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Because it has to be in order to fund Bidenomics.

As Powell clasps his hands in desperate hope without any evidence to back his hope, the US Treasurer today, like the Treasurer in yesteryear, is giving a solid thumbs-up to his plan, which is already accomplishing everything the Treasury desperately needed.

After yesterday’s low “jobless claims” report that held unemployment steady and that looked rigged to hit a targeted goal (again), today delivered a “new jobs” report that came in (at 175,000 new jobs), well below expectations of 240,000. By that report, the unemployment rate ticked higher from 3.8% to 3.9%.

As I commented yesterday, we may be nearing the point where all the layoffs this year and last year are bringing jobs down enough to where they will finally start to come in line with available workers. Once that threshold is met, unemployment can rise when and if layoffs are higher than normal. We’ll have to see if this minute rise becomes a trend, though, since the numbers pulled a head fake to his level in February, too, then dipped back down in March to the familiar 3.8 level they had hovered along in August, September and October of last year.

As usual, the slightest hint of a softening labor market caused stock and bond investors to back markets down from the recent financial tightening investors had brought back to the marketplace. Brains smoked in the fumes of hopium and fueled with pure testosterone bid stocks and bonds and rate cuts hopes all back up again today in response to this slight hint that the Fed’s jobless gauge may finally allow it to cut rates. Same pipe dream from the same glass-pipe smokers. Powell’s limp comments about fighting inflation this week had already given lift back to falling markets.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

What Are the Odds the Fed Hikes Interest Rates to 8 Percent?

May 5, 2024

What Are the Odds the Fed Hikes Interest Rates to 8 Percent?

8 Percent “Prediction” or “Possibility”?

This headline by TFTC caught my eye: JP Morgan Predicts Crushing 8% Interest Rate Spike

JP Morgan forecasts interest rates rising to 8%, potentially triggering a recession and banking crisis similar to past financial downturns.

JP Morgan, the largest bank in the United States, has released a 61-page shareholder letter predicting an increase in interest rates to 8%—a figure that hasn’t been seen since the era of the late eighties. This dire forecast comes on the heels of staggering stagflation numbers and warns of potentially catastrophic consequences for the economy and the banking system.

The last time the country grappled with 8% interest rates, it triggered the recession during the first Bush administration, resulting in mortgage rates soaring to 10% and ten-year bond yields hitting 9%. The implications of such rates in today’s climate could be devastating. An analysis suggests that the housing market, already struggling, would face further decline, with a 7% rate hike serving as a crippling blow to prospective young American homeowners, increasing their purchasing costs by an estimated 50%.

No Such Prediction

That sounds dire, and it surely would be. However, Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan, made no such prediction in its 2023 Annual Shareholder Letter (link repeated from above). Here is the pertinent snip:

Equity values, by most measures, are at the high end of the valuation range, and credit spreads are extremely tight. These markets seem to be pricing in at a 70% to 80% chance of a soft landing — modest growth along with declining inflation and interest rates. I believe the odds are a lot lower than that. In the meantime, there seems to be an enormous focus, too much so, on monthly inflation data and modest changes to interest rates…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

David Stockman on the $1.3 Trillion Elephant In The Room

May 3, 2024

David Stockman on the $1.3 Trillion Elephant In The Room

These people have to be stopped!

We are talking about the nation’s unhinged monetary politburo domiciled in the Eccles Building, of course. It is bad enough that their relentless inflation of financial assets has showered the 1% with untold trillions of windfall gains, but their ultimate crime is that they lured the nation’s elected politician into a veritable fiscal trance. Consequently, future generations will be lugging the service costs on insuperable public debts for years to come.

For more than two decades these foolish PhDs and monetary apparatchiks drove the entire Treasury yield curve to rock bottom, even as public debt erupted skyward. In this context, the single biggest chunk of the Treasury debt lies in the 90-day T-bill sector, but between December 2007 and June 2023 the inflation-adjusted yield on this workhorse debt security was negative 95% of the time.

That’s right. During that 187-month span, the interest rate exceeded the running (LTM) inflation rate during only nine months, as depicted by the purple area picking above the zero bound in the chart, and even then by just a tad. All the rest of the time, Uncle Sam was happily taxing the inflationary rise in nominal incomes, even as his debt service payments were dramatically lagging the 78% rise of CPI during that period.

Inflation-Adjusted Yield On 90-Day T-bills, 2007 to 2022

The above was the fiscal equivalent of Novocain. It enabled the elected politicians to merrily jig up and down Pennsylvania Avenue and stroll the K-Street corridors dispensing bountiful goodies left and right, while experiencing nary a moment of pain from the massive debt burden they were piling on the main street economy..

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

If Treasury Bonds Hit 5%, You’re Gonna See Some Serious Sh*t

May 2, 2024

If Treasury Bonds Hit 5%, You’re Gonna See Some Serious Sh*t

Almost as if all of us Austrian Economists (read: any carbon based life form using common sense when it comes to finance) live in an echo chamber together, a third expert I respect came out over the last few days and has warned that 5% on the 10 year treasury would be the breaking point for markets and the economy.

If my calculations are correct, when this thing hits 5%…you’re going to see some serious sh*t.

Peter Schiff now argues that the Federal Reserve and US Treasury are being forced to confront the reality that inflation is persistent, which has led to an increase in yields, recently reaching 4.7% on the 10 year, the highest since November.

The thought process, for financial neophytes, is that bond traders will continue to sell bonds, driving yields up, in order to make it difficult for the Fed to cut rates — and essentially forcing the Fed to fight inflation head-on instead of capitulating to the economy and markets (should they crash).

This follows Jack Boroudjian’s analysis from last week, stating that rates will keep drifting higher and that 5% to 5.5% is the danger zone: Yields To Trigger “Serious Earthquakes” Across Economy: Jack Boroudjian

It also follows Harris Kupperman’s similar take: Bond Market About To Have An “Aneurism”: Harris Kupperman

Put simply, the Fed faces a dilemma: it needs to raise rates to combat inflation and make Treasuries more appealing, but higher rates would exacerbate the already burdensome debt servicing costs and threaten industries reliant on borrowing. Or, to use the parlance of my recent interview with Matt Taibbi, higher rates simply serve up another day of “sh*t burgers” to the economy, whereas lower rates act as rocket fuel for economic activity (and market confidence).

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Federal Reserve Is About to Go Full Banana Republic

April 30, 2024

The Federal Reserve Is About to Go Full Banana Republic

Peeling back the truth, one banana at a time.

According to an article on Yahoo! today, the top banana in finance, J. Powell, has already decided to go full bananatard. It is the financial hallmark of banana republics to print money in order to finance their debts. The Federal Reserve has never been allowed by law under its charter to do that because politicians were, long ago, smart enough to notice that all nations that take that path to financing their ambitious government programs turn to ash in the flames of hyperinflation.

We already have high inflation to deal with. After just writing a Deeper Dive that explained why we are already in a situation of true stagflation—the very situation that banana republics try to print their way out of—another financial writer this morning says the same thing on Seeking Alpha:

An old “new word” has entered the economic and market narratives in recent weeks: Stagflation. It’s an old word because the United States suffered from two bouts of “stagflation” from the middle 1970s to early 1980s. It’s a new word because there’s a new generation of market participants.

Stagflation is an economic cycle when economic growth is low (the “stag”) and inflation (the “flation”) are high. Low growth in past bouts also included high unemployment. A key factor in those stagflations was OPEC’s manipulation of oil supplies….

One of the key components of inflation has always been energy. We can see that going back a century in the data. It was most acutely felt during the 1970s and early 1980s stagflationary periods.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Central Banks Are Wrong about Rate Cuts

April 27, 2024

Central Banks Are Wrong about Rate Cuts

When we talk about monetary policy, people do not understand the importance of interest rates reflecting the reality of inflation and risk. Interest rates are the price of risk and manipulating them down leads to bubbles that end in financial crises, while imposing too high rates can penalize the economy. Ideally, interest rates would flow freely and there would be no central bank to fix them.

A price signal as important as interest rates or the amount of money would prevent the creation of bubbles and, above all, the disproportionate accumulation of risk. The risk of fixing rates too high does not exist when central banks impose reference rates, as they will always make it easier for state borrowing—artificial currency creation—in the most convenient—what they call “no distortions”—and cheap way.

Many analysts say that central banks do not impose interest rates; they only reflect what the market demands. Surprisingly, if that were the case, we wouldn’t have financial traders stuck to screens on a Thursday waiting to decipher what the rate decision is going to be. Moreover, if the central bank only responds to market demand, it is a good reason to let interest rates float freely.

Citizens perceive that raising interest rates with high inflation is harmful; however, they do not seem to understand that what was really destructive was having negative real and nominal interest rates. That’s what encourages economic agents to take far more risks than we can take and to disguise excess debt with a false sense of security. At the same time, it is surprising that citizens praise low rates but then complain that home prices and risky assets rise too fast.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Woods Exposes the Federal Reserve System

April 26, 2024

Woods Exposes the Federal Reserve System

The first thing to know about Dr. Thomas E. Woods, Jr.’s’ book Our Enemy, the Fed is he’s giving it away. Click the link, get your copy and read the whole book. Clearly, such intellectual charity is not only rare but in the educational spirit of Mises.org. The subject matter is light-heavy but Woods, author of the bestseller Meltdown (reviewed here), navigates it with the smooth skill of a master, making the reader experience satisfying from beginning to end.

The title reflects another insight, paralleling as it does Albert Jay Nock’s Our Enemy, the State. Most of us were raised to believe government and its agencies serve our best interests. As libertarian scholarship has shown the truth is the exact opposite, particularly with government’s sleazy relationship with money and banking. Admittedly, it’s a hard idea to accept since it involves a pernicious breach of trust, but Woods makes it abundantly clear. To our overlords we are easily-duped chattel.

Until Ron Paul decided to run for president and his End the Fed came along in 2009, the general public was mostly blind to the Fed’s existence. Austrians aside, the few who knew something about it — mostly university-trained economists on the take from the Fed — considered it a vital part of an advanced industrial economy. Yet the Fed had been around for 96 years when Dr. Paul’s book emerged. Given that it’s in charge of the money we use how did it remain in the shadows for tax-burdened citizens for nearly a century? What’s up with that?

The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis tells us the Fed’s congressional assignment is “to promote maximum employment and price stability.” (Bold in original) For these it talks about interest rates, and its aim is to increase the money supply so that prices rise gently at or around a 2 percent rate.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

What the Rising Gold Price Signals

April 24, 2024

What the Rising Gold Price Signals

The recent run-up in the gold price has not garnered the attention among the mainstream financial media outlets as it should. Gold has, in part, been overshadowed by the rise in the price of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.

Naturally, the financial press, which is really an arm of the government and its central bank, wants to ignore, as much as possible, references to gold as protection against the continuing increase in the price level which itself has been deliberately understated by monetary officials. The media and government understand that precious metals are the ultimate security against runaway inflation and economic collapse.

While the increase in the gold price has reached nominal highs, it and the price of silver have not passed their all-time 1980 highs in real terms. Adjusted for inflation, gold would have to rise to about $3590 an ounce while silver would have to surpass $50 an ounce. Both are poised to exceed these watermarks in the not-too-distant future.

Precious metals will continue to escalate unless the Federal Reserve radically changes its interest rate policy to combat inflation as former Fed Chairman Paul Volcker once did. Volcker raised interest rates to double-digit levels which caused gold prices to fall. While Volcker could get away with such actions (because, at the time, the U.S. was still a creditor nation), current Chair Jerome Powell cannot because of the enormity of public and private debt. Double-digit interest rates would collapse the economy and plunge millions of Americans into bankruptcy.

The rising price of gold is anticipating some of the promised policy actions of the Fed. Since the end of last year, the central bank has indicated that it would be cutting interest rates. In addition, Powell is considering ending the Fed’s “Quantitative Tightening” (QT) program. Both are highly inflationary.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Black swan hedge fund says Fed rate cuts will signal market crash

April 23, 2024

Black swan hedge fund says Fed rate cuts will signal market crash

Federal Reserve Board Building in Washington

NEW YORK, April 22 (Reuters) – While U.S. financial markets debate the timing of interest rate cuts, one tail-risk hedge fund is warning that investors should make the most of recent economic optimism while it lasts, as a shift to lower rates will signal a dramatic market crash.

“This is a case of be careful what you wish for,” said Mark Spitznagel, chief investment officer and founder of Universa, a $16 billion hedge fund specializing in risk mitigation against “black swan” events – unpredictable and high-impact drivers of market volatility.

Spitznagel’s view is not widely held. The much-anticipated shift to a less restrictive monetary policy by the Federal Reserve has helped buoy stocks and bonds in recent months, although signs of stubborn inflation have eroded expectations for how deeply the central bank will be able to cut interest rates in 2024.

Spitznagel argues that such a shift would likely take place only when economic conditions deteriorate, creating a challenging environment for markets.

“People think it’s a good thing the Federal Reserve is dovish, and they’re going to cut interest rates … but they’re going to cut interest rates when it’s clear the economy is turning into a recession, and they will be cutting interest rates in a panicked fashion when this market is crashing,” Spitznagel said in an interview with Reuters.

Funds such as Universa often use credit default swaps, stock options and other derivatives to profit from severe market dislocations. Generally they are cheap bets for a big, long-shot payoff that otherwise are a drag on the portfolio, much like monthly insurance policy payments.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Markets Are Biting Their Lips over Global Chaos

April 21, 2024

Markets Are Biting Their Lips over Global Chaos

And Fed Chair Powell is joining them because suddenly nothing is going right for his soft-landing plans!

Rising Middle-East tensions are driving up the price of crude oil and driving down the price of stocks and value of bonds. Analysts are saying oil could go to $100/bbl if the conflict between Israel and Iran goes any further. If Israel responds to the recent attack by Iran, some think Iran is likely to fight back with the West in a variation of what it has already done via its proxies. In the worst-case scenario for oil, Iran will block the Strait of Hormuz to tanker traffic, using its proxies to do there as they have already done on the other side of the Arabian Peninsula (or doing that directly, themselves, from Iran). That could raise oil to $130/bbl, which would blow the doors off inflation. Societe Generale puts the risk at $140/bbl if the US gets involved. For now, however, the oil market is just biting its lips … like this:

Well, that’s Fed Chair Jerome Powell, but he is biting his, too, as everything turns against his flight plans for a soft landing at the end of his own war … with inflation.

That’s because the Fed pumped so much money into the economy during the Covid lockdown fiasco that he can’t get the surplus money out quickly enough. As noted yesterday, and caught in the news again today, Powell has clearly pushed rate cuts back once again. In fact, Bank of America is now resetting its calendar for the first cut to March of next year (going for a different March than the one most analysts originally thought they would get…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Forget the Black Swans; the Vultures already Circling us Are Bad Enough to Kill us

April 16, 2024

Forget the Black Swans; the Vultures already Circling us Are Bad Enough to Kill us

There is certainly more coming to eat away at your finances as infamous bankster Jamie Dimon laid out quite broadly and plainly this week.

gray and white bird on brown tree branch during sunset — Photo by Abhishek Singh on Unsplash

Jamie Dimon never saw a dying bank he didn’t want to eat. Yet, while I think that Dimon’s name should be pronounced less like the clear, crown jewel of choice and more like the horned fiends of Hades, he does often speak of things likely to bring down the banking world or the economy with more candor than any other bankers, including particularly his partners in crime at the Fed. And you can be sure he has his scavenger eye on those things.

Perhaps it is just because he has unparalleled confidence that he is untouchable like a serial killer who talks to police on the street about how sorry he feels that they have had no luck at all finding the serial killer. He’s just that confident his next big take from hauling in a failing bank at fire-sale prices is so certain, he needn’t worry that warning everyone of the coming failures will get in the way of his business. Thus, he can play the saint for warning us all, knowing the greedy will ignore his warnings anyway, and still wait in the wings for that Friday evening call from Fed Chair Jerome Powell that says, “We have another bank for you. Can we meet tomorrow morning to discuss terms and complete a weekend sale?”

Fitting right in with my theme for this weekend’s Deeper Dive for paying subscribers to be titled “The Apoceclypse,” The CEO of JPMorgan Chase warned the world this week that it faces “Risks that eclipse anything since World War II.” I, of course, couldn’t agree more, so I want to spend this article distilling the Dimon’s annual report down to the most essential risks:

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Meltdown of Commercial Real Estate

March 29, 2024

The Meltdown of Commercial Real Estate

Commentary

In case you’ve still got money in a bank, Bloomberg is warning that defaults in commercial real estate loans could “topple” hundreds of U.S. banks.

Leaving taxpayers on the hook for trillions in losses.

The note, by senior editor James Crombie, walks us through the festering hellscape that is commercial real estate.

To set the mood, a new study predicts that nearly half of downtown Pittsburgh office space could be vacant in four years. Major cities such as San Francisco are already sporting zombie-apocalypse downtowns, with abandoned office buildings baking in the sun.

So what happened?

The Fed’s yo-yo interest rates first flooded real estate with low rates and cheap money. Which were overbuilt.

Then came the lockdowns, which forced millions to figure out new workday patterns. People liked foregoing the long commute (not to mention the free money). Despite every effort, downtown businesses have not been able to get all workers back.

These days, everyone talks about hybrid models of working, some in-person and some remote. But judging from observation, remote is winning. In any case, even a 30 percent reduction in the footprint of office space once the leases are renewed could topple the entire sector.

The restaurant and retail sectors of downtown feel the pinch, with more closures all the time. Adding to the pressure are absurd levels of inflation and ever-riskier streets on matters of personal security. Put it all together and there is ever less reason to slog to the office.

When the Fed panic-hiked interest rates in the 2021 inflation, that put trillions of commercial real estate underwater even without other factors. Add to that crime, inflation, plus remote work, and you have a dangerous mix that could topple cities as we know them.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Fed’s Dovish Twist – Only Surprising on the Surface

March 27, 2024

The Fed’s Dovish Twist – Only Surprising on the Surface

Rate Cuts, Money Printer Go Brrr, and Biden

“The Federal Reserve is not only too big to fail, it’s too big to be held accountable.”

~ Thomas Massie

Last week at its Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) meeting, the Fed made it clear that it will go back to stoking inflation.

Leaving the Fedspeak aside, here’s the gist: The Fed wants to cut interest rates three times this year, each time by 0.25%, with the goal of reaching a range between 4.55% to 4.75%.

That’s the plan for 2024. But the Fed’s expectation is to lower them even further in 2025 and 2026.

Now, this is quite a turn… and quite an odd one at that in terms of the timing. First, you’ve got the stock market recently hitting all-time highs. Gold and Bitcoin are also hovering near their all-time highs.

And hold on a second, isn’t the Fed supposed to be fighting inflation? Didn’t it come in pretty hot recently?

It did.

The PCE (or Personal Consumption Expenditures) — the Fed’s preferred gauge for measuring inflation — jumped by 0.4% in January, hitting its fastest pace in almost a year.

The inflation report for December was not great either.

Leaving aside the fact that the whole core PCE thing is a sham because it excludes food and energy (the two things Americans depend on the most), the Fed, being all “data-dependent,” is shrugging off the data it doesn’t like.

Alright, that’s pretty noteworthy on its own, but that wasn’t the only jaw-dropping news from the Fed last week.

It came from Fed Chair Jerome Powell himself, who suggested that the central bank could ease quantitative tightening (QT) “fairly soon.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

“We Will Have A Hard Landing At Some Point. I Guarantee You That.”

March 10, 2024

“We Will Have A Hard Landing At Some Point. I Guarantee You That.”

Can you guess who the quote in the article title is from? I will give you a hint. It wasn’t me. I know that it sounds like it could have come from me, but it actually comes from a very big name on Wall Street. Ellen Zentner is Morgan Stanley’s chief U.S. economist, and she is the one that said it. During an interview with CNBC she warned that “the tightening impacts from monetary policy” will have enormous consequences for the U.S. economy in the months ahead…

“We will have a hard landing at some point. I guarantee you that. We’re all wondering: When does that come?” she said. “The point that Dimon makes is that there are these cumulative impacts that build over time, and we are in the camp that we haven’t yet seen all of the tightening impacts from monetary policy,” she added, referring to the impact of Fed rate hikes.

She makes a really great point.

The consequences of interest rate hikes are felt over time.

Higher interest rates have certainly started to cause a lot of problems, but if rates are not brought down soon the level of pain that we are experiencing will begin to go up dramatically.

Unfortunately, the Fed is not likely to reduce interest rates any time soon because inflation continues to run hotter than expected…

Inflation increased by the largest amount in almost a year, according to the Fed’s preferred measure – confirming expectations interest rates will not be cut until around June.

The so-called core personal consumption expenditures (PCE) index – which excludes volatile food and energy prices – increased 0.4 percent between December and January.

Marko Kolanovic, the chief market strategist for JPMorgan Chase, believes that the U.S. economy could be headed into “something like 1970s stagflation”…

…click on the above link to read the rest…

Irony Alert: “Outlawing” Recession Has Made a Monster Recession Inevitable

February 15, 2024

Irony Alert: “Outlawing” Recession Has Made a Monster Recession Inevitable

Those who came of age after 1982 have never experienced a real recession, and so they’re unprepared for anything other than guarantees of rescue and permanent expansion.

The mainstream view is that recession is caused by economic-financial factors. The mainstream view is wrong, for recession is ultimately caused by Wetware1.0–human nature. Human nature–our innate attraction to windfalls and something-for-nothing, our ability to habituate to extremes and normalize counterproductive dynamics–manifest as economic-financial factors, but these are effects, not causes.

The mainstream view is that recessions are bad, so let’s make sure they never happen. In other words, let’s outlaw them by flooding the economy and financial system with Federal Reserve monetary stimulus and federal stimulus via increased deficit spending.

The history of the past 40 years “proves” these policies effectively eliminate recession: all recessions since 1981-82 have been shallow and brief, basically a spot of bother that lasts one quarter.

Our Wetware1.0 has responded to this “no recession guarantee” in ways that count as unintended consequences. Massive “emergency” stimulus that became permanent policy has created a bubble economy in which low interest rates and unlimited credit for those who are more equal than others has sparked demand for income-producing assets, which then sparked a speculative mania.

We’ve habituated to both the bubble economy and the speculative mania so that these are now considered normal. But behind the comfortable normalization, something counterproductive has taken hold: we’re now addicted to the bubble economy and its crazed twin, speculative mania. If the bubbles pop and speculators go broke, the economy and financial system will both implode.

Without ZIRP (zero-interest rate policy), capital actually has a cost, and the bubble economy cannot survive if capital has a cost. Once capital has a cost, then speculation becomes risky, and speculation cannot survive if risk actually has a cost.

…click on the above link to read the rest…

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