Month: March 2014

Authored by Ken Rogoff, originally posted at The Guardian,

The promise that each generation will be better off than the last is a fundamental tenet of modern society. By and large, most advanced economies have fulfilled this promise, with living standards rising over recent generations, despite setbacks from wars and financial crises.

In the developing world, too, the majority of people have started to experience sustained improvement in living standards and are rapidly developing similar growth expectations. But will future generations, particularly in advanced economies, realise such expectations? Though the likely answer is yes, the downside risks seem higher than they did a few decades ago.

So far, every prediction in the modern era that mankind’s lot will worsen, from Thomas Malthus to Karl Marx, has turned out to be spectacularly wrong. Technological progress has trumped obstacles to economic growth. Periodic political rebalancing, sometimes peaceful, sometimes not, has ensured most people have benefited, albeit some far more than others.

As a result, Malthus’s concerns about mass starvation have failed to materialise in any peaceful capitalist economy. And, despite a disconcerting fall in labour’s share of income in recent decades, the long-run picture still defies Marx’s prediction that capitalism would prove immiserating for workers. Living standards around the world continue to rise.

But past growth performance is no guarantee that a broadly similar trajectory can be maintained throughout this century. Leaving aside potential geopolitical disruptions, there are some formidable challenges to overcome, mostly stemming from political underperformance and dysfunction.

The first set of issues includes slow-burn problems involving externalities, the leading example being environmental degradation. When property rights are ill-defined, as in the case of air and water, government must step in to provide appropriate regulation. I do not envy future generations for having to address the possible ramifications of global warming and fresh-water depletion.

A second set of problems concerns the need to ensure that the economic system is perceived as fundamentally fair, which is the key to its political sustainability. This perception can no longer be taken for granted, as the interaction of technology and globalisation has exacerbated income and wealth inequality within countries, even as cross-country gaps have narrowed.

Until now, our societies have proved remarkably adept at adjusting to disruptive technologies; but the pace of change in recent decades has caused tremendous strains, reflected in huge income disparities within countries, with near-record gaps between the wealthiest and the rest. Inequality can corrupt and paralyse a country’s political system – and economic growth along with it.

The third problem is that of aging populations, an issue that would pose tough challenges even for the best-designed political system. How will resources be allocated to care for the elderly, especially in slow-growing economies where existing public pension schemes and old-age health plans are patently unsustainable? Soaring public debts surely exacerbate the problem, because future generations are being asked both to service our debt and to pay for our retirements.

The final challenge concerns a wide array of issues that require regulation of rapidly-evolving technologies by governments that do not necessarily have the competence or resources to do so effectively. We have already seen where poor regulation of rapidly-evolving financial markets can lead. There are parallel shortcomings in many other markets.

A leading example is food supply – an area where technology has continually produced evermore highly-processed and genetically refined food that scientists are only beginning to assess. What is known so far is that childhood obesity has become an epidemic in many countries, with an alarming rise in rates of type 2 diabetes and coronary disease implying a significant negative impact on life expectancy in future generations.

Many leading health researchers, including Kelly Brownell, David Ludwig, and Walter Willett, have documented these problems. Government interventions to date, mainly in the form of enhanced education, have proved largely ineffective. Self-destructive addiction to processed foods, which economists would describe as an “internality,” can lower quality of life for those afflicted, and can eventually lead to externalities for society, such as higher healthcare costs. Again, despite a rising chorus of concern from researchers, political markets have seemed frozen.

All of these problems have solutions, at least in the short to medium run. A global carbon tax would mitigate climate risks while alleviating government debt burdens. Addressing inequality requires greater redistribution through national tax systems, together with enhanced programs for adult education, presumably making heavy use of new technologies. The negative effects of falling population growth can be mitigated by easing restrictions on international migration, and by encouraging more women and retirees to enter or stay in the workforce. But how long it will take for governments to act is a wide-open question.

Capitalist economies have been spectacularly efficient at enabling growing consumption of private goods, at least over the long run. When it comes to public goods – such as education, the environment, health care and equal opportunity – the record is not quite as impressive and the political obstacles to improvement have seemed to grow as capitalist economies have matured.

Will each future generation continue to enjoy a better quality of life than its immediate predecessor? In developing countries that have not yet reached the technological frontier, the answer is almost certainly yes. In advanced economies, though, the answer should still be yes, but the challenges are becoming formidable.

via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/1lJt7nI Tyler Durden

Did somebody say de-escalation?

Earlier today, photos were distributed showing the latest military convoy reinforcements heading into the Crimea, accompanies by a Police car demonstrating Moscow license plate numbers, most likely providing further support to the pro-Russian forces in the peninsula.

 

Supposedly the trucks are carrying troops to reinforces the members of the new Crimean army, pictured below:

 

While at the same time along the makeshift border between Crimea and the mainland, the Pro-Russian forces are putting down minefields.

 

However, the Ukrainians, having already been mobilized for over a week, finally appear set to seize back the offensive:

The first clip below captured the 80th Airborne Regiment out of Lviv moving out, direction mainland, preparing to repel foreign attack.

 

The next video shows what are allegedly Buk SAM batteries deployed in the Donetsk region, a city in Eastern Ukraine which in the past week has swayed between Ukraine and Russian authority.

 

The clip below shows the 95th Airborne brigade also moving out of their barracks in Zhytomyr in western Ukraine, heading East, with an impressive deployment of trucks and APCs.

 

Finally, 20 T-64 tanks preparing to depart in Bila Tserkva, a city in central Ukraine:

 

So where again are all those pundits who were so eager to explain away the Ukraine confrontation as one that will promptly be forgotten, and is by now most certainly priced in?

(Source: @Ukroblogger, @SergeyPonomarev)

via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/1k4qpGo Tyler Durden

With 40% of the portfolio in cash and having returned $4 billion to clients at year-end, Seth Klarman's Baupost Group has "drawn the line in the sand" as they reflect on the diminished opportunities in the so-called "Truman Show" market we see today. In the face of mixed economic data and at a critical inflection point in Federal Reserve policy, Klarman notes, the stock market, heading into 2014, resembles a Rorschach test – "what investors see in the inkblots says considerably more about them than it does about the market." From "born bulls" to "worry genes" and from Bitcoin to flash-mob-speculation, "there is a growing gap between the financial markets and the real economy…and the overall picture is one of growing risk and inadequate potential return almost everywhere one looks… as every 'Truman' under Bernanke’s dome knows the environment is phony."

Excerpted from Baupost Group's Seth Klarman letter,

"Born Bulls"

In the face of mixed economic data and at a critical inflection point in Federal Reserve policy, the stock market, heading into 2014, resembles a Rorschach test. What investors see in the inkblots says considerably more about them than it does about the market.

If you were born bullish, if you’ve never met a market you didn’t like, if you have a consistently short memory, then stock probably look attractive, even compelling. Price-earnings ratios, while elevated, are not in the stratosphere. Deficits are shrinking at the federal and state levels. The consumer balance sheet is on the mend. U.S. housing is recovering, and in some markets, prices have surpassed the prior peak. The nation is on the road to energy independence. With bonds yielding so little, equities appear to be the only game in town. The Fed will continue to hold interest rates extremely low, leaving investors no choice but to buy stocks it doesn’t matter that the S&P has almost tripled from its spring 2009 lows, or that the Fed has begun to taper purchases and interest rates have spiked. Indeed, the stock rally on December’s taper announcement is, for this contingent, confirmation of the strength of this bull market. The picture is unmistakably favorable. QE has worked. If the economy or markets should backslide, the Fed undoubtedly stands ready to once again ride to the rescue. The Bernanke/Yellen put is intact. For now, there are no bubbles, either in sight or over the horizon.

But if you have the worry gene, if you’re more focused on downside than upside, if you’re more interested in return of capital than return on capital, if you have any sense of market history, then there’s more than enough to be concerned about. A policy of near-zero short-term interest rates continues to distort reality with unknown but worrisome long-term consequences. Even as the Fed begins to taper, the announced plan is so mild and contingent – one pundit called it “taper-lite” – that we can draw no legitimate conclusions about the Fed’s ability to end QE without severe consequences. Fiscal stimulus, in the form of sizable deficits, has propped up the consumer, thereby inflating corporate revenues and earnings. But what is the right multiple to pay on juiced corporate earnings? Pretty clearly, lower than otherwise. Yet Robert Schiller’s cyclically adjusted P/E valuation is over 25, a level exceeded only three times before – prior to the 1929, 2000 and 2007 market crashes. Indeed, on almost any metric, the U.S. equity market is historically quite expensive.

A skeptic would have to be blind not to see bubbles inflating in junk bond issuance, credit quality, and yields, not to mention the nosebleed stock market valuations of fashionable companies like Netflix and Tesla. The overall picture is one of growing risk and inadequate potential return almost everywhere one looks.

There is a growing gap between the financial markets and the real economy.

"Flash-Mob Speculation"

When it comes to stock market speculation, it’s never hard to build a “coalition of willing.” A flash mob of day traders, momentum investors, and the usual hot money crowd drove one of the best years in decades for U.S., Japanese, and European equities. Even with the ranks of the unemployed and underemployed still bloated and the economy barely improved from a year ago, the S&P 500, Dow Jones Industrial Average, and Russell 2000 regularly posted new record highs (45 for the S&P, 52 for the Dow, and 66 for the Russell) while gaining a remarkable 32.4%, 29.7%, and 38.8% including dividend reinvestment, respectively, in 2013. It was the best year for the S&P 500 since 1997… In the closing weeks of 2013, it was as if the strong gravitational pull of valuation had been temporarily suspended and stock prices had been launched by a booster rocket, allowing them to reach escape velocity. As with bull markets past, favored stocks started to become unmoored and unbounded.

"Speculative Froth" and Dot-Com 2.0

Whether you see today’s investment glass as half full or half empty depends on your age and personality type, as well as your “lifetime” of experiences in the markets and how you interpret them. Our assessment is that the Fed’s continuing stimulus and suppression of volatility has triggered a resurgence of speculative froth. Margin debt measured as a percentage of GDP recently neared an all-time high. IPO activity in 2013 was greater than it has been in years, with 230 offerings taking place, 59% more than last year and approaching 2007’s record of 288 transactions.

Twitter, for example, surged from $26 to almost $45 on day one, and closed the year around $64. It was priced, after all, at only twenty times its projected 2015 revenue. One analyst suggests the profitless company might achieve $50 million of “adjusted” cash earnings this year, giving it a P/E of over 500. Some hedge and mutual funds are again investing in late-stage, pre-IPO financing rounds for hot Internet companies at valuations that only seem reasonable if the companies go public, soon, and at astronomical prices.

Amazon.com, with a market cap of $180 billion, trades at about 15 times estimated 2013 earnings, Netflix at about 181 times. Tesla Motors’ P/E is about 279; LinkedIn’s is 145. Even though Netflix now carries some original programming, we’re pretty sure we’ve seen this movie before. Some 23-year-olds have sold their startup internet companies for hundreds of millions of dollars, while the profitless privately-held Snapchat has turned down a $3 billion buyout offer.

In Silicon Valley, it seems that business plans – a narrative of how one intends to make money – are once again far more valuable than many actual businesses engaged in real world commerce and whose revenues exceed expenses.

Ominous Signs

In an ominous sign, a recent survey of U.S. investment newsletters by Investors Intelligence found the lowest proportion of bears since the ill-fated year of 1987. A paucity of bears is one of the most reliable reverse indicators of market psychology. In the financial world, things are hunky dory; in the real world, not so much. Is the feel-good upward march of people’s 401(k)s, mutual fund balances, CNBC hype, and hedge fund bonuses eroding the objectivity of their assessments of the real world? We can say with some conviction that it almost always does.

Frankly, wouldn’t it be easier if the Fed would just announce the proper level for the S&P, and spare us all the policy announcements and market gyrations?

Europe Isn't Fixed

Europe isn’t fixed either, but you wouldn’t be able to tell that from investor sentiment. One sell-side analyst recently declared that ‘the recovery is here,’ a sharp reversal from his view in July 2012 that Greece had a 90% chance of leaving the Euro by the end of 2013. Greek government bond prices have nearly quintupled in price from the mid-2012 lows. Yet, despite six years of painful structural adjustments, Greece’s government debt-to-GDP ratio currently stands at 157%, up from 105% in 2008. Germany’s own government debt-to-GDP ratio stands at 81%, up from 65% in 2008. That doesn’t look fixed to us. The EU credit rating was recently reduced by S&P. European unemployment remains stubbornly above 12%. Not fixed.

Various other risks lurk on the periphery: bank deposits remain frozen in Cyprus, Catalonia seems to be forging ahead with an independence referendum in 2014, and social unrest continues to escalate in Ukraine and Turkey. And all this in a region that remains saddled with deep structural imbalances. As Angela Merkel recently noted, Europe has 7% of the world’s population, 25% of its output, and 50% of its social spending. Again, not fixed.

Bitcoin And Gold

Only in a bull market could an online “currency” dubbed bitcoin surge 100-fold in one year, as it did in 2013. The phenomenon spurred The Wall Street Journal to call it a “cryptocurrency” craze, with dozens of entrants. Bitcoin now has an estimated market “value” in excess of $6 billion, leaving alphacoin, fastcoin, gridcoin, peercoin, and Zeuscoin in its wake. Now most sell-side firms are rushing to provide research on this latest fad, while “bitcoin funds” are being formed. Recent recruitment e-mails to staff such a platform reassure that even though experience is preferred, it is not required.

While bitcoin is yet another bandwagon we are happy to let pass us by, the thinking behind cryptocurrencies may contain a kernel of rationality.

If paper currencies – dollars and yen – can be printed in essentially unlimited volumes, and just as with all currencies are only worth what recipients on any given day will exchange in goods or services, then what makes them any better than the “crypto” kind of money? The dollars and yen are, of course, legal tender issued by governments, but in an era in which governments are neither popular nor trusted, that is not necessarily a big plus.

Gold, at least, has been regarded as “money,” for thousands of years, and it is relatively stable and widely accepted store of value and medium of exchange. It’s a well-known monetary “brand.” It doesn’t exist only (or at all) in cyberspace, and it cannot be printed on the whim of authorities. Ironically and perplexingly, while gold, the hard money alternative to the printing press kind of money, dropped 28% in 2013, the untested and highly speculative bitcoin went completely through the roof.

"The Truman Show" Market

Welcome to “The Truman Show” market. In the 1998 film by that name, actor Jim Carrey is ignorant of the fact that his life is a hugely popular reality show. His every action, unbeknownst to him, is manipulated while being broadcast to millions of TV viewers worldwide. He seemingly lives in an idyllic seaside community where the manicured lawns are always green and the citizens are always happy. These people are, of course, actors. The world Truman inhabits turns out to be phony: a gigantic sound stage created for a manufactured “reality.” As Truman starts to unravel the truth, his anger erupts and chaos ensues.

Ben Bernanke and Mario Draghi, as in the movie, are the “creators” who have manufactured a similarly idyllic, if artificial, environment for today’s investors. They were the executive producers of “The Truman Show” of 2013. A global audience sat in rapt attention before this wildly popular production. Given the U.S. stock market’s continuing upsurge, Bernanke is almost certain to snag yet another People’s Choice Award for this psychological “thriller.” Even in “The Truman Show,” life was not as good as this for investors.

But there is one fly in the ointment: in Bernanke’s production, all the Trumans – the economists, fund managers, traders, market pundits – know at some level that the environment in which they operate is not what it seems on the surface. The Fed and the Treasury openly discuss the aim of their policies: to manipulate financial markets higher and to generate reported economic “growth” and a “wealth effect.” Inside the giant Plexiglas dome of modern capital markets, just about everyone is happy, the few doubters are mocked and jeered, bad news is increasingly ignored, and markets go asymptotic. The longer QE continues, the more bloated the Fed balance sheet and the greater the risk from any unwinding. The artificiality of today’s markets is pure Truman Show. According to the Wall Street Journal (12/20/13), the Federal Reserve purchased about 90% of all the eligible mortgage bonds issued in November.

Like a few glasses of wine with dinner, the usual short-term performance pressures on most investors to keep up with the market serve to dull their senses, which makes it a bit easier to forget that they are being manipulated. But what is fake cannot be made real. As Jim Grant recently noted on CNBC, the problem is that “the Fed can change how things look, it cannot change what things are.” According to John Phelan, a fellow at the Cobden Centre in the U.K., “the Federal Reserve has become an enabler of the financial havoc it was designed (a century ago) to prevent.”

Every Truman under Bernanke’s dome knows the environment is phony. But the zeitgeist so so damn pleasant, the days so resplendent, the mood so euphoric, the returns so irresistible, that no one wants it to end, and no one wants to exit the dome until they’re sure everyone else won’t stay on forever.

A marketplace of knowing Trumans seems even more unstable than the movie sound stage character slowly awakening to reality. Can the clued-in Trumans be counted on to maintain their complicity or will they go off-script? Will Fed actions reliably be met with the desired response? Will the program remain popular? Could “The Truman Show” be running out of material? After all, even Seinfeld ended.

Someday, the Fed’s show will be off the air and new programming will take its place. And people will debate just how good it really was. When the show ends, those self-deluded Trumans will be mad as hell and probably broke as well. Hopefully there will be no sequels.

Someday…

Someday, financial markets will again decline. Someday, rising stock and bond markets will no longer be government policy – maybe not today or tomorrow, but someday. Someday, QE will end and money won’t be free. Someday, corporate failure will be permitted. Someday, the economy will turn down again, and someday, somewhere, somehow, investors will lose money and once again come to favor capital preservation over speculation. Someday, interest rates will be higher, bond prices lower, and the prospective return from owning fixed-income instruments will again be roughly commensurate with the risk.

Someday, professional investors will come to work and fear will have come to the markets and that fear will spread like wildfire. The news flow will be bad, and the markets will be tumbling.

…

Six years ago, many investors were way out over their skis. Giant financial institutions were brought to their knees…

The survivors pledged to themselves that they would forever be more careful, less greedy, less short-term oriented.

But here we are again, mired in a euphoric environment in which some securities have risen in price beyond all reason, where leverage is returning to rainy markets and asset classes, and where caution seems radical and risk-taking the prudent course. Not surprisingly, lessons learned in 2008 were only learned temporarily. These are the inevitable cycles of greed and fear, of peaks and troughs.

Can we say when it will end? No. Can we say that it will end? Yes. And when it ends and the trend reverses, here is what we can say for sure. Few will be ready. Few will be prepared.

 

 

via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/1hW8yAw Tyler Durden

Submitted by Brandon Smith of Alt-Market.com,

When one studies history, all events seem to revolve around the applications and degenerations of war. Great feats of human understanding, realization and enlightenment barely register in the mental footnotes of the average person. War is what we remember, idealize and aggrandize, which is why war is the tool most often exploited by oligarchy to distract the masses while it centralizes power.

With the exception of a few revolutions, most wars are instigated and controlled by financial elites, manipulating governments on both sides of the game to produce a preconceived result. The rise of National Socialism in Germany, for instance, was largely funded by corporate entities based in the U.S., including Rockefeller giant Standard Oil, JPMorgan and even IBM, which built the collating machines specifically used to organize Nazi extermination camps, the same machines IBM representatives serviced on site at places like Auschwitz. As a public figure, Adolf Hitler was considered a joke by most people in German society, until, of course, the Nazi Party received incredible levels of corporate investment. This aid was most evident in what came to be known as the Keppler Fund created through the Keppler Circle, a group of interests with contacts largely based in the U.S.

George W. Bush’s grandfather, Prescott Bush, used his position as director of the New York-based Union Banking Corporation to launder money for the Third Reich throughout the war. After being exposed and charged for trading with the enemy, the case against Bush magically disappeared in a puff of smoke, and the Bush family went on to become one of the most powerful political forces in America.

Without the aid of international conglomerates and banks, the Third Reich would have never risen to power.

The rise of communism in Russia through the Bolshevik Revolution was no different. As outlined in Professor Antony Sutton’s book Wall Street And The Bolshevik Revolution with vast detail and irrefutable supporting evidence, it was globalist financiers that created the social petri dish in which the communist takeover flourished.  The same financiers that aided the Nazis…

The two sides, National Socialism and communism, were essentially identical despotic governmental structures conjured by the same group of elites. These two sides, these two fraudulent ideologies, were then pitted against each other in an engineered conflict that we now call World War II, resulting in an estimated 48 million casualties globally and the ultimate formation of the United Nations, a precursor to world government.

Every major international crisis for the past century or more has ended with an even greater consolidation of world power into the hands of the few, and this is no accident.

When I discuss the concept of the false left/right paradigm with people, especially those in the liberty movement, I often see a light turn on, a moment of awareness in their faces. Many of us understand the con game because we live it day to day. We see past the superficial rhetoric of Republican and Democratic party leadership and take note of their numerous similarities, including foreign policy, domestic defense policy and economic policy. The voting records of the major players in both parties are almost identical. One is hard-pressed to find much difference in ideology between Bush and Barack Obama, for example; or Obama and John McCain; or Obama and Mitt Romney, for that matter.

When I suggest, however, that similar false paradigms are used between two apparently opposed nations, the light fades, and people are left dumbstruck. Despite the fact that globalist financiers shoveled capital into the U.S., British, German and Soviet military complexes all at the same time during World War II, many Americans do not want to believe that such a thing could be happening today.

In response, I present the crisis in Ukraine versus the crisis in Syria…

Ukraine Versus Syria

It seems as though much of the public has already forgotten that at the end of 2013, the U.S. came within a razor’s edge of economic disaster — not to mention the possibility of World War III. The war drums in Washington were thundering for “intervention” in Syria and the overthrow of Bashar Assad. The only thing that saved us, I believe, were the tireless efforts of the independent media in exposing the darker motives behind the Syrian insurgency and the bloodlust of the Obama Administration. The problem is that when the elites lose one avenue toward war and distraction, they have a tendency to simply create another. Eventually, the public is so overwhelmed by multiple trigger points and political powder kegs that they lose track of reality. I often call this the “scattergun effect.”

The crisis in the Ukraine is almost a carbon copy of the civil war in Syria, culminating in what I believe to be the exact same intent.

The Money

Money from globalist centers has been flowing into the Ukrainian opposition since at least 2004, when the Carnegie Foundation was caught filtering funds to anti-Russian political candidate Viktor Yushchenko, as well as to the groups who supported him.

The Ukrainian Supreme Court called for a runoff due to massive voter fraud and the rise of the pro-Western Orange Revolution, determining the winner to be Yushchenko over none other than Viktor Yanukovych. Yanukovych went on to win the 2010 elections, and the revolution returned to oust him this year.

It has been discovered that the current revolution has also been receiving funds from NATO and U.S. interests, not just from the State Department, but also from billionaires like Pierre Omidyar, the chairman of eBay and the new boss of journalist Glen Greenwald, the same journalist who is now famous for being the first to expose National Security Agency documents obtained by Edward Snowden.

Much of the monetary support from such financiers was being funneled to men like Oleh Rybachuk, the right-hand man to Yanukovych during the Orange Revolution and a favorite of neoconservatives and the State Department in the U.S.

The International Monetary Fund has also jumped at the chance to throw money at the new Ukrainian regime, which would prevent default of the country and allow the opposition movement to focus their attentions on Russia.

The revolution in Syria was also primarily driven by Western funds and arms transferred through training grounds like Benghazi, Libya. There is much evidence to suggest that the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi was designed to possibly cover up the arming of Syrian rebels by the CIA, who had agents on the ground who still have not been allowed to testify in front of Congress.

After this conspiracy was exposed in the mainstream, globalist-controlled governments decided to openly supply money and weapons to the Syrian insurgency, instead of ending the subterfuge.

The ‘Rebels’

Some revolutions are quite real in their intent and motivations. But many either become co-opted by elites through financing, or they are created from thin air from the very beginning. Usually, the rebellions that are completely fabricated tend to lean toward extreme zealotry.

The Syrian insurgency is rife with, if not entirely dominated by, men associated with al-Qaida. Governments in the U.S. and Israel continue to support the insurgency despite their open affiliation with a group that is supposedly our greatest enemy. Syrian insurgents have been recorded committing numerous atrocities, including mass execution, the torture of civilians and even the cannibalism of human organs.

The revolution in Ukraine is run primarily by the Svoboda Party, a National Socialist (fascist) organization headed by Oleh Tyahnybok.  Here is a photo of Tyahnybok giving a familiar salute:

So far, the opposition in Ukraine has been mostly careful in avoiding the same insane displays of random violence that plagued the Syrians’ public image. It is important to remember though that mainstream outlets like Reuters went far out of their way in attempts to humanize Syrian al-Qaida. Their methods were exposed only through the vigilance of the independent media. With the fascist Svoboda in power in the Ukraine, I believe it is only a matter of time before we see video reports of similar atrocities, giving Russia a perfect rationalization to use military force.

John McCain?

I am now thoroughly convinced that John McCain is a pasty ghoul of the highest order. He claims to be conservative yet supports almost every action of the Obama Administration. He is constantly defending anti-Constitutional actions by the Federal government, including the Enemy Belligerents Act, which was eventually melded into the National Defense Authorization Act; NSA surveillance of U.S. citizens; and even gun control.

And for some reason, the guy makes appearances like clockwork right before or during major overthrows of existing governments. McCain was in Libya during the coup against Moammar Gadhafi.

McCain showed up to essentially buy off the rebels in Tunisia.

McCain hung out with al-Qaida in Syria.

And, what a surprise, McCain met with the Ukrainian opposition movement just before the overthrow of Viktor Yanukovych.  Here is a photo of McCain giving a speech to the opposition with none other than Neo-Nazi Oleh Tyahnybok standing over his left shoulder.

Why McCain? I have no idea. All I know is, if this guy shows up in your country, take cover.

Russia In The Middle

The great danger in Syria was not necessarily the chance of war with Assad. Rather, it was the chance that a war with Assad would expand into a larger conflagration with Iran and Russia. Russia’s only naval facility in the Mideast is on the coast of Tartus in Syria, and Russia has long-standing economic and political ties to Syria and Iran. Any physical action by the West in the region would have elicited a response from Vladimir Putin. The mainstream argument claims that the threat of Russian intervention scared off Obama, but I believe the only reason war actions were not executed by the White House and the globalists was because they didn’t have even minimal support from the general public. For any war, you need at least a moderate percentage of the population to back your play.

In Ukraine, we find the globalists creating tensions between the West and the East yet again. Russia’s most vital naval base sits in Crimea, an autonomous state tethered to the Ukrainian mainland. Currently, Russia has flooded Crimea with troops in response to the regime change in Ukraine. The new Ukrainian government (backed by NATO) has called this an “invasion” and an act of war, while Western warmongers like McCain and Lindsay Graham spread the propaganda meme that Russia made such a move only because Putin believes the Obama Administration to be “weak.”

Clearly, the idea here is to engineer either high tensions or eventual war between Russia and the United States. Syria failed to produce the desired outcome, so the Ukraine was tapped instead.

Energy Markets And The Dollar At Risk

In Syria, any U.S. led military action would have resulted in the immediate closing of the Straight of Hormuz by Iran, threatening to obstruct up to 30% of global petroleum shipments.  Foreign resentment could have easily led to the abandonment of the U.S. dollar as the petro-currency.  Both China and Russia implied the possibility of an economic response to American intervention, though they did not officially go into specifics.  In all likelihood, the dollar's world reserve status would have been damaged irrevocably.

In the Ukraine, the chance of intervention has been countered with VERY specific threats from Russia, including a freeze on natural gas imports to the European Union through Gazprom, which supplies approximately 30% of the EU's fuel.  In 2009, a temporary Ukranian pipeline closure led to widespread shortages across Europe.  While some in the mainstream claim that Russia's influence over EU energy has "diminished" the fact is a loss of 30% of natural gas reserves for an extended period would inflate energy prices wildly and cripple the EU's economy.

Another specific reaction given by Russia is the dumping of U.S. treasury bonds.  Russia's bond holdings may not seem like much leverage, except for the fact that China has now publicly backed Russian efforts in the Ukraine, just as they backed Russian opposition to U.S. activities in Syria.  A dump of bonds by Russia would invariably be followed by a Chinese dump as well.  In fact, China and Russia have been setting the stage for a global dollar decoupling since at least 2008.   I have been warning for years that globalists and central bankers needed a "cover event", a distraction or scapegoat imposing enough to provide a veil of chaos in which they could then destroy the greenback as the world reserve and usher in a global currency system.  The Ukraine crisis offers yet another opportunity for this plan to unfold.

The False Paradigm And The Globalist Chessboard

So far, I have outlined what appears to be a correspondence of conspiracy between Syria and the Ukraine and how each event has the continued potential to trigger regional conflict, dollar collapse, or world war. But is this conspiracy one-sided? Are only the West and NATO being manipulated by globalists to box in Russia and provoke a conflict? And what do globalists have to gain by sparking such disaster?

As with every other catastrophic fabricated war, the goal is the erasure of sovereign identity while consolidating economic, political and social power. It is not enough that global financiers dominate the banking industry and own most politicians; they want to transform the public psyche. They want US to ask THEM for global governance. This manufacture of consent is often achieved by pitting two controlled governments against each other and then, in the wake of the tragedy, calling for global unification. The argument is always presented that if we simply abandoned the concept of nation states and reform under a single world body, all war would “disappear.”

The question is whether Russia’s Putin is aware of the plan. Is he a part of it?  Are we seeing repeat theater of a puppet Russia versus a puppet NATO like that witnessed during the Cold War?

What I do know is that Putin has, a number of times in the past, called for global control of the economy through the IMF and the institution of a new global currency using the IMF’s Special Drawing Rights (SDR).

Loans from the IMF are what saved Russia from debt default in the late 1990s. And Putin has recently called for consultations with the IMF concerning Crimea. Remember, this is the same IMF that is working to fund his opponents in Western Ukraine.

Bottom line, if you believe in national sovereignty and decentralization of power, Putin is NOT your buddy. Once again, we have the globalists injecting money into both sides of a conflict which could morph into something nightmarish.  Putin wants global economic governance and consolidation under the IMF just as much as the supposedly "American-run" IMF wants consolidation.  Global governance of finance and money creation ultimately means global governance of everything else.

Is a war being created through the false paradigm of East versus West in order to pave the road for global government?  Are East/West tensions being exploited as a smokescreen for the final destruction of the dollar's world reserve status?  It is hard to say if the Ukraine will be the final trigger; however, the evidence suggests that if a conflict occurs, regardless of who “wins” such a scenario, the IMF comes out on top.

Imagine you are playing a game of chess by yourself. Which side wins at the end of that game: black or white? The answer is it doesn’t matter. You always win when you control both sides.

via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/1fbRTt9 Tyler Durden

With stocks rising to record high after record high, and with even Goldman’s clients now asking “When does the party end?” as noted by Goldman’s David Kostin overnight, the answer is simple: nothing has changed. Specifically, between the Fed’s ongoing monetization of tens of billions monthly in bonds, the missing piece to the equation is also a known one – corporate buybacks. In fact as Goldman admits, “February was the busiest month in our buyback desk’s history.” (which surely is Chinese walled off from Goldman’s prop trading desk). Why? Because as Reuters reported previously, this was the second-busiest week ever recorded for high-grade bond issuance. And with the use of proceeds certainly not going to capex, companies continue to buyback their shares in record amounts to mask the decline in actual cash earnings by lowering the amount of shares outstanding and thus keeping EPS rising or flat.

But aren’t companies leery of buying back their shares at all time highs?

Well, not if in the process of purchasing they can get the momentum chasing algos and what little retail dumb money is left to piggyback along, and generate additional upside, which then allows companies to use their overvalued equity as M&A currency. Confirming precisely that corporations now see their stocks as the most highly valued ever, is that the share of M&A primarily paid for in stock is now at an all time high!

And confirming just how incredulous investors are in this latest “growth stock mania” phase is that as Goldman says, it has led many investors to ask: “When does the party end?” Growth companies such as Facebook, Yelp, and Alexion Pharmaceuticals have returned more than 30% YTD and trade at high valuations that imply market expectations for strong future growth.

Goldman’s punchline: the median company’s EV/sales ratio is now the highest in 35 years, surpassing even the dot com bubble.

Goldman then wonders, with the market at full valuation what amount of growth is necessary to sustain the lofty valuations and fulfill the expectations embedded in premium multiples. To answer the question, the vampire squid analyzed the historical performance of stocks across the Russell 3000, examining EV/sales ratios in order to include smaller growth companies. Its findings:

Of stocks with the highest embedded expectations, only those able to realize truly exceptional revenue growth reliably outperform. Exhibit 5 shows the median 1-, 3-, and 5-year forward returns for stocks with EV/sales ratios of 10x-15x. The median stock in this category underperforms its sector peers in most cases. For example, even stocks able to double or triple sales in a year have historically lagged by a median of 10 pp during those 12 months. Only stocks that grew revenues by more than 500% over a five year period (43% CAGR) typically outperformed, and then by less than 5 pp.

 

In other words, the party rarely continues for long. Shares priced to grow the fastest rarely succeed in growing into their valuations. Firms ranking in the top 10% of EV/sales ratios (typically 10x and higher), generally lag peers over 1-, 3-, and 5-year horizons, regardless of realized growth.

 

Many investors find the historical example surprising given its contrast with recent trends. The median Russell 3000 stock with a EV/sales ratio above 10x one year ago returned 34% during the past 12 months, outperforming the index’s median stock by 500 bp.

Not surprisingly, it is the cheap stocks that perform better in the long-run. Stocks on the other end of the distribution have historically tended to
outperform across time horizons, regardless of growth rate (Exhibit 6). The median firm with EV/sales below 0.5x typically outpaces sector peers. But who knows – after all never before has the entire stock market been a bubble of such unprecedented proportions blown willingly and knowingly by a Fed which has gone all in on its bet its record balance sheet will trickle down into the economy via the Russell 2000 “transmission mechanism”, and never before has the Fed – which now in retrospect admits the 2007 market was a bubble – cast so blind an eye on the current bubble which as even Goldman admits is bigger than it ever was before.

Which then, according to Goldman, leaves investors with a choice: (1) Target the stocks priced to grow the fastest and either ride the current wave of popularity or aim to beat the historical odds by identifying the outliers; or (2) invest in stocks with low multiples and outperform as a base case, with larger returns as a bonus for identifying the firms that actually deliver the fastest growth.

In our view there is a third choice – the same we have been advocating for the past 5 years: ignore the manipulated, broken, gamed stock market entirely, in which only criminal insiders and HFT algos can and do make money on a regular basis (because remember: no “advisor” will urge you to sell just before the all time highs… or 20% below it… or 50% below it – after all it is just a BTFD opportunity), and instead keep investing (as in not gambling) in hard assets, those which the Fed can not and will not print in order to generate the impression that things are better just because 99% of the population has no clue what the difference between real and nominal, and between paper and actual gains, is.

via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/NKpOOS Tyler Durden

 

In March of 2011 I had this to say about Puerto Rico and its muni bonds:

 

The weather is great. The beaches are beautiful. The food is good and the drinks are better. The bonds, on the other hand, don’t get on my “buy” list.

 

We damn near had a significant problem with PR – there was a real possibility the Island would have been forced to default a few months ago. That’s not the case any longer. Wall Street (and some deep pocket funds) are going to do a private bailout next week.

 

 

$3 'Large' will be the largest muni deal ever. The new bonds will have a coupon that pushes 10% – and they will be priced in the hole to give the big-buck buyers a quick boost (retail investors will not see a dime of these bonds). These are tax free, so the fat cats will have a real yield pushing 16%! Thank you Uncle Sam!

The underwriters stand to make a quick $40+ million in fees. Come Tuesday night, the Champagne will be flowing….(I think the deal will be a blowout success – the whole $3B was all spoken for as of Friday)

The best part of the deal (for the Street) is that the new bonds will be Senior to most of PR’s other $70B of bonds. That’s because PR got rolled over a barrel and was forced to allow these bonds to be subject to NYS law – meaning that the new bond holders can grab collateral, and force the other creditors to the back of the bus when the SHTF.

In my estimation, the $3B deal will buy PR at least 24 months before the next credit crunch hits. I have little expectation that PR is going to turn things around in that period of time, so the crunch will happen. But that's so far away that PR, and its financial woes, will fall off the headlines. As that happens, the new bonds are going to rip up in value – a 10% pop in these bonds is a distinct possibility. That would mean that come Tuesday, those who get to play in this sand box stand to rake in an “extra” $300m.

By Christmas, the new PR bonds will have been sold at big premiums over par to yield-hungry retail investors (more Champagne). And the poor retail guys will be wondering what they bought sometime before 2017.

So Hurray for Wall Street and the moneymen. The fact that $3b can be raised for a troubled credit (that does not have a rosy future) is a measure of power. WS can do what the IMF can’t – provided it gets paid well for the effort.

My take on this? Puerto Rico bonds might be a Buy – but they most certainly are not a Hold. Three years from now I'll be reminding folks about the warning today. Wall Street can clean up junk well enough, but it can't make it go away.

 

 

via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/1edxBv5 Bruce Krasting

The dismal news overnight that a Malaysian Airlines jet, carrying over 200 passengers and crew, had “gone missing” appears to have become considerably more troublesome. News this morning of pools of oil off the Vietnam coast – suggestive of a crash – are dreadful but, as NBC News reports, perhaps more crucially, U.S. officials told NBC News on Saturday they are investigating terrorism concerns after two people listed as passengers on the missing Malaysia Airlines jet turned out not to be on the plane and had reported their passports stolen.

 

 

The lastest on the “missing” plane (via The Telegraph),

Vietnam air force planes spot two oil slicks suspected to be from missing Malaysian Boeing 777 jet.

 

The fate of flight MH370 from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing remains unclear more than 12 hours after air traffic controllers lost touch with the plane.

 

However, Vietnamese authorities said they had spotted a 14-mile long oil slick 120 miles off the coast of Cape Ca Mau – the most southerly point of Vietnam’s mainland. 

 

A Vietnamese government statement said the slicks were spotted late on Saturday off the southern tip of Vietnam and were each between six and nine miles long.

But there are growimng concerns that this was a terrorist attack… (via NBC News,)

Luigi Maraldi, 37, was the only Italian on a passenger manifest released by the airline after the jet disappeared over the South China Sea.

 

?But his father, Walter Maraldi, told NBC News from Cesena, Italy: “Luigi called us early this morning to reassure us he was fine, but we didn’t know about the accident. Thank God he heard about it before us.”

 

Luigi Maraldi was on vacation in Thailand, the father said. He said that Luigi Maraldi’s passport was stolen one year ago.

 

The foreign ministry of Austria confirmed to NBC News that police had made contact with a citizen who was also on the passenger list, and who reported his passport stolen two years ago while traveling in Asia.

 

 

via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/1cEjVOS Tyler Durden