The law, signed last week by President Obama, exempts the SEC from disclosing records or information derived from "surveillance, risk assessments, or other regulatory and oversight activities." Given that the SEC is a regulatory body, the provision covers almost every action by the agency, lawyers say. Congress and federal agencies can request information, but the public cannot.
In related news, 2+2=4, up is up, down is down, and you can't spend yourself into prosperity--no matter how much the Gov't/Federal Reserve speak to the contrary. (2,243)
Now that Greenspan is no longer working for the government, he's once again turned into a capitalist.
In a rant he recently wrote for the WSJ, he said “The United States, and most of the rest of the developed world, is in need of a tectonic shift in fiscal policy ... Incremental change will not be adequate.”
He went on to say that “Perceptions of a large U.S. borrowing capacity are misleading,” and current long-term bond yields are masking America’s debt problem. “Long-term rate increases can emerge with unexpected suddenness,” such as the 4 percentage point surge over four months in 1979-80.
“The federal government is currently saddled with commitments for the next three decades that it will be unable to meet in real terms,” Greenspan said. “[The] very severity of the pending crisis and growing analogies to Greece set the stage for a serious response.”
He also says that yields on U.S. Treasuries have decreased in recent months (demand has increased) because of the European debt crisis--a situation that is likely only temporary. This is of course directly contradicting Bernanke's latest tirade against the Gold Rally in which he suggested that the low yields on US Treasuries in recent months were a sign of long-term stability (a pack of lies Latewire immediately called out).
10-year Treasury notes yielded 3.20 percent as of 12:11 p.m. in Tokyo on June 17th, down from the year’s high of 4.01 percent in April and compared with as high as 5.32 percent in June 2007, before the recession began. Yields continue to be low “despite the surge in federal debt to the public during the past 18 months to $8.6 trillion from $5.5 trillion". Greenspan says this shift in demand from European into American Bonds is “temporary.”
“Our economy cannot afford a major mistake in underestimating the corrosive momentum of this fiscal crisis,” Greenspan said. “Our policy focus must therefore err significantly on the side of restraint.”
I couldn't have said it better myself. Can you please tell your former underlings that?
UPDATE: Peter Schiff just released a VLOG where he said almost exactly the same thing. (22,973)
Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke says he’s a bit puzzled by surging gold prices. The 30% rally from a year ago, on top of gains in previous years, ... Gold is seen by many investors as a hedge against inflation risk.
Mr. Bernanke notes that the inflation signal isn’t confirmed by movements in other asset classes.
That's because the CPI is complete BS, and everyone knows it (with the possible exception of Bernanke). Of course he's also leaving out such asset classes as "Food" and "Energy" (apart from Oil). Plus his whole "reflation" strategy is keeping prices high as household income declines (fewer hours, worse wages, unemployment), plunging everyone but the super-rich into horrible poverty (worse than we would've had even with just the recession).
Yields on Treasury bonds tend to rise when investors worry about inflation, but those yields have been falling recently.
1) People are fleeing the Euro 2) The fed is BUYING THE FREAKIN BONDS IN RECORD NUMBERS ON THE SECONDARY MARKET
Inflation expectations as measured in Treasury Inflation Protected Securities (TIPS) markets remain low.
Again...
And other commodity prices are falling. Gold is breaking records, but copper prices are down 17% so far this year.
Demand for copper, now that the housing market is on its last legs, is going to be reduced from the highs the federal reserve and other government agencies artificially raised them. The copper bubble popped with the housing bubble, and as of yet Bernanke hasn't been able to inflate your way out of it. Not to mention the fact that China is no longer stockpiling all the copper on the planet. (18,342)
Markets are panicking, Greeks are rioting, Hungarians are having conniptions, and the rest of the over-leveraged world is finally asking the question: when is it going to be my turn?
Meanwhile, the economics enthusiasts here at Latewire/InflationHell, as well as some of the actual experts have been notably silent. You may be wondering why that is (or you may be wondering how water-activated growable sponge animals work, but we're not going there so shut up). I think even some of the more famous soothsayers (who we plagiarize unabashedly) have been a little quiet lately on the bad reports (only today did Peter Schiff release something about it).
The reason why is that... well... what's there to say? The writers here as well as other believers in Austrian Economics have put enormous effort into writing essays, books, lectures, and even publishing educational videos on history and governmental fiscal figures. We explained why 2+2 does not equal 5, no matter how much the Fed says it does. We told you things were unsustainable, we told you the how and the why. You'll notice that some other economists/financial "experts" who were predicting a continued rally or recovery are either scared speechless or rationalizing/modifying their statements.
It dawned on me today, after a long night of heavy drinking, that there is one thing we should probably be reporting at this point.:
We told you so.
But don't worry, this is only the beginning. This is just the tip of the debt-crises iceberg.
Yes, we realize that these numbers are wacky partially out of fear and panic, and they'll wax and wane for a while as the changes set in. We also realize that it is extremely early in the decline, and that these "bumps in the road" are unpredictable in the temporal sense. Rest assured though, soon enough the people of these countries will finally realize how leveraged they are, that their standard of living has been a lie, and that now they and their children are going to pay for their mistakes with compounding interest for a very, very long time. At that point, you wont have to come to our website to view images like these, you can just look out your front window.
In possibly the biggest revelation in history: Could my favorite talking head (actually, the only one I can stand) also be a fellow fan of Dewars' White Label? For those not in the know, Dewars is the best scotch under $100/fifth (at least from what I've found). It's also my liver's arch nemesis as they have done battle on many, many occasions.
In his latest installment of his show "Stossel" (his show on gambling), John throws in clips of him and others playing Texas Hold 'Em with a fifth of Dewars' White Label sitting right in front of him. Is that his beverage or is that a prop? This question must be answered, John.
The epitome of the Fat-cat is back, and his name rhymes with "sacks." This is appropriate, considering that not since Lincoln's prostitution to the Railroad companies have we seen such shameless and unapologetic chrome-plated balls in our corporate governance.
A few days ago Sachs was sued by the SEC, ostensibly out of nowhere (they weren't even given the customary prior-notice to prepare). This is an unquantifiable mountain of horse-shit. I'm not saying they haven't done anything wrong, I'm saying that everybody knows it's a show-trial and nothing will come of it... well, everybody but the average American, that is.
The average American will see this as a fresh reminder of why we "need" financial reform. When Obama gets up on stage and finally signs this shit into law, most Americans will be watching it live on TV--clapping their sausage-digitted mits together, resulting an enormous orange plume of Dorito-dust which will likely be the 3rd of man's creations that will be visible from space.
Make no mistake: This isn't being done to penalize Goldman Sachs. This fact is so obvious that even the GOP is calling them out on it.
It's not just about the financial reform bill, either. What makes this particular moment in time the most strategic for distraction is that the SEC was finally forced to acknowledge 13 years of epic failure. Long story short: A guy ran a $7 billion ponzi scheme, was investigated by the SEC for 13 years and found to be extremely dirty. Four Times. They never prosecuted--that is, until now. This whole Goldman Shit-fit is almost certainly related. (27,336)
Someone pointed this out to me earlier and it seems pretty obvious:
1) The goal of every elected official is to get reelected above all else 2) The Republicans probably could have blocked or stalled the bill if they'd really, really wanted to 3) It helps Republicans get elected a lot more if they run against a hated opponent rather than running on the "I stopped the healthcare bill" 4) People will hate Republicans regardless, but if they hate the Democrats more for a brief stint, they can win back congress 5) Given all this, do you really think they put forth their best effort to block the bill?
Don't fall into the trap. Reps would've passed this bill (or one close to it) too if they were in power, just like they passed the Medicare Drug plan and all that other crap.
Next time you go to the polls, just remember who these assholes are, ALL of them. (33,890)
I'm ill as hell today. Still managed to finish it though!
Rough Transcript: Remember the movie back to the future 2? The villain uses a time machine to go back 30 years and change the timeline.
In the alternate timeline, the good guys are either dead or subjugated by the villain, who is so powerful he can essentially do whatever he wants.
The people of the alternate timeline are oblivious to how they ended up in that mess and just assume it's the way things are meant to be.
This is kind of the same thing we see with government stimulus. Essentially, our future could go one of two ways: with stimulus, or without. When stimulus is applied, the result is that people are in worse shape, and don't recognize what they've lost by government altering the timeline.
Let me first say that I'm talking mostly in terms of fiscal stimulus here, like the TARP, Obama's $700b stimulus, and the upcoming $15B jobs bill. However, many of the things I'm about to say could be applied to monetary stimulus as well.
Let's pretend first that you're an investor in 2008 after the stocks, housing, and other asset prices have fallen dramatically. Things are uncertain, and you want to be very careful in reinvesting your money. You're going to choose businesses that look like they have a healthy outlook. You're going to research, and you're going to pick your next investment solely based on the profit it will yield.
Government, on the other hand, does the opposite: Stimulus projects are chosen not based on what will be the biggest wealth producer in the future, but by a myriad of other factors including: - Who paid what in campaign contributions - Is the business located in my district where it will employ my constituents - What the most influential lobbyists are saying - What the politician is currently invested in*
*I bet you didn't know that it's actually legal for politicians or their friends to invest in a business they know will benefit from an upcoming piece of legislation. They can therefore use your tax dollars to bolster a stock and enrich themselves.
A lot of economists reply to this and say: "So what? It doesn't matter what the money is spent on. As long as the money is being spent, it will create jobs and help the crisis." This is what the Keynesians call boosting "aggregate demand."
The problem with this is two fold 1) Jobs are not about babysitting people or generally killing their time and handing them a paycheck, they're about creating wealth. 2) The money comes from somewhere, and invariably is shunting money away from legitimate long-term investments
Let's talk about jobs. Like I said, jobs are about creating wealth. I'm going to use a quick example of how wealth is created, so you can understand how it is our standard of living rises.
Say I save up and buy an empty plot of land and some saplings for $1,000 dollars. I spend another $1,000 on labor and grow the trees for lumber. I sell the rights to the trees to a lumber company for $5,000. Did you see that? I just created $3,000 of wealth. It doesn't end there, either. The lumber company cuts the trees down and processes them into planks and blocks at a cost of $1,000 in labor, $1,000 in machinery costs, and resells all that wood for $10,000. They have just created a net of $3,000. The company they sold the wood to makes furniture in a factory at a cost of $2,000 for the labor, $1,000 for the machinery, and resells the pieces for $20,000. Another $7,000 is created.
The laborers and capital investors of this scenario added $13,000 in value. That value is reintroduced into the economy either through consumption or yet even more capital investment. Using my profits from my tree farm, I can now choose to spend another $2,000 and double the size of my business. Then I could put the other $1,000 in the bank and they might loan that money out to someone else who might start their own businesses.
When government ties up labor for its own purposes, that labor never creates as much wealth as it would in the private sector. This can be due to the laziness of government contractors or employees, but it's also due to the fact that the investor chooses projects based on yield whereas the government does not. Essentially, government money is primarily either paying people to work less productively or paying people not to work at all.
Therefore, the biggest problem with government spending is not the taxes, it's actually the loss of the fruits of the labor we would've gotten in the alternate scenario where government was smaller and employed fewer people.
Now let's talk about the money. 100% of these stimulus packages have essentially been lumped into the national debt. People know that debt is simply deferred taxation--that we're syphoning off our children's future in exchange for a better standard of living today. What you probably didn't count on is that even in the present, large deficits have repercussions.
The national debt is composed of bonds. Bonds can be bought by anyone, and in fact despite what you may have heard, most US bonds are held domestically by Americans and American institutions. The biggest foreign bondholder is Japan, followed by China.
The question that you need to ask is: where is the money for the bonds coming from? People invest in US treasury bonds because they're perceived as a secure investment. In fact, until recently, most investors wouldn't even fathom a future where US Bonds wouldn't be the most secure investment out there.
In spite of the ballooning debt, people are still buying these bonds. The question is, as an investor, if in an alternate timeline, the government weren't issuing bonds, where would your money be?
Unless these people are inclined to keep their money under their mattress, their money would either be in other, carefully-chosen investments or in a bank. What does a bank do with deposit money? It also carefully invests.
So basically, by issuing government bonds, the government ensures that those monies are not put into the wealth-producing private sector, but instead into the wealth-draining public sector.
Not only that, but there's the obvious problem with having to pay back those bondholders in the future, which is paradoxically better for the economy than the stimulus the debt was used to fund. (60,438)
Dr Roe has explained the dire state of the economy so fluently that I've been putting off publishing anything on the subject. But since we're getting near th' end zone in our collective run for a doomsday touchdown, I might as well just drop a note to explain why it is that some of the most educated economists and business experts in th' US made decisions that are, on their face, bound to destroy the value of the US dollar.
Currency values, even those of modern fiat currency, are pretty simple. They're really controlled by just two fundamental factors. The first, confidence in the government which issues the currency, is important because money that's not backed by a hard asset (like, say, gold, or lima beans) is only backed by the solvency and integrity of the government itself. If the issuing government is not going to be around or if it's going to default on its obligations, its currency isn't worth much. The second basic thing is the same factor that controls the price of all commodities - scarcity.
Scarcity means, simply, that the less of a commodity there is, the higher its price will be. And likewise, the more of that commodity there is, the cheaper it will be. This is a basic and immutable fact of commodity trading.
The government-chartered private bank that controls our money, the Federal Reserve, explicitly told us some time ago that it would print "as much [money] as necessary" during the current crisis. Current estimates are that it has printed, that is, created out of thin air, over three trillion dollars since 2008.
IMPORTANT : THE INTRODUCTION OF MORE SUPPLY OF A COMMODITY RESULTS IN ONLY ONE THING : THE DECREASE OF PRICE
This is basic high school econ stuff. You don't need a degree in econ or finance to know this stuff. So, when econ whiz kids Ben Bernanke and Henry Paulson cooked up this scheme, they knew that printing dollars willy-nilly could have no other effect than the dilution of the dollar's value due to oversupply. That's what we call '%^&*ing massive inflation.' [Incidentally, they also would have known that eroded international confidence in the dollar would cause our big creditors -- like, say, China -- to get skittish about buying our debt, further depressing the currency]. So, knowing this and being employed by th' government -- that is, by taxpayers -- to save and not damn our economic posterior, why did they do it?
To quote Stimpy, the answer's simple, really. Just like Mark Hart made a killing betting against the housing market and Greek debt [ http://bit.ly/cIaFyO ], Bernanke and buddies are going to make a killing because they've bet against the dollar they swore to protect. That's right. I'm saying that the treasonous slaves Ben Bernanke, Timothy Geithner, Henry Paulson, and all their pals made bets against the value of the dollar and then intentionally torpedoed it with their insane monetary policy and general bailout $%#&ery. I'm not kidding. When the jig is finally up and all that extra supply coupled with a tanking economy makes your Benjamins worth less than Zig-Zags, the bald buggerers will make a quick stop at the bookmakers', pick up the vast sums of cash they've made on the bet against your future, and take their NetJets to Aruba where they will sip pina coladas whilst your neighborhood burns.
This is not like your standard conspiracy hypothesis because it is very likely to be true. Use your %^&*ing head. These people aren't stupid. They know exactly what they're doing. And what they're doing is placing bets against US currency while making decisions that they know cannot other but adversely affect it.
Got cash? Get rid of it. Sooner rather than later, you'll be better off with a wallet full of 'Bazooka Joe' comics. At least those smell good. (37,413)
In a completely unexpected turn of events, the 'yes we can have hope and change' president has vetoed hope and issued an executive order against change. Obama has apparently lied about not enforcing the federal ban on marijuana in otherwise legal situations. As Obama pays populist lip-service to medical marijuana, his minions at the DEA are continuing to raid medical marijuana growers. Some of them may never live outside of a prison cell again. If this were done on a lower level, the claim that he would not enforce certain laws and giving the go-ahead to violate them may be considered entrapment.
"Yes I can!... Be a Machiavellian despot!"--Barack "The Prince" Obama (41,776)
"The scope of the controversy changed when the new science of economics entered the scene. Political parties which passionately rejected all the practical conclusions to which the results of economic thought inevitably lead, but were unable to raise any tenable objections against their truth and correctness, shifted the argument to the fields of epistemology and methodology. They proclaimed the experimental methods of the natural sciences to be the only adequate mode of research, and induction from sensory experience the only legitimate mode of scientific reasoning. They behaved as if they had never heard about the logical problems involved in induction. Everything that was neither experimentation nor induction was in their eyes metaphysics, a term that they employed as synonymous with nonsense." - Von Mises, Theory and History (51,568)
After bailouts and printed money equivalent to double-digits of the GDP have been injected into the economy, the government managed to boost the GDP figure by 5.7%.
That's like burning your neighbor's house down because you ran out of wood for your fireplace.
What's odd is how unimpressed the Keynesians are with this result:
As expected, a big GDP number, signifying nothing much. It’s an inventory blip: topline growth at 5.7 percent, but only 2.2 of that is final demand. ... And I find myself wondering why I even bother reading the actual numbers; the Goldman Sachs prediction was almost exactly right.
It was a tad strange to have had inventories contribute half to the GDP tally, and at the same time see import growth cut in half last quarter. Normally, inventory adds are at least partly fuelled by purchases of foreign-made inputs. Not this time. Strip out inventories and the foreign trade sector, we see that domestic demand growth in the fourth quarter actually slowed to a paltry 1.7% annual rate from 2.3% in the third quarter. Some recovery. Based on some simulations we ran, demand growth with all the massive doses of fiscal and monetary stimulus should already be running in excess of a 10% annual rate. So, the real question that nobody seems to ask is why it is that underlying demand conditions are still so benign more than two years after the greatest stimulus of all time. The answer is that this epic credit collapse is a pervasive drain on spending and very likely has another five years to play out. ... If you believe the GDP data — remember, there are more revisions to come — then you de facto must be of the view that productivity growth is soaring at over a 6% annual rate. No doubt productivity is rising — just look at the never-ending slate of layoff announcements. But we came off a cycle with no technological advance and no capital deepening, so it is hard to believe that productivity at this time is growing at a pace that is four times the historical norm. Sorry, but we're not buyers of that view. In the fourth quarter, aggregate private hours worked contracted at a 0.5% annual rate and what we can tell you is that such a decline in labour input has never before, scanning over 50 years of data, coincided with a GDP headline this good. Normally, GDP growth is 1.7% when hours worked is this weak, and that is exactly the trend that was depicted this week in the release of the Chicago Fed’s National Activity Index, which was widely ignored. On the flip side, when we have in the past seen GDP growth come in at or near a 5.7% annual rate, what is typical is that hours worked grows at a 3.7% rate. No matter how you slice it, the GDP number today represented not just a rare but an unprecedented event, and as such, we are willing to treat the report with an entire saltshaker — a few grains won’t do.
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He went on to say that “Perceptions of a large U.S. borrowing capacity are misleading,” and current long-term bond yields are masking America’s debt problem. “Long-term rate increases can emerge with unexpected suddenness,” such as the 4 percentage point surge over four months in 1979-80.
Markets are panicking, Greeks are rioting, Hungarians are having conniptions, and the rest of the over-leveraged world is finally asking the question: when is it going to be my turn?
The epitome of the 
I'm not talking about the fact that most of the commissars and stooges in our government's interventionary nightmare have either 
In a completely unexpected turn of events, the 'yes we can have hope and change' president has vetoed hope and issued an executive order against change. Obama has 
