Apr 142015
 
 April 14, 2015  Posted by at 9:41 pm Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,  4 Responses »


DPC French Market, New Orleans 1910

From southern Europe to the far north, matters are shifting, sometimes slowly, sometimes faster. There are moments when it seems all that goes on is the negotiations over the Greek dire financial situation and its bailout conditions, but even there nothing stands still. The Financial Times ran a story claiming Greece is about to default on is debt(s), and many a pundit jumped on that, but there was nothing new there. Of course they are considering such options, but they are looking at many others as well. That doesn’t prove anything, though.

Yanis Varoufakis’ publisher, Public Affairs Books, posted a promo for an upcoming book by the Greek Finance Minister, due out only in 2016, mind you, that reveals a few things that haven’t gotten much attention to date. It’s good to keep in mind that most of the book will have been written before Yanis joined the new Greek government on January 26, and not see it as a reaction to the negotiations that have played out after that date.

Varoufakis simply analyzes the structure of the EU and the eurozone, as well as the peculiar place the ECB has in both. Some may find what he writes provocative, but that’s beside the point. It’s not as if Europe is beyond analysis; indeed, such analysis is long overdue.

Indeed, it may well be the lack of it, and the idea in Brussels that it is exempt from scrutiny, even as institutions such as the ECB build billion dollar edifices as the Greek population goes hungry, that could be its downfall. It may be better to be critical and make necessary changes than to be hardheaded and precipitate your own downfall. Here’s the blurb for the book:

And The Weak Suffer What They Must
Europe’s Crisis and America’s Economic Future

“The strong do as they can and the weak suffer what they must.” —Thucydides

The fate of the global economy hangs in the balance, and Europe is doing its utmost to undermine it, to destabilize America, and to spawn new forms of authoritarianism. Europe has dragged the world into hideous morasses twice in the last one hundred years… it can do it again. Yanis Varoufakis, the newly elected Finance Minister of Greece, has a front-row seat, and shows the Eurozone to be a house of cards destined to fall without a radical change in direction. And, if the EU falls apart, he argues, the global economy will not be far behind.

Varoufakis shows how, once America abandoned Europe in 1971 from the dollar zone, Europe’s leaders decided to create a monetary union of 18 nations without control of their own money, without democratic accountability, and without a government to support the Central Bank.

This bizarre economic super-power was equipped with none of the shock absorbers necessary to contain a financial crisis, while its design ensured that, when it came, the crisis would be massive. When disaster hit in 2009, Europe turned against itself, humiliating millions of innocent citizens, driving populations to despair, and buttressing a form of bigotry unseen since WWII.

In the epic battle for Europe’s integrity and soul, the forces of reason and humanism will have to face down the new forms of authoritarianism. Europe’s crisis is pregnant with radically regressive forces that have the capacity to cause a humanitarian bloodbath while extinguishing the hope for shared prosperity for generations to come. The principle of the greatest austerity for the European economies suffering the greatest recessions would be quaint if it were not also the harbinger of misanthropy and racism.

Here, Varoufakis offers concrete policies that the rest of the world can take part in to intervene and help save Europe from impending catastrophe, and presents the ultimate case against austerity. With passionate, informative, and at times humorous prose, he warns that the implosion of an admittedly crisis-ridden and deeply irrational European capitalism should be avoided at all cost. Europe, he argues, is too important to be left to the Europeans.

How dire the situation is in Greece becomes obvious from the following article by documentary film maker Constantin Xekalos, posted on Beppe Grillo’s site. It makes you wonder how Europe dare let this happen. How it could possibly have insisted prior to the January elections that the Greeks should vote for the incumbent government, and how someone like Eurogroup head Dijsselbloem could ever have had the gall to point to “all the progress we’ve made”.

Greece, The Euro’s Greatest “Success”

Greece is a social disaster zone. 3 million people are without guaranteed healthcare, 600,000 children are living under the breadline and more than half of them are unable to meet their daily nutritional needs. 90% of families living in the poorer areas rely on food banks and feeding schemes for survival, and unemployment is approaching 30%, with youth unemployment approaching 60%. These are not just numbers, they are real people. In order to show their faces and tell their stories, writer and documentary film maker from Crete and now living in Florence, Constantin Xekalos, decided to make a documentary film entitled: “Greece, the Euro’s greatest success “. In today’s Passaparola he talks about this documentary film and about the suffering of the Greek people that he has encountered in his personal experience. Today it is all happening, but is Italy next?

The healthcare tragedy in Greece When we made this documentary it was said that 1/3 of the Greek population, (more than 3 million people,) were without any guaranteed healthcare. In the interim that number has grown. They have been abandoned. If you go to a hospital, obviously a public one, they will treat you and they will accept you if it is an emergency, but if you are admitted, you then have to pay. If you are unable to pay, they send the bill to the Receiver of Revenue’s office and they take it from there. If you have no money, they start with foreclosure, even your home , even if it is your only home!

This is crime against society that is totally unacceptable. In an advanced and so-called democratic Country that is part of the western world, things like this are totally inconceivable, absurd and unacceptable. I repeat, this is crime against society that we absolutely cannot accept! If you are ill, democracy guarantees the treatment you need, otherwise it should be called by some other name. When a child is not guaranteed the nutrition he/she needs, a mere helpless child, or elderly people that are no longer able to look after themselves, then that is no longer democracy. Some of the older Greeks were telling me that when the Germans were there during the occupation in the Second World War, the people lived exactly like they are living now.

The Greeks are dying of hunger 90% of Greek families living in the poorer areas are obliged to rely on food banks and feeding schemes in order to survive. Unfortunately there are many in this situation. We toured a number of Athens’ districts and in each and every district there is a square where good people, people who care about others and truly have a sense of community have rolled up their sleeves and, with the help of the Church, are providing meals for those who would otherwise have nothing to eat. Every district has its own square. I saw children passing out because of lack of food, but are too embarrassed to admit it. We simply cannot accept this kind of thing. It’s a crime when children go without food to eat. I will shout that from the rooftops until I burst and I hope that they lay charges against me: it is a crime when a child cannot get enough to eat!

The disappearance of the Greek middle-class Many good people found themselves unemployed from one day to the next, not through any fault of their own and not by choice, not lazy people as they would have us believe. They want to work but at this point there simply are no jobs any more. The social fabric is gone, there is no more middle-class, it is virtually nonexistent. All there is is an ever-shrinking oligarchy of very wealthy people and then the rest of the people who are becoming ever poorer. Very real poverty! Currently, and here I’m talking about the latest data from a month ago now, someone who does indeed find a job has to accept a salary of €300 a month . Take into account that Athens is a very expensive city to live in, even more so than Florence. I happen to live in Florence so this is just by way of example, but I was horrified at the thought. How on earth do these people manage to live? There is no way that they can live decently, there is no longer any dignity and therefore they cannot be free: they are destroying your soul as well as you body!

Over 50% of young people are unemployed Youth unemployment is now standing somewhere between 50% and 60% . The young people do whatever they can, they accept any kind of position, even things that not right and unfair, simply because necessity forces them to accept job offers that should not even be made. I saw jobs offered at €100 a month . This sort of thing is now happening here in Italy as well.

What all this will eventually lead to, inevitably so, becomes clear from the following. Anti-euro, anti-immigrant, anti-bailout and down the line anti anything to do with the failed European project. In Finland, of all places, the anti-euro party looks certain to get into the next government. Finland’s economy is in tatters, despite its AAA rating, and people increasingly choose to see the world through blinders.

Anti-Euro Finnish Party Gets Ready to Rule as Discontent Brews

The anti-euro The Finns party, which eight years ago got just 4% of the vote, is now dressing itself up for Cabinet seats as Finnish voters are set to oust the government after four years of economic failure. The Finns, whose support is based on equal parts of anti-euro, anti-immigrant and anti-establishment sentiment, have captured voters on the back of the euro-area’s economic crisis and a home-grown collapse of key industries. In the 2011 election, during the height of the euro crisis, it shocked the traditional parties by winning 19% of the vote. “We can’t be ignored, because a strong majority government won’t be possible without us,” Timo Soini, the party leader, said [..]

The country is struggling to emerge from a three-year recession after key industries such as its papermakers have buckled amid slumping demand and Nokia Oyj lost in the smartphone war, cutting thousands of jobs. The government has raised taxes and lowered spending, adding to unpopularity, and on top of that have been bailout costs for Greece and Portugal, among others, which have eroded finances for Finland, still top-rated at Fitch Ratings and Moody’s Investors Service. “Our stance will be very tight, no matter what,” Soini said. “Nothing is forcing Finland to participate in these bailout policies. If we don’t want to take part, we can refuse.”

Soini’s recipe for fixing the economy includes encouraging exports, backing entrepreneurship, investing in road infrastructure and cutting red tape. The party seeks to balance public finances through budget cuts of as much as €3 billion and higher taxes for the wealthy. The euro-skeptic group will probably join a three-party coalition. Polls predict more than 50 seats out of 200 for the opposition Center Party.

The Center Party backed bailouts and loans for Greece, Portugal and Ireland while in government in 2010 and 2011 and was then ousted. It has since opposed further help, alongside The Finns party. The Center Party and us will have a majority within the government, if it keeps the stance it has had,” Soini said. His group isn’t currently pushing for Finland to exit the euro. Still, “Finland should under no circumstances declare it will always and forever stay,” he said.

The party first negotiated joining government after the 2011 elections, after catapulting to third place with 39 lawmakers. Its opposition to euro-area bailouts in the height of the crisis meant the door to government was closed. In 2007, its five seats didn’t qualify for an invitation to join talks to form a ruling coalition. “We’ve grown, we’ve moved forward, we’ve stabilized,” Soini said. “It’s a key goal for us to consolidate our backing and be one of the big parties, so that we’re not just a one-vote wonder.”

Of course, there are worse options than the True Finns. You can get from anti-immigrant to downright extreme right wing, where Greece may be headed if Europe doesn’t adapt to Syriza’s view of what the eurozone might be.

The prevailing views amongst Europe’s richer nations, and its domestic banking sectors, don’t look promising. And when the European project crashes to a halt, things are not going be pretty. The wisest thing for Brussels to do may well be to try and dismantle itself as peacefully as it can. But Brussels is far too loaded with people seeking to hold on to the power they have gathered.

Still, there’s no denying they have held sway over rapidly deteriorating conditions on the ground (though they will prefer to lay the blame elsewhere), which will down the line lead to their own downfall. They better listen to Yanis now.

Oct 242014
 
 October 24, 2014  Posted by at 12:52 pm Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , ,  4 Responses »


Jack Delano Family of Dennis Decosta, Portuguese Farm Security Administration client Dec 1940

The Zombie System: How Capitalism Has Gone Off the Rails (Spiegel)
Fed’s $4 Trillion Holdings Keep Boosting Growth Beyond End of QE (Bloomberg)
EU Tells Britain To Pay Extra €2.1 Billion Because It Does Well (FT)
EU Agrees To Budget Talks After £1.7 Billion Cash Demand On UK (BBC)
Renzi Vs Barroso Over EU’s Budget Letter (FT)
EU Agrees Target To Cut Greenhouse Gas Emissions by 40% in 2030 (FT)
German Lawmakers Rip ECB Over Corporate Bonds Report (Reuters)
ECB Tries for Third Time Lucky in European Stress Tests (Bloomberg)
World Faces $650 Billion Housing Problem (CNBC)
China’s Economic Growth May Slow Further, Data Show (MarketWatch)
China Local Debt Fix Hangs On Beijing’s Wishful Thinking (Reuters)
China Home-Price Drop Spreads as Easing Fails to Halt Slide (Bloomberg)
China Scores Cheap Oil 14,000 Miles Away as Glut Deepens (Bloomberg)
Saudi Arabia’s Risky Oil-Price Play (BW)
Eastern Europe Shivers Thinking About Winter Without Gas (Bloomberg)
Germany Inc. Scrutinized for Using Labor Like Paper Clips (Bloomberg)
Alabama Man Gets $1,000 In Police Settlement, His Lawyers Get $459,000 (Reuters)
Doctor With Ebola In Manhattan Hospital After Return From Guinea (Reuters)
Mali Becomes Sixth African Country To Report Ebola Case (Bloomberg)

Great, long, 4-part series from German Der Spiegel magazine.

The Zombie System: How Capitalism Has Gone Off the Rails (Spiegel)

Six years after the Lehman disaster, the industrialized world is suffering from Japan Syndrome. Growth is minimal, another crash may be brewing and the gulf between rich and poor continues to widen. Can the global economy reinvent itself?

[..] Politicians and business leaders everywhere are now calling for new growth initiatives, but the governments’ arsenals are empty. The billions spent on economic stimulus packages following the financial crisis have created mountains of debt in most industrialized countries and they now lack funds for new spending programs. Central banks are also running out of ammunition. They have pushed interest rates close to zero and have spent hundreds of billions to buy government bonds. Yet the vast amounts of money they are pumping into the financial sector isn’t making its way into the economy. Be it in Japan, Europe or the United States, companies are hardly investing in new machinery or factories anymore. Instead, prices are exploding on the global stock, real estate and bond markets, a dangerous boom driven by cheap money, not by sustainable growth. Experts with the Bank for International Settlements have already identified “worrisome signs” of an impending crash in many areas.

In addition to creating new risks, the West’s crisis policy is also exacerbating conflicts in the industrialized nations themselves. While workers’ wages are stagnating and traditional savings accounts are yielding almost nothing, the wealthier classes — those that derive most of their income by allowing their money to work for them — are profiting handsomely. According to the latest Global Wealth Report by the Boston Consulting Group, worldwide private wealth grew by about 15% last year, almost twice as fast as in the 12 months previous. The data expose a dangerous malfunction in capitalism’s engine room. Banks, mutual funds and investment firms used to ensure that citizens’ savings were transformed into technical advances, growth and new jobs. Today they organize the redistribution of social wealth from the bottom to the top. The middle class has also been negatively affected: For years, many average earners have seen their prosperity shrinking instead of growing.

Read more …

“Boosting growth”. Are we ever going to get real?

Fed’s $4 Trillion Holdings Keep Boosting Growth Beyond End of QE (Bloomberg)

Quantitative easing may turn out to be a gift that keeps on giving for the U.S. economy. As the Federal Reserve prepares to end its third round of bond buying next week, the central bank plans to hang on to the record $4.48 trillion balance sheet it has accumulated since announcing the first round of purchases in November 2008. That will continue to keep a lid on borrowing costs, helping the Fed lift inflation closer to its target and providing support to a five-year expansion facing headwinds abroad, from war in the Mideast to slowing growth in Europe and China. Holding bonds on the Fed’s balance sheet limits the supply of securities trading on the public markets, which helps keep prices up and yields lower than they otherwise would be. That provides stimulus to the economy just as a cut in the Fed’s benchmark interest rate would, according to Michael Gapen, a senior U.S. economist for Barclays in New York and former Fed Board section chief.

“Preserving it will continue to support the economy,” Gapen said. “The Fed message is we think we’ve done enough to generate momentum and keep the economy on the right track. Now we’re going to wait and see how things go.” The Federal Open Market Committee plans to end its purchases of Treasuries and mortgage bonds at the next meeting Oct. 28-29, according to minutes of the last gathering. Chair Janet Yellen opened the door to keeping a multi-trillion-dollar portfolio for years, saying a decision on when to stop reinvesting maturing bonds depends on financial conditions and the economic outlook. Shrinking the balance sheet to normal historical levels “could take to the end of the decade,” Yellen said at her press conference last month. Fed quantitative easing has provided the Treasury market with a steady and consistent buyer, helping to keep yields lower than they otherwise would be. The central bank is now the largest holder of U.S. government securities.

Read more …

Don’t even try to tell me you could have made this up: “The surcharge stems from the EU changing the way it calculates gross national income to include more hidden elements such as prostitution and illegal drugs.”

EU Tells Britain To Pay Extra €2.1 Billion Because It Does Well (FT)

Britain has been told to pay an extra €2.1 billion to the EU budget within weeks on account of its relative prosperity, a hefty surcharge that will further add to David Cameron’s domestic woes over Europe. To compensate for its economy performing better than other EU countries since 1995, the UK will have to make a top-up payment on December 1 representing almost a fifth of the country’s net contribution last year. France, meanwhile, will receive a €1 billion rebate, according to Brussels calculations seen by the Financial Times. The one-off bill will infuriate eurosceptic MPs at an awkward moment for the prime minister, who is wrestling with strong anti-EU currents in British politics that are buffeting his party and prompting a rethink of the UK’s place in Europe. Mr Cameron is determined to challenge the additional fee and last night met with Mark Rutte, the Netherlands premier, to discuss the issue. His country is also being required to make a top-up payment, though it is smaller than the UK’s.

A Downing Street source said: “It’s not acceptable to just change the fees for previous years and demand them back at a moment’s notice.” The source added: “The European Commission was not expecting this money and does not need this money and we will work with other countries similarly affected to do all we can to challenge this.” The surcharge stems from the EU changing the way it calculates gross national income to include more hidden elements such as prostitution and illegal drugs. [..] The surcharge comes on top of the net UK contribution to the EU budget, which was £8.6 billion in 2013. Britain faces by far the biggest top-up payment: the preliminary figures show that the Netherlands pays an extra €642 million, while Germany receives a rebate of €779 million, France €1 billion and Poland €316 million.

Read more …

It’s a shame the Anglo press make this about Britain. Holland pays far more extra per capita (more expensive hookers?), but what’s really fun is that Greece has to pay more too, and Italy. Let’s give the EU all the room they need to majestically screw this up.

EU Agrees To Budget Talks After £1.7 Billion Cash Demand On UK (BBC)

EU finance finance ministers have agreed to David Cameron’s call for emergency talks after the UK was told it must pay an extra £1.7bn. Mr Cameron interrupted a meeting of EU leaders in Brussels to express dismay at the demand for the UK to pay more into the EU’s coffers on 1 December. He told Commission boss Jose Manuel Barroso he had no idea of the impact it would have, Downing Street said. It will add about a fifth to the UK’s annual net EU contribution of £8.6bn. There has been anger across the political spectrum in the UK at the EU’s demand for additional money, which comes just weeks before the vital Rochester and Strood by-election, where UKIP is trying to take the seat from the Conservatives. EU leaders discussed the issue for an hour in Brussels on Friday, with Mr Cameron due to give a press conference later. Mr Cameron told Mr Barroso, who steps down next month, that the problem was not just press or public opinion but was about the amount of money being demanded.

The surcharge follows an annual review of the economic performance of EU member states since 1995, which showed Britain has done better than previously thought. Elements of the black economy – such as drugs and prostitution – have also been included in the calculations for the first time. The prime minister will do everything he can to show he’s coming out fighting over the EU budget demand. He has buttonholed Commission President Barroso. He has called for an emergency meeting. EU leaders have pondered the problem for a full hour in their meeting. The PM is proud of getting down the EU budget limit in 2013. He says it proves he can get his way in Brussels. Handing over £1.7bn to the EU would sting at any time. Doing it a few days after a crunch by-election scrap with UKIP would be agony. This could still go David Cameron’s way. If he can persuade the EU to tear up the bill, he can come out smiling. If he fails it will hurt the Conservatives badly.

Read more …

Nice side fight.

Renzi Vs Barroso Over EU’s Budget Letter (FT)

If you read the EU’s budget rules, it appears to be a cut and dried affair: if the European Commission has concerns that a eurozone country’s budget is in “particularly serious non-compliance” with deficit or debt limits, it has to inform the government of its concerns within one week of the budget’s submission. Such contact is the first step towards sending the budget back entirely for revision. As the FT was the first to report this week, the Commission decided to notify five countries – Italy, France, Austria, Slovenia and Malta – that their budgets may be problematic on Wednesday. Helpfully, the Italian government posted the “strictly confidential” letter it received from the Commission’s economic chief, Jyrki Katainen, on its website today.

But at day one of the EU summit in Brussels, the letter – and Italy’s decision to post it – suddenly became the subject of a very public tit-for-tat between José Manuel Barroso, the outgoing Commission president, and Matteo Renzi, the Italian prime minster. Barroso fired the first shot at a pre-summit news conference, expressing surprise and annoyance that Renzi’s government had decided to make the letter public. For good measure, he took a pop at the Italian press, which in recent days has been reporting that Barroso was the one pushing for a hard line against Rome, and implying he was motivated by his desire to score political points back home in Portugal, where he has long been rumoured as a potential presidential candidate after leaving the Commission:

The first thing I will say is this: If you look at the Italian press, if you look at most of what is reported about what I’ve said or what the Commission has said, most of this news is absolutely false, surreal, having nothing to do with reality. And if they coincide with reality, I think it’s by chance.

Aside from his swipe at Italian newspapers, Barroso was clearly annoyed at the Italian government, saying Katainen’s letter was intended to be private correspondence to begin talks over trying to get Italy’s budget back in line with EU rules:

Regarding the letter from vice-president Katainen yesterday, sent to his Italian colleague, the decision to publish it on the website of the ministry of finance is a unilateral decision by the Italian government. The Commission was not in favour of the publication because we are continuing consultations with various governments. These are informal consultations and in some cases they are quite technical, and we think it’s better to have this kind of consultations in an atmosphere of trust. But the Italian government contacted the Vice President Katainen telling him that he would publish the letter and of course we do not object to the publication, it is their right, but again, this is not true it is the Commission which pressed the government to publish the letter. If we wanted to publish it, the Commission could publish the letter itself.

Read more …

Hot air in every sense of the word.

EU Agrees Target To Cut Greenhouse Gas Emissions by 40% in 2030 (FT)

The EU has set the pace for a global climate agreement in Paris next year by overcoming resistance from eastern member states and agreeing a landmark target to cut greenhouse gas emissions. The 28-member bloc has been so riven by divisions over environmental policy in recent months that Brussels risked losing its status as the global leader in the fight against climate change. In the days before an EU summit on Thursday, countries as diverse as Portugal and Poland appeared liable to veto a deal on setting a new target for reducing emissions by 2030. Talks dragged on into the early hours of Friday morning before European leaders finally agreed to a cut of at least 40% from 1990 levels. Environmentalists have slammed this goal as the bare minimum required for the EU to play its role in containing global warming, but diplomats argue that it was the toughest target that could win broad political support across Europe.

“We have sent a strong signal to other big economies and all other countries: we have done our homework, now we urge you to follow Europe’s example,” said Connie Hedegaard, the EU’s climate commissioner. Green groups condemned the deal as a political fudge. Greenpeace had pushed for a cut of 55%. “It’s a deal that puts dirty industry interests ahead of citizens and the planet,” said Brook Riley of Friends of the Earth. The EU said that its 40% target would be reviewed after the UN’s Paris conference next year where a global deal on cutting emissions is expected. Some European countries had been fearful that the EU would set itself too high a target, which the U.S. and China would not follow.

Read more …

This fight ain’t over.

German Lawmakers Rip ECB Over Corporate Bonds Report (Reuters)

Senior lawmakers from Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservative party heaped criticism on the European Central Bank on Wednesday following a Reuters report that it was considering the purchase of corporate bonds to spur growth. The report on Tuesday, citing several sources familiar with the central bank’s thinking, said the ECB could decide as soon as December to go ahead with corporate bond buys on the secondary market, with a view to starting the purchases early next year. ECB officials confirmed on Wednesday that buying corporate bonds was an option for the bank but said no final decision had been taken on whether to go ahead. “The Governing Council has taken no such decision,” an ECB spokesman said. The move would widen out the private-sector asset-buying program that it began on Monday in the hopes of encouraging more lending to businesses in the faltering euro zone economy.

“With its purchase programs, the ECB is taking unforeseeable risks onto its balance sheet,” said Norbert Barthle, a veteran lawmaker for Merkel’s Christian Democrats (CDU) who sits on the Bundestag’s budget committee. The ECB should focus on its main target of price stability and refrain from more “dubious measures” to boost the economy, Barthle warned. Hans Michelbach of the Christian Social Union (CSU), the Bavarian sister party of the CDU, said Draghi was endangering the stability of financial markets with his moves. “The ECB is turning itself into a bad bank for the euro zone’s crisis countries at an increasingly rapid pace,” said the senior conservative member of the finance committee. “The ECB needs a clear change of course.”

Read more …

It’ll be fun Sunday at noon EU time. Draft was just leaked that says 25 banks will fail. Numbers get bigger.

ECB Tries for Third Time Lucky in European Stress Tests (Bloomberg)

For the European Central Bank, success as the euro area’s financial supervisor may begin this weekend with a few failures. At noon in Frankfurt on Oct. 26, investors will learn which of the currency bloc’s 130 biggest banks fell short in the ECB’s year-long examination of their asset strength and ability to withstand economic turbulence. After two previous stress tests run by the European Banking Authority didn’t reveal problems at lenders that later failed, the ECB has staked its reputation on getting this exercise right. The two-part audit known as the Comprehensive Assessment forms one pillar of the ECB’s effort to move the euro zone forward after half a decade of financial turmoil by disclosing the extent of the damage. Since the beginning, ECB President Mario Draghi has said banks need to fail to prove the losses of the past have been dealt with.

“There will be enough for policy makers to declare victory, but the full picture will take longer to emerge because this thing is so complicated,” said Nicolas Veron, a fellow at the Bruegel research group in Brussels. “What you don’t want is to sound the all clear and then three to six months later, there’s an unpleasant surprise.” Bank-level data and an aggregate report on the Asset-Quality Review and stress test will be released on the ECB’s website at 12 p.m. Frankfurt time. The ECB stress test was conducted in tandem with the London-based EBA, which will release its results at the same time. The EBA’s sample largely overlaps the ECB’s, though it also contains banks from outside the euro area.

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The $650 billion is what people can’t afford to pay, but have to anyway.

World Faces $650 Billion Housing Problem (CNBC)

A staggering 330 million urban households around the world live in substandard housing or are so financially stretched by housing costs they forgo other basic needs like food and health care, according to McKinsey. Urban dwellers globally fork out $650 billion more per year on housing than they can afford, or around 1% of world gross domestic product (GDP), McKinsey estimated in a new report, highlighting the enormity of the affordability gap. More than two-thirds of the gap is concentrated in 100 large cities. In several low-income cities such as Lagos and Mumbai, the affordable housing gap can amount to as much as 10% of area GDP. McKinsey’s study looked at the cost of housing as a portion of household income in cities around the world to determine where urban residents were most under financial pressure For this study, it defined affordability as housing costs that consume no more than 30% of household income.

Based on current trends in urban migration and income growth, the affordable housing gap would grow to 440 million, or 1.6 billion people, within a decade. This trend will exact an enormous toll on society, the report warned. “For families lacking decent affordable housing, health outcomes are poorer, children do less well in school and tend to drop out earlier, unemployment and under-employment rates are higher, and financial inclusion is lower,” it said. McKinsey estimates that an investment of $9-$11 trillion would be required to replace today’s substandard housing and build additional units needed by 2025. Including land, the total cost could be $16 trillion. The belief that major cities no longer have land for affordable housing is a myth, it added. Even in cities such as New York there are many parcels of under-utilized or idle land—including government-owned land—that could support successful housing development, the report said.

Read more …

Bet you it’s already much lower than reported.

China’s Economic Growth May Slow Further, Data Show (MarketWatch)

September data suggest China’s economic growth may well slow further, the Conference Board said late Thursday, citing its Leading Economic Index. The index rose 0.9% in September, after a 0.7% gain in August, but a 1.3% rise in July, the association said. “The six-month growth rate of the Leading Economic Index has eased steadily throughout the third quarter, indicating increased downside risks to economic growth in the months ahead,” Conference Board China Center resident economist Andrew Polk said. “While activity in the property sector stabilized a bit, sharp weakening in demand for both bank credit and real estate point to sluggish private investment in the last quarter of 2014. Recent developments, therefore, confirm our long-term view of a soft fall of the economy,” Polk said.

Read more …

It’s the amounts of debt that are the problem, but Beijing wants to solve it by changing the kinds of debt.

China Local Debt Fix Hangs On Beijing’s Wishful Thinking (Reuters)

China is asserting control over once-chaotic local government financing by banning the use of opaque funding vehicles, but filling the gap with a huge expansion of the fledgling municipal bond market will raise a whole new set of problems. Chastened by promiscuous local investment in response to the 2008 global financial crisis, Beijing wants to restore discipline as part of its wider economic reforms, but the muni bond market, be deviled by price distortions and inadequate disclosure standards, is no quick fix. China’s State Council, the country’s cabinet-level political institution, prohibited local government financial vehicles (LGFVs) from raising funds on behalf of local authorities in a decree issued earlier this month. On Tuesday sources told Reuters the Ministry of Finance had circulated a draft document saying localities would be allowed to issue new muni bonds to pay off old debt.

“It’s not an isolated move – rather it’s part of a systematic approach to tackle the local debt issue,” said Bank of America-Merrill Lynch China strategist Tracy Tian. If the draft becomes law and localities are allowed to roll over a substantial portion of their estimated 18 trillion yuan ($3 trillion) of outstanding debt, the muni bond market would have to expand dramatically from the quota of just 109.2 billion yuan that Beijing has set for 2014. “We estimate that as much as 1 trillion yuan of new bonds may be issued to fill the financing gap in 2015,” wrote UBS economist Tao Wang in a research note this month. The market appears ill-equipped for such explosive growth. It got off to a dubious start in 2014, with impoverished and debt-ridden local governments able to issue bonds at yields below even the central government’s sovereign yield.

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It’ll be fine till panic selling starts. Then it will no longer be so fine.

China Home-Price Drop Spreads as Easing Fails to Halt Slide (Bloomberg)

China’s new-home prices fell in all but one city monitored by the government last month as the easing of property curbs failed to stem a market downturn amid tight credit. Prices dropped in 69 of the 70 cities in September from August, the National Bureau of Statistics said in a statement today, the most since January 2011 when the government changed the way it compiles the data. They fell in 68 cities in August. The central bank on Sept. 30 eased mortgage rules for homebuyers that have paid off existing loans, reversing course after a four-year campaign to contain home prices as Premier Li Keqiang seeks to prevent economic growth from drifting too far below the government’s 7.5% annual target. Home sales slumped 11% in the first nine months of this year.

“Prices will continue the downtrend for the rest of the year,” said Donald Yu, Shenzhen-based analyst at Guotai Junan Securities Co. “If sales in the fourth quarter fail to clear inventories as developers want, more price cuts are still likely in the first quarter of next year.” All but five of the 46 cities that imposed limits on home ownership since 2010 have removed or relaxed such restrictions amid the property downturn that has dented local revenues from land sales.

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Bit of ISIS oil with that, perhaps?

China Scores Cheap Oil 14,000 Miles Away as Glut Deepens (Bloomberg)

China is finding oil supplies 14,000 miles away, aided by the global rout in prices that’s left producers vying for new markets. PetroChina Co. said it bought Colombian crude for a northern refinery for the first time because it was good value. The transaction underscores how the world’s second-biggest oil consumer is benefiting as producers from the Middle East to Latin America vie for customers in Asia. Brent oil futures tumbled to the lowest level since 2010 as the highest U.S. output in almost 30 years cuts its consumption of foreign crude. OPEC’s biggest producers are reducing prices to defend their market share. China consumed the second-biggest amount of crude on record in September and imported the largest volume ever for that time of year, customs data show.

“China will just look to get the cheapest crude possible from whatever source it can,” Virendra Chauhan, a London-based analyst at Energy Aspects Ltd., said by phone Oct. 21. “I expect a lot more volumes flowing to China in particular.” The country’s crude imports rose 7.8 percent to 27.6 million tons, or 6.74 million barrels a day, in September from last year, the data show. The number of supertankers sailing toward China’s ports surged to a nine-month high last week, according to IHS Fairplay vessel-tracking signals compiled by Bloomberg as of Oct. 17.

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Lots of curious views and opinions on Saudi oil policy.

Saudi Arabia’s Risky Oil-Price Play (BW)

With the U.S. on track to become the world’s largest oil producer by next year, it’s become popular in Washington and on Wall Street to call America the new Saudi Arabia. Yet the real Saudi Arabia hasn’t relinquished its role as the producer with the most influence over oil prices. Its reserves of 266 billion barrels, ability to pump as many as 12.5 million barrels a day, and, most important, its low cost of extracting crude still make it a formidable rival to the U.S., whose shale wells are hard to exploit. “Saudi Arabia is the only one in the position of putting more oil on the market when they want to and cutting production when they want to,” says Edward Chow, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. The Saudis are also the most powerful member of OPEC, the 12-member group that’s increasingly facing off against Russian, U.S., and Canadian production.

In September, despite a global oil glut developing largely because of China’s slowdown and the rapid increase in U.S. production, the Saudis boosted production half a percent, to 9.6 million barrels a day, lifting OPEC’s combined production to an 11-month high of almost 31 million barrels a day. Then, on Oct. 1, Saudi Arabia lowered prices by increasing the discount it offered its major Asian customers. The kingdom might just as easily have cut production to defend higher prices. Instead, the Saudis sent a strong signal that they were determined to protect their market share, especially in India and China, against Russian, Latin American, and African rivals. Iraq and Iran followed Saudi Arabia’s example. The news set off a bear market in oil: Brent crude, the international benchmark, fell from $115.71 a barrel on June 19 to $82.60 a barrel on Oct. 16, the lowest price in almost four years, as investors realized that the big oil states were not going to cut production.

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Better get ready to make that deal.

Eastern Europe Shivers Thinking About Winter Without Gas (Bloomberg)

As winter approaches, former Soviet satellite nations from Poland to Bulgaria are watching Russia and Ukraine’s stalled gas negotiations with growing trepidation. The lack of discernible progress is sending a collective shiver down the spine of Eastern Europe, which retains vivid memories of Russian energy cuts during unusually cold winters in 2006 and 2009. The ensuing shortages led to shuttered factories and a return to wood for heating and cooking in rural areas. Despite the two episodes, little has been done to diversify supplies within a region that remains highly dependent on energy delivery systems dating back to the Soviet era. “Parts of eastern Europe are still quite vulnerable this winter,” said Emily Stromquist, a Eurasia analyst in London. “The problem is that until recently the relations with Russia have generally been good, so perhaps there was no feeling of urgency to build quickly.”

If Moscow and Kiev don’t reach a compromise before winter and OAO Gazprom fails to restart supplies to its western neighbor, Ukraine may resort to siphoning off gas carried through its territory. As in 2009, that could prompt Russia to cut transit through Ukraine altogether, leaving parts of eastern Europe exposed to severe shortages. Poland, Hungary and especially the Balkan peninsula would be most affected. Connected to the old Soviet pipeline system that runs through Ukraine and Moldova, the Balkan countries rely on Russia for close to 100% of their needs. Moreover, they’re poorly connected with their neighbors and their underground storage isn’t sufficient to cover demand for the entire winter.

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German salaries: €48.40 ($61.27) per hour on average. This compares to €4.81 in Romania and €25.63 in the U.S.

Germany Inc. Scrutinized for Using Labor Like Paper Clips (Bloomberg)

Daimler AG is among German companies that have found a way to cut personnel costs in the high-wage country: buy labor like it’s paper clips. By purchasing certain tasks such as logistics services from subcontractors, businesses can legally keep these workers off the payroll and outside of wage agreements with unions. That’s led to growing ranks of contract workers who help boost profit at German companies by lowering labor costs. The downside is abuse of the system, which leaves some workers unprotected and even unpaid. That’s caught the attention of Labor Minister Andrea Nahles, who’s promising a crackdown, and forcing Germany Inc. to defend the practice. “We can’t pay everyone the high wage” in union deals, Wilfried Porth, Daimler’s personnel chief, said in an e-mail to Bloomberg News. “Our cost situation has deteriorated compared to the competition. We can’t afford that.”

Proponents argue hiring subcontractors to provide services keeps Germany, where labor costs in the auto industry are the highest in the world, competitive. Opponents say the widespread practice in industries that include shipbuilding, retail, logistics and construction undermines the German labor model of a partnership between employers and workers. Every third employee in the German auto industry is working either for a subcontractor or as a temporary laborer, according to a poll by IG Metall union published last November. Doing so has helped keep in check already high personnel costs, which amount to €48.40 ($61.27) per hour on average, according to the Berlin-based VDA auto industry group. This compares to €4.81 in Romania and €25.63 in the U.S.

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What a lovely example of a screwed up society. For all sorts of reasons.

Alabama Man Gets $1,000 In Police Settlement, His Lawyers Get $459,000 (Reuters)

An Alabama man who sued over being hit and kicked by police after leading them on a high-speed chase will get $1,000 in a settlement with the city of Birmingham, while his attorneys will take in $459,000, officials said Wednesday. The incident gained public attention with the release of a 2008 video of police officers punching and kicking Anthony Warren as he lay on the ground after leading them on a roughly 20-minute high-speed chase. Warren is serving a 20-year sentence for attempted murder stemming from his running over a police officer during the chase, in which he also hit a school bus and a patrol car before crashing and being ejected from his vehicle.

Under the terms of the settlement of Warren’s 2009 federal suit, in which he accused five Birmingham police officers of excessive force, his attorneys will receive $100,000 for expenses and $359,000 in fees, said Michael Choy, an attorney representing the officers on behalf of the city. The agreement was reached last month and approved on Tuesday by the Birmingham City Council. The city settled to avoid further litigation and the risk of a higher payout, Choy said.

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Riding the subway?!

Doctor With Ebola In Manhattan Hospital After Return From Guinea (Reuters)

A doctor who worked in West Africa with Ebola patients was in an isolation unit in New York on Friday after testing positive for the deadly virus, becoming the fourth person diagnosed with the disease in the United States and the first in its largest city. The worst Ebola outbreak on record has killed at least 4,900 people and perhaps as many as 15,000, mostly in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea, according to World Health Organization figures. Only four Ebola cases have been diagnosed so far in the United States: Thomas Eric Duncan, who died on Oct. 8 at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital in Dallas, two nurses who treated him there and the latest case, Dr. Craig Spencer. Spencer, 33, who worked for Doctors Without Borders, was taken to Bellevue Hospital on Thursday, six days after returning from Guinea, renewing public jitters about transmission of the disease in the United States and rattling financial markets. Three people who had close contact with Spencer were quarantined for observation – one of them, his fiancée, at the same hospital – but all were still healthy, officials said.

Mayor Bill de Blasio and Governor Andrew Cuomo sought to reassure New Yorkers they were safe, even though Spencer had ridden subways, taken a taxi and visited a bowling alley between his return from Guinea and the onset of his symptoms. “There is no reason for New Yorkers to be alarmed,” de Blasio said at a news conference at Bellevue. “Being on the same subway car or living near someone with Ebola does not in itself put someone at risk.” Health officials emphasized that the virus is not airborne but is spread only through direct contact with bodily fluids from an infected person who is showing symptoms. After taking his own temperature twice daily since his return, Spencer reported running a fever and experiencing gastrointestinal symptoms for the first time early on Thursday. He was then taken from his Manhattan apartment to Bellevue by a special team wearing protective gear, city officials said. He was not feeling sick and would not have been contagious before Thursday morning, city Health Commissioner Mary Travis Bassett said.

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“Others at risk are Benin, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Democratic Republic of Congo, Gambia, Ghana, Mauritania, Nigeria, South Sudan, and Togo.” Add Kenya.

Mali Becomes Sixth African Country To Report Ebola Case (Bloomberg)

Mali became the sixth West African country to report a case of Ebola, opening a new front in the international effort to prevent the outbreak of the deadly viral infection from spreading further. A 2-year-old girl who traveled from Kissidougou, Guinea, with her family to Mali was admitted to a hospital in Kayes yesterday, Malian President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita’s office said in a statement. Test results confirmed she had Ebola. Ebola has infected almost 10,000 people this year, mostly in Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia, killing about 4,900. Senegal and Nigeria, which also had cases, are now free of the virus. Disease trackers now must trace everyone the girl came in contact with and monitor them for signs of infection. Mali was one of four countries the World Health Organization said this month was at highest risk of Ebola among a group of African nations the agency said needed to be prepared for cases.

A WHO-led team has been in Mali this week helping to identify gaps in the country’s defenses. “The big issue is getting the response up in those countries so that you can prevent a travel-related case from becoming an outbreak,” Keiji Fukuda, the WHO’s assistant director-general for health security, said in a phone interview today. “We’re working with Mali to try to contain it in the same way that it was contained in Senegal and in Nigeria.” Mali, a nation of about 16.5 million people to the northeast of Guinea, is Africa’s third-largest gold producer. Ivory Coast, Senegal and Guinea Bissau also are at the top of the list of countries that need to be prepared for Ebola cases, the WHO said Oct. 10. Others at risk are Benin, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Democratic Republic of Congo, Gambia, Ghana, Mauritania, Nigeria, South Sudan, and Togo.

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Oct 222014
 
 October 22, 2014  Posted by at 10:47 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , ,  2 Responses »


Russell Lee Migrant family in trailer home near Edinburg, Texas Feb 1939

At Least 11 Banks To Fail European Stress Tests (Reuters)
All the Markets Need Is $200 Billion a Quarter From the Central Bankers (BW)
What Would It Take To Trigger The ‘Fed Put’? (MarketWatch)
Currency Wars Evolve With Goal of Avoiding, Exporting Deflation (Bloomberg)
Are Belgium, Finland And France The ‘New Periphery’ In Europe? (CNBC)
EU To Warn France And Italy On Budget Plans (FT)
US Shale Producers Cramming Wells in Risky Push to Extend Boom (Bloomberg)
Oil at $80 a Barrel Muffles Forecasts for US Shale Boom (Bloomberg)
How Wall Street Is Killing Big Oil (Oilprice.com)
Investors Pile Into Oil Funds at Fastest Pace in 2 Years (Bloomberg)
Markets Need To Accept Low Growth As ‘New Normal’ In China (Saxo)
China to Let World in on Gauge Showing State of Economy (Bloomberg)
UK Deficit Up 10% From Last Year, National Debt Rises £100 Billion (Guardian)
The Moral Economy Of Debt (Robert Skidelsky)
Fears Over Gas Supply As Russia-Ukraine Talks Fail (Reuters)
New York Fed Caught Sight of London Whale and Let Him Go (Bloomberg)
World’s Top-Ranked Pension Funds Probed for Hedge Fund Use (Bloomberg)
How To Start A War And Lose An Empire (Dmitry Orlov)
“Omenland” (James Howard Kunstler)
WHO: Ebola Serum In Weeks And Vaccine Tests In Africa By January (Guardian)

This could make a whole lot of people really nervous.

At Least 11 Banks To Fail European Stress Tests (Reuters)

At least 11 banks from six European countries are set to fail a region-wide financial health check this weekend, Spanish news agency Efe reported, citing several unidentified financial sources. The results of the stress tests on 130 banks by the European Central Bank are due to be unveiled on Sunday. Four banks in Greece, three Italian lenders and two Austrian ones are among those that preliminary data showed had failed the tests, Efe said. It gave no details of how much capital the banks would have to raise and said this could yet change as numbers could be revised at the last minute.

The euro fell on the report. Efe also identified a Cypriot bank and possibly one from Belgium and one from Portugal. The exercise is designed to see how banks would cope under various economic scenarios, including adverse ones, and is likely to reveal capital shortfalls at some entities. The ECB is carrying out the checks of how the biggest euro zone banks have valued their assets, and whether they have enough capital to weather another economic crash, before taking over as their supervisor on Nov. 4.

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Anyone still realize how insane that is, or are our brains completely numb and dumbed down by now?

All the Markets Need Is $200 Billion a Quarter From the Central Bankers (BW)

The central-bank put lives on. Policy makers deny its existence, yet investors still reckon that whenever stocks and other risk assets take a tumble, the authorities will be there with calming words or economic stimulus to ensure the losses are limited. A put option gives investors the right to sell their asset at a set price so the theory goes that central banks will ultimately provide a floor for falling asset markets to ensure they don’t take economies down with them. Last week as markets swooned again, it was St. Louis Federal Reserve President James Bullard and Bank of England Chief Economist Andrew Haldane who did the trick.

Bullard said the Fed should consider delaying the end of its bond-purchase program to halt a decline in inflation expectations, while Haldane said he’s less likely to vote for a U.K. rate increase than three months ago. “These comments left markets with the impression that the ‘central-bank put’ is still in place,” Morgan Stanley currency strategists led by Hans Redeker told clients in a report yesterday. Matt King, global head of credit strategy at Citigroup, and colleagues have put a price on how much liquidity central banks need to provide each quarter to stop markets from sliding. By estimating that zero stimulus would be consistent with a 10% quarterly drop in equities, they calculate it takes around $200 billion from central banks each quarter to keep markets from selling off.

With the Fed and counterparts peeling back their net liquidity injections from almost $1 trillion in 2012 toward that magic marker, King’s team said “a negative reaction in markets was long overdue.” “We think the markets’ weakness owes more to an almost belated reaction to a temporary lull in central bank stimulus than it does to any reduction in the effect of that stimulus in propping up asset prices,” they said in an Oct. 17 report to clients. Bank of America Merrill Lynch strategists said in a report today that another 10% decline in U.S. stocks might spark speculation of a fourth round of quantitative easing from the Fed. That would mimic how the Fed acted following equity declines of 11% in 2010 and 16% in 2011.

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It would seem that all it takes is for other central bankers failing to put in those $200 billion four times a year. But that still pre-supposes that the Fed’s first priority is to support the markets. Whereas I suggest it’s to support the big banks. And that’s not one and the same thing.

What Would It Take To Trigger The ‘Fed Put’? (MarketWatch)

Janet Yellen runs the Federal Reserve now, but that doesn’t mean that notions about what used to be known as the “Bernanke put,” named after her predecessor, Ben Bernanke, have expired. So far, there’s been little talk of a “Yellen put,” but the U.S. Federal Reserve still remains ready to bail out the markets if things get hairy, Bank of America Merrill Lynch analysts say. Actual financial puts give the holder the right but not the obligation to sell the underlying security at a set price, known as the strike price. Puts named after central bankers are figurative. They’re shorthand for the idea the Fed will rush in to rescue tanking markets, a notion denied by Alan Greenspan and Bernanke, but reinforced by the Fed’s aggressive actions following big market declines, most recently, during the 2008 crisis. The BofA Merrill analysts, in a Tuesday note, say recent market volatility shows that investors are now losing faith in what traders had dubbed the “Draghi put,” named after European Central Bank President Mario Draghi.

Investors are growing less certain the ECB will step in with a program of full-fledged quantitative easing of its own stave off deflationary pressures in the eurozone. “If this ECB option turns out to be worthless, the key question becomes how much protection does the Fed provide? In other words, approximately how big can an equity correction become before the Fed steps in again?” they write. They note that in 2010 and 2011, the Fed stepped in following equity corrections of 11% and 16%, respectively. Based on their assessment of last week’s market action, the analysts say it appears it would take a further 10% decline from the recent lows to trigger anticipation of what might be dubbed QE 4, or the fourth iteration of the U.S. central bank’s monetary stimulus measures.

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Everywhere but America.

Currency Wars Evolve With Goal of Avoiding, Exporting Deflation (Bloomberg)

Currency wars are back, though this time the goal is to steal inflation, not growth. Brazil Finance Minister Guido Mantega popularized the term “currency war” in 2010 to describe policies employed at the time by major central banks to boost the competitiveness of their economies through weaker currencies. Now, many see lower exchange rates as a way to avoid crippling deflation. Weak price growth is stifling economies from the euro region to Israel and Japan. Eight of the 10 currencies with the biggest forecasted declines through 2015 are from nations that are either in deflation or pursuing policies that weaken their exchange rates, data compiled by Bloomberg show.

“This beggar-thy-neighbor policy is not about rebalancing, not about growth,” David Bloom, the global head of currency strategy at HSBC which does business in 74 countries and territories, said in an Oct. 17 interview. “This is about deflation, exporting your deflationary problems to someone else.” Bloom puts it in these terms because, when one jurisdiction weakens its exchange rate, another’s gets stronger, making imported goods cheaper. Deflation is a both a consequence of, and contributor to, the global economic slowdown that’s pushing the euro region closer to recession and reducing demand for exports from countries such as China and New Zealand.

[..] Disinflationary pressures in the euro area are starting to spread to its neighbors and biggest trading partners. The currencies of Switzerland, Hungary, Denmark, the Czech Republic and Sweden are forecast to fall from 4% to more than 6% by the end of next year, estimates compiled by Bloomberg show, partly due to policy makers’ actions to stoke prices. “Deflation is spilling over to central and eastern Europe,” Simon Quijano-Evans, head of emerging-markets at Commerzbank, said yesterday by phone. “Weaker exchange rates will help” them tackle the issue, he said. Hungary and Switzerland entered deflation in the past two months, while Swedish central-bank Deputy Governor Per Jansson last week blamed his country’s falling prices partly on rate cuts the ECB used to boost its own inflation. A policy response may be necessary, he warned.

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Interesting development. Forgot to ‘reform’ the core.

Are Belgium, Finland And France The ‘New Periphery’ In Europe? (CNBC)

The improvement in competitiveness in southern euro zone nations has left some core countries such as Belgium and France lagging behind, posing the risk that they could become the “new periphery,” a new report warns. “A handful of core euro zone economies have registered pretty sharp increases in their unit labor costs (ULCs) over the past four years,” according to a report by Capital Economics published Monday. This was happening at the same time as those in many peripheral countries had been falling outright, it said. “While this process may help the peripheral economies regain relative competitiveness more rapidly, some core economies, including Belgium, now look at risk of falling behind, threatening to push the euro-zone’s periphery north,” Roger Bootle and Jonathan Loynes, managing director and chief European economist at Capital Economics respectively, said in their report. The report analysed changes in competitiveness in the euro zone by looking at unit labor costs (the average cost of labor to produce one unit of output) across the region.

On this metric it found that the southern peripheral economies comprised of Spain, Italy, Ireland and Portugal “have succeeded in cutting costs relative to the euro zone as a whole over the past few years.” However, in a handful of core economies, notably Belgium, Finland and France, ULCs have continued to rise, both in absolute terms and relative to the euro zone average. “In Belgium in particular, ULCs have risen sharply and are now the highest in the euro-zone. Belgium’s high costs already appear to be harming both investment and export growth, traditionally strong drivers of growth in the economy. And its current account has fallen into a sustained deficit for the first time in 30 years.” “All this suggests that Belgium’s recovery is unlikely to gather further pace [and] in contrast to governments in the south, we doubt that Belgian politicians will be prepared (or forced) to tackle these issues any time soon.” they added.

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Rome and Paris will stare them down.

EU To Warn France And Italy On Budget Plans (FT)

The European Commission will on Wednesday tell five euro zone countries, including France and Italy, that their budget plans risk breaching EU rules, say three officials briefed on the decision. The move comes a week after all euro zone countries submitted their budgets to Brussels for review as part of the EU’s new fiscal rules. Officially a request for more information, the commission’s move is the first step in a politically charged process of rejecting a euro zone nation’s budget and sending it back to national capitals for revision. A decision on rejection must be made by the end of the month. In addition to France and Italy, EU officials said similar requests will be sent to Austria, Slovenia and Malta. Simon O’Connor, a spokesman for Jyrki Katainen, the EU’s economic commissioner who is in charge of the evaluations, would not confirm the move. But he said it would not mean that Brussels had definitively decided to reject a country’s budget plan.

“Technical consultations with member states on the draft budget plans do not prejudge the outcome of our assessment,” O’Connor said. A formal request for revisions to the French and Italian budgets could prove politically explosive. Both governments are fending off rising anti-EU sentiment. Under the EU’s new budget rules, adopted at the height of the euro zone crisis, the commission is required to send a budget back to its government within two weeks of submission if it finds “particularly serious non-compliance” with EU budget rules. If the commission is contemplating such a move, the rules require it to notify the government in question within one week. Wednesday is the deadline for the one-week notification. EU officials said France and Italy may contravene different parts of the budget rules. France is required to get its deficit back under the EU ceiling of 3% of economic output by next year but its plan ignored that commitment, projecting a deficit of 4.3% of gross domestic product.

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Right. We all know that by sticking two straws in a glass of soda, you get out twice as much as with one. And sure, a shale play is not exactly like a glass of water, but still close enough. I think this is not about getting out more, but about getting the same amount out faster. Doesn’t sound like a terrible solid business model, but it’s not at all surprising either, given how the shale industry operates.

US Shale Producers Cramming Wells in Risky Push to Extend Boom (Bloomberg)

U.S. shale producers are cramming more wells into the juiciest spots of their oilfields in a move that may help keep the drilling boom going as prices plunge. The technique known as downspacing aims to pull more oil at less cost from each field, allowing companies to boost profit, attract more investment and arrange needed loans to continue drilling. Energy companies see closely-packed wells as their best chance to add billions more barrels of oil to U.S. production that’s already the highest in a quarter century. “We would be dealing with more than a decade of inventory,” said Manuj Nikhanj, co-head of energy research for ITG Investment Research in Calgary. “If you can go twice as tight, the multiplication effect is massive.”

To make downspacing work, the industry must first solve a problem that for decades has required producers to carefully distance their wells. Crowded wells may steal crude from each other without raising total production enough to make the extra drilling worthwhile. Too much of that cannibalization could propel the U.S. production revolution into a faster downturn. In the past, most wells were drilled vertically into conventional reservoirs, which act more like pools of oil or gas. Companies learned quickly that packing wells too closely together just drains the reservoirs faster without appreciably increasing production, like two straws in the same milkshake. Shale rock is different, acting more like an oil-soaked sponge.

Drilling sideways through the layers of shale taps more of the resource, while fracking is needed to crack the rock to allow oil and gas to flow more freely into the well. So far, early results from downspacing experiments by a handful of companies have been mixed. It’s “the billion-dollar question,” said Wood Mackenzie’s Jonathan Garrett, “Is downspacing allowing access to new resources, or is it drawing down the existing resources faster?” An analysis of a group of wells on the same lease in La Salle County, in the heart of Texas’s booming Eagle Ford formation, showed that closer spacing reduced the rate of return for drilling to 23% from a high of 62% for wells spaced further apart, according to a paper published in April by Society of Petroleum Engineers.

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A sordid tale indeed.

Oil at $80 a Barrel Muffles Forecasts for US Shale Boom (Bloomberg)

The bear market in oil has analysts reassessing the U.S. shale boom after five years of historic growth. The U.S. benchmark price dropped to $79.78 a barrel on Oct. 16, the lowest since June 2012. At that level, one-third of U.S. shale oil production would be uneconomic, analysts for New York-based Sanford Bernstein said in a report yesterday. Drillers would add fewer barrels to domestic output than the previous year for the first time since 2010, according to Macquarie, ITG Investment and PKVerleger. Horizontal drilling through shale accounts for as much as 55% of U.S. production and just about all the growth, according to Bloomberg Intelligence. The nternational Energy Agency predicted in November that the U.S. would pass Russia and Saudi Arabia to become the biggest producer in the world by 2015. Though some forecasts show oil rebounding or stabilizing, any slower increase in U.S. output would shake perceptions for the global market, said Vikas Dwivedi, an oil and gas economist in Houston for Sydney-based Macquarie.

“It would reshape the way everybody would think about oil,” Dwivedi said. Daily domestic production added a record 944,000 barrels last year and reached a 29-year high of 8.95 million barrels this month, according to the Energy Information Administration, the U.S. Department of Energy’s statistical arm. Output, much less growth, is difficult to maintain because shale wells deplete faster than conventional production. Oil production from shale drilling, which bores horizontally through hard rock, declines more than 80% in four years, more than three times faster than conventional, vertical wells, according to the IEA. New wells have to generate about 1.8 million barrels a day each year to keep production steady, Dwivedi said. At $80 a barrel, output would grow by 5%, down from a previous forecast of 12%, according to New York-based ITG. At $75 a barrel, growth would fall 56% to about 500,000 barrels a day, Dwivedi said. Closer to $70 a barrel, the growth rate would drop to zero, he said.

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why

This has been going on for a number of years. Exxon will go the way of IBM. Or maybe Rosneft can do a hostile take-over. That would be so funny.

How Wall Street Is Killing Big Oil (Oilprice.com)

Lee Raymond, the famously pugnacious oilman who led ExxonMobil between 1999 and 2005, liked to tell Wall Street analysts that covering the company would be boring. “You’ll just have to live with outstanding, consistent financial and operating performance,” he once boasted. For generations, Exxon and its Big Oil brethren, including Chevron, ConocoPhilipps, BP, Royal Dutch Shell and Total, dominated the global energy landscape, raking in enormous profits and delivering fat dividends to shareholders. Big Oil has long been an investor darling. Those days are over. Once reliable market beaters, Big Oil shares are lagging: Over the last five years, when the S&P 500 rose more than 80%, shares of Exxon and Shell rose just over 30%. The underperformance reflects oil majors’ inability to maintain steady cash flows and increase production in a world where much of the easy oil has already been found and project costs are rapidly escalating.

Last year, Exxon, Chevron and Shell failed to increase oil and gas production despite having spent US$500 billion over the previous five years, $120 billion in 2013 alone. Under pressure from investors, the world’s largest oil companies are now forced to cut capital expenditure and sell assets to boost cash flows. Big Oil is, in short, heading towards liquidation. And this process has set in motion a tectonic shift in the global energy balance of power away from western international oil companies, or IOCs, and towards state-owned national oil companies, NOCs, in emerging markets. Not only do the NOCs – companies like Saudi Aramco; Russia’s Gazprom and Rosneft; China’s CNOOC, CNPC and Sinopec; India’s ONGC; Venezuela’s PDVSA; and Brazil’s Petrobras – control approximately 90% of the world’s known petroleum reserves, they are also immune to the market pressures constraining Big Oil.

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Betting that the Saudi’s will blink. Hey, it’s a casino out there.

Investors Pile Into Oil Funds at Fastest Pace in 2 Years (Bloomberg)

Investors are putting money into funds that track oil prices at the fastest rate in two years, betting that crude will rebound from a bear market. The four biggest oil exchange-traded products listed in the U.S. have received a combined $334 million so far this month, the most since October 2012, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Shares outstanding of the funds, including the United States Oil Fund (DBO) and ProShares Ultra Bloomberg Crude Oil, rose to 55 million yesterday, a nine-month high. “There are investors who love to catch a falling knife,” said Dave Nadig, chief investment officer of San Francisco-based ETF.com. “It’s pretty easy to look at what’s been going on in oil and say ‘well, it has to bottom out somewhere.’ There are plenty of investors out there who still believe that the long-term trend of oil has to be $100.” Money has flowed into the funds as West Texas Intermediate and Brent crudes, the benchmarks for U.S. and global oil trading, each plunged more than 20% from their June highs, meeting a common definition of a bear market.

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Wonder what the real number is at this point in time for China, the actual growth. Even 4% feels high.

Markets Need To Accept Low Growth As ‘New Normal’ In China (Saxo)

Pauline Loong, Managing Director of Asia-analytica, gives us her assessment of the latest Chinese GDP figures: “The worst quarterly GDP performance in almost six years has raised hopes of a bolder policy response from Beijing. But more aggressive measures in the coming months might still not provide the hoped-for catalyst on stock prices or deliver the boost needed for a return to market-moving growth rates.” Pauline says we need to “be realistic” about China’s GDP and get used to lower numbers. For example 6.9% could be the “new normal” next year. China’s official GDP target for 2014 remains 7.5%, a number which looks increasingly out of reach. In response, Beijing has been “micro managing” stimulus, in Pauline’s view, going from sector to sector and even telling banks what size of business to lend to. Pauline Loong warns that China’s gear change from export driven economy to consumer driven market will take longer than most may imagine, it’s worth bearing in mind that Chinese GDP per capita is only just above Iraq in global rankings.

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200 million migrant workers are missing from the official stats. That’s considerably more than the entire active US workforce. Remember, from the article above, that “Chinese GDP per capita is only just above Iraq in global rankings.”

China to Let World in on Gauge Showing State of Economy (Bloomberg)

Chinese Premier Li Keqiang has an insider’s knowledge on the strength of the world’s second-largest economy that helps him determine when stimulus is needed. He’s about to share part of the secret. Li has said several times this year that slower growth is tolerable as long as enough jobs are created, often referring to a survey-based unemployment indicator that’s different from the registered urban jobless rate released every quarter. The published gauge excludes migrant workers who aren’t registered with local authorities, estimated at more than 200 million. The more comprehensive jobless rate will be released “very soon,” Sheng Laiyun, spokesman for the National Bureau of Statistics, said in Beijing yesterday. “The quality of the indicator, for now, looks very good. So, we are using it internally for policy decision-making references.”

China’s leaders have eschewed across-the-board stimulus and interest-rate cuts even as growth cooled to the weakest pace in more than five years last quarter, sticking to limited steps such as easing home-purchase controls. Having access to better barometers like the new unemployment measure would help economists estimate how deep a slowdown in gross domestic product the government will tolerate. “The lack of good unemployment data is the main reason why China still focuses so much on GDP,” said Zhu Haibin, chief China economist at JPMorgan Chase & Co. in Hong Kong. “In fact, the government is more concerned about employment and inflation, and that’s why they refrained from big stimulus.” Releasing the methodology, breakdown and samples for the new jobless rate in addition to the headline number, as the U.S. does, would also greatly help researchers, Zhu said.

He called China’s current registered unemployment rate “untrustworthy and unusable.” Sporadic revelations made by the government about the broader unemployment gauge, which surveys 31 cities, show about a 1 percentage-point divergence from the official rate this year. The surveyed rate fell for four straight months to 5.05% in June, the National Development and Reform Commission said on its website in July. In contrast, the official registered rate was 4.08% in the second quarter, unchanged from the previous three months. The new surveyed rate adopts a methodology following the guidance of the International Labour Organization, according to Cai Fang, vice director of the government-backed Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. “All eyes will be on it,” said Ding Shuang, senior China economist at Citigroup Inc. in Hong Kong. “It’s going to be really important, like that of the U.S.”

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The UK government is a joke.

UK Deficit Up 10% From Last Year, National Debt Rises £100 Billion (Guardian)

The chancellor’s plan to cut the deficit this year looks increasingly unrealistic after another jump in government borrowing in September pushed the deficit 10% higher in the first half of the year, lessening the chances of a pre-election giveaway at December’s autumn statement. Borrowing last month was £11.8bn, £1.6bn higher than in September 2013 and more than £1bn higher than City economists had forecast, official figures showed, as the tax take failed to keep pace with government spending despite the recovery in the economy. Tax receipts have disappointed over recent months partly due to unexpectedly weak pay growth and the increase in the personal allowance to £10,000. In the first six months of the tax year, between April and September, borrowing was £58bn, up £5.4bn on the first half of last year, according to the Office for National Statistics. Economists said it was looking increasingly likely George Osborne would miss his target of reducing the deficit by more than £12bn in 2014-15.

Alan Clarke, economist at Scotiabank, said that if the current trend continued, borrowing would come in about £10bn above the target. Howard Archer, chief UK economist at IHS Global Insight, said: “The chancellor is looking ever more unlikely to meet his fiscal targets for 2014/15. This means that Mr Osborne faces an awkward fiscal backdrop as he announces his autumn statement in December as the May 2015 general election draws ever nearer. This gives him little scope to announce any major sweeteners.” The Office for Budget Responsibility, the Treasury’s official forecaster, cautioned that although there was uncertainty over government borrowing in the second half of the fiscal year, tax receipts for the full year were likely to come in below forecast. “Factors such as weaker-than-expected wage growth, lower-than-expected residential property transactions and lower oil and gas revenues mean it is looking less likely that the full year receipts growth forecast will be met,” it said.

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How is this not a criminal practice: “The US student loan provider, Sallie Mae, sells repackaged debt for as little as 15 cents on the dollar.”

The Moral Economy Of Debt (Robert Skidelsky)

Every economic collapse brings a demand for debt forgiveness. The incomes needed to repay loans have evaporated, and assets posted as collateral have lost value. Creditors demand their pound of flesh; debtors clamour for relief. Consider Strike Debt, an offshoot of the Occupy movement, which calls itself “a nationwide movement of debt resisters fighting for economic justice and democratic freedom”. Its website argues that “with stagnant wages, systemic unemployment, and public service cuts” people are being forced into debt in order to obtain the most basic necessities of life, leading them to “surrender [their] futures to the banks”. One of Strike Debt’s initiatives, rolling jubilee, crowdsources funds to buy and extinguish debt, a process it calls collective refusal. The group’s progress has been impressive, raising more than $700,000 and extinguishing debt worth almost $18.6m. It is the existence of a secondary debt market that enables rolling jubilee to buy debt so cheaply.

Financial institutions that have come to doubt their borrowers’ ability to repay, sell the debt to third parties at knockdown prices, often for as little as five cents on the dollar. Buyers then attempt to profit by recouping some or all of the debt from the borrowers. The US student loan provider, Sallie Mae, sells repackaged debt for as little as 15 cents on the dollar. To draw attention to the often-nefarious practices of debt collectors, rolling jubilee recently cancelled student debt for 2,761 people enrolled at Everest College, a for-profit school whose parent company, Corinthian Colleges, is being sued by the US government for predatory lending. Everest’s loan portfolio was valued at almost $3.9m. Rolling jubilee bought it for $106,709.48, or about three cents on the dollar. But that is a drop in the ocean. In the US alone, students owe more than $1tn, or about 6% of GDP. And the student population is just one of many social groups that lives on debt.

Indeed, throughout the world, the economic downturn of 2008-09 increased the burden of private and public debt – to the point that the public-private distinction became blurred.In a recent speech in Chicago, Irish president Michael D Higgins explained how private debt became sovereign debt. He said: “As a consequence of the need to borrow so as to finance current expenditure and, above all, as a result of the blanket guarantee extended to the main Irish banks’ assets and liabilities, Ireland’s general government debt increased from 25% of GDP in 2007 to 124% in 2013.” The Irish government’s aim, of course, was to save the banking system. But the unintended consequence of the bailout was to shatter confidence in the government’s solvency.

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One day a deal is announced, the next it’s denied.

Fears Over Gas Supply As Russia-Ukraine Talks Fail (Reuters)

Russia and Ukraine failed to reach an accord on gas supplies for the coming winter in EU-brokered talks on Tuesday but agreed to meet again in Brussels in a week in the hope of ironing out problems over Kiev’s ability to pay. After a day of talks widely expected to be the final word, European Energy Commissioner Guenther Oettinger told a news conference the three parties agreed the price Ukraine would pay Russia’s Gazprom – $385 per thousand cubic metres – as long as it paid in advance for the deliveries. But Russian Energy Minister Alexander Novak said Moscow was still seeking assurances on how Kiev, which earlier in the day asked the EU for a further €2 billion ($2.55 billion) in credit, would find the money to pay Moscow for its energy.

Dependent on Western aid, Ukraine is in a weak position in relation to its former Soviet master in Moscow, though Russia’s reasons were unclear for wanting further assurances on finances, beyond an agreement to supply gas only for cash up front. Citing unpaid bills worth more than $5 billion, Russia cut off gas flows to Kiev in mid-June. The move added to East-West tensions sparked by Russia’s annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea and conflict in Russian-speaking eastern Ukraine. The two countries are fighting in an international court over the debt, but Oettinger noted that Ukraine had agreed to pay off $3.1 billion in two tranches this year to help unblock its access to gas over the winter. European Union states, many also dependent on Russian gas and locked in a trade war with Moscow over Ukraine, fear their own supplies could be disrupted if the issue is not resolved.

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Boy oh boy, what a surprise.

New York Fed Caught Sight of London Whale and Let Him Go (Bloomberg)

It seems pretty clear to me that JPMorgan’s London Whale episode, in which the bank’s Chief Investment Office lost $6.2 billion on poorly managed credit derivatives trades, was a huge win for U.S. banking regulators. Like, here is a rough model of banking regulation:

  1. Banks tend to be better at banking than banking regulators are, so they are unlikely to want to defer to the regulators’ judgment in most circumstances.
  2. You need the banks to buy into the regulation, and defer to the regulators, for the regulation to produce real broad-based risk reduction rather than mere check-the-box compliance efforts.
  3. One way to get the banks to buy into regulation is for them to fail catastrophically and realize that they’re not as good at their jobs as they thought they were.
  4. But catastrophic failure is precisely what, as a regulator, you want to prevent.
  5. Because it’s bad.
  6. But also because, if you allow a catastrophic failure, then you’re not a very good regulator either, so the failure provides no additional reason for a bank to listen to you.

So 2008 ushered in a new regulatory environment but at, you know, a certain cost, both to the world and to the regulators’ credibility.

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At east the Danes have not yet fully been taken over.

World’s Top-Ranked Pension Funds Probed for Hedge Fund Use (Bloomberg)

Denmark, home to the world’s top-ranked pension system, will toughen oversight of the $500 billion industry after regulators observed a surge in risk-taking linked in part to more widespread use of hedge funds. The Financial Supervisory Authority in Copenhagen will require pension funds to submit quarterly reports on their alternative investments to track their use of hedge funds, exposure to private equity and infrastructure projects. The decision follows funds’ failures to account adequately for risks in their investment strategies, according to an FSA report. The regulatory clampdown comes as Denmark deals with risks it says are inherent to a system due to be introduced across the European Union in 2016.

The new rules will allow pension funds to invest according to a so-called prudent person model, rather than setting outright limits. In Denmark, the approach has proven problematic for the only EU country to have adopted the model, said Jan Parner, the FSA’s deputy director general for pensions. “The funds are setting up for their release from the quantitative requirements, but the problem is, it’s not clear what a prudent investment is,” Parner said in an interview. “The challenge for European supervisors is to explain to the industry what prudent investments are before the opposite ends up on the balance sheets.” Denmark, which has almost two years of experience with the approach after its early adoption in 2012, says a lack of clear guidelines invites misinterpretation as firms try to inflate returns.

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Great Orlov piece on Unkraine, US, Russia, NATO.

How To Start A War And Lose An Empire (Dmitry Orlov)

A year and a half I wrote an essay on how the US chooses to view Russia, titled The Image of the Enemy. I was living in Russia at the time, and, after observing the American anti-Russian rhetoric and the Russian reaction to it, I made some observations that seemed important at the time. It turns out that I managed to spot an important trend, but given the quick pace of developments since then, these observations are now woefully out of date, and so here is an update. [..] … what a difference a year and a half has made! Ukraine, which was at that time collapsing at about the same steady pace as it had been ever since its independence two decades ago, is now truly a defunct state, with its economy in free-fall, one region gone and two more in open rebellion, much of the country terrorized by oligarch-funded death squads, and some American-anointed puppets nominally in charge but quaking in their boots about what’s coming next.

Syria and Iraq, which were then at a low simmer, have since erupted into full-blown war, with large parts of both now under the control of the Islamic Caliphate, which was formed with help from the US, was armed with US-made weapons via the Iraqis. Post-Qaddafi Libya seems to be working on establishing an Islamic Caliphate of its own. Against this backdrop of profound foreign US foreign policy failure, the US recently saw it fit to accuse Russia of having troops “on NATO’s doorstep,” as if this had nothing to do with the fact that NATO has expanded east, all the way to Russia’s borders. Unsurprisingly, US–Russia relations have now reached a point where the Russians saw it fit to issue a stern warning: further Western attempts at blackmailing them may result in a nuclear confrontation. The American behavior throughout this succession of defeats has been remarkably consistent, with the constant element being their flat refusal to deal with reality in any way, shape or form.

Just as before, in Syria the Americans are ever looking for moderate, pro-Western Islamists, who want to do what the Americans want (topple the government of Bashar al Assad) but will stop short of going on to destroy all the infidel invaders they can get their hands on. The fact that such moderate, pro-Western Islamists do not seem to exist does not affect American strategy in the region in any way. Similarly, in Ukraine, the fact that the heavy American investment in “freedom and democracy,” or “open society,” or what have you, has produced a government dominated by fascists and a civil war is, according to the Americans, just some Russian propaganda. Parading under the banner of Hitler’s Ukrainian SS division and anointing Nazi collaborators as national heroes is just not convincing enough for them. What do these Nazis have to do to prove that they are Nazis, build some ovens and roast some Jews? Just massacring people by setting fire to a building, as they did in Odessa, or shooting unarmed civilians in the back and tossing them into mass graves, as they did in Donetsk, doesn’t seem to work.

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And my main man Jim was in Sweden.

“Omenland” (James Howard Kunstler)

[..] too soon, I landed back in Newark Airport, Lord have mercy. I grabbed a taxi to the Newark train station to get to the Hudson River line out of New York City back upstate. Along the way on Route 21, I passed a graffiti on an overpass. It said “Omenland.” The anonymous genius who sprayed that there sure caught the US zeitgeist. Newark compares to Stockholm as an Ebola victim in the gutter compares to a supermodel at poolside. The scene in the Newark train station was like the barroom from Star Wars, a creature-feature extravaganza, intergalactic Mutt Central, wookies in hoodies with burning coals for eyes, ladies with pierced cheeks, crack-heads, winos, missing body part people, lopsided head people, and the scrofulous physical condition of the station is proof positive that Chris Christie is unqualified to be president. This is a gateway to New York, America’s greatest city, you understand, and it looks like the veritable checkpoint to the rectum of the universe. You know what occurred to me: maybe it is?

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Guess it’s better than nothing.

WHO: Ebola Serum In Weeks And Vaccine Tests In Africa By January (Guardian)

The World Health Organisation has announced it hopes to begin testing two experimental Ebola vaccines in west Africa by January and may have a blood serum treatment available for use in Liberia within two weeks. The UN’s health agency said it aimed to begin testing the two vaccines in the new year on more than 20,000 frontline health care workers and others in west Africa – a bigger rollout than previously envisioned. Dr Marie Paule Kieny, an assistant director general at the WHO, acknowledged there were many “ifs” remaining and “still a possibility that it [a vaccine] will fail”. But she sketched out a much broader experiment than was imagined only six months ago, saying the WHO hoped to dispense tens of thousands of doses in the first months of the new year. “These are quite large trials,” she said.

Kieny said in remarks reported by the BBC that a serum was also being developed for use in Liberia based on antibodies extracted from the blood of Ebola survivors. “There are partnerships which are starting to be put in place to have capacity in the three countries to safely extract plasma and make preparation that can be used for the treatment of infective patients. “The partnership which is moving the quickest will be in Liberia where we hope that in the coming weeks there will be facilities set up to collect the blood, treat the blood and be able to process it for use.” A WHO spokeswoman, Fadela Chaib, said the agency expected 20,000 vaccinations in January and similar numbers in the months afterwards using the trial products. An effective vaccine would still not in itself be enough to stop the outbreak but could protect the medical workers who are central to the effort. More than 200 of them have died of Ebola.

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