OVERNIGHT

Stocks were down Tuesday in Japan as negative interest rates hit the banking sector coupled with falling energy price in the U.S. Oil traded around $35.32 and the yen 110.76. The Nikkei was off a little over 2% at 15,759.

Most other markets in the area were also down with the Hang Seng off 1.42%, the Australian and South Korean markets were also down. The Shanghai Composite Index was the only one heading higher in what has been a recent surprise gaining 6% over the past two months while the Nikkei has lost around 7% in that time.

Investors may be coming to realize that there is a limit to what central bankers can do with their wild schemes and that could well spell big trouble for markets going forward. Meanwhile, the Australian central bank held its interest rates at 2% and conflicting statements by members of the Federal Reserve since Chair Janet Yellen's dovish talk last week could also bode trouble for markets.

A further concern is the yen may be signaling less of a trade advantage in its export markets. Gold was higher

 

 

 

IN THIS CASE, UNFORTUNATELY, IT'S BOTH

There's an old saying that it takes one to know one.

So it's a rare day when we would say anything favorable about the editorial staff at the WSJ especially in their zeal for all the wrong reasons to deny Trump should he legitimately gather the necessary votes to win nomination.

Once again we're not supporters.

But there's no shortage of zealots afoot, all at the ready to push their version of their perceived wisdom down your gullet. And one of the most obnoxious and most dangerous is Rhode Island Democrat Senator Sheldon Whitehouse.

Apparently, the good public servant who spends much of his time genuflecting at the alter of climate change rather than doing his job of serving the people of the tiniest speck on the continent got into a urinating match with the WSJ over the Senator's religion, climate change, and the RICO Act.

Now the Senator suffers from a common malady known as former attorneys general syndrome, you know the kind, the ones who are constantly trying to twist laws that were passed for one reason and use them to ensnare others by broadening their definition without the consent of the public. It's called how dare you differ with my truth.

You can always tell a zealot; they never pass the smell test. It's funny. Even the quasi-government agency called the FDA rallies against physicians who use drugs that were approved for one reason but are indiscriminately used for others not FDA sanctioned. It's a safe bet the good Senator most likely approves of those actions.

Now the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization Act was passed to go after the so-called bad guys like thugs and mobsters, mafia guys who were successfully evading prosecution under laws already on the books. Apparently, Senator Whitehouse believes it should now be applied scientists and editorialists--not to mention ordinary folks--who question the validity of climate change.

The WSJ called him out for trying "to 'stifle' political and scientific debate." Mr. Whitehouse apparently has suggested such to the Department of Justice. Here are Whitehouse's own words from a recent rant on the subject at Huffington Puff.  Read it for yourself. While you're reading it note his use of the term similarities of the two examples he cites.

As someone who spent a good part of a professional career trying to get people off cigarettes even to the point of getting them banned from Federal Medical Centers where they were sold at deep discounts from the public market place, for Mr. Whitehouse to claim anyone who questioned the Surgeon General's data or questioned what was really a public stick-up of a major industry wasn't singled out is what your mother use to wash your mouth out with soap for telling.

We note this because this is what dangerous zealots do, twist facts, revise history. Senator Whitehouse likes to recall some quotes from the past. Well, here's a few for him from the same periods. Recall, too, until recently it was labeled global warming, a quite specific term before it was conveniently changed.

"The cooling has already killed hundreds of thousands of people in poor nations. It has already made food and fuel more precious, thus increasing the price of everything we buy. If it continues, and no strong measures are taken to deal with it, the cooling will cause world famine, world chaos, and probably world war, and this could all come by the year 2000."
–Lowell Ponte, The Cooling, 1976.

The facts have emerged, in recent years and months, from research into past ice ages. They imply 
that the threat of a new ice age must now stand alongside nuclear war as a likely source of 
wholesale death and misery for mankind."
–Nigel Calder, former editor of New Scientist and producer of scientific television documentaries, 
"In the Grip of a New Ice Age," International Wildlife, July 1975.

I believe that increasing global air pollution, through its effect on the reflectivity of the earth, is currently dominant and is responsible for the temperature decline of the past decade or two" Reid Bryson, "Environmental Roulette, Global Ecology: Readings Toward a Rational Strategy for Man, John P. Holdren and Paul R. Ehrlich, eds., 1971.

At this point, the world's climatologists are agreed..Once the freeze starts, it will be too late."
–Douglas Colligan, "Brace Yourself for Another Ice Age," Science Digest, February 1973.

You should also note here that Paul R. Ehrlich is the Stanford professor who made a public television bet he lost but never paid about famines caused by population explosion. Here is the opening sentence from his panic-stricken, so-called expert-academic scientific perch in his book, The Population Bomb, in the late 1960s.  "The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate .

The person Erhlich bet with was another scientist of equal reputation and academic standing.They simply disagreed. And we now know who was incorrect.

One reason is that such a suit by the Department of Justice under the Clinton and Bush 
administrations was successful against the fraudulent industry enterprise to sow false doubt 
about tobacco’s dangers (before the RICO suit was won by DOJ, the Journal had called it
 “abuse,” “hypocrisy,” and “a shakedown”). So there’s the little matter of this being the law.

A second reason is that if there is indeed a core of deliberate fraud at the heart of the climate
 denial enterprise, no industry should be big enough to suppress investigation of that fraud. 
Most of the writers I mentioned note similarities between the tobacco fraud scheme and the
 climate denial operation, as has the lawyer who won the tobacco lawsuit for DOJ; as
 apparently have more than a dozen state Attorneys General.

(Does the same apply, Senator, if fraud is found on the part of scientific zealots
 pushing climate change?)

Climate skeptics — people who “disagree” with me on the reality of climate change — are
 not the targets of such an investigation, any more than smokers or people who “disagreed” 
with the Surgeon General were targets of the tobacco case. Those folks may very well be
 victims of the fraud, the dupes. Fraud investigations punish those who lie, knowing that
they are lying, intending to fool others, and do it for money. No one should be too big to
 answer for that conduct.

(Those who knowingly lie, intending to fool other and do it for money. Does this,
 Mr. Senator, include bureaucrats and politicians?)

This is an important difference, and it’s the difference I’m talking about when I say 
the Wall Street Journal editorial page is trying to saddle me with an argument I’m not 
making because they don’t have a good response to the one I am. Frankly, all this makes
 it look like they are out to protect the fraudsters, by misleading regular people about 
what such a lawsuit would do and continuing their long tradition of downplaying or denying 
scientists’ warnings about the harms of industries’ products.

(And here you have one of the favorite ploys of zealots, guilt by insinuation. 
It's right up there with concrete terms like similarities.) 

Like all zealots, Mr. Whitehouse is extremely selective in selecting his quotes 
(Or at least his taxpayer staff  is!) and that's a two-way street and all the more 
reason not to panic and stifle public debate without the threat of RICO 
arbitrarily hanging over the heads of reputable scientists and decent citizens 
in the public at large. 

Governments' track record around the globe of jumping to serious 
conclusions with serious unintended consequences and wasting serious 
taxpayer money is hardly a shinning example for building public trust. 

Zealots come in all sizes and shapes. One common characteristic is their attire. 
Usually, it's either religious or political. In this case, unfortunately, it's
 both.

THERE'S NO CON LIKE A NEOCON

There's leprechauns, pecans and neocons. Only one is dangerous to your health and freedom. There's is nothing new about the neocons. And the last three letters of their name is the only accurate part of the appellation.

A good number of those who resent Trump and his bid for the White Shack in Washington are neocon Republicans. But neocons are not exclusive to Republicans. There's more than enough in the Donkey Party to go around. One of the neocons' favorite cons is NATO, an over-expensive, over-budgeted archaic 19th century relic that should have had Taps played over it a score and five years ago.

The idea that the U.S. taxpayer should still be paying for the cost of protecting Europe after all this time would be hilarious if it weren't so pathetically stupid and so pitifully costly. It's part and package of the industrial-military complex neocons love.

At a time when heavyweights like billionaire Stanley Druckenmiller of hedge fund fame is attacking entitlement programs like social security and such complaining that a disaster looms by 2030, there are some questions here. We don't know Druckenmiller, we respect his well-known track record and we followed his career long before he became a household name in the investing world.

The man worked for years for George Soros. Though some might disagree, we find it difficult to believe one can have worked for so long for another without sharing some of that other person's political,social and economic views. He was present during the doing-in of the British pound many years ago. No crime, just a statement of fact.

Who made all these entitlement promises, Democrats or Republicans or both? Or was it just the now dead ones? The other larger question here is U.S. foreign policy or the lack thereof a coherent one. And where does responsibility for this looming mess get placed? There was supposed to be peace dividend when the Berlin Wall crumbled.

Keeping troops billeted half way around the world in numerous far-flung places is costly. And just whose retirement assets are they protecting: yours or those of Goldman Sachs, Blackrock  and your friendly Congress person? A recent blurb out says one retiring Congress lady will receive around $800,000 annually in retirement.

This is what this election is all about, the failed two party system. One presidential candidate in this miasma was recently on television pointing her finger at the crowd saying if she gives her word, she will keep it. That sounds like a promise to us ensconced therein more entitlements..

Neocons love also to pound the war drums. Jingoistic is their middle name. One of the first Republican neocons was Teddy "Rough Rider" Roosevelt. He was a guy who believed there wasn't anything the government couldn't do including starting wars. And there still at it. Good ole Teddy.

Everyday people don't need the Stanley Druckenmillers to tell them a disaster awaits. And telling them they need to plan for their own retirement, though true, is the Big Lie. The first Keogh plan for self-employed if memory serves appeared in the early 1970s. Since then IRAs of numerous stripes have been created from individual SEPs to Roth ones, all government concocted.

But the same government in their greed has made them so complicated with regulations and arbitrary changes that financial planners have a hard time keeping up.When 49 of the 52 state attorneys generals several years ago stuck a portable rocket launcher in the ribs of tobacco companies, evil or not evil in your eyes, and collected billions of dollars none of that lucre found its way into many severely underfunded state run retirement funds.

Just recently until the governor there changed his mind, ( That should tell you about the power of high people in high places.), the state of Connecticut threatened to tax Yale's rich endowment plan. Endowment is about planning for the future just like your retirement plan. Trouble is, you have don't have any heavyweights fighting to keep yours from from thaose octopi in Washington and state capitols.

If you want to know about underfunded state retirement funds, just ask the mayor of Chicago or the governor of California. The greedy governments, federal and state, can't wait for their cut until the retiree dies, so they cooked up RMD, required minimum distribution. It awaits you in the future, should you be lucky or privileged enough to get there.

Look it up if you want to know more. Meanwhile, your ever so prescient central bankers have made it next to impossible to live on whatever funds retirees have, in their zeal to playoff the immediate against your future with their insane policies. We don't know about you, but that sounds like more folks, not fewer, will be looking at the government for help.

Now back to the neocons. There is a place for them. It's the same place you might want to look if you're trying to find one of Ford Motors greatest mistakes, the Edsel.

SCAN THE SCANNERS

Here's a story you might want to pay attention to, that is, if you value your security and privacy.

WASHINGTON--The Federal Bureau of Investigation told law enforcement agencies around the country Friday it would try to help them open locked phones or other devices as much as "legal and policy constraints" allow.

The guidance from the nation's top law-enforcement agency is in response to a surge of interest from state and local authorities in how the agency was able to open a locked iPhone seized in the probe of a terror attack in San Bernardino, Calif., in December.

nasdaq.com/article/fbi-tells-police-it-will-try-to-help-them-open-locked-photo

There are some keys words in this story, "legal and policy constraints." Legal and policy constraints are about in today's society as changeable as the weather. Where does the FBI come off stating it will help local police break into cell phones?  These phones are the property of privates citizens, criminal accusations or not. This issue if politicians who say they care about public opinion, though we know they really don't, should be put to a national vote.

Trumped up charges are hardly new in our system. And the onslaught of private property and private property rights of all sorts is an ongoing matter most often carried out under the guise of getting the bad folks in order to help or to protect the not so bad folks.

Now before you start to roll out your list of epithets, wait a few years when you have no cash just a plastic card in your wallet like the one 40 million Americans on food stamps have that dictate what and where you can buy and how much you paid for it. Then you can call people paranoid.

This is about collecting data. Data that can be leaked or abused, irrespective of motive or inadvertent mistakes.  HIPPA laws are designed to protect one's medical records. It could be something as simple as taking anti-angiolytics for stress. If you're naive enough to think employers want to hire stress-prone employees, be one of the first to volunteer your cell phone to local authorities.

Such things can not only effect your employment but even your ability to secure a loan or get credit. Once again you have a national domestic organization interfering in local problems, local business, preempting  personal privacy and liberty.  For those who sing the song about you must have something to hide or you would not object obviously have never been falsely accused or caught up in such situations. We admire your naiveté. But isn't always the other guy such things happen to.

One scribe from Reuters wrote this misleading, juvenile comment. 

They said most iPhone users have more to fear from criminals than from countries, and few crooks can afford anything like what it costs to break into a fully up-to-date iPhone. 

Breaking into phones isn't the problem. And neither is criminals. This is an information or data fishing expedition easily applied to ordinary citizens with no history of any criminal activity except based on suspicion if even that.

The federal government already uses airplanes that can fly over areas and collect all cell phone numbers active as they scan. And, yes, they can even listen in on conversations, though they claim they don't. What they don't claim is they never have. It was used to scan phone activity after the horrible San Bernardino tragedy where they flew repeatedly, criss crossing a large area that covered miles.

This is a government supposedly reluctant to monitor a few known hostile mosques but is more than
willing to spy on its people. When do you get to scan the scanners or, for that matter, read the e-mails of every government employee irrespective of rank, pay grade or office.

We're willing to bet not anytime soon.

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ALL IN ALL IT'S MORE OF THE SAME

 
Next week is a busy one if you're a central banker. Minneapolis Fed President Neel Kashkari kicks off the week jawboning it at a town hall meeting on "too big to fail," as if we need more discussion on that. Boston Fed President Eric Rosengren discusses cyber security and financial stability. We didn't know central bankers were "hacking" experts. What a surprise.

Tuesday, Chicago Fed President Charles Evans enlightens us on current economic conditions and monetary policy from old Hong Kong. Seems like a far piece to go, but maybe  it was his turn to reap the Hong Kong perk. The same day Magic Man ECB President Mario Draghi reveals all about Europe's economic and financial situation.

On Wednesday, Cleveland Fed President Loretta Mester describes the U.S. and it's regional and economic outlook. Cleveland has one? But you have to hold your breathe until Thursday when the big guns--past and present--capture the cynosure with Janet Yellen, her comrade and predecessor, Ben Bernanke, Alan Greenspan and Paul Volcker on the marquee in New York. Not to be outdone, Thursday the IMF releases it analytical mumbo jumble on World Economic Outlook. Kansas City Fed President Ester George wraps up the week Friday speaking about--get this--the economy.

Being a bureaucrat seems to be a pretty good gig if one can get it. But at this level it's a perk-laden privilege. Tax payers might want to start asking what they're getting for their bucks with these folks.

Just to pile on the already mountains of economic data for the week, the ISM non manufacturing index for March is set for public consumption Tuesday. The Senate-Banking committee views the effects of consumer-finance regulations. Wednesday, Christine Legarde of IMF fame talks at the Women in the World Summit. Who'd a even thought there were actual women in the world. When did that happen? Thursday, those all-life changing jobless claims the Yellen crowd pay so much heed to are out. Factory orders for February are set for Monday. Tuesday it's international trade. And Wednesday those coveted minutes from the Fed's last meeting get released.

So all in all, it's a full week of reporting what many already know.