Federal Reserve To Crash Markets Before Launching QE3?
Dominique de Kevelioc de Bailleul: Desperate to print Wiemar-style to fight off the most viscous Kondratiev Winter on record, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke may not satisfy ‘inflation trade’ onlookers at the close of his Jackson Hole speech scheduled Friday.
He may, instead, merely allow months of anticipatory front-running of stocks do the work of propping up asset prices for him.
And if investors don’t get the ‘all-systems go’ at Jackson Hole, there’s always the FOMC meeting of Sept. 12 & 13 to get the good news.
That’s when market volatility could move off the charts, maybe extreme volatility to the downside, according some Wall Street analysts.
“With the equity market pricing in a significant chance of QE3, stock prices are no longer as useful a signal to Fed officials. Should the Fed disappoint at its September policy meeting, the risk of a stock sell-off is high,” Bank of America Merrill Lynch analysts wrote in a note to clients, Aug. 21.
“Some in the markets
think that the Fed effectively targets equity prices, meaning that to predict Fed policy, one merely needs to track the U.S. stock market,” the analysts add. “There is a curious circularity to this view, however: the Fed will not launch QE3 so long as stock prices are high, yet the stock market is high because it anticipates QE3.”
The old adage on the Street, ‘buy the rumor, sell the fact’, may be at play here. But if Bernanke plays too-hard-to-get with investors in the coming weeks, a nasty fall could be in store for the Fed chief—a fall that could outright overwhelm the NY Fed’s PPT and result in a stock market plunge akin to the Crash of 1987. Maybe.
The chart of the S&P 500, Spanish IBEX 35 and Chinese SSEC shows the gaping chasm between U.S. stocks and two indexes represented by two economies with, again, divergent outlooks.
Spain’s fiscal outlook in coming years isn’t much different from the federal budget outlook for the U.S., while the Chinese $3 trillion war chest of reserves couldn’t be in a better relative position to survive the righting of the bogus ‘World is Flat’ global agenda.
Would Bernanke risk a market meltdown that snaps the notion of an eternal ‘Bernanke put’? Is he that confident that the remaining holdouts of an obviously rigged market will plunge the world economy into the anticipated financial Armageddon—before a U.S. presidential election?
The answer may be a shocking, even cockamamy—YES and YES! And it may not be that much of a risk. A surprise ‘not yet’ to further money printing at Jackson Hole and the FOMC meeting could be forthcoming.
Consider the geopolitics in the Middle East, and contemplate the dire political tug-o-war between Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and U.S. President Barrack Obama regarding Iran.
Netanyahu insists military action against Iran be taken before the U.S. election in November, while Obama remains adamant that the issue surrounding Iran must wait until after the election—a stand which probably infuriates the warmongering neocons and bankers, who have since put their stock on Republican candidate for president Mitt Romney as their next bankster puppet.
And the white-hot ambitious, some say, narcissistic, Romney won’t be taking any chances leading up to what is expected to be a close election, if recent polls serve as a guide. He may need a little help from a financial catastrophe to convince enough voters that they may have to believe in a different kind of change.
But first, Romney must take the pledge—for the record.
Jul. 29, he told a gathering of Israelis in Jerusalem:
“We serve the same cause and we provoke the same hatreds in the same enemies of civilization. It is my firm conviction that the security of Israel is in the vital national security interests of the United States . . .”
“Israel and America are, in many respects, reflections of one another. We both believe in democracy, in the right of every people to select their leaders, and choose their nation’s course. We both believe in the rule of law, knowing that in its absence, willful men will be inclined to oppress the weak. We both believe that our rights are universal, granted not by our government, but by our creator.”
Later in the speech, Romney spoke the magical words that signaled the Netanyahu regime that he, not Obama, is your man.
Stopping Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons “must be our highest national security priority” and “we must use any and all measures” to destroy that capability.
“Containment is not an option,” Romney added.
And because “both men [Obama and Netanyahu] share a deep dislike and distrust of each other,” writes Anshel Pfeffer of the leftist Israeli newspaper Haaretz, the Israeli and Anglo-American mutually aligned partnership in the petrodollar wars must not be jeopardized by a Commander and Chief not willing to do what’s necessary, in the eyes of the neocons, of course.
Therefore, Obama must go, leaving the banking cartel’s lead man at the Fed, Bernanke, to continue manipulating the markets, but this time, to the downside to throw the game for Romney and the neocons at this critical moment (for Israel) in the Middle East.
Bernanke can always come in with a bazooka money blast and ‘make things better’ for Wall Street while putting that one last lid on the gold price (maybe) before the out-of-control launch of the yellow metal truly begins during the first year of a Romney first term.
“If the S&P drops 150 or 200 points, you can be sure that there will be more QE, not only QE3 but QE4 and so forth,” Swiss money manager Marc Faber tells GoldSeek Radio this past weekend.
But, not to worry. QE is coming, but a little politics comes first to nail down decades-long geopolitical strategy in the oil patch concerning a much bigger war between the U.S., Russia and China regarding the U.S. dollar and the gold price.
Though Faber doesn’t speculate on the upcoming Fed actions, he does state “it’s premature to say that this a genuine breakout” in gold and silver, and I “say that with great confidence.”
By Dominique de Kevelioc de Bailleul From Beacon Equity Research