I find it un-freaking believable that markets continue to hit new highs while central banks pump them with liquidity and dingbat money managers keep gambling with other people's money. The only way out of this mess is through sarcasm.
The G-20 is doing a u-turn away from austerity even though it knows by know that monetary easing doesn't spur real growth. All of those ugly protests in Greece and Spain spooked the elites into thinking they won't get their weekly caviar fill if austerity brings revolution.
China's interest-rate liberalization now makes excessive borrowing easier than ever. This extends the life of the shadow banking system's overburdened balance sheets by months, or perhaps years. Chinese real-estate developers now have to meet fewer hurdles to commit control fraud.
Mme. Lagarde wants the US Supreme Court to reaffirm the doctrine of sovereign immunity so she can get on with the IMF's business of ignoring the imminent sovereign debt defaults of the PIIGS bloc. The IMF and other transnational institutions didn't get the memo that sovereignty still matters to investors who consider tax policies, political risk, and other factors specific to nation-states. The globalization of the ruling class into a transnational blob came about thirty years too late. Now the pendulum swings back to nations and their tribal constituents, just as it did in the fifth century as the Roman Empire came apart.
Existing US home sales are heading down the tubes again. Just a teensy rise in mortgage rates was all it took to make the numbers crater. Many homeowners still haven't returned to their breakeven price and now they get to watch their home equity get flushed all over again.
I'd like to thank all of the idiots I've met and heard about recently for making this sarcasm possible. I wouldn't be who I am without them.
