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The Fed’s Forever War Against Savers

June 14, 2020

The Fed’s Forever War Against Savers

The Fed’s Forever War Against Savers

The war on savers rages into its second decade.

And yesterday Field Marshal Powell vowed indefinite bombing, shelling, machine-gunning and bayoneting… until the white flag rises over enemy lines.

It is war to the knife… and from the knife to the hilt.

The only peace terms he will accept are these:

Complete, undiluted and unconditional surrender.

These hoarding hellcats must be vanquished. And their cities must be sowed with salt… as triumphant Rome vanquished Carthage… and sowed it with salt.

Here is yesterday’s dispatch from headquarters:

We are going to be deploying our tools — all of our tools — to the fullest extent for as long as it takes… We are not thinking about raising rates; we are not even thinking about thinking of raising rates.

Zero Rates Through at Least 2022

Powell and staff indicated they will clamp rates to zero, or near zero… through 2022.

We wager rates will remain clamped to zero longer yet.

Deflation hangs over the battlefield like a thick cloud of chlorine gas. And the Federal Reserve’s 2% inflation target appears more wishful than ever.

We do not expect any rate hikes until it lifts. And we hazard little will lift until 2022 has passed.

Meantime, Marshal Powell reminded us yesterday that the pre-pandemic 3.5% unemployment rate yielded little inflation.

He suggested, that is, that unemployment could sink below 3.5% before inflation menaced.

But it could be a long, long while before unemployment drops to pre-pandemic levels.

As we recently noted:

After the last financial crisis, over six years lapsed before employment fully recovered — 76 months.

If we assume a parallel recovery… pre-pandemic unemployment would return in 2026.

Of course comes our disclaimer: Pre-pandemic unemployment would return before 2026.

We simply do not know. Nor does anyone.

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

How Fed Rate Hikes Impact US Debt Slaves

December 12, 2017

How Fed Rate Hikes Impact US Debt Slaves

But savers are still getting shafted.

Outstanding “revolving credit” owed by consumers – such as bank-issued and private-label credit cards – jumped 6.1% year-over-year to $977 billion in the third quarter, according to the Fed’s Board of Governors. When the holiday shopping season is over, it will exceed $1 trillion. At the same time, the Fed has set out to make this type of debt a lot more expensive.

The Fed’s four hikes of its target range for the federal funds rate in this cycle cost consumers with credit card balances an additional $6 billion in interest in 2017, according to WalletHub. The Fed’s widely expected quarter-percentage-point hike on December 13 will cost consumers with credit card balances an additional $1.5 billion in 2018. This would bring the incremental costs of five rates hikes so far to $7.5 billion next year.

Short-term yields have shot up since the rate-hike cycle started. For example, the three-month US Treasury yield rose from near 0% in October 2015 to 1.33% today. Credit card rates move with short-term rates.

Mortgage rates move in near-parallel with the 10-year Treasury yield, which, at 2.39%, has declined from about 2.6% a year ago. Hence, 30-year fixed-rate mortgages are still quoted with rates below 4%, and for now, homebuyers have been spared the impact of the rate hikes.

Auto loans, in line with mid-range Treasury yields, have wavered a lot and moved up only a little. The average APR on a 48-month new-car loan rose only 40 basis points over the past two years to 4.4% in August 2017, according to WalletHub, citing the most recent data available. Note that the offers of “0% financing” are usually in lieu of rebates or other incentives and are therefore rarely free.

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

Deranged Central Bankers Blowing Up the World

February 15, 2016

DERANGED CENTRAL BANKERS BLOWING UP THE WORLD

It is now self-evident to any sentient being (excludes CNBC shills, Wall Street shyster economists, and Keynesian loving politicians) the mountainous level of unpayable global debt is about to crash down like an avalanche upon hundreds of millions of willfully ignorant citizens who trusted their politician leaders and the central bankers who created the debt out of thin air. McKinsey produced a report last year showing the world had added $57 trillion of debt between 2008 and the 2nd quarter of 2014, with global debt to GDP reaching 286%.

The global economy has only deteriorated since mid-2014, with politicians and central bankers accelerating the issuance of debt. These deranged psychopaths have added in excess of $70 trillion of debt in the last eight years, a 50% increase. With $142 trillion of global debt enough to collapse the global economy in 2008, only a lunatic would implement a “solution” that increased global debt to $212 trillion over the next seven years thinking that would solve a problem created by too much debt.

The truth is, these central bankers and captured politicians knew this massive issuance of more unpayable debt wouldn’t solve anything. Their goal was to keep the global economy afloat so their banker owners and corporate masters would not have to accept the consequences of their criminal actions and could keep their pillaging of global wealth going unabated.

The issuance of debt and easy money policies of the Fed and their foreign central banker co-conspirators functioned to drive equity prices to all-time highs in 2015, but the debt issuance and money printing needs to increase exponentially in order keep stock markets rising. Once the QE spigot was shut off markets have flattened and are now falling hard. You can sense the desperation among the financial elite. The desperation is borne out by the frantic reckless measures taken by central bankers and politicians since 2008.

…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…

The Central Bankers’ Malodorous War On Savers

August 30, 2015

The Central Bankers’ Malodorous War On Savers

Well, that didn’t take long!

After just three days of market turmoil the monetary politburo swung into action. This time they sent out B-Dud to promise still another monetary sweetener. Said the head of the New York Fed,

“From my perspective, at this moment, the decision to begin the normalization process at the September FOMC meeting seems less compelling to me than it was a few weeks ago.”.

Needless to say, “B-Dud” is a moniker implying extreme disrespect, and  Bill Dudley deserves every bit of it. He is a crony capitalist fool and one of the Fed ring-leaders prosecuting a relentless, savage war on savers. Its only purpose is to keep carry trade speculators gorged with free funding in the money markets and to bloat the profits of Wall Street strip-mining operations, like that of his former employer, Goldman Sachs.

The fact is, any one who doesn’t imbibe in the Keynesian Kool-Aid dispensed by the central banking cartel can see in an instant that 80 months of ZIRP has done exactly nothing for the main street economy. Notwithtanding the Fed’s gussied-up theories about monetary “accommodation” and closing the “output gap” the litmus test is real simple.

To wit, artificial suppression of free market interest rates by the central bank is designed to cause households to borrow more money than they otherwise would in order to spend more than they earn, pure and simple. Its nothing more than a modernized version of the original, crude Keynesian pump-priming theory—–except it dispenses with the inconvenience of getting politicians to approve spending increases and tax cuts in favor of the writ of a small posse of unelected monetary mandarins who run the FOMC and peg money market interest rates at will.

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

 

 

The Euthanasia Of The Saver

April 23, 2015

The Euthanasia Of The Saver

What have been the economic consequences of ultra-low interest rates? The answer might not be as hopeful as you may think.

While better known for the role of government in stimulating the economy, John Maynard Keynes, one of the most influential economists of the 20th century, also provided the intellectual framework for a big reduction in interest rates with two goals in mind: to reduce economic inequality and to achieve full employment.

Here’s what he had to say about the “rentier” (a quasi-Communist term for “saver”) in Chapter 24 of his seminal book “The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money”, published in 1936. It requires some effort to go through it (and even more to comprehend it, if at all) but because it influences so much of the current economic thinking it is worth it [our emphasis in bold]:

“The outstanding faults of the economic society in which we live are its failure to provide for full employment and its arbitrary and inequitable distribution of wealth and incomes.

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

 

 

 

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