The Truth Behind the Headlines

"April 10 was the first trading day in London after the “London Whale” articles were published. When the U.S.

Anyone predicting that gold would outperform housing in 2001 would likely have been viewed as being seriously deranged.  After all, housing prices had increased for decades and by the peak of the housing market in 2007, real estate was believed to be a "can't lose investment."  The mantra that housing values only go up proved to be disastrous for many Americans as the over-leveraged real estate market imploded, shattering the wealth dreams of both naive homeowners and investors.

Despite the trillions of dollars of direct support from ...

The ideas CNBC is spreading about the FISCAL CLIFF is just absurd. The addiction to higher stock prices has meant that a failure to get the equity market to rally due to falling off the“CLIFF” prevents quality policy from being attained. Going over the“CLIFF” will at least put spending front and center for we are all sure that taxes are going higher so the discussion must get to a genuine discussion about spending, and yes, that means serious cuts in the bloated defense sector. The FED‘s policy means that monetary policy will support the economy into the medium term and alleviate some of the pain from government spending cuts. It’s not drastic austerity but a realistic plan for dealing with rampant profligacy.

Many pundits and saltwater economists claim the global financial system is not worried about U.S. fiscal policy because the 10-year note yield continues to hover around 1.7%. This argument is preposterous because the price of U.S. debt is meaningless as long as the FED‘s continued QE and large-scale asset purchases (LSAP)continues to badly distort the market. The FED is now purchasing $85 billion a month in Treasury and MBS debt. When you couple that with the continued needs of insurance companies and pension funds, the pricing mechanism for DEBT is badly broken. To exemplify the issue, Bloomberg ran an article yesterday about ...