Have been scanning the conference call archives, and Monster comments on US job market. Clearly the sickness industry perp is a key driver, as is financial paper shuffling. Takes intelligent personnel to doctor diabetics and financial Ponzi scams.
Mark Stoever: The unemployment rate in North America is clearly at relative lows to historical patterns and there are sectors within that, […]

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Michael McDonald, writing for Bloomberg is talking about What Fidelity Knows About Bernanke That Gross Doesn’t. Bill Gross, manager of the world’s biggest bond fund at Pacific Investment Management Co., says Treasuries maturing in less than two years will lead a market rally next year as the Federal Reserve lowers interest rates. George Fischer, who…

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Is the urban commercial sprawl game on it’s last legs? Are the purveyors of this strategy waking up to the future realities. Opponents of urban and town edge commercial megastore development put their arguments succinctly as:
The 10 sins of retail sprawl
* It destroys the economic and environmental value of land
* It encourages an inefficient land-use […]

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Countrywide reported third-quarter profit rose 2 percent, less than analysts expected, as demand for home loans slumped. The company’s shares surged higher on plans to lay off more than 2,500 employees and buy back up to $2.5 billion of stock, and as higher profits in other units, including Countrywide Bank, cushioned the mortgage decline. It…

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On October 13th & 14th I attended the Chicago Natural Resources Conference. If you have not been to a mining/minerals or natural resources conference you owe it to yourself to do so. I had the pleasure of sitting on two Q&A panels along with Bob Moriarty of 321gold.com, Clyde Harrison of Brookshire Raw Materials Group,…

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This post is a followup discussion to Kool Aid & Krispy Kremes, a discussion I had with Mike Morgan at Morgan Florida on October 15th. If you are hungry for donuts or thirsty for Kool Aid or simply have not read the above article it is a good lead-in for what follows. Following is Morgan’s…

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This bombshell really caught my eye last night. The US Wizards (Fed) actually conducted a $2.32 billion drain (sold securities from it’s holdings, pulling money out of the economy) from it’s SOMA or permanent account last week. Further, they conducted the drain in the T-Notes, not Bills. The timing didn’t strike me as technical, as the huge TIO operations conducted by the Treasury are abating. On top of it, the Treasury is going to market to raise $21.5 billion (plus or minus, the to be announced four week bill ) in new money next week. Therefore, for a SOMA drain to make sense from a timing point of view, it should have occurred a month ago, not now. The Fed hasn’t really been friendly with liquidity at all of late, and to me this suggests they are stepping aside of any operation to keep longer rates down. Their cronies, the foreign central banks (FCB), have not been friendly either.  In the last six weeks they have sold $8 billion in US Old Maid Cards from their custodial accounts.

The rationale for this approach is long overdue. The Wizard’s clients, the Pig Men, especially the banking wing of the enterprise, is now being badly squeezed by the inverted yield curve. Banks have already milked all the time deposits they captured in 2004-2005. Nearly all of those have now rolled off, and with little, if any deposit growth, banks must compete for funds, and cost for new time deposits are solidly over 5%. Therefore it doesn’t make sense for banks to borrow new money at 5.5%, and purchase what to my mind are longer term, high risk, low yield securities like agencies, or mortgages, mortgage back securities (MBS) or asset backed securities (ABS; car loans, etc). 

Indeed, one big player, Bankamerica, said as much in their conference call yesterday, announcing that they are going to gradually unload $100 billion in securities (MBS represent 80% of what BAC has for sale), presumably to Riskloves and FCBs. I say presumably, because this ASSumes that hedge funds are willing to be the last ones standing when the music stops. The Riskloves in turn are ASSuming the FCBs will take these Old Maid Cards as well, but in reality the FCBs have actually sold $1.6 billion in agencies in the last four weeks. Gee, ya think these rocket scientists have finally connected the dots about rising foreclosures, and ghost neighborhoods in the US?  On the later score, this story out of Las Vegas even blew my cynical mind, especially this part. Do vacant houses with big mortgages, really make sense for a central bank reserve holding?

Right now there are about 22,000 existing homes on the market across the valley and 9,800 of them are vacant.

Apparently, some foreign entities philosophically just don’t buy into this scam? Russia, seems to be one, they are just reluctant to play the game. They announced this week that they would shift $35 billion in USD out of their holdings, and into Yen. The Yen carry trade Riskloves dismissed this one too, but one by one the Ponzi daisy chain is breaking up. Adding insult to injury, China conducted the largest IPO in history. That’s $19.1 billion in capital flows coming from “somewhere” back into Asia, to support Chinese, rather than American plutocrats.

When one adds all this up, the Fed is trying to impact the longer end of the curve higher for several reasons: 1. keep the waning capital flows coming  to support this (see Chart) 2. get a normal “profitable” yield curve in place for their banking cronies, who incidentially are also short a slew of note futures, how convenient, umh. 3. slow down runaway credit demand into nonsensical speculative ventures, such as Ponzi finance to support more vacant properties. 4. actually slow imported consumption some (see chart again), and put up a further token inflation fight.  Perhaps, though this ASSumes, the Wizards are even capable of promoting this kind of sound policy? Stay tuned.

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The Associated Press reported in a story today that real estate “buyers are demanding cash payments and other incentives that may be artificially propping up sales prices, suggesting the real estate market downturn could be even more pronounced than has been reported.” A Realtor -registered trademark- from Prudential California Realty told the reporter that he…

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