Remove All Doubt

There's old children's game called Musical Chairs.

It's pretty simple. A certain number of chairs are placed in a circle minus one versus the number of players. In short, 11 players but only 10 chairs. Then the music starts, the children move in circles until the music suddenly stops and all the kids scramble to find a seat. The one who doesn't find a seat is out of the game.

As we said, it's simple game, but one fraught with life lessons. Here's one of them: Something dramatic happens when the music stops. One might suggest the Federal Reserve has a clear understanding of this game. One might even go so far as to suggest at the risk of being labeled a cynic it's the only thing they have a clear understanding of.

Here's article from Zerohedge on the subject.zerohedge.com/news/2016-06-29/fed-finds-good-excuse-extend-and-pretend-through-brexit.



Brexit has happened. Those who are not happy with this reality are making their voices heard; yet, so too are those who are overjoyed to have their liberty and freedom back in their own hands.

This divide is glaringly obvious and has been the highlight of the news reel since last week's vote. There has been a flood of articles relating to the matter, and for good reason. This is a historic event and a move that slaps the global elites squarely in the face, something that rarely happens throughout our history.

Regardless, turbulent times are ahead for the global markets, as this move was considered a "black swan" event, one that was not expected by many, even by those who hoped it would happen. Even Nigel Farage, one of the leaders of the "Leave" campaign, suspected that the vote would be close, but didn't hold out hope that they would win.

Therefore, it is no surprise to find that the FED is also shocked by this turn of events. They, along with many others, did not expect this to happen - but never fear! They will take advantage of the situation and use it as a full-blown excuse as to why they once again cannot act and raise interest rates.

Brexit has essentially given Janet Yellen a perfect excuse as to why she cannot raise rates. The FED has been jawboning about a raise in rates once again over the past few months, something that I have highlighted time and time again.

This MOPE is a constant theme at just about any press conference the FED attends. They must keep people thinking that they have some sort of power, that they can unravel this mess they have created in the fiat markets. The fact is they cannot, and they know this.

If Brexit didn't occur, then the FED would have simply found another excuse to not raise rates. That, or they would have just engaged in more extend and pretend, pushing the idea down the road just a little further as they so often do.

Either way, near-rock bottom interest rates are here to stay as the U.S. dollar strengthens vs the pound and the Euro. As the elites say, never let a good crisis go to waste. Don't worry - the FED isn't.

What's important here is not so much the Fed's inactivity. It's the only refuge to maintain any semblance of credibility they have left. Once that's gone it's like that simple game of musical chairs--something dramatic happens. To put is another way: Someone once said that it is better to be thought of as a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt.

It doesn't matter what the Fed does next. Whatever it is it will remove all doubt.

Overnight

A picture as we all know is worth, well, a picture. And the picture in Asia overnight was a relief to many as fear of Brexit subsided at least for now. Among those apparently relieved were people fearing another market freeze up as occurred when Lehman blew up in what seems an eon ago. Still many remain cautious trying not to forget those famous words of stock market guru, the late Yogi Berra: "It ain't over until it's over."



The above numbers speak for themselves following last Friday's selloff. As pundits of all sorts ponder the full impact the the UK vote to leave the EU, many investors expect volatility to remain a front and center market issue to which one can only say that only time will tell.

Meanwhile, the major rating agencies jumped into the fray, as is there wont, better late that never to downgrade UK debt to AA from AAA.Two terms, lesser predictability and efficiency in policy setting were tossed around by some to explain the reasoning behind the downgrade. The WSJ reported: Gold prices rose 0.4% to $1,323 a troy ounce and the Japanese yen strengthened 0.2% to 102.46 yen to one U.S. dollar, both early in Asian trading Wednesday.

Yields on Japanese government bonds stayed low and Reuters noted, "Returns on the Japanese 20-year bond reached a fresh all time-low of 0.039%. The yen took a break as the " dollar firmed to 102.63 yen, moving further away from its 2-1/2-year low of 99.00 touched on Friday after the outcome of the UK referendum," according to Reuters. Japanese PM Shinzo Abe pulled a page from Mario Draghi by advising his finance minister and central bank head to take any "necessary measures" to support the economy and financial markets.


:

The Face Of An American Elitist

We're posted this link to an article that appears at davidstockmanscontracorner.com/the-elites-snobbish-reaction-to-brexit-is-the-reason-brexit-happened.

If you want to get an insight of the them-versus-us or us-versus-them theme Brexit symbolizes to see just how authentic it is, you need to read this article. Even more important you need to pass it on. It buttresses what we and others have been saying for a long, long time. Here's a quote to get you started from one of the American elitist crowd, Harvard economist Ken Rogoff. It gives a good account of how these elitists view the rest of us. Never, however, make the mistake that this is something new.

On op-ed pages, there was a lot of the same. Harvard economics professor and chess grandmaster Kenneth Rogoff wrote a piece for the Boston Globe called “Britain’s democratic failure” in which he argued:
“This isn’t democracy; it is Russian roulette for republics. A decision of enormous consequence… has been made without any appropriate checks and balances.”
Rogoff then went on to do something that’s become popular in pundit circles these days: He pointed to the lessons of antiquity. Going back thousands of years, he said, Very Smart People have warned us about the dangers of allowing the rabble to make decisions.
“Since ancient times,” he wrote, “philosophers have tried to devise systems to try to balance the strengths of majority rule against the need to ensure that informed parties get a larger say in critical decisions.”
Presumably playing the role of one of the “informed parties” in this exercise, Rogoff went on:

“By some accounts… Athens had implemented the purest historical example of democracy,” he wrote. “Ultimately, though, after some catastrophic war decisions, Athenians saw a need to give more power to independent bodies.”
This is exactly the argument that British blogging supernova Andrew Sullivan unleashed a few months ago in his 8,000-word diatribe against Donald Trump, “Democracies end when they are too democratic.”
Like Rogoff, Sullivan argued that over-democratic societies drift into passionate excesses, and need that vanguard of Very Smart People to make sure they don’t get themselves into trouble.

In short, you the rabble can have our gift to you of voting your choice, but we the superior humans of the planet need to have our checks and balances to override whenever you make a mistake and exceed your mental capacity. Mistake here, of course, means voting for something they in their superior intellect disagree with.

Prayers Get Answered

 
Here's some more CNN Money financial nonsense. Most of it more whining and whimpering over the UK's exit from the EU. We warned you about the post-Brexit scaremongering from MSM and its elitist friends in high places.money.cnn.com/2016/06/28/news/economy/uk-economy-brexit-taxes-spending-austerity.

1. Economists have slashed their growth forecasts for this year, and next, with some even predicting a recession.

When is the last time economists anywhere on the planet got their growth forecasts anywhere near correct? And their predictions have been about as accurate as those of Goldman Sachs, abominable.

2. Britain's top finance official: 'It will not be plain sailing.

Here we have outgoing UK Treasury Chief George Osborne telling the globe the obvious. After plowing through months of  articles about the upcoming Brexit, we cannot recall anyone on the leave side suggesting it would be smooth sailing if UK voters voted to leave.

3. "It's very clear that the country is going to be poorer as a result of what's happening to the economy," Osborne told the BBC on Tuesday.

"We are absolutely going to have to provide fiscal security to people," he said. "In other words, we're going to have to show the country and the world that the government can live within its means."

This pathetic quote almost deserves no response. We thought that's what they been doing all these years, providing fiscal security to people, the very thing that's been preventing them from living within their means.

4. The chancellor's assessment that more austerity will be needed is the latest body blow to hopes that Britain's economy would be relatively unscathed by a decision to leave the EU.

Again, another straw man ploy. We don't recall anyone suggesting the economy if exit was voted in would get through relatively unscathed.

5. Osborne was once viewed as a possible successor to Prime Minister David Cameron, but he has ruled himself out as a replacement.

Who said prayers never get answered? Here we have a high ranking British bureaucrat pulling an updated Dick Nixon.

More True Now Than Ever

There's a common misconception about elections--one fostered either from purpose or ignorance for years by MSM--that they evolve around liberal versus conservative. Any even cursory study of non-doctored or non-revised history shows that was never the case and the Brexit vote lasers home that point.

The Republican Party founded in Michigan in the 1850s and later to send Abraham Lincoln to the White House was a remnant of the old Whig Party with it's economic agenda firmly fixed by the statist Whig doctrines featuring a huge increase in centralized government power centered on big income tax increases, heavy taxes on liquor and tobacco, huge land grants and monetary handouts to railroads and the reinstatement of protective tariffs.

A recent musical Broadway hit that celebrated Federalist Alexander Hamilton gained much praise for its PC rather than its historical accuracy. The Hamiltonian Higher Federalists Party preceded the Whig Party, followed then by the new Republican Party, all sharing their common love of a central bank and for big centralized government.

The other side of that ledger, as Murray Rothbard in his, "The Case Against the Fed," puts it:  "Ranged against this powerful group of nationalists was an equally powerful movement dedicated to laissez-faire, free markets, free trade, ultra-minimal and decentralized government, and....a hard money system based squarely on gold and silver, with banks shorn of all special privileges and hopefully confined to 100-percent specie banking."

This group, as Rothbard notes, "comprised Jeffersonian Democratic-Republican and then the Jacksonian Democratic Party, and their potential constituents permeated every occupation except those of banker and banker's favorite elite clientele."  Jackson was a huge opponent of central banking and laid to rest the second rendition of a harmful U.S. central bank in the 1830s before Wall Street bankers led by J Pierpont Morgan and others reopened Pandora's box in 1913 with the current version.

If there is anything even remotely redolent of laissez-faire, free markets, free trade, ultra-minimal and decentralized government, and a hard money system backed squarely by gold and silver with banks shorn of special privileges...." about the current left-wing controlled Democrat Party we have yet to see it. And the same applies to that Grand Old Party today's neocons on both sides love. You know the ones: military-industrial complex, war and more of the same. Both are corporatism nannies. It's just a matter of degree.

This is why the recent Brexit vote is so important and symbolic. With the birth of the Internet people now know they are both the same; however, like any good, profitable drug dealer they're simply pushing their brand of elitism. Shackles come in many sizes and names.

The WSJ, a shill for the Grand Old Party, recently printed this canard: "Elections are usually fought on the familiar terrain of liberal versus conservative and big government versus small. That is now shifting to nationalist versus internationalist and ordinary workers versus elites."

The truth is, as the example above notes, it's always been ordinary workers versus the elites and its history goes back a long, long way. A while back in U.S. political history a third party candidate characterized these two parties, saying: "There's not a dime's worth of difference between the two."

Since then we've suffered some serious inflation, but the concept is more true now than ever. And that's just one reason why Brexit has so fired up the fear meters of the entrenched.

Contemplating Departure

                                                 
We can't claim credit for this alliteration (It came from an article by Brian Westbury), but you need to get prepared for it because we're going to get a lot more: "The pouting pundits of pessimism are once again crying the sky is falling."

As you can see we inadvertently created our own alliteration--can't claim credit. What we can do, however, is call it what it is--a sham. We've seen and read so many of these scaremonger articles for months leading up to Brexit, it would probably gag a big bureaucratic EU maggot.

Now that the tally is in and it didn't go the way they wanted, the whimpering and sniveling continues. If only, one pundit post-Brexit opined, we'd let the UK have more input on their immigration problems things might have turned out different. If only Jean-Claude "it's okay to lie at times" Juncker would have lied more forcefully, suggested another, the people of the UK would've bought the EU snake oil.

To paraphrase one of those EU bureaucrats' favorite historical figures and a Brit himself, John Maynard Keynes, nine of ten times the worst expected never happens.The EU was a disaster looking for a place to abort from the beginning. They overplayed their heavy-handedness from the start, tossing in a brand of conceit and arrogance that could only come from a rules-laden place like Brussels or a French politician. Still another loudmouth Brussels commissioner, never believing the vote would go the way it did, arrogantly popped off: "Leave means leave now!"

Cutting a makeshift phony deal to keep UK money flowing into Brussels coffers should be an insult to the 52 percent who voted hasta la vista. The EU should asphyxiate, as it eventually will, on its own flatulence before a single pound gets sent there.

The UK is a tiny island populated by a people with a long history of surviving difficult times.
Bring on your reprisals and show the rest of the globe your true colors particularly those contemplating their own departure..

Overnight

It's another choppy night in Asia as Brexit fallout continues to trouble much of the globe.

The Nikkei started  out on a down leg, falling nearly 2%, but came back to trade flat. The Hang Send dropped 0.9%, the Australia ASX 200 shed 1.8%, the Shanghai Composite drifted lower 0.1% while the Korean Kospi turned up slightly, 0.2%. Part of the early sell off came from down performances in Europe and the U.S. as investors continue to try to digest the full impact of Brexit. Japanese automakers took the brunt of the early selloff with Toyota down 3.2%, Honda off 1.5% and Mazda crumbling 4.7%.

"Until companies get a clear sense of what the impact will be on their earnings, a strong yen will likely to stay as the reason for selling," said one analyst. Banks  were  in the news and the news wasn't  good for Australian banks as shares were hit by a sell-off. Some were saying that the earlier hamming U.K. and EU bank stocks received, according to one report, the worst two-days in history, spilled over into Asia.

The Chinese weakening their currency yesterday though it was pegged a bit higher overnight didn't help matters either as the dollars gains strength and worry about EU bank solvency gather momentum.  

• 
  
• 
  
• 
  
• 
  
• 
  

 

Quack! Quack!

If it looks like, quacks like, poops like a duck, it's probably not a duck. More than likely it's a recession. The only other possibility is an investment banker.

We just told you about the fast food fare business (Five Twenties, Please!) and here's another indicator from zerohedge.com/news/2016-06-27/recession-dallas-fed-workweek-hits-7-year-low.

The Dallas Fed Business Outlook has now been in contraction for 18 straight months. The underlying components are mixed but the average workweek has collapsed back to its lowest since Nov 2009. As one respondent noted, "This is a recession... Fed policy has us locked into a lethargic and tenuous position... We cannot have millions of people out of the workforce and be healthy economically - they are a burden not a benefit."
The biggest drop in Dallas Fed workweek since 2009!

They Aren't Going Away

We recently took issue (You Never Know) with the following: In a WSJ Weekend piece, Fraser Nelson, the editor of Spectator and Daily Telegraph columnist, writes in his "A Very British Revolution," The world is looking at Britain and asking: What on Earth just happened? Those who run Britain are asking the same question.

Mr. Nelson claims there are no parallelisms between the UK Brexit vote and the Trump movement. He is wrong, completely out of touch not only with many Americans but apparently with many of his own fellow Brits. We welcome your response, sir.


The story below from today's Financial Times with the link to it further supports our premise that the leave Brexit vote in the UK has far closer similarities to the U.S. upcoming presidential election and the traction Donald Trump is generating among voters who are hardly xenophobes, gun-nuts, haters, isolationists or white redneck crazies. 

Immigration is a global issue EU bureaucrats ignored at what now turns out to be their own peril. Those in the UK who voted to leave are neither hateful nor crazy in the main. They have a legitimate concern that was not being heard. Ask Angel Merkel this morning. Or Japan's Prime Minister.

There are other legitimate issues to be sure. These and immigration are dividing issues. Get it and get it straight. Park the epithets where they belong, completely absent from the debate. Understand what's at risk here. People--decent, good people--who want their sovereignty, liberty and privacy aren't going away. Now for the Times link below.

There are strong parallels between those backing Leave and Donald Trump’s supporters

against. Mr Cameron vowed to cap net UK immigration at 100,000 a year — a promise he failed to keep. Successive US administrations have promised to enforce America’s borders before offering amnesty. As a test of market conditions, Britain’s contest between elite hypocrisy and populist sincerity could not be bettered.

edward.luce@ft.com

Five Twenties, Please

 
When all else fails blame the consumer.

That's the strategy of policy wonks, market gurus and other Keynesian trolls. NIRP, ZIRP, increased public spending and all those others kinds of economic deep burps didn't work, so what's left--the favorite whipping dog of all Keynesians, young and old: those dirty, rotten, stubborn, cheap consumers.

For any and all who can still afford one, there's no more room in the garage to stack imported Chinese junk, a huge blow to the ego of Keynesian worshipers. And now here comes more unpalatable economic fare. The history of American consumers is fraught with many passing things, drinking their liquor from old fruit jars, trolling around shopping malls in their blue suede shoes, but they almost never, ever drive past a fast food window.

We all know the ones, those folks in the UK who finally stepped up and voted for their freedom and liberty, the ones who decided to look after themselves and take personal responsibility for their own lives, every interventionist and centralist nightmare. In the U.S. it looks as if those chintzy crowd members are dorsiflexing their hands and pushing themselves away from the fast food tables, according to the WSJ.

Restaurant visit growth has completely stalled in the last three months, signaling that consumers, jittery over economic uncertainties, are retrenching. Visits to fast-food restaurants had been growing at a quarterly clip of 2% since September 2015, but haven't grown at all in March, April or May, according to as-yet-unpublished data from market research firm NPD Group Inc.

When fast-food growth comes to a halt, “that’s a red flag because it’s been an area of growth and it’s 80% of the industry,” NPD restaurant analyst Bonnie Riggs said.
Restaurants are among the first industries to benefit when consumers are feeling flush, but recent economic indicators may be giving people pause about dining out. Job growth slowed last month, and gas prices are starting to climb again. Now, with the U.K. planning to exit the European Union, analysts say any related turbulence in U.S. financial markets could exacerbate the pullback.

We don't know if fast food visits are important enough to make the dot-plot list of Fed Chair Janet Yellen, but it might be another thorn in the side of further interest rate hikes this year. Instead of the coming helicopter money drops, why burn up that expensive aviation fuel, passing it out at the fast food pick up window, Janet, might prove more effective.

"A couple of cheeseburgers, hold the onions and mayonnaise, some fries, a large coke and five twenties, please!"