CNBC – Page 2 – The Burning Platform

THE ANTI-CINDERELLA MAN (PART TWO)

In Part One of this article I made a fact based case that most Americans are experiencing an economic depression on par with the Great Depression of the 1930’s. In Part Two I will compare and contrast two very different men who raised the spirits of the common man during difficult economic times. As we approach the perilous portion of this Fourth Turning, it will take more than hope to get us through to the other side.

Cinderella Man

Likening Braddock to Trump might seem far-fetched, until you think about parallels between the economic conditions during the 1930’s and today, along with the deepening mood of crisis, despair and anger at the establishment. Braddock’s career coincided with the last Fourth Turning. James J. Braddock was born in 1905, to Irish immigrant parents Joseph Braddock and Elizabeth O’Toole Braddock in a tiny apartment on West 48th Street in New York City. His life personified that of a GI Generation hero. One of seven children, Jimmy enjoyed playing marbles, baseball and hanging around the old swimming hole on the edge of the Hudson River as a youngster. He discovered his passion for boxing as a teenager.

Braddock refined his skills as an amateur fighter and in 1926 entered the professional boxing circuit in the light heavyweight division. Braddock overwhelmed the competition, knocking out multiple opponents in the early rounds of most fights. As a top light heavyweight, he stood over six feet two inches, but seldom weighed over 180 pounds. But his powerful right hand was no match for opponents that weighed close to 220 pounds. His star was ascending. He earned a shot at the title in 1929. On the evening of July 18th 1929, Braddock entered the ring at Yankee Stadium to face Tommy Loughran for the coveted light heavyweight championship. Loghran avoided Braddock’s deadly right hand for 15 rounds and won by decision. Less than two months later the stock market crashed and the country plunged into the Great Depression.

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THE ANTI-CINDERELLA MAN (PART ONE)

There are several movies I will watch every time they are aired on one of my generally useless 600 cable channels. They all have the same thing in common – a compelling character portrayal which keeps you riveted and mesmerized by how the protagonist deals with adversity and circumstances beyond their control. The movies I can’t resist include: The Godfather I & II, The Green Mile, Shawshank Redemption, Apocalypse Now, and Patton. Another captivating movie, which didn’t do well at the box office, is Cinderella Man. The portrayal of Depression era heavyweight boxing champion James J. Braddock by Russell Crowe is inspirational, with a rousing and improbable victory by the champion of the common man. While watching this great movie a few weeks ago I found myself equating the themes to the current presidential campaign.

The Greater Depression

Braddock was an inspiration to all downtrodden demoralized Americans during the Great Depression. The parallels between the 1930’s Great Depression and today’s Greater Depression are uncanny, despite the propaganda emitted by the establishment politicians, media and banking cabal that all is well. The corporate mainstream media faux journalists scorn and ridicule anyone who makes the case we are currently in the midst of another Great Depression. They are paid to peddle a recovery narrative to keep the masses ignorant, sedated, and distracted by latest adventures of Caitlyn Jenner and the Kardashians. An impartial assessment of the facts reveals today’s Depression to be every bit as dreadful for the average American as it was in the 1930’s.

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IT’S NOT THE BREXIT STUPID

Just over a week ago the world was coming unglued, as enough British citizens grew a pair and spit in the face of the EU establishment and global elite by voting to exit the EU. The fear mongering by central bankers and their puppet political hacks failed to deter people who have become sick and tired of being abused and pillaged by bureaucrats working on behalf of bankers and billionaires.

Stock markets around the world plummeted on Thursday and Friday. The world braced for another Black Monday. The phone lines were buzzing between central bankers around the world over the weekend as their banker constituents demanded relief. If one thing has been proven over the last seven years, its a coordinated effort between central bankers and Wall Street banks to rig the stock market higher can work over a short time period.

The titans of finance were able to once again confound short-sellers and the prophets of doom with a 5% surge from the Friday lows over the next week. It was surely a coincidence the Fed declared all Wall Street banks, safe, sound, and capable of buying back their stocks to the tune of billions early in the week.

These insolvent zombies were now free to borrow billions to buy back their overvalued stocks, destroying shareholder value, while boosting executive compensation. Poor Jamie Dimon is struggling to get by on his $27 million per year. The Wall Street banks obliged by immediately announcing multi-billion dollar buyback schemes to capitalize on the short-term trading mentality of the 30 year old MBA trading geniuses who bought the news without worrying about the actual value of the stocks they were buying.

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HALFWAY UPDATE

Half the year is over and all you will hear on CNBC and the rest of the captured corporate media is about the ongoing bull market in stocks. You won’t hear about the real bull market. Stocks haven’t gone anywhere in the last 20 months. Their QE created bull market ended in October 2014 when the liquidity spigot was shut off.

Even in this rigged market, with the Fed directly buying through their intermediaries, corporations buying back hundreds of billions of their own stock, and HFT machines programmed to buy by the Wall Street cabal, stocks have barely made any gains in the first six months.

The real bull market, which shall not be mentioned, is revealing the failure of central bankers around the world to debase their way to prosperity. If every country in the world attempts to debase their currency at the same time, there can be only one winner – precious metals. Look who’s winning YTD:

Silver – up 48%
Gold – up 27%
S&P 500 – up 4%
Dow – up 4%
Nasdaq – down 3%

All shall be revealed in the fullness of time. Gold and silver are revealing the failure of the Fed and their establishment puppeteers in their quest to sustain an unsustainable economic system.

YOU WON’T HEAR THIS ON CNBC

The establishment and their mainstream media mouthpieces will continue their narrative of economic recovery and ongoing bull market while distracting the public with other false narratives about guns, gays, Russian aggression, and transgender bathrooms, as their puppets at the Federal Reserve continue monetary policies designed to enrich bankers and their establishment cronies.

Do you think Jim Cramer or any of the CNBC whores will put up this graphic today?:

Dow – up 1.5% YTD
S&P 500 – up 1.4% YTD
Gold – up 23.7% YTD
Silver – up 28.7% YTD

They also won’t tell you the stock market is exactly where it was in December 2014. That’s right. This raging bull market hasn’t gone anywhere in the last 19 months. This is despite a Federal Reserve keeping interest rates at 0%, Wall Street HFT machines rigging the market, every major corporation in the S&P 500 buying back hundreds of billions of their own stock, and the media cackling about stocks being cheap.

Now for the bad news. The economy is in recession. Corporate profits are plunging. Consumers aren’t spending because they haven’t gotten any real wage increases in the last 30 years. Real inflation for real people is raging at above 5%. Stock valuations are at all-time highs. Bonds are priced to deliver negative real returns. Home prices are ridiculously overvalued. Enjoy this delusional interlude before reality slaps you in the face and kicks you down the cellar stairs.

Gold and silver prices have been suppressed by the Fed and their bank puppeteers and they are still rising. The Fed’s credibility and central banker credibility across the globe has been lost. They have tried every trick in their book. All have failed. They have nothing left as we approach the cliff. But they’ll accelerate anyway.

HARD TIMES & FALSE NARRATIVES

The mainstream media mouthpieces for the establishment peddle false narratives, disingenuous storylines, and outright propaganda to keep the ignorant masses confused, oblivious to reality, misinformed, and passively submissive to the opinions of highly paid “experts” and captured fiscal authorities. The existing social order likes things just as they are.

They reap ill-gotten riches, wield unchecked power, and control the minds of the masses. They are the invisible government consciously manipulating the minds, habits and opinions of the multitudes in order to dominate society, control the levers of government, and accumulate obscene levels of wealth through manipulation of the currency and domination of the banking and corporate interests.

One of the false narratives being flogged by the establishment propaganda peddlers is the mass retirement of Baby Boomers causing the plunge in the employment to population rate from 64.4% in 2000 to 59.7% today. They need to peddle this drivel, because the difference between these two rates amounts to 12 million missing jobs. The employment to population ratio is currently at 1984 levels. Any critical thinking person with basic math skills realizes the government reported unemployment rate of 5% is an Orwellian farce.

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16 YEARS AND THIS IS ALL I GOT?

You won’t hear these facts on CNBC. They wouldn’t dare discuss anything in inflation adjusted terms. The Dow is up a measly 7.3% over the last 16 years on an inflation adjusted basis. That’s the good news. In reality, we all know the CPI is understated by at least 3% to 5%. So, in reality, the Dow is significantly negative over the last 16 years. Using a true level of inflation would show the Dow not much higher than it was in 1966 at the onset of the welfare/warfare state and before the unlinking of our fiat currency from gold.

If you were a connected insider or friend of the Fed (aka Wall Street bankers) you’ve done quite well since March 2009. But, it seems that once the QE spigot was turned off in October 2014, the Dow has gone nowhere fast. This faux bull market is dying of old age and lack of Fed injected fiat. It’s a long way down to long term support.

Chart of the Day

The Dow is currently trading 4% below its May 19th all-time record high. For some perspective, today’s chart illustrates the inflation-adjusted Dow since 1900 — there are several points of interest. Take for example an unlucky buy-and-hold investor that invested in the Dow right at the dot-com peak of December 1999. A decade and a half later, the inflation-adjusted Dow is up a mere 7.3%. That is not altogether an impressive performance considering that over 16 years have passed. On the other hand, take the investor who bought right at the end of the financial crisis. The inflation-adjusted Dow is up a significant 119% from its financial crisis lows — not bad for a for a seven year investment. More recently, the inflation-adjusted Dow has broken below support of a trend that has existed since the end of the financial crisis induced bear market.

J.C. PENNEY STILL ON BANKRUPTCY PATH

I find J.C. Penney to be a sick joke. The executives of this company think they can put out positive press releases and have their financial statements not properly show in the earnings press release to cover up the fact their financial results are deteriorating – not improving. CNBC will dutifully report the corporate lies. Checkout the press release where, for some reason, the financial results don’t format. Must be a glitch. Right?

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/jcpenney-reports-a-63-percent-increase-in-ebitda-to-176-million-and-reaffirms-full-year-ebitda-guidance-of-1-billion-2016-05-13

The press release heading makes you think business is booming. Whenever a corporation crows about EBITDA, you know they are covering up their true results. Of course, a company with $4.7 billion of debt wouldn’t want to include interest expense in the results they announce.

These rocket scientists owe their ongoing existence to Bernanke and Yellen. A company with this much debt and billions in losses over the last five years should be paying 20% interest on their debt. Instead they can finance themselves at 8% rates. This bloated pig should have gone belly up by now. That’s how creative destruction works in a free market. Their existence as a dead retailer walking brings down the results of other retailers, creating the current zombie retail environment. These retailers just plod along, losing money, buying back stock, and never dying. The Fed has created this Walking Dead Economy with their warped QE and ZIRP “solutions”.

If you go to JC Penney’s website, you can actually see their income statement, balance sheet and cash flow statement.

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The Lemmings Of Wall Street

Guest Post by David Stockman

I mistakenly took Squawk Box off mute this morning. It was just in time to hear one of the regular anchors—–the one who makes Joe Kernen sound slightly insightful by comparison——forecast a pick-up in global growth on the grounds that “China is recovering”.

Yes, the credit intoxicated land of the Red Ponzi just tied one on for the record books. During Q1 it generated new debt at a madcap annual rate of $4 trillion or nearly 40% of GDP.

And that incendiary deposit of more unpayable debt, which came on top of the $30 trillion already smothering history’s greatest construction site and open air gambling den, did indeed goose China’s real estate prices, state company CapEx, infrastructure building and steel production. Call it fiat growth because even pyramid building adds to stated GDP, at first.

Even then, the overwhelming share of this explosion of new credit went to pay interest on the existing mountain of IOUs. Charles Ponzi could never have imagined a scam so audacious.

Nor are the red suzerains of Beijing unique in the headlong dash toward the financial cliff. Except for the nicety that Japan’s 30-year and 40-year bonds are trading at a microscopic fraction this side of zero (0.3%), Kuroda and his tiny band of mad men at the BOJ have driven the entirety of Japan’s monumental public debt——which is now actually measured in the quadrillions of yen—–into the netherworld of negative yield.

Needless to say, the visage of an old age colony being hurtled toward the edge of a debt cliff by central bankers who have taken leave of their faculties does not bring the idea of economic recovery and growth immediately to mind.

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THE BOOMER RETIREMENT MEME IS A BIG LIE

As the labor participation rate and employment to population ratio linger near three decade lows, the mouthpieces for the establishment continue to perpetuate the Big Lie this is solely due to the retirement of Boomers. It’s their storyline and they’ll stick to it, no matter what the facts show to be the truth. Even CNBC lackeys, government apparatchiks, and Ivy League educated Keynesian economists should be able to admit that people between the ages of 25 and 54 should be working, unless they are home raising children.

In the year 2000, at the height of the first Federal Reserve induced bubble, there were 120 million Americans between the ages of 25 and 54, with 78 million of them employed full-time. That equated to a 65% full-time employment rate. By the height of the second Federal Reserve induced bubble, there were 80 million full-time employed 25 to 54 year olds out of 126 million, a 63.5% employment rate. The full-time employment rate bottomed at 57% in 2010, and still lingers below 62% as we are at the height of a third Federal Reserve induced bubble.

Chart via econimica

Over the last 16 years the percentage of 25 to 54 full-time employed Americans has fallen from 65% to 62%. I guess people are retiring much younger, if you believe the MSM storyline. Over this same time period the total full-time employment to population ratio has fallen from 53% to 48.8%. The overall labor participation rate peaked in 2000 at 67.1% and stayed steady between 66% and 67% for the next eight years. But this disguised the ongoing decline in the participation rate of men.

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WORST CASE SCENARIO = 73% DOWN FROM HERE

As the stock market gyrates higher and lower in a fairly narrow range, the spokesmodels and talking heads on CNBC breathlessly regurgitate the standard bullish mantra designed to keep the muppets in the market. They are employees of a massive corporation whose bottom line and stock price depend upon advertising revenues reaped from Wall Street and K Street. They aren’t journalists. They are propagandists disguised as journalists. Their job is to keep you confused, misinformed, and ignorant of the true facts.

Based on the never ending happy talk and buy now gibberish spouted by the pundit lackeys, you would think we are experiencing a bull market of epic proportions and anyone who hasn’t been in the market has missed out on tremendous gains. There’s one little problem with that bit of propaganda. It’s completely false. The Fed turned off the QE spigot at the end of October 2014 and the market has gone nowhere ever since.

QE1 began in September 2008, taking the Fed balance sheet from $900 billion to $2.3 trillion by June 2010. This helped halt the stock market crash and drove the S&P 500 up by 50% from its March 2009 lows. QE2 was implemented in November 2010 and increased the Fed balance sheet to $2.9 trillion by the end of 2011. This resulted in an unacceptable 10% increase in the S&P 500, so the Fed cranked up their printing presses to hyper-speed and launched the mother of all quantitative easings, with QE3 pushing their balance sheet to $4.5 trillion by October 2014, when they ceased their “Save a Wall Street Banker” campaign.

As Main Street dies, Wall Street has been paved in gold. The S&P 500 soared to all-time highs, with 40% gains from the September 2012 QE3 launch until its cessation in October 2014. Like a heroine addict, Wall Street has experienced withdrawal symptoms ever since, and begs for more monetary easing injections. Yellen and her gang of central bank drug dealers keep the patient from dying by continuing doses of ZIRP and psychologically comforting dialogue designed to cheer up Wall Street bankers.

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THE GREAT CORPORATE EARNINGS FRAUD

“What are the odds that people will make smart decisions about money if they don’t need to make smart decisions–if they can get rich making dumb decisions? The incentives on Wall Street were all wrong; they’re still all wrong.” ― Michael Lewis, The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine

Corporate earnings reports for the fourth quarter are pretty much in the books. The deception, falsification, accounting manipulation, and propaganda utilized by mega-corporations and their compliant corporate media mouthpieces has been outrageously blatant. It reeks of desperation as the Wall Street shysters attempt to extract the last dollar from their muppet clients before this house of cards collapses.

The CEOs of these mega-corporations accelerated their debt financed stock buybacks in 2015 as stock prices reached all-time highs and are currently so overvalued, they will deliver 0% returns over the next decade. This disgraceful act of pure greed by the Ivy League educated leaders of corporate America to boost their own stock based compensation is reckless and absurd.

It is proof education at our most prestigious universities has produced avaricious MBAs following financial models and each other like lemmings going over the cliff. Proof of their foolishness is self evident after perusing the chart below. These intellectual giants evidently never learned the basic rule of buying low and selling high in order to make a profitable trade.

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Why The Bulls Will Get Slaughtered

Guest Post by David Stockman

Well, they got that right. Detecting that “parts of the U.S. jobs report for January seem fishy” MarketWatch offered this pictorial summary:

Needless to say, none of that stink was detected by Steve Liesman and his band of Jobs Friday half-wits who bloviate on bubblevision after each release. This time the BLS report actually showed the US economy lost 2.989 million jobs between December and January. Yet Moody’s Keynesian pitchman, Mark Zandi described it as “perfect”

Yes, the BLS always uses a big seasonal adjustment (SA) in January——so that’s how they got the positive headline number. But the point is that the seasonal adjustment factor for the month is so huge that the resulting month-over-month delta is inherently just plain noise.

To wit, the seasonal adjustment factor for the month was 2.165 million. That means the headline jobs gain of 151k reported on Friday amounted to only 7% of the adjustment amount!

Any economist with a modicum of common sense would recognize that even a tiny change in the seasonal adjustment factor would mean a giant variance in the headline figure. So the January SA jobs number cannot possibly reveal any kind of trend whatsoever—-good, bad or indifferent.

But that didn’t stop Beth Ann Bovino, US chief economist at Standard & Poor’s Rating Services, from dispatching the usual all is swell hopium:

“Today’s numbers are about momentum, so while 151,000 new jobs in January is below expectations and off pace from prior months, the data shows America’s recovery is continuing. Amid all the global economic turmoil and domestic market gyrations, positive job growth, the drop in the unemployment rate to 4.9%, and the uptick in wages show the U.S. is heading in the right direction.”

Actually, it proves none of those things. For one thing, the January NSA (non-seasonally adjusted) job loss this year of just under 3 million was 173,000 bigger than last January—-suggesting that things are getting worse, not better. In fact, this was the largest January job decline since the 3.69 million job loss in January 2009 at the very bottom months of the Great Recession.

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HOW LOW CAN YOU GO?

I’m guessing CNBC isn’t informing their brain dead audience the Dow is now lower than it was in May 2014. Yep, the market hasn’t gone anywhere in the last 19 months. They probably won’t be telling you it has now fallen 10% since its May 2015 high. Jim Cramer and his butt buddies will be telling you it’s the best time to buy. Just like they did nineteen months ago. There will be dynamic rallies in the coming days. They will serve to keep the believers in the market during the collapse. There will be a lot of dead muppets when this is over.

THIS TIME ISN’T DIFFERENT

Last year ended with a whimper on Wall Street. The S&P 500 was down 1% for the year, down 4% from its all-time high in May, and no higher than it was 13 months ago at the end of QE3. The Wall Street shysters and their mainstream media mouthpieces declare 2016 to be a rebound year, with stocks again delivering double digit returns. When haven’t they touted great future returns. They touted them in 2000 and 2007 too. No one earning their paycheck on Wall Street or on CNBC will point out the most obvious speculative bubble in history. John Hussman has been pointing it out for the last two years as the Fed created bubble has grown ever larger. Those still embracing the bubble will sit down to a banquet of consequences in 2016.

At the peak of every speculative bubble, there are always those who have persistently embraced the story that gave the bubble its impetus in the first place. As a result, the recent past always belongs to them, if only temporarily. Still, the future inevitably belongs to somebody else. By the completion of the market cycle, no less than half (and often all) of the preceding speculative advance is typically wiped out.

Hussman referenced the work of Reinhart & Rogoff when they produced their classic This Time is Different. Every boom and bust have the same qualities. The hubris and arrogance of financial “experts” and government apparatchiks makes them think they are smarter than those before them. They always declare this time to be different due to some new technology or reason why valuations don’t matter. The issuance of speculative debt and seeking of yield due to Federal Reserve suppression of interest rates always fuels the boom and acts as the fuse for the inevitable explosive bust.

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