Infographic - Are Guns And Ammo The New Gold?

There are those who contend that when fiat dies, gold and precious metals will take its place. Then, a smaller subset out there, claims that it matters not who owns the gold or silver. All that matters is who is in charge of the lead. The following inforgraphic from ammo.net may shed some much needed light on the topic, which as recent Thanksgiving record sales indicated, more and more people are starting to lock in on (and load).

David Rosenberg Explains Why The Q4 US Economic "Decoupling" Is Over

Even as it is ending, the fourth quarter of 2011 has been one of dramatic inversions and dislocations, the two main ones being the decoupling between corporate profits, which have for the first time in years started sagging, as ever more companies pre-announce misses or outright disappoint on the top and bottom line, while paradoxically Q4 GDP is expected to post its best quarter of the year, and print somewhere north of 3%. Which in turn has led to the other great inversion: contrary to 2010 when the US growth was lagging and investors (who still harbor the foolish atavism of believing the market reflects the economy) were told to ignore the US and focus on the rest of the world, now we are seeing the traditional reverse decoupling being blasted from every legacy media mouthpiece: namely that the US can withstand the economic crunch gripping Asia and Europe (incidentally, neither forward nor reverse decoupling has ever worked in the history of the globalized world but knock yourself out). How does one explain this paradox? Simple - as David Rosenberg shows, the payroll tax cut, with its gargantuan $10/week benefit is completely irrelevant. The far more important one is that the average price of gas has tumbled from $3.77 ten months ago to $3.29 currently: "That is practically equivalent to a $70 billion tax cut (at an annual rate) for the consumer sector, and happened right in time for the most important part of the year for retailers." The problem - the benefit is only felt while the price is declining; once it stabilized it has no incremental boost. So unless crude collapses (recall Saxo Bank's outrageous forecasts - it just might), there is no more exogenous boosting to economic growth. And if inversely gas starts rising again, then that $70 billion tax cut will become a tax hike. Long story short, the "US Economic Decoupling" is ending. Furthermore, even if tax manages to pass the payroll tax extension, it will at best not detract from growth. But it certainly will not add to it. Which is why the market which has so staunchly been ignoring what happens in Q1 2012, may want to reconsider. And with 9 days left in the year, it may want to do it soon... just in time for tax selling purposes.

Flowcharting The True Cause Of The Eurozone Crisis

All neoclassical-Keynesians or whatever else they like to call themselves these days (mendacious voodoo shamans works great but for some reason is considered insulting), should flip through this great flowchart from the BBC which explains how it was nothing else than simply untenable debt that both precipitated and exacerbated the debt crisis, resulting in various derivative offshoots that led to a feedback loop that required ever more debt to artificially smooth out the developing divergences between Europe's two opposite worlds. And yes, while cutting spending involves significant pain, it means a soft reset for the system which will lead to a viable outcome for everyone in the long-run. On the other hand, the Keynesian espoused lunacy is to keep doing more of the same, and hoping for a better outcome which i) will never come and ii) will result in a hard reset from which there will be no recovery. Ironically, it is Europe doing the right thing, and while it will suffer a very deep recession shortly, it will come out stronger at the end. More importantly - it will come out. Which is much more than we can say about America.

Charting Hedge Funds' Abysmal 2011 Track Record And Mid-November Performance Update

2011 has not been good for hedge funds: as the following chart from Reuters shows, this will be the first year of many, possibly ever, in which the average hedge fund had a negative return, even as the broader market had a minimally positive return, although there are still a few more trading days in the year so the S&P could well close negative. No doubt this collapse in returns will be blamed on this and that, yet we can't help but wonder how in the "New Hedge Fund Normal" in which fundamentals no longer matter and alpha is irrelevant, in which what does matter is which central bank prints and how much and who can get more levered beta, in which "expert networks" and "information arbitrage" are a thing of the past, in which every phone conversation is tapped and in which your friendly state DA just wants to bust some hedge fund ass to make that governor bid easier, will hedge funds ever return to their old prominence? And if they can't, just what will happen to that ultra critical $2 trillion marginal purchasing power, levered 3 times, which has traditionally been the driving force for market moves higher?

Bloomberg's Freudian Hyperinflationary Blast From The Future - Overnight Euro Libor At 39,929%

Now this is one funny, and very apropos, fat finger. Save this post - in a few years it will be revisited only then it won't be a joke.

PIMCO Releases 2012 Economic Forecasts; Presenting The Wall Street 2011 Market Forecast Track Record

Here Is The Math: Carry Trade Profits From The LTRO Are Woefully Insufficient To Make Any Impact

Following yesterday's €489 billion LTRO there are few things we know with certainty, primary among them is that the net proceeds from the 3 year refi operation are really €210 billion, due to the rolling of various other duration facilities which are already in use into the LTRO as discussed yesterday. What we do not know, is whether the net proceeds of €210 billion have been used by banks to purchase sovereign debt or as Peter Tchir suggested, are actually used in a reflexive ponzi whereby banks use the explicit ECB guarantee to buy their own debt. Perhaps the best evidence that the LTRO was an epic failure when it comes to subsidizing the peripheral bond market is the fact that hours after its completion the ECB was forced to jump into the secondary market and buy up billions in Italian and Spanish bonds: an action that was supposed to be conducted by the banks themselves. But let's assume that the entire €210 billion form the first LTRO (and there certainly will be more) is used to fund carry trades: what then? Well, luckily UBS has performed a mathematical analysis which looks at how much paper profit banks can extract from said trade and juxtaposes it with the most recent €115 billion capital shortfall calculated by the EBA in its most recent stress test (not to be confused with the second to last stress test which saw Dexia pass with the highest marks possible). The result: woefully insufficient . In other words, anyone who believes that the LTRO will be used by banks as a source of carry "profits" is massively deluded. If anything banks will find creative loophole to prop up their balance sheets and issue more of their own debt instead of chasing pennies in front of the bond vigilante rollercoaster by loading up on more sovereigns. Because the last thing Italian banks can afford is another late Novemeber blow out in yields which brought the system to within hours of imminent collapse.

A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The LTRO

Banks in weak countries have been issuing debt, getting a government guarantee, and then posting them as collateral at the ECB. There are examples of this for Greek banks for sure, but my understanding is it has also been occurring in Portugal and Ireland. It is the only way banks in Greece (and the other countries) can raise money. It always struck me as a little bizarre, but guess it was done so the ECB could justify lending the money. I always thought it was relatively harmless, and was only adding to the risk of countries that were already in deep trouble – providing a guarantee is NOT riskless. But it appears about €40 billion of yesterday’s LTRO was done by Italian banks that issued bonds to themselves and got a government guarantee, and then posted it to LTRO. So these banks didn’t have any other collateral they could post?  Unicredit has a balance sheet approaching a €TRILLION but they had nothing they could post as ollateral? That seems strange.  Extremely strange.  

Ron Paul: Government Is a Big Auction, They Steal Money and Pass It Out

 

 

You Decide...

Military to Designate U.S. Citizens as Enemy During Collapse

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[Ed Note: We always try to do the honorable thing here at SGTreport. But given the new NDAA bill and our rapid decline into pure tyranny, we will direct you to infowars.com for the links to the documents the government now deems "classified". We value truth, but we also value living life OUTSIDE of a U.S. military dungeon.]
by Aaron Dykes and Alex Jones, InfoWars.com:

UPDATE: Government censors document revealing plans to wage war on Americans. READ HERE.

NOTE: Within an hour of posting this article and linking to the pertinent document, the feds at FBO.gov have pulled the link and implied that it was a classified posting. We believe this was public and of interest to American citizens, taxpayers and peoples of the world and are in the process re-establishing an archive link of the material. Obviously, however, this information is revealing and certain parties do not wish it to be widely known.
Infowars has discovered new FEMA documents that confirm information received from DoD sources that show military involvement in a FEMA-led takeover within the United States under partially-classified Continuity of Government (COG) plans. It involves not only operations for the relocation of COG personnel and key officials, population management, emergency communications and alerts but the designation of the American people as ‘enemies’ under a live military tracking system known as Blue Force Situational Awareness (BFSA).
Read the documents @ InfoWars.com