Aug 142016
 


Harris&Ewing Goat team, Washington, DC 1917

Silicon Valley May Get Hit By China’s ‘Virtual Reality’ Economy (CNBC)
High-Risk ‘Shadow’ Credit in China Put at $2.9 Trillion by IMF (BBG)
Insanity, Oddities and Dark Clouds in Credit-Land (AM)
The Next President Should Forgive All Student Loans (TIME)
The Big Idea about Private Debt (Steve Keen)
How to Break the Power of Money (Korten)
TTIP: The Suicide of Nations (PCR)
How Global Elites Forsake Their Countrymen (Noonan)
Megaupload’s Dotcom To Seek A Review Of US Court’s Forfeiture Ruling (R.)
A Year After The Crisis Was Declared Over, Greece Is Still Spiralling Down (G.)
The Greek Crisis Will Flare Up Again. And Why Should It Not? (G.)
Aid and Attention Dwindling, Refugee Crisis Intensifies in Greece (NYT)
Germany To Send 3,000 Refugees Back To Greece (KTG)

 

 

Virtual money economy.

Silicon Valley May Get Hit By China’s ‘Virtual Reality’ Economy (CNBC)

“Japan 25 years ago and China now were both debt [and] currency fueled flood of cash into U.S. assets inflating both valuations and fears,” Josh Wolfe, co-founder and managing partner of Lux Capital, a $700 million venture capital firm, told CNBC via email this week. Like other skeptical investors, Wolfe believes there are “really two Chinas: A high growth tech and biotech driven economy conflated with a levered old asset state owned influenced burden of very bad decision making and governance.” China’s high debt, slowing growth and appetite for U.S. assets—the country already owns trillions in U.S. Treasuries and dollars—raises the stakes for tech companies if the country’s fortunes should suddenly reverse.

Of the nearly $60 billion that the National Venture Capital Association says was invested in U.S. startups last year, about a quarter of those flows came from one destination: China. Along with art and high end real estate, tech ventures have been the primary recipient of China’s largesse. Meanwhile, 2016 has already exceeded last year’s record flow of Chinese capital, according to recent figures from The Rhodium Group. Wolfe told CNBC that Chinese investors “are fleeing a virtual reality economy in China and funding virtual reality startups in the U.S. They seem to be choosing illiquidity and uncertainty, denominated in dollars over liquidity and certainty of devaluation denominated in yuan.”

China’s slowing economy has reverberated across the globe, sending commodities reeling and giving investors fright. That pain is far from over: The IMF warned on Friday that China’s real GDP could sink below 6% in 2020. If Chinese interest rates rise or liquidity tightens, the flood of money threatens to do “what all excesses do: reverse or stop,” said Lux Capital’s Wolfe. “As the China bubble pops, it has been commodities and commodity exporting countries in the first wave, then banks and non-performing loans, then it will be the assets they financed or were secured by.”

Read more …

Yuan+Junk=Yunk.

High-Risk ‘Shadow’ Credit in China Put at $2.9 Trillion by IMF (BBG)

IMF staff said that 19 trillion yuan ($2.9 trillion) of Chinese “shadow” credit products are high-risk compared with corporate loans and highlighted the danger that defaults could lead to liquidity shocks. The investment products are structured by the likes of trust and securities companies and based on equities or on debt – typically loans – that isn’t traded, staff members John Caparusso and Kai Yan said in a report released Friday. The commentary highlighted the potential for risks bigger to the nation’s financial stability than from companies’ loan defaults. While loan losses can be realized gradually, defaults on the shadow products could trigger risk aversion that’s harder to manage, the report said.

The “high-risk” products offer yields of 11% to 14%, compared with 6% on loans and 3% to 4% on bonds, the commentary said. The lowest-quality of these products are based on “nonstandard credit assets,” typically loans, it said. In a separate document in a bundle released by the IMF, the Chinese banking regulator was cited as saying that banks’ exposures to “nonstandard credit assets” were a key concern, with moves already made to require higher provisioning against such exposures than for regular loans.

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“Foreign buying of US assets very often reaches record highs prior to major financial accidents.”

Insanity, Oddities and Dark Clouds in Credit-Land (AM)

Bond markets are certainly displaying a lot of enthusiasm at the moment – and it doesn’t matter which bonds one looks at, as the famous “hunt for yield” continues to obliterate interest returns across the board like a steamroller. Corporate and government debt have been soaring for years, but investor appetite for such debt has evidently grown even more. A huge mountain of interest-free risk has accumulated in investor portfolios and on bank balance sheets. Globally, more than $13 trillion in sovereign bonds trade at negative yields to maturity. In spite of soaring defaults, junk bond yields have collapsed again as well. In short, insanity rules in the bond markets. A recent article in the FT informs us of “a wave of foreign demand for US corporate debt”:

“Record-low interest rates are no barrier for US companies finding buyers for their debt thanks to a relentless global quest for fixed returns that shows little sign of easing. The pace of US corporate debt sales – which has not been fast enough to quench investor demand – is expected to continue unabated driven by foreign buyers in a world where roughly $13tn of sovereign and corporate debt trades in negative territory. “It is a low return world,” says Ed Campbell, a portfolio manager with asset manager QMA. “You don’t have a lot of asset classes that are attractive and there is a flight to quality where the US is outperforming.” More than $2.3tn of dollar-denominated debt has been issued by companies and banks since the year began, including three of the ten largest corporate bond sales on record, Dealogic data show.”

This not only shows that “investors” (we use the term loosely) are insane, it also happens to be a contrary indicator. Foreign buying of US assets very often reaches record highs prior to major financial accidents. Is this really a “flight to quality?” Corporate defaults are currently at the highest level since 2009, with US defaults clearly leading the pack:

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And what should(s)he do for everyone else who’s in trouble? Can’t very well help only students.

The Next President Should Forgive All Student Loans (TIME)

If Hillary Clinton is to win this November, she needs to motivate the electorate to come out to vote for something more than a justified aversion to Donald Trump. Particularly for younger voters and voters with families, she has to capture their imaginations with a bold, simple, and common sense proposal to address one of the most critical financial and social problems currently facing a generation: the student loan crisis. And she needs to do so in a way that can do the most immediate good for the nation at large. First, all outstanding student loan debt should be forgiven. Second, a new loan program should be created that is tied to incentives for college graduates to choose careers in public service and which indexes repayment to income.

Current outstanding student loans amount to 1.3 trillion dollars, roughly 10% of all household debt. Student loan debt is larger than either car loans or credit card debt. Forty-two million Americans hold student loan debt. Student debt has been a drag on younger generations’ incomes and has contributed to the stagnation in middle class earnings. The average debt at graduation has skyrocketed from $10,000 in 1993 to more than $35,000 in 2016. Furthermore, the federal government has set interest rates on student loans at twice the current market rate of other types of loans. Going to college should not be a profit center for Wall Street and the federal government.

By forgiving student loan debt—which is largely held by the government—a tremendous economic stimulus would be generated, whose beneficiaries are people, not banks. The cost is comparable to the stimulus program created in the wake of the financial crisis of 2008, and, in this case, Main Street and not Wall Street will benefit. Quickly, more than two generations of Americans would be able to invest in homes and develop and support families. And the Americans who benefit are those who have obtained education and skills, but whose careers have been hobbled by an inordinate amount of debt.

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Private debt sinks societies. For no good reason. Make forgiving student debt part of a modern jubilee?!

The Big Idea about Private Debt (Steve Keen)

This is a talk I gave to the Northern Ireland Big Ideas Event organised by NICVA: the “Northern Ireland Council for Voluntary Action” (https://www.nicva.org/event/big-ideas-…). Unfortunately I ran out of time to finish my presentation on why a “Modern Debt Jubilee” is needed to escape from the current economic state of credit stagnation, but I covered why it is this–and not “secular stagnation” that explains the prevalence of low rates of economic growth globally.

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True but not strong.

How to Break the Power of Money (Korten)

Our current political chaos has a simple explanation. The economic system is driving environmental collapse, economic desperation, political corruption, and financial instability. And it isn’t working for the vast majority of people. It serves mainly the interests of a financial oligarchy that in the United States dominates the establishment wings of both the Republican and Democratic parties. So voters are rebelling against those wings of both parties—and for good reason. As a society we confront a simple truth. An economic system based on the false idea that money is wealth—and the false promise that maximizing financial returns to the holders of financial assets will maximize the well-being of all—inevitably does exactly what it is designed to do:

1. Those who have financial assets and benefit from Wall Street’s financial games get steadily richer and more powerful. 2. The winners use the power of their financial assets to buy political favor and to hold government hostage by threatening to move jobs and tax revenue to friendlier states and countries. 3. The winners then use this political power to extract public subsidies, avoid taxes, and externalize environmental, labor, health, and safety costs to further increase their financial returns and buy more political power. This results in a vicious cycle of an ever greater concentration of wealth and power in the hands of those who demonstrate the least regard for the health and well-being of others and the living Earth, on which all depend.

Fewer and fewer people have more and more power and society pays the price. A different result requires a different system, and the leadership for change is coming, as it must, from those for whom the current system does not work.

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“The agreements make global corporations immune to laws and regulations that can be said to adversely impact their profits.”

TTIP: The Suicide of Nations (PCR)

The TransAtlantic and TransPacific “partnerships” are the economic and financial counterpart to Washington’s military and foreign policy push for world hegemony. TTIP and TPP are neither partnerships nor trade agreements. They are instruments of financial imperialism that, if they come into effect, subordinate the sovereignty of countries to the profits of global corporations. The reason the “partnerships” are negotiated in secrecy without public discussions and the participation of the national legislatures is that the so-called agreements cannot stand the light of day. The reason is simple. The agreements make global corporations immune to laws and regulations that can be said to adversely impact their profits.

It makes no difference whether the laws protect the environment, the safety of food and workers or are part of the social fabric. If the laws impose costs that reduce profits, corporations can sue the governments in “corporate tribunals” in which the corporations themselves serve as judge and jury. This is no joke. Public Citizen reports that the agreements would greatly expand the privileges given to foreign corporations by the North American Free Trade Agreement under which $350 million has been paid out by governments to corporations because of costs of complying with toxic waste and logging rules, with $13 billion in claims pending.

Economist Michael Hudson cites a British study that public provision of health care, such as the UK’s National Health Service, is a TTIP target on the grounds that not only health care regulations but also public provision of health care harms the commercial interests of corporations. TTIP and TPP are tools for disenfranchising electorates and overturning democratic outcomes and for looting taxpayers via damage suits against governments for the costs of complying with health, safety, environmental, and social laws and regulations. The agreements place corporations above the laws of countries. The agreements have the potential of producing a worldwide sweatshop with starvation wages devoid of environmental and safety legislation.

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Curious ideas when coming from the Wall Street Journal.

How Global Elites Forsake Their Countrymen (Noonan)

On Wall Street, where they used to make statesmen, they now barely make citizens. CEOs are consumed with short-term thinking, stock prices, quarterly profits. They don’t really believe that they have to be involved with “America” now; they see their job as thinking globally and meeting shareholder expectations. In Silicon Valley the idea of “the national interest” is not much discussed. They adhere to higher, more abstract, more global values. They’re not about America, they’re about … well, I suppose they’d say the future. In Hollywood the wealthy protect their own children from cultural decay, from the sick images they create for all the screens, but they don’t mind if poor, unparented children from broken-up families get those messages and, in the way of things, act on them down the road.

From what I’ve seen of those in power throughout business and politics now, the people of your country are not your countrymen, they’re aliens whose bizarre emotions you must attempt occasionally to anticipate and manage. In Manhattan, my little island off the continent, I see the children of the global business elite marry each other and settle in London or New York or Mumbai. They send their children to the same schools and are alert to all class markers. And those elites, of Mumbai and Manhattan, do not often identify with, or see a connection to or an obligation toward, the rough, struggling people who live at the bottom in their countries. In fact, they fear them, and often devise ways, when home, of not having their wealth and worldly success fully noticed.

Affluence detaches, power adds distance to experience. I don’t have it fully right in my mind but something big is happening here with this division between the leaders and the led. It is very much a feature of our age. But it is odd that our elites have abandoned or are abandoning the idea that they belong to a country, that they have ties that bring responsibilities, that they should feel loyalty to their people or, at the very least, a grounded respect.

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“Did they think they can separate me from my kids without a fight? I fight corrupt US empire clowns all day, every day. Not even tired.”

Megaupload’s Dotcom To Seek A Review Of US Court’s Forfeiture Ruling (R.)

German tech entrepreneur and alleged internet pirate Kim Dotcom will seek a review of a Federal Court decision which rejected his bid to keep hold of millions of dollars in assets held in Hong Kong and New Zealand, his lawyer said. A three-judge panel of the 4th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals ruled two to one on Friday that Dotcom could not recover his assets because by remaining outside the U.S., he was a fugitive, which disentitled him from using the resources to fight his case. Dotcom’s lawyer Ira P. Rothken said his client would seek a review of the decision in front of the full bench and, if necessary, petition the Supreme Court.

“This opinion has the effect of eviscerating Kim Dotcom’s treaty rights by saying if you lawfully oppose extradition in New Zealand, the U.S. will still call you a fugitive and take all of your assets,” Rothken said in an email to Reuters received on Sunday. Dotcom has been fighting extradition from New Zealand over charges of copyright infringement, racketeering and money laundering in the United States related to the Megaupload file-sharing site he founded in 2005. A New Zealand court ruled in December he could be extradited, but an appeal hearing has been set for later this month. Dotcom responded to the Federal Court ruling on Twitter. “Did they think they can separate me from my kids without a fight? I fight corrupt US empire clowns all day, every day. Not even tired.”

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The writedowns total down the road keeps growing rapidly.

A Year After The Crisis Was Declared Over, Greece Is Still Spiralling Down (G.)

In a side street in the heart of Athens, two siblings are hard at work. For the past year they have run their hairdressing business – an enterprise that was once located on a busy boulevard – out of a two-bedroom flat. The move was purely financial: last summer, as it became clear that Greeks would be hit by yet more austerity to foot the bill for saving their country from economic collapse, they realised their business would go bust if it continued operating legally. “We did our sums and understood that staying put made no sense at all,” says one sibling. “If we didn’t [offer] receipts, if we avoided taxes and social security contributions, we could just about make ends meet.”

They are far from being alone. A year after debt-stricken Greece received its third financial rescue in the form of international funding worth €86bn, such survival techniques have become commonplace. For a middle class eviscerated by relentless rounds of cuts and tax rises – the price of the country’s ongoing struggle to avert bankruptcy – the draconian conditions attached to the latest bailout are invariably invoked in their defence. Measures ranging from the overhaul of the pension system to indirect duties – slapped on beer, fuel and almost everything in between – and a controversial increase in VAT are similarly cited by Greeks now reneging on loan repayments, property taxes and energy bills.

Against a backdrop of monumental debt – €320bn, or 180% of GDP, the accumulation of decades of profligacy – fatalism is fast replacing pessimism on the streets. “Our country is doomed,” sighs Savvas Tzironis, summing up the mood. “Everything goes from bad to worse.” Close to half a million Greeks are believed to have migrated since the crisis begun, thanks to the searing effect of persistent unemployment (at just under 24%, the highest in Europe) and an economy that has shed more than a third of its total output over the past six years. The nation has been assigned some €326bn in bailout loans since May 2010 – the biggest rescue programme in global financial history. Yet the fear that it is locked in an economic death spiral was given further credence last week when Eurobank analysts announced that consumption and exports had also fallen, by 6.4% and 7.2%, in the second quarter of the year.

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And why should Larry Elliott not call a spade a spade? What’s happening to Greece is not some ‘policy mistake’, all parties involved know exactly what they do.

The Greek Crisis Will Flare Up Again. And Why Should It Not? (G.)

Greece has ceased to make headlines. A year ago, the TV cameras were trained on the protesters thronging the streets of Athens because there were fears that a crisis that had been steadily becoming more acute in the first half of 2015 could result in the single currency splintering. That threat was removed by a deal that involved a humiliating climbdown by the Syriza-led government. Greece received a bailout, but with harsh conditions attached. There were three obvious problems with that 2015 deal, which secured Greece its third bailout in five years. The first was that the new dose of austerity would make it more difficult for Greece to emerge from a slump just as severe as that which gripped the US in the 1930s.

The second was that Greece’s creditors were making unrealistic assumptions for growth and deficit reduction. The third was that sooner or later the Greek crisis would flare up again. It was a case of when, not if. It has not all been bad news over the past 12 months. Fears that yields on Greek bonds would soar after the UK’s Brexit vote did not materialise. Some of the tough capital controls that were imposed in the summer of 2015 to protect the banking system have been eased. There has been talk that by next summer it will be possible for the government in Athens to raise money in the world’s financial markets by selling Greek government bonds. All that said, though, the first two predictions have come true.

By last summer, Greece had suffered a five-year slump that was on a par with the damage caused to the US economy in the Great Depression. Yet the country’s creditors thought it was a good idea to suck even more demand out of the economy through spending cuts and tax increases. The result has been depressingly predictable. Far from there being a resumption of growth, the economy has continued to contract. Greece’s national output was 1.4% lower in the first three months of 2016 than it was a year earlier. Consumer spending was down by 1.3%. Nor, with confidence at rock bottom, is there much prospect of better times. Greece remains deep in recession.

[..] The IMF says that without debt relief, Greece’s debt could hit 250% of GDP by the middle of the century. Germany would prefer those discussions to be delayed until after its election in autumn next year. But the chances are that Greece will be back in the headlines before then.

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Oh, irony. Just a few days after I wrote about Greece’s 15 minutes of fame in Meanwhile in Greece.., both the Guardian and the NY Times happen to notice the same thing. “..ceased to make headlines..” , “..Attention dwindling..”

Aid and Attention Dwindling, Migrant Crisis Intensifies in Greece (NYT)

Seven months after the EU shut the doors to large numbers of newcomers, Greece remains Europe’s de facto holding pen for 57,000 people trapped amid the chaos. Many are living in a distressing limbo in sordid refugee camps on the mainland and on Greek islands near Turkey. A year after the world was riveted by scenes of desperate men, women and children streaming through Europe, international attention to their plight has waned now that the borders have been closed and they are largely confined to camps. Anti-immigrant sentiment has surged since last year in many countries, especially as people who entered Europe with the migrant flow are linked to crimes and, in a few cases, attacks planned or inspired by the Islamic State or other radical groups.

Neither the prosperous nations of Western and Northern Europe, where the refugees want to settle, nor Turkey, their point of departure for the Continent, are living up to their promises of help. [..] The ranks of those in limbo are most likely to grow despite a deal to resolve the crisis that took effect March 20 between the EU and Turkey. While the number of migrants entering Greece has dwindled from nearly 5,000 a day last year, hundreds have started crossing the Aegean Sea again after the July 15 coup attempt in Turkey. Few of the resources pledged by the EU to assist the asylum seekers and process their applications have actually come through, leaving the Greek authorities struggling to cope with a daunting humanitarian and logistical challenge that has fallen from view in the rest of Europe.

European Union member states have sent just 27 of the 400 asylum specialists and 24 of the 400 interpreters they had agreed to provide to process claims for refugees like Mrs. Madran. So far, 21,000 migrants have been registered for asylum; 36,000 have not. A union plan to ease Greece’s burden by relocating tens of thousands of asylum seekers to the Continent has also fizzled, with European countries taking less than 2,300 people.

The bottlenecks have overwhelmed many of the camps, especially on the Greek islands, where migrants arriving after the March 20 deal are supposed to be held until being deported to Turkey. That program has stalled because of legal challenges and because Greece must process each asylum application first. So far, 468 of the more than 10,000 people who have arrived since the deal took effect have been returned. Turkish monitors assigned to assist were fired by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey after the coup attempt against him.

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“The cost for Greece since the beginning of the Refugee Crisis “is more than €2 billion, the EU has allocated so far €330million – not to the Greek government but to NGOs, mostly NGOs from abroad..” Makes you wonder how much of that €330million has actually been used to help refugees, and how much on NGO operating costs.

Germany To Send 3,000 Refugees Back To Greece (KTG)

I thought, EU members states were supposed to take 6,000 refugees per month from Greece – according to some forgotten EU Deal signed the European Commission and the EU member states. Reality teaches us, the deal will work the other way around. Member states will send refugees back to …Greece. Blame the Dublin III Agreement. Germany decided to send to Greece and specifically to Crete more than 3,000 refugees in first phase. Berlin considers that this number is “redundant” in its territory. According to local media ekriti.gr, the Greek government has adopted this German decision, while Migration Minister Yiannis Mouzalas chaired a revelant meeting in Herakleion recently and announced the transfer.

The refugees will start coming by plane initially in Heraklion and Chania in December. Mouzalas had said that they will come after the tourist season. Independent MEP Notis Marias also confirmed the transfer in an interview with Radio Kriti. The cost for Greece since the beginning of the Refugee Crisis “is more than two billion euro, the EU has allocated so far €330million – not to the Greek government but to NGOs, mostly NGOs from abroad,” ekriti notes. Meanwhile the influx from Turkey started to increase again, more than 650 refugees and migrants arrived last week. Athens is worried that Ankara will draw back from the EU-Turkey deal in October.

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Aug 122016
 
 August 12, 2016  Posted by at 10:17 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,  2 Responses »


G. G. Bain At Casino, Belmar, Sunday, NJ 1910

Private Lenders Increase the Risk of a Global Debt Crisis (TeleSur)
US Homeownership Dips to Lowest Rate Since 1960 (RCM)
The Next Huge American Housing Bailout Could Be Coming (TAM)
China’s Stimulus Efforts Show ‘Malinvestment Is Still Hard at Work’ (BBG)
The UK Is the New Engine of Bond-Market Distortion (WSJ)
A Really Vicious Circle Is Threatening UK Pension Pots (BBG)
IMF to ECB: Forget Negative Rates, Or You’ll Do More Harm Than Good (MW)
Global Shipping Giant Moller-Maersk Reports 90% Fall In Net Profit (CNBC/R.)

 

 

Warning against vulture funds. Then again, isn’t the IMF one of them too?

Private Lenders Increase the Risk of a Global Debt Crisis (TeleSur)

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

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

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Remember affordable housing?

US Homeownership Dips to Lowest Rate Since 1960 (RCM)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Debt at work.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Consolation: it happens everywhere.

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

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

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

Read more …

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

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

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

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

Read more …

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

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

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

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

Read more …

Aug 042016
 
 August 4, 2016  Posted by at 9:22 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , ,  5 Responses »

Howard Hollem George Lane April 1942
“George Lane, served in the last war with the British Army from Vimy Ridge to the Occupation. Two of his sons are in the American Army, one with the Air Corps in Australia. His daughter volunteered for the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps. Seven of his nephews are in the British Army”

 

 

With the Bank of England about to announce its latest set of desperate measures today, the first since the Brexit, I accidentally stumbled upon an article I wrote on January 16 2012, well over 4 1/2 years ago, in the Automatic Earth’s last days at Blogger. Posting it again here seems appropriate 5 weeks after the Brexit, because the article shows you that the referendum result did not come out of nowhere, no matter what many people claim. The British economy was already doing very poorly, and already failing millions of people, going into 2012.

Note: of course not all predictions made back then played out the way they were made, but I’m more interested in the overall picture. For instance, unemployment numbers are not as dire as forecast, but that hides the deterioration in the quality of jobs, and what they actually pay, much as that happens in the US. Bubbles in stocks and housing hide a lot too. David Cameron’s rule has been hard on the poorer British people, and it will take a long time for that to be corrected. I changed the coding just a little bit (Blogger vs WordPress), nothing big, so it looks a bit different. Here’s from early 2012, happy time travel:

 

 

Ilargi: There is a relative silence in the international financial press when it comes to Britain. The economic situation of continental Europe gets almost all the attention. Every now and then someone in France or Germany states that Britain, too, should be downgraded, like when S&P cut the ratings of 9 European countries, but such statements attract hardly any interest at all. This might not be overly wise, though.

At the end of last year, Tyler Durden at ZeroHedge published a graph from Haver Analytics/Morgan Stanley that should probably have sounded alarm bells quite a bit louder than it did.

Still, this graph would seem to indicate that the only core issue in the UK is its outsize financial sector with its outsize debt. From time to time, however, news articles pop up that seem to indicate there’s more going on than trouble in the City of London.

I found this one alarmingly interesting, for instance, from James Hall in the Telegraph on January 4:

One million people take out emergency loans to pay mortgage

Almost one million Britons have taken out an emergency ‘payday’ loan to help pay their rent or mortgage in the last year, according to Shelter, the housing charity.

The high degree of borrowing highlights the ‘spiral of debt’ that people are falling into to keep a roof over their head, Shelter said. The charity also found that seven million Britons are relying on some form of credit to help pay their housing costs.

Campbell Robb, Shelter’s chief executive, said: ‘These shocking findings show the extent to which millions of households across the country are desperately struggling to keep their home.’

Ilargi: Payday loans to pay off your mortgage? Sounds like perhaps Britain has a substantial hidden real estate problem, a pre-shadow inventory one that could spiral out of control at a rapid clip.

On January 9, the same James Hall had this follow-up:

Six million households have only five days’ savings

Around six million households would be unable to survive for more than five days if they stopped being paid, such are the low levels of savings among Britons, new research shows.

A new report from First Direct, the bank, warns that one in three UK households have less than £250 in accessible savings. A fifth of all households have no savings at all.

The bank said that £250 is the equivalent of three days’ average monthly household take-home pay. With average monthly outgoing currently at £1,536, these savings would last just five days.

Ilargi: Obviously, the two groups, those that take out loanshark payday loans to keep a roof over their head, and those that live paycheck to paycheck, overlap each other to a large extent.

Still, what makes it striking is the sheer number of people affected. One million people need emergency loans to keep their families in their homes, while six million households have nothing whatsoever saved for a rainy day.

If we put the average household size at 2.5 people, that means that, out of 60 million living in Britain, 2.5 million are on the verge of losing their homes, and 15 million, or 25% of the population, risk having to cut on their basic needs, food and heating, if they hit even the slightest speedbump.

And what are the chances this situation will improve any time soon? It doesn’t look good; in fact it looks set to worsen. While there’s no lack of denial, an increasing number of voices admit that the British economy has already slipped back into recession. This is from the BBC this morning:

UK in recession say Item Club economic forecasters

The UK may have already slipped back into recession, economic forecaster the [Ernst&Young] Item Club has warned. The think tank said gross domestic product shrank in the final quarter of last year and would contract again in the current three-month period.

It said that even if the eurozone could resolve its problems the UK economy would grow by just 0.2% this year. It also predicted unemployment would rise by a further 300,000 to just below three million people. [..]

Meanwhile, the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development said unemployment would stay above 2.5 million until at least 2016, peaking at 2.9 million next year. Chief economic adviser John Philpott said the jobless rate would rise to 8.8% at the end of next year. [..]

Another forecast from the Centre for Economics and Business Research said the UK would actually shrink this year by 0.4% and by a full 1% if the eurozone broke up.

Ilargi: Nor is it hard to find an ironic twist in all this. In what depicts a fast growing chain of events, Zoe Wood reports for the Guardian:

Royal Bank of Scotland pulls out of deal to rescue Peacocks

More than 13,000 retail jobs are on the line at value fashion group Peacocks after Royal Bank of Scotland walked away from restructuring talks at the heavily indebted retail chain.

Peacocks may have to appoint administrators after the state-backed lender had an abrupt change of heart about a deal to refinance the retailer’s £600m debt pile, which would have involved risking more money in the business. RBS and Barclays were in the driving seat of the complex debt-for-equity negotiations – which were said to involve 18 funds and lenders – as they are owed the most. Both banks are owed more than £100m.

Peacocks’ advisers have been trying to put together a rescue deal for months, but talks broke down at the weekend, leaving the future of the store, which has 550 branches and employs around 10,000 staff, hanging in the balance. [..] “It’s quite a complex deal,” said one insider. “It was all going well until RBS walked away last week. There are still conversations going on.” [..]

RBS is facing a series of tough decisions this year as a number of struggling high-street chains, including HMV and Clinton Cards, are reliant on its largesse. “Each company restructure is judged on its own merits, but clearly the difficult conditions that retailers face is an important factor,” said an RBS spokesman. [..]

A string of high-street chains including La Senza, Blacks Leisure and Barratts Priceless have called in administrators in recent weeks as trading failed to produce enough cash to cover costs such as rent and interest payments on loans.

Ilargi: With the country in a recession, but hardly anyone willing to concede that to date, least of all its government, it’s no wonder that things like this happen, mostly hidden from sight.

The ironic twist to it is provided by that fact that RBS is 70% owned by the British government, which has poured billions of pounds into the bank, and then lets it make decisions that cost 10’s of 1000’s of jobs.

I don’t want to get into a political debate about this; however, protecting banks with taxpayer funds, but not jobs, is a decision that is of course as political as it is ironic. Letting bailed out bank executives make decisions that cut all these jobs and at the same time pay themselves multi-million dollar bonuses is way beyond ironic.

But all of the above is just today’s prologue. I received an article yesterday that outdoes it all, and then some.

John Ross, Visiting Professor at Antai College of Economics and Management at Jiao Tong University in Shanghai writes a real stunner on his blog Key Trends in Globalisation:

The incredible shrinking UK economy

The magnitude of the blow suffered by the UK economy since the beginning of the financial crisis is very considerably minimized by not presenting it in terms of a common international yardstick. Gauged by decline in GDP, using a common international purchasing measure, dollars, no other economy in the world has shrunk even remotely as much as the UK.

As most countries produce only annualized GDP data it will be necessary to wait before a comprehensive global comparison can be made for 2011. However it is clear no substantial growth in dollar terms took place in the UK economy during that year – GDP at national current prices rose only 1.4 per cent between the 1st and 3rd quarters and the change in the pound’s exchange rate against the dollar during the year was a marginal 0.3 per cent.

Therefore there will have been no significant recovery from the UK data set out in Table 1 below, and the gap between the UK and other European economies, which form the next worst performing major group, is too great to have been qualitatively affected by changes in the Euro’s exchange rate – the Euro declined against the pound by only 3.3 per cent in 2011.

Table 1 shows that the fall in UK GDP in 2007-2010 was $562 billion compared to the next worst performing national economy, Italy, with a decline of $65 billion – i.e. the decline in UK GDP in the common measuring yardstick of dollars was more than 8 times that of the next worst performing national economy. Table 1 shows the 10 national economies suffering the greatest declines in dollar GDP.

It is also extremely striking that the UK’s decline was more than two and a half times that of the entire Eurozone.

The UK accounted for a somewhat astonishing 77% of the EU’s decline.

Expressed in percentage terms the situation is no better. Of all economies for which World Bank data is available only Iceland, with a decline in dollar GDP of 38.4%, suffered a worst percentage fall than the UK – even bail out economy Ireland, with a fall of 18.4%, outperformed the UK economy.

Two trends intersected for the UK’s performance to be so much worse than that of any other economy. First, contrary to the government’s anti-European rhetoric, UK economic performance in constant price national currency terms has been significantly worse than the Eurozone during the financial crisis (Figure 2). [..]

… between the beginning of 2008 and the beginning of 2012, the pound’s exchange rate has fallen by 21.0% against the dollar compared to the Euro’s 11.4% drop in the same period. The multiplicative effect of the severity of the relative drop in constant price GDP and the fall in the pound’s exchange rate accounts for the unequalled decline in UK GDP in dollars.

As at present the UK economy shows no substantial sign of recovery, the present UK government, which maintains a steadfastly ostrich like attitude towards Europe in particular, and most other countries in general, may argue that a measure in terms of dollars at current exchange rates is irrelevant – the UK currency is the pound and what counts is constant price shifts. Such an argument is false and an attempt to disguise the true scale of the decline of the UK economy.

The internationally unmatched decline in UK dollar GDP is a huge fall in real international purchasing ability. The far higher than targeted inflation in the UK during the last two years, which has substantially eroded the population’s living standards, is itself in part a reflection of the decline in the UK’s exchange rate and consequent raising of import prices. In short, the decline in the international purchasing power of the UK’s economy translates into a direct fall in real incomes.

It may also be seen that the government’s claim that the UK is outperforming Europe and the Eurozone is entirely without foundation even in constant price national currency terms. But when measured in terms of real international comparisons, i.e. in dollars, the UK’s performance is incomparably worse than Europe’s.

It appears extremely unlikely that the UK’s economy will escape from this circle of decline in the next period. The austerity policies pursued by the present UK government have substantially slowed the economic recovery that was taking place in 2009 and the first part of 2010 – between the 3rd quarter of 2010 and the 3rd quarter of 2011 the UK economy grew by only 0.5%. [..]

Even if any partial recovery takes place, for example by some increase in the exchange rate of the pound against the Euro, the sheer magnitude of the decline in the UK economy makes it implausible that this could be on a scale sufficient to reverse the fall in its relative international position.

Ilargi: Britain lost 20% of GDP from 2007 – 2011. Against this backdrop, and don’t let’s forget the over-600% debt to GDP ratio just for Britain’s financial sector, which will inevitably lead to more – calls for – bailouts, what is the Cameron government’s response?

First of all, austerity measures. Which will hit those people very hard who are in the bottom 25% or so who already have no savings, no nothing, to fall back on. And which will also lead to a rise in unemployment, which in turn will exacerbate the vicious problem circle.

Cameron also distances himself, and his country, from continental Europe, even though that is Britain’s main export destination. How smart is that?

Britain is a country of relatively large regional disparities as well as wealth disparities. The already rich center increasingly sucks up the remaining wealth of the periphery of society. There is then only one possible outcome of those one million people paying their rents and mortgages with payday loans: the British housing bubble will burst sooner rather than later.

Tax revenue has only one way to go as well. Down. So what will Cameron use to support the banks? How will he attempt to prevent a large scale repeat of last year’s Tottenham riots?

Looking at all this, we also need to wonder how much longer, and why in the first place, Britain is perceived as a safe haven, with its sovereign bonds – gilts – much sought after. Sure, Britain has its own currency and central bank, it can “print”, it can do QE 1001, but it’s not as if it hasn’t already tried that route. And still lost 20% of GDP.

Whatever it decides to do, it seems safe to presume that Britain might well steal some of the limelight away from Greece and Italy in the not too distant future.

 

 

Me in 2016 again for a moment: after reading this -I wrote it 55(!) months ago-, does the Brexit still surprise you?

 

 

Jul 222016
 


Dorothea Lange ‘OK Family bound for Kingfisher and Lubbock. We’ll be in California yet’ 1938

Basic income is a topic I’ve been thinking about for a while, and while I won’t get anywhere near a comprehensive overview -there are too many uncertainties and untested ideas-, I’m going to try to paint a first chapter in a work of progress. Or, a thought experiment, for me and others.

Of course I’ve read a lot of and about other people’s ideas on the topic, and I’m sure there are many more out there that I haven’t seen yet, but I’m afraid to say that about all of those I did read tend to fall into the same ‘trap’. That is, they project their ideas, which are widely varying, onto -or close to- the economy (economies) and society (societies) as they are today.

Their basic income examples and ideas and theories (as well as criticisms of them) are all built around a perception of the economy as it is, or better still as it once was. And that is probably a bad idea. Because the economy of the future will not be like it is today, or was yesterday, and neither will societies.

And that is not because of the role automation and/or robots will play, a topic that features prominently in many basic income writings; those things are but a minor distraction. What will change our world much more profoundly will be the inevitable demise of the economic system as we know it.

And it’s against that backdrop that the issue of basic income must be viewed. If only because it then becomes something entirely different.

 

 

I started thinking a while back that it would not be robots or inequality that would be the foundation of and driving force behind basic income, but the ruin of our pension systems. Of course one has to be careful with general statements on this, because there are so many different systems and approaches when it comes to pensions and other old-age ‘provisions’ and/or ‘benefits’.

What all have in common today, though, is that they’re woefully underfunded and sliding down further fast due to ultralow interest rates and other ‘policies’, as well as to ageing societies. It seems almost incredulous that until a few years ago most pensions funds were required by law to invest only in AAA-rated assets.

While they may not all suffer from the same afflictions, all these systems, from Social Security to private pension funds, do suffer from the same symptoms. Painting the picture with a broad stroke, it’s safe to say they’re all in essence Ponzi schemes.

While many of the ‘Social Security variety’ depend on the trust in a government to pay out something for which nothing -or very little- has been set aside, those of the variety in which money IS actually paid in are inflicted by the twin impairments of too little return on what is paid in to maintain the fund, and too few newcomers to pay for what ‘oldtimers’ never paid but do want to take out.

A third ‘impairment’ will occur when younger workers figure out they’re paying into something they will never see any benefits of, and refuse to fork over any longer.

Low interest rates and ageing populations are wreaking havoc on -especially- European and Japanese pensions even as we speak, and a brief look at future trendlines makes abundantly clear where things are going.

Pondering all that, it seems obvious that at some point a government with at least a bit of vision would come to the conclusion that a basic income to replace all the faltering old-age provisions schemes -and many others- might make a lot of sense. If only because, once you think about it, ‘free’ money only for older people does not make sense, neither politically nor economically.

 

 

But let’s take a step back; that last bit still doesn’t take sufficiently into account that our economies are about to undergo radical changes because they are collapsing. What I find interesting is that this collapse actually seems to play into the hands of a basic income. For several reasons, as a matter of fact.

I am convinced that a basic income in an economy that’s part of a centralized, even globalized, system, makes no sense. You can’t really have a basic income in a society that imports most of what it uses, but that still is the model of most of our societies. We import much of what’s essential, and export non-essential things.

That is a problem that will more or less solve itself, though we better pay attention and be prepared, or else. We may not know exactly when or how the economic collapse will occur, but that’s not the most important thing. What is, is that centralization can only happen in a growing economy. As soon as growth halts -or even reverses-, economies will of necessity decentralize. Unless perhaps they’re under a dictatorship, but even then.

Setting up a basic income system in a society that, for example, imports its clothes and furniture -and sometimes even food- from China, is a doomed proposition. The number one requirement for a successful basic income is that the money issued stays inside the society it’s being issued in. If not, it would merely speed up bankruptcy.

The money must be spent locally, on local products, as much as possible, because then it will be worth much more to the local economy. This will also go far towards fighting deflation, because the velocity of money will increase. To ensure that as much as possible is spent inside a community/society, the manufacturing base will need to be (re-)built.

Which must happen anyway as the global economy sinks, and the sooner, the better. The worldwide transport lines we know today will not exist for much longer, and it will take time to adapt one’s economy to that.

On the bright side, this decentralization, or relocalization, or ‘protectionism’ if you will, will (re-)create a lot of jobs. Not ones that will pay as much as what we see now, but that’s not necessarily such a bad thing. And besides, it’s not as if we have some kind of free choice. Reality will dictate the terms. We must produce our own essentials once again: food, clothing, housing, furniture etc.

Still on the bright side, the new jobs will make basic income much less costly for a society. Because you can top off what people make on top on whatever the basic income is, and you can do so at a level that everyone can agree to.

 

 

That’s my first take of basic income in a crisis, a crisis I see as set in stone. Which changes the whole issue of a basic income. Plenty people will see this as socialism or something in that vein, I see it as perhaps the only way to make sure you have a functioning society on the way down. With none of the alternatives looking particularly appealing.

When discussing the details of such a program, what would probably be good, if only for the sake of justice, is to combine it with Steve Keen’s notion of a Modern Debt Jubilee, in which debt gets cancelled but those with most debt are obliged to pay -part of it- down, while those who are debt-free get ‘rewarded’ for that status.

What I have always found difficult to envision is how a jubilee would work in modern days. The ones ‘of old’ would typically involve a local ruler and/or landlord to whom subjects owed debts of some sort, which the ruler could declare null and void while still being the ruler- and the richest man around.

Today debts are global, with much of them having been securitized and sold on to large -financial- institutions who may even be anonymous and have shareholders in dozens of different countries. How do you get them to agree to large-scale debt cancellation or reform? I’m not saying it can’t be done, but it’s not the same thing.

The hardest part of what I laid out above may well be to get people who feel they are owed benefits, pensions or otherwise, to accept that these will be incorporated into a new basic income system. Not many understand to what extent pensions systems are Ponzi’s, and even those who do to an extent may still refuse to give up their slice of the pie.

It should be fairly easy, though, to explain what their slice will look like once the systems collapse, or even simply once nobody pays in anymore. And because younger people have no reason to pay for something they know they will never see the benefits of, and moreover all this can be phased in/out over a certain period of time, it may well unfold faster and easier than one might think at first sight.

 

 

Lastly, some numbers. Greg Ip wrote for the Wall Street Journal last week: Revival of Universal Basic Income Proposal Ignores Needs of Labor Force. Obviously, in my example, i.e. in an economy that’s going down the drain, the term ‘needs of the labor force’ takes on a whole different role and meaning. In his piece, Ip says:

To send every American adult $10,000 a year would cost $2.4 trillion, or 13% of GDP.

And I think that is a misleading way of phrasing things. Because the money doesn’t disappear, so it doesn’t ‘cost’ that; and that’s not only true in my theoretical example. Most of the ‘basic income money’ would circulate inside the economy, and much comes back to the issuing state through various taxes. Crux is don’t let it leave the economy it’s issued in.

Mind you, I don’t see a basic income trial happen in the US, because it’s far too big a country. The EU is too large too. You’d need smaller units. And as I said, a shrinking economy would of necessity make units smaller. In Europe, these units already exist. In countries the size of Finland, Switzerland, Scotland, Wales, perhaps Greece, a basic income trial may well be viable.

That is, provided they shrug off the strangleholds that bind them to centralized systems. But that they will wind up doing regardless. What’s more important is that such a trial is meticulously planned, and not with some pie in the sky idea of where the world economy is headed.

Greg Ip suggests that a $10,000 basic income for all US adults is not realistic, because it would ‘cost’ 13% of GDP. But this graph from the World Economic Forum World Economic Forum on social expenditures as calculated by the OECD, puts things in a different light:

 

In 2014, US social expenditures were at about 20% of GDP, which is 50% more than Ip’s example. And that is the main point behind the basic income question, even if you don’t subscribe to the collapsing economy ‘thesis’: what would happen if you replace all -or almost all- social benefit schemes in a particular society with a basic income? How much money would you save, or how much extra would it cost?

Ip seems to contend that a basic income would be prohibitively expensive. But, even if the OECD numbers fail to include certain items, there’s a lot of leeway between the 13% of GDP a US basic income would cost, and the 20% of GDP America now pays in benefits. About $1.2 trillion in leeway. So the cost picture at the very least is not all that obvious.

By the way, it’s kind of funny that I’ve seen nobody address the perhaps most ironic thing: even if the state would save a lot of money moving to the much simpler basic income from a myriad of other programs, that would make a whole lot of civil servants unemployed all at once. Can’t help wondering why no-one brings that up.

But the US is not the best example, for various reasons. It’s countries that have the right size to hold a trial in, or at least what we can perceive as the right size. Finland, Belgium, Denmark all spend close to 30% of GDP on social expenditures. Portugal, Greece, Slovenia, Luxembourg are at 25%. If a basic income can be had for 13% of GDP, these countries stand to save a fortune…

Unfortunately, you can’t be in the EU and start a basic income trial. And that’s a shame. Because it’s going to be very hard to get this right, and it’ll take some serious time and effort. So much so that not starting today is a risk in itself.

But as long as people keep having faith in the economists, politicians, bankers and reporters who drill the ‘recovery is right around the corner’ meme into them 24/7, and any alternative to that meme just scares the heebees out of them, I’m afraid there’ll be no basic income trial. Yes, there are a few ideas, but they’re all based on the wrong -growth- assumptions, so they’re sure to fail.

Caveat: No, I haven’t gone through all different social benefits plans of all countries I’ve mentioned, so I don’t know what part of GDP each spends at present, or how much they could save or lose. Someone will have to write ‘the book’ on this.

For my thought experiment here I found it sufficient to go with the basic principles, and throw in a few numbers. And the most elementary difference between me and other voices is not there anyway: that is in my putting the basic income issue against the backdrop of economic collapse, and nobody else really doing that whom I’ve read.

Yes, the title is Marquez, of course, THE time of cholera

 

 

Jul 082016
 
 July 8, 2016  Posted by at 8:05 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , ,  4 Responses »


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

Brexit Opens Up Bank Fault Line From Milan To Lisbon (R.)
Europe Banks Close to Breaching 2011 Crisis Lows on Italy Woes (BBG)
EU Declares Spain, Portugal In Violation Of Deficit Rules (EuA)
UK Property Fund Turmoil Continues As Three More Firms Cut Value (G.)
World Faces Deflation Shock As China Devalues At Accelerating Pace (AEP)
Forget Brexit, Watch China And The Renminbi (VW)
Central Banks Put Squeeze on Sovereign-Debt Market (WSJ)
Bond Market Is In An ‘Epic Bubble Of Colossal Proportions,’ Says Boockvar (CNBC)
Race And Real Estate: How Hot Chinese Money Is Making Vancouver Unlivable (G.)
Why Australia Could Be About To Lose Its AAA Rating (VW)
Chilcot’s Judgment Is Utterly Damning – But It’s Still Not Justice (Monbiot)
More Obscuration From The British Establishment (Paul Craig Roberts)
The United States and NATO Are Preparing for a Major War With Russia (Klare)
Pressure Mounts For Varoufakis’ Secret Plan X To Be Investigated (Kath.)
The Strange Gaps in Hillary Clinton’s Email Traffic (Pol.)
Marine’s Defense For Handling Classified Info Will Cite Hillary Case (WaPo)
Europe Is Full … Of Empty Houses (LifeSeekers)

 

 

Beautiful Brexit bursts bubbles.

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

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

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

Read more …

How much did Draghi spend to reach this point?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Brexit bursts bubbles. Is that a bad thing?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Forget Brexit, Watch China And The Renminbi (VW)

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

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

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Not enough paper left.

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

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

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

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

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Kuroda and Bernanke are meeting next week.

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

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

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

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

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Once again: how to kill a city.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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PCR gets mad: Elect Hillary and die.

More Obscuration From The British Establishment (Paul Craig Roberts)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Saw that coming from miles away.

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

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

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

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

Europe Is Full … Of Empty Houses (LifeSeekers)

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

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

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Jul 042016
 
 July 4, 2016  Posted by at 8:23 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,  3 Responses »


Walker Evans “Sidewalk scene in Selma, Alabama.” 1935

China Bank Bailout Calls Go Mainstream (BBG)
Deutsche: Probability Of US Recession Surges To 60% (ZH)
Druckenmiller, Soros, Spitznagel, Gross Warn Of Crisis (VW)
Oil Rally Threatened as Gasoline Supply Surge Swamps US Demand (BBG)
Brexit Is a Lehman Moment for European Banks (BBG)
Angela Merkel ‘To Oust Juncker’ As Europe Splits Deepen Over Brexit (Tel.)
Germany’s Schäuble Urges Post-Brexit Push to Curb EU Commission (BBG)
French Economy Minister Macron Claims Euro-Clearing Business for Paris (BBG)
Where Have Those Nice Britons Gone? (G.)
Brexit Voters Are Not Thick, Not Racist: Just Poor (Spec.)
German Arms Exports Almost Doubled In 2015 (R.)
Kaczynski May Divert Polish Pension Cash to State Projects (BBG)
Europe Puts Greece On Ebay (G.)
How To Fix A Broken Auckland? Crash Home Prices By 40% (Grimes)

 

 

“Non-performing loans jumped by more than 40% in the 12 months ended March to 1.4 trillion yuan ($210 billion)..” “..CLSA estimating NPLs were probably closer to 11.4 trillion yuan at the end of last year..” That would be well over $2 trillion….

China Bank Bailout Calls Go Mainstream (BBG)

Predictions of a Chinese banking system bailout are going mainstream. What was once the fringe view of permabears and short sellers is now increasingly being adopted by economists at some of the world’s biggest banks and brokerages. Nine of 15 respondents in a Bloomberg survey at the end of last month, including Standard Chartered and Commonwealth Bank of Australia, predicted a government-funded recapitalization will take place within two years. Among those who provided estimates of the cost, a majority said it will exceed $500 billion. While a bailout of that size would be a far cry from the $10 trillion forecast of U.S. hedge fund manager Kyle Bass in February, the responses reflect widespread concern that Chinese lenders will struggle to cope as bad loans surge.

Even as some analysts said a state recapitalization would put the banking system on a stronger footing, 80% of respondents predicted news of a rescue would weigh on Chinese markets – dragging down bank stocks and the yuan while pushing up government borrowing costs and credit risk. “A recapitalization will happen after the Chinese government comes clean with the true nonperforming loan figure,” said Kevin Lai at Daiwa Capital Markets. “That will require a lot of money creation.” [..] Chinese lenders are grappling with a growing mountain of bad debt after flooding the financial system with cheap credit for years to prop up economic growth.

Non-performing loans jumped by more than 40% in the 12 months ended March to 1.4 trillion yuan ($210 billion), or 1.75% of the total, according to government data. The figures are widely believed to understate the true scale of the problem, with CLSA estimating NPLs were probably closer to 11.4 trillion yuan at the end of last year.

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Reading the yield curve.

Deutsche: Probability Of US Recession Surges To 60% (ZH)

Over the weekend, following the latest collapse in long-term yields to new all time lows, Deutsche Bank looked at what implied recession odds are if one once-again adjust for Fed intervention. What it found, in the words of Deutsche Bank’s Dominic Konstam, is “worrisome.” From Deutsche Bank:

Since the UK referendum the US yield curve has flattened to new post-crisis lows. The 3m10y spread is now 115 bps compared to 210 bps at the start of the year, and the 2y10y spread is just 85 bps versus 120 bps on January 1. This relentless flattening of the curve is worrisome. Given the historical tendency of a very flat or inverted yield curve to precede a US recession, the odds of the next economic downturn are rising. In our probit model, the probability of a recession within the next 12 months has jumped to 60%, the highest it’s been since August 2008.

The model adjusts the 3m10y spread by the historically low level of short rates and it suggests that on an adjusted basis the curve has already appeared to be inverted for some time. The yield curve had successfully signaled the last two recessions when the model output rose above 70%. If 10y yields rally to 1.00% and the 3m rate is unchanged, the implied recession probability from our model will reach that number. At current market levels, the market is just 40 bps from that distinct possibility.

In other words, while the Fed is terrified of killing the recovery by “tightening” financial conditions, all that will take for the next recession to arrive is for the Fed and its central bank peers to ease just that much more to send the long end 40 bps lower, something which as we reported yesterday may happen even sooner than expected, now that pension funds are ready to throw in the towel and start buying 10Y and 30Y Tsys with wreckless (sic) abandon.

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“One of the best indicators showing how healthy is the economy is the velocity of circulation of money.”

Druckenmiller, Soros, Spitznagel, Gross Warn Of Crisis (VW)

Brexit referendum pushed financial markets into turmoil. Even if this is only the beginning of tough times the main reason behind this is definitely not the result of the UK referendum. What we see today is merely a result of financial markets being disconnected from the real condition of the global economy. The red flags signalling overpriced markets (especially in the case of the US) now are raised not only from statistical data but also from experienced investors having a good forecasting record.

From the start, I would like to focus on aforementioned statistical data. They can give us clear picture of the US economy and what happened after previous crisis until now. The financial situation of the US is crucial because it is the American stock exchange that delivers 44% of the global capitalisation of financial markets. American financial sector is responsible for setting trends and today those trends are pointing south. Developing markets are falling right behind the trendsetter. One of the best indicators showing how healthy is the economy is the velocity of circulation of money. The better the economy, the more money people and other participants of the economy spend – this increases money circulation.

At first glance, you can see that after 2008-09 crisis situation worsened. During official ‘post-crisis recovery’ velocity was slightly above 1.7 while during the first quarter of 20016 it fell below 1.5 (for comparison – before the crisis it around 2.0). The above chart is not the only data point. Low money velocity means also less consumption – this is visible in higher inventory-to-sales ratio. Below you can see a record of it. Today this indicator is above the Lehman level. What is more, it soon can match the levels of the worst phase of the 2008 meltdown. This clearly shows how American society is getting poorer.

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Low prices, but falling demand.

Oil Rally Threatened as Gasoline Supply Surge Swamps US Demand (BBG)

American drivers’ seemingly insatiable thirst for gasoline is running into a flood of supply. Refineries across the nation are operating full-out and imports are pouring into the East Coast, boosting gasoline supplies to a record. At the same time, consumption has turned out to be less robust than thought. That’s weighed on prices, threatening to stem oil’s rebound from a 12-year low. “Earlier this year there was a lot of hope that gasoline would lead crude higher,” said John Kilduff, partner at Again Capital, a New York hedge fund focused on energy. “That’s not turned out to be the case and gasoline will soon be a weight on the market.”

The Energy Information Administration said in a monthly report on June 30 that demand in April was 9.21 million barrels a day, down from 9.49 million seen in weekly data. “The monthly data for April raises doubts about the idea that we have reliably robust gasoline demand to support the entire complex,” said Tim Evans, an energy analyst at Citi Futures Perspective in New York. Gasoline stockpiles along the East Coast, which includes New York Harbor, the delivery point for U.S. futures contracts, surged to a record 72.5 million barrels in week ended June 24, EIA data show. Imports to the region jumped to a six-year seasonal high. Production climbed to a record in the previous week, as refiners typically run harder in the second quarter to meet summer peak driving season.

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“When the biggest bank in Europe’s biggest economy, with annual revenue of about €37 billion, is worth about the same as Snapchat – a messaging app that generated just $59 million of revenue last year – you know something’s wrong.”

Italy’s efforts at aiding its banks risk leading to a big problem with Germany, but Brexit makes the latter hesitant. But it can’t give in, it would set a precedent the EU can’t handle. So is Italy the next Greece?

Brexit Is a Lehman Moment for European Banks (BBG)

European banks are undergoing a real-life stress test in the wake of Britain’s vote to leave the European Union. Their share prices were already down 20% this year; since the referendum result was announced, they’ve doubled that decline. If the rot isn’t stopped soon, Europe will have found a novel solution to the too-big-to-fail problem — by allowing its banks to shrink until they’re too small to be fit for purpose. The answer is found in the adage never let a good crisis go to waste. The current situation should be both a motivation and an excuse to do what Europe failed to do after the 2008 collapse of Lehman Brothers brought the financial world to its knees: fix its banking system. Here’s a snapshot of this year’s drop in value of some of the region’s biggest institutions:

Deutsche Bank, which once had pretensions to be Europe’s contender on the global investment banking stage, is now worth just €17 billion. When the biggest bank in Europe’s biggest economy, with annual revenue of about €37 billion, is worth about the same as Snapchat – a messaging app that generated just $59 million of revenue last year – you know something’s wrong. No wonder the billionaire investor George Soros was betting against Deutsche Bank shares this month. Greece has recapitalized its banks three times, to almost no effect. Piraeus Bank, for example, is worth less than €1.5 billion, down from €4 billion in December after the last cash injection, and as much as €40 billion just two years ago.

UniCredit, Italy’s biggest bank, has suffered particularly badly this year. It has a market capitalization of just €12 billion, dwarfed by its non-performing loans worth €51 billion. Italian banks as a whole have non-performing debts worth €198 billion, a total that’s been rising ever since the financial crisis and is illustrative of Europe’s failure to tackle its banking problems. Add in so-called “sofferenze,” Italian for doubtful loans, and the total value of Italian debt at risk of non-payment rises to about €360 billion. That explains why Italy has seized upon Brexit to justify trying to shovel €40 billion of state aid into its banking system, much to the annoyance of Germany, which views the move as contravening rules on state aid.

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The end of the ever closer union.

Angela Merkel ‘To Oust Juncker’ As Europe Splits Deepen Over Brexit (Tel.)

Angela Merkel could move to oust Europe’s federalist chief Jean-Claude Juncker ‘within the next year’, a Germany government minister has said, in a sign of deepening European divisions over how to respond to Britain’s Brexit vote. The German chancellor’s frustration with the European Commission chief came as Europe split over whether to use the Brexit negotiations as a trigger to deepen European integration or take a more pragmatic approach to Britain as it heads for the exit door. “The pressure on him [Juncker] to resign will only become greater and Chancellor Merkel will eventually have to deal with this next year,” an unnamed German minister told The Sunday Times, adding that Berlin had been furious with Mr Juncker “gloating” over the UK referendum result.

Mr Juncker’s constant and unabashed calls for “more Europe”, as well as his reported drinking problem has led to several of Europe other dissenting members – including Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic – to lay some of the blame for Brexit at his door. Since the June 23 vote both the Czech and Polish foreign ministers have called publicly for Mr Juncker to resign – moves that one senior EU official dismissed last week as “predictable”. However, the rumblings from Berlin now represent a much more serious threat to Mr Juncker’s tenure. The split also offers a glimmer of hope for British negotiators who are preparing for fractious EU-UK divorce talks and are desperate to avoid a repeat of February’s failed negotiations which – controlled as they were by Mr Juncker and the Commission – left David Cameron without enough ‘wins’ to avoid Brexit.

“Everyone is determined that this negotiation is handled in the European Council – i.e. between the 27 heads of government – and not by the Commission, the eurocrats and the EU ‘theologians’ in Brussels,” a senior UK source told The Telegraph. In a signal that battle has partly already been won, Mrs Merkel pointedly met with French and Italian leaders in Berlin last week, excluding Mr Juncker from the conversation. The Commission has also declined to fight the Council for the role of “chief negotiator”. British strategists hope that creating a much broader negotiation that includes the UK’s role in keeping Europe geopolitically relevant through its deep Nato ties, defence contributions and links to Washington, they can avoid a narrow tit-for-tat negotiation on trade where the UK has only very limited leverage.

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The problem with the end of the ever closer union is who will then decide. And that can only be Germany. The quintessential EU conundrum is unsolvable.

Germany’s Schäuble Urges Post-Brexit Push to Curb EU Commission (BBG)

Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble signaled that Germany wants national governments to set the pace for future cooperation within the European Union, saying in a newspaper interview that they should sidestep the European Commission in Brussels if needed. Schaeuble’s comments to Welt am Sonntag outline the emerging response by Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government to the U.K. referendum on June 23 to leave the EU. It signals a looming clash with advocates of EU integration such as European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker. EU countries must seek to reach agreements even if not all of the 27 non-U.K. members want to participate and should circumvent the commission, the EU’s executive arm, if it isn’t willing to cooperate, the newspaper quoted Schaeuble as saying.

“Now is the time for pragmatism,” Schaeuble told the newspaper. “If not all 27 want to pull together from the beginning, then we’ll just start with a few. If the Commission isn’t along, then we’ll take matters into our own hands and solve problems between governments.” Schaeuble expressed frustration that EU officials in Brussels took too long to respond to the refugee crisis last year. Many people’s dissatisfaction with the EU is because rules weren’t respected, including by the European Commission in its response to the sovereign-debt crisis, he was quoted as saying. The U.K. and the EU have a shared interest in starting exit talks quickly to limit the fallout and because “market pressure” may rise the longer it takes, Schaeuble told the newspaper.

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Another sociopath striving for power.

French Economy Minister Macron Claims Euro-Clearing Business for Paris (BBG)

Scruples be damned. The dust has barely settled on the June 23 British vote to take the U.K. out of the European Union, and the French Economy Minister Emmanuel Macron is claiming the euro-clearing business for Paris. Speaking Sunday in a Bloomberg interview, Macron laid out why the French capital is a contender for the business as other euro-area cities from Frankfurt to Dublin gear up for a battle for transactions currently done in London, Europe’s largest financial center. German officials have said Paris is dreaming if it thinks it can beat out Frankfurt, the home of the ECB and Deutsche Boerse’s Eurex operations. “On clearing, we will have a full discussion on a series of issues,” the 38-year-old French minister said.

“We have many more players now in Paris than in Frankfurt, and a much deeper market place.” London’s role in clearing trades in the $493 trillion derivatives market has returned as an issue since Britain voted to exit the 28-nation bloc. EU courts blocked a previous ECB effort to bring clearing under its regulatory control by shifting it to a euro-area country. But that was before the Brexit vote. While echoing President Francois Hollande’s insistence last week that euro-clearing won’t remain in London, Macron went further, saying that Paris may be the best place to move the process.

ECB Executive Board member Benoit Coeure warned his French compatriots to cool down on the prospect, insisting that London’s status as the biggest executor of euro financial transactions will depend on the kind of separation agreement the U.K. negotiates with the remaining 27 countries in the EU. “It is premature to have this type of discussion,” he said in Aix-en-Provence Saturday. “Everything will depend on the legal framework. This landscape, will it change? It depends on the relationship between the U.K. and the single market. Right now, we have no idea.” Separately, Macron also said he doesn’t rule out running for president next year, even though he insisted it was too early to declare.

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Hi hi. “The rest of the EU wanted to be able to restrain eastern Europeans for another seven years. Most of us did. You kept true to your word and did not.”

Where Have Those Nice Britons Gone? (G.)

Who are you and what have you done with those Britons I used to know and like so much? Have you no idea how disruptive uncertainty is for our countries, for business? Forgive me, of course you do – it’s you British who taught us that. The single market, for heaven’s sake, the EU’s largest and most formidably lucrative business venture, was very much down to you. It was your Lord Cockfield who worked out a plan, and if your then prime minister Margaret Thatcher had not used all her force to push it through in the face of reluctant protectionists on the continent, it might never had happened. Trade is your thing, after all and here it was: full freedom of movement for capital, goods, services and people. Yes, for people, including for eastern Europeans, not long after the Berlin Wall came down.

That happened because you British insisted on uniting the whole of Europe, the sooner, the better, while the French, the Italians and others all held back for as long as they could. They were so worried that the eastern European workers would come storming in their millions to the west, taking our jobs, pushing our wages down. But you insisted. Openness, inclusiveness, freedom – we have come to associate that with you. And you have, or had, such a way with words. You’re so gifted at persuasion, winning us over with your thoroughly prepared and elegant arguments. In the end, all agreed to do the enlargement your way. Except for the instant freedom of movement for all. The rest of the EU wanted to be able to restrain eastern Europeans for another seven years. Most of us did. You kept true to your word and did not.

You also have such a way with people. Your politicians are well schooled in parliament, aspiring to hold their own in any heated debate with their opponents. For decades, you have applied the brakes in the EU and watered down proposals to suit you. (Thanks by the way. You have never been an easy partner but the less-than-perfect compromise that is the EU has been improved by your hard work in Brussels.) And your Foreign Office comes better prepared than anyone else with numbers and facts, closely following what is going on in other countries, and sometimes managing diplomatic acrobatics that stun others into a deal. How on earth did Thatcher talk the others into giving one of the richest countries billions of pounds’ worth of a rebate to its EU fee? Permanently!

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Amen.

Brexit Voters Are Not Thick, Not Racist: Just Poor (Spec.)

The most striking thing about Britain’s break with the EU is this: it’s the poor wot done it. Council-estate dwellers, Sun readers, people who didn’t get good GCSE results (which is primarily an indicator of class, not stupidity): they rose up, they tramped to the polling station, and they said no to the EU. It was like a second peasants’ revolt, though no pitchforks this time. The statistics are extraordinary. The well-to-do voted Remain, the down-at-heel demanded to Leave. The Brexiteer/Remainer divide splits almost perfectly, and beautifully, along class lines. Of local authorities that have a high number of manufacturing jobs, a whopping 86% voted Leave. Of those bits of Britain with low manufacturing, only 42% did so.

Of local authorities with average house prices of less than £282,000, 79% voted Leave; where house prices are above that figure, just 28% did so. Of the 240 local authorities that have low education levels — i.e. more than a quarter of adults do not have five A to Cs at GCSE — 83% voted Leave. Then there’s pay, the basic gauge of one’s place in the pecking order: 77% of local authorities in which lots of people earn a low wage (of less than £23,000) voted Leave, compared with only 35% of areas with decent pay packets. It’s this stark: if you do physical labour, live in a modest home and have never darkened the door of a university, you’re far more likely to have said ‘screw you’ to the EU than the bloke in the leafier neighbouring borough who has a nicer existence.

Of course there are discrepancies. The 16 local authorities in Scotland that have high manufacturing levels voted Remain rather than Leave. But for the most part, class was the deciding factor in the vote. This, for me, is the most breathtaking fact: of the 50 areas of Britain that have the highest number of people in social classes D and E – semi-skilled and unskilled workers and unemployed people – only 3 voted Remain. Three. That means 47 very poor areas, in unison, said no to the thing the establishment insisted they should say yes to. Let’s make no bones about this: Britain’s poor and workless have risen up. And in doing so they didn’t just give the EU and its British backers the bloodiest of bloody noses. They also brought crashing down the Blairite myth of a post-class, Third Way Blighty, where the old ideological divide between rich and poor did not exist, since we were all supposed to be ‘stakeholders’ in society.

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Amoral.

German Arms Exports Almost Doubled In 2015 (R.)

German arms exports almost doubled last year to their highest level since the beginning of this century, a German newspaper said on Sunday, citing a report from the Economy Ministry that is due to be presented to the cabinet on Wednesday. Newspaper Welt am Sonntag said the value of individual approvals granted for exporting arms was €7.86 billion last year compared with €3.97 billion worth of arms exports in 2014. It said the Economy Ministry had pointed to special factors that boosted arms exports such as the approval of four tanker aircraft for Britain worth €1.1 billion.

It also pointed to the approval of battle tanks and tank howitzers along with munitions and accompanying vehicles worth €1.6 billion for Qatar – a controversial deal that the report said was approved in 2013 by the previous government. In February German Economy Minister Sigmar Gabriel said preliminary figures showed that Germany had given approval for around €7.5 billion worth of arms shipments in 2015. The Federal Office for Economics and Export Control (Bafa), a subsidiary of the economy ministry, is responsible for licensing arms export deals and Gabriel had promised to take a much more cautious approach to licensing arms exports, especially with regard to the Middle East. Germany is one of the world’s main arms exporters to EU and NATO countries and has been cutting its sales of light weapons outside those states.

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This happens everywhere: pensions being moved into risky and/or politically driven ‘assets’. That will be the end of pensions.

Kaczynski May Divert Polish Pension Cash to State Projects (BBG)

Poland is considering diverting funds from the country’s $35 billion pension industry and piling them into government-backed projects, ruling party leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski said. Poland’s privately run pension funds, set up in 1999 to provide long-term financing for the nation’s companies and make Warsaw into a regional capital hub, own a fifth of the shares traded on the Warsaw stock exchange. The proposed shift of money from the funds could help the eight-month-old government fulfill its election promises, including higher social benefits, cheap housing as well as state-backed investments into industries ranging from ship building to the production of coal and electric buses.

“We must think what to do with the money in the pension funds, there are already proposals,” Kaczynski, who was reappointed as head of the Law & Justice party on Saturday, said at the party’s congress. “That money is now losing its value,” while it could be the “basis for new, important investments, that will help build strong economic policy and support millions of Polish households.” Kaczynski said his party seeks to implement a new “economic order,” one based on redistributing wealth and rejection of free-market reforms. The Law & Justice government imposed the European Union’s highest levies on banks, rolled out unprecedented child benefits and is in a stand-off with the EU over democratic standards, which triggered the country’s first-ever credit rating downgrade and spooked investors.

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From May 30. Just loved the Simpsons’ image.

Europe Puts Greece On Ebay (G.)

In Greece today, government power comes with few trappings. Unable to tap capital markets and dependent wholly on international aid, the debt-stricken country’s senior officials are acrobats in a tightrope act. They are placating creditors, whose demands at times seem insatiable, and citizens, whose shock is never far away. Few know this better than Stergios Pitsiorlas, the head of Greece’s privatisation agency. The agency’s asset portfolio – readily available online – goes some way to explaining why. A catalogue of beaches, islands, boutique hotels, golf courses, Olympic venues and historic properties in Plaka on the slopes beneath the ancient Acropolis, it could be a shopping list for the scenery in a movie – rather than a list of possessions that Athens is under immense pressure to offload.

In the coming months, the list will grow as the contours of a “super fund” – established to expedite the sale of ailing utilities and state-owned properties – take shape. The fund, the product of last week’s agreement to disburse an extra €10.3bn (£7bn) in bailout loans in return for further reforms, takes the divestment of state holdings to new heights. More than 71,000 pieces of public property will be transferred to the umbrella entity in what will amount to the biggest privatisation programme on the continent of Europe in modern times. Seven years into Greece’s seemingly unstoppable financial crisis, lenders are not taking any chances. The EU and IMF, which to date have poured more than €250bn into Greece in the form of three bailouts, have demanded that the organisation operates for 99 years.

Greeks have reacted with anger and derision, viewing the fund as the lowest point in the country’s epic struggle to remain anchored to the eurozone. For many, it is the ultimate depredation, another dent to their dignity at a time of unprecedented unemployment, poverty and suffering. If this is the way, they say, then only the Acropolis will retain a patina of Greekness about it. “There is nothing we are not giving up,” splutters Maria Ethymiou, a small business owner encapsulating the mood. “The Germans are going to take everything. I hear that even beaches are up for sale. Is this the Europe that we want? Is this the united Europe of our dreams?”

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Absolutely right and horribly mistaken at the same time. Arthur Grimes is former chief economist of the Reserve Bank.

How To Fix A Broken Auckland? Crash Home Prices By 40% (Grimes)

In March 2016, the REINZ Auckland median house price reached $820,000. Four years previously, it was $495,000 – that’s a 66% increase in 4 years. What’s more alarming is that in 2012, many people considered that house prices were already getting of reach for most people. That was particularly the case for young people and low income earners. That extraordinary increase – coupled with the already high level in 2012 – was behind my call to a recent Auckland Conversations event that policy-makers should strive to cause a 40% collapse in house prices to bring the median back to around $500,000.

My call for policies to drive a house price collapse is driven by my personal value judgement that it’s great for young families and families on lower incomes, to be able to afford to buy a house if they wish to do so. My concern is not for older, richer families, couples or individuals who already own their own (highly appreciated) house. Others may have a different value judgement to mine – but rarely do they make such a judgement explicit. Or, they may argue that such a collapse would cause financial instability given banks’ loans to mortgage-holders. Luckily, New Zealand’s banks are well-capitalised and stress tests have shown that they can survive a large fall in house prices – mostly because the bulk of their loans pertain to older mortgages with plenty of equity behind them.

For those who share my wish to bring house prices back to a level at which ordinary people can afford, what is to be done? One possibility is to try and stem the demand. Many Aucklanders seem to want their city to remain something like a rural town. In world terms, however, Auckland is a smallish city; while in Australasian terms, it is a mid-sized city sitting between Adelaide and Perth in size, and well behind the big three (Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane). If New Zealand is to have one city of moderate size where head offices, R&D facilities and other wealth-generating activities reside, Auckland needs to be that city. To curb its growth is tantamount to saying that development should take place in Australia, not here. I favour Auckland being competitive in attracting high-value activities at least within the Australasian context. So I am not in favour of curbing Auckland’s growth.

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Jun 062016
 


Jordan Osmond and Samuel Alexander Image from ‘A Simpler Way: Crisis as Opportunity’ 2016

On July 27 2015, I posted a 2-hour interview with Nicole Foss that was recorded when we were in Melbourne in April that year. The interview -though not the full two hours of course- was always meant to be part of a documentary by our friends Jordan Osmond and Samuel Alexander. The documentary is now out.

Below, you can find the trailer, the full documentary, as well as a re-run of the full interview with Nicole. I haven’t had time to watch the documentary, just got the mail from Sam, but I will later today. No doubt, it’ll be worth your while and mine. I remember complimenting them on the sound- and picture quality of the interview last year. Plus, get the likes of our dear friend Dave Holmgren together with Nicole and Ted Trainer, amongst others, and you can’t very well go wrong, can you?

(NOTE: Saw some rushes, and it may contain a tad much hippieness and/or reality-TV semblance for some)

The trailer:

With the text published with it:

The overlapping economic, environmental, and cultural crises of our times can seem overwhelming, can seem like challenges so great and urgent that they have no solutions. But rather than sticking our heads in the sand or falling into despair, we should respond with defiant positivity and try to turn the crises we face into opportunities for civilisational renewal.

During the year of 2015 a small community formed on an emerging ecovillage in Gippsland, Australia, and challenged themselves to explore a radically ‘simpler way’ of life based on material sufficiency, frugality, permaculture, alternative technology and local economy. This documentary by Jordan Osmond and Samuel Alexander tells the story of this community’s living experiment, in the hope of sparking a broader conversation about the challenges and opportunities of living in an age of limits.

The documentary also presents new and exclusive interviews with leading activists and educators in the world’s most promising social movements, including David Holmgren (permaculture), Helena Norberg-Hodge (localisation), Ted Trainer (the simpler way), Nicole Foss (energy and finance), Bill Metcalf (intentional communities) and Graham Turner (limits to growth).

The full documentary:

Then the text I included back then:

The fimmakers about their project:

The purpose of the documentary is to unflinchingly describe the overlapping crises of industrial civilisation and explain why a ‘simpler way’ of life, based on material sufficiency not limitless growth, signifies the only coherent response to those crises. The dominant mode of development today seeks to universalise high-consumption consumer lifestyles, but this is environmentally catastrophic and it has produced perverse inequalities of wealth. Even the privileged few who have attained material affluence rarely find it satisfying or fulfilling, because consumerism just leaves people feeling empty and alone. Consequently, our forthcoming documentary seeks to show why genuine progress today means rejecting consumerism, transcending growth economics, and building new forms of life based on permaculture, simple living, renewable energy, and localised economies.

But what does that mean? And how should we go about building a new world? Mainstream environmentalism calls on us to take shorter showers, recycle, buy ‘green’ products, and turn the lights off when we leave the room, but these measures are grossly inadequate. We need more fundamental change – personally, culturally, and structurally. Most of all, we need to reimagine the good life beyond consumer culture and begin building a world that supports a simpler way of life. This does not mean hardship or deprivation. It means focusing on what is sufficient to live well. The premise of our documentary is that a simple life can be a good life.

One of the main concerns driving this documentary, and the Wurruk’an project more generally, is the uncomfortable realisation that even the world’s most successful ecovillages have ecological footprints that are too high to be universalised. In other words, even after many decades of the modern environmental movement, we still don’t have many or any examples of what a flourishing ‘one planet’ existence might look. This is highly problematic because if people do not have some understanding of what sustainability requires of us or what it might look like, it will be hard to mobilise individuals and communities to build such a world. A Simpler Way represents an attempt to envision and demonstrate what ‘one planet’ living might look like and provoke a broader social conversation about the radical implications of living in an age of limits.

We hope that this documentary will challenge and inspire people to explore a simpler way of life and to begin building sufficiency-based economies that thrive within planetary limits. If you feel this is a worthwhile film for social change, please support our project by donating here [link coming soon] and sharing the link with your networks.

And finally, the Nicole interview I posted last year, of which significant parts are in the documentary.

Mar 282016
 
 March 28, 2016  Posted by at 8:40 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,  3 Responses »


Albert Freeman Mrs. Alice White at the War Fund Victory Store, Hardwick, VT 1942

The Seven Countries Most Vulnerable To A Debt Crisis (Steve Keen)
Capital and Credit (Mr. Practical)
Japan’s Negative Rates A Looming Headache For Central Bank (Reuters)
Japan Seen Stuck With Negative Yields on 70% of Bonds for 2016 (BBG)
China’s Pension Fund To Flow Into Stock Market This Year (CD)
China Hunts Source of Letter Urging Xi to Quit (WSJ)
US Energy Companies Pay Up to Raise Cash (WSJ)
Negative Gearing Has Created Empty Houses And Artificial Scarcity (SMH)
Has The Brics Bubble Burst? (Guardian)
In Yahoo, Another Example of the Buyback Mirage (NY Times)
Wealthier Countries Have More Leisure Time – With One Big Exception (Wef)
Is Monsanto Losing Its Grip? (WS)
Pentagon, CIA-Armed Militias Fight Each Other In Syria (LA Times)
Saudi Arabia Campaign Leaves 80% Of Yemen Population Needing Aid (G.)
Smugglers Prepare New Human Trafficking Route To Italy (DW)
EU Prepares For Massive Migration Flows From Libya (EurActiv)

It’s Steve’s birthday today!

The Seven Countries Most Vulnerable To A Debt Crisis (Steve Keen)

For decades, some of the most important data about market economies was simply unavailable: the level of private debt. You could get government debt data easily, but (with the outstanding exception of the USA—and also Australia) it was hard to come by. That has been remedied by the Bank of International Settlements, which now publishes a quarterly series on debt—government & private—for over 40 countries. This data lets me identify the seven countries that, on my analysis, are most likely to suffer a debt crisis in the next 1-3 years. They are, in order of likely severity: China, Australia, Sweden, Hong Kong (though it might deserve first billing), Korea, Canada, and Norway. I’ve detailed the logic behind my argument too many times to count, and I won’t repeat it here.

The bottom line is that private sector expenditure in an economy can be measured as the sum of GDP plus the change in credit, and crises occur when (a) the ratio of private debt to GDP is large; (b) growing quickly compared to GDP. When the growth of credit falls—as it eventually must, as growing debt servicing exhausts the funds available to finance it, new borrowers baulk at entry costs to house purchases, and numerous euphoric and Ponzi-based debt-financed schemes fail—then the change in credit falls, and can go negative, thus reducing demand rather than adding to it.

This is what caused the Global Financial Crisis, and the simplest way to simply substantiate my argument—which virtually every other economist on the planet will advise you is crazy (except Michael Hudson, Dirk Bezemer and a few others)—is to show you this data for the USA. The crisis began as the rate of growth of credit began to fall, and the Great Recession was dated as starting in 2008 and ending in 2010. As you can see from Figure 1, the sum of GDP plus credit growth peaked in 2008, and fell till 2010—at which point the recovery began.


Figure 1: America’s crisis began when the rate of growth of credit began to fall

The BIS database lets me identify other countries—several of which managed to avoid a serious downturn during the GFC—which fill these two pre-requisites: a high level of private debt to GDP, and a rapid growth of that ratio in the last few years. The American ex-banker turned philanthropist and debt reformer Richard Vague, in his excellent empirical study of crises over the last 150 years, concluded that crises occur when (a) private debt exceeds 1.5 times GDP and (b) the level grows by about 20% (say from 140% to 160%) over a 5 year period.

America fitted those gloves in 2008, as did many other countries—all of which are either still in a crisis (especially in the Eurozone), or are suffering “inexplicably” low growth after an apparent recovery (as is the case in the USA, the UK, and so on). Using the BIS database, I can identify 21 countries that meet Richard’s first criteria, but to “go for broke” on this forecast, I restricted myself to the 16 countries that had a private debt to GDP ratio exceeding 175% of GDP. To simplify my analysis, I then limited the second criteria to countries where the increase in private debt last year exceeded 10% of GDP. That combination gave me my list.


Figure 2: Countries with private debt/GDP > 175% & debt growth in 2015 > 10% of GDP, ranked by debt growth

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“If all the savings are chased out of banks, what is left for investment for the future?”

Capital and Credit (Mr. Practical)

Central banks have altered the definition of debt. Debt was once created by banks when they lent out deposits, transferring the liquid capital of the depositor to the debtor; the bank, acting as a clearing house, guaranteed the deposit. The Federal Reserve allows banks to lever that functionality by requiring banks to keep just 10% of the deposit as collateral; ergo, a bank could lend ten times its deposit base. That was the first step in levering capital up in the economy. It was and is called fractional banking. Over the last 30 years, central banks, regulators, and Wall Street have created various methods to increase that leverage even more; in other words, they have taken a modicum of capital and created mountains of debt with it. In other words, financial engineering creates new and different ways to increase leverage.

Most of those vehicles are disguised as derivatives. For example, some stocks allow investors to buy them on margin of 50%: they put up half of the cost and a broker lends them the other half so the investor’s capital is levered two-to-one. Alternatively, through derivatives, they can buy an SP500 futures contract and only put up 5% in capital and the broker will lend them the other 95%, so the investor’s capital is levered twenty to one! The derivatives market has a notional value of ~$1 quadrillion (one thousand trillions; pause to let the enormity of that number sink in); this provides a glimmer of the risk and leverage embedded in the derivatives markets, and by extension the stock and commodity markets. The system imploded under this debt in 2008 because there was not enough income being generated to pay back interest and principal.

Central banks and governments responded by adding $60 trillion of fresh global debt to reflate the bubble. How is that working? Well, we’re now seeing negative interest rates (NIRP) in Europe and Asia and many think they are coming to the U.S. Negative interest rates mean savers are now being charged to keep their money at the bank; there now is a cost to holding cash in a savings account. This is not natural and has revolting consequences. If you buy an Italian government bond you actually have to pay them interest to lend them money. This is ridiculous on its face but especially since Italy is bankrupt. The only reason it is possible is that the central bank of Europe is buying them up to that price. And why is this happening? The bubble is fraying. It is about to pop again for all of the new debt created since 2008; that debt is even less productive than the previous debt and generates even less income to pay it back.

Bureaucrats can either lever capital or re-distribute it. t seems they are having trouble levering it any further so negative rates are an attempt to re-distribute capital. All of the savings in liquid capital within the banks must be chased out to buy increasingly risky assets like stocks and houses to stimulate the economy. This is like Dr. Frankenstein raising the dead. If all the savings are chased out of banks, what is left for investment for the future?

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“The JGB market is really in a bubble, when you think about it as an investment vehicle..”

Japan’s Negative Rates A Looming Headache For Central Bank (Reuters)

Driving interest rates below zero, the Bank of Japan has turned a comatose government bond market into an enormous free-for-all, complicating the central bank’s own efforts to kick-start growth and end deflation. The $9 trillion market for Japanese government bonds had been all but paralyzed since the BOJ began a massive monetary easing three years ago that made the bank the dominant buyer. But in the two months since the BOJ announced it was imposing a negative interest rate, JGBs have become a volatile commodity, with prices swinging wildly as below-zero yields confound investors’ attempts to find fair market value. “The JGB market is really in a bubble, when you think about it as an investment vehicle,” said Takuji Okubo at Japan Macro Advisors. “Their prices have moved away from fundamentals, and people don’t have a traditional way to measure their value.”

As the BOJ’s dominance distorts bond market functions and dries up liquidity, the central bank could have a hard time tapering its buying binge when it eventually chooses to exit its “quantitative and qualitative easing” program. The bank theoretically could just sit on its enormous holdings until the bonds mature, but policymakers are unlikely to want those assets to remain on the balance sheet for decades. On the other hand, it might be difficult to smoothly taper off its asset purchases, much less sell its holdings. So far, the BOJ’s money printing has kept the cost for financing the government’s massive public debt very low. A spike in that cost could stoke market fears Japan may be losing control of its finances, potentially triggering a damaging bond sell-off, some analysts say. “It would be quite tough for the BOJ to taper such an enormous balance sheet without disrupting markets,” said a person familiar with the BOJ’s thinking.

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Abe to call snap elections, the opposition melting into blocks to prevent a 2/3 majority.

Japan Seen Stuck With Negative Yields on 70% of Bonds for 2016 (BBG)

Japanese primary dealers say negative bond yields are here to stay in 2016, and room for capital gains has run out. [..] Three years after the start of the Bank of Japan’s unprecedented quantitative and qualitative easing, or QQE, and two months since the surprise announcement of negative interest rates, bond investors are still trying to adjust to the conditions that have turned yields on 70% of the market negative. Even amid such extreme measures, the central bank has failed to prevent inflation from flatlining for more than a year. Most of the dealers surveyed expect a further expansion of stimulus. “The BOJ has dominated the bond market,” said Takafumi Yamawaki at JPMorgan, who sees the 10-year note yielding minus 0.15% at year-end. “Yields will remain deeply depressed.” An investor would just about break even if the 10-year JGB yield ended the year at minus 0.1%, after accounting for reinvested interest.

The 10-year yield was at minus 0.095% on Friday, the lowest globally after Switzerland’s minus 0.35%. The equivalent U.S. Treasury note yielded 1.9%. JGBs have returned 5.3% over the past six months, the most of 26 sovereign debt markets tracked by Bloomberg, as yields pushed ever lower amid pressure from BOJ easing. “We expect an expansion of stimulus, and if the market happens to rule out any additional boost in stimulus, that would create an opportunity to go long,” said Takeki Fukushima at Citigroup in Tokyo, who predicts the 10-year note will yield about minus 0.15% at year-end. The BOJ owns an unprecedented one-third of outstanding JGBs, more than any other class of investor, as it snaps up as much as 12 trillion yen ($106 billion) of the debt each month. The result has been a loss of liquidity that has heightened volatility and hurt market functionality.

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There goes the kitchen sink.

China’s Pension Fund To Flow Into Stock Market This Year (CD)

China’s massive pension fund may begin investing in the nation’s A-share markets this year, an anticipated move that will channel approximately 600 billion yuan ($92.28 billion) into the equity market and likely improve its liquidity. The target date comes several months after China’s State Council published an investment guideline that would allow the country’s pension fund to invest in more diversified and risker products, with the maximum proportion of investments in stocks and equities set at 30% of total net assets. As of last Friday, the nation’s A-share markets’ combined value totaled about 44 trillion yuan. China’s pension fund, which accounts for approximately 90% of the country’s total social security fund pool, had net assets of 3.98 trillion yuan by the end of 2015.

By the end of last year, total investible pension fund nationwide reached approximately 2 trillion yuan, according to data from the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security. Yin Weimin, the minister of Human Resources and Social Security, said last week: “Detailed guidelines about how the investments will be conducted are expected shortly and the investments will be made through commissioned institutional investors.” According to a survey by the Shenzhen Stock Exchange, which polled 3,874 small investors from 219 cities around China, more than 77.5% of respondents said they had been anticipating the pension fund investments and that the move will bring a wave of liquidity.

The move is expected to not only benefit the equity market but also the pension fund itself, because yields from investing in equities are normally higher than that from treasury bonds or interest rates from bank accounts. Critics have said that the low yields earned from bank accounts or bonds will not meet the increasing demands of a rapidly growing elderly population. Researchers said it will take time for all of the investible portion of the pension fund to become fully injected into the equity market. Provinces that have already piloted their local pension funds to be invested in the equity market have reported positive yields. South China’s Guangdong province reportedly accrued a combined yield of 17.34 billion yuan from a 100-billion-yuan investment.

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China, Turkey, Saudi: what’s the difference? And they’re all our friends…

China Hunts Source of Letter Urging Xi to Quit (WSJ)

A Chinese news portal’s publication of a mysterious letter calling for President Xi Jinping’s resignation appears to have triggered a hunt for those responsible, in a sign of Beijing’s anxiety over bubbling dissent within the Communist Party. The letter, whose authorship remains unclear, appeared on the eve of China’s legislative session in early March, the most public political event of the year. Since then, at least four managers and editors with Wujie Media—whose news website published the missive—and about 10 people from a related company providing technical support have gone missing, according to their friends and associates, who say the disappearances are linked to a government probe into the letter.

A U.S.-based dissident author said authorities have also taken away his family in southern China over claims that he had helped disseminate the letter – an allegation he denies. The editor of an overseas Chinese website that also published the letter said he has received harassing phone calls and anonymous death threats. Wujie Media -which is based in Beijing and partly owned by the government of China’s far western Xinjiang region- hasn’t published any original news content since mid-March, while its social-media accounts have also gone silent. Many among its more than 100 employees worry that the company may soon be shut down, according to a Wujie employee and two people familiar with the situation.

[..] Analysts said the incident highlights the party’s concerns over the letter and a broader pushback against Mr. Xi’s domineering style of leadership. The response “shows a real brittleness of power and of high levels of nervousness,” said Kerry Brown, professor of Chinese studies at King’s College London. “If this sort of complaint spreads, then there could be real problems,” he said. [..] “The concentration of power in Xi’s hands, as well as the budding personality cult, have come to arouse dissent among party circles,” said Daniel Leese, a professor of Chinese history and politics at Germany’s University of Freiburg. Over the past two months, divisions between the disgruntled party members and Mr. Xi’s camp have spilled out into the open. After prominent real-estate tycoon and party member Ren Zhiqiang questioned Mr. Xi’s demands for loyalty from the media, party news outlets savaged the retired businessman.

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“These firms have come to rely on selling new shares to pay down debt and keep rigs drilling..”

US Energy Companies Pay Up to Raise Cash (WSJ)

Energy companies tapping the stock market to fill their coffers are deepening the pain for shareholders. These firms have come to rely on selling new shares to pay down debt and keep rigs drilling since oil and gas prices began tumbling in late 2014. The further commodity prices and energy stocks slid, the more shares that companies have had to sell at ever lower prices to raise the desired proceeds. This has further diluted the stakes held by existing shareholders, who are already suffering from falling share prices. North American oil and gas producers have raised more than $10 billion selling new shares this year. That’s in line with the amount raised over the same period last year, which went on to be a record year for so-called follow-on stock offerings with about $18 billion raised.

The cash injections haven’t guaranteed stability for the companies selling shares, though. Emerald Oil, which sold $27.5 million of new shares last year, filed Tuesday for chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. Wunderlich Securities estimates that a prearranged sale of Emerald’s North Dakota drilling fields will yield roughly enough to pay back its bank lenders, leaving little for other creditors and nothing for shareholders. Those who bought roughly $50 million of stock that Goodrich Petroleum sold last March have been basically wiped out. The Houston company’s stock, which ended the week trading at 8 cents, was delisted from the New York Stock Exchange earlier this year. Earlier this month Goodrich said that when it discloses its 2015 financial results, its auditors are likely to express “substantial doubt” about its ability to stay in business.

Much of the money raised by oil and gas producers this year has been through deals that involve banks putting up their own capital to buy a chunk of the company’s stock—below the market rate because of the risk they are taking on—before selling it to investors. A bigger discount in these so-called block, or bought, deals reflects the risk perceived by banks when it comes to energy companies at a time when the price of oil has been fluctuating and large U.S. banks have said they are seeing more energy loans go bad. Last June, Energen raised about a net $400 million in a sale of 5.7 million shares, according to Dealogic. Following the offering, shares declined by nearly 70% by Feb. 16, more than the nearly 60% decline of the SIG Oil Exploration and Production stock index, an industry benchmark, in the same period.

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Australia is belatedly waking up. It won’t stop the pain.

Negative Gearing Has Created Empty Houses And Artificial Scarcity (SMH)

A major myth that permeates the recent debate on housing affordability is that the present level of housing supply is not meeting demand. Scarcity of housing, we are repeatedly told, is driving up prices. The same voices simplistically suggest, reduce the barriers caused by planners and housing supply will respond, bringing affordability back into the market. But more reasoned voices can be heard above the clamour, focussing on the perverse effects of our highly skewed housing taxation and subsidy system, as well as a complete lack of a national housing policy framework to support affordable housing. Nevertheless, throughout this debate there is little recognition of the broader shifts in housing stock, tenure and housing opportunity that these policies have created.

At the last census there were nearly 120,000 empty dwelling in the greater Sydney region alone, representing nearly one fifth of the projected new housing demand to be met by 2031, or equivalent to nearly five years of projected dwelling need. When this is combined with under-utilised dwellings, such as those let out as short-term accommodation, the total number of dwellings reaches 230,000 in Sydney, and 238,000 in Melbourne. There is a possibility that these aggregate figures could be accounted for by a spatial mismatch between supply and demand. That is, they are in places that people simply don’t want to live. But this isn’t the case. When these numbers are mapped there is a clear concentration of unoccupied dwellings in central parts of all our metropolitan areas. In Sydney there is a clear bias towards inner, eastern suburb and north shore locations.

This aligns with established areas of highest rents and prices. This picture is repeated in the other cities. If you chose to accept that there is a housing shortage in Sydney, then the sheer scale and location of these figures strongly suggest that this is an artificially produced scarcity. The number of empty dwellings could more than account for the notional supply shortfalls. Why, then, are these homes left vacant when they could command the highest prices or rents? To answer this, we mapped rental yields for the same period. What it reveals is that rental yields tend to be highest in the outer suburbs, where residential property is cheaper to purchase. Where rental yields are lowest is in the inner city and eastern and north shore suburbs, where capital values (and therefore gains) are highest. And this is where we also see higher rates of vacant properties. This is not a coincidence.

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There’s a lot more bursting in the offing.

Has The Brics Bubble Burst? (Guardian)

The political crisis in Brazil over economic mismanagement and high-level corruption, likely to come to a head next week, has reinforced the fashionable view, popular among western governments and businesses, that the Brics bubble has burst. Members of the exclusive Brics club of leading developing countries – Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa – are failing to justify predictions that, separately and together, they will dominate the 21st century world, or so the argument goes. The Brics concept, plus acronym, was dreamed up in 2001 by Jim O’Neill, chairman of Goldman Sachs Asset Management. He highlighted the combined potential of non-western powers controlling one quarter of the world’s land mass and accounting for more than 40% of its population. O’Neill’s idea morphed into a formal association, with South Africa joining the original Bric group in 2011.

The five nations, with a joint estimated GDP of $16tn, set up their own development bank in parallel to the US-dominated IMF and World Bank and hold summits rivalling the G7 forum. Their next meeting will be in Goa, India, in October. But ambitious plans to create an alternative reserve currency to the US dollar and challenge American dominance in IT and global security surveillance have come to little. Meanwhile, adverse economic conditions compounded by falling global demand and lower oil and commodity prices are taking their toll. Last November, Goldman Sachs, where the idea originated, closed its Bric investment fund after assets reportedly declined in value by 88% from a 2010 peak. The bank told the SEC it did not expect “significant asset growth in the foreseeable future”. “The promise of Bric’s rapid and sustainable growth has been challenged very much for the last five years or so,” Jorge Mariscal at UBS told Bloomberg Business. “The Bric concept was popular. But nothing is eternal.”

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“..Yahoo, if it had invested that same amount of money in its operations, would have had to generate only a 3.2% after-tax return to produce overall net profit growth of 16% annually over those years.”

In Yahoo, Another Example of the Buyback Mirage (NY Times)

It is one of the great investment conundrums of our time: Why do so many stockholders cheer when a company announces that it’s buying back shares? Stated simply, repurchase programs can be hazardous to a company’s long-term financial health and often signal a management that has run out of better ways to invest in the business. And yet investors love them. Not all stock repurchases are bad, of course. But given the enormous popularity of buybacks nowadays, those that are harmful probably outnumber the beneficial. Those who run companies like buybacks because they make their earnings look better on a per-share basis. When fewer shares are outstanding, each one technically earns more. But a company’s overall profit growth is unaffected by share buybacks.

And comparing increases in earnings per share with real profit growth reveals the impact that buybacks have on that particular measure. Call it the buyback mirage. Consider Yahoo. The company bought back shares worth $6.6 billion from 2008 to 2014, according to Robert L. Colby, a retired investment professional and developer of Corequity, an equity valuation service used by institutional investors. These purchases helped increase Yahoo’s earnings per share about 16% annually, on average. But a good bit of that performance was the buyback mirage. Growth in Yahoo’s overall net profits came in at about 11% annually. Given these figures, Mr. Colby reckoned that Yahoo, if it had invested that same amount of money in its operations, would have had to generate only a 3.2% after-tax return to produce overall net profit growth of 16% annually over those years.

Some companies argue that the money they spend repurchasing stock is a shrewd use of their capital. And given Yahoo’s track record in recent years, its management team seems to have had a hard time identifying profitable investments. But Mr. Colby pointed out that buybacks provide only a one-time benefit, while smart investments in a company’s operations can generate years of gains. This analysis may be of interest to Starboard Value, an activist investor that is a large and unhappy Yahoo shareholder. On Thursday, Starboard nominated nine directors to replace the company’s entire board, saying its current members lack “the leadership, objectivity and perspective needed to make decisions that are in the best interests of shareholders.”

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“Sure, the French may have day care and five-week vacations and 35-hour work weeks,” we’ve argued. “But we’ve got flat-screen TVs, $5 footlongs and big cars.”

Wealthier Countries Have More Leisure Time – With One Big Exception (Wef)

The American work ethic can basically be boiled down to one well-worn phrase: “Work hard, play hard.” But new research from a pair of Stanford University economists suggests we are failing, miserably, at the latter half of that maxim. Take a look at the chart below. It’s a plot of hours worked per capita versus GDP, and one country really stands out. As countries get wealthier, their annual hours worked per capita tend to decrease, at least in the sample examined here by economists Charles Jones and Peter Klenow. They measure GDP in fractions of U.S. GDP, because they’re most interested in how other countries stack up to the United States in terms of economic well-being. For instance, Russia’s GDP per capita is less than half of that in the United States, so it lands halfway down the chart’s X axis.

The relationship between GDP and working hours harkens back to economist John Maynard Keynes’ famous prediction that his grandchildren would be working 15-hour work weeks – thanks, in part, to increased productivity from new machines and technology. Since you’re probably reading this story at your office or on your commute, you’re well aware that things didn’t exactly work out this way. We didn’t trade our productivity gains for more time, we traded them instead for more stuff. But the extent of that trade-off -time versus stuff- hasn’t been the same in all countries, as the chart above illustrates. “Average annual hours worked per capita in the U.S. are 877 versus only 535 in France: the average person in France works less than two-thirds as much as the average person in the U.S.,” Jones and Klenow write. You see similar numbers in Spain, Italy and the UK.

For a long time we’ve used our stuff to justify our workaholism. “Sure, the French may have day care and five-week vacations and 35-hour work weeks,” we’ve argued. “But we’ve got flat-screen TVs, $5 footlongs and big cars.” Or, in strictly economic terms: “France’s per capita GDP is only 67% of ours. Who’s living the good life now?” But in their new research, forthcoming in the American Economic Review, Jones and Klenow attempt to devise a “a summary statistic for the economic well-being” that goes beyond GDP. Economists have proposed alternative measures incorporating everything from “greenness” to “gross national happiness.” The Stanford economists make the latest contribution to the genre with their measure that “combines data on consumption, leisure, inequality, and mortality.”

They find that when you throw these other qualities into the mix, the economic well-being gap between the United States and other wealthy countries shrinks – but it doesn’t disappear completely. “Living standards in Western Europe are much closer to those in the United States than it would appear from GDP per capita,” Jones and Klenow conclude. “Longer lives with more leisure time and more equal consumption in Western Europe largely offset their lower average consumption vis a visthe United States.” So, even when you factor in our ridiculously long work weeks, the things we miss out on when we work long hours, and the myriad ways that overwork iskilling us, the United States is still No. 1! Which is irksome, I’m sure, to the millions of French workers who spend literally the entire month of August at the beach.

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Monsanto counts on the TPP and TTiP.

Is Monsanto Losing Its Grip? (WS)

Monsanto is not having a good year. The company recently slashed its 2016 earnings forecast from the $5.10-$5.60 per share it had forecast in December to $4.40-$5.10, claiming that about 25-30 cents of the reduction was due to the stronger dollar. But judging by recent trends, a strong dollar could soon be the least of its concerns. Across a number of key markets, the company is facing growing resistance, not only from farmers and consumers but also, amazingly, governments. In India, the world’s biggest cotton producer, the Ministry of Agriculture accuses Monsanto of price gouging. It even imposed a 70% cut in the royalties that the firm’s Indian subsidiary could charge farmers for their crop genes, prompting Monsanto to threaten that it would withdraw its biotech crop genes from the country. If Monsanto’s threat was a bluff, it’s just been called.

According to Mandava Prabhakara Rao, the president of the National Seed Association of India (NSAI), Monsanto’s threat came as a big relief: All these years, the company has restrained us from using technologies other than the one developed by it. It forced the seed firms to sign the licence agreements that barred them from using other technologies. India’s government also seems unconcerned by the prospect of Monsanto’s withdrawal.“It’s now up to Monsanto to decide whether they want to accept this rate or not,” said Minister of state for agriculture and food processing, Sanjeev Balyan. “We’re not scared if Monsanto leaves the country, because our team of scientists are working to develop (an) indigenous variety of (GM) seeds.” India’s pushback against Monsanto is part of a gathering global backlash against Monsanto and the GMO industry as a whole.

Even in the U.S., where GMOs are estimated to represent more than 90% of corn, soybean, and cotton acres, the trend is no longer Monsanto’s friend. Earlier this year the company filed a lawsuit against the state of California for its intent to label glyphosate, the main chemical used in Monsanto’s flagship Roundup herbicide, as a probable carcinogen, in accordance with the World Health Organization’s recent findings. There’s also growing pressure on major food outlets to stop using GMO ingredients. After the USDA’s 2015 approval of genetically modified apples and potatoes, companies including McDonald’s and Wendy’s claimed they didn’t plan to use them, saying they were happy with non-GMO suppliers. Even more importantly, the Orwellian-titled Deny Americans the Right to Know (DARK) act, aimed at prohibiting mandatory GMO labelling, was defeated in the Senate last week.

Meanwhile, in Mexico, Monsanto’s fourth biggest market after the U.S., Brazil, and Argentina, a moratorium remains in place on the granting of licenses for GMO seed manufacturers like Monsanto, Dow, and Du Pont. In the face of growing public and judicial opposition, Monsanto & Friends have pinned their hopes on the Peña Nieto government’s upcoming agrarian reform act. Manuel Bravo, Monsanto’s director for Latin America, recently told El País that he is confident that once the legal problems in the courts are “resolved,” the issue will become a central plank in the current administration’s agenda. “The Government has been very clear about the importance of these technologies,” he said. Across the Atlantic, Monsanto’s problems are somewhat more intractable. Already more than half of EU countries have moved to bar GMO cultivation, while a last-minute mutiny by four EU states (France, Sweden, Italy, and the Netherlands) recently forced the postponement of a vote in Brussels on re-licensing glyphosate.

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“This is a complicated, multi-sided war where our options are severely limited..”

Pentagon, CIA-Armed Militias Fight Each Other In Syria (LA Times)

Syrian militias armed by different parts of the U.S. war machine have begun to fight each other on the plains between the besieged city of Aleppo and the Turkish border, highlighting how little control U.S. intelligence officers and military planners have over the groups they have financed and trained in the bitter five-year-old civil war. The fighting has intensified over the last two months, as CIA-armed units and Pentagon-armed ones have repeatedly shot at each other while maneuvering through contested territory on the northern outskirts of Aleppo, U.S. officials and rebel leaders have confirmed. In mid-February, a CIA-armed militia called Fursan al Haq, or Knights of Righteousness, was run out of the town of Marea, about 20 miles north of Aleppo, by Pentagon-backed Syrian Democratic Forces moving in from Kurdish-controlled areas to the east.

“Any faction that attacks us, regardless from where it gets its support, we will fight it,” Maj. Fares Bayoush, a leader of Fursan al Haq, said in an interview. Rebel fighters described similar clashes in the town of Azaz, a key transit point for fighters and supplies between Aleppo and the Turkish border, and on March 3 in the Aleppo neighborhood of Sheikh Maqsud. The attacks by one U.S.-backed group against another come amid continued heavy fighting in Syria and illustrate the difficulty facing U.S. efforts to coordinate among dozens of armed groups that are trying to overthrow the government of President Bashar Assad, fight the Islamic State militant group and battle one another all at the same time. “It is an enormous challenge,” said Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Burbank), the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, who described the clashes between U.S.-supported groups as “a fairly new phenomenon.”

“It is part of the three-dimensional chess that is the Syrian battlefield,” he said. The area in northern Syria around Aleppo, the country’s second-largest city, features not only a war between the Assad government and its opponents, but also periodic battles against Islamic State militants, who control much of eastern Syria and also some territory to the northwest of the city, and long-standing tensions among the ethnic groups that inhabit the area, Arabs, Kurds and Turkmen. “This is a complicated, multi-sided war where our options are severely limited,” said a U.S. official, who wasn’t authorized to speak publicly on the matter. “We know we need a partner on the ground. We can’t defeat ISIL without that part of the equation, so we keep trying to forge those relationships.”

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More refugees.

Saudi Arabia Campaign Leaves 80% Of Yemen Population Needing Aid (G.)

It is difficult to view Saudi Arabia’s relentless war of attrition in Yemen as anything other than a destructive failure. The military intervention that began one year ago has killed an estimated 6,400 people, half of them civilians, injured 30,000 more and displaced 2.5 million, according to the UN. Eighty per cent of the population, about 20 million people, are now in need of some form of aid. The Saudis’ principal aim – to restore Yemen’s deposed president, Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi – has not been achieved. If they hoped to contain spreading Iranian regional influence, that has not worked, either. If the US-backed coalition’s campaign was intended to combat terrorism, that too has flopped. Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), in particular, and Islamic State (Isis) have profited from the continuing anarchy.

The conflict pits Aden-based Hadi government forces and their Sunni Arab allies against Houthi Shia militias, backed by Tehran, who control the capital, Sana’a, and much of central and northern Yemen. Already one of the world’s poorest countries before fighting escalated last year, Yemen now faces widespread famine. Food shortages are being exacerbated by a growing bank and credit crisis, Oxfam warned this week. “The destruction of farms and markets, a de facto blockade on commercial imports, and a long-running fuel crisis have caused a drop in agricultural production, a scarcity of supplies and exorbitant food prices,” Oxfam said. Sajjad Mohamed Sajid, Oxfam’s country director, said: “A brutal conflict on top of an existing crisis … has created one of the biggest humanitarian emergencies in the world today – yet most people are unaware of it. Close to 14.4 million people are hungry and the majority will not be able to withstand the rising prices.”

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Inevitable. Refugee streams flow like water. Impossible to stop.

Smugglers Prepare New Human Trafficking Route To Italy (DW)

Trafficking gangs are arranging a new way to ship migrants from Turkey to the EU by sailing to Italy, a leading German newspaper reports. Demand for alternative routes has been rising for weeks, according to the article. The smugglers intended to start transporting refugees via the new Italian route in the first week of April, according to the Sunday edition of the “Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung” newspaper. They would reportedly use small cargo vessels and fishing ships to ferry their customers from the seaside resort Antalya in Turkey, the Turkish city of Mersin near the Syrian border, and the Greek capital Athens. According to the paper, the price for such trip is between 3,000 and 5,000 euros ($3,400 -$5,600), which is much more expensive than traveling the usual route from Turkish shores to one of the Greek islands.

However, refugees face growing obstacles attempting to reach Western Europe through Greece, with several countries along the Balkan route closing their borders to migrants. Last week, the EU also forged an agreement with Ankara about shipping migrants back to Turkey, slowing the influx to a trickle. The traffickers responded to growing demand for alternative routes in recent weeks by preparing their new venture, according to the Sunday article. Some of the smugglers aimed to offer two trips per week, and at least one claimed he could fit 200 people on a boat. They also advised migrants to stay below deck until the vessels reached international waters. In addition to migrants in Turkey and Greece, hundreds of thousands of people were waiting to cross to Italy from Libya, EU officials said. The Italian interior ministry has registered almost 14,000 arrivals this year.

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“..In August [2015], we had 40-50 Moroccans, and in November, their number was over 7,000.”

EU Prepares For Massive Migration Flows From Libya (EurActiv)

EU leaders will discuss the critical situation in Libya and potential waves of immigrants trying to reach Europe on 18 April, EurActiv Greece has been informed. The discussion will take place following the regular Foreign Affairs Council meeting and ahead of Foreign Affairs Council Defence on 19 April, in Luxembourg. French Defence Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian said yesterday (24 March) that some 800,000 migrants are in Libya hoping to cross to Europe. Le Drian told Europe 1 radio that “hundreds of thousands” of migrants were in Libya, having fled conflict and poverty in the Middle East and elsewhere, adding that the figure of 800,000 was “about right”. In an interview with EurActiv in December, Greece’s Alternate Foreign Minister for European Affairs, Nikos Xydakis, noted that new routes and new compositions [in migration flows] were found.

“The people who now come from the Turkish coast to the Greek islands are from the Maghreb. Let me give you an example. In August [2015], we had 40-50 Moroccans, and in November, their number was over 7,000.” “The route we have identified is the following: Moroccans and Algerians can travel without a visa from Maghreb countries, with a very cheap ticket with Turkish Airlines, directly to Constantinople [Istanbul], and then they easily reach the coast and go to the other side [Greece],” Xydakis said. But the presence of NATO in the Aegean Sea combined with a possible “isolation” in Greece due to the closed borders on the north might have discouraged migrants and re-directed the routes.

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Feb 282016
 
 February 28, 2016  Posted by at 9:07 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,  4 Responses »


Harris&Ewing US Weather Bureau kiosque, Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, DC 1921

Markets At Risk As G20 Proves Investor Hopes Were “Pure Fantasy” (ZH)
Currency Wars Coming In Leaderless World: Citi’s Buiter (CNBC)
G-20 Wants Governments Doing More, and Central Banks Less (BBG)
We’re In Recession And It’s Getting Worse: Ron Paul (CNBC)
PBoC Defends Halting Publication Of Sensitive Financial Data (SCMP)
How Xi Jinping Is Bringing China’s Media To Heel (Guardian)
Mervyn King: New Financial Crisis Is ‘Certain’ Without Reform Of Banks (PA)
Hidden Debt That No One Is Talking About -And It Involves You- (SMH)
North Sea Firms Are ‘Sleepwalking Into Disaster’ As Insolvencies Loom (Tel.)
European Oil Majors Tally $19 Billion In Losses (MW)
Citigroup Faces Fraud Suit Claiming $1.1 Billion in Losses (BBG)
How Land Barons, Industrialists And Bankers Corrupted Economics (Kent)
Alabama Lawmakers To Cities: We Won’t Let You Raise The Minimum Wage (CSM)
The Donald – The Good And Bad Of It (David Stockman)
Switzerland Votes On Expelling Foreigners For Minor Offences (Guardian)
Double Crisis Deepens Despair In Greece’s ‘Warehouse Of Souls’ (Guardian)

As I said yesterday before the communique was out.

Markets At Risk As G20 Proves Investor Hopes Were “Pure Fantasy” (ZH)

Anyone hoping this week’s G-20 meeting would yield some manner of “Shanghai Accord” to revive sluggish global growth, pull the global economy out of the deflationary doldrums and calm jittery markets that have seen harrowing bouts of volatility in the first two months of the year are disappointed on Saturday. The joint communique issued by policymakers at the end of the two-day summit is bland and generic, with officials parroting vacuous promises to avoid competitive currency devaluations and maintain monetary policies aimed at supporting economic activity and price stability. Officials pledged to “consult closely” on FX markets, a reference presumably to China’s “surprise” August 11 deval and the PBoC’s move in December to adopt a trade weighted basket as a reference point for the RMB, a move that telegraphed lots of downside for the currency.

The statement also “acknowledges” the fact that geopolitical risks abound and as Bloomberg noted this morning, “officials added a potential ‘Brexit’ to its long worry list in the communique.” “That’s a win for Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne, who had sought to rally international finance chiefs behind the campaign to keep Britain in the European Union,” Bloomberg goes on to point out. “Downside risks and vulnerabilities have risen,” due to volatile capital flows and slumping commodities but – and this was a critical passage – “monetary policy alone cannot lead to balanced growth.” What?! We thought counter-cyclical Keynesian tinkering was the magic elixir. A cure-all that smooths business cycles and creates demand out of thin air.

Now you’re telling us it “can’t lead to balanced growth” and implicitly that Paul Krugman is a snake oil salesman? This can’t be. “The global recovery continues, but it remains uneven and falls short of our ambition for strong, sustainable and balanced growth,” the statment continues, in a rather dour assessment of the economic landscape. “While recognising these challenges, we nevertheless judge that the magnitude of recent market volatility has not reflected the underlying fundamentals of the global economy,” officials added. Right. If markets were “reflecting the underlying fundamentals” of this global deflationary trainwreck, things would probably be even more volatile.

Predictably, everyone called on fiscal policy to save the day, in what amounts to a tacit admission that central banks have failed. “Countries will use fiscal policy flexibly to strengthen growth, job creation and confidence, while enhancing resilience and ensuring debt as a share of GDP is on a sustainable path,” the statement reads. So countries will somehow adopt expansionary fiscal policies without resorting to deficit financing via debt sales. So, magic. Got it. Long story short, there is no “Shanghai Accord” akin to the 1985 Plaza Accord between the United States, France, West Germany, Japan, and the United Kingdom, which agreed to weaken the USD to shore up America’s trade deficit and boost economic growth. All we have here is a generic statement and empty promises.

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Even Buiter agrees.

Currency Wars Coming In Leaderless World: Citi’s Buiter (CNBC)

The global economy is bound to remain leaderless, as G-20 countries meeting in Shanghai on Friday are unlikely to produce anything more than a rhetorical statement, Citigroup’s chief economist Willem Buiter said. Buiter said Friday the global economy truly needs an agreement on exchange rates that will be defended through intervention, as well as expansion of supportive monetary policy, fiscal stimulus modulated according to countries’ needs, and “supply side reforms that sustain animal spirits in the corporate sector.” “You’re not going to get any of that in substance. There is no leadership in the global economy. And there is no willingness to forgo the short-run benefits of beggar-thy-neighbor exchange rate depreciation. Currency wars will be the reality of what we’ll see over the next few years,” he told CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street”.

Buiter and Citigroup analysts said in a note Wednesday the risk of the global economy falling into a recession is rising as fundamentals remain poor. “We are currently in a highly precarious environment for global growth and asset markets after two to three years of relative calm,” Citigroup said, noting that global growth was “unusually weak” in the fourth quarter at around 2 percent. Buiter said central banks are nearly out of ammo when it comes to using conventional and unconventional monetary policy as a means of stimulating demand. “If we have a further slowdown, it will have to be combined more with the fiscal policy, and the world just isn’t ready for that, institutionally, politically and any other way,” he said.

At the same time, the private and public sectors in most advanced economies have become highly leveraged, he noted. Citi is not expecting a U.S. recession, provided no surprises from abroad send the dollar sharply higher. But it does anticipate a further incremental slowing in the absence of a supportive Federal Reserve and as corporations ratchet up debt following a period of “unspectacular, mediocre” growth, he said. Markets have appropriately priced in the risk of recession following last year’s “excessive optimism,” he said. “Markets are ahead of the policymakers here for once,” he said. “People have now rediscovered that, yes, future earnings growth projections on which the stock valuations were based were unrealistic.”

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While knowing that governments won’t.

G-20 Wants Governments Doing More, and Central Banks Less (BBG)

Finance chiefs from the world’s top economies committed their governments to doing more to boost global growth amid mounting concerns over the potency of monetary policy. In a pledge that will prove easier to write than deliver and may disappoint investors looking for a coordinated stimulus plan, the Group of 20 said “we will use fiscal policy flexibly to strengthen growth, job creation and confidence.” After a two-day meeting in Shanghai, finance ministers and central bank governors also doubled down on a line from their last gathering that “monetary policy alone cannot lead to balanced growth.” For those few analysts calling for a 1985 Plaza Accord-type agreement to address exchange-rate tensions, there was no such luck: IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde said there were no discussions about anything like that.

The G-20 members did reaffirm they will refrain from competitive devaluations, and – in new language – agreed to consult closely on currencies. An increasing sense monetary policy is reaching its limit permeated officials’ briefings during the meetings that ended Saturday. While central banks proved critical in avoiding a global slide into depression last decade, there is now no consensus among the world’s top economic guardians backing stepped-up monetary stimulus. That leaves focus on fiscal polices that are subject to domestic political constraints, and a structural-reform agenda the G-20 said will be gauged through a new indicator system. “Central bankers have done their bit in recent years to stabilize the world economy,” said Frederic Neumann at HSBC in Hong Kong.

“But as their tools are losing their effectiveness, only more aggressive fiscal policy and structural reforms will help to lift growth.” Among those publicly indicating a potentially reduced role for central banks was Lagarde, who said Friday the effects of monetary policies, even innovative ones, are diminishing. Bank of England Governor Mark Carney used a Shanghai speech ahead of the G-20 to voice skepticism over negative interest rates – now in place in continental Europe and Japan – and their ability to boost domestic demand.

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“They’re paid to spin it in a positive manner..” “You can’t expect them to say anything else.”

We’re In Recession And It’s Getting Worse: Ron Paul (CNBC)

Ron Paul wants to deliver a message to the market that he claims the Federal Reserve refuses to do itself. The former U.S. Republican congressman said this week that the Fed has been propping up markets, and the U.S. economy has already entered a recession despite what central bankers might say. “They’re paid to spin it in a positive manner,” the libertarian firebrand told CNBC’s “Futures Now” in an interview. He added: “You can’t expect them to say anything else.” Paul’s warning comes as a growing number on Wall Street have turned pessimistic on the economy. This week, Citigroup analysts cautioned in a note that the risk of the global economy sinking into a full-fledged recession is on the rise, amid a “tightening in financial conditions everywhere.”

Dragging down the economy is a massive load of personal and sovereign debt, Paul said. A 2015 analysis by the McKinsey Global Institute said that global debt had grown by $57 trillion in the last several years, while no major economy has successfully de-leveraged since 2007. According to Paul, the Fed has played a large role in that accumulation of debt by implementing artificially low interest rates for years. This has pushed individuals and companies to spend beyond their means, he added.

“When things get out of kilter from artificially low interest rates…the only correction is the liquidation of the debt, but that is not permissible,” Paul said. Now, Paul warned that the government may be losing control of markets, which will lead to more volatility in stocks. “Everything is designed to keep the stock market alive. At the same time, the employment numbers when you look at them closely aren’t all that great,” he said. In January, the U.S. economy added 151,000 jobs, missing economist expectations and falling well short from the previous month. From here, Paul said growth will continue to deteriorate. “I think that the conditions will get a lot worse,” he said. “The slope is going to be down, for economic growth and prosperity.”

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Lame defense that breaks down confidence instead of building it up.

PBoC Defends Halting Publication Of Sensitive Financial Data (SCMP)

China’s central bank has defended the removal of sensitive data from a regular financial report used by the market to assess the flow of capital in and out of the country. The People’s Bank of China said in a statement that the figures were no longer published as they were misleading and not an accurate reflection of capital flows. The removal of the data comes as huge amounts of cash is flowing out of China as the nation’s economy slows and its currency weakens. China’s foreign exchange reserves fell by a record US$108 billion in December and US$99.4 billion in January. The absence of the regular figures in the report was first reported by the South China Morning Post last week. Analysts had complained that sudden lack of clear information made it hard for markets to draw a clear picture of the financial positions in China’s banking system.

Figures on the “position for forex purchase” for all financial institutions, including the central bank, were regularly published in the PBOC’s monthly report on the “Sources and Uses of Credit Funds of Financial Institutions”. The December reading in yuan was 26.6 trillion yuan. But the data was missing in the central bank’s latest report. The central bank did publish figures for its own purchases of foreign exchange. A central bank statement issued before the start of a G20 finance ministers and central bank leaders meeting in Shanghai said the figures on “commercial banks foreign exchange transactions do not necessarily affect the central bank’s foreign exchange position, nor necessarily reflect capital flows”. The data has “little resemblance to its original meaning and cannot reflect the real condition of capital flows”, the statement said.

The indicator was useful to measure capital flows when almost all foreign exchange at commercial banks was purchased in yuan, but particularly after China joined the World Trade Organisation in 2001 the correlation between foreign exchange and yuan positions at commercial banks was no longer clear, the central bank said. The data removed from the report used to be closely monitored by analysts and the media as a guide to capital flows in and out of China. Chen Xingdong, chief economist at BNP Paribas in Beijing, said: “If China’s capital flows were not so closely watched, the tweak may not stir debate, but as China’s capital flow situation is such a hot issue the central bank’s adjustment is put under the spotlight. China’s central bank has to improve its communications” with the market, he said.

[..] Christopher Balding, an associate professor at Peking University HSBC Business School, said the change in published data was relatively small, but still made it more complicated to track China’s capital flows. “Rather than censoring or redacting, it is better to say obfuscating or making [it] more difficult to track,” said Balding. It showed the central bank was unaware “how sceptical people are of these types of surprises and Chinese data”, he said. The problems with central bank data were similar to figures released by other Chinese government agencies, according to Balding. “They are constantly redefining key data to mean different things, most of the time without telling anyone…you never know if you are making the correct comparison.”

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Great way to create confidence.

How Xi Jinping Is Bringing China’s Media To Heel (Guardian)

It was an astonishing admission from one of the Communist party’s key mouthpieces: with China’s economic star fading, its leaders now urgently needed to strengthen their hold on the media in order to maintain control. “It is necessary for the media to restore people’s trust in the Party,” an editorial in the China Daily argued this week in the wake of a high-profile presidential tour of the country’s top news outlets in which Xi Jinping demanded “absolute loyalty” from their journalists. “The nation’s media outlets are essential to political stability.” China’s government-run media has long been a propaganda tool of the Party with Chairman Mao once famously declaring: “Revolution relies on pens and guns.”

But as Xi Jinping enters his third year as president experts say he is seeking to cement that grip even further, doubling down on the Party’s control of organisations such as state broadcaster CCTV, official news agency Xinhua, and Beijing’s flagship newspaper, the People’s Daily. “They must love the party, protect the party, and closely align themselves with the party leadership in thought, politics and action,” Xi told newsroom staff during a highly choreographed tour of the three outlets last Friday after which he set out his blueprint for the media. In case Xi’s message had been missed, an editorial in the People’s Daily informed news reporters their key role was not as speakers of truth to power but “disseminators of the Party’s policies and propositions”. “Guiding public opinion for the Party is crucial to governance of the country,” the newspaper said.

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‘Lord King’. How odd that sounds.

Mervyn King: New Financial Crisis Is ‘Certain’ Without Reform Of Banks (PA)

Another financial crisis is “certain” and will come sooner rather than later, the former Bank of England governor has warned. Mervyn King, who headed the bank between 2003 and 2013, believes the world economy will soon face another crash as regulators have failed to reform banking. He has also claimed that the 2008 crisis was the fault of the financial system, not individual greedy bankers, in his new book, The End Of Alchemy: Money, Banking And The Future Of The Global Economy, serialised in The Telegraph. “Without reform of the financial system, another crisis is certain, and the failure … to tackle the disequilibrium in the world economy makes it likely that it will come sooner rather than later,” Lord King wrote.

He added that global central banks were caught in a “prisoner’s dilemma” – unable to raise interest rates for fear of stifling the economic recovery, the newspaper reported. A remark from a Chinese colleague who said the west had not got the hang of money and banking was the inspiration for his book. Lord King, 67, said without understanding what caused the crash, politicians and bankers would be unable to prevent another, and lays the blame at the door of a broken financial system. He said: “The crisis was a failure of a system, and the ideas that underpinned it, not of individual policymakers or bankers, incompetent and greedy though some of them undoubtedly were.” Spending imbalances both within and between countries led to the crisis in 2008 and he believes a current disequilibrium will lead to the next.

To solve the problem, Lord King suggests raising productivity and boldly reforming the banking system. He said: “Only a fundamental rethink of how we, as a society, organise our system of money and banking will prevent a repetition of the crisis that we experienced in 2008.” Lord King was in charge of the Bank of England when the credit crunch struck in 2007, leading to the collapse of Northern Rock and numerous other British lenders, including RBS, and has been criticised for failing to see the global financial crisis coming.

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Private debt. Warrants far more attention than it gets. See Steve Keen.

Hidden Debt That No One Is Talking About -And It Involves You- (SMH)

There’s a paradox when it comes to debt in Australia. We have endless debate about the magnitude of the government’s borrowings, even though they are comparatively low by global standards. Meanwhile, the level of household debt gets relatively little attention even though it’s among the highest in the world. In the past two decades the debt owed by households has risen from about 80% of combined income to more than 180%. A fresh surge in borrowing driven by the recent boom in house prices, coupled with slow wage growth, has pushed the debt-to-income ratio to new heights. When economist Kieran Davies last year compared countries using another measure – the ratio of household debt to gross domestic product – he found Australia’s to be the world’s highest, just above Denmark, Switzerland and the Netherlands.

Australians’ household debts may be manageable now, but higher interest rates would stretch many people. Even so, I think Australia’s household debt story gets less scrutiny than it deserves, considering the risks. About 85% of household borrowings – which include mortgages, credit cards, overdrafts and personal loans – are owed to Australian lenders, mostly banks. The Reserve Bank pointed out recently that a small but fast-growing proportion is owed to Australian governments – mostly university-related HECS/HELP debt – and to overseas banks and governments, which is mostly owed by recent migrants. Household surveys by research firm Digital Finance Analytics have found more than one in 10 owner-occupiers would have difficulty meeting their mortgage repayments if interest rates were to rise by just 1 percentage point from their current historic lows.

Martin North, the principal of Digital Finance Analytics, says it’s not just low-income households that are exposed. “My reading is that overall the market is OK but there are some significant pockets of stress even in this low-interest rate environment,” he said. “But those pockets are not necessarily where you would expect the risk to be, it’s not just western Sydney for example. Some quite affluent people who have taken out very large mortgages are more leveraged and therefore more exposed if interest rates were to rise.” One striking trend going largely under the radar is the dramatic shift in customers using short-term loans from so called “payday lenders” following regulatory changes in 2013 and advances in information technology. In the past, payday loans were typically used by those on very low incomes in financial crisis. But a growing share of these loans – now called “small amount credit contracts” – are being taken out by those in higher income groups.

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High time to scrutinize the lenders.

North Sea Firms Are ‘Sleepwalking Into Disaster’ As Insolvencies Loom (Tel.)

The North Sea industry is “sleepwalking” into a wave of insolvencies in the coming months as the full brunt of the collapse in the price of crude causes the finances of many companies to buckle, some of the City’s top restructuring lawyers have said. The majority of North Sea firms have so far endured a punishing 70pc oil price decline since 2014 by relying on loans which were approved based on market hedges secured one to two years before the market crash. But with hedge positions now unwinding firms will be exposed to the full brunt of the oil collapse and the increasingly stressed loan facilities keeping them afloat will be stretched to breaking point. Lenders may have offered firms a stay of execution last year in anticipation of a market recovery, but hopes for significantly higher crude prices are now dashed.

Within weeks, big North Sea lenders will begin a review of the loans that have propped up many Aim-listed explorers through the 18-month oil price rout, prompting a swath of insolvencies later this year.. Stephen Phillips, head of restructuring at Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe, said: “There’s a sense that the North Sea may be sleepwalking into a disaster zone.” Simon Tysoe a partner at Latham & Watkins, said half a dozen North Sea explorers were being actively discussed by banks and lenders as firms which will go into restructuring and possibly insolvency. North Sea bankruptcies have been rare in the past but the severity of the current downturn has already forced Iona Energy and First Oil Expro, two smaller oil companies, to call in administrators.

Now larger Aim-listed firms look at risk, which will also leave project partners and oilfield service firms vulnerable as the financial contagion spreads through the embattled sector. Mr Tysoe said: “Most oil companies have in fact not been selling their oil at $30 a barrel, they’ve been selling their oil at prices like $75 a barrel, notwithstanding the spot price of oil, because they’ve had financial hedges in place.” “The impact of this collapse is going to look very bad. In oilfield services, the position is significantly worse. The question is: when will lenders pull the trigger?”

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How much did the banks lose?

European Oil Majors Tally $19 Billion In Losses (MW)

How much has Big Oil in Europe lost in the last quarter? Try $19 billion — or slightly more than Iceland’s entire economy. The culprit is of course an unrelenting decline in crude and Brent prices through the period, when the contracts slid 18% and 24%, respectively. That sparked a round of significant impairment charges, project delays and reduced exploration among Europe’s major energy companies, with the majority of the Stoxx Europe 600’s oil and gas producers reporting losses in the one-billion dollar territory. “It’s been a mixed bag for oil company results — most have been pressured by weaker oil prices,” said Jason Kenney, head of pan-European oil equity research at Banco Santander, in emailed comments.

“Many have had to write down assets given the new oil price environment. The key to weathering the storm is disinvestment in our view — cutting costs, lowering capex, deferring spend, divesting peripheral businesses, offloading capital commitments, restructuring operations, and generally squeezing more from current operations for hopefully a lot less,” he added. Earnings from Europe’s oil majors have trickled out through February and were rounded off with a set of downbeat fourth-quarter numbers from Italian oil giant Eni on Friday. Eni said its quarterly loss more than tripled to 8.5 billion euros ($9.4 billion) in the final three months of the year, bringing the total tally of losses among the European oil majors to $19.3 billion..

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Does Belgium jail people for fraud? How about bankers?

Citigroup Faces Fraud Suit Claiming $1.1 Billion in Losses (BBG)

Citigroup Inc. was sued for fraud by investors and creditors of a bankrupt Mexican oil services firm over claims they were harmed by a loan scheme that also led the bank to cut 2013 profit by $235 million and fire at least a dozen people. Citigroup’s loans led to the 2014 collapse of the Mexican firm Oceanografia, and caused Dutch lender Rabobank, with investors and creditors, to lose at least $1.1 billion, according to the lawsuit filed Friday in Miami federal court. Rabobank and other investors separately filed a negligence suit in Delaware state court against auditor KPMG. Citigroup’s Mexican subsidiary, Banamex, made short-term loans to Oceanografia, which did work for state-run Petroleos Mexicanos, or Pemex. In turn, Pemex repaid the bank.

Citigroup CEO Michael Corbat said in February 2014 that $400 million of accounts receivable from Oceanografia were fraudulent. He said the bank was working with Mexican authorities and would find out “who perpetrated this despicable crime.” Rabobank and the investors claim Citigroup conspired with Oceanografia to accept falsified work estimates even as the oil services firm became increasingly dependent on cash advances to survive. Those Citigroup loans propped up Oceanografia, while Pemex repaid the bank with millions of dollars in interest, according to the complaint. “Intentional misconduct on the part of Wall Street banks – including Citigroup specifically – is far from unfamiliar,” according to the complaint. “Yet again, greed and dishonesty have victimized blameless businesses and investors.”

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Things weren’t always like this.

How Land Barons, Industrialists And Bankers Corrupted Economics (Kent)

The Corruption of Economics by Mason Gaffney and Fred Harrison, while free online, is hardly known; as of December 2015 only three New Zealand university libraries and the Auckland Public Library held copies. Yet in it is a very important story. Fred Harrison describes the phenomenon of Henry George, the San Francisco journalist who took the world by storm with his book Progress and Poverty in 1879, in which he argues that the benefits of land ownership must be shared by all and that a single tax is needed to fund government – a land tax. The factors of production are land, capital and labour. Untax labour and tax land was the cry. Poverty could be beaten. Social justice was possible! Of Henry George influential economic historian John Kenneth Galbraith writes,

“In his time and even into the 1920s and 1930s Henry George was the most widely read of American economic writers both at home and in Europe. He was, indeed, one of the most widely read of Americans. Progress and Poverty… in various editions and reprintings… had a circulation in the millions.” Unlike many writers, Henry George didn’t stop there. He took his message of hope everywhere he could travel – across America and to England, New Zealand, Australia, Scotland and Ireland. He turned political. Seven years after his book came out in remote California, in 1886 he narrowly missed out on being elected Mayor of New York, outpolling Teddy Roosevelt. During the 1890s George, Henry George was the third most famous American, after Mark Twain and Thomas Edison. Ten years after Progress and Poverty he was influencing a radical wing of the British Liberal Party.

He was read by semi-literate workers from Birmingham, Alabama to Liverpool, England. His Single Tax was understood by peasants in the remotest crofts of Scotland and Ireland. Gaffney’s section of the book outlines how certain rich land barons, industrialists and bankers funded influential universities in America and proceeded to change the direction of their economics departments. He names names at every turn, wading through presidents and funders of many prestigious universities. In particular, Gaffney, an economist himself, names the economists bought to discredit his theories, their debates with George and their papers written over many decades.

“George’s ideas were carried worldwide by such towering figures as Lloyd George in England, Leo Tolstoy and Alexander Kerensky in Russia, Sun Yat-sen in China, hundreds of local and state and a few power national politicians in both Canada and the USA, Billy Hughes in Australia, Rolland O’Regan in New Zealand, Chaim Weizmann in Palestine, Francisco Madero in Mexico, and many others in Denmark, South Africa and around the world. In England Lloyd George’s budget speech of 1909 reads in part as though written by Henry George himself. Some of Winston Churchill’s speeches were written by Georgist ghosts.” When he died there were 100,000 at his funeral.

The wealthy and influential just couldn’t let the dangerous ideas spread. Their privileged position was gravely threatened. Henry George must be stopped. But the strategy had to be subtle. What better route than by using their money to influence the supposed fount of all knowledge, the universities? That would then indoctrinate journalists and the general public. Nice one! The story explains how, for their wealthy paymasters, academics corrupted the language to subsume it under capital. They redefined rent, and created a jargon to confuse public debate. Harrison says, ‘For a century they have taken people down blind alleys with abstract models and algebraic equations. Economics became detached from the real world in the course of the twentieth century.’ Yes, the wealthy paid money to buy scholars to pervert the science.

Gaffney’s rich, whimsical language is a joy to read. He writes to Harrison, ‘Systematic, universal brainwashing is the crime, tendentious mental conditioning calculated to mislead students, to impoverish their mental ability, to bend their minds to the service of a system that funnels power and wealth to a parasitic minority.’

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“..we’re talking about a legislature … that says we don’t care about y’all.”

Alabama Lawmakers To Cities: We Won’t Let You Raise The Minimum Wage (CSM)

While major demonstrations have led to a $15 minimum wage in San Francisco, Seattle, New York Los Angeles, and 10 other cities in the past year, Birmingham’s plans to boost local wages have been thwarted by state legislation. The city council of Birmingham, Ala., voted 7 to 0 (with one abstention) to become the first city in the deep South to enact a minimum wage above the current federal level of $7.25. The ordinance planned an increase to $8.50 per hour by July 2016, with a second increase to $10.10 set for July 2017. But the Alabama legislature this past week fired back, passing a bill that prevents cities and counties from mandating their own benefits, including minimum wage, vacation time, or set work schedules. The bill passed easily in both houses and Gov. Robert Bentley signed it into law on Thursday.

Supporters argued that a “patchwork” of varying wages would devastate businesses, cost jobs, and send the regional economy into a slump. “We want businesses to expand and create more jobs – not cut entry-level jobs because a patchwork of local minimum wages causes operating costs to rise,” said State Sen. Jabo Waggoner (R) after the bill’s passage. Critics of the new law countered that higher wages lift families out of poverty and inject new spending into the regional economy. “We’re talking about the bare survival of people,” said Sen. Rodger Smitherman (D), reported the Montgomery Advertiser. “And we’re talking about a legislature … that says we don’t care about y’all.” “When you lift a person on the bottom, everybody above them is lifted up,” he added.

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No space here for the whole thing, but very much worth the time.

The Donald – The Good And Bad Of It (David Stockman)

[..] Once upon a time, by contrast, the GOP actually stood for free markets, fiscal rectitude, hard money and minimalist government. Calvin Coolidge did a pretty good job of it. And even the unfairly besmirched Warren G. Harding got us out of the foreign intervention business—-a path that the great Dwight D. Eisenhower pretty consistently hewed to under the far more challenging conditions of the cold war. But these were sons of America’s old school interior – Massachusetts, Ohio and Kansas. As temporary sojourners in Washington, they remained incredulous and chary of grand state missions either at home or abroad. Harding called it returning to “normalcy”. Coolidge said Washington’s business was to get out of the way.

And Ike actually shrank the Warfare state by one-third, ended Truman’s wars and started no new ones, resisted much of the Dulles’ brother’s interventionist agenda, balanced the budget and froze the New Deal as hard in place at he had the votes to achieve. Today’s Republican crowd bears no resemblance. They live in the capital, fully embrace its projects and pretensions and visit the provinces as sparingly as possible. And that’s why The Donald has them so rattled, even petrified. To be sure, there is much that is ugly, superficial and stupid about Donald Trump’s campaign platform, if you can call it that, or loose cannon oratory to be more exact. More on that below, but at the heart of his appeal are two propositions which strike terror in the hearts of the Imperial City’s GOP operatives.

To wit, he is loudly self-funding his own campaign and bombastically insisting that America is getting a bad deal everywhere in the world. The first of these propositions explicitly tells the legions of K-Street lobbies to take a hike, thereby posing a mortal threat to the fund raising rackets which are the GOPs lifeblood. And while the “bad deal” abroad is superficially about NAFTA and our $500 billion trade deficit with China, it is really an attack on the American Imperium The American people are sick and tired of the Lindsay Graham/John McCain/George Bush/neocon wars of intervention and occupation; and they resent the massive fiscal burdens of our outmoded but still far-flung alliances, forward bases and apparatus of security assistance and economic aid. They especially have no patience for the continued huge cost of our commitments to cold war relics like NATO, the stationing of troops in South Korea and the defense treaty with the incorrigible Japanese, who still blatantly rig their trade rules against American exports.

In short, The Donald is tapping a nationalist/isolationist impulse that runs deep among a weary and economically precarious main street public. He is clever enough to articulate it in the bombast of what sounds like a crude trade protectionism. Yet if Pat Buchanan were to re-write his speech, it would be more erudite and explicit about the folly of the American Imperium, but the message would be the same. That’s why the War Party is so desperate, and why its last great hope is the bantam weight Senator from Florida. In truth, Marco Rubio is an obnoxious kid who wants to be President so he can play with guns, planes, ships and bombs. He is a pure creature of the Imperial City, even if at his young age he has idled there only since 2010.

Yet down to the last nuance of his insipid neocon worldview and monotonous recitation of the American Exceptionalism catechism, he might as well have been born in Washington of GS-16 parents, not Cuban refugees, raised as a Congressional page, and apprenticed to the Speaker of the US House rather than serving as the same in the backwaters of Tallahassee. What Marco Rubio is all about is Warfare State republicanism. When he talks about restoring American Greatness it is through the agency of Imperial Washington. He has no kinship with Harding, Coolidge or Eisenhower. None of them were intent on searching the earth for monsters to destroy, as does Rubio in every single speech.

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Traffic violations?! Gives a whole new meaning to ‘two strikes you’re out’.

Switzerland Votes On Expelling Foreigners For Minor Offences (Guardian)

Switzerland votes in a referendum Sunday on whether foreigner citizens who commit two minor offences, like traffic violations, in the space of 10 years should be automatically deported. The referendum asks whether any foreign national found guilty of two lower-level infractions, including fighting, money laundering, giving false testimony and indecent exposure, should be expelled. The vote comes at a time when many European countries are hardening their attitudes to migrants after more than a million arrived on the continent last year. A quarter of the people living in Switzerland have a foreign passport, the majority of them from European countries.

More than half of Swiss voters backed strengthening rules to automatically expel foreign nationals convicted of violent or sexual crimes in a referendum on the same topic six years ago. But the populist right-wing Swiss People’s Party (SVP), which won the biggest share of the vote in parliamentary elections last October, has accused parliament of dragging its feet on writing the text into law and watering it down when it did so last March. Known for its virulent campaigns against immigration, the European Union and Islam, the party has proposed tougher rules, calling for “a real deportation of criminal foreigners”. The initiative faces stiff opposition, including from the government, parliament and all the other major political parties, who have warned it circumvents the “fundamental rules” of democracy.

If passed, it would dramatically increase the number of offences that could get foreign nationals automatically kicked out of Switzerland, including misdemeanours usually punishable with fines or short prison sentences. It would also remove a judge’s right to refrain from deportation in cases where it would cause the foreign national “serious personal hardship”. More than 50,000 people including hundreds of celebrities have signed a petition against the proposals. [..] Opponents warn that if the text passes, people born to foreign parents in Switzerland risk being deported to countries they have never lived in, for petty offences.

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Getting worse fast.

Double Crisis Deepens Despair In Greece’s ‘Warehouse Of Souls’ (Guardian)

There are more than 25,000 refugees and migrants stuck in Greece, police sources have told the Observer. The borders leading out have closed down one by one, leaving the country in danger of becoming what the Greek prime minister, Alexis Tsipras, described last week as a “warehouse of souls”. Tsipras has threatened to block future EU agreements and has withdrawn the Greek ambassador to Austria from Vienna in protest at the lack of support being offered by other nations during the refugee crisis. Austria is accepting only 80 migrants a day. The Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orbán, plans to hold a referendum on compulsory migrant quotas. Macedonia, Croatia, Serbia and Slovenia are refusing to accept Afghans and other refugees deemed not to be from conflict zones and are accepting a maximum of 580 migrants a day. The German chancellor, Angela Merkel, appears to be staking everything on a crucial EU-Turkey summit, scheduled to take place on 7 March.

[..] The convergence of two crises – the refugee influx and the debt drama that has plagued the country for the past six years – has caused the rhetoric of catastrophe to be ratcheted up in Athens and abroad. After the announcement by the European commission on Friday that, in the wake of border closures, it had been forced to put together a humanitarian aid plan for Greece, there is an inescapable sense of impending doom. “It was difficult for the government to manage Greece’s own domestic economic crisis,” said Dirk Reinermann, project manager for southern Europe at the World Bank. “The new exogenous challenge of having to deal with refugees and migrants is such that the overall task at hand borders on the impossible.” While EU diplomats spoke of the nightmare scenario of seeing hundreds of thousands of people trapped in the country by May, analysts predicted that Europe’s southern flank could soon become embroiled in scenes of chaos and immense social hardship.

“It’s going to get a lot worse before it gets better,” said Thanos Dokos, who heads Eliamep, a leading Greek thinktank. He told the Observer: “We are at risk of seeing an economy without any hope of recovery, and the country being flooded by people who have no intention of staying in camps but instead [will be] making their way to borders where there will be no shelter or facilities to host them.” Anger at the influx has mounted on Aegean islands close to the Turkish coast, where tourism has been hard hit. In an interview, Constantine Michalos, president of the Athens chamber of commerce and industry, said pre-bookings in Kos, Rhodes and Lesbos, the islands that have borne the brunt of the refugee and migrant arrivals, were down by 60%.

[..] Dimitra Koutsavli is working for Doctors of the World – Greece. The organisation is having constantly to move its operations to follow the ever-changing makeshift camps opening and closing on political orders across the country. She said she had never seen the situation as bad in Athens as over the past few days. “The situation here is worsening. Refugees are all over the city, in squares, in the port. According to our emergency mission in Piraeus port on Friday, we saw thousands of refugees there, among them many children.” To say that Greeks think the rest of Europe could do more is an understatement. There were peaceful protests in Athens and Piraeus last week by Greeks and refugees, and on Saturday there was a protest by 300 people outside the Austrian embassy in Athens. Not many of those in Victoria Square went to the demonstration. “It’s for Europe to decide if it can help us. We just say, ‘Please open the borders.’ We don’t want to sit here,” said Sharzai..

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Jan 132016
 
 January 13, 2016  Posted by at 9:01 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , ,  Comments Off on Debt Rattle January 13 2016


Jimmy King Bowie last photo on last birthday Jan 8 2016

Beware The Great 2016 Financial Crisis, Warns Albert Edwards (Guardian)
Chinese Exports Post First Annual Decline Since 2009 (WSJ)
China’s Hefty Trade Surplus Is Dwarfed by Outflows (WSJ)
China Predicts Painful Year In 2016 As Trade Slumps (Guardian)
Behind Chinese Yuan’s Tiny Drop, Indications of True Crisis Lurk (BBG)
Chinese Shipyards Vanish With Appetite for Consuming Iron Ore (BBG)
China’s Banks Could Be The Next Big Problem (MarketWatch)
Yuan Jolt May Prompt Looser Policies in Australia, Singapore (BBG)
In Rush to Exit Yuan, China Traders Buy Sinking Hong Kong Stocks (BBG)
OPEC Considering Emergency Meeting On Oil Prices (CNN)
Saudi Arabia Says It Remains Committed to Dollar Peg (WSJ)
Saudi Debt Risk on Par With Junk-Rated Portugal as Oil Slides (BBG)
What Market Turbulence Is Telling Us (Martin Wolf)
UK Industrial Output Plunges Most in Almost Three Years (BBG)
California Air Resources Board Rejects VW Engine Fix (BBG)
First Lady’s Box Should Be Empty At State Of The Union Speech (USA Today)
Population Growth In Africa: Grasping The Scale Of The Challenge (Guardian)
3.7 Million Brazilians Return To Poverty Due To Economic Crisis (Xinhua)
Smugglers Change Tactics As Refugee Flow To Greece Holds Steady (DW)

“Deflation is upon us and the central banks can’t see it.”

Beware The Great 2016 Financial Crisis, Warns Albert Edwards (Guardian)

The City of London’s most vocal “bear” has warned that the world is heading for a financial crisis as severe as the crash of 2008-09 that could prompt the collapse of the eurozone. Albert Edwards, strategist at the bank Société Générale, said the west was about to be hit by a wave of deflation from emerging market economies and that central banks were unaware of the disaster about to hit them. His comments came as analysts at RBS urged investors to “sell everything” ahead of an imminent stock market crash. “Developments in the global economy will push the US back into recession,” Edwards told an investment conference in London. “The financial crisis will reawaken. It will be every bit as bad as in 2008-09 and it will turn very ugly indeed.”

Fears of a second serious financial crisis within a decade have been heightened by the turbulence in markets since the start of the year. Share prices have fallen rapidly and a slump in the cost of oil has left Brent crude trading at barely above $30 a barrel. “Can it get any worse? Of course it can,” said Edwards, the most prominent of the stock market bears – the terms for analysts who think shares are overvalued and will fall in price. “Emerging market currencies are still in freefall. The US corporate sector is being crushed by the appreciation of the dollar.” The Soc Gen strategist said the US economy was in far worse shape than the Federal Reserve realised. “We have seen massive credit expansion in the US. This is not for real economic activity; it is borrowing to finance share buybacks.”

Edwards attacked what he said was the “incredible conceit” of central bankers, who had failed to learn the lessons of the housing bubble that led to the financial crisis and slump of 2008-09. “They didn’t understand the system then and they don’t understand how they are screwing up again. Deflation is upon us and the central banks can’t see it.” Edwards said the dollar had risen by as much as the Japanese yen had in the 1990s, an upwards move that pushed Japan into deflation and caused solvency problems for the Asian country’s banks. He added that a sign of the crisis to come was the collapse in demand for credit in China. “That happens when people lose confidence that policymakers know what they are doing. This is what is going to happen in Europe and the US.”

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Some confusion stems from counting trade in yuan vs dollars. But remember these are all still official Chinese numbers.

Chinese Exports Post First Annual Decline Since 2009 (WSJ)

Chinese exports declined for the year, marking their worst performance since 2009, as weak demand continued to weigh on the world’s second-largest economy. Exports, however, fell less than expected in December thanks to a favorable comparison with year-earlier figures. The improved monthly results don’t signal a major recovery this year despite a weaker yuan, economists said. “In the next few months, the comparative price effect will fade out and export growth will recover,” ING Group economist Tim Condon said. “But it’s not going to be as strong as in 2013 or 2014.” According to the General Administration of Customs, China’s exports fell 1.4% in December in dollar terms from a year earlier, after a drop of 6.8% in November.

This was a more modest decline than the 8.0% fall forecast by 15 economists surveyed by The WSJ In yuan terms, exports rose last month. Imports last month fell 7.6% from a year earlier, compared with an 8.7% decline in November. The country’s trade surplus widened to $60.1 billion in December from $54.1 billion in November. Last year’s weak Chinese exports and even weaker imports led to a record $594.5 billion annual trade surplus, compared with $382.5 billion in 2014, the agency said, as full-year exports fell 2.8% and imports fell 14.1%. Despite the decline in exports last year, the Asian giant managed to increase its share of global trade. “China’s declining exports in 2015 were mainly due to sluggish external demand on the back of slowing global economic recovery since the financial crisis,” Customs spokesman Huang Songping told reporters Wednesday.

“But China’s export performance is better than other major economies in the world.” Few economists see a huge export turnaround ahead, however, with exports no longer as important for China as they used to be. December’s improved outbound data may reflect a one-time boost as companies rushed to meet year-end orders. While business sentiment in Germany picked up recently, confidence surveys in the U.S. have weakened. And on the import side, domestic demand and global commodity prices remain weak. “Demand may not be a big driver,” said Standard Chartered Bank economist Ding Shuang.

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“..there was roughly $750 billion of capital outflow in 2015. No wonder the currency is under pressure.”

China’s Hefty Trade Surplus Is Dwarfed by Outflows (WSJ)

China’s fat trade surplus should be a source of comfort. But juxtaposed against falling reserves, it actually sends an alarming message about the degree of capital flight. The surplus swelled by 55% in 2015, to $595 billion, figures released Wednesday showed. This news isn’t as good as looks. For one, it doesn’t reflect a boom in exports, which for the full year actually fell by 2.8%. The surplus widened because imports fell even more, by 14.1%. Moreover, it raises a question: How did China manage to post a decline of $513 billion in foreign-exchange reserves last year? Since a trade surplus brings foreign currency into the country, and most exporters turn that currency over to the central bank, it should boost reserves by a corresponding amount. That reserves fell suggests fund outflows large enough to overwhelm even that trade surplus.

To get a full picture, more variables must be accounted for. Full-year data isn’t yet available for China’s foreign direct investment, overseas direct investment and services trade deficit. But based on numbers currently available, and adding the trade surplus, a rough estimate of total net inflows from trade and direct investment in 2015 comes to about $379 billion. This must be compared with the fall in reserves. In fairness, this decline was exaggerated by the stronger dollar, which makes China’s holdings in other currencies less valuable when they are reported in dollar terms. Taking these valuation effects into account, and based on estimates of the composition of its mostly secret portfolio, China may have sold a net $375 billion of reserves in 2015. Putting these two figures together, it appears that there was roughly $750 billion of capital outflow in 2015. No wonder the currency is under pressure.

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“It’s just a shame they had to go to such lengths to achieve this. The question is what asset class will be the next target for the speculators?”

China Predicts Painful Year In 2016 As Trade Slumps (Guardian)

Weak demand for Chinese goods will continue to hurt the country’s economy in 2016, according to officials, despite better than expected trade figures that helped shore up stock markets in Asia Pacific. China’s trade volume fell 7% in 2015 compared with the previous year, Chinese customs said on Wednesday, as slowing growth in the world’s second-largest economy and plunging commodity prices took their toll. Although imports slumped 13.2% and exports were down 1.8%, the numbers surprised the markets where economists had been forecasting a much weaker reading. Helped by further action from Beijing to stabilise the yuan and dampen fears of a devaluation, equity markets in the region initially bounced back after days of volatile trading.

The Shanghai Composite index was up slightly at 4am GMT while the Australian ASX/S&P200 index looked set to snap eight straight days of losses by surging more than 1%. In Japan, the Nikkei was up 2.4% and Hong Kong’s Hang Seng was also up more than 2%. However, customs spokesman Huang Songping warned at a news conference that China’s trade faced “many challenges” in 2016 due to weak external demand. One of the main reasons for China’s lower exports in 2015 was weak external demand, he added. The 5% fall in the value of the yuan since last August had helped support exports but the impact would begin to fade, he said. Earlier, the People’s Bank of China held the line on the yuan for a fourth straight session on Wednesday while putting the squeeze on offshore sellers of the currency.

The central bank has also used aggressive intervention to engineer a huge leap in yuan borrowing rates in Hong Kong, essentially making it prohibitively expensive to short the currency. The result has been to drag the offshore level of the yuan back toward the official level, closing a gap that had threatened to get out of control just a few days earlier. Confusion about China’s policy had stoked concerns Beijing might be losing its grip on economic policy, just as the country looks set to post its slowest growth in 25 years. Chris Weston at IG Markets in Melbourne welcomed a more stable day of trading but cautioned that Beijing may have delayed another outbreak of volatility by driving up funding costs in Hong Kong and making it impossible to short the yuan.

“What counts is the fact Chinese authorities have achieved their goal of converging the onshore and offshore yuan, with stability in the ‘fix’ and they have even seen a positive session in the equity markets,” he said. “It’s just a shame they had to go to such lengths to achieve this. The question is what asset class will be the next target for the speculators?”

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Objects in mirror are bigger than they appear.

Behind Chinese Yuan’s Tiny Drop, Indications of True Crisis Lurk (BBG)

The Chinese yuan’s 6% decline over the past five months is hardly anyone’s idea of a crisis. On average it comes out to a drop of less than 0.04% a day. But behind the scenes, Chinese policy makers are unleashing a torrent of measures to stabilize the currency and prevent it from tumbling. Added up, these efforts rival some of the biggest currency defenses seen in emerging markets over the past two decades. Here’s a quick look at the central bank’s most aggressive steps. Hong Kong has become a key focal part for policy makers. Over the last two days, they bought enough yuan there to push overnight borrowing costs for the currency to a record 67% on Tuesday from just 4% at the end of last week. These rates, designed to discourage speculators, are even higher than those at the peak of Russia’s defense of the ruble in 2014 and Brazil’s intervention in 1999.

In propping up the exchange rate, the People’s Bank of China also burnt through more than half a trillion of dollars in foreign reserves in the past 12 months, cutting them to $3.3 trillion. The draw-down was almost equivalent to the entire stockpile of Switzerland, the world’s fourth largest holder. Regulators also went to great lengths to tighten capital controls, cracking down on illegal money transfers and restricting lenders from conducting some cross-border transactions. Among its emerging-market peers, the yuan remains one of the top-performing currencies over the past year against the dollar, yet Chinese policy makers are acting with an increasing sense of urgency. At stake is the financial stability of the world’s No. 2 economy – disorderly depreciation could fuel more capital outflows, which already approached $1 trillion in the 12 months through November. “They are really trying to stop the panic,” said Lucy Qiu at UBS Wealth Management said.

By intervening in the Hong Kong market, the PBOC is forcing the offshore rate to converge toward the stronger onshore rate in an effort to anchor expectations among overseas investors. Officials also stressed that the aim is to keep the yuan basically stable against a basket of currencies, rather than pegging it against the rising dollar. Deterring speculators and attracting investors with off-the-chart rates can help contain a currency crisis, but it can also send an economy into a tailspin by cutting companies and consumers off from credit. That is unlikely to be the case in China. The yuan loan increase in Hong Kong would have less impact on the mainland’s economy, where the benchmark seven-day interbank rate remains stable at about 2.4%.

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Job losses will be a major China issue in 2016. Beijing will try and force companies to hire large groups of people, but that’s sure to backfire.

Chinese Shipyards Vanish With Appetite for Consuming Iron Ore (BBG)

The weakening yuan and China’s waning appetite for raw materials have come around to bite the country’s shipbuilders, raising the odds that more shipyards will soon be shuttered. About 140 yards in the world’s second-biggest shipbuilding nation have gone out of business since 2010, and more are expected to close in the next two years after only 69 won orders for vessels last year, JPMorgan analysts Sokje Lee and Minsung Lee wrote in a Jan. 6 report. That compares with 126 shipyards that fielded orders in 2014 and 147 in 2013. Total orders at Chinese shipyards tumbled 59% in the first 11 months of 2015, according to data released Dec. 15 by the China Association of the National Shipbuilding Industry.

Builders have sought government support as excess vessel capacity drives down shipping rates and prompts customers to cancel contracts. Zhoushan Wuzhou Ship Repairing & Building last month became the first state-owned shipbuilder to go bankrupt in a decade. “The chance of orders being canceled at Chinese yards is becoming greater and greater,” said Park Moo Hyun at Hana Daetoo Securities in Seoul. “While a weaker yuan could mean cheaper ship prices for customers, it still won’t be enough to lure back any buyers. Chinese shipbuilders won’t be able to revive even if you try breathing some life into them.” The Baltic Dry Index, which measures the cost of transporting raw materials, dropped 39% last year and hit a historical low Dec. 16.

Aggravating the situation is Chinese shipyards’ heavy reliance on bulk carriers, which are used to haul commodities from iron ore to coal and grain. Bulk ships accounted for 41.6% of Chinese shipyards’ $26.6 billion orderbook as of Dec. 1, according to Clarkson, the world’s largest shipbroker. That compares with a 3.5% share at South Korean shipyards, which have more exposure to the tankers and gas carriers that are among the few bright spots in a beleaguered shipping industry.

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How is Xi going to save his banks? Hard to see.

China’s Banks Could Be The Next Big Problem (MarketWatch)

While China’s equity turbulence appears to have temporarily paused, its main equity indices are now 15% lower since the start of the year, despite Beijing remaining committed to its policy of market intervention. In some ways the government’s hands are tied from last year’s stock buying as it now has a substantial position to protect. Added to this, the original reason the party could not let its bull market die remains due to the potential political fallout from losses after it effectively orchestrated the bubble. But in attempting to solve one problem, are policy makers just sowing the seeds of another? Attention is now turning to the collateral damage from official intervention to support stocks, in particular to the banks. Analysts are questioning the cost to China’s state-owned yet overseas-listed banks, which have once again been called up for national service.

The concern is that by acting as a buyer of last resort to prop up the stock market, this sets up China’s banks to be the next fault line in the economy. In a new report, rating agency Fitch warns of a clear conflict between banks struggling to manage state strategic roles and their profit goals. How much intervention has come this year is still unknown, but last July after the initial stock market rout 17 banks, including the big five, were reported to have lent $200 billion. There is also a pattern here. Last summer state-owned banks had to play another strategic role as they were strong-armed by the central government into a 3.2 trillion yuan debt-for-bond swap to help bail out local authorities. The list of troubled assets needing help is unlikely to end there. The central government has prioritized cleaning up struggling state-owned enterprises, which, according to SocGen, includes some 30% that are bankrupt with 23 trillion yuan in liabilities.

Given this accumulation of questionable assets at the behest of the state, investors might feel somewhat anxious in case there ultimately is a reckoning. While Fitch notes these initiatives will harm profits, it does at least expect the central government rather than non-sovereign shareholders will be the banks’ main source of funds if they do need additional capital. If investors suspected that they would be forced to repeat the scenario from the global financial crisis when Western banks raised fresh capital from shareholders with deeply discounted share issues, stock prices would be vulnerable to steep falls. Fitch’s sanguine assumption of the central government stepping in depends on how much capital China’s banks may need.

Analyst Charlene Chu at Autonomous Economics, estimates this figure could be as high as $7.7 trillion of new capital in the next three years. Such a figure would send the government debt-to-GDP ratio skyrocketing, which at around 22% is usually used to reaffirm China’s robust financial position. Another issue is that in China the overlap between corporates and the state can often make it difficult to get a true financial picture. For instance, hugely profitable state banks in recent years have by some estimates accounted for 50% of the net profits of all listed Chinese companies. This could mean if China’s banks had to recognize a substantial increase in bad debts, another wild card is the impact on the central government’s fiscal position through lost tax revenue.

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The yuan can shake the entire region.

Yuan Jolt May Prompt Looser Policies in Australia, Singapore (BBG)

The extreme jolt financial markets received this year from a weakening yuan is spurring speculation that central banks from Singapore to Australia will be forced to loosen policy. The Monetary Authority of Singapore may widen the band within which it guides the local dollar if the currencies of its major trading partners and competitors become “extremely volatile,” said Mirza Baig at BNP Paribas. Central banks in Australia, Taiwan and India are most likely to respond by cutting interest rates, said Mansoor Mohi-uddin at RBS. Weaker-than-estimated yuan fixings last week heightened concerns that China’s economic slowdown is accelerating and triggered a global market rout. About a year ago, foreign-exchange markets were hammered when Switzerland surrendered its three-year-old cap on the franc against the euro and nations from Canada to Singapore unexpectedly eased monetary policy.

“The depreciation of the RMB is clearly creating large financial shocks,” said Baig, who is based in Singapore. “One thing that we are considering – although this doesn’t enter into our forecast – is that the RMB becomes more of a free-floating, more volatile currency. Then local central banks are also likely to adopt a more laissez-faire kind of approach towards currency management.” China stepped up its defense of the yuan, buying the currency in Hong Kong on Tuesday, according to people familiar with the matter. Betting against the yuan will fail and calls for a large depreciation are “ridiculous” as policy makers are determined to ensure the currency’s stability, Han Jun, the deputy director of China’s office of the central leading group for financial and economic affairs, said Monday in New York. The State Bank of Vietnam has already moved this year to a more market-based methodology in setting a daily reference rate versus the dollar.

“They’re now forced to change their currency regime to make it more in tune with day-to-day fluctuations in markets,” Baig said. While BNP Paribas expects Singapore’s central bank to maintain its monetary policy, there is a risk that it may widen its band ”in response to elevated financial market volatility,” Baig said. The Monetary Authority of Singapore guides the local currency against an undisclosed basket and adjusts the pace of appreciation or depreciation by changing the slope, width and center of a band. It refrains from disclosing details of the basket, the band, and the pace of appreciation or depreciation. The yuan probably has the third-highest weighting in the basket, exceeded only by the U.S. dollar and Malaysian ringgit, Baig said. A JPMorgan gauge of currency volatility rose to 10.42% Monday, the most since September. “The more volatile and weaker yuan is set to be more of a risk to regional central banks’ outlooks than higher Fed interest rates this year,” RBS’s Mohi-uddin said.

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But just how low can the yuan go?

In Rush to Exit Yuan, China Traders Buy Sinking Hong Kong Stocks (BBG)

Chinese investors are so desperate to shift their money out of yuan-denominated assets that they’re piling into some of the world’s worst-performing stocks. Mainland buyers purchased Hong Kong shares through the Shanghai stock link for a 10th week last week, even as the Hang Seng Index tumbled 6.7%. Chinese traders held 112.5 billion yuan ($17.1 billion) of the city’s equities by Monday, the most since the bourse program started in 2014, and up by 23.7 billion yuan since late October. With the yuan weakening, investors are looking for a way out, according to Reorient. “By buying Hong Kong stocks, it’s like buying the Hong Kong dollar,” said Uwe Parpart, chief strategist at the brokerage. Mainland investors are expecting “further depreciation and when that’s the case it’s a good idea to get out. If you buy at a certain rate and then the yuan goes down, even when the stock market goes down, you may still be getting ahead in the game.”

Hong Kong and mainland markets are at the epicenter of a global stock slump fueled by concern about China’s sliding currency and economic management. The Hang Seng Index was down 9.2% this year through Monday, while a rout in Shanghai and Shenzhen wiped out more than $1.3 trillion in value. With forecasters expecting the yuan to weaken further against the dollar and restrictions on capital outflows whittling down investment options, the exchange link offers a government-sanctioned way for Chinese traders to own assets in a strengthening currency. “Channels for outflows from mainland China are currently limited,” said Cindy Chen at Citigroup. “I expect the flow to continue.”

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Result will be zero.

OPEC Considering Emergency Meeting On Oil Prices (CNN)

After watching the price of crude oil collapse by more than 65% to a 12-year low, there are signs that OPEC may have had enough. Nigeria’s top oil official and OPEC President Emmanuel Kachikwu said the cartel is considering an emergency meeting, perhaps as soon as next month. At issue is whether OPEC would agree to cut production, a move that could help stop the crude price freefall. “I expect to see one. … There’s a lot of energy currently around that,” he told CNN. “I think a … majority in terms of [OPEC] membership are beginning to feel that the time has come to … have a meeting and dialogue again once more without the sort of tension that we had in Vienna on this.” When OPEC last met in the Austrian capital in December, it was bitterly divided and refused to cut output.

The next ordinary meeting is scheduled for June 2. Led by Saudi Arabia, OPEC decided in 2014 to wage a price war with low cost producers in the U.S. and elsewhere in a bid to defend market share. Since then, oil companies have sacked hundreds of thousands of workers, and slashed investment budgets. But the global supply glut continues, thanks in part to China’s slowing economy, and prices have continued to tumble. A strong dollar, which makes oil more expensive around the world, has fueled the slump. Oil prices fell toward $30 a barrel early on Tuesday, having plunged by 16% in 2016 alone, but steadied later to trade little changed on the day. Many OPEC countries are still making money at these prices but others are losing – Nigeria’s production costs are estimated at about $31 a barrel, for example.

And all, including Saudi Arabia, are suffering a huge squeeze on government revenues. Kachikwu said most OPEC members were watching their economies “being shattered,” and something had to give. “We need to… see how we can balance the need to protect our market share with the need for the survival of the business itself, and survival of the countries.” An emergency meeting is no guarantee that OPEC will act to restrain supply, however Iran is eager to boost production this year as soon as Western sanctions are lifted – expected imminently – and it’s hard to see Saudi Arabia working with its big Mideast rival to support oil prices. Saudi Arabia broke off diplomatic relations with Iran last week after its embassy in Tehran was attacked. That attack followed Saudi Arabia’s execution of a prominent Shiite cleric.

Still, the OPEC president believes an agreement of some form is possible. “I think ultimately for the interest of everybody some policy change will happen,” Kachikwu said. “Now will the amount of barrels that you can take out because of that policy change necessarily make that much of a dramatic difference? Probably not, but the symbolism of the action is even more important than the volumes that are taken out of the market.”

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Lots of private debt in foreign currrencies. The confidence starts to look out of place…

Saudi Arabia Says It Remains Committed to Dollar Peg (WSJ)

Saudi Arabia will maintain the riyal’s peg to the U.S. dollar, the governor of the country’s central bank said Monday, while criticizing bets against the currency. In a statement posted on the website of Saudi Arabian Monetary Agency, as the central bank is known, governor Fahad al-Mubarak said speculation was driving volatility in the forward market for the Saudi riyal, but the country’s financial and economic fundamentals remained stable. “I would like to reiterate our official position that Saudi Arabian Monetary Agency will uphold its mandate of maintaining the peg, “ the governor said.

The riyal is fixed at roughly 3.75 to the dollar, but one-year forward contracts have hit multiyear highs in the past days—reflecting speculation on a weaker riyal—after the kingdom ran a record budget deficit of nearly $98 billion last year, forcing it to announce late last month spending and subsidy cuts for 2016 to cope with a fall in the global price of oil, the kingdom’s main revenue earner. A sharp fall in the price of oil since the middle of 2014 has put immense pressure on Saudi Arabia’s petrodollar-dependent economy, with some investors betting in recent months that the kingdom would let go of the nearly 30-year old peg as foreign-exchange reserves decline. These have fallen to $635.5 billion at the end of November, down 15% from a peak of $746 billion in August last year, according to the latest central bank data.

Analysts say the central bank has spent billions to maintain the currency peg; in the past, the has worked well for Saudi Arabia, giving it stability as it enjoyed a decade of high-price oil. But income from oil sales has slumped, adding strains to Saudi Arabia’s finances. Abandoning the peg would stretch those dollars as the riyal would weaken. Backing away from peg pledges isn’t unprecedented, however. Officials at the Swiss National Bank, for instance, publicly backed the franc’s link to the euro mere days before the bank stunned markets by abandoning it a year ago. Still, most analysts don’t see Saudi Arabia abandoning its peg in the near- to midterm, as repayment costs for households and corporates that have borrowed in foreign currencies will rise in local-currency terms. Consumer price inflation is likely to accelerate due to a rise in import prices, which the government can ill-afford after cutting subsidies.

And even if the peg were adjusted rather than abandoned, this would add uncertainty about future adjustments, and ultimately make it more vulnerable to speculative attacks. “The peg is a key policy anchor,” said Paul Gamble, senior director for sovereigns at Fitch Ratings. “There is a huge capacity to defend it and a strong political commitment to it.”

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… where confidence really stands.

Saudi Debt Risk on Par With Junk-Rated Portugal as Oil Slides (BBG)

Investors wanting to take out insurance on Saudi Arabia’s debt have to pay as much as they would for Portugal, a nation still saddled with a junk credit-rating five years after an international bailout. The cost of insuring the kingdom’s debt more than doubled in the past 12 months to a 190 basis points, or $190,000 annually to insure $10 million of the country’s debt for five years, the highest since April 2009. That’s almost identical to contracts linked to debt from Portugal, whose rating is seven levels below Saudi Arabia’s Aa3 investment grade at Moody’s Saudi Arabia’s finances are under pressure as it fights a war in Yemen at a time when crude prices are languishing at the lowest level in almost 12 years.

The country, which counts on energy exports for 70% of government revenue, sold domestic bonds for the first time since 2007 last year to help fund a budget deficit that may have been the widest since 1991. Net foreign assets dropped for 10 straight months through November, the longest streak since at least 2006, to $627 billion. “They have huge reserves and extremely low debt, but the question is, how long are oil prices going to stay at this level?” said Anthony Simond at Aberdeen Asset Management. Brent crude, a pricing benchmark for more than half the world’s oil, sank below $35 a barrel last week. It advanced 0.8% to $31.82 a barrel today, rebounding from the lowest level in almost 12 years. The Saudi government, which doesn’t have any outstanding international bonds, said it will choose from options including selling local and international debt and drawing from its reserves to finance an expected 2016 budget deficit of 326 billion riyals ($87 billion).

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“Global investors withdrew about $52bn from emerging market equity and bond funds in the third quarter of 2015..” Otherwise, Wolf gets lost in his own growth story.

What Market Turbulence Is Telling Us (Martin Wolf)

Bull markets, it is said, climb a wall of worry. There are certainly plenty of reasons to worry. But markets are no longer climbing, which indicates the bull market is dead. Since markets are already highly valued, that would not be surprising. Standard & Poor’s composite index of the US market has in effect marked time since June 2014. According to Robert Shiller’s cyclically adjusted price/earnings ratio, the US market has been significantly more highly valued than it is at present only during the disastrous bubbles that burst in 1929 and 2000. Professor Shiller’s well-known measure of value is not perfect. But it is a warning that stock market valuations are already generous and that a continued bull market might be dangerous. Still more important, a portfolio rebalancing is under way.

The most important shift is in the perceived economic and financial prospects for emerging economies. As a result, capital is now flowing out of emerging economies. These outflows are driving the strong dollar. Given that, the US Federal Reserve’s decision to tighten monetary policy looks like an important blunder. In its new Global Economic Prospects report, the World Bank brings out the extent of the disillusionment with (and within) emerging economies. It notes that half of the 20 largest developing country stock markets experienced falls of 20 per cent or more from their 2015 peaks. The currencies of commodity exporters (including Brazil, Indonesia, Malaysia, Russia, South Africa), and of big developing countries subject to rising political risks (including Brazil and Turkey), fell to multiyear lows both against the US dollar and in trade-weighted terms.

Global investors withdrew about $52bn from emerging market equity and bond funds in the third quarter of 2015. This was the largest quarterly outflow on record. Net short-term debt and bank outflows from China, combined with retrenchment in Russia, accounted for the bulk of this; but portfolio and short-term capital inflows dried up elsewhere in the third quarter of 2015. Net capital flows to emerging and frontier economies even fell to zero, the lowest level since the 2008-09 crisis. An important feature is not just the reduction in inflows but also the sheer size of outflows from affected economies.

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The ‘healthy’ British economy has become a mere narrative.

UK Industrial Output Plunges Most in Almost Three Years (BBG)

U.K. industrial production fell the most in almost three years in November as warmer-than-usual weather reduced energy demand. Output dropped 0.7% from the previous month, with electricity, gas and steam dropping 2.1%, the Office for National Statistics said in London on Tuesday. Economists had forecast no growth on the month. The data highlight the uncertain nature of U.K. growth, which remains dependent on domestic demand and services. After stagnating in October and falling in November, industrial production will have to rise 0.5% to avoid a contraction in the fourth quarter. The pound fell against the dollar after the data and was trading at $1.4486 as of 9:35 a.m. London time, down 0.4% from Monday. Manufacturing also delivered a lower-than-forecast performance in November, with output dropping 0.4% on the month.

On an annual basis, factory output fell 1.2%, a fifth consecutive decline. The data follow other reports of weakness in the manufacturing sector. A survey published by Markit this month showed growth cooled in December, suggesting it made little contribution to the economy in the fourth quarter. According to manufacturers’ organization EEF, companies are feeling increasingly pressured by issues such as the strength of the pound. It said on Monday that only 56% of manufacturers say the U.K. is a competitive location, compared with 70% a year ago. Bank of England officials will probably keep their key interest rate at a record-low 0.5% this week. Minutes of the meeting released Thursday may reveal their thinking on the fall in oil prices and worries about China’s economy.

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CARB is one organization you don’t want to do battle with.

California Air Resources Board Rejects VW Engine Fix (BBG)

Volkswagen’s work to overcome the emissions-cheating scandal was set back after the California Air Resources Board rejected its proposed engine fix, just a day before Chief Executive Officer Matthias Mueller meets regulators to discuss ways out of the crisis. California spurned the automaker’s December recommendation for how to fix 2-liter diesel engines as “incomplete.” VW said it will present a reworked plan to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency at a meeting in Washington on Wednesday. Europe’s largest automaker is in the midst of complex technical talks with the California board and counterparts at the EPA about possible fixes for 480,000 diesel cars. The EPA said Tuesday it agreed that VW’s plan can’t be approved. Volkswagen set aside $7.3 billion in the third quarter to help pay for the crisis and has acknowledged this won’t be enough.

“The message from the regulators to VW couldn’t be more clear – you need to come up with a better plan,” said Frank O’Donnell, president of Clean Air Watch, a Washington environmental group. “VW has mistakenly thought it could resolve this on the cheap.” On its website, the state said it determined that there was “no easy and expeditious fix for the affected vehicles.” “Volkswagen made a decision to cheat on emissions tests and then tried to cover it up,” Mary Nichols, chairwoman of the state board, said in an e-mailed statement. “They need to make it right.” Volkswagen responded that it had asked California last month for an extension to submit additional information and data about the turbocharged direct injection, or TDI, diesel engines.

“Since then, Volkswagen has had constructive discussions with CARB, including last week when we discussed a framework to remediate the TDI emissions issue,” VW said in an e-mailed statement. The California board said it and the EPA will continue to evaluate VW’s technical proposals. The rejection closely followed a bumble by CEO Mueller on Sunday, the eve of the North American International Auto Show in Detroit. During an interview with National Public Radio, he appeared to dismiss the crisis by saying Europe’s largest automaker “didn’t lie” to regulators about what amounts to a “technical problem.” When the interview aired Monday morning, VW asked NPR for a do-over, where Mueller blamed a noisy atmosphere for his earlier comments. He apologized on behalf of the automaker, hewing more closely to comments he had made in a Detroit speech on Sunday night.

[..] Fixes prescribed for Europe haven’t translated into U.S. approval because of the tougher emissions standards in North America, which is why Volkswagen had begun cheating in the U.S. in the first place. In Europe, the company’s proposed fix on 8.5 million diesel engines was approved a month ago. For most vehicles in Europe, software upgrades will suffice, while others will get a tube with mesh on one end to regulate air flow. VW estimated that repair would take less than an hour to complete. Germany took the lead on signing off on the technical fix, which encompasses a range of engine sizes including the 2-liter variant now contested in the U.S. In the U.S., beyond developing an effective fix for each of the three types of non-compliant 4-cylinder engines, VW must document any adverse impacts on vehicles and consumers.

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If you have to look at USA TOday for some sanity….

First Lady’s Box Should Be Empty At State Of The Union Speech (USA Today)

The White House announced that there will be a seat left vacant in the gallery during Obama’s State of the Union Address “for the victims of gun violence who no longer have a voice.” This old stunt is part of Obama’s campaign for new federal restrictions on firearms ownership, but if he really wanted to provide a voice for those who’ve lost theirs, at least in part, due to his own administration’s policies, he’d have to empty all the seats in the gallery reserved for the first lady and her guests. While trumpeting the private death toll from guns, Obama on Tuesday night will likely ignore the 986 people killed by police in the United States last year according to The WaPo’s database. Many police departments are aggressive — if not reckless — in part because the Justice Department always provides cover for them at the Supreme Court.

Obama’s “Justice Department has supported police officers every time an excessive-force case has made its way” to a Supreme Court hearing, The New York Times noted last year. Attorney General Loretta Lynch recently said that federally-funded police agencies should not even be required to report the number of civilians they kill. To add a Euro flair to the evening, Obama could drape tri-color flags on a few empty seats to commemorate the 30 French medical staff, patients, and others slain last Oct. 3 when an American AC-130 gunship blasted their well-known hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan. The U.S. military revised its story several times but admitted in November that the carnage was the result of “avoidable … human error.” Regrettably, that bureaucratic phrase lacks the power to resurrect victims.

No plans have been announced to designate a seat for Brian Terry, the U.S. Border Patrol agent killed in 2010. Guns found at the scene of Terry’s killing were linked to the Fast and Furious gunwalking operation masterminded by the Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) agency. At least 150 Mexicans were also killed by guns illegally sent south of the border with ATF approval. The House of Representatives voted to hold then-attorney general Eric Holder in contempt for refusing to disclose Fast and Furious details, but Obama is not expected to dwell on this topic in his State of the Union address. On a more festive note, why not save some seats for a wedding party? Twelve Yemenis who were celebrating nuptials on Dec. 12, 2013, won’t be able to attend Obama’s speech because they were blown to bits by a U.S. drone strike.

The Yemeni government – which is heavily bankrolled by the U.S. government – paid more than a million dollars compensation to the survivors of innocent civilians killed and wounded in the attack. Four seats could be left vacant for the Americans killed in the 2012 attack in Benghazi, Libya – U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens, Foreign Service Officer Sean Smith, and CIA contractors Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty. But any such recognition would rankle the presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton, who has worked tirelessly to sweep those corpses under the rug. It would also be appropriate to include a hat tip to the hundreds, likely thousands, of Libyans who have been killed in the civil war unleashed after the Obama administration bombed Libya to topple its ruler, Moammar Gadhafi.

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Welcome to Europe.

Population Growth In Africa: Grasping The Scale Of The Challenge (Guardian)

The last 100 years have seen an incredible increase in the planet’s population. Some parts of the world are now seeing smaller increments of growth, and some, such as Japan, Germany, and Spain, are actually experiencing population decreases. The continent of Africa, however, is not following this pattern. Now home to 1.2 billion (up from just 477 million in 1980), Africa is projected by the United Nations Population Division to see a slight acceleration of annual population growth in the immediate future. In the past year the population of the African continent grew by 30 million. By the year 2050, annual increases will exceed 42 million people per year and total population will have doubled to 2.4 billion, according to the UN. This comes to 3.5 million more people per month, or 80 additional people per minute.

At that point, African population growth would be able to re-fill an empty London five times a year. From any big-picture perspective, these population dynamics will have an influence on global demography in the 21st century. Of the 2.37 billion increase in population expected worldwide by 2050, Africa alone will contribute 54%. By 2100, Africa will contribute 82% of total growth: 3.2 billion of the overall increase of 3.8 billion people. Under some projections, Nigeria will add more people to the world’s population by 2050 than any other country. The dynamics at play are straightforward. Since the middle of the last century, improvements in public health have led to a inspiring decrease in infant and child mortality rates. Overall life expectancy has also risen.

The 12 million Africans born in 1955 could expect to live only until the age of 37. Encouragingly, the 42 million Africans born this year can expect to live to the age of 60. Meanwhile, another key demographic variable – the number of children the average African woman is likely to have in her lifetime, or total fertility rate – remains elevated compared to global rates. The total fertility rate of Africa is 88% higher than the world standard (2.5 children per woman globally, 4.7 children per woman in Africa). In Niger, where GDP per capita is less than $1 per day, the average number of children a woman is likely to have in her life is more than seven. Accordingly, the country’s current population of 20 million is projected to grow by 800,000 people over the next 12 months.

By mid-century, the population may have expanded to 72 million people and will still be growing by 800,000 people – every 18 weeks. By the year 2100, the country could have more than 209 million people and still be expanding rapidly. This projectionis based on an assumption that Niger’s fertility will gradually fall to 2.5 children over the course of the century. If fertility does not fall at all – and it has not budged in the last 60 years – the country’s population projection for 2100 veers towards 960 million people. As recently as 2004, the United Nations’ expected Africa to grow only to 2.2 billion people by 2100. That number now looks very out of date.

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Got to keep wondering what the Olympics will look like. An international podium for protests?

3.7 Million Brazilians Return To Poverty Due To Economic Crisis (Xinhua)

Around four million Brazilians have returned to poverty as a consequence of the country’s ongoing economic crisis, local media reported on Monday. The news daily Valor Economico cited data from a recent study carried out by Banco Bradesco, one of the largest private banks in Brazil, which found the crisis pushed around 3.7 million Brazilians back to poverty. The middle class dropped by two%age points to 54.6% during the period of January to November, 2015. Meanwhile, the number of those in the lower class increased to 35%, according to the report. The study also indicates a drop in salaries, with the middle class receiving a monthly income of $407 to $1630 US and that of the poorest stands at $233. Brazil is in the depth of a recession as it grapples with rising unemployment, stagnant growth and soaring inflation. Brazil’s Central Bank has changed its previous prediction for the country’s drop in GDP for 2016 from 2.95% to 2.99%.

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“Boat captains are now forcing refugees to jump out and swim ashore before steering the dinghies back to Turkey.”

“These people will travel around the whole world just to find an open door.”

Smugglers Change Tactics As Refugee Flow To Greece Holds Steady (DW)

Looking over pitch-black waters, Pothiti Kitromilidi smokes a cigarette with her eyes fixed on distant streetlights along the Turkish coast. Aside from the stars, little else is visible. It is Friday night, and Kitromilidi, a coordinator for the FEOX Rescue Team, is standing on the southeastern shore of Chios, a Greek island where asylum-seekers have been arriving under the cover of darkness ever since the Turkish Coast Guard increased its presence. Only a few refugees made the crossing in recent days, but Kitromilidi credits bad weather over the authorities, who she says “pretend to work during the week and take weekends off.” Now the seas are calm again and Kitromilidi’s expecting a long night out. She radios back and forth with team members spread out over the area on ATVs and Vespa scooters.

Everyone is waiting as Kitromilidi shines a light into the dark water below. “We don’t see them, we have to hear them,” she said. Then the call comes in: “Boat landed! Boat landed!” Kitromilidi jumps in her car and speeds to the arrival site where 45 Afghans are standing, dripping wet and shivering. The rescue team gets to work, providing dry clothes and emergency thermal blankets with help from a Norwegian humanitarian group, Drop in the Ocean, while Spanish doctors from Salvamento Maritimo Humanitario (SMH) attend to the injured. Amidst screaming children and aching bodies, the chaotic process seems almost streamlined: Wet clothes off, dry clothes on, plastic bags replace wet socks and everyone gets filed onto a bus while volunteers pick up any trash left behind in an impressive display of cross-organizational coordination.

Yet after months of refining their procedures, humanitarian workers in Chios continue facing new challenges as smugglers change tactics under new pressures from Turkey and the European Union. Whenever the flow seems to slow down, large backlogs of refugees arrive in short bursts of time, overwhelming humanitarian services. This past weekend, more than 3,000 people arrive in Chios alone. “The numbers have been stable since the fall and now we are thinking they will stay the same until March,” said Edith Chazelle, Camp management coordinator for the Norwegian Refugee Council. “We are all surprised they are still coming with the cold weather and the rough water.”

Rescue workers also noted most dinghies are no longer being abandoned on Greek beaches. Boat captains are now forcing refugees to jump out and swim ashore before steering the dinghies back to Turkey. On Friday night, FEOX volunteer Mihalis Mierousis swam out to save a baby that was tossed overboard. The infant was less than one year old and survived the ordeal, but Mierousis said the practice might be due to a shortage of dinghies. “Unfortunately, this is not unusual,” he said. “Many people get thrown into the water, and we have to save them this way.” Other rescue workers said smugglers are taking families hostage and forcing fathers to steer dinghies to Chios and back as ransom. Rumors abound.

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