Good bye...

This is our beloved Kira who passed away suddenly after dental surgery yesterday. Pretty tough going around here as a result..she was our "shadow" for the last 10 years and to say that she will be missed is a tremendous understatement..  :(

Two great videos

Via the Big Picture blog:

Mohammad El-Erian interview

I dunno, this guy just seems so rational to me ;)  Anyways, key point in this interview is this excerpt highlighted by Business Insider:


"7:25 The bond market is pricing in a buyer with a printing press, so it is not a leading indicator."

Where the logic behind this statement can be applied to this chart:

That said, I'm not 100% sold on the idea that the 10 year bond yield is useless as a leading indicator, just that the spread shown in this comparison chart between the SPX and the TNX is not as dramatic as it might appear.  The gap will be closed, the only question is how.

Ambrose in typical form...

This time on the headline du jour, "Currency Wars are necessary if all else fails"


"This is a dangerous moment for the world, and may backfire against the US itself. We are already starting to see the same sort of rush into oil and resources that played such havoc in mid-2008, and may have been a key trigger for the Great Recession. There is a risk that this commodity shock will hit before QE stimulus filters through.

And while the French deny that they are in talks with China over the creation of a new currency regime, I heard French finance minister Christine Lagarde say in person at a meeting in Italy that France would use its G20 presidency to push for an alternative to the dollar. She specifically cited the “Bancor”, the idea floated by Keynes in the 1940s for a commodity currency priced off a basket of metals. The US risks gambling away the “exorbitant privilege” it has enjoyed for two thirds of a century as currency hegemon.

Yet the surplus states have most to lose if this brinkmanship tips into commercial war. They must know this, but what we are witnessing may run deeper than a calculus of advantage. Was it naïve to think that Confucian Asia and the old democracies of the Atlantic seaboard can share an open global trading system?"

FYI

Jim Grant

Great interview with Jim Grant..

You can hear the panic...

Just listen to this.  Perhaps we are finally past the denial stage?  Step on the QE gas pedal is the ONLY proposed solution.



Denninger says this on QE:
QE is in fact DEFLATIONARY, as all such programs in fact exchange interest-paying debt for cash, which bears no coupon.  It is therefore deflationary, not inflationary, and you both know it and are lying about your intentions and actions in this regard.  It can only be inflationary if the cash injected can make its "turns" in the banking system.  But in a debt-saturated economy, and we are in one, such is impossible and as such the removal of that coupon from the economy serves to deflate, not inflate.


And so...the wheels on the bus go round and round...right off the cliff.

Green box alert!

Beep beep.  Whirr Whirr

Your guess is as good as mine...

I'm bearish..but hey...that means squat!