This is a brilliant piece of propaganda. Central Planners are trying with all their might to force people into behaviors and financial assets that are in direct contrast to their logic as well as long term financial well being. This is the height of immorality, not to mention hubris. In the end, there is no chance of any of this working as the reality on the ground will overwhelm all of the manipulations and lies of the corrupt oligarch class.
From the Washington Post/Bloomberg article “Almost All of Wall Street Got 2012 Wrong as Markets Saved World”:
Blankfein was more prescient. “I tend to be a little more positive than what I’m hearing from other people,” the 58-year- old CEO told Bloomberg Television in an April 25 interview at Goldman Sachs’s New York headquarters. “One of the big risks that people have to contemplate is that things go right.”
Well of course Mr. Blankfein was optimistic. He knows he has the Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve in his back pocket and they will do whatever he says with one phone call. Furthermore, if things go wrong you just get a bailout. Crony Capitalism 101. That’s how the World’s 100 Richest People Got $241 Billion Richer in 2012.
Stocks rose as Federal Reserve decisions to keep benchmark interest rates at record lows while buying more than $80 billion a month of mortgages and Treasuries boosted confidence in the economy.
“In general they’re trained to analyze the economic data, balance sheets and so on. They’re not trained to predict political decisions. These factors have ruled the lives of fund managers in a more significant manner than what used to be over the past 20 or 30 years.”
The paragraph above pretty much sums it up. There are no markets, there are manipulations. As for the nonsense going around yesterday about a Fed exit, this is what I tweeted:
There is a 0% chance of any FED exit ever. This entire experiment ends with civil unrest and martial law. That is the exit strategy.
Full article here.
In Liberty,
Mike
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Anyone have a device that can turn my silver eagles into
Throwing stars ?? Agree with mike no QE = civil unrest
When Blanfein warns that political risk to a portfolio is greater than most analysts realize, he brings to mind the observation by economist Franz Oppenheimer. He said that there are only two ways of increasing wealth- what he called the “economic means”, by which he meant free exchange, and what he called the “political means” by which he meant cronyism, regulatory capture, political consideration, etc.
To the above, I would add that the time value of money now carries grave political risk. As the matrix of non-economic factors for investment is increased, the risk of failure increases exponentially. And above all, investment must be sustainable (a concept the left loves to scold the rest of us about) so that there is sufficient (after-tax) capital to fund the next round of startups and growth opportunities. The bigger that government gets, the bigger the risk matrix and the lower the net rate of economic growth.