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From Zero Hedge: While Paul Singer, Kyle Bass, and Stan Druckenmiller got the headlines, there were in total 14 worthwhile speakers at yesterday’s Ira Sohn Conference. Though many of the themes were unsurprising, it is nonetheless useful to compare your own views to those of these professional money managers who are now bludgeoned daily by the ‘idiot-maker’ rally… of course, that is, until they are proved 100% correct. Jones Trading Recap of Ira [...] from FT: It is easier to make money than sense out of China’s banks. These big four state-owned commercial banks are huge profit centres, but many who see vulnerabilities in China’s economy think that these banks are the problem when they actually reflect symptoms of distortions elsewhere. China’s banks are in fact too secure – and their performance could be improved by strengthening competition and breaking up the “too big to [...] The Fed is worried about overheating markets, CEOs Worry About ‘Uncertainty’, investors worry about tax hikes and spending cut, no one is worry about Debt Time Bomb and inflation.
You can’t make this up: Federal Reserve officials now say they’re worried about “overheating markets” Federal Reserve officials are voicing increased concern that record-low interest rates are overheating markets for assets from farmland to junk bonds, which could heighten risks when they reverse their [...]  from Michael A. Gayed: The decline in the S&P 500 and worldwide equities has been unrelenting so far this month, as the corrective risks I highlighted Oct. 1 and in every single writing since then have abruptly ended the reflation trade post QE3. On Nov. 5 I began pounding the table to ” forget the elections ” on the stark warning price was signaling through the return of [...] From FT: It’s not so much that monetary policy is ineffective. Rather, people expect too much from it. Indeed, I would argue that unconventional policies create distortions that make an early return to economic health rather unlikely Read more In a new report entitled Gold: Adjusting For Zero, Deutsche Bank analysts Daniel Brebner and Xiao Fu paint an incredibly dark picture of the bind the global economy is in right now.
Brebner and Xiao are pretty frank about how levered up the financial system is at the moment, and they warn that the next shock will be totally involuntary and unexpected. Here is what the analysts have to say about how upside down the world is [...] From Goldman’s Dirk Schumacher ECB meeting: Introducing the OMT The announcements made at today’s ECB press conference were broadly in line with our expectations. An overwhelming majority of the Governing Council agreed to “address severe distortions in government bond markets, which originate from, in particular, unfounded fears on the part of investors of the reversibility of the Euro”. We view the ECB’s determination to provide a “fully effective backstop” as credible and, [...] Optimism has seized stock markets in the past month on the back of better economic data in the United States and a late-summer lull in the euro crisis. Market volatility is at its lowest level in years.
BofA’s top economist Ethan Harris says investors shouldn’t be fooled in a pretty downbeat note to clients – he thinks the U.S. economy is “in the eye of the storm” right now. Here is what Harris sees on [...] by Simon Black of Sovereign Man blog, Last Friday, US Congressman Dennis Kucinich introduced HR 6357, a bill which aims to ‘prohibit the extrajudicial killing of United States citizens’ by the federal government. In other words, in the Land of the Free, they need to pass a law to prevent the government from indiscriminately murdering its own citizens. Now if this doesn’t give one reason to pause and consider the distortions of liberty that have taken place in [...] From Economic Policy Journal: Anyone who understands basic economics and how interventionist government leads to greater interventionist government knew this was going to happen. Market price signals are destroyed, supply and demand distortions start to occur, and the regulative power centers are captured by insiders. Costs go up, care goes down, and the only solution the interventionists can think of are more interventions. WSJ has the details: So Boston’s latest adventure deserves particular scrutiny, since [...] Intentional distortions of one of the world’s most important financial benchmarks has sparked a worldwide scandal. What’s more, suggestions that central banks knew about manipulations of the London Interbank Offered Rate (LIBOR) and looked the other way have led many to accuse central banks of failing in their duty of keeping the financial markets working properly. Manipulations of the LIBOR rate, while minuscule to most individuals, had much more substantial effects in the money markets, [...] China’s slowdown dragged Hong Kong’s retail-sales growth to the weakest pace since 2009 as shoppers visiting from the mainland cut back on purchases of luxury goods such as jewelry and watches. Sales increased 8.8 percent in May from a year earlier to HK$36 billion ($4.6 billion), the government said on its website yesterday. That was the smallest gain since September 2009, excluding seasonal distortions each January and February. The deceleration of Asia’s [...] Fortune Magazine’s Katherine Eban has a major scoop this morning, reporting that the notorious “Fast and Furious” operation was really focused on halting gun sales at the border with phony purchases—and not intended to track guns into Mexican drug cartels.
For years, the media has reported that the operation was a botched attempt to go after the Sinaloa drug cartel. According to that version of the story, in 2010, American Border Agent [...] US and European regulators are essentially forcing banks to buy up their own government’s debt—a move that could end up making the debt crisis even worse, a Citigroup analysis says. Regulators are allowing banks to escape counting their country’s debt against capital requirements and loosening other rules to create a steady market for government bonds, the study says. While that helps governments issue more and more debt, the strategy could ultimately explode [...] Typical distortions. Not intellectual honest enough to fight on a factual basis. http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2…ref=fpnewsfeed BRIAN BEUTLER APRIL 17, 2012, 1:45 PM 2853 45 It may be a political winner, but it’s a deeply flawed way to look at budgeting, as even [...] kingworldnews.com John Williams, of Shadowstats, notes that manipulated government statistics are not changing the fact that the true SGS Unemployment Measure now sits at a staggering 22.2%. Williams also demonstrates that despite the hype from Wall Street about a recovery, parts of the economy remain collapsed. Here is what Williams had to say about the situation: “Adding the SGS estimate of excluded long-term discouraged workers back into the total unemployed and labor [...] By Chris Oliver, MarketWatch Reuters A circuit board production line in Suining, China. HONG KONG (MarketWatch) — Chinese industrial companies reported weaker profits in the first two months of the year — the first such broad earnings drop since 2009 — stoking fresh concerns the economy hit a soft patch after rebounding in the final quarter of last year. Data released by the National Bureau of Statistics on Tuesday showed the [...] Almost all of the news items about George Zimmerman and Trayvon Martin contains a combination of false statements, opinions presented as facts, transparent distortions, and a complete absence of some of the most relevant details. Almost all news items are written solely from the point of view of the grieving family. The media also fills their articles with outdated baby-faced pictures of Trayvon. Very few include that he was a [...] Typical distortions. http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2…ref=fpnewsfeed SAHIL KAPUR MARCH 15, 2012, 2:09 PM 3804 31 by Adam Taylor A second round of quantitative easing in the UK will leave the country’s pension funds £90 billion ($141 billion) out of pocket, the National Association of Pension Funds (NAPF) announced on the third anniversary of QE in the UK. Joanne Segars, Chief executive of NAPF, said: “Businesses running final salary pensions are being clouted by QE. Deficits that were already big now look even bigger because of its artificial distortions. “Pension funds want [...] By Chris Oliver, MarketWatch HONG KONG — Rival Chinese manufacturing surveys released Thursday indicated mild improvement in February, though underling data showed surging input prices and deteriorating new orders, suggesting further weakening in the nation’s economy. The closely watched manufacturing Purchasing Managers’ Index (PMI) for February rose to 51.0 on the 100-point scale, up from 50.5 in January, according to the government-backed China Federation of Logistics & Purchasing. The result, [...] By David Marsh, MarketWatch LONDON — The world’s greatest macroeconomic imbalances are not between the U.S. and China, as many believe, but within the not-so-united states of Europe. This is just one result of the currency and competitive distortions caused by what German Chancellor Angela Merkel calls the “common destiny” of economic and monetary union. Destabilizing European current-account imbalances will need to be eliminated, sooner [...] by Robert Paulson Title: How the USA got to where it finds itself, why the full faith and credit of governments is inferior to real assets and how we can fix it once and for all I used to think like a statist, and I used to agree with them. It’s appealing to redistribute wealth, especially when it’s not fairly achieved. But what I’ve realized is that the solution [...] Bob Chapman The debauching of currencies worldwide goes on with great abandon, and of course, leading the pack in the US, UK and Europe. What these countries and others are doing is awakening the hidden forces of inflation and destroying the value of their currencies. In Europe the Germans, over the past six months, have said at the polls they do not want to [...] European & U.S. Bank Leverage Central bankers are in the business of “currency manipulation,” James Grant, editor of Grant’s Interest Rate Observer, told CNBC Thursday. He wants a “modernized, 21st century gold standard that checks [...] |
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