the dollars now in circulation and on deposit -- about $2.7 trillion -- with the approximately 261 million ounces of gold believed to be held by the U.S. government, gold prices would have to rise as high as $10,000 an ounce. Who said gold is not money?

Financially speaking, Japan is fast becoming a Keynesian dystopia. Its entire economy is now hostage to a fiscal time bomb. Namely, government debt which already exceeds 240% of GDP and which is growing rapidly because even the recent traumatic increase in the sales tax from 5% to 8% does not come close to filling the fiscal gap. Moreover, even at today’s absurdly low and BOJ rigged bond rate of 0.6% nearly 25% of government revenue is absorbed by interest payments. Now comes the coup de grace, as Kyle Bass predicted, Japan’s savings rate has collapsed and its vaunted current account surplus is about ready to disappear.

"I am not God, I am not here to judge who is right and who is wrong, but if you look at geopolitics in Asia from a Chinese perspective, its completely unacceptable in the long run to have American military presence in Asia," blasts Marc Faber.

"As a large power like France and Britain and America, you might be able to push around small countries, but you can't push around a country that has twice the population of Europe and the United States, and has become a relatively modern state with military that is very powerful."

Moments ago, St. Louis Fed president Bullard gave one of his signature yellow-backgrounded presentations to the Tennessee Bankers Association Annual Meeting taking place at the favorited by 1%-ers everywhere Breakers hotel in Palm Beach, Florida. The bulk of his presentation is the usual trite platitudes, but he did have some chose comments, such as:

• BULLARD: FED SHOULDN'T BE `INTERVENING' ALL THE TIME IN MARKETS

So just intervene from 9:30 am to 4:00 pm in the US equity market? But what will those who have been screaming about rigged, manipulated, broken US equity markets rail about if the Fed isn't intervening all the time in "markets", and if some semblance of normalcy, even if highly crashy, returns?

Meet Mieko Tatsunami, a 70 year old retired kimono dresser from Tokyo. Unlike the scores of paid actors ordered to pitch Abenomics and to spread the gospel of rising asset prices, Mieko shares a most rare commodity in this day of pervasive propaganda: the truth. “The price of everything we eat on a daily basis is going up,” Tatsunami, 70, a retired kimono dresser, said while shopping in Tokyo’s Sugamo area. “I’m making do by halving the amount of meat I serve and adding more vegetables.” Ironically, that's what Americans are doing too. Only here the "halving" of the food is done by the food producers, while the consumers rarely if ever notices that they are paying the same amount for ever lesser amounts of food. At least in Japan they are honest about the food inflation. As Bloomberg shows, Tatsunami’s concerns stem from the price of food soaring at the fastest pace in 23 years after April’s sales-tax increase. Rising prices helped push the nation’s misery index to the highest level since 1981, while wages adjusted for inflation fell the most in more than four years.

The best lies contain elements of truth. The truth here is that the East is forming alliances in opposition to the West, the West is involved in underhanded covert operations all over the planet, and both “sides” are in fact on the verge of a catastrophic battle for supremacy. The great lie is that important details have been left out of our little story. Both sides are merely puppet pieces in a grand game of global chess, and any conflict will ultimately benefit the small group of men standing over the board. They include the international financiers who have influenced the very policy fabric of each government toward a climactic crisis which they hope will finally give them the “New World Order” they have always dreamed of.

This is a great example of how the game works. In a world in which every government on earth needs “liquidity” to survive, and the primary goal of every government is and always has been survival (the retention of arbitrary power at all costs), the provider of liquidity is king. So what is liquidity and who provides it? ...Ecuador agreed to transfer more than half its gold reserves to Goldman Sachs for three years as the government seeks to bolster liquidity...“Gold that was not generating any returns in vaults, causing storage costs, now becomes a productive asset that will generate profits,” the central bank said in the statement.

We found it surprising that it was none other than Paul Volcker himself who, on May 21 at the annual meeting of the Bretton Woods Committee, said that "by now I think we can agree that the absence of an official, rules-based cooperatively managed, monetary system has not been a great success. In fact, international financial crises seem at least as frequent and more destructive in impeding economic stability and growth." We can, indeed, agree. However, we certainly disagree with Volcker's proposal for a solution to this far more brittle monetary system: a new Bretton Woods.

Financial expert, Pentagon insider and bestselling author James Rickards has warned that “typical investors” may not be able to acquire physical gold when prices begin to surge hundreds of dollars a day as “massive shortages” will take place. In another fascinating interview,, Rickards said that gold will become the preserve of the “big guy” in the form of sovereign wealth funds and central banks.

As we discussed previously, delinquent loans in China are a problem... and a growing one. It seems that news is finally starting to filter to a mainstream audience as Bloomberg reports that China’s biggest banks are poised to report the highest proportion of bad debts since 2009 after late payments on loans surged to a five-year high, indicating borrowers are struggling amid an economic slowdown.As S&P warns,"overdue loans are a leading indicator of asset-quality deterioration and show the rising liquidity constraints among borrowers... and the disturbing thing is the end is nowhere in sight." CNY has pluned almost 150 pips to new 19-month lows on the news.

Unrestricted flow of capital is the most effective way to encourage reforms, and North Korea is no exception. History has proven time and again that regime change does not occur when conditions are at their worst, but when circumstances begin to improve and the people grow impatient for further progress.