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Private creditors have replaced the public sector as lead borrower to developing countries, which has contributed to a new borrowing and lending boom. Private financial institutions are responsible for prompting a potential “new wave” of debt crises among developing nations, according to a new report carried out by European Think Tank Eurodad. Public debt in developing countries is increasingly being borrowed from private lenders, which the authors argue has meant that an increasing portion of credit is not effectively monitored or regulated. “Private borrowers, in particular private corporations, have used this regulation gap to throw a big borrowing party, a debt party, and thus have contributed disproportionately to the external debt burden that developing countries carry now,” the report warned.

As part of its findings, the authors of the report concluded that, “while relative debt burdens decreased between 2000 and 2010, these trends have reversed in 2011. Since then debt is on an upward path, also when measured in relative terms.” Developing countries total external debt burden reached US$5.4 trillion in 2014 and over half of this amount is now owed by private debtors, according to data from the report titled,“The Evolving Nature of Developing Country Debt and Solutions for Change.” The study attributed the recent increase in private creditors to the heavy public borrowing that took place during the 1980’s and 1990’s, which prompted sharper restrictions on public lending institutions such as the International Monetary Fund.

Remember affordable housing?

• US Homeownership Dips to Lowest Rate Since 1960 (RCM)

The US homeownership rate, as recently reported by the Census Bureau, dropped to 62.9% in the second quarter of 2016, a rate about equal to the rate of 61.9% reported over a half century ago for 1960. This stagnation compares unfavorably to 1900 to 1960 when the non-farm homeownership rate increased from 36.5% to 61%.-a period encompassing rampant urbanization, immigration, and population growth. For example, the non-farm population quadrupled from about 42 million to 166 million, yet the non-farm homeownership rate increased by 67%. Except for the interruption caused by the Great Depression, the rate of increase was moderate to strong throughout the period.

How can this be? Isn’t there an alphabet soup of federal agencies-FHA, HUD, FNMA, FHLMC, GNMA, RHS, FHLBs-all with the goal of increasing homeownership by making it more “affordable”? Don’t these agencies fund or insure countless trillions of dollars in home loan lending–most with very liberal loan terms? Could it be the federal government massive liberalization of mortgage terms creates demand pressure leading to higher prices? Could it be federal, state, and local governments’ implement land use policies that constrain supply and drive prices up even further? Could it be government housing policies have made homeownership less, not more affordable or accessible?

The answer is an unequivocal yes. Since the mid-1950, liberalized federal lending policies have fueled a massive and dangerous increase in leverage-one that continues to this day. For example, in 1954 FHA loans had an average loan term of 22 years vs. 29.5 years today, an average loan-to-value of 80% vs. 97.5%, average housing debt-to-income ratio of 15% vs. 28%. Only the average borrowing cost in 1954 of 4.5% is the same as it is today. The result is today’s FHA borrower can purchase a home selling for twice as much as one with the underwriting standards in place in 1954-but without a dollar’s increase in income!

It’s all a big rip-off. Get the government out of housing once and for all.

• The Next Huge American Housing Bailout Could Be Coming (TAM)

The failures of government intervention in the economy have made headlines yet again. Recent stress tests by the Federal Housing Finance Agency found something sinister brewing under the surface at notorious mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The results show that these puppet companies could need up to a $126 billion bailout if the economy continues to deteriorate. That’s right — the two companies that were taken over by the government and that sucked $187 billion from the treasury could be entitled to more taxpayer money. The toxic home loans bought during the last crisis coupled with a lack of liquidity have suddenly become serious risk factors.

The so-called “recovery” that has been trumpeted for years by countless politicians and economists is falling apart in plain view. The media will do just about anything to assure the public that this is all isolated and overblown, but the canary in the coal mine has just dropped dead. The tests ran a scenario eerily similar to warnings we’ve heard about what the economic future might hold: “The global market shock involves large and immediate changes in asset prices, interest rates, and spreads caused by general market dislocation and uncertainty in the global economy.” In the throes of the 2008 crisis, the government took many unprecedented actions, but one of the most notable was seizing control of the two largest mortgage loan holders in the country.

Since then, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have been converted from subsidized private organizations into some of the biggest government-sponsored enterprises ever created. These institutions have been used to prop up the entire real estate market by purchasing trillions of dollars in home loans from other banks to keep prices elevated. Without Fannie and Freddie, the supply of houses on the market would have far exceeded the number of buyers. This glut in supply and low demand would have forced sellers to lower prices until a deal was made. Instead, these wards of the state were able to buy up properties at artificially high prices using government-issued blank checks, allowing for the manipulation of home values back up to desired levels.

Debt at work.

• China’s Stimulus Efforts Show ‘Malinvestment Is Still Hard at Work’ (BBG)

It was supposed to be different this time. Ahead of looming fiscal stimulus from China, analysts were quick to emphasize that this would be a leaner, smarter government spending program. There would be a new method of financing to try to keep the debt burdens for local governments from becoming too onerous. And, above all, it would be targeted to avoid exacerbating the excess capacity that’s abundant in many industries. While the scale of the expenditures certainly pales in comparison to those that followed the Great Recession, the story remains the same. A Morgan Stanley team, led by Chief China Economist Robin Xing, noted that fixed-asset investment growth among state-owned enterprises (or SOEs) has accelerated across the board in 2016, with the exception of mining.

This same trend also holds for investment in services sectors, Xing observed. These data suggest that stimulus efforts have not been as targeted as proponents hoped, belie the narrative of rotation of growth from credit-driven infrastructure projects to activity linked to domestic demand, and raise the specter of further malinvestment in the world’s second largest economy. “We know a) in real terms rebalancing isn’t advancing as much as the government protests citing nominal data and b) the restimulation this last year of investment via credit and fiscal policies will certainly have slowed it down further,” writes George Magnus, senior economic adviser at UBS. “Capital accumulation isn’t all or always wrong but if it’s largely debt financed and SOE provided, I’d say that malinvestment is still hard at work.”

Lest we forget: There is no market. There is only distortion.

• The UK Is the New Engine of Bond-Market Distortion (WSJ)

Britain has taken over from Japan as the world’s wildest bond market, raising new questions about the distortions being caused by central banks. The soaring price (and so plunging yield) of the 30-year gilt means it has now returned the same 31% over the past 12 months as the Japanese 30-year note, even as some of the excess in long-dated Japanese bonds falls away. The race into gilts partly anticipated and was accelerated by the Bank of England’s resumption of bond purchases this week, part of a package of monetary easing designed to offset damage to the economy from June’s Brexit vote. Lower gilt yields are in turn contributing to demand for global bonds, helping keep U.S. Treasury yields depressed even as other market moves suggest a revival of hopes for growth and inflation.

This again raises a long-running problem for investors. Should they regard low yields as a sign of how grim a future is in store for the world economy? Or are central banks distorting the signal so much through bond purchases that yields no longer carry much information about the economy? The rally in gilts has been extraordinary, with the yield on the U.K.’s longest-dated bond, the 2068 maturity, almost halving from 2% on the day of the referendum to 1.06% on Thursday. The price of the bond is up 53% this year, the sort of gains usually produced by risky stocks, not rock-solid government paper.

Consolation: it happens everywhere.

• A Really Vicious Circle Is Threatening UK Pension Pots (BBG)

As the Bank of England seeks to ease Brexit angst by injecting money into the U.K. economy, pension managers and insurers are finding themselves caught up in a vicious circle. Britain’s new quantitative-easing program, combined with monetary easing around the world, is crushing yields, leaving these long-term investors ever more desperate to hold on to their 20-, 30- and 50-year bonds to meet return targets and liabilities. That forces protagonists like the BOE, which is buying 60 billion pounds ($78 billion) of government debt over six months, to bid higher prices – driving yields down even further.

This may explain the crunch this week, when the central bank failed to find enough investors to sell it longer-maturity gilts, the part of the debt market dominated by pensions and insurers. While the revival of QE is intended to reduce the risk of a Brexit-fueled slump, the shortfall raises the question of whether debt purchases with newly created money are becoming part of the problem as well as the solution. “We recognize the Bank’s concern and the need to protect the economy,” said Helen Forrest Hall, defined-benefit policy lead at the Pensions and Lifetime Savings Association in London. “But the challenge we have is that the QE programs do have an impact on pension funds’ liabilities.”

Yeah, can’t risk bank profits, can we?

• IMF to ECB: Forget Negative Rates, Or You’ll Do More Harm Than Good (MW)

Economists at the IMF are urging the ECB to stop yanking interest rates further into negative territory, warning it will take a toll on the region’s already struggling banks and reduce lending to businesses and households. In a blog post on the IMF website, economists Andy Jobst and Huidan Lin say any additional cuts that would push rates further below zero will encounter diminishing returns and threaten, at this point, to do more harm than good. “Further policy rate cuts could bring into focus the potential trade-off between effective monetary transmission and bank profitability. Lower bank profitability and equity prices could pressure banks with slender capital buffers to reduce lending, especially those with high levels of troubled loans,” the analysts said on the blog.

“The prospect of prolonged low policy rates has clouded the earnings outlook for most banks, suggesting that the benefits from a negative interest rate policy might diminish over time,” they said. The warning comes as expectations are rising the central bank will announce fresh stimulus at its September meeting to offset the negative impact on the eurozone from the U.K.’s Brexit vote on June 23. At its July meeting, ECB boss Mario Draghi stopped short of pledging more measures, saying the policy makers will reassess in September when it will have fresh economic forecasts that factor in the impact of the U.K.’s referendum on ending its EU membership.

New normal: Profit falls 90%, shares up 5.3%.

• Global Shipping Giant Moller-Maersk Reports 90% Fall In Net Profit (CNBC/R.)

Moller-Maersk kept its downbeat 2016 profit forecast on Friday as the Danish shipping and oil giant reported net profit way under expectations as it struggles to cope with a shipping recession and tough oil markets. The Danish shipping and oil group said net profit fell to $101 million in April-June, lagging a forecast of $196 million. It was also around 90% lower than the $1.069 billion reported for the same period last year. The company maintained its outlook for an underlying profit for the full year significantly below last years $3.1 billion. Shares of the group were up 5.3% Friday morning.

Trond Westlie, chief financial officer of Maersk Group, told CNBC on Friday that the shipping industry faced turbulent times as a result of the “very difficult” oil market and decline in freight rates. “When we look at the overall market and when we look at supply and demand and the growth in the world, we still think it’s going to be low-growth and volatile.” “For us, like always, we have a view on a couple of weeks or a four weeks’ indication on where the market is going but after that it’s very opaque for us as well.”

Debt Rattle August 8 2016

Aug 082016

August 8, 2016 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 9:20 am Finance Tagged with: bonds, China, depression, exports, globalization, imports, oil, open society, steel, yields 6 Responses »

NPC Dr. H.W. Evans, Imperial Wizard 1925

• The US Market Has Been And Remains Today, The Last Ponzi Game Standing (Adler)

• Priced Out Of The ‘Open Society’ (McKenna)

• Shrinking Imports And Exports—A Far More Meaningful Counterpoint To BLS (Alh.)

• China’s July Exports, Imports Fall More Than Expected (R.)

• China Crude Imports Fall to 6-Month Low, Fuel Exports Surge (BBG)

• China’s Great River of Steel Swells as Trade Tensions Build (BBG)

• Draghi Jumps Brexit Hurdle to Find Oil Damping Price Outlook (BBG)

• Bond Market’s Big Illusion Revealed as US Yields Turn Negative (BBG)

• China’s Marshall Plan (BBG)

• Earnings Beats Are Concealing Bad Results (MW)

• We’re in a Low-Growth World. How Did We Get Here? (NYT)

• Musical Chairs in a Depression (Thomas)

Great piece from Lee Adler. “It’s abstract impressionism. It’s a joke.”

• The US Market Has Been And Remains Today, The Last Ponzi Game Standing (Adler)

I’m not here to argue whether the July report was lousy or not. The US economy may well be spawning big numbers of crappy low paying jobs. Withholding tax collections were huge in the last 4 weeks of July. We know that that didn’t come from big wage gains by existing workers. They’re running at about a 2.5% annual growth rate. So when tax collections increase by a significant margin over a similar period a year ago, it suggests that there were new jobs, maybe a lot of them. I’m also not here to argue that the headline number bears any semblance of reality. The headline number is the seasonally adjusted month to month gain in the estimated number of jobs. The whole process of seasonal adjustment is a bogus attempt to smooth a jagged trend with peaks and valleys into a continuous modified moving average.

The number is a fiction. Because it’s based on a moving average it has a built in lag, for which statisticians try to compensate with a bunch of statistical hocus pocus. That includes constantly revising the number based first on subsequent surveys, and then on benchmarking the data with actual tax collections in the 5 subsequent years. Not only is the number revised twice after the first month it’s issued, but it’s then fit to the curve of actuality for the next 5 years until the reading is finalized. July’s reading won’t be final until July 2021. The process is really “seasonal finagling.” It’s abstract impressionism. It’s a joke. What I have come to argue here is that the not seasonally adjusted (NSA) numbers, which I have always relied upon in my analysis of the jobs trend, is probably also a joke.

Look at this chart. Do those railroad tracks look like the real world to you, or are these some kind of computer generated auto-numbers that merely make a pretense of reality. Law of Large Numbers or not, I have never seen any other economic series behave with such regularity. This is a joke, a farce, a sham. But it doesn’t matter because the economy doesn’t matter. The world’s central banks have attempted, and largely succeeded, in rigging the financial markets. One of the consequences, intended or unintended, is that the bulk of the benefit of that rigging flows to the US financial markets. That has been so been since 2009. The US market has been and remains today, the Last Ponzi Game Standing. All roads lead to the US.

Saxo Bank’s Mike McKenna comments on an Economist cheerleading piece on ‘Open Society’, which somehow -presumably because it sounds positive- has become synonymous to globalization. McKenna’s conclusion: the world can’t afford globalization. Which is what I’ve been saying: without growth there can be no centralization. The Saxo boys seem to think that a return to growth is still possible/desirable. I think not.

• Priced Out Of The ‘Open Society’ (McKenna)

The biggest problem facing globalism, however, is neither its hypocrisy nor its will-to-power – these are ordinary human failings common to all ideologies. Its biggest problem is much simpler: it’s very expensive. The world has seen versions of the wealthy, cosmopolitan ideal before. In both Imperial Rome and Achaemenid Persia, for example, societies characterised by extensive trade networks, multicultural metropoli and the rule of law (relative to the times) eventually succumbed to rampant inequality, inter-community strife, and expensive foreign wars in the case of Rome and a death-spiral of economic stagnation and constant tax hikes in the case of Persia.

It seems near-axiomatic that, in the absence of the sort of strong GDP growth that characterised the post-World War Two era, the pluralist ideal might begin to show strains along the seams of its own construction. Such strains can be inter-ethnic, ideological, religious, or whatever else, but the legitimacy of The Economists’s favoured worldview largely came about due to the wealth and living standards it was seen to provide in the post-WW2 and Cold War era. Now that this is beginning to falter, so too are the politicians and institutions that have long championed it. In Jakobsen’s view, the rising tide of populist nationalism is in no way the solution, but it is a sign that globalisation’s elites have grown distant from the population as a whole.

“The world has become elitist in every way,” says Saxo Bank’s chief economist. “We as a society have to recognise that productivity comes from raising the average education level… the key thing here is that we need to be more productive. If everyone has a job, there is no need to renegotiate the social contract.” Put another way, would the political careers of Trump, Le Pen, Viktor Orban, and other such nationalist leaders be where they are if the post-crisis environment had been one of healthy wage growth, inflation, an increase in “breadwinner” jobs, and GDP expansion?

Globalization crashing head first into its inherent limits.

• Shrinking Imports And Exports—A Far More Meaningful Counterpoint To BLS (Alh.)

In the first six months of 2005, the US imported 27.2% more in Chinese goods than the first six months of 2004, and that was 28.8% more than the first six months of 2003. In the first six months of 2016, the US imported 6.5% less than the first six months of 2015, itself only 6.1% more than the first six months of 2014. The US actually imported slightly less from China so far this year than two years ago.

As we know very well from US production levels it’s not as if some native “buy American” grassroots opposition has successfully convinced American buyers to ditch the cheaper Chinese alternatives, redistributing “strong” consumer spending toward American products. There is much less goods being produced and traded with and within the United States – alarmingly so. Further, as you can see above and below, the timing of this most recent change from plain weakness to dangerous weakness is significant.

Starting September 2015, meaning dating back to August, US imports from China have dropped off a cliff. While year-over-year growth was slightly positive in September, it has been negative in every month since except February 2016 and that was due to calendar effects here and holiday weeks there (and was easily wiped out by the massive contraction in March). The mainstream reading of the payroll reports up to that point indicated that US demand would and should be nothing but strong. Instead, it has been much worse than it already was.

It isn’t just China that is feeling the increasing absenteeism of the US consumer. US imports from Europe contracted for the third straight month, where the -1.8% 6-month average is the lowest since 2010 and the initial recovery from the Great Recession. Imports from Japan were up for the first time in three months, but overall for the first half of 2016 are down nearly 5% in total.

But that’s only due to who does the ‘expecting’.

• China’s July Exports, Imports Fall More Than Expected (R.)

China’s exports and imports fell more than expected in July in a rocky start to the third quarter, suggesting global demand remains weak in the aftermath of Britain’s decision to leave the EU. Exports fell 4.4% from a year earlier, the General Administration of Customs said on Monday, while adding that it expects pressure on exports is likely to ease at the beginning of the fourth quarter. Imports fell 12.5% from a year earlier, the biggest decline since February, suggesting domestic demand remains sluggish despite a flurry of measures to stimulate growth. That resulted in a trade surplus of $52.31 billion in July, versus a $47.6 billion forecast and June’s $48.11 billion.

Trying to keep the teapots alive…

• China Crude Imports Fall to 6-Month Low, Fuel Exports Surge (BBG)

China’s crude imports fell to the lowest level in six months as demand from independent refineries eased. Net fuel exports surged to a record. The world’s biggest energy user imported 31.07 million metric tons of crude in July, according to data released by the General Administration of Customs on Monday. That’s about 7.35 million barrels a day, the slowest pace since January. Meanwhile, net fuel exports jumped to 2.49 million tons last month.

The nation’s appetite for overseas crude, which increased 14% in the first half year from the same period of 2015, may be weaker in the near term as insufficient infrastructure and scheduled maintenance at some independent refiners will likely hinder their crude purchases, BMI Research said in a report dated Aug. 4. “Teapots’ crude buying has slowed in the third quarter amid maintenance,” Amy Sun, an analyst with ICIS China, said before data were released. “Some plants have also seen their crude-import quotas filling up.”

They have no intention of halting this either.

• China’s Great River of Steel Swells as Trade Tensions Build (BBG)

There’s a river of steel flooding from China despite the best efforts of governments around the world to dam the flow from the world’s top producer, with data on Monday showing that overseas shipments held above 10 million tons in July. Sales increased 5.8% on-year to 10.3 million metric tons last month, compared with 10.9 million tons in June, according to China’s customs administration. Exports in the first seven months expanded 8.5% to 67.4 million tons, a record volume for the period. That’s in line with what South Korea, the world’s sixth-largest producer in 2015, makes in an entire year.

The robust export showing by China’s mills contrasts with the country’s broader performance last month, which fell in dollar terms, and risks further stoking trade tensions with partners from India to Europe after they imposed curbs to keep out the alloy. Premier Li Keqiang has defended the country’s growing presence in overseas steel markets, saying last month that overcapacity isn’t the fault of a single country. “Orders from abroad have held up relatively well as steelmakers in China have a cost advantage,” Dang Man, an analyst at Maike Futures Co. in Xi’an, said before the data. “Attention is still on global trade friction as the number of cases against Chinese exports is quite large.”

The graph illustrates one thing alright. Food, Alcohol and Tobacco prices rise only because of taxes. That suggests governments could get rid of deflation just by raising taxes. Which, really, is nonsense. Therefore, so is the graph and the methodology it is based on. Rising prices don’t equal inflation.

• Draghi Jumps Brexit Hurdle to Find Oil Damping Price Outlook (BBG)

Whenever Mario Draghi clears a hurdle on his path to higher inflation, a new one appears. Just as the 19-nation economy sends encouraging signals that challenges from Brexit to terrorism won’t derail the modest recovery, a new decline in oil prices is casting a shadow over an expected pick-up in inflation. With growth not strong enough to generate price pressures, the ECB president may have to revise his outlook yet again. Inflation remains far below the ECB’s 2% goal after more than two years of unprecedented stimulus and isn’t seen reaching it before 2018.

Staff will begin to draw up fresh forecasts in mid-August, and while officials are in no rush to adjust or expand their €1.7 trillion quantitative-easing plan in September, economists predict Draghi will have to ease policy before the end of the year. “Now that the euro-area economy seems to have shrugged off the Brexit vote, focus will again shift on inflation, against the background of those negative news from oil prices,” said Johannes Gareis, an economist at Natixis in Frankfurt. “Yes, the ECB has managed to dispel deflation fears, but all the uncertainty means inflation will stay lower for longer – and Draghi will have to take notice.”

Maybe Zimbabwe bonds still offer some yield?

• Bond Market’s Big Illusion Revealed as US Yields Turn Negative (BBG)

For Kaoru Sekiai, getting steady returns for his pension clients in Japan used to be simple: buy U.S. Treasuries. Compared with his low-risk options at home, like Japanese government bonds, Treasuries have long offered the highest yields around. And that’s been the case even after accounting for the cost to hedge against the dollar’s ups and downs – a common practice for institutions that invest internationally. It’s been a “no-brainer since forever,” said Sekiai, a money manager at Tokyo-based DIAM. That truism is now a thing of the past. Last month, yields on U.S. 10-year notes turned negative for Japanese buyers who pay to eliminate currency fluctuations from their returns, something that hasn’t happened since the financial crisis.

It’s even worse for euro-based investors, who are locking in sub-zero returns on Treasuries for the first time in history. That quirk means the longstanding notion of the U.S. as a respite from negative yields in Japan and Europe is little more than an illusion. With everyone from Jeffrey Gundlach to Bill Gross warning of a bubble in bonds, it could ultimately upend the record foreign demand for Treasuries, which has underpinned their seemingly unstoppable gains in recent years. “People like a simple narrative,” said Jeffrey Rosenberg at BlackRock. “But there isn’t a free lunch. You can’t simply talk about yield differentials without talking about currency differentials.”

Imagine the enormous amounts of debt that would be involved in this. Then look at China’s current debt. Then draw your conclusions. More globalization nonsense. The next Chinese bubble.

• China’s Marshall Plan (BBG)

China’s ambition to revive an ancient trading route stretching from Asia to Europe could leave an economic legacy bigger than the Marshall Plan or the EU’s enlargement, according to a new analysis. Dubbed ‘One Belt, One Road,’ the plan to build rail, highways and ports will embolden China’s soft power status by spreading economic prosperity during a time of heightened political uncertainty in both the U.S. and EU, according to Stephen L. Jen, CEO at Eurizon SLJ Capital, who estimates a value of $1.4 trillion for the project. It will also boost trading links and help internationalize the yuan as banks open branches along the route, according to Jen.

“This is a quintessential example of a geopolitical event that will likely be consequential for the global economy and the balance of political power in the long run,” said Jen, a former IMF economist. Reaching from east to west, the Silk Road Economic Belt will extend to Europe through Central Asia and the Maritime Silk Road will link sea lanes to Southeast Asia, the Middle East and Africa. While China’s authorities aren’t calling their Silk Road a new Marshall Plan, that’s not stopping comparisons with the U.S. effort to rebuild Western Europe after World War II. With the potential to touch on 64 countries, 4.4 billion people and around 40% of the global economy, Jen estimates that the One Belt One Road project will be 12 times bigger in absolute dollar terms than the Marshall Plan.

China may spend as much as 9% of GDP – about double the U.S.’s boost to post-war Europe in those terms. “The One Belt One Road Project, in terms of its size, could be multiple times larger and more ambitious than the Marshall Plan or the European enlargement,” said Jen. It’s not all upside. Undertaking an expansive plan like this one will inevitably run the risk of corruption, project delays and local opposition. Chinese backed projects have frequently run into trouble before, especially in Africa, and there’s no guarantee that potential recipient nations will put their hand up for the aid. In addition, resurrecting the trading route will need funding during a time of slowing growth and rising bad loans in the nation’s banks. Sending money abroad when it’s needed at home may not have an enduring appeal.

Still, at least China has a plan. “The fact that this is a 30-40 year plan is remarkable as China is the only country with any long-term development plan, and this underscores the policy long-termism in China, in contrast to the dominance of policy short-termism in much of the West,” said Jen. And that’s a win-win for soft power. “The One Belt One Road Project could be a huge PR exercise that could win over government and public support in these countries,” he said.

“The beat on earnings is due at least in part to negative earnings revisions heading into earnings season, similar to what we have seen for the last 29 quarters..”

• Earnings Beats Are Concealing Bad Results (MW)

Investors shouldn’t be fooled by this season’s “better-than-expected” earnings—they are still pretty bad. With nearly 90% of the S&P 500 companies having reported second-quarter results through Friday morning (437 out of 505), aggregate earnings-per-share for the group are on course to decline 3.5% from a year ago, according to FactSet. Many Wall Street strategists are pleased, because that is a lot better than expectations of a 5.5% decline on June 30, just before earnings reporting season kicked off. So are investors, as the S&P and Nasdaq Composite Index closed in record territory Friday, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed less than 0.3% away. But that is like saying you should be happy with the “D” you got, because it would really be a “B” if the teacher changed the scale to grade on a curve.

“The beat on earnings is due at least in part to negative earnings revisions heading into earnings season, similar to what we have seen for the last 29 quarters with aggregate upside to expectations,” Morgan Stanley equity strategists wrote in a recent note to clients. Earnings might be beating lowered expectations, but they are still worse than the aggregate FactSet consensus of a 3.1% decline at the end of the first quarter on March 31. It also means S&P 500 earnings will suffer the fifth-straight quarter of year-over-year declines, the longest such streak since the five-quarter stretch from the third quarter of 2008 through the third quarter of 2009, the heart of the Great Recession.

By fooling ourselves into thinking we’d never get there again?

• We’re in a Low-Growth World. How Did We Get Here? (NYT)

One central fact about the global economy lurks just beneath the year’s remarkable headlines: Economic growth in advanced nations has been weaker for longer than it has been in the lifetime of most people on earth. The United States is adding jobs at a healthy clip, as a new report showed Friday, and the unemployment rate is relatively low. But that is happening despite a long-term trend of much lower growth, both in the United States and other advanced nations, than was evident for most of the post-World War II era. This trend helps explain why incomes have risen so slowly since the turn of the century, especially for those who are not top earners. It is behind the cheap gasoline you put in the car and the ultralow interest rates you earn on your savings.

It is crucial to understanding the rise of Donald J. Trump, Britain’s vote to leave the European Union, and the rise of populist movements across Europe. This slow growth is not some new phenomenon, but rather the way it has been for 15 years and counting. In the United States, per-person gross domestic product rose by an average of 2.2% a year from 1947 through 2000 — but starting in 2001 has averaged only 0.9%. The economies of Western Europe and Japan have done worse than that. Over long periods, that shift implies a radically slower improvement in living standards. In the year 2000, per-person G.D.P. — which generally tracks with the average American’s income — was about $45,000.

But if growth in the second half of the 20th century had been as weak as it has been since then, that number would have been only about $20,000. To make matters worse, fewer and fewer people are seeing the spoils of what growth there is. According to a new analysis by the McKinsey Global Institute, 81% of the United States population is in an income bracket with flat or declining income over the last decade. That number was 97% in Italy, 70% in Britain, and 63% in France.

“Since 2007, the world has been in an unacknowledged depression.”

• Musical Chairs in a Depression (Thomas)

Economics is a bit like musical chairs. In a recession, the economy takes a hit and there are some casualties. Some players fail to get a chair in time and are out of the game. The game then goes on without them. The economy eventually recovers. But a depression is a different game entirely. Since 2007, the world has been in an unacknowledged depression. A depression is like a game of musical chairs in which ten children are walking around, but suddenly nine of the chairs are taken away. This means that nine of the children will soon be out of the game. But it also means that all ten understand that the odds of them remaining in the game are quite slim and that desperate times call for desperate measures. It’s time to toss out the rule book and do whatever you have to, to get the one remaining chair.

Of course, the pundits officially deny that we have even been in a depression. They regularly describe the world as “in recovery from the 2008–2010 recession,” but the “shovel-ready jobs” that are “on the way” never quite materialize. The “green shoots” never seem to blossom. So, what’s going on here? Depressions do not occur all at once. It takes time for them to bottom and, if an economy is propped up through economic heroin (debt), the Big Crash can be a long time in coming. In that regard, this one is one for the record books. As Doug Casey is fond of saying, a depression is like a hurricane. First there are the initial crashes, then a calm as the eye of the hurricane passes over, then, we enter the trailing edge of the other side of the hurricane.

This is the time when things really get rough—when even the politicians will start using the dreaded “D” word. We have entered that final stage, as the economic symptoms demonstrate, and this is the time when the game of musical chairs will evolve into something quite a bit nastier. In normal economic times, even including recession periods, we observe financial institutions maintaining their staunchly conservative image. For the most part, they deliver as promised. But, as we move into the trailing edge of the second half of the hurricane, we notice more and more that the bankers are rewriting the rule book in order to take possession of the wealth that they previously held in trust for their depositors.

And they don’t do this in isolation. They do it with the aid of the governments of the day. New laws are written in advance of the crisis period to assure that the banks can plunder the deposits with impunity. Since 2010, such laws have been passed in the EU, the US, Canada and other jurisdictions. Trial balloons have been sent up to ascertain to what degree they will get away with their freezes and confiscations. Greece has been an excellent trial balloon for the freezes and Cyprus has done the same for the confiscations. The world is now as ready as it’s going to be for the game to be played on an international level.

So what will it look like, this game of musical chairs on steroids? Well, first we’ll see the sudden crashes of markets and/or defaults on debts. Shortly thereafter, one Monday morning (or more likely one Tuesday after a long weekend) the financial institutions will fail to open their doors. The media will announce a “temporary state of emergency” during which the governments and banks must resolve some difficulties in order to “assure a continued sound economy.” Until that time, the banks will either remain shut, or will process only small transactions.

Debt Rattle August 5 2016

Aug 052016

August 5, 2016 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 9:46 am Finance Tagged with: bonds, elite, EU, evergreen, Gulen, Ike, peace, rate cut, Trump, Tsipras, war 1 Response »

G.G. Bain Three-ton electric sign blown into Broadway, New York. 1912

• New Tool for Central Banks: Buying Corporate Bonds (WSJ)

• UK Interest Rate Cut Is A ‘Hammer Blow’ For Workplace Pensions (G.)

• UK Labor Market Enters “Freefall” After Brexit Vote (R.)

• China Regulator Tells Banks to Evergreen Loans of Troubled Companies (ET)

• For Europe’s Elite the Party Lives On After Brexit (BBG)

• Tsipras Eyes Southern EU Alliance To Back Debt Deal (Kath.)

• The 60-Year Decay of American Politics (Bacevich)

• US Unlikely To Extradite Imam Turkey Blames For Coup (CNBC)

• How Europe Is Getting Rich by Fueling Its Own Terror Epidemic (TAM)

• War Or Peace: The Essential Question For American Voters On November 8th (RI)

Maybe we need to remind ourselves from time to time that we do NOT have functioning markets. Central banks buying up corporate bonds is of course about as distorting for markets as it comes.

We will yet take debt to its inevitable conclusion.

• New Tool for Central Banks: Buying Corporate Bonds (WSJ)

Central banks have a new favorite tool for boosting lackluster growth: corporate-debt purchases. Two months after the ECB started buying corporate bonds, the Bank of England said Thursday that it would adopt a similar strategy. It will buy as much as £10 billion ($13.33 billion) of U.K. corporate debt starting in September as part of a larger package of stimulus measures, including £60 billion of additional government-bond purchases. The move, investors and analysts say, is likely to drive down borrowing costs even further around the globe for large companies already benefiting from ultralow interest rates.

But the decision again raises concerns about possible side effects of unconventional monetary policies, including excessive risk taking by investors, and faces substantial skepticism from investors who doubt such programs meaningfully address the global economy’s core deficiencies, centering on soft demand for goods and services. Already this year, negative-interest-rate policies and aggressive bond buying by central banks in Japan and Europe have helped create trillions of dollars of negative-yielding government bonds. That in turn has driven down corporate-bond yields, leading to robust debt issuance among companies in the U.S., if not all developed countries.

In the U.S., the average yield of investment-grade corporate bonds was 2.85% Wednesday, compared with 3.67% at the end of 2015, according to Barclays data. The average spread to Treasury yields also has shrunk, to 1.48 percentage points from 1.72. Companies have issued $519.2 billion of investment-grade corporate bonds this year, just below their pace at this time last year when issuance ultimately reached a record $794.6 billion, according to Dealogic.

Wait till the stock market crashes, that’s when pensions will be hit.

• UK Interest Rate Cut Is A ‘Hammer Blow’ For Workplace Pensions (G.)

Pension savers could be big losers from the Bank of England rate cut, as critics warned of a “hammer blow” to workplace schemes and forecast that pension payouts would fall to record lows. Within minutes of the Bank’s decision to cut the base rate to 0.25%, yields on government bonds, otherwise known as gilts, dived to all-time lows. Companies that still offer final salary pension schemes will as a result see the cost of maintaining them soar. Hymans Robertson, a pensions consultancy, said the rate cut meant a £70bn increase in the amount company schemes needed to meet their commitments to scheme members, to a total of £2.4trn. “To put this in context, UK GDP currently stands at £1.8trn. This has pushed the aggregate UK [company scheme] deficit up to £945bn – the worst it has ever been,” it said.

Companies will have to find the money to fill the gap in their pension schemes, or like most already have, close them to new members. In extreme cases, some may attempt to redraw pension contracts to cap their future liabilities. Patrick Bloomfield of Hymans Robertson said: “Pension schemes are being hit hard by recent events, but we need to remember that the impact will not be felt equally by all … There are schemes with robust funding plans that don’t take more risk than they need to, which will be able to weather this. The gap between pension schemes that hedged their risks and those that haven’t is starker than ever before.”

A forced reset is not necessarily a bad thing.

• UK Labor Market Enters “Freefall” After Brexit Vote (R.)

Britain’s labour market entered “freefall” after the vote to leave the European Union, with the number of permanent jobs placed by recruitment firms last month falling at the fastest pace since May 2009, a survey showed on Friday. The monthly report from the Recruitment and Employment Confederation (REC) showed starting salaries for permanent jobs rose in July at the slowest pace in more than three years. Overall, the survey added to evidence that business confidence and activity slowed sharply after the June 23 vote to leave the European. “The UK jobs market suffered a dramatic freefall in July, with permanent hiring dropping to levels not seen since the recession of 2009,” said REC chief executive Kevin Green. “Economic turbulence following the vote to leave the EU is undoubtedly the root cause.”

Different countries have different ways of hiding their debt.

• China Regulator Tells Banks to Evergreen Loans of Troubled Companies (ET)

On the surface, China is talking the reform talk. But is it also walking the walk? There are many examples to demonstrate it isn’t. The most recent one is a directive from the China Banking Regulatory Commission (CBRC) to not cut off lending to troubled companies and evergreening bad loans. This first reported by The Chinese National Business Daily on Aug. 4. “A Notice About How the Creditor Committees at Banks and Financial Institutes Should Do Their Jobs” tells banks to “act together and not ‘randomly stop giving or pulling loans.’ These institutes should either provide new loans after taking back the old ones or provide a loan extension, to ‘fully help companies to solve their problems,’” the National Business Daily writes.

“It’s big news. A couple of weeks ago they were threatening Liaoning Province to cut off all lending to them if they didn’t tighten loan standards,” said Christopher Balding, a professor of economics at Peking University in Shenzen. “This is a pretty significant turn-around for them to do and it indicates how significant the problem is.” The official reform narrative is espoused in this Xinhua piece which claims China has to reform because there is no Plan B. “Supply-side structural reform is also advancing as the country moves to address issues like industrial overcapacity, a large inventory of unsold homes and unprofitable ‘zombie companies.’” Clearly resolving the bad debt of zombie companies is not high on the priority list.

Goldman Sachs complained in a recent note to clients that companies can default on payments and often nothing happens. The investment bank notes that companies like Sichuan Coal default on payments of interest and principal for weeks or months and then maybe pay creditors later. The company in question defaulted on 1 billion yuan ($150 million) worth of commercial paper in June but made full payments later during the summer, a somewhat arbitrary process. Another case is Dongbei Special Steel, which missed at least five payments on $6 billion of debt since the beginning of the year, but has done nothing to resolve the problem. This is why creditors wrote an angry letter to the local government to help resolve the issue.

Why the EU can’t be reformed.

• For Europe’s Elite the Party Lives On After Brexit (BBG)

Europe’s political elite may have missed the Brexit memo. Six weeks since U.K. voters rebuked the ruling class by choosing to leave the European Union, the region’s establishment has reacted by carrying on as before. The revolving door of former policy makers joining the finance industry has spun again, with European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso signing up with Goldman Sachs and former Bank of England Governor Mervyn King joining Citigroup. Meanwhile departed Prime Minister David Cameron is facing criticism for nominating numerous aides for honors, including his wife’s stylist.

The perception of elite coziness risks further disenfranchising those backing Brexit, and peers across the continent who share the feeling of being left behind by the powerful and wealthy in the era of globalization and financial crises. A potential upshot is more support for populist parties that tap into alienation such as the U.K. Independence Party or France’s National Front. “Anything that doesn’t show government or public institutions in a good light merely confirms some of the attitudes that probably contributed to the Brexit vote,” said Chris Roebuck, a visiting professor at London’s Cass Business School. For some voters, “there is a group of people out there who aren’t normal people like you or me, who have benefited since the financial crisis – because they’re an elite.”

Tsipras already lost the ‘fight’. Beppe Grillo may lead such an alliance, not Tsipras.

• Tsipras Eyes Southern EU Alliance To Back Debt Deal (Kath.)

Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras is planning to forge an alliance with the leaders of other countries in Southeastern Europe in a bid to bolster Greece’s bid for a debt restructuring and lower the primary surplus targets set by creditors. Tsipras is expected to explore the prospects for such an alliance at a meeting of European socialist heads of state scheduled to take place in Paris on August 25, particularly with Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi and French President Francois Hollande. The meeting had originally been planned for May 20 in Rome but was postponed after an Egyptian passenger plane crashed in the Mediterranean. The Greek premier’s aim, according to sources, is to arrange a subsequent meeting in Athens, probably on September 9, and in any case before a scheduled European Union leaders’ summit on September 16, to further explore the prospect of forming a Southeastern European alliance.

Tsipras and Renzi had agreed at their last meeting on the sidelines of an EU summit on June 28 on the need for southern states to create their own growth-focused agenda, compared to the austerity prescribed by Northern European countries. At the time, Hollande and Portuguese Prime Minister Antonio Costa had appeared open to the prospect of such an alliance. In Athens, sources close to Tsipras believe the time is right to pursue the creation of a strong southern “axis” to counter the stance of countries in Northern Europe. The idea of a united front of Southern European countries was first mooted by leftist SYRIZA before the general elections of January 2015 that brought it to power.

At the time, Tsipras thought Athens would attract the solidarity of Southern European countries in SYRIZA’s rhetoric against austerity and that those countries would stand by Greece in its negotiations with international creditors. That solidarity did not transpire then. However, sources close to Tsipras believe the current situation is potentially more beneficial for Athens as the protracted imposition of austerity on Greece and elsewhere has increased the pressure on countries in Southern Europe. Athens is also hopeful about forming a common front on another crucial issue that has divided Southern and Northern European countries: the ongoing refugee crisis. Indications by Turkey that it might not honor a migrant deal with the EU have fueled concerns in Greece that a slowed migrant influx could pick up again.

Nostalgia. “And don’t kid yourself that things really can’t get much worse. Unless Americans rouse themselves to act, count on it, they will.”

• The 60-Year Decay of American Politics (Bacevich)

Presidential campaigns today are themselves, to use Boorstin’s famous term, “pseudo-events” that stretch from months into years. By now, most Americans know better than to take at face value anything candidates say or promise along the way. We’re in on the joke — or at least we think we are. Reinforcing that perception on a daily basis are media outlets that have abandoned mere reporting in favor of enhancing the spectacle of the moment. This is especially true of the cable news networks, where talking heads serve up a snide and cynical complement to the smarmy fakery that is the office-seeker’s stock in trade. And we lap it up. It matters little that we know it’s all staged and contrived, as long as — a preening Megyn Kelly getting under Trump’s skin, Trump himself denouncing “lyin’ Ted” Cruz, etc., etc. — it’s entertaining.

This emphasis on spectacle has drained national politics of whatever substance it still had back when Ike and Adlai commanded the scene. It hardly need be said that Donald Trump has demonstrated an extraordinary knack — a sort of post-modern genius — for turning this phenomenon to his advantage. Yet in her own way Clinton plays the same game. How else to explain a national convention organized around the idea of “reintroducing to the American people” someone who served eight years as First Lady, was elected to the Senate, failed in a previous high-profile run for the presidency, and completed a term as secretary of state? The just-ended conclave in Philadelphia was, like the Republican one that preceded it, a pseudo-event par excellence, the object of the exercise being to fashion a new “image” for the Democratic candidate.

The thicket of unreality that is American politics has now become all-enveloping. The problem is not Trump and Clinton, per se. It’s an identifiable set of arrangements — laws, habits, cultural predispositions — that have evolved over time and promoted the rot that now pervades American politics. As a direct consequence, the very concept of self-government is increasingly a fantasy, even if surprisingly few Americans seem to mind.

At an earlier juncture back in 1956, out of a population of 168 million, we got Ike and Adlai. Today, with almost double the population, we get — well, we get what we’ve got. This does not represent progress. And don’t kid yourself that things really can’t get much worse. Unless Americans rouse themselves to act, count on it, they will.

Can’t see US handing Gulen over on a platter, but Turkey is not done demanding his head. And many others.

• US Unlikely To Extradite Imam Turkey Blames For Coup (CNBC)

U.S. officials weren’t likely to extradite Fethullah Gulen, an imam Turkey blames for plotting the recent failed coup, The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday, citing people familiar with the discussion. Those people said the evidence presented so far by Turkey wasn’t convincing and U.S. officials were also concerned about Turkish officials’ threatening public statements, which made the fairness of his potential treatment questionable, the report said. Gulen, who lives in Pennsylvania, has denied wrongdoing, the report said.

Separately, Reuters reported that Turkey’s President Tayyip Erdogan pledged on Thursday to cut off revenues from businesses tied to the 75-year-old Gulen, which include schools, firms and charities. Even before the failed coup, authorities in Turkey had seized Islamic lender Bank Asya, closed media businesses and arrested businessmen on accusations of funding the imam’s movement, Reuters reported. The failed coup, which took place on July 15, left more than 230 dead. Since then, more than 60,000 people across various branches of government have been detained, suspended or put under investigation, Reuters reported. That’s spurred concerns Erdogan was cracking down on all dissent.

“68 flights that took place within 13 months transported weapons and ammunition to the Middle East, including to NATO member Turkey, which in turn “funnelled arms into brutal civil wars in Syria and Yemen.”

• How Europe Is Getting Rich by Fueling Its Own Terror Epidemic (TAM)

Though Europe does not have the rates of gun violence the United States continues to grapple with, European governments have made over a billion euros by fueling gun violence in the Middle East and North Africa. A report conducted by a team of reporters from the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network (BIRN) and the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) found a group of European nations has been funneling arms into the Middle East region since 2012, making at least 1.2 billion euros in the process. According to the report, 68 flights that took place within 13 months transported weapons and ammunition to the Middle East, including to NATO member Turkey, which in turn “funnelled arms into brutal civil wars in Syria and Yemen.”

The report also notes that these flights make up only a small portion of the 1.2 billion euros in arms deals between Europe and the Middle East since 2012. The report’s conclusions are horrifying, to say the least. The report states: “Arms export licenses, which are supposed to guarantee the final destination of the goods, have been granted despite ample evidence that weapons are being diverted to Syrian and other armed groups accused of widespread human rights abuses and atrocities.” Considering Europe is battling a continually rising terrorist threat, they seem to be going about tackling this issue the wrong way. Surely the best way to counter terrorism is to cease funding it in the first place.

One astounding aspect of the report is that the lucrative war-profiteering business involves nations the world would not usually regard as overly-interested in war. The countries contributing to the rising terror threat, as identified by the report, are Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, and Romania, among others. This report adds to the already glaring problem of European countries making billions of dollars off the death and destruction of Middle Eastern civilian life. The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) found the United Kingdom was second only to the United States in arms sales, making up 10.4% of the total $401 billion worth of arms sold around the world for the 2014 period.

Trump for Peace. We have 3 months left to get used to that.

• War Or Peace: The Essential Question For American Voters On November 8th (RI)

In matters of substance as opposed to character assassination that both parties’ candidates have engaged in freely, what separates the candidates and makes it worthwhile to register and vote on November 8th is the domain of international relations. This, as a general rule, is the only area where a president has free hands anyway, whatever position his party holds in the Congress. Here the choice facing voters is stark, I would say existential: do we want War or Peace? Do we want to pursue our path of global hegemony, which is bringing us into growing confrontation with Russia, meaning a high probability of war, (the policy of Hillary Clinton), or do we want a harmonious international order in which the U.S. plays its role at the board of governors, just like other major world powers (the policy of Donald Trump).

Let me go one step further and explain what “war” means, since it is not something that gets much attention in our media, whereas it is at the top of the news each day in Russia. “War” does not mean Cold War-II, a kind of scab you can pick to indulge a pleasure in pain that is not life threatening. War means what our military like to call “kinetics” to mask the horror of it all. It means live ammunition, ranging from conventional to thermonuclear devices that can devastate large swathes of the United States if we play our hand badly, as would likely be the case for reasons I explain below should Hillary and her flock of Neocon armchair strategists take the reins of power in January 2017.

Debt Rattle August 3 2016

Aug 032016

August 3, 2016 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 8:23 am Finance Tagged with: bitcoin, bonds, bubble, contagion, euro, NAFTA, narcissism, plunge, sheep, Stress Test 4 Responses »

NPC O Street Market, Washington DC 1925

• Bank Shares Plunge Across Europe As Stress Tests Warn Of Contagion (G.)

• Bank of England’s Stress Tests ‘Worse Than Useless’ (Ind.)

• Global Bond Market Rally Unravels as Japan Shows Limit to Demand (BBG)

• HSBC Reports 29% First-Half Profit Slump (G.)

• Bitcoin Sinks After Hackers Steal $65 Million From Exchange (BBG)

• The One-Size Euro Might Not Be So Tight After All (BBG)

• China Inc. Has $1 Trillion in Cash That It’s Too Scared to Spend (BBG)

• China’s Trouble With Bubbles (BBG)

• Investment In Greek Economy Fell 66% Between 2007 And 2015 (Kath.)

• Pay Time: The Big Squeeze On Small Business (West)

• Vancouver Enacts 15% Property Tax To Stave Off Chinese Investment Surge (AFR)

• Furious Sheep (Dmitry Orlov)

• Why Capitalism Has Turned Us Into Narcissists (G.)

• What Kind Of School Punishes A Hungry Child? (G.)

• Bodies Of 120 Migrants Washed Up On Libya Shores In Past 10 Days (R.)

“Once contagion spreads from Italy to Germany and then to the UK, we will have a new banking crisis but on a much grander scale than 2007-08.”

• Bank Shares Plunge Across Europe As Stress Tests Warn Of Contagion (G.)

Bank shares across Europe have slumped, as investors digested the results of health checks on major lenders and the impact of low interest rates on their long-term health. Shares in Germany’s Commerzbank hit record lows after a warning that profits would be down this year. This compounded the findings of stress tests by the European Banking Authority watchdog last week, which left the Frankfurt-based institution in the bottom half of the results from health checks on 51 major lenders. The worst performer in the stress tests, Italy’s Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena (MPS), suffered a 16% in its shares on Tuesday and Italy’s biggest bank Unicredit fell 7% after heavy losses the day before.

The pan-European bank stock index was down 3.5% as the prospect of prolonged period of low interest rates makes it more difficult for banks to make profits. The Bank of England will conduct a bank industry assessment this year, which prompted the Adam Smith Institute – a leading thinktank – to publish a report calling for the abandonment of the “worse than useless” stress tests unless changes can be made. Kevin Dowd, professor of finance and economics at Durham University, and author of the report, said: “As the EU banking system goes into a renewed crisis, the UK banking system is in no fit state to withstand the storm. Once contagion spreads from Italy to Germany and then to the UK, we will have a new banking crisis but on a much grander scale than 2007-08.

“The Bank of England is asleep at the wheel again, and we will be back to beleaguered banksters begging for bailouts – and the taxpayer will be ripped off yet again, but bigger this time.”

Stress tests are meant to be useless. Pure lipstick.

• Bank of England’s Stress Tests ‘Worse Than Useless’ (Ind.)

The Bank of England’s annual stress tests of the UK’s banks, designed to ensure Britain’s lenders will not be at the heart of another destructive financial crisis, have been branded “worse than useless”, by a new report. Kevin Dowd, professor of finance and economics at Durham University, argues in a paper published today by the Adam Smith Institute that the Bank’s tests, which model various adverse economic scenarios each year such as a major fall in UK house prices or a Chinese property crash, have a series of “fatal flaws” and that the central bank is “asleep at the wheel”. “The purpose of the stress-testing programme should be to highlight the vulnerability of our banking system and the need to rebuild it. Instead, it has achieved the exact opposite, portraying a weak banking system as strong”.

Professor Dowd warns that the eurozone banking system is on the precipice of another crisis, which will also engulf the UK’s major lenders. “Once contagion spreads from Italy to Germany and then to the UK, we will have a new banking crisis but on a much grander scale than 2007-08” he said. “The Bank of England is asleep at the wheel again, and we will be back to beleaguered banksters begging for bailouts – and the taxpayer will be ripped off yet again, but bigger this time.” Among the flaws in the Bank’s testing exercise identified by Professor Dowd are the fact that the stress tests rely on analytical “risk weights” for banks’ assets, which have been much criticised for potentially underplaying the true riskiness of various assets such as mortgages and sovereign debt.

A potential global earthquake.

• Global Bond Market Rally Unravels as Japan Shows Limit to Demand (BBG)

The record-setting global bond market rally is coming undone. Bonds in Bank of America’s G-7 Government Index yielded 0.58% on average, the highest level in five weeks. The move is a rebound from the record low of 0.45% set in July. Japan led the selloff, and yields are rising from Australia to Germany. Global bonds surged from the end of June as the U.K.’s vote to leave the EU drove expectations the global economy would slow enough to keep the Federal Reserve from raising interest rates. Now investors and analysts are questioning whether yields dropped too far. Donald Trump said U.S. interest rates are artificially low, while Bill Gross said record-low yields aren’t worth the risk. A rally in long-term Japanese government bonds is probably over, according to PIMCO.

BBG: “Pretax earnings fell 45% to $3.61 billion from a year earlier..”

• HSBC Reports 29% First-Half Profit Slump (G.)

HSBC has admitted it is breaching a US regulator’s order to bolster its defences against financial crime as it announced a slump in first-half profits. The UK’s biggest bank also announced a $2.5bn share buyback following the sale of its Brazilian business in a move intended to demonstrate its financial strength. As the bank reported a 29% fall in first-half profits to $9.7bn, it also made a series of legal disclosures that confirmed it had received requests for information from various regulatory and law enforcement authorities around the world in relation to Mossack Fonseca, the Panama law firm linked to tax-haven companies.

Among the legal disclosures is a reference to an order agreed in October 2010 with the US Office of the Comptroller of the Currency which required the bank to “establish an effective compliance risk management programme across HSBC’s US businesses”. “HSBC Bank USA is not currently in compliance with the OCC order. Steps are being taken to address the requirements of the orders,” HSBC said, without providing details. In February the bank had revealed an official monitor it installed after a $1.9bn fine over money laundering four years ago had raised “significant concerns” about the slow pace of change to its procedures to combat crime. “Through his country-level reviews the monitor identified potential anti-money laundering and sanctions compliance issues that the [department of justice] and HSBC are reviewing further.”

Bitcoin has turned into a Chinese bubble machine. “Chinese exchange OKCoin was the largest overall bourse for trading in the digital currency, over 90% of which is denominated in the Chinese yuan.”

• Bitcoin Sinks After Hackers Steal $65 Million From Exchange (BBG)

Bitcoin plunged after one of the largest exchanges halted trading because hackers stole about $65 million of the digital currency. Bitcoin slumped 5.3% against the dollar as of 10:17 a.m. on Wednesday in Tokyo, bringing its two-day drop to 13%. Prices also sank 6.2% on Monday, although it was not clear if that initial move was related to the hack. Hong Kong-based exchange Bitfinex said on Tuesday that it halted trading, withdrawals and deposits after discovering the security breach. The exchange said it was still investigating details and cooperating with law enforcement, but acknowledged that some bitcoin have been stolen from its users.

“Yes – it is a large breach,” Fred Ehrsam, co-founder of Coinbase, a cryptocurrency wallet and trading platform, wrote in an e-mail. “Bitfinex is a large exchange, so it is a significant short term event, although Bitcoin has shown its resiliency to these sorts of events in the past.” Bitfinex confirmed in a message to Bloomberg News on Wednesday that the hackers took 119,756 bitcoin, or about $65 million at current prices. More than $1.5 billion has been wiped out from bitcoin’s market capitalization this week, according to research from CoinDesk. “We will look at various options to address customer losses later in the investigation,” Bitfinex wrote in a blog post. “We ask for the community’s patience as we unravel the causes and consequences of this breach.”

The Hong Kong exchange was the largest for U.S. dollar-denominated transactions over the past month, according to bitcoincharts.com. Chinese exchange OKCoin was the largest overall bourse for trading in the digital currency, over 90% of which is denominated in the Chinese yuan.

Between the lines you can see just how faulty the design of the euro is. It makes the rich countries much richer, but the poor so much poorer that the system MUST collapse. Greed is blind.

• The One-Size Euro Might Not Be So Tight After All (BBG)

It’s a given that the euro can’t have the right exchange rate for all of its 19 diverse members, all of the time. Yet at the helm of the ECB, Mario Draghi may be making it a closer fit for more countries, more of the time. Angel Talavera, an economist at Oxford Economics in London, has calculated for Bloomberg Benchmark what would have been the equilibrium exchange rate for 8 euro-area economies between 2011 and 2015 ” the rate that would be best suited to an economy’s domestic and external profiles. Germany’s economic strength and positive balance of payments would warrant the euro trading at around $1.40, while Greece’s woes would require it to be below parity with the dollar.

At the beginning of Draghi’s term, the euro was too strong for pretty much everyone, and has typically aligned itself more to the needs of “core” economies, Germany included. That hasn’t been helpful. “What would normally happen with a country that has its own currency is that the currency will appreciate or depreciate over time to help correct those imbalances,” Talavera said. “In the case of the Eurozone obviously you can’t have both things happening, so those imbalances are not correcting, but rather amplifying most of the time.” His calculations bear this out. At the height of the sovereign-debt crisis in 2011 the spread between the optimal rate for Germany and Greece was $0.32. By the end of last year the gap had widened to $0.42.

Given the structure of the euro, though, there may be only so much that the current set of policies can do. According to Talavera’s Oxford Economics study, the ECB’s monetary policy has always been plagued by a paradox: while it has has been “generally right for the common currency area as a whole, it has proven to be wrong for most of its individual members most of the time.”

Really? So what are their debts at the same time?

• China Inc. Has $1 Trillion in Cash That It’s Too Scared to Spend (BBG)

Never before have China’s companies had so much cash and so little to spend it on. With investment opportunities sparse amid the country’s weakest economic expansion in a quarter century, Chinese firms reported an 18% jump in cash holdings during their latest quarter, the biggest increase in six years. The $1.2 trillion stockpile – which excludes banks and brokerages – grew at a faster pace than in the U.S., Europe and Japan, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. While there are worse problems than having too much cash, China Inc.’s unprecedented hoard is frustrating both policy makers and investors. Because companies lack the confidence to spend on new projects, government attempts to boost growth by pumping money into the financial system are falling short.

Stockholders, meanwhile, would rather see bigger dividends or share buybacks than a buildup of idle cash on corporate balance sheets. “This is actually becoming a bigger and bigger issue,” said Herald van der Linde at HSBC. “Cash is becoming a point of debate.” The impulse to hoard instead of invest is relatively new for a country where corporate risk-taking has been rewarded for much of the past 25 years. But as economic growth moves deeper below 7% from double-digit levels just a few years ago, the change in mindset has been stark. Growth in China’s private spending on fixed assets, which topped 10% last year, slowed to 2.8% in the six months through June, the weakest level on record. “The drivers aren’t there” for Chinese firms to invest, said Sean Taylor at Deutsche Asset Management in Hong Kong.

Moving into ever more and newer bubbles is the only thing that keeps China going.

• China’s Trouble With Bubbles (BBG)

The collapse of China’s stock markets a year ago was eye-catching, but in the end, hardly earth-shattering. Despite the pain for millions of retail investors, the fact is that stocks remain a small part of the financial system in China. Their brief, giddy rise and spectacular collapse never really threatened the wider Chinese economy, let alone the global financial system. That doesn’t mean the rest of the world should rest easy, however. While equities remain subdued, bubbles are growing in bonds and real estate – two markets that play a much bigger role in the mainland economy. The question is whether Chinese regulators can handle a new crisis any better than the old one.

Faith that China can safely manage fast-growing, debt-fueled bubbles assumes its regulators aren’t just as good as their peers in the rest of the world, they’re better. Last year’s events should call that confidence into question. Throughout the first half of 2015, policymakers allowed leverage to grow unchecked. When the market peaked and margin calls accelerated the decline, the combined force of financial regulators, public security officials and the state press were powerless to stop the slide. The situation places a premium on policies, rather than personalities, that can prevent things from unraveling. China needs to find a way to tap the brakes on credit without sending the markets into a downward spiral. Tighter rules and larger capital requirements for wealth management products – a key source of risk – are a start.

But as long as loan growth continues to accelerate faster than GDP, it’s hard to argue that a true basis for stability has been established. For evidence the underlying problems remain unsolved, look no further than China’s other asset markets. One might’ve expected that after the trauma of the stock crash, Chinese investors would become a shade more cautious. Nothing could be further from the truth. The equity boom-and-bust was followed almost immediately by a similar cycle in the metal market, which saw steel prices surge almost 80%. Property prices in Shenzhen are up 64% in the last nine months. Leveraged bets in the fixed income market mean yields continue to creep down, even as default risks grow.

Thank the IMF for this.

• Investment In Greek Economy Fell 66% Between 2007 And 2015 (Kath.)

Investment in the Greek economy plummeted more than 60% between 2007 and 2015, according to data published in Eurobank’s weekly bulletin on Tuesday. According to the lender’s economists, fixed capital investment declined by €40 billion or 66.1% during the period in question. At the same time, Greece’s GDP fell €56.7 billion. The Eurobank document described the drop in investment since 2007 as “deep and prolonged.” The reduction in investment was mainly felt in the housing market (€23.8 billion euros), followed by machinery and equipment (€12.1 billion) and other types of construction (€2.3 billion).

Eurobank said some of the key reasons for the dramatic slide in the amount of capital being invested in the Greek economy were the increases and frequent changes in taxation, the rising cost of capital, the reduction in lending by banks, the rise of uncertainty, an inability to create an investor-friendly environment despite some progress in this area, and expectations of weak economic activity. The lender also notes that net fixed capital formation, which measures gross investment minus depreciation, has been in negative territory since the end of 2010. The most recent data show that the annual shortfall is close to €11 billion.

To underline how damaging the last few years, and the collapse in investment described earlier, have been for the Greek economy, Eurobank’s weekly report pointed out that unemployment in December 2007 was at 8.1%, meaning there were just 403,000 people out of work. By the end of 2015, the jobless rate had risen to 24.2%, with 1.1 million people without work. During this eight-year spell, 860,000 jobs disappeared.

Time for Fonterra to collapse. It’s too big for its own good.

• Pay Time: The Big Squeeze On Small Business (West)

US cereal giant Kellogg’s and New Zealand milk multinational Fonterra have put the squeeze on local suppliers by stretching their payment terms out to a crushing 120 days. Along with other multinationals such as Unilever and Nestle, Kellogg’s and Fonterra already had their suppliers on 90-day terms, a punishing delay for family businesses who have to pay staff and a slew of other costs within the month. The move to 120 days does not bode well for small business, already fed up with “being used as a bank”, as one framed it. “Small business is the engine room of the economy,” he said, declining to be named for fear of reprisals, “And we are bankrolling these multinationals. I’ve got staff, super, rent and electricity to pay: and GST and payroll tax to collect. I can’t tell my staff to wait for 120 days to be paid”.

Kellogg’s was ducking for cover when rung for comment, its media team refusing to return calls. Fonterra issued this statement via a spokesperson: “In 2011, we identified that international best practice was to pay vendors supplying goods and services on a 60 day global standard payment from the end of the month in which the invoice was received. Part of our 2015 business transformation was to speed up compliance to this global standard term. We have 20,000 vendors globally and 16,000 or 80% of them have had no change to their payment terms.” According to a Fonterra document seen by this reporter, however, the new terms are “1st of the month, 3 months following invoice date”.

As for Fonterra’s claim of “international best practice”, payment terms in Europe have been moving the other way, by law. Since March 2013, the maximum delay for companies in the EU to for pay for goods and services is 30 days, unless agreed by both parties in writing, in which case it may be 60 days.

Get ready for the NAFTA law suits.

• Vancouver Enacts 15% Property Tax To Stave Off Chinese Investment Surge (AFR)

As of Tuesday, foreign buyers of property in Vancouver, which like Sydney is one of the world’s hottest real estate markets, will have to pay a 15% transaction tax. Property prices in Vancouver trail only Sydney and Hong Kong on the list of the world’s least-affordable housing markets, a Demographia survey shows. Trying to correct that, the NSW government said two months ago that it would levy a 4% stamp-duty surcharge on foreign buyers beginning next year and also charge an extra 0.75% land-tax surcharge on residential real estate, where prices are buoyed by incoming investment from mainland China. British Columbia legislators passed the new law on Friday going into a three-day holiday weekend even as local property agents called for exemptions for deals made to buy but not yet complete.

The new tax means non-Canadian residents buying a $2 million home will have to pay an additional $300,000 in tax. “While investment from outside Canada is only one factor driving price increases, it represents an additional source of pressure,” British Columbia Finance Minister Michael de Jong said in a statement. “This additional tax on foreign purchases will help manage foreign demand while new homes are built to meet local needs. A surge in purchases by Chinese property buyers has resulted in driving up the value of more than 90% of detached homes in Vancouver to more than C$1 million ($1.04 million), compared with 19% 10 years ago. Vancouver’s average home price is Canada’s highest, at $1.2 million, the Royal Bank of Canada estimates.

“Should you be asked what does matter to you, concentrate on such issues as the candidates’ body language, fashion sense and demeanor.”

• Furious Sheep (Dmitry Orlov)

you have to understand the way the electoral game is played. It is played with money—very large sums of money—with votes being quite secondary. In mathematical terms, money is the independent variable and votes are the dependent variable, but the relationship between money and votes is nonlinear and time-variant. In the opening round, the moneyed interests throw huge sums of money at both of the major parties—not because elections have to be, by their nature, ridiculously expensive, but to erect an insurmountable barrier to entry for average citizens. But the final decision is made on a relatively thin margin of victory, in order to make the electoral process appear genuine rather than staged, and to generate excitement.

After all, if the moneyed interests just threw all their money at their favorite candidate, making that candidate’s victory a foregone conclusion, that wouldn’t look sufficiently democratic. And so they use large sums to separate themselves from you the great unwashed, but much smaller sums to tip the scales. When calculating how to tip the scales, the political experts employed by the moneyed interests rely on information on party affiliation, polling data and historical voting patterns. To change the outcome from a “lose-win” to a “lose-lose,” you need to invalidate all three of these:

• The proper choice of party affiliation is “none,” which, for some bizarre reason, is commonly labeled as “independent,” (and watch out for American Independent Party, which is a minor right-wing party in California that has successfully trolled people into joining it by mistake). Be that as it may; let the Furious Sheep call themselves the “dependent” ones. In any case, the two major parties are dying, and the number of non-party members is now almost the same as the number of Democrats and Republicans put together.

• When responding to a poll, the category you should always opt for is “undecided,” up to and including the moment when you walk into the voting booth. When questioned about your stands on various issues, you need to remember that the interest in your opinion is disingenuous: your stand on issues matters not a whit (see study above) except as part of an effort to herd you, a Furious Sheep, into a particular political paddock. Therefore, when talking to pollsters, be vaguely on both sides of every issue while stressing that it plays no role in your decision-making. Should you be asked what does matter to you, concentrate on such issues as the candidates’ body language, fashion sense and demeanor.

This reviewer misses the point entirely, as evidenced by stupid things like “A cheerful worker is as much as 12% more productive.”

• Why Capitalism Has Turned Us Into Narcissists (G.)

It is no wonder that the notion of happiness has been taken into public ownership, given the remarkable spread of spiritual malaise around the globe. Around a third of American adults and close to half in Britain believe that they are sometimes depressed. Even so, more than half a century after the discovery of antidepressants, nobody really knows how they function. Work over which individuals have little control can heighten the risk of heart disease. (Co-operatives, by contrast, are apparently good for your health.) So-called austerity has made people sicker and driven some to death. Vastly unequal nations such as the UK and the US breed mental health problems far more than more egalitarian ones such as Sweden.

Illness, absenteeism and “presenteeism” (coming into work purely to be physically present) are estimated to cost the US economy as much as $550bn (£417bn) a year. There is evidence that a competitive ethos can trigger mental illness among the winners as well as the losers, not least in the case of sport stars. Despite the living disproof known as Donald Trump, the more you chase after money, status and power, the lower your sense of worth is likely to be. Given their pathologically upbeat culture, Americans tend to downplay their dejectedness, while the French, with their suspicion that happiness is unsophisticated, are more likely to under-report it. It is the kind of thing that cavorts at the end of piers wearing a striped jacket and red plastic nose.

Happiness is excellent for business. A cheerful worker is as much as 12% more productive. A science of human sentiments – what Davies calls “the surveillance, management and government of our feelings” – is thus one of the fastest growing forms of manipulative knowledge. So is market research into shopping, which now uses extensive face-scanning programmes in order to reveal customers’ emotional states. The more bright-eyed neuroscientists claim they are close to discovering a “buy button” in the brain.

if you’re still wondering why Brexit happened after reading this, good luck and good night. Britain is a thoroughly sick nation. Not saying it’s unique in that. But…

• What Kind Of School Punishes A Hungry Child? (G.)

Michaela community school in Wembley was widely criticised last week for placing children in “isolation” because their parents were late with lunch payments. The lunches are compulsory, with parents being charged £75 upfront for each six-week period. Fall even a week behind, and you may be warned that your child faces “lunch isolation”, where “they will receive a sandwich and a piece of fruit only”. That’s not counting the side order of segregation and humiliation. The child will spend the whole 60 minutes away from their friends, and “only when the entire outstanding amount is paid in full will they be allowed into ‘family lunch’ with their classmates”.

“A sandwich is fine – at least the child is being fed,” you might think. But a sandwich is not “fine”. The School Food Plan, by Leon founders Henry Dimbleby and John Vincent, states that only 1% of packed lunches, which typically comprise a sandwich and snacks, meet the nutritional requirements for school meals. It is easier to get nutrients into a hot meal. After the story broke, Michaela’s headteacher, Katharine Birbalsingh, insisted she was not punishing children for being poor: the sanction didn’t apply to pupils receiving free school meals (more than one in five of those at the school) or whose families had money problems. The problem was the small number of families who were “playing the system”, “trying to get other poor families to pay for their child’s food” and “betraying their children”.

We have heard these accusations before. Back in 2013, Lord Freud claimed that food bank users were simply abusing a free facility, thus demonstrating his lack of understanding of the obstacles between a hungry mother and a food bank parcel. A willingness to seek help, for example. Swallowed pride. A referral from a doctor or social worker. Perhaps the bus fare to the nearest centre, with children in tow.

The.Beat.Goes.On.

• Bodies Of 120 Migrants Washed Up On Libya Shores In Past 10 Days (R.)

The bodies of 120 migrants have washed up on the shores of Libya in the past 10 days, not from previously known shipwrecks in the Mediterranean, the International Organization for Migration (IOM) said on Tuesday. A total of 4,027 migrants or refugees have died worldwide so far this year, three-quarters of them in the Mediterranean while trying to reach Europe, IOM spokesman Joel Millman told a briefing. That represents a 35% increase on the global toll during the first seven months of 2015, he said.

Debt Rattle July 9 2016

Jul 092016

July 9, 2016 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 8:25 am Finance Tagged with: Banks, bonds, Brexit, coup, debt, EU, Greece, Italy, NATO, poor, QE Comments Off

Jack Delano Mike Evans, welder, Proviso Yard, Chicago & North Western RR 1940

• The Decline & Fall Of The Biggest Bond Market In The World (ZH)

• More Than 20% Of Americans Are Simply Too Poor To Shop (NYPost)

• What If I Told You Employment Actually Declined 119,000 In June (Rosenberg)

• Chicken Little Economists Are Wrong About Brexit (MW)

• UK Property Hits Levels Of Unaffordability Not Seen Since 2007 (TiM)

• If Bank Stocks Are Linked to Bank Lending, Europe Should Worry (BBG)

• Italy PM’s Tuscan Nightmare: The Fall Of ‘Daddy Monte’ (R.)

• Albert Edwards: Brexit Is Old News, Time To Worry About Italy (VW)

• Italy’s In An Economic Straitjacket, Needs To Be Freed: Albert Edwards (CNBC)

• Only Europe’s Radicals Can Save The EU: Yanis Varoufakis (Newsweek)

• Worst. Coup. Ever. (TeleSur)

• The Persian Gulf’s Huge New Export: Debt (WSJ)

• Greek Exports Record Major Decline In May (Kath.)

• Russia Hits Back At ‘Anti-Russian’ NATO ‘Hysteria’ (CNBC)

Stop it already!

• The Decline & Fall Of The Biggest Bond Market In The World (ZH)

Government bonds are themselves becoming more illiquid, most particularly, as CLSA’s Chris Wood notes, in a country like Japan where the Bank of Japan has been buying more than the net issuance. Monthly trading of JGBs by lenders and insurers has collapsed from a peak of ¥123tn in April 2012 to a record low of ¥15tn in May 2016. This raises the pertinent issue of whether the Bank of Japan has reached the practical limit of its government buying programme in terms of its current purchase programme of ¥80tn relative to estimated annual JGB net new issuance of ¥34tn.

In this respect, the Japanese central bank has from a potentially monetisation standpoint always defended the integrity of its JGB purchase programme by stressing that it only buys JGBs in the secondary market, which means that the seller of the JGB to the BoJ forfeits a claim to that asset. This is contrasted to what would happen if the BoJ bought JGBs in the primary market on an open-ended basis. Such a process would be highly inflationary and, sooner or later, would be viewed by the market as such. And as Wood concludes, the next step is obvious…

“This is why Japan, as well as America, is also a candidate for monetisation of infrastructure stimulus or for what Bernanke has called a “money-financed fiscal programme”, or what has been called in other quarters “overt monetary financing”. This is because Bank of Japan governor Haruhiko Kuroda is now looking for a new alternative form of monetary easing, given he has probably reached the practical limits of responsible JGB buying, as already discussed, while his initial move to impose negative rates in January led to the opposite market reaction than expected (ie, a stronger yen and a weaker stock market) while also proving politically very unpopular. This probably explains why Kamikaze Kuroda has not expanded the negative rate policy further since January even though inflation and inflation expectations have moved in the opposite direction of what he has been targeting.”

The latest data will make it harder for Kuroda to do nothing at the next BoJ policy meeting due to be held on 28-29 July given the stress he has put on monitoring inflation expectations. That is unless he just admits he has failed! Given the unattractive options of buying still more JGBs or ETFs, or risking an undoubtedly unpopular expansion of negative rates, Kuroda and indeed Abe will be looking for a new approach. Monetisation of infrastructure stimulus may be the option. Meanwhile, in an effort to calm potential concerns about the integrity of the fiscal budget central bankers implementing such a future monetisation of infrastructure spending will doubtless be at pains to describe the process as a “one off” though, as the ever theoretical Bernanke stated in his blog: “To have its full effect, the increase in the money supply must be perceived as permanent by the public.”

But the jobs report?!

• More Than 20% Of Americans Are Simply Too Poor To Shop (NYPost)

Retailers have blamed the weather, slow job growth and millennials for their poor results this past year, but a new study claims that more than 20% of Americans are simply too poor to shop. These 26 million Americans are juggling two to three jobs, earning just around $27,000 a year and supporting two to four children — and exist largely under the radar, according to America’s Research Group, which has been tracking consumer shopping trends since 1979. “The poorest Americans have stopped shopping, except for necessities,” said Britt Beemer, chairman of ARG. Beemer has been tracking this subgroup for two years, ever since his weekly surveys of 15,000 consumers picked up that 21% of consumers did not finish their Christmas shopping in 2014 due to being too busy working.

That number grew to 29% last year, and Beemer dug in to learn more about them, calling them on holidays. He estimates that this group has swelled from 6 million households four years ago, because their incomes have not kept pace with expenses like medical costs. Nearly half of all Americans have not seen an increase in salary over the last five to seven years, and another 28% have seen their take-home pay reduced by higher medical insurance deductions or switching to part-time jobs, ARG found. “It’s scary when you start to see things that you’ve never seen before,” said Beemer. “People are so pessimistic about their future.” Most of those living on the edge — 68% are women between the ages of 28 and 38 — work in retail or in call centers, according to Beemer.

Rosenberg flip flop. “This is otherwise known as looking at the big picture.”

• What If I Told You Employment Actually Declined 119,000 In June (Rosenberg)

David Rosenberg: What if I told you that employment actually declined 119,000 in June and has been faltering now for three months in a row? Yes, that is indeed the case. Of course, the focus, as always is on the non-farm payroll report but keep in mind that while this is the data series that moves markets, it does not necessarily have the final word on how the labor market is truly faring. Okay, so let’s get the pablum out of the way first. Nonfarm payrolls surprised yet again but this time to the upside — surging 287,000 in the best showing since last October and again making a mockery of the consensus economics community which penned in a 180,000 bounce….

…as if the Household sector ratified the seemingly encouraging news contained in the payroll data as this survey showed a tepid 67,000 job gain last month and rather ominously, in fact, has completely stagnated since February. Historians will tell you that at turning points in the economy, it is the Household survey that tends to get the story right.

[..] The simple fact of the matter is that May and June were massive statistical anomalies. The broad trends tell the tale. Go back to June 2014 and the six-month trend in payrolls is running at a 2.2% annual rate and the three-month trend at 2.4%. A year ago, as of June 2015, the six-month pace was 1.9% and the three-month at 2.2%. Fast forward to today, and the six-month annualized rate is 1.4% and the three-month has slowed all the way down to a 1.2%. This is otherwise known as looking at the big picture.

When the Household survey is put on the same comparable footing as the payroll series (the payroll and population-concept adjusted number), employment fell 119,000 in June – again calling into question the veracity of the actual payroll report — and is down 517,000 through this span. The six-month trend has dipped below the zero-line and this has happened but two other times during this seven-year expansion.

“..the E.U.’s “free-trade zones” have become classic Orwellian nomenclature. Flip it: “Free-trade zone” means “unfree-trade zone.”

• Chicken Little Economists Are Wrong About Brexit (MW)

A few years ago when Grexit was the E.U. crisis du jour, I explained why Greece just didn’t matter to the world’s economies or the U.S. stock markets in columns like this one called, “Apple is bigger than the entire Greek economy.” Did you know that Great Britain’s GDP is 10 times larger than Greece’s? Unlike with Apple vs Greece’s entire GDP, at $2.7 trillion per year, Britain’s economy is equal to the combined market cap of Apple, Google, Microsoft, Exxon Mobil, Berkshire Hathaway, Amazon and Facebook. The total market cap of the DJIA is only (?) about $5.5 trillion, or twice Britain’s GDP. Clearly, Brexit has a much bigger potential to impact the broader economy and the financial markets than Greece ever did.

Which, in my opinion, is a good thing. Greece’s economy has shrunk 20% since the great Greek Financial Crises Du Jour was hitting the markets and the country chose to stay in the E.U. rather than getting out. Staying in the E.U. has created a Great Depression kind of decline in the economy there. Now I don’t think Great Britain has ever been positioned as poorly as Greece has been inside the E.U., so I certainly don’t think its economy is about to crash 20% in the next two or three years whether in or out of the E.U. But I like the prospects for the country to unwind the cumbersome red tape, regulations and control from the E.U.’s central powers, thereby unleashing entrepreneurship, innovation and freer trade,

One of the great ironies that Brexit has highlighted is that the E.U.’s “free-trade zones” have become classic Orwellian nomenclature. Flip it: “Free-trade zone” means “unfree-trade zone.” As LunaticTrader put it in a discussion about all of this on Scutify: “The E.U. worked well until the late 1990s when it was mainly a free-trade zone. It has gradually morphed into an ‘unfree trade zone’ because that ‘free’ has been gradually replaced by 80000 laws and regulations, combined with the euro, which took away the weaker countries’ (Greece, Italy, Spain…) main tool to manage their own economy. This doesn’t offer any economic benefits to the weaker E.U. members, as has become abundantly clear.”

From this corner’s perspective, Great Britain’s leaving the E.U. gives the nation itself a much higher probability of creating economic growth and prosperity for its citizens than staying in the E.U. ever did. That new upside potential, plus the fact that its economy is large enough to impact the global and U.S. economies nets out to Brexit being a positive, despite all the handwringing in the media and Chicken Little politicians, economists, pundits and traders who are basically begging you to freak out about it.

What Brexit will correct.

• UK Property Hits Levels Of Unaffordability Not Seen Since 2007 (TiM)

UK house prices continued to rise in June, adding almost £3,000 in a month, stretching affordability to levels not seen since the run-up to the financial crisis in 2007, a new survey suggests. Halifax said it was too early to say how the referendum that sanctioned the UK’s decision to leave the EU will impact the housing market, but added there were signs the pace of growth is easing. The price of the average home in the UK rose by 1.3% between May and June, or by £2,708, to hit £216,823, up from 0.6% the previous month, according to the latest index by the mortgage lender. Meanwhile, the ratio of house prices to earnings rose to 5.70 in June from 5.65 in May, marking its highest level since October 2007.

This means that buying a new home will cost the average workers close to six years of their earnings before tax. On an annual basis, however, prices grew by 8.4%, down from 9.2% in May, posting the lowest growth since July last year. Martin Ellis, Halifax housing economist, said: ‘There is evidence that the underlying pace of house growth may be easing.’ And added: ‘House prices continue to increase, albeit at a slower rate, but this precedes the EU referendum result, therefore it is far too early to determine any impact since.’ The Bank of England this week warned that property prices ‘had become stretched’ in recent months – meaning a cooling of the market was likely at some point regardless of the Brexit vote.

“..if banks decide to keep their balance sheets unchanged until the end of 2017, this could halve economic growth in the euro area next year.”

• If Bank Stocks Are Linked to Bank Lending, Europe Should Worry (BBG)

Don’t underestimate the toll that the post-Brexit bank equity rout can take on the euro-area economy. Initial calculations of the effect of the U.K. referendum on the region’s recovery have suggested that the blow will be relatively mild, with ECB President Mario Draghi telling European Union leaders that the impact from direct trade could add up to 0.5 %age point over three years. But such scenarios don’t take into account the consequence of the 23% decline in bank stocks since the Brexit vote. Historically, bank equities have correlated strongly with bank lending, with about a year’s lag, as the chart below shows.

Deutsche Bank analysts led by Marco Stringa argue in a July 5 paper that there’s also a causal link: As banks are now under regulatory pressure to raise capital, slumping stock prices and low profitability make it very difficult to build up funds either externally or internally. Deutsche Bank’s own share price has fallen by more than 25% since June 23. If banks struggle to raise capital, they may come under extra pressure to shrink assets. That could mean less lending to the economy. Bankers often claim that asking them to have more funds of their own instead of borrowing from the market hampers their ability to extend credit. Regulators retort that higher capital requirements in fact strengthen a bank’s ability to make loans, not the opposite.

Even so, it might mightn’t take much for Brexit to put a stop to the timid pick-up in euro-area bank lending that started just last year. That’s not least because of the impact of uncertainty on households’ and companies’ investment choices. The impact of a renewed credit crunch on Europe’s largely bank-dependent companies could be severe. Not by chance, fixing the banks to restart credit to the real economy has been one of the main goals of the ECB’s policies since the crisis. Stringa estimates that if banks decide to keep their balance sheets unchanged until the end of 2017, this could halve economic growth in the euro area next year. Worse still, if lenders only manage to raise half of the funds they need to meet what the economists refer to as “Basel IV” requirements, this could force them to reduce their loan book’s risk-weighted assets.

May have co-financed Columbus: “In 1624, the Medici Grand Duke of Tuscany rushed to the defense of depositors of a bank that was by then already 152 years old..”

• Italy PM’s Tuscan Nightmare: The Fall Of ‘Daddy Monte’ (R.)

In 1624, the Medici Grand Duke of Tuscany rushed to the defense of depositors of a bank that was by then already 152 years old, Monte dei Paschi di Siena, guaranteeing their savings at a time of economic crisis. Nearly 400 years later, Italian Prime Minister and fellow Tuscan Matteo Renzi aims to do something similar as the world’s oldest bank and Italy’s third-largest lender again threatens the region’s savers. This time the stakes are much higher. The collapse of Monte dei Paschi could not only impoverish thousands of ordinary Italians, it could lead to a wider banking crisis, help tip Renzi from power and provide another strong jolt to the European Union, already reeling from Britain’s referendum vote to leave the group.

“The government must assume its responsibilities, save the bank and its investors, otherwise this gangrene will spread to the rest of the system,” said Romolo Semplici, a 58-year-old real estate entrepreneur whose 22,000-euro investment in the bank’s shares is now worth less than 200 euros. “I’ve always been pro-European, but if Europe doesn’t protect its own citizens then we should think twice if this the kind of Europe that we want to be in.” Government sources say Italy is considering options to prop up the bank, including a state guarantee that would enable the bank to raise money it would otherwise struggle to secure from skeptical investors. Many bankers say the bank will inevitably have to raise around €3-4 billion.

Officials in Brussels, a world away from the medieval cobble-stoned alleys of Siena, one of Italy’s most popular tourist centers, may stand in Renzi’s way. A state rescue of Monte dei Paschi would be the first real test of EU rules limiting the use of taxpayers’ money to bail out investors. The rules require holders of the bank’s shares and junior debt to bear some of the losses. Depositors with more than €100,000 would also be hit. The bank’s share price has halved since Britain voted on June 23 to leave the EU, as investors stampede out of Italian banks on concerns that Brexit could send Italy back into recession and saddle them with even more bad debts.

“..Italy may fall in October or may not, but it will eventually occur..”

• Albert Edwards: Brexit Is Old News, Time To Worry About Italy (VW)

Edwards looks at the 2008 financial crisis and says it was not Lehman Brothers that was causation. Lehman was a symptom of an economic engine already in decline. Likewise there is Brexit, an issue he notes has been accompanied by some of the most emotional ranting he’s seen – on both sides of the argument, including his own. Brexit will be used as an excuse for all sorts of economic ills, but it is only a symptom, a benchmark for a larger trend. When he takes off the emotional hat, he says the real issue is the continued dismantling of the European Union that is upon which savvy investors should focus. There is a game of dominoes being played out and Brexit was just the latest move in a trend.

“In the aftermath of the Brexit vote there is an increasing fear of other dominoes falling within the heart of the EU – the eurozone,” Edwards wrote. “Italy is bleeping very loudly on most people’s radars with its banking crisis and impending referendum seen as leaving the country on a knife-edge.” The Italian banking crisis is important, but it is not the primary problem. “It is a symptom of the problem that problem being a perpetually stagnant economy and deflation,” he wrote. “Italy simply does not appear to be able to grow inside the eurozone and more importantly probably never will.” But it is not just Italy that could be part of the trend extension, the trend could be extended across Europe.

In making this analysis, Edwards does not cite all too simple issues of immigration, fear of globalization or a lack of foresight by the slovenly masses who vote. He looks at economic numbers and notes that it’s not just Italy that is at risk of withdrawing from a marriage. There have been economic winners and losers, and they are clear and documentable. “Indeed the Italian economy has barely grown one jot since it joined the eurozone at the start of 1999 while Germany has grown rich,” he said, pointing to one clear winner with many clear losers. “As inevitably people compare their fortunes with that of their neighbours, the Italians are mighty pissed off.”

“..the country is “condemned to perpetual economic stagnation within the strictures of the euro zone..”

• Italy’s In An Economic Straitjacket, Needs To Be Freed: Albert Edwards (CNBC)

The citizens of Italy will vote to leave the euro zone after an impending recession and a shift in power inside the country’s political system, according to Societe Generale’s notoriously bearish strategist, Albert Edwards. “The people are angry,” Edwards said in a note Friday, highlighting a poll in May by IPSOS Global that showed almost half of Italians would vote “out” in a referendum on their country’s EU membership. “Italy simply does not appear to be able to grow inside the euro zone and more importantly probably never will … after the next recession I believe a majority of Italians will have had enough of the euro zone experiment and vote in the radical Five Star Movement,” he added.

Anti-establishment Five Star Movement (M5S) is now Italy’s most popular party after a poll on Wednesday showed that it would win an election over Prime Minister Matteo Renzi’s Democratic Party (PD), according to Reuters. This comes at a time when Renzi is trying to deal with a fragile banking system, bogged down by non-performing loans. A referendum on constitutional reform this October is also looming and could well usher in new elections. But Edwards suggests that the Italian bank crisis – and also Brexit – are not a cause of the world’s economic problems, but just symptoms. The real issue is that the country is “condemned to perpetual economic stagnation within the strictures of the euro zone,” he said, suggesting that recapitalizing the Italian banks will not solve their problems.

With a slew of figures, the Societe Generale strategist detailed in his research note how unemployment has risen since the mid-2000s and how productivity has stagnated. Going forward, he believes Renzi should announce an “aggressive fiscal pump” despite the complaints that might arise from Germany and the European Commission. “Italy has played by the fiscal austerity rules for too long. Although its problems are structural in nature, after running an underlying primary fiscal surplus for some 20 years it is time to break free from its self-imposed deflationary fiscal chains,” he added.

Question is: why save the EU?

• Only Europe’s Radicals Can Save The EU: Yanis Varoufakis (Newsweek)

Spaniards went to the polls three days after the shock of Brexit to produce a result that, ostensibly, delivers victory to the status quo. However, the status quo is tired, fragmenting, and prone to vicious unraveling unless the EU’s deconstruction is impeded. But, the Spanish establishment, which is determined to maintain the status quo, lacks both the analytical power and the political will to impede the EU’s disintegration. And so an electoral result in favor of continuity becomes the harbinger of deep uncertainty. Reeling under the British voters’ radical verdict, “official” Europe took solace from Spain’s general election outcome. They read into it evidence that the post-Brexit fear factor may help knock some “sense” into voters, putting them off “populist” parties.

But, even if this is so, for how long will fear keep voters loyal to a crumbling status quo? The threat of a pyrrhic victory for Spain’s establishment is, thus, clear and present. Spain and the U.K. differ in one crucial sense. While EU policies and institutions have damaged the Spanish economy a great deal more than Britain’s, Spain’s political system remains largely free of euroskepticism. The paradox dissolves quickly when one considers the traditional lack of legitimacy of the Spanish elites in their own country. British Tories, like Michael Gove and Boris Johnson, knew they could draw mass support from a slogan like “We want our country back!” The Spanish establishment cannot do this.

And they cannot do it because, over the last four decades, they managed to retain control by offering voters an unlikely deal: “You keep us in government and we shall do what is necessary to rid you of us, by transferring power to Brussels and to Frankfurt.” Calling for a restoration of sovereignty now would strike Spanish voters as backtracking on the promise to rid them of their local rulers. But, then again, this promise is under increasing strain at a time when the process of Europeanization is in serious trouble.

As you may have noticed, I find it ever harder to stay away from politics. This is because the economic collapse increasingly spils over into what is after all a fully integrated politico-economic system. In this case, what caused Brexit is also what makes Corbyn strong. But Britons are not nearlly far enough along in the Kübler-Ross cycle to understand this. They’re still stuck in blaming other people for the perceived injustices that befall them.

• Worst. Coup. Ever. (TeleSur)

As the Chilcot Inquiry report is released to the public, those MPs attempting to depose Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn—their leading lights inescapably sullied by having supported the war—are suing for peace. Over a week of high-profile resignations, statements, demands, pleas and threats have seemingly done little but consolidate Corbyn’s position. In record time, it has gone from being a coup to a #chickencoup to a #headlesschickencoup. This could be the biggest own-goal in the history of British politics. Journalists steeped in the common sense of Westminster, assumed that it was all over for Labour’s first ever radical socialist leadership. How can he lead, they reasoned, if his parliamentary allies won’t work with him?

This, in realpolitik terms, merely encoded the congealed entitlement and lordly presumption of Labour’s traditional ruling caste. Even some of Corbyn’s bien-pensant supporters went along with this view. They should have known better. The putschists’ plan, such as it was, was to orchestrate such media saturation of criticism and condemnation aimed at Corbyn, to create such havoc within the Labour Party, that he would feel compelled to resign. The tactical side of it was executed to smooth perfection, by people who are well-versed in the manipulation of the spectacle. And yet, in the event that Corbyn was not wowed by the media spectacle, not intimidated by ranks of grandees laying into him, and happy to appeal over the heads of party elites to the grassroots, their strategy disintegrated.

This was not politics as they knew it. The befuddlement was not for want of preparation. From even before his election as Labour Party leader, there were briefings to the press that a coup would be mounted soon after his election. And in the weeks leading up to the European Union referendum, Labour Party activists reported that they were expecting a coup to be launched after the outcome was announced, regardless of what the result was. This seemed like a half-baked idea—there was still no overwhelming crisis justifying a coup attempt—and so it turned out to be.

Undoubtedly, part of the rationale for hastening the attempted overthrow was the looming publication of the findings of the Chilcot Inquiry, which was expected to be harshly critical of former Prime Minister Tony Blair, of the justification for the invasion of Iraq, and of the relationship with the Bush administration. Given the role of the Parliamentary Labour Party in leading Britain into that war, against fierce public and international opposition, and given its role in supporting the subsequent occupation, this was a bad moment to have Corbyn at the helm. In the event, Corbyn survived to make a dignified statement apologizing for Labour’s role in the disaster and promising to embark upon a different foreign policy—one quite at odds with that supported by the pro-Trident, pro-bombing backbenchers.

The world needs more debt!

• The Persian Gulf’s Huge New Export: Debt (WSJ)

The energy-producing states of the Persian Gulf are issuing bonds at the fastest clip ever, showing how the oil bust is reshaping the region’s finances despite a near doubling of crude prices this year. The Gulf Cooperation Council states of Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar and Oman together have raised a record $18 billion in 2016, according to Dealogic, helping refill coffers depleted by sharp revenue declines. Investors expect issuance to increase further, as governments brace for lower prices than they were budgeting only a few years ago. Saudi Arabia is expected to raise up to $15 billion more in the coming weeks, and total issuance by the Gulf nations could reach $35 billion this year, according to JP Morgan Chase, more than doubling the previous high set in 2009.

The issuers are paying slightly higher costs than other emerging countries with similar ratings, reflecting uncertainty over how successful they will be in opening up their economies, the region’s geopolitical risks and the murky outlook for oil prices, analysts and portfolio managers said. But the bond sales generally have been successful, driven by strong demand from local investors and banks, improving market sentiment due to the oil rebound, and a persistent decline in global interest rates that is putting a premium on securities with better yields. In May, Qatar raised $9 billion in an offering that drew more than twice that sum in orders. The five-year notes issued by the nation of 2.5 million trade at 2.13%. That is more attractive when compared with 1.83% on the comparably rated bonds issued by Korea National Oil, according to Anita Yadav at Emirates NBD.

-12.4% YoY

• Greek Exports Record Major Decline In May (Kath.)

Exports posted a significant decline in May, reflecting to a great extent the impact of the uncertainty from Athens’s months-long negotiations with its creditors, as well as of the industrial action at the ports of Piraeus and Thessaloniki. According to Hellenic Statistical Authority (ELSTAT) figures issued on Friday, exports contracted 12.4% compared with May 2015, amounting to 2.02 billion euros. The decline came to 6.4% not including fuel products, as exports recorded their first decline in the last four months.

“This decline, besides the general problems and the continued uncertainty in the Greek economy, is partly due to the situation in the country in recent months, as the industrial action at the ports of Thessaloniki and Piraeus started in May,” noted the Greek International Business Association (SEVE) in a statement. Panhellenic Exporters Association chief Christina Sakellaridi added that “an entire year has passed since the capital controls were imposed without normality having been restored to the market. The only favorable impact is expected from the repayment of the state’s dues to private parties, the activation of the investment incentives law, the restoration of cheap liquidity flows to banks, the developments concerning bad loans and privatizations, and the attraction of new investments.”

“..absurd to talk about any threat coming from Russia at a time when dozens of people are dying in the center of Europe and when hundreds of people are dying in the Middle East daily..”

• Russia Hits Back At ‘Anti-Russian’ NATO ‘Hysteria’ (CNBC)

At a NATO summit in Warsaw, Poland on Friday, the military alliance is expected to formally agree to deploy four battalions with a total of 3,000 to 4,000 troops to the Baltic states (Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania) and Poland on a rotational basis. The deployment comes amid increasing concerns in those areas (all of which were under Soviet control during the Cold War) that Russia could be prepared to try to increase or regain its sphere of influence. In a statement on Thursday, NATO also said it would “strengthen political and practical cooperation with Ukraine, Georgia and the Republic of Moldova” – all former Soviet republics experiencing increasing tensions with Russia due to their political and economic relations with the EU.

In addition, the EU and NATO signed a declaration on Friday aimed at bolstering the region’s security ahead of the full NATO summit Friday afternoon. Left out in the cold from NATO and ostensibly the reason for such a deployment, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov reportedly hit back at the alliance, saying its actions were akin to “anti-Russian hysteria.” “If one needs badly to look for an enemy image so that [one can] promote anti-Russian, so to say, hysteria, and then, with this emotional background, to deploy more and more air force units, ground troop units, getting them closer to Russian borders, then one can hardly find any common ground for cooperation,” he was quoted by Russia’s Itar Tass news agency as saying.

Peskov was also quoted by Reuters as telling reporters that it was “absurd to talk about any threat coming from Russia at a time when dozens of people are dying in the center of Europe and when hundreds of people are dying in the Middle East daily,” adding that “you have to be extremely short-sighted to twist things in that way.”

Debt Rattle July 8 2016

Jul 082016

July 8, 2016 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 8:05 am Finance Tagged with: AAA, Blair, bonds, Brexit, crisis, debt, deficit, deflation, Hillary, NATO, squeeze, yuan 4 Responses »

Lewis Wickes Hine Whole family works, Browns Mills, New Jersey 1910

• Brexit Opens Up Bank Fault Line From Milan To Lisbon (R.)

• Europe Banks Close to Breaching 2011 Crisis Lows on Italy Woes (BBG)

• EU Declares Spain, Portugal In Violation Of Deficit Rules (EuA)

• UK Property Fund Turmoil Continues As Three More Firms Cut Value (G.)

• World Faces Deflation Shock As China Devalues At Accelerating Pace (AEP)

• Forget Brexit, Watch China And The Renminbi (VW)

• Central Banks Put Squeeze on Sovereign-Debt Market (WSJ)

• Bond Market Is In An ‘Epic Bubble Of Colossal Proportions,’ Says Boockvar (CNBC)

• Race And Real Estate: How Hot Chinese Money Is Making Vancouver Unlivable (G.)

• Why Australia Could Be About To Lose Its AAA Rating (VW)

• Chilcot’s Judgment Is Utterly Damning – But It’s Still Not Justice (Monbiot)

• More Obscuration From The British Establishment (Paul Craig Roberts)

• The United States and NATO Are Preparing for a Major War With Russia (Klare)

• Pressure Mounts For Varoufakis’ Secret Plan X To Be Investigated (Kath.)

• The Strange Gaps in Hillary Clinton’s Email Traffic (Pol.)

• Marine’s Defense For Handling Classified Info Will Cite Hillary Case (WaPo)

• Europe Is Full … Of Empty Houses (LifeSeekers)

Beautiful Brexit bursts bubbles.

• Brexit Opens Up Bank Fault Line From Milan To Lisbon (R.)

The ripples from Britain’s decision to leave the EU have spread across Europe to its southwestern edge, where Portugal is quietly struggling to contain a banking crisis. Since Britain’s shock vote on June 23 for a “Brexit”, attention in the banking sector has mainly focused on Italy, where non-performing loans are causing concern, bank shares have tumbled and confidence has sunk. Political tensions in Europe have also deepened, with Rome and Lisbon trying to bend EU rules on helping laggard banks but meeting resistance from economic powerhouse Germany and the executive European Commission. “It’s putting the whole banking system under stress,” said Gunnar Hokmark, a lawmaker in the European Parliament, echoing the nervousness expressed by investors who spoke to Reuters.

“It will be serious for countries in a fragile situation,” said Hokmark, who helped write rules imposing losses on bondholders and large depositors of failing banks which Portugal and Italy want loosened to allow state help. Portugal’s problems have attracted fewer headlines than Italy’s but its predicament is potentially no less painful. Data show Portuguese savings are being spent, unlike in Italy, and private debt is much higher. A euro zone official who asked not be identified said Portugal’s situation was as critical as Italy’s but it was unlikely to be treated with leniency because it was smaller and posed no “systemic” threat to Europe’s financial stability. Portugal sees it differently. “Wherever you look, there is a threat or a risk,” said Filipe Garcia, a financial expert and consultant in Portugal.

How much did Draghi spend to reach this point?

• Europe Banks Close to Breaching 2011 Crisis Lows on Italy Woes (BBG)

European banks have fallen to levels not seen since the worst days of the region’s debt crisis as turmoil surrounding Italy’s lenders intensified. Worries about market contagion dragged the Stoxx Europe 600 Banks Index just 1.4% away from its 2011 low. Most of Europe’s banks lost at least 40% of their value in the last year – Banco Popular Espanol, Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena, Deutsche Bank and Credit Suisse reached fresh record lows this week.

If EU sanctions Madrid and Lisbon, it can’t leave others be.

• EU Declares Spain, Portugal In Violation Of Deficit Rules (EuA)

The European Commission on Thursday (7 July) officially declared Spain and Portugal in violation of the EU rules on government overspending, the first step towards unprecedented penalties against members of the 28-country bloc. “The Commission confirms that Spain and Portugal will not correct their excessive deficits by the recommended deadline,” the EU’s executive arm said in a statement. If endorsed by the EU’s finance ministers, the Commission is then legally obliged to propose fines against the two neighbouring countries, which were both hit hard by the financial crisis. “Lately, the two countries have veered off track in the correction of their excessive deficits and have not met their budgetary targets,” said Valdis Dombrovskis, the EU Commission’s VP in charge of the euro.

“We stand ready to work together with the Spanish and Portuguese authorities to define the best path ahead,” he said. Many EU powers led by Germany have long hoped for the Commission to finally crack down on public overspenders, but with populist fires burning after the Brexit vote, ministers meeting in Brussels on Tuesday could decide to delay their immediate endorsement. “There is uncertainty creeping in light of the UK vote result,” an EU diplomat told AFP. France and Italy will be the most willing to delay the penalty process, fearing that their own years of EU rule breaking would put them next in line for a sanction by Brussels. Ahead of the Commission announcement, Portuguese Prime Minister Antonio Costa warned that Brussels would foster a rise in Euroscepticism in Portugal if EU sanctions are applied.

Brexit bursts bubbles. Is that a bad thing?

• UK Property Fund Turmoil Continues As Three More Firms Cut Value (G.)

Shopping centres, office blocks and warehouses worth up to £5bn could be put up for sale as the turmoil in the UK commercial property sector prompted by the Brexit vote forces fund managers to revalue their portfolios or temporarily prevent investors withdrawing their savings. With the pound under pressure on the foreign exchange markets, fund managers Legal & General, Foreign & Colonial and Dutch-owned Kames cut the value of their property funds on Thursday. L&G cut the value of its £2.3bn fund by 10% – following a 5% cut last week – while F&C and Kanes both cut by 5%. Aberdeen Fund Management announced on Wednesday it was halting trading in its property fund for 24 hours and devaluing it by 17% – thought to be the biggest adjustment ever made by a property fund.

Aberdeen has since extended the trading ban until Monday. Others have suspended dealings for longer, starting with Standard Life’s decision on Monday to halt trading in its £2.9bn commercial property fund, leading to a cascade effect with Aviva, Prudential’s M&G, Henderson, Columbia Threadneedle and Canada Life following suit – taking the total value of property funds suspended to £18bn. Mike Prew, equity analyst at Jefferies, said buildings could be sold to find the cash to repay investors in the funds: “We estimate that £3bn to £5bn of assets could be put up for sale but it’s a trading vacuum and what sells is likely to get a hefty Brexit discount. “Buildings are now being readied for sale but keys to cash can typically take three to six months.”

One of the factors weighing on sentiment is uncertainty about the role of London as a financial centre outside the EU. George Osborne, the chancellor, met the heads of major international banks including Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley on Thursday to discuss ways to keep the City as a major trading centre. “We are determined to work together,” they said in a joint statement.

Ambrose lags me by a week: Deflation Is Blowing In On An Eastern Trade Wind

• World Faces Deflation Shock As China Devalues At Accelerating Pace (AEP)

China has abandoned a solemn pledge to keep its exchange rate stable and is carrying out a systematic devaluation of the yuan, sending a powerful deflationary impulse through a global economy already caught in a 1930s trap. The country’s currency basket has been sliding at an annual pace of 12pc since the start of the year. This has picked up sharply since the Brexit vote, suggesting that the People’s Bank (PBOC) may be taking advantage of the distraction to push through a sharper devaluation. “This makes a mockery of the PBOC’s suggestion that its policy is to keep the currency’s value stable,” said Mark Williams, chief China economist at Capital Economics. “Markets will not take PBOC policy statements at face value in the future.”

Mr Williams said it is unclear whether Beijing intended to deceive investors all along when it gave categorical assurances earlier this year, or whether it is feeding on events. Either way the markets have stopped believing what they are told, storing serious trouble for the authorities should there be another surge in capital flight later this year, as widely expected. “When it comes, the PBOC will find itself sorely lacking in credibility. It may have to intervene on a large scale to maintain control,” he said. Factory gate prices within China are falling at a rate of 2.9pc, further amplifying the deflationary impact. Analysts fear that Beijing is engaged is an undeclared policy of beggar-thy-neighbour mercantilism, trying to avert an industrial crisis at home by exporting its overcapacity in steel, shipbuilding, chemicals, plastics, paper, glass, and even solar panels, to the rest for the world.

“When you have a relatively closed capital account like China, it means that any currency move like this is a policy decision,” said Hans Redeker, currency chief at Morgan Stanley. “They seem to be overriding their own model and letting the remnimbi (yuan) fall to improve competitiveness. They are in the same sort of deflationary syndrome as Japan in the 1990 but on a much bigger scale. The global economy is in no position to absorb this.”

Again, Deflation Is Blowing In On An Eastern Trade Wind.

• Forget Brexit, Watch China And The Renminbi (VW)

As the world’s attention has been fixed on Brexit and meltdown of the European financial system, China has been quietly devaluing its currency without causing too much turbulence in the financial markets as it did the last time policymakers attempted such a strategy. On Wednesday the yuan fell to a fresh five-and-a-half-year low against the dollar extending its slide to a fifth straight session, after China’s central bank sharply weakened its official guidance rate as the dollar surged. The yuan traded as low as 6.6955 against the dollar at one point, closing in on the psychologically important 6.7 level. China’s policymakers have made it clear that they are willing to let the yuan fall as low as 6.8 per dollar in 2016 to support struggling exporters, a depreciation of 4.5% for the full year matching last year’s decline.

This time around China’s central bank is trying to send a message to the markets that it has the depreciation under control. Reuters reports that traders believe state-owned banks across the country are offering dollars to soothe markets while the People’s Bank of China has been intervening in the foreign exchange market to slow down the yuan’s decline. Forex reserves fell by $27.9 billion in May to $3.19 trillion, their lowest since December 2011 although currency movements are almost entirely to blame for the decline. The renminbi depreciated by 1.8% during May. FX reserves increased by $10.3 billion during March and $7.1 billion during April.

Not enough paper left.

• Central Banks Put Squeeze on Sovereign-Debt Market (WSJ)

Christopher Sullivan, a money manager in New York, is worried that when he needs U.S. Treasury bonds one day, he might not be able to get them. On the surface, the concern might seem unwarranted: The U.S. Treasury has $13.4 trillion in debt securities outstanding, making the U.S. bond market the largest in the world and Treasurys among the most easily traded asset classes. But Mr. Sullivan, who oversees $2.3 billion as chief investment officer at the United Nations Federal Credit Union, said he is afraid that he may soon be squeezed out of that market as central banks continue to vacuum up high-quality debt around the world and nervous overseas investors turn to Treasurys for relief.

A buying spree by central banks is reducing the availability of government debt for other buyers and intensifying the bidding wars that break out when investors get jittery, driving prices higher and yields lower. The yield on the benchmark 10-year Treasury note hit a record low Wednesday. “The scarcity factor is there but it really becomes palpable during periods of stress when yields immediately collapse,’’ he said. ”You may be shut out of the bond market just when you need it the most.’’

On Wednesday, the yield on the 20-year Japanese government bond fell below zero for the first time, joining a pool of negative-yielding bonds around the world that has expanded rapidly over the past year. In Switzerland, government bonds through the longest maturity, a bond due in nearly half a century, are now yielding below zero. In Germany, government debt with maturities out as far as January 2031 is trading with negative yields.

Kuroda and Bernanke are meeting next week.

• Bond Market Is In An ‘Epic Bubble Of Colossal Proportions,’ Says Boockvar (CNBC)

One of the most crowded trades on Wall Street is about to implode, says one market watcher. “We’re in an epic bubble of colossal proportions,” Peter Boockvar, at The Lindsey Group, said Tuesday on CNBC’s ” Futures Now “. Global yields have been tumbling to record lows, with many dipping into negative territory. The U.S. 10-year hit its lowest level ever this week as traders continue to seek safety in the bond market. Yields move inversely to prices. However, Boockvar believes that this activity is a ticking time bomb for the global economy. He reasoned that U.S. Treasury yields are being dragged down by negative-yielding debt out of Germany, Japan and Switzerland and misplaced monetary policy, and is therefore skeptical as to how much longer the rally can continue.

“It could be central banks that end this,” said Boockvar in regard to upward momentum for bonds. In his recent coverage, he reacted to the newly released FOMC minutes and further questioned the Fed’s ability to act effectively. “They’ll call it being ‘patient.’ Their forecasts are now irrelevant, their communication is now meaningless and their tools to handle whatever might come our way are toothless,” noted Boockvar when describing the Fed’s ability to address a flattening yield curve. In Europe, concern for Italy’s economy continues to rise as that nation struggles to maintain negative interest rates while simultaneously raising capital for its banking system, which is straddled with mounting debt.

“Maybe Italian banks are telling us that central bankers and their negative interest rate policies are actually destroying the Japanese and European banking system?” asked Boockvar in the CNBC interview. He reasoned that Bank of Japan Governor Haruhiko Kuroda and ECB President Mario Draghi could take a look at what’s happening in Italy and decide that their respective monetary policies are the wrong course of action. Ultimately, Boockvar warned of the fallout that could occur if multiple nations opt to end what he referred to as a “negative deposit rate regime.” “Even if they put it back to zero, imagine the carnage, at least in the short-term bond markets,” concluded Boockvar.

Once again: how to kill a city.

• Race And Real Estate: How Hot Chinese Money Is Making Vancouver Unlivable (G.)

Here’s one,” says Melissa Fong. She’s browsing online real estate listings in a cafe near Vancouver’s City Hall. Behind her, the mountains of the North Shore – the view that launched a thousand bidding wars – rise through mist. “Three-bedroom townhouse, 1,400 sq ft, C$1.5m (£800,000). You could start a family in a place like this. Way, way out of my price range, though.” Fong moves on, scrolling through half a dozen homes, each smaller than the last, until she arrives at a tiny, 500 sq ft condominium on the east side of the city. “Unassuming” would be a generous way to describe how it looks from the photos, which, tellingly, are all exterior shots. “You could live there if you only had one kid, right?” she says with a grim smile.

An urban planning researcher, Fong divides her time between Vancouver, where her elderly parents live, and Toronto, where she’s finishing a doctorate. She grew up in Vancouver, has deep roots in the city, and plans to settle here with her husband, a home renovator. But she has looked on with a mixture of frustration and horror as the cost of housing in Canada’s famously liveable city rise beyond the means of young professionals like her. “When you think it can’t get any worse, it does. So you keep adjusting your expectations, you know?”

Over the past year, the price of a single family house in Vancouver increased by an incredible 30%, to an average of $1.4m. It’s just the latest, most dramatic jump in an already dramatic long-term trend that has turned the beautiful but unassuming Canadian city into one of the world’s least affordable, with a housing price-to-income ratio of 10.8. That’s third after Hong Kong and Sydney, and well ahead of London, which ranks eighth at 8.5. Driving the rise is an unprecedented flood of foreign capital, mainly from China.

“What you have is a huge pool of very wealthy people who want to hedge against uncertainty back home,” says Thomas Davidoff, a real estate economist at the University of British Columbia (UBC). “Combine anxious money – a lot of it – with a beautiful gateway city that has limited space to build, low property taxes, lax regulation on capital flows, and wealth-friendly immigration programmes, and you get a market like this one,” – a market where an ordinary house with a waterfront view can sell for $15m while people earning local wages struggle to buy or rent a home.

Lemme guess. Because it’s f**king broke?

• Why Australia Could Be About To Lose Its AAA Rating (VW)

Australia’s AAA credit rating was under pressure even before the election and is now looking decidedly shaky. Ratings agency Standard & Poors has moved Australia’s rating outlook from “stable” to “negative”, due to debt and a poor chance of budget repair. This follows warnings from the other major credit rating agencies – Moody’s and Fitch Ratings. The problem is budget repair will only become harder over the coming years, whatever the final numbers in the parliament. On the parties’ approach to budget repair, the Coalition and Labor are virtually indistinguishable as far as the credit agencies are concerned. The May budget projected a deficit (in underlying cash terms) of A$37 billion in 2016-17, gradually falling to $6 billion over the four-year forward estimates.

Labor’s plan is to reduce the deficit from $39 billion to $11 billion over that time. Both Coalition and Labor forecast a return to surplus over the subsequent years and indeed quite large surpluses ten years from now. Budget repair on this scale was utterly implausible before the election and is fiction now. The government’s so-called “zombie” budget measures were baked into its projections over the forward estimate period. These were mainly the cuts to university funding, family payments and the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme. None of these had any prospect of being legislated with the past Senate, never mind with a larger, more powerful set of crossbench senators.

The Parliamentary Budget Office estimates these “zombie” measures to be worth $8 billion in total over the forward estimates. This accounts for roughly half of the difference between the total projected deficits of Coalition and Labor over the same period. In short, there is little or no prospect of achieving the budget repair that is a pre-requisite for maintaining Australia’s AAA credit rating. Both sides of politics need to spell out to all Australians what this means. The effect of a credit downgrade is like an income cut to households, businesses and government.

Blair won’t be jailed, neither will Dubya or Cheney. But we could at least try to make sure this can’t happen again. By telling them of consequences before they pull these things.

• Chilcot’s Judgment Is Utterly Damning – But It’s Still Not Justice (Monbiot)

Little is more corrosive of democracy than impunity. When politicians do terrible things and suffer no consequences, people lose trust in both politics and justice. They see them, correctly, as instruments deployed by the strong against the weak. Since the first world war, no British prime minister has done anything as terrible as Tony Blair’s invasion of Iraq. This unprovoked war caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people and the mutilation of hundreds of thousands more. It flung the whole region into chaos, which has been skillfully exploited by terror groups. Today, three million people in Iraq are internally displaced, and an estimated 10 million need humanitarian assistance.

Yet Blair, the co-author of these crimes, whose lethal combination of appalling judgment and tremendous powers of persuasion made the Iraq war possible, saunters the world, picking up prizes and massive fees, regally granting interviews, cloaked in a forcefield of denial and legal impunity. If this is what politics looks like, is it any wonder that so many people have given up on it? The crucial issue – the legality of the war – was, of course, beyond Sir John Chilcot’s remit. A government whose members were complicit in the matter under investigation (Gordon Brown financed and supported the Iraq war) defined his terms of reference.

This is a fundamental flaw in the way inquiries are established in this country: it’s as if a defendant in a criminal case were able to appoint his own judge, choose the charge on which he is to be tried and have the hearing conducted in his own home. But if Brown imagined Chilcot would give the authors of the war an easy ride, he could not have been more wrong. The Chilcot report, much fiercer than almost anyone anticipated, rips down almost every claim the Labour government made about the invasion and its aftermath. Two weeks before he launched his war of choice, Tony Blair told the Guardian: “Let the day-to-day judgments come and go: be prepared to be judged by history.” Well, that judgment has just been handed down, and it is utterly damning.

PCR gets mad: Elect Hillary and die.

• More Obscuration From The British Establishment (Paul Craig Roberts)

Sir John Chilcot, a member of the British establishment and also a member of the Butler Inquiry, the responsibility of which was to determine if the so-called “intelligence” used as the excuse for the US/UK invasion of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was “fixed” to justify the invasion, has, after seven years of delay, finally issued its report. Remember, there was a leaked memo from the head of British intelligence that the intelligence justifying the Iraqi Invasion was “fixed” or orchestrated to produce the justification for the invasion, a war crime under the Nuremberg standard established by the United States. Chilcot’s job was to make this fact go away or assume less importance and to protect the Butler Inquiry’s orchestrated verdict that, despite the word of the head of British intelligence, the intelligence was not fixed.

In other words, Sir John’s assigned task under the guise of an “impartial inquiry” was to absolve former UK PM and war criminal Tony Blair not of all responsibility but of all responsibility deserving of prosecution. Sir John’s report is akin to FBI director Comey’s report on Hillary: They did it but they didn’t do it enough to be prosecuted. In the context of democratic politics, if such existed in England, Tony Blair would be in the crosshairs of the ruling UK party, the Tories or Conservatives. Yet, as both parties represent the same private interest groups, the Conservative Prime Minister, David Cameron, who has announced his resignation effective next October, rushed to the opposition party’s defense and gave in Parliament what former British Ambassador Craig Murray calls a “dishonest, apologia for the invasion that bore no relationship to the Chilcot report.”

The UK media, for the most part, also came out in defense of Tony Blair, the war criminal and liar, providing, according to Amb. Murray, “unlimited airtime to Blair and his defender Alastair Campbell” and “almost no airtime to those who campaigned against the war.” Here is the judgement of a British Ambassador, Craig Murray: “Blair is still a creature of absolute self-serving slime.” You could make the same judgment on almost every member of the Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama regimes. And Hillary’s regime would be even worse. My prediction is that life on earth would not survive Hillary’s first term. Elect Hillary and die.

Not Klare’s strongest effort, but the risk is there.

• The United States and NATO Are Preparing for a Major War With Russia (Klare)

For the first time in a quarter-century, the prospect of war—real war, war between the major powers—will be on the agenda of Western leaders when they meet at the NATO Summit in Warsaw, Poland, on July 8 and 9. Dominating the agenda in Warsaw (aside, of course, from the “Brexit” vote in the UK) will be discussion of plans to reinforce NATO’s “eastern flank”—the arc of former Soviet partners stretching from the Baltic states to the Black Sea that are now allied with the West but fear military assault by Moscow. Until recently, the prospect of such an attack was given little credence in strategic circles, but now many in NATO believe a major war is possible and that robust defensive measures are required.

In what is likely to be its most significant move, the Warsaw summit is expected to give formal approval to a plan to deploy four multinational battalions along the eastern flank—one each in Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. Although not deemed sufficient to stop a determined Russian assault, the four battalions would act as a “tripwire,” thrusting soldiers from numerous NATO countries into the line of fire and so ensuring a full-scale, alliance-wide response. This, it is claimed, will deter Russia from undertaking such a move in the first place or ensure its defeat should it be foolhardy enough to start a war.

The United States, of course, is deeply involved in these initiatives. Not only will it supply many of the troops for the four multinational battalions, but it is also taking many steps of its own to bolster NATO’s eastern flank. Spending on the Pentagon’s “European Reassurance Initiative” will quadruple, climbing from $789 million in 2016 to $3.4 billion in 2017. Much of this additional funding will go to the deployment, on a rotating basis, of an additional armored-brigade combat team in northern Europe.

As a further indication of US and NATO determination to prepare for a possible war with Russia, the alliance recently conducted the largest war games in Eastern Europe since the end of the Cold War. Known as Anakonda 2016, the exercise involved some 31,000 troops (about half of them Americans) and thousands of combat vehicles from 24 nations in simulated battle maneuvers across the breadth of Poland. A parallel naval exercise, BALTOPS 16, simulated “high-end maritime warfighting” in the Baltic Sea, including in waters near Kaliningrad, a heavily defended Russian enclave wedged between Poland and Lithuania.

Greek politics has degenerated into Class B theater, and that’s if you want to be overly generous.

• Pressure Mounts For Varoufakis’ Secret Plan X To Be Investigated (Kath.)

Opposition parties kept up the pressure on the government Wednesday to give a clearer account of its actions over the revelations in US economist James K. Galbraith’s latest book regarding preparations in Greece last year for a possible exit from the euro. The opposition pressed home its views on the matter despite the fact that coalition officials distanced themselves from the academic, who clarified exactly what role he played in 2015 while Yanis Varoufakis was finance minister. Writing on the website belonging to the DiEM25 movement founded by Varoufakis, Galbraith said that he had been asked by the then finance minister in March 2015 to “help with a delicate task.” “This was the preparation of a preliminary plan – requested by the prime minister – for the contingency that Greece might be forced out of the euro,” he wrote.

Galbraith said that he worked on a memorandum, called Plan X, for six weeks with a small group of experts that were sworn to secrecy. The economist insisted that the final note, which touched on issues such as issuing a new currency, setting up a new central bank and ensuring law and order, was not intended as a blueprint for exiting the euro but “an outline of measures that might have to be taken and of problems that could occur.” “It was not our mission to make recommendations, and we made none; we were preparing for a scenario that everyone had hoped to avoid,” wrote Galbraith. Despite the academic’s explanation, Alternate Finance Minister Giorgos Houliarakis launched a strong attack on Galbraith during a session in Parliament Wednesday. “Who is this gentleman?” said the ministry official. “What he is saying is unbelievably frivolous.”

“Clinton signed documents declaring she had turned over all of her work-related emails. We now know that is not true. But even more importantly, the absence of emails raises troubling questions about the nature of the correspondence that might have been deleted.”

• The Strange Gaps in Hillary Clinton’s Email Traffic (Pol.)

The past few weeks have brought a myriad of revelations about the private server Hillary Clinton used while she was secretary of state. First, there was the State Department inspector general’s devastating critique of the former secretary’s email practices. Then came sworn testimony of two key Clinton aides about how the server was set up and how the system worked (or didn’t). Just this weekend, Clinton met with the FBI to discuss her email arrangements. And on Tuesday, FBI Director James Comey announced that the agency would not recommend criminal charges over the handling of these emails, while at the same time offering a brutal assessment of how poorly Team Clinton handled classified information.

But, when it comes to Clinton’s correspondence, the most basic and troubling questions still remain unanswered: Why are there gaps in Clinton’s email history? Did she or her team delete emails that she should have made public? The State Department has released what is said to represent all of the work-related, or “official,” emails Clinton sent during her tenure as secretary—a number totaling about 30,000. According to Clinton and her campaign, when they were choosing what correspondence to turn over to State for public release, they deleted 31,830 other emails deemed “personal and private.” But a numeric analysis of the emails that have been made public, focusing on conspicuous lapses in email activity, raises troubling concerns that Clinton or her team might have deleted a number of work-related emails.

We already know that the trove of Clinton’s work-related emails is incomplete. In his comments on Tuesday, Comey declared, “The FBI … discovered several thousand work-related e-mails that were not in the group of 30,000 that were returned by Secretary Clinton to State in 2014.” We also already know that some of those work-related emails could be permanently deleted. Indeed, according to Comey, “It is also likely that there are other work-related e-mails that [Clinton and her team] did not produce to State and that we did not find elsewhere, and that are now gone because they deleted all emails they did not return to State, and the lawyers cleaned their devices in such a way as to preclude complete forensic recovery.”

Why does this matter? Because Clinton signed documents declaring she had turned over all of her work-related emails. We now know that is not true. But even more importantly, the absence of emails raises troubling questions about the nature of the correspondence that might have been deleted.

Saw that coming from miles away.

• Marine’s Defense For Handling Classified Info Will Cite Hillary Case (WaPo)

A Marine Corps officer who has been locked in a legal battle with his service after self-reporting that he improperly disseminated classified information will use Hillary Clinton’s email case to fight his involuntary separation from the service, his lawyer said. Maj. Jason Brezler’s case has been tied up in federal court since he sued the service in December 2014. He became a cause celebre among some members of Congress, Marine generals and military veterans after he sent a classified message using an unclassified Yahoo email account to warn fellow Marines in southern Afghanistan about a potentially corrupt Afghan police chief. A servant of that police official killed three Marines and severely wounded a fourth 17 days later, on Aug. 10, 2012, opening fire with a Kalashnikov rifle in an insider attack.

An attorney for Brezler, Michael J. Bowe, said that he intends to cite the treatment of Clinton “as one of the many, and most egregious examples” of how severely Brezler was punished. FBI Director James B. Comey announced Tuesday that he would not recommend the U.S. government pursue federal charges against Clinton, but he rebuked her “extremely careless” use of a private, unclassified email server while serving as secretary of state. The FBI found that 110 of her emails contained classified information. Bowe said it is impossible to reconcile President Obama’s statement that Clinton’s intentional act of setting up a secret, unsecured email server did not detract “from her excellent ability to carry out her duties” while Brezler received a “completely opposite finding… involving infinitely less sensitive and limited information.”

“..there are at least 15.8 million verified empty homes in Europe..”

• Europe Is Full … Of Empty Houses (LifeSeekers)

“Our country is full” is a statement you might often hear as a justification for not accepting any more migrants and refugees. According to this opinion, European countries do not have capacity to accept more newcomers, who put pressure on infrastructure – and especially housing. But when we look more closely, can it really be said that Europe is full? According to data from the censuses conducted across Europe in 2011, there are at least 15.8 million verified empty homes in Europe; in other words, there are enough empty homes in Europe to house all the asylum seekers that arrived in Europe last year, and all of Europe’s 4 million homeless people, several times over.

However, many Europeans are struggling with a housing market that makes it even more difficult for them to buy or rent a home. There are many reasons for this, including housing speculation, where investors buy houses to use simply as assets to be sold on when their value increases, as well as the economic situation and unstable employment. But what seems clear is that this market is not working for European people, and migrants and refugees are not the cause of the problem. This unfair housing market is especially serious for young people in Europe. Ever-rising rents mean that living situations for most young Europeans are unstable: it’s no surprise that over 48% of young people (aged 18-34) in the EU still live with their parents, unable to truly realise their independence. And meanwhile, there are millions of homes sitting empty.

Debt Rattle July 7 2016

Jul 072016

July 7, 2016 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 9:59 am Finance Tagged with: bonds, Brexit, bubble, debt, Deutsche, Italy, M5S, MI6, Putin, voodoo Comments Off

Harris&Ewing Childs Restaurant, Washington, DC 1918

• The Eurozone Is Ersatz Deutschland (David McWilliams)

• I’m in Awe at How Fast Deutsche Bank is Coming Unglued (WS)

• “When Deutsche Bank Goes To Single Digits People Will Start To Panic” (ZH)

• To Save Italian Banks, The EU Will Have To Bend Some Rules (BBG Ed.)

• Populist Politicians Take On Italy’s Massive Debt Pile (BBG)

• Italy May Spur Systemic Bank Crisis: SocGen (BBG)

• Italy’s Bad Loan Woes Tiny Compared To Europe’s Derivative Problem – Renzi (R.)

• From Brexit to the Future (Stiglitz)

• Finance Insiders: The UK Won’t Really Go (Pol.)

• China’s Innovation Economy A Real Estate Bubble In Disguise? (R.)

• Bill Gross Calls Sovereign Bonds Too Risky (BBG)

• Voodoo Central Banking Is A Bad Idea (BBG)

• US June Truck Orders Down 34% vs Year Ago (R.)

• The Rock Movie Plot ‘May Have Inspired MI6 Source’s Iraqi Weapons Claim’ (G.)

• Putin Warns of War: ‘I Don’t Know How to Get Through to You People’ (RI)

• Crazy – A Story Of Debt (Grant WIlliams)

Williams points out what I have many times: the EU’s problem -and the one that will undo it- is that Germany gets to call the shots every time and all of the time, and “the rest of the countries are little more than policy eunuchs..”

• The Eurozone Is Ersatz Deutschland (David McWilliams)

Of course, the main player in all this will be Germany. Germany calls the shots. Over the past five years, the pretence of a European Germany has given way to the reality of a German Europe. This is the new deal. As a result of this, the Eurozone is Ersatz Deutschland, where the rest of the countries are little more than policy eunuchs, emasculated by German fiscal straightjackets and German creditor obsessions. Again, if you doubt this, watch the ongoing implosion of the Italian banking system, which will dwarf even the great Irish banking crisis. Italy wants to recapitalise its banks using government money because it fears a complete collapse of its crippled economy. Germany is saying no. As always, German decisions reflect the interest of German industry.

This is entirely understandable. It means that the interests of German carmakers that sell tens of thousands of cars to the UK every year will influence the attitude of German politicians towards the deal that Britain gets. Already Angela Merkel is urging the Commission to back off and give the British time to sort themselves out. So because of German industrial interests, Italy, the friend with the broken banking system, will be treated harshly by Germany, while the UK, now the putative political enemy, will be treated more favourably. In short, the anti-EU Brits will get a better hearing from the Germans than the pro-EU Italians. It is this apparent mistreatment of so-called allies that initially drove Brexit and is driving Marine Le Pen’s support in France and will determine the background noise to the Italian general election later this year.

All this also puts Germany on a collision course with the EU institutions that are seeking to punish the UK for the temerity of Brexit. Germany will look to get the Brits the most access to EU market in the same way as Germany shouted loudly about Vladimir Putin’s annexation of bits of Ukraine but still took Russia’s oil and gas. This is Realpolitik – and the Commission had better get used to it.

Will Germany prop up Deutsche even when it won’t allow Italy to prop up its banks?

• I’m in Awe at How Fast Deutsche Bank is Coming Unglued (WS)

Deutsche Bank – “the most important net contributor to systemic risks,” as the IMF put it last week after a lag of several years – is having a rough time. Shares dropped 4.2% today to close at a new three-decade low of €11.63, down 48% since July 31 last year, lower even than the low during the doom-and-gloom days of the euro debt crisis and the Global Financial Crisis. It’s not the only European bank in trouble. Credit Suisse dropped 1.7% today to CHF 9.92, another multi-decade low, down 63% since July 31. Other European banks are getting mauled too. The European Stoxx 600 banking index dropped 3% today to 117.69, approaching the Financial Crisis low of March 2009.

If July 31, 2015, keeps showing up, it’s because this was the propitious day when Draghi’s harebrained experiment with negative interest rates and massive QE came unglued, when European stocks, and particularly European bank stocks began to crash. Deutsche Bank is so shaky that German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble found it necessary to stick his neck out and explain to Bloomberg in February that he has “no concerns about Deutsche Bank.” Finance ministers don’t say this sort of thing about healthy banks. At the time, CEO John Cryan – whose main job these days is propping up Deutsche Bank with his rhetoric – explained ostensibly to frazzled employees that the bank’s position was “absolutely rock-solid, given our strong capital and risk position.”

Days later, he followed up his rhetoric with a stunning ruse: On February 12, the bank announced that it would buy back $5.4 billion of its own bonds, including some issued only a month earlier. “The bank is using market conditions to buy back these bonds at attractive prices and to cut debt,” CFO Marcus Schenck said at the time. “By buying them back below their issuance value, the bank is making a profit. The bank is also using its financial strength to provide liquidity to bond investors in a difficult market environment.” Shares soared 12% on the spot! Its bonds rocketed higher. Even its contingent convertible bonds, the infamous CoCo bonds, though they weren’t part of the buyback plan, bounced.

For example, its €1.75 billion of 6% CoCo notes soared from a record low of 70 cents on the euro on February 9 to 87 cents by March – a 24% move! The ruse had worked! During the miracle rally, short sellers got their heads handed to them. But it was one of the silliest, most desperate ways to prop up shares and bonds. And now the bond-buyback miracle-nonsense rally has collapsed, with shares at a new multi-decade low, and with bonds swooning. This is what these 6% CoCo notes did: they plunged 5.7% today to 75 cents on the euro. Nearly the entire bond-buy-back miracle-nonsense rally has re-collapsed…

“..you’ll see someone say, ‘Someone is going to have to do something’.”

• “When Deutsche Bank Goes To Single Digits People Will Start To Panic” (ZH)

Following today’s Fed minutes release, Jeff Gundlach had a far less “uncertain” message: “Things are shaky and feeling dangerous,” Gundlach told Reuters in a telephone interview. It’s not just stocks that Gundlach was not too excited about, he also had some choice words about buying Treasuries here. “You’re seeing people who hated the ‘2%’ 10-year suddenly loving it at a 1.38-1.39% revisit of the all-time low closing yield,” Gundlach said. “If you buy 10-year Treasuries now, I would say, it is a terrible trade location. In fact, it is the worst trade location in the history of the 10-year Treasury.”

True, just like buying stocks less than 2% from all time highs, however what Gundlach failed to mention is that those who are buying Treasurys here are not doing it for the yield (or lack thereof on more than $11 trillion in notional), they are simply doing so to frontrun even more central bank purchases now that the monetary spigots have once again been activated as “confused” central banks around the world have just one trick left up their sleeve – to monetize even more debt in hopes of pushing every last investor into risk assets. The DoubleLine bond king also had some choice words about Europe’s banking crisis: “Banks are dying and policymakers don’t know what to do,” Gundlach said. “Watch Deutsche Bank shares go to single digits and people will start to panic… you’ll see someone say, ‘Someone is going to have to do something’.”

But it can’t bend rules only for Italy, that’s another Pandora’s box.

• To Save Italian Banks, The EU Will Have To Bend Some Rules (BBG Ed.)

Italy’s slow-motion banking crisis is getting worse, and if it isn’t stopped, it could cause system-wide damage across the euro area and beyond. To contain this danger, the European Union must be willing to bend some rules. Shares in Italy’s third-largest lender, Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena, are down about 75% this year and trading at one-tenth of book value. A ban on short-selling the bank’s stock was imposed on Wednesday. Monte dei Paschi is only one of a group of Italian banks beset with 360 billion euros ($398 billion) of nonperforming loans; that’s some 20% of Italy’s GDP. Banking crises in Spain and Ireland were rooted in real-estate bubbles, but Italy’s stems from a culture of cronyism, poor governance and shoddy lending.

The banks’ sickness has hurt the broader economy, too: As borrowers defaulted, banks withheld credit, dragging down growth. Reforming Italy’s banking culture is the job of years, but short-term action is needed right now to halt the panic. The simplest approach would be to sequester impaired loans in a state-supported “bad bank” – along the lines of the ones used by Spain and Ireland. A stabilized banking industry could then resume its vital economic function of supporting investment. After Greece’s financial debacle, though, the EU adopted rules requiring a failing bank’s shareholders and creditors to shoulder much of the cost of any rescue – to be “bailed in,” as it’s called. That’s a good idea in principle. In Italy, it’s close to impossible politically, because a third of bank bonds are held by households.

The result has been a characteristic EU muddle of half-baked answers and hoping for the best. A scheme to attract private capital and securitize bad loans has been tried but hasn’t worked. Confidence kept on deteriorating. Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi is doubtless looking to save his political skin, but he’s right that Italy needs more freedom of action than EU rules allow. Renzi has staked his job on an October referendum on constitutional reform, one that polls show he could lose. If that happens, the euroskeptic, populist Five Star Movement might take the country in a new direction not to Europe’s liking – least of all now, coming on the heels of Brexit.

The use of the word ‘populist‘ is up there with ‘migrant’ in trying to paint a picture that is not real. Beppe Grillo has nothing to do with Farage or Le Pen or any of these people, other than he wants Italy out of the eurozone (and EU). Populist could simply mean: for normal people, but that’s not the connotation it gets, it’s utilized in a much more sinister way. On purpose.

• Populist Politicians Take On Italy’s Massive Debt Pile (BBG)

The Rome Olympics of 1960 marked the rebound of the Italian capital after years of war and reconstruction, an affirmation of the country’s renaissance and the city’s emergence as a symbol of dolce vita insouciance. Rome is still paying the bill, and the new mayor, Virginia Raggi, is sick of it. The city has roughly €13.6 billion ($15.2 billion) in debt and more than 12,000 creditors—though the pile is so complex no one really knows how much is owed to whom. Rome faces outstanding bills for operating its 61-year-old metro system, hauling trash, and running a network of unprofitable pharmacies that compete with private shops. The courts are grappling with hundreds of lawsuits over unpaid debts going back 50 years for land expropriated to build hospitals, streets, and other city projects—including some debts connected to the 1960 games, former Mayor Ignazio Marino has said.

The average interest rate: 5%, at a time when the Italian government is issuing 10-year bonds at 1.5% annually. “We can’t keep paying such high interest just because nobody bothered to renegotiate the debt,” Raggi, who was elected on June 19, told the RAI television network. Raggi, a 37-year-old lawyer and Rome’s first female mayor, has ridden a wave of frustration with Italy’s old guard—especially its handling of the economy—to one of the country’s most powerful political jobs. Her rise mirrors the growing strength of her party, the Five Star Movement, founded in 2009 by Beppe Grillo. Five Star (the stars are meant to represent water, environment, transport, development, and energy, though the party mostly focuses on fighting corruption and cutting regulations) has grown into a formidable rival to the Democratic Party of Prime Minister Matteo Renzi.

[..] Few would argue that Italy doesn’t desperately need a solution to its debt woes. The country owes creditors €2.2 trillion, or more than 130% of GDP—a ratio higher than any EU country’s other than Greece. High taxes aimed at paying down the debt stifle growth, which reduces the government’s ability to fund new programs. At the same time, Italy’s banks hold more of their country’s sovereign debt than lenders in any other euro area nation, and they’re burdened with €360 billion in bad loans, more than a quarter of the total held by euro area financial institutions. Government attempts to load these assets into a “bad bank” have foundered because of European rules against state aid to banks. As a result some institutions could face insolvency.

No, no no, I kid you not: in this Bloomberg video, the reporter asks SocGen Chairman Bini Smaghi: “Do you get a sense that markets are orderly, that markets are rational at the moment?” And he responds: “I mean, you have uncertainty, you don’t know what’s going to happen…”

Orderly and rational? You f**king kidding me? There are no markets, you bleeding doodles. And you’re not supposed to know beforehand what’s going to happen either. But you f**king do anyway, because central banks keep on feeding losers like you and there is no price discovery anywhere to be found. It’s insane to see how fast the new normal becomes normal. But these wankers make their present profits at the cost of you and me. Let’s put a halt to that. These people have no connection to us. But they should.

• Italy May Spur Systemic Bank Crisis: SocGen (BBG)

Italy’s banking crisis could spread to the rest of Europe, and rules limiting state aid to lenders should be reconsidered to prevent greater upheaval, Societe Generale SA Chairman Lorenzo Bini Smaghi said. “The whole banking market is under pressure,” the former ECB executive board member said. “We adopted rules on public money; these rules must be assessed in a market that has a potential crisis to decide whether some suspension needs to be applied.” With Italian banks weighed down by about €360 billion in soured loans, the government has been sounding out regulators on ways to shore up lenders amid a renewed selloff in the wake of the British vote to leave the EU.

The government would invoke an EU rule allowing temporary state aid if regulatory stress tests uncover a shortfall at Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena, a person with knowledge of the discussions said Tuesday. European banking stocks resumed their descent as policy makers disagreed and sometimes issued contradictory statements about what may come next. Deutsche Bank, Germany’s largest lender, slid 6.1% to its lowest level since at least 1989. Societe Generale, France’s second-biggest bank, which Bini Smaghi has chaired for just over a year, fell 1.8% as of 2 p.m. in Paris. Italian Finance Undersecretary Pier Paolo Baretta said in an interview on RAI radio Wednesday morning that a “technical solution” on Monte Paschi could be hours away, before issuing a statement an hour later that said “no intervention is expected in the next few hours.”

German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble, speaking at a news conference in Berlin hours later, said his Italian counterpart Pier Carlo Padoan told him that Italy intends to stick to the banking-union rules.

He’s talking about Deutsche. Renzi’s desperate to save his skin. And he WILL challenge Berlin to do it. They will respond by making Italy Greece Redux.

• Italy’s Bad Loan Woes Tiny Compared To Europe’s Derivative Problem – Renzi (R.)

The difficulties facing Italian banks over their bad loans are miniscule by comparison with the problems some European banks face over their derivatives, Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi said on Wednesday. Italian bank shares have tumbled in recent days and are the worst performers among European lenders this year on investor concerns over how they will handle some €360 billion of bad and non-performing loans. Speaking at a joint news conference with Swedish Prime Minister Stefan Lofven, Renzi said other European banks had much bigger problems than their Italian counterparts. “If this non-performing loan problem is worth one, the question of derivatives at other banks, at big banks, is worth one hundred. This is the ratio: one to one hundred,” Renzi said.

Stiglitz doesn’t have much. Disappointing?!

• From Brexit to the Future (Stiglitz)

Digesting the full implications of the United Kingdom’s “Brexit” referendum will take Britain, Europe, and the world a long time. The most profound consequences will, of course, depend on the European Union’s response to the UK’s withdrawal. Most people initially assumed that the EU would not “cut off its nose to spite its face”: after all, an amicable divorce seems to be in everyone’s interest. But the divorce – as many do – could become messy. The benefits of trade and economic integration between the UK and EU are mutual, and if the EU took seriously its belief that closer economic integration is better, its leaders would seek to ensure the closest ties possible under the circumstances.

But Jean-Claude Juncker, the architect of Luxembourg’s massive corporate tax avoidance schemes and now President of the European Commission, is taking a hard line: “Out means out,” he says. That kneejerk reaction is perhaps understandable, given that Juncker may be remembered as the person who presided over the EU’s initial stage of dissolution. He argues that, to deter other countries from leaving, the EU must be uncompromising, offering the UK little more than what it is guaranteed under World Trade Organization agreements. In other words, Europe is not to be held together by its benefits, which far exceed the costs. Economic prosperity, the sense of solidarity, and the pride of being a European are not enough, according to Juncker.

No, Europe is to be held together by threats, intimidation, and fear. That position ignores a lesson seen in both the Brexit vote and America’s Republican Party primary: large portions of the population have not been doing well. The neoliberal agenda of the last four decades may have been good for the top 1%, but not for the rest. I had long predicted that this stagnation would eventually have political consequences. That day is now upon us.

Hey, their jobs depend on it…

• Finance Insiders: The UK Won’t Really Go (Pol.)

Finance industry insiders still don’t think a full Brexit will actually happen. Only 37% of participants in POLITICO’s Economic Caucus, which surveyed an elite group of 63 business and economic leaders, said that Britain will exit the European Union following the June 23 referendum. An overwhelming majority said the U.K. won’t cut its ties altogether — a finding that reflects the finance community’s optimism, delusion or a little of both. Britain will suffer much more than the rest of the Continent and will fall into recession following the referendum, said the caucus, which includes EU ambassadors, European Commission Vice President Kristalina Georgieva, former Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti, and OECD and European Central Bank economists.

More than three-quarters of those surveyed said the U.K. should brace itself for a major economic slowdown as uncertainty hits “confidence, consumer spending and investment,” whereas they predicted the wider European economy will fare much better. Britain scored “an astonishingly avoidable own goal,” said one member of the caucus, all of whom spoke on condition their remarks not be individually attributed. “The uncertainty [while exit negotiations take place] will particularly hit the British services market, which is the strong point of the U.K. economy at the moment,” said one caucus member, adding that “anti-foreigner sentiment, if not kept in check, might persuade many skilled workers to leave the U.K.” Reports of hate crime in London are up by more than 50% since Britons voted by a margin of 52-48% to leave the EU, police figures show.

Bubbles are all China has left. Nothing new there.

• China’s Innovation Economy A Real Estate Bubble In Disguise? (R.)

The Chinese government’s call to the nation to build an innovation-driven economy from the top down has sparked a rush by local governments to construct new buildings in the name of supporting creativity. Innovation centers have been popping up around the country and are set to more than double to nearly 5,000 in the next five years, according to internet research firm iiMedia. The only problem for local governments; entrepreneurs are not moving in. Many centers are in small Chinese cities or towns, not ideal locations for attracting startups. There is no local market for their product, no local ecosystem of suppliers and fellow entrepreneurs and centers generally provide only basic amenities, such as a desk and a telephone. They lack the financial, technical or marketing expertise that many startups need.

Most incubators have occupancy rates of no more than 40%, iiMedia says. The result: like steel mills, theme parks and housing before them, the country now faces a glut of innovation centers as another top-down policy backfires to leave white-elephant projects and a further buildup of debt. “The risk of a bubble is extremely large,” said Shi Jiqiang, a partner at Leilai Management, which runs day-to-day operations at a startup base in the city of Tianjin, near Beijing. “This is both a test for government and for the managers of startup spaces … there aren’t enough entrepreneurs.” [..] Beijing argues its development model that worked so well for infrastructure and real estate, powering the country through the global financial crisis, can build successful, high-tech startups.

Supernova revisited.

• Bill Gross Calls Sovereign Bonds Too Risky (BBG)

Bill Gross said sovereign bond yields at record lows aren’t worth the risk. “The sovereign bonds are not up my alley,” Gross, who built the world’s biggest bond fund at PIMCO and is now at Denver-based Janus Capital, said on Bloomberg Television Wednesday. “It’s too risky.” Low yields mean bonds are especially vulnerable because a small increase can bring a large decline in price, he said. Yields in the U.S., the U.K. and Australia pushed to all-time lows Wednesday, while those in Germany and Japan dropped to unprecedented levels below zero. The average yield on the bonds in Bank of America’s World Sovereign Bond Index this week dropped below 1% for the first time, based on data going back to 2006.

Bonds are rallying on speculation the British vote to leave the European Union will damp global economic growth, driving demand for the safest assets. The Federal Reserve is losing confidence in its need to raise interest rates as officials face rising uncertainty about the outlook for growth at home and abroad, the minutes of its most recent meeting issued Wednesday indicate. [..] Gross warned almost a month ago central bank policies that pushed trillions of dollars into bonds with negative interest rates will eventually backfire violently. “This is a supernova that will explode one day,” he wrote on Twitter.

But it’s all they have left.

• Voodoo Central Banking Is A Bad Idea (BBG)

Desperate times, we’re told, demand desperate measures, and there may be no more desperate country anywhere in the world than Japan. Even as policymakers struggle to boost growth and inflation, post-Brexit turmoil has caused the yen to strengthen, slamming Japanese exporters. BOJ Governor Haruhiko Kuroda is coming under more and more pressure to expand his already crazy-loose monetary policy. With few options available, he might be forced to push key interest rates even deeper into negative territory when the BOJ meets later this month. Proponents of Kuroda’s negative-rate policy, introduced in January, contend that the strategy is transferring profits from big banks to needy households, lowering borrowing costs for companies, encouraging more risk-taking in investment and propping up real estate values.

Kuroda in June proclaimed that negative rates were “having a positive impact on the real economy.” Yet there are already ample indications that negative rates are failing to achieve their main goals of spurring growth and inflation. And more broadly, the fact that central bankers have resorted to negative rates at all is a signal of just how narrow-minded and counterproductive the approach to restoring global growth has become. Contrary to Kuroda’s optimistic words, Japan sunk even deeper into deflation in May. The IMF has slashed its 2016 forecast for Japan’s GDP growth to 0.5%. Perhaps Japan’s negative-rate policy needs more time to work its magic. Maybe Japanese companies and consumers, knowing how desperate Kuroda is, are holding out for even lower borrowing costs in coming months.

Yet Europe’s experience suggests otherwise. Even though the ECB introduced negative rates two years ago, growth in the euro zone looked to be slowing even before Brexit. Inflation is barely expected to inch back into positive territory in June, at 0.1%. It’s at least as likely that the entire strategy is flawed. The purpose of loose monetary policy is to stimulate economies by encouraging greater borrowing. That, however, assumes that investors see sound economic opportunities that make taking on debt worthwhile. Apparently, not many Japanese feel that way. [..] In the first quarter, according to a recent report by Capital Economics, bank lending to Japan’s private sector grew at the slowest pace since 2014, while the amount of corporate bonds outstanding actually shrank.

But we’ll bury that under blubber like: “”The Class 8 market is stuck in a holding pattern, at the bottom end of this cycle…”

• US June Truck Orders Down 34% vs Year Ago (R.)

U.S. orders for heavy duty trucks in June were down 34% from the same month last year to a four-year low as trucking firms were holding off on buying new 18-wheelers amid a weak freight environment, according to preliminary data released by a freight transportation forecaster on Wednesday. “The Class 8 market is stuck in a holding pattern, at the bottom end of this cycle,” Don Ake, vice president for commercial vehicles at FTR said in a statement. “Fleets are cautious as freight demand has cooled off this year,” he said. Preliminary data showed 13,000 units ordered in June, the lowest monthly total since July 2012 and the worst June since 2009. FTR said that all truck manufacturers were equally affected by the month’s weak order numbers.

Your first reaction is ‘you can’t make this up’. But then you realize that’s exactly what somebody did. And MI6 actually discussed the movie and its plot in 2002, but Britain went on to help kill 600,000 Iraqi’s anyway.

• The Rock Movie Plot ‘May Have Inspired MI6 Source’s Iraqi Weapons Claim’ (G.)

An allegation in an MI6 report about Iraq’s supposed chemical weapons capability before the 2003 war to remove Saddam Hussein appeared to have been lifted from a Hollywood film, according to the Chilcot report. A section of the inquiry’s findings about the build-up to the conflict in the autumn of 2002 found that MI6, formally known as the Secret Intelligence Service or SIS, feared a source might have taken inspiration from The Rock, a 1996 thriller starring Sean Connery and Nicolas Cage. The report details how MI6 sent information to “a small number of very senior readers”, including Tony Blair and the then foreign secretary, Jack Straw, on 11 and 23 September 2002. Based on what MI6 called “a new source on trial with direct access”, this alleged that Saddam’s government had accelerated the production of chemical and biological agents, and in particular that chemical agents might be carried in glass containers.

After some discussion on the reliability of the new source, in early October MI6 was questioned directly about this idea. The report says: “It was pointed out that glass containers were not typically used in chemical munitions; and that a popular movie [The Rock] has inaccurately depicted nerve agents being carried in glass beads or spheres.” MI6 accepted this possible flaw to the intelligence, the report adds: “The questions about the use of glass containers for chemical agents and the similarity of the description to those portrayed in The Rock had been recognised by SIS. There were some precedents for the use of glass containers but the points would be pursued when further material became available.”

“The World Is Being Pulled In An Irreversible Direction..”

• Putin Warns of War: ‘I Don’t Know How to Get Through to You People’ (RI)

Vladimir Putin has finally taken the kid gloves off. The Russian president was meeting with foreign journalists at the conclusion of the Saint Petersburg International Economic Forum on June 17th, when he left no one in any doubt that the world is headed down a course which could lead to nuclear war. Putin railed against the journalists for their “tall tales” in blindly repeating lies and misinformation provided to them by the United States on its anti-ballistic missile systems being constructed in Eastern Europe. He pointed out that since the Iran nuclear deal, the claim the system is to protect against Iranian missiles has been exposed as a lie. The journalists were informed that within a few years, Russia predicted the US would be able to extend the range of the system to 1000 km.

At that point, Russia’s nuclear potential, and thus the nuclear balance between the US and Russia, would be placed in jeopardy. Putin completely lost patience with the journalists, berating them for lazily helping to accelerate a nuclear confrontation by repeating US propaganda. He virtually pleaded with the western media, for the sake of the world, to change their line: We know year by year what’s going to happen, and they know that we know. It’s only you that they tell tall tales to, and you buy it, and spread it to the citizens of your countries. You people in turn do not feel a sense of the impending danger – this is what worries me. How do you not understand that the world is being pulled in an irreversible direction? While they pretend that nothing is going on. I don’t know how to get through to you anymore.

Must watch.

• Crazy – A Story Of Debt (Grant WIlliams)

This is a story about debt – 2008 was the crystallization of that, the years since have been the denial of it, and the years to come will be the resolution. Grant Williams, founder & publisher of the ‘Things That Make You Go Hmmm…’ research service, and co-founder of Real Vision TV, brings us an eye-opening presentation titled Crazy, where he puts into perspective the extraordinary levels of global debt and unprecedented monetary policy, and reminds us that the many factors that led to the ‘08 crisis are still very much present.

Debt Rattle July 1 2016

Jul 012016

July 1, 2016 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 9:26 am Finance Tagged with: bonds, Canada, China, deflation, Italy, Japan, jet stream, price discovery, refugees 2 Responses »

Harris&Ewing Oil for salads 1918

• Japan Deflation Intensifies (R.)

• Japan’s Prices Keep Falling in Challenge to Abe, Kuroda (BBG)

• China QE Dwarfs Japan and EU (VW)

• China To ‘Tolerate’ Weaker Yuan (R.)

• China Is Headed For A 1929-Style Depression: Andy Xie (MW)

• Asian Factories Struggle, Brexit Throws Up New Threats (R.)

• Europe Post-Brexit (Brad Setser)

• EU Approves Italian Contingency Plan To Guarantee Bank Liquidity (R.)

• The Italian Job (DDMB)

• Standard & Poor’s Cuts EU Credit Rating (G.)

• Price Discovery, RIP (David Stockman)

• Scientists Warn Of ‘Global Climate Emergency’ Over Jet Stream Shift (Ind.)

• Refugees Encounter a Foreign Word: Welcome (NY Times)

Abenomics and BOJ stimulus are dismal failures. So what to do? Moar of the same of course. How much longer can Abe remain in power?

• Japan Deflation Intensifies (R.)

Japanese manufacturers’ confidence was subdued in June and service-sector sentiment deteriorated from three months ago on weak consumption, a central bank survey showed, in discouraging signs for a fragile economy grappling with a strong yen and slack overseas demand. The results of the survey could have been much worse had it captured the gloom from Britain’s vote last week to leave the EU, which spread turmoil in financial markets and put pressure on the Bank of Japan to expand its stimulus later this month. Separate data on Friday showed household spending fell for the third straight month in May and core consumer prices suffered their biggest annual drop since 2013, keeping policymakers under pressure to do more to spur growth.

“Worsening sentiment for non-manufacturers represents weak demand. This gives the government an incentive to increase stimulus spending,” said Daiju Aoki at UBS Securities. “If the government announces the size of stimulus spending shortly after the upper house election next week, the BOJ could ease policy at the end of the month,” he said. The BOJ’s closely-watched quarterly tankan survey showed the headline index for big manufacturers’ sentiment stood at plus 6, unchanged from three months ago and better than a median market forecast of plus 4. Big non-manufacturers’ sentiment index worsened to plus 19 from plus 22, the survey showed, as retailers felt the pain from weak domestic consumption and a slowdown in spending among overseas tourists.

“The yen strengthened about 8% against the dollar in June.”

• Japan’s Prices Keep Falling in Challenge to Abe, Kuroda (BBG)

With a little more than a week until Japan goes to the polls for an upper-house election, a batch of economic data released Friday underscores the challenge Prime Minister Shinzo Abe faces in convincing voters that his policies are working. Consumer prices excluding fresh food fell for a third straight month and household spending declined, undermining efforts to revitalize the world’s third-largest economy. While corporate confidence and unemployment were unchanged, there is still little pressure for higher wages. Friday’s data followed reports earlier this week showing that industrial production fell more than economists had forecast and retail sales were flat in May, adding to concern that Japan’s recovery may be faltering after the economy returned to growth in the first quarter.

The U.K.’s vote to leave the European Union has strengthened the yen and roiled financial markets, increasing risks to corporate earnings for Japanese companies. The data will put more pressure on Bank of Japan Governor Haruhiko Kuroda to expand monetary stimulus at the policy meeting later this month, especially with the stronger yen and the central bank far from its 2% inflation target. “Given concerns over the effects of the Brexit vote and the strengthening yen, there is a high chance that the BOJ will ease further at its July meeting,” said Hiroaki Muto at Tokai Tokyo Research Center. “If the BOJ doesn’t move this time, there’s a possibility that the yen will strengthen further.” The Topix index dropped about 9% in June, plunging on June 24 with the Brexit vote, the most since the aftermath of the 2011 earthquake. The yen strengthened about 8% against the dollar in June.

Chinese deflation.

• China QE Dwarfs Japan and EU (VW)

In July of 2014, we wrote about the huge imbalance with respect to China’s M2 money supply and nominal GDP relative to the US. At the time, China’s M2 money supply was 71% higher than the US but its economy was 56% smaller, which we said was an indication of the overvaluation of the Chinese currency. Since that time, the yuan has fallen by only 6.8% relative to the dollar. We haven’t seen anything yet. Today, the circumstances have significantly worsened. Money supply has continued to grow faster than GDP. With over $30 trillion of assets in its banking system and an underappreciated non-performing loan problem, we are convinced that China is headed for a twin banking and currency crisis. Money velocity has reached historically low levels which reflects China’s extreme credit imbalance and its crimping impact on its ability to generate future real GDP growth.

Just as worrying as the immense amount of credit built up, China has been reporting major downward revisions in its balance of payments (BoP) accounts. For more than a decade, China had been reporting an impossible twin surplus in its BoP accounts. When we wrote about this issue in 2014, we emphasized the likelihood of massive illicit capital outflows that not been accounted for. At that time, according to the State Administration of Foreign Exchange of China (SAFE), China had accumulated a BoP imbalance that was close to $9.4 trillion surplus since 2000 which we believed represented capital outflows that should have been recorded in the capital account.

The same accumulated BoP number today, revised by SAFE several times since, is now a deficit of about $2.8 trillion. Essentially, with its revisions, the SAFE has acknowledged even more capital outflows over the last 16 years than we had initially identified. On the capital account side, there was a downward revision of $10.1 trillion – from a $4.2 trillion surplus to a $5.9 trillion deficit. On the current account side, the revisions show that Chinese exports have not been as strong as initially reported over the last decade and a half. China’s current account surplus has been reduced by $2.1 trillion– going from $5.1 trillion to $2.9 trillion over the last 16 years. What we initially considered to be a $9.4 trillion imbalance has been more than proven by a $12.2 trillion revision.

Cryptic fun.

• China To ‘Tolerate’ Weaker Yuan (R.)

China’s central bank would tolerate a fall in the yuan to as low as 6.8 per dollar in 2016 to support the economy, which would mean the currency matching last year’s record decline of 4.5%, policy sources said. The yuan is already trading at its lowest level in more than five years, so the central bank would ensure any decline is gradual for fear of triggering capital outflows and criticism from trading partners such as the United States, said government economists and advisers involved in regular policy discussions. Presumptive U.S. Republican Presidential nominee Donald Trump already has China in his sights, saying on Wednesday he would label China a currency manipulator if elected in November.

The economists and advisers are not directly briefed on policy by the People’s Bank of China (PBOC), but they have regular meetings and interactions with central bank officials and they provide policy recommendations. They said the central bank would tolerate a further weakening of the yuan this year to between 6.7-6.8 per dollar. “The central bank is willing to see yuan depreciation, as long as depreciation expectations are under control,” said a government economist, who requested anonymity due to the sensitivity of the matter. “The Brexit vote was a big shock. The market volatility may last for some time.”

Good read.

• China Is Headed For A 1929-Style Depression: Andy Xie (MW)

Andy Xie isn’t known for tepid opinions. The provocative Xie, who was a top economist at the World Bank and Morgan Stanley, found notoriety a decade ago when he left the Wall Street bank after a controversial internal report went public. Today, he is among the loudest voices warning of an inevitable implosion in China, the world’s second-largest economy. Xie, now working independently and based in Shanghai, says the coming collapse won’t be like the Asian currency crisis of 1997 or the U.S. financial meltdown of 2008. In a recent interview with MarketWatch, Xie said China’s trajectory instead resembles the one that led to the Great Depression, when the expansion of credit, loose monetary policy and a widespread belief that asset prices would never fall contributed to rampant speculation that ended with a crippling market crash.

China in 2016 looks much the same, according to Xie, with half of the country’s debt propping up real-estate prices and heavy leverage in the stock market — indicating that conditions are ripe for a correction. “The government is allowing speculation by providing cheap financing,” Xie told MarketWatch. China “is riding a tiger and is terrified of a crash. So it keeps pumping cash into the economy. It is difficult to see how China can avoid a crisis.” Xie’s viewpoints have at times attracted unwelcome attention. In 2006, when he was a star Asia economist at Morgan Stanley a leaked email to colleagues in which he said money laundering was bolstering growth in Singapore led to his abrupt departure from the bank. In early 2007, he termed China’s surging markets a “bubble” that could lead to a banking crisis,” and in 2009 he likened them to a “Ponzi scheme.”

“Most of the responses from manufacturers also preceded the Brexit vote, suggesting July could be even tougher.”

• Asian Factories Struggle, Brexit Throws Up New Threats (R.)

China’s vast factory sector flatlined in June as exports shrank and jobs were cut, a worrying trend evident across Asia that argues for yet more policy stimulus as doubts gather over the potency of measures taken so far. The hard times signaled by a range of surveys was not what the world needed a week after Britain’s vote to leave the European Union condemned that bloc to months, if not years, of political and economic instability. Most of the responses from manufacturers also preceded the Brexit vote, suggesting July could be even tougher. “The unimaginable has happened and the UK vote will cast a long shadow over the UK, Europe and global markets for some time to come,” warned Westpac head currency strategist Robert Rennie.

“A structurally weaker pound, a softer euro and weaker global growth beckons.” Among the many surveys out on Friday, China’s official Purchasing Managers’ Index (PMI) slipped a tick to 50 in June, dead on the level that is supposed to separate growth from contraction. One saving grace was the services sector measure, which nudged up to 53.7 in a positive sign for consumer activity. More worrying was the Caixin version of the PMI, which covers a greater share of smaller firms, where the index fell to a four-month trough of 48.6 in June, from 49.2 in May.

“..the euro area’s aggregate fiscal impulse will be negative in 2017—exactly the opposite of what it should be when a surplus region is faced with a shock to external demand..”

• Europe Post-Brexit (Brad Setser)

A few thoughts, focusing on narrow issues of macroeconomic management rather than the bigger political issues. The U.K. has been running a sizeable current account deficit for some time now, thanks to an unusually low national savings rate. That means, on net, it has been supplying the rest of Europe with demand—something other European countries need. This isn’t likely to provide Britain the negotiating leverage the Brexiters claimed (the other European countries fear the precedent more than the loss of demand) but it will shape the economic fallout. The fall in the pound is a necessary part of the U.K.’s adjustment. It will spread the pain from a downturn in British demand to the rest of the euro area.

Brexit uncertainty is thus a sizable negative shock to growth in Britian’s euro area trading partners not just to Britain itself: relative to the pre-Brexit referendum baseline, I would guess that Brexit uncertainty will knock a cumulative half a%age point off euro area growth over the next two years.* Of course, the euro area, which runs a significant current account surplus and can borrow at low nominal rates, has fiscal capacity to counteract this shock. Germany is being paid to borrow for ten years, and the average ten year rate for the euro area as a whole is around 1%. The euro area could provide a fiscal offset, whether jointly, through new euro area investment funds or simply through a shift in say German policy on public investment and other adjustments to national policy.

I say this knowing full-well the political constraints to fiscal action. The Germans do not want to run a deficit. The Dutch are committed to bringing an already low deficit down further. France, Italy and especially Spain face pressure from the Commission to tighten policy. The Juncker plan never really created the capacity for shared funding of investment. The euro area’s aggregate fiscal stance is, more or less, the sum of national fiscal policies of the biggest euro area economies. If I had to bet, I would bet that the euro area’s aggregate fiscal impulse will be negative in 2017—exactly the opposite of what it should be when a surplus region is faced with a shock to external demand. A lot depends on the fiscal path Spain negotiates once it forms a new government, given that is running the largest fiscal deficit of the euro area’s big five economies.

€150 billion. Chump change. Wait, there was a eurozone debt crisis in 2011?

Italy’s banks can now issue bonds with the same guarantee sovereign bonds have. But only the solvent ones, as in: those who don’t need it.

This is worse than a band-aid. Just wait till the vultures wake up.

• EU Approves Italian Contingency Plan To Guarantee Bank Liquidity (R.)

The European Commission has authorized an Italian government plan to guarantee liquidity for banks in the event of a financial crisis in the euro zone’s third-largest economy, an EU executive spokeswoman said on Thursday. The Commission approved the scheme last Sunday, another EU official said, days after Britain voted to leave the EU, triggering a sell-off in European bank stocks, especially in Italy, home to roughly a third of the euro zone’s bad debts. The scheme, worth up to €150 billion according to some media reports, would only be triggered in circumstances similar to the euro zone debt crisis of 2011, when some banks in the currency bloc needed to be bailed out and the interbank market had ceased to function. “Given the financial markets turmoil of recent days, the government saw it fit to prepare for all scenarios, even the most improbable, to be ready to step in to protect savers,” the Italian Treasury said in a statement.

Italian officials stressed they did not expect Italy to suffer a 2011-style meltdown in confidence but said it was prudent to plan for a worst-case scenario. Italian bank shares ended up 2% on Thursday after news of the scheme. Under the scheme, a bank can ask the government to guarantee its bond issues, ensuring that it can raise money even in troubled markets, but it only applies until the end of this year and only to banks with solvent balance sheets. “In this way, they can issue bonds that, with the assistance of the public guarantee, are similar to an Italian government bond,” said one source familiar with the scheme. [..] Rome has said it is concerned that Italian banks, which hold €360 billion of bad loans, risk attack by hedge funds betting that market turmoil, increased by last week’s Brexit vote, could tip them into a full-blown crisis.

How Germany is blowing up the very EU that is making it rich.

• The Italian Job (DDMB)

More than any of its peers, the Italian economy has suffered since joining the euro in 1999. Since 2007, its economy has contracted by 10% and suffered not one, not two, but three recessions. Competitive export-led growth has been deeply impaired by virtue of Italy’s being effectively yoked to the massive German economy. Despite the rise of China, Germany has been able to maintain its top three ranking among world exporters. The secret weapon? That would be the euro. In 1998, the year before Germany switched to the euro, the country exported $540 billion. By 2015, that figure had swelled to $1.3 trillion. Italy’s exports have also grown, but not nearly as robustly, coming in last year at $459 billion compared to $242 billion the year before it joined the euro.

Just as it once was the case with China, Germany benefits from its relatively weak currency. If Germany was not tethered to its weaker-economy neighbors and was still on the Deutsche Mark, it would have a significantly stronger currency and substantially lower exports due to the price of its exports being much more expensive for world markets. Back in 2011, UBS put pencil to paper and figured that losing the common currency would trigger an immediate effective tax increase for the average German citizen of about €7,000 and between €3,500 to €4,000 every single year going forward. By contrast, swallowing half the debt of Greece, Ireland and Portugal at that time would have generated a little over €1,000 tab per citizen.

Now you see why bailing out is so easy to do, though the Germans do put on a great show of irritation at having to foot such bills. But let’s be honest. Consider the alternative. Reverse that effect and, with all else being equal, you begin to appreciate why Italy’s exports have become relatively more expensive, burdened as they are with a more expensive currency than they would have had. Consider that globalization had already done a number on the country’s once magnificent industrial base when Italy opted into the euro and left the lire behind. Since then, the country’s industrial capacity has been further decimated, shrinking by 15%. To take but one example, in 2007, Italy manufactured 24 million appliances; by 2012 it had declined to 13 million.

S&P doesn’t mind doing useless things.

• Standard & Poor’s Cuts EU Credit Rating (G.)

The European Union has suffered a downgrade of its long-term credit rating following the UK’s Brexit vote last week. In a move that will increase the borrowing costs for the 28-member bloc, the credit ratings agency S&P said the EU should see its status as a safe haven for investors reduced to AA from AA+. The agency said: “After the decision by the UK electorate to leave the EU … we have reassessed our opinion of cohesion within the EU, which we now consider to be a neutral rather than positive rating factor.” International investors use credit agency reports to gauge the safety of their funds and the likelihood that their investments will become insolvent. Pension funds and other investors typically move their money to safe havens in times of uncertainty.

But concerns that the ripple effects of the Brexit vote will hit the profits of corporations in Europe, the US and Japan and hurt government finances have grown in recent days. Earlier this week S&P became the last of the three major ratings agencies to strip the UK of its last AAA rating as it warned that the economic, fiscal and constitutional risks the country faced had increased following the EU referendum result. The UK was placed on negative watch, which puts the government on notice of possible further downgrades, after S&P described the result of the vote as “a seminal event” that would “lead to a less predictable, stable and effective policy framework in the UK”. The agency added that the vote to remain in Scotland and Northern Ireland “creates wider constitutional issues for the country as a whole”.

“..the ECB apparently determined it will not go broke in subzero land even if it is driving insurance companies, pension funds, banks and plain old savers in exactly that direction.”

• Price Discovery, RIP (David Stockman)

That was quick. With nearly 85% of the Brexit loss recovered in three days and the market now up for the quarter and the year, what’s not to like? After all, the central banks are purportedly at the ready, and, in the case of the ECB and BOE, are already swinging into action according to their shills in the MSM. MarketWatch thus noted,

Markets were boosted by reports indicating the ECB is weighing changes to its bond-buying program, while “the Bank of England also said they are all in,” said Joe Saluzzi at Themis Trading. The ECB is considering changing the rules regarding the types of bonds it can buy as part of its stimulus package to amid concerns it could run out of securities to buy under current stipulations, according to Bloomberg News. The report followed comments from BOE Gov. Mark Carney, who indicated the central bank is poised to further ease monetary policy to combat.

Well now, by the sound of it you would think that the madman Draghi is fixing to uncork the mother of all QEs if there is a danger that the ECB will “run out of securities to buy”. Who would have thought that the debt engorged governments of the eurozone couldn’t manufacture enough IOUs to satisfy Mario’s “buy” button? In fact, with public debt at 91% of GDP you would think that the $12.5 trillion outstanding would be enough to go around. It turns out, however, that the operative phrase is “under current stipulations”. In a fit of apparent prudence, the ECB determined that in buying $90 billion of government bonds and other securities per month, it would only purchase securities with a yield higher than its negative 0.4% deposit rate.

That’s right. Stumbling around in their monetary puzzle palace, the geniuses at the ECB determined that subzero rates are just fine with one condition. Namely, so long as they don’t have to pay more to own German bonds, for example, than German banks are paying to deposit excess funds at the ECB. Stated differently, the ECB apparently determined it will not go broke in subzero land even if it is driving insurance companies, pension funds, banks and plain old savers in exactly that direction. But then comes the catch-22. The more bonds Draghi promises to buy, the more the casino front-runners scarf-up those same bonds on 95% repo leverage – knowing that Mario will gift them with a big fat gain on their tiny sliver of capital at risk.

“The behaviour of the jet stream suggests massive hits to the [global] food supply and the potential for massive geopolitical unrest. There’s very strange things going on on planet Earth right now.”

• Scientists Warn Of ‘Global Climate Emergency’ Over Jet Stream Shift (Ind.)

Environmental scientists have declared a “global climate emergency” after the Northern hemisphere jet stream was found to have crossed the equator, bringing “unprecedented” changes to the world’s weather patterns. Robert Scribbler and University of Ottawa researcher Paul Beckwith warned of the “weather-destabilising and extreme weather-generating” consequences of the jet stream shift. The scientists said the anomalies were most likely precipitated by man-made climate change, which caused the jet stream to slow down and create larger waves. Scribbler wrote in a post on his environmental blog on Tuesday: “It’s the very picture of weather-weirding due to climate change. Something that would absolutely not happen in a normal world.

Something, that if it continues, basically threatens seasonal integrity. The blogger explained the barrier between the two jet streams generates the strong divide between summer and winter, and the “death of winter” could commence if it is eroded as warm weather leaks into the “winter zone” of the year. He continued: “As the poles have warmed due to human-forced climate change, the Hemispherical Jet Streams have moved out of the Middle Latitudes more and more. You get this weather-destabilising and extreme weather generating mixing of seasons.” Meanwhile, Mr Beckwith confirmed the changes would usher in a sustained period of “climate system mayhem” which could prove difficult to resolve.

He said: “Our climate system behaviour continues to behave in new and scary ways that we have never anticipated, or seen before. “Welcome to climate chaos. We must declare a global climate emergency. “The behaviour of the jet stream suggests massive hits to the [global] food supply and the potential for massive geopolitical unrest. There’s very strange things going on on planet Earth right now.”

Absolute must read. How is it possible that my adopted home away from home gets it so right, yet no-one else tries to learn from it?

• Refugees Encounter a Foreign Word: Welcome (NY Times)

Much of the world is reacting to the refugee crisis – 21 million displaced from their countries, nearly five million of them Syrian — with hesitation or hostility. Greece shipped desperate migrants back to Turkey; Denmark confiscated their valuables; and even Germany, which has accepted more than half a million refugees, is struggling with growing resistance to them. Broader anxiety about immigration and borders helped motivate Britons to take the extraordinary step last week of voting to leave the EU. In the United States, even before the Orlando massacre spawned new dread about “lone wolf” terrorism, a majority of American governors said they wanted to block Syrian refugees because some could be dangerous.

Donald J. Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, has called for temporary bans on all Muslims from entering the country and recently warned that Syrian refugees would cause “big problems in the future.” The Obama administration promised to take in 10,000 Syrians by Sept. 30 but has so far admitted about half that many. Just across the border, however, the Canadian government can barely keep up with the demand to welcome them. Many volunteers felt called to action by the photograph of Alan Kurdi, the Syrian toddler whose body washed up last fall on a Turkish beach. He had only a slight connection to Canada – his aunt lived near Vancouver – but his death caused recrimination so strong it helped elect an idealistic, refugee-friendly prime minister, Justin Trudeau.

The Toronto Star greeted the first planeload by splashing “Welcome to Canada” in English and Arabic across its front page. Eager sponsors toured local Middle Eastern supermarkets to learn what to buy and cook and used a toll-free hotline for instant Arabic translation. Impatient would-be sponsors — “an angry mob of do-gooders,” The Star called them — have been seeking more families. The new government committed to taking in 25,000 Syrian refugees and then raised the total by tens of thousands. In the ideal version of private sponsorship, the groups become concierges and surrogate family members who help integrate the outsiders, called “New Canadians.” The hope is that the Syrians will form bonds with those unlike them, from openly gay sponsors to business owners who will help them find jobs to lifelong residents who will take them skating and canoeing.

Ms. McLorg’s group of neighbors and friends includes doctors, economists, a lawyer, an artist, teachers and a bookkeeper. Advocates for sponsorship believe that private citizens can achieve more than the government alone, raising the number of refugees admitted, guiding newcomers more effectively and potentially helping solve the puzzle of how best to resettle Muslims in Western countries. Some advocates even talk about extending the Canadian system across the globe. (Slightly fewer than half of the Syrian refugees who recently arrived in Canada have private sponsors, including some deemed particularly vulnerable who get additional public funds. The rest are resettled by the government.)

Debt Rattle June 12 2016

Jun 122016

June 12, 2016 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 10:21 am Finance Tagged with: bonds, Brexit, bubble, ECB, pensions, unemployment, war 6 Responses »

Jack Delano Worker inspecting locomotive, Proviso Yard 1942

• European Central Bank Preparing for Brexit (IS)

• We’re Rich! We’re Rich! Are Inflated Asset Prices Like Real Wealth? (SA)

• The Pension Bubble: How The Defaults Will Occur (PD)

• Bulging Pension Funds Lure US Asset Managers to Australia (WSJ)

• ‘Condition Red Alert’ – Albert Edwards (BI)

• ECB Corporate Bond-Buying Program Makes Up Almost 1 In 5 Trades (CNBC)

• Real Unemployment Rate More Than Double The Official Number: CLSA (ZH)

• Where Do Matters Stand? (Paul Craig Roberts)

“..Brexit might potentially be a worse hit to mainland Europe than to the UK itself..”

• European Central Bank Preparing for Brexit (IS)

The European Central Bank said they are gearing up for the UK leaving the EU by activating swap lines to financial institutions should the Brexit trigger capital outflows in the short-term. Meanwhile, major European Banks are already facing declines in stock valuation, with dynamics in yield curves suggesting the market is weighing a greater possibility of the ‘Out’ vote in the UK. As volatility increases ahead of the June 23 referendum, additional euro-denominated liquidity might come in handy for the European banking system, particularly so given that the ultra-accommodative monetary conditions are failing to boost either growth or inflation in the near-to-mid-term.

The ECB announced they are ready to pour extra euro liquidity to financial institutions through the existing mechanisms of swap lines should the UK decide to leave the EU. In such a scenario, additional euros would help calm the markets and boost the already-battered banking sector capitalization, staving off the risks of massive financial turmoil amidst the uncertainty of the potential effects of Britain’s separation from the bloc. “Life won’t change much after the referendum — these agreements and contracts will still be in force,” Ilmars Rimsevics of the ECB Governing Council, and also the head of Latvia’s central bank said. “If they’ll be needed and there is some sort of shock, then of course these lines will work.”

Meanwhile, the European banks are tumbling and crumbling, as the prospect of Brexit becomes increasingly likely. During the past two weeks, the European financial institutions suffered the worst blow to their capitalization in two years, hinting at possible massive capital outflows in case of Brexit. Deutsche Bank dropped to its record lowest, according to European stock market data. Considering these developments, Brexit might potentially be a worse hit to mainland Europe than to the UK itself. Either way, the upside of this is that the overheated European stock markets would cool to be more in line with the sluggish overall growth in the region.

“..the U.S. economy is by far the best it has ever been and total household wealth is clearly vastly superior to prior periods.”

• We’re Rich! We’re Rich! Are Inflated Asset Prices Like Real Wealth? (SA)

The Federal Reserve recently released the latest “Financial Accounts of the United States” and I am pleased to inform readers that the U.S. economy is by far the best it has ever been and total household wealth is clearly vastly superior to prior periods. In a nutshell, we’ve done it. We beat back the last recession and generated enormous amounts of new wealth by having asset prices for existing wealth move higher. Who says you need growth in GDP or that real wealth has to be measured in having the goods and services that improve human lives? The financial accounts clearly show that the total household wealth in the United States has grown dramatically and vastly outpaced inflation so long as inflation is measured in other terms.

[..] Say you live in a city where the hospital has only one ambulance. If you have a heart attack, you may be out of luck. If the hospital can acquire a second ambulance, the community has gained a form of real wealth. That ambulance can provide a service that can save lives. In such a situation, you might feel that your odds of surviving a heart attack had improved. On the other hand, if the price of ambulances doubled it would do nothing to improve your odds of surviving. Unfortunately, either of these situations would double asset value recorded for ambulances. Since inflation rates are low over the last several years there is a general theory that the impact of inflation is not material to these measurements.

Slowly?!

• The Pension Bubble: How The Defaults Will Occur (PD)

Experts worry about stock, bond and real estate market excesses. But a bubble is forming that dwarfs them all: in pension plans. Millions of Americans and Canadians who are counting on pension benefits to fund their retirements risk being severely disappointed. The hard money community has, of course, been aware of this for some time. However in recent years, even the elites have been taking notice. One such group, the International Forum of the Americas, will be holding its fourth annual pension conference in Montreal next Monday. There politicians, financiers and monetary policy officials will discuss the declining rates of return in public and private sector pension plans. The picture they will paint is increasingly grim.

Pension funds, which have been issuing over-optimistic revenue forecasts for years, aren’t going to earn nearly enough money to pay the benefits recipients expect. Much of this relates to secular stagnation in the economy. Bonds, which form a major part of most plans’ holdings, earn next to nothing in interest. Stocks, which are trading at record levels, despite falling corporate earnings, look to have more downside risk than upside potential. Worse, if bond returns average 2%, balanced portfolios projecting 7% to 8% annual returns, have to earn 12% to 14% on equities investments to make up the difference. That’s unlikely to happen. At least private sector plans have some money in them – public sector plans are in even in worse shape. Governments have almost nothing put aside to fund future retirees – and they don’t even fully list their debts.

That process of “cooking the books” ramped up in a major way during Bill Clinton’s administration, whom Hillary Clinton, the current Democratic Presidential nominee, has promised to “put in charge of the economy.” The upshot is that most Americans and Canadians have no clue how far in debt their countries are. Researchers such as Laurence Kotlikoff , a professor at Boston University and a write-in candidate for President in 2016, suggest that unfunded pension and other liabilities run into the tens of trillions of dollars in the United States. The Fraser Institute has shown that Canada isn’t much better.

Hedge funds will help pension funds default.

• Bulging Pension Funds Lure US Asset Managers to Australia (WSJ)

U.S. asset managers are going for the hard sell in Australia in a bid to woo some of the world’s most cashed-up pension funds as clients. The push is being led by hedge funds and other firms offering so-called alternative investments in anything from almond plantations to oil futures. Several large U.S. asset managers recently opened offices in Sydney. Others have forged alliances with local fund managers and some already-established players are adding more sales staff.

Los Angeles-based Oaktree Capital Management, which invests in commercial mortgages and debt of financially troubled companies, opened a local branch here in March. U.S. giant TIAA Global Asset Management, which for years has been buying up Australian farmland, timber plantations and shopping malls, last year cemented its presence with a Sydney office. A major draw for foreign managers is the country’s two trillion Australian dollars (about US$1.5 trillion) in retirement savings, one of the largest and fastest-growing pools of pension money in the world. “Everyone wants to get their hands on that pie,” said Jesse Huang at Boston-based quantitative hedge fund PanAgora Asset Management. “People think there’s a lot of money to be made in Australia.”

“It is not a pleasant place. It is cold, dark, and damp..”

• ‘Condition Red Alert’ – Albert Edwards (BI)

“The key to the Ice Age thesis is to sound CONDITION RED ALERT as each recession approaches, because the equity outcome then always proves much worse than anyone expects due to the additional phase of secular de-rating..” In the aftermath of the latest, weaker than expected, nonfarm payroll data, economists are certainly more worried. The excellent folks at Advisor Perspectives highlight the Fedis Labour Market Conditions Index as suggesting a recession is imminent (the cumulative peak is an average of 9 months ahead of the start of recession and we are now four months beyond a peak. For investors who think copper still has some predictive power, its recent move is disturbing.

This, of course, is just another recession in Edwards’ Ice Age thesis, which posits that during long-term equity downturns, it takes at least four recessions to work through. So far, according to Edwards, we have only had two since the top of the bubble in 2000, so we still have a way to go until the pain is over. “The secular bear market only ends when cyclically adjusted valuation measures reach rock bottom (such as the Shiller PE on the bottom line),” said Edwards. “Each successive recession (red part of real S&P top line) sees huge downturns, usually to new lower lows of both prices and valuations. That is why we reiterated our view early this year that in the coming recession the S&P will bottom at 550, a 75% decline from current levels.”

Edwards maintains that he is bearish for a reason, despite it being a difficult spot. “We remain at the bearish extreme of the market,” he wrote. “It is not a pleasant place. It is cold, dark, and damp. People either don’it speak to you or send you abusive emails. Members of your own family pretend not to know you. Actually, I made that last bit up.”

They’re shooting for more.

• ECB Corporate Bond-Buying Program Makes Up Almost 1 In 5 Trades (CNBC)

Nearly 19% of all corporate bond activity in the past two days is down to the European Central Bank’s corporate bond-buying program, according to insights from market data provider Trax. The ECB formally kicked off its corporate bond buying program on June 8th, a move heralded by President Mario Draghi in March. As part of its plan, the ECB will buy euro-denominated investment grade bonds issued by companies in the euro area. Data from Trax released Friday showed that in the whole of 2015, corporate bond buying accounted for 12% of all corporate bond activity processed by Trax. This number went up to 14% in just the first half of 2016, the firm reported. The company processes approximately 65% of all fixed income transactions in Europe through its post-trade services.

What everyone knows.

• Real Unemployment Rate More Than Double The Official Number: CLSA (ZH)

While everyone loves to focus on the headline unemployment rate as a reason to say the economy is doing well, especially those at the Fed trying to justify hiking rates into a recession, or those in the current administration trying to establish a legacy of being a market whisperer, the facts get in the way of that narrative. We continuously remind those who are interested in the truth that the number of Americans who are no longer in the labor force has hit an all time high of 94.7 million. If one were to factor in the low labor force participation rate, the actual unemployment rate would be significantly higher than the 4.7% headline.

According to CLSA economists, who have updated an analysis we first did in the summer of 2010, if the participation rate stayed at the levels before the financial crisis, the unemployment rate would be 9.6%, more than double what it is today.

“..the West is incapable of producing leadership capable of preserving life on earth.”

• Where Do Matters Stand? (Paul Craig Roberts)

On the eve of World War II the United States was still mired in the Great Depression and found itself facing war on two fronts with Japan and Germany. However bleak the outlook, it was nothing compared to the outlook today. Has anyone in Washington, the presstitute Western media, the EU, or NATO ever considered the consequences of constant military and propaganda provocations against Russia? Is there anyone in any responsible position anywhere in the Western world who has enough sense to ask: “What if the Russians believe us? What if we convince Russia that we are going to attack her?” The same can be asked about China.

The recklessness of the White House Fool and the media whores has gone far beyond mere danger. What do the Russians think when they see that the Democratic Party intends to elect Hillary Clinton president of the US? Hillary is a person so crazed that she declared the president of Russia to be “the new Hitler” and organized through her underling, neocon monster Victoria Nuland, the overthrow of the democratically elected government of Ukraine. Nuland installed Washington’s puppet government in a former Russian province that until about 20 years ago was part of Russia for centuries. I would bet that this tells even the naive pro-western part of the Russian government and population that the United States intends war with Russia.

[..] The Russians know that the propaganda about “Russian aggression” is a lie. What is the purpose of the lie other than to prepare the Western peoples for war with Russia? There is no other explanation. Even morons such as Obama, Merkel, Hollande, and Cameron should be capable of understanding that it is extremely dangerous to convince a major military power that you are going to attack. To simultaneously also convince China doubles the danger. Clearly, the West is incapable of producing leadership capable of preserving life on earth.

Debt Rattle June 8 2016

Jun 082016

June 8, 2016 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 8:43 am Finance Tagged with: arctic, BoJ, bonds, Brexit, Draghi, EU, fake invoices, Growth, monopoly, refugees 3 Responses »

Harris&Ewing Washington Monument, view from air 1919

• Bank of Japan’s Sovereign Debt Endgame Is The Naked Emperor (FP)

• Japan’s Biggest Bank To Quit As JGB Primary Dealer (ZH)

• Draghi Fires Starting Gun on Corporate Bond Purchases in Europe (BBG)

• Public Support For The EU Plunges Across Europe (R.)

• France Shuns Europe As Brexit Revolt Spreads (AEP)

• Billions Of Pounds Taken Out Of Britain Amid Fears Of Brexit (Ind.)

• China’s Exports Weaken, Signaling More Headwinds For Growth (BBG)

• China Central Bank Holds Line On Growth Forecast, Sees More Pain To Come (R.)

• US-China Talks Limited by Disagreements (WSJ)

• Millions Around The World Are Fleeing Neoliberal Policy (RNN)

• Only 10 Countries In The World Are Not At War (Ind.)

• Arctic Sea Ice Hit A Stunning New Low In May (WaPo)

• Greek Legal Rulings Back 35 Refugees Appealing Deportation (Kath.)

• EU Considers Linking African Aid to Curbs on Migrant Flows (WSJ)

“The workability of the institution breaks down when a different set of rules are seen to apply to governments versus those that apply to everyone else.”

• Bank of Japan’s Sovereign Debt Endgame Is The Naked Emperor (FP)

Last week, Bloomberg reported in depth on Japan’s miraculous diminishing debt load. Turns out, despite a steady rise in government borrowing, the burden of repayment is diminished because the buyer of 90% of that debt is the Bank of Japan. This has serious implications for Canadian investors, yet the full significance has not yet been thoroughly unpacked by media. My bet is most analysts and economists are aghast at this admission by a G7 government that debt could just be summarily forgiven. It suggests the notion of liability in credit does not apply to government, or its associated (yet private, to varying degree) central banks. But it’s really quite simple. The single most important rule upon which our global debt-driven economic growth equation is dependent is that debt is repaid.

If it isn’t, assets are confiscated. Just like if you don’t keep up with the mortgage payments on your house, you lose it. But what happens when the biggest creditor is also the debtor? The entire debtor/creditor relationship is rendered nonsensical. The size of the debt any one nation can undertake is directly related to its ability to repay any proposed amount over time. Its ability to repay its debt, in turn, is derived from the consensus of markets that demand a higher rate of interest the closer a debtor gets to defaulting. The debt limit is reached when no one will lend, because even at the highest rate of interest, the chance of default is greater. Or when the debtor misses a payment. This works well in a world ostensibly governed by free markets, and when the rules are universally applied. The workability of the institution breaks down when a different set of rules are seen to apply to governments versus those that apply to everyone else.

BoJ buys everything. Banks have to deal with a monopoly, no profit in that.

• Japan’s Biggest Bank To Quit As JGB Primary Dealer (ZH)

Ever since the launch of Japan’s QE, and worsening in the aftermath of January’s shocking NIRP announcement, Japan’s bond market, which moments ago slid to new record lows yields across the curve, has had its share of near-death experiences: between repeated VaR shocks, to days in which not a single bond was traded, to trillions in bonds with negative yields, it has seemed that the Japanese Government Bond is on life support. That support may be ending. According to Nikkei, and confirmed by Bloomberg, Japan’s biggest bank, Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ, is preparing to quit its role as a primary dealer of Japanese government bonds as negative interest rates turn the instruments into larger risks, a fallout from massive monetary easing measures by the Bank of Japan.

While the role of a Primary Dealer comes with solid perks such as meetings with the Finance Ministry over bond issuance and generally being privy to inside information and effectively free money under POMO, dealers also are required to bid on at least 4% of a planned JGB issuance, which as the Nikkei reports has become an increasingly heavy burden for BTMU. In other words, one of the key links that provides liquidity and lubricates the Japanese government bond market has just decided to exit the market due to, among other thinks, lack of liquidity entirely due to the policy failure of Abenomics in general, and Kuroda’s disastrous monetary policies in particular.

One could, of course, ask just how does BTMU plan on also exiting the Japanese economy itself, if and when the country’s $8 trillion bond market implodes, but we doubt the bank will ever be able to answer that. The ministry is expected to let the bank resign. Japan has 22 primary dealers including megabanks and major brokerages. Several foreign brokerages had pulled out before as part of restructuring efforts at home or for other reasons, but BTMU will be the first Japanese institution to quit. In a revolutionary shift, one created by the Bank of Japan itself, banks, once the biggest buyers of JGBs, see little appeal in sovereign debt today. The bonds have very low yields, and a rise in interest rates could leave banks with vast unrealized losses.

Private-sector banks held just over 229 trillion yen ($2.13 trillion) in JGBs at the end of 2015, nearly 30% less than at the end of March 2013, before the BOJ launched massive quantitative and qualitative easing measures. Negative rates introduced this year by the BOJ reinforced the trend. The highest bid yield on benchmark 10-year JGBs sank to a record low of negative 0.092% on Thursday. BTMU was the fifth-largest buyer of Japanese government bonds among the 22 primary dealers until spring 2015, but ranked 10th or lower between October 2015 and March 2016 as shareholders turned up their nose on government debt.

One day we’ll understand just how insane this is. One massive debt orgasm.

• Draghi Fires Starting Gun on Corporate Bond Purchases in Europe (BBG)

Investors will be watching Mario Draghi’s first corporate bond purchases on Wednesday for an indication of whether they were right to snap up the notes before the ECB. The ECB is adding investment-grade corporate notes to its €80 billion monthly purchase program, which already includes covered bonds, asset-backed securities and government debt, as part of efforts to encourage growth. The challenge will be buying enough bonds in increasingly illiquid markets, investors and analysts say. “There is a fair amount riding on this in terms of the ECB’s credibility,” said Victoria Whitehead at BNP Paribas Investment Partners. “The perception is that if they can’t buy at least €5 billion of bonds a month, the program will be seen as unsuccessful.” Investors have piled into investment-grade corporate bonds on the promise of central bank purchases, driving up prices and cutting borrowing costs.

The average yield for euro notes tumbled to 1.002% on Monday, the lowest in more than a year, according to BofAML index data. Companies responded to the surge in demand by selling more than €50 billion of bonds in the single currency in May, the second-busiest month on record. While purchases of more than €5 billion of bonds may boost the market, investors may be disappointed if the ECB bought less than €3 billion a month, CreditSights analysts wrote in a June 5 report. Commerzbank and Morgan Stanley don’t expect the monthly purchases to surpass €5 billion. “We’re worried that they won’t be able to buy quite as much as they want to,” said Tim Winstone at Henderson Global Investors. “If the buying underwhelms and reported volumes are less than most people expect, there is a risk of a selloff.”

Dissolve the monster peacefully while you still can. Or else.

• Public Support For The EU Plunges Across Europe (R.)

Public support for the European Union has fallen sharply in its biggest member states over the past year, a survey showed on Tuesday, weeks before Britons vote on whether to leave the 28-nation bloc. The survey of 10 large EU states by the Washington-based Pew Research Center showed strong support for Britain to stay in the EU, with 89% of Swedes, 75% of Dutch and 74% of Germans viewing a so-called Brexit as a bad thing. But most striking was a plunge in the percentage of Europeans who view the EU favorably, a development which appears linked to the bloc’s handling of the refugee crisis and the economy. The fall was most pronounced in France, where only 38% of respondents said they had a favorable view of the EU, down 17 points from last year.

Favorability ratings also fell by 16 points in Spain to 47%, by eight points in Germany to 50%, and by seven points in Britain to 44%. Public support for the EU was strongest in Poland and Hungary, countries which ironically have two of the most EU-sceptical governments in the entire bloc. The Pew survey showed that 72% of Poles and 61% of Hungarians view the EU favorably. “The British are not the only ones with doubts about the European Union,” Pew said. “Much of the disaffection with the EU among Europeans can be attributed to Brussels’ handling of the refugee issue. In every country surveyed, overwhelming majorities disapprove of how Brussels has dealt with the problem.”

This was especially true in Greece, which has been overwhelmed by migrants crossing the Aegean Sea from Turkey. Some 94% of Greeks believe the EU has mishandled the refugee crisis. In Sweden it was 88%, in Italy 77% and in Spain 75%. At 92%, Greeks were also the most disapproving of the EU’s handling of the economy, followed by the Italians at 68% and French at 66%. Roughly two-thirds of Greeks and Britons said powers should be returned to national governments from Brussels, far higher than in the other surveyed countries.

Close to what I’ve written before: “They may have to dissolve the EU as it is and try to reinvent it, both in order to bring the Brits back and because they fear that the whole political order will be swept away unless they do..”

• France Shuns Europe As Brexit Revolt Spreads (AEP)

France has turned even more viscerally eurosceptic than Britain over recent months, profoundly altering the political geography of Europe and making it impossible to judge how Paris might respond to Brexit. An intractable economic crisis has been eating away at the legitimacy of the French governing elites for much of this decade. This has now combined with a collapse in the credibility of the government, and mounting anger over immigration. A pan-European survey by the Pew Research Center released today found that 61pc of French voters have an “unfavourable” view, compared to 48pc in the UK. A clear majority is opposed to “ever closer union” and wants powers returned to the French parliament, a finding that sits badly with the insistence by President Francois Hollande that “more Europe” is the answer to the EU’s woes.

“It is a protest against the elites,” said Professor Brigitte Granville, a French economist at Queen Mary University of London. “There are 5000 people in charge of everything in France. They are all linked by school and marriage, and they are tight.” Prof Granville said the mechanisms of monetary union have upset the Franco-German strategic marriage, wounding the French psyche. “The EU was sold to the French people as a `partnership’ of equals with Germany. But it has been very clear since 2010 that this is not the case. Everybody could see that Germany decided everything in Greece,” she said. The death of the Monnet dream in the EU’s anchor state poses an existential threat to the European project and is running in parallel to what is happening in Britain.

The Front National’s Marine Le Pen is leading the polls for the presidential elections in 2017 with vows to restore the French franc and smash the EU edifice. While it has long been assumed that she could never win an outright majority, nobody is quite so sure after the anti-incumbent upset in Austria last month. “The Front National is making hay from the Brexit debate,” said Giles Merritt, head of the Friends of Europe think tank in Brussels. “The EU policy elites are in panic. If the British vote to leave the shock will be so ghastly that they will finally wake up and realize that they can no longer ignore demands for democratic reform,” he said.

“They may have to dissolve the EU as it is and try to reinvent it, both in order to bring the Brits back and because they fear that the whole political order will be swept away unless they do,” he said. Mr Merritt said it is an error to suppose that the EU would carry on as a monolithic bloc able to dictate terms after a Brexit vote. “The British would have pricked the bubble. The Germans are deeply alarmed at how suddenly the mood is shifting everywhere,” he said.

It’s going to be so much fun, the next two weeks. Can the footballers save England at the Euro Cup?

• Billions Of Pounds Taken Out Of Britain Amid Fears Of Brexit (Ind.)

Investors are moving billions of pounds in assets out of British currency and assets ahead of the EU referendum, new figures suggest. An analysis by Sky News found £65bn left the UK or was converted into other currencies in March and April, the largest amount since the economic crash. In the six months to the end of April, £77bn was pulled out of British pounds, compared to just £2bn in the six months to the end of last October. The figures, published by the Bank of England, are consistent with investors worrying that the pound is due for a sharp fall should Brexit to occur. Because financial markets are prone to collective panic, investors’ views are the main factor in determining whether the pound will actually fall. Any perception that a fall was about to take place could end up becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.

In February, HSBC warned that 20% could be wiped off the value of sterling were Britain to leave the EU. In May this figure was corroborated by the National Institute for Economic and Social Research. The pound plunged to a three-week low yesterday, probably partly in response to polls showing the Leave campaigning ahead. It hit a seven-year low against the dollar the day after the former Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, announced he was backing Brexit, and also suffered the biggest one-day fall since David Cameron become Prime Minister. The collapse of the pound at the end of June would mean Britons going abroad during the summer would have their spending power reduced. Imported goods such as electronics would also likely become significantly more expensive.

That is one damning graph. Where would China’s imports be without the fake invoices?

• China’s Exports Weaken, Signaling More Headwinds For Growth (BBG)

China’s exports stabilized in May, with a weakening currency giving some support to growth in the world’s biggest trading nation. Overseas shipments fell 4.1% in dollar terms from a year earlier, the customs administration said Wednesday. Imports slipped 0.4% – the smallest drop since late 2014 – to leave a trade surplus of $50 billion. Reflecting a weaker currency, both exports and imports fared better when measured in local currency terms. The Shanghai Composite Index pared losses and the Australian dollar rallied. “The worst time for Chinese exports has passed,” said Harrison Hu at Royal Bank of Scotland in Singapore, adding that the dollar-denominated export growth is slightly misleading due to the price changes.

“The quantity of exports actually showed a subdued increase. The yuan also depreciated against a basket of currencies, which supports exports.” Still, that support remains restrained. The World Bank on Tuesday cut its global growth estimate to 2.4% for this year, which would be the same as 2015, from the 2.9% projected in January. Ma Jun, chief economist of the People’s Bank of China’s research bureau, lowered his forecast for China’s exports this year to a 1% decline, versus a 3.1% increase seen previously, according to a work paper published Wednesday. “The weakening momentum of global growth is our main reason to lower the forecast,” he wrote. “A 10-percentage point decline in exports can drag GDP growth down by about 1%.”

“China’s trade shrank 8% last year, compared with the government’s goal for 6% growth..”

• China Central Bank Holds Line On Growth Forecast, Sees More Pain To Come (R.)

China’s central bank slashed its forecast for exports on Wednesday, predicting a second straight annual fall in shipments, but said the economy will still grow 6.8% this year. The People’s Bank of China also warned in its mid-year work report that the government’s push to reduce debt levels and overcapacity could increase bond default risks and make it more difficult for companies to raise funds. And ahead of a meeting of the U.S. Federal Reserve’s policymaking board next week, it said the pace of U.S interest rate rises would affect global capital flows and emerging market currencies, but it did not mention the yuan. “Since the beginning of this year, the global and domestic economic environment has experienced a number of changes,” the PBOC said in the report.

“Reflecting these recent developments, we revised our China macroeconomic forecasts for 2016. Compared with our published forecasts in December last year, we maintain our baseline projection of 2016 real GDP growth at 6.8%.” The report was released shortly after monthly data showed China’s exports fell an annual 4.1% in May, more than expected and the 10th decline in the past 12 months. Imports were more encouraging, however, declining only marginally and much less than expected, pointing to improving domestic demand and adding to views that the economy may be slowly stabilizing. Preliminary commodity trade data showed sharp rises in imports of copper and iron ores.

[..] Despite cutting its forecast for exports to minus 1% from growth of 3.1%, the PBOC saw a domestic recovery remaining on track. It upgraded its forecast for fixed-asset investment growth to 11%, an increase of 0.2 percentage points from estimates it made late last year. A government spending spree on major infrastructure projects and a continuing recovery in the housing market have boosted demand for materials from cement to steel. China’s trade shrank 8% last year, compared with the government’s goal for 6% growth , in the worst performance since the global financial crisis.

And those are here to stay. Sharply conflicting interests.

• US-China Talks Limited by Disagreements (WSJ)

The U.S. and China made little progress on a series of disagreements during two days of high-level economic and security talks, as both countries prepare for leadership change and further economic uncertainty. Statements by officials from both sides on Tuesday suggested mostly incremental results from the dialogue. U.S. Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew said Chinese officials reaffirmed a commitment not to devalue an already weakening yuan for competitive purposes and pledged not to “target” an expansion of the steel industry, whose surging production he previously called market-distorting. Beijing widened access to its tightly regulated financial markets, offering U.S. investors a quota of 250 billion yuan ($38.1 billion) to buy Chinese stocks and bonds.

The two governments agreed to designate clearing banks in the U.S. for settling yuan transactions, a move that would promote greater use of the Chinese currency. Mr. Lew said it was too early to say which U.S. financial institution might be chosen but said the U.S. will have the second-largest quota after Hong Kong. On the more contentious issues in the relationship, the senior officials appeared to restate positions and, in some cases, outright disagree. A new Chinese law that grants police the authority to monitor foreign nonprofits provoked sharp differences. This year’s meeting of the Strategic and Economic Dialogue is the last for the Obama administration, with the U.S. presidential election approaching. China soon will face its own important leadership transition.

In 2017, five of the seven members of the Politburo Standing Committee, China’s top decision-making body, are due to step down. The timing of the meetings, combined with tensions over the South China Sea—where the U.S. is challenging Beijing’s assertion of sovereignty over islands, reefs and surrounding waters claimed by other countries—limited prospects for breakthroughs on issues such as trade and investment barriers and China’s currency policy.

TEXT

• Millions Around The World Are Fleeing Neoliberal Policy (RNN)

What it tells is almost identical to what has already been narrated for Russia and Greece. And what’s responsible for the increasing death rates is actually neoliberal economic policy, neoliberal trade policy, and the polarization and impoverishment of a large part of society. After the Soviet Union broke up in 1991, death rates soared, lifespans shortened, health standards decreased all throughout the Yeltsin administration, until finally President Putin came in and stabilized matters. Putin said that the destruction caused by neoliberal economic policies had killed more Russians than all of whom died in World War II, the 22 million people. That’s the devastation that polarization caused there.

Same thing in Greece. In the last five years, Greek lifespans have shortened. They’re getting sicker, they’re dying faster, they’re not healthy. Almost all of the British economists of the late 18th century said when you have poverty, when you have a transfer of wealth to the rich, you’re going to have shorter lifespans, and you’re also going to have immigration. The countries that have a hard money policy, a creditor policy, people are going to emigrate. Now, at that time that was why England was gaining immigrants. It was gaining skilled labor. It was gaining people to work in its industry because other countries were still in the post-feudal system and were driving them out. Russia had a huge emigration of skilled labor, largely to Germany and to the United States, especially in information technology. Greece has a heavy outflow of labor.

The Baltic states have had almost a 10% decline in their population in the last decade as a result of their neoliberal policies. Also, health problems are rising. Now, the question is, in America, now that you’re having as a result of this polarization shorter lifespans, worse health, worse diets, where are the Americans going to emigrate’ Nobody can figure that one out yet. There’s no, seems nowhere for them to go, because they don’t speak a foreign language. The Russians, the Greeks, most Europeans all somehow have to learn English in school. They’re able to get by in other countries. They’re not sure where on earth can the Americans come from’ Nobody can really figure this out.

Curious ‘thingy’ from the Independent: somewhere in the article it says Iceland is the world’s most peaceful country, even though it’s not in that list of 10.

• Only 10 Countries In The World Are Not At War (Ind.)

The world is becoming a more dangerous place and there are now just 10 countries which can be considered completely free from conflict, according to authors of the 10th annual Global Peace Index. The worsening conflict in the Middle East, the lack of a solution to the refugee crisis and an increase in deaths from major terrorist incidents have all contributed to the world being less peaceful in 2016 than it was in 2015. And there are now fewer countries in the world which can be considered truly at peace – in other words, not engaged in any conflicts either internally or externally – than there were in 2014. According to the Institute for Economics and Peace, a think-tank which has produced the index for the past 10 years, only Botswana, Chile, Costa Rica, Japan, Mauritius, Panama, Qatar, Switzerland, Uruguay, and Vietnam are free from conflict.

Brazil is the country that has dropped out of the list, and as one of the worst performing countries year-on-year represents a serious concern ahead of the Rio Olympics, the IEP’s founder Steve Killelea told The Independent. But perhaps the most remarkable result from this year’s peace index, he said, was the extent to which the situation in the Middle East drags down the rest of the world when it comes to peacefulness. “If we look at the world overall, it has become slightly less peaceful in the last 12 months,” Mr Killelea said. “But if we took the Middle East out of the index over the last decade – and last year – the world would have become more peaceful,” he said. “It really highlights the impact the Middle East is having on the world.”

Man was here.

• Arctic Sea Ice Hit A Stunning New Low In May (WaPo)

The 2016 race downward in Arctic sea ice continued in May with a dramatic new record. The average area of sea ice atop the Arctic Ocean last month was just 12 million square kilometers (4.63 million square miles), according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC). That beats the prior May record (from 2004) by more than half a million square kilometers, and is well over a million square kilometers, or 500,000 square miles, below the average for the month. Another way to put it is this: The Arctic Ocean this May had more than three Californias less sea ice cover than it did during an average May between 1981 and 2010. And it broke the prior record low for May by a region larger than California, although not quite as large as Texas.

This matters because 2016 could be marching toward a new record for the lowest amount of ice ever observed on top of the world at the height of melt season — September. The previous record September low was set in 2012. But here’s what the National Snow and Ice Data Center has to say about that: Daily extents in May were also two to four weeks ahead of levels seen in 2012, which had the lowest September extent in the satellite record. The monthly average extent for May 2016 is more than one million square kilometers (386,000 square miles) below that observed in May 2012. In other words, for Arctic sea ice, May 2016 was more like June 2012 — the record-breaking year. Going into the truly warm months of the year, then, the ice is in a uniquely weak state.

The whole thing is turning into such a mess you would think this is happening on purpose.

• Greek Legal Rulings Back 35 Refugees Appealing Deportation (Kath.)

Fears are rising about the possible breakdown of a deal between the European Union and Turkey for the return of migrants after legal committees in Greece upheld dozens of appeals by refugees against their deportation. By late Monday, Greek appeals committees had ruled in favor of 35 refugees, ruling that Turkey is “an unsafe country.” Only two rulings overturned appeals by refugees against their deportation. On Tuesday a crowd of refugees blocked the container terminal at the port of Thessaoniki to protest the slow pace at which asylum applications are being processed. Hundreds of applications are pending and there are fears that they too will result in rulings in favor of refugees, undercutting a deal signed between Ankara and Brussels in March to return migrants to Turkey.

Meanwhile there are also concerns about a pickup in arrivals from neighboring Turkey. For several weeks, a crackdown by Turkish authorities on smugglers had all but stopped the migrant influx. Now that ties between Turkey and the EU are strained over the former’s refusal to reform terrorism laws and its insistence that Turks be granted visa-free access to the bloc, more migrants have started arriving in Greece from Turkey. The total number of refugees in Greece is 57,458, according to government figures made public on Tuesday. The figure includes 5,700 people in rented accommodation arranged by the United Nations refugee agency, UNHCR. The remainder of the migrants are living in makeshift camps or state-run facilities on the Aegean islands or mainland Greece.

When in a hole, keep digging. One deal with a madman is not enough.

• EU Considers Linking African Aid to Curbs on Migrant Flows (WSJ)

The European Union’s executive body on Tuesday presented plans linking trade and investment perks for African countries to their efforts in reducing migration to Europe, a controversial idea that still needs the backing of EU governments. While the bloc has managed to stem the influx of Syrian refugees and other migrants after striking a deal with Turkey in March, an increasing number of mostly African migrants are attempting to make the perilous journey via Libya across the Mediterranean Sea to Italy. Nearly 50,000 people were rescued and brought to Italy this year and over 2,000 are feared dead after several boats capsized off the Libyan coast, according the United Nations’ refugee agency.

“We must do in the southern Mediterranean what we’ve done in the Aegean,” European Commission Vice-President Frans Timmermans said Tuesday in the European Parliament in Strasbourg. Under the proposed measures from the European Commission, which still need the approval of EU governments and the European Parliament, EU development funding and trade incentives would be linked to the countries’ level of cooperation on migration. “We propose a mix of positive and negative incentives, to reward those countries willing to cooperate effectively with us and to ensure there are consequences for those who do not. This includes using our development and trade policies to create leverage,” Mr. Timmermans said.

EU diplomats in Brussels expect “quite heated discussions” on the idea of linking development aid and trade policies to cooperation on migration, as governments have different views on whether it is ethical to make aid conditional on countries taking people back or preventing them from leaving. EU interior ministers meeting in Luxembourg on Friday will have a first exchange of views on the topic.

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