Business

By EconMatters

Over the past several weeks, courtesy of the jump in oil prices from 13 years lows, the narrowly reopened window granting some companies the chance to sell equity and in some cases debt (and promptly use the proceeds to repay their secured lenders), and the various last-ditch extensions afforded to near-default oil and gas companies, the dire reality of the default wave about to be unleashed in the shale patch has been swept under the rug, if only briefly.

That is about to change.

For the past four years, bond traders have quickly turned their focus after Federal Reserve meetings to something called the dot plot (seen as a key insight into their collective thinking on rates). The problem is, as Bloomberg exposes, the forecasts weren't very good... and fund managers are increasingly ignoring the dot plot for investment decisions, as one strategist exclaimed "we don’t put a lot of credibility in the dots, [officials] have usually been cheerleaders for the economy, and they get turning points in the economy wrong."

While not nearly as exciting as JPM cornering and manipulating the gold or silver markets, over the past few years Jamie Dimon's bank appears to have cornered a very prominent commodity traded on the London Metals Exchange, aluminum, resulting in price "anomalies" which as Reuters politely puts it "mean prices do not always reflect fundamentals" and which as we put it, reflect outright manipulation, however because regulators are captured have so far completely slipped through the cracks.

Submitted by Simon Black via SovereignMan.com,

“Prosperity is like a Jenga tower. Take one piece out and the whole thing can fall.”

That’s a direct quote from John Williams, the President of the San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank in a speech he gave a few weeks ago.

He could have just as easily been talking about propaganda. The Fed, the White House, Wall Street, the media have a vested interest in peddling a certain narrative about the economy.