Though there still exists economists, portfolio strategists and corporate CEOs who still don’t see or admit to seeing a double-dip coming to America [did you watch CNBC yesterday?], everyone’s favorite sleaze, George Soros, on September 21, told—that very same 24-hour propaganda doubly-sleaze outfit—CNBC, that the U.S. is in “a double dip already.”
Sometimes, Soros, too, tells the truth, as long as it aligns well with his fascist global-community agenda.
But if you’ve been listening to John Williams of shadowstats.com, you’d already know the fake recovery was just that, fake, and that the worse days for the U.S. are yet to come.
“As activity begins to turn down again, you are going to see things get even worse, and the continued economic trouble is going to be very long and very deep,” Williams told KWN on July 11. “That puts the Fed in a circumstance where you virtually are assured of a quantitative easing three. That in turn will weaken the U.S. dollar further.”
But as we all know, Bernanke, instead of giving the market what it perceived it needed on Wednesday, crushed the dollar slide, instead. No QE3! Not today, anyway. But Williams will most assuredly be proved correct after the fight from Republicans on Capitol Hill turns Captain Queeg ‘yellow stain’ as it did during Speaker Newt Gingrich’s 1995 noble fight to turn the money spigots off by shutting down the Treasury-Fed cabal.
At some point, the mob will beg for QE3! Ask Gingrich, who went from Time’s Man of the Year to the bum who authored the ‘Contract ON America” —which leads us to today’s Fed puzzle.
“The markets apparently were hoping for a large, magic pill for an anemic economy that feels like it’s catching the flu,” Barton Biggs told Bloomberg News. He’s now been quoted by the Washington Post as saying we may be “on the eve” of a financial crisis.
And Dr. Feelgood at the Fed can’t wait for his patient to beg for that shot, thereby garnering support in Washington and within his own ranks to play catch up in the race to minimize the impact of a crushing debt load plaguing the U.S. economy.
John Williams (as well as BU’s Laurence Kotlikoff) has worked the numbers and concludes that the federal budget is “beyond containment.” The U.S., too, is standing inline for a Greek moment—a Minsky Moment—but that moment is temporarily frozen in time.
What Bernanke showed us Wednesday is that he is indeed very concerned about commodities prices forking the wrong way during that critical phase of a debt-based monetary system gone hopelessly broken, a phase that von Mises referred to as the ‘Crack-up Boom.’
Bernanke doesn’t want hyperinflation; he’s not stupid. But he does want some inflation in the money supply (however it’s defined)! “The Bernanke” just doesn’t want his helicopter money printing of U.S. dollars to become expected by market participants. Admittedly, in hindsight, he had no choice but to punish the markets for even suggesting, at this time, for that whopper monetary shot. Bernanke wants everyone on the same page begging for QE3.
The Bernank refers to inflation expectation incessantly in his testimonies, speeches and writings. Believe it or not, The Bernank (and Greenspan, and every Fed chairman since Marriner Eccles (from whom we get the name of the politburo headquarters in Washington) has heard of von Mises and has read his brilliant works.
Austrian economics professor Ludwig von Mises (September 29, 1881 – October 10, 1973) stated that the Crack-up Boom we’re immersed in today can lead to two outcomes: deflation or hyperinflation. Von Mises wrote:
“If once public opinion is convinced that the increase in the quantity of money will continue and never come to an end, and that consequently the prices of all commodities and services will not cease to rise, everybody becomes eager to buy as much as possible and to restrict his cash holding to a minimum size. For under these circumstances the regular costs incurred by holding cash are increased by the losses caused by the progressive fall in purchasing power. The advantages of holding cash must be paid for by sacrifices which are deemed unreasonably burdensome. This phenomenon was, in the great European inflations of the twenties, called flight into real goods (Flucht in die Sachwerte) or crack-up boom (Katastrophenhausse).”
Money supply dropped post 1929 crash, and the student of the Great Depression vowed to Milton Friedman that it won’t happen again. Take Bernanke at his word. That’s why he was chosen to head the Fed.
But there’s a catch to the money pumping, many, in fact, but most notably the expectations for the direction of consumer prices. Are inflation expectations “firmly anchored”? as Bernanke likes to state.
And the best way to crush exceptions is to coordinate an attack, initially, on the Swiss franc and commodities complex, then the precious metals, then, everything connected to the inflation trade. Bravo. Well done.
Bless CNBC’s Bob Pisani, too, for his repetitive comments regarding traders “gaming the Fed” the week prior to the FOMC meeting. He was right! And Bernanke certainly was on board with that observation along with every hedge fund manager from Tokyo to Greenwich, Connecticut. Even Greenwich’s has-been Barton Biggs ended up looking like a chump for making a call for a market bottom in August.
Well, it’s Revenge of the Nerds. Isn’t it? Cool hedge fund managers getting clocked by a bearded policy wonk.
So what is a fiat-money slave to do?:
Well, has anything materially changed in the outlook for currencies debasement in the coming zillion years? Read a little from BU’s Laurence Kotlikoff or subscribe to John Williams Shadowstats.com for an instant primer on the disaster that has been covered up by everyone who’s been benefiting from the cover up.
So, stop cryin’ and start loading up the basket of silver goodies left behind by those unfortunate, scared, stupid, impetuous, lazy, distracted or drugged out to know the tsunami will eventually move from the entire world back to U.S. shores.
And, by the way, if you happen to live in Brazil and were clever enough to hold gold (silver prices will be a commin’, too), gold hit a record high in Reals yesterday. What? No coverage on CNBC? So, the inflation generated by, and led by, the gang of four at the Fed, ECB, BOE and BOJ has reached the ‘invincible’ Brazil. A crushing 22% collapse in the Real since July 26 spells potential civil unrest from those lagging behind its approximate $10,000 PPP national average.
Watch for a potential Brazilian Real-like crash in the Malaysian Ringgit, Thai Baht, Philippines Peso, Indonesian Rupiah and other currency escape routes out of the U.S. Dollar. The tide has gone out fully now, and the Bernanke knows it will eventually come back to the shores of the U.S.
MP Nigel Farage said it well; he told King World New’s Eric King, yesterday, “Yeah, we’ve had a setback, a little bit of a settling of the gold price after what was a meteoric rise. I think the worst in the financial system is yet to come, a possible cataclysm and if that happens the gold price could go (higher) to a number that we simply cannot, at this moment, even imagine. Gold is in an uptrend and professional traders should be buying the dips.”
Naturally, it’s dittos for buying silver.
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