Tyranny Of The PhDs | David Stockman's Contra Corner

Tyranny Of The PhDs

by David Stockman • June 14, 2016

Sad to say, you haven’t seen nothin’ yet. The world is drifting into financial entropy, and it is going to get steadily worse. That’s because the emerging stock market slump isn’t just another cyclical correction; it’s the opening phase of the end-game.

That is, the end game of the PhD Tyranny.

During the last two decades the major central banks of the world have been colonized lock, stock and barrel by Keynesian crackpots. These academic scribblers and power-hungry apparatchiks have now pushed interest rate repression, massive monetization (QE) and relentless rigging of the financial markets to the limits of sanity and beyond. Honest, market-driven price discovery is dead as a doornail.

No more proof is needed than the “matrix” below. The very thing that financial history proves, above all else, is that governments can’t be trusted to honor their debts.  And that cardinal fact is supposed to be embodied in the yield.

In fact, modern welfare state democracies have a veritable fiscal death wish.

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The Case For A Super Glass-Steagall | David Stockman's Contra Corner

The Case For A Super Glass-Steagall

Donald Trump can instantly get to the left of Hillary with respect to Wall Street and the one percenters by embracing Super Glass-Steagall.

The latter would cap U.S. banks at $180 billion in assets (<1% of GDP) if they wished to have access to the Fed’s discount window and have their deposits backed by FDIC insurance. Such Federally privileged institutions would also be prohibited from engaging in trading, underwriting, investment banking, private equity, hedge funds, derivatives and other activities outside of deposit taking and lending.

Instead, these latter inherently risky economic functions would be performed on the free market by at-risk banks and financial services companies. The latter could never get too big to fail or to manage because the market would stop them first or they would be disciplined by the fail-safe institution of bankruptcy. No taxpayer would ever be put in harms’ way of trades like those of the London Whale.

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Losing Ground In Flyover America——Wanting For Work, Buried In Debt, Part 4 | David Stockman's Contra Corner

Losing Ground In Flyover America — Wanting For Work, Buried In Debt, Part 4

by David Stockman • June 2, 2016

The flyover zones of America are wanting for work and buried in debt. That’s the legacy of three decades of Washington/Wall Street Bubble Finance. The latter has exported jobs, crushed the purchasing power of main street wages and showered the bicoastal elites with the windfalls of financialization.

The graph below depicts the main street side of this great societal swindle at work. There are currently 126 million prime working age persons in the US between 25 and 54 years of age. That’s up from 121 million at the beginning of 2000.

Yet even as this business cycle is rolling over, the 77.1 million employed full-time from that pool is still 1.2 million below its turn of the century level and accounts for only 61% of the population. On top of that, average real hourly wages have fallen by 7% (based on the Flyover CPI), as well.

It might be wondered, therefore, as to how real consumption expenditures rose by $3.1 trillion or 38% during the same 16-year period?

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Losing Ground In Flyover America, Part 3 | David Stockman's Contra Corner

Losing Ground In Flyover America, Part 3

by David Stockman • May 28, 2016

As we indicated in Part 2, the Fed’s crusade to pump-up inflation toward its 2.00% target by hammering-down interest rates to the so-called zero bound is economically lethal. The former destroys the purchasing power of main street wages while the latter strip mines capital from business and channels it into Wall Street financial engineering and the inflation of stock prices.

In the case of America’s 80 million working age adults (25 or over) with a high school education or less, the Fed’s double whammy has been catastrophic. As we demonstrated yesterday, the employment-to-population ratio for this group has plummeted from 60% prior to the great recession to about 54% today.

In round terms this means that the number of job holders in that pool of the less educated has shrunk from 49.4 million to 43.5 million since early 2007.That’s nearly 6 million workers gone missing or 12% of the total from just nine years ago.

And as we documented yesterday this plunge is not due to aging demographics. The MSM meme that it’s all about the baby boomers hanging up their spikes doesn’t wash; the labor force participation rate of persons over 65 has actually increased sharply in recent years.

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Losing Ground In Flyover America, Part 2 | David Stockman's Contra Corner

Losing Ground In Flyover America, Part 2

There has never been a more destructive central banking policy than the Fed’s current maniacal quest to stimulate more inflation and more debt. That’s what is killing real wages and economic vitality in flyover America—-even as it showers prodigious windfalls of unearned wealth on Wall Street and the bicoastal elites who draft on the nation’s vastly inflated finances.

In fact, the combination of pumping-up inflation toward 2% and hammering-down interest rates to the so-called zero bound is economically lethal. The former destroys the purchasing power of main street wages while the latter strip mines capital from business and channels it into Wall Street financial engineering and the inflation of stock prices.

In the case of the 2% inflation target, even if it was good for the general economy, which it most assuredly is not, it’s a horrible curse on flyover America. That’s because its nominal pay levels are set on the margin by labor costs in the export factories of China and the EM and the service sector outsourcing shops in India and its imitators.

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Losing Ground In Flyover America | David Stockman's Contra Corner

Losing Ground In Flyover America

The cowardly dithering in the Eccles Building is sucking Wall Street punters into a vortex. And it promises to be the mother of all bubble implosions.

There is no other possible outcome for a stock market that is trading at 24Xreported earnings in the teeth of the most enormous headwinds ever accumulated.

The intensifying global deflation/recession lapping upon these shores gets more ominous by the day. Yet that’s only the half of it.

When you take an unvarnished look at the domestic economy, the real recessionary skunk in the woodpile becomes apparent. Yet the casino is falsely capitalizing earnings as if recessions have been outlawed and the nirvana of Keynesian full-employment has become a permanent condition, world without end.

Today’s bubblevision meme that all is well because the Fed judges the economy to be strong enough to absorb 1% money market rates some time next year is just a manifestation of that permanent full employment delusion. After all, earnings always collapse during a recession—–so implicitly there is not one in sight as far as the eye can see.

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Trumped! Why It Happened And What Comes Next, Part 3 (The Jobs Deal) | David Stockman's Contra Corner

Trumped! Why It Happened And What Comes Next, Part 3 (The Jobs Deal)

Donald Trump’s patented phrase “we aren’t winning anymore” lies beneath the tidal wave of anti-establishment sentiment propelling his campaign and, to some considerable degree, that of Bernie Sanders, too.

As we demonstrated in Part 1, what’s winning is Washington, Wall Street and the bicoastal elites. The latter prosper from finance, the LA and SF branches of entertainment ( movies/TV and social media, respectively) and the great rackets of the Imperial City—including the military/industrial/surveillance complex, the health and education cartels, the plaintiffs and patent bar, the tax loophole farmers and the endless lesser K-Street racketeers.

But most of America’s vast flyover zone has been left behind. Thus, the bottom 90% of families have no more real net worth today than they had 30 years ago and earn lower real household incomes and wages than they did 25 years ago.

Needless to say, the lack of good jobs lies at the bottom of the wealth and income drought on main street, and this week’s April jobs report provided still another reminder.

During the last three months goods-producing jobs have been shrinking again, even as the next recession knocks on the door. These manufacturing, construction and energy/mining jobs are the highest paying in the US economy and average about $56,000 per year in cash wages. Yet it appears that the 30 year pattern shown in the graph below——lower lows and lower highs with each business cycle—-is playing out once again.

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Trumped! Why It Happened And What Comes Next, Part 2 (The Peace Deal) | David Stockman's Contra Corner

Trumped! Why It Happened And What Comes Next, Part 2 (The Peace Deal)

When it comes to the economic future, a Trump presidency could bring either a shitstorm or salvation. Regrettably, the odds of the former are immensely the higher.

That’s because Trump is a welcome, but extremely unguided missile. On the one hand, his great virtue is that he is a superb salesman and showman who has captured the GOP nomination and has a serious shot at the White House with absolutely no help whatsoever from the Washington/Wall Street establishment.

So unlike any other candidate in recent memory, he owns his own talking points; is not saddled with a stable of credentialed advisors schooled in three decades of policy error and failure; and has the hutzpah to trust his own instincts——many of which, especially on foreign policy, are exactly the rebuke that Imperial Washington and its legions of parasites and racketeers so richly deserve.

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Trumped! Why It Happened And What Comes Next, Part 1 | David Stockman's Contra Corner

Trumped! Why It Happened And What Comes Next, 

Part 1

First there were seventeen. At length, there was one.

Donald Trump’s wildly improbable capture of the GOP nomination, therefore, is the most significant upheaval in American politics since Ronald Reagan. And the proximate cause is essentially the same. Like back then, an era of drastic bipartisan mis-governance has finally generated an electoral impulse to sweep out the stables.

Accordingly, the Donald’s patented phrase that “we aren’t winning anymore” is striking a deep nerve on main street. But that is not on account of giant trade deficits or a faltering foreign policy and failed military adventures per se.

Indeed, it has very little to do with any patriotic impulse with respect to America’s collective polity, and everything to do with voter perceptions that they personally are not winning economically anymore, either.

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The Cult Of Central Banking Is Dead In The Water | David Stockman's Contra Corner

The Cult Of Central Banking Is Dead In The Water

The Fed has been sitting on the funds rate like some monetary mother hen since December 2008. Once it punts again at the June meeting owing to Brexit worries it will have effectively pegged money market rates at the zero bound for 90 straight months.

There has never been a time in financial history when anything close to this happened, including the 1930s. Nor was interest-free money for eight years running ever even imagined in the entire history of monetary thought.

So where’s the fire? What monumental emergency justifies this resort to radical monetary intrusion and repression?

Alas, there is none. And that’s as in nichts, nada, nope, nothing!

There is a structural growth problem, of course. But it has absolutely nothing to do with monetary policy; and it can’t be fixed with cheap money and more debt, anyway.

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Toward A Grand New Bargain: How Donald Trump Can Clear The Field And Realign American Politics | Zero Hedge

Toward A Grand New Bargain: How Donald Trump Can Clear The Field And Realign American Politics

Submitted by David Stockman via Contra Corner blog,

It’s actually pretty easy. At an apt moment very soon, Trump should offer Governor Kasich the VP slot and Senator Cruz the vacant Supreme Court seat.

Such a grand bargain would not only clear the primary field and quash any backroom hijacking of the nomination by the Washington GOP establishment; it would also permit each man to play his highest and best role at this great inflection point in the nation’s history.

That is, Donald Trump’s job is to destroy the Republican/Neocon establishment and bring working class America back into a modern version of a McKinley-style Republican Party. Ted Cruz’ task is to spend a lifetime bringing strict constructionism back to the high court, thereby helping to restore constitutional restraints on a leviathan state that fundamentally threatens personal liberty and economic freedom and prosperity in America.

And, yes, there really isn’t much for a washed-out, me-too Republican pol like Kasich to do at all. Except to get out of the way and exercise his apparent talent for preacherly uplift as America’s eulogist-in-chief at foreign state funerals.

Beyond the rightness of it, there’s some pretty potent logic for the politics of the deal, too, There would be lots of of winners all around—–most especially the long-suffering American people.

Mitch McConnell and his rudderless Senate wheels, for example, would not need even a ten minute caucus to hand down to young Ted Cruz a life sentence to the Supreme Court.

At the same time and more importantly, however, the American public would score a twofer——a more faithful high court and one less warmonger on Capitol Hill.

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Toward A Grand New Bargain: How Donald Trump Can Clear The Field And Realign American Politics | David Stockman's Contra Corner

Toward A Grand New Bargain: How Donald Trump Can Clear The Field And Realign American Politics

It’s actually pretty easy. At an apt moment very soon, Trump should offer Governor Kasich the VP slot and Senator Cruz the vacant Supreme Court seat.

Such a grand bargain would not only clear the primary field and quash any backroom hijacking of the nomination by the Washington GOP establishment; it would also permit each man to play his highest and best role at this great inflection point in the nation’s history.

That is, Donald Trump’s job is to destroy the Republican/Neocon establishment and bring working class America back into a modern version of a McKinley-style Republican Party. Ted Cruz’ task is to spend a lifetime bringing strict constructionism back to the high court, thereby helping to restore constitutional restraints on a leviathan state that fundamentally threatens personal liberty and economic freedom and prosperity in America.

And, yes, there really isn’t much for a washed-out, me-too Republican pol like Kasich to do at all. Except to get out of the way and exercise his apparent talent for preacherly uplift as America’s eulogist-in-chief at foreign state funerals.

Beyond the rightness of it, there’s some pretty potent logic for the politics of the deal, too, There would be lots of of winners all around—–most especially the long-suffering American people.

Cont...... 

The World Economy Wreckers Of Beijing | David Stockman's Contra Corner

The World Economy Wreckers Of Beijing

The desperate suzerains of the Red Ponzi are incorrigible. There appears to be no insult to economic rationality that they will not attempt in order to perpetuate their power, privileges and rule.

So now comes the most preposterous gambit yet. Namely, a veritable tsunami of state handouts to foster, yes, capitalist entrepreneurs!

That’s right. As described by Bloomberg, Premier Li Keqiang  gave the word, and, presto, nearly $340 billion poured into an instantly confected army of purported venture capital funds run by local government officialdom all over the land.

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