FedUpUSA

Archive for November 6th, 2010

The following chart prepared recently by JPMorgan demonstrates something rather scary, and makes it all too clear how the Chairman’s plan to “assist” the US population via some imaginary “wealth effect” due to QE2, is about to backfire. As is now becoming very evident, the prices of energy and food products are about to surge, and in many cases have already done so, but courtesy of some clever gimmicks (Wal Mart selling what was formerly 39 oz of coffee as a 33.9 oz product for example) the end consumers haven’t quite felt it yet. They will soon.

There is a limit to how much every commodity can open limit up before it appears on the SKU price at one’s local grocer. And while a marginally declining “core CPI” is irrelevant for this exercise as it measures only items that are completely outside of the scope of everyday life, what will be far more important to end consumers will be the push higher in food and energy costs. The problem, however, is that for the lowest 20% of Americans, as per the BLS, food and energy purchases represent over 50% of their after-tax income (a number which drops to 10% for the wealthiest twenty percentile). In other words should rampant liquidity end up pushing food and energy prices to double (something that is a distinct possibility currently), Ben Bernanke may have very well sentenced about 60 million Americans to a hungry and very cold winter, let alone having any resources to buy trinkets with the imaginary wealth effect which for over 80% of the US population will never come.

Here is how JPM explains the phenomenon:

When the Fed considers the possible consequences of a falling dollar resulting from QE2, it should perhaps focus on food and energy prices as much as on traditionally computed core inflation.  First, the food/energy exposures of the lower 2 income quintiles are quite high (see chart).  Second, the core  CPI has a massive weight to “owner’s equivalent rent”, which suggests that the imputed cost of home occupancy has gone down.  Unfortunately, this is not true for families living in homes that are underwater, and cannot move to take advantage of it (unless they choose to default and bear the consequences of doing so).   Due to the housing mess, there has perhaps never been a time when traditionally computed core inflation as a way of measuring changes in the cost of things means less than it does right now.

Since nothing else appears to have jarred America from its prime time TV/iPad hypnosis yet, perhaps this is for the best, and a few hungry months in subzero temperatures is precisely what several tens of millions of Americans need to finally march on Constitution avenue.

ZeroHedge

Ilargi over at Automatic Earth has an excellent article today. Here are some of the high points, but I recommend reading it all.

You may think by now that Geithner and Bernanke and Larry Summers and Bob Rubin and all the rest of the pack are miserable failures and two sheets to the wind and all that, but you’d do better to give them a lot more credit than that.

QE2 is here, despite the gigantic failures and behemoth losses of its predecessors, because QE works like a Mother Mary statue in tears’ bleeding charm. Of course these guys all know that no proof of a QE ever reviving an economy exists. But they can pretend it does, and so they do: $900 billion, even for them, is real money.

Thing is, they never meant QE2 to do what they publicly claim they intended it for. This is nothing but another move to bail out lethally wounded banks.

These are America’s largest financial institutions, and finance over the past 10-20 years has become a disproportionally huge chunk of the US economy. And its politics. And that’s where the crux is.

I don’t know about you, but I have completely lost interest in trying to figure out which candidate in the midterm elections got how much from Wall Street. They all need their campaign contributions from bankrupt institutions such as BofA and Citi if they want to have a shot at being elected.

For now, please understand that QE2 was never intended to jump-start the American economy. It was meant to prolong Wile E.’s 15 minutes of fame, to keep banks like BofA and Citi above water long enough to allow anyone who has some skin in it to get the hell out without triggering any alarm bells.

There is money being handed out in QE2, which in the end is awfully simply yours, and which is thrown overboard in a way that makes you believe it’s in your best interest. Some people see it as a hidden tax, but that’s a far too gentle view. Daylight stand-and-deliver robbery or Grand Theft Auto are much more accurate denominations.

Is it that hard to understand, simple calculus? That every dollar spent ostensibly “on your behalf” will have to be paid back by you, even if not a penny of this, your own, money, went towards making your life better?

If that is really so, then QE2 works exactly the way it was meant to work. They’re not all that dumb, and they’re not making the grand mistakes some folks claim they do. They’re robbing you blind in plain daylight, and, as they go along, make you believe that’s in your best interest. It’s all nothing but a high-stakes game of pick-pocketing.

I think that’s about all anyone needs to know about how the looting operation works.

STOP THE LOOTING AND START PROSECUTING!

From the Vail Daily in Colorado:

EAGLE, Colorado — A financial manager for wealthy clients will not face felony charges for a hit-and-run because it could jeopardize his job, prosecutors said Thursday.

Martin Joel Erzinger, 52, faces two misdemeanor traffic charges stemming from a July 3 incident when he allegedly hit bicyclist Dr. Steven Milo from behind then sped away, according to court documents.

What? Read that again. Well, perhaps the victim, Dr. Milo was not hurt very badly…..

Milo suffered spinal cord injuries, bleeding from his brain and damage to his knee and scapula, according to court documents. Over the past six weeks he has suffered “disabling” spinal headaches and faces multiple surgeries for a herniated disc and plastic surgery to fix the scars he suffered in the accident.

“He will have lifetime pain,” Haddon wrote. “His ability to deal with the physical challenges of his profession — liver transplant surgery — has been seriously jeopardized.”

Uh huh. Well, sounds like Dr. Milo is in a world of hurt and his ability to do his job may be seriously compromised. Yet, Mr. Erzinger is not being prosecuted because apparently it may jeopardize HIS job. I can’t imagine what he does that’s even more important than performing life-saving organ transplants….

Erzinger, an Arrowhead homeowner, is a director in private wealth management at Morgan Stanley Smith Barney in Denver. His biography on Worth.com states that Erzinger is “dedicated to ultra high net worth individuals, their families and foundations.”

Erzinger manages more than $1 billion in assets. He would have to publicly disclose any felony charge within 30 days, according to North American Securities Dealers regulations.

Ah, yes. I see. It’s so obvious now. What was I thinking?

Carry on. Nothing to see here.

Today the financial world was buzzing with excitement because there was one moderately good piece of news for the U.S. economy.  U.S. employers added 151,000 jobs during the month of October and the unemployment rate remained unchanged at 9.6%.  This is certainly welcome news, but these days it seems as though there are at least ten pieces of bad economic news for every hopeful economic signal.  So don’t get fooled when the U.S. economy takes one step forward, because it is about to take another dozen or so steps backwards.  We are living in the middle of a nightmarish long-term economic decline that has been building for generations.  The deindustrialization of the United States, the horrific trade deficit caused by globalization and the skyrocketing national debt are problems that have taken decades to develop.  The Federal Reserve has been ripping the guts out of our financial system since 1913.  These are not things that are going to be fixed overnight.  In fact, there are some statistics that just keep getting worse and worse and worse as time goes by.  We are heading straight for a devastating economic collapse and hopefully we can all warn as many people as possible while there is still time.

The more research that you do into our economic situation the more depressing it becomes.  We are in big, big, big trouble.  The following are 14 pieces of bad economic news that are so horrifying you might not want to read them standing up….

#1 More than 42 million Americans were on food stamps during the month of August.  That is a new all-time record, and that number is 17 percent higher than it was one year earlier.  In fact, the number of Americans on food stamps is up more than 58 percent since August 2007.

#2 The number of “persons not in the labor force” in the United States has set another new all-time record.  The United States has not had such an extended bout of mass unemployment since the Great Depression.  The “official” unemployment rate in the United States has been at nine and a half percent or above for 14 consecutive months.

#3 More than 1000 people now live in the 200 miles of flood tunnels that exist under the city of Las Vegas.  Once one of the most prosperous cities in the United States, Las Vegas is now little more than a shiny, glittering corpse that it rapidly decaying.

#4 Poverty is absolutely exploding and it is hitting those who are the most vulnerable the hardest.  According to one recent study, approximately 21 percent of all children in the United States are living below the poverty line in 2010.

#5 In the past 60 days alone, the price of cotton is up 54%, the price of corn is up 29%, the price of soybeans is up 22%, the price of orange juice is up 17%, and the price of sugar is up 51%.

#6 One out of every six Americans is now enrolled in at least one anti-poverty program run by the federal government.

#7 The American Bankruptcy Institute says that there will be about 1.6 million consumer bankruptcies in 2010.  That would represent a huge increase over 2009.

#8 According to one recent survey, 28% of all U.S. households have at least one member that is looking for a full-time job.

#9 The individual U.S. states are mostly flat broke.  For example, it is being reported that the 15 largest U.S. states spent on average over 220% of their tax receipts over the past decade.  Clearly this is not even close to sustainable.

#10 The U.S. government is completely and totally broke.  After analyzing Congressional Budget Office data, Boston University economics professor Laurence J. Kotlikoff concluded that the U.S. government is facing a “fiscal gap” of $202 trillion dollars.

#11 In an attempt to keep our financial system solvent, the U.S. Federal Reserve has announced plans to create $600 billion out of thin air and pump it into the U.S. economy.  The Fed is calling this “quantitative easing“, but what they should really be calling it is “cheating, debasing and inflating”.

#12 Many of the major trading partners of the United States are expressing deep resentment regarding the new quantitative easing policy announced by the Fed.  Ambrose Evans-Pritchard recently described the growing animosity this way….

Li Deshui from Beijing’s Economic Commission said a string of Asian states share China’s “deep bitterness” over dollar debasement, and are examining ways of teaming up to insulate themselves from the tsunami of US liquidity.

#13 For many analysts, the economic collapse of the United States comes down to cold, hard math.  For example, the former CEO of the tenth largest bank in the United States says that it is a “mathematical certainty” that the U.S. government will eventually go bankrupt.

#14 According to a recent article on CNBC, the financial world is already buzzing about QE3….

“They’re already talking about QE3,” said Dave Rovelli, managing director of US equity trading for Canaccord Adams. “Eventually we’re going to be printing so much money the dollar is going to really go down and everybody’s going to try to deflate their currency against us. I just don’t know how this could end well.”?

So is that all the Federal Reserve has left?

Are they just going to keep pouring bags of money into the economy until things get back to “normal”?

Are we going to have “Quantitative Easing 3″, “Quantitative Easing 4″, and “Quantitative Easing 5″?

It has been a long-running joke, but perhaps by the end of this thing Ben Bernanke will literally go up in a helicopter and start shoveling out huge piles of cash over the countryside.

The era of great prosperity that we have all enjoyed for so long is coming to an end.  It would be advisable to use the remaining period of economic stability that we still have to prepare for what is ahead.

These economic problems could have been fixed decades ago if people would have actually listened and would have followed sound economic principles on an individual and on a corporate level, but that did not happen.

Now we are up to our eyeballs in debt and the greatest economic machine in history is rotting all around us.

We are in deep, deep, deep trouble and denying it is not going to make it go away.

The Economic Collapse

What if the Federal Reserve openly declared war against American companies and no one noticed?  It appears that is just what happened yesterday.  Just as stunning, the Federal Reserve President openly admitted that Chairman Ben Bernanke committed perjury in front of Congress.    It appears that the Federal Reserve is quite secure in its belief Americans will continue not to care.

This guy really ought to shut up – he just validated my thesis.

“We are showing insufficient stimulus,” Bernanke said today in remarks to college students in Jacksonville, Florida. Asset purchases have “the goal of reducing interest rates, providing more stimulus to the economy and, we hope, creating a faster recovery and an inflation rate consistent with long-run stability,” Bernanke said to students.

Now watch very carefully… remember, my thesis is this: Depressions are a function of margin collapse, not deflation.  You seek deflation intentionally every time you go to the store.  Technology creates massive deflation in many things (e.g. calculators, computers, music players, televisions, etc)   This is not bad, it is good.  It allows your earnings to go further and enhances your standard of living.

Here’s what Bernanke said today:

Asked by a student if “skyrocketing” commodities prices may threaten his inflation outlook, Bernanke said rising commodities prices are “the one exception” to a broad reduction in inflationary pressures. Overall, excess slack in the economy will make it difficult for producers to push through higher prices to consumers, he said.

So…..

Bernanke intends to collapse margins.

At the same time he is driving stock prices higher.

Yet you pay for earnings when you buy stock.

Earnings will be decreasing, because excess slack will make it difficult for producers to push through higher prices to consumers.

Therefore, margins decrease, and earnings decrease.

And you just got driven into “risky assets” – at a multiple he is destroying.

Thank you very much Ben.  We’ll remember this, along with your lie about monetizing the debt.  When, not if, the market crashes back to earth as a consequence of your intentional destruction of operating margins, can we send all the pissed-off retirees that lose their money (which you forced out of safe CDs and money markets) over to your home so you can explain to them that you did this on purpose?

Oh, on that lie.  Here it is again:

And here is your own Fed President Hoenig stating that you committed PERJURY before Congress:

What’s the risk of this move looking like the Fed is monetizing the debt?

I think it’s a legitimate risk because we are monetizing the debt, call it whatever you will. It is buying long-term or intermediate-term Treasurys in substantial amounts, that is by any definition monetizing the debt. What the consequences of that are, we can agree on or disagree on. The position would be that it’s temporary and that we would reverse all this. My concern is that if my experience is a reasonable base, then we will be slow to reverse it. And that means leaving it in there longer than — in hindsight — we will think was appropriate, we will create the next series of problems, whatever those are.