Federal Reserve

David Stockman – Bernanke’s (Untough) Love Child: The $27 Billion Affair At The Hilton

The idea that LBOs carry massive debt that is never paid down, leaving behind “financial zombies on the ragged edge of insolvency,” defies historical principles of LBOs, writes David Stockman. Blackstone’s LBO of Hilton Hotels is one of these “free market defying zombies” – “one global business slump away from bankruptcy.” And it just filed for an IPO.

David Stockman: The Debt Zombies Kept On Coming

The founders of the LBO industry – KKR, Blackstone, Apollo, TPG, and Bain Capital – are stuck in giant deals that have turned into debt zombies. The outbreak of mega-LBO mania during 2006–2007 reflected a financial market deformation that sowed recklessness across the entire private equity space. And the debt zombies are still out there.

Jobs Don’t Keep Up With Population Growth, But Unemployment Rate Drops Elegantly, Keeps Intact The Pretext For Fed “Taper”

When the Fed said it wanted to print more money in order to create jobs, it’s this graph that came to mind. And when it now says that it wants to taper that process because it already created enough jobs, it’s also this graph that comes to mind. Job creation and economic growth were just a pretext – a pretext that has been very crummy.

Bonds Bleed: Largest Bubble In History Unwinds, But The “Great Rotation” Into Stocks Is Deceptive Wall Street Hype

The bond-fund massacre is spectacular. Antsy investors yanked $7.7 billion in August out of the world’s largest bond fund, Pimco’s Total Return Fund. In July, they’d yanked out $7.5 billion, in June $14.5 billion. From May 1 through August 31, the fund’s assets shriveled 14%. Other bond funds got hit too. And September is shaping up to be even worse.

David Stockman: How KKR Stripped The Beds In America’s Largest Hospital Chain With Some Help From Bubbles Ben

“Bernanke’s maniacal money printing after the Lehman event catalyzed a virtual stampede back into the very same risk-asset classes which had been reduced to smoldering ruins,” David Stockman writes. It produced the craziest junk-bond binge of all times, allowing the mega-buyouts from before the crisis to survive and pay rich fees to the LBO lords.

Stocks: “Drastic Correlation Between Printing and Pumping” – And What It means When The Printing Ends

The Fed’s taper “may not be smooth,” explained Bank of England deputy governor Charles Bean at the central-banker shindig in Jackson Hole. He was referring to the currencies, bonds, and stocks of emerging-market economies such as Brazil, Indonesia, and India that have gotten massacred.

David Stockman: How The Fed Helped Bushwhack TXU

In this installment from Chapter 25, “DEALS GONE WILD: Rise of the Debt Zombies,” of his bestseller, David Stockman vivisects the LBO craze before the financial crisis, including the insane and largest ever buyout, Texas mega-utility TXU Corporation – now in bankruptcy. And then there is Goldman….

A Very Profitable Part Of Banking Goes Totally To Heck

Refinancing mortgages is phenomenally profitable for banks – one of the few growth sectors actually spawned by the Fed’s herculean efforts to force down long-term interest rates through waves of quantitative easing. Banks went on a hiring binge to shuffle all this paper around and extract fees. But now, with rising rates, that business is getting decimated.

When “QE Infinity” Turns Into A Pipedream: Hot Money Evaporates, Rout Follows – See Emerging Markets

Printing money and forcing interest rates to near zero, that’s how the Fed and other central banks papered over the Financial Crisis, duct-taped the bursting credit bubble back together, inflated new asset bubbles, and propped up TBTF banks. It accomplished a huge feat: a worldwide tsunami of hot money. Which is now receding.

This is What Mucks Up Housing, Costs Homeowners Dearly

Home prices have jumped around the country, in some cities over 20% on an annual basis. “Recovery of the housing market,” is what this phenomenon is called. Everyone from President Obama on down has taken credit for it, particularly the Fed, whose handiwork this is. But there is a very ugly fly in this illusory ointment.