FedUpUSA

Archive for the ‘Wall Street’ Category

BANK, n. Bottomless cavity in the ground that sucks in money and the unwary. I had quite a bit of money but then I put it in the bank.

BOND, n. A profitless contrivance used for catching the gullible or feeble-minded. That pension fund is 100% in bonds now.

BROKER, adj. A comparative descriptive state for a client of a Wall Street bank. He didn’t exactly have a lot of money before he started dealing with Goldman Sachs. Now he’s even broker.

BUBBLE, n. Fundamental prerequisite for a functioning Anglo-Saxon economy. We need a new bubble to replace the ones we had in dotcom and property.

CENTRAL BANK, n. Lobbyist for commercial banks well versed in alchemy.

CURRENCY, n. Largely intangible substance with an inherent property that tends to instantaneous evaporation, the destruction of life and the permanent impairment of wealth. I had money once but then I exchanged it for currency in a moment of madness.

DEFAULT, n. Semi-mythical celestial occurrence that passes by Earth every 76 years. I was worried for a second about that Greek default, but I realise there’s nothing to see now and all is well.

FEDERAL RESERVE, n. A wholly owned subsidiary of Goldman Sachs. The Federal Reserve voted to give a few more billion dollars to Wall Street.

GREECE, n. An undesirable or unfortunate happening that occurs unintentionally but results in harm, injury, damage and colossal loss of wealth. And profits for Goldman Sachs. Did you see Greece ? Sheesh.

HORLICK, n. Progressive and insufficiently appreciated investment visionary.

HOUSE, n. In most countries, simply a place to live. In Britain, a theoretically infinite source of perpetual tax revenue for deluded Lib Dems. (This is tautological. – Ed.)

INVESTOR, n. Plucky protagonist admired for brave deeds and quixotic struggling who is about to get shafted by Wall Street interests. I was an investor in euro zone sovereign bonds but then everything went Greek.

JAPAN, n. Where hopes of profit go to die.

KEYNES, n. Slang: Vulgar. Disparaging and offensive. That joker Posen is a complete Keynes.

POLITICIAN, n. Someone better informed than you about how to spend your money.

RATINGS AGENCY, n. A professional entertainer who amuses by relating absurd and fantastical tales. That ratings agency’s credit assessment was so funny, I had to change my trousers.

RESTRUCTURING, n. Statutory rape. Those bondholders are undergoing a voluntary restructuring – you might even call it a ‘credit event’.

ROGUE TRADER, n. Unprofitable proprietary trader. (Hat-tip to Killian Connolly.)

SOCIETY, n. The process whereby wealth is diverted from taxpayers to banks.

TAXPAYER, n. Simple-minded dolt too foolish to be working for the government.

US GOVERNMENT, n. Another wholly owned subsidiary of Goldman Sachs. We seem to be running out of Goldman Sachs alumni here in the Treasury. No, wait, we’ve still got hundreds of ‘em.

VINCE CABLE, n. (No longer in technical use; considered offensive) a person of the lowest order in a former and discarded classification of mental retardation. Don’t be a Vince Cable – get down off that wardrobe and come and eat your tea!

The Sovereign Man

h/t Asimov from The Forum

Give me a break.

I’ve written on this so many times that I can’t count it.  The infamous 2007 “August OpEx Surprise” discount rate cut was obviously leaked to the banks in question, as there was a monstrous increase in both call buying and financial stock volume the afternoon before the action.

This is a complete scam folks and always has been.  I’ve been paying attention to this issue since the 1990s when it was clear that inside information was being used on government data releases.

Can someone find me just one example of a prosecution of a Wall Streeter for inside trading on government data releases?  I can’t recall it ever happening.

Reality is that there has always been an issue with government data being “glad-handed” to people ahead of time, and when it comes to thinks like Fed actions and such The Fed often actually polls primary dealers before it acts, either directly or indirectly.

At its core this system is corrupt and there is no real solution available until and unless the concept of “primary dealers” is eradicated.  Why should the nation’s largest commercial banks (along with foreign banks!) be given what amounts to not only a monopoly privilege on government borrowing?  Not only do they get a captive “skim” on such issues, but in addition they wind up being part of the information conduit on policy actions and thus have the “privilege” of being able to steal from their customers on a routine basis as well!

“Thousands upon thousands are yearly brought into a state of real poverty by their great anxiety not to be thought of as poor.” – Robert Mallett

I hear the term de-leveraging relentlessly from the mainstream media. The storyline that the American consumer has been denying themselves and paying down debt is completely 100% false. The proliferation of this Big Lie has been spread by Wall Street and their mouthpieces in the corporate media. The purpose is to convince the ignorant masses they have deprived themselves long enough and deserve to start spending again. The propaganda being spouted by those who depend on Americans to go further into debt is relentless. The “fantastic” automaker recovery is being driven by 0% financing for seven years peddled to subprime (aka deadbeats) borrowers for mammoth SUVs and pickup trucks that get 15 mpg as gas prices surge past $4.00 a gallon. What could possibly go wrong in that scenario? Furniture merchants are offering no interest, no payment deals for four years on their product lines. Of course, the interest rate from your friends at GE Capital reverts retroactively to 29.99% at the end of four years after the average dolt forgot to save enough to pay off the balance. I’m again receiving two to three credit card offers per day in the mail. According to the Wall Street vampire squids that continue to suck the life blood from what’s left of the American economy, this is a return to normalcy.

The definition of normal is: “The usual, average, or typical state or condition”. The fallacy is calling what we’ve had for the last three decades of illusion – Normal. Nothing could be further from the truth. We’ve experienced abnormal psychotic behavior by the citizens of this country, aided and abetted by Wall Street and their sugar daddies at the Federal Reserve. You would have to be mad to believe the debt financed spending frenzy of the last few decades was not abnormal.

The Age of Illusion

“Illusions commend themselves to us because they save us pain and allow us to enjoy pleasure instead. We must therefore accept it without complaint when they sometimes collide with a bit of reality against which they are dashed to pieces.” - Sigmund Freud

In my last article Extend & Pretend Coming to an End, I addressed the commercial real estate debacle coming down the pike. I briefly touched upon the idiocy of retailers who have based their business and expansion plans upon the unsustainable dynamic of an ever expanding level of consumer debt doled out by Wall Street banks. One only has to examine the facts to understand the fallacy of a return to normalcy. We haven’t come close to experiencing normalcy. When retail sales, consumer spending and consumer debt return to a sustainable level of normalcy, the carcasses of thousands of retailers will litter the highways and malls of America. It will be a sight to see. The chart below details the two decade surge in retail sales, with the first ever decline in 2008. Retail sales grew from $2 trillion in 1992 to $4.5 trillion in 2007. The Wall Street created crisis in 2008/2009 resulted in a decline to $4.1 trillion in 2009, but the resilient and still delusional American consumer, with the support of their credit card drug pushers on Wall Street, set a new record in 2011 of $4.7 trillion.

A two decade increase in retail sales of 135% might seem reasonable and normal if wages and household income had grown at an equal or greater rate. But total wages only grew by 125% over this same time frame. Interestingly, the median household income only grew from $30,600 to $49,500, a 62% increase over twenty years. It seems the majority of the benefits accrued to the top 20%, with their aggregate share of the national income exceeding 50% today, versus 47% in 1992 and 43% in the early 1970s. The top 5% are taking home in excess of 21% of the national income versus less than 19% in 1992 and 16% in the early 1970s. It appears the financialization of America, after Nixon closed the gold window and allowed unlimited money printing by the Federal Reserve, has benefitted the few, at the expense of the many. The bottom 80% of households has seen their share of the national income steadily decrease since the early 1970s. There are 119 million households in the United States and 95 million of these households have seen their wages and income stagnate. One might wonder how the 80% were able to fuel a two decade surge in retail sales with such pathetic wage growth.

Your friendly Wall Street banker stepped into the breach and did their part to aid a vast swath of Americans to enslave themselves in debt. As the chart above reveals, the slave owners on Wall Street have been the chief beneficiary of the decades long debt deluge. It seems that charging 18% interest on hundreds of billions in credit card debt can be extremely profitable for the shyster charging the interest. Decades of mailing millions of credit card offers, inundating financially ignorant Americans with propaganda media messages convincing them they needed a bigger house, fancier car, or latest technological gadget and creating complex derivatives that permitted banks to market debt to people guaranteed not to pay them back but not care since they sold the packages of these toxic AAA rated loans to pension funds and little old ladies, has done wonders for earnings per share, stock option awards, executive salaries and bonus pools. It hasn’t done wonders for the net worth of the average American who has been entrapped in the chains of debt, forged link by link over decades of purposeful deception and willful delusion.

The 135% increase in retail sales over two decades may have been slightly enhanced by the 213% increase in consumer credit outstanding. Consumer revolving credit rose from $800 billion to the current level of $2.5 trillion over the last two decades. Those 15 credit cards in our possession were so easy to use that we financed our trips to Dollywood, Sandals, and Euro-Disney, in addition to financing our 72 inch 3D HDTVs, granite countertops, stainless steel appliances, decks, pools, recliners with a built in fridges, home theatre rooms, Coach pocketbooks, Jimmy Cho shoes, Rolex watches, yachts, bigger and better boobs, and of course our smokes and beer. Much has been made about the great de-leveraging by the American consumer. There’s just one inconvenient fact – it hasn’t happened – yet.

Total consumer credit outstanding peaked at $2.58 trillion in July 2008. Today it stands at $2.50 trillion. Revolving credit card debt peaked at $972 billion in September 2008 and subsequently declined to $790 billion by April 2011. It now stands at $801 billion, as living well beyond our means has resumed its appeal. Meanwhile, non-revolving credit for automobiles, boats, student loans, and mobile homes peaked at $1.61 trillion in July 2008 and “crashed” all the way down to $1.58 trillion in May 2010. Once Bennie fired up the printing presses, the government car companies decided to make subprime auto loans again and the Federal government started doling out student loans like a pez dispenser, all was well in the non-revolving consumer loan world. The debt outstanding has soared to $1.7 trillion, a full $90 billion above the pre-crash peak. So, after three and a half years of “austerity” and supposed deleveraging, consumer debt outstanding has fallen by 3%.

The Big Lie of austerity and consumer deleveraging is unquestioned by the talking heads in the mainstream media. They are incapable or unwilling to examine the actual data which substantiates the fact that Americans have NOT deleveraged and have NOT taken austerity to heart. The most basic facts fly in the face of consumers even having the wherewithal to pay down their debt. Median household income has declined from $50,300 in 2008 to $49,400 today. There are 5 million less people employed today than employed in 2008. Total wages in the country have only grown from $6.6 trillion in 2008 to $6.8 trillion today. This increase was concentrated among the .01%, who do not carry credit card debt. They profit from credit card debt. Real disposable personal income has fallen by 5% since the peak in 2008 as Bernanke’s Wall Street bailout zero interest rate policy has caused prices for everything except our houses to surge. The people carrying most of the credit card debt are the least able to pay it off. These are the same people who have swelled the food stamp rolls from 28 million in 2008 to 46.5 million today.

A CNBC bubble headed arrogant bimbo might sarcastically ask, “If the American consumer isn’t deleveraging, than how did revolving credit card debt drop by $182 billion over three years?” Rather than do the minimal research needed to find the answer, they would rather parrot the company/government line. The chart below, compiled from Federal Reserve data, provides the answer. The Wall Street banks have written off $193.3 billion of bad debt since 2008. Now for some basic math, that will probably be over the head of most Wall Street analysts and CNBC parrots. If you start with $972 billion of credit card debt and you write-off $200 billion (assuming another $7 billion in the 4^th Quarter of 2011) and your ending balance is $801 billion, how much debt did the American consumer pay down? It’s a trick question. The American consumer ADDED $29 billion of credit card debt since 2008 to go along with the $90 billion of auto and student loan debt ADDED onto their aching backs. So much for the deleveraging storyline. It’s comforting to convince ourselves we’ve changed, but we haven’t. And the powers that be need you to keep believing, so they can continue to keep you enslaved and under their thumbs.

Consumer Credit Card Debt and Charge-off Data (in Billions):

(Source: CardHub.com, Federal Reserve)

Loving Our Servitude

“There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods. And this seems to be the final revolution.” Aldous Huxley

The American people have come to love their servitude through a combination of self- delusion, corporate mass media propaganda, and an irrational desire to appear successful without making the necessary sacrifices required to become successful. The drug of choice used to corral the masses into their painless concentration camp of debt has been Wall Street peddled financing. Can you think of a better business model than being a Wall Street bank? You hand out 500 million credit cards to 118 million households, even though 60 million of the households make less than $50,000. You then create derivatives where you package billions of subprime credit card debt and convince clueless dupes to buy this toxic debt as if it was AAA credit. When the entire Ponzi scheme implodes, you write-off $200 billion of bad debt and have the American taxpayer pick up the tab by having your Ben puppet at the Federal Reserve seize $450 billion of interest income from senior citizens and re-gift it to you through his zero interest rate policy. You then borrow from the Federal Reserve at 0% and charge an average interest rate of 15% on the $800 billion of credit card debt outstanding, generating $120 billion of interest and charging an additional $22 billion of late fees. Much was made of the closing of credit card accounts after the 2008 financial implosion, but most of the accounts closed were old unused credit lines. Now that the American taxpayer has picked up the tab for the 2008 debacle, the Wall Street banks are again adding new credit card accounts.

With 40% of all credit card users carrying a revolving balance averaging $16,000, they are incurring interest charges of $2,400 per year. Some of the best financial analysts in the blogosphere have been misled by the propaganda spewed by the Wall Street media shills at Bloomberg and CNBC. The following chart, which includes mortgage and home equity debt, gives the false impression households are sensibly deleveraging, as household debt as a percentage of disposable personal income has fallen from 115% in June 2009 to 101% today. As I’ve detailed ad nauseam, $200 billion of the $1.2 trillion of “household deleveraging” was credit card write-offs. The vast majority of the remaining $1 trillion of “deleveraging” could possibly be related to the 5 million completed foreclosures since 2009. Of course, this pales in comparison to the unbelievably foolhardy mortgage equity withdrawal of $3 trillion between 2003 and 2008 by the 1% wannabes.  Bloomberg might be a tad disingenuous by excluding the $1 trillion of student loan from their little chart. If student loan debt is included, household debt outstanding surges to $11.5 trillion.

Based on the Bloomberg chart you would assume wrongly that American consumers are using their rising incomes to pay down debt. Besides not actually reducing their debts, the disposable personal income figure provided by the government drones at the BEA includes government transfer payments for Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, unemployment compensation, food stamps, veterans benefits, and the all- encompassing “other”. Disposable personal income in the 2^nd quarter of 2008 reached $11.2 trillion. It has risen by $500 billion, to $11.7 trillion by the end of 2011. Coincidentally, government social transfers have risen by $400 billion over this same time frame, a 20% increase. Excluding government transfers, disposable personal income has risen by a dreadful 1.1%. For the benefit of the slow witted in the mainstream media, every penny of the social welfare transfers has been borrowed. Only a government bureaucrat could believe that borrowing money from the Chinese, handing it out to unemployed Americans and calling it personal income is proof of deleveraging and austerity.

Household debt as a percentage of wages in 2008 was 185%. Today, after the banks have written off $1.2 trillion of debt, this figure stands at 169%. Meanwhile, total credit market debt in our entire system now stands at an all-time high of $54 trillion, up $3 trillion from 2007. It stands at 360% of GDP. In 1992, total credit market debt of $15.2 trillion equaled 240% of GDP ($6.3 trillion). Was it a sign of a rational balanced economic system that total credit market debt grew by 355% in the last two decades while GDP grew by only 238%? I think it is pretty clear the last two decades have not been normal or built upon a sustainable foundation. In the three decades prior to 1990 household debt as a percentage of disposable personal income stayed in a steady range between 60% and 80%. The current level of 101% is abnormal. In order to achieve a sustainable normal level of 80% will require an additional $2 trillion of debt destruction. No one is prepared for this inevitable end result. The impact of this “real” deleveraging will devastate our consumer dependent society.

The colossal accumulation of debt in the last two decades was the cause and abnormally large retail sales were the effect. The return to normalcy will not be pleasant for consumers, retailers, mall owners, local governments or bankers.

Demographics are a Bitch

In addition to an unsustainable level of debt, the pig in the python (also known as the Baby Boomer generation) will relentlessly impact the future of consumer spending and the approaching mass retail closures. Baby Boomers range in age from 51 to 68 today. The chart below details the retail spending by age bracket. Almost 50% of all retail spending is done by those between 35 years old and 54 years old. This makes total sense as these are the peak earnings years for most people and the period in their lives when they are forming households, raising kids and accumulating stuff. As you enter your twilight years, income declines, medical expenses rise, the kids are gone, and you’ve bought all the stuff you’ll ever need. Spending drops precipitously as you enter your 60’s. The spending wave that began in 1990 and reached its apex in the mid-2000s has crested and is going to crash down on the heads of hubristic retail CEOs that extrapolated unsustainable debt financed spending to infinity into their store expansion plans. The added kicker for retailers is the fact Boomers haven’t saved enough for their retirements, have experienced a twelve year secular bear market with another five or ten years to go, are in debt up to their eyeballs, and have seen the equity in their homes evaporate into thin air in the last seven years. This is not a recipe for a spending up swell.

Demographics cannot be spun by the corporate media or manipulated by BLS government drones. They are factual and unable to be altered. They are also predictable. The four population by age charts below paint a four decade picture of reality that does not bode well for retailers over the coming decade. The population by age data correlates perfectly with the spending spree over the last two decades.

• 26% of the population in the prime spending years between 35 and 54 years old.
• Only 14% of the population over 65 years old indicating reduced spending.

• 31% of the population in the prime spending years between 35 and 54 years old.
• Only 13% of the population over 65 years old indicating reduced spending.

• 28% of the population in the prime spending years between 35 and 54 years old.
• A rising 14% of the population over 65 years old indicating reduced spending.

• 24% of the population in the prime spending years between 35 and 54 years old.
• A rising 17% of the population over 65 years old indicating reduced spending.

The irreversible descent in the percentage of our population in the 35 to 54 year old prime spending age bracket will have and is already having a devastating impact on retail sales. In addition, the young people moving into the 25 to 34 year old bracket are now saddled with $1 trillion of student loan debt and worthless degrees from the University of Phoenix and the other for-profit diploma mills, luring millions with their Federal government easy loan programs. The fact that 40% of all 20 to 24 year olds in the country are not employed and 26% of all 25 to 34 year olds in the country are not working may also play a role in holding back spending, as jobs are somewhat helpful in generating money to buy stuff. Even with Obama as President they will have a tough time getting onto the unemployment rolls without ever having a job. The 55 and over crowd, who have lived above their means for three decades, will be lucky if they have the resources to put Alpo on the table in the coming years. The unholy alliance of debt, demographics and delusion will result in a retail debacle of epic proportions, unseen by retail head honchoes and the linear thinkers in the media and government.

We’re Not in Kansas Anymore Toto

“We tell ourselves we’re in an economic recovery, meaning we expect to return to a prior economic state, namely, a turbo-charged “consumer” economy fueled by easy credit and cheap energy. Fuggeddabowdit. That part of our history is over. We’ve entered a contraction that will seem permanent until we reach an economic re-set point that comports with what the planet can actually provide for us. That re-set point is lower than we would like to imagine. Our reality-based assignment is the intelligent management of contraction. We don’t want this assignment. We’d prefer to think that things are still going in the other direction, the direction of more, more, more. But they’re not. Whether we like it or not, they’re going in the direction of less, less, less. Granted, this is not an easy thing to contend with, but it is the hand that circumstance has dealt us. Nobody else is to blame for it.” – Jim Kunstler

The brilliant retail CEOs who doubled and tripled their store counts in the last twenty years and assumed they were geniuses as sales soared are getting a cold hard dose of reality today. What they don’t see is an abrupt end to their dreams of ever expanding profits and the million dollar bonuses they have gotten used to. I’m pretty sure their little financial models are not telling them they will need to close 20% of their stores over the next five years. They will be clubbed over the head like a baby seal by reality as consumers are compelled to stop consuming. As we’ve seen, just a moderation in spending has resulted in a collapse in store profitability. Retail CEOs have failed to grasp that it wasn’t their brilliance that led to the sales growth, but it was the men behind the curtain at the Federal Reserve. The historic spending spree of the last two decades was simply the result of easy to access debt peddled by Wall Street and propagated by the easy money policies of Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke. The chickens came home to roost in 2008, but the Wizard of Debt – Bernanke – has attempted to keep the flying monkeys at bay with his QE1, QE2, Operation Twist, and ZIRP. As the economy goes down for the count again in 2012, he will be revealed as a doddering old fool behind the curtain.

There are 1.1 million retail establishments in the United States, but the top 25 mega-store national chains account for 25% of all the retail sales in the country. The top 100 retailers operate 243,000 stores and account for approximately $1.6 trillion in sales, or 36% of all the retail sales in the country. They are led by the retail behemoth Wal-Mart and they dot the suburban landscape from Maine to Florida and New York to California. These super stores anchor every major mall in America. There are power centers with only these household names jammed in one place (example near my home: Best Buy, Target, Petsmart, Dicks, Barnes & Noble, Staples). These national chains had already wiped out the small town local retailers by the early 2000s as they sourced their goods from China and dramatically underpriced the small guys. The remaining local retailers have been closing up shop in record numbers in the last few years as the ability to obtain financing evaporated and customers disappeared. The national chains have more staying power, but their blind hubris and inability to comprehend the future landscape will be their downfall.

Having worked for one of the top 100 retailers for 14 years, I understand every aspect of how these mega-chains operate. They all approach retailing from a very scientific manner. They have regression models to project sales based upon demographics, drive times, education, average income, and the size of the market. They will build any store that achieves a certain ROI, based on their models. The scientific method works well when you don’t make ridiculous growth assumptions and properly take into account what your competitors are doing and how the economy will realistically perform in the future years. This is where it goes wrong as these retail chains get bigger, start believing their press clippings and begin ignoring the warnings of sober realists within their organizations. When the models show that cannibalization of sales from putting stores too close together will result in a decline in profits, the CEO will tweak the model to show greater same store growth and a larger increase in the available market due to higher economic growth. They assume margins will increase based upon nothing. At the same time, they will ignore the fact their competitor is building a store 2 miles away. Eventually, using foolhardy assumptions and ignoring facts leads to declining sales and profitability.

There is no better example of this than Best Buy. They increased their U.S. store count from 500 in 2002 to 1,300 today. That is a 160% increase in store count. For some perspective, national retail sales grew by 42% over this same time frame. Their strategy wiped out thousands of mom and pop stores and drove their chief competitor – Circuit City – into liquidation. But their hubris caught up to them. There sales per store has plummeted from $36 million per store in 2007 to less than $28 million per store today, a 24% decline in just five years. They have cannibalized themselves and have seen a $6 billion increase in revenue lead to $100 million LESS in profits. It appears the 444 stores they have built since 2007 have a net negative ROI. Top management is now in full scramble mode as they refuse to admit their strategic errors. Instead they cut staff and use upselling gimmicks like service plans, technical support and deferred financing to try and regain profitability. They will not admit they have far too many stores until it is too late. They will follow the advice of an earnings per share driven Wall Street crowd and waste their cash buying back stock. We’ve seen this story before and it ends in tears. I was in a Best Buy last week at 6:00 pm and there were at least 50 employees servicing about 10 customers. Tick Tock.

You would have to be blind to not have noticed the decade long battles between the two biggest drug store chains and the two biggest office supply chains. Walgreens and CVS have been in a death struggle as they have each increased their store counts by 80% to 90% in the last 10 years. Both chains have been able to mask poor existing store growth by opening new stores. They are about to hit the wall. I now have six drug stores within five miles of my house all selling the exact same products. Every Wal-Mart and Target has their own pharmacy. At 2:00 pm on a Sunday afternoon I walked into the Walgreens near my house and there were six employees, a pharmacist and myself in the store. This is a common occurrence in this one year old store. It will not reach its 3rd birthday.

Further along on the downward death spiral are Staples and Office Depot. They both increased their store counts by 50% to 60% in the last decade. Despite adding almost 200 stores since 2007, Staples has managed to reduce their profits. Sales per store have declined by 20% since 2006. Office Depot has succeeded in losing almost $2 billion in the last five years. These fools are actually opening new stores again despite overseeing a 36% decrease in sales per store over the last decade. These stores sell paper clips, paper, pens, and generic crap you can purchase at 100,000 other stores across the land or with a click of you mouse. Their business concept is dying and they don’t know it or refuse to acknowledge it.

Even well run retailers such as Kohl’s and Bed Bath & Beyond have hit the proverbial wall. Remember that total retail sales have only grown by 42% in the last ten years while Kohl’s has increased their store count by 180% and Bed Bath & Beyond has increased their store count by 175%. Despite opening 200 new stores since 2007, Kohl’s profits are virtually flat. Sales per store have deflated by 26% over the last decade as over-cannibalization has worked its magic. Bed Bath & Beyond has managed to keep profits growing as they drove Linens & Things into bankruptcy, but they risk falling into the Best Buy trap as they continue to open new stores. Their sales per store are well below the levels of 2002. Again, there is very little differentiation between these retailers as they all sell cheap crap from Asia, sold at thousands of other stores across the country. With home formation stagnant, where will the growth come from? Answer: It won’t come at all.

The stories above can be repeated over and over when analyzing the other mega-retailers that dominate our consumer crazed society. Same store sales growth is stagnant. The major chains have over cannibalized themselves. Their growth plans were based upon a foundation of ever increasing consumer debt and ever more delusional Americans spending money they don’t have. None of these retailers has factored a contraction in consumer spending into their little models. But that is what is headed their way. They saw the tide go out in 2009 but they’ve ventured back out into the surf looking for some trinkets, not realizing a tsunami is on the way. The great contraction began in 2008 and has been proceeding in fits and starts for the last four years. The increase in retail sales over the last two years has been driven by inflation, not increased demand. The efforts of the Federal Reserve and Wall Street to reignite our consumer society by pushing subprime debt once more will ultimately fail – again. The mega-retailers will be forced to come to the realization they have far too many stores to meet a diminishing demand.

The top 100 mega-retailers operate 243,000 stores. Will our contracting civilization really need or be able to sustain 14,000 McDonalds, 17,000 Taco Bells & KFCs, 24,000 Subways, 9,000 Wendys, 7,000 7-11s, 8,000 Walgreens, 7,000 CVS’, 4,000 Sears & Kmarts, 11,000 Starbucks, 4,000 Wal-Marts, 1,700 Lowes and 1,800 Targets in five years?  As our economy contracts and more of our dwindling disposable income is directed towards rising energy and food costs, retailers across the land will shut their doors. Try to picture the impact on this country as these retailers are forced to close 50,000 stores. Where will recent college graduates and broke Baby Boomers work? The most profitable business of the future will be producing Space Available and For Lease signs. Betting on the intelligence of the American consumer has been a losing bet for decades. They will continue to swipe that credit card at the local 7-11 to buy those Funions, jalapeno cheese stuffed pretzels with a side of cheese dipping sauce, cartons of smokes, and 32 ounce Big Gulps of Mountain Dew until the message on the credit card machine comes back DENIED.

There will be crescendo of consequences as these stores are closed down. The rotting hulks of thousands of Sears and Kmarts will slowly decay; blighting the suburban landscape and beckoning criminals and the homeless. Retailers will be forced to lay-off hundreds of thousands of workers. Property taxes paid to local governments will dry up, resulting in worsening budget deficits. Sales taxes paid to state governments will plummet, forcing more government cutbacks and higher taxes. Mall owners and real estate developers will see their rental income dissipate. They will then proceed to default on their loans. Bankers will be stuck with billions in loan losses, at least until they are able to shift them to the American taxpayer – again. No politician, media pundit, Federal Reserve banker, retail CEO, or willfully ignorant mindless consumer wants to admit the truth that the last three decades of debt delusion are coming to a tragic bitter end. The smarmy acolytes of Edward Bernays on Wall Street and in corporate America have successfully used propaganda and misinformation to lure generations of weak minded people into debt servitude. But, at the end of the day, you need cash to service the debt. Mind control doesn’t pay the bills.  We will eventually return to normal, just not the normal many had in mind.

Jim Quinn for The Burning Platform

Well look what we have here!

Meager resources have been applied to investigate the financial assault on our country, which wiped away trillions of dollars in household wealth and has resulted in 24 million people jobless or underemployed. The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, which Congress created to examine the full scope of the crisis, was given a budget of $9.8 million — roughly one-seventh of the budget of Oliver Stone’s “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps.” The Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations did its work on the financial crisis with only a dozen or so Congressional staff members.

Despite their limited budgets, both inquiries turned over rocks and exposed disturbing financial practices, and both entities referred potential violations of law to the Justice Department.

Yep — even when there was under-oath testimony, such as that from Citi Financial’s former chief risk officer of knowing sale of garbage loans to investors, nothing was done about it.

As for the items turned over to the Justice Department I would have liked to have seen that list made public.  It wasn’t, but it should have been in all of its glory.  After all, this inquiry was paid for with public funds.  We deserve to see the entire report and all referrals, don’t you think?

No one should seek or condone prosecutions for revenge or political purposes. But laws need to be enforced to deter future malfeasance. Just as important, the American people need to believe that a thorough investigation has been conducted; that our judicial system has been fair to all, regardless of wealth and power; and that wrongs have been righted.      

Indeed Phil.

I’ve wondered if we were ever going to get something more than a whitewash.

I wasn’t impressed with the final report, as in my view it did not go anywhere near far enough.  But it is what it is, and it is also now history.

Nonetheless there’s plenty there if anyone cares to go dig up the truth and complete the investigations necessary to develop that which will support indictments.

If anyone cares.

The American people should demand that our government, in fact, does care.

Despite the practical impossibility of real comparisons we know perfectly well that the value of a dollar or a pound, shekel, rouble or euro isn’t what it used to be…This fact, however, doesn’t stop us from almost exclusively focusing on how much money we have today rather than what it can purchase for us: we think about money in nominal terms rather than real ones [- and that is what is known as money illusion. Let me explain.]

So says Timarr (www.psyfitec.com) in edited excerpts from the original article* which Lorimer Wilson, editor of www.munKNEE.com (Your Key to Making Money!), has further edited below for length and clarity – see Editor’s Note at the bottom of the page. (This paragraph must be included in any article re-posting to avoid copyright infringement.)

Timarr goes on to say, in part:

What is Money Illusion?

Money illusion is the trait that causes people to focus on the amount of money they possess rather than it’s worth to them. A hundred dollars a hundred years ago is obviously worth much more than a hundred dollars now: prices have inflated and the value of the hundred dollars is far less than it used to be…

[The money illusion trait has] spawned a range of measures that are more or less (usually less) useful to us in everyday life leading us to various predictable, albeit unpleasant, consequences such as believing that “you can’t go wrong with property” or that storing cash in your mattress equates to sensible financial planning …

Money Illusion and Inflation

People hoard cash in low interest savings accounts or get excited about huge multiples of value increases in their house prices without really thinking through what this means in real terms. The brutal reality is that most asset classes lose you money when inflation is taken into account. Money illusion really matters and striving to ensure that we’re not victims of it is a fight well worth picking.

Money Illusion and Deflation

It’s not just savings and investments where money illusion causes a problem. Just as we don’t easily take into account the effect of inflation neither do we readily come to terms with its opposite, the dreaded deflation…

It is not entirely obvious why everyone gets quite so anxious about deflation, because it would generally seem to be a good thing to be able to buy a new car tomorrow for less than you can today…but what gets politicians and bankers all nervous and edgy is the experience of deflation in the Great Depression [which evolved into a time of] mass unemployment. This left a generation of workers deeply scarred and central bankers worried about the social problems that arise from such situations. If it was a golden age of anything it was labor disputes…

Money Illusion and Unemployment

Sadly, money illusion has its part to play in this going wrong. If prices are falling then profit margins are also decreasing so, assuming that wages are a significant part of a company’s expenditure [and, as such,] it makes sense to reduce their wage bill. Rationally they should achieve this by cutting wages – after all, if prices are deflating, then a wage cut doesn’t mean you’re any worse off because you can still buy just as much as you used to be able to. Unfortunately, driven by money illusion most people react violently against such proposals, employers feel unable to make such requests and to cut their wage bills they adopt the more “socially acceptable” method of firing workers. Thanks to money illusion people would rather risk losing their jobs and earn nothing than taking a pay cut…

Money Illusion and “Higher” Company Profits/”Higher” Wages

Money illusion also explains why many companies can actually increase their profits when inflation is on the rise. When inflation is low people still want pay rises and corporations find it difficult to resist this, ultimately having to raise wages in real terms – i.e. over and above the rate of inflation. When inflation is high people are often satisfied with wages that increase only with the rate of inflation – they still get a nice big pay rise, and happily ignore the fact that they’re no better off than they used to be.

Money Illusion and Investor Returns

Money illusion seems to be indicted in:

• house price booms, according to Brunnermeier and Julliard, who concluded that:

A reduction in inflation can fuel run-ups in housing prices if people suffer from money illusion. For example, investors who decide whether to rent or buy a house by simply comparing monthly rent and mortgage payments do not take into account the fact that inflation lowers future real mortgage costs. We decompose the price-rent ratio into a rational component meant to capture the “proxy effect” and risk premia and an implied mispricing. We find that inflation and nominal interest rates explain a large share of the time-series variation of the mispricing, and that the tilt effect is very unlikely to rationalize this finding.

• and in the stock market according to the Modigliani-Cohen hypothesis that argues that:

If inflation is high then people think that increases in stock prices include the excess returns that stocks offer over other securities, and systematically undervalue them.

That is simply money illusion, again…Higher periods of inflation seem to be great times for long term investors, as stocks are on offer at a discount due to the effects of money illusion. Lower inflation seems to be more indicative of over-pricing in the markets. Basically everything’s governed by money illusion – revenues, earnings, stock prices and, of course, valuation ratios. This is yet another reason why it’s hard to compare the value of stocks between the decades – a price-earnings ratio in a decade of low or reducing inflation will be more real than one in a time where inflation is rampant. Repeat it one more time: price is what you pay, value’s what you get.

Editor’s Note: The above article has been has edited ([ ]), abridged (…) and reformatted (including the title, some sub-titles and bold/italics emphases) for the sake of clarity and brevity to ensure a fast and easy read. The article’s views and conclusions are unaltered and no personal comments have been included to maintain the integrity of the original article.

Lorimer Wilson – MunKNEE.com

One of the things we learned in almost 30 years in the brokerage business is that self-regulation does not work. The players are simply too abusive, greedy and prove to take the regulations to the very edge. We saw that at MF global. All markets are rigged today. Twenty-five years ago perhaps 80% were rigged. The SEC and CFTC are well aware of this and in many cases aid and abet in the crimes. The crimes are too many to mention, but among the leading problems are complicity in front running and naked shorting. There is no such thing as an efficient market hypothesis. Just another phase to led you off into the forest.

A small group of big hitters control Wall Street, the Federal Reserve, our government and our economy. Just ask members of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission or the Bilderberg Group. They know what is going on because they help make policy, and arrange to get it executed. Wall Street is one long litany of fraud, where the guilty seldom go to jail and the tables are squared via fines, usually paid by the firms and not the individuals. While the SEC and CFTC investigations go nowhere, or don’t happen at all, they relish charging small and medium sized brokerage houses to justify their existence. That is when they are not pursuing some newsletter writer, all of whom cannot afford top legal help, or any legal help at all. The whole game is crooked and has been for many years. It is government and its agencies and Wall Street and baking that controls your entire lives. Their power is immense and that is how they get away with what they get away with.

The same is true with Congress 90% of which are bought and paid for via campaign contributions and other artifices such as insider trading. That is why we have free trade and globalization, offshoring and outsourcing. Congress and those running for the office and president don’t even talk about it, yet, in 12 years it has cost 12 million jobs and 450,000 businesses. Obviously that is not a serious matter for Congress. Or should we say those who pay Congress, transnational conglomerates, want free trade just as it is. Our nation could not compete with slave labor countries in 1795 and they cannot compete now. There has to be a leveling force, a balance that stops the pillaging of America, which destroys economic independence and eventually sovereignty. We are a step away from post industrial dependency and bankrupt as well. Congressional complicity stands out like a beacon, when these asset strippers do not have to pay taxes on foreign earnings. Who has ever heard of something so unreasonable? Instead of lowering corporate taxes as other nations had done we eliminated taxation, so transnational corporations could compete. This is what we call modern colonialism.

After the debacles of the 1790s and British colonialism, the US switched to a tariff system, which worked quite well until about 25 years ago. Then came WTO, NAFTA and CAFTA, the result of which you are witnessing today. The system of tariffs allowed government to fund itself via exercise taxes funded by foreign corporations, which kept Americans from having to pay income taxes for about 100 years. Tariffs are part of what made America great and we cannot be great again without tariffs, it is as simple as that. You cannot have prosperity giving away 12 million jobs in 12 years. As we have seen you cannot have persistent and growing trade deficits year after year and not go broke. Here we are 217 years later doing the same stupid thing over again. The main reason for this is that the public is not paying attention and Congress does whatever their paymasters tell them to do.

The debt position of the US deteriorates each day and with it not only the dollar, the world’s reserve currency, deteriorates versus other currencies and gold and silver. Having the dollar as the world’s reserve currency gives many benefits to Americans and if that advantage is lost so is what is left of American prosperity. Are we to follow in the footsteps of Greece? It is wrong to say that tariffs cause depressions. They were increased six times over the past 200 years and no depression followed. If we do not get tariffs America cannot survive as a world leader.

If a written document exists outlining the deliberate default of Greece and has been in the possession of two Wall Street banks for a month then the fall of Greece has been in the works for some time. The date of March 23rd was supposedly the date for default. The rating agencies are supposed to be the trigger for the default. The 23rd is a Friday and on Saturday Greek bank accounts are to be frozen. If that is true all Greeks should have their euros and any other currencies and valuables out of all Greek banks.

Several months ago we stated that we did not know what was really going on behind the scenes in Germany. Our question was did they really want to save Greece and perhaps the euro, or were they interested as the majority of Germans are, in dumping the euro and the EU? Over the past week commentaries were all over the place, many of them off the wall. We have seen delays for 2-1/2 years, but nothing like we have seen over the past month. It is like most non-Greeks had monkey wrenches to throw into the gears of progress. The US says they do not want to get any deeper into Europe’s problems, as the IMF offers a pittance. The Germans and Schäuble these past 2 weeks had nothing but negative comments and commands trying to keep moving the goal posts, so to cast confusion among Greek negotiators. We are told on Saturday that on Thursday a deal was cut. Mrs. Merkel wants to replace the Greek government with a EU commissioner. In German it is called Gauleiter. We guess they want to have Greece as a subsidiary of Germany.

Bob Chapman – The International Forecaster