Jul 242016
 
 July 24, 2016  Posted by at 9:25 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , ,


Milton Greene “Actress Marilyn Monroe in bed” 1955

China’s Growth Sucks In More Debt Bucks For Less Bang (R.)
G20 Will Use ‘All Policy Tools’ To Protect Growth As Brexit Looms (R.)
OECD’s Gurria Says No Other EU Country Will Consider Exit After Brexit (CNBC)
EU Considers Migration ‘Emergency Brake’ For UK For Up To 7 Years (O.)
Mortgages Issued By Greek Banks Declined 99% In Past Decade (Kath.)
5 Reasons Why Trump Will Win (Michael Moore)
Trump Policy Will Unravel Traditional Neocons – Michael Hudson (RNN)
WikiLeaks Trove Plunges Democrats Into Crisis On Eve Of Convention (SMH)
DNC Chair Won’t Speak At Dem Convention Following WikiLeaks Fallout (CNN)
Imagine How The Land Feels (G.)

 

 

Reuters says: “..this year it has taken six yuan for every yuan of growth,[..] twice even the level in the United States during the debt-fueled housing bubble..”

That’s questionable. ZH in 2013: “..over the past five years in the developed world, it took $18 dollars of debt (of which 28% was provided by central banks) to generate $1 of growth..”

China’s Growth Sucks In More Debt Bucks For Less Bang (R.)

As China’s economy notches up another quarter of steady growth, the pace of credit creation grows ever more frantic for every extra unit of production, as inefficient state firms swallow an increasing share of lending. The world’s second-largest economy grew 6.7% in the first half of the year, unchanged from the first quarter, testament to policymakers’ determination to regulate the pace of slowdown after 25 years of breakneck expansion. Analysts say that determination has come at the cost of a damngerous rise in debt, which is six times less effective at generating growth than a few years ago. “The amount of debt that China has taken in the last 5-7 years is unprecedented,” said Morgan Stanley’s head of emerging markets, Ruchir Sharma, at a book launch in Singapore.

“No developing country in history has taken on as much debt as China has taken on on a marginal basis.” While Beijing can take comfort that loose money and more deficit spending are averting a more painful slowdown, the rapidly diminishing returns from such stimulus policies, coupled with rising defaults and non-performing loans, are creating what Sharma calls “fertile (ground) for some accident to happen”. From 2003 to 2008, when annual growth averaged more than 11%, it took just one yuan of extra credit to generate one yuan of GDP growth, according to Morgan Stanley calculations. It took two for one from 2009-2010, when Beijing embarked on a massive stimulus program to ward off the effects of the global financial crisis.

The ratio had doubled again to four for one in 2015, and this year it has taken six yuan for every yuan of growth, Morgan Stanley said, twice even the level in the United States during the debt-fueled housing bubble that triggered the global crisis. Total bond debt in China is up over 50% in the past 18 months to 57 trillion yuan ($8.5 trillion), equal to around 80% of GDP, and new total social financing, the widest measure of credit provided by China’s central bank, rose 10.9% in the first half of 2016 to 9.75 trillion yuan. China’s money supply has increased in tandem with new lending, and at 149 trillion yuan is now 73% higher than in the US, an economy about 60% larger. “China is the largest money printer in the world – they have been for some time. The balance is really extreme,” says Kevin Smith, CEO of U.S.-based Crescat Capital.

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Ionesco and Samuel Beckett were ahead of their time, but we’re catching up with them. Words lose ever more meaning. Example are this article, but also this WSJ headline: “Hillary Clinton Introduces Tim Kaine as ‘a Progressive Who Likes to Get Things Done'”. That may have sounded lofty even just 20 years ago, but today it’s just meaningless, if not outright repulsive.

G20 Will Use ‘All Policy Tools’ To Protect Growth As Brexit Looms (R.)

Leaders from the world’s biggest economies are poised on Sunday to renew their commitments to support global growth and better coordinate actions in the face of uncertainty over Britain’s decision to leave the EU and growing protectionism. The meeting of finance ministers and central bankers from the Group of 20 major economies in China’s southwestern city of Chengdu is the first of its kind since last month’s Brexit vote and a debut for Britain’s new finance minister. Philip Hammond faced questions about how quickly the UK planned to move ahead with formal negotiations to leave the EU. “We are taking actions to foster confidence and support growth,” a draft statement by the policymakers seen by Reuters said.

“In light of recent developments, we reiterate our determination to use all policy tools – monetary, fiscal and structural – individually and collectively to achieve our goal of strong, sustainable and balanced growth,” it said. The IMF this week cut its global growth forecasts because of the Brexit vote. Data on Friday seemed to bear out fears, with a British business activity index posting its biggest drop in its 20-year history. The draft communique, expected to be issued at the end of the meeting on Sunday afternoon, said Brexit added to uncertainty in the global economy but G20 members were “well positioned to proactively address the potential economic and financial consequences”.

U.S. Treasury Secretary Jack Lew said on Saturday it was important for G20 countries to boost shared growth using all policy tools, including monetary and fiscal policies as well as structural reforms, to boost efficiency. “This is a time when it is important for all of us to redouble our efforts to use all of the policy tools that we have to boost shared growth,” Lew told reporters.

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He’ll find out yet.

OECD’s Gurria Says No Other EU Country Will Consider Exit After Brexit (CNBC)

Countries in the European Union are unlikely to consider an exit from the bloc once they realize how complicated, costly and disruptive the process will be for the United Kingdom, the secretary general of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) told CNBC on Saturday. “Nobody in their right mind will even attempt or even think of leaving the European Union because they will understand that it is not in their best interest,” Angel Gurria told CNBC before the start of the G-20 finance ministers and central bank governors meeting in Chengdu, China.

Gurria had recommended against the Brexit vote, but says the next step should be helping the U.K. and its partners through the proceedings in the least costly and least disruptive way. On the Italian banking crisis and whether the EU should rescue the country’s third largest bank, Monte dei Paschi di Siena, Gurria said that “national, regional and EU intervention is necessary”. However, the challenge is to define who is going to be doing what, he added. Rome is bracing for the results of critical bank stress tests that are due on July 29 and is hoping to find a solution for the battered bank ahead of that.

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Mere days after everyone said there could be no pre-Brexit discussions with the UK, of course there’s things like this anyway.

EU Considers Migration ‘Emergency Brake’ For UK For Up To 7 Years (O.)

Plans to allow the United Kingdom an exemption from EU rules on freedom of movement for up to seven years while retaining access to the single market are being considered in European capitals as part of a potential deal on Brexit. Senior British and EU sources have confirmed that despite strong initial resistance from French president François Hollande in talks with prime minister Theresa May last week, the idea of an emergency brake on the free movement of people that would go far further than the one David Cameron negotiated before the Brexit referendum is being examined.

If such an agreement were struck, and a strict time limit imposed, diplomats believe it could go a long way towards addressing concerns of the British people over immigration from EU states, while allowing the UK full trade access to the European market. While the plan will prove highly controversial in many member states, including France, Poland and other central and eastern European nations, the attraction is that it would limit the economic shock to the EU economy from Brexit by keeping the UK in the single market, and lessen the political damage to the European project that would result from complete divorce.

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Sales only to those with deep pockets. The rest of the world buys up Greece.

Mortgages Issued By Greek Banks Declined 99% In Past Decade (Kath.)

Cash was the preferred from of payment for the few people who decided to purchase real estate in the first half of the year in Greece, bank officials have suggested. Converging estimates by bank officials contacted by Kathimerini show that eight out of 10 property buyers opted for the transfer of cash between deposit accounts instead of a loan, a trend that started with the imposition of capital controls by the government just over a year ago and continues to date. The same trend is also dominant in consumer credit.

According to data compiled by Kathimerini, the new loans issued in H1 came to €75 million in mortgage credit across the banking system and to €150 million in consumer credit. This sum constitutes a historic low for the last few decades at least. Comparisons with a decade ago are staggering: The number of mortgages issued in January-June 2016 – also affected by the lawyers’ strike – came to just 800, against about 80,000 in the same period in 2006. A Bank of Greece analysis recently said that the course of loans to households is mainly determined by demand, and in the last couple of years the drop in house prices has played a decisive role in the reduction of loan issues.

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Well argued. But as Moore himself also argues, that’s a problem, not a winner.

5 Reasons Why Trump Will Win (Michael Moore)

Friends: I am sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but I gave it to you straight last summer when I told you that Donald Trump would be the Republican nominee for president. And now I have even more awful, depressing news for you: Donald J. Trump is going to win in November. This wretched, ignorant, dangerous part-time clown and full time sociopath is going to be our next president. President Trump. Go ahead and say the words, ‘cause you’ll be saying them for the next four years: “PRESIDENT TRUMP.” Never in my life have I wanted to be proven wrong more than I do right now. I can see what you’re doing right now. You’re shaking your head wildly – “No, Mike, this won’t happen!”

Unfortunately, you are living in a bubble that comes with an adjoining echo chamber where you and your friends are convinced the American people are not going to elect an idiot for president. You alternate between being appalled at him and laughing at him because of his latest crazy comment or his embarrassingly narcissistic stance on everything because everything is about him. And then you listen to Hillary and you behold our very first female president, someone the world respects, someone who is whip-smart and cares about kids, who will continue the Obama legacy because that is what the American people clearly want! Yes! Four more years of this! You need to exit that bubble right now. You need to stop living in denial and face the truth which you know deep down is very, very real.

Trying to soothe yourself with the facts – “77% of the electorate are women, people of color, young adults under 35 and Trump cant win a majority of any of them!” – or logic – “people aren’t going to vote for a buffoon or against their own best interests!” – is your brain’s way of trying to protect you from trauma. Like when you hear a loud noise on the street and you think, “oh, a tire just blew out,” or, “wow, who’s playing with firecrackers?” because you don’t want to think you just heard someone being shot with a gun. It’s the same reason why all the initial news and eyewitness reports on 9/11 said “a small plane accidentally flew into the World Trade Center.” We want to – we need to – hope for the best because, frankly, life is already a shit show and it’s hard enough struggling to get by from paycheck to paycheck. We can’t handle much more bad news. So our mental state goes to default when something scary is actually, truly happening.

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The attempts to link Trump to Russia have become a sort of hilarious boomerang.

Trump Policy Will Unravel Traditional Neocons – Michael Hudson (RNN)

On Friday, just after the RNC wrapped up with its presidential candidate, Donald Trump, Paul Krugman of the New York Times penned an article titled “Donald Trump: The Siberian Candidate.” He said in it, if elected, would Donald Trump be Vladimir Putin’s man in the White House? Krugman himself is worried as ludicrous and outrageous as the question sounds, the Trump campaign’s recent behavior has quite a few foreign policy experts wondering, he says, just what kind of hold Mr. Putin has over the Republican nominee, and whether that influence will continue if he wins. Well, let’s unravel that statement with Michael Hudson. [..] So let’s take a look at this article by Paul Krugman. Where is he going with this analysis about the Siberian candidate?

HUDSON: Well, Krugman has joined the ranks of the neocons, as well as the neoliberals, and they’re terrified that they’re losing control of the Republican Party. For the last half-century the Republican Party has been pro-Cold War, corporatist. And Trump has actually, is reversing that. Reversing the whole traditional platform. And that really worries the neocons. Until his speech, the whole Republican Convention, every speaker had avoided dealing with economic policy issues. No one referred to the party platform, which isn’t very good. And it was mostly an attack on Hillary. Chants of “lock her up.” And Trump children, aimed to try to humanize him and make him look like a loving man.

But finally came Trump’s speech, and this was for the first time, policy was there. And he’s making a left run around Hillary. He appealed twice to Bernie Sanders supporters, and the two major policies that he outlined in the speech broke radically from the Republican traditional right-wing stance. And that is called destroying the party by the right wing, and Trump said he’s not destroying the party, he’s building it up and appealing to labor, and appealing to the rational interest that otherwise had been backing Bernie Sanders.

So in terms of national security, he wanted to roll back NATO spending. And he made it clear, roll back military spending. We can spend it on infrastructure, we can spend it on employing American labor. And in the speech, he said, look, we don’t need foreign military bases and foreign spending to defend our allies. We can defend them from the United States, because in today’s world, the only kind of war we’re going to have is atomic war. Nobody’s going to invade another country. We’re not going to send American troops to invade Russia, if it were to attack. So nobody’s even talking about that. So let’s be realistic.

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Well, I said a long time ago that Clinton would not be electable. There’ll be much more of this released while the convention takes place.

WikiLeaks Trove Plunges Democrats Into Crisis On Eve Of Convention (SMH)

On the eve of the convention at which Hillary Clinton is to be confirmed as presidential candidate, the Democratic Party has been plunged into crisis – the US media is brimful of ugly and embarrassing stories from within the party’s head office, all based on 20,000 emails dropped on Friday evening by the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks. The correspondence seems to confirm allegations by the campaign of defeated Senator Bernie Sanders that the Democratic National Committee was actively rooting for Mrs Clinton to win, a revelation that will most likely serve as a wedge between the two camps and make it even more difficult for her to persuade Sanders voters to support her.

The emails also reveal plotting within the DNC to embarrass Republican candidate Donald Trump, including drafting a fake ad to recruit “hot women” to work for him. Bad as this trove of emails is, it could presage something much worse. A brief introduction to the emails, that were released on Twitter with a link to a webpage, described them as “part one of our new Hillary Leaks series”. Naming key DNC officials, the introduction says how many of the emails came from each, including communications director Luis Miranda (10,770 emails), national finance director Jordon Kaplan (3797 emails), and finance chief of staff Scott Comer. The emails are dated through the five months to May 25, 2016.

Several of the emails address efforts to embarrass or to wrong-foot the Sanders campaign, which began almost as a non-event but surged with young voter support in particular to become a serious and determined challenger to Mrs Clinton. One email suggests that Senator Sanders be questioned on his faith, in the hope of revealing him as an atheist. It reads: “Does he believe in a God. He had skated on saying he has a Jewish heritage. I think I read he is an atheist. This could make several points difference with my peeps. My Southern Baptist peeps would draw a big difference between a Jew and an atheist.”

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“She’s been quarantined..” She should be under investigation.

DNC Chair Won’t Speak At Dem Convention Following WikiLeaks Fallout (CNN)

The head of the Democratic National Committee will not speak at the party’s convention next week, a decision reached by party officials Saturday after emails surfaced that raised questions about the committee’s impartiality during the Democratic primary. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, whose stewardship of the DNC has been under fire through most of the presidential primary process, will not have a major speaking role in an effort “to keep the peace” in the party, a Democrat familiar with the decision said. The revelation comes following the release of nearly 20,000 emails.

One email appears to show DNC staffers asking how they can reference Bernie Sanders’ faith to weaken him in the eyes of Southern voters. Another seems to depict an attorney advising the committee on how to defend Hillary Clinton against an accusation by the Sanders campaign of not living up to a joint fundraising agreement. Wasserman Schultz is expected to gavel the convention in and out, but not speak in the wake of the controversy surrounding the leaked emails, a top Democrat said. “She’s been quarantined,” another top Democrat said, following a meeting Saturday night.

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Love it. Not so much the part of how to get nature into a novel, but the idea itself. The world is alive. These fierce looking hunters singing to the land, the forest. And the land singing back:

“The place itself, in which their people had lived for millennia, was not an inanimate “environment”, a mere backdrop for human activity. It was part of that activity. It was a great being, and to live as part of it was to be in a constant exchange with it. And so they sang to it; sometimes, it sang back.”

Imagine How The Land Feels (G.)

We had climbed, slowly, to a high mountain ridge. We were two young Englishmen who were not supposed to be here – journalism was forbidden – and four local guides, members of the Lani tribe. Our guides were moving us around the highlands of West Papua, taking us to meet people who could tell us about their suffering at the hands of the occupying Indonesian army. The mountain ridge was covered in deep, old rainforest, as was the rest of the area we had walked through. This forest, to the Lani, was home. In the forest they hunted, gathered food, built their homes, lived. It was not a recreation or a resource: there was nothing romantic about it, nothing to debate. It was just life.

Now, as we reached the top of the ridge, a break in the trees opened up and we saw miles of unbroken green mountains rolling away before us to the horizon. It was a breathtaking sight. As I watched, our four guides lined up along the ridge and, facing the mountains, they sang. They sang a song to the forest whose words I didn’t understand, but whose meaning was clear enough. It was a song of thanks; of belonging. To the Lani, I learned later, the forest lived. This was no metaphor. The place itself, in which their people had lived for millennia, was not an inanimate “environment”, a mere backdrop for human activity. It was part of that activity. It was a great being, and to live as part of it was to be in a constant exchange with it. And so they sang to it; sometimes, it sang back.

When European minds experience this kind of thing, they are never quite sure what to do with it. It’s been so long since we had a sense that we dwelled in a living landscape that we don’t have the words to frame what we see. Too often, we go in one of two directions, either sentimentalising the experience or dismissing it as superstition. To us, the wild places around us (if there are any left) are “resources” to be utilised. We argue constantly about how best to use them – should we log this forest, or turn it into a national park? – but only the bravest or the most foolish would suggest that this might not be our decision to make.

To modern people, the world we walk through is not an animal, a being, a living presence; it is a machine, and our task is to learn how it works, the better to use it for our own ends. The notion that the non-human world is largely inanimate is often represented as scientific or rational, but it is really more like a modern superstition. “It is just like Man’s vanity and impertinence,” wrote Mark Twain, “to call an animal dumb because it is dumb to his dull perceptions.” We might say the same about a forest; and science, interestingly, might turn out to be on our side.

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Home Forums Debt Rattle July 24 2016

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  • #29489

    Milton Greene “Actress Marilyn Monroe in bed” 1955 • China’s Growth Sucks In More Debt Bucks For Less Bang (R.) • G20 Will Use ‘All Policy Tools’ To P
    [See the full post at: Debt Rattle July 24 2016]

    #29491
    V. Arnold
    Participant

    “Nobody in their right mind will even attempt or even think of leaving the European Union because they will understand that it is not in their best interest,” Angel Gurria told CNBC.

    This guy (I assume guy) is out of his mind! Doesn’t see the writing on the wall.
    IMO, Brexit is the beginning of the end for the EU; by all measure it’s already fracturing. Just like NATO and it’s many disparate members.
    Denial is strong among the leadership class and they will be the last to join the last dance at the party.
    I think it’s pretty clear, that many changes in the world order are coming soon and cannot be stopped. Even a nuclear conflagration cannot stop what’s coming; in fact, it will expedite changes; but in a far less pleasant atmosphere.
    Buckle your seat belts people; the future is coming fast…

    #29494
    John Day
    Participant

    Hey, what will there be to leave? The EU could not be sustained, because it could never actually even be created. A lot of lies have been built into a huge imaginary house of cards. It just doesn’t exist at all…
    Kingsnorth has the right approach. Natural mind is way more vast than human mind. Ask anybody who has lived on Hawaii (the island) about their will vs Pele. Hahahahaaa!

    #29506
    V. Arnold
    Participant

    But, but, “they” say the EU exists; are you going to believe their words or your own lying eyes. 😉
    Yes, the fools in charge have convinced themselves the EU is real; or have they?
    I think my vote goes to; they know what’s what; but we’re the ones who drank the kool-aide.
    Many have trouble accepting the world as it really is and will fight tooth and nail to maintain the status quo…
    I gave up on that decades ago…

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