Dec 162016
 
 December 16, 2016  Posted by at 9:46 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , ,  2 Responses »


John Vachon Big Four Cafe, Cairo, Illinois 1940

Obama’s Blunder; Trump’s Gambit (Rickards)
Trump Rally May Not Last Long – Marc Faber (CNBC)
This Stock Rally Is More Hope Than Substance (WSJ)
China, Others are Dumping US Treasurys as Never Before (WS)
The Longer China’s Record M&A Spree Lasts, The Stranger The Deals Get (BBG)
ECB Bond Buying Props Up Oil, Cars, Guns, Drones, Gambling, Handbags (DQ)
EU Agrees Dutch Demands On Ukraine Deal To Avoid ‘Present For Russia’ (R.)
Justin Trudeau: ‘Globalisation Isn’t Working For Ordinary People’ (G.)
Crackdown On Cash Is An Attack On The Poor And A Reward For Banks (Soos)
Why Are the Media Taking the CIA’s Hacking Claims at Face Value? (Nation)
Turkey Has Back-Up Plans If EU Fails To Keep Visa-Free Travel Promises (AFP)
“Without Antibiotics, Essentially You Do Not Have Modern Medicine” (R.)
The Shattering Effect Of Roads On Nature (G.)

 

 

We need more refreshing views like this. Actual thinking people.

Obama’s Blunder; Trump’s Gambit (Rickards)

[..] Russia is a more natural ally of the U.S. than China. Russia is a parliamentary system, albeit with autocratic overtones; China is a Communist dictatorship. Russia has empowered the Orthodox Church in recent decades, while China is officially atheistic. Russia is encouraging population growth while China’s one child policy and sex-selective abortions resulted in the deaths of over twenty million girls. These cultural aspects – elections, Christianity, and family formation – provide Russia with a natural affinity to western nations. Russia is also superior to China militarily despite recent Chinese advances. That makes Russia the more desirable ally in any two-against-one scenario.

The most powerful argument for embracing Russia to checkmate China is energy. The U.S. and Russia are the two largest energy producers in the world. U.S. energy production is set to expand with the support of the Trump administration. Russian production will expand also based in part on initiatives led by Rex Tillerson of Exxon, soon to be Secretary of State. China has few oil and natural gas reserves and relies heavily on dirty forms of coal and some hydropower. The remainder of China’s energy needs is met through imports. An energy alliance between the U.S. and Russia, supported by Saudi Arabia, could leave the Chinese economy and, by extension, the standing of the Communist Party of China, in jeopardy. That threat is enough to insure Chinese compliance with U.S. aims.

An emerging U.S.-Russian entente could also lead to the alleviation of western economic sanctions on Russia. This would open the door to an alliance between Germany and Russia. Those two economies have near perfect complementarity since Germany is technology rich and natural resource poor, while Russia is the opposite. Isolation of Russia is a fool’s errand. Russia is the twelfth largest economy in the world, has the largest landmass of any country in the world, is a nuclear power, has abundant natural resources, and is a fertile destination for direct foreign investment. The Russian culture is highly resistant to outside pressure, but open to outside cooperation. Just as fifty years of U.S. sanctions failed to change Cuban behavior, U.S. sanctions will not change Russian behavior except for the worse.

Engagement, not confrontation is the better course. The new Trump administration gets this. [..] Fortunately it’s not too late to reestablish a balance of power that favors the United States. China is a rising regional hegemon that should be constrained. Russia is a natural ally that should be empowered. The U.S. has blundered in its foreign policy for the past eight years. A new Trump administration has an opportunity to reverse those blunders by building bridges to Russia, and it seems to be moving in that direction.

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“..Ronald Reagan and Herbert Hoover also began their tenures with huge rallies, followed by crashes…”

Trump Rally May Not Last Long – Marc Faber (CNBC)

If President-elect Donald Trump’s rhetoric ends up fueling a trade war with China, it’s the U.S. that will take it on the chin, Marc Faber, the publisher of the Gloom, Boom & Doom report, told CNBC on Friday. “Mr. Trump is not particularly keen on China,” Faber told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” on Friday. “There may be some trade war escalation or trade restrictions with China, which in my view would rather be negative for the U.S. than for China.” Trump has certainly set his sights on China. On the campaign trail, Trump repeatedly accused China of manipulating its currency in order to give its exports an advantage over U.S.-made goods, and he threatened to slap a tariff of up to 45% on Chinese imports.

While China’s yuan has fallen against the U.S. dollar in recent months, policymakers on the mainland have been intervening to support the currency, not weaken it. But Faber, who is also known as Dr. Doom for his usually pessimistic predictions, noted that China wouldn’t be easily cowed. “China does not depend on the U.S. The U.S. is still its largest export destination as a country, but taken together, all the emerging markets are for China much more important,” Faber noted. China exported about $482 billion in goods to the U.S. last year, more than any other country exported to the United States, according to the Office of the United States Trade Representative. The U.S. exported about $116 billion in goods to China in 2015, putting its goods trade deficit $366 billion.

[..] “We have a credit bubble in China, like, by the way, everywhere else in the world. It’s just bigger in China and that, in my view, will have to be deflated,” he said. Dr. Doom also wasn’t trusting Wall Street’s rally since Trump’s election, nothing that Presidents Ronald Reagan and Herbert Hoover also began their tenures with huge rallies, followed by crashes. On Thursday, the Dow Jones rose 59.71 points, or 0.3%, to close at 19,858.24, after climbing at one point to a mere 50 points away from hitting the 20,000 mark. Faber said that the U.S. market was getting toppish. “If you want to be in equities, the U.S. market is now at the most expensive level compared to Europe, Japan and emerging economies it’s ever been,” he said.

Despite Thursday’s gains, “there were more new 12-month lows than new highs.” He wasn’t optimistic on how much further the market can run. “In March 2017, the U.S. bull market will be eight years old. By any standard, this is a very aging bull market. By June 2017, the economic recovery will be eight years old. By any standard, a recovery that is very mature,” he noted. Faber was also pessimistic about the market’s prospects under the Trump administration. “We have to be very careful when we talk about investments. We have a lot of volatility coming toward us. I think that in general people are far too optimistic about the U.S. becoming again a great country,” he said. “I doubt that one man alone can do it.”

Read more …

“When you have an adrenaline rush you don’t feel pain. It’s when the adrenaline wears off that you feel it.”

This Stock Rally Is More Hope Than Substance (WSJ)

Janet Yellen may not have an armored horse, but her effect on the bull market looks very like the ineffective stab of a picador. The stock market bull seemed to be badly hurt after the U.S. Federal Reserve chairwoman’s words on Wednesday. The Fed raised interest rates and said policy makers expected three rate increases next year, while Ms. Yellen said the economy is near full capacity and doesn’t need fiscal stimulus—suggesting rates will rise even faster if president-elect Donald Trump goes ahead with promised tax cuts. But after their stumble, stocks regained their feet on Thursday, with the S&P 500 recovering to where it was before Fed Day. A mere picador is never enough to take down a bull.

The true danger to this latest bull run—the Trump rally—comes from itself. The genius of a matador is to wear out the bull by persuading it to keep charging, entrancing the audience in the process. The stock market has been attracted by the flourishes of Mr. Trump, the appealing prospect of tax cuts and infrastructure spending. The question for the next month is whether the bull will be worn out before Mr. Trump even takes office. When markets move a long way very fast, they become vulnerable. Late investors who pile on to little more than momentum have less confidence in their positions. The more momentum builds, the more it hurts if the bull trips and those momentum investors jump off. This market has moved very fast indeed.

The post-election rotation from defensive stocks to economically sensitive cyclical shares has been the biggest of any similar period since the bounce back after the Lehman crash. The 10-year bond’s losses have almost matched the selloff of the 2013 taper tantrum. And the dollar has surged 9% against the yen, taking it to its strongest since 2002 against a basket of currencies. There are plenty of reasons to worry about whether Mr. Trump’s policies will be implemented quickly, or will be as big-league as he has said. So long as those remain worries for another day, the market can keep rising. David Bloom, head of foreign-exchange strategy at HSBC, says investors who missed out on the fast moves in stocks, bonds and the dollar after the election are now being sucked into the trade to avoid missing out. “We’re in a euphoric time,” he said. “When you have an adrenaline rush you don’t feel pain. It’s when the adrenaline wears off that you feel it.”

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We can only imagine where the dollar would be without this mass sell-off.

China, Others are Dumping US Treasurys as Never Before (WS)

All kinds of things are now happening in the world of bonds that haven’t happened before. For example, authorities in China today halted trading for the first time ever in futures contracts of government bonds, after prices had swooned, with the 10-year yield hitting 3.4%. Trading didn’t resume until after the People’s Bank of China injected $22 billion into the short-term money market. What does this turmoil have to do with US Treasurys? China has been dumping them to stave off problems in its own house…. The US Treasury Department released its Treasury International Capital data for October, and what it said about the dynamics of Treasury securities is a doozie of historic proportions. Net “acquisitions” of Treasury bonds & notes by “private” investors amounted to a negative $18.3 billion in October, according to the TIC data.

In other words, “private” foreign investors sold $18.3 billion more than they bought. And “official” foreign investors, which include central banks, dumped a net $45.3 billion in Treasury bonds and notes. Combined, they unloaded $63.5 billion in October. In September, these foreign entities had already dumped a record $76.6 billion. They have now dumped Treasury paper for seven months in a row. Over the past 12 months through October, they unloaded $318.2 billion. A 12-month selling spree in this magnitude has never occurred before. There have been a few months of timid net selling in 2012, and some in 2013, and a few in 2014, but no big deal because the Fed was buying under its QE programs. But then, with QE tapered out of the way, the selling picked up in 2015, and has sharply accelerated in 2016.

This chart (via Trading Economics), going back to the early 1980s, shows just how historic this wholesale dumping (circled in red) of US Treasury bonds and notes by foreign entities has been: The chart is particularly telling: It shows in brutal clarity that foreign buyers funded the $1 trillion-and-over annual deficits during and after the Financial Crisis, with net purchases in several months exceeding $100 billion. The other big buyer was the Fed. But since last year, the world has changed. China, once the largest holder of US Treasurys, has been busy trying to keep a lid on its own financial problems that are threatening to boil over. It’s trying to prop up the yuan. It’s trying furiously to stem rampant capital flight. It’s trying to keep its asset bubbles, particularly in the property sector, from getting bigger and from imploding – all at the same time. And in doing so, it has been selling foreign exchange reserves hand over fist.

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Beijing’s own policies come back to bite it hard. Fully predictable too.

The Longer China’s Record M&A Spree Lasts, The Stranger The Deals Get (BBG)

It’s no wonder the country’s regulators are getting concerned. This month, Chinese agencies including the National Development and Reform Commission said they’re closely watching “irrational” outbound purchases in sectors including entertainment and real estate, without naming specific deals. The heightened scrutiny coincides with a broader government effort to limit capital outflows, posing a risk to global takeover volumes after Chinese firms began rivaling their U.S. counterparts as the biggest buyers of overseas assets this year. For the Wall Street bankers helping to sell Western companies, the changing regulatory environment could make a delicate balance even trickier. Advisers need to court a widening pool of Chinese acquirers while at the same time making sure the companies are savvy enough to complete their deals.

“The M&A landscape has shifted focus to Chinese buyers,” said Brian Gu at JPMorgan Chase, the top-ranked adviser on Chinese outbound acquisitions tracked by Bloomberg this year. “How to solicit credible potential Chinese buyers now becomes an essential part of a pitch for any global sell-side mandates.” More than 360 Chinese companies announced their first cross-border acquisitions in the initial 11 months of this year, with the combined size of the transactions more than doubling from the full year 2015, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Sifting through those new ranks of Chinese acquirers takes some work. When EQT Partners decided to sell Germany’s EEW Energy from Waste, its bankers at Morgan Stanley arranged for executives to meet potential buyers in Shanghai, Beijing and Hong Kong weeks before it began soliciting bids.

[..] While Chinese policy makers have been supportive of outbound acquisitions that help domestic companies gain foreign technology and strengthen industries seen as important drivers of economic growth, the worry is that some deals are being used as a way to move money offshore or make quick profits by re-listing acquired businesses at higher valuations in China. “Some of these companies invest outside of their core competency because they want to get money out of China, as they see the Chinese yuan will continue to depreciate,” said Christopher Balding, a professor at Peking University’s HSBC Business School in Shenzhen, without naming any specific deals.

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Nice piece of research from Don Quijones. Title is mine, couldn’t help myself.

ECB Bond Buying Props Up Oil, Cars, Guns, Drones, Gambling, Handbags (DQ)

In June 2016, the ECB activated its corporate bond buying program, ostensibly to revive the Eurozone’s stalled economy. The program has been shrouded in secrecy, as the ECB has refused to reveal the identity of most of the companies, divulging only the International Securities Identification Number (ISIN) of the bonds, but not the amounts. The ECB coordinates the overall effort, but the actual buying is done by the national central banks. Now the non-profit Corporate Europe Observatory (CEO) has cracked the code, so to speak: Finding the names via the ISIN code is a simple job. CEO has looked them all up to see what investments the ECB has found worthy of public money. Unfortunately, a lack of transparency at the ECB means the amounts held in bonds of individual corporations are not revealed.

While many pension funds do release this information, it seems that the common national bank for hundreds of millions of European citizens is unable to! Nevertheless, a lot can be learned from the lists… For instance, the fact that Europe’s oil majors have been particularly spoiled, with the ECB splurging on bonds issued by Shell no less than 11 times. The central bank bought bonds from Italian oil company Eni 16 times, Spain’s Repsol six times, Austrian OMV six times, and Total 7 times. Gas companies have also fared remarkably well. When counting the purchase of bonds in Spain, for example, 53% are from companies involved in the natural gas sector. The corresponding number in Italy is an astounding 68%. Also well favored are Europe’s biggest car companies, in particular those from Germany, with Daimler and BMW tied in top spot with 15 purchases apiece. The ECB also bought seven times bonds issued by Volkswagen, despite the reputational and financial fallout from its emissions scandal.

And it bought Renault bonds three times. Other companies on CEO’s list of coddled giants include Thales, a French producer of missiles, rifles, armored vehicles, and military drones, which has been engulfed in a spate of corruption scandals in recent years; France’s three major water corporations, Suèz, Vivendi, and Veolia; Novomatic, an Austrian-based gambling company owned by billionaire Johan Graf; and luxury goods companies like LVMH, producer of Moët & Chandon champagne, Hennessy cognac, and Louis Vuitton women’s handbags. These are just some of the corporations benefiting handsomely from a bond-buying binge that has already reached some €46 billion (as of Nov. 25, 2016). When the ECB buys these bonds, it inflates the bond prices and pushes their yields down, which is the purpose, and it thus lowers the cost of capital for this companies even further. By the end of the program, which is “scheduled” to finish in September, 2017, the ECB is expected to have lavished around €125 billion on them.

But that’s not the worst of it. As we reported in August, the ECB has admitted that it is not only buying already-issued bonds trading in secondary markets, as the public was initially led to believe; it is also buying bonds from companies via so-called “private placements.” These debt sales are not open to the broader market, so there’s no need for a prospectus. Only a small number of institutional investors participate. Private placements are not unusual. What’s new is that the ECB is using them to buy bonds. This was done discreetly, but it was leaked – and the ECB had some explaining to do. The central bank’s new role as “debt-buyer of first resort” raises a whole litany of concerns. It grants the ECB an almost god-like grip over Europe’s financial markets. And according to The Wall Street Journal, Citigroup figured “that bonds eligible for ECB purchases have already outperformed ineligible bonds by roughly 30% since the bond-buying program was announced in March.”

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A Dutch referendum in April voted down the EU association deal with Ukraine. PM Rutte now pretends that with a few minor tweaks it’s acceptable regardless. Rutte will now take it to his parliament for approval, which would overwrite the referendum result. Democracy. They’re handing the entire continent to Wilders and Le Pen on a platter. Oh, and who does Rutte blame for his behavior? You got it, Russia.

EU Agrees Dutch Demands On Ukraine Deal To Avoid ‘Present For Russia’ (R.)

EU leaders agreed on Thursday to additional Dutch demands over a landmark deal establishing closer ties with Ukraine, Maltese Prime Minister Joseph Muscat said. The EU’s so-called association agreement with Ukraine is central to the former Soviet republic’s efforts to move closer to the West. Mass street protests toppled a pro-Russian Ukrainian president in 2014 after he tried to ditch it. The Netherlands is the only EU country that has not ratified the deal, which fosters closer political ties and aims to free up trade between Ukraine and the bloc, after Dutch voters rejected it in a referendum last April. The Hague has asked the EU for additional guarantees to ensure the deal does not lead to EU membership for Ukraine.

Asked if all 28 EU leaders have arrived to a common position on the Dutch demand, Muscat said: “Yes, there is agreement.” Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte will now take it to his parliament for approval, which would overwrite the referendum result. Rutte told reporters before the talks that it was crucial to get a united European stance in the face of an emboldened Russia. “Russia is an increasing risk, look what happened in Crimea and eastern Ukraine and rockets being placed between Poland and Lithuania. You cannot, as the Netherlands … break this unity, that is why I’m so motivated to get this done,” he said.

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Justin is trying to make me believe that building pipelines is the way to go towards a “carbon-free economy”. Sure. He’s turning into soundbite man.

Justin Trudeau: ‘Globalisation Isn’t Working For Ordinary People’ (G.)

[..] A silver lining for Trudeau may lie in Trump’s pledge to resurrect plans for TransCanada’s Keystone XL pipeline. When the Obama administration rejected the plan last year, Trudeau said in a statement he was “disappointed” in the decision. When Trudeau called Trump to congratulate him after the election, the two briefly spoke about Keystone, said Trudeau, adding that it remains to be see how the US will move forward with plans for the pipeline. Any reluctance to move forward on climate change south of the border could be a boon for Canadian companies across various sectors, said Trudeau. “I know Canada is well positioned to pick up some of the slack and when people finally realise that it’s a tremendous business opportunity to lead on climate change, Canada will already have a head start.”

[..] Last week’s announcement of a national carbon price is a key part of Trudeau’s environmental policy – one that has been derided by environmentalists for enabling the expansion of fossil fuels, compensated by initiatives that include investments in clean tech and promises to phase out federal subsidies for oil and gas companies. The policy saw Trudeau recently approve a liquefied natural gas project in British Columbia as well as two pipelines that will offer Alberta’s oil sands nearly a million barrels a day in increased capacity. The approvals have sparked broad opposition among environmentalists, some First Nations and several of the communities affected by the planned infrastructure projects. “There is a number of people out there who’ve always [believed] if you stop pipeline, you stop the oil sands,” said Trudeau. “Well, actually as we’ve seen, it doesn’t work that way and what we end up with is much more oil by rail.”[..]

The government’s environmental policy takes a long view on the transition to a carbon-free economy, said Trudeau. “It’s not going to happen in a day, or in a week, but it will happen over years and perhaps a decade or two,” he said. “I know there are people out there extremely passionate about the environment, who don’t think I made the right decision on approving a couple of pipelines. But I think that everyone can see at least what it is we’re trying to do and that we’re consistent with what I’ve always said which is, you protect the environment and you build a strong economy at the same time.” The double-barrelled approach, said Trudeau, echoes his government’s broader effort to address the tensions currently wreaking havoc on the political status quo around the world. “People get that we need jobs, we need a protected environment,” he said. “On the other hand, if people have no jobs, if they have no opportunity, they’re not going to worry about protection of the air and water if they can’t feed their kids.”

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I don’t know that throwing in the drug legalization topic is very relevant. Just ‘hands off!’ should do it.

Crackdown On Cash Is An Attack On The Poor And A Reward For Banks (Soos)

The Coalition government recently announced a taskforce to investigate and recommend ways to deal with the so-called black economy. This primary revolves around business transactions conducted in cash to evade taxes. Other justifications concern the illicit drug trade and welfare fraud. The plan is to clamp down on this aspect of the black economy to make it more difficult for workers, businesses and households to evade tax, boosting taxation revenue. It is estimated the black economy accounts for about 1.5% of GDP or $21bn. There is also speculation that the $100-dollar bill may be removed from circulation. The Coalition government’s explanations seem sensible, with the mass media generally supportive. Yet, there are robust arguments why the Australian public should oppose this move – mostly because the government is trying to deal with problems it created itself.

The drug trade in Australia is thriving and constitutes a considerable portion of the black economy. This illegal trade, however, only exists because the government criminalises it. The primary reason offered is that it prevents the production and consumption of dangerous substances for recreational purposes. It clearly does nothing of the sort. By criminalising drugs, product is manufactured in unregulated and uncertain conditions, leading to vastly inferior quality relative to that in the legal and regulated pharmaceutical industry. Huge monopolistic profits are reaped by drug cartels and those in the supply chain, leading to a significant loss of taxable income. None of this would happen if the drug trade was legalised – and there is growing acceptance that it should be.

In short, the government cannot use the pretext of clamping down on an industry which is presently illegal by claiming the cash transactions facilitates the existence and growth of it when it is the government’s own criminalisation policy which brought it into existence. By legalising, billions of dollars of taxes could be raised through the GST, income tax and externality/sin taxes. Another area of alleged concern is welfare fraud. Recipients of welfare payments can work in the black economy, making a modest income without reporting it. If this were properly reported, welfare payments would be reduced. Again, this is a problem government has itself created. While the government and certain sections of the mass media pretend Australia has an out-of-control welfare system, the facts demonstrate Australia has some of the smallest welfare expenditures relative to GDP, easily the most well-targeted and has the highest “target-efficiency” (each dollar in spending reduces income inequality the most) in the OECD.

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I’d like to ignore this tale (who reads the WaPo anymore), but the Nation has a passable one: “..the CIA has “(1) attempted to overthrow more than 50 governments, most of which were democratically-elected, (2) attempted to suppress a populist or nationalist movement in 20 countries, (3) grossly interfered in democratic elections in at least 30 countries, (4) dropped bombs on the people of more than 30 countries, (5) attempted to assassinate more than 50 foreign leaders.”

Why Are the Media Taking the CIA’s Hacking Claims at Face Value? (Nation)

In 1977, Carl Bernstein published an exposé of a CIA program known as Operation Mockingbird, a covert program involving, according to Bernstein, “more than 400 American journalists who in the past 25 years have secretly carried out assignments for the Central Intelligence Agency.” Bernstein found that in “many instances” CIA documents revealed that “journalists were engaged to perform tasks for the CIA with the consent of the managements of America’s leading news organizations.” Fast-forward to December 2016, and one can see that there isn’t much need for a covert government program these days.

[..] The high-profile anchors and analysts on CNN, CBS, ABC, and NBC who have cited the work of The Washington Post and The New York Times seem to have come down with a bad case of historical amnesia. The CIA, in their telling, is a bulwark of American democracy, not a largely unaccountable, out-of-control behemoth that has often sought to subvert press freedom at home and undermine democratic norms abroad. The columnists, anchors, and commentators who rushed to condemn Trump for not showing due deference to the CIA seem to be unaware that, throughout its history, the agency has been the target of far more astute and credible critics than the president-elect.

In his memoir Present at the Creation, Truman’s Secretary of State Dean Acheson wrote that about the CIA, “I had the gravest forebodings.” Acheson wrote that he had “warned the President that as set up neither he, the National Security Council, nor anyone else would be in a position to know what it was doing or to control it.” Following the Bay of Pigs fiasco, President John F. Kennedy expressed his desire to “to splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds.” The late New York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan twice introduced bills, in 1991 and 1995, to abolish the agency and move its functions to the State Department which, as the journalist John Judis has observed, “is what Acheson and his predecessor, George Marshall, had advocated.”

[..] To see what a corrosive effect outside powers can have on democratic processes, one need look no further than the 1996 Russian presidential election, in which Americans like the regime-change theorist Michael McFaul (later US Ambassador to Russia from 2012–14) interfered in order to keep the widely unpopular Boris Yeltsin in power against the wishes of the Russian people. For its part, the CIA has a long history of overthrowing sovereign governments the world over. According to historian William Blum, the CIA has “(1) attempted to overthrow more than 50 governments, most of which were democratically-elected, (2) attempted to suppress a populist or nationalist movement in 20 countries, (3) grossly interfered in democratic elections in at least 30 countries, (4) dropped bombs on the people of more than 30 countries, (5) attempted to assassinate more than 50 foreign leaders.”

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Yada yada

Turkey Has Back-Up Plans If EU Fails To Keep Visa-Free Travel Promises (AFP)

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Thursday Turkey had back-up plans if the EU failed to keep its promise over visa-free travel for Turks to the passport-free Schengen zone. Turkey and the EU signed a controversial deal in March, in which Ankara agreed to take back Syrian migrants landing on Greek islands in return for incentives including €3 billion in funds and visa-free travel. “If we do not get the expected outcome regarding the visa issue… if promises are not fulfilled, Turkey will no doubt have a plan B and it will have a plan C,” Erdogan warned during a news conference with his Slovenian counterpart in Ankara.

“We do not have to say ‘yes’ to every decision made about us. The EU has given us nothing so far,” he added, without elaborating. Ties between Brussels and Ankara have been strained since a failed July 15 coup in Turkey. The rocky relationship worsened after the European Parliament voted last month in favour of halting long-stalled membership talks with Turkey over its post-coup crackdown, a non-binding vote which Erdogan branded worthless. Turkey accuses the EU of failing to show enough solidarity after the failed putsch while Brussels has repeatedly urged Turkey to act within the rule of law as it arrests tens of thousands of people suspected of links to coup plotters.

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Horror story.

“Without Antibiotics, Essentially You Do Not Have Modern Medicine” (R.)

For nearly two years, a killer stalked the patients of Providence Alaska Medical Center. It was a bacteria called Acinetobacter baumannii, a common cause of infections in hospitals. This one was different. After a rash of mild cases in early 2011, doctors began seeing highly drug-resistant infections in patients, said Dr Megan Clancy, an infectious-disease specialist at the Anchorage, Alaska, hospital. And the bacteria was attacking more patients than just the severely ill ones who are the usual victims of drug-resistant “superbugs.” Clancy took emergency measures. Infected patients were isolated. Staff and visitors had to adhere to strict hand-washing and other infection-control protocols. Furniture and equipment were scrubbed to remove a microbe that can stubbornly persist on all sorts of surfaces.

Clancy also contacted outside researchers for help. They found that a strain of the bacteria had acquired a rare combination of traits. Bacteria typically are either highly resistant to drugs or highly virulent. This strain was both. Doctors quickly burned through the antibiotics used as the second and third lines of defense against superbugs. This strain shook them off. “When you start running out of medications, it gets pretty desperate,” Clancy said. Eventually, they turned to colistin. This powerful antibiotic was largely abandoned in the 1960s for its toxic side effects. Out of necessity, it has become in recent years a weapon of last resort against the worsening superbug scourge.

But in some of the Alaska cases, even colistin didn’t work. For public health officials, that’s the nightmare scenario. “It’s the worst of all possible worlds: You have a bacteria that is good at establishing infection, and it can’t be treated with antibiotics,” said Dr Robert Clifford, a microbiologist at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research who studied the outbreak.

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Needs much more attention. This is how we kill the living world.

The Shattering Effect Of Roads On Nature (G.)

Rampant road building has shattered the Earth’s land into 600,000 fragments, most of which are too tiny to support significant wildlife, a new study has revealed. The researchers warn roadless areas are disappearing and that urgent action is needed to protect these last wildernesses, which help provide vital natural services to humanity such as clean water and air. The impact of roads extends far beyond the roads themselves, the scientists said, by enabling forest destruction, pollution, the splintering of animal populations and the introduction of deadly pests. New roads also pave the way to further exploitation by humans, such as poaching or mining, and new infrastructure.

An international team of researchers analysed open-access maps of 36m km of road and found that over half of the 600,000 fragments of land in between roads are very small – less than 1km2. A mere 7% are bigger than 100km2, equivalent to a square area just 10km by 10km. Furthermore, only a third of the roadless areas were truly wild, with the rest affected by farming or people. The last remaining large roadless areas are rainforests in the Amazon and Indonesia and the tundra and forests in the north of Russia and Canada. Virtually all of western Europe, the eastern US and Japan have no areas at all that are unaffected by roads. The scientists considered that land up to a kilometre on each side of a road was affected, which they believe is a conservative estimate.

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Oct 202016
 
 October 20, 2016  Posted by at 9:48 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , ,  2 Responses »


Thomas Eakins Walt Whitman 1891

Fed Risks Repeating Lehman Blunder As US Recession Storm Gathers (AEP)
ECB Urges EU To Curb Virtual Money On Fear Of Losing Control (R.)
Saudi Arabia’s Bond: a Defining Trade for 2016 (WSJ)
How do Clinton and Trump’s Tax Plans Compare? (TF)
Trump is a Pink Elephant (Scott Adams)
California Launches Criminal Probe Into Wells Fargo Account Scandal (R.)
Who’s Powering the War on Cash? (DQ)
The Cult Of The Expert – And How It Collapsed (G.)
Theresa May To Tell EU Leaders ‘There Will Be No Second Referendum'(G.)
Australia Housing Boom Peak Has Passed – Morgan Stanley (BBG)
Did the White House Declare War on Russia? (Stephen F. Cohen)
What Obama’s Record Deportations Look Like (I’Cept)
Use Of Strongest Antibiotics Rises To Record Levels On European Farms (G.)

 

 

“The Bank for International Settlements estimates that 60pc of the world economy is locked into the US currency system, and that debts denominated in dollars outside US jurisdiction have ballooned to $9.8 trillion.”

Fed Risks Repeating Lehman Blunder As US Recession Storm Gathers (AEP)

The risk of a US recession next year is rising fast. The Federal Reserve has no margin for error. Liquidity is suddenly drying up. Early warning indicators from US ‘flow of funds’ data point to an incipent squeeze, the long-feared capitulation after five successive quarters of declining corporate profits. Yet the Fed is methodically draining money through ‘reverse repos’ regardless. It has set the course for a rise in interest rates in December and seems to be on automatic pilot. “We are seeing a serious deterioration on a monthly basis,” said Michael Howell from CrossBorder Capital, specialists in global liquidity. The signals lead the economic cycle by six to nine months. “We think the US is heading for recession by the Spring of 2017. It is absolutely bonkers for the Fed to even think about raising rates right now,” he said.

The growth rate of nominal GDP – a pure measure of the economy – has been in an unbroken fall since the start of the year, falling from 4.2pc to 2.5pc. It is close to stall speed, flirting with levels that have invariably led to recessions in the post-War era. “It is a little scary. When nominal GDP slows like that, you can be sure that financial stress will follow. Monetary policy is too tight and the slightest shock will tip the US into recession,” said Lars Christensen, from Markets and Money Advisory. If allowed to happen, it will be a deeply frightening experience, rocking the global system to its foundations. The Bank for International Settlements estimates that 60pc of the world economy is locked into the US currency system, and that debts denominated in dollars outside US jurisdiction have ballooned to $9.8 trillion.

The world has never before been so leveraged to dollar borrowing costs. BIS data show that debt ratios in both rich countries and emerging markets are roughly 35 percentage points of GDP higher than they were at the onset of the Lehman crisis. This time China cannot come to the rescue. Beijing has already pushed credit beyond safe limits to almost $30 trillion. Fitch Ratings suspects that bad loans in the Chinese banking system are ten times the official claim. The current arguments over Brexit would seem irrelevant in such circumstances, both because the City would be drawn into the flames and because the eurozone would face its own a shattering ordeal. Even a hint of coming trauma would detonate a crisis in Italy.

[..] The velocity of M1 money in the US has continued to slow, hitting a 40-year low of 5.75 over the summer, and markets are only just awakening to the unsettling thought that China’s latest boomlet has already topped out. Beijing is having to hit the brakes again. Crossborder said new rules for money market funds that came into force this month have complicated the picture, causing the stock of US commercial paper to shrivel by $200bn. Yet there are ways to filter out some of these effects. The plain fact is that 3-month lending rates in the off-shore ‘eurodollar’ markets in London have tripled since July to 0.93pc, sharply tightening conditions for global finance. Investors may have been too complacent in discounting these gyrations as part of a regulatory hiccup when something more sinister is emerging.

[..] Albert Edwards from Societe Generale says gross domestic income (GDI) was the most accurate gauge of the economy as the pre-Lehman crisis unfolded, and this measure has been flat for the last two quarters.”The pronounced weakness of GDI relative to GDP might be an ominous omen, for it may well be indicating that a US recession is already underway – just as it was in 2007,” he said.

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A central bank that tells politicians what legislation it desires can never again claim independence anymore.

ECB Urges EU To Curb Virtual Money On Fear Of Losing Control (R.)

The European Central Bank wants EU lawmakers to tighten proposed new rules on digital currencies such as bitcoin, fearing they might one day weaken its own control over money supply in the euro zone. The European Commission’s draft rules, aimed at fighting terrorism, require currency exchange platforms to increase checks on the identities of people exchanging virtual currencies for real ones and report suspicious transactions. In a legal opinion published on Tuesday, the ECB said EU institutions should not promote the use of digital currencies and should make clear they lack the legal status of currency or money.

“The reliance of economic actors on virtual currency units, if substantially increased in the future, could in principle affect the central banks’ control over the supply of money … although under current practice this risk is limited,” the ECB said in the opinion for the European Parliament and Council. “Thus (EU legislative bodies) should not seek in this particular context to promote a wider use of virtual currencies.” The ECB argues the Commission’s proposal does not go far enough as it does not cover the use of virtual money to buy goods and services. “Such transactions would not be covered by any of the control measures provided for in the proposal and could provide a means of financing illegal activities.”

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Dissaving.

Saudi Arabia’s Bond: a Defining Trade for 2016 (WSJ)

Want a single instrument that wraps together nearly every big political, financial and economic theme in today’s world? Saudi Arabia’s mammoth $17.5 billion bond issue, marking its debut in international markets, is it. The size of the deal is impressive but actually the least important thing about it. Big bond deals tend to build a momentum of their own. But it does speak to the search for yield. The $6.5 billion 30-year portion of Saudi Arabia’s bond is set to pay 2.1 percentage points more in yield than a comparable U.S. Treasury, or around 4.6%. That is a sizeable pickup in a world where developed-market bond yields are on the floor or in negative territory. That Saudi Arabia is doing the deal at all is a more telling factor: The oil bounty that has propelled the economy has run dry.

The 18-month-long rout in oil prices that started in 2014 sent the country hurtling from a budget surplus to a deficit in 2015 of 15.9% of GDP that is set to narrow only to 13% in 2016, according to the IMFd. In 2013, government debt stood at just 2.2% of GDP, according to Moody’s. By 2017, it is forecast to be 22.9%. The level isn’t a source of concern, but the swift change shows the country’s stark reversal of fortunes. In the near term, buyers of the bonds are betting largely on oil. Swings in the price are likely to have a direct impact on the perception of Saudi Arabia as a credit. The recovery in oil prices, which stand close to their high of the year, has eased concerns about financial stability and helps explain some of the enthusiasm for the deal. But further ahead, this is a bet on the ability and willingness of the country to transform itself while maintaining social and political stability.

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Explanations at the link. h/t Mish

How do Clinton and Trump’s Tax Plans Compare? (TF)

Both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump have released tax plans during the campaign. The Tax Foundation has analyzed both the plans using our Taxes and Growth (TAG) model to estimate how their plans would impact taxpayers, federal revenues, and economic growth. Below, is a chart that contains all you need to know about the candidates’ plans.

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“..if you are afraid that Donald Trump is a racist/sexist clown with a dangerous temperament, you have been brainwashed by the best group of brainwashers in the business right now..”

Trump is a Pink Elephant (Scott Adams)

Here’s a little thought experiment for you: If a friend said he could see a pink elephant in the room, standing right in front of you, but you don’t see it, which one of you is hallucinating? Answer: The one who sees the pink elephant is hallucinating. Let’s try another one. If a friend tells you that you were both abducted by aliens last night but for some reason only he remembers it, which one of you hallucinated? Answer: The one who saw the aliens is hallucinating. Now let’s add some participants and try another one. If a crowd of people are pointing to a stain on the wall, and telling you it is talking to them, with a message from God, and you don’t see anything but a stain, who is hallucinating? Is it the majority who see the stain talking or the one person who does not? Answer: The people who see the stain talking are experiencing a group hallucination, which is more common than you think.

In nearly every scenario you can imagine, the person experiencing an unlikely addition to their reality is the one hallucinating. If all observers see the same addition to their reality, it might be real. But if even one participant can’t see the phenomenon – no matter how many can – it is almost certainly not real. Here I pause to remind new readers of this blog that I’m a trained hypnotist and a student of persuasion in all its forms. I’ve spent a lifetime trying to learn the tricks for discerning illusion from reality. And I’m here to tell you that if you are afraid that Donald Trump is a racist/sexist clown with a dangerous temperament, you have been brainwashed by the best group of brainwashers in the business right now: Team Clinton. They have cognitive psychologists such as Godzilla advising them. Allegedly.

I remind you that intelligence is not a defense against persuasion. No matter how smart you are, good persuaders can still make you see a pink elephant in a room where there is none (figuratively speaking). And Clinton’s team of persuaders has caused half of the country to see Trump as a racist/sexist Hitler with a dangerous temperament. That’s a pink elephant. As a public service (and I mean that literally) I have been trying to unhypnotize the country on this matter for the past year. I don’t do this because I prefer Trump’s policies or because I know who would do the best job as president. I do it because our system doesn’t work if you think there is a pink elephant in the room and there is not. That isn’t real choice. That is an illusion of choice.

Trump represents what is likely to be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to bring real change to a government that is bloated and self-serving. Reasonable people can disagree on policies and priorities. But Trump is the bigger agent for change, if that’s what you think the country needs. I want voters to see that choice for what it is. And it isn’t a pink elephant. If you are wondering why a socially liberal and well-educated cartoonist such as myself is not afraid of Trump, it’s because I don’t see the pink elephant. To me, all anti-Trumpers are experiencing a shared illusion.

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If you don’t even jail people for this kind of stuff, your justice system is fast eroding.

California Launches Criminal Probe Into Wells Fargo Account Scandal (R.)

The California Attorney General’s Office has launched a criminal investigation into Wells Fargo over allegations it opened millions of unauthorized customer accounts and credit cards, according to a seizure warrant seen by Reuters. Attorney General Kamala Harris authorized a seizure warrant against the bank that seeks customer records and other documents, saying there is probable cause to believe the bank committed felonies. The probe marks the latest setback for the bank in a growing scandal that led to the abrupt retirement of its chief executive officer, monetary penalties, compensation clawbacks, lost business and damage to its reputation.

[..] This is at least the second criminal probe to be opened into Wells Fargo since last month. In September a source told Reuters that federal prosecutors are also looking into the matter. An affidavit filed by Special Agent Supervisor James Hirt with the California Department of Justice reveals that interviews with possible victims of the fraud have already started. One victim, identified only as “Ms. B,” told the investigator that she had declined a request by a Wells Fargo teller in late 2011 or 2012 to open new accounts. But sometime in late 2013 or early 2014, she started to receive notices that she and her husband “allegedly owned on three life insurance policies held by the bank,” the affidavit says.

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Everyone with power is.

Who’s Powering the War on Cash? (DQ)

[..] cash’s days are numbered, as technological advances and changes in generational priorities dampen its allure. The world is brimming with individuals and institutions determined to put it out of its misery. Top of the list are the world’s central banks, which have the perfect motive for whacking cash: i.e. to make negative interest rates an eternal — or at least, more enduring — reality. And the only way to do that is to stop depositors from cashing out, as the Bank of England chief economist Andrew Hadlaine all but admitted in 2014. Japan and Europe are already deep into negative territory, and Fed Chair Janet Yellen has already said that the U.S. should be prepared for the same outcome. But as long as cash exists, there’s no way of preventing depositors from doing the logical thing – i.e. taking their money out of the bank and parking it where the erosive effects of NIRP can’t reach it.

Central banks are not the only ones who dream of a cash-free world. For credit card companies, cash is the ultimate rival. As such, it’s no surprise that the likes of Visa and MasterCard are among those pushing the hardest for a cashless economy. For banks, the benefits are no less obvious, including cost cuts, greater control over the flow of customer funds, and larger fees. As for politicians, Eurocrats and global plutocrats, including the senior servants of the IMF, World Bank and United Nations, they will enjoy even greater access to and dominion over the people’s funds. What better way of controlling the people than by controlling their access to the money they need to survive? It would amount to what Martin Armstrong calls “totalitarian control over the economy.”

These powerful agents have already created a perfect platform for achieving their dream: The Better Than Cash Alliance (BTCA), a UN-hosted partnership of governments, companies and international organizations. Its purpose, in its own words, is “to accelerate the transition from cash to digital payments globally through excellence in advocacy, knowledge and services to members.” The Better Than Cash Alliance’s membership list reads like a who’s who of some of the world’s most influential corporations and institutions. They include Coca Coca, Visa and Mastercard. Apple is, for now, conspicuously absent from the list, but in its place representing the tech industry is the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Also on the list are the Citi Foundation, the US Agency for International Development (USAID), and the World Saving Banks Institute, which represents 7,000 retail and savings banks worldwide. Member institutions range from powerful private foundations — including the Ford Foundation and the Clinton Development Initiative — to a bewildering alphabet soup of UN organizations, including WFP (the World Food Programme), UNFPA (the UN Population Fund), UNPD (the UN Development Program), IFAD (the International Fund for Agricultural Development) and UNCDF (the UN Capital Development Fund).

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Interesting theme, but in an article of this length, confining your self to central bankers only seems a shame.

The Cult Of The Expert – And How It Collapsed (G.)

When the history is written of the revolt against experts, September 2008 will be seen as a milestone. The $85bn rescue of the American International Group (AIG) dramatised the power of monetary gurus in all its anti-democratic majesty. The president and Congress could decide to borrow money, or raise it from taxpayers; the Fed could simply create it. And once the AIG rescue had legitimised the broadest possible use of this privilege, the Fed exploited it unflinchingly. Over the course of 2009, it injected a trillion dollars into the economy – a sum equivalent to nearly 30% of the federal budget – via its newly improvised policy of “quantitative easing”. Time magazine anointed Bernanke its person of the year. “The decisions he has made, and those he has yet to make, will shape the path of our prosperity, the direction of our politics and our relationship to the world,” the magazine declared admiringly.

The Fed’s swashbuckling example galvanized central bankers in all the big economies. Soon Europe saw the rise of its own path-shaping monetary chieftain, when Mario Draghi, president of the European Central Bank, defused panic in the eurozone in July 2012 with two magical sentences. “Within our mandate, the ECB is ready to do whatever it takes to preserve the euro,” he vowed, adding, with a twist of Clint Eastwood menace, “And believe me, it will be enough.” For months, Europe’s elected leaders had waffled ineffectually, inviting hedge-fund speculators to test the cohesion of the eurozone. But now Draghi was announcing that he was badder than the baddest hedge-fund goon. Whatever it takes. Believe me.

In the summer of 2013, when Hollywood rolled out its latest Superman film, cartoonists quickly seized upon a gag that would soon become obvious. Caricatures depicted central-bank chieftains decked out in Superman outfits. One showed Bernanke ripping off his banker’s shirt and tie, exposing that thrilling S emblazoned on his vest. Another showed the bearded hero hurtling through space, red cape fluttering, right arm stretched forward, a powerful fist punching at the void in front of him. “Superman and Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke are both mild-mannered,” a financial columnist deadpanned. “They are both calm, even in the face of global disasters. They are both sometimes said to be from other planets.”

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They’re going to roast her today, and not in a funny way.

Theresa May To Tell EU Leaders ‘There Will Be No Second Referendum'(G.)

Theresa May is to warn her 27 fellow European Union leaders over a working dinner in Brussels that Britain’s decision to leave is irreversible and there can be no second referendum. Thursday’s meeting of the European council will be the prime minister’s first opportunity to address the leaders of all the other member states since the UK voted to leave the European Union in June. Donald Tusk, the European council president, has insisted Britain’s future relationship with the EU will not be on the formal agenda for the two-day meeting, but he will give May the opportunity to set out the “current state of affairs in the country” over coffee at the end of the meal.

A No 10 source said she would tell her fellow EU leaders: “The British people have made a decision and it’s right and proper that that decision is honoured. There will be no second referendum. The priority now has got to be looking to the future, and the relationship between the UK, once we leave”. The source added that the prime minister would also seek to reassure the other member states, amid growing fears that Brexit could unleash political and economic instability in Britain and the rest of Europe. “She wants the outcome at the end of this process to be a strong UK, as a partner of a strong EU,” the source said. “She doesn’t want the process of the UK leaving to be damaging for the rest of the EU. She wants it to be a smooth, constructive, orderly process.”

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Painful times ahead.

Australia Housing Boom Peak Has Passed – Morgan Stanley (BBG)

Australia’s housing boom has passed its peak, with a looming apartment glut set to lead to a sharp slowdown in future developments, according to Morgan Stanley. The slowdown in construction will hurt economic growth, put 200,000 jobs at risk and prompt the central bank to resume cutting interest rates next year, Morgan Stanley analysts led by Daniel Blake said in a note dated Oct. 19. “We believe the growth contribution from the housing boom has already peaked and look for a plateau over 2017 and decline through 2018,” the analysts said. The housing industry is also facing a “more imminent credit crunch” for purchases and developments, they said. “The greatest vulnerability is settlement risk on the 160,000 apartments we forecast being completed through the end of 2017,” they said in the report.

“Listed developers report low failure rates currently, but also confirm credit availability has tightened, especially for foreign investors. Non-bank credit is moving to plug the gap at higher interest rates, but we expect some projects will land with the receiver.” Shares of developer Lendlease Group slumped as much as 5.5% in Sydney trading Thursday after the company flagged a slowdown in building activity, saying Sydney apartment activity is peaking and the Melbourne apartment sector is facing a high level of supply. In May, all 391 apartments offered by Lendlease at a project in Sydney were snapped up in just four hours. A national housing oversupply of about 100,000 dwellings will develop by 2018, Morgan Stanley said, as a glut of apartment projects are completed, particularly in Sydney and Melbourne.

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Cohen is the no. 1 American expert on Russia. Audio file at the link.

Did the White House Declare War on Russia? (Stephen F. Cohen)

Nation Contributing Editor Stephen F. Cohen and John Batchelor continue their weekly discussions of the new US-Russian Cold War. Cohen reports that a statement by Vice President Joe Biden on NBC’s Meet the Press on October 16, released on October 14, stunned Moscow (though it was scarcely noted in the American media). In response to a question about alleged Russian hacking of Democratic Party offices, in order to disrupt the presidential election and even throw it to Donald Trump, Biden said the Obama administration was preparing to send Putin a “message,” presumably in the form of some kind of cyber-attack.

The Kremlin spokesman and several leading Russian commentators characterized Biden’s announcement as a virtual “American declaration of war on Russia” and as the first ever in history. Cohen observed that at this fraught stage in the new US-Russian Cold War, Biden’s statement, which clearly had been planned by the White House, could scarcely have been more dangerous or reckless—especially considering that there is no actual evidence or logic for the two allegations against Russia that seem to have prompted it. Biden was reacting to official US charges of Kremlin hacking for political purposes. Cohen points out that in fact no actual evidence for this allegation has been produced, only suppositions or, as Glenn Greenwald has argued, “unproven assertions.”

While the US political-media establishment has uncritically stated the allegation as fact, a MIT expert, professor Theodore Postol, has written that there is “no technical way that the US intelligence community could know who did the hacking if it was done by sophisticated nation-state actors.” Instead, Cohen suggests, the charges, leveled daily by the Clinton campaign as part of its McCarthyite Kremlin-baiting of Donald Trump, are mostly political, and he laments the way US intelligence officials have permitted themselves to be used for this unprofessional purpose. Moreover, it is far from clear that the Kremlin actually favors Trump, despite Clinton’s campaign claims.

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“Obama is now on pace to deport more people than the sum of all 19 presidents who governed the United States from 1892-2000..”

What Obama’s Record Deportations Look Like (I’Cept)

Donald Trump noted during the third presidential debate that the Democratic president, Barack Obama has deported millions of people. Indeed, Obama has deported more people than any modern president. From January, at Fusion.net: “Donald Trump’s bilious blather about immigrants reminds us—more often than most people need reminding—that words matter. But the Obama administration’s recent wave of police-state raids on Central American women and children, whose only crime is poverty and a lack of proper paperwork, reminds us that actions matter too. When it comes to getting tough on immigration, Republican candidates talk the talk, but Obama walks the walk. Obama has deported more people than any U.S. president before him, and almost more than every other president combined from the 20th century.

“Immigration-flow numbers are staggering in both directions. In 2014, it’s estimated that more than 200,000 Central Americans tried to emigrate to the United States without documentation. But the Obama government has been deporting them as fast as it can. Since coming to office in 2009, Obama’s government has deported more than 2.5 million people—up 23% from the George W. Bush years. More shockingly, Obama is now on pace to deport more people than the sum of all 19 presidents who governed the United States from 1892-2000, according to government data.

“And he’s not done yet. With the clock ticking down his final months in office, Obama appears to be running up the score in an effort to protect his title as deporter-in-chief from future presidents. To pad the numbers, Homeland Security is now going after the lowest-hanging fruit: women and children who are seeking asylum from violence in Central America. “This is the only time I remember enforcement raids on families of women and children who are fleeing some of the most violent places on the planet,” says Royce Bernstein Murray, director of policy for the National Immigrant Justice Center.

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Intelligent species.

Use Of Strongest Antibiotics Rises To Record Levels On European Farms (G.)

Use of some of the strongest antibiotics available to treat life-threatening infections has risen to record levels on European farms, new data shows. The report reinforces concerns about the overuse of antibiotics on farms, following revelations from the Guardian of the presence of the superbug MRSA in UK-produced meat, in imported meat for sale in UK supermarkets, and on British farms. According to the data from the European Medicines Agency, medicines classified as “critically important in human medicine” by the World Health Organisation appear to be in frequent use on farm animals across the major countries of the EU, including the UK.

This comes in spite of WHO advice that, because of their importance, these drugs should be used only in the most extreme cases, if at all, in treating animals. The latest report from the EMA collates data from member states on the sales of antibiotics for veterinary purposes in 2014, and shows that antibiotic use on farms fell by about 2% on the previous year overall, and by as much as 12% in many countries. But this disguises the rise in the use of the strongest medicines, such as colistin, which is a last resort for life-threatening human illness. The percentage of antibiotics sales made up by the most potent antibiotics remained steady or in some cases increased slightly, indicating an increase in the amount of so-called critically important antibiotics used.

For instance, sales of fluoroquinolones – the newest versions of which are used to treat life-threatening illnesses including pneumonia and Legionnaire’s disease – stood at 141 tonnes across the countries surveyed in 2013, and rose to 172 tonnes in 2014. Sales of macrolides, also classed as critically important to human health, rose from 59 to 67 tonnes in the same period. This shows that efforts to prevent the drugs most crucial for human health from being used in farming are failing.

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Dec 122015
 
 December 12, 2015  Posted by at 10:17 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,  Comments Off on Debt Rattle December 12 2015


Banksy Steve Jobs, son of a Syrian immigrant 2015

Russia Calls Saudi Bluff, Plans $40 Oil For Seven Years (AEP)
December 16, 2015 – When The End Of The Bubble Begins (Stockman)
Stocks Are More Overvalued Now Than At 2000 And 2007 Peaks (MarketWatch)
As Commercial Real-Estate Prices Soar, Fed Weighs Consequences (WSJ)
Why The Junk Bond Selloff Is Getting Very Scary (MarketWatch)
Carl Icahn: Junk Bond Market A ‘Keg Of Dynamite’ (CNBC)
It Starts: Junk-Bond Fund Implodes, Investors Stuck (WS)
Gundlach Says ‘Never Just One Cockroach’ In Any Credit Meltdown (Reuters)
Third Avenue Redemption Freeze Sends Chill Through Credit Market (BBG)
Stone Lion Capital Partners Suspends Redemptions in Credit Hedge Funds (WSJ)
Bank of Canada Crushes Loonie, Creates Mother of All Shorts (WS)
China Property Firms’ Debt Issuance Jumps, More To Come (Reuters)
Even the Mafia Wants Out of Italy’s South (BBG)
New Superbug Resistant To All Antibiotics Linked To Imported Meat (Forbes)
Banksy Uses Steve Jobs Artwork To Highlight Refugee Crisis (Guardian)

It’s not a bluff, it’s desperation on all sides.

Russia Calls Saudi Bluff, Plans $40 Oil For Seven Years (AEP)

Russia is battening down the hatches for a Biblical collapse in oil revenues, warning that crude prices could stay as low as $40 a barrel for another seven years. Maxim Oreshkin, the deputy finance minister, said the country is drawing up plans based on a price band fluctuating between $40 to $60 as far out as 2022, a scenario that would have devastating implications for Opec. It would also spell disaster for the North Sea producers, Brazil’s off-shore projects, and heavily indebted Western producers. “We will live in a different reality,” he told a breakfast forum hosted by Russian newspaper Vedomosti. The cold blast from Moscow came as US crude plunged to $35.56, pummelled by continuing fall-out from the acrimonious OPEC meeting last week. Record short positions by hedge funds have amplified the effect.

Bank of America said there was now the risk of “full-blown price war” within Opec itself as Saudi Arabia and Iran fight out a bitter strategic rivalry through the oil market. Brent crude fell to $37.41, even though demand is growing briskly. It is the lowest since the depths of the Lehman crisis in early 2009. But this time it is a ‘positive supply shock’, and therefore beneficial for the world economy as a whole. The International Energy Agency said in its monthly market report that Opec has stopped operating as a cartel and is “pumping at will”, aiming to drive out rivals at whatever cost to its own members. Opec revenues will fall to $400bn (£263bn) this year if current prices persist, down from $1.2 trillion in 2012. This is a massive shift in global wealth.

The IEA said global oil stocks were already at nose-bleed levels of 2,971m barrels, and were likely to increase by another 300m over the next six months as “free-wheeling Opec policy” floods the market. The watchdog played down fears that the world was running out of sites to store the glut, citing 230m barrels of new storage coming on stream. Inventories in the US are still only at 70pc capacity. But this could change once Iranian crude comes on stream later next year. Russia’s $40 warning is the latest escalation in a game of strategic brinkmanship between the Kremlin and Saudi Arabia, already at daggers drawn over Syria. The Russian contingency plans convey a clear message to Riyadh and to Opec’s high command that the country can withstand very low oil prices indefinitely, thanks to a floating rouble that protects the internal budget.

Saudi Arabia is trapped by a fixed exchange peg, forcing it to bleed foreign reserves to cover a budget deficit running at 20pc of GDP. Russia claims to have the strategic depth to sit out a long siege. It is pursuing an import-substitution policy to revive its industrial and engineering core. It can ultimately feed itself. The Gulf Opec states are one-trick ponies by comparison. The deputy premier, Arkady Dvorkovich, told The Telegraph in September that Opec will be forced to change tack. “At some point it is likely that they are going to have to change policy. They can last a few months, to a couple of years,” he said. Kremlin officials suspect that the aim of Saudi policy is to force Russia to the negotiating table, compelling it to join Opec in a super-cartel controlling half the world’s production.

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“Wall Street margined the Fed’s gift of collateral, and did so over and over in an endless chain of rehypothecation.”

December 16, 2015 – When The End Of The Bubble Begins (Stockman)

They are going to layer their post-meeting statement with a steaming pile of if, ands & buts. It will exude an abundance of caution and a dearth of clarity. Having judged that a 25 bps pinprick is warranted, the FOMC will then plant itself firmly in front of the great flickering dashboard in the Eccles Building. There it will repose to a regimen of “watchful waiting”, scouring the entrails of the “incoming data” to divine its next move. Perhaps the waiting won’t be so watchful as all that, however. What is actually coming down the pike is something that may put the reader, at least those who have already been invited to join AARP, more in mind of that once a year hour-long special broadcast by Saturday morning TV back in the days of yesteryear; it explained how the Lone Ranger got his mask.

Memory fails, but either 12 or 19 Texas Rangers rode high in the saddle into a box canyon, confident they knew what was around the bend. Soon there was a lot of gunfire and then there was just one, and that was only because Tonto’s pony needed to stop for a drink. Yellen and her posse better pray for a monetary Tonto because they are riding headlong into an ambush in the canyons of Wall Street. To wit, they cannot possibly raise money market interest rates—-even by 75 bps—-without massively draining liquidity from the casino. Don’t they know what happened to the $3.5 trillion of central bank credit they have digitally printed since September 2008? Do they really think that fully $2.8 trillion of it just recycled right back to the New York Fed as excess bank reserves?

That is, no harm, no foul and no inflation? The monetary equivalent of a tree falling in an empty forest? To the contrary, how about recognizing the letter “f” for fungibility. What all that “excess” is about is collateral, not idle money. The $2.8 trillion needed an accounting domicile—so “excess reserves” was as good as any. But from a financial point of view it amounted to a Big Fat Bid for existing inventories of stocks and bonds. Stated more directly, Wall Street margined the Fed’s gift of collateral, and did so over and over in an endless chain of rehypothecation. So that’s why December 16th will be the beginning of the end of the bubble. If the Fed were to actually raise money market rates the honest way, and in the manner employed by central banks for a century or two, it would have to drain cash from the system; and it would have to do so in the trillions in order to levitate the vast sea of money it has pinned to the zero bound.

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What excess money will buy you.

Stocks Are More Overvalued Now Than At 2000 And 2007 Peaks (MarketWatch)

The stock market currently is even more overvalued than it was at the bull market peaks of both March 2000 and October 2007 — according to not just one, but two, valuation measures. That at least is the message of an analysis released earlier this week by Ned Davis Research, the quantitative research firm. What caught my eye in the firm’s analysis was that, unlike virtually all others that conclude that stocks are overvalued, this one was not based on the Shiller P/E — the cyclically-adjusted P/E ratio championed by Nobel laureate Robert Shiller. That’s noteworthy, since there would be nothing new in reporting that Shiller’s P/E shows stocks to be overvalued. That ratio has been giving this same message for several years now, and skeptics have found many ways of wriggling out from underneath its bearish implications.

But Ned Davis’s latest report focuses on something different: the median stock’s price/earnings and price/sales ratios. The median stock, of course, is the one for which exactly half have higher ratios and half have lower. By focusing on the median, Davis’s findings are immune from the charge that they are being skewed by outliers — such as the terrible earnings among energy companies. The chart at the top of this column summarizes what Davis found. Currently, according to his firm’s research, the median NYSE-listed stock has a price/earnings ratio of 25.6, when calculated based on trailing 12-month earnings. At the bull market peak in October 2007, for example, the comparable ratio was below 20; at the top of the Internet bubble in March 2000, it was even lower. In fact, according to Davis, the price/earnings ratio currently for the median NYSE stock is the highest it’s ever been since his data series began in 1980 — except for the bear-market lows of October 2002 and March 2009, when earnings were depressed by recessions.

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Fed mouthpiece Hilsenrath with an pretty astonishing tale: After creating the biggest bubble ever, “the central bank remained ill-equipped to quell [..] dangerous asset bubbles..”

As Commercial Real-Estate Prices Soar, Fed Weighs Consequences (WSJ)

Federal Reserve officials participating in a “war game” exercise this year came to a disturbing conclusion: Six years after the financial crisis ended, the central bank remained ill-equipped to quell the kind of dangerous asset bubbles that destabilized the savings-and-loan industry during the late 1980s, tech stocks in the 1990s and housing in the mid-2000s. The five officials—gathered at a conference table in Charlotte, N. C.—had to determine if hypothetical booms in commercial real estate and corporate borrowing risked collapse and damaging fallout for the broader economy. The group was asked what to do about it. Fed officials said afterward they saw they lacked clear-cut tools or a proper road map of regulatory measures to help stem the simulated booms.

They also disagreed on whether to use higher interest rates to stop bubbles, a blunt instrument affecting the entire economy. “I walked away more sure about the discomfort I originally had,” said Esther George, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City and a participant in the June exercise. She and others believe the Fed’s low-rate policies might have played a role in booming asset prices. The worry has turned more concrete. Commercial real-estate prices are soaring and Fed officials face the conundrum of what, if anything, to do. “Signs of valuation pressures are emerging in commercial real-estate markets, where prices have been rising at a solid clip and lending standards have deteriorated, although debt growth has not yet accelerated notably,” Stanley Fischer, vice chairman of the Fed, said in a speech Thursday.

Central bank officials would feel an urgency to act only if they believed the commercial real-estate market could suffer a sharp reversal that destabilizes the financial system or hurts the U.S. economy. That isn’t clear. Commercial real estate is a relatively small segment of the overall economy, and unsustainable debt hasn’t emerged as a problem. But financial bubbles have been root causes of the past three recessions and is a consideration as the Fed nears a decision on interest rates. Officials have signaled they will raise short-term interest rates from near zero at their policy meeting next week with the economy and job market improving. For some officials, the commercial real estate boom—and other financial sector froth—could be an added incentive.

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“High-yield bonds have led previous big reversals in S&P 500..”

Why The Junk Bond Selloff Is Getting Very Scary (MarketWatch)

The junk bond market is looking more and more like the boogeyman for stock market investors. The iShares iBoxx $ High Yield Corporate Bond exchange-traded fund dropped 2% on Friday to close at the lowest price since July 17, 2009. Volume 54.1 million shares, or nearly six times the 30-day average of 9.5 million shares, according to FactSet. While weakness in the junk bonds – bonds with credit ratings below investment grade – is nothing new, fears of meltdown have increased after high-yield mutual fund Third Avenue Focused Credit Fund on Thursday blocked investors from withdrawing their money amid a flood of redemption requests and reduced liquidity. This chart shows why stock market investors should care:

The MainStay High Yield Corporate Bond Fund was used in the chart instead of the iShares iBoxx ETF (HYG), because HYG started trading in April 2007. When investors start scaling back, and market liquidity starts to dry up, the riskiest investments tend to get hurt first. And when money starts flowing again, and investors start feeling safe, bottom-pickers tend to look at the hardest hit sectors first. So it’s no coincidence that when the junk bond market and the stock market diverged, it was the junk bond market that proved prescient.

There’s still no reason to believe the run on the junk bond market is nearing an end. As Jason Goepfert, president of Sundial Capital Research, points out, he hasn’t seen any sign of panic selling in the HYG, which has been associated with previous short-term bottoms. “Looking at one-month and three-month lows [in the HYG] over the past six years, almost all of them saw more extreme sentiment than we’re seeing now,” Goepfert wrote in a note to clients.

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Icahn likes Trump to ‘shake up the system’.

Carl Icahn: Junk Bond Market A ‘Keg Of Dynamite’ (CNBC)

Activist investor Carl Icahn renewed his warnings about the high-yield debt market Friday, criticizing a perceived lack of liquidity in junk bond funds. “The high-yield market is just a keg of dynamite that sooner or later will blow up,” he said on CNBC’s “Fast Money: Halftime Report.” Icahn’s comments echoed remarks he has made in recent months about the dangers of high-yield debt. They come as Third Avenue Management looked to block investors from withdrawing money from a nearly $1 billion junk bond fund that it is trying to liquidate. Third Avenue’s troubles could fuel concerns as markets await an interest rate decision next week from the Federal Reserve, another frequent Icahn target.

High-yield funds look perilous because “there’s no liquidity” behind them, Icahn contended. He voiced similar criticism of BlackRock this summer, saying some of its bond funds create an “extremely dangerous situation.” “The average person that goes into this should basically be warned,” he said Friday. Icahn stressed that financial support for some high-yield funds may prove shaky, and investors should be better informed about the risks. He noted that, while he does not support more government intervention, regulators may want to put increased attention on risks in the junk bond market.

Video from Icahn’s website, Sep 2015

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Wille the Fed end up bailing out junk bonds?

It Starts: Junk-Bond Fund Implodes, Investors Stuck (WS)

We have warned about “open-end” bond mutual funds, particularly those with a lot of high-yield bonds. We know some folks who got burned when Charles Schwab’s $13-billion bond fund SWYSX blew up during the financial crisis and lost 60% or so of its value before its data went offline. Schwab settled all kinds of class-action and individual lawsuits for cents on the dollar. It got in trouble over other bond funds. And other purveyors of bond funds got in trouble too. It works like this: When an “open-end” bond fund starts losing money, investors begin to sell it. Fund managers first use all available cash to pay investors. When the cash is gone, they sell the most liquid securities that haven’t lost much money yet, such as Treasuries. When they’re gone, they sell the most liquid corporate paper.

As they go down the line, they sell bonds that have already lost a lot of value. By now the smart money is betting against the fund, having figured out what’s happening. They’re shorting the very bonds these folks are trying to sell. The longer this goes on, the more money investors lose and the more spooked they get. It turns into a run. And people who still have that fund in their retirement account are getting cleaned out. Bond funds can be treacherous – especially if they hold dubious paper, which is never dubious until it suddenly is. And when they get in trouble, you want to be among the first out the door. The $1.8-trillion or so of US junk bonds are everywhere. Investors loved them because they have discernible yields in the Fed-designed zero-interest-rate environment. Junk bonds were hot, and so were the funds.

People went for them, with no idea that they were putting their nest egg in a fund larded with explosives. A significant part of Corporate America is junk rated, well-known names like Chrysler, Valeant Pharmaceuticals, or iHart Communications, yup, the LBO wunderkind owned by private equity firms and weighed down by $8.9 billion in debt that is now “distressed.” They issue debt because they’re cash-flow negative and need new money, or because they gorge on M&A, or have to fund share-buybacks and special billion-dollar dividends back to the private equity firms that own them. During the boom years of the credit bubble, nothing could go wrong. And now, as ever more junk bonds wither, crash, default, and cause their owners to tear out their hair – just then, a bond fund implodes. And the next crisis hasn’t even started yet.

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Gundlach stands to lose big.

Gundlach Says ‘Never Just One Cockroach’ In Any Credit Meltdown (Reuters)

Jeffrey Gundlach, the widely followed investor who runs DoubleLine Capital, warned Friday that crumbling credit markets could expose more fund debacles such as Third Avenue Management’s junk bond portfolio and the Federal Reserve should take note of deteriorating financial conditions. “I’d have to believe that if they met today that they wouldn’t raise rates,” Gundlach told Reuters in a telephone interview. “I mean, Wow. Look at the chart of JNK (The SPDR® Barclays High Yield Bond ETF). It’s accelerating to the downside.” Thursday, Martin Whitman’s Third Avenue Management said it was barring investor withdrawals while it liquidated its high-yield bond fund, an unusual move that highlights the dangers of loading up on risky assets that are hard to trade even in good times.

“There’s never just one cockroach” in any kind of credit meltdown, said Gundlach, who oversees $80 billion at the Los Angeles-based DoubleLine Capital. Investors have been on “credit overload,” in a reach for yield, Gundlach said. “People are too long credit and the credit is melting down and the stock market is whistling through the graveyard. It is so similar to 2007, it’s scary.” The junk-bond fund blowup comes ahead of next week’s Federal Reserve’s Open Market Committee meeting on December 15 and 16, at which time policy makers are expected to raise rates from near-zero levels for the first time in nearly a decade. Gundlach, who has been warning that the U.S. Federal Reserve should not tighten monetary policy next week, said: “They’re just hell-bent on raising rates. They talked that they would do it and they want to do it – and yet nominal GDP is lower than it was in September of 2012.” “Yet they did QE3 in September 2012,” Gundlach said.

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Cockroach no. 1. Or is it no. 2?

Third Avenue Redemption Freeze Sends Chill Through Credit Market (BBG)

Investors who piled into the riskiest corners of the credit markets during seven years of rock-bottom interest rates are getting a reminder of how hard it can be to cash out. With outflows from U.S. high-yield bond funds running at the fastest pace in more than a year, Martin Whitman’s Third Avenue Management took the rare step of freezing withdrawals from a $788 million credit mutual fund on Dec. 9. The firm’s assessment that meeting redemptions would be impossible without resorting to fire sales has put a spotlight on the dangers for junk-bond investors as the Federal Reserve prepares to lift interest rates as soon as next week. “It’s definitely a dark cloud over the market,” said Anthony Valeri at LPL Financial. Investor withdrawals “are driving the high yield market now more than anything.

Institutions – hedge funds and mutual funds – are being forced to get out and unfortunately that’s pressuring the entire market.” The selloff in riskier debt, fueled by tepid global economic growth and a collapse in earnings at commodity companies, deepened on Thursday as news of Third Avenue’s decision rattled investors. Yields on U.S. high-yield debt climbed to the highest in almost four years, putting the market on pace for its first annual loss since 2008, a Bank of America Merrill Lynch index shows. Growing tumult in credit markets comes eight years after BNP Paribas helped spark a global financial crisis by freezing withdrawals from three investment funds because it couldn’t “fairly” value their mortgage holdings.

While Third Avenue said its positions have the potential to deliver returns over a longer investment horizon, Berwyn Income Fund’s George Cipolloni said the similarities between today’s markets and those before the crisis are getting too big to ignore. “A lot of this looks like late 2007 or early 2008,” when the credit crunch began to take root, said Cipolloni, whose fund has outperformed 72% of peers tracked by Bloomberg over the past five years. “But instead of housing and mortgages, it’s energy and materials leading the decline.”

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Losers. Big losers.

Stone Lion Capital Partners Suspends Redemptions in Credit Hedge Funds (WSJ)

Stone Lion Capital Partners said it suspended redemptions in its credit hedge funds after many investors asked for their money back. The move, nearly unprecedented in the hedge-fund industry since the financial crisis, is the latest example of the sudden crunch facing traders across Wall Street looking to sell beaten-down positions. On Thursday, Third Avenue stunned investors with the announcement it was barring withdrawals while it liquidates a high-yield bond mutual fund, a move that intensified a selloff sweeping the junk-bond world. Stone Lion, founded in 2008 by Bear Stearns veterans Gregory Hanley and Alan Mintz, is in a similar malaise, facing heavy losses on so-called distressed investments including junk bonds, post reorganization equities and other special situations, people familiar with the matter said.

Its oldest set of credit funds, which manage $400 million altogether, received “substantial redemption requests,” precipitating the decision, the firm said in a statement. The firm didn’t give a time frame for when the money would be returned. A Stone Lion spokesman said suspending redemptions was the only way to “ensure fair and equitable treatment for all” investors. The firm continues to operate several other funds, including one that bets on Puerto Rico’s economic recovery. Stone Lion’s hedge funds were down about 7% through the end of July, when it cut off many prospective investors from receiving updates, people familiar said. In a midyear letter to investors, Messrs. Hanley and Mintz professed optimism in the “ultimate recovery figures underpinning our investment theses.” But the funds have suffered significant losses since then, the people said; investor documents indicate the funds manage 24% less now than they did at the end of July.

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Beggar thy neighbor. And thyself?

Bank of Canada Crushes Loonie, Creates Mother of All Shorts (WS)

The Canadian dollar swooned 1% against the US dollar on Friday, to US$0.7270, after having gotten hammered for the past six of seven trading days. It’s down 5% in November so far, 15.5% year-to-date, and 31% from its post-Financial Crisis peak of $1.06 in April 2011. It hit the lowest level since June 2004. The commodities rout would have been bad enough. Given the importance of commodities to the Canadian economy, the multi-year decline in the prices of metals, minerals, and natural gas, and then starting in mid-2014, the devastating plunge of the price of oil, would have been sufficient in driving down the loonie. That the Fed has tapered QE out of existence last year and has been waffling and flip-flopping about rate hikes ever since made the until then beaten-down US dollar, at the time the most despised currency in the universe, less despicable – at the expense of the loonie.

Those factors would have been enough to knock down the loonie. But it wasn’t enough, not for the ambitious Bank of Canada Governor Stephen Poloz. The man’s got a plan. He is in an all-out currency war. He’s out to crush the loonie beyond what other forces are already accomplishing. He’s out to pulverize it, and no one knows how far he’ll go, or where he’ll stop, or if he’ll ever stop. He has singlehandedly created the short of a lifetime. It should spook every Canadian with income and assets denominated in Canadian dollars and those wanting to buy a home in Canada (we’ll get to that bitter irony in a moment). Poloz has been in office since June 2013, and this is what he has accomplished so far:

One reason for pulverizing the Canadian dollar is to boost revenues and earnings of exporters. They get to translate their foreign-currency revenues into Canadian dollars on their financial statements. And analysts love that. It doesn’t matter how the bigger numbers got there, whether by inflation or devaluation, as long as they’re bigger. And Canadian stocks could use some help. Despite the destruction of the loonie, the Toronto Stock Exchange index TSX has plunged 18% since its peak in June 2014 and is now back where it had been in September 2013.

So Poloz is trying to get Canadian workers to be able to compete with workers in Mexico and China and Bangladesh, and with those beaten-down wages in the US. His tool is to pulverize the currency. Alas, the Mexican peso too has gotten crushed. But ironically, the Bank of Mexico is spinning in circles to halt the decline. It’s selling its limited dollar reserves and buying pesos to prop up its currency, even as Canadians watch helplessly as their own currency descends into banana-republic status – something the US dollar used to excel at when the Fed was on its path of total dollar destruction.

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Of course, more debt will solve everyhting.

China Property Firms’ Debt Issuance Jumps, More To Come (Reuters)

China’s real estate companies have sharply increased the amount of funds raised from debt so far this year compared with 2014 as borrowing costs hit historical lows, and they are planning to borrow more. Property developers have raised 495 billion yuan ($77 billion) from domestic Chinese bonds, almost double 2014 levels, Barclays Capital estimates. Goldman Sachs suggests property companies have issued more than 400 billion yuan ($62.5 billion) in domestic bonds, over seven times total issuance in 2014. It uses a different set of companies as the basis of its estimate. “Conditions are great for these developers who should take this opportunity to strengthen their balance sheets and deleverage in a disciplined manner, rather than leverage up,” said Dhiraj Bajaj at Lombard Odier Singapore.

After tightening regulations in recent years to dampen a hot property market, regulators have moved this year to make it easier for developers to raise debt in the hope a lift for the real estate market will boost the wider economy. The property sector drives about 15% of gross domestic product and could help support an economy that many analysts predict will grow this year at its slowest pace in more than two decades. Historically low interest rates are helping to fuel the rush. The central bank has cut its benchmark interest rates six times since November by 1.65%age points and reduced banks’ reserve requirements three times this year.

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Two nations under the same flag.

Even the Mafia Wants Out of Italy’s South (BBG)

A large portion of Italy is being left behind. The economic gap between Italy’s prosperous north and its depressed south has widened so much that the difference between Lombardy near the Swiss Alps and Calabria in the toe of the boot-shaped peninsula is wider than that between Germany and Greece. “With the latest recession, a whole chunk of the south’s productive structure has disappeared,” said Stefano Prezioso, head of forecasts at research institute Svimez, which seeks to promote industry in the south. “The process of decoupling that began in 2001 has quickened and it may now take many years to get back to a growth pace similar to the north.”

Italy has suffered through two recessions in seven years and its recovery is lagging behind other euro-area countries. That means a large part of the country’s population living in the south, known as Mezzogiorno, may not even see an improvement in economic conditions. Bank of Italy Director General Salvatore Rossi, who comes from the southern city of Bari, highlighted the issue in a Dec. 3 speech by saying the regional disparity is at a record and widening. Successful companies in northern Italy were increasingly subjected to “contamination” by organized-crime groups, including those from the south, as the businesses tried to weather the effects of the nation’s recession, Milan-based Assolombarda, the Lombardy industrialists’ association, said earlier this year. Prosecutors have also said the Mafia and other organized crime gangs are moving more of their operations to the north.

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“We’re One Giant Step Closer To The End Of Antibiotics..”

New Superbug Resistant To All Antibiotics Linked To Imported Meat (Forbes)

Just last month, Yi-Yun Liu’s team discovered the mcr-1 gene, which conveys resistance to colistin, an antibiotic of last resort. They were doing a surveillance project on E. coli bacteria from food animals in China. A whopping 15% of meat samples and 21% of animals tested between 2011 and 2014 also had bacteria that carried this gene. The researchers from South China also found this resistance gene in E. coli and Klebsiella pneumonia isolates from 16 hospitalized patients’ blood, urine or other sites. The isolates were all very resistant ESBL bacteria to begin with, so now were resistant to all antibiotics. It gets worse. This week, Frank Aarestrup’s team, from the Danish National Food Institute, reported that they also searched their collection of bacteria, looking for this new gene.

They found the mcr-1 gene in the blood of a patient and in 5 poultry samples that originated in Germany between 2012-14. The patient had not left the country and was believed to have become infected by eating contaminated meat. The genes found in the poultry were identical to those from the Danish patient and from China. Why is this important? The mcr-1 gene transfers resistance to E. coli, Klebsiella, Pseudomonas—common bacteria—by plasmids, small bits of DNA that can be transferred to different types of bacteria. Previously, colistin resistance was transferred on chromosomes, and therefore affected only those bacteria and their descendants. Plasmid-borne resistance genes are more likely to be rapidly spread widely, and can spread between species of bacteria. According to George Washington University’s Dr. Lance Price, it’s a bit less likely to be a problem with Salmonella for now, as “we don’t have those bordering on pan-resistance like E. coli.”

One of the problems is that colistin is widely used in China’s agriculture industry. Co-author Professor Jianzhong Shen explains, “The selective pressure imposed by increasingly heavy use of colistin in agriculture in China could have led to the acquisition of mcr-1 by E. coli.” The WHO called for limiting the use of colistin in 2012, calling it a critically important antibiotic. Yet most of the 12,000 tons of colistin fed to livestock each year is in China. In Europe, polymyxins (the colistin class) were the 5th most heavily used type of antibiotic in agricultural use in 2013. Colistin is not widely used in the U.S., but it is not prohibited either. Colistin is a nasty antibiotic. Until the past few years, when we were desperate for options for treating carbapenem resistant bacteria (CRE), it was not used due to its toxicity. I’ve had to use it a rarely, resulting in inevitable renal failure in the patients receiving it.

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Interesting artist.

Banksy Uses Steve Jobs Artwork To Highlight Refugee Crisis (Guardian)

Banksy has revealed a new artwork, sprayed on a wall in the Calais refugee camp called “the Jungle”, intended to address negative attitudes towards the thousands of people living there. The work depicts the late Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple, with a black bin bag thrown over one shoulder and an original Apple computer in his hand. The work is a pointed reference to Jobs’s background as the son of a Syrian migrant who went to America after the second world war. In a rare statement accompanying the work, Banksy said: “We’re often led to believe migration is a drain on the country’s resources but Steve Jobs was the son of a Syrian migrant. Apple is the world’s most profitable company, it pays over $7bn (£4.6bn) a year in taxes – and it only exists because they allowed in a young man from Homs.”

The graffiti is one of a series of works Banksy has created in response to the refugee crisis. During his trip to Calais, the artist covered several walls across the French port with related graffiti, including a riff on Theodore Gericault’s Raft of the Medusa, featuring a luxury yacht. This summer, his temporary “bemusement” park in Weston-Super-Mare featured an installation of boats filled with bodies. On the closing night of Dismaland, Banksy also invited Pussy Riot to debut their song criticising the global failure to help the migrants entering Europe. Since the park closed in September, the artist has been shipping leftover infrastructure from Dismaland to help build emergency housing for the 7,000 migrants, mainly from Syria, Eritrea and Afghanistan, now living on the site of a former rubbish tip in Calais.

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Nov 192015
 
 November 19, 2015  Posted by at 9:51 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,  2 Responses »


Wyland Stanley REO taxicab, San Francisco 1924

China’s Steel Industry Peers Into Abyss as Output to Plunge (Bloomberg)
Rio Tinto’s Optimistic About Iron Ore And That’s Reason To Worry (Bloomberg)
Zinc Lowest in 6 Years, Nickel at 12-Year Low on China Concerns (Bloomberg)
Can Anything Stop Companies From Loading Up on Debt? UBS Says No. (Alloway)
Debt, The Never-Ending Story (Economist)
Finland’s Depression Is The Final Indictment Of Europe’s Monetary Union (AEP)
China Inclusion In IMF Currency Basket Not Just Symbolic (FT)
New Players Break Into Credit Derivatives (FT)
Atlantic City’s Mayor Warns of Insolvency by April Without Aid (Bloomberg)
Fed Tipping Toward December Rate Hike, Minutes Show (Hilsenrath)
Australia Blocks Ranch Sale to Foreigners on Security Fears (Bloomberg)
Turkey Could Cut Off Islamic State’s Supply Lines. So Why Doesn’t It? (Graeber)
Trudeau Tells Canada To Reject Racism Amid Opposition To Refugee Plan (Reuters)
History Is A Cruel Judge Of Intolerance In America (Bloomberg)
Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia Building Fence Along Greek Border (Kath.)
EU Nations Miss Deadline To Appoint Officers For Refugee Relocations (Guardian)
20 African Migrants Lost At Sea In Atlantic After Boat Sinks (Reuters)
Antibiotic Resistance: World On Cusp Of ‘Post-Antibiotic Era’ (BBC)

Overleveraged overinvestment.

China’s Steel Industry Peers Into Abyss as Output to Plunge (Bloomberg)

Crude steel production in China will collapse by 23 million metric tons next year, according to the nation’s leading industry group. That’s equivalent to more than a quarter of annual output from the U.S. Supply from the top producer may drop 2.9% to about 783 million tons from 806 million tons in 2015, according to the China Iron & Steel Association. The slump would be driven by a deepening downturn in local demand and as mills encounter stiffer opposition to exports, Deputy Secretary General Li Xinchuang said in an interview on Wednesday. “You can’t find any bright spots,” Li said in Shanghai, citing weakness across Asia’s largest economy.

“Property developments used to enjoy annual growth of 20% and now at best it is 5%. Infrastructure investments haven’t taken off due to lack of funds despite of all the planned numbers of projects. Manufacturing investments have also dropped like a stone.” China’s mills, which produce about half of worldwide output, are battling against losses, oversupply and sinking prices as local consumption shrinks for the first time in a generation. The fallout from the steelmakers’ struggles is hurting iron ore prices and boosting trade tensions as mills seek to sell their surplus overseas. Shanghai Baosteel Group Corp. has forecast that China’s steel production may eventually shrink 20%.

Li’s estimate of 783 million tons of Chinese production compares with supply from the U.S. of 88.3 million tons in 2014, according to data from the World Steel Association for 2014, the last complete year of figures. That year, output in China was 823 million tons. Steel demand in China would slump to about 654 million tons in 2016 from 668 million tons this year, said Li, who’s also president of the China Metallurgical Industry Planning & Research Institute. Iron ore imports may drop to 920 million tons in 2016 from about 930 million tons, according to Li. The oversupply of steel in China is so acute that David Humphreys, a former chief economist at mining company Rio Tinto Group, said that the country would do well to demolish unneeded mills. “There’s about 300 million tons of surplus capacity in China that needs to be not just shut down, it needs to be eradicated, it needs to be bulldozed,” Humphreys said ..

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What can they do but talk their books?

Rio Tinto’s Optimistic About Iron Ore And That’s Reason To Worry (Bloomberg)

You’re concerned about the slowdown in China’s economy. It bothers you that industrial output has plunged to the weakest levels since 2008. You’re unsettled that the China Iron & Steel Association “can’t see any bright spots” for the metal that’s driven the country’s urbanization. You’re perturbed Jim Chanos thinks the world’s second-biggest economy is heading the same way as Japan in the 1990s. Stop fretting: Rio Tinto, the world’s second-biggest iron ore miner, says China’s going to be O.K. The world should stop focusing on daily price gyrations for the steelmaking metal and concentrate on the long-term trend, CEO Sam Walsh told Bloomberg. The company’s analysts have been “very, very careful” in their forecasts that iron ore demand will reach 3 billion tons by 2030, up about 36% from last year, Megan Clark, a non-executive director at the miner, said.

That’s good news, right? Not so fast.The Anglo-Australian miner has good reason to err on the side of optimism. Like peers Vale and BHP Billiton, it has some of the world’s cheapest iron ore mines, and the least to lose from oversupply hitting the market.The big three miners are engaged in the same game with higher-cost competitors as the one Saudi Arabia is playing against the U.S. shale industry: Let’s flood the market, and see who’s left standing. Like Ali al-Naimi, the Saudi minister who said in June that Chinese oil demand was growing, Walsh and Clark are glass-half-full sorts of people. But their optimism stands in contrast to the industry’s own assessment. China’s steel sector needs to go through a “painful restructuring” and output will collapse by 20%, Baosteel Chairman Xu Lejiang said last month.

Demand is evaporating at “unprecedented speed” and oversupply is worsening, the deputy head of the China Iron & Steel Association said a week later. Steel demand in China fell in 2014 and will slip again in 2015 and 2016, the World Steel Association said in April. Even the flood of exports driven by lackluster domestic demand is shrinking as mills in other countries push governments to impose import charges and start trade disputes. The U.S. is levying tariffs of as much as 236% on some varieties of Chinese steel. A price index for the rebar used in making reinforced concrete for buildings dropped below 2,100 yuan a metric ton Monday for the first time since at least 2003:

For a reality check, see what the higher-cost producers have to say. Rio Tinto and BHP are in an “imaginary world” and more production needs to be halted, according to Lourenco Goncalves, the chief executive officer of U.S.-headquartered Cliffs Natural Resources. Steel demand in China has “plateaued”, Nev Power, his counterpart at the world’s fourth-largest producer Fortescue Metals, said last month. Commodity gluts do eventually correct themselves as the least profitable producers quit the market and bring supply back in line with demand. But there’s little sign of that happening right now. After a modest recovery during the third quarter, an index of Chinese iron ore prices compiled by Metal Bulletin has slipped, and on Tuesday was just 99 cents above July’s record-low $44.59 a metric ton.

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Everything’s becoming a worry going into 2016.

Zinc Lowest in 6 Years, Nickel at 12-Year Low on China Concerns (Bloomberg)

Zinc dropped to the lowest in more than six years amid signs of ample supply and concern that demand is faltering in China, the world’s biggest user. Nickel closed at the lowest in 12 years. Global refined zinc output of 10.486 million metric tons January through September exceeded demand of 10.298 million tons, the International Lead and Zinc Study Group said in a report Wednesday. China President Xi Jinping said the economy faces “considerable downward pressure,” while data showed the nation’s home-price recovery slowed in October. “It certainly continues to point to a more bearish view on China, and they haven’t released any other stimulative type of measure,” Mike Dragosits at TD Securities in Toronto, said. “The market continues to trade pessimistically on the Chinese demand outlook.”

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ZIRP. How the Fed destroys markets.

Can Anything Stop Companies From Loading Up on Debt? UBS Says No. (Alloway)

It’s no secret that companies have been taking advantage of years of low interest rates to sell cheap debt to eager investors, locking in lower funding costs that have allowed them to go on a spree of share buybacks and mergers and acquisitions. With fresh evidence that investors are becoming more discerning when it comes to corporate credit as the first U.S. interest rate rise in almost a decade approaches, it’s worth asking whether anything might stop the trend of companies assuming more and more debt on their balance sheets. In a note published on Wednesday, UBS analysts Matthew Mish and Stephen Caprio offer an answer to that question. After looking at four factors that could theoretically derail the corporate debt train they answer: pretty much nothing.

For a start, they note that higher funding costs are unlikely to dissuade companies from continuing to tap the debt market since, even after a rate hike, financing costs will remain near historic lows. “The predominant reason is the Fed[eral Reserve] is anchoring low interest rates,” the analysts wrote. When it comes to the hubris of corporate chief financial officers, who have been more than happy leveraging up balance sheets in order to reward shareholders, the analysts didn’t mince words. “We find that corporate CFOs historically are inherently backward-looking when setting corporate financing decisions, relying on past extrapolations of economic activity, even when current market pricing suggests future investment returns may be lower,” they wrote.

“Several management teams have been on the road indicating higher funding costs of up to 100 to 200 basis points would not impede attractive M&A deals, in their view.” Higher market volatility has often been cited as one factor that could knock the corporate credit market off its seat, but the UBS duo sees little reason for it to put a dent in debt issuance. “In a low-yield environment, we anticipate significant vol[atility] selling interest to resurface so long as fundamentals are not falling off a cliff,” they said. Even in the third quarter of 2015, when markets were roiled by a global stock selloff, sales of investment-grade bonds were up 32% year-on-year, they noted.

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What goes up…

Debt, The Never-Ending Story (Economist)

It is close to ten years since America’s housing bubble burst. It is six since Greece’s insolvency sparked the euro crisis. Linking these episodes was a rapid build-up of debt, followed by a bust. A third instalment in the chronicles of debt is now unfolding. This time the setting is emerging markets. Investors have already dumped assets in the developing world, but the full agony of the slowdown still lies ahead. Debt crises in poorer countries are nothing new. In some ways this one will be less dramatic than the defaults and broken currency pegs that marked crashes in the 1980s and 1990s. Today’s emerging markets, by and large, have more flexible exchange rates, bigger reserves and a smaller share of their debts in foreign currency.

Nonetheless, the bust will hit growth harder than people now expect, weakening the world economy even as the Federal Reserve begins to raise interest rates. In all three volumes of this debt trilogy, the cycle began with capital flooding across borders, driving down interest rates and spurring credit growth. In America a glut of global savings, much of it from Asia, washed into subprime housing, with disastrous results. In the euro area, thrifty Germans helped to fund booms in Irish housing and Greek public spending. As these rich-world bubbles turned to bust, sending interest rates to historic lows, the flow of capital changed direction. Money flowed from rich countries to poorer ones. That was at least the right way around. But this was yet another binge: too much borrowed too fast, and lots of the debt taken on by firms to finance imprudent projects or purchase overpriced assets.

Overall, debt in emerging markets has risen from 150% of GDP in 2009 to 195%. Corporate debt has surged from less than 50% of GDP in 2008 to almost 75%. China’s debt-to-GDP ratio has risen by nearly 50 percentage points in the past four years. Now this boom, too, is coming to an end. Slower Chinese growth and weak commodity prices have darkened prospects even as a stronger dollar and the approach of higher American interest rates dam the flood of cheap capital. Next comes the reckoning. Some debt cycles end in crisis and recession—witness both the subprime debacle and the euro zone’s agonies. Others result merely in slower growth, as borrowers stop spending and lenders scuttle for cover. The scale of the emerging-market credit boom ensures that its aftermath will hurt.

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“The IMF warned this week against austerity overkill and “pro-cyclical” cuts before the economy is strong enough to take it. [..] Finland should not even be thinking of a “front-loaded” fiscal contraction or slashing investment at a time when its output gap is 3.2pc of GDP. The Finnish authorities admitted in their reply to the IMF’s Article IV report that they had no choice because they had to comply with the Stability Pact. This is what European policy-making has come to.”

Finland’s Depression Is The Final Indictment Of Europe’s Monetary Union (AEP)

Finland is sliding deeper into economic depression, a prime exhibit of currency failure and an even more unsettling saga for theoretical defenders of the euro than the crucifixion of Greece. A full 6.5 years into the current global expansion, Finland’s GDP is 6pc below its previous peak. It is suffering a deeper and more protracted slump than the post-Soviet crash of the early 1990s, or the Great Depression of the 1930s. Nobody can accuse Finland of being spendthrift, or undisciplined, or technologically backward, or corrupt, or captive of an entrenched oligarchy, the sort of accusations levelled against the Greco-Latins. The country’s public debt is 62pc of GDP, lower than in Germany. Finland has long been held up as the EMU poster child of austerity, grit, and super-flexibility, the one member of the periphery that supposedly did its homework before joining monetary union and could therefore roll with the punches.

Finland tops the EU in the World Economic Forum’s index of global competitiveness. It comes 1st in the entire world for primary schools, higher education and training, innovation, property rights, intellectual property protection, its legal framework and reliability, anti-monopoly policies, university R&D links, availability of latest technologies, as well as scientists and engineers. Its near-perfect profile demolishes the central claim of the German finance ministry – through its mouthpiece in Brussels – that countries get into bad trouble in EMU only if they drag their feet on reform and spend too much. The country has obviously been hit by a series of asymmetric shocks: the collapse of its hi-tech champion Nokia, the slump in forestry and commodity prices, and the recession in Russia.

The relevant point is that it cannot now defend itself. Finland is trapped by a fixed exchange rate and by the fiscal straightjacket of the Stability Pact, a lawyers’ construct that was never intended for such circumstances. The Pact is being enforced anyway because rules are rules and because leaders in the Teutonic bloc have an idee fixee that moral hazard will run rampant if any country in the EMU core sets a bad example. Finland’s output shrank a further 0.6pc in the third quarter and the country’s three-year long recession is turning into a fourth year. Industrial orders fell 31pc in September. “It’s spooky,” said Pasi Sorjonen from Nordea. Sweden was able to navigate similar shocks by letting its currency take the strain at key moments over the last decade. Swedish GDP is now 8pc above its pre-Lehman level.

The divergence between Finland and Sweden is staggering for two Nordic economies with so much in common, and it has rekindled Finland’s dormant anti-euro movement. The Finnish parliament is to hold ‘Fixit’ hearings next year on exit from monetary union and a return to the Markka, the currency that saved Finland in the early 1990s (once the ill-judged hard-Markka policy and the fixed ECU-peg was abandoned). Paavo Väyrynen, a Euro-MP and honorary chairman of the ruling Centre party, forced the euro hearings onto the parliamentary agenda after collecting 50,000 signatures. “The eurozone is not an optimal currency area and people are becoming aware of the real reasons for our crisis,” he said. “We are in a similar situation to Italy and have lost a quarter of our industry. Our labour costs are too high,” he said. [..] .. if the euro cannot be made to work for what is supposed to be the most competitive country in the EU, who can it work for?

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My gut says Xi’s going to regret this, and/or get into trouble with the rest of the world. He gives no sign of understanding hia own power limits.

China Inclusion In IMF Currency Basket Not Just Symbolic (FT)

Back in 2009, the west was desperately seeking green shoots of recovery and paid little attention when Zhou Xiaochuan called for nothing less than a new world financial order. China’s central bank governor proposed replacing the US dollar as the international reserve currency with a global system controlled by the IMF. If, as expected, the IMF this month approves the inclusion of China’s renminbi as a reserve currency, it will mark a small step for Mr Zhou’s 2009 vision, but a big move for the renminbi. The prospect of China’s currency joining the dollar, euro, yen and sterling in backing the IMF’s Special Drawing Rights — its unit of account, restricted to member governments — has been described as everything from a symbolic ego trip by Beijing to the dawning of a new era.

In all probability it will be like many Chinese financial reforms: significant in hindsight, but harder to get excited about in its early stages. Market enthusiasm over early-stage reforms such as the de-pegging of the renminbi 10 years ago has gradually given way to a level of ennui as the changes get smaller and China gets bigger. The result is often disappointment in the numbers as China maintains a staunch antipathy to the sort of sweeping changes, accompanied by headline-grabbing figures, beloved of newly-installed western executives and politicians. Even the Shanghai-Hong Kong Stock Connect, one year old this week, was shrugged aside by many, because the absolute numbers involved are relatively small.

However, its real significance lies in the fact that it was the first scheme under which China had let foreign investors in “blind” — that is, without requiring approval of each investor. SDR inclusion risks being categorised the same way. That would miss the point, since this is not about boosting short-term demand from central banks for renminbi. Rather, it is about embedding the currency in the international system and committing China to financial reform. If China were to constitute up to 10% of the SDR basket, that would result in a need for reserve managers to buy just $28bn or its currency — not a particularly meaningful number compared with the $20bn traded daily in the onshore spot market. Reserve figures are thus another source of headline number disappointment.

If China were to make up 3% of the $11.5tn of reserves held globally by the end of 2016, as forecast by DBS economist Nathan Chow, the $340bn that implies would vault the renminbi straight into the top league alongside sterling and the yen. Yet the dollar comprises almost two-thirds of reserves and the euro a further 20%. Numbers aside, the bigger ramifications of SDR inclusion come from its effect on financial reform. Xiangrong Yu, economist at CICC, likens it to the impact of China joining the World Trade Organisation in 2002. “Even if the renminbi fails to be added this time around, it will be impossible to reverse these reform measures,” he adds.

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Oh, lovely…

New Players Break Into Credit Derivatives (FT)

New entrants are breaking into the dealer-dominated credit derivatives market as trading increasingly occurs on electronic platforms. Eagle Seven, a proprietary trading firm in Chicago, confirmed it began quoting prices on cleared index credit default swaps last week. Verition, a New York-based hedge fund and Stifel Nicolaus, a new bank entrant to CDS markets, have also been making inroads, according to people familiar with the matter. It comes as banks draw close to settling a court case in which investors allege they have been shut out of the clubby CDS market for years. Traditionally CDS has been traded bilaterally between banks and their clients.

But regulation mandating the electronic trading of index CDS has since been introduced in the US, with platforms like Bloomberg replicating the bilateral model using a “request for quote system”, whereby investors can request electronic quotes from market makers. The new entrants are active in RFQ, with Eagle Seven also streaming prices on to a public screen called a central limit order book — a nascent trading model for CDS investors. Similar changes have also occurred in interest rate swap markets with Citadel, a non-bank electronic market maker, claiming to be one of the leading participants on Bloomberg’s trading venue.

A number of firms have also actively been pushing single-name CDS — which tracks the likelihood of default of a single company — to trade electronically and with the counterparty risk of buyers and sellers pushed centrally into a clearing house. Centralised clearing mutualises counterparty risk across the market and helps reduce bank capital requirements. Michael Hisler, head of fixed income cleared products at Stifel, said central clearing also removes the need for bilateral execution documents because all trades face the clearing house. Investors hope this may help encourage more new entrants and improve liquidity in the product, which has waned since the 2008 financial crisis. “Central bank regulation is making uncleared derivatives punitive for banks to hold on their balance sheet,” said Mr Hisler.

“Consequently, the traditional financing of uncleared positions is being significantly reduced or eliminated and forcing clearing of all standardised products.” Some of the biggest CDS users are currently drafting a letter with the intention of collecting investor signatures to commit to begin clearing single name CDS starting in the new year, according to a person familiar with the matter. Some banks have also begun offering clients incentives to move old trades into clearing, including cutting fees or giving very favourable pricing. “Clearly there is an incentive,” the head of CDS sales at a European bank said. “You are trying to reduce your counterparty exposure and capital. There is a value attached to that.”

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Detroit was never alone.

Atlantic City’s Mayor Warns of Insolvency by April Without Aid (Bloomberg)

Atlantic City, the distressed New Jersey gambling hub that’s under state oversight, will run out of money by the end of April if bills aimed at bolstering its finances aren’t enacted, Mayor Don Guardian said. “Cash flow runs out April 29,” Guardian told reporters Wednesday during the New Jersey State League of Municipalities conference in his city. Governor Chris Christie conditionally vetoed legislation that would have redirected a portion of casino revenue to the city, which was counting on the money to help close a $101 million deficit this year. He requested changes that steps up the state’s power over the funds. Lawmakers must approve them by Jan. 12 to avoid having to re-introduce the bills in the next session.

The measures were aimed at addressing the financial strains that have gripped Atlantic City as its onetime dominance over East Coast gambling is eroded by competition from neighboring states. The closing of four of 12 casinos last year battered Atlantic City’s revenue, and some of those that remain have sought to lower their property-tax bills by challenging the city’s assessments. If the city runs out of cash, it won’t be able to borrow to stay afloat, Guardian said. Moody’s Investors Service grades the city’s debt Caa1, seven steps below investment grade. Standard & Poor’s ranks it B, five levels into so-called junk. “It would be foolish to bond at the rates we would have to,” he said. “If we could find anyone to take our bonds.”

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Yada yada yada.

Fed Tipping Toward December Rate Hike, Minutes Show (Hilsenrath)

The Federal Reserve sent out new signals that officials will raise interest rates in December as long as job growth and inflation trends don’t take a turn for the worse. Most officials meeting last month anticipated that December “could well be” the time to lift short-term rates after leaving them near zero for seven years, according to minutes of their last meeting three weeks ago, released Wednesday. Officials changed the wording of their policy statement at the October meeting—adding a reference to the possibility of a December increase—to ensure their options were open. The Fed has been waiting to see further improvement in the job market and to gain confidence that inflation, which is running below its 2% target, will start moving up.

“Most participants anticipated that, based on their assessment of the current economic situation and their outlook for economic activity, the labor market, and inflation, these conditions could well be met by the time of the next meeting,” the October meeting minutes said. Since the Fed’s October gathering, economic data have generally supported the central bank’s view that the job market is improving and offered some evidence wage and inflation pressures are slowly and gradually starting to build. The U.S. central bank has now warned about rate increases so many times that investors appear to be getting used to the idea. Raising the cost of borrowing typically sends stock prices tumbling, but stocks rose Wednesday, a sign that a rate increase is already priced into markets.

[..] The minutes stated “some” Fed officials felt in October it was already time to raise rates. “Some others” believed the economy wasn’t ready. The wording meant that minorities on both sides of the Fed’s rate debate are pulling in different directions, with a large center inside the central bank inclined to move. Officials cited a number of reasons to avoid delay: They risked creating uncertainty in financial markets by holding off; they risked allowing financial market excesses to build if they kept rates too low; they risked signaling a lack of confidence in the economy if they didn’t move rates higher; and they risked ignoring cumulative gains in the economy already registered. At the same time, the Fed minutes included several new signals that after the Fed does move rates higher, the subsequent path of rate increases is likely to be exceptionally shallow and gradual.

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They need to stop selling themselves. The reason why makes no difference.

Australia Blocks Ranch Sale to Foreigners on Security Fears (Bloomberg)

Australia blocked the sale of the nation’s largest private landowner to an overseas buyer, saying the location of one of the company’s 10 cattle ranches in a weapons testing area could compromise national security. S. Kidman & Co.’s properties were listed for sale in April, with local media reporting that China’s Shanghai Pengxin Group was in exclusive talks to buy the string of ranches for about A$350 million ($250 million). Treasurer Scott Morrison said in a statement that half of Kidman’s Anna Creek station, the nation’s largest single property holding, sits within the Woomera Prohibited Area – a remote stretch of the outback that’s been used to test nuclear bombs, launch satellites and track space missions. Selling Kidman in its current form to a foreigner would be “contrary to Australia’s national interest,” Morrison said in the statement.

Australia’s government has increased scrutiny of foreign acquisitions of agricultural land and earlier this month passed legislation to set up a register of overseas holdings of farm properties. Kidman’s ranches span 101,000 square kilometers (39,000 square miles), or about 1.3% of the nation’s total land area, and carry about 185,000 cattle. The Woomera range “makes a unique and sensitive contribution to Australia’s national defense and it is not unusual for governments to restrict access to sensitive areas on national security grounds,” Morrison said. All bidders have withdrawn their applications to the Foreign Investment Review Board to buy Kidman, Morrison said without identifying them, and it was “now a matter for the vendor to consider how they wish to proceed.”

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The world’s biggest hornet’s nest.

Turkey Could Cut Off Islamic State’s Supply Lines. So Why Doesn’t It? (Graeber)

In the wake of the murderous attacks in Paris, we can expect western heads of state to do what they always do in such circumstances: declare total and unremitting war on those who brought it about. They don’t actually mean it. They’ve had the means to uproot and destroy Islamic State within their hands for over a year now. They’ve simply refused to make use of it. In fact, as the world watched leaders making statements of implacable resolve at the G20 summit in Antalaya, these same leaders are hobnobbing with Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a man whose tacit political, economic, and even military support contributed to Isis’s ability to perpetrate the atrocities in Paris, not to mention an endless stream of atrocities inside the Middle East. How could Isis be eliminated? In the region, everyone knows.

All it would really take would be to unleash the largely Kurdish forces of the YPG (Democratic Union party) in Syria, and PKK (Kurdistan Workers party) guerillas in Iraq and Turkey. These are, currently, the main forces actually fighting Isis on the ground. They have proved extraordinarily militarily effective and oppose every aspect of Isis’s reactionary ideology. But instead, YPG-controlled territory in Syria finds itself placed under a total embargo by Turkey, and PKK forces are under continual bombardment by the Turkish air force. Not only has Erdoan done almost everything he can to cripple the forces actually fighting Isis; there is considerable evidence that his government has been at least tacitly aiding Isis itself. It might seem outrageous to suggest that a Nato member like Turkey would in any way support an organisation that murders western civilians in cold blood.

That would be like a Nato member supporting al-Qaida. But in fact there is reason to believe that Erdoan s government does support the Syrian branch of al-Qaida (Jabhat al-Nusra) too, along with any number of other rebel groups that share its conservative Islamist ideology. The Institute for the Study of Human Rights at Columbia University has compiled a long list of evidence of Turkish support for Isis in Syria. How has Erdogan got away with this? Mainly by claiming those fighting Isis are terrorists’ themselves And then there are Erdogan’s actual, stated positions. Back in August, the YPG, fresh from their victories in Kobani and Gire Spi, were poised to seize Jarablus, the last Isis-held town on the Turkish border that the terror organisation had been using to resupply its capital in Raqqa with weapons, materials, and recruits – Isis supply lines pass directly through Turkey.

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What’s Justin going to do when the pressure increases?

Trudeau Tells Canada To Reject Racism Amid Opposition To Refugee Plan (Reuters)

The Canadian prime minister, Justin Trudeau, urged Canadians to resist hatred and racism as a poll showed most Canadians were opposed to his plan to bring in 25,000 Syrian refugees by year-end and a flurry of racist incidents were reported around the country. The Liberals, who took power after an election last month, campaigned on a promise to bring in the refugees by 1 January. Critics say the number is too large and could threaten security following the Paris terror attacks. An Angus Reid poll released on Wednesday showed 54% of Canadians opposed the plan, up from 51% before the bloodshed in Paris.

But support for the plan also increased, with 42% in favour, up from 39% in October. Most of those who opposed Trudeau’s plan did so because of the short timeline, with 53% saying the schedule was too short to ensure all the necessary security checks were completed. Another 10% said 25,000 was too many, and 29% said Canada should not be accepting any Syrian refugees. Trudeau has vowed to stick to the plan despite the growing criticism. Travelling through Europe and Asia as part of his first global trip, Trudeau issued an appeal to Canadians to reject racism, and condemned attacks on “specific Canadians” in the aftermath of the attacks by Islamic State in Paris.

A mosque was burned in the Ontario city of Peterborough at the weekend, windows were smashed at a Hindu temple in another city, and a Muslim woman was attacked in Toronto by two men who called her a terrorist and said she should go home. “Diversity is Canada’s strength. These vicious and senseless acts of intolerance have no place in our country and run absolutely contrary to Canadian values of pluralism and acceptance,” Trudeau said. A separate poll by Leger for the TVA news network showed 73% of people in the predominantly French-speaking province of Quebec were worried about attacks in Canada while 60% felt that 25,000 refugees were too many.

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Well, some of the intolerance lasted for centuries. And is over only in law, not in practice.

History Is A Cruel Judge Of Intolerance In America (Bloomberg)

History is a cruel judge of intolerance in America. Let that be a warning to politicians rushing to bar Syrian refugees, especially Muslims, from seeking sanctuary in the U.S. Segregationists are condemned today, even those who later recanted; think of George Wallace. There are few kind words for the American nativist strain, embodied by political movements like the anti-Roman Catholic Know-Nothing Party that flourished in the 1850s. Even progressive icons like Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Chief Justice Earl Warren are censured for their role in interning Japanese-Americans in World War II. On the positive side, Seth Masket of Vox wrote this week about Governor Ralph Carr of Colorado, who in 1942 became a lonely voice for the rights of Japanese-Americans.

Now Republican presidential candidates and governors, and a handful of Democrats, are playing a politically motivated fear card. It doesn’t matter, they argue, if families and little children are fleeing mayhem and carnage in Syria. Don’t let them in, especially if they are Muslims. They cite, of course, the terrorist attack in Paris. Public concern about Syrian refugees is understandable; one of the Paris terrorists might have slipped into Europe with refugees. But real leaders shouldn’t exploit people’s fears. Sometimes their responsibility is to calm them. That’s not what we’re getting from Donald Trump, or from Governor Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, who is straining to get to the right of the other candidates.

Jindal and David Vitter, the Republican senator who is running to replace him – the election is Saturday – have warned of hordes of Syrian refugees threatening the citizens of Louisiana. Vitter said there’s an “influx coming” and that vetting can’t guard against possible “terrorist elements.” The New Orleans Times-Picayune reported this week that there are Syrian refugees in the Bayou State – 14 to be exact. The resettling agency is the New Orleans Archdiocese’s Catholics Charities. The general counsel for the Archdiocese is Wendy Vitter, the wife of Senator Vitter. After Pearl Harbor, the Roosevelt administration decided to put Japanese-Americans in guarded camps.

Colorado’s Carr objected. He said Japanese-Americans were entitled to the same constitutional rights as other citizens and decried the “shame and dishonor” of racial hatred. He was dumped by his own Republican party. The country overwhelmingly supported FDR and Earl Warren, then attorney general of California, who whipped up anti-Japanese sentiment. FDR is now celebrated as a great president. Warren went on to become governor of California and Chief Justice of the United States. His Supreme Court expanded civil rights and civil liberties. Both, however, get bad marks from most historians for their role in internment. Carr’s courage ended his political career. But history smiled. Today there’s a statue of him in downtown Denver. A scenic section of a highway bears his name. The Japanese-American Citizens League has an award in his honor.

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Someone’s got to be getting wealthy over this?!

Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia Building Fence Along Greek Border (Kath.)

The Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia is erecting a fence on its border with Greece in a bid to block refugees and migrants heading to Central Europe, Kathimerini understands. FYROM has threatened in recent days to put up a fence along the Greek border if countries further along the Balkan refugee trail reduce the number of refugees they are taking in. FYROM’s security council has also taken a decision foreseeing such a move. According to Christos Gountenoudis, the mayor of Paionia, close to the FYROM border, construction is already under way. “Machines have started work behind the border,” he told Kathimerini. The project, which is being overseen by the Balkan state’s army, is expected to raise a 1.5-kilometer-long barbed wire fence running from opposite the small Greek town of Idomeni to the bank of the Axios River.

It appears that FYROM authorities are rushing to get the fence up before countries further north close their borders. Hungary and Slovenia have already built fences along their respective borders with Croatia while Croatia has threatened to put up a fence along its border with Serbia. Thousands of migrants and refugees have crossed into FYROM from Greece in recent weeks. On Wednesday around 5,000 people gathered at Idomeni, while on Tuesday it was 4,600 and on Monday 6,892, sources said. Gountenoudis told Kathimerini he briefed Immigration Policy Minister Yiannis Mouzalas on the construction of the fence. He said he asked Mouzalas what will happen if thousands of refugees end up unable to leave Greece. “He told me the government has a plan,” he said. There are plans for reception centers in Thessaloniki, Kavala and Kilkis, the mayor said.

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Found under ‘disgrace’ in your dictionary.

EU Nations Miss Deadline To Appoint Officers For Refugee Relocations (Guardian)

EU nations have once again missed their own deadline for appointing liaison officers required to coordinate refugee relocations with Greece and Italy, according to information provided by the European commission this week. European council conclusions from 9 November noted that member states committed to appointing the liaison officers to Italy and Greece by 16 November. But the figures released the day after the self-imposed deadline show that 11 member states still have not done so – and six of these – Bulgaria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Latvia and Slovakia – have not provided liaison officers at all. At the council meeting member states had also said they would “endeavour to fill by 16 November 2015 the remaining gaps in the calls for experts and border guards” requested by the European Asylum Support Office (EASO) and Frontex, the European border control agency.

However, the commission figures reveal that only 177 of the 374 experts requested, and 392 border guards of the 775 requested, have so far been provided. The pace of relocation of refugees from the most affected countries – such as Greece and Italy – remains slow. Only 128 refugees from Italy and 30 from Greece have been relocated so far. EU member states agreed in September to relocate 160,000 people in “clear need of international protection” through a scheme set up to relocate Syrian, Eritrean and Iraqi refugees from the most affected EU states to others. The relocation is meant to take place over the next two years, but at this rate it would take 166 years to meet the commitment.

European nations are also falling short in terms of their funding pledges. As of 17 November there is a shortfall of €2.2bn (£1.5bn) to reach the €5.6bn pledged for the UN refugee agency, UNHCR, World Food Programme and other relevant organisations and funds. Member states have collectively provided €573m so far, while the EU, which is matching the national funds, has provided its €2.8bn share. Moreover, the latest data reveals that still too few member states have responded to calls from Serbia, Slovenia and Croatia to provide the resources they need to cope with the refugee crisis. Many items requested by the three countries have not been delivered, including essentials such as beds, blankets, winter tents, clothing and first aid kits.

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Not even near Greece.

20 African Migrants Lost At Sea In Atlantic After Boat Sinks (Reuters)

Around 20 African migrants are missing at sea after their boat sunk in the Atlantic Ocean around 20 miles off the coast of Western Sahara, Spanish sea rescue services said on Wednesday. Spanish lifeguards rescued 22 African men from the sea late on Tuesday in stormy conditions and recovered the corpse of one man. The search continues for the remaining migrants. Survivors say there were over 40 people traveling in the boat, including one woman, the sea rescue services spokesman said. Photographs showed the survivors being transferred from the rescue boat to Gran Canaria island where they were attended to by Red Cross workers in makeshift tents set up in the port. The sea route from West Africa to Spain’s Canary Islands was a major route for migrants attempting to enter Europe until about 10 years ago when Spain stepped up patrols.

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Only solution: immediate ban on feeding livestock antibiotics. Which won’t happen because the chemical industry likes its profits too much.

Antibiotic Resistance: World On Cusp Of ‘Post-Antibiotic Era’ (BBC)

The world is on the cusp of a “post-antibiotic era”, scientists have warned after finding bacteria resistant to drugs used when all other treatments have failed. Their report, in the Lancet, identifies bacteria able to shrug off colistin in patients and livestock in China. They said that resistance would spread around the world and raised the spectre of untreatable infections. Experts said the worrying development needed to act as a global wake-up call. Bacteria becoming completely resistant to treatment – also known as the antibiotic apocalypse – could plunge medicine back into the dark ages. Common infections would kill once again, while surgery and cancer therapies, which are reliant on antibiotics, would be under threat.

Chinese scientists identified a new mutation, dubbed the MCR-1 gene, that prevented colistin from killing bacteria. It was found in a fifth of animals tested, 15% of raw meat samples and in 16 patients. The resistance was discovered in pigs, which are routinely given the drugs in China. And the resistance had spread between a range of bacterial strains and species, including E. coli, Klebsiella pneumoniae and Pseudomonas aeruginosa. There is also evidence that it has spread to Laos and Malaysia. Prof Timothy Walsh, who collaborated on the study, from the University of Cardiff, told the BBC News website: “All the key players are now in place to make the post-antibiotic world a reality. “If MRC-1 becomes global, which is a case of when not if, and the gene aligns itself with other antibiotic resistance genes, which is inevitable, then we will have very likely reached the start of the post-antibiotic era.

“At that point if a patient is seriously ill, say with E. coli, then there is virtually nothing you can do.” Resistance to colistin has emerged before. However, the crucial difference this time is the mutation has arisen in a way that is very easily shared between bacteria. “The transfer rate of this resistance gene is ridiculously high, that doesn’t look good,” said Prof Mark Wilcox, from Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust. His hospital is now dealing with multiple cases “where we’re struggling to find an antibiotic” every month – an event he describes as being as “rare as hens’ teeth” five years ago. He said there was no single event that would mark the start of the antibiotic apocalypse, but it was clear “we’re losing the battle”.

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 May 23, 2015  Posted by at 10:31 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , ,  1 Response »


G. G. Bain Hudson-Fulton celebration. Union League Club. New York. 1909

Our $58 Trillion Love Affair With Debt, In One Crazy Chart (CNBC)
Fed On Track To Hike Rates As Economic Headwinds Wane: Yellen (Reuters)
BRICS To Establish New Multi-Currency Financial Order (RT)
How ‘Mathiness’ Made Me Jaded About Economics (Bloomberg)
Jim Chanos Thinks China Could Be The Next Greece (MarketWatch)
Greece and Creditors Struggle for Elusive Deal (WSJ)
Eurozone Says No Greek Deal Without IMF (FT)
Yanis Varoufakis Is More Than His Clothes (AlJazeera)
How Politics Will Seal The Fate Of Greece (FT)
German Business Morale Weakens And Trade Dampens Q1 Growth (Reuters)
The Strikes Sweeping Germany Are Here To Stay (Guardian)
Bank Of England Secretly Investigates Financial Fallout Of Brexit (Guardian)
GM Inquiry Said to Find Criminal Wrongdoing (NY Times)
Ireland Says Yes To Same-Sex Marriage By Up To 2:1 Margin (Ind.ie)
‘March Against Monsanto’ in 38 Countries, 428 Cities (RT)
Bayer CEO: The World Needs An Antibiotics Bailout (Reuters)
California Accepts Offer By Farmers To Cut Water Usage By 25% (Guardian)
Attacks On The Last Elephants And Rhinos Threaten Entire Ecosystems (Monbiot)
Yet Another Antarctic Ice Mass Is Becoming Destabilized (WaPo)

The one area where the US sees actual growth.

Our $58 Trillion Love Affair With Debt, In One Crazy Chart (CNBC)

Those having a hard time finding growth in the U.S. economy are looking in the wrong places. Forget about real estate, technology or manufacturing: The real American growth industry is debt. While gross domestic product has lingered in the 2 to 2.5% growth range for years, the level of debt as measured through credit market instruments has exploded. As the nation entered the 1980s, there was comparatively little debt—just about $4.3 trillion. That was only about 1.5 times the size of gross GDP. Then a funny thing happened. The gap began to widen during the decade, and then became basically parabolic through the ’90s and into the early part of the 21st century.

Though debt took a brief decline in 2009 as the country limped its way out of the financial crisis, it has climbed again and is now, at $58.7 trillion, 3.3 times the size of GDP and about 13 times what it was in 1980, according to data from the Federal Reserve’s St. Louis branch. (The total debt measure is not to be confused with the $18.2 trillion national debt, which is 102% of GDP and is a subset of the total figure.) Of the total debt, nonfinancial debt leads the way at $41.4 trillion, which breaks down as household and nonprofits holding just shy of $13.5 trillion, nonfinancial business debt at $12 trillion and total government debt at $15.9 trillion.

Growth, such as it is, has been present in all debt categories: In the fourth quarter of 2014, when GDP was growing at just a 2.2% rate, business debt jumped 7.2%, federal government debt surged 5.4% and household debt rose 2.7%, with overall domestic nonfinancial debt up 4.7. So while many economists have bemoaned the 0.2% GDP growth in the first quarter and the dimming prospects for growth the remainder of the year, the debt engine is keeping things humming along—until, of course, the next crisis comes and we start all over again.

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What was it? 0.2% GDP growth in Q1? That can’t be the reason. The Fed made up its mind a long time ago.

Fed On Track To Hike Rates As Economic Headwinds Wane: Yellen (Reuters)

Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen was clearer than ever on Friday that the central bank was poised to raise interest rates this year, as the U.S. economy was set to bounce back from an early-year slump and as headwinds at home and abroad waned. Yellen spoke amid growing concern at the Fed about volatility in financial markets once it begins to raise rates, and a desire to begin coaxing skeptical investors toward accepting the inevitable: that a 6-1/2-year stretch of near-zero interest rates would soon end. In a speech to a business group in Providence, Rhode Island, Yellen said she expected the world’s largest economy to strengthen after a slowdown due to “transitory factors” in recent months, and noted that some of the weakness might be due to “statistical noise.”

The confident tone suggested the Fed wants to set the stage as early as possible for its first rate rise in nearly a decade, with Yellen stressing that monetary policy must get out ahead of an economy whose future looks bright. While cautioning that such forecasting is always highly uncertain, and citing room for improvement in the labor market, the Fed chief said delaying a policy tightening until employment and inflation hit the central bank’s targets risked overheating the economy. “For this reason, if the economy continues to improve as I expect, I think it will be appropriate at some point this year to take the initial step to raise the federal funds rate target,” and begin normalizing monetary policy, Yellen told the Providence Chamber of Commerce.

In a speech in March, Yellen said only that a rate hike “may well be warranted later this year,” though the Fed was at the time giving “serious consideration” to making the move. Investors globally are attempting to predict when the Fed will modestly tighten policy. Most economists point to September, while traders in futures markets held firm on December. Ahead of a three-day U.S. holiday weekend, Treasury yields hit session highs after Yellen spoke on Friday, and short-term interest rate futures extended losses, hitting session lows. U.S. stocks were largely flat. “This is probably the most telegraphed Fed lift-off in some time,” said Bruce Zaro at Bolton Global. “I think they’re concerned about the market’s reaction – they don’t want to have a period of volatility that causes the market to react in a crash-type form.”

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At some point it will reach critical mass.

BRICS To Establish New Multi-Currency Financial Order (RT)

The new BRICS initiatives break the monopoly of existing western institutions over the financial order – a very important symbolic change, as it’s the first time a global financial institution is led by developing countries, said experts to RT. “If the new development bank experiment succeeds, it will show the world that the emerging countries can do and manage a multilateral economic institution by themselves,” Akshay Mathur, geo-economic fellow head of research at the Indian Council on Global Relations, told RT at the BRICS academic forum. While talking about the bank’s challenge to western-dominated financial system, he said that one of its goals is to stimulate lending to countries in local currencies for the new projects in that region.

“Right now the bank has clauses in its charter to encourage lending in local currencies. It can do it for lending in the new projects in the East, for Russian projects in the ruble,” he said. BRICS has already employed tools to move away from US dollar dominance, believes H.H.S. Viswanathan, Distinguished Fellow at India’s Observer Research Foundation. “A lot of trade between China and Russia is already taking place in local currencies. As far as India is concerned, it’s not that advanced, but in some areas – yes, we are using local currencies,” he said adding that the main advantage of the banks’ moving away from the dollar is that trading in local currencies reduces the operational cost.

Akshay Mathur also pointed out the potential risks the bank may face, cautioning that China, the largest of the five BRICS economies, could end up dominating the new financial institution. China has already shown notable success in internationalizing yuan. It is issuing foreign loans in its national currency and has currency swaps with 21 countries. “China is lending now more than the World Bank and the IMF combined in Africa and Latin America. So, what I mean about the risk of Chinese financial architecture is that we want to move to a more multilateral multi-currency equitable architecture, because now we have been moving from the risks of one currency to the risks of another,” he said.

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“..math is central to everything that economists do. But the way math is used in macroeconomics isn’t the same as in the hard sciences..”

How ‘Mathiness’ Made Me Jaded About Economics (Bloomberg)

Economics has a lot of math. In no other subject except mathematics itself will you see so many proofs and theorems. Some branches of econ, such as game theory, could legitimately be housed in university math departments. But even in fields such as macroeconomics, which ostensibly deal with real-world phenomena, math is central to everything that economists do. But the way math is used in macroeconomics isn’t the same as in the hard sciences. This isn’t something that most non-economists realize, so I think I had better explain.

In physics, if you write down an equation, you expect the variables to correspond to real things that you can measure and predict. For example, if you write down an equation for the path of a cannonball, you would expect that equation to let you know how to aim your cannon in order to actually hit something. This close correspondence between math and reality is what allowed us to land spacecraft on the moon. It also allowed engineers to build your computer, your car and most of the things you use. Some economics is the same way, especially in microeconomics, or the study of individuals’ actions — you can predict which kind of auction will fetch the highest prices, or how many people will ride a train. But macroeconomics, which looks at the broad economy, is different.

Most of the equations in the models aren’t supported by evidence. For example, something called the consumption euler equation is at the core of almost every modern macroeconomic model. It specifies a relationship between consumption growth and interest rates. But when researchers looked at real data on consumption growth and interest rates, they found that the equation gives exactly the wrong predictions! Yet it continues to be used as the core of almost every macro model. If you read the macro literature, you see that almost every famous, respected paper is chock full of these sort of equations that don’t match reality. This paper predicts that everyone will hold the same amount of cash. This paper predicts that people buy financial assets that only pay off if people are able to change the wage that they ask to receive.

These and many other mathematical statements don’t remotely correspond to observable reality, nor do they have any evidence in support of them. Yet they are thrown into big multi-equation models, and those models are then judged only on how well they fit the aggregate data (which usually isn’t very well). That whole approach would never fly in engineering. Engineering is something you expect to work. But macroeconomists often treat their models as simply ways, in the words of David Andolfatto, vice president of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, to “organize our thinking” about the world. In other words, macroeconomists use math to make their thoughts concrete, to persuade others, and to check the internal consistency of their (sometimes preposterous) ideas, but not to actually predict things in the real world.

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So do I: .

Jim Chanos Thinks China Could Be The Next Greece (MarketWatch)

China could be the next Greece and its debt woes may even exceed the European country’s in the next few years, predicts prominent hedge-fund manager Jim Chanos of Kynikos Associates. “I joke to my Chinese friends, somewhat half-seriously, another three-four years they are going to be like my homeland Greece,” said Chanos in an interview, which will air this weekend on Wall Street Week, a show hosted by Anthony Scaramucci, co founder of investment-management firm SkyBridge Capital. The perennial China bear pointed to China’s debt-to-GDP ratio of nearly 300% and projected that the ratio is likely to balloon to 400% over the next few years. Here’s an excerpt from the interview:

“The problem is the credit story,” Chanos said. “China’s banking system is bloated and it’s basically taking on more and more leverage.” Chanos declined to elaborate further when contacted for comments but he has been an unabashed critic of China’s debt-fueled economic growth and has been sounding alarm bells of possible hard landing for the world’s second largest economy for several years. A so-called hard landing can refer to a rapid economic slowdown that occurs typically as a government’s central bank is attempting to tighten fiscal policy and combat inflation. China’s total debt hit $28.2 trillion in 2014, equivalent to 280% of its gross domestic product, according to The Wall Street Journal. Chinese monetary officials earlier this month lowered interest rates to combat a worse-than-expected economic slowdown as companies and governments struggled under heavy debt. China’s GDP rose 7% in the first quarter, slowing from the 7.3% growth in the fourth quarter, the National Bureau of Statistics said in April.

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As I predicted, the June 5 date is no longer a stumbling block. The 16th looks darker, though.

Greece and Creditors Struggle for Elusive Deal (WSJ)

Greece and its lenders are casting around for ways to prevent the country from defaulting on debts to the International Monetary Fund in June, as negotiations to unlock bailout aid barely inch forward and the Athens government runs dangerously low on cash. Greece needs financial help in some form by mid-June in order to repay a series of IMF loans falling due, several officials from the country and its creditors said. The Greek government is expected to be able to cover pensions and public-sector wages in May, and it can probably scrape together enough cash to repay a €300 million IMF loan on June 5, these people said.

But three subsequent IMF payments totaling €1.25 billion due in mid-June pose a severe challenge to Athens’s bare treasury, the officials say, and could force the government to either take politically costly measures such as raiding pension funds or delay the payments and risk an unpredictable fallout at home and abroad. Missing an IMF payment would signal that Athens’s coffers are empty. That could spark heavy deposit withdrawals from Greek banks and force capital controls, deepening the country’s economic crisis, said Jacob Kirkegaard, senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington.

The looming IMF payments are putting massive pressure on the government, led by the left-wing Syriza party, to agree by early June to the economic-overhaul demands of its creditors. The IMF itself, which is withholding fresh loans pending a deal on policy measures, wants tough pension cutbacks and labor deregulation, without which it believes Greece can’t achieve sustainable growth or solvency. Those measures are anathema to Syriza, elected in January on an antiausterity platform, leaving Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras faced with only unappealing options. Signing the creditors’ terms and putting them to parliament could split his party. A referendum or elections would need time, which is fast running out, and could trigger uncertainty, bank runs and capital controls.

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The White House will be needed to get the IMF in line.

Eurozone Says No Greek Deal Without IMF (FT)

European leaders have told Greece there will be no deal to release desperately needed bailout aid without approval from the more hardline IMF, setting up a stand-off that could leave cash-strapped Athens without funds well into June. The message, delivered by Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, to Alexis Tsipras, her Greek counterpart, at a private meeting in Riga, Latvia’s capital, as well as by lower-level European officials to their Greek interlocutors, comes as the IMF has been weighing whether to withhold its €3.6bn portion of the €7.2bn bailout tranche Athens needs to avoid default. Eurozone and Greek negotiators have been pushing to complete a deal by the end of the month to free up bailout funds before the first in a series of loan repayments owed the IMF totalling €1.5bn falls due June 5.

But securing IMF approval for a bailout deal significantly complicates that timeline. IMF officials believe Mr Tsipras’s government has reversed many of the economic reforms the IMF had agreed with previous Greek governments and do not feel Athens will be able to hit budget targets that would allow its growing debt pile to be reduced quickly. IMF staff have told their board they would not disburse aid without a “comprehensive” deal that started to lower debt levels. They also want EU assurances that Greece will be able to pay its bills for the next 12 months, a demand that could require eurozone governments to commit to another bailout programme. “It has to be a comprehensive approach, not a quick and dirty job,” Christine Lagarde, IMF chief, said at an event in Rio de Janeiro on Friday..

Greek officials have told their eurozone counterparts they are worried about the IMF’s hardline stance and have argued their conditions are politically undeliverable, especially when it comes to the pension reforms, which remain the biggest stumbling block. The IMF has clashed with the European Commission over how tough a line to take, with the commission going so far as to moot cutting the IMF out of a deal. But German officials have bristled at the commission’s interventions and have made clear all three bailout monitors — the IMF, the commission and the ECB — must approve any deal. “The deal must be concluded with the three institutions,” Ms Merkel said at a gathering of leaders from the EU and former Soviet states on Friday. “There is very, very intensive work to be done.”

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“..when close to a solution, the EU goes back to the table with demands that make no sense in the current context..”

Yanis Varoufakis Is More Than His Clothes (AlJazeera)

As the media picked apart Varoufakis, from his smirk to his casual footwear, ugly stereotypes about Greeks resurfaced. In a German daily, the reporter wrote that while “the other finance ministers looked pale and tired, Varoufakis looked as if he had just come back from vacation.” The fallacy of hardworking northerners and lazy southerners should have been put to rest with the 20th century but is still around in 2015. The press briefings cited in most media — which come almost exclusively from unofficial, anonymous sources — said that the discussions that took place over the past few months were no better. They spoke of Greece having no viable proposals and of living in an alternative reality.

They accused Varoufakis of being an ideologue, as though German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s notion of “expansionary contraction,” which was used to justify the austerity dogma, wasn’t in and of itself an ideological intervention (let alone a contradiction in terms). They even complained that Varoufakis was lecturing them on macroeconomics. He was, in a way. “One of the great ironies of the Eurogroup is that there is no macroeconomic discussion. It’s all rules based, as if the rules are God given and as if the rules can go against the rules of macroeconomics,” Varoufakis said in The Irish Times, in response to a criticism by Ireland’s finance minister that he was “too theoretical.”

For now, Varoufakis, like Greece, enjoys too much unwanted attention. While support for Syriza is growing and the party is now leading with 21 percentage points over New Democracy, everyone from everyday supporters of the party (as recent polls have shown) to Greek businesses agrees that the negotiations have gone on too long. But it’s also becoming obvious that when close to a solution, the EU goes back to the table with demands that make no sense in the current context. Earlier this week The Wall Street Journal reported that German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble “showed no willingness to compromise in the negotiations to unlock the final installment of Greece’s €245 billion bailout.”

And in late-night talks on Thursday, Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras met with his counterparts from France and Germany; the atmosphere, Bloomberg reported, was convivial, but the team failed to reach an agreement to release additional bailout funds. We’re running out of time, as we’re only a few weeks before Greece is forced to default on billions of euros in debt repayments. Europe and the international media should stop talking about its finance minister’s clothes and address his nation’s needs and the ideas that he is putting on the table.

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Wait, who said that before? “The Greek crisis was always as much about politics as economics. Now it is all about politics.” I sure didn’t use the same ‘logic’, however: Greece Is Now Just A Political Issue .

How Politics Will Seal The Fate Of Greece (FT)

Forget debt ratios, fiscal balances, liquidity crunches and the rest. The EU and IMF technicians negotiating with Athens are going through the motions. The Greek crisis was always as much about politics as economics. Now it is all about politics. There are two theories of the Syriza government led by Alexis Tsipras. One presents a cast of bungling amateurs who have spent the past several months digging Greece into an ever deeper economic hole — all the while squandering the trust and goodwill of its eurozone partners. The other says the antics of Yanis Varoufakis, finance minister, are an elaborate political charade calculated to set Greece free from the shackles of merciless creditors.

The first hypothesis is the most popular. The preening and pirouetting, the interviews in glossy magazines, the undergraduate Marxism and love of the limelight — all point to a colossal failure on Mr Varoufakis’s part to grasp the depth of Greece’s plight or the sensitivities of its European partners. Along the way, tens of billions of dollars have drained from Greek banks as citizens stash their savings elsewhere. The conspiracy theory, though, also has its adherents. They start with the assumption that no one could be quite as witless as Syriza has often seemed. Mr Tsipras’s government knew from the outset that it could not reconcile its domestic promises with Greece’s international obligations.

The problem was that Greeks had voted at once for an end to austerity and to stay in the euro. A crisis had to be manufactured to show the government’s hand had been forced. By the Germans, of course. I lean towards the former theory, but it hardly matters. Even at this late hour it would be unwise to say that a deal with creditors is absolutely impossible. High-stakes politics occasionally demands that pigs are seen to fly. What strikes me, though, is how far the conversation in other capitals has moved on. The risk of contagion in the rest of the eurozone has long been discussed. The talk now is about the chaos that would descend on Greece after default and euro exit. Would it be manageable or would the EU be left with a failed state?

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More ‘logic’: “..in view of the long recovery the German economy already has behind it, it was normal that its growth rate would be weaker than the rest of the euro zone..”

German Business Morale Weakens And Trade Dampens Q1 Growth (Reuters)

German business morale deteriorated slightly in May for the first time in seven months though it remained at a high level overall, a leading survey showed, adding to signs of softening in Europe’s largest economy. Although growth levels remain decent, separate data published on Friday showed the slowing of the German economy during the first quarter was down to a drag from foreign trade, which had propelled the economy for much of the past decade. The Munich-based Ifo think tank said its business climate index, based on a monthly survey of 7,000 firms, edged down to 108.5 in May from 108.6 in April. That was slightly above the Reuters consensus forecast for 108.3, sending the euro to a day’s high against the dollar.

It comes after ZEW’s survey this week showed investor sentiment weakening and a purchasing managers’ survey (PMI) showed private sector expansion slowing. “With today’s GDP data, yesterday’s PMIs and now the Ifo, new doubts about the strength of the German economy could emerge again,” said Carsten Brzeski, economist at ING. “Germany is at the end of a very positive reform-growth cycle, which is artificially extended by external tailwinds,” he said, adding that in view of the long recovery the German economy already has behind it, it was normal that its growth rate would be weaker than the rest of the euro zone. The Ifo survey showed companies were more optimistic about the current situation than at any point since June 2014 but they became slightly more pessimistic about their future prospects.

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Germany is not used to inequality.

The Strikes Sweeping Germany Are Here To Stay (Guardian)

German strikes once seemed like German jokes: a contradiction in terms. But no more: this year, Europe’s largest economy is on course to set a new record for industrial action, with everyone from train drivers, kindergarten and nursery teachers and post office workers staging walkouts recently. The strike wave is more than a conjunctural blip: it is another facet of the inexorable disintegration of what used to be the “German model”. Good economic conditions play a part, but unions in the thriving export industries are not the ones that are striking these days. Strikes cluster in domestic services, especially the public sector, and indications are that they are here to stay.

In the old days, the powerful unions of the metalworkers set the pace for wage increases throughout the economy. But the last time IG Metall went on a nationwide strike was in 1984. In the 1990s, its members, in particular those in the large car factories, learned the hard way that manufacturing jobs could more easily than ever be moved abroad, to China or the formerly communist eastern Europe. International competition is now no longer just about market share, but also employment. It did not take long for the union leadership to notice this. Fear of unemployment, incidentally, accounts also for German manufacturing workers’ unwillingness to contribute to macroeconomic balance under European monetary union by pushing for higher wages in order to bring down the German export surplus.

Today, the action has shifted to services, where job export is more difficult. But other factors also account for the rise of industrial disorder. Since unification, public employers, in pursuit of fiscal consolidation, have broken up Germany’s peculiar public sector collective bargaining regime, which covered everyone from refuse collectors to professors and generated, essentially, the same yearly wage increases for all. Moreover, several occupations – including train drivers, teachers and postal workers – lost the uniquely German employment status of Beamter, of civil servants without a right to strike but with lifelong tenure and guaranteed pay raises in line with the rate of economic growth.

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How is this a big story? Of course the BoE studies Brexit.

Bank Of England Secretly Investigates Financial Fallout Of Brexit (Guardian)

Bank of England officials are secretly researching the financial shocks that could hit Britain if there is a vote to leave the European Union in the forthcoming referendum. The Bank blew its cover on Friday when it accidentally emailed details of the project – including how the bank intended to fend off any inquiries about its work – direct to the Guardian. According to the confidential email, the press and most staff in Threadneedle Street must be kept in the dark about the work underway, which has been dubbed Project Bookend. It spells out that if anyone asks about the project, the taskforce must say the investigation has nothing to do with the referendum, saying only that staff are involved in examining “a broad range of European economic issues” that concern the Bank.

The revelation is likely to embarrass the bank governor, Mark Carney, who has overhauled the central bank’s operations and promised greater transparency over its decision-making. MPs are now likely to ask whether the Bank intended to inform parliament that a major review of Britain’s prospects outside the EU was being undertaken by the institution that acts as the UK’s main financial regulator. Carney is also likely to come under pressure within the Bank to reveal whether there are other undercover projects underway.

Officials are likely to have kept the project under wraps to avoid entering the highly charged debate around the EU referendum, which has jumped to the top of the political agenda since the Conservatives secured an overall majority. Many business leaders and pro-EU campaigners have warned that “Brexit” would hit British exports and damage the standing of the City of London.

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More cooperative criminals?!

GM Inquiry Said to Find Criminal Wrongdoing (NY Times)

Justice Department investigators have identified criminal wrongdoing in General Motors’ failure to disclose a defect tied to at least 104 deaths, and are negotiating what is expected to be a record penalty, according to people briefed on the inquiry. A settlement could be reached as soon as this summer. The final number is still being negotiated, but it is expected to eclipse the $1.2 billion paid last year by Toyota for concealing unintended acceleration problems in its vehicles, said the people, who did not want to be identified because the negotiations weren’t complete. GM’s eagerness to resolve the investigation – a strategy that sets it apart from Toyota, which fought prosecutors – is expected to earn it so-called cooperation credit, one of the people said.

That credit could translate into a somewhat smaller penalty than if GM had declined to cooperate. Former GM employees, some of whom were dismissed last year, are under investigation as well and could face criminal charges. Prosecutors and GM are also still negotiating what misconduct the company would admit to. For more than a year, federal prosecutors in Manhattan and the F.B.I. have homed in on whether the company failed to comply with laws requiring timely disclosure of vehicle defects and misled federal regulators about the extent of the problems, the people who were briefed on the inquiry said. The authorities also examined whether GM committed fraud during its bankruptcy proceedings in 2009 by not disclosing the defect.

An agreement with the Justice Department, which could still fall apart, would represent a crucial step as GM tries to move past a scandal-laden year that tainted its reputation for quality and safety and damaged its bottom line. “We are cooperating fully with all requests,” the automaker said in a statement. “We are unable to comment on the status of the investigation, including timing.” In February 2014, the automaker began recalling 2.6 million Chevrolet Cobalts and other small cars with faulty ignitions that could unexpectedly turn off the engine, disabling power steering, power brakes and the airbags. The switch crisis prompted a wave of additional recalls by GM for various safety issues. All told, GM recalled more than 30 million vehicles worldwide last year – a record for the automaker.

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Is there any other choice?

Ireland Says Yes To Same-Sex Marriage By Up To 2:1 Margin (Ind.ie)

The same-sex marriage referendum will be comfortably passed, based on early tallies from across the country. The margin of victory is tipped to be heading towards a 2:1 majority. The high turnout favoured Yes campaigners as the efforts to get the vote out worked effectively, particularly among young voters. Few, if any locations, are showing a No vote winning the referendum. Even in traditionally conservative rural area, the vote is coming in at 50:50. Dublin will be strongly Yes, right across the city and county. But this trend is being matched in locations across the country.

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“Monsanto is a monopoly, and it’s acting like one. It’s basically controlling 90% of the seed market in the United States..”

‘March Against Monsanto’ in 38 Countries, 428 Cities (RT)

Hundreds of thousands of demonstrators in 428 cities are expected to turn out this weekend to protest agribusiness giant Monsanto. The third annual ‘March Against Monsanto’ seeks to highlight the company’s part in control of the food supply. The worldwide protest scheduled for May 23 is a continuation of growing awareness and opposition to industrial agriculture’s increasing consolidation of farming resources and methods, according to organizers. In 2013, the first March Against Monsanto garnered more than 2 million protesters in 436 cities across the world, according to a previous report by RT. Similar numbers were reported for last year’s demonstrations.

Monsanto’s track record has been scrutinized ever since it aided US warfare during the Vietnam war. Agent Orange was manufactured for the US Department of Defense primarily by Monsanto Corporation, the use of which is estimated to have killed and maimed around 400,000 while causing birth defects for 500,000 children. Scientific studies have linked the chemicals in Monsanto’s biocides to Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease, autism, and cancer. “People are fed up. We should break up Monsanto,” Adam Eidinger of Occupy Monsanto told RT. “Monsanto is a monopoly, and it’s acting like one. It’s basically controlling 90% of the seed market in the United States. We wouldn’t let one cell phone company control 90% of the cell phones. But for some reason we let food be controlled.”

As the most powerful multinational biotech corporation today, Monsanto has drawn the ire of those within the movement for its firm grip on the global food chain. The company’s control and advancement of genetically modified organism (GMO) seeds is of prime concern. “In polls conducted by the New York Times, Washington Post, Consumer Reports, and many others, over 90% of respondents were in support of national GMO labeling – an initiative that has been defeated time and time again at the state level thanks to heavy spending by Monsanto-backed lobbying groups,” wrote March Against Monsanto in a news release.

Amid a wave of concern over genetically engineered foods sweeping through the US and around the world, major agribusiness and biotechnology conglomerates like Monsanto have spent immense amounts of cash to cloud the ‘right-to-know’ movement in the US. According to the Center for Food Safety, dozens of US states have in recent years considered labeling legislation and ballot initiatives while a handful have passed laws mandating GMO transparency. Vermont’s governor signed the nation’s first clean GMO-labeling requirement into law in 2014, to take effect in 2016, but a coalition of biotech firms filed a lawsuit to prevent that from happening. Other states have passed labeling laws, but with strings attached.

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These are the people who are instrumental in creating the problem, and now want us to pay them for a solution.

Bayer CEO: The World Needs An Antibiotics Bailout (Reuters)

German drugmaker Bayer expects the world’s largest economies to pool billions of euros in funding for the development of antibiotics against the growing threat of drug-resistant superbugs, its chief executive said on Friday. “I expect a multinational fund for antibiotics research. One country alone can’t shoulder it,” CEO Marijn Dekkers told Germany’s Der Spiegel magazine, according to an excerpt of an interview provided to Reuters on Friday. The funds were expected to be pledged during the June summit of the Group of Seven (G7) wealthy nations in Germany, he was quoted as saying. He mentioned reports that four new antibiotics would cost $22.4 billion to develop, saying that was “maybe a bit too much, but it will be really expensive”.

The World Health Organization has deemed the rising tide of drug-resistant bacteria, or so-called superbugs, as the “single greatest challenge in infectious diseases”. Germany’s health ministry has said Berlin would seek to address drug-resistant superbugs as part of the country’s presidency of the G7, leading up to the G7 summit in Bavaria in June. Governments should award development contracts for more antibiotics to pharmaceuticals companies, modelled on development contracts tendered to the defence industry, Dekkers told Der Spiegel. The pharma industry has argued that the private sector was being deterred from funding the development of new antibiotics because, to prevent the emergence of even more resistant bacteria, they would only be used when existing therapies have failed.

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A frist step. But nobody knows if it will be enough.

California Accepts Offer By Farmers To Cut Water Usage By 25% (Guardian)

California’s drought has produced a plot twist too singular even for Chinatown: farmers volunteering to give up a quarter of their water. Scores of farmers in the delta of the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers made the unprecedented offer on Friday in a deal to stave off even steeper mandatory cuts. Agricultural players have fiercely guarded their water rights since the 19th century, rebuffing competing claims from cities and other rivals in the so-called water wars, a web of intrigues immortalised in Roman Polanski’s Chinatown. The film’s fictional farmers never countenanced voluntarily cutting their water use but as California endures a fourth year of drought growers in the delta calculated it was the lesser evil.

By promising to forfeit a quarter of this season’s water – by fallowing land or finding other measures to cut usage – they have averted harsher restrictions from state authorities. The State Water Board had warned it was days away from ordering some of the first cuts in more than 30 years to senior water rights holders. “This proposal helps delta growers manage the risk of potentially deeper curtailment, while ensuring significant water conservation efforts in this fourth year of drought,” State Water Board chair Felicia Marcus said in a statement.

“It allows participating growers to share in the sacrifice that people throughout the state are facing because of the severe drought, while protecting their economic well-being by giving them some certainty regarding exercise of the State Water Board’s enforcement discretion at the beginning of the planting season.” The agreement applies only to so-called riparian rights holders – farmers with direct access to streams. Those who participate can opt to reduce water diversions from streams by 25%, or fallow 25% of their land. In both cases, the reductions will be from 2013 levels.

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They threaten my mental sanity, too.

Attacks On The Last Elephants And Rhinos Threaten Entire Ecosystems (Monbiot)

Until 2008, conservationists, in some places at least, appeared to be winning. But in that year the number of rhinos killed in South Africa rose (from 13 in 2007) to 83. By 2011, the horrible tally had risen to 448. It climbed to 668 in 2012, 1004 in 2013 and 1215 in 2014. In the first four months of this year, 393 rhinos have been killed there, which is 18% more than in the same period last year. The reasons for this acceleration in the Great Global Polishing are complex and not always easy to tease out. But they appear to be connected to rising prosperity in Vietnam, the exhaustion of illegal stocks held by Chinese doctors and, possibly, speculative investment in a scarce and tangible asset during the financial crisis. Corruption and judicial failure help to keep the trade alive.

Already, the western black rhino is extinct (the declaration was made in 2011). The northern white rhino has been reduced to five animals: a male at the end of its anticipated lifespan and four females, scattered between Kenya, the US and the Czech Republic. Similar stories can be told about some populations of elephants – in particular the forest elephants of west and central Africa. It’s not just these wonderful, enchanting creatures that are destroyed by poaching, but also many of the living processes of the places they inhabit. Elephants and rhinos are ecological engineers, creating conditions that hundreds of other species have evolved to exploit. As the paper in Science Advances notes, the great beasts maintain a constantly shifting mosaic of habitats through a cycle of browsing and toppling and trampling, followed by the regrowth of the trees and the other plants they eat.

They open up glades for other herbivores, and spaces in which predators can hunt. They spread the seeds of trees that have no other means of dispersal (other animals are too small to swallow the seeds whole, and grind them up). Many trees in Africa and Asia are distributed exclusively by megaherbivores. They transport nutrients from rich places to poor ones and in some places reduce the likelihood of major bushfires, by creating firebreaks and eating twigs and leaves that would otherwise accumulate as potential fuel on the ground. Many animal species have co-evolved with them: the birds that eat their ectoparasites, the fish that feed on hippos’ fighting wounds (some of these species, I believe, are now used for fish pedicures), the wide range of life that depends on their dung for food and moisture, on their wallows for habitats, on the fissures they create in trees for nesting holes.

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Crumbling stability all around.

Yet Another Antarctic Ice Mass Is Becoming Destabilized (WaPo)

The troubling news continues this week for the Antarctic peninsula region, which juts out from the icy continent. Last week, scientists documented threats to the Larsen C and the remainder of the Larsen B ice shelf (most of which collapsed in 2002). The remnant of Larsen B, NASA researchers said, may not last past 2020. And as for Larsen C, the Scotland-sized ice shelf could also be at potentially “imminent risk” due to a rift across its mass that is growing in size (though it appears more stable than the remainder of Larsen B). And the staccato of May melt news isn’t over, it seems.

Thursday in Science, researchers from the University of Bristol in Britain, along with researchers from Germany, France and the Netherlands, reported on the retreat of a suite of glaciers farther south from Larsen B and C along the Bellingshausen Sea, in a region known as the Southern Antarctic Peninsula. Using satellite based and gravity measurements, the research team found that “a major portion of the region has, since 2009, destabilized” and accounts for “a major fraction of Antarctica’s contribution to rising sea level.” The likely cause of the change, they say, is warmer waters reaching the base of mostly submerged ice shelves that hold back larger glaciers — melting them from below.

This has been a common theme in Antarctica recently — a similar mechanism has been postulated for melting of ice shelves in nearby West Antarctica (which contains vastly more ice, and more potential sea level rise, than does the Antarctic peninsula). “This is one of now three really quite substantial signals that we’ve seen from different parts of West Antarctica and the Antarctic peninsula that is all going in the same way,” said Jonathan Bamber of the University of Bristol, one of the paper’s authors. The other two are the losses of ice in the Larsen ice shelf region — where glaciers have sped up their seaward lurches following past ice shelf collapses — and in West Antarctica.

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Mar 252015
 
 March 25, 2015  Posted by at 7:39 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,  Comments Off on Debt Rattle March 25 2015


William Henry Jackson Jupiter & Lake Worth R.R., Florida 1896

The Long-Distance Relationship Between Americans and Jobs (WSJ)
American Cash Is Flooding Into European Stocks (CNN)
Bank of Canada, Government and Others Face Lawsuit for IMF Conspiracy (Epoch T.)
ECB Said to Limit Greek Lenders’ Treasury-Bill Holdings (Bloomberg)
Greeks Celebrate Independence as EU Creditors Discuss Their Fate (Bloomberg)
Next Task For Tsipras Is To Convince His Party (Kathimerini)
Greece: Fascists At The Gate (Hallinan)
China’s Influence Poised To Climb In Revamp Of Postwar Order (Bloomberg)
The New Chinese Dream (Pepe Escobar)
Gulf Should Be More Worried About Yemen Than Oil (CNBC)
Oil Stand-Off In Ukraine Shows Oligarchs Won Maidan Revolution (Sputnik)
Fiscal Virtue And Fiscal Vice – Macroeconomics At A Crossroads (Skidelsky)
Pension Funds Seek Shelter From Dollar’s Rise (WSJ)
Brazil Investigates Deficit-Ridden Pension Fund (Bloomberg)
Money May Make The World Go Round, But At What Cost? (BBC)
Obama Snubs NATO Chief as Crisis Rages (Bloomberg)
Paulson and Warren: The Unlikely Twin Towers of Dodd-Frank (Bloomberg)
Presidents, Bankers, the Neo-Cold War and the World Bank (Nomi Prins)
Financial Feudalism (Dmitry Orlov)
Antibiotics In Meat Rising Fast Worldwide, Especially Bacon (UPI)
Monsanto Bites Back at Roundup Findings (WSJ)

3 trillion kilometers driven last year.

The Long-Distance Relationship Between Americans and Jobs (WSJ)

For more Americans, jobs are moving out of reach, literally. The number of “nearby jobs”–jobs within a typical commute for residents in a major metropolitan area–dropped 7% between 2000 and 2012, according to a new study of census data by Elizabeth Kneebone and Natalie Holmes of the Metropolitan Policy Program at the Brookings Institution. Minorities and poor Americans, who have moved to the suburbs in droves, fared worse. The number of nearby jobs fell 17% for Hispanic residents and 14% for blacks over this time period, compared with a drop of 6% for whites. Typical poor residents saw a drop in job proximity of 17%, versus 6% for the nonpoor. The growing distance between Americans and job opportunities is a discouraging trend amid what’s become the strongest job creation in two decades.

Last month, U.S. employers added a seasonally adjusted 295,000 jobs, the 12th straight month of 200,000-plus net job creation. That’s the best streak since 1995. Most of those jobs are full-time. (In 2012, where the Brookings analysis ends, overall U.S. employment in America’s largest metros was about 2% higher than in 2000, following the Great Recession’s catastrophic job losses.) But what matters for Americans’ employment prospects isn’t just the number of job opportunities, or even how “good” they are, but where they are. People near jobs are more likely to work, and have shorter job searches and periods of joblessness—especially black Americans, women and older workers, Brookings says. Among the poor, being near a job increases the chances of leaving welfare.

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The world gets more distorted by the day.

American Cash Is Flooding Into European Stocks (CNN)

American cash is pouring into European stocks. Last week alone, U.S.-based funds sent a record amount -$3.9 billion – into Europe equities. That’s according to EPFR Global, a research firm that tracks fund flow data. “The trend is definitely accelerating,” says Cameron Brandt, director of research at EPFR. U.S. investments going to Europe thru mid-March have already outpaced February’s total and are triple the size of January’s figure. Here’s why investors are flocking to Europe:

• Europe’s stock success: It’s no secret that European stocks are hot right now. Since the ECB announced its stimulus plan for the continent in January, markets have surged. The STOXX index (SXXL) is up 16% this year while Germany’s DAX has risen 21% in 2015. Markets in Belgium, Sweden and even Spain – yes, Spain! – are doing great so far too. That’s a lot better than the U.S. markets, which are up just over 1% so far this year. As U.S. stocks look pricey, investors see more upside potential across the pond.
“It’s time for Europe to play catch up,” says Kevin Kelly at Recon Capital. “That’s why you’re seeing investors and funds flow into Europe.”

The stimulus plan has weakened the value of the euro, and at the same time the U.S. dollar is gaining value. The euro has rallied a bit this week, but it’s still near 12-year lows. Many believe the dollar and euro could be equal later this year. The currency situation makes European companies more attractive to investors because their products are cheaper to sell than American companies’ products. European exports are on the rise, and the eurozone economy is showing signs of a pick up.

• Expect the trend to continue: The flood of money into Europe is unlikely to stop any time soon. Sixty-three% of fund managers want to invest more in Europe this year, according to the most recent BofA Merrill Lynch fund manager survey. That’s the highest rate since 2001. One of the hot-ticket items right now for investors is exchange-traded fund (ETF) that own European stocks. Investment in those ETFs so far this year has doubled compared to the same time a year ago, according to BlackRock.

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Intriguing.

Bank of Canada, Government and Others Face Lawsuit for IMF Conspiracy (Epoch T.)

It would be easy to assume the people suing the Queen of England, the Bank of Canada, and three ministers for a conspiracy against “all Canadians” wear tinfoil hats. They don’t. They may be conspiracy theorists, but they are also intelligent, thoughtful people who have a lawyer with a history of winning unlikely cases. And despite the government’s best efforts to have this case thrown out, it’s going ahead after winning an appeal that overturned a lower court’s ruling to have it tossed and surviving a follow-up motion to have it tossed again. The government has one more chance to have it thrown out through an appeal at the Supreme Court, but that has to be filed by Mar. 29 and that looks unlikely. That means the Committee on Monetary and Economic Reform (COMER) is going to have its day in federal court.

This little think-tank alleges that the Bank of Canada, the Queen, the attorney general, the finance minister, and minister of national revenue are engaging in a conspiracy with the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the Financial Stability Board (FSB), and the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) to undermine Canada’s financial and monetary sovereignty. No major media have covered this story. That could be because of the powerful vested interests the suit targets, as Rocco Galati, the lawyer trying the case, suggests. Or it could be because there are parts of the statement of claim that read like they were pulled from the dark corners of some Internet conspiracy forum. They weren’t. These are serious people with wide knowledge of the financial and monetary system. And their lawyer is no slouch.

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Dangerous games.

ECB Said to Limit Greek Lenders’ Treasury-Bill Holdings (Bloomberg)

The ECB banned Greek banks from increasing holdings of short-term government debt, two people familiar with the matter said. The decision, approved by the ECB Governing Council, comes five days after the same body stalled a previous proposal by the institution’s supervisory arm, pending legal review. In the intervening days, Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras met high-level euro-area officials, including ECB President Mario Draghi and German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Tsipras agreed to submit a comprehensive list of policy measures aimed at securing more financial aid from European partners.

Euro-area finance officials will hold a call on Wednesday to discuss progress on Greece, amid concerns that the country will run out of money by early April. The Governing Council decision makes previous supervisory recommendations legally binding, and reflects increasing concern at the ECB’s bank oversight body, the SSM, about Greek lenders’ exposure to the state and the accompanying default risk. The ban echoes decisions already made on the monetary policy side, such as a €3.5 billion limit on accepting Greek treasury bills as collateral, one of the people said.

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Independence Day. But not a lot of independence.

Greeks Celebrate Independence as EU Creditors Discuss Their Fate (Bloomberg)

Greeks celebrate their independence Wednesday with a military parade and a folk-music festival sponsored by the Ministry of Defense, as European officials more than 1,000 miles away review the financial aid that will shape their future. The ECB Governing Council will hold a weekly call to assess the Emergency Liquidity Assistance keeping Greece’s banking system afloat while euro-area finance ministry officials will have a separate discussion on the progress of the country’s economic policy program. Without access to capital markets, or the ECB’s normal financing operations, Greek banks rely on almost €70 billion of ELA to cover a financing shortfall exacerbated by steep deposit withdrawals.

While inspectors are gauging the case for continuing financial support for Europe’s most-indebted nation, many Athenians will be watching a parade of battle tanks and fighter jets to mark the beginning in 1821 of the war that won independence from the Ottoman Empire. The government of George Papandreou scaled down military parades to cut costs after the Greek debt crisis erupted in 2010. Fighter jets made a comeback to the skies of Athens last year at a cost of about €500,000, according to a defense ministry official from the previous administration.

With government cash supplies running out and negotiations on financial aid only inching forwards, European officials have said that Greece could default on its obligations within weeks unless there’s a breakthrough. The government has to pay about €1.5 billion of salaries and pensions by the end of March and Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras is at loggerheads with its creditors over the conditions attached to its emergency loans. Revenue from taxes also missed budget targets by about €1 billion in the first two months of the year, the country’s Ministry of Finance said Tuesday, further depleting cash buffers.

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Will Syriza blow it all up?

Next Task For Tsipras Is To Convince His Party (Kathimerini)

Returning from his official visit to Germany, one of Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras’s main tasks will be to ensure his party’s support for the reform list his government is compiling and preparing to send to lenders, possibly by the end of the week. Sources said that Tsipras will take it upon himself to convince SYRIZA members and MPs to back the reform plan, which should secure Greece the funding it needs to survive until the end of June, when the government will have to reach a new agreement with its lenders. The prime minister’s first port of call in this effort to sell the current package will be the party’s political secretariat. A meeting is expected to take place in the next few days.

This will be followed by a gathering of SYRIZA’s parliamentary group, where Tsipras will try to persuade the party’s 149 MPs to back the reforms when they come to Parliament. The content of the reform package is not yet known but the government is concerned that it will contain a number of items that will not go down well within SYRIZA. This could include the retention of the contentious ENFIA property tax for another year, albeit adjusted so that the less well-off pay less, as well as labor and pension reforms. The coalition has already sought to defuse any tension over privatizations by saying that it will only seek strategic partnerships that allow the state to retain a controlling majority.

An area of increasing friction is what the government plans to do with value-added tax. Lenders want the special 30% reduction on VAT enjoyed by islands to be scrapped. Alternate Finance Minister Nadia Valavani told ANT1 TV yesterday that one option might be to adopt regular VAT rates on the most popular islands, such as Santorini and Myconos. However, this runs counter to what government sources have been saying so far. It is believed the coalition is examining the option of adopting an across-the-board VAT rate of 15%, which means some goods will become cheaper and others more expensive, but with possible exceptions for some basic items such as medicines.

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Next in line if Syriza fails?!

Greece: Fascists At The Gate (Hallinan)

When some 70 members of the neo-Nazi organization Golden Dawn go on trial sometime this spring, there will be more than street thugs and fascist ideologues in the docket, but a tangled web of influence that is likely to engulf Greece’s police, national security agency, wealthy oligarchs, and mainstream political parties. While Golden Dawn—with its holocaust denial, its swastikas, and Hitler salutes—makes it look like it inhabits the fringe, in fact the organization has roots deep in the heart of Greece’s political culture Which is precisely what makes it so dangerous. Golden Dawn’s penchant for violence is what led to the charge that it is a criminal organization. It is accused of several murders, as well as attacks on immigrants, leftists, and trade unionists. Raids have uncovered weapon caches.

Investigators have also turned up information suggesting that the organization is closely tied to wealthy shipping owners, as well as the National Intelligence Service (EYP) and municipal police departments. Several lawyers associated with two victims of violence by Party members—a 27-year old Pakistani immigrant stabbed to death last year, and an Afghan immigrant stabbed in 2011— charge that a high level EYP official responsible for surveillance of Golden Dawn has links to the organization. The revelations forced Dimos Kouzilos, director of EYP’s third counter-intelligence division, to resign last September. There were several warning flags about Kouzilos when he was appointed to head the intelligence division by rightwing New Democracy Prime Minister Antonis Samaras.

Kouzilos is a relative of a Golden Dawn Parliament member, who is the Party’s connection to the shipping industry. Kouzilos is also close to a group of police officers in Nikea, who are currently under investigation for ties to Golden Dawn. Investigators charge that the Nikea police refused to take complaints from refugees and immigrants beaten by Party members, and the police Chief, Dimitris Giovandis, tipped off Golden Dawn about surveillance of the Party. In handing over the results of their investigation, the lawyers said the “We believe that this information provides an overview of the long-term penetration ands activities of the Nazi criminal gang with the EYP and the police.” A report by the Office of Internal Investigation documents 130 cases where Golden Dawn worked with police.

It should hardly come as a surprise that there are close ties between the extreme right and Greek security forces. The current left-right split goes back to 1944 when the British tried to drive out the Communist Party—the backbone of the Greek resistance movement against the Nazi occupation. The split eventually led to the 1946-49 civil war when Communists and leftists fought royalists and former German collaborationists for power.

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What if a big recession hits?

China’s Influence Poised To Climb In Revamp Of Postwar Order (Bloomberg)

Seven decades after the end of World War II, the international economic architecture crafted by the U.S. faces its biggest shakeup yet, with China establishing new channels for influence to match its ambitions. Three lending institutions with at least $190 billion are taking shape under China’s leadership, one of them informally referred to as a Marshall Plan – evoking the postwar U.S. program to rebuild an impoverished Europe. Also this year, China’s yuan may win the IMF’s blessing as an official reserve currency, a recognition of its rising use in trade and finance. China’s clout has been expanding for decades, as its rapid growth allowed it to snap up a rising share of the world’s resources, its exports penetrated global markets, and its bulging financial assets gave it power to make big individual loans and purchases.

Now, the creation of international lending institutions is leveraging that economic influence closer to the political and diplomatic arenas, as U.S. allies defy America to back China’s initiative. “This is the beginning of a bigger role for China in global affairs,” said Jim O’Neill, formerly at Goldman Sachs, who coined the term BRICs in 2001 to highlight the rising economic power of Brazil, Russia, India and China. Chinese President Xi Jinping’s vision of achieving the same great-power status enjoyed by the U.S. received a major boost this month when the U.K., Germany, France and Italy signed on to the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank. The AIIB will have authorized capital of $100 billion and starting funds of about $50 billion.

Canada is considering joining, which would leave the U.S. and Japan as the only Group of Seven holdouts as they question the institution’s governance and environmental standards. Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s cabinet approved negotiations to join too, according to a government official who asked not to be identified as the decision hasn’t been made public. “China’s economic rise is acting as a huge pull factor forcing the existing architecture to adapt,” said James Laurenceson, deputy director of the Australia-China Relations Institute in Sydney. “The AIIB has shown the U.S. that a majority in international community support China’s aspirations for taking on greater leadership and responsibility, at least on economic initiatives.”

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It’s still all just printed Monopoly cash, Pepe.

The New Chinese Dream (Pepe Escobar)

It’s no wonder top nations in the beleaguered EU have gravitated to the AIIB – which will play a key role in the New Silk Road(s). A German geographer – Ferdinand von Richthofen – invented the Seidenstrasse (Silk Road) concept. Marco Polo forever linked Italy with the Silk Road. The EU is already China’s number one trade partner. And, once again symbolically, this happens to be the 40th year of China-EU relations. Watch the distinct possibility of an emerging Sino-European Fund that finances infrastructure and even green energy projects across an integrated Eurasia. It’s as if the Angel of History – that striking image in a Paul Klee painting eulogized by philosopher Walter Benjamin – is now trying to tell us that a 21st century China-EU Seidenstrasse synergy is all but inevitable.

And that, crucially, would have to include Russia, which is a vital part of the New Silk Road through an upcoming, Russia-China financed $280 billion high-speed rail upgrade of the Trans-Siberian railway. This is where the New Silk Road project and President Putin’s initial idea of a huge trade emporium from Lisbon to Vladivostok actually merge. In parallel, the 21st century Maritime Silk Road will deepen the already frantic trade interaction between China and Southeast Asia by sea. Fujian province – which faces Taiwan – will play a key role. Xi, crucially, spent many years of his life in Fujian. And Hong Kong, not by accident, also wants to be part of the action.

All these developments are driven by China being finally ready to become a massive net exporter of capital and the top source of credit for the Global South. In a few months, Beijing will launch the China International Payment System (CIPS), bound to turbo-charge the yuan as a key global currency for all types of trade. There’s the AIIB. And if that was not enough, there’s still the New Development Bank, launched by the BRICs to compete with the World Bank, and run from Shanghai.

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.. the Saudi Arabian foreign minister said the GCC would take “necessary measures” to resolve the Yemeni conflict..”

Gulf Should Be More Worried About Yemen Than Oil (CNBC)

Civil strife and terrorism in Yemen could pose a greater threat to the Gulf countries of the Middle East than tumbling oil prices, a major bank said on Tuesday. “We can’t help but think that the turmoil in Yemen is the emerging and underappreciated risk for investors in GCC (Gulf Cooperation Council) stocks,” said Citi analysts Josh Levin and Rahul Bajaj in a research note. Despite worries about Islamic insurgency and destabilization in the Middle East and North Africa, investors in the oil-exporting GCC countries of Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) have focused on the potential hit from the slump in energy prices, with crude oil down around 50% since a peak in June 2014.

However, Levin and Bajaj said that increasing strife in Yemen—which borders Saudi Arabia to the south and Oman to the west— could be an “underappreciated risk” to the GCC. “One of the key takeaways from our GCC trip in early February came from an executive in Qatar who observed that while most people are focused on the price of oil, the recent instability in Yemen posed a greater and underappreciated risk to the GCC. Recent events appear to bear out this executive’s observation,” they said on Tuesday. Yemen is in the grips of a worsening civil war, with fighting intensifying between ousted Sunni President Abd-Rabbuh Mansuh Hadi and the Shiite, anti-American rebels who seized power in a coup in January.

The rebels also face violent resistance from Sunni tribesman and competing Islamist extremists in the south. Last week, suicide bombers opposed to the rebels killed 137 people and injured more than 300 others during Friday prayers in the Yemini capital of Sana’a. On Monday, the Saudi Arabian foreign minister said the GCC would take “necessary measures” to resolve the Yemeni conflict, according to media reports. This is in response to requests for military assistance from Hadi, who belongs to the same Muslim Sunni sect as Saudi Arabia’s leaders. Levin and Bajaj warned that the turmoil in Yemen had the potential to spill over into nearby countries. “We have no edge or ability to predict whether or not the conflict in Yemen will spill over into neighboring countries or impact other GCC countries,” they said.

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Kolomoysky ‘resigned’ after the article was written.

Oil Stand-Off In Ukraine Shows Oligarchs Won Maidan Revolution (Sputnik)

Whatever the outcome of the stand-off between President Petro Poroshenko and his subordinate Igor Kolomoysky may be, their conflict over Ukrainian oil giant Ukrnafta reveals realities about post-Maidan Ukraine which mainstream media manages to circumvent. Firstly, the country is still ruled by oligarchs, not by the people, even though Igor Kolomoysky is formally governor of Dnepropetrovsk region. Kolomoysky’s private army simply took control first of Ukrtransnafta (Ukraine’s oil transportation monopoly) and later of Ukrnafta. What does this tell us about the Ukrainian state? Secondly, Ukraine’s oligarchs are not at peace with each other; the country is bracing for a major ‘war for assets’ between the country’s richest men (Kolomoysky is worth $2.4 billion on the Forbes list and Poroshenko is worth $1.3 billion).

Thirdly, the Maidan revolution not only left the country without any meaningful legal opposition in the parliament or in the media – as Kost Bondarenko, director of the Kiev-based Foundation for Ukrainian Politics, put it in his article for the Moscow-based Nezavisimaya Gazeta – but the revolution also left Ukraine in a situation of complete lawlessness, when neither laws nor even the words of the president mean much before brutal force and big money (the main weapons of oligarchs). The story of the weekend conflict between Ukraine’s president and the governor of Ukraine’s most important industrial region is a perfect illustration of all these sad truths. Kolomoysky’s men with submachine guns not only took control of Ukrtransgaz on Friday, but the governor of Dnepropetrovsk was apparently untroubled by President Poroshenko’s reprimand for his “unethical behavior” issued the next day.

Kolomoysky’s response to this “scolding” from Poroshenko was widely reported, along with an officially unconfirmed freeze on the accounts of Poroshenko’s companies in Kolomoysky’s bank (Privat-bank). Adding armed insult to the financial injury, Kolomoysky’s men on Sunday took control of Ukrnafta, the country’s biggest oil company, presenting themselves as members of the “voluntary battalion Dnieper” (a Kolomoysky-sponsored paramilitary group known for its atrocities against civilians in the rebellious Donetsk Region). Despite Poroshenko’s order to disarm the gunmen and the president’s promise that “there will be no pocket armies in Ukraine,” Kolomoysky’s men did not leave the building on Monday; instead, they started to put up metal fences around it.

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“..fiscal tightening has cost developed economies 5-10 percentage points of GDP growth since 2010..”

Fiscal Virtue And Fiscal Vice – Macroeconomics At A Crossroads (Skidelsky)

Until a few years ago, economists of all persuasions confidently proclaimed that the Great Depression would never recur. In a way, they were right. After the financial crisis of 2008 erupted, we got the Great Recession instead. Governments managed to limit the damage by pumping huge amounts of money into the global economy and slashing interest rates to near zero. But, having cut off the downward slide of 2008-2009, they ran out of intellectual and political ammunition. Economic advisers assured their bosses that recovery would be rapid. And there was some revival; but then it stalled in 2010. Meanwhile, governments were running large deficits – a legacy of the economic downturn – which renewed growth was supposed to shrink.

In the eurozone, countries such as Greece faced sovereign-debt crises as bank bailouts turned private debt into public debt. Attention switched to the problem of fiscal deficits and the relationship between deficits and economic growth. Should governments deliberately expand their deficits to offset the fall in household and investment demand? Or should they try to cut public spending in order to free up money for private spending? Depending on which macroeconomic theory one held, both could be presented as pro-growth policies. The first might cause the economy to expand, because the government was increasing public spending; the second, because they were cutting it. Keynesian theory suggests the first; governments unanimously put their faith in the second.

The consequences of this choice are clear. It is now pretty much agreed that fiscal tightening has cost developed economies 5-10 percentage points of GDP growth since 2010. All of that output and income has been permanently lost. Moreover, because fiscal austerity stifled economic growth, it made the task of reducing budget deficits and national debt as a share of GDP much more difficult. Cutting public spending, it turned out, was not the same as cutting the deficit, because it cut the economy at the same time. That should have ended the argument. But it did not. Some economists claim that governments faced a balance of risk in 2010: cutting the deficit might have slowed growth; but not committing to cut it might have made things even worse.

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Reinforce your local infrastructure!

Pension Funds Seek Shelter From Dollar’s Rise (WSJ)

The soaring U.S. dollar is driving pension funds into the currency markets, in part to protect their overseas investments but also to take advantage of some of the biggest price swings in the financial world. In January, the California State Teachers Retirement System, the nation’s second-largest public pension fund with $190.8 billion under management, handed $500 million to a pair of specialist currency funds as part of an effort to limit losses on their international investments, which fall in value as the dollar rises against other currencies. Late last year, the $150.2 billion Florida State Board of Administration expanded its currency investments by more than 10%, to $2.25 billion.

Last June, the $29 billion Connecticut Retirement Plans & Trust Funds hired two managers to help reduce the foreign-currency risks in its international stock investments. And the $14.3 billion Kansas Public Employees Retirement System is now looking to hire a currency manager. The clamor to protect against currency swings marks a return to a strategy that pension funds have tried on and off for years, with mixed results. While it is good news for the money managers that provide the strategies, which stand to reap tens of thousands of dollars in fees for every pension plan that signs up, it also adds to the risks taken on by pensions. Currency markets are among the most volatile, raising the potential for big profits, but also big losses.

“The pickup since December has been extraordinary,” said Adrian Lee, who manages Adrian Lee & Partners hedge fund. “We’ve had more funds interested in our strategies in the last three months than we’ve had in the last three years.” The fund’s assets have grown 30% in the past year, as existing clients raised their allocations, Mr. Lee said. At their most basic, currency strategies come in two flavors. A passive currency-overlay program that seeks to hedge against foreign-exchange losses typically costs between 0.05% and 0.1% of assets, based on a pension’s exposure to foreign markets, according to NEPC, a consultant to pension plans.

Active strategies that seek to profit from currency swings tend to be several times more expensive, as they include higher management fees and allow hedge funds to keep a share of profits. The rising dollar has re-energized interest in both strategies. While the U.S. Federal Reserve is expected to raise interest rates as soon as June, both Europe and Japan are pumping out economic stimulus at unprecedented levels, seeking to stimulate their economies by keeping rates low. The divergence in borrowing costs has sparked an exodus of capital, as investors quit euro and yen-denominated assets and head into the greenback.

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From one scandal to the next.

Brazil Investigates Deficit-Ridden Pension Fund (Bloomberg)

The deficit-ridden pension fund for Brazilian postal workers is being investigated for alleged reckless management after several years of money-losing bets ranging from investments in Lehman Brothers bonds to Argentine debt, two people with knowledge of the matter said. Pension-fund agency Previc, securities regulator CVM, the central bank and federal prosecutors are collaborating on the probe and meeting weekly to conclude a report on Postalis, Brazil’s third-largest retirement system by number of beneficiaries, said one of the people, who asked not to be named because the issue is private. The findings may be released in coming days, the person said. Under Brazilian law, the agencies may seek penalties that may include fines of as much as 1 million reais ($320,200) and a 10-year ban from managing pension funds.

Postalis has been running a deficit every year since 2011 and the shortfall of 5.6 billion reais now eclipses its 5 billion reais in assets, public records show. Now, the pension fund created in 1981 to take care of Brazil’s more than 100,000 postal workers is requiring those same employees to boost contributions so it can keep making payments to beneficiaries. “They threw us under the bus,” said 36-year-old Douglas Melo, who is required to pitch in an extra 40 reais a month on top of the 55 reais he already contributes to guarantee future benefits of 200 reais a month. “The fund’s investments that later defaulted or were involved in scandals make no sense.”

Postalis amassed billions of reais in losses pursuing risky bets while its peers flocked to the relative safety and high yields of Brazilian government debt. Brazil’s pension funds allocated 15% of their combined 641.7 billion-real portfolio to Brazil local sovereign debt in 2012, according to the nation’s association that tracks the industry. Postalis held less than 1% in 2012. Postalis bet on a fund that booked 18 million reais of Lehman Brothers debt in August 2008, one month before the New York investment bank filed for bankruptcy, according to data from Brazil’s securities regulator. It bought bonds or invested in funds of mid-sized Brazilian banks that were liquidated by the central bank in 2012 amid fraud allegations and lack of capital.

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Rage against the monopoly. And then create another one just as fast.

Money May Make The World Go Round, But At What Cost? (BBC)

Banks once had a near monopoly on moving money around the world, and they charged a pretty penny for it. But since the 2008 financial crisis, their reputations have taken an almighty battering, and a growing number of technology-focused start-ups are intent on getting a slice of the action. Cost has become the battleground and technology the weapon in this huge business: people send more than $500bn (£334bn) abroad each year. TransferWise, for example, says banks and independent money transfer giants such as Western Union and MoneyGram, charge about 5-8% in fees when transferring money abroad, and these fees are often concealed within the exchange rate. It charges just 0.5% of the amount being converted. This can equate to a £100-£150 saving on a £5,000 international money transfer.

Founded by Estonians Taavet Hinrikus and Kristo Kaarman, the firm achieves this by matching people transferring money in one direction with people transferring it in the other – so called peer-to-peer transfers. In other words, you are in effect buying your currency from other individuals, thereby cutting out a big chunk of exchange rate and “foreign transaction” charges normally levied by banks. “We didn’t understand why transferring money had to be so expensive,” says Mr Hinrikus, who was one of the first employees of Skype, the online communications company. “With us, it’s all about transparency – that’s really important. We choose the mid-market rate when we transfer money.” Another key to their success – TransferWise has shifted more than £3bn of customers’ money since 2011 – is the simplicity of design, he says.

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Does he do this of his own accord?

Obama Snubs NATO Chief as Crisis Rages (Bloomberg)

President Barack Obama has yet to meet with the new head of NATO, and won’t see Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg this week, even though he is in Washington for three days. Stoltenberg’s office requested a meeting with Obama well in advance of the visit, but never heard anything from the White House, two sources close to the NATO chief told me. The leaders of almost all the other 28 NATO member countries have made time for Stoltenberg since he took over the world’s largest military alliance in October. Stoltenberg, twice the prime minister of Norway, met Monday with Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper in Ottawa to discuss the threat of the Islamic State and the crisis in Ukraine, two issues near the top of Obama’s agenda. Kurt Volker, who served as the U.S. permanent representative to NATO under both President George W. Bush and Obama, said the president broke a long tradition.

“The Bush administration held a firm line that if the NATO secretary general came to town, he would be seen by the president … so as not to diminish his stature or authority,” he told me. America’s commitment to defend its NATO allies is its biggest treaty obligation, said Volker, adding that European security is at its most perilous moment since the Cold War. Russia has moved troops and weapons into eastern Ukraine, annexed Crimea, placed nuclear-capable missiles in striking distance of NATO allies, flown strategic-bomber mock runs in the North Atlantic, practiced attack approaches on the UK and Sweden, and this week threatened to aim nuclear missiles at Denmark’s warships. “It is hard for me to believe that the president of the United States has not found the time to meet with the current secretary general of NATO given the magnitude of what this implies, and the responsibilities of his office,” Volker said.

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Barney Frank memoirs.

Paulson and Warren: The Unlikely Twin Towers of Dodd-Frank (Bloomberg)

On the surface, Henry Paulson, the former CEO of Goldman Sachs and Secretary of the Treasury under President George W. Bush, and Senator Elizabeth Warren, the populist Democrat from Massachusetts, seem an unlikely team. But former Representative Barney Frank, co-author of the Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation enacted in 2010, said he views Paulson and Warren as twin pillars protecting the financial system. In an interview this week on the Charlie Rose television program, Frank, who was chairman of the House Financial Services Committee during the 2008-2009 financial crisis, recalled former Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and Paulson telling Congressional Democratic leaders, “The economy is about to fall apart and we have got to do something the public isn’t going to like.”

Frank worked with Bernanke and Paulson to push through the unpopular but ultimately successful financial bailout known as the Troubled Asset Relief Program. Paulson, Frank said, remained helpful even after leaving government, assisting in the drafting and passing of Dodd-Frank. While Paulson helped establish Dodd-Frank, Frank said, “Elizabeth Warren is helping safeguard it” from Republicans eager to scuttle the law. He acknowledged that Dodd-Frank is complex. But Frank insisted it was neither politically nor substantively possible to make the legislation, which overhauls some regulations dating to the 1930s, less complicated. “In the thirties, there was no such thing as credit default swaps and collateralized loan obligations and collateralized debt obligations,” he said.

Frank’s memoir – titled “Frank” – chronicles his more than four decades in public life. For the first two decades, he said, he felt it necessary to hide his sexuality while celebrating his advocacy of liberal policies. Now, he says, it’s easier to be gay — he was married during his final term in Congress – and harder to champion liberal policies.

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The World Bank as a power tool.

Presidents, Bankers, the Neo-Cold War and the World Bank (Nomi Prins)

At first glance, the neo-Cold War between the US and its post WWII European Allies vs. Russia over the Ukraine, and the stonewalling of Greece by the Troika might appear to have little in common. Yet both are manifestations of a political-military-financial power play that began during the first Cold War. Behind the bravado of today’s sanctions and austerity measures lies the decision-making alliance that private bankers enjoy in conjunction with government and multinational entries like NATO and the World Bank. It is President Obama’s foreign policy to back the Ukraine against Russia; in 1958, it was the Eisenhower Doctrine that protected Lebanon from a Soviet threat. For President Truman, the Marshall Plan arose partly to guard Greece (and other US allies) from Communism, but it also had lasting economic implications.

The alignment of political leaders and key bankers was more personal back then, but the implications were similar to the present day. US military might protected its major trading partners, which in turn, did business with US banks. One power reinforced the other. Today, the ECB’s QE program funds swanky Frankfurt headquarters and prioritizes Germany’s super-bank, Deutschebank and its bond investors above Greece’s future. These actions, then and now, have roots in the American ideology of melding military, political and financial power that flourished in the haze of World War II. It’s not fair to pin this triple-power stance on one man, or even one bank; yet one man and one bank signified that power in all of its dimensions, including the use of political enemy creation to achieve financial goals.

That man was John McCloy, ‘Chairman of the Establishment’ as his biographer, Kai Bird, characterized him. The relationship between McCloy and Truman cemented a set of public-private practices that strengthened private US banks globally at the expense of weaker, potentially Soviet (now Russian) leaning countries. [..] During the Cold War, the World Bank provided funds for countries that leaned toward capitalism versus communism. Political allies of the United States got better treatment (and still do). The Nations that private bankers coveted for speculative and lending purposes saw their debt loads increase substantially and their industries privatized. Equally, the bankers decided which bonds they could sell to augment public aid funds, which meant they would have control over which countries the World Bank would support. The World Bank did more to expand US banking globally than any treaty or entity that came before it.

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Good read.

Financial Feudalism (Dmitry Orlov)

Once upon a time—and a fairly long time it was—most of the thickly settled parts of the world had something called feudalism. It was a way of organizing society hierarchically. Typically, at the very top there was a sovereign (king, prince, emperor, pharaoh, along with some high priests). Below the sovereign were several ranks of noblemen, with hereditary titles. Below the noblemen were commoners, who likewise inherited their stations in life, be it by being bound to a piece of land upon which they toiled, or by being granted the right to engage in a certain type of production or trade, in case of craftsmen and merchants. Everybody was locked into position through permanent relationships of allegiance, tribute and customary duties: tribute and customary duties flowed up through the ranks, while favors, privileges and protection flowed down.

It was a remarkably resilient, self-perpetuating system, based largely on the use of land and other renewable resources, all ultimately powered by sunlight. Wealth was primarily derived from land and the various uses of land. Feudalism was essentially a steady-state system. Population pressures were relieved primarily through emigration, war, pestilence and, failing all of the above, periodic famine. Wars of conquest sometimes opened up temporary new venues for economic growth, but since land and sunlight are finite, this amounted to a zero-sum game. But all of that changed when feudalism was replaced with capitalism. What made the change possible was the exploitation of nonrenewable resources, the most important of which was energy from burning fossilized hydrocarbons: first peat and coal, then oil and natural gas.

Suddenly, productive capacity was decoupled from the availability of land and sunlight, and could be ramped up almost, but not quite, ad infinitum, simply by burning more hydrocarbons. Energy use, industry and population all started going up exponentially. A new system of economic relations was brought into being, based on money that could be generated at will, in the form of debt, which could be repaid with interest using the products of ever-increasing future production. Compared with the previous, steady-state system, the change amounted to a new assumption: that the future will always be bigger and richer—rich enough to afford to pay back both principal and interest.

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A tragic species killing itself:”..antibiotic use in livestock will likely rise 67% by 2030 if livestock conditions don’t improve. About 80% of antibiotics sold in the United States go to livestock”.

Antibiotics In Meat Rising Fast Worldwide, Especially Bacon (UPI)

In the next 15 years, countries around the world will see a major increase in antibiotic use in livestock, a new study finds. “The invention of antibiotics was a major public health revolution of the 20th century,” said senior author Ramanan Laxminarayan, a senior research scholar at the Princeton Environmental Institute and director of the Center for Disease Dynamics, Economics and Policy. “Their effectiveness – and the lives of millions of people around the world – are now in danger due to the increasing global problem of antibiotic resistance, which is being driven by antibiotic consumption.” The study was done by researchers at the Center for Disease Dynamics, Economics and Policy, Princeton University, the International Livestock Research Institute and the Université Libre de Bruxelles.

The researchers found antibiotic use in livestock will likely rise 67% by 2030 if livestock conditions don’t improve. About 80% of antibiotics sold in the United States go to livestock. Antibiotic resistance not only applies to the animals, but it can affect the humans eating the meat. The researchers found pig farmers producing pork and bacon use four times as many antibiotics as cattle farmers. One of the major reasons farmers are having to use more and more antibiotics is that demand for meat is going up, and animals are often subjected to smaller and smaller living quarters, where disease can spread.

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Feel the power.

Monsanto Bites Back at Roundup Findings (WSJ)

Monsanto Co. escalated its criticism of a World Health Organization agency’s finding last week that a commonly used herbicide probably has the potential to cause cancer in humans. The St. Louis-based agribusiness giant—a major seller of the weed killer—sought a meeting with senior WHO officials on the International Agency for Research on Cancer’s finding, while a WHO agency official defended what he called an “exhaustive” review of eligible data. The IARC’s classification of glyphosate, the U.S.’s most commonly used weedkiller, as “probably carcinogenic” in a report published Friday reignited debate over a chemical that environmental groups have long criticized and the agricultural industry has defended as safe for humans and less harsh on the environment than others.

“We are outraged with this assessment,” Robert Fraley, Monsanto’s chief technology officer, said Monday, arguing that the finding was derived from “cherry picking” data based on an “agenda-driven bias.” Monsanto, which markets glyphosate under the Roundup brand, sent letters to WHO members seeking to discuss the IARC classification, which Monsanto officials said ran counter to many other findings, including those by other WHO programs, according to Philip Miller, the company’s vice president of global regulatory affairs. Dana Loomis, deputy head of the monographs section for the IARC, said the agency’s classification of glyphosate as “probably carcinogenic” was based on an examination of peer-reviewed research and completed government reports on the herbicide.

“We feel confident that our process is transparent and rigorous, based on the best available scientific data, and that it’s free from conflicts of interest,” Mr. Loomis said. He also said it was “categorically not true” that the IARC overlooked research on glyphosate, as Monsanto and other agriculture groups alleged. He said the IARC seeks to find and review all publicly available, peer-reviewed research and government documents in their final form. That excludes draft research, he said, which can change before it is completed.

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Jan 082015
 


DPC Old Absinthe House, bar, New Orleans 1906

Most Americans Are One Paycheck Away From The Street (MarketWatch)
Ron Paul On Paris Attack: Bad Foreign Policy ‘Invites Retaliation’ (Breitbart)
Why Oil Will Go Even Lower (CNBC)
The Worrying Math From US Shale Plays (Ron Patterson)
White House Doesn’t Feel Pressure To Expand US Crude Exports (Reuters)
Oil Investors Pour Most Money Into Funds in 4 Years (Bloomberg)
World’s Best Forecaster Targets Euro-Dollar Parity (Bloomberg)
Are Bond Yields Flashing A Panic Signal? (CNBC)
Eurozone Deflation Is The Final Betrayal Of Southern Europe (AEP)
A Tale Of Two Record Unemployments: Italy vs Germany (Zero Hedge)
German Unemployment Falls to Record Low on Strengthening Economic Recovery (Bloomberg)
Italy Jobless Rate Rises to Record Amid Growth Outlook Concerns (Bloomberg)
Greek Crisis Jolts QE Juggernaut as ECB Ponders Deflation (Bloomberg)
German Lawmakers Say Greek Debt Talks Possible After Vote (Bloomberg)
ECB Wants New Greek Government To Quickly Reach Deal With Creditors (Reuters)
Here’s One Road Map For A Greek Eurozone Exit (MarketWatch)
We Are Entering An Era Of Shattered Illusions (Alt-Market)
Fed Bullish On US Recovery (Reuters)
Japan Household Mood Worsens To Levels Before ‘Abenomics’ (Reuters)
China Steps In To Support Venezuela, Ecuador As Oil Prices Tumble
Lawmakers Up Pressure On Obama To Release Secret 9/11 Documents (Fox)
‘France Wants To Mend Ties With Russia’ (RT)
Fight Over Keystone Pipeline is Completely Divorced From Reality (Bloomberg)
Most Fossil Fuels Are ‘Unburnable’ (BBC)
The ‘Untouchable Reserves’ (BBC)
US Antibiotics Discovery Labelled ‘Game Changer’ For Medicine (BBC)

A gutted society.

Most Americans Are One Paycheck Away From The Street (MarketWatch)

Americans are feeling better about their job security and the economy, but most are theoretically only one paycheck away from the street. Approximately 62% of Americans have no emergency savings for things such as a $1,000 emergency room visit or a $500 car repair, according to a new survey of 1,000 adults by personal finance website Bankrate.com. Faced with an emergency, they say they would raise the money by reducing spending elsewhere (26%), borrowing from family and/or friends (16%) or using credit cards (12%). “Emergency savings are not just critical for weathering an emergency, they’re also important for successful homeownership and retirement saving,” says Signe-Mary McKernan, senior fellow and economist at the Urban Institute, a nonprofit organization that focuses on social and economic policy.

The findings are strikingly similar to a U.S. Federal Reserve survey of more than 4,000 adults released last year. “Savings are depleted for many households after the recession,” it found. Among those who had savings prior to 2008, 57% said they’d used up some or all of their savings in the Great Recession and its aftermath. What’s more, only 39% of respondents reported having a “rainy day” fund adequate to cover three months of expenses and only 48% of respondents said that they would completely cover a hypothetical emergency expense costing $400 without selling something or borrowing money. Why aren’t people saving? “A lot of people are in debt,” says Andrew Meadows, producer of “Broken Eggs,” a documentary about retirement. “Probably the most common types of debt are student loans and costs related to medical issues.”

He spent seven weeks traveling around the U.S. and interviewed over 100 people about why they haven’t saved enough money. “People are still feeling the heat from the Great Recession.” Some 44% of senior citizens have enough savings to cover unexpected expenses versus 33% of millennials, Bankrate.com found. On the upside, the Bankrate survey found that 82% of Americans keep a household budget, up from 60% in 2012. Even in the age of the smartphone, most people keep a budget the old-fashioned way, either with a pen and paper (36%) or in their heads (18%). Just 26% of those surveyed say they use a computer program or smartphone app.

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That’s exactly what I said yesterday in I Follow Charlie.

Ron Paul On Paris Attack: Bad Foreign Policy ‘Invites Retaliation’ (Breitbart)

On Wednesday’s “The Steve Malzberg Show” on NewsMax TV, former Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) tied the Paris shooting, along with other Western domestic terrorist attacks to the bad foreign policies of those countries. “Partially what the Secretary of State said is true,” Paul said. “This is pretty obscene, when it comes to violence, and libertarians are pretty annoyed by anybody who initiates violence. “The context of things, France has been a target for many, many years, because they’ve been involved in foreign affairs in Libya, and they really prodded us along in — recently in Libya, but they’ve been involved in Algeria, so they’ve had attacks like this, you know, not infrequently,” he added.

“So, it does involve, you know, their foreign policy as well. When people do this, you know, the rejection of the violence has to be made, and with that I agree. I put blame on bad policy that we don’t fully understand, and we don’t understand what they’re doing because the people who are objecting to the foreign policy that we pursue, they do it from a different perspective. They see us as attacking them, and killing innocent people, so yes, they, they have — this doesn’t justify, so don’t put those words in my mouth — it doesn’t justify, but it explains it.” Paul cited U.S. involvement in the Middle East that helped to inspire the rise of ISIS.

“And this is why we say if we had somebody do to us what we have done to so many countries in the Middle East, and how many people we’ve killed, and sending over drones, and bombing, being involved in all these wars, and supporting dictators one week, and taking away the support — and the stupidity of us sending all those weapons into Syria, ending up in the hands of ISIS — and right now we’re even sending more weapons. You know, because ISIS took all the American weapons. It’s that overall policy which invites retaliation, and they see us as intruders. But it’s a little bit more complex, you know, when they hit us, either here at home, and hit civilians, and what’s happening in France. But I don’t think you can divorce these instances from the overall foreign policy.”

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“The median estimate of more than 30 forecasters in a Bloomberg survey is $1.15 by the end of 2016.”

World’s Best Forecaster Targets Euro-Dollar Parity (Bloomberg)

Being more bearish on the euro than the consensus helped ING become the world’s most accurate currency forecaster in 2014. The Dutch bank sees no reason to change its strategy now, breaking from the pack to predict a drop to parity with the dollar within two years. After watching the 19-nation currency slide as low as $1.1792 today from last year’s high of $1.3993 in May, ING sees it continuing to weaken all the way to $1, a level last seen in 2002. The median estimate of more than 30 forecasters in a Bloomberg survey is $1.15 by the end of 2016. ING expects measures by the European Central Bank to boost the euro zone’s flagging economy and avoid deflation will have direr consequences for the currency than most other firms. Few investors will want the euro as policy makers expand the money supply, especially as the Federal Reserve makes dollar assets more attractive by raising interest rates.

“We are one of the most bearish houses on euro-dollar,” Petr Krpata, a foreign-exchange strategist at ING in London, said yesterday by phone. “It looks as if the Fed will start hiking rates sooner rather than later, potentially even late in the second quarter, and this will further fuel the divergence on policy.” ING topped Bloomberg’s rankings of foreign-exchange analysts for the four quarters ended Dec. 31, rising from second place previously and supplanting German lender Landesbank Baden-Wuerttemberg in the No. 1 slot. In one of its best calls, ING predicted at the start of 2014 the euro would fall 13% to $1.20 by Dec. 31, compared with a median estimate in a Bloomberg survey of $1.28 at the time. The shared currency ended the year at $1.2098, and traded at $1.1798 as of 9:39 a.m. in London.

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Or is it a loss of sanity signal?

Are Bond Yields Flashing A Panic Signal? (CNBC)

Government bond yields in the U.S., Europe and Japan are plumbing lows, suggesting a flight to safety, but analysts aren’t ready to hit the panic button. “This is the first time ever that rates are this low, as even during the 1930s rates were well above current levels,” Steven Englander, head of G-10 foreign-exchange strategy at Citigroup, said in a note this week, noting the average G-3 10-year government bond yield is below 1%. The 10-year U.S. Treasury yield was trading around 1.98% late Tuesday in the U.S. after starting the year around 2.17%. Germany’s 10-year bund was around 0.47%, around all-time lows, after ending 2014 around 0.54%, while the Japanese government bond (JGB) was around 0.30%, a tad up from the record low 0.265% touched earlier this week. Bond prices move inversely to yields.

“This is not happening during the panic phase of a crisis, but after the panic is over and we have had significant recoveries in asset prices globally,” he said. But rather than a panic signal, he calls it “more a sign that investors think we are going nowhere for a long time.” Others are also disregarding the idea that declines in already low bond yields may be a warning signal. “The markets seem to be suggesting that you have perhaps even a recessionary environment, not dissimilar to an emerging market crisis, an Asian crisis or even the GFC (global financial crisis),” Piyush Gupta, CEO of DBS, said at a presentation for the bank’s private banking clients. He cited the 30-year U.S. Treasury’s around 40 basis point drop in yield in the first three trading days of this year, saying it may be the biggest drop in the 30-year’s yield since records began.

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“U.S. oil production rose again—to 9.132 million barrels a day, on par with the largest output in more than three decades.”

Why Oil Will Go Even Lower (CNBC)

New data showing a surge in U.S. gasoline and diesel fuel supplies spell more trouble for oil prices but is good news for consumers. The Energy Information Administration on Wednesday reported that U.S. gasoline stocks rose by 8.1 million barrels last week, compared with expectations for a 3.4 million barrel build. Distillate stocks, including diesel fuel and heating oil, rose by 11.2 million barrels, more than five times the amount expected. Gasoline futures for February slumped more than 2% on the Nymex to $1.32 per gallon, but West Texas Intermediate oil futures rose slightly to $48.62 per barrel even though the large supply of refined products means lower demand for oil in coming weeks.

The data showed a bigger-than-expected drop of 3.1 million barrels in crude inventories last week, but it also showed that U.S. oil production rose again—to 9.132 million barrels a day, on par with the largest output in more than three decades. Production was at 9.12 million barrels a day last week, and has been above 9 million barrels daily since early November. The surge in U.S. production, largely from shale drilling, is what set off a price war between OPEC and other producers as U.S. crude displaced that of other competitors. OPEC, at its last meeting on Thanksgiving, adopted a strategy of standing back and letting the market determine price. That has helped drive oil down further and faster than many analysts had expected.

Analysts see oil prices weakening further through the second quarter before leveling off and rising in the fourth quarter. “Despite the falling rig count, we tend to hover near 30-year highs in output,” said John Kilduff of Again Capital. He said Wednesday’s weekly data reaffirmed his negative outlook for oil prices. U.S. oil production is expected to continue to grow over the next several months, as producers pump at current levels and some even more, particularly if they are cash strapped. Analyst say it will be several months before cutbacks in capital spending start to show up in decreased oil output. “My outlook’s pretty bearish. I don’t know if it can possibly get more bearish,” Kilduff said. “I still think we’re going to punch the clock on $33 and see what happens from there.”

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Decline rates even worse than thought.

The Worrying Math From US Shale Plays (Ron Patterson)

There has been considerable dispute over how many new wells required to keep production flat in the Bakken and Eagle Ford. One college professor posted, over on Seeking Alpha, figures that it would take 114 rigs in the Bakken and 175 in Eagle Ford to keep production flat. He bases his analysis on David Hughes’ estimate that the legacy decline rate for Bakken wells is 45% and 35% for Eagle Ford wells. And he says a rig can drill 18 wells a year, or about one well every 20.3 days. The EIA has come up with different numbers. The data for the chart below was taken from the EIA’s Drilling Productivity Report. The EIA has current legacy decline at about 6.3% per month for Bakken wells and about 7.7% per month for Eagle Ford wells. That works out to be about 54% per year for the Bakken and 62% per year for Eagle Ford. I believe the EIA’s estimate of legacy decline, in this case, is fairly accurate.

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“If you look at what’s going on in the market and actions that the Department took, I think that … there’s not a lot of pressure to do more.”

White House Doesn’t Feel Pressure To Expand US Crude Exports (Reuters)

The White House does not feel pressure to loosen restrictions on U.S. oil exports further and views debate over the issue as resolved for now, John Podesta, a top aide to President Barack Obama, told Reuters in an interview. The drop in oil prices and the Commerce Department’s move to allow companies to ship as much as a million barrels per day of ultra-light U.S. crude to the rest of the world has taken pressure off the administration to do more. “At this stage, I think that what the Commerce Department did in December sort of resolves the debate. We felt comfortable with where they went,” Podesta said from his West Wing office in the most substantive comments yet from a White House official on the contentious issue of exporting abundant U.S. shale oil. “If you look at what’s going on in the market and actions that the Department took, I think that … there’s not a lot of pressure to do more.”

His comments may disappoint some Republicans and energy companies such as Hess Corp. which have lobbied for more relief from a ban they view as a relic of the 1970s Arab oil embargo. While few analysts expected Obama to make a serious effort to repeal the ban – a delicate political topic due to widespread fears among Americans that doing so could inflate gasoline prices – some had hoped that further modest measures to ease its impact might emerge this year. By standing pat, however, Obama may avoid clashing with his environmentalist supporters who have begun to campaign against lifting the restrictions, hoping that might keep a lid on domestic oil drilling by depressing local prices. Some refiners such as PBF Energy, which have benefited from the abundance of U.S. shale oil, also oppose easing the ban. Podesta, who plans to leave the administration in early February and help Hillary Clinton if she decides to run for president, has played a critical role on energy and climate policy during his one-year tenure with Obama.

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Well, if you need to gamble ..

Oil Investors Pour Most Money Into Funds in 4 Years (Bloomberg)

Investors betting oil will rebound from the lowest prices in 5 1/2-years poured the most money in more than four years into funds that track crude. The four biggest oil exchange-traded products listed in the U.S. received a combined $1.23 billion in December, the most since May 2010, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Another $109.9 million was added this month through Jan. 5. Investors are piling into oil ETFs even after West Texas Intermediate crude tumbled the most since 2008 last year amid signs of rising supply and weak demand. Shares outstanding of the four funds surged to the highest since 2009. “Commodity investors can be contrarian investors,” said Matt Hougan, president of research firm ETF.com. “There are a lot of true believers in the commodity space. A lot of people are attached to the idea that oil’s natural price should be $100, not $50.”

The U.S. Oil Fund (USO), the biggest oil ETF, attracted $629.9 million in December and $100.4 million so far this month. The fund (DBO), which follows WTI prices, added 1.8% to $18.369 yesterday on the New York Stock Exchange. The number of U.S. Oil Fund shares on loan to short sellers was 3.93 million on Jan. 5, down from as high as 9.53 million last month, data compiled by Markit and Bloomberg show. Money is pouring into oil ETFs even as commodity-linked index liquidations surged to a record $17 billion in the first 11 months of last year, Barclays said in a report yesterday. Total commodity assets under management fell to $276 billion in November, the lowest since early 2010, according to the bank.

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“There is a risk of a real economic vicious cycle: less investment, which in turn reduces potential growth, the future becomes even grimmer and investment is reduced even further ..”

Eurozone Deflation Is The Final Betrayal Of Southern Europe (AEP)

The eurozone has let it happen. Europe’s authorities have so mismanaged monetary and fiscal strategy that the whole currency bloc has tipped into deflation. The drop in the eurozone’s headline price index to -0.2% in December scarcely captures the significance of what is happening. Deflationary forces have been gaining a grip on all the crisis states of the South for 18 months. A chorus of economists began warning two years ago that the region was sailing close to the wind by letting inflation drift ever lower, leaving itself one shock away from a loss of policy traction. That shock is now hitting in successive waves: the Russia crisis; China’s over-investment glut; and now the collapse of oil prices. Textbook theory suggests that a halving of energy costs should be cause for celebration, a tax cut for consumers. It is very different calculus when inflation is already zero, bond yields are plummeting to 14th century lows across the world, and market psychology is becoming “unhinged” – to use central banking vernacular.

“Normally, any central bank would prefer to look through a positive supply shock,” said Peter Praet, the European Central Bank’s chief economist. “But we may not have that luxury at present. Shocks can change: in certain circumstances supply shocks can morph into demand shocks via second-round effects.” Mr Praet said families and firms are already adapting pre-emptively to the new order, describing what amounts to a classic deflation trap. “There is a risk of a real economic vicious cycle: less investment, which in turn reduces potential growth, the future becomes even grimmer and investment is reduced even further,” he told Börsen-Zeitung. Mr Praet warned that an “underemployment equilibrium” is setting in, invoking the term used by Keynes in the 1930s. He exhorted “all the authorities”, including governments, to step up to their responsibilities and take “urgent action”. This is a man who knows that monetary union is in deep crisis.

His boss, Mario Draghi, has been bending every sinew for a long time to head off this awful moment. He went to Berlin as far back as November 2013 to plead for understanding from Germany’s economic elites, warning even then that radical measures were needed to secure a “safety margin against deflationary risks”. He feared that the downward slide was pushing EMU crisis countries into a deeper rut as they tried to claw back competitiveness. “Real debt burdens rise,” he said. Mr Draghi did not invoke Irving Fisher’s classic text published in 1933 – Debt-Deflation Theory of Great Depressions – but his message was the same. Falling prices are not benign in highly-leveraged economies. There comes a point when the sailing ship does not right itself by the normal swing of the cycle. It tips too far and capsizes. Try to right it then. The Japanese are still trying 15 years later.

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Zero Hedge noticed the same phenomenon I did earlier in yesterday’s I Follow Charlie. As I said: “If the European economy doesn’t magically recover, the north will – continue to – save its economies by strangling the south.”

A Tale Of Two Record Unemployments: Italy vs Germany (Zero Hedge)

For the first time ever, Italy’s unemployment rate is more than twice that of its European Union (one region, one monetary policy) neighbor Germany. As Germany’s jobless rate fell for the 3rd month in a row to 6.5% (the lowest level in records going back more than two decades), Italian unemployment unexpectedly rose to a record high at 13.4% (well above the euro-region rate of 11.5%). Of course, while these two nations ‘economic’ state diverges by the most on record, bond yields are at record lows in both – leaving us (and everyone else) questioning, just what it is that ECB QE will do to help Europe’s economies?

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Here’s the German part:

German Unemployment Falls to Record Low on Strengthening Economic Recovery (Bloomberg)

German unemployment fell for a third month in December to a record low, signaling that growth in Europe’s largest economy will accelerate in 2015. The number of people out of work fell a seasonally adjusted 27,000 to 2.841 million in December, the Federal Labor Agency in Nuremberg said today. The adjusted jobless rate dropped to 6.5%, the lowest level in records going back more than two decades.

The rest of that article is just a whole load of nonsense, hubris and whale blubber. But then you contrast it with this:

Italy Jobless Rate Rises to Record Amid Growth Outlook Concerns (Bloomberg)

Italy’s unemployment rate increased more than forecast to a new high of 13.4% in November as companies failed to hire on concern the country’s longest recession on record isn’t about to end. The jobless rate rose from a revised 13.3% in October, the Rome-based national statistics office Istat said in a preliminary report today. The November reading is the highest since the quarterly series began in 1977.

Two more weeks of this endless discussion …

Greek Crisis Jolts QE Juggernaut as ECB Ponders Deflation (Bloomberg)

Mario Draghi has more evidence than ever to start quantitative easing as soon as this month – if only he can find a way to deal with Greece. Two weeks before the first monetary-policy meeting of the year on Jan. 22, governors gathered yesterday and discussed the decision over dinner. Hours earlier, data showed the first annual drop in consumer prices since 2009 and stubbornly high unemployment, handing the European Central Bank president a stronger case for buying government bonds. Overshadowing their meal was the return of Greek tensions, with the prospect that elections three days after the meeting will bring a party to power that wants to restructure the nation’s debt. That threat adds a new dimension to the argument for Draghi, whose chief challenge in convincing opponents of quantitative easing is to show it won’t turn into a bailout for recalcitrant governments.

“The case for further ECB action is strong and the negative rates of inflation will provide great mood music for Draghi to push QE through the Governing Council,” said Nick Kounis, head of macro research at ABN Amro Bank NV in Amsterdam. “The Greek issue could complicate the announcement and the ECB may well hold off from providing the details until March, giving it a chance to see how the situation turns out.” Euro-area consumer prices dropped an annual 0.2% in December as oil costs plunged, and November unemployment remained near a record at 11.5%. Draghi has argued that slumping energy prices may worsen inflation expectations, a development the ECB won’t be able to ignore. A decision in favor of large-scale government-bond purchases still has hurdles to overcome.

Policy makers including Bundesbank President Jens Weidmann have spoken publicly against them, citing legal risks and the likelihood that a program would reduce the incentive for governments to reform their economies. The treatment of Greek bonds, which are rated junk by the three major credit-rating companies, demands particular attention by officials. The ECB already owns 8% of the nation’s debt, and has committed to accept it as collateral in refinancing operations as long as the country stays in a program to ensure its reform efforts stay on track. Greek opposition party Syriza, which leads in opinion polls, has campaigned on an anti-austerity platform that includes relief on the nation’s debt. That leaves the ECB facing a dilemma over whether to buy the bonds.

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Greece can get anything it wants, as long as Germany’s interests are secured. And that’s the whole problem.

German Lawmakers Say Greek Debt Talks Possible After Vote (Bloomberg)

Germany is leaving the door open to discussing debt relief with Greece’s next government, lawmakers in Chancellor Angela Merkel’s coalition said, signaling a more flexible stance than her administration has taken publicly. While writing off Greek debt isn’t on the table, talks on easing the repayment terms on aid that Greece received from European governments are possible after the country’s parliamentary elections on Jan. 25, the lawmakers from Germany’s two biggest governing parties said. The condition is that Greece sticks to its austerity commitments, they said.

The potential opening reflects scenarios under discussion in Merkel’s coalition for how to respond if Greek voters oust Prime Minister Antonis Samaras, a Merkel ally who has enforced German-led demands for austerity, and elect anti-austerity leader Alexis Tsipras’s Syriza party. “There should be talks with any government that emerges from the election,” Ingrid Arndt-Brauer, a Social Democrat who chairs the lower house’s finance committee, said in an interview. “You can talk about extending maturities and easing the interest rate on loans with a left-wing government, too.” A senior lawmaker from Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union said Germany will talk with any elected Greek government, including about an easing of aid conditions, as long as Greece doesn’t renege on its austerity commitments.

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If the creditors are willing to forgive enough debt, this shouldn’t be a problem. 😉

ECB Wants New Greek Government To Quickly Reach Deal With Creditors (Reuters)

The European Central Bank wants Greece’s new government to soon reach an agreement with its European partners to enable the country’s banks to continue to have access to funding, Greek newspaper Kathimerini reported on Thursday. “The ECB sent clear and stern messages to Athens yesterday through Bank of Greece Governor Yannis Stournaras asking for an agreement with European partners soon after the election so that liquidity access to banks can continue,” the paper said. ECB funding to Greek banks rose 2.3% to €44.85 billion in November. Banks have reduced their exposure but still depend on ECB funding for liquidity.

Citing the country’s central banker, the paper said the ECB will maintain its funding access to the nation’s lenders as long as Athens remains under a bailout program and continues to meet its obligations. “As regards the upcoming election, the ECB is not taking any side but wants whatever government emerges to be formed soon and complete negotiations with the (EU/IMF/ECB) troika so that there is agreement on the day after,” Kathimerini said. The paper said business and household deposits dropped by about €2.5 billion in December, according to estimates by bankers who do not see the situation as a cause for concern.

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“.. preparations must be made in secret by a small group of officials and then acted on more or less straightaway ..”

Here’s One Road Map For A Greek Eurozone Exit (MarketWatch)

Remember Grexit? Looming elections in Greece have people again talking about the possibility of a country leaving the euro. If it were to come to that, it wouldn’t be a simple task. And some economists fear the turmoil that would surround a breakup could trigger another global financial crisis. While financial markets aren’t exactly up in arms over the prospect, it’s worth a closer look at exactly how a Greek exit might play out. One possible path was detailed by economist Roger Bootle, the founder of London-based research firm Capital Economics. In fact, the plan won the 2012 Wolfson Economics Prize, which was a contest for proposals on how to dismantle the eurozone. Here are some of the plan’s highlights:

Secret preparations, capital controls: This would be necessary because word of an exit would prompt a run on the banks. After all, who would want to leave their euros parked in a Greek bank to see them converted overnight into drachmas? “Accordingly, preparations must be made in secret by a small group of officials and then acted on more or less straightaway,” wrote Bootle and his associates. Temporary capital controls, including temporary closure of the banks, would be essential just before departure. Parity with the euro (at first): In order to maintain price transparency and boost confidence, it would be best to introduce the new currency at parity with the euro. In other words, if the price of an item was €1.35, it would now be 1.35 drachmas. They note that the drachma would, of course, be free to fall on foreign exchange markets and that it is actually crucial that it does so.

Redenominated debt, substantial default: The government should redenominate its debt in the new currency and make clear it plans to renegotiate the terms, which would likely include a “substantial default,” they wrote, while also making clear the intention to resume servicing remaining debt as soon as possible. Bootle and his team offered several other recommendations, including a call for the national central bank of an exiting country to implement inflation-targeting and stand ready to inject liquidity into its own banking system, using quantitative easing, if necessary. They must also make clear they’re ready to recapitalize banks, the plan recommends.

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“.. the idea that such things can happen despite a consensus of social and geopolitical health does not seemed to have soaked into the thick skulls of average people.”

We Are Entering An Era Of Shattered Illusions (Alt-Market)

The structure of history is held together by two essential and distinct kinds of links, two moments in time to which no one is immune: moments of epiphany, and moments of catastrophe. Sometimes, both elements intermingle at the birth of a singular epoch. Men often awaken to understanding in the midst of great crisis; and, invariably, great crises can erupt when men awaken. These are the moments when social gravity vanishes, when the kinetic glue of normalcy melts away, and we begin to see the true foundations of our world, if a foundation exists at all. Catastrophe occurs when too many people refuse to accept that around us always are two universes at work. There is the cold, hard reality that underlies everything. And on the surface is a veil of deceit and compromise. The more humanity compromises vital truths in order to enjoy the comfort of illusions, the more mind-shattering it will be when those illusions fall away. These two worlds can coexist only for short periods of time, and they will always and eventually collide. There is no other possible outcome.

I think it could be said that the more polarized our realities become, the more explosive and disastrous the reaction will be when the separation is removed. I feel it absolutely necessary to relate this danger because today humanity is living so historically far from the bedrock of reality, political reality, social reality and economic reality that the stage has been set for a kind of full spectrum destabilization that has never been seen before. Though my analysis tends to lean toward the economic side of things, I am not only speaking of shattered illusions in the financial realm. In my next article, one last time I plan to go over nearly every mainstream economic statistic used today to misdirect the public (from national debt to unemployment to inflation to retail sales and corporate profits) and expose why they are false while giving you the real numbers. For now, I want to discuss the core problem of self-deception, the problem that makes all the rest of our problems possible.

When the initial phase of the global collapse was triggered in 2007 and 2008, there was a substantial explosion in interest and education in terms of liberty issues and alternative economic awareness. I remember back in 2006 when I had just begun writing for the movement that the ratio of people on any given Web forum or in any given public discussion was vastly opposed to alternative viewpoints and information — at least 50-1 by my observations. We were at the height of the real estate frenzy; everyone was buying houses with money they didn’t have and borrowing on their mortgages to purchase stuff they didn’t need. Life was good. The shock of the credit crisis came quickly and abruptly for most people, and there has been a considerable shift in the kinds of discussions many are willing to entertain about our future. Yet the idea that such things can happen despite a consensus of social and geopolitical health does not seemed to have soaked into the thick skulls of average people.

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Setting the stage for rate hikes.

Fed Bullish On US Recovery (Reuters)

U.S. central bankers have looked beyond a global deflation threat, fear of energy-sector bond defaults, and a surge of oil patch layoffs to reach what appears to be a firm conclusion: the U.S. recovery is here to stay. New trade data released on Wednesday and signs of ever-stronger consumer spending confirmed the United States remains the bright spot in a global economy plagued by uncertainty. The trade deficit shrank in November to less than $40 billion, providing a boost to growth as Americans spent less on imported oil. Meanwhile, the first corporate reports from the Christmas season showed at least some of that money trickling into stores as J.C. Penney said same-store sales rose 3.7% in November and December, pushing the company’s stock up nearly 20%.

At its December policy-setting meeting, according to minutes released on Wednesday, the Federal Reserve took close stock of plunging world oil prices and turmoil in Europe and decided that those negative trends would not undo that underlying strength. “Several participants … suggested that the real economy may end up showing more momentum than anticipated, while a few others thought that the boost to domestic spending coming from lower energy prices could turn out to be quite large.” The minutes set the stage for what could be a key economic theme this year: how the global system will react as Fed policy diverges from that of other major central banks. The European Central Bank and the Bank of Japan are expected to further loosen monetary conditions in coming weeks or months, while the luster has fallen from emerging markets that had been attracting record levels of investment in recent years.

“These minutes defined the environment post-tapering,” said Robert Tipp, chief investment strategist at Prudential Fixed Income in New Jersey. “If the Fed moves aggressively it would suck up capital from emerging markets.” Global conditions have arguably weakened since the Fed’s Dec. 16-17 meeting, and the minutes note that the United States would not be immune if the world economy turns sharply down. There is already fallout. Credit analysts have honed in on the debts of companies involved in oil and gas exploration and production, with Standard & Poor’s downgrading half a dozen firms at the end of 2014 and concluding the entire sector will be under pressure if prices remain so low.

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Abecomics has been far worse than a mere failure.

Japan Household Mood Worsens To Levels Before ‘Abenomics’ (Reuters)

Japanese households’ sentiment worsened in December to levels last seen before premier Shinzo Abe unleashed radical stimulus policies two years ago, a central bank survey showed, underscoring the challenges he faces reviving the economy. The diffusion index measuring how households felt about the current state of the economy stood at minus 32.9 in December, down 12.5 points from September, the Bank of Japan’s quarterly survey on people’s livelihood showed on Thursday. Abe’s ruling party won a landslide victory in a snap poll in December last year, giving the premier a fresh mandate to proceed with his “Abenomics” mix of massive fiscal, monetary stimulus and structural reforms dubbed “Abenomics.”

That is the lowest level since December 2012, when Abe won the previous election and launched his radical program aimed at breaking the economy free of a long deflationary phase. While the policies helped weaken the yen and boost stock prices, the effect on the economy has been disappointing as companies remain hesitant over boosting wages and capital spending. Another index gauging households’ livelihood fell 3.1 points to minus 47.2, the worst level since 2011, the survey showed. A negative reading means respondents who feel they are worse off than three months ago exceed those who fell better off.

Many of those who replied that they are worse off complained of rising costs of living and stagnant wage growth, a sign households are feeling the pinch from a sales tax hike in April 2014 and rising import costs due to the weak yen. The weak reading suggests Abe’s decision last November to delay a second sales tax hike, initially planned for October 2015, did little to brighten sentiment. It also highlights the dilemma of the BOJ, which is printing money aggressively to achieve its 2% inflation target sometime during the fiscal year beginning in April. More than 80% of respondents expect prices to rise a year from now, roughly unchanged from September. But 83.8% of households consider rising prices as undesirable, up from 78.8% in September, the survey showed.

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More than happy to.

China Steps In To Support Venezuela, Ecuador As Oil Prices Tumble

China stepped up its courtship of Latin American countries Thursday, promising to double trade with the region by 2025 and offering fresh loans to support left-wing governments in Venezuela and Ecuador. At a meeting in Beijing with the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States, or CELAC, President Xi Jinping said that annual bilateral trade would rise to $500 billion over the next 10 years, and that China would invest some $250 billion in the region in that period. That would threaten the U.S.’s traditional pre-eminence as the region’s biggest trading partner, inevitably diluting its political clout there. However, it’s not clear quite how Xi arrived at his figures. Although trade and investment have rocketed in the last 20 years as China has sucked up natural resources from around the world to fuel its industrialization, growth slowed sharply in the first 11 months of last year, as China refocused its economy on domestic demand.

According to CELAC figures, trade volumes grew only 1.3% year-on-year in the first 11 months of 2014. Despite that, China remains the biggest buyer for Venezuelan oil, Chilean copper and Argentinian soybeans, among other things. Of more immediate impact than Xi’s promises Thursday were agreements to bankroll the governments of Venezuela and Ecuador, two of the most viscerally anti-U.S. regimes in the region and two oil exporters who are struggling with the consequences of the 60% drop in oil prices since the start of last year. Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro was reported as saying that he had secured over $20 billion in investment from the state-owned institutions Bank of China and China Development Bank, adding to over $45 billion in the last 10 years. He didn’t give details of the loans’ terms. Ecuador, meanwhile, said it had agreed a new $5.3 billion credit line with China’s Export-Import Bank and $2.2 billion in other funding.

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Saudi involvement in the attacks.

Lawmakers Up Pressure On Obama To Release Secret 9/11 Documents (Fox)

Congressional lawmakers on Wednesday ramped up efforts to get President Obama to release 28 top-secret pages from a 9/11 report that allegedly detail Saudi Arabia’s involvement in the terror attacks. Lawmakers and advocacy groups have pushed for the declassification for years. The effort already had bipartisan House support but now has the backing of retired Florida Democratic Sen. Bob Graham, a former Senate Intelligence Committee chairman whom supporters hope will help garner enough congressional backing to pressure Obama into releasing the confidential information. “The American people have been denied enough,” North Carolina GOP Rep. Walter Jones said on Capitol Hill. “It’s time for the truth to come out.”

Jones has led the effort with Massachusetts Democratic Rep. Stephen Lynch, among the few members of Congress who have read the 28 redacted pages of the joint House and Senate “Inquiry into Intelligence Activities Before and After the Terror Attacks,” initially classified by President George W. Bush. They introduced a new resolution on Wednesday urging Obama to declassify the pages. Jones and other lawmakers have described the documents’ contents as shocking. That 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudi Arabian citizens is already known. But Graham and the congressmen suggested the documents point to Saudi government ties and repeatedly said Wednesday that the U.S. continues to deny the truth about who principally financed the attacks – covering up for Saudi Arabia, a wealthy Middle East ally.

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Don’t be surprised if France moves quickly on this.

‘France Wants To Mend Ties With Russia’ (RT)

France intends to take a lead in de-escalating the confrontation with Russia as a face-saving measure while the EU is facing big economic challenges, John Laughland, Director of studies at the Institute of Democracy and Cooperation in Paris, told RT.

RT: Francois Hollande on Monday said that sanctions against Russia “must stop now.” What does this statement from the French leader mean for the upcoming talks?

John Laughland: I think that means that France is intending to take a lead in deescalating the confrontation with Russia and in seeing an end to sanctions, in seeing the sale of the Mistral helicopter carrier ships and also in seeing a de facto – at least – recognition of the annexation of Crimea. I said this back in December when Francois Hollande, the French president visited Vladimir Putin on the way back from Kazakhstan. It was clear that he was taking the lead then, taking a lead against Germany and against Mrs. Merkel of who many people thought that she would be pro-Russian force in Europe. She’s turned out to be very opposite. And we are seeing France assuming a relatively traditional position now in foreign policy and reassuming and reasserting its traditional friendship with Russia. So I’m relatively optimistic about these latest statements.

RT: Hollande added that progress has to be made at the talks. Moscow has been actively engaged in the peace process in eastern Ukraine. The latest talks saw hundreds of prisoners returned by both Kiev and eastern militias, but the sanctions still remain. So what exactly constitutes progress?

JL: He is saying that he wants to sell the Mistral, he wants to get rid of the problem, he would like, as he said, the end of the sanctions and so on. He assured himself, extremely understanding for the Russian position. He didn’t mention Crimea. He implied that Crimean annexation would be accepted, and he showed understanding as well for Russian opposition to NATO membership for Ukraine. When he says “progress” I regard that as purely a face-saving phrase. The fact is that Ukraine is off the headlines now. We haven’t had much news from Ukraine for many weeks now in the Western media. Quite frankly it is off people’s radar screen. Providing it stays off the radar screen, providing it stays off headlines it would be a good time – if that is indeed his intention – to move on from this unfortunate episode.

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As I said: why bother?

Fight Over Keystone Pipeline is Completely Divorced From Reality (Bloomberg)

In the six years since TransCanada Corp. first sought U.S. approval to build the pipeline, the debate over Keystone XL pipeline has, somewhat strangely, become one of the central fights in U.S. politics. It’s about to get even bigger. On Wednesday, Republicans will inaugurate the new Congress by taking up a Senate bill to approve the Keystone XL pipeline that would connect oil producers in Western Canada to U.S. refineries on the Gulf Coast. The House will vote on the measure on Friday. Several years ago, liberals looking for a cause to rally around settled on Keystone because the oil it would transport, extracted from tar sands, is especially damaging to the environment. James Hansen, then the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, famously declared that if the pipeline goes forward and Canada develops its oil sands “it will be game over for the planet.”

Conservatives seized on Keystone because it offered a clear example of liberals prioritizing the environment over the jobs the pipeline’s construction would create, an effective political attack in a lousy economy. President Obama’s anguish over whether or not to approve it only added to the appeal. As a result, Keystone has attained tremendous symbolic importance for both Democrats and Republicans. But this is the opposite of how it should be — the political fight has become completely divorced from reality. The pipeline’s actual importance to oil markets, the economy and the environment has steadily diminished. Whoever wins, the “victory” will be pointless and hollow. The liberal claim that blocking Keystone would limit Canadian oil sands development, or even slow Canadian oil exports to the United States, has turned out to be wrong.

Over the last four years, Canadian exports to the Gulf Coast have risen 83%. Last year, U.S. oil imports from Canada hit a record. This year, Canadian oil producers expect shipments to double. One way producers achieved this is by building new pipelines, such as the Flanagan South pipeline, which can transport 600,000 barrels a day of heavy crude, and expanding old ones. At the same time, the Canadian government has approved two new lines as a fallback to Keystone—one running east to Quebec, the other west to the Pacific—that avoid the U.S. entirely. Collectively, these projects dwarf Keystone’s 800,000 barrel-a-day capacity. “Keystone is kind of old news,” Sandy Fielden, director of energy analytics at Austin, Texas-based RBN Energy, told Bloomberg News. “Producers have moved on and are looking for new capacity from other pipelines.”

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“Policy makers must realise that their instincts to completely use the fossil fuels within their countries are wholly incompatible with their commitments to the 2C goal.”

Most Fossil Fuels Are ‘Unburnable’ (BBC)

Most of the world’s fossil fuel reserves will need to stay in the ground if dangerous global warming is to be avoided, modelling work suggests. Over 80% of coal, 50% of gas and 30% of oil reserves are “unburnable” under the goal to limit global warming to no more than 2C, say scientists. University College London research, published in Nature journal, rules out drilling in the Arctic. And it points to heavy restrictions on coal to limit temperature rises. “We’ve now got tangible figures of the quantities and locations of fossil fuels that should remain unused in trying to keep within the 2C temperature limit,” said lead researcher Dr Christophe McGlade, of the UCL Institute for Sustainable Resources.

“Policy makers must realise that their instincts to completely use the fossil fuels within their countries are wholly incompatible with their commitments to the 2C goal.” Past research has found that burning all of the world’s fossil fuel resources would release three times more carbon than that required to keep warming to no more than 2C. The new study uses models to estimate how much coal, oil and gas must go unburned up to 2050 and where it can be extracted to stay within the 2C target regarded as the threshold for dangerous climate change. The uneven distribution of resources raises huge dilemmas for countries seeking to exploit their natural resources amid attempts to strike a global deal on climate change:
• The Middle East would need to leave about 40% of its oil and 60% of its gas underground
• The majority of the huge coal reserves in China, Russia and the United States would have to remain unused
• Undeveloped resources of unconventional gas, such as shale gas, would be off limits in Africa and the Middle East, and very little could be exploited in India and China
• Unconventional oil, such as Canada’s tar sands, would be unviable.

The research also raises questions for fossil fuel companies about investment in future exploration, given there is more in the ground than “we can afford to burn”, say the UCL scientists. “We shouldn’t waste a lot of money trying to find fossil fuels which we think are going to be more expensive,” co-researcher Prof Paul Ekins told the BBC. “That almost certainly includes Arctic resources. It will certainly include a lot of the shale gas resources in Europe, which have not really been explored or exploited at all.”

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Different take on same story.

The ‘Untouchable Reserves’ (BBC)

Is the “carbon bubble” wobbling in the face of a new assault? A paper in the journal Nature has lent support to the notion that combating climate change and developing more fossil fuels are mutually contradictory. Its key message is that keeping global temperature rise within 2C means leaving in the ground 80% of known coal reserves, 50% of gas and 30% of oil. The University College London authors invite investors to ponder whether $670bn, the amount they say was spent last year on seeking and developing fossil fuels, is a wise use of money if we can’t burn all the fuel we’ve already found.

The movement to divest from fossil fuel companies is being prompted by the small but increasingly influential NGO Carbon Tracker, which argues that investment has created a carbon bubble of fossil fuel assets that will be worthless if climate change is taken seriously. The managers of the Rockefeller fortune have heard its message and already divested from coal. The University of Glasgow’s investment fund will avoid fossil fuels altogether. NGO 350.org is gathering support for a similar campaign in the US, and Norway’s vast government pension fund is seeking to pressure companies to take their climate responsibilities more seriously.

Surprisingly, the Bank of England has also chipped in. It is conducting an enquiry into the risk of an economic crash if future climate change rules render coal, oil and gas assets worthless. The findings will be interesting; even if the enquiry team are alarmed by the potential extent of stranded assets, they can hardly make their case bluntly for fear of creating a stampede. To heap on the pressure, the talks leading to the prospective climate deal in Paris in December will debate whether fossil fuels can be completely phased out by 2050. Oil firms like Shell have stated their confidence in the energy status quo that has formed the economic bedrock of modern society and helped billions out of poverty. They say they see no risk to their business model (because executives privately do not believe that politicians will keep their promises on carbon limits). And they have hopes that technology to capture and store carbon will give their products a new lease of life.

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This would save a lot of lives in the future. Then again, we’d start feeing them to farm animals, and restart the whole cycle.

US Antibiotics Discovery Labelled ‘Game Changer’ For Medicine (BBC)

The decades-long drought in antibiotic discovery could be over after a breakthrough by US scientists. Their novel method for growing bacteria has yielded 25 new antibiotics, with one deemed “very promising”. The last new class of antibiotics to make it to clinic was discovered nearly three decades ago. The study, in the journal Nature, has been described as a “game-changer” and experts believe the antibiotic haul is just the “tip of the iceberg”. The heyday of antibiotic discovery was in the 1950s and 1960s, but nothing found since 1987 has made it into doctor’s hands. Since then microbes have become incredibly resistant. Extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis ignores nearly everything medicine can throw at it. The researchers, at the Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts, turned to the source of nearly all antibiotics – soil. This is teeming with microbes, but only 1% can be grown in the laboratory.

The team created a “subterranean hotel” for bacteria. One bacterium was placed in each “room” and the whole device was buried in soil. It allowed the unique chemistry of soil to permeate the room, but kept the bacteria in place for study. The scientists involved believe they can grow nearly half of all soil bacteria. Chemicals produced by the microbes, dug up from one researcher’s back yard, were then tested for antimicrobial properties. The lead scientist, Prof Kim Lewis, said: “So far 25 new antibiotics have been discovered using this method and teixobactin is the latest and most promising one. “[The study shows] uncultured bacteria do harbour novel chemistry that we have not seen before. That is a promising source of new antimicrobials and will hopefully help revive the field of antibiotic discovery.”

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