I found this article to be quite insightful. Transiting Pluto in Capricorn squaring transiting Jupiter & Uranus in Aries is sure to bring lots of changes to the established world order & big business. Fed Up with the Fed and the Welfare State?? |
"When we have a look at markets today, well...it's depressing. Day after day we all have to put up with the fraud of serious looking men and women in suits making a complete mockery of common sense, reason, and good judgment. As exhibit A in the case against the absurdists running our money and our economy into the ground, we offer the remarks this week of Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke.
Bernanke spooked investors in New York when he fronted a group of empty headed Senators in Washington and told them that the future of the U.S. economy was "unusually uncertain." But in a real boon to those of us looking forward to the inflationary effects of trillions of dollars more in quantitative easing, Bernanke assured the Senators that, "We remain prepared to take further policy actions as needed to foster a return to full utilization of our nation's productive potential in a context of price stability."
Can this sort of nonsense really be taken seriously? Unfortunately, we have to take it seriously because it has serious investment consequences.
But how long will it be before most people understand that the Fed, the regulators, and the monetary authorities have no credibility when it comes to: a) understanding what is going on, b) fixing it, c) confessing to their culpability in causing the misallocation of capital and the zombification of large chunks of the global banking sector and generally forcing all of us contemplate their moronic and opaque pablum?
These people really are vandals and thieves. We are encouraged to take them seriously and cede micromanagement of the economy and public life to people who don't have an entrepreneurial bone in their body. What a big con.
In any event, don't be fooled by the results of the stress test. Those so-called stress tests for European banks are just as much a whitewash of the real capital inadequacy issues as were the American stress tests. In fact, the whole exercise is perfect pretext for another round of central bank quantitative easing/outright support of asset prices.
After all, American and European banks are stuffed full of housing- backed securities and sovereign debt. The credit boom manifested itself in many assets. Much of the fiscal and monetary policy since 2000 has been designed to keep those assets from deflating. It can't work.
We reckon this latest and largest round of quantitative easing will come sooner than most people are expecting and be a lot less effective than some people are hoping. It's time to get ready for it now. Crank up the fan...here comes the merde.
.....We would instead make a high-handed, ivory tower, abstract kind of comment that the people of a nation can't all get rich by buying and selling houses from one another. For one, it's a singularly unambitious national goal. But that's not the biggest argument against it.
Creating a profit is hard. In some ways, it's unnatural. Profit is surplus value. Human beings improve their living standards by increasing productivity and efficiency through innovation and constant adaptation. The free market is a great mechanism for producing surplus, as long as risk taker and small businesspeople and crack pot inventors and dreamers and builders have access to capital. Of course the banks are under no obligation to take bad risks (unless you're talking about U.S. banks compelled to make loans to bad credit risks during the American housing boom.)
As for the aforementioned impending (we believe) quantitative easing round two, how should you prepare? Well, in the fashion that you find most fit naturally. But we'd suggest that asset markets are going to cop it good and hard in the second half of this year. We're expecting a one-two combination of big falls in stock markets and then wild, irresponsible, unprecedented and unconventional attempts to reflate by central banks."
Regards,
Dan Denning, The Daily Reckoning Australia
