Alan Greenspan

The establishment desires to acclimate Americans to the idea that being anti-government is wrong; that it is a despicable philosophy embracing social deviance, aimless violence, isolation and zealotry. Looking beyond the mainstream position, my question is, is it really such a bad thing to be anti-government today?

As Mike "Hidden Secrets Of Money" Maloney has said many times before, the economic crisis of 2008 was only a speed bump on the way to the main event.  He believes that before the end of this decade there will be an economic crisis so historic that it will eclipse the crash of 29 and the subsequent great depression.  He also believes it is both unavoidable and inevitable, because it is merely the free market releasing the stored up energy from decades of economic manipulation. As Maolney notes, "the best investment that you will ever make in your lifetime is your own financial education," and the following provides a succinct reminder of the top reasons to buy gold and silver...

Just a few days ago Alan Greenspan’s latest piece of work was published (October 20th 2013). It’s entitled The Map and the Territory: Risk, Human Nature, and the Future of Forecasting.

The kabuki theater that passes for governance in Washington D.C. reveals the profound level of ignorance shrouding this Empire of Debt in its prolonged death throes. Ignorance of facts; ignorance of math; ignorance of history; ignorance of reality; and ignorance of how ignorant we’ve become as a nation, have set us up for an epic fall. It’s almost as if we relish wallowing in our ignorance like a fat lazy sow in a mud hole. The lords of the manor are able to retain their power, control and huge ill-gotten riches because the government educated serfs are too ignorant to recognize the self-evident contradictions in the propaganda they are inundated with by state controlled media on a daily basis.

March 18, 1996. It was the height of the dot-com boom years. And gracing the cover of Fortune magazine was a photo of a rather smug looking Alan Greenspan, then Chairman of the US Federal Reserve.  The headline across the top-- "It's HIS economy, stupid". The inside story was entitled "In Greenspan We Trust".  And the article went on to suggest that, no matter WHO won the presidential election that year between Bill Clinton and Bob Dole, Greenspan would still be running the economy. And handily.  This is a major testament to the state of our financial system. We award a tiny banking elite nearly totalitarian control over our money supply... and by extension, the economy.  We're just supposed to trust that they're good guys. Competent guys. That they know what they're doing.  Fast forward almost two decades. Long Term Capital Management. The NASDAQ bubble. The real estate bubble. The credit crunch. The mortgage crisis. The banking crisis. The sovereign debt crisis.

Ye Gods! Even that discredited old hack, Alan Greenspan ? the man who bears as much responsibility as anyone for the hypertrophy of state- supported finance and thus for the havoc it continues to wreak ? is at it, trying to tell us that because of a low ‘equity premium’ (read: ludicrously intervention?depressed bond yields), the ‘momentum’ of stocks ‘is still relativel. Such a market is therefore likely to suck everyone in to its last, Plinian updraft no matter how stretched everything becomes and no matter how great the risk of being cast into perdition in the pyroclastic collapse to come.

It has been a very interesting week as the Government shutdown/debt ceiling debate debacle moves into the background.  The focus has now turned back towards the fundamentals of the market, economic environment and the ongoing Federal Reserve interventions.  What is becoming increasingly evident is that market participants are once again potentially throwing "caution to the wind" betting on a belief that the Fed's ongoing Q.E. programs will continue to trump valuations and economics.  After all, that has seemingly been the case up to this point.  The problem is that no one really knows how this will turn out.  However, as we discussed earlier this week, it is likely that we are close to finding out answer. In the meantime, here is our weekly list of "things to ponder this weekend."

As Alan Greenspan described this week, in an interview with John Stewart on “The Daily Show,”

“We really can't forecast all that well. We pretend that we can but we can't. And markets do really weird things sometimes because they react to the way people behave, and sometimes people are a little screwy.”

Which means they don’t necessarily go along with your central planning, no matter how good you think it is. But still economists insist that, if they are allowed to monkey around with it, they can make an economy better. And therefore, the Fed, which has lived by the sword of QE, will probably die by it too.

Back on August 1, 2010, Alan Greenspan - who is once again making the media rounds in a desperate attempt to peddle his ridiculous book about forecasting (in which he explains it wasn't the Fed's models that were wrong; it was reality, and all those who inhabit it, that had a glitch) and is arguably the man who created the single biggest credit expansion in the Pre-New Normal era who no longer has access to the money printer so needs to sell books, and soon enough he may devolve to pitching newsletters - issued one of his most memorable post-Lehman bloopers. To wit: "if the stock market continues higher it will do more to stimulate the economy than any other measure we have discussed here." We decided to investigate his claim...

Alan Greenspan is out pitching his news book. We explained the miracle of revisionist history and questioned the sanity of anyone buying this 'guide to economic forecasting' earlier in the week, but in his appearance this morning on CNBC, the "maestro" did a great job explaining just how flawed his own logic was (without our help). He explains (sadly reflective of the current clairvoyance of Jim Bullard) that, speaking for himself and his FOMC colleagues, "all of us knew there was a bubble," though failing to admit to being the progenitor, "but we badly missed the timing."  But, perhaps summing up the mantra of his ilk better than any other sentence, Greenspan concludes, "a bubble in and of itself does not give you a crisis..." adding, during a later Bloomberg TV clip, "I missed certain forecasts, you don’t apologize for that... We are not omniscient. I am a human being."

Charts Show that U.S. Policy Has Increased Terror Attacks

Behold the Wealth Effect: according to the NY State comptroller, the average NYC banker made $360,700 in 2012. This is 5.2 more than the average non-financial job in the city (i.e., all other jobs).

The Chinese yuan has reached 20-year highs versus the U.S. dollar. It's a significant development with potentially huge ramifications for China and the world.

As markets twiddle their thumbs waiting on Washington to come up with a political solution to the Federal Debt Limit/budget debate, ConvergEx's Nick Colas decided it would be a good time to review the academic literature on how markets discount expectations in the first place. Behavioral finance posits that human nature skews perceptions of risk and return, causing everything from irrational risk aversion to asset price bubbles. Against this current backdrop of theoretical uncertainty, measures like the VIX are currently somnambulant.  So, using the modern vernacular, WTF?  The bottom line, Colas explains, is that Wall Street thinks it has the current "Crisis" all figured out: a last minute deal with no Treasury default.  And just as we haven’t sold off materially during this drama, don’t expect a huge (+5%) lift afterwards.

Stunning Facts that Your History, Economics and Business Teachers Never Learned ...