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. 

QE Removes Banking Collateral, So Gold Steps In And The Price Plunges

So says Jeffrey Snider of Alhambra Investment Partners, here, who sees it as a sign of big trouble ahead, with banks out front in the lead:

[I]n times of extreme stress, gold acts like a universal liquidity stopgap – when all else fails, repo gold. The operational reality of a gold repo is a gold lease, charged at the forward rate (GOFO). In terms of market mechanics, a dramatic increase in gold leasing is seen as a massive increase in supply on the paper markets. For various reasons in the past five years, collateral chains and the available collateral pool has dwindled dramatically. That has left banks to scramble for operational bypasses, but it also has led to periods of very acute stress. When we match the price of gold against these stressed periods, they coincide perfectly. In other words, whenever collateralized lending has become problematic banks appeal to the universal collateral. Unfortunately, that looks like gold selling to the uninitiated. These large declines in gold prices match date for date the extreme developments in the banking system across several currencies. And in each case the gold selloff has previewed a larger decline in systemic liquidity that eventually catches other asset classes.

Did you get that? The price drops on the appearance of a massive increase in supply, on the paper markets, when in actuality there is nothing of the kind.

Another Gold Bear Recognizes Fair Value Is Below $500 The Ounce

Noted by Bob Pisani, here:

Gold bears like MKM note that if gold had simply moved with the CPI basket since 1913, it would stand at $490 an ounce. Wow. That is more than 60 percent below it's [sic] already low price. I doubt it will go anywhere near there.

Pisani and just about everyone else is focusing on the run-up in gold since 2008 to its extraordinarily high levels of recent years, finding it nearly inconceivable that gold could lose all of those gains since 2008, while ignoring at the same time the run-up to 2008 which established gold's floor for the last five years' move to the stratospheric level.

It would be easy to blame the financial crisis and/or QE for the last five years of gold price rises to $1900, but QE had nothing to do with the five to seven years before 2008 when gold rose to $800 from $300. Perhaps easy money could be credited with that in the 2000s, but we've had easy money before 2003, too. Alan Greenspan's easy money from 1995 did nothing for gold, which continued down to $263 by late 2000. So what made gold skyrocket beginning after 2003? Everyone is ignoring who were the buyers then who helped drive up the price of gold.

The answer is buyers of GLD, the gold ETF launched in 2004. If puny little Cyprus can set off a wave of gold selling today with 14 lousy metric tonnes in question at the maximum, think about what GLD has done to gold buying, and thus to the gold price, over the years building up a wave of 1300 tonnes from 2004. GLD easily qualifies as the major player in the buying action in an annual production environment of about double that figure. It's just that now the limit has been reached under current conditions, and people are starting to realize that confiscation is becoming thinkable again. The gold price has slowly eroded from the September 2011 peak, and is now being shoved over the edge by confiscation fears.

You build a market and they will come, until actual ownership becomes more important than a paper proxy. That is a problem GLD cannot solve, nor any other gold "investment" which does not involve transfering physical possession to the buyer. Germany, for example, no longer trusts its gold in others' hands and wants it back in country. Try telling that to GLD, which won't be transferring gold to any "owners". I'd say that's very negative for GLD going forward, and very negative for gold prices generally because of GLD's sheer heft, just as possible confiscation of weak sovereigns' gold looming as a very real possibility is negative for gold prices because of their relative size and importance.

When it comes to GLD or any other form of paper gold, the only important question is, "Where are all the customers' yachts?"

Carnage in Gold Creates Near Perfect Gold/Oil Ratio of 15.2

The collapse in NY gold from $1501 on Friday to $1352 tonight adds a nearly 10% decline on top of Friday's 4% decline.

Oil closed down too, today, just below 89, yielding a nearly perfect gold/oil ratio of 15.2.

Based on the decline in the ratio down to this point, the buy signal for oil the higher ratio indicated comes off. But that doesn't mean we've got a buy signal for gold. Yet.

At 82.29, the US Dollar Currency Index is not indicating any real new strength on these developments.

Caution is indicated as gold may well continue down, and oil may follow it.

TIPS Sell-Off A Sign Of Deflation In The Economy?

Bloomberg has the story about the sell-off in Treasury inflation-protected securities, here:

For the first time since the depths of the financial crisis in 2008, mutual funds that target Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities have seen outflows for three straight months, according to Morningstar Inc.

Even after the Fed injected more than $2.3 trillion into the financial system since 2008, inflation is under control, bolstering the appeal of bonds while providing the central bank with more scope to provide stimulus as needed to foster the economic recovery. Commodity prices are down and wages have grown just 1.9 percent on average since 2009, below the 3.1 percent in the prior three years, government data show.

“With such weak labor markets, flat income growth and flat wages, and commodities weak, we just won’t see the inflation that the TIPS market is pricing in,” Dan Heckman, a fixed- income strategist at the U.S. Bank Wealth Management unit of U.S. Bancorp, which manages $110 billion, said in telephone interview April 9.

Art Cashin Looks For A Watering Hole, Out Of The Deflationary Wind

Five o'clock has been replaced. Our kind of guy:

"It's always noon somewhere."

On the Friday just past, here.

Illegal Immigration Magnet In Chief

They say,

"Obama's gonna let me go."

And,

“Where do I go for my amnesty?”

Story here.

Josh Brown Doesn't Think Too Much Of Your Paper Gold

Oliver Cromwell

And he's not too fond of the real thing sitting right in front of you, either, here:

'It is utterly uninteresting to me and gold equity investing - things like paper ETFs and the shares of horrible gold miners - seems to defeat the whole purpose of an end-of-the-world asset class in the first place. I promise, should a torrent of plague and genocide wash across the land on a roaring floodtide of blood and economic catastrophe, your stupid-ass "stock market gold" shan't be left unscathed.  And if I am dismissive of it as an investment, you can imagine how I feel about it as an actual real-life medium of exchange - I live in the United States of America in the 21st Century and I have no interest in exchanging dollars in my savings account for something that hedge funds and sovereign governments can pump and dump at will.'

Well, they can pump and dump worthless paper currencies, too, and are. That's the problem. But as I pointed out here last year, gold has been on a tear ever since paper gold in the form of GLD made its appearance in November 2004. At the time, the US Dollar Currency Index opened the month at 81.82, just a little under where it is today, and then promptly rose, but gold closed that year under $440 the ounce, as it had the year before. After dropping about 4% on Friday to $1,501 the ounce, gold today is presently down another 6% to $1,404, but even that is a price which is much too high even though gold is now technically in a bear market, down over 26% from the September 2011 highs around $1,900.

They have made a market of gold which didn't exist before, and the price went up, up, up, just as they have made a market of mortgages and of houses through securitization and commoditization, and the price went up, up, up, until it came down, down, down.

I'd say gold has about another $1,000 down to go to get to fair value, but if you follow Louis Woodhill a price in the $200s is more like it, and John Tamny rather likes it at $800. Which is to say, there is lots of distortion in markets generally which is preventing price discovery.

Time will tell. So keep your powder dry as they say, if you've got any left. If you don't, maybe you'll have to sell some gold.

"Invest" In Housing? Real Home Prices Up 0.2 Percent Per Annum 1890-1990.

So warns Robert Shiller, here:

"Home prices look remarkably stable when corrected for inflation. Over the 100 years ending in 1990 — before the recent housing boom — real home prices rose only 0.2 percent a year, on average. The smallness of that increase seems best explained by rising productivity in construction, which offset increasing costs of land and labor."

Tax Compliance Costs: Over A Full Week Of Your Time

The poll tax in the north for 1873

If it takes 6.1 billion hours to comply with the tax code as reported here, for 114.7 million households that's over 53 hours per household, or 6.7 eight hour days, each.

It took me four six hour days but still, this is insane. 

If Babies Had Guns . . .

Libertarian Megan McArdle Makes Me Want To Puke

Because she thinks there is anything which can make abortion humane, here:

"I knew about the Gosnell case, and I wish I had followed it more closely, even though I'd rather not.  In fact, those of us who are pro-choice should be especially interested.  The whole point of legal abortion is to prevent what happened in Philadelphia: to make it safer and more humane.  Somehow that ideal went terribly, horribly awry.  We should demand to know why."

Abortion at any stage is the brutal murder of another human being, the mark of an unrefined, barbarous people, and our country is full of them. To exercise humanity in this situation would be to sterilize every woman who comes into an abortion clinic, and every man who put her there. They should have no right ever again to inflict such pain and injustice on another utterly defenseless human being.

Robert Samuelson: Obama Is Timid, Lazy, Phony, Tiny and Small

"Timid, lazy, phony, tiny and small" doesn't quite have the same ring as "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short", but you never know, it might catch on.

Here:

There is something profoundly timid about President Obama's proposed $3.778 trillion budget for 2014. ... [T]he budget is a status-quo document. It lets existing trends and policies run their course, meaning that Obama would allow higher spending on the elderly to overwhelm most other government programs. This is not "liberal" or "conservative" so much as politically expedient and lazy. ...

Obama remains unwilling to grapple with basic questions posed by an aging population, high health costs and persistent deficits. Why shouldn't programs for the elderly be overhauled to reflect longer life expectancy and growing wealth among retirees? Shouldn't we have a debate on the size and role of government, eliminating low-value programs and raising taxes to cover the rest? The "spin" given by the White House -- and accepted by much of the media -- is that the president is doing precisely this by putting coveted "entitlement" spending on the bargaining table.

It's phony. Compared with the size of the problem, Obama's proposals are tiny. The much-discussed shift in the inflation adjustment for Social Security benefits to the "chained" consumer price index would save $130 billion over a decade; that's about 1 percent of projected Social Security spending of $11.23 trillion over the same period. ...

The work of politics is persuasion. It is orchestrating desirable, though unpopular, changes. (Popular changes don't require much work.) . . . Already, his small proposed cuts in Social Security benefits have outraged much of the liberal base.

So Obama has taken a pass. He has chosen the lazy way out. He's evading basic choices while claiming he's bold and brave. ...

Despite Gold's Drop, Gold/Oil Ratio Finishes The Week At Oil-Bullish 16.45

texasbullfights.com

Even at the spot price of gold of $1,477 after the NY close the ratio is 16.18, indicating that oil remains on sale relative to gold.

Gold closed at $1501.40, well below what is understood to be a key support level of $1,521. There is talk of price falling to below $1,300 by early 2014.

At current prices of oil around $90, $1,300 gold would be an attractive buy, but it remains to be seen if oil can remain that expensive in a period of reduced demand due to chronic, severe unemployment, increasing domestic supply from oil shales, replacement of diesel with natural gas and increased passenger vehicle efficiency standards.

Rising dollar strength from early February to as high as 83.22 on the index in late March may well be the result of these oil trends, along with relative constraints on US federal spending due to divided government and more certainty about government revenue streams due to the settlement of long-standing income tax impermanencies. 

Gold Fell Out Of Bed Today, Dropping 4%

The carnage continues in after hours trading with spot prices around $1,477 the ounce.

It is thought in some quarters that the terms of the Cyprus deal requiring Cyprus to sell some of its gold to contribute for its bailout sets a bad precedent for other periphery countries in the Euro who may also be asked to sell gold to help pay for bailouts. The increased supply would be hugely negative for prices.

Sounds like people got out of GLD in particular big time just as the rumors were breaking in the middle of the week, and today the facts are spreading a dim pall over the entire gold market.

Deposit confiscation, then sovereign gold. Are they going to start going through the safe deposit boxes, too?

Real Retail Remains In Depression, Still Over 8% Down From 2005 Peak

Doug Short explains his chart, here.

Real retail remains mired in a depression, despite the progress made digging out of the bottom of the hole reached in 2009. Adjusted for population and inflation, and backing out gasoline sales which Short rightly deems a tax, the current level remains over 8% off the 2005 peak, eight years ago.

Russia Was Just The Excuse For The Eurogroup To Steal From Cyprus

So says Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, here, for the UK Telegraph:

"First they purloin the savings and bank deposits in Laiki and the Bank of Cyprus, including the working funds of the University of Cyprus, and thousands of small firms hanging on by their fingertips. Then they seize three quarters of the country’s gold reserves, making it ever harder for Cyprus to extricate itself from EMU at a later date. ...

"Cypriots are learning what it means to be a member of monetary union when things go badly wrong. The crisis costs have suddenly jumped from €17bn to €23bn, and the burden of finding an extra €6bn will fall on Cyprus alone. ...

"The workhouse treatment of Cyprus is nevertheless remarkable. The creditor powers walked away from their fresh pledges for an EMU banking union by whipping up largely bogus allegations of Russian money-laundering in Nicosia. A Council of Europe by a British prosecutor has failed to validate the claims. The EU authorities have gone to great lengths to insist that Cyprus is a 'special case', but I fail to see what is special about it. There is far more Russian money – laundered or otherwise – in the Netherlands. The banking centres of Ireland and Malta are just as large as a share of GDP. Luxembourg’s banking centre is at least four times more leveraged to the economy. ...

"The original plan in Cyprus – approved by the Eurogroup, but rejected by the Cypriot parliament – was to steal the money from any bank regardless of its health, and from small depositors regardless of the €100,000 guarantee. They have shown their character. The Eurogroup don’t give a damn about moral hazard. They are thieves."

Jim Cramer Still Thinks You Are A Fool. He May Be Right.

M1 since the 2008 panic

M2 since the 2008 panic

M2 is up $2.71 trillion since the crisis, M1 $1.05 trillion. That means since September 1, 2008, nearly 39% of the rise in M2 is directly the result of the increase in M1 (checkable deposits, i.e. the spending money in circulating cash and checking accounts).

Overall, M1 is up nearly 75% over the period, but M2 just 35%. But back out the M1 and M2 is up only 21% net, or $1.66 trillion. Still, that's a lot of moolah being saved and not flowing into stock markets.

Enter Jim Cramer, who here says that as CD instruments (M2) mature now, they will not be rolled over but get invested in the only thing going for return, namely stocks:

"Every-day CDs from the halcyon days of the middle of the last decade, when rates were going higher, will come due -- and the dramatic decline in the rollover CDs should force that money into the stock market. Invariably I hear that this flow won't amount to a lot of money. Just dismiss these people out of hand; they are either short or ignorant."

"Force"? "I hope" is more like it. I smell a book-talker.

Most of this CD and money market fund money is money of "households", small time stuff under $100,000. With plunging returns on savings over the period as the US Federal Reserve Bank pursues its policy of financial repression through zero interest rate policy, Cramer is hoping households will suddenly become the greater fools with markets at all time highs and plunge into stocks even though households have been net negative all along since the crisis, pulling out $250 billion from the stock markets according to widely reported figures from Standard and Poors.

In contrast to households it's the funny money which has been driving the markets higher, banks and other corporations doing stock buy-backs to the tune of $1.2 trillion net over the period. Most troubling of all, a year ago already banks were reported to be responsible for fully 32% of the ownership of the total market all on their own, rivaling the household sector's 37% share. If you want to understand how markets are up so much, you have to look there.

Suckers who took Cramer's sell advice in early October 2008, people who "need their money in the next five years", have entirely missed this bank-driven rally which has been aided and abetted by the Fed. And potentially they lost as much as 25% right up front in just the first three weeks after his sell announcement on the nationally televised NBC Today Program, before the markets opened on Monday morning, October 6, 2008, the Monday after TARP was signed.

And here he is, 4.5 years later, hoping people will take his advice again and plunge in because there's plenty of liquidity to keep markets buoyant. Well, plenty as long as you provide it.

You know. Sell low, buy high.

They should hang a warning label around that guy's neck.

For What The Nation Earns Homes Are Still Overpriced (15%)

So says Bloomberg Businessweek, here:

"[H]ouses are overvalued. From 1988 through 1999, median home values averaged 2.6 times the median annual income. As the bubble kicked into gear, prices pushed up to almost four times income. With the crash, that ratio has come down—but not far enough, largely because incomes have been stagnant, if not declining, in recent years. Home values are now at three times the median income—that’s 15 percent higher than they have historically been, relative to what Americans earn."

From the point of view of the Case Shiller Home Price Index, a 15% correction to the current index value of 136 would imply 115.

In the post-war period, we have witnessed 115 on the index in December 1982, March 1975, December 1973, September 1968, and December 1952.

Jim Cramer Blames President's Fear-Mongering Over Sequester For March Jobs Number

Here:

"I think the report can be totally explained by our Fear Monger in Chief (i.e., President Obama), who scared the heck out of everyone as he talked about the massive job losses coming from sequester. I am sure that'll be the case, but the real impact here was similar to the U.S.'s pre-cliff non-dive, when the country's business was frozen."

35% Of Long Islanders Seriously Delinquent On Mortgages, Banks Not Foreclosing

And the people just keep living in the homes so long the notices of default expire and have to be refiled.

So says Keith Jurow for BusinessInsider here, who thinks the recovery in the housing market is a mirage actually created by the banks to help them unload some inventory at higher prices:

"I have solid figures from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York on the number of first mortgages in both NYC and Long Island. So the latest figures from the NYS Division of Banking indicate that roughly 30% of all owner-occupied properties in NYC are now seriously delinquent. For Long Island, it is an incredible 35%. ...

"Had the banks been foreclosing in the NYC metro, then the total number still delinquent would certainly be much lower than the Division of Banking figures. But the banks are not foreclosing in the NYC metro. I have shown this in several previous articles. ...

"Once a filing (called a notice of default) has been active for three years, it expires under NY state law. So the attorney for the lender has to refile the notice and begin the process all over. Picture those owners living in their house for more than three years without having paid a nickel toward the mortgage. It’s crazy, but that is what is occurring throughout Long Island." 

US Prints Record 3+ Billion $100 bills in 2012

The US Bureau of Engraving and Printing issued a record 3.0272 billion individual $100 bills in fiscal year 2012, according to its website here. Production problems with the new $100 bill for 2011 release as reported here resulted in only $72.32 billion in $100 bills being produced in fiscal 2011. The $100 note is the most produced paper currency in the US, averaging $173 billion worth annually for the last five years.

The $100 denomination's print run in fiscal 2012 alone is worth $302.72 billion.

The total production figures since 2008 for all paper money are as follows, averaging $216 billion annually:

2008 $154.2 billion

2009 $219.5 billion

2010 $239.5 billion

2011 $109.7 billion

2012 $358.9 billion.

Since over 90% of the notes replace money which is or has been in circulation, on average about $21 billion annually is actually being added to the currency supply, which is peanuts in a banking system with in excess of $10 trillion in deposits.

It is reported here that total circulating cash presently comes to about $1.175 trillion, so it would take about 6 years to replace all circulating currency at current production levels, perhaps a little longer as some currency effectively disappears because it is destroyed in accidents, sold on the collector market, or hoarded, the latter becoming more popular abroad. Currency in circulation, however, appears to be up about 26% since 2010 when $930 billion was reported to be in circulation. That's an increase of $245 billion in just over two years, which is curious if it's true since one might expect an increase of barely $50 billion over that short a time.

If that is thought to be highly inflationary, however, the figure actually pales in comparison to the real money increase in the country since 2008, namely total credit market debt outstanding, which is up $4.5 trillion to October 2012.

Margaret Thatcher Was No Libertarian, Moving Leftward To Adapt Like Sen. Rand Paul

Marco Rubio, are you listening?

Ben Domenech, here:

Thatcher was originally seen as a Heath acolyte within the Tory wing, given a cabinet position in Education – but the distance between them grew, and she became closer to fellow Cabinet member Keith Joseph, forming a tiny band of back benchers disagreeing with the aims of the party leadership. ...

Heath’s approach failed at the ballot box. After losing the election in 1974 and failing to form a coalition government with the Liberal Party (a No Labels-esque Government of National Unity), he took it as a sign that the Tories had to move leftward in order to adapt to the opinions of the nation. Thatcher disagreed, and that made all the difference. When Joseph announced that he would challenge Heath for party leadership, Thatcher was the only Cabinet member to endorse him; when Joseph was forced to withdraw (thanks to demography comments implying the working class really ought to consider using birth control more regularly – the speech is here), he was forced to withdraw. So Thatcher insisted she would run. ...

The dominant assumption was that [Thatcher] would have to moderate to become acceptable to the British people. She did not. Instead, she repackaged conservative principles with a message of common sense and optimism, attacking nonsensical regulation, union dominance, and high taxes with verve. She promised hope and growth, not dour austerity, and insisted that acceptance of a nation in decline was a choice, not an inevitability.

Thatcher: "Socialist governments ... always run out of other people's money."

Llew Gardner:

There are those nasty critics, of course, who suggest that you don't really want to bring them down at the moment. Life is a bit too difficult in the country, and that … leave them to sort the mess out and then come in with the attack later … say next year.

Mrs. Margaret Thatcher:

I would much prefer to bring them down as soon as possible. I think they've made the biggest financial mess that any government's ever made in this country for a very long time, and Socialist governments traditionally do make a financial mess. They always run out of other people's money. It's quite a characteristic of them. They then start to nationalise everything, and people just do not like more and more nationalisation, and they're now trying to control everything by other means. They're progressively reducing the choice available to ordinary people. Look at the trouble now we're having with choice of schools. Of course parents want a say in the kind of education their children have. Look at the William Tyndall School—an example where the parents finally rebelled. Of course they did. These schools are financed by taxpayers' money, but the choice to parents is being reduced.

Look at the large numbers of people who live on council estates. Many of them would like to buy their own homes. Oh, but that's not approved of by a Socialist government …   . oh no! But that's absurd. Why shouldn't they? Well over thirty per cent of our houses are council houses. Why shouldn't those people purchase their own homes if they can?

-- February 5, 1976, Thames TV interview, here

Thatcher's Finest Hour: And So Say All Of Us

"She always afterwards regarded the Falklands War as the most important period of her premiership."

-- The UK Telegraph, here

"The Prophet Without Honor In Her Own Country": Thatcher Dead at 87

both free at last

'The second negative [which helped end her prime ministership] was [Mrs. Thatcher's] intransigent attitude to further European integration; this put her in a minority in her own party. But re-reading her strident speeches today gives no sense of them being out-of-date or belonging to a by-gone era. She dismissed the idea of a United States of Europe as a fantasy. I believed in it at the time, but now I see that she was correct. She thought that the European Union should be simply a free trade area with limited co-operation between sovereign nations. That is what an increasing number of us who were once fervent Europeans would like to get back to. As she said in a famous speech in Bruges that was widely criticised: “Working closely together does not require power to be centralised in Brussels or decisions to be taken by an appointed bureaucracy… We have not successfully rolled back the frontiers of the State in Britain, only to see them re-imposed at a European level with a European super-state exercising a new dominance from Brussels.”

'... [I]n light of the perpetual crisis in which members of the Eurozone have found themselves since the onset of the financial banking crisis in 2007 as a result of misjudged integration, those negative judgments now appear wrong. In this respect at least, she was an example of the prophet without honour in her own country.'

-- Andreas Whittam Smith in The UK Independent, here

Since ObamaCare Was Upheld 2.03 Million Jobs Have Simply Disappeared

Ho-ney? I shrank the workforce!

The Supreme Court upheld ObamaCare on June 28, 2012.

Since July 1, 2012, full-time jobs are down 1.335 million over the eight months.

Part-time employment for economic reasons is down 607,000.

And part-time for noneconomic reasons is down 84,000.

So ObamaCare appears to be more negative for full-time jobs, but part-time employment is down also, by 691,000.

ObamaCare doesn't yet appear to be transforming the workforce into part-time. It just appears to be shrinking it, period.

Why Both Bush And Obama Were Re-elected

Bush and Obama both were re-elected in part because full-time jobs under their respective watches started and ended at almost precisely the same levels. Full-time employment was at 112 million and change at the beginning for each, and at 113 million and change at the end for each. 

Full-time jobs were up 1.6% under George W. Bush, and up 0.8% under Barack H. Obama.

Figures are for first terms beginning after accession to office through calendar election years, beginning on Feb. 1 and ending on Dec. 31.

Strange, but true. 

First They Came For Your Silver . . .

First they came for your silver (1964, last year minted).

Then they came for your dollar (1971, final year of dollar convertibility to gold).

Then they came for your tax deductions (1986 Tax "Reform" repealed deductibility of credit card interest).

Then they came for your mortgages (1997, introduction of two year rule to get you to borrow and churn).

Then they came for your banks (1999, allowed commercial banks to act like investment banks but with FDIC backstop).

Now they are coming for your bank deposits (2013, Cyprus), and not coincidentally, your guns.

Next it will be your 401ks and IRAs.

And then?

Of course there were other firsts before 1964, but these will do for now.

Economic Impact Of Lost Full-Time Jobs Since 2007

The level of full-time jobs for the five years between 2008 and 2012 has averaged about 114.2 million.

Peak full-time was 123.2 million in July 2007, so the average level is down from the 2007 peak by 9 million.

Average hourly earnings for all employees in the private sector for the period is about $22.60, or $47,008 per annum.

Times 9 million jobs that's $423.1 billion per year, or $2.12 trillion over the five years.

That's simply the payroll cost savings to American business, without adding in savings from no longer having to pay Social Security matching, unemployment insurance and workmen's compensation insurance premiums, and all the other benefits like health insurance, retirement and the like. The savings to business could easily have reached $2.5 trillion to date.

If you are wondering where business got the $1.2 trillion it has used for stock buybacks during the crisis, now you know.

March Unemployment Drops To 7.6%, Full-Time Work Still In Depression

You talkin' to me?

The full pdf report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics is here.

The official number of unemployed fell to 11.7 million from 12.0 million last month, but nearly 500,000 left the civilian labor force in the seasonally-adjusted measure. In the raw measure the civilian labor force participation rate is down to 63.1%, the only other example of which in the data going back to 1948 was in July 1976. Those not in the labor force rose year over year by about 2.5% to almost 90.5 million.

Multiple job-holding is up barely 2% year over year in the report. Full-time with a secondary part-time job is up 7.7% year over year. Holding two part-time jobs is down 7.9% year over year. Part-time for both voluntary and involuntary reasons is not much changed year over year: Voluntary is up about 1.2%, involuntary is actually down less than one half of one percent in the seasonally-adjusted category, but down 1.7% in the raw numbers. . . . I'm not yet seeing any convincing evidence in the data to date that ObamaCare is part-timing the country in general. Full-time by either measure is actually up a little, by about 0.7% year over year.

Total nonfarm employment is either 134.5 million not-seasonally-adjusted, or 135.2 million seasonally-adjusted, up less than 1.5% year over year. Peak was in January 2008 at 138 million seasonally-adjusted, so the depression in employment continues, driven by the loss of full-time jobs, which in the raw measure are still down 8.4 million from the July 2007 peak, or 6.8%.

Jobs added per month on average for the last year has been at the level of 169,000. Both January and February saw upward revisions to the previous reports of jobs added in the neighborhood of 30,000 each month. Jobs added in March at 88,000 looks like a big stall in the trend, but we'll have to wait a month or two for the revisions to say that with certainty.

At the current rate of job addition, Obama will be long gone (one hopes) before full-time jobs come back. Of the 169,000 jobs added per month on average in the last year, only somewhere between 63,000 and 73,000 are full-time per month based on the year over year gains in full-time. Call it 68,000 per month, that's 816,000 per year, so it will take only 10.3 more years to add back those 8.4 million full-time jobs we're down and get us back to the level of 2007 . . . in the year 2023.

Way to go, Brownie!

The Line of the Day: "I'll Bet Romney's Had Coffee"

Callahan doesn't take sugar in his coffee.

"He just didn't swallow."

h/t 'Nita

Gold: Over 60 Million Krugerrands Circulate, More Than All Others Combined

So says the Rand Refinery's latest brochure, here, showing 2012 mint specimens. Figures through 2008 previously indicated 46 million ounces minted.

These 60 million Krugerrands are not all 1 oz. coins, but if they were, that would mean something like $96 billion worth with current gold prices around $1,600 the ounce.

Presumably therefore, there must be something like 110 million gold coins of all kinds out there if Krugerrands represent more than all the rest combined, with a current value of roughly $176 billion.

Not very much real money when you get right down to it.

Of course, there's lots of bars out there which can be turned into coin.

Official global gold reserves as of last summer were approaching 31,000 metric tons (2,204.6 lbs each), for a grand total of 68,342,600 lbs, which is 1,093,481,600 ounces, in other words, potentially about 1.093 billion more gold coins, with a current estimated value of $1.75 trillion.

Add the current gold coinage and you've got a potential $1.93 trillion in gold money for the world at current prices, 1.2 billion one ounce gold coins, or 12 billion tenth ounce gold coins, or 1.6 tenth ounce gold coins for every man, woman and child on the planet (7.1 billion), or $256 each.

Equality is such a bummer.

Meanwhile at home, current net worth of US households and non-profits in US funny money is $66.072 trillion, or $210 billion for every man, woman and child in the country.

Now, that's more like it!

Forbes: The Fed Is The Most Hypocritical, Thieving, Incompetent Bank In The Country

Richard Salsman for Forbes here savages the thieving, incompetent US Federal Reserve for its utter hypocrisy in keeping comparatively well-capitalized big banks from paying out dividends when its own balance sheet is the most under-capitalized of all and pays out 100% of what it makes.

Not news, but it bears repeating as often as possible, especially when it's stated so well:

'[I]n the century prior to the Fed’s founding in 1913, U.S. commercial banks were far more liquid and far better capitalized; in the century since 1913, however, and especially since the FDIC was established in 1934, the banks’ liquidity and capital adequacy measures have steadily deteriorated. This artificial, policy-induced financial precariousness has been used routinely as a pretext to justify onerous regulations – which, it’s easy to notice, have never quite adequately curbed all the excessive risk-taking and hence periodic banking crises. Bank executives often oppose the onerous regulations, but not the government subsidies which invite them. ...

'What about the Fed? It’s now got the biggest balance sheet of all the major banks in the U.S. – $3.1 trillion in total assets (versus $2.2 trillion at Bank of America, the largest private-sector bank in the U.S.) – and yet the Fed also has only $55.1 billion in capital (versus $160.3 billion at Bank of America). That means the Fed’s capital/assets ratio is a mere 1.8%, less than a quarter of the average capital ratio for the top eighteen banks subject to CCAR (8.0%) and of the three banks recently deemed inadequate (8.2%). The Fed’s capital ratio is only 15% of the ratio of BB&T (11.5%), the most-capitalized of the top private banks. Moreover, the Fed’s dividend payout ratio is hardly conservative or capital-preserving (like 10-33%); it is a 100% payout, since the Fed pays all its income (mainly from Treasury bonds, notes and bills), none of which is taxed, straight to the Treasury. Whereas the Fed is leveraged 56:1 (liabilities/capital), the top eighteen banks are leveraged by just 12:1 (average), while the three censured banks are leveraged by only 10:1 (average). ...

'This is the same Fed which, over the past century, has debased the dollar to such a degree that it’s now worth only 5% of its initial real purchasing power in 1913 (whereas the dollar in 1913 was approximately as valuable as it was in 1813, because it was anchored by the gold standard, not by a flimsy Fed standard). This is the same Fed that Alan Greenspan touted in a 1996 speech as “the ultimate guardian of the purchasing power of our money.” Is it truly a “guardian” – or instead an incompetent, or perhaps a thief – who presides over a loss of 95%? This is the same Fed which now censures private banks for having capital levels many times greater than the Fed’s own capital level. Isn’t it high time we ended the hypocrisy whereby the politically-financially reckless among us rule the day?'

The big banks' off-balance-sheet assets make their capital ratios much worse than stated above, but that just makes them more like the Fed in that respect. Salsman points out that before 1913 when we still had true, private banking, capital ratios averaged 20%+, whereas today 8% is about as good as it gets. 

The Nation: Bill Clinton Wrecked The Economy, Not David Stockman

So Robert Sheer, here:

It wasn’t Stockman who wrecked the economy. It was Bill Clinton who deregulated the too-big-to-fail banks, and it was George W. Bush and Barack Obama who bailed them out. But even Paul Krugman, who knows how bad things are and yet manages to be charitable in appraisals of his Princeton colleague Ben Bernanke, dismisses Stockman’s critique as “cranky old man stuff. ...” ...

Herein is a lesson that the bankers should have been taught back during the Clinton presidency when, as Stockman writes, the principle of a bailout for Wall Street’s hustlers “was reinforced by the Fed’s unforgivable 1998 bailout of the hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management.”

That fiasco’s enablers—Alan Greenspan, Robert Rubin and Lawrence Summers—and the more disastrous ones to follow were crowned “The Committee to Save the World” on Time magazine’s Feb. 15, 1999, cover and are still welcomed in those polite circles where truth-teller Stockman is being treated as a pariah.

Corporations Borrow Cheap, Drive Market Highs Since March 2009 With $1.2T In Buybacks

So reports CNBC.com here, stating individual investors by contrast have pulled out $250 billion:

Corporate stock purchases have been the principal driver of the market's surge off its March 2009 lows, as companies have helped levitate prices through nearly $1.2 trillion in buybacks since the beginning of the third quarter in 2009, according to Standard & Poor's data.

During that same time, individual investors have pulled a net of more than $250 billion out of mutual funds, according to records from the Investment Company Institute that indicate the retail crowd has mostly fled the stock market and put the bulk of its money in cash or bonds. Mutual funds are seen as a proxy for mom-and-pop investors who use funds and 401(k) plans to put money into the market.

Companies have been able to be so aggressive because the Federal Reserve has kept money cheap. The U.S. central bank has held its target funds rate near zero to maintain low borrowing costs, while it also has flooded financial markets with more than $3 trillion in liquidity through money creation.

American Women Abort 3,300/Day, But These Two Think White Men Are More Violent

The clueless Childresses, here:

"Nearly all of the mass shootings in this country in recent years — not just Newtown, Aurora, Fort Hood, Tucson and Columbine — have been committed by white men and boys. Yet when the National Rifle Association (NRA), led by white men, held a news conference after the Newtown massacre to advise Americans on how to reduce gun violence, its leaders’ opinions were widely discussed."

Total Credit Money Creation Has Stalled Since 2007

Total credit money creation, aka total credit market debt outstanding (TCMDO), has stalled since 2007.

Doubling time for TCMDO has averaged 8.25 years between 1949 and 2007. The longest doubling times were 11.5 years from 1949 to 1961 and 10 years from 1989 to 1999. The shortest two episodes were each six years long: from 1977 to 1983, and from 1983 to 1989.

Real GDP over the longest periods increased 56% and 36% respectively. Over the shortest periods it increased 14% and 28% respectively.

Since 2007 TCMDO is expanding at a crawl, comparatively speaking, up at just 12% for the five years ended in July 2012. Real GDP for the period is a pathetic 3%.

At the current snail's pace, $1165 billion per year for the last five years, it will take until the year 2050 for TCMDO to double again.

Current quantitative easing programs continued indefinitely at the current rate of $1020 billion per year are as unlikely as previous iterations to lead to the expansion of TCMDO. The transfer mechanism is broken because the credit money creators, the banks, now prefer the option of investing elsewhere, which they did not have before 1999. The only way to fix that is to overturn Gramm-Leach-Bliley, and to reform mortgage lending. 

Credit money, the lifeblood of the nation, is not even reaching the veins, let alone flowing through them at a rate sufficient to generate any GDP heat.

Ben Bernanke Is Trying But Failing Miserably At Money Printing

And it's not exactly his fault.

Historically in the postwar period, the increase in Total Credit Market Debt Outstanding (TCMDO) has closely shadowed the increase in Total Net Worth, seemingly helping to finance it, until the late great recession when for the first time, and very briefly, net worth flagged below the level of the debt owed. (Ignoramuses in the Doomosphere everywhere cried "Insolvency" at the time, not understanding the meaning of the term "net"). Ex post facto, net worth has made a dramatic upswing while the debt owed has increased at a much reduced rate by historical standards. To quote a famous president, "That doesn't make any sense."

Despite all the debt naysayers out there, total credit market debt is not increasing at anything like it should be, and appears to be disconnected to a significant degree from the recent increase in total net worth, which is up 29% since its nadir at the beginning of 2009, or $14.7 trillion. For the whole five year period from July 2007 (the last time TCMDO doubled, going back to 1999) to July 2012, TCMDO increased at a rate of just 12% and real GDP increased just 2.9%, whereas TCMDO increased at a rate of 100% between 1949 and 2007 on average every 8.25 years. The shortest doubling times have included two periods of 6 years each, one of 6.75 years, one of 8 years, one of 9.5 years, one of 10 years, and one of 11.5 years. The very worst real GDP performance of all of those was for a 6 year doubling period when we got 14% real GDP, nearly 5 times better than we're getting now. All the rest posted real GDP of between 23% and 56%.

It is evident that Ben Bernanke's quantitative easing program (right scale) anticipated the leveling off of TCMDO (left scale). Clearly he expected the troubled banks to need a push to keep the credit money creation process going, but didn't understand how fruitless it would be. One notes that he has added about $2 trillion to the monetary base from the middle of the late great recession. By contrast, TCMDO is up (only!) $9 trillion from the beginning of 2007. By historical standards TCMDO should be up $25 trillion by now if TCMDO is to double again in ten years from 2007. And it should be up a lot more than even $25 trillion by now if it's to double sooner than ten years. At the average doubling time of 8.25 years, the $49.8 trillion of TCMDO in July 2007 should hit $99.684 trillion by October of 2015 if the postwar pattern is to continue. Instead, at the current rate of growth in TCMDO, it's going to take an unprecedented 27 years to double it, unless of course there are limits to borrowing to fuel growth, as many are beginning to tell us. In either event one can only assume there will be only pathetic real GDP growth going forward, if there is any at all.

Clearly something is horribly amiss in the transmission process of credit money creation for the first time in the postwar. Seemingly gargantuan quantities of money from the Fed through the process of quantitative easing should be seeding the banks who in turn should be creating massive amounts of credit way beyond the $9 trillion so far created. Instead, the banks are doing something else with it, by-passing the normal distribution channel. Some of the seed money is being held back to comply with increased capital requirements, to be sure, but more appears to be going directly into household net worth creation through investment gains from the stock market, enriching a very few bondholders, shareholders and banking industry players through the private trading desks of the banks, a unique development by historical standards made possible only since 1999 with the abolition of Glass-Steagall through the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act. As an act of Congress, Ben Bernanke can't do much about that even if he is the most powerful man in the country.

In the absence of a creative policy change from the Fed whereby Congressional intent would be thwarted and money would actually reach the marketplace through a different avenue than the uncooperative banks, one must conclude that the Fed thinks it necessary to continue the various easing schemes because it judges the banks to be still too fragile to risk stopping them. That would be putting the best construction on the matter, to borrow a phrase from Luther's catechism. Either that, or the Fed itself has been completely captured by the bankers.

Cyprus: "Punishing A Whole Country Just To Hit Russians"

'Particularly successful at luring Russians, Cyprus has built up a large infrastructure of lawyers, accountants and other professionals schooled in the arts of tax avoidance. Its corporate registry now has 320,000 registered companies, a staggering number for a country with only 860,000 people. Most are hollow shells set up for foreign companies and wealthy individuals seeking to avoid taxes.

'"We have been thrown to the wolves, and now the wolves have responded," said Nicholas Papadopoulos, who heads the financial and budgetary affairs committee in the House of Representatives.

'Bitterly critical of last week's bailout deal — which is forcing Cyprus to shrink its banking and financial services industry drastically and stick the largest bank depositors with much of the bill — Mr. Papadopoulos said the European Union was "punishing a whole country just to hit Russians."'

More here.

Developing Countries Bail Out Of The Euro Big Time Since 2009

"The choice of where to hold reserves sends a clear signal of which currencies developing countries regard as the most stable, safe and liquid. Euros now make up only 24 percent of their reserves, the lowest since 2002, and down from a peak of 31 percent as recently as 2009. The dollar has held steady at about 60 percent."

Read the rest, here.

David Stockman Hates Everything About America, Except Cash

Just like, you guessed it, The New York Times!

He hates:

Crony capitalism, Keynesianism, imperialism, stimulus, social insurance, incumbency, the constitution, free elections, lobbying, deficit spending, the Fed's discount window, the FDIC, the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, quantitative easing, interest rate repression, and currencies in a race to the bottom.

But honestly, all he really hates are the new stock market highs.

"When the latest bubble pops, there will be nothing to stop the collapse. If this sounds like advice to get out of the markets and hide out in cash, it is."

Wah. Wah. Wah.

Read it all here.

The US Dollar Has A Long Way To Go, But The Trend Has Been Up

The US dollar is up for a number of reasons: 

permanency in the tax code effective January 1, 2013;

elevated spending by the federal government arrested, due to PARTISAN gridlock (hurrah!);

and increased US DOMESTIC oil production from technology advances, despite the most anti-oil president ever to sit in the Oval.

Just think where we would be if we actually had a pro-US president.

Well, for one thing, we'd be WORKING, most likely.

Charlie Maxwell Believes Increased US Oil Production Strengthens The Dollar

Summary transcript of his comments from March 24th, here:

Next was a discussion of how the production from the Baaken formation in North Dakota affected supply and demand in the U.S. It has had a favorable affect in that we now import about 8 million barrels per day and 4-5 years ago we imported about 11 million barrels. We are headed for 5-6 million barrels per day (of imports) within the next 10 years. Two favorable outcomes will be a stronger dollar and a delay of the time when we run short of oil, worldwide.

Why Deposit Confiscation On Cyprus Was Wrong

Liam Halligan, for the UK Telegraph, here:

"Across Cyprus this Easter, hundreds of family-owned businesses are trying to come to terms with what they see as the theft of their working capital. Numerous charities, universities and other educational endowments have also been whacked. As I said, depositors are not investors. There is an absolutely crucial distinction between them, or, at least, in a modern society, there should be. Moving on any depositors, large or small, seriously undermines the financial and legal fabric of capitalism itself."