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Larry Summers is a pretentious Keynesian fool, but I refer to him as the Great Thinker’s Vicar on Earth for a reason. To wit, every time the latest experiment in Keynesian intervention fails——as 84 months of ZIRP and massive QE clearly have—–he can be counted on to trot out a new angle on why still another interventionist experiment or state sponsored financial fraud is just the ticket.

Right now he is leading the charge for the greatest stroke of foolishness yet conceived. Namely, negative interest rates based on the rubbish theory that the “natural” money market rate of interest is at an extraordinarily low point. Accordingly, the central bank should drive the “policy rate” to sub-zero levels in order to achieve the appropriate level of “accommodation” in an economy that refuses to attain “escape velocity”.

ENLARGE

As can’t be pointed out often enough, however, there is no such economic ether as “accommodation”. It’s just a blanket cover story for what Keynesian central bankers believe they are accomplishing by pegging interest rates below market clearing levels and by bending and mangling the yield curve to cause more investment.

But after 86 months it is evident that all of this putative monetary “accommodation” has failed. Falsifying the cost of money and capital can only work if it causes households and businesses to borrow more than they would otherwise; and to then lay credit based spending for consumption and investment goods on top of what can be funded out of current production and income. Another name for that is leveraging private balance sheets and thereby stealing production and income from the future.

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

The Banking Turmoil Spreads—-Massive Banking Crisis Brewing In Singapore

February 17, 2016

The Banking Turmoil Spreads—-Massive Banking Crisis Brewing In Singapore

By Singapore Business Review

The three biggest banks are losing capital.

A crisis of staggering proportions is looming in China, and tiny Singapore will be caught right in the middle of the storm once the disaster finally erupts.

Speaking at the annual Barron’s roundtable, Swiss billionaire investor Felix Zulauf warned that Singapore’s largest banks are at risk of massive capital outflows if the Chinese economy experiences a hard landing, which he expects will happen this year.

“We are in a down cycle that will end with crisis and calamity. China in today’s cycle is what US housing was during the financial crisis in 2008,” Zulauf warned.

Zulauf warned that capital outflows in China will continue, prompting regulators to devalue the yuan by as much as 15% to 20% within the year. When this happens, Asian economies which are heavily dependent on China—particularly Singapore—will suffer because Chinese corporates will cut their imports even more, while indebted Chinese companies will be placed at greater risk of default.

“I expect the situation the deteriorate to a point where we will witness a banking crisis in Asia that will hit Singapore and Hong Kong particularly hard,” Zulauf said.

“It is conceivable that Singapore, which has attracted a lot of foreign capital over the years because of its image as a strong-currency state, will be extremely exposed to the situation in China. Singapore’s banking-sector loans have grown dramatically in the past five or six years. Singapore is now losing capital, which means the banking industry is losing deposits,” Zulauf said.

He said that such a situation will cause carry trades to go awry, which will result in steep losses for heavily-leveraged traders.

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

Mutual Funds, ETFs at Risk of a Run Warns Stockman

February 13, 2016

Mutual Funds, ETFs at Risk of a Run Warns Stockman

In one of his starkest warnings yet, Former White House Budget Director (Office of Management and Budget, OMB), David Stockman has warned that banks and the global financial system remain vulnerable and there is likely to be another global financial crisis which will be worse than the first involving “a run on mutual funds and ETFs.”

Stockman warns in a Bloomberg interview that Deutsche Bank

“has a $2 trillion balance sheet and they have a net tangible equity of $66 billion. So that is 3% – “they are leveraged 30 to 1 in terms of net tangible equity.”

“What is whirling around in that $2 trillion nobody knows but I do think that the banks have unloaded the worst of their stuff and today it is in mutual funds and ETFs, today it is in non bank financial institutions, like all these companies that have come up over night to make auto loans by selling junk bonds as a form of capital.”

This is reminiscent of the first financial crisis and the financial collapse wrought on the world with the subprime mortgage fraud as beautifully illustrated in the must see movie ‘The Big Short’.

Regarding how ‘mom and pop’ investors and pension owners are vulnerable, Stockman says

“The dangers of a run are far more serious now than it was with banks then. Back then, main street banks did not have to mark to market most of their assets and there never was a run on mainstreet banks, it was only on a few hedge funds …

This time you are going to have a run of $5 trillion or $6 trillion of mutual funds. This time you are going to have a run on the ETFs. There were only $1 trillion of ETFs in existence in 2008. There is over $3 trillion now and they are an accelerator mechanism.“

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

Take Cover—–Now Comes The Gong Show

February 11, 2016

Take Cover—–Now Comes The Gong Show

It was a bad hair night for the Beltway. Among the roughly 515,000 votes cast in the New Hampshire primaries, about 55% or 280,000 went to Bernie, the Donald and Senator Cruz. That is, the preponderance of Republican, Democrat and independent votes alike went for the anti-establishment candidates.

Since the latter are basically campaigning against the Imperial City and all of its careerists, cronies and corruptions, the first impulse is to cheer them on. After all, nothing could be worse than the self-perpetuating gang of war mongers, welfare statists, K-Street lobbyists and pork-barreling politicians who rule the nation today from their permanent berths in Washington DC.

Unfortunately, there is something worse. When you combine the mindless raw populism of Bernie and The Donald with the rapidly advancing lunacy and desperation of Janet and her baleful band of money printers you have a combustible recipe for abrupt system failure. American capitalism and democracy as we have known it could blow sky high by the time this election cycle is complete and a new President settles into office.

Before elaborating on that dismal note, however, let me first dispatch with Senator Ted Cruz. He unfortunately has the Ronald Reagan mutation when it comes to his political genome. I admire his resolute opposition to Big Government at home and his demonstration in Iowa that you can standup to a big, thieving special interest group like the Ethanol Lobby, and still win elections.

On that score, I recall my third election to Congress in 1980 from a small town district in Michigan. Even though it was a hotbed of Chrysler supplier plants and evangelical right-to-lifers, I helped lead the charge against the Chrysler bailout on the House floor and voted against the Hyde anti-abortion amendment dozens of times, thereby earning the wrath of Chrysler CEO Lee Iacocca in Detroit and the so-called pro-life lobby in Washington.

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

The Spook In the Casino—–Recession Just Ahead, Part 1

February 9, 2016

The Spook In the Casino—–Recession Just Ahead, Part 1

The wise guys keep buying the dips owing to the simple proposition that there is never a lasting bear market without a recession. So after today’s blow-out we are likely to get another call to scoop up the “bargains” because the correction has run its course and the US economy is still chugging along notwithstanding the contretemps in China and other places of purportedly limited moment.

Indeed, on the basis of Wall Street’s muscle memory alone there is surely another dead cat bounce on its way any day. But here’s the memo. BTFDs is not working any more and, more crucially, there is a recession coming and soon. And then the bear will maul, not simply paw as today.

The fact is, BTFD hasn’t worked on a net basis hasn’t for about 730 days now. The S&P 500 closed today where it first crossed in February 2014.

^SPX data by YCharts

In light of this extended dwell time in no man’s land, it is not surprising that the market is getting spooked. After all, the real driver of the post-March 2009 rebound of the stock indices was the Fed’s massive intrusion in money and capital markets, not a sustainable recovery of main street business activity or real household incomes. Real net CapEx is still below 2007 levels, for example, as is the real median household income.

And most certainly the market’s 220% gain between the post-recession bottom of 670 and the May 2015 peak of 2130 was not owing to an explosion of corporate earnings. If you set aside Wall Street’s annually renewable ex-items hockey stick, what you actually have on the profits front is a paltry 8% cummulative gain since the pre-crisis earnings peak way back in June 2007.

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

The War On Savers And The 200 Rulers Of Global Finance

February 5, 2016

The War On Savers And The 200 Rulers Of Global Finance

There has been an economic coup d’état in America and most of the world. We are now ruled by about 200 unelected central bankers, monetary apparatchiks and their minions and megaphones on Wall Street and other financial centers.

Unlike Senator Joseph McCarthy, I actually do have a list of their names. They need to be exposed, denounced, ridiculed, rebuked and removed.

The first 30 includes Janet Yellen, William Dudley, the other governors of the Fed and its senior staff. The next 10 includes Jan Hatzius, chief economist of Goldman Sachs, and his counterparts at the other major Wall Street banking houses.

Then there is the dreadful Draghi and the 25-member governing council of the ECB and still more senior staff. Ditto for the BOJ, BOE, Bank of Canada, Reserve Bank of Australia and even the People’s Printing Press of China. Also, throw in Christine Lagarde and the principals of the IMF and some scribblers at think tanks like Brookings. The names are all on Google!

Have you ever heard of Lael Brainard? She’s one of them at the Fed and very typical. That is, she’s never held an honest capitalist job in her life; she’s been a policy apparatchik at the Treasury, Brookings and the Fed ever since moving out of her college dorm room.

Now she’s doing her bit to prosecute the war on savers. She wants to keep them lashed to the zero bound—-that is, in penury and humiliation—–because of the madness happening to the Red Ponzi in China. Its potential repercussions, apparently, don’t sit so well with her:

Brainard expressed concern that stresses in emerging markets including China and slow growth in developed economies could spill over to the U.S.

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

Slouching Toward The Dark Side

February 2, 2016

Slouching Toward The Dark Side

Last Wednesday we noted there is something rotten in the state of Denmark, meaning that the world’s great potemkin village of Bubble Finance is unraveling. The evidence piles up by the day.

To wit, now comes still another story about the Red Paddy Wagons rolling out in China. This time they are rounding-up the proprietors of a $7.6 billion peer-to-peer (P2P) lending Ponzi called Ezubao Ltd.

The particulars of this story are worth more than a week of bloviating by the Wall Street economists, strategists and other shills who visit bubblevision the whole day long. That’s because it exposes the rotten foundation on which the entire Red Ponzi and the related world central bank regime of Bubble Finance is based.

Needless to say, these dangerous, unstable and incendiary deformations are not even visible to the Keynesian commentariat and policy apparatchiks. They blithely assume that what makes modern economies go is the deft monetary, fiscal and regulatory interventions of the state. By their lights, not much else matters——and most certainly not the condition of household, business and public balance sheets or the level of speculation and leveraged gambling prevalent in financial markets and corporate C-suites.

As that pompous fool and #2 apparatchik at the Fed, Stanley Fischer, is wont to say—–such putative bubbles are just second order foot faults. These prosaic nuisances are not the fault of monetary policy in any event, and can be readily minimized through a risible scheme called “macro-prudential” regulation.

After all, if the Keynesians had any inkling that debt was a problem they wouldn’t have attempted to radically subsidize it with 84 straight months of ZIRP.

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

Death Throes Of The Bull

January 31, 2016

Death Throes Of The Bull

The fast money and robo-machines keep trying to ignite stock rallies, but they all fizzle because bad karma is beginning to infect the casino. That is, apprehension is growing among whatever adults are left on Wall Street that 84 months of ZIRP and $3.5 trillion of Fed balance sheet expansion, aka money printing, didn’t do the trick.

Not only is the specter of recession growing more visible, but it is also attached to a truth that cannot be gainsaid. Namely, having stranded itself at the zero bound for an entire business cycle, the Fed is bereft of dry powder. Its only available tools are a massive new round of QE and negative interest rates.

But these are absolutely non-starters. The former would provoke riots in the financial markets because it would be an admission of total failure; and the latter would provoke a riot in the American body politic because the Fed’s seven year war on savers and retirees has already generated electoral revulsion. Bernie and The Donald are not expressions of public confidence in the economic status quo.

So the dip buying brigades have been reduced to reading the tea leaves for signs that the Fed’s four in store for 2016 are no more. Yet even if the prospect of delayed rate hikes is good for a 50-handle face ripping rally on the S&P 500 index from time to time, here’s what it can’t do. The Fed’s last card—-deferring one or more of the tiny interest rate increases scheduled for this year——cannot stop the on-coming recession.

And it is surely coming. We got one more powerful indicator on that score in this morning’s data on core capital goods orders (i.e. nondefense excluding aircraft).

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

Red Ponzi Ticking

January 28, 2016

Red Ponzi Ticking

There is something rotten in the state of Denmark. And we are not talking just about the hapless socialist utopia on the Jutland Peninsula——even if it does strip assets from homeless refugees, charge savers 75 basis points for the deposit privilege and allocate nearly 60% of its GDP to the Welfare State and its untoward ministrations.

In fact, the rot is planetary. There is unaccountable, implausible, whacko-world stuff going on everywhere, but the frightful part is that most of it goes unremarked or is viewed as par for the course by the mainstream narrative.

The topic at hand is the looming implosion of China’s Red Ponzi; and, more specifically, the preposterous Wall Street/Washington presumption that it’s just another really big economy that overdid the “growth” thing and is now looking to Beijing’s firm hand to effect a smooth transition. That is, an orderly migration from a manufacturing, export and fixed investment boom-land to a pleasant new regime of shopping, motoring, and mass consumption.

Would that it could. But China is not a $10 trillion growth miracle with transition challenges; it is a quasi-totalitarian nation gone mad digging, building, borrowing, spending and speculating in a magnitude that has no historical parallel.

So doing, It has fashioned itself into an incendiary volcano of unpayable debt and wasteful, crazy-ass overinvestment in everything. It cannot be slowed, stabilized or transitioned by edicts and new plans from the comrades in Beijing. It is the greatest economic trainwreck in human history barreling toward a bridgeless chasm.

And that proposition makes all the difference in the world. If China goes down hard the global economy cannot avoid a thundering financial and macroeconomic dislocation. And not just because China accounts for 17% of the world’s $80 trillion of GDP or that it has been the planet’s growth engine most of this century.

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

Chart Of The Day: 155 Years Of Real ($2015) Oil Prices——-Average=$47

January 27, 2016

Chart Of The Day: 155 Years Of Real ($2015) Oil Prices——-Average=$47

Why Dip Buyers Will Get Clobbered: The US Economy Isn’t Doing “Just Fine”

January 26, 2016

Why Dip Buyers Will Get Clobbered: The US Economy Isn’t Doing “Just Fine”

As of June 2008 no Wall Street banking house was predicting a recession, yet by then the Great Recession—–the worst economic downturn since the 1930s—– was already six months old, as per the NBER’s subsequent official reckoning.

Actually, it was already several years old if you concede that the phony housing boom of 2005-2007 was generating merely transient “statistical” GDP, not permanent gains in main street wealth. Even the movie houses now showing “The Big Short” have some pretty palpable reminders on that point——not the least being the strip club dancer who owned 5 residential properties, with two adjustable rate mortgages on each.

In fact, by then main street America was crawling with strippers. That is, equity strippers who were repeatedly doing “cash out” refinancings in order to generate between $20,000 and $100,000 or more of mortgage proceeds to spend on vacations, cars, man caves, aspirational leather goods, shoes and apparel, among much else.

At the peak in 2006-2007, upwards of 10% of personal consumption expenditures were accounted for by MEW (mortgage equity withdrawal). The utter unsustainability of that kind of Potemkin prosperity goes without saying, but the point here is that it was no deep dark secret buried in the economic entrails.

In fact, Chairman Greenspan went to great lengths to publicize the facts of MEW on an up-to-date basis. But he wasn’t trying to warn that the end was near. Unaccountably, he and his Wall Street acolytes concluded that the US economy had become virtually recession proof because of the extra firepower being accorded to household consumption by MEW!

In short, the economic booby trap of MEW was hiding in plain sight and so was the Great Recession. Yet there was nothing at all unusual about the 2008 recession call miss.

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

The Sleepwalkers Awaken

January 21, 2016

The Sleepwalkers Awaken

A host on bubblevision this afternoon noted that the S&P 500 is now down $2 trillion for the year and wondered if his panel could explain “what’s happened since January 1st?”

The implication, of course, was that since no new recessions have started—- nor have any new wars been declared, polar glaciers melted or Wall Street banks gone down for the count——that the market’s worst ever start of the year was surely overdone. Maybe it was even BTFD time again.

Then again, maybe the outlook is just as bad as it was before January 1st, but that the outlookers have acquired a new outlook. Stated more baldly, perhaps the sleepwalkers have finally awakened.

That would certainly seem to be the case with the market’s high flyers. Most of this year’s spectacular flameouts have reported nothing new nor issued any disturbing 8-Ks. Amazon apparently had a swell Christmas, for example, but its share price is now down 19% from the bubblevision man’s line of demarcation.

Indeed, Amazon and its fellow FANGs (Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and Google) succinctly explain the pivot. They have actually been the canary in the coal mine all along; it just now that their warnings signals are being noticed.

As we have previously pointed out, the FANGs were the “beard” that hid the market’s initial breakdown during 2015. They gained $485 billion of market cap (+66%) while the other 496 companies in the S&P 500 actually deflated by more than half a trillion dollars.

Needless to say, that happened before the calendar year turned. Yet when the stock market’s advance drastically narrows to just a handful of ultra-momentum stocks, the bull’s days are numbered, and always have been.

That truth goes back to the Four Horsemen of the tech bubble, the Nifty Fifty of the early 1970s and even the pyramided investment trusts of 1929.

Just call this the Last Stocks Standing (LSS) syndrome.

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

Soon Comes The Deluge

January 20, 2016

Soon Comes The Deluge

The robo-machines are now having a grand old time hazing the August lows at 1870 on the S&P, and may succeed in ginning up another dead-cat bounce or two. But this market is going down for the count owing to a perfect storm.

To wit, the global and US economies are heading into an extended deflationary recession; S&P earnings peaked at $106 per share more than a year ago and are already at $90, heading much lower; and the central banks of the world are out of dry powder after a 20-year binge of balance sheet expansion.

Global Central Bank Balance Sheet Explosion

The latter is surely the most important of the three. It means there will be no printing press driven reflation of the financial markets this time around. And without more monetary juice it’s just a matter of time before a whole generation of punters and front-runners abandon the casino and head for the hills.

Even with today’s ragged bounce, the broad market has now gone sideways for nearly 700 days. The BTFD meme is loosing its mojo because it only worked so long as the Fed-following herd could point to more printing press cash flowing into the market or promises of “accommodation” that were credible. But that will soon be ancient history.

^SPX data by YCharts

Indeed, it is already evident that “escape velocity” has again escaped. Q4 GDP growth is now running at barely 0.5%, and the current quarter could actually be negative for reasons we will analyze in the days ahead.

But the real economic situation is actually worse than the apparent flatling trend of recent months. As we have long insisted, the GDP does not measure true gains in national wealth or main street living standards.

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

Amazon And The Fantastic FANGs——A Bubblicious Breakfast Of Unicorns And Slippery Accounting

January 16, 2016

Amazon And The Fantastic FANGs——A Bubblicious Breakfast Of Unicorns And Slippery Accounting

At year end we posted a rant about the “Brobdingnagian” bubble embedded in Amazon’s market cap. On December 29th it was valued at $325 billion and had gained $180 billion or 55% of that towering figure in just the previous 12 months.

Self-evidently this was a flashing red warning signal that the end of the third great central bank fueled financial bubble of his century was near. AMZN and its three other FANG amigos had accounted for a $530 billion gain in market cap while the other 496 stocks in the S&P 500 had declined by an even larger amount.

That is, the apparently flat S&P 500 index of 2015 was hiding an incipient bear—–owing to a market narrowing action like none before. Compared to the Fabulous FANGs (Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and Google), the early 1970s Nifty Fifty of stock market lore paled into insignificance.

After the worst start to a year in history, some of the air has now been let out of the bubble. Amazon’s market cap is now down by $53 billion or 16% and the story has been roughly the same for the rest of the FANGs.

After Wednesday’s plunge, Goggle is now also down by $52 billion or 10%; Facebook is lower by $33 billion or 10%; and Netflix is off by $6 billion or 11%. In all, the FANGs have given back in eight trading days about $144 billion or 28% of their madcap gains during 2015.

AMZN Market Cap data by YCharts

Call that a start, but in the great scheme of things it doesn’t amount to much. Consider the case of Amazon. Its PE multiple on LTM net income of $328 million has dropped from 985X all the way to…….well, 829X!

Likewise, it’s now valued at 97X its $2.8 billion of LTM free cash flow compared to 117X at year end.

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

Hey, Wall Street——-This Bud’s For You!

January 15, 2016

Hey, Wall Street——-This Bud’s For You!

The hordes of Washington politicians promising to boost the nation’s economic growth rate and the posse of monetary central planners and their Keynesian economists (excuse the redundancy) lamenting that “escape velocity” appears to have gone MIA have one thing in common. To wit, they have never looked at the chart below, or don’t get it if they have.

Plain and simple, the sum of Washington policy is to induce the business economy to eat it seed corn and bury itself in debt. Capitol Hill does its part with a tax code which provides a giant incentive for debt finance, and the Fed completes the job through massive intrusion in the money and capital markets. The result of systemic financial repression is deeply artificial, subsidized interest rates and free money for carry trade gamblers—–distortions which have turned the C-suites of corporate America into stock trading rooms.

As a case in point, the $46 billion of bonds sold by the owners of Budweiser last night where priced at a ten-year yield of 3.67%, which means that after taxes and inflation, the company’s borrowing cost was hardly 1%. Yet, as explained more fully below, the only point of this massive offering was to fund with nearly free long-term capital the huge payday for speculators in SABMiller stock that will result from the $120 billion Anheuser-Busch InBev (BUD) takeover transaction.

But consider the economic context. As astounding as it may seem, US net business investment in fixed assets last year was 10% below its turn of the century level. And that’s in nominal dollars—-in real terms its down by nearly one-fifth.

Moreover, net investment is the right measure, and its not at all comparable to the what Wall Street stock peddlers, who claim to be economists, are always bloviating about.

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

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