OVERNIGHT

Trouble in Doha set the stage for overnight trading Monday as any agreement to cut production in oil apparently fell apart after 18 countries met over the weekend in the capitol of Qatar.

According to reports from Reuters, the pact fell apart "when Saudi Arabia demanded that Iran join the agreement." Iran had previously stated it would not consider cutting production until it reach its 500,000 barrels a day quota it was doing before sanctions were slapped on the nation for its nuclear program. Many felt going into this meeting that would be s sticking point. Brent crude was down 4.5% to $41.10 while U.S. crude was trading at $38.26.

Japanese shares were hit by concerns over the devastating earthquake that hit the southwest part of the country. The big quake registered at 7.3 early Saturday, following a smaller one Thursday. Reuters noted:

The plunge in crude oil prices took a large slice out of commodity currencies.
The greenback gained 1.1 percent against the Canadian dollar to C$1.2961 CAD=D4 while the Australian dollar shed 0.8 percent to $0.7663 AUD=D4.
The Japanese yen, a perceived safe-haven, rose on the turmoil, with the dollar skidding 0.6 percent to 108.07 yen JPY=.

Meanwhile, the Nikkei 225  dropped 2.7% until investor figured out how bad the quake affected an area known for its manufacturing. In other news, economic data out Friday in the U.S. showed further slowing as industrial production declined more than expected. economists were looking for 0.1% drop but the data showed 0.6% downturn last month, the sixth downturn in the last seven months./ Consumer sentiment added to the gloom dropping to its lowest level in seven months. Gold managed a 0.2% gain to $1,233.70. The Shanghai Composite Index slipped 1.3% and South Korea’s Kospi was off 0.5%.

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A SOUND DOLLAR

This is a presidential election year, as nearly everyone knows.

There's much at stake. Possibly a deciding seat on the Supreme Court of the Land. Possibly what some are calling a rogue president. But if you ask us all three of the major candidates, not to leave out those possible subs on the sidelines, look like rogues to us.

But that in our view is the least of our worries. The most dangerous thing in America today is the Federal Reserve Bank. We would say the out-of-control-feeling-their-way-in-the-dark Federal Reserve Bank but that would be a gross understatement.

These are hand picked, non-elected, appointed people. Vetted by whom, Congress? If Congress' public confidence ratings gets any lower, it will soon be whale dung on the ocean's floor. This is serious business. Joined by their global central bank comrades, the havoc these people are setting up is the real shock and awe awaiting this country. 

And what's at stake here is your future, your liberty and that of your children and their children. Believe these bureaucrats and their MSM shills at your own peril. If you awoke one morning to discover you were just a few bucks short of being $43,000 in debt and so was every person in your household, your neighborhood, your county, your state and your country, how would you feel about that? Then there's a knock the door and someone from the government says he's there to collect.

All governments are rogue and rogue governments always try to inflate their way out of debt, the more crushing, the more obvious. Ask yourself why all these central banks are suddenly looking for a bit of. inflation. Praying in some circles might still be a proper term. We know what they tell us. But that's like the Big Rock Candy Mountain, a fantasy.

Deflation is about falling prices. It's about the increasing purchasing power of your money. When did deflation become Public Enemy Number One? When the Fed figured out it didn't understand and know how to deal with it? It's about creditors trumping debtors. The big squeeze is on. Printing money is a counterfeit form of low cost borrowing.

As we said, this is an election year. Your vote might not count for much, but your voice, that's a whole another matter. Below is an excerpt from James Grant of the Interest Rate Observer and it's link.  Read it for yourself and decide. We are well aware of what awaits those who question the in-crowd. They'll roll out their trite package of epithets, gold bug, scaremonger, conspirator and no doubt a bunch more unseemly ones if need be.

The Fed has painted the country--maybe even the globe--into a horrible corner that really has only one of two ways out. But neither will pleasant when the time comes.

We always need protection against cockeyed economic experimentation. Once a national consensus on money and debt furnished this protective armor. Money was gold and debt was bad, Americans assumed. Most credentialed economists today will smile at these ancient prejudices. Allow me to suggest that our forebears knew something.

Keynes himself would recoil at 0% bank-deposit rates, chronically low economic growth and the towering trillions that we have so generously pledged to one another. (All we have to do now is earn the money to pay them.)

How do we escape from our self-constructed fiscal jail? According to the Government Accountability Office, unpaid taxes add up to more than $450 billion a year. Even so, according to the Tax Foundation, Americans spend6.1 billion hours and $233.8 billion each tax season complying with a federal tax code that runs to 10 million words. Are we quite sure we want no part of the flat-tax idea? An identical low rate on most incomes. No deductions, no H&R Block. Impractical? So is the debt.

So is the spending (and the promises to spend more down the road). We need to stop the squandermania. How? By resuming the principled fight that Vivien Kellems waged against the IRS during the Truman Administration. It enraged Kellems, a doughty Connecticut entrepreneur, that she was forced to withhold federal taxes from her employees’ wages. She called it involuntary servitude, and she itched to make her constitutional argument in court. She never got that chance, but she published her plan for a peaceful revolution.

She asked her readers–I ask mine–to really examine the stub of their paycheck. Observe how much your employer pays you and how much less you take home. Notice the dollars withheld for Medicare, Social Security and so forth. If you are like most of us, you stopped looking long ago. You don’t miss the income that you never get to touch.

Picking up where Kellems left off, I propose a slight alteration in payday policy. Let each wage-earning citizen hold the whole of his or her untaxed earnings–actually touch them. Then let the government pluck its taxes.

“Such a payroll policy,” wrote Kellems in her memoir, Taxes, Toil and Trouble, “is entirely legal and if it were universally adopted, in six months we would have either a tax revolution or a startling contraction of the budget!”

Black ink, sound money and the spirit of Vivien Kellems are the way forward. “Make America solvent again” is my credo and battle cry. You can fit it on a cap.

http://time.com/4293549/the-united-states-of-insolvency/

WELCOME ABOARD!

The Ivy League Pedigree Disease. Yes, there is one.

There is a long article in The WSJ weekend edition, "The Next Conservative Movement," by Yuval Levin. Levin is a contributing editor to the National Review and the Weekly Standard. That, conservatively speaking, places him in the conservative camp, the faction of the GOP most in an uproar about a certain presidential primary candidate.

Though he apparently is from the University of Chicago, the Ivy League Pedigree Disease is contagious. Probably the only time he spends in the real world everyday is when he commutes to and from his book-lined academic cellar. His writing style is a bit stilted, highly Latinate and punctuated with a heavy dose of the obligatory -tion words, nouns mostly abstract and meaningless, all too safe and common to the world of bureaucrats and political party apologists.

They sound good, at least to him and his pedigree. And probably look good to his eye on paper as well. Not to mention the Journal editors.They're a formula, a recipe supposedly for fixing things. They're the polar opposite for the declarative, straight-forward subject, verb, object. The real essence of honest communication. Billy hit the ball. He touched all the sacks on his way around the diamond.

There is no room for misunderstanding or error there. Nor for highfalutin, academic babble attempting to masquerade as prose. One of his criticisms of a current presidential hopeful is the candidate criticizes but offers no solutions.

The is not a new line of thinking. We run into it frequently. The point being one must offer solutions along with one's criticisms for his criticisms to be valid. That's the kind of half-truth academia and it denizens are noted for. But there are times when one has to realize there is a problem first before one can focus on possible solutions.

This is a form of shooting the messenger. In politics, apparently, one has to have solutions before taking office. Is that it, kind sir?  Cite a president who has not been guilty of learning on the job including the current one who may make history books as the classic example of such.

And is a solution not a solution because you or I don't agree with it? We don't endorse or agree with building walls, xenophobia and such. But to a candidate who tossed them out there and to those who supported him in trumped up, phony primary elections, under the guise that their vote matters, they must see them also as solutions.

To make up for years of wasteful mismanagement of taxpayer money, one of the other candidates wants to tax us to kingdom come in the name of fairness and a whole gaggle of other abstracts. One of the excuses for such often cited is comparing us with what those in other countries pay. Why must we be compared with anyone? Who wrote that rule? We're suppose to be a sovereign nation.

We don't necessarily see that as a solution. But we understand many do. Are they correct? Is their answer a valid solution and that of anyone who differs not so? In the same issue in the Opinion section, Michael Barone, a well-know mouthpiece of the status quo GOP, writes this pathetic but telling paragraph. Barone's article is "Trump Can't Break the Republican Party."

It is generally agreed that the presidential nomination process is the weakest part of our political system. One reason is that it leaves the two great parties vulnerable to disruptive candidates--controversial political figures who threaten to reshape the party to which they have attached themselves.

Notice the terms disruptive, reshape, controversial,vulnerable. That should  give you an idea about elitism, diversity of opinion, controversial, tolerance and a rock hard mentality to keep the status quo. Focus also on the "our political system." We thank the WSJ and the two authors for letting us see your real, exclusionary feelings.

The "two great parties," Barone sounds as if he stole that phrase from another WSJ GOP apologist. These are two essentially bankrupt parties that have served less than 25% of the population for decades. The numbers of people who don't vote anymore now rival the number of people who dropped out of looking for a job a long time ago, the ones the Fed don't want to accurately report.

Levin notes what is one of the biggest blabbed American secrets, this is a fractured nation. And indeed it is. It started out that way and little has changed. One has to forgive his pedantic pedigree leanings and realize he's speaking only to the GOP troops, not ordinary people who queued up in those primary voting lines to express their votes. Barone coughs up Theodore Roosevelt and his Progressive movement failed to do-in the GOP. Teddy was s Democrat in bison clothing. He never met a government too big. Many of those who dropped out understand all too well what their vote actually means in a system governed by these "two great parties." The value is right up there with negative zero interest rates.

The other octopus in Washington, the Democrats, have not been able to do-in the GOP either after all these years. But it looks like they won't have to. Elitist statements like the paragraph noted above will do it for them.

A while back the CEO of BlackRock, a multi-billionaire, the world's largest asset management fund, publicly stated he didn't understand why everyone was so upset. To Mr. Barone and Mr. Levin we can say: "Welcome aboard," You three must know each other.

FULL SWING AHEAD

They say in show business the show must go on and, apparently, in the U.S. fracking business so must the pumping. This today from zerohedge.com/news/2016-04-15/default-cycle-now-full-swing-goodrich-petroleum-latest-energy-company-file-chapter-1.

Interesting point here despite filling for bankruptcy many of these fracking firms will continue in business. So is this the end of the beginning or the beginning of the end of these defaults? Meanwhile, investors are on hold at least for the weekend pending an oil meeting set to take place.

Suddenly, the price of oil has become an important indicator for investors as they decided how much risk they want to wager.

OVERNIGHT

Sounding a lot like ECB President Mario Draghi, Japan's central bank counterpart, Haruhiko Karoda, speaking in New York Wednesday said the BOJ "will not hesitate to take additional easing measures in terms of....quantity, quality and the interest rate if it judged necessary."

Japan and the EU are both fiddling around with negative interest rates in what so far has been anything but a success. The idea was to weaken both currencies in an attempt to revive their economies at least in part by exports. Investors have responded in Japan's case by pushing the yen to 18 month highs against the dollar.

But uncertainty creates it's own sometimes unexpected uncertainty as the yen became a safe haven currency with investors pushing it to new highs. That wasn't suppose to happen. Part of the problen has been concerns about China, the global economy in general and the credibility of Abernomics in particular.

In what was a caution mood early Friday, investors avoided risk ahead of a weekend oil meeting that will be watched closely to see if any meaningful production cuts are in store. Meanwhile, China reported GDP growth 6.7%, a number many feel is suspect. But investors seemed unruffled.
Reuters reported Japan's Nikkei .N225 was down 0.3 percent, while Australian shared edged up 0.4 percent . Other modest gainers included Malaysian and Indonesian stocks. Shanghai .SSEC lost 0.4 percent, while South Korea's Kospi .KS11 inched down 0.1percent. MSCI's broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan slipped 0.1 percent. The index has gained about 3.5 percent on the week during which it hit a five-month high, helped by a slight thaw in pessimism over the Chinese economy and an earlier surge in crude oil prices.

OUT OF THE CLEAR BLUE

 It's usually something totally unexpected, in popular terms often described "as out of the blue."

However small or seemingly unexpected and insignificant, it frequently has bone rattling consequences. Those bone rattling consequences often spell changes. Sometimes big, well needed changes. The Panama Papers, what now appears to be a botched Internet hacking job, could be the latest version.

The widespread evidence of corruption and, to use a play on the words one of this year's presidential hopefuls, gaming the system, could be the blow that chops down the cherry tree no one can no longer deny is rotten to its roots.

One sure sign of this truth is the trouble the entrenched are waging to stop a couple of what can be  described only as real outliers, Sanders and Trump, underdogs. It's almost enough to make one wish the two would form their own ticket and fire a significant shot of real change to be heard around the globe.

It's over. Two senseless, meaningless, corrupt political parties are done. Finis. Let the sluggards, the elitists and the money-lenders know: That was then, but this is now. Such a union might sound weird at first, but could hardly be worse than what we've had. At least early on they might be too much in the spotlight to attempt anything shady.

It takes a while to build arrogance, conceit and contempt. And with these two parties we're way past the ninth inning. These two candidates, like them or otherwise, appear to be what the population wants, as different as they seem. That's why we hold shameful gatherings every four years called elections, isn't it? But these two parties care less what the population wants. What they care about is self-propagation and control.

What we have here is what one writer called "the mythology of democracy." You can vote all right and you can saunter out of your local polling place wearing the little paper tag that you have, but that's as far as it goes. Those trying feverishly to derail Sanders and Trump are proof positive just how little importance your vote carries with them.

And the longer you play this charade the sooner you will forfeit any remaining vestige of hope for freedom and liberty you may have. We recently wrote about Goldman Sachs and their almost hysteria about Brexit. Most of us know who David Cameron is. If you don't, he is part of the Western mythology of democracy.

ODD IS AS ODD DOES

We've talked about the Fed's sudden turn around about raising interest rates after the February G20 meeting. We called it odd.

We talked about how just a few months earlier the Fed was projecting four or five rates hikes in 2016, an abrupt change is probably an understatement, but so it is.Yesterday we had Fed Chair Yellen meeting with Obama and Biden is what certainly was an unusual meeting given the timing and that just a week before she had given a speech in New York.

We've covered the pathetic shape European banks are in in general and Italian banks in particular and the recently announced 5 billion euro rescue plan. We know China's projected GDP numbers are questionable at best. We mentioned it seemed odd that JP Morgan came out yesterday changing it China view from neutral to overweight.

Now today, just one day later, we get this reassurance from Mother Hen Yellen that the Fed is following its mandate of taking care of America and Americans. It's her Main Street meme.

We know negative zero interest rates are having some unintended effects in the world and confidence in its exponents is sinking faster than you can spell incompetent bureaucrat. We know under the guise of losing their independence, the Fed deplores any and all talk about an open, objective audit of their balance sheet. We looked up the term transparency in Webster's. And just this morning we did the same for odd.

That might seem odd. Here's more. Read it for yourself.

In an oddly-timed-release, just a day after her 'unusual' meeting with President Obama (and sandwiched between two "emergency Fed meetings"), Janet Yellen's seemingly legacy-protecting narrative-confirming interview with TIME magazine proclaiming once again that "we are focused on Main Street, on supporting economic conditions - plentiful jobs and stable prices - that help all Americans." So now you know - it's all for you America - the bank bailouts, the deflationary-glut-creating ZIRP, the money-printing, and the "confusing and confounding" messaging. Now stop your complaining and Vote Hillary!

As TIME reports, you don’t often hear central bankers say, “I don’t know.” That’s because monetary wizards, like brain surgeons and rocket scientists, tend to cultivate an aura of omniscience. Their vast underground computers crank out supposedly precise answers to complex questions about where the global economy will be in the next five minutes or the next five years. But Federal Reserve Board Chair Janet Yellen has never been allergic to uncertainty.

zerohedge.com/news/2016-04-13/day-after-obama-meeting-yellen-confirms-fed-focused-main-street-helping-all-american

OVERNIGHT

It was a good day for Asian stocks Thursday with the exception of China as most markets edged higher.

The Nikkei rose 2.6% After a string of positive days, the benchmark is on track to mark its first weekly gain in three weeks, according to a WSJ report.The yen was last trading at 109 per U.S. dollar, after touching as strong as 107 this week. A strong yen pressures profits of Japanese companies by making their exports more expensive. Australia’s S&P/ASX 200 climbed 1%, Korea’s Kospi rose 1.3%, and Hong Kong’s Hang Seng Index was up 0.9%. 
 
Much of the action centered on the Singapore central bank that surprised traders by lowering its policy band on the Singapore dollar to zero after a round of slower growth in the first quarter. The local dollar fell 0.6% that apparently spilled over into other Asain currencies wiht the Krean wndonw a full percent against the U.S. dollar

In other markets MSCI's broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan rose 0.3 percent, reaching its highest level since Dec. 2. The index has risen 4.7 percent since Friday, breaking above several resistance levels to signal further gains, Reuters noted.In the overnight U.S. market  JP Morgan's first quarter earnings fell but less than expected. And a plan in Europe to bail out Italian banks aided Italian bank shares with a 5 billion euro fund that was in the news earlier.

The WSJ also reported this: J.P. Morgan upgraded its stance on China to overweight from neutral, citing the slower pace of foreign exchange reserves declines, receding fears about yuan devaluation and improving China economic data.With the all the recent happenings surrounding the Fed and it's reversal and Yellen's powwow with Obama and Biden, that makes one wonder if the fix is in when it comes to China, especially until after the election in November.

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DATA JUNKIES II

Earlier we posted Data Junkies, we should probably call it Data Junkies I, a piece about the new newsletters the New York and Atlanta Feds are now springing on the scene with boring, unimaginative monikers.

Part of our point is we've for years been questioning much of the authenticity of the Fed's numbers. Job numbers and the old NROU, natural rate of unemployment a case in point. Questioning is the kind term, deliberate doctoring another.

Part of our skepticism stems for our own personal experience with big, centralized government, cases where you know the data is inaccurate. We won't bore you with examples other than to say if someone has been dead and officially witnessed and buried for years but keeps popping up in quarterly government reports as being alive, that might be an indication.

We could cite numerous others like the number of man hours lost by government employees owing to work injuries. Regular reports get sent to Washington. If those numbers got any more doctored they'd be a patented medicine. You might find it hard to believe that an injured worker is forced to come into work and lay on a cot in his or her supervisor's office for eight hours so that month's report can be sent in with zero lost man hours.

Yea, we're discussing the good old USA. So despite what you might think, it's hardly a stretch to suspect economic data goes undoctored. The surprise would be if it didn't go undoctored. So here's another point on the same subject. Like a lot of people you feel a little lonely out there, maybe from time to time even a little guilty thinking such suspicious thoughts.

But as it's been noted a long time ago, facts are stubborn things. Here's a piece by someone else we don't even know.
dailyspeculations.com/wordpress/?p=11000

Bill Rafter and I have discussed for years the steadily growing discontinuity in the BLS's employment data versus that implied by payroll tax receipts.

A few years ago the staff economists at the Atlanta Fed got so fed up with the nonsensical BEA GDP reports that they started issuing their own report anticipating the GDP release with their GDPNow report.

Although the media has since glommed onto the report it is treated in similar fashion to the ADP employment release.

The differences between the two is important however.

The ADP report is distinct from the BLS data and uses inputs chosen by ADP.

The GDPNow report is designed to mirror the BEA's data inputs to anticipate not what what GDP is but what the BEA will report that it is.

The Atlanta Fed staff are putting the manipulators on notice, and those in the media and at the FOMC willing to go along with it, that there are consequences.

The actions by the Atlanta Fed staff have also helped to embolden other Fed staff members to do similar work and make it public.

The Richmond Fed staff economists have now produced a model of unemployment called the non-employment index that challenges the accuracy of the BLS data.

The importance of this is that it challenges the usefulness of the U3 unemployment rate and the FOMC natural rate of unemployment (NROU) predicated on it.

The point is that data is being willfully corrupted by providers and this has engendered, finally, a push back by others.

Being aware of the totality of this, especially for a group focused on clean data is important.

DATA JUNKIES

Its first day of confusion started way back in 1913 and not much has changed since.

The Federal Reserve Bank of New York just sprung on the American populous a new so-called gee-whiz indicator that will give them and supposedly the rest of us peons a real insight into "real time" economic data. Translation: What the hell's really going on.

The new report supposedly will track U.S. growth in the nation's GDP. We can tell by the reaction of the throngs just how thrilled everyone is. This new report will supposedly stick it economic head out of the nation's birth canal this week.

There's just a couple of bumps in that road. New indicators to better foresee are not new and their history for inaccuracy or really revealing anything significant is hardly new either. But a more intriguing problem is the rivalry that seems to be set up between the New York bank and it's sibling in Atlanta.

It appears, too, to be a battle for catchy named newsletters. Since 2014 the Atlanta Federal Reserve Bank has been spitting out its GDPNow letter. The New York Fed, the new kid on the block at least in this area, calls it's gem, FRBNY Staff Nowcast. You can see these bureaucrats have been burning much of their midnight creative powers on brilliant names.

As for another problem, as the WSJ reports today, quoting from the website's of both banks: "The New York Fed's Staff Nowcast is estimating tepid first-quarter growth of at 1.1% and the Atlanta Fed's measure is showing a near stall of 0.1%."  It's just a small one percent difference.

GDP reports are not limited to government ones. Private firms and some corporations issue their own to serve clients and others who want to know. One of those want-to-know groups is investors and traders. Conflicting reports like these two are hardly helpful.

So what's one to do? Well, one executive at a private firm in what was most likely a burst of pragmatic thinking says: He told his clients to take an average of the two until further notice. But whatever you do, we hardly thinks he'll want you to call him in the morning.

Are you surprised? Nor should you be surprised how these data-hounded bureaucrats can waste tax payer dollars. In some circles this used to known as a circle jerk. In academia it's called peer-based reviews. Our data junkies are better than yours.