BERNANKE’S PINK SLIP

Smokey, don’t get excited, it’s the paper pink slip, not the one he wears 🙂
Bernanke, we’re making changes. You’re one of them.

You should have gotten both of Captain Obvious’s memos—one titled “Arab Spring,” the other going by “#Occupy Wall Street.” Just the very fact that we are having this conversation clearly indicates that your complete lack and understanding is not limited to just our economy.

Let me spell this out for you.

The memos indicate that 99% of the world has had enough with the Federal Reserve system and its “leadership”. Together the two account for 99% of the world’s ills.

Former Comptroller General David Walker said: “The fourth and most serious of all [of America’s deficits] is our leadership deficit.” Bernanke, you and former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan are poster boys for personifying America’s “Most Serious Leadership Deficit.”

That’s really putting it too kindly though. After all, you helped create the Second Great Depression, so we don’t have to be polite about this, and I’m not going to be.

The Millennials—those 75 million kids our son’s and daughter’s age; that majority protesting; the ones camping out in tents with sleeping bags on cold hard cement sidewalks; the kids and old farts occupying our city parks; little unarmed girls that are our children’s age obeying the law only to get pepper-sprayed in their eyes by oppressive law-breaking New York City Cops; kids carrying around signs that read “End the Fed” and “Osama Bin Bernanke”; those born between 1977-1998 that now face an unemployment rate between 37%-50%, most of who have student loans up the proverbial.

osama bin bernanke

I don’t think they like you.

Why? It’s very simple—Congress gave the Fed two mandates in 1913:

  1. To Maintain Maximum Employment.
  2. To Maintain Stable Prices.

Two mandates, but you and Greenspan added a third—worshiping the banks. By doing so you’veroyally screwed up the first two. You’ve revealed that the corrupt banksters who own the Federal Reserve are really the gods you worship. (Read The Sander’s Report of the Fed audit here)

As a result, the consumer who contributes to 70% of the economy has become the sacrifice to your evil gods. Without a consumer we’ll all wind up in a living hell.

Let me break it down to three main points:

Point #1: Maximum Employment. We now have a depressionary unemployment rate of 23.1%.The tragically comical part is we have a student of [or do you now call yourself a scholar of] The Great Depression, who refuses to address the real (unadjusted) unemployment rate.

23.1% NOT 9.1%.

You know that it is 23.1%. You just lie about it by using the Bureau of BS Labor Statistics 9.1% numbers!

shadow govenment stats unemployment

How can you miss the fact that we have 46,000,000 Americans on food stamps? Many of whom collect in Wal-Marts an hour before midnight creating modern day electronic breadlines. Their carts filled with baby formula for their starving children. At the stroke of midnight their “EBT” cards are refilled and their “benefit” is transferred from the government to the poor by one of the big banks who skims off the top for their “services.” Ironic, after they blew up the economy they now get to profit off the poor who got stuffed with the 10.4++ trillion dollar tab of bailing them out. (Link to Wal-Marts CEO’s description of this.)

Let’s address the substance in Point #3: Housing & Lying before we move onto Point #2: Stable Price Mandate.

Point #3: Housing & Lying. Many financial bloggers have observed and written about your voice crackling or shaking whenever you mention ‘9.1% unemployment’ or just the word ‘unemployment.’

I first noticed the crackling voice phenomena in 2005. On CNBS you were asked if housing was in a bubble. I knew it was. Ron Paul knew back in 2003. I knew because I ran the Hyman Minsky Bubble Checklist and the only “indicator” unchecked was “Revulsion.” Number 7 of 7. Judging by the subprime reset dates we knew that revulsion wasn’t going to be too far down the road.

We were correct.

So there you are on CNBS being asked: “Tell me sir, is housing in a bubble?” And you flat out lie. You, the self-professed “scholar of the Great Depression”, tell Maria Barta-What-Ever-Her-Name-Is (incidentally, whose voice I can’t stand) that, “home prices have never declined on a nationwide basis before.”

BS!

They have. A fourth grader can read the chart below and see that.

history of home values

The instant you said house prices have never declined on a nationwide basis your voice faltered. It got all feebly. It cracked. Look, I’m a former airline captain, company instructor and check airman with around 15,000 hours. I know what fear sounds like. I know what a weasels voice sounds like when they screw up and try to cover it over. Just because people didn’t go to Harvard or teach at Princeton doesn’t mean they’re stupid and that they can be played for a fool Ben.

Frankly, that whole “Harvard, Princeton, Columbia Card” doesn’t get much mileage after Charles’s fine documentary “Inside Job” where he showed how scholars are now just being paid off for their favorable opinions.

I emailed Pamela Meyer and asked her to look into you. Pamela Meyer did a phenomenal-speech on TED, it was titled: “How to Spot a Liar”.

Her reply totally floored me: “I will take a look at Bernanke….many [emphasis mine] have sent comments similar to yours as well regarding his “tells”.”

Many have sent comments.

Many.

If it lies like a rug…

I say, “What else do you lie about?” because I know you were lying about housing. The FY2005 FOMC minutes reveal that the Fed knew housing was in an impending bubble and any idiot who read one book on the Great Depression would have known that housing prices HAVE declined in our nation’s history.

Frankly, any idiot who read one book on the Great Depression would also be capable of recognizing that we’ve entered into the world’s Second Great Depression.

Just curious, are David Walkers’ leadership deficit words ringing loud and clear here?

They should be.

America is suffering. Millions have been foreclosed upon, kids go to bed starving in motels, and tent cities are springing up all over the place. In California they have a school for homeless kids whose parents peddle them to on their bikes. The kids steal food to take to their parents tents. Just how much more Grapes of Wrath-“ish”” can we get when reading the news?

More responsible prime borrowers were hurt than were subprime borrowers because 1 in 6 jobs were housing related and Wall Street sold this stuff to cities, pension funds, and entire countries.

While betting against it.

Who was in charge while all this went down?

Point #2: Stable Prices. You’ve decimated the value of the dollar. Since 1913, our dollar is now worth mere pennies. Over that time we’ve seen a 2,191.8% increase in inflation. You’ve robbed 2,191.8% from my grandfather, father and I. Perhaps Americans should demand reparations for stripping generations of our families’ wealth?

inflation calculator

(By the way, we know it is way worse than 2,191.8%. Enron was more honest about its books than the BLS is with its inflation or unemployment calculations.)

2,191.8%.

If isn’t inflation, then what is it?

real cost of living

The BEA and BLS should be abolished and a portion of that money should go to John Williams of Shadow Statistics—who does what those clowns are supposed to do.

etrade babyYou know the problem? You all have NO real world experience. Hell, the E*Trade baby has more trading experience than you momos combined.

Un-effing believable that this has been going on for over 100 years.

Nice job Champ.

I’m going to end it here. I could go on, and on. I could write a book called The Second Grapes of Wrath and in it include all the many ways the Fed hurts and then laughs at decimating the consumer who supports 70% of our economy.

I could reveal how the Fed laughs about exploiting workers through globalization. I could expose how the Fed laughs and jokes about which political party likes to borrow more money. But, I’ll stop here. Maybe if I hear from a good agent I’ll do a book.

In Summary: Bernanke if you had 1 one trillionth of a leadership gene you’d have taken command in 2008 and said:

  1. We have bad news: We have a major structural problem. But we are Americans so we have good news: We have a fix for it. For now, we’re bailing out the banks to keep credit from freezing up.
  2. But, we’re bailing out the banks vis-a-vis underwater homeowners in order to prevent 1 in 6 jobs related to housing from cratering and becoming 23.1% unemployment which puts 46 million Americans on an electronic breadline at Wal-Mart.
  3. We’ve identified structural problems in the economy that were caused by mistakes made by the Federal Reserve.
  4. Alan created too much cheap money, he muzzled Brooksley Born when she wanted to regulate derivatives, and he also helped get rid of Glass-Steagall. All this contributed to the mess. We’ve had Fed members who took money and wrote BS reports so lawmakers would look favorably at what were really dangerous instruments that let bankers shoot up.
  5. He failed to recognize a perverse incentive structure where CEOs with a fleet of personal jets, fancy yachts, and a dozen homes had no concern over the financial products they sold.
  6. Politicians have fed off the system buying votes with borrowed Federal Reserve Notes. The bread and circus show is so far gone that it is beyond balancing. Beyond cuts. Beyond repair. We’ve hidden more debt off balance sheet than a million Enron’s could of hoped for. Thus, our new dollar will be revalued to wipe away this debt.
  7. The root cause of our money system is that money is loaned into existence. This means that each second more money must be created in order to service the interest or the system implodes. It causes bubbles. It creates boom to bust cycles. It creates inflation which is outright theft. While no system is perfect, our new system will be better.
  8. Exponential growth is not sustainable. Our economy is nothing more than digging up finite resources and selling them. With 7 billion people on this planet 3% compounding growth each year is not sustainable. We’re seeing this now in higher oil prices. The difference between global oil production and global oil consumption is an economic resource canary.
  9. We must get well-paying manufacturing jobs back from China.
  10. We must create a few “Manhattan” projects to redefine banking and to promote a stable sustainable economy.

But you’re not a dynamic leader.

You’re a clown, and you’ll wait until Europe or some other force breaks the camel’s back and then declare, like the housing bubble, no one could have seen this coming.

About the Author

UNEMPLOYMENT CHART PORN

Ritholtz has some good unemployment charts, (not that there is such a thing, unless it’s pegged at <4%) here are a few.

Sadly, I didn’t see John Williams latest chart showing unemployment at 23.1%.

Nice job Moron Bernanke.  You have two mandates: Reduce unemployment, and keep the dollar strong.  You fucked them both up Champ. 23.1% and .04 cents respectively.  What a fucking POS douchebag loser scum of the earth bankster prostitute.

Be sure to catch the real average hourly earnings, in January 1973 they were $21.35 in September 2011 they are $19.52.

Federal Reserve’s Federal Open Market Committee (Fed FOMC) minutes from FY2005 indicate that exploiting globalization is funny stuff: “But the common concern coming from the retailers, the rails, the shippers, the shipbuilders, and so on, was the following: Everyone I’ve talked to continues to try to figure out ways to exploit globalization. Each of them, from the IT [information technology] guys to the big box retailers to the specialty chemical firms to the service firms, wants to have offshore supply. One of the CEOs said, “We have a long way to go in exploiting China.”  We’ve heard that forever. And one of my favorites was the comment, “China, India, and Indonesia can make Italian ceramics better than Italians can now or could 200 years ago.” [Laughter]”

This chart’s for Smokey:

CDS RATES CAUSING GLOBAL CREDIT CRISIS

The banks in Europe fucked up — betting on Greece like our morons doing God’s work in the US bet on housing.

Assholes!

The bets the banks made went south like some Smokey team pick.

Shocker.

Now the price to insure the moron-bank’s bonds is blowing out.  This is causing a massive credit crunch.  Anything not nailed down is getting sold (think back to gold losing $300 bucks.)  The banks are smart enough to not trust one another.  Credit is drying up.

Dexia is Belgium’s largest bank it is French based also.

2008 Redux on a global scale never seen before.

“Credit default swaps on lenders as far afield as China and Australia, countries that until recently seemed immune to the chaos, have doubled in the last two months to levels not seen since the financial crisis.

In Europe, French and Belgian government officials are due to meet on Monday to discuss the crisis enveloping Dexia as speculation mounts about a possible break-up of the Franco-Belgian lender.

Last week, the cost of insuring Dexia bonds hit an all-time high of 900 basis points, nearly double the level just two months ago, meaning the annual cost to insure €10m (£8.59m) of the bonds is £900,000.

“The money ran out in June and what you are seeing now is the beginning of a new credit crunch, except this time it will be truly global, not Western,” said one senior London-based credit analyst.

Dexia, along with other European lenders, has been hard hit by the closure of the interbank lending markets and the continuing unwillingness of investors to buy the bonds of eurozone banks.”

DEFLATION CRACKS IN “LOGIC”

On why Schilling sees deflation on the horizon:

“In my new book, I identify seven different types of deflation. Now five of those are already in place — we’re having financial asset deflation, tangible asset deflation, commodities are coming down, wages are coming down. The one that hasn’t kicked in yet is goods and services deflation. The point is that the whole world is really marking down assets. It’s marking down the whole spectrum. I don’t think goods and services are going to hold up in terms of inflation. I think that will move to deflation fairly soon.” Link

Let’s just run with this “deflation” assumption.  Let’s assume <del>Smokey</del> (slip) Schilling is right – for a second.  So we have deflation.  Super.  Prices come down, the dollar strenghtens and that is a good thing.

Right?

Well, not for government revenues.  Our government debt doesn’t deflate.  Professor Kotlikoff pegs our debt at 200 trillion, I’ve said 128 trillion and Bill Gross says 60 trillion off balance sheet and to that we can add another 14.6 for the non-Enron accounted for debt.

Let’s be conservative and go with Gross’s numbers.

We now take in 2 trillion and we piss away 4 trillion.  Or more.  What’ll happen when we take in less than 2 trillion in tax revenues because we have deflating prices?

We could default. That would be massively inflationary as Greece is about to show us.  We import half of our 20 million barrels a day in oil.  Wonder how much gas will cost when our dollar goes from .04 cents in value to .00000000000000000000000000000000000004 cents in value?

We could continue to print the difference.  Zimbabwe here we come.

We could raise rates. Oops, our interest on debt service would kill us and kiss the economy goodbye as commercial credit along with every other type of interest rate would be a firehouse on an already smoldering economy.  And seriously, we’d be at Greek numbers.  Triple digit interest numbers in order to entice enough people to invest in a country that holds more debt than any other country on the globe.

We could cut Grannies Social Security and all her other benefits, cut 46 million people getting food stamps, toss the 99’rs off unemployment.  Oops, we’d have massive social unrest and even less in tax revenues.