Goldman Sachs Invades Bank of England, Dick Morris Hangs Up on Peter Schiff, and Some Great Charts

I always say that conspiracy theories are sometimes really hard to buy into, maybe the folks at Zerohedge are on to something when they say that Goldman Sachs is trying to run the world.  Robert Wenzel from EPJ reports:

Goldman Sachs' senior European economist Ben Broadbent is leaving the firm to become a member of the Bank of England's nine-member Monetary Policy Committee.

Broadbent has been a senior European economist at Goldman Sachs since 2000.

If Mario Draghi becomes head of the European Central Bank (He's the favorite to replace Jean-Claude Trichet after Trichet completes his term), Goldman Sachs will have former employees at the New York Fed (William Dudley), the Bank of England and the ECB.

Only thing left seems to be the China Central Bank.  Speaking of Central Banks, is the Fed really funding the  purchasing of municipal bonds?  USA Today reports Municipal Bonds Get Some Love from Investors:

An estimated net $4.6 billion fled muni funds the four weeks ended Feb. 23, the latest figures available from the Investment Company Institute, the funds' trade group.

Bad as that sounds, it's far better than the $12.4 billion that fled the funds in January and the $12.9 billion that left in December. All told, $37.7 billion has poured out of muni funds since Oct. 31.

Not to get into conspiracy theories again, but time will tell if our minimal economic growth is natural or QE driven.  

If you need a pick-me-up after that, check out this sure-to-be classic.  Upon calling into the Peter Schiff radio show to promote his book Revolt!: How to Defeat Obama and Repeal His Socialist Programs, Dick Morris hangs up on Peter after he challenges him on whether public financing of student loans and requiring every high school student to take a drug test counts as socialism.  Check it out below:

Know why Ron Paul is so great?  Precisely because people like Dick Morris call him "horrific."  I mean, who seriously buys his books?


Now for some great charts.  Check out this great chart on Obama's proposed budget bath from Keith Hennessey that I retrieved from Robert P. Murphy's great, though kind of wonkish, Mises Daily today:

 So much for proposing a budget that actually saves money over the long term.

Did You Know that Gallup has a different method for calculating the unemployment rate that lacks seasonal adjustment?  According to their newest calculation, the unemployment rate is really 10.3%

Part time workers desiring full time work: 9.6%

And underemployment which accounts for those desiring full time work along with the unemployed: 19.9%

For more details, see Mish.  Also check out his great post on John Hussman's description of the Iron Law of Equilibrium.  Here is a sample:

Technically, the Fed is buying Treasury securities and creating currency and bank reserves to pay for them. This would simply be an asset swap were it not for the fact that the U.S. is running a budget deficit of about 10% of GDP, so the Fed's purchases don't even absorb the amount of newly issued Treasury debt. The government budget constraint is simple: spending = taxes, plus the change in Treasury securities held by the public, plus the change in Treasury securities held by the Fed (base money creation). So the overall effect of QE is to reduce the amount of debt that the public would otherwise have to buy, and to instead create money and bank reserves to indirectly finance government spending.

Again, its all kind of wonkish.  I am struggling to understand it completely.

I will end with a great passage from John Tamny's Forbes article today on the two party system:

The seemingly simple minded among us might first ask how the “U.S.”, meaning our federal government, could have any dealings in mortgages given a Constitution that in no way empowers any such involvement. The above would be true, but then us simpletons suffer under a two-party political system in which one expresses worship of our founding document all the while ignoring it, while the other doesn’t even pretend that its actions are even remotely informed by the Constitution at all. Pick your poison, or better yet, don’t vote as a way of not encouraging the political class altogether.

With people like Dick Morris advising Republicans, pick your poison in deed.