They rush to sue everybody! The investment banks who were midwifes to the birth of FB into the public markets weren’t playing fair, they say. They gave their best clients more and better info than they fed to the public.

Well, what…you mean…could you be saying…that the insiders have an edge?

Well…duh…uh…

“The thing about this IPO,” said a friend at lunch, “was that the whole world was watching. That’s why this was so important. It showed everyone how Wall Street operates. Everybody got burned. And they blame Wall Street…because they can see that the pros were being only half honest. And the other half was incompetent.”

Yes, dear reader, our hunch seems to have been right. The FB launch was a disaster for shareholders…for Wall Street…and for the whole cult of equities that has ruled the investment world for the last 3 decades.

“…a six-decade passion for equities has come to an end,” reports The Financial Times.

“Stocks have not been so far out of favor for half a century,” continues the report… “with equity returns virtually flat for more than a decade, the incentive for investors to take risks by funding smaller, more entrepreneurial companies has declined — eroding a process that has traditionally given managers the flexibility they need to grow. Capitalism with less equity finance would follow a much more conservative model.”

In the US, pension funds allocated as much as 70% of their funds to equities 10 years ago. Now, they’re down to 52%.

Everyone is turning his back on stocks…at least, that’s what the FT says. And analysts are already comparing this FT article to the “Death of Equities” cover story in BusinessWeek in 1979…just before a huge new bull market began.

Relative to bonds, stocks haven’t been this cheap since 1956. That was the year when George Ross Goobey announced he was switching the entire portfolio of Imperial Tobacco’s pension fund into stocks.

Goobey turned out to be a genius. Stocks began a great bull market which continued, aside from a countertrend between 1966 and 1982, for the next 56 years!

And now a lot of people think this is another Goobey moment. Stocks are cheap, they say. Get ready for another grand bull market!

What do we say? Nah…

The problems are:

1) This ain’t 1956…this is 2012. The US is no longer on top of its game. It’s no longer in full expansion. It is slipping…sliding…burdened by high costs…zombie industries…and corrupt governments. Growth rates are low…lower than the rate of debt build-up… There is no reason to think America’s capital structure — either stocks or bonds — will become more valuable.

2) Stocks are not cheap. They are only cheap when you compare them to bond yields. But bonds yields are suppressed by a Great Correction…about which more below. In order to be absolutely cheap, US stock prices will have to be cut in half — at least. That would put yields and P/Es near where you can get a 5%+ yield and buy a dollar’s worth of earnings for $5…not $12. Then, stocks will be cheap.

3) Bond yields fall in a correction because people do not want to increase their debt levels; they want to reduce them. They also reduce spending…which lowers business sales and profits, thus making stocks less valuable, not more valuable. As the Great Correction intensifies (and it appears to be doing so now) we can expect stocks to follow the Japanese example. Japan has been in a Great Correction for 22 years. Its stocks have lost 3/4 of their value. They’re still down 75% — nearly a quarter century after the correction began.

Goobey moment? We don’t think so. It’s time to sell stocks, not buy them.

Regards,

Bill Bonner
for The Daily Reckoning

Facebook Fallout: A Lesson in How Wall Street Really Works originally appeared in the Daily Reckoning. The Daily Reckoning, published by Agora Financial provides over 400,000 global readers economic news, market analysis, and contrarian investment ideas. Recently Agora Financial released a video titled "What Causes Gas Price to Increase?".

“Great empires, such as the Roman and British, were extractive,” the economist Paul Craig Roberts observed recently. “The empires succeeded, because the value of the resources and wealth extracted from conquered lands exceeded the value of conquest and governance.”

But unlike empires of the past, the American Empire has a perverse logic all its own.

“America’s wars are very expensive,” says Roberts, stating the obvious. “Bush and Obama have doubled the national debt, and the American people have no benefits from it. No riches, no bread and circuses flow to Americans from Washington’s wars.”

In the big Iraqi oil auction of 2009, for example, even as US military helicopters droned overhead, the Iraqi oil minister gave out zero contracts to American firms. Not one. And we spent at least $3 trillion on war — $2.9 trillion more than Team Bush’s original budget. So much for paying for war with “oil profits.”

Russia was actually the big winner here. So what gives? The American Empire has perverted the Roman mantra “Veni, vidi, vici” (I came, I saw, I conquered) into the odd imperial slogan: “We came, we saw… we borrowed!”

The results from this turn of phrase are less than desirable. Again Roberts: “Washington’s empire extracts resources from the American people for the benefit of the few powerful interest groups that rule America. The military-security complex, Wall Street, agribusiness and the Israel lobby use the government to extract resources from Americans to serve their profits and power. The US Constitution has been extracted in the interests of the Security State, and Americans’ incomes have been redirected to the pockets of the 1%.

“That is how the American Empire functions,” concludes Roberts. Instead of plundering foreign resources to finance itself, the American Empire is always looking to inflate the next financial bubble. Each of these serial bubbles has the effect of “extracting” wealth from the citizens — by drawing both savings and credit into overly inflated asset classes that then implode.

As the bubbles inflate, robust tax revenues flow to the federal government. As the bubbles implode, tax-payer dollars flow to the connected Wall Street elite. Thus, over time, savings pass from the wallets of citizens to the pockets of scoundrels in Washington and on Wall Street.

For confirmation of this assertion we need look no further than the top o’ the 1%, the Oracle of Omaha. Peter Schweizer of Reason reckoned in his March exposé on Warren Buffett that this folksy fellow “needed the TARP bailout more than most.”

Let’s run through the numbers. Berkshire Hathaway firms in total received $95 billion in TARP money. Berkshire, you’ll recall, held stock in Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs and American Express. Not only did these companies receive TARP funds… they also dipped into the FDIC’s treasury to back their debt. Total bailout: $130 billion. TARP-enabled companies accounted for 30% of the Oracle’s publicly disclosed stock portfolio.

He’s definitely one of the top beneficiaries of the big bank bailout. And to sharpen the sting, he even got a better deal to help ailing Goldman Sachs than our own government. Buffett got a 10% preferred dividend while the Feds got all of 5%. He cleaned up with $500 million a year in dividends. Without the bailout, you can bet many of his stock holdings would have gone near-zero instead.

Contrast that with a blog post from Rosemarie Jackowski, a community activist at Dissident Voice. She’s describes her experiences working with the underclass in a small town in Vermont.

“In Bennington, there are three very distinct classes,” writes Jackowski. “First, there are the ‘fancy people.’ They are the ones who rule and control everything. They are on the boards — the hospital board, the library board, the select board, the school boards. They have the power — even the power over life and death. They, occasionally during a medical crisis in the hospital, make the decision to pull the plug or allow life to go on.”

Then there is the large group of ordinary citizens. Some are blue-collar workers. Most work hard. Love their families. And have had family in Vermont for generations. They acknowledge the class system in conversation often. They call it the ol’ boys network — cronyism.

The third group consists of those who are in need. Those on the bottom of the economic pile. A poor mother of two disabled children, for example, talked about the oppressive avalanche of redundant paperwork required to get any tiny benefit. The social services system is designed by nameless, faceless, unelected bureaucrats. It is set up to assure maximum job security to the workers in the system. To a struggling family, it often feels like an attack of the “paper churners.” Being poor is a full-time job.

In her post, Ms. Jackowski provides a list of 35 ways poverty robs you of your dignity. Here are just a few:

Poverty means living with shame.

Poverty means working three jobs, and still not “making it.”

Poverty means that you go to work when you are sick. Worse than that, you send your children to school when they are sick.

Sometimes poverty means that you skip meals so that your children can eat.

Poverty means that your housing is never secure…

Poverty means following all of the rules, then graduating with oppressive student debt so that the president of UVM can be paid $447,000 per year.

Tragically, more and more “ordinary citizens” are faced with the challenge of joining this third group of government dependents. Case in point: “In the most recent Census,” writes our managing editor Samantha Buker in The Little Book of the Shrinking Dollar (a book we co-authored for the Wiley Little Book Series), “48% of America qualifies as ‘low income.’ There are more Americans living under extreme poverty than have ever been recorded.

“Since 2009, we’ve added another 4 million souls to the category of low income to below the poverty line. That’s 146 million people in America who aren’t consuming much aside from ever-increasing applications for food stamps.”

In November 2008, food stamp applicants topped 30 million for the first time in history. Today, we’re still posting “record highs,” having added over 16 million more names to the food stamp list.

Does this sound like a nation of financially healthy citizens, able to contribute to the national coffers? Au contraire. Sounds like another case in which our Empire will hand out more than it’s taking in.

Again.

Regards,

Addison Wiggin
for The Daily Reckoning

Borrow-As-You-Go Politics originally appeared in the Daily Reckoning. The Daily Reckoning, published by Agora Financial provides over 400,000 global readers economic news, market analysis, and contrarian investment ideas. Recently Agora Financial released a video titled "What Causes Gas Price to Increase?".

Smash! Crash! Crunch! Whack!

Fenders banged up. Radiators steaming. Tires flattened. Whee!

But here’s the most exciting scene in the whole show. Greece and Germany are playing chicken!

Greece presses down the accelerator and heads for Germany. “If you force us out of the euro, all of Europe will go up in flames,” say the Greeks.

“Oh yeah?” say the Germans, turning on the speed in their Mercedes, “ve’ll see about that. Ve haf airbags!”

And we watch. Wonder. Which one will lose his nerve? Or will they crash head-on?

Nobody knows for sure.

But nobody wants to have money in Greek banks…in Europe’s periphery banks…or even in euros…when they find out.

Yesterday, more money leaked out of Greece…and out of the euro. The euro fell to its lowest level in two years as “Europe braced for turmoil…”

One headline said Greece was making plans to withdraw from the euro. The Greeks promptly denied it…which reminded us of what they used to say in Soviet Russia: no rumor is confirmed until it is officially denied…

De La Rue, an English company that prints most of the world’s currencies, would not say whether an order for drachma had come through or not.

Meanwhile, all these wrecks and smash-ups are damaging Europe’s economy. The New York Times is on the story:

Economic reports Thursday showed Europe’s prospects dimming as the long battle to defend the euro zone continued to undermine confidence and raised the prospect of a renewed cycle of demands for austerity.

The relentlessly bleak data, reflecting weakness across the Continent and in Britain, came a day after political leaders again failed to break the deadlock over how to resolve the European debt crisis.

A Markit Economics index that tracks the European services and manufacturing sectors fell in May to 45.9 from 46.7, worse than economists surveyed by Reuters and Bloomberg had expected. An index reading below 50 suggests the economy is contracting. In the first quarter, the euro zone economy grew just 0.1 percent.

Perhaps even more worryingly, German data released Thursday showed signs of a slowdown in an economy that until now had been a bright spot for the Continent. A Markit index based on surveys of purchasing managers of German manufacturing companies fell to 45.0 in May from 46.2 in April.

And Britain’s is worse. New data show the slump is worse than previously thought. The NYT again:

The Office for National Statistics revised the decline in gross domestic product in the first three months of this year to 0.3 percent, up from the 0.2 percent it estimated last month, because of a deeper slump in the construction industry. Construction output dropped 4.8 percent from a year earlier, the agency said, not 3 percent, as it had estimated earlier.

The revised figures were “bad news for UK policy makers as it shows the economy faring even more badly than initially thought,” said Scott Corfe, senior economist at the Center for Economics and Business Research in London. “Indeed, the latest data show the UK economy performing worse than the euro zone economy, which saw zero growth at the start of the year — meaning the UK’s woes cannot even be fully attributable to the debt crisis embroiling the Continent.”

So, stay tuned…let’s see what happens tomorrow…

Bill Bonner
for The Daily Reckoning

Euro Declines as Greece and Germany Play “Chicken” originally appeared in the Daily Reckoning. The Daily Reckoning, published by Agora Financial provides over 400,000 global readers economic news, market analysis, and contrarian investment ideas. Recently Agora Financial released a video titled "What Causes Gas Price to Increase?".

Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett’s partner in crime at Berkshire Hathaway, told CNBC recently, “I think gold is a great thing to sew into your garments if you’re a Jewish family in Vienna in 1939, but I think civilized people don’t buy gold. They invest in productive businesses.”

In a way, Munger is correct. Gold is uncivilized in the sense that it functions best when civilization functions worst. The more uncivilized a society becomes, the more civilized gold becomes.

So the easiest way to dismiss this statement is to say that maybe it’s 1939 again and maybe this time “we’re all Jewish families in Vienna.” But let’s not let Charlie off the hook so easily. Instead, let’s “unpack it,” in the words of our tutors at St John’s College in Santa Fe, New Mexico. To ‘unpack it’ we need to focus on two key words in Charlie’s statement: “productive” and “civilized.”

Charlie might be right if the world were, indeed, civilized. But maybe the modern world isn’t as civilized as he thinks. Part of what made the world so uncivilized in 1939 was unsound money. The abandonment of the classical gold standard in 1914 made the expansion of the Warfare state possible. The equally unsound system that emerged from World War I — including the Treaty of Versailles — virtually guaranteed that monetary and fiscal instability would lead to political instability. Radical parties like the Nazis flourished.

Gold, on the other hand, is sound money. You are not buying it for a capital gain. You are buying it, by our reckoning, as a way of preserving purchasing power. You extract paper from the fiat money system and turn it into something (bullion) you can later exchange for whatever currency emerges when the financial system becomes more civilized.

Interestingly, for more than a decade Berkshire has underperformed gold — the investment asset Buffett recently called “forever unproductive.”

Since 1997, Berkshire’s shares have declined relative to this forever unproductive asset. The nearby chart depicts the trailing 10-year return of gold since 2007. Thus, the first data point on this chart shows the return an investor would have received from buying gold or Berkshire Hathaway in 1997. Moving across the chart to the right shows subsequent 10-year time frames. Bottom line: Based on a 10-year holding period, there has not been a single moment since late 1997 what an investor would have been better off buying Berkshire Hathaway instead of gold.

No wonder Charlie is so cranky!

This lengthy underperformance by Berkshire may explain Buffett’s and Munger’s very vocal and public hostility toward gold. Or maybe that’s just a function of both men living most of their adult lives in an era where the monetary system was not disintegrating. They are unable to imagine it.

But the chart above isn’t an indictment of the investment acumen of Buffett and Munger. It’s an indictment of the world’s fiat monetary system! A civilized society with civilized people has sound money. An economy with sound money has price stability. This stability allows for long-term planning and investment. This stability rewards investors for identifying which businesses are the most productive and efficient users of shareholder capital.

For these exact reasons, William McKinley campaigned for President in 1896 and again in 1900 as a champion of the gold standard. He won…twice. But just 12 years after his assassination in 1901, the Era of Incivility began: The Federal Reserve came into being. Just 20 years after that, FDR confiscated all privately held gold. And 38 years after that, Nixon cut the dollar’s last remaining ties to gold, thereby establishing today’s very uncivilized “fiat money” system.

In an uncivilized society, where the value of your labor is stolen through inflation (made possible by an unsound money system) long-term planning and investment become much more difficult, if not impossible.

If you accept that we live in civilized monetary times where productive labor is actually rewarded, your brain has been tranquilized by the Big Lie of our times. Munger wants you right where you are. The less you think about how uncivilized the current monetary system is, the less likely you are to question it or disrupt it (which would be inconvenient for Charlie).

But if you live an era that subverts accurate valuation of productive businesses — an era that subverts the productivity of the economy itself by encouraging debt and consumption, owning gold seems prudent, not wacky.

Uncivilized times call for uncivilized investments.

Regards,

Dan Denning
for The Daily Reckoning

Uncivilized Investing originally appeared in the Daily Reckoning. The Daily Reckoning, published by Agora Financial provides over 400,000 global readers economic news, market analysis, and contrarian investment ideas. Recently Agora Financial released a video titled "What Causes Gas Price to Increase?".

— Neil Sedaka

What’s the Greek word for ‘chutzpah’? We don’t know either.

But the leader of the communists/socialists, Alexis Tsipras, has it. He must have heard that old saying:

“When you owe your bank $100,000, you can’t sleep at night. When you owe your bank $1 million, your banker can’t sleep at night.”

Since the Greeks owe money all over town, he figured he could thumb his nose at his lenders. He told the Germans that they were trapped. They had no choice. They had to keep the money flowing to Greece. Otherwise, the Greeks would default…and cause Hell to all of Europe.

What’s the word for “oh yeah?” in German? We don’t know that either. But surely the Germans have a word for this occasion. A word that means… “We’ll show you what a moron you are…”

In the event, the Bundesbank did the talking. As to the possibility of the Greeks’ departure:

“The challenges this would create for the euro area and for Germany would be considerable but manageable given prudent crisis management.”

Or, in the words Gerald Ford used in responding to New York City’s request for a loan: ‘Drop Dead.’

Yesterday, the Dow was down as much as 170 points as investors wondered what would happen next. The dollar rose to $1.25 to the euro. By the close of trading, the Dow had managed to pull itself up to only a 6-point loss. Everything else was down, down, down…and it keeps going down. Watch out…investors could panic!

In Europe itself, things seem to be coming to a head. It looks like the Greeks might finally leave…or be pushed out of the euro.

Bloomberg continues:

Greece may have only a 46-hour window of opportunity should it need to plot a route out of the euro.

That’s how much time the country’s leaders would probably have to enact any departure from the single currency while global markets are largely closed, from the end of trading in New York on a Friday to Monday’s market opening in Wellington, New Zealand, based on a synthesis of euro-exit scenarios from 21 economists, analysts and academics.

But switching currencies is not an easy thing to do. Bloomberg continues:

It would most likely be necessary to close borders to stop Greeks smuggling out euros to stash in banks elsewhere. But with hundreds of miles to cover, much of it in inaccessible mountain, wood and scrubland, security forces would be stretched thin.

Simultaneously, police would likely have to manage a dramatic spike in unrest and perhaps more political and criminal violence. Already, there have been isolated examples of Germans — or those suspected of being German — being assaulted in apparent anger over EU-enforced austerity.

Greece’s leaders could decide to deploy the army onto the streets in an attempt to reassure the population and bring calm. But that could prove deeply divisive…

The commentariat still insists that it would be against Germany’s interest to push the Greeks out of the euro. One says Germany would be “shooting itself in the foot” or perhaps the head. Another says it would cost a fortune, $1 trillion, according to a report in the Telegraph:

The British government is making urgent preparations to cope with the fallout of a possible Greek exit from the single currency, after the governor of the Bank of England, Sir Mervyn King, warned that Europe was “tearing itself apart”.

Reports from Athens that massive sums of money were being spirited out of the country intensified concern in London about the impact of a splintering of the eurozone on a UK economy that is stuck in double-dip recession. One estimate put the cost to the eurozone of Greece making a disorderly exit from the currency at $1tn, 5% of output.

Yes, breaking up is hard to do. It would be costly. But money isn’t everything. People do bad things for money, it’s true. But they do worse things IN SPITE OF money.

Where was the money in WWI? In starving the Ukrainians? In Hitler’s ‘final solution’? In the extermination of the Armenians?

You might find a money motive…but few mass murderers are bottom-line oriented. They’re usually world-improvers…

There are some things more important than money. National pride is one of them. Here’s our point. At some point, people stop counting the costs…they go ‘off their heads’…and begin doing things that don’t really benefit anyone in a financial way. So, it may not matter whether it “makes sense” to kick the Greeks out of the European monetary system or not.

Greece was still in it as of yesterday. Today, anything could happen. But at this stage, the Germans may prefer to blow off a toe or two in order to get rid of them.

We went to Toronto yesterday to visit an old friend who made a lot of money in the mining business but now works in bio-tech. Why did you get out of mining, we wanted to know?

“It just got too crowded. You know what they say about the ‘crowded trade.” Get out. Well, I guess it was the big run-up in commodities a couple of years ago that caused it. Suddenly, everyone was starting up a mining company. And they were getting a lot of investment money. Everybody thought he’d get rich in resources.

“But it doesn’t work that way. The mining business is extremely cyclical. Prices go up. It draws in the marginal players. And the good deals disappear. Everything is too expensive. There’s too much production. Too many projects. Too many promoters. And then prices collapse.

“We’ve already had a good pullback. I’m starting to see some good deals again. But I’m waiting a little longer. I think we’ll get some better deals before this is over.”

Our guess, here at The Daily Reckoning, is that Facebook’s IPO represented some kind of high water market for the virtual economy. It was like Blackstone’s IPO in June 2007, which marked the top in the financial economy.

Now, the economy will shift back to the real things…oil, and copper, and precious metals. It could take years.

But heck, we’re not in any hurry either.

Regards,

Bill Bonner
for The Daily Reckoning

Bracing for a Greek Exit originally appeared in the Daily Reckoning. The Daily Reckoning, published by Agora Financial provides over 400,000 global readers economic news, market analysis, and contrarian investment ideas. Recently Agora Financial released a video titled "What Causes Gas Price to Increase?".

Revolutions in our understanding of the genome and proteome, however, are opening up new pathways toward vanquishing the cancer foe…

These technologies are maturing and are finally starting to put a dent in the problem. It can take a decade or more to get from the academic lab to the oncologist’s office, but we are beginning to see a harvest in the form of new therapies.

One of the things I love to see in pre-commercial biotech companies is a drug discovery engine that gives it a competitive advantage. An advantage when it comes to discovering and designing next-generation therapies.

Although the main headlines in drug discovery are lately grabbed by breakthroughs in computer modeling or bioinformatics, all successful drug candidates must also be screened in vivo. That is to say, in living organisms.

A superior computer-based discovery process is a huge advantage when it comes to screening millions of potential compounds. Nevertheless, before moving on to human clinical testing, potential suitability must first be verified in animals.

There are the obvious ethical considerations regarding human testing that the FDA helps enforce. However, the prohibitively high cost of testing in humans also demands that a candidate compound be thoroughly vetted before initiating an expensive clinical trial. Researchers must “check their work” as rigorously as possible before assuming these risks.

Here, the older technology has limitations.

Traditional cancer discovery techniques use implanted tumors in animal models to test potential compounds. However, these tumor cell implants, called xenografts, aren’t adapted to an in vivo setting. They are typically grown in a culture and are therefore adapted to that environment.

In this respect, they aren’t truly representative of a real-life tumor, which develops from a mutated cell in a living organism. This causes cancer researchers to drill a great many “dry wells” in their search for a winning formula — since existing in vivo technology turns up a lot of false positives.

One platform is designed to improve on the limitations of the existing technology. It is built upon the revolution in genomics that has enabled researchers to map genetic mutations unique to cancer cells in order to target them.

In addition, advances in genetic engineering now allow researchers to develop custom cell lines that express the same molecular targets as the cancers they want to treat.

It uses mouse stem cells into which cancer-causing gene mutations are inserted. These stem cells are then injected into mouse embryos alongside healthy cells. The chimeric embryos are then implanted into mice, creating a line of custom-made animal models that develop cancers expressing the same cancer targets researchers want to hit.

Unlike tumor xenografts, these tumors are more similar to those that occur in real life, since they form spontaneously in the body. Normal tumor interactions with surrounding tissues are preserved.

Not only that, they also express a genetic variation that is more like what exists in tumors that form naturally in humans.

Since the genetic variation more accurately models what goes on in the real world, it helps identify why some tumors of a specific cancer type respond to a therapy while others do not…

This is important, since resistance to therapy can vary widely from patient to patient, even if the cancer is of the same type.

Companies working towards new ways of discovering drug compounds will maintain the competitive edge in their field. Dilution is the usual downside of investing in pre-commercial biotech companies. Not yet profitable, they need to raise capital to continue funding operations.

However, before you put your money into a small, pre-commercial biotechnology company, you want to make sure they have something no one else is offering.

Regards,

Ray Blanco,
for The Daily Reckoning

Superior Biotechnology Leads to Superior Drugs originally appeared in the Daily Reckoning. The Daily Reckoning, published by Agora Financial provides over 400,000 global readers economic news, market analysis, and contrarian investment ideas. Recently Agora Financial released a video titled "What Causes Gas Price to Increase?".

— Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, circa 1923

Poor Zuckerberg. He’s got all those Facebook shares. And they’re dropping in price. The stock closed a bit over $31yesterday…and then kept sinking… It was down to $30 in afterhours trading.

What did you expect? The company has sales of $4 billion. IF…IF…it were able to claw out a 10% profit margin…and IF a fair multiple for its earnings were, say, 10…the company would be worth $4 billion. Not $100 billion. Four billion dollars. And instead of having shares valued at $15 billion, Mr. Zuckerberg would have shares worth about $800 million.

The Dow itself was flat yesterday. Not a very good showing after so many down days. We’ll keep our ‘Crash Alert’ flag up. The bottom could drop out at any time.

The Facebook IPO looks more and more like the end of an era. The end of the pie-in-the-sky social network era. The end of the post-crisis recovery rally. The end of the public’s residual confidence in Wall Street. The end of America’s youthful energy…its era of growth, innocence and hope for the future.

Now, growth rates are low; they’ve been falling for the last 30 years. The baby boomers are neither booming nor babies. Stocks are passé…people want bonds now. And 63% of voters think their children will be worse off than they are.

At least Zuckerberg has it made. He’s got about 500 million shares and options. But every two dollars they fall costs him about $1 billion. So, he’s lost $5 billion since the company went public on Friday.

Still, we’re not going to feel sorry for him. He’s still got $15 billion or so.

Not that we care how much money he’s got. He could have twice as much; he’d still be a putz. We saw the movie!

Seriously, Americans care far too much about money. That’s what people who don’t have it say. They say that too much money is a sign of greed. And that people with too much money can’t relate to everyone else. We lose our sense of community…our public space. People with money live separately from the rest of us. They buy elections and use too much energy…and leave small tips. They’ve got too much power, too much influence, and too much of the pie.

Paul Krugman, Thomas Friedman and Barack Obama want to solve this problem by taking money away from the people who have it. And making it harder for them to earn more.

The guys at J.P. Morgan lost a few billion. You’d think the anti-money crowd would be happy about that. Instead, they want to make a federal case out of it. Practically every pundit is calling for more regulation. “If even good bankers can lose so much,” they say, “we’ve got to get control of them!”

The whole idea that they can regulate risk out of the system is loony. It doesn’t work that way. The more they regulate, the more they distort the market, and the more mistakes investors make.

Investors are buying US treasury bonds, for example, by the boatload. Why? Because the regulators at the Fed have taken the risk out of buying bonds. If interest rates rise, the Fed will buy bonds itself.

Dear Readers and connoisseurs of regulatory FUBARity will appreciate the flexibility of America’s central bank. Its aim is to drive investors into risky assets…by suppressing yields on “safe” treasuries. The unintended consequence is to create depression-like yields…and capital gains for bond buyers. Investors flee stocks…and go into the Treasury bonds the Fed was trying to get them out of. Thus does the Fed manage to bend its right leg far enough to kick its own derriere.

People who don’t like the rich should spend a little time thinking about how the rich got that way. Were they smarter than others? Greedier? Or just luckier?

In our humble observation, we’d say they were a little of all those things. But most of the big increase in wealth the rich enjoyed has come thanks to those same regulators whom the feds want to sic on them.

Yes, dear reader, the rich got richer because of the fixers…not because of the rich themselves. In 1971, Richard Nixon changed America’s money. The old money — backed by gold — flowed to the hardworking producers. It was saved, invested, and put to work. This new money had different ideas. It ran around in different circles. It preferred a different class of friends — bankers, money managers, investors, speculators, venture capitalists, derivative mongers, private equity operators…

You can see this shift illustrated in the difference between Mitt Romney and his father. The ol’ man ran an auto company. He made cars. That’s where the money was back then. He made the Rambler. Remember that? We had one. It was cheap. It was ugly. It ran. What more could you ask for?

But the son never made anything…but money itself. He didn’t run productive companies. Instead, at Bain Capital he was a leading member of the new class of people who fiddled with them.

By 2007, this class had gotten far too big for its britches. The whole capital structure began to wobble. Left alone, it would have crashed to the ground…bringing rich people down to earth with it.

Left to its own devices — without the generous support of the feds — the Dow might have fallen to 6,000 in 2008…and kept falling. And it probably would have brought down J.P. Morgan…and Goldman Sachs…the Bank of America and most of the rest of Wall Street. Even GM, which by then had become a finance company, would have gone out of business.

And today…there wouldn’t be nearly as many rich people to complain about. Problem solved.

Instead, the fixers fixed it so the fixees stayed fixed.

Hey…here’s another bubble…getting ready to blow up. Bubble bubble student trouble:

Student Loans With Over $1 Trillion are Likely One of the Next Hindenburg Zeppelin Financial Infernos

Barry James Dyke, author of The Pirates of Manhattan II: Highway to Serfdom predicts that student loans, in excess of $1 trillion, will likely be one of the country’s next financial infernos.

Federal student loans interest rates will rise to 6.8% on July 1st 2012 from their current 3.4% base if Congress does not act. Banking lobbies oppose any reduction in interest rates. If Congress does nothing, the average student’s $23 thousand subsidized loan costs will increase an additional $5,000 over a ten year period.

The author states, “Student loans are a form of indentured servitude as student loans cannot be discharged in bankruptcy. Student loans do not die with death. Collection agencies can call day and night to collect student loan debts. Garnishment to pay student loan debt is common. Students are not getting enough well-paying jobs to pay back these enormous loans, yet The Department of Education through the Department of Treasury can attach tax refunds to pay off student loans. What is more, our Congress drove the getaway car for academia and the banks in 2005 with the Bankruptcy Abuse and Consumer Protection Act of 2005 — which turned student loans into non-dischargeable debt.”

According to the Department of Education, two thirds of students who earn a bachelor degree use some type of loan to finance their education with an average loan of roughly $23 thousand. The New York Times recently reported that as much as 94% of students borrow to get a college degree.

The taxpayer underwrites roughly $105 billion a year in Title IV student loans a year, with $24 billion going to for profit schools owned by Wall Street asset managers. Student loans guaranteed by the taxpayer are a major source of revenue for the US higher educational system and if default rates accelerate, it could bring about a Greece like debt problem to the nation’s colleges.

“Excessive borrowing for an education will be a dark cloud hanging over this generation for decades,” claims Dyke. ”Default rates on student loans for traditional undergraduate and graduate rates are currently as high as 15.8%, and as high as 48% for for-profit colleges. The New York Fed reports that nearly one in four student loan holders are falling behind on their student loan payments.

Regards,

Bill Bonner
for The Daily Reckoning

The Delusion of Regulating Risk originally appeared in the Daily Reckoning. The Daily Reckoning, published by Agora Financial provides over 400,000 global readers economic news, market analysis, and contrarian investment ideas. Recently Agora Financial released a video titled "What Causes Gas Price to Increase?".

Doug: That means that all the work the average guy does until April 17 goes to pay for the government that failed to protect him on September 11, 2001, failed to protect him from the crash of 2008, and continues failing him every day. We pay for an organization bent on doing not just the wrong things, but the exact opposite of the right things in economics, foreign policy, and everything else we’ve talked about in all our conversations. It’s rather perverse that Emancipation Day — the day the first slaves in the US were freed in the District of Columbia in 1862 — is April 16. But what is a slave? He’s someone who is deprived by force of the fruits of his labor. Sound familiar? I disapprove of slavery, in any form — including its current form.

However, Tax Freedom Day is an incomplete way of looking at things. What’s the cost to business forced to install equipment to meet government regulations? That’s not paid as a tax, but it’s a serious burden. There’s something called Cost of Government Day that’s a somewhat more inclusive estimate of the burden the state imposes on the average guy…

L: I just looked for that too and don’t see that a date for 2012 has been announced yet; but Cost of Government Day for 2011 was August 12. According to that estimate, the average US taxpayer slaved away for about two-thirds of the year to pay for the state and got to keep only a third of the fruit of his labor for his own benefit and improvement.

Doug: That may be a more accurate way of looking at the burden of government the average guy has to bear, but it still doesn’t even begin to address what economists call “opportunity cost.” Basically, I don’t just look at what the state we have costs us in cash, but in terms of the innovation and growth we don’t have because of government policies, laws, and regulations. This covers everything from new medicines to all sorts of new technologies to different forms of social and business organizations to the cleaner intellectual atmosphere I think we’d have without government propaganda machines cluttering it up.

I don’t believe in utopia, but I do believe our world could be far freer, healthier, and happier than it is today — without any divine intervention, magic, or changes in the laws of physics. Just a different path, every bit as possible as the one we’ve taken to where we are today… Without any major differences in technological development and without assuming that people would spontaneously become angels, the average standard of living worldwide would be much higher if…America had stayed out of WWI, or had not ratified the 16th Amendment to the Constitution, or had not elected FDR.

L: Okay, but those things did happen, and we live in the world we have today — the one you call a prison planet. How should people try to do what’s right in such a world without ending up in jail?

Doug: First, it’s important to think about what’s actually possible, because people will not even try to reach for what they are sure is impossible. The world needs idealists to challenge us all to aim higher… including idealists willing to go to jail for what they believe in, like Henry David Thoreau. But even he said that while he encouraged all people to disobey unjust laws, he wouldn’t ask those who support families to get themselves locked up and leave their families destitute.

So my take is as we started out saying: It is both ethically and practically imperative to starve the beast. The less cooperation of any sort we give the state — but especially the less money we give it — the less mischief it can get into. We’re unlikely to get politicians to vote for getting the state off our backs, out of our pocketbooks, out of our bedrooms, and out of other people’s countries as a matter of principle, but we could see the state get out of places it doesn’t belong simply for lack of funds. And if everybody treated minions of the state with the contempt they deserve, most of them would quit and be forced to find productive work. As Gandhi showed us, civil disobedience cannot only be an ethical choice, but a very powerful force for change.

L: Any specific advice?

Doug: Get a good accountant, take every deduction you can, and look for ways to legally reduce your tax burden. For example, our readers should know that charitable contributions in the US get deducted after the alternative minimum tax wipes out your other deductions. That means that a substantial fraction of every dollar you give a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit does not go to the federal government.

Now, as you know, I don’t believe in charity, at least not in the institutional sense, but wasting money on charities is far, far better than giving it to the government to use bombing innocents and creating enemies for generations to come. And if that charity happens to be something like the Institute for Justice, the Fully Informed Jury Association, or any of the other libertarian think tanks dedicated to reducing the size and scope of government, you get to help fight the beast and starve it at the same time.

L: I do my economics and entrepreneurship camps in Eastern Europe under the auspices of the International Society for Individual Liberty — of which I should disclose that I am a director. I have to admit that it pleases me greatly to see funds that would have gone into making bombs to drop on foreigners and hiring more goons in uniform to oppress people at home redirected to something I consider constructive.

But what about the international diversification question: can that help reduce your tax burden back home?

Doug: It’s different for different countries, and each individual should consult a tax specialist with the details of his or her own case, or proposed case. However, there is an exclusion for Americans who live abroad for a whole tax year — it was around $100,000 the last I looked. So there are very good tax reasons for Americans to live abroad. There are even better reasons for Canadians, Europeans, and almost everyone else to leave their native country — many can live 100% tax-free. I guess it’s just a sad testimony to the medieval-serf mentality that most people suffer from that few people take advantage of this. They’re born someplace, and they stay rooted there, like a plant. Oh well, everybody basically makes his own bed, reaps what he sows, and gets what he deserves…

However, as appealing as the “permanent tourist” idea is, I recommend international living first and foremost as a way to protect your assets. As we’ve discussed before, real estate in foreign countries cannot be repatriated or confiscated by the government that thinks of you as its milk cow. There is nothing illegal or nefarious about buying real estate abroad, and it could come in very handy if things get really chaotic back home, wherever that happens to be.

L: Okay… any investment implications to discuss?

Doug: Sure, but nothing new to our readers. Starving the state-beast is the right thing to do, ethically and practically, but I believe the state’s days are numbered anyway. The thing to be aware of is that the beast won’t go quietly, and in its death throes it can do a lot of harm. Still, like Nietzsche said, “That which is about to fall deserves to be pushed.”

In the meantime, much higher taxes are on the way. More and more currency controls are coming. You may have heard that the US is contemplating a law denying issue or canceling the passport of anyone accused of owing more than $50,000 in taxes. I expect the transformation of what was once America into a police state to continue, and I expect other “developed” nations — especially Europe, Canada, and Australia — to follow suit. And this will happen whether or not the global economy exits the eye of the storm as I expect it to.

So you want to rig for stormy weather and invest for continuing crisis. Own gold for prudence, speculate on related stocks and others that may benefit from government profligacy, and as we’ve just been saying, diversify your assets and personal living arrangements internationally.

The day is coming when your local government may stop seeing you as a milk cow and start seeing you as a beef cow, and you want to have options before that day.

Regards,

Doug Casey
for The Daily Reckoning

Doug Casey on Taxes and Freedom, Part II originally appeared in the Daily Reckoning. The Daily Reckoning, published by Agora Financial provides over 400,000 global readers economic news, market analysis, and contrarian investment ideas. Recently Agora Financial released a video titled "What Causes Gas Price to Increase?".

The Dow rose 135 points. Not very impressive, after so many down days.

Everything has been sinking… Stocks, commodities, oil…

In Europe and emerging markets the damage has been even worse than in the US. Even China is slowing down.

It’s just like…well…a Great Correction!

And look at Facebook. We knew the Facebook IPO would cost a lot of saps a lot of money. But we didn’t expect it to happen so fast. We figured Wall Street would get a chance to squeeze the lumpen a little longer before they fled the market.

As it turned out, the mom and pop investors came into the market to buy Facebook and got whacked right away.

Here’s one completely un-savvy buyer quoted in The New York Post:

“I’m very psychic when it comes to stocks, I really am. I have no retirement, I have no pension, so I try to make money on the market.”

The press reported that cab drivers and plumbers were buying Facebook shares on the first day…for the wrong reasons, of course. One buyer had recently had his house foreclosed. He was buying the stock, he said, to help put his children through school. Good luck on that!

Colleague Justice Litle called it ‘Facebust!’ The hype sent shares up in early trading on Friday. The insiders who moved fast were able to cash out at over $40. But then, the selling overpowered the buying. Justice, writing over the weekend:

Countless idiots, er, optimists expected Facebook shares to pop 50% or more on their first day of trading, not taking into account the fact that, when EVERYONE IN THE WORLD has the same universally telegraphed notion as you — with ability to execute by mashing a mouse button — it is probably not the sharpest play.

At any rate, after a very anemic “pop” reminiscent of discount bin champagne purchased from a gas station, FB shares fell straight to the $38 level (where the IPO was officially priced).

At $38 the underwriter investment banks came in, vigorously “defending the shares” as a matter of business honor. Without the heavy buying of Morgan Stanley and others, for the express purpose of propping up the shares, FB could have seen a death spiral on its first day of trading. This would have forever marred said underwriters’ reputations, which is why it didn’t happen.

(Investment banks are paid a very pretty penny for bringing an IPO to market; one of the services they provide, in exchange for that fat payday, is propping up the shares, i.e. “creating a price floor,” with their own dough as need be, to keep the offering from looking like a dog. This is completely legal and sanctioned by the SEC.)

The Facebook IPO was a sort of psychological fulcrum point. It was perhaps the biggest public participation event of all time, in terms of getting “the man on the street” to take a flyer on a stock. When such tomfoolery works out badly, Joe Sixpack’s taste for risk — the mother’s milk of Wall Street — is that much further soured. (It should be noted that a whole raft of other “social media” stocks — Zynga etc. etc. — fell hard when Facebook came up short.)

In addition to the above, virtually every large mutual fund and long-only money manager on Wall Street felt compelled to purchase Facebook shares (for fear of missing out on “the next Apple” had they not).

If the Facebook hype fails, then — if the Maginot line of $38 price support gives way — it could have an incredibly demoralizing impact on the market as a whole, alongside the ominous “doom loop” that is Greece.

Such are the conditions in which “unease” turns to “maybe we should get out,” which then has a nasty habit of escalating to “GET ME OUT NOW,” acted upon by groupthink investors en masse.

And yesterday, the Maginot Line gave way…

“Market Up, But Investors Dump Facebook,” was the headline report from Reuters. The stock sold off…finishing the day down 11%. What happened to the underwriters, everyone wanted to know. The stock fell below the IPO price on its first full day of trading. Apparently, Wall Street was not willing to come to the rescue — not with its own money.

We had a hunch that Facebook might become the hinge event for this stock market. Shares had been selling off for two weeks prior to the FB launch. But the selling was orderly.

After so much selling for so many days, buyers are bound to come back. So the Dow went up yesterday.

But the FB hinge has creaked…and squeaked…and warned retail investors. They came in the door. They didn’t like what they saw. Many will take to the exits quickly. Others will stick around, until a growing sense of revulsion, mixed with losses, eventually pushes them out.

Ray Dalio calls it a “beautiful de-leveraging.” We don’t see the beauty in it. But we admire it for what it is — a natural and necessary response to the grotesque debt build-up of the last half century. It may not be beautiful, but it is doing its work as best it can under the circumstances.

Households are lowering their debt levels. Businesses are hoarding cash. The private sector, generally, is getting itself into better shape. All very natural…and all things in nature have a beauty, of sorts.

It doesn’t hurt that interest rates are so low. Even the price of gasoline is going down. In this sense, the Great Correction itself is helping…beautifully. The whole world economy is slowing down, lowering prices for energy and housing — two of the biggest items in the household budget.

The way to cut debt is to first cut expenses. Then, you have more money available to pay off your loans. And it’s fairly easy to cut expenses when interest rates are so low.

In 2005 and 2006 we advised Dear Readers to sell their overpriced real estate and rent. Now it’s time to reverse the procedure. At today’s rates…and today’s prices…it’s time to buy.

Here’s why:

In some areas, house prices are down 50%

In those very same areas rents have risen.

At 3% (which you can get on a 15-year fixed rate mortgage) your monthly mortgage payment might be only HALF your rent payment. So you can save money there.

Then, you deduct the interest from your taxes.

And then, the Fed gives you a bonanza when its monetary inflation finally turns into consumer price inflation…or even hyperinflation. Your mortgage balance could be reduced 10%…30%…80% in just a few months.

In other words, you get paid to wait for the feds to wipe out your mortgage!

Cut your expenses. Get into cash. Remember, our ‘Crash Alert’ flag is up. And a lovely correction is underway.

Tomorrow: how the vandals in Washington and at the Fed are defacing the “beautiful de-leveraging.”

Regards,

Bill Bonner
for The Daily Reckoning

Is Facebook the Rusty Hinge of the Stock Market? originally appeared in the Daily Reckoning. The Daily Reckoning, published by Agora Financial provides over 400,000 global readers economic news, market analysis, and contrarian investment ideas. Recently Agora Financial released a video titled "What Causes Gas Price to Increase?".

Louis James: We get a lot of letters from readers who know about your international lifestyle and wonder about the tax advantages they assume it confers. Is this something you care to talk about?

Doug Casey: Yes; something wicked this way comes, indeed. But first, I have to say that as much as I can understand the guy who flew his airplane into an IRS building, as we once discussed, I do not encourage anyone to break the law. That’s not for ethical reasons — far from it — but strictly on practical grounds. The Taxman can and will come for you, no matter how great or small the amount of tax he expects to extract from you. The IRS can impound your assets, take your computers, freeze your accounts, and make life just about impossible for you, while you struggle to defend yourself against their claims and keep the rest of your life going. The number of IRS horror stories is beyond counting. As the state goes deeper into insolvency, its enforcement of tax laws will necessarily become more draconian. So you absolutely don’t want to become a target.

L: So… just bow down and lick the boots of our masters?

Doug: Of course not. People can and should do everything they can to pay as little in taxes as possible. This is an ethical imperative; we must starve the beast. It could even be seen as a patriotic duty — if one believes in such things — to deny revenue to the state any way possible, short of endangering yourself. Starving the beast may be the only way to force it back into its cage — we certainly can’t count on politicians to make the right choices — they’re minions of the state. They inevitably act to make it bigger and more powerful… The state, the media, teachers, pundits, corporations — the entire establishment, really — all emphasize the moral correctness of paying taxes. They call someone who doesn’t do so a “tax cheat.” As usual, they have things upside down.

Let’s start with a definition of “theft,” something I hold as immoral and destructive. Theft is to take someone’s property against his will, i.e., by force or fraud. There isn’t a clause in the definition that says, “unless the king or the state takes the property; then it’s no longer theft.” You have a right to defend yourself from theft, regardless of who the thief is or why he is stealing.

It’s much as if a mugger grabs you on the street. You have no moral obligation to give him your money. On the contrary, you have a moral obligation to deny him that money. Does it matter if the thief says he’s going to use it to feed himself? No. Does it matter if he says he’s going to feed a starving person he knows? No. Does it matter if he’s talked to other people in the neighborhood, and 51% of them think he should rob you to feed the starving guy? No. Does it matter if the thief sets himself up as the government? No. Now of course, this gets us into a discussion of the nature of government as an institution, which we’ve talked about before.

But my point here is that you can’t give the tax authorities the moral high ground. That’s important because decent people want to do the morally right thing. This is why sociopaths try to convince people that the wrong thing is the right thing.

If an armed mugger or a gang of muggers wanted my wallet on the street, would I give it to them? Yes, most likely, because I can’t stop them from taking it, and I don’t want them to kill me. But do they have a right to it? No. And every taxpayer should keep that analogy at the top of his mind.

L: I also believe that the initiation of the use of force (or fraud, which is a sort of indirect, disguised form of force) is unethical. It doesn’t matter what the reason for it might be nor how many people might approve of the action. But some people claim that taxation is really voluntary — the price one pays for living in society… and if I’m not mistaken, the US government says the federal income tax is voluntary.

Doug: [Snorts] That is a widely promoted lie. It’s propaganda to help statists claim the moral high ground, confuse the argument, and intimidate people who aren’t critical thinkers. Just try not volunteering to pay it and see what happens. Taxation is force alloyed with fraud — a nasty combination. It’s theft, pure and simple. Most people basically admit this when they call taxation a “necessary evil,” somehow mentally evading confrontation with the fact that they are giving sanction to evil. But I question whether there can be such a thing as a “necessary evil.” Can anything evil really be necessary? Can anything necessary really be evil?

Entirely apart from that, if people really wanted anything the state uses its taxes for, they would, should, and could pay for it in the marketplace. Services the state now provides would be offered by entrepreneurs making a profit. I understand, and am somewhat sympathetic, to the argument that a “night-watchman” state is acceptable; but since the state always has a monopoly of force, it inevitably grows like a cancer, to the extent that the parasite overwhelms and kills the host. That’s where we are today.

I think a spade should be called a spade, theft should be recognized for what it is, and evil should be opposed, regardless of the excuses and justifications given for it. Ends do not justify means — and evil means lead to evil ends, as we see in the bloated, corrupt, dangerous governments we have all over the world.

L: That runs counter to the conventional wisdom, Doug. Evil or not, most people think taxation is part of the natural order of things, like rain or day and night. Death and taxes are seen as the two inevitable things in life, and you are a silly idealist — if not a dangerous madman — if you believe otherwise.

Doug: That saying about death and taxes is both evil and stupid; it’s a soul-destroying and mind-destroying perversion of reality. It’s evil, because it makes people reflexively accept the worst things in the world as permanent and inevitable. As for death, technology is actively advancing to vanquish it. Who knows how far medicine, biotech, and nanotech can delay the onset of death? And taxes are, at best, an artifact of a primitive feudal world; they’re actually no longer necessary in an advanced, free-market civilization.

People also once thought the world was flat, that bathing was unhealthy, and that there was such a thing as the divine right of kings. Many things “everyone knows” just aren’t so, and this is one of those. A government — for those “practical” people who think they need one — that stuck to the basic core functions of police and courts to defend people against force and fraud and a military to defend against invasion, would cost a tiny, tiny fraction of what today’s government costs, and that could be funded in any number of ways that essentially boil down to charging for services.

As it is now, the average US taxpayer probably works half of the year just to pay direct and indirect taxes. That doesn’t even count the cost of businesses destroyed by regulation and lives lost to slow approval of new treatments by regulators, or a million other ways governments burden, obstruct, and harass people.

Stay tuned for Part II of the interview, tomorrow…

Regards,

Doug Casey,
for The Daily Reckoning

Doug Casey on Taxes and Freedom originally appeared in the Daily Reckoning. The Daily Reckoning, published by Agora Financial provides over 400,000 global readers economic news, market analysis, and contrarian investment ideas. Recently Agora Financial released a video titled "What Causes Gas Price to Increase?".