Abe Archives - Page 2 of 3 - The Automatic Earth

Good morning – Warren Murray here with your Tuesday briefing. Britain’s rising level of personal debt has prompted a warning from the Bank of England about dire consequences for lenders and the economy. There are “classic signs” that the risks involved in car finance, credit cards and personal loans are being underestimated as financial institutions make hay while the sun shines, says Alex Brazier, the Bank’s director for financial stability. The economy defied expectations when it grew strongly in the six months after the EU referendum. But that was partly fuelled by consumers racking up their credit cards and loans, as lenders offered easier terms and longer interest-free deals. Much higher levels of borrowing compared with income are now being allowed, at a time when household incomes have only marginally risen.

As the anniversary of the global financial meltdown approaches, Brazier has suggested current low rates of default on personal credit may have again caused banks to become blinkered to the potential for disaster. Back in 2007, “banks – and their regulators – were blind to the basic fact that more debt meant greater risk of loss”. “Lenders have not entered, but they may be dicing with, the spiral of complacency. The spiral continues, and borrowers rack up more and more debt. “[In 2007] complacency gave way to crisis. Companies and households were unable to refinance their debts. The result was economic disaster.”

The BoE creates huge bubbles, and afterwards starts warning about them. Typical central bank behavior.

• Bank of England Warns of ‘Spiral Of Complacency’ on Household Debt (G.)

The Bank of England has told banks, credit card companies and car loan providers that they risk fresh action against reckless lending as it warned of a looming “spiral of complacency” about mounting consumer debt. In its toughest warning yet about the possibility of a rerun of the financial crisis that devastated the economy 10 years ago, Threadneedle Street admitted it was alarmed about the increase in the amount of money being borrowed on easy terms over the past year. “Household debt – like most things that are good in moderation – can be dangerous in excess”, Alex Brazier, the Bank director for financial stability, said in a speech in Liverpool. “Dangerous to borrowers, lenders and, most importantly from our perspective, everyone else in the economy.”

Brazier’s said there were “classic signs” of lenders thinking the risks were lower following a prolonged period of good economic performance and low losses on loans. The first signs of the Bank’s anxiety about consumer debt came from its governor, Mark Carney, a month ago, but Brazier’s comments marked a ratcheting up of Threadneedle Street’s rhetoric. “Lenders have been the lucky beneficiaries of the benign way the economy has evolved. In expanding the supply of credit, they may be placing undue weight on the recent performance of credit cards and loans in benign conditions,” Brazier said. The willingness of consumers to take on more debt to fund their spending helped the economy grow strongly in the six months after the EU referendum, a period when the Bank expected growth to fall sharply.

Over the past year, Brazier said, household incomes had grown by just 1.5% but outstanding car loans, credit card balances and personal loans had risen by 10%. He added that terms and conditions on credit cards and personal loans had become easier. The average advertised length of 0% credit card balance transfers had doubled to close to 30 months, while advertised interest rates on £10,000 personal loans had fallen from 8% to around 3.8%, even though official interest rates had barely changed.

More great work by Lance. if these graphs and numbers don’t scare you, look again.

• How Big Of A Deleveraging Are We Talking About? (Roberts)

Debt, if used for productive investments, can be a solution to stimulating economic growth in the short-term. However, in the U.S., debt has been squandered on increases in social welfare programs and debt service which has an effective negative return on investment. Therefore, the larger the balance of debt becomes, the more economically destructive it is by diverting an ever growing amount of dollars away from productive investments to service payments. The relevance of debt growth versus economic growth is all too evident as shown below. Since 1980, the overall increase in debt has surged to levels that currently usurp the entirety of economic growth. With economic growth rates now at the lowest levels on record, the growth in debt continues to divert more tax dollars away from productive investments into the service of debt and social welfare.

It now requires nearly $3.00 of debt to create $1 of economic growth.

In fact, the economic deficit has never been greater. For the 30-year period from 1952 to 1982, the economic surplus fostered a rising economic growth rate which averaged roughly 8% during that period. Today, with the economy growing at an average rate of just 2%, the economic deficit has never been greater.

But again, it isn’t just Federal debt that is the problem. It is all debt. As discussed last week, when it comes to households, which are responsible for roughly 2/3rds of economic growth through personal consumption expenditures, debt was used to sustain a standard of living well beyond what income and wage growth could support. This worked out as long as the ability to leverage indebtedness was an option. The problem is that eventually, the debt reaches a level where the level of debt service erodes the ability to consume at levels great enough to foster stronger economic growth. In reality, the economic growth of the U.S. has been declining rapidly over the past 35 years supported only by a massive push into deficit spending by households.

[..]The massive indulgence in debt, or a “credit induced boom”, has now begun to reach its inevitable conclusion. The debt driven expansion, which leads to artificially stimulated borrowing, seeks out diminishing investment opportunities. Ultimately these diminished investment opportunities lead to widespread malinvestments. Not surprisingly, we clearly saw it play out in “real-time” in 2005-2007 in everything from sub-prime mortgages to derivative instruments. Today, we see it again in mortgages, subprime auto loans, student loan debt and debt driven stock buybacks and acquisitions.

When credit creation can no longer be sustained the markets will begin to “clear” the excesses. It is only then, and must be allowed to happen, can resources be reallocated back towards more efficient uses. This is why all the efforts of Keynesian policies to stimulate growth in the economy have ultimately failed. Those fiscal and monetary policies, from TARP and QE to tax cuts, only delay the clearing process. Ultimately, that delay only potentially worsens the inevitable clearing process. That clearing process is going to be very substantial. With the economy currently requiring roughly $3 of debt to create $1 of real, inflation-adjusted, economic growth, a reversion to a structurally manageable level of debt would involve a nearly $35 Trillion reduction of total credit market debt from current levels.

Difference: BOJ and ECB still buy trilions in ‘assets’.

• IMF: US Looks Weaker, Rest Of The World Picks Up Economic Slack (CNBC)

Despite cutting the economic growth outlook for the U.S. and U.K., the IMF kept its global growth forecast unchanged on expectations the euro zone and Japanese growth would accelerate. In the July update of its World Economic Outlook, the IMF forecast global economic growth of 3.5% for 2017 and 3.6% for 2018, unchanged from its April outlook. That was despite earlier cutting its U.S. growth projection to 2.1% from 2.3% for 2017 and to 2.1% from 2.5% for 2018, citing both weak growth in the first quarter of this year as well as the assumption that fiscal policy will be less expansionary than previously expected. A weaker-than-expected first quarter also spurred the IMF to cut its forecast for U.K. growth for this year to 1.7% from 2.0%, while leaving its 2018 forecast at 1.5%.

But slowdowns in the U.S. and U.K. were expected to be offset by increased forecasts for many euro area countries, including Germany, France, Italy and Spain, where first quarter growth largely beat expectations, the IMF said. “This, together with positive growth revisions for the last quarter of 2016 and high-frequency indicators for the second quarter of 2017, indicate stronger momentum in domestic demand than previously anticipated,” the IMF said in its release. It raised its euro-area growth forecast for 2017 to 1.9% from 1.7%. For 2018, it increased its forecast to 1.7% from 1.6%.

The Guardian has the guts to claim that people don’t move out because they don’t have the money to stay, but because they want to get on the f*cking property ladder.

• Bloated London Property Prices Fuel Exodus (G.)

In the Kent seaside town of Whitstable, long-term residents call them DFLs – people who have moved “down from London”, sometimes for the lifestyle but more often for cheaper housing. The number of people fleeing the capital to live elsewhere has hit a five-year high. In the year to June 2016, net outward migration from London reached 93,300 people – more than 80% higher than five years earlier, according to analysis of official statistics. A common theme among the leavers’ destinations is significantly cheaper housing, according to the estate agent Savills, which analysed figures from the Office for National Statistics and the Land Registry. Cambridge, Canterbury, Dartford and Bristol are reportedly among the most popular escape routes for people who have grown tired of London and its swollen property prices.

The most likely destination for people aged over 25 moving from Islington is St Albans in Hertfordshire, where the average home is £173,000 cheaper. People moving from Ealing to Slough – the most popular move from the west London borough – stand to save on average £241,000. Among all homeowners leaving London, the average house price was £580,000 while the average in the areas they moved to was £333,000. The exodus is not just of homeowners, but of renters too. Rents in London have soared by a third in the last decade, compared to 18% in the south-west, 13% in the West Midlands and 11% in the north-west of England.

The only age group that has a positive net migration figure in the capital is those in their twenties, the research found. Everyone else, from teens to pensioners, is tending to get out. Since 2009, the trend has been steadily increasing among people in their thirties with 15,000 more people in that age bracket leaving every year than at the end of the last decade – a 27% rise. The phenomenon is being driven by a widespread desire to “trade up the housing ladder”, something that is all too often impossible in London according to Lucian Cook, Savill’s head of residential research. “Five years ago people would have been reluctant [to move out] because the economy wasn’t as strong and some owners didn’t want to miss out on house price growth [in London],” he said.

Pretending it’s the last of the pig. We’ll see about that.

• The Foreclosure ‘Pig’ Moves Through The Housing-Crisis ‘Python’ (MW)

As the effects of the housing crisis further recede, markers of distress are declining, with one notable exception: Among the batches of severely delinquent mortgages bought by institutional investors, foreclosures are on the rise. The trend is a reminder of the reasons many community advocates resisted allowing institutional investors to buy delinquent mortgages in government auctions that began in 2010. Wall Street, those advocates said, shouldn’t be rewarded for its role in creating the housing crisis with the chance to buy for pennies on the dollar the very assets whose values it dented. The government auctions promised a risk-sharing solution that would benefit nearly everyone: Homeowners whose mortgages had been bought dirt-cheap could get loan modifications, investors would get profitable assets, and communities would see tax revenues restored and neighborhoods revitalized.

But that win-win-win scenario may bring little relief to the most distressed among those troubled assets. A new Attom Data analysis for MarketWatch shows increasing foreclosures in the mortgages auctioned by the government. A subsidiary of private-equity firm Lone Star Investments, for example, has foreclosed on nearly 2,000 homeowners this year, through early July, and has increased foreclosures every year since 2013. And a Goldman Sachs subsidiary called MTGLQ, which has more than doubled foreclosures each year from 2014 to 2016, may do the same again this year, based on early 2017 data. Those figures stand in stark contrast to the housing market overall, where foreclosures fell 22% in the second quarter, touching an 11-year low of just over 220,000.

The institutional-investor foreclosure figures are a small fraction of the total, noted Daren Blomquist, Attom’s senior vice president of communications. And they don’t surprise investors who intentionally snatch up the most distressed mortgages available because their elevated risk promises higher yield. Attom Data does show an uptick in foreclosures by other lenders, though not all participated in the government auctions. But they’re a reminder that a decade after the housing downturn began, the pockets of foreclosures that still pop up represent the worst of the worst, prompting even those questioning the program to agree that some foreclosures were inevitable, no matter who owned the mortgages. Analysts call the current crop of foreclosures “the last of the pig moving through the python.”

All bubble countries now face the issue. There’s no way out. So they’ll deny their bubble for a while longer.

• Australian Housing Market At Risk Of Crash – UBS Research (CNBC)

The Australian housing market has peaked and could crash if the country’s central bank raises rates by too much or too quickly according to researchers at the Swiss bank, UBS. Property in Australia has boomed and the most recent government data marked growth in residential property prices at 10.2% year on year for the 2017 March quarter. In a note Monday, UBS Economist George Tharenou said any rash interest rate action from the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) could trigger a crash. “We still see rates on hold in the coming year, amid macroprudential tightening on credit growth and interest only loans. “Hence we still see a correction, but not a collapse, but if the RBA hikes too early or too much (as flagged by its hawkish minutes), it risks triggering a crash,” Tharenou warned.

Housing starts fell 19% in the first quarter of the year and May’s mortgage approvals also slid 20%. After a multi-year boom, the cost of an average home in the country now sits at 669,700 Australian dollars ($532,000) but Tharenou said price growth is certain to slow. “Despite weaker activity, house prices just keep booming with still strong growth of 10% y/y in June. However, this is unsustainably 4-5 times faster than income. “Looking ahead, we still see price growth slowing to 7% y/y in 2017 and 0-3% in 2018, amid record supply & poor affordability,” the economist added.

Raising rates into a gigantesque bubble. No problem.

• It’s Time To Rethink Monetary Policy (Rochon)

July 12 marks the date the Bank of Canada ignored common sense and increased its rate for the first time in seven years. Economists are largely divided on whether this was a good move, but in my opinion this was an ill-informed decision, largely based on the usually strong first quarter data, which may prove unsustainable in the longer term. In turn, it raises important questions about the conduct of monetary policy and the need to rethink the role and purpose of central bank policy. For the record, I don’t think there is much to fear from a single increase to 0.75% from 0.50, though it will have an immediate impact on mortgage rates — some Canadians will pay more for their homes. However, it is the prospect of what that move represents that sends chills down this economist’s spine.

As we know all too well, central banks never raise rates once or twice, but usually do so several times. Indeed, the consensus among economists is that there will be at least two more raises before the end of 2018, bringing the bank rate to 1.25%. This is still low by historical standards, but the raises begin to add up. I expect many more rate hikes through 2019 and 2020. You see, the Bank of Canada believes the so-called natural rate is 3%, which means we could possibly see nine more interest rate increases. Imagine the damage that will do. Yet, according to their own model, this rate is the “neutral” or “natural” rate and should have no far reaching impact. Try telling that to Canadians who have consumer debt and a mortgage. Clearly, there is nothing “neutral” about these rate increases. This alone is a reason to rethink monetary policy.

Second, the Bank of Canada targets inflation, and has been officially since 1991, a fact it reminds us of all the time. All other objectives, including economic growth and unemployment, or even household debt and income inequality, are far behind the principal objective of trying to keep the inflation rate on target. There is much to say about this, including whether interest rates and monetary policy in general are the best tool to deliver on the inflation crusade. Even if we accept this, inflation is currently at a near two-decade low. In other words, where’s the inflation beef? Inflation does not represent a current threat, and there are no inflationary pressures in the economy, which raises the question: Why raise rates?

With Abenomics dead, so is Abe.

• Scandals Threaten Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s Grip On Power (G.)

Shinzo Abe is fighting for his future as Japan’s prime minister as scandals drag his government’s popularity close to what political observers describe as “death zone” levels. Apart from clouding Abe’s hopes of winning another term as leader of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) when a vote is held next year, the polling slump also undermines his long-running push to revise Japan’s war-renouncing constitution. Abe, who returned to the prime ministership four and a half years ago, was long seen as a steady hand whose position appeared unassailable – so much so that the LDP changed its rules to allow Abe the freedom to seek a third consecutive three-year term at the helm of the party. “He is no longer invincible and the reason why he is no longer invincible is he served his personal friends not the party,” said Michael Thomas Cucek, an adjunct professor at Temple University Japan.

Abe’s standing has been damaged by allegations of favours for two school operators who have links to him. The first scandal centred on a cut-price land deal between the finance ministry and a nationalist school group known as Moritomo Gakuen. The second related to the approval of a veterinary department of a private university headed by his friend, Kotaro Kake. Abe has repeatedly denied personal involvement, but polls showed voters doubted his explanations, especially after leaked education ministry documents mentioned the involvement of “a top-level official of the prime minister’s office” in the vet school story. Abe attempted to show humility in a parliamentary hearing this week by acknowledging it was “natural for the public to sceptically view the issue” because it involved his friend. “I lacked the perspective,” he said. Experts doubt that Abe’s contrition, combined with a planned cabinet reshuffle next week, will do much to reverse his sagging fortunes.

The limits of the anti-Russia craze.

• Brussels To Act ‘Within Days’ If US Sanctions Hurt EU Trade With Russia (RT)

The EU should act “within days” if new sanctions the US plans to impose on Russia prove to be damaging to Europe’s trade ties with Moscow, an internal memo seen by the media says. Retaliatory measures may include limiting US jurisdiction over EU companies. An internal memo seen by the Financial Times and Politico has emerged amid mounting opposition to a US bill seeking to hit Russia with a new round of sanctions. The bill, if signed into law, will also give US lawmakers the power to veto any attempt by the president to lift the sanctions. The document reportedly said European Commission chief Jean-Claude Juncker was particularly concerned the sanctions would neglect the interests of European companies. Juncker said Brussels “should stand ready to act within days” if sanctions on Russia are “adopted without EU concerns being taken into account,” according to the FT.

The EU memo also warns that “the measures could impact a potentially large number of European companies doing legitimate business under EU measures with Russian entities in the railways, financial, shipping or mining sectors, among others.” Restrictions against Russia come as part of the Countering Iran’s Destabilizing Activities Act, targeting not only Tehran, but also North Korea. Initially passed by the Senate last month, the measures seek to impose new economic measures on major sectors of the Russian economy. The draft legislation would also introduce individual sanctions for investing in Gazprom’s Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline project, outlining steps to hamper construction of the pipeline and imposing sanctions on European companies which contribute to the project.

So EU vs US, and EU vs EU. The problem seems to be that US companies could profit from the sanctions, as European ones suffer.

• EU Divided On How To Answer New US Sanctions Against Russia (R.)

European Commission preparations to retaliate against proposed new U.S. sanctions on Russia that could affect European firms are likely to face resistance within a bloc divided on how to deal with Moscow, diplomats, officials and experts say. A bill agreed by U.S. Senate and House leaders foresees fines for companies aiding Russia to build energy export pipelines. EU firms involved in Nord Stream 2, a 9.5 billion euro ($11.1 billion) project to carry Russian gas across the Baltic, are likely to be affected. Both the European Union and the United States imposed broad economic sanctions on Russia’s financial, defense and energy sectors in response to Moscow’s annexation of Crimea from Ukraine in 2014 and its direct support for separatists in eastern Ukraine. But northern EU states in particular have sought to shield the supplies of Russian gas that they rely on.

Markus Beyrer, director of the EU’s main business lobby, Business Europe, urged Washington to “avoid unilateral actions that would mainly hit the EU, its citizens and its companies”. The Commission, the EU executive, will discuss next steps on Wednesday, a day after the U.S. House of Representatives votes on the legislation, knowing that the U.S. move threatens to reopen divisions over the bloc’s own Russia sanctions. Among the European companies involved in Nord Stream 2 are German oil and gas group Wintershall, German energy trading firm Uniper, Anglo-Dutch Royal Dutch Shell, Austria’s OMV and France’s Engie. The Commission could demand a formal U.S. promise to exclude EU energy companies; use EU laws to block U.S. measures against European entities; or impose outright bans on doing business with certain U.S. companies, an EU official said.

But if no such promise is offered, punitive sanctions such as limiting the access of U.S. companies to EU banks require unanimity from the 28 EU member states. Ex-Soviet states such as Poland and the Baltic states are unlikely to vote for retaliation to protect a project they have resisted because it would increase EU dependence on Russian gas. An EU official said most member states saw Nord Stream 2 as “contrary or at least not fully in line with European objectives” of reducing reliance on Russian energy. Britain, one of the United States’ closest allies, is also wary of challenging the U.S. Congress as it prepares to leave the EU and seeks a trade deal with Washington. In fact, the EU’s chief executive, Jean-Claude Juncker, has few tools that do not require unanimous support from the bloc’s 28 governments.

The Commission could act alone to file a complaint at the World Trade Organisation. But imposing punitive tariffs on U.S. goods would require detailed proof to be gathered that European companies were being unfairly disadvantaged — a process that would take many months. Diplomatic protests such as cutting EU official visits to Washington are unlikely to have much effect, since requests by EU commissioners for meetings with members of Trump’s administration have gone unanswered, EU aides say.

Let’s hope they don’t try.

• US ‘May Send Arms’ To Ukraine, Says New Envoy (BBC)

The new US special representative for Ukraine says Washington is actively reviewing whether to send weapons to help those fighting against Russian-backed rebels. Kurt Volker told the BBC that arming Ukrainian government forces could change Moscow’s approach. He said he did not think the move would be provocative. Last week, the US State Department urged both sides to observe the fragile ceasefire in eastern Ukraine. “Defensive weapons, ones that would allow Ukraine to defend itself, and to take out tanks for example, would actually to help” to stop Russia threatening Ukraine, Mr Volker said in a BBC interview.

“I’m not again predicting where we go on this, that’s a matter for further discussion and decision, but I think that argument that it would be provocative to Russia or emboldening of Ukraine is just getting it backwards,” he added. He said success in establishing peace in eastern Ukraine would require what he called a new strategic dialogue with Russia.

Undoubtedly not the last we hear of this.

• Tsipras and Varoufakis Go Public With Spat (K.)

The coalition on Monday rejected calls for an investigation to be launched into the first months of the government’s time in power, as a dispute between Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras and ex-finance minister Yannis Varoufakis over that period in 2015 became public. “The evaluation of this period has to be conducted with political criteria, not myth-making or gossip,” said government spokesman Dimitris Tzanakopoulos, who accused Varoufakis of trying to advertise his recent book via the “systemic media” he once attacked. Tzanakopoulos’s comments came after Tsipras gave an interview to The Guardian in which he admitted making “big mistakes” in the past and suggested that Varoufakis’s plan for a parallel payment system could not be considered seriously.

“Yanis is trying to write history in a different way,” said Tsipras. “When we got to the point of reading what he presented as his plan B it was so vague, it wasn’t worth the trouble of even talking about. It was simply weak and ineffective.” The former minister immediately responded to the premier’s comments by claiming they displayed a “deep incoherence,” as Varoufakis claims that he had made Tsipras aware of the plan before he came to office yet the SYRIZA leader still chose to appoint him to the cabinet. “Either I was the right choice to spearhead the ‘collision’ with the troika of Greece’s lenders because my plans were convincing, or my plans were not convincing and, thus, I was the wrong choice as his first finance minister,” he wrote in a letter to The Guardian.

New Democracy called for judicial and parliamentary investigations into the claims made by Varoufakis, as well as by former energy minister Panayiotis Lafazanis. The latter claimed in a radio interview on Saturday that he had secured an advance payment from Russia for a gas pipeline to be used to held fund Greece if it left the euro. “Varoufakis and Lafazanis described with clarity the SYRIZA leadership’s plans to take Greece out of the eurozone,” said the conservatives in a statement. “If these plans were seen through to the end, the country would have found itself in a dramatic situation like Venezuela, with unforeseeable social consequences.”

Makes sense.

• Alexis Tsipras’s Mixed Messages Over Appointing Me As Finance Minister (YV)

[..] the Greek prime minister, Alexis Tsipras, having admitted to “big mistakes”, was asked if appointing me as his first finance minister was one of them. According to the interviewer, Mr Tsipras said “Varoufakis … was the right choice for an initial strategy of ‘collision politics’, but he dismisses the plan he presented had Greece been forced to make the dramatic move to a new currency as ‘so vague, it wasn’t worth talking about’”. Given that I presented my plans to Mr Tsipras for deterring the troika’s aggression and responding to a potential impasse (and any move by the troika to evict Greece from the eurozone) before we won the election of January 2015, and I was chosen by him as finance minister (one presumes) on the basis of their merit, his answer reflects a deep incoherence.

Either I was the right choice to spearhead the “collision” with the troika of Greece’s lenders because my plans were convincing, or my plans were not convincing and, thus, I was the wrong choice as his first finance minister. Arguing, as Mr Tsipras does, that I was both the right choice for the initial confrontation and that my plan B was so vague it wasn’t worth the trouble of even talking about is disingenuous, albeit insightful, for it reveals the impossibility of maintaining a radical critique of his predecessors while adopting the Tina (There Is No Alternative) doctrine.

A brand new line of lipstick for farm animals.

• Greece Plans Return To Bond Market As Athens Sees End To Austerity (G.)

Athens has outlined plans to return to the financial markets for the first time since 2014, with a plan to sell new five-year bonds to investors. Existing Greek five-year bonds were trading at 3.6% on Monday morning compared with 63% at the height of the Greek financial crisis in 2012 when the finance ministry was unable to pay public sector wages and there were riots in the streets. Following the announcement that Athens would be returning to the market, the yield fell to 3.4%. The Greek finance ministry has set a goal of a 4.2% interest rate on the new bond. But banking sources believe that level will be hard to achieve and say an interest rate of between 4.3% to 4.5% is much more likely. Government sources say valuation will take place on Tuesday 25 July.

The market test is crucial to Greece for not only judging sentiment of the market, from which it has been essentially exiled since the start of its economic crisis, but also for weaning itself off borrowed bailout funds. Speaking after the bond issue was announced, the EU’s economy commissioner, Pierre Moscovici, described the public spending cuts imposed on Greece since it almost went bust as “too tough” but “necessary”, adding there was now “light at the end of austerity”. Reuters reported that Greece had employed six banks – BNP Paribas, Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Citigroup, Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs and HSBC – to act as joint lead managers for a five-year euro bond “subject to market conditions”. Greek ministers will provide more details on Monday afternoon about how much it hopes to borrow, and on what terms.

If the issue is successful, it could help Greece, which is still coping with a debt to GDP ratio of 180%, to exit its long cycle of austerity and rescue packages. Late on Friday, S&P upgraded its outlook on Greek government debt from stable to “positive”, thanks partly to renewed hopes that the country’s creditors could finally grant it debt relief.

And here’s how it’s done.

• Greek Spending Cuts Prettify Budget Data (K.)

Delays in the funding of hospitals, social spending cuts and low expenditure on the Public Investments Program served to prettify the picture of the state budget over the first half of the year, producing a primary surplus of 1.93 billion euros, Finance Ministry figures showed on Monday. At the same time budget revenues posted a marginal increase over the target the ministry had set for the January-June period. However, the big challenge for the government starts at the end of this month with the payment of the first tranche of income tax by taxpayers, followed later on by the Single Property Tax (ENFIA) and road tax at the end of the year.

In total the state will have to collect 33 billion euros by the end of the year, which is considerably higher than in the second half of 2016. According to the H1 budget data, the primary surplus amounted to 1.936 billion euros, against a primary surplus of 1.632 billion in the same period last year, and a target for 431 million for the year to end-June. Expenditure missed its target by 1.15 billion euros, amounting to 22.86 billion in the first half. Compared to last year it was down 757 million euros. Hospital funding missed its target by 265 million.

Debt Rattle August 22 2016

Aug 222016

August 22, 2016 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 9:29 am Finance Tagged with: Abe, Australia, Brexit, cash, derivatives, Greece, Hillary, Inuit, journalism, oil, refugees, Trump 4 Responses »

NPC Wilkins-Rogers Milling Co., Washington, DC 1926

• Oil Falls As August Price Rally Seen Overblown, China Fuel Exports Soar (R.)

• Less Than 5% Of Japan Inc. Think Abe’s Stimulus Will Boost The Economy (R.)

• Grim Outlook for the Economy, Stocks: Stephanie Pomboy (Barron’s)

• Citi Is About to Relive the 2008 Derivatives Nightmare (MM)

• The Brexit Question That Nobody Asked (BBG)

• China Is Grappling With Hidden Unemployment (BBG)

• Australia’s Unprecedented Collapse In Business Investment, In One Chart (BI)

• Australia Central Bank Loses Credibility As Housing Boom Continues (AFR)

• American Journalism Is Collapsing Before Our Eyes (Goodwin)

• The Clintons Really Do Think They Can Get Away With Anything (WSJ)

• Clinton Not In The Clear (Jack Kelly)

• The History of Money: Not What You Think (Minskys)

• German Government: Citizens Should Store Food, Water And Cash (DWN)

• ‘Nobody Believes In Anything Anymore’: Greek Crisis is Far From Over (CNBC)

• Rescuing Refugees: ‘You Never Get Used To It – And That’s A Good Thing’ (G.)

• Inuit Fear Being Overwhelmed As ‘Extinction Tourism’ Descends On Arctic (G.)

“China’s July exports of diesel and gasoline soared by 181.8% and 145.2% respectively..”

• Oil Falls As August Price Rally Seen Overblown, China Fuel Exports Soar (R.)

Oil prices fell on Monday as analysts doubted upcoming producer talks would rein in oversupply, saying that Brent would likely fall back below $50 a barrel as August’s more than 20% crude rally looks overblown. Soaring exports of refined products from China also pressured prices, as this was seen as the latest indicator of an ongoing global fuel glut, traders said. China’s July exports of diesel and gasoline soared by 181.8% and 145.2% respectively compared with the same month last year, to 1.53 million tonnes and 970,000 tonnes each, putting pressure on refined product margins. Brent crude futures were trading at $50.22 per barrel at 0224 GMT, down 66 cents, or 1.3%.

U.S. West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude was down 51 cents, or 1.05%, at $48.01 a barrel. Analysts cast doubt on an August price rally, saying that much of it was a result of short-covering and anticipation of upcoming producer talks to discuss means to curb oversupply. “Positioning data seems to confirm our view that the latest oil bounce is more technical and positioning-oriented than fundamental. In fact, new buyers have been mostly absent the past few months,” Morgan Stanley said. Regarding the upcoming producer talks, the bank said a agreement was “highly unlikely” and that there were “too many headwinds and logistical challenges to a meaningful deal”.

Less than 5% are wrong.

• Less Than 5% Of Japan Inc. Think Abe’s Stimulus Will Boost The Economy (R.)

Japanese companies overwhelmingly say the government’s latest stimulus will do little to boost the economy and the Bank of Japan should not ease further, a Reuters poll showed, a setback for policymakers’ efforts to overcome deflation and stagnation. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe this month unveiled a 13.5 trillion yen (£102.6 billion) fiscal package of public works projects and other measures, vowing a united front with the BOJ to revive the economy and raising speculation of a surge in government spending essentially financed by the central bank. But less than 5% of companies believe the steps will boost the economy near-term or raise its growth potential, according to the Reuters Corporate Survey, conducted August 1-16.

“It’s disappointing that the stimulus focuses on public works, and it lacks attention to promoting industry and technology that would lead to future growth,” said a manager at a precision-machinery maker. Abe took office 3 1/2 years ago, pledging to reboot the economy with aggressive monetary stimulus, fiscal spending and reform plans. After an early spurt of growth and surging corporate profits, helped by a sharp fall in the yen, the economy is again sputtering and prices are slipping, underscoring the challenge for Japan to beat nearly two decades of deflation and anaemic growth. “Unless drastic steps are taken to fix the root of Japan’s problems – the falling birthrate and working population – solid economic growth won’t return … only public debt would pile up without sustainable growth,” said an electrical machinery firm.

You would still have to specify those who have nothing left to save; economists miss out on that.

• Grim Outlook for the Economy, Stocks: Stephanie Pomboy (Barron’s)

For some time, Stephanie Pomboy, an economist and the founder of MacroMavens, has pushed a provocative theory that a crisis-chastened U.S. consumer would retard global growth. That is why a U.S. recovery has taken so long to take off, and why Japan and Europe look set to embark on more rounds of quantitative easing. An avid reader of Shakespeare, Pomboy appreciates the comic and tragic dimensions of the markets—the giddy optimism for the second half of the year, and the potentially disastrous consequences of excessively low rates. As stocks teetered at new highs, we phoned Pomboy in Vail, Colo., where she lives when not in Manhattan, to hear her latest views. They aren’t rosy: Investors and policy makers are deluding themselves that we will soon return to a pre-financial crisis framework. Things have changed, she says, which means expectations for economic growth in the second half are far too optimistic. And today’s low rates could cause another financial crisis, bankrupting pension plans, putting retirees at risk, and hurting stocks.

Barron’s: You like to focus on the consumer—and plot U.S. consumer spending as a percentage of GDP versus world trade. Why? Pomboy: What ignited and supported the entire era of globalization was the spendthrift U.S. consumer; economies have been totally reliant on trade to U.S. consumers. This once-in-a-generation asset deflation will fundamentally change behavior, just as the Depression changed an entire generation’s attitude about spending and saving. Obviously, the burden of proof is on me, because for 20 years the consumer has reliably borrowed from China to buy their tube socks. Post-crisis, the consumer has clearly pulled back.

How many months did we have disappointing retail sales numbers that no one could explain? They’d say it’s too hot, too cold, there’s Brexit. But what’s really causing this slowdown in spending is that the post-crisis consumer is determined to save, and do it the old-fashioned way. Historically, when rates go down, people save less. In this cycle, things have completely reversed. Over the same stretch of time that the two-year note has gone from 4% to 1%, the savings rate has doubled. There are mountains of evidence to support my thesis. But every Wall Street analyst and the Fed is using the pre-crisis analytical framework to look at an economy that is fundamentally challenged.

Note the numbers: “Credit Suisse prudently sold $380 billion of derivatives to Citi, thereby reducing its own leverage exposure by $5 billion.”

• Citi Is About to Relive the 2008 Derivatives Nightmare (MM)

Deutsche Bank – with its stock now trading at a 30-year low – was recently called the world’s riskiest financial institution by the IMF. Better late than never… In a last-ditch effort to save itself, DB is trying to dump a bucket load of credit derivatives – the murky, risky financial instruments that triggered the 2008 financial crisis. You would think no one would buy these weapons of financial mass destruction… but you’d be wrong. In a staggeringly stupid move, the American bank I’m telling you about today has gone on a derivatives shopping spree, eagerly taking credit default swaps off the hands of failing Eurozone banks like DB and Credit Suisse. That means, of course, another outsize short opportunity for you to take…

Citigroup already nearly destroyed itself with derivatives during the 2008 crisis, requiring the biggest taxpayer bailout in history in order to stay afloat. Strangely, it didn’t learn its lesson the first time its stock fell below $1. As rival banks see the writing on the wall and scramble to get rid of their derivatives, Citi is now cheerfully snapping up billions of dollars’ worth. Several weeks ago, Credit Suisse prudently sold $380 billion of derivatives to Citi, thereby reducing its own leverage exposure by $5 billion. Last year, Deutsche Bank palmed off $250 billion of credit default swaps on (guess who?) Citi, and is in talks to get rid of even more. The result is that Citi now holds the most derivatives of any of its U.S. rivals. That’s a staggering total exposure of nearly $56 trillion, according to the OCC’s latest report, shown here:

[..] our current $650 trillion derivatives market is a nightmare scenario waiting to happen. First problem: the size. It’s 36x the size of the U.S. GDP and over 8x larger than the world GDP – the entire global output of the entire world in a year. While credit default swaps shrank significantly in size since the financial crisis, they remain large enough to constitute a potential time bomb inside the financial system that could blow up any time. Second problem: the interconnectedness. Every derivative contract involves two parties that agree to make certain payments to each other. But if one party is unable or unwilling to live up to its agreement and make those payments, the other party is left holding the bag and nursing a big loss. In a crisis, this can leave a volume of broken contracts that will overwhelm these institutions and render them instantly insolvent.

Where is the EU heading?

• The Brexit Question That Nobody Asked (BBG)

Mervyn King, former governor of the Bank of England, has written the best article I’ve read on Britain’s exit from the EU. In an essay for the New York Review of Books he makes many excellent points, but one is of surpassing importance. It’s an obvious point, or ought to be, that nonetheless has been almost entirely ignored by other respectable commentators: Whether Britain should stay in the EU depends on where the EU is heading. The EU is plainly in deep trouble with or without the U.K., and its condition as a political project is anything but stable. Judging whether Britain is better off as a member therefore requires a judgment not only about what Britain has gained or lost from membership up to now but also an assessment of the future character of the whole EU enterprise.

Britain’s Remain campaign, expressing the collective opinion of every expert on the subject, has had almost nothing to say about this. As King points out, the EU is structurally unsound. (Joseph Stiglitz in the FT makes the same point.) It has pressed political union both too far and not far enough. That is, it has created half a political union – with a single currency but without a collective fiscal policy or the political apparatus that would be necessary to legitimize it. King: Putting the cart before the horse – setting up a monetary union before a political union – has led the ECB to become more and more vocal about the need to “complete the architecture” of monetary union by proceeding quickly to create a Treasury and finance minister for the entire eurozone.

The ability of such a new ministry to make transfers between member countries of the monetary union would reduce pressure on the ECB to find new ways of holding the monetary union together. But there is no democratic mandate for a new ministry to create such transfers or to have political union – voters do not want either. And voters aren’t the only ones who don’t want it. German officialdom (backed by popular opinion) is viscerally opposed to a “transfer union,” which is Germany’s name for fiscal policy as it operates in any normal country. Germany’s position is understandable, since Germans would give much more than they received in any such arrangement. But that doesn’t alter the conclusion: Not only is the EU structurally unsound, but there’s also little prospect that the structure either can be or will be repaired.

Color me baffled.

• China Is Grappling With Hidden Unemployment (BBG)

Cracks are starting to show in China’s labor market as struggling industrial firms leave millions of workers in flux. While official jobless numbers haven’t budged, the underemployment rate has jumped to more than 5% from near zero in 2010, according to Bai Peiwei, an economics professor at Xiamen University. Bai estimates the rate may be 10% in industries with excess capacity, such as unprofitable steel mills and coal mines that have slashed pay, reduced shifts and required unpaid leave. Many state-owned firms battling overcapacity favor putting workers in a holding pattern to avoid mass layoffs that risk fueling social unrest. While that helps airbrush the appearance of duress, it also slows the shift of workers to services jobs, where labor demand remains more solid in China’s shifting economy.

“Underemployment in overcapacity industries is a drag on the potential improvement of productivity in China, which will lead to a softening wage trend,” said Grace Ng at JPMorgan in Hong Kong. “It would exert pressure on private consumption demand and in turn affect the overall rebalancing of the economy.” Other projections indicate the employment situation is even worse. An indicator of unemployment and underemployment produced by London-based research firm Fathom Consulting has more than tripled since 2012 to 13.2%. The official jobless rate isn’t much help for economists: it’s been virtually unchanged at about 4.1% since 2010 even as the economy slowed. The gauge only counts those who register for unemployment benefits in their home towns, which doesn’t take into account 277 million migrant workers. Total employment is 775 million, National Bureau of Statistics data show.

Wow. What a chart that is.

• Australia’s Unprecedented Collapse In Business Investment, In One Chart (BI)

You’ve probably heard of the “capex cliff”, the term for the collapse in capital expenditure plans by Australian businesses that is an inevitable feature of the economy following the once-in-a-lifetime mining investment boom driven mainly by the surge in Chinese demand over the past two decades. But with Australia’s manufacturing industry having been hollowed out too over the past decade, the capital investment pipeline for both mining and manufacturing are gone. So the fall-off, when measured in terms of a percentage of GDP, is nothing short of spectacular in historical context, as shown in this chart from Macquarie. It’s not hard to see why economists have occasionally mentioned the word “recessionary” in reference to the investment outlook.

Part of what’s driving this is that Australia’s economy is increasingly being driven by much less capital-intensive sectors such as education and tourism, which don’t require huge pieces of machinery and infrastructure like trains, tunnelling machines and factory plant equipment. And on the other side of the ledger, the huge increases in capital investment during the mining boom have laid the foundations for the vast increase in Australia’s commodity export volumes, which have been supporting economic growth since the spending started to fall away. The Macquarie research team notes, however, that “non-mining business capex has yet to meaningfully react to lower interest rates, and that companies are “waiting for clear signs of sustained demand before investing.” Right now, those signs are nowhere to be seen.

You can make charts just like this one for many countries.

• Australia Central Bank Loses Credibility As Housing Boom Continues (AFR)

Australia’s booming housing market has once again head-faked the central bank, which is losing credibility every time it cuts on claims the world’s dearest residential property prices are nothing to worry about. In rationalising its decision to reduce the cash rate to 1.5% in August, the Reserve Bank of Australia alleged that “the likelihood of lower interest rates exacerbating risks in the housing market has diminished”. Yet auction clearance rates in our two largest cities, Sydney and Melbourne, which account for 47% of the metro population, have subsequently risen back to boom-time levels. CoreLogic reports that 86.4% of Sydney auctions on the weekend resulted in a sale, which is 10 percentage points higher than the equivalent clearance rate 12 months ago and just shy of the 89.7% record set in May last year.

In Melbourne, 76.1% of auctions saw a sale, besting the 74.3% clearance rate in the same week last year. Median clearance rates in Sydney and Melbourne over the four weeks since July 31 have been 78% and 76% respectively, materially above the median levels observed in these cities since the current housing boom commenced in 2013 on the back of the RBA’s stimulus. While the RBA argues that much lower sales volumes in 2016 signal weakness, this is likely more a reflection of a four-year boom exhausting supply. And it does not stack up with unusually strong clearance rates or persistently exuberant capital gains across Sydney and Melbourne.

I can only fully agree. And no, again, that’s not because I support Trump. Everything and everyone should be scrutinized.

• American Journalism Is Collapsing Before Our Eyes (Goodwin)

Donald Trump may or may not fix his campaign, and Hillary Clinton may or may not become the first female president. But something else happening before our eyes is almost as important: the complete collapse of American journalism as we know it. The frenzy to bury Trump is not limited to the Clinton campaign and the Obama White House. They are working hand-in-hand with what was considered the cream of the nation’s news organizations. The shameful display of naked partisanship by the elite media is unlike anything seen in modern America. The largest broadcast networks – CBS, NBC and ABC – and major newspapers like The New York Times and Washington Post have jettisoned all pretense of fair play. Their fierce determination to keep Trump out of the Oval Office has no precedent.

Indeed, no foreign enemy, no terror group, no native criminal gang, suffers the daily beating that Trump does. The mad mullahs of Iran, who call America the Great Satan and vow to wipe Israel off the map, are treated gently by comparison. By torching its remaining credibility in service of Clinton, the mainstream media’s reputations will likely never recover, nor will the standards. No future producer, editor, reporter or anchor can be expected to meet a test of fairness when that standard has been trashed in such willful and blatant fashion. Liberal bias in journalism is often baked into the cake. The traditional ethos of comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable leads to demands that government solve every problem. Favoring big government, then, becomes routine among most journalists, especially young ones.

I know because I was one of them. I started at the Times while the Vietnam War and civil-rights movement raged, and was full of certainty about right and wrong. My editors were, too, though in a different way. Our boss of bosses, the legendary Abe Rosenthal, knew his reporters leaned left, so he leaned right to “keep the paper straight.” That meant the Times, except for the opinion pages, was scrubbed free of reporters’ political views, an edict that was enforced by giving the opinion and news operations separate editors. The church-and-state structure was one reason the Times was considered the flagship of journalism. Those days are gone. The Times now is so out of the closet as a Clinton shill that it is giving itself permission to violate any semblance of evenhandedness in its news pages as well as its opinion pages.

But then you think: well, well, what got into the Wall Street Journal editors? Expect pressure on Clinton Foundation to increase.

• The Clintons Really Do Think They Can Get Away With Anything (WSJ)

After years of claiming that the Clinton Foundation poses no ethical conflicts for Bill and Hillary or the U.S. government, Bill Clinton now admits the truth—sort of. If his wife becomes President, he says the Super PAC masquerading as a charity won’t accept foreign or corporate contributions. Bill will also resign from the foundation board, and Chelsea will stop raising money for it. Now they tell us. If such fund-raising poses a problem when she’s President, why didn’t it when she was Secretary of State or while she is running for President? The answer is that it did and does, and they know it, but the foundation was too important to their political futures to give it up until the dynastic couple were headed back to the Oval Office.

Now that Hillary is running ahead of Donald Trump, Bill can graciously accept new restrictions on their pay-to-play politics. Bill must be having a good laugh over this one. The foundation served for years as a conduit for corporate and foreign cash to burnish the Clinton image, pay for their travel expenses for speeches and foreign trips, and employ their coterie in between campaigns or government gigs. Donors could give as much as they wanted because the foundation is a “charity.” President Obama may have banished Sidney Blumenthal from the State Department, but Bill could stash his conspiratorial pal at the foundation, keeping him on the family payroll while Sid flooded Hillary with foreign-policy advice. Her private email server was supposed to hide their email traffic—until that gambit was exposed last year.

But FBI Director James Comey let Hillary off the hook on the emails, and he declined to investigate the foundation, so it looks like they’re home free. By now the corporate and foreign cash has already been delivered, in anticipation that Hillary Clinton could become the next President. So now it’s the better part of political prudence to claim the ethical high ground. If you choose to believe or have a short memory. Readers may recall that the foundation promised the White House when Mrs. Clinton became Secretary of State that the foundation would restrict foreign donations and get approval from the State Department. It turned out the foundation violated that pledge, specifically when accepting $500,000 from Algeria.

The foundation also agreed to disclose donor names but failed to do so for more than 1,000 foreign donors until the failure was exposed by press reports. [..] Far from offering some new clean ethical slate, this latest foundation gambit ought to be a warning about a third Clinton term. Protected by Democrats and a press corps desperate to beat Donald Trump, the Clintons really do think they can get away with anything.

“.. In 2013, for instance, the Clinton Foundation took in $140 million, but spent just $9 million (6.4%) on direct aid. A typical charity devotes about 75% of receipts to aid.”

• Clinton Not In The Clear (Jack Kelly)

Hillary Clinton has little to fear from Donald Trump. But she may be casting nervous glances over her shoulder at Preet Bharara. You may not have heard of Mr. Bharara. Sheldon Silver, former speaker of the New York State Assembly, a Democrat, and Dean Skelos, former majority leader of the New York Senate, a Republican, wish they hadn’t. In May, they were sentenced to 12 years and five years in prison, respectively, for corruption. Preet Bharara is the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York. Since his appointment in 2009, Mr. Bharara “has launched a one-man crusade against evil-doers, ranging from corrupt politicians to the Mafia,” wrote Alan Chartock, a political science professor who’s a longtime watcher of New York state government.

The Southern District of New York is the lead of three U.S. attorneys’ offices investigating the Clinton Foundation, a recently retired deputy director of the FBI told the Daily Caller. The Clinton Foundation is headquartered in New York. It was begun in Little Rock, Ark., to raise funds for the Clinton library. The office in Washington, D.C., may focus on when Hillary was secretary of state. The Clinton Foundation has received more than $2 billion in contributions. More than 1,000 donors are foreigners. The foundation won’t disclose their names or amounts donated. Few of the funds raised have been spent on charitable works. In 2013, for instance, the Clinton Foundation took in $140 million, but spent just $9 million (6.4%) on direct aid. A typical charity devotes about 75% of receipts to aid.

Much more is spent on pay and benefits for staff, office rent, conferences and travel. Some of the highest-paid staffers are political operatives, such as Huma Abedin, who for a time was on the payrolls of both the Clinton Foundation and the State Department, and Sid Blumenthal, who ran a private intelligence network for Hillary in Libya. The most ballyhooed project, relief for Haiti after a devastating earthquake in 2010, was an example of “Robin Hood in reverse”— robbing the poor for the benefit of the rich, said financial analyst Charles Ortel. The Clinton Foundation is a “charity fraud network,” Mr. Ortel wrote on his blog. “What possesses powerful, wealthy and educated persons to prey on the most desperately poor humans on earth as they posture as philanthropists?”

Interesting view.

• The History of Money: Not What You Think (Minskys)

Most of us have an idea of how money came to be. It goes something like this: People wanted to exchange goods for other goods, but it was difficult to coordinate. So they started exchanging goods for money, and money for goods. This tells us that money is a medium of exchange. It’s a nice and simple story. The problem is that it may not be true. We may be understanding money entirely wrong. The above story assumes that first there was a market, and then people introduced money to make the market work better. But some people find this hard to believe. Those who subscribe to the Chartalist school of thought give a different history. Before money was used in markets, they say, it was used in primitive criminal justice systems.

Money started as—and still is—is a record of debt. It is a way to keep track of what one person owes another. There’s anthropological evidence to back up this view. Work by Innes, and Wray suggest that the origins of money are more like this: In a pre-market, feudal society, there was usually a system to maintain justice in the community. If someone committed a crime, the authority, let’s call him the king, would decide that the criminal owed a fine to the victim. The fine could be a cow, a sheep, three chickens, depending on the crime. Until that cow was brought forward, the criminal was indebted to the victim. The king would record the criminal’s outstanding debt. This system changed over time. Rather than paying fines to the victim, criminals were ordered to pay fines to the king.

This way, resources were being moved to the king, who could coordinate their use for the benefit of the community as a whole. This was useful for the King, and for the development of the society. But the amount of resources coming from a criminal here and there was not impressive. The system had to be expanded to draw more resources to the kingdom. To expand the system, the king created debt-records of his own. You can think of them as pieces of papers that say King-Owes-You. Next, he went to his citizens and demanded they give him the resources he wanted. If a citizen gave their cow to the king, the king would give the citizen some of his King-Owes-You papers. Now, a cow seems more useful than a piece of paper, so it seems silly that a citizen would agree to this.

But the king had thought of a solution. To make sure everyone would want his King-Owes-You papers, he created a use for them. He proclaimed that every so often, all citizens had to come forward to the kingdom. Each citizen would be in big trouble, unless they could provide little pieces of paper that showed the king still owed them. In that case, the king would let the citizen go, and not owe them any longer. The citizen would be free to go off and acquire more King-Owes-You papers, to make sure he would be safe the next time, too.

Saw this on Reuters and other sites, but they all left out the need to store cash, for some reason, which is in the original directive. So I ran the article through Google Translate and corrected it a little.

A government advising people to store cash is not a minor point, I would think. Not in the days of plastic and a war on cash.

• German Government: Citizens Should Store Food, Water And Cash (DWN)

For the first time since the end of the Cold War, the federal government according to a report wants to encourage new stockpiling the population again, so that they, in the case of a disaster or an armed attack temporarily, can take care of themselves. “The population is ‘advised’ to hold a personal supply of food of ten days,” quoted the “Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung” from a concept for civil defense, which the government is requested to adopt on Wednesday. According to the report, the population should be able to protect themselves in an emergency before calling government action to ensure an adequate supply of food, water, energy and cash. Therefore, the population should also be ‘advised’, to hold, for a period of five days, two liters of drinking water per person per day, it is stated in the text drawn up by the Ministry of the Interior.

According to “FAS” is the first strategy for civil defense since the end of the Cold War in 1989. She had been given in 2012 by the Budget Committee of the Bundestag in order. In the 69-page concept it is stated “that an attack on the territory of Germany, which requires a conventional defense, play” was. Nevertheless, it was necessary, “nevertheless to such sufficiently prepared not fundamentally excluded for the future development of life-threatening”. Interestingly, the FAZ reported in this regard that the Federal Government also worry about their own safety. The newspaper writes that in the paper literally stand “. Precautions are the event the task of the service office to meet in order to relocate the performance of duties of a public authority to another, sheltered place (Emergency Seat) can”

It is not clear whether these preparations related to a possible war. The federal government has recently changed its military strategy and regarded Russia as an enemy. NATO considers Russia an attack on NATO territory possible. Therefore, NATO wants the US and the EU also defend outside their own territory. Reuters writes that in the concept of “the need for a reliable alarm system, a better structural protection of buildings and sufficient capacity discussed in the health system” would. Reuters: “The civilian support of the armed forces should be again a priority. These included modifications to the traffic steering when the Bundeswehr must relocate combat units. “

Very far from over. Please help me support. Read: Meanwhile in Greece..

• ‘Nobody Believes In Anything Anymore’: Greek Crisis is Far From Over (CNBC)

With Europe facing pressing crises including the refugee crisis, economic slowdown and political disintegration following the Brexit vote, it’s easy to forget that Greece’s political and economic crisis dominated headlines last summer. One year on and a third bailout worth €86 billion later, arrived at after tortuous negotiations between Greece and its lenders, and the situation in Greece is a game of two halves with many Greeks suffering – and some trying to make something out of a bad situation. Greece’s government has been forced to make widespread spending cuts over the course of its three separate bailout programs, making life harder for most Greeks of ordinary means. The cuts have affected all ages with unemployment rising to the highest level in Europe.

A survey by independent analysis firm DiaNEOsis in June revealed that many Greeks were facing an increasing struggle to get by. Extreme poverty in the Greek population (of 11 million people) had risen from 2.2% in 2009, to 15% in 2015, the public opinion survey of 1,300 people showed, with 1.6 million people now living below in extreme poverty. One resident of the northern Greek city of Thessaloniki, Evangelos Kyrimlis, told CNBC that the Greece’s crisis had taken its toll on society, both at a local and national level. “Disillusionment is the first big thing that’s going on,” he noted. “Nobody believes in anything anymore.” “The second big thing is withdrawal. People have retreated to their families and fight only for the family survival. Society has been fragmented,” he said.

Kyrimlis works for his partner’s family firm, having returned to Greece after working for an engineering consultancy in London. Returning to Greece in the midst of the country’s financial breakdown, he said he now noted an increase in animosity between people, saying there was a “widespread hatred not directed to anyone in particular, it’s like all against all.”

“When they reached the port in Sicily the Italian Red Cross were there, with coffins and flowers for every person who died [..] The tough MSF doctors who have been going from war to war cried because of the flowers..”

• Rescuing Refugees: ‘You Never Get Used To It – And That’s A Good Thing’ (G.)

It was the silence of the passengers that Hassiba Hadj-Sahraoui first noticed. Usually when the humanitarian rescue boat sees a tiny dinghy bobbing about in the Mediterranean there’s frantic waving and shouting. “When our team approached in smaller boats and everyone was so quiet we realised something was wrong,” she says. “We asked permission to go aboard and that’s when we realised the others had been waiting for rescue for hours with dead bodies in the boat.” Twenty-two bodies were recovered that day (21 of them women) and 209 people were saved by the crew of the Aquarius, a boat run by Medicins Sans Frontieres (MSF) that patrols the refugee route between Libya and Italy. MSF advocacy manager Hadj-Sahraoui got an idea of how they died from the testimonies of survivors once they were safely on the Aquarius.

A wooden board that had been placed along the bottom of the dinghy broke and water started to come in, mixing with leaking fuel cans. A panic ensued and the 22 people died either in a stampede or drowning in a mix of water and fuel. The people they rescued were in shock. “The priority – it’s sad to say – is with the living,” says Hadj-Sahraoui. “So there’s a very quick medical team, trying to assess needs.” Once the survivors were on the Aquarius they were each given a blanket, water and some food. The people who were soaked in fuel were sent for a shower, because the fuel and sea salt cause nasty burns. Then they registered them. Hadj-Sahraoui speaks Arabic, French and English, a great advantage in her line of work. She asks each person where they are from, how old they are, and if they are travelling alone.

“We don’t wear sunglasses, because we need to have eye contact. It’s about humanity. It’s big smiles saying: ‘You’re now safe. This is where you are. This is what’s going to happen next.’ What surprised me is how polite people are. How they take their time to say thank you.” Once all the survivors were safely on board, and being tended to, the crew of the Aquarius also felt it was right on this occasion to recover the bodies of the women and one man who died. “For several hours we tried to keep the living on one side of the boat. The bodies had spent hours in the water, so we were trying to protect the living from seeing that. The doctor took pictures for identification, because families will never know what happened to their loved ones.” When they reached the port in Sicily the Italian Red Cross were there, with coffins and flowers for every person who died.

“The tough MSF doctors who have been going from war to war cried because of the flowers,” says Hadj-Sahraoui. “I was one of the suckers who cried a lot.” She says that people who do humanitarian work need to learn to take care of themselves, because there’s a lot of emotional burnout. MSF staff have psychological debriefings before and after they go on missions, and after extreme experiences like this one.

No-one’s going to stop this.

• Inuit Fear Being Overwhelmed As ‘Extinction Tourism’ Descends On Arctic (G.)

In a few days, one of the world’s largest cruise ships, the Crystal Serenity, will visit the tiny Inuit village of Ulukhaktok in northern Canada. Hundreds of passengers will be ferried to the little community, more than doubling its population of around 400. The Serenity will then raise anchor and head through the Northwest Passage to visit several more Inuit settlements before sailing to Greenland and finally New York. It will be a massive undertaking, representing an almost tenfold increase in passenger numbers taken through the Arctic on a single vessel – and it has triggered considerable controversy among Arctic experts. Inuit leaders fear that visits by giant cruise ships could overwhelm fragile communities, while others warn that the Arctic ecosystem, already suffering the effects of global warming, could be seriously damaged.

“This is extinction tourism,” said international law expert Professor Michael Byers, of the University of British Columbia. “Making this trip has only become possible because carbon emissions have so warmed the atmosphere that Arctic sea ice in summer is disappearing. The terrible irony is that this ship – which even has a helicopter for sightseeing and a huge staff-to-passenger ratio – has an enormous carbon footprint that is only going to make things even worse in the Arctic.” The Serenity is by far the biggest cruise vessel to traverse the fabled Northwest Passage, whose exploration has claimed the lives of hundreds of seamen. The ship has a crew of 655 and carries 1,070 passengers, who have paid between £19,000 and £120,000 for a voyage that Crystal Cruises says will take them on an “intrepid adventure” from Anchorage in Alaska to New York over 32 days.

For its part, Crystal insists its clients will have to follow a strict code of conduct during shore visits, while the ship’s air, water and rubbish discharges will be tightly controlled. Only low-sulphur fuel will be burned in the Serenity’s engines, said a spokesman. The Serenity will be accompanied by the UK icebreaker the RSS Ernest Shackleton, he added.

Debt Rattle August 2 2016

Aug 022016

August 2, 2016 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 9:10 am Finance Tagged with: Abe, bailout, IMF, refugees, SDR, UniCredit, VW, yields 2 Responses »

Lewis Wickes Hine ‘Hot dogs’ for fans waiting for gates to open at Ebbets Field 1920

• Asia Stocks Fall as Japan Awaits Stimulus (BBG)

• Japanese Bonds Are Plunging, Australia’s Surge To Record (BBG)

• China Debt Situation Gets Worse And Other EMs Start To Struggle (VW)

• China Set For Special Drawing Rights Bond Issues (SCMP)

• China Regulator Shutters 10,000 Funds (R.)

• Student-Loan Defaulters in a Standoff With Federal Government (WSJ)

• The State Of Europe’s Banks Is Far From Steady (CNBC)

• UniCredit Shares Fall Sharply After European Bank Stress Tests (G.)

• UK PM May Revives Industrial Policy Killed Off By Thatcher 30 Years Ago (R.)

• Home Ownership In England At Lowest Level In 30 Years (G.)

• South Korea Halts Sale of 80 Volkswagen Models Over Emissions Scandal (AFP)

• Aid Workers Try To Convert Muslim Refugees At Greek Camp (G.)

• New Greek Bailout Finds IMF In A Political Bind (AFP)

• Let the Games Begin! (Jim Kunstler)

With the BOJ running out of playing field, what goood can Abe do?

• Asia Stocks Fall as Japan Awaits Stimulus (BBG)

Asian stocks fell for the first time in seven days, retreating from an almost one-year high, as Japanese shares slid ahead of the announcement of a $274 billion stimulus package and a slump in oil weighed on energy and commodity companies. The MSCI Asia Pacific Index dropped 0.4% to 136.85 as of 9:03 a.m. in Tokyo after closing Monday at the highest since Aug. 17. Material and industrial shares led losses on the regional gauge, while energy producers also retreated, after crude sank into a bear market and sank below $40 a barrel for the first time since April on Monday. Japan’s Topix index lost 0.8% as investors weighed earnings and the government was poised to give details on steps to bolster an economy threatened by a strengthening yen and weak consumer spending.

Asian equities have extended their July rally, which was the best month since March, on the prospect of more global stimulus. The regional gauge has now shrugged off the fallout of Britain’s vote to leave the European Union and is up 3.7% for the year. Still, oil’s fall of more than 20% from its June high is muddying the waters and raising concerns about the recovery of the global economy. Crude’s decline “will probably weigh on sentiment a little bit and we may see some risk-off moves associated with that,” James Woods, a strategist at Rivkin Securities in Sydney, said by phone. “We’ll have an update from Shinzo Abe in Japan today, just running through the measures of the 28 trillion yen stimulus package. It’s really what’s going to dictate risk sentiment today.”

Yikes.

• Japanese Bonds Are Plunging, Australia’s Surge To Record (BBG)

Japanese bonds are plunging. Australia’s surged to a record. Blame it all on central banks. Benchmark sovereign notes in Japan headed for their biggest loss in three years on speculation the central bank will amend its unprecedented debt-purchase plan as soon as September. Australian yields tumbled to levels never seen before as the Reserve Bank cut interest rates in response to inflation running below its target. The divergence highlights the potency central banks have over their bond markets, even when analysts are questioning the limits of monetary policy. The Reserve Bank of Australia, with a benchmark of 1.5%, still has room to cut. PIMCO said the Bank of Japan – which is buying 80 trillion yen ($780 billion) a year of bonds and uses negative interest rates – has pushed policy as far as it can.

“The financial markets are being driven by what the central banks are doing,” said Roger Bridges at Nikko Asset Management in Sydney. “The central bank here has room to cut if necessary. In Japan, the policy options are deemed to be running out.” [..] Japanese policy makers fueled speculation they’re running out of options when they finished a meeting last week and opted against extending their two main tools, the bond purchases and negative interest rates, even as the inflation rate falls further below zero. They also announced a review of the effectiveness of the central bank’s policies. “We have probably seen the low of the yield of the super long JGBs,” Tomoya Masanao, Pimco’s head of portfolio management in Japan, wrote. “The BOJ hit its limit,” he wrote in a report on the company’s website last week.

Let’s see the NPLs in the shadow system.

• China Debt Situation Gets Worse And Other EMs Start To Struggle (VW)

One article this month pretty much summed up the overbuilding issue in China. In aggregate, Chinese cities are planning for 3.4 billion people in 2030. That’s three times the existing population and forecast population growth is minimal. Peak urbanisation may have arrived for China, the substantial slowdown in wage inflation is a strong indicator that the demand for labour is flat at best. This aligns with recent reports of a substantial increase in the unemployment rate. The city of Tieling is one example of what happens when a construction and manufacturing bubble pops. Remember that local governments earn most of their revenues from property development activities, which would fall flat if urbanisation stops.

A collapse in revenue would make debt servicing problematic, which is particularly concerning as local governments have seen an enormous increase in their debt issuance in 2015 and 2016. This includes continuing to build coal fired power plants when the existing plants are running at low capacity. Local governments are blocking lenders from withdrawing credit in order to protect jobs at zombie companies. 7.5% of companies in China are believed to be economically unviable, with medium and large state owned entities the worst.

Last month I wrote about the first non-performing loan securitisations in China and it looks like this process is ramping up. The Agricultural Bank of China is planning to sell a US$1.6b securitisation of non-performing loans which includes the underlying loans being marked down to 29% of face value. The other big way that banks are planning to clean up their loan books is debt to equity swaps, which are expected to start soon. There’s plenty to worry about with peer to peer lending and a crackdown is coming for wealth management products. In order to reduce fraud in these areas executives are being given tours of prisons, as a reminder of what might happen to them when investors lose money.

I talked about this yesterday in Why Should The IMF Care About Its Credibility? I don’t see it becoming a major issue any time soon, if at all.

• China Set For Special Drawing Rights Bond Issues (SCMP)

China might take another big step forward this month in its long-term aim to forge an IMF money system into the world’s dominant currency. Mainland media group Caixin reported that the World Bank planned to issue bonds denominated in Special Drawing Rights in China as early as the end of this month. It said policy bank China Development Bank was also planning an SDR bond issue. The SDR is a unit of money created by the IMF and defined by a weighted average of various convertible currencies. Market traders questioned the real purpose of such bonds, saying the SDR had little use in investment and trade. China has long had an obsession with the IMF’s SDR and wants to reduce the global reliance on the US dollar.

The IMF agreed last November to add the yuan to its SDR basket of currencies and offered the weighting as the third-biggest in the group, which Beijing saw as a triumph in its push for the yuan to have greater global influence. But the yuan later came under heavy depreciation pressure amid massive capital outflows, raising doubts about its credibility as a global currency. Beijing then began to publish its foreign exchange reserves, overseas investment and payments denominated in SDR. Central bank governor Zhou Xiaochuan said in April that the People’s Bank of China was studying the feasibility of issuing SDR bonds in China. If the World Bank issue went ahead, it would be one month before the yuan was formally included in the currency basket.

Bank of China researcher Zhao Xueqing said the timing was proper because the IMF was looking for ways to expand the use of the monetary unit. However, one Shanghai-based trader at a major bank said the issue would be more symbolic than meaningful. “It’s more like China wanting to show it has a big role in the global financial market”, she said. “But who will buy them? How will they be priced and transacted? … Even yuan-denominated bonds issued by foreign institutions are not actively traded.” An in-house economist at a Shenzhen-based domestic bank said:“I doubt there is any meaningful use to the issuing of such bonds. If such bonds were worth investing in, why hasn’t there been any active issues or transactions in much more mature countries before?”

China’s financial world is still Wild East. Lots of abuse and losses for grandma’s.

• China Regulator Shutters 10,000 Funds (R.)

China’s funds regulator said on Monday it has canceled the licenses of over 10,000 funds, amid a crackdown on the country’s poorly regulated fund management sector, which has been dogged by runaway managers and misappropriation of investments. The move comes after the hedge fund industry was thrown into disarray earlier this year as managers rushed to comply with stringent new rules. “Some funds registered in reality had no intention of getting into the business,” the Asset Management Association of China (AMAC) said. “Some engaged in illegal fundraising for illegal and criminal activities under the guise of funds, cheating the public,” the note added. New rules introduced by AMAC that took effect in July require fund managers to fully disclose their investment risks, review the identities of investors, and set up special accounts to manage capital.

Something will have to give. The numbers are getting out of hand.

• Student-Loan Defaulters in a Standoff With Federal Government (WSJ)

The letters keep coming, as do the emails. They head, unopened, straight into Jason Osborne’s trash and deleted folder. The U.S. government desperately wants Mr. Osborne and his wife to start repaying their combined $46,500 in federal student debt. But they are among the more than seven million Americans in default on their loans, many of them effectively in a standoff with the government. These borrowers have gone at least a year without making a payment—ignoring hundreds of phone calls, emails, text messages and letters from federally hired debt collectors. Borrowers in long-term default represent about 16% of the roughly 43 million Americans with student debt, now totaling $1.3 trillion across the U.S., and their numbers have continued to climb despite the expanding labor market.

Their failure to repay—in many cases due to low wages or unemployment, in other cases due to outright protest at what borrowers see as an unfair system—threatens to leave taxpayers on the hook for $125 billion, the total amount they owe. The Osbornes say they are the victims of a for-profit school that made false promises and a predatory lender—the government. “Do you think I’m going to give them one penny I’m making to pay back the loan for a job I’m never going to hold?” said Mr. Osborne, 45, who studied to be a health-care worker but can’t find a job as one. The rising number of borrowers in default weakens the economy as underwater homeowners did after the housing crash: by damaged credit, an inability to spend and save for the future, and a lack of resources to move to better jobs.

“..the 34 listed banks in the latest stress tests results have lost on average 33% of their book value since the last stress tests were done less than two years ago..”

• The State Of Europe’s Banks Is Far From Steady (CNBC)

Bank investors rejoice! The European Banking Authority declares stress tests should no longer be about pushing fresh capital into the system, as they were five years ago, or drilling down in to asset quality, as in 2014. Nope. The good news is that we are now in a world where “steady-state monitoring” is what’s needed. So will this “steady state’ policy pronouncement provide the confidence and assurance investors need? I hate to say it but I’m not convinced. Even if the stock prices overall bounce a bit this week, the banking sector did not get off to a good start Monday. I fear the market will continue to apply their own version of stress tests and find both the banks – and the regulators for that matter -lacking.

I asked European Central Bank President Mario Draghi at the last policy meeting if investors were over-exaggerating the risks. His response was cautious but positive. ”I don’t want to underplay the situation, to say it’s not a solvency problem, it’s a profitability problem doesn’t mean that one underplays but figure wise, we see from a solvency viewpoint, our banks are better off than years ago but our banks do have profitability issues, especially those with a high share of NPLs (non-performing loans), but not only those with high share of NPLs, some of it has to do with weak growth performance of the past few years. Draghi added that he was pretty confident that “strong supervision, robust regulation and better communication by supervisory authorities will still improve the situation and the perception in the rest of the world’s eyes.”

Call me cynical but I’m not sure the EBA’s “steady state” monitoring communication is quite what investors are looking for. Especially when you have a panel of respected academics including ZEW’s Sascha Steffen suggesting this month that European banks need €900 billion ($1 trillion) of fresh capital to convince investors they are robust. Who knows? But just compare that to the €280 billion the EBA says has been pumped in since 2011. Plus the report’s authors also point out that the 34 listed banks in the latest stress tests results have lost on average 33% of their book value since the last stress tests were done less than two years ago. A clear sign in my mind that the market still had significant concerns about the health of bank balance sheets and their ability to make profits.

Can Renzi bail out his biggest banks too, like he trying to do with Monte Passchi?

• UniCredit Shares Fall Sharply After European Bank Stress Tests (G.)

Italy’s biggest bank, UniCredit, has borne the brunt of lingering anxiety about the country’s banking sector, seeing its shares fall sharply following the EU-wide banking health checks. The 9.4% drop in UniCredit shares, which were being closely monitored by the Italian Borse on Monday amid heavy trading, followed Friday’s publication of stress tests on 51 banks across the EU. In the European Banking Authority tests, UniCredit recorded a capital ratio of more than 7% after the stress test applied a hypothetical shock to global growth, interest rates and currencies. Although well above the legal minimumof 4.5%, it left Unicredit as one of the five weakest out of the 51 banks tested.

The deterioration in its capital ratio was not on the scale of Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena (MPS) – Italy’s third largest bank – which announced a rescue package on Friday aimed at funding at least €5bn worth of capital, after the stress test showed that its entire capital base would be wiped out under the adverse scenario. MPS was the worst-performing bank of any bank tested. Shares in MPS, regarded as the world’s oldest bank, were among the few to rally after the stress test results as its rescue operation appeared to alleviate pressure on the Italian government to intervene. Even so, questions remained about how easily MPS could find investors willing to stump up €5bn when its existing stock market value was less than €1bn.

In itself, not a bad idea. Just don’t push it all towards exports. Make your own stuff. It’s the way of the future.

• UK PM May Revives Industrial Policy Killed Off By Thatcher 30 Years Ago (R.)

Prime Minister Theresa May will on Tuesday outline her bid to reshape the British economy for a post-Brexit world, reviving the once unfashionable concept of industrial policy 30 years after Margaret Thatcher killed it off. May will chair the first meeting of the “Cabinet Committee on Economy and Industrial Strategy” in her Downing Street Offices, bringing together the heads of 11 other ministries to set out her vision for a state-boosted industrial renaissance. “If we are to take advantages of the opportunities presented by Brexit, we need to have our whole economy firing,” May said ahead of the meeting in a statement released by her office. “We also need a plan to drive growth up and down the country – from rural areas to our great cities.”

After a referendum campaign that revealed dissatisfaction in many of Britain’s struggling post-industrial regions, May is pitching a plan to reunite the country by raising the prospects of those who she casts as “hard-working people”. The June 23 vote to leave the EU has raised serious questions about the future of the world’s fifth largest economy, with some surveys indicating a recession, a hit to consumer confidence and a possible fall in investment. “We need a proper industrial strategy that focuses on improving productivity, rewarding hard-working people with higher wages and creating more opportunities for young people so that, whatever their background, they go as far as their talents will take them,” May said ahead of the meeting.

This is the kind of pain that takes a long time to heal. But how predictable would you like it? “According to Nationwide, the UK average had risen to £196,930 in February – a 60% increase in 13 years.”

• Home Ownership In England At Lowest Level In 30 Years (G.)

Home ownership in England has fallen to its lowest level in 30 years as the growing gap between earnings and property prices has created a housing crisis that extends beyond London to cities including Manchester. The struggle to get on the housing ladder is not just a feature of the London property market, according to a new report by the Resolution Foundation thinktank, with Greater Manchester seeing as big a slump in ownership since its peak in the early 2000s as parts of the capital, and cities in Yorkshire and the West Midlands also seeing sharp drops. Home ownership across England reached a peak in April 2003, when 71% of households owned their home, either outright or with a mortgage, but by February this year the figure had fallen to 64%, the Resolution Foundation said.

The figure is the lowest since 1986, when home ownership levels were on the way up, with a housing market boom fuelled by the deregulation of the mortgage industry and the introduction of the right-to-buy policy for council homes by Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government. The Resolution Foundation’s analysis highlights the scale of the job faced by the prime minister, Theresa May, who has pledged to tackle the housing deficit. May warned last month that unless the issue was dealt with “young people will find it even harder to afford their own home. The divide between those who inherit wealth and those who don’t will become more pronounced. And more and more of the country’s money will go into expensive housing.”

The report, based on analysis of the latest Labour Force Survey, showed that in early 2016 only 58% of households in Greater Manchester were homeowners, compared with a peak of 72% in 2003. In outer London, the peak in ownership came earlier, in 2000, but the fall was also from 72% then to 58% in February. The West Midlands and Yorkshire have also seen double-digit drops, driven by declines in Sheffield and Leeds.

VW had already suspended sales July 25. BTW: 80 different models?!

• South Korea Halts Sale of 80 Volkswagen Models Over Emissions Scandal (AFP)

South Korea is suspending sales of 80 Volkswagen models as part of a widening investigation into the German carmaker’s emissions cheating scandal. The environment ministry said most of the models had been showcased for sale until recently, and added that the problem vehicles had fabricated documents for emissions and noise-level tests. “As of August 2 we have revoked the certification of 83,000 vehicles of 80 models,” said a ministry statement. In July South Korean prosecutors arrested an executive of Volkswagen’s South Korean unit as part of their investigations.

The world’s second-largest automaker faces legal action in several countries after it admitted to faking US emissions tests on some of its diesel-engined vehicles. In November 2015 Seoul ordered Volkswagen Korea to recall more than 125,000 diesel-powered cars sold in South Korea and fined the firm 14.1bn won ($12.3m). Foreign carmakers, especially German brands like Volkswagen, have steadily expanded their presence in South Korea’s auto market, long dominated by the local giant Hyundai and its affiliate Kia. Sales of foreign cars account for about 15% of total auto sales, compared with 10% in 2012. Around 70% of foreign auto sales in South Korea are diesel-engined vehicles.

One of many things that are going wrong in Greece vis a vis refugees.

• Aid Workers Try To Convert Muslim Refugees At Greek Camp (G.)

Christians working in Greece’s most notorious asylum detention centre have tried to convert some of the Muslim detainees, who have been held under the terms of the EU-Turkey migration deal. On at least two occasions in recent months, aid workers have distributed conversion forms inside copies of Arabic versions of the St John’s gospel to people held at the Moria detention camp on Lesbos. The forms, seen by the Guardian, invite asylum seekers to sign a statement declaring the following: “I know I’m a sinner … I ask Jesus to forgive my sins and grant me eternal life. My desire is to love and obey his word.” Muslim asylum seekers who received the booklet said they found the aid workers’ intervention insensitive.

“It’s a big problem because a lot of the people are Muslim and they have a problem with changing their religion,” said Mohamed, a detainee from Damascus. “They were trying this during Ramadan, the holiest Muslim month.” A second Syrian, Ahmed, said: “We like all religions, but if you are a Christian, and I give you a Qur’an, how would you feel?” Detainees alleged that the forms were distributed by at least two representatives of Euro Relief, a Greek charity that became the largest aid group active in Moria after other aid organisations pulled out in protest against the EU-Turkey deal. The camp is overseen by the Greek migration ministry, but aid groups perform most of the day-to-day management.

As I wrote yesterday in Why Should The IMF Care About Its Credibility?, the IMF has a credibility problem. Multiple, in fact.

• New Greek Bailout Finds IMF In A Political Bind (AFP)

The IMF can scarcely ignore Europe. Its members together hold the largest voting bloc on the Executive Board, the body which approves bailouts. The United States is still the single-largest member. The result is a complex equation for the Fund, which has pledged to make a decision before the end of the year. If it bails Greece out again, some will surely see Europes hand pulling the strings. But if it abstains, the Fund may appear to suggest the bailout is doomed to fail. “That’s the conundrum they face,” Peter Doyle, a former official in the IMF’s European Department, told AFP. ”If they go along they look like they’re caving in; if they reject, it means that they could potentially be raising new big alarms.” With its nerves already frayed by Brexit, Europe can still hardly afford a new, large-scale Greek crisis.

This latest dilemma could still offer the IMF a means of proclaiming its independence from the member countries. “Theres a need for them to rebuild their credibility,” Desmond Lachman, a former European Department official, told AFP. “By staying out of Greece, they could tell the rest of the world ‘weve realized that we were politically used.’” Doyle does not believe the IMF can be truly independent, saying the United States and Europe will still call the shots. ”That’s only what matters and that has always been the case,” said Doyle, who left the Fund in 2012. At the center of the drama and after six years of recession, Greece has seized on the latest controversy to make its views known. “The IMF has been neither useful nor needed in Europe,” said Olga Gerovassili, a government spokeswoman.

“And so the great disaster movie of 2016 commences: Godzilla Versus Rodan the Flying Reptile.”

• Let the Games Begin! (Jim Kunstler)

The distraction du jour is whether Trump has become an agent of Russia. Notice that this line of intel comes direct from the neo-con central agitprop desk. This unofficial US War Party representing the amalgamated war industries has been busy demonizing Russia throughout the current presidential term. Not all Americans are so easily gulled, though. Those who know history understand, for instance, that the Crimea has been a province of Russia almost continually for hundreds of years — except the brief interval when the ur-Ukrainian Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev one drunken evening gave it away to the then-Soviet region of Ukraine in a fit of sentimentality, assuming it would remain a virtual property of Greater Russia forever.

Notice, too, that since Russia annexed it in 2014 (being the site of its only warm water port and major naval stations) not even the US neo-con war party has been able to make a credible case for fighting over it. Instead, they’ve resorted to name-calling: Putin the “thug,” Putin the “worst political gangster in the world.” This is exactly the brand of foreign policy that Hillary will bring to the Oval Office. Not that Donald Trump offers a coherent alternative. The reasonable suspicion persists that he doesn’t know his ass from a hole in the ground vis-à-vis how the affairs of the world actually work. For him it’s all same as tough-talking the sheet-rocker’s union. Then, of course, Trump had to immediately step in dog-shit by bad-mouthing the mother of an American army hero who-just-happened-to-be of the Mohammedan persuasion.

Trump for practical purposes is a child and a reasonable case is not hard to make for denying him presidential power. And so the great disaster movie of 2016 commences: Godzilla Versus Rodan the Flying Reptile. Which one will survive to completely destroy the sclerotic remains of our nation? The good news is that voters are moving to the Third and Fourth party nominees, Gary Johnson (Libertarian) and Jill Stein (Green) in droves, herds, flocks, porpoise pods, and stampedes. Perhaps both of these relatively sane candidates will show enough polling strength to make it into the Great Debates. Won’t that be fun?

Debt Rattle July 27 2016

Jul 272016

July 27, 2016 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 9:12 am Finance Tagged with: Abe, bees, Brexit, Deutsche, DNC, Hillary, Hong Kong, LUCA, neocons, nyet, oil, shadow banks, WMP 5 Responses »

John Vachon Five o’clock crowds, Chicago 1941

• Japan PM Unveils More Than $266 Billion Stimulus (AFP)

• Deutsche Bank’s Q2 Net Income Plunges Nearly 100% Year-On-Year (CNBC)

• China’s Debt Problem May Be Worse Than Expected, Moody’s Warns (CNBC)

• China Stocks Tumble on Report of Wealth Management Product Curbs (BBG)

• Hong Kong Imports/Exports Plunge in Line with Japan and China (R.)

• A Refinery-Driven Correction Is Upon Us’ (BBG)

• Cameron Was Right, Britain Is Broken (G.)

• Kremlin Says Idea It Hacked Democratic Party Emails Absurd (R.)

• Assange: “A Lot More Material” Will Be Released (ZH)

• The Neocons Are Backing Hillary Clinton (Intercept)

• The Odious Versus the Tedious (Kunstler)

• Auckland House Prices Must Deliberately Be Reduced By 50% – NZ Greens (RNZ)

• Catalonia Tells Spain It Will Push For Secession With Or Without Assent (G.)

• We Love To Talk Of Terror (Robert Fisk)

• The Power of “Nyet” (Dmitry Orlov)

• Leading Insecticide Cuts Bee Sperm By 40%, Lifespan By A Third (G.)

• LUCA: The Ancestor Of All Living Things On Earth (IBT)

Abenomics must end in full-blown madness.

• Japan PM Unveils More Than $266 Billion Stimulus (AFP)

Japan on Wednesday announced a whopping economic stimulus package worth more than 28 trillion yen ($266 billion), media reported, to boost the stumbling economy. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe announced the package in a speech in southwestern Japan, giving few details except to say it would include about 13 trillion yen in government spending, according to Jiji Press news agency.

“..scrapping dividend payments to shareholders, thousands of job cuts and asset sales…”

• Deutsche Bank’s Q2 Net Income Plunges Nearly 100% Year-On-Year (CNBC)

Deutsche Bank, the German bank which is an important part of the global financial system, announced revenue and income falls Wednesday which could add further concerns for investors made jittery by a combination of Brexit and previous issues at the bank. Its second-quarter net income was down 98% from the same period in the previous year, to 20 million euros ($22 million), as it exited parts of its business while revenues were down 20% to 7.4 billion euro. Further cuts may be needed, John Cryan, chief executive of Deutsche Bank, warned. “If the current weak economic environment persists, we will need to be yet more ambitious in the timing and intensity of our restructuring,” he said in a statement.

Deutsche’s CET1 ratio – a key measure of financial strength – improved slightly to 10.8%. The bank, one of Germany’s largest lenders, has lost around 40% of its market value this year as concerns mount about its capital position and $14 billion in fines over past misconduct. John Cryan, the bank’s co-chief executive who was appointed in July last year, has embarked on a drastic plan to meet its capital targets, including scrapping dividend payments to shareholders, thousands of job cuts and asset sales. Raising new capital is likely to be difficult because of the bank’s holdings of debt for some of the worse off euro zone countries.

As I’ve said 100 times: “China’s “shadow banking” system is masking the rise in indebtedness..”

• China’s Debt Problem May Be Worse Than Expected, Moody’s Warns (CNBC)

China’s “shadow banking” system is masking the rise in indebtedness in China, Moody’s Investors Service said in a report Wednesday. The rating agency said overall leverage in China’s economy continued to rise with credit growth outpacing the rise in nominal GDP. “The growth in overall leverage may be understated, because some of the fastest growing components of shadow banking are not included in TSF (total social financing),” said Michael Taylor, Moody’s chief credit officer for Asia Pacific. The credit growth was measured using TSF, an economic barometer of total fundraising by Chinese non-state entities, including individuals. It didn’t, however, include all shadow banking activities, which have grown in recent years.

“We estimate the potential understatement to be significant, amounting to at least RMB16 trillion ($2.4 trillion) or 23% of GDP at end-2015, equivalent to around one-third of shadow banking,” Taylor added. Moody’s said TSF flows were being sustained by formal bank credit flows supported by accommodative monetary policy. The increasing leverage was worrying. “The rise in overall leverage and further expansion of shadow banking activity are pushing up financial risks,” said Stephen Schwartz, a Moody’s senior vice president.

Shadow banks and their ‘wealth’ products.

• China Stocks Tumble on Report of Wealth Management Product Curbs (BBG)

Chinese stocks slumped the most in six weeks amid concern regulators are moving to limit equity investments by some wealth-management products. The Shanghai Composite Index fell 1.6% at the mid-day break, reversing a gain of as much as 0.2%. The Shenzhen Composite Index lost 3%, while the ChiNext Index of small-company shares sank 4%, the most since June 13. China’s banking regulator is considering tightening curbs on the nation’s $3.6 trillion market for WMPs, the 21st Century Business Herald reported, citing people it didn’t identify. Authorities may set a limit on how much WMPs can invest in equities and “non-standard assets” such as loans, the report said.

“There’s an obvious trend that the regulators want to strengthen market monitoring and lower the use of leverage in financial markets to control risks,” said Dai Ming at Hengsheng Asset Management. “Under such circumstances, Chinext is especially vulnerable, given its high valuations and the recent gains.” The China Banking Regulatory Commission met with some banks this month on the rule revision and a final version hasn’t been drafted, the 21st Century Business Herald report said. China’s watchdogs have signaled they’re paying closer attention to the fund managers and brokerages who funnel the nation’s household savings into investments from stocks to bonds and derivatives.

The China Securities Regulatory Commission this month issued guidelines curbing the use of leverage by structured asset management plans. Li Chao, vice chairman of the regulator, told a gathering of firms in the northeastern city of Harbin last week to do better due diligence on prospective clients when arranging initial public offerings, secondary share sales and bond issues, people familiar with the matter said.

Hong Kong=Japan=China. Exact same pattern. World trade collapsing. If Hong Kong weren’t so dependent on imports, those would fall much more than 5.6%. “Domestic exports to the United Kingdom [..] plunged 48.2% in June.”

• Hong Kong Imports/Exports Plunge in Line with Japan and China (R.)

Hong Kong’s total exports in June fell for the 14th straight month, dampened by a slowdown in China, with the city’s factories bracing for more pain in coming months from the impact of Brexit. Open and trade-dependent economies in Asia such as Hong Kong are expected to be among the most vulnerable to a slowdown in global trade from Britain’s shock vote to leave the European Union as the effects filter through factory supply chains, analysts say. Hong Kong’s total exports in June fell 1% from a year earlier to HK$296.5 billion ($38.2 billion), government data showed on Tuesday. Total imports fell 0.9%, in its 17th straight month of decline, to HK$342.1 billion. In May, annual exports slipped 0.1% while imports dropped 4.3%.

For the first half of 2016, total exports value dropped 3.9%, while imports fell 5.6%. The city recorded a visible trade deficit of HK$199.6 billion for the first half period, equivalent to 10.8% of the value of imports. “Looking ahead, the external trading environment remains challenging given the uncertainties associated with the outcome of the UK referendum in favor of leaving the EU, slow recovery in the advanced markets, monetary policy divergence among major central banks and heightened geopolitical tensions in various regions,” the government said, adding it will monitor the situation closely. Domestic exports to the United Kingdom, which accounted for 2.2% of the total, plunged 48.2% in June.

Well, not really, it’s all just about demand.

• A Refinery-Driven Correction Is Upon Us’ (BBG)

Gear up for a fall in oil prices. The global oil market is “severely oversupplied” with gasoline — with stocks at a five-year high — serving as a blow to crude prices from next month, reckon Morgan Stanley analysts led by Adam Longson. In a report published on Sunday, the analysts foresee “worrisome trends” for oil supply and demand, led by refineries generating too much gasoline in recent months. Faced with the need to cut back on capacity utilization to protect profit margins, these refineries are set to crimp crude oil purchases and drag prices lower, the analysts say. “Crude oil demand is trending below refined product demand for the first time in three years,” they write.

“Refineries are the true consumer of crude oil, and crude oil demand is ultimately more important than aggregate refined product demand for oil balances. Given the oversupply in the refined product markets, fading refinery margins, and economic run cuts, we expect crude oil demand to deteriorate further over the coming months.” A glut of gasoline could weigh significantly on oil prices, which have been lifted in recent weeks by supply disruptions and healthy petrol demand in emerging markets. Excess gasoline also means that refiners may close their doors sooner and for longer than usual during their traditional summer production shutdown, taking further demand out of the market.

Reading through a piece like this, it becomes even more surprising that Brexit was a surprise to so many Brits.

• Cameron Was Right, Britain Is Broken (G.)

In opposition, David Cameron battered Gordon Brown with two words: Broken Britain. It was his Murdoch-inspired catchphrase for hoodies scrapping in gangs, Neets necking alcopops, teenagers ending up pregnant. It set the framework for Iain Duncan Smith’s welfare reforms. Broken Britain summed up the dark side of the New Labour era: a busted social contract and a class wantonly sponging off the rest of society. It always struck me as the right phrase for the wrong target. The real Broken Britain is the one revealed over the past four days in two reports from MPs. It is workers urinating into bottles at the “Victorian workhouse” of Sports Direct, because their toilet breaks are restricted. It is women being offered permanent jobs in return for sexual favours.

It is BHS, a high-street chain nearly as old as the Queen, effectively killed by two “plundering” owners. It is 10,000 shop workers who will shortly be out on the streets, and 20,000 pension-scheme members who must now worry over how much they’ll have to live on in their old age. The riots of 2011 were taken by Cameron as proof he’d been right all along: “Irresponsibility. Selfishness. Behaving as if your choices have no consequences … Reward without effort. Crime without punishment. Rights without responsibilities.” This is Philip Green and Mike Ashley summed up – along with all the well-heeled consultants, directors and credulous politicians (including Cameron) who applauded and subsidised them on their way, bought off with fat fees and cheap photo-ops.

The rioting kids who stole bottles of water and robbed tellies from their local Argos were given prison sentences worth a total of 1,200 years. By contrast, Green and Ashley weren’t even going to bother facing MPs. Only after five months of back and forth did Sports Direct’s Ashley get in the chauffeured car down to Westminster. Green went one better, demanding that Frank Field resign from the BHS inquiry – then rocking up to parliament and telling MPs to stop looking at him. Such prickliness from a multibillionaire would have been funny had it not been for the thousands of families whose lives he’d just ruined.

Wow. I found a few sentences at Reuters that sound somewhat sensible on the topic. “If the Russians hadn’t hacked us (for which we have no proof), Americans would have never found out about what we did.” Dumb f**ks!

• Kremlin Says Idea It Hacked Democratic Party Emails Absurd (R.)

“We are again seeing these maniacal attempts to exploit the Russian theme in the U.S. election campaign,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters when asked about the leaked emails. “This is not breaking new ground, this is an old trick which is being played again. This is not good for our bilateral relations, but we understand that we simply have to get through this unpleasant period.” U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said earlier on Tuesday he had raised the hacking issue at a meeting in Laos with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. “I don’t want to use four-letter words,” was Lavrov’s only response to reporters when asked whether Russia was responsible for the email hack.

Earlier this month, Carter Page, a foreign policy adviser to Trump, visited Moscow, where he gave a lecture complaining that Western governments had often had a hypocritical focus on democratization in the post-Soviet world. Analysts say the Kremlin would welcome a Trump win because the billionaire U.S. businessman has repeatedly praised Putin, spoken of wanting to get along with Russia, and has said he would consider an alliance with Moscow against Islamic State. Trump’s suggestion he might abandon NATO’s pledge to automatically defend all alliance members is also likely to have gone down well in Moscow, where the military alliance is cast as an outdated Cold War relic.

“Assange told CNN that Democratic Party officials were using the specter of Russian involvement to distract from the content of the emails..”

• Assange: “A Lot More Material” Will Be Released (ZH)

One month ago, when Wikileaks’ Julian Assange told ITV’s Richard Peston that he would publish “enough evidence” to indict Hillary Clinton, few took him seriously. And while Hillary has not been indicted – yet – last Friday’s leak has already managed to wreak havoc and has led to revelations of cronyism and collusion within the Democratic party and the media, the resignation of the DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz, as well as chaos on the first day of the Democratic convention. Hence, why we believe Assange will be taken more seriously this time. Earlier today, Assange told CNN that Wikileaks might release “a lot more material” relevant to the US electoral campaign. Assange spoke to CNN following the release of nearly 20,000 hacked Democratic National Committee emails.

The topic then turned to the topic du jour: “did Putin do it”? Assange refused to confirm or deny a Russian origin for the mass email leak, saying Wikileaks tries to create ambiguity to protect all its sources. “Perhaps one day the source or sources will step forward and that might be an interesting moment some people may have egg on their faces. But to exclude certain actors is to make it easier to find out who our sources are,” Assange told CNN. The Kremlin has rejected allegations its behind the hacking, calling suggestions it ordered the release of the emails to influence US politics the “usual fun and games” of the US election campaigns, while the Russian foreign minister had an even simpler reaction to the same question: “I don’t want to use four-letter words.”

Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin spokesman, added, “This is not really good for bilateral relations.” All of this now appears to be irrelevant, and as we speculated earlier, the “anti-Russia” narrative is now in motion and moments ago Obama said that it’s ‘possible’ Putin is trying to sway vote for Trump. Which brings us to the next point: speaking from the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where he faces extradition over sexual assault allegations, Assange told CNN that Democratic Party officials were using the specter of Russian involvement to distract from the content of the emails, which have had tumultuous affect on the party at the start of its national convention [..]

And you think Trump is the danger? These are the people who shed blood around the globe. These are the people responsible for the terrorist attacks against the west.

• The Neocons Are Backing Hillary Clinton (Intercept)

As Hillary Clinton puts together what she hopes will be a winning coalition in November, many progressives remain wary — but she has the war-hawks firmly behind her. “I would say all Republican foreign policy professionals are anti-Trump,” leading neoconservative Robert Kagan told a group gathered around him, groupie-style, at a “foreign policy professionals for Hillary” fundraiser I attended last week. “I would say that a majority of people in my circle will vote for Hillary.” As the co-founder of the neoconservative think tank Project for the New American Century, Kagan played a leading role in pushing for America’s unilateral invasion of Iraq, and insisted for years afterwards that it had turned out great.

Despite the catastrophic effects of that war, Kagan insisted at last week’s fundraiser that U.S. foreign policy over the last 25 years has been “an extraordinary success.” Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s know-nothing isolationism has led many neocons to flee the Republican ticket. And some, like Kagan, are actively helping Clinton, whose hawkishness in many ways resembles their own. The event raised $25,000 for Clinton. Two rising stars in the Democratic foreign policy establishment, Amanda Sloat and Julianne Smith, also spoke.

The way they described Clinton’s foreign policy vision suggested that if elected president in November, she will escalate tensions with Russia, double down on military belligerence in the Middle East and generally ignore the American public’s growing hostility to intervention. Sloat, the former deputy assistant secretary of state in the Bureau of European and Eurasian Affairs, boasted that Clinton will be “more interventionist and forward-leaning than Obama’s been” in Syria. She also applauded Clinton for doing intervention the right way, through coalitions instead of the unilateral aggression that defined the Bush years.

“What higher service to democracy than to expose the anti-democratic workings of the party that affects to call itself Democratic? ”

• The Odious Versus the Tedious (Kunstler)

You thought the Republican convention was a ghastly spectacle of royal Trumpery (and Iago-style backstabbing featuring the arch-asshole Ted Cruz)? Now comes the Democratic Annunciation of I’m-With-Her-It’s-My-Turn, the incarnation of crony corruption in our late-state Republic of Racketeering. Remember that old movie, The Exorcist, with its demonic spewage of projectile vomit. Expect something like that on the grand scale in Philadelphia this week as the Exalted-Breaker-of-Glass-Ceilings steps forth to accept her victory tiara.

The New York Times is blaming the Ruskies for releasing those thousands of new emails disclosing the perfidy of the Democratic National Committee staff in pimping for Hillary against Bernie and trafficking with the major network news operations to manage and spin things Her way — and especially to rig the electoral machinery against Sanders. How much will his supporters Feel the Bern this week in Philly as the party attempts to put on an appearance of unity (Ha!) behind HRC? How can it conceivably be possible now for Bernie to stand by her side for the crucial unity photo op? I suspect he’d rather chew his right arm off.

For my money, the Ruskies should get the Nobel Peace Prize if they were behind the email release. What higher service to democracy than to expose the anti-democratic workings of the party that affects to call itself Democratic? The sudden appearance of 20,000 smoking guns made party chairperson Debbie Wasserman-Schultz vamoose faster than you can say Debbie Wasserman Schultz, though her replacement, Donna Brazile is every inch just another blatant HRC foot-soldier. Perhaps she’ll have to orchestrate the proceedings with smoke signals or invisible ink instead of emails.

As the conventions rolled out, the aggregate miasma we call the news industry resorted to that tired trope of Optimism Versus Pessimism. Translation: you can’t handle the truth so somebody please bring out the rainbow-leaping unicorns. The American zeitgeist is a tattered garment worn by a three hundred pound tranny in a diabetic coma. It’s probably beyond salvation at this point. Somebody please put it out of its misery. Hence: Trump Versus Hillary, the odious versus the tedious, the election to end all elections.

This makes too much sense.

• Auckland House Prices Must Deliberately Be Reduced By 50% – NZ Greens (RNZ)

Auckland house prices should be deliberately reduced by up to 50% over a period of time to make the market affordable again, Greens co-leader Metiria Turei says. The average house price in Auckland has risen to nearly $1 million, or 10 times the median household income. Ms Turei said the only way to reverse that was to slowly bring prices back down to three or four times the median household income. She told Morning Report the Green Party was considering what timeframe would work without crashing the market and hurting people who already owned homes. “The only way to prevent a bust, and to protect families in the short and long term is to lay out a comprehensive plan, which means using every comprehensive tool that we’ve got so that we can slowly bring down house prices so that they’re reasonable.”

The Auckland Council’s chief economist had suggested bringing prices down to five times the median household income by 2030, she said. Labour leader Andrew Little said Ms Turei’s declaration that Auckland house prices should be deliberately reduced was irresponsible. There was no way a Labour-led government would consider the idea, he said. “We have a very clear plan. It’s not about crashing house prices. It’s about stabilising prices. “We don’t want to cause undue economic harm to those who – in good faith – have bought homes, entered into mortgages. That’s not a responsible approach.”

“Last month, Spain’s interior minister, Jorge Fernández Díaz, and the head of Catalonia’s anti-fraud office, Daniel de Alfonso, were apparently recorded discussing possible investigations that could be launched against pro-independence politicians in the region.”

• Catalonia Tells Spain It Will Push For Secession With Or Without Assent (G.)

The Catalan government has intensified its war of words with Spain by vowing to use its democratic mandate to forge a separate Catalan state with or without the approval of Madrid. Catalonia is preparing to defy Spain’s constitutional court this week by debating the conclusions of a working group on sovereignty, nine months after the Catalan parliament put forward a resolution calling for the “beginning of a process of the creation of an independent Catalan state”. Carme Forcadell, the president of the parliament, and Raül Romeva, the minister of foreign affairs, told the Guardian enduring hostility from Madrid had left Catalonia with no choice but to press ahead with the independence agenda.

“The [Spanish state] has left us feeling that we just don’t have an alternative,” Romeva said. “We have always said that we would have preferred a Scottish-type scenario, where we could negotiate with the state and hold a coordinated and democratic referendum. We keep talking to Madrid, but all we get back from them is an echo.” Forcadell pointed to a recent scandal as evidence of the Spanish government’s attitude towards Catalonia. Last month, Spain’s interior minister, Jorge Fernández Díaz, and the head of Catalonia’s anti-fraud office, Daniel de Alfonso, were apparently recorded discussing possible investigations that could be launched against pro-independence politicians in the region.

Forcadell said she was incredulous at the idea that the acting Spanish government, led by Mariano Rajoy, could simply brush aside the alleged incident and say nothing was going on. “How can they say that when the interior minister, who’s meant to defend the interests of all citizens, is caught conspiring to find evidence against citizens solely because they think differently? How can absolutely nothing come of that? We don’t understand it,” she said.

The power of words.

• We Love To Talk Of Terror (Robert Fisk)

The frightful and bloody hours of Friday night and Saturday morning in Munich and Kabul – despite the 3,000 miles that separate the two cities – provided a highly instructive lesson in the semantics of horror and hypocrisy. I despair of that generic old hate-word, “terror”. It long ago became the punctuation mark and signature tune of every facile politician, policeman, journalist and think tank crank in the world. Terror, terror, terror, terror, terror. Or terrorist, terrorist, terrorist, terrorist, terrorist. But from time to time, we trip up on this killer cliché, just as we did at the weekend. Here’s how it went. When first we heard that three armed men had gone on a “shooting spree” in Munich, the German cops and the lads and lassies of the BBC, CNN and Fox News fingered the “terror” lever.

The Munich constabulary, we were informed, feared this was a “terrorist act”. The local police, the BBC told us, were engaged in an “anti-terror manhunt”. And we knew what that meant: the three men were believed to be Muslims and therefore “terrorists”, and thus suspected of being members of (or at least inspired by) Isis. Then it turned out that the three men were in fact only one man – a man who was obsessed with mass killing. He was born in Germany (albeit partly Iranian in origin). And all of a sudden, in every British media and on CNN, the “anti-terror manhunt” became a hunt for a lone “shooter”. One UK newspaper used the word “shooter” 14 times in a few paragraphs.

Somehow, “shooter” doesn’t sound as dangerous as “terrorist”, though the effect of his actions was most assuredly the same. “Shooter” is a code word. It meant: this particular mass killer is not a Muslim. [..] It all comes down to the same thing in the end. If Muslims attack us, they are terrorists. If non-Muslims attack us, they are shooters. If Muslims attack other Muslims, they are attackers. Scissor out this paragraph and keep it beside you when the killers next let loose – and you’ll be able to work out who the bad guys are before the cops tell you.

More power of words.

• The Power of “Nyet” (Dmitry Orlov)

The way things are supposed to work on this planet is like this: in the United States, the power structures (public and private) decide what they want the rest of the world to do. They communicate their wishes through official and unofficial channels, expecting automatic cooperation. If cooperation is not immediately forthcoming, they apply political, financial and economic pressure. If that still doesn’t produce the intended effect, they attempt regime change through a color revolution or a military coup, or organize and finance an insurgency leading to terrorist attacks and civil war in the recalcitrant nation. If that still doesn’t work, they bomb the country back to the stone age. This is the way it worked in the 1990s and the 2000s, but as of late a new dynamic has emerged.

In the beginning it was centered on Russia, but the phenomenon has since spread around the world and is about to engulf the United States itself. It works like this: the United States decides what it wants Russia to do and communicates its wishes, expecting automatic cooperation. Russia says “Nyet.” The United States then runs through all of the above steps up to but not including the bombing campaign, from which it is deterred by Russia’s nuclear deterrent. The answer remains “Nyet.” One could perhaps imagine that some smart person within the US power structure would pipe up and say: “Based on the evidence before us, dictating our terms to Russia doesn’t work; let’s try negotiating with Russia in good faith as equals.”

And then everybody else would slap their heads and say, “Wow! That’s brilliant! Why didn’t we think of that?” But instead that person would be fired that very same day because, you see, American global hegemony is nonnegotiable. And so what happens instead is that the Americans act baffled, regroup and try again, making for quite an amusing spectacle.

But it’s a billion-dollar industry!

• Leading Insecticide Cuts Bee Sperm By 40%, Lifespan By A Third (G.)

The world’s most widely used insecticide is an inadvertent contraceptive for bees, cutting live sperm in males by almost 40%, according to research. The study also showed the neonicotinoid pesticides cut the lifespan of the drones by a third. The scientists say the discovery provides one possible explanation for the increasing deaths of honeybees in recent years, as well as for the general decline of wild insect pollinators throughout the northern hemisphere. Bees and other insects are vital for pollinating three-quarters of the world’s food crops but have been in significant decline, due to the loss of flower-rich habitats, disease and pests and the use of pesticides.

Neonicotinoids were banned from use on flowering crops in the EU in 2013. The UK opposed the ban and allowed a limited “emergency” lifting of the ban in 2015, but has refused further suspensions this year. There is clear scientific evidence that neonicotinoids harm bees, but there is only a little research showing the pesticides harm the overall performance of colonies. Previous work has shown that neonicotinoids reduce the number of bumblebee queens produced and severely cuts the survival and reproduction of honeybee queens. But the new research, led by Lars Straub at the University of Bern, Switzerland and published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, is the first to test how neonicotinoids affect male bee fertility.

We’re really killing off our own family.

• LUCA: The Ancestor Of All Living Things On Earth (IBT)

The planet we live on is home to an estimated 10 million species of living organisms. Hard as it may be to fathom, the immense diversity of life we see around us today – from the bacteria living in the garden soil to the majestic blue whale inhabiting the deep blue seas – all evolved from one single-celled ancestor that lived, and died, billions of years ago. In a paper published Monday in the journal Nature Microbiology, researchers have described, in unprecedented detail, this Last Universal Common Ancestor, or LUCA, which was only “half alive.” This ancestor – a single-cell, bacterium-like organism – is believed to have existed roughly four billion years ago, when Earth was just over 500 million years old. LUCA, the researchers say, was the common point of origin for three great domains of life — bacteria, archaea, which are bacteria-like single-cell prokaryotes, and the eukaryotes, a domain that includes all plants and animals.

Phylogeny for LUCA’s genes: In the two-domain tree of life, eukaryotes stem from prokaryotes, so the last universal common ancestor, LUCA, is the ancestor of archaea and bacteria.

“We are seeing something for which there was previously no evidence,” co-author William Martin from the Heinrich Heine University in Düsseldorf, Germany, told the Washington Post. “Just by asking the right questions of genome data, we were able to obtain some very interesting answers that also mesh well with what we know from geochemistry.” In order to get a clear picture of what LUCA was like, the researchers examined over six million protein-coding genes found in the present-day bacteria and archaea. After analyzing the DNA sequence of each gene and determining whether these genes were present in both bacteria and archaea, the researchers identified 355 gene “clusters” that were probably present in LUCA. “It was flabbergasting to us that we found as many as we did,” Martin told New Scientist.

Debt Rattle July 12 2016

Jul 122016

July 12, 2016 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 8:30 am Finance Tagged with: Abe, accountants, Barroso, Bernanke, Brexit, Citi, helicopter, IMF, Italy, Trump 5 Responses »

NPC L.E. White Coal Co. yards, Washington 1922

• Asian Shares Rally As Wall Street Strikes New Record High (R.)

• Abe Orders New Stimulus Package To Water ‘Seeds Of Growth’ (R.)

• Japan Turns Again to Bernanke, as Fruits of Abenomics Wither (BBG)

• Bernanke’s Black Helicopters Of Money (David Stockman)

• The Trillions Spent By Central Banks Has Been A Dud: BofA (MW)

• Ground Zero of China’s Slowdown Leaves Locals Looking for Exit (BBG)

• HSBC Avoided US Money Laundering Charges Because Of ‘Market Risk’ Fears (BBC)

• Brexit Seen Biting Profit for Years at US Banks (BBG)

• Italy ‘Facing 20 Years Of Economic Woe’: IMF (BBC)

• Dutch Bonds Just Did Something That We Haven’t Seen In 499 Years (BI)

• Citibank To Close Key Venezuela Payment Account: Maduro (AFP)

• European Commission Under Fire Over Barroso’s Goldman Sachs Job (EuO)

• Oligarchs of the Treasure Islands (MWest)

• Trump Wins -Even If He Loses- (Nomi Prins)

Everyone’s betting on the helicopter arriving soon.

• Asian Shares Rally As Wall Street Strikes New Record High (R.)

Asian stocks rose to a 2-1/2-month peak on Tuesday, a day after Wall Street shares hit a record high thanks to a combination of upbeat U.S. data and expectations of more stimulus from global policymakers. MSCI’s broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan rose 0.6% to hit its highest level since late April. Japan’s Nikkei jumped 2.5% as investors bet the country’s government may inject $100 billion in fiscal spending to boost the economy, possibly financed by the central bank’s money-printing, a policy mix that is often dubbed “helicopter money”. European shares are seen opening flat to slightly lower, with spread-betters expecting Britain’s FTSE 100 and Germany’s DAX to fall 0.1% and France’s CAC 40 to be flat.

On Wall Street, the S&P 500 index on Monday broke a new record high, its first in more than a year, extending its gain after Friday’s bumper job figures reduced worries about slowdown in employment. The benchmark closed at a record 2,137.16, overtaking the previous high of 2,130.82 hit on May 21, 2015. Globally low interest rates from central bank stimulus in both Japan and Europe are supporting risk assets. Bond yields in the U.S., Japan, Germany, France and the U.K all hit record lows last week as investors bet on more stimulus following the Brexit shock.

Follow the strong leader no matter what he says or does. A culture fraught with danger.

• Abe Orders New Stimulus Package To Water ‘Seeds Of Growth’ (R.)

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe ordered a new round of fiscal stimulus spending after a crushing election victory over the weekend as evidence mounted the corporate sector is floundering due to weak demand. Abe did not give details on the size of the package, but Japanese stocks jumped nearly 4 percent and the yen weakened over perceptions a landslide victory in upper house elections now gives him a free hand to draft economic policy. An unexpected decline in machinery orders shows the economy needs something to overcome consistently weak corporate investment. Economists worry, however, that Abe’s focus on public works spending will not tackle the structural issues around a declining population and workforce.

More public works also increases pressure on the Bank of Japan to keep interest rates low and the yen weak to make sure stimulus spending will gain traction. The government was ready to spend more than 10 trillion yen ($100 billion), ruling party sources told Reuters before the election. “We are going to make bold investment into seeds of future growth,” Abe told a news conference on Monday at the headquarters for his ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP). [..] Abe said he wanted to strengthen agriculture exports from rural areas and improve infrastructure, such as trains and ports, to welcome more tourists and cruise ships from overseas. “We have promised through this election campaign that we will sell the world the agricultural products and tourism resources each region is proud of,” he said.

Abe has no more ideas.

• Japan Turns Again to Bernanke, as Fruits of Abenomics Wither (BBG)

Less than three weeks before the Bank of Japan’s next scheduled policy meeting, Governor Haruhiko Kuroda met with former Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke over lunch on Monday. The BOJ issued no statement on the substance of the talks, which come as the central bank confronts a fresh strengthening in the yen this year that risks undermining inflation and weakening the appetite for investment and wage increases. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe will meet Bernanke at 3 p.m. local time on Tuesday, according to Abe’s office. For Bernanke, offering views on Japan’s challenges and policy options would be nothing new. He delivered a famous 2003 speech calling for greater cooperation between monetary and fiscal policy makers to defeat deflation and spur the economy.

In the room during Bernanke’s meetings with Japanese officials 13 years ago in Tokyo: Abe and Kuroda, who a decade hence unleashed an unprecedented stimulus to revive Japan. Now, that project is increasingly at risk with inflation moving away from the BOJ’s target, and GDP growth far from Abe’s goals. Bernanke’s 2003 visit, when he was a Federal Reserve Board member, and his message at the time is still discussed by BOJ officials. Japan has a tradition of seeking the advice of overseas experts, something that’s been taken to a new level under Abe, who consulted with Nobel laureates Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz prior to his decision in June to delay a sales-tax hike. Unlike with this week’s Bernanke visit, the meetings with Krugman and Stiglitz were well-publicized.

Stockman uses strange definitions of inflation and deflation. Nobody should use CPI.

• Bernanke’s Black Helicopters Of Money (David Stockman)

Ben Bernanke is one of the most dangerous men walking the planet. In this age of central bank domination of economic life he is surely the pied piper of monetary ruin. At least since 2002 he has been talking about “helicopter money” as if a notion which is pure economic quackery actually had some legitimate basis. But strip away the pseudo scientific jargon, and it amounts to monetization of the public debt—–the very oldest form of something for nothing economics. Back then, of course, Ben’s jabbering about helicopter money was taken to be some sort of theoretical metaphor about the ultimate powers of central bankers, and especially their ability to forestall the boogey-man of “deflation”.

Indeed, Bernanke was held to be a leading economic scholar of the Great Depression and a disciple of Milton Friedman’s claim that Fed stringency during 1930-1932 had caused it. This is complete poppycock, as I demonstrated in The Great Deformation, but it did give an air of plausibility and even conservative pedigree to a truly stupid and dangerous idea. Right about then, in fact, Bernanke grandly promised during a speech at Friedman’s 90th birthday party that today’s enlightened central bankers – led by himself – would never let it happen again. Presumably Bernanke was speaking of the 25% deflation of the general price level after 1929.

The latter is always good for a big scare among modern audiences because no one seems to remember that the deflation of the 1930’s was nothing more than the partial liquidation of the 100%-300% inflation of the general price level during the Great War. In any event, Bernanke was tilting at windmills when he implied that the collapse of the US wartime and Roaring Twenties boom had anything to do with the conditions of 2002. Even the claim that Japan was suffering from severe deflation at the time was manifestly false. In fact, during the final stages of Japan great export and credit boom, the domestic price level had risen substantially, increasing by nearly 70% between 1976 and 1993. It then simply flattened-out – and appropriately so – after the great credit, real estate and stock market bubble collapse of 1990-1992.

And this is the end result of QE et al.

• The Trillions Spent By Central Banks Has Been A Dud: BofA (MW)

Toasts all around? U.S. stocks charged into record territory on Monday after Friday’s jobs report helped restore confidence in the U.S. economic recovery. But not so fast. The solid data mask a worrisome reality — despite the trillions collectively spent by central banks to breathe life into their economies since the 2008 financial crisis, authorities have been largely shooting blanks, according to Bank of America Merrill Lynch. The S&P 500 climbed to an intraday high of 2,143 Monday, passing the previous intraday record of 2,134.72 set on May 21, 2015. Stocks gained in part because the U.S. economy added 287,000 new jobs last month, far better than the gain of 170,000 projected by economists in a MarketWatch survey.

Yet the same report revealed that the labor participation rate—a metric to measure those who are employed or actively searching for jobs—is hovering at a 38-year low of 62.7%. A weak labor participation rate is an indication that an increasing number of people are leaving the labor force either through retirement or because they’re discouraged by not finding employment. It is also a sign that job growth isn’t tracking as robustly as it should considering that the U.S. economy expanded to $18 trillion in 2015 from $2.4 trillion in 1978. What’s more, the official unemployment rate edged up to 4.9% in June from 4.7% in May as more people entered the labor force looking for jobs. This headline number, however, excludes millions of part-time workers who would really rather work full time, as well as those who have become too discouraged to look for work, period. If this broader group was accounted for, the actual jobless rate would be closer to 10%.

It all suggests that the labor market, and by extension the economy, may not be as healthy as it should be given the prolonged period of accommodative monetary policy in the U.S. and elsewhere. It’s against this backdrop that a team led by Michael Hartnett, chief investment strategist at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, demonstrated how ineffective they believe central banks’ collective quantitative easing has been. Central banks around the world have cut interest rates a combined 659 times since Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy on Sept. 15, 2008, resulting in negative rates in many major economies, according to Hartnett. “Incited by the belief that every single interest rate in the world is heading to zero, the mountain of cash on the sidelines has induced fresh ‘irrational upside’ in government and corporate bonds,” said the strategist, in a note.

A picture of the real China.

• Ground Zero of China’s Slowdown Leaves Locals Looking for Exit (BBG)

Tea-shop manager Zhang Yue is so desperate about her home city of Tieling’s future that she’s borrowed about five times her annual income to buy a work visa to leave for Japan – an economy that’s flat-lined for a generation. “Two years ago, everything was fine and I bought whatever I wanted,” said Zhang, 29, whose husband’s wages have since halved and her own have stalled. “Then, suddenly, the slump started. The economy went straight down. It’s in free fall.” The home to about 3 million people in the northeast rust-belt province of Liaoning is ground zero in China’s slowdown – the worst-performing city in the worst-performing province. Ads offering work visas abroad are peppered across hoardings, and billboards offer loans for people in “urgent need.”

Shuttered car-parts factories flank the highway to the high-speed train station. In the center, a closed wedding-photograph studio has a notice in the window that reads: “Owner is going overseas. Shop for sale.” Tieling is among the places hardest hit by a slowdown across the nation of 1.4 billion people triggered in recent years by a commodity-price slump, housing correction and campaign to rein in wasteful investment. The city has seen a triple whammy from the three dynamics, which left the local economy contracting 6.2% last year – compared with national growth of near 7%. Fixed-asset investment in Tieling – largely property and infrastructure investment – plummeted 39%, steel output plunged 89%, industrial output dropped 18% and coal production was down almost 8%.

Keep this up and tar and feathers are your part.

• HSBC Avoided US Money Laundering Charges Because Of ‘Market Risk’ Fears (BBC)

US officials refused to prosecute HSBC for money laundering in 2012 because of concerns within the Department of Justice that it would cause a “global financial disaster”, a report says. A US Congressional report revealed UK officials, including Chancellor George Osborne, added to pressure by warning the US it could lead to market turmoil. The report alleges the UK “hampered” the probe and “influenced” the outcome. HSBC was accused of letting drug cartels use US banks to launder funds. The bank, which has its headquarters in London, paid a $1.92bn settlement but did not face criminal charges . No top officials at HSBC faced any charges. The report says: “George Osborne, the UK’s chief financial minister, intervened in the HSBC matter by sending a letter to Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke… to express the UK’s concerns regarding US enforcement actions against British banks.”

The letter said that prosecuting HSBC could have “very serious implications for financial and economic stability, particularly in Europe and Asia”. Justice Department spokesman Peter Carr said a series of factors were considered when deciding how to resolve a case, including whether there may be “adverse consequences for innocent third parties, such as employees, customers, investors, pension holders and the public”. The report also accuses former US Attorney General Eric Holder of misleading Congress about the decision. The report says Mr Holder ignored the recommendations of more junior staff to prosecute HSBC because of the bank’s “systemic importance” to the financial markets.

Nonsensical article. If any of this were valid, US banks were so weak pre-Brexit, lower profits were cast in stone no matter what.

• Brexit Seen Biting Profit for Years at US Banks (BBG)

When U.S. banks post second-quarter results in days, it’ll boil down to this: Bonus cuts are coming for just about everyone this year, says Wall Street recruiter Richard Lipstein. “If you are break-even, it’s an achievement.” That’s the picture taking shape as analysts trim estimates for the quarter and overhaul long-term projections for banks’ main businesses after the U.K.’s vote to leave the European Union. Starting this week, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup and Goldman Sachs probably will say they saw a quick bump in trading after the June 23 referendum, but that deals are stalling and years of pain lie ahead. Combined net income at the six biggest U.S. banks is estimated to fall 18% in the second quarter from a year earlier, according to analysts surveyed by Bloomberg.

Fred Cannon, global research director at Keefe, Bruyette & Woods, said many analysts are just starting to rework projections for future periods to account for Brexit’s fallout, such as the prolonging of low interest rates. “We went from lower for longer into what seems like lower forever,” he said. That will erode interest from lending. Market turmoil and economic drags linked to Brexit will hurt investment banking revenue as companies reconsider acquisitions and selling new securities. And that’s after trading units suffered their worst first quarter since 2009.

For the full year, analysts predict combined earnings at the six U.S. banks – which also include Bank of America, Wells Fargo and Morgan Stanley – will drop 14%. It may only partially recover in 2017, the estimates show. The projections for both years tumbled after markets swung earlier this year, and then slipped further after the U.K. vote as analysts began updating research. “Up until June 24, everybody thought the second quarter was building a nice recovery, and now you have to question that,” said Chris Kotowski, a bank analyst at Oppenheimer & Co., referencing the day ballots were tallied. “I’m more cautious than I was.”

As long as the country stays in the eurozone, yes.

• Italy ‘Facing 20 Years Of Economic Woe’: IMF (BBC)

The IMF has warned that Italy faces two decades of stagnant economic growth. Its latest report on the country puts growth this year at under 1%, down from its previous 1.1% estimate, and forecasts growth in 2017 of about 1% – down from a 1.25% estimate. The IMF says Italy will not reach pre-crisis levels until 2025, by which time its neighbours will have economies 20-25% above 2008 levels. Italy is the third largest eurozone country. It has 11% unemployment and a banking sector in crisis, with government debt second only to that of Greece. The country’s banks are under pressure because the long-standing poor economic performance has depressed tax revenue and increased the chances of businesses getting into difficulty and being unable to maintain their loan payments.

Italian banks are weighed down by massive bad debts, and may need a significant injection of funds. The IMF says any recovery is likely to be prolonged and subject to risks. Among those risks are the UK’s withdrawal from the European Union, which it said last week had prompted it to downgrade its forecasts for growth for the entire eurozone. Other problem areas include “the refugee surge, and headwinds from the slowdown in global trade”.

Just in case it wasn’t clear yet just how crazy our times are.

• Dutch Bonds Just Did Something That We Haven’t Seen In 499 Years (BI)

Dutch 10-year government bond yields dropped below zero for the first time ever on Monday, making them the latest to join the negative yield club. The Netherlands’ 10-year dipped by 0.08 %age points to as low as -0.007%. It has fallen by about 30 basis points since the June Brexit vote. There’s roughly $13 trillion of global negative-yielding debt now, according to data from Bank of America Merrill Lynch, cited by the Wall Street Journal on Sunday. By comparison, there was about $11 trillion ahead of the UK’s vote on EU referendum.

When a bond is negative yielding, it means investors get less back when the debt is due than what they pay for it today. The Dutch bond yields are the lowest the country has ever seen. Amazingly, there’s nearly half a millennium of records to compare that against, as record keeping began in 1517. As a historical reference point, that’s the same year that Martin Luther published his 95 Theses. You can see the history of the Dutch 10-year going back to 1517 in the chart below, which was shared by Deutsche Bank’s Jim Reid in his Monday note to clients.

America wants revenge.

• Citibank To Close Key Venezuela Payment Account: Maduro (AFP)

Citibank plans to close the account Venezuela uses to make international payments, President Nicolas Maduro said Monday, accusing the US-based bank of a “financial blockade.” “Citibank, with no warning or communication, says that it is going to close the Central Bank and Bank Of Venezuela account. That is what you call a financial blockade,” the embattled president said in televised remarks. He said the move amounted to an “inquisition” by US President Barack Obama’s administration. Maduro said his South American nation, a major oil producer, uses the account to make payments “within 24 hours, to other accounts in the United States and worldwide.” Maduro’s socialist government has often claimed that US interests and local business elites were trying to blockade his state-led economy and prevent Venezuela’s access to international credit.

“Do you think they are going to stop us by putting in place a financial blockade? No, ladies and gentlemen, nobody stops Venezuela! With Citibank or without it, we are moving forward. With Kimberly or without, we are moving.” Venezuela’s government said just hours earlier that it would take over operations at facilities where US consumer goods giant Kimberly-Clark recently shut down, citing unworkable economic conditions. The American company announced on Saturday it would cease production, saying that it was impossible to get enough hard currency to buy raw materials, and that inflation was surging. “We are going to sign, at the workers’ request… to authorize immediate occupation of the workplace known as Kimberly-Clark de Venezuela… by its workers,” Labor Minister Oswaldo Vera said at the facility’s plant in the central city of Maracay.

Look, they just don’t care. That’s what Britain has a unique oppottunity to step away from. It doesn’t mean there’s no corruption in Britain, but inside the EU it would be guaranteed. Note: it’s quite an achievement to get France’s socialists and Marine le Pen on the same page. But Barroso gets it done. AND he’ll remain eligible for his (very rich) EU benefits and pension …

• European Commission Under Fire Over Barroso’s Goldman Sachs Job (EuO)

[..] “Barroso’s decision … is morally and politically deplorable”, said Gianni Pittella, leader of the Socialist and Democrats group in the European Parliament. “After 10 years of mediocre governance of the EU, now the former EU Commission president will serve those who aim to undermine our rules and values,” he added. The Brussels-based lobby watchdog, Corporate Europe Observatory’s (CEO), said the commission’s line – that Barroso acted within the rules – was “pathetic”. “Major loopholes exist in both the rules and the way in which they are implemented … there should be a mandatory cooling-off period of at least five years for former commission presidents regarding direct and indirect corporate lobbying activities,” the NGO’s Nina Holland said. She noted that nine of Barroso’s former commissioners had gone to work for big business after their terms ended in 2014.

Meanwhile, the timing of Barroso’s move could hardly have been worse for the commission. Eurosceptic movements around Europe have long accused EU officials of trampling on ordinary people’s welfare to serve the interests of elites in developments that came to a head in the Brexit vote. France’s far-right Marine Le Pen tweeted that the Barrose move was “not a surprise for people who know that the EU does not serve people but high finance”. French socialist MEPs called on Goldman Sachs to let him go. In a statement on Monday they called the appointment “outrageous and shameful”. They said that he breached the EU treaty and should be stripped of his EU benefits and pension.

They cited article 245 of the EU treaty, which says that commissioners should respect the “obligations arising therefrom and in particular their duty to behave with integrity and discretion as regards the acceptance, after they have ceased to hold office, of certain appointments or benefits.” Barroso led the commission through the tumultuous years of the euro crisis and related bailouts. Under his tenure, the EU set up financial rescue funds to help troubled countries and their banks, but at the cost of severe austerity in Greece, Ireland and Portugal. Goldman Sachs was one of the US investment banks at the heart of the 2008 financial crisis that triggered the events when lenders traded failing mortgages as parts of complex financial instruments.

Earlier this year, the Wall Street firm agreed to a civil settlement of up to $5 billion with federal prosecutors and regulators to resolve claims resulting from the marketing and selling of faulty mortgage securities to investors. Goldman Sachs also helped Greece to hide part of its deficit in the early 2000s, by using so called currency swaps. But the currency trades end up doubling the Greek deficit and leading to the edge of ruin. Barroso himself had been a student leader in an underground Maoist group during his university years. The 60 year-old served as prime minister of Portugal between 2002 and 2004 before heading the EU’s executive for 10 years.

Accountants, unaccountable.

• Oligarchs of the Treasure Islands (MWest)

The “Big Four” global accounting firms – PwC, Deloitte, KPMG and Ernst & Young – are the masterminds of multinational tax avoidance, the architects of tax schemes which cost governments and their taxpayers more than $US1 trillion a year. Although presenting as “the guardians of commerce” they are unregulated and unaccountable; they have infiltrated governments at every level and should be broken up. This is the view of George Rozvany, Australia’s most published expert on transfer pricing, which is one of the principal ways large corporations pursue cross-border tax avoidance. Rozvany stepped down last year as head of tax in Australia for the world’s biggest insurance company, Allianz. Formerly, he was an insider at Ernst & Young, PwC and Arthur Andersen.

“The Big Four have, under a Rasputin-like cloak of illusion strayed from their original and critical role of verifying the accuracy of financial accounts for all stakeholders, to be “accountants of fortune” merely representing the accounting position for multinationals and developing aggressive international tax avoidance practices,” he told michaelwest.com.au. Rozvany is writing a series of books on corporate tax ethics. “This is not a victimless crime,” he says. “While Western governments have been cutting back their aid to the most underprivileged in society, from the homeless to orphaned children in Africa, multinational companies have been diverting ever larger profits into tax havens”.

“The global community must also recognise the links between aggressive taxation behaviour, money laundering, corruption, organised crime and terrorism, of which the Brussels bombings and 9/11 are chilling reminders. This, unquestionably, is the financial sewer of humanity where the purpose for such money, no matter how malevolent, is simply hidden until used”, Rozvany says. [..] “Their signage adorns the skyline in every major city in the world. They have meticulously manicured their public image. They are spectacularly profitable but beyond the law. They are trusted but not trustworthy. They have become too big, too big to fail, so they must be broken up. Break up is hardly radical. It has been done in many industries including banking, oil and communications”.

He’ll get stronger in the face of adversity.

• Trump Wins -Even If He Loses- (Nomi Prins)

Once upon a time not so long ago, making America great again involved a bankroll untainted by the Republican political establishment and its billionaire backers. There would, The Donald swore, be no favors to repay after he was elected, no one to tell him what to do or how to do it just because they had chipped in a few million bucks. But for a man who prides himself on executing only “the best” of deals (trust him) this election has become too expensive to leave to self-reliance. One thing is guaranteed: Donald Trump will not pony up a few hundred million dollars from his own stash. As a result, despite claims that he would never do so, he’s finally taken a Super PAC or two on board and is now pursuing more financial aid even from people who don’t like him.

Robert Mercer and his daughter Rebekah, erstwhile influential billionaire backers of Ted Cruz, have, for instance, decided to turn their Make America Number 1 Super PAC into an anti-Hillary source of funds – this evidently at the encouragement of Ivanka Trump. In the big money context of post-Citizens United presidential politics, however, these are modest developments indeed (particularly compared to Hillary’s campaign). To grasp what Trump has failed to do when it comes to funding his presidential run, note that the Our Principles Super PAC, supported in part by Chicago Cubs owners Marlene Ricketts and her husband, billionaire T.D. Ameritrade founder J.

Joe Ricketts, has already raised more than $18.4 million for anti-Trump TV ads, meetings, and fundraising activities. (On the other hand, their son, Pete, Republican Governor of Nebraska, has given stump speeches supporting Trump.) To put this in context, that $18.4 million is more than the approximately $17 million that all of Trump’s individual supporters, the “little people,” have contributed to his campaign.

Debt Rattle May 30 2016

May 302016

May 30, 2016 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 7:59 am Finance Tagged with: Abe, bad loans, Brexit, coral, debt, default, deflation, NIRP, obesity, productivity, WMP 9 Responses »

Jack Delano Foggy night in New Bedford, Massachusetts 1941

• The Mystery of Weak US Productivity (Luce)

• China Default Chain Reaction Threatens Products Worth 35% of GDP (BBG)

• China’s Veiled Loans May Prove Lethal (BBG)

• How Many Bad Loans Might China Have? (BBG)

• Easy Money = Overcapacity = Trade Wars = Deflation (Rubino)

• Negative Rates Fail to Spur Investment for Corporate Europe (BBG)

• Saudi Arabia’s Petrodollar Reserves Fall to 4-Year Low (BBG)

• CEO of No. 1 Asian Commodity Trader Noble Group Resigns In Surprise Move (R.)

• Japan Must Delay Sales-Tax Rise to Recover, Abe Aide Says (BBG)

• The Butterfly Effect: Cheap Oil Means Fewer Nose Jobs (BBG)

• The Source of Failure: We Optimize What We Measure (CH Smith)

• 30.4% Of Americans Were Obese In 2015 (Forbes)

• Tory Turmoil Escalates With Open Call For Cameron To Quit (G.)

• Half Of Central, Northern Great Barrier Reef Corals Are Dead (SMH)

“This year, for the first time in more than 30 years, US productivity growth will almost certainly turn negative..”

“Unless we become smarter at how we work, growth will start to exhaust itself too.” Er, no, that has already happened.

“For the first time the next generation of US workers will be less educated than the previous..”

• The Mystery of Weak US Productivity (Luce)

Look around you. From your drone home delivery to that oncoming driverless car, change seems to be accelerating. Warren Buffett, the great investor, promises that our children’s generation will be the “luckiest crop in history”. Everywhere the world is speeding up except, that is, in the productivity numbers. This year, for the first time in more than 30 years, US productivity growth will almost certainly turn negative following a decade of sharp slowdown. Yet our Fitbits seem to be telling us otherwise. Which should we trust — the economic statistics or our own lying eyes? A lot hinges on the answer. Productivity is the ultimate test of our ability to create wealth. In the short term you can boost growth by working longer hours, for example, or importing more people.

Or you could lift the retirement age. After a while these options lose steam. Unless we become smarter at how we work, growth will start to exhaust itself too. Other measures bear out the pessimists. At just over 2%, US trend growth is barely half the level it was a generation ago. As Paul Krugman put it: “Productivity isn’t everything, but in the long run it is almost everything.” It is possible we are simply mismeasuring things. Some economists believe the statistics fail to capture the utility of setting up a Facebook profile, for example, or downloading free information from Wikipedia. The gig economy has yet to be properly valued. Yet this argument cuts both ways. Productivity is calculated by dividing the value of what we produce by how many hours we work — data provided by employers.

But recent studies — and common sense — say our iPhones chain us to our employers even when we are at leisure. We may thus be exaggerating productivity growth by undercounting how much we work. The latter certainly fits with the experience of most of the US labour force. It is no coincidence that since 2004 a majority of Americans began to tell pollsters they expected their children to be worse off — the same year in which the internet-fuelled productivity leaps of the 1990s started to vanish. Most Americans have suffered from indifferent or declining wages in the past 15 years or so. A college graduate’s starting salary today is in real terms well below where it was in 2000. For the first time the next generation of US workers will be less educated than the previous, according to the OECD, which means worse is probably yet to come. Last week’s US productivity report bears that out.

“All the risks are accumulating in an overcrowded financial system.”

• China Default Chain Reaction Threatens Products Worth 35% of GDP (BBG)

The risk of a default chain reaction is looming over the $3.6 trillion market for wealth management products in China. WMPs, which traditionally funneled money from Chinese individuals into assets from corporate bonds to stocks and derivatives, are now increasingly investing in each other. Such holdings may have swelled to as much as 2.6 trillion yuan ($396 billion) last year, based on estimates from Autonomous Research this month. The trend has China watchers worried. For starters, it means that bad investments by one WMP could infect others, causing a loss of confidence in products that play an important role in bank funding. It also suggests WMPs are struggling to find enough good assets to meet their return targets.

In the event of widespread losses, cross-ownership will create more uncertainty over who’s vulnerable – a key source of panic in 2008 when soured U.S. mortgage securities triggered a global financial crisis. Those concerns have become more pressing this year after at least 10 Chinese companies defaulted on onshore bonds, the Shanghai Composite Index sank 20% and China’s economy showed few signs of recovery from the weakest expansion in a quarter century. “There’s abundant liquidity in the financial system, but a scarcity of high-yielding assets to invest in,” said Harrison Hu, the chief Greater China economist at RBS in Singapore. “All the risks are accumulating in an overcrowded financial system.”

Issuance of WMPs, which are sold by banks but often reside off their balance sheets, exploded over the past three years as lenders competed for funds and fees while savers sought returns above those offered on deposits. The products, which offer varying levels of explicit guarantees, are regarded by many as having the implicit backing of banks or local governments. The outstanding value of WMPs rose to 23.5 trillion yuan, or 35% of China’s gross domestic product, at the end of 2015 from 7.1 trillion yuan three years earlier, according to China Central Depository & Clearing Co. An average 3,500 WMPs were issued every week last year, with some mid-tier banks, such as China Merchants Bank and China Everbright Bank, especially dependent on the products for funding.

Interbank holdings of WMPs swelled to 3 trillion yuan as of December from 496 billion yuan a year earlier, according to figures released by the clearing agency last month. As much as 85% of those products may have been bought by other WMPs, according to Autonomous Research, which based its estimate on lenders’ public disclosures and data on interbank transactions. The firm speculates that in some cases the products are being “churned” to generate fees for banks. “We’re starting to see layers of liabilities built upon the same underlying assets, much like we did with subprime asset-backed securities, collateralized debt obligations, and CDOs-squared in the U.S.,” Charlene Chu, a partner at Autonomous who rose to prominence in her former role at Fitch Ratings by warning of the risks of bad debt in China, said in an interview on May 17.

“The unconsolidated structured entities managed by the Group consist primarily of collective investment vehicles (“WMP Vehicles”) formed to issue and distribute wealth management products (“WMPs”), which are not subject to any guarantee by the Group of the principal invested or interest to be paid.”

• China’s Veiled Loans May Prove Lethal (BBG)

Credit is a risky business, but loans that dare not speak their name? They are possibly even more dangerous, as China is about to find out.As many as 15 publicly traded Chinese lenders, large and small, report roughly $500 billion of such debt between them, which they hold not as loans but as receivables from shadow banking products. While the traditional credit business of these banks is 16 times bigger, receivables have jumped sixfold in three years. Explosive growth of this type usually ends badly. It’s hard to see why it’ll be different for the People’s Republic. Before they can brace themselves – or embrace the risk, if they think the rewards are worth it – equity investors need to know where to look. Flitting from one explanatory note to another in dense annual reports isn’t everybody’s idea of a day well spent.

But the effort may be worth it. For instance, page 184 of Agricultural Bank’s 2015 annual report informs us that the bank has 557 billion yuan ($85 billion) worth of assets tied in “debt instruments classified as receivables.” On page 245, we further learn that most of this is old hat, and the only fast-growing portion is an 18.7 billion yuan chunk helpfully titled as “Others.” A footnote adds that the category primarily consists of “unconsolidated structured entities managed by the group.” Give up? Then you miss the big reveal that occurs 34 pages later: “The unconsolidated structured entities managed by the Group consist primarily of collective investment vehicles (“WMP Vehicles”) formed to issue and distribute wealth management products (“WMPs”), which are not subject to any guarantee by the Group of the principal invested or interest to be paid.” That’s broadly how Chinese lenders disclose their cryptic linkages with shadow banks.

The names keep changing, from “investment management products under trust scheme” and “investment management products managed by securities companies” to “trust beneficiary rights” and “wealth management products.” The latter have swelled to the equivalent of 35% of GDP, and account for 3 trillion yuan of interbank holdings. The common thread to these products is that they’re all exposed to corporate credit and designed to get around lenders’ minimum capital requirements and maximum loan-to-deposit norms, with scant loss provisioning in case things go wrong.There’s plenty that could. The reported nonperforming loan ratio of 1.75% is a joke. CLSA says bad loans have already snowballed to 15 to 19% of the loan book; Autonomous Research partner Charlene Chu estimates the figure will reach 22% by the end of this year. A 20% loss on a $500 billion portfolio of loans masquerading as receivables would wipe out 58% of annual profit of the 15 banks under our scanner.

” In the basic resources sector, 46% of loans are with firms without enough income to cover interest payments. ”

• How Many Bad Loans Might China Have? (BBG)

How many of China’s loans could turn bad? The official data show a non-performing loan ratio of 1.75%, but that’s widely believed to reflect optimistic accounting. Bloomberg Intelligence Economics has estimated the %age of “at risk” loans – those where the borrower doesn’t have sufficient earnings to cover interest payments. The results show 14% of corporate borrowing at risk of default, up from a low of 5% in 2010. By sector, the basic resources, retail and industrial sectors are among the highest risk. In the basic resources sector, 46% of loans are with firms without enough income to cover interest payments.

Telecommunications, utilities, and travel and leisure sectors look more secure, reflecting stronger earnings and lower debt. The methodology is based on an approach used by the IMF. For a universe of 2,865 Chinese listed firms (excluding financial companies), we screened for firms with interest costs higher than their EBITDA. We then calculated total debt of those firms as a %age of total debt of all listed firms. We assume that the ratio of “at risk” loans for the corporate sector as a whole is the same as for listed companies.

“..over-investment produces slow growth and falling prices while ever-more-aggressive monetary policy distorts markets beyond recognition and encourages new over-investment in different sectors, which then proceed to follow oil and steel into the deflationary abyss.”

• Easy Money = Overcapacity = Trade Wars = Deflation (Rubino)

So what happens to all that Chinese steel that was on its way to the US and EU before slamming into those prohibitively high tariffs? One of three things: Either it’s sold elsewhere, probably at even steeper discounts, thus pricing US and EU steel exports out of those markets. Or it’s stockpiled in China for future use, thus lowering future demand for new steel production and, other things being equal, depressing tomorrow’s prices. Or many of China’s newly-built steel mills will close, and China will eat the losses related to this malinvestment. Each scenario results in lower prices and financial losses somewhere. Put another way, as far as steel is concerned, the world’s fiat currencies are rising in value, which is the common definition of deflation.

And since steel is just one of many basic industries burdened with massive overcapacity, it’s safe to assume that the process which began with oil and recently spread to steel will continue to metastasize throughout the developed and developing worlds. Next up: real estate. “Modern” monetary policy, designed to achieve exactly the opposite outcome (that is, rising prices for real things), will in response be ratcheted up to ever-more-extreme levels — which in this analytical framework is like trying to douse a fire with gasoline. The result is a world in which past over-investment produces slow growth and falling prices while ever-more-aggressive monetary policy distorts markets beyond recognition and encourages new over-investment in different sectors, which then proceed to follow oil and steel into the deflationary abyss. And so on, until the system collapses under the weight of its own absurdity.

Because they are deflationary.

• Negative Rates Fail to Spur Investment for Corporate Europe (BBG)

A prolonged period of negative interest rates is failing to revive investment at Europe’s companies, with the vast majority of businesses in the region saying the stimulus measures have had no affect at all on their growth plans. Some 84% of the 9,440 companies surveyed by Swedish debt collector Intrum Justitia AB for its European Payment Report 2016 say low interest rates haven’t affected their willingness to invest. And perhaps more alarmingly, the number is up from 73% last year. “Creating economic growth requires stability and optimism,” Intrum Justitia Chief Executive Officer Mikael Ericson said in the report. “Evidently, the strategy of keeping interest rates record low for more than a year has not created the much sought-after stability.”

Signs of stalling investment mark a blow to central banks hoping to revive growth across Europe through negative rates and quantitative easing. Europe needs its businesses to invest more if it’s to create the jobs needed to spur growth. In the euro area, where interest rates have been negative since mid-2014, gross domestic product will slow to 1.6% this year, compared with 2.3% in the U.S., the European Commission estimates. “A calculation of an investment includes assumptions of the future,” Intrum said. “To get the calculation to go together those assumptions need to include a belief in stability and prosperity in that future. Perhaps the negative interest rates do not signal that stability at all – rather that we are still in an extraordinary situation?”

The survey also identified another threat to growth, namely late payments. Some 33% of survey participants said they regard not being paid on time as a threat to overall survival while 25% said they are likely to cut jobs if clients pay late or not at all. That problem is more pronounced among Europe’s 20 million small and medium-sized companies, with many reporting that bigger firms are forcing them to accept late payments. “It is a market failure that costs job opportunities for millions of Europeans that big corporations deliberately force SMEs to finance their cash flow,” Ericson said. “As much as two out of five SMEs say late payments prohibit growth of the company. That large corporations use their much smaller sub-suppliers to act as financier of their own cash-management processes is not only wrong, it also creates an imbalance in society.”

Might as well devalue now.

• Saudi Arabia’s Petrodollar Reserves Fall to 4-Year Low (BBG)

Saudi Arabia’s net foreign assets fell for a 15th month in April, as the kingdom announced its “vision” for a post-oil future. The Saudi Arabian Monetary Agency said on Sunday net foreign assets declined 1.1% to $572 billion, the lowest level in four years. The slump in crude prices has forced the government to sell bonds and draw on its currency reserves, still among the world’s largest. Net foreign assets fell by $115 billion last year, when the kingdom ran a budget deficit of nearly $100 billion.

The fiscal crunch has pushed Saudi Arabia’s rulers to look beyond oil, consider new taxes, and plan an initial public offering of state giant Saudi Arabian Oil Co. Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman sketched out the planned changes dubbed Saudi Vision 2030 on April 25. The strain on reserves has also fueled speculation that the kingdom will adjust its decades-old riyal peg to the dollar. New central bank Governor Ahmed Alkholifey told Al-Arabiya on Thursday that Saudi Arabia doesn’t plan to change its exchange rate policy.

Firesale. Given what’s happened in commodities the past year, not surprising.

• CEO of No. 1 Asian Commodity Trader Noble Group Resigns In Surprise Move (R.)

Embattled commodity trader Noble Group announced the surprise resignation of CEO Yusuf Alireza on Monday and said it planned to sell a U.S. unit to bolster its balance sheet as it seeks to regain investor confidence. Alireza, a former Goldman Sachs banker had steered Asia’s biggest commodity trader to sell assets, cut business lines and take big writedowns as it battled weak commodity markets and the fallout from an accounting dispute. “With this transformation process now largely complete, Mr. Alireza considered that the time was right for him to move on,” Noble said in a statement. It appointed senior executives William Randall and Jeff Frase as co-chief executive officers and said it would begin a sale process for Noble Americas Energy Solutions, “expected to generate both significant cash proceeds and profits to substantially enhance the balance sheet.”

Noble came under the spotlight in February last year when it was accused by Iceberg Research of overstating its assets by billions of dollars, claims which Noble rejected. Its shares have since plunged by about 75% and its debt costs have risen as the company has been hit hard by credit rating downgrades and weak investor confidence. “The first task is to stabilize the situation and convey stability and continuity,” said Nirgunan Tiruchelvam at Religare Capital Markets. “That would be the immediate task of somebody in this business which has volatility,” he said. Noble won the backing of banks earlier this month to refinance its debt. In February, Noble reported its first annual loss since 1998, battered by a $1.2 billion writedown for weak coal prices. The company’s shares slumped 65% last year, knocking it out of the benchmark Straits Times index.

So a delay in the tax hike would trigger elections. And Abe counts on the Japanese to be blind enough to re-elect him.

• Japan Must Delay Sales-Tax Rise to Recover, Abe Aide Says (BBG)

Japan needs to delay increasing its sales tax until late 2019 to sustain its economic recovery, an aide to Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said Sunday. There is a possibility that such a move could trigger a general election. The government will probably hold off raising the tax because it needs to give priority to economic growth, Abe aide Hakubun Shimomura said on Fuji television. Japan’s lower house of parliament would need to be dissolved for a general election if the planned increase is delayed again, Finance Minister Taro Aso was cited by Kyodo News as saying on Sunday at a meeting of the ruling party’s members. Abe has said he’ll make a decision before an upper-house election this summer on whether to go ahead with a planned increase in the levy next April to 10%, from 8% at present.

He had previously said the matter would be decided at an appropriate time and that it would be postponed only if there was a shock on the scale of a major earthquake or a corporate collapse like that of Lehman Brothers. An increase in the levy in 2014 pushed Japan into a recession. “We have no other options but to postpone the sales-tax increase,” Shimomura said. “If the increase means a decline in tax revenue for the government, that would threaten the achievement of the goals under Abenomics.” The prime minister told Finance Minister Taro Aso and LDP’s Secretary General Sadakazu Tanigaki on Saturday to delay the sales-tax increase to October 2019, NHK reported.

Aso advised the prime minister to be cautious about the idea, NHK said. “If the tax increase is delayed, a general election is needed to put the plan to the public,” Aso was quoted by Kyodo News as saying on Sunday. Kyodo reported later that Abe doesn’t plan to call snap elections on the same day as the Upper House vote. If Abe fails to go ahead with his plan of raising the tax in April, it means his economic policies have failed and he and his cabinet members should resign to take responsibility, Tetsuro Fukuyama, vice secretary general of the opposition Democratic Party of Japan, said in a program aired by public broadcaster NHK on Sunday.

Unexpected advantages.

• The Butterfly Effect: Cheap Oil Means Fewer Nose Jobs (BBG)

Oil slumps. Middle Eastern patients cancel treatments abroad. Thai hospital stocks slide. It’s the butterfly effect in action. Weak growth outlooks in the Gulf states are prompting greater competition from local clinics, stemming the flow of visitors to the world’s top medical tourism destination. That’s clouding the outlook for Thailand’s health-care shares, which surged more than 800% over the past seven years, as valuations start to look stretched amid the falling demand. Bangkok’s Bumrungrad Hospital, known as the grandaddy of international clinics, has slumped 16% since early March after patient volumes from the United Arab Emirates, its second-biggest source of overseas visitors, fell 20% in the first quarter.

Thailand attracted as many as 1.8 million international patients in 2015, many of whom stayed on afterward for a beach holiday. More than one in three foreigners treated at Bumrungrad are from the Gulf states and Kasikorn Securities says declining growth in the region and a rise in competition from clinics in the U.A.E., where the government is encouraging its citizens to stay home for medical care, are curbing demand. “In the short term, the economic slowdown in the the Middle East will weaken some investors’ confidence on earnings growth for domestic hospital operators,” said Jintana Mekintharanggur at Manulife Asset Management. “We are still bullish on the sector” in the long term as it will benefit from growth in countries like Myanmar and Vietnam that have less-developed health systems, she said.

Hey, look, we are born as liars. And we will lie to ourselves about that, too.

• The Source of Failure: We Optimize What We Measure (CH Smith)

The problems we face cannot be fixed with policy tweaks and minor reforms. Yet policy tweaks and minor reforms are all we can manage when the pie is shrinking and every vested interest is fighting to maintain their share of the pie. Our failure stems from a much deeper problem: we optimize what we measure. If we measure the wrong things, and focus on measuring process rather than outcome, we end up with precisely what we have now: a set of perverse incentives that encourage self-destructive behaviors and policies. The process of selecting which data is measured and recorded carries implicit assumptions with far-reaching consequences. If we measure “growth” in terms of GDP but not well-being, we lock in perverse incentives to boost ‘growth” even at the cost of what really matters, i.e. well-being.

If we reward management with stock options, management has a perverse incentive to borrow money for stock buy-backs that push the share price higher, even if doing so is detrimental to the long-term health of the company. Humans naturally optimize what is being measured and identified as important. If students’ grades are based on attendance, attendance will be high. If doctors are told cholesterol levels are critical and the threshold of increased risk is 200, they will strive to lower their patients’ cholesterol level below 200. If we accept that growth as measured by GDP is the measure of prosperity, politicians will pursue the goal of GDP expansion.

If rising consumption is the key component of GDP, we will be encouraged to go buy a new truck when the economy weakens, whether we need a new truck or not. If profits are identified as the key driver of managers’ bonuses, managers will endeavor to increase net profits by whatever means are available. The problem with choosing what to measure is that the selection can generate counterproductive or even destructive incentives. This is the result of humanity’s highly refined skill in assessing risk and return. All creatures have been selected over the eons to recognize the potential for a windfall that doesn’t require much work to reap.

Can’t leave out the ones that are diabetic without knowing it. Oh, and: “..these obesity rates are calculated from self-reported heights and weights.”

• 30.4% Of Americans Were Obese In 2015 (Forbes)

If recent headlines are to be believed, we are rapidly approaching the future depicted in Wall-E, with a morbidly obese population that can get from place to place only with the help of a hover-scooter. “Americans are fatter than ever, CDC finds,” trumpets CNN. “This Many Americans Need To Go On A Diet ASAP, According To New CDC Report,” content farm Elite Daily smugly proclaims. But is it really that cut-and-dried? The report both articles refer to is succinctly titled “Early Release of Selected Estimates Based on Data from the National Health Interview Survey, 2015.” It was released on Tuesday, and it provides an early look at annual data from the titular survey on 15 different points, from health insurance and flu shots to smoking rates and, yes, obesity.

The publication says 30.4% of Americans were obese in 2015, with a 95% confidence interval (so somewhere between 29.62% and 31.27%). That’s compared to 19.4% in 1997. Obesity rates were higher among middle-aged people (ages 40 to 59), with the rate for that group hitting 34.6%. Ages 20 to 39, perhaps predictably, were the least obese, with 26.5% of that population having a BMI of 30 or more. Obesity was highest for black women (45%), followed by black men (35.1%), Latina women (32.6%), Latino men (32%), white men (30.2%) and white women (27.2%). The data in the release didn’t provide any information on other ethnic or racial groups, nor did it break obesity rates down by household income.

In concert with rising obesity rates, Americans are getting more diabetic. In 1997, 5.1% of U.S. adults had been diagnosed with diabetes. By 2015, that number had nearly doubled, to 9.5%. Although, again, the data here don’t break everything down to my satisfaction–there are no numbers for each specific type of diabetes, for instance–it’s safe to say that these correlations are the consequence of rising obesity, as 95% of people diagnosed with diabetes have type 2.

Managed to monopolize the entire Brexit debate, but they can’t leave well enough alone…

• Tory Turmoil Escalates With Open Call For Cameron To Quit (G.)

David Cameron’s hopes of being able to avoid terminal damage to Conservative party unity after the EU referendum campaign were dented on Sunday when two rebel MPs openly called for a new leader and a general election before Christmas. The attacks came from Andrew Bridgen and Nadine Dorries – both Brexiters, and longstanding, publicity-hungry opponents of the prime minister – and their claim that even winning the EU referendum won’t stop Cameron facing a leadership challenge in the summer was dismissed by fellow Tories. But their comments coincided with the ministers in charge of the leave campaign launching some of their strongest personal attacks yet on Cameron, prompting Labour’s Alan Johnson to say that the Tory infighting was getting “very ugly indeed”.

Bridgen told the BBC’s 5 Live that Cameron had been making “outrageous” claims in his bid to persuade voters to back remain and that, as a consequence, he had effectively lost his parliamentary majority. “The party is fairly fractured, straight down the middle and I don’t know which character could possibly pull it back together going forward for an effective government. I honestly think we probably need to go for a general election before Christmas and get a new mandate from the people,” he said. Bridgen said at least 50 Tory MPs – the number needed to call a confidence vote – felt the same way about Cameron and that a vote on the prime minister’s future was “probably highly likely” after the referendum.

Dorries told ITV’s Peston on Sunday she had already submitted her letter to the chairman of the Tory backbench 1922 committee expressing no confidence in the prime minister. “[Cameron] has lied profoundly, and I think that is actually really at the heart of why Conservative MPs have been so angered. To say that Turkey is not going to join the European Union as far as 30 years is a lie.”

Australia will keep debating this while the last bits die off.

• Half Of Central, Northern Great Barrier Reef Corals Are Dead (SMH)

More than one-third of the coral reefs of the central and northern regions of the Great Barrier Reef have died in the huge bleaching event earlier this year, Queensland researchers said. Corals to the north of Cairns – covering about two-thirds of the Great Barrier Reef – were found to have an average mortality rate of 35%, rising to more than half in areas around Cooktown. The study, of 84 reefs along the reef, found corals south of Cairns had escaped the worst of the bleaching and were now largely recovering any colour that had been lost. Professor Terry Hughes, director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies at James Cook University, said he was “gobsmacked” by the scale of the coral bleaching which far exceeded the two previous events in 1998 and 2002.

“It is fair to say we were all caught by surprise,” Professor Hughes said. “It’s a huge wake up call because we all thought that coral bleaching was something that happened in the Pacific or the Caribbean which are closer to the epicentre of El Nino events.” The El Nino of 2015-16 was among the three strongest on record but the starting point was about 0.5 degrees warmer than the previous monster of 1997-98 as rising greenhouse gas emissions lifted background temperatures. Reefs in many regions, such as Fiji and the Maldives, have also been hit hard. Bleaching occurs when abnormal conditions, such as warm seas, cause corals to expel tiny photosynthetic algae, called zooxanthellae. Corals turn white without these algae and may die if the zooxanthellae do not recolonise them.

The northern end of the Great Barrier Reef was home to many 50- to 100-year-old corals that had died and may struggle to rebuild before future El Ninos push tolerance beyond thresholds. “How likely is it that they will fully recover before we get a fourth or a fifth bleaching event?” Professor Hughes said. The health of the reef has been a contentious political issue, with Environment Minister Greg Hunt pledging more funds in the May budget to improve water quality – one aspect affecting coral health. But Mr Hunt has also had to explain why his department instructed the UN to cut out a section on Australia from a report that dealt with the threat of climate change to World Heritage sites including the Great Barrier Reef and Kakadu.

Debt Rattle May 3 2016

May 032016

May 3, 2016 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 9:14 am Finance Tagged with: Abe, Apple, arctic, border control, China, currency war, EU, refugees, superstate, USD, yen, ZIRP 1 Response »

DPC French Market, New Orleans 1910

• The EU Exists Only To Become A Superstate (Lawson)

• US Dollar Falls To 1-Year Low (BBG)

• Yen Under Pressure to Extend World-Beating Rally Against Dollar (BBG)

• Kuroda Kollapse Kontinues As USDJPY Nears 105 Handle (ZH)

• BOJ Chief Kuroda Warns Current Yen Strength Risks Harming Recovery (BBG)

• China Factory Activity Contracts for 14th Straight Month In April (CNBC)

• Fed’s Williams Sees Big Drop In Asset Prices As Systemic Risk (R.)

• Apple’s Losing Streak Is Nearing Historic Levels (BBG)

• No Alternative To Low Rates For Now, Draghi Says (R.)

• ECB Report Says Investors May Be Profiting From Leaked US Data (FT)

• Six Counterpoints About Australian Public Debt (Stanford)

• ‘Bank of Mum and Dad’ Behind 25% Of British Mortgages (G.)

• Dominoes: Vanishing Arctic Ice Shifts Jet Stream, Which Melts Glaciers (WaPo)

• Germany Wants To Extend Border Controls For Another 6 Months (AP)

• Denmark Extends Controls On German Border (EN)

• EU States Face Charge For Refusing Refugees (FT)

• 90,000 Unaccompanied Minors Sought Asylum In EU In 2015 (R.)

I don’t think I have much in common with Nigel Lawson -aka Lord Lawson of Blaby-, but it’s important that this ‘little fact’ be known and exposed. Even a superstate needs values if it is to survive. The EU ain’t got any left. Who wants to belong to that?

• The EU Exists Only To Become A Superstate (Lawson)

For Britain, the issue in the coming European referendum is not Europe, with its great history, incomparable culture, and diverse peoples, but the European Union. To confuse the two is both geographically and historically obtuse. European civilisation existed long before the coming of the EU, and will continue long after this episode in Europe’s history is, hopefully, over. On the European mainland it has always been well understood that the whole purpose of European integration was political, and that economic integration was simply a means to a political end. In Britain, and perhaps also in the US, that has been much less well understood, particularly within the business community, who sometimes find it hard to grasp that politics can trump economics. The fact that the objective has always been political does not mean that it is in any way disreputable.

Indeed, the most compelling original objective was highly commendable. It was, bluntly, to eliminate the threat to Europe and the wider world from a recrudescence of German militarism, by placing the German tiger in a European cage. Whether or not membership of the EU has had much to do with it, that objective has been achieved: there is no longer a threat from German militarism. But in the background there has always been another political objective behind European economic integration, one which is now firmly in the foreground. That is the creation of a federal European superstate, a United States of Europe. Despite the resonance of the phrase, not one of the conditions that contributed to making a success of the United States of America exists in the case of the EU. But that is what the EU is all about. That is its sole raison d’être. And, unlike the first objective, it is profoundly misguided.

For the United Kingdom to remain in the EU would be particularly perverse, since not even our political elites wish to see this country absorbed into a United States of Europe. To be part of a political project whose objective we emphatically do not share cannot possibly make sense. It is true that our present Prime Minister argues that he has secured a British “opt-out” from the political union, but this is completely meaningless. “But,” comes the inevitable question, “what is your alternative to membership of the EU?” A more absurd question it would be hard to envisage. The alternative to being in the EU is not being in the EU. And it may come as a shock to the little Europeans that most of the world is not in the EU – and that most of these countries are doing better economically than most of the EU.

Why don’t I see nobody accuse the US of currency manipulation?! That still the Shanghi Accord legacy?

• US Dollar Falls To 1-Year Low (BBG)

The dollar fell to an 18-month low against the yen and touched its weakest since August versus the euro amid speculation that the U.S. won’t raise interest rates any time soon. The U.S. currency has lost ground versus most major peers over the past month as traders lowered expectations for a rate increase by the Federal Reserve in June to 12%. The Bloomberg Dollar Spot Index headed for the lowest close in almost a year, after a report showed manufacturing in the U.S. expanded less than forecast. Persistent weakness dragged the dollar down against the euro for a third straight month in April – its longest losing streak since 2013 – amid signs U.S. policy makers aren’t convinced the global and domestic economies can withstand higher borrowing costs.

It fell on Tuesday against Australia’s currency as Chinese equities climbed by the most in nearly three weeks. The U.S. has posted disappointing growth data as nascent signs of recovery emerge in Europe and China’s growth momentum accelerates. “The Fed is completely out of the picture now for the next few weeks – even with the June meeting, there’s got to be a lot of doubt about whether the Fed can raise rates,” said Shaun Osborne at Bank of Nova Scotia in Toronto. “The dollar has just not done particularly well over the past few weeks as the Fed has moved toward delaying rate hikes, and that’s a situation that definitely will continue, certainly for the near term.”

Abe must be going nuts.

• Yen Under Pressure to Extend World-Beating Rally Against Dollar (BBG)

The yen’s world-beating rally against the dollar looks to be gathering momentum, as central bank inaction on both sides of the Pacific Ocean leaves inflation expectations to drive the exchange rate. Japan’s currency extended its climb to an 18-month high Monday after Bank of Japan Governor Haruhiko Kuroda refrained from adding to stimulus on Thursday. That took its gain this year to 13%, the most among developed-market peers. The BOJ’s decision came just hours after Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen frustrated dollar bulls by reiterating she’s in no rush to cool the economy by raising interest rates. JPMorgan sees further yen gains after the U.S. put Japan on a new currency watch list.

With consumer price pressures building in the U.S. and dissipating in Japan, that narrows the gap in so-called real yields – the returns an investor can expect after accounting for inflation – supporting yen strength. If both central banks stay on the sidelines, Credit Suisse projects Japan’s currency could rapidly appreciate toward 90 per dollar. “So long as the Fed signals that they are being cautious in raising rates, real yields in the U.S. will decline, leading the dollar weaker,” said Hiromichi Shirakawa, the Swiss lender’s chief Japan economist and a former BOJ official. “The currency market is in a rather dangerous zone.” The BOJ’s benchmark for measuring progress toward its 2% target showed prices retreated at an annual 0.3% pace in March, the biggest decline since April 2013, the month that Kuroda initiated his stimulus program.

It had previously hovered near zero for more than a year. By contrast, the Fed’s preferred measure of inflation, based on the prices of goods and services consumers buy, rose 0.8% in the year through March. The so-called core measure, which strips out food and energy prices, climbed 1.6%. That’s seen a Treasury market gauge of inflation expectations over the coming decade – called the break-even rate – jump to 1.7% from as low as 1.2% in February. The equivalent measure in Japan is languishing at 0.3%. Benchmark 10-year Treasury Inflation Protected Securities yield around 0.1%, compared with about minus 0.5% for equivalent Japanese notes.

Japan met two of three criteria used to judge unfair practices in the U.S. report: a trade surplus with the U.S. above $20 billion, and a current-account surplus amounting to more than 3% of gross-domestic product. The third would be a repeated depreciation of the currency by buying foreign assets equivalent to 2% of gross domestic over a year. Meeting all three would trigger action by the U.S. president to enter discussions with the country and seek potential penalties. China, Germany, South Korea and Taiwan also made the watch list.

“..Perhaps Jack Lew’s “currency manipulation” report was enough to stall the Japanese currency war for now?..”

• Kuroda Kollapse Kontinues As USDJPY Nears 105 Handle (ZH)

Either The BoJ steps in soon and intervenes (even by just “checking levels”) or Kuroda-san is truly terrified of The G-20. USDJPY has now crashed 7 handles since last Thursday’s shock BoJ disappointment crashing to within 5 pips of a 105 handle tonight for the first time in 18 months…

Erasing the entire devaluation post-Fed, post QQE2…

Perhaps Jack Lew’s “currency manipulation” report was enough to stall the Japanese currency war for now? Or is China greatly rotating its Yuan devaluation pressure against another member of its basket…?

Charts: Bloomberg

1) What recovery? 2) Abe and Kuroda are powerless prisoners to America’s dollar manipulation

• BOJ Chief Kuroda Warns Current Yen Strength Risks Harming Recovery (BBG)

Bank of Japan Governor Haruhiko Kuroda warned that the yen’s biggest rally since Abenomics began risks harming the nation’s economic recovery. Speaking to reporters in Frankfurt Monday, Kuroda also reiterated that BOJ policy makers won’t hesitate to expand monetary stimulus in order to achieve their 2% inflation target. Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said the same day in Paris that rapid movements in exchange rates are undesirable, according to national broadcaster NHK. “There is a risk that the yen’s current appreciation brings an unwelcome impact on the economy,” Kuroda said on the sidelines of an annual gathering of finance chiefs from members of the Asian Development Bank, which he used to lead.

“We will be closely monitoring the impact of financial markets on the real economy and prices.” A weaker currency has been a linchpin of Abe’s program to stoke growth and exit deflation. Japan’s economy is at risk of sliding into its second recession in two years after contracting in the final three months of 2015, while inflation remains far from the BOJ’s target. One gauge showed consumer prices retreated at an annual 0.3% pace in March, the biggest decline since April 2013, the month that Kuroda initiated his stimulus program. The yen has climbed 13% against the dollar this year, the best performance among its developed-market peers. That has chipped away at the 36% decline over the previous four years, which was triggered by Abe’s pledge of unlimited monetary easy to correct yen strength.

Kuroda and his board left policy settings unchanged at a meeting Thursday, spurring a nearly 5%, two-day surge in the yen against the dollar. It reached an 18-month high of 106.05 per greenback on Tuesday, before trading at 106.19 as of 9:54 a.m. in Singapore. Japanese markets are closed for holidays Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday this week.

Beyond salvation.

• China Factory Activity Contracts for 14th Straight Month In April (CNBC)

Activity in China’s manufacturing sector unexpectedly declined further in April, a private survey showed Tuesday, reviving doubts over the health of the world’s second-largest economy. The Caixin Manufacturing Purchasing Managers’ Index (PMI) fell to 49.4 in April from 49.7 in March, according to Markit, which compiles the index. A reading above 50 indicates expansion; one below indicates contraction. The Caixin PMI, which focuses on smaller and medium-sized enterprises, was last in expansionary territory in February 2015. The official PMI, which targets larger companies, printed at 50.2 in April, the second successive month of expansion, figures released over the weekend showed. The survey findings follow recent economic data that appeared to suggest that China’s economy was slowly regaining its poise after a torrid 12 months.

China’s exports rose at their fastest clip in a year in March, while industrial profits also picked up in the first quarter. A flurry of rate cuts and easing of reserve requirement have helped bolster sentiment, while the capital outflows that had unnerved sentiment at the start of the year have slowed. The Caixin survey, however, cast a more somber picture. Respondents reported stagnant new orders, while new export work fell for a fifth month running. Companies shed staff as client demand was muted. “The fluctuations indicate the economy lacks a solid foundation for recovery and is still in the process of bottoming out. The government needs to keep a close watch on the risk of a further economic downturn,” said He Fan at Caixin Insight Group.

What blows up must blow down.

• Fed’s Williams Sees Big Drop In Asset Prices As Systemic Risk (R.)

San Francisco Fed President John Williams reiterated Monday his view that the U.S. economy is ready for higher interest rates, but flagged the risk of broad-based declines in asset prices as a result. “It makes sense for us to be moving interest rates gradually back to more a normal level over the next couple years,” Williams said. “I actually think that’s a sign of strength for the global economy.” Speaking at a panel on systemic risk at the Milken Institute Global Conference, Williams said the biggest systemic financial risk currently is the possibility that “broad sets of assets are going to see big movements downward” as interest rates rise. “That’s an area that I think is a potential risk.” Williams did not suggest he sees another crisis brewing, adding that U.S. regulators have made “amazing” progress in shoring up banks against potential future failure.

“What I worry a lot more about is when people forget about the financial crisis, when they forget about the terrible things that happened,” he said, suggesting that may not happen for another five or ten years. The Fed raised interest rates for the first time in nearly a decade last December, but has held off raising them any further amid global stock volatility and worries over a decline in global growth. Even after the Fed resumes raising rates, Williams said, it will not be able to lift them as high as it has in the past. Most Fed officials currently think that the rate at which the economy can sustain healthy employment and steady prices has probably fallen to about 3.25% in the long run, a full %age point lower than was the case before the crisis. But there are significant downside risks to that estimate, Williams said.

No. 1 US stock for years.

• Apple’s Losing Streak Is Nearing Historic Levels (BBG)

So far in 2016, Apple is the dog of the Dow. After an underwhelming earnings report led to the shares’ worst week since January 2013, Apple stock extended its losses to kick off May, closing down 0.18% on Monday. The benchmark index’s laggard has declined by nearly 11% so far this year heading into today’s session: Bespoke Investment Group notes that Monday’s negative close marks eight straight sessions in the red for Apple—something that last happened in July 1998, and has now happened only four times in the company’s history. More than $79 billion in Apple’s market capitalization has been erased over the past eight sessions.

The company’s heavy weighting in major sector and benchmark indexes, coupled with the stock’s terrible two-week stretch, has made $4 billion in assets of exchange-traded funds evaporate over this stretch. “Smart beta” ETFs are poised to trounce their more popular peers, Bloomberg’s Eric Balchunas observes, in the event that this span of underperformance continues. There’s a possible silver lining for Apple bulls, and investors who own those market-cap-weighted ETFs: The stock tends to bounce back in earnest following these rare stretches of rotten performance. “Two of the three eight-day streaks saw the stock fall on day nine as well, but the stock has never experienced a losing streak longer than nine trading days,” Bespoke writes. “While the next day and next week returns following eight-day losing streaks lean negative, the stock has been higher over the next month all three times for a median gain of 8.01%.”

Well, there is, but Draghi’s masters don’t want it.

• No Alternative To Low Rates For Now, Draghi Says (R.)

Low interest rates are not harmless but they are only the symptom, not the cause of an underlying problem across major economies, ECB President Mario Draghi said on Monday, arguing that there was no alternative for now. “Thus the second part of the answer to raising rates of return is clear: continued expansionary policies until excess slack in the economy has been reduced and inflation dynamics are sustainably consistent again with price stability,” Draghi told a conference. “There is simply no alternative to this today.” “The only potential margin for maneuver is in the composition of the policy mix, that is, the balance of monetary and fiscal policy,” he added.

Corruption is not a deficiency, it’s the MO.

• ECB Report Says Investors May Be Profiting From Leaked US Data (FT)

US investors may be profiting from leaked economic data releases that allow them to front-run market-moving news, according to a research paper published by the ECB. Macroeconomic news announcements can move markets, as traders watch for indications about how the economy is performing. The data are released to everyone at the same time to ensure fairness but ECB researchers said they had found evidence of “informed trading” ahead of US data releases. Of the 21 market-moving announcements analysed, seven “show evidence of substantial informed trading before the official release time”, according to the paper, including two releases from the US government. The pre-release “price drift” accounts for about half of the overall price impact from the announcement.

The researchers looked at the impact on futures tracking the S&P 500 stock index and the 10-year Treasury bond for the 30 minutes preceding the announcement. The researchers also note that the price impact has become worse since 2008, and estimate that since 2008 profits in the S&P “e-mini” futures market alone amount to about $20m per year. “These results imply that some traders have private information about macroeconomic fundamentals,” said the report. “The evidence suggests that the pre-announcement drift likely comes from a combination of information leakage and superior forecasting based on proprietary data collection and reprocessing of public information.”

The paper raises questions about the safeguards used to ensure data are protected up until scheduled release time. Important economic indicators in the US are subject to the “Principle Federal Economic Indicator” guidelines, but the report notes that many distributors of the data are not subject to the same rules. “To ensure fairness, no market participant should have access to this information until the official release time,” the report added. “Yet, in this paper we find strong evidence of informed trading before several key macroeconomic news announcements.”

Household debt is a much bigger factor is some countries than others. In Australia, it’s far bigger than government debt. But the latter is what all political talk is about. “Pumping up fear of government debt is always an essential step in preparing the public to accept cutbacks in essential public services.”

• Six Counterpoints About Australian Public Debt (Stanford)

In the lead-up to today’s pre-election Commonwealth budget, much has been written about the need to quickly eliminate the government’s deficit, and reduce its accumulated debt. The standard shibboleths are invoked liberally: government must face hard truths and learn to live within its means; government must balance its budget (just like households do); debt-raters will punish us for our profligacy; and more. Pumping up fear of government debt is always an essential step in preparing the public to accept cutbacks in essential public services. And with Australians heading to the polls, the tough-love imagery serves another function: instilling fear that a change in government, at such a fragile time, would threaten the “stability” of Australia’s economy.

However, this well-worn line of rhetoric will fit uncomfortably for the Coalition government, given its indecisive and contradictory approach to fiscal policy while in office. The deficit has gotten bigger, not smaller, on their watch, despite the destructive and unnecessary cutbacks in public services imposed in their first budget. Their response to Australia’s fiscal and economic problems has consisted mostly of floating one half-formed trial balloon after another (from raising the GST to transferring income tax powers to the states to cutting corporate taxes), with no systematic analysis or framework. And their ideological desire to invoke a phony debt “crisis” as an excuse for ratcheting down spending will conflict with another, more immediate priority: throwing around new money (or at least announcements of new money), especially in marginal electorates, in hopes of buying their way back into office.

In short, the politics of debt and deficits will be both intense and complicated in the coming weeks. To help innoculate Australians against this hysteria, here are six important facts about public debt, what it is – and what it isn’t.

1. Australia’s public debt is relatively small

3. Other sectors of society borrow much more than government

Somone should explain to these people what’s going on. Mum and Dad will lose their shirts AND their skirts. Ironically, some insist more homes must be build. Ironoc, because that would mean even steeper losses for those buying into today’s craze.

• ‘Bank of Mum and Dad’ Behind 25% Of British Mortgages (G.)

The “Bank of Mum and Dad” will help finance 25% of UK mortgage transactions this year, according to research. Parents are set to lend their children £5bn to help them on to the property ladder. If the lending power was of all these parents was combined, it would be a top 10 mortgage provider. Nigel Wilson, chief executive of Legal & General, which carried out the research, said the data showed a number of issues, including house prices being “out of sync with wages”. The research estimated that the Bank of Mum and Dad will provide deposits for more than 300,000 mortgages. The homes purchased will be worth £77bn and the average contribution is £17,500 or 7% of the average purchase price.

But relying on parental support might soon be unsustainable as parents could be giving away more than they can afford. Wilson said that in London the funding method was reaching “tipping point” already as parental contributions made up more than 50% of the wealth (excluding property) of the average household in the capital. He said: “The Bank of Mum and Dad plays a vital role in helping young people to take their early steps on to the housing ladder.” Not all young people have parents who can afford to help them and some who do still do not have enough to buy a place of their own, he said. He added: “We need to fix the housing market by revolutionising the supply side – if we build more houses, demand can be met at a sensible level and prices will stabilise relative to wages.”

Positive feedback.

• Dominoes: Vanishing Arctic Ice Shifts Jet Stream, Which Melts Glaciers (WaPo)

Investigating the factors affecting ice melt in Greenland — one of the most rapidly changing places on Earth — is a major priority for climate scientists. And new research is revealing that there are a more complex set of variables affecting the ice sheet than experts had imagined. A recent set of scientific papers have proposed a critical connection between sharp declines in Arctic sea ice and changes in the atmosphere, which they say are not only affecting ice melt in Greenland, but also weather patterns all over the North Atlantic. The new studies center on an atmospheric phenomenon known as “blocking” — this is when high pressure systems remain stationary in one place for long periods of time (days or even weeks), causing weather conditions to stay relatively stable for as long as the block remains in place.

They can occur when there’s a change or disturbance in the jet stream, causing the flow of air in the atmosphere to form a kind of eddy, said Jennifer Francis, a research professor and climate expert at Rutgers University. Blocking events over Greenland are particularly interesting to climate scientists because of their potential to drive temperatures up and increase melting on the ice sheet. “When they do happen, and they kind of set up in just the right spot, they bring a lot of warm, moist air from the North Atlantic up over Greenland, and that helps contribute to increased cloudiness and warming of the surface,” Francis said. “When that happens, especially in the summer, we tend to see these melt events occur.” Now, two new studies have suggested that there’s been a recent increase in the frequency of melt-triggering blocking events over Greenland — and that it’s likely been fueled by climate change-driven losses of Arctic sea ice.

A paper set to be published Monday in the International Journal of Climatology reveals an uptick in the frequency of these blocking events over Greenland since the 1980s. A team of researchers led by the University of Sheffield’s Edward Hanna used a global meteorological dataset relying on historical records to measure the frequency and strength of high pressure systems over Greenland all the way back to the year 1851. Previous analyses had only extended the record back to 1948, so the new study is able to place recent blocking events in a much larger historical context. When the researchers analyzed the data, they found that the increase in blocking frequency over the past 30 years is particularly pronounced in the summer, the time of year when blocking events are likely to have the biggest impact on ice melt.

Clueless, rudderless, valueless.

• Germany Wants To Extend Border Controls For Another 6 Months (AP)

Germany and some other EU countries are planning to ask the European Commission for an extension of border controls within the Schengen passport-free travel zone for another six months because they fear a new wave of migrants. Interior Minister Thomas de Maizere’s spokesman says a letter is being sent Monday asking for an extension of the controls on the German-Austrian border, which were implemented last year when thousands of migrants crossed into Germany daily. De Maizere has expressed concern before that an increasing number of migrants will try to reach Europe this summer by crossing the Mediterranean Sea from lawless Libya to Italy, then travel north to Austria and Germany. Germany registered nearly 1.1 million new arrivals last year and is keen to bring the numbers down in 2016.

Germany’s defense minister, meanwhile, said it was up to Italy to protect its borders but other European countries must be ready to help if needed. Ursula von der Leyen’s comments Monday touched on the potential problems Italy could have with increased arrival of migrants looking for an alternative route into the EU now that the West Balkans route is closed and Turkey has committed to taking back those arriving illegally to Greece. She said a solution must be found “together with Italy.” Austria plans to impose border controls at its main border crossing with Italy to prevent potential attempts by migrants to enter, and with Austria bordering Germany, von der Leyen’s comments indicate her country’s concern that it also may have to deal with new waves of migrants seeking entry.

“..We have to protect ourselves against the Islamic State group..”

• Denmark Extends Controls On German Border (EN)

Denmark has extended temporary controls on its border with Germany, first imposed in January to help regulate an influx of migrants. The measures have been prolonged by another month until the beginning of June. The European Commission, struggling to prevent the collapse of the Schengen agreement, has confirmed it will soon authorise more such extensions. The Danish government says it has joined several countries in writing to the Commission asking for a two-year extension. “Together with the Germans, the French, the Austrians and the Swedes I have today sent a letter to the EU commission asking for the possibility to extend the border control for the next two years,” said Inger Støjberg, Danish minister of immigration and integration.

“I have done so because we need to look out for Denmark. We have to protect ourselves against the Islamic State group, who are trying to take advantage of the situation where there are holes in borders. But also as protection against the influx of refugees coming through Europe.” The Commission could give the green light as early as Wednesday to countries within the passport-free Schengen zone wishing to extend exceptional border controls. The five countries have taken the measures because of the influx of migrants and refugees heading north via the so-called Balkans route after entering Europe via the Greek shores. Although the crisis has eased, the governments say many migrants are still camped along the route and in Greece.

The cattle trade continues unabated. Europeans are as immoral as their leadership.

• EU States Face Charge For Refusing Refugees (FT)

European countries that refuse to share the burden of high immigration will face a financial charge of about €250,000 per refugee, according to Brussels’ plans to overhaul the bloc’s asylum rules. The punitive financial pay-off clause is one of the most contentious parts of the European Commission’s proposed revision of the so-called Dublin asylum regulation, due to be revealed on Wednesday. It represents the EU’s most concerted attempt to salvage an asylum system that collapsed under the weight of a million-strong migration to Europe last year, endangering the principle of passport-free travel in the Schengen area. In recent weeks migrant flows to Greece have fallen due to tighter controls through the western Balkans and a deal with Turkey to send-back asylum seekers arriving on Greek islands.

However, the EU remains as politically divided as ever over strengthening the bloc’s asylum rules. While acknowledging these political constraints, the commission’s reforms aim to gradually shift more responsibility away from the overwhelmed frontline states, such as Greece, in future crises, primarily through an automatic system to share refugees across Europe if a country faces a sudden influx. Crucially, this is backed by a clause that allows immigration-wary countries to pay a fee — set at a deliberately high level — if they want to avoid taking relocated asylum seekers for a temporary period. According to four people familiar with the proposal, this contribution was set at €250,000 per asylum seeker in Monday’s commission draft. But those involved in the talks say it may well be adjusted in deliberations over coming days.

“The size of the contribution may change but the idea is to make it appear like a sanction,” said one official who has seen the proposal. Another diplomat said in any event the price of refusing to host a refugee would be “hundreds of thousands of euros”. Eastern European states such as Poland and Hungary would welcome alternatives to mandatory asylum quotas but will balk at the high penalties suggested. At the commission’s recommended rate, Poland would need to pay around €1.5bn to avoid its existing 6,200 quota to relocate refugees from Italy and Greece. These financial contributions are in part designed to fix incentives around migrant quotas, which have badly failed and proved almost impossible to implement even once agreed in law. The commission proposal builds on the EU’s flagship emergency scheme to relocate 160,000 refugees, which has barely redistributed 1% of its target since it was agreed last year.

And how many did you say are unaccounted for, Europe?

• 90,000 Unaccompanied Minors Sought Asylum In EU In 2015 (R.)

Some 88,300 unaccompanied minors sought asylum in the EU in 2015, 13% of them children younger than 14, crossing continents without their parents to seek a place of safety, EU data showed on Monday. More than a million people fleeing war and poverty in the Middle East and Africa reached Europe last year. While that was roughly double the 2014 figure, the number of unaccompanied minors quadrupled, statistics agency Eurostat said. Minors made up about a third of the 1.26 million first-time asylum applications filed in the EU last year. EU states disagree on how to handle Europe’s worst migration crisis since World War II and anti-immigrant sentiment has grown, even in countries that traditionally have a generous approach to helping people seeking refuge.

Four in 10 unaccompanied minors applied for asylum in Sweden, where some have called for greater checks, suspicious that adults are passing themselves off as children in order to secure protection they might otherwise be denied. Eurostat’s figures refer specifically to asylum applicants “considered to be unaccompanied minors,” meaning EU states accepted the youngsters’ declared age or established it themselves through age assessment procedures. More than 90% of the minors traveling without a parent or guardian were boys and more than half of them were between 16 and 17 years old. Half were Afghans and the second largest group were Syrians, at 16% of the total. After Sweden, Germany, Hungary and Austria followed as the main destinations for unaccompanied underage asylum seekers.

Debt Rattle March 22 2015

Mar 222015

March 22, 2015 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 8:06 am Finance Tagged with: Abe, basic income, China, extraction, Fed, Great Barrier Reef, Le Pen, nazi, oil, wildlife 6 Responses »

Jack Delano “Untitled” 1940

• We’re All Hedge Funds Now (John Rubino)

• Why Has Germany Bailed Out A Tiny Bank? (Coppola)

• The Perfect Storm For Oil Hits In Two Months (Zero Hedge)

• The ‘Natural Interest Rate’ Is Always Positive And Cannot Be Negative (Mises)

• The Federal Reserve Bank Must Be Destroyed! (Patrick Barron)

• We’re Much Worse Off Than Just Before The Last Economic Crisis (Michael Snyder)

• Draghi To Go To Italian Committee But Not Irish Bank Inquiry (Irish Times)

• China To Curb Risks From Short-Term Local Debt (Reuters)

• Why Do American Weapons End Up In Our Enemies’ Hands? (Ron Paul)

• Nazi Extortion: Study Sheds New Light on Forced Greek Loans (Spiegel)

• Michael Hudson: Europe Tilts East Towards China (NC/TRRN)

• Abe-Kuroda Honeymoon Soured By Fiscal Friction (Reuters)

• ‘Abandoned’ French Working Class Ready To Punish Left, Vote Le Pen (Guardian)

• The Idea of “Basic Income” Takes Root (CP)

• Wild Anti-Austerity Strike in Québec (Printemps2015.org)

• Moral Hazard: Ukraine New Spy Law Designed As Provocation (RT/RonPaul Inst.)

• Russia Urges Germany, France To Safeguard Peace In Ukraine (Reuters)

• France Decrees New Rooftops Must Be Covered In Plants Or Solar Panels (Guardian)

• Africa Is Centre Of A ‘Wildlife War’ That The World Is Losing (Observer)

• Australia PM Tony Abbott Unveils Plan To Save Great Barrier Reef (Guardian)

• The Global Extraction Industry: Plunder, Violence And Corruption (Observer)

“Will this time around be any different? Definitely. It will be much worse because the numbers are so much bigger.”

• We’re All Hedge Funds Now (John Rubino)

As negative interest rates spread from Switzerland, Japan and Germany to the rest of the developed world, people with money to invest face some life-defining choices. Retirees who need to generate 6% to avoid dipping into principal can’t get there with bank CDs. Pension funds that have promised an 8% return in order to meet obligations to future retirees can’t get anywhere near that with government bonds. Same thing for insurance companies and money market funds, whose business models require positive returns with low risk. What to do? Well, a retiree can either stop being a retiree — that is, go back to work — or invest a lot more aggressively to meet the required 6% return.

That means loading up on equities and junk bonds, either blithely because she doesn’t know what they are (only that they’ve been going up) or with trepidation because she’s aware that every five or so years these things tend to crash. For public companies, building new factories no longer pays as well as borrowing money and using the proceeds to buy back their own common stock. Pension funds, meanwhile, have more options though the end result is the same. They can, like our hypothetical retiree, load up on equities, as Japanese pension funds are reportedly doing…[..] …or they can wander even further into the “alternative” investing universe by hiring hedge funds to generate “alpha.”[..]

In the world of aggressive investing, retirees, corporations and pensions funds are all “dumb money.” They don’t do this kind of thing regularly so they have no institutional or personal experience to draw upon. The result, for pension funds and retirees, is the quintessential beginner strategy of trend following, buying what was hot last year because that’s where the biggest returns are being generated, while public companies are being even dumber, buying stocks on margin (i.e., with borrowed money) without regard for valuation. Similar things happened during the previous bubble, when individuals became real estate speculators, pension funds embraced alternative investments, and corporations ramped up their share repurchase programs. All got creamed in 2008. Will this time around be any different? Definitely. It will be much worse because the numbers are so much bigger.

Moral hazard?!

• Why Has Germany Bailed Out A Tiny Bank? (Coppola)

The first German bank has died from Austrian contagion. Duesseldorfer Hypothekenbank (“Duesselhyp”), a tiny mortgage lender, has been seized by the Bundesverband Deutsche Banken (BDB), Germany’s association of private banks. According to Reuters, The BDB had hammered out a deal over the weekend with financial market watchdog Bafin, the Bundesbank and resolution authority FMSA to provide a guarantee for DuesselHyp’s holdings of around 350 million euros ($370 million) in Heta bonds that are subject to a debt moratorium imposed by Austrian financial regulators.Duesselhyp’s core tier1 (CT1) capital of €233m was not enough to allow it to continue trading after the expected 50% haircut on its holdings of senior unsecured HAA/Heta bonds.

Under German law, Lone Star, the private equity group that owned Duesselhyp, was not obliged to contribute more capital, and the planned sale of Duesselhyp to Attestor Capital could not proceed. The BDB’s seizure of Duesselhyp is therefore understandable: the alternative was disorderly collapse.But it is not immediately clear why the BDB opted to bail out Duesselhyp rather than forcing bail-in of its creditors. After all, Germany has already adopted the European Bank Resolution & Recovery Directive (EBRRD). True, Duesselhyp is tiny: bailing it out could be done entirely from existing funding without recourse to taxpayers. But bailing out a tiny, over-leveraged and under-capitalized bank seems contrary to the spirit if not the law of the EBRRD. So why did the BDB do it?

The reason is the nature of Duesselhyp’s liabilities. Duesselhyp is an issuer of Pfandbriefe, the super-safe covered bonds that are the bedrock of the German financial system. A look at Duesselhyp’s 2014 interim balance sheet shows that Pfandbriefe backed by public sector loans are by far the largest proportion of Duesselhyp’s liabilities: it has issued a rather smaller number of mortgage Pfandbriefe too. The remainder of Duesselhyp’s liabilities are institutional deposits (it has no retail deposits), which are covered by unlimited guarantees from the German deposit fund. In short, almost all of Duesselhyp’s liabilities are covered by explicit or implicit German government guarantees.

Storage issue once more.

• The Perfect Storm For Oil Hits In Two Months (Zero Hedge)

This is what we said back in early March when the BTFDers were hoping WTI in the low $40s would never again be seen: “Come June, when all available on-land storage is exhausted, each incremental barrel will have to be dumped on the market forcing prices lower and inflicting further pain on the entire US shale complex (just as Q1 results are released which will invariably show huge writedowns as companies will no longer be able to hide behind the SEC-mandated accounting trick that made Q4 results appear respectable).”

Since then, as expected, crude tumbled to new post-Lehman lows, confirming the global deflationary wave is raging (for more details please see China), and WTI only posted a rebound on quad-witching Friday as another algo-driven stop hunt spooked all those who were short the energy complex. The problem is that despite the latest “dead oil bounce” we have since had to revise our forecast for full US oil storage, and pulled forward the date when this will happen in the aftermath of the latest API inventory data. Recall that earlier this week API reported, and EIA later confirmed, that for the 10th week in a row there was a “massive 10.5 million barrels (far bigger than the 3.1 million barrel expectation) and a 3 million barrel build at Cushing. If this holds for DOE data tomorrow (and worryingly API has tended to underestimate the build in recent weeks) it will be the biggest weekly build since 2001.”

It also means that at the current rate of record oil production, storage will be exhausted in under two months, some time in mid-May. At that point, with no more storage to buffer the record oil production, the open market dumping begins and prices of WTI will crater as every barrel will have to be sold at any clearing price, since the producers will have no other choice than to, literally, dump the oil. In other words, a perfect storm is shaping up for oil some time in late May, early June.

Amen.

• The ‘Natural Interest Rate’ Is Always Positive And Cannot Be Negative (Mises)

Some economists have been arguing that the “equilibrium real interest rate” (that is the “natural interest rate” or the “originary interest rate”) has become negative, as a “secular stagnation” has allegedly caused a “savings glut.” The idea is that savings exceed investment, and that a negative real interest rate is required for bringing savings in line with investment. From the viewpoint of the Austrian school, the notion of a “negative equilibrium real interest rate” doesn’t make sense at all. To show this, let us develop the case step by step. To start with, one should make a distinction between two types of interest rates: There is the market interest rate, and there is the originary interest rate. The market interest rate is the outcome of the supply of and demand for savings in the market place.

It can be observed, for instance, in the deposit, bond, or loan market for different maturities and credit qualities. The originary interest rate is a category of human action, saying that acting man values goods available at present more highly than goods available in the future. In other words: Future goods trade at a price discount relative to present goods. For instance, 1 US$ available today is preferred over 1 US$ available in one year’s time. If 1 US$ to be received in one year’s time is valued at, say, 0.909 US$, the originary rate of interest is 10%. (1 US$ divided by 0.909 minus 1 gives you 0.10, or 10%, for that matter.) 10% is here the originary interest rate (disregarding any other premia). The originary interest rate is expressive of a value differential, which results from so-called time-preference.

The term time-preference denotes that acting man prefers an earlier satisfaction of wants over a later satisfaction of wants. Time-preference is always and everywhere positive, and so is the originary interest rate. This is, first and foremost, what common sense would tell us. If the originary interest rate was near-zero, it means that you prefer two apples available in, say, 1,000 years over one apple available today. A truly zero originary interest rate implies that the actor’s planning horizon or “period of provision” is infinitely long, which is another way of saying that he would never act at all but would continually push the attainment of his goals into the future. The notion that time-preference and the originary interest rate could be zero, does not only sound absurd, it is also a logical impossibility: Positive time-preference and a positive originary interest rate are logically implied in the irrefutably true “axiom of human action.”

“Note that there is nothing that a central bank could provide that could not be provided by another private bank.”

• The Federal Reserve Bank Must Be Destroyed! (Patrick Barron)

The Fed was founded under false economic premises–to prevent bank runs by providing temporary liquidity to banks which found themselves unable to redeem their certificates and demand deposits for cash and/or specie. The real cause of illiquid banks–fractional reserve banking–was never seriously addressed. It was assumed that banks had the legal right to invest their customers’ demand funds in loans and that runs were caused by over indulging in this practice. But as Murray N. Rothbard explain in What Has Government Done to Our Money?, loaning demand funds instantly places the bank in an insolvent position, for it cannot redeem all of its demand accounts for cash or specie.

Through the process of lending demand funds, the banks have created fiduciary media out of thin air, reducing their reserve ratio below one hundred percent. If the banks do this on a very modest basis, the public may not be aware of the fraud. However, once the rumor starts that the bank is illiquid, there is a literal “run” to the bank to withdraw demand funds. In such a case, even a bank that only modestly lent its demand funds might find itself unable to honor all withdrawal claims and would be forced to close its doors. (NOTE: Central Banking was established to legitimize counterfeiting fraud, aka – Fractional Reserve Banking) The Federal Reserve Bank, as the lender of last resort, was supposed to prevent such occurrences by providing temporary, penalty rate loans to struggling banks.

Note that there is nothing that a central bank could provide that could not be provided by another private bank. In fact the banking panic of 1907 was stemmed by private bank interventions led by J. P. Morgan. However, Morgan realized that such private bailouts were very risky and presented a case of moral hazard; i.e., that bankers, confident of a bailout by the Morgan banking empire, might book riskier, higher yielding loans. So rather than face the real cause of banking crises and lobby to outlaw fractional reserve banking, the Morgans, Rockefellers, etc.–who did not want to forego the financial benefits of lending demand deposits–lobbied instead for government to create a lender of last resort, a central bank, which we named the Federal Reserve Bank.

Good graphs. Pity Michael doesn’t understand inflation.

• We’re Much Worse Off Than Just Before The Last Economic Crisis (Michael Snyder)

If you believe that ignorance is bliss, you might not want to read this article. I am going to dispel the notion that there has been any sort of “economic recovery”, and I am going to show that we are much worse off than we were just prior to the last economic crisis. If you go back to 2007, people were feeling really good about things. Houses were being flipped like crazy, the stock market was booming and unemployment was relatively low. But then the financial crisis of 2008 struck, and for a while it felt like the world was coming to an end. Of course it didn’t come to an end – it was just the first wave of our problems.

The waves that come next are going to be the ones that really wipe us out. Unfortunately, because we have experienced a few years of relative stability, many Americans have become convinced that Barack Obama, Janet Yellen and the rest of the folks in Washington D.C. have fixed whatever problems caused the last crisis. Even though all of the numbers are screaming otherwise, there are millions upon millions of people out there that truly believe that everything is going to be okay somehow. We never seem to learn from the past, and when this next economic downturn strikes it is going to do an astonishing amount of damage because we are already in a significantly weakened state from the last one.

For each of the charts that I am about to share with you, I want you to focus on the last shaded gray bar on each chart which represents the last recession. As you will see, our economic problems are significantly worse than they were just before the financial crisis of 2008. That means that we are far less equipped to handle a major economic crisis than we were the last time.

Don’t insult the Irish!

• Draghi To Go To Italian Committee But Not Irish Bank Inquiry (Irish Times)

The ECB is holding to its position that its president, Mario Draghi, will not go before the Oireachtas banking inquiry in spite of the fact that he will appear at certain committees of the Italian parliament on March 26th. In a statement released to The Irish Times on foot of a question as to why Mr Draghi will not attend the Irish inquiry but will address committees of the Italian parliament, a spokesman said: “The ECB as a European institution is primarily held to account by the European Parliament as the representation of all the union’s citizens. “Therefore, it does not participate in national parliamentary inquiries and will not take part in the proceedings of the inquiry committee of the Irish parliament.”

It added: “Nevertheless, in line with past practice of interaction between the ECB and national parliaments, the ECB is ready to take part in an informal exchange of views on matters within the remit of the ECB’s mandate with the relevant committees of the Irish parliament.” The spokesman reiterated that deputy president Vítor Constâncio “stands ready” to represent the ECB in “such an exchange of views”, adding he was well placed to do so by being the longest-serving member of the executive board who also attended the relevant Eurogroup/Ecofin meetings during the Irish financial crisis. The ECB president has also appeared before committees of the German, French and Spanish parliaments and the ECB spokesman said Mr Draghi would address the budget, finance and European affairs committees of the Italian parliament later this month.

Irish MEP Brian Hayes said it was “totally unsatisfactory” Mr Draghi was not willing to appear before the banking inquiry but addresses national parliaments in certain situations. Inquiry committee member John Paul Phelan wants the ECB to clarify its position: “We know Mr Draghi already attended a German parliamentary finance committee in late October 2012. It now appears he is attending a similar committee in Italy. The ECB needs to clarify its position. On the one hand it says it is not accountable to member state parliaments and so the ECB won’t attend our inquiry. “But without explanation the president of the ECB appears willing to attend Italy’s parliamentary finance committee.”

They’re going to try and buy out the shadow system?

• China To Curb Risks From Short-Term Local Debt (Reuters)

China will take steps to rein in possible risks from short-term local government bonds, including converting such bonds into long-term debt, the country’s vice finance minister, Zhu Guangyao, said on Saturday. On March 8, the ministry announced local governments would be permitted to swap 1 trillion yuan ($161.2 billion) of maturing, high-interest local debt for new official municipal or provincial bonds, to help cut interest costs. Zhu said local governments were burdened by piles of short-term debt, including that raised through trust products. “In accordance with the State Council’s plans, we will turn such short-term financing into long-term financing, and the size for 2015 is 1 trillion yuan,” Zhu told an international conference on China’s development attended by government officials, business leaders and academics. “This will help reduce the funding costs and reduce risks.”

But the authorities must prevent the problem of “moral hazard” in the process, he said, without elaborating. The government will keep economic growth stable this year while pushing forward financial and fiscal reforms, Zhu added. China has been trying to reduce excess factory capacity, local government debt and risks from a cooling property market, which are likely to drag growth to a quarter-century low of around 7% this year from 7.4% in 2014. “The pre-condition for our deleveraging is to maintain relatively stable economic growth,” Zhu said. The central bank has cut interest rates twice since November, on top of a cut in bank reserve requirements in February, amid concerns about growing deflationary risks, and more such moves are expected. In addition, the government plans to run its biggest budget deficit in 2015 since the global crisis to support spending.

By design?

• Why Do American Weapons End Up In Our Enemies’ Hands? (Ron Paul)

It happens so often you wonder whether it is due to total ineptness or a deliberate policy to undermine our efforts overseas. It’s most likely a result of corruption and unintended consequences, combined with a foreign policy that makes it impossible to determine who are our friends are and who are our enemies. One would think that so many failures in arming others to do our bidding in our effort to control an empire would awaken our leaders and the American people and prompt policy changes.

A recent headline in Mother Jones read: “US Weapons Have A Nasty Habit of Going AWOL.” The report was about $500 million worth of military equipment that is unaccounted for in Yemen. Just as in so many other places, our policy of provoking civil strife in Yemen has been a complete failure. At one time it was announced that there was a great victory in a war being won with drones assisting groups that claimed to be on our side in the Yemen Civil War. As usual, we could have expected that these weapons would end up in the hands of the militants not on the side of United States and would never be accounted for.

There are numerous examples of how our foreign intervention backfires and actually helps the enemy. Just recently a headline announced: “CIA cash sometimes refills al-Qaeda coffers.” This was a story of our government helping pay ransom to al-Qaeda for the release an Afghan diplomat. However this was a measly $5 million so it was not considered a big deal. Another headline just recently announced that, “Iraqi army downs two UK planes carrying weapons for ISIL.” The Iraqi army is supposed to be on our side, and many people believe the UK is also on our side as well. One thing for sure the American taxpayer pays for all this nonsense.

Building weapons and seeing them end up in the hands of the enemy is almost a routine event and one should expect it to continue to happen under the circumstances of the chaos in the Middle East. This represents a cost to the American taxpayer and is obviously a major contributing factor in what will be the ultimate failure of our plan to remake the Middle East. This is bad enough, and the only people who seem to benefit from it are those who are earning profits in the military-industrial complex. But there is something every bit as bad as our weapons ending up in the hands of the jihadists and being used against us. That is, the fact that our presence there, our weapons, and our bombs, are the best recruiting tool for getting individuals to join the fight against America’s presence in so many conflicts around the world.

See Looks Like Germany May Have To Pay Up .

• Nazi Extortion: Study Sheds New Light on Forced Greek Loans (Spiegel)

Last week in Greek parliament, Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras demanded German reparations payments, indirectly linking them to the current situation in Greece. “After the reunification of Germany in 1990, the legal and political conditions were created for this issue to be solved,” Tsipras said. “But since then, German governments chose silence, legal tricks and delay. And I wonder, because there is a lot of talk at the European level these days about moral issues: Is this stance moral?” Tspiras was essentially countering German allegations that Greece lives beyond its means with the biggest counteraccusation possible: German guilt. Leaving aside the connection drawn by Tsipras, which many consider to be inappropriate, there are many arguments to support the Greek view. SPIEGEL itself reported in February that former Chancellor Helmut Kohl used tricks in 1990 in order to avoid having to pay reparations.

A study conducted by the Greek Finance Ministry, commissioned way back in 2012 by a previous government, has now been completed and contains new facts. The 194-page document has been obtained by SPIEGEL. The central question in the report is that of forced loans the Nazi occupiers extorted from the Greek central bank beginning in 1941. Should requests for repayment of those loans be classified as reparation demands – demands that may have been forfeited with the Two-Plus-Four Treaty of 1990? Or is it a genuine loan that must be paid back? The expert commission analyzed contracts and agreements from the time of the occupation as well as receipts, remittance slips and bank statements.

They found that the forced loans do not fit into the category of classical war reparations. The commission calculated the outstanding German “debt” to the Greek central bank and came to a total sum of $12.8 billion as of December 2014, which would amount to about €11 billion. As such, at issue between Germany and Greece is no longer just the question as to whether the 115 million deutsche marks paid to the Greek government from 1961 onwards for its peoples’ suffering during the occupation sufficed as legal compensation for the massacres like those in the villages of Distomo and Kalavrita. Now the key issue is whether the successor to the German Reich, the Federal Republic of Germany, is responsible for paying back loans extorted by the Nazi occupiers. There’s some evidence to indicate that this may be the case.

Must read/Listen. “..the funding of the World Bank has mainly been to fund infrastructure developments, vastly overpriced, to Third World countries to create money for American engineering firms; also to lend out dollars and to indebt countries to it..”

• Michael Hudson: Europe Tilts East Towards China (NC/TRRN)

Real News Network: So, Michael, let’s begin with the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank. The Chinese have established this bank with a $50 billion investment. Now, is this then a serious challenge to the World Bank?

HUDSON: Well, the idea is to make an alternative development philosophy to the World Bank. From the very beginning, the World Bank has been basically an extension of the U.S. Defense Department, from the first president, John J. McCloy, who is assistant secretary of defense, down through Robert McNamara, 1968 to ’81, and then by the neocon cold warrior Paul Wolfowitz, 2005 to ’07, and Larry Summers, the chief economist, along with Bob Zoellick. So you have the purpose of the World Bank lending essentially for plantation export crops, for export crops to make countries avoid producing anything that might compete with American exports, above all grain, although every single mission of the World Bank, country mission, has recommended that countries undertake land reform and agricultural extension to help promote family farming and countries to feed themselves. The World Bank has not made loans for this.

The World Bank, under U.S. congressional pressure, has said, look, we’re not going to finance countries becoming independent of the United States; our function is to make them export more to the United States and to buy from the United States. So the funding of the World Bank has mainly been to fund infrastructure developments, vastly overpriced, to Third World countries to create money for American engineering firms; also to lend out dollars and to indebt countries to it; and worst of all, to promote privatization. And that’s really the big difference between the Chinese Development Bank’s philosophy and the World Bank.

The World Bank is pressured everywhere for privatization of public utilities, of basic infrastructure, and then it will make loans to the governments to develop this infrastructure or the roads and the external economies, and then sell them cheap to American buyers, who essentially will create monopolies and turn infrastructure into a rent extraction to squeeze out interest, dividends, management fees that are all going to be paid to the Americans. And this has been raising the price of basic utilities–communications, transportation, water, and other things throughout the Third World.

And this has made these economies uncompetitive with the United States that has a mixed economy where the government subsidizes infrastructure. So the Chinese Development Bank is to help make other countries get independent of this sort of neocon, neoliberal, right-wing economic philosophy and work government-to-government, help governments develop infrastructure, so that they can provide basic services at a lower cost or a subsidized cost, or even freely to the populations. That’s how the European countries and American economy got rich. And the only way to help repeat this process is to make a clean break from the United States and the World Bank.

Abenomics has been a failure from day one. Is the blame game finally taking off?

• Abe-Kuroda Honeymoon Soured By Fiscal Friction (Reuters)

A rift is emerging between Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and his hand-picked central bank boss on how to fix Japan’s tattered finances, which could blunt the impact of the “Abenomics” stimulus policies they have worked together to prosecute. Two years into Bank of Japan Governor Haruhiko Kuroda’s tenure, the cracks are becoming hard to conceal and could affect the timing of any further monetary easing and an eventual end to the massive money-printing program he set in train. Their differences over fiscal policy needed to cut Japan’s staggering public debt, which at 230% of GDP is twice the U.S. figure and about 50 points higher than perilous Greece, have so far been masked by their shared determination to end deflation.

The perception of common purpose is critical to giving businesses, markets and consumers the confidence to change behavior and ensure that the stimulus measures and inflation targets are effective. But the mask began to slip last year when Abe decided to delay a sales tax hike, making Japan’s primary fiscal goal harder to achieve. “The honeymoon days are over,” said Izuru Kato, chief economist at Totan Research. “Kuroda must be frustrated over a lack of progress in structural reform and fiscal consolidation.” A former finance ministry bureaucrat, Kuroda feels Japan cannot afford to delay tax hikes and spending cuts given its dire fiscal state, while Abe prefers to focus more on boosting growth to raise tax revenues.

Last month a key policy panel run by Abe’s right-hand man, Economics Minister Akira Amari, began debating proposals that could water down Japan’s fiscal target of returning to a primary budget surplus, excluding debt servicing costs and income from bond sales, in fiscal 2020. Abe has not resiled from that target, but the panel is laying the ground for him to add other goals that give him more wiggle-room on spending, government officials say.

Too late to stop this. Hollande has turned into Tony Blair.

• ‘Abandoned’ French Working Class Ready To Punish Left, Vote Le Pen (Guardian)

At an election meeting just days before France’s regional elections, a Japanese journalist asked Marine Le Pen a question: why was her far-right Front National party tipped to do so well? Polls suggest that the FN vote will reach unprecedented levels, with up to 30% of the vote, just ahead of the opposition Union for a Popular Movement (UMP) party and leaving the ruling Socialist party trailing. “The Front National is alone against everyone. The French people have realised for some time now that the Front National’s analysis is right, and the other political parties have failed,” Le Pen responded. The FN had gone from “a party of opposition … to a movement of government” by addressing “the economy, immigration and Islamic fundamentalism”, she added. From Le Pen, a damning analysis of this type might be expected.

But from a member of the leftwing commentariat? A new “state of the nation” tome, L’Insécurité culturelle, by analyst Laurent Bouvet, has caused a storm in Paris salons by suggesting that the country’s working class is ready to vote FN in droves because it has been abandoned by the left and deceived by the country’s Socialist government. Bouvet accuses the left of sparking an identity crisis – “cultural insecurity” – among its core blue-collar electorate, by almost exclusively focusing on the problems of minority groups instead of French society as a whole. This has left the workers feeling cast adrift and alienated, he says. “The economic crisis, unemployment, social problems, globalisation make people afraid, but if it was just about economics we would see these people voting for the radical left, which they are not,” Bouvet told the Observer.

Bouvet is a political science professor and member of the leftwing thinktank the Jean Jaurès Foundation, which advises the Socialist party (PS) and aims to “promote the study of workers’ movements and international socialism and promote democratic and humanist ideas”. He says his latest, decidedly politically incorrect, message is one the left does not want to hear. Bouvet says PC blinkers have prevented the Socialists from addressing working-class anxieties about immigration and the rise of Islam – even in its moderate form – in areas where the so-called Français de souche (born-and-bred French) find themselves outnumbered by those with a different religion and cultural habits. Branded les petits blancs (white trash), and accused of racism or patronised if they express their fears, they have turned en masse to the FN, he says.

Always a good discussion.

• The Idea of “Basic Income” Takes Root (CP)

After years of having relatively few supporters, the idea of Basic Income is now spreading around the world. In Spain – probably “the place on Earth where the debate around Basic Income is most advanced” – after five years of public spending cuts, depressed demand, record unemployment, burgeoning poverty, and a growing public debt now at around 100% of GDP, and after twenty years of discussion in universities, grassroots movements and social networks, Basic Income is finally going mainstream.

Although the new game-changing left-wing political party Podemos has temporarily retreated from its initial Basic Income proposal in favour of “full employment” (more fitting, perhaps, for the welfare states of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s), many party members are Basic Income stalwarts. Other political organisations now proposing it include Equo, Pirata and Bildu (a coalition in the Basque Country) and, in Galicia, Anova, while still more small parties have projects which, while not strictly a Basic Income, come close.

A recent number of the Basic Income Earth Network newsletter gives an idea of the worldwide spread of different versions of Basic Income. In Greece the new ruling party Syriza has declared its aim to establish “a closer link between pension contribution and income… and provide targeted assistance to employees between 50 and 65, including through a Guaranteed Basic Income scheme so as to eliminate the social and political pressure of early retirement which over-burdens the pension funds”. In Finland, 65.5% of 1,642 (out of nearly 2,000) candidates for the parliamentary elections on 19 April publicly support the policy. Cyprus has passed a new law giving low income families a Guaranteed Minimum Income of €480 a month.

In 2013, a grassroots movement in Switzerland called for a Basic Income of 2,500 Swiss francs per month and received over 100,000 signatures needed to force a referendum on the proposal. 90% of the members of Hungary’s Green-Left party Párbeszéd Magyarországért (“Dialogue for Hungary”) have voted for a Basic Income to which all citizens would be entitled, €80 per month for children, €160 for adults and €240 for young mothers. The poverty line in Hungary is estimated at around €200 for a single adult. In Portugal, where Basic Income is relatively unknown and misunderstood, the political party LIVRE has included Basic Income in its draft political programme for the autumn elections this year. Now recognising that inequality and social justice are also “green” issues, the fast-growing Green Party of England and Wales has announced that a Basic Income will be included in its manifesto.

Announcement from my old stomping grouds for the coming week. Québec has a long history of standing up for the poor, since the French were held down for centuries.

• Wild Anti-Austerity Strike in Québec (Printemps2015.org)

Like wolves, humans act collectively and form groups in order to survive and defend our common interests. The idea of community is closely related to survival in the face of adversity and to the well being of society. The preservation of our habitat, of our social rights, and of our future depends on solidarity. Acting together in large numbers makes it much easier to defend our rights and our collective needs. That’s why we propose the creation of an alternative to the isolation and individualism pervasive in society by choosing collective action against the aggressive attacks of governments on our collective wellbeing. Both federal and provincial governments are engaged in attacks on the population.

They now demand that we pay more at the same as they are wantonly slashing everywhere: education and health systems, scientific research, pension funds, the environment, social and community programs, housing, arts and culture, union rights… Faced with the bewildering rate at which cuts and austerity measures are announced, action is urgently needed. The Spring 2015 committee calls for a push towards social change, starting this spring. We envision concrete resistance to austerity uniting students, workers, and society as a whole taking root in Québec. While they reach for the last pennies in our pockets, federal and provincial governments increase military spending, invest in prisons, police, and security measures, and roll out the red carpet for the extractive industries.

People with friends in high places, the rich, large companies, multinationals, banks and lobbying firms are running the show. A small minority is strangling the community. If the interests of the majority do not orient the actions and priorities of the government, it is illusory to continue to speak of this as a democracy. In a just and equitable society, wealth should not be accumulated at the expense of our environment and should be fairly redistributed amongst all. Indigenous peoples, Québecers, and Canadians are neither represented nor respected by governments who do not defend their rights. We will amplify popular discontent and launch a WILD STRIKE.

We call for the pillaging of society to be resisted with a general strike! Let’s disrupt this failed economic order which relegates the interests of society to the bottom of the list. An inclusive strike, a strike by any means: the closure of schools and offices, and cities at a standstill until each and every one of us receives what we are collectively owed. We demand that governments stop privatisation and the sabotage of the common good, end the destruction of the environment, and cease to only favour the rich! Otherwise, we’ll bite. This spring, block austerity! The Spring 2015 committees aim to facilitate the organisation of effective struggles for collective and environmental rights. Everywhere across Québec, let’s join together to massively refuse the ideological project of austerity.

“..they feel they have the US particularly and the West in general behind them. So they feel they can engage in every moral reckless behavior because there are no consequences..”

• Moral Hazard: Ukraine New Spy Law Designed As Provocation (RT/RonPaul Inst.)

If a Ukrainian draft law on intelligence comes into force, we might start seeing assassinations, bomb blasts, and psychological attacks in the Donbass region, says Daniel McAdams of the Ron Paul Institute. Ukraine’s parliament has passed a law allowing its intelligence units to carry out military operations in eastern Ukraine. If the President Petro Poroshenko signs the law, it would allow special services to infiltrate and operate in the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Lugansk republics.

RT: How does this current move from Kiev correlate with the current peace process in east Ukraine?
Daniel McAdams: I think it’s a provocation and it is designed to be a provocation. The goal is stated clearly from Kiev and it’s echoed in Washington, and to a degree in Berlin, as well, which is that Ukraine needs to be whole again—that is the point they are making including eastern Ukraine and even Crimea. So it is meant to be a provocation. The problem is the government in Kiev is operating with what in finance circles is called “moral hazard”—they feel they have the US particularly and the West in general behind them. So they feel they can engage in every moral reckless behavior because there are no consequences to the actions that they take. But if it does pass, I think it may give us some information, some indication as to what all of the visits from the CIA director to Kiev over the past year and a half were all about. And then we can probably start seeing things like assassinations in Donetsk and Lugansk, bombs going off, provocations, psychological operations. I think it opens the whole can of worms.

RT: The parliament in Kiev also voted on a bill branding some territories in the east as ‘occupied’ including Crimea. What is Kiev trying to achieve here?
DM: Because they can get away with it. The law on autonomy now is going to be granted only after elections take place under Kiev’s rules and laws which definitely goes against the Minsk agreements. They will be supervised by the OSCE which has hardly shown itself to be objective in this case. You’re basically having a de facto taking over of these regions all over again.

RT: What reaction are we expecting internationally, especially from France and Germany who are part of the Normandy Four?
DM: I don’t think they are going to do that much because they have not been willing to speak up and to reprimand their clients in Kiev so far. Yesterday, President Obama had a talk with Chancellor Merkel. And at least, according to the White House’s reading of the conversation, they are in complete agreement about retaining the sanctions on Russia and that the Minsk agreements needed to be fully implemented. So they are simply interpreting the Minsk agreement to suit their ultimate goal, which is the bringing of the regions of the east back under Kiev’s control.

RT: Do you think Washington and Europe are united on this objective?
DM: I wouldn’t say necessarily united but I think over the past year or so we’ve seen that Germany is ready to break. But aside from whisperers in the German intelligence community that basically half of the US generals are bonkers, there has been no real indication that Germany is ready to break. So I think reluctantly they are going along.

“.. Lavrov said he was concerned Kiev might stage “provocations” to try to persuade the United States that it should aid Kiev by sending it lethal weapons.” He should be.

• Russia Urges Germany, France To Safeguard Peace In Ukraine (Reuters)

Russia appealed to Germany and France on Saturday to ensure Kiev does not try to incite violence in east Ukraine to encourage the United States to send Ukrainian forces lethal weapons. Paris and Berlin helped mediate a peace deal in the Belarussian capital Minsk on Feb. 12 to try to end fighting between government forces and pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine but the truce remains fragile. In an interview with Russian television, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said he was concerned Kiev might stage “provocations” to try to persuade the United States that it should aid Kiev by sending it lethal weapons.

“Provocateurs in Kiev … could try to ‘whip something up’ in the expectation that this will influence the world public and weapons will flow into Ukraine,” he told the new program Vesti on Saturday with Sergei Brilev. “I am convinced that Berlin and Paris, as the most important players …, should prevent such a turn of events.” Lavrov also repeated Russia’s opposition to United Nations peacekeepers being sent to the east.

Makes sense.

• France Decrees New Rooftops Must Be Covered In Plants Or Solar Panels (Guardian)

Rooftops on new buildings built in commercial zones in France must either be partially covered in plants or solar panels, under a law approved on Thursday. Green roofs have an isolating effect, helping reduce the amount of energy needed to heat a building in winter and cool it in summer. They also retain rainwater, thus helping reduce problems with runoff, while favouring biodiversity and giving birds a place to nest in the urban jungle, ecologists say.

The law approved by parliament was more limited in scope than initial calls by French environmental activists to make green roofs that cover the entire surface mandatory on all new buildings. The Socialist government convinced activists to limit the scope of the law to commercial buildings.The law was also made less onerous for businesses by requiring only part of the roof to be covered with plants, and giving them the choice of installing solar panels to generate electricity instead. Green roofs are popular in Germany and Australia, and Canada’s city of Toronto adopted a by-law in 2009 mandating them in industrial and residential buildings.

Only the death penalty for all involved will help. Hunters, traders, buyers, the whole lot. No mercy.

• Africa Is Centre Of A ‘Wildlife War’ That The World Is Losing (Observer)

The northern white rhino is heading the way of the dinosaurs. With only five left on Earth – three in Kenya, one in America, and one in the Czech Republic – extinction is now inevitable. It survived for millions of years, but could not survive mankind. This is just one subspecies, but soon the planet’s remaining 28,500 rhinos could be under threat from the illegal wildlife trade. Worth up to £12bn a year, it has joined drugs, arms and human trafficking as one of the world’s biggest crime rackets. Ground zero in this “wildlife war” is Africa, and the conservationists are losing as animals are slaughtered on an industrial scale to meet demand for horn and ivory in newly affluent Asian countries.

Urgent solutions will be debated this week in Kasane, Botswana, as politicians and environmentalists gather for a follow-up to last year’s much-trumpeted London conference on the crisis. Hosted by the British government and Princes Charles, William and Harry, 46 countries signed up to a “London declaration” that promised to address corruption, adopt legislation for tougher penalties against poachers and recruit more law enforcement officers. William Hague, then the foreign secretary, announced at the time: “I believe today we have begun to turn the tide.” More than a year later, however, when the Kasane summit reviews whether these commitments have been implemented, it seems likely that some will be found wanting.

Despite a celebrity-led drive to raise awareness in China and Vietnam, where horn is coveted as an ingredient in traditional medicine or as a status symbol, a record 1,215 rhinos were killed last year in South Africa, 20% more than in 2013. At least 220 chimpanzees, 106 orang-utans, 33 bonobos and 15 gorillas have been lost from the wild over the past 14 months, according to estimates by the Great Apes Survival Partnership. Elephants also remain under siege – at least 20,000 were poached annually from 2011 to 2013, according to the UN – although countries such as Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda have fought back with some measure of success over the past year. “The numbers are still going up and they don’t make us any happier,” said Dr Patrick Bergin, chief executive of the African Wildlife Foundation.

About the last person on earth you want to handle the issue.

• Australia PM Tony Abbott Unveils Plan To Save Great Barrier Reef (Guardian)

Australia has submitted its long-term plan to arrest the decline of the Great Barrier Reef, with Tony Abbott stressing to the international community that the government is “utterly committed” to the reef’s preservation. The Reef 2050 Long-Term Sustainability Plan has been compiled to allay concerns from Unesco over the fading health of the reef, with the organisation’s world heritage committee set to meet in June to decide whether the reef is to be listed as “in danger.” The plan sets a number of targets to reduce pollution running on to the reef, including an 80% reduction in nitrogen and a 50% cut in sediment by 2025.

The final version of the strategy has been re-written to include the policies of Queensland’s new Labor government, which has pledged to ban the dumping of dredged sediment in the reef’s world heritage area and to provide $100m over five years to improve water quality. For its part, the federal government is banning dumping in the reef’s marine park and announced a further $100m in funding for the Reef Trust, a body that will work with landowners to ensure chemicals are not flowing into the coral ecosystem. There will also be a new independent scientific panel, headed by the government’s chief scientist, Ian Chubb, which will oversee the work of the Reef Trust. Abbott said the government was helping to ensure that the reef is “handed on in the best possible condition to our children and grandchildren”.

Our biggest crime aginst humanity: “African mining scandals, says Baldwin, “have roots in Mayfair”, while “oil deals in London have links to violence in Congo.”

• The Global Extraction Industry: Plunder, Violence And Corruption (Observer)

Index on Censorship could not have awarded one of its Freedom of Expression prizes more estimably than to Angolan reporter Rafael Marques de Morais. In doing so, Index prises open Marques’s principal discourse: the prising open of the land itself by those who plunder for profit without heed. Marques’s writing in Angola on the links between diamond mining and government corruption draws attention to the growing causes for concern around the world in relation to the industry of “extraction” and how it behaves financially, politically and morally as it pursues sought-after minerals and commodities to fuel economic growth.

Across the globe, the management of extraction in poor countries rich in resources – by government and the multinationals they invite in – has become hallmarked by scandal, violence, corruption and environmental calamity. Vast international conglomerates are often faced with allegations that they abet the plundering of natural resources, usually in league with local officials and almost always to the detriment of indigenous communities. Only a fraction of the wealth accrued from extraction is left in the host country – to say nothing of the communities often “resettled” – ergo forcibly removed – from the land concerned. This nexus of politics and capitalism leads invariably to violence and death.

Ovid, who wrote around 10BC about the origins of man, accounted for the genesis of warfare in these terms: “The land, which had previously been common to all, like sunlight and breezes, was now divided up far and wide by boundaries, set by cautious surveyors. Nor was it only corn and their due nourishment that men demanded of the rich earth: they explored its very bowels, and dug out the wealth which it had hidden away, close to the Stygian shades; and this wealth was a further incitement to wickedness. By this time iron had been discovered, to the hurt of mankind, and gold, more hurtful still than iron. War made its appearance, using both metals in its conflict, clashing weapons in bloodstained hands.”

Debt Rattle November 21 2014

Nov 212014

November 21, 2014 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 12:47 pm Finance Tagged with: Abe, ABS, Banks, China, CO2, commodities, consumer debt, Draghi, emissions, Krugman, rhino 1 Response »

Russell Lee Hammond Ranch general store, Chicot, Arkansas Jan 1939

• Americans, With Record $3.2 Trillion Consumer Debt, Borrow More (Guardian)

• How Wall Street Banks Traded Lending For Oil, Gas And Nukes (MarketWatch)

• Citigroup Ejected From ECB FX Group for Rigging (Bloomberg)

• China ‘Triple Bubble’ Points To Long Slide For Commodities (MarketWatch)

• ECB Dips Toe Into Dead Sea Of Rebundled Debt (Reuters)

• ECB’s Draghi: ‘Strong Recovery Unlikely’ (CNBC)

• Draghi Says ECB Must Raise Inflation as Fast as Possible (Bloomberg)

• Greece To Submit Contentious Budget For 2015 (CNBC)

• Hanging Around: Why Abe’s Holding an Election in a Recession (Bloomberg)

• Abe Listening to Krugman After Tokyo Limo Ride on Abenomics Fate (Bloomberg)

• US Federal Reserve To Review How It Supervises Major Banks (Reuters)

• Hugh Hendry: “QE ‘Worked’ By Redistributing Wealth Not Creating It” (Zero Hedge)

• Britain Abandons Banker Bonus Fight After EU Court Blow (Bloomberg)

• Russia Warns US Against Supplying ‘Lethal Defensive Aid’ To Ukraine (RT)

• EuroMaidan Anniversary: 21 Steps From Peaceful Rally To Civil War (RT)

• Dutch Government Refuses To Reveal ‘Secret Deal’ Into MH17 Crash Probe (RT)

• Creativity, Companies, And The Wisdom Of Crowds (Robert Shiller)

• China Starts $2 Trillion Leap Forward to Slash Pollution (Bloomberg)

• The Magical Thought That’s Assumed in Climate Studies (Bloomberg)

• Rhino Poaching Death Toll Reaches Record in South Africa (Bloomberg)

• Growth First. Then These Other Things Can Be Dealt With (Clarke&Dawe)

This is going to end well, right?

• Americans, With Record $3.2 Trillion Consumer Debt, Borrow More (Guardian)

Americans are borrowing more even as they have racked up enormous amounts of consumer debt, Federal Reserve data show. The newly released minutes of the last Federal Reserve meeting in October give a wider picture of the US economy. A weak housing market weighed on the US economy, while the fear of Ebola put some brief pressure on the stock markets, the Fed found. The interesting trend, however, is the growing indebtedness of US consumers now that banks have loosened the spigots on lending. The Federal Reserve customarily releases the minutes of its meetings, where the board of governors and staff discuss the major forces at work in the US economy, including employment, housing, borrowing and inflation. The Fed took a positive view of overall economic progress, noting a low unemployment rate, low inflation and, generally, “a continued improvement in labor market conditions”. While the minutes provide a big-picture view of the economy, there are some specific – and strange – worries that make it into the Fed’s discussions.

“Worries about a possible spread of Ebola also appeared to weigh on market sentiment somewhat at times,” the Fed said. The Fed’s meeting was shortly after the first American Ebola patients were being admitted to hospitals. Elsewhere in the economy, the Fed acknowledged that the housing market had slowed. After new home prices hit record highs in 2013, prices have been drifting downward as homeowners still struggle to get mortgages. “Housing market conditions seemed to be improving only slowly,” the central bank said, noting that new home sales were flat in September after moving up in August, and sales of existing single-family homes had not showed much progress and “moved essentially sideways” over the past several months. Banks also loosened the reins and started extending more credit to consumers, particularly through credit cards and auto loans, which some have suggested may be a bubble.

“The three financial holding companies chose to engage in commodity-related businesses that carried potential catastrophic event risks.”

• How Wall Street Banks Traded Lending For Oil, Gas And Nukes (MarketWatch)

A U.S. Senate subcommittee investigation into bank commodities trading has produced some eye-popping findings: Goldman Sachs owned a uranium business that carried the liability of a nuclear accident. J.P. Morgan operated as if it were Con Edison. It owned multiple power-generation plants, exposing it to potential accidents there. Morgan Stanley played the role of Exxon Mobil, stockpiling storage, pipelines, and other natural gas and oil infrastructure.

Together, the report found that banks not only were out of their comfort zone, but put the financial system at risk because they turbo-charged these investments with derivative contracts. They ended up with “huge commodity inventories and participating in outsized transactions,” the Senate Permanent Subcommittee for Investigations said. “The three financial holding companies chose to engage in commodity-related businesses that carried potential catastrophic event risks.” The overreaching foray into commodities underscores how bank “innovation” can take simple services for clients and create massive risk. Banks entered the commodities markets to provide hedges for providers, traders and other market participants. They ended up with huge stakes and, according to the committee, were able to corner at least parts of the market.

This is a far cry from simple brokerage services and investment banking. It is a quantum leap from deposit-taking and lending institutions that are backed by the Federal Reserve and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. And it all took place in a market supposedly regulated by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which should have at least raised red flags, even if its powers were limited by Congress. While many banks have either left, reduced or signaled they want to exit commodities, the pattern in which simple banking and brokerage products become suddenly dangerous and enormous quagmires may be the larger problem. Regulators can’t put a cop in every division and office on Wall Street, much less every power plant across the country.

“Citigroup is the world’s biggest foreign-exchange dealer ..”

• Citigroup Ejected From ECB FX Group for Rigging (Bloomberg)

The European Central Bank ejected Citigroup from its foreign-exchange market liaison group after the U.S. bank was fined for rigging the institution’s own currency benchmark, two people with knowledge of the move said. The ECB removed Citigroup from the panel, which advises the central bank on market trends, after regulators fined the lender $1 billion for rigging currency benchmarks including the ECB’s 1:15 p.m. fix, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the decision hasn’t been made public. Citigroup was one of six banks fined $4.3 billion by U.S. and U.K. regulators last week and is the only one that also sits on the ECB Foreign Exchange Contact Group. About 20 firms with large foreign-currency operations, ranging from Airbus to Deutsche Bank sit on the committee. The panel’s agenda includes how to improve currency benchmarks.

Citigroup is the world’s biggest foreign-exchange dealer, with a 16% market share, according to a survey by London-based Euromoney Institutional Investor Plc. A spokesman for the New York-based bank declined to comment. The panel isn’t involved in how the ECB’s daily fix is calculated. Currency benchmarks such as the ECB fix and the WM/Reuters rates are used by asset managers and pension funds to value their holdings, including $3.6 trillion in index tracker funds around the world. According to documents released with the settlements, senior traders at the firms shared information about their positions with each other and coordinated trading strategies to the detriment of their clients. They’d congregate in electronic chat rooms an hour or so before benchmark rates were set to discuss their orders and how to execute them to their mutual benefit.

China’s share for some commodities is insane. And it won’t last.

• China ‘Triple Bubble’ Points To Long Slide For Commodities (MarketWatch)

The “commodity super cycle” is dead. Now, it’s time to get used to the “commodity super down cycle, and China is the biggest reason why, warn strategists at Credit Suisse in a Thursday note. Commodity demand tends to be very cyclical. Commodities, however, have been underperforming cyclical indicators of growth, including industrial production and new manufacturing orders (as measured by Institute for Supply Management survey data), they say. Much of the blame is on China, the strategists argue, noting that the country remains the “most significant source” of demand for most industrial commodities. Moreover, they see China on track for a “hard landing” at some point in the next three years. The report adds to some of the recent gloom around China, where the fate of the economy remains a topic for debate.

Standard & Poor’s Ratings Services on Wednesday said its negative outlook for Chinese property developers is casting a pall on the rest of the Asia-Pacific region, though it sees prospects for the sentiment to recover next year thanks to looser government policies, particularly on mortgages. The Credit Suisse strategists, meanwhile, see a “triple bubble” in credit, real estate and investment. On credit, they highlight a private-sector to GDP ratio that is 30%age points above trend. China’s investment share of GDP is 48%, much higher than Japan or Korea at similar stages of industrialization, Credit Suisse says. Real estate, meanwhile, is in a “classic bubble.” Prices have dropped six months in a row. A drop of another 20% or more will make for a “hard landing,” they write.

The headline tells the story.

• ECB Dips Toe Into Dead Sea Of Rebundled Debt (Reuters)

The European Central Bank is set to embark this week on a scheme to buy the kind of rebundled debt that sparked the global economic crash. With sparse investor interest its efforts could fall short. Asset backed securities (ABS), reparcelled debt that mixes high-risk loans with safer credit, gained notoriety when rebundled home loans in the United States unravelled to spark financial turmoil. Seven years on, seeking to pump money into a moribund euro zone economy, the ECB believes the same type of debt may make it easier to get credit to companies. It will be safe, the ECB argues, because such European debt, whether car loans or credit cards, is typically repaid and its repackaging should be simpler to understand. The programme is one plank in a strategy which ECB chief Mario Draghi hopes will increase its balance sheet by up to €1 trillion.

If it falls short and fails to boost the economy significantly, pressure to launch full quantitative easing will reach fever pitch. Regulators and investors are sceptical and even within the ECB expectations are muted, people familiar with its thinking say. To limit its risk, the ECB will buy only the most secure part of such loans in the hope that others pile in behind it to buy riskier credit. It is a strategy with little prospect of success, says Jacques de Larosiere, the former head of the International Monetary Fund who has pushed for the repackaging and sale of loans. “While I welcome the ECB’s initiative … it cannot work if it is alone in buying the senior tranches,” he told Reuters. “That is the very area where there is no problem in finding buyers. In order to have an impact, the ECB or other buyers must also be able to buy the lower-quality riskier tranches of ABS.”

Gee, we had no idea.

• ECB’s Draghi: ‘Strong Recovery Unlikely’ (CNBC)

TThe euro zone economy is likely to remain stagnant in the short-to-medium term and the European Central Bank stands ready to act fast to combat low inflation, President Mario Draghi said on Friday. “A stronger recovery is unlikely in the coming months,” Draghi said in an opening speech at the Frankfurt European Banking Congress, referring to the latest flash euro area Purchasing Managers Index (PMI). The PMI, published on Thursday, showed that new orders in the euro zone fell this month for the first time since July 2013. The composite index read 51.4—below forecasts and below October’s final reading of 52.1.

The ECB has launched a slew of measures to ease credit conditions in the region in order to boost growth and combat dangerously low inflation. These include cutting interest rates to record lows and announcing plans to purchase covered bonds and asset-backed securities (ABS). The latest reading for headline inflation in the euro zone was 0.4%—well below the close to 2% level targeted by the ECB and down from 0.9% a year ago. “The inflation situation in the euro area has also become increasingly challenging,” said Draghi on Friday. “We see that it has been essential that the ECB has acted —and is continuing to act—to bring inflation back towards 2%.” Speculation has been rife as to if and when the ECB will start a U.S -style sovereign bond-buying program, as a further measures to ease monetary conditions.

Mario must be needing tranquilizers by now.

• Draghi Says ECB Must Raise Inflation as Fast as Possible (Bloomberg)

Mario Draghi said the European Central Bank must drive inflation higher quickly, and will broaden its asset-purchase program if needed to achieve that. “We will do what we must to raise inflation and inflation expectations as fast as possible, as our price-stability mandate requires,” the ECB president said at a conference in Frankfurt today. Shorter-term inflation expectations “have been declining to levels that I would deem excessively low,” he said. Any new action would follow a flurry of activity since June that has included interest-rate cuts, long-term bank loans, and covered-bond purchases, with buying of asset-backed securities due to start as soon as today.

Draghi has declined to rule out large-scale government-bond buying and said after this month’s monetary policy meeting that staff are studying further measures to boost the economy if needed. “Draghi is sending a clear signal that more stimulus is coming,” said Lena Komileva, chief economist at G Plus Economics . in London. “If the ECB’s current measures prove underwhelming and inflation expectations fail to recover, the ECB will act to expand quantitative easing.”

When will the next bond attack start?

• Greece To Submit Contentious Budget For 2015 (CNBC)

Greece’s proposed budget for 2015 has put it at loggerheads again with the “Troika” of international monitors, who are worried the plan will land it with a bigger fiscal gap than forecast. The coalition government led by Antonis Samaras has promised the budget will include no further austerity measures—on which its bailout is contingent— in an effort to combat the risk of snap national elections next year. The latest polls show that the anti-austerity left-wing opposition party SYRIZA would win an election, if it was held now. Greek Finance Minister Gikas Hardouvelis will submit the final plan for 2015 to the President of the Parliament at 10 a.m. GMT on Friday. Negotiations in Parliament on the Greek budget for 2015 will then start December 4.

The Troika—the European Commission, International Monetary Fund and European Central Bank – is worried that the budget will land Greece with a much bigger fiscal gap next year than the government says. The disagreement has already delayed the country’s review by the Troika and Greece risks missing a December 8 deadline to receive the final instalment of its bailout from Europe, which is worth 144.6 billion euros. This completion of the review would also pave the way for talks on a possible financial backstop for Greece after the European part of its bailout expires at the end of this year.”Only once a staff-level agreement has been reached for the conclusion of the review can discussions on the follow-up to the program take place. The full staff mission will return to Athens as soon as the conditions are there,” Margaritis Schinas, chief spokesperson of the European Commission told CNBC.

Power games save faces, but not countries.

• Hanging Around: Why Abe’s Holding an Election in a Recession (Bloomberg)

The economy’s in recession, his support is sliding, and he has two years left in office with a big majority. Hardly surprising Japanese voters say they don’t understand why Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has called an election. Abe dissolved the lower house of parliament today for the vote to be held in mid-December. His coalition isn’t likely to lose its majority as the opposition is in disarray. A solid win now would snuff out potential threats from within his own party in a leadership election set for next year. Abe is taking a page out of his family’s history. His great-uncle Eisaku Sato, the longest-serving prime minister since the war, twice called early elections during his eight years in office from 1964-1972 to consolidate his grip on power.

While Abe has already closed the revolving door of one-year prime ministers that began with his own resignation in 2007, he needs to be seen as keeping his pledges to revive the economy to be able to challenge Sato’s record. “Tradition is that as soon as a prime minister’s popularity goes down, you put in another guy,” said Steven Reed, professor of political science at Chuo University in Tokyo. Each of the last six prime ministers “lost popularity rapidly because they didn’t keep any promises,” he said. The risk is that Abe’s plan backfires and he loses enough seats to fuel a challenge from his own allies, who in Japanese politics are often a more formidable threat to a sitting prime minister than the opposition. 63% of respondents in a Kyodo News poll yesterday said they didn’t understand his reasons for calling an election.

Say sayonara Nippon.

• Abe Listening to Krugman After Tokyo Limo Ride on Abenomics Fate (Bloomberg)

When Japanese economist Etsuro Honda heard that Paul Krugman was planning a visit to Tokyo, he saw an opportunity to seize the advantage in Japan’s sales-tax debate. With a December deadline approaching, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was considering whether to go ahead with a 2015 boost to the consumption levy. Evidence was mounting that the world’s third-largest economy was struggling to shake off the blow from raising the rate in April, which had triggered Japan’s deepest quarterly contraction since the global credit crisis. Honda, 59, an academic who’s known Abe, 60, for three decades and serves as an economic adviser to the prime minister, had opposed the April move and was telling him to delay the next one. Enter Krugman, the Nobel laureate who had been writing columns on why a postponement was needed.

“That nailed Abe’s decision – Krugman was Krugman, he was so powerful,” Honda said in an interview yesterday in the prime minister’s residence, where he has an office. “I call it a historic meeting.” It was in a limousine ride from the Imperial Hotel — the property near the emperor’s palace that in a previous construction was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright — that Honda told Krugman, 61, what was at stake for the meeting. The economist, who’s now heading to the City University of New York from Princeton University, had the chance to help convince the prime minister that he had to put off the 2015 increase. Confronting Honda and fellow members of Abe’s reflationist brain-trust – such as Koichi Hamada, a former Yale University economist, and Kozo Yamamoto, a senior ruling-party lawmaker — were Ministry of Finance bureaucrats.

Timing is everything. What year is today?

• US Federal Reserve To Review How It Supervises Major Banks (Reuters)

The U.S. Federal Reserve said on Thursday it has launched a review of how it oversees major banks, calling on its inspector general to help with the probe after a series of critical reports. Separate studies to be undertaken by the Fed’s Washington-based Board of Governors and its Office of Inspector General are meant to ensure that “divergent views” about the state of large banks are adequately aired. The reviews will determine whether frontline supervisors and other officials at the regional Federal Reserve banks, as well as at the board level, “receive the information needed to ensure consistent and sound supervisory decisions,” the Fed said in a press release.

That includes being made aware of “divergent views” about a bank’s operations, a reference to criticism that supervisors at the Fed’s regional banks have sometimes suppressed the views of staff members considered too critical of the banks they examine. The issue will be the focus of a Senate Banking committee hearing on Friday that features New York Fed President William Dudley as the chief witness. Several Fed regional banks are involved in supervising the country’s 15 largest financial institutions, including Citigroup and Bank of America, that generally have more than $50 billion in assets. But the New York Fed in particular has come under fire for being lax with the banks it oversees and for not reacting forcefully enough in the run-up to the 2007-2009 financial crisis.

A recent inspector general’s report said supervision at the New York Fed was hampered by the loss of key personnel and an inadequate plan for succession into important positions. Secret recordings made by former New York Fed supervisor Carmen Segarra also portrayed the bank as cozy with major institutions like Goldman Sachs. In testimony prepared for the Senate hearing but released on Thursday afternoon, Dudley said “it is undeniable that banking supervisors could have done better in their prudential oversight of the financial system” in advance of the financial crisis.

More Hugh. He has very original insights.

• Hugh Hendry: “QE ‘Worked’ By Redistributing Wealth Not Creating It” (Zero Hedge)

Hendry: This is almost unparalleled in being the most exciting moment for global macro today. And I predicate that upon making an analogy with the Central Bank coordinated policy intervention, in the foreign exchange markets, after the Plaza Accord in, I believe, 1985. There was a profound unease at the current account and particularly the trade deficit that America was running up, especially against the Japanese, which was deemed to be contentious. The real economy is composed of slow-moving prices, wages are slow and the notion of having to wait for productivity improvements and wage price negotiations to work their course, via the U.S. corporate landscape in Japan, such as those deficits would be resolved successfully and become less politically contentious. It was just too long. Politicians just don’t have that time and so they jumped into the world of macro. Macro’s all about fast-moving prices. Foreign exchange is fast. Stock markets prices are fast.

So the notion then was that the Yen and the Deutschmark would appreciate. Now for hedge funds that was amazing. This is the period of the alchemy of finance, as George Soros has celebrated in very successful financial adventures. They just run the biggest long positions. No one stopped to say “Well, the Deutschmark’s getting expensive.” It didn’t really enter into the vernacular of trading in that market. It was macro, there was a policy impulse, a sponsorship by the world’s monetary authorities and you were trending and you had to have that position. By and large it succeeded. So what I would said to you today is that the policy response can’t be found in foreign exchange markets. It’s been muted somewhat by the “Beggar thy neighbour” way that everyone can pursue the same policy. So currencies, up until very lately, haven’t really moved that much. Instead the drama is unfolding in the stock market.

Cameron keeps on losing against the EU.

• Britain Abandons Banker Bonus Fight After EU Court Blow (Bloomberg)

Britain abandoned a bid to overturn a European Union ban on banker bonuses of more than twice fixed pay after it suffered a setback in the EU’s top court. Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne said he wouldn’t “spend taxpayers’ money” pursuing the legal challenge any further after Britain’s arguments were rebuffed by a senior official at the EU Court of Justice yesterday. The U.K. government will instead redirect its efforts toward countering the effects of the “badly designed rules,” which include an increase in bankers’ overall pay, Osborne said in a statement. The U.K. Treasury said it may be necessary to “develop standards that ensure that non-bonus or fixed pay is put at risk,” echoing remarks this week by Bank of England Governor Mark Carney.

U.K. banks face a running battle with regulators over the EU remuneration rules, with Barclays, HSBC, Lloyds and Royal Bank of Scotland among more than 30 lenders that have tried to circumvent it by introducing so-called role-based pay. The four banks declined to comment on the court opinion. The European Banking Authority, which brings together financial watchdogs from throughout the 28-nation EU, said in October that role-based allowances violate EU rules in “most cases,” and urged regulators to ensure compliance. Osborne and Carney have criticized the EU bonus curb as counterproductive. Britain started the legal fight against the measure last year.

“Lethal assistance “remains on the table. It’s something that we’re looking at …”

• Russia Warns US Against Supplying ‘Lethal Defensive Aid’ To Ukraine (RT)

Moscow has warned Washington a potential policy shift from supplying Kiev with “non-lethal aid” to “defensive lethal weapons”, mulled as US Vice President visits Ukraine, would be a direct violation of all international agreements. A Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson said that reports of possible deliveries of American “defensive weapons” to Ukraine would be viewed by Russia as a “very serious signal.” “We heard repeated confirmations from the [US] administration, that it only supplies non-lethal aid to Ukraine. If there is a change of this policy, then we are talking about a serious destabilizing factor which could seriously affect the balance of power in the region,” Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman Aleksandr Lukashevich cautioned.

His remarks follow US deputy National Security Advisor Tony Blinken Wednesday’s statement at a hearing before the Senate Committee for Foreign Affairs, in which he said that Biden may offer the provision of “lethal defensive weapons” as he visits Ukraine. Lethal assistance “remains on the table. It’s something that we’re looking at,” Blinken said. “We paid attention not only to such statements, but also to the trip of representatives of Ukrainian volunteer battalions to Washington, who tried to muster support of the US administration,” Lukashevich said.

Useful timeline.

• EuroMaidan Anniversary: 21 Steps From Peaceful Rally To Civil War (RT)

Protesters who went out to Kiev’s Maidan Square exactly a year ago have their goal – a deal with the EU – achieved. However, they hardly expected the protest would also trigger a bloody civil war which has already claimed 4,000 lives. RT takes a look at the milestone events of the past 365 days, which brought Ukraine – and the world – to where it is now.

1) Then-President Victor Yanukovich’s unwillingness to sign an Association Agreement with the EU led to Maidan (Independence Square) in Ukraine’s capital Kiev filling with protesters on November 21, 2013. The rally participants were holding hands, waving flags and chanting slogans like “Ukraine is Europe!”

2) The brutal dispersal of a protest camp on the morning of November 30 was a turning point in the ensuing events. It’s still unclear whose idea it was to use force against demonstrators. Yanukovich laid the blame on the city’s police chief and sacked him. But that was not enough for the Maidan protesters, who switched from demands of signing the EU deal to calls for the toppling of the government.

3) Over the course of several weeks, which followed the face of Maidan started to change – peaceful protesters were more and more giving way to masked and armed rioters, often from far-right groups. A collective of radicals called the Right Sector were among the most prominent. Peaceful protests evolved into a continuous stand-off between the rallying people and riot police.

4) The deadliest day of the Maidan protests came on February 20 when over a hundred people were killed in the center of Kiev, most of them by sniper fire. The ongoing official investigation blamed a group of elite soldiers from the Berkut riot police for the killings. But there is a lingering suspicion that the massacre was committed by somebody among the anti-government forces.

More secrets, just what the situation needed.

• Dutch Government Refuses To Reveal ‘Secret Deal’ Into MH17 Crash Probe (RT)

The Dutch government has refused to reveal details of a secret pact between members of the Joint Investigation Team examining the downed Flight MH17. If the participants, including Ukraine, don’t want information to be released, it will be kept secret. The respected Dutch publication Elsevier made a request to the Dutch Ministry of Security and Justice under the Freedom of Information Act to disclose the Joint Investigation Team (JIT) agreement, along with 16 other documents. The JIT consists of four countries – the Netherlands, Belgium, Australia and Ukraine – who are carrying out an investigation into the MH17 disaster, but not Malaysia. Malaysian Airlines, who operated the flight, has been criticized for flying through a war zone.

Part of the agreement between the four countries and the Dutch Public Prosecution Service, ensures that all these parties have the right to secrecy. This means that if any of the countries involved believe that some of the evidence may be damaging to them, they have the right to keep this secret. “Of course [it is] an incredible situation: how can Ukraine, one of the two suspected parties, ever be offered such an agreement?” Dutch citizen Jan Fluitketel wrote in the newspaper Malaysia Today. Despite the air crash taking place on July 17 in Eastern Ukraine, very little information has been released about any potential causes. However, rather than give the public a little insight into the investigation, the Dutch Ministry of Security and Justice is more worried about saving face among the members of the investigation.

“I believe that this interest [international relations] is of greater importance than making the information public, as it is a unique investigation into an extremely serious event,” the Ministry added, according to Elsevier. Other reasons given for the request being denied included protecting investigation techniques and tactics as well as naming the names of officials who are taking part in the investigation. The Ministry said it would be a breach of privacy if they were revealed. “If the information was to be released then sensitive information would be passed between states and organizations, which would perhaps mean they would be less likely to share such information in the future,” said the Ministry of Security and Justice. Dutch MP Pieter Omtzigt, who is a member of the Christian Democratic Party, has made several requests for the information to be released to the public. “We just do not know if the Netherlands has compromised justice,” he said in reaction to the ministry’s decision. The MP was surprised that this agreement was even signed, never mind kept secret.

Shiller is a blind man: “If we are to encourage dynamism, we need Keynesian stimulus and other policies that encourage creativity”.

• Creativity, Companies, And The Wisdom Of Crowds (Robert Shiller)

Economic growth, as we learned long ago from the works of economists like MIT’s Robert M. Solow, is largely driven by learning and innovation, not just saving and the accumulation of capital. Ultimately, economic progress depends on creativity. That is why fear of “secular stagnation” in today’s advanced economies has many wondering how creativity can be spurred. One prominent argument lately has been that what is needed most is Keynesian economic stimulus – for example, deficit spending. After all, people are most creative when they are active, not when they are unemployed. Others see no connection between stimulus and renewed economic dynamism. As German Chancellor Angela Merkel recently put it, Europe needs “political courage and creativity rather than billions of euros.” In fact, we need both. If we are to encourage dynamism, we need Keynesian stimulus and other policies that encourage creativity – particularly policies that promote solid financial institutions and social innovation.

In his 2013 book Mass Flourishing, Edmund Phelps argues that we need to promote “a culture protecting and inspiring individuality, imagination, understanding, and self-expression that drives a nation’s indigenous innovation.” He believes that creativity has been stifled by a public philosophy described as corporatism, and that only through thorough reform of our private institutions, financial and others, can individuality and dynamism be restored. Phelps stresses that corporatist thinking has had a long and enduring history, going back to Saint Paul, the author of as many as 14 books of the New Testament. Paul used the human body (corpus in Latin) as a metaphor for society, suggesting that in a healthy society, as in a healthy body, every organ must be preserved and none permitted to die. As a public-policy credo, corporatism has come to mean that the government must support all members of society, whether individuals or organizations, giving support to failing businesses and protecting existing jobs alike.

Throw a big number out there and see if it sticks.

• China Starts $2 Trillion Leap Forward to Slash Pollution (Bloomberg)

China, which does nothing in small doses, is planning an environmental makeover in keeping with the political, cultural and market revolutions it has pursued over the past six decades. In his agreement last week with President Barack Obama, Chinese President Xi Jinping committed to cap carbon emissions by 2030 and turn to renewable sources for 20% of the country’s energy. His pledge would require China to produce either 67 times more nuclear energy than the country is forecast to have at the end of 2014, 30 times more solar or nine times more wind power – – more non-fossil fuel energy than almost the entire U.S. generating capacity. That means building roughly 1,000 nuclear reactors, 500,000 wind turbines or 50,000 solar farms. The cost will run to almost $2 trillion, holding out the potential of vast riches for nuclear, solar and wind companies that get in on the action.

“China is in the midst of a period of transition, and that calls for a revolution in energy production and consumption, which will to a large extent depend on new energy,” Liang Zhipeng, deputy director of the new energy and renewable energy department under the National Energy Administration, said at a conference in Wuxi outside of Shanghai this month. “Our environment is facing pressure and we must develop clean energy.” By last year, China had already become the world’s largest producer of wind and solar power. Now, with an emerging middle class increasingly outspoken about living in sooty cities reminiscent of Europe’s industrial revolution, China is looking at radical changes in how its economy operates. “China knows that their model, which has done very well up until recent times, has run its course and needs to shift, and they have been talking about this at the highest levels,” said Paul Joffe, senior foreign policy counsel at the World Resources Institute.

Interesting concept: to meet official goals, ‘We’ll have to suck the carbon out of the air’. We won’t.

• The Magical Thought That’s Assumed in Climate Studies (Bloomberg)

Here’s one way to phrase the basic climate change conundrum: There’s a huge gap between the volume of pollution emitted every year and how much scientists say we can safely send aloft. This has a weird implication for potential fixes governments may need in the future. Emission levels in 2020 could end up about 23% higher than what scientists suggest is safe, according to an annual study of the so-called “emissions gap” put out by the UN Environment Program. The carbon overshoot could grow by 2030 to 40%. “Safe” means what the UN-led climate negotiators have defined it to mean: warming of less than two degrees Celsius above global average temperatures from the beginning of the record, or around 1880. But two degrees doesn’t say much to normal people when you’re talking about the temperature of a planet. That’s why scientists have been beating their heads against walls the last several years to translate “two degrees Celsius” into something incrementally more intelligible – more intelligible even than 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit.

They’ve come up with the idea of a carbon budget, or the volume of pollution we can put into the atmosphere and still have a halfway decent chance of containing the problem. At the rate we’re going, the budget may burn up by the 2040s. Now, in finance, the notion of a budget deficit make sense. When someone overspends, he pays the money back at a later date. Ecological deficits make less sense. How do you pay the ground back in carbon minerals once they’ve been vaporized and are hanging in the atmosphere? Here’s what’s weird, what the Emissions Gap report calls out. It has to do with these “carbon deficits” that result. We’re burning through so much of the budget today that in “safe” projections of the 2070s and 2080s, greenhouse gas emissions must go negative for the climate to stay safe. Smokestacks will have to start inhaling rather than exhaling. We’ll have to suck the carbon out of the air, through reforestation or some as-yet unproven airborne-carbon removal technology.

This is who we are. This is mankind.

• Rhino Poaching Death Toll Reaches Record in South Africa (Bloomberg)

A record 1,020 rhinos have been killed by poachers for their horns in South Africa this year, more than all of 2013 and triple the number four years ago. Kruger National Park, a reserve the size of Israel, has seen 672 rhinos killed since Jan. 1. A total of 1,004 were slaughtered throughout the country in 2013, the Department of Environmental Affairs said today in a statement. The horns are more valuable than gold by weight. Prices for a kilogram of rhino horn range from $65,000 to as much as $95,000 in Asia. “The South African government recognizes that the ongoing killing of the rhino for its horns is part of a multi-billion dollar worldwide illicit wildlife trade and that addressing the scourge is not simple,” the department said. Demand for rhino horns has climbed in Asian nations including China and Vietnam because of a belief that they can cure diseases such as cancer.

South Africa has taken measures including setting up an protection zone within Kruger Park, using new technology, intelligence, and moving rhinos to safe areas within South Africa and other countries where they live. Poachers killed 333 rhinos in 2010 and 668 in 2012, Albi Modise, spokesman for the Department of Environmental Affairs, said today in a mobile-phone text message. “Government will continue to strengthen holistic and integrated interventions and explore new innovative options to ensure the long-term survival of the species,” the department said. Authorities have made a record number of arrests for poaching and related activities, according to the department. A total of 344 alleged rhino poachers, couriers and poaching syndicate members have been apprehended this year, compared with 343 in all of last year, Modise said. Most rhinos in South Africa are white rhinos, the bigger of the two types of the animal found in Africa. They can weigh more than 2 metric tons. The horns are largely made up of keratin, a substance similar to human hair.

The world’s best economic analysts are two Australian comedians. Fitting.

• Growth First. Then These Other Things Can Be Dealt With (Clarke&Dawe)

Japan Is Dying And We Still Don’t Get It?!

Nov 182014

November 18, 2014 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 8:30 am Finance Tagged with: Abe, Banks, deflation, Draghi, GDP, Japan, QE, spending, stimulus 6 Responses »

Dorothea Lange Miserable poverty, Hooverville, Elm Grove, Oklahoma County, OK Aug 1936

What is it with us? Don’t we WANT to understand? Japan announced on Monday that its economy is in hopeless trouble and back in recession (as if it was ever out). And what do we see? ‘Experts’ and reporters clamoring for more stimulus. But if Japan has shown us anything over the past years, and you’re free to pick any number between 2 and 20 years, it’s that the QE-based kind of stimulus doesn’t work. Not for the real economy, that is.

The land of the setting sun has during that time thrown so much stimulus into its financial system that Krugman-esque calls for even more of the same look even more ludicrous today than they did all along. Abenomics is a depressing failure, just as we knew it would be since it started almost two years ago. It’s not complicated, and it never was.

Japan’s stimulus has achieved the following: banks get to pretend they’re healthy and stocks rise to heights that are fundamentally disconnected from underlying real values. On the flipside of that, citizens are being increasingly squeezed and ‘decide’ not to spend (not much of a decision if you have nothing to spend). Since Japan’s ‘consumer’ spending makes up about 60% of GDP, things can only possibly get worse as time passes. If ‘consumers’ don’t spend, deflation is the inevitable result – and that has nothing to do with the much discussed sales tax, it’s been going on for decades -.

Therefore, the sole thing QE stimulus has achieved is a wealth transfer from poorer to rich. And that’s not only the case in Japan. Mario Draghi yesterday hinted – again – at all the stuff he could start buying next year, including sovereign bonds, even though that would violate EU law. And whether or not Germany will let him in the end, the fact that he keeps the option alive even if only in theory, tells us plenty about the mindset at the ECB.

That is, it’s the same as in Japan. And doing the same can only lead to the same results. A poorer population, a richer toplayer and an economy that continues to shrink, which will and must lead to the same deflationary trend. The idea that an economy can be rescued by pushing public funds into its finance system and stock markets has been forever thrown out by Japan’s experiences.

Draghi said yesterday that ‘monetary policy has done a lot’, and while that may be correct, it says nothing about WHAT it has done. From where I’m sitting, Germany’s recent drift into negative territory and the ongoing record unemployment rates around the Mediterranean certainly tell us a lot about what it has NOT done. QE, no matter how big and how crazy, doesn’t heal real economies, it makes them sicker.

If consumer spending makes up 60% of GDP, as in Japan, or even 70%, as in the US, then you need to boost that spending. And you don’t do that by handing over what financial wiggle room you have left, to banks so they can pile it on to the reserves they hold at central banks.

It is accepted as gospel that it’s a good thing to give banks free money, but it would be the devil’s work to give it to consumers. Instead, the latter must be squeezed from all sides, through austerity, the loss of services, benefits, wages and jobs, in order to prop up the financial system. How and where is it not clear what that will result in? There’s only one possible outcome.

The reason why all governments and central banks keep following the failed QE stimulus path regardless lies in the relative political powers that different parts of a society have. In today’s world, saving the banks, which equals saving the rich, is not only the priority, it’s the only deliberation.

And if you might be under the impression that what is true in Japan and Europe does not hold in the US, why not start with this graph from Doug Short, and take it from there.

If and when an economy is as deep in the doldrums as all major economies today are, you can’t rescue it by taking from the poor to save the rich. It’s fundamentally impossible. You need the bottom 90%’s spending in order to generate enough GDP to stay out of deflation. Money must move through an economy for it to stay sufficiently ‘lubricated’. And the only people who can keep that money moving are the bottom 90%. It’s Catch-22.

Any stimulus must be directed at the bottom, or it must of necessity fail. Nothing commie or socialist about it, but simply the way economies work. And it’s not just some difference of ideal or insight or something, it’s very simply that an economy cannot function without its poorer 90% of citizens spending.

Anything else is simply Grand Theft Auto. Both Japan and Europe are preparing for more of it.

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