What Mitt Romney Also Said: A Glimpse Of The Endgame?

The world economic situation is dire.

From Zero Hedge:

By now everyone has heard the infamous Mitt Romney speech discussing the "47%" if primarily in the context of how this impacts his political chances, and how it is possible that a president "of the people" can really be a president "of the 53%." Alas, there has been very little discussion of the actual underlying facts behind this statement, which ironically underestimates the sad reality of America's transition to a welfare state. Recall Art Cashin's math from a month ago that when one adds the 107 million Americans already receiving some form of means-tested government welfare, to the 46 million seniors collecting Medicare and 22 million government employees at the federal, state and local level, and "suddenly, over 165 million people, a clear majority of the 308 million Americans counted by the U.S. Census Bureau in 2010, are at least partially dependents of the state." Yes, Romney demonstrated potentially terminal lack of tact and contextual comprehension with his statement, and most certainly did alienate a substantial chunk of voters (most of whom would not have voted for him in the first place) but the math is there. The same math that inevitably fails when one attempts to reconcile how the $100+ trillion in underfunded US welfare liabilities will someday be funded. Yet the above is for political pundits to debate, if not resolve. Because there is no resolution. What we did want to bring attention to, is something else that Mitt Romney said, which has received no prominence in the mainstream media from either side. The import of the Romney statement is critical as it reveals just what the endgame may well looks like.

Here is the reality: under ZIRP, all bonds with a maturity inside the guaranteed 0% envelope are essentially cash equivalents. This means all bonds 3 years and less, which as is to be expected for riskless paper, have a coupon of roughly 0% (except Fed counterparty risk of course, because the only reason they should trade above 0% is if the Fed loses control of inflation and ends ZIRP prematurely before its announced end date now sometime in 2015). When the Treasury issues them the buyers takes on ZERO risk, thanks to ZIRP. This is also the reason why the Fed sells $45 billion in short-end paper each month, as part of Twist sterilization. In essence the only debt issuance that matters for the US Treasury is that of longer-dated issuance. This amounts to roughly $45 billion per month in the 10-30 year window, and is virtually all the debt that the Fed monetizes on the long-end as part of Twist. This is also knows as Flow as we have explained repeatedly, but we don't except someone still stuck teaching 1980s economics to understand this (Goldman explained this here)

But this is not news: back in February we noted that Under Twist the fed has monetized 91% of all LT gross issuance.

Between Twist 1 and 2, the Treasury has not auctioned off one dollar of gross LT debt to the private market, as evidenced by the total inventory of 10-30 year paper which has remained fixed at $650 billion. It is this liquidity limitation that forced Bernanke to monetize not more TSYs, but to commence buying Mortgage Backed debt.

The fact that Krugman does not get this simplest fact about the nuances in the Fed's monetization activities demonstrates just how dangerous it is to assume that just because someone has been awarded a Nobel, they automatically are an expert in something, anything, especially involving numbers.

And because we enjoy spreading knowledge, and for the benefit of even the most math-challenged Economics professors, here again is a simple clip showing how Romney is actually lowballing the real number of relevant gross issuance, which is nearly all in the critical 10-30 year ballpark, and where the Fed will soon be virtually the sole marginal market player.

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/what-mitt-romney-also-said-glimpse-endgame