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The Philly Fed's Charles Plosser did a reverse jawbone on Fed policy today when he remarked:"We are unlikely to see much benefit to growth or to employment from further asset purchases. Conveying the idea that such action will have a substantive impact on labor markets and the speed of the recovery risks the Fed’s credibility.”
Read the entire story here.
In case you were wondering Plosser is not a voting member of the Fed's FOMC this year.
It is one thing for a nobody like myself to say this sort of thing, but when the President of the Philly Fed says it, it can move markets, and it did. It did not help that Catepillar had guided lower last night and the market was primed for some profit taking at this stage of the end of quarter two step dance.
It is going to take significant financial and economic reform and rebalancing to sustain this recovery. Plosser didn't recommend anything other than to say that the Fed cannot do anything more, and that it 'risks its credibility.'
Sorry Charlie. It doesn't have any credibility anymore. The last two bubbles fixed that.
Sheila Bair beat up Turbo Timmy and his bankster buddies in the early releases of her new book. He is the bailout king according to her and raised some serious questions about his catering to a few of the big TBTF's like Citigroup.
David Malpass was the 'closer' on Bloomberg TV today. He said some odd sounding things for someone who is a famed 'chief economist.' But that is what it said on his business card at Bear Stearns so it must be true.
If this is going to be a typical end of quarter shenanigan fest then we should see the selling dry up tomorrow and a ramp into the weekend coming.
Jitters over Iran are not helping markets to keep their paint from peeling. But the paint will probably go on the tape nonetheless.
It appears that Sprott has drawn down the cash levels in the Silver trust to add additional bullion to the funds holdings.
The Silver Trust spent approximately $23,000,000 of their cash to buy 680,104 ounces of silver bullion or about 33.82 per ounce.
The Trust typically does not operate with cash levels much lower than this. They need to pay all the expenses of the fund's administration including record keeping and storage fees.
I suspect that they may act to raise cash levels, probably by doing another follow on offering within the next three to four months. They will probably wait for the premium to expand a bit first, depending on how they view the physical market for bullion shaping up.
"We will all swallow our cup of corporate poison. We can take it from nurse Romney, who will tell us not to whine and play the victim, or we can take it from nurse Obama, who will assure us that this hurts him even more than it hurts us, but one way or another the corporate hemlock will be shoved down our throats. The choice before us is how it will be administered.
Corporate power, no matter who is running the ward after January 2013, is poised to carry out U.S. history’s most savage assault against the poor and the working class, not to mention the Earth’s ecosystem. And no one in power, no matter what the bedside manner, has any intention or ability to stop it.
If you insist on participating in the cash-drenched charade of a two-party democratic election at least be clear about what you are doing. You are, by playing your assigned role as the Democratic or Republican voter in this political theater, giving legitimacy to a corporate agenda that means your own impoverishment and disempowerment.
All the things that stand between us and utter destitution—Medicaid, food stamps, Pell grants, Head Start, Social Security, public education, federal grants-in-aid to America’s states and cities, the Women, Infants, and Children nutrition program (WIC), Temporary Assistance for Needy Families and home-delivered meals for seniors—are about to be shredded by the corporate state.
Our corporate oligarchs are harvesting the nation, grabbing as much as they can, as fast as they can, in the inevitable descent...
Obama is not in charge. Romney would not be in charge. Politicians are the public face of corporate power. They are corporate employees. Their personal narratives, their promises, their rhetoric and their idiosyncrasies are meaningless. And that, perhaps, is why the cost of the two presidential campaigns is estimated to reach an obscene $2.5 billion. The corporate state does not produce a product that is different. It produces brands that are different. And brands cost a lot of money to sell.
You can dismiss those of us who will in protest vote for a third-party candidate and invest our time and energy in acts of civil disobedience. You can pride yourself on being practical. You can swallow the false argument of the lesser of two evils. But ask yourself, once this nightmare starts kicking in, who the real sucker is. "
Chris Hedges, How Do You Take Your Poison?
Read the rest here.
Quo vadimus, Domine?
