‘Whoever controls the volume of money in any country is absolute master of all industry and commerce, and when you realize that the entire system is very easily controlled, one way or another, by a few powerful men at the top, you will not have to be told how periods of inflation and depression originate.’ James A. Garfield. President of the USA. Two weeks before he was assassinated. (1831-1881).
The Dallas Fed Board Is Now Complicit in the Robert Kaplan Saga October 12, 2021
Last Wednesday, the Editorial Board of the Financial Times of London penned an editorial under a headline that read: “The Fed’s Trading Scandal Undermines Public Trust.” The editorial noted that the President of the Dallas Fed, Robert Kaplan, “held stakes over $1m each in 27 investments, and moved in and out of S&P 500 futures. The precise dates of his transactions are unknown as his form declaring financial interests merely gives ‘multiple’ as the timeframe.”
Last Friday, this headline appeared at the Wall Street Journal: “Boston, Dallas Fed Banks Pledge Cooperation With Stock-Trading Probe.” But then the article revealed this:
“The Dallas Fed has declined multiple requests to fully disclose Mr. Kaplan’s extensive trading activity. For example, Mr. Kaplan’s disclosures list ‘multiple’ for trades in stocks and other investments without specifying the dates of the transactions.”
The financial disclosure form that Kaplan and every other Federal Reserve Bank President is required to file clearly indicates that the filer is required to give the month, day and year of each purchase and each sale. The form even provides an example of how it wants the date shown, e.g., 2/1/93. As a former CPA with Peat Marwick Mitchell and 22-year veteran of the trading powerhouse Goldman Sachs, Kaplan certainly knew, or should have known, that he was evading the prescribed rules of the Federal Reserve system when he substituted the word “multiple” for the specific dates of his trades. Kaplan didn’t do this just on his financial disclosure form for 2020, he did this on every financial disclosure form that he filed annually from 2015 through 2020. (See Kaplan’s 2015 through 2020 financial disclosure forms here.)
Spoiler alert…In a “de grossing world” the answer is a definitive and very ugly YES!
Will Risk Parity Blow Up…??? October 11, 2021
For four decades, the US stock market has traded up and to the right. During those brief moments of setback, treasuries rallied strongly. The fact that these two asset classes seemed to offset each other, creating a smoothed-out return profile, was not lost on certain fund managers who created portfolios comprised of the two. Then, to better market this portfolio to the sorts of institutional investors who cannot bear drawdowns, the overriding strategy was given the pseudo-intellectual sounding Risk Parity moniker. Over time, the reliability of Risk Parity funds has astonished most observers, especially after being tested by fire during the GFC. As a result, portfolio managers took the logical next step and added copious leverage—because in finance, when you do a back-test, every return stream works better with leverage. Naturally, as Risk Parity continued to produce returns, inflows bloated these funds. Risk Parity strategies, in one form or another, now dominate many institutional asset allocations. While everyone makes their sausage a bit differently, trillions in notional value are now managed using this strategy—long equities, long treasuries. Are they highly-leveraged time-bombs??
Taking a step back, it’s important to ask, what created this smooth stream of Risk Parity returns? Was it investor brilliance or was it a four-decade period of declining interest rates that systematically increased equity market multiples while reducing bond yields? What if all the sausage-making was just noise? This then brings out the next logical question; what happens if the rate cycle has now turned and we have an extended period of both increasing interest rates and declining equity market multiples?
We have continually told you to watch “credit” as that is where the fire will be no matter where the smoke is. Shortly we will be witnessing a world going through bankruptcy, do you own money that cannot bankrupt?
“It’s A Disastrous Day” – All Hell Breaks Loose In China’s Bond Markets October 12, 2021
The US bond market may be closed, but it was fully open in China, and locals took advantage of this fact to do one thing: sell.
In the aftermath of our viral post “”Catastrophic” Property Sales Mean China’s Worst Case Scenario Is Now In Play”, China property firms bonds were hit with another wrecking ball on Monday as Evergrande was set to miss its third round of (offshore) bond payments in as many weeks and rival Modern Land became the latest scrambling to delay deadlines.
Having already suffered the fastest drop on record, Chinese junk bond markets – where property developer issuers dominate – were routed once again as fears about fast-spreading contagion in the $5 trillion sector, which drives a sizable chunk of the Chinese economy, continued to savage sentiment. Meanwhile, China Evergrande Group’s offshore bondholders still had not received interest payment by a Monday deadline Asia time, Reuters reported citing sources.
But while Evergrande’s default is now just semantics, and one week after Fantasia shocked bondholders with a surprise announcement it too would stuff creditors just weeks after it had said its liquidity was fine, which sent its bond plunging from par to 74 cents in seconds…
Jamie Dimon, JPMorgan Chase chairman and CEO, isn’t a fan of bitcoin, the largest cryptocurrency by market value.
“I personally think that bitcoin is worthless,” Dimon said during an Institute of International Finance event on Monday, CNBC Pro reported.
But, “I don’t want to be a spokesperson — I don’t care. It makes no difference to me,” he said. “Our clients are adults. They disagree. That’s what makes markets. So, if they want to have access to buy yourself bitcoin, we can’t custody it but we can give them legitimate, as clean as possible, access.”
I have just one, very legitimate question. Does this mean my platinum eagle is also worth $1 trillion? I didn’t think so. The real solution of course is this, IF we really did have the gold Treasury claims to have, why not mark up the price of gold so that their holdings are worth trillions? And thus repair completely broken balance sheets. Could it be because we no longer have the claimed gold? Maybe we should have had an aut or two since the 1950’s but, oh well!
Trillion-Dollar Platinum Coin Could Be Minted At The Last Minute October 5, 2021
A trillion-dollar platinum coin could be minted “within hours of the Treasury Secretary’s decision to do so,” Philip Diehl, former director of the United States Mint, tells Axios.
Why it matters: Congressional solutions to the debt-ceiling problem could take weeks to implement, especially if the reconciliation process is used — and time is running out. In case of emergency, a trillion-dollar coin could be deployed to bridge any gap between the money running out and the debt ceiling being raised.
How it works: The U.S. Mint, which Diehl ran from 1994 to 2000, already produces a one-ounce Platinum Eagle and has no shortage of platinum blanks already in stock.
Producing a trillion-dollar Eagle would require only the denomination to be changed. “This could be quickly executed on the existing plaster mold of the Platinum Eagle,” says Diehl. Then an automated process would transfer the new design to a plastic resin mold.
Even if Janet Yellen, the Treasury secretary, has no intention of minting such a coin, there is no reason for her not to quietly instruct the Mint director to take those steps a day or two in advance.
Former Goldman Compliance Officer Busted For Insider Trading September 30, 2021
Is it just us, or are we starting to see a pattern here?
After a former UBS compliance officer was jailed after being convicted of an insider trading scheme in the UK, yet another compliance officer – this time, working for Goldman Sachs – has been swept up in another insider trading scandal, this time in the US.
The SEC complaint filed on Wednesday accused Jose Luis Casero Sanchez, 35, who worked for Goldman as a senior compliance analyst out of the bank’s office in Warsaw, of earning more than $471,000 from the trades.
His role as a compliance analyst gave him access to “highly sensitive” information linked to mergers and other deals between September 2020 and March 2021. Sanchez allegedly “abused that position of trust” by making at least 45 trades based on confidential information gleaned through his position at Goldman.
Some of the companies Sanchez allegedly traded in include pet retailer Petco Health and Wellness, US-headquartered Norwegian Cruise Line and the British company GW Pharmaceuticals, per court documents.
Joseph Sansone, chief of the SEC’s market abuse unit, said in a statement the agency had “exposed gross violations of duty by a compliance professional who exploited the sensitive information he was hired to protect.” Sanchez allegedly restricted the size of his trades and used four separate US-based brokerage accounts under his parents’ names to try and avoid detection.
Dallas Fed President Kaplan Was Making Bold, Market-Moving Statements to Media During 2020 Crisis; the Same Year He Traded Tens of Millions of Dollars in Stocks and S&P 500 Futures September 30, 2021
Last year, during the worst health crisis in more than a hundred years in the United States, Dallas Fed President Robert Kaplan was frequently throwing gasoline on the fire in broadcast and print media interviews. Also in 2020, Kaplan was trading in and out of S&P 500 futures, a sophisticated instrument used by hedge funds to time the market and/or short the market. The Dallas Fed will not say if Kaplan engaged in shorting the market during a national health crisis. (Shorting means to place a bearish bet that the market or a security will fall in value.)
Kaplan gave a total of 68 interviews with the press in 2020, an eyebrow raising number for a man also trading S&P 500 futures.
Twice in the span of six days in May of 2020, Kaplan predicted that unemployment was going to surge to 20 percent. That’s a very bold and very bearish call. According to the Congressional Research Service, the maximum unemployment rate in 2020 topped out at 14.8 percent in April.
How could anyone not see it coming? The entire world is complete falsehood and lies, why would markets be any different? Besides, markets MUST support the false narrative, otherwise the narrative could never be…
The Market Crash Nobody Thinks Is Possible Is Coming September 28, 2021
The banquet of consequences is being served, and risk-off crashes are, like revenge, best served cold.
The ideal setup for a crash is a consensus that a crash is impossible–in other words, just like the present: sure, there are carefully measured murmurings about a “correction” but nobody with anything to lose in the way of public credibility is calling for an honest-to-goodness crash, a real crash, not a wimpy, limp-wristed dip that will immediately be bought.
What I’m calling for is a rip your face off, weeping bitter tears over the grave of the speculative wealth that you thought was forever crash. All those buying the dip because the Fed will never let the market go down will be crushed like scurrying cockroaches and all those trying to rotate into the next hot sector or asset class will also be crushed like scurrying cockroaches because when the Everything Bubble pops, well, everything pops. There is no shelter in a risk-off cascade.
The crash is coming as a result of multiple mutually reinforcing dynamics, the first being that no “serious person” believes a crash is possible, much less imminent. In no particular order, here are a raft of other causally consequential triggers of a cascading market crash:
1.As I noted in my call for the top, Is Anyone Willing to Call the Top of the Everything Bubble? (September 6, 2021), there is no history to support the widespread confidence that the extremes of over-valuation, leverage, euphoria and speculation last forever, or even much longer than the lifespan of a cockroach. We’re well past that benchmark into unprecedented insanity. So what happens next: squish.
Whether Evergrande is the final straw or not, it is coming as sure as the Sun will rise tomorrow!
Turn Out The Lights, The Party’s Over-Evergrande Misses A Second Dollar Bond Interest Payment September 30, 2021
By Stan Szymanski
As a young musician in Pittsburgh I was blessed to learn how to play jazz by going to a ‘session’ every Thursday in the North Side that was led by Randy Purcell (trombone-Maynard Ferguson) and his brother Rick (keyboards/vocals). They shepherded me over the course of a little over a year of navigating the standards of the American Songbook.
At the end of every Thursday night session Randy would call -one- song: The Party’s Over. That was a sure call that it was time to pack up and go home. In that spirit, the financial condition of Evergrande has tuned on the lights to show everything for what it really was and is shutting down the bar, the well if you will, that the debt-drunken investors of the world have imbibed in for so long.
Yesterday, according to a Reuters article: …’The company, reeling under a debt pile of $305 billion, was due on Wednesday to make a $47.5 million bond interest payment on its 9.5% March 2024 dollar bond, after having missed $83.5 million in coupon payments last Thursday.’…
Ok, so there is 131 million dollars in interest payments that Evergrande has not paid to foreign investors in the last six days. If they can’t pay their interest payments on time why would anyone think that they will get their money back when Evergrande bonds start to mature in March 2022? What about the $162.38 million in dollar denominated interest in the next month?
“WOW” pretty much sums it up! They get to resign and keep the spoils? And the punchline is …gold and silver are down in the aftermath because the dollar is a stronger entity now that we know the corruption goes to the very top? Any questions?
Robert Kaplan Was Trading Like a Hedge Fund Kingpin for Five Years while President of the Dallas Fed; a Dozen Legal Safeguards Failed to Stop Him September 27, 2021
Dallas Fed President, Robert Kaplan, wasn’t just trading like an aggressive hedge fund kingpin in 2020, he’s been doing the same thing for five years at the Dallas Fed while simultaneously having access to non-public, market moving information from the Federal Reserve’s interest-rate setting FOMC meetings and other confidential communications.
In 2017 and 2020, Kaplan was a voting member of the FOMC. In the other years since he joined the Dallas Fed in 2015, he sat in on the confidential FOMC deliberations and was allowed to participate in the discussions.
Each of Kaplan’s financial disclosures forms dating back to when he first became Dallas Fed President on September 8, 2015 (which we obtained directly from the Dallas Fed), show that Kaplan was trading in and out of S&P 500 futures, a highly speculative form of trading used by hedge funds and day traders. Each of Kaplan’s S&P 500 transactions are listed at “over $1 million.” The phrase “over $1 million” could mean anything from $1,000,001 to tens of millions of dollars per transaction. The phrase is a form of opacity that leads to more loss of credibility at the Dallas Fed.
The next time someone calls you a Covidiot, or tells you to “just do the right thing”…show them this!
30 Facts You NEED To Know: Your Covid Cribsheet September 22, 2021
We get a lot of e-mails and private messages along these lines “do you have a source for X?” or “can you point me to mask studies?” or “I know I saw a graph for mortality, but I can’t find it anymore”. And we understand, it’s been a long 18 months, and there are so many statistics and numbers to try and keep straight in your head.
So, to deal with all these requests, we decided to make a bullet-pointed and sourced list for all th
Here are key facts and sources about the alleged “pandemic”, that will help you get a grasp on what has happened to the world since January 2020, and help you enlighten any of your friends who might be still trapped in the New Normal fog (click links to skip):
1. The survival rate of “Covid” is over 99%. Government medical experts went out of their way to underline, from the beginning of the pandemic, that the vast majority of the population are not in any danger from Covid.
Private Equity May Now Own Your Life Insurance Policy September 26, 2021
Ownership of many life insurance policies are changing hands from the traditional insurers who once ran the industry to private equity and asset management companies.
While insurers look to offload the risks associated with policies, names like Blackstone are moving into the industry, according to a new write up by the Wall Street Journal. The shift has been caused by rates falling, which has “led traditional insurers, which invest policyholders’ premiums and the capital backing up their obligations primarily in plain-vanilla bonds, to retreat from products most hurt by low rates”.
In other words, insurers are looking to get out of the policies and annuities that become a drag on profitability thanks to the Fed rigging the bond market.
Free speech is good, unless your speech is not “politically correct”…this is so dangerous! George Orwell and Nostradamus were brothers with different mothers!
Heckler’s Veto: 66% Of College Students Say Stopping Speech Is Free Speech September 24, 2021
Authored by Jonathan Turley,
We have previously discussed the worrisome signs of a rising generation of censors in the country as leaders and writers embrace censorship and blacklisting. The latest chilling poll was released by 2021 College Free Speech Rankings after questioning a huge body of 37,000 students at 159 top-ranked U.S. colleges and universities. It found that sixty-six percent of college students think shouting down a speaker to stop them from speaking is a legitimate form of free speech. Another 23 percent believe violence can be used to cancel a speech. That is roughly one out of four supporting violence.
Faculty and editors are now actively supporting modern versions of book-burning with blacklists and bans for those with opposing political views. Others are supporting actual book burning. Columbia Journalism School Dean Steve Coll has denounced the “weaponization” of free speech, which appears to be the use of free speech by those on the right. So the dean of one of the premier journalism schools now supports censorship.Free speech advocates are facing a generational shift that is now being reflected in our law schools, where free speech principles were once a touchstone of the rule of law. As millions of students are taught that free speech is a threat and that “China is right” about censorship, these figures are shaping a new society in their own intolerant images.
The most chilling aspect of this story is how many on left applaud such censorship. A prior poll shows roughly half of the public supporting not just corporate censorship but government censorship of anything deemed “misinformation.” Perhaps the same citizens and academics will embrace the Chinese model on social scoring and praise actions that the reported move by Chase bank.
We discussed this issue recently with regard to a lawsuit against SUNY. It is also discussed in my forthcoming law review article, Jonathan Turley, Harm and Hegemony: The Decline of Free Speech in the United States, 45 Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy (2021).
Over 3,000 Doctors and Scientists Sign Declaration Accusing COVID Policy-Makers of ‘Crimes Against Humanity’ September 24, 2021
A “Physicians’ Declaration” produced by an international alliance of physicians and medical scientists strongly condemns the global strategy to treat COVID, accusing policy-makers of potential “crimes against humanity” for preventing physicians from providing life-saving treatments for their patients and suppressing open scientific discussion.
The document states that “one size fits all” treatment recommendations have resulted in needless illness and death.
As of 1:00 Friday afternoon, the declaration had garnered over 3,100 signatures from doctors and scientists around the world.
A group of physicians and scientists met in Rome, Italy earlier this month for a three day Global Covid Summit to speak “truth to power about Covid pandemic research and treatment.”
The summit, which was held from September 12 to September 14, gave the medical professionals an opportunity to compare studies, and assess the efficacy of the various treatments that have been developed in hospitals, doctors offices and research labs throughout the world.
The document, reprinted below in its entirety, sprang from that conference.
No one knows the timing, but anyone who thinks critically and can form logic knows the big bang is coming!
The Clock Is Ticking: The Financial Crisis Is Now Potentially 30 Days Away September 25, 2021
By Stan Szymanski
On Thursday the worlds’ most in hock (indebted) developer, Evergrande, let its’ interest payment on its dollar denominated bond due March 2022 come and go without the interest payment being made to bond holders. Technically, they are not in default until 30 days past the due date of the payment date of the bond. On the heels of that event, Evergrande has another interest payment due on another dollar denominated bond this coming Wednesday.
Just this past Wednesday CBS News ran a story stating that Evergrande -would- make its interest payment that are due this week. That payment was not made as promised. Companies that know they are circling the drain put out information to keep comforting investors that are worried. They also put out this information to try to keep these same investors from becoming sellers of the wretched security of the potentially bankrupt institution and pushing the price of the security into the dirt.
Although that horse has already left the barn and Evergrande stock and bond prices have already been pummeled, in a CNBC article by Weizhen Tan dated 9/23/21 states that ‘Market sentiment was somewhat soothed when Evergrande assured investors on Wednesday that it would fulfil its interest payment on a mainland-traded, yuan-denominated bond also due Thursday.’ So the company is saying that they -would- pay their yuan denominated interest obligations while letting the dollar denominated bond interest payments ride (for now) through the 30 day grace period.
