Wednesday, April 4, 2012

US Federal Reserve: Believing It's Own Lies?

At 2PM est, Tuesday, April 3, 2012...notes, purportedly from a "meeting of the minds" at the US Federal Reserve, are released to the ever vigilant financial news media for dissemination to global investors seeking another "fix" from their Sugar Daddy.

Aw shucks, Sugar Daddy says [or wants you to believe] there is no more sugar in his pocket.  ALL the markets drop like a diabetic that has forgotten his lunch.  No more sugar, no more fix, NO MORE NEW HIGHS.

BUMMER!

Why does ANYBODY, believe ANYTHING the Fed says?  WHY?  The are notoriously wrong!  So wrong, so often in fact, that Ben Bernanke should change his name to Often Wrong Bernanke.  Or, honestly, he should just change his name to Pinocchio.

Bernanke Was Wrong
Bernanke telling us not to worry about housing, mortgages, or car companies in the years before the recession, like denying a train wreck that is coming down the tracks.
 


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And now we are suposed to believe the Fed when they tell us the economy is growing, the jobs market is improving, and America is on the cusp of an economic recovery so great that the need for further Fed stimulus is unneccessary?

Does anybody remember this stellar Bernanke prediction?
Bernanke Believes Housing Mess Contained
Evelyn M. Rusli, 05.17.07, 4:21 PM ET, [Forbes]

The subprime mess is grave but largely contained, said Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke Thursday, in a speech before the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. While rising delinquencies and foreclosures will continue to weigh heavily on the housing market this year, it will not cripple the U.S. economy, he said. The speech was the Chairman’s most comprehensive on the subprime mortgage issue to date.

“Given the fundamental factors in place that should support the demand for housing, we believe the effect of the troubles in the subprime sector on the broader housing market will likely be limited,” Bernanke said.
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Limited Ben?  Guess not, huh?

And yet here we are today, our bumbling Fed Chairman once again blowing smoke up our asses as we grab our ankles thanking him for yet another "vote of confidence" in the US financial system and economy.

BULL SHIT!


The Fed’s Con Appears To Be Working But The Curtain Is Rising On The Third Act
By lee Adler, April 3, 201
In today’s conomic news, the mainstream media focused on the disappointment surrounding the FOMC Minutes, the massaged and sanitized fairy tale about what the participants said at last month’s FOMC confab. The market was shocked! SHOCKED! that most of the members saw no need for additional QE, unless things got worse. I had concluded that a couple of months ago based on the fact that every time QE speculation arose, not only did stocks rally, but so did energy and other commodity prices. The commodity vigilantes, I thought, would tie the Fed’s hands. That and the fact that the conomic data was coming in relatively perky, at least in terms of the headline data, made it highly unlikely that the Fed would do any more money printing.

But here’s the thing. The minutes are fake. They are fabricated, false, phony, ginned up and sterilized garbage, designed for public consumption. To put it bluntly, they’re propaganda. They are what the Fed and the Wall Street casino owners want you to think. They are a blatant attempt to manipulate the behavior of market participants through the use of clever turns of phrase. The Fed wants the market to go higher, but it doesn’t want commodities to go with it, so its story line is that the conomy is healthy enough to continue growing without more QE. That gives traders reason to continue buying stocks, and no reason to buy commodities, which everyone “knows” go up when the Fed prints, in spite of Bernanke’s denials that he’s doing that. And besides, even if he was, commodities are up for other reasons, not anything Ben did, according to Ben.

That’s what these “minutes” are about, self justification and market manipulation. We won’t know the real story until February 2018 when the Fed will release the transcripts of this year’s FOMC meetings. Why do they hold them back for at least 5 years? Because the Fed thinks that you can’t handle the truth. The problem is that you can and they just don’t want you to know what it is, because if you did, you’d be able to make informed investment decisions. The decisions the Fed wants you to make are to buy stocks, buy and hold Treasuries, and sell commodities. They tailored the minutes accordingly, so that the headlines would elicit the desired response. They think that they’re Pavlov, and we’re the dogs.

Admittedly, I have not yet read the minutes (I will for this weekend’s Fed Report), but I have read the news headlines. Those headlines are what the Fed-Wall Street-Media-Industrial Complex wants you to think, so you really don’t need to read the minutes. Rest assured that the Fed got the propaganda it wanted. The market reaction it wanted it hasn’t yet gotten, yet, but the Fed is betting that it will, and therein lies the rub. The Fed doesn’t always get what it wants. If traders decide to sell the Dow off 200 points in response to this news, then the next morning, the Fed’s ventriloquist dummy, Jon Hilsenrath, will float another QE3 trial balloon in the Wall Street Urinal.
So we’ll just have to wait and see how traders respond to what the Fed wants it to think. As for what the Fed really thinks, sorry, that will have to wait 6 years.
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It looks like Ben can't have his cake and eat it too.  Can't make a cake without sugar Ben...and who wants cake without frosting?

If any truth came out of the Fed's minutes released yesterday afternoon it was the TRUTH that our stock market rally is based on NOTHING more than sugar from the Fed.  The long rally in equities since Bernanke got the markets hooked on thats ugar in March 2009 is fundamentally baseless. 
Today's market reaction to a Wall Street without sugar bowls on every desktop is all the proof I need that the Fed will either continue printing money and doling out the sugar the markets crave, or the markets are going to their grave.

Nevermind the equity markets...who is going to buy America's debt if the Fed withholds the suar bowl?

Strictly A Rhetorical Question...
From Dave In Denver, The Golden Truth

...because the answers is obvious.

How will the U.S. Government fund all of the additional budget deficit spending that has already been built into this year's spending plans if the Fed does not print money in some fashion in order to help finance all of the new Treasury debt issuance in 2012?

Before you answer this, you need to be aware, and you can use google to find the numerous sources of this data, from the time QE2 commenced until it ended the Fed directly or indirectly purchased over 100% of of all new Treasury debt issuance during that time period. In other words, it also paid for some of the refunding/rollover issuance.
Furthermore, Operation Twist, was nothing more than a attempt a cleverly disguising the Fed's role in funding Treasury issuance since QE2 formally ended. With this operation, the Fed simply sold down its short term Treasury holdings to a collateral-starved money market and repo-collateral market and used the funds to buy Treasuries in the meat of funding curve - 7 to 10 yrs - which funded the Treasury plus helped keep a lid - sort of - of mortgage rates. For all of 2011, the Fed purchased a "stunning" 61% of ALL net Treasury issuance: LINK
I think we all can see what happens if the Fed does not start printing soon.

I thought I'd throw in a little humor after yesterday's post. I frequent a news aggregator and excellent market monitor website called Finviz (www.finviz.com). This morning when I pulled it up to check the list of news items, I found these two headlines posted 1st and 2nd respectively:

"Private sector [adds] 209,000 jobs in March" LINK
"Yahoo lays off 2,000 employees" LINK

I just love that. The 1st metric comes from the monthly ADP payroll report. This report is commonly understood to be even less reliable than the monthly BLS employment report. I did some research a while back on how ADP calculates its numbers and discovered that they use similar algorithmic modelling as the BLS. I think that tells you all you need to know about the ADP monthly report. Note also that it is clearly stated as an "estimate."

Yahoo, on the other hand, is reporting jobs that have already been chopped. Now they have to inform the chop-ees. I suspect we'll see a lot more reports of big companies cutting jobs. I'm sure Yahoo isn't done yet for the year as well.

I wanted to stop there today, but I came across this revealing blog piece from Felix Salmon. In terms of systemic liquidity and the question of whether or not the Fed will roll out QE3 (I think we all know the true answer to that), Salmon has a chart you have to look at which shows syndicated bank lending by quarter. Syndicated bank loans - which is the big corporate loan market - are starting to cliff dive. This means that corporations are not funding new projects AND that banks are not lending to new projects. To make this data even uglier, most of the syndicated lending that has occurred - 70% in fact - has been refinancing older, higher interest rate debt. Not only are the banks NOT providing liquidity to the corporate market, but only a small relative percentage of the lending is "new blood" lending. Here's the LINK

Batten down the hatches. It could get really ugly for awhile...
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There's No Painless Way Out

Uncle Sam's bills of almost $4tn per year relative to his income of just over $2tn means that he does what most American's do - he borrows money - and it is this simple fact that underpins the reasoning that there is no painless way out of the mountain of debt that we have amassed over the last few decades. While none of this is new, the straightforward nature of this video's message makes it hard to argue, from anything other than an ivory tower, that this supposed self-sustaining print-and/or-borrow-fest can go on forever. Paying off your mortgage with your credit card remains the clearest analogy of what is occurring and while the Mutually Assured Destruction case is made again and again for why the analogous credit-card-providers will never halt our limit, it seems increasingly clear that the fiat money fiasco has switched regimes to chaos rather than the apparent nominal calmness of the great moderation.


Is this country run by geniuses, or what? 

Ben says...

Fed Minutes, Gold Manipulation & Fool’s Play
April 3, 2012, at 7:30 pm
by Eric King in the category King World News | Print This Post | Email This Post

Courtesy of www.KingWorldNews.com

Dear CIGAs,

On the heels of the release of the Fed minutes, today legendary trader and investor Jim Sinclair told King World News the release of the Fed minutes and subsequent market reaction in gold was orchestrated. Sinclair also said this is government manipulation against the tide of the bull market and it will be overrun. Here is what Sinclair had to say about what transpired today in the gold market: “The tactic is always the same. The gold banks enter the COMEX and offer more gold for sale at the market than has been mined in the last five years. Immediately, the locals (pit traders) try to run in front and hit any bids they happen to have on their book or are out there in order to get the price down.”

Jim Sinclair continues:

“Gold tanks down to the $1,640 level and now the brokers for the gold banks begin to enter the market to cover shorts to reduce the short position taken, and most likely to completely flatten it on the day. This has been going on from 1968 to 1980 and it’s also been going on from 2001 to today.

The net effect is absolutely nothing. The idea that there is a significant, improving economy directly in front of us is absolutely, completely and utterly a fabrication. The only reason car sales are firm is because they are giving away easy credit out there, so much so that even my dogs could buy a Cadillac Escalade….

“The markets are being run right in front of your eyes. Trading gold has never been easy and if you can’t stand the heat, you have to get out of the kitchen. You have to have courage and know that you are right. You have to look at today as a fool’s play.

This was completely orchestrated and enhanced by mainstream financial media. It was operated on the exchange and covered by the close. Shame on them. QE to infinity is as sure as death and taxes and all the way through this sage of QE to infinity there will be denial of its use.

Click here to read the full written interview…

Click here to hear the full interview...
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Fed - Actions Speak Louder Than Words
By: Axel G. Merk, Merk Investments

Investors may be taken for a ride by today’s Minutes of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), which expand on the FOMC’s March 13, 2012 statement; in the interim, we believe the Federal Reserve (Fed) Chairman Bernanke has gone out of his way to assure the markets that monetary policy will remain “highly accommodative,” at least through late 2014.

The Fed does indeed have a credibility problem: having assured investors that rates will remain low for an extended period, it may only take one or two FOMC members to turn more optimistic about the economic outlook to cause the markets to more aggressively price-in tighter monetary policy. Conversely, Bernanke has made it clear that he is most concerned about a recovery in the housing market and that low interest rates – throughout the yield curve – are desirable. Operation Twist is specifically aimed to achieve that, lowering long-term rates and flattening the yield curve. However, should investors become increasingly optimistic about economic improvement, odds increase that investors sell bonds, putting upward pressure on long-term rates.

To understand the Fed’s “communication strategy”, one needs to be aware of who is calling the shots. We are not just talking about Fed Chairman Bernanke, but also the composition of voting FOMC members. Without a doubt, the “hawks” (hawks are FOMC members considered to favor tighter monetary policy compared to “doves”) on the FOMC are getting more vocal. At the same time, the only voting “hawk” on the FOMC this year is Richmond Fed President Jeff Lacker:


The scale may tilt a tad towards the centrist/hawkish side should Congress fill the two vacant seats with the candidates under consideration. Still, when all is said and done, it is the voting members who ultimately determine imminent monetary policy decisions, rather than the noise created by non-voting members. And those actions remain, in our interpretation, decisively on the dovish side:

  • “almost all members again agreed to…maintain a highly accommodative stance…”
  • “a number of members perceived a non-negligible risk that improvements in employment could diminish as the year progressed”

Obviously, should economic data continue to surprise to the upside, the Fed will have an ever-more difficult time defending its dovish position. The credibility of the Fed will be seriously tested as the Fed has committed to keeping rates low until late 2014. However, should we enter a weak patch, we believe the odds are rather high that the FOMC will “take out insurance” against another slowdown. In a world where everyone hopes for the best, but plans for the worst, central banks around the world – including the Fed - may keep the world awash in money.

After all, a world laden with debt may need inflation if deflation is to be avoided. Bernanke has argued many times that tightening monetary policy too early was one of the biggest mistakes the Fed made during the Great Depression. We don’t think Bernanke will repeat this. Indeed, we consider he will err firmly on the side of inflation. As such, when the dust settles, look at actions, not words. We see doves, not hawks, managing the monetary aviary.
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Jim Sinclair’s Commentary

The transparency of today and yesterday:

To put things into perspective, who did Financial TV interview on yesterday’s FOMC statement from the Fed? Of course, it was the only hawk on the board, Lacker.

Ten other members are ignored because what they would say would not fit with the market play the five leading US banks executed in the market yesterday and today.

The transparency of the charade is so clear that it reflects an egomaniacal approach to all markets. Those who the gods wish to destroy they make mad first. Egomania is madness. A sociopath acts as if they were a demon.

An egomaniac sociopath would take great joy in showing the world who is the boss. There will be great toasting on $1000 bottles of wine at a special Italian restaurant in New York tonight.

If you have no margin you will prevail.
If you deal on margin you are toast.
If you have margin get rid of it.
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Gold Market Like a Coiled Spring Ready to Explode to the Upside
April 2, 2012, at 11:02 pm
by Eric King in the category King World News | Print This Post | Email This Post

Dear CIGAs,

Eric King of www.KingWorldNews.com has been kind enough to interview me once again on the actions in the gold market and how it has turned after hitting the low two weeks ago.

Click here to listen to the full interview on KingWorldNews.com…

The following is courtesy of KingWorldNews.com:

Today legendary trader and

Continue reading Gold Market Like a Coiled Spring Ready to Explode to the Upside
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Got Gold You Can Hold?

Got Silver You Can Squeeze?

It's NOT Too Late To Accumulate!

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