the lies and Liars of communism

Ben Bernanke has a question for you: Are you happy?

http://economywatch.nbcnews.com/_news/20....

Thanks for asking, Ben. I'm fine, but not because of what you're doing. I'd be even happier if you'd stop doing it.

I'm glad you picked that up. If you just think about what's mainly exported from taiwan... like electronic components... you get more of an idea how much of a global slowdown there really is.

That's a bigger clue for me than damn near anything else I've seen.

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since when do you want prices to be higher if you wish to expand ownership of a given good

You are assuming the Fed wants expanded ownership of housing. I dont think that's their motive at all.

I believe the Fed wants higher housing prices to put more notional value collateralizing all the various outstanding mortgage bonds owned by the FIRE sector.

The Boston Fed after all, is just a bank that happens to be owned by all the banks in the Boston Fed district. Rosengren is just responding to the desperate needs of the FRB Boston's owners.

Saw a chart on T.V. the other day that said the major economies had Qed to the tune of 7 trillion dollars. Looks like a lot of it has headed for the stock market.
the more I look at what is happening I feel so f.. up. Governments borrowing money they have absolutely no hope of ever paying back. But someone is lending it to them. Some at ridiculously low rates some at ridiculously high rates. Gotta dig a bigger hole or the whole lot caves in. WTF.
In 2009 I thought this cannot go on for much longer and here we are in the back end of 2012 and looks like the games still got a way to go.
Meanwhile the average person sees there living standard decline. Thats the true face of it. Not how well the stockmarket is flying.

Anyone see the Liesman interview with Fed dickwad this morning. "We need more QE" " It must be openhanded"............The low rates are helping people in Boston to afford buying a condo.........This is where all the money is..On the east coast feeding these leechfuchs.....
These Aholes will do anything to justify their existence and power. This does absolutely nothing for the average American except to increase his cost of living and destroy his passive income investments. Ask an middle class American what credit card rates he is paying.

Every day seems to be a pump day for the market. It seems that they are getting more and more desparate because they know what is coming.

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It's the collapse in international trade, which has been quietly picking up steam for months

For more bad news, watch the garbage:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-....


Ruh-roh!

I'll give you a piece of anecdotal. There are a LOT of containerships--brand-new ones, just finished, in ALL of South Korea's three major shipyards. Seems like the companies that contracted to buy them don't want them at this time and are using every trick in the book to avoid taking delivery.

If there was any work for those vessels, which are the newest and most energy-efficient there are, they wouldn't be sitting there collecting barnacles. Trade is down now and it's going to get worse. Maybe if we get a change of Administrations the world can get a psychological boost. Even if the numbers still suck, confidence can make a lot of difference.

That said, if we get another four of the bastard *****son, prepare yourself for a mass hunkering-down like none of you have ever seen in your lifetimes. I have serious doubts that the country can survive it in its current form.

"But you can't change the reality of arithmetic. You can try to evade it for a period of time, and for a while you might even succeed."

That is all they care about. Evade it for a period of time. Bush evaded it in 2001 with a housing bubble. Obama has evaded it with trillion dollar deficits.

I was listening to KNX this morning and some FED member said there is no danger of inflation and the next credit easing has to be BIG. More evasion. Whether the FED will go BIG or go home, based on the hot air of one FED member, is the question waiting to be answered. But desperate times result in desperate measures and i wouldn't be surprised if the FED opened all the stops they have left.

The markets seem to be paying attention to The Bernanke!

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This is where all the money is..On the east coast feeding these leechfuchs.....

I'd modify that slightly: the money is out of the sunbelt and in Democratic, urban areas, which is what the stimulus and TARP support.

R2judge wrote..

That is all they care about. Evade it for a period of time. Bush evaded it in 2001 with a housing bubble. Obama has evaded it with trillion dollar deficits.

Easier to do if you never have to pay the price. So far, no one has, and I suspect that we'll all pay the price soon enough.

Aztrader wrote..

Ask an middle class American what credit card rates he is paying

I'm a middle class American, and I don't pay any credit card rates because we never use them to purchase anything we can't pay off when the payment is due.

Been doing that for 30+ years, and it's not because I'm rich (I'm not.) As a child, I watched my (divorced) mom nearly drive herself to the point of financial ruin and despair via the credit trap, and I like to learn from others.

People who pay credit card interest charges have a choice to make: do without, or dig a deeper hole. I can understand digging a deeper hole if you truly have an emergency, but it's not an emergency if you're doing it every month.

What's a credit card?

Asimov wrote..

What's a credit card?

It's a tool to be used to your benefit. If using a credit card doesn't result in a net benefit the user, it's like enriched plutonium: the user shouldn't go near it.

Edit: Of course, one could go 'tinfoil' and talk about hidden/adhesion contracts, admiralty law, government bennies via credit card protection laws and interstate commerce traps if you want to go there. I won't, there's no point in it (I'd argue that we're all up to our necks in and fully connected to the Matrix, metaphorically speaking) and our beloved host would probably frown upon such discussions here.

The printing will be catastrophically destructive, but they will do it anyway. Rock and a hard place for them, and printing will at least give the appearance of power and someone doing something.

The Congressional bills and Presidential decrees to deal with the resulting chaos, unrest, etc are already written and waiting. The media will wave the flag, call everyone to "shared sacrifice in this time of crisis," and we will be further subjugated to the banks. The center left and the center right will cheer; a few old-school small-l liberals will wail, the far left will cheer the expansion of government power over absolutely everything, and the religious right will chant "render unto god that which is god's, and unto Caesar that which is Caesar's."

The sheep need to be led; they in fact demand it. They need to be told what to think, as they are demonstrably incapable of independent thought. Libertarians will never succeed as long as they doubt this.

Bs: If you don't have the money, you can't afford it.

Exception for houses and *MAYBE* cars.

Gen -

Taiwan is NOT China - their economic data may reflect the Chinese situation only indirectly since they export 40% of their stuff to mainland China. Their slowdown likely reflects world economy going into toilet, and not population worrying about multinationals/pollution. Ideologically they are perhaps the most anti-mainland Chinese :).

On other note, I talked to few people from SE Asia who are in US now (Vietnamese, Filipino). Their relatives back home say that they should not come home any time soon because there is a feeling of impending war with China. If Chinese economy goes into crisis, they will have to find external enemy.

"But you can't change the reality of arithmetic. You can try to evade it for a period of time, and for a while you might even succeed."

And now a word from our sponsor, The Minstry of Truth, for today's Talking Point Memo....

We Now Have Our Smallest Government in 45 Years
By Jordan Weissmann
Aug 3 2012, 3:04 PM ET

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/arch....

As usual fantastic post Karl here's another good article IMO

Government Economic 'Stimulus' as Economic Quackery

snippet...

Whenever the government announces a "stimulus" program, it continually amazes me that hardly and mainstream economists in favor of such things aren't challenged as to where the money for such programs are going to come from. The money is either going to be printed up, which means new dollars are out there bidding up products against others holding dollars, who are out bid by those holding the new dollars. Or the money is taxed or borrowed away from others, meaning those from whom it is taken have less money to spend.

Thus, stimulus programs are worse than a wash and are really a negative, since instead of allowing a non-stimulus economic environment, a government stimulus program distorts and takes, in one form or another money from others, mostly by some form of coercion, and then runs it through the government bureaucracy and then doles it out to those who can influence government power centers. This folks is an anti-stimulus. anti-free market program

Economist Arthur Laffer took to the pages of the Wall Street Journal yesterday to make part of this very important point:

continue
http://www.economicpolicyjournal.com/201....

I don't think they are insane at all. They are getting exactly the sort of reaction they want. The Dow above 13k and the SnP above 1400. The sheeple are happy and think all is well. Looks like a job well done for the Bernank. At least for now.

It blows my mind that what they had was enough and now 3 times that much isn't enough. Bernanke is financing THEFT, plain and simple and nothing else. I can't even write what should be done to this guy, in a public place with tickets sold for live viewing. Pay per view would destroy the records of any fight in history.

What he is attempting to do is force people to hold cash. On the other hand, anyone not largely in cash is an idiot, but then again, the validity of cash might depend on the solvency of what is pretty much bankrupt, the banks and the governments. Any of us can be totally broke, but if the bank keeps clearing our checks, we will look like millionaires. This is what the Fed is doing for the banks and government. The cost is being borne by the productive elements of the economy, basically the middle class, while the multinationals and their management accrue debts against them.

Cash has to be held. It can be spent, but those that receive it have to hold it or use it to bid up assets of someone else, who takes the cash or extinguish it by paying debts to the banks. Contrary to the idea it will stimulate the economy, it ties up productive capital in what has become a non-performing asset. The only purpose is to give those that sit on top, the political class and their crony bankers, the appearance they are solvent. Let the government pay what is considered the natural rate of interest on 10 year treasuries, inflation plus 2% to 3% and suddenly the bond needs a risk premium as well, because interest costs go immediately to $1 trillion a year and increase $60 billion or so annually. Of course, the government would attempt to finance this trillion as well and the exponential increase would double.

There is a legal maximum that what originates in fraud remains in fraud. Just because it is the government and the Fed committing the act doesn't make it any less fraud, as fraud is using false premesis in an action. All bubbles have a massive and increasing element of fraud in them. Those that get in on the ground floor of a bubble make out big time, while those that buy in later end up paying for the fraud. Karl brings this up all the time when asking "where are the handcuffs". Hard to have handcuffs when the policy originates from the highest offices in the land? There are those that sing the praises, but AAPL is just as much a bubble as the last tech bubble. What will keep it from being the next Blackberry (RIMM). Wasn't Blackberry replaced with iphone? How did that work? AMZN? There seems to be an idea it is going to take over retail. How is that working? PE well north of 100? No dividends? Money for nothing and chicks for free? Peddle the stock, which costs nothing to hold because cromedome isn't requiring interest and blow it up. No loss, when the air comes out, if it is real, you can pick it up for pennies on the dollar, like CSCO, YHOO, JDSU, AIG, C, NT, LU, ENE, FNM, FRE, GM; all high cap stocks that went to something far less than they were blown up in the story, many of which never came back. But, all sold under the guise that they were buy and hold forever and the market will pay you royally.

You can't fix an economy by stealing from one group and giving to another, especially when the theft is from the bottom to the top. BSTV was blowing smoke about China being able to inflate again. Who holds the money in China? The working people. Inflate in the US? Gasoline is moving to $3 a gallon going into the fall. The profits flow to the top, to wall street with its strangle trades in oil. The poor guy or woman with kids, making $13 an hour has to cough up another hour of labor a week as a result and probably has to look into joining the FSA in order to survive. In the meantime, the cartels on wall street acquire what they deem to be key components out of the small business world for nothing.

We have an unholy alliance in US politics. It has been going on for the past 100 plus years. I'm going to write about it, as I believe labor is being forced into the same group as the fruits, nuts and FSA, while small business is forced into the hands of the cartel. Of course, the cartel runs both sides with the goal of sucking as much as they can get out of labor and small business as they can, free, care of Ben Bernanke. The link below carries some clues.

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/2012/08/....

Murray Rothbard wrote a book called "Origins of the Fed". For free you can get what many people pass around as something that was a great secret. Rothbard goes into the nonsense behind the Fed, "The panel of Experts" involved to steer politics toward accepting banker bondage. Morgan and Rockefeller controlled almost every last one of the experts, usually through stealth and hidden ties. He also tells us who the Republicans and Democrats were in the 1800's and how, just as today, people are being pushed right into the hands of their political enemies.

http://mises.org/document/6119/The-Origi....

Most business owners use savings to get up and running, but as they grown, credit is needed to grow.
What most people don't understand is that small businesses use their credit cards to purchase inventory and services for their businesses. They can't always pay these off unless they have the cash flow. This is where the real damage is being done. These businesses can't operate without credit and when the rates are completely unreasonable, they end up slowly choking to death.
Watching the large, established companies benefit with Bernanke's QE while everyone else gets squeezed is getting pathetic. Small businesses are being destroyed while the large companies can sell debt at insanely low rates.
Most business cards are charging double digit rates and with margins where they are, this become a losing proposition.

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Rosengren, in short, needs an appointment with a rubber room

Rosengren, in short, needs an appointment with a Guillotine!

FIFY.