Posts Tagged ‘QE’
The Most-Corrupt Administration Ever?
Let’s see how I do with the list.
- Fast And Furious (guns for drug lords, resulting in murder of Americans and Mexicans)
- Robosigning (over 100,000 perjured affidavits filed in court cases)
- IRS Tea Party and other group and individual abuse in direct violation of the law (politically-based harassment and now apparently-perjured testimony before Congress)
- Money Laundering for terrorists and drug lords (by multiple large banks)
- Intentional and unlawful destruction of property rights (GM bondholders screwed for political cronies in the UAW)
- Intentional and unlawful destruction of your saved wealth (QE, QE2, QE3, QEinfinity, $1 trillion+ deficits, etc; Treasury and Federal Reserve actions)
- Benghazi (apparent illegal arming of terrorists, then an attempt to reverse that leading to the attack on our CIA outpost and what appears to beintentional indifference and orders to stand down during the attack that had to come from the White House despite ability to respond; this amounts to conspiracy with the terrorists to kill Chris Stevens and the others who died.)
- Swindles by the billions in countless schemes during the 2000s related to securitizations and other hinky deals (where despite black letter legal requirements for actual endorsement and delivery of documents banks simply did not comply and now argue there should be no penalty for not having done so, and that these defects are “mere procedural errors” despite intent to not comply.) The result is that our land title system no longer has any resemblance of integrity.
- Intentional destruction of anything approaching a “free market” for health care going back 30+ years and now compounded through active conspiracy by Obama and all of the political parties to grant, protect and enforce through government monopolies and cost-shifting resulting in cost escalations of 500-1,000% or even more against market prices and now, with Obamacare, abuse of the IRS tax power to force another 100% or more increase in those expenses down your throat for the express purpose of enrichment of those in the medical industry.
I’m sure I’ve missed a bunch, but this is a good start.
What do all these (and more) have in common?
Your refusal, as Americans, to stand and demand that The Rule of Law be restored and honored and that those who refuse to do so be impeached (if in government) and stand trial for their abuses.
I keep hearing people ask when I, or someone else, will “lead” on this issue.
Why do you ask where the leader is?
Do you want a Hitler? You’re going to get one if you keep that shit up.
We the people do not need “leaders” to resolve this.
We all need to personally grow a pair of balls to replace that vacuum between our legs (or nestled in our pelvis where our ovaries are supposed to be.)
We need to get off our fat asses and stop demanding that someone else take care of what is our job as citizens of this nation.
You do not have the right to health care.
You do not have the right to a job.
You do not have the right to go to college.
You do not have the right to a house.
You do not have the right to food.
You do have the right to effort to generate some form of economic activity by your own hand and mind for yourself and those who you have as dependents through your own actions, such as your children (who exist because of your actions – your exercise of the power to create life.) You may then expend the fruits of that economic activity as you see fit because such is your property; you earned it through an honest exchange with another.
You do have the right to life, liberty and the pursuit (but not guarantee of attainment) of happiness. This means that all of the above — every single one of those abuses that have been served upon you — are unlawful.
But those three rights only exist so long as you will stand and defend them. A person is a victim only until he or she gives consent.
Put a different way: The only difference between sex and rape is consent.
As soon as you consent to the frauds and abuses heaped upon you they cease to be frauds and abuses and become part of a sick sado-masochistic ritual you have willingly taken upon yourself.
They remain so until you stand and demand that it stop, backing that demand with whatever defensive force is necessary to stop what has now become rape rather than sex.
It is for that reason that I am an absolutist on where the Second Amendment’s boundaries lie. It is impossible as a matter of logic for me or anyone else to depend on someone else to stop a criminal who intends to take my life or that of those in my care, irrespective of how we would otherwise design such a social system. By definition the first person able and often the only person able to stop such an assault is the victim that the perpetrator intends to assault or kill. It matters not whether the assailant is an individual thug, a pair of thugs, an organized gang or a government agency.
The bottom line is the same; your right to life only exists so long as you are willing and able to defend it.
The same bottom line exists for liberty and the offense against it that is delineated in most of the above list; you have such a right only so long as you are willing to defend it. The minute you cede that right you have consented to what you are experiencing and you lose the right to bitch about it until and unless you stand and take back that which God gave you.
This is basic logic and as soon as you cede basic logic you inevitably lose every other point of argument. In this case when you lose those arguments you risk losing your life and/or liberty; you are literally risking death or enslavement.
Since 2007 I have written on these matters in the economic realm and laid forth arithmetic proving that what has been done is not an accident but rather is a swindle. It is not a new swindle either; it is in fact one of the oldest in the history books, rivaling only prostitution in age. Arithmetic is not subject to debate; you can choose to overlook it but you cannot change it.
Those of you who seek leaders are fools; each of you should lead for yourself and confine that leadership to yourself and your life along with those dependent upon you through acts of your own free choice, enjoying or suffering the consequences of those choices.
Your right to lead in that regard ends as soon as you demand that someone else pay for whatever it is that you want to acquire or suffer as a consequence of your actions and inactions, whether it be food, shelter, education, health care or anything else.
The first principle behind The Declaration is that we are a nation governed by laws, not men, with each such law that is valid and enforceable being able to be tied back all the way to The Declaration through The Constitution.
The Declaration sets forth the reason why although rights are absolute societies organize governments — it is for the purpose of providing a framework of laws to enforce those rights and punish violators. Absent that you have only the law of the jungle, where the individual with the biggest teeth, claws and body mass wins while everything else is food.
That is what you have in the absence of the rule of law, and that is what we have collectively and individually allowed to occur in this country. All of the above has occurred because we have regressed to The Law of the Jungle from The Rule of Law.
We either stop it or we will be consumed by it.
QE’s Folly: Diversion And Destruction
We got a problem here folks, and it’s going to lead to the next crash — and sooner than you think.
First, let’s talk about the impact of QE on companies. The common mantra is that it makes it “easier” for firms to borrow money. The problem is that borrowing, in general, is a destructive act as you must pay back said borrowing with interest — no matter how small. The bigger problem, however, is that long-established businesses have obligations that were all contracted with the expectation of lending other people money and earning a spread on it, such as their pensions.
QE is quietly destroying those pensions — and corporate balance sheets.
“The continued decline in the pension discount rates, driven by the unprecedented low interest rate environment, has caused a significant noncash increase in our pension expense,” said Greg Smith, Boeing’s CFO.
No, really?
You just noticed this now when I’ve been pointing it out in this column and in fact called out to union members that they were being systematically destroyed by these policies in The Ticker – since 2008?
The problem with this impact is that it doesn’t disappear when QE ends. It’s cumulative and permanent. This is the nature ofall compound functions and is why it’s so destructive across the board to implement so-called “emergency” policies — but nowhere is the impact going to be worse from a financial markets perspective than in companies who are now stuck with the pension impacts.
What’s worse is that when these plans fail to be able to deliver in a decade or so the impact is going to come right up the chute of those around 50ish now, at the same time their earnings have been destroyed on their retirement funds.
Between now-retired people who have had their portfolio returns in fixed income destroyed over the last few years you can now add everyone who is in the “pre-retirement” mode, specifically those around 10-15 years from retirement. Those are the people who were made promises in pension funds that are not going to be kept because of the impossible-to-recover impact of 5+ years of “crisis” interet rates and repression.
In short what has happened is that the 50+ population segment has had its money stolen in The Fed’s “monetary experiment” — and few if any of them understand what has been done to them.
They will, however, when they’re eating catfood — and that day is coming much sooner than anyone would think.
The destructive effect of this policy cannot be overstated. The peak earnings years for most people are in their 50s, but it is those earnings that fund retirement spending which is to a large degree discretionary for those in middle incomes and above. And those returns, despite claims that “most of the wealth has been returned to people in the stock market”, have been trashed.
What’s worse is that as the stock market has more than doubled off the lows of 2009 it has sucked people back into the market, especially now in the last couple of months. Most people did not sell out in 2007 or early 2008, despite people like me shouting from the rooftops that you were about to get your head cut off. Nor will anyone listen this time either, yet the problem for most stocks is that the actual value of all stocks in the long term is determined only by the discounted cash flow of dividends; everything else is speculative premium in that someone has to come along that believes in the future appreciation of price or you cannot sell!
Finally, the paradox of “easy money” is that while it appears to make government borrowing “free” it is in fact not free at all. At the same time it makes running large fiscal debts appear sustainable and thus encourages overspending (and in fact is designed to cause such overspending) at the same time it destroys the incentive of banks and other entities to lend money in the private market as there is no return that can be earned by doing so. Since risk must be paid for in the form of interest as the rate is depressed the incentive to take said risk with loans evaporates as the profit in doing so disappears. Remember that nobody ever intentionally lends at a loss.
Finally, we have embedded into our budget process these trillion dollar deficits. Congress must stop this right here and now, but there is scant evidence that it will. If Boehner, Pelosi, McConnell and Reid do not stop the destructive cycle of deficit spending within this budget cycle the risk rises precipitously that the market will pull the rug out from under the charade for them.
We are headed for a crack-up folks, and not of the “hyperinflationary boom” sort either.
Last year we had this sort of rally in the early part of the year, then things went soft. This year we’ve got even more stressors that are in the marketplace but they’re being ignored to a degree that is even larger. One of those is the ill-advised 2% Payroll Tax abatement that has done material and permanent damage to Social Security funding — specifically, it has loaded a monstrous hosing aimed at the 50+ age group right as the rest of the monetary games have targeted this same group of people.
Folks, the entirety of the market’s rise last year can be credited to multiple expansion, more or less. Expecting more of the same when you’re destroying the component of the population that has the largest disposible income by age group is foolish.
The market can (and will) remain irrational for longer than you can remain solvent shorting it, but the fact of the matter is that the cliff edge is much closer and the edge far more fragile than you believe.
And this time there are no fed policies that can be brought in to “save the day.”
Discussion (registration required to post)
Sustained Unemployment Confirms The Failure of QE-2
So today, two bits of news came out: Unemployment declined to 8.9% last February, as the U.S. economy added 192,000 jobs; and the Federal Reserve signalled that it is definitely-definitely-definitely ending Quantitative Easing 2 (QE-2) in June, as originally scheduled, on the assumption that the economy is improving, and therefore no further extension of QE-2 will be necessary.
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| Portrait of the author, chewing over what it all means. |
On its face, this would seem to be . . . not good news, but at the least encouraging news: The economy seems to be improving, albeit anæmically.










