SP 500 and NDX Futures Daily Charts

The indices looks a little stretched to the upside.

They can go further. Wait for it, wait until the market starts discounting the debt ceiling battle.

The wiseguys will probably want to run it up, and then suck in the funds and the pedestrian bystanders and then short it on the way down.

Democracy Now on Jack Lew's Appointment as Treasury Secretary

Word has it that Obama wanted Lew for his reputation as a 'tough negotiator.'

The progressive side dislikes him because he has a penchant for the status quo, and is no genuine reformer, which come to think of it is probably not a bad description of the President.

The conservative side dislikes him because he is a tough negotiator, and the fact that they wish to disrupt the processes of an opposition government at any opportunity no matter the cost and the benefit to anyone else. It is certainly based on no moral principles or standards.

Gold Daily and Silver Weekly Charts - Economic Goofiness and Competing Crime Families

Yet another intraday commentary here on the nature of money and the Platinum Coin solution to our debt problems. After all, modern money is just an accounting fiction, easily created and destroyed, taken from these and given to our powerful friends.

The more I thought about what Mr. Krugman wrote, the more troubled about it I became.

He seems to elevate what the central bankers do to the realm of pure science, as a purely mathematical function without resort to or consideration of morality or moral choices. As if.

That sounds like something one of the Austerians might say.  We have to do these terrible things, require people to make awful sacrifices, because the economic equations compel us. It is not our fault. And making these difficult choices is such hard work that we deserve magnificent recompense for it, as in  British MP's have asked for a 32% pay increase.

Economics deals with a set of higher level public policy choices, and a series of specific economic decisions and tradeoffs designed to implement them.  And not the other way around. 

Our current system is upside down, where those with the money and the insider connections make the decisions, and those who serve them in various ways receive power and outsized rewards from those monied interests and their institutions.  It is not all that far from what Hedges' calls inverted totalitarianism.

Consider how badly policy and monetary choices have damaged the people of the United States in the past twenty years, and a good part of the rest of the world for that matter.  Who can be confident that wisdom will prevail and justice will be done when there is no serious reform, and the perpetrators continue to write the rules for themselves.  It is as though we are witnessing the struggles of competing crime families, and not a democratic process.

I think it is a terrible canard to say that people who wish to have a stable money supply and some confidence in its value, especially with regard to their savings, wish to have a money supply that comes from God as some sort of divine money. 

Rather, I think the man is willfully misunderstanding and denigrating people who are referencing the principles of equal justice and 'inalienable rights' to freedom and property, without arbitrary confiscation by a central authority.   Money is a powerful tool as any economist should know, and it is very dangerous when wielded badly, or by the wrong hands.  The process of money needs to be transparent, and above reproach.

And especially when the monetary authority has proven itself repeatedly to be as ineffective, prevaricating, secretive, given to conflicts of interest and cronyism, and self-serving as the current crop of leadership that we have today in the Fed, Wall Street, and the government.

It is not as though these fellows do not understand what is at stake.  Today Mr. Krugman said why he prefers the Platinum Coin gimmick to hitting the debt ceiling.

"My own view is that I was willing to go over the brink on the fiscal cliff, but not here, for three reasons.
First, this is seriously risky business. The fiscal cliff would have been a known quantity: basically, a negative Keynesian shock to the economy, which is something we understand quite well, and furthermore something that would have built only gradually over time. The risks, in short, were somewhat contained.

By contrast, nobody really knows what happens if America defaults, even briefly. The whole structure of world financial markets is built around the use of Treasury bills as the ultimate safe asset; what happens if they lose that status? It would certainly be an interesting experiment, but one best carried out if you have plenty of bottled water and spare ammunition in your basement."

Paul Krugman, Thinking About the Brink

So allowing the debt ceiling to come, which is NOT a default on debt since interest can still be paid, which Clinton had done quite successfully as I recall, is to be feared to the point of doomsday. But using a dodgy method of overtly monetizing the debt, which has existed as an idea on the fringes until a month ago and has never been done before, is much less risky and will bother nobody. Are you kidding me?!

SP 500 and NDX Futures Daily Charts - Up Day

The stock markets went out near their daily highs.

After the bell American Express reported earnings about a week ahead of schedule.

They reported 1.09 EPS vs. 1.06 as expected.

They also announced that they would be laying off about 8% of the workforce.

Obama named Jack Lew as his nominee as Treasury Secretary to replace Timmy.

Let the histrionics from Republic Senators about Lew begin.

Net Asset Value Premiums of Certain Precious Metal Trusts and Funds

The Sprott premiums remain under somewhat unusual pressure as compared to the two other major funds.

It's Official. Krugman Does Not Understand the Value of Money

Well I did say that Mr. Krugman should proceed, and like Mitt Romney, he did, and doubled down.

I am not quite sure I have the words.  Chris Hedges was right.

Like other progressives and independents, I have been discouraged that many old school liberal economists have had so little to say about financial reform, and the frauds in the banking system, even as they blindly pressed their case for more stimulus to be distributed without repairing a broken financial system that taxes the real economy with fraud.   It is 'whatever works' as they define and measure it. Justice and equity have no part in their calculations. They learned part of the lesson from FDR, but not the part that really matters, and that made him memorable.

They make themselves and their models willfully blind to the crony capitalism that exists between the Fed and Wall Street, and the manipulation in the markets, and the lack of any credible prosecutions for some of the most egregious financial crimes since the 1920's.  How many more scandals will have to be revealed before they end their denial?

But in grabbing this whacko platinum gimmick of overt monetization which typifies almost everything that is wrong about modern economics, and in stubbornly claiming that it can do no harm, while dismissing anyone who expresses concern as some economic Luddite, Krugman and too many others have shown the purblind ignorance of the ideologue who does not understand what is wrong, and why the people are becoming restless. 

And they answer them with sophistry and derisive baby talk.  No wonder that economics is a disgraced profession. 

The greatest irony is when we become what we hate.

This is another example of the credibility trap, and a failure in leadership.  The Emperor is naked, and the people do not quite know what to do about it except to mill about in restless and embarrassed silence.

...For many people on the right, value is something handed down from on high It should be measured in terms of eternal standards, mainly gold; [Because something is not purely arbitrary does not require that it be divine - Jesse] I have, for example, often seen people claiming that stocks are actually down, not up, over the past couple of generations because the Dow hasn’t kept up with the gold price, never mind what it buys in terms of the goods and services people actually consume. 

And given that the laws of value are basically divine, not human, any human meddling in the process is not just foolish but immoral. Printing money that isn’t tied to gold is a kind of theft, not to mention blasphemy.  [Again, the intolerance of the ideologue, who is so far over on the continuum that they can only look across and see their other extreme, entirely overlooking the middle - Jesse]

For people like me, on the other hand, the economy is a social system, created by and for people. Money is a social contrivance and convenience that makes this social system work better — and should be adjusted, both in quantity and in characteristics, whenever there is compelling evidence that this would lead to better outcomes.  [Money is just another tool, a cool toy, to the financial engineers who govern the economy like a benevolent elite.  They do not understand value and consequences as they tinker and experiment, hoping for better luck next time.  And amongst financial engineers, Greenspan was Dr. Frankenstein. - Jesse]

It often makes sense to put constraints on our actions, e.g. by pegging to another currency or granting the central bank a high degree of independence, but these are things done for operational convenience or to improve policy credibility, not moral commitments — and they are always up for reconsideration when circumstances change.  [The ruling übermenschen are above conventional morality in their arcane knowledge. And how does one measure 'better outcomes?' For at the end of the day, economics is no pure science, but a social science of a certain class of policies, and policy has its roots in 'justice.' This is why the financiers must operate in secret, like the great Wizard of Oz. Because they have no science, but do not wish to be encumbered by anything, and especially something as inconvenient as justice, as they conduct their experiments. - Jesse]

Now, the money morality types try to have it both ways; they want us to believe that monetary blasphemy will produce disastrous results in practical terms too. But events have proved them wrong. [Yes that's right. The credit bubble, tech bubble, and housing bubbles have been benign and not based on policy errors. All of them were facilitated by economic quackery from both sides.  But the would be elite can admit no error. - Jesse]

And I do find myself thinking a lot about Keynes’s description of the gold standard as a “barbarous relic”; it applies perfectly to this discussion. The money morality people are basically adopting a pre-Enlightenment attitude toward monetary and fiscal policy — and why not? After all, they hate the Enlightenment on all fronts.  [As he cries for more leeches to bleed the patient... - Jesse]

The bottom line is that we aren’t really having a rational argument here. Nor can we: rationality has a well-known liberal bias. [The hubris of an ideology or a professional class in failure knows no bounds. - Jesse]

Paul Krugman, Barbarous Relics

Gold Daily and Silver Weekly Charts - The ¥100 Trillion Pair of Chopsticks

Intraday commentary on The Platinum Coin Debate here.

Here is a decent summary of the Platinum Coin chronicles from The Atlantic.

I think that the fact that this nonsense is being discussed by Very Serious People demonstrates how far off the cliff of reason our financial and political systems have already gone. Let's hope China et al. are willing to view America's antics with the same jolly forbearance.

I got a kick out of this late breaking article over at ZH, and about the ¥100 Trillion Pair of Chopsticks.

It is not enough to be willing to print money, and give it to your wealthy friends for their personal enjoyment. That looks like foreign aid being given to some hard luck third world country where the money flows primarily to their warlords, and little reaches the people. You have to find the guts and the honesty to take on the hard job of reforming the corruption, imbalanced economic structures, and cronyism between the oligarchs and the government that got to where you are in the first place. And that is where the credibility trap comes in.

What concerns me a bit is not that so many otherwise intelligent people do not understand the nature of money, because so few really do. What really concerns me is that those that do understand what is going on seem to be toying with this whacko monetization scheme, which shows a certain desperation and lack of a Plan B that should make those who are holding their paper very uncomfortable.

If anything could bring a couple million people with torches and pitchforks to Washington in protest, the Platinum Coin pretension might just do the trick.

Editorial comment on the state of modern economics in the video clip below.

The twilight of ancien régimes and dying empires may embrace extravagant fashions in thought and produce eccentric, démodé behaviour, but sometimes they are set to catchy tunes.

As for the rest of the world:

“The burning question that I always have, I’m amazed at their ongoing willingness to continue to accumulate, and hold, such large amounts of US denominated bonds. It’s been my view that they are basically playing a Ponzi scheme.

I’ve had that confirmed when I’ve had long discussions with different sovereign wealth funds and different government agencies around the world. They’ve been willing to play this game, but more and more now, as their domestic economies have grown and the US portion of their exports becomes smaller, and with the amount of T-Bills that they have (already) accumulated, I believe they’ve reached the boiling point where they are really going to be unwilling to grow their reserves (of US Treasuries).

Just the process of not growing their reserves is going to be very disruptive. If they are not willing to accumulate more T-Bills, this is going to force the trade deficit closed. I think that is really going to rock the financial world at some point in the near future..."

Sprott President Kevin Bambrough in today's KWN Interview

SP 500 and NDX Futures Daily Charts

What if they rigged a market, and nobody came?

What if all the honest players either left or were broken, as the people finally realized that the Emperor was naked?

Would that be winning?

For an evening diversion, Matt Taibbi suggests that Hank Greenberg Should Be Shot Into Space For Suing the Government Over the AIG Bailout.