"Its a very serious test"...really it is...

“It is a very serious test,” Franz-Christoph Zeitler, a member of the executive board of the Bundesbank, Germany’s central bank, said at a news conference in Frankfurt. “All this criticism was absolutely premature.”

The stress tests, similar to an exercise conducted in the United States last year, were intended to rebuild confidence in European financial institutions that has been shaken by the sovereign debt crisis. Uncertainty about which banks may be sitting on piles of Greek debt and other potentially toxic assets has made institutions reluctant to lend to each other as well as to businesses, and acted as a drag on economic growth. - nytimes

What I find interesting is that a stress test designed to rebuild confidence can accomplish that rather duplicitous task and surreptitious goal. I am rather confident that this is not a stress test but rather another piece in the charade to paint numbers with different colors in the hope that people don't recognize them for what they are and continue believing that the debt based fractional reserve money creation mechanics can create enough principle to pay the interest on the new principle they create. Thankfully, anyone who thinks that sentence sounds a little conflicted probably understands that the results of more charades and lies will suffer a similarly conflicted state. The difference is that by that time all the rich banks and bankers will have transfered any remaining assets into their books and the bills onto ours.

What is interesting is that the one thing you would expect on a stress test is what would happen if a EURO nation defaulted...or if a large bank imploded because of it. Naahhh, that type of analysis does not belong on a serious stress test. So, the people most likely to come up with this fairy tale have got to be the same people who told us the there was no subprime crisis or recession and unemployment was not a problem...speaking of which I think they just said it again:

"The White House said it expects unemployment will stay at or above 9% until 2012, and that the 2010 deficit will come in at $1.47 trillion" - cnn money

"But again, you are seeing a recovery," says Geithner in an interview to be shown on NBC's "Meet the Press" on Sunday morning. "You're seeing private investment expand again, job growth starting to come back. And that's very encouraging."

• Also, you may think FDIC insurance is $250,000 per account...right? Wrong! They tumpet the ponzi scheme when they need to and then conveniently sweep the reversion back to $100,000 per account under the rug...did you hear this get any press early in the year when it was rolled back? (Note 7/26/10: The new finance reform bill permanently sets the FDIC insurance level at $250,000.)

• FDIC bank seizures are tracking well above last year same time (70 vs 102), but that doesn't matter does it...Ever wonder how many of those passed the FED's stress tests?

lets see how this plays out...most likely not like the propagandists are saying, in my opinion.

Live from Bernakejing, China...its a new data manipulation

Who do they think they are fooling? Is the market really that insane that it will get more confidence from a number that makes absolutely no sense? BDI is a great way to gauge china. Shipping rates have dropped nearly 60% over the time that china reports 10.3% growth. There IS a reason for that...its called "no exports". There is also a reason that the shipbreaker business is swamped - companies are dismantling ships they don't need...and most of the rest of them are sitting idle waiting for the off chance that somebody wants a delivery from China for something that is not an imaginary town funded with not imaginary credit in an imaginary economy. Now I know what Timmy Geithner and Bernake think they can accomplish at these G20 conspiriatory meetings.

Can someone please explain to me how a country with billions of people can grow at 10% in the middle of a depression? Even US banks with free money and congress in their pockets can't do it - but a country with billions of people and crashed export demand can actually come up with a growth number most companies in the world would be happy to have right now.

More lies = more lies and less confidence...any way you try to look at it I can not come up with one good way to spin this...I am sure that JPM will have a way and probably made a lot of money on that imaginary 10.3% growth china had on its imaginary balance sheet. More fundamentals we can rely on - amazing!