Mar 222017
 
 March 22, 2017  Posted by at 9:00 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,  4 Responses »


Ray K. Metzker Philadelphia 1963

 

Vancouver Won’t Have A Middle Class Left In The Future (CBC)
Nomi Prins: Financial System Worse Now Than 2007 (EIR)
Kashkari: “A Market Drop Is Unlikely To Trigger A Crisis” (ZH)
Dijsselbloem Says Southern Europe Blew Cash On ‘Drinks And Women’ (Tel.)
Dijsselbloem Not Fit To Be Eurogroup President – Socialist MEP Leader (Pol.)
Dijsselbloem ‘Mail Bomb Target’ (AFP)
Greece Won’t Last In Eurozone In Long Run, Says Bavarian FinMin (R.)
IMF Wants Greek Opposition To Also Commit To Fiscal Targets, Measures (Naft.)
As Bailout Talks Drag, Greece Says May Not Sign EU Rome Treaty (K.)
Fresh Increase In Registered Greek Unemployed (K.)
Italy’s Populist ‘Mad Man’ Extremely Worrying For Eurozone Stability (CNBC)
Germany Rejects Arms Exports To Turkey (Kom)
Turkey Says EU Refugee Deal Near Collapse (BBG)
The Mechanical Turn in Economics and Its Consequences (Inet)
The Kagans Are Back; Wars to Follow (Robert Parry)
Ganges and Yamuna Rivers Granted Same Legal Rights As Human Beings (G.)
More Than 100 Chinese Cities Now Above 1 Million People (G.)
Access To Nature Reduces Depression And Obesity (G.)
The Man Who Planted A Tree And Grew A Whole Family Of Forests (G.)

 

 

How to Kill a City part 831. I should write the article I’ve long had in my head. But this is the trendline. Which will break, but then you have untold millions of ‘homeowners’ with properties worth much less than their mortgages -and a low interest rate is but a detail-, and a banking system threatening to topple. Again.

Vancouver Won’t Have A Middle Class Left In The Future (CBC)

A former city planner warns if Vancouver doesn’t start protecting dedicated housing for middle-income residents, there won’t be a middle class left in the city in the future. “The estimates are by 2030, if you’re a Millennial household with about $72,000 to $75,000 in your income, you won’t be able to be in this housing market at all. In fact, it would take all of your income to buy a very modest place,” explained Larry Beasley, who is currently a professor with the University of British Columbia’s School of Community and Regional Planning. Beasley says the solution to the problem is to create secure middle income housing. “We have a low-income sector that’s all owned by government and it’s basically rental and we have a market sector for all the rest,” he said.

“We need to protect a middle income sector of housing … It would be protected from being in the open market where it could sell at any price and rent at any price … It would be delivered, either rented or sold, time and time again to middle income people.” Although some middle income people get help from their parents, buy further away or buy smaller places, he said, this cushion won’t last forever and eventually middle income residents will be completely shut out of the city’s real estate market. “It doesn’t matter how much you save and it doesn’t matter how much you borrow from government, you still won’t be able to get into the market. People will face some pretty stark choices.” [..] “If you rule out the middle class, you rule out the potential of creativity. You rule out the people who are doing the jobs everyday and you rule out the people who are driving the day-to-day economy.”

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Private debt is much higher than 10 years ago, in far too many places, because of the housing bubbles.

Nomi Prins: Financial System Worse Now Than 2007 (EIR)

Financial analyst, Author and fmr. Goldman Sachs Managing Director, Nomi Prins sits down with EIR’s Paul Gallagher to discuss just how rotten the current financial system is, making a sobering case that we are far worse off today than we were before the 2007-08 crisis. Prins refers to her political and financial road map for 2017, (nomiprins.com) and discusses the important, combined role China and Japan can play in bringing the US back from the brink and into the new paradigm of investment in the real economy.

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Contradictions, Watson?

Kashkari: “A Market Drop Is Unlikely To Trigger A Crisis” (ZH)

Former Goldmanite and current Minneapolis Fed president, Neel Kashkari, conducted another #AskNeel session on Twitter where the dovish FOMC voter (he was the only one to dissent in last week’s rate hike decision) received numerous question. Among them was the following one from Zero Hedge:

His response:

At this point we would like to “timestamp” Kashkari’s claim that a “stock market drop is unlikely to trigger a crisis” It was not clear just how the Fed president separates a market crash from “financial instability”, but Kashkari’s response that the Fed is not concerned about the level of the S&P500, and instead is more focused on comprehensive market stability, is not being taken well by the market which has continued to sell off as Kashkari responds to further questions, among which the following exchanges:

In response to a question about rising inflation, Kashkari said he would tolerate 2.3% inflation for as long as U.S. has had below-target inflation, “if we really believe 2% is a target. That is what a target means” and adds that “Not sure if my colleagues wld really buy into that however.” We wonder how that question would look like if instead 2.3% inflation one used 3.6%, which is the current true level of inflation according to PriceStats. At least the Fed has been polite enough to advise America it will tolerate a material “overshoot” in its inflation target.

When asked about the two latest rate increases, he said that “data didn’t support a hike. Data basically hasn’t changed. Moving sideways rather than toward dual mandate.” He also said that he would like to see plan on balance sheet normalization soon, adding: “I would prefer to see it before we increase the federal funds rate again” and added that the balance sheet “needs to grow as economy and demand for dollars grows. We will shrink but not to 2006 levels.”

In short, Kashkarhi – who allegedly does not care about the level of the  S&P500 – is willing to risk a market crash and a Fed balance sheet-driven bond tantrum. Or, to paraphrase Richard Breslow, “The Fed Is Making This Up As They Go Along“”

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What a douche.

Dijsselbloem Says Southern Europe Blew Cash On ‘Drinks And Women’ (Tel.)

The head of the eurozone’s finance ministers has been criticised for stating that southern European countries blew their money on “drinks and women”. Jeroen Dijsselbloem, the Dutch finance minister who leads the group, made the comments in an interview on Monday with German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ). “During the crisis of the euro, the countries of the north have shown solidarity with countries affected by the crisis,” he said.“As a Social Democrat, I attribute exceptional importance to solidarity. “But you also have obligations. “You cannot spend all the money on drinks and women and then ask for help.” Inside the European parliament, MEPs turned on Mr Dijsselbloem on Tuesday, calling his remarks “insulting” and “vulgar”.

Gabriel Mato, a Spanish MEP, said the remarks were “absolutely unacceptable” and an “insult” to southern member states – claiming he had lost his neutrality as finance chief. Ernest Urtasun, another Spanish MEP, said: “Maybe this is funny for you, but I don’t think it is. I would like to know if this is your first statement as a candidate to renew your post as president of the eurogroup.” Mr Dijsselbloem’s term ends next year, and he is believed to be considering running for re-election. He attempted to brush off the criticism, telling the MEPs: “Don’t be offended.” He continued: “It is not about one country, but about all our countries.” He then attempted to dig himself out of the hole by saying all countries had failed to uphold the financial rules set by the EU. “The Netherlands also failed a number of years ago to comply with what was agreed,” he said. “I don’t see a conflict between regions of the eurogroup.”


If the money was spent on drinks and women, it wasn’t the Greeks

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He never was, because “..it was “not the first time” that Dijsselbloem has expressed opinions “which are openly in contradiction with the line of the European progressive family.”

MEP=Member of European Parliament.

Dijsselbloem Not Fit To Be Eurogroup President – Socialist MEP Leader (Pol.)

Jeroen Dijsselbloem is “not fit to be president of the Eurogroup,” Socialist MEP leader Gianni Pittella said Tuesday, accusing the Dutch finance minister of making “discriminatory comments” about southern EU countries in German media. Without naming names, Dijsselbloem told the Frankfurter Allgemeine on Monday that “countries in crisis” should stick to the deficit targets set by the European Commission and show the same solidarity as northern eurozone states during the financial crisis. “As a social democrat, for me solidarity is extremely important,” Djisselbloem said. “But those who call for it (solidarity) also have duties. I cannot spend all my money on liquor and women and plead for your support afterwards. This principle applies on the personal, local, national and also European level.” On Tuesday, Pittella described these comments as “shameful and shocking.”

“Dijsselbloem went far beyond by using discriminatory arguments against the countries of southern Europe,” he said. “There is no excuse or reason for using such language, especially from someone who is supposed to be a progressive.” Dijsselbloem has been Eurogroup president since January 2013 and was re-elected for a second term in July 2015. However, his Dutch Labor Party (PvdA) did badly in last week’s election and he will almost certainly not stay on as finance minister. Pittella said it was “not the first time” that Dijsselbloem has expressed opinions “which are openly in contradiction with the line of the European progressive family.” “I truly wonder whether a person who has these beliefs can still be considered fit to be president of the Eurogroup,” he added. Portuguese Foreign minister Augusto Santos Silva joined in the criticism, saying Dijsselbloem should not be able “to remain at the head of the Eurogroup and the Portuguese government shares this opinion.”

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Only surprise: What took them so long?

Dijsselbloem ‘Mail Bomb Target’ (AFP)

Eurogroup chief Jeroen Dijsselbloem was targeted by a mail bomb which had been “intercepted,” his spokesman said Tuesday, a day after Greek police found eight “suspect” packages addressed to European officials. “I can confirm that Minister Dijsselbloem was the target of a mail bomb,” Coen Gelinck told AFP. “It was however intercepted,” said Gelinck, declining to give any further information or to confirm whether it was one of the packages found in Athens. Police in the Greek capital found eight packages Monday at the postal service’s main sorting centre north of Athens. The news came after a domestic militant group last week sent mail bombs to the IMF and the German finance ministry.

Monday’s packages were intended for “officials at European countries,” Greek police said. A police source later said the packages were intended for officials at the Eurogroup and other global institutions. Last week, a mail bomb sent to the IMF’s offices in Paris exploded and injured a secretary. A second bomb sent to the German finance ministry was intercepted by security. The investigation so far suggests that both the IMF and the German finance ministry bombs were sent by a far-left group called the Conspiracy of Fire Nuclei, which police thought they had mostly dismantled in 2011.

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Why stay one day longer, then?

Greece Won’t Last In Eurozone In Long Run, Says Bavarian FinMin (R.)

Greece will not last in the eurozone in the long run and officials working on a review of its bailout package should prepare for such a possibility, a senior member of the Bavarian sister party of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservatives said. Greece has lost a quarter of its national output since it first sought financial aid in 2010. Its current bailout package is the third in seven years. “Greece is unlikely to survive in the eurozone over the long term,” Bavarian Finance Minister Markus Soeder told the Handelsblatt newspaper in an interview published on Tuesday. Soeder urged officials working on the bailout review to develop a “Plan B” or alternative plan. “We’ll see if Greece meets the conditions. I’m very skeptical,” Soeder said, adding that the participation of the International Monetary Fund was essential.

Soeder’s Christian Social Union is the Bavarian sister party of Merkel’s Christian Democrats and has long accused Greece of failing to implement reforms promised under its bailout packages. Germany faces national elections in September and the anti-euro Alternative for Germany party (AfD), which has been particularly critical of eurozone bailouts, is expected to perform well. Greek Finance Minister Euclid Tsakalotos said on Monday he planned to stay in Brussels for further consultations with his country’s creditors towards finalizing the latest bailout review. He said he hoped for a preliminary deal by April 7. Greece and its international lenders are still at odds over pension, labor and energy market reforms that are needed before new loans can be disbursed to Athens. The IMF has yet to decide whether to participate in Greece’s €86 billion bailout, expressing deep concerns over debt sustainability in the crisis-hit nation.

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And their grandchildren too, while we’re at it?!

IMF Wants Greek Opposition To Also Commit To Fiscal Targets, Measures (Naft.)

The IMF wants Greece’s political opposition to also approve any new agreement for fiscal measures and targets after 2019, French Finance Minister Michel Sapin maintained on Tuesday, an abrupt revelation that would further complicate ongoing negotiations between Athens and its institutional creditors if proved true. The French minister also expressed his surprise over the Fund’s latest demand vis-a-vis the Greek program. “Can you image if they asked us, the French, to ask for the opposition’s commitment,” he said, adding that such a demand is unrealistic. Moreover, he referred to the IMF’s “obsessions” with labor market liberalization and social security reform.

With fiscal targets dictating an annual primary budget surplus of 3.5% (as a percentage of GDP) in the “medium term” after 2019, the IMF has pressed for – and European creditors have accepted – that austerity measures are enacted now in order to ensure that targets are achieved after the third bailout ends in mid 2018. Sapin made the statement in Brussels, a day after yet another Eurogroup meeting ended without a staff-level agreement between creditors and the increasingly embattled leftist-rightist government in Athens. Finally, he said all parties should assume their responsibilities in concluding the now utterly delayed second review of the Greek program, which he said will have repercussions on others, and not just the Greek economy.

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Let’s see you do it, Alexis.

As Bailout Talks Drag, Greece Says May Not Sign EU Rome Treaty (K.)

With Greece’s international creditors indicating that insufficient progress has been achieved for bailout monitors to return to Athens, government sources have threatened to block the Rome Declaration, Kathimerini understands, connecting it to the negotiations on the second review. According to sources, the Greek official participating in preparatory talks ahead of the drafting of a common statement that EU leaders are expected to sign at a summit in Rome on Saturday, regarding the bloc’s common values and principles, told his interlocutors that Greece cannot agree to such a text while being pressed to implement unrealistic demands of the IMF.

Sources said that Greek officials aim to ensure that the joint declaration includes a paragraph referring to European regulations protecting citizens’ labor rights. It is the issue of labor rights — and the IMF’s demands for further liberalization of the sector — that has become the major sticking point in talks between Greece and its lenders. On Monday, finance ministers discussing Greek bailout negotiations deemed that inadequate progress had been achieved for foreign auditors to return to Athens. Finance Minister Euclid Tsakalotos commented that he and other Greek ministers would remain in Brussels for further negotiations in a bid to establish enough common ground for bailout monitors to return to the Greek capital and resume talks.

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Inevitable. All the recovery claims are bogus. The Greek economy CANNOT recover under present conditions.

Fresh Increase In Registered Greek Unemployed (K.)

The number of people registered as unemployed at Greece’s Manpower Organization (OAED) rose by about 6,000 in February to almost 1.1 million at the end of the month, a dramatic rate which is expected to continue until at least the end of 2017. This trend corresponds with the rise seen in the quarterly jobless rate late last year. The sum of OAED-registered unemployed who are seeking work amounted to 936,110 people, with more than half of them (503,431 people or 53.78%) having been registered for at least 12 months. There is a significant difference between men and women, as they break down into 576,491 women (61.58%) and 359,619 men (38.42%). Another 159,756 people were registered who are not seeking work, of whom 32,897 or 20.59% had been on the register for at least a year. The number of unemployment benefit recipients came to 178,105 people last month, of whom 73,205 (41.1%) were seasonal workers in the tourism industry.

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Shoddy journalism. The Party is named M5S, not 5SM. Common knowledge. (Corrected)

And you can’t claim that “Europe should be strong enough to manage a “mad man” like Grillo becoming Italy’s Prime Minister”, because Beppe is not a candidate -for any office-, and won’t be.

Italy’s Populist ‘Mad Man’ Extremely Worrying For Eurozone Stability (CNBC)

Italy’s anti-establishment and anti-euro party Five Star Movement (M5S) represent the greatest threat to euro area stability, analysts told CNBC on Tuesday, as the populist party surged ahead of its political rivals in the latest opinion poll, putting it on course to be the biggest party if elections were called. M5S leader Beppe Grillo has enjoyed a recent, and remarkable, uptick in support, buoyed in part by the divisions in the ruling Democratic Party (PD) as former Prime Minister Matteo Renzi attempts to regain support. Grillo, who has campaigned for Italy to hold a referendum on the single currency if elected, has overseen M5S’s support grow to 32.3%, according to an Ipsos poll published in daily newspaper Correa della Sera on Tuesday.

“If Five Star Movement could secure 30 or 40% of the vote then of course that would be extremely worrying for the euro area’s stability. Whether they can gain an absolute majority… we’ll have to wait and see,” Claus Vistesen, chief euro zone economist at Pantheon Macroeconomics told CNBC via telephone. Italy is due to hold its next national election by early 2018 and, although Europe’s heavy political calendar has pushed the thought of Italy to the back of most investors’ minds, Deutsche Bank analysts argued it is Rome that poses the greatest threat to the euro area’s stability. The German lender suggested its base case scenario is for Renzi’s PD party, currently second in the polls, to fracture as a result of internal feuds. If this were to happen, it would then leave M5S in the driving seat ahead of the country’s general election.

[..] At the moment, parties in Italy are still looking to draw up a new electoral law, which most observers expect to result in a form of proportional representation that could reward a stable majority government to any party that can secure over 40% of the vote. M5S are significantly below the 40% threshold and have ruled out any desire to form a coalition government. However, Vistesen and Stringa both suggested with some confidence that Italy could expect weak economic growth throughout 2017 and therefore it would be conceivable for Grillo’s M5S to enjoy even greater support in the run up to a vote. Both France and Germany are due to elect new premiers before Italy and Vistesen concluded that, so long as the political favorites are able to win in each country, then Europe should be strong enough to manage a “mad man” like Grillo becoming Italy’s Prime Minister.

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The US will fill in. Or Britain, France.

Germany Rejects Arms Exports To Turkey (Kom)

Germany has rejected more requests for arms exports to Turkey during the past 5 months than in five years between 2010 and 2015, German newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung reported on Tuesday. The sharp increase in rejections, mainly handguns, ammunition and parts needed in weapons production, is due to “the risk of a deployment in the context of internal repression or the Kurdish conflict,” according to a written response by State Secretary Matthias Machnig to a question posed by lawmaker Jan van Aken. “Respect for human rights is a matter of particular importance for arms export decisions,” the answer from Machnig of the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy also outlined.

“This is a first step,” van Aken told Sueddeutsche Zeitung, “And the next must be that Turkey does not get any weapons from Germany,” the Left Party (Die Linke) law maker said, adding that the Turkish government is waging a war both within its own borders and in Syria while fast becoming a dictatorship. Relations between Germany and Turkey are strained. Turkey’s plans to campaign in Germany ahead of the referendum were refused on several occasions and Turkish politicians, including President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, accused Germany of Nazi measures.

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EU membership is now linked to the death penalty?!

Turkey Says EU Refugee Deal Near Collapse (BBG)

Turkey’s agreement with the European Union to help stem the largest flow of refugees since World War II is inching closer to collapse, according to Turkey’s minister in charge of EU integration. By hosting about 3 million refugees – the most of any nation – and halting their migration to Europe, Turkey has saved the EU from a “racist” backlash that threatens the bloc’s democratic character, Omer Celik said in an interview on Tuesday in Ankara. Describing the deal as one-sided, he said Turkey is under no obligation to continue implementing it, adding that his country’s commitment to seeking EU membership wasn’t unconditional. “We won’t abandon these people to their deaths, but an agreement has two sides and if one side doesn’t abide by its obligations, neither will the other,” Celik said. “If the refugee agreement collapses, what we foresee is clear: we won’t cooperate with any mechanisms acting on behalf of the EU.”

The prospects of Turkey joining the union are dissipating as politicians lash out ahead of a series of votes that could define relations for decades. In Europe, populists are campaigning on anti-Muslim and anti-immigration sentiment, while in Turkey, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has been appealing to nationalists ahead of an April referendum on endowing his office with full executive authority. European officials have voiced their disapproval of the plebiscite, saying it would undermine democracy in the NATO member. [..] While support in Turkey for EU membership remains high, belief that it will happen has collapsed, Celik said. Ultimately, the issue could be put to the public as part of a referendum on reintroducing the death penalty, he said. “This issue depends on whether relations with the EU are maintained or not.” he said. “It is up to the Turkish people whether to keep the EU process or halt it.”

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I’ve had this sitting in a tab for a while. It’s good that people are now picking it up, but it always seems weird that these things need to be explained this way. Economics truly is a blind field. Nature? Nature of man? Nah..

The Mechanical Turn in Economics and Its Consequences (Inet)

With Adam Smith, and hints before in Ricardo and others, economics took the path of treating the economy as a natural object that should not be interfered with by the state. This fit the Newtonian ethos of the age: science was great, science was mathematics; science was true, right and good. But along the way the discussion in, for example, Montaigne and Machiavelli — about the powers of imagination, myth, emotions, sentiment, human relations and community — was abandoned by the economists. (Adam Smith had written his Theory of Moral Sentiments 20 years earlier and sort of left it behind, though the Wealth of Nations is still concerned with human well-being.) Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire was published in 1776, the same year as Smith’s Wealth, but hardly read today by most economists.

In philosophy and the arts (romanticism among others) there was great engagement in these issues economics was trying to avoid. But that philosophy and art criticism have not been widely read for many years. The effect of ignoring the human side of lives was to undermine the social perspective of the “political,” by merging it with the individually focused “interest.” So, instead of exploring the inner structure of interest (or later utility or preference), or community feeling and the impact of culture, these were assumed to be irrelevant to the mechanics of the market. Politics, having to do with interest groups and power arrangements, is more vague and harder to model than economic activity. Those who wanted economics to be a science were motivated by the perception that “being scientific” was appreciated by the society of the time, and was the path to rock-solid truth.

But the move towards economics as a science also happened to align with a view of the landed and the wealthy that the economy was working for them, so don’t touch it. We get the equation, embracing science = conservative. This is still with us because of the implication that the market is made by god or nature rather than being socially constructed. Since economics is the attempt at a description of the economy, it was more or less locked in to the naturalist approach, which ignores things like class and ownership and treated capital as part of economic flow rather than as a possession that was useable for social and political power. Even now, economics still continues as if it were part of the age of Descartes and avoids most social, historical and philosophical thought about the nature of man and society. Names like Shaftesbury and Puffendorf, very much read in their time, are far less known now than Hobbes, Descartes, Ricardo, Mill and Keynes.

Karl Polanyi is much less well known than Hayek. We do not learn of the social history such as the complex interplay in Viennese society among those who were classmates and colleagues such as Hayek, Gombrich, Popper and Drucker. The impact of Viennese culture is not known to many economists. The result is an economics that supports an economy that is out of control because the feedback loops through society and its impact of the quality of life – and resentment – are not recognized in a dehumanized economics, and so can’t have a feedback correcting effect. The solution, however, is not to look for simplicity, but to embrace a kind of complexity that honors nature, humans, politics, and the way they are dealt with in philosophy, arts, investigative reporting, anthropology and history. Because the way forward cannot be a simple projection of the past. We are in more danger than that.

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Parry is an authorative voice.

The Kagans Are Back; Wars to Follow (Robert Parry)

Back pontificating on prominent op-ed pages, the Family Kagan now is pushing for an expanded U.S. military invasion of Syria and baiting Republicans for not joining more enthusiastically in the anti-Russian witch hunt over Moscow’s alleged help in electing Donald Trump. In a Washington Post op-ed on March 7, Robert Kagan, a co-founder of the Project for the New American Century and a key architect of the Iraq War, jabbed at Republicans for serving as “Russia’s accomplices after the fact” by not investigating more aggressively. Then, Frederick Kagan, director of the Critical Threats Project at the neocon American Enterprise Institute, and his wife, Kimberly Kagan, president of her own think tank, Institute for the Study of War, touted the idea of a bigger U.S. invasion of Syria in a Wall Street Journal op-ed on March 15.

Yet, as much standing as the Kagans retain in Official Washington’s world of think tanks and op-ed placements, they remain mostly outside the new Trump-era power centers looking in, although they seem to have detected a door being forced open. Still, a year ago, their prospects looked much brighter. They could pick from a large field of neocon-oriented Republican presidential contenders or – like Robert Kagan – they could support the establishment Democratic candidate, Hillary Clinton, whose “liberal interventionism” matched closely with neoconservatism, differing only slightly in the rationalizations used for justifying wars and more wars. There was also hope that a President Hillary Clinton would recognize how sympatico the liberal hawks and the neocons were by promoting Robert Kagan’s neocon wife, Victoria Nuland, from Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs to Secretary of State.

Then, there would have been a powerful momentum for both increasing the U.S. military intervention in Syria and escalating the New Cold War with Russia, putting “regime change” back on the agenda for those two countries. So, early last year, the possibilities seemed endless for the Family Kagan to flex their muscles and make lots of money. As I noted two years ago in an article entitled “A Family Business of Perpetual War”: “Neoconservative pundit Robert Kagan and his wife, Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, run a remarkable family business: she has sparked a hot war in Ukraine and helped launch Cold War II with Russia and he steps in to demand that Congress jack up military spending so America can meet these new security threats.

[..] But things didn’t quite turn out as the Kagans had drawn them up. The neocon Republicans stumbled through the GOP primaries losing out to Donald Trump and then – after Hillary Clinton muscled aside Sen. Bernie Sanders to claim the Democratic nomination – she fumbled away the general election to Trump. After his surprising victory, Trump – for all his many shortcomings – recognized that the neocons were not his friends and mostly left them out in the cold. Nuland not only lost her politically appointed job as Assistant Secretary but resigned from the Foreign Service, too. With Trump in the White House, Official Washington’s neocon-dominated foreign policy establishment was down but far from out. The neocons were tossed a lifeline by Democrats and liberals who detested Trump so much that they were happy to pick up Nuland’s fallen banner of the New Cold War with Russia.

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How about the Colorado river, or the Rhine? Can you see it happening?

Ganges and Yamuna Rivers Granted Same Legal Rights As Human Beings (G.)

The Ganges river, considered sacred by more than 1 billion Indians, has become the first non-human entity in India to be granted the same legal rights as people. A court in the northern Indian state of Uttarakhand ordered on Monday that the Ganges and its main tributary, the Yamuna, be accorded the status of living human entities. The decision, which was welcomed by environmentalists, means that polluting or damaging the rivers will be legally equivalent to harming a person. The judges cited the example of the Whanganui river, revered by the indigenous Maori people. people, which was declared a living entity with full legal rights by the New Zealand government last week. Judges Rajeev Sharma and Alok Singh said the Ganges and Yamuna rivers and their tributaries would be “legal and living entities having the status of a legal person with all corresponding rights, duties and liabilities”.

The court in the Himalayan resort town of Nainital appointed three officials to act as legal custodians responsible for conserving and protecting the rivers and their tributaries. It ordered that a management board be established within three months. The case arose after officials complained that the state governments of Uttarakhand and neighbouring Uttar Pradesh were not cooperating with federal government efforts to set up a panel to protect the Ganges. Himanshu Thakkar, an engineer who coordinates the South Asia Network on Dams, Rivers and People, said the practical implications of the decision were not clear. “There are already 1.5bn litres of untreated sewage entering the river each day, and 500m litres of industrial waste,” he said. “All of this will become illegal with immediate effect, but you can’t stop the discharge immediately. So how this decision pans out in terms of practical reality is very unclear.”

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I see slums in your future.

More Than 100 Chinese Cities Now Above 1 Million People (G.)

China now has more than 100 cities of over 1 million residents, a number that is likely to double in the next decade. According to the Demographia research group, the world’s most populous country boasts 102 cities bigger than 1 million people, many of which are little known outside the country – or even within its borders. Quanzhou, for example, on the south-east coast of China, was one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the world a millennium ago, when it served as a hub for traders from across Asia and the Middle East. It is now home to more than 7 million people, nearly 800,000 more than Madrid. But while Madrid is a cultural powerhouse and the centre of Spanish politics, Quanzhou, with its 1,000-year-old mosque and charming cafes, is rarely discussed even within Chinese media, whereas Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong continue to get most of the headlines.

Outside China, meanwhile, few will even have heard of Kaifeng, a former imperial capital that was once a terminus on the Silk Road, or Weihai, both cities bigger than Liverpool (estimated population of urban area 880,000). The scale of China’s urban ambitions is staggering: it now has 119 cities bigger than Liverpool. By 2025, according to a report by the McKinsey Global Institute, that number is predicted to have more than doubled. One reason is that the government is actively encouraging rural residents to urbanise. China aims to have 60% of its people living in cities by 2020, up from 56.1% currently, and the World Bank estimates a billion people – or 70% of the country’s population – will be living in cities by 2030. Thousands of government officials have campaigned across the country to convince farmers to move to newly built urban districts, turning centuries-old villages into ghost towns.

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Poorly argued but still true. The Chinese had better plant a zillion trees in those cities of them.

Access To Nature Reduces Depression And Obesity (G.)

People living close to trees and green spaces are less likely to be obese, inactive, or dependent on anti-depressants, according to a new report. Middle-aged Scottish men with homes in deprived but verdant areas were found to have a death rate 16% lower than their more urban counterparts. Pregnant women also received a health boost from a greener environment, recording lower blood pressures and giving birth to larger babies, research in Bradford found. Overall, nature is an under-recognised healer, the paper says, offering multiple health benefits from allergy reductions to increases in self-esteem and mental wellbeing.

A study team of 11 researchers at the Institute for European environmental policy (IEEP) spent a year reviewing more than 200 academic studies for the report, which is the most wide-ranging probe yet into the dynamics of health, nature and wellbeing. The project first appeared as an unpublicised 280-page European commission literature review last autumn, before being augmented for Friends of the Earth Europe with analysis of the links between nature-related health outcomes and deprivation. “The evidence is strong and growing that people and communities can only thrive when they have access to nature,” said Robbie Blake, a nature campaigner for Friends of the Earth Europe, which commissioned the analysis.

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Talking about planting trees:

This is a great story, which should have many people follow the example, for if we would all plant just one tree every day, we would never have a lack of trees again.

And of course I can’t post this without adding a famous French 1953 story by Jean Giono, The Man Who Planted Trees, which inspired Québec’s Frédérick Back to make his 1987 Oscar winning animation. What a masterpiece it still is. Please watch. It’ll make you feel so much better.

The Man Who Planted A Tree And Grew A Whole Family Of Forests (G.)

When Antonio Vicente bought a patch of land in São Paulo state and said he wanted to use it to plant a forest, people called him crazy. It was 1973 and forests were seen by many as an obstacle to progress and profit. Brazil’s then military government encouraged wealthy landowners to expand by offering them generously subsidised credit to invest in modern farming techniques, a move the ruling generals hoped would boost national agriculture. But water, or an impending lack of it, was Vicente’s concern as he worriedly watched the expansion of cattle grazing and industry, the destruction of local forests, and the growth of the population and the rapid urbanisation of the state. One of 14 children, Vicente grew up on a farm where his father worked. He’d watched him cut down the trees at the owners’ orders, for use in charcoal production and to clear more land for grazing cattle.

Eventually the farm’s water springs dried up and never returned. Maintaining forests are essential for water supplies because trees absorb and retain water in their roots and help to prevent soil erosion. So with some donkeys and a small team, he worked on his little patch – 31 hectares (77 acres) of land that had been razed for grazing cattle – and set about regenerating. “The area was totally stripped,” he says, demonstrating by pointing to a painting of the treeless land in 1976. “The water supplies had nearly dried up.” His neighbours, who were cattle and dairy farmers, used to tell him: “You are dumb. Planting trees is a waste of land. You won’t have income. If it’s full of trees, you won’t have room for cows or crops.” But what started off as a weekend gig has now become a full-time way of life. More than 40 years later, Vicente – now 84 – estimates he has replanted 50,000 trees on his 31 hectare Serra da Mantiqueira mountain range property.

“If you ask me who my family are, I would say all this right here, each one of these that I planted from a seed,” he says. [..] Vicente has seen first-hand the devastating effects of mass deforestation. He travelled at one point to Rondonia, now one of Brazil’s most deforested Amazon states, in 1986 during a drive by the Brazilian government to settle the region which proved disastrous as following mass deforestation, the land yielded poor results. “The government were giving the land away for cheap, but the land didn’t serve for anything,” he says. “People cut down the trees but after 3 to 4 years, the soil turned into sand and nothing grows.” Speaking of his own project in the Mantiqueira mountain range: “I didn’t do it for money, I did it because when I die, what’s here will remain for everyone.” He adds: “People don’t call me crazy any more.”

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Nov 142014
 
 November 14, 2014  Posted by at 12:13 pm Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , ,  1 Response »


DPC St. Catherine Street, Montréal, Québec 1916

Most US Cities Unaffordable For Average Americans To Live In (MarketWatch)
US Wealth Inequality: Top 0.1% Worth As Much As The Bottom 90% (Guardian)
US Foreclosure Filings Climb 15% In October (MarketWatch)
Sub-$2-a-Gallon Gasoline Futures Hand US Motorists Gift (Bloomberg)
Albert Edwards: USDJPY 145, “Tidal Wave Of Deflation Westward” (Zero Hedge)
Oil, Other Commodities Will Be In The Dumps For Another Decade (MarketWatch)
Oil Price Rout To Deepen Amid Supply Glut, Warns IEA (Telegraph)
Keystone Left Behind as Canadian Oil Pours Into US (Bloomberg)
Putin Stockpiles Gold As Russia Prepares For Economic War (Telegraph)
It May Be Too Late for Japan PM to Fix World’s Third Largest Economy (TIME)
Europe’s Debt Fight May Undermine Push for Growth Deal (Bloomberg)
Cold Comfort As France, Germany Eke Out Tiny Q3 Growth (Reuters)
Italy’s Slump Enters Fourth Year, Complicating Renzi’s Plans (Bloomberg)
World Outlook Darkening as 89% in Poll See Europe Deflation Risk (Bloomberg)
China Busts Underground Banks Linked to $23 Billion Transactions (Bloomberg)
Stock Market Fear, Stress And Tensions Climbing (MarketWatch)
Apple Could Swallow Whole Russian Stock Market (Bloomberg)
Fracking Boom Spurs Demand for Sand and Clouds of Dust (Bloomberg)
Massive OW Bunker Bankruptcy: Questions Of Governance And Oversight (SeaTrade)
Aboriginals Decry G-20 Host Australia as Leaders Gather (Bloomberg)

This is what we’ve come to, and it’s hardly surprising. Where are the raised voices, though?

Most US Cities Unaffordable For Average Americans To Live In (MarketWatch)

Most big American cities are no longer affordable for the average worker. Home buyers earning a median income can only afford a median-priced home in 10 of the 25 largest metropolitan areas in the U.S., according to a survey by personal finance site Interest.com. That’s still a slight improvement on last year when only 8 of those metropolitan areas were affordable, but still lower than 2012 when 14 of those 25 areas were affordable for people on a median income in those regions. Being priced out of buying a home in the country’s major cities means more multi-family buildings in big cities and more people moving into second-tier cities and rural areas, says Stuart Gabriel, director of UCLA’s Richard S. Ziman Center for Real Estate.

“The consequences are large,” he says, “and they’re not just about affordability. It affects economic growth and economic viability of our major metropolitan areas.” While some people will find ways to work from home, for instance, spiraling housing costs also hurt people who need to work in cities. “Teachers, firefighters and police, these are people who are absolutely essential to the functioning of our urban areas, are priced out of those areas and have to commute long distances to get to work,” Gabriel says. “It’s certainly true here in L.A.” Sacramento had the biggest drop in home affordability over the past 12 months, falling to No. 18 this year from No. 12 in 2013. But it’s still more affordable than the other three California metro areas on the list: Los Angeles (No. 22), San Diego (No. 24) and San Francisco (No. 25) where the median income is 46% less than what is required to buy a median-priced home here. New York is No. 23 on the list.

The cheapest areas are Minneapolis, Atlanta, St. Louis and Detroit. “Low mortgage rates are helping home affordability to some extent, but the key ingredient — which has been missing to this point — is substantial income growth,” says Mike Sante, managing editor of Interest.com. “Millennials, in particular, are struggling to overcome their student loans and save enough money for a down payment.” The Interest.com survey reflects a broader trend: 52% of Americans have made at least one major sacrifice to cover their rent or mortgage over the last three years, according to research commissioned by the nonprofit John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation released earlier this year. These sacrifices include getting a second job, deferring saving for retirement and cutting back on health care.

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Here’s why Americans can’t afford their own cities anymore.

US Wealth Inequality: Top 0.1% Worth As Much As The Bottom 90% (Guardian)

Wealth inequality in the US is at near record levels according to a new study by academics. Over the past three decades, the share of household wealth owned by the top 0.1% has increased from 7% to 22%. For the bottom 90% of families, a combination of rising debt, the collapse of the value of their assets during the financial crisis, and stagnant real wages have led to the erosion of wealth. The research by Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman [pdf] illustrates the evolution of wealth inequality over the last century. The chart shows how the top 0.1% of families now own roughly the same share of wealth as the bottom 90%. The picture actually improved in the aftermath of the 1930s Great Depression, with wealth inequality falling through to the late 1970s. It then started to rise again, with the share of total household wealth owned by the top 0.1% rising to 22% in 2012 from 7% in the late 1970s. The top 0.1% includes 160,000 families with total net assets of more than $20m (£13m) in 2012.

In contrast, the share of total US wealth owned by the bottom 90% of families fell from a peak of 36% in the mid-1980s, to 23% in 2012 – just one percentage point above the top 0.1%. The growing indebtedness of most Americans is the main reason behind the erosion of the wealth share of the bottom 90%, according to the report’s authors. Many middle-class families own their homes and have pensions, but too many have higher mortgage repayments, higher credit card bills, and higher student loans to service. The average wealth of bottom 90% jumped during the stock market boom of the late 1990s and the housing bubble of the early 2000s. But it then collapsed during and after the most recent financial crisis. Since then, there has been no recovery in the wealth of the middle class and the poor, the authors say. The average wealth of the bottom 90% of families is equal to $80,000 in 2012— the same level as in 1986. In contrast, the average wealth for the top 1% more than tripled between 1980 and 2012.

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No surprise here either.

US Foreclosure Filings Climb 15% In October (MarketWatch)

The pace of new foreclosures picked up last month as more troubled properties were pushed through the system, according to data released Thursday. In October, there were default notices and other foreclosure filings reported on more than 123,000 U.S. homes, up 15% from September — the largest monthly growth since foreclosure activity peaked in early 2010, online foreclosure marketplace RealtyTrac reported. Last month’s pop was driven by seasonal factors — banks were trying to “get ahead of the usual holiday foreclosure moratoriums,” said Daren Blomquist, vice president at RealtyTrac.

October’s spike narrowed the year-over-year contraction in foreclosure filings to 8%, the slowest annual drop since May 2012. “Distressed properties that have been in a holding pattern for years are finally being cleared for landing at the foreclosure auction,” Blomquist said. Despite October’s increase in filings, the pace of the foreclosure-related notices is trending closer to levels seen before the U.S. housing bubble burst. In 2006, as home prices were near their peak, there were average monthly foreclosure filings on 105,000 properties. October’s 123,000 foreclosure filings were down about 66% from a peak of 367,000 hit in 2010.

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Not going to boost holiday sales.

Sub-$2-a-Gallon Gasoline Futures Hand US Motorists Gift (Bloomberg)

U.S. drivers will have some extra money in their pockets this holiday season as gasoline futures tumbling below $2 a gallon mean lower prices at the pump. “The drop in futures is eventually going to translate into further declines at the pump,” Tim Evans, an energy analyst at Citi Futures Perspective in New York, said by phone yesterday. “There will be a little extra discretionary spending that consumers can use somewhere else this holiday season.” The nation’s largest motoring club says retail prices “have a very good chance” of being the lowest for the Nov. 28 Thanksgiving holiday in five years. Motorists are already paying the least since 2010 after crude oil tumbled more than 20% in the past four months. Gasoline futures added 0.7 cent, or 0.3%, to $2.0085 a gallon in electronic trading at 12:12 p.m. Singapore time.

Yesterday the contract closed at the lowest since September 2010. The average retail price for regular gasoline fell 0.6 cent to $2.917 a gallon on Nov. 12, the least since December 2010, according to Heathrow, Florida-based AAA. Based on the drop in the futures market, pump prices could fall to $2.70 or thereabouts, Michael Green, a Washington-based spokesman for AAA, said by telephone yesterday. “At this point, the market refuses to stabilize, the price of crude oil continues to fall and refiners are making more gasoline. There’s no end in sight.” Almost one-fourth of filling stations in the U.S. are selling gasoline for less than $2.75 a gallon, Green said. Less than 1% are under $2.50, he said. “We’re still a long way from getting down to $2,” Green said. “But I didn’t think it was going below $3, and here we are.”

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Edwards is one scary guy. Because he’s mostly right.

Albert Edwards: USDJPY 145, “Tidal Wave Of Deflation Westward” (Zero Hedge)

Less than two months ago, Albert Edwards presented “The Most Important Chart For Investors” in which he predicted, correctly, that the real action will come not in the Euro but the Japanese Yen, and at a time when the USDJPY was trading around 108, Edwards forecast a sharp move to 120. A month later, Abe’s just as shocking “all in” bet on boosting QE to a level where it matches the Fed’s peak monthly POMO despite an economy that is a third the size of the US, proved Edwards correct and has since sent the USDJPY some 800 pips higher and just 400 pips shy of Edwards’ 120 forecast. At this rate, the 120 target may be taken out within weeks not months. So what happens next? Here, straight from the horse’s mouth that got the first part of the rapid Yen devaluation so right, is the answer.

As Edwards updates with a note from this morning, “the yen is set to follow the US dollar DXY trade-weighted index by crashing through multi-decade resistance – around ¥120. It seems entirely plausible to me that once we break ¥120, we could see a very quick ¥25 move to ¥145, forcing commensurate devaluations across the whole Asian region and sending a tidal wave of deflation westwards.” Edwards, never one to beat around the bush, slams strategists who are at best willing to get the direction of a given move, if not the magnitude. So he will be the outlier:

… in the foreign exchange (FX) world, extreme volatility is often readily apparent but seldom ever predicted. We explained recently that investors were overly focusing on the euro/US$ when a further round of Japanese QE would make the yen the dominant currency story. I expect the key ¥120/$ support level to be broken soon and the lows of June 2007 (¥124) and Feb 2002 (¥135) to be rapidly taken out. If you want a target to reflect historic volatility, think about the Y145 low of August 1998 (see chart). That is my Q1 forecast.

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I see little value in predicting anything 10 years out today. The US dollar looks strongest, stocks definitely do not, they’re way too overvalued. in 2024, who says there’ll be much of any financial markets remaining? But hey, someone has to lose all that money going forward. Might as well this guy.

Oil, Other Commodities Will Be In The Dumps For Another Decade (MarketWatch)

Remember the commodities supercycle, that seemingly endless 2000s commodities boom? It drove oil, gold, copper and other commodities to record levels. The supercycle was driven by exploding demand from China and other emerging countries, supply bottlenecks caused by years of not developing wells and mines, and rock-bottom interest rates that inflated demand for hard assets all around the world. But now gold, oil and other commodities are well off their peaks, so far off, in fact, and for so long that they can only be described as in a supercycle in reverse, or a secular bear market. If that’s true – and I’m pretty sure it is – investors who piled in to commodities are in for a bruising decade ahead unless they take profits or cut their losses.

Meanwhile, stocks, which run counter to commodities, may well go much higher, along with the U.S. dollar. “We believe that we are in the initial years of a secular down cycle in commodities,” wrote Shawn Driscoll, manager of the natural resource-focused T. Rowe Price New Era Fund in the fund’s most recent semiannual report. “Commodity cycles are very long on the way up and the way down,” he told me in a phone interview. They last around 13 to 15 years, because it takes that long for fundamentals of supply and demand to go to extremes. When the most recent supercycle began in 1998, Driscoll said, commodities prices had plummeted, so producers shuttered old mines and wells and hadn’t opened new ones in a while. But when demand revived, it took years for producers to catch up. Ultimately, companies built too much capacity just in time for the next peak.

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“With this key level out of the way a move towards $75 now looks likely as the hunt for a real floor in oil prices goes on.” WTI at $74 this morning, Brent at $78.

Oil Price Rout To Deepen Amid Supply Glut, Warns IEA (Telegraph)

The rout which has sent oil prices to a four-year low is expected to deepen, the International Energy Agency warned in its latest monthly market report. The Paris-based watchdog said Friday: “While there has been some speculation that the high cost of unconventional oil production might set a new equilibrium for Brent prices in the $80 to $90 range, supply/demand balances suggest that the price rout has yet to run its course.” Against a backdrop of weakening demand, oil supply in October increased adding further downward pressure on prices, the IEA said in its monthly market report. According to the watchdog, global oil supply inched up by 350,000 barrels per day (bpd) in October to 94.2m bpd.

However, in London Brent crude bounced at the open up almost 1pc at around $78 per barrel after heavy losses overnight in the US saw West Texas Intermediate blend crude fall to $74 per barrel. “Crude prices are enduring another hefty move lower, with Brent shifting below $80 for the first time since late 2010,” said Chris Beauchamp, Market Analyst, IG. “With this key level out of the way a move towards $75 now looks likely as the hunt for a real floor in oil prices goes on.” The supply glut will add to pressure on the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries to sharply cut back on production at their meeting on November 27. However, the group’s major producers may be reluctant to do so due to the risk of losing more market share to shale oil drillers in the US.

The IEA’s warning on prices follows the US Energy Department, which this week pared back its forecasts for prices in 2015. The US Energy Information Administration (EIA) – part of the Department of Energy – has slashed its price forecasts for 2015. The EIA now expects US crude blends to average $77.75 per barrel next year, down from a previous forecast of $97.72, and Brent to average $83.42 in 2015, down from its old estimate of $101.67. The EIA has also revised down its global demand forecast by 200,000 barrels per day (bpd) to average 92.5m bpd in 2015, based on weaker global economic growth prospects for next year.

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The US doesn’t produce enough domestically yet, or so I guess.

Keystone Left Behind as Canadian Oil Pours Into US (Bloomberg)

Delays of the Keystone XL pipeline are providing little obstacle to Western Canadian oil producers getting their crude to the U.S. Gulf Coast, with shipments set to more than double next year. The volume of Canadian crude processed at Gulf Coast refineries could climb to more than 400,000 barrels a day in 2015 from 208,000 in August, according to Jackie Forrest, vice president of Calgary-based ARC Financial. The increase comes as Enbridge’s Flanagan South and an expanded Seaway pipeline raise their capacity to ship oil by as much as 450,000 barrels a day. Canadian exports to the Gulf rose 83% in the past four years.

The expansion shows Canadians are finding alternative entry points into the U.S. while the Keystone saga drags on. In the latest chapter, a Democratic senator and a Republican representative are seeking votes in their chambers to set the project in motion. The two are squaring off in a runoff election for a Senate seat from Louisiana, a state where support for the project is strong. “Keystone is kind of old news,” Sandy Fielden, director of energy analytics at Austin, Texas-based consulting company RBN Energy, said Nov. 12 in an e-mail. “Producers have moved on and are looking for new capacity from other pipelines.” TransCanada’s Keystone XL, which would transport Alberta’s heavy oil sands crude to refineries on the Gulf, has been held up for six years, awaiting Obama administration approval.

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Over the top headline and commentary. Russia buys gold because sanctions make access to dollar markets harder.

Putin Stockpiles Gold As Russia Prepares For Economic War (Telegraph)

Russia has taken advantage of lower gold prices to pack the vaults of its central bank with bullion as it prepares for the possibility of a long, drawn-out economic war with the West. The latest research from the World Gold Council reveals that the Kremlin snapped up 55 tonnes of the precious metal – far more than any other nation – in the three months to the end of September as prices began to weaken. Vladimir Putin’s government is understood to be hoarding vast quantities of gold, having tripled stocks to around 1,150 tonnes in the last decade. These reserves could provide the Kremlin with vital firepower to try and offset the sharp declines in the rouble. Russia’s currency has come under intense pressure since US and European sanctions and falling oil prices started to hurt the economy.

Revenues from the sale of oil and gas account for about 45pc of the Russian government’s budget receipts. The biggest buyers of gold after Russia are other countries from the Commonwealth of Independent States, led by Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan. In total, central banks around the world bought 93 tonnes of the precious metal in the third quarter, marking it the 15th consecutive quarter of net purchases. In its report, the World Gold Council said this was down to a combination of geopolitical tensions and attempts by countries to diversify their reserves away from the US dollar. By the end of the year, central banks will have acquired up to 500 tonnes of gold during the latest buying spell, according to Alistair Hewitt, head of market intelligence at the World Gold Council.

“Central banks have been consistently adding to their gold holdings since 2009,” Mr Hewitt told the Telegraph. In the case of Russia, Mr Hewitt said that the recent increases in its gold holdings could be a sign of greater geopolitical risk that has arisen since it seized Crimea sparking a dispute with Ukraine and the West. Overall, the World Gold Council said that global demand for gold was down 2pc year-on-year to 929 tonnes in the third quarter amid signs that buying in China, one of the main markets, had tailed off. Jewellery demand in the quarter ending in September was down 39pc to 147 tonnes, signalling weaker consumer sentiment in the world’s second-largest economy.

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After 2.5 years, and countless comments at TAE about Abe’s inevitable failure, mainstream America is catching on. Even a jibe at Krugman here.

It May Be Too Late for Japan PM to Fix World’s Third Largest Economy (TIME)

Tokyo is abuzz with speculation that Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is about to dissolve the Diet, as the country’s legislature is known, and call a snap election. He by no means has to take such action. It has only been two years since his Liberal Democratic Party, or LDP, swept to power in a massive landslide, and the opposition is in such disarray that there is little doubt Abe would be returned to office in a new election. Nevertheless, Abe apparently feels the need for another vote of confidence from the public, likely in part to bolster support for his radical program to revive Japan’s economy, nicknamed Abenomics. The problem is that it could already be too late. Abenomics is a failure, and Abe isn’t likely to fix it, no matter how many seats his party holds in parliament.

When Abe first introduced Abenomics, many economists – most notably, Nobel laureate Paul Krugman – believed the unconventional program would finally end the economy’s two-decade slump. The plan: the Bank of Japan (BOJ), the country’s central bank, would churn out yen on a biblical scale to smash through the economy’s endemic and destructive cycle of deflation, while Abe’s government would pump up fiscal spending and implement long-overdue reforms to the structure of the economy. Advocates argued that Abenomics was just the sort of bold action to jump-start growth and fix a broken Japan, and we all had reason to hope that it would work. Japan is still the world’s third largest economy, and a revival there would add another much-needed pillar to hold up sagging global economic growth.

However, I had my concerns from the very beginning. In my view, Japan’s economy doesn’t grow because there is a lack of demand. Pumping more cash into the economy, therefore, will not restart growth. Only deep reform to raise the potential of the economy can do that — by improving productivity and unleashing new economic energies. Unless Abe changed the way Japan’s economy works — and I doubted he would — all of the largesse from the BOJ would at best come to nothing. In a worst-case scenario, Abe’s program could turn Japan into an even bigger economic mess than it already is.

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The G20 is the most useless gathering on the planet. They see one thing only, growth, whether it’s there or not.

Europe’s Debt Fight May Undermine Push for Growth Deal (Bloomberg)

Europe’s infighting over debt rules may be the biggest challenge to its ambitions for a new commitment to growth at the Group of 20 summit in Australia. World leaders have already expressed their frustration with the European Union’s German-mandated obsession with budget deficits. When they sit down in Brisbane this weekend to consider the 28-nation bloc’s call for a “comprehensive” growth strategy that seeks to boost private investment and rein in fiscal excess, the G-20 group will include France and Italy, the euro nations that have most publicly fought the EU view. Germany and its allies say the debt rules are essential for the EU’s credibility yet the euro area’s six-year slump has already weakened the bloc’s reputation for economic management, regardless of whether the 18 euro members can eventually wrestle their budget deficits under control.

As global growth wanes, the rest of the world’s capacity to keep indulging Europe’s budget focus is narrowing too. “Europe has, from a global perspective, been too tight for years,” said Jacob Funk Kirkegaard, senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington. Even if the euro area relaxes its stance somewhat, “the global economy is growing slower now, so any undershoot matters more.” Behind the united facade European leaders will present in Brisbane, France and Italy are straining at the budget limits they’ve been set, spurred on by calls from European Central Bank President Mario Draghi for nations to supplement his “whatever it takes” monetary policy stance.

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A big relief, was the announcement. So why are EU stocks falling?

Cold Comfort As France, Germany Eke Out Tiny Q3 Growth (Reuters)

European stocks were flat on Friday after gross domestic product numbers showed both France and Germany grew marginally in the third quarter, while the dollar rose further against the yen on expectations of a snap election in Japan. The European data confirmed that the outlook for much of the world economy still looks much shakier than for the United States, although France beat expectations. Asian stocks fell following the latest signs that growth in China is slowing. Energy stocks were depressed as crude oil hovered near a four-year low in an oversupplied market and the Russian ruble, hammered in recent weeks as world oil prices fell, was again testing record lows around 48 rubles per dollar. Germany’s economy eked out growth of 0.1% on the quarter, while France – generally seen as in deeper trouble than its neighbor – grew by 0.3%. Overall euro zone data was due later. “The German number is slightly positive in line with expectations but it’s still soft,” said Patrick Jacq, a rate strategist at BNP Paribas in Paris.

“The (French) growth in Q3 is only driven by inventories. It’s just a one-off positive figure in a very weak environment and therefore this is not something which could lead the market to think that the economic situation is improving in France.” A Reuters poll showed Japanese companies overwhelmingly want Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to delay or scrap a planned tax increase, a move expected to come along with a decision, expected by many, to call a new election. The yen, down more than 3% against a stronger dollar this month, fell another half% to a seven-year low of 116.385 yen per dollar. “The argument is that delaying the sales tax hike means the impulse to CPI inflation will start to drop,” said Alvin Tan, a currency strategist at French bank Societe Generale in London. “If there’s no additional sales tax hike, the impulse to higher inflation starts to fade away quite rapidly. So in order to push inflation higher, which is what everybody wants, you need the currency to weaken a lot more.”

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All those years lost for growth that will never come. Renzi is not a smart guy.

Italy’s Slump Enters Fourth Year, Complicating Renzi’s Plans (Bloomberg)

Italy’s economy shrank in the third quarter pushing the nation into a fourth year of a slump that has complicated Prime Minister Matteo Renzi’s efforts to revive growth and keep public finances in check. Gross domestic product fell 0.1% from the previous three months, when it declined 0.2%, the national statistics institute Istat said in a preliminary report in Rome today. That matched the median forecast in a Bloomberg survey of 22 economists. Output was down by 0.4% from a year earlier. GDP in the euro region’s third-biggest economy has fallen in all but two of the last 13 quarters as the jobless rate rose to the highest on record.

Renzi is relying on estimated 0.6-percent growth next year to rein in a public debt of more than €2 trillion ($2.50 trillion) and preserve a tax rebate to low-paid employees aimed at reviving consumer demand. The Bank of Italy said yesterday in a report that the country needs to avoid a “recessionary demand spiral” due to the “persistence of economic difficulties, which have been exceptional in terms of duration and depth.” Italians rallied in Rome last month to protest an overhaul of labor market rules tha Renzi proposed to make it easier for businesses to hire and fire workers. The premier has repeatedly said the plan is a way to attract investments and that its framework will get parliamentary approval by year’s end before being fully implemented in 2015.

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Finally a Bloomberg poll that gets something right?

World Outlook Darkening as 89% in Poll See Europe Deflation Risk (Bloomberg)

The world economy is in its worst shape in two years, with the euro area and emerging markets deteriorating and the danger of deflation rising, according to a Bloomberg Global Poll of international investors. A plurality of 38% of those surveyed this week described the global economy as worsening, more than double the number who said that in the last poll in July and the most since September 2012, when Europe was mired in a recession. Much of the concern is again focused on the euro area: Almost two-thirds of those polled said its economy was weakening while 89% saw disinflation or deflation as a greater threat there than inflation over the next year. Respondents said the European Central Bank and the region’s governments are making the situation worse by pursuing too-tight policies, and fewer expressed confidence in ECB President Mario Draghi and German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

“The euro-zone economy has deteriorated and will get worse if there are no fiscal policy actions from core European countries, mainly Germany,” poll participant Sanwook Lee, a senior portfolio manager at Shinhan Bank in Seoul, said in an e-mail. Europe isn’t the only source of concern in the global economy, according to the quarterly poll of 510 investors, traders and analysts who are Bloomberg subscribers. More than half of those contacted said conditions in the BRIC economies – Brazil, Russia, India and China – are getting worse, compared with 36% who said so in July.

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China is filled to its credit boom with this kind of shady deals.

China Busts Underground Banks Linked to $23 Billion Transactions (Bloomberg)

Beijing police raided and shut down more than 10 underground banks that were involved in 140 billion yuan ($23 billion) of transactions over the past few years. The banks were raided on Sept. 18, with 59 people arrested and 264 bank accounts frozen, Beijing Municipal Public Security Bureau said in a statement today. The investigation started in February when Beijing police found that a man with surname Yao had transferred more than $5 million abroad in a year, according to the statement. Yao, who had a number of bank accounts, frequently bought $50,000 of foreign exchange, the police said. That’s the most overseas currency that a Chinese citizen can buy annually. The underground banks, most of which are family-run and operating out of homes, use online and mobile payment devices to buy or sell foreign exchange and illegally transfer funds abroad, according to the statement. Beijing police said they would continue to crackdown on crimes that threaten China’s economic and financial security.

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Investors are clueless and befuddled. Ideal patsies.

Stock Market Fear, Stress And Tensions Climbing (MarketWatch)

What happens if we get another melt-up, maybe to 18,000 on the Dow Jones Industrial Average before we see 17,000 again? I’m in a less aggressive mode for now, but feet to fire, if this bubble-blowing bull market is to keep on blowing, why not a total melt-up into and above 18,000 before year-end? Stranger things have happened. I often ask, who’s more scared right now, the bulls or the bears because when there’s an overwhelming consensus in the answer to that question, it’s often time for the markets to put on a big contrarian move opposite that sentiment. Are you a bull or one of the few bears remaining? Are you scared right now? Do you think most bulls are scared right now?

Fear, stress and tensions have been climbing along with the markets, which isn’t what you’d expect, is it? I’ve noticed throughout this week that tensions have been very high on Latest Scuttles and that’s a reflection of the stress felt by most traders and investors right now. There’s likely a lot of money managers who missed this last leg higher from the Ebola lows and now find themselves drastically behind their market benchmarks with just 45 days to go into year-end. That kind of technical setup into year-end could be a catalyst for the winners to keep their momentum heading higher. I personally am not trying and wouldn’t suggest trying to game the next market move, but it’s something to think about.

And what if you’ve missed this bull run over the last five years and still aren’t in the markets or even if you just find yourself like the aforementioned money managers and feel underinvested here? Like I said, I don’t think the continuing bubble-blowing bull market that I’ve predicted would play out like this is over yet. I wouldn’t be aggressive, but if you don’t think you own enough stocks (or any for that matter) then I do suggest scaling into some of the best stocks you can find, including some of the very best, most revolutionary growth stocks you can find.

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The take-away: Apple is an 800-pound bubble.

Apple Could Swallow Whole Russian Stock Market (Bloomberg)

If you owned Apple Inc., and sold it, you could purchase the entire stock market of Russia, and still have enough change to buy every Russian an iPhone 6 Plus. The CHART OF THE DAY shows the total market capitalization of all public companies in the world’s largest country slipped below that of the world’s most-valued company for the first time on record. The gap, at $121 billion on Nov. 12, is about the price of 143 million contract-free 64-gigabyte iPhones, based on Apple Store prices. The value of Russian equities has slumped $234 billion to $531 billion this year, while Apple gained $147 billion to $652 billion, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

The technology company’s innovation and brand value attract investors, while Russia’s political conflicts, sanctions and the threat of economic stagnation next year make them nervous, according to Vadim Bit-Avragim, a portfolio manager who helps oversee about $4 billion at Kapital Asset Management LLC in Moscow. “Apple works with shareholders to maximize returns and is based where property is protected by law,” Bit-Avragim said. “In Russia, the legislative protection for property is not as good, most state-run companies have poor corporate governance, resources are concentrated in state hands and borrowing costs are shooting up. After all this, when you get involved in conflicts with your neighbors, it becomes very hard to persuade investors from all over the world to invest here.”

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Destruction is our middle name.

Fracking Boom Spurs Demand for Sand and Clouds of Dust (Bloomberg)

A little sand mine down the road didn’t seem like a big deal 17 years ago, when Alphonse Dotson picked the site for a vineyard in the Texas Hill Country. Today he’s surrounded by four mines blasting sand from the earth, filling the air with a fine dust that drifts across acres of sensitive grape vines. A fifth will open soon, and he says he’s worried. “I don’t want us to be smothered to death,” he said. Add sand mining to the list of industries transformed by the U.S. oil boom. The tiny grains of silica are what keep frackers fracking, propping open cracks punched into rock so oil and natural gas can flow. As drilling surged, so has demand for sand. Sand production has more than doubled in the U.S. over the past seven years. By the end of 2016, oil companies in North America will be pumping 145 billion pounds (66 billion kilograms) of it down wells annually. That’s enough to fill railcars stretching from San Francisco to New York – and back.

That’s triggering complaints from local communities, according to a Grant Smith, senior energy policy adviser at the Civil Society Institute. Dust from sand can penetrate deep into lungs and the bloodstream; mines consume massive amounts of water; sand-laden trucks are damaging roads; and property values can be affected. The surge in mining is a “little-understood danger of the fracking boom,” Smith said in a September call with reporters. Energy companies are paying 6% more for sand this year at a time when oil prices are plunging. While low prices may slow down drilling, that won’t make up for a supply bottleneck, said Samir Nangia, a principal at the Houston-based research company PacWest Consulting Partners. Fracking companies are struggling to get enough sand because there aren’t enough trucks and railcars to deliver it. Higher transportation costs are eating into profits at oil-services companies like Schlumberger, Halliburton and Baker Hughes.

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A company that had revenues of $17 billion in 2013 just topples over, and no-one pays attention, because it happened to be in Denmark and SIngapore.

Massive OW Bunker Bankruptcy: Questions Of Governance And Oversight (SeaTrade)

The rapid collapse into bankruptcy of OW Bunker just 48 hours after it revealed a $125m fraud at Singapore subsidiary Dynamic Oil Trading, as well as $150m in risk management losses announced at the same time, leaves an awful lot of unanswered questions. OW Bunker was not a two-bit marine fuel supplier, it had revenues of $17bn in 2013 and claimed a 7% share of the global marine fuel supply market. In March this year its IPO on Copenhagen’s NASDAQ exchange valued the company at DKK5.33bn ($900m), making it one of Denmark’s largest IPOs in recent years. In May this year OW Bunker made Forbes list of top 2,000 list of the world’s biggest public companies. As it stands just seven months on the from the IPO some 20,000 investors will have lost everything they put into the company, based on the statement when it filed for in-court restructuring of its main operating subsidiaries that it “must be assumed that the group’s equity is lost”.

Suppliers and sub-contractors will find themselves with large unpaid bills, something which P&I insurers Skuld have warned shipowners about. And more than 600 employees of the group worldwide face a very uncertain future. Trading is a risky business, and anyone investing in it needs to understand this, but this is also why corporate governance and oversight are so important. It is worth noting that according to reports in the Danish media the company did not actually uncover the fraud at Dynamic itself; one of its senior executives flew to Denmark and tearfully confessed to it. How long it would have gone on if this had not happened we can only speculate. Two employees have since been reported to the Danish police as OW Bunker filed for bankruptcy. What fraud was actually committed we do not know, although we do know it was over a six month period, so its open to question whether it was actual embezzlement or the hiding of losses as the market turned against the executives involved.

Certainly the recent sharp falls in the oil and bunker price point to the latter as a possibility. The case bears certain parallels to then Singapore-based, British national, rogue trader Nick Leeson who caused the collapse of Barings Bank in 1995 having run up losses on speculative trades that eventually totaled in the region of $1.4bn. Indeed the BBC is reporting the fraud at Dynamic could be one of Singapore’s largest financial scandals in the last 10 years, joining what is already a huge scandal in Denmark. The fraud revelations came on top of the $150m in risk management losses that resulted in the firing of OW Bunker head of risk management and evp Jane Dahl Christensen. The full extent of the fallout of OW Bunker’s sudden bankruptcy will most likely take years to unravel. However, lessons do need to be learned on corporate governance and oversight for the benefit of all going forward.

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That Tony Abbott is one dumb f*ck: “Sydney before British settlement was “nothing but bush.”

Aboriginals Decry G-20 Host Australia as Leaders Gather (Bloomberg)

Across the Brisbane River from where some of the world’s biggest leaders will soon gather, a group of 200 indigenous Australians is seeking to present another side to the country’s image as host and regional power. “We want to talk to the people of the world,” said twenty-seven-year-old Meriki Onus, who joined the Aboriginal people protesting in a city park after a two-day, 1,100-mile bus ride to the Queensland state capital. “The police system here is racist, the government systems here are racist and we’ve used the G-20 as an opportunity to tell the world that it’s not OK.” Australia’s first inhabitants – who lived on the continent at least 40,000 years prior to British settlement in 1788 and now make up about 3% of the population – are among groups using the draw of leaders like U.S. President Barack Obama at the Group of 20 meetings to highlight their causes.

The indigenous people gathered in the subtropical city, where police outnumber the 7,000 delegates and media, say the system of government has entrenched poverty. “This country is occupied by force, like what happened in Poland and France during War War II, but for us this has been going on for more than two centuries,” Wayne Wharton, spokesman for the Brisbane Aboriginal Sovereign Embassy, said today at the park protest. “Our people want our rightful place in the world, and that means economic benefits, social benefits, responsibility and services.” Speaking at a business breakfast today in Sydney with U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron, Australia’s leader Tony Abbott, a self-declared prime minister for Aborigines and host of this weekend’s G-20 summit, said Sydney before British settlement was “nothing but bush.”

“As we look around this glorious city, as we see the extraordinary development, it’s hard to think that back in 1788 it was nothing but bush and that the marines and the convicts and the sailors that straggled off those 12 ships just a few hundred yards from where we are now must have thought they’d come almost to the moon,” Abbott said. Daubed with “mourning paint” across his face and torso to highlight indigenous deaths in police custody, Wharton said the G-20 won’t help his people or other Aboriginal races throughout the world because it’s designed to make rich nations wealthier at the expense of the poor. “It all comes back to having the ability to accumulate and then distribute wealth – my people have never had that,” he said.

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Nov 122014
 
 November 12, 2014  Posted by at 12:28 pm Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , , ,  3 Responses »


Ben Shahn L.F. Kitts general store in Maynardville, Tennessee Oct 1935

What the Economy Has Done to the Family (Bloomberg)
Full-Time Employee Jobs Account For Only 1 In 40 Created Since 2008 (Guardian)
US Cities Struggle to Recover From Recession (Bloomberg)
QE Isn’t Dying, It’s Morphing (Nomi Prins)
A Few Central Bankers and Money Managers Get It, Yellen and Kuroda Don’t (Lee Adler)
It’s The 0.01% Who Are Really Getting Ahead In America (Economist)
In New Oil Order, OPEC’s Choice Is Pricing Power or Sales (Bloomberg)
Shale Boom Masks Multiple Threats to World Oil Supply (Bloomberg)
Low Oil Prices To Bite Into 2015 US Shale Growth: IEA (Reuters)
Fossil Fuels With $550 Billion in Subsidy Hurt Renewables (Bloomberg)
Record Exports of Cheap Chinese Steel May Spark Trade War (Bloomberg)
Japan Snap-Election Potential Looms, Abenomics at Risk as Growth Stalls (Bloomberg)
Junk Bond Risks Escalate With Leverage Back to ’08 Levels (Bloomberg)
Banks to Pay $3.3 Billion in FX-Manipulation Probe (Bloomberg)
Leverage Up To 50-1 Lures Mom-and-Pop FX Traders Who Mostly Lose (Bloomberg)
Environmentalists Sue To Protect Whales, Dolphins From Navy War Games (Fox)
Sinking Jakarta Starts Building Giant Wall as Sea Rises (Bloomberg)

It’s hard to see how the loss of familes can not be detrimental to human society.

What the Economy Has Done to the Family (Bloomberg)

It could be a future diorama at New York’s Museum of Natural History: A human male and female who not only got married, but stayed married. Divorce among 50-somethings has doubled since 1990. One in five adults have never married, up from one in ten 30 years ago. In all, a majority of American adults are now single, government data show, including the mothers of two out of every five newborns. These trends are often blamed on feminists or gay rights activists or hippies, who’ve somehow found a way to make Americans reject tradition. But the last several years showed a different powerful force changing families: the economy. The effects of the Great Recession on families are hard to ignore. Births and marriages have plunged, as millions of millennials skip or delay starting traditional families. The economic uncertainty of the downturn dismantled job security which, in turned, ripped up many wedding plans.

Families that have made unconventional arrangements are the most financially fragile. An Allianz survey of 4,500 Americans included an extra sample of families outside the historical norm, including single parents, same-sex couples and blended families. These “modern families” were less financially secure than traditional families, the study found. They were 50% more likely to have unexpectedly lost their main form of income – and twice as likely to have declared bankruptcy. Rocky times rearrange plans and priorities. When women in their early 20’s face an economy with high unemployment, for example, they tend to have fewer children. The spike in unemployment starting in 2008 should result in 9.2 million young women giving birth to 430,000 fewer babies over their lifetimes, according to a 2014 National Academy of Science study.

Why would more unemployment mean fewer babies? When asked what they’d like in a potential spouse, single men’s top answer is “similar ideas about having and raising children,” a Pew Research survey found in September. But when women were asked, 78% said they wanted a spouse with “a steady job.”A man with a steady job is harder to find. Since the 1970s, men have been holding jobs for shorter and shorter periods of time. Women’s average job tenure hasn’t fallen, but that’s only because so many more joined the workforce in the ‘80s and ‘90s. Both sexes are working more temporary or contract gigs, have stagnant wages and enjoy fewer company benefits. The number of big companies offering pensions has dropped 57% in 10 years.

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Wow. 1 in 40. Many western countries hide significant protions of unemployment behind ‘self-employment’. Peel off that fake layer, and you uncover a bitter reality.

Full-Time Employee Jobs Account For Only 1 In 40 Created Since 2008 (Guardian)

Only one in every 40 new jobs created since the recession has been for a full-time employee, according to the Trades Union Congress. The share of full-time employee jobs – excluding self-employment – fell during the recession and has failed to recover since, falling from 64% in 2008 to 62% in 2014, the TUC said. That is equivalent to a shortfall of 669,000 full-time employees. Unemployment never reached the levels feared at the onset of the crisis, but the figures highlight that job creation between 2008 and 2014 has been dominated by rising self-employment and part-time work, not full-time employee jobs. Employment increased by 1.08m between January to March 2008 and June to August 2014, but only 26,000 were full-time employee roles. Frances O’Grady, TUC general secretary, said: “While more people are in work there are still far too few full-time employee jobs for everyone who wants one. It means many working families are on substantially lower incomes as they can only find reduced hours jobs or low-paid self-employment.”

While one in 40 of the net jobs added to the economy between 2008 and 2014 has been a full-time employee job, 24 in every 40 have been self-employed and 26 in every 40 have been part-time. The TUC said that although part-time work was an important option for many people, the number of part-time employees who say they want to work full-time is still almost double the number before the recession at 1.3m. The TUC also said that at least part of the increase in self-employment was driven by people unable to find employee jobs or those forced into false self-employment by companies seeking to evade taxes and avoid paying out entitlements such as holiday pay, sick pay and pensions. O’Grady said: “The chancellor has said he wants full employment, but that should mean full-time jobs for everyone who wants them. At the moment the economy is still not creating enough full-time employee jobs to meet demand.”

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They’ll never come back. Detroit was merely a guinea pig.

US Cities Struggle to Recover From Recession (Bloomberg)

Most big U.S. cities have struggled to restore revenue to pre-recession peaks amid lagging property-tax receipts and cuts in state and federal funds, according to a report from the Pew Charitable Trusts. Pew analyzed financial statements for the central cities of the 30 most-populous metropolitan areas and found that as of 2012 a majority still hadn’t recovered from the recession that ended in June 2009. Revenue of 18 municipalities declined in 2012 after adjusting for inflation, with eight logging the lowest collections since the economic slump started in 2007, a report released yesterday showed. Even with fiscal gains since 2012 from a growing national economy and rallying stocks, the governments are straining to balance costs for services such as police and fire protection with the expense of obligations to retirees. In Houston, the biggest increase in the proposed 2015 budget is a 21% boost in pension contributions, eclipsing spending on libraries, parks, trash and courts combined, Pew said.

“Cities are not out of the woods yet,” Mary Murphy, a Pew officer and one of the report’s authors, said in a conference call with reporters. “In spite of an ongoing national recovery, serious financial concerns remain for local leaders in many of the nation’s cities.” For Atlanta, Dallas, Detroit, Las Vegas, Phoenix, Pittsburgh and San Antonio, revenue declines in 2012 from 2011 were the largest since the recession began, Pew said. “The recovery hasn’t been evenly felt across the country, and these pockets of distress remain,” Murphy said in an interview from Washington. Researchers blamed a drop in property-tax collections, generally a city’s largest source of financing, and reduced funding by states and the federal government, for most of the revenue declines. Both categories fell by an average of 4% in 2012, the report said. While the national housing market has begun to rebound, municipal real-estate levy collections trail increases to assessments by at least a year, Pew said. Twenty-four cities reported declines in receipts from 2011.

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The taper was never meant to hurt back profits. That should be very obvious by now.

QE Isn’t Dying, It’s Morphing (Nomi Prins)

The Fed is already the largest hedge fund in the world, with a book of $4.5 trillion of assets. These will plummet in value if rates rise. Cue the banks that are gearing up their own (still small in comparison, but give them time) role in this big bamboozle. By doing so, they too are amassing additional risk with respect to interest rates rising, on top of all their other risk that counts on leveraging cheap money. Only the naïve could possibly believe that the Fed and its key banks haven’t been in regular communication about this US Treasury security shell game. Yet, aside from a few politicians, such as Ron Paul, Sherrod Brown, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, the notion that Fed policy has helped bankers, rather than other people, remains largely divorced from bi-partisan political discussion. Adding more fuel to the central-private bank collusion fire, is the fact that the Fed is a paying client of the JPM Chase. The banking behemoth is bagging fees for holding and executing transactions on the $1.7 trillion New York Fed’s QE mortgage portfolio.

Wouldn’t it be convenient if JPM Chase was also trading this massive mortgage book for its own profits? Or rather – why wouldn’t they be? Who’s going to stop them – the Fed? Besides, they hold more trading assets than any other US bank, so why not trade the Fed’s securities ostensibly purchased to help the public – recover? According to call report data compiled by the extremely thorough website www.BankRegData.com, nearly 97% of all bank trading assets (including US Treasuries) are held by just 10 banks, led by JPM Chase with 43.80% and followed by Citigroup at 24.51% of all bank trading assets. Last quarter, US Treasuries were the fastest growing form of security bought by banks, increasing by 26.3% or $72 billion over the prior quarter. As the Fed tapered, banks stepped in to do their part in the coordinated Fed-private bank QE game. In the past year, banks have added $185.8 billion of US Treasuries to their books, more than doubling their share of government debt.

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Sounds reasonable, except for the praise of Fisher and Plosser.

A Few Central Bankers and Money Managers Get It, Yellen and Kuroda Don’t (Lee Adler)

It may be more than a few, but increasingly some central bankers like the courageous Richard Fisher of the Dallas Fed and Chuck Plosser of the Philly Fed are speaking up, joined by a few well known money managers. They’re echoing the complaints that I and others have made for years about the insane (and immoral) policies of ZIRP and QE that the world’s major central banks have been promulgating since 2008. At a meeting of central bankers held by the Banque du France in Paris last week, a few of those people spoke out.

Among the gripes: Central-bank stimulus has relieved pressure on governments to revamp their economies, punished savers, inflated asset bubbles and left financial markets overly reliant on liquidity [emphasis mine] and prone to volatility when it reverses.
– via Central Bankers Join Investors Warning on Easy Money – Bloomberg.

That says it all in a nutshell. Finally a few people in the mainstream are expounding on those themes that I have hammered on in futility for years. In time, the longer that QE and ZIRP continue to fail in increasingly obvious ways, the more the groundswell against them will grow. Meanwhile, hidebound jackasses like Yellen and Kuroda remain in denial. Hey Janet! Hey Haruhiko! Riddle me this. If QE and ZIRP are so essential to stimulating growth, why with the BoJ’s balance sheet tripling in size and rates held at zero for years, is Japan’s GDP now no more than it was in 2006? Could it be that QE and ZIRP actually don’t stimulate growth? Could it be that the financial engineering, speculative excess, and labor suppression that results from QE and ZIRP are actually detrimental to real growth? Maybe, just maybe, higher interest rates would promote thrift, and rational, real investment that benefits everybody, not just the bankers, speculators, and corporate executives engaged in the constant easy money wealth transfer schemes that you promote and enable?

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So when are we going to do something about it? I’ve seen zero attempts at that.

It’s The 0.01% Who Are Really Getting Ahead In America (Economist)

Among the most controversial of Thomas Piketty’s arguments in his bestselling analysis of inequality, “Capital in the Twenty-First Century”, is that wealth is increasingly concentrated in the hands of the very rich. Rising wealth inequality could presage the return of an 18th century inheritance society, in which marrying an heir is a surer route to riches than starting a company. Critics question the premise: Chris Giles, the economics editor of the Financial Times, argued earlier this year that Mr Piketty’s data were both thin and faulty. Yet a new paper suggests that, in America at least, inequality in wealth is approaching record levels. Earlier studies of American wealth have tended to show only small increases in inequality in recent decades. A 2004 study of estate-tax data by Wojciech Kopczuk of Columbia University and Emmanuel Saez of the University of California, Berkeley, found an almost imperceptible rise in the share of wealth held by the top 1% of families, from about 19% in 1976 to 21% in 2000.

A more recent investigation of the Federal Reserve’s data on consumer finances, by Edward Wolff of New York University showed a continued but gentle increase in inequality into the 2000s. Mr Piketty’s book, which drew on this previous work, showed similarly modest rises in wealth inequality in America. A new paper by Mr Saez and Gabriel Zucman of the London School of Economics reckons past estimates badly underestimated the share of wealth belonging to the very rich. It uses a richer variety of sources than prior studies, including detailed data on personal income taxes (which the authors mine for figures on capital income) and property tax, which they check against Fed data on aggregate wealth. The authors note that not every potential source of error can be accounted for; tax avoidance strategies, for instance, could cause either an overestimation of the wealth share of the rich (if they classify labour income as capital income in order to take advantage of lower rates) or an underestimation (if they intentionally seek out lower yielding investments for their tax advantages).

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Look, teh Saudis would never have enacted their latest policies without extensive delibeartions with the relevant Americans (which may well not include the President). Their 90-year old King is acutely aware of his family’s decades-long and still nigh-complete dependence on the US for its safety and its hold on power. Any discussion about today’s oil prices must always consider that.

In New Oil Order, OPEC’s Choice Is Pricing Power or Sales (Bloomberg)

The decision OPEC faces at this month’s meeting isn’t just over whether to cut oil production. It’s a choice of whether the group is willing to fight to maintain the sway it has had over crude markets for decades. The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, buffeted by plunging prices, could reassert control by cutting output, said Societe Generale SA, ceding more market share to U.S. shale oil producers. The alternative – waiting to see if lower prices choke off the North American shale boom – would usher in a “new oil order” where pricing power is handed to drillers in Texas and North Dakota, according to Goldman Sachs. “We’ve not seen a turning point like this in decades,” Mike Wittner, Societe Generale’s head of oil market research in New York, said by phone yesterday. “Is OPEC going to abdicate its role in the market? If the Saudis do exactly what they’re signaling, and just let the market take care of the overproduction, then it could certainly become irrelevant.”

Oil plunged into a bear market last month, the result of a surge in shale drilling that has lifted U.S. production to a three-decade high as well as slowing growth in global demand. The drop has caused financial pain for some OPEC members, prompting Ecuador, Venezuela and Libya to call for action to halt the slide. Nigeria’s currency slumped to an all-time low last week and Venezuela’s benchmark bond fell yesterday to 56.63 cents on the dollar, the lowest level since March 2009. The group’s data show shale output has trimmed a %age point from its market share and will take it to the lowest in more than 25 years during this decade. Reducing output is a tougher decision to make when there are more competitors ready to supply clients cut off by OPEC.

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Duh!

Shale Boom Masks Multiple Threats to World Oil Supply (Bloomberg)

The U.S. shale boom masks threats to global oil supply including Middle East turmoil, conflict in Ukraine and the difficulty of unconventional oil production beyond North America, the International Energy Agency said. “The global energy system is in danger of falling short of the hopes and expectations placed upon it,” the IEA said in its annual World Energy Outlook today. “The short-term picture of a well-supplied oil market should not disguise the challenges that lie ahead as reliance grows on a relatively small number of producers.” Global oil consumption will rise to 104 million barrels a day in 2040 from 90 million barrels a day in 2013, driven by demand for transport fuel and petrochemicals in developing countries, the report said. To meet that growth and replace exhausted fields will require about $900 billion a year in investment by the 2030s as oil companies develop fields from Canada’s oil sands to the deep waters off Brazil, the IEA said.

Oil prices slumped to a four-year low this month on concern that supply from U.S. unconventional fields is rising faster than global demand. The recent price slowdown is threatening investment in the industry as companies try to insulate profits from the price fall. While the near-term picture is secure, the development of capital-intensive areas outside North America is at risk, the IEA said. In the Canadian oil sands, among the most expensive oil deposits in the world to exploit, a slowdown is already evident and the IEA estimates about a quarter of projects are at risk as prices fall. Likewise, the complexity and capital intensity of developing Brazil’s deepwater fields could also contribute to a shortfall in investment. Replicating the U.S. shale oil boom outside of North America will also be a challenge, the report said. A lack of existing oil and gas infrastructure, environmental opposition to fracking, and uncertain geology are among the reasons unconventional drilling hasn’t spread.

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And a lot. Please note that Fatih Birol is an absolute douche. And the IEA only pushes industry agendas, it has no use for objective research.

Low Oil Prices To Bite Into 2015 US Shale Growth: IEA (Reuters)

Falling oil prices may cut investment in U.S. shale oil by 10% next year, the International Energy Agency (IEA) said, slowing growth in a sector that has turned the United States to a major global producer. The recent drop in oil prices “should not blind us to the problems that may be around the corner,” Fatih Birol, the IEA’s chief economist, told Reuters ahead of the launch of the agency’s 2014 World Energy Outlook. Benchmark oil prices have dropped by about 30% over the past four months to around $82 a barrel due mostly to increased supplies from the Middle East and North America, squeezing budgets of oil producing nations and oil companies.

“If prices remain at these lows, this may result in a decline in U.S. upstream capital expenditures by 10% in 2015, which will have implication for future production growth,” Birol said. U.S. oil production has risen by 1 million barrels per day (bpd) per year over the past year as strong oil prices led to a boom in shale oil production through fracking, a technique that uses high pressure to capture gas and oil trapped in deep rock. Production is set to grow by an additional 963,000 bpd in 2015, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

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That’s more than the $88 billion discussed yesterday, but then, that was only for exploration. Other reports talk about $5 trillion per year, see: Energy Costs – Necessity, Not Folly .

Fossil Fuels With $550 Billion in Subsidy Hurt Renewables (Bloomberg)

Fossil fuels are reaping $550 billion a year in subsidies and holding back investment in cleaner forms of energy, the International Energy Agency said. Oil, coal and gas received more than four times the $120 billion paid out in subsidy for renewables including wind, solar and biofuels, the Paris-based institution said today in its annual World Energy Outlook. The findings highlight the policy shift needed to limit global warming, which the IEA said is on track to increase the world’s temperature by 3.6 degrees Celsius by the end of this century. That level would increase the risks of damaging storms, droughts and rising sea levels. “In Saudi Arabia, the additional upfront cost of a car twice as fuel efficient as the current average would at present take 16 years to recover through lower spending on fuel,” the IEA said. “This payback period would shrink to three years if gasoline were not subsidized.”

Renewable use in electricity generation is on the rise and will account for almost half the global increase in generation by 2040, according to the report. It said about 7,200 gigawatts of generating capacity needs to be built in that period to keep pace with rising demand and replace aging power stations. The share of renewables in power generation will rise to 37% in countries that are members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, according to the IEA. It said that globally, wind power will take more than a third of the growth in clean power; hydropower accounts for about 30%, and solar 18%. Wind may produce 20% of European electricity by 2040, and solar power could take 37% of summer peak demand in Japan, it said. The IEA singled out the Middle East as a region where fossil fuel subsidies are hampering renewables. It said 2 million barrels per day of oil are burned to generate power that could otherwise come from renewables, which would be competitive with unsubsidized oil.

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It’s a dog eat dog world.

Record Exports of Cheap Chinese Steel May Spark Trade War (Bloomberg)

Record steel exports from China are undercutting foreign rivals on price, triggering complaints from Seoul to South Africa that may signal the start of a trade conflict. China produces about half the world’s steel and exports are on pace to exceed 80 million tons this year, the most ever, according to the China Iron & Steel Association. That’s exacerbating trade tensions in the region as Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and President Barack Obama meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping this week in Beijing. With China’s economy slowing to levels not seen for more than two decades, producers are boosting shipments to other markets. “It’s certain the trend to export will continue next year,” said Luo Yongdong, head of imports and exports at the Panzhihua Iron & Steel Group, a unit of Anshan Iron & Steel Group, one of China’s largest steelmakers. “As a result, trade disputes will intensify.” Hebei Iron & Steel Group’s Tangshan unit said this week it will make its first shipments of auto sheet to Latin America, while its Xuancheng unit shipped hard steel wire to Japan on Nov. 7 for the first time.

In Japan, Tokyo Steel Manufacturing Managing Director Kiyoshi Imamura said the sheer scale of China’s exports puts it on pace to reach 100 million tons a year. That’s about equal to the entire output of Japan, the world’s second-largest producer. Japan’s Kobe Steel and South Korea’s Posco said they have complained to counterparts in China about the flood of metal that’s eating into their sales. Chinese steel is also piling up in ports in India and Africa, where local producers have asked governments to do something to stop it. The exports are reaching as far as the U.S., where imports of the metal rose more than 50% in September. Exports to Taiwan and India rose more than four-fold. In the Southeast Asia markets, China’s lower costs allow it to sell some types of steel at about $40 to $50 a ton less than South Korea and $100 lower than Japan, said Wei Zengmin, an analyst from Mysteel.com, the nation’s largest industry research company.

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Abe will only do it if he knows he’ll win. Besides, who else wants to take over his bankrupt estate?

Japan Snap-Election Potential Looms, Abenomics at Risk as Growth Stalls (Bloomberg)

A potential snap election in Japan next month clouds the outlook for the Abe administration’s economic program as the nation struggles to shake off the impact of this year’s sales-tax increase. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is likely to call a general election on Dec. 14, according to two people with knowledge of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party’s strategy. His government favors delaying the next bump in the sales levy until April 2017, according to LDP lawmakers who asked not to be named. With steps such as opening Japan to casinos, scaling back labor regulations and reforming social security still to be taken, a parliamentary election in December risks putting off structural changes deeper into 2015. Any reduced majority for the ruling coalition could also open Abe’s reflation program to increased criticism. “It would be asking the voters to give an endorsement of Abenomics,” said Izumi Devalier, an economist at HSBC in Hong Kong. An election would also help Abe silence “fiscal hawks” in the party who want the tax hike, she said.

The Nikkei 225 Stock Average gained 0.4% today after jumping 2.1% yesterday amid speculation of a delay in the tax and a December election. The world’s third biggest economy contracted 7.1% in the second quarter, the most in more than five years, after the government increased the tax by 3 %age points to 8%. Abe adviser Etsuro Honda said today that the tax hike is out of the question if the economy grows less than 3.8% in the third quarter. Gross domestic product data will be released on Nov. 17, with the median of projections by economists for a rise of 2.8%. No decision has been made to postpone the tax rise, Finance Minister Taro Aso said today in parliament, adding that it would be very hard to fund Japan’s social welfare without increasing the tax to 10%, as planned.

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Chasing yield shielded by the Fed. Or so they think.

Junk Bond Risks Escalate With Leverage Back to ’08 Levels (Bloomberg)

The riskiest corporate debtors in the U.S. aren’t growing fast enough to pay down their borrowings, increasing the risk for bond investors at a time when valuations are already at about record highs. That’s the conclusion of Deutsche Bank, which estimates that the biggest jump in earnings in almost three years may be coming too late for speculative-grade borrowers as the amount of debt on balance sheets climbs back to levels seen in early 2008 before the financial crisis. To make matters worse, their ability to make interest payments is about where it was in 2007, even as the Federal Reserve has held its benchmark rate close to zero.

“We expect the next restructuring cycle will be dominated by companies with good operations but not able to grow into their balance sheets or refinance maturing debt,” Kenneth Buckfire, president of restructuring firm Miller Buckfire said. Investors have piled into junk bonds for their relatively high yields amid the suppressed rates. That has allowed the least creditworthy borrowers to raise $1.64 trillion in the bond market since the end of 2008, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. That led to average annual returns of 18.6% from 2009 through 2013, compared with 17.7% for stocks as measured by gains in the Bank of America Merrill Lynch U.S. High Yield Index and the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index.

Debt exceeds earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization by about four times at speculative-grade companies, near 2008 levels, Deutsche Bank strategists Oleg Melentyev and Daniel Sorid wrote in a Nov. 7 report. Leverage rose even as cash flow grew 12% at those companies that had reported third-quarter results, according to the New York-based analysts. The Fed has held its benchmark rate between zero and 0.25% since the end of 2008 to spur economic growth. Yields on junk-rated debt, which is rated below BBB- by S&P and less than Baa3 by Moody’s Investors Service, have fallen to 6.36%, from a peak of more than 22% at the end of 2008, according to Bank of America index data. Yields touched a record low 5.7% on June 23.

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Not even 10 times that would be enough.

Banks to Pay $3.3 Billion in FX-Manipulation Probe (Bloomberg)

Regulators in the U.S., Britain and Switzerland ordered five banks to pay about $3.3 billion to settle a probe into the manipulation of benchmark foreign-exchange rates. Switzerland’s UBS was ordered to pay the most at $800 million, according to statements from the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission, Britain’s Financial Conduct Authority and Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority. Citigroup was ordered to pay $668 million, followed by JPMorgan at $662 million, the filings show. HSBC paid $618 million and Royal Bank of Scotland $534 million. “Countless individuals and companies around the world rely on these rates to settle financial contracts, and this reliance is premised on faith in the fundamental integrity of these benchmarks,” Aitan Goelman, the CFTC’s director of enforcement said in the statement. “The market only works if people have confidence that the process of setting these benchmarks is fair, not corrupted by manipulation by some of the biggest banks in the world.”

The settlements are the first since authorities around the world began investigating allegations last year that dealers at the biggest banks colluded with counterparts at other firms to rig benchmarks used by fund managers to determine what they pay for foreign currency. Probes have expanded to include whether traders used confidential information to take bets on unauthorized personal accounts, and whether sales desks charged clients excessive commissions in the $5.3 trillion-a-day foreign-exchange market. The FCA said it would “progress” its probe of Britain’s Barclays, which wasn’t fined today, to cover its wider foreign exchange trading business. “We will continue to engage with these authorities, including the FCA and CFTC, with the objective of bringing this to resolution in due course,” Barclays said in a statement.

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FX trading eats people.

Leverage Up To 50-1 Lures Mom-and-Pop FX Traders Who Mostly Lose (Bloomberg)

It’s a Saturday afternoon in March, and more than 500 people have tuned in for a two-hour webinar that tells them they can become rich trading foreign currencies. “Success in trading is not a fantasy; it’s a formula,” Jared Martinez, founder of Market Traders Institute, the oldest and largest such school in the U.S., tells his audience. “We have that formula.” The Lake Mary, Florida, company that Martinez founded in 1994 says it has educated 30,000 amateur foreign-exchange investors. “How many people would like to learn a skill where, within two days, they could make a thousand dollars?” Martinez asks that afternoon. “I’m here to tell you I can teach you how to trade consistently.” He introduces Jose Tormos, his son-in-law, who echoes Martinez’s advice, Bloomberg Markets will report in its December issue. “It is the easiest, most predictable and safest way to invest,” Tormos says. “Many of you are missing out on opportunities to build a retirement nest egg.” One person familiar with the webinar pitch is Dan Gratton, a 71-year-old retiree who lives on Social Security in Kingman, Arizona.

He says he’s been a student of the institute for two years and had hoped that taking its home-study classes and watching webinars would help him succeed with forex trading. That hasn’t happened. “Probably the most consistent thing is losing,” Gratton says. He’s right. Most retail currency investors lose money most of the time, according to the industry’s own data. Reports to clients by the two biggest publicly traded over-the-counter forex companies – FXCM and Gain Capital – show that, on average, 68% of investors had a net loss from trading in each of the past four quarters. These kinds of losses make for investor churn. The average OTC forex investor drops out of the market after just four months, according to the National Futures Association, an industry self-regulatory group. Retail forex investors, many of whom are well educated in fields other than finance, enter into a market that is lightly regulated, opaque and rife with conflicts of interest. They are enticed by pitches from coaches like Martinez, saying people can finance their retirements trading forex.

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How did we get there from here?

Environmentalists Sue To Protect Whales, Dolphins From Navy War Games (Fox)

Worried about collateral damage to whales, dolphins and other marine life, environmentalists are fighting the U.S. Navy in court in a bid to protect the creatures of the sea from war games in the Pacific Ocean. “The worst harm comes from the explosives going off,” said David Henkin, an attorney for EarthJustice. U.S. Navy testing and war games are underway in American waters off the coasts of California and Hawaii. The drills amount to critical practice for the military and last through 2018, but environmental groups like EarthJustice say hundreds of marine mammals will die or get injured by the time the Navy is through. They said they don’t want to stop the Navy from training – but change how they do it. The testing areas are home to nearly 40 marine mammal and five sea turtle species. According to the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Navy will conduct 500,000 hours of sonar testing between 2013 and 2018. During that time, 260,000 bombs, missiles and other explosives will be tested.

According to an analysis of the National Marine Fisheries Service, a division of the Department of Commerce charged with protecting mammals, the estimated damage to the marine life includes the deaths of 155 whales, dolphins and seals; 2,000 permanent injuries to marine mammals; and 9.6 million incidents of temporary hearing loss and behavior changes in areas like migration, nursing and feeding. But the Navy says fears are overblown and that war-gaming, which dates back to 1886, is a consistently reliable way to train for combat. “Despite decades of the Navy conducting very similar activities in these same areas, there is no evidence of these types of impacts,” Kenneth Hess, Navy spokesman, told FoxNews.com. “Bear in mind that the permits the Navy requires to conduct at-sea training and testing can only be issued if our activities will have no more than a negligible impact on marine mammal populations.”

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Behold your children’s world.

Sinking Jakarta Starts Building Giant Wall as Sea Rises (Bloomberg)

If you worry that rising sea levels may one day flood your city, spare a thought for Michelle Darmawan. Her house in Jakarta is inundated several times a year — and it’s 3 kilometers (1.9 miles) from the coast. Whenever there’s a particularly high tide or heavy rain, the Ciliwung River and its network of canals overflow, swamping thousands of homes in Indonesia’s capital. In January, a muddy deluge washed over Darmawan’s raised porch, contaminating her fresh-water tank and cutting off electricity for three days. “We were sitting on the second floor, looking down at the floods, calling out to neighbors to make sure they’re OK,” said Darmawan, 27, a marketing executive whose family had to store drinking water in buckets.

Jakarta, a former Dutch trading port, is one of the world’s megacities most at risk from rising sea levels. That’s because parts of the metropolis of almost 30 million people are sinking by as much as 6 inches a year, more than 10 times faster than the sea is rising. The Indonesian capital ranks eighth among the 30 biggest cities in the 2015 Climate Change Vulnerability Index compiled by Bath, England-based risk-assessment company Maplecroft. The index is led by Dhaka, Lahore in Pakistan, and Delhi. The government’s solution: a $40 billion land-reclamation project unveiled last month. It includes a 32-kilometer (20-mile) sea wall, a chain of artificial islands, a lagoon about the size of Manhattan – and a giant offshore barrier island in the shape of the national symbol, the mythical bird Garuda.

The first pile for the initial stage of the program – a barrier to strengthen existing sea defenses along 32 kilometers – was sunk at the Oct. 9 opening ceremony. “The whole city is sinking like Atlantis,” said Christophe Girot, principal investigator of the Jakarta Study at the Future Cities Laboratory research group in Singapore. “You see the absolute most miserable and poorest population living right by the river, and they know they’re going to get flooded and may be killed three or four more times a year.” The central and municipal governments will split the 3.2 trillion rupiah ($263 million) cost for the first 8 kilometers of the wall. Developers would put up the remaining 24 kilometers by 2030 in exchange for the right to build on reclaimed land. [..] .. the metropolis is home to almost 30 million people, making it the second-most-populous urban area in the world, after Tokyo-Yokohama,

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