deflation Archives - Page 3 of 16

Keita Kameyama, a 30-year-old civil servant in Kagawa, a rural province, has been saving around 25% of his $40,000 salary each year to eventually marry his longtime girlfriend. He lives at home with his mother, drives an old Honda and rarely shops. The central bank’s stimulus measures had no effect on Mr. Kameyama’s spending. He still salts away his money in plain-vanilla bank accounts. He fears Japan’s long stagnation will wipe out his pension, and worries he won’t have enough money to care for his mother—a growing concern in a country with twice as many people over 60 than between 20 and 34. He sees bank accounts, which offer minuscule interest rates on deposits despite negative short-term rates, as the only way to save. Hyakujushi Bank, Ltd. the biggest in Kagawa, pays only 0.05% on deposits and has paid less than 1% since 1995.

“People in Kagawa love to save,” says Mr. Kameyama. “I have heard [the Bank of Japan] is trying very hard to get people to spend their money, but I don’t think I will be opening my wallet.” Many young Japanese economize because they simply don’t have enough money. More are working low-paying and temporary jobs with no benefits. “Companies aren’t growing, and they have aging workforces that they can’t fire,” says Takuji Okubo at the Japan Macro Advisors research group. “So there’s no room to hire young people.” Automobile, beer and cosmetics firms have slashed young-adult advertising and market to retirees instead, says Yohei Harada at Tokyo ad agency Hakuhodo. “The role of parents and children is getting reversed, where the parents from the bubble generation still act like children and want to buy the fancy car, while their children in the post-bubble generation worry about their parents’ spending,” he says.

“There will not be Obama Care repeal and replace. There will be no tax cut. There will be no infrastructure stimulus. There will be just one giant fiscal bloodbath over a debt ceiling that has to be increased and no one wants to vote for.”

• Giant Fiscal Bloodbath Coming Soon – David Stockman (USAW)

Former Reagan Administration White House Budget Director David Stockman says financial pain is a mathematical certainty. Stockman explains, “I think we are likely to have more of a fiscal bloodbath rather than fiscal stimulus. Unfortunately for Donald Trump, not only did the public vote the establishment out, they left on his doorstep the inheritance of 30 years of debt build-up and a fiscal policy that’s been really reckless in the extreme. People would like to think he’s the second coming of Ronald Reagan and we are going to have morning in America. Unfortunately, I don’t think it looks that promising because Trump is inheriting a mess that pales into insignificance what we had to deal with in January of 1981 when I joined the Reagan White House as Budget Director.”

So, can the Trump bump in the stock market keep going? Stockman, who wrote a book titled “Trumped” predicting a Trump victory in 2016, says, “I don’t think there is a snowball’s chance in the hot place that’s going to happen. This is delusional. This is the greatest suckers’ rally of all time. It is based on pure hopium and not any analysis at all as what it will take to push through a big tax cut. Donald Trump is in a trap. Today the debt is $20 trillion. It’s 106% of GDP. . . Trump is inheriting a built-in deficit of $10 trillion over the next decade under current policies that are built in. Yet, he wants more defense spending, not less. He wants drastic sweeping tax cuts for corporations and individuals. He wants to spend more money on border security and law enforcement. He’s going to do more for the veterans. He wants this big trillion dollar infrastructure program. You put all that together and it’s madness. It doesn’t even begin to add up, and it won’t happen when you are struggling with the $10 trillion of debt that’s coming down the pike and the $20 trillion that’s already on the books.”

Then, Stockman drops this bomb and says, “I think what people are missing is this date, March 15th 2017. That’s the day that this debt ceiling holiday that Obama and Boehner put together right before the last election in October of 2015. That holiday expires. The debt ceiling will freeze in at $20 trillion. It will then be law. It will be a hard stop. The Treasury will have roughly $200 billion in cash. We are burning cash at a $75 billion a month rate. By summer, they will be out of cash. Then we will be in the mother of all debt ceiling crises. Everything will grind to a halt. I think we will have a government shutdown. There will not be Obama Care repeal and replace. There will be no tax cut. There will be no infrastructure stimulus. There will be just one giant fiscal bloodbath over a debt ceiling that has to be increased and no one wants to vote for.”

“Very simply, the market starts to go down. As it goes down, it will start triggering selling, and then it will be like an avalanche..”

• Marc Faber Warns Investors An ‘Avalanche’ Could Be Coming (CNBC)

The man often hailed as the original ‘Dr. Doom’ is warning investors that the U.S. stock market is vulnerable to a seismic sell-off—one that could start any time in a very unassuming way. Marc Faber, the editor of “The Gloom, Boom & Doom Report,” predicted the rally’s disruption won’t be caused by any single catalyst. His argument: Stocks are very overbought and sentiment is way too bullish for the so-called Trump rally to continue. “Very simply, the market starts to go down. As it goes down, it will start triggering selling, and then it will be like an avalanche,” said Faber recently on “Futures Now.” “I would underweight U.S. stocks.” Faber, a supporter of President Donald Trump, isn’t blaming the new administration for his bearish forecast. “One man alone, he cannot make ‘America great again.’ That you have to realize,” he said.

“Trump, unlike Mr. Reagan, is facing huge, huge headwinds — including a debt to GDP that is gigantic, as it is in other countries.” Faber lists interest rates going up, as well as earnings and margins at record levels, as additional risks to the historic rally. The Dow Jones Industrial Average registered its eleventh record close in a row on Friday. And, if you take a look at just the S&P 500 in February, it’s on track to see the fewest declines in any month since May 1990. [..] There are areas overseas which are in much better shape than the United States, according to the notoriously bearish investor. “China looks quite attractive,” said Faber. “For the next three months, money can flow into China. The economy, surprisingly, has begun to do quite well. We see that in retail in Hong Kong. We see that in the hotel industry, and we see that in the demand for commodities.”

According to Faber, resource commodities such as copper and gold could also give investors solid profits this year. “When you look at Trump and his administration, and the way the budget is, I think further money printing down the line is inevitable,” he said — a policy which would could lift commodities even higher.

Two Bannon articles today. Not because I’m a fan, as some people undoubtedly like to think. Just better to know something.

• What Does Steve Bannon Want? (NYT)

[..] some of the roots of Mr. Bannon’s ideology, like the roots of Mr. Trump’s popularity, are to be found in the disappointed hopes of the global economy. But Mr. Bannon, unlike Mr. Trump, has a detailed idea, an explanation, of how American sovereignty was lost, and of what to do about it. It is the same idea that Tea Party activists have: A class of regulators in the government has robbed Americans of their democratic prerogatives. That class now constitutes an “administrative state” that operates to empower itself and enrich its crony-capitalist allies. When Mr. Bannon spoke on Thursday of “deconstructing the administrative state,” it may have sounded like gobbledygook outside the hall, but it was an electrifying profession of faith for the attendees. It is through Mr. Bannon that Trumpism can be converted from a set of nostalgic laments and complaints into a program for overhauling the government.

Mr. Bannon adds something personal and idiosyncratic to this Tea Party mix. He has a theory of historical cycles that can be considered elegantly simple or dangerously simplistic. It is a model laid out by William Strauss and Neil Howe in two books from the 1990s. Their argument assumes an 80- to 100-year cycle divided into roughly 20-year “highs,” “awakenings,” “unravelings” and “crises.” The American Revolution, the Civil War, the New Deal, World War II — Mr. Bannon has said for years that we’re due for another crisis about now. His documentary about the 2008 financial collapse, “Generation Zero,” released in 2010, uses the Strauss-Howe model to explain what happened, and concludes with Mr. Howe himself saying, “History is seasonal, and winter is coming.”

What’s striking is that both Bannon articles are mild. Even if they’re from NYT and WaPo.

• Where Did Steve Bannon Get His Worldview? From My Book.. (Howe)

The headlines this month have been alarming. “Steve Bannon’s obsession with a dark theory of history should be worrisome” (Business Insider). “Steve Bannon Believes The Apocalypse Is Coming And War Is Inevitable” (the Huffington Post). “Steve Bannon Wants To Start World War III” (the Nation). A common thread in these media reports is that President Trump’s chief strategist is an avid reader and that the book that most inspires his worldview is “The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy.” I wrote that book with William Strauss back in 1997. It is true that Bannon is enthralled by it. In 2010, he released a documentary, “Generation Zero,” that is structured around our theory that history in America (and by extension, most other modern societies) unfolds in a recurring cycle of four-generation-long eras.

While this cycle does include a time of civic and political crisis — a Fourth Turning, in our parlance — the reporting on the book has been absurdly apocalyptic. I don’t know Bannon well. I have worked with him on several film projects, including “Generation Zero,” over the years. I’ve been impressed by his cultural savvy. His politics, while unusual, never struck me as offensive. I was surprised when he took over the leadership of Breitbart and promoted the views espoused on that site. Like many people, I first learned about the alt-right (a far-right movement with links to Breitbart and a loosely defined white-nationalist agenda) from the mainstream media. Strauss, who died in 2007, and I never told Bannon what to say or think. But we did perhaps provide him with an insight — that populism, nationalism and state-run authoritarianism would soon be on the rise, not just in America but around the world. Because we never attempted to write a political manifesto, we were surprised by the book’s popularity among certain crusaders on both the left and the right.

[..] The cycle begins with the First Turning, a “High” which comes after a crisis era. In a High, institutions are strong and individualism is weak. Society is confident about where it wants to go collectively, even if many feel stifled by the prevailing conformity. Many Americans alive today can recall the post-World War II American High (historian William O’Neill’s term), coinciding with the Truman, Eisenhower and Kennedy presidencies. Earlier examples are the post-Civil War Victorian High of industrial growth and stable families, and the post-Constitution High of Democratic Republicanism and Era of Good Feelings.

The Second Turning is an “Awakening,” when institutions are attacked in the name of higher principles and deeper values. Just when society is hitting its high tide of public progress, people suddenly tire of all the social discipline and want to recapture a sense of personal authenticity. Salvation by faith, not works, is the youth rallying cry. One such era was the Consciousness Revolution of the late 1960s and 1970s. Some historians call this America’s Fourth or Fifth Great Awakening, depending on whether they start the count in the 17th century with John Winthrop or the 18th century with Jonathan Edwards.

The Third Turning is an “Unraveling,” in many ways the opposite of the High. Institutions are weak and distrusted, while individualism is strong and flourishing. Third Turning decades such as the 1990s, the 1920s and the 1850s are notorious for their cynicism, bad manners and weak civic authority. Government typically shrinks, and speculative manias, when they occur, are delirious.

Finally, the Fourth Turning is a “Crisis” period. This is when our institutional life is reconstructed from the ground up, always in response to a perceived threat to the nation’s very survival. If history does not produce such an urgent threat, Fourth Turning leaders will invariably find one — and may even fabricate one — to mobilize collective action. Civic authority revives, and people and groups begin to pitch in as participants in a larger community. As these Promethean bursts of civic effort reach their resolution, Fourth Turnings refresh and redefine our national identity. The years 1945, 1865 and 1794 all capped eras constituting new “founding moments” in American history.

Admiral Ben Moreell (1892 – 1978) was the chief of the U.S. Navy’s Bureau of Yards and Docks and of the Civil Engineer Corps. Best known to the American public as the Father of the Navy’s Seabees, Moreell’s life spanned eight decades, two world wars, a great depression and the evolution of the United States as a superpower. He was a distinguished Naval Officer, a brilliant engineer, an industrial giant and articulate national spokesman.

• Of Bread And Circuses (Admiral Ben Moreell, January 1, 1956)

A twentieth-century repetition of the mistakes of ancient Rome would be inexcusable.Rome was eight and a half centuries old when the poet, Juvenal, penned his famous tirade against his degenerate countrymen. About 100 A.D. he wrote: “Now that no one buys our votes, the public has long since cast off its cares; the people that once bestowed commands, consulships, legions and all else, now meddles no more and longs eagerly for just two things, bread and circuses.” (Carcopino, Daily Life in Roman Times [New Haven, Yale University Press, 1940], p. 202.) Forty years later, the Roman historian, Fronto, echoed the charge in more prosaic language: “The Roman people is absorbed by two things above all others, its food supplies and its shows.” (Ibid.)

Here was a once-proud people, whose government had been their servant, who had finally succumbed to the blandishments of clever political adventurers. They had gradually relinquished their sovereignty to government administrators to whom they had granted absolute powers, in return for food and entertainment. And the surprising thing about this insidious progression is that, at the time, few realized that they were witnessing the slow destruction of a people by a corruption that would eventually transmute a nation of self-reliant, courageous, sovereign individuals into a mob, dependent upon their government for the means of sustaining life.

There are no precise records that describe the feelings of those for whom the poet, Juvenal, felt such scorn. But using the clues we have, and judging by our own experience, we can make a good guess as to what the prevailing sentiments of the Roman populace were. If we were able to take a poll of public opinion of first and second century Rome, the overwhelming response would probably have been—“We never had it so good.” Those who lived on “public assistance” and in subsidized rent-free or low-rent dwellings would certainly have assured us that now, at last, they had “security.”

Those in the rapidly expanding bureaucracy—one of the most efficient civil services the world has ever seen—would have told us that now government had a “conscience” and was using its vast resources to guarantee the “welfare” of all of its citizens; that the civil service gave them job security and retirement benefits; and that the best job was a government job! Progressive members of the business community would have said that business had never been so good, that the government was their largest customer, which assured them a dependable market, and that the government was inflating currency at about 2 per cent a year, which instilled confidence and gave everyone a sense of well-being and prosperity.

These ‘people’ are actually proud of themselves. An opposition politician in Holland seriously suggested to let Dijjsselbloem stay on as FinMin and Eurogroup head even if he loses the March 15 election, ‘because he’s such a success’. His party stands to lose 2/3 of its votes…

• Dijsselbloem Comes Out Fighting as Wilders Holds Dutch Poll Lead (BBG)

Dutch Finance Minister Jeroen Dijsselbloem said his Labor Party is fighting for every seat as populist Geert Wilders maintained a poll lead less than three weeks before general elections. Dijsselbloem, who has served as finance minister in a coalition government with Prime Minister Mark Rutte’s Liberal Party since 2012, is campaigning for his political future in the March 15 elections. Dijsselbloem also leads the group of euro-area finance ministers, and a poor showing that cost Labor its coalition slot could put his post in doubt. “I am optimistic, we have had highs and lows, we will just need to keep on fighting,” Dijsselbloem, who is third on the Labor Party’s list of candidates, said at an event in Amsterdam on Sunday. “At home and relaxed, I get somber, but as long as I remain busy I get the feeling we are getting an extra seat.”

Wilders’s anti-Islam Freedom Party would place first with 29 out of the 150 seats in parliament compared to 25 seats for Rutte’s Liberal Party, according to a poll published by Peil.nl on Sunday. While that’s the same four-seat lead as last week’s Peil.nl survey, an Ipsos poll published Friday showed the Liberals overtaking the Freedom Party, with 28 seats to 26 seats. The Labor Party under Deputy Prime Minister Lodewijk Asscher’s leadership would take 12 seats in Sunday’s poll. Labor, which currently holds 38 seats, lost support after it formed a coalition with the Liberals. Though the parties differ in their ideology, they managed to agree on a broad range of reform measures.

Starting in the middle of the economic crisis, the coalition passed a €22 billion austerity package that included cost cuts in elderly care and healthcare, an increase in the pension age and a reform of the housing market. Rutte’s second cabinet will be the first government to complete a full term since Prime Minister Wim Kok’s first ended in 1998. “It has been a journey through the desert, but we are now the most competitive economy of Europe and also one of the fastest growing, with the largest drop in unemployment in 10 years,” Rutte said in an interview in Het Financieele Dagblad on Saturday. “So that’s quite an achievement.”

Please let them try to do more things that people don’t want.

• EU Lawmakers Call For ‘Federal Union’ Of European States (RT)

The leaders of the lower chambers of parliament of Germany, Italy, France, and Luxembourg have called for a European “Federal Union” in an open letter published in Italian newspaper La Stampa on Sunday. In the letter, four representatives of EU governments – Claude Bartolone of the French National Assembly, Laura Boldrini of the Italian Chamber of Deputies, Norbert Lammert of the German Bundestag, and Mars Di Bartolomeo of the Luxembourg Chamber of Deputies – say that closer cooperation is essential for dealing with problems that no one EU state can tackle on its own, such as immigration, terrorism, and climate change. “Now is the moment to move towards closer political integration — the Federal Union of States with broad powers. We know that the prospect stirs up strong resistance, but the inaction of some cannot be the paralysis of all. Those who believe in European ideals, should be able to give them a new life instead of helplessly observing its slow sunset,” the letter read.

The letter’s authors also warn that the European integration project is currently more at risk than ever before, with high unemployment and immigration problems driving populist and nationalist movements. The EU must also come to grips with the fact that, last June, the United Kingdom decided to leave the union after holding a national referendum, aka Brexit, becoming the first member nation to opt out of the bloc. On Sunday, a number of EU states, including Germany, France and Italy, called for the UK to pay a hefty price as a “divorce settlement.” The letter was published in the run-up to a meeting of parliamentary leaders in Rome on March 17 to mark the 60th anniversary of the Treaty of Rome, which established the European Economic Community (EEC). The treaty’s signing by six countries– Belgium, France, Italy, Luxembourg, West Germany and the Netherlands – in 1957 eventually paved the way for the Maastricht Treaty and the European Union in 1991.

In September of 2015, Lammert, Bartolone, Boldrini and di Bartolomeo also signed a declaration calling for deeper and faster European integration. However, greater European integration is being increasingly challenged by a number of Eurosceptic parties around the continent, including the Alternative for Germany, the National Front in France, and the Party for Freedom in the Netherlands. Upcoming elections could bring these parties closer to power. According to the European Parliament’s chief Brexit negotiator, Guy Verhofstadt, the EU must reform, or it risks disappearing under a barrage of internal and external attacks. Late last year Noam Chomsky also warned that the surge in right-wing and anti-establishment sentiment stemming from Europe’s failed neo-liberal policies is likely to lead to the EU’s collapse, adding that “it would be a tragic development” if the bloc fell apart.

Silent censorship. What’s not to like?

• EU Lawmakers, In Unusual Move, Pull The Plug On Racist Talk (AP)

At the European Parliament, where elections are due in 2019, many say the need for action against hate speech, and strong sanctions for offenders, is long overdue. The assembly— with its two seats; one in the Belgian capital of Brussels, and the other in Strasbourg in northeast France – is often the stage for political and sometimes nationalist theater. Beyond routine shouting matches, members occasionally wear T-shirts splashed with slogans or unfurl banners. Flags adorn some lawmakers’ desks. Yet more and more in recent years, lawmakers have gone too far. “There have been a growing number of cases of politicians saying things that are beyond the pale of normal parliamentary discussion and debate,” said British EU parliamentarian Richard Corbett, who chaperoned the new rule through the assembly.

“What if this became not isolated incidents, but specific, where people could say: ‘Hey, this is a fantastic platform. It’s broad, it’s live-streamed. It can be recorded and repeated. Let’s use it for something more vociferous, more spectacular,'” he told The Associated Press. In a nutshell, rule 165 of the parliament’s rules of procedure allows the chair of debates to halt the live broadcast “in the case of defamatory, racist or xenophobic language or behavior by a member.” The maximum fine for offenders would be around 9,000 euros ($9,500). Under the rule, not made public by the assembly but first reported by Spain’s La Vanguardia newspaper, offending material could be “deleted from the audiovisual record of proceedings,” meaning citizens would never know it happened unless reporters were in the room. Weingaertner said the IPA was never consulted on that.

A technical note seen by the AP outlines a procedure for manually cutting off the video feed, stopping transmission on in-house TV monitors and breaking the satellite link to halt broadcast to the outside world. A videotape in four languages would be kept running to serve as a legal record during the blackout. A more effective and permanent system was being sought. It is also technically possible to introduce a safe-guard time delay so broadcasts appear a few seconds later. This means they could be interrupted before offending material is aired. But the system is unwieldy. Lawmakers have the right to speak in any of the European Union’s 24 official languages. An offending act could well be over before the assembly’s President Antonio Tajani even has a chance to hit the kill switch. Misunderstandings and even abuses could crop up.

During a debate in December, Gerolf Annemans, from Belgium’s Flemish independence party Vlaams Belang, expressed concern that the rule “can be abused by those who have hysterical reactions to things that they qualify as racist, xenophobic, when people are just expressing politically incorrect views.”

What a decade of fake news can achieve.

• No Debt Relief For Greece, Germany’s Deputy Finance Minister Says (R.)

Greece must not be granted a “bail in” that would involve creditors taking a loss on their loans, Germany’s deputy finance minister said in an interview broadcast on Sunday, reiterating the German government’s opposition to debt relief for Athens. “There must not be a bail-in,” Jens Spahn told German broadcaster Deutschlandfunk, according to a written transcript of the interview. “We think it is very, very likely that we will come to an agreement with the IMF that does not require a haircut,” he said, referring to losses that Greece’s creditors would have to take if debt was written off. The IMF has called for Greece to be granted substantial debt relief, but this is opposed by Germany, which makes the largest contribution to the budget of the European Stability Mechanism (ESM), the euro zone’s bailout fund.

Greece and its creditors agreed on Monday to further reforms by Athens to ease a logjam in talks with creditors that has held up additional funding for the troubled euro zone country. Inspectors from the European Commission, the ESM, the IMF and the European Central Bank are due to return to Athens this week. Spahn, a senior member of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservatives, said Greece’s problem was a lack of growth rather than debt and giving Athens debt relief would upset other euro zone countries such as Spain that had to deliver tough reforms. “Our Spanish friends, for example, say: ‘Hang on – that wouldn’t be fair: we carry out reforms and get no haircut and now you’re talking about giving Greece one?!'” Spahn said Germany was campaigning hard to keep the IMF on board in Greece’s bailout because of its expertise in helping countries that need to deliver reforms in return for aid.

Manfred Weber, who leads the conservative bloc in the European Parliament, said this month that if the IMF insisted on debt relief for Greece, it should no longer participate in the bailout, breaking ranks with Berlin’s official line that the program would end if the IMF pulled out.

Much more in the article. On how all public assets are forcibly sold at firesale prices etc.

• Germany Announces The Final Pillage Of Greece (RI)

It’s official: The Germans will not allow debt relief for Greece. Instead, Berlin wants to send in the repo man. The untold story of the Greek “bailouts” is that it wasn’t a “bailout” — it was an auction of Greek assets. Real, tangible things with real, tangible value were seized in exchange for pieces of paper that guarantee Athens will be chained to Berlin and Brussels for the foreseeable future. It’s your basic extortion racket. As one rather gloomy (but intriguing) analysis puts it:

The debt problem continues to erode the European Union from within – it is already impossible to hide, and Greek tragedy, for example, is growing. Against this background, Germany seems to have a consensus about how to get rid of Greece with its debts and inefficient economy. The scheme of this careless schoolboy by the ear from the class, it seems, differs only in details: either to expel or allow suffering – to provoke the Maidan in Athens, and then to expel in any case.

Bavaria’s 50-year-old finance minister and CSU politician Markus Soeder became the declarant of this ‘plan B’, who stated about the necessity of ‘a plan B’. “New billions should only flow when Athens implemented all the reforms. Even then, however, aid should only be given against a pledge “in the form of cash, gold or real estate”,” Soeder stated.

In his own way, he’s right – all conditions have been created for Maidan in Athens. Previously, the EU and the ECB assessed all the Greece’s public property at 50 billion euro that does not even cover the necessary new loans on debt payments of this country (80-90 billion euro). Therefore, the collateral should be gathered from private funds through the expropriation of gold and real estate. Implementation of reforms will lead to the final death of the Greek small and medium businesses after bringing the taxation to “European standards”, and namely such steps of the Ukrainian government have led to the Maidan in Kiev in 2013 with the collapse of the ruling regime in February 2014.

A bit too melodramatic? We forgot — we are supposed to use the friendly neoliberal term for this policy of national enslavement and communal suicide: “voluntary privatization.” Yes, we know. The poor, altruist Germans had to save irresponsible Greece. They did a fine job of it too.

Debt Rattle February 18 2017

Feb 182017

February 18, 2017 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 10:40 am Finance Tagged with: Armageddon, broke, China, Deep State, deflation, Greece, NATO, Pence, Russia, Trump, war 3 Responses »

Unknown California State Automobile Association signage 1925

• “That War You Ordered….” (Jim Kunstler)

• US ‘Unwavering’ In NATO Support – Pence (BBC)

• European Union President Rejects Trump Call For More NATO Spending (CNBC)

• Four NATO Nations Would Pick Russia to Defend Them If Threatened (BBG)

• Who Really Rules The United States? (FreeB)

• Australia Headed For ‘Economic Armageddon’ (News.com.au)

• China Is Going Broke (Jim Rickards)

• Brexit Was A Revolt Against Snobs Like Tony Blair (Spec.)

• Small Businesses Face Being ‘Driven Out Of London’ (Ind.)

• Norway Central Bank Chief Warns Of Sharp Drop In Wealth Fund (BBG)

• Only Germans Love the Euro These Days (BBG)

• How Do You Say Deja Vu In Greek? (R.)

• Can Tax Increases Bring Inflation To Greece? (KTG)

• Greek Labor Minister Says Pensioners Can Barely Make Ends Meet (K.)

Hard to find any news articles these days that are not severely biased. So let’s go with Jim.

• “That War You Ordered….” (Jim Kunstler)

The Russia paranoia frenzy is serious business because it indicates that a state-of-war exists between the permanent bureaucracy of government (a.k.a. the Deep State) and the new Trump administration. There are features of the struggle that ought to be much more disturbing than the dubious alleged monkey business about Russia hacking the election and the hoo-hah around a single intercepted phone call between Michael Flynn and the Russian ambassador, made to open a line-of-communication between high-ranking officials, strictly routine business in any other administration. Most disturbing are signs that the so-called intelligence community (IC) has gone rogue in collusion with forces aligned around Democratic Party functionaries up to and including former president Obama and Hillary Clinton, along with CNN, The Times, The Wash-Po, NBC News and a few other mouthpieces of the defeated establishment.

Obama and Hillary remain conspicuously sequestered from this maelstrom, but they must be working their phones like nobody’s business. (Is the IC monitoring them, too, one wonders?) Until his Queeg-on-steroids news conference late yesterday, Trump laid pretty low after General Flynn was thrown under the bus, but he must be plotting counter-moves, with Bannon and Steven Miller straining at their leashes, slavering for blood. Will some employees over at the CIA and the — what? — sixteen other IC outposts that stud the government like shipworms in a rotting hulk — be called on the carpet of the oval office, and possibly handed pink slips? How do you drain that swamp in Langley, VA? Perhaps with subpoenas? Surely Jeff Sessions over at the Department of Justice has got to be weighing action against the IC leakers. That shit is against the law.

The next disturbing element of the situation is all the war-drum beating by the same cast of characters: the IC, the Democratic Party, and major media. Why in hell are we antagonizing Russia? In the last month of Obama’s term — and for the first time in many years — NATO moved a bunch of tanks close to Russia’s border with the Baltic states. Do you really think Russia wants to reoccupy these countries for the pleasure of subsidizing them and draining the Russian treasury? In those twilight days of Obama, government officials made wild and unspecific charges about “Russian aggression,” and vague assertions about Russian plans to dominate the global scene. ajor what-the-fuck there. There’s the ugly situation in Ukraine, of course, but that was engineered by Obama’s state department.

Do you know why Russia annexed Crimea after that? It couldn’t have been for more transparently rational reasons. And what exactly is our beef with Russia in Syria? That they’re trying to prop up the Assad government because the last thing the Middle East needs is another failed state with no government whatsoever? What’s our plan for Syria, anyway? Same as Somalia, Iraq, and Libya? These stories about Russia’s intentions seem insane on their face. It’s amazing that readers of The New York Times swallow them whole. It must say something about the deterioration of the coastal gene pool. The story-mongers have a purpose though: to promote a state of permanent hostility, neo-cold-war style, to justify the grotesquely overgrown operations of the IC.

Hollow words.

• US ‘Unwavering’ In NATO Support – Pence (BBC)

The US will be “unwavering” in its support for Nato, vice-president Mike Pence told European leaders at the Munich Security Conference. In the first major foreign policy address for the Trump administration, Mr Pence said the US would “stand with Europe today and every day”. But he told the gathered leaders that European countries were “failing to pay their fair share” on defence. That failure “erodes the foundation of our alliance”, he said. Apart from the US, only four other nations had met a commitment to spend 2% of GDP on defence, “The time has come to do more,” he said.

President Donald Trump warned before taking office that the US might not uphold its commitment to come to the defence of Nato allies who were not perceived to have contributed enough financially. Mr Pence went on to say that the US would “continue to hold Russia accountable, even as we search for new common ground, which as you know, President Trump believes can be found”. Mr Pence said Russia must honour the Minsk peace accords on Ukraine and de-escalate its military operations in the east of the country.

Juncker makes sense for a change.

• European Union President Rejects Trump Call For More NATO Spending (CNBC)

European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker has said Europe should resist U.S. pressure to spend more spending on defense. U.S. President Donald Trump has criticized the NATO defense alliance, suggesting he could withdraw support if European countries did not raise defense spending to at least 2% of their economic output.In a speech on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference Thursday, Juncker, who heads the EU’s executive arm, suggested some resistance to Trump’s threat was in order. “It has been the American message for many, many years. I am very much against letting ourselves be pushed into this,” he said. Juncker also said the EU’s other spending commitments made up for any shortfalls in military funding. “Modern politics cannot just be about raising defense spending,” he said.

“If you look at what Europe is doing in defense, plus development aid, plus humanitarian aid, the comparison with the United States looks rather different,” he said. Juncker added that European nations should bundle their defense spending better and spend the money more efficiently. At a NATO meeting Wednesday, the U.S. Defense Secretary James Mattis reinforced Trump’s message, warning treaty allies they must boost their defense spending or America could “moderate its commitment.” “Americans cannot care more for your children’s future security than you do. I owe it to you to give you clarity on the political reality in the United States and to state the fair demand from my country’s people in concrete terms,” he said in a speech to NATO allies in the Belgian city of Brussels on Wednesday.

Originally filed by reporter (see URL) as: “Melania Trump’s Slovenia Would Pick Russian Over US Protection”. Say no more.

• Four NATO Nations Would Pick Russia to Defend Them If Threatened (BBG)

Who you gonna call? For the citizens of four NATO countries asked which military power they’d want fighting on their side if attacked, the answer was simple – Russia. That was among the findings of a multi-nation Gallup poll published just ahead of Friday’s annual gathering of the transatlantic security community in Germany that appeared to map out shifts in the post-Cold War security alliances which have come under renewed strain and scrutiny since Donald Trump’s election to the U.S. presidency. By far the largest number of countries polled by WIN/Gallup International chose the U.S. for their go-to defense partner, suggesting that it remains the world’s only military power with truly global reach and alliances. At the same time, however, China and Russia picked each other, war-torn Ukraine and Iraq split down the middle, while those four members of the U.S.-led North Atlantic Treaty Organization – Bulgaria, Greece, Slovenia and Turkey – plumped for Russia.

As U.S. Secretary of Defense James Mattis tours Europe delivering a message of tough love to NATO allies – increase spending or see the U.S. “moderate’’ its support – the poll shows the world’s gradual political reorganization around different security poles, according to Kancho Stoychev, vice president of WIN/Gallup International. “It isn’t surprising that Russians and Chinese chose each other, but it is new,’’ said Stoychev. “It shows us something very important – that U.S. policy over the last 20 years has driven Russia into the arms of China, which is quite strange because Russia is fundamentally a part of Europe.’’ At the same time, some of the results in European NATO countries showed how their fundamental security choices were moving beyond the alliance, he said. Bulgaria and Greece, for example, see their biggest security threat coming from Turkey.

Right wing. As I said, very hard to find anything unbiased. All heels are dug in deeply.

• Who Really Rules The United States? (FreeB)

Donald Trump was elected president last November by winning 306 electoral votes. He pledged to “drain the swamp” in Washington, D.C., to overturn the system of politics that had left the nation’s capital and major financial and tech centers flourishing but large swaths of the country mired in stagnation and decay. “What truly matters,” he said in his Inaugural Address, “is not which party controls our government, but whether our government is controlled by the people.” Is it? By any historical and constitutional standard, “the people” elected Donald Trump and endorsed his program of nation-state populist reform. Yet over the last few weeks America has been in the throes of an unprecedented revolt. Not of the people against the government—that happened last year—but of the government against the people. What this says about the state of American democracy, and what it portends for the future, is incredibly disturbing.

There is, of course, the case of Michael Flynn. He made a lot of enemies inside the government during his career, suffice it to say. And when he exposed himself as vulnerable those enemies pounced. But consider the means: anonymous and possibly illegal leaks of private conversations. Yes, the conversation in question was with a foreign national. And no one doubts we spy on ambassadors. But we aren’t supposed to spy on Americans without probable cause. And we most certainly are not supposed to disclose the results of our spying in the pages of the Washington Post because it suits a partisan or personal agenda. Here was a case of current and former national security officials using their position, their sources, and their methods to crush a political enemy. And no one but supporters of the president seems to be disturbed.

Why? Because we are meant to believe that the mysterious, elusive, nefarious, and to date unproven connection between Donald Trump and the Kremlin is more important than the norms of intelligence and the decisions of the voters. But why should we believe that? And who elected these officials to make this judgment for us? Nor is Flynn the only example of nameless bureaucrats working to undermine and ultimately overturn the results of last year’s election. According to the New York Times, civil servants at the EPA are lobbying Congress to reject Donald Trump’s nominee to run the agency. Is it because Scott Pruitt lacks qualifications? No. Is it because he is ethically compromised? Sorry. The reason for the opposition is that Pruitt is a critic of the way the EPA was run during the presidency of Barack Obama. He has a policy difference with the men and women who are soon to be his employees. Up until, oh, this month, the normal course of action was for civil servants to follow the direction of the political appointees who serve as proxies for the elected president.

Personal debt.

• Australia Headed For ‘Economic Armageddon’ (News.com.au)

Australia is headed for an “economic Armageddon”, with record household debt, record foreign debt and a massive housing bubble creating a perfect storm that could “wipe out” millions of families if there is a global shock. That is the apocalyptic warning of a former government economic advisor, who says the government needs to cut tax incentives such as negative gearing and welfare handouts and the RBA needs to increase interest rates in order to avoid a “devastating depression”. Corporate governance specialist John Adams, who was an economics and policy advisor to Senator Arthur Sinodinos and management consultant to a big four accounting firm, believes he has found seven disturbing signs that the global economy is primed for a major fall. Worse still, Australia is particularly vulnerable because of significant structural imbalances, including record levels of household debt not seen since the lead up to the last great depression in the 1920s.

“Australians should be concerned over the state of both the Australian and global economy,” Mr Adams told news.com.au. “The data clearly demonstrates that there are significant structural economic imbalances in the Australian economy. Significant expansion of the broad money supply and record low interest rates by the Reserve Bank of Australia as well as generous tax incentives and welfare provisions by the Federal Government have led Australians to amass record levels of personal debt which have fuelled the creation of asset bubbles, particularly in housing. “Millions of Australians are not only doing it tough through significant cost of living and debt serving pressures, but are at significant risk of being financially wiped out if an unanticipated adverse international economic shock were to hit Australia such as a new global financial crisis.”

End of the year?

• China Is Going Broke (Jim Rickards)

[..] of the 2.9 trillion, about one trillion of that is not liquid, meaning it’s wealth of some kind, it represents investment, but China wanted to improve their returns actually on their investments, so they invested in hedge funds, they invested in private equity funds, they made direct investments in gold mines in Zambia and so forth, so about a trillion of that is, it’s wealth, but it’s not liquid. It’s not money that you can use to pay your bills. So now, we’re down to 1.9 trillion liquid. Well, about another trillion is going to have to be held in what’s called a “precautionary reserve” to bail out the Chinese banking system.

When you look at the Chinese banking system, private estimates are that the bad debts are 25% of total assets. Banks usually run with 5, maybe 7-8% capital. Even if you said 10% capital, well, if 25% of your assets are bad, that completely wipes out your capital, so the Chinese banking system is technically insolvent, even though they don’t admit that. I mean, they cook the books, they take these bad loans. Let’s say I’m a bank and I have a loan to a state owned enterprise, a steel mill or something and the guy can’t pay me, can’t even come close to paying me and the loan’s due, I say, “Well, look, you owe me 300 million dollars. I’ll tell you what. I’ll give you a new loan for 400 million dollars, but I’ll take the money and pay myself back the old loan plus the interest, and then I’ll give the new loan to your maturity and I’ll see you in two years.”

So, if you did that in the U.S. banking system you’d go to jail. You’re not allowed to do that. You’re throwing good money after bad and you’re supposed to right off a loan that is clearly not performing or where the borrower is unable to pay. But in this case, it’s just extend to pretend, and so it’s still on the books, in my example, 400 million dollar good loan with a two year maturity, but in fact it’s a rotten loan that the guy couldn’t pay in the first place, and now he just can’t pay a bigger amount. He’s probably going to go bankrupt and I’ll have to write it off at the end of the day. So, with that as background for the Chinese banking system, people kind of shrug and say, “Well, can’t China just bail it out? They’ve got all this money.”

Well, the answer is they could, and they’ve done so before, and they can bail it out, but it’s going to trust a trillion dollars, so you’ve got to put a trillion dollars to one side, for when the time comes, to bail out the banking system. Well, now you’re down to 900 billion, right? Remember, we started with four trillion, 1.1 trillion’s out door, 1 trillion’s illiquid, 1 trillion you’ve got to hold to one side to bail out the banking system, well now you only have 900 billion of liquid assets to defend your currency, to prop up the Chinese yuan. But the problem is the reserves are going out the door at a rate of, it varies month to month, 30, 40, 50 billion dollars a month. Some months more, some months over 100 billion dollars.

Blair getting involved will be a huge boon for Brexit.

• Brexit Was A Revolt Against Snobs Like Tony Blair (Spec.)

The brass neck of Tony Blair. The Brexit vote was ‘based on imperfect knowledge’, says the man who unleashed barbarism across the Middle East on the basis of a student dissertation he printed off the internet. Who marched thousands into unimaginable horror on the basis of myth and spin. That NHS claim on the side of the Leave bus is small fry, infinitesimally small fry, in comparison with the guff this bloke came out with. It didn’t cause anyone to die, for one. For Blair to lecture the British people about truth is an affront to memory and decency and reason. No self-respecting citizen should put up with it. Blair made his comments about our ‘imperfect knowledge’ – dimwits that we are – in a speech for Open Britain, a cross-party pro-EU group, in London this morning.

The speech sums up the elitism and arrogance and contempt for democracy of those Remainers who just cannot accept that they lost. ‘The people voted without knowledge of the true terms of Brexit’, Blair haughtily declared. Rubbish. We all knew what it meant to tick the box saying ‘Leave the European Union’ — it meant leaving the European Union. It meant what it said — and we meant what we said. Blair and the connected, moneyed weepers for the EU who make up Open Britain can’t get their heads around this. They think we didn’t know what we were doing. And so they’ve come to enlighten us and make us think again. Remainers must ‘rise up’, says Blair, and turn the throng’s ‘imperfect knowledge’ into ‘informed knowledge’ by giving us ‘easy to understand’ information about how Brexit will ‘cause real damage to the country’.

Risen, brave, ‘informed’ Remainers must hold back the ‘rush over the cliff’s edge’, he said. The whole thing stinks to the heavens of paternalism. Blair is positioning himself and his switched-on mates as the possessors of information that we the imperfect plebs lack. Like lemmings we’re leaping off the cliff, and this good man must save us. He must impart to us his wisdom — in ‘easy to understand’ ways, of course, because we can’t handle anything too complex — and in the process fulfil the duty of the political leader to ‘give answers’ rather than ‘ride the anger’ of the public. He depicts Open Britain as cool and knowledgable, and Leavers as uninformed and angry. It’s positively aristocratic, with Open Britain fancying itself as the small but beautiful font of wisdom in a land of madness.

[..] Blair spoke in the language of revolution. Remainers must ‘rise up’. He talked about the need for a ‘revolt’, by ‘force of argument’, against the Leave vote. Excitable media outlets have gone even further, describing his speech as a call ‘for people to “rise up” against Brexit’, a plea that ‘Britain must rise up against Brexit’.

How to kill a city, part 826.

• Small Businesses Face Being ‘Driven Out Of London’ (Ind.)

An increase in business rates is one of biggest issues concerning small businesses in London, easily trumping fears around economic uncertainty and worries relating to recruiting the right talent. According to a survey by the Federation of Small Businesses (FSB) and trade body Camden Town Unlimited, the average micro business in the city, defined as a company with fewer than 10 employees, will be paying business rates of £17,000 as of April this year under a Government hike. “London is in serious danger of losing its vital support system of micro and small businesses,” the FSB’s chair for London, Sue Terpilowski, said in a statement. “We need to realise that the hard costs of operating a business in the capital are starting to outweigh the benefits which simply does not make economic sense – and so tacking these burdens at the spring Budget is critical,” Ms Terpilowski added.

Business rates – which are sometimes referred to as non-domestic rates – are levies that companies occupying commercial properties pay. That tax goes towards covering the cost of services provided by local authorities and the emergency services. The survey found that close to three quarters – 74% – of businesses consider rates to be one of the biggest issues affecting them, while 36% cited economic uncertainty, and, one third said that the difficulty around recruiting the right staff was their biggest concern. “The new business rates will drive firms out of London, force some businesses to cut staff or close down altogether,” said Simon Pitkeathley, the chief executive of Camden Town Unlimited.

Fast and furious. Caught in the oil wars.

• Norway Central Bank Chief Warns Of Sharp Drop In Wealth Fund (BBG)

Norway’s central bank governor sharpened his warning on rising spending of oil revenue as he drew up scenarios for a 50% loss of capital over the next 10 years for the world’s biggest sovereign wealth fund. Governor Oystein Olsen said that the continued rise in oil cash spending, which now accounts for about 20% of the budget and 8% of GDP, must now be halted to protect the $900 billion fund, the world’s largest sovereign pool of cash. “With a high level of oil revenue spending, there’s a risk of a sharp reduction in the fund’s capital,” Olsen said in the traditional Annual Address in Oslo Thursday. “This could, for example, happen if a global recession triggers both a decline in oil revenue and low or negative returns on the fund’s capital.” Government withdrawals from the fund are estimated to jump about 25% this year after an historic first outflow last year. The Conservative-led government was last year forced to dip into the oil fund for the first time to cover budget needs and protect the economy amid a plunge in oil prices.

Why the euro is doomed.

• Only Germans Love the Euro These Days (BBG)

French presidential candidate Marine Le Pen unsettled investors with her pledge to pull France out of the euro and re-denominate all French debt in newly minted francs. Polls suggest Le Pen won’t get the chance; she is expected to lose a second-round runoff. Even if polls are correct this time, that doesn’t mean the euro is safe. In fact, political support for the single currency has been waning – especially in Germany’s two largest euro-zone trading partners. In both France and Italy, there is now a plurality of support for candidates who advocate a withdrawal from the euro, with pro-euro candidates gathering less than 30% in polls. In France, anti-euro candidates – Le Pen and Socialist Jean-Luc Melanchon – together have nearly 40% support.

Of course, that doesn’t mean that all of Le Pen’s supporters, or Melanchon’s, oppose the euro. Most French voters still tell pollsters they favor the euro; but clearly that support waning, as the latest Eurobarometer poll showed. Anti-euro sentiment, once a blip on the fringes of public opinion, is now credible and has found its way onto political platforms. Respondents are asked whether they think the euro is a good or bad thing for their country. In Italy, the euro gets even less love than in France, with 47% saying the euro is a “bad” thing for their country. That is in stark contrast to Germany, where there is now a clear majority in favor of the euro. This chart shows how opinion has changed over time:

This is a dramatic reversal in opinion: A German population that was initially reluctant to give up the Deutsche mark is now firmly wedded to the euro, while support in France and Italy has declined (particularly sharply in Italy’s case). But this shift is the logical result of the euro’s structural deficiencies. German industry, whose productivity has been increasing more than its European counterparts, now dominates the continental economy. While German unemployment was decreasing and its economy recovering from the financial crisis, Italy was stagnant with rising unemployment. Already saddled with a very large public debt (now over 130% of gross domestic product), Italy could neither reflate its economy, nor bail out its banks, while whole segments of its industry, particularly in lower and medium-cost goods, have disappeared.

Damning: 56% of Greeks make less than €8,600 a year. And the Troika wants to tax them more. “..the tax- free income threshold, now at about €8,600 per person per year, a number the IMF maintains lets some 56% of wage-earning Greeks escape paying income tax.”

• How Do You Say Deja Vu In Greek? (R.)

[..] it would not be trite to say that another festering row with Greece is the last thing the euro zone needs when faced with a protectionist U.S. president, Britain leaving the European Union, and anti-euro politicians vying for power or presence in French, Dutch and German elections. So EU officials have been urging speed in finding agreement and calmly warning of instability ahead if none is found. “There is a common understanding that time lost in reaching an agreement will have a cost for everyone,” the European commissioner responsible for the euro, Valdis Dombrovskis, told Greek news portal Euro2day. The issue, however, is multi-layered and thus particularly complex. Part of it is about what kind of primary surplus – what is left in a surplus budget before debt obligations – Greece must reach and run for some time.

The bailout, signed by Greece and euro zone lenders, says 3.5% of GDP(which would be by far the highest in the euro zone). The IMF, the other major lender, says that is undoable without further Greek belt-tightening. It says 1.5% of GDP and some form of debt relaxation – for example, over what is paid when – would be more realistic and sustainable. The IMF, furthermore, says it won’t participate in any bailout that it does not believe to be viable. Germany and others say that the IMF must be a part of the bailout or there is no deal. Both lenders have told Greece they want about €3.6 billion in additional savings, including a reduction in the tax- free income threshold, now at about €8,600 per person per year, a number the IMF maintains lets some 56% of wage-earning Greeks escape paying income tax.

Greece says no. Its economy contracted again in the fourth quarter of 2016, nearly one in four Greeks is unemployed and its pensioners have already seen 11 cuts to income. So plenty of scope for crisis – if not quite yet.

Good example of why rising prices do not equal inflation. Greece is deflating like mad. Money velocity has plummeted, making recovery impossible.

• Can Tax Increases Bring Inflation To Greece? (KTG)

Special consumption fees imposed on fuel, coffee, tobacco products and telecommunications beginning of the year skyrocketed consumer prices and led to the inevitable: inflation. According to Greek Statistics Authority ELSTAT inflation reached 1.5% in January from 0.3% in December. ‘This is almost a five-year high and above market expectations that were forecasting a 0.4% for January,’ Reuters notes. I do not know how ‘markets’ make their forecasts, but real Greek life shows a different picture. The supermarkets had massive discount offers in a plethora of goods in December. The special fees imposed as of 1.1.2017 were not immediately seen in supermarket prices but in fuel and tobaccoo products and telecommunications. Super markets kept offering discounts until around January 20th. Then the “households party” was over.

On February 1st, the price for half a kilo filter coffee went up to €7.68 from €5.46. Apparently sales stagnated, the import company lowered the price by 1 euro. A week later, the discount offer was just 50 cents. Officially, the special fee was supposed to be €2-3 per kilo of roasted coffee. In real life, the increase is higher €2.12 for just half a kilo. Similarly, the price for 400-gr package for a cocoa drink of a well known international brand went up to €3.40 from €2.60. At the same time, the cheaper soft package disappeared from the supermarket shelves. Here to note that for year the hard package used to contain 500gr. Sometime in 2010, I was badly surprised to see the package was down to 400gr, while the price remained the same.

In real life, I have to spend a total of €9 to €10 more per supermarket visit once a week. This makes a nice sum of €40 more per month. And that’s alone for the supermarket. Add the increases in other sectors and start the calculation.

As the EU keeps stressing the importance of unity, the Troika inches ever closer to causing a civil war in Greece. Unity is not just a word.

• Greek Labor Minister Says Pensioners Can Barely Make Ends Meet (K.)

Greece’s Minister of Labor, Social Security and Social Solidarity Effie Achtsioglou insisted in a letter published Friday in the Financial Times that Greek pensioners have barely enough to live on and urged IMF chief Christine Lagarde to listen. “We cannot accept IMF insistence on further cuts in pensions. As minister for pensions I must answer, hoping that IMF managing director Christine Lagarde will listen,” she said, ahead of Monday’s Eurogroup, in a bid to explain why Greece cannot make any more pension cuts. “The narrative about Greek pensions is driven by demands of its creditors. They argue that the pension system is overgenerous and a drain on the economy,” she said, adding that it is based on the crude statistic that pensions require annual transfers from the state budget of around 11% of GDP in Greece compared with the eurozone average of 2.25%.

This comparison, she said, is misleading. “Following the implementation of the new pension law last year, total state financing of pensions is projected at less than 9% of GDP,” she explained. “The bottom line is that Greece’s old people are much worse off than elsewhere in Europe because they do not have access to other benefits. Per capita income for individuals aged over 65 is about €9,000, compared with €20,000 in the eurozone.” she added, asking “how could the major problem confronting Greece be overgenerous pensions, when 43% of pensioners receive less than €660 a month?.”

PRESS CONFERENCE

searching
inside his cranium

trying to find
a brain to rack,

he found the word
”uranium”

and launched
an unclear attack

Brian Bilston

Debt Rattle November 25 2016

Nov 252016

November 25, 2016 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 9:53 am Finance Tagged with: debt, deficits, deflation, Erdogan, Lesbos, Merkel, OPEC, refugees, Russia, WMP 10 Responses »

Robert Capa Anti-fascist militia women at Barcelona street barricade 1936

• America’s Trade Advantage: Large Deficits (Pettis)

• All Aboard Post-TPP World (Escobar)

• The Bank of Japan Can’t Keep Stores From Cutting Prices (BBG)

• China Banking Regulator Wrestles With $2.9 Trillion Off-Balance Sheet WMPs (R.)

• China Central Bank Warns Against Outflows Disguised As Investment (R.)

• ECB Says It Can Shield Eurozone From Global Finance Instability (BBG)

• The Snowball of Debt (HowMuch/VC)

• Russia to OPEC: Oil Freeze Is All You Get

• Germany, 15 Other Countries Press For Arms Control Deal With Russia (R.)

• Fillon Calls Hollande’s Hardline Policy On Russia ‘Absurd’ (EuA)

• EU Parliament President Martin Schulz to Step Down, Run Against Merkel (WSJ)

• Increasingly Rapid Ice Melt Could Trigger Uncontrollable Climate Change (G.)

• Erdogan Threatens To Open Borders To Refugees After EU Vote (AFP)

• Refugees Torch Lesbos Camp After Gas Explosion Kills Two (AFP)

Interesting point of view. What Pettis ignores is that the issuer of a global reserve currency MUST always run a deficit, or the world will be starved of money.

• America’s Trade Advantage: Large Deficits (Pettis)

Even China’s official voice, the People’s Daily, pointed out Monday how unlikely it was that China could “overtake the U.S. to lead the world.” This is because China must accommodate high and rising trade surpluses to moderate a stark trade-off between rising debt and rising unemployment. After years of deep imbalances and accelerating credit growth, China this year met its 6.7% GDP-growth target—needed to stabilize employment—only by growing debt in a frightening amount equal to more than 40 percentage points of GDP. Debt limits are a major constraint on China’s difficult adjustment. The country must therefore rely on its trade surplus for crucial breathing space, with each percentage point of surplus substituting for about 10 percentage points of debt.

To see how this affects China’s leadership role, consider how the U.S., only after 50 years as the world’s largest economy and a negligible governance role, finally came to dominate global trade. This occurred over two separate periods. The first ran for roughly five decades beginning with World War I. Two highly destructive world wars left all the world’s major economies acutely short of capital—all except for the U.S., which began the period as the world’s largest surplus nation and its main exporter of savings. This inevitably put America at the center of the emerging economic order. By the 1970s, conditions were very different. The other advanced nations had rebuilt their economies, global savings were abundant and other forms of demand determined the growth rates for most economies.

Rather than receive access to scarce capital, these countries wanted instead to export capital, i.e., to expand demand by increasing exports of tradable goods while constraining imports. With its flexible financial system and the gradual elimination by the 1970s of all capital restrictions, the U.S. quickly adapted and began running large deficits, the costs of which, in the form of unemployment and consumer debt, America was willing to absorb for political advantage. This is the key reason why China cannot replace the U.S. as the leader of global trade.

[..] Opposition to trade, particularly among Americans most vulnerable to unemployment and consumer debt, was therefore inevitable. But rather than other countries reorganizing around the surpluses China requires, it is more likely that over time global trade will become unstable and increasingly contentious. That is in fact closer to the historical norm than the anomalous stability of the four decades before 1914 and the six after 1945. A U.S. retreat from trade would clearly be damaging to global prospects. Many economists argue that it will also damage U.S. prospects. But they are almost certainly wrong. History suggests that intervention usually benefits diversified economies with large, persistent trade deficits, especially when driven at least in part by distortions abroad.

Escobar should read Pettis.

• All Aboard Post-TPP World (Escobar)

A half-hearted near handshake between US President Barack Obama and Russian President Vladimir Putin before and after they spoke ‘for about four minutes’, standing up, on the sidelines of the APEC summit in Lima, Peru, captured to perfection the melancholic dwindling of the Obama era. A whirlwind flashback of the fractious relationship between Obama and ‘existential threats’ Russia and China would include everything from the Washington-sponsored Maidan in Kiev to Obama’s ‘Assad must go’ in Syria, with special mentions to the oil price war, sanctions, the raid on the ruble, extreme demonization of Putin and all things Russian, provocations in the South China Sea – all down to a finishing flourish; the death of the much vaunted TPP treaty, which was reconfirmed at APEC right after the election of Donald Trump.

It was almost too painful to watch Obama defending his not exactly spectacular legacy at his final international press conference – with, ironically, the backdrop of the South American Pacific coast – just as Chinese President Xi Jinping all but basked in his reiterated geopolitical glow, which he already shares with Putin. As for Trump, though invisible in Lima, he was everywhere. The ritual burial, in Peru’s Pacific waters, of the «NATO on trade» arm of the pivot to Asia (first announced in October 2011 by Hillary Clinton) thus offered Xi the perfect platform to plug the merits of the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), amply supported by China. RCEP is an ambitious idea aiming at becoming the world’s biggest free trade agreement; 46% of global population, with a combined GDP of $17 trillion, and 40% of world trade.

RCEP includes the 10 ASEAN nations plus China, Japan, South Korea, India, Australia and New Zealand. The RCEP idea was born four years ago at an ASEAN summit in Cambodia – and has been through nine rounds of negotiations so far. Curiously, the initial idea came from Japan – as a mechanism to combine the plethora of bilateral deals ASEAN has struck with its partners. But now China is in the lead. [..] Meanwhile, Putin and Xi met once again – with Putin revealing he’s going to China next spring to deepen Russian involvement in the New Silk Roads, a.k.a. One Belt, One Road (OBOR). The ultimate objective is to merge the Chinese-led OBOR with the development of the Russia-led Eurasia Economic Union (EEU).

That’s the spirit behind 25 intergovernmental agreements in economy, investment and nuclear industry signed by Russian PM Dmitry Medvedev and Chinese PM Li Keqiang in St. Petersburg in early November, as well as the set up of a joint Russia-China Venture Fund. In parallel, almost out of blue, and with a single stroke, Turkey President Tayyip Erdogan, on the way back from a visit to Pakistan and Uzbekistan, confirmed what had been all but evident for the past few months; “Why shouldn’t Turkey be in the Shanghai Five? I said this to Mr. Putin, to (Kazakh President) Nazarbayev, to those who are in the Shanghai Five now… I think if Turkey were to join the Shanghai Five, it will enable it to act with much greater ease”.

How is it possible that this is still allowed to continue?

• The Bank of Japan Can’t Keep Stores From Cutting Prices (BBG)

While Governor Haruhiko Kuroda’s vow to overshoot the Bank of Japan’s 2% inflation target caused a stir among monetary policy watchers in September, it’s yet to have an impact among retailers. Stores as diverse as supermarket operator Aeon, Mister Donut and Wal-Mart have all announced price cuts since Kuroda’s pledge, underscoring the weakness in Japanese consumer spending and the difficulty of overcoming the “deflationary mindset” that the BOJ set out to eradicate. Consumer prices fell for an eighth straight month in October, a government report showed Friday. “Companies are just being practical,” said Masamichi Adachi at JPMorgan. “No one is buying the BOJ’s new commitment. There is strong doubt that the BOJ can even achieve the 2% target and the name ‘overshooting commitment’ itself is hard to understand for ordinary people.”

Falling prices and expectations for more of the same could also drag on annual wage talks, which start soon. Kuroda said last week that he’s “paying close attention” to these, as weak growth in pay has been hampering efforts to generate inflation. It’s essential for Japanese companies to set salaries based on the premise of 2% inflation, he said. Base salaries, which exclude bonuses and overtime, will rise this year by less than last year, Dai-ichi Life Research Institute forecast in a report this month. This reinforces frugality among shoppers and encourages retailers to compete by discounting.

Beijing does not control its own economy. It’s hostage to the shadow banks.

• China Banking Regulator Wrestles With $2.9 Trillion Off-Balance Sheet WMPs (R.)

China’s banking regulator may be getting serious about how lenders provision for the more than 20 trillion yuan ($2.9 trillion) of wealth management products (WMPs) that have been issued as non-guaranteed off-balance sheet liabilities. The China Banking Regulatory Commission (CBRC), in new draft rules released on Wednesday, demanded banks apply a more “comprehensive” approach to cover “substantive risks” related to off-balance sheet activities, or shadow banking. The guidelines, which would replace 2011 regulations and are awaiting comment, proposed such measures as adding impairment loss allowances and properly calculating risk-weighted assets for off-balance sheet activity.

It was the latest measure announced by CBRC to curb shadow banking risks and address the rapid growth of WMPs, which amounted to 26.28 trillion yuan ($3.8 trillion) by end-June, data from the Banking Sector Wealth Management Product Registration and Custodian Centre showed. That amounts to around 39% of China’s GDP in 2015. About 77%, or 20.18 trillion yuan, of the products are non-guaranteed bank WMPs, a major component of shadow banking activity, the data showed. CBRC Chairman Shang Fulin warned banks in September the rampant growth of their off-balance sheet operations must be curtailed, and represented a “hidden credit risk that potentially threatens financial safety”.

[..] China’s mid-tier and small lenders, which have raised a greater proportion of their funding using WMPs, are more vulnerable to off-balance sheet liquidity risks. One important obstacle is capital. A very strict interpretation of the draft regulations, requiring banks to hold reserves against all off-balance sheet issuance, would require banks to raise as much as 1.7 trillion yuan to maintain current capital levels, said Jack Yuan, a banking analyst at Fitch. “The incentives for banks to issue more off-balance sheet WMPs still exists,” said Yuan. “There’s nothing in these rules that disincentivizes banks from continuing on with more off-balance sheet activity.” “It’s like driving a car,” said a risk manager at another mid-size lender. “If you don’t follow the rules, there’s a mess. But if you follow the rules, that doesn’t mean you have to slow down.”

How do you tell them apart though?

• China Central Bank Warns Against Outflows Disguised As Investment (R.)

China’s central bank has urged commercial banks in Shanghai to guard against money outflows via the Shanghai Free Trade Zone (FTZ) disguised as foreign investment, two sources with knowledge of the instructions said on Friday. The Shanghai headquarters of the People’s Bank of China asked for particular vigilance against money originating in other provinces or cities in China that flowed into the FTZ en route abroad, the banking industry sources said. The guidance from the PBOC’s was the latest in a string of measures to stem surging capital outflows as the yuan currency plumbs 8-1/2 year lows against the surging U.S. dollar.

“The central bank has urged lenders to strengthen due diligence to prevent capital outflows disguised as outbound investment,” said one source, who declined to be identified because he was not authorized to speak publicly about the matter. On Wednesday it said it would crack down on capital flight and closely monitor abnormal capital flows through the FTZ. In a report on Tuesday, Capital Economics estimated that capital outflows last month were the largest since January, and posed a threat to China’s exchange rate regime. The Shanghai FTZ was launched in 2013 to promote international trade and cross-border investment, but three years later the city government is trying to balance efforts to accelerate financial reforms in the zone while preventing capital outflows.

But of course….

• ECB Says It Can Shield Eurozone From Global Finance Instability (BBG)

The ECB is confident it will be able to continue shielding the euro area from the risk of a sudden correction in asset prices, after political events such as the election of Donald Trump threaten to increase volatility in coming months. “We are certainly seeing a correction coming from the U.S.,” ECB Vice President Vitor Constancio said on Thursday in an interview with Bloomberg TV’s Matt Miller. “The ECB will continue to exert its stabilizing role, so I don’t think there will be significant contagion to Europe.” Constancio spoke on the occasion of the publication of the ECB’s twice-yearly Financial Stability Review.

The report warns that the risk of an abrupt global market correction has intensified on the back of widespread political uncertainty, posing a threat to banks, stability and economic growth. While the policies of incoming President Trump may lead to higher spending and faster inflation in the U.S., their effect on the euro area is difficult to gauge given the possibility of protectionist tit-for-tats and higher chances of populist victories in votes across the continent. “More volatility in the near future is likely and the potential for an abrupt reversal remains significant,” according to the bank. “Elevated geopolitical tensions and heightened political uncertainty amid busy electoral calendars in major advanced economies have the potential to reignite global risk aversion and to trigger a major confidence shock.”

A similar graph of private debt would be more revealing.

• The Snowball of Debt (HowMuch/VC)

With the U.S. National Debt closing in on the $20 trillion mark, there has been a lot of conversation in Washington about debt and its role in government. And most of that conversation right now revolves around President-elect Donald Trump. On one hand, the Trump campaign had early rhetoric in the Presidential campaign that the elimination of the deficit and existing government debt would be paramount if elected. The Trump administration has also been highly critical of the Federal Reserve, saying that the Fed’s policies create a “false economy”. As a result, some see Trump embracing the unique opportunity to put his stamp on how the Federal Reserve does business in early 2017.

On the other hand, even many conservative think tanks are concerned about what Trump policies mean for government debt. Rebuilding infrastructure is not cheap, and widely-cited estimates see the national debt increasing by anywhere from $5.3 trillion to $11.5 trillion over the next 10 years. While giant numbers like $20 trillion sound abstract and meaningless, converting them to debt-per-capita can make things more intuitive. The per-capita amount shows the amount of debt that exists per citizen, and makes things plain and simple. Today’s infographic from HowMuch.net, a cost information site, shows government debt-per-capita in every country in the world, including the United States.

Here are the countries where people owe the most debt per person:
Japan: $85,694.87 per person
Ireland: $67,147.59 per person
Singapore: $56,112.75 per person
Belgium: $44,202.75 per person
United States: $42,503.98 per person
Canada: $42,142.61 per person
Italy: $40,461.11 per person
Iceland: $39,731.65 per person
Australia: $38,769.98 per person
United Kingdom: $36,206.11 per person
Of course, debt-per-capita isn’t the only lens to view government debt.

Manipulating prices with empty words. If they ever sign an agreement, it will be a hollowed out one, and it won’t last more than two weeks.

• Russia to OPEC: Oil Freeze Is All You Get

Facing pressure from OPEC to make a significant output reduction, Russia reiterated its readiness to freeze oil production at current levels, arguing that the offer amounted to a cut compared with next year’s plans. A production cap would mean Russia pumping 200,000 to 300,000 barrels a day less than planned in 2017, Energy Minister Alexander Novak told reporters in Moscow on Thursday. That means a freeze would be “quite a difficult and harsh situation for us as our plans envisioned an output growth next year,” he said. OPEC, which is seeking to finalize its own supply cuts of as much as 1.1 million barrels a day next week, asked non-members to contribute by cutting daily production by about 500,000 barrels, Novak said.

OPEC reached a preliminary deal in September to reduce collective output to 32.5 million to 33 million barrels a day, compared with the group’s estimate of 33.6 million in October. Talks on individual production quotas continued this week with the aim of securing a final pact by the ministerial meeting in Vienna on Nov. 30. The group will meet lower-level OPEC officials to discuss cooperation on Nov. 28, followed by a Nov. 30 breakfast meeting between ministers and non-members, including Russia, before the ministerial summit, according to people familiar with the matter.

Merkel’s anti-Putin stance will be used against her. Germany and Russia should always try to talk. They are too close to not talk.

• Germany, 15 Other Countries Press For Arms Control Deal With Russia (R.)

Fifteen European countries have joined Germany in its push for a new arms control agreement with Moscow, saying more dialogue is needed to prevent an arms race in Europe after Russia’s actions in Crimea and eastern Ukraine, a German newspaper said. “Europe’s security is in danger,” German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier told Die Welt newspaper in an interview published on Friday. “As difficult as ties to Russia may currently be, we need more dialogue, not less.” Steinmeier, a Social Democrat who has been nominated to become German president next year, first called for a new arms control deal with Russia in August to avoid an escalation of tensions in Europe.

Fifteen other countries – all belonging to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe – have since joined Steinmeier’s initiative: France, Italy, Austria, Belgium, Switzerland, the Czech Republic, Spain, Finland, the Netherlands, Norway, Romania, Sweden, Slovakia, Bulgaria and Portugal. The group plans to issue a joint statement on Friday and will meet again on the sidelines of a Dec. 8-9 ministerial level OSCE meeting in Hamburg that will be hosted by Germany, which now holds the rotating presidency of the OSCE. Steinmeier condemned Russia’s annexation of Crimea and its support for separatists in eastern Ukraine, saying such acts undermined delicate bonds of trust built up over decades and threatened to unleashed a new arms race.

U.S. officials are skeptical about the initiative, citing Russia’s failure to abide by existing agreements and treaties. Steinmeier also drew criticism from U.S. and NATO officials in June after warning that Western military maneuvers in eastern Europe amounted to “saber-rattling and shrill war cries” that could worsen tensions with Russia.

I’ve said it before: it’s never a good feeling when the looses cannons make most sense. But that’s 2016 for you.

• Fillon Calls Hollande’s Hardline Policy On Russia ‘Absurd’ (EuA)

In a televised debate last night (24 November) French conservative frontrunner François Fillon said Russia must be anchored to Europe, or else Moscow would couple with China, to the detriment of the continent. The debate was largely seen as the last chance for Alain Juppé, who came second in the first round of the primary elections of the conservatives last Sunday, to impress the conservative electorate and catch up on Fillon ahead of the 27 November run-off. The one-and-a-half hour debate was generally uncontroversial. One of the rare contentious exchanges was when Juppé questioned Fillon’s perceived closeness to Russian President Vladimir Putin. Putin knew Fillon when they were both prime ministers.

In an unusual televised appearance the Russian president praised him Wednesday as a “great professional” and a “very principled person”. “This must be the first presidential election in which the Russian president chooses his candidate,” Juppé said. Fillon brushed off Putin’s comments but said the West must work more closely with Russia at a time when relations are at their worst since the Cold War. “Russia is a dangerous country if we treat it as we have treated it for the last five years,” Fillon said. He said the real danger to Europe was not Russia but the economic threat of “the Asian continent”. Fillon argued that Russia should be anchored to Europe geopolitically or risk seeing Moscow forge alliances with China instead.

He called “absurd” the hardline policy of French President François Hollande with regard to Russia, saying it only made Moscow harden its positions and exacerbate its nationalist reflexes. The French conservative frontrunner said the EU would not change alliances and would not abandon its transatlantic link, but added that Paris didn’t need the permission from Washington to talk to Moscow. “What I am asking is that we sit down at a table with the Russians without asking for the agreement of the United States and that we re-establish a link, if not a relation based on confidence, which will make it possible to anchor Russia to Europe.”

His EU pension for life will be stunning. And now he can add a German one.

• EU Parliament President Martin Schulz to Step Down, Run Against Merkel (WSJ)

European Parliament President Martin Schulz said on Thursday that he would stand down in January and run in next year’s elections in Germany, where he is seen as a potential rival to Chancellor Angela Merkel. The 60-year-old, who has been a member of the European Union’s legislature for the past 22 years, said it was “not an easy decision” to quit. Mr. Schulz’s return to German politics after more than 20 years in Brussels is fueling speculation that he could lead his Social Democratic Party’s ticket at next year’s general election, to run against Ms. Merkel’s conservatives. “My commitment to the European project is unwavering. From now on I will be fighting for this project from the national level, but my values don’t change,” Mr. Schulz said.

He noted that as the largest country in the EU, Germany “bears a special responsibility” which he will strive to fulfill, as of next year, from Berlin. Mr. Schulz didn’t comment on the possibility that he could succeed Frank-Walter Steinmeier as Germany’s foreign minister after the latter vacates his post early next year to run for the largely ceremonial office of German president. The SPD has said it would decide in January who would lead it into the general election next fall. SPD officials said Sigmar Gabriel, party chairman and economics minister, had the first shot, and would have to voluntarily yield to Mr. Schulz. The two men are longtime friends.

We play around, very much at our own peril. with systems far too complex for us to understand. We simply deny we don’t understand. And there’s something ironically stupid in the Trump team taking away funding from NASA to be used in … space exploration. That you don’t make up.

• Increasingly Rapid Ice Melt Could Trigger Uncontrollable Climate Change (G.)

Arctic scientists have warned that the increasingly rapid melting of the ice cap risks triggering 19 “tipping points” in the region that could have catastrophic consequences around the globe. The Arctic Resilience Report found that the effects of Arctic warming could be felt as far away as the Indian Ocean, in a stark warning that changes in the region could cause uncontrollable climate change at a global level. Temperatures in the Arctic are currently about 20C above what would be expected for the time of year, which scientists describe as “off the charts”. Sea ice is at the lowest extent ever recorded for the time of year. “The warning signals are getting louder,” said Marcus Carson of the Stockholm Environment Institute and one of the lead authors of the report. “[These developments] also make the potential for triggering [tipping points] and feedback loops much larger.”

Climate tipping points occur when a natural system, such as the polar ice cap, undergoes sudden or overwhelming change that has a profound effect on surrounding ecosystems, often irreversible. In the Arctic, the tipping points identified in the new report, published on Friday, include: growth in vegetation on tundra, which replaces reflective snow and ice with darker vegetation, thus absorbing more heat; higher releases of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, from the tundra as it warms; shifts in snow distribution that warm the ocean, resulting in altered climate patterns as far away as Asia, where the monsoon could be effected; and the collapse of some key Arctic fisheries, with knock-on effects on ocean ecosystems around the globe.

The research, compiled by 11 organisations including the Arctic Council and six universities, comes at a critical time, not only because of the current Arctic temperature rises but in political terms. Aides to the US president-elect, Donald Trump, this week unveiled plans to remove the budget for climate change science currently used by Nasa and other US federal agencies for projects such as examining Arctic changes, and to spend it instead on space exploration.

More power away from Merkel.

• Erdogan Threatens To Open Borders To Refugees After EU Vote (AFP)

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Friday threatened to throw open Turkey’s borders to illegal migrants after the European Parliament voted to back a freeze in membership talks with Ankara. “Listen to me. If you go any further, then the frontiers will be opened, bear that in mind,” Erdogan told the EU in a speech in Istanbul. On March 18, Ankara and Brussels forged a deal for Turkey to halt the flow of migrants to Europe – an accord that has largely been successful in reducing numbers crossing the Aegean Sea.

It’s a miracle we haven’t seen much moe of this kind of thing happen.

• Refugees Torch Lesbos Camp After Gas Explosion Kills Two (AFP)

Angry migrants set fire to a camp on the Greek island of Lesbos after a woman and a six-year-old child died following a gas cylinder explosion, local police said. The explosion occurred while the 66-year-old woman was cooking, police said, adding that the child’s mother and four-year-old sibling were hospitalised with serious injuries. In an apparent act of rage, migrants then set fire to the Moria camp on Lesbos, causing significant damage, police said. Firefighters arrived at the scene to try to put out the flames. Ensuing clashes between migrants and police left six refugees slightly injured. Some migrants fled the camp after the blast but had since returned and calm was being restored, a police source said.

Several fires have erupted in refugee camps on the Greek islands, where some 16,000 people became stranded after the European Union signed a deal that was aimed at stemming the influx of migrants. Moria has a capacity for 3,500 people but currently houses more than 5,000. Part of the camp was badly damaged in a fire on September 19 during clashes between migrants and police, and thousands had to be moved out before returning two days later. Nearly 66,000 refugees and migrants are currently stranded in Greece, according to official figures.

Debt Rattle November 20 2016

Nov 202016

November 20, 2016 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 10:15 am Finance Tagged with: amateurs, bailout, basic income, Brexit, deflation, Italy, NSA, Obama, pardon, Snowden, water 3 Responses »

Wynand Stanley Cadillac touring car at Yosemite in snow 1919

• Peak & Decline of International Reserves: Massive Asset Deflation Ahead (SRSR)

• “Developed Countries’ Currencies Solely Driven By Politics” (CNBC)

• How A Universal Basic Income Would Transform Society (Agnos)

• End London’s Role as a Clearing-House for Dirty Money (G.)

• Europe’s Leaders To Force Britain Into Hard Brexit (O.)

• Italy’s Crisis Turns into a Multi-Headed Hydra (DQ)

• Italian Banks ‘Not Necessarily Bankrupt’ But Awfully Close (NYT)

• ‘Political Amateurs Are Conquering The World’ – Beppe Grillo (EN)

• Bruegel Institute Chief: 4th Bailout Seems Inevitable for Greece (GR)

• Slovenia Adds Water To Constitution As Fundamental Right For All (AFP)

• EU Ministers At Odds Over Immigration, No Compromise In Sight (R.)

• Pentagon and Intelligence Chiefs Urge Obama To Remove NSA Chief (WaPo)

• Obama Claims He Cannot Pardon Snowden but He Knows That’s Not True (TD)

Causation and correlation of energy and economics are not nearly as clear as implied here, but the trends are interesting.

• Peak & Decline of International Reserves: Massive Asset Deflation Ahead (SRSR)

The world is sitting at the edge of a massive deflationary cliff. Even though Central Banks are desperately trying to keep the world’s financial assets from plunging down into the great depression below, signs suggest they are losing the battle. One critical sign is the peak and decline of International Reserves. Hugo Salinas Price has been keeping an eye on International Reserves for quite some time. In his recent article, A Reversal In The Trend Of International Reserves, he stated the following:

International Reserves peaked on August 1, 2014, at $12.032 Trillion dollars, and as of October 28, 2016 they stood at $11.066 Trillion dollars. International Reserves stood at about $10 Trillion in 2011, but the rate of growth slacked off; the weekly increases in Reserves (which Bloomberg used to publish every Friday) stalled and became smaller, week by week. As mid-2014 came around, the increases were quite small. It was clear that the trend was for ever-smaller increases, and that could only mean that finally there would be no increase, which would be immediately followed by decreases in the total of International Reserves held by Central Banks. That is exactly what took place.

Hugo Salinas Price explains in the article, “that the increases of International Reserves take place when the Reserve Currency issuing countries effect payments to the rest of the world.” Basically, countries such as the United States that run trade deficits, exchange fiat money or Treasuries for goods from other countries. This shows up as an increase in International Reserves. Now, what is important to understand about the chart above is the timing of the PEAK & DECLINE of International Reserves. I had an email exchange with Mr. Salinas on what I believe was the leading factor in why the International Reserves peaked and declined. When I went back and looked at a five-year price chart of a barrel of oil (West Texas), I found a very interesting coincidence:

The price of a barrel of West Texas Crude fell below $100 starting at the beginning of August, 2014…. TO THE DATE. Even though the oil price had traded between $85-$100 over the past three years, it averaged over $95. However, by the end of 2014, it had fallen by more than half. This had a profound impact on International Reserves as the low oil price gutted the energy-commodity-goods producing countries. These are the countries that hold the majority of International Reserves. So, as the price of oil continued to stay below $50 a barrel, these countries had to sell Bonds and acquire cash to fund their own domestic account deficits. Thus, the peak and decline of International Reserves occurred right at the same time, the peak and decline of high oil prices. THIS IS NO COINCIDENCE.

Free markets still exist in name though…

• “Developed Countries’ Currencies Solely Driven By Politics” (CNBC)

The G10 currency market is driven solely by political events, one strategist told CNBC Friday. Dominic Bunning, FX Strategist at HSBC said that whereas a range of events had impacted the performance of G10 currency pairs, now it is only politics. “In G10, everything is driven by politics. We used to think about economics and cyclical stories and structural stories and balance of payments etc but now all we care about is politics,” Bunning said. He explained that if you have a strong political view then you make trading decisions on the basis of that. “If you think the euro zone is going to break up then by all means sell the euro,” Bunning said, while warning that he doesn’t have a strong view on euro.

On sterling however, Bunning said the weakness is likely to continue. “We still think there is a strong weakness in sterling even though it is relatively lower because the political outlook in the UK is very challenging.” The G10 currencies are the U.S. dollar, the euro, the pound, the yen, the Swedish krona, the Norwegian krone, the Australian dollar, the New Zealand dollar, the Swiss franc and the Canadian dollar. A number of these currencies have seen a lot of volatility since the start of the year owing to political uncertainties in their respective countries or on a global level. The biggest events this year have been the U.K.’s vote to leave the European Union and the U.S. presidential elections.

While sterling is down more than 16% since the Brexit vote on June 23, the euro has been on its worst losing streak since the currency arrived in 1999. The dollar, meanwhile, has been seeing some strength, rising to a 14-year high against a basket of currencies on the growing perception that the economic policies of U.S. President-elect Donald Trump will push up consumer prices. While traders are growing more bullish on the dollar, HSBC’s Bunning warned that it is not great for emerging market currencies. “You need to be selective in terms of your currency choices. I don’t think it’s a dollar bull run against everything but I do think if you look at the outlook for emerging market currencies, particularly the high-yield currencies at the moment, it is very hard to have a positive currency view.”

Plenty of lofty ideals and ideas out there, but UBI, if it does at all, will happen only out of necessity.

• How A Universal Basic Income Would Transform Society (Agnos)

No child’s dream is to make lots of money. We certainly aren’t born with any innate need for money itself. But at some point in our lives, we are introduced to money and the need to earn it. For many, it comes at a time when we are just beginning to learn about the world and what excites us. We start to open the doors to all of life’s possibilities, when the adult in the room says, “It’s really nice that you want to feed people in need, but what are you going to do to earn a living?” “You mean I can’t actually do what I really want to do?” we wonder. With a universal basic income (UBI) – where the government replaces all other forms of monetary assistance with a yearly stipend given to every adult of say, $20,000 per year – this would all change.

For the first time in human history, people would be able to make their childhood wishes a reality, instead of being forced to work in jobs they are aren’t passionate about just to survive. Today, humanity has the ability to create a world of sustainable abundance where everyone has access to everything they need and much of what they desire. But this requires a shift in long held societal views. Changing the view that money is a reward for hard work and private property is an extension of the self will be difficult. A shift in mindset is needed to see everyone as inherently worthy, rather than in terms of their ability to produce. For this reason, it is important to understand the philosophical justification for a UBI, as it reveals some of the deep underlying flaws of our capitalistic economy and the way it views human nature. Given these flaws, how we fund a UBI will go a long way toward the effectiveness of the shift in mindset from an age of ownership to an age of access.

Let us stop and imagine what we might do if we no longer had to work in order to meet our basic needs. Presently, we are all burdened with the stress that comes with knowing that failure to earn a living could result in social isolation. Imagine the psychological shift in knowing that no matter what happened, you would always have a roof over your head and food to eat without having to give away your precious time and energy. How would not having to work to survive change your day to day life? What would you do instead? A UBI has the potential to unleash unimaginable amounts of human time, energy, creativity, and passion that has the potential to radically transform society. Instead of everyone working to survive, people would have the means to pursue their own dreams, and to spend more quality time with their family, friends, and community.

The Heart of Darkness.

• End London’s Role as a Clearing-House for Dirty Money (G.)

The National Crime Agency says up to £90bn is laundered through the UK each year, while an estimated £120bn worth of UK property is owned by offshore shell companies. Some 75% of properties whose owners are under investigation for corruption made use of offshore corporate secrecy to hide their identities. And according to the director of the National Crime Agency, “the London property market has been skewed by laundered money. Prices are being artificially driven up by overseas criminals who want to sequester their assets here in the UK.” Those assets are far too often being extracted from developing nations desperately in need of tax revenues. A century on from Heart of Darkness, the Democratic Republic of the Congo still ranks near the bottom of the UN Human Development Index, with one in seven children dead before the age of five.

And, as in Conrad’s time, London’s imperial connections are helping to facilitate the exploitation of this asset-rich nation. Diamond and mineral wealth is being extracted by political elites, funnelled via London to old remnants of empire in the overseas territories, then repatriated via Kensington townhouses back to the UK. Our financial, accountancy and property agents are the beneficiaries, the people of the DRC and househunters of London the losers. [..] We are told that much of London’s success is because of its unimpeachable legal system and absence of corruption. But that is no good if, under the banner of the rule of law, we are also aiding and abetting exploitation. In Surrey mansions and Mayfair sit the lost wealth, the never-built hospitals and unopened schools of too many developing nations.

“.. the only way to deal with Brexit is hard Brexit. Otherwise we would be seen to be giving in to a country that is leaving. That would be fatal.”

• Europe’s Leaders To Force Britain Into Hard Brexit (O.)

European leaders have come to a 27-nation consensus that a “hard Brexit” is likely to be the only way to see off future populist insurgencies, which could lead to the break-up of the European Union. The hardening line in EU capitals comes as Nigel Farage warns European leaders that Marine Le Pen, leader of the Front National, could deliver a political sensation bigger than Brexit and win France’s presidential election next spring – a result that would mean it was “game over” for 60 years of EU integration. According to senior officials at the highest levels of European governments, allowing Britain favourable terms of exit could represent an existential danger to the EU, since it would encourage similar demands from other countries with significant Eurosceptic movements.

One top EU diplomat told the Observer: “If you British are not prepared to compromise on free movement, the only way to deal with Brexit is hard Brexit. Otherwise we would be seen to be giving in to a country that is leaving. That would be fatal.” The latest intervention by Farage will only serve to fuel fears in Europe that anti-EU movements have acquired a dangerous momentum in countries such as France and the Netherlands, following the precedent set by the Brexit vote. Ukip’s interim leader, who predicted both the vote for Brexit and Donald Trump’s US victory, said that while Le Pen was still more likely to be runner-up to an establishment candidate next May, she now had to be taken seriously as a potential head of state. “She will clearly win through to the second round. And after what has happened elsewhere, only a fool would say she would have no chance of winning overall. France is a deeply, deeply unhappy country. If she were to win, it would be game over for the EU.”

“It’s a banking crisis, an economic crisis, a debt crisis, and a political crisis all rolled into one..”

• Italy’s Crisis Turns into a Multi-Headed Hydra (DQ)

Bank stocks have surged just about everywhere since Trump’s election, with one exception: Italy. In the last month only one large Italian bank has seen its shares rise, and that’s the 500-year old bank at the center of Italy’s banking crisis, Monte dei Paschi di Siena, whose nearly worthless shares jumped to €0.24. Shares of Italy’s other large banks have suffered heavy losses. Over the past week alone, shares of Italy’s largest bank, Unicredit, plunged 15%, as did the shares of Banca Popular and UBI Banca. Shares of Italy’s second largest bank, Intesa Sanpaolo, fell just under 10%. The recent losses compound what’s been a miserable year for Italy’s banking stocks. The best performing stock is the investment bank Mediobanca, which is down a mere 24% for 2016. During the same period, Unicredit has shed over 60%, UBI Banca 65%, Banco Popolare 80%, and Monte dei Paschi 85%.

It’s not just banks’ shares that are flashing all the wrong signals. UniCredit’s five-year credit default swap surged to 221.2 basis points on Friday, meaning it now costs €221,200 to insure €10 million of UniCredit’s debt against default over five years. As with all major crises, Italy’s current predicament is a multi-headed hydra. It’s a banking crisis, an economic crisis, a debt crisis, and a political crisis all rolled into one, and all coming to a head at the same time. Italy’s economy has been in reverse ever since it joined the euro 17 years ago. Since 2007, its GDP has shrunk by a staggering 10%. In the meantime its public debt has continued to grow, reaching 135% of GDP today, the highest level of any Eurozone country with the exception of Greece. And now the yield on Italy’s 10-year bond is on the rise, hitting 2.09% on Friday in a NIRP world, its highest point in over 13 months.

If Renzi loses the referendum next month, how much longer can this can be kicked?

• Italian Banks ‘Not Necessarily Bankrupt’ But Awfully Close (NYT)

Victor Massiah has grown weary of talk that the Italian banking system is so threadbare and stuffed with terrible loans that it threatens Europe with another financial crisis. The mansion that serves as local headquarters for the bank he runs, UBI Banca, one of Italy’s largest lenders, does not feel like a place on the verge of running out of money. An inlaid marble fireplace sits in a conference room beneath wooden beams worthy of a castle. A statue of the Greek goddess Athena stands triumphantly over a staircase. “As you can see,” he says, sweeping a hand across the scene, “we’re not necessarily bankrupt.” Among policy makers alert for signs of the next financial disaster, Italy’s mountain of uncollectable bank debt is a subject discussed in tones ordinarily reserved for piles of plutonium.

Its banks seem at once too big to fail and eminently capable of doing so, menacing the global economy. For years, Italian lenders have muddled through, hoping time would cure their afflictions. But Italy’s economy has been terminally weak, not growing at all over a recent 13-year stretch. Bad loans have festered. Good loans have deteriorated. Italy’s problems are Europe’s problems. Nearly one-fifth of all loans in the Italian banking system are classified as troubled, a toll worth €360 billion, at the end of last year, according to the International Monetary Fund. That represents roughly 40% of all the bad loans within the countries sharing the euro. In recent weeks, the world’s focus has shifted to Germany’s largest lender, Deutsche Bank, on fears that it could be forced to seek a rescue.

But if Deutsche has become the crisis of the moment, Italy is the perpetual threat that could, at any moment, present the world with an unpleasant surprise potent enough to send legions of officials descending on Rome to try to contain the damage. The Italian government has sought to spend more money to spur the economy. But European leaders, led by Germany, have enforced rules limiting budget deficits. And Italian banks have held tight to cash and are reluctant to lend, starving an already anemic economy of capital. All of which leaves Italy and Europe, and to some extent the global economy, with a formidable conundrum. Europe may never regain economic vigor so long as Italy’s banks are a slow-motion emergency. But Italy’s banks cannot get healthy without growth. And Italy’s economy can’t grow without healthy banks.

One of the few thinking men left in Europe.

• > ‘Political Amateurs Are Conquering The World’ – Beppe Grillo (EN)

euronews “Beppe Grillo, our meeting takes place at a time that, without undue exaggeration, can be labelled ‘historic’. That’s to say, the election of Donald Trump to the presidency of the United States. What’s your take on that?” Beppe Grillo, Leader of the Five Star Movement “It’s an extraordinary turning point. This corn cob – we can also call Trump that in a nice way – doesn’t have particularly outstanding qualities. He was such a target for the media, with such terrifying accusations of sexism and racism, as well as being harassed by the establishment – such as the New York Times – but, in the end, he won. “That is a symbol of the tragedy and the apocalypse of traditional information. The television and newspapers are always late and they relay old information.

They no longer anticipate anything and they’re only just understanding that idiots, the disadvantaged, those who are marginalised – and there are millions of them – use alternative media, such as the Internet, which passes under the radar of television, a medium people no longer use. “With Trump, exactly the same thing has happened as with my Five Star Movement, which was born of the Internet: the media were taken aback and asked us where we were before. We gathered millions of people in public squares and they marvelled. We became the biggest movement in Italy and journalists and philosophers continued to say that we were benefitting from people’s dissatisfaction. We’ll get into government and they’ll ask themselves how we did it.”

euronews “There is a gap between giving populist speeches and governing a nation.” Beppe Grillo “We want to govern, but we don’t want to simply change the power by replacing it with our own. We want a change within civilisation, a change of world vision. “We’re talking about dematerialised industry, an end to working for money, the start of working for other payment, a universal citizens revenue. If our society is founded on work, what will happen if work disappears? What will we do with millions of people in flux? We have to organise and manage all that.”

euronews “Do you think appealing to people’s emotions is enough to get elected? Is that a political project?” Beppe Grillo “This information never ceases to make the rounds: you don’t have a political project, you’re not capable, you’re imbeciles, amateurs… “And yet, the amateurs are the ones conquering the world and I’m rejoicing in it because the professionals are the ones who have reduced the world to this state. Hillary Clinton, Obama and all the rest have destroyed democracy and their international policies. “If that’s the case, it signifies that the experts, economists and intellectuals have completely misunderstood everything, especially if the situation is the way it is. If the EU is what we have today, it means the European dream has evaporated. Brexit and Trump are signs of a huge change. If we manage to understand that, we’ll also get to face it.”

Europe’s MO. Keep squeezing.

• Bruegel Institute Chief: 4th Bailout Seems Inevitable for Greece (GR)

Bruegel Institute Chief Zsolt Darvas said that there are two possible solutions for Greece’s debt problems following 2018. One is huge debt restructuring or a fourth bailout program for the country. Speaking with Greek daily Ta Nea, the Hungarian economist said that even if Greece has the expected development for 2017-2018, debt will still be at a high rate. He does not believe that Greece will be able to borrow from the markets at a reasonable rate under the current circumstances. Darvas expects to see some form of debt restructuring within a time framework to bond maturation, along with a lowering or freezing of interest rates. He said that this per se may still not be enough for Greece to avoid a fourth bailout program.

Regarding investments, Darvas said that the height of Greece’s debt is not helping draw investors. Another problem is the excessive bureaucracy. The OECD indexes also show Greece’s weaknesses. When asked about U.S. President Barack Obama’s support for debt relief for Greece, Darvas said that he fears that Obama cannot influence European decisions regarding Greece. In the past, there were no results when he or other members of the government called for debt relief. He considers this unlikely to change. He does not believe that there will be any decision regarding debt relief until after the German elections.

Every country, every society, should make protection of basic needs their number one priority. They are indeed ‘not a market commodity’.

• Slovenia Adds Water To Constitution As Fundamental Right For All (AFP)

Slovenia has amended its constitution to make access to drinkable water a fundamental right for all citizens and stop it being commercialised. With 64 votes in favour and none against, the 90-seat parliament added an article to the EU country’s constitution saying “everyone has the right to drinkable water”. The centre-right opposition Slovenian Democratic party (SDS) abstained from the vote saying the amendment was not necessary and only aimed at increasing public support. Slovenia is a mountainous, water-rich country with more than half its territory covered by forest.

“Water resources represent a public good that is managed by the state. Water resources are primary and durably used to supply citizens with potable water and households with water and, in this sense, are not a market commodity,” the article reads. The centre-left prime minister, Miro Cerar, had urged lawmakers to pass the bill saying the country of two million people should “protect water – the 21st century’s liquid gold – at the highest legal level”. “Slovenian water has very good quality and, because of its value, in the future it will certainly be the target of foreign countries and international corporations’ appetites. “As it will gradually become a more valuable commodity in the future, pressure over it will increase and we must not give in,” Cerar said.

Only Greece and Italy need worry about this now. The rest can sit pretty. It’ll cost them the EU though.

• EU Ministers At Odds Over Immigration, No Compromise In Sight (R.)

European Union interior ministers were at odds on Friday over how to handle immigration, with heated discussions between states who want more burden sharing and those who oppose any kind of obligatory relocation. “We are looking for compromises but at the moment they are not there,” said Thomas De Maiziere of Germany, which last year took in about 900,000 migrants and refugees. The ministers disagreed over a proposal by the EU’s current chair Slovakia on reforming the bloc’s asylum system, which collapsed last year as 1.3 million refugees and migrants from the Middle East and Africa reached Europe and member states quarrelled over how to handle the influx.

Overall, the arrivals have decreased from last year but they continue unabated in Italy and tens of thousands of people are still stuck in Greece and Italy, sometimes in dire conditions. Despite agreeing last year to relocate 160,000 people from Italy and Greece, eastern European countries, including Slovakia, Poland and Hungary, have refused to take any in. “We cannot pretend that the quotas as we know them now are working,” said Robert Kalinak of Slovakia. “The 160,000 is only a very small part of the million that came to Europe last year and we only relocated less than 10,000 people. Even those who were for this system were not successful. We want to come up with a system that would be effective.”

The mess below the surface.

• Pentagon and Intelligence Chiefs Urge Obama To Remove NSA Chief (WaPo)

The heads of the Pentagon and the nation’s intelligence community have recommended to President Obama that the director of the National Security Agency, Adm. Michael S. Rogers, be removed. The recommendation, delivered to the White House last month, was made by Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter and Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr., according to several U.S. officials familiar with the matter. Action has been delayed, some administration officials said, because relieving Rogers of his duties is tied to another controversial recommendation: to create separate chains of command at the NSA and the military’s cyberwarfare unit, a recommendation by Clapper and Carter that has been stalled because of other issues.

The news comes as Rogers is being considered by President-elect Donald Trump to be his nominee for director of national intelligence to replace Clapper as the official who oversees all 17 U.S. intelligence agencies. In a move apparently unprecedented for a military officer, Rogers, without notifying superiors, traveled to New York to meet with Trump on Thursday at Trump Tower. That caused consternation at senior levels of the administration, according to the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal personnel matters. [..] Carter has concerns with Rogers’s performance, officials said. The driving force for Clapper, meanwhile, was the separation of leadership roles at the NSA and U.S. Cyber Command, and his stance that the NSA should be headed by a civilian.

[..] Rogers, 57, took the helm of the NSA and Cyber Command in April 2014 in the wake of revelations by a former intelligence contractor of broad surveillance activities that shook public confidence in the agency. The contractor, Edward Snowden, had secretly downloaded vast amounts of digital documents that he shared with a handful of journalists. His disclosures prompted debate over the proper scale of surveillance and led to some reforms. But they also were a black eye for an agency that prides itself on having the most skilled hackers and cybersecurity professionals in government. Rogers was charged with making sure another insider breach never happened again. Instead, in the past year and a half, officials have discovered two major compromises of sensitive hacking tools by personnel working at the NSA’s premier hacking unit: the Tailored Access Operations. One involved a Booz Allen Hamilton contractor, Harold T. Martin III, who is accused of carrying out the largest theft of classified government material.

Even if he would pardon Snowden, Manning, Assange, what would their lives look like?

• Obama Claims He Cannot Pardon Snowden but He Knows That’s Not True (TD)

In a big interview with the German media outlet Der Spiegel, President Obama was asked about his interest in pardoning Ed Snowden in response to the big campaign to get him pardoned. Obama’s response was that he could not, since Snowden has not been convicted yet: ARD/SPIEGEL : Are you going to pardon Edward Snowden? Obama:” I can’t pardon somebody who hasn’t gone before a court and presented themselves, so that’s not something that I would comment on at this point. I think that Mr. Snowden raised some legitimate concerns. How he did it was something that did not follow the procedures and practices of our intelligence community. If everybody took the approach that I make my own decisions about these issues, then it would be very hard to have an organized government or any kind of national security system.

At the point at which Mr. Snowden wants to present himself before the legal authorities and make his arguments or have his lawyers make his arguments, then I think those issues come into play. Until that time, what I’ve tried to suggest – both to the American people, but also to the world – is that we do have to balance this issue of privacy and security. Those who pretend that there’s no balance that has to be struck and think we can take a 100-percent absolutist approach to protecting privacy don’t recognize that governments are going to be under an enormous burden to prevent the kinds of terrorist acts that not only harm individuals, but also can distort our society and our politics in very dangerous ways. And those who think that security is the only thing and don’t care about privacy also have it wrong.”

This is simply incorrect – as is known to anyone who remembers the fact that Gerald Ford pardoned Richard Nixon before he had been indicted. And it appears that the President knows this. Because, as the Pardon Snowden campaign points out, Obama pardoned three Iranian Americans who had not yet stood trial. That happened this year. So for him to say it’s impossible to pardon someone who hasn’t gone before the court is simply, factually, historically wrong. And there’s a Supreme Court ruling that makes this abundantly clear. 150 years ago, in the ruling on Ex Parte Garland, the Supreme Court stated: “The power of pardon conferred by the Constitution upon the President is unlimited except in cases of impeachment. It extends to every offence known to the law, and may be exercised at any time after its commission, either before legal proceedings are taken or during their pendency, or after conviction and judgment. The power is not subject to legislative control.”

‘Old’ media write their own death warrant.

• The Real Fake News List (Liberty Report)

We’ve seen the make-shift “fake news” list created by a leftist feminist professor. Well, another fake news list has been revealed and this one holds a lot more water. This list contains the culprits who told us that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and lied us into multiple bogus wars. These are the news sources that told us “if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor.” They told us that Hillary Clinton had a 98% chance of winning the election. They tell us in a never-ending loop that “The economy is in great shape!” This is the real Fake News List (and it’s sourced):

Debt Rattle November 7 2016

Nov 072016

November 7, 2016 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 10:30 am Finance Tagged with: deflation, Greece, Hillary, impeachment, journalism, Nuland, reef, Trump, Turkey, wealth 2 Responses »

NPC Auto wreck, Washington, DC April 1917

• Betting Sites See Record Wagering On US Presidential Election (R.)

• When Might We Know Who Won? Potentially Hours Earlier Than Usual (BBG)

• Could Trump Or Clinton Face Impeachment As President? (John Crudele)

• This Election Has Disgraced the Entire Profession of Journalism (Silverstein)

• Much More Than Trump (Repost), by Robert Gore

• Private Capital Allocation As Inefficient As In Great Depression (Beversdorf)

• Housing ‘Wealth Creation’ Leads To National Wealth Destruction (Janda)

• China Might Finally Give Wall Street What It Wants – 20 Years Late (WSJ)

• Hong Kong Derails Property Streetcar (BBG)

• Negative Bond Yields in Japan Don’t Look So Bad With Deflation (BBG)

• Architect Of Euro In Stark Warning (BBC)

• Obama Aiming To Make Lasting Impression With Athens Speech (Kath.)

• Erdogan Blasts West As Turkey’s Kurdish Party Boycotts Parliament (R.)

• Great Barrier Reef: What Have We Left For Our Children? (Naomi Klein)

How fitting.

• Betting Sites See Record Wagering On US Presidential Election (R.)

The raucous, passionate and unpredictable 2016 U.S. presidential election is on track to notch another distinction: the most wagered-upon political event ever. With many opinion polls showing a tight race just one day before Tuesday’s election, record numbers of bettors are pouring millions into online platforms from Ireland to Iowa in the hope of capturing a financial windfall from a victory by Democrat Hillary Clinton or Republican Donald Trump. UK-based internet betting exchange Betfair said on Sunday its “Next President” market was set to become the most traded it had ever seen and expected to surpass even Brexit. By Sunday, roughly $130 million had been traded on who will become the next U.S. president, compared with $159 million on the Brexit referendum, Betfair spokeswoman Naomi Totten said.

The amount bet so far on the 2016 contest dwarfs the roughly $50 million laid on the 2012 race. “We think it is because (of) how raw the Brexit (vote) is in people’s minds – they’re not convinced yet that it’s a done deal,” Totten said. Most polls leading into Britain’s June 23 referendum predicted Britons would choose to remain in the EU. Instead, they voted to leave by a 52% to 48% margin. Betfair’s “Next President” market was by far the largest of more than 70 markets on the site related to the U.S. election. As of Friday, some $140 million has been put into play on markets ranging from who will win the popular vote to how many states each party will carry. On Ireland’s Paddy Power, which merged with Betfair earlier this year, the U.S. presidential election “is definitely on course to be the biggest political event,” said spokesman Féilim Mac An Iomaire. The site has had about $4.38 million bet on the race so far.

Who needs the west?

• When Might We Know Who Won? Potentially Hours Earlier Than Usual (BBG)

4. When might the public know who won? Potentially hours earlier than usual.

5. Why’s that? There’s a wrinkle this year that might undermine the tradition of major television networks holding off declaring a new president until polls close on the West Coast. Exit polling available to the networks and the Associated Press, combined with early returns in key districts, can point to a likely winner hours before the polls close. Since 1980, when Ronald Reagan’s landslide victory was called while West Coast polls were still open – spurring complaints that some voters didn’t see any reason to go to the polls — networks have resisted calling winners until a given state’s polls have closed.

6. Who’s challenging that arrangement this year? A startup company called VoteCastr plans to collect data from seven battleground states – Colorado, Florida, Nevada, New Hampshire, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin – on Election Day, stream it through a mobile app and use it “to generate minute-by-minute projected outcomes.” The news website Slate.com will publish VoteCastr’s findings as they come in. “Publishing our data will help level the playing field, so that voters know as much as campaigns do,” Slate’s editor, Julia Turner, said.

Not easy. Entirely new information would be needed.

• Could Trump Or Clinton Face Impeachment As President? (John Crudele)

[..] .. might it be possible for Congress to initiate impeachment proceedings immediately after their swearing-in as president, whoever wins? I asked professor Eric Schickler, who is the chairman of Travers Department of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. “That is an interesting question”, Schickler said. “The conventional understanding of impeachment is that it is due to actions taken while in office. That is how it has traditionally been applied. But impeachment, as anyone who has lived through the Nixon and Bill Clinton eras knows, is ultimately a political decision”, says Schickler. “The Constitution does not define ‘high crimes and misdemeanors’, which is supposed to be the standard for an impeachable offense. “As such, there is discretion for Congress to define its range”, he added.

But Schickler says it would be a “serious case of political overreach for Congress to impeach after an election for actions taken before a person is in office. That s particularly so where those actions were known at the time of the election itself”, he says. OK, my turn again. So what he s saying is that an impeachment proceeding right after the election would really piss voters off. Then, how about a month after inauguration? Or six months? Or a year from now, when the economy still isn t buzzing (as it s unlikely to be) and people have had enough of our new president – whoever that may be. So let’s figure out what crimes we can come up with for Trump and Hillary Clinton. Clinton’s crimes are obvious. Her opponent has described her as a liar and a crook, and so have I.

She has nearly been indicted twice, and could easily have other offenses that are lurking in the background. She’s become very wealthy because of connections made while in public service. She’s had numerous shady real estate deals and even had a commodities transaction – admittedly long ago – that reeked. And there’s the e-mail controversy. And perhaps lying to Congress and the FBI. And things that may have occurred at the Clinton Foundation. And on and on and on. And if the Republicans keep control of Congress, it’s anyone’s guess if they will go after her. Trump’s “crimes” are a little harder to spot. He’s a pig, that’s for sure. But pinching someone in a bar or saying vulgar things on camera aren’t really impeachable unless, of course, the enemies in his own party decide that they’d prefer vice presidential candidate Mike Pence as a substitute.

Professor Michael J. Gerhardt, the Samuel Ashe Distinguished Professor of Constitutional Law at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, says that a president “may be impeached based on serious misconduct committed prior to the time the individual entered the office he or she currently occupies.” A federal district judge, for instance, got impeached (which is like an indictment) and convicted for lying on a questionnaire he needed to fill out for the job. But there’s a catch, says Gerhardt. The misconduct has to be serious — which is a tricky term to define — and not considered at the time of the election. “It becomes a trickier case if the American people can be said to have ‘ratified’ the prior misconduct” by electing that person.

Planet Ponzi speaks.

• This Election Has Disgraced the Entire Profession of Journalism (Silverstein)

There’s nothing secret about the media’s anti-Trump stance. A formal declaration of war was launched on August 7, when Jim Rutenberg, the New York Times media columnist, wrote a story under the headline, “Trump Is Testing the Norms of Objectivity in Journalism.” Rutenberg wrote that journalists were in a terrible bind trying to stay objective because Trump, among other things, “cozies up to anti-American dictators,” has “put financial conditions on the United States defense of NATO allies,” and that his foreign policy views “break with decades-old …consensus.” Rutenberg made clear that he and other reporters viewed “a Trump presidency as something that’s potentially dangerous,” which required them to report on him with a particularly critical point of view. This, he said, would make journalists “move closer than you’ve ever been to being oppositional,” which would be “uncomfortable and uncharted territory.”

There are so many things wrong with all this that it’s hard to know where to start. Rutenberg’s comment about dictators was clearly a reference to Vladimir Putin, who is an authoritarian leader who Trump, to his shame, admires. However, Russia is not the world’s worst dictatorship — and has been far more effective at fighting ISIS than the Obama administration — and Hillary’s cordial relationship with the Saudi regime, to cite just one example, seems far more dangerous. But rethinking “the alliances that have guided our foreign policy for 60 years” — the alliances that have resulted in non-stop war since 9/11 and the U.S.’s current involvement in seven overseas conflicts — is not an acceptable position for a presidential candidate in Rutenberg’s view.

Furthermore, how is it that the media has derogated to itself the right to decide what candidates deserve special scrutiny and what policies are acceptable? In a democracy, that is supposed to be the voters’ job. And worst of all is Rutenberg’s statement about the role of journalists. “All governments are run by liars and nothing they say should be believed,” I.F. Stone once wrote. “Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed: everything else is public relations,” said George Orwell. For those two self-evident reasons, being “oppositional” is the only place political journalists should ever be, no matter who is in power or who is campaigning. But for Rutenberg and the New York Times being oppositional is only “uncomfortable” when it comes to covering Hillary Clinton.

It didn’t seem uncomfortable at all when it came to running a story about Trump’s taxes based on three pages of a decades-old tax return that was sent anonymously or when it ran another story with the headline, “The 282 People, Places and Things Donald Trump Has Insulted on Twitter: A Complete List.” All during the campaign we have watched Hillary Clinton rehearse campaign themes and, almost as if by magic, the media amplifying those themes in seeming lockstep. The hacked emails from Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta have demonstrated that this was not mere happenstance, but, at least in part, resulted from direct coordination between the Clintonistas and the press.

“..a chasm that cannot be straddled..”

• Much More Than Trump (Repost), by Robert Gore

While the Kennedy assassination offered the American public a glimpse into the heart of darkness, only a few independent-minded skeptics challenged the Warren Commission whitewash. Vietnam was different; hundreds of thousands returned knowing not just that the so-called best and brightest couldn’t win the war, but that for years they had lied to the American public. In the following decades, it had to have been especially galling for the Vietnam veterans that the hippies, draft-deferred campus protesters, the “fortunate sons” (google Credence Clearwater Revival) whose numbers never came up, and the mockers of the values they held dear ended up among the elite. The Clintons, of course, became the prime example.

Disaffected veterans were the core of a group that would grow to millions, their “faith” in government and the people who ran it obliterated by its repeated failures and lies. Revolutions dawn when an appreciable number of the ruled realize their rulers are intellectual and moral inferiors. The mainstream media is filled with vituperative, patronizing, and insulting explanations of what’s “behind” the Trump phenomenon. It all boils down to revulsion with the self-anointed, incompetent, pretentious, hypocritical, corrupt, prevaricating elite that presumes to rule this country. It is, in a word, inferior to the populace on the other side of the yawning chasm, the ones they have patronized and insulted for decades, and the other side knows it.

Peggy Noonan is one of the few mainstream writers who has tried to understand, rather than insult or condemn, the Trump phenomenon. In a widely cited article, she ascribed it to the split between the “protected,” those who run the government and its allied institutions, and the “unprotected,” the government’s and its allies’ victims (“Trump and the Rise of the Unprotected,” The Wall Street Journal, 2/25/16). It was a nice try, but Ms. Noonan is attempting to straddle a chasm that cannot be straddled. She writes for the Journal, an establishment organ, some of whose writers have been either so clueless or disingenuous that they have denied the existence of an establishment. And ultimately, the protected-unprotected differentiation doesn’t fly.

Most Trump supporters don’t want the government to do something for them; they want the government to quit doing things to them. They viscerally revile the elite—it’s personal—and they want no part of that class or its government. They know how to take care of themselves, and many know the government hurts the most those whom it ostensibly protects.

Whet can be done when demand is set to be weak for a long time?

• Private Capital Allocation As Inefficient As In Great Depression (Beversdorf)

1) Economic policy objectives (monetary and fiscal) are meant to incentivize domestic private business investment, which drives incomes and the money multiplier effect, i.e. the engine of the economy.

2) Economic policy objectives have failed because CEO’s, the private capital allocators, simply cannot accommodate business investment when the demand function is as weak as we currently find it, no matter how available and how cheap the capital.

3) The demand function is weak because we misunderstood and ignored the side effects of trade policies and their reliance on new world economies that naturally have a lower money multiplier effect than old world economies.

4) A materially damaged demand function leads to a misallocation of resources; for the past 15 years capital has been and continues at an accelerating rate to be allocated to cash distribution (the most economically inefficient use of capital) rather than investment, further deteriorating the demand function (economic death spiral).

5) The only question that matters now then is; How do we get private sector capital allocators to allocate capital more efficiently? I’ll give you a hint, it requires indications of sustainable demand improvement and neither monetary nor fiscal policy have the capacity to generate sustainable demand improvement when the demand function is damaged to the point that CEO’s refuse to invest productively. This then requires a new economic policy framework, one that CAN generate sustainable demand improvement, which will allow capital allocators to invest productively.

We can understand the problem without villainizing any particular stakeholders by focusing on where we are today and delivering a viable solution. Mistakes were made and judging whether they were honest or malicious in nature is irrelevant to finding the solution. Our focus here is a solution.

Bloated home prices strangle consumption, which is typically 50-70% of GDP.

• Housing ‘Wealth Creation’ Leads To National Wealth Destruction (Janda)

Robertson cites two brunches a week, two coffees a day and a $60 dinner a week as areas where many Gen Ys could save some cash. Aside from the many responses I’ve heard from Gen Ys who don’t spend anything like this much on such items, when you add up the savings it really isn’t that much. On Robertson’s figures one could save just under $6,000 a year. Let’s be extra tight arse and cut out the booze, say $50 a week for $2,600 a year, save another $1,000 by holidaying up the coast in a caravan park instead of heading overseas and $400 more through buying cheaper clothes. So let’s assume it’s reasonable to cut $10,000 in expenses and let’s also assume, even though it’s unlikely given their other spending habits, that our hypothetical Gen Y already saves $5,000 a year from their post-tax, post-HECS/HELP repayment income.

With a median home price of $800,000 in Sydney, it would take a single person more than a decade to save a deposit, so more than five years for a couple who were both saving $15,000 a year. But first time buyers shouldn’t be buying the median, or middle-priced, home I hear boomers respond. Agreed. So let’s take the median apartment price instead. Given the number of studios and tiny one-bedders out there, the median unit price probably gets you a pretty small apartment within 10km of the CBD or a two-bedder somewhere further out. Surely the boomers can’t begrudge that as being excessively luxurious? That’s still $138,000 for a 20% deposit, not including stamp duty, legal and moving costs.

For a single person that’s still nine years of saving, or the best part of five for a couple, and that’s assuming home prices don’t keep rising faster than their incomes and the earnings on their savings, which has been the experience of the past four years. Even a deposit on a Melbourne apartment is six-and-a-half years of saving for a single and more than three years for a couple, again not including other unavoidable purchase costs. That’s the individual challenge that Gen Ys face, even those on pretty decent incomes which are becoming rarer in an increasingly part-time and casualised labour market. But what all of the analysis thus far has ignored is the macroeconomic cost. Imagine for a second that hundreds of thousands of Gen Ys gave up all their brunches and coffees – cafes across Australia would be going broke.

Who do they employ? Often Gen Ys. Likewise the restaurants, bars and retailers that would also be hit if Gen Y really did close their wallets completely. This illustrates the problem with an over-inflated housing market, it absolutely sucks the life out of every other part of the economy.

“Chinese banks had a 10% share of investment-banking revenue in Asia [..] a decade ago… This year, that share has increased to 61%..”

• China Might Finally Give Wall Street What It Wants – 20 Years Late (WSJ)

Beijing is considering allowing Wall Street firms to run their own investment-banking businesses on the mainland, according to people briefed on the discussions, a long-awaited step that would give them more access to China’s hard-to-crack domestic market. The move is being discussed as part of a new U.S.-China trade and investment framework. Firms such as Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan Chase potentially could operate investment-banking business in China on their own. Currently, the firms must pair with domestic brokerages in joint ventures. The people briefed on the discussions caution negotiations aren’t finalized. Details need to be hashed out with Chinese regulators, and any agreement would need to be ratified by the U.S. Senate.

The possibility of getting closer to the Chinese market is a breakthrough for Wall Street firms. Global banks have limited access to the $7.48 trillion stock markets of Shanghai and Shenzhen and China’s domestic bond market, compared with the ease they can operate in global markets such as London and Tokyo. Any change, however, would come at a late stage. China’s banks have large balance sheets and have become formidable rivals. The banks also have long relationships with corporate Chinese clients, some of whom may not recognize Western brand names.

Chinese banks had a 10% share of investment-banking revenue in Asia, excluding Japan and Australia, a decade ago, according to data provider Dealogic. This year, that share has increased to 61%, boosted by Chinese companies that prefer to do business with domestic firms. Although U.S. banks have spent heavily to bulk up operations in the region, their share has declined since 2000, from 43% to just 14% so far this year, according to Dealogic.

Popping bubbles before they become tumors.

• Hong Kong Derails Property Streetcar (BBG)

When pro-market authorities tamper with prices to cool asset bubbles, economists speak of “throwing sand in the wheels of finance.” Having emptied its bucket of sand without stanching the desire to own property, Hong Kong decided to derail the out-of-control streetcar in a pit of exorbitant taxation. Considering the more painful alternative, it’s a wise move. Now that foreigners, including all-important mainland Chinese buyers, must pay a 30% stamp duty to buy overpriced shoeboxes, transactions could drop by 70%, Bloomberg News reported. Weaker demand might jolt earnings of the city’s developers. That’s what the biggest drop in 16 months in Cheung Kong Property’s shares suggested Monday. A more violent reaction, which might have occurred as Hong Kong’s U.S.-linked interest rates rose, may have been avoided.

As Gadfly pointed out, Hong Kong property has been a magnet for the kind of speculative frenzy that Singapore managed to tame. A gush of money out of the People’s Republic and into something – anything – in Hong Kong is the main reason a skilled worker in the territory was being asked to hand over seven years’ more wages than his Singapore counterpart to own the roof over his head. Even as Hong Kong’s pro-democracy activists are ticked off by Beijing for trying to chart an independent political course, the city can exert more control over its economic destiny by making the world’s least affordable housing a little less so. Not only will the 30% tax dissuade mainland buyers, it also could also put an end to speculative land purchases by Chinese developers.

Well, let’s all get us some deflation then.

• Negative Bond Yields in Japan Don’t Look So Bad With Deflation (BBG)

If you thought Japan’s negative yields don’t offer any value, take a look at the nation’s fall back into deflation. The 10-year Japanese government bond yield of minus 0.065% turns into a real yield of about 44 basis points, near a three-year high, after accounting for consumer prices. The figure beats the U.S. 10-year real yield of about 30 basis points. The Bank of Japan last week acknowledged its negative short-term interest rates and its plan to control the yield curve will need more time to push up living costs. It forecast 2% inflation won’t be achieved until the year ending March 2019. Bondholders are the beneficiaries, with Japan’s debt market little changed over the past month, even as Treasuries dropped 0.4%, based on the Bloomberg World Bond Indexes.

“Even with the BOJ being vigilant about controlling bond levels, Japanese yields are on a gradual declining path given the lack of conviction that prices will rise,” said Souichi Takeyama at SMBC Nikko Securities Inc. in Tokyo, a unit of Japan’s second-biggest lender. “There is a lack of concern about inflation.” The government will test demand when it sells 10-year debt Tuesday and 30-year bonds on Thursday. Japanese consumer prices are falling at a year-on-year pace of 0.5%, matching the biggest declines since 2013, giving bondholders reason to stick with the securities at a time when the central bank is trying to hold nominal 10-year yields at about zero. In the U.S., investors get 1.80%. Japan’s 40-year bond is more attractive at 0.575%, or a real yield exceeding 1%.

Wonder how much he blames himself for.

• Architect Of Euro In Stark Warning (BBC)

A founding father of monetary union has given a damning assessment of the euro bloc, saying that not incorporating an exit strategy was a mistake. Prof Otmar Issing told the BBC’s Wake up to Money that faultlines across the eurozone remain, citing economic weakness in Greece, Portugal and Italy. The ECB’s first chief economist also warned about the impact of negative interest rates. And he said political pressures threatened central banks’ independence. Prof Issing told the BBC that structural problems in the eurozone and dwindling public support in some countries were still major problems. The euro currency was “stable and performing much better than expected”, he said. “But I wish I could say the same about the euro area.”

Countries that tipped the bloc into recession during the global financial meltdown were still in serious economic trouble. Greece was in “permanent crisis”, and economic reforms in Portugal and Italy were either on hold or being reversed, the professor said. Prof Issing, a former adviser to Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel, has in recent years become suspicious of the euro project he helped to create, warning that it would collapse without reform. He told the BBC that it was a “mistake in the construction of the whole arrangement that once a member, you remain a member for eternity”. It meant that countries not complying with the eurozone’s economic and budgetary rules “can blackmail the others”. Allowing a temporary exit would, for example, have helped Greece to reform its economy so that it could then return later in better financial health.

However, some countries should never have joined the euro in the first place, he said, without naming names. They “were not yet ready to thrive under a single monetary policy and one central bank”. Prof Issing is also increasingly concerned about central banks’ use of zero or negative interest rates in a bid to stimulate growth. The policy has been used by, among others, the ECB, Japan, Switzerland and Sweden It is hindering the recovery of banks, he said, adding: “If it persists for longer, then I think we will see dramatic consequences for insurance companies and pension schemes.” Furthermore, “the longer zero interest rates continue, the more difficult it will be to exit from this situation”.

A lasting impression accompanied by Victoria Nuland and new ambassador to Greece Geoffrey Pyatt. Athens has better be very careful with the Ukraine star couple in place.

• Obama Aiming To Make Lasting Impression With Athens Speech (Kath.)

US President Barack Obama is planning to deliver what American officials have described to Kathimerini as a “legacy speech” when he visits Athens on November 15. Although the details of the president’s trip have not been finalized, officials in Washington indicated that Obama intends to make a statement that resonates when he comes to Greece. One official likened it to the historic speech delivered by John F. Kennedy when he visited Berlin in 1962. Obama is expected to make extensive references to democracy and how it has endured in Greece despite its recent problems. The US president is also due to highlight the need for Athens to receive debt relief and for the Greek government to persist with structural reforms.

Obama is expected to tread carefully on the issue of debt so that his comments do not appear as an attack on German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who he considers an important partner and who he will be visiting after his trip to Athens. Sources said that the American president’s speech will also contain a message for Turkey. Obama wants to draw attention to the refugee crisis during his visit to Greece but due to security concerns a visit to the island of Lesvos has been ruled out. There is, however, a possibility that he will visit a refugee camp in Attica.

It is not yet known who will accompany the American leader on his visit but the impression is that First Lady Michelle Obama will not accompany him on the trip. There has been no final decision on whether Treasury Secretary Jack Lew will also travel to Athens. It is considered likely that Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland and Special Envoy for International Energy Affairs Amos Hochstein will be part of the team that will fly to Greece from Washington.

Prediction: “we” are going to let this run awfully out of control.

• Erdogan Blasts West As Turkey’s Kurdish Party Boycotts Parliament (R.)

Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan accused Europe on Sunday of abetting terrorism by supporting Kurdish militants and said he did not care if it called him a dictator. Turkey drew international condemnation for the arrest on Friday of leaders and lawmakers from the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), the second-largest opposition grouping in parliament, as part of a terrorism investigation. The government accuses the HDP, which made history last year by becoming the first Kurdish party to win 10% of the vote and enter parliament, of financing and supporting an armed Kurdish insurgency, which it denies. The HDP announced a partial boycott of parliament on Sunday, saying it was “halting its legislative efforts” and that its deputies would stop participating in sessions of the legislature or meetings of parliamentary commissions.

“I don’t care if they call me dictator or whatever else, it goes in one ear, out the other. What matters is what my people call me,” Erdogan said in a speech at an Istanbul university, where he was receiving an honorary doctorate. Erdogan and the government are furious at what they see as Western criticism of their fight against the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) militant group, which has waged a three-decade insurgency for Kurdish autonomy and whose allied groups in Syria enjoy U.S. support in the fight against Islamic State. Erdogan said the PKK, listed as a terrorist group by the EU and US, had killed almost 800 members of the security forces and more than 300 civilians since a ceasefire in the largely Kurdish southeast collapsed last year. [..] “Europe, as a whole, is abetting terrorism. Even though they declared the PKK a terrorist organisation, this is clear,” Erdogan said. “We see how the PKK can act so freely and comfortably in Europe.”

HDP co-leaders Selahattin Demirtas and Figen Yuksekdag were jailed pending trial on Friday after refusing to give testimony in a probe linked to “terrorist propaganda”. Ten other HDP lawmakers were also detained, though some were later released. The US expressed deep concern, while Germany and Denmark summoned Turkish diplomats over the Kurdish arrests. European Parliament President Martin Schulz said the actions “call into question the basis for the sustainable relationship between the EU and Turkey”. “After discussions with our parliamentary group and our central executive board, we have decided to halt our legislative efforts in light of everything that has happened,” HDP spokesman Ayhan Bilgen said in a statement read out in front of the party’s offices in Diyarbakir and broadcast online. HDP officials would consult with the party’s supporters, many of whom are in the largely Kurdish southeast, and could then consider a full withdrawal from parliament, he said.

“Climate change is intergenerational theft.”

• Great Barrier Reef: What Have We Left For Our Children? (Naomi Klein)

There is no question that the strongest emotions I have about the climate crisis have to do with Toma and his peers. I have flashes of sheer panic about the extreme weather we have already locked in for them. But even more intense than this fear is the sadness about what they won’t ever know. These kids are growing up in a mass extinction, robbed of the cacophonous company of being surrounded by so many fast-disappearing life forms. According to a new WWF report, since I was born in 1970 the number of wild animals on the planet has dropped by more than half – and by 2020 it is expected to drop by two-thirds. What a lonely world we are creating for these kids. And what more powerful place to illustrate that absence than the Great Barrier Reef, on the knife-edge of survival?

So this film shows the reef through Toma’s eyes. He’s too young to understand concepts like coral bleaching and dying – it’s tough enough for him to understand that coral was ever alive in the first place. It also shows the Great Barrier Reef through the eyes of his mother: moved by the beauty that remains, heartbroken and infuriated by what has been lost. Because what has happened to this wondrous part of the world is not just a tragedy, it’s a crime. And the crime is still very much in progress, with our respective governments busily clearing the way for new coalmines and new oil pipelines.

Debt Rattle November 4 2016

Nov 042016

November 4, 2016 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 9:56 am Finance Tagged with: Brexit, deflation, devaluation, Egypt, France, Hillary, Kurds, pensions, poverty, Trump, Yucca Comments Off

DPC Madison Street east from Fifth Avenue, Chicago Sep 1 1900

• Both US Parties Need to Worry About Poverty (BBG)

• The End of a Great Industrial Power: France Car Production Collapses (Gef.)

• The Sad Case Of Japan Should Serve As A Warning For China (BBG)

• China Faces Looming Bulge in Currency Pressure (WSJ)

• Egypt Central Bank Devalues Currency By 48% In Exchange For IMF Loan (AlJ.)

• ‘The FBI Is Trumpland’: Anti-Clinton Atmosphere Spurred Leaks (G.)

• US Voters Fear The Media Far More Than Russian Hackers (WE)

• Trump is Half Right and Half Wrong about Mosul (Di Lorenzo)

• Tory MPs Warn High Court Trio Of Early Election If They Don’t Back Down (DM)

• Government Pension Plans Are Headed For Disaster (Mises Inst.)

• Toronto Home Prices Surge in October, Undaunted by New Rules (BBG)

• Turkey Police Round Up Kurdish Party Leaders in Midnight Raids (BBG)

• Turkey Appears To Have Closed Most Of The Internet (Ind.)

• Historic Climate Pact Enters Into Force (AFP)

• Early Closings Of US Nuclear Plants Leave Toxic Waste With Nowhere To Go (BBG)

Poverty is a problem the US flatly denies and ignores.

• Both US Parties Need to Worry About Poverty (BBG)

There’s a reason presidential nominee Donald Trump’s message of a declining America is inspiring support in Republican strongholds: poverty is worsening in his party’s congressional districts, a new analysis by the Brookings Institution shows. The poverty rate increased in nearly all – 96% – of the Republican-controlled districts between 2000 and the 2010-2014 period, according to a study by Elizabeth Kneebone, a fellow with the institute. She analyzed Census data and figures from the American Community Survey. The population living in poverty in all Republican districts climbed by 49%, compared with a 33% increase in Democratic areas. A big theme of this presidential election campaign that will be decided on Nov. 8 has been the battle to win low-income voters who feel left behind from the economic expansion.

Trump’s rallies have been often packed with middle-class supporters who are receiving his message to “make America great again.” Both him and Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton have promised to raise the minimum wage and deal with the affordability of college and childcare. Neighborhoods in Democrat-leaning districts also have a high proportion of poor people. Combined, the poverty rate in districts represented by Democrats was higher at 17.1% in 2010-14 than the 14.4% in Republican areas. However, the overall number of poor residents was larger in Red districts at 25.1 million compared with 22.7 million in Blue districts, the study found. “Poverty and opportunity should be more than a top-of-the-ticket conversation,” Kneebone said. “Challenges of poverty cut across the political divide and touch all 436 congressional districts.”

France suffers from the same disease as all Southern European contries. As long as it stays in the Eurozone, this can only get worse.

• The End of a Great Industrial Power: France Car Production Collapses (Gef.)

French industry has been contracting since the adoption of the euro. It was not able to recover after either of the 2001 or 2008 crises because the euro, a currency stronger than the French franc would be, has become a burden to France’s economy. The floating exchange rate works like an indicator of the strength of the economy and like an automatic stabilizer. A weaker currency helps to regain competitiveness during a crisis, while a stronger currency supports consumption of foreign goods. China has been accused of artificial devaluation of its currency to prop up exports, while the ECB’s policy has had an opposite effect for the economy of France and some South European countries: the euro has become too strong; whereas for Germany’s it has become too weak.

That is why the common currency has increased consumption and imports in less productive countries and strengthened German competitiveness and exports. Because of the euro France could not regain international competitiveness in the world’s market after the 2001 crisis, so its industry has been slowly dying ever since. What we are saying is not that weakening your currency is a solution to boost a never-ending growth. The floating exchange rate is a great tool for bad times, which is excellently known in Poland, where there was no recession because of, among others, a temporarily weaker national currency. France and South European countries have just given this tool over to the ECB and they were not able to have a quick recovery. Just like Germany has had with an undervalued euro in their case.

Today, according to the Eurostat, industry (except construction) makes up 14.1% of the French total gross value added, while in 1995 it was 19.2%. The EU’s average is still 19.3%, but in Germany 25.9%. Moreover, the share of industry in total employment in France is only 11.9%, also under the EU’s average (15.4%) and the German level (18.8%). One of the imprints of the dying French manufacturing under the ECB rules is automotive sector collapse. According to OICA data, the world’s car production almost doubled in the years 1997-2015 from 53 million vehicles produced yearly to 90 million. At the same time, Germany increased its car production by 20% from 5 to 6 million. What happened in France, once the proud producer of beautiful and modern vehicles?

Deflation.

• The Sad Case Of Japan Should Serve As A Warning For China (BBG)

China and Japan may seem to inhabit alternative economic universes. After more than two decades of stagnation, Japan is a fading global power that can’t seem to revive its fortunes no matter what unorthodox gimmicks it tries. By contrast, China’s ascent to superpower status appears relentless as it gains wealth, technology, and ambition. Yet these Asian neighbors have a lot in common, and that doesn’t bode well for China’s economic future. The sad case of Japan should serve as a cautionary tale for China’s policymakers. Beijing pursued almost identical economic policies to Tokyo’s to generate its rapid development. Now China’s leaders are repeating the missteps the Japanese made that tanked Japan’s economy and thwarted its revival.

30 years ago, few foresaw the decline of Japan, either. Japan was the East Asian giant poised to overtake the U.S. as the world’s top economy. Driving that ascent was an economic system that many considered superior to laissez-faire American capitalism. By fostering close, cooperative ties among the state, big corporations, and banks, Japan’s policymakers encouraged investment and guided a national industrial strategy. Bureaucrats in Tokyo interfered with markets to a degree unthinkable in the U.S. by protecting nascent industries and directing financing to favored sectors and companies. Backed by such support, Japanese companies burst onto the world stage and pushed their American competitors to the wall. But even as Japan appeared destined for greatness, its economy was, in reality, starting to rot.

Those clubby ties among finance, business, and government misallocated capital and led to wasteful investments. Growth was given a boost by cheap credit in the second half of the 1980s, but that also helped inflate debt levels and stock and property prices. When this “bubble economy” burst in the early 1990s, the financial industry was flattened. Japan has yet to fully recover. [..] The methods Beijing employed to generate rapid growth—directing finance, nurturing targeted industries, and promoting exports—are replicas of Japan’s. And since the state in China’s “state capitalism” plays an even larger economic role than Japan’s officious bureaucracy does, the Chinese government interferes with markets to a greater degree.

More record lows every day.

• China Faces Looming Bulge in Currency Pressure (WSJ)

Markets have grown more accustomed to the slow-motion decline in the value of the Chinese yuan. The currency’s next milestone, however, may usher in a more challenging period. China’s currency has fallen nearly 4% against the dollar this year, with a chunk of that move taking place over the past month, though there has been a small recovery in recent days. Recent dollar strength is certainly a factor in the minds of China’s currency managers in deciding when to intervene and when to let the yuan slide. Beijing has spent more than $500 billion in reserves to manage the yuan’s slide over the past two years on a balance-of-payments basis. Still, the yuan has slipped from 6.06 a dollar to above 6.75. That is getting close to 6.82, the level around which the yuan was pegged for an extended period from 2008 until 2010.

Currency traders could be accused of overplaying such historical levels having an effect on current trading. But in this case, it may have more than just a psychological impact. The two years in which the yuan was stuck around 6.82 was also the period of the largest inflows into the Chinese economy, to the tune of $764 billion, noted Kevin Lai of Daiwa Securities. Quantitative easing in the U.S. was in full effect and trillions flowed to emerging markets, especially China. Individuals and companies that borrowed in dollars or brought money in as a carry trade may have hung on until now, figuring they haven’t lost money on the exchange rate. But seeing the yuan get back to the rate when they brought it in could hasten transfers.

Unlike the period from 2008 to 2010, when interest-rate differentials vastly favored bringing money to China, and the exchange rate was pegged, the difference between dollar rates and yuan rates have narrowed substantially, plus the Chinese have to account for the possibility the yuan will weaken further. That explains why Federal Reserve rate increases have such a powerful effect on China’s capital flows. [..] It isn’t inevitable that the bulge of money that flowed in from 2008 to 2010 will necessarily leave. But outflows do continue to bubble below the surface. The ghosts of inflows past may yet haunt China’s future.

Lagarde poking a stick into a hornest nest.

• Egypt Central Bank Devalues Currency By 48% In Exchange For IMF Loan (AlJ.)

Egypt has devalued its currency by 48%, meeting an important demand set by the IMF in exchange for a $13bn loan over three years to overhaul the country’s economy. Thursday’s much anticipated decision by the Egyptian Central Bank followed a sharp and sudden decline this week in the value of the dollar in the unofficial market, dropping from an all-time high of 18.25 pounds to around 13 to the US currency. The devaluation pegs the Egyptian pound at 13 to the dollar, up from nearly nine pounds on the official market. The IMF’s executive board has yet to ratify the $12bn loan provisionally agreed by Egypt and the IMF in August.

Egypt’s central bank increased interest rates by three percent to rebalance currency markets following weeks of turbulence. A shortage of dollars in the economy had put the currency under intense downward pressure in recent months. A rapid slide on the black market to 18 earlier this week pushed the importers to cease buying, with the rate strengthening to 13 late on Wednesday, creating a rare opportunity for the central bank to devalue. The central bank said the new exchange rate was non-binding and would serve as “soft guidance to jumpstart the market”.

Even this can be turned into an anti-everyone-but-Hillary piece, as the Guardian proves.

• ‘The FBI Is Trumpland’: Anti-Clinton Atmosphere Spurred Leaks (G.)

Deep antipathy to Hillary Clinton exists within the FBI, multiple bureau sources have told the Guardian, spurring a rapid series of leaks damaging to her campaign just days before the election. Current and former FBI officials, none of whom were willing or cleared to speak on the record, have described a chaotic internal climate that resulted from outrage over director James Comey’s July decision not to recommend an indictment over Clinton’s maintenance of a private email server on which classified information transited. “The FBI is Trumpland,” said one current agent. This atmosphere raises major questions about how Comey and the bureau he is slated to run for the next seven years can work with Clinton should she win the White House.

The currently serving FBI agent said Clinton is “the antichrist personified to a large swath of FBI personnel,” and that “the reason why they’re leaking is they’re pro-Trump.” The agent called the bureau “Trumplandia”, with some colleagues openly discussing voting for a GOP nominee who has garnered unprecedented condemnation from the party’s national security wing and who has pledged to jail Clinton if elected. At the same time, other sources dispute the depth of support for Trump within the bureau, though they uniformly stated that Clinton is viewed highly unfavorably. “There are lots of people who don’t think Trump is qualified, but also believe Clinton is corrupt. What you hear a lot is that it’s a bad choice, between an incompetent and a corrupt politician,” said a former FBI official.

Sources who disputed the depth of Trump’s internal support agreed that the FBI is now in parlous political territory. Justice department officials – another current target of FBI dissatisfaction – have said the bureau disregarded longstanding rules against perceived or actual electoral interference when Comey wrote to Congress to say it was reviewing newly discovered emails relating to Clinton’s personal server. [..] Comey’s decision to tell the public in July that he was effectively dropping the Clinton server issue angered some within the bureau, particularly given the background of tensions with the justice department over the Clinton issue. A significant complication is the appearance of a conflict of interest regarding Loretta Lynch, the attorney general, who met with Bill Clinton this summer ahead of Comey’s announcement, which she acknowledged had “cast a shadow” over the inquiry.

It’s only a poll of 1000, but perhaps the US voter is not completely stupid.

• US Voters Fear The Media Far More Than Russian Hackers (WE)

Voters fear the media far more than Russian hackers when it comes to tampering with election results. According to a Suffolk University/USA Today poll, 46% of likely voters believe the news media is “the primary threat that might try to change the election results.” The national political establishment was the second most-suspected group at 21%, and another 13% were undecided. Foreign interests, including “Russian hackers,” ranked fourth with 10% and “local political bosses” came in last with 9% of likely voters as the main threat to truthful election results. The poll results found 51% of likely voters were either “very concerned” or “somewhat concerned” about the possibility of violence erupting on election day or afterwards.

The poll of 1,000 likely voters was taken between Oct. 20 and Oct. 24 and followed the release of private emails by the hacking group WikiLeaks that revealed cozy relationships between some prominent media stars and the Clinton campaign. The WikiLeaks dump also discovered Donna Brazile, the interim chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee, forwarded a debate question to Clinton that was later asked at a CNN Democratic town hall. Brazile at the time was a CNN contributor. The poll found 39% of likely voters believe the media is coordinating coverage with individual political campaigns, while 48% said the media is reporting “completely of its own accord.” The Gallup Poll has found trust in the media to have sunk to an historic low. A September Gallup survey found just 32% of American adults saying they have a great deal or fair amount of trust in the media,” a number that has dropped 8 %age points from last year.

“.. keeping Boobus Americanus fooled into believing that that guy in the black pajamas with the giant sword will be in their neighborhood next week..”

• Trump is Half Right and Half Wrong about Mosul (Di Lorenzo)

In his campaign stump speech Donald Trump ridicules Obama for publicly announcing four months in advance that “we” will be invading Mosul, Iraq to kick out ISIS there and capture its leaders. No element of surprise there. Twelve minutes after the announcement, said Trump, and the ISIS leaders were gone. Trump is right to mock this foolish talk. The element of surprise is what military commanders dream about. Stonewall Jackson’s famous flanking maneuver at the Battle of Chancellorsville (VA), where his 60,000-man army outflanked and surprised the 133,000-man Army of the Potomac with a crushing defeat is still to this day taught at military academies around the world.

But Obama is not that stupid. He’s just not interested in winning the “war on terra,” as Dub-Yuh called it. His main interest is keeping Boobus Americanus fooled into believing that that guy in the black pajamas with the giant sword will be in their neighborhood next week chopping off heads if we ever stop intervening in the Middle East. It’s all theater, in other words. That’s why the regime announces some big new military escalation every few months, lest Boobus forgets that he’s supposed to be frightened into acquiescing in the never-ending explosive growth of the military-industrial complex and the relentless growth of the state in general that it nourishes.

The mess will only get deeper unless Brits stop blaming each other.

• Tory MPs Warn High Court Trio Of Early Election If They Don’t Back Down (DM)

Theresa May could be forced to hold an early election if judges and Remain campaigners do not back down in the war against Brexit, Tory MPs warned last night. On a frantic day at Westminster, the Prime Minister vowed to appeal yesterday’s High Court verdict which would allow Parliament to frustrate or even scupper the process of Britain leaving the EU. No 10 sent a clear message to the courts that 17.4 million voters had backed Brexit and that they should not get in the way of ‘delivering the best deal for Britain’. David Davis, the Brexit Secretary, said that – if yesterday’s verdict was upheld by the Supreme Court – a full Act of Parliament would be required to trigger Brexit.

This would allow MPs or unelected peers to table amendments that could dictate the terms of Brexit or even halt the process. But Mr Davis warned that heading down this path would be a huge mistake. And senior Tories said that, if MPs and peers did try to frustrate Brexit, a General Election was almost inevitable, suggesting Mrs May would have no option but to trigger an ‘immediate’ poll in early 2017. Last night, Mr Davis said: ‘Parliament voted by six to one to give the decision to the people, no ifs or buts, and that’s why we are appealing this to get on with delivering the best deal for Britain. ‘Parliament is sovereign and has been sovereign, but of course the people are sovereign.

‘The people are the ones who parliament represents…17.4 million of them, the biggest mandate in history, voted for us to leave the EU. ‘We’re going to deliver on that mandate in the best way possible for the British national interest. ‘The people want us to get on with it and that is what we intend to do.’ Ex-justice minister Dominic Raab said the verdict had opened ‘Pandora’s box’. He added: ‘I think the elephant in the room here is if we get to the stage where [Remainers] allow this negotiation to even begin, I think there must be an increased chance that we will need to go to the country again. ‘I think that would be a mistake and I don’t think those trying to frustrate the verdict in the referendum will be rewarded.’

A global phenomenon. “..the political process [..] actually rewards those who underfund the present and defray costs onto future generations.”

• Government Pension Plans Are Headed For Disaster (Mises Inst.)

The combined debt held by U.S. public pension plans will top $1.7 trillion next year, according to a just-released report from Moody’s Investors Services. This “pension tsunami” has already forced towns like Stockton, California and Detroit, Michigan into bankruptcy. Perhaps no government mismanaged their pension as badly as Puerto Rico, where a $43 billion pension debt forced the commonwealth to seek protection from the federal government after having defaulted on its obligations to bondholders — a default which is expected to spread to retirees in the form of benefit cuts. While the disastrous outcome of Puerto Rico’s pension plan – which is projected to completely run out of assets by 2019 – represents the worst-case scenario, the same series of events that led to its demise can be found in most public pension plans nationwide.

There are three primary culprits that can be found in nearly every state suffering from a public pension crisis: 1) The use of accounting gimmicks that are designed to shift costs onto future generations – an approach outlawed for private pension plans and rejected by both public and private plans in Canada and Europe. 2) Lawmakers, acting in their political self-interest, who have catered to the past demands of government unions to enrich their members’ benefits while passing the costs onto future generations. 3) A broken governance structure where public pension board members are actually penalized in tangible ways for acting responsibly, and are rewarded by choosing to delay the day of reckoning. Perhaps the most concise assessment of public pensions came from the former chief actuary for the nation’s largest public pension fund – CalPERS – who noted simply that: “Politics and pensions just don’t mix.”

And it’s not just “liberal” states like California who have succumbed to the siren call of public pensions. My home state of Nevada – historically thought to be a bastion of limited government thought – is in a proportionally deeper hole than our California neighbors! [..] In theory, government is ostensibly designed to override the allegedly short-sighted, greedy nature of individual actors with policies that are long-term oriented and designed to maximize the general welfare. Yet, as the case of public pensions (not to mention infrastructure spending, the national debt, entitlements, etc.) reveals, the political process actually does the exact opposite: it actually rewards those who underfund the present and defray costs onto future generations.

Just ask yourself: who profits?

• Toronto Home Prices Surge in October, Undaunted by New Rules (BBG)

Toronto home sales rose to a record and prices surged in October, showing little effect so far from new government rules designed to bring stability to the market. Sales in Canada’s biggest city rose 12% to 9,768 transactions from the same month a year earlier, while average prices jumped 21% to C$762,975 ($569,852), according to the Toronto Real Estate Board. The average price of a detached home was C$1,034,077, up 26% on the year. New listings rose 0.9% to 13,377 homes. “Until we experience sustained relief in the supply of listings, the potential for strong annual rates of price growth will persist, especially in the low-rise market segments,” Jason Mercer, the board’s director of market analysis, said in a statement on Thursday.

The market remained hot even as Finance Minister Bill Morneau unveiled new federal rules in October that included a stress test for home-loan borrowers and came into effect halfway through the month. The rules also stiffened requirements for low-ratio mortgage insurance and closed a tax loophole. Toronto’s march higher contrasts with Vancouver’s continued sales decline since the provincial government enacted a tax on non-Canadian home buyers. Sales in the west coast city fell 39% in October over the prior year, while prices for all residential properties climbed to an average of C$919,300, a 25% jump from a year earlier and a 0.8% decline from September.

The west uses the Kurds when it comes to fighting ISIS, but leaves them hanging when it comes to Erdogan’s delusions.

• Turkey Police Round Up Kurdish Party Leaders in Midnight Raids (BBG)

Turkish police began rounding up Kurdish lawmakers in post-midnight raids on Friday, extending a crackdown on the opposition as President Recep Tayyip Erdogan consolidates power following a July 15 coup attempt. Selahattin Demirtas and Figen Yuksekdag, co-chairs of the Peoples’ Democratic Party, also known as the HDP, were among those detained, according to CNN-Turk. At Erdogan’s request, parliament had passed a law in May stripping the party’s lawmakers of their immunity from prosecution, which allows them to be charged with terrorism-related offenses. Last year, Demirtas looked to be a rising political star in Turkey. He led a pro-Kurdish party to win seats in parliament for the first time, passing the threshold of 10% of the national vote.

He also ran for president in 2014, and campaigned on a promise to prevent Erdogan from winning the power he seeks to transfer the seat of power in Turkey from parliament to an enhanced executive presidency. The police raids were carried out in Diyarbakir, Turkey’s largest Kurdish-majority city, and in the capital Ankara, according to Haberturk newspaper. Sirri Sureyya Onder, a member of parliament representing Istanbul, was also detained in Ankara, it said. Over the weekend, police arrested the elected mayors of Diyarbakir and later replaced them with government appointees. Demirtas had said that members of his party wouldn’t abide by orders to appear before courts, saying they’d become servants of the ruling party and were illegitimate.

Erdogan says the HDP is merely a front for the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, a group classified by Turkey and allies – including the U.S. and EU – as a terrorist organization. The HDP is the third-largest party in Turkey’s parliament, holding 59 of the legislature’s 550 seats.

Could still be an incident, but it would fit the pattern.

• Turkey Appears To Have Closed Most Of The Internet (Ind.)

Much of the internet appears to have gone down in Turkey. People in the country are having problems accessing much of the internet’s biggest websites and services, including Facebook, WhatsApp, YouTube, Twitter and more. The website Down Detector confirmed problems in the country, particularly in the west. Some have reported that the sites are simply slow, but that it is still possible to access them. Others say they are down entirely. It isn’t clear whether the outage has been caused by an intentional ban, a cyber attack or just an accident. Some reported that issues with Turk Telecom appeared to be the cause of the problems.

Turkey Blocks, a website that tracks issues with the internet in Turkey, claimed that web traffic including that for WhatsApp was subject to throttling, where connections are slowed down to the point they are unusable. It claimed that the internet ban was related to the arrest of some political activists the night before the outage went into effect. The issue began overnight but has been going on throughout the day, according to local reports. The internet in general seems to be having a rocky few weeks – recently, it went down for almost a full day after a strange cyber attack on the internet’s infrastructure that appeared to be executed by webcams.

Yeah, yeah, CON21. Mankind is capable of producing huge amounts of hot air in more ways than one.

• Historic Climate Pact Enters Into Force (AFP)

A hard-fought pact to stave off worst-case-scenario global warming enters into force Friday after record-fast ratification by nations reassembling next week for a fresh round of UN climate talks. Dubbed the Paris Agreement, it is the first-ever pact binding all the world’s nations, rich and poor, to a commitment to cap average global warming by curbing planet-warming greenhouse gases from burning coal, oil and gas. “Humanity will look back on November 4, 2016, as the day that countries of the world shut the door on inevitable climate disaster,” UN climate chief Patricia Espinosa said. While cause for celebration, “it is also a moment to look ahead with sober assessment and renewed will over the task ahead,” she said.

This meant drastically cutting emissions in the short term, “certainly in the next 15 years,” Espinosa pointed out a day after a UN report said current trends were steering the world towards climate “tragedy”. By 2030, said the UN Environment Programme, annual greenhouse gas emissions will be 12 to 14 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) higher than the desired level of 42 billion tonnes. The 2014 level was about 52.7 billion tonnes. 2016 is on track to become the hottest year on record, and carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere passed an ominous milestone in 2015. On Friday, the Eiffel Tower in Paris as well as government and public buildings in Marrakesh, New Delhi, Sao Paulo and Adelaide, among others, will be lit up in green to mark the entry into force of the historic pact.

“..interim storage sites while the government develops a permanent solution..” Baloney. There is no permanent solution. Yucca Mountain was discarded after a judge ruled the government had to guarantee safe storage for 100,000 years. There is no such guarantee.

• Early Closings Of US Nuclear Plants Leave Toxic Waste With Nowhere To Go (BBG)

Under a 1982 law, the U.S. government, not the utilities, is responsible for disposing of radioactive waste that can take thousands, even hundreds of thousands, of years to degrade. But more than a half-century after nuclear energy powered the first American home, the U.S. Department of Energy still doesn’t have a permanent solution for the waste left behind. It’s a problem that will only get worse. On October 24, the Fort Calhoun Nuclear Generating Station near Blair, Nebraska, became the fifth nuclear plant to close in five years. Of 119 reactors in the U.S., 20 are now being decommissioned and a half-dozen more are expected to close prematurely, nudged out by cheap natural gas and growing use of renewables.

Beyond that, “the big wave of retirements really starts coming in around 2030,” Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz warned last month at an event in Washington. Among experts, the nuclear waste debate invariably turns on the fleeting nature of human institutions in dealing with an element that the Environmental Protection Agency has said must be isolated for 10,000 years to protect humans and the environment from toxic radiation. “The problem with federal agencies is that the management structure changes every few years,” said Allison Macfarlane, a former chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), which licenses and regulates civilian use of radioactive material. “In hundreds of years, will these institutions be there, will they care, will they pay?” That’s one issue. A second is where exactly to put the waste.

The safest thing to do is to bury it deep underground, below the water table and within a stable rock formation. Congress picked such a site in 1987: a desert ridge in Southern Nevada known as Yucca Mountain. The site abuts a nuclear weapons testing ground where 928 atomic tests were conducted between 1951 and 1992. While a few Nevada counties agreed with the selection, the state government didn’t, and the Yucca solution soon devolved into a decades-long political fight that crossed party lines and spanned presidential administrations. In 2010, President Barack Obama finally scrapped the plan altogether, declaring the site unworkable.

Debt Rattle October 28 2016

Oct 282016

October 28, 2016 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 9:11 am Finance Tagged with: Abenomics, Assange, bubble, Calais, deflation, Hillary, money velocity, Trump, war, Xi Comments Off

Theodor Horydczak Washington Monument 1933

• China Capital Flight Flashes Warning As Authorities Prick Property Bubble (AEP)

• Unacceptable Cures for the Days Ahead (Dent)

• Japan Consumer Prices Keep Falling, Household Spending Slips (BBG)

• Bank of Japan Loses Bark And Bite Under Humbled Kuroda (R.)

• The Gap Between Poor And Rich Regions In Europe Is Widening (Economist)

• Xi Jinping Becomes ‘Core’ Leader Of China (R.)

• Waking Up in Hillary Clinton’s America (Nomi Prins)

• Donald Trump Has Won, Even If He Loses The US Election (Malmgren)

• Why Is the Foreign Policy Establishment Spoiling for More War? (Kucinich)

• Assange First Interview Since Being Censored (JJ)

• Wither Democracy (Lessig)

• Calais Children Abandoned At Former ‘Jungle’ Camp Site (EuO)

“The worry is a “negative feedback loop between a weakening yuan and capital flight”.

• China Capital Flight Flashes Warning As Authorities Prick Property Bubble (AEP)

Capital outflows from China are accelerating. The hemorrhage has reached the fastest pace since the currency panic at the start of the year. The latest cycle of credit-driven expansion has already peaked after 18 months. Beijing has had to slam on the brakes, scrambling to control property speculation that the Communist authorities themselves deliberately fomented. How this episode could have happened is astonishing, given that premier Li Keqiang has warned repeatedly that excess credit is becoming dangerous and will ultimately doom China to the middle income trap. It will be clear by early to mid 2017 that the economy is rolling over and that the underlying ‘quality of growth’ has deteriorated yet further. “We think the recovery will run out of steam early next year,” said Chang Liu from Capital Economics.

This stop-go rotation – an all-too familiar pattern – coincides with an incipient liquidity squeeze in global finance as dollar LIBOR and Eurodollar rates ratchet upwards. A rate rise by the US Federal Reserve will clinch it. Since the commodity rebound is in great part driven by demand for Chinese industry and construction – and by a touching belief that China’s economy will sail majestically through 2017 – this looming slowdown spells trouble. Stress is already visible in the capital account. Morgan Stanley estimates that net outflows reached $44bn in September. Capital Economics thinks the figure was closer to $55bn, led by a surge in purchases of off-shore securities through the Shanghai-Hong Kong Stock Connect Scheme.

This does not yet match the capital flight seen late last year when a mismanaged shift in exchange rate policy set off outflows averaging $70bn a month, and triggered the global equity rout of January and February. But it is nearing a neuralgic threshold for currency traders. Beijing is clearly alarmed. Nikkei’s Yusho Cho reports that the authorities have ordered banks in Shanghai and Guangzhou to restrict access to foreign currency, and have imposed a “gag order” to keep it quiet. Institutions must now justify why they need foreign exchange. The worry is a “negative feedback loop between a weakening yuan and capital flight”. The central bank (PBOC) spent roughly $50bn defending the yuan last month, but this has not stopped the exchange rate sliding to 6.77 against the dollar – the weakest in six years.

The PBOC has burned through $800bn of foreign reserves since mid-2014, when they peaked at $4 trillion. It still has ample fire-power but bond sales automatically tighten China’s internal monetary policy since it is hard to sterilize the effect, and tightening may the last thing they want if the economy is slowing hard next year. “Our view is that the RMB (yuan) will depreciate 20pc against the US dollar to 8.1 by the end of 2018 as deflation of the property bubble leads to more capital outflows,” Zhiwei Zhang from Deutsche Bank. “This is deflationary for global trade.”

Velocity of money is the no. 1 Deflation indicator.

• Unacceptable Cures for the Days Ahead (Dent)

Then Dr. Lacy Hunt took the stage… As I was telling Boom & Bust subscribers in their 5 Day Forecast email on Monday, he’s the only economist (outside of Steve Keen from Australia, who’s currently in hibernation in London) that I recommend you to follow. He’s classically trained and deeply knowledgeable, and goes beyond the theoretical nature of his chosen field. He understands how debt and financial bubbles build and deleverage, a rarity among economists today. And he has possibly the best explanation of money velocity. Basically, it’s a sign of how productive investment in the economy is. Productive investment creates more profits, jobs and expansion, and hence, greater M2 velocity. Speculation, stock buybacks or empty buildings do not. His money velocity chart was my favorite of the conference.

With this single chart, Lacy shows the level and falling trends for money velocity across the U.S., Europe, Japan and China. And as you can see, the most unproductive investment is in China! See, solid proof from perhaps the most competent economist in America! Building stuff for no one isn’t productive for the economy. This is the most concrete proof yet of something that should be obvious. Despite 6-10% growth rates, China’s money velocity is even lower than Japan’s most dismal “coma economy” that is surviving solely on endless QE as they age and see exponential growth in debt levels… Do you get this? China is worse than Japan when you reflect the truth of money velocity. You can also see why we are the best house in a bad neighborhood. Our money velocity, despite continually slowing since 2000, is 50% stronger than the euro and three times that of Japan and China.

The end of Abenomics nears..

• Japan Consumer Prices Keep Falling, Household Spending Slips (BBG)

Japan’s consumer prices fell for a seventh straight month and household spending slumped again in September, underscoring the challenges Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and Bank of Japan Governor Haruhiko Kuroda face in trying to revive the world’s third-largest economy. The downbeat inflation and spending data came despite an increasingly tight labor market. The unemployment rate slipped to 3% in September, equal to the lowest since 1995. The low jobless figure hasn’t yet resulted in significant wage gains, a key element of efforts to reflate Japan’s economy.

…and that is also the end of Kuroda.

• Bank of Japan Loses Bark And Bite Under Humbled Kuroda (R.)

As his term winds down, Bank of Japan Governor Haruhiko Kuroda has retreated from both the radical policies and rhetoric of his early tenure, suggesting there will be no further monetary easing except in response to a big external shock. In a clear departure from his initial “shock and awe” tactics to jolt the nation from its deflationary mindset, he has even taken to flagging what little change lies ahead, trying predictability where surprise has failed. This new approach will be on show next week, when the BOJ is set to keep policy unchanged despite an expected downgrade in forecasts that could show Kuroda won’t hit his perpetually postponed 2% inflation target before his five-year term ends in April 2018. “The days of trying to radically heighten inflation expectations with shock action are over,” said a source familiar with the BOJ’s thinking. “No more regime change.”

Kuroda told parliament last week that while the BOJ might again stretch the timing for its inflation target, he saw no need to ease at the Oct. 31-Nov. 1 policy meeting. “There may be some modification to our forecast that inflation will hit our 2% target during fiscal 2017,” he said, the first time he has offered hints on upcoming projections. In the past, the market has learned to expect the unexpected. In 2013, when the BOJ deployed its massive asset-buying program, dubbed “quantitative and qualitative easing” (QQE), his shock therapy boosted stocks and weakened the yen. Further surprises came with an expansion of QQE in October 2014, and then the switch to negative rates early in 2016, which he had denied was an option just days before. But the law of diminishing returns bought him less bang for each buck.

Nice research, the graph shows hoe German data hide the sinking of Europe. Quite poorly reported, though.

• The Gap Between Poor And Rich Regions In Europe Is Widening (Economist)

The beautiful but rubbish-strewn streets of Catania, Sicily’s second-biggest city, are a world away from swanky Trento, in the country’s richer north. About a quarter of Sicilians are “severely materially deprived”—meaning that they cannot afford things like a car, or to heat their home sufficiently—compared with just 5% in Trento. Italy is not unique. In many places, the divide within countries appears to be getting worse. According to an analysis by The Economist, the gap between richer and poorer regions of euro-zone countries has increased since the financial crisis. Our measure of regional inequality looks at the average income per head of a country’s poorest region, expressed as a%age of the income of that country’s richest part. The weighted average for 12 countries shows that regional inequality was declining in the years leading up to the financial crisis of 2007-08, but has increased since then (see chart).

The poorest area in Slovakia, the euro zone’s most geographically unequal economy, now has an income per person of just 28% of the richest, a slight fall from before the crisis. In Calabria, Italy’s poorest region, income per person as a share of the country’s best-off part, the province of Bolzano, was 45% in 2007 but is only 40% now. Elsewhere poor regions of the euro zone have seen income falling in both relative and absolute terms. An exception is Germany: in its once-communist east, excluding Berlin, GDP per person reached 67% of that in former West Germany last year. (Most of the catch-up took place in the early 1990s, but continues more slowly.) Deindustrialisation is partly to blame. Most of the euro zone’s 19 members have fewer manufacturing jobs than in 2008.

Manufacturing employment is high in many of Europe’s poorer countries, but they have lost international competitiveness in part because of an overvalued euro. Tight public spending also plays a role. Since 2008 the number of civil servants in the euro zone has fallen by about 6%. This has often hurt needy regions most. Cuts in welfare benefits also hit harder. A paper by Luca Agnello, Giorgio Fazio and Ricardo Sousa, three economists, found that austerity led to higher regional inequality in 13 European countries between 1980 and 2008. This suggests that the problem will continue: public funds will be tight for years to come, while weak public spending on education and infrastructure will crimp future growth. Even if the euro zone starts to grow strongly again, the geographical scars will be plain to see.

China will be calling out loud for a strong leader as its economy grinds to a halt.

• Xi Jinping Becomes ‘Core’ Leader Of China (R.)

China’s Communist party has given the president, Xi Jinping, the title of “core” leader, putting him on par with previous strongmen Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping, but signalled his power would not be absolute. A lengthy communique released after a four-day meeting of senior officials in Beijing emphasised the importance of collective leadership. The system “must always be followed and should not be violated by any organisation or individual under any circumstance or for any reason”, the party said. But all members should “closely unite around the central committee with comrade Xi Jinping as the core”, said the document, released through state media. The core leader title marks a significant strengthening of Xi’s position before a key party congress next year, at which a new standing committee, the pinnacle of power in China, will be constituted.

Since assuming office almost four years ago, Xi has rapidly consolidated power, including heading a group leading economic change and appointing himself commander-in-chief of the military, though as head of the central military commission he already controlled the armed forces. While head of the party, the military and the state, Xi had not previously been given the title “core”. Deng coined the phrase “core leader”, and said he, Mao Zedong and Jiang Zemin were core leaders, meaning they had almost absolute authority and should not be questioned. Xi’s immediate predecessor, Hu Jintao, was never called the “core”. The plenum meeting paves the way for a congress, held every five years, in autumn 2017, at which Xi will further consolidate his power and which could indicate who may replace him at the 2022 congress.

Nomi’s very mild and polite.

• Waking Up in Hillary Clinton’s America (Nomi Prins)

To date, $10 trillion worth of assets sits on the books of the Big Six banks. Since 2008, these same banks have copped to more than $150 billion in fines for pre-crisis behavior that ranged on the spectrum of criminality from manipulating multiple public markets to outright fraud. Hillary Clinton has arguably taken money that would not have been so available if it weren’t for the ill-gotten gains those banks secured. In her usual measured way, albeit with some light admonishments, she has told them what they want to hear: that if they behave – something that in her dictionary of definitions involves little in the way of personalized pain or punishment – so will she.

So let’s recap Hillary’s America, past, present, and future. It’s a land lacking in meaningful structural reform of the financial system, a place where the big banks have been, and will continue to be, coddled by the government. No CEO will be jailed, no matter how large the fines his bank is saddled with or how widespread the crimes it committed. Instead, he’s likely to be invited to the inaugural ball in January. Because its practices have not been adequately controlled or curtailed, the inherent risk that Wall Street poses for Main Street will only grow as bankers continue to use our money to make their bets. (The 2010 Dodd-Frank Act was supposed to help on this score, but has yet to make the big banks any smaller.)

And here’s an obvious corollary to all this: the next bank-instigated economic catastrophe will not be dealt with until it has once again crushed the financial stability of millions of Americans. The banks have voted with their dollars on all of this in multiple ways. Hillary won’t do anything to upset that applecart. We should have no illusions about what her presidency would mean from a Wall Street vs. Main Street perspective. Certainly, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon doesn’t. He effectively endorsed Hillary before a crowd of financial industry players, saying, “I hope the next president, she reaches across the aisle.” For Wall Street, of course, that aisle is essentially illusory, since its players operate so easily and effectively on both sides of it. In Hillary’s America, Wall Street will still own Main Street.

“Reality TV Land will immediately install itself in the Oval Office if he wins. Then, anything goes.”

• Donald Trump Has Won, Even If He Loses The US Election (Malmgren)

Donald Trump has already won the US presidential election and Hillary Clinton has already lost it, even if she emerges with the title of commander-in-chief. It is already apparent that Trump will not skulk off the global stage. Nor will he have to. Consider what happens if he loses the presidential race. He will most likely launch a reality TV show that will undoubtedly attract a record number of viewers. From this ridiculously unconstrained and lucrative perch, he’ll relentlessly attack President Clinton, the Republican Party and the Democratic Party alike. In retrospect, it will be clear that his entire campaign was a trailer for the blockbuster show that follows. In this way he will continue to influence, if not dominate, public opinion.

[..] he won’t go away. Neither will the forces that swept him to the top of politics: the anger, the loss, the sense of unfairness, the inability of the traditional parties to deliver a better outcome for most Americans. Meanwhile, the expectation that a Clinton presidency could conquer these forces is also likely to be proved false. The Oval Office is a highly constrained place that limits the influence of its occupant especially in the face of broader political disarray. She can try and set the tone but the rest of the political establishment looks too dysfunctional, and largely unwilling, to be able to help her. Her presidency seems set to open with high expectations and low approval ratings. Trump, however, could move to the next phase of his career with low expectations and high TV ratings.

Both have faced threats of prosecution throughout this long and increasingly ugly campaign. But, does Trump care if the courts or the government put his tax returns or the sexual allegations against him to the test? He won’t. Will he care if his emails are leaked? No. The real “public prosecutor” for Trump is the Fourth Estate – the media. It will prosecute him just as relentlessly if he becomes commander-in-chief but probably with the same limited impact. Will it matter to Clinton if her emails, from the past or future, are displayed to the public? Will it matter if the Clinton Foundation faces further allegations of “crooked” behaviour? But, we live in the internet age. The real “public prosecutor” for Clinton is and will remain Julian Assange and Wikileaks. His sights will continue to be firmly set on her. He does not care about Trump and Trump doesn’t care about him. Once again, Trump wins.

Trump’s only real threat of looking like the loser comes if the polls are wrong and he ends up winning. Many wonder whether he really wants the job. After all, the Oval Office is the political equivalent of a straightjacket. In theory, Trump won’t be able to shoot words from the hip so freely once he is sitting in the big shiny chair with his finger on the literal and metaphorical button. But, Reality TV Land will immediately install itself in the Oval Office if he wins. Then, anything goes. In the meantime, he will “win” in his effort to redefine America’s political landscape. As president, it won’t matter to him if the House and Senate block him. He is not concerned with process. His job is to break down the traditional political establishment.

“Any report advocating war that comes from any alleged think tank ought to be accompanied by a list of the think tank’s sponsors and donors..”

• Why Is the Foreign Policy Establishment Spoiling for More War? (Kucinich)

The American people are fed up with war, but a concerted effort is being made through fearmongering, propaganda, and lies to prepare our country for a dangerous confrontation, with Russia in Syria. The demonization of Russia is a calculated plan to resurrect a raison d’être for stone-cold warriors trying to escape from the dustbin of history by evoking the specter of Russian world domination. It’s infectious. Earlier this year the BBC broadcast a fictional show that contemplated WWIII, beginning with a Russian invasion of Latvia (where 26% of the population is ethnic Russian and 34% of Latvians speak Russian at home). The imaginary WWIII scenario conjures Russia’s targeting London for a nuclear strike.

No wonder that by the summer of 2016 a poll showed two-thirds of UK citizens approved the new British PM’s launching a nuclear strike in retaliation. So much for learning the lessons detailed in the Chilcot report. As this year’s presidential election comes to a conclusion, the Washington ideologues are regurgitating the same bipartisan consensus that has kept America at war since 9/11 and made the world a decidedly more dangerous place. The DC think tanks provide cover for the political establishment, a political safety net, with a fictive analytical framework providing a moral rationale for intervention, capitol casuistry. I’m fed up with the DC policy elite who cash in on war while presenting themselves as experts, at the cost of other people’s lives, our national fortune, and the sacred honor of our country.

Any report advocating war that comes from any alleged think tank ought to be accompanied by a list of the think tank’s sponsors and donors and a statement of the lobbying connections of the report’s authors. It is our patriotic duty to expose why the DC foreign-policy establishment and its sponsors have not learned from their failures and instead are repeating them, with the acquiescence of the political class and sleepwalkers with press passes.

“As I said it has long been our analysis that Hillary Clinton will win the election because she has all the establishments on her side..”

• Assange First Interview Since Being Censored (JJ)

“Wikileaks is one of the fighting dogs that has a lot of energy and runs around fighting all the time. It is built to fight it loves nothing more than to fight. And so when my internet was cut off we had long ago made strategic contingency plans for exactly this situation. So despite bombs raining down on us from statements by high US officials, media and so on this is exactly the sort of situation we enjoy so there was not even one day pause. We just continued on publishing the next day even though I was cut off from my team.” “As I said it has long been our analysis that Hillary Clinton will win the election because she has all the establishments on her side and we can see it in terms of polling.

If someone like Donald Trump – who has a great many problems I’m sure all of you are aware of it – but if he managed to get up to the 48% or 50% level in the polling which he has just on two occasions across the different polls united, immediately those big media networks and the funders get together and smash him back down. So I don’t think there’s any chance of Donald Trump winning the election. That would probably be bad inside the United States. It would probably be good outside the United States. Even with the amazing material we have published and will continue to publish because even though we publish it and there’s a lot of people reading it on the internet directly, most of the media originations in the United States are very strongly aligned with Hillary Clinton.

Two reasons really, a lot of them are owned by big businesses which are owned by banks which like Hillary Clinton. And the other is a class reason. Most journalists and media workers are very middle class and Donald Trump represents in their minds, white trash. So to do anything that looks to be like it might be supporting Donald Trump looks like you’re supporting white trash. And to those rivals that they have within their class they are white trash. So it lowers their social status and that’s a very dangerous thing to do in an institution, to have your social status lowered, because someone might get your job or the job that you want to have within the institution. So there is a lot of conformity and fear around criticizing Hillary Clinton in any way at all and it reduces the impact of even very significant material that is being released.”

Can Iceland give the world back its lost democracy?

• Wither Democracy (Lessig)

On the eve of the Icelandic Elections… WITHER DEMOCRACY, by Professor Lawrence Lessig, speaking from the University of Iceland. Lessig explains how democracy has failed the US and other citizens of the world, and how Iceland is on the brink of implementing an entirely new and improved system, based on a PEOPLE’S CONSTITUTION. Yes, it’s a world first, but then Iceland was the first country ever to form a parliament. Lester Lawrence “Larry” Lessig III is an American academic, attorney, and political activist. He was the co-founder, with our beloved Aaron Swartz, of Creative Commons. He is the Roy L. Furman Professor of Law at Harvard Law School; and the former director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University.

Our moral bankruptcy in all its splendor.

• Calais Children Abandoned At Former ‘Jungle’ Camp Site (EuO)

Scores of children have been left out in the cold, after French authorities flattened the make-shift migrants camp in Calais, in northern France, earlier this week. Journalists report that around a hundred children were sleeping rough on the remains of the camp, among burned-out shacks and riot police. The Guardian spoke to children who had been lured off the camp site, with promises of being transferred to reception centres where their asylum claims would be assessed. Instead, riot police cornered the group while bulldozers razed the camp. Media and NGO reports of the children’s treatment triggered protests of British home secretary Amber Rudd, who told her French counterpart, Bernard Cazeneuve, on Thursday, that children remaining in Calais had to be properly protected.

Cazeneuve later issued a statement saying he was surprised by Rudd’s declaration. He said France had given shelter to 1,451 minors since 17 October recalling that Britain had a legal duty to take those children that have a link to the UK, for instance through family. 274 children have been allowed to travel to the UK in the last two weeks. The decision to clear the camp came from French president Francois Hollande, calling it a ”humanitarian emergency” during a visit in September. French authorities started evacuating the camp, also known as the Jungle, on Monday (24 October) and said they had relocated almost all of the 6,000 people estimated to have been living there to other parts of France. [..] British baroness Shas Sheehan, who has been working as a volunteer teacher in the camp prior to its dismantlement, accused France and the UK of human rights violations, pointing to official assurances by both sides that the site wouldn’t be demolished before all the children were safeguarded.

Debt Rattle October 27 2016

Oct 272016

October 27, 2016 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 9:46 am Finance Tagged with: algorithms, deflation, globalization, Hillary, landfill, layoffs, mass extinction, nuclear, Putin 1 Response »

Marion Post Wolcott. Unemployed coal miner’s mother in law and child. Marine, West Virginia 1938

• With 70% Of Wildlife Gone, We Face Mass Extinction On Scale Of Dinosaurs (YP)

• Mass Consumption Is Causing Mass Extinction. Can We Stop Ourselves? (TP)

• Our Landfill Economy (CH Smith)

• Mike Maloney: DEFLATION FIRST! (Max Keiser)

• Globalization Goes Into Reverse (BBG)

• The Next 10 Years Will Be Ugly for Your 401(k) (BBG)

• Deutsche Bank Probes “Misstated” Derivative Valuations, Finds “Divergences” (ZH)

• Goldman Sachs Does Mass Layoffs Piece by Piece (BBG)

• US Election: Nothing to Lose (Steen Jakobsen)

• Hacked Memo Offers Angry Glimpse Into Conflicted ‘Bill Clinton Inc.’ (Pol.)

• Clinton Adviser Proposes Attacking Iran to Aid the Saudis in Yemen (NYMag)

• Putin Tried to Warn Us About Syria Three Years Ago (TAM)

• UK Deploys Hundreds Of Troops And Aircraft To Eastern Europe (G.)

• Merkel Accuses Facebook, Google Of “Distorting Perception” (ZH)

• Nuclear Power Is Over In The US Without More Government Subsidies (BBG)

To be correct, we don’t so much face it as live it.

• 70% Of Wildlife Gone: World Faces Mass Extinction On Scale Of Dinosaurs (YP)

Global wildlife populations will have fallen by more than two thirds on 1970 levels by the end of the decade, conservationists warn today. An assessment of more than 3,700 species of mammals, birds, fish, amphibians and reptiles reveals a fall of 58% between 1970 and 2012, with no sign of a slowdown in the annual two per cent reduction in numbers. By 2020, populations of vertebrate species could have fallen by 67pc over half a century, unless action is taken to reverse the damaging impacts of human activity, the Living Planet report from WWF and the Zoological Society of London said. The figures prompted experts to warn that nature was facing a global “mass extinction” for the first time since the demise of the dinosaurs.

African elephants in Tanzania have seen numbers decimated by persistent poaching, while maned wolves in Brazil are threatened by grasslands being turned into farmland. Leatherback turtles in the Atlantic have seen populations reduced by up to 95pc, and European eels are also in decline. Wildlife faces further threats from over-exploitation, climate change and pollution, the report warns. Among the species most at risk are tigers, with only 3,900 left in the wild, and Amur leopards, whose numbers have fallen to just 70 in the face of hunting and the destruction of their habitat. Giant pandas have a population of just 1,864 in the wild in China, and although numbers are increasing, the species is still threatened by climate change and impacts of human activity.

Humans themselves are also victims of the deterioration of nature, the report warns, since they depend on breathable air, water and nutritious food. [..] Mike Barrett, director of science and policy at WWF-UK, said: “For the first time since the demise of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, we face a global mass extinction of wildlife. “We ignore the decline of other species at our peril, for they are the barometer that reveals our impact on the world that sustains us. “Humanity’s misuse of natural resources is threatening habitats, pushing irreplaceable species to the brink and threatening the stability of our climate.”

This elephant is thought to have died after eating crops sprayed with pesticides in Assam, India REUTERS

No we can’t. But we will be stopped.

• Mass Consumption Is Causing Mass Extinction. Can We Stop Ourselves? (TP)

Populations of wild animals have plummeted 58% in the past four decades as humans have pushed them into ever-smaller habitats or killed them for food and financial gain, according to a new report from a leading environmental group. World Wildlife Fund researchers said the losses could be reversed over the 21st century by systematically factoring the value of nature into how we produce and consume goods and services, as well as adopting farming methods that work with ecosystems rather than against or in spite of them. WWF compiled data on more than 14,000 populations of 3,706 vertebrate species for the latest edition of its biennial Living Planet Report and found that global populations of amphibians, birds, fishes, mammals, and reptiles sank by an average of 58% between 1970 and 2012.

These populations could drop another 9% by 2020 based on current trends, the report stated. Freshwater wildlife populations dropped a dramatic 81%—meaning that for every 10 pond frogs that existed during Richard Nixon’s first term in the White House, there were fewer than two at the beginning of Barack Obama’s second. Terrestrial and marine species populations dropped by 38% and 36%, respectively, over the same period. The leading driver of wildlife population losses has been food production—overfishing and natural habitats converted to crop and grazing land—followed by pollution, invasive species, and climate change.

All five threats are symptoms of overconsumption of natural resources, the report stated, which has far outstripped the capacity of ecosystems to restore the fertile soil and clean water that support wildlife as well as human health and welfare. “Humanity currently needs the regenerative capacity of 1.6 Earths to provide the goods and services we use each year,” the report noted, and the short-term goals of most economic systems offer no incentive to change.

It had been a while since I last saw that term.

• Our Landfill Economy (CH Smith)

Correspondent Bart D. (Australia) captured the entire global economy in three words: The Landfill Economy. Stuff is manufactured, energy is consumed shipping it somewhere, consumers buy it and shortly thereafter it ends up as garbage in the landfill. This is of course the definition of “economic growth”: waste, inefficiency, environmental destruction–none of these matter. Only two things matter: maximize “growth” by any means necessary, and maximize profits by any means necessary. The Landfill Economy now encompasses the entire planet. The swirling gyre of plastic trash the size of Texas between Hawaii and California: it’s just one modest example of the planetary trash dump that “growth” and profit generate as byproducts/blowback.

The planet’s oceans are one giant trash dump. Everything from plastic water bottles to abandoned fishing nets to radiation to containers that fell off ships is floating around even the most distant corners of the seas. Seabirds nesting in remote islands die of starvation as their guts fill with plastic bits of “permanent growth.” Globalization has turned the planet’s land masses and rivers into trash dumps. Want to make a quick profit along a tropical sea coast? Dig some big holes near the coast, dump in baby prawns, food and chemicals to suppress algae blooms and diseases and then harvest the prawns to ship to the insatiable markets of the developed world. Once the prawn farms are poisoned wastelands, move on and despoil another coastline elsewhere.

Globalization has greased the slippery slope from factory to landfill by enabling the global distribution of defective parts. Whether they are pirated, designed to fail or just the result of slipshod quality control, the flood of defective parts guarantee that the entire assembly they are installed in–stoves, vacuum cleaners, transmissions, electronics, you name it–will soon fail and be shipped directly to the landfill, as repairing stuff is far costlier than buying a new replacement.

Mike Maloney is one of the very few people who, like the Automatic Earth, have emphasized Deflation and The Velocity of Money as driving forces ever since we both predicted the 2008 fiasco. It’s funny, because Mike is all gold and stuff, and we have been saying all the time that there are more important things, like growing your own food etc etc. But that’s just a matter of who you’re addressing, and our audience unlike Mike’s isn’t necessarily investors, but ‘normal’ people.

• Mike Maloney: DEFLATION FIRST! (Max Keiser)

Mike Maloney appears on Keiser Report to discuss how velocity of currency determines what happens next in the cycle. You’ll learn how central banks are manufacturing a crisis of epic proportions.

You heard it here first.

• Globalization Goes Into Reverse (BBG)

There’s a backlash against globalization underway in many Western countries. Although Americans still say positive things about international trade and immigration, political candidates like Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders have gotten a lot of support for opposing both to a degree that would have been unthinkable a decade ago. Meanwhile, trade deals like the relatively innocuous Trans-Pacific Partnership are suddenly in danger. Britain’s divorce from the European Union is also commonly interpreted as a rejection of globalization. But there’s a likelihood that today’s anti-globalization warriors are fighting yesterday’s war. By many measures, globalization has been in full retreat since the crisis of 2008. First, there’s trade. For many decades up until 2008, global trade volumes had been increasing at a healthy clip. But the crisis and recession stopped trade growth in its tracks, and it hasn’t recovered; 2008 was the all-time peak of world trade as a % of total output:

And the next 10 after that.

• The Next 10 Years Will Be Ugly for Your 401(k) (BBG)

It doesn’t seem like much to ask for—a 5% return. But the odds of making even that on traditional investments in the next 10 years are slim, according to a new report from investment advisory firm Research Affiliates. The company looked at the default settings of 11 retirement calculators, robo-advisers, and surveys of institutional investors. Their average annualized long-term expected return? 6.2%. After 1.6% was shaved off to allow for a decade of inflation1, the number dropped to 4.6%, which was rounded up. Voilà. So on average we all expect a 5%; the report tells us we should start getting used to disappointment. To show how a mainstream stock and bond portfolio would do under Research Affiliates’ 10-year model, the report looks at the typical balanced portfolio of 60% stocks and 40% bonds.

An example would be the $29.6 billion Vanguard Balanced Index Fund (VBINX). For the decade ended Sept. 30, VBINX had an average annual performance of 6.6%, and that’s before inflation. Over the next decade, according to the report, “the ubiquitous 60/40 U.S. portfolio has a 0% probability of achieving a 5% or greater annualized real return.” One message that John West, head of client strategies at Research Affiliates and a co-author of the report, hopes people will take away is that the high returns of the past came with a price: lower returns in the future. “If the retirement calculators say we’ll make 6% or 7%, and people saved based on that but only make 3%, they’re going to have a massive shortfall,” he said. “They’ll have to work longer or retire with a substantially different standard of living than they thought they would have.”

Deutsche senses legal threats, ‘volunteers’ to cooperate.

• Deutsche Bank Probes “Misstated” Derivative Valuations, Finds “Divergences” (ZH)

Perhaps the single biggest reason why Deutsche Bank’s stock has been drastically underperforming most of Europe’s banks, in addition to its skyhigh leverage and lack of capital buffer, is the market’s concern about what is hidden on its books, namely whether the bank’s billions in loans and its trillions in derivatives have been marked correctly. Which is why a just released report from Bloomberg that Deutsche Bank is reviewing whether it “misstated” the value of derivatives in its interest-rate trading business, will hardly spark optimism in the bank’s critical asset marking practices; the good news is that according to the report the biggest German lender is sharing its findings with U.S. authorities, according to people with knowledge of the situation.

Zero-coupon inflation swaps are derivatives that help customers bet on, or hedge against, inflation. Two parties agree to exchange a payment in the future whose size is determined by how much an inflation index rose or fell. The issue, however, is not the underlying security, but the total notional involved, which based on the DB’s latest public filings, could be in the hundreds of billions (or more), and how substantial the impact on DB’s P&L any variation from true market values will be. Specifically, DB is looking at valuations on a type of derivative known as zero-coupon inflation swaps. The reason for the probe is that, as has been a recurring case with many of its peers of the last few years, the bank found valuations that “diverged from internal models” at which point it began questioning traders.

The push to finally open its books comes after CEO John Cryan’s vow in February to try to resolve his institution’s legal challenges swiftly. As Bloomberg sarcastically adds, “he is still working on it.” The bank has been facing regulatory and enforcement pressure around the world, including a money-laundering investigation tied to its Russia operations, inquiries into mortgage-bond trading before and after the financial crisis and charges that the bank colluded to help falsify the accounts of Italy’s Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena. More importantly perhaps is the reason why DB has decided to share its internal probe with the US, whose Justice Department asked in September for a $14 billion settlement, an amount the bank said it wouldn’t pay.

The figure was big enough to unleash a selling frenzy in the stock, sending it to all time lows, leading to repeating rumored discussions with outside sources, most recently of Saudi and Chinese origina, about raising capital. The bank last year hired Steven F. Reich as its general counsel for the Americas to help navigate its legal probes. Reich is a former official at the Justice Department and attorney for former President Bill Clinton. Perhaps it is time for Deutsche to make some donations to the Clinton Foundation?

Spare a thought for a Goldman banker.

• Goldman Sachs Does Mass Layoffs Piece by Piece (BBG)

The first “plant layoff” notice came in February: 43 people would lose their jobs. The second arrived six weeks later, increasing the cuts to 109 workers. Then a third, in April, for 146 more. And a fourth, in June: 98. Three more notices followed, including 20 dismissals announced last week. The “plant” in question – Goldman Sachs. Like all big companies in New York State, the firm is required to file a “WARN notice” with state authorities when it plans to shed large numbers of employees as part of a plant closing, or “mass layoffs” involving 250 or more. Employers also must inform the state of smaller reductions under certain circumstances, and Goldman Sachs cited a “plant layoff” in each case. Last week’s notice brings this year’s job-cut tally to 443.

With the run of notices, seven since the start of the year, the bank has signaled its intention to dismiss hundreds of employees in New York without placing a single, headline-grabbing number on the overall reduction, already its largest since 2008. The company’s approach differs from competitors, including Morgan Stanley, who have shown a preference for larger, one-time cuts. “When there’s a big number, people right away get that something is happening at that firm – it’s a negative,” said Jeanne Branthover, a partner at New York-based executive-search firm DHR International. “This is more, ‘We’re having layoffs and we don’t want to explain it.’ It’s more under the radar screen.”

It also reflects the firm’s philosophy. The company doesn’t see a reason to make announcements about job cuts since it’s part of the normal course of business and something that needs to be done if the environment calls for it, CFO Harvey Schwartz said last year. “You just have to run the business, and if the revenue environment is such that you’re in a period of decline, you just need to take those actions,” Schwartz said in November at a conference. “So, you probably won’t hear us make lots of announcements.”

“..the US presidential campaign comes up short in many categories except one: failure is almost guaranteed.”

• US Election: Nothing to Lose (Steen Jakobsen)

My present macro speech is titled “Ugly: Don’t fight with ‘ugly’ people as they have nothing to lose”. To me, this is the essence of the US presidential campaign. The ugly truth surrounding this ballot lies in the bigger picture, as whomever becomes president will go down in history as the “non-president” – the president who made us need, see, and demand something else. For all of the colourful headlines, and the almost McCarthy-esque pursuit of Trump by mainstream media, this is not going to be about “Trump, the person” or his more or less moronic views; Trump merely represents the catalyst for change. He is the anti-establishment candidate, yes, but not our vision for the future. Ultimately, Trump may still win despite (rather than because of) being… Trump.

That does not excuse mainstream media for not going after Clinton. If elected, she will be the least-liked president in US history, and I doubt any of her policies will do anything good for America. More Barack Obama-type policy is not what the world needs. Obama may have created more jobs, but the average income for American has actually fallen during his presidency. What does this mean? It means he has presided over an economy that has created more jobs but less valuable ones, and growth during his tenure has been lower than during any other president, with the largest build-up in debt. I am pretty sure that even this economist could create jobs with the amount of money Obama has spent!

Mind you I am 100% agnostic, politically-speaking. In fact, I don’t even think this election really matters! No, this is not a new trend; no, Clinton is not the answer… but what this is a generational repositioning and renegotiation of the social contract. The last time that this happened was in the 1960s, when the children of World War II went for peace, love, and a lot of drugs. Now we have the Berlin Wall generation coming of age, and this time the focus is anti-globalisation and anti establishment sentiment… and yes, again a lot of drugs. The real election issue in America, but also in Europe. is how to deal with a broken social contract.

Society has been pushed so far away from its natural equilibrium in terms of markets, social homogeneity, equality, and productivity that the move back to “normal” will bear both a political price and a penalty in terms of growth and outlook. Put differently, when we look throughout history we know that part of the process of evaluation is to smell, feel, taste, and experience what we don’t need in order to move towards what we do – a better version of society, but mainly a better one of ourselves. The next election cycle is about protest; it will be followed by crisis and then new beginnings.

Boy what a mess. And all they can think of is blaming the Russians. And the media just copy that, no questions asked.

• Hacked Memo Offers Angry Glimpse Into Conflicted ‘Bill Clinton Inc.’ (Pol.)

As a longtime Bill Clinton adviser came under fire several years ago for alleged conflicts of interest involving a private consulting firm and the Clinton Foundation, he mounted an audacious defense: Bill Clinton’s doing it, too. The unusual and brash rejoinder from veteran Clinton aide and Teneo Consulting co-founder Doug Band is scattered across the thousands of hacked emails published by WikiLeaks, but a memo released Wednesday provides the most detailed look to date at the intertwined worlds of nonprofit, for-profit, official and political activities involving Clinton and many of his top aides.

The memo at one point refers bluntly to the money-making part of Clinton’s life as “Bill Clinton Inc.” and notes that in at least one case a company – global education firm Laureate International Universities – began paying Clinton personally after first being a donor to the Clinton Foundation. The 12-page document, prepared in November 2011 by Band with input from Clinton adviser John Podesta, came as Chelsea Clinton was pressing for changes to the foundation’s governance and complaining that Band, Teneo co-founder Declan Kelly and others were profiting from their ties to her father and the foundation. In the memo, addressed to outside lawyers conducting a review of the foundation’s governance, Band insists that the relationship actually benefited the foundation financially, by bringing in new donors.

[..] A spokesman for the Clinton Foundation declined to comment on the memo or confirm the authenticity of the document, which was apparently stolen in a massive hack of Podesta’s Gmail account. Hillary Clinton’s campaign has taken a similar tack, declining to comment on the emails, while pointing to evidence that their release is part of a Russian government effort aimed at interfering in the presidential election.

Morell’s perspective is in line with that of a new report on Middle East strategy released by the Center for American Progress and the thinking of Clinton’s top national-security aide Jake Sullivan, who recently declared, “We need to be raising the costs to Iran for its destabilizing behavior and we need to be raising the confidence of our Sunni partners.” On Tuesday, Morell put this sentiment in terms both more concise and grandiose: “We’re back and we’re going to lead again.”

• Clinton Adviser Proposes Attacking Iran to Aid the Saudis in Yemen (NYMag)

Michael Morell is a former acting director of the CIA and a national security adviser to Hillary Clinton — one who is widely expected to occupy a senior post in her administration. He is also an opponent of the Iran nuclear agreement, a defender of waterboarding, and an advocate for making Russia “pay a price” in Syria by covertly killing Putin’s soldiers. On Tuesday, Morell added another title to that résumé: proponent of going to war with Iran, for the sake of securing Saudi Arabia’s influence in Yemen. “Ships leave Iran on a regular basis carrying arms to the Houthis in Yemen,” Morell said, in remarks to the Center for American Progress, the liberal think tank founded by Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta. “I would have no problem from a policy perspective of having the U.S. Navy boarding their ships, and if there are weapons on them, to turn those ships around.”

Morell did note, per Bloomberg’s Eli Lake, that this policy “raised questions of international maritime law.” Which is a bit like saying, “Breaking into someone’s home, putting a gun in their face, and demanding they hand over all their weapons raises questions about armed-robbery law.” Understatement aside, Morell’s stipulation suggests that he might be dissuaded from initiating a naval war with Iran if the legal issues prove too pesky. But the fact that a person who has Clinton’s ear on national security thinks this proposal makes sense from a “policy perspective” is alarming. Forcibly boarding another nation’s naval or civilian vessels (outside one’s own territorial waters) and confiscating their weapons can reasonably be construed as an act of war, a point that would be unmistakable if the roles here were reversed.

How many Americans (whose paychecks aren’t directly or indirectly subsidized by Gulf State monarchies) think keeping Yemen within Saudi Arabia’s sphere of influence is a cause worth entering another Middle Eastern war over? How many would think so if they knew that the Saudis had recently bombed a Yemeni funeral hall, killing 140 people and leading the Obama administration to reconsider its support for the Saudi intervention? Or that some observers of the conflict contend that the Saudis are exaggerating Iran’s role, in order to justify the kingdom’s own expansionist ambitions?

And the west pretend they don’t know this. So we can create chaos and used it to take over resources.

• Putin Tried to Warn Us About Syria Three Years Ago (TAM)

As Russia and the United States approach arguably the most dangerous crossroads in history — and as Western media continues to crucify Russia for its actions within Syria — a closer look at the rationale Putin used for intervening in the Syrian war paints a sane explanation of how we ended up at this juncture of a global conflict. Unsurprisingly, the explanation comes from the Russian president himself and was actually offered over 3 years ago. As expected, the Western corporate media and the Obama administration chose to ignore Vladimir Putin’s explanation for Russia’s stance on Syria and continued a number of policies that have completely exacerbated the conflict.

In a live interview with RT in June 2013, Putin was asked for an explanation regarding Russia’s support for Bashar al-Assad in Syria, even though this support has made some people very angry at Russia. Putin’s response was that Russia does not support the Assad government or Assad himself, but before defining Russia’s official position, he explained what Russia does not want to do within Syria or across the Middle East: “We do not want to interfere into the internal schism of Islam, between Shias and Sunnis. These are internal issues of the Islamic world. We have very good relations with much of the Arabic world, Iran for example, and others.” However, according to Putin, what worries Russia can be identified by having a look “at what is going on in the Middle East in general.”

“Egypt is not calm. Iraq is not calm – and it is not assured in its continued existence as one state. Yemen is not calm; Tunisia is not calm. Libya is witnessing inter-ethnic, inter-tribal conflict. So the entire region has been engulfed, at a minimum, into a state of conflict and undecidedness. And now Syria, down the same path.” In Putin’s eyes, these events are no accident. As he puts it, these events happened for a reason: “Some people, from the outside, think that if they can ‘comb’ the region to how they see fit – some of them call this ‘democracy’ – then the region will come into calmness and order. That’s not how it is. Without taking into account the history, the traditions, religious particularities, you must not do anything in the Middle East, especially as an outsider.”

Don’t you guys have enough trouble at home?

• UK Deploys Hundreds Of Troops And Aircraft To Eastern Europe (G.)

The UK is deploying hundreds of troops, as well as aircraft and armour to eastern Europe as part of the biggest build-up of Nato forces in the region since the cold war. The deployment is taking place during growing tensions over a series of high-profile Russian military manoeuvres. RAF Typhoon aircraft from RAF Coningsby will be sent to Romania for up to four months, while 800 personnel will be sent with armoured support to Estonia, 150 more than previously planned, the Ministry of Defence (MoD) has said. France and Denmark will also commit more troops, the British government said. The announcement was made soon after a Russian fleet, believed to be bound to take part in the fighting in Syria, passed close to the British Isles.

On Wednesday, Russia withdrew a request to refuel its boats in Spanish territory, as Nato put pressure on Madrid to deny permission. Tensions between Nato members and Russia have been heightened since Moscow annexed Crimea in 2014 and Ukraine descended into civil war as a result. The deployment of British troops to Estonia forms part of a wider Nato commitment to station four new battalions, totalling around 4,000 personnel, on the alliance’s eastern flank. David Cameron confirmed at Nato’s summit in Warsaw in July that the UK was to send 650 troops to Estonia. As well as announcing the extra 150, the MoD on Wednesday gave further details of the deployment, including the Typhoons, a detachment of drones and Challenger tanks.

“The algorithms must be made public, so that one can inform oneself as an interested citizen on questions like: what influences my behavior on the internet and that of others?”

• Merkel Accuses Facebook, Google Of “Distorting Perception” (ZH)

While Facebook and Google have been repeatedly accused of media bias and manipulating public opinion, especially during the US presidential campaign, an unexpected attack on the two media giants came today not from the US but from Germany, when Chancellor Angela Merkel launched a full-on attack at the two companies, accusing them of “narrowing perspective,” and demanding they disclose their privately-developed algorithms. Merkel previously blamed social media for anti-immigrant sentiment and the rise of the far right. “The algorithms must be made public, so that one can inform oneself as an interested citizen on questions like: what influences my behavior on the internet and that of others?” said Merkel during a media conference in Berlin on Tuesday cited by RT.

What she said next echoed similar complaints lobbed at the media giants by those considered less than mainstream: “These algorithms, when they are not transparent, can lead to a distortion of our perception, they narrow our breadth of information.” In a tech-driven world, Google uses an algorithm to decide which search results are first shown to a user (and which are not, for example when one searches about Hillary’s health), while Facebook arranges the order of the news feed, and decides to include certain posts from a user’s liked pages and friends, at the expense of others. Both sites also promote links to news articles, often based on a user’s own media interests. However, it is still a human’s job to write and calibrate these algorithms which are at the core of the intellectual property of any social media or search website, and comprise some of the most highly-protected trade secrets in the world, potentially worth billions.

No internet giant has ever revealed its inner workings. Merkel did not specifically name Facebook, Google or Twitter, but implied that the large platforms are creating “bubbles” of self-reinforcing views, and squeezing out smaller news providers. One could also call it propaganda. “The big internet platforms, via their algorithms, have become an eye of a needle which diverse media must pass through to reach users,” warned Merkel. “This is a development that we need to pay careful attention to.” In their defense, Google and Facebooks have retorted that the so-called social media bubble is largely a “myth”, and that online users have a wider access to differing views than under a pre-internet model, where most news would be acquired from just a handful of newspapers and one or two TV channels.

It’s decomissioning that will be teh most expensive. Hey, US, what’s going on at Yucca mountain?

• Nuclear Power Is Over In The US Without More Government Subsidies (BBG)

Nuclear power will come to an end in the U.S. if the industry doesn’t get more government support, according to Carlyle Group, one of the world’s largest investment firms. The nation’s nuclear reactors need more subsidies to keep running, such as a federal carbon tax that’ll reward them for their zero-emissions power, Bob Mancini, co-head of Carlyle Group’s power unit, said at a conference in New York. Carlyle, which has $176 billion in assets under management across funds, invests in natural gas- and coal-fired power plants and renewable energy projects. Its outlook comes as nuclear power generators including Exelon and Entergy make plans to shut reactors across the country.

Low power prices, fueled by an abundance of natural gas from shale drilling and weakening demand, have squeezed their profits just as their operating costs rise amid mounting regulation. “We will see the end of the nuclear industry in the next coming decades” without legislation, incentives or other support to keep reactors open or encourage new builds, Mancini said at S&P Global Platts’s Financing U.S. Power Conference on Tuesday.

Debt Rattle September 30 2016

Sep 302016

September 30, 2016 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 9:35 am Finance Tagged with: bailout, bank run, Commerzbank, deflation, derivatives, Deutsche, Erdogan, Fed, ING, Merkel, Trump Comments Off

NPC Auto races, Rockville Fair, Montgomery County, Maryland 1923

• Deutsche Bank Shares Fall Below €10 First Time Ever; Commerzbank Down 6% (CNBC)

• Gundlach: The Market Will Keep Pushing Deutsche Lower Till It’s Bailed Out (ZH)

• Deutsche Bank Hedge Fund Clients Reduce Derivatives Exposure (BBG)

• Fines, Withdrawals, Job Cuts. It Was an Ugly Day for Global Banks (BBG)

• U.S. Stocks Retreat as Deutsche Bank Woes Hit Financial Shares (BBG)

• Germany Under Pressure To Show It’s Ready To Rescue Deutsche Bank (CNBC)

• Deutsche Bank Exposes Europe’s Capital Shortfall (BBG)

• Commerzbank To Axe Nearly 10,000 Jobs (R.)

• ING, Largest Dutch Lender, To Announce Thousands Of Job Cuts (BBG)

• China Factories Limp Along, Japan Inflation Goes Backwards (R.)

• ‘This Is Just The Start’: China’s Passion For Foreign Property (G.)

• More Wealth, More Jobs, Just Not for Everyone (NYT)

• Trump Isn’t All Wrong About The Fed (WSJ)

• Society Goes Through Painful, Cathartic Change – Dave Collum (CR)

• Iceland’s Pirates Head For Power On Wave Of Public Anger (R.)

• Erdogan Disputes 1923 Treaty Of Lausanne, Athens Responds (Kath.)

How can Merkel NOT bail out/bail in Deutsche over the weekend?

• Deutsche Bank Shares Fall Below €10 First Time Ever; Commerzbank Down 6% (CNBC)

Shares of Deutsche Bank fell 7% at the start of the European trading session Friday, amid capital concerns following a proposed settlement by the U.S. Department of Justice and a report that some hedge funds were reducing their exposure to the embattled bank. The German lender’s stock has been on wild ride in recent weeks and dipped below 10 euros a share on Friday morning, a new record low for its European-listed shares. By 9.30 a.m. London time the stock had pared some losses to trade around 5.7% lower. The German DAX was down 1.7% and the banking sector as a whole in Europe was down 3%.

Rival German lender Commerzbank saw its shares fall 6.5% after announcing job cuts on Thursday and a plan to cut its dividend. Other European lenders like Unicredit, Barclays and Credit Agricole also saw hefty losses as the session progressed. The cost of insuring Deutsche Bank’s debt against default jumped by 21 basis points on Friday, according to data from Markit, and trading in Deutsche Bank’s so-called “CoCo” bonds – widely-watched contingent convertible bonds – set a new record low, according to Dow Jones. These bonds are converted into equity once a specified event has occurred (if the bank were to undergo a precautionary recapitalization, for instance).

Vigilantes wake up.

• Gundlach: The Market Will Keep Pushing Deutsche Lower Till It’s Bailed Out (ZH)

With stunned investors reliving memories of the 2008 crisis as Deutsche Bank, a bank that is half the size of its host, Germany, seemingly on the precipice, and with Angela Merkel vowing as recently as this weekend not to bailout the bank, the market felt paralyzed: should it BTFD as it always has every time in the past 7 years, or should it wait for more clarity from the bailouters-in-chief before allocating capital to another riskless transaction, which may well be the next Lehman brothers. Not helping matters was Jeffrey Gundlach, who as part of his weekly chat with Reuters’ Jennifer Ablan said that should tread lightly carefully when trading Deutsche Bank shares because a government bailout is not out of the question. The problem is how does one get to it. “I would just stay away.

It’s un-analyzable,” Gundlach said about Deutsche Bank shares and debt. “It’s too binary.” Gundlach said investors who are betting against shares in Deutsche Bank might find it futile. Maybe, but not if they cover their shorts before the max pain point, something which the market – where equity/CDS pair trades now allow a “go for default” strategy – will actively seek out. “The market is going to push down Deutsche Bank until there is some recognition of support. They will get assistance, if need be.” What happens then? “One day, Deutsche Bank shares will go up 40%. And it will be the day the government bails them out. That jump will happen in a minute,” Gundlach said. “It is about an event which is completely out of your control.”

Trigger?

• Deutsche Bank Hedge Fund Clients Reduce Derivatives Exposure (BBG)

Amid mounting concern about Deutsche Bank’s ability to withstand pending legal penalties, about 10 hedge funds that do business with the German lender have moved to reduce their financial exposure. The shares slumped. The funds, a small subset of the more than 800 clients in the bank’s hedge fund business, have moved part of their listed derivatives holdings to other firms this week, according to an internal bank document seen by Bloomberg News. Among them are Izzy Englander’s $34 billion Millennium Partners, Chris Rokos’s $4 billion Rokos Capital Management, and the $14 billion Capula Investment Management, said a person familiar with the situation who declined to be identified talking about confidential client matters.

Deutsche Bank’s New York-listed shares fell 6.7% to a record low of $11.48 on Thursday. “In any given week, we experience ebbs and inflows,” said Barry Bausano, the bank’s chairman of hedge funds. “And this week is no different; it goes on all the time.” He declined to comment on net flows. While the vast majority of Deutsche Bank’s more than 200 derivatives-clearing clients have made no changes, the hedge funds’ move highlights concern among some counterparties about doing business with Europe’s largest investment bank. Deutsche Bank’s stock and debt have been under pressure after the U.S. Justice Department this month requested $14 billion to settle an investigation into residential mortgage-backed securities. The bank has said it expects to negotiate that lower, as other Wall Street banks have.

“The 38-company Bloomberg Europe Banks and Financial Services Index has tumbled 24% this year..”

• Fines, Withdrawals, Job Cuts. It Was an Ugly Day for Global Banks (BBG)

Even before the opening bell in New York, Thursday looked like a grim day for some of the giants of global banking. But few expected the barrage of bad news that soon hit on both sides of the Atlantic – a rat-a-tat-tat of job cuts, scandal and financial worry that sent bank shares tumbling and left many investors wondering just where or when the pain would end. It began in Germany, where long-struggling Commerzbank unveiled yet another plan to regain its footing, this time by cutting one in five of its employees. In Washington, came still more blistering attacks on John Stumpf, whose grip atop embattled Wells Fargo, the largest U.S. mortgage lender, remains tenuous amid the uproar over a scandal involving unauthorized accounts.

And then, back in Germany, came the bombshell: revelations that some hedge funds were moving to reduce their financial exposure to Deutsche Bank, now the biggest worry in global finance. Before Stumpf left the U.S. House chambers after more than four hours of grilling, news broke his bank would be hit with more penalties after improperly repossessing cars owned by U.S. soldiers. “While each has unique challenges, the overwhelming thing that has happened to the banks is they’re forgetting their purpose, while complexity is increasing opportunity for errors,” said Jon Lukomnik at the Investor Responsibility Research Center Institute in New York.

Eight years after the financial crisis, the global banking industry is groping for a way forward. Global regulators have sought to make banks look more like boring utilities, but that road has proven steep. Emboldened by an international populist groundswell, they continue to dole out fines and penalties, and firms are scrambling for ways to make money as trading volumes decline and capital requirements become more stringent. The 38-company Bloomberg Europe Banks and Financial Services Index has tumbled 24% this year, while the KBW Bank Index of 24 U.S. lenders has slid 4.6%, led by Wells Fargo’s 18% decline.

Brewing.

• U.S. Stocks Retreat as Deutsche Bank Woes Hit Financial Shares (BBG)

U.S. stocks fell as banks retreated amid growing concern that Deutsche Bank’s woes will spread to the global financial sector. Health-care shares sank on speculation tighter regulations will crimp profits. Financial shares erased gains and tumbled 1.5% after a Bloomberg News report that signaled growing concern among some Deutsche Bank clients roiled markets. A number of funds that clear derivatives trades with Deutsche withdrew some excess cash and positions held at the lender, according to an internal bank document seen by Bloomberg. Johnson & Johnson and Pfizer fell more than 1.7%, pacing declines among drug companies. The S&P 500 Index slid 0.9% to 2,151.13 at 4 p.m. in New York, after falling as low as 2,145, the level that marked the bottom of a selloff on Monday.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average declined 195.79 points, or 1.1%, to 18,143.45, and the Nasdaq Composite Index lost 0.9%. About 7.7 billion shares traded hands on U.S. exchanges, 17% more than the three-month average. “There’s some problems in the financial industry now,” Brian Frank at Frank Capital said. “There’s no fear and no volatility in the stock market so something like Deutsche Bank could make people say, maybe we shouldn’t be trading at such high valuations. It doesn’t make it easier for U.S. banks, especially with what’s going on with Wells Fargo.” The S&P 500 trades at 18.4 times forecast earnings, the highest since 2002. The main U.S. equity benchmark slipped below its average price during the past 50 days on Thursday, while erasing its climb for the month. Stocks fluctuated earlier amid a gain in energy shares sparked by the first output-reduction decision by OPEC in eight years.

Make or break for Merkel’s career?!

• Germany Under Pressure To Show It’s Ready To Rescue Deutsche Bank (CNBC)

German officials could be about to find themselves in an uncomfortable position: Being called on to show they’re ready to rescue a bank in a part of the world where such operations are considered taboo. Deutsche Bank came under intensified market fire Thursday, the latest salvo being a Bloomberg report that a small number of hedge funds are trimming their sails at the German bank. [..] Shares tumbled more than 7% in mid-afternoon trading. The plunge took the broader market down as well. Consequently, market talk intensified that it’s becoming time for the German government step in and assure investors that it will be at the ready to stabilize both Deutsche and the broader system — much along the lines of what U.S. officials had to do during the 2008 financial crisis.

“They’re going to probably have to say that they would be willing to put funds into the bank,” said banking analyst Christopher Whalen at Kroll Bond Rating. “It’s exactly like what (former Treasury Secretary Henry) Paulson did with Citi … It’s a very analogous situation. Hopefully, the German government will take a page from that particular book and look at how the U.S. responded.” In a statement, Deutsche Bank pointed out that it is financially stable: “Our trading clients are amongst the world’s most sophisticated investors. We are confident that the vast majority of them have a full understanding of our stable financial position, the current macro-economic environment, the litigation process in the U.S. and the progress we are making with our strategy”

As Citigroup teetered in late-2008 and early-2009, Paulson’s Treasury stepped in with two cash injections to keep the financial contagion from spreading after Lehman Brothers failed on Sept. 15, 2008. The highly unpopular bailouts kept Citi afloat as fear spread about further implosions in the financial system. However, the European corporate culture is different, particularly when it comes to banking. Bailouts are considered anathema, and German officials in recent days have signaled an unwillingness to step in. “The Germans have to stop talking about this publicly unless they say, ‘Yep, we got ’em, there is no issue here,'” Whalen said. “The concern is that the statements they did make were not helpful.”

Delusional: “From 2009 through 2015, Deutsche Bank paid out about €5 billion in dividends, a significant chunk of the €19 billion in equity it raised. ”

• Deutsche Bank Exposes Europe’s Capital Shortfall (BBG)

Less than a decade after the financial crisis, Deutsche Bank is in trouble again, with investors speculating about whether the German government will have to rescue one of the world’s largest financial institutions. The sad thing is how easily this predicament could have been avoided. This time around, Deutsche Bank isn’t dealing with an unforeseen market meltdown or sovereign-debt crisis. Rather, the proximate cause of distress is the U.S. Justice Department’s threat to fine the firm $14 billion for decade-old transgressions involving U.S. mortgage-backed securities – more than double what the bank has set aside to cover such legal costs. Concerns about capital adequacy have sent the stock price to record lows, and the German government says it won’t provide a financial safety net.

The episode illustrates Europe’s failure to learn an important lesson from the last crisis: The largest banks must have plenty of loss-absorbing equity capital, so that even after suffering a hit, their balance sheets are strong. Otherwise, governments risk finding themselves choosing between a taxpayer-backed rescue and the potentially devastating repercussions of letting a systemically important financial institution go bust. Instead of using the post-crisis years to build up irreproachable equity capital buffers, however, European banks have given back hundreds of billions of euros to shareholders in the form of dividends and share repurchases. From 2009 through 2015, Deutsche Bank paid out about €5 billion in dividends, a significant chunk of the 19 billion in equity it raised.

Today it is among the most thinly capitalized banks in Europe, with tangible equity amounting to less than 3% of assets – an astonishingly thin layer. Even if Germany genuinely wanted to let Deutsche Bank fail, it couldn’t credibly threaten to do so. The institution is arguably Europe’s most systemically risky, with assets amounting to more than half of Germany’s total annual gross domestic product. Making an example of Deutsche Bank could lead to a devastating contagion. [..] The euro region desperately needs better-capitalized banks, not only to avoid disaster but to help heal its faltering economy. If the near-death experience of one of the world’s largest institutions can’t spur European officials to action, it’s hard to imagine what could.

It’s not just Deutsche…

• Commerzbank To Axe Nearly 10,000 Jobs (R.)

Commerzbank is to cut nearly 10,000 jobs and suspend its dividend as part of a wide-ranging restructuring plan. Germany’s second biggest lender after Deutsche Bank said on Thursday it expected restructuring costs of €1.1bn as it combined business operations and cut costs to offset the impact of low loan demand and negative ECB interest rates amid a shift to digital banking. The revamp will come at a heavy cost for staff as Commerzbank slashes 9,600 of its 45,000 full-time positions – almost one in five jobs. The move is a more drastic reduction than at Deutsche Bank, which is axing about 10% of staff but suggests deeper cuts may be needed.

Commerzbank plans to merge its business with medium-sized German firms with its corporate and markets operations, while also scaling back trading activities in investment banking. That move is expected to prompt a writedown of about €700m in the third quarter, leading to a quarterly net loss. Commerzbank expects to turn a small net profit in full-year 2016, down from €1.1bn last year. The bank will concentrate on two customer segments in future: private and small business customers and corporate clients, with the restructuring expected to lift net return on tangible equity to at least 6% by the end of 2020 from 4.2% last year. Commerzbank aims to add 2,300 jobs in areas where business was growing, which would ease the net reduction to 7,300.

…and it’s not just German banks either.

• ING, Largest Dutch Lender, To Announce Thousands Of Job Cuts (BBG)

ING, the largest Netherlands lender, will announce thousands of job cuts at its investor day on Monday, Dutch newspaper Het Financieele Dagblad reported Friday, citing unidentified people with knowledge of the matter. The reorganization will result in more central management and may generate billions of euros in savings, the paper said. The bank employs about 52,000 people, according to its website. ING sees opportunities in Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany and Poland, Het Financieele Dagblad said. The lender has doubts about its presence in Turkey, where it lacks scale, according to the report. CEO Ralph Hamers has transformed ING into a bank focused on Europe and is seeking to expand lending to consumers and companies outside its home market as record-low interest rates and regulatory demands to bolster capital threaten to erode profit.

How to lose all credibility in just a few words: “”Given the modest acceleration in growth that we forecast and the many downside risks around these forecasts, it seems overly optimistic to suggest that the global economy has reached “escape velocity”,” said Barclays economist David Fernandez.”

• China Factories Limp Along, Japan Inflation Goes Backwards (R.)

China’s factory sector struggled to gain speed in September while Japanese inflation went backwards in August despite the best efforts of policymakers, underscoring the limits of stimulus in reviving world growth. Friday’s unflattering figures bookmarked a week in which the IMF warned it would likely downgrade forecasts for the U.S. economy, and the World Trade Organization slashed its outlook for global trade flows. That was unwelcome news for markets spooked by troubles at Deutsche Bank, whose U.S. shares took a hammering on reports some hedge funds had reduced financial exposure to Germany’s largest lender. The bank said the “vast majority” of its clients remained supportive, but the situation still drew comparisons to the 2008 failure of Lehman and the resulting global financial crisis.

There was at least some evidence that China, the world’s second largest economy, had stabilized, if only because of a burst of government spending and a red-hot housing market. The Caixin measure of manufacturing activity (PMI) edged up a tenth of a%age point to 50.1, led by output and new orders. While the move was marginal, it was only the second time the index had reached positive territory since February 2015. The U.S. economy also looked to have bounced back in the third quarter, while a string of data showed Europe weathered Britain’s Brexit vote better than many had feared. All of which encouraged Barclays to nudge up its 2017 call for global growth to 3.5%, from an expected 3.1% this year. Yet a true lift-off still seems remote.

Getting all giddy about foreigners buying up your country is something I’ll never understand. But it’s not going to happen either. This is simple forward projecting with blinders.

• ‘This Is Just The Start’: China’s Passion For Foreign Property (G.)

[..] many real-estate agents and property experts in east Asia believe a new wave of investment is just getting under way, as mainland investors develop a taste for international real estate, including postcodes up and down the UK. “Our thesis – and this is supported by quite a lot of evidence – is that in many ways the international Chinese investment journey is probably just starting,” says Charles Pittar, CEO of Juwai.com, a website that aims to pair mainland buyers with property developers in places such as Australia, the US and the UK. Pittar’s company, which lists 2.5 million properties and calls itself China’s largest international real-estate website, estimates that in 2014, Chinese outbound investment into residential and commercial property was more than $50bn.

“I guess the key is: what is it going to become?” Pittar says. “Our view is that … it could be growing to somewhere around $200bn [annually] over the next 10 years.” And Britain, despite its decision to leave the EU, is expected to be one of the key focuses, he adds. “The UK market, particularly post-Brexit, is really picking up.” Pittar traces mainland China’s hunger for overseas property back to the turn of the century, just before China’s entry into the World Trade Organisation signalled the latest phase of its integration into the global economy. But the outflow of money has gathered pace over the past decade, and is set to grow further as middle-class investors from second- and third-tier cities get in on the game.

“It’s a big market now, but it is likely to be anywhere from two to four times the size in 10 years’ time,” Pittar says. “The exciting thing about China is that there are 168 cities with more than a million people. So this is just such a huge market.”

Curious. A good strong damning piece on globalization, but the NYT dare not draw the inevitable conclusions. They leave that to Trump, presumably.

• More Wealth, More Jobs, but Not for Everyone (NYT)

When Dan Simmons started working at the mill 38 years ago, talk centered on how to make steel. These days, he spends his days at a job for which he feels little prepared — de facto social worker. Mr. Simmons is the president of the Steelworkers Local 1899, which represents 1,250 workers at the Granite City plant. On a recent morning, only about 375 of his people are employed. He sits at his desk inside the brick union hall, greeting laid-off workers who arrive seeking help. One man wants guidance scanning online job listings. Another has hit a snag with his unemployment benefits. A night earlier, Mr. Simmons took a call on his cellphone from the niece of a high school classmate, a laid-off millworker. He had shot himself to death, leaving behind two children.

Trade Adjustment Assistance, a government program started in 1962 and expanded significantly a dozen years later, is supposed to support workers whose jobs are casualties of overseas competition. The program pays for job training. But Mr. Simmons rolls his eyes at mention of the program. Training has almost become a joke. Skills often do not translate from old jobs to new. Many workers just draw a check while they attend training and then remain jobless. A 2012 assessment of the program prepared for the Labor Department found that four years after completing training, only 37% of those employed were working in their targeted industries. Many of those enrolled had lower incomes than those who simply signed up for unemployment benefits and looked for other work.

European workers have fared better. In wealthy countries like Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden and Denmark, unemployment benefits, housing subsidies and government-provided health care are far more generous than in the United States. In the five years after a job loss, an American family of four that is eligible for housing assistance receives average benefits equal to 25% of the unemployed person’s previous wages, according to data from the OECD. For a similar family in the Netherlands, benefits reach 70%. Yet in Europe, too, the impacts of trade have been uneven, in part because of the quirks of the EU. Trade deals are cut by Brussels, setting the terms for the 28 member nations. Social programs are left to national governments. “You’re pursuing trade and liberalization agreements at the EU level, and then leaving to the individual member countries how to deal with the damage,” said Andrew Lang at the LSE.

“..the S&P 500 index has gained 699 points since January 2008, and 422 of those points came on the 70 Fed announcement days. The average gain on announcement days was 0.49%, or roughly 50 times higher than the average gain of 0.01% on other days.”

• Trump Isn’t All Wrong About The Fed (WSJ)

The press spends a lot of energy tracking the many errors in Donald Trump’s loose talk, and during Monday’s presidential debate Hillary Clinton expressed hope that fact checkers were “turning up the volume” on her rival. But when it comes to the Federal Reserve, Mr. Trump isn’t all wrong. In a looping debate rant, Mr. Trump argued that an increasingly “political” Fed is holding interest rates low to help Democrats in November, driving up a “big, fat, ugly bubble” that will pop when the central bank raises rates. This riff has some truth to it. Leave the conspiracy theory aside and look at the facts: Since the Fed began aggressive monetary easing in 2008, my calculations show that nearly 60% of stock market gains have come on those days, once every six weeks, that the Federal Open Market Committee announces its policy decisions.

Put another way, the S&P 500 index has gained 699 points since January 2008, and 422 of those points came on the 70 Fed announcement days. The average gain on announcement days was 0.49%, or roughly 50 times higher than the average gain of 0.01% on other days. This is a sign of dysfunction. The stock market should be a barometer of the economy, but in practice it has become a barometer of Fed policy. My research, dating to 1960, shows that this stock-market partying on Fed announcement days is a relatively new and increasingly powerful feature of the economy. Fed policy proclamations had little influence on the stock market before 1980. Between 1980 and 2007, returns on Fed announcement days averaged 0.24%, about half as much as during the current easing cycle.

The effect of Fed announcements rose sharply after 2008 when the Fed launched the early rounds of QE, its bond purchases intended to inject money into the economy. It might seem that the market effect of the Fed’s easy-money policies has dissipated in the past couple of years. The S&P 500 has been moving sideways since 2014, when the central bank announced it would wind down its QE program. But this is an illusion. Stock prices have held steady even though corporate earnings have been falling since 2014. Valuations—the ratio of price to earnings—continue to rise. With investors searching for yield in the low interest-rate world created by the Fed, the valuations of stocks that pay high dividends are particularly stretched. The markets are as dependent on the Fed as ever.

Interview with Automatic Earth reader Collum: “We should have hung a few in the town square, but instead the Obama Department of Justice punished shareholders and savers.”

• Society Goes Through Painful, Cathartic Change – Dave Collum (CR)

I was non-political throughout college and much of my adult life, focusing on chemistry and family. It is probably only in the last 15 years that I’ve started hiking up my pants and bitching about the government. Now I am relatively outspoken because I sense existential risk in the American Experiment. We have an interventionist central bank—a global cartel of interconnected central banks actually—that is determined to use untested (read: flawed) models to try to repair an economy that was hurt by their policies and would fix itself if the Fed would just get out of the way. I think these guys are what Nassim Taleb calls I-Y-I (intellectual-yet-idiot). They will continue with their experiments until the system finally breaks in earnest. They will blame the unforeseeable circumstances.

The social contract on the home front is faltering badly. When the system started to fail in ’09, we stitched up a putrid wound without cleansing it. We needed reform of a highly flawed banking system corrupted by poor incentives. In the 1930s, the Pecora Commission rounded up scoundrels (including the head of the New York Stock Exchange) and threw them in prison. We should have hung a few in the town square, but instead the Obama Department of Justice punished shareholders and savers. A scandal at Wells Fargo emerging just this week, for example, led to a token fine while leaving some wondering if Wells Fargo is too corrupt to exist in its current form. It is not the government’s job to break up these institutions, nor should it save them.

We have stirred up a mess in the Middle East that seems to be washing up on our shores. (This weekend there were a half dozen attacks that appeared highly correlated to all but those in the politicized press.) Our policy in Syria is incomprehensible. The refugee crisis in Europe is our doing, and it is spreading. Fear of Trump seems odd given that the current neocons in liberal garb are stunningly militaristic. I think they are war crimes. Meanwhile, these I-Y-I’s insist on poking Putin in the eye with a stick as part of a policy that appears to be designed to take us to the brink of far greater armed conflict. People are now mad, and it shows in the chaotic election. We are guaranteed to elect a president that half the populace finds repugnant. It’s hard to imagine that the post-election temperament will improve. Change is in the air.

Anything ‘traditional’ in politics is now suspect.

• Iceland’s Pirates Head For Power On Wave Of Public Anger (R.)

A party that hangs a skull-and-crossbones flag at its HQ, and promises to clean up corruption, grant asylum to Edward Snowden and accept the bitcoin virtual currency, could be on course to form the next Icelandic government. The Pirate Party has found a formula that has eluded many anti-establishment groups across Europe. It has tempered polarizing policies like looser copyright enforcement rules and drug decriminalization with pledges of economic stability that have won confidence among voters. This has allowed it to ride a wave of public anger at perceived corruption among the political elite – the biggest election issue in a country where a 2008 banking collapse hit thousands of savers and government figures have been mired in an offshore tax furor following the Panama Papers leaks.

[..] Opinion polls show support for the party running at over 20%, slightly ahead of the Independence Party, which shares power with the Progressive Party. The left-leaning party is part of a global anti-establishment typified by Britain’s vote to leave the European Union. But their platform is far removed from the anti-immigration policies of UKIP, France’s National Front and Germany’s AfD, or the anti-austerity of Greece’s Syriza. Iceland’s gross income per capita was almost $50,000 in 2015, according to the World Bank, well above the $34,435 EU average – though still 20% below a 2007 peak. Immigration levels are low compared with many other European countries. Helped by a tourism boom, economic growth this year is expected to hit 4.3% and the latest data shows a seasonally adjusted unemployment rate of 3.1%.

There appears little appetite among the public or any party leader for economic radicalism. The Pirate Party has not set out detailed plans, but has made clear that it would not deviate far from current policies in the next government term. “We will not be doing any dramatic things in this regard, we will carry on with the lifting of capital control. We are not going to make any dramatic changes in the financial sector,” said Jonsdottir. There is little sign of business or investor panic. “Regarding the economic stability, looking at the long term, they can’t do any worse than what has been done so far,” said Jon Sigurdsson, CEO of prosthetics maker Ossur, one of Iceland’s biggest companies, referring to the banking crisis.

I’ve said it before, his overconfidence will get him. He now wants to redraw Turkey’s borders. And not just with Greece. Turkey’s borders with Syria hold a mich bigger prize.

• Erdogan Disputes 1923 Treaty Of Lausanne, Athens Responds (Kath.)

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan caused displeasure in Athens on Thursday by indicating that Ankara “gave away” Aegean islands to Greece under the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923, the pact that defined the borders of modern Turkey following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. In a speech to regional officials in Ankara, Erdogan appeared to express his regret for the border decisions imposed by the pact. “Some tried to deceive us by presenting Lausanne as victory,” he said. “In Lausanne, we gave away the islands that you could shout across to,” he said, referring to Greek islands located in the Aegean Sea close to the Turkish coastline. Reacting to Erdogan’s comments, a Greek Foreign Ministry source remarked that “everyone should respect the Treaty of Lausanne,” noting that it is “a reality in the civilized world which no one, including Ankara, can ignore.”

The same source indicated that the Turkish leader’s comments were likely geared for domestic consumption. While making clear his displeasure with the Treaty of Lausanne, Erdogan indicated during his speech that those who attempted a coup against Turkey in July would have imposed a far worse state of affairs. “If this coup had succeeded, they would have given us a treaty that would have made us long for Sevres,” he said, referring to the pact that preceded the Treaty of Lausanne in 1920, abolishing the Ottoman Empire. “We are still struggling about what the continental shelf will be, and what will be in the air and the land. The reason for this is those who sat at the table for that treaty. Those who sat there did not do [us] justice, and we are reaping those troubles right now,” he said..

Debt Rattle September 28 2016

Sep 282016

September 28, 2016 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 9:20 am Finance Tagged with: container, deflation, Deutsche, Fed, GMO, Greece, microplastic, OPEC, wages, Wells Fargo 7 Responses »

DPC Heart of Chinatown, San Francisco, after earthquake and fire 1906

• Small Army Of Fed Speakers, OPEC On Tap For Wednesday (CNBC)

• “Negative Growth” of Real Wages is Normal for Much of the Workforce (WS)

• Grocery Prices Are Plunging (BBG)

• EU Banking Mayhem, One Bank at a Time, then All at Once (WS)

• Deutsche Bank Troubles Cast Long Shadow Over European Banking (BBG)

• IMF Warns Central Banks Could Lose Deflation Fight (AFP)

• A Legal Barrier to Higher US Interest Rates (WSJ)

• Global Container Volume on Track for Worst Year Since 2009 (WSJ)

• Wells Fargo Executives Forfeit Millions, CEO To Forgo Salary (G.)

• Worries Grow Over Greek Economic Forecast (WSJ)

• Germany’s Hypocrisy Over Greece Water Privatisation (G.)

• China Wants GMOs. The Chinese People Don’t. (BBG)

• Single Clothes Wash May Release 700,000 Microplastic Fibres (G.)

And the MH17 report that lost all credibility long ago. Got to keep the customer entertained.

• Small Army Of Fed Speakers, OPEC On Tap For Wednesday (CNBC)

A flurry of Fed speakers, including the Fed chair, will keep markets busy Wednesday. There are also mortgage applications at 7 a.m. EDT, durable goods data at 8:30 a.m. EDT and oil inventory data at 10:30 a.m. EDT. OPEC, meanwhile, is meeting in Algeria and could continue to create volatility in oil prices after headlines from there triggered a near 3% plunge Tuesday. Fed Chair Janet Yellen appears before the House Financial Services Committee at 10 a.m. on supervision and regulation. The Fed chair was personally criticized in the presidential debate Monday night by GOP candidate Donald Trump, who said the Fed’s decision to keep rates low was political and that it’s creating a bubble in the stock market.

“It has to worry the markets that potentially you could have a president getting into a nasty dispute with the chairman of the Fed in early 2017. That’s something the market would not like to see. I think the Fed has not done a very good job communicating. It’s a cacophony of confusing comments. There’s reason to criticize the Fed, but the personal attack on Yellen is unprecedented,” said Greg Valliere, chief global strategist at Horizon Investments. Traders are watching to see if Yellen is in the political hot seat on banking regulation and supervision when she appears before the committee.

One side of US deflation is falling wages…

• “Negative Growth” of Real Wages is Normal for Much of the Workforce (WS)

The chart below shows the%age change of real wages (left, y-axis) as these men aged (horizontal, x-axis). As young adults, their wages soared by up to 10% a year. Then the rate of growth fell off sharply. When the men in this cohort turned 40 in the 1990s, wage growth disappeared. By around the year 2000, the real wage peak in the US, when the oldest men in this cohort turned 50, wages had begun to decline for most of them. By the time these men were in the mid-50s, their wages across the board were heading south – and for many of them, rapidly. Hence this colorful, drooping spaghetti:

This “negative real wage growth” – devastating as it may be for those experiencing it – is nothing special, according to the New York Fed. And it crushes not just white men, but everyone: “Real wages tend to rise early in a worker’s career, flatten out mid-career, and then decline as the worker approaches retirement. This inverted U-shape pattern is a well-established feature in the labor economics literature.” The report explained it further: “Labor economists explain the rapid real wage growth early in a worker’s career as a combination of on-the-job learning and better matching of workers to jobs. A large portion is due to job matching as workers change jobs in search of a position that better utilizes their skills. As workers age, the decline in the pace of their real wage growth reflects a diminished incentive to invest in new skills (because their remaining work life is shorter) and fewer job changes (because they have found a good job match).”

The report divides life for its purposes into three phases, terms of wage growth: • Fast growth, up to age 40, • Flat growth, ages 41-54, • “Negative growth,” age 55 and older. Now there’s another problem mucking up the overall and ever-elusive real-wage growth miracle everyone has been counting on: demographics. The US population is aging. There are more people aged 40 and over in the workforce, and their incomes are now flat or declining. The portion of the population in the first phase when wages are growing fast has plunged from close to 60% in the 1980s to the mid-40% range currently. And the portion of workers with wages in the “negative growth” phase has ballooned. Given the demographics, real wage declines among workers over 50 will continue to hammer the national averages.

…and when wages are falling, so must prices.

• Grocery Prices Are Plunging (BBG)

Call it the Great Grocery-Store Giveaway of 2016. In Austin, Texas, Randalls slashed prices for boneless beef ribs by 40%, to $3.99 a pound. Not to be outdone, the H-E-B grocer down the street charged $1 a pound less. Not long ago, Albertsons advertised a deal you don’t normally see on your finer cuts of meat: “buy 1 get 1 free” specials on “USDA Choice Petite Sirloin Steak.” And what does $1 buy these days? In North Bergen, New Jersey, you could pick up a dozen eggs at Wal-Mart. OK, the price was actually $1.14. A mile away, check out Aldi, the German supermarket discounter, which can actually break the buck – 12 eggs for 99 cents. A year ago, you would have paid, on average, three times that price.

In a startling development, almost unheard of outside a recession, food prices have fallen for nine straight months in the U.S. It’s the longest streak of food deflation since 1960 – with the exception of 2009, when the financial crisis was winding down. Analysts credit low oil and grain prices, as well as cutthroat competition from discounters. Consumers are winning out; grocery chains, not so much. Their margins and, in some cases, their stock prices, are taking a hit. Eggs and beef have have grown especially inexpensive, and it isn’t only an American phenomenon: In England, Aldi recently offered its prized 8-ounce wagyu steaks from New Zealand for about $6.50 – a little more than the price of a pint of beer. “The severity of what we’re seeing is completely unprecedented,” said Scott Mushkin at Wolfe Research, who has studied grocery prices around the country for more than ten years. “We’ve never seen deflation this sharp.”

“The can has been kicked down the road for years. Now negative interest rates appear to have inadvertently crushed the can.”

• EU Banking Mayhem, One Bank at a Time, then All at Once (WS)

Here are the 29 banks in the ESTX Banks Index of Eurozone banks (so Swiss and UK banks, for example are not included). It shows the percentage drop from their 52-week high. But for some of these banks, particularly for Italian and Portuguese banks, that 52-week high was just about last year’s 52-week low, so relentless has their decline been over the years. Some of them had already been reduced to penny stocks years ago, and for them, in euro terms, the biggest losses occurred back then. So these mayhem banks, color coded by country:

If a bank stock plunges from €0.04 to €0.01 over the 52-week period, such as Banco Comercial Português in Portugal, it has been toast for longer than 52 weeks, and the percentage plunge is essentially meaningless because shares were worthless to begin with. The shares of five of these banks trade under €1. Another 8 banks trade under €3. These 29 banks form a big part of the European financial system. It includes some of the world’s largest banks, such as Deutsche Bank, Societe Generale, and BNP Paribas. It includes a slew of other “systemically important financial institutions,” such as Unicredit, ING, and Santander. They’re troubled at the same time. The can has been kicked down the road for years. Now negative interest rates appear to have inadvertently crushed the can.

Deutsche won’t go alone. Just like saving only Deutsche is far from enough. The dominoes suppart each other.

• Deutsche Bank Troubles Cast Long Shadow Over European Banking (BBG)

The turmoil swirling around Deutsche Bank has brought simmering concerns about the health of Europe’s banks back to a boil. Germany’s largest lender extended losses to a record low this week, dragging down European financial stocks, after the U.S. Department of Justice requested $14 billion to settle claims tied to fraudulent mortgage-backed securities. While the bank said it won’t pay anywhere close to that amount, the dust-up fueled doubts over its capital levels and refocused investors on the industry’s faults. “One word – Deutsche,” David Moss at BMO Global Asset Management in London, said when asked to sum up the recent slump in European banks. “That’s the biggest thing – it’s reignited the risk around regulation, fines and litigation.”

Dismissing concern about the bank’s finances, Chief Executive Officer John Cryan told Bild in an interview published late Tuesday that capital “is currently not an issue,” and accepting government support is “out of the question for us.” Deutsche Bank has tumbled almost 20% this month, while Royal Bank of Scotland – which also faces a looming Justice Department fine – fell 13%, and Italy’s UniCredit slumped 12%. The Bloomberg Europe 500 Banks and Financial Services Index has declined 4.2% in September, making it the worst month since June, when Britain’s vote to exit the European Union roiled markets and sent bank shares plunging.

[..] European banks are grappling with tougher regulatory requirements, sputtering economic growth and negative interest rates, which squeeze lending margins and crimp investment returns. In Italy, where banks are burdened with some €360 billion of soured loans, UniCredit is working on a plan to boost capital that may include asset sales and a stock offering, according to people familiar with the matter. In Germany, Commerzbank scaled back its full-year profit goals and may announce thousands of job cuts this week,

They already have.

• IMF Warns Central Banks Could Lose Deflation Fight (AFP)

The IMF warned Tuesday that central banks are struggling to beat back deflationary forces and that governments need to spend to help them succeed. In a new assessment of global economic conditions, the IMF said many countries worldwide are battling disinflation – low and slowing inflation – due to weak global economic growth.If central banks around the world cannot halt this stall, and if companies and people increasingly believe they can’t halt it, their economies risk sinking into a deflationary spiral – where prices generally start to fall and companies and consumers hold back spending and investment, stalling the economy. In this case, “countries can’t afford to be complacent,” the Fund warned. The report said deflationary pressures in many countries are coming from abroad, in the form of sinking prices of both commodities and manufactured goods.

“The breadth of the decline in inflation across countries and the fact that it is stronger in the tradable goods sectors underscore the global nature of disinflationary forces,” the IMF said. Weak inflation challenges central banks’ ability to use monetary policy to stimulate demand, the IMF notes, because interest rates are likely to already be very low, giving them little room to cut further. That has been the case with top central banks including the Fed, the ECB and the BOJ, with the latter two already having taken some interest rates negative. “Eventually, ‘persistent’ disinflation can lead to costly deflationary cycles – as we have seen in Japan – where weak demand and deflation reinforce each other, and end up increasing debt burdens and hindering economic activity and job creation.”

How to politicize the Fed?!

• A Legal Barrier to Higher US Interest Rates (WSJ)

Defending the Fed’s recent decision to put off raising interest rates again, Fed Chair Janet Yellen told reporters last week that she and other Fed governors wanted “to see some continued progress” before taking that step. Politics, she insisted, had nothing to do with it. What Ms. Yellen didn’t say is that the Fed couldn’t raise its rates without breaking the law. Since when are Fed rate increases illegal? Since the 2007-08 subprime meltdown and financial disaster, actually. Until then the Fed could set any target it liked for the federal-funds rate—the interest rate banks pay for overnight loans of cash reserves. To keep the fed-funds rate from rising above target, the Fed pumped more reserves into the banking system. To keep it from dropping below, it took reserves away.

But after Lehman Brothers failed in 2008, the Fed’s efforts to keep the fed-funds rate from dropping below its target proved futile. To set a floor on how far the rate could go, the Fed started paying interest on banks’ reserve balances with the Fed, taking advantage of the 2006 Financial Services Regulatory Relief Act giving it permission to do so. Alas, it didn’t work. Government-sponsored enterprises Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the Federal Home Loan Banks, which also kept deposit balances at the Fed but weren’t eligible for interest on reserves (IOR), started making overnight loans to banks at rates below the IOR rate. In effect, this turned what the Fed hoped would be a floor on the fed-funds rate into a ceiling. To raise rates now, the Fed increases the rate on reserves.

So what’s to keep the Fed from raising rates this way again? The 2006 Financial Services Regulatory Relief Act is what. For that law only allows the central bank to pay interest on reserves “at a rate or rates not to exceed the general level of short-term interest rates.” The rub is that the Fed’s IOR rate of 50 basis points (0.5%) already exceeds the closest comparable market rates: those on shorter-term Treasury bills. At the start of this month, the four-week T-bill rate was just 26 basis points; since then it has slid even lower, all the way down to 10 basis points. Judging by these numbers, the Fed is already flouting the law. Another hike would mean flouting it all the more flagrantly. Lawmakers will be duty-bound to object. The law can only be stretched so far. Unless “general short-term rates” rise markedly, Congress can be expected to question the legality of any Fed rate increase. If it comes to that, Ms. Yellen will find it very hard to dissemble her way out of it.

2016 will be known as the good old days.

• Global Container Volume on Track for Worst Year Since 2009 (WSJ)

Global container volumes are on track for zero growth this year, which would mark the sector’s worst performance since the 2009 economic crisis and a sure catalyst for further bankruptcies and possible acquisitions in the beleaguered shipping industry, shipping executives said. Freight rates, the predominant source of income for shipping companies, fell 20% in the benchmark Asia to Europe trade route this week compared with last week to $767 per container. Rates have mostly stayed well below $1,000 since the start of the year and operators say anything below $1,400 is unsustainable. They aren’t expected to turn around soon.

China’s Golden Week holiday starts at the beginning of October, marking the slow season for operators as many Chinese factories cut production levels after an output frenzy in the summer months when western importers stack up products for the year-end holidays. “The industry faces its worst year since the Lehman Brothers collapse,” said Jonathan Roach, an analyst at London based Braemar ACM. “Demand is around zero and any moves to increase freight rates will likely fail.” Hanjin, South Korea’s biggest operator and the world’s seventh largest in terms of capacity, filed for bankruptcy protection last month and is under court order to sell its own ships and returning chartered ships to their owners. Container operators, which move everything from clothes and shoes to electronics and furniture, are burdened by 30% more capacity in the water than demand.

And they’ll keep their jobs?

• Wells Fargo Executives Forfeit Millions, CEO To Forgo Salary (G.)

Wells Fargo executives will forfeit millions of dollars in the wake of revelations that the bank’s sales quotas led to the creation of more than 2m unauthorized accounts. The bank’s chief executive John Stumpf will forgo his salary for the coming months as independent directors launch a new investigation into Wells Fargo’s retail banking and sales practices. Last year, Stumpf made about $19.3m. Stumpf will also forfeit unvested equity awards worth about $41m. Carrie Tolstedt, who oversaw the retail banking at Wells Fargo while the unauthorized accounts were opened, was slated to receive as much as $124.6m after retiring this summer, according to Fortune. The bank said on Tuesday that she would not receive an undisclosed severance and would forfeit about $19m in unvested awards.

Less than three weeks ago, Wells Fargo announced that it had agreed to pay $185m in penalties after an audit found that its employees opened as many as 1.5m deposit accounts and 565,000 credit card accounts without customers’ consent. The accounts were opened by the bank’s staff in hopes of meeting their monthly sales quota and earning their incentive bonuses. Wells Fargo workers have tried to draw attention to the “unreasonable” quotas before – some even staged a protest in front of the bank’s headquarters last year. When Stumpf testified in front of the US Senate last week, he drew ire from US lawmakers. Many of them called for the bank to recoup pay from Stumpf and Tolstedt and hold them accountable.

The EU has made Greek recovery impossible. Spending power has been murdered, and a whole generation of younger people is 50-60% long-term unemployed. It makes no difference what anyone forecasts.

• Worries Grow Over Greek Economic Forecast (WSJ)

Greece’s economic recovery is proving elusive, challenging the forecasts of the country’s government and foreign creditors still counting on growth reviving this year. The IMF said last week that the economy is stagnating, in the first admission from creditors that Greece’s recovery is off track again. Growth will only restart next year, the head of the IMF’s team in Greece said on a conference call with reporters, without offering details. Of particular concern is that exports, which are supposed to lead Greece out of trouble, are on a slow downward trajectory, hampered by capital controls, taxes and a lack of credit. “There is no chance we will see a rebound unless we see some bold political decisions that would introduce a more stable business environment,” said Dimitris Tsakonitis, general manager at mining company Grecian Magnesite.

The bailout agreement between Greece and its German-led creditors assumes rapid growth from late 2016 onward, including an official forecast of 2.7% growth in 2017. Private-sector economists believe next year’s growth could be closer to 0.6%. Weaker growth would undermine the budget, likely leading to fresh arguments with lenders about extra austerity measures. Greece is still grappling with the measures it has already agreed to. Late on Tuesday the country’s parliament approved pension overhauls and other policy changes that have been delayed for months, holding up bailout funding.

Good to note. Berlin buys back its water, and forces Athens to sell it. “It’s not any more a democracy or equality in the EU. It’s a kind of business..”

No society should ever agree to sell its basic needs to foreigners. Leaders who do that anyway should be fired.

• Germany’s Hypocrisy Over Greece Water Privatisation (G.)

Greek activists are warning that the privatisation of state water companies would be a backward step for the country. Under the terms of the bailout agreement approved by the Greek parliament today, Greece has pledged to support an existing programme of privatisation, which includes large chunks of the water utilities of Greece’s two largest cities – Athens and Thessaloniki. There is ongoing debate about water privatisation and the role of business. Across Europe a wave of austerity-driven privatisation proposals has led to protests in Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain. At the same time, some of northern Europe’s largest cities, including Paris and Berlin, are buying back utilities they sold just last decade.

President of the Thessaloniki water company trade union George Argovtopoulos said a move to a for-profit model would raise prices for consumers and degrade services. “It’s not any more a democracy or equality in the EU. It’s a kind of business,” he said, adding that austerity measures that require water privatisation smacked of a “do as I say, but not as I do” approach from Germany. “We know that in Berlin, just two years ago they remunicipalised the water there, although they paid just under €600m to Veolia [to buy back its stake]. It’s clear that the model of privatisation of water has failed all around the world,” he said. The German finance ministry refused to comment ahead of a Eurogroup meeting in Brussels on Friday where the third bailout deal looked set to be signed.

[..] Austerity-led changes to water supply have been fiercely resisted across Europe’s most indebted countries. In Dublin this year, huge protests erupted over plans to directly charge water users who previously paid for water through their taxes. This was seen as a first step towards selling off Ireland’s water supply. A water privatisation push by former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi was crushed by a 95% referendum vote in 2011. A similar referendum in Thessaloniki last year delivered a 98% vote against. A 2014 report by the Transnational Institute’s Satoko Kishimoto found that across the world 180 cities had bought back (or remunicipalised) their water supply. She said this was a response to almost universally higher water prices and the loss of control over a fundamental resource.

Another author claiming that “..the scientific consensus within and outside of China is that GMOs are safe..”

• China Wants GMOs. The Chinese People Don’t. (BBG)

The latest food safety scandal in China might be its most damaging. Earlier this week, a former doctoral student at one of the country’s national testing centers for genetically modified organisms went public with allegations of scientific fraud, including claims that records were doctored extensively, that unqualified personnel were employed under illegal contracts and – most seriously – that authorities refused to take action when his concerns were aired privately. On Wednesday, China’s Ministry of Agriculture responded to a social media storm by suspending operations at the center. That might take care of the current scandal, but the Chinese public’s hostility toward GMOs won’t go away so easily.

Those concerns have only grown over the past decade as the government has increased its support of GMOs, including approval of the state-owned ChinaChem Group’s $43 billion takeover offer for the Swiss seed giant Syngenta. These efforts have galvanized a very public opposition that transcends China’s typical political fault lines, and created one of the government’s most intractable headaches. Feeding China’s huge population has never been easy. But over the last three decades, the challenges have become considerably greater as urbanization devoured farmland, and pollution made even more of it unusable. Today, the government is faced with the task of feeding 21% of the world’s population with 9% of its arable land. Its reliance on foreign goods has made China the world leader in imports since 2011.

Officials now fear the country could become dependent on foreigners for its food supply and the government remains committed to maintaining self-sufficiency in rice, wheat, and other key grains. As a result, the political pressure to increase yields is considerable. In fact, this pressure is centuries-old. Domesticated rice first appeared in the Yangtze River Valley at least 8,000 years ago, and Chinese farmers and scientists have been innovating ever since. In 1992, China became the first country to introduce a GMO crop into commercial production, when it sowed a virus-resistant tobacco plant on 100 acres. Since then, the government has issued safety certificates for a wide range of GMO crops, ranging from chili peppers to petunias. Yet, so far at least, only cotton has gone into wide cultivation. Other GMOs – especially rice, a staple of the Chinese diet – are still awaiting approval to be domestically cultivated.

The blessings of plastic.

• Single Clothes Wash May Release 700,000 Microplastic Fibres (G.)

Each cycle of a washing machine could release more than 700,000 microscopic plastic fibres into the environment, according to a study. A team at Plymouth University in the UK spent 12 months analysing what happened when a number of synthetic materials were washed at different temperatures in domestic washing machines, using different combinations of detergents, to quantify the microfibres shed. They found that acrylic was the worst offender, releasing nearly 730,000 tiny synthetic particles per wash, five times more than polyester-cotton blend fabric, and nearly 1.5 times as many as polyester. “Different types of fabrics can have very different levels of emissions,” said Richard Thompson, professor of marine biology at Plymouth University, who conducted the investigation with a PhD student, Imogen Napper.

“We need to understand why is it that some types of [fabric] are releasing substantially more fibres [ than others].” These microfibres track through domestic wastewater into sewage treatment plants where some of the tiny plastic fragments are captured as part of sewage sludge. The rest pass through into rivers and eventually, oceans. A paper published in 2011 found that microfibres made up 85% of human-made debris on shorelines around the world. The impact of microplastic pollution is not fully understood but studies have suggested that it has the potential to poison the food chain, build up in animals’ digestive tracts, reduce the ability of some organisms to absorb energy from foods in the normal way and even to change the behaviour of crabs.

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