Free Republic

State Treasurer Bill Lockyer asked the California attorney general Monday to investigate whether school officials were breaking the law by hiring banks and their political strategists to promote bond measures before voters. Lockyer did not name the schools or banks involved in these deals. But some of the examples he describes in a letter to Attorney General Kamala Harris are the same as the Register found in place at Placentia-Yorba Linda Unified in a recent investigation.

Between Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke, they have helped to produce huge asset bubbles through monetary easing. Take, for example, the FNC 30 RPI house price index and the Fed Funds rate since January 2000. Greespan retired on January 31, 2006 and Bernanke took over. THAT is an asset bubble! According to the Beige Book, the U.S. economy expanded at a modest to moderate pace across most of the country amid rising consumer demand for homes and autos, the Federal Reserve said. (Did they mean “investor demand for homes”?) But housing isn’t the only bubble created by The Fed. The...

Is the U.S. Becoming a Banana Republic Politics / US PoliticsMarch 05, 2013 - 02:40 PM GMT By: Michael Pento It is sad to say there are just two reasons why the U.S. is not yet a banana republic. The first reason is that the US dollar has not yet lost its world’s reserve currency status, which is helping to keep interest rates at record low levels. If the dollar, yen and euro were not involved in a currency war, the dollar’s intrinsic decline would become much more evident, causing domestic inflation to soar, and our bond market to immediately...

Yes, on February 22nd Moody’s lowered the bond rating for UK debt from AAA to Aa1. The result between February 22nd and today? The yield curve for UK sovereign bonds has fallen. I compare the US Treasury yield curve over the same time period with the UK Sovereign curve. The US yield curve shows a much smaller decline which, of course, was not downgraded. Yet. The UK 5 year credit default swaps (CDS) has fallen from 51 on February 21st to 47.30 on March 1st. If you look at the time distribution of UK sovereign debt, they have a big...

Japan goes full Bernanke and will probably pick a monetary dove as Bank of Japan governor while sequestration remains in play in the USA. Feb. 25 (Bloomberg) — Japan’s five-year note yields slid to an all-time low as the government neared a decision on who will run the central bank and expand monetary easing measures. Ten-year yields slid to a two-month low while the yen fell against all its major peers. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is likely to nominate Asian Development Bank President Haruhiko Kuroda as Bank of Japan governor and Kikuo Iwata as a deputy at the central bank,...

BOND GOD: The World Is Changing, And Bonds Are The Most Overbought I've Seen In My 55 Year Career Joe WeisenthalFeb. 3, 2013, 12:05 PMFor years, investors have watched in disbelief as the 30-year bull market in fixed-income assets has raged on, leaving bears in the dust. The bond skeptics are having another moment, as talk grows of a "great rotation" from bonds into equities, as rates finally start to rise, and the economy turns back into the old normal. Dan Fuss of Loomis Sayles is the third bond fund manager to be called a "bond god" (the other two...

Will the Fed End QE Summer 2013? Interest-Rates / Quantitative EasingJan 30, 2013 - 07:30 PM GMT By: Money Morning Jeff Uscher writes: Amid all of the hoopla over the Standard & Poor's 500 Index touching 1,500 on Friday, it seems few people noticed that the yield on 10-year U.S. Treasury bonds has risen to within a couple of basis points of 2%. That is nearly 30 basis points higher than it was one month ago and 10 basis points higher than one year ago. It seems as if the bond market is beginning to price in higher inflation at...

GERALD CELENTE: The Financial Collapse Of 2013 Will Be Worse Than The Great Depression Sam RoDec. 23, 2012, 5:07 AM Forget the Mayan Apocalypse. Gerald Celente, the popular trends forecaster of Trends Research, cites the work of a former Treasury official and warns that the bonds are in a massive bubble that will burst in 2013 in what will be a financial collapse like nothing we've seen before. He recently spoke about it in an interview with King World News: This piece is being penned by Dr. Paul Craig Roberts, the former Assistant Treasury Secretary under Ronald Reagan. And he...

<p>We have Republican Rep. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota to thank for that bon mot—a play on the name of outgoing Chinese President Hu Jintao—about the country's massive holdings of U.S. Treasury debt. But, while America's dependence on the largess of foreigners is greater than ever, China's role is quietly receding.</p>

Obama proposed this last year and now its back on the table: This week, the Wall Street Journal’s John D. McKinnon and Andrew Ackerman are reporting that House Speaker John Boehner “is willing to consider curbing the tax-exempt status of municipal-bond interest, subject to negotiations with the White House.” Reality check...the only reason investors buy muni bonds is because of the tax exempt status. They pay less interest than other bonds that are already taxed so if they are gonna tax the muni's....might as well get the higher interest rate. So what happens then? Local, county and state municipalities will...

The financial disaster of the loss of over one Trillion Taxpayer Dollars per year by the incompetent financial stewardship of Benghazi-Coward B. Hussein Obama continues without significant opposition by the cowardly US House of Representatives. Sobber of the House Boehner is so fearful of the negative opinions that will always come from the Commie Liberal Agenda Media, (CLAM), that Boehner is willing to tearfully impale himself on Obama's threat of a veto just to "save" America from not getting a "Deal" by the end of 2012. Conservatives do not want a "Deal." What we want is for the US House...

Another bond-buying program seems likely as the Federal Reserve tries to boost the economy. But long term, it will lead to higher interest rates, inflation and bond market turmoil.

More than 200 school districts across California are taking a second look at the high price of the debt they've taken on using risky financial arrangements. Collectively, the districts have borrowed billions in loans that defer payments for years — leaving many districts owing far more than they borrowed.

SAN LUIS OBISPO, Calif. (MarketWatch) — Big money managers are warning investors. They’re now citing the Bible: “Seven lean years.” No recovery till 2016. That was Jeremy Grantham back a few years ago. His GMO firm manages $104 billion. Now Bill Gross and Mohamed El-Erian, the co-CEOs at the $2 trillion Pimco money managers, are citing the same biblical warning to jar investors awake and prepare for the coming lean years of slow, low growth and austerity. Except in Pimco’s new warning, the future just got much, much darker for investors — no recovery until 2022. Earlier in the summer...

PIMCO: 'THE US WILL GET DOWNGRADED' Rob WileOctober 18, 2012 PIMCO has seen enough of the federal government's "fiscal theatre" and now says the U.S.'s credit rating will inevitably be slashed, Bloomberg's Tracy Withers reports. “The U.S. will get downgraded, it’s a question of when,” Withers quotes Scott Mather, Pimco’s head of global portfolio management, as saying. “It depends on what the end of the year looks like, but it could be fairly soon after that.” If President Obama is reelected, Mather said, it's likely resolution of the country's deficit “doesn’t happen in a nice way, and we have disruption...

Regardless of who the President is after this close election, the equity markets and the U.S. economy are in trouble. Debt has spread throughout the Western world. The fallout is political dissonance, growing economic hardship and, in some places, mob violence.Ground zero for the spreading fear and panic is Greece, which was once the worldÂ’s greatest civilization and the birthplace of democracy, poetry and philosophy.There is violent evidence of the contradiction from what the ancients taught and what is unraveling in Greece. It would all just be another boring story at the end of the news day, except there is...

The picture below shows $15 trillion dollars worth of $100 bills on $10 million dollar pallets stacked on top of each other over an area that is one third larger than a regulation football field. An electronics van is parked between the stack and the Statue of Liberty. A single $100 million dollar pallet rests in front of the truck’s cab. See it?Recently, I reported that the Federal Reserve Bank (FED) secretly gave ten trillion dollars of interest-free loans to over a dozen European banks to shore up the Euro and keep them financially solvent. I later found out that...

QE3 certainly has wreaked havoc on the agency mortgage-backed securities market. The Fannie Mae 30 year current coupon (rate to MBS investors on new Fannie MBS) spread over 10 year Treasures has gone NEGATIVE! As in -3.65 basis points. But if we compare the Fannie 30 year current coupon to 5 year Treasury yields, we have a positive yield spread of about 100 basis points. Meanwhile, Fannie Mae 3.5 MBS duration just went negative! So, The Fed’s QInfinity has really done a number on MBS yields … and risk. MBS investors may be lining up to dump agency MBS on...

Japanese Finance Ministry To Japanese Bondholders: You’re Screwed! Wolf Richter, Testosterone PitSep. 25, 2012, 7:53 AMThis has got to be the icing on the Japanese cake. The otherwise bland website of the Japanese Ministry of Finance, more specifically the FAQ page on government bonds, has been catapulted to stardom on Facebook and Twitter. Not in a good way. As you flip through the MoF’s website, page after page, you will mostly see zero Facebook likes and zero tweets. Social media and the MoF ignore each other. But go to the FAQ page, to item 4, Government bonds. Under the second...

Beijing Hints At Bond Attack On JapanThe Telegraph (UK)Evans Ambrose-Pritchard A senior advisor to the Chinese government has called for an attack on the Japanese bond market to precipitate a funding crisis and bring the country to its knees, unless Tokyo reverses its decision to nationalise the disputed Senkaku/Diaoyu islands in the East China Sea. Jin Baisong from the Chinese Academy of International Trade – a branch of the commerce ministry – said China should use its power as Japan’s biggest creditor with $230bn (£141bn) of bonds to “impose sanctions on Japan in the most effective manner” and bring Tokyo’s...