Authored by Senator Rand Paul and Mark Spitznagel, originally posted at Time.com,
The country deserves to understand the extent of its balance sheet
On Jan. 12, Congress is scheduled to vote on the “Audit the Fed” legislation (H.R. 24/S. 264), which, if passed, would bring to an end to the Federal Reserve’s unchecked—and even arguably unconstitutional—power in the financial markets and the economy.
On Friday we presented Kyle Bass' latest interview in which the Texas hedge fund manager explained the reasoning why he thought shorting the Yuan is the "greatest investment opportunity right now." The crux behind the argument was well-known to Zero Hedge readers, namely China's peaking credit cycle driven by soaring bad, or non-performing, loans which have so far been swept away, but which courtesy of a $35 trillion financial system are nothing short of a "neutron bomb", as we first dubbed the embedded risk, waiting to go off. Here is Bass:
Via GEFIRA,
World oil consumption is more than 90 million barrels a day. Between 2009 and 2014 oil was traded for about 110 dollars a barrel; now oil is changing hands for 32 dollars a barrel. Roughly a 7-billion-dollar cash flow a day is vanishing from the global market.
Norway’s sovereign wealth fund that has accumulated a stake of 4.5 billion dollars in Apple over the past years, will turn from an Apple buyer into an Apple seller.
It's not the economy (or fundamentals), stupid - It's The Fed!
So we had a rate-hike, and...surprise - markets puked
Source: NorthmanTrader.com
Still think anything other than The Fed matters?
The S&P 500 has just caught back down almost perfectly to The Fed's balance-sheet-implied level...
Submitted by Charles Hugh-Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,
All the phantom wealth piled up in China's boost phase is now melting down, and the China Syndrome will trigger a meltdown in global phantom assets.
The 1979 film The China Syndrome took its name from the darkly humorous notion that a nuclear reactor meltdown in the U.S. would burn straight through the Earth to China. (wikipedia: The China Syndrome)