Deutsche Archives - Page 4 of 8 - The Automatic Earth

If finance had not been able to ‘securitize’ debts (turn them into assets) and sell them to speculators/investors over the past two decades, then debt creation could not have gone to such extremes and consumers would not have been able to borrow and spend themselves so far into financial ruin. If western consumers had not been able to borrow themselves so far into ruin, they would also not have been able to buy so many goods from Asia and other developing nations for a time.

Asia and developing nations would not then have been able to mint so many new millionaires and billionaires in their governments and businesses who then funneled capital into western property markets, and western property markets would not have appreciated so far beyond domestic income gains. If property prices had not increased so far beyond income gains, then households would not have had to borrow so much just to get a roof over their heads or a post-secondary education. If they had not been able to borrow so much, property prices, education and related services would never have been able to rise so much for so long, and become so unaffordable for the masses. But they did.

[..] The old need the young to drive productivity and innovation, pay taxes and support the social safety net. They also need the young to buy their assets (real estate, securities, businesses) when they wish to downsize and raise liquidity. If the young are broke: under-employed, over-indebted and under-saved, they cannot get a footing and the social contract is undone. Twenty years of central bank and government-enabled debt-driven asset bubbles, have broken long-standing laws of financial and social equilibrium. A secular global repricing cycle is necessary to break the impasse and reboot the system. The status quo is unraveling, as it must.

The same as above.

• ‘Grotesque’ Leverage and Rising Rates Already Causing Damage – SocGen (BBG)

The fear over 10-year U.S. Treasury yields breaking through 3 percent has been a long time coming, according to Societe Generale. “Interest rates are already doing damage, people just haven’t noticed,” Andrew Lapthorne, the firm’s global head of quantitative strategy, said in an interview Tuesday. “Leverage in the U.S. is grotesque for this stage of the cycle. At the moment you’ve got peak leverage at peak prices. It’s not like you have to dig deep to find a problem.” The number-one conversation Societe Generale’s having with clients right now is about the correlation between bonds and equities. But risks to corporate balance sheets is a bigger problem at the moment, particularly in the U.S. and China.

Lapthorne said he worries about volatility in debt because of the impact it can have on the economy, particularly how it weighs on businesses and the job market. Credit markets may get choppier due to triggers like high-profile bankruptcies, such as Toys ‘R’ Us, or if corporate buybacks drop, Lapthorne said. While Credit Suisse anticipates fewer share repurchases this year, they’re an outlier. JPMorgan Chase estimates they’ll rise to a record $800 billion from $530 billion last year. Bank of America said if the current pace continues there may be as much as $850 billion in 2018, while Goldman Sachs sees buybacks becoming “less constructive” in 2019. [..] He has further concerns about the direction of the markets as well. “Instead of the usual market driver of economic growth, this bull market has been driven by valuation growth,” Lapthorne said, adding that confidence in asset prices is deteriorating as volatility has risen.

“..a technical indicator using exponential moving averages of closing price data..”

• ‘Big Bear Market’ For Stocks Appears To Have Begun (MW)

The “big bear market” for stocks that market timer Tom McClellan has been expecting appears to have begun, as Tuesday’s broad selloff turned a key technical indicator down from an already negative position to convey a “promise” of lower lows. McClellan, publisher of the McClellan Market Report, said there could be a pause in the downtrend this week, as his market-timing signals point to a minor top due on Friday. But with his “price oscillator” turning lower following the Dow Jones Industrial Average 425-point drop, and the S&P 500 1.3% slide on Tuesday, he turned bearish for short- and intermediate-term trading styles. He has been bearish for long-term trading styles since Feb. 28.

“I have been looking for a big downturn in late April….We appear to have gotten that downturn now,” McClellan wrote in a note to clients. He said it is possible that the big down move pauses briefly in honor of the minor top signal due Friday, “but it should be a lasting and painful downtrend, heading down toward a bottom due in late August.” His bearishness for all trading styles was a result of the McClellan Price Oscillator, a technical indicator using exponential moving averages of closing price data, turning down after it was already in negative territory, as the chart below shows. “Turning down a Price Oscillator while it is still below zero conveys the promise of a lower closing low on the ensuing move,” McClellan wrote. Since “promise” isn’t the same as a “guarantee,” he said the indication can get revoked if the Price Oscillator turns up right away.

Central bank control is an illusion. Naked emperors.

• Market Is Obsessed With 10-Year Yield, Should Be Watching The 2-Year (CNBC)

The government’s benchmark debt instrument saw its yield pass 3% Tuesday, a four-year high that ostensibly helped to trigger a violent stock market reversal that saw the Dow industrials close lower by about 425 points. The calculus behind fear of the 3% yield seems obvious: With the S&P 500 dividend yield at 1.9%, a risk-free investment like U.S. Treasurys yielding 3% makes more sense in a volatile environment. But that reasoning is weak. The play assumes holding the bond to duration and clipping coupons, and the stock market has never shown inflation-adjusted returns that low over a 10-year period. Absent a major crash and a deep recession it likely won’t over the next decade as well.

The next two years, though? That could be a different story. While everyone on Wall Street is pounding the table over the rising 10-year yield, the 2-year note rose above 2.5% Wednesday, a level it last closed at August 2008, just a month before the financial crisis imploded with the collapse of Lehman Brothers. A risk-free investment with a 2.5% yield over two years? That seems a little more reasonable. Investors who bought the 2-year in mid-2006 would have gotten it at 5%, ahead of a stock market that was about to drop 60%. “As much as every investor knows market timing is very difficult, that’s the sort of case study that resonates just now,” Nick Colas, co-founder of DataTrek Research, said in his daily note Wednesday.

Investors have been testing the waters over the past month, yanking $868 million out of U.S. equity ETFs while pouring $5.2 billion into funds that invest in fixed income with duration of less than three years, Colas said, citing XTF data. The iShares Short Treasury Bond fund, which focuses on fixed income with duration between one and 12 months, alone has pulled in $3.4 billion over the past month, according to FactSet.

This can’t be good. How much longer?

• Deutsche Bank Plans ‘Significant’ Job Cuts After Sharp Drop In Profits (CNBC)

Deutsche Bank posted first-quarter net profits of 120 million euros ($146 million) Thursday, a 79% fall from last year’s figure. The bank announced plans to significantly reduce its workforce through the rest of 2018, particularly in its corporate and investment bank and infrastructure functions. It also aims to scale back operations in bond sales and equities trading, particularly in the United States and Asia.

The net profit number was significantly lower than a Reuters poll prediction of 376 million euros. The Frankfurt-based lender has been under scrutiny from shareholders for posting three consecutive years of losses, including a 497 million euro loss for 2017. Revenues for the quarter were down by 5% on the prior year period at 7 billion euros, pressured by the appreciation of the euro against the dollar and lower corporate and investment bank revenues, which fell 13% year-on-year to 3.8 billion euros. Revenues for all businesses were lower year-on-year.

Oh, good, everyone will drive a truck. These things are 40x your weight, not just 20x.

• Ford Kills Most US Cars (BBG)

Ford Motor is sharpening its knives to cleave another $11.5 billion from spending plans and cut several sedans, including the Fusion and Taurus, from its lineup to more quickly reach an elusive profit target. The automaker expects to save $25.5 billion by 2022, Chief Financial Officer Bob Shanks told reporters Wednesday as Ford reported first-quarter earnings per share and revenue that beat estimates. The company now anticipates reaching an 8 percent profit margin by 2020, two years ahead of schedule. The cuts are aimed at kick-starting a turnaround effort almost one year after Ford’s board ousted its chief executive officer.

New CEO Jim Hackett has been trying to convince investors that betting on a rebound is a worthwhile wager by laying out plans to get rid of slow-selling, low-margin car models and refocusing the company around more lucrative sport utility vehicles and trucks. “We’re going to feed the healthy part of our business and deal decisively with areas that destroy value,” Hackett said on an earnings call Wednesday. “We aren’t just exploring partnerships; we’ve now done them. We aren’t just talking about ideas; we’ve made decisions.” Ford finds itself on a road similar to the route Fiat Chrysler followed to pass Ford in North American profitability. Fiat Chrysler CEO Sergio Marchionne now wants to eclipse General Motors before his retirement in 2019.

“..they have had virtually no role in real governance since the Gipper last nodded in their direction decades ago..”

• Yield Shock On Wall Street, Conservative Default In Washington (Stockman)

[..] capitalist prosperity depends upon keeping the state and its central banking branch at bay and out of the way. And once upon a time that pretty much happened because the conservative party in Washington adhered reasonably well to the pillars of sound money, fiscal rectitude, free markets at home and non-intervention abroad. In the last three decades, however, the GOP has either jettisoned these pillars of capitalist prosperity or relegated them to ritual incantation. Either way, they have had virtually no role in real governance since the Gipper last nodded in their direction decades ago. What has happened, instead, is that the neocons hijacked the GOP and turned it into the party of Empire—the very opposite of Robert Taft’s notion of homeland security and non-intervention.

Likewise, the supply siders spread the insidious lie that deficits don’t matter and that you can grow your way out of unfinanced tax cuts. So, too, the devotees of Alan Greenspan and the Wall Street lobbies buried the storied idea of sound money–supplanting it with the new ideology of monetary central planning and stock market bailouts. Stated differently, the GOP in Washington today is essentially useless because it has abandoned the pillars of prosperity and has become an opportunistic gang of neocons, social cons, tax cons and Wall Street hand maidens. As a result, we now have a financial system that is flying blind toward a monumental monetary/fiscal crack-up.

Makes too much sense.

• Democrats Have a Plan to Save the Post Office – and Kill Payday Lenders (NYMag)

Generally speaking, advancing economic justice is neither cheap nor easy. The Democratic Party has assembled a long list of worthwhile economic reforms — almost all of which, for all their considerable virtues, pose either a significant budgetary cost, or policy-design challenge, or political risk (universal child-care costs money; the federal job guarantee is complicated and untested; and Medicare-for-all is disruptive … and complicated, and costs money). But Kirsten Gillibrand’s new plan to establish a public option for banking is an exception to the rule: By requiring the post office to provide basic financial services, Gillibrand’s bill would significantly mitigate the economic exploitation of America’s most vulnerable people, punish predatory lenders — and increase federal revenue — all without requiring policy wonks to navigate uncharted territory, or even break a sweat.

The stagnation of working-class wages in the U.S. combined with the rising cost of housing, and declining value of welfare benefits have left millions of American families dependent on short-term loans to make ends meet. And payday lenders have mined their financial desperation for hefty profits. A parent with a gap in employment and a hungry child is liable to accept a loan no matter how usurious the interest rate. Thus, the average annualized interest rate on a payday loan is 390%. And the average American household that uses alternative forms of credit earns just $25,500 a year — and spends nearly 10% of that meager salary on interest and fees, according to a 2011 KPMG study.

But the post office — with its economies of scale, and freedom from avaricious shareholders — could offer America’s working class access to short-term credit at a fraction of the present cost. Under the current system, billions of dollars move from the pockets of the poor into the coffers of payday lenders each year. Postal banking could redirect those funds — saving low-income borrowers billions on fees and interest, while plowing the (non-usurious) interest payments they do still make into the post office’s trust fund. According to a 2014 study by the Postal Service Inspector General, if just 10% of the money that working Americans currently spend on high-risk financial products were instead spent on loans from the post office, the agency could offer said loans at 90% less than the current market cost — and gain nearly $9 billion in annual revenue in the process.

This, too, are the Democrats. A deeply troubled party. The power of email lists, reminiscent of Facebook.

• The Democratic Party Is Paying Millions For Hillary Clinton’s Email List (IC)

Heading Into The 2018 midterms, with Democrats hoping to take back the House of Representatives and even make a run at the Senate, the party has spent more than $2 million worth of campaign resources on payments to Hillary Clinton’s new group, Onward Together, according to Federal Election Commission filings and interviews with people familiar with the payments. The Democratic National Committee is paying $1.65 million for access to the email list, voter data, and software produced by Hillary for America during the 2016 presidential campaign, Xochitl Hinojosa, a spokesperson for the DNC, told The Intercept. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has paid more than $700,000 to rent the same email list.

Clinton is legally entitled to rent her list to the party, rather than hand it over as a gift, but in 2015, Barack Obama gave his email list, valued at $1,942,640, to the DNC as an in-kind contribution. In 2013 and 2014, OFA had similarly made in-kind contributions exceeding $3.4 million for uses of the list that cycle. Obama’s list was at one point considered to be the most valuable in politics and raised more than twice as much money for the 2012 Obama campaign as Clinton’s did for hers in 2016. The DNC agreement with the Clinton campaign calls on the debt-ridden organization to fork the money over to an entity of Clinton’s choosing, which wound up being Onward Together, the operation she formed after her campaign ceased to exist.

Former DNC Chair Donna Brazile told The Intercept the deal was the result of “tough negotiations between the Clinton campaign and the DNC. I wanted to bring back our assets. I wanted to get as much from them as they got from us,” she said. “Under the terms I worked out, we had to pay quarterly for items that the DNC acquired. The final payment would have been in February of this year.” The DNC announced in April 2017 that Clinton had turned over her email list and related data and tools as an in-kind contribution to the party, with no suggestion that payments would later be made for it. “[P]utting the DNC on a strong footing is something that she’s been very focused on since the campaign, when she set out to leave the DNC in the black and did so,” said Clinton spokesman Nick Merrill at the time.

The biggest problem is people don’t understand the issue, as illustrated by the original headline, which said universal basic income. That’s not what Finland is doing.

• Finland Denies Claims Basic Income Experiment Has Fallen Flat (Ind.)

Finland has denied widespread claims its basic income experiment has fallen flat. A series of media reports said the Finnish government had decided not to expand its trial – a version of events which has been repudiated by officials. Miska Simanainen, a social affairs official, said the trial, where about 2,000 unemployed people aged 25-58 are being paid a tax-free €560 monthly income with no questions asked, was “proceeding as planned.” The €20m programme, which seeks to reform Finland’s social security system, ends in December, at which point Prime Minister Juha Sipila’s centre-right government will assess initial results.

Reports have said the government social affairs agency has requested up to €70m in extra funding this year, something Mr Simanainen says is false. Finland became the first country in Europe to start the basic income experiment in January 2017. Supporters of basic income argue it would help get unemployed people into temporary jobs, rather than forcing them to remain unemployed to qualify for benefits. They say it would provide a safety net, address insecurities associated with workers not having full-time staff contracts, and help boost mobility in the labour market as people would have a source of income between jobs.

Sheer insanity.

• NATO Think-Tank Expert: Russia Is ‘Comfortable’ Using Nuclear Weapons (RT)

Russia is more willing to run the risk of nuclear war than the West and NATO must pour more money into developing new capabilities to deter Moscow’s nuclear aggression, according to Atlantic Council analysts.
In a lengthy discussion on preparing for nuclear war with Russia, analysts from the neocon think tank lobbied for the US and NATO to spend more money on low-yield nuclear weapons and other methods of deterrence in order to dissuade Russia from using a limited nuke strike in order to “de-escalate” a conflict using the scare factor. The panel argued that Russia has adopted a policy of “escalate to de-escalate” which lowers the bar for nuclear weapons use.

Under this policy, Russia would respond to a large-scale conventional military attack by employing a limited nuclear response in order to deter further aggression against itself. Matthew Kroenig, the deputy director for strategy at the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security, went further by suggesting that Russia is simply “more comfortable using and threatening nuclear weapons” than the West. Russia’s so-called “escalate to de-escalate” policy was even referred to in the latest Nuclear Posture Review from the Trump administration. But while the Atlantic Council and White House are seemingly adamant that Russia is almost looking for excuses to use nuclear weapons, others have argued that the West has actually misunderstood Russia’s policy on nuclear use.

There is weak evidence that Russia has actually dropped its threshold for nuclear use at all. [..] Russia’s 2014 doctrine actually introduced the term “system of non-nuclear deterrence,” which is explained as a focus on preventing aggression “primarily through reliance on conventional (non-nuclear) forces.” It is more than likely that the Atlantic Council and its members are fully aware of this, which leads to the question: are they misleading people on Russia’s intentions in order to lobby for more military spending in Eastern Europe?

We sort of knew that already. But yeah, makes one wonder what Kin is giving up.

• North Korea Nuclear Test Site Has Collapsed Beyond Use – Chinese Study (G.)

North Korea’s main nuclear test site has partially collapsed under the stress of multiple explosions, possibly rendering it unsafe for further testing and leaving it vulnerable to radiation leaks, a study by Chinese geologists has shown. The findings could cast doubt on North Korea’s sincerity in announcing last weekend that it would stop testing nuclear weapons at the site ahead of Friday’s summit between the country’s leader, Kim Jong-un, and the South Korean president, Moon Jae-in. The test site at Punggye-ri, in a mountainous area in North Korea’s north-east, has been the location for all six of the regime’s nuclear tests since 2006.

The findings, by scientists at the University of Science and Technology of China, suggest the partial collapse of the mountain that contains the testing tunnels, as well as the risk of radiation leaks, have potentially rendered the site unusable. The study was published soon after Kim said his country would stop testing nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles, and close down Punggye-ri before his meeting with Moon just south of the countries’ heavily armed border. Nuclear explosions release enormous amounts of heat and energy, and the North’s largest test, in September last year, was believed early on to have rendered the site – a network of tunnels beneath Mount Mantap – unstable.

The Chinese scientists collected collected data for their study following the most powerful of the North’s six nuclear tests, on 3 September. The controlled explosion, which caused an initial magnitude-6.3 tremor, is believed to have triggered four more earthquakes over the following weeks. The study concluded that eight-and-a-half minutes after the test, there was “a near-vertical on-site collapse towards the nuclear test centre”.

Obvious. But he won’t be the only one.

• President Trump Will Personally Review Documents In Cohen Case (ABC)

In a filing Wednesday afternoon, attorneys for President Donald Trump told the federal judge overseeing the investigation of his personal attorney, Michael Cohen, that Trump would, as necessary, personally review documents to ensure that privileged information is not revealed accidentally to the FBI or prosecutors. “…Our client will make himself available, as needed, to aid in our privilege review on his behalf,” wrote attorneys Joanna Hendon, Christopher Dysard and Reed Keefe in their filing. The filing is part of the ongoing effort by Cohen and Trump to get the first crack at reviewing records seized earlier this month from Cohen’s home, hotel and office.

So far, US District Judge Kimba Wood has ruled against Cohen and Trump, though she has said she would be willing to consider their backup request to have an independent third-party review record before prosecutors and agents do. Trump’s attorneys made their submission late Wednesday in advance of a Thursday status meeting in US District Court in Manhattan. The issue of document review arose after the FBI raids and the subsequent public confirmation that Cohen has been under federal investigation for months. The probe is focused both on Cohen’s private business dealings as well as his work for and on behalf of Trump.

May and her government are behind this? And Windrush at the same time?

• UK Businesses Make World-First Pact To Ban Single-Use Plastics (Ind.)

More than 40 major businesses have pledged to eradicate single-use plastics from packaging in an effort to tackle the global pollution crisis. The launch of the UK Plastics Pact comes amid concerns over the impact such waste is having on the environment as it pervades the world’s land, oceans and waterways. With members across major food and non-food brands – including Sainsbury’s, Nestlé and Coca-Cola – the pact’s participants are collectively responsible for more than 80% of the UK’s supermarket plastic packaging. As the first initiative of its kind in the world, it is hoped the pact will serve as a template for other countries and spark a “global movement for change”.

The pact, which was welcomed by government ministers and environmental campaigners, consists of a series of targets that the industry as a whole will aim to meet by 2025. These include the complete elimination of “problematic or unnecessary” single-use plastic packaging by developing new designs and alternative delivery methods. Other targets include all plastic packaging being reusable, recyclable or compostable, and ensuring that at least 70% of packaging that is used actually makes it to recycling or composting facilities. There is also a commitment to ensuring 30% of the content of all plastic packaging comes from recycled sources by the target date.

Contact ourman in Kenya about this: “Yes it happened last year. About 300 factories were shut down, about 6 months notice was given. BUT there is still a black market for low quality black plastic bags amongst smaller vendors in rural areas and small towns. In the major supermarkets plastic has been entirely phased out, though please note that Kenya has a much lower number and density of supermarkets vs Europe. We’re looking at 120/150 major supermarkets country wide and 300-500 mini marts and mostly thousands of smaller kiosks.

Also plastic packaging has not been phased out yet. But they are targeting for the conversion of plastic to paper packaging in products. And also to phase out plastic water bottles if a national recycling scheme is not put in place. They’ve also banned forest logging as the tree cover of the nation is under 6-7%. So we will have to import trees and paper now instead of oil for plastic. [..] There’s been a large number of bans on all sorts of things since last year, we’re in a very weird phase politically. “

• Is The World’s Most Drastic Plastic Bag Ban Working? (G.)

Waterways are clearer, the food chain is less contaminated with plastic – and there are fewer “flying toilets”. A year after Kenya announced the world’s toughest ban on plastic bags, and eight months after it was introduced, the authorities are claiming victory – so much so that other east African nations Uganda, Tanzania, Burundi and South Sudan are considering following suit. But it is equally clear that there have been significant knock-on effects on businesses, consumers and even jobs as a result of removing a once-ubiquitous feature of Kenyan life. “Our streets are generally cleaner which has brought with it a general ‘feel-good’ factor,” said David Ong’are, the enforcement director of the National Environment Management Authority.

“You no longer see carrier bags flying around when its windy. Waterways are less obstructed. Fishermen on the coast and Lake Victoria are seeing few bags entangled in their nets.” Ong’are said abattoirs used to find plastic in the guts of roughly three out of every 10 animals taken to slaughter. This has gone down to one. The government is now conducting a proper analysis to measure the overall effect of the measure. The draconian ban came in on 28 August 2017, threatening up to four years’ imprisonment or fines of $40,000 (£31,000) for anyone producing, selling – or even just carrying – a plastic bag.

Debt Rattle August 18 2017

Aug 182017

August 18, 2017 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 8:53 am Finance Tagged with: bubble, China, corruption, Deutsche, Ice-Nine, neoliberalism, Pence, regression, Spain, Warren 6 Responses »

Edward S. Curtis Slow Bull Dakota Sioux Medicine Man In Prayer 1907

• Never Doubt Regression To The Mean (Rosso)

• The Stock Market Bubble is So Big Even the Fed’s Talking About It (Phoenix)

• Ice-Nine: The Plan To Freeze The Financial System (Rickards)

• Neoliberalism: The Idea That Changed The World (G.)

• So When Will China’s Debt Bubble Finally Blow Up? (WS)

• Charlene Chu Lays Out China’s “Doomsday” Scenario (ZH)

• China’s New Problem: Frenzy Of Consumer Lending Creates Debt Explosion (CNBC)

• ‘Simply Doesn’t Cut It’: Elizabeth Warren Slams Wells Fargo Board Changes (BI)

• Deutsche Bank, Bank of America Settle Agency Bond Rigging Lawsuits (R.)

• Who Is Lobbying Mike Pence And Why? (IBT)

• Mr. President: Close Down More “Advisory Councils” (Rossini)

• Spain Lacks Capacity To Handle Migration Surge – UNHCR (G.)

After a week of senseless violence and rhetoric, we could sure do with a medicine man praying for peace. I know, they say this is what the Fourth Turning looks like. But I don’t have to like it. Seeing some of the pictures of traumatized people in Barcelona I couldn’t help thinking how much they looked like those I’ve seen from Syria and Libya. Senseless violence.

Part of a longer piece on retirement distributions. Very strong graph.

• Never Doubt Regression To The Mean (Rosso)

Since 1877, secular bull years have totaled 80 vs. 52 for bears, which is a 60/40 ratio. Surprised? Bear markets happen more often than investors are led to believe. They usually occur at times of overvaluation which makes recent retirees or those close to retirement at greater risk of experiencing negative or poor future returns. Bad luck or rotten timing. Either way, it’s going to be important to remain cognizant of portfolio distribution rates, place renewed priority on risk management, and adjust spending accordingly perhaps over the next ten years. Those who were proactive to minimize stock and high-yield bond portfolio risk (like several of the writers for Real Investment Advice), and redeployed capital into stocks at 13x earnings in the summer of 2009, helped new retirees at that time meet their retirement objectives. In addition, they have experienced a cyclical tailwind in stocks that has allowed greater distribution rates. Great luck!

Stock market cycles are vast and span decades. Don’t stumble into a Recency Bias trap where you believe current complacent market conditions lay the path to a smooth, high-return future. Markets are mean reverting mechanisms. Cycles indeed change. Usually, markets are more volatile with periods of 5% pullbacks occurring every 3-4 months. As investors, this year we’ve witnessed shallow retracements followed up by buys on the dips. An environment like this fosters overconfidence. Volatility may excite traders and be helpful to those who are seeking lower prices to purchase risk assets. For those in retirement distribution mode, volatility and corrections have potential to place portfolio longevity in jeopardy.

“Remember, we’re talking about the Fed here… a group of people who go above and beyond to ignore risks in order to maintain the status quo…”

• The Stock Market Bubble is So Big Even the Fed’s Talking About It (Phoenix)

The Fed confirmed yesterday that stocks are in a bubble. Lost amidst the usual Fed-speak about inflation and other items were the following nuggets. 1) “Equities” (read: stocks) were the primary reason the Fed discussed financial stability risks. 2) The Fed raised its assessment of financial stability from “notable” to “elevated.” 3) The Fed discussed “stock valuations.” This is simply incredible. Remember, we’re talking about the Fed here… a group of people who go above and beyond to ignore risks in order to maintain the status quo. Put another way, the stock market bubble is now so massive that even THE FED is talking about it. Indeed, the Fed is even openly states that the bubble might cause financial instability (read: a CRASH). It’s not difficult to see what the Fed is talking about. Based on their cyclical adjusted price to earnings ratio (CAPE) stocks are in CLEAR bubble territory.

As you can see, stocks are currently as overpriced as they were at the 1929 peak. Indeed, the only time stocks were MORE expensive was the Tech Bubble: the single largest stock market bubble in history. They say you don’t ring a bell at the top. But what the Fed did yesterday is DARN close. So what happens when the markets wake up to the fact that yet another massive bubble is beginning to burst?

Freeze it before the collapse.

• Ice-Nine: The Plan To Freeze The Financial System (Rickards)

In my book The Road to Ruin, I discuss a phenomenon called “ice-nine.” The name is taken from a novel, Cat’s Cradle, by Kurt Vonnegut. In the novel, a scientist invents a molecule he calls ice-nine, which is like water but with two differences. The melting temperature is 114.4 degrees Fahrenheit (meaning it’s frozen at room temperature), and whenever ice-nine comes in contact with water, the water turns to ice-nine and freezes. The ice-nine is kept in three vials. The plot revolves around the potential release of ice-nine into water, which would eventually freeze the rivers and oceans and end all life on Earth. Cat’s Cradle is darkly comedic, and I highly recommend it. I used ice-nine in my book as a metaphor for financial contagion.

If regulators freeze money market funds in a crisis, depositors will take money from banks. The regulators will then close the banks, but investors will sell stocks and force the exchanges to close and so on. Eventually, the entire financial system will be frozen solid and investors will have no access to their money. Some of my readers were skeptical of this scenario. But I researched it carefully and provided solid evidence that this plan is already in place — it’s just not well understood. But the ice-nine plan is now being put into practice. Consider a recent Reuters article that admitted elites would likely shut down the entire system when the next financial crisis strikes. The article claimed that the EU is considering actions that would temporarily prevent people from withdrawing money from banks to prevent bank runs.

“The desire is to prevent a bank run, so that when a bank is in a critical situation it is not pushed over the edge,” said one source. Very few people are aware of these developments. They get a brief mention in the media, if they get mentioned at all. But people could be in for a shock when they try to get their money out of the bank during the next financial crisis. Think of it as a war on currency or a war on money. Even the skeptics can see how the entire financial system will be frozen solid in the next crisis. The only solution is to have physical gold, silver and bank notes in private storage. The sooner you put your personal ice-nine protection plan in place, the safer you’ll be.

“..the ideal of society as a kind of universal market (and not, for example, a polis, a civil sphere or a kind of family) and of human beings as profit-and-loss calculators (and not bearers of grace, or of inalienable rights and duties)..”

• Neoliberalism: The Idea That Changed The World (G.)

Last summer, researchers at the IMF settled a long and bitter debate over “neoliberalism”: they admitted it exists. Three senior economists at the IMF, an organisation not known for its incaution, published a paper questioning the benefits of neoliberalism. In so doing, they helped put to rest the idea that the word is nothing more than a political slur, or a term without any analytic power. The paper gently called out a “neoliberal agenda” for pushing deregulation on economies around the world, for forcing open national markets to trade and capital, and for demanding that governments shrink themselves via austerity or privatisation. The authors cited statistical evidence for the spread of neoliberal policies since 1980, and their correlation with anaemic growth, boom-and-bust cycles and inequality.

Neoliberalism is an old term, dating back to the 1930s, but it has been revived as a way of describing our current politics – or more precisely, the range of thought allowed by our politics. In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, it was a way of assigning responsibility for the debacle, not to a political party per se, but to an establishment that had conceded its authority to the market. For the Democrats in the US and Labour in the UK, this concession was depicted as a grotesque betrayal of principle. Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, it was said, had abandoned the left’s traditional commitments, especially to workers, in favour of a global financial elite and the self-serving policies that enriched them; and in doing so, had enabled a sickening rise in inequality. Over the past few years, as debates have turned uglier, the word has become a rhetorical weapon, a way for anyone left of centre to incriminate those even an inch to their right. (No wonder centrists say it’s a meaningless insult: they’re the ones most meaningfully insulted by it.)

But “neoliberalism” is more than a gratifyingly righteous jibe. It is also, in its way, a pair of eyeglasses. Peer through the lens of neoliberalism and you see more clearly how the political thinkers most admired by Thatcher and Reagan helped shape the ideal of society as a kind of universal market (and not, for example, a polis, a civil sphere or a kind of family) and of human beings as profit-and-loss calculators (and not bearers of grace, or of inalienable rights and duties). Of course the goal was to weaken the welfare state and any commitment to full employment, and – always – to cut taxes and deregulate. But “neoliberalism” indicates something more than a standard rightwing wish list. It was a way of reordering social reality, and of rethinking our status as individuals.

Still peering through the lens, you see how, no less than the welfare state, the free market is a human invention. You see how pervasively we are now urged to think of ourselves as proprietors of our own talents and initiative, how glibly we are told to compete and adapt. You see the extent to which a language formerly confined to chalkboard simplifications describing commodity markets (competition, perfect information, rational behaviour) has been applied to all of society, until it has invaded the grit of our personal lives, and how the attitude of the salesman has become enmeshed in all modes of self-expression. In short, “neoliberalism” is not simply a name for pro-market policies, or for the compromises with finance capitalism made by failing social democratic parties. It is a name for a premise that, quietly, has come to regulate all we practise and believe: that competition is the only legitimate organising principle for human activity.

I’m still convinced that people will react shocked if China is the first domino. But though Charlene Chu is right that China controls most of its system, its control over Chinese obligations abroad isn’t nearly that strong. Xi knows this, and that’s why Chinese purchases abroad are shrinking. China has become part of the global financial system with monopoly money. And sure, it has dollars and Treasuries, but they’re neither limitless nor limitlessly fungible. Weakest point? Local governments who have borrowed from foreign sources. Or from domestic ones that get their credit from foreigners. Shadow banks.

• So When Will China’s Debt Bubble Finally Blow Up? (WS)

Corporate debt in China has soared to $18 trillion, or 169% of GDP, the largest pile of corporate debt in the world, according to the worried BIS. The OECD has warned about it earlier this year. The New York Fed warned about this debt boom in February and that it could lead to a “financial crisis,” but that authorities have many tools to control it. The IMF regularly warns about China’s corporate debt, broken-record-like, and did so again a few days ago, lambasting the authorities for their reluctance to tamp down on the growth of debt. The “current trajectory,” it said, “could eventually lead to a sharp adjustment.” The Chinese authorities – the government and the central bank, supported by the state-owned megabanks – have allowed some bonds to default, rather than bail them out, to make some kind of theoretical point, and they have been working furiously on a balancing act, tamping down on the credit growth that fuels the economy and simultaneously stimulating the economy with more credit to keep the debt bubble from imploding.

A misstep could create a global mess. “Everyone knows there’s a credit problem in China, but I find that people often forget about the scale; it’s important in global terms,” Charlene Chu told the FT. Back in 2011, when she was still a China banking analyst at Fitch Ratings, she went out on a limb with her radical estimates that there was much more debt than disclosed by the central bank, particularly in the shadow banking system, that banks were concealing risky loans in off-balance-sheet vehicles, and that this soaring opaque debt could have nasty consequences. Her outlandish views at the time have since then become the consensus. And this pile of debt is in much worse shape than officially acknowledged, she says in her latest report, cited by the FT. She’s now with Autonomous Research.

She figured that by the end of 2017, bad debt in China could hit 51 trillion yuan, or $7.6 trillion. Or about 68% of GDP! It would take the bad-debt ratio to an astronomical 34% of all loans, and way above the 5.3% that the authorities are proffering. And the authorities – the government, the central bank, supported by the state-owned banks – are now pulling all levers to keep this under control. “What I’ve gotten a greater appreciation for is how everything is so orchestrated by the authorities,” she said. “The upside is that it creates stability. The downside is that it can create a problem of proportions that people would think is never possible. We’re moving into that territory.”

More Chu. Remarkable how she says “.. the ability to avoid recognizing losses only delays the inevitable day of reckoning as problems fester for longer, and grow larger than in an economy where actors respond purely to market incentives.” Remarkable because that describes America as much as it does China.

• Charlene Chu Lays Out China’s “Doomsday” Scenario (ZH)

The first time we laid out the dire calculations about what is perhaps the biggest mystery inside China’s financial system, namely the total amount of its non-performing loans, by former Fitch analyst Charlene Chu we called it a “neutron bomb” scenario, because unlike virtually every other rosy forecast the most dire of which topped out at around 8%, Chu argued that the amount of bad debt in China was no less than a whopping 21% of total loans. While traditional bank loans are not Chu’s prime focus – she looks at the wider picture, including shadow banking – she says her work suggests that nonperforming loans may be at 20% to 21%, or even higher. The chart below shows just how much of an outlier Chu’s stark forecast was in comparison to her peers, and especially the grotesquely low and completely fabricated official number released by the banks and the government.

Recall that one of the biggest scandals in China in 2014 was the realization (as many had warned previously) that millions of tons of commodities were rehypothecated countless times, and thus “pledged” as collateral to numerous counterparties, and that as a result these same counterparties were unable to make sense of who owns what at one of China’s largest ports, Qingdao. In this context, it is safe to assume that loss given default rates in China are if not 100% (or more, which is impossible in theoretical terms but in practice is quite possible, as another curious side effect of unlimited collateral rehypothecation), then as close to it as possible.

Fast forward to today, when Charlene Chu, described by the FT as “one of the most influential analysts of China’s financial system” is back with a revised estimate that the bad debt in China has now reached a stunning $6.8 trillion above official figures and warns that the government’s ability to enforce stability has allowed underlying problems to go unchecked. [..] So if Chu held the wildly outlier view nearly two years ago that China’s NPLs amount to 21% of total, what is her latest estimate? The number is a doozy: in her latest report, Chu estimates that bad debt in China’s financial system will reach as much as Rmb51 trillion , or $7.6 trillion, by the end of this year, more than five times the value of bank loans officially classified as either non-performing or one notch above.” That estimate implies a bad-debt ratio of 34%, orders of magnitude above the official 5.3% ratio for those two categories at the end of June.

One factor that has foiled countless shorts over the years is that Beijing can simply order state-owned banks to keep lending to a lossmaking zombie company or to a smaller lender that relies on short-term interbank funding to stay liquid, and that’s precisely what has been happening, when looking at the various non-conventional credit pathways in China in recent years, which include Wealth Management Products, Bank Loans to Non-Bank Institutions, Shadow Banking, Repos and Certificates of Deposit.

But Chu said the ability to avoid recognizing losses only delays the inevitable day of reckoning as problems fester for longer, and grow larger than in an economy where actors respond purely to market incentives. That said, the recent spike in corporate bankruptcies indicates that even Beijing is slowly shifting to a more “market” driven stance. “What I’ve gotten a greater appreciation for is how everything is so orchestrated by the authorities,” she said. “The upside is that it creates stability. The downside is that it can create a problem of proportions that people would think is never possible. We’re moving into that territory.” Finally, putting it all in context is the following chart showing the total size of China’s financial sector, which as of the latest quarter has grown to $35 trillion, double the size of the US.

Subtle tactics from Xi. Shift the debt but keep it high. What do you think the odds are that after the Party Congress China will withdraw into itself?

• China’s New Problem: Frenzy Of Consumer Lending Creates Debt Explosion (CNBC)

The Chinese government is moving to tackle high debt levels, but the country is still borrowing more, Deutsche Bank said in a report released Thursday. That’s because short-term consumer debt in China has begun to surge as authorities try to alleviate the high levels of corporate indebtedness. The redistribution comes as Beijing is trying to strike a balance between stability and strength in its economy. Household debt in China is growing “very fast” and has accelerated in the last three to four months, according to Deutsche Bank: “If we focus purely on the consumer lending … then China has been undergoing something akin to a consumer lending frenzy.” According to Deutsche Bank, corporate credit has fallen to 45% of net new credit, down from 65% in the last 10 years. Instead, Beijing is allowing households and governments to borrow more to fund growth, which is targeted for around 6.5% in 2017, said the analysts.

Now, short-term consumer credit is growing 35% year-over-year, and may hit about 40% year-over-year by the end of December at the current trend, Deutsche Bank said. The bank said it isn’t yet clear where exactly the short-term consumer credit is being deployed, although 70 to 80% of that debt has historically been credit card-related. Overall household credit growth in China, the analysts noted, is growing around 24% year-over-year. At the end of the first half of 2017, corporate the debt-to-GDP ratio fell to 165% from the peak of 169% in the first quarter of 2016. That was “more of a ‘stabilization’ than a significant reduction,” Deutsche Bank said, calling it an “explosion” of growth. Meanwhile, household and government debt however rose by 8 to 9% of GDP. “So when viewed in aggregate China is still leveraging up apace,” the Deutsche Bank report concluded.

Maybe somoneone should explain to Warren what the Fed is and does. Or Washington for that matter.

• ‘Simply Doesn’t Cut It’: Elizabeth Warren Slams Wells Fargo Board Changes (BI)

Wells Fargo’s effort to turn the page on consumer fraud scandals is falling short. That’s according to Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren, who has requested the Federal Reserve remove the bank’s board members who served between May 2011 and July 2015 in response to a series of vast consumer fraud scandals. The bank, already in hot water for creating millions of unauthorized accounts, recently admitted to also selling auto insurance without customers’ knowledge. Wells Fargo’s response? It has promoted an ex-Fed board governor, Elizabeth Duke, to chairwoman of the board. Duke, a champion of community banks while at the Fed, became a Wells Fargo director in 2015 and was named vice chair last year after the first round of scandals broke and led to the resignation of then-CEO John Stumpf.

Business Insider contacted Senator Warren to get her reaction. “Letting a few board members retire early and shuffling around current board members simply doesn’t cut it,” Warren said in an email. “The Fed should remove all remaining board members who served during the fake-accounts scandal.” Warren also renewed her call for board members’ removal with a new letter to Fed chairman Janet Yellen dated August 16, and voicing her dissatisfaction at what she sees as central bank inaction. “Instead of taking steps to remove the responsible Wells Fargo Board members, the Federal Reserve has actually sought to reduce their obligations and the obligations of other directors at the country’s biggest banks,” the letter said. In July, Warren repeatedly pressed Fed Chair Janet Yellen on the issue during recent Congressional testimony but Yellen would only say the central bank had the power to remove the directors — not that it had any inclination to do so.

More free rides for bankers. Warren! Oh wait, your own party takes their contributions.

• Deutsche Bank, Bank of America Settle Agency Bond Rigging Lawsuits (R.)

Deutsche Bank and Bank of America agreed to pay a combined $65.5 million to settle investor litigation accusing large banks of rigging the roughly $9 trillion government agency bond market over a decade. Preliminary settlements totaling $48.5 million for Deutsche Bank and $17 million for Bank of America were filed on Thursday with the U.S. District Court in Manhattan, and require a judge’s approval. Both banks denied wrongdoing. The settlements were the first in litigation accusing 10 banks of engaging in a “brazen conspiracy” to rig the market for U.S. dollar-denominated supranational, sub-sovereign and agency (SSA) bonds, court papers show. The investors are led by the Iron Workers Pension Plan of Western Pennsylvania, KBC Asset Management, and the Sheet Metal Workers Pension Plan of Northern California.

They accused banks of communicating by phone, chatrooms and instant messaging to share pricing data and function as a collective “super-desk,” while letting traders coordinate their strategies, to boost profit. This collusion allegedly ran from 2005 to 2015, and forced customers to accept unfair prices on bonds they bought and sold, court papers show. BNP Paribas, Citigroup, Credit Agricole, Credit Suisse, HSBC, Nomura, Royal Bank of Canada and Toronto-Dominion Bank were also sued, and all sought dismissals. U.S. regulators have also examined possible manipulation in the SSA bond market. The Manhattan court is home to a slew of private litigation accusing big banks of conspiring to rig various financial markets, interest rate benchmarks and commodities. Late Wednesday night, another group of investors sued six banks, claiming they rigged the more than $1 trillion stock lending market.

Simply how all of Washington works.

• Who Is Lobbying Mike Pence And Why? (IBT)

Mike Pence has been among the Trump administration’s most prominent voices pressing to replace the Affordable Care Act, repeal post-crisis financial regulations, privatize American infrastructure and promote fossil fuels. Those positions would benefit the industries that have been directly lobbying Pence since he was elected vice president, according to federal documents reviewed by International Business Times. Amid speculation that Pence could mount his own presidential bid — or replace Trump if he leaves office early — the former Indiana governor and U.S. congressman has been directly lobbied by major health care and drug companies, Wall Street firms, oil and gas interests and industry groups interested in shaping a federal infrastructure privatization initiative.

Pence’s office has also been lobbied by his former congressional chief of staff on behalf of insurance, defense contracting and telecommunications companies — and that lobbying revolved around health care policy, defense spending and net neutrality. Pence has enthusiastically backed the policies by the lobbying firms. While other vice presidents have been the target of lobbying in the past, Pence has been viewed as one of the most powerful vice presidents in recent history. He is a longtime politician serving a president with no experience in elected office, and during his vice-presidential selection process, Trump was reportedly offering potential running mates a vast policy portfolio to oversee. Pence also oversaw Trump’s White House transition, which shaped the administration’s personnel decisions and many of its policy proposals.

Companies that have lobbied the vice president have spent tens of millions of dollars in total federal lobbying so far this year. Here is a deeper look at the major industries lobbying him — and what exactly they have been pushing for in their efforts to influence the vice president. Despite his onetime support for expanding Obamacare subsidies in his home state, Pence has reversed course and led the Trump administration’s legislative bid to repeal the Affordable Care Act — just as health insurers have been lobbying him in 2017.

“If you’re one of those Americans who want to see Obamacare repealed and replaced, we literally are days, or maybe just weeks, away from being able to accomplish that historic objective,” he told conservative talk radio host Rush Limbaugh last month. “We believe if they can’t pass this carefully crafted repeal and replace bill — we do those two things simultaneously — we ought to just repeal only and then have enough time built into that legislation to craft replacement legislation.” The Pence-led repeal effort could be a financial boon to health insurers like Blue Cross and Blue Shield, as well as UnitedHealthcare Group — both which have been in direct contact with Pence, according to records reviewed by IBT.

Libertarian view.

• Mr. President: Close Down More “Advisory Councils” (Rossini)

So President Trump closed down his “Manufacturing Council” and no one cheered? What a shame. Why was there a “Manufacturing Council” to begin with? It’s not the job of the president to meddle with our economy. His job description says nothing about benefitting “manufactures” or “scientists” or “Silicon Valley” or anyone else. These “Councils” are breeding grounds for the cronyism that has virtually destroyed the American Dream. If a CEO has the ear of the president, do you think he’s going to “advise” the president to do anything that will hurt his own business? On the other hand, would the CEO be tempted to advise the president to hurt his competitors, both foreign and domestic? Would the CEO advise the president to make it hard for start-ups and entrepreneurs to compete?

Would he advise for subsidies? Strict licensing laws? The president doesn’t need Advisory Councils, Czars, or any other destroyer of our economic liberties. Let the CEO’s be “counciled” themselves by free market prices. Let them deal with economic reality as it is, not massage the president for unconstitutional interventions. Let them stand on their own. Either satisfy consumers profitably, or fold up so that other people can. The president, at the same time, should stop pretending that he can push buttons and pull levers to make the economy run. Nothing could be further from the truth. Government intervention only stifles the economy.

The economy continues to function despite the political intrusions that exist. Fortunately, entrepreneurs are creative enough to always find ways around so-called government “regulations”. There’s always a loophole somewhere. But why make it hard on entrepreneurs to begin with? Just get the heck out of the way! But alas, the government and multi-national corporations are attached at the hip. One scratches the back of the other. Mr. President, close down all the “Advisory Councils,” and keep your hands off the economy.

Spain’s views on this may have changed last night.

• Spain Lacks Capacity To Handle Migration Surge – UNHCR (G.)

Spain lacks the resources and capacity to protect the rising number of refugees and migrants reaching it by sea, the UN refugee agency has said. The warning from UNHCR comes as the Spanish coastguard said it rescued 593 people in a day from 15 small paddle boats, including 35 children and a baby, after they attempted to cross the seven-mile Strait of Gibraltar. The number of refugees and migrants risking the sea journey between Morocco and Spain has been rising sharply, with the one-day figure the largest since August 2014, when about 1,300 people landed on the Spanish coast in a 24-hour period. About 9,300 migrants have arrived in Spain by sea so far this year, while a further 3,500 have made it to two Spanish enclaves in north Africa, Ceuta and Melilla, the EU’s only land borders with Africa.

María Jesús Vega, a spokeswoman for UNHCR Spain, said police were badly under-resourced and there was a lack of interpreters and a shortage of accommodation for the new arrivals. “The state isn’t prepared and there aren’t even the resources and the means to deal with the usual flow of people arriving by sea,” she said. “Given the current rise, we’re seeing an overflow situation when it comes to local authorities trying to cope at arrival points.” Vega said the agency was seeing a very high number of vulnerable people including women, victims of people-trafficking, and children. “What we’re asking is for there to be the right mechanisms in place to ensure people are treated with dignity when they come,” she said.

Debt Rattle July 20 2017

Jul 202017

July 20, 2017 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 8:49 am Finance Tagged with: Australia, Brexit, CIA, coal, Deutsche, mega farm, plastic, Qatar, refugees, single payer, stairs, Syria 4 Responses »

Margaret Bourke-White Breadline, Kentucky 1937

• Trump Ends CIA Arms Support For Anti-Assad Syria Rebels (R.)

• Did the City of London Just Press the Panic Button on Brexit?

• Single Payer Is The Only Real Answer, Says Medicare Architect (IC)

• Deutsche Bank Expects Subpoenas Over Trump-Russia Investigation (G.)

• Asia’s Coal-Fired Power Boom ‘Bankrolled By Foreign Governments And Banks’ (G.)

• When Does a Home Become a Prison? (FAFC)

• Saudi-Led Bloc Drops List Of Demands For Qatar (BBC)

• Toronto Man Builds Park Stairs For $550, Irking City After $65,000 Estimate (CTV)

• US-Style Mega Farms Invade The World (G.)

• Australia Was Colonized By Humans 20,000 Years Before Europe (Ind.)

• Child Refugees Denied Care Amid Suicide And Abuse In Greek Camps (Ind.)

• UK Has Not Taken In Any Child Refugees Under Dubs Scheme This Year (G.)

• The World Has Made More Than 9 Billion Tons of Plastic (CNBC)

• World’s Plastic Waste Could Bury Manhattan 2 Miles Deep (AP)

The CIA will not like this. The press just can’t mention Putin enough. But a good decision.

• Trump Ends CIA Arms Support For Anti-Assad Syria Rebels (R.)

The Trump administration has decided to halt the CIA’s covert program to equip and train certain rebel groups fighting the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, two U.S. officials said, a move sought by Assad ally Russia. The U.S. decision, said one of the officials, is part of an effort by the administration to improve relations with Russia, which along with Iranian-supported groups has largely succeeded in preserving Assad’s government in the six-year-civil war. The CIA program began in 2013 as part of efforts by the administration of then-President Barack Obama to overthrow Assad, but produced little success, said the officials, both of whom are familiar with the program and spoke on the condition of anonymity.

The decision was made with National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster and CIA Director Mike Pompeo after they consulted with lower ranking officials and before Trump’s July 7 meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin at the G-20 summit in Germany. It was not part of U.S.-Russian negotiations on a ceasefire in southwestern Syria, the two officials said. One of the officials said the United States was not making a major concession, given Assad’s grip on power, although not on all of Syria, “but it’s a signal to Putin that the administration wants to improve ties to Russia.” A downside of the CIA program, one of the officials said, is that some armed and trained rebels defected to Islamic State and other radical groups, and some members of the previous administration favored abandoning the program.

Before assuming office in January, Trump suggested he could end support for Free Syrian Army groups and give priority to the fight against Islamic State. A separate effort by the U.S. military effort to train, arm and support other Syrian rebel groups with air strikes and other actions will continue, the officials said.

The real Macron.

• Did the City of London Just Press the Panic Button on Brexit?

Oh the irony: EU capitals are trying to attract the very institutions that caused some of the worst financial scandals of the last ten years.

In a sign of growing desperation, the City of London Corporation, the enigmatic city within the city that serves as the ultimate bastion of privilege in the UK, is now trying to appeal to brute populist sentiment to defend its position as the world’s most important financial center. In a memo to the British Treasury, MPs, and financial institutions, the City’s Brexit envoy to the EU, Jeremy Browne, bemoaned that the French are pushing for the most damaging Brexit possible, even if France doesn’t directly benefit. The memo was duly leaked to one of the UK’s most anti-EU newspapers, The Daily Mail: “Browne’s recent meeting at the Banque de France was the worst he had had “anywhere in the EU”. The French, he said, “are crystal clear about their objectives: the weakening of Britain and the ongoing degradation of the City of London” and plotting to “actively disrupt and destroy” the UK’s financial sector when Britain leaves the EU.

France isn’t the only country aggressively trying to poach business from the City of London; so too are Germany, Spain, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and even Italy. But France differs from the rest in one key aspect, says Browne: it “sees Britain and the City of London as adversaries, not partners.” The recent election as president of Emmanuel Macron, a former investment banker at Rothschild & Cie Banque, has merely intensified this dynamic. Paris has promised to unfurl the red carpet for the City of London’s highest paid bankers by offering low tax rates and bank-friendly legislation, including scrapping a proposed financial transaction tax, while also seeking to grow as a clearing center. Clearing is a huge business for the City of London. The U.K. is estimated to handle 75% of all euro-denominated derivatives transactions, equivalent to around €930 billion of trades per day.

It’s also home to roughly 90% of US dollar domestic interest-rate swaps. The world’s largest clearinghouse for interest rate swaps, LCH, is based there and is majority-owned by London Stock Exchange Group Plc. LCH functions as a middle man collecting collateral and standing between derivatives and swaps traders to prevent a default from spiraling out of control. As Bloomberg reports, the role of clearing houses like LCH in global finance has become far more entrenched since the 2008 Financial Crisis and the inexorable expansion of derivatives trading. For years the French government, together with the European Central Bank, has wanted a piece of the action. Ironically, it was the European Court of Justice (ECJ) — the same court whose jurisdiction the UK government is now determined to elude — that, in 2015, stopped that from happening on the grounds that the ECB cannot discriminate against an EU member. But if the UK leaves the EU, and thus the ECJ’s jurisdiction, that ruling will no longer be applicable.

They had the money but not the interest in the idea,” he lamented, “instead spending a year developing a complex bill that was DOA on [Capitol] Hill.”

• Single Payer Is The Only Real Answer, Says Medicare Architect (IC)

Thanks to a pair of defections from more GOP senators late yesterday, the Republican plan to repeal and replace or simply repeal the Affordable Care Act is dead — for now. But the health care status quo is far from popular, with 57% of Americans telling Gallup pollsters in March that they “personally worry” a “great deal” about health care costs. Many health care activists are now pushing to adopt what is called a “single payer” health care system, where one public health insurance program would cover everyone. The U.S. currently has one federal program like that: Medicare. Expanding it polls very well. One of the activists pushing for such an expansion is Max Fine, someone who is intimately familiar with the program — because he helped create it.

Fine is the last surviving member of President Kennedy’s Medicare Task Force, and he was also President Johnson’s designated debunker against the health insurance industry. Fine, now 91, wrote to The Intercept recently to explain that Medicare was never intended to cover only the elderly population, and that expanding it to everyone was a goal that its architects long campaigned for. “Three years after the enactment of Medicare, in Dec. 1968, a Committee of 100 leading Americans was formed to campaign for single payer National Heath Insurance. The campaign leaders were UAW pres. Walter Reuther, Dr. Michael DeBakey, Nat. Urban League Pres Whitney Young and Mary Lasker, a leader in the formation and funding of NIH,” he wrote.

”The NY Times and other newspapers gave front page play to the announcement of the campaign for ‘Medicare for All’ but the Committee gained even more attention when, shortly before xmas, pres-elect Nixon, emerging from his doctor’s office in San Diego, denounced us as socialists who were trying to create a problem when none existed.” Fine noted that this movement towards single payer has “risen and fallen over the years,” reaching a high point in the early 70s when former Democratic Massachusetts Sen. Ted Kennedy’s bill covering all Americans with government health insurance had 36 co-sponsors. But the Democratic Party decided to go a different direction, turning instead to private insurance to cover Americans.

Fine said he met with former First Lady Hillary Clinton’s health care task force in the early 1990’s, and advised them to incrementally expand Medicare, starting first with children and then lowering the age for the elderly. “They had the money but not the interest in the idea,” he lamented, “instead spending a year developing a complex bill that was DOA on [Capitol] Hill.”

Deutsche already did a review and reported nothing suspicious. Does that make them suspect?

• Deutsche Bank Expects Subpoenas Over Trump-Russia Investigation (G.)

Executives inside Deutsche Bank, Donald Trump’s personal bankers, are expecting that the bank will soon be receiving subpoenas or other requests for information from Robert Mueller, the special counsel who is investigating possible collusion between the Kremlin and the Trump campaign. A person close to the matter who spoke to the Guardian on the condition of anonymity said that Mueller’s team and the bank have already established informal contact in connection to the federal investigation. Deutsche’s relationship with Trump and questions about hundreds of millions in loans have dogged the German bank and the White House for months. They have also been the subject of intense scrutiny among some Democrats on Capitol Hill, who have demanded the bank turn over detailed information about the president’s accounts.

The requests for information from Maxine Waters, the top Democrat on the House financial services committee, have focused on whether any Russian entities may have provided financial guarantees for the loans that were made to the president or his immediate family members. The Guardian reported in February that the bank launched a review of Trump’s account earlier this year in order to gauge whether there were any suspicious connections to Russia and did not discover anything suspicious. Ivanka Trump, the president’s daughter and adviser in the White House; her husband, Jared Kushner, who is also a presidential adviser; and Kushner’s mother, Seryl Stadtmauer, are all clients of Deutsche Bank.

US media outlets have reported that Mueller’s investigation into possible Russian collusion with the Trump campaign will include a close examination of the president’s finances and businesses. While Deutsche Bank did engage in banking transactions with Russian banks as late as 2005, including some loan activity, a person familiar with the matter said the activity was not related to Trump’s accounts or his family.

What a surprise. The same ones that signed on to the Paris Accord, by any chance?

• Asia’s Coal-Fired Power Boom ‘Bankrolled By Foreign Governments And Banks’ (G.)

The much-discussed boom in coal-fired power in south-east Asia is being bankrolled by foreign governments and banks, with the vast majority of projects apparently too risky for the private sector. Environmental analysts at activist group Market Forces examined 22 deals involving 13.1 gigawatts of coal-fired power in Indonesia and found that 91% of the projects had the backing of foreign governments through export credit agencies or development banks. Export credit agencies, which provide subsidised loans to overseas projects to assist export industries in their home countries, were involved in 64% of the deals and provided 45% of the total lending. The majority of the money was coming from Japan and China, with the Japan Bank for International Cooperation (JBIC) involved in five deals and the Export-Import Bank of China (Cexim) involved in seven deals.

All the deals closed between January 2010 and March 2017. The China Development Bank was the biggest development bank lending to the projects, imparting $3bn, with a further $300,000 in development funds coming from Korea’s Korea Development Bank. The lending comes despite the world’s biggest development bank – the World Bank – warning last year that plans to build more coal-fired power plants in Asia would be a “disaster for the planet” and overwhelm the deal forged at Paris to fight climate change. “Right now, several key countries supporting the Paris climate change agreement are actively undermining it by trying to expand the polluting coal-power sector in other countries,” said Julien Vincent, executive director of Market Forces.

The upside down logic of the First American Financial Corporation. They need people to buy and sell, or their business is dead. Your home is a prison if you don’t sell it. But the supply shortage illusion is really gone, guys.

• When Does a Home Become a Prison? (FAFC)

In most markets, the seller, or supplier, makes their decision about adding supply to the market independent of the buyer, or source of demand, and their decision to buy. In the housing market, the seller and the buyer are, in many cases, actually the same economic actor. In order to buy a new home, you have to sell the home you already own. So, in a market with rising prices and strong demand, what’s preventing existing homeowners from putting their homes on the market? The housing market has experienced a long-run decline in mortgage rates from a high of 18% for the 30-year, fixed-rate mortgage in 1981 to a low of almost 3% in 2012. Today, five years later, mortgage rates remain just a stone’s throw away from that historic low point.

This long-run decline in rates encouraged existing homeowners to both move more often and to refinance more often, in many cases refinancing multiple times between each move. It’s widely expected that mortgage rates will rise further. This is more important than we may even realize because the housing market has not experienced a rising rate environment in almost three decades! No longer is there a financial incentive to refinance for most homeowners, and there’s more to consider when moving. Why move when it will cost more each month to borrow the same amount from the bank? A homeowner can re-extend the mortgage term another 30 years to increase the amount one can borrow at the higher rate, but the mortgage has to be paid off at some point.

Hopefully before or soon after retirement. Existing homeowners are increasingly financially imprisoned in their own home by their historically low mortgage rate. It makes choosing a kitchen renovation seem more appealing than moving.” There is one more possibility caused by the fact that the existing-home owner is both seller and buyer. In today’s market, sellers face a prisoner’s dilemma, a situation in which individuals don’t cooperate with each other, even though it is seemingly in their best interest to do so. Consider two existing homeowners. They both want to buy a new house and move, but are unable to communicate with each other. If they both choose to sell, they both benefit because they increase the inventory of homes available, and collectively alleviate the supply shortage.

However, if one chooses to sell and the other doesn’t, the seller must buy a new home in a market with a shortage of supply, bidding wars and escalating prices. Because of this risk, neither homeowner sells (non-cooperation) and neither get what they wanted in the first place – a move to a new, more desirable home. Imagine this scenario playing out across an entire market. If everyone sells there will be plenty of supply. But, the risk of selling when others don’t convinces everyone not to sell and produces the non-cooperative outcome. Rising mortgage rates and the fear of not being able to find something affordable to buy is imprisoning homeowners and causing the inventory shortages that are seen in practically every market across the country. So, what gives in a market short of supply relative to demand? Prices. According to the First American Real House Price Index, the fast pace of house price growth, combined with rising rates, has had a material impact on affordability.

A weird turnaround in an already weird file. Tillerson?

• Saudi-Led Bloc Drops List Of Demands For Qatar (BBC)

The four Arab nations leading a boycott of Qatar are no longer insisting it comply with a list of 13 specific demands they tabled last month. Diplomats from Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Egypt told reporters at the UN they now wanted it to accept six broad principles. These include commitments to combat terrorism and extremism and to end acts of provocation and incitement. There was no immediate comment from Qatar, which denies aiding terrorists. It has refused to agree to any measures that threaten its sovereignty or violate international law, and denounced the “siege” imposed by its neighbours. The restrictions put in place six weeks ago have forced the gas-rich emirate to import food by sea and air to meet the basic needs of its population of 2.7 million.

At a briefing for a group of UN correspondents in New York on Tuesday, diplomats from the four countries said they wanted to resolve the crisis amicably. Saudi permanent representative Abdullah al-Mouallimi said their foreign ministers had agreed the six principles at a meeting in Cairo on 5 July and that they “should be easy for the Qataris to accept”. This latest development does, on the surface, hint at a possible way out of the current standoff between Qatar and its neighbours. But it is unlikely to provide a permanent solution. The problem comes down to how countries choose to interpret “extremism and terrorism”. Qatar has long prided itself on giving voice to alternative views to the edited, government-approved ones aired by its conservative neighbours. Hence one of the reasons why Qatar’s Al Jazeera network has been such a thorn in their sides. However, the charge levelled against Qatar is that those alternative voices include people committed to the overthrow of governments in the region.

Please pay $64.450 to comply with bylaws.

• Toronto Man Builds Park Stairs For $550, Irking City After $65,000 Estimate (CTV)

A Toronto man who spent $550 building a set of stairs in his community park says he has no regrets, despite the city’s insistence that he should have waited for a $65,000 city project to handle the problem. The city is now threatening to tear down the stairs because they were not built to regulation standards. Retired mechanic Adi Astl says he took it upon himself to build the stairs after several neighbours fell down the steep path to a community garden in Tom Riley Park, in Etobicoke, Ont. Astl says his neighbours chipped in on the project, which only ended up costing $550 – a far cry from the $65,000-$150,000 price tag the city had estimated for the job. “I thought they were talking about an escalator,” Astl told CTV News Channel on Wednesday.

Astl says he hired a homeless person to help him and built the eight steps in a matter of hours. Astl’s wife, Gail Rutherford, says the stairs have already been a big help to people who routinely take that route through the park. “I’ve seen so many people fall over that rocky path that was there to begin with,” she said. “It’s a huge improvement over what was there.” Astl says members of his gardening group have been thanking him for taking care of the project, especially after one of them broke her wrist falling down the slope last year. “To me, the safety of people is more important than money,” Astl said. “So if the city is not willing to do it, I have to do it myself.” City bylaw officers have taped off the stairs while officials make a decision on what to do with it. However, Astl has not been charged with any sort of violation.

Mayor John Tory acknowledged that the city estimate sounds “completely out of whack with reality” on Wednesday. However, he says that still doesn’t justify allowing private citizens to bypass city bylaws to build public structures themselves. “I think everyone will understand that it will be more than $550,” he said on Wednesday. “We just can’t have people decide to go out to Home Depot and build a staircase in a park because that’s what they would like to have.”

Result: reisistant superbugs.

• US-Style Mega Farms Invade The World (G.)

Since the days of the wild west frontier, the popular image of American farming has been of cowboys rounding up steers on wide open ranches, to whoops, whips and hollers. Today, the cowboys on their ranches under wide open skies have been replaced by vast sheds, hulking over the plains, housing tens of thousands of animals each, with the noises and smells spreading far beyond their fences. The US has led the world in large-scale farming, pioneering the use of intensive livestock rearing in hog farms, cattle sheds and sheep pens. There are now more than 50,000 facilities in the US classified as concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs), with another quarter of a million industrial-scale facilities below that threshold. Around the world, developing countries in particular were quick to catch up.

Intensive farming of livestock offers many advantages over traditional open ranges, not least economies of cost and scale, more efficient healthcare for the herds and flocks, and ultimately cheaper food. According to the UN, globally CAFOs account for 72% of poultry, 42% of egg, and 55% of pork production. In 2000, there were an estimated 15 billion livestock in the world, according to the Worldwatch Institute. By last year, that had risen to about 24 billion, with the majority of eggs, chicken meat and pork produced on intensive farms. Ranching was never an option in the UK, but most people still expect farms to consist of green fields rather than vast industrial-scale sheds. The reality is an increasing number of livestock are “zero graze”, spending all or almost all of their time indoors in large warehouse-type facilities.

[..] at least 789 megafarms, meeting the US definition of CAFOs, now operate around the UK, with every region of the country hosting several such operations, many of them owned by foreign multinationals. These are the biggest in a wave of intensive farms that has increased by more than a quarter in six years. [..] Emma Slawinski, director of campaigns at Compassion in World Farming, said the problems of mega farms around the world included over-medication, where animals are given antibiotics whether they are needed or not. “Factory-farmed animals are regularly given antibiotics in their feed or water, because of the higher risk of disease when large numbers of animals are kept in these overcrowded conditions. There is strong evidence that this overuse of antibiotics in intensive farming is contributing to antibiotic resistance in human medicine.

How is this new information?

• Australia Was Colonized By Humans 20,000 Years Before Europe (Ind.)

Australia was colonised about 20,000 years before humans first arrived in Europe, according to new research. The discovery of the world’s oldest stone axes with ground edges, ochre used to make “spectacular rock art” and other artefacts in northern Australia pushes back the earliest known presence of humans to 65,000 years ago. Despite the relative closeness of Europe to Africa, where modern humans first evolved about 200,000 to 3000,000 years ago, the first concrete signs of Europeans are about 45,000 years old. In addition to their sophisticated axes, the people who first arrived on Australia’s shores may also have been armed with spears. The objects were found at Madjedbebe within the traditional lands of the Mirarr clan, an area of land that was excluded from the surrounding Kakadu National Park after a lease to mine uranium in the area was granted in 1982.

Representatives of the Mirarr said the research showed the “universal importance” of the area and called for it to receive the “highest level of conservation and protection”. Writing in the journal Nature, the researchers said: “The settlement of Madjedbebe around 65,000 years ago … sets a new minimum age for the human colonisation of Australia and the dispersal of modern humans out of Africa and across south Asia. “The final stages of this journey took place at a time of lower sea level, when northern Australia was cooler and wetter. “Our chronology … extends the period of overlap of modern humans and Homo floresiensis [the hominin species better known as hobbits] in eastern Indonesia to at least 15,000 years and, potentially, with other archaic hominins – such as Homo erectus – in southeast Asia and Australasia.”

In addition to changing the story of our species’ expansion across the globe, the new much older date challenges theories that Australia’s astonishing megafauna – a two-tonne wombat, giant kangaroos that were so big they couldn’t hop and a two-metre-tall bird – were quickly wiped out by humans. “Our chronology places people in Australia more than 20,000 years before continent-wide extinction of the megafauna,” the Nature paper said.

Deterrent is still the favorite approach for Greece as well as the EU. Cowards.

• Child Refugees Denied Care Amid Suicide And Abuse In Greek Camps (Ind.)

Unaccompanied child refugees are being wrongly identified as adults by Greek authorities and denied vital care in squalid camps, a new report has found. Human Rights Watch (HRW) interviewed children as young as 15, who said they had been denied special protections required under international law. The group found Greece’s legal age assessment procedure was not being “followed in practice” on the island of Lesbos, which has been at the epicentre of the Aegean refugee crisis. [..] Under Greek law, the government is supposed to appoint a guardian for each child to represent them in legal proceedings, hear their views and act in their best interests, separating minors into designated areas of “hotspot” processing centres.

The Greek Reception and Identification Service (RIS) is responsible for identifying unaccompanied children and other vulnerable groups, with support from the UN, Frontex border agency and EU, and referring them to social services and information. But HRW said the authority was “failing to meet its responsibilities” and sometimes “arbitrarily” recording ages above those given, sometimes using controversial dental examinations without any other evidence. Those classified as adults are left to fend for themselves at heightened risk of exploitation, trafficking and other abuse, including prostitution, aid workers have warned. “They live in official and unofficial sites with unrelated adult single men; are exposed to inhumane living conditions, including overcrowding, unsanitary conditions, and frequent incidents of violence; and are unable to go to school or otherwise access education,” HRW said.

[..] When there is no space in safe shelters for unaccompanied children, authorities frequently detain them in police stations, immigration detention facilities and asylum processing centres, with 1,149 unaccompanied minors currently awaiting places. The uncertainty and distress provoked by the process is worsening an ongoing mental health crisis in Greek camps, aid workers said, having already warned of increasing rates of suicide and self-harm. [..] Greek officials told HRW that a thorough procedure is followed to establish the ages of asylum claimants [..] The group called on authorities in Greece to bring age assessments in line with international best practice, so proper accommodation, care, education, counselling and legal aid can be given to those who need it.

Scandalous. But at least something UK and EU can agree on: let ’em rot.

• UK Has Not Taken In Any Child Refugees Under Dubs Scheme This Year (G.)

Home Office ministers have tried to deflect cross-party anger as it emerged that not a single extra lone child refugee has been brought to Britain from Europe under the “Dubs amendment” this year. The immigration minister, Brandon Lewis, met accusations that the government was “dragging its feet” by disclosing he will visit Italy and Greece next week to follow up the invitation to refer eligible children to be brought to Britain. But during an urgent Commons question raised by the outgoing Liberal Democrat leader, Tim Farron, he faced cross-party criticism that it was taking too long to process eligible refugee children in Europe to bring them to Britain. Home Office ministers have confirmed in written answers that only 200 children were transferred under Dubs in 2016 after the closure of the Calais camp and 280 local authority places remain to be filled.

The Dubs amendment, known as section 67, was passed in April 2016 amid a campaign to bring 3,000 lone refugee children stuck in camps in Europe to Britain. Ministers initially estimated local authority capacity at 350 but extended it to 480 in April after saying there had been “an administrative error” in the initial figure. Lily Caprani, of Unicef UK, said: “It’s unacceptable that we have seen no children brought under the Dubs scheme this year. As a nation we showed our compassion and our principles when we helped refugee children stranded in Calais, but we were told this was not the end of the story. We are seeing too many children still having to make dangerous journeys to reach safety.”

In the Commons, Farron said it was hard to see the government’s response as anything more than lip service and demanded to know when the “measly commitment” of 480 would be met. “I have visited the camps in Greece and elsewhere – something neither the home secretary nor the prime minister have done. I have met these children who, through no fault of their own, find their lives paused as ministers have chosen to ignore them,” said the Lib Dem leader. “Has the UK government even signed a memorandum of understanding with Greece to get these transfers under way? I know of two young people who signed a consent form to be transferred under Dubs over a year ago. They are still stuck in Greece.”

Bringing carbon to the surface.

• The World Has Made More Than 9 Billion Tons of Plastic (CNBC)

More than 9 billion tons of plastic have been made since the 1950s, and the vast majority of it has been thrown in the trash, says a new study. The paper says it is the first attempt to measure the total amount of plastic produced since the beginning of mass plastic production in the middle of the 20th century. A team of researchers from the University of California, Santa Barbara, the University of Georgia, and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, say that although plastic materials such as Bakelite were in use in the early 20th century, the material’s popularity began to rapidly rise after World War II, making it one of the most commonly used man-made materials. For example, the researchers estimated that the amount of plastic in use now is 30% of all the plastic ever produced.

While that has brought its benefits, such as lower-cost materials or capabilities like water resistance, our love of plastic has also produced a lot of trash. About 7 billion tons of it, by their estimate. And as of 2015, only 9% of the plastic waste produced ended up recycled, and another 12% was incinerated, the researchers found in their report. The remaining 79% has built up in landfills or ended up elsewhere in the environment. The team published their results in the journal Science Advances on Wednesday. To make their estimates, the researchers cobbled together datasets on global plastic production, such as global annual pure polymer (resin) production data from 1950 to 2015, published by the Plastics Europe Market Research Group, and global annual plastic fiber production data from 1970 to 2015 published by The Fiber Year and Tecnon OrbiChem.

Production is not just growing, growth is still accelerating.

• World’s Plastic Waste Could Bury Manhattan 2 Miles Deep (AP)

Industry has made more than 9.1 billion tons of plastic since 1950 and there’s enough left over to bury Manhattan under more than two miles of trash, according to a new cradle-to-grave global study. Plastics don’t break down like other man-made materials, so three-quarters of the stuff ends up as waste in landfills, littered on land and floating in oceans, lakes and rivers, according to the research reported in Wednesday’s journal Science Advances . “At the current rate, we are really heading toward a plastic planet,” said study lead author Roland Geyer, an industrial ecologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “It is something we need to pay attention to.” The plastics boom started after World War II, and now plastics are everywhere. They are used in packaging like plastic bottles and consumer goods like cellphones and refrigerators.

They are in pipes and other construction material. They are in cars and clothing, usually as polyester. Study co-author Jenna Jambeck of the University of Georgia said the world first needs to know how much plastic waste there is worldwide before it can tackle the problem. They calculated that of the 9.1 billion tons made, nearly 7 billion tons are no longer used. Only 9% got recycled and another 12% was incinerated, leaving 5.5 billion tons of plastic waste on land and in water. Using the plastics industry own data, Geyer, Jambeck and Kara Lavender Law found that the amount of plastics made and thrown out is accelerating. In 2015, the world created 448 million tons of plastic — more than twice as much as made in 1998.

Debt Rattle May 18 2017

May 182017

May 18, 2017 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 9:10 am Finance Tagged with: Amazon, Deutsche, F35, Greece, Mueller, refugees, retail, Saudi, terror, Troika, Trump 4 Responses »

Paul Klee Fire at Full Moon 1933

• ‘Bobby Three Sticks’ Mueller to Probe Russia-Trump imbroglio (R.)

• Trump To Announce $350bn Saudi Arabia Arms Deal – One Of Largest Ever (Ind.)

• America’s Reign of Terror: A Nation Reaps What It Sows (Whitehead)

• Investors Supercharge Bet Amazon Will Destroy US Retail (BBG)

• Fed’s Kashkari Says Don’t Use Rate Hikes To Fight Bubbles (R.)

• US Banks Tighten Auto Lending as More Borrowers Fall Into Default (BBG)

• Canadian Officials Say Housing Risks Are Contained (BBG)

• Prosecutor To Label Deutsche Bank An International Criminal Association (BBG)

• Germany Asks US For Classified Briefing On Lockheed’s F-35 Fighter (R.)

• Brazil: Explosive Recordings Implicate President Michel Temer In Bribery (G.)

• Get Ready For The Franco-German Revival (Pol.)

• Greek Parliament Committee Finds Salary, Pension Cuts Unconstitutional (GR)

• Deal On Greece Is Touch And Go (K.)

• Traffickers, Smugglers Exploit Record Rise In Unaccompanied Child Refugees (G.)

The echo chamber expands. It’s ironic to see how everyone praises Mueller’s independence, yet many are sure he will be Trump’s undoing. What flack will he get when he doesn’t do what the MSM demand?

• ‘Bobby Three Sticks’ Mueller to Probe Russia-Trump imbroglio (R.)

Former FBI director and prosecutor Robert Mueller, known for his independence in high-profile government investigations, is taking on a new challenge in the midst of a crisis that threatens the presidency of the United States. Mueller, 72, was named on Wednesday by the Justice Department to probe alleged Russian efforts to sway November’s presidential election in favor of Donald Trump and to investigate whether there was any collusion between Trump’s campaign team and Moscow. President Trump said in a statement there was no collusion between his campaign and “any foreign entity.” Mueller is known by some as “Bobby Three Sticks” because of his full name – Robert Mueller III – a moniker that belies the formal bearing and no-nonsense style of the former Marine Corps officer who was decorated during the Vietnam War.

Democrats and Republicans alike praised his appointment and hailed his integrity and reputation. Mueller was named to the post by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. His investigation will run in parallel to those being carried out by the FBI and the U.S. Congress. It would be difficult to fire Mueller, and past special counsel appointments have shown that the job comes with independence and autonomy. Chicago federal prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald was appointed during the George W. Bush administration in 2003 to a similar role to investigate the leak of the identity of Valerie Plame, an undercover CIA officer whose husband had criticized Bush administration policies. Fitzgerald indicted I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, a top aide to Vice President Dick Cheney. Bush granted Libby clemency from a prison sentence before he left office.

If you want to protest Trump, protest this….

• Trump To Announce $350bn Saudi Arabia Arms Deal – One Of Largest Ever (Ind.)

Donald Trump will use his upcoming Saudi Arabia trip to announce one of the largest arms sales deals in US history – somewhere in the neighbourhood of $98bn to $128bn worth of arms. That could add up to $350bn over ten years. The deal will be what the Washington Post said is a “cornerstone” of the proposal encouraging the Gulf states to form its own alliance like the NATO military alliance, dubbed “Arab Nato.” Nato is comprised of 28 countries including the US. Mr Trump been an outspoken critic of the organisation but after a face-to-face meeting with Nato Secretary General Jens Stollenberg, he said the alliance was “no longer obsolete.” The White House said the president will propose it as a template for an alliance that will fight terrorism and keep Iran in check.

Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman began negotiations on this deal shortly after the 2016 US election when he sent a delegation to Trump Tower to meet with the president’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, who is serving as a senior advisor of sorts to Mr Trump. The idea of an Arab Nato is not new. There was talk in 2015 of a “response force” in Egypt, comprised of approximately 40,000 troops from Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, and a few other Gulf nations. The “response force” would have had a Nato-like command structure, with soldiers paid for by their own countries and the Gulf Cooperation Council made up of wealthy oil economies finance operations and management of the force.

President Barack Obama’s administration brokered more arms sales than any US administration since World War II – estimated at $200bn. They sold Saudi Arabia alone $60bn in arms, which sparked criticism by Democrats concerned with Saudi Arabia’s alleged human rights violations. Mr Trump benefits by bringing about a more “fair” deal; he has claimed several times that Nato is unfair to the US because of the amount of contributions and support provided by the US compared to countries like Germany. If Arab Nato succeeds, the White House official said the US could shift the responsibility for security to those in the region and create jobs at home through the arms sales.

…because that Saudi arms deal is a further expansion of this long-term insanity. Military industrial complex.

• America’s Reign of Terror: A Nation Reaps What It Sows (Whitehead)

Who designed the malware worm that is now wreaking havoc on tens of thousands of computers internationally by hackers demanding a king’s ransom? The US government. Who is the biggest black market buyer and stockpiler of cyberweapons (weaponized malware that can be used to hack into computer systems, spy on citizens, and destabilize vast computer networks)? The US government. What country has one the deadliest arsenals of weapons of mass destruction? The US government. Who is the largest weapons manufacturer and exporter in the world, such that they are literally arming the world? The US government. Which is the only country to ever use a nuclear weapon in wartime? The United States. How did Saddam Hussein build Iraq’s massive arsenal of tanks, planes, missiles, and chemical weapons during the 1980s? With help from the US government.

Who gave Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida “access to a fortune in covert funding and top-level combat weaponry”? The US government. What country has a pattern and practice of entrapment that involves targeting vulnerable individuals, feeding them with the propaganda, know-how and weapons intended to turn them into terrorists, and then arresting them as part of an elaborately orchestrated counterterrorism sting? The US government. Where did ISIS get many of their deadliest weapons, including assault rifles and tanks to anti-missile defenses? From the US government. Which country has a history of secretly testing out dangerous weapons and technologies on its own citizens? The US government. Are you getting the picture yet? The US government isn’t protecting us from terrorism. The US government is creating the terror. It is, in fact, the source of the terror.

Just think about it for a minute: almost every tyranny being perpetrated against the citizenry—purportedly to keep us safe and the nation secure—has come about as a result of some threat manufactured in one way or another by our own government. Cyberwarfare. Terrorism. Bio-chemical attacks. The nuclear arms race. Surveillance. The drug wars. In almost every instance, the US government has in its typical Machiavellian fashion sown the seeds of terror domestically and internationally in order to expand its own totalitarian powers.

Let’s celebrate progress.

• Investors Supercharge Bet Amazon Will Destroy US Retail (BBG)

Investors who think Amazon.com Inc. is about to destroy the retail industry as we know it have figured out a way to supercharge that bet – by buying the online giant’s stock and pairing it with a short position in the SPDR S&P Retail ETF, symbol XRT, a foundering fund that primarily holds bricks-and-mortar stores. “If you are long Amazon, wouldn’t it make sense to be short the stocks Amazon will look to decimate?” said Ihor Dusaniwsky, head of research for S3 Partners. “It’s going long the ‘best of the breed’ and shorting the ‘worst of the breed.’” Traders are building up short positions in anticipation of XRT dropping to $40 or $41, Dusaniwsky said. The fund, which is down more than 5% this year, closed at $41.74 on Tuesday.

XRT’s top holdings include furniture stores, supermarkets and groceries, electronics chains and media streaming, all areas where Amazon is spending heavily, Dusaniwsky said. “If Amazon succeeds, it will be at the expense of companies like Wayfair, Sprouts Farmers Market, Whole Foods, Best Buy and Netflix,” Dusaniwsky said. These five companies make up around 7% of XRT, which also holds $3.37 million of Amazon stock, making it 1.2% to the portfolio. So far Amazon is holding up its end of the bet. The world’s largest online retailer beat profit and revenue estimates in the first quarter and said sales may top projections in second quarter, according to an April 27 statement. The stock’s up 28% this year, as the company continues to add subscribers to its $99-a-year Prime program, locking in loyalty and building a moat against competitors.

Is Kashkari denying the existence of bubbles?

• Fed’s Kashkari Says Don’t Use Rate Hikes To Fight Bubbles (R.)

Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank President Neel Kashkari on Wednesday warned against using interest-rate hikes to address unwanted asset bubbles, saying that bubbles are hard to identify and such hikes would likely do more harm than good. Kashkari is a voting member this year on the U.S. central bank’s policy committee, and in March was the lone dissenter on a Fed vote to raise rates for the third time since the Great Recession. He has previously said he opposed the rate hike because he felt keeping rates low would result in more jobs for Americans who want to work. Some Fed officials have worried that keeping rates too low for too long could create asset bubbles that could set the U.S. economy up for another recession.

But the main reason Fed chair Janet Yellen and others have given for raising rates is not to tamp down bubbles, but to keep a now nearly fully employed economy from going into overdrive. Kashkari’s latest essay argues that keeping a sharp eye out for potential bubbles and using supervisory powers to protect banks from failures are better options than raising rates. “Given the challenges of identifying bubbles with any confidence and the costs of making a policy mistake, I believe the odds of circumstances ever making sense to use monetary policy to try to slow asset prices down are very low,” he wrote. “I won’t say never but a whole lot of evidence would have to line up just right for it to be the prudent course of action.”

Horse. Barn.

• US Banks Tighten Auto Lending as More Borrowers Fall Into Default (BBG)

Lenders are tightening the spigot on new auto loans, making it harder for U.S. consumers with weak credit to buy a car, data from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York show. New car loans for subprime borrowers fell in the first quarter to $25.9 billion, the lowest in two years, according to the New York Fed’s quarterly report on household debt and credit. Drivers with credit scores below 620 now comprise less than 20% of new loans, down from almost 30% a decade ago. Borrowers with the highest credit scores – 760 or more – made up nearly a third of new auto loan originations in the first quarter as lenders target the safer deals. Banks including Fifth Third Bank have been trimming their loan books and cutting back on riskier credit as delinquent auto loan balances surge.

The share of auto debt more than 90 days overdue rose to 3.82% in the first quarter, the highest in four years. While caution may be good for banks’ balance sheets, it doesn’t offer much relief for automakers, who relied on cheap credit to fuel a seven-year stretch of booming sales. Now they’re boosting discounts and cutting production to address swelling inventory on dealer lots. Ford said Wednesday it’s cutting 1,400 jobs in North America and Asia to improve profits as the U.S. auto industry recorded a fourth straight drop in monthly sales in April, after eking out a record year in 2016. Tighter credit “is a big impediment to future strength in auto sales,” said Yelena Shulyatyeva, senior U.S. economist for Bloomberg Intelligence. “A lot of this demand was driven by loose lending standards.”

Not helping.

• Canadian Officials Say Housing Risks Are Contained (BBG)

Canadian government officials delivered a vote of confidence in the country’s housing sector and banking system, telling lawmakers that Vancouver and Toronto’s real estate markets are supported by fundamentals that leave risks well-contained. Senior officials from Canada’s Finance Department testified Wednesday evening to the Senate finance committee, fielding questions about the stability of the housing market, risks posed by high household debt levels in Canada and the recent downgrade of banks by Moody’s Investors Service Inc. The hearing came amid questions about the future of Home Capital and any knock-on effect that a potential failure there could have on Canada’s housing sector, particularly in Vancouver and Toronto.

The core message from the officials was Canada’s market was stable and, despite some risks, policy makers’ measures are taking effect. “We don’t think there’s any systemic risk across the country,” said Phil King, a director at the economic and fiscal policy branch at Finance Canada. “There are specific pockets of concern, which seem to have ameliorated somewhat in the very-near term but we’re keeping a very close eye on those.” Vancouver and Toronto have “very, very strong fundamentals” supporting prices including immigration, strong job creation, strong income gains and high wealth, he said. King described a national housing market with distinct regions — surging Toronto and Vancouver, soft markets in energy-producing regions such as Calgary, and other cities like Montreal and Ottawa where policy makers have “no concerns whatsoever.”

As Goldman Sachs should be for its activities in Greece.

• Prosecutor To Label Deutsche Bank An International Criminal Association (BBG)

Deutsche Bank, on trial in Milan for allegedly helping Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena conceal losses, must face accusations that it was running an international criminal organization at the time. Prosecutors used internal Deutsche Bank documents and emails to persuade a three-judge panel to consider whether there were additional, aggravating circumstances to the charges the German lender already faces related to derivatives transactions. The material included a London trader’s “well done!” message to a banker who is now on trial, evidence seen by Bloomberg shows. Allowing prosecutors to argue that the alleged market manipulation crimes were committed by an organization operating in several countries could lead to higher penalties if they win a conviction.

Giuseppe Iannaccone, a lawyer for Deutsche Bank and some of the defendants, sought to block the move at Tuesday’s hearing, saying there wasn’t a clear connection between the original charge of market manipulation and the alleged aggravating circumstances. “The trial for Deutsche Bank managers becomes more problematic after the judge’s decision,” said Giampiero Biancolella, an attorney specializing in financial crime who isn’t involved in the case. “If proven, the aggravating circumstance may increase the eventual jail sentence for the market manipulation to a maximum of nine years.” The German bank and Nomura went on trial in Milan in December, accused of colluding with Monte Paschi to cover up losses that almost toppled the Italian lender before its current battle for survival. Thirteen former managers of Deutsche Bank, Nomura and Monte Paschi were charged for alleged false accounting and market manipulation.

Deutsche Bank and Nomura are accused of using complex derivative trades to hide losses at the Italian lender, leading to a misrepresentation of its finances between 2008 and 2012. After the deals came to light in a 2013 Bloomberg News report, Monte Paschi restated its accounts and tapped shareholders twice to replenish capital. Deutsche Bank and six current and former managers were indicted in Milan Oct. 1 for allegedly helping falsify the Siena-based lender’s accounts through a deal known as Santorini. The prosecution’s request to label Deutsche Bank an international criminal association hinged on events that occurred in other parts of the globe, including the possible manipulation of an index, which isn’t the subject of charges in the Milan case.

History’s biggest ever financial boondoggle. And nobody dares stop it.

• Germany Asks US For Classified Briefing On Lockheed’s F-35 Fighter (R.)

The German Air Force this month sent the U.S. military a written request for classified data on the Lockheed Martin F-35 fighter jet as it gears up to replace its current fleet of fighter jets from 2025 to 2035. The letter, sent by the Air Force’s planning command and seen by Reuters, makes clear that the German government has not yet authorized a procurement program and is not committed to any particular aircraft to replace its current warplanes. It said the defense ministry would carry out “an in-depth evaluation of market available solutions, including the F-35, later this year,” with a formal “letter of request” to be issued in coming months.

Germany’s interest in the F-35 – the Pentagon’s most advanced warplane and its costliest procurement program – may surprise some given that it is part of the four-nation consortium that developed the fourth-generation Eurofighter Typhoon, which continues to compete for new orders. The Eurofighter is built by Airbus as well as Britain’s BAE Systems and Leonardo of Italy. Germany will need to replace its current fleet of fourth-generation warplanes – Tornadoes in use since 1981 and Eurofighters – between 2025 and 2035. The F-35 is considered a fifth-generation fighter given stealth capabilities that allow it to evade enemy radars.

Berlin’s letter also comes amid growing tensions between the West and Russia over Moscow’s support for separatists in eastern Ukraine, with NATO officials saying that Russian naval activity now exceeds levels seen even during the Cold War. Britain, the Netherlands, Norway, Turkey and Italy – key NATO allies of Germany – are already buying the F-35 fighter jet to replace their current aircraft, and other European countries such as Switzerland, Belgium and Finland are also looking at purchasing the fifth-generation warplane. Germany’s gesture may be aimed at strengthening its hand in negotiations with its European partners over the scale and timing of development of a next generation of European fighters. Any moves to buy a U.S. built warplane could run into political resistance in Germany, which has strong labor unions.

Just turn parliament into a prison building. Most effective solution.

• Brazil: Explosive Recordings Implicate President Michel Temer In Bribery (G.)

Angry crowds and outraged members of Brazil’s congress have demanded the impeachment of President Michel Temer following reports he was secretly recorded discussing hush money pay-offs to a jailed associate. The tapes were presented to prosecutors as part of a plea bargain by Joesley and Wesley Batista, brothers who run the country’s biggest meat-packing firm JBS, according to O Globo newspaper. They are said to contain conversations that incriminate several leading politicians, including the former presidential candidate Aecio Neves and the former finance minister Guido Mantega. Temer is alleged to have talked with Joesley about cash payments to Eduardo Cunha, the former speaker of the House who has been jailed for his role in the sprawling Petrobras corruption scandal.

Cunha is in the same ruling Brazilian Democratic Movement party as Temer and initiated the impeachment of Dilma Rousseff that allowed him to take over the presidency. He has alluded to the many secrets he knows about his former colleagues. In covert recordings made during two conversations in March, Joesley tells Temer he is paying Cunha to keep him quiet, to which the president allegedly replies: “You have to keep it going, OK?” According to Globo, police also have audio and video evidence that Temer’s aide Rocha Loures negotiated bribes worth 500,000 reais (US$160,000) a week for 20 years in return for helping JBS overcome a problem with the fair trade office.

No audio or transcripts were released. The supreme court has refused to comment on the validity of the alleged leak – but the news has enraged the public. Shouts and pot-banging (a traditional form of protest in Latin America) could be heard when the allegations were aired on TV. Crowds also gathered outside the presidential palace chanting “Fora Temer” (Temer out). Two congressmen submitted impeachment motions in the lower house.

Macron falls in line with what Berlin wants as much as Hollande did. Where’s the difference? Merkel and Schäuble like it, because now no-one will dare speak up anymore.

• Get Ready For The Franco-German Revival (Pol.)

With none of the previous three presidents Merkel has sat across from in the past 12 years did the cautious chancellor achieve the deep mutual understanding and political serendipity that powered European integration in the eras of Konrad Adenauer and Charles de Gaulle, Helmut Schmidt and Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, or Helmut Kohl and François Mitterrand. Macron promised to be a “frank, direct and constructive partner” for Berlin. If he can convince Merkel to revive the frequent, unscripted, plain-speaking meetings between French and German leaders of the past, it will be a crucial step toward setting a joint agenda for Europe. July’s joint cabinet session — where both defense and the economy will be on the agenda — will be a first test of the promised Franco-German revival.

Macron has made it clear he intends to use France’s major contribution to European defense and security as a lever to help secure progress in the eurozone. But his influence in Berlin, as he acknowledged, will depend on his ability to break the rigidities in the French labor market and put the country’s young people to work. He will need to overcome deep-seated resistance to eurozone intervention in national budget policies. The last Socialist government was as defiant as its Gaullist predecessors when the European Commission repeatedly criticized France’s excessive deficits, high tax burden on business and employment, and generous welfare and pension systems. But Macron is committed to the right track. Honoring commitments to EU-supervised economic reforms are part of his vision for a more integrated eurozone, he said in Berlin.

[..] When it comes to the eurozone, Germany will have to end its resistance to further risk-sharing to complete the EU’s banking union. And here progress is likely to be difficult. Macron will need Berlin to lift its blockade on common deposit insurance and a joint fiscal backstop for the European bank resolution fund. Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble — who has expressed support for some of Macron’s ideas — will hold both steps hostage at least until after the German general election in September. Schäuble is holding out for a very different form of eurozone governance, in which an inter-governmental (i.e. German-controlled) European Monetary Fund, built on the existing European Stability Mechanism, would impose automatic debt restructuring and an austerity program on any eurozone country that needed assistance.

Can Tsipras impose cuts when they violate his constitution? Can the Troika?

• Greek Parliament Committee Finds Salary, Pension Cuts Unconstitutional (GR)

The Parliamentary Scientific Committee in its new report that accompanies the new omnibus bill expressed concern over the constitutionality of the provisions of Law 4387/2016 that calls for new cuts to pensions and special salaries. According to Professor and former SYRIZA lawmaker Alexis Mitropoulos, the report was posted on the parliament site shortly after midnight on Tuesday. Mitropoulos spoke on Ant1 television on Wednesday saying that, “After the recent Court of Audit decision, and following a long meeting, the committee found that the cuts in special wages, pensions and taxation were found to be unconstitutional.”

The new bill includes deep cuts in pensions and slashes in salaries of army and police personnel, sectors where special salary regulations apply. “The proposed reductions disrupt the balance that must exist between, on the one hand, the pension as a personal asset, which is protected by Article 1 and, on the other, of the public interest,” the report says regarding the pension cuts. As for cuts in special salaries, the report argues that, the cuts “are part of a wider fiscal adjustment program containing a package of measures to revive the Greek economy and consolidate public finances” but their implementation “is a necessary but not sufficient condition for the constitutionality of these cuts.”

A child can tell that this is nonsense:

Growth predicted at “..2.1% this year and 2.5% in 2018, and continuing at a similar pace until 2060(!)..”. While the demanded budget surplus is 3.5% for the next 5 years. Which guarantees the growth predictions won’t be achieved.

• Deal On Greece Is Touch And Go (K.)

A senior eurozone official put on Wednesday the chances of a complete agreement on Greece being reached at this Monday’s Eurogroup meeting at 50%, while many issues remain open and the negotiation battle at this stage is mainly between Berlin and the IMF. The official also reiterated that there will be no tranche disbursement without the IMF agreeing to participate in the Greek program. There are three scenarios on the negotiating table, according to two eurozone officials who took part in last Monday’s Euro Working Group. All three provide for the primary budget surplus to remain at 3.5% of GDP until 2022, showing that this is not negotiable anymore.

The main obstacle to an agreement among Greece’s creditors is that they disagree on the rate of Greek growth in the coming years, a key parameter for the extent of Greek debt easing. The first scenario provides for growth to match the European Commission’s estimates for 2.1% this year and 2.5% in 2018, and continuing at a similar pace until 2060. If there is a primary surplus of 2-2.6% of GDP, then the measures agreed last May will suffice to make the Greek debt sustainable. According to the second scenario, growth will be below even the IMF forecast and will not exceed 1% per year in the long term. That should take the primary surplus down to 1.5% of GDP from 2023, and more measures will be needed to render the debt sustainable. The third scenario is similar to the second, but the growth forecast is slightly higher, at 1.25%.

Forget about hoping Brussels is looking for a solution NOT located in southern Libya. Just imagine what you would do if this was your child.

• Traffickers, Smugglers Exploit Record Rise In Unaccompanied Child Refugees (G.)

A record increase in the number of refugee and migrant children travelling alone has left many exposed to sexual abuse and exploitation at the hands of traffickers and opportunists. At least 300,000 unaccompanied and separated children were recorded in 80 countries in 2015-16, a rise of almost 500% on the 66,000 documented in 2010-2011, according to a Unicef report published on Wednesday. The central Mediterranean passage is one of several migration routes identified as particularly dangerous for children. More than 75% of the 1,600 14- to 17-year-olds who arrived in Italy reported being held against their will or forced to work.

“One child moving alone is one too many and yet, today, there are a staggering number of children doing just that – we as adults are failing to protect them,” said Unicef’s deputy executive director, Justin Forsyth. “Ruthless smugglers and traffickers are exploiting their vulnerability for personal gain, helping children to cross borders, only to sell them into slavery and forced prostitution. It is unconscionable that we are not adequately defending children from these predators.” The sheer number of migrant and refugee arrivals has left states struggling to cope, with children often falling through the cracks.

Border closures, aggressive pushback measures, overcrowded shelters, makeshift camps and heavy-handed authorities have only served to exacerbate the risk of child exploitation, encouraging unaccompanied minors to take highly dangerous routes in a desperate bid to reach their destinations. One 17-year-old girl from Nigeria told Unicef that she was trapped in Libya for three months and sexually assaulted by her smuggler-turned-trafficker as she attempted to travel alone to Italy. “Everything [he] said – that we would be treated well and that we would be safe – it was all wrong. It was a lie,” she said of the man who offered to help her. “He said to me if I didn’t sleep with him, he would not bring me to Europe. He raped me.”

Debt Rattle April 11 2017

Apr 112017

April 11, 2017 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 9:11 am Finance Tagged with: austerity, Canada, carnage, derivatives, Deutsche, Erdogan, Greece, opioids, recession, retail 6 Responses »

Carole Lombard 1934

• 54% Of Canadians Think Home Prices Will Never Fall (BNN)

• Wild Housing Speculation Drives Entire Canadian Economy (WS)

• Third of US Car Owners Can’t Afford Surprise Repairs (UT)

• The Retail Apocalypse’s Terrifying Impact On One Corner Of Wall Street (BI)

• China Is Playing a $9 Trillion Game of Chicken With Savers (BBG)

• Currency-Issuing Governments Never Have To Worry About Bond Markets (Bilbo)

• Recessions Are Never Desirable Events And Are Always Avoidable (Bilbo)

• So Many Triggers (Thomas)

• American Carnage – The New Landscape of Opioid Addiction (Caldwell)

• How Erdogan’s Referendum Gamble Might Backfire (Spiegel)

• Share of Member States in EU GDP (EC)

• Austria FinMin Calls For €1 Billion EU Investment In Greece (R.)

• JP Morgan Report Sees ‘Light At The End Of The Tunnel’ For Greece (Amna)

• Refugee Community Center Set To Open On Lesvos (K.)

Stupefying. “Of those in the younger generation who are already in the housing market, more than four of every five plan to sell..”

• 54% Of Canadians Think Home Prices Will Never Fall (BNN)

More than half of the country believes home prices will never fall, according to a new poll from CIBC. Despite lofty valuations in the Toronto and Vancouver housing markets, 54% of respondents to the CIBC poll say housing prices will rise indefinitely, while only 40% think prices will decline over the course of the next five years. David Madani, senior Canadian economist at Capital Economics, thinks the unbridled optimism is just one more sign the Toronto housing market is in bubble territory. “The fact that the majority of Canadians still think home prices can continue to shoot up is sort of testament to the fact we’re in a full-blown housing bubble,” he said in an interview with BNN. According to the poll, those high prices are keeping homeowners on the sidelines, with 62% of respondents saying they’re reluctant to sell their home, lest they become buyers again.

Home prices in Toronto are up more than 30% over the course of the last year, and prices in Vancouver have risen more than 14%. Those who are looking to sell are largely of the baby boomer cohort, with more than two-thirds of respondents older than 55 saying they plan to downsize to a smaller home or condo. CIBC says boomers are motivated to sell not just due to the ease of maintaining a smaller home, but also as a boost to their retirement savings. What’s less clear is who they’re going to sell their home to: 52% of the millennial generation either don’t believe they’ll ever own a home, or are unsure if home ownership is in their future, according to the CIBC poll. Of those in the younger generation who are already in the housing market, more than four of every five plan to sell, with 63% complaining the mortgage and housing costs are making them cash-poor.

It drives it and will make it crumble. But Justin isn’t listening.

• Wild Housing Speculation Drives Entire Canadian Economy (WS)

Here’s another data point on the Canadian housing bubble, how immense it really is, and how utterly crucial wild housing speculation has become to the Canadian economy. Housing starts surged to 253,720 units in March seasonally adjusted, the highest since September 2007, according to Canada Mortgage & Housing Corp. Of them, 161,000 were multi-family starts of condos and rental units in urban areas. In Toronto, one of the hot beds of Canada’s house price bubble, housing starts jumped by 16,600 units, all of them condos and apartments, defying any expectation of a slowdown. Housing starts are an indication of construction activity, a powerful additive to the local economy with large secondary effects. Housing construction gets fired up by the promise of ever skyrocketing housing prices, and thus big payoffs for developers, lenders, real estate agents, and the entire industry.

National home price data covers up the real drama in certain cities, particularly Vancouver (British Columbia) and Toronto (Ontario), but it does show by how much Canadian housing prices have overshot the already lofty US housing prices. The chart below by Stéfane Marion, Chief Economist at Economics and Strategy, National Bank of Canada, compares US home prices per the Case-Shiller 20-City index to Canadian home prices per the Teranet-National Bank 26-market index. Both indices are based on similar methodologies of comparing pairs of sales of the same home over time. The shaded areas denote recessions in Canada. Note that during the housing crisis in the US, there was only a blip in Canada’s housing market:

How important is real estate and housing construction to the Canadian economy? Hugely important! It accounts for an ever larger proportion of the Canadian economy. For all of Canada, according to data by Statistics Canada, housing construction and real estate activities combined account for 15.5% of GDP, up from 14.7% in 2011. This chart shows housing construction and real estate activities in the largest four provinces as percent of the province’s GDP in 2015, and for Canada overall. StatCan data for 2016 are not yet available. Note British Columbia: 22% of its economy is based on residential construction and real estate activities – due to Canada’s number one housing hot-bed Vancouver:

As I said last week: it seems there’s an article on this theme every week now.

• Third of US Car Owners Can’t Afford Surprise Repairs (UT)

Nearly one-in-three American motorists cannot pay for vehicle repairs without taking on debt, according to a new study from AAA. The study estimates 64 million drivers could not pay out-of-pocket for an average repair bill of $500 to $600. There are about 210 million licensed motorists in the country, according to the U.S. Department of Transportation. About 76% of men said they could afford the expense, while only 62% of women could do the same. “We were a little shocked at the results,” said Michael Calkins, AAA manager of technical services. “That one-third of American drivers couldn’t afford the cost of a $500 auto repair is a little concerning.”

AAA suggests motorists adhere to a scrupulous vehicle maintenance schedule and set aside $50 a month to build a fund for maintenance and unexpected repairs. But some motorists don’t – or can’t. About one-third of U.S. drivers delay or skip recommended car maintenance, Calkins said, a possible lingering repercussion of the 2008 recession. Motorists pay later for putting off vehicle maintenance now, as worn-down parts increase the likelihood of costly roadside breakdowns, Calkins said. A car-care fund can help motorists stick to their maintenance schedules, but for many low-income families, $50 a month is a big ask, said Asley Orr, executive director of Good News Mountaineer Garage, a nonprofit that donates used cars to West Virginians who need transportation to work.

Who owns the stores and malls? Who owns the debt that keeps them going until it doesn’t?

• The Retail Apocalypse’s Terrifying Impact On One Corner Of Wall Street (BI)

One of the biggest waves of retail closures in decades is killing off malls across the US and taking some Wall Street investments with it. Struggling with online competition, huge retailers like Sears, JCPenney, and Macy’s are closing hundreds of stores that typically anchor malls, meaning they occupy the largest spaces at mall entrances and drive most shopper traffic. When a big store shuts down, it triggers a chain reaction that can end with the shopping mall being unable to collect enough rent to cover its debts, forcing it to default. By one measure, as many as a third of the malls in the US are at risk of facing this situation. This has become a nightmare for investors who are expecting to collect on those debts. They own bonds – called commercial mortgage-backed securities, or CMBSs – that are backed by the mall properties’ rents.

If this sounds familiar, that’s because it’s similar to one element of the financial crisis. Back then, mortgage-backed securities, which pooled homeowners’ mortgages into a multitrillion-dollar financial market, were part of the problem. They encouraged risky lending, and together with derivatives on the bonds that were ginned up by Wall Street, they left banks and investors with massive losses that threatened the financial system. Nobody is predicting anything that dire today, but CMBSs, which Morgan Stanley says account for nearly 10% of the $3.6 trillion commercial real-estate mortgage market, work similarly. They pool debt payments from several malls or other commercial properties and then splice them so that investors can buy the segment and take on the kind of risk they want.

What’s happening in the retail market, though, is worse than anyone who invested in the bonds could’ve imagined a few years ago. “Malls are hard to turn around once they go downhill,” said Steve Jellinek, vice president of CMBS analytical services for Morningstar Credit Ratings. As a result, many CMBS investments are getting wiped out, and “retail lending has really taken a beating,” he said. About $48 billion in loans backed by mall properties are at risk of default, according to Morningstar.

This is how the Chinese see Beijing, first as full of hot air (true), and second as capable of making good on any and all losses (not true): “Cracking down on implicit guarantees is just like curbing home prices,” she says. “It’s something that the government needs to say, but it’s not something they will eventually do.”

• China Is Playing a $9 Trillion Game of Chicken With Savers (BBG)

Like many individual investors in China, Yang Mo has no idea what’s in the wealth management products that make up a big chunk of her net worth. She says there’s really no point in finding out. Sure, WMPs invest in all kinds of risky assets, but the government would never let a big one fail, she explains. “It’s not how the Chinese government does things, and it’s not even Chinese culture,” says Yang, a 29-year-old public relations professional in Beijing. Hers is a common refrain in Asia’s largest economy, where savers have poured $9 trillion into WMPs and similar products on the assumption that they’ll get bailed out if the investments sour. Even after news in February that policy makers are drafting rules to make it clear that state guarantees don’t exist, Yang is undaunted.

She says she’ll only withdraw money from WMPs in the unlikely event that they start to suffer losses. “Cracking down on implicit guarantees is just like curbing home prices,” she says. “It’s something that the government needs to say, but it’s not something they will eventually do.” Yang’s steadfast faith in bailouts illustrates the dilemma for authorities as they try to reduce moral hazard and improve the pricing of risk in China’s financial system: It may require a major WMP blowup to shake investors out of their complacency, an event that could wreak havoc on banks that increasingly rely on the products for funding. [..] WMPs – a key part of China’s shadow banking system – are getting squeezed as the nation’s central bank increases interest rates to discourage excessive leverage.

That’s not only putting pressure on products that use borrowed funds to meet their fixed return targets, it’s also weighing on the Chinese bond market, where WMPs allocate the biggest portion of their funds. For as long as they can, banks will make investors whole when WMPs run into trouble because they fear the reputational damage of a failed product, according to Hong. At some point, though, WMP shortfalls may be too large for the banks to cover, forcing policy makers to decide whether they’re willing to allow losses. Intervention is becoming less likely, if the new draft rules are anything to go by. Regulators are working on language that would make clear there are no state guarantees on asset-management products – which include WMPs, trusts, mutual funds and other products – people familiar with the matter said in February.

Snippets from a great and long article by Australian economist Bill Mitchell. Everything they tell you about austerity is a lie.

• Currency-Issuing Governments Never Have To Worry About Bond Markets (Bilbo)

How many times have you heard a politician claim they had to cut government spending and move the fiscal balance to surplus because they had to engender the confidence of the bond markets. Apparently, this narrative alleges that if bond markets are not ‘confident’ (whatever that means) then they will stop begging treasury departments for more debt issues and the government, in question, will run out of money and then pensions will stop being paid and the public service will be sacked and public trains and buses will stop running and before we know it the skies will blacken and collapse on us. The narrative ignores the usual statistics that bid-to-cover ratios are typically high (hence my ‘begging’ terminology) which are supplemented by well documented cases where the bond dealers (including banks etc) do actually beg central banks to stop driving yields down in maturity segments where these characters have pitched their “business model” (read: where they make the most profits).

The facts are exactly the opposite to the neo-liberal pitch. Currency-issuing governments never need to worry about how bond markets ‘feel’. Essentially, the bond markets are irrelevant to the ability of such a government to design and implement its fiscal plans. And, the central bank always can counteract any tendencies that the bond markets might seek to impose where governments do actually issue debt. [..] Nothing a student learns in a mainstream macroeconomics course at university (at any level – and the deception becomes worse the in later years as the student enters graduate school) about the relative powers of governments and bond markets is true. [..] So next time you hear an economist or a politician talk about how bond markets have to be satisfied and they use that as a justification for hacking into public spending (and driving up unemployment and poverty rates) you know they are lying and are frauds.

The bond traders never have to be satisfied. They can be forced to live on crumbs by the central bank if it so chooses. [..] The narrative that asserts that governments have to assuage the sentiments of the bond markets – which is an oft-repeated claim to justify job-destroying and poverty-inducing austerity – is just fake. It is a lie. It is just one of many lies that the elites use to pursue their biased austerity. Biased because they never advocate cutting spending or government support that helps them. They just support cuts that help the most disadvantaged who have little political voice and so can be disregarded. The point is that currency-issuing governments never have to worry about bond markets. And it would be better if the government eliminated the public debt market altogether – then the bond traders would have to do something productive for a living and get off the corporate welfare teat!

More Bill Mitchell.

• Recessions Are Never Desirable Events And Are Always Avoidable (Bilbo)

Bloomberg published an article last week (April 7, 2017) that it should not have published given that the article offers only fake knowledge to its readership. The article in question – Australia’s Delayed Recession Fallout Is Showing Up in Its Jobs Data – carried the sub-title “There may be trouble ahead” and purported to argue that because the Australian government’s fiscal stimulus allowed our nation to avoid a recession in 2009 we now have to ‘pay the piper’ and take our medicine and suffer a recession anyway. The proposition is ridiculous to say the least. The article uses as authority some nonsensical statements from a “business management consultant”, who doesn’t appear to have a very sound grasp of either history or what is actually going on. This is another case of misinformation.

The fact is that the Australian government’s fiscal stimulus in 2008 and 2009 saved the economy from recession. The current slowdown and parlous labour market is not some delayed effect from that. Rather, it is because the Australian government caught the ‘fiscal surplus bug’ obsession, and began a misguided pursuits of surpluses, irrespective of what the external and private domestic sectors were doing. It caused an immediate slowdown and all the virtuous dynamics that were accompanying the stimulus-led growth (for example, fall in household debt and the rise in the household saving ratio) were reversed, as we would expect. Far from being delayed effects, the poor jobs data is because current fiscal policy is too restrictive. Simple solution: expand the discretionary fiscal deficit (preferably with a large-scale public sector job creation strategy).

“..Deutsche is ten times larger than Lehman Brothers..”, ” (90% of Deutsche’s revenue has been from derivative trading, which is what brought down Lehman.)”

• So Many Triggers (Thomas)

Deutsche Bank has announced that it will create more shares, selling them at a 35% discount. Existing shareholders have not been pleased and, in the first four days since the offer was announced, the value of existing shares dropped by 13% as shareholders began dumping them. So why on earth would Germany’s foremost bank do something so rash? Well, in recent years, the bank has been involved in many arbitrations, litigations, and regulatory proceedings as a result of fraudulent activities, including the manipulation of markets. Having been found guilty, they presently owe $7.2 billion to the US Department of Justice and are now facing an additional $10 billion litigation bill. Unfortunately, the bank is already broke and, should Deutsche actually be able to sell the new shares, the $8.6 billion they hope to receive will still not save them from bankruptcy.

Business has also not been so good. They’ve lost nearly $2 billion in the last two years, instituted a hiring freeze, cut bonuses by 80%, and are facing a $2.5 million civil penalty to pay to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission for failure to report transactions and, not surprisingly, have been downgraded. The German government has stated that they will not bail out Deutsche and, indeed, under the EU agreement, they cannot do so. It’s safe to say that Germany’s largest bank will soon go the way of the dodo. For those who don’t live in Europe, this may not seem all that significant. However, Deutsche is the bank that funds the euro system, which they can now no longer do. Further, Deutsche is ten times larger than Lehman Brothers, an American bank that famously went down in 2008, heralding in that year’s economic crash. (90% of Deutsche’s revenue has been from derivative trading, which is what brought down Lehman.)

Upon the collapse of Deutsche Bank, four major US banks would be expected to become insolvent in a matter of days. The ripples would then continue to spread outward into the economic system as a whole. For many years, I’ve made repeated reference to the fact that the Western powers have been headed south economically, repeatedly relying on strategies that would provide short-term gain but would ultimately create long-term pain. They’ve been remarkably consistent and steadfast in this trend and, at this point, Deutsche is merely the latest trigger that may bring down the system.

Chilling.

• American Carnage – The New Landscape of Opioid Addiction (Caldwell)

There have always been drug addicts in need of help, but the scale of the present wave of heroin and opioid abuse is unprecedented. Fifty-two thousand Americans died of overdoses in 2015—about four times as many as died from gun homicides and half again as many as died in car accidents. Pawtucket is a small place, and yet 5,400 addicts are members at Anchor. Six hundred visit every day. Rhode Island is a small place, too. It has just over a million people. One Brown University epidemiologist estimates that 20,000 of them are opioid addicts—2% of the population. Salisbury, Massachusetts (pop. 8,000), was founded in 1638, and the opium crisis is the worst thing that has ever happened to it. The town lost one young person in the decade-long Vietnam War. It has lost fifteen to heroin in the last two years.

Last summer, Huntington, West Virginia (pop. 49,000), saw twenty-eight overdoses in four hours. Episodes like these played a role in the decline in U.S. life expectancy in 2015. The death toll far eclipses those of all previous drug crises. And yet, after five decades of alarm over threats that were small by comparison, politicians and the media have offered only a muted response. A willingness at least to talk about opioid deaths (among other taboo subjects) surely helped Donald Trump win last November’s election. In his inaugural address, President Trump referred to the drug epidemic (among other problems) as “carnage.” Those who call the word an irresponsible exaggeration are wrong.

Jazz musicians knew what heroin was in the 1950s. Other Americans needed to have it explained to them. Even in the 1960s and 1970s, with bourgeois norms and drug enforcement weakening, heroin lost none of its terrifying underworld associations. People weren’t shooting it at Woodstock. Today, with much of the discourse on drug addiction controlled by medical bureaucrats, it is common to speak of addiction as an “equal-opportunity disease” that can “strike anyone.” While this may be true on the pharmacological level, it was until quite recently a sociological falsehood. In fact, most of the country had powerful moral, social, cultural, and legal immunities against heroin and opiate addiction. For 99 percent of the population, it was an adventure that had to be sought out. That has now changed.

America had built up these immunities through hard experience. At the turn of the nineteenth century, scientists isolated morphine, the active ingredient in opium, and in the 1850s the hypodermic needle was invented. They seemed a godsend in Civil War field hospitals, but many soldiers came home addicted. Zealous doctors prescribed opiates to upper-middle-class women for everything from menstrual cramps to “hysteria.” The “acetylization” of morphine led to the development of heroin. Bayer began marketing it as a cough suppressant in 1898, which made matters worse. The tally of wrecked middle-class families and lives was already high by the time Congress passed the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act in 1914, threatening jail for doctors who prescribed opiates to addicts. Americans had had it with heroin. It took almost a century before drug companies could talk them back into using drugs like it.

Referendum on April 16: “..some pollsters see the “no” camp ahead by as much as 10%.”

• How Erdogan’s Referendum Gamble Might Backfire (Spiegel)

Support for the presidential system is crumbling. Erdogan may be giving the impression that the entire country is behind him, with his speeches resembling religious masses. On Sunday a week ago, tens of thousands cheered him on in Ankara. But some pollsters see the “no” camp ahead by as much as 10%. Even previously loyal Erdogan supporters, including party functionaries, don’t understand why the president so desperately wants this referendum. According to polls, one third of AKP voters are fluctuating between yes and no. The new system would concede powers to the president that even the nation’s founder, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, didn’t have.

The president would be able to appoint ministers and 12 of 15 constitutional judges, and he would have the power to dissolve parliament any time he wanted to. The position of prime minister would also be eliminated. Erdogan claims the reform is necessary to secure stability and prevent further coup attempts. But he already has more power than any other politician in recent Turkish history. Campaign posters plasterd with Erdogan’s visage hang everywhere in Bursa. The balconies are decorated with Turkish flags and vehicles drive through the streets blaring AKP election songs. The AKP is trying to create excitement, and that shouldn’t be too difficult here in Bursa. The city is Turkey’s fourth-largest and a higher-than-average share of residents voted for the AKP in the November 2015 parliamentary election.

For a long time, the residents of Bursa were the way Erdogan wanted them to be: hard-working and pious. The city has developed into an industrial center and the government built brand new residential neighborhoods, with shopping malls and mosques. But since the attempted coup, the economy has collapsed and many storefronts now stand empty. Mumcu’s cousin, who runs a textile company, says that his revenue has dropped from €50 million to €2 million in the past year.

Germany and France are half of EU GDP. The rest are mere pawns.

• Share of Member States in EU GDP (EC)

In 2016, the GDp of the European Union (EU) amounted to €14 800 billion (bn) at current prices. Over half of it was generated by three Member States: Germany, the United Kingdom and France. With a GDP worth €3 100bn in 2016, Germany was the leading EU economy, accounting for over a fifth (21.1%) of EU GDP. It was followed by the United Kingdom (16.0%), France (15.0%), Italy (11.3%), Spain (7.5%) and the Netherlands (4.7%). At the opposite end of the scale, eleven Member States had a GDP of less than 1% of the EU total. They were: Malta, Cyprus, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovenia, Croatia, Bulgaria, Luxembourg, Slovakia and Hungary. As regards the 19 Member States which form the euro area, their cumulated GDP stood at €10 700 bn in 2016, meaning that they accounted all together for 72.5% of the EU GDP. Germany (29.2%) and France (20.7%) made up half of the euro area GDP.

Schäuble is shaking his head.

• Austria FinMin Calls For €1 Billion EU Investment In Greece (R.)

The European Union should consider a one-billion-euro special investment programme to spur growth in debt-ridden Greece, Austria’s finance minister told daily Der Standard in an interview published on Monday. Hans Joerg Schelling said Greece would only be able to get back on track and regain access to capital markets if it was able to generate sustainable growth in the mid- and long-term. It was important to help the country participate in a pick-up in growth in the euro zone, he added. There was no immediate comment from Athens which has called for more help and debt relief as it struggles to cope with its financial crisis and attain a budget surplus of 3.5% of economic output, excluding debt servicing outlays next year.

“You must assess whether to start a big investment programme through the European Investment Bank or maybe with the (European bailout fund) ESM… to get an additional boost (for the Greek economy),” the paper quoted Schelling as saying. “I would define a scale of one billion euros.” Schelling, seen as a possible successor to Eurogroup President Jeroen Dijsselbloem, said one project could be an investment in renewable energy to make Greece less dependent on energy imports. The European Investment Bank (EIB) launched a one billion euro credit line to Greek banks in December, mainly to be used for on-lending to small and medium sized companies and firms promoting youth employment.

JP Morgan doesn’t understand the state the Greek economy is in.

• JP Morgan Report Sees ‘Light At The End Of The Tunnel’ For Greece (Amna)

The decision reached by Eurozone finance ministers in Malta concerning Greece increases the chances of a solution for completing the second review of the Greek programme before May 22, according to a report by J. P. Morgan released on Monday. The U.S. banking and financial services giant said the decisions appears to have clarified most of the obstacles that were delaying talks for concluding the review and point to a higher possibility of a good outcome for Greece. J.P. Morgan’s central scenario, to which it gives an 85 pct probability, predicts that the next step will be the return of the institutions’ missions to Greece to finalise the technical details that will support a staff-level agreement (SLA).

If its predictions are correct, the report said, there will be great progress over the next few weeks, while the sequence of events will be the signature of the SLA, passing of the measures agreed by the Greek Parliament and the completion of the review ensuring future disbursements and further details on debt relief measures. As a part of this positive scenario, J.P. Morgan said, it was also expected that Greece will become eligible for inclusion in the ECB’s quantitative easing programme in the summer. “We give an 85 pct probability to this development. This is the most positive result for the Greek bond market and we expect that 10-year Greek bonds will have price/yield rations of about 85 euros/5.5-6 pct with this scenario,” the report says. Even if the worst of the three scenarios it has drawn up should be proved right, J.P. Morgan said that an accident leading to Grexit was extremely unlikely after last Friday’s decisions and that in its medium-term outlook on Greek bonds “the reward for the risk remains attractive.”

Fantastic. The Automatic Earth and its very generous readers play a substantial role in this. Thank you so much for making it possible.

• Refugee Community Center Set To Open On Lesvos (K.)

Just a 10-minute walk from the municipal-run camp of Kara Tepe and a bit over a half-hour from the Moria migrant camp north of Mytilene, the capital of Lesvos, a community center currently under construction on a 1.5-acre site aspires to become a magnet for individuals stranded on the eastern Aegean island by offering a wide range of activities. Run by the Swiss Cross charity, the center, which is set to open in the coming days, was built by migrants with the help of volunteers who arrived here from different parts of Europe. The project is called “One Happy Family.” The facility will provide a coffee shop (complete with nargile), a home cinema, a library and a garden.

The O Allos Anthropos (Fellow Man) group has agreed to provide about 1,000 servings of food [daily]. The entire project will cost 200,000 euros, which includes rent for the first 12 months. “The Swiss are very good at organizing, while the Greeks are good at hospitality, so great things can come out of that mix,” Achilleas Peklaris, a writer and journalist now working for Swiss Cross, told Kathimerini. After doing charity work in Thessaloniki, northern Greece, Swiss Cross moved to Lesvos, prompted by the tragic deaths of Moria camp residents living outdoors in tents in freezing conditions this past winter.

Debt Rattle January 19 2017

Jan 192017

January 19, 2017 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 11:27 am Finance Tagged with: Brexit, Deutsche, elephant, EU, heat, Le Pen, NATO, primates, Steve Keen, Trump 11 Responses »

Photograph: Palani Mohan/Getty Images

• Anxious European Leaders Seek An Early Audience With Trump, Before Putin (AP)

• Hands off EU, Trump; We Don’t Back Ohio Secession: Juncker (R.)

• Jamie Dimon Says Eurozone May Not Survive (BBG)

• In Europe We See Only One Loser From Brexit – And It Won’t Be Us (Quatremer)

• Marine Le Pen Centers Presidential Run on Getting France Out of Eurozone (WSJ)

• By Ripping NATO, Trump Makes Europe Nervous and Arms Trade Happy (BBG)

• Steve Keen Exposes Next Global Economic Shockwaves (FinFeed)

• How Deutsche Bank Made €367 Million Disappear at Monte dei Paschi (BBG)

• Earth Breaks Heat Record In 2016 For Third Year In A Row (AFP)

• ‘A Cat In Hell’s Chance’ (Simms)

• Over Half of World’s Wild Primate Species Face Extinction (G.)

• If you were an elephant … (Foster)

I’m sorry, I’m trying, but I just can’t NOT find this funny. My article earlier today: He’s Just Not That Into You.

• Anxious European Leaders Seek An Early Audience With Trump, Before Putin (AP)

European leaders, anxious over Donald Trump’s unpredictability and kind words for the Kremlin, are scrambling to get face time with the new American president before he can meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin, whose provocations have set the continent on edge. One leader has raised with Trump the prospect of a U.S.-EU summit early this year, and the head of NATO — the powerful military alliance Trump has deemed “obsolete” – is angling for an in-person meeting ahead of Putin as well. British Prime Minister Theresa May is working to arrange a meeting in Washington soon after Friday’s inauguration. For European leaders, a meeting with a new American president is always a sought-after – and usually easy-to-obtain – invitation.

But Trump has repeatedly defied precedent, making them deeply uncertain about their standing once he takes office. Throughout his campaign and in recent interviews, Trump has challenged the viability of the EU and NATO, while praising Putin and staking out positions more in line with Moscow than Brussels. “There are efforts on the side of the Europeans to arrange a meeting with Trump as quickly as possible,” Norbert Roettgen, the head of the German Parliament’s foreign committee and a member of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s party, told AP. In fact, eager to stage an early show of Trans-Atlantic solidarity, Donald Tusk – the former Polish prime minister who heads the EU’s Council of member state governments – invited Trump to meet with the EU early in his administration, according to a EU official.

But a senior Trump adviser essentially rebuffed the offer, telling the AP this week that such a gathering would not be a priority for the incoming president, who wants to focus on meetings with individual countries, not the 28-nation bloc. Trump backs Britain’s exit from the EU, casting the populist, anti-establishment movement as a precursor to his own victory. In a recent joint interview with two European newspapers, Trump said of the EU, “I don’t think it matters much for the United States.” Such rhetoric alone was enough to set off alarm bells in Europe. And Trump’s praise for Putin and promise of closer ties to Moscow have deepened the uncertainty.

“..he was sure no EU state wanted to follow Britain’s example and leave the bloc..”

• Hands off EU, Trump; We Don’t Back Ohio Secession: Juncker (R.)

Donald Trump should lay off talking about the break-up of the European Union, the bloc’s chief executive said on Wednesday, pointing out that Europeans do not push for Ohio to secede from the United States. In pointed remarks on the eve of Trump’s inauguration as U.S. president, Jean-Claude Juncker said the new administration would realize it should not damage transatlantic relations but added it remained unclear what policies Trump would now pursue. Juncker told Germany’s BR television, according to a transcript from the Munich station, that he was sure no EU state wanted to follow Britain’s example and leave the bloc, despite Trump’s forecast this week that others would quit:

“Mr. Trump should also not be indirectly encouraging them to do that,” Juncker said. “We don’t go around calling on Ohio to pull out of the United States.” Juncker, the president of the European Commission, said he had yet to speak to Trump — contrary to what the President-elect said earlier this week. Juncker said Trump had confused him with European Council President Donald Tusk. “Trump spoke to Mr. Tusk and mixed us up,” said Juncker, taking a jab at the American billionaire’s grasp of his new role. “That’s the thing about international politics,” he said. “It’s all in the detail.”

If even Jamie Dimon can understand it…

• Jamie Dimon Says Eurozone May Not Survive (BBG)

The euro region could break up if political leaders don’t get to grips with the discontent that’s spurring support for populist leaders across the continent, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon said. Dimon said he had hoped European Union leaders would examine what caused the U.K. to vote to leave and then make changes. That hasn’t happened, and if nationalist politicians including France’s Marine Le Pen rise to power in elections across the region “the euro zone may not survive,” Dimon, 60, said in a Bloomberg Television interview with John Micklethwait. “What went wrong is going wrong for everybody, not just going wrong for Britain, but in some ways it looks like they’re kind of doubling down,” Dimon said in the interview Wednesday at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos.

Unless leaders address underlying concerns, “you’re going to have the same political things about immigration, the laws of the country, how much power goes to Brussels.” Dimon’s remarks on Europe were unusually pessimistic, coming in a wide-ranging interview in which he also criticized regulations that he said stunt economic growth. But he reiterated optimism for President-elect Donald Trump. Minutes later, Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein also expressed concern about Europe, telling CNBC that leaders are facing a backlash in the midst of a long, complicated process to create an economic bloc. “That’s complicated, that’s very hard to do,” said Blankfein. “It’s not done, and it’s not accomplished. We’re finding the pain of that.” [..] The bottom line is that Europe must become more competitive, Dimon said. “I say this out of respect for the European people, but they’re going to have to change,” he said. “They may be forced by politics, they may be forced by new leadership.”

Journalist Jean Quatremer is Mr. Europe. He’s been called an ‘ayatollah of European federalism’.

• In Europe We See Only One Loser From Brexit – And It Won’t Be Us (Quatremer)

When someone wants the impossible, in French we say that they want “the butter, the money from the butter, and the dairymaid’s smile”. In more vulgar usage we say they want something rather more from the dairymaid than a smile. This is precisely what we can take away from Theresa May’s speech on the “hard Brexit” she wants. It is “hard” only for the other 27 states but “soft” for Britain – because May wants to keep all the benefits of EU membership and concede nothing in return. That is not really a surprise since she had already announced it in October during the Conservative party conference. She even considers that any other kind of agreement would be unacceptable, because it would amount to “punishing” the British.

May is threatening to turn Britain into a tax haven by way of retaliation, if, by some misfortune, the Europeans refuse to bend to the demands of Her Glorious Majesty’s subjects. We might think we are dreaming, but no: it is either arrogance or recklessness (or, more likely, a mixture of the two). Let’s sum up: on the one hand, of course, May would like a clear, “clean break” with the union, which means no longer sitting in its institutions, contributing to the budget or respecting EU law. On the other hand, she does not want the status of some kind of “partial or associate” member, which would imply having to meet EU’s requirements in all kinds of areas.

Thus far, we get it: the UK will be treated like any other third country – Zimbabwe, for instance. That’s clear and “clean”. But after that it gets complicated, at least for a continental mind that lacks the subtleties of reflection of a product of Oxbridge. Because May considers it possible for British companies to retain the greatest possible access to the single market, in particular to negotiate sectoral customs agreements with the union. And that’s where things get interesting. Because customs duty or no, importing goods into a market presupposes compliance with local norms and standards: to be clear, if the British want to export their cars (which are in fact German or Japanese cars) to the continent, they need to respect European laws. That means submitting (I know, what an awful word) to those laws. So in reality, the clear, “clean break” could only concern one part of UK industry – the part that manufactures for the local market.

Le Pen is smartening up. She’s a true contender now.

• Marine Le Pen Centers Presidential Run on Getting France Out of Eurozone (WSJ)

National Front leader Marine Le Pen is seeking to turn May’s presidential election into a referendum on the European Union by detailing a strategy to pull France from the bloc and its single currency if she wins. She last ran in 2012 with an initial promise of a sharp and sudden break from the euro, but this time Ms. Le Pen has sought broader support from a splintered French electorate. She says she would organize an orderly exit rather than crashing out with unpredictable consequences. If elected, she and top National Front officials say, her administration will spend its first six months negotiating the creation, along with other disappointed euro nations, of a basket of shadow European currencies. A newly reinstated franc, she says, would eventually be pegged to that basket, replacing the euro.

Ms. Le Pen says other countries struggling to meet European rules would be willing to enter into talks on pulling the EU apart. The threat of having to leave the euro, she says, has been used to blackmail Greece and other Southern European countries into implementing austerity programs their people reject. “The euro has not been used as a currency, but as a weapon—a knife stuck in the ribs of a country to force it to go where the people don’t want to go,” Ms. Le Pen said this month. “Do you think we accept living under this threat, this tutelage? It’s absolutely out of the question.”

[..] An attempt by France, the eurozone’s second-largest economy, to pull out would be far more challenging than Brexit, which doesn’t touch on currency questions. A “Frexit” would likely unleash chaos across the currency union and undermine the broader EU in a way Britain’s departure wouldn’t. No country has attempted to leave the euro, and French polls show that while people want to claw back control from Brussels, a majority wouldn’t vote to leave the currency. The complications of an exit weren’t as clear to Ms. Le Pen in 2012, when she garnered only 17.9% of the presidential vote with her push for a clean break with the euro. “We set off on the idea in 2012 of an immediate exit, slamming the door,” said Jean-Richard Sulzer, a senior economic adviser to Ms. Le Pen. “Things were said too quickly, but this time Marine is much more prudent.”

Yeah, why not blame Trump for that too.

• By Ripping NATO, Trump Makes Europe Nervous and Arms Trade Happy (BBG)

Donald Trump is right to say America’s NATO allies aren’t paying their fair share. But, to the delight of the arms industry, that may be changing. Trump himself is the change-maker. He reaffirmed his skepticism about the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and his readiness to make deals with Russia, in European media interviews published last weekend. Trump isn’t famous for his policy consistency, but those positions have held fairly steady – leaving European leaders wondering whether they can still rely on the American security umbrella. “Let’s not fool ourselves,” German Chancellor Angela Merkel said last week. “There is no infinite guarantee.”

So Merkel’s Germany, and many other European nations, are boosting military budgets. The plans predate Trump, and under NATO rules they should’ve been carried out long ago. The alliance expects its members to spend 2% of GDP on defense. But it’s no secret that most of them don’t. The shortfall added up to about $121 billion last year at 2010 prices, according to Bloomberg calculations based on NATO country estimates.

Since Trump is promising to increase America’s already enormous military budget too, the prospect of a European arms-shopping spree is a win-win for suppliers. Investors have noticed: From Raytheon to Lockheed Martin to Thales, defense contractors have hit all-time highs since Trump’s election. “This is the best market for defense in many years, across the board,” said Richard Aboulafia, an aerospace analyst with the Teal Group in Fairfax, Virginia. NATO was established after World War II to protect western democracies against the Soviet Union. A key tenet is that an attack on any alliance member is considered an attack on all. And that’s what Trump has questioned. If Russia moved against one of NATO’s Baltic members, Trump told the New York Times in July, he’d come to their aid only after reviewing whether they have “fulfilled their obligations to us.”

Brilliant! Please don’t miss this!

It’s just that I thought Steve made his own Melania doll (no kidding.) And then she started talking.

• Steve Keen Exposes Next Global Economic Shockwaves (FinFeed)

Steve, who is Trump going to be pouring drinks for, as in economic growth and benefits, in 2017?

Steve Keen: He is trying to pour it just for his own economy. And this is going to be the dramatic challenge he faces. Because he is someone who actually knows a lot about money and banks and debt, having used it extensively in his own professional career.

Lelde Smits: And succeeded and failed and hopefully learnt from the failures.

Steve Keen: He’s turned failure into success in many, many ways, and let’s not go there in terms of how beneficial that was for his various suppliers but he understands going bankrupt, he understand re-organisation, he understands finance.

Lelde Smits: So where is this liquid in 2017?

Steve Keen: He’s going to realise at some point he owns his own bank now. Because he’s running the country he is going to spend.

Lelde Smits: So we have the Federal Reserve right?

Steve Keen: The Federal Reserve is there and can top him up as much as it likes.

Lelde Smits: So when does this stop Steve? That’s the magic question.

Steve Keen: It never has to stop. He’s going to enable the American economy to spend dramatically. Taxation is going to be cut. There will be an increase in government spending. There will be a large deficit coming out of that. So the government is going to be creating a lot of money and running a lot of infrastructure projects and so on. There are 4 million Americans who aren’t employed now who were employed in 2000. They are people who are going to get jobs in construction and start spending domestically and so on. And Trump is going to see that as boosting up the American economy. It’s all about Buy America, Made in America and so on.

How different do we think this is from what happened with Goldman and Greece? How to hide losses 101.

• How Deutsche Bank Made €367 Million Disappear at Monte dei Paschi (BBG)

On Dec. 1, 2008, most of the world’s banks were still panicking through the financial crisis. Lehman Brothers had collapsed. Merrill Lynch had been sold. Citigroup and others had required multibillion-dollar bailouts to survive. But not every institution appeared to be in free fall. That afternoon, at the London outpost of Deutsche Bank, the stolid-seeming, €2 trillion German powerhouse, a group of financiers met to consider a proposal from a team led by a trim, 40-year-old banker named Michele Faissola. The scion of an Italian banking family, Faissola was the head of Deutsche’s global rates unit, a division that created and sold financial instruments tied to interest rates. He’d been studying the problems of one of Deutsche’s clients, Italy’s Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena, which, as the crisis raged, was down €367 million ($462 million at the time) on a single investment.

Losing that much money was bad; having to include it in the bank’s yearend report to the public, as required by Italian law, was arguably much worse. Monte dei Paschi was the world’s oldest bank. It had been operating since 1472 [..] . If investors were to find out the extent of its losses in the 2008 credit crisis, the consequences would be unpredictable and grave: a run on the bank, a government takeover, or worse. At the Deutsche meeting, Faissola’s team said it had come up with a miraculous solution: a new trade that would make Paschi’s loss disappear. The bankers in the room had seen some financial sleight of hand in their day, but the maneuver that Faissola’s staffers proposed was audacious.

They described a simple trade in two parts. For one half of the deal, Paschi would make a sure-thing, moneymaking bet with Deutsche Bank and use those winnings to extinguish its 2008 trading losses. Of course, Deutsche doesn’t give away money for free, so for the second half of the deal, the Italians would make a bet that was sure to lose. But while the first transaction was immediate, the second would play out slowly, over many years. No sign of the €367 million sinkhole would need to show up when Paschi compiled its yearend financial reports.

New records set in 2005, 2010, 2014, 2015 and 2016.

• Earth Breaks Heat Record In 2016 For Third Year In A Row (AFP)

Last year, the Earth sweltered under the hottest temperatures in modern times for the third year in a row, US scientists said Wednesday, raising new concerns about the quickening pace of climate change. Temperatures spiked to new national highs in parts of India, Kuwait and Iran, while sea ice melted faster than ever in the fragile Arctic, said the report by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Taking a global average of the land and sea surface temperatures for the entire year, NOAA found the data for “2016 was the highest since record keeping began in 1880,” said the announcement. The global average temperature last year was 1.69 Fahrenheit (0.94 Celsius) above the 20th century average, and 0.07 degrees F (0.04 C) warmer than in 2015, the last record-setting year, according to NOAA.

This was “not a huge margin to set a new record but it is larger than the typical margin,” Deke Arndt, chief of NOAA global climate monitoring, said on a conference call with reporters. A separate analysis by the US space agency NASA also found that 2016 was the hottest on record. The World Meteorological Organization in Geneva confirmed the US findings, and noted that atmospheric concentrations of both carbon dioxide and methane reached new highs. The main reason for the rise is the burning of fossil fuels like oil and gas, which send carbon dioxide, methane and other pollutants known as greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere and warm the planet. The mounting toll of industrialization on the Earth’s natural balance is increasingly apparent in the record books of recent decades. “Since the start of the 21st century, the annual global temperature record has been broken five times (2005, 2010, 2014, 2015 and 2016),” said NOAA.

Denial is a river in the Arctic.

• ‘A Cat In Hell’s Chance’ (Simms)

What’s so special about 2C? The simple answer is that it is a target that could be politically agreed on the international stage. It was first suggested in 1975 by the environmental economist William Nordhaus as an upper threshold beyond which we would arrive at a climate unrecognisable to humans. In 1990, the Stockholm Environment Institute recommended 2C as the maximum that should be tolerated, but noted: “Temperature increases beyond 1C may elicit rapid, unpredictable and non-linear responses that could lead to extensive ecosystem damage.” To date, temperatures have risen by almost 1C since 1880. The effects of this warming are already being observed in melting ice, ocean levels rising, worse heat waves and other extreme weather events.

There are negative impacts on farming, the disruption of plant and animal species on land and in the sea, extinctions, the disturbance of water supplies and food production and increased vulnerability, especially among people in poverty in low-income countries. But effects are global. So 2C was never seen as necessarily safe, just a guardrail between dangerous and very dangerous change. To get a sense of what a 2C shift can do, just look in Earth’s rear-view mirror. When the planet was 2C colder than during the industrial revolution, we were in the grip of an ice age and a mile-thick North American ice sheet reached as far south as New York. The same warming again will intensify and accelerate human-driven changes already under way and has been described by James Hansen, one of the first scientists to call global attention to climate change, as a “prescription for long-term disaster”, including an ice-free Arctic.

Nevertheless, in 1996, a European Council of environment ministers, that included a young Angela Merkel, adopted 2C as a target for the EU. International negotiators agreed the same in 2010 in Cancun. It was a commitment repeated in the Paris Climate Accord of 2015 where, pushed by a new group of countries called the Climate Vulnerable Forum, ambitions went one step further, agreeing to hold temperature rises to “well below 2C above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase even further to 1.5C”.

I don’t know how much longer I can witness this. At what point do we set up a private army?

“The industries at work in tropical forest areas are expected to be served by an extra 25 million km of roads by 2050..”

• Over Half of World’s Wild Primate Species Face Extinction (G.)

Top row l-r: brown-headed spider monkey, chimpanzee, Western gorilla; Bottom row l-r: Bornean orangutan, Siau Island tarsier, ring-tailed lemur. Composite: Alamy and Getty Images

More than half of the world’s apes, monkeys, lemurs and lorises are now threatened with extinction as agriculture and industrial activities destroy forest habitats and the animals’ populations are hit by hunting and trade. In the most bleak assessment of primates to date, conservationists found that 60% of the wild species are on course to die out, with three quarters already in steady decline. The report casts doubt on the future of about 300 primate species, including gorillas, chimps, gibbons, marmosets, tarsiers, lemurs and lorises. Anthony Rylands, a senior research scientist at Conservation International who helped to compile the report, said he was “horrified” at the grim picture revealed in the review which drew on the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) red list, peer-reviewed science reports and UN databases.

“The scale of this is massive,” Rylands told the Guardian. “Considering the large number of species currently threatened and experiencing population declines, the world will soon be facing a major extinction event if effective action is not implemented immediately,” he writes in the journal Science Advances, with colleagues at the University of Illinois and the National Autonomous University of Mexico. The most dramatic impact on primates has come from agricultural growth. From 1990 to 2010 it has claimed 1.5 million square kilometres of primate habitats, an area three times the size of France. In Sumatra and Borneo, the destruction of forests for oil palm plantations has driven severe declines in orangutan populations. In China, the expansion of rubber plantations has led to the near extinction of the northern white-cheeked crested gibbon and the Hainan gibbon, of which only about 30 or animals survive.

More rubber plantations in India have hit the Bengal slow loris, the western hoolock gibbon and Phayre’s leaf monkey. Primates are spread throughout 90 countries, but two thirds of the species live in just four: Brazil, Madagascar, Indonesia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). In Madagascar, 87% of primate species face extinction, along with 73% in Asia, the report states. It adds that humans have “one last opportunity” to reduce or remove the threats facing the animals, to build conservation efforts, and raise worldwide awareness of their predicament. The market for tropical timber has driven up industrial logging and damaged forest areas in Asia, Africa and the neotropics. Mining for minerals and diamonds have also taken a toll. On Dinagat island in the Philippines, gold, nickel and copper mining endanger the Philippine tarsier. In the DRC, hunters working around the tin, gold and diamond mine industry are the greatest threat to the region’s Grauer’s gorilla. The industries at work in tropical forest areas are expected to be served by an extra 25 million km of roads by 2050, further fragmenting the primates’ habitats.

If you were an elephant … You would still feel love, hurt and grief.

“Perhaps one of the reasons we’re so keen to deny non-human creatures minds, consciousness and personhood is that, if they’re people, they’re embarrassingly better people than we are. They build better communities; they live at peace with themselves and aren’t, unlike us, actively psychopathic towards other species. ”

• If you were an elephant … (Foster)

If you were an elephant living wild in a western city, you’d be confused and disgusted. You’d have one two-fingered hand swinging from your face – a hand as sensitive as tumescent genitals, but which could smash a wall or pick a cherry. With that hand you’d explore your best friends’ mouths, just for the sake of friendship. With that hand you’d smell water miles away and the flowers at your feet. You’d sift it all, triaging. Category 1: immediate danger. Category 2: potential threat. Category 3: food and water. Category 4: weather forecasts – short and long range. Category 5: pleasure. Grumbles from trucks and cabs would shudder through the toxic ground, tickle the lamellar corpuscles in your feet and ricochet up your bones. You’d hear with your feet, and your femurs would be microphones.

As you walked 10 miles for your breakfast you’d chatter with your friends in 10 octaves. A nearby human would throb like a bodhran as subsonic waves bounced around her chest. Even if it swayed with grass instead of being covered in concrete and dog shit, the city would be far, far too small for you. You’d feel the ring roads like a corset. You’d smell succulent fields outside, and be wistful. But you’d make the most of what you had. You’d follow a labyrinth of old roads, relying on the wisdom of long-dead elephants, now passed down to your matriarch. You’d have the happiest kind of political system, run by wise old women, appointed for their knowledge of the world and their judgment, uninterested in hierarchy for hierarchy’s sake, and seeking the greatest good for the greatest number.

No room here for the infantile phallocentric Nietzscheanism that is destroying modern human culture. If you were a boy you’d be on the margins, drifting between family groups (but never allowed to disrupt them) or shacked up with your bachelor pals in the elephant equivalent of an unswept bedsit (though usually your behaviour would be gentler, more convivial and more urbane than cohabiting human males). Your function would be to inseminate, and that’s all. Government would be the business of the females. You’d be a communitarian. Relationality would be everything. It’s not that you couldn’t survive alone, although there would certainly be a survival benefit from being a member of a community, just as humans live longer if they are plugged into a church, a mosque or a bowling club.

Yes, at some level your altruism might be reciprocal altruism, where you scratch my back if I scratch yours, or kin selection, where you are somehow persuaded to sacrifice yourself if your death or disadvantage will preserve a gene in a sufficiently closely related gene-bearer. But at a much more obvious and important level you’d be relational – joyously shouldering the duties that come with community – because it made you happy. Why do elephants seek out other elephants? Not primarily for sex, or for an extra arsenal of receptors to pick up the scent of poachers, or because they assume that the others will have found particularly nutritious food, but because they like other elephants.

[..] As an elephant, you’d have a mind. You would, no doubt at all, be conscious. All the evidence agrees. None – absolutely none – disagrees. You’d have a sense of yourself as distinct from other things. When you looked out contemptuously at humans, wondering why they ate obviously contaminated food, opted to be miserable and alone, or wasted energy on pointless aggression and anxiety, it would be your contempt, as opposed to generic elephantine contempt, or reflexive contempt that bypassed your cerebral cortex, or the contempt of your sister. It would be you looking out, and you’d know it was you.

Photograph: Palani Mohan/Getty Images

Debt Rattle October 29 2016

Oct 292016

October 29, 2016 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 9:29 am Finance Tagged with: Assange, bombshell, Comey, Deutsche, emails, FBI, Hillary, soybeans, Trump, Weiner Comments Off

Unknown No Dog Biscuits Today

• It’s A First: Hillary Wants FBI To Publish Everything About Emails (DM)

• Bernstein: New Evidence “A Real Bombshell” Or FBI Would Not Reopen Case (RCP)

• 2006 Audio Emerges of Hillary Proposing Rigging Palestine Election (Obs.)

• China Laughs, Says US Choosing Between ‘A Crazy Guy’ And ‘A Swindler’ (DC)

• Inside The Invisible Government: War, Propaganda, Clinton, Trump (John Pilger)

• Prof. Michael Hudson: The Criminals Control The US (Renegade)

• Sorry, But The US Economy’s Growth Spurt Isn’t Going To Last (CNBC)

• The Story Of The Self Destruction Of Deutsche Bank (Spiegel)

• No 10 Must Have Made Nissan Big Promise, Say Ex-Business Minister (G.)

• EU-Canada CETA Trade Deal To Be Signed On Sunday (BBC)

• Iceland Voters To Choose Between Pirates And Establishment This Weekend (R.)

• The Strange Tale Of A Dating Site’s Attacks On Wikileaks Founder Assange (McCl.)

Clinton says she’s confident the new mails will not change the FBI’s conclusion in July. Thing is, if that were so, they probably wouldn’t have announced the mails on Friday.

• It’s A First: Hillary Wants FBI To Publish Everything About Emails (DM)

The FBI is investigating Weiner’s lewd texts with an underage girl, revealed in September by DailyMail.com. ‘We’ve heard these rumors,’ said Clinton – who sat near Abedin on her campaign on the flight to Des Moines. ‘We don’t know what to believe and I’m sure there will be even more rumors. That’s why it is incumbent upon the FBI to tell us what they’re talking about,’ she said. ‘Because right now your guess is as good as mine and I don’t think that’s good enough.’ [..] Meanwhile, it was also revealed on Friday that Comey reportedly told bureau staffers in separate memo that he broke custom in telling Congress about the reopening of the investigation because of its political sensitivity. In the internal memo obtained by Fox News, Comey said the bureau would not ordinarily communicate with the public about its ongoing investigations, but said he felt he needed to do so as amid the looming election.

He also notes he felt an ‘obligation’ to inform lawmakers about the investigation given he had testified repeatedly that their investigation into Clinton’s email was completed. ‘Of course we don’t ordinarily tell Congress about ongoing investigations, but here I feel an obligation to do so given that I testified repeatedly in recent months that our investigation was completed,’ Comey wrote in the memo. ‘I also think it would be misleading to the American people were we not to supplement the record. ‘At the same time, however, given that we do not know the significance of this newly discovered collection of emails, I don’t want to create a misleading impression. ‘In trying to strike that balance, in a brief letter, and in the middle of an election season, there is significant risk of being misunderstood, but I wanted you to hear directly from me about it.’

The NY Post suggests that NBC suggests that the FBI needs a fresh warrant to study the new batch of emails they suggest is connected to their investigation of Hillary Clinton’s use of a private server, which in turn is linked to possible mishandling of classified informaton. The (1000?!) mails were found on a laptop (and/or phone?) used by both Huma Abedin and Anthony Weiner. The ‘new warrant’ issue may be why Comey says “..the FBI cannot yet assess whether or not this material may be significant..”. They’ve seen things that led to Comey’s letter yesterday that perhaps they had no legal position to investigate. But they’ll get that warrant of course. Question is how long it will take. The Hillary camp can in the meantime try and use the uncertainty to say again and again that they don’t think the new revelations will change the FBI’s position that there was no reason to charge her, but as I suggested late last night (European time), and as Carl Bernstein confirms, for Comey to speak up now means this can only be a bombshell. Which means NOT speaking out now would down the line be seen as more partisan than speaking.

• Bernstein: New Evidence “A Real Bombshell” Or FBI Would Not Reopen Case (RCP)

CARL BERNSTEIN: Well, there’s no question that the e-mails have always been the greatest threat to her candidacy for president, that her conduct in regard to the e-mails is really indefensible and if there was going to be more information that came out, it was the one thing, as I said on the air last night, actually that could really perhaps affect this election. We don’t know what this means yet except that it’s a real bombshell. And it is unthinkable that the Director of the FBI would take this action lightly, that he would put this letter forth to the Congress of the United States saying there is more information out there about classified e-mails and call it to the attention of congress unless it was something requiring serious investigation. So that’s where we are… Is it a certainty that we won’t learn before the election? I’m not sure it’s a certainty we won’t learn before the election.

One thing is, it’s possible that Hillary Clinton might want to on her own initiative talk to the FBI and find out what she can, and if she chooses to let the American people know what she thinks or knows is going on. People need to hear from her… I think if she has information available to her from the FBI or any other source as to her knowledge of what these e-mails might be, hopefully she will let us know what they are and what is under discussion here. Right now we’re all talking in a vacuum but I want to add here that in the last, oh, 36, 48 hours, there has been an undercurrent of kind of speculative discussion among some national security people that something might surface in the next few days about e-mails, and I think the expectation in this chatter – and I took it as just chatter but informed chatter, to some extent – was that it would relate to another round of WikiLeaks e-mails, which our Justice Department people seem to be saying is not the case, but there has been some noise in the national security community the last day or two of this kind of possibility of some kind of revelation.

But this is her achilles heel and we have to remember that it also comes on the – back to the word heel – of the revelations about the Clinton Foundation. So the confluence of all of this is bad for her as it stands now but with some knowledge she might be able to stop, turn things around, and give us some idea of what’s going on in a way we might not otherwise know, and also it’s very possible that some members of congress very quickly are going to get an idea of what these e-mails are, and what this is all about, and for whatever purpose put some information out there.

Everyone’s talking about the domestic effects of things like this, but the international ones may well be much more significant.

• 2006 Audio Emerges of Hillary Proposing Rigging Palestine Election (Obs.)

On September 5, 2006, Eli Chomsky was an editor and staff writer for the Jewish Press, and Hillary Clinton was running for a shoo-in re-election as a U.S. senator. Her trip making the rounds of editorial boards brought her to Brooklyn to meet the editorial board of the Jewish Press. The tape was never released and has only been heard by the small handful of Jewish Press staffers in the room. According to Chomsky, his old-school audiocassette is the only existent copy and no one has heard it since 2006, until today when he played it for the Observer. The tape is 45 minutes and contains much that is no longer relevant, such as analysis of the re-election battle that Sen. Joe Lieberman was then facing in Connecticut.

But a seemingly throwaway remark about elections in areas controlled by the Palestinian Authority has taken on new relevance amid persistent accusations in the presidential campaign by Clinton’s Republican opponent Donald Trump that the current election is “rigged.” Speaking to the Jewish Press about the January 25, 2006, election for the second Palestinian Legislative Council (the legislature of the Palestinian National Authority), Clinton weighed in about the result, which was a resounding victory for Hamas (74 seats) over the U.S.-preferred Fatah (45 seats). “I do not think we should have pushed for an election in the Palestinian territories. I think that was a big mistake,” said Sen. Clinton. “And if we were going to push for an election, then we should have made sure that we did something to determine who was going to win.”

“In the US, political elites and media magnates have the freedom to say anything they want, while others can only choose to repeat their words or shut up..”

• China Laughs, Says US Choosing Between ‘A Crazy Guy’ And ‘A Swindler’ (DC)

China is laughing at America’s election and the media’s coverage of the election, noting that both make a sad argument for Western democracy. “In the past, I thought the US had the best education and most developed democracy in the world, but now what do they have for president? Either a crazy guy or a swindler,” a Chinese business owner told the Global Times. “The race to the bottom will … make [people] rethink the value of democracy,” the Global Times previously said of the elections. The election, deemed one of the “dirtiest” since World War II, “reflects the decay of U.S. politics and a deeply divided society,” the Xinhua News Agency argued. “People forget serious issues. They talk about sex, locker room conversation, men and lousy behavior.”

“Debates are getting nasty and that undermines the strength of Western democracy,” Yang Rui, an anchor for China’s state television, told the BBC. He added that using a ballot box to make major decisions is a bad idea because “you have to suppose every voter is rational and reasonable.” “[China’s non-democratic system] has allowed China forty years of uninterrupted growth within a stable system. Quiet deliberation is a more effective form of policy than a public shouting match, because policy making is complicated,” Fang Xinghai, a senior Communist Party of China official and the vice chair of the China Securities Regulatory Commission, told reporters. China regularly uses American elections to attack the U.S. political system and justify its non-democratic, authoritarian system.

“For a long time, the United States has boasted about how its extremely lively election is a sign of the superiority of the system, and it has even used this to willfully criticize the vast majority of developing countries,” asserted the People’s Daily, “The extreme self-confidence and arrogance by the ‘preacher of democracy’ should be reined in.” Beyond attacking the democratic process, Chinese critics of the election also targeted the mainstream media and America’s treasured freedom of speech, pointing out that the media has undermined this tradition. “CNN and other mainstream media’s freedom of speech only serves Hillary Clinton,” said one netizen on Guancha.cn. “In the US, political elites and media magnates have the freedom to say anything they want, while others can only choose to repeat their words or shut up,” said another, according to the Global Times.

Pilger’s never weak.

• Inside The Invisible Government: War, Propaganda, Clinton, Trump (John Pilger)

Some may remember in 2003 a succession of BBC reporters turning to the camera and telling us that Blair was “vindicated” for what turned out to be the crime of the century. The US television networks produced the same validation for George W. Bush. Fox News brought on Henry Kissinger to effuse over Colin Powell’s fabrications. The same year, soon after the invasion, I filmed an interview in Washington with Charles Lewis, the renowned American investigative journalist. I asked him, “What would have happened if the freest media in the world had seriously challenged what turned out to be crude propaganda?” He replied that if journalists had done their job, “there is a very, very good chance we would not have gone to war in Iraq”.

It was a shocking statement, and one supported by other famous journalists to whom I put the same question – Dan Rather of CBS, David Rose of the Observer and journalists and producers in the BBC, who wished to remain anonymous. In other words, had journalists done their job, had they challenged and investigated the propaganda instead of amplifying it, hundreds of thousands of men, women and children would be alive today, and there would be no ISIS and no siege of Aleppo or Mosul. There would have been no atrocity on the London Underground on 7th July 2005. There would have been no flight of millions of refugees; there would be no miserable camps.

When the terrorist atrocity happened in Paris last November, President Francoise Hollande immediately sent planes to bomb Syria – and more terrorism followed, predictably, the product of Hollande’s bombast about France being “at war” and “showing no mercy”. That state violence and jihadist violence feed off each other is the truth that no national leader has the courage to speak. “When the truth is replaced by silence,” said the Soviet dissident Yevtushenko, “the silence is a lie.”

The banks control it all. Hudson suggests Trump should have claimed he stiffed the banks by going bankrupt six times, and say “if I can do that for me, I can do it for all of us”.

• Prof. Michael Hudson: The Criminals Control The US (Renegade)

Prof. Michael Hudson, economist and author of ‘Killing the Host- How Financial Parasites and Debt Destroy the Global Economy’, speaks to Ross Ashcroft about the difficult choice faced by Americans in the upcoming US elections.

“Soybeans? Yes, there has been a record bumper crop this year in the U.S., and strong demand from China helped fuel an export bonanza.”

• Sorry, But The US Economy’s Growth Spurt Isn’t Going To Last (CNBC)

The U.S. economy grew in the third quarter at its fastest pace in two years, due largely to factors that are unlikely to last. GDP increased at a 2.9% rate, above expectations and at the best rate since the 5% posted in the third quarter of 2014. The positive surprise comes as the Fed contemplates its second interest rate hike in more than 10 years, and Americans are set to elect a new president in less than two weeks. However, a look under the hood shows that the U.S. is likely stuck in the same growth trap in which it has found itself since the Great Recession ended in mid-2009. Many of the gains came due to a surge in soybean exports. Soybeans? Yes, there has been a record bumper crop this year in the U.S., and strong demand from China helped fuel an export bonanza.

However, that’s not expected to last, and the U.S. also is likely to face competition in the market. But there were other factors besides soybeans not to like in this report. Consumer spending cooled to 2.1% from 4.3% in the previous quarter, residential investment tumbled by 6.2%, equipment purchases declined by 2.7% and the growth rate of final sales to domestic purchasers increased by just 1.4%. “Accordingly, a reasonable case could be made that this is actually a disappointing GDP report,” Paul Ashworth, chief U.S. economist at Capital Economics, said in a client note. In addition to the soybean-led export growth, the GDP report also was aided by a 0.6 %age point gain in inventories.

Excluding “transitory” effects, the actual growth rate would have been closer to the 1.5% rate of the past four quarters, even including Friday’s reading, according to David Rosenberg, chief economist and strategist at Gluskin Sheff. “In other words, nothing here to write home about,” he said in his morning note.

A German view of a once German bank.

• The Story Of The Self Destruction Of Deutsche Bank (Spiegel)

Greed, provincialism, cowardice, unfocused aggression, mania, egoism, immaturity, mendacity, incompetence, weakness, pride, blundering, decadence, arrogance, a need for admiration, naiveté: If you are looking for words that explain the fall of Deutsche Bank, you can choose freely and justifiably from among the above list. The bank, 146 years after its founding, has become the target for all manner of pejoratives, and not just from outside observers. All of the above terms were used in interviews held during months of reporting into the causes of the downfall of Germany’s largest financial institution. They popped up over the course of several hours of interviews with four Deutsche Bank CEOs, three former and one current.

And they were uttered in interviews with eight additional senior bank managers and board members conducted over the course of several years, from the 1990s until today, and in meetings with captains of industry who know the bank well and during encounters with major stakeholders. More than anything, the disparaging words come up frequently in interviews with those who have worked or still work at the bank as customer service advisors, as branch managers or in positions lower down on the food chain. What we have found in the course of these myriad interviews – combined with the hours spent analyzing bank balance sheets, thousands of pages of files, committee meeting minutes and archive material – is that the collapse of Deutsche Bank is the result of years, decades, of failed leadership, culminating in the complete loss of control of the company by top managers during the period between 1994 and 2012.

It is a story about how Hilmar Kopper, Rolf E. Breuer and Josef Ackermann, the leaders of Deutsche Bank during those fateful years, essentially turned over the bank to a hastily assembled group of Anglo-American investment bankers before Anshu Jain, the prince of these traders, rose to the top and spent three more years sailing the bank full-speed-ahead into the shoals. It is also a story of how these bank heads, along with numerous other members of the management and supervisory boards, stood aside as Jain and the many other new investment banking heroes modified the staid German financial institution to serve their own purposes – essentially looting it and robbing it of its very soul – without leaving behind a better, stronger bank.

You bet.

• No 10 Must Have Made Nissan Big Promise, Say Ex-Business Minister (G.)

A former business minister has said that Nissan had previously suggested it could move production to France if it was not protected from trade tariffs. Anna Soubry said that No 10 must have privately told Nissan that Britain was remaining in the EU customs union or promised mitigation against any future tariffs before the car firm announced plans to build two new models in the UK. Greg Clark, the current business secretary, has insisted that no financial compensation was offered during numerous discussions with Nissan, which allowed the Japanese carmaker to commit to building its new Qashqai and X-Trail vehicles at its Sunderland plant. It is understood that the government provided a “letter of comfort” to Nissan promising that the UK car industry would remain competitive after Brexit.

Ministers, however, would neither confirm nor deny whether such a letter had been sent. Sources said the letter was understood to give an undertaking that Nissan would not face “additional costs” after the UK leaves the EU, implying that the taxpayer could be liable for subsidising the car industry in the event of tariffs being imposed on automotive exports. Downing Street also declined to say if more specific informal promises had been offered to Nissan and by implication to other carmakers, but industry sources have said they have been reassured by the government that they would not suffer from tariffs after the UK leaves the EU. No 10 is under pressure to publish the letter and Clark is to be called before the Commons business committee to explain what he has offered in the way of support to Nissan.

Soubry, who was a senior minister in the business department until July, said the carmaker had privately suggested to her in the past it would move production to France if it did not have a guarantee that it would be protected from tariffs or if the government did not do “something to mitigate the damage of tariffs”. “They didn’t give the detail of what they wanted, they made it very clear that without a guarantee that they would not be subject to tariffs or if they were subject to tariffs the government would do something to mitigate the damage of tariffs … that without that, they told me, my understanding actually was that they would go to Renault because they clearly had the capacity there,” she said. The Japanese car company has a strategic partnership with the French manufacturer.

One question: how many Europeans would vote for CETA if they had the opportunity to do so?

• EU-Canada CETA Trade Deal To Be Signed On Sunday (BBC)

Canada and the European Union are to sign a long-delayed landmark trade deal at a summit in Brussels on Sunday. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau described it as “great news” and said he looked forward to attending. A signing ceremony planned for Thursday had to be cancelled after a Belgian region vetoed the agreement. But after marathon talks, a consensus was finally reached allowing all 28 EU states to formally approve the deal on Friday. “Mission accomplished!” European Council President Donald Tusk tweeted. Mr Trudeau tweeted back: “Great news and I’m looking forward to being there.”

The Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement with Canada, known as Ceta, required all EU member states to endorse it. But seven years of negotiations were left hanging in the balance after Belgium’s French-speaking region of Wallonia demanded stronger safeguards on labour, environmental and consumer standards. It also wanted more protection for Walloon farmers, who would face new competition from Canadian imports. On Thursday, Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel said that after marathon talks they had agreed on an addendum to the deal which addressed regional concerns. Prime Minister Robert Fico of Slovakia, which currently holds the EU presidency, said the final approval of the deal was “a milestone in the EU’s trade policy”.

Their numbers are not THAT strong: “..support for the Pirates has been steady at around 20% over the past months, well above the 5% it won in the 2013 election but below a 40% peak.”

• Iceland Voters To Choose Between Pirates And Establishment This Weekend (R.)

Iceland holds parliamentary elections on Saturday, with polls showing the opposition led by the anti-establishment Pirate Party could topple the current center-right ruling coalition. Icelanders’ faith in their political and financial establishment was shaken after the 2008 financial crisis and further eroded this year when several senior government figures were named in the Panama Papers. The biggest protests in the country’s history ultimately led to the resignation of Prime Minister Sigmundur David Gunnlaugsson of the Progressive Party and the early election this weekend. Founded by internet activists and led by poet Birgitta Jonsdottir, the Pirates promise to clean up corruption, look at granting asylum to former U.S. spy contractor Edward Snowden and relax restrictions on the use of the bitcoin virtual currency.

Recent polls show the Independence and Progressive parties stand to lose their current majority in the Althing, often described as the world’s oldest parliament, which means they would have to find a third coalition partner to stay in power. The Pirates would be looking to form a majority with the current opposition parties: The Left-Green Movement, the Social Democratic Alliance and Bright Future. An Oct. 27 poll conducted by Visir and Stod 2 showed 37% support for the government parties, while the four opposition parties polled around 47% combined. In a tight race, newly-established Vidreisn, the Reform Party, could become king-maker. The pro-European, liberal Vidreisn has not taken sides yet, but some analysts predict it would favor the current government as its economic policy leans rightwards. While the Independence Party remains the biggest party, support for the Pirates has been steady at around 20% over the past months, well above the 5% it won in the 2013 election but below a 40% peak.

This stinks ten ways to Sunday.

• The Strange Tale Of A Dating Site’s Attacks On Wikileaks Founder Assange (McCl.)

For an online dating site, toddandclare.com seems really good at cloak-and-dagger stuff. Disconnected phones. Mystery websites. Actions that ricochet around the globe. But the attention grabber is the Houston-based company’s target: Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, whose steady dumps of leaked emails from Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign have given supporters of Donald Trump the only cheering news of the last few weeks. In some ways, toddandclare.com’s campaign against Assange is as revelatory as the leaked emails themselves, illustrating the powerful, sometimes unseen, forces that oppose WikiLeaks.

Whoever is behind the dating site has marshaled significant resources to target Assange, enough to gain entry into a United Nations body, operate in countries in Europe, North America and the Caribbean, conduct surveillance on Assange’s lawyer in London, obtain the fax number of Canada’s prime minister and seek to prod a police inquiry in the Bahamas. And they’ve done it at a time when WikiLeaks has become a routine target of Democratic politicians who portray Assange as a stooge of Russian President Vladimir Putin and his reported efforts to disrupt the U.S. election. One part of toddandclare’s two-pronged campaign put a megaphone to unproven charges that Assange made contact with a young Canadian girl in the Bahamas through the internet with the intention of molesting her.

The second part sought to entangle him in a plan to receive $1 million from the Russian government. WikiLeaks claims the dating site is “a highly suspicious and likely fabricated” company. In turn, the company lashed out at Assange on Thursday and “his despicable activities against American national security,” and warned journalists to “check with your libel lawyers first before printing anything that could impact or endanger innocent people’s lives.” So why are the parties to the melee coming out with both barrels blazing? That remains a mystery of the kind that might take a WikiLeaks-style document dump to suss out.

Debt Rattle October 15 2016

Oct 152016

October 15, 2016 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 10:18 am Finance Tagged with: debt, deficit, Deutsche, Greece, Hillary, hypernormalization, MSM, pound, Trump, Varoufakis Comments Off

Harris&Ewing Motorcycle postman, Washington, DC 1912

• US Deficit Up for First Time Since 2009 on Spending Surge (BBG)

• Why the Economy Doesn’t Roar Anymore (WSJ)

• Jim Rogers: Sterling Is In Serious Decline, Could Go Below Dollar (Ind.)

• What The United States Needs (Varoufakis)

• German Government Has Ruled Out Taking Stake in Deutsche Bank (WSJ)

• Varoufakis, Others Deny Hollande’s Russian Drachma-Printing Claim (Kath.)

• A Child Born Today Comes Into the World With More Debt Than You (BBG)

• The Press Buries Hillary Clinton’s Sins (WSJ)

• Donald Trump Uncensored: This Is America’s “Moment Of Reckoning” (ZH)

• The Fury and Failure of Donald Trump (Matt Taibbi)

• Hypernormalisation: Adam Curtis’ Path From Syria To Trump, Via Jane Fonda (G.)

• Greece, The Hot Corner (Stavridis)

You don’t say!: “The slowdown in tax collections suggests some cooling in labor market activity..”

• US Deficit Up for First Time Since 2009 on Spending Surge (BBG)

The U.S. budget deficit as a share of the economy widened for the first time in seven years, marking a turning point in the nation’s fiscal outlook as an aging population boosts government spending and debt. Spending exceeded revenue by $587.4 billion in the 12 months to Sept. 30, compared with a $439.1 billion deficit in fiscal 2015, the Treasury Department said in a report released Friday. That was in line with a Congressional Budget Office estimate on Oct. 7 for a shortfall of $588 billion. As a share of gross domestic product, the shortfall rose to 3.2% from 2.5% a year earlier, the first such increase since 2009, government figures show. “The slowdown in tax collections suggests some cooling in labor market activity,” said Gennadiy Goldberg at TD Securities in New York. He sees the higher budget deficits implying more borrowing needs by Treasury.

Accepting that today’s reality is normal, and boom times are not, is at least a first step.

• Why the Economy Doesn’t Roar Anymore (WSJ)

The U.S. presidential candidates have made the usual pile of promises, none more predictable than their pledge to make the U.S. economy grow faster. With the economy struggling to expand at 2% a year, they would have us believe that 3%, 4% or even 5% growth is within reach. But of all the promises uttered by Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton over the course of this disheartening campaign, none will be tougher to keep. Whoever sits in the Oval Office next year will swiftly find that faster productivity growth—the key to faster economic growth—isn’t something a president can decree. It might be wiser to accept the truth: The U.S. economy isn’t behaving badly. It is just being ordinary. Historically, boom times are the exception, not the norm.

[..] It is tempting to think that we know how to do better, that there is some secret sauce that governments can ladle out to make economies grow faster than the norm. But despite glib talk about “pro-growth” economic policies, productivity growth is something over which governments have very little control. Rapid productivity growth has occurred in countries with low tax rates but also in nations where tax rates were sky-high. Slashing government regulations has unleashed productivity growth at some times and places but undermined it at others. The claim that freer markets and smaller governments are always better for productivity than a larger, more powerful state is not one that can be verified by the data.

Here is the lesson: What some economists now call “secular stagnation” might better be termed “ordinary performance.” Most of the time, in most economies, incomes increase slowly, and living standards rise bit by bit. The extraordinary experience of the Golden Age left us with the unfortunate legacy of unrealistic expectations about our governments’ ability to deliver jobs, pay raises and steady growth. Ever since the Golden Age vanished amid the gasoline lines of 1973, political leaders in every wealthy country have insisted that the right policies will bring back those heady days. Voters who have been trained to expect that their leaders can deliver something more than ordinary are likely to find reality disappointing.

Q: “How low could it get?”
A: “If I told you Mark, you’d hang up”.

• Jim Rogers: Sterling Is In Serious Decline, Could Go Below Dollar (Ind.)

International investor Jim Rogers has warned that the value of the pound could go under one dollar within three to four years if Scotland was to leave the UK. His comments came on the day that Nicola Sturgeon said declaring independence could help Scotland escape the uncertainty triggered by UK’s vote to leave the EU. Rogers, who co-founded the Quantum Fund with George Soros, said the UK is facing serious problems. Speaking to the BBC, Rogers said: “If Scotland leaves they are going to take their oil with them and the pound could go down a great deal. It would certainly go down under one US dollar.”

“You’ve got a lot of debt, you’ve got a serious balance of trade problem which shows no signs of being corrected. I don’t see anything to make sterling go up.“ Rogers warned that the City of London is now going to be under serious pressure as Europe is hoping to attract as much business leaving London as possible. His warning came as the pound fell below $1.22 against the dollar in early trading on Friday, pushed down by comments from the President of the European Council Donald Tusk and the French finance minister Michel Sapin. Sterling was still below the $1.22 mark at market closing time.

Not bad as an analysis in itself, but the conclusion that America needs “progressive internationalism” is a goal-seeked illusion, and useless. As is wishing for “massive private sector growth”.

• What The United States Needs (Varoufakis)

When the world faced Armageddon in the 1940s, in the form of Hitler’s atom bomb program, Washington responded with the Manhattan Project. In effect, they gathered the best scientists, gave them as much money as they needed in fully-appointed facilities, and said to them: “You have two years to deliver the bomb.” Today, we face similar threats to the planet: climate change, rising seas, water shortages, etc. Our cities are less sustainable than ever. Commuters waste more and more of their lives in stationary cars. America needs a new Manhattan Project, one located on hundreds of campuses around the United States, that helps put to work the idle trillions of dollars, our scientists, and the next generation of youngsters (who must be educated with government subsidies to end the student debt scandal).

The joint effort would produce technologies that could lead to a cost-effective green transition. Who will pay for it? Just as the government-funded Internet spurred massive private sector growth – and taxes – so would the technologies that could spring out of a new Manhattan Project. But first the initial investment must come from government. To do this, the United States needs to collect more taxes. It is scandalous, for instance, that the IRS does not exercise its right to tax the earnings of corporations like Apple, Google and Gilead for intellectual property rights developed on American soil, letting them park billions upon billions of dollars in tax havens, including Ireland.

Overall, US federal taxes must rise from the present ultra-low 17% of GDP to at least 25%, with all of the increase coming from the top 1%. This is what logic and justice demands. What stops America from doing this service to itself? It is the 30-year-old bipartisan class war waged against America’s working class and shrinking middle class. Republicans automatically gravitated to tax cuts for the rich. Democrats served Wall Street and exhausted their talents at finding ways to curtail welfare. Both burdened the young with unbearable student debt. The US has reached a point where sensible policies, that the nation needs, are off the table.

What’s German for bail-in?

• German Government Has Ruled Out Taking Stake in Deutsche Bank (WSJ)

Aides to Angela Merkel have told lawmakers the state wouldn’t take a stake in Deutsche Bank if it were to issue new stock to shore up its thin capital cushion, one person who attended the briefing said. The fact that Berlin appears to have ruled out any aid for the embattled lender as both unnecessary and politically unfeasible could put Deutsche Bank under renewed pressure as it works to stabilize its share price and stay out of the news while negotiating an acceptable settlement in a U.S. misconduct investigation. In a closed-door briefing with a small group of lawmakers last week, Chancellery aides and senior Finance Ministry officials said it was “inconceivable for the state to take a stake in Deutsche Bank,” said one person.

“We have a different bank resolution system than in 2009 and this must apply to us in Germany too,” the government officials said according to this person. This referred to recent legal changes that now force European governments to bail-in creditors—and in some cases depositors—before they shore up a struggling bank with taxpayer money. Deutsche Bank is currently negotiating with the U.S. Justice Department to bring down a settlement in several investigations over the mis-selling of mortgage-backed securities. Last month, The Wall Street Journal reported that U.S. authorities had floated a $14 billion amount as an opening bid, sparking a rout in the bank’s share price. The bank has said it would not pay anywhere near this amount, which would wipe out nearly all of its existing capital.

It is still unclear whether Deutsche Bank will need to increase capital and, if it does, whether it would need the government to pitch in. But the fact that Ms. Merkel’s government has ruled out any aid for the bank will come as a negative surprise to investors, given widespread expectations in the market that the state would offer some form of last-resort assistance given the scale of Deutsche Bank and the shock its failure could inflict on Europe’s financial system.

That Greece would have made some official request, that they would have asked Putin himself, and that he would have called up Hollande to tell him that, it’s all not very credible.

• Varoufakis, Others Deny Hollande’s Russian Drachma-Printing Claim (Kath.)

Former finance minister Yanis Varoufakis on Friday hastened to dismiss claims made by French President Francois Hollande in a new book that Russian President Vladimir Putin had told him he had been approached by Greek officials a day after a referendum on the country’s third bailout agreement on July 5, 2015, and asked whether Athens could print drachmas in Russia. “I can confirm that during my tenure at the Finance Ministry there were no thoughts of printing a new currency, let alone overtures to third parties at home or abroad,” Varoufakis said in a statement on Friday. Parliament Speaker Nikos Voutsis also denied the existence of such a plan on Friday, dismissing the discussion as being irrelevant, while Alternate Defense Minister Dimitris Vitsas brushed off the claims as “nonsense.”

Speaking on Skai TV on the same day, however, ruling SYRIZA MP Sakis Papadopoulos admitted that the leftist-led government had discussed a possible Greek exit from the eurozone in the days building up to the referendum and just after it. “This information did not come out of the blue,” he said. In “A President Shouldn’t Say That,” based on a series of interviews with Hollande by two journalists from daily Le Monde, the French president is quoted as saying he received a call from Putin, who allegedly told him that “Greece asked us to print drachmas in Russia because they no longer have a printing machine to do so.”

How about forgiving each new born the $66,000 (s)he owes, as a first step toward debt restructuring?!

• A Child Born Today Comes Into the World With More Debt Than You (BBG)

Each newborn’s share of the national debt today is more than double what it was in the 1990s. In the past 35 years, the national debt on a per capita basis has increased with each U.S. president. Under President Bill Clinton, the debt grew at the slowest pace — with a net increase of 1.4% over his two terms. After reducing the slope of public debt in his first term, he shrunk it in his second. Under current law, U.S. inflation-adjusted debt per person is expected to reach the $66,000 milestone by April 2026, based on Bloomberg calculations of Congressional Budget Office and Census Bureau data. So what would the debt path look like under either a Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump presidency? It would be pretty bleak in either case, according to a report released by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.

And while the committee is non-partisan, they do have a policy bent on fixing the national debt and improving the way the budget is developed. The committee projects debt held by the public to grow by $9 trillion over the next decade under current law. Economic proposals put forth by both presidential candidates would add to the national debt, and Trump’s would add even more than Clinton’s. The report estimates that Clinton’s policies would increase the national debt by $200 billion over the next decade, while Trump’s proposals would add $5.3 trillion.

Again, the WSJ diverging from the rest of the mainstream press. “.. the “vast majority” of [FBI] career agents and prosecutors working the case “felt she should be prosecuted” and that giving her a pass was “a top-down decision.”

• The Press Buries Hillary Clinton’s Sins (WSJ)

If average voters turned on the TV for five minutes this week, chances are they know that Donald Trump made lewd remarks a decade ago and now stands accused of groping women. But even if average voters had the TV on 24/7, they still probably haven’t heard the news about Hillary Clinton: That the nation now has proof of pretty much everything she has been accused of. It comes from hacked emails dumped by WikiLeaks, documents released under the Freedom of Information Act, and accounts from FBI insiders. The media has almost uniformly ignored the flurry of bombshells, preferring to devote its front pages to the Trump story. So let’s review what amounts to a devastating case against a Clinton presidency.

Start with a June 2015 email to Clinton staffers from Erika Rottenberg, the former general counsel of LinkedIn. Ms. Rottenberg wrote that none of the attorneys in her circle of friends “can understand how it was viewed as ok/secure/appropriate to use a private server for secure documents AND why further Hillary took it upon herself to review them and delete documents.” She added: “It smacks of acting above the law and it smacks of the type of thing I’ve either gotten discovery sanctions for, fired people for, etc.” A few months later, in a September 2015 email, a Clinton confidante fretted that Mrs. Clinton was too bullheaded to acknowledge she’d done wrong. “Everyone wants her to apologize,” wrote Neera Tanden, president of the liberal Center for American Progress.

“And she should. Apologies are like her Achilles’ heel.” Clinton staffers debated how to evade a congressional subpoena of Mrs. Clinton’s emails—three weeks before a technician deleted them. The campaign later employed a focus group to see if it could fool Americans into thinking the email scandal was part of the Benghazi investigation (they are separate) and lay it all off as a Republican plot. A senior FBI official involved with the Clinton investigation told Fox News this week that the “vast majority” of career agents and prosecutors working the case “felt she should be prosecuted” and that giving her a pass was “a top-down decision.”

[..] Voters might not know any of this, because while both presidential candidates have plenty to answer for, the press has focused solely on taking out Mr. Trump. And the press is doing a diligent job of it.

Not a bad analysis. At all.

• Donald Trump Uncensored: This Is America’s “Moment Of Reckoning” (ZH)

Sometimes, you just have to listen…

“There is nothing that the political establishment wil not do; no lie they will not tell, to hold their prestige and power at your expense… and that’s what’s been happening. The Wasshington establishment – and the financial and media corporations that fund it – exists for one thing only… to protect and enrich itself.”

“For those who control the levers of power in Washington and for the global special interests – they partner with these people that don’t have your good in mind – our campaign represents a true existential threat… like they haven’t seen before. This is not simply another four-year election; this is a crossroads in the history of our civilization that will determine whether or not we, the people, reclaim control over our government.”

Turn off MSNBC, CNBC, CNN, and NBC and listen – away from the spectacle – to some uncomfortable deep state realities…

It’s more the failure of the Republican party than of Trump, if you read Matt well.

• The Fury and Failure of Donald Trump (Matt Taibbi)

Trump’s early rampage through the Republican field made literary sense. It was classic farce. He was the lewd, unwelcome guest who horrified priggish, decent society, a theme that has mesmerized audiences for centuries, from Vanity Fair to The Government Inspector to (closer to home) Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. When you let a hands-y, drunken slob loose at an aristocrats’ ball, the satirical power of the story comes from the aristocrats deserving what comes next. And nothing has ever deserved a comeuppance quite like the American presidential electoral process, which had become as exclusive and cut off from the people as a tsarist shooting party The first symptom of a degraded aristocracy is a lack of capable candidates for the throne.

After years of indulgence, ruling families become frail, inbred and isolated, with no one but mystics, impotents and children to put forward as kings. Think of Nikolai Romanov reading fortunes as his troops starved at the front. Weak princes lead to popular uprisings. Which brings us to this year’s Republican field. There wasn’t one capable or inspiring person in the infamous “Clown Car” lineup. All 16 of the non-Trump entrants were dunces, religious zealots, wimps or tyrants, all equally out of touch with voters. Scott Walker was a lipless sadist who in centuries past would have worn a leather jerkin and thrown dogs off the castle walls for recreation. Marco Rubio was the young rake with debts. Jeb Bush was the last offering in a fast-diminishing hereditary line. Ted Cruz was the Zodiac Killer. And so on.

The party spent 50 years preaching rich people bromides like “trickle-down economics” and “picking yourself up by your bootstraps” as solutions to the growing alienation and financial privation of the ordinary voter. In place of jobs, exported overseas by the millions by their financial backers, Republicans glibly offered the flag, Jesus and Willie Horton. In recent years it all went stale. They started to run out of lines to sell the public. Things got so desperate that during the Tea Party phase, some GOP candidates began dabbling in the truth. They told voters that all Washington politicians, including their own leaders, had abandoned them and become whores for special interests. It was a slapstick routine: Throw us bums out!

[..] How Giuliani isn’t Trump’s running mate, no one will ever understand. Theirs is the most passionate television love story since Beavis and Butthead. Every time Trump says something nuts, Giuliani either co-signs it or outdoes him. They will probably spend the years after the election doing prostate-medicine commercials together.

Adam Curtis has no peers. Available from Sunday at BBCiPlayer (only in Britain?!) Great video excerpt on -some of- Trump’s Atlantic City losses.

• Hypernormalisation: Adam Curtis’ Path From Syria To Trump, Via Jane Fonda (G.)

I struggle to think a more perfect union of medium and message than HyperNormalisation, Adam Curtis’s new film for the BBC iPlayer. Though he’s spent the best part of four decades making television, Curtis’s signature blend of hypnotic archive footage, authoritative voiceover and a seemingly inexhaustible appetite for bizarre historical tangents is better suited to the web, a place just as resistant to the narrative handholding of broadcast TV as he is. Safe in the knowledge that his audience now has the ability to pause and rewind at will, Curtis crafts a mammoth labyrinth of political storytelling in the film, his follow-up to last year’s “war on terror” epic Bitter Lake.

Launching on Sunday, his 165-minute opus makes a feature of its sheer unwieldiness, as Curtis veers from social history to conspiracy theory via the odd rambling bar-room anecdote, like a man who’s two-dozen browser tabs into a major Wikipedia binge. He argues that an army of technocrats, complacent radicals and Faustian internet entrepreneurs have conspired to create an unreal world; one whose familiar and often comforting details blind us to its total inauthenticity. Not wishing to undersell the concept, Curtis begins the film with a shot of a torch shining limply into a thicket, so that viewers find themselves literally unable to see the wood for the trees.

From there, HyperNormalisation tracks a course to the present day, allowing Curtis to weigh in on Trump, Putin and Syria. But those expecting a snappy crash course in our chaotic world (“You won’t believe how this veteran BBC film-maker explains the Islamic State! What happens at 156:34 will shock you!”) clearly aren’t familiar with his methods. The film may address some of today’s most critical global issues, but it also allocates space to Jane Fonda, the fall of the Soviet Union and a supercut of pre-9/11 disaster movies. And unlike Curtis’s earlier work for TV, HyperNormalisation refuses to drop the kind of storytelling breadcrumbs that might anchor a viewer in its overarching narrative.

Not bad from US general with Greek roots. Who’s also a typical 13 in a dozen Putin basher, unfortunately.

• Greece, The Hot Corner (Stavridis)

First and foremost, Greece – perhaps more than any other country – represents the confluence of values in the trans-Atlantic community. These values are fundamental to our societies and cultures: democracy, liberty, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of education and assembly. They came to us from ancient Greece, passed through the Age of Enlightenment in Western Europe, and washed up on our shores as the principles of the American Revolution. To walk away from a nation that represents the core of those values would be an abiding mistake.

Second, geography continues to matter, and Greece’s position – on the figurative hot corner of Europe – means that without stability there, there will be an open gateway for migrant and refugee populations fleeing the violence in the Levant, the larger Arab world, and northern Africa. As a geographic location, Greece offers the best bases in the NATO Alliance from which to operate in the trouble spots of the Middle East and the Mediterranean. Our military-to-military relations with Greece are exceptionally good and provide us true strategic advantage both unilaterally for the USA and via the NATO Alliance.

A third crucial element that argues for supporting Greece is the excellence and professionalism of the Greek military. It is a relatively large and very technologically advanced force, with fine capabilities at sea, in the air, and via its land army. Greek soldiers, sailors, and airmen have participated in every NATO operation over the past decade: Afghanistan, the Balkans, Libya, and piracy, to name a few. Ensuring Greece’s economic viability will ensure those troops and capabilities are available for future operations as well.

Fourth, Greece has a unique and positive position in the Balkans and elsewhere via its influence in the Orthodox world. Greeks are well established regionally, and have useful connections in most of the Balkan countries (despite some disputes, including, for example over the name of Macedonia). The Greeks also have a relatively good set of relationships with fellow orthodox nation Russia, and are leaders in the broader global Orthodox community, providing a bridge to a variety of nations and communities around the world.

Debt Rattle October 9 2016

Oct 092016

October 9, 2016 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 8:54 am Finance Tagged with: Brexit, Calais, collapse, Deutsche, globalization, net worth, refugees, rent 2 Responses »

NPC Balloon at Shriners convention, Washington DC 1923

• Less Than Half Of US 22-26-Year-Olds Pay Their Own Rent, Health Insurance (F.)

• The Coming Collapse Of US Net Worth Will Wipe Out Millions Of Americans (SRSr)

• World Leaders Vow To Boost Growth Despite Brexit, Anti-Globalization (CNBC)

• Deutsche Bank CEO Cryan Doesn’t Reach Accord With US (BBG)

• Qatari Investors Eyeing Control of Deutsche Bank (Spiegel)

• Draghi Points to 2019 as Time for Inflation Mission Accomplished (BBG)

• US Unemployment Rate Shows At 5% But More Realistic Rate Is Higher (CNBC)

• UK MPs Demand Vote On Hard Brexit Plans (G.)

• Britain ‘Ignored Plea By France’ To Aid Stranded Calais Child Refugees (G.)

Recovery in all its glory.

• Less Than Half Of US 22-26-Year-Olds Pay Their Own Rent, Health Insurance (F.)

According to a new survey, people in their 20s and 30s are having trouble “adulting,” or achieving financial independence. Conducted by Bank of America and USA Today, the report says less than half of the 22-26-year-olds surveyed pay their own rent (47%), health insurance (41%), or contribute to a retirement account (27%). One thing they learned from the survey of Millennials (born in the early 1980s to mid ‘90s) and Generation Z’ers (born in the mid-1990s to early 2000s) said Andrew Plepler, the bank’s Enterprise, Social and Governance executive, was that “adulthood” defined by people in their 20s isn’t about age or milestones such as getting married or buying a home. “Instead, the majority said that adulthood really begins when you’re financially independent – when you can find a job, pay your own bills, cover your own rent and stop relying on mom and dad for financial support,” he said.

Indeed, the respondents who did report feeling like adults said it’s because they had help preparing from their parents (60%), because they have a job (60%) or they had a role model to guide the way (49%). They’re also thinking ahead about the economy in the wake of the presidential election : • 65% say economic issues are more important to them than social issues (34%) • Most would choose a candidate that’s best for the country (79%) over one who would improve just their own financial situation (21%) • Job growth/unemployment (27%), health care costs (25%) and college affordability/student debt (24%) rose to the top as young voters’ top campaign issues in this election. • Among those with student debt, nearly 25% say it will impact the way they vote “a great deal”

Yeah, maybe net worth vs energy use is a good way to measure reality.

• The Coming Collapse Of US Net Worth Will Wipe Out Millions Of Americans (SRSr)

As the Financial Circus continues today, pushing down the precious metals prices, millions of Americans are going to get wiped out when the collapse of U.S. net worth begins in earnest. Anyone with a tad bit of common sense realizes these financial markets today are totally disconnected from reality. With new stories of 40 million Russians to take part in “Nuclear Disaster” drill, the Philippine President telling President Obama “To Go To Hell”, he’s buying weapons from Russia, U.S. Suspends Diplomatic Relations With Russia on Syria, U.S. Ends Fiscal 2014 With $1.4 Trillion Debt Increase: Third Largest In History, Deutsche Bank Troubles Raise Fear of Global Shock, it’s completely hilarious that the gold and silver prices are selling off big time today.

With 90% of the U.S. media now in control by six large mega-corporations, Americans have no idea just how bad the U.S. financial system has become. News stories today that would have caused a stock market crash and a spike in the precious metals years ago… no longer are a realistic barometer of the market today. Instead, the broader Stock, Bond and Real Estate Markets where 99% of Americans are invested, continue to be propped up. How propped up? Well, let’s say by a staggering $31 trillion in the past six years. According to the wonderful folks at the Federal Reserve, U.S. net worth increased from $57.9 trillion Q2 2010, to a stunning $89 trillion Q2 2016:

I would imagine a lot of wealthy Americans believe they are living life “High On The Hog” today. However, that $31 trillion in additional wealth is a nothing more than a “Digital Mirage.” For wealth to grow, more energy must be burned and positive economic activity must be generated. This is the foundation of all economic principles. Unfortunately, Americans did not burn more energy to create this additional $31 trillion in U.S. net worth. Matter-a-fact, total U.S. energy consumption in 2016 will likely turn out to be less than it was in 2010. This chart is very simple to understand. The left axis shows U.S. net worth in trillions of dollars while the right axis indicates total U.S. energy consumption in quadrillion Btu’s (that’s one hell of a lot of energy). As we can see, total U.S. energy consumption has fluctuated a bit, but has been relatively flat for the past six years.

[..] How the U.S. GDP increased nearly 25% in six years while its energy consumption remained flat is one for the record books. Now, this wasn’t always the case. U.S. energy consumption nearly tripled from 34 quad Btu’s in 1950 to 98 quad Btu’s in 2000. Thus, U.S. GDP increased as total energy consumption increased.

Obsolete.

• World Leaders Vow To Boost Growth Despite Brexit, Anti-Globalization (CNBC)

World finance leaders pledged Saturday to use more resources to try to bolster economic gains as they confront stubbornly slow growth and a rising backlash against globalization. The policy committee for the 189-nation IMF said the world has “benefited tremendously from globalization” but that protectionism is a threat. Increasing anger over globalization dominated the annual meetings of the IMF and its sister lending agency, the World Bank. The unhappiness is evident in Britain’s vote in June to leave the EU and in the U.S. presidential campaign of Republican Donald Trump. Trump has said millions of Americans have lost jobs or seen wages stagnate because of unfair trade practices of countries such as China and Mexico. He is vowing to impose penalty tariffs if those practices are not halted.

The British vote sent shockwaves through financial markets this summer, and there were further troubles Friday when the British pound plunged by 6% against the dollar before recovering. Investors worry whether there will be more turbulence if the British exit proves to be messy and prolonged. IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde said “growth has been too low for too long, benefiting too few,” and that’s what officials need to address. In their statement, IMF officials committed to designing and putting in place policies “to address the concerns of those who have been left behind and to ensure that everyone has the opportunity to benefit from globalization and technological change.”

Raising more debt to pay for legal costs….

• Deutsche Bank CEO Cryan Doesn’t Reach Accord With US (BBG)

Deutsche Bank CEO John Cryan failed to reach an agreement with the U.S. Justice Department to resolve a years-long investigation into its mortgage-bond dealings during a meeting in Washington Friday, Germany’s Bild newspaper reported. The meeting was meant to negotiate the multi-billion-dollar settlement the bank will have to pay to resolve alleged misconduct arising from its dealings in residential-mortgage backed securities that led to the 2008 financial crisis, according to a Bild am Sonntag report. The German lender is still considering seeking damages against Anshu Jain and Josef Ackermann, who are both former CEOs of the bank, the newspaper reported. Bild said the bank froze part of the millions in bonus payments to Jain and other former top managers.

Concerns about Deutsche Bank’s ability to pay the $14 billion opening settlement bid from the Justice Department sent the lender’s stock to a record low last month. The bank, which set aside €5.5 billion ($6.2 billion) for litigation at the end of June, may face additional penalties to wrap up other outstanding investigations, including one into a money-laundering probe tied to its Russia operations. Analysts at Barclays speculate that could cost the bank as much as €2 billion. Cryan, a Briton who speaks fluent German, has sought for the last three weeks to reassure investors that Deutsche Bank can weather the formidable obstacles to its financial health.

The bank is holding informal talks with Wall Street firms about options to deal with legal costs, including a stock sale that could raise €5 billion, people with knowledge of the matter said this week. Qatar’s royal family is also considering increasing its stake in Deutsche Bank to as much as 25%, according to people with knowledge of the matter. Cryan has said the lender may fail to be profitable this year after posting the first annual loss since 2008 last year. With plans to eliminate thousands of jobs and cut risky assets, he called 2016 a peak restructuring year.

The state of the German economy: selling off assets.

• Qatari Investors Eyeing Control of Deutsche Bank (Spiegel)

On September 15, the Justice Department in the United States ordered the company to pay a $14 billion fine to settle accusations of fraud in Deutsche Bank’s packaging and sale of mortgage-backed securities in the free-wheeling days that led to the global financial crisis. Speculators and politicians have been in a state of near panic since the announcement, with open speculation about the possibility of a government bailout for the prestigious bank. An atmosphere of frustration and depression is currently prevailing inside the bank and Cryan is trying to combat it with messages of perseverance. For a time, Deutsche Bank’s market value plummeted below €15 billion, down from €35 billion a year ago.

Large-scale investor HBJ and his cousin – the former Emir of Qatar, Sheik Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, who he has since brought in as an investor as well – are believed to have lost more than a billion euros – on paper, at least. This summer, the two increased their holdings to just under 10% of the company, but Deutsche Bank’s market capital has since continued to slide. And yet, it appears that the low share price is encouraging the sheikhs to invest even more now that it wouldn’t take more than a few billion for them to gain control of Deutsche Bank. Information obtained by SPIEGEL indicates that the al-Thani cousins are considering propping up the bank with a fresh capital infusion and purchasing a blocking stake of 25% together with other investors.

To do this, they could partner with sovereign wealth funds, some of which are apparently willing to invest in the company. But the information obtained by SPIEGEL also suggests that HBJ and the former emir would only be willing to take that risk if they could have a strong say in business decisions at Deutsche Bank. They are said to be deeply frustrated over the fact that the bank has been unable to maneuver itself out of its defensive position. The Qataris are said to be increasingly unhappy with Cryan’s current management team and believe the company’s present course is dangerous. The problems can’t be fixed through cost saving measures alone, they believe, particularly with eroding revenues and profits could. This displeasure manifested itself through the appointment in July of attorney Stefan Simon to the supervisory board. He represents the Qataris’ interests inside the company.

Might as well have said 2029. Useless and hollow.

• Draghi Points to 2019 as Time for Inflation Mission Accomplished (BBG)

Inflation in the euro area should return to the European Central Bank’s target by early 2019 at the latest, ECB President Mario Draghi said. “Our inflation rate will pick up during the course of 2017, and then will continue moving in 2018 toward the objective which is close but below 2%,” Draghi said on Saturday at a press conference during the annual meeting of the IMF in Washington. “This is predicated on maintaining the extraordinary support of our monetary policy.” While the ECB hasn’t met its own definition of its mandate on inflation since early 2013, an unprecedented wave of stimulus measures during Draghi’s tenure including the current asset-purchase pace of €80 billion per month has helped keep the currency bloc away from outright deflation.

Draghi’s comments imply that fresh staff forecasts due in December – which build-in the impact of current stimulus – will show a 2019 inflation rate in line with the goal. Achieving that target would mark the end of Draghi’s fight against the euro area’s stubbornly low inflation after more than six years. The ECB has deployed negative rates, asset purchases and cheap long-term loans to banks to rein in inflation. The December round of staff forecasts may serve as the basis for a decision on whether the ECB intends to continue its quantitative easing program at the current rate beyond the end date in March 2017, whether the program will be wound down gradually after that, or if it could be stopped completely.

Update. No escape. No velocity.

• US Unemployment Rate Shows At 5% But More Realistic Rate Is Higher (CNBC)

The national unemployment rate rose slightly to 5% in September, the Labor Department reported Friday. But relying on that one headline number as an indicator of the economy’s direction leaves a lot of important information below the surface. Every month on “Big Jobs Friday,” the Bureau of Labor Statistics releases a boatload of data, each point of which provides its own unique perspective on a facet of the nation’s employment situation. Economists look past the official unemployment rate — that 5% figure, which is known as the “U-3” rate — to other metrics that provide their own nuanced views of the state of jobs. One of those figures is called the U-6 rate, which has a broader definition of what unemployment means. That figure remained unchanged at 9.7% in September.

The official unemployment rate is composed of “total unemployed, as a% of the civilian labor force,” but doesn’t include a number of employment situations in which workers might find themselves. The U-6 rate is defined as all unemployed, plus “persons marginally attached to the labor force, plus total employed part time for economic reasons, as a% of the labor force.” In other words: That’s the unemployed, the underemployed and the discouraged. The U-3 rate has in the past few months returned to the prerecession levels that economists consider full employment. The U-6 rate has remained above precession levels, though it has seen significant improvement in the past few years. Economists expected 176,000 jobs to be added in September, according to a late Reuters estimate. The report showed that the market added 156,000 jobs.

I see busy lawyers in your future…

• UK MPs Demand Vote On Hard Brexit Plans (G.)

Theresa May is under massive cross-party pressure to grant MPs a vote on any decision to leave or limit UK involvement in the European single market, amid growing outrage at the prospect that parliament could be bypassed over the biggest economic decision in decades. Tory MPs joined forces with former leaders of Labour and the Liberal Democrats, the SNP and Greens to insist that parliament have a say and a vote, pointing out that, while the British people had backed leaving the EU, they had not chosen to leave the biggest trading market in the western world. Former Labour leader Ed Miliband held discussions with pro-EU Tory MPs on Saturday, and was said to be considering tabling an urgent question in the Commons, demanding that May appear before parliament to explain its future role in Brexit decisions, when MPs return on Monday.

The SNP and pro-EU Tory MPs Nicky Morgan and Anna Soubry were also considering tabling questions, while former Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg, now the party’s Brexit spokesman, said it would be appalling if detailed terms of Brexit, including the UK’s future relations with the single market, were not voted on by MPs. Miliband told the Observer: “Having claimed that the referendum was about returning sovereignty to Britain, it would be a complete outrage if May were to determine the terms of Brexit without a mandate from parliament. “There is no mandate for hard Brexit, and I don’t believe there is a majority in parliament for [it] either. Given the importance of these decisions for the UK economy … it has to be a matter for MPs.”

Clegg said: “My great worry is that while there will be a vote on repealing the 1972 European Communities Act, which is about the decision to leave the EU, it will be left to the executive alone to decide the terms of Brexit. That would not be remotely acceptable.”

It’s becoming a lovely nation.

• Britain ‘Ignored Plea By France’ To Aid Stranded Calais Child Refugees (G.)

The Home Office has refused to respond to official requests from the French authorities to accept unaccompanied child refugees stranded in Calais who are eligible to come to Britain, the British Red Cross has said. With the planned demolition of Calais’s refugee camp only weeks away, the Red Cross says the Home Office is turning down “take charge” requests by the French on often pedantic grounds. Once such a request has been accepted by the UK government it is in effect responsible for a child who is seeking asylum. In some cases British officials claim to have “misplaced” requests from the French to help children, raising questions over Britain’s approach to what humanitarian experts call an urgent child protection issue.

The camp is scheduled to be demolished this month, with no provision agreed by the British and French for most of the 1,000 unaccompanied minors there, of whom at least 400 are eligible to enter the UK. A new report damningly articulates the Home Office’s intransigence, with research by the Red Cross revealing it takes up to 11 months on average to bring a child to the UK under an EU scheme to reunite families. Lawyers say there is no reason why the process should take more than several weeks. The report also identifies “problems ranging from basic administrative errors causing severe delays to a shortage of human resources on the French side”. It accuses the Home Office of unnecessarily forcing vulnerable children to stay in the camp for months after their case is rejected because of a basic administrative error or lack of documents. “Insufficient discretion or consideration is made for the child’s vulnerability and circumstances,” says the report, No Place For Children, released on Sunday.

Debt Rattle October 7 2016

Oct 072016

October 7, 2016 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 7:46 am Finance Tagged with: bankruptcy, bubble, Deutsche, IMF, Le Pen, Nobel, referendum, refugees, Trump, volatility Comments Off

G. G. Bain Katherine Stinson, “the flying schoolgirl,” Sheepshead Bay Speedway, Brooklyn 1918

• IMF, Global Finance Leaders Fret Over Populist Backlash (R.)

• Donald Trump Makes History With Zero Major Newspaper Endorsements (Yahoo)

• The Great Debt Unwind: US Business Bankruptcies Soar 38% (WS)

• Pound Falls 10% In ‘Insane’ Asian Trading Mystery (G.)

• California Overtakes UK To Become ‘World’s Fifth Largest Economy (Ind.)

• China’s Housing Boom Looks a Lot Like Last Year’s Stocks Bubble (BBG)

• Deutsche Bank Mismarked 37 Deals Like Monte Dei Paschi’s (BBG)

• 14 US Senators Call for Criminal Investigation of Wells Fargo (AP)

• Liar Loans Surge in Australia’s Red-Hot Housing Bubble (WS)

• Risk and Volatility Cannot be Extinguished (CH Smith)

• USA’s Day Of Reckoning – Hidden Secrets Of Money 7 (Mike Maloney)

• Why Democracy Rewards Bad People (Mises Inst.)

• Marine Le Pen Says EU Responsible For “Monstrous Chaos In Syria” (ZH)

• Renzi Must Go If He Loses Italy Referendum, Five Star Rival Says (BBG)

• This Greek Grandmother Could Win The Nobel Peace Prize (USA Today)

• EU Launches Tough Border Force To Curb Refugee Crisis (AFP)

Bunch of losers.

• IMF, Global Finance Leaders Fret Over Populist Backlash (R.)

World finance leaders on Thursday decried a growing populist backlash against globalization and pledged to take steps to ensure trade and economic integration benefited more people currently left behind. Their comments at the start of the IMF and World Bank fall meetings signaled frustration with persistently low growth rates and the surge of public anger over free trade and other pillars of the global economic system. The meetings are the first since Britain voted in June to leave the EU and U.S. billionaire Donald Trump secured the Republican presidential nomination with a campaign that attacked trade deals.

“More and more, people don’t trust their elites. They don’t trust their economic leaders, and they don’t trust their political leaders,” German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble said during an IMF panel discussion in Washington. “In the UK, everyone from the elites told the people, ‘don’t vote for a Brexit.’ But they did.” Schaeuble said Germany was trying to “hold Europe together” in the face of rising nationalism, and failure to do so would bode poorly for global economic cooperation. Last week, the World Trade Organization slashed its global trade volume growth forecast to the slowest pace since 2007, saying it expected it to rise just 1.7% this year, down from the 2.8% it forecast in April.

Propaganda works. Until it doesn’t.

• Donald Trump Makes History With Zero Major Newspaper Endorsements (Yahoo)

With just a little over a month until election day, Donald Trump has racked up zero major newspaper endorsements, a first for any major party nominee in American history. While newspaper endorsements don’t necessarily change voters’ minds, this year’s barrage of anti-Trump endorsements could actually move the needle come November, experts say. “It’s significant,” Jack Pitney, professor of government at California’s Claremont McKenna College, told TheWrap. “The cumulative effect of all these defections could have an impact on moderate Republicans.” Some conservative papers, which have endorsed Republicans for decades, are now breaking with tradition to endorse Hillary Clinton or, at the very least, urge their readers not to vote for Trump.

Several have taken a stand even at the expense of losing subscribers at a time when newspapers are barely staying afloat. Some papers have received death threats. But for a growing number of newspaper editorial boards, staying on the sidelines is no longer an option. The Dallas Morning News, which has endorsed every Republican nominee since 1940, was so appalled by the idea of a President Trump that it introduced its Clinton endorsement with this caveat: “We don’t come to this decision easily. This newspaper has not recommended a Democrat for the nation’s highest office since before World War II — if you’re counting, that’s more than 75 years and nearly 20 elections.”

But today’s jobs report will be a big ray of sunshine. It’s election time, don’t you know.

• The Great Debt Unwind: US Business Bankruptcies Soar 38% (WS)

Something funny happened on the way to the bank: In August, commercial and industrial loans outstanding at all banks in the US fell for the first time month-to-month since October 2010, which had marked the end of the collapse of credit during the Financial Crisis. In October 2008, the absolute peak of the prior credit bubble, there were $1.59 trillion commercial and industrial loans outstanding. As the Great Recession chewed into the economy, C&I loans plunged. Many of them were cleansed from bank balance sheets via charge-offs. But then the Fed decided what the US needed was more debt to fix the problem of too much debt, thus kicking off what would become the greatest credit bubble in US history. By July 2016, C&I loans had surged to $2.064 trillion, 30% above their prior bubble peak.

But in August, something stopped working: C&I loans actually fell 0.3% to $2.058 trillion, according to the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. That translates into an annualized decline of 3.8%, after an uninterrupted six-year spree of often double-digit annualized increases. Note that first month-to-month dip since October 2010. [..] The ugliest credit stories in terms of bonds, according to Standard & Poor’s Distress Ratio, are the doom-and-gloom categories of “Energy” and “Metals, Mining, and Steel.” Next down the line are two consumer-facing industries: brick-and-mortar retailers and restaurants.

But these metrics by credit ratings agencies are based on companies that are big enough to be rated by the ratings agencies and that are able to borrow in the capital markets by issuing bonds. The 18.9 million small businesses in the US and many of the 182,000 medium size businesses don’t qualify for that special treatment. They can only borrow from banks and other sources. And they’re not included in those metrics. But when they go bankrupt, they are included in the overall commercial bankruptcy numbers, and those numbers are getting uglier by the month. In September, US commercial bankruptcy filings soared 38% from a year ago to 3,072, the 11th month in a row of year-over-year increases, according to the American Bankruptcy Institute.

Just a fat finger, or…? Most of the loss has been recuperated.

• Pound Falls 10% In ‘Insane’ Asian Trading Mystery (G.)

A “fat finger” error by a trader or computerised chain reaction was thought responsible as the pound plunged to a new three-decade low during “insane” early trading in Asia on Friday – adding to the huge losses sterling had already suffered amid speculation that Britain is heading for a “hard Brexit”. The pound fell almost 10% at one point to US$1.1378, prompting confusion among traders who were struggling to identify any news or market event that could have been to blame. As the currency recovered to around $1.2415 there was speculation a technical glitch or human error had sparked a rash of computer-driven orders.

“What we had was insane – call it flash crash but the move of this magnitude really tells you how low the currency can really go,” said Naeem Aslam, chief market analyst of Think Markets, in a note. “Hard Brexit has haunted the sterling.” [..] The pound has fallen 13% against the dollar since Britain voted in late May to leave the EU, with its losses accelerated after Theresa May announced on Sunday that she would trigger Article 50 by next March, a move that would begin Britain’s formal exit from the EU. Sean Callow, senior currency strategist at Westpac, noted that sterling had been “on a precipice” since May’s declaration in a speech at the Conservative party conference. “I think we’ve underestimated how many people had money positions for a very wishy-washy Brexit, or even none,” he said.

Falling pound meets bragging rights.

• California Overtakes UK To Become ‘World’s Fifth Largest Economy (Ind.)

Kevin de Leon, the leader of the California Senate, has said the state of California is now the fifth largest economy in the world after UK’s vote to leave the EU. His comments came a day after the pound sterling hit a new 31-year low against the dollar as on-going fears over the consequences of a “hard” Brexit spooked traders. Speaking at an event celebrating the tenth anniversary of the California Global Warming solution Act, de Leon said: “As of this morning California is officially the 5th largest economy in the world. “We have created more jobs than the other top two job creators in the US, Florida and Texas, combined,” he added.

Economists tend to be wary of comparing the relative size of economies using volatile market exchange rates, generally preferring to use a Purchasing Power Parity measure which adjusts for differences in local purchasing power. However, according to the US Bureau of Economic Analysis, California’s GDP in 2015 was $2.46 trillion. This compares to a GDP of $2.36 trillion for the UK in 2016, at the current currency exchange rate of $1.27. In June, the state of California’s GDP surpassed France to become the sixth largest in the world on this measure.

China can only go from bubble to bubble, or the game is up.

• China’s Housing Boom Looks a Lot Like Last Year’s Stocks Bubble (BBG)

Tai Hui is experiencing deja vu. China’s surge in home prices reminds JPMorgan Asset Management’s chief Asia market strategist of last year’s stock market mania. Spiraling leverage and implicit state support are among the common denominators, he says. Shanghai property values jumped 31% in August from a year earlier, the latest data show. In 2015, a 60% rally in the city’s equities through June 12 was followed by a $5 trillion rout. Deutsche Bank warned last month that China’s housing market is in a bubble, while Goldman Sachs said this week it sees growing risks across the real estate industry. Home prices started to take off last year in the wake of the stock market crash after the governments eased curbs on property purchases.

In recent days, cities including Shenzhen have started re-imposing restrictions. “It’s similar to the equity market where if you let things loose, it just runs like a stallion,” said Hui. “And then you have to really rein it back, then it’s like an ice bucket challenge. So you go through this extreme heat and cold. That’s not particularly good for the economy because then you’re going through very aggressive investment cycles.” [..] Home prices started to climb after China eased mortgage policies and down-payment requirements in March 2015 to arrest what was then a slide in prices. New curbs, such as higher deposits to limits on the number of homes people can buy, are proving ineffective given the easy access homebuyers have to leverage, said Wee May Ling at Henderson Global Investors.

Medium and long-term new loans, mostly mortgages, totaled 529 billion yuan ($79 billion) in August, while aggregate financing jumped to 1.47 trillion yuan, helping fuel a 39% jump in property sales by value in the first eight months. Private investment in fixed assets, meanwhile, stalled at 2.1% for a second straight month in the January through August period, matching a record low. While HSBC says the overall level of China’s household debt remains low, Deutsche Bank said it sees “clear sign of a bubble” in property – one that will end in a major correction in two years’ time. Just like last year’s equity boom, China is using credit growth to boost the economy, Zhiwei Zhang, chief China economist at Deutsche Bank, wrote in a report on Sept. 28.

It’s like Tony Soprano is running the banking system.

• Deutsche Bank Mismarked 37 Deals Like Monte Dei Paschi’s (BBG)

Deutsche Bank, indicted for colluding with Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena to conceal the Italian lender’s losses, mismarked the transaction and dozens of others on its own books, according to an audit commissioned by Germany’s regulator. Executives at Deutsche Bank arranged 103 similar deals with a total value of €10.5 billion ($11.8 billion) for 30 clients, according to the audit, a copy of which was seen by Bloomberg. The lender, Germany’s largest, adjusted the accounting of 37 of those trades in 2013, in addition to Monte Paschi’s, changing them from loans that had been kept off the books to derivatives, the audit said. The widespread use of a transaction that’s now the subject of a criminal case highlights the lender’s appetite for complexity at a time when the bank was expanding its fixed-income empire.

While Deutsche Bank has since cut risky assets and eliminated thousands of jobs to bolster capital, mounting legal costs have become a source of increasing concern to investors, driving shares to a record low. “Very complex deals prevent the market and regulators from properly understanding the state of a bank’s balance sheet, inhibiting proper regulatory monitoring and distorting market discipline,” said Emilios Avgouleas at the University of Edinburgh. The audit found that while Monte Paschi was the only client that used a transaction to “window dress” its books, Deutsche Bank didn’t correctly account for similar deals with banks from Italy to Indonesia made between 2008 and 2010. The report also said senior executives didn’t properly authorize the Monte Paschi trade, dubbed Santorini, or adequately review the transaction after receiving a subpoena from the U.S. Federal Reserve in 2012.

[..] Deutsche Bank and six current and former managers, including Michele Faissola, who oversaw global rates at the time, and Ivor Dunbar, former co-head of global capital markets, were indicted in a Milan court on Oct. 1 for the 2008 Monte Paschi transaction. Both were top deputies to former Deutsche Bank co-Chief Executive Officer Anshu Jain, and all three have left the company.

What’s needed is a comprehensive investigation of the whole system. But by all means, start with Wells Fargo and Deutsche.

• 14 US Senators Call for Criminal Investigation of Wells Fargo (AP)

Fourteen senators are calling on the Justice Department to open a criminal investigation of Wells Fargo executives after revelations that bank employees opened millions of fake banks and credit card accounts. A bank teller who steals bills from a cash drawer is likely to face charges, the senators said in a statement, but “an executive who oversees a massive fraud that implicates thousands of bank employees and costs customers millions of dollars can walk away with a hefty retirement package and millions in the bank.” House and Senate hearings last month with Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf “raised serious questions” that point to possible wrongdoing by Stumpf and other high-ranking executive, said the senators, all but one of them Democrats.

U.S. and California regulators have fined San Francisco-based Wells Fargo $185 million, saying bank employees trying to meet aggressive sales targets opened up to 2 million fake deposit and credit card accounts in customers’ names. Regulators said employees issued and activated debit cards and signed people up for online banking without permission. The abuses are said to have gone on for years, unchecked by senior management. In their letter, the senators urged Attorney General Loretta Lynch to hold Wells Fargo accountable as a corporation and also prosecute individual executives who may have broken the law. “Every time the Department of Justice settles a case of corporate fraud without holding individuals accountable, it reinforces the notion that the wealthy and powerful have purchased a higher class of justice for themselves,” the senators said.

The letter was led by Democratic Sen. Mazie Hirono of Hawaii and signed by 12 other Democrats, including Sens. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, Jeff Merkley of Oregon and Patrick Leahy of Vermont. Warren and Merkley serve on the Senate Banking Committee, while Leahy is senior Democrat on the Judiciary Committee.

Well, that’s a surprise!

• Liar Loans Surge in Australia’s Red-Hot Housing Bubble (WS)

UBS Securities Australia reported today that about 28% of Australian mortgages issued in 2015 and 2016 are what we in the US have come to call “liar loans,” which played a big role in the housing boom and the collapse and subsequent bailout of the global financial system. Reality is the last phase of a housing bubble needs liar loans to keep going because buyers have to reach beyond their limits, and the only way to do this is lie now, or miss out forever on buying a home. Evidence that home buyers are lying about income, assets, expenses, and other things on their mortgage applications has been surfacing for a while, along with fears that this would eventually lead to a “Mortgage Meltdown.” The US-style mortgage fraud would be a “Nuclear Bomb” to Australia’s banks.

Hedge funds are betting on this meltdown by shorting the big four banks. But everyone else wants these bank stocks that dominate the Australian stock exchange to rise. They’re in everyone’s portfolio. And they’re all doing what they can to turn shorting the banks into a widow-maker trade. To get “hard evidence,” UBS Securities Australia and UBS Evidence Lab surveyed 1,228 Australians who’d taken out a residential mortgage in 2015 or 2016. Participants, who remained anonymous, were asked 63 questions. The survey was broad based, covering all states and territories in Australia. Given the size of the sample and broad spread of respondents we believe the results are representative of Australian mortgage borrowers. Conclusions based on the total sample have a potential sampling error of just ±2.71% at a 95% confidence level.

The resulting report, “Mortgages – Time for the Truth?” found that 28% of the respondents admitted that they’d lied on their mortgage application: • 21% claimed their applications were “mostly factual and accurate.” • 5% stated they were “partially factual and accurate”• 2% “would rather not say.” How many of these liar-loan applicants lied on the survey to hide their lies on the mortgage application? We don’t know. But the actual percentage of liar loans could even be higher, given the propensity of liar-loan applicants – just my hunch – to lie on surveys to cover their tracks.

Fractals, swaps and central banks.

• Risk and Volatility Cannot be Extinguished (CH Smith)

[..] while modern portfolio management is statistically based (all those “standard deviations” you always see referenced in quantitative analyses), the markets behave fractally. Fractals are known as the geometry of chaos, for they describe how seemingly stable systems can quickly, and unpredictably, degrade into chaos. But as Mandelbrot explains, “100-year floods” actually occur with startling regularity in all markets. Put another way: you cannot disappear all risk with fancy statistical models and credit default swaps, etc., that offload the risk onto others, i.e. counterparties. In other words, all you’re really doing is masking the risk-you’re not eliminating it. And in hiding the real risk, you are lulling the market participants into a pernicious choice architecture in which their willingness to take riskier and riskier actions is rewarded and encouraged, while caution is punished.

This is the Paradox of Risk: by masking risk behind assurances that the Fed has your back, the Federal Reserve is encouraging unwary investors to increase their exposure to risk without even being aware of the dangers. I covered the perverse consequences of believing risk can be “managed away to near-zero” in my book An Unconventional Guide to Investing in Troubled Times. This is how you get a total systemic collapse of the entire choice architecture. And by this I mean not just the financial markets, but the backstop provided by central banks. In a system that is now highly correlated to central bank policies, the idea that some counterparty will cover your losses is illusory. This is magical thinking: that when the system implodes, the counterparties will magically escape the highly correlated collapse.

Mike is one of the few people who understands the importance of money velocity -and deflation- the way the Automatic Earth has talked about it for a long time. We’ve been in touch off and on for many years now, lots of mutual respect. I’m not focused so much on the ‘crisis as opportunity’ story though, since in my view it leaves too many people behind.

• USA’s Day Of Reckoning – Hidden Secrets Of Money 7 (Mike Maloney)

History shows that once or twice in a generation a global crisis comes along that radically devastates people’s way of life. A fundamental shift so big and drastic and overwhelming that it destroys their standard of living and impacts every area of their lives. We are about to experience one of those events… As Mike Maloney outlines in his brand new episode of the Hidden Secrets of Money, that next major event is deflation. And the culprit will be a relatively obscure monetary term that will impact virtually every area of your life: money velocity. You may not know exactly what money velocity means, but we will all soon experience it firsthand. In fact, money velocity will be the culprit of not just deflation, but the resulting inflation—and maybe hyperinflation—that will immediately follow.

Not applicable to all forms of democracy, but as I’ve often said, our systems self-select for sociopaths.

• Why Democracy Rewards Bad People (Mises Inst.)

One of the most widely accepted propositions among political economists is the following: Every monopoly is bad from the viewpoint of consumers. Monopoly is understood in its classical sense to be an exclusive privilege granted to a single producer of a commodity or service, i.e., as the absence of free entry into a particular line of production. In other words, only one agency, A, may produce a given good, x. Any such monopolist is bad for consumers because, shielded from potential new entrants into his area of production, the price of the monopolist’s product x will be higher and the quality of x lower than otherwise. This elementary truth has frequently been invoked as an argument in favor of democratic government as opposed to classical, monarchical or princely government.

This is because under democracy entry into the governmental apparatus is free – anyone can become prime minister or president – whereas under monarchy it is restricted to the king and his heir. However, this argument in favor of democracy is fatally flawed. Free entry is not always good. Free entry and competition in the production of goods is good, but free competition in the production of bads is not. Free entry into the business of torturing and killing innocents, or free competition in counterfeiting or swindling, for instance, is not good; it is worse than bad. So what sort of “business” is government? Answer: it is not a customary producer of goods sold to voluntary consumers. Rather, it is a “business” engaged in theft and expropriation — by means of taxes and counterfeiting — and the fencing of stolen goods.

Hence, free entry into government does not improve something good. Indeed, it makes matters worse than bad, i.e., it improves evil. Since man is as man is, in every society people who covet others’ property exist. Some people are more afflicted by this sentiment than others, but individuals usually learn not to act on such feelings or even feel ashamed for entertaining them. Generally only a few individuals are unable to successfully suppress their desire for others’ property, and they are treated as criminals by their fellow men and repressed by the threat of physical punishment. Under princely government, only one single person – the prince – can legally act on the desire for another man’s property, and it is this which makes him a potential danger and a “bad.”

However, a prince is restricted in his redistributive desires because all members of society have learned to regard the taking and redistributing of another man’s property as shameful and immoral. Accordingly, they watch a prince’s every action with utmost suspicion. In distinct contrast, by opening entry into government, anyone is permitted to freely express his desire for others’ property. What formerly was regarded as immoral and accordingly was suppressed is now considered a legitimate sentiment. Everyone may openly covet everyone else’s property in the name of democracy; and everyone may act on this desire for another’s property, provided that he finds entrance into government. Hence, under democracy everyone becomes a threat.

As referenced quite lost here before: it’s an uncomfortable feeling if the far right is the only voice to speak the truth. But make no mistake: it speaks loud and clear to the failure of the entire rest of the political system.

• Marine Le Pen Says EU Responsible For “Monstrous Chaos In Syria” (ZH)

With the proxy war in Syria escalating dramatically on a day by day basis, with ideological support for the warring powers split along West vs Russia (and China) lines, one particular outlier in the “western world” emerged overnight when Marine Le Pen, leader of France’s National Front party and the frontrunner for the role of president in near year’s French elections, accused the EU of being responsible for the ongoing chaos in Syria. She added that Europe has been too busy trying to overthrow Assad while Russia was actually fighting terrorists.

“You’ve done everything to bring down the government of Syria, throwing the country into a terrible civil war, while accusing Russia which is actually fighting Islamic State. Your responsibility could not be concealed”, she said speaking at the European Parliament plenary session in Strasbourg on Wednesday. “You cannot hide your responsibility […] for plunging this part of the world into an absolutely monstrous chaos,” Le Pen said, alleging that policies advocated by both the United States and the EU had contributed to the state Syria is currently in, as well as neighboring Iraq.

Brussels is getting very nervous about this: “If he manages to supplant Renzi he plans to hold his own referendum – on Italian membership of the euro area..”

• Renzi Must Go If He Loses Italy Referendum, Five Star Rival Says (BBG)

Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi cannot wriggle out of his pledge to quit if he loses the country’s referendum on constitutional reform, his main rival said. Luigi Di Maio, a leader of the anti-establishment Five-Star Movement and deputy-speaker of the lower house, said Italy will have to hold elections “as soon as possible” if Renzi’s plans for reform are rejected by voters on Dec. 4. “I am sure that Italians will ask him to maintain that promise despite the fact he has changed his mind,” Di Maio said in an interview at Bloomberg’s Rome office on Wednesday. “If Italians vote “No,” Renzi must keep the promise.” The premier has repeatedly pledged to step down if he loses the referendum which he says is central to his plans to make Italy work again after years of stagnation.

Still, he has backtracked somewhat in recent interviews as surveys show the “No” camp edging ahead and investors concerns mounting. The 30-year-old from near Naples is already described as “prime minister-in-waiting” by newspapers like Corriere della Sera with Five-Star neck-and-neck with Renzi’s Democratic Party in opinion polls. If he manages to supplant Renzi he plans to hold his own referendum – on Italian membership of the euro area. “I’d also like to see a European referendum on the euro, to see other countries starting to talk about it,” Di Maio said. “I know this is very difficult but I don’t think the Europe we know today will be the one we will face when we’re in government in a couple of years’ time.”

Bless these people, win or no win. They need no prize, simply do what must be done. And in Greece, there’s so much that must be done.

• This Greek Grandmother Could Win The Nobel Peace Prize (USA Today)

Emilia Kamvysi is not the typical Nobel Peace Prize candidate. The 86-year-old is not a politician, activist or lawyer. Her days are simple and slow. Like other Greek retirees on the island of Lesbos off the Turkish coast, she cooks for her children and grandchildren, watches the evening news and sits on the bench with her neighbors gazing at the sea. Then her life changed. Along with two neighbors -aged 89 and 85- Kamvysi was sitting on a bench in February, helping out a Syrian refugee mother by feeding her child with a bottle. The photo went viral, and she and the two other grannies in the photo became symbols of Greek generosity toward the migrants who have fled to Europe in recent years.

Soon after, a group of Greek lawmakers, academics and others nominated the grandmother as well as Greek fisherman Stratis Valiamos and actress Susan Sarandon. A second nomination included the grandmother and local agencies. Both cited their humanitarian efforts for the refugees. This Friday, Kamvysi and her granny-corps will find out whether she’ll become an official laureate. “I wish that Greece wins this prize, not just me,” Kamvysi said, pledging if she wins to give her share of the $1.2 million prize to the decaying Greek healthcare system. She lives well enough now on a $360-per-month farmer’s-pension, she said. “What am I going to do with it anyway?” she asked. “There are many people that helped the refugees — the fishermen, the volunteers. It wasn’t just us. Those poor babies, escaping war and drowning in the waters. It’s such a shame. We’re all crying in the village whenever there’s a shipwreck.”

The exact opposite of the grandmothers helping refugees. Military force against people fleeing military force.

• EU Launches Tough Border Force To Curb Refugee Crisis (AFP)

The EU launched its beefed-up border force Thursday in a rare show of unity by the squabbling bloc as it seeks to tackle its worst migration crisis since World War II. EU officials inaugurated the new task force at the Kapitan Andreevo checkpoint on the Bulgarian-Turkish border, the main land frontier for migrants seeking to enter the bloc and avoid the dangerous Mediterranean sea crossing. The European Border and Coast Guard Agency (EBCG) will have at its disposal some 1,500 officers from 19 member states who can be swiftly mobilised in case of an emergency, like a sudden surge of migrants. Brussels hopes the revamped agency will not just increase security, but also help heal the huge rifts that have emerged between member states clashing over the EU’s refugee policies.

The long-term goal is to lift border controls inside the bloc and fully restore the passport-free Schengen Zone. “The new agency is stronger and better equipped to tackle migration and security challenges,” EBCG director Fabrice Leggeri said at the launch. The force will also conduct stress tests at the bloc’s external borders to “identify vulnerabilities before a crisis hits”, he added. EU Migration Commissioner Dimitris Avramopoulos hailed the launch as a “historical day for the European Union”. “From now onwards, the external EU border of one member state is the external border of all member states – both legally and operationally,” he said. “Countries like Bulgaria, Greece and Italy are still under pressure, but they are not alone.”

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