Civil War Archives - Page 3 of 3 - The Automatic Earth

“The Green Street Commercial Property Price Index has soared 107% from the trough in May 2009 and now exceeds the peak of the totally crazy bubble in 2007 by 26%“.

• Who’ll Get Hit by Fallout of $11 Trillion US Commercial Property Bubble? (WS)

Warnings about the loans, bonds, and commercial-mortgage-backed securities (CMBS) tied to the vast $11-trillion commercial property sector in the US have been hailing down for months. Moody’s Investor Services just warned about the rising delinquency rate of some $360 billion in CMBS it rates. Delinquencies of 60+ days jumped from 4.6% last year to 5.6% in September. Fitch Ratings has been fretting about valuations in the sector, and CMBS, for months. “Valuation and lending trends are not sustainable in the medium term,” it said most recently in its November report. It pinpointed debt backed by apartment buildings as a particular trouble spot. But now it’s also fretting about construction loans, which “experienced the highest loss severity in the last crisis, and we expect a similar trend in the next downturn,” it said.

It’s worried about the banks, whose commercial real estate (CRE) lending has reached “record levels”: “All of the most concentrated banks – those with more than 300% of risk-based capital in CRE – have less than $50 billion in assets and most have assets below $10 billion. These smaller banks also have varying degrees of sophistication in their risk management practices.” Fitch laments that the “timing and severity of this softening is uncertain and depends on factors including interest rates and overall economic conditions.” Alas, since the report was released on Election Day, interest rates have alread jumped. This comes at the worst possible moment, at the peak of the most gigantic CRE price bubble the US has ever seen. The Green Street Commercial Property Price Index has soared 107% from the trough in May 2009 and now exceeds the peak of the totally crazy bubble in 2007 by 26%:

Let’s see if a normal economy can still work.

• US Mortgage Applications Crash 30% As Borrowing Rates Surge (ZH)

Dear Janet…In the last few months, as The Fed has jawboned a rate hike into markets, mortgage applications in America have collapsed 30% to 10-month lows – plunging over 9% in the last week as mortgage rates approach 4.00%.

We suspect the divergent surge in homebuilders is overdone…

“We don’t want the U.S. government purchasing companies in the United States, why would we want the Chinese Communist government purchasing companies in the United States?”

• Congressional Panel Urges Ban On China State Firms Buying US Companies (R.)

U.S. lawmakers should take action to ban China’s state-owned firms from acquiring U.S. companies, a congressional panel charged with monitoring security and trade links between Washington and Beijing said on Wednesday. In its annual report to Congress, the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission said the Chinese Communist Party has used state-backed enterprises as the primary economic tool to advance and achieve its national security objectives. The report recommended Congress prohibit U.S. acquisitions by such entities by changing the mandate of CFIUS, the U.S. government body that conducts security reviews of proposed acquisitions by foreign firms.

“The Commission recommends Congress amend the statute authorizing the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) to bar Chinese state-owned enterprises from acquiring or otherwise gaining effective control of U.S. companies,” the report said. CFIUS, led by the U.S. Treasury and with representatives from eight other agencies, including the departments of Defense, State and Homeland Security, now has veto power over acquisitions from foreign private and state-controlled firms if it finds that a deal would threaten U.S. national security or critical infrastructure. If enacted, the panel’s recommendation would essentially create a blanket ban on U.S. purchases by Chinese state-owned enterprises.

The panel’s report is purely advisory, but could carry extra weight this year because they come as President-elect Donald Trump’s transition team is formulating its trade and foreign policy agenda and vetting candidates for key economic and security positions. Congress also could be more receptive, after U.S. voter sentiment against job losses to China and Mexico helped Republicans retain control of both the House and the Senate in last week’s election. Trump strongly criticized China throughout the U.S. election campaign, grabbing headlines with his pledges to slap 45 percent tariffs on imported Chinese goods and to label the country a currency manipulator on his first day in office. “Chinese state owned enterprises are arms of the Chinese state,” Dennis Shea, chairman of the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, told a news conference. “We don’t want the U.S. government purchasing companies in the United States, why would we want the Chinese Communist government purchasing companies in the United States?”

Normalization?

• Foreign Central Banks Liquidate Record $375 Billion In US Paper (ZH)

One month ago, when we last looked at the Fed’s update of Treasuries held in custody, we noted something troubling: the number had dropped sharply, declining by over $22 billion in one week, one of the the biggest weekly declines since January 2015, pushing the total amount of custodial paper to $2.805 trillion, the lowest since 2012. One month later, we refresh this chart and find that in last week’s update, foreign central banks continued their relentless liquidation of US paper held in the Fed’s custody account, which tumbled by another $14 billion over the course of a week, pushing the total amount of custodial paper to $2.788 trillion, a new post-2012 low.

Today, to corroborate the disturbing weekly slide in the Fed’s custody data, we also got the latest monthly Treasury International Capital data for the month of September, which showed that the troubling trend presented one month ago, has accelerated to an unprecedented degree. Recall that a month ago, we reported that in the latest 12 months we have observed a not so stealthy, actually make that a massive $343 billion in Treasury selling by foreign central banks in the period July 2015- August 2016, something unprecedented in size. Fast forward to today when in the latest monthly update for the month of September, we find that what until a month ago was “merely” a record $346.4 billion in offshore central bank sales in the LTM period ending August 31 has – one month later – risen to a new all time high $374.7 billion, or well over a third of a trillion in Treasuries sold in the past 12 months.

Among the biggest sellers – on a market-price basis – not surprisingly was China, which in August “sold” $28 billion in US paper (the actual underlying number while different, as this particular series is adjusted for Mark to Market variations, will be similar), bringing its total to $1.157 trillion, the lowest amount of US paper held by Beijing since 2012.

It wasn’t just China: Saudi Arabia also continued to sell its TSY holdings, and in August its stated holdings (which again have to be adjusted for MTM), dropped from $93Bn to $89Bn, the lowest since the summer of 2014. This was the 8th consecutive month of Treasury sales by the Kingdom, which held $124 billion in TSYs in January, and has since sold nearly 30% of its US paper holdings.

Eyewitness: “97% of the Indian economy is cash-based. With 88% of all outstanding currency no longer usable, the economy is coming to a standstill.”

• Panic In India As Gold Price Skyrockets After Currency Ban (AM)

I went to convert my banned banknotes into new ones. The largest amount one can have converted is Rs 4,000 ($60), until further notice. There was a huge rush of people at the bank. Arguments were erupting, as people refused to stand in queues and the banks gave no explanation of what needed to be done. Fights were breaking out. Amid the chaos I finally learned that there were three queues I had to go through in a sequence. I had to get a form from one counter, which I had to fill in with my name and address, my ID card details, the serial numbers of all the bills I wanted to exchange, and my cell-phone number. At the second counter, I then had to present the completed form along with a photocopy of my ID card. I had to sign on the photocopy which an official then stamped.

With my banknotes, the form and the photocopy of my ID card, I then went to the next queue to get my currency converted at a third counter. The whole process took about two hours. For most people in the busier parts of the cities, it took much longer.Anyone who thinks that a country which wastes two hours of every citizen’s life to convert his own $60 can ever hope to be an economic power is drinking too much Kool-Aid and cannot do primary level math. Forget any possibility of removing unaccounted for money or reducing corruption, what Modi is doing is a recipe for the destruction of whatever legitimate economy there is. That same afternoon, I went to the post office with a friend who wanted to get his money converted. After waiting a long time there, we found out that the post office had run out of cash.

Since then most ATMs have had limited amounts of cash available and banks keep running out of cash as well. The queues have continued to grow. People start lining up late into the night waiting for banks to open and still have to go back home with no cash. What started with two hours of queuing is becoming an endless slog now. Half of India’s citizens do not have a bank account and around 25% do not even have an ID card. These are the country’s poorest people, who have no way of converting their money – even if they learn how to do it, which is already a nigh insurmountable hurdle. Also, those who are old, disabled or sick have no choice but to suffer, for without personally visiting a bank branch office, one cannot convert one’s banknotes. 97% of the Indian economy is cash-based. With 88% of all outstanding currency no longer usable, the economy is coming to a standstill.

The daily-wage laborer, who leads a hand-to-mouth existence in a country with GDP per capita of a mere $1,600, no longer has work, as his employer has no cash to pay his wages. His life is in utter chaos. He is not as smart as Modi — despite the fact that Modi has no real life experience except as a bully and perhaps in his early days as a tea-seller at a train-station. He has no clue where his life is headed from here. These people are going hungry, and some have begun to raid food shops. People are dying for lack of treatment at hospitals. Old people are dying in the endless queues. Some are killing themselves, as they are unable to comprehend the situation and simply don’t know what to do. There are now hundreds of such stories in the media.

There are now voices that claim Modi used the measure to deprive oppositon parties of their campaign cash. Elections coming up in a key state.

• Modi May Need Six More Months to Replace India’s Junk Banknotes (BBG)

For Indians expecting respite from the government’s clampdown on cash, here’s a reality check: it probably won’t come soon. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s administration may need until May 2017 to replenish the stock of now worthless bills, according to Saumitra Chaudhuri, an economist who advised Modi’s predecessor. The government on Nov. 8 banned 500 ($7.5) and 1,000 rupee notes in a surprise move against graft and tax evasion. Delays in replacing the currency risk prolonging the pain in the $2 trillion economy, where about 98 percent of consumer payments are made in cash. Deutsche Bank predicts the crunch could easily shave off a half-point from India’s growth in October-December, which could imperil its position as the world’s fastest-growing major market.

This is how Chaudhuri reached his conclusion, which he published in a blog post on the Economic Times’ website: Extrapolating from central bank data, he estimates that Modi’s move sucked out about 16.6 billion notes of the 500-denomination, and 6.7 billion 1,000-rupee bills. That means more than 23 billion notes totaling 15 trillion rupees. Modi intends to replace these with new 2,000-rupee and 500-rupee bills. However, Bharatiya Reserve Bank Note Mudran Pvt., which prints the higher denomination currency, has a stated capacity of just 1.3 billion notes a month. That’s with working double shifts. Raise this to triple shifts and it becomes 2 billion bills, which means it will need until the end of 2016 to replenish in value the 1,000-rupee notes.

Security Printing & Minting Corporation of India Ltd., whose capacity Chaudhuri estimates at 1 billion pieces a month, will need several more months to meet the 500-rupee target, even if it joins forces with BRBNM, he said. “Ergo, currency shortages will remain with us for many months and economic contraction will rule this period,” he wrote. “At the end of the period, confidence will be at new lows and recovery will take time.” In what could make matters worse, the presses – busy with the new bills – have almost completely stopped printing 100-rupee notes, Bloomberg Quint reported Wednesday citing central bank sources it didn’t name. These bills are the bread-and-butter of India’s $780 billion informal economy, which employs more than 90 percent of the workforce.

“..at the next NATO summit, in the spring of 2017, and Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg had planned to extend a hearty welcome to the new US president, Hillary Clinton.” “..even the female English pronouns “she” and “her” had crept into internal written correspondence..”

• NATO Prepares for Trump Presidency (Spiegel)

Everything had been so perfectly planned. Construction of the new NATO headquarters building near the Brussels Airport, a giant glass-and-steel structure to house the world’s most powerful military alliance in the future, will have cost more than €1 billion ($1.07 billion) by the time it opens next year. The mammoth building was supposed to be officially dedicated at the next NATO summit, in the spring of 2017, and Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg had planned to extend a hearty welcome to the new US president, Hillary Clinton. At least that’s how officials at NATO headquarters planned it. Anything else seemed unthinkable. So unthinkable that even the female English pronouns “she” and “her” had crept into internal written correspondence to refer to the future occupant of the White House.

But there will be no female president. Instead of Clinton, a reliable partner and good, old acquaintance in many trans-Atlantic circles, Donald Trump will be coming to Brussels – the same man who described the alliance as “obsolete” in his campaign. If he even comes, that is. Fearing that Trump won’t even attend the NATO summit, only a few weeks after his inauguration, the alliance has postponed the event. A meeting of NATO leaders without the presence of the American president, after all, would be a signal of its decline. Now organizers are envisioning a date next summer, in the hope that, by then, Trump will have recognized that the United States will also need NATO in the future. There are enormous doubts that this will happen. Consternation over the election of Donald Trump as the next US president is especially great within the Brussels alliance.

[..] In their most favorable scenario, the NATO strategists assumed that the new US president would only strictly insist that the Europeans spend more money on their security. During the campaign, after all, Trump left no doubt that he intends to radically change burden sharing within the Western alliance. One of Trump’s closest advisers, General Mike Flynn, the former head of US military intelligence, told SPIEGEL in an interview in July that, when it comes to money, Trump will pay little attention to the carefully tended harmony in the alliance. “We have to have these alliances going forward and see who’s going to pay for them,” Flynn said. He added that “NATO as a political alliance does need to be relooked at in terms of everything, (including) resourcing and capabilities,” soon after Trump’s administration takes office.

At the 2014 NATO summit in Wales, the member states agreed to a goal of spending 2% of their national GDP on defense. But few countries are currently meeting that goal. Germany, the second-strongest economy in the alliance, next to the United States, spends only 1.19% of its GDP on defense. Trump is now threatening to make the mutual defense commitment under Article 5 dependent on fulfilling this goal, or even to increase the%age. For Germany, 2% would already signify a dramatic increase in the defense budget, from about €34 billion today to roughly €65 billion. In any case, NATO officials are preparing themselves for growing demands on the Europeans. “Europe has no other choice: It has to strengthen the European column in NATO,” says EU foreign policy expert Alexander Graf Lambsdorff, a member of the pro-business Free Democratic Party.

Global trade again. Plummeting exports and imports across Asia.

• Singapore’s Recession Risk Rises As October Exports Show 12% Decline (R.)

Singapore’s exports in October shrank more than expected as sales to major markets fell, with those to Europe contracting sharply and raising risks of a recession in the trade-dependent economy. Non-oil domestic exports (NODX) skidded 12% last month from a year earlier, the trade agency International Enterprise Singapore said in a statement on Thursday, far worse than the median forecast of a 3.5% decline in a Reuters poll. In September, overseas shipments slumped a revised 5% on-year though the decline in sales to China slowed. On a month-on-month, seasonally adjusted basis, exports decreased 3.7% in October, missing a forecast of a 1% slide in the survey. Exports to the EU contracted 28.6% last month from a year earlier, compared with 9.9% growth in September. Contraction in sales of pharmaceuticals, non-electric engines & motors, as well as personal computers led the decline in October.

It’s not even a black swan. I’ve warned of this risk for a long time. Without constructing bubble upon bubble, and without the shadow system that finances them, China has a long way to fall.

• China Civil War Is the Real Black Swan (RV)

TL Tsim has studied the Chinese political scene since the 1980s, with a background in journalism, including the South China Morning Post and Hong Kong Economic Journal before starting his own consultancy. In an interview with Real Vision TV he said the greatest misconception among its people is that Chinese dynasties are super stable structures that last a long time. That’s not really the case, he argued, because none of them lasted longer than the Habsburgs in Austria, who ruled for over 800 years. The last one in China – the Qing dynasty – lasted 260 years, which is much shorter in comparison. People also underestimate the length of the civil wars between Chinese dynasties, which can last for 150 years, he adds. “That is something most Chinese people do not understand. And it has a bearing on the way we go forward,” Tsim said.

“In spite of all of the intelligence, the learning, and the experience of the Chinese people over 5,000 years, they have not come up with a system of government which can deal with the effective and peaceful transfer of power. In the West, you do it through the ballot box. So Brexit is Brexit. You accept it. But in China, the fight goes on.” The shortest dynasty of any size and power in Chinese history was the Yuan dynasty, which lasted just less than 100 years, Tsim said. “This government, this administration, the Chinese Communist Party, came to power in 1949. And so it’s been around for 67 years. “We don’t know when something like the Russian collapse, the implosion of the former Soviet Union might take place. We don’t know whether this is going to be the Yugoslavian model, when the country broke up into six or seven parts. So to speculate on the timing of it is something I do not do.“

But it is not idle to speculate on how this is going to happen. The most likely scenario is a power struggle over-spilling into a coup d’etat and then over-spilling into civil war. That would be the trajectory.” The real concern for Tsim – and he said for the Chinese leaders as well– is that if you look at the breakup of the former Soviet Union, the problem was internal, arising out of disagreements within the center of the party itself. [..] “And sadly, I think we’re not going to see a Yugoslavian model either, because there they did have a civil war. But the civil war– the war was small, in terms of size and scale, and didn’t last very long. That is not the Chinese model either. The Chinese model is a bitter, long-standing civil war– very destructive, very divisive. This is the real black swan.”

I know many people won’t like to, but I would recommend reading at least part of this very long expose. How racist is Trump? And how do you know?

• You Are Still Crying Wolf (Scott Alexander)

Back in October 2015, I wrote that the media narrative of Trump as “the white power candidate” and “the first openly white supremacist candidate to have a shot at the Presidency in the modern era” were being fabricated out of thin air. I said that “the media narrative that Trump is doing some kind of special appeal-to-white-voters voodoo is unsupported by any polling data”, and predicted that: “If Trump were the Republican nominee, he could probably count on equal or greater support from minorities as Romney or McCain before him.” Well, guess what? The votes are in, and Trump got greater support from minorities than Romney or McCain before him. You can read the Washington Post article, Trump Got More Votes From People Of Color Than Romney Did, or look at the raw data.

Trump made big gains among blacks. He made big gains among Latinos. He made big gains among Asians. The only major racial group where he didn’t get a gain of greater than 5% was white people. I want to repeat that: the group where Trump’s message resonated least over what we would predict from a generic Republican was the white population. Nor was there some surge in white turnout. I don’t think we have official numbers yet, but by eyeballing what data we have it looks very much like whites turned out in equal or lesser numbers this year than in 2012, 2008, and so on. The media responded to all of this freely available data with articles like White Flight From Reality: Inside The Racist Panic That Fueled Donald Trump’s Victory and Make No Mistake: Donald Trump’s Win Represents A Racist “Whitelash”.

I stick to my thesis from October 2015. There is no evidence that Donald Trump is more racist than any past Republican candidate (or any other 70 year old white guy, for that matter). All this stuff about how he’s “the candidate of the KKK” and “the vanguard of a new white supremacist movement” is made up. It’s a catastrophic distraction from the dozens of other undeniable problems with Trump that could have convinced voters to abandon him. That it came to dominate the election cycle should be considered a horrifying indictment of our political discourse, in the same way that it would be a horrifying indictment of our political discourse if the entire Republican campaign had been based around the theory that Hillary Clinton was a secret Satanist. Yes, calling Romney a racist was crying wolf. But you are still crying wolf.

But today’s headlines are all about unemployment reaching 11-year lows. Makes you wonder, doesn’t it?!

• One In Three UK Working Families Struggle To Pay Energy Bills (G.)

One in three working families struggle to pay their energy bills, it has been claimed, as pressure mounts on suppliers to do more to help poorer households move on to the cheapest deals. 29% of families do not put on the heating even when the house is cold, said comparison website uSwitch, while two-thirds fear cutting their energy use to save money will affect their family’s health. “It’s appalling that even families in work are struggling to pay their energy bills,” said uSwitch’s energy expert, Claire Osborne. “Suppliers must play their part by doing all they can to help their customers move to their best deal.” The energy regulator, Ofgem, backed calls for suppliers to alert customers to cost-saving schemes such as the warm home discount (WHD).

The initiative forces firms with more than 250,000 customers to offer a £140 discount to low-income pensioners and other vulnerable groups, though it has been criticised for long delays in delivering the reduction. “We want suppliers to engage more actively with customers, particularly those on standard variable tariffs, to help them get a better deal,” said an Ofgem spokesperson. This week the business minister criticised energy companies amid claims they were profiteering from deals that do not offer good value. “Customers who are loyal to their energy supplier should be treated well, not taken for a ride, and it’s high time the big companies recognised this,” Greg Clark said. “I have made clear to the big firms that this can’t go on and they must treat customers properly or be made to do so.”

I’ll keep saying that a basic income for only parts of a society -as the pilot is set up- is doomed to fail.

• Canadian Province To Give Every Citizen $1,320 Basic Income (Ind.)

A Canadian province is to run a pilot project aimed at providing every citizen a minimum basic income of $1,320 a month. The provincial government of Ontario confirmed it is holding public consultations on the $25m (£15m) project over the next two months, which could replace social assistance payments administered by the province for people aged 18 to 65. People with disabilities will receive $500 more under the scheme, and individuals who earn less than $22,000 (£13,000) a year after tax will have their incomes topped up to reach that threshold. The pilot report was submitted by Conservative ex-senator Hugh Segal, who suggested the project should be tested on three distinct sites: in the north, south and among the indigenous community of Ontario.

Areas with high levels of poverty and food insecurity should be chosen for the test project, Mr Segal recommended. “It is in fact the precinct of rational people when looking to encourage work and community engagement and give people a floor beneath which they’re not allowed to fall,” he said. “We can do this for seniors without having to add any more bureaucrats or civil servants, we respect their freedom to choose, we give them the money, they decide what’s important. Why would we treat other poor people differently? “What Ontario is doing is saying let’s have a pilot project, let’s calculate the costs, let’s calculate the positive and the nudge effects behaviourally.” Mr Segal confirmed that participation in the project, which is due to launch in spring 2017, will be voluntary and promised “no one would be financially worse off as a result of the pilot”.

he can defend it all he wants, but defending the past shows you are blind to the present.

• Obama Defends Globalization On Germany Visit (BBC)

US President Barack Obama has made a strong defence of globalisation as he arrived in Germany on his final visit to Europe before leaving office. In a joint article, Mr Obama and German Chancellor Angela Merkel said that with the global economy developing faster than ever, co-operation was vital. Mr Obama arrived in Germany from Athens where he had warned of threats to modern democracy. He is seeking to calm unease following the election of Donald Trump. In the article in the business magazine, Wirtschaftswoche (in German), he and Mrs Merkel made a strong case for international trade in contrast to Mr Trump’s more protectionist stance. “There will be no return to a world before globalisation,” they wrote. “We owe it to our companies and our citizens, indeed to the entire world community, to broaden and deepen our co-operation.”

The two leaders voiced support for the proposed Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) between the US and the EU. By contrast, Mr Trump is a fierce critic of global free trade agreements and welcomed the UK’s decision in June to leave the EU. In Athens, Mr Obama acknowledged that globalisation had created a “sense of injustice” and a “course correction” was needed to address growing inequality. “When we see people, global elites, wealthy corporations seemingly living by a different set of rules, avoiding taxes, manipulating loopholes… this feeds a profound sense of injustice,” he told Greek leaders. Mr Obama’s visit to Greece was marked by street protests by leftist groups which denounced US “imperialism”. Police used tear gas against about 2,500 demonstrators who had tried to reach the city centre on Tuesday. The US president will stay in Germany until Friday and then head to Peru.

But the words were again empty.

• Athens Clings To Obama’s Words As Focus Shifts To Berlin (Kath.)

Greece on Wednesday hailed the support expressed by outgoing US President Barack Obama for debt relief for the country even as the latter arrived in Berlin for talks with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, whose country has consistently resisted restructuring Greece’s debt burden. Government spokesman Dimitris Tzanakopoulos expressed “satisfaction” with Obama’s references to the crucial issues of debt, the refugee crisis and Cyprus. “The US president made clear that austerity cannot lead to economic prosperity,” he said. Asked why an intervention by Obama in favor of Greek debt relief now that he is on his way out of the presidency should make a difference, Tzanakopoulos said that the situation in Europe is now very different and there is a shift against austerity.

“There is a very good possibility that by the end of the year we will have very positive developments as regards the Greek debt,” Tzanakopoulos said, noting that Athens was on course for a Eurogroup meeting on December 5. The spokesman described Obama’s visit as “an event of global significance” while sources indicated that the outgoing president had been “very friendly” to Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras. Earlier in the day, Obama delivered a stirring speech at the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center, exalting the virtues of democracy and ancient Greece’s contribution to the modern world. “I came here with gratitude for all that Greece – ‘this small, great world’ – has given to humanity through the ages,” Obama said, referring to Aeschylus, Euripides, Herodotus, Thucydides, Socrates and Aristotle.

Obama took advantage of the speech to highlight the democratic values he sought to honor while in office and implicitly prodded his Republic successor Donald Trump to do the same. He also emphasized his respect for Greece’s efforts to respond to Europe’s refugee crisis despite its own problems. “Because our democracies are inclusive, we’re able to welcome people and refugees in need to our countries. And nowhere have we seen that compassion more evident than here in Greece,” he said.

“Whoever says ‘we will relieve your debts’ is doing Greece a disservice..”

• Schaeuble Crushes Greek Debt Relief Hopes that Obama May Have Sowed (GR)

U.S. President Barack Obama’s visit to Greece raised fresh hopes for debt relief that German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble rushed to quash. He said late on Tuesday that granting Greece its debt relief would not be helping the country, describing such a move as a “disservice.” A German Finance Ministry spokesman confirmed that Schaeuble had indeed made this statement, but that it was not in direct response to Obama’s visit to Greece. “Whoever says ‘we will relieve your debts’ is doing Greece a disservice,” said Schaeuble, according to the report by the daily newspaper, Passauer Neue Presse. His comments are not surprising bearing in mind that Germany has long supported the notion that no immediate debt relief is needed for Greece as this would discourage structural reforms.

“We have noted that President Obama has pointed to the importance of debt relief. The euro group agreed in May on a timetable on exactly that subject, regarding measures for the short term, and later in 2018 for mid-term measures,” said German government spokesman Steffen Seibert at a news conference. He added that Obama’s visit had not changed Germany’s position on the matter, during a government news conference. Seibert added that Obama’s view that austerity on its own does not create growth is a viewpoint that reflects that of the German government, adding that two things needed for long-term growth are a sustainable budget and the need for structural reforms.

Think Obama went to see them?

• Share of Greek Children At Risk Of Poverty Rises To 37.8% (Kath.)

More than a third, or 37.8%, of children aged up to 17 in Greece were at risk of poverty and social exclusion in 2015, compared to 28.7% in 2010, according to a report published by the European Statistics Agency (Eurostat). This means that they were living in households with at least one of the following characteristics: at-risk-of-poverty after social transfers (income poverty), severely materially deprived or with very low work intensity. The increase, which took the total number of children at risk of poverty and social exclusion in Greece to 710,000, is the largest in the European Union since 2010. After Greece, Cyprus was the country with the highest rise since 2010, with 7.1%.

At the same time, the EU average dropped from 27.5% in 2010 to 26.9% in 2015, which corresponds to the alarming figure of approximately 25.26 million children. Greece was third in the EU in the total number of children faced with such a predicament, behind Romania at 46.8% and Bulgaria at 43.7%. Hungary was fourth at 36.1%, ahead of Spain at 34.4% and Italy at 33.5%. The lowest rates were recorded in the Scandinavian countries, with Sweden at 14%, ahead of Finland and Denmark, with 14.9% and 15.7% respectively.

At some point you may want to wonder if it’s a bug or a feature of the system.

• Drowning Deaths In Mediterranean Already 20% Higher Than All Of Last Year (G.)

About 240 people are suspected to have drowned this week in four separate incidents in the Mediterranean, raising the total annual death toll to an unprecedented 4,500. Deaths in the Mediterranean are now nearly 20% higher than last year’s total of 3,771, which was the previous annual record. About 130 asylum seekers are missing after a rubber boat capsized on Sunday night, while another 100 are thought to have drowned on Tuesday night in a separate incident, the UN refugee agency said. Up to 10 people died in two further tragedies in recent days, bringing the death toll this week to at least 240.

In the accident on Sunday 15 survivors were left in the water for 10 hours, clinging on to a piece of a capsized boat, before being rescued by an oil tanker. Nine are still in hospital, Iosto Ibba, a spokesman for UNHCR, said in a phone call. Migration between Turkey and Greece has lessened significantly since March, after Turkey agreed to re-admit people deported from Greece. But crossings between Libya and Italy continue unabated. More than 165,000 people have reached Italy so far this year from north Africa, and the final annual total is likely to surpass the previous record of 170,000.

Debt Rattle December 31 2015

Dec 312015

December 31, 2015 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 9:59 am Finance Tagged with: Brazil, China, Civil War, commodities, derivatives, Greece, mortgage, oil, refugees, yuan 1 Response »

DPC Market Street from Montgomery Street, San Francisco, after the earthquake 1906

• The Deadly Truth About the Great Boom and This “Recovery” (Dent)

• Asia’s Top Commodity Trader Ends a Turbulent Year With Cut To Junk (BBG)

• Mom And Pop Are The Greater Fools (ZH)

• Oil Ends 2015 In Downbeat Mood; Hangover To Be Long, Painful (Reuters)

• Impact Of Low Crude Prices On Oil Powers (Guardian)

• China’s Yuan Posts Biggest Annual Loss In 21 Years (BBG)

• China Fires a Warning Shot at Yuan Speculators With Bank Bans (BBG)

• China’s Financial Growing Pains Caused World of Hurt in 2015 (WSJ)

• Hong Kong Retail Slows as Mainland Tourists Stay Away (WSJ)

• Fannie and Freddie Give Birth to New Mortgage Bond (WSJ)

• The World’s Political And Economic Order Is Stronger Than It Looks (AEP)

• Derivatives vs Bank Deposits: Let the Bail-Ins Begin (Ellen Brown)

• It’s Every Snitch For Himself In Brazil’s Petrobras Scandal (BBG)

• For the Wealthiest, a Private Tax System That Saves Them Billions (NY Times)

• China Says Consulted Widely On Army Reform, Xi Closely Involved (Reuters)

• Turkey ‘One Step Away From A Civil War’ (NY Times)

• Greek Pension Cuts Back On The Table (Kath.)

• Greek House Price Drop Second To Worst In The World (Kath.)

• Merkel Urges Germans To See Refugee Arrivals As ‘An Opportunity’ (AFP)

“My forecast today: the stock market will start to crash by early February, if not sooner..”

• The Deadly Truth About the Great Boom and This “Recovery” (Dent)

Below is a chart that shows the office space per worker in square feet. It shows a rise into the height of the financial crisis, after which it’s fallen like a rock! At first this could seem counterintuitive. Why did the square footage per worker go up into the worst of the recession into mid- to late-2009? That’s because companies were laying off workers going into that recession, meaning there were more workers per square feet. But the real story comes in the recovery from late 2009 forward.

Square footage per worker has declined very sharply from 371 square feet to 270, down a whopping one-third in just over six years as businesses have rehired a large portion of the laid-off workers – which means largely NOT creating new jobs. You should not look at this chart and assume that because less square footage per worker means more workers than in the past that everything is hunky dory. What’s more important is that the sharp decrease in square footage implies a lack of demand in commercial real estate. And that’s because commercial real estate is already way over-expanded! We overbuilt it in the great boom of 1983 to 2007, so even these hires have not filled up the available space.

Which means businesses aren’t expanding their office or industrial space! So while hiring more workers sounds fine out of context… it’s masking much more severe, deeper-set issues in our capacity to build for the future. This is the hard truth that no one is looking at: businesses are merely re-employing their past capacity, and not creating new plants and offices for future employment. All the 200,000-plus jobs numbers per month, if they are even fully real, are just catching up with the past. And we shouldn’t be investing in such new work space as we already have all we need for decades ahead. This is the reality of demographics that clueless economists just don’t get.

[..] Folks, this “recovery” isn’t working! And no one has expected it to given the over-expansion in the greatest debt bubble in U.S. history from 1983 to 2008. Inflation hasn’t risen due to excess capacity here and around the world, especially China… Money velocity continues to drop without lending and productive investment to expand it… Businesses are struggling with stagnant earnings because we already hit the peak of debt capacity and demographic spending growth in the great boom that finally peaked in late 2007, as I forecast two decades before. Debt was running at 2.54 times GDP for 26 years. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist or nuclear physicist to tell you that pretty much guarantees a massive period of deleveraging and depression – not continued expansion.

So since growth is all but impossible, corporations have resorted to financial engineering to keep the wagon rolling – all courtesy of the Fed, with near-zero short- and long-term interest rates. They’ve had two options: either increase stock buybacks to leverage their stagnant earnings with rising earnings-per-share on fewer shares, or increase dividends to compete with lower and lower yielding bonds (also courtesy of the Fed). And they’ve been milking both options for all they’re worth! But financial engineering does not result in real growth. And speculation does not expand the money supply. It is only a sign of decreasing money velocity, and a bubble that will only burst – like in 1929, 2000, and now again! [..] My forecast today: the stock market will start to crash by early February, if not sooner [..].

There will be no recovery in commodities until the overcapacity is drained.

• Asia’s Top Commodity Trader Ends a Turbulent Year With Cut To Junk (BBG)

Asia’s top commodity trader exits 2015 in very different shape to how it began the year. Noble Group has lost almost two-thirds of its value, with its stock trading near the lowest since 2008, after a year of attacks on its finances by critics including the anonymous Iceberg Research and short-seller Muddy Waters LLC. The latest blow, amid a rout in raw materials, was the cut in its credit rating to junk by Moody’s Investors Service on concerns over its liquidity. It’s a downgrade that will test Chief Executive Officer Yusuf Alireza’s view that while an investment-grade rating is desirable, it isn’t required for the business, as Standard & Poor’s also reviews its assessment. Moody’s decision comes a week after the Hong Kong-based company agreed to sell the rest of its agriculture unit to Cofco for at least $750 million.

While the deal may help the company to cut debt, its liquidity will remain constrained, according to Moody’s, which expects a prolonged commodity slump. “They have had a really difficult year, not only fighting the commodity slump but also various allegations,” Bernard Aw at IG Asia said by e-mail. “Entering 2016, the performance of Noble will clearly hinge on the recovery in the commodity complex. Noble may continue to offload non-profitable assets, to improve its balance sheet and creditworthiness. These should help it better navigate the challenging landscape.” Noble Group stock fell 9.1% to end at 40 Singapore cents on Wednesday, and traded unchanged early Thursday. The shares are 65% lower this year and are the biggest losers in the Straits Times Index.

The company’s dollar bonds due in 2020, its most liquid, dropped on Wednesday to the lowest since they were issued in 2009. After the Noble Agri deal closes, Noble Group’s rating metrics will substantially exceed those required of an investment-grade credit, the company said in a statement on Tuesday. Noble Group still has its investment-grade ratings from S&P and Fitch Ratings, spokesman Stephen Brown said, referring to comments made on the company’s last earnings call. He added that its bank covenants aren’t ratings-dependent. “We are confident that the deal will be approved by our shareholders and will close before the end of February,” Noble Group said in a statement to the Singapore Exchange late on Wednesday. “The current environment is opportunity-rich and plays to our strengths.”

Question is, what keeps markets at their high levels?

• Mom And Pop Are The Greater Fools (ZH)

[..] while the market was surging last week, the smart money was selling. This comes at the same time as ICI reported major redemptions from both stock ($3.9 billion) and bond ($4.5 billion) mutual funds, even as corporate buybacks were decelerating, leading to the question of just who was buying stocks during the Santa rally of the past two weeks. But something even more surprising emerged when looking at the detailed breakdown of how the “smart money” has been flowing. As Bank of America clarifies, when explaining where its $0.7 billion in weekly outflows came from, “net sales were chiefly due to institutional clients last week” and adds that institutionals “have sold stocks for eight consecutive weeks”!

And then something even more surprising emerges when looking at the YTD breakdown of flows: while hedge funds and private clients (retail) have largely offset each other over the past year, the former selling $2.8BN and the latter buying $2.2BN in 2015, something odd has taken place at the institutional level: starting in early January, the largest financial institutions – mutual funds and various other asset managers – have unleashed an unprecedented selling spree for 11 consecutive months, which has brought their total outflow to $26.8 billion. Which leads to another question: if institutions are actively dumping stocks, perhaps mom and pop investors should show the following chart to their financial advisors, who directly or indirectly work for these institutions, and ask them: why should they be buying, when the counterparty they are buying from is, most likely, this very same financial advisor?

“..global crude production exceeds demand by anywhere between half a million and 2 million barrels every day..”

• Oil Ends 2015 In Downbeat Mood; Hangover To Be Long, Painful (Reuters)

Oil prices remained in a downbeat mood during their final Asian-hours trading session of 2015 after record U.S. crude inventories reinforced concerns about a global supply glut that has pulled down prices by a third over the past year. Crude inventories in the United States rose 2.6 million barrels last week, the U.S. Energy Information Administration said. Analysts polled by Reuters had expected a draw of 2.5 million barrels. Crude prices held losses after falling more than 3% in the previous session, with U.S. West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude futures trading around $36.70 per barrel at 0300 GMT on Thursday and Brent around $36.60 per barrel. Both benchmarks are down by around a third over 2015.

The immediate outlook for oil prices remains bleak, with some analysts like Goldman Sachs saying prices as low as $20 per barrel might be necessary to push enough production out of business and allow a rebalancing of the market. U.S. bank Morgan Stanley said in its outlook for next year that “headwinds (are) growing for 2016 oil.” The bank cites ongoing increases in available global supplies, despite some cuts by U.S. shale drillers in particular, as well as a slowdown in demand as the main reasons. “The imbalance in the global oil market has been diminishing in 2H15, but the hope for a rebalancing in 2016 continues to suffer serious setbacks,” the bank said, reflecting a market consensus that meaningfully higher prices are not expected before late 2016.

Traders expect some U.S. oil to be taken out of America and supplied into global markets, following the surprise lifting of a decades-old U.S. crude export ban in December, which ended a years-old discount in U.S. crude prices to international Brent. “At a time when U.S. shale is facing headwinds due to the collapse in crude oil prices… U.S. crude oil exports are likely to help reduce congestion concerns in the U.S.,” ING bank said. [..] Analysts estimate global crude production exceeds demand by anywhere between half a million and 2 million barrels every day. This means that even the most aggressive estimates of expected U.S. production cuts of 500,000 bpd for 2016 would be unlikely to fully rebalance the market.

A painful graph. We smell unrest.

• Impact Of Low Crude Prices On Oil Powers (Guardian)

A glut of oil, the demise of Opec and weakening global demand combined to make 2015 the year of crashing oil prices. The cost of crude fell to levels not seen for 11 years – and the decline may have further to go. There have been four sharp increases in the price of oil in the past four decades – in 1973, 1979, 1990 and 2008 – and each has led to a global recession. By that measure, a lower oil price should be positive for the world economy, with lower fuel costs for consumers and businesses in those countries that import crude outweighing the losses to producing nations. But the evidence since oil prices started falling from their peak of $115 a barrel in August 2014 has not supported that thesis – or not yet.

Oil producers have certainly felt the impact of the lower prices on their growth rates, their trade figures and their public finances butthere has been no surge in consumer spending or business investment elsewhere. Economist still reckon there will be a boost from a lower oil price particularly if it looks as if the lower cost of crude will be sustained. Dhaval Joshi, an economist at BCA, a London-based research company, said: “A commodity bubble has deflated three times in the past 100 years: the first was after world war one; the second was after the 1980s oil shock; the third is happening right now.” For the big producer countries, this is a major headache, the ramifications of which are only starting to be felt. Oil powers base their spending plans on an assumed crude price. The graphic below shows just how far below water their budgets are.

How long before IMF starts complaining on behalf of US?

• China’s Yuan Posts Biggest Annual Loss In 21 Years (BBG)

There’s no need to panic, according to the yuan’s top forecaster, even as the currency posted the biggest annual loss in more than two decades and a majority of economists predicted a further depreciation in 2016. “While a weaker yuan could create fear initially, the market will realize it’s a natural consequence of a more flexible yuan and divergent U.S.-China monetary policy,” said Ju Wang at HSBC, which had the best estimates for the onshore yuan over the last four quarters as measured by Bloomberg Rankings. A more adjustable policy will allow for swift reactions to domestic conditions, which “would be structurally positive for China’s economy,” she said. The nation overhauled its foreign-exchange system in 2015, giving market forces greater say in setting the yuan’s reference rate, allowing more foreign participants onshore and doubling trading hours.

The central bank kept investors guessing as it supported the exchange rate from March to August, shocked global markets with an Aug. 11 devaluation, and then spent billions of dollars to prop up the yuan before winning reserve status at the IMF on Nov. 30. The currency tumbled 4.5% in 2015 to close at 6.4936 a dollar in Shanghai on Dec. 31, according to China Foreign Exchange Trade System prices. That’s the biggest decline in data going back to 1994. The central bank cut its daily fixing, which limits onshore moves to a maximum 2% on either side, by 6.1% for the year. The reduction was the most since 2005, when China unpegged its currency from the greenback and allowed it to fluctuate against a basket of exchange rates.

Beijing is feeding speculation with its constant manipulations.

• China Fires a Warning Shot at Yuan Speculators With Bank Bans (BBG)

China has a message for currency speculators: the free lunch is over. The People’s Bank of China has suspended at least two foreign banks from conducting some cross-border yuan business until late March, according to people with direct knowledge of the matter. The clampdown comes as the growing offshore-onshore spread makes it profitable for those who skirt capital controls to buy the currency at a discount in Hong Kong and sell it in Shanghai. By closing loopholes in its regulations, China is trying to stabilize the yuan after a surprising revamp of its currency-valuation system in August led to capital outflows and prompted policy makers to tap $213 billion of foreign reserves to support the yuan. The risk is that discouraging arbitrage will cause the exchange rates to diverge further, undermining the goal of unifying the two markets.

“The market should see this as a warning shot across the bow,” said Douglas Borthwick at Chapdelaine, a unit of the British inter-dealer brokerage Tullet Prebon. Chinese regulators don’t want onshore trades to be speculative in nature and “in the short term this will likely lead to further widening of the spread,” he said. A three-month ban on settling offshore clients’ yuan transactions in the onshore market was imposed Tuesday, the people said. The central bank didn’t immediately respond to questions on the matter, and it was unclear how widely the ban has applied among foreign banks or which institutions are suspended. Spokespeople for Citigroup, HSBC and Standard Chartered, which are among the largest foreign dealers allowed in China’s interbank foreign-exchange markets, declined to comment on the ban and whether their operations were affected.

The offshore yuan, which is freely traded overseas, touched a five-year low on Wednesday before erasing losses on speculation the government was intervening to support the currency. It traded at 6.5810 a dollar as of 12:32 p.m. in Hong Kong, leaving it about 1.3% cheaper than the rate in mainland China. The gap between the two rates has widened since August when China’s devaluation, part of the move to a more market-determined currency regime, fueled expectations among overseas investors for further yuan weakness. The divergence is undesirable because it means companies cannot use hedging tools tied to overseas rates to protect their onshore exposure. By imposing the ban, China is seeking to prevent speculators from bringing money in illegally to arbitrage, even though it helps narrow the difference.

It’s all in the choice of words, isn’t it? Growing pains sounds so much better than bursting bubble.

• China’s Financial Growing Pains Caused World of Hurt in 2015 (WSJ)

China’s long history of tempestuous trading spilled over its borders this year, signaling that a once-isolated market is moving to the center of global finance. Chinese volatility upended markets from Tokyo to London, and helped send some emerging-market currencies to their weakest levels in nearly two decades. Commodities including copper and aluminum plumbed six-year lows as China, one of the world’s biggest metals consumers, reined in buying. While a summer stock crash and the surprise devaluation of China’s yuan spooked investors world-wide, the repercussions also exposed the growing pains of a maturing financial market. With one trading day left in 2015, Shanghai’s stock market is still up 10.5% this year, despite losing more than 40% of its value over the summer.

That gain outpaces the 1% rise in the S&P 500 through Tuesday, and the 9.6% advance in Germany’s DAX and 7.35% gain in the Stoxx Europe 600 index through Wednesday. China’s smaller Shenzhen stock market is up 66%, one of the best-performing benchmarks globally. Japan’s Nikkei Stock Average is up 9.1% for the year, as the central bank’s two-year easing campaign weakened the yen. A weaker currency can help exporters by boosting profits repatriated from abroad. Meanwhile, China’s yuan is on track for its largest annual fall on record, down more than 4% so far this year. Goldman Sachs economists say China was “arguably the prime mover in global markets” this year, though foreigners hold less than 2% of the mainland’s $8 trillion stock market and less than 3% of the onshore bond market.

On Aug. 24, dubbed “Black Monday” by Chinese government media, the Shanghai Composite’s 8.5% fall sparked a global selloff that dragged U.S. stocks to an 18-month low. Yet the struggles have been felt most acutely in markets of China’s regional trading partners, where slackening demand from the world’s second-largest economy has put a chill on exports of commodities and gadgets, dimmed the corporate outlook and sent currencies into a tailspin. Investors have pulled money out of Asia’s emerging-market equities every month since July, with the exception of October, according to the Institute of International Finance. Investors put $47 billion into emerging-market Asia stocks and bonds this year through November, compared with $107.9 billion for the whole of 2014.

Confidence in China is sagging.

• Hong Kong Retail Slows as Mainland Tourists Stay Away (WSJ)

Hong Kong, once a shopping mecca for mainland Chinese seeking Swiss watches and luxury handbags, is expected to record its biggest annual decline in retail sales since the outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, in 2003. The city may also post the first annual decline in mainland tourists since visa relaxations allowed individual visitors from China, also in 2003, prompting calls for extensive diversification of tourism—a pillar of the city’s economy. Spending by Chinese tourists has been the main driver of retail and commercial property sectors in Hong Kong in recent years, as the number of mainland tourists rose. During the boom, long lines outside the city’s numerous Louis Vuitton, Chanel and Gucci shops were commonplace, as luxury goods sold in Hong Kong were up to 40% cheaper than in China.

Those lines have largely disappeared as inflows of Chinese tourists slowed. The number of Chinese tourist arrivals was 15.4% lower in November compared with a year ago, the steepest decline all year, extending the year-to-date fall in Chinese visitors. Hong Kong’s tourism commission says the city’s tourism industry has “entered a consolidation period” after a decade of growth, and says it is now targeting “high-spending overnight visitors” from other markets to help fill the city’s myriad shopping malls and hotel rooms. Meanwhile, retail sales in the formerly bustling shopping hub have fallen for eight straight months on lower tourist spending, with total retail sales down 2.7% year-over-year for the first 10 months of 2015. That is steeper than the 2.6% decline recorded in 2003, when tourists shunned Hong Kong for several months during the SARS outbreak.

In October, Hong Kong saw a 38.5% drop in sales of Swiss watches, said the Federation of the Swiss Watch Industry. Other brands, like Chanel, went the unusual route of slashing the price of an iconic bag by over 24% in Hong Kong, among other rare discount offers, in a sign of the trying times. [..] Luxury sales began to decline in late 2013 after Beijing started cracking down on corruption and conspicuous consumption. The slump spread to mass-market retailers this year as the Chinese economy slowed. Milan Station, a vendor of secondhand handbags, said revenue in its Hong Kong shops fell over 28% in the first half of the year, while cosmetic retailers Sa Sa and Bonjour reported revenue declines of 10.6% and 14.4% in the six months ended September and June, respectively.

Washington needs to get out of the housing market.

• Fannie and Freddie Give Birth to New Mortgage Bond (WSJ)

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are turning to crisis-era tools to reduce their exposure to mortgage losses and spark a new market for financing home buyers. Beginning in 2016, the two government-controlled housing giants will ramp up sales of a new type of security that will transfer most of the cost of defaults on all but their safest mortgages to private investors. The securities will be based on the value of a pool of underlying mortgages—but only indirectly, making them a derivative similar to those that figured in the financial crisis seven years ago. The insurance-like products are called Connecticut Avenue Securities by Fannie Mae and Structured Agency Credit Risk by Freddie Mac. Standard-issue bonds from the housing giants protect investors from the risk that home buyers will stop making payments on their loans.

With the new securities, however, investors could lose some or all of their principal if the underlying mortgages default. The effort marks a notable return to financial engineering in housing finance—elements of which served useful purposes before bloating in the years leading to the crisis. The new securities ultimately could help reduce the government’s role in mortgages by persuading investors to take on the risk of default. Right now, the U.S. housing market relies almost entirely on guarantees from Fannie, Freddie or other government-backed entities. The companies, along with government agency Ginnie Mae, back most mortgages and issued 96% of all mortgage bonds in the first 10 months of the year, according to trade publication Inside Mortgage Finance.

Banks used to issue hundreds of millions of dollars worth of mortgage bonds that didn’t carry Fannie or Freddie’s guarantees, but that market dried up after the financial crisis. Proponents hope the new securities could help restore investors’ appetite for mortgage risk. If it works, backers think the securities could become a mainstay of the bond and housing markets over time, perhaps even getting included in the major indexes tracked by bond funds.

Ambrose’s history lesson dissolves into confusion. Still worth reading, though. “Yes, the world is a mess, but it has always been a mess, forever climbing the proverbial wall of political worry even in its halcyon days. So let us drink a new year’s toast with a glass at least half full.”

• The World’s Political And Economic Order Is Stronger Than It Looks (AEP)

Readers have scolded me gently for too much optimism over the past year, wondering why I refuse to see that the world economy is in dire trouble and that the international order is coming apart at the seams. So for Christmas reading I have retreated to the “World of Yesterday”, the poignant account of Europe’s civilisational suicide in the early 20th century by the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig – the top-selling author of the inter-war years. From there it is a natural progression to Zweig’s equally poignant biography of Erasmus, who saw his own tolerant Latin civilization smothered by fanatics four centuries earlier. Zweig’s description of Europe in the years leading up to 1914 is intoxicating. Everything seemed to be getting better: wealth was spreading, people were healthier, women were breaking free.

He could travel anywhere without a passport, received with open arms in Paris, Milan or Stockholm by a fraternity of writers and artists. It was a cheerful, peaceful world that seemed almost untainted by tribal animosities. It was not an illusion, but it was only half the story. A handful of staff officers at the apex of the German high command under Helmuth von Moltke were already looking for their chance to crush France and Russia, waiting for a spark in the Balkans – it could only be the Balkans – that would lock the Austro-Hungarian empire into the fight as an ally. What is striking in Zweig’s account is that even during the slaughter of the First World War, Europe still had a moral conscience. All sides still bridled at any accusation that they were violating humanitarian principles.

Two decades later, even that had disappeared. Zweig lived to see his country amputated, cut off from its economic lifelines, and reduced to a half-starved rump. He saw Hitler take power and burn his books in Berlin’s Bebelplatz in 1933, then in stages extend the ban to France and Italy. He saw what remained of Austria extinguished in 1938, and his friends sent to concentration camps. As a Jewish refugee in England he slipped from stateless alien to enemy alien. He committed suicide with his wife in February 1942 in Brazil, too heart-broken to keep going after his spiritual homeland – Europe – had “destroyed itself”. Erasmus was also the best-selling author of his day, attaining a dominance that has probably never been challenged by any other author in history, expect perhaps Karl Marx posthumously.

More than 1m copies of his works had been printed by the early 16th century, devoured by a Latin intelligentsia in the free-thinking heyday of the Renaissance, chortling at his satires on clerical pedantry and the rent-farming of holy relics. But after lighting the fire of evangelical reform, he watched in horror as the ideologues took over and swept aside his plea that the New Testament message of love and forgiveness is the heart of Christianity. They charged headlong into the Augustinian cul-de-sac of original sin and predestination, led by Martin Luther, a rough, volcanic force of nature, or the “Goth” as Erasmus called him. Luther preferred to see the whole world burn and Christian Europe split into armed camps rather than yield an inch on abstruse points of doctrine. And burn they did. The killing did not end until the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. By then the Thirty Years War had left a fifth of Germany dead.

“In principle, depositors are the most senior creditors in a bank. However, that was changed in the 2005 bankruptcy law, which made derivatives liabilities most senior.”

• Derivatives vs Bank Deposits: Let the Bail-Ins Begin (Ellen Brown)

Dodd-Frank states in its preamble that it will “protect the American taxpayer by ending bailouts.” But it does this under Title II by imposing the losses of insolvent financial companies on their common and preferred stockholders, debtholders, and other unsecured creditors. That includes depositors, the largest class of unsecured creditor of any bank. Title II is aimed at “ensuring that payout to claimants is at least as much as the claimants would have received under bankruptcy liquidation.” But here’s the catch: under both the Dodd Frank Act and the 2005 Bankruptcy Act, derivative claims have super-priority over all other claims, secured and unsecured, insured and uninsured. The over-the-counter (OTC) derivative market (the largest market for derivatives) is made up of banks and other highly sophisticated players such as hedge funds.

OTC derivatives are the bets of these financial players against each other. Derivative claims are considered “secured” because collateral is posted by the parties. For some inexplicable reason, the hard-earned money you deposit in the bank is not considered “security” or “collateral.” It is just a loan to the bank, and you must stand in line along with the other creditors in hopes of getting it back. State and local governments must also stand in line, although their deposits are considered “secured,” since they remain junior to the derivative claims with “super-priority.” Under the old liquidation rules, an insolvent bank was actually “liquidated” – its assets were sold off to repay depositors and creditors. Under an “orderly resolution,” the accounts of depositors and creditors are emptied to keep the insolvent bank in business.

The point of an “orderly resolution” is not to make depositors and creditors whole but to prevent another system-wide “disorderly resolution” of the sort that followed the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008. The concern is that pulling a few of the dominoes from the fragile edifice that is our derivatives-laden global banking system will collapse the entire scheme. The sufferings of depositors and investors are just the sacrifices to be borne to maintain this highly lucrative edifice. In a May 2013 article in Forbes titled “The Cyprus Bank ‘Bail-In’ Is Another Crony Bankster Scam,” Nathan Lewis explained the scheme like this:

At first glance, the “bail-in” resembles the normal capitalist process of liabilities restructuring that should occur when a bank becomes insolvent. . . . The difference with the “bail-in” is that the order of creditor seniority is changed. In the end, it amounts to the cronies (other banks and government) and non-cronies. The cronies get 100% or more; the non-cronies, including non-interest-bearing depositors who should be super-senior, get a kick in the guts instead. . . .

In principle, depositors are the most senior creditors in a bank. However, that was changed in the 2005 bankruptcy law, which made derivatives liabilities most senior. Considering the extreme levels of derivatives liabilities that many large banks have, and the opportunity to stuff any bank with derivatives liabilities in the last moment, other creditors could easily find there is nothing left for them at all. As of September 2014, US derivatives had a notional value of nearly $280 trillion.

A study involving the cost to taxpayers of the Dodd-Frank rollback slipped by Citibank into the “cromnibus” spending bill last December found that the rule reversal allowed banks to keep $10 trillion in swaps trades on their books. This is money that taxpayers could be on the hook for in another bailout; and since Dodd-Frank replaces bailouts with bail-ins, it is money that creditors and depositors could now be on the hook for. Citibank is particularly vulnerable to swaps on the price of oil. Brent crude dropped from a high of $114 per barrel in June 2014 to a low of $36 in December 2015.

What a story Brazil will be in 2016…

• It’s Every Snitch For Himself In Brazil’s Petrobras Scandal (BBG)

[..] all hail 2015, Brazil’s year of the snitch. Investigators in the city of Curitiba, where the so-called Operation Car Wash probe into corruption at Petrobras is based, have struck 40 such plea bargains, turning criminals into strategic witnesses for the prosecution. Negotiating reduced sentences is not new in Brazil. But until recently, most criminals preferred to gamble on the feeble court system and take their secrets to jail. Everything changed after 2012, when Brazil’s Supreme Federal Court sent two dozen moguls and political bosses to jail in a sweeping vote-buying scam. A rigorous anti-corruption law followed in 2013, and now criminals and cronies are lining up to cop their pleas.

Thanks largely to dishonor among thieves — not to mention financial trackers skilled in sniffing out hidden money — prosecutors have since secured 80 convictions of seemingly untouchable moguls and politicians, whose jail sentences total 782 years. So many criminals have been repurposed as state witnesses that police are running short on ankle bracelets. Brazilians would be forgiven for thinking that little has changed. By cutting deals with prosecutors, confessed criminals have managed to convert harsh jail terms into suspended sentences and house arrest. Yes, Fernando “Baiano” Soares, a lobbyist at the heart of the Car Wash cabal, had to forfeit a bundle of cash and two fancy vacation homes as part of his plea deal.

But when he left jail in November after agreeing to finger accomplices in the Petrobras scheme, he went home to his luxury apartment in one of Rio’s toniest beach districts. Pedro Jose Barusco Filho, sentenced last year to 18 years for turning his second-tier job at Petrobras into a bribe-collection counter, quickly signed an agreement with prosecutors and promised to return $615 million he’d skimmed from supply contracts. By Christmas, he was spotted kicking back at a luxury spa in the Rio hills. Two other guests reportedly left on the spot. Then there is Alberto Youssef, a shadowy money dealer who has been in and out of custody since 2005, when he first agreed to help authorities take down a money-laundering ring at a state-owned regional bank.

But he went back on his word and left investigators empty-handed. This time, the feds were cleverer. When, in early 2014, police again caught up to Youssef – now for helping high-rolling oil company executives and politicians on the take spirit their off-books earnings to offshore tax havens – they doubled down on the man known as “the black market’s central banker.” Jailed for breaking his earlier plea bargain, and with his name popping up in testimony from other state witnesses, Youssef buckled, agreed again to speak out, and led Brazil’s sleuths to the corner offices of Petrobras and beyond.

Snitch by snitch, the Car Wash case has made its way from the oil rigs to the Brazilian capital, where 54 senior politicians, former politicians and their associates are now under investigation. All eyes are now on Delcidio do Amaral, who is not only the first sitting Brazilian senator to be arrested but also a former Petrobras bureaucrat who served as a key dealmaker to the ruling Workers’ Party for the past 13 years. So far, Amaral hasn’t named any names, but the prospect that he might sing is roiling the political corridors. If anyone knows where the bodies in Brasilia are buried, it’s Amaral.

Money must be separated from political power, or huge trouble lies ahead.

• For the Wealthiest, a Private Tax System That Saves Them Billions (NY Times)

The hedge fund magnates Daniel S. Loeb, Louis Moore Bacon and Steven A. Cohen have much in common. They have managed billions of dollars in capital, earning vast fortunes. They have invested large sums in art — and millions more in political candidates. Moreover, each has exploited an esoteric tax loophole that saved them millions in taxes. The trick? Route the money to Bermuda and back. With inequality at its highest levels in nearly a century and public debate rising over whether the government should respond to it through higher taxes on the wealthy, the very richest Americans have financed a sophisticated and astonishingly effective apparatus for shielding their fortunes. Some call it the “income defense industry,” consisting of a high-priced phalanx of lawyers, estate planners, lobbyists and anti-tax activists who exploit and defend a dizzying array of tax maneuvers, virtually none of them available to taxpayers of more modest means.

In recent years, this apparatus has become one of the most powerful avenues of influence for wealthy Americans of all political stripes, including Mr. Loeb and Mr. Cohen, who give heavily to Republicans, and the liberal billionaire George Soros, who has called for higher levies on the rich while at the same time using tax loopholes to bolster his own fortune. All are among a small group providing much of the early cash for the 2016 presidential campaign. Operating largely out of public view — in tax court, through arcane legislative provisions and in private negotiations with the Internal Revenue Service — the wealthy have used their influence to steadily whittle away at the government’s ability to tax them.

The effect has been to create a kind of private tax system, catering to only several thousand Americans. The impact on their own fortunes has been stark. Two decades ago, when Bill Clinton was elected president, the 400 highest-earning taxpayers in America paid nearly 27% of their income in federal taxes, according to I.R.S. data. By 2012, when President Obama was re-elected, that figure had fallen to less than 17%, which is just slightly more than the typical family making $100,000 annually, when payroll taxes are included for both groups. The ultra-wealthy “literally pay millions of dollars for these services,” said Jeffrey A. Winters, a political scientist at Northwestern University who studies economic elites, “and save in the tens or hundreds of millions in taxes.”

Another example of why choice of words counts. Reform sounds much better than preparing for war.

• China Says Consulted Widely On Army Reform, Xi Closely Involved (Reuters)

China’s military consulted widely on its sweeping reform program, with President Xi Jinping closely involved by speaking with soldiers on the frontlines and hand-writing suggestions, the army’s newspaper said on Thursday. Xi unveiled a broad-brush outline of the reforms last month, seeking further streamlining of the command structure of the world’s largest armed forces, including job losses, to better enable it to win a modern war. He is determined to modernize at the same time as China becomes more assertive in territorial disputes in the East and South China Seas. China’s navy is investing in submarines and aircraft carriers and the air force is developing stealth fighters. The reforms, kicked off in September with Xi’s announcement he would cut service personnel by 300,000, have been controversial.

The military’s newspaper has published almost daily commentaries warning of opposition to the reforms and worries about lost jobs, and warnings that reforms are needed to win wars. In a lengthy front page commentary, the People’s Liberation Army Daily outlined the steps taken to listen to everyone’s opinions on the reforms, including Xi’s involvement. “Chairman Xi went into offices and visited colleges, went to the plateaus, visited the borders, sat in driving seats and cockpits, taking the pulse of reform with soldiers,” the newspaper said. The reform commission took opinions from more than 900 current and former senior officers and experts, issued questionnaires and received thousands of online suggestions, the report said.

There were more than 800 meetings about reform from March to October this year covering almost 700 military bases and units, the newspaper said. The article was also carried in the ruling Communist Party’s official People’s Daily. Xi “found time” to attend meetings on the feedback, saying he wanted to “listen to everyone’s opinion”, it said. “Every line, every word and every character – Chairman Xi earnestly reviewed every draft, putting forward many guiding suggestions, making many important changes with this own hand,” the report said. The enthusiasm for reform and willingness to listen to all sides meant the process was “ardently participated in” by soldiers throughout the ranks, it said.

We still label the PKK terrorists?! Why?

• Turkey ‘One Step Away From A Civil War’ (NY Times)

A major Turkish military operation to eradicate Kurdish militants in Turkey’s restive southeast has turned dozens of urban districts into bloody battlefields, displacing hundreds of thousands of civilians and shattering hopes of reviving peace as an old war reaches its deadliest level in two decades. Over the past week, Turkish tanks and artillery have pounded Kurdish targets across several southeast cities, killing at least 200 militants and more than 150 civilians, according to human rights groups and local officials. Their descriptions of the fighting and mass destruction in populated areas, which are off-limits to journalists, depict war zones not unlike the scenes in neighboring Syria to the south. The Kurds are a geographically dispersed minority whose aspirations for autonomy date back decades.

The flaring of their conflict with Turkey represents a dangerous complication in a region already convulsed by the upheavals in Syria, Iraq and Yemen. About half of all Kurds live in Turkey, a NATO member and American ally. Several Turkish cities are under tight lockdown, and many residents have been trapped without food or electricity as clashes between Kurdish militants and Turkish security forces have intensified. Militants of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party have dug trenches and put up barricades and are using heavy weaponry and rocket launchers to repel the Turkish police, according to local officials. Turkey has been fighting a counterinsurgency campaign against the Kurdistan Workers’ Party since the group ended a two-year cease-fire in July.

Analysts said the renewed conflict initially appeared to have been a calculated political strategy by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to strengthen support for his Justice and Development Party ahead of parliamentary elections in November. When Justice and Development won by a landslide – a result that Mr. Erdogan interpreted as the public’s demand for stability – many had hoped it would lead to the revival of peace talks. Instead, the violence has sharply escalated, stoking fears that it might spread. Mr. Erdogan has vowed to eliminate the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, considered a terrorist organization by Turkey, the United States and the European Union. Having carried out an insurgency against Turkey for three decades, the group, now emboldened by a radicalized youth branch inspired by the war in Syria, has declared autonomous regions and stepped up its fight for self-rule.

One more red line fades.

• Greek Pension Cuts Back On The Table (Kath.)

The government’s proposal to Greece’s creditors for reform of the country’s ailing pension system is likely to foresee 50% of the savings coming from increases to social security contributions and the other half from cuts to pensions, chiefly through supplementary pensions. Though the government has consistently resisted calls by creditors for further cuts to primary pensions, it is likely to make some small concessions. Apart from reductions to supplementary pensions, it is expected that the government’s proposal will foresee reductions to the size of lump sums paid out to retirees. Government sources on Tuesday indicated that there could be some “adjustments” to primary pensions too but that these would only comprise small reductions and would only affect monthly pensions over €2,500 and cases where retirees receive more than one pension.

Authorities are also said to be considering the use of revenue from games of chance and from the state privatization agency to bolster the pension system. Further, ther is the possibility of a tax on bank transactions of more than 1,000 euros which Economy Minister Giorgos Stathakis on Tuesday confirmed was on the table. Members of the Government Council for Economic Policy (KYSOIP) met Tuesday under Deputy Prime Minister Yiannis Dragasakis and discussed the issue of pension reform as well as plans for social welfare initiatives aimed to helping poorer citizens. Sources indicated after the meeting that the government is committed to carry out a series of actions aimed at rebuilding the welfare state and fighting unemployment as well as boosting the health and education systems.

And then the Germans buy them all up?!

• Greek House Price Drop Second To Worst In The World (Kath.)

Greece has the unenviable distinction of having the second to worst performing residential property market in the world this year, according to data up to the end of September. A Global Property Guide survey shows that the annual price decline in Greece came to 6.03%, second only to Dubai in the United Arab Emirates (-10.4%). Compared to the second quarter of the year, Greece’s price slide amounted to 2% in Q3. Among European Union member-states, Cyprus was a distant second behind Greece, with a 2.2% annual decline in home prices, while Spain was in third after seeing a small drop of 0.45%. As Bank of Greece data also show, pressure on the market prices of residential properties continues, albeit to a lesser degree that previously.

However, an Alpha Bank analysis revealed that after seven consecutive quarters of slowdown in the annual price reduction rate, the trend reversed in the second and third quarters of this year, when the decline accelerated again to 5% and 6.1% respectively, against a drop of 3.9% in Q1 on an annual basis. Apartments in particular saw a milder decline this year, suffering a 5% drop in prices in the first nine months against an 8.1% slump in the same period of 2014 and a 7.5% decline in the whole of 2014. Apartment prices have dropped 40.9% from 2008 up to end-September 2015. The central bank forecasts that the slide is unlikely to reverse in the coming quarters, as the factors that have led to it have not been eliminated.

The problems will come in 2016.

• Merkel Urges Germans To See Refugee Arrivals As ‘An Opportunity’ (AFP)

Chancellor Angela Merkel in her New Year’s address on Thursday asked Germans to see refugee arrivals as “an opportunity for tomorrow” and urged doubters not to follow racist hate-mongers. The past year – when the country took in more than a million migrants and refugees – had been unusually challenging, she said in a pre-released text of the speech, also bracing Germans for more hardships ahead. But she stressed that in the end it would all be worth it because “countries have always benefited from successful immigration, both economically and socially”. With a view to right-wing populists and xenophobic street rallies, she said “It’s important we don’t allow ourselves to be divided.”

“It is crucial not to follow those who, with coldness or even hatred in their hearts, lay a sole claim to what it means to be German and seek to exclude others.” Merkel has earned both praise and criticism at home and abroad for her decision to open Germany to a record wave of refugees, about half from war-torn Syria. Germany took in almost 1.1 million asylum seekers this year, five times 2014’s total, the Saechsische Zeitung regional daily reported on Wednesday citing unpublished official figures. Merkel, faced with opposition in her conservative camp and popular concerns about the influx, has vowed steps to reduce numbers in 2016. Her plan involves convincing other European Union members to take in more refugees, so far with little success, and an EU deal with gateway country Turkey to better protect its borders.

Merkel said “there has rarely been a year in which we were challenged so much to follow up our words with deeds”. She thanked volunteers and police, soldiers and administrators for their “outstanding” accomplishments and “doing far, far more than their duty”. Looking to 2016, she said: “There is no question that the influx of so many people will keep demanding much of us. It will take time, effort and money.”

Debt Rattle July 30 2015

Jul 302015

July 30, 2015 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 9:41 am Finance Tagged with: Civil War, Dijsselbloem, Greece, Plan B, reset, Syriza, treason, Varoufakis 7 Responses »

Harris&Ewing Harding inauguration 1921

• The Great Reset – Act II (Russell Napier)

• Treason Charges: What Lurks Behind The Bizarre Allegations (Varoufakis)

• This Is A Recipe For A European Civil War (AEP)

• The Defeat Of Europe (Yanis Varoufakis)

• If Varoufakis Is Charged With Treason, Then Dijsselbloem Should Be As Well (ZH)

• In Defence Of Yanis Varoufakis (El-Erian)

• Yanis Varoufakis Is Being Pilloried For Doing What Had To Be Done (Legrain)

• After Greece, Everyone Will Want A Plan B To Leave The Euro (MarketWatch)

• Bulgaria, Greece’s New Treasury (Novinite)

• Hay For Cheese? Barter Booms in Cash-Squeezed Rural Greece (Reuters)

• Tsipras Faces New Challenge From Syriza Hardliners Over Greek Bailout (FT)

• ‘Iron Lady’ To Play Central Role In Next Act Of Greek Bailout Drama (Guardian)

• Spain Thinks Its Workers Are Not Really As Unemployed As They Say (Economist)

• Nigel Farage On EU Referendum And The Mess In Dover-Calais (BBCBreakfast)

The Automatic Earth has been warning of deflation since its inception. There is no other possible outcome once deleveraging starts. And deleveraging has been postponed, and postponed only, through QE programs. Which are a bottomless pit.

• The Great Reset – Act II (Russell Napier)

In May 2011 this analyst changed his mind about the impact of the monetary love being spread around the world by developed world central bankers. He stopped forecasting higher inflation and instead foresaw the return of deflation. Fresh from the battering in the deflationary storm of 2007-2009 investors did not want to hear that such monetary love would be in vain. They counted on central bankers then, just as they are counting on them now, to restore a level of nominal GDP growth that can prevent the severe burning of another painful deleveraging through default. Central bankers, the argument goes, need to boost financial asset prices to achieve higher nominal growth and that higher growth, when finally achieved, will be good for asset prices anyway.

So while their love may be for higher nominal GDP growth, the goodwill this spreads to asset prices should be priced in if it succeeds in creating inflation. However, a list of some prices that have been falling from last year – gold, steel, iron ore, copper, crude, coffee, cocoa, live cattle, hogs, orange juice, wheat, sugar, cotton, natural gas, silver, platinum, palladium, aluminium and tin – must raise questions as to whether there is reflation or whether this monetary love is in vain. This analyst is told that such major decline in prices across a broad spectrum of commodities and products represents a supply shock and not the failure of central banks to spur demand! Such supply side synchronicity is highly unlikely. This is nothing less than a failure to reflate and it is due to the growing crisis in Emerging Markets.

It was in a report called The Great Reset, in May 2011, that this analyst suggested the world was more likely to move towards deflation rather than higher inflation. There were many reasons for this change of mind, but key to it was a realisation that EM external surpluses had peaked. That sounds like a rather esoteric reason to change from an inflationist to deflationist stance, and it was not one that was of any concern to investors. However, the end of a long period (1998-2011) when external surpluses, combined with exchange-rate intervention policies, forced EM to create more domestic high-powered money, while simultaneously depressing the yields on US Treasuries, seemed both important and deflationary. Crucially, The Great Reset predicted this decline in EM external surpluses would produce tighter monetary policy in both EM and the developed world despite the efforts of central bankers to prevent it.

Smear.

• Treason Charges: What Lurks Behind The Bizarre Allegations (Varoufakis)

The bizarre attempt to have me indicted me on… treason charges, allegedly for conspiring to push Greece out of the Eurozone, reflects something much broader. It reflects a determined effort to de-legitimise our five-month long (25th January to 5th July 2015) negotiation with a troika incensed that we had the audacity to dispute the wisdom and efficacy of its failed program for Greece. The aim of my self-styled persecutors is to characterise our defiant negotiating stance as an aberration, an error or, even better from the perspective of Greece’s troika-friendly oligarchic establishment, as a ‘crime’ against Greece’s national interest. My dastardly ‘crime’ was that, expressing the collective will of our government, I personified the sins of:

• Facing down the Eurogroup’s leaders as an equal that has the right to say ‘NO’ and to present powerful analytical reasons for rebuffing the catastrophic illogicality of huge loans to an insolvent state in condirion of self-defeating austerity

• Demonstrating that one can be a committed Europeanist, strive to keep one’s nation in the Eurozone, and, at the very same time, reject Eurogroup policies which damage Europe, deconstruct the euro and, crucially, trap one’s country in austerity-driven debt-bondage

• Planning for contingencies that leading Eurogroup colleagues, and high ranking troika officials, were threatening me with in face-to-face discussions

• Unveiling how previous Greek governments turned crucial government departments, such as the General Secretariat of Public Revenues and the Hellenic Statistical Office, into departments effectively controlled by the troika and reliably pressed into the service of undermining the elected government.

It is amply clear that the Greek government has a duty to recover national and democratic sovereignty over all departments of state, and in particular those of the Finance Ministry. If it does not, it will continue to forfeit the instruments of policy making that voters expect it to utilise in pursuit of the mandate they bestowed upon it. In my ministerial endeavours, my team and I devised innovative methods for developing the Finance Ministry’s tools to deal efficiently with the troika-induced liquidity crunch while recouping executive powers previously usurped by the troika with the consent of previous governments.

Instead of indicting, and persecuting, those who, to this day, function within the public sector as the troika’s minions and lieutenants (while receiving their substantial salaries from the long-suffering Greek taxpayers), politicians and parties whom the electorate condemned for their efforts to turn Greece into a protectorate are now persecuting me, aided and abetted by the oligarchs’ media. I wear their accusations as badges of honour. The proud and honest negotiation that the SYRIZA government conducted from the first day we were elected has already changed Europe’s public debates for the better. The debate about the democratic deficit afflicting the Eurozone is now unstoppable. Alas, the troika’s domestic cheerleaders do not seem able to bear this historic success. Their efforts to criminalise it will crash of the same shoals that wrecked their blatant propaganda campaign against the ‘No’ vote in the 5th July referendum: the great majority of the fearless Greek people.

“So we now have a Europe where the political temperature is rising to boiling point: where the EMU elites are refusing to shift course; and where mischievous lawyers are concocting criminal charges against anybody daring to explore a way out of the trap.”

• This Is A Recipe For A European Civil War (AEP)

It has come to this. The first finance minister of a eurozone country to draw up contingency plans for a possible euro exit is under investigation for treason. Greece’s chief prosecutor is examining criminal charges against a five-man “working group” in the country’s finance ministry for the sin of designing a “Plan B”, a parallel system of euro liquidity and bank payments that could – in extremis – lead to a return of the drachma. It is hard to see how a monetary union held together by judicial power, coercion and fear in this way can have a future in any of Europe’s ancient nation states. The criminalisation of any Grexit debate shuts off the option of an orderly return to the drachma, even though there is a high probability – some say a near certainty – that the latest EMU loan package for Greece will prove unworkable and precipitate the country’s exit from the single currency within a year.

As a matter of practical statecraft, this is sheer madness. The Greek newspaper Kathimerini – the voice of the oligarchy – reported that the charges would include “breach of duty, violation of currency laws and belonging to a criminal organisation”, as well as violating data privacy by hacking into the Greek tax base. The prosecutor appears to have latched onto a legal suit by a private lawyer accusing Yanis Varoufakis of treason. It is nothing less than an attempt to destroy the mercurial former finance minister, lest he return as an avenging political force. The Greek “Plan B” was approved from the outset by prime minister Alexis Tsipras. It was designed originally to create an alternative source of euro liquidity if the ECB cut off emergency funding for the Greek banking system.

The ECB did in fact do exactly that – arguably violating the ECB’s Treaty to uphold financial stability, and acting ultra vires in a purely political move as the enforcer of the creditors – when the Syriza government threw down the gauntlet with an anti-austerity referendum. Mr Varoufakis insists that his plan was based on California’s IOU scheme in 2009 to cover tax rebates and to pay contractors when liquidity dried up after the Lehman crisis. His purpose was to reflate the economy within the eurozone, not to leave it. Yet it had a double function, and there lies the alleged treason. “At the drop of a hat it could be converted to a new drachma,” he said.

Pablo Iglesias, the pony-tailed leader of Spain’s Podemos movement, has drawn his own conclusions after watching Europe’s first radical-Left government in modern times brought to its knees by liquidity asphyxiation, and then further crushed by internal forces within Greece. He accused Germany of imposing a Carthaginian settlement as punishment for daring to call a referendum, and warned that the “limits of democracy in Europe” are now brutally clear. The lesson to be learned is that if Podemos is elected in Spain it must expect a trial of strength (“medir fuerzas”) and make sure it takes power in the fullest sense. You can interpret this how you will, but there is a hint of Leninist defiance in these words, a warning that Podemos may feel compelled to launch pre-emptive strikes against the entreched positions of the Spanish establisment, in the media, the judiciary, the security forces and the commanding heights of the economy.

The fate of Syriza has clearly tainted the radical-Left brand. The EMU creditor powers have shown all too clearly that if you buck the system, your country will pay a bitter price. It is hard to explain to Spanish voters – or indeed to anybody – how Mr Tsipras could accept a package of draconian demands rejected by the Greek people in a landslide vote just a week earlier. Podemos has lost its electoral lead and has dropped to 17pc in the polls, trailing the Socialists by a wide margin. But it would be premature to conclude that this is the end of the story. The deeper message – still entering the collective consciousness – is that no Leftist government can pursue sovereign policies within the constraints of EMU.

Le Monde Diplomatique has posted the article in picture format. Click the link to read.

• The Defeat Of Europe (Yanis Varoufakis)

Le Monde Diplomatique has posted the article in picture format. Click the link to read.

And Schäuble. And many others.

• If Varoufakis Is Charged With Treason, Then Dijsselbloem Should Be As Well (ZH)

What makes matters confusing, is that the core allegation made by Varoufakis, namely that the Troika controls Greece tax revenues and had to be sabotaged, was strictly denied: European Commission spokeswoman Mina Andreeva on Tuesday described as “false and unfounded” Varoufakis’s claims that Greece’s General Secretariat for Public Revenues is controlled by the country’s creditors. In other words, if Andreeva is right, then Varoufakis’ transgression of threatening to hijack the Greek tax system was merely hot air, and the former finmin is guilty of nothing more than self-aggrandizement.

On the other hand, if Greece does find it has a legal basis to criminally charge Varoufakis with treason merely for preparing for a Plan B, then it brings up an interesting question: if Varoufakis was a criminal merely for preparing for existing the Euro, then comparable treason charges should also be lobbed against none other than Varoufakis’ nemesis – Eurogroup president and Dutch finance minister Jeroen Dijsselbloem. Recall from the November 28 post that “Netherlands, Germany Have Euro Disaster Plan – Possible Return to Guilder and Mark”, to wit:

The Dutch finance ministry prepared for a scenario in which the Netherlands could return to its former currency – the guilder. They hosted meetings with a team of legal, economic and foreign affairs experts to discuss the possibility of returning to the Dutch guilder in early 2012. At the time the Euro was in crisis, Greece was on the verge of leaving or being pushed out of the Euro and the debt crisis was hitting Spain and Italy hard. The Greek prime minister Georgios Papandreou and his Italian counterpart Silvio Berlusconi had resigned and there were concerns that the eurozone debt crisis was spinning out of control – leading to contagion and the risk of a systemic collapse.

A TV documentary broke the story last Tuesday. The rumours were confirmed on Thursday by the current Dutch minister of finance, Jeroen Dijsselbloem, and the current President of the Eurogroup of finance ministers in a television interview which was covered by EU Observer and Bloomberg. “It is true that [the ministry of] finance and the then government had also prepared themselves for the worst scenario”, said Dijsselbloem.

This is precisely what Varoufakis was doing too.

“Government leaders, including the Dutch government, have always said: we want to keep that eurozone together. But [the Dutch government] also looked at: what if that fails. And it prepared for that.” While Dijsselbloem said there was no need to be “secretive” about the plans now, such discussions were shrouded in secrecy at the time to avoid spreading panic on the financial markets.

Again, precisely like in the Greek scenario. In fact, if throwing people in jail, may round up Wolfi Schauble as well:

Jan Kees de Jager, finance minister from February 2010 to November 2012, acknowledged that a team of legal experts, economists and foreign affairs specialists often met at his ministry on Fridays to discuss possible scenarios. “The fact that in Europe multiple scenarios were discussed was something some countries found rather scary. They did not do that at all, strikingly enough”, said De Jager in the TV documentary. “We were one of the few countries, together with Germany. We even had a team together that discussed scenarios, Germany-Netherlands.”

When the EU Observer requested confirmation from Germany, the German ministry of finance did not officially deny that it had drawn up similar plans, stating simply: “We and our partners in the euro zone, including the Netherlands, were and still are determined to do everything possible to prevent a breakup of the eurozone.” [..] This is quite a revelation. At that time the German finance minister Wolfgang Schauble had said that the Euro could survive without Greece. Whether it could survive without the Dutch is another matter entirely.

Fast forward 3 years when Greece, too, was making preparations for “preventing the breakup of the eurozone” in doing precisely what Schauble wanted as recently as three weeks ago: implementing a parallel currency which would enable Greece to take its “temporary” sabbatical from the Eurozone. So one wonders: where are the legal suits accusing Dijsselbloem and Schauble of the same “treason” that Varoufakis may have to vigorously defend himself in a kangaroo court designed to be nothing but a spectacle showing what happens to anyone in Europe who dares to give Germany the finger, either literally or metaphorically.

El-Erian comes laden with salt.

• In Defence Of Yanis Varoufakis (El-Erian)

From blaming him for the renewed collapse of the Greek economy to accusing him of illegally plotting Greece’s exit from the eurozone, it has become fashionable to disparage Yanis Varoufakis, the country’s former finance minister. While I have never met or spoken to him, I believe that he is getting a bad rap (and increasingly so). In the process, attention is being diverted away from the issues that are central to Greece’s ability to recover and prosper – whether it stays in the eurozone or decides to leave. That is why it is important to take note of the ideas that Varoufakis continues to espouse. Greeks and others may fault him for pursuing his agenda with too little politesse while in office. But the essence of that agenda was – and remains – largely correct.

Following an impressive election victory by his Syriza party in January, Greece’s prime minister, Alexis Tsipras, appointed Varoufakis to lead the delicate negotiations with the country’s creditors. His mandate was to recast the relationship in two important ways: render its terms more amenable to economic growth and job creation; and restore balance and dignity to the treatment of Greece by its European partners and the IMF. These objectives reflected Greece’s frustrating and disappointing experience under two previous bailout packages administered by “the institutions”. In pursuing them, Varoufakis felt empowered by the scale of Syriza’s electoral win and compelled by economic logic to press three issues that many economists believe must be addressed if sustained growth is to be restored: less and more intelligent austerity; structural reforms that better meet social objectives; and debt reduction.

These issues remain as relevant today, with Varoufakis out of government, as they were when he was tirelessly advocating for them during visits to European capitals and in tense late-night negotiations in Brussels. Indeed, many observers view the agreement on a third bailout programme that Greece reached with its creditors – barely a week after Varoufakis resigned – as simply more of the same. At best, the deal will bring a respite – one that is likely to prove both short and shallow. [..] Now that he is out of office, Varoufakis is being blamed for much more than failing to adapt his approach to political reality. Some hold him responsible for the renewed collapse of the Greek economy, the unprecedented shuttering of the banking system, and the imposition of stifling capital controls.

Others are calling for criminal investigations, characterising the work he led on a plan B (whereby Greece would introduce a new payments system either in parallel or instead of the euro) as tantamount to treason. But, love him or hate him (and, it seems, very few people who have encountered him feel indifferent), Varoufakis was never the arbiter of Greece’s fate. Yes, he should have adopted a more conciliatory style and shown greater appreciation for the norms of European negotiations; and, yes, he overestimated Greece’s bargaining power, wrongly assuming that pressing the threat of Grexit would compel his European partners to reconsider their long-entrenched positions. But, relative to the macro situation, these are minor issues.

Another thing I said days ago. Surprise me, tell me something new. Alternatively: read me.

• Yanis Varoufakis Is Being Pilloried For Doing What Had To Be Done (Legrain)

Yanis Varoufakis has few friends in official circles these days. Greece’s outspoken former finance minister has long been loathed by his erstwhile eurozone counterparts, on whom he counterproductively impressed their mediocrity. Since he has been jettisoned by his prime minister, Alexis Tsipras, and criticised Greece’s capitulation to Germany’s iniquitous demands, his former Syriza colleagues are losing patience with him too. He is becoming the perfect fall guy for having devised a daring escape plan in the event that Greece’s creditors shut down its banking system and severed its international economic ties – as they eventually did. While Varoufakis’s plan to create a parallel payments system based on the country’s tax register was certainly unorthodox, it was completely understandable.

Until the recent revelations, Varoufakis was being criticised for standing up to Greece’s eurozone creditors without preparing a Plan B in case negotiations failed. As many experts and commentators, including me, advised, the Greek government needed to prepare for a parallel currency to provide liquidity to the economy in case eurozone authorities turned off the taps. That way it could credibly threaten to default on its debts while remaining in the eurozone – and thus, it hoped, convince its creditors to offer the debt relief that the depressed Greek economy desperately needed to recover.

But now it turns out Varoufakis did have a plan B, he is being attacked for that too. Some criticise the supposed recklessness and duplicity of preparing for a parallel currency that could have become a new drachma, given the government’s official commitment to staying in the euro. But that is disingenuous. Governments should and do prepare for all sorts of eventualities. The Bank of England is right to prepare for the possibility of Brexit, which may happen even though it is not government policy. One hopes that Whitehall has plans for dealing with a nuclear winter or a catastrophic epidemic. Varoufakis was right to prepare for how to cope with an outcome that wasn’t just possible, but likely.

Others object that the plan wouldn’t have worked. But why not? In principle, the idea of setting up a parallel payments system involving people’s tax numbers is ingenious. Since the value of the parallel currency would derive from the fact that the Greek government accepted it as payment for overdue, current and future taxes, it makes a lot of sense. Given that it takes time to print and distribute banknotes, starting with a purely electronic system is also sensible.

Part of why the tapes were leaked?!

• After Greece, Everyone Will Want A Plan B To Leave The Euro (MarketWatch)

Surely now every finance minister in Europe is going to be continually asked whether they, like the Greeks, have put in place a contingency plan for an alternative currency. It will be a very hard question to answer. If they say no, then they look irresponsible — after all, one of the key tasks of any government is to prepare for all kinds of terrible things that might happen. If they say yes, however, then they undermine their membership in the single currency. It is lose-lose — but that does not mean it is not going to happen. The Irish? They will certainly be expected to have a plan in place, given the underlying strength of their economy, and what happened to them last time around. The Spanish? With the rise of their own anti-austerity parties, they will certainly need to prepare for all eventualities.

The same is true of the Italians and the Portuguese. Once the questions start, they will be impossible to stop. The trouble is, that is now how a currency is mean to work. No one ever asks the governor of Virginia what plans he has put in place should the state decide to pull out of the dollar. No one asks the leader of Manchester Council whether they have prepared for leaving the sterling zone, or the leaders of Osaka whether they might replace the yen. It would be like asking whether they planned to colonize Mars — – the question would be too far-fetched to even be put. It simply wouldn’t happen. That is because properly functioning currency systems are permanent.

The Greeks and the German have changed that. Varoufakis’s legacy is, in truth, a reversible euro. A country might be a member, but only for the moment, and only so long as it works. It will always have a Plan B stored away somewhere, just in case. And yet, that is not a currency. It is fixed-exchange-rate system. The problem is that fixed-currency systems don’t often survive an economic shock. The euro is staggering on for now. But the chances of it surviving the next big wave or turmoil in the markets have just been dramatically reduced.

Hilarious in its tragedy.

• Bulgaria, Greece’s New Treasury (Novinite)

A short trip to Bulgaria is the only thing Greeks have to do to circumvent capital controls, German weekly Der Spiegel says. “Strict controls which actually had to save Greece’s banks from collapse, are leading to a mass exodus to the poorest EU member state,” it reports in a Tuesday article. Up to €14,000 are successfully transferred to Bulgaria every week despite capital controls. Something not only “normal citizens” do (with thousands having opened bank accounts there), but also companies which open branch offices or move their headquarters to the country, Der Spiegel argues. This is partly owned to the fact that one is allowed to have €2000 daily (or €14,000 weekly) transferred from their account for a trip abroad.

A bank employee in Bulgaria is quoted as saying that for Greek citizens it is quite easy to have accounts set up in her bank in either leva (the Bulgarian currency, BGN) or euro – all it takes is an ID document and wait for two hours. “We have many foreign clients. Of course, Greeks too,” she told the author of the article. Greeks are fearing that a return to the drachma might cost much of their wealth. “In the months when Greece’s crisis peaked they have withdrawn around EUR 45 B from their bank accounts. Now they are bringing the money abroad.” For companies, low corporate and personal taxes in Bulgaria turn out attractive, being at 10% compared to Greece’s 29% of corporate tax. The latter rate was introduced to comply with the demands of international lenders.

Lower minimum wage and levels of red tape add to Bulgaria’s appeal, and Greek entrepreneurs are able to set up a Bulgaria-based subsidiary normally in just a week. As a result, there were 11 500 entities with Greek participation in Bulgaria, 2500 more than the year before. Krasen Stanchev, an economist with the Institute for Market Economy, is quoted as saying that some EUR 4.5-5 B have been invested by Greek companies into Bulgaria since the crisis began. “Until a few years ago Greece was still a beacon of hope and a role model for other countries in the Balkans. We were a developed economy, integrated into the West, part of the center of Europe… Now even Albania looks more attractive,” an entrepreneur is quoted as saying.

Something tells me the Greeks will come out of this in good shape.

• Hay For Cheese? Barter Booms in Cash-Squeezed Rural Greece (Reuters)

Panagiotis Koutras, a cattle herder and farmer, recalls how he sold clover for animal feed worth 2,000 euros to a farmer who did not have cash and paid him in wheat. Another farmer offered his heavy equipment to cover €4,000 of a €6,000 bill for products Koutras had supplied him. Kostas Zavlagas, who produces cotton, wheat, and clover recounted how he gave bales of hay and machine parts to another farmer who did not have cash to pay him. “He is going to pay me back in some sort of product when he is able to, maybe in cheese,” says 47-year-old Zavlagas. “It’s representative of the daily issues that farmers face and why they turn to barter trading to resolve them.”

Still, for the country’s tax inspectors, the practice raises questions about whether it is fuelling endemic tax dodging since it is difficult to monitor whether receipts are issued to ensure value-added-tax is paid. “Barter is not illegal as long as the relevant legal documents are issued for every transaction,” said Christos Kyriazopoulos, research director at the finance ministry’s anti-corruption unit. “But we are closely monitoring the phenomenon, it’s something that we have our eyes on.” Many Greeks are reluctant to encourage the use of barter or to talk about it openly, fearing it symbolizes a society moving in reverse after seven years of economic crisis.

“Of course, a barter economy is something that we shouldn’t aspire to and should be a thing of the past – the last time we had it on a large scale was when we were under occupation,” says Stamatis of the Mermix platform, referring to Nazi German rule during World War Two. “But aren’t capital controls a financial form of occupation?”

“The IMF is part of the so-called “quadriga” of bailout monitors that also includes the EC, the ECB and, for the first time, the European Stability Mechanism, the EU’s own bailout fund.”

• Tsipras Faces New Challenge From Syriza Hardliners Over Greek Bailout (FT)

Alexis Tsipras will on Thursday face an unprecedented challenge to his authority, as the central committee of his governing Syriza party meets to discuss the prime minister’s plan to hold a snap election as soon as Greece signs up to a €86bn third bailout. After abandoning its earlier vows of unity, Left Platform, an anti-bailout faction of the party led by Panayotis Lafazanis, the former energy minister, appeared to be preparing for a showdown that could split Syriza and deprive Mr Tsipras of his parliamentary majority. The development was a reminder of the threats facing Greece’s prime minister as he tries to finalise a bailout deal with international creditors that is deeply unpopular within his own leftwing party.

Mr Tsipras has so far succeeded at winning parliamentary support for two packages of reforms connected to the bailout even as he has expressed his own misgivings about them. In the process, he appears to have energised Mr Lafazanis, a former Communist party official who has advocated a return to the drachma. The prime minister is expected to propose an extraordinary party congress for September, provided his government can meet its own tight deadline of August 12 to strike a deal with creditors. The central committee meeting also coincides with the arrival in Athens of Delia Valesescu, the IMF’s new head of mission. The IMF is part of the so-called “quadriga” of bailout monitors that also includes the EC, the ECB and, for the first time, the European Stability Mechanism, the EU’s own bailout fund.

Earlier this week technical experts from the EU and IMF gained access to the national accounting office at the finance ministry for the first time since Syriza came to power in January, reflecting a more accommodating attitude towards the creditors since Yanis Varoufakis, the combative finance minister, stepped down earlier this month. Mr Tsipras’s newfound willingness to negotiate tough economic reforms with the deeply unpopular bailout monitors in order to keep Greece in the euro has left Mr Lafazanis sounding disappointed and increasingly angry.

Maybe Romanians are good with diktats?

• ‘Iron Lady’ To Play Central Role In Next Act Of Greek Bailout Drama (Guardian)

Delia Velculescu, the Romanian economist chosen to lead the International Monetary Fund’s negotiating team in Greece, was dubbed the “iron lady” during the fraught talks over Cyprus’s bailout. Given the poor relationship between Athens and its creditors, her toughness will be tested anew in the coming days. Velculescu arrives in Athens on Thursday amid uncertainty over the IMF’s willingness to throw its weight behind a third bailout for the stricken eurozone state. Alexis Tsipras, the Greek prime minister, hopes to negotiate a deal before 20 August, but the IMF will subject any agreement to rigorous examination. The IMF has indicated that it regards Greece’s debt burden as unsustainable, and any new deal must include debt relief.

It is far from clear whether Athens’ eurozone creditors are ready to offer this. Velculescu will have to decide what role the Washington-based lender is willing to play in any new rescue – and what should be expected of Greece in return. Velculescu is not well known in her native Romania, having left for the US to attend university and later joined the IMF. “Inside Romanian financial institutions, she’s known due to her position at the IMF, but among journalists and the general public she is mostly unknown,” said Cristian Pantazi, editor-in-chief of Hotnews, an online Romanian news agency. “People who do know her here characterise her as a very serious and dedicated professional.”

Velculescu holds a masters and PhD in economics from Johns Hopkins University in Maryland, and has been at the IMF since 2002. She co-authored an earlier IMF review of the Greek economy in 2009, and this, coupled with her time in Cyprus as the IMF’s chief representative between 2012 and 2014, has led to her securing a prominent role in trying to resolve the ongoing crisis in Greece. [..] it was the Cyprus bailout in 2013 that made her name. It was the Cypriot media who portrayed Velculescu as an “iron lady” who was very tough and demanding in terms of fiscal consolidation and the requirements she made on the country. However, those who dealt with her during Cyprus’s bailout talks have a different viewpoint.

“She had a reputation for being tough, but I didn’t experience the toughness in my dealings with her,” said Marios Clerides, general manager at the Cooperative Central Bank in Cyprus. “She and the troika came across as resolved rather than aggressive,” he added. “She has quite a negative reputation in Cyprus,” said Alexander Apostolides, an economics historian at the European University Cyprus, who was a presidential adviser during the negotiations. “We are a male-dominated society and the fact that she was a woman caused some issues,” he said, but added that in his experience she was “a person willing to listen to other ideas and alternatives, more ready than others to hear other approaches”.

Good work. Steve will be able to point out tons of erroneous assumptions in mainstream economics.

• Help Make Minsky Easier To Use (Steve Keen)

Minsky has been programmed almost exclusively by Dr Russell Standish, and $10,000 will buy 100 hours of Russell’s programming time. About A$230,000 has been spent on it so far-with US$128,000 coming from an initial INET grant (when the US$ was worth less than the A$), US$78,000 from a Kickstarter campaign, and sundry other amounts from supporters like Bruce Ramsay, who runs the Ending Overlending page that is linked to from this blog. This funding enabled Russell to build the basic functionality Minsky needed, along with a lot of innovative smarts that set it apart from its much more established rivals in system dynamics programs like Matlab’s Simulink, Vensim, Stella and Vissim that cost thousands of dollars a copy and have been around for decades.

For example, Minsky is the only system dynamics program that lets you use Greek characters and symbols, superscripts and subscripts; it runs plots dynamically while a simulation is running (which only Vissim also does in the system dynamics product space), it s the only program that lets you insert variables and operators by typing directly onto the canvas rather than having to use the mouse and toolbox palettes; and of course it s the only program that supports double-entry bookkeeping to allow complex inter-related financial accounts to be simulated dynamically. But the program is still incomplete.

Some basic things like an IF/THEN/ELSE block are missing; some aspects of grouping don’t work properly yet, you can’t save part of a Minsky file as a toolkit, and so on. I’m putting $10,000 of my own cash in to get these things done now and there are many other features that should be added. These range from simple things like adding shortcut keys for Save As to the final ambitions I have for the program enabling it to model multiple sectors and multiple economies at once. If we can raise another $30,000 or so, we can also address one of the main complaints that I hear about Minsky: to quote my good friend Tom Ferguson, INET’s Research Director, from our dinner together in London last month, “Why is Minsky so hard to use?”

Crack down on the poor.

• Spain Thinks Its Workers Are Not Really As Unemployed As They Say (Economist)

He had the dishevelled air of a bon vivant, someone who enjoyed his food and cared little for appearances. When he showed up in the tiny hillside village of Gaucin at the beginning of the year, driving an old car and asking for directions, no one knew who he was, or cared. But he eased into village life, gossiping with the locals in the bars, mostly about who owned what in the area. He had done his homework on Owners Direct and Airbnb, two home-rental websites, and had a list of a hundred houses that were being rented out to holidaymakers. Next he began asking about villagers who were working part-time for cash as cleaners, gardeners or handymen, some of them officially claiming to be unemployed. Soon the word spread: the taxman had come to town.

The inspectors have come to villages like Gaucin to tackle the Spanish government’s difficulties in collecting revenue, in the face of economic problems that have driven much of the country’s business activity into the shadows. Spain’s economy has been growing lately, creating 411,000 net jobs in the second quarter according to figures released on July 23rd by the national statistics agency. But while unemployment fell 1.4 %age points, it is still an agonising 22.4%, having remained above 20% for five years. As elsewhere in southern Europe, this prolonged stagnation has encouraged workers and businesses to dodge taxes by shifting to the black market.

While northern European countries now promote electronic transactions, shopkeepers and housecleaners in Spain are happy to accept cash in order to dodge value-added tax of 21%. The grey economy is estimated to make up between a fifth and a quarter of Spain’s GDP. The government’s tax crackdown has netted almost €35 billion extra for the state’s coffers in the past three years. But the tax agency (or Agencia Tributaria) sees scope to improve that take. It plans to step up surveillance of social media and e-commerce sites, as well as of businesses such as hotels and restaurants which it suspects of keeping two sets of accounts to under-report income. Members of the public are encouraged to blow the whistle, and to report any payments of €2,500 or more in cash. Tax inspectors are offered financial incentives to meet ambitious targets.

Go Nigel go.

• Nigel Farage On EU Referendum And The Mess In Dover-Calais (BBCBreakfast)

UKIPs Nigel Farage on the EU referendum campaign, and moving it forward as all the other Eurosceptics are lazy bastards, and the immigration mess on Dover-Calais route with illegal immigrants smuggling themselves onto Eurotunnel trains.

Debt Rattle December 29 2014

Dec 292014

December 29, 2014 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 11:51 am Finance Tagged with: China, Churchill, Civil War, distressed debt, EU, Greece, Russia, Ukraine Comments Off

Unknown Daniels-Wells Pontiac, 3055 Broadway, Oakland 1938

• Greece Faces Snap Election as Samaras Fails to Install President (Bloomberg)

• Greek Stocks Tank After Presidential Vote (CNBC)

• ‘Life Will Go On’ Thesis About Global Economy Might Not Work In 2015 (Guardian)

• Distressed Debt Losses Worst Since ’08 Credit Crisis on Oil Rout (Bloomberg)

• US Bond Sentiment Worst Since Disastrous ’09 as Fed Shifts (Bloomberg)

• The 94% Plunge That Shows Abenomics Losing Global Investors (Bloomberg)

• Japan’s Regional Banks Face Stress Test For Ultra-Low Rates (Reuters)

• Zombie Bankruptcies Top New Year Wish-List for China’s Brokerages (Bloomberg)

• China Slashes Trade Target For 2015 To 6% (MarketWatch)

• China Looking At Deal With US To Recover Dirty Assets (Reuters)

• China First-World Quandary Exposed as $800 Billion Lending Freed (Bloomberg)

• Kiev Targets Oligarchs With Budget Bill (FT)

• Fed and ECB: Kudos And Problems Ahead (CNBC)

• The Liberal Idiocy on Russia/Ukraine (Robert Parry)

• In Reversal, Germany Cools to Russian Investment (NY Times)

• Russia Must Influence Separatists To End Ukraine Crisis, Says Merkel (Reuters)

• In Lieu Of Best Wishes: The Euro’s First Inkling (Varoufakis)

• Winston Churchill’s Family Begged Him Not To Convert To Islam (Ind.)

• The American Civil War: The Bloody Anniversary We All Forgot (Fisk)

Chaos assured in Europe as per Jan 1. Elections January 25. Expect crazy stuff from Samaras and Brussels. We’ll hear Armageddon a lot.

• Greece Faces Snap Election as Samaras Fails to Install President (Bloomberg)

Greece faces snap elections early in the New Year after Prime Minister Antonis Samaras failed in his third and final attempt to persuade parliament to back his candidate for head of state. With voting continuing in Athens today, more than 121 lawmakers in the 300-seat chamber refused to support Samaras’s nominee for president, Stavros Dimas, ensuring that he’ll fall short of the 180 votes required. Under the constitution, the legislature will now be dissolved and a date for elections set within the next 10 days. The prospect of early parliamentary elections as soon as Jan. 25 has roiled financial markets in Greece, evoking memories of the height of the financial crisis in 2012 when the country’s euro membership was in jeopardy.

The benchmark Athens Stock Exchange slumped the most among 18 western-European markets ahead of the vote. The anti-austerity Syriza party led by Alexis Tsipras is ahead of Samaras’s New Democracy movement in opinion polls. Samaras, who failed to gather enough support for Dimas in two previous rounds of voting on Dec. 17 and Dec. 23, called on lawmakers before today’s session to avert a dissolution of parliament, saying that snap elections posed a danger to the country. Heading a coalition of 155 lawmakers, he’d offered to form a broader administration and hold early parliamentary elections at the end of 2015 if lawmakers backed his nominee. His coalition’s term doesn’t expire until June 2016.

Bring in the Plunge Protectors.

• Greek Stocks Tank After Presidential Vote (CNBC)

Greek stocks tumbled over 10% on Monday, after Greek politicians failed to elect a president in a key vote, paving the way for a snap election. Stavros Dimas, the Greek government’s preferred candidate, secured only 168 votes in the third round of voting on Monday, short of the 180 needed to avoid a snap election. Greece’s main stock market fell 11% on the news, while the country’s 10-year bond yields spiked above 9%. Ahead of the vote, the euro slipped to a near-28-month low against the dollar. The result of the vote came as no surprise to analysts, who had not expected Prime Minister Antonis Samaras’ candidate Dimas to get the required votes.

Elena Panaritis, a former MP for Greek social democratic party PASOK, told CNBC on Monday tat the country was heading for snap elections. There are fears that if a snap general election takes place in early 2015, Greece’s popular anti-austerity Syriza party may be elected. This could put the country’s international bailout into jeopardy, as the party has promised to scrap Greece’s tough austerity policies if it gets into power. The unpopular cost-cutting measures are a condition of the country’s bailouts – worth €240 billion ($296 billion) – implemented by the International Monetary Fund, European Central Bank and European Commission.

OK overview.

• ‘Life Will Go On’ Thesis About Global Economy Might Not Work In 2015 (Guardian)

Russia is in crisis. There are concerns about the eurozone. Japan is struggling to emerge from stagnation. Booming stock markets seem divorced from economic reality. The Anglo-Saxon economies are outpacing the other developed economies of the west. This is the world as it exits 2014. But it was also the world as it was 15 years ago during a month in which the first major anti-globalisation protests took place on the streets of Seattle and preparations were made for the nonexistent millennium bug. Oil prices were low. Banks could lend money cheaply. There was talk of how technology would power a new industrial revolution. It would be a mistake, though, to think that nothing has really changed. The story of the past decade and a half is of the increasingly desperate attempts to prevent the Great Stalling of the global economy. Rock-bottom interest rates have failed to prevent growth rates from slipping. Living standards in many countries are back to the levels of the early 2000s.

Securing international cooperation to tackle climate change, to open markets to trade, to manage currencies or to create jobs has become increasingly difficult. The problems of 1999 are still the problems of 2014, but more serious and seemingly more intractable. There is no shortage of explanations for what has gone wrong and what needs to be done to put things right. One view, popular with central bankers and technologists, is that all that is needed is a bit of time. Seen from this perspective, the world is on the brink of the sort of technological shift that happens once in every 50 or 60 years. The transition, however, has been delayed by the structural changes in the global economy caused by the collapse of communism a quarter of a century ago.

Adjustment to these geopolitical shifts, such as the rise of China, is taking longer than expected but will eventually happen. Another view is that the zombie-like state of the global economy is owing to a lack of structural reform. Here there is common cause between the German government, which blames the eurozone crisis not on a lack of demand but on supply-side impediments to growth, and the free market economists who say the financial crisis of 2007-08 was caused by over regulation. The solution, therefore, is to make markets work better through reforms that sharpen incentives to work, dilute labour rights, cut taxes, reduce government spending, balance budgets and push back against growing protectionist tendencies.

Then there is the Keynesian view of the world. Here, the idea is return, as far as possible, to the world as it existed in the golden years of the 1950s and 1960s. That means governments rethinking their austerity programmes; keeping interest rates low; using redistribution to spread the fruits of growth more evenly; and returning to the sort of managed currency regime that existed until the early 1970s. What is common to the explanations is that they believe there is a short-term (sometimes a medium-term) fix that will put matters right. Growth and a steady increase in living standards has been a feature of the modern industrial world, stretching back to the 18th century: it is quite a stretch to believe that 250 years of progress have come to a halt. As a result, the assumption is that eventually the global economy will achieve escape velocity following several years in the post-global recession doldrums.

Emerging markets on their way to the bottom.

• Distressed Debt Losses Worst Since ’08 Credit Crisis on Oil Rout (Bloomberg)

Emerging-market distressed debt losses are the worst this month since the global financial crisis. Bank of America Merrill Lynch’s Distressed Emerging Markets Corporate Plus Index fell 13.4% through Dec. 26, set for its worst performance since October 2008, as a tumble in the price of oil sparked a currency crisis in Russia. That brought this year’s decline to 19.7%, the most in six years. Emerging markets accounted for 14 of the 56 global defaults this year in Standard & Poor’s coverage. Crude reached the lowest in five years earlier this month and is heading for its largest annual decline since 2008 as members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries resist production cuts to defend market share. A supply glut has also pushed metal and coal prices deeper into a bear market.

“With many moving parts to the equation, could there be a point where investors begin to interpret the circumstances as contagion?” said David Tawil, co-founder of New York-based Maglan Capital LP. “What happens if we need to add Venezuela and Russia to the mix? Contagion is good for no one.” Oil accounts for 95% of Venezuela’s exports and its government bonds have suffered as President Nicolas Maduro said he has no plans to curb fuel subsidies. Economic sanctions are also hurting Russia, pushing the country toward a recession, while corruption probes induced bond losses in Brazil and China. In Indonesia, the Bakrie family group of companies put its coal unit, PT Bumi Resources, under court protection.

So Yellen hikes rates, and then buys up all Treasuries Kuroda-style?

• US Bond Sentiment Worst Since Disastrous ’09 as Fed Shifts (Bloomberg)

Get ready for a disastrous year for U.S. government bonds. That’s the message forecasters on Wall Street are sending. With Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen poised to raise interest rates in 2015 for the first time in almost a decade, prognosticators are convinced Treasury yields have nowhere to go except up. Their calls for higher yields next year are the most aggressive since 2009, when U.S. debt securities suffered record losses, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Getting it right hasn’t been easy. Almost everyone who foresaw a selloff this year as the Fed ended its bond buying was caught off-guard as lackluster U.S. wage growth and turmoil in emerging markets propelled Treasuries to the biggest returns since 2011.

Now, even as the bond market’s inflation outlook tumbles, forecasters are sticking to the view that Treasuries are a losing proposition as the economy strengthens. “Next year should be the break-out year finally,” Chris Rupkey, chief financial economist at Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi, said by phone from New York on Dec. 23. “The market is ignoring the rhetoric that Yellen and the FOMC is getting closer and closer to tightening. The market has it wrong.” Rupkey, who is among the 74 economists and strategists surveyed by Bloomberg this month, has one of the highest projections. He said he expects 10-year yields to rise to 3.4% by the end of 2015 from 2.25% at 12:55 p.m. in Tokyo.

Back in January, Rupkey said yields would be 3.6% by now. The median forecast calls for yields to reach 3.01% during the same span. The roughly 0.75 percentage point increase would be almost twice as much as forecasters anticipated for 2014. Combined with projections for yields on the two-year note to more than double to 1.53% and those on the 30-year bond to rise 0.89 percentage point to 3.70%, the prognosticators are more bearish than any time since heading into 2009. That’s when they predicted yields on every debt maturity would rise more than a percentage point as the U.S., helped by the Fed’s easy-money policies, started to recover from its worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. Treasuries lost 3.7% that year in the biggest slide dating back to 1978.

Investors are still not completely stupid.

• The 94% Plunge That Shows Abenomics Losing Global Investors (Bloomberg)

Foreign investors have had just about enough of Abenomics. After pumping record amounts of cash into Japanese shares last year, they’ve hardly added to holdings in 2014. Inflows are down 94% this year to 898 billion yen ($7.5 billion), on pace for the smallest annual amount since the 2008 global financial crisis. The month of April 2013 alone registered almost three times as much foreign investment in the stock market as all of 2014. These figures provide the clearest look at how global investors have become disillusioned with Prime Minister Shinzo Abe after he pushed through a tax increase in April that sent Japan into recession. Fund managers from Sumitomo Mitsui to MV Financial say to lure investors back, Abe needs to move beyond short-term stimulus and start enacting the structural changes he laid out in his initial plan, dubbed Abenomics, to end Japan’s two-decade economic malaise.

“We need to see a framework where growth isn’t dependent on monetary easing,” Ayako Sera, a market strategist at Sumitomo Mitsui, which oversees $325 billion in assets. “If not growth, then at least a way to increase productivity. For now there’s nothing like that, so I imagine it’ll be hard for stocks to keep going higher and for foreigners to take an interest in them.” Purchases of the nation’s shares through Dec. 19 by investors outside Japan were less than a tenth of the 15.1 trillion yen they bought last year, according to data from the Tokyo Stock Exchange. Trust banks, which typically trade on behalf of pension funds, added 2.7 trillion yen, after offloading about 4 trillion yen of equities in 2013. Individuals were net sellers for a fourth straight year.

Deflation tests.

• Japan’s Regional Banks Face Stress Test For Ultra-Low Rates (Reuters)

Japan’s financial regulator is running stress tests to see if too much cash in the system is stifling smaller banks’ ability to earn, unlike regulatory tests elsewhere that have been designed to see whether lenders had enough capital to cope with financial shocks. Two people with direct knowledge of the process said the Financial Services Agency (FSA) had initiated the tests on concerns that with 10-year Japanese government bond yields near a record low around 0.3%, regional lenders in particular could be at risk as the gap between what they pay for deposits and what they collect on loans and bond holdings shrinks.

The action highlights one of the unintended risks of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s programme to end decades of deflation with the support of the Bank of Japan (BOJ), which by injecting monetary stimulus into the economy is helping to keep interest rates at rock bottom. Critics say policymakers in Europe should be considering such risks, too. The European Central Bank completed a review of the resilience of euro zone banks in October and came under fire for not including a deflationary scenario in its stress test hypotheses, even though inflation and bond yields in much of the region are hovering barely above zero. ECB Vice President Vitor Constancio defended the omission by arguing that a “deflation (scenario) is not there because indeed we don’t consider that deflation is going to happen”.

It was not immediately clear what scenario or assumptions the FSA was using in its assessment of the risk to regional and smaller banks, nor how the agency would follow up with lenders that appeared to be at particular risk from a period of persistently low, long-term interest rates. Japan’s more than 100 regional banks account for around 40% of the country’s $4.6 trillion in outstanding loans, but overall loan demand has shrunk 10% over the last 20 years. Such banks, which typically serve smaller businesses, have seen lending fall as Japan’s population ages, and many have cut the interest rates they charge to win business.

But what about the pretense? How many zombies can they blow up before it starts hurting and cascading?

• Zombie Bankruptcies Top New Year Wish-List for China’s Brokerages (Bloomberg)

Bond brokerages have a New Year’s resolution proposal for China’s policy makers: allow more defaults among so-called zombie companies. The extra yield on three-year AA rated debt over top-ranked notes surged 47 basis points this month to Dec. 25, the most for any month since October 2011, even after China’s first onshore bond payment in March failed to trigger a shakeup in the market. Borrowers graded at or below that rating need to repay a record 632.3 billion yuan ($101.6 billion) of notes in 2015, up 71% from 2014, China International Capital data show.

President Xi Jinping, who delivers a year-ahead address on Jan. 1, must balance the need to support an economy set for its slowest growth in more than two decades with reining in the world’s biggest corporate liabilities that Standard & Poor’s estimates stood at $14.2 trillion in 2013. Haitong Securities and Fitch say that will require greater use of bankruptcy laws. “Zombie companies will face higher borrowing costs, which will force more failures,” said Li Ning, a bond analyst in Shanghai at Haitong, the nation’s second-biggest brokerage. “That’s a good thing for the economy because allowing more defaults is a necessary step in building a sound financial asset pricing system.”

Haitong Securities’ Li said the number of bond defaults may increase next year and investors should shun lower-rated corporate debt because their yield premium over top-rated notes may rise. Zombie companies are using up too many lending resources, Liu Shiyu, who was deputy governor at the People’s Bank of China and is now chairman of Agricultural Bank of China, said earlier this year. In the only one onshore default China has had, investors didn’t lose a cent. Shanghai Chaori, which failed to make a full coupon payment in March, repaid all the principal and interest for its 1 billion yuan of bonds on Dec. 22. “It’s necessary to let those zombie companies default,” said Wang Ying, an analyst at Fitch Ratings in Shanghai. “If there is no real default, risks will never be priced in a correct way. Without a correct risk pricing mechanism, zombie companies can still survive by getting loans from banks.”

That quickly withdrawn paper yesterday gave it all away. 3.5% trade growth.

• China Slashes Trade Target For 2015 To 6% (MarketWatch)

China has cut its target for the growth of external trade to 6% for 2015, compared with a 7.5% target this year, the China Daily reported Monday. The paper cited Gao Hucheng, the minister of commerce, without saying where he made the remarks. With imports in particular falling short of expectations, China looks certain to miss this year’s target. In the first 11 months of 2014, total trade was up just 3.5% year-over-year in U.S. dollar terms, according to Dow Jones Newswires’ calculations. That is considerably slower than the official growth rate of the entire economy, which expanded 7.4% from a year earlier in the first three quarters.

Sure the FBI is only too happy to chase some rich Chinese around.

• China Looking At Deal With US To Recover Dirty Assets (Reuters)

China is looking at signing an agreement with the United States to target assets illegally taken out of China by corrupt officials, a newspaper said on Monday, as the government tightens the screws in its anti-graft battle. China has vowed to pursue a search, dubbed Operation “Fox Hunt,” beyond its borders for corrupt officials and business executives, and their assets. But Western countries have balked at signing extradition deals with China, partly out of concern about the integrity of its judicial system and treatment of prisoners. Rights groups say Chinese authorities use torture and that the death penalty is common in corruption cases.

The state-run China Daily said the central People’s Bank of China was talking to the U.S. Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network about signing an agreement targeting ill-gotten assets held in the U.S. China is set to finalize a similar deal with Canada, Chinese state media reported this month. The central bank was also looking at a deal with Australia, the China Daily said, citing Zhang Xiaoming, deputy head of the Finance Ministry’s legal assistance and foreign affairs department. “After the agreements are made, China will share intelligence with the U.S. and Australia, which will also offer information to their enforcement agencies to conduct further investigations,” Zhang told the English-language paper.

“Once law enforcement officers in the U.S. and Australia identify illegal funds, they will immediately initiate judicial procedures to freeze and confiscate those criminal proceeds in their countries.” The United States, Canada and Australia are popular locations for corrupt officials to transfer their assets, the paper added. But legal problems have prevented China from getting these assets back, Zhang said. “Although the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation or Australian police have traced the assets and collected enough evidence to identify them as ill-gotten gains, they are unable to take immediate measures to freeze and confiscate them due to the lack of asset restraining orders from the Chinese courts.”

Creative accounting.

• China First-World Quandary Exposed as $800 Billion Lending Freed (Bloomberg)

China’s central bank is joining the balancing act of developed-world counterparts as it moves to free up at least $800 billion in funds for lenders, seeking to support growth without further inflaming financial risk. The world’s largest emerging market will broaden the definition of a deposit in 2015, boosting the lending capacity of Chinese banks that have to cap loans at 75% of funds held. The relaxation, reported by the official Xinhua News Agency yesterday, could make an additional 5 trillion yuan ($800 billion) to 5.5 trillion yuan available, according to analysts at Credit Agricole CIB and Guotai Junan Securities Co.

“The change in rules allows the extension of additional loans worth half of this year’s new lending,” said Dariusz Kowalczyk, an economist at Credit Agricole CIB in Hong Kong. “Policy makers across the globe are trying to boost demand by increasing bank lending, especially to businesses, so in this sense China’s efforts to boost lending fit well into the picture.” Central bankers worldwide are hunting for new ways to stimulate investment as elevated debt levels in developed nations stifle the scope of governments to respond and record-low borrowing costs limit room for monetary maneuvering. As global policy makers grapple with concern that asset bubbles are a by-product of increased liquidity, the People’s Bank of China’s challenge is supporting growth sufficiently to avoid political discontent while discouraging a renewed borrowing binge in the world’s second-largest economy.

They’re just killing the whole economy on purpose.

• Kiev Targets Oligarchs With Budget Bill (FT)

Recession-battered and war-torn Ukraine overhauled its business-choking tax system early on Monday, promising to lower the burden on small businesses and lower-income citizens while closing loopholes long exploited by oligarchs. The package of legislation adopted after 9 p.m. London time on Sunday also envisions increases in import duties to help stabilize stretched state finances and counter a balance of payments crisis. The laws will form the revenue-boosting backbone of an austerity-packed 2015 budget that officials hope will unlock fresh multibillion-dollar bailouts from the IMF and other western donors. In a 4:15 a.m. vote during the extraordinary Sunday-into-Monday session of parliament, Ukraine’s lawmakers adopted the budget, cutting subsidies and government spending.

Though many lawmakers complained the government did not show them a final version of the draft budget before voting, they were under pressure to adopt it before the end of this year in order to swiftly re-engage with the IMF. With fears of a financial meltdown spreading after central bank reserves halved this year to about one month of import coverage, the IMF concluded this month that Ukraine would need $15 billion of additional support on top of its existing $17 billion loan program. The tax legislation was only adopted after 10 hours of grueling negotiations that tested the unity of a pro-western coalition. It aims to bolster small and medium-sized businesses, reduce a massive shadow economy and squeeze what officials described as a fairer share of revenue out of oligarch-owned businesses.

Kudos? Excuse me?

• Fed and ECB: Kudos And Problems Ahead (CNBC)

It seems to me that the Fed should speed up the removal of a mind-boggling inflationary potential presented by its bloated balance sheet. The latest numbers show that during the two weeks between November 26 and December 10, the Fed shrank its balance sheet by $56.3 billion. That brought the monetary base down to $3.7 trillion, a $315.1 billion decline from its peak of last August. These liquidity withdrawals had no negative impact on U.S. money and capital markets: The federal funds rate remained well below its 0.25% target, and the yield on the Treasury’s benchmark ten-year bond closed at 2.25% last Friday. I expect to see the Fed accelerating asset reductions in the weeks and months ahead.

The European Central Bank (ECB) is in a completely different situation as a result of the weak cyclical position of the euro area economy. With the monetary union’s growth rate of 0.9% in the first nine month of this year, and the bank loans to the private sector falling at an average annual rate of 1.3% in the three months to October, the ECB has to maintain its exceptionally loose monetary policy in the months ahead. But the ECB needs no additional liquidity creation. The euro area markets are already swimming in liquidity. The problem is in an inadequate bank lending to businesses and households. Banks are gun-shy because of bad credit risks in a stagnant economy. Their balance sheets are also closely (maybe too closely) monitored by the regulatory authorities.

That means that the ECB’s most urgent and important task is to fix its dysfunctional transmission mechanism between monetary policy and real economy. The ECB’s other problem is an apparent expectation of some euro area governments that the central bank will do the heavy lifting for them. True to form, Germans are issuing stern warnings to countries (France and Italy) accused of dragging their feet on structural reforms while pushing for even looser monetary policies. German taskmasters may have a point here because it does seem that advocates of greater liquidity are the ones seeking to avoid the political fallout from unpopular reforms.

“Kissinger argued that the West – with its strategy of pulling Ukraine into the orbit of the European Union – was responsible for the crisis by failing to understand Russian sensitivity over Ukraine ..”

• The Liberal Idiocy on Russia/Ukraine (Robert Parry)

Among honest and knowledgeable people, there really isn’t much doubt about what happened in Ukraine last winter. There was a U.S.-backed coup which ousted a constitutionally elected president and replaced him with a regime more in line with U.S. interests. Even some smart people who agree with the policy of going on the offensive against Russia recognize this reality. For instance, George Friedman, the founder of the global intelligence firm Stratfor, was quoted in an interview with the Russian liberal business publication Kommersant as saying what happened on Feb. 22 in Kiev – the overthrow of President Viktor Yanukovych – “really was the most blatant coup in history.”

Brushing aside the righteous indignation and self-serving propaganda, Stratfor’s Friedman recognized that both Russia and the United States were operating in what they perceived to be their own interests. “The bottom line is that the strategic interests of the United States are to prevent Russia from becoming a hegemon,” he said. “And the strategic interests of Russia are not to allow the U.S. close to its borders.” Another relative voice of reason, at least on this topic, has been former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger who – in an interview with Der Spiegel – dismissed Official Washington’s conventional wisdom that Russian President Vladimir Putin provoked the crisis and then annexed Crimea as part of some diabolical scheme to reclaim territory lost when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991.

“The annexation of Crimea was not a move toward global conquest,” the 91-year-old Kissinger said. “It was not Hitler moving into Czechoslovakia” – as former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had suggested. Kissinger noted that Putin had no intention of instigating a crisis in Ukraine: “Putin spent tens of billions of dollars on the Winter Olympics in Sochi. The theme of the Olympics was that Russia is a progressive state tied to the West through its culture and, therefore, it presumably wants to be part of it. So it doesn’t make any sense that a week after the close of the Olympics, Putin would take Crimea and start a war over Ukraine.” Instead Kissinger argued that the West – with its strategy of pulling Ukraine into the orbit of the European Union – was responsible for the crisis by failing to understand Russian sensitivity over Ukraine and making the grave mistake of quickly pushing the confrontation beyond dialogue.

A curious NY Times piece mostly made up of innuendo and slander, but which has a few relevent lines. What the Times seeks to insinuate is that German companies ‘cool on Russia’ because they no longer trust the country, whereas in reality it’s sanctions that force them out.

• In Reversal, Germany Cools to Russian Investment (NY Times)

The uncertainty hanging over Germany’s strong business ties with Russia, which are more than double the value of Russian trade with the United States, is in marked contrast to the optimism and relative stability of recent years. And it has been reflected in increasingly acrimonious exchanges in Germany’s political, diplomatic and intellectual elite over how to shape relations with Moscow. Last weekend, the two most prominent Social Democrats in Chancellor Angela Merkel’s grand coalition government of center right and center left — the party leader, Sigmar Gabriel, and the foreign minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier – voiced concern that sanctions might hobble the stricken Russian economy, and they opposed tightening them.

Ms. Merkel, clearly frustrated with the behavior of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, has so far taken a harder line. But the potential for conflict within Ms. Merkel’s government complicates her efforts to use Germany’s close ties with Russia as leverage to fashion a solution to the crisis in Ukraine. Business groups, normally strong backers of Ms. Merkel’s Christian Democrats, have agreed with the Social Democrats on Russia and warned against using economic means to put pressure on Mr. Putin. “Sanctions are not the proper means to resolve this political crisis,” Eckhard Cordes, a former Daimler executive who is chairman of the Committee on Eastern European Economic Relations, which represents companies doing business in the former Soviet bloc, said in an email. “The West cannot have an interest in destabilizing the Russian economy or Russian politics.”

[..] Political tensions are likely to intensify as sanctions against Russia come up for renewal in March, a year after Moscow annexed Crimea. “Anyone who believes that forcing Russia economically to its knees will lead to more security in Europe is wrong,” Mr. Steinmeier, the foreign minister, told the weekly newsmagazine Der Spiegel. Having Russia’s economy in chaos “cannot be in our interest,” he added. Mr. Gabriel, the leader of the Social Democrats, said pointedly that calls for intensifying sanctions were wrong. Gerhard Schröder, Ms. Merkel’s predecessor as chancellor and an avowed friend of Mr. Putin, was among 60 prominent signatories of an appeal entitled, “Again War in Europe?/Not in Our Name.”

Okay, and I say Merkel should influence Kiev.

• Russia Must Influence Separatists To End Ukraine Crisis, Says Merkel (Reuters)

German Chancellor Angela Merkel appealed to the Russian government on Sunday to use its influence on separatists in eastern Ukraine to implement a ceasefire plan agreed in Minsk in September aimed at ending the conflict. Planned talks involving Russia, Ukraine and the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe to further the ceasefire arrangements have not yet taken place. “(Merkel said) A stabilization of the situation can only come if the agreed contact lines are finally implemented,” said a spokeswoman in a statement. “She appealed to the Russian government to use its influence on the separatists to this end,” said the spokeswoman. In a phone call with Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko late on Saturday, Merkel expressed regret that the contact group talks had not happened.

Last week, Poroshenko had said the talks would take place on Dec. 24 and 26. Merkel, who has been closely involved in diplomatic efforts to resolve the crisis, also welcomed the exchange of prisoners between the Ukrainian government and separatists. The September truce has been flouted by both sides but violence in eastern Ukraine has decreased during December, raising hopes of further talks. The uprising by the separatists, who oppose Kiev rule and want a union with Russia, began after Russia annexed the Black Sea peninsula of Crimea from Ukraine in March. The pro-Western authorities in Kiev accuse Russia of orchestrating the uprising but the Kremlin denies it is behind the revolt.

Long piece from Syriza advisor Varoufakis on the origins of the euro.

• In Lieu Of Best Wishes: The Euro’s First Inkling (Varoufakis)

As 2015 is approaching, seemingly pregnant with crucial challenges for Europe, the euro and all those who have to live with it, I could not think of a better seasonal offering for readers of this blog than a suitable extract from my next book. I chose a piece that narrates, and interprets, the story of the first time the euro was proposed in the highest echelons of European decision making. Hope you enjoy it. With wishes for a 2015 worth remembering fondly.

An Indecent Proposal Kurt Schmücker was a man not given to strong emotions. But on the morning of March 23rd 1964 he could hardly trust his ears and only barely managed to contain his astonishment. As Germany’s Minister of the Economy, Herr Schmücker was used to meeting, regularly, with his French counterpart, Valerie Giscard d’ Estaing, President Charles De Gaulle’s finance minister and a man who would, ten years later, become President of France himself. So, when Giscard dropped by his Bonn office, for a two-hour chat, Minister Schmücker was relaxed, anticipating another anodyne meeting, like all previous get-togethers whose real purpose was to put on a show of European unity between the two erstwhile foes shouldering the burden of constructing a European Union at the early stages of its development.

Schmücker and Giscard normally exchanged polite views on how each saw the economic policies of the other, on how the two countries dealt with movements of money across their borders, on interest rates and trade balances, on their attitudes toward taxing business and, of course, on their joint efforts at cementing a European Union still in its infancy. Occasionally they would also swap tales of woe on their tense relations with their own central bankers, the Bundesbank and the Banque de France. Nothing, in other words, that might have prepared Herr Schmücker for what he was about to hear. But, that morning, once the obligatory niceties had been dispensed with, Giscard came out with a shocking proposal: France and Germany should create a common currency, inviting the other four members of the European Union to join in when and if they were ready.

It took Schmücker a few moments to recover his composure. What on earth was the aristocratic Frenchman saying? Germany and France sharing the same banknotes, the same coins, the same Central Bank? Which one? The Bundesbank? For heavens sake!, he is certain to have cried out inside his own head. Outwards, he put on a face of somber iciness, pretending not to have been taken aback. Indeed, the record shows that he responded as if he had not heard the earth-shattering proposition. Why not be more modest, he countered? Why don’t we just try to stabilize our exchange rates through our central banks and on the basis of (a conservative German’s wet-dream) “strict discipline” and “contractual rules”?

What a shame.

• Winston Churchill’s Family Begged Him Not To Convert To Islam (Ind.)

The family of Sir Winston Churchill urged him to “fight against” the desire to convert to Islam, a newly discovered letter has revealed. The Prime Minister who led Britain to victory in World War Two was apparently so taken with Islam and the culture of the Orient that his family wrote to try and persuade him not to become a Muslim. In a letter dated August 1907 Churchill’s soon to be sister-in-law wrote to him: “Please don’t become converted to Islam; I have noticed in your disposition a tendency to orientalise, Pasha-like tendencies, I really have. “If you come into contact with Islam your conversion might be effected with greater ease than you might have supposed, call of the blood, don’t you know what I mean, do fight against it.”

The letter, discovered by a history research fellow at Cambridge University, Warren Dockter, was written by Lady Gwendoline Bertie who married Churchill’s brother Jack. “Churchill never seriously considered converting,” Dr Dockter told The Independent. “He was more or less an atheist by this time anyway. He did however have a fascination with Islamic culture which was common among Victorians.” Churchill had opportunity to observe Islamic society when he served as an officer of the British Army in Sudan. In a letter written to Lady Lytton in 1907 Churchill wrote that he “wished he were” a Pasha, which was a rank of distinction in the Ottoman Empire. He even took to dressing in Arab clothes in private – an enthusiasm he shared with his good friend the poet Wilfrid S. Blunt. But Dr Dockter thinks Churchill’s family need never have worried about his interest in Islam.

Good read.

• The American Civil War: The Bloody Anniversary We All Forgot (Fisk)

Every month, my London mail package thumps on to my Beirut doorstep with An Cosantóir inside. It’s the magazine of the Irish Defence Forces – surely the glossiest-paged journal of any army, let alone one of the smallest military forces in the world. But among its accounts of Ireland’s UN missions abroad – think Golan, for example, with Syria’s civil war crashing around Irish soldiers – almost inevitably each month, there’s a piece of history we’ve forgotten. For while the start of the Great War of 1914-18 has been commemorated to the point of spiritualism these past 12 months, who remembers that this week we enter the 150th anniversary year of the end of the American Civil War?

In US history, it is a profound event that we should all remember; here, after all, lie the original bones of the Union, its victory consecrated among some of the units whose soldiers were sent to their deaths in Iraq in 2003, its brutality ghosted into the future narrative of American military records, its equalities reflected in the large number of black soldiers who died in present-day Mesopotamia. But for the Irish, too, the civil war of 1861-1865, is a sombre anniversary. They reckon that 210,000 Irish soldiers fought in British uniform in the First World War, and that 49,300 were killed. Yet almost as many Irishmen fought in the American Civil War – 200,000 in all, 180,000 in the Union army, 20,000 for the Confederates.

An estimated 20% of the Union navy were Irish-born – 26,000 men – and the total Irish dead of the American conflict came to at least 30,000. Many of the Irish fatalities were from Famine families who had fled the desperate poverty of their homes in what was then the United Kingdom, only to die at Antietam and Gettysburg. My old alma mater, Trinity College Dublin, is collating the figures and they are likely to rise much higher as Irish academics mine into the American Compiled Military Service Records for the regiments of both sides.

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