A couple of minor technical problems called “business” and “life” have now intruded on my increasingly bogged down publication schedule that, in the interest of getting caught up, I’m presenting a condensed version of the Fed Report tonight. It includes just the main components of the macro liquidity indicator (which I suspect is probably all that you really want anyway). For reference purposes you can access the last full report and a free preview here. I promise to do my best to get back to the usual 125 page tome by the end of this week. Then I will take a vacation!

In the meantime, I thank you for your forebearance and support. My 90 year old mother and my wife, who rarely see me, both thank you for sharing me with them from time to time.

I hope that you are enjoying the new Capitalstool.com Stool Pigeons Wire message board software also installed at the Wall Street Examiner forums, that I have been working to get installed and operational since yesterday. They’re pretty spiffy and were part of the reason for this delay, but only part.

So, with no more excuses and without further adieu, let’s begin this week’s festivities on a fresh page. However, before we do that, I would like to note just one thing that’s not covered in the summary report below. The Fed’s balance sheet shrank by $10 billion this week and is now $45 billion below its level when QE2 ended last June. So please don’t get sucked in by the nonsense flying around the web about the Fed doing a stealth QE. It just ain’t a fact, M’am!

Click here to download complete report in pdf format (Professional Edition Subscribers) including 19 pages of charts and clear, cutting edge analysis that you can use to gain an edge in the market. Try the Professional Edition risk free for thirty days. If, within that time, you don’t find the information useful, I will give you a full refund. It’s that simple. 30 day risk free trial for new subscribers. Click here for more information.

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Stay up to date with the machinations of the Fed, Treasury, Primary Dealers and foreign central banks in the US market, along with regular updates of the US housing market, in the Fed Report in the Professional Edition, Money Liquidity, and Real Estate Package. Try it risk free for 30 days. Don’t miss another day. Get the research and analysis you need to understand these critical forces. Be prepared. Stay ahead of the herd. Click this link and begin your risk free trial NOW!

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This is a syndicated post, which originally appeared at oftwominds-Charles Hugh Smith, reposted with permission. View original post.

Medicare is an example of an unsustainable system that will go away in the decade ahead. 

Here are the sobering facts about the number of workers and those drawing Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid entitlements in the U.S. While the government claims to have a “trust fund” to pay for Social Security and Medicare, this is illusory propaganda. There are no funds set aside to pay these entitlements–they are “pay as you go” programs funded by current tax revenues. If the tax revenues don’t cover the programs’ expenses, the Treasury sells bonds, i.e. issues debt to pay the entitlements.

Social Security (SSA) has 61 million beneficiaries as of March 2012.

Medicare has 49 million beneficiaries as of November 2011.

Medicaid has over 50 million beneficiaries; another source puts the current number at 58 million.

Kaiser Family Foundation says roughly 7 million “dual-eligibles” who receive both Medicaid and Medicare, so let’s use the data point of 50 million Medicaid-only recipients.

We can assume that most people drawing Medicare benefits also draw Social Security, while the 8+ million drawing disability from Social Security are also covered by Medicaid.

However you slice it, there are roughly 60 million people drawing Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid and another 50 million Medicaid recipients for a total of 110 million people drawing significant entitlements.

As I have noted here many times, there are only 115 million full-time jobs in the U.S.

That means the ratio of workers to recipients of significant “pay as you go” entitlements is roughly 1-to-1: 115 million full-time workers and 110 million people drawing Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid.

These programs consume the majority of the Federal budget. The Federal government spends around $3.7 trillion and collects around $2.6 trillion in taxes, so the basic deficit is $1.1 trillion. Off-balance sheet “supplemental appropriations” mean the real deficit is actually considerably higher.

Social Security costs $817 billion, Medicare and Medicaid costs total about $800 billion annually, and program outlays rise every year. The Pentagon/National Security budget is around $690 billion.

As I detailed in The Fraud at the Heart of Social Security (January 17, 2011), the program paid out $707 billion in 2010 and collected $631 billion in taxes, a $76 billion shortfall for 2010. The current program (2012) cost is $817 billion, a leap of $100 billion in a few short years as Baby Boomers flood into the program.

Of the roughly 150 million workers in the U.S., 38 million earn less than $10,000 per year, 50 million earn less that $15,000 a year and 61 million earn less than $20,000 annually. All these numbers are drawn directly from Social Security Administration payroll data.

100 million wage earners, or 2/3 the entire workforce, earn less than $40,000 per year.

Median pay in the U.S. is about $26,360 annually, while the average pay is about $40,000. Since the average American household takes in $63,091 per year, it seems the typical wage is roughly $30,000 a year.

The Medicare tax is 2.9% of wages, 1.45% each for employer and employee. If the typical worker makes $30,000 a year for 35 years, then lifetime earnings are about $1 million. If we take the $40,000/year average, then that rises to around $1.4 million in lifetime earnings. The 2.9% Medicare tax thus totals about $30,000 to $40,000 in lifetime contributions for the average worker.

The average benefits extracted from the system run from $393,000 to $525,000 (due to the benefits extended to non-working spouses, benefits for never-married people may be somewhat lower). Average annual costs per beneficiary run as high as $18,000, though expenses typically rise significantly in the last year of life.

As I have reported here earlier, a friend’s father was in the hospital a few years ago for less than a week for “observation” and a non-invasive gall-stone procedure. Medicare was billed $120,000, or roughly the lifetime contributions of three workers for this modest procedure and a few days in a hospital. My Mom had an office procedure performed on one of her toes and Medicare was billed $12,000. An office procedure (not in surgery) that took a few minutes absorbed 1/3 of my entire lifetime contributions to Medicare.

What we have is a system where the full-time worker to beneficiary is already 1-to-1 and the system pays out 10 times more per person than it collects in taxes.The Medicare system would need about 10 workers for every beneficiary to be sustainable. Right now the ratio is just above 2-to-1. That simply is not sustainable.

Tweaking the payouts doesn’t change the basic math: “pay as you go” entitlements are not sustainable when the number of recipients equals the number of full-time workers. Programs that pay out $400,000 per person (many of whom did not work a lifetime) and collect $40,000 per lifetime of full-time work are not sustainable.

Wishing the math were different does not make it different.

For more on this topic, please see:

America’s Hidden 8% VAT: Sickcare (May 10, 2012)

How We Do Harm: A Doctor Breaks Ranks About Being Sick in America (print)     (Kindle)

New Max Keiser: On the Edge with Charles Hugh Smith. I was sharper in the “live in Paris” interview but Max is always worth watching:

“Renouncing debt would be the way forward and eventually that will happen everywhere–either the currencies will go to zero, what people call hyperinflation, or the debt will be defaulted on.”

Fer crying out loud, does everyone already have their garden in?: largest discount ever from Everlasting Seeds. It’s the perfect time to start your veggie/herb garden, and Everlasting Seeds is offering oftwominds.com readers 15% off all products: Buy a Vegi-Max and share with friends!

For small gardens: The Simple Garden – Special price: $29.95 + $8.00 shipping
Contains 30 seeds of each:     Corn     Broccoli     Pea     Onion     Radish     Carrot     Cabbage     Tomato     Cauliflower     Spinach     Lettuce     Pole Bean

Resistance, Revolution, Liberation: A Model for Positive Change (print $25)
(Kindle eBook $9.95)

Read the Introduction (2,600 words) and Chapter One (7,600 words) for free.

We are like passengers on the Titanic ten minutes after its fatal encounter with the iceberg: though our financial system seems unsinkable, its reliance on debt and financialization has already doomed it.We cannot know when the Central State and financial system will destabilize, we only know they will destabilize. We cannot know which of the State’s fast-rising debts and obligations will be renounced; we only know they will be renounced in one fashion or another.

The process of the unsustainable collapsing and a new, more sustainable model emerging is called revolution, and it combines cultural, technological, financial and political elements in a dynamic flux.

History is not fixed; it is in our hands. We cannot await a remote future transition to transform our lives. Revolution begins with our internal understanding and reaches fruition in our coherently directed daily actions in the lived-in world.

This is a syndicated post, reposted with permission, from oftwominds-Charles Hugh Smith.View original post.

There is an undeniable internal logic to the crazy idea that Greece should jettison the euro and accept the U.S. dollar as its national currency.

Before you dismiss my crazy idea out of hand, hear me out. It might not be as crazy as it seems on first blush.

I have a straightforward three-point plan to set Greece on a sustainable, positive pathway. But before we can understand how the plan resolves Greece’s no-win situation (yet another Kobayashi Maru scenario), we first need to understand very clearly why the euro currency failed.

I have covered this many times before:

Why The European Union Is Doomed (March 28, 2011)
Why the Eurozone and the Euro Are Both Doomed (June 23, 2011)
Three More Reasons the Eurozone Is Doomed (September 22, 2011)
Yet Another Reason Why the Euro Is Doomed (October 17, 2011)

If we had to distill the dynamic down to a single paragraph, it would be this: By accepting the “strong currency” euro that was supported by promises of fiscal prudence, Greece and the other weaker economies of Europe artificially raised market willingness to lend them money and lowered the interest rate they would pay. At the same time, the euro also lowered the cost of goods from Germany by eliminating the market arbitrage of currencies.

I know this may sound complicated, but we can grasp the core dynamics using household analogies.

The willingness of lenders to lend and the rate of interest they charge is based on economic fundamentals: the balance sheet of assets and liabilities, and cash flow: how much income goes to pay liabilities and how much is left over as surplus to spend or invest.

Households and nations with weak balance sheets (i.e. liabilities exceed assets) and weak cash flow balances (i.e. much of the nation’s income is already committed to entitlements and liabilities, so relatively little is left to fund future borrowing) will find it difficult to borrow a lot, and the rate of interest they will pay will be high.

Nations have another mechanism to differentiate between strong and weak balance sheets: national currencies. Countries with weak cash flow and risky balance sheets will have weak currencies, as people price the risk into the currency.

In effect, Greece was like the poorer brother who suddenly got the wealthier sibling’s credit card. In this sense, the euro was a scam, because it stripped the market of the pricing mechanism that we call currencies. By pricing all money the same regardless of national balance sheets and cash flows, then weaker countries got the credit card of their stronger brethren.

Predictably, these nations over-borrowed. When presented with the opportunity to borrow huge sums at low rates of interest, it is “rational” to accept the opportunity.

Who benefited from this elimination of market pricing via currencies? Germany and the banks. In pre-euro days, it took a lot of Greek drachmas to buy expensive goods from Germany. After the euro was introduced, German goods became cheaper in terms of hours worked and interest rates paid.

German exports to the rest of Europe have been strong, and these exports within Europe are the backbone of the German economy. (Exports are roughly 40% of the German economy, the highest in the world for major economies. Exports make up about 10% to 15% of the economies of Japan and the U.S.)

The pool of apparently creditworthy borrowers expanded greatly, and the banks promptly began lending vast sums to both the public and private sectors of these fundamentally weaker nations.

You can’t fool Mother Nature with artificial games for long, and now reality has trumped artifice: the nations with weak balance sheets and cash flows cannot support the monumental debts they acquired during the decade of the euro-scam.

If you eliminate the market’s ability to price risk and credit, the market breaks down. That is the eurozone in a nutshell.

The no-win situation is clear: if it wants to continue using the euro, Greece must pay its debt and interest in euros. Its economy simply isn’t large enough or productive enough to do this, so that’s simply not possible. Wishing it were possible doesn’t make it possible.

As a result, the weaker, over-indebted nations are in death-spirals of higher taxes and higher debt servicing costs. Each bleeds vitality and trust from the economy, driving it deeper into fatal contraction.

These nations are also in political death spirals. I spoke at length with a well-informed young Greek friend who has lived in both Germany and the U.S., so he is well-acquainted with the perspectives of Germans and Americans.

He reports that the Greek people are profoundly divided on the question of whether to stay in the eurozone or risk leaving it. He said that even within the various political parties, there are two camps. In his opinion, the odds of either camp surrendering their deeply held beliefs and fears is very very low. Those who want to stay in the euro are terrified that a return to the drachma would wipe out the nation’s savings and further reduce the already diminished incomes of households: in effect, the middle class would be wiped out.

Others see a deeply sinister master plan in all this: pushing Greece back to the drachma would immediately render the nation poorer and make its assets very cheap to foreign Elites, who would rush in and snap up Greek assets at fire-sale prices. Greeks would lose their country.

This is indeed part of the dynamic when nations radically devalue their currency: if a villa in Greece was 300,000 euros before the return to the drachma, it might be only 100,000 euros when the drachma is re-instated. Priced in euros, the whole of Greece would “go on sale”.

I hope you can see that there are two parallel no-win situations here, a financial one and a political one. This is the Kobayashi Maru scenario on a national scale, and there is no exit if you stay within the rules of the game: euro or drachma, etc.

Here’s my “crazy idea that’s so crazy it might just work”: Greece should switch to the U.S. dollar as its currency while renouncing all debt denominated in euros. I don’t mean a “haircut,” I mean billiard-ball bald: 100% of all debt denominated in euros would be renounced. Not one euro will be repaid.

The reason is that the banks (lenders) knew darn well that Greece remained a weak economy, and eliminating the currency arbitrage by accepting the euro did not magically strengthen Greece’s financial fundamentals. It was all a scam that the banks exploited, including the European Central Bank, and so they will have to accept the losses now that the scam has collapsed.

Nobody put a gun to the head of lenders who fronted Greece stupendous sums of money at low rates of interest. It was their gamble and they lost. End of story.

Whatever else you can say about the U.S. dollar, it retains global trust as a medium of exchange and a transparent store of value. Your $100 bill is good in Laos, Bolivia, Russia, China and everywhere else. Its value fluctuates because the market is free to set the risk of holding dollars.

Ultimately, all fiat currencies are simply physical measures of trust. People know the U.S. has plentiful problems of its own, but they also know the problems are well-known and transparent to all, so the market can price risk in the dollar. They also know the U.S. isn’t going away tomorrow, and that there are enough dollars floating around the globe that there will always be someone who will accept the dollars in trade for tangible goods at a transparent price.

The problem with returning to the drachma is the risk of the transfer is unknown, and so the risk will be transferred to the drachma. By making the process into two steps–exit euro for the dollar, then later, exit the dollar for the drachma–much of the risk and distrust is removed from the initial step of exiting the euro.

Here’s the beauty of Greece accepting the dollar: since Greece cannot print dollars, then everyone will know the currency cannot be depreciated by the Greek state. If Greece can print drachmas in unlimited quantities, then the drachma will quickly lose whatever value it begins with. In contrast, regardless of the policies of the state or central bank of Greece, the dollar will still have the same value day to day.

All euros in accounts would convert to dollars.

This will immediately restore trust and trade, both domestically and internationally, as everyone will know the U.S. dollar will retain its value everywhere.

Does Greece need U.S. approval to take the dollar as its interim currency? No–the dollar is ubiquitous and in sufficient quantity that there are enough physical dollars floating around the world to serve as the currency for a small nation such as Greece. It would help if the U.S. accepted Greece’s choice, but American acceptance would be optional.

The third critical step in my plan is that Greece must reach a political consensus on taxation and governance. Everyone knows that tax avoidance has undermined the Greek state’s finances, and the people of a democracy have to reach a consensus themselves: it cannot be imposed by bureaucrats from afar.

Greece desperately needs a visionary politician to emerge who can clearly state Greece’s choices in taxation and governance: the State needs enough income to do what the people want it to do, and so everyone is going to have to pay taxes. Those who evade will have to be shunned/coerced by public opinion into compliance, for the national good. The institutions of taxation will have to restore trust in their fairness and transparency.

Greece must have a transparent national dialog on taxation and governance, and reach a consensus via the democratic process. Without this step, then it won’t matter what currency Greece uses, it will slip further into a death-spiral of dysfunction.

So here is the 3-point plan:

1. Renounce all debts denominated in the euro, i.e. a 100% writedown.

2. Accept the U.S. dollar as the national currency of Greece.

3. Engage in a transparent national dialog and reach a consensus about taxation and the role of the state in the Greek society and economy.

We might add a fourth point: renounce scams and kicking problems down the road rather than addressing them directly, sweeping dysfunction under the rug, etc.

There is a compelling internal logic to my crazy plan: when trust in national currencies and institutions is lost, then the black market becomes the trustworthy place to engage in trade. The world’s favorite black market currency is of course the U.S. dollar. In this sense, for Greece to officially accept the U.S. dollar as its currency is simply a recognition of the natural progression from a currency that is no longer viable to one that is.

New Max Keiser: On the Edge with Charles Hugh Smith. I was sharper in the “live in Paris” interview but Max is always worth watching:

“Renouncing debt would be the way forward and eventually that will happen everywhere–either the currencies will go to zero, what people call hyperinflation, or the debt will be defaulted on.”

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For small gardens: The Simple Garden – Special price: $29.95 + $8.00 shipping
Contains 30 seeds of each:     Corn     Broccoli     Pea     Onion     Radish     Carrot     Cabbage     Tomato     Cauliflower     Spinach     Lettuce     Pole Bean

Resistance, Revolution, Liberation: A Model for Positive Change (print $25)
(Kindle eBook $9.95)

Read the Introduction (2,600 words) and Chapter One (7,600 words) for free.

We are like passengers on the Titanic ten minutes after its fatal encounter with the iceberg: though our financial system seems unsinkable, its reliance on debt and financialization has already doomed it.We cannot know when the Central State and financial system will destabilize, we only know they will destabilize. We cannot know which of the State’s fast-rising debts and obligations will be renounced; we only know they will be renounced in one fashion or another.

The process of the unsustainable collapsing and a new, more sustainable model emerging is called revolution, and it combines cultural, technological, financial and political elements in a dynamic flux.

History is not fixed; it is in our hands. We cannot await a remote future transition to transform our lives. Revolution begins with our internal understanding and reaches fruition in our coherently directed daily actions in the lived-in world.

Reposted from Of Two Minds with the kind permission of Charles Hugh Smith

A sound system of credit is built on collateral. A doomed system of debt sits precariously on phantom collateral.

The global “recovery” is based not on reducing debt but on increasing it. Nice, but where’s the collateral? The basic idea of debt is that credit is extended based on collateral, i.e. something of enduring, tradable value, or an income stream that isn’t reduced to zero by non-discretionary spending and taxes.

A funny thing happened to collateral like housing equity and financial assets in the past four years–it shrank by trillions of dollars. According to the latest Z1 “Balance Sheet of Households and Non-Profits” from the Federal Reserve, real estate fell by $4.9 trillion since the bubble top in 2007 and owners’ equity lost $4.2 trillion.

Despite the stock market doubling since 2009 and a healthy run-up in the value of bonds, financial assets shrank by $2 trillion as well.

These are non-trivial sums when we consider that collateral is generally leveraged. If a home buyer puts down 20% cash, then that cash collateral is leveraged 4-to-1 in an 80% mortgage. If the buyer puts down 3% (as in an FHA loan), then the leverage is over 30-to-1.

Collateral matters when it comes to assessing the value of the debt. If a bank lists the mortgages in its “assets” column at full value even though the underlying collateral (the houses) has lost much of their value, then the bank is grossly over-estimating the value and security of the mortgage. The bank’s “assets” are based on phantom collateral.

Take away $1 in collateral and you impair $4, $10, $20 or even $30 of debt.

Recall that the vast majority of real estate equity and financial wealth is owned by the top 20%, with the majority of that concentrated in the top 5%.That means the bottom 80% own little collateral to leverage into debt.

How about leveraging income into more debt? Since the top 10% receivealmost 50% of the income, and most of the bottom 90%’s income goes to non-discretionary spending and taxes, then only the top 10% have discretionary income that can be leveraged into more debt.

Interestingly, The Wedge between Productivity and Wages by economist Mark Thoma reports that the enormous advances in productivity over the past few decades did not translate into higher wages for the bottom 90%.

I have often addressed income disparity and the evaporation of collateral, for example, Two Americas: The Gap Between the Top 5% and the Bottom 95% Widens(August 18, 2010) and The Housing Bubble Broke the Middle Class (April 27, 2011).

Regardless of the various causal factors, the fact remains that 90% of American households have limited collateral or discretionary income to leverage into more debt. That leaves around 10 million households (the top 10%) with the means to take on more debt–if they want to. Can 10% of the households prop up the entire economy with more debt and consumption? What if the wealthy decline the opportunity to leverage more debt?

We can also ask “where’s the collateral?” of the banking sector. As frequent contributor Harun I. observed about the European banking sector’s phantom collateral:

European banks do not have enough money for deposit redemptions (people withdrawing their cash from the banks) and the only way to get it is to have the European Central Bank (ECB) print money out of thin air thereby devaluing every euro, thereby destroying purchasing power (you get your money but it buys less).And what collateral are the banks providing for these loans? The sovereign debt of countries that are insolvent. Why not sell the bonds to raise the capital that is rightfully owed to depositors so that they could receive their money at par? Why then bond prices would tumble and governments would be forced to borrow at much higher interest rates. But borrow from whom? Insolvent banks that must have money printed to give depositors their money back at a fraction of its worth from when they deposited it. Not due to market forces which indicate their labor is worth less but because everybody just wants what’s rightfully theirs.

So to summarize this, the ECB prints money to buy the bonds of insolvent banks which are backed by the bonds of insolvent nations. The result of which is insolvent nations or in reality the people thereof are not only poorer, they are now responsible for paying back money that was their property to begin with… at interest.

Put these two factors together and you get a global economy dependent on debt borrowed against phantom collateral and an American economy in which only the top 10% have credible collateral and income to leverage into more debt. In a sane system, when the collateral vanishes, so too does the debt (writedowns, write-offs, bankruptcy, take your pick). In an insane system, then phantom collateral supports ever greater mountains of debt.

How long do you reckon the insane system we have now will last? The collateral is phantom, but the interest payments are very, very real.

New video presentation: Gordon T. Long and I discuss “Generational Cycles” (27 minute video with charts)

Resistance, Revolution, Liberation: A Model for Positive Change (print $25)
(Kindle eBook $9.95)

Read the Introduction (2,600 words) and Chapter One (7,600 words) for free.

We are like passengers on the Titanic ten minutes after its fatal encounter with the iceberg: though our financial system seems unsinkable, its reliance on debt and financialization has already doomed it.We cannot know when the Central State and financial system will destabilize, we only know they will destabilize. We cannot know which of the State’s fast-rising debts and obligations will be renounced; we only know they will be renounced in one fashion or another.

The process of the unsustainable collapsing and a new, more sustainable model emerging is called revolution, and it combines cultural, technological, financial and political elements in a dynamic flux.

History is not fixed; it is in our hands. We cannot await a remote future transition to transform our lives. Revolution begins with our internal understanding and reaches fruition in our coherently directed daily actions in the lived-in world.

I have long made the argument that shadow inventory is a bogeyman which, like shadow boxing, won’t hurt anyone, or at least won’t hurt the housing market in most areas, more than it already has. In effect it’s a sunk cost heavily affecting particular local markets, but will not affect the majority of the US where housing has stabilized. This article is an example of why that is.

Actually the conclusion of the headline is wrong. The fact that the banks refuse to recognize these losses on their balance sheet is bad for them, for the financial system, and especially for the US taxpayer, who stands behind Fannie and Freddie, who stands behind most of the failed, and mostly worthless, loans.

Neighborhoods crumble as thousands of homes sit in legal limbo, Sun Sentinel finds

By Megan O’Matz and John Maines, Sun Sentinel

April 29, 2012

Banks that made reckless home loans have been tiptoeing away from foreclosures in a tactic designed to cut their losses. The result: Orphaned, dilapidated homes dot the landscape from Kendall to Lake Worth.

There are no owners willing to claim and care for them.

A months-long Sun Sentinel investigation of property code violations involving abandoned homes uncovered case after case in which banks launched foreclosure lawsuits but then stalled or avoided taking ownership. In effect, the banks legally sidestepped responsibility for the empty homes, causing great harm to neighborhoods.

via Bad Neighbor Banks: Homes toxic for neighbors, good for lenders – South Florida Sun-Sentinel.com.

Get regular updates on the US housing market, and stay up to date with the machinations of the Fed, Treasury, Primary Dealers and foreign central banks in the US market, in the Fed Report in the Professional Edition, Money Liquidity, and Real Estate Package. Try it risk free for 30 days. Don’t miss another day. Get the research and analysis you need to understand these critical forces. Be prepared. Stay ahead of the herd. Click this link and begin your risk free trial NOW!

Improvement in first time unemployment claims is slowing. Actual, not seasonally manipulated data, including an adjustment for the usual weekly upward revision, shows that the year to year rate of change is on the cusp of a possible upside breakout, which would be good news for stock market bears if it happens.

Initial Unemployment Claims Chart- Click to enlarge

Here’s why it’s mind blowing. I’ve plotted it below on an inverse scale with the S&P 500 overlaid.

Unemployemt Claims and Stock Prices - Click to enlarge

That speaks for itself. As the improvement in claims has slowed, so have the gains in stock prices.

What’s the Fed’s role in all this? The chart below illustrates. As I have told my subscribers for years, the Fed triggered both the financial crash and the economic collapse when it pulled cash out of its System Open Market Account to fund the direct bailouts of AIG, Goldman Sacks and Pillages, Citi, DoucheBank et. al. Doing that crushed Lehman and other shaky Primary Dealers. Great for the ones that got the free money, bad for everybody else, especially working people and old retired people with a few bucks in savings. Yes, the depression would have happened anyway. The Fed just made it happen faster, more violently, and worse than it would have been, by transferring wealth from middle class workers and savers to the Lloyd Blankfiends and Jamie Demons of the world.

Unemployment and The Fed Chart- Click to enlarge

Lately, the Fed has gotten away with not growing its balance sheet because it is continuing to surreptitiously fund, cash out, and prop up the Primary Dealer casinos that own the Strip, …oops… the Street, to the tune of $30 billion a month in MBS buys. As long as it has done that, the layoffs and firings have continued to slow. There is zero chance that Fed will end this program in June because it knows what happens when it lets its balance sheet shrink, which it would if the MBS purchase end. Twist, the Treasury swap program is just a sideshow. The real game is the MBS replacements. That show must go on.

The Fed saw in the second round of QE that the trickle down theory of pimping the stock market to get the economy going just wasn’t paying the desired returns employment wise, and it was giving the old white farts around the table heartburn and gas because of the runaway rise in energy and commodity prices that it was causing. They denied responsibility. But we knew.

So Ben decided that it was time for the FOMClub to sit on their fat cat asses and just quietly keep feeding their Primary Dealer godfathers while continuing to starve all the little old retirees with a few bucks in a savings account. Oh, that’s right. Nothing left! As Paul Krugman says, ZIRP doesn’t matter because seniors live on Social Security, not savings.

That’s because they were forced to spend it all, you smug, clueless, craven, conscienceless intellectual fraud.

So there you have it, a couple of charts of the slings and arrows outrageous fortune, and the out of left field barbs that go with them when I get on a roll.

Until next time… with love.

Stay up to date with the machinations of the Fed, Treasury, Primary Dealers and foreign central banks in the US market, along with regular updates of the US housing market, in the Fed Report in the Professional Edition, Money Liquidity, and Real Estate Package. Try it risk free for 30 days. Don’t miss another day. Get the research and analysis you need to understand these critical forces. Be prepared. Stay ahead of the herd. Click this link and begin your risk free trial NOW!

Copyright © 2012 The Wall Street Examiner. If you repost this, you must include this copyright notice a prominent link to the source, The Wall Street Examiner.

Follow my real time comments on the markets and economy @Lee_Adler on Twitter!

Reposted from Bruce Krasting’s blog with his permission.

America’s Export-Import Bank (Exim) is tapped out. Its authority runs out on May 31 and Congress has to agree to some form of extension. Exim has $100 billion of borrowing authority, none of which shows up on the federal balance sheet. It may have already reached its $100 billion limit; there are billions of additional requests for financing that may not get fulfilled if its charter is not extended and its debt limit is not increased.

The Administration has requested a 40% increase in Exim’s borrowing authority. This would keep Exim afloat until 2015. The Republicans, led by Eric Cantor, have made a counter proposal to increase the debt limit by only $13 Billion. Cantor’s plan would have Exim run out of money in less than one year.

So there is a fight brewing on this issue. It is the same fight that has been going on over every economic issue. Conservatives want to cut back on big programs, liberals want to expand them as fast as possible.

Some on the Pro side include the Administration, big exporters like Boeing, liberals and their press:

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There are many voices on the Con side:

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Central to the issues at Exim is Boeing. From 2005 to 2010 Exim financed 634 Boeing aircraft. In 2011 it lent foreign airlines another $11.4B. This lending has surely helped Boeing, but it’s killing the domestic air carriers which have to compete on overseas routes.

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Delta Airlines has sued Exim over its lending to Air India. The lawsuit has to be resolved as part of the extension of the debt limit. Liberal guys, like Chuck Schumer have been talking to Delta. The proposal is to offset the competitive disadvantage that Exim creates, with new subsidies for the airlines.

Subsidies that create inequities that are fixed with more subsidies is bad government. I can’t see the Delta  Airlines “fix” getting inked without a large price tag. That cost will be the Republicans insisting that any subsidies be “paid” for with other cuts. A pissing match appears to be in the offing.

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When S&P downgraded the USA, it pointed at political gridlock and the inability of D.C. to agree to confront issues as the principal reason for the downgrade. The fight over Exim is a good example of that gridlock.

I’m 70% confident that an Exim “patch” will be in place within the next few weeks. That leaves a 30% chance for this to go wrong. If it gets nasty, it will highlight all that is wrong with the country.

The following video is an edited version of one that is making the rounds on YouTube. This has no ads and runs 64 seconds. Obama’s Exim flip-flop is worth noting.

Two minute Radio Free Wall Street clip.