Posted on 06/08/2014 6:42:22 PM PDT by Perseverando
Never in my 30+ year career as a market observer have I seen so many out on a limb which is about to be SAWED OFF. Those who live within the matrix are fully loaded for a recovery which is not and will not appear. Nominally the Main stream media can proclaim ECONOMIC recovery has arrived, point to the rising developed world stock markets, seemingly benign bond markets of all categories: sovereign, investment grade and Junk, Private equity, corporate buy backs and more have priced in “Happy Days are here again”. HFT, unrestrained leverage in a financially repressed world and Quantitative easing have done the rest in pushing financial assets to heights rarely, if ever, seen. Volatility is at all-time lows in most markets and investor confidence at superhuman levels. Like a boat where all the passengers are on one side of the boat and it is about to capsize, investors similarly have no fear.
“In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.”
- Friedrich Nietzsche
The central banks have created moral hazard on a scale which is simply unbelievable and set a stage for a bonfire of the vanities seldom, if ever, seen in history. In fact, nothing I can see rivals it.
“Over a protracted period of good times, capitalist economies tend to move from a financial structure dominated by hedge finance units to a structure in which there is a large weight to units engaged in speculative and Ponzi finance. . . . The greater the weight of speculative and Ponzi finance, the smaller the overall margins of safety in the economy and the greater the fragility of the financial structure.”
- Hyman Minsky, 1992
Professional Investors who have spent a lifetime playing these contrarian opportunities offered by human behavior are being carried out on stretchers as historic market behaviors fail to materialize. So the financial imbalances and historic overvaluations just grow and grow and when they are resolved only God knows. In my opinion, it isn’t materializing because many markets are manipulated, pure and simple, with and without the assistance of the central banks, government regulators and the bankster financial community. As long as the results and consequent headlines are politically correct there are no consequences to be feared, they will be allowed to continue. Politicians HATED markets because they used to expose them as the liars they are. NO MORE as they are now in the hands of megalomaniac’s and sociopaths who don’t know the difference between right and wrong.
“Sometimes the law defends plunder and participates in it. Sometimes the law even places the whole apparatus of judges, police, prisons and gendarmes at the service of the plunderers, and treats the victim, when he defends himself, as a criminal. But often the masses are plundered and do not even know it.”
- Frédéric Bastiat
The masses are being plundered on a scale which is inconceivable and unmatched in history; it is the source of the middle classes dying in the developed world. The developed world has become a well-disguised plantation of serfs and slaves. They are given nothing to store and save their labor in as the currency they hold are printed endlessly and have no reserves to back them and are redeemable in NOTHING, contrary to every sound currency in history. Modern day money is nothing less than a wealth confiscation scheme run by morally and fiscally bankrupt central banks and governments against their own citizens.
Is there any human activity where you are not taxed today in one way or another? Is there any major financial holding which people own free and clear of annual taxes or don’t have to share any gain with the masters in central governments? They are your partners in everything even though you performed the work to buy your assets. The government has given the working man nothing in exchange for sharing in the profits or appreciation. Government services such as roads, schools, sewers, police and courts are paid for out of taxes.
“None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.”
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
As long as big government progressives, elites, the main stream media, and banksters can manipulate and control the reality for the vast majority of citizens they tell themselves they are doing a public good. Fredric Bastiat described this nexus well:
“Sometimes the law defends plunder and participates in it. Sometimes the law even places the whole apparatus of judges, police, prisons and gendarmes at the service of the plunderers, and treats the victim, when he defends himself, as a criminal. But often the masses are plundered and do not even know it.”
- Frédéric Bastiat
Throughout the developed world, progressive governments have created huge welfare states that have crippled the futures of the people under whom they were meant to place a safety net. Now, it is a permanent way of life for them and the rolls are exploding daily.
“See if the law takes from some persons what belongs to them, and gives it to other persons to whom it does not belong. See if the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what the citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime. Then abolish this law without delay. If such a law is not abolished immediately it will spread, multiply and develop into a system.”
- French economist Frederic Bastiat (1801-1850)
This is the system in the developed world today and it will not be stopped except by Mother Nature and Darwin. These programs have now created a class of people who have no ability to rise and prosper in life: they have no skills, no ability to produce more than they consume, and do not know the source of their inability to do so. They are told their lack of success is someone else’s fault. They are crippled intentionally to be victims of the elites who wish to prey on them and their ignorance. They have been provided a POTEMKIN FAKE education by public schools who FAIL to provide them the educations necessary to rise through adversity and in life. These FAKE educations have ONLY one goal as outlined by George Carlin:
“…But I’ll tell you what they don’t want. They DON’T want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well-informed, well-educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that, that doesn’t help them. That’s against their interests. That’s right. They don’t want people who are smart enough to sit around the kitchen table and figure out how badly they’re getting F#CKED by system that threw them overboard 30 f#ckin’ years ago. They don’t want that. You know what they want? They want OBEDIENT WORKERS. OBEDIENT WORKERS. People who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork, and just dumb enough to passably accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits, the end of overtime, and the vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it.”
- George Carlin
Is this not the world we live in today? These words were said over 15 years ago. The USEFUL idiots as Lenin called them have no ability to think, manufactured by public school monopolies (which I call indoctrination/brain washing centers) and told they have been born with the right to all of their basic needs provided by the government:
“It is not an endlessly expanding list of rights —the “right” to an education; the “right” to health care; the “right” to food and housing. That is not freedom. That is dependency. Those are not rights. Those are the rations of slavery – hay and a barn for human cattle.”
- Alexis de Tocqueville
They believe the impossible dream that they have the right to live their lives at the expense of others and will vote for the people that tell them this is so and use a government gun to make it happen. Most of society today does not know: where money comes from, what it is or isn’t in a historical or practical sense, how wealth is created, the virtues of capitalism and wealth creation, why it’s important to stay debt free and live within your means, why they should work hard and never give up, why save money, why it’s important to be self-reliant, what the constitution is and why it’s important to protect our freedom and future, nor economics of any sort but socialism and Keynesianism (central government control of all aspects of life also known as Marxism).
In my estimation this means they are functually ILLITERATE to life’s basic requirements to grow and thrive as a human in society. They couldn’t be less prepared to meet life’s challenges. The school systems are designed to create peasants and serfs to socialism. Not educated, self-reliant and independent citizens. Prior generations such as mine where taught all these things. We want it restored, and now are labeled extremists and terrorists for insisting on it. This teaching of socialism labeled democracy has led to very destructive behavior:
Democratic institutions awaken and foster a passion for equality which they can never entirely satisfy. This complete equality eludes the grasp of the people at the very moment they think that they have grasped it… the people are excited in the pursuit of an advantage, which is more precious because it is not sufficiently near to be enjoyed. Democratic institutions strongly tend to promote the feeling of envy. A depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom.
- Alexis de Tocqueville, 1825
This is the agenda of the voting public with the president and his minions in congress and the bureaucracy as his supporters. I have never seen an administration so dedicated to dividing people and attacking the private economy which is the basis of future prosperity. Progressives in Government espouse the gospel of Carl Marx even though they never say so explicitly:
“The whole gospel of Karl Marx can be summed up in a single sentence: Hate the man who is better off than you are. Never under any circumstances admit that his success may be due to his own efforts, to the productive contribution he has made to the whole community. Always attribute his success to the exploitation, the cheating, the more or less open robbery of others. Never under any circumstances admit that your own failure may be owing to your own weakness, or that the failure of anyone else may be due to his own defects, to his laziness, incompetence, improvidence or simple stupidity.”
- Henry Hazlitt on envy and Marxism
This is from where progressives derive their power as this is what the public is taught in public schools. They are a generation of unaccountable victims. Government does not create prosperity or wealth, it destroys prosperity and wealth… correction: it CONSUMES them.
Several weeks ago, I commented on the $30 trillion dollars ($30 million million dollars printed out of THIN air) of new debt which has been created since the nadir of the Global Financial Crisis in late 2008. This has created the greatest fire hose of HOT money zooming around the world in history. Too much money chasing too few opportunities is repressing yields and returns. Combine this with deliberate FINANCIAL REPRESSION by banksters and governments as they transfer the returns from prudent savers to themselves to fill in the insolvency their Reserveless banking systems created. Trillions of dollars of unpaid interest has flowed to insolvent governments and banks during this period and continues to do so as REAL inflation eats the money the public is paid in and stores its wealth in. While bankers and governments borrow money for nothing, false government inflation statistics hide the theft from the public (see www.shadowstats.com).
“You never want to let a serious crisis go to waste.”
- Rahm Emanuel, February 9, 2009
This debt has been disguised as GDP by the governments of the world while they used the crisis not to reform themselves but, instead, to implement new and innovative ways to loot and enslave the publics they claim to serve by increasing taxes, taking regulations to levels of suffocation of private enterprise (moving this demand to connected crony capitalists), removing freedoms and taking confiscation of private property to new extremes. An insidious process, and exactly opposite of the recipe for economic recovery. They have destroyed the human spirit of hope, hard work, and tenacity as they destroy the incentives to do so.
“When people who earn more than the average have their ‘surplus,’ or the greater part of it, seized from them in taxes, and when people who earn less than the average have the deficiency, or the greater part of it, turned over to them in hand?outs and doles, the production of all must sharply decline; for the energetic and able lose their incentive to produce more than the average and the slothful and unskilled lose their incentive to improve their condition.”
- Henry Hazlitt
In the process, creating a society of misery spread widely (definition of socialism):
No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable.”
- Adam Smith
Is this not the mood of the vast majority of the developed world? And they are giving up in record numbers, succumbing to the hopelessness in the world their elite masters have created for them.
“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.”
- Carl Sagan
In closing, the greatest top in economic activity and leverage in human history has been in the making since 2000. When the leverage FAILS, the world’s developed economies will be thrust into the next leg of the cleansing process of deleveraging which began in 2000, made another top in 2008 and now this time. The leverage is far greater now than it was at the 2000, and the 2007/2008 highs. The destruction of it will be equally bigger. The world has slipped below the proverbial event horizon of a Black hole, slipping closer and closer to the final denouement of the insanity running amok today.
Then, we will have a time of great economic and social turmoil as what has gone before slides to its doom. Then, a great reformation will emerge just as it did in China after the cultural revolution failed in 1976 and then with Deng Xiaoping in 1989 when he said “to get rich is glorious” and he unleashed the human spirit in China and wealth creation exploded. Don’t you think similar epiphany’s lie in the future after the socialist welfare states of the world collapse?
“Political ideas that have dominated the public mind for decades cannot be refuted through rational arguments, they must run their course in life and cannot collapse otherwise than in great catastrophe.”
- Ludwig Von Mises
This conclusion is firmly on the horizon; let’s call it the great INSANITY. I believe this version is the greatest in history and will be written about for centuries. Those that forget history are doomed to repeat it and this time is no different. However, there is always great opportunity with great danger as the greatest transfer of wealth from these that hold it in paper to those that don’t is underway and there is nothing that can stop it. The sociopaths and elites have no ability to turn the ship of states around as their policies have created the collapse. While this is a manmade disaster, it is most definitely the greatest opportunity in history for those that see it and adjust their behavior accordingly. Don’t ever forget, THEY WILL PRINT THE MONEY!
They have a negative interest rate. You figure it out.
ask the people of Cyprus what happens when government/bankers change the bank rules and don’t want you to pull your money out of the banks
You didn’t answer the question, but then I didn’t really expect it.
Classical historians cannot explain why the bubble hasn't "burst" in 600 years. We have seen three giant leaps in prices 1400, 1700/1800, and 1980s-present. If you hold the market basket of goods constant, the burst of inflation never receded. Rather it coincides with these technological or organizational changes in society.
The Keynesians don't explain it because gov't isn't involved.
I think the term Bankster should go the way of the dodo.
The markets will be propped-up, and will continue to climb, for as long as Obama is in the White House.
After that, watch out.
Terrific article. Makes one want to weep.
Interesting because every time my wife and I have gone back to visit family over the past 20 years - prices have been higher. The deflation came in the form of business activities - infrastructure, financial, real estate. but as we are doing in the US today, prices for core necessities have continued to rise in Japan.
Japan and the US have the same issue an over-regulated, bifurcated economy - deflationary businesses outside of core necessities (ie food, fuel, utilities). with core being inflationary.
Billionaire elites are the landlords of the world. They just allow everyone else to rent some space.
Right. And the government appoints the people who run it, and can disestablish it and cancel the debt anytime it wants to do so. But they don't have to because the Fed is creating money, buying debt and "retiring" it already. About half the bonds the government sells are bought and retired by the Fed. It's just an indirect way of printing money, and Congress can deny doing it.
No they don't. The Fed simply retires however much debt they need to. It's just a shell game that allows the government to create (nobody bothers to print it anymore) money to spend while denying they are doing so.
Wondering how many of those suicide/murdered/dead bankers of late were investment bankers.
That's my investment portfolio for the past 5 years.
QE is winding down in the government. In the private sector, the U.S. is under-going massive economic revolutions such as: Oilfield fracking, Hyper-farming, Web 3.0, Cloud Computing/storage, Big Data, Entertainment Data Streaming (e.g. HBO Go and Netflix), the private Space Race (e.g. Rutan’s Virgin Galactic and Musk’s SpaceX), Electric cars (e.g. Tesla), 3D printing, DNA Programming for medicine, Genetically Modified (GM) seeds, and Crowd-funding.
I do not share your opinion that technology, especially as it relates to economy. is all that a nation is made of. There are many other factors: Political stability, government type, homogeneity, absence or presence of war, personal freedoms, invasion and immigration, presence or absence of morals, and a faith in the currency, to name just a few.
Rome is a great example of a country that had a vast technological edge. They adapted or invented the following: The aqueduct, the connecting-rod sawmill, the screw press, the construction crane, dams, indoor plumbing, the five-pulley-crane, the ballista mounted on the cart, their platoon tactics... the list goes on.
Yet, they collapsed. Theories abound as to why, but several prominent ones are the debasing of their currency, the introduction of too many immigrants to hold societal cohesion, and others too numerous to list here.
In a much shorter time frame, Germany collapsed under Hitler. They, Germany, were the world leaders in technology, sciences, and culture. Their leaders and their policies doomed them, however.
A nation is far more than a simple economy and the technologies that contribute to it. I postulate we are likely to see something akin to a collapse for reasons that barely touch technology and economy at all.
To this point: Now, why do I think that you are going to go into Denial and Anger and the other stages of grief based on the good news that I point out above? ...because I think that the people who are depressed about the current economic revolutions are those who are under-employed. No one wants to blame their self for making too little money. It’s always easier to blame the government or a “bad economy.” Likewise, people who are under-employed think that everything costs too much. Cars are too expensive and groceries “keep going up in price.”
Dude.
You of all people should know that I am (conservatively) in the top 20% of wage earners in the country -- maybe higher.
I am certainly not gnashing my teeth and cursing others for their good fortune. I am definitely not under-employed, even in this sickly economy.
I don't know why you'd include me in this broad categorization.
Your observations are likely solid; yet nations are born and nations die, even under that framework.
I think the author make a very strong and compelling case that the government is already actively working in opposition to the people they are to serve. However, the government is very savvy, they keep proclaiming that they care and that they are compassionate... all the while they stab them in the back, steal everything they own, and maim them for life.
How utterly sad that this people is so easily fooled and willingly attach government chains to their own ankles.
> “Why won’t people simply pull their money from the bank if the interest rate goes negative?”
Because the banks won’t let them. They will put a very low limit on how much you can draw out each day (say $50 or $100 per day). That has happened recently in several other countries and happened in the US during the Great Depression.
The reason they do that is to keep money in the banks until the government decides how much of it they want to keep.
US money was devalued during the “Bank Holiday” the US had in the depression. Everything was worth less than before. More recently, the government in Cyprus was more direct. The government just took a certain percentage of the money in all the banks in Cyprus and kept it. Anyone with more than some amount (I think it was 85,000 or 100,000 euros) lost everything over that amount. The people who had less than that did not get away whole. They lost some (but not as much).
Silver dollars and stamped 1/10 oz gold bullion cubes do that.
Anything else in times of crisis will have a value that can be disputed. Think what happened when people cashed in grandma's jewelry for melt-down value. They were at the mercy of the person buying it. And gold mutual funds or certificates saying it's being safely stored.....well, that's just plain dumb.
“Japan and the US have the same issue an over-regulated, bifurcated economy - deflationary businesses outside of core necessities (ie food, fuel, utilities). with core being inflationary”
A lose-lose scenario for the middle class.
At least the Weimar Republic had full employment.
We are told we have no inflation, therefore we get no return on fixed income investments-yet anyone who buys food and household products knows prices are zooming up. Sounds like the Japanese are being lied to just as we are.
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