We Know More About the CIA Than the Federal Reserve

Judge Napolitano weighs in on the recent actions of the Federal Reserve, and asks why now is the opportune time to officially introduce the next round of quantitative easing:

The job of the CIA is to steal and keep secrets. We know far more about the CIA than we do about the Federal Reserve. Its members are appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate, yet it's a private bank that makes its own money, regulates the economy, and can print money.

The Federal government doesn't print money.

The Federal Reserve prints money.

It's not federal. It's not a reserve. It's a private bank.

Why is it flooding the market with cash?

He's (Ben Bernanke) going to create out of thin air forty billion dollars in cash and put it in the accounts of the Federal government. That is more cash chasing, available for, the same amount of goods and service.

Answer: inflation.

What goes up first? The thing we use the most… Fuel, food….

In 2008, as Presidential election day was approaching, the rug was pulled out from under U.S. stock markets by restricting the flow of capital to banks and the broader economy. The crash and subsequent economic crisis was used as a means to torpedo John McCain's Presidential hopes and propel the policies of progessive socialists and Barack Obama into the spotlight.

It looks as if the Federal Reserve may very well be engaging in politics yet again, this time helping to maintain stock market levels. Barack Obama is in a close race with Mitt Romney, and a stock market crash would certainly put the final nail in the coffin of his campaign. The powers that be have decided that now is the time to pump more money into markets, which is strongly supportive of the current administration.

It's simple, really. If markets crash Obama is out and Romney is in.

Mitt Romney, for his part, has now come out against the Fed and called for transparency. He must know that they have conspired against him.

But is Mitt Romney really any different with respect to his position on the fractional reserve monetary system?

Today, this debasement that was at one time punishable by death is business as usual.

If you print money we call it counterfeiting and the punishments are severe.

When the Federal Reserve does the same thing we call it inflation and they are revered.

via SHTF Plan by Mac Slavo on 9/20/12

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QE3: Banks Already Drowning In Liquidity

It's become apparent that the "solution" to the growing complexity of the financial system is more complexity.  The Federal Reserve planning concept of fixing debt by adding more debt, especially as we just crossed $16 trillion in public debt last week. With a new QE round between $200 and $500 billion the world is drowning in liquidity.  In other words, not only is debt the fix to record debt, but liquidity is about to be unleashed on a world that is already drowning in liquidity. 

The bad news: everything being tried now will fail, as it did before, because nothing has changed, except for the scale, meaning the blow up will be all that more spectacular. The good news: at least the Keynesians (or is it simply Socialists now?) out there will not be able to say we should have just added one more [    ]illion in debt/liquidity and all would have worked, just as our textbooks predicted. Because by the time it's over, that too will have happened.

From JPM's Michael Cembalest:

"It has been a strange year. If you were concerned about the global economy this year, you were right:  

• Leading indicators of manufacturing, such as new orders, are weakening just about everywhere
• Chinese, Korean and Taiwanese exports are slowing sharply; China may be growing at only 6%
• European growth is ~0%, with the periphery in recession. Germany business surveys also fading
• Last week’s US jobs report was weak across the board (payrolls, work week, labor force participation and wages)
• US capital spending trends are slowing (e.g., capital goods orders ex-aircraft)
• Countries like Brazil are showing signs of industrial fatigue due to an overly strong currency in 2010-2011
• The US election does not look like it will bring clarity to the US fiscal/debt ceiling divide (polls show Democrats keeping the White House and Republicans keeping the House of Representatives)
• US housing is staging a modest recovery, but it’s not a game-changer given its smaller contribution to employment
• Corporate profits are high, but the trend in EPS revisions is negative and profits growth is slowing

However, global equity markets have done well, up 13% so far in 2012. The bottom line: with the world drowning in liquidity, the right portfolio moves this year have been to take advantage of low equity valuations, look through all the economic weakness and expect that continued monetary stimulus will  eventually bear fruit. We have done some of that but not as much as we might have, and as things stand now, global equity markets have outperformed what I had expected. The world’s Central Banks have made it clear that inflating their way out is preferable to the alternatives, an environment that is conducive to risky assets that are priced very cheaply, until and unless they lose control of inflation."

For those confused, Cembalest only added "unless" out of political courtesy, because as even the Fed itself admitted last night, first via St. Louis Fed's James Bullard and soon everyone else, the Fed has finally been exposed as being nothing but a puppet tool of politicians, who in turn have always been sponsored muppets of Wall Street (Who can possibly forget Chuck Schumer telling Bernanke to "get to work Mr. Chairman"). In other words, we now know politicians run not only fiscal, but monetary policy. How to hedge against this apocalyptic proposition? Simple. Cue Kyle Bass: "Buying gold is just buying a put against the idiocy of the political cycle. It's That Simple."

It really is.

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QE3: Watering the Money Tree

A third quantitative easing program almost certainly awaits because the Fed is incapable of letting interest rates rise due to the detrimental effects this would have on their balance sheet. The only way they can secure interest rates at a lower level than they were purchased is to keep on buying more securities with printed money and enforce a cap/ceiling on market interest rates. 

The Fed is certainly not going to sell assets because they are currently the major purchasers of the asset markets they participate in, i.e. Treasuries, agency debt and mortgage backed securities. The Fed being the major holder and purchaser of particular assets has led the Fed to mark their assets to prices which they would pay, not necessarily the price of an outside buyer, and should the Fed become a major seller of these assets the need for mark downs versus current valuations is highly likely. In this circumstance, the Fed will again come face to face with their tiny capital base as they are unable to absorb losses of even 1% on their current asset markings without going insolvent.

Without QE3, interest rates can be expected to rise, and this should influence the Fed to step in and try restrain yields. Even though money printing has continued since the end of QE2, this is insufficient to maintain the Fed?s bubble. If interest rates rise substantively, this will put major pressure on sovereign, state and household solvency and could lead to near future bankruptcies across the board. The Fed will not stand idle and will come in to try paper over the markets problems in an illusory rescue attempt.

Bill Gross, manager of the world?s largest bond hedge fund, says bond yields should rise after the Fed ends QE2. Who is going to buy those treasures when a trillion dollars of purchasing power exits the market, he asks? (see video interview) With the Fed?s intent to restrain bond yields from rising, another money printing program is the only solution in their tool kit.

Whether preemptive or responsive, the Fed?s reaction this time around will likely be much faster than in previous episodes. The Fed is much more equipped now, after having several new powers resolved by congress and experiencing the 2008 chapter of the crisis, and are now unlikely to be as timid and lagging going forward.

Another way of seeing the inevitability of QE3 is realizing that the Fed has two mandates, price stability and low unemployment. The Fed has convinced themselves that inflation is not a problem so the only responsibility left for them is to ensure a high level of employment. The only measure the Fed has to even attempt to influence this is to print money, and yesterday's Fed statement indicated that they are concerned about the level of unemployment, meaning they're getting ready for a new money printing program to try and address this.

All of the above points to good times ahead for gold and silver as the money printing spigot is more easily turned on rather than addressing the core issues.

Source

Prepare For The Coming Economic Collapse

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke is not going to save our economy.  He supposedly didn't see the last financial crisis coming, and even after things started falling apart he continued to insist that that everything was fine. Housing prices would not go down and that we would not have a recession.

Wrong. We had the worst housing crash and the worst recession since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

But still millions of Americans are trusting him to save us this time around. It didn't happen in 2008 and it's not going to happen now.

One of the biggest flaws in our financial system is with the Federal Reserve system itself. The U.S. government is 16 trillion dollars in debt is because the system is designed to create gigantic amounts of government debt. And even if we replaced every corrupt and/or incompetent politician our economic problems would still persist.

Most Americans are pinning their hopes for an economic turnaround on the upcoming election, but the truth is that neither Obama or Romney has a plan that will fix it. The total amount of all debt in the United States has gone from less than 2 trillion dollars to almost 55 trillion dollars in 40 years...and 8 Presidents. Economic collapse is going to happen no which political party is in power.

It is very probable you could wake up one day soon and discover that because Ben Bernanke has printed trillions upon trillions of new dollars to "fix" the financial system your life savings have been devalued by 50 percent.

That may sound extreme but this is what millions of Europeans are extremely worried about right now. In Spain there has been a full-blown run on the banks. In July alone, 94 billion dollars was pulled out of the Spanish banking system - the equivalent of 7 percent of Spain's GDP...in one month!

Time is running out.  In fact, we might not have much time left at all before the next major downturn. September will be a pivotal month. Be ready.

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Economic Collapse Will Happen No Matter Who Wins Election

Our incumbent President says that things are getting better, jobs are being created, and America is on the road to recovery. His opponent, Governor Mitt Romney, says the opposite, but claims he has a plan that will turn things around and bring prosperity back.

According to free market proponent Peter Schiff, it doesn’t matter who wins, because the crunch is coming – and it’s going to become apparent during the next President’s administration.

He [Mitt Romney] is not going to prevent the crisis. 

We’re headed for a real economic collapse regardless of who wins this election. 

The government has over-promised. There are gigantic Ponzi schemes. They do not work. Meanwhile, the only reason the economy has not collapsed is because interest rates are artificially low. the Fed cannot keep interest rates low indefinitely, and when interest rates go up the party is over. And then we’re not going to have a choice anymore.

We’re going to have to finally deal with these problems or destroy our currency, and that is a real economic crisis that is going to make 2008 look like a walk in the park. 

[The crunch] is going to happen in the next administration.

We can’t fix these problems by repealing Obamacare and cutting taxes. We have structural problems that underline the U.S. economy that are very deep that require real free market reforms, and unfortunately none of the major candidates are even talking about that right now.

Peter Schiff was ahead of the collapse of 2008, warning clients of his firm Euro Pacific Capital that global equities would crash as a result of fraud, unservicable debt levels and a failed monetary policy. After the crash he, like many others, urged Congress to address the fundamental problems within the US economy, including fiscal, monetary and economic policy reform.

He and the American citizenry were ignored as Washington not only didn’t listen, but engaged in exactly the opposite of what should have been done.

Four years on we’re worse off than ever before, with more money having been borrowed from foreign creditors and stolen by the government from taxpayers under the guise of bailing out essential financial and manufacturing sectors of the global economy.

We’re in too deep folks. At this point, it cannot be stopped.

Trillions of dollars are owed, and as a country we have no way to make good on that debt.

Confidence in the US dollar will soon be lost, and when that happens we will experience a collapse in the United States and the global economy unlike any that has ever been witnessed in the history of the world.

Historians will write about this era for centuries to come, just as they write of Rome today.

Mac Slavo

US Economy At Risk For 2013 Recession

The latest data of durable goods orders, released Friday by the Commerce Department showed an increase of 4.2% for July but excluding transportation goods the order declined by 04%. 

In addition orders for capital goods fell 3.4% over the same month while the June figure was revised down to 2.7%. 

The latest data are not only very weak but are a sign of the weakest economic recovery since WWII according to several US economists and analysts. The decline in capital goods orders is a sign that US companies are hesitant to invest and expand their production capacity in light of global uncertainty. 

China, Europe and Brazil, once thought as the economic drivers to set the tone of recovery after the end of the economic recession in the summer of 2009, are now struggling themselves to keep their growth at a steady pace. 

We have seen large dips in economic growth in China to an annual rate of 8%, down from 11% during 2011, and continued fiscal and debt struggles in Europe which largely affect the US economic growth overall since both regions are crucial to the US production output and exports. 

US exports to both regions have been stagnating since 2007 due to a slowing demand from Europe and China. 

China in particular struggles with high inflationary pressures which lead the government to intervene through quantitative easing to ensure their economy does not overheat. That results in a net decline of production materials which in large part are imported from the US. 

Europe on the other hand is still not out of the woodworks when it comes to curbing the budget shortfalls and the debt/GDP ratios of some members which puts extra pressure on Germany, France and The Netherlands to control their inflation for the benefit of euro stabilization. 

The US economy continues to grow albeit at a very slow rate but should the durable goods orders continue to falter then the risk of a double-dip recession in 2013 is not unimaginable. 

This scenario would result in the unemployment rate rising again to 9%, currently at 8.3%, when the expected budget cuts and tax increases take effect early 2013. 

The Federal Reserve has yet to give a sign that it is willing to implement QE3 but given the latest data it is expected that the next FOMC (Federal Open Market Committee) may hint at a higher possibility of bond buy-back programs to curb long-term interest rates even further and to encourage business borrowing and spending to keep the US economy for retracting any further. 

Written by Nick Doms © 2012, all rights reserved.