Nov 142016
 
 November 14, 2016  Posted by at 9:57 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,


Wyland Stanley Transparent Car, General Motors exhibit, San Francisco 1940

Era of Low Interest Rates Hammers Millions of Pensions Around the World (WSJ)
President Trump Will Fumigate The Fed (Mises Inst.)
Teslas in the Trailer Park: California Faces Its Housing Squeeze (NYT)
China Home Sales Value Rose 38% YoY in October (BBG)
Emerging Market Bond, Currency Markets Face ‘Meltdown’ After Trump Win (CNBC)
Bond Rout Deepens as Trump Bets Boost Dollar, Industrial Metals (BBG)
We Are Living In A Depression – That’s Why Trump Took The White House (G.)
Deplorables 1, Empire 0 (Edwards)
Morgan Stanley: “Trump Policies Are Like Schrodinger’s Cat” (ZH)
It’s Trump Versus New Normal In Play For US Growth (BBG)
‘Nobody’ Won the 2016 Presidential Election – and It Was a Landslide(TAM)
What So Many People Don’t Get About the US Working Class (Joan C. Williams)
EU Offers Trump Cooperation While Signaling Policy Firmness (BBG)
Trump Splinters Europe: UK, France, Hungary Snub EU Emergency Meeting (ZH)
Julian Assange To Be Interviewed Today Over Sex Assault Claim (G.)

 

 

Trouble coming to the USA: “They range from as low as a government bond yield in much of Europe and Asia to 8% or more in the U.S.”

Era of Low Interest Rates Hammers Millions of Pensions Around the World (WSJ)

Pension funds around the world pay benefits through a combination of investment gains and contributions from employers and workers. To ensure enough is saved, plans adopt long-term annual return assumptions to project how much of their costs will be paid from earnings. They range from as low as a government bond yield in much of Europe and Asia to 8% or more in the U.S. The problem is that investment-grade bonds that once churned out 7.5% a year are now barely yielding anything. Global pensions on average have roughly 30% of their money in bonds.Low rates helped pull down assets of the world’s 300 largest pension funds by $530 billion in 2015, the first decline since the financial crisis, according to a recent Pensions & Investments and Willis Towers Watson report.

Funding gaps for the two biggest funds in Europe and the U.S. have ballooned by $300 billion since 2008, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis. Few parts of Europe are feeling the pension pain more acutely than the Netherlands, home to 17 million people and part of the eurozone, which introduced negative rates in 2014. Unlike countries such as France and Italy, where pensions are an annual budget item, the Netherlands has several large plans that stockpile assets and invest them. The goal is for profits to grow faster than retiree obligations, allowing the pension to become financially self-sufficient and shrink as an expense to lawmakers. ABP,[Europe’s largest pension fund], currently holds 90.7 cents for every euro of obligations, a ratio that would be welcome in other corners of the world.

But Dutch regulators demand pension assets exceed liabilities, meaning more cash is required than actually needed. This spring, ABP officials had to provide government regulators a rescue plan after years of worsening finances. ABP’s members, representing one in six people in the Netherlands, haven’t seen their pension checks increase in a decade. ABP officials have warned payments may be cut 1% next year. “People are angry, not because pensions are low, but because we failed to deliver what we promised them,” said Gerard Riemen, managing director of the Pensioenfederatie, a federation of 260 Dutch pension funds managing a total of €1 trillion. Benefit cuts have become such a divisive issue that one party, 50PLUS, plans for parliamentary-election campaigns early next year that demand the end of “pension robbery.” “Giving certainty has become expensive,” said Ms. Wortmann-Kool, ABP’s chairwoman.

Read more …

Sounds like that’s a good thing for pensions. But my guess is it’s way too late.

President Trump Will Fumigate The Fed (Mises Inst.)

Trump’s occasional dovish comments do not match the passion and enthusiasm of his repeated hawkish campaign trail rhetoric. For the past year, the president-elect has been railing against the “false economy” that the Fed has created, as well as the political influence that runs rampant throughout the central bank. Perhaps Trump’s most scathing attack on the institution came last October, when he insinuated that Fed actions are crippling the middle class without creating any type of benefit to the economy at large. “[Chairwoman Yellen] is keeping the economy going, barely,” he said. “You know who gets hurt the most [by her easy money policies]? The people that went through 40 years of their life and saved a hundred dollars every week [in the bank].”

He then paused and shook his head for added effect before adding: “They worked all their lives to save and now what happens is they’re being forced into an inflated stock market and at some point they’ll get wiped out.” These anti-Fed talking points were recycled often on the campaign trail. In September, Trump attacked the Fed for putting us in a “big, fat, ugly bubble” and for keeping rates artificially low for political purposes, points that he again repeated in the first presidential debate. The business mogul has also promised to audit the Fed within the first 100 days of his administration and even included a criticism of the central bank in a recent online video ad. Team Trump’s economic advisers paint an even more optimistic picture of his future monetary policy.

Some of today’s most reasonable mainstream economic voices are included in his inner circle. These names include David Malpass of Encima Global, who co-signed a letter with Jim Grant opposing the Fed’s “inflationary” and “distortive” quantitative easing program; John Paulson of Paulson & Co., who made billions from shorting the housing market before the Great Recession; Andy Beal, a self-described “libertarian kind of guy” who blames the Fed for the credit crisis; and the Heritage Foundation’s Stephen Moore, who told CSIN in 2012 that he is a “very severe critic” of the Fed’s “incredibly easy-money policies policies of the past decade.”

While none of Trump’s economic advisers are by any means Austrians, they are far more hawkish than most of Presidents Bush and Obama’s past economic advisers. Ian Shepherdson, chief economist at Pantheon Macroeconomics, has even said that these advisers are pushing Trump to nominate two “hard money” candidates to fill the Fed’s current vacancies. “A core view of many Trump advisors is that the extended period of emergency policy settings has promoted a bubble in the stock market, depressing the incomes of savers, scared the public and encouraged capital misallocation,” Shepherdson told Market Watch. “Right now, these are minority views on the Fed policymaking committee, but Trump appointees are likely to shift the needle.”

Read more …

Growth like tumors grow.

Teslas in the Trailer Park: California Faces Its Housing Squeeze (NYT)

For all its imagination about the future, Silicon Valley’s geography looks a lot like the past. Today’s college-educated millennials might be crowding into city centers, but each day employees at companies like Google and Facebook endure hours in cars or on buses commuting to squat office complexes that have all the charm of a Walmart. Many employees say they would prefer to live closer to work. But these companies reside in small cities that consider themselves suburbs, and the local politics are usually aligned against building dense urban apartments to house them. Take Palo Alto, the Silicon Valley city that has become emblematic of the state’s reputation for rampant not-in-my-backyard politics. Palo Alto has one of the state’s worst housing shortages. With about three jobs for every housing unit, it has among the most out-of-balance mixes anywhere in Silicon Valley.

But instead of dealing with this issue by building the few thousand or so apartments it would take to make a dent in the problem, the city has mostly looked to restraining a pace of job growth that the mayor described as “unhealthy.” Farther up the peninsula near San Francisco, the small city of Brisbane told a developer that its proposal for a mixed-use development with offices and 4,000 housing units should have offices for about 15,000 workers, but no new housing. Play that out a thousand times over and the crux of the state’s housing crisis is clear: Everyone knows housing costs are unsustainable and unfair, and that they pose a threat to the state’s economy. Yet every city seems to be counting on its neighbors to step up and fix it.

The results are strange compromises like the one made by Rebecca and Steven Callister, a couple in their late 20s who live in a double-wide trailer in a Mountain View mobile home park whose residents are retirees and young tech workers. Mr. Callister is an engineer at LinkedIn, the sort of worker who, in most places, would own a home. But given the cost of housing in Mountain View and the brutal commute times from anywhere they could afford, a trailer makes the most sense and lets him spend more time with the couple’s two young children. “We joke that it’s the only mobile home park with Mercedeses and Teslas in the driveway,” Mrs. Callister said. “It’s like the new middle class in California.”

In contrast to Palo Alto, Mountain View is trying to wedge new apartments into its office parks. Much of the action centers on the North Bayshore area, a neighborhood of low-slung office buildings surrounded by asphalt parking lots.

Read more …

So many stories about market curbs, all the time. But this is still the reality.

China Home Sales Value Rose 38% YoY in October (BBG)

China’s new home sales growth slowed in October from a year earlier, suggesting the push by policy makers to rein in runaway prices is getting traction. The value of homes sold rose 38% to 941 billion yuan ($138 billion) last month from a year earlier, according to Bloomberg calculations based on data the National Bureau of Statistics released Monday. The increase compares with a 61% gain the previous month. Local authorities in nearly two dozens cities have since late September rolled out property curbs ranging from raising down-payments for first and second homes to ruling some potential buyers ineligible.

China’s banking regulator has told banks to review their business related to mortgage lending and property development loans, after China Minsheng Banking Corp. suspended approvals of some non-standard mortgages in Shanghai. Slower home sales have helped moderate credit growth. New medium- and long-term household loans, mostly residential mortgages, stood at 489.1 billion yuan in October, down from 571.3 billion yuan in September, according to central bank data on Friday. New yuan loans edged down to 651.3 billion yuan last month from 1.22 trillion yuan in September.

Read more …

It’s just dollars coming home, and that not as positive a sign as many seemt ot hink.

Emerging Market Bond, Currency Markets Face ‘Meltdown’ After Trump Win (CNBC)

U.S. President-elect Donald Trump appears to have burst the bond bubble, putting emerging markets (EM) from Mexico to Indonesia at the sharp end of a sell-off. Expectations of fiscal stimulus, infrastructure spending and reflationary policies under a Trump administration were fueling inflation fears, sending benchmark U.S. ten-year Treasury yields and the dollar surging. Expectations for tighter monetary policy and a December rate hike by the Federal Reserve were also playing a role. In the wake of last week’s election outcome, the U.S. 10-year Treasury yield climbed above 2% from levels below 1.8% in the days before the result, with many analysts pointing to expectations that Trump’s promised policies would spur a resurgence of inflation and further interest rate hikes from the U.S. Federal Reserve.

That created a negative feedback loop for emerging market assets. Indonesia’s rupiah fell by as much as 3% against the dollar on Friday to five-month lows, hurting local stocks, with the declines extending on Monday. Malaysia’s ringgit also fell to its lowest against the dollar since late 2015, near levels not seen since the Asian Financial Crisis in 1998. Central banks last week in Malaysia and Indonesia intervened to support their currencies, while foreign investors have slashed holdings of sovereign EM bonds perceived as most risky. Analysts were rejigging their outlook for Asian bonds. “Asian fixed income assets have operated on a ‘lower for longer’ assumption’ for U.S. rates since June,” RBS economists led by Vaninder Singh wrote. “This assumption is being challenged. High-yielding currencies will have to re-price to become attractive again.”

Read more …

A bit much casino for me.

Bond Rout Deepens as Trump Bets Boost Dollar, Industrial Metals (BBG)

Routs in global bonds and emerging markets intensified, while the dollar climbed with U.S. equity futures and industrial metals as investors position for the wave of fiscal stimulus that Donald Trump plans to unleash. Sovereign bonds in the Asia-Pacific region slid with U.S. Treasuries, extending a record debt selloff, amid speculation President-elect Trump’s pledge to boost infrastructure spending will trigger U.S. interest-rate hikes as economic growth and inflation pick up. Bloomberg’s dollar index climbed to a nine-month high as an earthquake weighed on New Zealand’s dollar. Japanese shares were set for their best close since April after gross domestic product data, while shares in developing nations fell. Copper surged to a 16-month high and gold slumped.

Trump’s election victory continues to send shockwaves through global markets, having already led to $1.2 trillion being wiped off the value of bonds worldwide last week as equities added about $1 trillion and industrial metals soared by the most in four years. Emerging markets are being hit by an exodus of capital as speculation builds that the U.S. is headed for an era of rising interest rates and more protectionist trade policies. “In the short-term the election of Donald Trump as president is causing a bit of uncertainty and markets tend to overreact to that,” said Shane Oliver at AMP Capital. “I suspect the dust will settle down in the next couple of months and this sort of market overreaction will provide opportunities.”

Read more …

Absolutely.

We Are Living In A Depression – That’s Why Trump Took The White House (G.)

Words matter. The process of understanding why Donald Trump is now heading for the White House starts with the correct description of what has happened in the eight years since Barack Obama became president. Some economists call the turbulent period that followed the collapse of Lehman Brothers the Great Recession. Others say the US along with other developed nations is experiencing secular stagnation. Anything, it seems, to avoid using the D word: depression. The dictionary definition of a depression is a sustained, long-term downturn in economic activity, which sums up precisely what has occurred since 2008. Growth rates globally have remained low despite colossal amounts of stimulus. Living standards have barely risen and the threat of deflation has loomed large.

The depression since 2008 has not been as severe as that of the 1930s but there are echoes of it all the same: in the food banks that are the new soup kitchens; in the mass movements of migrants in search of a better life who are the modern equivalent of the Okies in the Grapes of Wrath; and in Trump, who has tapped into anger that has been bubbling away quietly for decades. The turning point for the average American worker came in the mid-1970s because for the first 30 years after the second world war the gains from rising prosperity were evenly shared. But this trend was broken around the time of Watergate and the end of the Vietnam war. Since 1975, productivity in the US has more than doubled, but average hourly compensation has increased by only 50%. The fruits of growth have been captured by the few, not the many.

Read more …

“Created by the wars that required it, the Machine now creates the wars it requires.”

Deplorables 1, Empire 0 (Edwards)

It’s done. The foolish, arrogant propaganda excreted by the captive press of the Imperial Establishment is flushed, and they and their owners are eating their hubris, choking down the bitter, toxic medicine they inflicted on themselves. The nightmare they swore could never win is the Chosen One. What this may mean to them, to all of us, and to The Empire, no one can guess. The origin, though, of what Michael Moore called the greatest “Fuck You” in our political history, is clear behind the shock and awe of the elite. Between them, Trump and Clinton diligently stripped away the last shreds of the rent and ragged camouflage that disguised our zombie body politic.

Behind the mantra of Exceptionalism, the American Empire has behaved with exactly the same solipsistic arrogance all empires have embraced. Internationally it has raged, as imperial China did, as if with a “Mandate of Heaven”, flaunting self-interest with no regard for other nations or the laws of war. It has inflicted misery, chaos, and death on many millions of the poor and helpless for a Full Spectrum Dominance it could never impose. America’s Capitalist War Machine has raped and destroyed many countries for its profit, and destablized the entire world in its megalomania. Schumpeter said it best, of Imperial Germany’s military industry: “Created by the wars that required it, the Machine now creates the wars it requires.”

America has been transformed over time from a civil democracy with imperial economics to a militarist empire with vaudeville democracy. This was accomplished by binding both wings of the duopoly to the exclusive interest of Predatory Capitalism with corrupting money. A corporate state imposed via political and military power is the essence of Fascism. For generations, Americans have been dosed with the ultra-nationalist poison of Exceptionalism, with its implicit racist subtext, and its sexism buried in a hoo-rah masculinity cult, but it has always been flavored with the sweetening agent that We, The People, were both masters and beneficiaries of our benign, patristic system. The last several decades have painfully taught any conscious observer that this is a cynical fiction.

Read more …

I thought he was a straight talker…

Morgan Stanley: “Trump Policies Are Like Schrodinger’s Cat” (ZH)

As the sellside reports analyzing the post-president Trump world keep pouring in, one that caught our attention was from Morgan Stanley’s Andrew Sheets in which the strategist openly admits that pretty much nobody has any idea what is coming: “Most remarkably, however, after three debates, two conventions and an election that seemed to last forever, there remains a great deal of uncertainty over what type of president Trump will actually be. In an election that was dominated by coverage of tweets, videos and emails, policy questions received surprisingly little airtime. And those questions are now crucial for markets.

“To a remarkable extent, investors we’ve spoken to both before and after November 8 disagree on what President-Elect Trump will actually do. Many have told us, confidently, that they believe that, while he said some extreme things on the campaign trail, he is ultimately a moderate, pragmatic businessman. A deal-maker who will delegate policy to experts, lead with market-friendly (almost Keynesian) fiscal stimulus and ultimately avoid a large fight on trade. Other investors take a less benign view. They say the President-Elect should be taken at his word, and that since the start of his campaign he has defied predictions that he would moderate his tone or policy message.”

The problem, according to Morgan Stanley, is during the campaign, “Trump was a master at keeping both possibilities open, broadening his appeal. Like Schrodinger’s cat, his policies existed in a state of being both pragmatic and radical, all at the same time. Upcoming cabinet appointments offer clues to which interpretation is right. Until then, we promise to keep an open mind, and focus on modelling the different paths a Trump administration could take, and what it means for markets.”

Read more …

“The market’s been looking for the fiscal theme to take over,” said Deutsche Bank’s Alan Ruskin. “The burden of responsibility has shifted..”

It’s Trump Versus New Normal In Play For US Growth (BBG)

Count this among the ways that Donald Trump’s election has rocked the financial world: monetary policy is no longer in charge. The president-elect’s proposals for significant commitments to spending and tax cuts have shifted the burden of stimulating growth from central banks, for the moment at least. “The market’s been looking for the fiscal theme to take over,” said Deutsche Bank’s Alan Ruskin. “The burden of responsibility has shifted,” with those who doubt the market’s recalibration being the ones who need to prove their case. That accounts, in part, for the enthusiasm for equities and commodities. Expectations of faster U.S. inflation are also spreading to Europe and Japan as seen in rising breakeven rates.

Trump may get some of the spending and, especially, the tax cuts he wants from Congress. Whether these will have the effect the market is now betting on remains to be seen. Trump will be pushing against an economy that is on a lower long-term growth trend in what many economists call “the new normal.” As a candidate, he promised an expansion of 3.5% or faster. If it doesn’t materialize, will he double-down on his policies? The upward surge in bond yields across the curve, inflation expectations and the dollar may complicate Trump’s plans. Futures show traders are locking in bets on a December rate increase. It’s possible that tightening financial conditions may slow the Fed from further moves until stimulus bears fruit.

But monetary policy is no longer what’s driving these moves. Increasingly, central banks may see themselves in a defensive role, reacting to events rather than dictating trends. The greenback’s rally is already forcing Asian and Latin American central banks to protect their currencies. More such moves may be in the offing if dollar gains continue. Will Europe and Japan turn to the Trump model in an attempt to boost growth and inflation in ways monetary policy hasn’t? Europe may have a limited ability to increase spending, while Japan has essentially exhausted that growth channel, too, said Robert Tipp of Prudential. But for now, after growing weary of monetary-led slow growth, markets are grasping at Trump’s answer to the New Normal.

Read more …

People don’t vote when the only choices are -perceived to be- elites.

‘Nobody’ Won the 2016 Presidential Election – and It Was a Landslide(TAM)

“Nobody for President, that’s my campaign slogan,” Nick Cannon asserted in “Too Broke to Vote,” his viral criticism of the American electoral process from March of this year. Now, it turns out nobody for president won the 2016 election in a landslide. According to new voter turnout statistics from the 2016 election, 47% of Americans voted for nobody, far outweighing the votes cast for Trump (25.5%) and Hillary (25.6%) by eligible voters. And the “I voted for nobody” group is actually much larger than the 47% reported because that number only includes eligible voters. How many millions of Americans under the legal voting age – not to mention the countless millions who have lost their voting rights – voted for nobody, as well? Factoring in those individuals, around 193 million people did not vote for Trump or Clinton.

That’s nearly two-thirds of the population of the United States. Nobody also seemingly won the presidential primaries, with only 9% of Americans casting their votes for either Trump or Clinton. So when does nobody take office? Nobody won the majority of votes in the primaries or the general election, and the two main candidates who were running didn’t “win” the popular vote — they simply slightly outcompeted each other considering neither garnered over 50% of the eligible voters’ ballots. That’s where the real debate begins. As I wrote back in August when the primary voter turnout rates came in, one could argue that Trump (and Obama) do not have a legitimate mandate to rule over the people of the United States. Trump did not win the majority of Americans’ votes – not even close.

When all Americans are included, Trump only garnered the votes of about 19% of us. This means the United States will be ruled over by a small minority of voters who elected someone to continually impose their political positions on the other 81% of us. Of course, as is the case with Democrats looking to assign blame for Hillary’s loss, pundits and political pontificators argue the people who didn’t vote have no right to complain about the outcome. After all, a non-vote or a vote for a third-party candidate was, in actuality, a vote for Trump. But that logic is flawed. The majority of Americans don’t vote anymore because the political system no longer represents them. We’ve been disenfranchised by decades of corrupt, unrepresentative politicians.

Read more …

“The dorkiness: the pantsuits. The arrogance: the email server. The smugness: the basket of deplorables. Worse, her mere presence rubs it in that even women from her class can treat working-class men with disrespect. ”

What So Many People Don’t Get About the US Working Class (Joan C. Williams)

My father-in-law grew up eating blood soup. He hated it, whether because of the taste or the humiliation, I never knew. His alcoholic father regularly drank up the family wage, and the family was often short on food money. They were evicted from apartment after apartment. He dropped out of school in eighth grade to help support the family. Eventually he got a good, steady job he truly hated, as an inspector in a factory that made those machines that measure humidity levels in museums. He tried to open several businesses on the side but none worked, so he kept that job for 38 years. He rose from poverty to a middle-class life: the car, the house, two kids in Catholic school, the wife who worked only part-time. He worked incessantly. He had two jobs in addition to his full-time position, one doing yard work for a local magnate and another hauling trash to the dump.

Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, he read The Wall Street Journal and voted Republican. He was a man before his time: a blue-collar white man who thought the union was a bunch of jokers who took your money and never gave you anything in return. Starting in 1970, many blue-collar whites followed his example. This week, their candidate won the presidency. For months, the only thing that’s surprised me about Donald Trump is my friends’ astonishment at his success. What’s driving it is the class culture gap. One little-known element of that gap is that the white working class (WWC) resents professionals but admires the rich. [..] Why the difference? For one thing, most blue-collar workers have little direct contact with the rich outside of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.

But professionals order them around every day. The dream is not to become upper-middle-class, with its different food, family, and friendship patterns; the dream is to live in your own class milieu, where you feel comfortable — just with more money. “The main thing is to be independent and give your own orders and not have to take them from anybody else,” a machine operator told Lamont. Owning one’s own business — that’s the goal. That’s another part of Trump’s appeal. Hillary Clinton, by contrast, epitomizes the dorky arrogance and smugness of the professional elite. The dorkiness: the pantsuits. The arrogance: the email server. The smugness: the basket of deplorables. Worse, her mere presence rubs it in that even women from her class can treat working-class men with disrespect.

Look at how she condescends to Trump as unfit to hold the office of the presidency and dismisses his supporters as racist, sexist, homophobic, or xenophobic. Trump’s blunt talk taps into another blue-collar value: straight talk. “Directness is a working-class norm,” notes Lubrano. As one blue-collar guy told him, “If you have a problem with me, come talk to me. If you have a way you want something done, come talk to me. I don’t like people who play these two-faced games.” Straight talk is seen as requiring manly courage, not being “a total wuss and a wimp,” an electronics technician told Lamont. Of course Trump appeals. Clinton’s clunky admission that she talks one way in public and another in private? Further proof she’s a two-faced phony.

Read more …

The EU’s hubris is incredible, the disconnect to reality near complete. They’ve all fallen over each other to insult Trump over the past year, and now they come with vows and demands?

EU Offers Trump Cooperation While Signaling Policy Firmness (BBG)

The EU promised to cooperate with U.S. President-elect Donald Trump while vowing to stand by international agreements he has questioned including United Nations deals to curb climate change and ease sanctions on Iran. After a dinner in Brussels to discuss future EU-U.S. relations in the wake of Trump’s victory in the Nov. 8 American election, European foreign ministers also signaled a determination to maintain their opposition to Russia’s encroachment in eastern Ukraine. “We are looking forward to a very strong partnership with the next administration,” EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini told reporters late Sunday after hosting the gathering. “For us, it’s extremely important to work on the climate-change agreement implementation but also on non-proliferation and the protection of the Iranian nuclear deal.”

Trump’s win last week threatens to upend eight years of EU-U.S. cooperation during the tenure of President Barack Obama and decades of trans-Atlantic relations underpinned by NATO. As the Republican Party’s presidential candidate, Trump raised doubts about UN accords on global warming and Iran’s nuclear program that the Obama administration helped to forge and about the benefits of U.S.-led NATO. Trump also had praiseworthy words for Russian President Vladimir Putin, whose annexation of the Ukrainian region of Crimea in 2014 and support for pro-Russia rebels in eastern Ukraine prompted the U.S. and EU to impose sanctions that remain in place. “The EU has a very principled position on the illegal annexation of Crimea and the situation in Ukraine,” Mogherini said. “This is not going to change regardless of possible shifts in others’ policies.”

Read more …

This is the Europe Trump will encounter. No unified voice in sight anymore. And that’s before all the referendums and elections.

Trump Splinters Europe: UK, France, Hungary Snub EU Emergency Meeting (ZH)

While America’s so-called “establishment”, the legacy political system and mainstream media, appear to be melting, and transforming before our eyes into something that has yet to be determined, Europe also appears to be disintegrating in response to the Trump presidential victory: as the FT reports, in a stunning development, Britain and France on Sunday night snubbed a contentious EU emergency meeting to align the bloc’s approach to Donald Trump’s election, exposing rifts in Europe over the US vote. Hailed by diplomats as a chance to “send a signal of what the EU expects” from Mr Trump, the plan fell into disarray after foreign ministers from the bloc’s two main military powers declined to attend the gathering demanded by Berlin and Brussels.

The meeting, which comes as Trump appointed his key deputies – chosing the more moderate establishment figure, RNC chairman Reince Priebus, to be his chief-of-staff over campaign chairman Stephen Bannon, who becomes chief strategist and counsellor – was supposed to create a framework for Europe in how to deal with a “Trump threat” as Europe itself faces an uphill climb of contenuous, potentially game-changing elections over the coming few months[..] The split in Europe highlights the difficulties “European capitals face in coordinating a response to Mr Trump, who has questioned the US’s commitments to Nato and free trade and hinted at seeking a rapprochement with Russian president Vladimir Putin” much to the amusement of famous euroskeptic Nigel Farage who was the first foreign political leader to meet with Donald Trump at the Trump Tower over the weekend.

Trump’s move infuriated members of Europe’s fraying core, with Carl Bildt, the former Swedish prime minister, tweeting: “If Trump wanted to look statesmanlike to Europe, receiving Farage was probably the worst thing he could [do].” As the FT adds, British foreign secretary Boris Johnson dropped out of the Brussels meeting, with officials arguing that it created an air of panic, while French foreign minister Jean-Marc Ayrault opted to stay in Paris to meet the new UN secretary-general. Hungary’s foreign minister boycotted the meeting, labeling the response from some EU leaders as “hysterical”. Johnson’s refusal to attend will add to an already difficult relationship with his German counterpart Frank-Walter Steinmeier, who has told colleagues that he cannot bear to be in the same room as the British foreign secretary.

Read more …

In time for a pardon? Or does Sweden still have darker designs? Why are Swedish people not more enganged in this scandal?

Julian Assange To Be Interviewed Today Over Sex Assault Claim (G.)

The Ecuadorian government has welcomed moves by the Swedish authorities to interview Julian Assange, who will be questioned on Monday inside its embassy over a sex assault allegation. Representatives from the Swedish prosecutor’s office and the Swedish police will be present while questions are put to the WikiLeaks founder by an Ecuadorian official. Assange has been granted political asylum by Ecuador and has been living inside the embassy for more than four years. He believes that if he leaves the embassy he will be extradited to the US for questioning about the activities of WikiLeaks. He denies the allegation against him and has been offering to be interviewed at the embassy.

Guillaume Long, Ecuador’s foreign minister, said: “We are pleased that the Swedish authorities will finally interview Mr Assange in our embassy in London. “This is something that Ecuador has been inviting the Swedish prosecutors to do ever since we granted asylum to Mr Assange in 2012. “There was no need for the Swedish authorities to delay for over 1,000 days before agreeing to carry out this interview, given that the Swedish authorities regularly question people in Britain and received permission to do so on more than 40 occasions in recent years. “Ecuador has never sought to stand in the way of any legal process in Sweden. “What we have asked from Sweden, and the UK, are guarantees that Mr Assange will not be extradited to a third country, where he could be persecuted for his work as a journalist.

Read more …

Home Forums Debt Rattle November 14 2016

Viewing 2 posts - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)
  • Author
    Posts
  • #31352

    Wyland Stanley Transparent Car, General Motors exhibit, San Francisco 1940 • Era of Low Interest Rates Hammers Millions of Pensions Around the World (
    [See the full post at: Debt Rattle November 14 2016]

    #31357
    rapier
    Participant

    Trump is not going to square this circle. US Treasuries continued their post election melt up. The 35 year bull market in bonds is probably over. The only thing that could save it is another massive dose of QE, maybe. They may save the Treasury market but the rest of the worlds bond markets no, and that includes all manner of US bonds from the best corporate to the worst junk.

    All the talk about him and his team being interest rate hawks is just that, talk, For every politician in the world low interest rates are always and in every case the best short term prescription. If you think Trump doesn’t want low rates your crazy. If the melt up in rates continues he will notice soon enough and he is going to rail against the ‘markets’ hurting him, mark my words. And his hawkish advisers are going to turn into ultra doves. Low rates are encoded into most of the worlds people as an unquestioned good and businessmen most of all.

    The 35 year bull market has been a tailwind for the financial markets, governments, the real economy and most of all for the holders of bonds because you could always sell with a capital gain and liquidty was usually good in the bond markets. The marked to market losses in the bond market globally the last week are already surely in the hundreds of billions. If it’s over everything changes, every single thing.

Viewing 2 posts - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)
  • You must be logged in to reply to this topic.