Tuesday, November 24, 2009

Mosaic of Information

I will be off from work until Monday. 5 days off is just what I need after a super busy couple of months.

Leading Off
This story is just too awesome to leave alone, so I will give it another run tonight!

Clusterstock found an interesting Cornell Business School employee dirty email thread that is both mildly disturbing and hopelessly entertaining at the same time. Have at it:
Cornell Business School Employees Accidentally Email Everyone With Their Dirty Love Notes
After reading this I have the following thought:
Every morning at 6am as I am driving in to work about 90% of the people I see are talking on the cell phone. Now who would call the wife/husband right after leaving the house? How many of those people are doing work related calls at 6am? It is my opinion that in the cyber age there is all kinds of bad stuff going on just like these dirty emails between bored adults. Any thoughts?

That said, should Lil Kim or Joan Jett find themselves bored, please feel free to use the contact email listed at the left!!

Headlines Can be Misleading
Yahoo Finance has this lead concerning the released FED minutes:
Brighter FED forecast helps market pare losses
Sounds great! The FED is optimistic (when are they ever not??).

Another Clusterstock headline reads:
FOMC Minutes: Fed Admits That ZIRP Could Fuel A New Speculative Bubble
Key take away:
The Fed certainly doesn't think the economy is about to come booming back. Fed policymakers said it could take "five or six years" for the economy and the labor market to be consistently healthy.
A 5-6 year recovery plan is a bright forecast?

Asked and Answered
Mortgage Insider asks today:
Will the FED Let Mortgage Rates Rise?
Allow me, NO.

Attack on Gold?
The FED does not like Gold. The banks are net short gold and silver (big time). It may be very difficult absent a financial calamity (think last fall) to confiscate the metals. So how does the establishment go about messing with metal holders? Refuse to store it of course! Genius!

The Mess That Greenspan Made covers the Wall Street Journal article which details the HSBC decision to boot metals from their vaults. Tim Iacono makes some very good observations:
In another sign of the times, now that big investors are beating down the doors of HSBC asking them to store their growing quantities of gold bullion as part of the 2009 mad dash to shore up investment portfolios with something that is not paper and has no counterparty risk, the little guy who had his bars and coins stored there is getting the boot.
It would be fascinating to learn more of the details here - who and what's getting booted.

You can easily fit a half million dollars worth of gold in a large safe deposit box so, it's not clear just what kind of customer HSBC is asking to leave.

Are there that many individuals with millions of dollars in physical gold?
I am sure the answer is no. More from Tim:
My guess is that HSBC is pushing a lot of silver out of its vaults to make room for gold...

They are telling customers to remove their metal or prepare for it to be delivered to the address of record at the owners' expense, so, be on the lookout for armored trucks in your neighborhood that leave packages on doorsteps if nobody is home.
Sure, gang up on Silver you fiends!

This bears watching if a trend starts.

Deflation Taken on by Jesse
Today's must read comes from Jesse's Cafe Americain and while you should read the whole thing, I offer this zinger which really caught my way of thinking:
So, absent a conscious policy decision by the Fed to strangle the US economy premature to recovery, deflation becomes a likely outcome if the Federal Reserve runs out of debt obligations, both public and private, which it is willing and able to monetize. That is the only 'hard stop' in the game on that side of the equation, and good luck with that.
I agree 100%.

Expansion of MBS purchases will be the first step. TARP repayment is a scam that will be used to funnel that same money to bankrupt states and the municipal market. I expect more new creative ways to print money in the months ahead.

Have a good night.

5 comments:

GawainsGhost said...

Of course the Fed is not going to allow mortgage interest rates to rise. If it did, poor people wouldn't be able to buy houses they cannot afford. And then the repo market would collapse.

I don't know what's going on with this whole precious metals scenario. But it seems to me that the powers that be are trying to prop up the value of their paper (read worthless) currencies. I don't dabble in gold or silver. I'm not saying they're not sound investments, just that I don't deal with them. Only real estate. However, it's pretty obvious to me that if everyone were required to purchase real estate with gold or silver, there wouldn't be very many houses sold. So take that for what you will.

In the end though, I really don't care very much about all of this stuff. I'm too busy worrying about the Raiders on Thanksgiving.

I think they're going to come to play. And I'm not very confident in this Cowboys offense right now. I have to believe Dallas will prevail. But it's not going to be as easy as some think.

EconomicDisconnect said...

Gawains,
The Raiders are hard to figure out. They have beat two 1st place teams (at the time) the Eagles and Bengals and lost to everyone else. You never know with them. I think the Cowboys will win though.

EconomicDisconnect said...

All,
I am off work until Monday and will check in over the day so leave anything interesting in the comments section, news that is wanted to be buried tends to leak out right before a holiday!

1 said...

On the possibility that the Fed might raise interest rates, Jesse says this at NC:

"But it would fit the wet dream of a handful of badly informed deflationists, probably doomed to darwinian extinction like stolid communist party members in Moscow demonstrating for a return to the good old days in 1999."

More evidence of Jesse's idée fixe. Will he eat crow when he turns out to be wrong? Not a chance, guys like that never do.

Not sure what planet Jesse is on, but not only is there indisputable credit deflation everywhere, price deflation is taking hold as well. Note that deflationist theory - as oft commented on by Mish - posits that gold increases in value during deflation, whether it be in nominal or real terms.

Unlike the last depression, gold is not fixed in price. Therefore, real risk is involved in buying it; it may well decline from here in nominal value. That doesn't make me a seller; I didn't buy it because of inflation fears.

Have a look at Andy's site: you might like it.

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