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The United States has historically bragged about its free and transparent markets. But what the Fed is doing today is pulling a dark curtain around the financing of this so-called free and transparent market. The public has no idea which Wall Street firms have received this $3 trillion or why they can’t borrow it elsewhere. This kind of obfuscation by the Federal Reserve could actually stimulate distrust in the U.S. banking system. The Fed admitted as much in its most recent Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) minutes, writing that participation in the Fed’s loan program “could become stigmatized.”

– Wall Street on Parade: Is the Fed’s $3 Trillion in Loans to Trading Houses on Wall Street Legal?

The business model of Wall Street is fraud.
– Bernie Sanders

Financial services as currently structured is the most pernicious, predatory and corrupt industry on earth. Moreover, it’s the deliberately complex and opaque nature of the industry which then limits public debate when some problem arises and governments and central banks are called upon to take emergency measures to “save the system,” which is just a euphemism for enormous sums of corporate welfare being funneled to people and institutions who couldn’t survive otherwise.

It is systemic looting on a massive scale and the primary patrons of this ongoing and seemingly endless scheme are central banks. In the U.S. this means the Federal Reserve, which recently came back into the “market” with enormous new interventions in both the repo market and via renewed balance sheet expansion. I’ve read many of the smart takes on the repo crisis and still don’t feel confident I know precisely what’s going on. This is intentional.

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

NY Fed Announces Extension Of Overnight Repos Until Nov 4, Will Offer 8 More Term Repos

October 4, 2019

NY Fed Announces Extension Of Overnight Repos Until Nov 4, Will Offer 8 More Term Repos

Anyone who expected that the easing of the quarter-end funding squeeze in the repo market would mean the Fed would gradually fade its interventions in the repo market, was disappointed on Friday afternoon when the NY Fed announced it would extend the duration of overnight repo operations (with a total size of $75BN) for at least another month, while also offer no less than eight 2-week term repo operations until November 4, 2019, which confirms that the funding unlocked via term repo is no longer merely a part of the quarter-end arsenal but an integral part of the Fed’s overall “temporary” open market operations… which are starting to look quite permanent.

This is the statement published moments ago by the NY Fed:

In accordance with the most recent Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) directive, the Open Market Trading Desk (the Desk) at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York will conduct a series of overnight and term repurchase agreement (repo) operations to help maintain the federal funds rate within the target range.
Effective the week of October 7, the Desk will offer term repos through the end of October as indicated in the schedule below. The Desk will continue to offer daily overnight repos for an aggregate amount of at least $75 billion each through Monday, November 4, 2019.
Securities eligible as collateral include Treasury, agency debt, and agency mortgage-backed securities. Awarded amounts may be less than the amount offered, depending on the total quantity of eligible propositions submitted. Additional details about the operations will be released each afternoon for the following day’s operation(s) on the Repurchase Agreement Operational Details webpage. The operation schedule and parameters are subject to change if market conditions warrant or should the FOMC alter its guidance to the Desk.

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

Goldman: Here’s Why The Fed Is About To Shock The Market

June 16, 2019

Goldman: Here’s Why The Fed Is About To Shock The Market

As discussed earlier, and as both Bank of America and JPM explained, the biggest risk for the market next week is if the Fed not only doesn’t cut – the market assigns a very low probability to such a “pre-emptive” move – but fails to signal an aggressive dovish reversal in the form of a rate cut in July. And yet, despite its upbeat outlook – it still expects the S&P to close the year at 3,000, Goldman’s strategists are certainly taking the over on how hawkish the Fed will sound next week.

As Goldman’s chief economist Jan Hatzius writes, the bank expects “unchanged” policy at the June 18-19 FOMC meeting and sees the subjective odds of a June cut at only 10%. More importantly, while Goldman looks for a dovish tilt to the proceedings it won’t be nearly enough to appease markets that have aggressively priced rate cuts in the fall.

Barring an unlikely surprise on the funds rate, we expect the market to focus on four key developments:

the statement’s policy stance/balance of risks paragraph,
the number of participants projecting cuts in the Summary of Economic Projections (SEP),
the extent of dovish changes to the statement and economic forecasts, and
the tone of Powell’s press conference.

Rather than Goldman’s standard “Then and Now” table, the chart below “plots the setup for next week’s meeting across three dimensions, as well as their averages ahead of three major dovish shifts: September 2007 (at which the Fed abandoned the hiking bias and cut 50bps in response to subprime turmoil), September 2010 (formally signaled QE2), and March 2016 (scuttled the hiking cycle until global risks abated). Here, Hatzius also shows the three-month evolution of these four variables: stock prices, IG credit spreads, and consensus GDP growth.

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

Weekly Commentary: Doing Harm with Uber-Dovish

March 25, 2019

Weekly Commentary: Doing Harm with Uber-Dovish

This week’s FOMC meeting will be debated for years – perhaps even decades. The Fed essentially pre-committed to no rate hike in 2019. The committee downgraded both its growth and inflation forecasts. Having all at once turned of little consequence, we can now dismiss the 3.8% unemployment rate and the strongest wage growth in a decade. Moreover, the Fed announced it would be scaling back and then winding down balance sheet “normalization” by September. This put an impressive exclamation point on a historic policy shift since the December 19th meeting. At least for me, it hearkened back to a Rick Santelli moment: “What’s the Fed afraid of?”

Markets came into the meeting fully anticipating a dovish Fed. Our central bank returned to the old playbook of beating expectations. In the process, the Federal Reserve doused an already flaming fixed-income marketplace with additional fuel.

After trading to 3.34% during November 8th trading, ten-year Treasury yields ended this week a full 90 bps lower at 2.44%, trading Friday at the lowest yields since December 2017. Yields were down 15 bps this week – 17 bps from Tuesday’s (pre-Fed day) close – and 28 bps so far in March. And with three-month T-bill rates at 2.40%, the three-month/10-year Treasury curve flattened to the narrowest spread since 2007 (briefly inverting Friday). Five-year Treasury yields ended the week inverted 16 bps to three-month T-bills – and two-year Treasuries were inverted about eight bps.

Collapsing sovereign yields were a global phenomenon. Japan’s 10-year JGB yields declined four bps Friday to negative eight bps (-0.08%), the lowest yields since September 2016. With Germany’s Markit Manufacturing index sinking to the lowest level since 2012 (44.7), bund yields dropped seven bps to negative 0.015% – also lows going back to September 2016. Swiss 10-year yields sank 12 bps this week to negative 0.45%. Two-year German yields closed out the week at negative 0.57%. UK 10-year yields dropped 20 bps (1.01%), Spain 12 bps (1.07%) and France 11 bps (0.35%).

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

Laughable FOMC Statements on Phillips Curve, Inflation Expectations

February 22, 2018

Laughable FOMC Statements on Phillips Curve, Inflation Expectations

The Jan 30-31 FOMC minutes were published today. In addition to the usual drivel came laughable Phillips Curve nonsense.

The Fed released its January 30-31 FOMC Meeting Minutes today.

The minutes were a combination of the usual drivel about the economy plus some downright laughable comments on the Phillips Curve and inflation expectations.Let’s start with the drivel.

Economic Drivel

In their discussion of the economic situation and the outlook, meeting participants agreed that information received since the FOMC met in December indicated that the labor market continued to strengthen and that economic activity expanded at a solid rate. Gains in employment, household spending, and business fixed investment were solid, and the unemployment rate stayed low. On a 12-month basis, both overall inflation and inflation for items other than food and energy continued to run below 2 percent. Market-based measures of inflation compensation increased in recent months but remained low; survey-based measures of longer-term inflation expectations were little changed, on balance.

Almost all participants continued to anticipate that inflation would move up to the Committee’s 2 percent objective over the medium term as economic growth remained above trend and the labor market stayed strong; several commented that recent developments had increased their confidence in the outlook for further progress toward the Committee’s 2 percent inflation objective. A couple noted that a step-up in the pace of economic growth could tighten labor market conditions even more than they currently anticipated, posing risks to inflation and financial stability associated with substantially overshooting full employment.

However, some participants saw an appreciable risk that inflation would continue to fall short of the Committee’s objective. These participants saw little solid evidence that the strength of economic activity and the labor market was showing through to significant wage or inflation pressures.

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

The Power Elite: Bumbling Incompetents

May 29, 2016

The Power Elite: Bumbling Incompetents

Geniuses in Charge

BALTIMORE, Maryland – Is there any smarter group of homo sapiens on the planet? Or in all of history? We’re talking about Fed economists, of course.

Not only did they avoid another Great Depression by bold absurdity…giving the economy more of the one thing of which it clearly had too much – debt. They also carefully monitored the economy’s progress so as to avoid any backsliding into normalcy.

And where do we get this penetrating appraisal? From the Fed economists themselves, of course. Bloomberg:

“The U.S. Federal Reserve’s decisions to delay interest-rate hikes helped cushion the economic shocks caused by rapidly rising borrowing costs for U.S. companies from late last year through early 2016, according to economists at the New York Fed.

“By maintaining the federal funds rate lower, the FOMC managed to substantially offset the effect of tightening financial conditions on the economy,” the authors, referring to the rate-setting Federal Open Market Committee, wrote in a blog post on the bank’s website on Wednesday.”

They’re geniuses. No doubt about it. That’s why they’re in charge and we’re not. They’re the elite. They run the Deep State. They may not pay the piper, but they call the tune anyway. And good on them! Who knows what prices we might discover if we were left on our own?

Debt, debt, GDP and FF rate The gap between economic output and the debt accumulated to achieve it continues to widen…while savers are expropriated and capitalists are given an incentive to consume their capital (the “euthanasia of the rentier” propagated by Keynes has finally been achieved) – click to enlarge.

Four Lost Decades

One of the endearing features of the ruling classes is their abiding faith in their own judgment. Despite inexhaustible evidence that they are bumbling incompetents, the power elite stick to their guns – literally – and to their cushy sinecures.

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

Fed Official Confesses Fed Rigged Stock Market — Crash Certain

January 10, 2016

Fed Official Confesses Fed Rigged Stock Market — Crash Certai n

In a dynamite interview, Richard Fisher, former president and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, gave what may be the biggest confession you’ll ever see and hear from a Federal Reserve insider: the Federal Reserveknowingly “front ran” the US stock market recovery (i.e., manipulated the market) and created a huge asset bubble. Fisher expresses certainty that the “juiced” stock market will come down and is coming down now that the Fed has taken its foot off the accelerator … and that it has a long way yet to go.

While that is no news to readers here whose eyes are wide open, a “market put” has been denied by the Fed and by many market advisors. That the market was an overinflated bubble created by the Fed has been denied, too; but Fisher clearly and gleefully admits the Fed created a bubble that will have to deflate now that the Federal Reserve’s stimulus is off.

As one of the members of the Federal Reserve’s FOMC (the Federal Open Market Committee, which sets US monetary policy), Richard Fisher participated in and voted on all of the Fed’s policies of zero interest and quantitative easing, so he has inside knowledge of all the discussions behind the scenes at the Fed.

Here are the significant quotes from Richard Fisher on CNBC’s video:

What the Fed did — and I was part of that group — is we front-loaded a tremendous market rally, starting in 2009.

It’s sort of what I call the “reverse Whimpy factor” — give me two hamburgers today for one tomorrow.

I’m not surprised that almost every index you can look at … was down significantly. [Referring to the results in the stock market after the Fed raised rates in December.]

Basically, we had a tremendous rally, and I think there’s a great digestive period that is likely to take place now, and it may continue.

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

A Free Market in Interest Rates

December 22, 2015

A Free Market in Interest Rates

Unless you’re living under a rock, you know that we have an administered interest rate. This means that the bureaucrats at the Federal Reserve decide what’s good for the little people. Then they impose it on us.

In trying to return to freedom, many people wonder why couldn’t we let the market set the interest rate. After all, we don’t have a Corn Control Agency or a Lumber Board (pun intended). So why do we have a Federal Open Market Committee? It’s a very good question.

Someone asked it at the recent Cato Monetary Conference. George Selgin answered: no matter if the Fed stands pat or does something, it’s still setting rates. This is a profound truth, which brings us to a fatal flaw in the dollar.

In our irredeemable currency, interest cannot be set by the market. There’s literally no mechanism for it. To understand why, let’s start by looking at the gold standard.

Under gold, the saver always has a choice. If he likes the rate of interest, he can deposit his gold coin. If not, he can withdraw it. By withdrawing, he forces the bank to sell an asset. That in turn ticks down the price of the bond, which is the same as ticking up the rate of interest. His preference has real teeth, and that’s an essential corrective mechanism.

Unfortunately, the government removed gold from the monetary system. Now you can own it, but your choices have no effect on interest. If you buy gold, then you get out of the banking system. However, the seller takes your place, getting rid of his gold and thereby taking your place in the banking system. The dollars and gold merely swap owners, with no effect on interest rates.

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

Christmas Present

December 21, 2015

Christmas Present

Theory du jour: the new Star Wars movie is sucking in whatever meager disposable lucre remains among the economically-flayed mid-to-lower orders of America. In fact, I propose a new index showing an inverse relationship between Star Wars box office receipts and soundness of the financial commonweal. In other words, Star Wars is all that remains of the US economy outside of the obscure workings of Wall Street — and that heretofore magical realm is not looking too rosy either in this season of the Great Rate Hike after puking up 623 points of the DJIA last Thursday and Friday.

Here I confess: for thirty years I have hated those stupid space movies, as much for their badly-written scripts (all mumbo-jumbo exposition of nonsensical story-lines between explosions) as for the degenerate techno-narcissism they promote in a society literally dying from the diminishing returns and unintended consequences of technology.

It adds up to an ominous Yuletide. Turns out that the vehicle the Federal Reserve’s Open Market Committee was driving in its game of “chicken” with oncoming reality was a hearse. The occupants are ghosts, but don’t know it. A lot of commentators around the web think that the Fed “pulled the trigger” on interest rates to save its credibility. Uh, wrong. They had already lost their credibility. What remains is for these ghosts to helplessly watch over the awesome workout, which has obviously been underway for quite a while in the crash of commodity prices (and whole national economies — e.g. Brazil, Canada, Australia), the janky regions of the bond markets, the related death of the shale oil industry, and the imploding hedge fund scene.

As it were, all credit these days looks shopworn and threadbare, as if the capital markets had by stealth turned into a swap meet of previously-owned optimism. Who believes in anything these days besides the allure of fraud?

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

The FOMC Decision, US Money Supply and the Economy

December 19, 2015

The FOMC Decision, US Money Supply and the Economy

Giving the Kremlinologists Something to Do

As is well known by now, on Wednesday the US central monetary planning bureau finally went through with its threat to hike the target range for overnight bank lending rates from nothing to almost nothing.

2-nauticalmodernboatinterior

Photo credit: Luca Brenta

The very next day, the effective federal funds rate had increased from 15 to 37 basis points – moreover, as illustrated by the trend in short term rates prior to the FOMC meeting, the markets had already fully anticipated the rate hike:

US 3-month t-bill discount rate and the one year t-note yield: between the October and December FOMC meetings, the markets fully discounted the impending rate hike. Once again we can see that there is actually a feedback loop between the Fed and the markets, and that it is not true that the Fed has absolutely no control over interest rates (even though the degree of its control is limited) – click to enlarge.

Of course, some markets still managed to act surprised (and/or confused), most prominently the US stock market, which is traditionally the very last market to get the memo, regardless of what is at issue. This is why asset bubbles so often end in crashes – market participants tend to very “suddenly” realize that something is amiss.

This time, the trusty WSJ FOMC statement tracker reveals that the planners have given us Kremlinologists something to do, by changing the statement’s content quite a bit. By contrast to the previous carbon copy approach, it tells a completely new story. Well, almost.

Between the October and the December meetings, the minds of the committee members have evidently experienced a great epiphany. Suddenly they have realized that the economy is indeed just awesome.

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

A Free Market in Interest Rates

December 17, 2015

A Free Market in Interest Rates

The Corn Control Agency

Federal_Open_Market_Committee_Meeting Where the central planers meet. It’s all very Sovietesque, except the furniture isn’t as run-down as it used to be at GOSPLAN
Photo credit: Nils Tycho

In our irredeemable currency, interest cannot be set by the market. There’s literally no mechanism for it. To understand why, let’s start by looking at the gold standard.

Under gold, the saver always has a choice. If he likes the rate of interest, he can deposit his gold coin. If not, he can withdraw it. By withdrawing, he forces the bank to sell an asset.

That in turn ticks down the price of the bond, which is the same as ticking up the rate of interest. His preference has real teeth, and that’s an essential corrective mechanism.

Unfortunately, the government removed gold from the monetary system. Now you can own it, but your choices have no effect on interest. If you buy gold, then you get out of the banking system.

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

Today Will Be a Watershed Moment for Financial Markets

December 16, 2015

Today Will Be a Watershed Moment for Financial Markets

I believe the world is at the greatest financial market inflection point since 1929. One that calls for a basic truism:

You can make a profit in a rising market if you are long. And you can profit in falling market if you are short.

The $64 million question is: How can you know the market’s direction?

There are all kinds of financial advisors, market seers, chart readers and fancy investment formulas. Each purports to answer that question. But all of these assume some kind of steady state world in which the future unfolds in a grand cycle based on past history.

“Just get some good pattern recognition software” a financial TV advertisement might tell you, and “you’re all set to make a killing.”

I don’t believe that for a second. We are in uncharted waters after nearly 20 years of madcap money printing by the Fed and other central banks.

Everything has been wildly inflated — stocks, bonds, real estate — and also the entire real economy as measured by global GDP. That includes trade volumes, capital spending, commodity prices, energy and mining capacity, manufacturing investment, bulk carriers and containerships. Also, warehouse and distribution facilities, brick and mortar retail space and much, much more.

But before we get to some of the facts about this great financial deformation, let me get right to the investment thesis. The world’s central banks are finally out of dry powder. They no longer have the means to inflate the global credit and financial bubble.

That’s why I’m calling today’s FOMC meeting the most crucial inflection point since 1929.

We have reached the apogee of history’s greatest credit inflation. Now we’re hurtling into a prolonged worldwide deflation. You can already see this deflation in the plunge of oil, iron ore, copper and other commodity prices.

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

December 16, 2015—–When The End Of The Bubble Begins

December 12, 2015

December 16, 2015—–When The End Of The Bubble Begins

They are going to layer their post-meeting statement with a steaming pile of if, ands & buts. It will exude an abundance of caution and a dearth of clarity.

Having judged that a 25 bps pinprick is warranted, the FOMC will then plant itself firmly in front of the great flickering dashboard in the Eccles Building. There it will repose to a regimen of “watchful waiting”, scouring the entrails of the “incoming data” to divine its next move.

Perhaps the waiting won’t be so watchful as all that, however. What is actually coming down the pike is something that may put the reader, at least those who have already been invited to join AARP, more in mind of that once a year hour-long special broadcast by Saturday morning TV back in the days of yesteryear; it explained how the Lone Ranger got his mask.

Memory fails, but either 12 or 19 Texas Rangers rode high in the saddle into a box canyon, confident they knew what was around the bend. Soon there was a lot of gunfire and then there was just one, and that was only because Tonto’s pony needed to stop for a drink.

Yellen and her posse better pray for a monetary Tonto because they are riding headlong into an ambush in the canyons of Wall Street. To wit, they cannot possibly raise money market interest rates—-even by 75 bps—-without massively draining liquidity from the casino.

Don’t they know what happened to the $3.5 trillion of central bank credit they have digitally printed since September 2008? Do they really think that fully $2.8 trillion of it just recycled right back to the New York Fed as excess bank reserves?

That is, no harm, no foul and no inflation? The monetary equivalent of a tree falling in an empty forest?

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

From ZIRP to NIRP

October 1, 2015

From ZIRP to NIRP

The sudden end of the Fed’s ambition to raise interest rates above the zero bound, coupled with the FOMC’s minutes, which expressed concerns about emerging market economies, has got financial scribblers writing about negative interest rate policies (NIRP).

Coincidentally, Andrew Haldane, the chief economist at the Bank of England, published a much commented-on speech giving us a window into the minds of central bankers, with zero interest rate policies (ZIRP) having failed in their objectives.

Of course, Haldane does not openly admit to ZIRP failing, but the fact that we are where we are is hardly an advertisement for successful monetary policies. The bare statistical recovery in the UK, Germany and possibly the US is slender evidence of some result, but whether or not that is solely due to interest rate policies cannot be convincingly proved. And now, exogenous factors, such as China’s deflating credit bubble and its knock-on effect on other emerging market economies, are being blamed for the deteriorating economic outlook faced by the welfare states, and the possible contribution of monetary policy to this failure is never discussed.

Anyway, the relative stability in the welfare economies appears to be coming to an end. Worryingly for central bankers, with interest rates at the zero bound, their conventional interest rate weapon is out of ammunition. They appear to now believe in only two broad options if a slump is to be avoided: more quantitative easing and NIRP. There is however a market problem with QE, not mentioned by Haldane, in that it is counterpart to a withdrawal of high quality financial collateral, which raises liquidity issues in the shadow banking system. This leaves NIRP, which central bankers hope will succeed where ZIRP failed.

– See more at: http://www.cobdencentre.org/2015/09/from-zirp-to-nirp/#sthash.Qb02oWjj.dpuf

The Federal Reserve is Not Your Friend

August 21, 2015

The Federal Reserve is Not Your Friend

Fed policies disproportionately favor wealth.

Imagine that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) was a corporation, with its shares owned by the nation’s major pharmaceutical companies. How would you feel about the regulation of medications? Whose interests would this corporation be serving? Or suppose that major oil companies appointed a small committee to periodically announce the price of a barrel of crude in the United States. How would that impact you at the gasoline pump?

Such hypotheticals would strike the majority of Americans as completely absurd, but it’s exactly how our banking system operates.

The Federal Reserve is literally owned by the nation’s commercial banks, with a rotation of the regional Reserve Bank presidents constituting 5 of the 12 voting members of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), the body that sets targets for certain interest rates. The other 7 members of the FOMC are the D.C.-based Board of Governors—which includes the Fed chairperson, currently Janet Yellen—and are nominated by the President. The Fed serves its owners and patrons—the big banks and the federal government, while the rest of Americans get left behind.

The Federal Reserve has the ability to create legal tender through mere bookkeeping operations. By the simple act of buying, for example, $10 million worth of bonds, the Federal Reserve literally creates $10 million worth of money and adds it into the system. The seller’s account goes up by $10 million once the Fed’s monies are received. Nobody’s account gets debited for $10 million. This is a tremendous amount of power for an institution to possess, and yet the Fed shrouds itself in secrecy and is accountable to no one.

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

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