Over the weekend a fierce and savage cold front descended on New York City making outdoor excursions fit for neither man nor beast. It was the kind of crippling cold that makes you feel like you’ve just stepped out of the shower no matter how many layers of clothing you pile on. So, I decided to hunker down in the apartment.

By 2 a.m. Saturday, temperatures had dropped so low a piece of metal snapped off a window I was trying to close as if it were made of cheap Mexican plastic. I needed that window closed because with the apartment door open, it was creating a kind of wind tunnel effect through the kitchen, making it impossible to boil anything with the precision I required; a classic catch-22. If I closed the door my boiling would take on a proper rigor, but the deliveries from the pub downstairs would wake everyone up. If I left the door open the deliveries would function smoothly but the boiling would become haphazard and problematic, also waking everyone up. The situation demanded a compromise. So I turned the music up.

That’s how my weekend started, with a hard compromise. Two days later I’m sitting here still combing through the Special Inspector General’s report on the Troubled Asset Relief Program and I see the same game plan at work; when confronted with mutually exclusive and impossible-to-achieve objectives, turn the music up. It’s a type of fuzzy, 2 a.m. logic. It’s Washington logic.

Despite clocking in at 244 pages, the report is fairly breezy reading, but when I first came across it early Saturday I almost never made it to the second page. Something about the report’s cover stopped me cold.

But what? The logo was fairly routine for the government; a scale of weights and a skeleton key underneath some kind of perverted Confederacy stars and bars pattern. I asked the deliveryman from the bar his take on it.

“You see anything wrong with this?” I demanded, waving the cover page around.

“Just some of the glasses keep coming back broken, but — ”

“No, no,” I yelled. “This image. You see anything that looks… weird, out of place?”

He took the page, glanced at it and handed it back with a shrug.

“Two dollar bill,” he said flatly. “Means it’s fake.”

Enraged, I chased him out of the apartment, threading the closing elevator door’s needle with a well-thrown shoe; a small price to pay. He was right but for the wrong reason, and now he’d never know why, because sometimes a random show of force is needed to keep the delivery process on track.

Yes, that was it, alright. The American two-dollar bill, not exactly fake, but goofy, suitable only for birthday cards and broken down horse players. Was this supposed to be somebody’s idea of a sick joke? A 244-page report on a massive $700 billion government relief program illustrated by the corner of a $2 bill?

Perhaps there’s something else going on. On his next trip, my deliveryman apologized profusely for insulting the authenticity of the American $2 bill. “I’m Irish, you know, and we’re deeply suspicious of all forms of currency,” he said.

Briefly, in 2006, near the height of the credit bubble, savvy strip club owners across America began stocking up on two-dollar bills. “Strip clubs hand out $2 bills when they give customers their change, and the bills end up in dancers’ garters and bartenders’ tip jars,” USA Today reported at the time. “The entertainers love it because it doubles their tip money,” Angelina Spencer, a former stripper and executive director of the Association of Club Executives, an adult nightclub trade
group, told the newspaper.

But I digress.

See, I did comb through the report, all 244-pages of it, and there are literally dozens of fascinating paragraphs and charts, all explaining in great detail how the program functions and why, exactly, it doesn’t work; it’s a Calculus of Fools. While the word calculus may also mean a kidney stone or some kind of nasty gall bladder concretion, the word fool is straightforward enough. It’s either a lack of judgment or an outright deception. Take your pick.

From the Executive Summary:

“Despite the fact that the explicit goal of the Capital Purchase Program was to increase financing to US businesses and consumers, lending continues to decrease, month after month, and the TARP program designed specifically to address small-business lending — announced in March 2009 — has still not been implemented by Treasury.”

Of course, one of the main dilemmas here is that no matter how comprehensive it is, the TARP program can do little to end the vicious cycle of credit bubble corrections where lenders, having facilitated the bubble by relaxing lending standards too much, are forced as the bubble unwinds to tighten standards, which has the perverse effect of lowering overall credit quality.

What’s happening is that even as the goal of the CPP is to increase lending, the pool of available borrowers is shrinking, and this shrinkage is occurring from several different trigger points, including natural credit aversion and increased lending standards.

But let’s go back to this Capital Purchase Program for a moment, because the purpose of the program and the mechanics of how it’s working are instructive on a couple of different levels.

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This is a guest post by Minyanville Editor-in-Chief Kevin Depew.

1. The Economic Crisis Takes a Virulent Turn

The word credit comes from the Latin “credere” which means “to believe, or to trust.” That’s really all you need to know about the modern financial system. When the “credere” is gone, the whole thing unravels, and it works both ways, from lender to borrower, and from borrower to lender.

Now we’ve arrived at the point where that belief, “credere” — stretched to its limits by policies of endless credit expansion over the past two decades — has been weakened to such an extent that it has developed what may be likened to an autoimmune disorder; a condition where the immune system mistakenly attacks itself, destroying even healthy  tissue in the process.

I was reminded of that comparison this morning when reading the text of Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke’s economic outlook speech delivered to the Economic Club of New York today. Bernanke didn’t make it through the first sentence without referring to the financial crisis as a virus.

“When I last spoke at the Economic Club of New York a little more than a year ago, the financial crisis had just taken a much more virulent turn,” Bernanke said. The comparison isn’t at all far-fetched, and understanding how a virus operates, and how doctors treat it, is helpful in grasping the nature of our own economic autoimmune disorder.

Under normal circumstances, say, without excessive credit expansion policies, the system’s immunity defenses would attack and destroy toxic substances — such as subprime mortgages — and leave the healthy tissue alone. Unfortunately, an autoimmune disorder often results in the destruction of the body itself (the financial system), or abnormal growth of an organ (government and regulation), and/or changes in an organ’s function (the banking system).

As government bureaucrats trapped within the framework of their fiat currency-based operating systems, central bankers have little choice but to focus on the symptoms our virus presents, a virus that was unleashed on the patient by their own doing, without recourse to either irony or shame. And so they attempt to cure the symptoms of the virus over and over again without recognizing that the cure is worse than the disease itself; it only suppresses the symptoms for a brief time before they return with greater severity.

Bernanke sounds more like a physician than a central banker when he says the following:

The flow of credit remains constrained, economic activity weak, and unemployment much too high. Future setbacks are possible. Nevertheless, I think it is fair to say that policymakers’ forceful actions last fall, and others that followed, were instrumental in bringing our financial system and our economy back from the brink.

After all, he’s talking about a circulatory system — one in which credit functions as the blood flow — where the flow remains restricted, the body weak, fever high. Unfortunately, while the severity of the symptoms has temporarily passed, the virus lingers, building up strength for the next attack. Judging by retail sales, that attack may begin sooner than Bernanke and other optimists think.

2. The Entrails of Retail Sales

Optimists were out in full force after retail sales were reported this morning, citing the fact that headline retail sales rose more than expected in October. Sure, the usual caveats — “mostly  due largely to a big rebound in auto sales” — were present, but the headlines were largely positive … and with the market itself quickly tacking on more than 1.5 %, it was hard not to think maybe they were correct.

The reality, however, is that when you look inside the report, it is clear that broader consumer spending remains under pressure. Excluding auto sales, retail demand rose 0.2%, half of the expected 0.4% rise. The main sticking point, however, is that the government revised the September performance down to show a 2.3% decline, from the 1.5% drop initially reported. Ooops.

The 0.2% increase in retail sales excluding autos was down from a 0.4% rise in September and was the weakest showing since a 0.5% drop in July. Sales also fell 0.8% at furniture stores and 0.6% at electronics and appliance stores, Associated Press reported.

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1. The Federal Reserve is Irrelevant… for Now

Well, that was fun wasn’t it? All that waiting and waiting yesterday afternoon, and for what? Just a brief statement churned out from a laser printer, an obligatory nod to “weak economic activity.” But there’s more here than meets the eye, and it’s not about what the Federal Reserve will do, it’s about what they can’t do; namely, stimulate credit expansion.

The key nugget from the Fed statement was this:

The Committee will maintain the target range for the federal funds rate at 0 to 1/4 percent and continues to anticipate that economic conditions are likely to warrant exceptionally low levels of the federal funds rate for an extended period.

What that means is the Federal Reserve won’t be tightening interest rates anytime soon, which is fine — we already knew that. But stocks sold off on the news anyway, largely because of this piece of the statement:

To provide support to mortgage lending and housing markets and to improve overall conditions in private credit markets, the Federal Reserve will purchase a total of $1.25 trillion of agency mortgage-backed securities and up to $200 billion of agency debt.  The Committee will gradually slow the pace of these purchases in order to promote a smooth transition in markets and anticipates that they will be executed by the end of the first quarter of 2010.

The stock market took a dim view of this, perceiving it to be a back-door attempt at tightening. Which may be true, but as we shall see momentarily, is nonetheless irrelevant.

Meanwhile, the frenzied buying of credit continued unabated, with a little more than $3 billion in new corporate bond issues priced yesterday — on a Fed day no less — and junk-issue spreads actually narrowing in the face of that supply.

Who’s buying all of this new supply of debt? The real question is, who isn’t? Because the sources are almost exactly the same this time as last, credit hedge funds (with a significant amount of credit shorts still being taken in), banks employing the carry trade – the usual suspects, all with leverage.

Wait, as we edge closer to October 2009, isn’t this exactly how we arrived at October 2008? Yes. And so won’t this end just as badly? Yes again. In fact, the same mistakes aren’t even being thinly disguised as new mistakes, they’re simply being repeated as if scripted.

2. It Just Doesn’t Matter

And now back to the Fed’s irrelevance. We’ve run this chart before, the last time was back in 2007.

Here it is updated.

3. DeMark Indicator Update

Just a quick update on where we stand via DeMark indicators for the major indices. On a quarterly and monthly basis, of course, there’s little change. The S&P 500 and Dow Industrials are on bar seven this quarter of a potential buy setup. The Russell 2000 is on bar eight.

Click Here to Read the Remainder of Number 3, Number 4, and Number 5 …