October 3rd – Recommended Reads

Outward Bound At Deutsche Bank:  Why The Liquidity Cascade Ends In Failure Or Bailout

It is not solvency, or the lack of capital – a vague, synthetic, and usually quite arbitrary concept, determined by regulators – that kills a bank; it is – as Dick Fuld will tell anyone who bothers to listen – the loss of (access to) liquidity: cold, hard, fungible (something Jon Corzine knew all too well when he commingled and was caught) cash, that pushes a bank into its grave, usually quite rapidly: recall that it took Lehman just a few days for its stock to plunge from the high double digits to zero.

Obama To Use Secret Slush Fund To Bailout Affordable Care Act Insurers

The Obama administration is maneuvering to pay health insurers billions of dollars the government owes under the Affordable Care Act, through a move that could circumvent Congress and help shore up the president’s signature legislative achievement before he leaves office…….The payments most likely would draw from an obscure Treasury Department fund intended to cover federal legal claims, the executives and lawyers said. This approach would get around a recent congressional ban on the use of Health and Human Services money to pay the insurers.

Memo To Hillary: Your Hubby’s Subprime Housing Mandates Fueled The 2008 Crash

On the debate stage Monday night, Hillary Clinton smugly repeated the big lie that Democrats have been telling with something close to impunity since 2008…….What caused the market crash was the collapse of the subprime market. If that collapse had an architect-in-chief, his name was Bill Clinton. This is not a speculation. It is an easily documented fact.

Wall Street Drooling—-Yellen Says Buying Stocks Is A “Good Thing To Think About”

Having hinted overnight that The Fed could buy stocks “maybe in the future,” Janet Yellen blurted out confirmation that buying assets other than long-term U.S. debt is on the table. Despite the total and utter failure of SNB and BOJ direct equity buying to create increased consumption, Yellen explained “it could be useful to be able to intervene directly in assets where the prices have a more direct link to spending decisions.”

The Fed Is Leading Us To Economic Hell

The Fed argues that low rates have worked. The economy emerged from recession. Unemployment drifted back down. “Yay for us,” said the Fed……Don’t buy that statistical economic garbage. The economy recovered in spite of Fed policy, not because of it. The economy recovered because business owners, entrepreneurs, and workers rolled up their sleeves and made things happen.

Structural Barriers To Growth—-And The Fed’s Dope Dealers On Speed Dial

In recent years, the U.S. equity market has scaled the third steepest cliff in history, eclipsed only by the 1929 and 2000 peaks, as investors rest their full confidence and weight on the protrusions of a structurally deteriorating economy……. Over the past decade, the average annual nominal growth rate of GDP has dropped to just 2.9%, while real GDP growth has plunged to just 1.3%; both the lowest growth rates in history, outside of the Depression.

Crony Capitalist Colonizer: Is Elon Musk Taking Taxpayers For A Ride To Mars?

When it comes to colonizing Mars, it’s easy to get swept up in Musk’s vision. Commercial space flight has a bright future, but that future shouldn’t be built on the backs of taxpayers…….The government bought into his pitch of cheap rocket launches and rewarded him with lucrative contracts. Unfortunately, his low bid price may end up offset by the explosive tendencies of his rockets. Now that he has set his sights on Mars, let’s hope—for the future of science and exploration—that he can avoid similar disasters and also that he has the courtesy to leave taxpayers out of it.

Libertarianism And War: Rothbard’s Rule—Foreign Policy Comes First

The year was 1956: the icy winds of the cold war were blowing across the political landscape. And it was a presidential election year, pitting the internationalist Republican Dwight Eisenhower against Adlai Stevenson, the darling of the Democratic party’s left wing…….While most if not all conservatives and libertarians favored Eisenhower, Rothbard shocked his readers with a ringing endorsement of the liberal Democrat Stevenson…… the Communist system, he wrote in Faith and Freedom, was “relatively inefficient” and doomed to fail. The enemy, he pointed out, was not merely communism, but “statism in all its forms.”

Where’s All The Money——Household Income Growth Still Sliding

Personal income less transfer payments was barely more in August than July, once again indicating that the economy is weaker in 2016 than even 2015; so much that this slowing of the slowing has almost surely taken an imprecise toll on even the labor market.

Gold, The J.R. Ewing Of The Investment Word——50 Charts On The Yellow Metal

Naturally, there is no guarantee whatsoever that gold will resume its outperformance in coming years, but we believe the secular bull market still has some life left. In fact, long term bull markets in gold and commodities traditionally tend to deliver their greatest gains in the final rally phase (this is so because these assets are driven by fear rather than greed – and fear always produces price spikes).