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By Tyler Durden

Submitted by Lorelei McFly via CopBlock.org,

One of the biggest lies our government tells us is that it wages the War on Drugs to keep us safe. More than 40 years after it was started, we know that it has been a colossally-expensive epic failure on its stated goals, was intentionally designed to further disenfranchise marginalized groups, and has become a full-fledged assault on our civil liberties.

Even with all the billions of tax dollars it spends each year, and all the flashy photo ops of seized drugs stacked on tables, the Drug Enforcement Agency only stops 1% of the illegal drug supply from being distributed in America, according to the video below. Not only is law enforcement pathetically inept at stemming the flow of drugs, they are active participants in the illicit drug trade at both the federal and local level:

• Documents Show CIA complicity in the crack cocaine epidemic of the 1980s
• DEA’s 12-year business arrangement with El Chapo’s Sinaloa drug cartel
• Florida Cops Laundered Millions For Drug Cartels, Failed To Make A Single Arrest
• 13 Current and Former North Carolina and Virginia Law Enforcement Officers Indicted for Drug Smuggling
• California Drug Cop Busted Smuggling $2 Million Worth of Marijuana
• Pennsylvania Police Officer Who Obtained Hundreds of Narcotic Pills from 19 Different Doctors Given Plea Deal for Probation
• Narcotics Unit Supervisor Charged with Stealing Drugs from Evidence Room in Ohio

That drug prohibition causes far more harm than it supposedly prevents would not even be a question of debate were it not for the fact that so many people’s livelihoods now depend on waging it. The ugly unspoken truth is that the War on Drugs is a massive jobs and funding program for law enforcement that is operated under the guise of saving people from the evils of substance abuse.

State-Sanctioned Theft

Everything we do is suspect, and everything we own is subject to seizure— take cash for an example. The saying used to be that “cash is king,’ however these days it’s “cash is criminal” since cash transactions and even withdrawing or carrying “large amounts,” basically more than a few dollars, of your own money is now considered an indication of criminal activity (see here). Section 31 U.S.C. 5103 states, “United States coins and currency (including Federal reserve notes and circulating notes of Federal reserve banks and national banks) are legal tender for all debts, public charges, taxes, and dues,” so why does the government that prints that same money have such a problem with its citizens using it?

How Cash Became Criminal

Cash transactions are anonymous, so it is assumed that people who make cash transactions are trying to avoid leaving records of their activities. And if any aspect of your life is not a traceable, verifiable open book for the government, obviously you must be hiding something. Never mind that the case is often that people simply find using cash allows them to <a target=_blank rel="nofollow" …read more

Source: State-Sanctioned Theft – The Failed War On Drugs And Cops’ Abuse Of Civil Forfeiture

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By Tyler Durden

Helicopter money may be on the horizon, but if Deutsche Bank has its way, there is at least one intermediate step.

According to DB’s Dominic Konstam, now that the benefits QE “have run their course”, it is time for the next, and far more drastic step: “the ECB and BoJ should move more strongly toward penalizing savings via negative retail deposit rates or perhaps wealth taxes. With this stick would also come a carrot – for example, negative mortgage rates.”

Here is the big picture unveiling of what is coming next from Deutsche Bank’s Dominic Konstam, who is also buying the Treasury long end hand over fist:

• The G3 central banks all stood pat, continuing the move away from the beggar-thy-neighbor paradigm. However, the adverse market reaction to the BoJ’s inaction suggests that the benefits of QE (or QQE) in its present form might have run their course.
• It is becoming increasingly clear to us that the level of yields at which credit expansion in Europe and Japan will pick up in earnest is probably negative, and substantially so. Therefore, the ECB and BoJ should move more strongly toward penalizing savings via negative retail deposit rates or perhaps wealth taxes. With this stick would also come a carrot – for example, negative mortgage rates.
• Until then, bank NIM compression will continue to drive elevated demand for dollar-denominated assets, which manifests itself in suppressed UST term premia and wide cross-currency bases.
• What this means for the US is that policy rates and longer bond yields are unlikely to go up until global growth accelerates materially. Until such time, it is critical for the Fed to continue to relent, allowing real yields to keep falling while breakevens rise and nominal yields remain roughly static.
• If the Fed were to turn hawkish, there is perhaps even less scope for long-end yields to rise as breakevens would likely collapse on policy error fears.

Some of the troubling detail:

QE as implemented in major economies since the crisis has operated through two shocks: a demand shock whereby real yields are forced lower through lower nominal yields and static – or even falling – breakevens, and a shock to inflation expectations, whereby real yields ultimately continue to fall but due to rising BEI and static to lower nominal yields. In the case of the Anglo-Saxon economies, the demand shock quickly gave way to the shock (higher) to inflation expectations and actually allowed nominal yields to rise, if fleetingly.

The second shock, to inflation expectations, has thus far remained stubbornly elusive in Europe and more so in Japan, and ephemeral in the Anglo-Saxon economies. That said, this dynamic appears to have re-emerged in the US post Fed relent and has been an important driver of the recovery in risk assets and, more generally, the easing of financial conditions.

This week’s BoJ announcement disappointed, and as a result the yen appreciated sharply. This outcome does not bode well for the future efficacy of QE, at least while that is the primary policy …read more

Source: Deutsche Bank Unveils The Next Step: "QE Has Run Its Course, It’s Time To Tax Wealth"

    

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Martin Sorrell, the long time CEO of advertising company WPP, made $102 million in 2015.

Podcast favorites: Bernie gets the Axe | Radical Islam in America | Graham Opposes GOP Leader

…read more

Source: Is this CEO worth 1,444 times what he pays workers?

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By Tyler Durden

Submitted by Alasdair Macleod via GoldMoney.com,

Saudi Arabia has been in the news recently for several interconnected reasons. Underlying it all is a spendthrift country that is rapidly becoming insolvent.

While the House of Saud remains strongly resistant to change, a mixture of reality and power-play is likely to dominate domestic politics in the coming years, following the ascendency of King Salman to the Saudi throne. This has important implications for the dollar, given its historic role in the region.

Last year’s collapse in the oil price has forced financial reality upon the House of Saud. The young deputy crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, possibly inspired by a McKinsey report, aims to diversify the state rapidly from oil dependency into a mixture of industries, healthcare and tourism. The McKinsey report looks like a wish-list, rather than reality, particularly when it comes to tourism. The religious police are unlikely to take kindly to bikinis on the Red Sea’s beeches, or to foreign women in mini-shorts wandering around Jeddah.

It is hard to imagine Saudi Arabia, culturally stuck in the middle ages, embracing the changes recommended by McKinsey, without fundamentally reforming the House of Saud, or even without a full-scale revolution. Nearly all properties and businesses are personally owned or controlled by members of the extended royal family, not the state, nor by lesser mortals. The principal exception is Aramco, estimated to be worth $2 trillion.

The state is subservient to the House of Saud. It is therefore hard to see how, as McKinsey recommends, the country can “shift from its current government-led economic model to a more market-based approach”. The country is barely government led: a puppet of the Saudis is more like it. But the state’s lack of funds is making it increasingly desperate.

It was for this reason the Kingdom recently placed a $10bn five-year syndicated loan, the first time it has entered capital markets since Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. It proposes to raise a further $100bn by selling a 5% stake in Aramco. The financial plan appears to be a combination of this short-term money-raising, contributions from oil revenue, and sales of US Treasuries (thought to total as much as $750bn). The government has, according to informed sources, been secretly selling gold, mainly to Asian central banks and sovereign wealth funds. Will it see the Kingdom through this sticky patch?

Maybe. Much more likely, buying time is a substitute for ducking fundamental reform. But one can see how stories coming out of Washington, implicating Saudi interests in the 9/11 twin-towers tragedy, could easily have pulled the trigger on all those Treasuries.

Whatever else was discussed, it seems likely that this topic will have been addressed at the two special FOMC meetings “under expedited measures” at the Fed earlier this month, and then at Janet Yellen’s meeting with the President at the White House. This week’s holding pattern on interest rates would lend support to this theory.

The White House’s involvement certainly points towards a matter involving foreign affairs, rather than just interest rates. If the …read more

Source: Taking The ‘Petro’ Out Of The Dollar

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By Tyler Durden

As we covered previously, in an effort to remain solvent the Central States Pension Fund has submitted an application to the Treasury for approval to cut member benefits. While some plan participants could see pension incomes cut in half, the fund projects that it will become insolvent by 2025 if nothing is done.

Treasury is set to decide on the matter by May 7th, and as it turns out, the decision impacts more than just current plan participants…

During its Q1 earnings call, UPS told investors that if Treasury approves the CSPF plan to cut benefits, the company would have to take a charge of approximately $3.2 to $3.8 billion.

As part of a collective bargaining agreement with the International Brotherhood of Teamsters when UPS withdrew from the fund in 2007, the company agreed to provide supplemental benefits to any remaining members in the event that certain benefits were lawfully reduced.

While any income statement impact will be adjusted out by analysts, it will be a significant drain on UPS' cash flow (UPS generated $5 billion in free cash flow in fiscal 2015) as it funds the benefit gap over time.

UPS is just the latest example of what lies ahead and forces the government's hand to provide yet another bailout (and encourage yet more moral hazard over-promising).

As we concluded previously, “This is going to be a national crisis for hundreds of thousands, and eventually millions, of retirees and their families. It's going to open the floodgates for other cuts.” said Karen Friedman, executive president of the Pension Rights Center.

We can't help but wonder that as more pension funds become insolvent, and more and more participants are forced to take reductions in benefits, whether helicopter money won't soon become a reality for the United States, even before it becomes one in Japan. Especially if it is spun by some opportunistic politicans as the “only hope” for America's workers to preserve some of their retirement savings.

…read more

Source: UPS Braces For $3.8 Billion Charge As Treasury’s Pension Benefit Decision Looms

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By Tyler Durden

Submitted by Wall Street Examiner's Lee Adler via Contra Corner blog,

Comparing the growth in the number of full time jobs versus the growth in new home sales starkly illustrates both the horrible quality of the new jobs, and how badly ZIRP has served the US economy.

Growth in new home sales has always been dependent on growth in full time jobs. For 38 years until the housing bubble peaked in 2006, home sales and full time jobs always trended together, subject to normal cyclical swings. With the exception of 1981-83 when Paul Volcker pushed rates into the stratosphere, new home sales always fluctuated between 550 and 1,100 sales per million full time workers in the month of March.

That correlation broke in the housing crash of 2008-09 when sales fell to a low

But in the housing crash in 2007-09 sales fell to a low of 276 per million full time workers. Since then the number of full time jobs has recovered to greater than the peak reached in 2007. In spite of that, new home sales per million workers remain at depression levels.

With 30 year mortgage rates now at 3.6% sales are lower today than they were when mortgage rates were above 17% in 1982. Sales have never reached 400 sales per million workers in spite of the recovery in the number of jobs, in spite of ZIRP, in spite of mortgage rates often under 4%.

ZIRP has actually made the problem worse. It has caused raging housing inflation which has caused median monthly mortgage payments for new homes to rise by 20% since 2009. ZIRP has enabled corporate CEOs to game the stock market to massively increase their own pay while encouraging them to cut worker salaries and shift higher paying jobs overseas. That leaves the US economy to create only low skill, low pay jobs that do not pay enough for workers to be able to purchase new homes.

The perverse incentives of ZIRP are why the housing industry languishes at depression levels.

…read more

Source: The Real Story Behind The True Magnitude Of The New Home Sales Collapse

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The Powerball jackpot has reached $314 million after going weeks without a winner. …read more

Source: Here we go again! Powerball jackpot reaches $314 million

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By Tyler Durden

Submitted by Dan Popescu via Acting-Man.com,

The Inflation Illusion

We hear more and more talk about the possibility of imposing negative interest rates in the US. In a recent article former Fed chairman Ben Bernanke asks what tools the Fed has left to support the economy and inter alia discusses the use of negative rates.

We first have to define what we mean by negative interest rates. For nominal rates it’s simple. When the interest rate charged goes negative we have negative nominal rates. To get the real rate of interest we have to subtract inflation from the nominal rate, so to speak remove the illusion of inflation.

The “real” federal funds rate (effective FF rate minus CPI-U y/y rate of change)

Real interest rates have been negative fairly often, including for most of the period since 2009. The main problem consists of choosing the appropriate measure of inflation.

Since the calculation of price inflation is highly subjective and easy to manipulate, one possibility is to adjust nominal prices to gold to calculate real interest rates. In the chart below you can see nominal U.S. 10-year Treasury rates versus gold-adjusted rates since 1962.

Nominal vs. gold-adjusted treasury yields (actually, the calculation of “price inflation” or a “general level of prices” is not merely subjective – it is literally impossible) – click to enlarge.

Ben Bernanke says in his article:

“The fundamental economic constraint on how negative interest rates can go is that, beyond a certain point, people will just choose to hold currency, which pays zero interest. (It’s not convenient or safe for most people to hold large amounts of currency, but at a sufficiently negative interest rate, banks or other institutions could profit from holding cash, for a fee, on behalf of customers). Based on calculations of how much it would cost banks to store large quantities of currency in their vaults, the Fed staff concluded in 2010 that the interest rate paid on bank reserves in the U.S. could not practically be brought lower than about -0.35 percent.”

Well-known monetary quack Ben Bernanke, who in a way is the John Law of our times. He actually seems to think he knows something (no-one has told him differently, but they should), but if one looks closely at what he is writing and saying, it soon becomes clear how utterly simplistic and superficial his theoretical thinking really is. Moreover, he and his counterparts elsewhere couldn’t even forecast their way out of a paper bag, i.e., they are completely useless in practice as well. Bernanke e.g. denied for years that there was a housing bubble in the US, a bubble that was so glaringly obvious even blind Freddie and his dog (h/t JD) could see it. It is rather astonishing that people like him not only seem to believe they should manipulate the economy, but actually expect something good to come of it! One might be tempted to call this the triumph of …read more

Source: Gold And Negative Interest Rates

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The Oracle of Omaha joked that the impact on Corporate America would not be the biggest problem of a Donald Trump presidency. …read more

Source: Warren Buffett is not a fan of Donald Trump

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By Tyler Durden

Submitted by David Stockman via Contra Corner blog,

The Fed has been sitting on the funds rate like some monetary mother hen since December 2008. Once it punts again at the June meeting owing to Brexit worries it will have effectively pegged money market rates at the zero bound for 90 straight months.

There has never been a time in financial history when anything close to this happened, including the 1930s. Nor was interest-free money for eight years running ever even imagined in the entire history of monetary thought.

So where’s the fire? What monumental emergency justifies this resort to radical monetary intrusion and repression?

Alas, there is none. And that’s as in nichts, nada, nope, nothing!

There is a structural growth problem, of course. But it has absolutely nothing to do with monetary policy; and it can’t be fixed with cheap money and more debt, anyway.

By contrast, there is no inflation deficiency—–even by the Fed’s preferred measure. Indeed, the very idea of a central bank pumping furiously to generate more inflation comes straight from the archives of crank economics.

The following two graphs dramatize the cargo cult essence of today’s Keynesian central banking regime. Since the year 2000 when monetary repression began in earnest, the balance sheet of the Fed has risen by 800%, while the amount of labor hours used in the US economy has increased by 2%.

At a ratio of 400:1 you can’t even try to argue the counterfactual. That is, there is no amount of money printing that could have ameliorated the “no growth” economy symbolized by flat-lining labor hours.

Owing to the recency bias that dominates mainstream news and commentary, the massive expansion of the Fed’s balance sheet depicted above goes unnoted and unremarked, as if it were always part of the financial landscape. In fact, however, it is something radically new under the sun; it’s the footprint of a monetary fraud breathtaking in its magnitude.

In essence, during the last 15 years the Fed has gifted the US economy with a $4 trillion free lunch. Uncle Sam bought $4 trillion worth of weapons, highways, government salaries and contractual services but did not pay for them by extracting an equal amount of financing from taxes or tapping the private savings pool, and thereby “crowding out” other investments.

Instead, Uncle Sam “bridge financed” these expenditures on real goods and services by issuing US treasury bonds on a interim basis to clear his checking account. But these expenses were then permanently funded by fiat credits conjured from thin air by the Fed when it did the “takeout” financing. Central bank purchase of government bonds in this manner is otherwise and cosmetically known as “quantitative easing” (QE), but it’s fraud all the same.

In essence, Uncle Sam has gotten $4 trillion of “something for nothing” during the last 16 years, while the Washington politicians and policy apparatchiks were happy to pretend that the “independent” Fed was doing god’s work of catalyzing, coaxing and stimulating more jobs and growth out of …read more

Source: The Cult Of Central Banking Is Dead In The Water

    

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