Economy

One of my favorite internet articles of all time, entitled "Pompous Prognosticators," placed quotes of various politicians and other authority figures across a chart of the Dow Jones, spanning the years 1925 to 1933. A portion of that article is located here.

Here’s an image from the original article to jog your memory, in case you can’t recall which article I am referring to:

I loved that article when it came out, and still love it today, because it reveals that nothing has changed through the decades and that believing the self-interested pronouncements of "green shoots" can be hazardous to your wealth.

So I decided to recreate that effort but update it for our modern times. Let’s continue to update this chart over time and see where it goes.  The people at Lowesville will recognize the work below, because I presented it there, along with a lot of other new information, inlcuding the Crash Course Toolbox, which is a main feature of my in-person seminars.

The Bank Stress Tests Have Already Failed

Here’s part of the conclusion:

A “stress test,” at least as far as I understand it from a scientific or engineering standpoint, is supposed to encompass a set of conditions beyond normal, or expected, values. The bank stress-test assumptions are already exceeded in each case by real-world conditions, and therefore will be neither illuminating nor predictive when they are released. Let’s all be thankful that the Federal Reserve and Treasury Department do not design bridges. If they did, they might “stress test” them by simulating an average load of traffic under average conditions and declare them perfectly safe.

I advise you to tune out what is certain to be an upbeat assessment of the condition of our banks, when the stress test results are finally released.  My opinion is that the stress tests were specifically designed to be neither stressful nor revealing.  Instead, they were designed to produce expected results for the purpose of instilling confidence in banks and in the crisis management team.

I recently wrote about the flaws in the survey reports, so I won’t spend more time here discussing why these reports are best taken with a very large grain of salt.

First, the survey data that was released today:

Below is a Martenson Report from February that I am now making freely available.  I referenced it in today’s Financial Sense Newshour broadcast with Jim Puplava.  

This report states my arguments for why our experiences with steadily rising asset prices, mainly for stocks and bonds and houses, over the 1980’s and 1990’s may have been as much a function of simple demographic pressures as anything else. 

It’s worth pondering.  

Where are we going, and what lies next? To address these questions, we need to know how we got here in the first place.

I want to share with you an interesting observation that I think will provide great clarity and insight into our current predicament, as well as indicate that our recovery, such as it is, will be protracted and incomplete.

I have long been a cynic of the bailouts, and, unfortunately, I cannot detect even the slightest sliver of daylight between the prior and current administrations. The reason, I fear, is captured by this quote from Simon Johnson, the former Chief Economist at the IMF and current professor at MIT’s Sloan School of Management:

The crash has laid bare many unpleasant truths about the United States. One of the most alarming, says a former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, is that the finance industry has effectively captured our government—a state of affairs that more typically describes emerging markets, and is at the center of many emerging-market crises. If the IMF’s staff could speak freely about the U.S., it would tell us what it tells all countries in this situation: recovery will fail unless we break the financial oligarchy that is blocking essential reform. And if we are to prevent a true depression, we’re running out of time.

The unfortunate conclusion here is that our system and processes are fully “captured” by a tangled web of interests that serve themselves over everything else. Your future, my future, and our future is being systematically ruined by a self-interested group of insiders that can no longer distinguish between their good and the common good.

Here’s the latest string of outrages from this week.