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During the 40 months after Alan Greenspan’s infamous “irrational exuberance” speech in December 1996, the NASDAQ 100 index rose from 830 to 4585 or by 450%. But the perma-bulls said not to worry: This time is different—-it’s a new age of technology miracles that will change the laws of finance forever.

It wasn’t. The market cracked in April 2000 and did not stop plunging until the NASDAQ 100 index hit 815 in early October 2002. During those heart-stopping 30 months of free-fall, all the gains of the tech boom were wiped out in an 84% collapse of the index. Overall, the market value of household equities sank from $10.0 trillion to $4.8 trillion—-a wipeout from which millions of baby boom households have never recovered.

Likewise, the second Greenspan housing and credit boom generated a similar round trip of bubble inflation and collapse. During the 57 months after the October 2002 bottom, the Russell 2000 (RUT) climbed the proverbial wall-of-worry—-rising from 340 to 850 or by 2.5X.

And this time was also held to be different because, purportedly, the art of central banking had been perfected in what Bernanke was pleased to call the “Great Moderation”. Taking the cue, Wall Street dubbed it the Goldilocks Economy—-meaning a macroeconomic environment so stable, productive and balanced that it would never again be vulnerable to a recessionary contraction and the resulting plunge in corporate profits and stock prices.

Wrong again!

During the 20 months from the July 2007 peak to the March 2009 bottom, the RUT gave it all back. And we mean every bit of it—-as the index bottomed 60% lower at 340. This time the value of household equities plunged by $6 trillion, and still millions more baby-boomers were carried out of the casino on their shields never to return.

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

Weekly Commentary: Chronicling for Posterity

December 16, 2017

Weekly Commentary: Chronicling for Posterity

Janet Yellen’s Wednesday news conference was her final as Fed chair. Dr. Yellen has a long and distinguished career as an economist and public servant. Her four-year term at the helm of the Federal Reserve is almost universally acclaimed. History, however, will surely treat her less kindly. Yellen has been a central figure in inflationist dogma and a fateful global experiment in radical monetary stimulus. In her four years at the helm, the Yellen Fed failed to tighten financial conditions despite asset inflation and speculative excess beckoning for policy normalization.

Ben Bernanke has referred to the understanding of the forces behind the Great Depression as “the holy grail of economics.” When today’s historic global Bubble bursts, the “grail” quest will shift to recent decades. Yellen’s comments are worthy of chronicling for posterity.

CNBC’s Steve Liesman: “Every day it seems we look at the stock market, it goes up triple digits in the Dow Jones. To what extent are there concerns at the Federal Reserve about current market valuations? And do they now or should they, do you think, if we keep going on the trajectory, should that animate monetary policy?”

Chair Yellen: “OK, so let me start, Steve, with the stock market generally. I mean, of course, the stock market has gone up a great deal this year. And we have in recent months characterized the general level of asset valuations as elevated. What that reflects is simply the assessment that looking at price-earnings ratios and comparable metrics for other assets other than equities, we see ratios that are in the high end of historical ranges. And so that’s worth pointing out.

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

Necessity is the Mother of Invention–Retirees Desperate Reach for Yield

October 27, 2017

NECESSITY IS THE MOTHER OF INVENTION – RETIREES DESPERATE REACH FOR YIELD

Ben Bernanke’s creativity inspired a generation of economists and central bankers. QE, ZIRP and NIRP established a new class of economics that is mathematically sound but practically disastrous. Billions of dollars were transferred from savers to investors to boost the economy, but the wizards of quant forgot that something has to give. In this case, it was the formation of a pension crisis that threatens the golden years of millions of retirees across the world. None of the econometrics models provide a solution for the growing gap in pension funding, other than unsustainable debt accumulation.

Creativity cascaded to the less sophisticated pension fund managers. In a desperate reach for yields they increased exposure to project finance. Perceived higher returns, long-term investment horizon and inflation protection made it the perfect match for pension funds. However, like their central banker peers, pension fund managers were completely mistaken. Actual risks were largely underestimated. The binary nature of cashflow risks makes conventional risk measures meaningless. This is best illustrated by looking at the cumulative default rates of project finance (1991-2011) in North America, which exceeded the default rate of the non-investment grade Ba bonds in the first 6 years and is more than triple that of investment grade default rates.

Cum Defaut Rates

The European Investment Bank (EIB) decided to ride the wave of project finance and waste taxpayers’ money by providing loans and insurance on risks that EIB cannot remotely comprehend. They ignored the fact that mono-liners in the US did the same a decade ago and paid a hefty price when the bubble burst where almost all bond insurers went out of the market.

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

Political Economics

October 21, 2017

Political Economics

Who President Trump ultimately picks as the next Federal Reserve Chairman doesn’t really matter. Unless he goes really far afield to someone totally unexpected, whoever that person will be will be largely more of the same. It won’t be a categorical change, a different philosophical direction that is badly needed.

Still, politically, it does matter to some significant degree. It’s just that the political division isn’t the usual R vs. D, left vs. right. That’s how many are making it out to be, and in doing so exposing what’s really going on.

As usual, the perfect example for these divisions is provided by Paul Krugman. The Nobel Prize Winner ceased being an economist a long time ago, and has become largely a partisan carnival barker. He opines about economic issues, but framed always from that perspective.

To the very idea of a next Fed Chair beyond Yellen, he wrote a few weeks ago, “we’re living in the age of Trump, which means that we should actually expect the worst.” Dr. Krugman wants more of the same, and Candidate Trump campaigned directly against that. As such, there is the non-trivial chance that President Trump lives up to that promise.

Again, it sounds like a left vs. right issue, but it isn’t. The political winds are changing, and the parties themselves are being realigned in different directions (which is not something new; there have been several re-alignments throughout American history even though the two major parties have been entrenched since the 1850’s when Republicans first appeared). Who the next Fed Chair is could tell us something about how far along we are in this evolution.

What Krugman wants, meaning, it is safe to assume, what all those like him want, is simple: success. He believes that the central bank has given us exactly that, therefore it is stupid to upset what works.

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

Weekly Commentary: Arms Race in Bubbles

October 21, 2017

Weekly Commentary: Arms Race in Bubbles

The week left me with an uneasy feeling. There were a number of articles noting the 30-year anniversary of the 1987 stock market crash. I spent “Black Monday” staring at a Telerate monitor as a treasury analyst at Toyota’s US headquarters in Southern California. If I wasn’t completely in love with the markets and macro analysis by that morning, there was no doubt about it by bedtime. Enthralling.

As writers noted this week, there were post-’87 crash economic depression worries. In hindsight, those fears were misplaced. Excesses had not progressed over years to the point of causing deep financial and economic structural maladjustment. Looking back today, 1987 was much more the beginning of a secular financial boom rather than the end. The crash offered a signal – a warning that went unheeded. Disregarding warnings has been in a stable trend now for three decades.

Alan Greenspan’s assurances of ample liquidity – and the Fed and global central bankers’ crisis-prevention efforts for some time following the crash – ensured fledgling financial excesses bounced right back and various Bubbles hardly missed a beat. Importantly, financial innovation and speculation accelerated momentously. Wall Street had been emboldened – and would be repeatedly.

The crash also marked the genesis of government intervention in the markets that would evolve into the previously unimaginable: negative short-term rates, manipulated bond yields, central bank support throughout the securities markets, Trillions upon Trillions of central bank monetization and the perception of open-ended securities market liquidity backstops around the globe. Greenspan was the forefather of the powerful trifecta: Team Bernanke, Kuroda and Draghi. Ask the bond market back in 1987 to contemplate massive government deficit spending concurrent with near zero global sovereign yields – the response would have been “inconceivable.”

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

Krugman and the “Heroic” Fed

October 19, 2017

Krugman and the “Heroic” Fed

Once an avid reader of Paul Krugman’s New York Times twice-weekly columns, I admit to rarely even glancing at his work now, since I know that anything he writes is going to have the theme of “Trump evil, Democrats good” each time, and it doesn’t take long to get one’s fill of that, even if one disagrees with Donald Trump’s policies or cringes at some of his public statements. The real problem, however, is that Krugman also manages to endorse unsound and inflationary economic policies as a “solution” to what he calls “Trumpism.”

If one reads Krugman to see what “vulgar” Keynesian fallacies he is promoting, the man rarely disappoints, and a recent column in which he attacks what he believes will be Trump’s future choice to head the Federal Reserve System only burnishes Krugman’s Keynesian credentials. After claiming that Trump has been like a “Category 5 hurricane sweeping through the U.S. government, leaving devastation in his wake,” Krugman then worries if the Fed will suffer the same fate. One only could hope….

Before looking at Krugman’s worshipful commentary on the current Fed leadership, a brief point is in order regarding the rest of official Washington that Trump allegedly has devastated. People like Krugman believe that Washington and its gaggle of Alphabet-Soup agencies regulating nearly every aspect of individual lives is the very source of social stability and economic prosperity in this country – provided there are little or no restraints on what government agents can do. As Krugman and his fellow progressives see it, we need more, not less, bureaucratic control of our lives, and especially control by people of progressive bent with “elite” academic credentials, since they are smarter than the rest of us, so they should be able to tell us what to do.

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

Janet Yellen: False Prophet of Prosperity

July 10, 2017

Janet Yellen: False Prophet of Prosperity

Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen recently predicted that, thanks to the regulations implemented after the 2008 market meltdown, America would not experience another economic crisis “in our lifetimes.” Yellen’s statement should send shivers down our spines, as there are few more reliable signals of an impending recession, or worse, than when so-called “experts” proclaim that we are in an era of unending prosperity.

For instance, in the years leading up to the 2008 market meltdown, then-Fed Chair Ben Bernanke repeatedly denied the existence of a housing bubble. In February 2007, Bernanke not only denied that “sluggishness” in the housing market would affect the general economy, but predicted that the economy would expand in 2007 and 2008. Of course, instead of years of economic growth, 2007 and 2008 were marked by a market meltdown whose effects are still being felt.

Yellen’s happy talk ignores a number of signs that the economy is on the verge of another crisis. In recent months, the US has experienced a decline in economic growth and the value of the dollar. The only economic statistic showing a positive trend is the unemployment rate — and that is only because the official unemployment rate does not count those who have given up looking for work. The real unemployment rate is at least 50 percent higher than the manipulated “official” rate.

A recent Treasury Department report’s called for rolling back of bank regulations could further destabilize the economy. This seems counterintuitive, as rolling back regulations usually contributes to economic growth. However, rolling back bank regulations without ending subsidies like deposit insurance that create a moral hazard that incentivizes banks to engage in risky business practices could cause banks to resume the unsound lending practices that were a major contributor to the growth, and collapse, of the housing bubble.

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

Why The Markets Are Overdue For A Gigantic Bust

June 10, 2017

r.classen/Shutterstock

Why The Markets Are Overdue For A Gigantic Bust

It’s just not possible to print our way to prosperity

If you’re not familiar with the term, ‘confirmation bias’ suggests that once we’ve invested time and emotional energy into developing a worldview, we’ll then seek information to confirm that view.

After writing about the economy for so many years, I’m now so convinced that we can’t print our way to prosperity that I find myself seeing signs confirming this view everywhere, every single day. So that’s the danger to be aware of when listening to me. I’m going to keep repeating this mantra and Im going to keep finding data that supports this view.

Based on lots of historical inputs, I have concluded that Printing money out of thin air can engineer lots of things, including asset price bubbles and the redistribution of wealth from the masses to the elites. But it cannot print up real prosperity.

As much as I try, I simply cannot jump on the bandwagon that says that printing up money out of thin air has any long-term utility for an economy. It’s just too clear to me that doing so presents plenty of dangers, due to what we might call ‘economic gravity’: What goes up, must also come down.

Which brings us to this chart:

The 200 bubble blown by Greenspan was bad, the next one by Bernanke was horrible, but this one by Yellen may well prove fatal. At least to entire financial markets, large institutions, and a few sovereigns.

It’s essential to note that more than two-thirds of the net worth tracked in the above chart is now comprised of ‘financial assets.’ That is, paper claims on real things.

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

How to Stick It to Your Banker, the Federal Reserve, and the Whole Doggone Fiat Money System

May 13, 2017

How to Stick It to Your Banker, the Federal Reserve, and the Whole Doggone Fiat Money System

Bernanke Redux

Somehow, former Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke found time from his busy hedge fund advisory duties last week to tell his ex-employer how to do its job. Namely, he recommended to his former cohorts at the Fed how much they should reduce the Fed’s balance sheet by. In other words, he told them how to go about cleaning up his mess.

Praise the Lord! The Hero is back to tell us what to do! Why, oh why have you ever left, oh greatest central planner of all time. We are not worthy.

We couldn’t recall the last time we’d seen or heard from Bernanke. But soon it all came back to us. There he was, in the flesh, babbling on Bloomberg and Squawk Box, pushing the new paperback version of his mis-titled memoir “The Courage to Act.” Incidentally, the last time we’d heard much out of the guy was when the hard copy was released in late 2015.

With respect to the Fed’s balance sheet, Bernanke remarked that the Fed should cut it from $4.5 trillion to “something in the vicinity of $2.3 to $2.8 trillion.” What exactly this would achieve Bernanke didn’t say. As far as we can tell, a balance sheet of $2.8 trillion would still be about 300 percent higher than it was prior to the 2008 financial crisis.

Bernanke, by all measures, is an absolute lunatic. He, more than anyone else, is responsible for the utter mess that radical monetary policies have made of the U.S. economy. He’s the one who dropped the federal funds rate to near zero and inflated the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet by over 450 percent.

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

The Coming Great Wealth Transfer

March 4, 2017

WakingTimes.com

The Coming Great Wealth Transfer

Spoiler alert! It’s already here.

In the past, I’ve warned about the coming Great Wealth Transfer. But now we need to talk about it in the present tense, because it’s here.

And it will only accelerate from here on out. The Rich will get richer at the expense of everybody else.

This isn’t personal. It’s simply a feature of what happens near the end of a debt-based monetary system run by corruptible humans.

Of course, those in charge don’t think of themselves as corrupted or villainous. I’m sure that Federal Reserve Chairs Greenspan, Bernanke and Yellen all think of themselves as good and decent people doing “God’s work”. But the truth is they’ve irrevocably harmed millions — if not billions — of innocent people.

They and other central bankers have become the standard bearers of a system that can best be described as a reverse Robin Hood scheme, one that takes from the poor and gives to the Rich. It’s just that in this tale, the ‘poor’ means everybody not in the top 1%.

So you need to understand this wealth transfer process — how it works, who’s perpetrating it, and what dangers to watch for. If not, you’ll be a victim of it. And you’ll probably live in confusion and shock by how hard just ‘getting by’ becomes going forward.

Realizing that you’re being specifically targeted by a system determined to separate you from your wealth is the essential first step towards figuring out how to evade the predators and protect yourself.

The Great Wealth Transfer

What do we mean by a Wealth Transfer?

It isn’t just some academic concept. It’s a playbook that’s been used many times in the past by governments to forcibly extract wealth from the public and use it for the benefit of those in power.

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

The Coming Of Depression Economics

January 29, 2017

The Coming Of Depression Economics

Like it or not, this is where we have been all along and a great many people are just now catching up. No matter what Janet Yellen says about the economy, she is talking out the side of her mouth. Internally, the recovery is gone, and it is never coming back. Externally, we have sub-5% unemployment so we all should be so happy, especially with, in her view, stable prices.

To their credit, many prominent economists aren’t so enthusiastic about those prospects. Among them are Larry Summers, Paul Krugman, and Brad DeLong, all who recognize that “something” just isn’t right and therefore “something” else should be done about it. Thus, the real economic debate over the coming years (unfortunately) will take shape around those two facets. Having wasted nearly a decade on purely central bank solutions that were never going to work, the real discoveries can now possibly take place.

The problem is as I wrote yesterday, where in a rush to do anything and everything “different” the Trump administration might actually spoil the process. De-regulation and income tax cuts, as well as the repeal of Obamacare, are all very good things that sorely need to be addressed; but they didn’t cause this depression and thus won’t get us out of it. And you can bet that none of Summers, Krugman, or DeLong will be in favor of those options, so if they all fail to restore economic growth, as I believe they will if left in isolation, then that will severely diminish those ideas for perhaps a generation or more. That would be a fatal mistake, especially since for the first time in many generations people outside of Economics are receptive to “new” ideas (that are only new because they have been out of practice and actively discouraged for so long).

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

Sorry Losers!

September 10, 2016

Sorry Losers!

By its actions, the Federal Reserve has selected a precious few winners and many, many losers. Sadly, you are highly likely to be one of the losers.

Sorry!

I’m one, too, if that helps soften the blow.

But we have a lot of company. Other losers include:

Savers
Anyone with money in a checking account
Anyone with money in a savings account
Anyone with money in a CD
Anyone depending on bond income
All pensions
Endowments
First time homebuyers
Renters
Those who invest based on fundamentals
Everybody alive in the future, when the bills come due

Anyone on this list has been intentionally pre-selected by the Fed for losing. The Fed has done this deliberately, with full pre-knowledge that it was going to diminish the prospects of the majority in favor of the benefit of an elite few. And to make matters worse, it has no plans to — and no clue how to — reverse the damage it has wrought.

Everyone on the list above has been dinged by the Federal Reserve — on purpose and by design, I will repeat — in order to transfer wealth and purchasing power to:

Big banks
The government
Entities with large stock (equity) holdings
The wealthiest 0.1%
Speculators
Borrowers (the heavier the better)
Well-connected insiders whom the Fed tipped off in advance

This has, of course, not been lost on the 99.9% relegated to the loser camp. They are angry and growing more pissed off by the day. We see this anger playing out politically, in street protests, and in growing tensions with the police. All of this is connected, of course.

Soon, more and more folks will figure out the source of the growing inequity causing this anger, and the hot new trend of the future will be Fed bashing. So you might as well get in on the ground floor…

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

Helicopter Money——The Biggest Fed Power Grab Yet

July 14, 2016

Helicopter Money——The Biggest Fed Power Grab Yet

The Cleveland Fed’s Loretta Mester is a clueless apparatchik and Fed lifer, who joined the system in 1985 fresh out of Barnard and Princeton and has imbibed in its Keynesian groupthink and institutional arrogance ever since. So it’s not surprising that she was out flogging—-albeit downunder in Australia—- the next step in the Fed’s rolling coup d’ etat.

We’re always assessing tools that we could use,” Mester told the ABC’s AM program. “In the US we’ve done quantitative easing and I think that’s proven to be useful.

“So it’s my view that [helicopter money] would be sort of the next step if we ever found ourselves in a situation where we wanted to be more accommodative.

This is beyond the pale because “helicopter money” isn’t some kind of new wrinkle in monetary policy, at all. It’s an old as the hills rationalization for monetization of the public debt—–that is, purchase of government bonds with central bank credit conjured from thin air.

It’s the ultimate in “something for nothing” economics. That’s because most assuredly those government bonds originally funded the purchase of real labor hours, contract services or dams and aircraft carriers.

As a technical matter, helicopter money is exactly the same thing as QE. Nor does the journalistic confusion that it involves “direct” central bank funding of public debt make a wit of difference.

Suppose Washington issues treasury bonds to the 23 primary dealers on Wall Street in the regular manner. Further, assume that some or all of these dealers stick the bonds in inventory for 3 days, 3 months or even 3 years, and then sell them back to the Fed under QE (and most likely at a higher price).

So what!

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

Alan “Bubbles” Greenspan Returns to Gold

July 10, 2016

Alan “Bubbles” Greenspan Returns to Gold

Under a gold standard, the amount of credit that an economy can support is determined by the economy’s tangible assets, since every credit instrument is ultimately a claim on some tangible asset. […] The abandonment of the gold standard made it possible for the welfare statists to use the banking system as a means to an unlimited expansion of credit.

— Alan Greenspan, 1966

BALTIMORE – That old rascal!

Before joining the feds, former Fed chief Alan “Bubbles” Greenspan was a strong proponent of gold and the gold standard.

He wrote clearly and forcefully about how it was necessary to restrain the Deep State and protect individual freedom.

Then he went to Washington and faced a fork in the tongue.

In one direction, lay honesty and integrity. In the other, lay power and glory.

Faking It

Under the Bretton Woods monetary system, the U.S. promised foreign central banks that it would convert their dollars to gold at a fixed price of $35 an ounce.

This constrained the amount of dollars the U.S. could print to the amount of gold it had in its reserves.

A smart man, Greenspan quickly realized he could not advocate for this old, tried-and-true gold standard and run the Deep State’s new credit money system.

In 1987, he made his choice. He took over the top job at the Fed and faked it for the next 19 years.

Since 1978, we have had four different Fed chiefs. Some were smart. Some were honest. Only Paul Volcker was smart and honest.

Bernanke was honest… we believe. As near as we can tell, so is Janet Yellen. Both may mean well, but both are careful not to think out of the Deep State box.

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

Bernanke Blew It Big-Time: He Should Have Raised Rates Three Years Ago

June 7, 2016

Bernanke Blew It Big-Time: He Should Have Raised Rates Three Years Ago

Bernanke blew it big-time, letting the “recovery” run seven years without any significant increase in rates.

It is now painfully obvious that Ben Bernanke blew it big-time by not raising rates three years ago when the economy and markets enjoyed tailwinds. The former Federal Reserve chairperson, who has claimed the mantle of savior of the global economy, foolishly kept rates at zero until tailwinds turned to headwinds, at which point he handed Janet Yellen the unenviable task of raising rates as the headwinds are strengthening.

Ben Bernanke is not the savior who rescued the global economy; he is the clueless fool who plunged a poisoned knife in its back. After weathering the spot of bother in Euroland in 2011-2012, the global economy had multiple tailwinds in 2013–tailwinds that enabled Bernanke and the Fed to raise rates in a series of measured steps.

Tailwind #1: the Fed’s binge-buying of assets (QE3) was still ramping up in 2013:

Tailwind #2: the yield curve spread had bounced off its 2012 low:

Tailwind #3: market speculative positions and sentiment were solidly positive:

Tailwind #4: China’s economy and appreciation of the yuan had not yet weakened:

In April 2013, the market’s “recovery” had already been running for four years. By mid-2013, the S&P 500 had soared from 667 in March 2009 to 1,600, exceeding its previous all-time highs around 1,574–a gain of 930 points or 140% off the 2009 lows.

What else did The Bernank want in mid-2013–an infinite line of credit with the Central Bank of Mars? He had literally every tailwind a central banker could want to support higher interest rates–especially rates that could have clicked higher by tiny .25% increments.

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

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