Monday, May 19, 2014 - Still Too Big to Jail

Still Too Big to Jail
by Sinclair Noe

DOW + 20 = 16511
SPX + 7 = 1885
NAS + 35 = 4125
10 YR YLD + .02 = 2.54%
OIL + .58 = 102.16
GOLD - .10 = 1293.60
SILV - .01 = 19.44

Merger Mania Monday. Late yesterday, AT&T announced an offer to buy DirecTV for $48 billion, or $95 per share. The combined AT&T-DirecTV would serve 26 million customers; that would make it the second-largest pay TV operator behind a combined Comcast-Time Warner Cable, which would serve 30 million under a $45 billion merger proposed in February. The Comcast deal still faces regulatory hurdles.

AT&T and DirecTV promised consumer benefits like more economical bundles that tie mobile phone, pay TV and Internet service together on a single bill. The deal could face regulatory scrutiny from the Federal Communications Commission and Department of Justice. Unlike the cable company tie-up, the AT&T-DirecTV merger would effectively cut the number of video providers from four to three for about 25% of US households. That's a situation that could result in higher prices for consumers and usually gives regulators cause for concern.

The value that DirecTV offers that no other national TV provider offers is a special deal for football fans; for $240 to $330 you can buy a special package that gets you all the NFL football games, including your hometown favorite no matter where you live. That’s why DirecTV paid an estimated $4 billion to the NFL for the latest Sunday Ticket contract; that deal expires at the end of the upcoming NFL season. If the Sunday Ticket arrangement were not to be extended, AT&T would reportedly have a legal out, according to terms of the takeover.

Part of the value of DirecTV is what it isn’t. DirecTV does not offer fixed-line or mobile Internet service, and its rights to airwave frequencies for satellite TV are not the kind that AT&T can use to improve its mobile phone network. If AT&T can convert DirecTV’s customers into high-speed Internet subscribers, they could have 25% of all pay TV subscribers and then two companies would control 55% to 60% of all Internet subscriptions in the US.

The board of AstraZeneca has rejected the improved, and apparently final $119 billion takeover offer from US drugmaker Pfizer. Pfizer, which is the world's second-biggest drugmaker by revenue, has been courting No. 8 AstraZeneca since January. Yesterday, Pfizer raised the offer 15% to $119 billion; that would be the richest acquisition ever among drugmakers and the third-biggest in any industry. AstraZeneca didn't take long to reject the new offer, its board arguing Pfizer is making "an opportunistic attempt to acquire a transformed AstraZeneca, without reflecting the value of its exciting pipeline" of experimental drugs.

Pfizer's offer comes amid a surge of other deals among drugmakers. Those deals include Switzerland's Novartis agreeing to buy GlaxoSmithKline's cancer-drug business for up to $16 billion, to sell most of its vaccines business to GSK for $7.1 billion, plus royalties, and to sell its animal health division to Eli Lilly for about $5.4 billion. Canada's Valeant Pharmaceuticals has also made an unsolicited offer of nearly $46 billion for Botox maker Allergan, which has turned it down, so far.

Law enforcement agents have arrested more than 90 hackers accused of infecting more than half-a-million computers worldwide with malicious snooping software. The suspects were charged with developing, selling and marketing a remote access tool, or “RAT,” that allowed users to infiltrate computers, view files and steal personal data from unwitting victims. Talk about creepy; the malware could even take over your webcam and take pictures and videos of you. The original creator of the software, who founded an organization called “Blackshades,” was arrested in June 2012, but investigators said an international ring of hackers continued to sell and disseminate the software after his arrest, reaching thousands of people in more than 100 countries; 19 countries participated in the arrests, and more than 300 searches had been conducted in what law enforcers described as one of the largest cybersecurity operations in history.

The United States charged five Chinese government officials with allegedly orchestrating cyber-attacks against six major American companies. It marks the first time the US has formally charged foreign government officials for explicitly acting at the behest of a foreign government in cyber-crimes. The companies targeted by hackers were Alcoa, Westinghouse, Allegheny Technologies, US Steel, United Steelworkers Union, and Solar World.

Attorney General Eric Holder said: “In some cases, they stole trade secrets that would have been particularly beneficial to Chinese companies at the time they were stolen. In others, they stole sensitive, internal communications that would provide a competitor, or adversary in litigation, with insight into the strategy and vulnerabilities of the American entity. In sum, the alleged hacking appears to have been conducted for no reason other than to advantage state-owned companies and other interests in China, at the expense of businesses here in the United States.”

The Justice Department has criminally charged Credit Suisse AG and two of its units with conspiring to willfully help Americans evade taxes. A Virginia federal court filing accuses Credit Suisse of conspiring to in part "advise the preparation and presentation of false income tax returns and other documents to the Internal Revenue Service.'' The four-page criminal information charges the bank with "assisting clients in using sham entities'' as the purported owners of secret offshore accounts and "soliciting IRS forms that falsely stated under penalties of perjury that the sham entities … owned the assets in the accounts.''

The criminal case follows a Senate subcommittee investigation that found the bank provided accounts in Switzerland for more than 22,000 US clients totaling $10 billion to $12 billion. The report said Credit Suisse sent Swiss bankers to recruit American clients at golf tournaments and other events, encouraged US customers to travel to Switzerland and actively helped them hide their assets.

Credit Suisse has apparently agreed as part of a settlement to plead to one count of conspiring to aid tax evasion. It would mark the first time in more than 20 years that a major bank has plead guilty to criminal wrongdoing. But make no mistake, this was a negotiated guilty plea that does not bear the consequences of criminal guilt. Credit Suisse will pay about $2.6 billion in penalties and hire an independent monitor for up to two years, which sounds exactly like a civil penalty. Recognizing that criminal charges could prompt regulators to revoke a bank’s license to operate, the corporate equivalent of the death penalty, prosecutors met with regulators to discuss punishing Credit Suisse without putting it out of business and imperiling the economy. The biggest challenge facing Credit Suisse could be that some of its own clients, such as pension funds, have internal requirements that prohibit them from doing business with an entity that has pleaded guilty to a crime.

Otherwise, this amounts to another slap on the wrist. The CEO and Chairman keep their positions. Credit Suisse will admit to a statement of facts that shows the U.S. tax evasion was widely fostered by the bank, the people said. The firm won’t have to disclose the names of US account holders under terms of the agreement.

The Credit Suisse plea won’t be the last. BNP Paribas is expected to plead guilty in coming weeks to doing business with countries like Sudan and Iran that the United States has blacklisted; BNP is also expected to pay more than $5 billion in fines. And eventually, we could see criminal charges brought against American banks such as JPMorgan and Citigroup, which are the subjects of criminal investigations, but those inquiries are at an earlier stage and it is unclear whether they would result in criminal charges. The Justice Department's highest-profile settlement over sales of risky mortgage securities in the run-up to the financial crisis — the $13 billion deal among the department, state regulators and JPMorgan Chase — was a civil case, and no bank executives were charged. Federal prosecutors in California have been conducting a related criminal investigation.

So for now we have a new strategy for controlling the illegality of the big banks: charge them with criminal activity and punish them with civil penalties. So what we have, in the end, seems to be a version of the anemic civil settlements and deferred-prosecution agreements that banks always get when they commit crimes. As usual, it is little more than the cost of doing business. Eric Holder can say that no bank is too big to jail, but then he folds like a tortilla when it comes to pursuing criminal charges that actually carry criminal penalties. For now, the government's message to banks remains the same: Go ahead and break the law. If worse comes to worst, your low-level bankers will take the fall, and your shareholders will pick up the tab.

Monday, May 05, 2014 - Riggers’ Propaganda

Riggers’ Propaganda

by Sinclair Noe

DOW + 17 = 16,530
SPX + 3 = 1884
NAS + 14 = 4138
10 YR YLD + .02 = 2.61%
OIL - .38 = 99.38
GOLD + 9.10 = 1310.70
SILV + .13 = 19.69

Last week we told you about prosecutors and regulators preparing to criminally prosecute Credit Suisse and maybe BNP Paribas, and the slap on the wrist enforcement efforts of the past decade, and especially under the mis-guidance of Attorney General Eric Holder’s “Too Big to Jail” policy. The Swiss finance minister met Holder on Friday to discuss a US probe into Swiss banks that allegedly helped Americans evade US taxes, which includes Credit Suisse. Today, Holder posted a video on the Justice Department website saying that the DOJ is pursuing criminal investigations of financial institutions that could result in action in the coming weeks and months, and adding that no company was “too big to jail.”

A criminal conviction of an entity regulated in the United States could lead authorities to potentially revoke a charter, essentially a death sentence for a bank. In his video, Holder said prosecutors are working closely with regulators to address the issues before taking action, "Rather than wall off banks from prosecution, the potential for such severe consequences simply means that federal prosecutors conducting these investigations must go the extra mile to coordinate closely with the regulators that oversee these institutions' day-to-day operations."

It’s starting to sound like Holder is going after criminal charges without the consequences of criminal charges; maybe he can collect a slightly bigger fine, but still leave the bank charter in place. Otherwise, this is a big pile of baloney. And the proof will be in the putting. Until we see a banker jailed and a charter revoked, AG Holder is just spouting propaganda.

The propaganda mill is spinning fast in Washington DC these days. Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Mary Jo White flatly rejected claims that retail investors are being fleeced by high-frequency traders who can use their speed to jump ahead with buy and sell orders that fetch better prices.

White told a US House of Representatives panel last week, "The markets are not rigged." White reiterated that her agency's investigators are actively pursuing probes into high-speed traders and dark pools, or anonymous trading venues, but she also sought to dispel the notion that using high-speed technologies to trade ahead of others using stock quotes disseminated on public data feeds could meet the legal definition of "unlawful insider trading." She acknowledged at one point that the market is not "perfect" and told lawmakers that the agency's "data-driven" review of market structure issues surrounding areas such as order types, dark pool trading and data feeds was still ongoing. Even though the SEC has not concluded or barely even launched the investigation, White already knows the facts, saying: "I want to be very clear that the market metrics suggest that the retail investor is very well-served by the current market structure."

The rather unusual reason why SEC Chair White and Congress are suddenly concerned about rigged markets is because of Michael Lewis' latest book Flash Boys and HFT (high-frequency trading) and whether the markets are manipulated. What they're not talking about is how the markets have been set up for institutionalized rigging. And they are rigged; have been for a long time.

It goes back to the time when the NYSE was the only game in town, and prices were quoted in fractions: a half, a quarter, an eighth. Buyers and sellers of listed shares used brokers to send orders to the NYSE Floor for execution. On the Floor, "specialists" are in charge of every stock. Their job was, and still is, to match up buyers and sellers and "keep a fair and orderly market" as they facilitate "price discovery."

The specialist used to see all orders for the stocks they were in charge of because all orders had to come to them. Besides matching up buyers and sellers, specialists can also trade for their own account. That means they can try and make money trading the stocks where they are specialists. Here's how the specialist makes real money, besides getting paid a small fee for matching up orders.

The key to being the specialist is seeing all the order flow. Because specialists have knowledge of who is buying, who wants to buy and how much and at what prices, and the same is true for knowing the sell side, the specialist essentially gets to trade on inside information. The specialist could raise the bid if he wanted to buy stock because he knew there were more buy orders coming into his book, and if he was right and the stock moved higher, he could sell his position for a nice profit.

And that is pretty much how the system works today. Eventually, investors grew weary of having the specialists slice off profits on insider information. Even though we got rid of the fractional system, we still have the insiders slicing off small profits on each trade. Now the Nasdaq doesn’t have a specialist system because there is no central trading floor where dealers meet and call out prices, but in the automated, cyberspace world, each dealer is his own specialist.

Eventually, electronic communications networks (ECNs) sprang up. ECNs were and still are networks where dealers who weren't part of Nasdaq could place their quotes and buy and sell with each other. From there it wasn't long before Nasdaq dealers wanted to get onto all the ECNs and demands were made to trade NYSE and AMEX stocks on the computer networks. That's how technology changed the old specialist system into a mass of different trading venues that now includes entirely new exchanges like BATS, and dark pools where banks and crossing services trade for clients demanding anonymity.

The problem now is that there is no longer any one central place where all orders go to be executed. Orders are spread around based on cost, and services, and, most importantly, "payment for order flow." So, now the online brokerage firms like Schwabb, and Etrade, and whoever, don’t have their own traders to execute trades and they don’t have their own trading desks, so they have to route those orders to an exchange or a couple of exchanges to match up buyers and sellers. In order for exchanges and networks that offer execution of orders to be successful, they have to have orders coming in so they can match up buyers and sellers. Otherwise, if there aren't enough orders to allow matching of buyers and sellers at prices where customers want to transact, that exchange would have no "liquidity" and it would lose business.

So how do all these competing exchanges get orders? They pay for them. They pay Schwab, and Ameritrade and Scottrade for their "order flow." That's right; your order at your discount brokerage is sold to someone so it can be traded on their exchange. Who gets paid for your order? Not you. Your brokerage gets paid.

So, after the switch to decimalization in 2001, we had the rise of the market makers. Market makers are the same as specialists, except they are mini-specialists in the stocks they trade electronically for their broker-dealer or bank trading desk who trade on Nasdaq or on the ECNs or anywhere where an intermediary can interpose himself into a trade, and they will impose their trade ahead of your trade. That’s why they buy order flow, so they can create an internal “book” so they can have their own inside information on the order flow, so they can trade against it, or sell it to other traders.

HFT operators are looking at all the order flow going into all the different exchanges and trading venues they can peer into. They look into the total flow of orders, which no single exchange can see, and with their empirically modeled time sequencing of orders, spreads, and depth that they run through reinforcement learning algorithms, they come up with a trade that steps in to buy or sell shares before someone who intended to transact there gets a chance to.

Speed is critical to high-frequency trading. Exchanges rent HFT shops space next to their servers (co-location) so they get their data faster than everyone else. That's legal. They couldn't do it if there weren't so many exchanges and trading venues competing for orders. You can thank the SEC for making that a reality without sensible limits. They couldn't do it if there was no such thing as payment for order flow; yes, they get paid for their order flow too. You can thank the SEC for allowing that neat little scheme.  HFT shops can buy and sell at the same price (that's a zero profit or loss), but because they provided some venue "liquidity" by sending their super-fast order there to be executed, they get paid. That's not arbitrage in the traditional sense; that's just playing the game. They couldn't do it if they didn't have all the information at the speed they get it at from the exchanges the SEC regulates.

And so you pay whenever you make a trade; you lose about a penny per share, sometimes more, and you’re expected to accept this little slice in the name of liquidity, but it isn’t really liquidity, it’s really just volume. High-frequency trading has nothing to do with what liquidity is, what liquidity means to the market. Volume is not liquidity.

Everything is usually fine when markets are moving up or are relatively stable. We won't really notice HFT. But, in a wicked downdraft, when HFT players turn off their computers, we will see that there are no bids on any specialists' books or parked with market makers. There will be no stopping stocks from falling for that reason. We saw it in the May 2010 flash crash. That's what HFT has done to the market. It has made it a dark pool, and a dark pool is not required to yell out a price like the old-school specialists; instead prices come in at a more leisurely pace, when it suits the ECNs, after they scalped their share. What this means is that we don’t really know what the price is, and you can’t have a market without prices, which means one day we could have a catastrophic market failure; despite the propaganda otherwise. 

Tuesday, June 04, 2013 - Systemically Dangerous

Systemically Dangerous

by Sinclair Noe

DOW – 76 = 15,177
SPX – 9 = 1631
NAS – 20 = 3445
10 YR YLD un = 2.13%
OIL + .38 = 93.83
GOLD – 11.20 = 1401.00
SILV - .20 = 22.65

Tuesday?? What happened? For 20 consecutive weeks, Tuesday was an up day on Wall Street; going back to January, every Tuesday was a winner. I don't know why. Maybe there was something going on in the shadows and dark corners of Wall Street, maybe it was just a fluke of nature; maybe it was a trend that started and continued as the algorithmic traders took notice.

The first rule of trends is that a trend in place is more likely to continue than it is to reverse, until it reverses. That sounds simple, but it isn't. Behind that concept is the idea that you follow the market rather than trying to impose your will, or your pre-conceived notions, or your bias on the market. Today, the trend reversed.

Federal regulators have proposed a group of firms that aren't banks to be deemed potential threats to the financial system that need stricter government oversight. The Financial Stability Oversight Council, which includes Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, was created to help prevent another meltdown.

Nonbank financial firms include insurers, hedge funds, mutual fund companies and private equity firms. Those deemed "systemically important" would have to increase their cushion against losses, limit their use of borrowed money and submit to inspections by Fed examiners. These firms would have 30 days to notify the council that they're contesting the designation. The council would have to vote again to finalize each designation. The regulators didn't name the firms or say how many it wants to designate as so big and interconnected that their potential troubles could imperil the financial system.

Some of the usual suspects include the insurance firms, AIG and Prudential, they might include names like Pimco; we'll get to them in a moment. I'm not sure how much credence we lend to the regulators, especially considering they haven't been able to regulate the systemically dangerous banks. If they want to be taken seriously, the first step is to reinstate Glass-Steagall.

We don't know the firms on the list of nonbank, potentially dangerous financial firms, but it would seem that Pimco is pretty big – about $2 trillion, and before they could be labeled dangerous, bond guru Bill Gross has taken aim at the Federal Reserve and Ben Bernanke, charging that the Fed's super-easy monetary policies are dangerous to an economic recovery.

Gross is the founder and co-chief investment officer of Pimco and he writes a regular letter to investors which he posts on the firm's website. The latest letter is entitled “Wounded Heart” and he warns investors to reduce risk assets as a result of the weak rewards to be gained. Gross characterized the Fed's zero interest rate policy and quantitative easing as distorting markets by keeping interest rates artificially low and creating an insatiable demand for riskier, higher yielding assets.

Gross wrote: "Our global financial system at the zero-bound is beginning to resemble a leukemia patient with New Age chemotherapy, desperately attempting to cure an economy that requires structural as opposed to monetary solutions.”

Gross also wrote: “Central banks — including today’s superquant, Kuroda, leading the Bank of Japan — seem to believe that higher and higher asset prices produced necessarily by more and more QE check writing will inevitably stimulate real economic growth via the spillover wealth effect into consumption and real investment. That theory requires challenge if only because it doesn’t seem to be working very well.”

The quick version of Gross' thesis is that financial markets require “carry” to pump oxygen to the real economy; “Carry” is compressed – yields, spreads and volatility are near or at historical lows; the Fed's QE plan assumes higher asset prices will reinvigorate growth; it doesn't seem to be working; therefore reduce risk/carry related assets.

Gross may have a point, but then he missed his mark claiming that low rates create less incentive to take risk; and while that may be true, it is the wrong answer. Gross seems stuck in his supply-side world. The answer is not creating more credit, but creating more demand. Short-term the Fed has been able to re-inflate the stock market, and Bernanke makes no bones about that, but it is a dangerous game to inflate asset bubbles, and it doesn't really do much to create jobs. If the Fed really wants to lower the unemployment rate, they will have to change their tactics, and that seems to be what the Fed is priming the markets for right now.

Today,  Esther George, president and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City and a member of the Federal Open Market Committee, which determines central bank monetary policy gave a speech and she said she is in support of "slowing the pace of asset purchases as an appropriate next step for monetary policy." While she acknowledged her views are not shared by the "majority" of the voting members of the FOMC, it created fresh uncertainty about when the Fed will start dialing down its stimulus. This is the dangerous gamble part of the Fed's asset bubble policy

George went on to say: "History suggests that waiting too long to acknowledge the economy's progress and prepare markets for more normal policy settings carries no less risk than tightening too soon," and "A slowing in the pace of purchases could be viewed as applying less pressure to the gas pedal, rather than stepping on the brake. Adjustments today can take a measured pace as the economy's progress unfolds." It's not so much a matter of applying the brakes, as it is that the Fed is in the wrong vehicle.

Back to those systemically dangerous, too big to fail institutions. Back in 1999, then deputy US attorney general Eric Holder wrote a memo entitled  “Bringing Criminal Charges Against Corporations,”  in which he argued that government officials could take into account “collateral consequences" when prosecuting corporate crimes.

That memo has resurfaced at a time when Holder, now U.S. attorney general, faces increasing criticism for the Department of Justice's reluctance to bring charges against white-collar criminals. Although it brought only a modest change in the way prosecutors evaluate whether to bring criminal charges against corporations, Holder's memo laid the groundwork for subsequent policies that allowed for more leeway when going after large firms.

In 1999, Holder highlighted the possibility of deferred prosecution -- an arrangement now common in the wake of the financial crisis -- whereby prosecutors essentially give defendants amnesty in exchange for paying a fine, enacting reforms and cooperating with investigators. Later, officials published further memos, turning the option into more of a recommendation. The policy was strengthened in response to the Arthur Andersen scandal of the early 2000s. After the government brought criminal charges against the consulting firm, the company failed, causing 28,000 workers -- many of whom likely had no role in any wrongdoing -- to lose their jobs. A court later overturned the charges.

Holder told the Wall Street Journal in 2006 that he drafted the memo in response to complaints that there seemed to be no uniform rules for deciding whether to bring charges in corporate cases: "[I] didn’t expect these issues would become as big as they were," Holder told the WSJ at the time. Indeed, they've only grown larger in the seven years since that interview.

The government has yet to prosecute any big banks or major executives for their role in the meltdown, and critics have derided Holder and his Justice Department for using the collateral damage argument as an excuse for not doing enough to hold those institutions accountable. The DOJ came under fire last year after declining to prosecute HSBC for years of money laundering violations, saying that to do so would bring too much damage to the global economy.

The government just backed down. Maybe there were reasons in 2008 to say maybe we shouldn’t indict any bank we can because it will just add to the systemic risk. But we were in 2012 to 2013 with HSBC -- that risk wasn’t there and we weren’t dealing with something that was relating to the activities that produced the 2008 crisis.

And finally today, we have a follow-up to the London Whale. Bloomberg Markets will report in its July Issue that Bruno Iksil, a Frenchman who would soon become known as the London Whale because of the size of his trades, knew that the trades were going very badly. On March 23, 2012 he wrote a message to an assoicate saying, “We are dead I tell you.”

Iksil had lost $44 million on corporate-credit bets three days earlier and was down more than $500 million for the year. He and junior trader Julien Grout, under pressure from their manager, had tried to hide the extent of losses that would swell to more than $6.2 billion, the bank’s biggest trading blunder ever.

“They are going to destroy us,” Iksil wrote to Grout that Friday in one of hundreds of e-mails, instant messages, transcripts of recorded conversations and other documents released in March by the U.S. Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations after a nine-month probe.

In a 301-page report and at a hearing, the panel accused the largest and most profitable U.S. bank of hiding losses, deceiving regulators and misinforming investors.

The report, the bank’s own 129-page account and interviews with traders and current and former executives offer evidence of a widening spiral of panic as the losses became known beyond a small circle of traders and the extent of the damage reached top management, including Chief Executive OfficerJamie Dimon.

What the documents show is that Dimon presided over a company whose traders amassed growing positions in complex derivatives and whose executives offered rosy forecasts, withheld information from regulators and ignored risk limits that were breached 330 times in the first four months of 2012.

The records reveal how little has changed to prevent even the best-managed banks from speculating their way into trouble five years after the collapse of Lehman Brothers and three years after passage of the Dodd-Frank Act.

Wednesday, May 15, 2013 - Have Another Cookie

Have Another Cookie

by Sinclair Noe

DOW + 60 = 15275
SPX + 8 = 1658
NAS + 9 = 3471
10 YR YLD - .01 = 1.94%
OIL + .18 = 94.39
GOLD – 33.30 = 1393.50
SILV - .82 = 22.69

More record highs on Wall Street. We celebrate with milk and cookies, and remembrances of the days of rice and beans and tins of tuna. Record highs are fleeting, almost ephemeral. I know the trend is your friend; don't fight the Fed; a rising tide lifts all boats; yada, yada. Why is this starting to feel like an asset bubble?

Stock Traders Daily did a comparison of quarter to quarter earnings and revenue growth rates for the S&P 500 and the Dow Industrials: “For the past two consecutive quarters, the Dow Jones Industrial Average has had zero growth. In fact, this quarter revenue growth declined by 2.65% (25 companies reporting thus far) and earnings have barely budged. Last quarter, there was negative earnings growth with revenue growth less than 1%, and since the third quarter of 2010, the EPS growth rate for the Dow has been declining steadily.”

So, the growth rate is at zero and the prices keep going higher. Don't worry, have another cookie; after 13 years in the market, you should be back to break even.

Meanwhile, the National Association of Home Builders/Wells Fargo housing-market index rose to 44 in May from 41 in April. The NAHB says builders are noting an increased sense of urgency among potential buyers as a result of thinning inventories of homes for sale, continuing affordable mortgage rates and strengthening local economies. Have another cookie.

Wholesale prices dropped in April. The producer-price index declined by a seasonally adjusted 0.7% to mark the biggest drop in more than three years. Wholesale prices over the past 12 months are up just 0.6%. In April, the cost of fuel fell 2.5%, led by a 6.0% drop in gasoline prices. Electricity and home-heating-fuel costs also eased, though natural-gas prices posted the biggest increase since mid-2008.

The price of food, meanwhile, fell 0.8% in April after jumping by the same amount in March. Vegetable prices plunged 10.6%, with the cost of squash, lettuce, celery and cucumbers all taking a dive. Meat prices also fell. Cookie prices were not included in the report.

The muted rate of inflation at both the producer and consumer levels gives the Federal Reserve more leeway to keep interest rates low and continue with QE. So, the talk about tapering off of QE might make more sense if the Fed was actually getting closer to its targets of 6.5% unemployment or 2.5% inflation. They aren't close.

The Federal Reserve Bank of New York reports households reduced debt during the first quarter by 1 percent to the lowest level since 2006. Household debt fell to $11.2 trillion in the first quarter compared with a peak burden of $12.7 trillion in the third quarter of 2008. Consumers reduced debt by $110 billion after increasing their borrowing by $31 billion in the fourth quarter of 2012, while delinquency rates fell across the board. Student debt bucked the trend, rising to a record $986 billion.

Households in the first quarter improved their debt payment patterns as delinquency rates on mortgages fell to 5.4 percent from 5.6 percent, on home equity loans to 3.2 percent from 3.5 percent, on credit cards to 10.2 percent from 10.6 percent and on student loans to 11.2 percent from 11.7 percent. One way to look at this is that reducing debt results in a better vintage of debt. Student lending has surpassed credit cards, auto loans, and home equity loans, and is now the largest form of consumer debt after mortgages.

Last week, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke said “the Fed could push banks to maintain a higher leverage ratio, hold certain types of debt favored by regulators, or other steps to give the largest firms a ‘strong incentive to reduce their size, complexity, interconnectedness.’

“The Fed chairman acknowledged growing concerns that some financial companies remain so big and complex the government would have to step in to prevent their collapse and said more needs to be done to eliminate that risk.”

And Fed Governor Jeremy Stein said pretty much the same thing; and Fed Governor Daniel Tarullo also picked up on the talking point.

James Kwak raised a vital question about these talking points: Too-big-to-fail banks enjoy implicit subsidies and impose externalities on the rest of us; therefore those subsidies and externalities should be priced; and then those banks can decide whether they want to absorb those costs or make themselves smaller. 

Here’s what they are saying: Too-big-to-fail banks are too big and complex and pose a systemic risk to all of us; therefore they need to become smaller and less complex; and the Fed will tweak the regulations until they become smaller and less complex.

What’s remarkable about this? These three men—probably the three most important on the Board of Governors when it comes to systemic risk regulation (as opposed to monetary policy, for example)—all say that they know that the megabanks are too big and complex. They all say that accurate pricing of subsidies and externalities is not an end in itself.* They all say that the goal is smaller, less complex banks.

If the goal is smaller, less complex banks, why not just mandate smaller, less complex banks? Why beat around the bush with capital requirements and minimum long-term debt levels? Those tools might be appropriate if you think huge, complex banks should exist but you want to make them safer. But if you’ve already concluded that banks need to be smaller and less complex, then they’re just a waste of time.

They also betray a frightening naivete regarding corporate governance. The theory is that higher capital requirements, for example, will lower banks’ profits, which will upset shareholders, who will eventually force the board of directors to eventually convince the CEO to break up his empire. This scenario, unfortunately, depends on the premise that American corporations are run for the benefit of their shareholders, which is only roughly true, and even that often requires long, expensive, and messy shareholder activist campaigns.

Instead, there’s an obvious solution: rules that limit the size and scope of financial institutions. But Bernanke has ruled out “arbitrary” size caps in favor of his cute regulatory dial-tweaking.

Again, Bernanke’s position might be defensible if he wasn’t already sure that today’s banks are too big and complex. Then it might make sense to tweak the incentives and see how the market reacts. But if he knows they are too big and complex, he should eliminate that risk in the simplest, most direct way possible. If he’s not sure how much smaller and simpler banks need to be, he can do it in steps: set one set of size and scope limits, see what he thinks about the outcome, and then set another set of limits if he’s still unhappy.

To use a crude analogy, let’s say we’re concerned about guns on airplanes. Ben Bernanke thinks, like I do, that guns on planes present an unacceptable risk to the safety of air travel. But his approach is to charge a $100 fee for anyone who wants to bring a gun onto a plane. If people keep bringing guns on board, he’ll raise the fee to $200, then $300, and so on until people stop. The sensible, obvious solution is to just ban guns on planes. But that would be “arbitrary.”

It is theoretically plausible that one should simply price the subsidies and externalities and then let the market determine whether big banks provide enough societal benefit to offset the costs they impose on the rest of us. But that is not what Stein, Tarullo, and Bernanke are saying.

Meanwhile, Attorney General Eric Holder was speaking before the House Judiciary Committee hearing today on another subject, but he was asked about comments he made back in March about the idea that the big banks are too big to jail. He said his comments were misconstrued and he added that there is “no bank, there’s no institution, there’s no individual who cannot be investigated and prosecuted by the United States Department of Justice.”

And that was the straightest answer he gave in testimony today. Have another cookie.

Meanwhile, a few years ago, I wrote a book about breaking up the too big to fail banks; Eat The Bankers: The Case Against Usury: The Root Cause of the Economic Crisis and the Fix

Thursday, March 07, 2013 - Banks Rule the Law

Mark your Calendar, April 5 & 6 and make your reservations for the 2013 Wealth Protection Conference in Tempe, AZ. For conference information visit www.buysilvernow.com or click here or call 480-820-5877.

Banks Rule the Law

by Sinclair Noe

DOW + 33 = 14,329
SPX + 2 = 1544

NAS + 9 = 3232
10 YR YLD + .05 = 1.99%
OIL + 1.09 = 91.52
GOLD – 5.90 = 1579.60
SILV - .16 = 28.98

Another day, another record high close. It seems blasé, these little record high celebrations; and the more we see it the more mundane, but you'll miss it when it's gone. When will it be gone?

I'll let the market tell us. Right now the market is telling us that it is hitting record highs. Is there a disconnect between the market and the economy? Yes, there is. We have seen improvements in the economy, and we have some economic reports to cover in just a moment, but this is not a great, robust economy. So, can we expect a bubble in the market? Not necessarily. It's certainly possible, but as of today, there is not a bubble. Check tomorrow.

It is possible to have a less than perfect economy and to have record highs in the stock market; in fact, it's not uncommon: 1929, 1937, 1946, 1966, 1982; market highs, rough economic times. At some point you might expect the markets to reflect the economy, meaning you might expect a bubble; maybe tomorrow, maybe three years, or maybe longer. The markets can remain irrational, exuberantly so, for much longer than you can remain solvent.

Are there reasons to be sour on the economy? Sure. Are there reasons to be sour on the markets? Sure, but just be aware that the market has hit a high. Should you jump in? You'll remember that I told you, for less-active investors, that the easiest way to play the market was to follow the Best Six Month, Worst Six Month Strategy. In which case, you are in. You're welcome.

And if you feel battle scarred from Wall Street chopping your financial legs out from under you, and if you have vowed to not let it happen again, then don't. There is no rule that says you have to invest in stocks or bonds. I'm not saying you should bury your cash in a coffee can in the back yard. I am saying that it's O.K. To think outside the box.

Now, over to economic news.

The number of Americans who applied last week for new unemployment benefits fell 7,000 to a seasonally-adjusted 340,000 in the latest week. It's the lowest level in a month and a half and hovered just above a five-year low, offering another sign that the outlook for hiring is on the upswing, or more precisely it was on an upswing. The sequester will start to effect the labor market soon, but not yet. Tomorrow we'll dig into the monthly jobs report for February.

The numbers for fourth quarter productivity were revised slightly lower, to a 1.9% annual rate from 2.0% in its preliminary tally. The output of goods and services and the amount of time workers put in on the job were both somewhat higher compared to the earlier estimate. In the short term, declining productivity can be a signal that companies need to hire more workers to keep up with rising demand while maintaining strong profit margins. Hourly pay for American workers rose 2.6% in the fourth quarter, but adjusted for inflation, earnings only increased 0.4%. What’s worse, inflation-adjusted hourly wages fell 0.6% for the full year, following a revised 0.6% decline in 2011.

You may recall the trade gap narrowed in December as oil prices dropped. You may also remember that all through January and February, you were getting a case of sticker shock whenever you went to the gas station. Today, the Commerce Department reports the trade deficit widened by $6.3 billion in January to $44.4 billion. Excluding petroleum, the trade deficit was unchanged.

So, with all the talk about the sequester and the continuing resolution, which was continued and will not result in a government shutdown, and record highs and Italian elections, yada, yada, yada. You may have forgotten that banksters behave badly. That's where I come in, to tell you more banking news that should twist your intestines.

Attorney General Eric Holder, the top law enforcement official, the nation's top cop appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee and admitted the most self-evident truth: the big banks are too big to jail.

Holder was responding to questions from Republican Senator Chuck Grassley about why the Justice Department brought no criminal charges against the large British bank HSBC after it admitted laundering money for parties in Iran, Libya and Mexican drug lords. Holder said:

"I am concerned that the size of some of these institutions becomes so large that it does become difficult for us to prosecute them when we are hit with indications that if you do prosecute, if you do bring a criminal charge, it will have a negative impact on the national economy, perhaps even the world economy," he said. "And I think that is a function of the fact that some of these institutions have become too large."

Holder acknowledged that the sheer size of the big banks "has an inhibiting impact on our ability to bring resolutions that I think would be more appropriate.  That is something you (members of Congress) all need to consider."

Grassley and Sen. Sherrod Brown, an Ohio Democrat, have been pushing the Justice Department on the issue and have asked for the names of the outside “experts” officials say advised them that it would threaten financial stability to prosecute big banks. It's no secret.

Allowing the big banks to operate above the law is at one with the philosophy that guided both the Bush and the Obama administrations during the financial collapse. Tim Geithner, former head of the New York Federal Reserve bank under Bush and Treasury Secretary under Obama, gave the advise to protect the banks. In what has become known as the “Geithner doctrine,” documented by numerous eyewitnesses to the administration’s deliberations on the financial crisis, the former Treasury chief consistently advocated preservation of the banks as the paramount objective in any measure. Geithner said that it was necessary to "foam the runway" to protect the banks from total crackup.  That "foam" included literally trillions in the backdoor bailout of banks organized by the Federal Reserve, abandoning the underwater homeowners who were victimized by Wall Street's predatory practices and reckless gambling.

Foaming the runway essentially neutered regulators who weren't already bought and paid for. Holder claimed that the Justice Department has been “appropriately aggressive” in pursuing fraud at the banks, which is an absolute joke. And then contradicted himself when he conceded that levying a fine that is a small percentage of profit is far less effective in scaring bank executives into obeying the law than putting some individuals in jail. Holder said:  “The greatest deterrent effect is to prosecute the individuals in the corporations that are responsible for those decisions.”

At a hearing last week, Warren took Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke to task for the “subsidy” reaped by the big banks from the perception that they are too big to fail, which a study by Bloomberg evaluated at $83 billion.

Bernanke countered that any benefit was a result of market perceptions, but he became less convincing as he argued that the perception was inaccurate because the Fed would not bail out the banks again.

Holder tried to place the blame at the feet of Congress, and Congress needs to stop stuffing their pockets for a few moments to take action. Bankers spend tens of millions lobbying to weaken regulations and starve regulators of authority and resources.  But when the action gets hot, the bubble starts to build, the music keeps playing, they can trample the laws, mislead the regulators and defraud their customers, bolstered by the confidence that the laws will not apply to them. 

The banksters know their losses are covered, while they pocket their winnings.  They have multi-million dollar personal incentives to leverage up, use other people's money to make big bets on high risk operations that offer big rewards.  Their excesses blew up the economy, but they got bailed out and emerged bigger and more concentrated than ever. And, of course, since investors know the big banks can't fail, the big banks can attract money at much lower rates than smaller banks, a subsidy worth about $83 billion a year according to recent calculations by Bloomberg News.

So, banks operate above the law. Holder's argument is indefensible. There is no reason a bank can't survive the indictment of a CEO or CFO. And if the bank did fall, so be it. It's not the end of the world. The far greater fear than a bank failure is a country that abandons the rule of law.