Grant Williams wrote a brilliant piece, with a few excerpts here and a link to John Mauldin's website:
That Was the Weak That Worked
On
the one hand, Bernanke would want to leave the Fed with the wind-down
of his expansionist policy underway so that he would have the kind of
plausible deniability that history has gradually been stripping away
from Alan Greenspan. ("Hey, don't blame ME. We were exiting QE when I
left office!") On the other hand, though, he wouldn't want to hand Janet
Yellen an impossible situation.
The solution? Taper Lite
"All the goodness of the Taper with no bitter aftertaste!"
... and the markets, after the scares in May and June, LOVED it!!"
Or what I call it: The Taper ... that isn't!
Bernanke
is trying to evade accountability for what's coming, while giving
Yellen the green light to keep the monetary heroin going.
Later, after the market collapse again, he'll then deny all responsibility!
Just like Greenspan has done, including just within the last few weeks.
Then,
after having KILLED free markets and capitalism, they'll declare that
free markets and capitalism don't work. As if their endless state
interventions were somehow some form of capitalism.
We will need
to hold them accountable when that happens. What they have been doing
is NOT capitalism nor free markets. It's progressivism. It's statism.
It's fascism. They have the same roots.
"Errrr ... sorry to spoil the party, but a couple of things here:
Firstly,
the reason the market spiked is that the Fed's Taper turned out to be a
paltry $10 bn a month and not the "whopping" $20 bn a month that had
been floated by various Fed mouthpieces back in May
cough-cough-cough-hilsenrath-c ough." /Jon Hilsenrath, the Fed's "voice"
at the Wall St Journal, who I refer to as Bernanke's whore./
from
the article, quoting "Bernanke's whore", who released the Fed's
"translation" (this is only a tiny quote, while Hilsenrath's entire
explanation was much longer) just seconds after the Fed's statement. My,
how fast he types!
"(WSJ): The Fed went to great lengths to send
the message that interest rates are staying low even longer than the
Fed indicated earlier. It said today that it will keep interest rates
low "well past" the time when the unemployment rate reaches 6.5%."
As I said, the Taper... that isn't!
"Thirdly,
they managed to communicate that this policy will be reversible at the
drop of a hat should things start to look as though the vaunted
"recovery" is nothing more than a mirage conjured by their actions."
"...the
markets reacted just as you would expect, once they realized that they
had faced down the Fed in the summer and forced them into a taper that
is essentially a non-event."
Again, the taper... that isn't! This so-called QE taper is worse than mere mistake. It's deception! It's PROPAGANDA!
I will next post a graph that shows what a farce -- a HOAX -- the Fed's
QE taper really is! It's just more debt monetization, while calling it a
return to normalcy. It's really a SCAM!
The QE Taper... that isn't!
Does that really look like much of a wind-down to you? The Fed will still monetize $900 billion of new debt over the next year! Does that sound like the end of QE to you?
Me neither!
another excerpt from the article:
"A look at the correlation of the S&P 500 to the Fed's balance sheet tells you just about all you need to know. Since 2009, the correlation has been an astonishing 89.7%. Why would anybody not just buy markets, given that they are going to go up based purely on the Fed's aggressive stimulus?"
more:
"Bizarrely, by creating an environment that forces those with capital to seek out additional risk due to the paltry returns afforded by zero percent rates, the Federal Reserve has steered investors to seek out the least-risky place to invest their money, and that has been equities."
Note that without endless QE, stocks would be only about 1/3 of their current price.
"Equity prices USED TO BE a reflection of the strength of the underlying economy — after all, the component pieces of benchmark indices were functioning companies that existed in the real world where they need to manufacture something and sell it to a buyer in order to stay in business and make a profit...
"But under the surface and in the wider economy, the story is very different, indeed, as the mountain of cash on corporate balance sheets has led to an avalanche of buybacks, which has in turn boosted earnings and given the impression that things are roaring, when in fact the true story is a familiar one of an increase in debt." (emphasis mine)
more from the article:
"Assets less liabilities for corporations economy-wide are approximately where they were in the last quarter of 2004 or the first quarter of 2005. But stock prices are much higher in aggregate."
Do you understand that? Corporations aren't any stronger today. But stock prices are MUCH higher. Does that sound sustainable to you? Doesn't that sound like a description of a BUBBLE, rather than sound economic growth?
more:
"This chart was bad at the end of 2012 — in bubble territory, for sure — which was a big part of why I didn't think we'd get through 2013. Well, we did — and now it's worse, because this is only updated through the end of September and of course the market has gone screaming higher in the last three months."
Did he use the word "bubble"? And that was a YEAR AGO! And he's says it's much worse NOW!
"(USA Today): Boosting optimism for the new year ahead, the government announced Friday that the economy in the third quarter grew at its fastest rate in nearly two years and much better than previously estimated...
""The consumer is back in the game," exulted Chris Rupkey, chief financial economist of Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ, in a client note Friday. "Is this economic growth fast enough to put America back to work? The answer is, yes. The wheels of the economy are turning fast enough to bring down the unemployment rate further."
But the reality from the GDP report cited in the media is this:
"...Meanwhile, over a third of the strength in the economy was down to private inventory buildup — the biggest such buildup since records began almost 70 years ago /He then shows another chart, which I won't post here/.
"So, despite equity markets making all-time highs in 2013 more often than Miley Cyrus gave offence, beneath the surface, the economy — which equities are supposed to reflect — didn't perform as well as the headlines would have you believe; and by far the biggest driving force behind the strength of the equity market was free money courtesy of QE."
