GOLD - The $210 Per Oz., Per $1T, of Central Bank Asset Expansion

THE ONLY NUMBER YOU NEED REMEMBER > $210

Sprott: Why SocGen Is Wrong About Gold's Imminent 'Demise' 04-05-13 David Franklin and David Baker via Sprott Group, via ZH

• Total gold supply can only grow marginally, while fiat money supply can grow exponentially through printing programs. This is why gold’s monetary value is so important – it’s the only “currency” in play that is immune to government devaluation. 
• Chart A illustrates the relationship between the growth of central bank balance sheets in the US, EU, UK and Japan and the price of gold. This relationship has an extremely high correlation with an R2 of about 95%. As central banks increase the size of their balance sheets through ‘open market operations’ to buy bonds, mortgage-backed securities (“MBS”) and the like, they inject more fiat dollars into their respective banking systems. As gold has a relatively stable supply, if there are more dollars available, the price of gold should rise in dollar terms. It’s really a very simple and intuitive relationship – as it should be.

• This relationship between central bank printing and gold has existed since the beginning of the gold bull market in 2000. In fact, this relationship shows that for every US$1 trillion increase in the collective central banks’ balance sheets, the price of gold has generally appreciated by an average of US$210/oz.
• Somewhat surprisingly, it turns out that the collective central bank balance sheets have actually shrunk over the past three months – by approximately US$415 billion. The biggest drop was seen in the ECB’s balance sheet, which shrunk by the equivalent of US$370 billion, while other central banks also experienced small declines. Based on our simple model above, a decrease of US$415 billion should produce a gold price decline of roughly US$87/oz. And as it turns out, gold fell by US$76/oz over the first quarter of 2013. Does this sound like a bubble to you? It certainly doesn’t appear to be. Gold is performing almost exactly as it should – by acting as a currency barometer for the amount of money being injected into or withdrawn from the economy... which leads us to Japan.
• Japan’s recent QE announcement is a thing of wonder. It represents an absolutely massive injection of yen relative to the size of the Japanese economy. The Bank of Japan’s US$75 billion equivalent per month of yen printing, coupled with the US Federal Reserve’s $85 billion per month (through its current QE program) will addUS$1.97 trillionto the collective central bank balance sheets over the next 12 months. Given Japan’s considerable contribution, we seriously question how SocGen believes gold can drop to US$1,375/oz by the end of the year. For that to happen, we would need to see a collective balance sheet decline of roughly 15%. Does SocGen seriously believe the US Fed (or any other central bank for that matter) is going to reverse its QE accumulation and then start aggressively selling balance sheet assets over the next year?
• If the Fed were to remove that flow of capital, the free market would once again dictate US bond yields and stock prices. There’s not a chance the Fed will take the risk of finding out what US bonds or stocks are worth to the market without a perpetual government-induced backstop. Why take the risk? Especially since the cumulative QE programs to date have not caused a drastic increase in inflation expectations.

VALUATIONS - Historical Forward Operating PE

Stocks Are Not Cheap 04-05-13 Morgan Stanley via ZH

Normally Low Interest Rates equate to Low PE Multiples.

This time it is different?

SENTIMENT - Over the last two years declines in bullish AAII sentiment have preceded drops in the equity market.

Bullish Sentiment Drops For Third Straight Week 04-06-13 Bspoke Investment

Individual investors continued to show less enthusiasm for equities this week as bullish sentiment dropped for the third week in a row.  According to the American Association of Individual Investors (AAII), bullish sentiment dropped from 38.4% down to 35.5%.  Since hitting a high of 52.3% in January, bullish sentiment has now dropped by 32.2%.  With readings like this, it is hard to argue that investors are overly optimistic.

While individual investor sentiment is often considered to be a contrary indicator for equities, over the last two years declines in bullish sentiment have preceded drops in the equity market.  

DISPOSABLE INCOME: The Death Blow to a 70 Precent Consumption Economy

The 21 Key Statistics About The Explosive Growth Of Poverty In America 04-05-13 Michael Snyder of The Economic Collapse blog via ZH

If the economy is getting better, then why does poverty in America continue to grow so rapidly?  Yes, the stock market has been hitting all-time highs recently, but also the number of Americans living in poverty has now reached a level not seen since the 1960s.  Yes, corporate profits are at levels never seen before, but so is the number of Americans on food stamps.  Yes, housing prices have started to rebound a little bit (especially in wealthy areas), but there are also more than a million public school students in America that are homeless.  That is the first time that has ever happened in U.S. history. 

So should we measure our economic progress by the false stock market bubble that has been inflated by Ben Bernanke's reckless money printing, or should we measure our economic progress by how the poor and the middle class are doing?  Because if we look at how average Americans are doing these days, then there is not much to be excited about.  In fact, poverty continues to experience explosive growth in the United States and the middle class continues to shrink.  Sadly, the truth is that things are not getting better for most Americans.  With each passing year the level of economic suffering in this country continues to go up, and we haven't even reached the next major wave of the economic collapse yet.  When that strikes, the level of economic pain in this nation is going to be off the charts.

The following are 21 statistics about the explosive growth of poverty in America that everyone should know...

1 - According to the U.S. Census Bureau, approximately one out of every six Americans is now living in poverty.  The number of Americans living in poverty is now at a level not seen since the 1960s.

2 - When you add in the number of low income Americans it is even more sobering.  According to the U.S. Census Bureau, more than 146 million Americans are either "poor" or "low income".

3 - Today, approximately 20 percent of all children in the United States are living in poverty.  Incredibly, a higher percentage of children is living in poverty in America today than was the case back in 1975.

4 - It may be hard to believe, but approximately 57 percent of all children in the United States are currently living in homes that are either considered to be either "low income" or impoverished.

5 - Poverty is the worst in our inner cities.  At this point, 29.2 percent of all African-American households with children are dealing with food insecurity.

6 - According to a recently released report, 60 percent of all children in the city of Detroit are living in poverty.

7 - The number of children living on $2.00 a day or less in the United States has grown to 2.8 million.  That number has increased by 130 percent since 1996.

8 - For the first time ever, more than a million public school students in the United States are homeless.  That number has risen by 57 percent since the 2006-2007 school year.

9 - Family homelessness in the Washington D.C. region (one of the wealthiest regions in the entire country) has risen 23 percent since the last recession began.

10 - One university study estimates that child poverty costs the U.S. economy 500 billion dollars each year.

11 - At this point, approximately one out of every three children in the U.S. lives in a home without a father.

12 - Families that have a head of household under the age of 30 have a poverty rate of 37 percent.

13 - Today, there are approximately 20.2 million Americans that spend more than half of their incomes on housing.  That represents a 46 percent increase from 2001.

14 - About 40 percent of all unemployed workers in America have been out of work for at least half a year.

15 - At this point, one out of every four American workers has a job that pays $10 an hour or less.

16 - There has been an explosion in the number of "working poor" Americans in recent years.  Today, about one out of every four workers in the United States brings home wages that are at or below the poverty level.

17 - Right now, more than 100 million Americans are enrolled in at least one welfare program run by the federal government.  And that does not even include Social Security or Medicare.

18 - An all-time record 47.79 million Americans are now on food stamps.  Back when Barack Obama first took office, that number was only sitting at about 32 million.

19 - The number of Americans on food stamps now exceeds the entire population of Spain.

20 - According to one calculation, the number of Americans on food stamps now exceeds the combined populations of "Alaska, Arkansas, Connecticut, Delaware, District of Columbia, Hawaii, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Oregon, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Utah, Vermont, West Virginia, and Wyoming."

21 - Back in the 1970s, about one out of every 50 Americans was on food stamps.  Today, close to one out of every six Americans is on food stamps.  Even more shocking is the fact that more than one out of every four children in the United States is enrolled in the food stamp program.

Unfortunately, all of these problems are a result of our long-term economic decline.  In a recent article for the New York Times, David Stockman, the former director of the Office of Management and Budget under President Ronald Reagan, did a brilliant job of describing how things have degenerated over the last decade...

ince the S&P 500 first reached its current level, in March 2000, the mad money printers at the Federal Reserve have expanded their balance sheet sixfold (to $3.2 trillion from $500 billion). Yet during that stretch, economic output has grown by an average of 1.7 percent a year (the slowest since the Civil War); real business investment has crawled forward at only 0.8 percent per year; and the payroll job count has crept up at a negligible 0.1 percent annually. Real median family income growth has dropped 8 percent, and the number of full-time middle class jobs, 6 percent. The real net worth of the “bottom” 90 percent has dropped by one-fourth. The number of food stamp and disability aid recipients has more than doubled, to 59 million, about one in five Americans.

For the last couple of years, the U.S. economy has experienced a bubble of false hope that has been produced by unprecedented amounts of government debt and unprecedented money printing by the Federal Reserve.

Unfortunately, that bubble of false hope is not going to last much longer.  In fact, we are already seeing signs that it is getting ready to burst.

For example, initial claims for unemployment benefits shot up to 385,000 for the week ending March 30th.

That is perilously close to the 400,000 "danger level" that I keep warning about.  Once we cross the 400,000 level and stay there, it will be time to go into crisis mode.

In the years ahead, it is going to become increasingly difficult to find a job.  Just the other day I saw an article about an advertisement for a recent job opening at a McDonald's in Massachusetts that required applicants to have "one to two years experience and a bachelor's degree".

If you need a bachelor's degree for a job at McDonald's, then what in the world are blue collar workers going to do when the competition for jobs becomes really intense once the economy experiences another major downturn?

Do not be fooled by the fact that the Dow has been setting new all-time highs.  The truth is that we are in the midst of a long-term economic decline, and things are going to get a lot worse.  If you know someone that is not convinced of this yet, just share the following article with them: "Show This To Anyone That Believes That 'Things Are Getting Better' In America".

FOOD STAMPS - 15 Percent, 47.3M or 1 in 7 Americans on SNAP

Some 15% of U.S. Receives Food Stamps 04-05-13 WSJ

• Food-stamp use rose 1.8% in the U.S. in January from a year earlier, with 15% of the U.S. population receiving benefits. (See an interactive map with data on use since 1990.)
• One of the federal government’s biggest social welfare programs, which expanded when the economy convulsed, isn’t shrinking back alongside the recovery, the Journal reported last month.
• Food stamp rolls increased on a year-over-year basis, but were 1.1% lower from the prior month, the U.S. Department of Agriculture reported. Though annual growth continues, the pace has slowed since the depths of the recession.
• The number of recipients in the food stamp program, formally known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), reached 47.3 million, or nearly one in seven Americans.
• Illinois was the only state to see a double-digit year-over-year jumps in use, while Oregon, Maine, Missouri, Texas, Arizona, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Idaho, North Dakota, Utah and North Carolina all posted annual drops.
• Mississippi was the state with the largest share of its population relying on food stamps — 22% — though Washington, DC was a bit higher overall at 23%. One in five residents in Louisiana, Tennessee and George also were food-stamp recipients. Wyoming had the smallest share of its population on food stamps — 7%.

JAPAN - Did They Just Lose Control Of Rates??

Is It Beginning? Biggest JGB Price Collapse In Over 10 Years Triggers TSE Circuit Breakers 04-05-13 Zero Hedge

Just over 4 hours ago we discussed the stunning collapse in 10Y Japanese bond yields. Since then - things have taken a very dramatic turn for the worse for bonds. 10Y JGB yields have exploded higher. The move from 32bps to 65bps triggered circuit breakers on the Tokyo Stock Exchange in JGB Futures trading as JGB prices plunged by their largest amount since September 2002. We can only imagine there is liquidations galore occurring given the massive outsize moves we are seeing in Japanese bonds, stocks, FX, swaps, and CDS. Did the BoJ just lose control?

Now that is a reversal!!

Biggest price drop in JGB Futures in over 10 years.

JAPAN - They Will Lose Control of Rates Due to Insolvency

Kyle Bass: "Japan Will Implode Under Weight Of Their Debt" 04-04-13 CNBC via ZH

"they will lose control of rates, since leaving the zone of insolvency is impossible now"

As the fast-money flabber-mouths stare admiringly at the rise in nominal prices of Japanese (and the rest of the world ex-China) stock prices amid soaring sales of wheelbarrows following Kuroda's 'shock-and-awe' last night, it is Kyle Bass who brings these surrealists back to earth with some cold-hard-facting. Out of the gate Bass explains the massive significance of what the Japanese are embarking on, "they are essentially doubling the monetary base by the end of 2104."

It is a "Giant Experiment," he warns, but when you are backed into a corner and your debts are north of 20 times your government tax revenue, "you're already insolvent." Simply put, Bass says they have to do something and they have to something big because they are "about to implode under the weight of their debt." For a sense of the scale of the BoJ's 'experimentation', Bass sums it up perfectly (and concerningly), "the BoJ is monetizing at a rate around 75% of the Fed on an economy that is one-third the size of the US!"

What they are trying to do is devalue the currency to attempt to become more competitive while holding their rates market flat - the economic zealots running the world's central banks believe they can live in that Nirvana - and Bass believes that is not the case, as they will lose control of rates, since leaving the zone of insolvency is impossible now. His advice, "if you're Japanese, spend! or take it out of your country. If you're not, borrow in JPY and invest in productive assets." Do not be long JPY or Japanese assets as he concludes with the reality of Japan's "hollowed out" manufacturing industry and why USDJPY is less important that KRWJPY.

WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW

• Debts are 23X your tax revenues = Insolvency
• Doubling Monetary in 2 years is extremely experimental with these existing debt levels,
• What they are trying to do is devalue the currency to attempt to become more competitive while holding their rates market flat.
• they will lose control of rates, since leaving the zone of insolvency is impossible now.
• A 1% increase in interest rates would cost 255 of tax revenue = Insolvency
• "the BoJ is monetizing at a rate around 75% of the Fed on an economy that is one-third the size of the US!"
• How could anyone expect that they will get their money back at the value it is presently being placed at??

JAPAN - Understanding the Japanese Problem in Less than 7 minutes

Japan's Debt Crisis Visualized 04-04-13 Addogram via ZH

In just a few short minutes, inspired by Kyle Bass, Addogram presents a short visual explanation of Japan's debt problem. In the time it takes Ben Bernanke to print $13.7 million you'll have a deep understanding of Aso, Abe, and Kuroda's impending debt crisis.

• Increase Monetary Base from Y135T ($1.43T) to Y270T ($2.86) by March 2015
• Buying Long Term Bonds Government (JGB) increasing average Maturity from 3 to 6 Years,
• Buying 7 trillion yen, or $75 billion, of bonds per month,
• Balance Sheet expands by 1% of GDP PER MONTH IN 2013 AND 1.1% IN 2014,
• US is increasing its Balance Sheet by 0.54% of GDP per month,

BANK OF JAPAN - ABE-Nomics Roll-Out -1

Japan's Great Economic Experiment Starts In Just A Few Hours — Here's What You Need To Know 04-03-13 BI

BANK OF JAPN - Board Meeting 04-04-13

EU - Policy Shift Threatens the View of Bank Deposits

Bail-In Blues: Luxembourg Warns of Investor Flight from Europe 03-29-13 der Spiegel

The debate over this week's "bail in" of bank account holders in Cyprus as part of the country's debt crisis bailout is continuing to simmer in Europe. In Luxembourg, Finance Minister Luc Frieden has warned that the example set in Cyprus by taxing people holding €100,000 ($129,000) or more in their accounts could drive investors out of Europe.

dsl/SPIEGEL

THE CYPRUS IMPACT - Crumbling EU Foundation Principles

The Seven Broken Taboos Of The Cyprus Deal 03-31-13 Barclays via ZH

The euro’s core founding principles, based on the Maastricht Treaty’s:

1- “irrevocable” fixing of currency rates, and of

2- the free movement of capital, have been violated.

According to Barclays: From a European perspective, the list of broken taboos and assumptions continues to grow. It includes:

1. EU sovereign debt cannot be restructured: broken by the Greek PSI.

2. Senior bank debt-holders cannot be bailed in: broken several times with respect to banks in Denmark, Ireland and now two Cypriot banks.

3. Depositors are sacrosanct: broken by Cyprus – deposits greater than the formal guarantee (EUR100k) in the two biggest banks, with EUR4.2bn of uninsured deposits in Laiki Bank set for a large haircut of unknown size, and Bank of Cyprus deposits set for a haircut of around 35% according to several news reports (eg, Economist, Reuters).

4. Depositors should not be punitively taxed: broken by the Cypriot government and implicitly endorsed by the EU, but vetoed by the Cypriot parliament.

5. If capital controls are applied in the euro area, it is ‘game over’: broken by Cyprus – banks were shut for nearly two weeks; draconian controls of uncertain duration have been imposed.

6. Discussion of a euro exit is ‘off limits’: already it is apparent that euro exit was discussed with respect to Greece during H1 12; this topic again re-emerged last weekend with respect to Cyprus.

7. The EU can rely on the IMF to be sympathetic in providing financing without haircuts, even for countries with high public debt: from the Greek and now the Cypriot experience, the Fund is evidently evaluating new programmes more critically, particularly when debt/GDP ratios rise above 100%.

The euro will never be the same again; its preservation now depends urgently upon economic recovery. Without the delivery of economic growth, unemployment will rise to yet higher post-war record levels, and the widespread and growing disillusionment felt by EU citizens towards their economic regime will threaten to spill over into more explicit questioning of the euro’s suitability.

GLOBAL GROWTH - Slowdown Starting to Accelerate

Global Economic Slowdown Accelerates Again 04-01-13 Goldman Sachs via ZH

It would appear that between the historical revisions of over-optimistic initial prints in macro data in the last few months and the reality of the weakness in Europe; the global economy is in Slowdown. Goldman's Swirlogram has now seen its Global Leading Indicator in the 'slowdown' phase for two months as momentum fades rapidly and seven of the ten major factors in the index declining with Global (Aggregate) PMI, and Global New Orders-less-Inventories worsening. Quite comically, the three factors providing some positivity are the Baltic Dry Index (which we are told is irrelevant when it drops), Japanese Inventory/Sales (which improved but remains at depression-era levels), and US initial jobless claims (which have become a farce statistically from what we can tell). Of course, none of this macro reality matters for now - until it does that is.

The red arrows show the relative size of adjustments from the initial estimates...

and the last 3 days have seen the biggest drop in US macro data in 9 months...

Charts: Bloomberg and Goldman Sachs

EU - The "CORE" Problem

Europe Back To 19th Century Growth Rates 04-01-13 JP Morgan via ZH

Long-term growth conditions in Spain, Italy and France are as weak as they have been (other than during wartime) in over a century. The chart below tells the story. As JPMorgan's Michael Cembalest notes, while European sovereign debt spreads have rallied across the board, European bank lending to households and businesses is still declining, and the cost of small business loans in Italy and Spain is higher than both real and nominal growth. With ECB policy now clearly useless given Europe's fragmentation, and with Germany's forward expectations rolling over, it is hard to see how, absent wholesale devaluation and/or inflation (or as Cembalest notes destruction & rebuilding), Europe will recover from this.

SENTIMENT - Small Investors Edging Into Market Afraid to Miss Rally

Mom and Pop Run With the Bulls 03-29-13 WSJ

The market's record-breaking spree has raised a new fear in many American households—dread that they are missing out on big gains.

When stock prices collapsed in 2008, the bear market wiped out half of the savings of Lucie White and her husband, both doctors in Houston. Feeling "sucker punched," she says, they swore off stocks and put their remaining money in a bank.

This week, as the Dow Jones Industrial Average and Standard & Poor's 500-stock index pushed to record highs, Ms. White and her husband hired a financial adviser and took the plunge back into the market.

"What really tipped our hand was to see our cash not doing anything while the S&P was going up," says Ms. White, a 39-year-old dermatologist in Houston. "We just didn't want to be left on the sidelines."

• So far this year, U.S. stock-focused mutual funds—the traditional domain of mom-and-pop investors—have taken in a net of $33.6 billion, according to Lipper.

• That is a small reversal compared with the $445 billion that they pulled from domestic stock mutual funds from 2007 through the end of 2012.

• Many on Wall Street think that trend will likely accelerate in coming months, particularly if the stock rally continues.

• So far, most of the gains have been powered by big institutions and professional traders, whose buying helped push the blue-chip Dow to a gain of 11% in the first quarter of the year, which ended last Thursday.

• That rally, which also pushed up the S&P 500 to a record last Thursday, is the best start for the Dow since 1998.

• Providing some comfort to small investors are fading concerns about the health of the U.S. economy. While growth is far from vibrant, unemployment is falling. Crucially for individual investors, the values of homes—the biggest single investment for most Americans—have started to inch higher. Corporate profits are at record levels, and confidence is rising among consumers and businesses.

• But there is nothing like bad returns to scare away investors, and good ones to bring them back.

• After the long bull market of the 1980s and 1990s, the first 10 years of this century have become known on Wall Street as the "lost decade." The S&P 500 finished 2009 down 24% from where it was a decade earlier, thanks to a pair of vicious bear markets.

• First came the collapse of the technology stock bubble starting in March 2000, which saw the S&P 500 tumble 49% to its nadir in October 2002. Then from its peak just before the financial crisis in October 2007, the S&P 500 slid 57% to its March 2009 low.

FED MODEL - No Longer Prices Risk

The Fallacy Of The Fed Model 04-04-13 Lance Roberts of Street Talk Live blog via ZH

RISK - Quickly Escalating Risk

Three Bearish Charts for Equities 03-29-13 Stone Street Advisors

ECONOMIC RISK

Economic risk: SPX has lined up very well initial jobless claims for the past 5+ years but has recently overshot by quite a bit.

SPX versus INITIAL JOBS CLAIMS

"HIGH QUALITY" RISK

High quality risk: the BAML Global Financial Stress Index, which attempts to measure stress in areas such as solvency and liquidity, price momentum, and short term volatility. This is the first time it has broken significantly below equities in over two years.

SPX versus GLOBAL FINANCIAL STRESS INDEX

"LOW QUALITY" RISK

the Markit CDX North America High Yield Index tracks CDS for 100 non investment grade debt issuers. This has been an extremely tight relationship.

SPX versus Markit CDX North America High Yield Index

(100 non investment grade debt issuers)

SENTIMENT - Rising Cash Allocations

AAII: Cash Allocations at a 16-Month High 04-03-13 Berry Ritholtz

Today, lets look at another interesting data point from AAII: Cash allocations reached a 16-month high in March. Individual investors pulled money from both equities and bonds last month.

We have shown the flip side of this chart in the past — equity allocation — which is similarly moderate.

Equity allocations fell 3.0 percentage points to 59.5% in March. Surprisingly, the past 15 months have not seen much variation in equity allocations stuck in a range from 58.8% (June 2012) to 62.5% (February 2013). The historical average is 60%.

March AAII Asset Allocation Survey results:

• Stocks Total: 59.5%, down 3.0 percentage points
• Bonds Total: 17.7%, down 1.5 percentage points
• Cash: 22.8%, up 4.6 percentage points

Historical Averages:

• Stocks/Stock Funds: 60%
• Bonds/Bond Funds: 16%
• Cash: 24

EARNINGS - Elevated Negative Pre-Announcements

You Know The Market's Euphoric When... 04-02-13 Zero Hedge

We noted last night the 'six charts' that represent the sum total of the hopefulness of these markets with relation to fundamental earnings but it is the ratio of negative to positive earnings guidance - which stands at a record high - that should worry investors the most (and doesn't). As the WSJ notes, in the last bull market, the negative corporate guidance ratio hit a peak of 2.38 in the third quarter of 2007 - just as that bull market was ending (and troughed at 0.97 right as the bottom was in in stocks in Q1 2009). The current 3.55 ratio is the highest on record. But what is more representative of the market's absolutely sanguine nature is that just 2 days after guiding earnings down, stock prices are down just 0.3% (and half the stocks actually rose). As the WSJ concludes, and we tend to agree, watch out. There may be a nasty drop on the other side of this wall.

EARNINGS - Investors Ignore Negative Pre-Announcements

Investors Ignore Negativity at Their Peril 04-01-13 WSJ

As the first quarter drew to a close, 86 companies in the S&P 500 issued negative guidance for what they expect to report in earnings for that period. Just 24 issued positive guidance. At 3.58 negative updates for every positive one, that is by far the highest ratio since FactSet began tracking such data in 2006.

A look at consensus earnings-per-share expectations for the companies with the 10 highest weightings in the S&P 500—making up close to a fifth of the total—shows a similar pattern. Relative to where forecasts stood at the start of the year, they have fallen for seven and risen for three.

Ignore corporate worrywarts at your peril. In the last bull market, the negative corporate guidance ratio hit a peak of 2.38 in the third quarter of 2007—just as that bull market was ending. Meanwhile, one of the lowest ratios of negative guidance, 0.97, came during the second quarter of 2009, when many analysts and investors still were very pessimistic and stocks hit a 13-year low.

Investors' reaction to recent guidance shows they may be too sanguine. FactSet notes that the average stock-price change from two days before to two days after the announcement of negative guidance has been a drop of just 0.3% this quarter. About half of the stocks involved actually rose.

Conversely, companies issuing positive guidance had larger-than-typical gains on average, although this figure was pulled higher by Netflix, which rallied by two-thirds

TOTAL RETURNS - US & Japan the Only Positives

Best And Worst Performing Assets In 2013 04-03-13 Deutsche Bank via ZH

A rather skewed distribution in asset returns Year to Date (through March 31), with the winners so far i) the Nikkei, in both JPY and USD terms, on endless jawboning out of the Japanese political apparatus that it may do virtually anything - although in a few hours we will see just what the BOJ actually will do, the S&P on the $85 billion in monthly liquidity injections, and finally the FTSE on expectations the arrival of yet another Goldman central planner will unleash yet another epic episode of monetization in July, just as the Japan effect is fading.

The losers: pretty much everyone else. (BitCoin was not included in the sample).

ANALYTICS - Weakness Below the Headline Numbers

Underneath The Surface, People Are Seeing Signs That The Stock Market Is Breaking Down 04-03-13 BI

ANALYTICS - Weakness Below the Headline Numbers - 2

There's A Rotation Underway Out Of Small-Cap Stocks That Could Be Bad News For Everyone 04-01-13 BI

SENTIMENT - Contrarian Indicator Suggests Upside Potential

Sell Side Consensus Indicator Still Extremely Bearish 04-01-13 Barry Ritholtz

CANARIES - Rosenberg Sees Signs of Overbought Market

ROSENBERG: I See 10 Signs That Show The Stock Market Is Overbought 04-01-13 Gluskin Sheff's David Rosenberg via BI

PATTERNS - Long Cycles

Long Cycles 04-02-13 Ed Carlson via Safehaven

Chances are you have seen a long-term chart of the Dow annotated as the chart below has been. The red hash marks designate secular bull and bear markets. But if you look closely, you may notice one significant difference from similar charts; the first secular market begins in 1921 and not in 1932 as is often shown.

Why the low in 1921? Why is the secondary low of March 2003 used and not the nominal low in October 2002? The dates shown on this chart are the lows of, what George Lindsay called, the Long Cycle and were found using very specific, rules-based methods devised by him. These rules are explained in the book An Aid to Timing. I recently took a moment to count the exact length of these long-cycles. Although Lindsay devised these methods using data he had collected back to 1798, he wrote the original An Aid to Timing in 1950 so he wasn't able to do perform this exercise for our "modern" market. Review the table below and notice how similar the four cycles are in duration.

Regardless of the time period chosen, the long cycle which began in 2003 is not expected to bottom until 2023. This should eliminate any question of whether the Dow began a new secular bull market at the low in March 2009.

RISK - Increasing Levels of Market Risk

US Retail Investor - Do You Feel Lucky? 04-01-13 Doug Short dshort.com via ZH

For all those calling for multiple expansion to save us from dismal earnings - take a look at this...

GOLD-DOW RATIO - A Secular Trend

In the chart below, courtesy of Cambridge House, we ask readers: in which period was there a more stable relationship between tangible and intangible values, and a less exuberant irrationality vis-a-vis that which is purely based on confidence, if not so much reality.

A second logical follow up question is: where is this ratio of intangible to tangible value going next? The chart below attempts to provide some log-based perspective on precisely this.

FALLING BEHIND - Here is Why

INSIDEOUS INVOLVEMENT - Stealth Capture of Controlling Financial Repression Information

All U.S. Intelligence Agencies – Including CIA and NSA – to Spy On Americans’ Finances 03-14-13 Washingtonsblog.com

Government to Spy On Everyone Who Banks In the U.S.

Reuters notes:

U.S. to let spy agencies scour Americans’ finances

The Obama administration is drawing up plans to give all U.S. spy agencies full access to a massive database that contains financial data on American citizens and others who bank in the country, according to a Treasury Department document seen by Reuters.

***

Financial institutions that operate in the United States are required by law to file reports of “suspicious customer activity,” such as large money transfers or unusually structured bank accounts, to Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN).

The Federal Bureau of Investigation already has full access to the database. However, intelligence agencies, such as the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency, currently have to make case-by-case requests for information to FinCEN.

The Treasury plan would give spy agencies the ability to analyze more raw financial data than they have ever had before ….

***

The planning document, dated March 4, shows that the proposal is still in its early stages of development, and it is not known when implementation might begin.

***

The plan calls for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence – set up after 9/11 to foster greater collaboration among intelligence agencies – to work with Treasury. The Director of National Intelligence declined to comment.

The excuse given for this intrusion on privacy?

As with the destruction of all of our privacies and other liberties, the excuse given is terrorism.

Indeed, given that the government claims the right to assassinate or indefinitely detain Americans without any due process of law, do you think government employees will hesitate in seizing the assets of Americans labels as “enemies?”

The government has done it before, and President Obama authorized seizure of property again last year.

And the government’s take-down of Megaupload was an exercise of the power to seize all of the legal property held in a storage facility because a handful of crooks have illegal property in theirs.

The Puppet Master: Government 03-31-13 Bill Buckler, author of The Privateer via ZH

The Puppet Master - Government

It has been well and often said that only two types of “paper” money have ever existed in history - those that are already worthless and those that are going to be. Eventually, the physical pieces of paper or plastic which have been given a function as a medium of exchange by government order may remain - but their purchasing power on the market does not. The transition point always comes when the “promises to pay” on which the fiat money depends are exposed beyond the possibility of denial to be the LIES which they always were. History is replete with examples, yet very few ask the obvious question: “Pay? - WITH WHAT??” One of the great wonders of the twentieth century was the lengths to which the economics “profession” proved willing to go to avoid even facing that question let alone trying to answer it.

For hundreds if not thousands of years of human history, the vast majority were all too well aware that the government “lives” on the backs of the people. Today, that long-held knowledge has been astonishingly successfully reversed. Today, the perceived “wisdom” is that the people live on the back of the government. In the realm of the history of ideas, it took many centuries to bring forward the idea that a life might be lived without constant kowtowing to government. It has only taken one century - the time since WW I - to all but totally submerge that legacy in a new wave of government dependency.

The old and tired phrase - “I’m from the government and I’m here to help you” - is met by as much derision as it has ever been when people bemoan the impositions of their rulers. But those same people rely on the government to insulate them from the consequences of any action they may choose to undertake.

There are people who love government, people who hate it, and people who fear it. But when the chips are down, the majority of those same people profess to have “confidence” in the government’s power to protect their “welfare”. Governments count on that confidence” above all other things.

Short On Credit And Long On Faith

The ignorance over the mechanisms and procedures which power the modern global financial and monetary system is fiercely held. When it comes to the general public, we have seen demonstrations of that on numerous occasions over the past few years, the latest being in Cyprus. As was the case in all previous like instances in other nations in Europe and elsewhere, very few of those demonstrating in the street have ever thought about the TRUE nature of the banks, central banks and governments in which they place their “trust”. Many reports on the anger of the Cypriots have talked about the end of the “age of innocence”.

Unfortunately, the term innocence is not defined as the fierce refusal to see what is right in front of one’s face. At the end of his great work, Human Action, Ludwig von Mises dealt with the real problem like this:

“There is no means by which anyone can evade his personal responsibility. Whoever neglects to examine to the best of his abilities all the problems involved voluntarily surrenders his birthright to a selfappointed elite of supermen. In such vital matters blind reliance upon ‘experts’ and uncritical acceptance of popular catchwords and prejudices is tantamount to the abandonment of self-determination and to yielding to other people’s domination. As conditions are today, nothing can be more important to every intelligent man than economics. His own fate and that of his progeny are at stake.”

“Whether we like it or not, it is a fact that economics cannot remain an esoteric branch of knowledge accessible only to small groups of scholars and specialists. Economics deals with society’s fundamental problems; it concerns everyone and belongs to all. It is the main and proper study of every citizen.”

Human Action was published in 1949. The problems which von Mises so brilliantly dissected then are incomparably worse now. But the main failing remains the same. Those who refuse to gain the knowledge necessary to stand for something will fall for anything. The result in Cyprus is the latest in a long line of similar cases. To give one example, how many of the “Occupy Wall Street” crowd could give a cogent explanation of what they were protesting against? The specific instances may differ, but the reaction remains the same: “But ... BUT ... YOU TOLD US IT WAS ‘SAFE’!!”

What makes it worse is that most knew that it was NOT ‘safe’ - but they refused to admit it to themselves.

TAX AVOIDANCE -- Gaming the 'Nation State' Concept through Offshore Tax Havens

The Tax Free Tour A You Tube Video by Taxodus.

How 1% asset-holes’ offshore tax havens hide $21 – $32 trillion 03-31-13 Washingtonblog

McKinsey Chief Economist James Henry leads explanation in this brilliant 53-minute video tour of how the 1% hide $21 to $32 trillion in tax havens. The US top seven banks hide over $10 trillion, many top US corporations claim income losses, while the bottom 90%’s tax burden increases – in part to pay top corporations’ tax refunds.

Only the middle class and poor pay taxes.

Since 1966, inflation-adjusted annual income for the bottom 90% of Americans increased just $59, while the 1% increased income average by $625,000, and the 1% of the 1% increased average incomes by $18,700,000 per year.

Our choices seem to be only two:

• Arrest these asset-holes in leadership for crimes in unlawful wars and criminal economic fraud, or
• Surrender all previous Americans’ sacrifices for our freedoms, and damn our children to escalating psychopathic policies of war-murders and debt slavery.

Obama’s ‘change’: 1% get 81% income gains then tax-shelter $21-$32 trillion; bottom 90% lose income 04-28-13 Washingtonblog

Pulitzer Prize-winning tax journalist David Kay Johnston reports IRS tax data since Mr. Obama’s 2009 inauguration shows “change” for 90% of Americans: they lost income. The 1% increased income; taking 81% of gains (the top 1% of the 1% took 39% of this total).

This follows a pattern that between 1980 and 2005, the 1% also took over 80% of all income gains.

Since 1966, inflation-adjusted annual income for the bottom 90% of Americans increased just $59, while the 1% increased income average by $625,000, and the 1% of the 1% increased average incomes by $18,700,000 per year.

This occurs in the context of McKinsey Chief Economist James Henry documenting the 1% hide $21 to $32 trillion in tax havens, the US top seven banks hide over $10 trillion, many top US corporations claim income losses, while the bottom 90%’s tax burden increases – in part to pay top corporations’ tax refunds.

It also occurs in context of accelerating technological capacity that should allow all Earth’s inhabitants to live higher quality lives.

Mr. Johnston reports the excellent work of economists Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty.

Mr. Obama’s Democratic leadership’s escalation of Mr. Bush’s Republican leadership shows us that US politics is one criminal body with puppets at the end of Left and Right arms.

One obvious solution is to arrest US political leadership for crimes in unlawful wars and criminal economic fraud.

If you’re ready for solutions rather than death to millions, harm to billions, and looting of trillions: now’s the time to take all the lawful action previous generations have given you under the US Constitution.

INEQUALITY - Standards of Living

Inequality – Both Economic and In Access to Liberty And Justice – Skyrockets to Historic Levels 04-04-13 Washingtonsblog

"We have fascism / communist style socialism with kleptocracy, oligarchy or banana republic style corruption."

Poverty Spikes In America … While the Government Throws Money at the Super-Elite

AP reports that the U.S. is seeing the highest spike in poverty since the 1960s, and notes:

According to a report by the non-partisan Congressional Research Service late last year, “U.S. income distribution appears to be among the most unequal of all major industrialized countries and the United States appears to be among the nations experiencing the greatest increases in measures of income.”

Inequality has grown steadily worse:

Indeed, a recent study shows that the richest Americans captured more than 100% of all recent income gains. And see this. And the details of poverty in the U.S. are shocking.

Social mobility – the ability to go “from rags to riches” – is no longer an American quality. Indeed, many parts of the world have now surpassed the U.S. in social mobility.

We’ve previously reported that income inequality has increased more under Obama than under Bush.

But we have to go much farther back in history to find inequality as high as in American today. Specifically, inequality in America today is worse than it was in Gilded Age America, modern Egypt, Tunisia or Yemen, many banana republics in Latin America, and worse than experienced by slaves in 1774 colonial America. It is twice as bad as in ancient Rome – which was built on slave labor.

2 Economies: One for the Super-Rich, One for Everyone Else

There are 2 economies: one for the rich, and the other for everyone else.

Jim Quinn has previously documented the growing gap in how the retailers catering to the wealthy are doing, versus the stores selling to the average American. So have Bloomberg and Zero Hedge.

Now David Stockman – Director of the Office of Management and Budget under Ronald Reagan – hammers on this theme in a new book:

Even the tepid post-2008 recovery has not been what it was cracked up to be, especially with respect to the Wall Street presumption that the American consumer would once again function as the engine of GDP growth. It goes without saying, in fact, that the precarious plight of the Main Street consumer has been obfuscated by the manner in which the state’s unprecedented fiscal and monetary medications have distorted the incoming data and economic narrative.

These distortions implicate all rungs of the economic ladder, but are especially egregious with respect to the prosperous classes. In fact, a wealth-effects driven mini-boom in upper-end consumption has contributed immensely to the impression that average consumers are clawing their way back to pre-crisis spending habits. This is not remotely true.

Five years after the top of the second Greenspan bubble (2007), inflation-adjusted retail sales were still down by about 2 percent. This fact alone is unprecedented. By comparison, five years after the 1981 cycle top real retail sales (excluding restaurants) had risen by 20 percent. Likewise, by early 1996 real retail sales were 17 percent higher than they had been five years earlier. And with a fair amount of help from the great MEW (measurable economic welfare) raid, constant dollar retail sales in mid-2005 where 13 percent higher than they had been five years earlier at the top of the first Greenspan bubble.

So this cycle is very different, and even then the reported five years’ stagnation in real retail sales does not capture the full story of consumer impairment. The divergent performance of Wal-Mart’s domestic stores over the last five years compared to Whole Foods points to another crucial dimension; namely, that the averages are being materially inflated by the upbeat trends among the prosperous classes.

For all practical purposes Wal-Mart is a proxy for Main Street America, so it is not surprising that its sales have stagnated since the end of the Greenspan bubble. Thus, its domestic sales of $226 billion in fiscal 2007 had risen to an inflation-adjusted level of only $235 billion by fiscal 2012, implying real growth of less than 1 percent annually.

By contrast, Whole Foods most surely reflects the prosperous classes given that its customers have an average household income of $80,000, or more than twice the Wal-Mart average. During the same five years, its inflation-adjusted sales rose from $6.5 billion to $10.5 billion, or at a 10 percent annual real rate. Not surprisingly, Whole Foods’ stock price has doubled since the second Greenspan bubble, contributing to the Wall Street mantra about consumer resilience.

To be sure, the 10-to-1 growth difference between the two companies involves factors such as the healthy food fad, that go beyond where their respective customers reside on the income ladder. Yet this same sharply contrasting pattern is also evident in the official data on retail sales.

***

That the consumption party is highly skewed to the top is born out even more dramatically in the sales trends of publicly traded retailers. Their results make it crystal clear that Wall Street’s myopic view of the so-called consumer recovery is based on the Fed’s gifts to the prosperous classes, not any spending resurgence by the Main Street masses.

The latter do their shopping overwhelmingly at the six remaining discounters and mid-market department store chains—Wal-Mart, Target, Sears, J. C. Penney, Kohl’s, and Macy’s. This group posted $405 billion in sales in 2007, but by 2012 inflation-adjusted sales had declined by nearly 3 percent to $392 billion. The abrupt change of direction here is remarkable: during the twenty-five years ending in 2007 most of these chains had grown at double-digit rates year in and year out.

After a brief stumble in late 2008 and early 2009, sales at the luxury and high-end retailers continued to power upward, tracking almost perfectly the Bernanke Fed’s reflation of the stock market and risk assets. Accordingly, sales at Tiffany, Saks, Ralph Lauren, Coach, lululemon, Michael Kors, and Nordstrom grew by 30 percent after inflation during the five-year period.

***

This tale of two retailer groups is laden with implications. It not only shows that the so-called recovery is tenuous and highly skewed to a small slice of the population at the top of the economic ladder, but also that statist economic intervention has now become wildly dysfunctional. Largely based on opulence at the top, Wall Street brays that economic recovery is under way even as the Main Street economy flounders.

The Horrible Economic Effects of Runaway Inequality

Extreme inequality helped cause the Great Depression, the current financial crisis … and the fall of the Roman Empire.

Neither Conservatives Nor Liberals Like So Much Inequality

We noted in 2011:

Renowned behavioral economist Dan Ariely (Duke University) and Michael I. Norton (Harvard Business School) recently demonstrated that everyone – including conservatives – thinks there should be more equality.

Their study found:

Respondents constructed ideal wealth distributions that were far more equitable than even their erroneously low estimates of the actual distribution. Most important from a policy perspective, we observed a surprising level of consensus: all demographic groups—even those not usually associated with wealth redistribution such as Republicans and the wealthy—desired a more equal distribution of wealth than the status quo.

Ariely comments:

Taken as a whole, the results suggest to us that there is much more agreement than disagreement about wealth inequality. Across differences in wealth, income, education, political affiliation and fiscal conservatism, the vast majority of people (89%) preferred distributions of wealth significantly more equal than the current wealth spread in the United States. In fact, only 12 people out of 849 favored the US distribution. The media portrays huge policy divisions about redistribution and inequality – no doubt differences in ideology exist, but we think there may be more of a consensus on what’s fair than people realize.

Why Do We Have So Much Inequality?

If runaway inequality is so harmful to our economy – and if most people don’t want so much inequality – why is inequality becoming more and more extreme?

The short answer is because the super-elite want it. The rest of this post sets forth the details. (By pointing out that inequality is skyrocketing, we’re not calling for a redistribution of wealth downward. We’re calling for an end to policies which allow wealth to be concentrated in a few hands.)

The big banks literally own the Federal Reserve. And they own Washington D.C. politicians, lock stock and barrel. See this, this, this and this.

Two leading IMF officials, the former Vice President of the Dallas Federal Reserve, and the the head of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, Moody’s chief economist and many others have all said that the United States is controlled by an “oligarchy” or “oligopoly”, and the big banks and giant financial institutions are key players in that oligarchy.

Economics professor Randall Wray writes:

Thieves … took over the whole economy and the political system lock, stock, and barrel.

No wonder the government has saved the big banks at taxpayer expense, chosen the banks over the little guy, and said no to helping Main Street … while continuing to throw trillions at the giant banks.

No wonder crony capitalism has gotten even worse under Obama.

No wonder Obama is prosecuting fewer financial crimes than Bush, or his father or Ronald Reagan.

Indeed, not only is the chief law enforcement official in the country refusing to prosecute the big criminals, but he’s working to get the already-jailed ones sprung.

No wonder:

All of the monetary and economic policy of the last 3 years has helped the wealthiest and penalized everyone else. See this, this and this.

***

Economist Steve Keen says:

“This is the biggest transfer of wealth in history”, as the giant banks have handed their toxic debts from fraudulent activities to the countries and their people.

Stiglitz said in 2009 that Geithner’s toxic asset plan “amounts to robbery of the American people”.

And economist Dean Baker said in 2009 that the true purpose of the bank rescue plans is “a massive redistribution of wealth to the bank shareholders and their top executives”.

David Stockman notes that the Federal Reserve’s policies have helped the rich get richer at everyone else’s expense:

The central banking branch of the state remains hostage to Wall Street speculators who threaten a hissy fit sell-off unless they are juiced again and again. Monetary policy has thus become an engine of reverse Robin Hood redistribution; it flails about implementing quasi-Keynesian demand–pumping theories that punish Main Street savers, workers, and businessmen while creating endless opportunities, as shown below, for speculative gain in the Wall Street casino.

***

These futile stimulus actions are demanded and promoted by the crony capitalist lobbies which slipstream on whatever dispensations as can be mustered. At the end of the day, the state labors mightily, yet only produces recovery for the 1 percent.

He’s right. Quantitative easing doesn’t help Main Street or the average American. It only helps big banks, giant corporations, and big investors. And by causing food and gas prices skyrocket, it takes a bigger bite out of the little guy’s paycheck, and thus makes the poor even poorer.

Nobel prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz says that inequality is caused by the use of money to shape government policies to benefit those with money. As Wikipedia notes:

A better explainer of growing inequality, according to Stiglitz, is the use of political power generated by wealth by certain groups to shape government policies financially beneficial to them. This process, known to economists as rent-seeking, brings income not from creation of wealth but from “grabbing a larger share of the wealth that would otherwise have been produced without their effort”[59]

Rent seeking is often thought to be the province of societies with weak institutions and weak rule of law, but Stiglitz believes there is no shortage of it in developed societies such as the United States. Examples of rent seeking leading to inequality include

• the obtaining of public resources by “rent-collectors” at below market prices (such as granting public land to railroads,[60] or selling mineral resources for a nominal price[61][62] in the US),
• selling services and products to the public at above market prices[63] (medicare drug benefit in the US that prohibits government from negotiating prices of drugs with the drug companies, costing the US government an estimated $50 billion or more per year),
• securing government tolerance of monopoly power (The richest person in the world in 2011, Carlos Slim, controlled Mexico’s newly privatized telecommunication industry[64]).

(Background here, here and here.)

Stiglitz says:

One big part of the reason we have so much inequality is that the top 1 percent want it that way. The most obvious example involves tax policy …. Monopolies and near monopolies have always been a source of economic power—from John D. Rockefeller at the beginning of the last century to Bill Gates at the end. Lax enforcement of anti-trust laws, especially during Republican administrations, has been a godsend to the top 1 percent. Much of today’s inequality is due to manipulation of the financial system, enabled by changes in the rules that have been bought and paid for by the financial industry itself—one of its best investments ever. The government lent money to financial institutions at close to 0 percent interest and provided generous bailouts on favorable terms when all else failed. Regulators turned a blind eye to a lack of transparency and to conflicts of interest.

***

Wealth begets power, which begets more wealth …. Virtually all U.S. senators, and most of the representatives in the House, are members of the top 1 percent when they arrive, are kept in office by money from the top 1 percent, and know that if they serve the top 1 percent well they will be rewarded by the top 1 percent when they leave office. By and large, the key executive-branch policymakers on trade and economic policy also come from the top 1 percent. When pharmaceutical companies receive a trillion-dollar gift—through legislation prohibiting the government, the largest buyer of drugs, from bargaining over price—it should not come as cause for wonder. It should not make jaws drop that a tax bill cannot emerge from Congress unless big tax cuts are put in place for the wealthy. Given the power of the top 1 percent, this is the way you would expect the system to work.

Bloomberg reports:

The financial industry spends hundreds of millions of dollars every election cycle on campaign donations and lobbying, much of which is aimed at maintaining the subsidy [to the banks by the public]. The result is a bloated financial sector and recurring credit gluts.

Another reason why the super-rich are becoming much richer and everyone else poorer is that Obama is prosecuting virtually no financial criminals.

Without the government’s creation of the too big to fail banks (they’ve gotten much bigger under Obama), the Fed’s intervention in interest rates and the markets (most of the quantitative easing has occurred under Obama), and government-created moral hazard emboldening casino-style speculation (there’s now more moral hazard than ever before) … things wouldn’t have gotten nearly as bad.

Indeed, crony capitalism has gotten even worse under Obama.

As we documented in 2009, the bailout money is just going to line the pockets of the wealthy, instead of helping to stabilize the economy or even the companies receiving the bailouts.

Goosing the Stock Market

Moreover, the Fed has more or less admitted that it is putting almost all of its efforts into boosting the stock market.

Robert Reich has noted:

Some cheerleaders say rising stock prices make consumers feel wealthier and therefore readier to spend. But to the extent most Americans have any assets at all their net worth is mostly in their homes, and those homes are still worth less than they were in 2007. The “wealth effect” is relevant mainly to the richest 10 percent of Americans, most of whose net worth is in stocks and bonds.

AP writes:

The recovery has been the weakest and most lopsided of any since the 1930s.After previous recessions, people in all income groups tended to benefit. This time, ordinary Americans are struggling with job insecurity, too much debt and pay raises that haven’t kept up with prices at the grocery store and gas station. The economy’s meager gains are going mostly to the wealthiest.

Workers’ wages and benefits make up 57.5 percent of the economy, an all-time low. Until the mid-2000s, that figure had been remarkably stable — about 64 percent through boom and bust alike.

David Rosenberg points out:

The “labor share of national income has fallen to its lower level in modern history … some recovery it has been – a recovery in which labor’s share of the spoils has declined to unprecedented levels.”

The above-quoted AP article further notes:

Stock market gains go disproportionately to the wealthiest 10 percent of Americans, who own more than 80 percent of outstanding stock, according to an analysis by Edward Wolff, an economist at Bard College.

Indeed, as I reported in 2010:

As of 2007, the bottom 50% of the U.S. population owned only one-half of one percent of all stocks, bonds and mutual funds in the U.S. On the other hand, the top 1% owned owned 50.9%.***

(Of course, the divergence between the wealthiest and the rest has only increased since 2007.)

Professor G. William Domhoff demonstrated that the richest 10% own 98.5% of all financial securities, and that:

The top 10% have 80% to 90% of stocks, bonds, trust funds, and business equity, and over 75% of non-home real estate. Since financial wealth is what counts as far as the control of income-producing assets, we can say that just 10% of the people own the United States of America.

(While many argue that the booming housing market shows that the government’s policies are helping the economy, many of the buyers are actually investors and speculators, not people planning to live in the homes they buy.)

Over-Financialization

When a country’s finance sector becomes too large finance, inequality rises. As Wikipedia notes:

[Economics professor] Jamie Galbraith argues that countries with larger financial sectors have greater inequality, and the link is not an accident.[66][67]

Government policy has been encouraging the growth of the financial sector for decades:

(Economist Steve Keen has also shown that “a sustainable level of bank profits appears to be about 1% of GDP”, and that higher bank profits leads to a ponzi economy and a depression).

Unemployment and Underemployment

A major source if inequality is unemployment, underemployment and low wages.

Government policy has created these conditions. And the pretend populist Obama – who talks non-stop about the importance of job-creation – actually doesn’t mind such conditions at all.

The“jobless recovery” that the Bush and Obama governments have engineered is a redistribution of wealth from the little guy to the big boys.

The New York Times notes:

Economists at Northeastern University have found that the current economic recovery in the United States has been unusually skewed in favor of corporate profits and against increased wages for workers.

In their newly released study, the Northeastern economists found that since the recovery began in June 2009 following a deep 18-month recession, “corporate profits captured 88 percent of the growth in real national income while aggregate wages and salaries accounted for only slightly more than 1 percent” of that growth.

The study, “The ‘Jobless and Wageless Recovery’ From the Great Recession of 2007-2009,” said it was “unprecedented” for American workers to receive such a tiny share of national income growth during a recovery.

***

The share of income growth going to employee compensation was far lower than in the four other economic recoveries that have occurred over the last three decades, the study found.

Obama apologists say Obama has created jobs. But the number of people who have given up and dropped out of the labor force has skyrocketed under Obama (and see this).

And the jobs that have been created have been low-wage jobs.

For example, the New York Times noted in 2011:

The median pay for top executives at 200 big companies last year was $10.8 million. That works out to a 23 percent gain from 2009.

***

Most ordinary Americans aren’t getting raises anywhere close to those of these chief executives. Many aren’t getting raises at all — or even regular paychecks. Unemployment is still stuck at more than 9 percent.

***

“What is of more concern to shareholders is that it looks like C.E.O. pay is recovering faster than company fortunes,” says Paul Hodgson, chief communications officer for GovernanceMetrics International, a ratings and research firm.

According to a report released by GovernanceMetrics in June, the good times for chief executives just keep getting better. Many executives received stock options that were granted in 2008 and 2009, when the stock market was sinking.

Now that the market has recovered from its lows of the financial crisis, many executives are sitting on windfall profits, at least on paper. In addition, cash bonuses for the highest-paid C.E.O.’s are at three times prerecession levels, the report said.

***

The average American worker was taking home $752 a week in late 2010, up a mere 0.5 percent from a year earlier. After inflation, workers were actually making less.

AP pointed out that the average worker is not doing so well:

Unemployment has never been so high — 9.1 percent — this long after any recession since World War II. At the same point after the previous three recessions, unemployment averaged just 6.8 percent.

– The average worker’s hourly wages, after accounting for inflation, were 1.6 percent lower in May than a year earlier. Rising gasoline and food prices have devoured any pay raises for most Americans.

– The jobs that are being created pay less than the ones that vanished in the recession. Higher-paying jobs in the private sector, the ones that pay roughly $19 to $31 an hour, made up 40 percent of the jobs lost from January 2008 to February 2010 but only 27 percent of the jobs created since then.

Alan Greenspan noted:

Large banks, who are doing much better and large corporations, whom you point out and everyone is pointing out, are in excellent shape. The rest of the economy, small business, small banks, and a very significant amount of the labour force, which is in tragic unemployment, long-term unemployment – that is pulling the economy apart.

Money Being Sucked Out of the U.S. Economy … But Big Bucks Are Being Made Abroad

Part of the widening gap is due to the fact that most American companies’ profits are driven by foreign sales and foreign workers. As AP noted in 2010:

Corporate profits are up. Stock prices are up. So why isn’t anyone hiring?

Actually, many American companies are — just maybe not in your town. They’re hiring overseas, where sales are surging and the pipeline of orders is fat.

***

The trend helps explain why unemployment remains high in the United States, edging up to 9.8% last month, even though companies are performing well: All but 4% of the top 500 U.S. corporations reported profits this year, and the stock market is close to its highest point since the 2008 financial meltdown.

But the jobs are going elsewhere. The Economic Policy Institute, a Washington think tank, says American companies have created 1.4 million jobs overseas this year, compared with less than 1 million in the U.S. The additional 1.4 million jobs would have lowered the U.S. unemployment rate to 8.9%, says Robert Scott, the institute’s senior international economist.

“There’s a huge difference between what is good for American companies versus what is good for the American economy,” says Scott.

***

Many of the products being made overseas aren’t coming back to the United States. Demand has grown dramatically this year in emerging markets like India, China and Brazil.

Government policy has accelerated the growing inequality. It has encouraged American companies to move their facilities, resources and paychecks abroad. And some of the biggest companies in America have a negative tax rate … that is, not only do they pay no taxes, but they actually get tax refunds.

And a large percentage of the bailouts went to foreign banks (and see this). And so did a huge portion of the money from quantitative easing. More here and here.

Capital Gains and Dividends

According to a study published last month by a researcher at the U.S. Congressional Research Service:

The largest contributor to increasing income inequality…was changes in income from capital gains and dividends.

Business Insider explains:

Drastic income inequality growth in the United States is largely derived from changes in the way the U.S. government taxes income from capital gains and dividends, according to a new study by Thomas Hungerford of the non-partisan Congressional Research Service.

Essentially, what Democrats have been saying about income inequality — that it’s in a large part due to favorable taxation and deduction policies for high income Americans — is largely right

***

The study … conclusively found that the wealthy benefitted from low tax rates on investment income, which in turn caused their wealth to grow faster.

Essentially, taxing capital gains as ordinary income would make the playing field more fair, and reduce over time income inequality.

Joseph Stiglitz noted in 2011:

Lowering tax rates on capital gains, which is how the rich receive a large portion of their income, has given the wealthiest Americans close to a free ride.

Indeed, the Tax Policy center reports that the top 1% took home 71% of all capital gains in 2012.

Ronald Reagan’s budget director, assistant secretary of treasury, and domestic policy director all say that the Bush tax cuts were a huge mistake. See this and this.

The Bottom Line

The bottom line is that the super-elite have destroyed the American economy and the American system of government. We no longer have a capitalist system within a democratic republic. Instead, we have fascism, communist style socialism, kleptocracy, oligarchy or banana republic style corruption.

We noted above that inequality in America today is worse than in modern Egypt, Tunisia or Yemen, many banana republics in Latin America, worse than experienced by slaves in 1774 colonial America, and much worse than in ancient Rome – which was built on slave labor.

Arguably, we have lost almost as many liberties as people in those systems. There are two systems of justice in America … one for the big banks and other fatcats, and one for everyone else. And see this.

Indeed, the loss of economic power and the loss of freedom often go hand-in-hand. A strong rule of law is the main determinant of prosperity. On the other hand, failure to prosecute fraud by the white collar elite is destroying our prosperity.

America has suffered a catastrophic loss of both legal – and economic – freedom.

Inequality, in both senses of the word – both economic and access to liberty and justice – is skyrocketing to historic levels.