Abet Chichi2

[Tuff-Stuff]

AutomaticEarth<>Debt Rattle March 19 2017

Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 9:35 am



DPC Broadway from Chambers Street, NYC 1910

• More Proof of Janet Yellen’s Idiocy (David Stockman)

• How The Bosses ‘Game’ Workers (Moore)

• Oz Parliamentary Budget Office Costs Plan To Kill Off Stamp Duty (SMH)

• Russian Parliament Backs Investigation Into US Media (R.)

• German Foreign Minister: Turkey Further Away From EU Membership Than Ever (R.)

• Turkey Furious As Kurds Rally In Frankfurt With PKK Insignia (AFP)

• Fear Stalks Refugees Huddled Along Hungary’s Border (G.)

• Dirty Deals Done Dirt Cheap (ECRE)

• Desperate Conditions In Greece’s Migration Jails (AlA)

• ‘Exiles in the Aegean’: A Year After The EU–Turkey Deal (Christopoulos)

“..corporate America will desperately unload inventories, workers and assets to appease the robo-machines of Wall Street.”

• More Proof of Janet Yellen’s Idiocy (David Stockman)

During the last 129 months, the Fed has held 86 meetings. On 83 of those occasions it either cut rates or left them unchanged. So you can perhaps understand why Wednesday’s completely expected (for the last three weeks!) 25 bips left the day traders nonplussed. The Dow rallied over 100 points that day. Traders understandably believe that this monetary farce can continue indefinitely, and that our Keynesian school marm’s post-meeting presser was evidence that the Fed is still their friend. No it isn’t! Janet Yellen’s sing-song gibberish was the equivalent of a monetary DEFCON 1, alerting all except the most addicted Kool-Aid drinkers to get out of the casino.

Our monetary politburo has expanded its balance sheet by a lunatic 22X during the last three decades and in the process has systematically falsified financial asset prices and birthed a mutant debt-fueled of simulacrum of prosperity. But once it begins to withdraw substantial amounts of cash from the canyons of Wall Street as per its newly reaffirmed “normalization” policy, the whole house of cards is destined to collapse. There will be a stock market implosion soon, and that will in turn generate panic in the C-suites as the value of stock options vanish. Like in the fall of 2008 — except on an even more sweeping and long-lasting scale — corporate America will desperately unload inventories, workers and assets to appease the robo-machines of Wall Street. But there is nothing left to brake the casino’s fall.

If the money market rate conforms to the Fed’s latest command and settles at 88 basis points, it is still effectively at the zero bound. Our monetary politburo is thus still out of dry powder — except for the nuclear option of QE4, which Yellen herself made quite clear would never happen until after the next recession is already underway. Yet by then it will be too late — way too late. That’s because the market is priced as if the business cycle has been outlawed and as if the feckless band of Keynesian pretenders who have seized control of financial markets have ushered in the Nirvana of permanent full-employment. World without end. Needless to say, they haven’t because they haven’t repealed the law of supply and demand. That is, if the Fed plans to keep raising until rates until they reach 3.0% by 2019, it will have to suck massive amounts of cash out of the financial markets.

So doing, it will drive long-term yields substantially higher and thereby obliterate the ultra-low cap rate delusion on which the entire regime of Bubble Finance is based. In fact, in a blathering response at her presser about the pace by which the Fed intends to shrink its bloated $4.4 trillion balance sheet, Yellen proved she is clueless about the financial firestorm our rogue central bank is about to unleash. She claimed that the Fed could implement 3-4 money market rate increases a year, while deferring the shrinkage of its balance sheet into the indefinite future. But that it most assuredly cannot do. With a staggering overhang of $2.1 trillion of excess reserves in the financial system, even our vaunted monetary politburo cannot command the tides to recede. If it wants the money rate to rise on its appointed path through 2019, it must drain loads of cash from Wall Street.

Read more … Briefs or link out for full @ https://www.theautomaticearth.com/2017/03/debt-rattle-march-19-2017/