Federal Reserve – Page 15 – The Burning Platform

SOMETHING SMELLS FISHY

It’s always interesting to see a long term chart that reflects your real life experiences. I bought my first home in 1990. It was a small townhouse and I paid $100k, put 10% down, and obtained a 9.875% mortgage. I was thrilled to get under 10%. Those were different times, when you bought a home as a place to live. We had our first kid in 1993 and started looking for a single family home. We stopped because our townhouse had declined in value to $85k, so I couldn’t afford to sell. In 1995 I convinced my employer to rent my townhouse, as they were already renting multiple townhouses for all the foreigners doing short term assignments in the U.S. We bought a single family home in 1995 with the sole purpose of having a decent place to raise a family that was within 20 minutes of my job.

Considering home prices on an inflation adjusted basis were lower than they were in 1980, I was certainly not looking at it as some sort of investment vehicle. But, as you can see from the chart, nationally prices soared by about 55% between 1995 and 2005. My home supposedly doubled in value over 10 years. I was ecstatic when I was eventually able to sell my townhouse in 2004 for $134k. I felt so smart, until I saw a notice in the paper one year later showing my old townhouse had been sold again for $176k. Who knew there were so many greater fools.

This was utterly ridiculous, as home prices over the last 100 years have gone up at the rate of inflation. Robert Shiller and a few other rational thinking people called it a bubble. They were scorned and ridiculed by the whores at the NAR and the bimbo cheerleaders on CNBC. Something smelled rotten in the state of housing. We now know who was responsible. Greenspan and Bernanke were at least 75% responsible for the housing bubble and its eventual implosion, which essentially destroyed our economic system. They purposely kept interest rates at obscenely low levels, encouraging every Tom, Dick and Julio to buy a home with a negative amortization, no doc, nothing down, adjustable rate mortgage, so they could live the American dream of being in debt up to their eyeballs.

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WHY STOCKS WILL CRASH IN TWO CHARTS

“Things always become obvious after the fact” – Nassim Nicholas Taleb

“Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.” – Aldous Huxley

The S&P 500 currently stands at 2,126, fractionally below its all-time high. It is now 300% above the 2009 low and 34% above the 2008 and 2001 previous highs. Most people believe this is the new normal. They are comfortably numb in their ignorance of facts, reality, the truth, and the inevitability of a bleak future. When the herd is convinced progress and never ending gains are the norm, the apparent stability and normality always degenerates into instability and extreme anxiety. As many honest analysts have proven, with unequivocal facts and proven valuation measurements, the stock market is as overvalued as it was in 1929, 2000, and 2007.

Facts haven’t mattered, as belief in the infallibility and omniscience of Federal Reserve bankers, has convinced “professionals” to program their high frequency trading supercomputers to buy the all-time high. If central bankers were really omniscient and low interest rates guaranteed endless stock market gains, then why did the stock market crash in 2000 and 2008? The Federal Reserve’s monetary policies created the bubbles in 2000, 2007 and today. There was no particular event which caused the crashes in 2000 and 2008. Extreme overvaluation, created by warped Federal Reserve monetary policies and corrupt Washington D.C. fiscal policies, is what made the previous bubbles burst and will lead the current bubble to rupture.

Benjamin Graham and John Maynard Keynes understood how irrational markets could be over the short term, but eventually they would reach fair value:

“In the short run, the market is a voting machine but in the long run, it is a weighing machine.” – Graham

“The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.” – Keynes

Graham’s quote reflects the difference between hope and reality. This explains the ridiculous overvaluation of Amazon, Shake Shack, Twitter, Linkedin, Tesla, Google, and the other high flying new paradigm stocks. Story stocks soar because the herd believes the stories peddled by Wall Street and company executives. Five of these six stocks don’t have a PE ratio because you need earnings to calculate a PE ratio. In the long run the market will weigh the value these companies based upon profits and cashflow. It is the same story for the market as a whole. There is no question who is to blame for what now amounts to a three headed hydra of bubbles poised to burst.

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Today’s CPI Lesson: The Fed’s 2% Inflation Target Is Completely Stupid

Guest Post by David Stockman

The madness of the Fed’s pending 81 month run of zero interest rates comes down to an inflation subterfuge that has no logical or empirical grounding in real world economics. Essentially, the Keynesians who currently inhabit the Eccles Building have turned all of central banking’s anti-inflation history on its head, saying, instead, that there is not enough of it to create optimum economic growth and wealth; and, besides, the CPI is running below the 2% target—so prolonging the free money gravy train can’t do much harm.

Every part of that proposition is dead wrong. To wit, free money does immense harm by fueling rampant carry trade speculation; there is zero evidence that 2% inflation results in any more growth than 1% or even 0% inflation; and, as an empirical matter, there is plenty of inflation in the US economy and has been during the entire past 15 years of rampant money printing designed to stimulate more growth.

Still, real final sales in the US economy have grown at only a 1.8% rate since the year 2000, or by just half of the 3.5% rate recorded for the prior 46 years. But that downshift is not in any way attributable to inflation missing the allegedly optimum 2% target. In fact, during the last 15 years the CPI has increased at an average rate of exactly 2.18%.

So where’s the beef or rather the allegedly missing beef? Well, the monetary high priests hold that the PCE deflator, not the CPI, is the correct measure of inflation because it takes better account of changing consumer preferences or weighting shifts in the market basket of what people buy. That is, it captures their shifting to chicken, tuna or spam when they can’t afford steak.

Yet its hard to believe that the scant daylight shown in the chart below accounts for the drastic deterioration of economic growth during the last 15 years. In other words, we have had 2% inflation on the most commonly used measuring stick—-so what’s wrong with the ruler?

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BIGGEST RETAILER IN THE WORLD REPORTS AWFUL RESULTS

This company has annual sales of $485 billion per year. If it was a country, that revenue would make them the 28th largest country in the world, bigger than Austria, Iran, Denmark, Egypt, Israel, and hundreds of other countries. They are the most recognized retailer on the planet. They are the canary in the world coal mine, and the canary is coughing and wheezing. Their operating income in the first quarter plunged by 8.3%, or $500 million. They operate on very thin margins (3.3%), so a $500 million decline is significant. They are a retailer dependent upon the middle and lower classes to sustain their profits.

The steady deterioration of their financial results is a reflection of our dying economy, dying middle class, and dependency on government handouts as the only thing keeping them from experiencing a complete collapse in revenue and profits. Their net income this year will be about the same as it was in 2012. It will be more than $1 billion lower than it was in 2013. If the country was truly experiencing an economic recovery and has added millions of jobs since 2012 why would Wal-Mart revenues and income be stagnant and falling? They wouldn’t be. The entire recovery storyline is a farce. The Wall Street crowd (.1%) has experienced a Federal Reserve created boom, while the Main Street crowd (the 99.9%) continues to face an ongoing and deepening recession.

Walmart Sales, Comps Miss; Operating Income Tumbles; Runs Out Of Scapegoats

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 05/19/2015 07:20 -0400

In what may be the most cryptic press release from Walmart yet, the company just issued an 8-K which consisted all of 5 bullet points, a few charts, and precious little else. Perhaps the reason for the pithy transmission is that WMT had nothing good to say: Revenue declined from $115 billion to $114.8 billion, missing expectations of a jump to $116.2 billion, EPS also missed at $1.03, vs $1.05 expected, operating income tumbled 8.3% from $6.2 billion to $5.7 billion, and finally comp store sales also missed at 1.0%, below the 1.5% expected. With these results, anyone would be short and to the point.

After previously providing extensive explanations for why the massive Apple Sachs Industrial Member member missed, this quarter the firm almost didn’t even bother to scapegoat. This is what it said:

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UM, YEAH… I’M NOT GONNA NEED YOU TO COME IN ANYMORE

This was the good old days. The vaunted Obama jobs recovery (waitresses, retail clerks, fry cooks, and maids) has petered out. The trade data earlier this week confirmed negative GDP for the 1st quarter. The Atlanta Fed model already shows only 0.9% GDP growth in the 2nd quarter. That will go negative as people with no jobs and those with jobs seeing their real wages decline have stopped spending.The 4th quarter GDP was boosted by citizens having to pay more Obamacare and heat for their cold houses. Winning!!!

Corporations are reporting declining revenues and profits, while using their spare cash to buy back their stock at all-time highs to boost executive stock compensation. Why spend money on capital investment or pay your workers more when you can pump your EPS, fire 5,000 people and outsource their jobs to India? It’s the American way.

The 99% are experiencing a recession in the real world. People around the globe are experiencing a depression. But Wall Street, aided and abetted by their Federal Reserve puppets and Politician cronies in DC, is joyous and overflowing with riches for the .01%. How long can they artificially prop up financial markets before the floor gives out?

If people in this country could just look up from their iGadgets and think for one moment…..

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GOVERNMENT USING SUBPRIME MORTGAGES TO PUMP HOUSING RECOVERY – TAXPAYERS WILL PAY AGAIN

It seems hard to believe, but your government is purposely recreating the mortgage debacle of 2007 and putting you on the hook for the billions in losses coming down the road. In their frantic effort to generate the appearance of economic recovery they are willing to gamble with taxpayer’s money while luring unsuspecting blue collar folks into buying houses they can’t afford. During the previous housing bubble, greedy Wall Street bankers, deceitful mortgage brokers, and corrupt rating agencies colluded to commit the greatest control fraud in the history of mankind. This time it is your government, aided and abetted by the Federal Reserve, that is actively promoting the lending of money to people incapable of paying it back. And again, you the taxpayer will be on the hook when it predictably blows up.

The FHA, created during the first Great Depression, is supposed to be self-sustaining through mortgage insurance premiums charged to homeowners, just like Fannie, Freddie, Medicare, Social Security, and student loan lending were supposed to be self- sustaining through taxes, fees, and interest. This agency was supposed to promote homeownership for lower income Americans, but has been used by politicians as a tool to capture votes, payoff crony capitalist benefactors, and as a Keynesian stimulus tool designed to kindle a fake housing recovery. They entered the fray at the tail end of the last Fed/Wall Street created housing bubble, insuring a huge number of subprime mortgage loans from 2007 through 2009. The taxpayer has already had to bail out this incompetent, politically motivated, joke of an agency to the tune of $1.7 billion in 2014.

Edward J. Pinto, a former Fannie Mae official, estimates that under standard accounting practices the agency is already insolvent to the tune of $25 billion. Mark to fantasy accounting hasn’t just benefitted the criminal Wall Street cabal, but also the bloated pig government housing agencies – Fannie, Freddie and the FHA. The FHA’s share of new loans with mortgage insurance stood at 16.4% in 2005 and currently stands at 44.3%. This is a ridiculously high level considering the percentage of first time home buyers is near all-time lows and low income buyers have lower real median household income than they had in 2005. Distinguished congresswoman Maxine Waters, who once declared: “We do not have a crisis at Freddie Mac, and particularly Fannie Mae, under the outstanding leadership of Frank Raines.”, prior to them imploding and costing taxpayers $187 billion in losses, thinks the FHA is doing a bang up job. Her financial acumen is unquestioned, so you can expect another bailout in the near future.

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The Creature from Jekyll Island

Guest Post by Martin Armstrong

This is like being asked to criticize the Bible since so many people believe every word written in this book. Well here goes and probably thousands of hatemails will flood in but conspiracy-myths be damned, they are a cover-up for the real culprit – Congress. Some hate central banks so much because of this book they believe Andrew Jackson was a hero and are oblivious to the fact he set off a round of Wildcat banking that ended in yet another sovereign debt default among the States who then tried to bailout their own banks.Well fiction be damned. I will say this. “The Creature From Jekyll Island” is amateurish at best and just another total misrepresentation of the facts and events. It is very one-sided and ignores the real political manipulation of the Fed by government for their own self-interest. It promotes the very same Marxist/socialistic beliefs from the Progressive Era that gave us the New Deal and has robbed everyone of their future beside altering the family structure in the West forever.

The entire original design of the Fed was to be private for banks were to contribute to fund their own bailouts as JP Morgan had done taking the lead during the Panic of 1907. It was not to be a government bailout operation. The United States had no central bank at that time. There was never any intent to create the institution as it exists today for its original design was altered dramatically by lawyers who never understood the madness of their own mind in their pursuit of power as politicians.

JPMorgan-Testimony

We must also look at the context of the era from which Griffin draws his ideas. We must be EXTREMELY careful for much of what was being said was sheer propaganda directed at the bankers to support the rise of Marxism – the new Progressive Movement. This movement finally won with the New Deal with the Great Depression completely blaming the bankers when in fact Europe collapsed into a Sovereign Debt Crisis in 1931, which had sent the dollar soaring and a capital concentration from around the world made the 1929 high just as the Nikkei peaked in Japan during 1989. To look at this era we absolutely MUST step back and look at the whole thing dispassionately. If we do not put this conspiracy aside, then we will never understand what needs to be really reformed.

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TRUTH – THE CURE FOR COGNITIVE DISSONANCE

“In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.” ― George Orwell

Every time the BLS puts out their monthly propaganda report on the wonderful state of the U.S. jobs market and states with a straight face the unemployment rate is a measly 5.5%, their corporate mouthpieces in the mainstream cheerleader media regurgitate the fake numbers and urge you to buy stocks. The millionaire talking heads on CNBC and the corrupt bought off politicians in D.C. make broad sweeping declarations about economic recovery, strong job growth, GDP advancement, record highs in the stock market, and soaring consumer confidence.

The people living in the real world know otherwise, but they want to believe the “experts” and “leaders”. This dichotomy between reality and what they are being told is causing a tremendous amount of mental stress. This cognitive dissonance of attempting to reconcile what they are experiencing in their every day existence and the propaganda being peddled at them on a daily basis from big media, big bankers, corporate titans, and captured politicians pulling the strings and running the show, is causing psychological discomfort. Most people want their lives to get better, so to reduce their cognitive dissonance they choose to believe the government and media reports about economic improvement.

It is only a small minority who want to know the unvarnished truth. They are drawn to alternative media websites, which the the captured corporate media refers to as doom sites. These critical thinking individuals understand the facts. The Deep State propaganda has no impact on these people because they have no cognitive dissonance. They know things are far worse than what is reported by the government and their media whores. Knowing the truth and seeing how the majority remain willfully ignorant results in rising anger among truth seekers. Huxley was right.

“You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you mad.” ― Aldous Huxley

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THE REAL REASON THE AMERICAN DREAM IS UNRAVELING

Marketwatch posted an article this week titled Why the American Dream is Unraveling, in 4 charts. As usual, the MSM journalist and the liberal Harvard academic can create charts that reveal a huge problem, but they completely misdiagnose the causes and offer the typical wrong solution of taking more money from producers and handing it to the poor, with no strings attached. This has been the standard operating procedure since LBJ began his War on Poverty 50 years ago. Do these control freaks ever step back and assess how that war is going?

The poverty rate had plunged from 34% in 1950 to below 20% before LBJ ever declared war. It continued down to 15% just as the welfare programs began to be implemented. The percentage of people living in poverty hasn’t budged from the 15% range since the war began. This war has been just as successful as the war on drugs and the war on terrorism. Any time a politician declares war on something, expect a huge price tag and more of the “problem” they are declaring war upon.

The Federal government runs over 80 means-tested welfare programs that provide cash, food, housing, medical care, and targeted social services to poor and low-income Americans. Over 100 million Americans received benefits from at least one of these programs. Federal and state governments spent $943 billion in 2013 on these programs at an average cost of $9,000 per recipient (not including Social Security & Medicare). That is 27% of the total Federal budget. Welfare spending as a percentage of the Federal budget was less than 2% prior to the launch of the War on Poverty.

In the 50 years since this war started, U.S. taxpayers have spent over $22 trillion on anti-poverty programs. Adjusted for inflation, this spending (which does not include Social Security or Medicare) is three times the cost of all U.S. military wars since the American Revolution. In terms of LBJ’s main goal of reducing the “causes” rather than the mere “consequences” of poverty, the War on Poverty has utterly failed. In fact, a large proportion of the population is now completely dependent upon government handouts, incapable of self-sufficiency, and enslaved in a welfare mentality that has destroyed their communities.

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BREAKING BAD (DEBT) – EPISODE THREE

In Part One of this three part article I laid out the groundwork of how the Federal Reserve is responsible for the excessive level of debt in our society and how it has warped the thinking of the American people, while creating a tremendous level of mal-investment. In Part Two I focused on the Federal Reserve/Federal Government scheme to artificially boost the economy through the issuance of subprime debt to create a false auto boom. In this final episode, I’ll address the disastrous student loan debacle and the dreadful global implications of $200 trillion of debt destroying the lives of citizens around the world.

Getting a PhD in Subprime Debt

“When easy money stopped, buyers couldn’t sell. They couldn’t refinance. First sales slowed, then prices started falling and then the housing bubble burst. Housing prices crashed. We know the rest of the story. We are still mired in the consequences. Can someone please explain to me how what is happening in higher education is any different?This bubble is going to burst.” – Mark Cuban

Now we get to the subprimiest of subprime debt – student loans. Student loans are not officially classified as subprime debt, but let’s compare borrowers. A subprime borrower has a FICO score of 660 or below, has defaulted on previous obligations, and has limited ability to meet monthly living expenses. A student loan borrower doesn’t have a credit score because they have no credit, have no job with which to pay back the loan, and have no ability other than the loan proceeds to meet their monthly living expenses. And in today’s job environment, they are more likely to land a waiter job at TGI Fridays than a job in their major. These loans are nothing more than deep subprime loans made to young people who have little chance of every paying them off, with hundreds of billions in losses being borne by the ever shrinking number of working taxpaying Americans.

Student loan debt stood at $660 billion when Obama was sworn into office in 2009. The official reported default rate was 7.9%. Obama and his administration took complete control of the student loan market shortly after his inauguration. They have since handed out a staggering $500 billion of new loans (a 76% increase), and the official reported default rate has soared by 43% to 11.3%. Of course, the true default rate is much higher. The level of mal-investment and utter stupidity is astounding, even for the Federal government. Just some basic unequivocal facts can prove my case.

There were 1.67 million Class of 2014 students who took the SAT. Only 42.6% of those students met the minimum threshold of predicted success in college (a B minus average). That amounts to 711,000 high school seniors intellectually capable of succeeding in college. This level has been consistent for years. So over the last five years only 3.5 million high school seniors should have entered college based on their intellectual ability to succeed. Instead, undergraduate college enrollment stands at 19.5 million. Colleges in the U.S. are admitting approximately 4.5 million more students per year than are capable of earning a degree. This waste of time and money can be laid at the feet of the Federal government. Obama and his minions believe everyone deserves a college degree, even if they aren’t intellectually capable of earning it, because it’s only fair. No teenager left behind, without un-payable debt.

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BREAKING BAD (DEBT) – EPISODE TWO

‘If you’re committed enough, you can make any story work. I once told a woman I was Kevin Costner, and it worked because I believed it’ – Saul Goodman – Breaking Bad

“As calamitous as the sub-prime blowup seems, it is only the beginning. The credit bubble spawned abuses throughout the system. Sub-prime lending just happened to be the most egregious of the lot, and thus the first to have the cockroaches scurrying out in plain view. The housing market will collapse. New-home construction will collapse. Consumer pocketbooks will be pinched. The consumer spending binge will be over. The U.S. economy will enter a recession.” – Eric Sprott – 2007

In Part One of this article I provided the background of how our current debt saturated economy got to this point of ludicrousness. The “crazy” bloggers, prophets of doom, and analysts who could do basic math were warning of an impending financial crisis in 2006 and 2007, which would be caused by the issuance of hundreds of billions in subprime slime by the Too Big To Trust Wall Street shysters. Subprime mortgages, auto loans, and credit card lines provided the kindling for the 2008 conflagration.

Under normal circumstances we wouldn’t have seen such irrational, reckless, greedy behavior from Wall Street for another generation. But, Wall Street didn’t have to accept the consequences of their actions. They were bailed out and further enriched by their puppets at the Federal Reserve, the lackey politicians they installed in Washington D.C., and on the backs of honest, hard-working, tax paying Americans. The lesson they learned was they could continue to take excessive, reckless, unregulated risks without concern for losses, downside, or consequences.

In reality, the Fed and government have worked in tandem with Wall Street to create the subprime economic recovery. The scheme has been to revive the bailed out auto industry by artificially boosting sales through dodgy, low interest, extended term debt. With the Feds taking over the entire student loan market, they have doled out hundreds of billions to kids who don’t have the educational skills to succeed in college, in order to keep them out of the unemployment calculation.

That’s why you have a 5.7% unemployment rate when 41% of the working age population (102 million people) is not working. The appearance of economic recovery has been much more important to the ruling class than an actual economic recovery for average Americans, because the .1% have made out like bandits anyway. Who has benefited from the $650 billion of student loan and auto debt disseminated by the oligarchs in the last four years, the borrowers or lenders?

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