Today’s News 25th February 2016

• Dear Janet, Mario, & Haruhiko – It's Time For The 'C' Word

  As policy errors pile up – just as they did in 2007/8 – around the world, we thought the following three charts might warrant the use of the most important word in modern central banking… "Contained"

   

  Haruhiko, You Are Here…

  

   

  Mario, You Are Here…

  

   

  And Janet, You Are Here…

  

  It does make one wonder, with all this carnage and so little action, whether "coordinated" inaction is the post-Davos decision – Don't just do something, stand there and jawbone!!

  With the goal being a big enough catastrophe to warrant unleashing the war on cash, then NIRP, then the unlimited money drop… because as we stand, no matter what crazy policy has been imagined by the Keynesian "seers" – inflationary (well deflationary now) expectations have collapsed.

  

  

  

  

• EIA Inventory Report Recap 2 24 2016 (Video)

  By EconMatters

  

  Some mixed components in this week`s EIA Inventory report. Oil builds are bearish due to storage concerns, but the gasoline demand numbers are robust, and U.S. Oil production is starting to roll over which is bullish.

   

  © EconMatters All Rights Reserved | Facebook | Twitter | YouTube | Email Digest | Kindle  

  

  

  

  

• A Warning To The Feds On Incremental Prosecutions Of The Liberty Movement

  Submitted by Brandon Smith via Alt-Market.com,

  At the very onset of what would become the Soviet Empire, Vladimir Lenin decreed the creation of a national internal army called the “Cheka.” The Cheka were handed very broad police powers and tasked with the disruption and elimination of any form of dissent within the communist system. Lenin launched what would later be known as the “Red Terror”, in which nearly every Russian population center had an established Cheka office of operations using surveillance, infiltration, nighttime raids, imprisonment, torture and execution to silence opposition to the authority of the state.

  Some of these people were active rebels, some were outspoken political opponents and journalists, others were merely average citizens wrongly accused by neighbors or personal enemies. The Cheka created a society of fear and suspicion in which no one could be trusted and little criticism was spoken above a whisper anywhere, even in one’s own home.

  It is important to note, however, that the dominance of the Cheka was established incrementally, not all at once.

  Agents of the state began their “cleansing” of the Russian population by targeting specific groups at opportune times and worked their way through the citizenry at an exponential pace. The most intelligent, effective and dangerous activists and rebels were slated for destruction first, as they represented a kind of leadership mechanism by which the rest of the population might be mobilized or inspired. More innocuous organizations (like Christian churches and rural farmers) were persecuted as background noise while the political mop-up was underway.

  Through this incrementalism, the communists were able to intern or eradicate vast numbers of potential opponents without the rest of Russians raising objections. The general populace was simply thankful that the eye of the Cheka had not been turned upon them, and as long as it was some other group of people unrelated to their daily life that disappeared in the night, they would keep their heads down and their mouths shut.

  I would point out that the communists were very careful and deliberate in ensuring that the actions of the internal police were made valid through law and rationalized as a part of “class struggle.” Such laws were left so open to interpretation that literally any evil committed could later be vindicated. Man-made law is often a more powerful weapon than any gun, tank, plane or missile, because it triggers apathy within the masses. For some strange reason, when corrupt governments legalize their criminality through legislation or executive decree, the citizenry suddenly treats that criminality as legitimate and excusable.

  Incremental prosecution and oppression is effective when the establishment wishes to avoid outright confrontation with a population. Attempt to snatch up a million people at one time, and you will have an immediate rebellion on your hands. Snatch up a million people one man at a time, or small groups at a time, and people do not know what to think or how to respond. They determine to hope that the authorities never get to them, that it will stop after a few initial arrests, or they hope that if they censor themselves completely, they will never be noticed.

  In fact, corrupt governments issue warrants of arrest for a handful of dissenters and initiate imprisonment in a very public manner in the beginning with the express purpose of making examples and inspiring self censorship in the masses so that the authorities do not have to expend large amounts of resources to fight a more complex rebellion.

  I bring up the historic example of the Cheka and incrementalism because a trend is brewing within our current establishment by which I believe a similar (if not more sterilized) brand of oppressive action is being planned against the liberty movement.

  After the debacle in Burns, Oregon during the refuge standoff, federal officials immediately began a subtle campaign in the media promoting internal police powers that when examined in an honest light, are truly anti-liberty.

  It remains my personal position according to the evidence I have seen that the refuge standoff was likely influenced by at least one if not more federal provocateurs and that Ammon Bundy was “encouraged” in his choice of actions and location by this person or persons. The goal? I can only guess that the intent was to trap the liberty movement in a Catch-22 scenario; either we join the poorly planned and executed standoff on some of the worst defensive ground possible and risk everything on one centralized event, or, we refuse to participate in the strategy and watch helplessly as a group of people, many with good intentions but little tactical sense or training, are arrested or killed. Either we gamble everything on the worst possible terms, or, we avoid the gamble and watch as the entire movement is made to look weak or incompetent by association with a few.

  The majority of the movement chose the latter action, rightly I feel. Burns was no Bundy Ranch — everything about it felt rigged. And though there were many angry anonymous voices calling us “sunshine patriots” and “keyboard warriors” because we would not participate, apparently none of those loud mouths ever showed up in Burns either, so I am assuming they finally saw the wisdom in our decision.

  It would seem as though the feds did not get exactly what they wanted out of the refuge standoff, but they have decided to squeeze as much advantage out of the event as possible.

  Cliven Bundy was arrested after arriving by plane in Portland, Oregon, not on any charges relating to the refuge and his son Ammon, but on charges stemming from the Bundy Ranch standoff of 2014.

  These charges include a strange and very broad legal measure relating to “interference with the duties of federal officials.” This in particular should be disconcerting to all of us, for “interference” could be any number of activities.

  Any duties of federal officials that are not moral or constitutional should be interfered with in a tactically intelligent manner whenever possible. Such charges are a deliberate anathema to civil disobedience designed to counter immoral actions by government authorities. For any opposition could be deemed “interference” given a twisting of precedence, and thus treated as illegal.

  In my recent article “Liberty Activists And ISIS Will Soon Be Treated As Identical Threats,” I examined statements made by the Justice Department’s chief of national security, John Carlin, in an article published by Reuters. Carlin and the Justice Department have made it clear that they intend to apply rules of prosecution used for foreign terrorist organizations to “domestic extremists.” The Oregon standoff was specifically mentioned as an example of such extremism.

  Carlin claimed that domestic extremists represent a “clear and present danger,” alluding to the “Clear And Present Danger Doctrine” allowing the government in “times of national crisis” to prosecute almost any citizen giving “material support” to enemies of the state. “Material support” in the past has even included verbal opposition to government policies. Meaning, Carlin is testing the waters of material support laws and such tests may target liberty movement speakers and journalists along with anyone involved in physical opposition. As with the Cheka, no one is really safe.

  These charges are also being brought in a retroactive manner, long after the supposed crimes have been committed as we have seen with Cliven Bundy. Meaning, the feds plan to retain warrants and prolong charges, only arresting people later when they think they can get away with it. This is where the incrementalism comes in…

  Rumors of further indictments have surfaced possibly including dozens of people involved in the Bundy Ranch standoff. And because of the nature of the incremental game the government is playing, verification is difficult until the arrests are activated.

  It has come to my attention from personal sources that there may be a lot of truth to the rumors of pending or retroactive indictments, and that the FBI in particular may be biding its time and waiting to bring charges when particular people are at their most vulnerable and when the movement is less likely to react. These sources have indicated that the federal government is seeking to work around the public relations problems of standoff scenarios like Ruby Ridge, Waco, and Bundy Ranch. The feds may claim that they have “seen the light” in terms of avoiding outright mass murder, but I believe they have just found a better way to sneak past public opinion.

  If they can manipulate the liberty movement into participation in poorly planned standoffs like Burns, Oregon, they will. Such standoffs are doomed from their inception and can even be controlled from within by agents provocateur. They are not a real threat.

  If a standoff occurs organically, as it did at Bundy Ranch in Nevada, and public support is on the side of the liberty movement, then the establishment will simply back off and pluck activists from their homes or at the airport months later.

  It is incumbent upon me to offer a warning to federal agencies in the event that incremental prosecution of liberty activists is truly a strategy they are planning to carry out: It is the general consensus of many in the liberty movement that ANY further arrests predicated on activism at Bundy Ranch or similar opposition events in the past to Bureau Of Land Management abuses of power will result in further and expanded engagements by activists. That is to say, such arrests and indictments will not be allowed to continue.

  This is not a threat, this is fair warning to government agencies that they are walking a razor’s edge. Incremental prosecutions and dismantling of the liberty movement will not be tolerated; they represent a non-negotiable line in the sand. The feds may or may not care what the consequences will be for crossing this line. They may even think they want such consequences. Regardless, consequences there will be.

  While the refuge occupiers essentially handed their heads to the feds on a platter, and the movement was not able to salvage the situation in any viable manner, this does not mean that liberty activists will not take measures during future events depending on the circumstances. Federal agencies may be quick to forget the massive response at Bundy Ranch. This is a mistake. They should probably expect a similar response, if not a more aggressive one, if further arrests are undertaken.

  With the ethereal nature of criminal charges like “material support” or “interference with federal officials,” due process becomes a bit of joke. You see, federal agents and agencies, you have to take into account the reality that the liberty movement is well aware of the government push to remove due process altogether. With the AUMF and the NDAA, among other executive actions, we realize that the friendly mask of due process is worn by government today, but not necessarily tomorrow.

  If the movement gives ground and does nothing while dozens or more are retroactively imprisoned one case at a time for opposing federal abuse, then how long will it be before the rest of us are imprisoned on even broader charges? How long before the mask comes off and the rendition and indefinite detention provisions of the AUMF and the NDAA come into play? Do you really expect the movement to put faith in due process given the circumstances? Of course you do not.

  I would venture to guess that the feds think that any opposition that does arise during the execution of warrants against liberty activists will be “easily managed.” This would be a mistake.

  We have seen this all before in the passive sublimation of past societies. We recognize the signs of trespasses to come. And if such trespasses are brought upon the liberty movement or the population at large, then many of us will adopt the attitude that there is not much left to lose.

  Personally, I do not look forward to this kind of fight, but I have no illusions that it can be avoided given the course our country has taken. Federal agencies have deemed it a matter of national security to watch us all very closely. They should keep in mind, though, that we are also watching them.

  

  

  

  

  

• In Biggest Victory For Saudi Arabia, North Dakota's Largest Oil Producer Suspends All Fracking

  Yesterday, during his speech at CERAWeek in Houston, Saudi oil minister Ali al-Naimi made it explicitly clear that Saudi Arabia would not cut production, instead saying that it is high-cost producers that would need to either “lower costs, borrow cash or liquidate” adding that there is “no need for cuts as marginal barrel will get out of the market.” He was right.

  Today his wish is slowly coming true after news that North Dakota’s largest producer, Whiting Petroleum, would suspend all fracking, and that Continental Resources has effectively done the same after reporting that it no longer has any fracking crews working in the Bakken shale.

  As Reuters reports, Whiting said it would “suspend all fracking and spend 80 percent less this year, the biggest cutback to date by a major U.S. shale company reacting to the plunge in crude prices.”

  It was also confirmation that the Saudi plan to put high-cost producers on ice is working, if only temporarily.

  After sliding 5.6% to $3.72, Whiting stock jumped 8% to over $4 per share in after-hours trading as investors cheered the decision to preserve capital, even if it means generating far less revenue.

  Whiting’s cut is one of the largest so far this year in an energy industry crippled by oil prices at 10-year lows. The cuts will have a big impact in North Dakota, where Whiting is the largest producer.

  The Denver-based company said it would stop fracking and completing wells as of April 1. Most of its $500 million budget will be spent to mothball drilling and fracking operations in the first half of the year. After June, Whiting said it plans to spend only $160 million, mostly on maintenance.

  Rival producers Hess Corp and Continental Resources Inc have also slashed their budgets for the year, though neither has cut as much as Whiting.

  As noted above, during its earnings report, Continental said that in 2016, the Bakken drilling program will continue to focus on high rate-of-return areas in McKenzie and Mountrail counties, targeting wells with an average EUR of 900,000 Boe per well.  Based on the higher EUR and a lower targeted completed well cost of $6.7 million per well, the Company expects capital efficiency to increase 17% and finding cost to decrease 15% in 2016.

  Given its plans to defer most Bakken completions in 2016, Continental expects to increase its Bakken DUC inventory to approximately 195 gross operated DUCs at year-end 2016. However, Continental also said that while the Company currently has four operated drilling rigs in the North Dakota Bakken and plans to maintain this level through year end, it noted that it currently has no fracking crews deployed in the Bakken, which led some, including Bloomberg to believe, that Continental too has halted Bakken shale fracking.

  One thing is certain: the cuts will drag down production and likely reverberate in the economy of North Dakota, the second-largest U.S. oil producing state after Texas, which currently pumps 1.1 million barrels per day. It means that after the 250,000 oil workers already laid off (according to Credit Suisse estimates), tens of thousands of new pink slips to highly paid workers are about to be handed out.

  And another thing: as of this moment, Saudi’s oil minister is taking a victory lap in his Lamborghini – after all his plan to push the price of oil so low that marginal oil producers have no choice but to mothball production is starting to bear fruit.

  There is just one problem.  Whiting Chief Executive Officer Jim Volker said that “we believe this conservative strategy should help us to maintain our liquidity position and leave us well positioned to capitalize on a rebound in oil prices.”

  In other words, the moment oil prices rebound even modestly, and according to many the new breakeven shale prices are as low at $40-$50/barrel, the Whitings and Continentals will immediately resume production, forcing Saudi Arabia to go back to square one, boosting supply even higher, and repeat the entire charade from scratch.

  And so on.

  

  

  

  

  

• Jim Rogers Warns "Governments Plan Is To Destroy The People Who Save"

  "Everybody should be worried.. and be prepared," warns legendary investor Jim Rogers, as he sees the market "facing a bigger collapse than in 2008," and the central banks will be unable to kick the can much longer. "This is the first time in recorded history where you have Central Banks & governments setting out to destroy the people who save & invest," Rogers exclaims and "the markets are telling us that something is wrong – we're getting close."

  "The central bankers haven't given up yet… they think they are smarter than you and me and the market… they're not!"

  Full interview with FutureMoneyTrends below…

  Detailed breakdown

  • 1:20 Is this Market Crash Different?
  • 5:00 Cashless Society – it gives 'them' more control, it is bad for you and me. There is now way to exit from this.
  • 7:20 Crash will be Bigger – eventually the market is going to say "enough is enough"
  • 8:40 Gold – going much higher, may be opportunity to buy more lower first
  • 10:10 2016 Election, Donald Trump
  • 11:20 Where Jim is Investing – Short US equities, Short Junk bonds, Shorting Europe into rally
  • 12:30 China's Economy
  • 17:30 One investment over five years, sugar or rice or Russian Ruble

  

  

  

  

  

• When Currency Pegs Break, Global Dominoes Fall

  Submitted by Charles Hugh-Smith of OfTwoMinds blog,

  When a currency peg breaks, it unleashes shock waves of uncertainty and repricing that hit the global financial system like a tsunami.

  The U.S. dollar has risen by more than 35% against other major trading currencies since mid-2014:

  

  If all currencies floated freely on the global foreign exchange (FX) market, this dramatic rise would have easily predictable consequences: everything other nations import that is priced in dollars (USD) costs 35% more, and everything the U.S. imports from other major trading nations costs 35% less.

  But some currencies don't float freely on the global FX markets: they're pegged to the U.S. dollar by their central governments. When a currency is pegged, its value is arbitrarily set by the issuing government/central bank.

  For example, in the mid-1990s, the government/central bank of Thailand pegged the Thai currency (the baht) to the USD at the rate of 25 baht to the dollar.

  Pegs can be adjusted up or down, depending on a variety of forces. But the main point is the market is only an indirect influence on the peg, not the direct price-discovery mechanism as it is with free-floating currencies.

  If central states/banks feel their currency is becoming too strong via a vis the USD, they can adjust the peg accordingly.

  Why do states peg their currency to the U.S. dollar? There are several potential reasons, but the primary one is to piggyback on the stability of the dollar without having to convince the market independently of one's stability.

  Another reason to peg one's currency to the USD is to keep your currency weaker than the market might allow. This weakness helps make your exports to the U.S. cheap/ competitive with other nations that have weak currencies.

  Nations defend their peg by selling dollars and buying their own currency. The way to understand this is supply and demand: if nobody wants the currency, the demand is low and the price falls. If there is strong demand for a currency, it rises in purchasing power if the supply is limited.

  By selling USD and buying their own currency, nations put downward pressure on the dollar and put a floor under their own currency.

  The problem is you need a big stash of dollars to sell when you want to defend your peg. If you run out of dollars (usually held in U.S. Treasury bonds), you can't defend your peg, and the peg breaks.

  This is why China amassed a $4 trillion stash of U.S. Treasuries. Now that the USD has soared, China's yuan (RMB) has also soared against other currencies because it's pegged to the USD. This has made Chinese goods more expensive in other currencies.

  Currently, the government/central bank of China is attempting to adjust its currency peg to weaken the yuan vis a vis the dollar. To avoid showing signs of losing control, China is attempting to defend the yuan against a break in the peg, and it has burned over $700 billion of its stash of USD in the past few months defending the yuan peg.

  Here is a chart of the yuan in USD. Note that China moved the peg from 8.3 to 6.8 to the dollar to strengthen the yuan when the U.S. complained that it was undervalued. The yuan rose to 6 to 1 USD in early 2014, and has since started to weaken as the dollar has soared.

  

  The problem with currency pegs is they have a nasty habit of breaking. The Seneca Cliff offers a model for the way pegs appear stable for a long time and then collapse:

  

  Why the Chinese Yuan Will Lose 30% of its Value

  When a currency peg breaks, it unleashes shock waves of uncertainty and repricing that hit the global financial system like a tsunami. When Thailand's 25-to-1 peg to the USD broke in 1997, it triggered the Asian Contagion that nearly pushed the world economy into recession.

  Now that China's peg to the dollar is under assault, what happens to the global economy when a weakening China finds it can't stop a rapid devaluation of its currency?

  Gordon Long and discuss this and other critically important aspects of currency pegs in THE U.S. DOLLAR & THE GLOBAL "PEG PAIN TRADE" (28:36 min.)

  

  

  

  

  

• Norway Warns Sweden Will Collapse, PM Will Defy Geneva Convention To Protect Border

  As you might have heard, Sweden has a refugee problem.

  We’ve spent quite a bit of time documenting the country’s trials and travails over the course of the last 12 months during which time Sweden has taken on more than 160,000 asylum seekers.

  Last month, on the heels of reports from Germany that men of “Arab and North African” origin assaulted women in central Cologne during New Year’s Eve celebrations, Swedish media alleged that police orchestrated a massive coverup designed to keep a string of similar attacks that allegedly occurred at a youth festival in Stockholm’s Kungsträdgården last August from seeing the light of day.

  Meanwhile, a 22-year-old refugee center worker was stabbed to death by a Somali migrant at a shelter for asylum seekers and at the Stockholm train station, “gangs” of Moroccan migrant children reportedly spend their days attacking security personnel and accosting women.

  Sweden plans to deport some 80,000 of the refugees this year but according to Norwegian PM Erna Solberg, it may be too little too late to keep the country from collapsing. So concerned is Solberg that she’s now crafted an emergency law that will allow Norway to refuse asylum seekers at the border in the event “it all breaks down” in Sweden.

  “It is a force majeure proposals which we will have in the event that it all breaks down, the power just comes, and all end in Norway because we are at the top and most of Europe. Norway is the end point, is not it,” Solberg said, in an interview with Berlingske whose Tinne Knudsen adds that “the legislation will soon be presented to the Parliament and is expected to meet broad support.”

  
  

  Here’s how the proposal is being presented by the anti-immigration Swedish online magazine Fria Tider: “Norway is now preparing to denounce the Geneva Convention and to secure the border with Sweden by force – without letting people apply for asylum.”

  Norway’s Bar Association says the move would violate the country’s international obligations as well as basic human rights. But Solberg isn’t backing down. “When we make such a proposal, we know that it is quite a big break with how things have been, but we must have some measures that are preparing for the worst case scenarios,” she insists.

  Yes, “worst case scenarios,” like what Sweden’s Foreign Minister Margot Wallström described last October when she said “most people feel that we cannot maintain a system where perhaps 190,000 people will arrive every year – in the long run, our system will collapse.” 

  Expect other countries to make similar threats as the international order breaks down amid the cascade of Mid-East refugees. Once everyone’s borders are closed the question becomes this: will animosity push member states in Merkel’s “harmonious” union to the brink of war with one another?

  

  

  

  

  

• "Credit Risk Is Growing," FDIC Warns As Loss Provisions Jump $3.8 Billion In 3 Months

  On Tuesday, we got the answer (or at least a partial answer) to the question we posed last month when we asked the following: “How long before the impairments and charges currently targeting smaller firms finally shift to the bigger ones? And how underreserved is JPMorgan for that eventuality?”

  We were of course referring to JPMorgan’s exposure to America’s dying oil patch where a rash of defaults and bankruptcies are just around the corner once the bevy of cash flow negative producers see their credit facilities cut by 10-20% when RBL is reevaluated in April.

  What prompted us to ask specifically about JPMorgan’s exposure was the fact that in Q4, the bank did something it hasn’t done in 22 quarters: it increased loan loss provisions.

  

  That very likely had to do with the worsening prospects for its energy book where O&G exposure is a whopping $44 billion against which the bank said yesterday it will now provision an exra $500 million in Q1 of 2016. That brings total provisions against JPMorgan’s energy exposure to $1.3 billion, or around 3%. Of the total $44 billion in energy exposure, $19 billion is HY or, junk.

  

  Of course that’s just one bank. What we don’t know is what the breakdown looks like for other large, systemically important institutions, nor do we have any idea what the granular data is for the banking sector is as a whole. 

  What we do know, however, is that when you look out across 6,182 FDIC-insured institutions, provisions have been on the rise for six consecutive quarters and they jumped sharply in Q4, rising $3.8 billion in total.

  

  “Some of the increase in loss provisions is attributable to stress in the energy sector,” the FDIC said, adding that “there are signs of growing credit risk, particularly among loans related to energy and agriculture.”

  Yes, “particularly” there. Given the fact that banks habitually put off setting aside adequate reserves in order to “smooth” out earnings, one wonders what the Q4 numbers would have looked like had provisions been appropriately large. And that raises the next question: what will Wall Street’s earnings look like when postponing the inevitable is no longer possible?

  

  

  

  

  

• We Just Found Out The Real Reason The FBI Wants A Backdoor Into The iPhone

  Submitted by Jake Anderson via TheAntiMedia.org,

  The FBI versus Apple Inc. An unstoppable force meets an immovable object — the feverish momentum of American technocracy accelerating into the cavernous Orwellian entrenchment of the surveillance state. You thought the patent wars were intense? The ‘Battle of the Backdoor’ pits one of America’s most monolithic tech conglomerates against the Department of Justice and, ultimately, the interests of the national security state. And this case is likely only the opening salvo in what will be a decades-long ideological war between tech privacy advocates and the federal government.

  On its face, the case boils down to a single locked and encrypted iPhone 5S, used by radical jihadist Syed Rizwan Farook before he and his wide Tashfeen Malik killed 14 people in San Bernardino on December 2nd. The DOJ wants Apple to build a backdoor into the device so that it can bypass the company’s state of the art encryption apparatus and access information and evidence related to the case.

  At least, that’s the premise presented to the public. As we are learning, the FBI and the federal government have a far more comprehensive end-game in mind than merely bolstering the prosecution of this one case.

  Whistleblower Edward Snowden tweeted last week that “crucial details [of the case] are being obscured by officials.” Specifically, he made the following trenchant points:

  Journalists: Crucial details in the @FBI v. #Apple case are being obscured by officials. Skepticism here is fair: pic.twitter.com/lEVEvOxcNm

  — Edward Snowden (@Snowden) February 19, 2016

   

  Now, the Wall Street Journal has confirmed that there are actually 12 other iPhones the FBI wants to access in cases that have nothing to do with terrorism. According to an Apple lawyer, these cases are spread all across the country: “Four in Illinois, three in New York, two in California, two in Ohio, and one in Massachusetts.”

  With each of these cases, the FBI’s lawyers cite an 18th-century law called All Writs Act, which they say is the jurisprudence needed to force Apple to comply and bypass their built-in proprietary encryption methods. Is it any wonder the only case the public hears about is the one that involves terrorism?

  While law enforcement authorities claim these 12 additional cases are evidence that encryption has become a major hindrance to investigations across the country, privacy advocates say it is, conversely, evidence that national security is not the only factor at play in the government’s desire to circumvent encryption. This is further evidenced by the fact that the government has been pressuring Apple to create iPhone backdoors since long before the San Bernardino attack.

  Rather, information privacy advocates like the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) say the push for bypassing encryption — specifically, compelling Apple to build a backdoor operating system — involves a large-scale campaign to use the threat of terror to overreach their legal authority, breaching civil liberties in the process. We saw this in the wake of 9/11, when NSA’s PRISM program conscripted Google, Microsoft, and Facebook in a covert data mining campaign to collect metadata from American citizens.

  The EFF says the Apple case is part of an ongoing pattern of the state using the threat of terrorism as a Trojan horse to get backdoor access to citizens’ smartphones:

  “The power to force a company to undermine security protections for its customers may seem compelling in a particular case, but this week’s order has very significant implications both for technology and the law. Not only would it require a company to create a new vulnerability potentially affecting millions of device users, the order would also create a dangerous legal precedent. The next time an intelligence agency tries to undermine consumer device security by forcing a company to develop new flaws in its own security protocols, the government will find a supportive case to cite where before there were none.”

  The DOJ deployed talking heads to all the media outlets to make the specious argument that what they’re asking for doesn’t really constitute a backdoor. The fact of the matter is, they are asking for a court to mandate that Apple work for the government (which, some have argued, creates a 13th amendment violation as well as privacy concerns) in weakening their own security and creating access to a locked, encrypted device. This is a backdoor, and virtually all tech experts agree that they are dangerous.

  Nate Cardozo explained on the PBS NewsHour:

  “Authoritarian regimes around the world are salivating at the prospect of the FBI winning this order. If Apple creates the master key that the FBI has demanded that they create, governments around the world are going to be demanding the same access.”

  Computer programming expert and Libertarian Party presidential candidate John McAfee tried to call the FBI’s bluff last week by offering to take apart the San Bernardino iPhone and help the government extract the data they want without building a backdoor. He made the rounds on major media outlets as well, warning of the dangers of complying with the Justice Department.

  McAfee says the FBI is “asking every owner of an iPhone to make their phone susceptible to bad hackers and more importantly foreign enemies of the United States like China.”

  Meanwhile, this week, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg offered intellectual solidarity with Apple’s CEO Tim Cook, while Bill Gates took a more moderate stance on the issue, suggesting privacy advocates were overreacting. Gates later backslid from this position and lent his support to Apple.

  It’s also worth pointing out that the FBI’s own mistakes during the investigation of the San Bernardino shooting may the reason they now need Apple’s help. According to Truthdig,

  “The FBI reportedly asked San Bernardino County officials to tamper with the iCloud account of one of the suspected shooters in last December’s attack, in an effort that ultimately failed — making it impossible to know if there were other ways of recovering encrypted information without taking Apple to court.”

  Apple’s brand is on the line, too. Previously hailed as a data security juggernaut among smartphone manufacturers, a judicial order to build a backdoor would compromise their status in a market in which uncompromised encryption is becoming rarer by the day.

  The stakes couldn’t be higher. As noted by The Pontiac Tribune, if the FBI prevails in this case, the ramifications won’t be limited to smartphones. It will set a precedent for the government legally conscripting any and every entity they desire for the purposes of citizen surveillance and metadata collection.

  * * *

  After the bell we hear news from The New York Times that:

  • APPLE SAID TO BE WORKING ON IPHONE THAT IT CAN'T EVEN HACK

  That should solve problem… who will The FBI force to un-encrypt now?

  

  

  

  

  

• Canary, Meet Coal Mine: These Are The Tranches Where The CLO 2.0 Meltdown Begins

  It was just three days ago when we brought you what we called “the next shoe to drop:” CLOs.

  The market for collateralized loan obligations dried up completely in the wake of the crisis, as just about the last thing anyone wanted anything at all to do with was paper “secured” by leveraged loans.

  But Wall Street (not to mention investors) never learn and supply came storming back in 2012. Within two years, issuance was running at a $124 billion per year clip. For reference, that’s about the same amount of supply that came to market last year in the auto loan-backed ABS space.

  Issuance slipped in 2015 and in Q1 2016, it’s fallen off the map.

  

  Why? Simple: the collateral pools are littered with the kind of “assets” you might not want in the current environment. Like exposure to US energy companies whose prospects are increasingly bleak. According to S&P, the credit ratings of some 1.4% of assets held by US CLOs have been downgraded or placed on credit watch negative this year. Similarly, Moody’s notes that 12.6% of CLO assets carry a negative outlook – that’s up 2.2% in just three months. 

  As we noted on Sunday, performace is suffering mightily – especially in certain buckets. “Based on our sample, we estimate that the median total return for US CLO 2.0 (2014-15 vintage) BBs is -9.2%, and for single-Bs is -20.9%,” Morgan Stanley wrote, in a recent report. “Investment-grade US CLO tranches performed better but still within negative total return territory, except for AAAs.”

  

  Performance woes are compounding the problem for a space that was already facing a looming regulatory headache in the form of the 5% risk retention rule which, in an effort to ensure managers have “skin in the game” so to speak, will effectively cause a third of CLO managers to either attempt to consolidate with bigger players with deeper pockets, or else curb issuance. The is made all the worse by the fact that compelling managers to take a 5% stake in the first loss tranche effectively forces them to have more than 5% skin in the game. After all, it’s the first loss tranche.

  And all of that is on top of soaring funding costs:

  

  

  Just hours after our “next shoe to drop” warning, Moody’s followed in S&P’s footsteps and delivered their first downgrade of post-crisis US CLOs. In the crosshairs: Silvermine Capital or, more specifically, Silvermore CLO and Silver Spring CLO where exposure to junk debt and the increasingly toxic O&G space is worryingly high.

  “In two of the three deals, the exposure has even increased somewhat from the initial portfolio,” Deutsche Bank notes.

  

  Here’s the tranche-by-tranche breakdown:

  

  “In market value terms they have lost a lot of value but the actual test par erosion is still very limited, so there is a large amount of implied losses but still some runway to go before payments to equity get cut off,” Deutsche cheerfully notes.

  We’re reminded of what Morgan Stanley said last week: “… we reiterate our view that the levels of distress in the US market may create “option-like” payoffs in CLO equity in the secondary market, especially in deals by managers who are better ‘credit pickers.'”

  So who’s a buyer?

  *  *  *

  Bonus chart: monthly US CLO issuance

  

  

  

  

  

  

• Citi: "We Have A Problem"

  In his latest must read presentation, Citigroup’s Matt King continues to expose and mock the increasing helplessness and cluelessness of central bankers, something this website has done since 2009 knowing full well how it all ends (incidentally not in a deflationary whimper, quite the opposite).

  Take Matt King’s September 2015 piece in which he warned that one of the most serious problems facing the world is that we may have hit its debt ceiling beyond which any debt creation is merely pushing on a string leading to slower growth and further deflation. Or his more recent report which explained why despite aggressive easing by the BOJ and ECB, asset prices continue to fall as a result of quantitative tightening by EM reserve managers and China, which are soaking up the same liquidity injected by DM central banks.

  Overnight, he put it all together in a simple and elegant way that only Matt King can do in a presentation titled ominously “Don’t look down: You might find too many negatives.”

  In it he first proceeds to lay out how things have dramatically changed in recent months compared to prior years: first, the “appalling” asset returns and the “rising dislocations” between asset prices in recent months and especially in 2016, or a broken market which is not just about Crude (with correlation regimes flipping back and forth), or China (as YTD bank returns in Japan and Switzerland are far worse than those in the China-exposed Eurozone), as appetite for risk has effectively disappeared. Worse, as the Japanese NIRP showed, incremental easing in the form of QE actually triggered ongoing weakness, sending both the Nikkei and the USDJPY plunging, suggesting that central bank grip on markets is almost gone.

  King then notes that while spreads are at recessionary levels, yields – courtesy of record low interest rates – are still quite affordable and “in principle there is nothing to worry about”, perhaps it is just the market overshooting: he points out several lagging indicators such as employment and loan demand which do not suggest that a recession is imminent and all that needs to happen is to “replace fear with greed.“

  That is easier said than done, though, because despite all the “adjustments” data is already rapidly deteriorating, not only in manufacturing where the entire world is in a recession, but also in services as today’s contractionary Markit report showed.

  King then begins his conclusive tour de force by noting that “None of the his is supposed to be happening” – inflation and economic growth are supposed to be rising in a world as manipulated by central bankers as this one. Instead, the opposite is taking place.

  

   

  So where does that leave us? Having laid out the issues ailing the market, he note that “maybe it all fizzles out by itself”…

  

   

  Actually, it’s not just one problem. Many problems.

  Problem #1: the world finds itself in the aftermath of a series of bubbles inflated by central banks, compounded by the market’s own realization that “we are now running out of greater fools.”

  

  Problem #2: “Whenever we’ve had these spread levels… we’ve always been rescued by central banks.” This time, however, they are either late, or their interventions are failing.

  

   

  Problem #3: The marginal effect of easing is no longer positive, and “everything QE was supposed to have done, it hasn’t“

  

   

  Problem #4: as a result of coordinated, global intervention, central banks are now forced to fight not just local but global demand shortfalls.

  

   

  Problem #5: As a result of this global coordination, countries that withdraw liquidity such as EM and China, offset the “favorable” impact of central banks which contribute to liquidity.

  

   

  Problem #6: as global central banks now operate as a cabal, this has “serious implications”, namely 1) individual CBs not in control of their own destinies; 2) Everything ECB and BoJ are doing is being offset by outflows from EM, and 3) What do these correlations imply for
  herding?

  

  Problem #7: As a result of this required, but failed coordination, the world is left with a global problem that desperately needs a solution. “What should be done”, King asks, and provides the following menu of policy actions, however as he adds, “the things which might make a difference feel miles away”… and even further after today Jack Lew warned not to expect anything out of this weekend’s G-20 meeting in Shanghai.

  

   

  And the final Problem: the “next phase” will likely be a crisis of confidence in central banks.

  

  King, at his most ominous, concludes with the only possible response should it come to this: “Sell what hasn’t moved against what has.”

  To this we would add one minor tangent: once we get to the “next phase“, sell everything whose value only exists as a result of confidence in central banks.

  

  

  

  

• According To Morgan Stanley This Is The Biggest Threat To Deutsche Bank's Survival

  Two weeks ago, on one of the slides in a Morgan Stanley presentation, we found something which we thought was quite disturbing. According to the bank’s head of EMEA research Huw van Steenis, while in Davos, he sat “next to someone in policy circles who argued that we should move quickly to a cashless economy so that we could introduce negative rates well below 1% – as they were concerned that Larry Summers’ secular stagnation was indeed playing out and we would be stuck with negative rates for a decade in Europe. They felt below (1.5)% depositors would start to hoard notes, leading to yet further complexities for monetary policy.”

  

   

  As it turns out, just like Deutsche Bank – which first warned about the dire consequences of NIRP to Europe’s banks – Morgan Stanley is likewise “concerned” and for good reason.

  With the ECB set to unveil its next set of unconventional measures during its next meeting on March 10 among which almost certainly even more negative rates (for the simple reason that a vast amount of monetizable govt bonds are trading with a yield below the ECB’s deposit rate floor and are ineligible for purchase) the ECB may cut said rates anywhere between 10bps, 20bps, or even more (thereby sending those same bond yields plunging ever further into negative territory).

  As Morgan Stanley warns that any substantial rate cut by the ECB will only make matters worse. As it says, “Beyond a 10-20bp ECB Deposit Rate Cut, We Believe Impacts on Earnings Could Be Exponential.”

  

   

  Which brings us the the punchline: according to Morgan Stanley, a fellow bank, the biggest threat to its largest European competitor, Deutsche Bank is not its unquantified commodity loan exposures, nor its just as opaque exposure to China, nor its massive derivatives book, not even its culture of rampant corruption and crime which have resulted in constant top management changes over the past several years, but the deflationary challenges to profitability – specifically, “Risks to Trading/Markets Revenues and Due to Negative Rates” imposed by none other than the European Central Bank!

  

   

  In other words, according to Morgan Stanley the biggest threat to the profibatility, viability and outright existence of the most leveraged commercial bank in the world, is none other than ECB president Mario Draghi…

  

   

  … who will almost certainly unveil even more negative rates in two weeks time, and in doing so will unleash another round of selling in European bank securities, which will further tighten financial conditions, which may force even more “desperate” ECB intervention and so forth in a feedback loop, for the simple reason that Draghi appears to not realize that just like Kuroda, he himself is the cause of asset volatility and European bank instability.

  Which, incidentally, is precisely what Bundesbank president (and ECB member) Jens Wiedmann warned against. As WSJ reports, Weidmann expressed reservations Wednesday about further expansionary monetary policy to combat very low rates of inflation in the currency bloc.

  According to prepared remarks to present the annual report of the Deutsche Bundesbank, which he heads, Mr. Weidmann said “it would be dangerous to simply ignore” the longer-term risks and side effects of loosening already highly accommodative policy.

  As the WSJ writes, “the comments from perhaps the ECB’s most outspoken critic of very accommodative policy provide further evidence that ECB head Mario Draghi may have a tough time garnering unanimity for any effort to further expand the central bank’s accommodative monetary policy.”

  Still, Draghi may well get his wishes: after all, despite the ongoing conflict between the two central bankers, so far Draghi has gotten absolutely everything he has gotten, from QE to NIRP, over Weidmann’s loud objections. The WSJ further adds that the ECB is expected to cut its deposit rate further into negative territory beyond the minus 0.3% where it sits now, as well as expanding its bond buying program beyond the EUR60 billion a month of mostly government bonds that it has purchased since last March.

  The two are linked: for the ECB to expand QE – now that the NIRP genie has been released – it will have to cut rates or else it will run into liquidity limitations and an inability to procure the desire bonds.

  Worse, due to the central bank’s voting rotation system, Mr. Weidmann won’t have a vote at the March meeting.

  On a separate topic, Weidmann also criticized efforts to abolish the EUR500 bank note and presented a 22-page report defending the use of cash, pushing back against proposals that German policy makers worry could be used to cut interest rates more deeply in the euro area.

  Specifically, Weidmann warned that abolishing the EUR500 note could damage citizens’ confidence in the single currency. “If we tell citizens the bank notes they currently hold are not valid, that would impact trust,” Mr. Weidmann said.

  Weidmann also ridiculed the “fantasy” that cash might be abolished altogether to make it easier for central banks to cut interest rates further. “In my view this would be the false, disproportionate answer to the challenges,” he said.

  Well, that’s what many said about the ECB’s QE, which many years ago was, correctly, seen as monetary financing and thus banned by Article 123. Everyone knows that happened next.

  But going back to NIRP, the question then becomes: is Mario Draghi really so naive and confused not to realize that the more negative and Net Interest Margin crushing rates and conditions he unrolls, the worse Deutsche Bank’s (and all other European banks’) fate will be.

  And then this question in turn is transformed into a more sinister one: since Draghi most certainly does understand that impact on bank profitability from excessively negative rates (as virtually every bank from DB to MS to BofA has warned in recent weeks), is he engaging in this escalation of negative rates with an intent to harm Deutsche Bank on purpose?

  Because should Draghi cut rates on March 10 and send DB’s stock price to fresh record low, and its CDS to all time highs, the comparisons to Lehman will get every louder, at which point the self-fulfilling prophecy may become a reality.

  And not just due to those two factors. Recall that in the bankruptcy of Lehman it was a former Goldmanite who ultimately decided to pull the plug on the bank – US Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson. By doing so, he unleashed the biggest bailout of the banking system in history, and what may have been the most lucrative period of all time for Goldman bankers as well as the greatest wealth transfer in human history.

  That period is ending, so it may be time for another wholesale, global bailout. Just one thing is missing: the “next Lehman” sacrificial lamb whose failure will be the catalyst for the next mega bailout of everyone else who will survive. And since this bailout will involve the paradropping (both metaphorical and literal) of trillions in paper or digital money, central banks may just get the inflation they so desire.

  As for the former Goldmanite pulling the switch this time, well we already know who it is: Mario Draghi.

  

  

  

  

  

• Japanese 'Margin' Traders Suffer Biggest Losses "Since Lehman"

  Mrs Watanabe has a major problem.

  Following Kuroda's regime shift to NIRP (and the ensuing collapse of Japanese stocks and USDJPY)…

  

   

  The herded masses of leverage speculators – who bought on the back of China-like promises and Peter-Pan(ic) hopes from the government that everything will be awesome – are suffering the largest unrealized losses since Lehman.

  

  h/t @moved_average

  Let's hope Kuroda can do something before the unrealized becomes 'realized' and waterfalls through the real economy (and the world's collateral chains).

  

  

  

  

  

• How the Economist(s) manipulate gold's value in one chart

  Todays “Chart of the Day” from The Economist makes an attempt to show that gold isn’t doing any better when it comes to preserving buying power than currencies such as the Swiss Franc (CHF) or the Japanese Yen (JPY). Roy Sebag, co-founder of BitGold and CEO of GoldMoney, took the liberty to point out the obvious (and many) flaws in their chart (see his comments below):

   

  “Here is an example of how the mainstream media either purposely or inadvertently manipulates data with respect to gold, preventing the masses who have little time to invest from assessing gold’s true performance.

  In a piece published on February 24, 2016, The Economist created this graph entitled: ”Safe Havens”. In the graph they place three data points:

   

  “Real” Gold Price

  “Real Trade-Weighted” Swiss Franc

  “Real Trade-Weighted” Japanese Yen

   

  Error #1 – The Graph has gold starting at a different axis from the currencies. What in the world would warrant that? While the Japanese Yen and the Swiss Franc start at a value of 100, the gold price appears to start at a price of around 40. This disguises the outperformance of gold and manipulates the net performance to be closer in line with the currencies.

   

  Error #2 – You do not inflation adjust gold. Gold is an indestructible element that can be purchased once, and held forever. Thus its value should not be inflation adjusted. A Tomato, or a barrel of oil should be inflation adjusted. I also argue that one shouldn’t inflation adjust any capital investment given that earning the inflation rate of return is impossible without taking risk.

   

  Error #3 – If a decision was made to inflation adjust gold, why weren’t the currencies inflation adjusted? Note the sleight of hand using “Real trade-weighted exchange rate” – This is not equivalent to deflating a fiat currency by its local CPI equivalent

   

  The author of this graph should have known better unless they have zero experience with econometrics and basic data science.”

  

   

  Here is what the actual chart comparing CHF and JPY to gold would have looked like. While the CHF and the JPY preserved value better than the USD, both currencies are still down 87% and 90% vs gold, respectively.

   

  

   

   

  

  

  

  

• Exposing The Hidden Agenda Of Davos 2016

  Submitted by Nick Giambruno via InternationalMan.com,

  “It’s a big club and you ain’t in it!”

  I’m often reminded of these words, spoken by the great comedian George Carlin, when I read about the annual World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Switzerland.

  That’s where the global power elite gather to discuss the big issues of the day. The most important world leaders attend. As do the CEOs of the largest companies, leaders in the mainstream media and top academics. Central bankers attend, too, along with a wide assortment of celebrities.

  Three types of meetings happen in Davos, according to the BBC:

  1. Public meetings, which anyone can attend.

  1. Closed meetings, which you can only attend by invitation.

  1. Secret meetings, which are unannounced. The public doesn’t know the agenda or who attends.

  The biggest and most important deals take shape in these secret meetings. And this year, I think there was one secret meeting with huge historical significance.

  I think world leaders decided to dramatically escalate the War on Cash, making it easier for them to impose negative interest rates.

  Negative interest rates mean the lender pays the borrower for the privilege of lending him money. It’s a bizarre, upside-down concept.

  Negative rates could not exist in a free market. They can only exist in an Alice in Wonderland economy created by central bankers.

  *  *  *

  [ZH: We confirmed this belief last week when we pointed out the rather disturbing headline spotted in a Davos presentation…

  the most disturbing development we have seen yet in the push for a cashless society has come from the following slide in a Morgan Stanley presentation, one in which the bank's head of EMEA equity research Huw van Steenis, pointed out the following…

  

   

  … and added this:

  One of the most surprising comments this year came from a closed session on fintech where I sat next to someone in policy circles who argued that we should move quickly to a cashless economy so that we could introduce negative rates well below 1% – as they were concerned that Larry Summers' secular stagnation was indeed playing out and we would be stuck with negative rates for a decade in Europe. They felt below (1.5)% depositors would start to hoard notes, leading to yet further complexities for monetary policy.

  Consider this the latest, and loudest, warning on the road to digital fiat serfdom.]

  *  *  *

  Punishment Interest

  Think of it as “punishment interest.”

  That’s a common term in Germany for negative interest rates. I think it’s an apt description.

  Punishing savers is exactly what central bankers—who are really central economic planners—would like to do. They think stinging savers with negative interest rates will encourage them to spend now. It’s effectively a tax on saving money.

  Central planners just want you to spend money. Even if you have to go into debt to do it. Consumption based on fear of negative interest rates is somehow supposed to “stimulate” the economy.

  However, their harebrained scheme is not working. Switzerland, Denmark and Sweden all have negative interest rates. But consumer spending is not being “stimulated” in those countries. It’s totally (and predictably) backfiring on the central planners. And it’s easy to see why.

  Negative interest rates make it harder to save. Put $1,000 in your bank account at the beginning of the year, and it becomes $950 by the end of the year. And that’s not even accounting for inflation.

  This scenario scares people. It doesn't induce them to spend.

  Producing more than you consume and saving the difference has always been the basis of prosperity. Prudent saving and thriftiness are supposed to be good things. However, negative interest rates destroy the incentive to save. That’s just one of the reasons it’s such a toxic concept.

  But there’s another important reason to fear negative interest rates…

  If you don’t like the sting of negative interest, you can withdraw your money from the bank and stash the cash under your mattress. The more it costs to store money at the bank, the less inclined people are to do it.

  Of course, this is not the outcome central economic planners want. It puts a natural limit on how far down they can drive interest rates.

  Their solution to this “problem” is to push the world closer to a cashless society. That cuts off your main escape route from punishment interest.

  Central planners are doing this by phasing out larger denominations of currency notes, which makes large cash transactions impractical. Some are outright prohibiting cash transactions over a certain amount. France recently made cash transactions over €1,000 illegal, down from the previous limit of €3,000.

  Statist economists even advocate declaring all dollar bills with a serial number ending in “9” invalid.

  These are just some of their methods. They all make it inconvenient or illegal to use cash. This forces people to use electronic payment methods more and more, which, of course, is what the U.S. government wants.

  It’s exactly like Ron Paul said: “The cashless society is the IRS’s dream: total knowledge of, and control over, the finances of every single American.”

  After Davos, the War on Cash Goes into Overdrive

  For weeks, Haruhiko Kuroda, the head of Japan’s central bank, repeatedly denied plans to adopt negative interest rates.

  Kuroda was at the January 20–23 summit in Davos.

  A few days later, on January 29, he decided to impose negative interest rates in Japan for the first time ever. Something must have changed his mind.

  I don’t think this was an isolated incident. I’m quite sure global leaders secretly discussed ramping up the War on Cash in Davos.

  There was a flurry of related activity during and immediately after Davos. Here are some of the most noteworthy incidents:

  • January 20: Deutsche Bank CEO John Cryan predicted cash won’t exist in 10 years.
  • January 22: Norway’s biggest bank, DNB, called for the country to stop using cash.
  • January 29: The editorial board of Bloomberg published an article titled “Bring On the Cashless Future.” It called for the elimination of physical cash.
  • February 4: The Financial Times ran an op-ed titled “The Benefits of Scrapping Cash.” It advocated the elimination of physical money.
  • February 8: Peter Sands, president emeritus of Harvard, issued a paper titled Making it Harder for the Bad Guys: The Case for Eliminating High Denomination Notes. It advocates removing large bills from circulation to help fight the various made-up wars…the war on crime, the war on drugs, the war on terror…
  • February 15: Mario Draghi, head of the European Central Bank (ECB), announced that he has essentially decided to phase out the €500 note. These notes represent around 30% of the physical euro notes in circulation. With the use of physical cash curtailed, J.P. Morgan estimates the ECB could ultimately bring interest rates as low as negative 4.5%.
  • February 16: Larry Summers, a Harvard professor and former Treasury secretary, wrote an article in The Washington Post titled “It’s time to kill the $100 bill.” Summers became the latest high-profile “economist” to call for the abolition of cash. Removing the $100 bill from circulation would eliminate the value of 78% of all U.S. currency in circulation.
  • February 16: Hasbro, maker of the Monopoly board game, announced that, starting in the fall, the famous game will no longer feature cash. The company is replacing in-game cash with special bank cards players scan on handheld “banking units” to make purchases.
  • February 22: The editorial board of The New York Times published an article titled “Getting Rid of Big Currency Notes Could Help Fight Crime.” It called for getting rid of high denomination notes.

  The writing is on the wall. The War on Cash is accelerating. And it’s setting the table for negative interest rates in the U.S.

  That should not surprise anyone. Janet Yellen, the chair of the Federal Reserve, recently said, “Potentially anything—including negative interest rates—would be on the table.”

  It’s time to protect yourself from negative interest rates and the War on Cash…before it’s too late. You don’t want to find yourself unprepared when negative interest rates hit you.

  The War on Cash and negative interest rates are obvious signs of desperation. They are huge threats to your financial security.

  Central bankers are playing with fire and inviting a currency catastrophe, just like they have done so many times in the past.

  The sad truth is most people have no idea what really happens when a currency collapses, let alone how to prepare…

  We think everyone should own some physical gold. Gold is the ultimate form of wealth insurance. It’s preserved wealth through every kind of crisis imaginable. It will preserve wealth during the next crisis, too.

  But if you want to truly save yourself from the consequences of all this stupidity, there's more to do…

  How will you protect your savings from the War on Cash and negative interest rates?

  

  

  

  

  

• "Where Are The Bubbles?" – UBS Shows Them All In One Chart

  As has become increasingly obvious to many, unconventional central bank policies have resulted in an unprecedented level of crowding – a "herd mentality" to trade positioning on the basis of a similar theme – throughout global equity markets. UBS quant team guages the "barometric pressure of developing investment bubbles" across various factors and looks for the inflection points with the dollar, oil, and politics as the main catalysts.

  Despite the possession of the most rigorous and innovative analytical tools, in former Fed Chair Ben Bernanke's words, "Identifying a bubble in progress is intrinsically difficult."

  Bubbles throughout history have unfolded uniquely.

  Once identified, bubbles can inflate well beyond the naysayers and even the most wild-eyed optimists' expectations. Fed Chair Greenspan's popularization of the phrase "irrational exuberance" occurred in the midst of Nasdaq's historic climb, where prices rallied a further 500% to the peak in March 2000, only to fall 80% thereafter (Figure 3). Ironically, Bernanke's speech lamenting the difficulty in identifying bubbles came days after the 2000-02 technology led Bear Market's historic capitulation low.

  

  But UBS' quantitative equity research team cites unprecedented capital market conditions, quantitative easing and divergence in monetary policies which have led to large flows of cheap money into equity markets globally as a reason that thematic investment bubbles have inflated, increasing the prevalence and risk of crowding – a global "herd mentality" to trade positioning.

  With fundamental input from UBS' regional strategists, the quant team introduces its "toolkit" for gauging the barometric pressure of developing investment bubbles (in both overweight and underweight themes) using institutional holdings, return correlations within peer groups and sell-side sentiment. The results identify a number of potential global equity market bubbles:

  

  Are underweight US Energy and EM and overweight US Healthcare truly bubbles? Positioning and sentiment dynamics that would indicate that US Energy is a bubble in negativity while US Healthcare is a more traditionally "bullish bubble."

  In terms of institutional holdings, return correlations within peer groups and sellside sentiment, quantitatively this would appear to be the case, in varying degree and size. And if indeed these three are bubbles, they likely have begun to deflate in recent months.

  Catalysts: Dollar, Oil Politics

  With identification of bubbles and timing of bubble deflation ostensibly as much art as science, what could cause the potential underweight US Energy and EM bubbles and the overweight Health Care bubble to pop?

  Given the extremely strong correlation of oil prices and the US dollar to US Energy and EM share performance over the last two years (Figures 8 and 9) a stabilization and rally in Oil (UBS forecasts $40 WTI for 2016) or a continued decline in the US Dollar (UBS forecasts Euro/$ of 1.16 by year end 2016) – both of which have been supportive over the past month – could catalyze further outperformance in these areas over the coming months, particularly if oil producers agree to cutbacks or Fed rhetoric continues to guide markets in a dovish manner.

  

  On Health Care, while earnings trends would appear to be relatively intact, the threat of political action once Washington changes regimes in 2017 could continue to pressure valuation, as has been the case since the first "political broadside" against "excessive" drug pricing went viral in September 2015 and as threats to repeal Obamacare have magnified.

  The persistence of political pressure and the possibility of a legislative assault on earnings in 2017 and 2018 could catalyze investors to re-rate Health Care stocks in a manner similar to that which the post GFC regulatory regime has resulted in lower mean valuation for Financials.

  In our view, the option markets provide a good risk to reward profile for implementation of "Crowded trade unwind positions".

  

  

  

  

  

• Detroit Teachers Face "Payless Paydays" As Dilapidated School District Faces Financial Reckoning

  When last we looked at the effect America’s multiple state and local government fiscal crises are having on the country’s school systems, we noted that budget drama across both Illinois and Pennsylvania threatened to force layoffs and class cancellations.

  In Chicago, for instance, the Board of Education has variously been described as “a gambler at the end of his run,” a reference to officials’ bad habits when it comes to skipping pension payments and borrowing heavily to stay afloat. “Let’s be clear Chicago Public Schools are in dramatic trouble,” Governor Bruce Rauner said in December. “They’re looking at a disaster somewhere in the next nine months.”

  Just this month, the Board sold another $725 million in bonds at punishing interest rates of up to 8.5%. Here’s a look at the 2042s:

  

  Things have gotten so bad that Rauner wants to block the system from borrowing more money and take over the schools. “If it determined that any school district was in financial duress, the state board has the right — the legal authority — to block any debt offerings,” he told reporters on Monday. “The state board has not ever chosen to do that for the city of Chicago. I hope that never becomes necessary, but we’ve got to be ready to take action and step in.”

  As for Pennsylvania whose schools, you’re reminded, started the year minus $1 billion in funds, Governor Tom Wolf warned earlier this month that the state’s ticking budget timb bomb would eventually force massive layoffs. “At the Senate hearing Monday, Majority Leader Jake Corman, R-Centre, challenged Mr. Wolf’s claim during his budget address that if his proposals are not enacted, thousands of teachers will be removed from Pennsylvania schools,” the Pittsburgh Post Gazette writes. “Mr. Corman noted that the Republican budget would have increased education funding, though not by as much as Mr. Wolf wants.”

  Whatever the case, partisan budget brawls and gross fiscal mismanagement are imperiling the future of America’s school children. Literally. That’s not some attempt to employ hyperbole in order to tie the future of America’s youth to economics and finance. It’s a reality in more locales than one. 

  Case in point: today we learn that Detroit’s public schools have officially reached their borrowing limit which means absent some manner of intervention from the state government, the district will run out of cash by April.

  “This month the amount of state aid that’s siphoned off to service debt will jump to roughly what is spent on salaries and benefits, pressuring the district’s ability to pay its bills,” Bloomberg writes, and that means “the district may have to stop paying workers if lawmakers fail to reach an agreement.”

  Detroit’s school system is sitting on more than a half a billion in debt to the state loan authority and will be insolvent in less than 60 days. Last month, some schools were forced to close because teachers called in sick to protest poor conditions. Poor conditions like those shown below:

  

  

  

  

  

  

  “The city began inspecting the buildings last month after the teacher strikes began,” Bloomberg goes on to note. “On Feb. 6, the district announced it was reallocating $300,000 from other spending to begin repairs to buildings.”

  “DPS is finally on the brink,” State Treasurer Nick Khouri told lawmakers today. “When they run out of cash, sometime in the spring or early summer, without legislative interaction, they will have payless paydays,” he warned.

  In order to “fix” the situation, lawmakers want to split the district into two entities one that will carry the debt burden which the state will help to pay down, and another to administer the schools themselves. 

  “The package of six bills would split the 46,000-student DPS into two entities, creating a new debt-free school district,” The Detroit Free Press reported, earlier today. “Two bills already pending in the Senate contains a similar plan, but the House bills have been more controversial because they add collective bargaining restrictions to teachers and don’t restore a fully elected school board to the city for eight years.”

  Each year, the district spends $70 million more than it brings in in revenues, but a bankruptcy would result in 12 months of “chaos,” Khouri cautioned. 

  So, just another day in the heart of America’s gutted manufacturing heartland. For anyone who is still clinging to the idea that US manufacturing is in the midst of or is somehow capable of experiencing a renaissance in the years ahead, we encourage you to have a look at one last chart from Bloomberg, which should tell you everything you need to know about the Rust Belt’s future.

  

  

  

  

  

• Donald Trump Is Right: Here Are 100 Reasons Why We Need To Audit The Federal Reserve

  Submitted by Michael Snyder via The Economic Collapse blog,

  When a leading nominee for President gets something exactly right, we should applaud them for it.  In this case, Donald Trump’s call to audit the Federal Reserve is dead on correct.  Most Americans don’t realize this, but the Federal Reserve has far more power over the economy than anyone else does – including Barack Obama. 

  Financial markets all over the planet gyrate wildly at the smallest comment from Fed officials, and virtually every boom and bust cycle over the past 100 years can be traced directly back to specific decisions made by the Federal Reserve.  We get all excited about what various presidential candidates say that they “will do for the economy”, but in the end it is the Fed that is holding all of the cards.  The funny thing is that the Federal Reserve is not even part of the federal government.  It is an independent private central bank that was designed by very powerful Wall Street interests a little over 100 years ago.  It is at the heart of the debt-based financial system which is eating away at America like cancer, and it has no direct accountability to the American people whatsoever.

  The Fed has been around for so long that most people assume that we need it.

  But the truth is that we don’t actually need the Federal Reserve.  In fact, the greatest period of economic growth in United States history happened during the decades before the Federal Reserve was created.

  A little over 100 years ago, very powerful forces on Wall Street successfully pushed for the creation of an immensely powerful central bank, and since that time the value of the U.S. dollar has fallen by about 98 percent and our national debt has gotten more than 5000 times larger.

  The Federal Reserve does whatever it feels like doing, and Fed officials insist that the institution must remain “independent” and “above politics” because monetary policy is too important to entrust to the American people.

  To me, this is absolutely ridiculous.  Everything else, including our national defense, is subject to the normal political process, and yet the decisions made by the Fed are so “important” that the American people can’t have a voice?

  It is high time that the American people begin to learn what the Federal Reserve is really all about, and that can start with a full, comprehensive audit of all of the Federal Reserve’s activities.  Yesterday, Donald Trump came out in favor of such an audit…

  It is so important to audit The Federal Reserve, and yet Ted Cruz missed the vote on the bill that would allow this to be done.

  — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 22, 2016

   

  Previously, Trump has made quite a few comments that were very critical of the Fed.  For example, last year he told Bloomberg News that he believed that the Federal Reserve was “creating a bubble”…

  “In terms of real estate, if I want to develop … from that standpoint I like low interest rates. From the country’s standpoint, I’m just not sure it’s a very good thing, because I really do believe we’re creating a bubble.”

  And of course Trump was exactly right about that too.  By pushing interest rates to artificially low levels and creating billions upon billions of dollars out of thin air during the quantitative easing era, stock prices were driven to ridiculously high levels.  Now that the artificial support has been withdrawn, stocks are beginning to crash, and the financial collapse which is starting to happen is going to be far worse than it otherwise would have been because of the Fed’s actions.  The following comes from one of my previous articles…

  As stocks continue to crash, you can blame the Federal Reserve, because the Fed is more responsible for creating the current financial bubble that we are living in than anyone else.  When the Federal Reserve pushed interest rates all the way to the floor and injected lots of hot money into the financial markets during their quantitative easing programs, this pushed stock prices to wildly artificial levels.  The only way that it would have been possible to keep stock prices at those wildly artificial levels would have been to keep interest rates ultra-low and to keep recklessly creating lots of new money.  But now the Federal Reserve has ended quantitative easing and has embarked on a program of very slowly raising interest rates.  This is going to have very severe consequences for the markets, but Janet Yellen doesn’t seem to care.

  I don’t understand why so many Americans continue to support the Federal Reserve.

  We don’t need a bunch of central planners setting interest rates and determining monetary policy.  We are supposed to have a free market system, and the free market should be setting interest rates – not the Federal Reserve.

  Unfortunately, just about every nation on the entire planet now has a central bank.  Even though the nations of the world can’t agree on much, somehow central banking has been adopted virtually everywhere.  At this point, more than 99.9% of the population of the world lives in a country that has a central bank.

  There are still some minor island countries such as the Federated States of Micronesia that do not have a central bank, but the only major nation not to have one right now is North Korea.  And nobody in their right mind would ever want to live there.

  So how in the world did this happen?

  Did the people of the world willingly choose this debt-based system or was it imposed upon them?

  To my knowledge, there has never been a single vote where the population of a nation has willingly chosen to establish a central bank.  I could be wrong about this, but I have never heard of one.

  It is the elite that have always wanted central banking, and now they pretty much have the entire planet in their grasp.

  That is why we should applaud Donald Trump when he stands up to the elite.  And it isn’t just regarding the Fed that he has done this.  The following comes from an excellent article that was just written by Dan Lyman…

  Ultimately, Trump knows it is the global elite who have pried our borders wide open. He knows it is THEY who are responsible for the tens of millions of Third Worlders pouring into our nations. He knows that THEY are the monsters who need the world to be constantly at war. He knows THEY are radically altering our food supply with GMOs and poisonous chemicals. He knows THEY are responsible for poisoning our drinking water, filling our skies and air supplies with toxic waste, genociding our unborn children, collecting data on all citizens to implement the Orwellian police state, forcing poison into our babies’ veins – and soon the rest of us, redistributing what remains of our wealth under the guises of ‘saving the planet’ or ‘refugee aid,’ allowing and funding the ISIS Islamofascists to decimate places like Syria and Iraq in Satanic fashion, promoting the psychotic LGBT Nazis to goose-step all over our religious liberties and gender-privacy in school bathrooms. If there is a societal cancer metastasizing somewhere, it can usually be traced back to the same sources.

  Yes, there are many things that we can criticize Trump and the other Republican candidates for.  But when they nail something, we should be willing to admit that they got something right.

  In this case, Donald Trump is absolutely correct to call for an audit of the Fed.  As I promised in the title of this article, I want to share 100 reasons why the Fed should be audited.  The following list has been adapted from one of my previous articles…

  #1 We like to think that we have a government “of the people, by the people, for the people”, but the truth is that an unelected, unaccountable group of central planners has far more power over our economy than anyone else in our society does.

  #2 The Federal Reserve is actually “independent” of the government. In fact, the Federal Reserve has argued vehemently in federal court that it is “not an agency” of the federal government and therefore not subject to the Freedom of Information Act.

  #3 The Federal Reserve openly admits that the 12 regional Federal Reserve banks are organized “much like private corporations“.

  #4 The regional Federal Reserve banks issue shares of stock to the “member banks” that own them.

  #5 100% of the shareholders of the Federal Reserve are private banks. The U.S. government owns zero shares.

  #6 The Federal Reserve is not an agency of the federal government, but it has been given power to regulate our banks and financial institutions. This should not be happening.

  #7 According to Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution, the U.S. Congress is the one that is supposed to have the authority to “coin Money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin, and fix the Standard of Weights and Measures”. So why is the Federal Reserve doing it?

  #8 If you look at a “U.S. dollar”, it actually says “Federal Reserve note” at the top. In the financial world, a “note” is an instrument of debt.

  #9 In 1963, President John F. Kennedy issued Executive Order 11110 which authorized the U.S. Treasury to issue “United States notes” which were created by the U.S. government directly and not by the Federal Reserve. He was assassinated shortly thereafter.

  #10 Many of the debt-free United States notes issued under President Kennedy are still in circulation today.

  #11 The Federal Reserve determines what levels some of the most important interest rates in our system are going to be set at. In a free market system, the free market would determine those interest rates.

  #12 The Federal Reserve has become so powerful that it is now known as “the fourth branch of government“.

  #13 The greatest period of economic growth in U.S. history was when there was no central bank.

  #14 The Federal Reserve was designed to be a perpetual debt machine. The bankers that designed it intended to trap the U.S. government in a perpetual debt spiral from which it could never possibly escape. Since the Federal Reserve was established 100 years ago, the U.S. national debt has gotten more than 5000 times larger.

  #15 A permanent federal income tax was established the exact same year that the Federal Reserve was created. This was not a coincidence. In order to pay for all of the government debt that the Federal Reserve would create, a federal income tax was necessary. The whole idea was to transfer wealth from our pockets to the federal government and from the federal government to the bankers.

  #16 The period prior to 1913 (when there was no income tax) was the greatest period of economic growth in U.S. history.

  #17 Today, the U.S. tax code is about 13 miles long.

  #18 From the time that the Federal Reserve was created until now, the U.S. dollar has lost 98 percent of its value.

  #19 From the time that President Nixon took us off the gold standard until now, the U.S. dollar has lost 83 percent of its value.

  #20 During the 100 years before the Federal Reserve was created, the U.S. economy rarely had any problems with inflation. But since the Federal Reserve was established, the U.S. economy has experienced constant and never ending inflation.

  #21 In the century before the Federal Reserve was created, the average annual rate of inflation was about half a percent. In the century since the Federal Reserve was created, the average annual rate of inflation has been about 3.5 percent.

  #22 The Federal Reserve has stripped the middle class of trillions of dollars of wealth through the hidden tax of inflation.

  #23 The size of M1 has nearly doubled since 2008 thanks to the reckless money printing that the Federal Reserve has been doing.

  #24 The Federal Reserve has been starting to behave like the Weimar Republic, and we all remember how that ended.

  #25 The Federal Reserve has been consistently lying to us about the level of inflation in our economy. If the inflation rate was still calculated the same way that it was back when Jimmy Carter was president, the official rate of inflation would be somewhere between 8 and 10 percent today.

  #26 Since the Federal Reserve was created, there have been 18 distinct recessions or depressions: 1918, 1920, 1923, 1926, 1929, 1937, 1945, 1949, 1953, 1958, 1960, 1969, 1973, 1980, 1981, 1990, 2001, 2008.

  #27 Within 20 years of the creation of the Federal Reserve, the U.S. economy was plunged into the Great Depression.

  #28 The Federal Reserve created the conditions that caused the stock market crash of 1929, and even Ben Bernanke admits that the response by the Fed to that crisis made the Great Depression even worse than it should have been.

  #29 The “easy money” policies of former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan set the stage for the great financial crisis of 2008.

  #30 Without the Federal Reserve, the “subprime mortgage meltdown” would probably never have happened.

  #31 If you can believe it, there have been 10 different economic recessions since 1950. The Federal Reserve created the “dotcom bubble”, the Federal Reserve created the “housing bubble” and now it has created the largest bond bubble in the history of the planet.

  #32 According to an official government report, the Federal Reserve made 16.1 trillion dollars in secret loans to the big banks during the last financial crisis. The following is a list of loan recipients that was taken directly from page 131 of the report…

  Citigroup – $2.513 trillion
  Morgan Stanley – $2.041 trillion
  Merrill Lynch – $1.949 trillion
  Bank of America – $1.344 trillion
  Barclays PLC – $868 billion
  Bear Sterns – $853 billion
  Goldman Sachs – $814 billion
  Royal Bank of Scotland – $541 billion
  JP Morgan Chase – $391 billion
  Deutsche Bank – $354 billion
  UBS – $287 billion
  Credit Suisse – $262 billion
  Lehman Brothers – $183 billion
  Bank of Scotland – $181 billion
  BNP Paribas – $175 billion
  Wells Fargo – $159 billion
  Dexia – $159 billion
  Wachovia – $142 billion
  Dresdner Bank – $135 billion
  Societe Generale – $124 billion
  “All Other Borrowers” – $2.639 trillion

  #33 The Federal Reserve also paid those big banks $659.4 million in “fees” to help “administer” those secret loans.

  #34 During the last financial crisis, big European banks were allowed to borrow an “unlimited” amount of money from the Federal Reserve at ultra-low interest rates.

  #35 The “easy money” policies of Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke have created the largest financial bubble this nation has ever seen, and this has set the stage for the great financial crisis that we are rapidly approaching.

  #36 Since late 2008, the size of the Federal Reserve balance sheet has grown from less than a trillion dollars to more than 4 trillion dollars. This is complete and utter insanity.

  #37 During the quantitative easing era, the value of the financial securities that the Fed has accumulated is greater than the total amount of publicly held debt that the U.S. government accumulated from the presidency of George Washington through the end of the presidency of Bill Clinton.

  #38 Overall, the Federal Reserve now holds more than 32 percent of all 10 year equivalents.

  #39 Quantitative easing creates financial bubbles, and when quantitative easing ends those bubbles tend to deflate rapidly.

  #40 Most of the new money created by quantitative easing has ended up in the hands of the very wealthy.

  #41 According to a prominent Federal Reserve insider, quantitative easing has been one giant “subsidy” for Wall Street banks.

  #42 As one CNBC article stated, we have seen absolutely rampant inflation in “stocks and bonds and art and Ferraris“.

  #43 Donald Trump once made the following statement about quantitative easing: “People like me will benefit from this.”

  #44 Most people have never heard about this, but a very interesting study conducted for the Bank of England shows that quantitative easing actually increases the gap between the wealthy and the poor.

  #45 The gap between the top one percent and the rest of the country is now the greatest that it has been since the 1920s.

  #46 The mainstream media has sold quantitative easing to the American public as an “economic stimulus program”, but the truth is that the percentage of Americans that have a job has actually gone down since quantitative easing first began.

  #47 The Federal Reserve is supposed to be able to guide the nation toward “full employment”, but the reality of the matter is that an all-time record 102 million working age Americans do not have a job right now. That number has risen by about 27 million since the year 2000.

  #48 For years, the projections of economic growth by the Federal Reserve have consistently overstated the strength of the U.S. economy. But every single time, the mainstream media continues to report that these numbers are “reliable” even though all they actually represent is wishful thinking.

  #49 The Federal Reserve system fuels the growth of government, and the growth of government fuels the growth of the Federal Reserve system. Since 1970, federal spending has grown nearly 12 times as rapidly as median household income has.

  #50 The Federal Reserve is supposed to look out for the health of all U.S. banks, but the truth is that they only seem to be concerned about the big ones. In 1985, there were more than 18,000 banks in the United States. Today, there are only 6,891 left.

  #51 The six largest banks in the United States (JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley) have collectively gotten 37 percent larger over the past five years.

  #52 The U.S. banking system has 14.4 trillion dollars in total assets. The six largest banks now account for 67 percent of those assets and all of the other banks account for only 33 percent of those assets.

  #53 The five largest banks now account for 42 percent of all loans in the United States.

  #54 We were told that the purpose of quantitative easing was to help “stimulate the economy”, but today the Federal Reserve is actually paying the big banks not to lend out 1.8 trillion dollars in “excess reserves” that they have parked at the Fed.

  #55 The Federal Reserve has allowed an absolutely gigantic derivatives bubble to inflate which could destroy our financial system at any moment. Right now, four of the “too big to fail” banks each have total exposure to derivatives that is well in excess of 40 trillion dollars.

  #56 The total exposure that Goldman Sachs has to derivatives contracts is more than 381 times greater than their total assets.

  #57 Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke has a track record of failure that would make the Chicago Cubs look good.

  #58 The secret November 1910 gathering at Jekyll Island, Georgia during which the plan for the Federal Reserve was hatched was attended by U.S. Senator Nelson W. Aldrich, Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Department A.P. Andrews and a whole host of representatives from the upper crust of the Wall Street banking establishment.

  #59 The Federal Reserve was created by the big Wall Street banks and for the benefit of the big Wall Street banks.

  #60 In 1913, Congress was promised that if the Federal Reserve Act was passed that it would eliminate the business cycle.

  #61 There has never been a true comprehensive audit of the Federal Reserve since it was created back in 1913.

  #62 The Federal Reserve system has been described as “the biggest Ponzi scheme in the history of the world“.

  #63 The following comes directly from the Fed’s official mission statement: “To provide the nation with a safer, more flexible, and more stable monetary and financial system.” Without a doubt, the Federal Reserve has failed in those tasks dramatically.

  #64 The Fed decides what the target rate of inflation should be, what the target rate of unemployment should be and what the size of the money supply is going to be. This is quite similar to the “central planning” that goes on in communist nations, but very few people in our government seem upset by this.

  #65 A couple of years ago, Federal Reserve officials walked into one bank in Oklahoma and demanded that they take down all the Bible verses and all the Christmas buttons that the bank had been displaying.

  #66 The Federal Reserve has taken some other very frightening steps in recent years. For example, back in 2011 the Federal Reserve announced plans to identify “key bloggers” and to monitor “billions of conversations” about the Fed on Facebook, Twitter, forums and blogs. Someone at the Fed will almost certainly end up reading this article.

  #67 Thanks to this endless debt spiral that we are trapped in, a massive amount of money is transferred out of our pockets and into the pockets of the ultra-wealthy each year. Incredibly, the U.S. government spent more than 415 billion dollars just on interest on the national debt in 2013.

  #68 In January 2000, the average rate of interest on the government’s marketable debt was 6.620 percent. If we got back to that level today, we would be paying more than a trillion dollars a year just in interest on the national debt and it would collapse our entire financial system.

  #69 The American people are being killed by compound interest but most of them don’t even understand what it is. Albert Einstein once made the following statement about compound interest…

  “Compound interest is the eighth wonder of the world. He who understands it, earns it … he who doesn’t … pays it.”

  #70 Most Americans have absolutely no idea where money comes from. The truth is that the Federal Reserve just creates it out of thin air. The following is how I have previously described how money is normally created by the Fed in our system…

  When the U.S. government decides that it wants to spend another billion dollars that it does not have, it does not print up a billion dollars.

   

  Rather, the U.S. government creates a bunch of U.S. Treasury bonds (debt) and takes them over to the Federal Reserve.

   

  The Federal Reserve creates a billion dollars out of thin air and exchanges them for the U.S. Treasury bonds.

  #71 What does the Federal Reserve do with those U.S. Treasury bonds? They end up getting auctioned off to the highest bidder. But this entire process actually creates more debt than it does money…

  The U.S. Treasury bonds that the Federal Reserve receives in exchange for the money it has created out of nothing are auctioned off through the Federal Reserve system.

   

  But wait.

   

  There is a problem.

   

  Because the U.S. government must pay interest on the Treasury bonds, the amount of debt that has been created by this transaction is greater than the amount of money that has been created.

   

  So where will the U.S. government get the money to pay that debt?

   

  Well, the theory is that we can get money to circulate through the economy really, really fast and tax it at a high enough rate that the government will be able to collect enough taxes to pay the debt.

   

  But that never actually happens, does it?

   

  And the creators of the Federal Reserve understood this as well. They understood that the U.S. government would not have enough money to both run the government and service the national debt. They knew that the U.S. government would have to keep borrowing even more money in an attempt to keep up with the game.

  #72 Of course the U.S. government could actually create money and spend it directly into the economy without the Federal Reserve being involved at all. But then we wouldn’t be 17 trillion dollars in debt and that wouldn’t serve the interests of the bankers at all.

  #73 The following is what Thomas Edison once had to say about our absolutely insane debt-based financial system…

  That is to say, under the old way any time we wish to add to the national wealth we are compelled to add to the national debt.

   

  Now, that is what Henry Ford wants to prevent. He thinks it is stupid, and so do I, that for the loan of $30,000,000 of their own money the people of the United States should be compelled to pay $66,000,000 — that is what it amounts to, with interest. People who will not turn a shovelful of dirt nor contribute a pound of material will collect more money from the United States than will the people who supply the material and do the work. That is the terrible thing about interest. In all our great bond issues the interest is always greater than the principal. All of the great public works cost more than twice the actual cost, on that account. Under the present system of doing business we simply add 120 to 150 per cent, to the stated cost.

   

  But here is the point: If our nation can issue a dollar bond, it can issue a dollar bill. The element that makes the bond good makes the bill good.

  #74 The United States now has the largest national debt in the history of the world, and we are stealing roughly 100 million dollars from our children and our grandchildren every single hour of every single day in a desperate attempt to keep the debt spiral going.

  #75 Thomas Jefferson once stated that if he could add just one more amendment to the U.S. Constitution it would be a ban on all government borrowing…

  I wish it were possible to obtain a single amendment to our Constitution. I would be willing to depend on that alone for the reduction of the administration of our government to the genuine principles of its Constitution; I mean an additional article, taking from the federal government the power of borrowing.

  #76 At this moment, the U.S. national debt is sitting at $18,141,409,083,212.36. If we had followed the advice of Thomas Jefferson, it would be sitting at zero.

  #77 When the Federal Reserve was first established, the U.S. national debt was sitting at about 2.9 billion dollars. On average, we have been adding more than that to the national debt every single day since Obama has been in the White House.

  #78 We are on pace to accumulate more new debt during the 8 years of the Obama administration than we did under all of the other presidents in all of U.S. history combined.

  #79 If all of the new debt that has been accumulated since John Boehner became Speaker of the House had been given directly to the American people instead, every household in America would have been able to buy a new truck.

  #80 Between 2008 and 2012, U.S. government debt grew by 60.7 percent, but U.S. GDP only grew by a total of about 8.5 percent during that entire time period.

  #81 Since 2007, the U.S. debt to GDP ratio has increased from 66.6 percent to 102.98 percent.

  #82 According to the U.S. Treasury, foreigners hold approximately 5.6 trillion dollars of our debt.

  #83 The amount of U.S. government debt held by foreigners is about 5 times larger than it was just a decade ago.

  #84 As I have written about previously, if the U.S. national debt was reduced to a stack of one dollar bills it would circle the earth at the equator 45 times.

  #85 If Bill Gates gave every single penny of his entire fortune to the U.S. government, it would only cover the U.S. budget deficit for 15 days.

  #86 Sometimes we forget just how much money a trillion dollars is. If you were alive when Jesus Christ was born and you spent one million dollars every single day since that point, you still would not have spent one trillion dollars by now.

  #87 If right this moment you went out and started spending one dollar every single second, it would take you more than 31,000 years to spend one trillion dollars.

  #88 In addition to all of our debt, the U.S. government has also accumulated more than 200 trillion dollars in unfunded liabilities. So where in the world will all of that money come from?

  #89 The greatest damage that quantitative easing has been causing to our economy is the fact that it is destroying worldwide faith in the U.S. dollar and in U.S. debt. If the rest of the world stops using our dollars and stops buying our debt, we are going to be in a massive amount of trouble.

  #90 Over the past several years, the Federal Reserve has been monetizing a staggering amount of U.S. government debt even though Ben Bernanke once promised that he would never do this.

  #91 China recently announced that they are going to quit stockpiling more U.S. dollars. If the Federal Reserve was not recklessly printing money, this would probably not have happened.

  #92 Most Americans have no idea that one of our most famous presidents was absolutely obsessed with getting rid of central banking in the United States. The following is a February 1834 quote by President Andrew Jackson about the evils of central banking…

  I too have been a close observer of the doings of the Bank of the United States. I have had men watching you for a long time, and am convinced that you have used the funds of the bank to speculate in the breadstuffs of the country. When you won, you divided the profits amongst you, and when you lost, you charged it to the Bank. You tell me that if I take the deposits from the Bank and annul its charter I shall ruin ten thousand families. That may be true, gentlemen, but that is your sin! Should I let you go on, you will ruin fifty thousand families, and that would be my sin! You are a den of vipers and thieves. I have determined to rout you out and, by the Eternal, (bringing his fist down on the table) I will rout you out.

  #93 There are plenty of possible alternative financial systems, but at this point all 187 nations that belong to the IMF have a central bank. Are we supposed to believe that this is just some sort of a bizarre coincidence?

  #94 The capstone of the global central banking system is an organization known as the Bank for International Settlements. The following is how I described this organization in a previous article…

  An immensely powerful international organization that most people have never even heard of secretly controls the money supply of the entire globe. It is called the Bank for International Settlements, and it is the central bank of central banks. It is located in Basel, Switzerland, but it also has branches in Hong Kong and Mexico City. It is essentially an unelected, unaccountable central bank of the world that has complete immunity from taxation and from national laws. Even Wikipedia admits that “it is not accountable to any single national government.” The Bank for International Settlements was used to launder money for the Nazis during World War II, but these days the main purpose of the BIS is to guide and direct the centrally-planned global financial system. Today, 58 global central banks belong to the BIS, and it has far more power over how the U.S. economy (or any other economy for that matter) will perform over the course of the next year than any politician does. Every two months, the central bankers of the world gather in Basel for another “Global Economy Meeting”. During those meetings, decisions are made which affect every man, woman and child on the planet, and yet none of us have any say in what goes on. The Bank for International Settlements is an organization that was founded by the global elite and it operates for the benefit of the global elite, and it is intended to be one of the key cornerstones of the emerging one world economic system.

  #95 The borrower is the servant of the lender, and the Federal Reserve has turned all of us into debt slaves.

  #96 Debt is a form of social control, and the global elite use all of this debt to dominate all the rest of us. 40 years ago, the total amount of debt in our system (all government debt, all business debt, all consumer debt, etc.) was sitting at about 3 trillion dollars. Today, the grand total is approaching 60 trillion dollars.

  #97 Unless something dramatic is done, our children and our grandchildren will be debt slaves for their entire lives as they service our debts and pay for our mistakes.

  #98 Now that you know this information, you are responsible for doing something about it.

  #99 Congress has the power to shut down the Federal Reserve any time that it would like. But right now most of our politicians fully endorse the current system, and nothing is ever going to happen until the American people start demanding change.

  #100 The design of the Federal Reserve system was flawed from the very beginning. If something is not done very rapidly, it is inevitable that our entire financial system is going to suffer an absolutely nightmarish collapse.

  

  

  

  

  

• Wedbush Goes There: "Beware The Panics And Crashes Of March"

  As if several markets tumbles and heartstopping short squeezes in just the first two months of 2016 have not been enough to turn professional traders’ hair prematurely gray and drive all retail daytraders permanently out of the “market”, here is a warning from Wedbush’s otherwise quite somber repo market analyst, Scott Skyrm, according to whom the volatility is only just starting.

  As he says in his latest note to clients, “over the past 20 years, there was a series of market sell-offs during the month of March. In 1998, it was the subject of a news story on CNBC. They claimed it’s a combination the market digesting the February refunding and Japanese investors preparing for Japanese year-end on March 31st. These days, world markets are more complex than in 1998, but there continues to be a series of market panics and crashes in March.”

  And while the past may or may not be prologue, here is a brief history of the March crashes in the past 25 years which could signal a comparable event is on deck in what is already an extremely jittery market.

  • March 1992: Short-end sells-off, market prices a 75 bps tightening, but the Fed eases in April
  • March 1994: Fed tightens in February and March igniting a sell-off in the long-end of the curve. Mortgage and CMO markets crash. Kidder Peabody is sold
  • March 1995: U.S. dollar crashes. Central banks intervene to support the dollar with large operations of March 1996: Large employment number triggers a sell-off across the entire yield curve
  • March 1998: General market sell-off at the beginning of the month Feb/Mar 1999: Bond market experiences a series of 1 point drops
  • March 24, 2000: NASDAQ (technology) market reaches a peak and begins major decline
  • March 2001: Sell-off in U.S. stock market after Fed fails to cut rates aggressively
  • March 2003: After Gulf War II starts, bond market sells-off considerably
  • March 2005: After poor earnings from General Motors, corporate and emerging markets bonds sell-off
  • Feb/Mar 2007: Stock sell-off in China sparks global sell-off, flight-to-quality, sub-prime market under stress
  • March 2008: Liquidity crisis causes the collapse of Bear Stearns
  • March 2009: Sell-off in stocks brings Dow Jones index to a low of 6547; lowest since 1996
  • Feb/Mar 2010: Greek sovereign debt crisis begins
  • Mar 2011: Earthquake in Japan sends ¥ higher, leads to both a flight-to-quality & sell-off in the cash market
  • March 20, 2012: Late hour bailout from the Eurozone and IMF save Greece from default

  If the VXX crashes back to 2016 lows tomorrow, it may not be a bad idea to get some.

  

  

  

  

  

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