Personal saving surges to over $6T once again. Guess we all stopped going to restaurants?

 Here we go again. Personal saving surged to $6.04 trillion in March. I'm just waiting now for Neel Kashkari to come out and explain that it's because we didn't go to movie theaters and restaurants. (Hey, Neel, restaurants are open and people are spending again. Check retail sales.)

Actually, Neel's an idiot. (Seems to be a requirement to work at the Fed.) The reason for the surge in personal savings was due to those stimulus checks and other fiscal support. It works.

By the way, one byproduct of this has been a precipitous slowdown in the growth of bank loans. Not surprising. When the government supplies cash to people their need for bank credit goes down. Poor banks. Fewer customers begging for their credit. That means less fees and interest payments.

Scott Minerd again. Calls stock market "Titanic heading for an iceberg." You gotta buy.

Guggeheim Partners' Scott Minerd says the stock market is like "the Titanic heading for an iceberg."

Look...

“Just as an iceberg loomed in the distant darkness to be struck by the Titanic under full steam, so the US economy approaches the distant fiscal drag of 2020 under the full steam of rate increases to contain inflation and an overheating labor market...”

He's got a flowery way with words.

Fiscal drag? What fiscal drag is he talking about? The government is operating with record spending and in 2020 according to the CBO spending will be even higher along with the deficit.

The fiscal drag that Minerd is referring to is the deficit. He thinks that's fiscal drag when he should be cheering these numbers.

You gotta buy in this dip.

BTW...I've put up numerous posts about Minerd's calls in the past. Check them out here.

Early Treasury data not encouraging for economy, stocks, dollar

We're only six statement days into the new fiscal year, however, Treasury data is not encouraging. Employment tax deposits collected by Treasury are 5.5% below where they were at the same time last October and total withdrawals (spending) is 9.1% below last year. Short dollar. Stock market upside limited from here as I said.

In typical clueless Bloomberg reporting style, company says U.S. has no options to avoid downturn

Looks like Bloomberg has a new "Caroline Baum." Remember her? She was the cinema major who regularly opined on economic matters and each time it was a shock and awe display of economic and monetary ignorance.

But Baum left earlier this year so the new girl over there is some chick named Kasia Klimasinska. Today she writes that the U.S. had, like, zero options to deal with a downturn.

The headline caught my attention (stupid fodder) so I checked it out. I wanted to see if she said anything about fiscal policy or, if was all going to be about the Fed not having any "bullets."

And guess what? I did find this pearl on fiscal policy:

U.S. debt stands at 74 percent of gross domestic product, compared with 35 percent in 2007, based on a Congressional Budget Office report released Tuesday. That burden is expected to grow further in coming years, limiting government options for additional fiscal stimulus in the form of spending or lower taxes.

While the U.S. could follow in the footsteps of Japan, Ireland, Italy or Greece, which have racked up   even higher debt-to-GDP levels, heftier deficits would be a hard political sell. After all, Congress has been loathe to borrow, curbing spending through "sequester" limits and pushing the nation to the brink of default in 2011 amid disputes over a debt-limit extension.

Yes, you did see that..."follow in the footsteps of Greece." If it came out of Bloomberg you KNEW that had to be there.

When she says that the debt level of 74% of GDP "limits government options" I'm left wondering, according to who? Her?

To her credit she says it would be a hard political sell. She's right on that score, but that's only because we have an inept leader named Barack Obama who believes that "we're out of money."

Then she says this:

Partly for that reason, the Bank for International Settlements has warned that still-low rates around the world pose a looming economic risk. 

So according to Kasia it looks like the United States of America is taking marching orders from the Bank for International Settlements now.

And Mike Bloomberg built a $40 billion fortune on this crap? I'm REALLY in the wrong business.

My podcast for Tuesday, March 3.

Here's my podcast for March 3.

Replacing the Money-Multiplier with the Thinking-Multiplier?

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)

It's not clear that replacing one simplistic fad with another is the right approach.

This journalist blithely replaces the "Money-Multiplier" with a "Fiscal-Multiplier." If only things were that simplistic. Then we wouldn't have to think at all.

Austerity has been an even bigger disaster than we thought

Yes it has, at least for the royal "we," yet only because the bulk of us weren't "thinking" critically enough in the first place.

Look, countless people grasp how countless complex processes work. 

Can't we just agree to treat Public Purpose and Public Policy as a complex process too, instead of just something to throw simplistic slogans at?

If we're gonna rely on one, mythical multiplier, how about we select a Thinking Multiplier?

After all, the root of all disasters is the lack of thinking, not the following steps in the causality flow.

Stop Pegging Aggregate Policy Options To Narrow Interests & Perceived Personal Options. Aggregate Options Are Bigger Than Any Of Us.

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson.)



Personal hoarding of a hill of beans? All that ever produces is more old farts, plus grandchildren guaranteed to be neglected in diverse ways. Working harder to guide aggregate options by way of limited, personal perceptions just won't work, no matter HOW HARD our 1% Central Planners try to think for us, instead of with us. At our present rate, we might as well beat our collective heads against a wall, in unison. Democracy is simple. Just LISTEN, all the time, to all of us. If that keeps getting more difficult, then develop the needed methods, instead of bickering about old methods that can't scale to present needs and opportunities.

Fiscal & monetary policy almost always comes down to attempts to yoke or peg constantly expanding aggregate interests & options to narrow interests & perceived personal options. Aka, pegging public dynamic fiat to private static wealth metrics, which is always and only a function of trust and organizational alignment.

The rare times the two align are most often in times of war ... if even then.

By definition, a growing aggregate ALWAYS needs better/faster/leaner methods for practicing ways to grow affinity, trust & alignment. That seems to be our primary gating issue.

Ironically, the only - widely accepted - formal methodology that comes close to addressing our primary need is the science of military mobilization, which is itself still far off the needed mark needed for our national agenda, and is mostly misused by clueless electorates & policymakers. Luckily, that whole approach seems to be slowly transitioning back towards a timeless, OpenSource science of "outcomes based training & education" or OBT&E.

First [perfected] by Colonel Casey Haskins at Fort Benning, Georgia, OBT&E develops individual confidence, initiative, and accountability in addition to mastery of specific skills. While most training focuses on drilling students to a basic level of performance, with OBT&E the focus is on the total outcome of a task or event rather the particular way it was achieved, [thereby] encouraging the development of tangible skills and intangible attributes such as [group agility,] creativity and judgment.

Just let easy happen ... instead of mobilizing to fight ourselves?

Perhaps more flash MOBT&Es* will be the trigger that transforms us to our next level of achievement?

* Mobilizing OBT&E