Jackson Hole Archives - The Automatic Earth

No matter how much you earn, getting by is still a struggle for most people these days. 78% of full-time workers said they live paycheck to paycheck, up from 75% last year, according to a recent report from CareerBuilder. Overall, 71% of all U.S. workers said they’re now in debt, up from 68% a year ago, CareerBuilder said. While 46% said their debt is manageable, 56% said they were in over their heads. About 56% also save $100 or less each month, according to CareerBuilder. The job-hunting site polled over 2,000 hiring and human resource managers and more than 3,000 full-time employees between May and June.

Most financial experts recommend stashing at least a six-month cushion in an emergency fund to cover anything from a dental bill to a car repair — and more if you are the sole breadwinner in your family or in business for yourself. While household income has grown over the past decade, it has failed to keep up with the increased cost-of-living over the same period. Even those making over six figures said they struggle to make ends meet, the report said. Nearly 1 in 10 of those making $100,000 or more said they usually or always live paycheck to paycheck, and 59% of those in that salary range said they were in the red.

“Someone once alerted me to the Bohica syndrome. Bohica? I asked.

He sneered: “Bend Over, Here It Comes Again.”

• Systemic Banking Fraud Means Next Crisis Will Be Worse (Feierstein)

Henry Paulson. Hank. Remember him? Of the crisis in 2008, he said: “Where I come from, if someone takes a risk and they’re going to make the profit from that risk, they shouldn’t have the taxpayer pay for the losses.” Quite the wisdom one expects from the 74th US Secretary of the Treasury. Yet, as Paulson played pass the parcel with the rest of us, it was he who unwrapped the final layer when the music stopped, and discovered that the prize within was a grenade. Understandable, therefore, that he offered a second opinion somewhat in contrast to his first: “It’s better to have the taxpayer pay for the losses than have the United States of America become an economic wasteland. If the financial system collapses, it’s really, really hard to put it back together again.”

Well, it did, and it was. Two years after the fall of Lehman Brothers, former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan was still reflecting on the solution. “There are two fundamental reforms we need — to get adequate capital and… far higher levels of enforcements of… fraud statutes.” So what progress has been made in the efforts to reduce the risks of another crisis? Not enough. In a letter this year to Bank of England’s Governor, Mark Carney, (in his capacity as chairman of the Financial Stability Board), the Senior Supervisors Group reported that “firms’ progress toward consistent, timely, and accurate reporting of top counterparty exposures fails to meet supervisory expectations”. It said there is still too little reform, and too little essential knowledge of counterparty risk.

But what of Greenspan’s assertions of criminal behaviour in financial markets? Again, no change. Market manipulation is not a conspiracy theory. The Bank of Japan has manoeuvred its bond market to a point where bond futures no longer trade. Its interventions have distorted free-market pricing mechanisms to the point that risk is virtually impossible to quantify. But the most pressing concern is the behaviour of central banks, which had previously appeared a solid safe haven.

Guess where the trillions went?!

• Did the Economy Just Stumble Off a Cliff? (CHS)

The signs are everywhere for those willing to look: something has changed beneath the surface of complacent faith in permanent growth. This is more intuitive than quantitative, but my gut feeling is that the economy just stumbled off a cliff. Neither the cliff edge nor the fatal misstep are visible yet; both remain in the shadows of the intangible foundation of the economy: trust, animal spirits, faith in authorities’ management, etc. Since credit expansion is the lifeblood of the global economy, let’s look at credit expansion. Courtesy of Market Daily Briefing, here is a chart of total credit in the U.S. and a chart of the%age increase of credit. Notice the difference between credit expansion in 1990 – 2008 and the expansion of 2009 – 2017. Credit expanded by a monumental $40+ trillion in 1990 – 2008 without any monetary easing (QE) or zero-interest rate policy (ZIRP). The expansion of 2009 – 2017 required 8 long years of massive monetary/fiscal stimulus and ZIRP.

This chart of credit change (%) reveal just how lackluster the current expansion of credit has been, despite unprecedented trillions of stimulus pumped into the financial sector.

Back in the real world, have you noticed a slowing of animal spirits borrowing and spending? Have you tightened up your household budget recently, or witnessed cutbacks in the spending habits of friends and family? Have you noticed retail parking lots aren’t very full nowadays, and once-full cafes now have empty tables? According to the conventional economic statistics, everything’s going great: there are millions of job openings, unemployment is near historic lows, GDP is expanding nicely and of course, everyone’s favorite signifier of wonderfulness, the stock market, is hovering near all-time highs.

The possibility that the real economy just stumbled off a cliff creates instant cognitive dissonance, as the official narrative is the economy is expanding slowly but surely and everything is nominal: there’s plenty of everything, from oil/gas to consumer credit to jobs to student loans. Nonetheless, I feel a disturbance in the Force: once credit expansion slows or ceases, the economy will roll over into recession, as wages have been stagnant for the past 17 years, and the bottom 95% of households can only spend more if they borrow more.

The Fed is going to raise rates as Japan and Europe continue to buy everything not bolted down? Boy, I’d like to see that happen…

• Central Bank Balance Sheets Are Headed for a Great Divergence (BBG)

A brief convergence this year in the dollar value of the balance sheets of the Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank and the Bank of Japan has passed and the trio are now set to take very different paths. After all three touched $4.5 trillion in April, they’ve split, mostly due to a rally in the euro and strength in the yen. With expectations that Janet Yellen may begin whittling away at the Fed’s balance sheet in the next few months, and the BOJ set to carry on with its unprecedented asset purchases, the Japanese central bank may find itself carrying something approaching double the load of its American counterpart two years from now. The ECB’s picture is much more difficult to discern, and investors will be listening intently on Friday when Mario Draghi speaks at the annual Jackson Hole summit of central bankers in Wyoming. With Europe’s recovery gathering pace, officials may start talks this fall about a strategy for 2018 that could include gradually reducing net purchases to zero.

When it comes to the size of the balance sheets relative to the economies of the U.S., Europe and Japan, Haruhiko Kuroda’s BOJ is already the uncontested heavyweight, and will keep extending its lead. The BOJ doesn’t expect to hit its 2% inflation target until sometime around the fiscal year starting in April 2019, dictating the need for hefty asset purchases for years to come. This divergence has big implications for the central banks the next time crisis threatens the global economy. The Fed and the ECB are likely to have more room to dive back into asset purchases or cut interest rates, while the BOJ may find itself pinned down unless it can find a way out of its current predicament before the next problem comes along.

Are central bankers really this dumb?

• Low World Inflation Dogs Central Bankers, Even As Economies Grow (R.)

The world’s top central bankers gather in Jackson Hole, their confidence bolstered by a sustained return to economic growth that may eventually allow the European Central Bank and the Bank of Japan to follow the Federal Reserve in winding down their crisis-era policies. Yet in one key area, none of the world’s central banks has found the answer. Inflation remains well below their 2% targets, stoking a debate about whether they are missing signals of a less than healthy economy and the need for a slower path of “rate normalization”, or that they simply don’t understand how inflation works in a globalized world. In Japan, officials have researched behavioral causes, wondering whether businesses and families are just slower to react to economic signals than thought. European officials have blamed slow-moving union wage contracts and online shopping, while U.S. policymakers have cited a lengthy sequence of “one-offs” in pricing from oil to cellphones to prescription drugs.

In each case the response of policymakers has been the same: wait it out and talk confidently about inflation’s return, as the Fed has put it since 2013, over “the medium term”. “Yes, our models aren’t perfect… Certainly the fact that we have had some low inflation readings is something that we take very seriously,” said Cleveland Fed President Loretta Mester. Yet Mester is convinced the problem is not a weakening economy, but changes in how businesses set prices – a supply side issue she says leaves her comfortable pressing ahead with slow but steady interest rate increases. Not everyone is convinced by Mester’s approach. Concerns over the significance of a recent slide in inflation have renewed questions about whether a global tightening of monetary policy can proceed, with U.S. investors betting the Fed will have to hold off on more rate changes until later next year.

[..] The use of inflation targeting has been an important innovation in central banking, rooted in theories of how public expectations, central bank communication and other factors shape economic behavior. It was a recognition that how policymakers talked about inflation, and what households believed, would in part determine the outcome. But the developed world’s alignment around a 2% target has become a headache as much as a policy guide, with central banks trying to estimate and regulate something they acknowledge they don’t fully understand. Bank of Japan consultants have puzzled over whether people shop and save as if they fully see the future, or whether they look at the past and only slowly adapt to change. If the latter, then what central banks say is less important. [..] “Look, inflation is hard to forecast,” Mester said in an interview with Reuters, noting that the most elaborate models don’t do much better than simply saying inflation will be 2% and leaving it at that.

Finance humor.

• Amazon’s Plans to Cut Food Prices Will Be a Headache for the Fed (BBG)

Amazon’s plans to cut prices at Whole Foods is great news for shoppers, but not so much for Federal Reserve officials wondering whether they’ll ever hit their 2% inflation target. A low unemployment rate is supposed to boost inflation, or so the economic theory goes. One possible reason it’s not happening, according to the minutes of the central bank’s latest meeting in July: “Restraints on pricing power from global developments and from innovations to business models spurred by advances in technology.” Chicago Fed President Charles Evans earlier this month mused that “people are utilizing newer technologies, competition is emerging from unexpected places – not necessarily your nearest competitor but somebody else – and that could lead to reduced margins and downward price pressure for some period of time.”

Many years ago.

• Has The Fed Completely Lost Control (Roberts)

An interesting thing happened on the way to World Domination, uhh, I mean “Stability” – the data quit cooperating with the Federal Reserve’s carefully devised plan. Just recently the Federal Reserve quit updating their carefully constructed “Labor Market Conditions Index” which failed to support their ongoing claims of improving employment conditions. The chart below is the last iteration before it was discontinued which showed a clear deterioration in underlying strength.

The problem for the Fed in making the decision to discontinue their own Labor Market Conditions Index, which is likely providing a more accurate picture of the real conditions, is being forced to remain tied to an outdated U-3 employment index. As noted recently by Morningside Hill:

“There is sufficient evidence to suggest the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) calculation method has been systemically overstating the number of jobs created, especially in the current economic cycle. Furthermore, the BLS has failed to account for the rise in part-time and contractual work arrangements, while all evidence points to a significant and rapid increase in the so-called contingent workforce as full-time jobs are being replaced by part-time positions, resulting in double and triple counting of jobs via the Establishment Survey. Lastly, a full 93% of the new jobs reported since 2008 and 40% of the jobs in 2016 alone were added through the business birth and death model – a highly controversial model which is not supported by the data. On the contrary, all data on establishment births and deaths point to an ongoing decrease in entrepreneurship.”

This last point was something I have addressed many times previously, the chart below shows the actual employment roles in the U.S. when stripping out the Birth/Death Adjustment model. With such a large overstatement of actual employment, the flawed model does support the idea of a tight labor market.

Unfortunately, despite arguments to the contrary, there is little support for why the bulk of Americans that should be working, simply aren’t.

Not everyone is completely nuts.

• No Alternative To Austerity? That Lie Has Now Been Nailed (G.)

Ever since the banks plunged the western world into economic chaos, we have been told that only cuts offer economic salvation. When the Conservatives and the Lib Dems formed their austerity coalition in 2010, they told the electorate – in apocalyptic tones – that without George Osborne’s scalpel, Britain would go the way of Greece. The economically illiterate metaphor of a household budget was relentlessly deployed – you shouldn’t spend more if you’re personally in debt, so why should the nation? – to popularise an ideologically driven fallacy. But now, thanks to Portugal, we know how flawed the austerity experiment enforced across Europe was. Portugal was one of the European nations hardest hit by the economic crisis. After a bailout by a troika including the IMF, creditors demanded stringent austerity measures that were enthusiastically implemented by Lisbon’s then conservative government.

Utilities were privatised, VAT raised, a surtax imposed on incomes, public sector pay and pensions slashed and benefits cut, and the working day was extended. In a two-year period, education spending suffered a devastating 23% cut. Health services and social security suffered too. The human consequences were dire. Unemployment peaked at 17.5% in 2013; in 2012, there was a 41% jump in company bankruptcies; and poverty increased. All this was necessary to cure the overspending disease, went the logic. At the end of 2015, this experiment came to an end. A new socialist government – with the support of more radical leftwing parties – assumed office. The prime minister, António Costa, pledged to “turn the page on austerity”: it had sent the country back three decades, he said. The government’s opponents predicted disaster – “voodoo economics”, they called it.

Perhaps another bailout would be triggered, leading to recession and even steeper cuts. There was a precedent, after all: Syriza had been elected in Greece just months earlier, and eurozone authorities were in no mood to allow this experiment to succeed. How could Portugal possibly avoid its own Greek tragedy? The economic rationale of the new Portuguese government was clear. Cuts suppressed demand: for a genuine recovery, demand had to be boosted. The government pledged to increase the minimum wage, reverse regressive tax increases, return public sector wages and pensions to their pre-crisis levels – the salaries of many had plummeted by 30% – and reintroduce four cancelled public holidays. Social security for poorer families was increased, while a luxury charge was imposed on homes worth over €600,000 (£550,000).

The promised disaster did not materialise. By the autumn of 2016 – a year after taking power – the government could boast of sustained economic growth, and a 13% jump in corporate investment. And this year, figures showed the deficit had more than halved, to 2.1% – lower than at any time since the return of democracy four decades ago. Indeed, this is the first time Portugal has ever met eurozone fiscal rules.

But it’s about political power, not economics: “Germany has a bigger surplus even than China, they should spend it in the European economy.” By bleeding Europe dry, Germany expands its dominance.

• Germany Slammed For Domestic Under-Spending (Ind.)

A Nobel economics laureate, Sir Christopher Pissarides, has hit out at Germany’s refusal to increase its domestic state spending in order to help entrench the eurozone’s recovery. Speaking at the Lindau meetings in Germany on Wednesday, Sir Christopher said that despite the bounce back in the single currency zone in recent months after years of crisis, the Continent’s largest economy was still exerting a damaging and unnecessary drag. “German fiscal policy is not at all what some countries still need,” he said, arguing that demand across the single currency zone was still too low. “Why is there no demand? Because of German fiscal policies! There is austerity, there is low infrastructure spending and therefore companies are hesitating [on] investment.” “Where is expansion going to come from? It’s going to come from the surplus countries spending more. Germany has a bigger surplus even than China, they should spend it in the European economy.”

The German government is running a fiscal budget surplus and its current account surplus (the difference between its total national spending and total national income) of $294bn in 2016 has drawn criticism from a host of economic bodies, including the IMF, for similar reasons as those advanced by Sir Christopher. Sir Christopher, who was awarded the Nobel in 2010 for his theoretical breakthroughs on labour market analysis, said that countries such as Spain had pushed through major and necessary job market reforms in 2010 and 2011 in the teeth of its sovereign debt crisis. The official headline Spanish unemployment rate currently stands at 17.3%, down from a 2013 peak of 27%. But Sir Christopher said it should be falling faster and that higher German state spending would help. “It’s certainly the case that if the European economy as a whole expanded faster we would see faster positive results from these [labour market] reforms,” he said.

Completely nuts.

• EU States Begin Returning Refugees To Greece As German Reunions Slow (G.)

European countries are poised to begin the process of returning refugees to Greece, as migrants seeking reunification with their family members – mostly in Germany – step up protests in Athens. In a move decried by human rights groups, EU states will send back asylum seekers who first sought refuge in Greece, despite the nation being enmeshed in its worst economic crisis in modern times. Germany has made nearly 400 resettlement requests, according to officials in Berlin and sources in Athens’ leftist-led government. The UK, France, the Netherlands and Norway have also asked that asylum seekers be returned to Greece. Greece’s migration minister told the Guardian the first returns were expected imminently.

“The paperwork has begun and we expect returns to begin over the next month,” said Yannis Mouzalas. “It will start with a symbolic number as an act of friendship [towards other EU nations]. Greece has already accepted so many [refugees], it has come under such pressure, that to accept more would be absurd, a joke if it weren’t such a tragedy.” Mouzalas said he had no idea where the returnees would be placed or whether they would ever leave Greece. “I don’t know where they will go. It could be Athens, it could be Thebes … they are accommodated in an apartment scheme,” he said. “Whatever [happens], conditions will be good, they have improved greatly and will meet EU criteria.”

[..] On Monday a reported 330 migrant arrivals were registered on Greece’s eastern Aegean isles, piling the pressure on overcrowded and vastly overstretched reception centres in Lesvos, Chios, Kos, Leros and Samos. An estimated 14,335 people are currently in limbo in accommodation centres on the Greek islands, according to figures released by the country’s interior ministry on Thursday. Conditions in the centres are described as deplorable, and protests and riots are commonplace. Human Rights Watch recently said self-harm and suicide attempts along with aggression, anxiety and depression were all on the rise. Local services complain about being unable to cope.

Our friends and allies.

• Yemen: The War No One Is Allowed To Know About (NS)

Ten thousand people have died. The world’s largest cholera epidemic is raging, with more than 530,000 suspected cases and 2,000 related deaths. Millions more people are starving. Yet the lack of press attention on Yemen’s conflict has led it to be described as the “forgotten war”. The scant media coverage is not without reason, or wholly because the general public is too cold-hearted to care. It is very hard to get into Yemen. The risks for the few foreign journalists who gain access are significant. And the Saudi-led coalition waging war in the country is doing its best to make it difficult, if not impossible, to report from the area. Working in Sana’a as a fixer for journalists since the start of the uprisings of the so-called Arab Spring in 2011 has sometimes felt like the most difficult job in the world.

When a Saudi-led coalition started bombing Yemen in support of its president, Abdrabbuh Mansour Hadi, in March 2015, it became even harder. With control of the airspace, last summer they closed Sana’a airport. The capital had been the main route into Yemen. Whether deliberately or coincidentally, in doing so, the coalition prevented press access. The media blackout came to the fore last month, when the Saudi-led coalition turned away an extraordinary, non-commercial UN flight with three BBC journalists on board. The team – including experienced correspondent Orla Guerin – had all the necessary paperwork. Aviation sources told Reuters that the journalists’ presence was the reason the flight was not allowed to land. The refusal to allow the press to enter Yemen by air forced them to find an alternative route into the country – a 13-hour sea crossing.

Sorry, Greece… (btw, it took a century to figure this out)

• 3,700-Year-Old Babylonian Clay Tablet Just Changed The History of Maths (SA)

A Babylonian clay tablet dating back 3,700 years has been identified as the world’s oldest and most accurate trigonometric table, suggesting the Babylonians beat the ancient Greeks to the invention of trigonometry by over 1,000 years. The tablet, known as Plimpton 322, was discovered in the early 1900s in what is now southern Iraq, but researchers have always been baffled about what its purpose was. Thanks to a team from the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Australia, the mystery may have been solved. More than that, the Babylonian method of calculating trigonometric values could have something to teach mathematicians today. “Our research reveals that Plimpton 322 describes the shapes of right-angle triangles using a novel kind of trigonometry based on ratios, not angles and circles,” says one of the researchers, Daniel Mansfield.

“It is a fascinating mathematical work that demonstrates undoubted genius.” Experts established early on that Plimpton 322 showed a list of Pythagorean triples, sets of numbers that fit trigonometry models for calculating the sides of a right-angled triangle. The big debate has been about what those triples were actually for. Are they just a series of exercises for teaching, for example? Or are they something more profound? Babylonian mathematics used a base 60 or sexagesimal system (like the minute markers on a clock face), rather than the base 10 or decimal system we use today. By applying Babylonian mathematical models, the researchers were able to show that the tablet would originally have had 6 columns and 38 rows. They also show how the mathematicians of the time could’ve used the Babylonian system to come up with the numbers on the tablet.

The researchers suggest that the tablet may well have been used by ancient scribes to make calculations for building palaces, temples, and canals. But if the new study is right, then the Greek astronomer Hipparchus, who lived about 120 BC, is not the father of trigonometry that he’s long been regarded as. Scholars date the tablet to around 1822-1762 BC. What’s more, because of the way the Babylonians did their maths and geometry, it’s the most accurate trigonometric table as well as the oldest. The reason is that a sexagesimal system has more exact fractions than a decimal system, which means less rounding up. Whereas only two numbers can divide 10 with nothing left over – 2 and 5 – a base 60 system has far more. Cleaner fractions means fewer approximations and more accurate maths, and the researchers suggest we can learn from it today.

Don’t want to cry wolf, but.. Be safe!

• Hurricane Harvey Has All the Ingredients to Become a Monster (AP)

Hurricane Harvey is following the perfect recipe to be a monster storm, meteorologists say. Warm water. Check. Calm air at 40,000 feet high. Check. Slow speed to dump maximum rain. Check. University of Miami senior hurricane researcher Brian McNoldy said Harvey combines the worst attributes of nasty recent Texas storms: The devastating storm surge of Hurricane Ike in 2008; the winds of Category 4 Hurricane Brett in 1999 and days upon days of heavy rain of Tropical Storm Allison in 2001. Rainfall is forecast to be as high as 35 inches through next Wednesday in some areas. Deadly storm surge — the push inwards of abnormally high ocean water above regular tides — could reach 12 feet, the National Hurricane Center warned, calling Harvey life-threatening. Harvey’s forecast path is the type that keeps it stronger longer with devastating rain and storm-force wind lasting for several days, not hours.

“It’s a very dangerous storm,” National Weather Service Director Louis Uccellini told AP. “It does have all the ingredients it needs to intensify. And we’re seeing that intensification occur quite rapidly.” Warm water is the fuel for hurricanes. It’s where storms get their energy. Water needs to be about 79 degrees (26 Celsius) or higher to sustain a hurricane, McNoldy said. Harvey is over part of the Gulf of Mexico where the water is about 87 degrees or 2 degrees above normal for this time of year, said Jeff Masters, a former hurricane hunter meteorologist and meteorology director of Weather Underground. A crucial factor is something called ocean heat content. It’s not just how warm the surface water is but how deep it goes. And Harvey is over an area where warm enough water goes about 330 feet (100 meters) deep, which is a very large amount of heat content, McNoldy said.

“It can sit there and spin and have plenty of warm water to work with,” McNoldy said. If winds at 40,000 feet high are strong in the wrong direction it can decapitate a hurricane. Strong winds high up remove the heat and moisture that hurricanes need near their center and also distort the shape. But the wind up there is weak so Harvey “is free to go nuts basically,” McNoldy said.

Debt Rattle August 29 2016

Aug 292016

August 29, 2016 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 5:01 am Finance Tagged with: Brexit, collapse, EU, Hillary, Jackson Hole, migrants, Third Pole, TTIP, Turkey, Yellen, yen 2 Responses »

DPC Up Sutter Street from Grant Avenue, San Francisco 1906

• Asia Currencies Head Down The Jackson Hole (CNBC)

• German Economy Minister Says EU-US TTiP Talks Have Failed (AP)

• UK Must Pay For Brexit Or EU Is In ‘Deep Trouble’, Says German Minister (G.)

• German Vice Chancellor Says Can’t See Turkey In EU Anytime Soon (R.)

• Brexit, Grexit: When The Sky Didn’t Fall (WSJ)

• TTIP’s ‘Failure’ Signals Clues About UK’s Post-Brexit Trading (Ind.)

• The 11 Bone-Chilling Things I Gleaned from Yellen’s Chart (WS)

• “If This Does Not Disqualify Hillary For The Presidency, What Will?” (ZH)

• There Is A Third Pole On Earth, And It’s Melting Quickly (WEF)

• Italy Rescues 1,100 Migrants In Mediterranean In One Day (R.)

• What Life Will Be Like After An Economic Collapse (Stewart)

Travel day today, so an early Debt Rattle

Abe won’t mind.

• Asia Currencies Head Down The Jackson Hole (CNBC)

The newly resurgent dollar pressured Asian currencies as markets revived bets that the U.S. Federal Reserve could possibly raise interest rates as soon as next month. The advances in regional currencies were substantial. The dollar was fetching 102.03 yen at 9:51 a.m. HK/SIN, after flirting with levels around 100 yen just before the Fed’s conclave in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. The Australian dollar also felt the sting, fetching $0.7534 Monday morning, down from nearly $0.77 on Friday. The Singapore dollar was also lower, with the greenback fetching S$1.3614 Monday morning, up from as little as S$1.3469 on Friday.

The Malaysian ringgit also fell, with the dollar fetching 4.0425 ringgit on Monday morning, compared with as little as 4.0100 ringgit on Friday. The dollar index, which measures the greenback’s performance against a basket of currencies, jumped to 95.525 on Monday morning, from as low as 94.246 on Friday. Analysts pointed to Fed Chair Janet Yellen’s speech at the conclave on Friday as the reason for the newly resurgent dollar. While markets still saw December as the most likely timing for a Fed rate hike, Yellen opened the door to a September hike when she said the case for a rate hike strengthened in recent months.

Not making Merkel happy.

• German Economy Minister Says EU-US TTiP Talks Have Failed (AP)

Free trade talks between the European Union and the United States have failed, Germany’s economy minister said Sunday, citing a lack of progress on any of the major sections of the long-running negotiations. Both Washington and Brussels have pushed for a deal by the end of the year, despite strong misgivings among some EU member states over the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, or TTIP. Sigmar Gabriel, who is also Germany’s vice chancellor, compared the TTIP negotiations unfavorably with a free trade deal forged between the 28-nation EU and Canada, which he said was fairer for both sides. “In my opinion, the negotiations with the United States have de facto failed, even though nobody is really admitting it,” Gabriel said during a question-and-answer session with citizens in Berlin.

He noted that in 14 rounds of talks, the two sides haven’t agreed on a single common item out of 27 chapters being discussed. Gabriel accused Washington of being “angry” about the deal that the EU struck with Canada, known as CETA, because it contains elements the U.S. doesn’t want to see in the TTIP. “We mustn’t submit to the American proposals,” said Gabriel, who is also the head of Germany’s center-left Social Democratic Party. In Washington, there was no immediate comment from the office of the U.S. trade representative. Christian Wigand, a spokesman for the European Commission, the EU’s executive arm and which is leading the TTIP negotiations, said Sunday that the institution had no comment or reaction at this time.

Gabriel’s ministry isn’t directly involved in the negotiations with Washington because trade agreements are negotiated at the EU level. But such a damning verdict from a leading official in Europe’s biggest economy is likely to make further talks between the EU executive and the Obama administration harder. Gabriel’s comments contrast with those of Chancellor Angela Merkel, who said last month that TTIP was “absolutely in Europe’s interest.” Popular opposition to a free trade agreement with the United States is strong in Germany. Campaigners have called for nationwide protests against the talks on Sept. 17 — about year before Germany’s next general election.

Same guy.

• UK Must Pay For Brexit Or EU Is In ‘Deep Trouble’, Says German Minister (G.)

German economy minister Sigmar Gabriel has said that Britain must not be allowed to “keep the nice things” that come with EU membership without taking responsibility for the fallout from Brexit. As Theresa May called a cabinet meeting to discuss the UK government’s Brexit strategy on Wednesday, Gabriel warned if the issue was badly handled and other member countries followed Britain’s lead, Europe would go “down the drain”. “Brexit is bad but it won’t hurt us as much economically as some fear – it’s more of a psychological problem and it’s a huge problem politically,” he told a news conference. The world now regarded Europe as an unstable continent, said Gabriel, who is the deputy to chancellor Angela Merkel in Germany’s governing coalition. “If we organise Brexit in the wrong way, then we’ll be in deep trouble, so now we need to make sure that we don’t allow Britain to keep the nice things, so to speak, related to Europe while taking no responsibility,” Gabriel said.

Still same guy.

• German Vice Chancellor Says Can’t See Turkey In EU Anytime Soon (R.)

German Vice Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel said on Sunday he did not see Turkey joining the EU during his political career, adding that the bloc would not be in a position to take Turkey in even if Ankara met all the entry requirements tomorrow. Turkey started talks about joining the European Union in 2005 but has made little progress despite an initial burst of reforms. Many EU countries are wary about the possibility of the large, mainly Muslim country becoming a member of the bloc and Europe has long worried that Turkey’s anti-terrorism laws are used to quash dissent. A crackdown since a failed July 15 coup in Turkey has fueled tension between Ankara and Brussels.

“Even if you’re very optimistic about my political career, I certainly won’t see Turkey becoming a member of this EU,” Gabriel, 56, told a news conference on Sunday. “With the state we’re in, we’re not even in a position to take in a city state,” said Gabriel, leader of the Social Democrats (SPD) – the junior coalition partner in Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government. He said one logistical problem was Turkey’s large population, which stands at about 79 million according to the World Bank. “How would that work in a European Union that is currently losing one of its most important member states, that has been rattled, that doesn’t know how it should reorganise itself?,” he added, referring to Britain’s recent vote to leave the bloc.

He said Turkey might instead, in the distant future, become a partner “in an outer ring” of a changed EU. Earlier this month, Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said his government could stop helping to stem the flow of refugees and migrants to Europe if Brussels failed to relax travel rules for Turks from October. Visa-free access to the EU — the main reward for Ankara’s collaboration in choking off the influx of migrants — has been subject to delays due to a dispute over the anti-terrorism legislation, as well as the post-coup crackdown. Gabriel said in an interview on Saturday that Merkel’s conservatives had “underestimated” the challenge of integrating record migrant arrivals.

Problem of course is there are no markets, there are only central banks. So no price discovery.

• Brexit, Grexit: When The Sky Didn’t Fall (WSJ)

Some economists warned the U.S. congressional budget battles in 2013, which led to sharp spending cuts known as sequestration, could throw the economy back into recession. The economy grew 2.7% that year. Then, in 2010 and 2012, some economists warned the Federal Reserve’s massive bond-buying program would cause hyperinflation, soaring commodity prices and a collapse of the dollar. Nothing of the sort occurred. Warnings abounded in 2015 that if Greece rejected an international bailout, it could spark a sovereign default or a banking crisis or Greece being cast off the euro. Greece’s economy is far from a success story, but it hasn’t gone bankrupt. Its banking system has been battered and drained of deposits, but hasn’t collapsed. It remains in the euro.

So what about Brexit? It’s now been two months since British voters on June 23 cast their ballots to exit from the European Union, and it’s becoming unclear if the recession so many feared will materialize—at least in the near term. It’s worth revisiting the level of concern prior to the vote. George Osborne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, said a vote for Brexit would cause a “DIY recession.” In the immediate aftermath of the vote, many market economists forecast recession would begin almost immediately. In the days after the vote, global stock markets indeed fell sharply. Perhaps if it had been just a little bit worse, a broader panic would have sent things into a spiral. Instead, markets have rebounded. The FTSE 100 climbed to near-record levels by the middle of August. Nor has the wider economy shown many signs of a coming downturn.

What good’s a clue if you’re clueless?

• TTIP’s ‘Failure’ Signals Clues About UK’s Post-Brexit Trading (Ind.)

The apparent failure of the EU-US trade talks signalled by German Vice-Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel should come as little surprise – for good and bad reasons – and contains some interesting clues about the UK’s post-Brexit trading future. One “good” reason for the negotiators being unable to agree so far on a single chapter of the 27 in the draft Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership is that the Europeans are deeply suspicious about how much power will be given to large multinational companies in the process. The secret “court” for settling disputes is absurdly opaque and unaccountable, for example. That would be bad enough across most areas of the economy, but when it impinges on the way the NHS operates for the public good, it is plainly unacceptable.

Anti-business sentiment is often facile and hypocritical, or worse, but TTIP just offers up too many egregious potential abuses to be comfortable with. It could be made more politically palatable, at any rate, and we should always remember that free trade is good for the long-term prosperity of all. Globalisation, unfashionable as it is, has done more good than harm, not least lifting 500 million Chinese out of poverty. TTIP could be made to work, in other words. The “bad” reason for the difficulties TTIP finds itself in is because the EU’s disparate membership can’t agree on what they want, as so often. This, then, supports the Leave camp who argue that the very size and complexity of the EU makes important trade deals such as this impossible to secure. They point to similar failures on EU trade with China and India.

As I’ve said so often: They have no clue.

• The 11 Bone-Chilling Things I Gleaned from Yellen’s Chart (WS)

At the Symposium in Jackson Hole, so feverishly anticipated by the entire world, Fed Chair Janet Yellen gave an even more feverishly anticipated speech on Friday, in which she said the same stuff she’d been saying all along, such as these nuggets: “And, as ever, the economic outlook is uncertain, and so monetary policy is not on a preset course.” “Our ability to predict how the federal funds rate will evolve over time is quite limited because monetary policy will need to respond to whatever disturbances may buffet the economy.” To document this, she supplied the fan chart below, adding this explanation: “The line in the center is the median path for the federal funds rate based on the FOMC’s Summary of Economic Projections in June.” “The shaded region, which is based on the historical accuracy of private and government forecasters, shows a 70% probability that the federal funds rate will be between 0 and 3.25% at the end of next year and between 0 and 4.5% at the end of 2018.”

1. They have no clue about what might happen next. Their forecasts and “forward guidance” are either figments of their imagination or just efforts to manipulate the markets.

2. They have no clue how to get out of what initially was an emergency treatment of a Fed-sponsored financial system in full and self-inflicted collapse, but is now the “new normal” treatment for an economy buckling under its Fed-encouraged debt.

[..] 11. They’re trying to make us forget how long this insanity has been going on. Yellen’s chart begins in Q1 2015. But the Fed’s historic craziness began in 2008. So that we can remember for just how long the Fed has inflicted its policies on the economy, I have added to Yellen’s chart the prior six years, for a total of eight years. It shows that they have no clue about how to get back to normal, and that they have instead changed the definition of normal:

Tyler.

• “If This Does Not Disqualify Hillary For The Presidency, What Will?” (ZH)

This is the week that the steady drip, drip, drip of details about Hillary Clinton’s server turned into a waterfall. This is the week that we finally learned why Mrs. Clinton used a private communications setup, and what it hid. This is the week, in short, that we found out that the infamous server was designed to hide that Mrs. Clinton for three years served as the U.S. Secretary of the Clinton Foundation.

In March this column argued that while Mrs. Clinton’s mishandling of classified information was important, it missed the bigger point. The Democratic nominee obviously didn’t set up her server with the express purpose of exposing national secrets—that was incidental. She set up the server to keep secret the details of the Clintons’ private life—a life built around an elaborate and sweeping money-raising and self-promoting entity known as the Clinton Foundation.

Had Secretary Clinton kept the foundation at arm’s length while in office—as obvious ethical standards would have dictated—there would never have been any need for a private server, or even private email. The vast majority of her electronic communications would have related to her job at the State Department, with maybe that occasional yoga schedule. And those Freedom of Information Act officers would have had little difficulty—when later going through a state.gov email—screening out the clearly “personal” before making her records public. This is how it works for everybody else.

Mrs. Clinton’s problem—as we now know from this week’s release of emails from Huma Abedin’s private Clinton-server account—was that there was no divide between public and private. Mrs. Clinton’s State Department and her family foundation were one seamless entity—employing the same people, comparing schedules, mixing foundation donors with State supplicants. This is why she maintained a secret server, and why she deleted 15,000 emails that should have been turned over to the government.

Most of the focus on this week’s Abedin emails has centered on the disturbing examples of Clinton Foundation executive Doug Band negotiating State favors for foundation donors. But equally instructive in the 725 pages released by Judicial Watch is the frequency and banality of most of the email interaction. Mr. Band asks if Hillary’s doing this conference, or having that meeting, and when she’s going to Brazil. Ms. Abedin responds that she’s working on it, or will get this or that answer. These aren’t the emails of mere casual acquaintances; they don’t even bother with salutations or signoffs. These are the emails of two people engaged in the same purpose—serving the State-Clinton Foundation nexus.

The other undernoted but important revelation is that the media has been looking in the wrong place. The focus is on Mrs. Clinton’s missing emails, and no doubt those 15,000 FBI-recovered texts contain nuggets. Then again, Mrs. Clinton was a busy woman, and most of the details of her daily State/foundation life would have been handled by trusted aides. This is why they, too, had private email. Top marks to Judicial Watch for pursuing Ms. Abedin’s file from the start. A new urgency needs to go into seeing similar emails of former Clinton Chief of Staff Cheryl Mills.

Mostly, we learned this week that Mrs. Clinton’s foundation issue goes far beyond the “appearance” of a conflict of interest. This is straight-up pay to play. When Mr. Band sends an email demanding a Hillary meeting with the crown prince of Bahrain and notes that he’s a “good friend of ours,” what Mr. Band means is that the crown prince had contributed millions to a Clinton Global Initiative scholarship program, and therefore has bought face time. It doesn’t get more clear-cut, folks. That’s highlighted by the Associated Press’s extraordinary finding this week that of the 154 outside people Mrs. Clinton met with in the first years of her tenure, more than half were Clinton Foundation donors. Clinton apologists, like Vox’s Matthew Yglesias, are claiming that statistic is overblown, because the 154 doesn’t include thousands of meetings held with foreign diplomats and U.S. officials.

Nice try. As the nation’s top diplomat, Mrs. Clinton was obliged to meet with diplomats and officials—not with others. Only a blessed few outsiders scored meetings with the harried secretary of state and, surprise, most of the blessed were Clinton Foundation donors. Mrs. Clinton’s only whisper of grace is that it remains (as it always does in potential cases of corruption) hard to connect the dots. There are “quids” (foundation donations) and “quos” (Bahrain arms deals) all over the place, but no precise evidence of “pros.” Count on the Clinton menagerie to dwell in that sliver of a refuge.

But does it even matter? What we discovered this week is that one of the nation’s top officials created a private server that housed proof that she continued a secret, ongoing entwinement with her family foundation – despite ethics agreements – and that she destroyed public records. If that alone doesn’t disqualify her for the presidency, it’s hard to know what would.

Lest we forget.

• There Is A Third Pole On Earth, And It’s Melting Quickly (WEF)

When we think of the world’s polar regions, only two usually spring to mind – the North and South. However, there is a region to the south of China and the north of India that is known as the “Third Pole”. That’s because it is the third largest area of frozen water on the planet. Although much smaller than its north and south counterparts, it is still enormous, covering 100,000 square kilometres with some 46,000 glaciers. Scientists conducting research in the area have warned of disturbing global warming trends, and how, if they continue, they could affect the lives of 1.3 billion people. What happens to ice in the polar regions is taken as clear evidence of climate change. When the ice melts, we know that the planet is warming up.

The Earth’s north and south extremities are crucial for regulating the climate, and at the same time are particularly sensitive to global warming. The Third Pole, because it is high above sea level, is also sensitive to changes in temperatures. It also powers life for many thousands of miles. It is estimated that the water that flows from the Third Pole supports 120 million people directly through irrigation systems, and a total of 1.3 billion indirectly through river basins in China, India, Nepal, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan. That’s nearly one fifth of the world’s population.

It is remote – the region encompasses the Himalaya-Hindu Kush mountain ranges and the Tibetan Plateau – but 10 of Asia’s largest rivers begin here, including the Yellow river and Yangtze river in China, the Irrawaddy river in Myanmar, the Ganges, which flows through India and Bangladesh, and the trans-boundary Mekong river. Australian TV company ABC was recently invited to visit one of the remote research stations in the Third Pole by lead researcher, Professor Qin Xiang. Scientists have been gathering data from this remote area for over 50 years, and recent findings are disturbing. Among them, the fact that temperatures there have increased by 1.5 degrees – more than double the global average.

As the fighting continues.

• Italy Rescues 1,100 Migrants In Mediterranean In One Day (R.)

About 1,100 migrants were rescued from boats in the Strait of Sicily on Sunday as they tried to reach Europe, Italy’s coastguard said. The migrants were picked up from eight rubber dinghies, one large boat and two punts through 11 rescue operations in the Mediterranean, the coastguard said in a statement. It did not mention the migrants’ country of origin. Latest data from the International Organization for Migration, released on Friday, said some 105,342 migrants have reached Italy by boat this year, many of them setting sail from Libya. An estimated 2,726 men, women and children have died over the same period trying to make the journey, often dangerously packed into small vessels unsuitable for the voyage. Italy has been on the front line of Europe’s migrant crisis for three years, and more than 400,000 have successfully made the voyage to Italy from North Africa since the beginning of 2014, fleeing violence and poverty.

A useful and thorough reminder.

• What Life Will Be Like After An Economic Collapse (Stewart)

If you have been waiting for a public announcement or news headline to let you know that an economic collapse has begun, you are in for the surprise of your life. If history in other countries and in Detroit, Michigan is any indication, there won’t be an announcement. An economic collapse tends to sneak up on a city, region, or country gradually over time. In some cases, the arrival of an economic collapse is so gradual that most people living in it aren’t even aware of it at first. Things just get gradually worse, often so gradually that people and families adjust as best they can until one day they actually realize that it’s not just their home or their neighborhood that has been hit so hard financially, it’s everyone. By that time, it’s often too late to take preventative action.

In March of 2011, Detroit’s population was reported as having fallen to 713,777, the lowest it had been in a century and a full 25% drop from 2000. In December 2011, the state announced its intention to formally review Detroit’s finances. In May of 2013, almost two years later, the city is deemed “clearly insolvent” and in July of 2013, the state representative filed a Chapter 9 bankruptcy petition for Motor City. Detroit became one of the biggest cities to file bankruptcy in history. So we have only to look at what happened in Detroit, Michigan post-bankruptcy, to get an indication of what might soon be widespread across the United States and what is already widespread in countries like Brazil and Venezuela.

Grocery stores and other businesses will fail one by one or be shut down from the riots and looting. In Detroit, the economic collapse left less than 5 national grocery stores for over 700,000 people. Imagine the lines even if food was still being shipped in on trucks. Small independent corner stores and family owned stores become the most convenient place to shop. These are stores with already high prices who make most of their profit from beer, wine, lottery, and cigarettes. Now imagine that shipping schedules have been affected by the economic crisis, this would mean longer lines with less certainty that any food would even be available once you got into the store to shop. People in Venezuela are actually dealing with government-run grocery stores and are limited to two days per week they can shop.

Debt Rattle August 27 2016

Aug 272016

August 27, 2016 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 9:22 am Finance Tagged with: BleachBit, Brexit, future, Hillary, Jackson Hole, pensions, religion, stimulus, trust 10 Responses »

Jack Delano Mother of three, wiper at the roundhouse. Chicago & North Western R.R.” 1943

• America’s Biggest Economic Problem: Nobody Is Investing For Tomorrow. (MW)

• The Stimulus Our Economy Needs (Da Costa)

• Grim Employment Prospects For Young People Around The World (Economist)

• Fed’s Jackson Hole Circus

• Bill Gross Says Yellen’s Economy ‘May Never Walk Normally Again’ (BBG)

• Losses Piling Up for S&P 500 as Weekly Drop Is Worst Since June (BBG)

• World’s Biggest Pension Fund Loses $52 Billion in Q2 Stock Rout (BBG)

• Why No One Trusts China’s Markets (Balding)

• Theresa May Will Trigger Brexit Negotiations Without Commons Vote (Tel.)

• BleachBit Brags It “Stifled FBI Investigation” Of Hillary Clinton (ZH)

• Majority Of Greek Properties Valued Under €50,000 (Kath.)

• We Don’t Know What We Are Talking About When We Talk About Religion (Taleb)

“America’s Investment In Its Own Future Is In A Depression”. As epitomized by share buybacks. Which in turn are simply an expression of ‘the thing that shall not be mentioned’: a lack of confidence in growth, and in the economy as a whole. Why invest when there will be no return?

• America’s Biggest Economic Problem: Nobody Is Investing For Tomorrow. (MW)

The U.S. economy, by some measures, has recovered from the Great Recession: The unemployment rate is only half what it was at the worst, real gross domestic product is about 10% larger than the previous peak, and personal wealth has risen by more than $20 trillion as the stock market and the housing market have bounced back. But everyone knows the recovery has been uneven. Total employment may have grown by 6 million since the recession began in 2008, but employment in manufacturing is down nearly 1.5 million. Real disposable incomes may be up by 16%, but because most of the increase has been captured by the richest sliver of society, the median family’s annual inflation-adjusted income is still down more than $3,000.

Most troubling, there’s still very little investment in the buildings, equipment and intellectual property that we ought to be putting into place today as the foundation of our prosperity tomorrow. Who’s preparing the United States for the 21st century? Nobody, really. Not the 22 million private businesses, not the 118 million households, and not the 90,000 state, local or federal government agencies. Since the recession, investments have fallen sharply, and they haven’t gotten back up again. It seems that everyone is still scarred by the Great Recession, and by the collapse of asset bubbles in 2000 and 2006. Gross domestic investment totaled about $3.6 trillion in the second quarter of 2016, about 20% of gross domestic product. That may seem a large sum, but it’s the lowest share of GDP, except during recessions, since 1947.

And, unfortunately, even that weak number grossly exaggerates the actual contribution of this investment in creating new productive capacity for the economy. Why is the figure exaggerated? Because these data are reported on a gross basis, without subtracting the depreciation of capital assets such as equipment, buildings, software and the like. After you subtract the capital that’s used up, net investment totaled only about $750 billion in the second quarter, or 4% of GDP, about half of the average over the post-war period. In fact, net investment has been running at the lowest rates since the Great Depression of the 1930s, suggesting that U.S. investment itself is in a depression.

Makes some sense, but relies too much on the assumption that policy makers know what they do. They don’t.

• The Stimulus Our Economy Needs (Da Costa)

All told, nearly 9 million jobs were lost during the 2007-2009 slump, not counting the new jobs that were needed to keep up with population growth. The unemployment rate more than doubled to a peak of 10.2% in October 2009 and took seven years to get back to around 5%, seen as normal. Even the current 4.9% rate is seen as a poor depiction of the U.S. labor market’s actual ongoing weakness. So what would a constructive pro-jobs policy of employment insurance look like? It could take many forms, and, despite any central bank role in funding the stimulus, the decision on how to spend the money would remain fully accountable to the democratic process — in the hands of elected lawmakers.

One approach might see Congress adopt a mandate similar to the one it assigned the Fed itself — to maintain low and stable prices while striving for maximum sustainable employment. Such a goal would offer clearer guidelines for when a program of budget spending aided by central bank intervention might be needed, like determining what thresholds of economic pain might trigger its launch. Rather than relying on a spotty, limited system of jobless benefits that can leave the unemployed in or close to poverty, wouldn’t it be better to directly create government jobs in areas where the private sector appears to be falling short?

Employer-of-last-resort-type policies, as proposed by the economist Hyman Minsky, where the government generates employment in socially useful sectors that are underserved by the private sector alone — including infrastructure, education, health care, child and elderly care, and the arts — could be optimal. After all, most people would agree instinctively with Article 23 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the U.N. in 1948, which states, “Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favourable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment.”

Same difference: no investments in the future.

• Grim Employment Prospects For Young People Around The World (Economist)

A new report from the International Labour Organisation has provided a snapshot of job prospects for young people around the world. Things have worsened this year following a period of slight improvement. Unemployment among 15-24-year-olds has risen to 13.1% in 2016 and is close to its historic peak of 2013. The rate is highest in Arab countries, at 30.6%, and lowest in East Asia, at 10.7%. The report also finds that even where jobs are available to young people, they often fail to provide secure incomes.

Youth unemployment is typically lower in poorer countries than in rich ones. This is because workers in less-developed countries have to take work just to make ends meet and, with few choices, end up in low-paid jobs with no security. Even in richer countries, the young often end up in less-secure employment than the older generation. In 2015, 25% of young workers in OECD countries were in temporary jobs and 26% were employed part-time, often on an involuntary basis. Those rates are more than twice as high as for workers aged 25 to 54.

In fact, young people with jobs are now at greater risk of living in poverty than the elderly in some rich countries. This is especially true in places where there has been a sharp economic shock, such as Greece, Romania and Spain. The need to work to supplement household income in the short-term creates a vicious cycle in which the young forgo training in the skills required for better long-term job prospects. Given the bleak future faced by many, it is little surprise that 40% of 15-29-year-olds in Africa, eastern Europe and Latin America would countenance a permanent move abroad.

“Friday, almost six years to the day, marked the anniversary of former Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke’s address to the Jackson Hole confab, at which he outlined the second phase of quantitative easing [..] Since then, Wilshire Associates estimates the value of U.S. equities has increased by over 100%, some $13.3 trillion..”

• Fed’s Jackson Hole Circus

The Fed has fueled the populism that has thrown this year’s U.S. elections into an unprecedented tizzy, the Journal wrote in more considered terms in a page-one feature on Friday. While the central bank dealt forcefully with the 2007-08 financial crisis, it failed to anticipate it and subsequently failed to bring about a recovery worthy of the name. What it has accomplished is a massive inflation, not of consumer prices—as officially measured, at least—but of asset prices. Friday, almost six years to the day, marked the anniversary of former Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke’s address to the Jackson Hole confab, at which he outlined the second phase of quantitative easing (central bank–speak for securities purchases to pump money into the financial system), which was popularly dubbed QE2.

Since then, Wilshire Associates estimates the value of U.S. equities has increased by over 100%, some $13.3 trillion. Since Bernanke outlined QE3 in September 2012, U.S. equities are up about 50%, or $8.6 trillion, by Wilshire’s reckoning. In the process, interest rates have hovered at or near record-low levels, tonic for asset values but poison for savers. The uneven impact of the Fed’s policies among the haves and have-nots has further stoked resentment against the monetary authorities. Low yields and inflated asset prices mean modest future returns for all. But though it is equally illegal for the beggar and the king to sleep under the bridge, low returns are less of a burden for those who have already accumulated wealth than for those who have not.

None of this sociology and politics should influence the Fed, but it is an inescapable backdrop to policy decisions. Based on the data on which the central bank professes to depend, the “case for an increase in the federal-funds rate has strengthened in recent months,” Yellen said in her much-anticipated address to the Jackson Hole gathering.

“Credit-enhanced cycles come to worse ends than the normal kind.”

• Bill Gross Says Yellen’s Economy ‘May Never Walk Normally Again’ (BBG)

Bill Gross, the billionaire Janus Capital Group Inc. money manager, criticized Fed Chair Janet Yellen’s suggestion that she could consider further asset purchases as the equivalent of “providing a walker or a wheelchair for an ailing economy.” Yellen, speaking Friday at a conference of central bankers and economists in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, said while the U.S. economy has strengthened to the point that interest rate hikes are possible, further asset purchases must remain part of the Fed’s toolkit. Gross, who runs the $1.5 billion Janus Global Unconstrained Bond Fund, has long criticized central bankers in the U.S., Europe and Japan for keeping interest rates ultra-low and artificially inflating asset prices without adding sustainable economic growth.

“She is opening the door to creating even greater asset bubbles as have the BOJ and ECB and SNB by purchasing corporate bonds and stocks,” Gross wrote Friday in an e-mail response to questions. “This is not capitalism. This is providing a walker or a wheelchair for an ailing economy. It may never walk normally again if monetary policy continues in this direction.” Gross said Yellen’s comments didn’t take a September rate hike off the table, especially if job growth is healthy. The Labor Department reports August employment data on Sept. 2. The probability of a hike at the Sept. 21 Fed meeting has risen to 38% from 15% two weeks ago, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

“To the extent that next month we see a decent job growth number, then I think for sure or close to for sure, you know, in September we’re going to see a Fed hike of 25 basis points,” Gross said in an interview on CNBC. “The market hadn’t expected that.” Tad Rivelle, chief investment officer of fixed income at TCW Group, warned that central bank intervention to keep rates low and prop up asset prices may worsen the impact of an inevitable end to the current credit cycle. “Every cycle in human history has ultimately come to an end,” Rivelle, who helps oversee $195 billion for TCW, said in a Bloomberg Television interview Friday. “Credit-enhanced cycles come to worse ends than the normal kind.”

“Not since the presidential administration of Lyndon B. Johnson have stocks done so little for so long.”

• Losses Piling Up for S&P 500 as Weekly Drop Is Worst Since June (BBG)

What had been just a sleepy August is turning into an increasingly painful one for U.S. equity market bulls. Notwithstanding an hour-long burst of optimism that followed Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen’s policy speech Friday, the buoyancy that lifted stocks for the first half of the summer has now been missing for the better part of a month. The S&P 500 Index fell 0.7% to 2,169.04 this week, the biggest drop since June, to erase its August gains. Not since the presidential administration of Lyndon B. Johnson have stocks done so little for so long. Unable to break out of a 1.5% band for more than 30 days, the market is locked in its tightest trading range since the end of 1965 amid confusion about Federal Reserve policy and the outlook for earnings.

While losses remain tiny day to day, they’re starting to pile up, with the S&P 500 declining in five of the last six sessions. The Dow Jones Industrial Average slipped 157.17 points in the week to 18,395.4, while the Nasdaq Composite Index retreated 0.4% to 5,218.92. At about 5.8 billion shares, daily volume in U.S. exchanges was lower this week than in any non-holiday period since June 2015. “Once we dug into the report from Yellen, it was kind of a non-event, and we’re ending in the same range we started the week,” Chris Gaffney, president of world markets at St. Louis-based EverBank, said by phone. “The data we got this week was mixed. There’s no clear direction and that’s why we’re sitting in these ranges.”

Guess the Japanese simply don’t understand what Abe does to their pensions.

• World’s Biggest Pension Fund Loses $52 Billion in Q2 Stock Rout (BBG)

The world’s biggest pension fund posted a $52 billion loss last quarter as stocks tumbled and the yen surged, wiping out all investment gains since it overhauled its strategy by boosting shares and cutting bonds. Japan’s Government Pension Investment Fund lost 3.9%, or 5.2 trillion yen ($52 billion), in the three months ended June 30, reducing assets to 129.7 trillion yen, it said in Tokyo on Friday. That erases a 4.1 trillion yen investing return for the previous six quarters starting October 2014, the month it decided to put half its assets into equities. The quarterly decline follows a 5.3 trillion yen loss in the fiscal year through March, the worst annual performance since the global financial crisis.

After benefiting from a surge in Japanese equities and a weaker yen earlier in Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s term, GPIF has posted losses as domestic stocks tumble and gains in the currency reduce the value of overseas assets. Still, for Sumitomo Mitsui Trust Bank Ltd., that’s no reason to veer from the current approach. “Since its investments are tied to market moves, it’s natural that this would happen and there’s no point looking at it with a short-term view,” said Ayako Sera, a Tokyo-based market strategist at the bank. “GPIF is so big that its losses look huge even though the fluctuations in its investments just mirror the market.”

“Regulators assess a company’s balance sheet and history, mandate an offering price, and then let the market figure out who might be lying or hiding things.”

• Why No One Trusts China’s Markets (Balding)

When China’s top securities regulator said recently that it plans to delist Dandong Xintai Electric for falsifying initial public offering documents, it didn’t grab many headlines. But it suggested some far-reaching changes may be afoot. Xintai is the first company to be expelled from Shenzhen’s ChiNext board for such an offense, and one of only a handful that have ever been delisted in China. Its expulsion suggests that regulators are facing up to some unfortunate truths about China’s capital markets. Those markets are, in important ways, only superficially market-like. In the stock market, the government has intervened on a huge scale to prop up prices. Investment in the bond market is overwhelmingly directed to state-owned enterprises. There’s no derivatives market to speak of.

Financial disclosures are often implausible, suspicions of insider trading are rife and doubts about corporate governance are widespread. All these are symptoms of a common ailment: a regulatory system focused not on disclosure and market mechanics but on setting asset prices and allocating returns. In most countries, when companies are considering an IPO, regulators require them to accurately disclose information, then let markets dictate prices. In China, the reverse holds true: Regulators assess a company’s balance sheet and history, mandate an offering price, and then let the market figure out who might be lying or hiding things. The result is that investors, both domestic and foreign, have lost confidence in China’s markets.

Foreign portfolio investment into China is down 60%, year over year, through July. MSCI has repeatedly declined to include China’s domestic equities in its benchmark indexes. Even the much-celebrated Chinese retail investor is staying on the sidelines: Individual investment accounts holding less than 500,000 yuan declined to 46.8 million last month, from 47.4 million in July 2015. This credibility deficit affects all areas of the markets. Major Chinese commercial banks have been trading at a price-to-equity ratio of about five – compared to an average of about 12 for commercial banks elsewhere – because investors think their loan portfolios are much worse off than they’re letting on.

Somone will try to stop her.

• Theresa May Will Trigger Brexit Negotiations Without Commons Vote (Tel.)

Theresa May will not hold a parliamentary vote on Brexit before opening negotiations to formally trigger Britain’s withdrawal from the European Union, The Telegraph has learned. Opponents of Brexit claim that because the EU referendum result is advisory it must be approved by a vote in the Commons before Article 50 – the formal mechanism to leave the EU – is triggered. However, in a move which will cheer Eurosceptics, The Telegraph has learned that Mrs May will invoke Article 50 without a vote in Parliament It had been suggested – by Tony Blair, the former Labour Prime Minister, and Owen Smith, the Labour leadership candidate, among others – that Remain-supporting MPs could use a Parliamentary vote to stop Brexit.

But sources say that because Mrs May believes that “Brexit means Brexit” she will not offer opponents the opportunity to stall Britain’s withdrawal from the EU. A Downing Street source said: “The Prime Minister has been absolutely clear that the British public have voted and now she will get on with delivering Brexit.” Mrs May has consulted Government lawyers who have told the Prime Minister she has the executive power to invoke Article 50 and begin the formal process of exiting the European Union without a vote in Parliament. Her decision will come as a blow to Remain campaigners, who had been hoping to use Parliament to delay or halt Brexit entirely.

And it will yet get crazier.

• BleachBit Brags It “Stifled FBI Investigation” Of Hillary Clinton (ZH)

Yesterday we noted that South Carolina Representative Trey Gowdy revealed that Hillary had used a software called “BleachBit” to wipe her servers clean. Gowdy, appearing on Fox News, suggested that using a software like “BleachBit” undermines her claims that she only deleted innocuous “personal” emails from her private server. Specifically, Gowdy told Fox News:

“If she considered them to be personal, then she and her lawyers had those emails deleted. They didn’t just push the delete button, they had them deleted where even God can’t read them. “They were using something called BleachBit. You don’t use BleachBit for yoga emails.” “When you’re using BleachBit, it is something you really do not want the world to see.”

Now, the BleachBit team is using the whole controversy as a marketing tool with a note on their website entitled “BleachBit stifles investigation of Hillary Clinton.” The site even incorporates the now-famous Clinton gaffe where she asked reporters if they wanted to know whether she had wiped her servers clean “like with a cloth or something” pointing out that “it turns out now that BleachBit was that cloth.”

Last year when Clinton was asked about wiping her email server, she joked, “Like with a cloth or something?” It turns out now that BleachBit was that cloth.

The BleachBit team also points out that they have not been served with any warrants or subpoenas at this time even though it doesn’t really matter because the “cleaning process is not reversible.”

As of the time of writing BleachBit has not been served a warrant or subpoena in relation to the investigation. BleachBit is free of charge to use in any environment whether it is personal, commercial, educational, or governmental, and the cleaning process is not reversible.

Finally, BleachBit points out they’re receiving overwhelming interest from folks looking to permanently erase yoga and bridesmaid emails and/or other similar incriminating information.

Compare that to other EU nations.

• Majority Of Greek Properties Valued Under €50,000 (Kath.)

74% of real estate owners in Greece have property whose taxable value does not exceed 100,000 euros, according to data published on Friday by the Finance Ministry. More precisely, one in two own property that is valued by tax authorities at 50,000 euros or less, while just 8% of real estate owners have property worth between 100,000 and 200,000 euros. The total taxable value of the properties owned by the two groups has been calculated by the ministry, respectively, at 63.6 billion euros and 132 billion euros.

Taleb targets Salafism.

• We Don’t Know What We Are Talking About When We Talk About Religion (Taleb)

People rarely mean the same thing when they say “religion”, nor do they realize that they don’t mean the same thing. For early Jews and Muslims, religion was law. Din means law in Hebrew and religion in Arabic. For early Jews, religion was also tribal; for early Muslims, it was universal[i]. For the Romans, religion was social events, rituals, and festivals –the word religio was a counter to superstitio, and while present in the Roman zeitgeist had no equivalent concept in the Greek-Byzantine East[ii]. Law was procedurally and mechanically its own thing, and early Christianity, thanks to Saint Augustine, stayed relatively away from the law, and, later, remembering its foundations, had an uneasy relation with it. For instance, even during the Inquisition, a lay court handled the sentencing.

The difference is marked in that Christian Aramaic uses a different word: din for religion and nomous (from the Greek) for law. Jesus, with his imperative “give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar”, separated the holy and the profane: Christianity was for another domain, “the kingdom to come”, only merged with this one in the eschaton. Neither Islam nor Judaism have a marked separation between holy and profane. And of course Christianity moved away from the solely-spiritual domain to embrace the ceremonial and ritualistic, integrating much of the pagan rites of the Levant and Asia Minor.

For Jews today, religion became ethnocultural, without the law – and for many, a nation. Same for Syriacs, Chaldeans, Armenians, Copts, and Maronites. For Orthodox and Catholic Christians religion is aesthetics, pomp and rituals, plus or minus some beliefs, often decorative. For most Protestants, religion is belief with neither aesthetics, pomp nor law.

Further East, for Buddhists, Shintoists and Hindus, religion is practical and spiritual philosophy, with a code of ethics (and for some, cosmogony). So when Hindu talk about the Hindu “religion” they don’t mean the same thing to a Pakistani as it would to a Hindu, and certainly something different for a Persian. When the nation-state idea came about, things got much, much more complicated. When an Arab now says “Jew” he largely means something about a creed; to Arabs, a converted Jew is no longer a Jew. But for a Jew, a Jew is someone whose mother is a Jew. (This has not always been the case: Jews were quite proselytic during the early Roman empire). But Judaism, thanks to modernism, somewhat merged into nation-state, and now can also mean a nation.