The Nightmare after Christmas

by Detlev Schlichter
of The Cobden Center
Posted December 26, 2011

THE PATHETIC STATE OF THE GLOBAL FINANCIAL SYSTEM WAS AGAIN ON DISPLAY THIS WEEK. Stocks around the world go up when a major central bank pumps money into the financial system. They go down when the flow of money slows and when the intoxicating influence of the latest money injection wears off. Can anybody really take this seriously? On Tuesday, the prospect of another gigantic cash infusion from the ECB’s printing press into Europe’s banking sector, which is in large part terminally ill but institutionally protected from dying, was enough to trigger the established Pavlovian reflexes among portfolio managers and traders.

None of this has anything to do with capitalism properly understood. None of this has anything to do with efficient capital allocation, with channelling savings into productive capital, or with evaluating entrepreneurship and rewarding innovation. This is the make-believe, get-rich-quick (or, increasingly, pretend-you-are-still-rich) world of state-managed fiat-money-socialism. The free market is dead. We just pretend it is still alive.

There are, of course those who are still under the illusion that this can go on forever. Or even that what we need is some shock-and-awe Über-money injection that will finally put an end to all that unhelpful worrying about excessive debt levels and overstretched balance sheets. Let’s print ourselves a merry little recovery.

How did Mr. Bernanke, the United States’ money-printer-in-chief put it in 2002? “Under a paper-money system, a determined government can always generate higher spending…” (Italics mine.)

Well, I think governments and central banks will get even more determined in 2012. And it is going to end in a proper disaster.

Lender of all resorts

Last week in one of their articles on the euro-mess, the Wall Street Journal Europe repeated a widely shared myth about the ECB: “With Germany’s backing, the ECB has so far refused to become a lender of last resort, …” This is, of course, nonsense. Even the laziest of 2011 year-end reviews will show that the ECB is precisely that: A committed funder of states and banks. Like all other central banks, the ECB has one overriding objective: to create a constant flow of new fiat money and thus cheap credit to an overstretched banking sector and an out-of-control welfare state that can no longer be funded by the private sector. That is what the ECB’s role is. The ECB is lender of last resort, first resort, and soon every resort.

Let’s look at the facts. The ECB started 2011 with record low policy rates. In the spring it thought it appropriate to consider an exit strategy. The ECB conducted a number of moderate rate hikes that have by now all been reversed. By the beginning of 2012 the ECB’s policy rates are again where they were at the beginning of 2011, at record low levels.

So why was the springtime attempt at “rate normalization” aborted? Because of deflationary risks? Hardly. Inflation is at 3 percent and thus not only higher than at the start of the year but also above the ECB’s official target.

The reason was simply this: states and banks needed a lender of last resort. The private market had lost confidence in the ability (willingness?) of certain euro-zone governments to ever repay their massive and constantly growing debt load. Certain states were thus cut off from cheap funding. The resulting re-pricing of sovereign bonds hit the banks and made it more challenging for them to finance their excessive balance sheets with money from their usual sources, not least U.S. money market funds.

So, in true lender-of-last resort fashion, the ECB had to conduct a U-turn and put those printing presses into high gear to fund states and banks at more convenient rates. While in a free market, lending rates are the result of the bargaining between lenders and borrowers, in the state-managed fiat money system, politicians and bureaucrats define what constitutes “sustainable” and “appropriate” interest rates for states and banks. The central bank has to deliver.

The ECB has not only helped with lower rates. Its balance sheet has expanded over the year by at least €490 billion, and is thus 24% larger than at the start of the year. This does not even include this week’s cash binge. The ECB is funding ever more European banks and is accepting weaker collateral against its loans. Many of these banks would be bust by now were it not for the constant subsidy of cheap and unlimited ECB credit. If that does not define a lender of last resort, what does?

And as I pointed out recently, the ECB’s self-imposed limit of €20 billion in weekly government bond purchases (an exercise in market manipulation and subsidization of spendthrift governments but shamelessly masked as an operation to allow for smooth transmission of monetary policy) is hardly a severe restriction. It would allow the ECB to expand its balance sheet by another €1 trillion a year. (The ECB is presently keeping its bond purchases well below €20 billion per week.)

Deflation? What deflation?

It is noteworthy that there still seems to be a widespread belief that all this money-printing will not lead to higher inflation because of the offsetting deflationary forces emanating from private bank deleveraging and fiscal austerity.

As the world crumbles: The ECB spins, the Fed smirks, and US banks pillage

by Nomi Prins
Posted November 21, 2011

OFTEN, WHEN I TROLL AROUND WEBSITES OF ENTITIES LIKE THE ECB AND IMF, I UNCOVER LITTLE OF STARTLING NOTE. They design it that way. Plus, the pace at which the global financial system can leverage bets, eviscerate capital, and cry for bank bailouts financed through austerity measures far exceeds the reporting timeliness of these bodies.

That’s why, on the center of the ECB’s homepage, there’s a series of last week’s rates – and this relic – an interactive Inflation Game (I kid you not)  where in 22 different languages you can play the game of what happens when inflation goes up and down. If you’re feeling more adventurous, there’s also a game called Economia, where you can make up unemployment rates, growth rates and interest rates and see what happens.

What you can’t do is see what happens if you bet trillions of dollars against various countries to see how much you can break them, before the ECB, IMF, or Fed (yes, it’ll happen) swoops in to provide “emergency” loans in return for cuts to pension funds, social programs, and national ownership of public assets. You also can’t input real world scenarios, where monetary policy doesn’t mean a thing in the face of  tidal waves of derivatives’ flow. You can’t gauge say, what happens if Goldman Sachs bets $20 billion in leveraged credit default swaps against Greece, and offsets them (partially) with JPM Chase which bets $20 billion, and offsets that with Bank of America, and then MF Global (oops) and then…..you see where I’m going with this.

We’re doomed if even their board games don’t come close to mimicking the real situation in Europe, or in the US, yet they supply funds to banks torpedoing local populations with impunity. These central entities also don’t bother to examine (or notice) the intermingled effect of leveraged derivatives and debt transactions per country; which is why no amount of funding from the ECB, or any other body, will be able to stay ahead of the hot money racing in and out of various countries.  It’s not about inflation – it’s about the speed, leverage, and daring of capital flow, that has its own power to select winners and losers. It’s not the ‘inherent’ weakness of national economies that a few years ago were doing fine, that’s hurting the euro. It’s the external bets on their success, failure, or economic capitulation running the show. Similarly, the US economy was doing much better before banks starting leveraging the hell out of our subprime market through a series of toxic, fraudulent, assets.

Elsewhere in my trolling, I came across a gem of a working paper on the IMF website, written by Ashoka Mody and Damiano Sandri,  entitled ‘The Eurozone Crisis; How Banks and Sovereigns Came to be Joined at the Hip” (The paper does not ‘necessarily represent the views of the IMF or IMF policy’. )

The paper is full of mathematical formulas and statistical jargon, which may be why the media didn’t pick up on it, but hey, I got a couple of degrees in Mathematics and Statistics, so I went all out.  And it’s fascinating stuff.

Basically, it shows that between the advent of the euro in 1999, and 2007, spreads between the bonds of peripheral countries and core ones in Europe were pretty stable. In other words, the risk of any country defaulting on its debt was fairly equal, and small. But after the 2007 US subprime asset crisis, and more specifically, the advent of  Federal Reserve / Treasury Department construed bailout-economics, all hell broke loose – international capital went AWOL daring default scenarios, targeting them for future bailouts, and when money leaves a country faster than it entered, the country tends to falter economically. The cycle is set.

The US subprime crisis wasn’t so much about people defaulting on loans, but the mega-magnified effects of those defaults on a $14 trillion asset pyramid created by the banks. (Those assets were subsequently sold, and used as collateral for other borrowing and esoteric derivatives combinations, to create a global $140 trillion debt binge.) As I detail in It Takes Pillage, the biggest US banks manufactured more than 75% of those $14 trillion of assets. A significant portion was sold in Europe – to local banks, municipalities, and pension funds – as lovely AAA morsels against which more debt, or leverage, could be incurred. And even thought the assets died, the debts remained.

The world is drowning in debt, and Europe laces on concrete boots

by Charles Hugh Smith
from Of Two Minds
Posted November 14, 2011 

Three metaphors describe Europe: drowning in debt, circular firing squad and trying to fool the money gods with an inept game of 3-card monte.

The world’s major economies are drowning in debt – Europe, the U.S., Japan, China. We all know the U.S. has tried to save its drowning economy by bailing out the parasite which is dragging it to Davy Jones Locker–the banking/financial sector– and by borrowing and squandering $6 trillion in new Federal debt and buying toxic debt with $2 trillion whisked into existence on the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet.

It has failed, of course, and the economy is once again slipping beneath the waves while Ben Bernanke and the politico lackeys join in a Keynesian-monetary cargo-cult chant: Humba-humba, bunga-bunga. Their hubris doesn’t allow them to confess their magic has failed, and rather than let their power be wrenched away, they will let the flailing U.S. economy drown.

Europe has managed to top this hubris-drenched cargo-cult policy – no mean feat. First, it has indebted itself to a breathtaking degree, on every level: sovereign, corporate and private:

Germany, the mighty engine which is supposed to pull the $16 trillion drowning European economy out of the water, is as indebted as the flailing U.S. Second, the euro’s handlers have already sunk staggering sums into hopelessly insolvent debtor nations, for example, Greece, which has 355 billion euros of outstanding sovereign debt and an economy with a GDP around 200 billion euros (though it’s contracting so rapidly nobody can even guess the actual size). According to BusinessWeek, the E.U. (European Union), the ECB (European Central Bank) and the IMF (International Monetary Fund) own about $127 billion of this debt.

Since the ECB is not allowed to “print money,” the amount of cash available to buy depreciating bonds is limited. The handlers now own over 35% of the official debt (recall that doesn’t include corporate or private debt), which they grandly refuse to accept is now worth less than the purchase price. (The market price of Greek bonds has cratered by 42% just since July. Isn’t hubris a wonderful foundation for policy?)

In other words, they have not just put on concrete boots, they’ve laced them up and tied a big knot. We cannot possibly drown, they proclaim; we are too big, too heavy, too powerful. We refuse to accept that all these trillions of euros in debt are now worth a pittance of their face value.

When you’re drowning in debt, the only solution is to write off the debt and drain the pool. The problem is, of course, that all this impaired debt is somebody else’s asset, and that somebody is either rich and powerful or politically powerful, for example, a union pension fund.

Third, the euro’s handlers have set up a circular firing squad. Since the entire banking sector is insolvent, the handlers are demanding that banks raise capital. Since only the ECB is insane enough to put good money after bad, the banks cannot raise capital on the private market, so their only way to raise cash is to sell assets–such as rapidly depreciating sovereign-debt bonds.

This pushes the price of those bonds even lower, as supply (sellers) completely overwhelm demand from buyers (the unflinching ECB and its proxies).

This decline in bond prices further lowers the value of the banks’ assets, which means they need to raise more capital, which means they have to sell even more bonds.

Voila, a circular firing squad, where the “bulletproof” ECB is left as the only buyer who will hold depreciating bonds longer than a few hours, and all the participants gain by selling bonds before they fall any further. This is the classic positive feedback loop, where selling lowers the value of remaining assets and that drives further selling.

Dear Ben, please print us more money

by testosteronepit
Posted August 30, 2011 

DEAR BEN,
Please print us more money. We want you to prop up the stock market. Everybody knows it’s a Ponzi scheme that will collapse without your support. You don’t want us to end up like Bernie Madoff’s clients. No, Ben, we love Ponzi schemes. We get in early and get out before they collapse. That’s why we’re rich. The bad thing is that they sometimes collapse before we can get out. But you already bailed us out twice in the last couple of years through printing trillions of dollars. Why not a third time?

That will also keep the bond-market bubble inflated. We have to admit that you’ve done an excellent job there, hands down. Negative real yields all the way up the yield curve! Awesome. Now if you could just print a few trillions and buy up the sovereigns from the PIIGS. Euro crisis over. End of story. And we’d get richer because we’d sell them to you at face value though we bought them at fifty cents on the dollar.

And why not forever? Just keep printing. Because as soon as you stop, stock markets will crash again, and credit markets will seize, and then we’re back on this awful ride to hell.

Of course, it’ll cause inflation, which is good. You yourself said that. You stated many times that you want inflation. In fact, you said that one of the goals of the Fed, after propping up the markets, is to create inflation. So stick to it, Ben. Don’t slack off suddenly just because some cowboy threatened you.

Inflation, in conjunction with your near-zero yields, has all sorts of benefits. For example, it will eat up the Social Security trust fund, whose $2 trillion balance is invested in treasuries. Fixed-income investors, retirees, and everybody who has any savings will also be demolished. And homeowners. But don’t worry. They won’t figure it out. They don’t get a statement every month that shows how much inflation cost them. It’s a quiet way of stealing from them, and it’ll impoverish them over time, but it’ll make us, the recipients of the money you print, richer.

You see, Ben, we can charge higher prices for our goods and services. And even if we have to pay more for raw materials, we look good. Our inventories increase in value, and we can claim sales jumped 10% because we raised prices by 10%. Analysts dig that.

Recently, Ben, you’ve done a decent job on inflation. In July, we were running at an annual rate of 6%. Not bad. But you need to preempt any cooling off. So keep printing.

Now, we’re not talking about wage inflation. Oh no. We have to keep wages down. We need cheap labor, or else we’d have to send these jobs to China—which we’re doing anyway. And not just to assemble iPhones. Heck, our lawyers in India are doing the same work as our local lawyers for one-tenth the pay. So, if our local lawyers want to be competitive…. Just think how much more profit we could make if wages collapsed!

Real wages have been declining for ten years and fell another 1.7% since July 2010. But that’s not enough. So get with it, Ben. Print more. And don’t worry about the wusses out there who say that choking the middle class like that will put us into a permanent recession. Just get the banks to loan them lots of money so they can buy our stuff, and when the loans blow up, you buy them from the banks at face value. Full circle, Ben.

The trillions you’ve printed and handed to us, well, we put them to work, and we created jobs in China and Mexico and Germany, and we bought assets, and it inflated prices, and now we’re even richer. We’re proud of you, Ben. Think of the influence you have. And not just here. Around the world, Ben! Look at the Middle East and North Africa. See the food riots, rebellions, and civil wars it caused? Thousands of people died and entire governments were toppled…. Oh, wait. That’s a bad example.

And then there is Congress. We invested in them through campaign contributions and other mechanisms to get them to spend trillions of dollars every year on our products and services, and they even started a few wars, and it made us richer—without taxing our companies or us. It’s a wonderful system.

But the deficits have become so huge that they exceed what the Treasury can borrow. So we’re glad, Ben, that you stepped up to the plate and printed enough money to monetize the deficit. But Ben, you can’t just stop now! You’ve got to keep at it. Or else, the whole system will blow up. Well, it’ll blow up anyway, but we don’t want it to blow up now. So, Ben, you don’t have a choice. Otherwise, we’d lose a lot of money in our schemes, and nobody wants that.

Federal Reserve policy mixed with extreme weather has put the world on a fast track to revolution and war

by David DeGraw
of AmpedStatus
Posted August 25, 2011

THERE ARE MANY FACTORS THAT CLEARLY DEMONSTRATE WHY IT WOULD BE DISASTROUS for the Federal Reserve to repeat their vicious Quantitative Easing (QE) policy. If you want to know a significant reason why they cannot get away with another round of QE, here is an equation for you:

(Quantitative Easing + Extreme Weather = Revolution + World War III)

From the very beginning we knew that the Federal Reserve’s QE program was going to cause the cost of food to rise and the dollar to decline in value, and that these intended results would lead to an increase in poverty and civil unrest.

Are food prices approaching a violent tipping point?

A provocative new study suggests the timing of the Arab uprisings is linked to global food price spikes, and that prices will soon permanently be above the level which sparks conflicts. There is a specific food price level above which riots and unrest become far more likely. That figure is 210 on the UN FAO’s price index: the index is currently at 234, due to the most recent spike in prices which started in the middle of 2010 [coinciding with QE2].

Lastly, the researchers argue that current underlying food price trends – excluding the spikes – mean the index will be permanently over the 210 threshold within a year or two. The paper concludes: “The current [food price] problem transcends the specific national political crises to represent a global concern about vulnerable populations and social order.” Big trouble, in other words. The next part of the study identifies that the serious unrest in North Africa and the Middle East also correlates very closely with [the QE2] food price spike. Bar-Yam also notes: “Several of the initial riots in North Africa were identified in news stories as food riots.” From there, the researchers make their prediction of permanently passing the 210 threshold in 12-24 months.

In other words, if the Fed engages in another round of QE, the global unrest that they have already ignited will go hyperbolic. Before getting into the details on how the Fed deliberately made these food prices spike, let’s look at another new study, which also helps demonstrate the obvious, extreme weather is linked to war:

Climate cycles linked to civil war, analysis shows

Changes in the global climate that cut food production triggered one-fifth of civil conflicts between 1950 and 2004. Cyclical climatic changes double the risk of civil wars, with analysis showing that 50 of 250 conflicts between 1950 and 2004 were triggered by the El Niño cycle, according to scientists. El Niño brings hot and dry conditions to tropical nations and cuts food production, to outbreaks of violence in countries from southern Sudan to Indonesia and Peru.

Solomon Hsiang, who led the research at Columbia University, New York, said: “We can speculate that a long-ago Egyptian dynasty was overthrown during a drought. This study shows a systematic pattern of global climate affecting conflict right now. We are still dependent on climate to a very large extent.” Mark Cane, a member of the team, said global warming would have greater climatic impacts than El Niño, making it “hard to imagine” it would not provoke conflicts. [read full report]

Put all these factors together and you have, “The Road Through 2012: Revolution [and/or] World War III.”

In summation, Ben Bernanke and the Fed’s economic central planners were clearly aware of the hostile climate and weather patterns when they engaged in QE2. The Fed’s infamous policy, as I said before, “deliberately threw gasoline all over those brush fires. QE2 was another economic napalm bomb from the global banking cartel.” They knew that they were deliberately attacking (sacrificing) tens of millions of people, but that was secondary to keeping their global Ponzi scheme going by pumping another $2.1 trillion into their fraudulent, insolvent banking system through both QE programs. This is why Ben Bernanke is guilty of crimes against humanity. Now, let’s revisit what I’ve been reporting on for the past year:

Centrally Planned Economic Repression

The IMF has a well-worn strategy that they use to conquer national economies. As I warned four months ago, we have now progressed into Step 3.5: World Wide IMF Riots. Back in October, in a TV interview with Max Keiser, we discussed leaked World Bank documents that revealed the IMF’s strategy. I stated the following:

“They have a four-step strategy for destroying national economies. We are about to enter what they would call Step Three. Step Three is when you’ve looted the economy and now food and basic necessities all of a sudden become more expensive, harder to get to. And then, Step 3.5 is when you get the riots. We are headed to, as the IMF said, and as they plan, Step 3.5: IMF Riots. That’s what’s coming…”

Fast-forward four months to today, and now we see country after country rebelling against high food prices. Since our October interview, food prices have spiked 15%. According to new World Bank data, since June 2010, “Rising food have pushed about 44 million people into poverty in developing countries.”

As Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke announced another round of Quantitative Easing (QE2), those of us paying attention knew that the trigger had been pulled and Step Three had been executed. It was a declaration of economic war, an economic death sentence for tens of millions of people – deliberately devaluing the dollar and sparking inflation in commodities/basic necessities. It was a vicious policy that would impact people from Boston to Cairo.

When QE2 was announced, I warned: “Food and Gas Prices Will Skyrocket, The Federal Reserve Just Dropped An Economic Nuclear Bomb On Us.” I also wrote: “The Federal Reserve is deliberately devaluing the dollar to enrich a small group of a global bankers, which will cause significant harm to the people of the United States and severe ramifications throughout the world. The Federal Reserve’s actions are already causing the price of food and gas to increase and will cause hyperinflation on most basic necessities.”

To be clear, there are several significant factors contributing to rising food prices, such as extreme weather conditions, biofuel production and Wall Street speculation; but the Federal Reserve’s policies deliberately threw gasoline all over those brush fires. QE2 was another economic napalm bomb from the global banking cartel.

In a recent McClathy news article entitled, “Egypt’s unrest may have roots in food prices, US Fed policy”, Kevin Hall reports:

“‘The truth of the matter is that when the Federal Reserve moved on the quantitative easing, it did export inflation to a lot of these emerging markets. There’s no doubt that one of the side effects of the weak dollar and quantitative easing has been rising commodity prices. It helped create this bullish environment for commodities. This is a very delicate balancing act.’

It’s a view shared by Ed Yardeni, a veteran financial market analyst, who reached a similar conclusion in a research note to investors. He joked that Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke should be added to a list of revolutionaries, since his quantitative easing policy, unveiled last year in Wyoming, has provoked unrest and change in the developing world

‘Since he first indicated his support for such a revolutionary monetary change, the prices of corn, soybeans and wheat have risen 53 percent, 37 percent and 24.4 percent through Friday’s close,’ Yardeni noted. ‘The price of crude oil rose 19.8 percent over this period from $75.17 to $90.09 this (Monday) morning. Soaring food and fuel prices are compounding anger attributable to widespread unemployment in the countries currently experiencing riots.’”

The people throughout the Middle East and Northern Africa, on the fringe of the Neo-Liberal economic empire and most vulnerable to the Fed’s inflationary policies, are the first to rebel. The conclusion that we reach, the unfortunate reality of our current crisis: the Federal Reserve and global economic central planners have declared war on us. We are under attack. We must remove Ben Bernanke from power and hold him and the rest of the global banking cartel accountable. We must also break up the “too big to fail” banks. This a message I, along with many others who have analyzed our economic situation, have been repeating over and over for the past three years.

Hopefully, a critical mass of people will soon understand this reality and back it up with non-violent civil disobedience before riots and violence rip our society apart. For these reasons, let’s all go to Wall Street on September 17th and show these tyrants that we’ve had enough.

Keynesian solutions: after total failure, try, try again

by Jim Quinn
The Burning Platform
Posted August 23, 2011

“LENIN IS SAID TO HAVE DECLARED THAT THE BEST WAY TO DESTROY THE CAPITALIST SYSTEM was to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. By this method they not only confiscate, but they confiscate arbitrarily; and, while the process impoverishes many, it actually enriches some. The sight of this arbitrary rearrangement of riches strikes not only at security, but at confidence in the equity of the existing distribution of wealth.” – John Maynard Keynes – The Economic Consequences of the Peace

While Barack Obama vacations on Martha’s Vineyard this week he’ll be thinking about his grand vision to save America – again. There is one thing you can say about Obama – he’s predictable. He promises to unveil his “new” plan for America in early September. The White House said Obama will give a speech after the September 5 Labor Day holiday to outline measures to boost hiring and find budget savings that surpass the $1.5 trillion goal of a new congressional deficit-cutting committee. It is heartening to see that Barack has turned into a cost cutter extraordinaire. He should be an inspiration to the Tea Party, except for one little problem. The plan he unveils in a few weeks will increase spending now and fret about spending cuts at some future unspecified date.

I can reveal his plan today because the White House has already leaked the major aspects of his plan. He will call for an extension of the Social Security payroll tax cut of 2% for all working Americans. This was supposed to give a dramatic boost to GDP in 2011. Maybe it will work next time. He will demand that extended unemployment benefits be renewed. Somehow providing 99 weeks of unemployment benefits is supposed to create jobs. It’s done wonders thus far. He will propose some semblance of an infrastructure bank or tax cuts to spur infrastructure spending. It will include a proposal for training and education to help unemployed people switch careers. He will attempt to steal the thunder from the SUPER COMMITTEE of twelve by coming up with $2 trillion of budget savings by insisting the Lear jet flying rich fork over an extra $500 billion.

You may have noticed that followers of Keynesian dogma like Paul Krugman, Larry Summers, Brad Delong, Richard Koo, John Galbraith, every Democrat in Congress, and every liberal pundit and columnist have been shrieking about the Tea Party terrorists and their ghastly budget cuts that are destroying our economy. They contend the stock market is tanking and the economy is heading into recession due to the brutal austerity measures being imposed by the extremists in the Republican Party. There is just one small issue with their argument. It is completely false. It is a bold faced lie. This is 2011. The economy has been in freefall since January 1. No spending cuts have occurred. Nada!!! As the CBO chart below reveals, the horrendous slashing of government will amount to $21 billion in 2012 and $42 billion in 2013. Of course, those aren’t even cuts in spending. They are reductions in the projected increases in spending. Politicians must be very secure in the knowledge that Americans are completely ignorant when it comes to anything other than the details of Kim Kardashian’s wedding and who Snooki is banging on Jersey Shore.

I’d like to remind the Harvard educated Keynesian economists that Federal government spending is currently chiming in at $3.8 trillion per year. Federal spending was $2.7 trillion in 2007 and $3.0 trillion in 2008. Keynesians believe government spending fills the gap when private companies are contracting. Obama has taken Keynesianism to a new level. Federal spending will total $10.8 trillion in Obama’s first three years, versus $8.4 trillion in the previous three years. Even a Harvard economist can figure out this is a 29% increase in Federal spending. What has it accomplished? We are back in recession, unemployment is rising, forty six million Americans are on food stamps, food and energy prices are soaring, and the middle class is being annihilated. The standard Keynesian response is we would have lost 3 million more jobs, we were saved from a 2nd Great Depression and the stimulus was too little. It would have worked if it had just been twice as large.

The 2nd Great Depression was not avoided, it was delayed. Our two decade long delusional credit boom could have been voluntarily abandoned in 2008. The banks at fault could have been liquidated in an orderly bankruptcy with stockholders and bondholders accepting the consequences of their foolishness. Unemployment would have soared to 12%, GDP would have collapsed, and the stock market would have fallen to 5,000. The bad debt would have been flushed from the system. Instead our Wall Street beholden leaders chose to save their banker friends, cover-up the bad debt, shift private debt to taxpayer debt, print trillions of new dollars in an effort to inflate away the debt, and implemented every wacky Keynesian stimulus idea Larry Summers could dream up.  These strokes of genius have failed miserably. Bernanke, Paulson, Geithner and Obama have set in motion a series of events that will ultimately lead to a catastrophic currency collapse. We have entered the second phase of the Greater Depression and there are no monetary or fiscal bullets left in the gun. Further expansion of debt will lead to a hyperinflationary collapse as the remaining confidence in the U.S. dollar is exhausted. We are one failed Treasury auction away from a currency crisis.

John Maynard Keynes argued the solution to the Great Depression was to stimulate the economy through some combination of two approaches: a reduction in interest rates and government investment in infrastructure. Investment by government injects income, which results in more spending in the general economy, which in turn stimulates more production and investment involving still more income and spending and so forth. The initial stimulation starts a cascade of events, whose total increase in economic activity is a multiple of the original investment.

It sounds so good in theory, but it didn’t work in the Depression and it hasn’t worked today. It is a doctrine taught in every business school in America with no actual results to support it. Who needs facts and actual results when a good story believed and perpetuated by non-thinking pundits will do? Every Keynesian play in the playbook has been used since 2008. The American people were told by Obama and his Keynesian trained advisors that if we implemented his $862 billion shovel ready stimulus package, unemployment would peak at 7.9% and would decline to 6.5% by today. The cascade of recovery was going to be jump started by a stimulus package that equaled 27% of the previous year’s entire spending. Obama’s complete package was implemented. The outcome was an eye opener.

Too stupid for words – If this doesn’t convince you hyperinflation is upon us, nothing will!

by Andy Hoffman (Ranting Andy)
Posted August 8th, 2011

LAST NIGHT I CAME ACROSS AN ARTICLE DEPIECTING SUCH A LEVEL OF STUPIDITY, MORAL HAZARD, and chutzpah, that I had to reread it several times to make sure it wasn’t satire.  I figured there is no way such “luminaries” in the eyes of the doting public could possibly give such moronic, and destructive soundbytes, particularly during the most significant sovereign threat the U.S. has faced since Pearl Harbor.  But they DID anyway, and weren’t even challenged by the press.

I initially sent a brief email stating my loss of words, but as any of my readers know, that condition rarely lasts long, particularly when pertaining to an opportunity to castigate two of the people I hate most on EARTH, Alan Greenspan and Warren Buffett.  I had also gone essentially a whole day of sleep, but now that I’m refreshed the creative juices are again flowing. No need to list the Hall of Shame accomplishments of these clowns, particularly Greenspan who, unlike Buffett never earned a dime in the “legitimate business world” (sorry, I had to steal that phrase from Dr. Phillip Bombay in “Back to School”, my all-time favorite comedy).

Given the ongoing, and now accelerating, COLLAPSE of the U.S. financial system, sometimes one really needs to EMPHASIZE how far down the rabbit hole we have gone to realize that the odds of escape are no better than a ray of light in a black hole.

This weekend, amongst perhaps the most intense GLOBAL episode of “Sunday Night Special” ever, in an attempt to assuage investor fears, the puppet media trotted out their two biggest shills, Greenspan and Buffett, to give worldwide investors their sage advice.  But rather than to even hedge their comments, they straight out stated ‘all is well, nothing to see here.

Greenspan, in my mind THE NUMBER ONE PERSON RESPONSIBLE FOR THIS MESS, whom in his retirement years has been subtlely hinting that he remembers his roots as advocate of REAL MONEY (i.e. gold), decided to do a 180 and return to the Greenspan of old, fearless of “irrational exuberance” and ever-willing to implement the “Greenspan put” with a few strokes of his money-printing keyboard.

In response to a Meet the Press question regarding the validity of S&P’s decision to downgrade U.S. Treasury debt, he vociferously defended his former employers by stating  “The United States can pay any debt because we can always print money to do that. So there is zero probability of default.”  Yes readers, he actually said that, in front of a GLOBAL audience, fully believing this would be a comfort to bondholders, creditors, and rating agencies alike.

Even better, everyone’s favorite government sell-out and insider trading expert, Warren Buffet, had the gall to not only attack S&P, but add that a new rating of AAAA should be instituted so the U.S. could be UPGRADED!

Readers, we are entering a VERY, VERY DANGEROUS TIME, unprecedented in human history.  The largest, most destructive fiat Ponzi scheme of all time is on the verge of certain collapse, and frankly at the pace things are going such a cataclysm could occur at any moment. Bill H., also of GATA fame, penned a great missive this morning comparing the time frames of a mania versus a panic, driving home the conclusion about how fast things can plummet when CONFIDENCE is lost and FEAR takes over, as opposed to the slow-motion inflation of a GREED-based bubble.  That loss of confidence is picking up steam as we speak, and comments like this are the type that could potentially start an avalanche at any time.

Yes, Greenspan is an old, senile coot, but he has had more influence over world monetary policy than any man in history.  And more importantly, we now have the past TWO Fed Chairmen, Greenspan and Bernanke, who have cumulatively destroyed the dollar for 24 of the 40 years it has reigned as “reserve currency”, giving similar statements about ‘helicopter drops’ in terms of the arsenal available to them. With protests and in some cases riots going on all over the world in response to rising inflationary pressures (Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, Bahrain, Greece, and now more civilized nations such as Israel and the UK), such massively hyperinflationary statements from the reserve currency’s LEADERS can only bode for potentially horrific near-term outcomes, in my view.

Sorry for the light humor about Back to School, as frankly this is no time for humor of any kind.  At the GATA conference, Jim Rickards spoke about the psychology of complex systems such as financial markets, noting that every system has its own threshold of pain, and that at any time we could witness the “straw that breaks the market’s back.”  Once the hyperinflationary genie is out of the bottle (and it’s pushing FULL FORCE at the cork right now), the 1971-2011 worldwide status quo will be GONE FOREVER, replaced by a MUCH SCARIER reality, the type that has inspired insidious fictions such as 1984, V for Vendetta, and Atlas Shrugged, as well as more diabolical realities such as Stalinist Russia, Fascist Italy, and Nazi Germany.

Holding any material portion of your “wealth” in DOLLARS, POUNDS, or EUROS appears SUICIDAL, particularly if held in insolvent BANKS in the U.S., UK, or Europe.  All one needs to do is look at the chart of Bank of America, THE LARGEST AMERICAN BANK, (http://www.ffiec.gov/nicpubweb/nicweb/top50form.aspx), which has been bailed out perhaps a half dozen times (on its own and via Merrill Lynch and Countrywide Credit), to realize that NO AMOUNT OF PAPER, ACCOUNTING CHICANERY, OR PPT SUPPORT, will ultimately be able to save the system.

NOW IS OFFICIALLY NOT SOON ENOUGH to PROTECT YOURSELF from the tsunami which is about to wipe out the Western financial system once and for all.  The receding of the waters is long past, and now the wave is within spitting distance of the shore

Debt Ceiling Drama

by Dr. Ron Paul
Posted July 19, 2011

THE DEBT CEILING DEBATE IS PROVIDING PLENTY OF OPPORTUNITY for political theater in Washington. Proponents of raising the debt ceiling are throwing around the usual scare tactics and misinformation in order to intimidate opponents into accepting more debt and taxes. It is important to distinguish the truth from the propaganda.

First of all, politicians need to understand that without real change default is inevitable. In fact, default happens every day through monetary policy tricks. Every time the Federal Reserve engages in more quantitative easing and devalues the dollar, it is defaulting on the American people by eroding their purchasing power and inflating their savings away. The dollar has lost nearly 50% of its value against gold since 2008. The Fed claims inflation is 2% or less over the past few years; however economists who compile alternate data show a 9% inflation rate if calculated more traditionally. Alarmingly, the administration is talking about changing the methodology of the CPI calculation yet again to hide the damage of the government’s policies. Changing the CPI will also enable the government to avoid giving seniors a COLA (cost of living adjustment) on their social security checks, and raise taxes via the hidden means of “bracket creep.” This is a default. Just because it is a default on the people and not the banks and foreign holders of our debt does not mean it doesn’t count.

Politicians also need to acknowledge that our debt is unsustainable. For decades our government has been spending and promising far more than it collects in taxes. But the problem is not that the people are not taxed enough. The government has managed to run up $61.6 trillion in unfunded liabilities, which works out to $528,000 per household. A tax policy that would aim to extract even half that amount of money from American families would be unimaginably draconian, and not unlike attempting to squeeze blood from a turnip. This is, unequivocally, a spending problem brought about by a dramatically inflated view of the proper role of government in a free society.

Perhaps the most abhorrent bit of chicanery has been the threat that if a deal is not reached to increase the debt by August 2nd, social security checks may not go out. In reality, the Chief Actuary of Social Security confirmed last week that current Social Security tax receipts are more than enough to cover current outlays. The only reason those checks would not go out would be if the administration decided to spend those designated funds elsewhere. It is very telling that the administration would rather frighten seniors dependent on social security checks than alarm their big banking friends, who have already received $5.3 trillion in bailouts, stimulus and quantitative easing. This instance of trying to blackmail Congress into tax increases by threatening social security demonstrates how scary it is to be completely dependent on government promises and why many young people today would jump at the chance to opt out of Social Security altogether.

We are headed for rough economic times either way, but the longer we put it off, the greater the pain will be when the system implodes. We need to stop adding more programs and entitlements to the problem. We need to stop expensive bombing campaigns against people on the other side of the globe and bring our troops home. We need to stop allowing secretive banking cartels to endlessly enslave us through monetary policy trickery. And we need to drastically rethink government’s role in our lives so we can get it out of the way and get back to work.

Bernanke: Gold isn’t money

from The New York Sun
Posted July 13, 2011

The Fed Chairman and Ron Paul clash over the dollar

IF ONE WANTED TO EDIT OUR SUMMER OF QUARRELS DOWN TO ONE EXCHANGE that encapsulates our national misunderstanding, we would commend that which took place today between the chairman of the Federal Reserve governors, Ben Bernanke, and the chairman of the House Monetary Affairs subcommittee, Congressman Ron Paul. The exchange lasted five minutes, and one won’t find it flagged on the front pages of, say, the New York Times. But it was up in lights on the Drudge Report, which has mounted a picture of Mr. Bernanke under the headline “Bernanke: Gold Not Money,” and linked to a piece in Forbes.

Dr. Paul began by expressing skepticism over optimistic reports on the economy, noting our lackluster performance over the past three years despite the Congress and the Fed having injected $5.3 trilllion dollars into the economy. He noted that the national debt has grown by $5.1 trillion, while GDP has grown less than 1% and 7 million people are unemployed. The average term of unemployment, he observed, has soared to nearly 40 weeks from 17 weeks. He also expressed skepticism over claims that inflation is low, citing one definition of inflation that has prices up 34% over the three years despite the weak economy. So, he asked, why pay money to banks and corporations under a policy of too big to fail rather than giving money directly to the people?

Mr. Bernanke responded by saying that the Fed hasn’t spent any money but has, in fact, made profits that it has returned to the government. He noted that the Fed was founded to deal with financial panics. Dr. Paul interrupted, noting that his five minutes were running out, and asked about the collapse in the value of the dollar by almost 50% in the past three years to less than a 1,580th of an ounce of gold. “When you wake up in the morning, do you care about the price of gold?” he asked Mr. Bernanke.

“Well,” the chairman replied. “I pay attention to the price of gold. But I think it reflects a lot of things. It reflects global uncertainties. I think the reason people hold gold is as protection against of what we call tail risks, really, really bad outcomes. And to the extent that the last few years have made people more worried about the potential of a major crisis then they have gold as a protection.”

“Do you think gold is money?”

Here the chairman paused awkwardly, before, finally, replying.

“No, it’s not money. It’s a precious metal.”

“Even if it’s been money for the past 6,000 years, somebody reversed that, eliminated that economic law?”

“Well, it’s an asset. Would you say treasury bills are money? I don’t think they’re money, either. They’re an asset.”

“Why do central banks hold it?”

“Well, it’s a form of reserve.”

“Why don’t they hold diamonds?”

“Well, it’s tradition, long term tradition.”

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

The exchange, which Dr. Paul ended by remarking that some people still think gold is money, throws into relief the disconnected nature of our dialog. In the narrow sense, it’s true that the Fed doesn’t spend money. In the broader sense, it’s true that the Fed has become the enabler of the Federal government’s binge of spending — all the while boasting of the profits from such lending. Now we are in a showdown between a House elected to halt the increases in taxes and spending and a president and Senate bent increasing both. Into this midst comes a central bank signaling its preparedness to mount yet another round of quantitative easing, while the definition of inflation undergoes the equivalent of a gerrymander to disguise the significance of the collapse in the value of the dollar, which — on cue — hit a record low even as the chairman was speaking and the Republican leadership in the Senate was maneuvering to grant the president authority to issue debt on his own say-so. In our 40 years on this beat we don’t think we’ve seen a more cynical performance — by a central bank or an administration — than that which has been on display these past few years.

Feigning cluelessness, Helicopter Ben fools no one

by Rick Ackerman
Posted ‘Rick’s Picks’ June 23, 2011

HELICOPTER BEN WAS DEEP IN DENIAL YESTERDAY FOLLOWING A TWO-DAY FED meeting, telling reporters [see below,article from SeattlePI] he’s puzzled by recent signs of deterioration in the economy.  “We don’t have a precise read on why this slower pace of growth is persisting.” Is this guy a hoot, or what?

Earth to Bernanke: The Great Recession never ended!  In fact, the term “Great Recession” itself is popularly used by plain folks to assert that economic hard times are very much with us, notwithstanding brazen statistical claims to the contrary. As anyone can see, many trillions of stimulus dollars have yet to improve a dismal employment picture one iota — only kept it from getting worse; nor have those “dollars” boosted household incomes or real estate prices. What they have boosted are bank profits and the prices of stocks, commodities and basic goods

Surprising no one, Mr. Bernanke also failed to mention the still-deflating housing market as a possible reason for the punk economy. Who but a Fed chairman could fail to connect the dots? It seems not to have occurred to him that consumers are no longer binging because their homes have continued to plummet in value – another 4.2% in the last quarter alone.

In a policy statement issued after the meeting, the Fed muckety-mucks blamed the usual suspects for the weakening economy: higher energy prices and the disaster in Japan. Perhaps Bernanke had second thoughts about trotting out such a lame explanation, however, and that’s why he deflected the matter by feigning cluelessness. Whatever the case, although he further widened the cognitive gap between the government’s spinmeisters and the working stiff, the Fed chief may have bought time to feign yet more cluelessness when he admitted that the ”sluggish recovery” could linger into next year.

We wonder what he sees for 2012 that could change things for the better, since even realtors and developers who are usually giddy with optimism seem to have accepted that there isn’t yet any light at the end of the tunnel – at least, none that can be discerned by the uncompromised eye. Unfortunately for Mr. Bernanke, no matter how little he tries to say, he’ll have to give away his game when QE2 sunsets at the end of the month. You can bet that whatever form QE3 takes, it will be called something else. Bernanke and Obama can count on the mainstream media to go along with the ruse and to tell us as often as needed that the Emperor is wearing a fine suit of clothes, but we’ll look to Europe’s editorialists to call the next phase of Fed monetization by its proper name.