Barry Ritholtz doesn't live in Realville, calls recent wage gains "decent" when they are peanuts

The Economy Is Finally Coming Through for U.S. Workers:

Decent wage gains are showing up in paychecks. That should continue for a while. Workers had an average gain in hourly wages of 3.2 percent in December, well above the average of 2.4 percent during the past five years . . ..

There's nothing wrong with his facts, just his perspective, which isn't long-term. He's content to compare his data to the Obama era, which sucked big-time. Note how he doesn't say that, however, big New York liberal that he is. 

Year over year, the average gain in 2018 isn't even Bush-league let alone Clinton-league. And certainly not pre-Reagan-league, when workers in this country got much bigger raises on average than they do in this supposedly booming economy.

Barry likes charts. Here's the only one that counts, showing that raises for 80% of workers on average can't hold a candle to the late 1980s, the 1990s, and the 2000s (when Democrats couldn't stop complaining about George W. Bush's horrible economy).

Employers remain stingy, and there is no employment boom, or else they'd be hiring all the old people the greedy bastards fired in 2009 because they made too much money.

I KNOW.

Josh Brown must be nuts: valuations are high, markets are exuberant and growth is as pathetic as 2007

Is Ritholtz paying him to say this stuff?

Here:

"Valuation is not going to tell you when the run ends. We were reasonably valued in 2007. The economy fell off the cliff," he said. Brown also said he agreed with Yardeni that there was "no sign of a recession."

"Those are usually what coincide with the end of a bull market," he said. "I'm not telling you P/E expansion takes us significantly higher, but earnings growth could, revenue growth could, and in the second half of this year, we should be seeing a meaningful uptick based on what analysts are expecting at the moment. So, I think it's smarter to be constructive than to be worried about the next 5 percent in either direction."

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In late September 2007 the Shiller p/e was high, in the range of 26/27, the S&P500 was making new all time highs, and 1Q2007 GDP had just been finalized at 0.6% after a 2.1% and a 1.1% print for the two previous quarters of 2006. That's growth of more or less just 1.2% over three quarters.

The 3.8% 3rd estimate for Q2 at the time arguably contributed to the blow off market top at 1565 within days of the announcement, but growth in the economy had been pathetic up to that point. People thought things were looking up again, but within a year we were almost scraping people off the sidewalks of Wall Street.

Today valuations are similarly high at 26, the market has made new all time highs, and we've just booked a horrible NEGATIVE GDP for the first quarter. The average of the last three quarters is now the same as it was in late September 2007: 1.2%.

Valuations are reasonable? There's no sign of a recession? Both may very well be coinciding right now to signal the end of a bull market, just like in 2007.

Nothing Else Is Working, So The US Federal Reserve Should Be QEing Gold Instead Of Treasuries

So said Christopher T. Mahoney, a former Vice Chairman at Moody's, for Project-Syndicate last June, here, just not in so many words:

It may be that when rates are at the zero bound and the banking system is broken, the appropriate policy instrument may not be to buy bonds from banks, since buying them doesn’t seem to affect the price level. Bernanke was certainly correct that the Fed could create inflation by dropping money on citizens from helicopters, but that would be a rather blunt instrument.

It seems to me that the Fed needs to buy something besides Treasury and agency bonds. The obvious alternative to Treasuries would be foreign government bonds, or gold. Since the former would constitute a “currency war”, that would seem to leave gold.

I have no doubt that if the Fed were to announce that it will buy gold until it has achieved 2% inflation and 6.5% unemployment, it would get there. It would disrupt the gold market (and enrich some of the wrong people) but that is a small price to pay. No foreign government could object to the Fed buying gold; it’s been doing it for 100 years.

But I said it more or less three times a year ago this month, here, here and especially here:

The United States at present is in the throes of a deflationary collapse of monetarist making, not of dollar currency but of credit money, and it is the principal reason for the collapse of GDP. One of the largest sources of the "currency" of credit money in recent years has been mortgages, which are now effectively unacceptable as collateral because of the rot permeating the system in the form of defaults and underwaters.

Federal Reserve policy has actually been removing such collateral from circulation, along with US Treasuries, by placing it on its balance sheet. But since there is nothing "real" behind the dollars the Fed replaces this collateral with, there is no corresponding expansion of credit in size to match the former vigor of the process.

So perhaps the Fed should QE gold instead of MBS and Treasuries to provide something real behind the money created which would give that money a surer basis in collateral.

Central banks around the world have been buying gold in quantities not seen in 30 years in order to fill the collateral gap. The Fed should join them.

"Bad" job reports for two years have been great for higher corporate earnings

Barry Ritholtz, here:

It has taken quite a long time for many investors to understand that reduced labor costs, greater productivity and ever-increasing efficiency has led to higher earnings. The basic assumptions about “good” or “bad” job reports may not be accurate relative to what equities do over time.

-------------------------------------------------------

That's correct. The latest employment situation report indicates that there hasn't been much change up or down in jobs for two years running even as the stock market made over fifty new all-time highs in 2013.

Additions to non-farm payrolls have been averaging 182,000 and 183,000 a month in 2013 and 2012. Same old same old.

To the unemployed: The L-shaped "recovery" continues . . . without you.

Ritholtz doing The Mussolini

Barry Ritholtz Is Against The World Religion Of Gold

Barry Ritholtz here recently had some fun with the goldbugs, whom he ridicules as devotees of a "religious cult".

The piece is regrettably inflammatory. Doesn't he know he's writing off the whole world as a bunch of religious kooks in this temper tantrum? That's pretty much what ideologues do when reality won't cooperate with their theories, but surely he must know that sovereigns and central banks the world over continue to build their hoardes of gold year upon year, now approaching 32,000 tonnes and 20% of all the stuff ever pulled out of the ground. That's quite the foundation for the edifice of the worldwide church of gold.

In fact, many of the central banks in particular have been on a tear recently, acquiring the stuff in quantities not seen in 30 years. Evidently they are to a man possessed by the Oracle of Au (pronounced "Ow"). But try as they may to acquire new gold reserves, no one of them yet even comes close to the chief priest bowing and scraping before the barbarous relic, namely the USA, the number one holder of gold in reserve to the tune of 8,134 tonnes (not to be confused with tons). 

That even the USA with all its fiat money still considers this gold to be the most sublime of all currencies can be seen in its own gold issues. Gold Eagles, in one ounce sizes down to tenth ounce, are denominated from $50 down to $5. It says so right on the coins. (I understand if you don't believe me because you haven't seen one. They are expensive these days.) I myself haven't seen one of these things in my change at Walmart recently, or anywhere else, but theoretically you could. In various places around the country they are in fact found in Salvation Army kettles from time to time, usually around the time of a holiday formerly known as "Christmas".

There is a reason for what appears on a Gold Eagle: The US government has decreed that gold is money, and that the price of gold cannot fall. It has fixed the price at $42.22 per troy ounce since 1973, and it hasn't fallen since. The one ounce $50 Gold Eagle thus closely approximates this valuation, as it should if America wants to maintain its credibility as the leader of the free world and the spokesman for truth, justice and the, well, American way. The excess, in case you were wondering, is simply a small bonus in exchange for providing the world with both its security and its reserve currency, both of which are quite costly to the inhabitants of the land of the free.

Over our long history, the price of gold has indeed risen despite the best efforts of "manipulators" to stop it from doing so. For a long time the price of gold had been ruthlessly kept down at $20.67, from the War Between the States to FDR, but suddenly became $35 when the greatest Democrat ever saved us from the bad old ways. Not to be outdone, however, the great Republican Richard Nixon managed to make gold higher still, at $42.22, where it has stood ever since.

See, the price of gold hasn't ever fallen in America, it's only risen, just like Jesus. It's God's will. It is our manifest destiny.

That said, more people these days do need to come to accept the reality of this defacto gold standard to which our benevolent government all too secretly adheres. Younger generations of mockers actually have arisen among us who need to repent of their intemperate outbursts against gold and believe in the Gold Gospel once again. Instead of denying the reality of this kingdom of gold, which is really present here and now in the sacramental dollar, they need to wake up and consider the future possibilities of our great civilization and its gold religion.

Perhaps then there would be more public support for all these central bankers who print funny money to drive gold prices higher, especially for our own Ben Bernanke at the Federal Reserve who far excells all others at this. What he really needs most right now is more public encouragement to use that funny money like our competitors do in the world. Like them, we need to start augmenting our gold reserves once again using funny dollars to buy gold just as they are doing using, say, funny yuans. After all, this is actually a divinely sanctioned practice, what the Bible calls making use of "unrighteous mammon". You can look it up, it's right in there. Ben really needs to get on this right away. It should be a matter of his monetary policy to drive up the price of gold by hoarding it. Who knows, maybe we can even get our tonnage back up where it used to be after WWII, around 20,000 tonnes, and just think, all it will cost us is some paper and ink.

Meanwhile gold continues to work for us in season and out of season, in good times and in bad. Our reserves have seen us through thick and thin, whether it's been the boom times under Reagan/Bush/Clinton or the misery index years of Jimmy Carter or the new depression years of Barack Obama. Our gold is still there, just like the flag. It hasn't rusted, shrunk in the rain, or even tarnished. Good as gold as they say. Things might be even better if we had more of it, but you've got to be thankful for your blessings, thankful for what you do have.

The truth is, even in the very worst of circumstances imaginable gold has performed miracles for people. A few well-placed gold coins not that long ago meant the difference between some of our fellow countrymen coming here or going to the gas chambers. Ask them and their progeny if escaping an apocalypse wasn't "just fine", even if they were penniless afterward.

No, the only suckers when it comes to gold have been those who let theirs go when misguided government came looking for it. Some of those babies confiscated in 1933 now fetch $300,000. The rest appreciated in value in their melted down form in the government's vault, but only 6600%. You could go to Harvard today with just 120 of those ounces. In the present banks and governments across the globe are finding the collateral gold provides rather more reliable than US Treasuries in a pinch, which is why they keep acquiring it. Evidently we haven't yet understood the message that this sends. 

It's true in a sense that gold is a rejection of government control, but only in the sense of its opposite, self-control, which is what in America is the unique basis of our form of government. It was an idea bequeathed to us by Protestantism, and also by Plato, both of which are unhappily out of favor. But seeking to control your own destiny, which is what many foreigners are doing by acquiring gold, is actually the sincerest form of flattery of what the United States used to stand for. Free from the control of a reserve currency, there's no telling what others in the world may accomplish without us. But under a universal currency, there's no telling what we could still accomplish together. 

The Banks Rule America And Blaspheme Against Capitalism

In "Bankistan Vanquishes America" here Barry Ritholtz rages against the criminal enterprise under which we live, with a rash of supporting links. Under Clinton, Bush and Obama, its grip has only gotten tighter.

From the conclusion:

On the other side lay the bank apologists, corrupted politicians, and crony capitalists. They advocate the Big Lie of the financial crisis. They choose to ignore the facts and data that disprove their narrative. They continue to push the lies that the bailouts were a good investment. (They weren’t). They work against the Bipartisan consensus that the giant banks should be broken up. They ignore the many former bank CEOs who call for the break up of “Too Big to Fail” banks. They mandated that GSEs were banned from Lobbying, but they made sure that the big banks retained their influence peddling and hold on Washington DC.

They no longer represent the voters of their districts, but instead are the elected representatives of Bankistan.

And unless we do something — and soon — they will vanquish America.

Things haven't changed much since 1819 when the revolutionary paper of fictitious capital resulted in fraudulent bankruptcies on the backs of real capital, real property and commerce (think of today's zero interest rates returning nothing to retirees, collapse in the value of housing long purchased honestly, and moribund GDP and zero velocity money punishing millions with unemployment):

The enormous abuses of the banking system are not only prostrating our commerce, but producing revolution of property, which without more wisdom than we possess, will be much greater than were produced by the revolutionary paper. That too had the merit of purchasing our liberties, while the present trash has only furnished aliment to usurers and swindlers. The banks themselves were doing business on capitals, three fourths of which were fictitious: and, to extend their profit they furnished fictitious capital to every man, who having nothing and disliking the labours of the plough, chose rather to call himself a merchant to set up a house of 5000. D. a year expence, to dash into every species of mercantile gambling, and if that ended as gambling generally does, a fraudulent bankruptcy was an ultimate resource of retirement and competence. This fictitious capital probably of 100. millions of Dollars, is now to be lost, & to fall on some body; it must take on those who have property to meet it, & probably on the less cautious part, who, not aware of the impending catastrophe have suffered themselves to contract, or to be in debt, and must now sacrifice their property of a value many times the amount of their debt. We have been truly sowing the wind, and are now reaping the whirlwind. If the present crisis should end in the annihilation of these pennyless & ephemeral interlopers only, and reduce our commerce to the measure of our own wants and surplus productions, it will be a benefit in the end. But how to effect this, and give time to real capital, and the holders of real property, to back out of their entanglements by degrees requires more knolege of Political economy than we possess. I believe it might be done, but I despair of it’s being done. The eyes of our citizens are not yet sufficiently open to the true cause of our distresses. They ascribe them to every thing but their true cause, the banking system; a system, which, if it could do good in any form, is yet so certain of leading to abuse, as to be utterly incompatible with the public safety and prosperity. At present all is confusion, uncertainty and panic.

-- Thomas Jefferson

"Naked Capitalism" Supports The Occupy Movement

In your heart you felt she was nuts, but now you know it.

Those occasional protestations to being a middle of the road type of person never rang true when you observed all those posts she's had from Washingtons Blog, the 911 conspiracy theorist, who shows up, by the way, also at Barry Ritholtz' The Big Picture.

No one goes from being a moderate directly to anarchist communism unless they were something more extreme all along.

The first principle of all ideology is to lie in order to gain the confidence of the people, and if not the confidence, an opening.

Banking "The Achilles Heel Of Capitalism"? Or The Right's Version Of Socialism?

There is a term for right-wing socialism, but nobody seems to want to use it because to do so is to indict what we've been living under since at least the time of FDR as fascism.

It was inevitable that grafting onto capitalism elements of left-wing economics would turn out this way. Just look at China, which grafted from the other direction. Both now meet in that middle ground of state capitalism and find in each other the most agreeable of economic partners. The Chicoms have become but the mirror image of an America which long ago shed its devotion to free-market capitalism.

This upsets people, especially the partisans of left and right who couldn't possibly tolerate the obliteration of the distinctions they assert between themselves, as between Republicans and Democrats. Still, some perceptive individuals in our midst see that there is really no difference between left and right in America because the two have been combined in a peculiarly American way through multiple revolutions in banking which socialized both the assets and the liabilities.

Despite what anyone says, the fact is we don't have a free market in banking, and haven't had one for a very long time.

From Ed Yardeni, excerpted here:

“The problem with banks is that they tend to blow up on a regular basis. That’s because bankers are playing with other people’s money (OPM). They consistently abuse the privilege and shirk their fiduciary responsibilities. Whenever they get into trouble, government regulators scramble to bail them out first and then scramble to regulate them more strictly. Without fail, the bankers respond to tougher rules by using some of the OPM to hire financial engineers and political lobbyists to figure out ways around the new regulations.

"In my opinion, banks are the Achilles’ heel of capitalism. They really do need to be regulated like utilities if their liabilities are either explicitly or implicitly guaranteed by the government, i.e., by taxpayers. Banks should be permitted to earn a very low utility-like stable return. Bankers should receive compensation in the middle of the pay scale for government employees, somewhere between the pay of a postal worker and the head of the FDIC. It should be the capital markets, hedge funds, and private-equity investors that provide credit to risky borrowers instead of the banks.”

Our money is your money. We print it for you to use.

NY Fed Study Shows S&P 500 Near 600 Subtracting Fed Interventions Since 1994

Many have been thinking and some have been saying for quite some time now that assets are egregiously overvalued because of Federal Reserve policy which manipulates the cost of money, the problem with which is that this short-circuits the process of price discovery.

Barry Ritholtz is especially famous with me because he came out at a critical time and wrote that perhaps the most important investing lesson you can learn is "don't fight the Fed".

Now we have proof of this of a sort from the NY Fed itself, showing that minus Fed witching-hour moves in the markets, the Standard and Poor's 500 index would stand nearer 600 today instead of 1300.

The almost laughable story is here:

The FOMC has released eight announcements a year at 2:15 ET since 1994. The study took the gains in the SP 500 from 2 pm the day before the announcement to 2 pm the day of the statement and subtracted that market move from the SP 500’s total return over that time span.

Without the gains in anticipation of a positive Fed action, the SP 500 would stand at just 600 today, rather than above 1300.


575 looks as good to me now as it did in August 2011, here.

Massive Global Central Bank Balance Sheet Expansion Interferes With Interest Rates

The balance sheets of the world's biggest central banks have exploded 178 percent between May 2006 and November 2011.

So says the data compiled and illustrated by James Bianco in late January at The Big Picture here:

The combined size of [the world's largest] eight central banks’ balance sheets has almost tripled in the last six years from $5.42 trillion to more than $15 trillion and is still on the rise! ...

QE is an expanding of balance sheets via increasing bank reserves.  The purpose of QE ... is to increase bank reserves through purchases of fixed income securities in order to lower interest rates. ...

[I]t is fair to compare the size of these balance sheets (now $15 trillion) to the capitalization of the world’s stock markets (now $48 trillion). ...

Prior to the 2008 financial crisis, the eight central bank balance sheets were less than 15% the size of world stock markets and falling.  In the immediate aftermath of Lehman Brothers’ failure, these eight central bank balance sheets swelled to 37% the capitalization of the world stock market.  But keep in mind that the late 2008/early 2009 peak was due to collapsing stock market values combined with balance sheet expansion via “lender of last resort” loans.

Recently, the eight central bank balance sheets have spiked back to 33% of world stock market capitalization.  This has come about not by lender of last resort loans, but rather by QE expansion (buying bonds with “printed money“) even faster than world stock markets are rising.


Some people look at this information as evidence that the intent of the central banks is to boost asset prices to keep the illusion of growth going. But what if it's really just about buying time, attempting to secure lower roll over interest rates for refinancing massive debt loads which have become a giant millstone around the neck of the world?

The total public and private debt of the world's 35 most indebted nations alone tops $57 trillion, which is 95 percent of the $60 trillion in 2011 GDP of the world's 35 most productive nations. Of 27 of those most productive nations (not counting Greece whose 34.38 percent rate is an outlier) shown here, sovereign 10 year bond yields last week averaged 4.2 percent, implying world wide debt service payments of $2.4 trillion just to stay current.

The US alone spends nearly $0.5 trillion annually in debt service payments, and calls it a victory when $0.04 trillion in spending is cut. Meanwhile deficits and debt continue to build, here and abroad.

GDP growth averaging 3.5 percent per annum is the way out, but the debt burden eats up the progress.

This can't go on forever. 

Barry Ritholtz Can't Take It That Fellow Liberal Bloomberg Blames Congress For '08 Meltdown

In The Washington Post, here.

In the end, I think this is because of two things. One, a bias toward liberalism, the finger prints of which are all over the current crisis, so Barry can't stand it when one of his own departs from his version of the accepted narrative and puts the blame on liberalism's institutional face. And two, a widespread intellectual failure affecting liberals, conservatives and independents alike, which conflates the free market and the banking sector:

The previous Big Lie — the discredited belief that free markets require no adult supervision — is the reason people have created a new false narrative.

The banks are beholden to a fiat currency mediated by a fiat central bank fed by a government printing press. They are by no means a private sector player, and haven't been since 1913. Banking isn't a free market, it does require adult supervision, and the taxpayers should be outraged by the on-going failure of it every goddamn Friday night. Congress willingly acceded to this failure in the 1990's under Clinton and the Republicans when they gave banks free reign over money creation. The Federal Reserve became beside the point. It only took a decade to implode.

To paraphrase Russell Kirk: Free markets aren't a failure, they just haven't been tried recently.

Off the Hook

Remove the taxpayer guarantee and put bankers personally on the hook, and that will change things for the better in a hurry. 

Big Banks Aren't Fixed: The Same Problems Remain as Before

So says Ritholtz, here:

• stuffed with declining assets


• eliminating Fair value accounting via FASB 157 did not fix balance sheet problems, but instead allowed banks to hide them


• management does not keep adequate capital


• management and traders still have the same upside to roll the dice, but do not have the downside risks, which remains on shareholders and taxpayers

The rest of the entry provides a good summary of how a bad bank should get seized and carved up instead of zombie-fied as in current practice.

Are We Following in Japan's Footsteps?

Seen at The Big Picture here.

The idea is that the Japanese stock market experience in red superimposed over the US SPX in green (lagged by a decade) predicts a new low in the US below the 683/666 level of March 2009 by 2015.

The market trend line in the US went haywire in 1995. The February/March 2003 and March 2009 lows represent corrections toward that old line.

The Maestro noted the irrationality of the break out from the trend already in December 1996.

August 5, 1997: A Date That Will Live in Housing Infamy

When President Bill Clinton signed into law The Taxpayer Relief Act of 1997, and liberalism turned your home into just another commodity:

The act exempted from taxation the profits on the sale of a personal residence of up to $500,000 for married couples filing jointly and $250,000 for singles. This is for residences that were lived in for at least 2 years over the last 5 ... .

Real estate churning was off to the races, in concert with a deregulated financial industry, almost as if someone had flipped on a switch:

(source: Ritholtz/Steve Barry, The Big Picture, here)

Barry Ritholtz Can't Even Spell Other People's Book Titles Properly

His latest demonstration of illiteracy is here (which I rather like to point out now and again since Ritholtz seems to think he's God's appointed corrector of innumeracy--what's so great about being able to count when you can't read or write, either?):

The Case Shiller chart showing home prices in the 1920s or 30s does not use actual sales data, but are [sic] hypothesized by Prof Shiller in his book Irrational Exuberence.

On the substantive issue, Ritholtz is right to stress that there are problems comparing the two eras since data are not complete for the past in the same way that they are today for many things.

I rather liked one commenter's response to this post, objecting to the obvious straw man argument among other things: 

Mark A. Sadowski Says: 

June 1st, 2011 at 10:19 am

There’s a couple of problems with this post.

1) You’re conflating the claim that residential housing has done worse with the claim that this recession is as bad as the Great Depression. These are two seperate [ah, that would be "separate"] claims and one does not imply the other.

2) The relative absence of mortgages in the Great Depression would have greatly reduced the foreclosure problem relative to our own times.

3) High end real estate in Manhattan [!] in the 1930s was not a proxy for housing nationally.

Grebler, Blank and Winnick constructed a fairly decent index of nominal housing prices nationally (Shiller uses it). It fell 30.5% from 1925 to 1933.

http://www.nber.org/books/greb56-1

In contrast the S&P/Case-Shiller index has fallen 34.0% from 2006Q2 through 2010Q4.

Moreover your claim ignores the fact that there was considerable deflation in everything during the Great Depression. Taking into account the CPI, real housing prices only fell 12.6% from 1925 through 1932. In contrast real housing prices have fallen 40.1% this time around (so far).

P.S. For comparison[']s sake on the 67% decline in housing prices in Manhatten [Manhattan] between 1929Q3 and the end of 1932, consider the city of Las Vegas today. From peak in April 2006 to present housing prices in Las Vegas have fallen 58.4%. Adjusting for CPI the decline in housing prices in Manhatten [Manhattan] in the early 1930s is 57% whereas the decline in Las Vegas today it is 62.7% (so far).

If Ritholtz is so smart, how come it's not called the Case/Ritholtz index?

Now wasn't that fun? 

Forget Ritholtz, Here's The Real Dollar Collapse

Ritholtz' so-called big picture since 2001:

Since 1913, the real big picture:

Barry Ritholtz: Author of Redundancies

Here:

After Standard [and] Poor’s missed the greatest collapse in history – indeed, they helped create it by rating junk mortgage backed securities Triple AAA – they are now over-compensating. As I mentioned on The Big Picture, there is an old Wall Street joke about analysts: “You don’t need them in a Bull Market, and you don’t want them in a Bear Market.” That especially seems apt with regard to S [and] P.

The Most Important Investing Advice You Can Read, Maybe Ever

Il Duce

From "Why Politics and Investing Don't Mix" by Barry Ritholtz in The Washington Post, this time without a single typo:

Liquidity is a major factor in how the economy and stock markets perform. Trillions of dollars in fresh cash was very likely to goose equities higher [in 2003]. (Sound familiar?)

And maybe the best thing he's ever written, too.

Read it all, here.

P.S. Martin Walker said as much on May 8, 2009 on The McLaughlin Group, as we pointed out here. Nerves of steel those guys have, and guts of iron.

That Critic of the Innumerate, Barry Ritholtz, is (Still) Illiterate

"Why do am I critical . . .?"

". . . you cans get a pretty good estimate . . .."

References passim, but notably here.