Tag Archives: Jobs

Aug 1 2014

The Five Elements to Creating a Something-for-Nothing Society


Re-post from The Market Oracle By: Ty_Andros Jul 24, 2014 – 06:51 PM GMT

Politics

This week’s TedBits is as important a commentary as any I have ever written in my 10+ years writing Austrian analysis of the unfolding world macroeconomics and geopolitical situation. It covers the origins, causes and destinations we are headed for, the participants, historical context and the future based upon past episodes: Past, present and future so to speak. I hope you enjoy it. Best wishes Ty.

Adam Smith in his seminal book, Wealth of Nations, outlined how all great empires rest upon an educated, productive and prosperous citizenry. The United States is no exception as its schools over the centuries from grade school to colleges provided the teachings of history, reading and writing, logic, self-reliance, independence and the principles of the constitutional republic brought to us by our founding fathers and God. The United States was founded by people seeking shelter from Despots, authoritarian governments and dictators. Independent souls who were not afraid of providing for themselves, who wanted freedom of religion, and who were willing to strike out into the wilderness to flourish or die. And flourish they did, as did their children and grandchildren. They created the greatest empire in history, the most freedom, the least government, the greatest wealth and middle classes as never seen in history.

Now, this is coming to an end. The assault on the wealth (citizens) and freedoms of the United States began with Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson (created the Federal Reserve) a century ago. With a BIG BOOST from progressive liberal Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the creation of the Second Bill of Rights. The progressive movement goal of transforming the United States from a Capitalist constitutional republic to a progressive socialist democracy has been underway for over 100 years and its realization spells the demise of the greatest country ever known. We are near the final denouement of economic collapse and destruction of our monetary and financial system caused by their policies. Ultimately, these PROGRSSIVE men and their supporters transform their societies from the production of great wealth, also known as CAPITALISM, to the consumption of it, known as SOCIALISM (the Orwellian name they use is DEMOCRACY). This final conversion of capitalist economies in the developed world to SOCIALIST economies was set in motion in the developed world at Bretton Woods II.

As empires enter the sunset of their existence, a malignancy of a “Something for Nothing” society emerges which has put the nails in the coffins of every empire that has preceded it. They are a man-made personality/societies created by the powers that be to be sheeple and serfs to the most corrupt at the top of the societies who they have placed their trust in. These elites have forgotten how to create and maintain the policies of wealth creation. Socialism is the consumption and redistribution of wealth not the production of it. The something for nothings/useful idiots cannot produce more than they consume. They are CRIPPLED by the system they inhabit and it is man made by those who control society. They are not taught the lessons of history, how wealth is created and where it comes from, or how to think for themselves. They are not given any of the skills and habits of successful living and prudent lifestyles, creating legions of people DEPENDANT on Government or thinking they are helpless to help themselves. They are ROBBED of their futures by the powers that be.

They are created by public school monopolies as espoused by Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin who called them USEFUL IDIOTS. They are the mob. One of the primary missions of the constitution was to protect the minorities among us from the majorities. Most people think just because they are born that intelligence follows. No, if that was the case the world would be a highly productive and prosperous place. Humans are like pieces of clay; they are molded just as a sculpture is. The people in charge of our schools have broken the old mold that created the most successful and wealthy society in the history of mankind and created more wealth and prosperity for more people in history. And substituted it with one that is RIGGED against the public, creates the foundations of failed socialist states, and turned their futures from BRIGHT to BLEAK. I have put a video of George Carlin at the end of this missive and he has it completely correct that the elites who control society have no interest in creating citizens who can challenge them. They are created to serve the elites in a type of quiet desperation.

The elites that George Carlin speaks of were left out of a having a place in the United States by the founding fathers, INTENTIONALLY. Their core comes from the multi-century banking houses such as the Rothschild’s, Warburg’s, Rockefellers (female side of the Rothschild’s) and JP Morgan’s of history. These families have been preying on men for over 400 years; playing the booms and busts their banking models create to acquire one way or another over 60% of all wealth in the world over that period. They understand and exploit the difference between real tangible wealth and paper wealth with no tangible value (leverage and credit created out of thin air through their central banking monopolies) which create the oscillations necessary to sell at the top and buy at the bottom. They are masters of the game and own virtually every politician, and government. The constitution had many clauses which sought to prevent them gaining a foothold here. Divided government, prohibiting a PRIVATELY OWNED central bank, PRIVATE classical education (reading, writing and arithmetic) and a constitutional requirement for sound money were the primary barriers to them. Those barriers have now been dismantled in one manner or another and the tenets of Marxism/socialism have been substituted.

“Let me issue and control a nation’s money supply, and I care not who makes its laws.” – Mayer Amschel Rothschild

It has been accomplished slowly but surely over the last 100 plus years. As Socialism displaces wealth creation, the world’s economies are constantly shrinking in real terms. As the economic pie shrinks, they resort to measures which create more for them and less for the public at large. Using unsound money, crony capitalism, and an ever expanding welfare state (redistribution of wealth from the makers to the takers) to create a NET under their supporters and victims, which are one and the same.

There are FIVE ELEMENTS to CREATING a SOMETHING-for-NOTHING society:

The first and most important element is the creation of UNSOUND money (control of the central bank), the destruction of private property rights and confiscation/destruction of freedom through RUNAWAY economic regulations. The Something for Nothing society destroys all incentives to produce wealth, as it will be confiscated in one manner or another (inflation or taxes).
A CENTRALLY controlled public school system to destroy the wealth of the nation by crippling the ability of citizens to solve problems, be economically productive and self-reliant, think for themselves, and understand history to learn its lessons.
A mainstream media that reports misinformation as fact to manipulate the masses (useful idiots created by the public school monopoly) for the benefit of socialists and elites who control things.
Make a middle class into SERFS and slaves to government and banks in one form or another. Create desperation for growth and personal progress in their lives.
Embrace the very leaders who have preyed upon them and support them in ROBBING the very parts of their economies which are the only hope of a prosperous future (freedom, capitalism, sound money and hard work) – aka KILLING the GOLDEN Goose.

The Creation of Unsound Monetary System

Money is now a government sponsored monopoly designed to change the private sector into a land of serfs to governments (socialists) and Private banksters. (Can anyone reading this article give me one example of a monopolist who served its customers more than it served themselves?) Woodrow Wilson in 1913 sold Americans down the river in exchange for UNLIMITED funding for EXPANDING progressive government and his campaign. He also implemented the INCOME tax a concept that the founding fathers also tried to prohibit. The road to the serfdom and ultimate demise of Capitalism and the United States began at this time.

Real Money versus Fake Fiat Money
ty-andros-24-1

“I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around the banks will deprive the people of all property – until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered.” – Thomas Jefferson

Thomas Jefferson is one of the greatest Founding fathers of the United States speaking of the privately owned Federal Reserve, a bank who was given a monopoly on the creation of money and credit in the UNITED STATES. From that point forward the economy is and has been run for the BENEFIT of the BANKING systems. Of course, we are at the conclusion of this process today. The next wave of deflation, insolvency and credit failures will usher in the next wave of confiscation by the banking and financial systems.

The Dollar was remade into a semi-sound monetary system, but fractional reserve banking began its insidious rise in 1913. Booms and Busts became the GAME plan, not the prevention of them as was presented to the public. The independent private banks around the country became the game to be hunted by the central bank known as the Federal Reserve and its owners scattered geographically around the country and the BIG New York commercial banks were its owners. The great depression was just an episode of a business plan that BANKSTERS have had in place for over 400 years. They took what was yours and made it theirs. You owned it at the top and, when the leverage FAILED, they bought it at the bottom… with what else? “Money printed out of THIN AIR”. The busts of 1973, 1982, 2000 and 2008 were also episodes of asset transfers from you to them using their business plan. The big commercial banks also known as too big to fail are part of the cabal participating.

After World War II, the global financial systems and most developed world economies lay in shambles. To the victor went the spoils and the United States had gathered most of the gold in Europe and Asia during the battles and transferred it to the United States. It did not want to return the spoils of war (Gold) so a new monetary system was created with the dollar as the world’s currency. At Bretton Woods, in New Hampshire in 1944, it was reformed with the dollar redeemable in Gold by central banks but the currencies systems of the central banks who were party to the agreement were required to run FIAT currency and credit systems. This is when the term the “Dollar is as good as gold” began. It also led to the world’s central banks creditably saying their currencies were back by gold by simply holding dollars as reserves.

The US started printing away and was when Lyndon Johnson implemented the great society programs of welfare, and simultaneously was involved in the Vietnam War. Central banks, seeing the debasement of their RESERVES, began repatriating their gold. This proverbial run on the bank lasted until the US gold reserve had been cut by about 80% since Bretton Woods I. In order to preserve some of the United States GOLD holdings, Richard Nixon closed the central bank gold window in August 1971.

In 1971, Richard Nixon, a big Government progressive in conservative clothing, betrayed the world when he tore the final foundations of sound money from the reserve currency of the world and exchanged worthless IOU’s redeemable in NOTHING in exchange for them. The concept of private property was destroyed on that day, only very few knew it. It was the greatest THEFT in HISTORY and succeeded because no one really knew what money was anymore. What sound money had been dropped from school curriculums decades earlier. Humans worldwide no longer had a sound place to store their labor and wealth.

This is a picture of the destruction of the money people are paid and store their wealth in. It is a picture of the middle class being destroyed by unsound money. As a store of value and purchasing power, it is obviously on its way to WORTHLESSNESS!

Gold is the currency of KINGS
Silver is the currency of MERCHANTS
Credit is the currency of SLAVES
Credit is NOT MONEY

In August 1971, Americans went from the top two categories to the bottom two categories in one fell swoop! Money is now a government sponsored monopoly designed to change the private sector into a land of serfs to governments and banksters. In exchange for UNLIMITED funding for government, the economy is run for the BENEFIT of the BANKING systems.

THIS IS WHY THE MIDDLE class is GONE, killed by the governments and banking systems they have placed their trust in. UNSOUND MONEY has:

allowed Public servants to COVER up POOR economic policies with artificial demand and FAKE GDP created by issuing credit and growing government, bringing forward demand and borrowing from the future.
allowed government and credit to grow in an unlimited fashion and far in excess of inflation and economic growth.
implemented redistribution of wealth from the private sector to the public sector and banking systems.
allowed Governments (though deficit spending and currency debasement) and bankers to absorb the income and wealth of the private sector through runaway currency and credit growth.

…and set in motion the final demise of the capitalist systems which had created the prosperity of the developed on a scale previously unknown by man:

“The best way to destroy the capitalist system is to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens… There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose.” – John Maynard Keynes

At Bretton Woods II, The Capitalist Economic model was PERMANENTLY changed to Progressive Socialist model!

From: producing more than you consume, creating capital, wealth and savings for future investment in productive ventures.

To: Consuming more than you produce and borrowing from the future creating growth and economic activity predicated on always expanding credit and consumption of wealth rather than living within ones means, producing more than you consume and creating wealth! The CAPITALIST economic model was TURNED UPSIDE DOWN, and INSIDE OUT.

The Something for Nothing society was BORN! Instead of taxes from a growing private sector, the government could just borrow it (putting its citizens in debt) or print it out of thin air!

“In the end all paper money returns to its intrinsic value: worthless” – Voltaire

“Nations are not ruined by one act of violence, but gradually and in an almost imperceptible manner by the depreciation of their circulating currency, through excessive quantity” – Nicholas Copernicus

“Gold is money, everything else is just credit.” – JP Morgan

“Paper is poverty. It is only the ghost of money, and not money itself.” – Thomas Jefferson

In conclusion, the path to the future is firmly inculcated into society today. It is like a stone rolling downhill, or being below the event horizon of a black hole: UNSTOPPABLE! I am writing this tome to let you see this progression and unfolding debacle so that you can prepare yourselves. Austrian economics is extremely PREDICTIVE, as it is history repeating and common sense as outlined by Ludwig Von Mises, Frederic Hayak and many more too numerous to mention. May God Bless them all for giving us their wisdom and roadmaps to today’s issues.

Part two of three of this commentary “Useful Idiots and the Something for Nothing Society” will cover more of the five elements bringing us to where we find ourselves today. It will be sent out next week to your favorite website, posted to our blog at http://www.TedBits.com, or you can have it delivered into you inbox by subscribing.

Wishful thinking or living with rose colored glasses will not serve you well. We all need to see reality, work to restore what elements we can, and plan for the worse and hope for the best in our personal lives. There are many things you can do personally to insulate yourselves from much of the chaos and capitalize on it as well. I have always said that this is the greatest opportunity in history and I continue to believe this. Applied Austrian economics and a great grasp of history can help you turn lemons to lemonade. I am working to turn a light on and let you connect the dots, which so many fail to do. May God bless you and see you next week!

May God Bless you, Ty

Jul 29 2014

The Obama Economy: Over a Third of Americans Dealing with Collection Agencies


This makes sense from what I see driving around Cleveland, Ohio USA. There are two America’s forming one the upper and upper middle classes and two all the rest with the elimination of the old middle class. The old middle middle class was forces out of their jobs in ’08/’09 as they were mostly over 55/50 and were able to survive selling off things and going on disability. This created the drop in the labor participation rate that we have seen from 66.2% in late ’07 to 62.8% at present. Those people not working but should be by age and ability went from 77.5 million in ’07 to 92.1 million today. These people are finding it harder and harder to survive and therefore falling behind on their payments.

Jul 29 2014

John Hussman: “Make No Mistake – This Is An Equity Bubble, And A Highly Advanced One”


Good work here pay attention!

Jul 27 2014

How Progressivism got Started


In the Battle Between Woodrow and Wilson, Wilson Lost. So Did the World.

Re-Post from Gary North’s Specific Answers – July 24, 2014

Judge Andrew Napolitano has written a book, Theodore and Woodrow. It is on the first decades of the 20th century, when the Progressive movement captured American politics. Except for the 1920’s — Harding and Coolidge — Progressivism has never surrendered political control in the United States.

I spoke with him on July 22, at Mises University, the annual week-long training program for undergraduates, which is sponsored by the Ludwig von Mises Institute. He was presenting a week-long series of lectures on the Constitution and the free market. The students get very good training on how the United States Constitution has been reinterpreted over the years, especially during the Progressive era.

I gave him some background that almost nobody knows. The essence of the battle for constitutional interpretation in the 20th century is found in the names “Woodrow” and “Wilson.”

THOMAS WOODROW WILSON

Woodrow Wilson’s full name was Thomas Woodrow Wilson, but he never went by Thomas. He always went by Woodrow. Woodrow is a strange name for a little boy to have. It is certainly a strange first name. As a middle name, it was okay, because it was his mother’s maiden name. So is my middle name. But I do not call myself by this middle name.

Woodrow Wilson’s father was Joseph Ruggles Wilson. He was the senior permanent bureaucrat in the southern Presbyterian Church in the late 19th century. He maintained the position of Stated Clerk for a third of a century. He was part of what was known as Old School Presbyterianism. This was the most conservative theological faction in 19th-century America — the true hard-liners. They were committed to a long document, the Westminster Confession of Faith (1648), plus two other documents, the Shorter Catechism in the Larger Catechism. These are the most detailed creedal documents in American history.

The position of the Old School was this: in order to become an elder in the Presbyterian Church, you had to swear your allegiance to these three long, highly detailed documents. A candidate for eldership was allowed certain reservations or exceptions, but these had to be approved by the presbytery, the regional bureaucratic structure. This applied to teaching elders (ministers/preachers) and ruling elders (laymen who had votes in the local congregation and the presbytery). In terms of Constitutional language, these were “original intent” interpreters of the foundational documents, i.e., the strict constructionists.

In contrast to the Old School was the New School. New School Presbyterians were much looser with regard to the rigor by which they enforced ministerial allegiance to the documents. The New School became dominant in the North after the Civil War, but not in the Southern Presbyterian Church. There, the Old School was dominant from the denomination’s creation in 1861, when the Civil War began, until the early 20th century.

There was a third group. These were the liberals. The liberals hid under the loose-construction confessional umbrella of New School Presbyterianism, but they in fact had almost no use whatsoever for any of the creedal documents. In order to get ordained, and then get lifetime salaries as ministers, they crossed their fingers. That is why I titled my book, Crossed Fingers. The subtitle is straightforward, How the Liberals Captured the Presbyterian Church. I specifically was referring to the Northern Presbyterian Church, but the same tactics were used by liberals in the middle the 20th century to capture the Southern Presbyterian Church. The two denominations reunited in 1983. The resulting denomination is liberal.

Woodrow Wilson’s mother had a brother, James Woodrow. James Woodrow was by far the most prominent liberal in the Southern Presbyterian Church in the late 19th century. He was a believer in theistic evolution. He openly stated his views, which was the cause of battles against him. His nephew Woodrow agreed with him. He was repeatedly brought to trial and officially sanctioned at the church’s national level, but the church never succeeded in removing him. He taught alongside his brother at Columbia Theological Seminary, the main seminary of the denomination. It trained ministers.

Woodrow was a Ph.D. in science (Heidelberg University). In 1884, he began to teach that the Bible’s account of man’s creation was not inconsistent with Darwin’s view. The furor grew. In 1886-87, the seminary shut down for a year because of the controversy. Yet it never fired him. He finally retired in 1905. The seminary then officially rescinded its previous criticisms. He was totally victorious. (For a detailed account of this controversy, click here.) He became the president of South Carolina College in 1891. Finally, in 1901, the denomination capitulated completely. He was elected as the moderator of the Synod of Georgia.

When Wilson became president of Princeton University in 1902, replacing an Old School minister, Francis Patton, he oversaw a complete transformation of the university. It began to teach straight Darwinism in its science courses — not a trace of theistic evolution.

James Woodrow died in 1907.

CONSTITUTIONAL GOVERNMENT

In Wilson’s book, Constitutional Government (1908), he came out in favor of implementing a Darwinian view of evolution to civil government. In 1906, he wanted to run for President in 1908 as the Democratic Party’s nominee. He had an ideological problem. He had been a Hamiltonian throughout his classroom career: a believer in a strong central government. The Hamiltonian vision was associated with the Republican Party generally, and after 1909, with Theodore Roosevelt’s Progressives specifically.

This was not the tradition of the Democratic Party in 1906. The Jeffersonian-Jacksonian tradition was laissez-faire. Bryan’s radical Populism had abandoned this tradition in 1896, but Populism was totally hostile to any elitist oligarchy–the essence of Hamiltonianism and, in Bryan’s eyes, the Republican Party.

The Democratic Party had nominated conservative lawyer Alton B. Parker in 1904, a defender of the gold standard, who lost so badly to Roosevelt that some of the Party’s leaders were ready to abandon the old Andrew Jackson-Grover Cleveland-Whig liberalism tradition. Bryan despised this tradition; he called it “Clevelandism.” Bryan was correct when he wrote in a letter, immediately after Parker’s defeat, “The defeat was so overwhelming that we are not likely to hear much more–for some years at least–of the reorganizers. The Democratic Party will now have a chance to become a real reform party.” Regionally, the Democratic Party was moving toward Progressivism throughout the first decade of the twentieth century, even in the South, but the national party did not clearly position itself as Progressive until after Taft’s defeat of Bryan in 1908.

Constitutional Government praised the presidency as the central political office: head of the party. This was a self-conscious break from the Constitution’s view of the office. The Constitution does not mention political parties, and the Framers had hated political factions in 1787. Wilson, having switched to Progressivism, had to undermine this older political faith. He turned to Darwin as the solution.

The framers had been Whigs because they had been Newtonians, he correctly argued. This Newtonian Whig worldview is incorrect, he insisted, and so is the Constitutional order that assumes it. “The government of the United States was constructed upon the Whig theory of political dynamics, which was a sort of unconscious copy of the Newtonian theory of the universe. In our own day, whenever we discuss the structure or development of anything, whether in nature or in society, we consciously or unconsciously follow Mr. Darwin; but before Mr. Darwin, they followed Newton. Some single law, like the law of gravitation, swung each system of thought and gave it its principle of unity” (pp. 54-55). The checks and balances built into the Federal government by the Constitution are now a hindrance to effective political action, he said. This language of balances reflects mechanism. We need to overcome this mechanical way of thinking, Wilson wrote.

The trouble with the theory is that government is not a machine, but a living thing. It falls, not under the theory of the universe, but under the theory of organic life. It is accountable to Darwin, not to Newton. It is modified by its environment, necessitated by its tasks, shaped to its functions by the sheer pressure of life. No living thing can have its organs offset against each other as checks, and live. On the contrary, its life is dependent upon their quick cooperation, their ready response to the commands of instinct or intelligence, their amicable community of purpose. Government is not a body of blind forces; it is a body of men, with highly differentiated functions, no doubt, in our modern day of specialization, but with a common task and purpose. Their cooperation is indispensable, their warfare fatal. There can be no successful government without leadership or without the intimate, almost instinctive, coordination of the organs of life and action (pp. 56-57).

I pointed out to Napolitano that “Wilson the Progressive” was the product of “Woodrow, the evolutionist.” Uncle James completely overcame the influence of his father.

CONCLUSION

Woodrow Wilson was the spiritual son of James Woodrow. He adopted his uncle’s position, theistic evolution, and then went beyond it academically: Darwinian evolution–no God, no purpose, no miracles. He then adopted Progressivism, which was the statist version of social Darwinism. (I discuss the transition from free market Darwinism to statist Darwinism in Appendix A of my book, Sovereignty and Dominion.) By 1900, it had replaced the free market social Darwinism of Herbert Spencer in the thinking of American intellectuals.

In the theological battle between Woodrow and Wilson, Woodrow won.

Ideas have consequences. This includes theological ideas.

Jul 23 2014

The Rot Within, Part II: Inflation Is Not “Growth”


As a degreed economist I 100% agree with this; and I will add that Milton Friedman a Noble laureate economist proved definitely that is was the Federal Reserve that created the Great Depression (not the market crass of ’29) and by extension it was the same ineptness of the FED that created the housing bubble and crash of ’08 not the banks. The FED is now in the process of creating a sovereign debt bubble that is close to bursting and it will be worse than ’08. Keynesian economics is nothing more than a Ponzi scheme!

Jul 22 2014

The Rot Within, Part I: Our Ponzi Economy


I can tell you with 100% certainty that this is 100% correct, I’m a degreed economist and engineer. I have studied this problem in detail since the late ’90s and I would say its even more dire than implied here — but we’ll see what the next part shows!

Jul 16 2014

Industrial Production Drops, Misses By Most Since January


This lack of “real” growth not the funneling of money into the market is the underlining problem we have have in out country. And that stems from so much of our production being exported to China, India and Indonesia. Most would blame business but that would not be completely fair as they had no choice as we the citizens demanded cheap goods at the same time we demanded high wages. It doesn’t seem to me that the two are compatible unless the government controls the input.  Sadly they did not as the surplus money went into funding the Treasure but buying T-bills and buy doing so the politicians had more money to play with and give us free stuff.  That works only as long as the exporters allow it to happen — right now they are telling us they no longer want to do this and are changing the international system of exchange.  That is going to be very very bad for us.

Re-Post from Zero Hedge Submitted by Tyler Durden on 07/16/2014 09:24 -0400

For the 3rd month in a row, Industrial Production missed expectations as hopes and dreams of follow through in Q2 remain dashed on the shores of hard data. IP rose 0.2% (missing the 0.3% expectation) and May’s jump was downwardly revised to 0.5%. What is stunning is that Industrial Production has slowed its gains from the polar-vortex Q1 into a much more economically frigid Q2. Capacity Utilization also missed expectations. Perhaps most worrying is the manufacturing industry’s mere 0.1% gain in June – the slowest increase since January.

Industrial Production missed for 3rd month in a row…

 

As Manufacturing tumbled…

Charts: Bloomberg

 

*  *  *

Does this look like a Q2 recovery bounce that is strong and supportive of 3% GDP growth?

Jul 16 2014

The Almighty Dollar Is In Peril As The Global ‘De-Dollarization’ Trend Accelerates


Watch this closely over the next few months — this is the Achilles Heel of world commerce

Jul 16 2014

Impact of IMF SDRs for Commercial Trade


Watch this closely over the next few months — this is the Achilles Heel of world commerce

Jul 15 2014

This is a bit technical but VERY TRUE and the bottom line is we are very close to another collapse much like in October 2008


The Implosion Is Near: Signs Of The Bubble’s Last Days

Re-Post from Stockman’s Corner by David Stockman • July 14, 2014

The charts on his site to not transfer so go there to get the entire story.

The Implosion Is Near: Signs Of The Bubble’s Last Days

The central banks of the world are massively and insouciantly pursuing financial instability. That’s the inherent result of the 68 straight months of zero money market rates that have been forced into the global financial system by the Fed and its confederates at the BOJ, ECB and BOE. ZIRP fuels endless carry trades and the harvesting of every manner of profit spread between negligible “funding” costs and positive yields and returns on a wide spectrum of risk assets.

Moreover, this central bank sponsored regime of ZIRP and money market pegging contains a built-in accelerator. As carry trade speculators drive asset prices steadily higher and fixed income spreads steadily thinner—- fear and short interest is driven out of the casino, making buying on the dips ever more profitable and less risky. Indeed, the explicit promise by central banks that the money market rate will remain frozen for the duration and that ample warning of any change in rate policy will be “transparently” announced is the single worst policy imaginable from the point of view of financial stability. It means that the speculator’s worst nightmare—–suddenly going “upside down” due to a sharp spike in funding costs—-is eliminated by central bank writ.

Stated differently, ZIRP systematically dismantles the market’s natural stability mechanisms. One natural deterrent to excessive financial gambling, for example, is the cost of hedging a speculator’s portfolio of “risk assets” against a broad market plunge. In an honest market environment, hedging costs consume a high share of profits, thereby sharply limiting risk appetites and the amount of capital attracted to speculative trading.

By contrast, an extended regime of ZIRP, coupled with the central banks’ perceived “put” under risk assets, drives the cost of “downside insurance” to negligible levels because S&P 500 put writers are emboldened and subsidized to pick up nickels (i.e. options premium) in front of a benign central bank steamroller. This ultra-cheap downside insurance, in turn, attracts ever larger inflows of speculative capital to the casino.

This corrosive game has been underway ever since the Greenspan Fed panicked on Black Monday in October 1987 and flooded the stock market with liquidity. It is now such an endemic feature of Wall Street that it is falsely assumed to be the normal order of things. But, then, would anyone have been picking up nickels in front of the Volcker steamroller?

This dynamic is evident in the chart of the S&P 500 since the March 2009 bottom. The dips have gotten shallower and shallower as ZIRP and other pro-risk central bank policies have eroded the market’s natural defenses against excessive speculation. As of mid-2014, therefore, it can be fairly said that fear and short interest have been extinguished almost entirely. The Wall Street casino has thus become a one-way market that coils dangerously upward, divorced completely from the fundamentals of earnings and cash flow and real world economic conditions and prospects.

The inverse side of this coin is disappearance of volatility in the equity markets. As shown below, the current readings are at all-time lows, even below bottoms reached on the eve of the 2008 financial crisis. Needless to say, this dangerous condition does not appear by happenstance: its is the inexorable and systematic result of ZIRP and the associated tools of monetary central planning.

But all of this is ignored by the central banks because their Keynesian economic plumbing models contain a fatal flaw. These models purport to capture capitalism at work, but they contain no balance sheets and hardly any proxy for the financial markets which are at the heart of modern capitalist economies. As a result, central banks pursue ZIRP in order to inflate the plumbing system of the macro-economy with more “demand”—and hence more jobs, income, investment and GDP—-while ignoring the systematic destruction of financial stability that results from these very same policies.

As a consequence, Keynesian central bankers are bubble-blind. Whereas they monitor immense amounts of “in-coming” high-frequency macro-economic data that is trivial and “noisy” in the extreme, they ignore entirely “in-coming” financial market data that points to monumental troubles just ahead.

At the present time, for example, 40% of all syndicated loans are being taken down by sub-investment grade issuers. This is materially higher than the 2007 peak, and is accompanied by an even more virulent outbreak of “cov-lite” credit terms. Indeed, upwards of 60% of these junk loans have no protection against debt layering and cash stripping by equity holders—-notwithstanding their nominal “senior” status in the credit structure. The obvious implication, of course, is that the Fed “easy money” is being massively diverted into leveraged gambling and rent stripping by the LBO houses. Three times since 1988 this kind of financial deformation has led to a thundering bust in the junk credit market. Why would monetary central planners, who allegedly watch their so-called “dashboards” like a flock of hawks, think the outcome would be any different this time?

40pc of syndicated loans are to sub-investment grade borrowers

The monetary politburo remains unperturbed, of course, because they are not monitoring the composition and quality of credit. Their models simply stipulate that aggregate business loan growth will lead to more spending on capital assets and operational expansion including hiring. That assumption is manifestly wrong, however, because it is plainly evident that most of the massive expansion of business credit since the last peak has gone into financial engineering—-stock buybacks, LBO’s and cash M&A deals—-not expansion of productive business assets. Indeed, total non-financial business credit outstanding has risen from $11 trillion in December 2007 to $13.8 trillion at present, or by 25%, yet real business investment in plants and equipment is still $70 billion or 5% below its pre-crisis peak.

And that is “gross” spending for plant and equipment as recorded in the “I” term of the GDP accounts. The far more relevant measure with respect to economic health and future growth capacity is “net business investment” after accounting for depreciation and amortization allowances. That is, after accounting for the consumption of capital that occurred in the production of current period GDP. As shown below, that figure in real terms is 20% below the peak achieved two cycles back in the late 1990s.

In short, the combination of faltering investment in real plant and equipment juxtaposed to peak levels of leveraged loan finance should be a warning sign of growing financial instability. Instead, the central bankers bray that valuation multiples are not out of line and financial institution leverage is reasonably well-contained.

The “valuations are normal” line proffered by Yellen and her band of money printers, however, is simply an adaptation of the Wall Street hockey sticks based on projected earnings ex-items. That is to say, the kind of “earnings” estimates that omitted on average 23% of actual P&L charges over the course the 2007-2010 boom and bust cycle owing to non-recurring write-downs of goodwill, plants, leases and restructuring costs, among countless other real expenses—all of which ultimately consume corporate cash and capital. As I demonstrated in “The Great Deformation”, cumulative S&P 500 “earnings less items” over that four-year period amounted to $2.42 trillion compared to GAAP reported earnings—-that is, the kind that you don’t go to jail for reporting to the SEC—of only $1.87 trillion.

Consequently, the Fed fails to see the in-coming data on financial instability because it isn’t looking for it, and is simply tossing out Wall Street sell-side propaganda as a sop. The disappearance of volatility in the S&P 500 chart shown at the beginning, for example, is nearly an identical replica of the run-up to the 2007 stock market peak. Yet the appearance of a proven warning sign of a bubble top has been resolutely ignored.

The fact is, PE multiples are far above “normal” based on GAAP earnings in historical context. During the LTM period ending in Q1 2014, S&P 500 earnings amounted to $100 per share after adjustment for a recent change in pension accounting that is not reflected in the historical data. Accordingly, even the big cap “broad” market is trading at 19.6X reported earnings—a level achieved historically only at points when the stock market was on the verge an implosion.

Moreover, today’s $100 per share of earnings are highly artificial owing to massive share buybacks funded by cheap debt and by deep repression of interest carry costs. The S&P 500 companies carry upwards of $3 trillion in debt, but were interest rates to normalize— earnings per share would drop by upwards of $10. Likewise, profit margins are at an all-time high, indicating that the inevitable “mean-regression” will chop significant additional amounts out of currently reported profits.

In other words, at a point which is month #61 of the current business cycle, and thereby already beyond than the average cycle since 1950, why would any one in their right mind say a market is not bubbly when it’s trading at nearly 20X reported earnings. Indeed, in a world where interest rate and profit rate normalization must inevitably come, the capitalization rate for current earnings should be well below normal—-not extended into the nosebleed section of historical results.

And this applies to almost any other measure of valuation in risk asset markets. The Russell 2000, for example, still stands at the absurd height of 85X reported earnings. The cyclically adjusted S&P stands at 24X, or six turns higher than its half century average. The Tobin’s Q measure is also far more stretched than in 2007.

Likewise, emerging markets have piled on $2 trillion in foreign currency debt since 2008. This makes them far more significant in the global financial scheme than they were in 2008 or even at the time of the East Asia crisis of the late 1990s. And that is not even considering the massive house of cards in China, where credit market debt has soared from $1 trillion at the turn of the century to $25 trillion today.

At the end of the day, the Fed and its fellow traveling central banks have systematically dismantled the natural stability mechanisms of financial markets. Accordingly, financial markets have now become dangerous casinos in which speculative bubbles are guaranteed to build to dangerous extremes as the central bank driven financial inflation gathers force. That’s where we are now. Again.