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The euro’s founding father has warned that Europe’s latest plan for an EMU-wide finance ministry is a dangerous attempt to smuggle through political union, and breaches the basic tenets of modern democracy. Professor Otmar Issing, the chief architect of monetary union through its early years, said it would be “dangerous” to transfer control over tax and spending to the EU federal level before full political union has been established first on democratic foundations. Such a quantum leap in the constitutional structure of Europe – effectively the creation of an EU superstate, with a parliament comparable in power to the US Congress – is unthinkable in the current political atmosphere. It would require referenda across Europe, and a two-thirds majority in both houses of the German parliament.

“The chances of political union are close to zero,” he said, speaking at the Ambrosetti forum of world policymakers on Lake Como. If Europe were to jump the gun and force the pace of integration, this would lead to a rogue plenipotentiary with unbridled powers over sensitive issues of national life. “It is hard to see how it could be given democratic accountability,” he said. Prof Issing, a towering figure in the pre-EMU Bundesbank and the ECB’s first chief economist, said control of budgets must for now be left to national government and sovereign parliaments that are genuinely answerable to their own peoples. “Political union cannot be obtained in the European Union by the back door. It is a violation of the principle of no taxation without representation, and represents a wrong and dangerous approach,” he said.

Prof Issing was making a clear allusion to the American Revolution and the events that led up to the English Civil War in the 1640s, two great struggles triggered by a monarchical assault on the parliamentary power of the purse. The early democracies of Europe were all rooted in legislative control over spending. The proposals for an EMU finance ministry emerged in a paper by the heads of the Commission, Council, Parliament, Eurogroup, and ECB in June, a document known as the “Five Presidents Report”. It will start with an advisory European fiscal board and a strategic investment fund with enhanced powers, clearly a finance ministry in embryo. It will graduate towards a “euro area Treasury” from 2017 onwards, anchored in the EU treaties.

The report says that the new machinery will be established on a “lasting, fair and democratically legitimate basis”, and is in many ways a soul-searching admission that the EMU project has gone badly wrong, leading to bitter divisions. Yet critics warn that the EU is once again putting the cart before the horse. They point to the same fundamental errors that have led to perma-crisis in monetary union and spawned populist revolts across much of the EU. Prof Issing has always been open to an authentic United States of Europe similar to the US federal democracy. What he objects to is a deformed halfway house where supra-national bodies take decisions behind closed doors. The euro may survive “for a period” under its current structure, but it will break apart if the principles of monetary union are permanently violated. “Pacta sunt servanda (Agreements must be kept),” said Prof Issing.

Something tells me it’s going to take many meetings. And the outcome will be a huge disappointment. Perhaps we passed peak humanity a while ago and didn’t notice.

• UN Agencies ‘Broke And Failing’ In Face Of Ever-Growing Refugee Crisis (Guardian)

The UN’s humanitarian agencies are on the verge of bankruptcy and unable to meet the basic needs of millions of people because of the size of the refugee crisis in the Middle East, Africa and Europe, senior figures within the UN have told the Guardian. The deteriorating conditions in Lebanon and Jordan, particularly the lack of food and healthcare, have become intolerable for many of the 4 million people who have fled Syria, driving fresh waves of refugees north-west towards Europe and aggravating the current crisis. Speaking to the Guardian, the UN high commissioner for refugees, António Guterres, said: “If you look at those displaced by conflict per day, in 2010 it was 11,000; last year there were 42,000.

This means a dramatic increase in need, from shelter to water and sanitation, food, medical assistance, education. “The budgets cannot be compared with the growth in need. Our income in 2015 will be around 10% less than in 2014. The global humanitarian community is not broken – as a whole they are more effective than ever before. But we are financially broke.” Recent months have seen severe cuts to food rations for Syrian refugees in Lebanon and Jordan as well as for Somali and Sudanese refugees in Kenya. Darfuris living in camps in Chad have been warned that their rations may end completely at the end of the year. UN-run healthcare services have also been closed across a large part of Iraq, leaving millions of internally displaced people without access to healthcare.

Guterres warned that the damage being done by these cuts would be impossible to reverse. “We know that we are not doing enough, we are failing the basic needs of people. “The situation is beyond irreparable. If you look at the number of children who will see their lives so dramatically impacted by malnutrition and lack of psychosocial support, you will see this is already happening.”

Commodities trading.

• Europe Debates Migrant Quota Buyout Plan (FT)

European Commission officials are debating a proposal that would allow some EU countries to pay money in order to opt out of a mandatory quota system for accepting refugees, in a plan that could ease a stand-off between eastern and western members over how to relieve Europe’s migrant crisis. Some eastern states have balked at being forced to accept mandatory numbers, under a plan to divide 160,000 migrants across the region to be announced on Wednesday by commission president Jean-Claude Juncker. They argue that voluntary targets allow member states to provide better care to people looking to settle in Europe. “We are ready to share the burden and take responsibility, but only if we have control over the situation,” said Poland’s minister for Europe, Rafal Trzaskowski.

Over the summer a harrowing exodus of people from the Middle East, Africa and Afghanistan has leapt to the top of Europe’s political agenda, and led to a quadrupling of the EU’s resettlement target from 40,000 people in July. Commission officials and eastern diplomats stressed that the plan would only allow countries to take temporary “time-outs” from any expanded quota regime, in exchange for payments to a fund supporting refugees. “It creates an opportunity for voluntary decision making,” said an eastern EU official. “If they do it with penalties, then that is a bad idea. But if there is a system where you contribute financially to helping the problem in a different way, then that is much more palatable.”EU officials stressed that any opt-out would also have to be justified by “objective reasons” — for example Poland’s desire to have contingency plans in place to accept large numbers of refugees from Ukraine if the conflict there worsens.

Month, year, decade, you name it.

• Get Ready For A Real Lousy Month In The Stock Market (MarketWatch)

Investor sentiment has suffered with the recent correction and is not likely to improve in the short term, setting stocks up for a volatile September as international concerns overshadow domestic ones. Stocks took a big hit last week with the Dow Jones dropping 3.3%, the S&P 500 shedding 3.4%, and the Nasdaq falling 3%. International factors are feeding market volatility more than any other domestic factor, according to Brad McMillan, chief investment officer at Commonwealth Financial. McMillan said that Germany’s weak manufacturing orders report likely had more to do with Friday’s selloff than the jobs report’s effect on a September rate increase from the Federal Reserve.

What could affect the Fed’s decision is a continued stock market selloff. McMillan said if investors come back from the Labor Day holiday and decide to take risk off the table, the S&P 500 could break down through 1,870 as low as 1,790. If that happens, then the likelihood for a September rate increase falls below 50%, he said. “We’ve got another month or so before confidence bounces back,” McMillan said. “A lot of damage has been done to sentiment.” Others believe the correction still has a ways to go, with one indicator showing that investor sentiment has fallen to “panic” levels. Citi Research’s Tobias Levkovich said his Panic/Euphoria model, which brings together such indicators as short-interest ratios, margin debt, compiled bullishness data, and put/call ratios, broke into “panic” territory for the first time since late 2012.

“..the dollar value of foreign currency reserves held by all developing nations ballooned by almost $7 trillion in just one decade to a peak of some $8.05 trillion by the middle of last year.” It was $1.05 trillion 10 years ago….

• Forex Reserves Unwind Could Reverse Global Bond Supercycle (Reuters)

China’s summer shock may mark the end of an era of globalization that helped define world markets for more than a decade. Investor anxiety about the consequences is well-founded. Beijing’s integration into the global economy since 2002 reshaped the financial as well as economic landscape – mainly by the way China itself and the economies it supercharged with outsize demand for raw materials banked the hard cash windfalls they earned over the following 12 years. According to the IMF, the dollar value of foreign currency reserves held by all developing nations ballooned by almost $7 trillion in just one decade to a peak of some $8.05 trillion by the middle of last year.

While China was the main driver, accounting for about half of that increase, its economic boom created a commodity supercycle that flooded the coffers of resource-rich nations from across Asia to Russia, Brazil and the Gulf. As the vast bulk of this hard cash was banked in U.S. Treasury and other low risk, rich-country bonds, they were at least one critical factor in the halving of U.S. Treasury and other Group of Seven government borrowing costs over the same period. Alongside the disinflationary impact of China’s low cost labor on western goods imports and wages, this reserve stash helped extend what has now been a 20-year bull market in bonds.

What’s more, the drop in yields, by skewing relative returns between stocks and bonds and also the relative cost of capital for companies, also at least partly underwrote a post-credit crisis surge in equity prices to successive records. Reverse that bond buying, even at the margin, and world asset markets may have a major problem. That’s especially so at a time when the big other marginal bid for bonds, the U.S. Federal Reserve’s quantitative easing program, has ended and when western recoveries are pressuring the Fed and others to normalize near zero interest rates.

How much longer can China keep up the pretense?

• Capital Flight Now The Big Concern For Slowing China (FT)

Last month, Dalian Wanda, one of the most outward facing corporates in China, bought the organiser of the Ironman triathlons from a US private equity firm for $650 million. Meanwhile, Anbang Insurance, another company with similar global aspirations, looked less likely to succeed in its courtship of the Portuguese authorities in the hope of purchasing the remnants of a troubled financial conglomerate in Lisbon — precisely because the Chinese already have purchased so many assets there. At the same time, Chinese tourists continue to flood destinations like Japan, purchasing luxury goods which have become ever more inexpensive as a result of the steady appreciation of the Chinese currency, with the intention to sell them back home for a tidy profit.

It is hard to know what represents prudent diversification and what constitutes capital flight on the part of Chinese groups and wealthy travellers. But for those who track capital outflows from China, the distinction does not much matter. In the four quarters to the end of June, such outflows, (which do not include debt repayment) have totalled more than $500 billion according to data from Citigroup. China’s mountain of foreign reserves, once around $4 trillion, are now down to less than $3.7 trillion and are expected to drop further to $3.3 trillion by the end of the year, Citi calculates. Not long ago, it seems that the world was awash in cheap dollars. Many of those cheap dollars could be traced to the generous monetary policies of the Federal Reserve.

But many of them also came from the mainland as Chinese recycled their dollar earnings from the sale of exports abroad. Chinese capital flowed into everything from farms in Africa to ports in Sri Lanka and Pakistan, to dairies in New Zealand, energy firms in Canada and Treasuries in the US. More recently China started undertaking massive new, and expensive initiatives including the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, the New Development Bank, its Silk Route projects and a recapitalisation of the two policy banks that help recycle its reserves.

Suddenly, though, the question has shifted from what China will do with all the capital that flowed in and its arguably excessive reserves to whether it has enough money and adequate reserves at all. “It is neither the sell-off in Chinese stocks nor weakness in the currency that matters most,” notes George Saravelos, a currency strategist in London with Deutsche Bank. “It is what is happening to China’s FX reserves and what this means for global liquidity. The People’s Bank of China’s actions are equivalent to an unwind of QE or, in other words, Quantitative Tightening.”

Shanghai down another 2.52% today.

• China Freezes Outbound Investment Quotas as Outflows Hurt Yuan (Bloomberg)

China refrained from granting new quotas for residents to invest in overseas markets for a fifth month in August, the longest halt in six years, as authorities seek to stem weakness in the yuan. The State Administration of Foreign Exchange, which has approved 132 local institutions to put as much as $89.99 billion in offshore assets via its Qualified Domestic Institutional Investor program, hasn’t granted new allocations since March. Quotas for overseas investors to access domestic capital markets rose $16.4 billion to $140.3 billion in the period, data from the regulator show. The yuan traded 1.5% weaker outside of China than inside the country on Monday, indicating depreciation pressure.

China is trying to open its capital account enough for the yuan to win reserve status from the International Monetary Fund, while trying to curb an exodus of funds from an economy expanding at the slowest pace since 1990. Chinese investors are seeking to diversify in overseas assets after the Shanghai Composite Index of shares tumbled 39% from this year’s peak on June 12. The yuan slumped 3.6% in Shanghai and 4.9% in Hong Kong in the past 12 months. “Interest is there but whether the money can leave in the short term is the problem,” said Thomas Kwan, Hong Kong-based chief investment officer at Harvest Global Investments Ltd., whose Chinese unit offers QDII funds. “To avoid triggering excessive yuan outflows, I don’t think regulators would grant additional QDII quotas in the short term.”

Stand up act. Very funny people, the Chinese.

• China Revises Down 2014 GDP To 7.3% From 7.4% (CNBC, Reuters)

China’s National Bureau of Statistics on Monday revised down 2014 gross domestic product (GDP) growth to 7.3% from a previously reported 7.4%. This growth revision comes on the back of comments by China’s Finance Minister Lou Jiwei over the weekend that GDP growth will remain around 7% in 2015, as predicted earlier in the year, and the new economic normal may last for four to five years. A lower GDP number for 2014 should also make year-on-year comparisons for economic growth in 2015 more favorable. GDP stood at 63.6 trillion yuan ($10.00 trillion) last year, down by 32.4 billion yuan from the initial estimate, Reuters reported, citing the statistics bureau.

“China revises growth data every year, but it’s usually upwards. In that regard, it is unusual that the revision was downwards,” said Dariusz Kowalczyk, senior economist and strategist at Credit Agricole. “Rationally speaking, a 0.1% revision isn’t a big deal – and it doesn’t tell us much about the Chinese economy, but when it comes to sentiment, this is a negative development,” he said. The government will not particularly care about quarterly economic fluctuations and maintain steady macro-economic policy, Lou said, according to a statement late Saturday on the People’s Bank of China website. China is headed for its slowest economic expansion in 25 years in 2015 and mainland markets have slumped 40% since mid-June, sending global financial markets skittering.

“Like a zoo,” Mr. Hadad said. “Like we are dogs.”

• As Europe Grasps for Answers, More Migrants Flood Its Borders (NY Times)

Along Hungary’s border with Serbia, the scene was anything but smooth. “While Europe rejoiced in happy images from Austria and Greece yesterday, refugees crossing into Hungary right now see a very different picture: riot police and a cold, hard ground to sleep on,” Barbora Cernusakova, an Amnesty International researcher, said in a statement released by the group. The new camp in Roszke was being called a “reception center” by Hungarian officials, though the police on the scene referred to it as an “alien holding center.” Both migrants and relief groups were reporting harsh treatment and a hostile reception from the border authorities. On the Serbian side, officials temporarily blocked at least some trains headed north, amid numerous reports of the police demanding bribes to allow the migrants to pass.

Photos on social media from the new camp showed the police with dogs guarding a desolate compound surrounded by high fences. Omar Hadad, 24, from Dara’a, Syria, had been at a nearby camp along the border before he was shifted on Sunday to one west of Budapest, in the town of Bicske. “The Hungarian police came into the camp and they beat me with batons,” he said of his time in the holding center near the Serbian border. He peeled off his socks to show a bruised foot and leg. Journalists were not allowed into the Bicske camp, but the migrants could come out or speak across the entrance gate. Several other migrants rushed toward Mr. Hadad when they saw him displaying his wounds.

“Here, here, look,” said Salam Barajakly, a student from Damascus who began counting off the wounds and scars on his arms, legs and neck that he said he had gotten on the journey to Hungary, some by accident, some from the police, some from crawling under razor-wire fences. Two men held out smartphones showing videos of the camp where they had been held near the Serbian border. Hundreds of people squatted in the dust while the police tossed sandwiches and bottles of water to them over a barbed-wire fence. “Like a zoo,” Mr. Hadad said. “Like we are dogs.”

And that’s just the Catholics. But let’s see the response.

• Pope Francis Calls On European Parishes To House Up To 500,000 Refugees (WaPo)

In a statement that could have far-reaching implications, Pope Francis called on all Catholic parishes and monasteries in Europe to each house one refugee family that has fled “death from war and hunger.” “Every parish, every religious community, every monastery, every sanctuary of Europe, take in one family,” the pope said during his customary Sunday address, the news agency Agence France-Presse reported. He also said the Vatican will welcome two families of refugees. There are about 122,000 Catholic parishes in Europe, according to a study conducted by Georgetown University and published in June. If each of them housed one refugee family consisting of three to four people, about 360,000 to 500,000 refugees could be accommodated in the coming months.

It is unclear, however, whether all parishes will accede to the pope’s wish. In addition, housing refugees in parishes would have little bearing on the strict policies in countries such as France that have left desperate refugees — fleeing conflict and persecution — with limited options when they make their way to European shores. Addressing thousands of people in St. Peter’s Square on Sunday, Francis provided few details about his call to accommodate refugees, many of whom are not Catholics. The pope called his idea a “concrete gesture” ahead of a “year of mercy” that starts in December. The announcement, nevertheless, could relieve some of the countries that have taken in a large share of the refugees who have recently arrived in Europe, such as Germany or Sweden.

If all of Germany’s 12,000 parishes responded favorably to the pope’s demand, they alone could house a total of more than 30,000 refugees, according to Reuters. However, Germany expects about 800,000 refugees to apply for asylum in the country by the end of the year. The pope’s push resembles other, smaller initiatives already popular in the country. Some Germans have invited refugees to stay in their homes for free as authorities confront increasing difficulties in their bid to provide adequate apartments and reception centers. Many refugees are still housed in tent camps, and it is unclear whether alternative housing can be provided before winter arrives, as WorldViews reported earlier.

“They all knew about it … but they just let it go.”

• ‘If This Is Your Idea Of Europe, You Can Keep It’ (CNBC)

“If this is your idea of Europe, keep it for yourself.” Thus spoke an irate Matteo Renzi, Italy’s Prime Minister, during an E.U. Council meeting last June as his East European colleagues refused any obligation to accept some of the thousands of Middle Eastern and African refugees lucky enough to reach alive the Greek and the Italian shores. More than two months later, there is still no unified E.U. policy on how to resettle the growing waves of refugees overwhelming Italy, Greece, Serbia and Hungary. In the middle of all that, some European leaders say they are defending Europe’s Christian values with barbed wires and overcrowded railway cars stuffed with suffocating people – the chilling images reminiscent of the darkest chapters in European history.

Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s Prime Minister, and a self-proclaimed defender of the “Christian Europe,” is justifying such acts by saying that “Europeans are scared because they see that their leaders have completely lost control of the situation.” Along with hundreds of thousands of refugees during the recent Balkan wars, and close to a million of refugees and displaced people from Ukraine’s eastern provinces, this latest human tragedy is emblematic of E.U.’s inability to respond to any major challenges – to say nothing of its inability to anticipate such extraordinary events. And that is not for lack of institutional infrastructure. The E.U. Commission has people in charge of everything – economic, social and foreign policy issues, including even the “specialists” writing the rules and procedures for cheese manufacturing.

The refugee crisis is not a sudden emergency. It is a disaster that has brewed over the past three years. The U.N. confirmed last Friday that it repeatedly warned the E.U. Commission of the coming influx of refugees from war-torn areas of Africa and Middle-East. This horrendous case of ineptitude and mismanagement will remind some of the European “shock” at “discovering” in 2009 that many euro area countries had been violating for years the monetary union’s fiscal rules, and that some of them had totally lost control of their banking systems. How was it possible that nobody knew about that? Jean-Claude Trichet, the former President of the ECB had the answer: “They all knew about it … but they just let it go.”

Can you then blame an angry German Chancellor Angela Merkel for roiling the markets with incendiary statements and imposing debilitating austerity policies to punish the fiscal transgression and banks’ mismanagement in a number of euro area countries? Yes, you can. As a key euro area member, Germany had the responsibility to help enforce the fiscal and financial treaty obligations binding the countries where the euro serves as a legal tender. Anger and vindictiveness are no substitutes for anticipating problems and applying proper policies.

Amen. Even a failed Canadian politician can oversee this.

• The Refugee Crisis Isn’t a ‘European Problem’ (Michael Ignatieff)

Those of us outside Europe are watching the unbelievable images of the Keleti train station in Budapest, the corpse of a toddler washed up on a Turkish beach, the desperate Syrian families chancing their lives on the night trip to the Greek islands — and we keep being told this is a European problem. The Syrian civil war has created more than four million refugees. The United States has taken in about 1,500 of them. The United States and its allies are at war with the Islamic State in Syria — fine, everyone agrees they are a threat — but don’t we have some responsibility toward the refugees fleeing the combat? If we’ve been arming Syrian rebels, shouldn’t we also be helping the people trying to get out of their way? If we’ve failed to broker peace in Syria, can’t we help the people who can’t wait for peace any longer?

It’s not just the United States that keeps pretending the refugee catastrophe is a European problem. Look at countries that pride themselves on being havens for the homeless. Canada, where I come from? As few as 1,074 Syrians, as of August. Australia? No more than 2,200. Brazil? Fewer than 2,000, as of May. The worst are the petro states. As of last count by Amnesty International, how many Syrian refugees have the Gulf States and Saudi Arabia taken in? Zero. Many of them have been funneling arms into Syria for years, and what have they done to give new homes to the four million people trying to flee? Nothing. The brunt of the crisis has fallen on the Turks, the Egyptians, the Jordanians, the Iraqis and the Lebanese.

Funding appeals by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees have failed to meet their targets. The squalor in the refugee camps has become unendurable. Now the refugees have decided, en masse, that if the international community won’t help them, if neither Russia nor the United States is going to force the war to an end, they won’t wait any longer. They are coming our way. And we are surprised? Blaming the Europeans is an alibi and the rest of our excuses — like the refugees don’t have the right papers — are sickening. Political leadership from outside Europe could reverse the paralysis and mutual recrimination inside Europe. The United Nations system to register refugees is overwhelmed. Countries like Hungary say they can’t resettle them all on their own. The obvious solution is for Canada, Australia, the United States, Brazil and other countries to announce that they are willing to send processing teams to Budapest, Athens and the other major entry points to register refugees and process them for admission.

Countries will set their own targets, but for the United States and Canada, for example, a minimum of 25,000 Syrian refugees is a good place to start. (The United States’ recent promise to take in 5,000 to 8,000 Syrian refugees next year is still far too small.) Churches, mosques, community groups and families could agree to sponsor and resettle refugees. Most of the burdened countries — Hungary, Greece, Turkey, Italy — would accept help in a heartbeat. Once these states take a lead, other countries — including those wretched autocrats in the Gulf States — could be shamed into doing their part.

Somewhat plausible.

• Refugee Flow Linked To Turkish Policy Shift (Kath.)

A sharp increase in the influx of migrants and refugees, mostly from Syria, into Greece is due in part to a shift in Turkey’s geopolitical tactics, according to diplomatic sources. These officials link the wave of migrants into the eastern Aegean to political pressures in neighboring Turkey, which is bracing for snap elections in November, and to a recent decision by Ankara to join the US in bombing Islamic State targets in Syria. The analyses of several officials indicate that the influx from neighboring Turkey is taking place as Turkish officials look the other way or actively promote the exodus. According to one Greek official, security fears are a key reason for Turkey’s encouragement of migrant flows.

“Turkey is facilitating or at least is not hampering the movement of illegal immigrants toward Greece, thinking that in this way it will limit the risk of a possible new terrorist attack on its territory as a reprisal for the military operations it has carried out on Syrian soil,” the official said. Another diplomat said Turkey wants to create a “dead zone” on its border with Syria that would allow the Turkish military to freely move against jihadists and Syrian Kurds. “This is why it is encouraging, or at least not obstructing, the movement of refugees from camps near the Syrian border to the Aegean and Greece,” he said.

Hungary is largely a nation of former refugees.

• Hungarian Official Admits Campaign To Generate Hate Against Migrants (EurActiv)

A Hungarian official indirectly admitted that the poster campaign ordered by the government last summer to discourage immigrants from coming into the country was aimed at generating hate towards them. Anti-immigration posters put up by the Hungarian government have sparked political controversy since June, featuring slogans such as “If you come to Hungary, you cannot take away Hungarians’ jobs”, and “If you come to Hungary, you have to respect our culture!”

Strangely enough, the posters can hardly be understood by migrants, because they are written in Hungarian. The posters – widely ridiculed on social media – were part of a larger anti-immigration campaign driven by Prime Minister Viktor Orban in response to a surge in asylum seekers. The campaign included a public questionnaire linking migration to terrorism and blaming EU policies for the influx of refugees.

But now a Hungarian official has admitted that the posters were in fact aimed at instigating hate against the migrants. Gergely Prohle, substitute state secretary of EU affairs in the Ministry of Human Resources, started by saying that the radical football hooligans did not become radical due to the country’s poster campaign. Then he added that Hungarian society displayed vast solidarity with the refugees, and if the poster campaign did have the desired effects on our society this would not be so.

Next year?!

• Merkel Seeks $6.7 Billion for Refugees NEXT YEAR! (Bloomberg)

German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government announced plans to spend an extra €6 billion on refugees next year as thousands more migrants poured into the country over the weekend. Merkel’s governing coalition said on Monday that Germany will add 3 billion euros in spending to the 2016 federal budget and provide another €3 billion to states and municipalities to tackle the region’s biggest refugee crisis since World War II. Germany and Austria plan to end emergency measures that allowed the passage of thousands of migrants over the weekend from Hungary without registering in that country. That decision came after talks between Merkel, Austrian Chancellor Werner Faymann and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, Faymann said in a statement on Sunday.

The countries late on Friday suspended European Union rules that require migrants to register and stay in the EU country where they first enter. The refugees, many coming from war-torn Syria, traveled on trains to Munich’s main station and were then sent to shelters around the country as German citizens volunteered in mass numbers to help the newcomers. Merkel’s government is considering putting excess 2015 tax revenue in a fund that would help cover the refugee costs next year, according to a person familiar with the plans, who asked not to be identified discussing private deliberations. In her weekly podcast, Merkel said the government would stick to its balanced budget goal even as it spends more on refugees.

Reuters said “Migration crisis”. But that sounds too nonsensical.

• Greece Asks EU For Humanitarian Aid To Cope With Refugee Crisis (Reuters)

Greece asked the European Union on Monday for humanitarian aid to help it cope with what it called “a volatile situation” following the large flow of migrants and refugees from the Middle East and Africa onto its shores. It requested the EU activate its civil protection mechanism, the bloc’s crisis-response body, to provide staff, medical and pharmaceutical supplies, clothes and equipment, the Interior Ministry said. Greece is struggling to cope with the thousands of people fleeing poverty and war in countries such as Syria for Europe. Tensions have flared on eastern islands including Kos and Lesbos where most refugees land due to their proximity to Turkey.

On Monday morning, a Greek ferry unloaded 2,500 migrants at the port of Piraeus, bringing the total number of people moved to the mainland since last Monday to more than 15,000. Thousands more are waiting to be identified and ferried to Athens to continue their trip to other European countries. “The First Response Service requested that the EU civil protection mechanism is activated in order to substantially strengthen the efforts undertaken by the First Reception Service to manage a volatile situation,” the ministry said. “The satisfaction of the said request is expected to be of critical assistance to the work of the First Response System, which, under current conditions, is extremely difficult.”

The EU’s civil protection mechanism coordinates the bloc’s humanitarian aid efforts, channeling aid and sending special teams with equipment to disaster areas. It has previously helped Greece fight forest fires. European Commission First Vice President Frans Timmermans and Migration Commissioner Dimitris Avramopoulos have already promised Athens €33 million to help it tackle the crisis.

Refugees as an election issue, Alexis? You sure?

• Statement By The President Of SYRIZA On The Refugees (Alexis Tsipras)

Europe is experiencing an unprecedented humanitarian crisis as a result of the refugees that are fleeing war and violence in our region. Greece is at the forefront of this crisis. Yesterday’s picture of three-year old Ailan, dead in the Aegean Sea, on the coast of Bodrum, was a powerful punch in the gut for all of us. And particularly for Europe. A Europe that has responded with initial indifference, nonsensical repression and now awkwardness in the face of a global drama caused by erratic foreign policy and the West’s military interventions.

Yesterday’s horrific picture that shocked the world unfortunately demonstrates the tremendous irresponsibility and great shame of the political forces and especially of New Democracy, which from the outset sought to exploit the problem for petty gains; stoking the most extreme populist instincts, the very ones Golden Dawn is manipulating as well to gain more votes. For now, I will ignore New Democracy’s inability to manage this – even rudimentarily – as a government, and will concentrate on its criticism of open borders. What exactly were they demanding from the Greek government? To use Greek coast guard ships to sink the inflatable boats carrying refugees? And to turn the Aegean into a watery grave for thousands of children like Ailan? Even populism and trying to win votes must have some limits.

Stop making sense?!

• Tsipras Vows Battle To Improve Bailout After Greek Election (Reuters)

Former prime minister Alexis Tsipras promised on Sunday to fight to improve the terms of Greece’s latest bailout as he tried to shore up a rapidly collapsing lead in opinion polls, two weeks before a snap election. In a campaign speech in the northern town of Thessaloniki, Tsipras offered no new policy ideas but pledged thousands of new jobs and an attack on corruption. He defended his record of battling Greece’s creditors in his seven months in office, even though he was eventually forced to capitulate to their demands to secure the €86 billion rescue package, Greece’s third in a protracted debt crisis that at times has threatened its future in the euro.

“The battle to improve it is far from over,” Tsipras said, referring to the bailout. He said he would seek to win some form of debt relief and press Greek demands to restore collective bargaining powers for workers, a move the creditors oppose. Tsipras resigned last month to make way for the election, hoping to secure a stronger mandate. But having started out as the clear frontrunner, his leftist SYRIZA party’s poll lead has now all but disappeared, making for an unexpectedly close contest against the conservative New Democracy party. The prospect of a fractured result after the September 20 vote has stoked fears of yet more turmoil in a country hit by years of instability and recession, and raised the prospect of Greece having to go to the polls again.

A sad state. Beyond repair.

• On The State Of The European Union (Yanis Varoufakis)

In a session entitled ‘Old and New Conflicts and Challenges in the EU’, featuring also Peter Sutherland (FT), Mario Monti and Otmar Issing, I used the unwillingness of the Eurogroup, and the troika, even to consider a document prepared by my (then) ministry (entitled “A Policy Framework for Greece’s Fiscal Consolidation, Recover and Growth“) as a case in point of how Europe has lost its integrity and is in the process of losing its soul (judging by the scandalous failure to address the refugee crisis).

Hats off to the Greek people.

• Greek Crisis Prompts A Rethink On Food Waste (AFP)

With little end to their economic misery in sight, Greeks are finding inventive ways to feed the poor while also fighting waste – a movement that is chipping away at traditional attitudes to food. Three years ago, Xenia Papastavrou came up with a simple idea: take unsold food from shops and restaurants that was headed for the bin, and use it to feed the growing number of Greeks going hungry as the financial crisis took hold. “In June, they gave us 3,000 kilos of melons; in August we got 7,200 cartons of milk,” the 39-year-old told AFP at her office behind Athens’ central market. Boroume (“We Can”), the organization she founded, matches donated foodstuffs with charities in need – whether vegetables, bread or “even these 12 tiropita (cheese pies), which weren’t sold at the bakery.”

These days the food routed through Boroume provides an average of 2,500 meals a day across Greece, from Athens to Thessaloniki in the north. “Greece is a country that throws a lot away,” explained Papastavrou from behind a computer screen covered with data tables and the addresses of charities. In Greek tavernas, if the plates aren’t piled with huge pyramids of food, a meal between friends can be considered a failure, she added. “There isn’t really a mentality of paying attention to this,” she said. “Here, it’s: ‘I’ve paid for it, so I can do what I want with it.'” But years of hardship have started to change habits in a country where official figures show a quarter of the population is at risk of poverty.

Debt Rattle September 2 2015

Sep 022015

September 2, 2015 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 8:52 am Finance Tagged with: Canada, China, EU, FX, Grexit, Hungary, IMF, oil, Orwell, refugees 1 Response »

Arthur Rothstein Family leaving South Dakota drought for Oregon Jul 1936

• Global Stock Markets Begin September With More Losses (Guardian)

• Central Banks To Dump $1.5 Trillion FX Reserves By End 2016 -Deutsche (Reuters)

• Investors Wake Up To Emerging Market Currency Risk (FT)

• IMF’s Lagarde Sees Weaker Than Expected Global Economic Growth (Reuters)

• 2015: The Year China Goes Broke? (Gordon G. Chang)

• China Risks An Economic Discontinuity (Martin Wolf)

• Alibaba Is the Canary in China’s Coal Mine (Pesek)

• China Turns Up Heat On Market Participants (FT)

• Huge Purchases By Chinese Oil Trader Raise Prices, Confusion (WSJ)

• A Corner of the Oil Market Shows Why It’s So Tough to Read China (Bloomberg)

• Hit By Cheap Oil, Canada’s Economy Falls Into Recession (Reuters)

• Alberta Issues Bleak Economic Report (Globe and Mail)

• Say Goodbye to Normal (Jim Kunstler)

• France ‘Intimidated’ By Germany On Economic Policy: Stiglitz (AFP)

• Grexit May Be Better For Greece: Euro Architect (CNBC)

• Democratizing the Eurozone (Yanis Varoufakis)

• Inability To Unite On Major Challenges May Pull The EU Apart (EurActiv)

• Bid For United EU Response Fraying Over Refugee Quota Demands (Guardian)

• Hungarian TV ‘Told Not To Broadcast Images Of Refugee Children’ (Guardian)

• Greece’s Ionian Islands To Hold Plebiscite Over Airport Privatization (Kath.)

• The Price of European Indifference (Bernard-Henri Lévy)

• This Is What Greece’s Refugee Crisis Really Looks Like (Nation)

• Greek Island Lesvos Registers 17,500 Refugees Just Over The Past Week (Kath.)

• Orwell Rules: EU Task Force To Take On Russian Propaganda (New Europe)

• Is The World Running Out Of Space? (BBC)

Plunge protection saved Shanghai from bigger losses overnight. Tomorrow’s China’s big parade day, got to look good for that. Will they let markets do their own thing after tomorrow?

• Global Stock Markets Begin September With More Losses (Guardian)

Global stock markets staged a dramatic start to September as rising worries about China’s economic slowdown sparked fresh sell-offs in Asia, Europe and on Wall Street. After suffering their worst month in three years in August, US shares tumbled after Tuesday’s opening bell. At close, the Dow Jones industrial average had dropped 469 points, or 2.8%, to 16,058 and the Standard & Poor’s 500 index fell 58 points, or 3%, to 1,913. News that US manufacturing activity slowed in August added to pressure on share prices. The sell-off on Wall Street mirrored losses in Asia overnight, and later on European bourses, in the wake of more weak data on China’s manufacturing sector, suggesting output slumped to a three-year low in August.

Worries about waning demand from the world’s second biggest economy left Japan’s Nikkei down a hefty 3.8%, taking it close to a six-month low last week. China’s Shanghai composite index suffered a smaller 1.3% loss. As the sell-off rippled out to Europe, the FTSE 100 closed down more than 3% at 6,058.54 on Tuesday afternoon, extending last month’s sharp losses. A 6.7% drop during August marked the worst month for UK’s leading share index since May 2012. The pan-European FTSEurofirst 300 shed 9% over the same period, the worst monthly performance for four years. On Tuesday it was down 3%. Investor confidence has been rattled by a combination of factors.

Alongside signs China’s economy is slowing, the country’s stock market has tumbled from multi-year highs in June and interventions by policymakers have done little to stem the rout. At the same time, markets are bracing for the prospect of the first US interest rate rise since before the global financial crisis. Despite the recent market turmoil, there is still some expectation that the US Federal Reserve could hike as soon as this month, especially after its vice-chair Stanley Fischer said over the weekend that it was too soon to decide on a September move. The likelihood of higher borrowing costs in the US is undermining already fragile confidence in emerging markets from Latin America to Asia.

Could be much faster.

• Central Banks To Dump $1.5 Trillion FX Reserves By End 2016 -Deutsche (Reuters)

Central banks will sell $1.5 trillion foreign exchange reserves by the end of next year as they try to counter capital outflows stemming from slowing growth in China, low oil prices and an impending rise in U.S. interest rates, Deutsche Bank said on Tuesday. This would mark a major shift in global capital flows, ending two decades of reserve accumulation by emerging markets and potentially forcing the Federal Reserve into slowing down the unwinding of its “quantitative easing” crisis-fighting stimulus. George Saravelos, currency strategist at Deutsche and co-author of the report, said the $1.5 trillion estimate is based on the pace that emerging markets – especially China – have been drawing down their FX reserves recently to counter capital flight. “The risks are it’s actually faster than that,” Saravelos said.

Also on Tuesday, analysts at Dutch bank Rabobank published a report estimating that China sold up to $200 billion of reserves in the last few weeks of August alone. China is by far the biggest holder of FX reserves in the world with around $3.65 trillion, mostly thought to be in dollar-denominated assets like U.S. government bonds and bills. Last year, it had almost $4 trillion. China and emerging markets led the build up in global FX reserves following the 1997 Asian crisis to a peak of $12 trillion last year. This cash pile shielded them from the 2007-08 crisis, and looks like it is once again being deployed. The Deutsche estimate is the latest of many from analysts trying to determine just how much China’s slowdown and recent currency devaluation, low commodity prices, the prospect of higher U.S. rates and recent market volatility will deplete global reserves.

Bond and currency markets will feel the impact. “The peak in bond demand is probably behind us. QE in the U.S. has stopped, and the shift in global reserve accumulation has started too,” he said. The Fed could be forced to delay the unwinding of its QE programme because of the “significant amount of pressure” reserves selling could put on the Treasuries market. Saravelos said the upward pressure on U.S. yields from the selling of large quantities of bonds should also put upward pressure on the dollar, with every $100 billion reduction in reserves pushing the euro down three cents against the dollar.

But deny it at the same time.

• Investors Wake Up To Emerging Market Currency Risk (FT)

If there is a mood of anxiety across the US and Europe over the impact of China catching a cold, there is an air of déjà vu for investors who deal in emerging markets. The panicked market reaction to “Black Monday” in Chinese equities suggests much of the developed world has only just woken up to the risk that a slowing Chinese economy poses around the globe. But it is nothing new for EM countries. “The biggest surprise [about last week’s market panic] was not that China has slowed but that it’s come as such a surprise,” says Paul McNamara, EM portfolio manager at GAM Holding. China’s slowdown has been worrying EM countries throughout 2015.

It has been a year of falling commodity prices, brought lower, thanks in part, to drip-drip evidence that the Chinese investment drive — which fuelled growth in commodity countries and investor interest in their economies — was being checked. Black Monday, says Mr McNamara, was “a pretty intense dose of what we’ve been seeing all year”. It has been a year of consistent weakness, “a lot of which has been sourced in China”. Take Colombia, a big oil producer. Its peso currency had fallen 24% from the beginning of the year up until Black Monday, when it fell a further 4%. EM countries have been pummelled by double blows to the solar plexus all through the year. Punch one: the Chinese slowdown. Punch two: the continuous market focus on when the US would raise rates, which has driven dollar strength and so weakened EM currencies.

The repetitive empty void of words like these will come back to hurt Lagarde. The IMF is nothing without credibility. The window of credibility is narrowing.

• IMF’s Lagarde Sees Weaker Than Expected Global Economic Growth (Reuters)

Global economic growth is likely to be weaker than earlier expected, the head of the IMF said on Tuesday, due to a slower recovery in advanced economies and a further slowdown in emerging nations. IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde also warned emerging economies like Indonesia to “be vigilant for spillovers” from China’s slowdown, tighter global financial conditions, and the prospects of a U.S. interest rate hike. “Overall, we expect global growth to remain moderate and likely weaker than we anticipated last July,” Lagarde told university students at the start of a two-day visit to Indonesia’s capital. The IMF in July forecast global growth at 3.3% this year, slightly below last year’s 3.4%.

Lagarde said China’s economy was slowing, although not sharply or unexpectedly, as it adjusts to a new growth model. “The transition to a more market-based economy and the unwinding of risks built up in recent years is complex and could well be somewhat bumpy,” she said. “That said, the authorities have the policy tools and financial buffers to manage this transition.” Lagarde, who is visiting Indonesia for the first time in three years, said Southeast Asia’s largest economy had the “right tools to actually react” to the global volatility. “You have very sound public finances with overall government debt in the range of 20%-ish relative to GDP, you have a relatively small deficit,” she said before meeting with Indonesian President Joko Widodo.

“..the government has already shelled out $1.3 trillion.”

• 2015: The Year China Goes Broke? (Gordon G. Chang)

China, the Financial Times noted Friday, could exhaust its foreign exchange reserves within a year as it defends the value of its plunging currency, the renminbi. The paper’s arithmetic is correct of course, but the projection, which at first sounds alarming, is actually optimistic. Beijing might be broke in months—and maybe by the end of this year—despite now holding the world’s largest foreign exchange reserves. At the same time, the Chinese central government has been supporting stock valuations through various means, especially the direct purchases of shares. Beijing’s efforts to defend both stocks and the currency are severely straining its finances. China’s problems were a long time in the making, but they became evident this spring, when the main indexes measuring the Shanghai and Shenzhen stock markets peaked on June 12 and then fell precipitously.

In early July, Beijing, in a series of announcements, unveiled its rescue program, which included the government buying of shares. The ill-conceived effort was largely abandoned, it appears. As a result, shares fell hard last Monday, now known in China as “Black Monday,” and the following two days. The Shanghai Composite, the most widely followed index of Chinese stocks, ended trading on last Wednesday down 43.3% from its June 12 peak. Chinese leaders, however, took markets by surprise on Thursday, when shares snapped their five-day losing streak. The Shanghai Composite was down 0.7% entering the last hour of trading of the afternoon session. Massive government purchases of large-cap stocks sent prices soaring in the final minutes, and the index closed up 5.3%.

Sources told Bloomberg that Beijing’s buying was intended to prevent stocks from plunging during the run up to the September 3-4 holiday to mark the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II, what China has renamed the Chinese People’s War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression. Beijing repeated the trick Friday, engineering an impressive rally in the last 90 minutes of trading. The Shanghai index posted a 4.8% gain for the day. Late buying was also evident Monday, although it was not quite enough to completely erase the sharp drop in the morning session. Are happy times here again? About a year ago, Chinese technocrats created a stock market boom by doing nothing more than talking up the market.

Unsupported by fundamentals—either a robust economy or rising corporate earnings—the market is inevitably coming back down unless the Chinese central government purchases more shares. Beijing’s so-called “national team”—a collection of state entities—appears to be the only big buyer in the market. The government has a large “war chest,” believed to be between 2 and 5 trillion yuan (about $322 billion to $807 billion). Whatever its size, the fund has been rapidly depleted since officials started buying stock in large quantities. In the middle of this month, Goldman Sachs estimated the government had spent 800-900 billion yuan to acquire shares. Christopher Balding of Peking University’s HSBC Business School, taking a more expansive view of Beijing’s market-supporting initiatives, believes the government has already shelled out $1.3 trillion.

More on China’s frantic ‘market support’.

• China Risks An Economic Discontinuity (Martin Wolf)

David Daokui Lee, an influential Chinese economist, has argued that: “The stock market sell-off is not the problem… the problem — not a huge one, but a problem nonetheless — is the Chinese economy itself.” I agree with both points, with one exception. The problem may prove huge. Market turmoil is not irrelevant. It matters that Beijing has spent $200bn on a failed attempt to prop up the stock market and that foreign exchange reserves fell by $315bn in the year to July 2015. It matters, too, that a search for scapegoats is in train. These are indicators of capital flight and policymaker panic. They tell us about confidence — or the lack of it. Nevertheless, economic performance is ultimately decisive. The important economic fact about China is its past achievements.

Gross domestic product (at purchasing power parity) has risen from 3% of US levels to some 25% (see chart). GDP is an imperfect measure of the standard of living. But this transformation is no statistical artefact. It is visible on the ground. The only “large”(bigger than city state) economies, without valuable natural resources, to achieve something like this since the second world war are Japan, Taiwan, South Korea and Vietnam. Yet, relative to US levels, China’s GDP per head is where South Korea’s was in the mid-1980s. South Korea’s real GDP per head has since nearly quadrupled in real terms, to reach almost 70% of US levels. If China became as rich as Korea, its economy would be bigger than those of the US and Europe combined.

This is a case for long-run optimism. Against it is the caveat that “past performance is no guarantee of future performance”. Growth rates usually revert to the global mean. If China continued fast catch-up growth over the next generation it would be an extreme outlier .
In emerging economies growth tends to be marked by “discontinuities”. But what Chinese policymakers call the “new normal” is not itself such a discontinuity. They believe they have overseen a smooth slowdown from annual growth of 10% to still-fast growth of 7%. Is a far bigger slowdown possible? More important, would this be a temporary interruption, as in South Korea in the late 1990s crisis — or more permanent, as in Brazil in the 1980s or Japan in the 1990s?

There are at least three reasons why China’s growth might suffer a discontinuity: the current pattern is unsustainable; the debt overhang is large; and dealing with these challenges creates the risks of a sharp collapse in demand. The most important fact about China’s current pattern of growth is its dependence on investment as a source of supply and demand (see charts). Since 2011 additional capital has been the sole source of extra output, with the contribution of growth of “total factor productivity” (measuring the change in output per unit of inputs) near zero. Moreover, the incremental capital output ratio, a measure of the contribution of investment to growth, has soared as returns on investment have tumbled.

Looks like a smart view.

• Alibaba Is the Canary in China’s Coal Mine (Pesek)

It turns out investors were right about Alibaba: No company is more on the front lines of China’s economic shifts than Jack Ma’s juggernaut. And that’s just where the problems begin. Alibaba’s shares slide with each new report of middle-class Chinese who are dumping apartments to raise cash, delaying weddings, canceling vacations, terminating automobile orders and cutting up credit cards. A social media app called “Guide on Safe Passage Through the Economic Crisis” is all the rage as hundreds of millions of mainlanders encounter their first bear market. All that most Chinese younger than 50 know is annual growth of more than 10%. Crashing stocks and recession are Western maladies, not China’s. Ma has hitched the fortunes of his e-commerce behemoth to these people, and the value of his company is falling in sync with them.

After surging as much as 75% from their initial offering price of $68 each last September, the company’s American depositary receipts plunged 16% in August, to $66.12, the third consecutive monthly decline in New York. Anyone who doubts that China won’t experience a negative wealth effect as Shanghai cracks hasn’t looked at Alibaba’s numbers. Skeptical investors have shaved $65 billion from its market value since last year’s euphoric initial public offering. Things are about to get worse — both for the economy and Ma’s investors. Five interest-rate cuts since November aren’t boosting factory activity, which is the weakest in at least three years. The 49.7 reading on the August Purchasing Managers’ Index confirmed the worst fears of China bulls: Domestic and external demand is sliding with the Shanghai Composite Index.

Li and Xi will do anything to keep the blame of their own shoulders.

• China Turns Up Heat On Market Participants (FT)

Beijing intensified its clampdown on stock market impropriety and rumour-mongering on Tuesday as the whereabouts of one of China’s leading hedge fund managers remained unclear. The husband of Li Yifei, Man Group China head, denied that she was in detention. An earlier Bloomberg report saying she had been taken into custody by police in connection with the stock market probe into market volatility was “not accurate”, Wang Chaoyong, Ms Li’s husband, told the Financial Times. “Li is in a meeting with [financial industry] authorities at the moment in the suburbs of Beijing,” he said, adding that the meeting was continuing from Monday and that “it sounds like there are a lot of people attending from foreign financial institutions”.

Mr Wang said he did not know the purpose of the meeting, adding “it’s confidential, they are not allowed to turn on their phones”. But he said such encounters between foreign businesses and the Chinese market authorities were normal and he did not appear distressed about his wife’s situation. “I talked to her yesterday morning and the day before,” he said. “I haven’t talked to her today.” Questions over Ms Li’s whereabouts come after Chinese authorities turned up the heat on other prominent figures, including four senior executives of Citic Securities, a respected financial journalist and an official of the China Securities Regulatory Commission, the market watchdog.

Authorities have blamed market manipulation and foreign forces as the market slumps lower. The Shanghai Composite index is down more than 40% from its June 12 peak, prompting a slew of detentions alongside technical measures designed to reverse the slide. Ms Li leads the China business of London-listed Man Group, the world’s largest publicly traded hedge fund. A kung fu expert who once worked as a stunt double in martial arts, she previously held senior roles in China for MTV and Viacom. But Man Group does not run a trading desk or make investments from its Chinese office, and fewer than five people are employed there. Ms Li’s role is to sell Man Group funds to Chinese institutional investors. The group first received permission to market in China from the government under the so-called QDLP programme, which was launched in 2013. The programme allowed approved foreign hedge funds to raise up to $50m in assets in mainland China.

The rally explained.

• Huge Purchases By Chinese Oil Trader Raise Prices, Confusion (WSJ)

A Chinese oil-trading company bought record volumes of oil on a regional cash market for Middle Eastern crude last month, pushing up benchmark prices and causing confusion among crude buyers and sellers in Asia about the company’s motives. Chinaoil, the trading arm of state-run China National Petroleum, bought nearly 90% of the oil cargoes on the Dubai spot market in August, setting a record for the number of cargoes traded on the small marketplace in a single month. Chinaoil has engaged in heavy crude-buying in Dubai periodically over the past year, during which time global oil prices have fallen by roughly half. China’s oil imports have held up this year despite a slowdown in the country’s economic growth, with much of the crude believed to have gone toward building up the country’s strategic oil reserves.

China is expected to surpass the U.S. as the world’s largest oil importer this year on an annual basis, and its net oil imports were up 9.4% over the first seven months of this year. Still, traders involved in the Dubai market have questioned Chinaoil’s motives, saying its market dominance is distorting prices by making them higher than they would otherwise be. “The Dubai oil price is detached from actual supply and demand. There is a very clear disconnect from the market,” said one Singapore-based oil trader. Dubai crude prices are widely used by Asian oil producers and sellers when fixing contracts, as much of the region’s crude is sourced from the Middle East. The benchmark is assessed by price-reporting agency Platts, a unit of McGraw Hill, which bases its assessment on trades done during a 30-minute window each day.

Platts assessed the price of Dubai crude cargoes for loading in October at $48.41 a barrel on Monday, and at an average of $47.691 a barrel over August. Brent crude was trading at $52.16 a barrel on Monday. The Dubai market is now in a situation called backwardation, in which current prices are higher than future prices, because of Chinaoil’s large purchases. For global benchmarks such as Brent and West Texas Intermediate, by contrast, the price for oil to be delivered in a month is sharply lower than future prices, a situation called contango. “If you look at the physical market it is not tight. So [Chinaoil’s buying] is kind of distorting the market,” said Tushar Bansal at Facts Global Energy. Oil traders offered several theories for Chinaoil’s large purchases. Some said the company could be engaged in opportunistic stockpiling, while others said it could be profiting by taking an offsetting position in the oil futures market.

This will cost a lot of people a lot of money. A huge headfake in oil prices.

• A Corner of the Oil Market Shows Why It’s So Tough to Read China (Bloomberg)

Glencore Plc’s Ivan Glasenberg has lamented the difficulty of reading China’s commodity demand. The nation’s oil traders aren’t helping. State-run China National United Oil Corp., a unit of the country’s biggest energy company, bought 36 million barrels of Middle East crude last month as part of a pricing process in Singapore used to determine commodity benchmarks around the world. While the purchases by the trader known as Chinaoil were unprecedented, what’s more unusual is that the seller of most of those cargoes was another government-owned trading company called Unipec. “It’s unsettling and confusing for other players, and defies market logic,” Victor Shum at IHS said by phone from Singapore.

China has surpassed the U.S. as the world’s biggest buyer of overseas oil, driven by an ambition to keep a strategic stockpile of supplies. As global markets convulse after the surprise devaluation of the yuan in August, one state company buying from another underscores the challenge of determining demand in the largest user of energy, metals and grains. Glasenberg, the chief executive officer of leading commodity trader Glencore, said last month that “none of us know what is going on” currently in the world’s second-largest economy.

The record buying in Singapore was part of the market-on-close price assessment process run by Platts, a unit of McGraw Hill Financial Inc., where bids, offers and deals are reported by traders through e-mails, instant messages and phone conversations in a fixed period each day. These are used to create end-of-day price assessments for various commodities and form benchmarks for transactions globally. “Chinaoil and Unipec each have their own trading book and strategy,” Ehsan Ul-Haq, a senior market consultant at KBC Advanced Technologies, said by phone from London. “The Chinese government will not hinder free trading.”

These boyos are talking about a technical recession. Wait till home prices start plummeting, then we’ll talk again.

• Hit By Cheap Oil, Canada’s Economy Falls Into Recession (Reuters)

The Canadian economy shrank again in the second quarter, putting the country in recession for the first time since the financial crisis, with a plunge in oil prices spurring companies to chop business investment. The confirmation on Tuesday of a modest recession will figure heavily into the election campaign as Canadians head to the polls Oct. 19 and poses a challenge to Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who is seeking a rare fourth consecutive term. Still, there was a silver lining as growth picked up for the first time in six months in June, underscoring expectations the recession will be short-lived. Harper was quick to downplay what some supporters and economists have dismissed as a “technical” recession, pointing to the upbeat June figures during a campaign stop. “The Canadian economy is back on track,” he said.

But politicians from the opposition New Democrats and Liberals said the numbers were evidence Harper’s economic policies were failing. Economists mostly agreed the 0.5% pickup in June put Canada on good footing for a better third quarter. “Despite the technical recession materializing, it does look like the Canadian economy is jumping back, is rebounding strongly in the third quarter,” said Derek Burleton at Toronto-Dominion Bank. The Canadian dollar initially rallied to a session high against the greenback following the data before giving up ground later in the day as oil prices fell. The last time Canada was in recession was in 2008-09, when the U.S. housing market meltdown triggered a global credit crisis.

This time around, Canada has been primarily hit by the slump in crude prices, with weakness concentrated in energy-related sectors. Oil-exporting provinces like Alberta and Saskatchewan have been particularly hard-hit. GDP contracted at an annualized 0.5% rate in the second quarter, Statistics Canada said. That was better than forecast, though revisions showed the first quarter’s contraction was steeper than first reported. Two consecutive quarters of contraction are typically considered the textbook definition of a recession. But some economists have argued that such a definition is too narrow. They note unemployment has remained relatively subdued at 6.8%, and housing markets outside of Alberta and retail sales have been reasonably strong.

Hear that distant rumble over the prairies?

• Alberta Issues Bleak Economic Report (Globe and Mail)

Alberta’s economy is sliding into recession and its deficit for this year could top $6.5-billion, the province’s NDP government says in an economic update. It is a dramatic change from March, when the previous government forecast a deficit of nearly $5-billion and was expecting the economy to grow in 2015. Monday’s bleak new numbers came as neighbouring Saskatchewan announced it is forecasting a $292-million deficit this year due to low oil prices and the cost of fighting forest fires. The Prairie province had projected a surplus of $107-million in March. Alberta Finance Minister Joe Ceci avoided using the word “recession” on Monday, but confirmed the update’s findings that the economy of the province, Canada’s economic engine for much of the past decade, will contract by 0.6% this year and grow by only 1.3% in 2016.

“The last month has been volatile for the energy sector,” he said. “It is clear that revenues have dipped even further these past few weeks. If current conditions continue, the final deficit will be in the range of $6.5-billion.” Alberta’s new projected deficit is the second-largest in the country as a proportion of its economy, after that of Newfoundland and Labrador. “There is no doubt many Alberta families and businesses are feeling the effects of the dramatic drop in oil prices,” Mr. Ceci said. On Tuesday, Statistics Canada will report on whether the national economy shrank for a second consecutive quarter. The Federal Balanced Budget Act defines two consecutive quarters of negative growth as a recession. “Almost certainly, all the headlines on Tuesday will be ‘Canada in recession,’” said ATB Financial chief economist Todd Hirsch.

“But over the last five years, all of Canada’s growth has been coming from Alberta. We’ve been doing our share of the heavy lifting, but in 2015, we’re a drag on the national economy.” His forecast for this year fits with the government’s latest numbers. However, he is expecting zero growth next year. Alberta’s government finances are closely tied to the price of a barrel of oil, with royalties paying for as much as one-third of provincial spending during times of high energy prices. Recent fluctuations in oil prices have made forecasting difficult. Over the past week, oil prices have surged from $38.24 (U.S.) a barrel to $49.20 on Monday. “The situation over the month of August has changed so dramatically, I don’t want to say that the forecast is inaccurate, but we might see some revision,” Mr. Hirsch said. “Anything could happen in the next few months. We could be at $20 oil or $60-per-barrel oil.”

“Put your head between your legs and kiss your ass goodbye.”

• Say Goodbye to Normal (Jim Kunstler)

The tremors rattling markets are not exactly what they seem to be. A meme prevails that these movements represent a kind of financial peristalsis — regular wavelike workings of eternal progress toward an epic more of everything, especially profits! You can forget the supposedly “normal” cycles of the techno-industrial arrangement, which means, in particular, the business cycle of the standard economics textbooks. Those cycles are dying. They’re dying because there really are Limits to Growth and we are now solidly in grips of those limits. Only we can’t recognize the way it is expressing itself, especially in political terms. What’s afoot is a not “recession” but a permanent contraction of what has been normal for a little over two hundred years.

There is not going to be more of everything, especially profits, and the stock buyback orgy that has animated the corporate executive suites will be recognized shortly for what it is: an assest-stripping operation. What’s happening now is a permanent contraction. Well, of course, nothing lasts forever, and the contraction is one phase of a greater transition. The cornucopians and techno-narcissists would like to think that we are transitioning into an even more lavish era of techno-wonderama — life in a padded recliner tapping on a tablet for everything! I don’t think so. Rather, we’re going medieval, and we’re doing it the hard way because there’s just not enough to go around and the swollen populations of the world are going to be fighting over what’s left.

Actually, we’ll be lucky if we can go medieval, because there’s no guarantee that the contraction has to stop there, especially if we behave really badly about it — and based on the way we’re acting now, it’s hard to be optimistic about our behavior improving. Going medieval would imply living within the solar energy income of the planet, and by that I don’t mean photo-voltaic panels, but rather what the planet might provide in the way of plant and animal “income” for a substantially smaller population of humans. That plus a long-term resource salvage operation.

[..] I have to say it again: prepare to get smaller and more local. Things on the grand level are not going to work out. Get your shit together locally, and do it in place that has some prospect for keeping on: a small town somewhere food can be grown and especially places near the inland waterways where some kind of commercial exchange might continue in the absence of the trucking industry. Sound outlandish? Okay then. Keep buying Tesla stock and party on, dudes. Hail the viziers in their star-and-planet bedizened Brooks Brother raiment. Put your head between your legs and kiss your ass goodbye.

You would almost hope Marine Le Pen takes over.

• France ‘Intimidated’ By Germany On Economic Policy: Stiglitz (AFP)

France has been intimidated by Germany into pursuing an economic policy that isn’t working, Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz told AFP in an interview on Monday. “There is a kind of intimidation,” Stiglitz, an outspoken opponent of austerity policy, said of the influence of Germany over the economic policy pursued by President Francois Hollande. Stiglitz also said he agreed with former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis that Germany’s intransigence against Athens was aimed at striking fear in Paris and convincing the French government to continue austerity policies. “The centre-left government in France has not been able to stand up against Germany” on its budget policy, eurozone policy, or on the response to the Greek crisis, said the former World Bank chief economist and advisor to US president Bill Clinton.

Regarding the EU, he criticised Brussels for focusing on nominal deficits of member states rather than those adjusted for the economic cycle, as well as the policy response. “Cutting taxes and expenditures contracts the economy, just the opposite to what you need,” said Stiglitz. “I do not understand why Europe is now trying that after all the evidence, all the theory says it does not work,” he added. He said the “totally discredited” policy now only has support in Germany and a few people in France. Stiglitz, who is in France to promote the translation of his latest book, “The Great Divide”, said the “centre-left has lost confidence in its progressive agenda”. He noted that former British prime minister Tony Blair, ex-German chancellor Gerhard Schroeder and US President Barack Obama all supported the “banking system, have supported deregulation, trade agreements that are bad for ordinary workers”.

Contradictio in terminus: “The euro is irreversible – but if it is irreversible for every country has become an open question..”

• Grexit May Be Better For Greece: Euro Architect (CNBC)

Leaving the euro might help struggling Greece, according to Otmar Issing, the former ECB board member and chief economist who is known as one of the euro currency’s architects. “The euro is irreversible – but if it is irreversible for every country has become an open question,” Issing told CNBC on Tuesday. Issing raised eyebrows earlier this summer when he said that the euro’s irreversibility was an “illusion,” contradicting current ECB members who have insisted that there is no going back from the single currency. However, economists and politicians away from the ECB have questioned whether highly indebted Greece can remain in the euro zone and whether it might in fact do better economically outside the currency union.

“For Greece, there are very good arguments that it would do well outside the euro area for some time to come, but it all depends on the Greek government’s reactions” Issing told CNBC. Greece has just begun a third much-needed bailout, after months of negotiations, which looked like they might result in a disorderly exit from the single currency region. Since then, China has replaced Greece as the economy causing most worry to the global financial system. Issing, who is currently president of the Center for Financial Studies at Goethe University, spoke of the “high degree of uncertainty” that remains and forecast an era of “moderate growth but not stagnation.”

“We are heading for a time of high uncertainty in which governments still have many measures in hand to sustain the situation,” he said. He cautioned the ECB, which meets later this week, against any further extension of its quantitative easing program, arguing that the “danger of creating bubbles in fixed income markets” outweighed any advantages.

It’s no use trying to democratize the EU. Or rather: the only way to democratize the EU is to dismantle the union. Yanis should know that better than just about anyone.

• Democratizing the Eurozone (Yanis Varoufakis)

Like Macbeth, policymakers tend to commit new sins to cover up their old misdemeanors. And political systems prove their worth by how quickly they put an end to their officials’ serial, mutually reinforcing, policy mistakes. Judged by this standard, the eurozone, comprising 19 established democracies, lags behind the largest non-democratic economy in the world. Following the onset of the recession that followed the 2008 global financial crisis, China’s policymakers spent seven years replacing waning demand for their country’s net exports with a homegrown investment bubble, inflated by local governments’ aggressive land sales. And when the moment of reckoning came this summer, China’s leaders spent $200 billion of hard-earned foreign reserves to play King Canute trying to hold back the tide of a stock-market rout.

Compared to the European Union, however, the Chinese government’s effort to correct its errors – by eventually allowing interest rates and stock values to slide – seems like a paragon of speed and efficiency. Indeed, the failed Greek “fiscal consolidation and reform program,” and the way the EU’s leaders have clung to it despite five years of evidence that the program cannot possibly succeed, is symptomatic of a broader European governance failure, one with deep historical roots. In the early 1990s, the traumatic breakdown of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism only strengthened the resolve of EU leaders to prop it up. The more the scheme was exposed as unsustainable, the more doggedly officials clung to it – and the more optimistic their narratives. The Greek “program” is just another incarnation of Europe’s rose-tinted policy inertia.

The last five years of economic policymaking in the eurozone have been a remarkable comedy of errors. The list of policy mistakes is almost endless: interest-rate hikes by the European Central Bank in July 2008 and again in April 2011; imposing the harshest austerity on the economies facing the worst slump; authoritative treatises advocating beggar-thy-neighbor competitive internal devaluations; and a banking union that lacks an appropriate deposit-insurance scheme. How can European policymakers get away with it? After all, their political impunity stands in sharp contrast not only to the United States, where officials are at least accountable to Congress, but also to China, where one might be excused for thinking that officials are less accountable than their European counterparts. The answer lies in the fragmented and deliberately informal nature of Europe’s monetary union.

If finance doesn’t implode the union, we have other flavors.

• Inability To Unite On Major Challenges May Pull The EU Apart (EurActiv)

French Socialist Party leaders have warned that the multitude of crises currently buffeting the European Union could deal a death blow to the European project. EurActiv France reports. The economic crisis, the Greek crisis and the refugee crisis are subjects of grave concern for the French Socialists. “This is a time when the European construction could actually disappear,” the MEP Pervenche Bérès warned at the French Socialist Party’s summer university in La Rochelle last week. Between the economic crisis that has rumbled on since 2008, the threat of a “Grexit” earlier in the summer, security concerns and the rise of terrorism and now the humanitarian crisis unfolding on Europe’s borders with the arrival of so many refugees, there is no shortage of reasons to be worried.

The political unity of Europe is at stake. For Guillaume Bachelay, a French Socialist MP, “the risk is that generations to come will have to suffer the deconstruction of the European project”. The Greek crisis is an open wound. For many, the fact that high ranking politicians in countries like Germany had called for Greece’s eviction from the eurozone caused damage to the Union that is not easily repaired. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the socialist camp has nothing but praise for French President, François Hollande, whose unwavering support for Greece certainly helped them avoid this fate.

“If France succeeded in playing this role, it was not in the name of a currency or the interests of the Greeks, Europe, or France. It was in the name of a political idea. When Europe moves forward, there is no way back. We refused to let the EU crumble,” said Michel Sapin, the French finance minister and a close ally of François Hollande.

Too late now for leaders to stand up.

• Bid For United EU Response Fraying Over Refugee Quota Demands (Guardian)

Europe’s fragmented attempts to get to grips with its worst ever migration crisis are disintegrating into a slanging match between national capitals ahead of what is shaping up to be a major clash between eastern and western Europe over a common response. Berlin has won plaudits for seizing the moral high ground and opening its doors unconditionally to Syrian refugees but Austria and Hungary attacked it on Tuesday for stoking chaos at their railway stations, on their roads and at their borders as thousands of people seek transit to Germany. The German chancellor, Angela Merkel, rejected the criticism and stepped up her campaign to pressure reluctant EU partners into relieving the load on Germany and taking part in a more equitable system of sharing refugees across the EU.

“We must push through uniform European asylum policies,” she said. With Germany expecting to process 800,000 asylum applications this year – more than four times the figure for 2014 and more than the rest of the EU combined – Merkel insisted that there had to be a fairer distribution. “The criteria must be discussed,” she said. Mariano Rajoy, the Spanish prime minister, stood alongside Merkel in Berlin as she spoke, but he rejected the German pressure for a new system of binding quotas for refugees spread across the EU. “Some countries don’t want refugees,” he said. “You can’t force anyone [to take them].” “It’s not the time to be pointing fingers at each other,” said Natasha Bertaud, the European commission’s spokeswoman on immigration.

Hungary has no idea what to do, and receives as little aid as Greece does.

• Hungarian TV ‘Told Not To Broadcast Images Of Refugee Children’ (Guardian)

Employees of Hungarian state television have been instructed not to include children in footage of news pieces about migrants and refugees, a leaked screenshot of editorial advice to journalists at news channel M1 reveals. Hungary’s government-appointed Media Authority, MTVA, denied state media outlets have been told to limit public sympathy towards refugees, arguing that the memo was designed to protect children, while a pro-government journalist, who wished to remain anonymous, told the Guardian this had only been one-off instruction. “They do show children sometimes: actually the%age of children registered in Hungary this year is quite low, so in some opposition media they are somewhat overrepresented,” the source said.

Hungary has become a major transit country for migrants and refugees in recent months, but while M1 was quick to broadcast footage showing demonstrations outside the overcrowded transit zone at Budapest’s Keleti station over the weekend, protests against government policies on refugees have received scant coverage in state media. Refugee solidarity group MigSzol has held mass protests against the Hungarian government’s “national consultation” on immigration and the construction of a fence along the country’s border with Serbia. However, the pro-government journalist argued that these protests have been overlooked because “MigSzol tends to campaign against some Hungarian and even EU laws regarding migration.”

The civic aid initiatives that have sprung up in lieu of co-ordinated state help have also been largely ignored by state media. The journalist said: “The NGOs helping the migrants are very political: people known from the opposition scene take part and they mix pro-migration content with criticism of the government, so pro-government, more rightwing media won’t really give (a platform) for these people … even if their work to help migrants is okay.”

Democracy in action.

• Greece’s Ionian Islands To Hold Plebiscite Over Airport Privatization (Kath.)

The Regional Authority of the Ionian Islands has said that it is planning to hold a referendum over government plans to privatize 14 airports around the country, including the popular holiday islands of Corfu and Cephalonia. “The decision… for the concession of 14 regional airports to the German consortium of Fraport is a particularly negative development for the Ionian islands,” Regional Governor Theodoros Galiatsatos told the state-run Athens-Macedonian News Agency on Tuesday, following a meeting of the regional council, which agreed to organize a plebiscite following the September 20 general elections. “The impact on the region’s economy is expected to be extremely negative as four of the 14 airports that are up for sale have a direct effect on the region’s socio-economic life,” Galiatsatos said, referring to the airports of Corfu, Aktaio, Cephalonia and Zakynthos.

I think it’s more sinister than mere indifference.

• The Price of European Indifference (Bernard-Henri Lévy)

Europe’s migration debate has taken a disturbing turn. It began with the creation of the catch-all concept (a legal freak) of a “migrant,” which obscures the difference, central to the law, between economic and political migration, between people escaping poverty and those driven from their homes by war. Unlike economic migrants, those fleeing oppression, terror, and massacre have an inalienable right to asylum, which entails an unconditional obligation by the international community to provide shelter. Even when the distinction is acknowledged, it is often as part of another sleight of hand, an attempt to convince credulous minds that the men, women, and children who paid thousands of dollars to travel on one of the rickety boats washing up on the islands of Lampedusa or Kos are economic migrants.

The reality, however, is that 80% of these people are refugees, attempting to escape despotism, terror, and religious extremism in countries like Syria, Eritrea, and Afghanistan. That is why international law requires that the cases of asylum-seekers are examined not in bulk, but one by one. And even when that is accepted, when the sheer number of people clamoring to get to Europe’s shores makes it all but impossible to deny the barbarity driving them to flee, a third smokescreen goes up. Some, including Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, claim that the conflicts generating these refugees rage only in Arab countries that are being bombed by the West. Here again, the figures do not lie.

The top source of refugees is Syria, where the international community has refused to conduct the kinds of military operations required by the “responsibility to protect” – even though international law demands intervention when a mad despot, having killed 240,000 of his people, undertakes to empty his country. The West also is not bombing Eritrea, another major source of refugees. Yet another damaging myth, perpetuated by shocking images of refugees swarming through border fences or attempting to climb onto trains in Calais, is that “Fortress Europe” is under assault by waves of barbarians. This is wrong on two levels. First, Europe is far from being the migrants’ primary destination. Nearly two million refugees from Syria alone have headed to Turkey, and one million have fled to Lebanon, whose population amounts to just 3.5 million.

Jordan, with a population of 6.5 million, has taken in nearly 700,000. Meanwhile, Europe, in a display of united selfishness, has scuttled a plan to relocate a mere 40,000 asylum-seekers from their cities of refuge in Italy and Greece. Second, the minority who do choose Germany, France, Scandinavia, the United Kingdom, or Hungary are not enemies who have come to destroy us or even to sponge off of European taxpayers. They are applicants for freedom, lovers of our promised land, our social model, and our values. They are people who cry out “Europe! Europe!” the way millions of Europeans, arriving a century ago on Ellis Island, learned to sing “America the Beautiful.”

A portrait.

• This Is What Greece’s Refugee Crisis Really Looks Like (Nation)

In the baking midday August heat on the Greek island of Lesbos, Ziad Mouatash bounces out of an overcrowded inflatable raft and touches EU soil for the first time. The 22-year-old from Yarmouk—the Palestinian refugee camp on the edge of Damascus that has been besieged and bombed since 2012 by Bashar al-Assad’s forces and recently invaded by ISIS and the Al Qaeda–affiliated Nusra Front—hugs everyone around him, ecstatic to be alive. From the Greek shore, activists and locals had looked on helplessly as the boat’s motor broke down two miles away, water pouring into the barely floating rubber dinghy. Children and adults alike cried desperately for help, until they were towed to Greece by another boat of refugees coming from Turkey.

Mouatash paid human traffickers in Turkey over 1,000 euros for this near-death experience, but as far as he’s concerned, it was a far less risky choice than continuing to hide out in deteriorating Damascus, which he’d abandoned for Turkey two weeks before. As a Palestinian who grew up in Syria’s refugee camps, he is stateless, but he has a brother in Paris and hopes to start a new life in France. He paces up and down the shoreline, unsure of which direction to go, while local activists try to bring the new arrivals together to tell them that they need to start a 40-mile walk to a registration center on the other side of the island. “Thanks to God I have made it here. I am free, I am alive!” Mouatash exclaims, overcome with emotion.

Although he has escaped the horrors of Syria’s grinding civil war, Mouatash is just beginning the difficult journey through Europe. He will have to cross more borders illegally; rest in filthy, makeshift camps; pay traffickers to help him cross those borders; dodge border police; and sleep in parks and fields, before he can reunite with his brother. Still, Mouatash is one of the lucky ones. Four days after his arrival, a raft off the Greek island of Kos capsized and six Syrians—including a baby—drowned. According to Lt. Eleni Kelmani, a spokesperson for the Lesbos Coast Guard, up to 2,000 refugees are now arriving daily on the island. She notes that this sunny tourist haven has seen the arrival of 75,000 of the estimated 120,000 refugees who have landed in Greece this year. Outside her office, hundreds of them sleep next to parked cars or in tents on the edge of the port.

Kathimerini, too, persists in using the term ‘migrants’. That’s called a political agenda.

• Greek Island Lesvos Registers 17,500 Refugees Just Over The Past Week (Kath.)

More than 4,200 refugees were due to arrive in Piraeus on two ships from Lesvos Tuesday, only temporarily easing the pressure on scant resources on the island but at the same time increasing concern in Athens about the fate of those who would disembark. Authorities on Lesvos have registered some 17,500 refugees and migrants over the past week but the transfer to Athens of many of those people would only provide brief respite as hundreds more are arriving each day. While many refugees head for Greece’s border with the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM), some end up stranded in Athens. Victoria Square in the city center has become a popular gathering point for refugees.

Athens Mayor Giorgis Kaminis is due to meet caretaker Immigration Minister Yiannis Mouzalas Thursday to discuss the issue. European Commissioner for Migration Dimitris Avramopoulos is also due in Greece Thursday. Greek President Prokopis Pavlopoulos called his French counterpart Francois Hollande to discuss the issue. Pavlopoulos took the opportunity to explain to Hollande the size of the problem Greece is facing. More than 350,000 migrants have crossed the Mediterranean this year and 2,600 have died while making the journey, the International Organization for Migration said Tuesday.

The latest figures from IOM show that 234,778 migrants had landed in Greece and another 114,276 in Italy, with most of the other arrivals split between Spain (2,166) and the island of Malta (94). The figure from 2015 already dwarfs that of 2014, when 219,000 made the crossing throughout the entire year.

Orwell reigns supreme in Brussels. New Europe equals newspeak.

• EU Task Force To Take On Russian Propaganda (New Europe)

The European Commission is launching a small ‘start-up’ team, composed of ten experts, in efforts to respond to the misleading Russian information system. The step comes in reaction to the conclusions of the March European Council, which stressed “the need to challenge Russia’s ongoing disinformation campaigns”. The spokesperson for foreign and security policy of the European Commission, Catherine Ray, told journalists that, “We indeed put a team in place a team within the EEAS to work on it, and they will start working on it as of September. They are now in full shape.” As requested by the March Council, An Action Plan on Strategic Communication was prepared.

The focus of the Action Plan, the EU source described to New Europe, “is on proactive communication of EU policies and values towards the Eastern neighbourhood. The measures cover not only EU Strategic Communication, but also wider EU efforts aimed at strengthening the media environment and supporting independent media. Some of the actions are for the EU institutions to take forward; others are more relevant to the Member States.” It remains to be seen how the different efforts will be divided between Institutions and Member States, and indeed what the impact on the media landscape will be. The decision to create such a team has been considered a reaction to growing concern in eastern Europe and the Baltic states about the destabilizing influence of Russian propaganda.

The EU Official told New Europe that “This is not about engaging in counter-propaganda. However, where necessary the EU will respond to disinformation that directly targets the EU and will work with partners to raise awareness of these activities.“ The special team will be part of the European External Action Service (EEAS) and will be based in its headquarters in Brussels. According to the source, the tasks of the team include “media monitoring” and “the development of communication products and media campaign focused on explaining EU policies in the region.” The mission will also support independent media and work with partner governments. With the goal to effectively communicate the EU policies in the the Eastern neighborhood, the task force will monitor, analyze and respond to reports on EU activities. In regards to expanding the missions, the task force, the EU source said, is “only one element of a wide range of EU activities aimed at communicating on EU policies.”

Not very useful exercise if manmade disasters are not part of the discussion.

• Is The World Running Out Of Space? (BBC)

Sometimes it’s difficult to fathom that the world could actually become even more crowded than it is today – especially when elbowing through a teeming Delhi market, hustling across a frenetic Tokyo street crossing or sharing breathing space with sweaty strangers crammed into a London Tube train. Yet our claustrophobia-inducing numbers are only set to grow. While it is impossible to precisely predict population levels for the coming decades, researchers are certain of one thing: the world is going to become an increasingly crowded place. New estimates issued by the United Nations in July predict that, by 2030, our current 7.3 billion will have increased to 8.4 billion. That figure will rise to 9.7 billion by 2050, and to a mind-boggling 11.2 billion by 2100.

Yet even today, it’s difficult enough to get away from one another. Drive a few hours outside of New York City or San Francisco, into the Catskill Mountains or Point Reyes National Seashore, and you’ll find crowds of city-dwellers clogging trails and beaches. Even more remote and supposedly idyllic spaces are feeling the crush, too. Backcountry permits for the Grand Tetons in Wyoming sell out months in advance, while Arches National park in Utah had to shut down for several hours last May due to a traffic gridlock. For those who can afford the luxury of occasionally escaping other members of our own species, doing so often requires getting on a plane and travelling to increasingly far-fetched locales.

Yet humanity’s footprint extends even to the most seemingly isolated of places: you’ll find nomadic herders in Mongolia’s Gobi desert, Berbers in the Sahara and camps of scientists in Antarctica. This begs the question: as the world becomes even more crowded, will it become practically impossible to find a patch of land free from human settlement or presence? Will we eventually overtake all remaining habitable space?

Debt Rattle August 28 2015

Aug 282015

August 28, 2015 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 11:10 am Finance Tagged with: bear market, China, emerging markets, FX, GDP, Growth, refugees, rout, swaps, Treasuries 4 Responses »

Dorothea Lange Resettlement project, Bosque Farms, New Mexico Dec 1935

• Real Chinese GDP Growth Is -1.1%, According to Evercore ISI (Zero Hedge)

• BofA: China Stock Rout To Resume As Intervention Ends (Bloomberg)

• Money Pours Out of Emerging Markets at Rate Unseen Since Lehman (Bloomberg)

• What China’s Treasury Liquidation Means: $1 Trillion QE In Reverse (ZH)

• Global Equity Funds Witness Biggest-Ever Exodus (CNBC)

• PBOC Uses Derivatives to Tame Yuan Fall Expectations (WSJ)

• China Local Govt Pension Funds To Start Investing $313 Billion ‘Soon’ (Reuters)

• Chinese Banking Giants: Zero Profit Growth as Bad Loans Pile Up (Bloomberg)

• The Great Wall Of Money (Hindesight)

• China Will Respond Too Late to Avoid -Global- Recession: Buiter (Bloomberg)

• China’s Ongoing FX Trilemma And Its Possible Consequences (FT)

• China Has Exposed The Fatal Flaws In Our Liberal Economic Order (Pettifor)

• Albert Edwards: “99.7% Chance We Are Now In A Bear Market” (Zero Hedge)

• Who Will Be the Bagholders This Time Around? (CH Smith)

• Now’s The Right Time For Yellen To Kill The ‘Greenspan Put’ (MarketWatch)

• The Emperor Is Naked; Long Live The Emperor (Fiscal Times)

• IMF Could Contribute A Fifth To Greek Bailout, ESM’s Regling Says (Bloomberg)

• Yanis Varoufakis: ‘I’m Not Going To Take Part In Sad Elections’ (Reuters)

• For Those Trying to Reach Safety in Europe, Land can be as Deadly as Sea (HRW)

That sounds more like it.

• Real Chinese GDP Growth Is -1.1%, According to Evercore ISI (Zero Hedge)

With Chinese data now an official farce even among Wall Street economists, tenured academics, and all others whose job obligation it is to accept and never question the lies they are fed, the biggest question over the past year has been just what is China’s real, and rapidly slowing, GDP – which alongside the Fed, is the primary catalyst of the global risk shakeout experienced in recent weeks. One thing that everyone knows and can agree on, is that it is not the official 7% number, or whatever goalseeked fabrication the communist party tries to push to a world that has realized China can’t even manipulate its stock market higher, let alone its economy.

But what is it? Over the past few months we have shown various unpleasant estimates, the lowest of which was 1.6% back in April. Today we got the worst one yet, courtesy of Evercore ISI, which using its own GDP equivalent index – the Synthetic Growth Index (SGI) – gets a vastly different result from the official one, namely Chinese growth of -1.1% annually. Or rather, contraction. To wit, from Evercore:

Our proprietary Synthetic Growth Index (SG!) fell 1.1% mim in July, and was also down 1.1% y/y. No wonder global commodities are so weak. The most recent 18 months have been much weaker than the 2011-13 period. Even if we adjust our SG I upward (for too-little representation of Services — lack of data), we believe actual economic growth in China is far below the official 7.0% yly. And, it is not improving, Most worrisome to us; the ‘equipment’ portion of Plant & Equipment spending is very weak, a bad sign for any company or country. Expect more monetary and fiscal steps to lift growth.

And here is why the world is in big trouble.

With confidence gone, is there another option left?

• BofA: China Stock Rout To Resume As Intervention Ends (Bloomberg)

The rebound in China’s stocks will be short-lived because state intervention is too costly to continue and valuations aren’t justified given the slowing economy, says Bank of America. “As soon as people sense the government is withdrawing from direct intervention, there will be lots of investors starting to dump stocks again,” said David Cui at Bank of America in Singapore. The Shanghai Composite Index needs to fall another 35% before shares become attractive, he said. The Shanghai gauge rallied for a second day on Friday amid speculation authorities were supporting equities before a World War II victory parade next week that will showcase China’s military might. The government resumed intervention in stocks on Thursday to halt the biggest selloff since 1996.

China Securities Finance, the state agency tasked with supporting share prices, will probably end direct market purchases within the next month or two, Cui said. While the benchmark gauge trades 47% above the levels of a year earlier, data from industrial output to exports and retail sales depict a deepening slowdown. China’s first major growth indicator for August showed the manufacturing sector is at the weakest since the global financial crisis. Profits at the nation’s industrial companies fell 2.9% in July, data Friday showed. Equities on mainland bourses are valued at a median 51 times reported earnings, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. That’s the most among the 10 largest markets and more than twice the 19 multiple for the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index. Even after tumbling 37% from its June 12 peak, the Shanghai gauge is the best-performing equity index worldwide over the past year.

This is going to be seminal.

• Money Pours Out of Emerging Markets at Rate Unseen Since Lehman (Bloomberg)

This week, investors relived a nightmare. As markets from China to South Africa tumbled, they pulled $2.7 billion out of developing economies on Aug. 24. That matches a Sept. 17, 2008 exodus during the week Lehman Brothers went under. The collapse of the U.S. investment bank was a seminal moment in the timeline of the global financial crisis. The retreat from risky assets, triggered by concern over a slowdown in China and higher interest rates in the U.S., has taken money outflows from emerging markets to an estimated $4.5 billion in August, compared with inflows of $6.7 billion in July, data compiled by Institute of International Finance show. It’s lower stock prices that people are most worried about.

Equity outflows from developing nations increased to $8.7 billion this month, the highest level since the taper tantrum of 2013 when the prospect of higher rates in the U.S., making riskier assets less attractive, first shook emerging markets. Debt inflows softened this month while remaining positive at $4.2 billion, the IIF says. “Emerging market investors have been spooked by rising uncertainty about China, and stress has been exacerbated by a combination of fundamental concerns about EM economic prospects and volatility in global financial markets,” Charles Collyns, chief economist at the IIF, said.

Interconnections.

• What China’s Treasury Liquidation Means: $1 Trillion QE In Reverse (ZH)

Earlier today, Bloomberg – citing the ubiquitous “people familiar with the matter” – confirmed what we’ve been pounding the table on for months; namely that China is liquidating its UST holdings. As we outlined in July, from the first of the year through June, China looked to have sold somewhere around $107 billion worth of US paper. While that might have seemed like a breakneck pace back then, it was nothing compared to what would transpire in the last two weeks of August. Following the devaluation of the yuan, the PBoC found itself in the awkward position of having to intervene openly in the FX market, despite the fact that the new currency regime was supposed to represent a shift towards a more market-determined exchange rate.

That intervention has come at a steep cost – around $106 billion according to SocGen. In other words, stabilizing the yuan in the wake of the devaluation has resulted in the sale of more than $100 billion in USTs from China’s FX reserves. That dramatic drawdown has an equal and opposite effect on liquidity. That is, it serves to tighten money markets, thus working at cross purposes with policy rate cuts. The result: each FX intervention (i.e. each round of UST liquidation) must be offset with either an RRR cut, or with emergency liquidity injections via hundreds of billions in reverse repos and short- and medium-term lending ops.

It appears that all of the above is now better understood than it was a month ago, but what’s still not well understand is the impact this will have on the US economy and, by extension, on US monetary policy, and furthermore, there seems to be some confusion as to just how dramatic the Treasury liquidation might end up being. Recall that China’s move to devalue the yuan and this week’s subsequent benchmark lending rate cut have served to blow up one of the world’s most popular carry trades. As one currency trader told Bloomberg on Tuesday, “it’s a terrible time to be long carry, increased volatility – which I think we’ll stay with – will continue to be terrible for carry. The period is over for carry trades.”

Negative records being set all over.

• Global Equity Funds Witness Biggest-Ever Exodus (CNBC)

Investors yanked $29.5 billion out of global equity funds in the week that ended August 26, the biggest single-week outflow on record as markets around the world over went into meltdown mode, according to data from Citi. On a regional basis, U.S. funds suffered the highest level of outflows at $12.3 billion, followed by Asia funds, which saw $4.9 million in redemptions. Citi’s records go back to 2000. European funds, which broke their chain of 14 weeks of inflows, witnessed $3.6 billion in outflows for the week.

Concerns around the outlook for the Chinese economy and jitters around the U.S. Federal Reserve’s impending rate hike have sent global markets into a tailspin over the past week. The MSCI World Index and MSCI Emerging Market Index both slid over 7% between August 19 and August 26. China, the market at the heart of the global selloff, saw losses of a far higher magnitude. The notoriously volatile benchmark Shanghai Composite tumbled 22% over this period, leading to outflows of $1.2 billion from China and Greater China funds during the week.

Yeah, sure, add more leverage…

• PBOC Uses Derivatives to Tame Yuan Fall Expectations (WSJ)

China’s central bank used an unusual and complex financial tool Thursday to tame growing expectations for the yuan to fall, three people familiar with the matter said. The People’s Bank of China intervened in the market for U.S. dollar-yuan foreign-exchange swaps, causing their price to fall sharply, a movement that implies a stronger Chinese currency and lower interest rates in the world’s No. 2 economy in the future, said the people. The move came after waves of sharp selloffs in the Chinese currency in offshore markets, such as Hong Kong’s, where the yuan trades freely, following Beijing’s surprise nearly 2% yuan devaluation on Aug. 11.

Thanks to what each of the three people described as “massive” orders from a few commercial banks acting on the PBOC’s behalf, the so-called one-year dollar-yuan swap spread—in rough terms, a measure of the implied future differential between Chinese and U.S. interest rates—plunged to 1200 points from 1730 points Wednesday. In the offshore market, the spread dropped to 1950 points from 2310 points Tuesday, following the onshore move. A drop in the spread for dollar-yuan swaps, which consist of a spot trade and an offsetting forward transaction, would also imply a weaker spot exchange rate at a predetermined future date.

The currency derivatives are typically used by investors seeking to hedge against exchange-rate and interest-rate fluctuations. “The central bank chose a rarely used tool this time—the FX swaps—to intervene and it did so via a couple of midsize banks, instead of the usual big state lenders that serve as its agent banks,” one of the people said.

Desperation. Again, remember when pensions were limited to AAA rated assets?

• China Local Govt Pension Funds To Start Investing $313 Billion ‘Soon’ (Reuters)

China’s local pension funds will start investing 2 trillion yuan ($313.05 billion) as soon as possible in stocks and other assets, senior government officials said on Friday, in a bid to boost the investment returns of such funds. China said last weekend that it would let pension funds under local government units to invest in the stock market for the first time, a move that might channel hundreds of billions of yuan into the country’s struggling equity market. Up to 30 percent can be invested in stocks, equity funds and balanced funds. The rest can be invested in convertible bonds, money-market instruments, asset-backed securities, index futures and bond futures in China, as well as major infrastructure projects.

“We will actively make early preparations… we will formally start investment operations as soon as possible,” Vice Finance Minister Yu Weiping told a briefing. But the timing of investment will depend on preparations as the National Social Security Fund (NSSF), the manager of local pension funds, will entrust professional investment firms to make actual investments, Yu told reporters after the briefing. “When they (investment firms) will enter the market, the government will not intervene,” Yu said. You Jun, vice minister of human resources and social security, told the same news conference that pension investment will benefit the economy and the country’s capital market, but he downplayed any attempt to support the ailing stock market. “Supporting the stock market or rescuing the stock market is not the function and responsibility of our funds,” You said.

The crucial point becomes how much of this can be kept hidden.

• Chinese Banking Giants: Zero Profit Growth as Bad Loans Pile Up (Bloomberg)

The first two Chinese banking giants to report earnings this week have two things in common: zero profit growth and bad loans piling up at more than twice the pace of a year earlier. Industrial & Commercial Bank of China posted a 31% increase in bad loans in the first half, while Agricultural Bank of China had a 28% jump, their stock-exchange statements showed on Thursday. At a press briefing in Beijing, ICBC President Yi Huiman indicated that the lender may have to abandon a target of keeping its nonperforming loan ratio at 1.45% this year, citing “severe” conditions. The level at the end of June was 1.4%.

The economic weakness and $5 trillion stock-market slump that prompted the central bank to cut interest rates and lenders’ reserve requirements this week may make it harder for China’s banks to revive earnings growth and attract investors. For now, the biggest banks are trading below book value. “We are nowhere near the end of this down cycle, not with the economy wobbling like now,” said Richard Cao at Guotai Junan Securities. ICBC’s profit was little changed at 74.7 billion yuan ($11.7 billion) in the quarter ended June 30, based on an exchange filing, almost matching 74.8 billion yuan a year earlier. That compared with the 75.7 billion yuan median estimate of 10 analysts surveyed by Bloomberg. Nonperforming loans jumped to 163.5 billion yuan, the company said.

Agricultural Bank reported a profit decline of 0.8% to 50.2 billion yuan and bad loans of 159.5 billion yuan, including debt in the construction and mining industries. For ICBC, the biggest increases in nonperforming credit in the first half were in China’s western region, where coal businesses are struggling, the Yangtze River Delta and the Bohai Rim. ICBC, Agricultural Bank and another of China’s large lenders to report on Thursday, Bank of Communications, all reported declines in net interest margins, a measure of lending profitability. The rural lender had the biggest fall, a slide of 15 basis points from a year earlier to 2.78%.

Bretton Woods.

• The Great Wall Of Money (Hindesight)

China is in severe trouble and that trouble has already been reverberating around EM exporters for a number of years. It is just one of many dollar currency peg countries that have experienced tightening conditions because of higher US interest rate guidance and dollar strength. An unwelcome addition to their own domestic issues, but always a circular outcome, as they are inextricably linked to the US by their Bretton Woods II relationship. By devaluing and thus de-stabilising the ‘nominal’ anchor for Asian exchange rates, they will crush the growth engine of the developed countries on whose consumption they so rely on.

Since 2009, we have forecast and documented the unwinding of the Bretton Woods II currency system. Financialisation of our economies and markets, which escalated post-2008 at the instigation of governments and central bankers, is going to go into full reverse for all asset classes. Economies and markets are so entwined that a drop in asset classes will lead the world back into recession. In 2013, we believed the odds had tilted firmly towards increasing debt deflation at the hands of China. Large current account deficits had led to unsustainable debt creation, and as a consequence the trade deficit countries were the first to experience a severe financial crisis. However, on the other side of the equation, the surplus countries were now experiencing their reaction to the crisis.

In November 2013, we wrote: “The deleveraging process which began in 2008 has been a slow burner but is likely now in full swing. The deflationary risks are very high. China is the driver. All eyes on China.” We conceive that this slow-burner of deleveraging, which has occurred since the 2008 crisis, is potentially about to engulf all asset prices. We are beginning to think the unthinkable – that just maybe asset prices will back up 20 to 30% and fast and that through the autumn we could experience even greater price depreciation. Almost 8 years on from the GFC, the Dow Jones Industrials are perched on the edge of a sharp drop.

Will the Ghost of 1937 revisit us eight years on from the Great Crash of 1929, when U.S. stocks and the world economy got roiled all over again? This is already unfolding as we speak. The Yuan movement may well send more Chinese capital floating across the globe into financial assets and real estate, but it will be short-lived. The debt deleveraging which has been engulfing Emerging Markets has just begun to turn into a ranging inferno, which will eventually burn down all, especially overpriced, global assets. Since the GFC, ‘The Great Wall of Money’ that Bretton Woods II has furnished via its vendor-financing relationship, has masked the deleveraging of our world economy. The Great Wall is about to collapse and fall.

Not too late, but too little. Because too little is all that is left.

• China Will Respond Too Late to Avoid -Global- Recession: Buiter (Bloomberg)

China is sliding into recession and the leadership will not act quickly enough to avoid a major slowdown by implementing large-scale fiscal policies to stimulate demand, Citigroup’s top economist Willem Buiter said. The only thing to stop a Chinese recession, which the former external member of the Bank of England defines as 4% growth on “the mendacious official data” for a year, is a consumption-oriented fiscal stimulus program funded by the central government and monetized by the People’s Bank of China, Buiter said. “Despite the economy crying out for it, the Chinese leadership is not ready for this,” Buiter said in a media call hosted Thursday by the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. “It’s an economy that’s sliding into recession.”

Premier Li Keqiang is seeking to defend a 7% economic growth goal at a time when concern over slowing demand in China is fueling volatility in global markets. The true rate of expansion “is probably something closer to 4.5% or less,” Buiter said. Li has repeatedly pledged to avoid stimulus similar to the one following the global financial crisis in 2008 that led to a surge in debt for local governments and corporations. Some economists and investors have long questioned the accuracy of China’s official growth data. When Li was party secretary of Liaoning province in 2007, he said that figures for gross domestic product were “man-made” and therefore unreliable, according to a diplomatic cable published by WikiLeaks in 2010.

“They will respond but they will respond too late to avoid a recession, which is likely to drag the global economy with it down to a global growth rate below 2% – which is in my definition a global recession,” said Buiter.

“..open capital account, independent monetary policy, and stable tightly managed exchange rate”

• China’s Ongoing FX Trilemma And Its Possible Consequences (FT)

From UBS’s Tao Wang on what, post China’s surprise revaluation, is now an oft used phrase, the impossible trinity — AKA the corner China finds itself in:

“The impossible trinity says that a country cannot simultaneously have an open capital account, independent monetary policy, and stable tightly managed exchange rate. Some academics argue that since capital controls are no longer as effective in the current day world, complete monetary policy independence is still not possible without some degree of exchange rate flexibility, even without a fully open capital account – or impossibly duality. Regardless of whether it is an impossible trinity or duality, the fact is that in recent years, as a result of substantial capital controls relaxation, China has found it increasingly difficult to manage independent monetary policy while simultaneously maintaining a fixed exchange rate.

Since last year, the PBOC has had to repeatedly inject liquidity and use the RRR to offset capital outflows – its efforts to ease monetary policy have been less effective because of FX leakages, while at the same time rate cuts are reducing arbitrage opportunities to add further downward pressures on the currency. As China’s government has announced and seems to be committed to fully opening the capital account soon, these challenges will only become greater. Therefore, it is the right thing to do to break the RMB’s dollar peg and move to materially increase its flexibility. At the moment, China’s weak domestic demand and deflationary pressures necessitate further interest rate cuts, which may further fan capital outflows and depreciation pressures.

Meanwhile, not only is the RMB’s recent effective appreciation still hurting China’s tradable goods sector, but the central bank’s defence of the exchange rate is also draining substantial domestic liquidity that necessitates constant replenishing, both of which is undermining the effectiveness of overall monetary policy easing. With a more flexible exchange rate, the RMB can be weakened by outflows and depreciation pressures without draining domestic liquidity, and domestic assets will become relatively cheaper and thus more attractive than foreign assets – which may ultimately alter market expectations to reduce capital outflows.

In addition, a weaker RMB should improve China’s current account balance to also alleviate depreciation pressures. Conversely, if China’s exchange rate is allowed to appreciate along with capital inflows and appreciation pressures, it will make domestic assets more expensive and less attractive, to ultimately worsen China’s current account balance.”

“The Chinese should have been warned, for they won accolades from Western economists for their “Goldilocks” economy.”

• China Has Exposed The Fatal Flaws In Our Liberal Economic Order (Pettifor)

How can we make sense of volatile global stock markets? Economists explained this week’s dramatic falls by pinning responsibility on China. They are at pains to assure us this is not 2008 all over again. I beg to disagree. Even though data is not reliable, it appears that China is slowing down. By 2009, the Chinese authorities were embracing the Western economic model that had just brought down much of Western capitalism. Undeterred, they launched a massive credit-fuelled investment programme. Growth soared at 10% per annum. Investment recently peaked at an extraordinary 49% of GDP. Total debt (private and public) rocketed to 250% of GDP – up 100 points since 2008, according to the IMF. Property and other asset markets boomed, as did consumption.

The Chinese should have been warned, for they won accolades from Western economists for their “Goldilocks” economy. China’s stimulus helped keep the global economy afloat in the years following. But there are economic, ecological, social and political limits to a developing country like China continuing to support richer economies. And there are limits to Beijing’s willingness to abandon control and adopt in full the Western neoliberal economic model; the Communist Party has begun intervening. It is this intervention, we are led to believe, that spooked global markets. Yet the real reason for global weakness lies elsewhere – in the Western neoliberal economic model itself, which lay behind the global financial crisis of 2007-9.

Financial and trade liberalisation, privatisation of taxpayer-financed assets, excessive private indebtedness and wage repression constituted an explosive economic formula and blew up the Western banking system. That model has not undergone even superficial change since 2009. On the contrary: economists and financiers used the “shock and awe” generated by the crisis to buttress the model. The crisis had its origins in banks suffering severe bouts of debt intoxication. Like alcohol addicts, they could not be treated effectively until admitting to the problem: the flawed liberal, financial and economic order. Yet neither the private finance sector nor central bankers and their political friends were willing to admit to the cause of the disease. Instead, central bankers rushed to offer life support in the form of QE to private banking systems in the UK, Japan and the US.

“Although I am a bear of very little brain one thing I have learned is that most investors only realise the economy is in a recession well after it has begun. ”

• Albert Edwards: “99.7% Chance We Are Now In A Bear Market” (Zero Hedge)

Over the years, SocGen’s Albert Edwards has repeatedly expressed his skepticism of both the economy and the market (the longest US equity “bull market” since 1945) both propped up by generous central banks injecting liquidity by the tens of trillions (at this point nobody really knows the number now that the ‘black box’ that is China has entered the global “plunge protection” game) and yet never did he have as “conclusive” a call as he does today. As the following note reveals, when looking at one particular indicator, Edwards is now convinced: ‘we are now in a bear market.” First, Edwards looks east, where he finds nothing short of China’s central bank succumbing to the “wealth effect” preservation pressures of its western peers:

After holding firm last weekend and resisting pressure to give the market what it wanted namely a cut in interest rates and the reserve requirement ratio – the PBoC caved in, unable to endure the riot in the equity markets. In giving the markets what they want China is indeed acting like a fully paid up member of the international financial community. I am not thinking here about freeing up their capital account and allowing the renminbi to be more market determined. I?m thinking instead of China?s replicating the failed US policies of ramping up the equity market to boost economic growth, only to then open the monetary flood gates as equity investors turn nasty.

We disagree modestly with this assessment because as we described first on Tuesday, the RRR-cut had much more to do with unlocking $100 billion in much needed funding so that China could continue to intervene in the FX market by dumping a comparable amount of US Treasurys since its August 11 devaluation, something which as we reported earlier today, China itself has also now admitted. But the reason why we do agree, is that while the RRR-cut may have had other “uses of funds”, today’s dramatic intervention by the PBOC in both the stock market, leading to a 5.5% surge in the last hour of trading, as well as a dramatic intervention in the FX market, it is quite clear that the PBOC will do everything in its power once again to prevent any market drops. Edwards, then goes on to observe something which is sure to anger the Keynesians and monetarists out there: no matter how many trillions central banks inject, they will never replace, or override, the most fundamental thing about the economy: the business cycle.

Despite deflation fears washing westward and US implied inflation expectations diving to levels not seen since the 2008 Great Recession, there remains a touching faith that the US is resilient enough to withstand further renminbi devaluation. And if it isn’t, why worry anyway, because QE4 will be around the corner. But let me be as clear as I can: the US authorities CANNOT eliminate the business cycle, however many QE helicopters they send up. The idea that developed economies will decouple from emerging market turmoil is as ridiculous as was the reverse in the first half of 2008. Remember EM and commodities had then de-coupled from the west’s woes until they too also crashed.

Which brings us to the key point – the state of the market, and why for Edwards the signal is already very clear – the bear market has arrived:

Although I am a bear of very little brain one thing I have learned is that most investors only realise the economy is in a recession well after it has begun. The same is true of an equity bear market. We need help before it is too late to react. Hence when Andrew Lapthorne shows that one of his key predictors of a bear market registers a 99.7% probability that we are already in a bear market, there might still be time to act!

Just about everyone will.

• Who Will Be the Bagholders This Time Around? (CH Smith)

Once global assets roll over for good, it’s important to recall that somebody owns these assets all the way down. These owners are called bagholders, as in “left holding the bag.” Those running the rigged casino have to select the bagholders in advance, lest some fat-cat cronies inadvertently get stuck with losses. In China, authorities picked who would be holding the bag when Chinese stocks cratered 40%: yup, the poor banana vendors, retirees, housewives and other newly minted punters who borrowed on margin to play the rigged casino. Corrupt Chinese officials, oil oligarchs and everyone else who overpaid for flats in London, Manhattan, Vancouver, Sydney, etc. will be left holding the bag when to-the-moon prices fall to Earth.

Anyone buying Neil Young’s 2-acre estate in Hawaii for $24 million will be a bagholder. (If nobody buys it at this inflated price, Neil may end up being the bagholder.) Bond funds that bought dicey emerging market debt (Mongolian bonds, anyone?) and didn’t sell at the top are bagholders. Everyone with bonds and stocks in the oil patch who didn’t sell last summer is a bagholder. Everyone holding yuan is a bagholder. Everyone who bought euro-denominated assets when the euro was 1.40 is a bagholder at euro 1.12. Everyone with 401K emerging market equities mutual funds who didn’t sell last summer is a bagholder. Everyone who reckons “buy and hold” will be the winning strategy going forward will be a bagholder.

Anyone buying anything with borrowed money is a bagholder. Leveraging up to buy risk-on assets like Mongolian bonds and homes in vancouver is brilliant in bubbles, but not so brilliant when risk-on turns to risk-off. As the asset’s value drops below the amount borrowed to buy it, the owner becomes a bagholder. Anyone betting China’s GDP is really expanding at 7% and the U.S. economy will grow by 3.7% next quarter is angling to be a bagholder.

One of many views. My own notion is that too many people believe the Fed is looking out for the US economy, whereas they really look out for banks.

• Now’s The Right Time For Yellen To Kill The ‘Greenspan Put’ (MarketWatch)

The Federal Reserve says the timing of its first interest rate hike in nine years depends on the data, but that doesn’t mean the Fed will be digging through the jobs, growth and inflation reports for the all-clear signal. Instead, the Fed will be doing what millions of people have been doing for the past couple of weeks: Watching the stock market. Many investors have assumed that the recent selloffs in markets from Shanghai to New York meant that the Fed definitely won’t pull the trigger on a rate hike at its Sept. 16-17 meeting. Many prominent talking heads – from Suze Orman to Jim Cramer – are explicitly begging the Fed to hold off on higher interest rates as a way to protect stock prices.

It seems they still fervently believe in the “Greenspan put.” They assume that the Fed will always come riding to the rescue of the markets, as Fed Chair Alan Greenspan did so many times. You can’t blame them for believing that, because from 1987 to today, the Fed has reacted to nearly every market hiccough and tantrum by flooding markets with liquidity and reassurances. They’ve given the markets rate cuts, quantitative easing and promises that easy-money policies will continue for a long time, if not forever. This “Greenspan put” means investing in the stock market is a one-way bet. On Wednesday, New York Fed President Bill Dudley seemed to close the door on a September rate hike when he said that, “at this moment,” a rate hike next month no longer seemed as “compelling” as it once did.

Traders in federal funds futures lowered the odds of an increase in September to about 24%, down from about 50% just before the global market selloff intensified last week. But Dudley didn’t take September off the table, as many people have assumed. Indeed, he explicitly said that a September rate hike “could become more compelling by the time of the meeting as we get additional information.” And what sort of additional information would make a rate hike more compelling? Dudley said the Fed is looking at more than the economic data, widening its scope to examine everything that might impact the economic outlook. They are looking at the value of the dollar, the price of commodities, the risk of contagion from Europe, from China, and from emerging markets. And, above all, the U.S. stock market.

I believe the market selloff has made a September rate hike even more compelling than it was before, because it gives Fed Chair Janet Yellen the opportunity she needs to kill the “Greenspan put” once and for all.

Great pic.

• The Emperor Is Naked; Long Live The Emperor (Fiscal Times)

Over at Barclays, economists Michael Gapen and Rob Martin pushed back their rate hike forecast to March 2016. They admit Fed policymakers are “market dependent” and won’t tighten policy in the maw of a stock correction, even as they see “economic activity in the U.S. as solid and justifying modest rate hikes.” Should the market turmoil continue, the rate hike could be pushed past March. Alberto Gallo, head of credit research at RBS, is more direct: “Policymakers responded to the financial crisis with easy monetary policy and low interest rates. The critics — including us — argued against ‘solving a debt crisis with more debt.’ Put differently, we said that QE was necessary, but not sufficient for a recovery. We are now coming to the moment of reckoning: central bankers look naked, and markets have nothing else to believe in.”

Gallo believes an overreliance on excess liquidity has actually hindered capital investment — as companies have focused on debt-funded share buybacks and dividend hikes instead — limiting the global economy’s potential growth rate. Now, contagion from China — lower commodity prices, lower demand, currency volatility — has revealed the structural vulnerabilities. More stimulus, in his words, “could be self-defeating without fiscal and reform support.” As for Fed hike timing, Gallo sees the odds of a September liftoff at just 30%, down from 36% last week, based on futures market pricing. December odds are at 60%. The open question is: Should the Fed delay its rate hike and the People’s Bank of China ease, will stocks actually rebound? Or has the Pavlovian reaction function been broken by a loss of confidence? We’re about to find out.

The IMF would have to do a 180 on its own sustainability assessment.

• IMF Could Contribute A Fifth To Greek Bailout, ESM’s Regling Says (Bloomberg)

The IMF will probably join Greece’s third bailout and might contribute almost a fifth to the €86 billion program, the head of Europe’s financial backstop said. Speaking to reporters in Berlin on Thursday, European Stability Mechanism Managing Director Klaus Regling said “it would make sense” for the fund to use the 16 billion euros it didn’t pay out to Greece during the second bailout, which expired at the end of June. “Up to 16 billion is something I could imagine,” Regling said. “I assume with a large probability that the IMF will contribute,” though less than the third it contributed to Greece’s bailout five years ago, he said.

Regling is expressing optimism on the IMF’s participation even after Managing Director Christine Lagarde said debt relief for cash-strapped Greece must go “well beyond what has been considered so far.” The IMF has accepted the euro-region view that Greece’s debt load as a percentage of its economy isn’t a proper debt sustainability gauge as long as bond redemptions and interest payments are largely suspended thanks to the financial support, Regling said. Greece’s gross financing need will be below 15% of GDP for a decade, he said. Maturities on outstanding Greek debt can be extended and interest rates lowered to a “certain” degree to achieve the debt easing demanded by the IMF, while a nominal haircut for public creditors is not on the agenda, Regling said. One “needn’t do a whole lot” to help Greece meet the revised debt sustainability requirement, he said.

Europe-wide will not get you anywhere.

• Yanis Varoufakis: ‘I’m Not Going To Take Part In Sad Elections’ (Reuters)

Yanis Varoufakis will not take part in “sad” elections expected next month in Greece and will instead focus on setting up a new movement to “restore democracy” across Europe, the former Greek finance minister told Reuters on Thursday. The combative, motorbike-riding academic was sacked as finance minister last month after alienating euro zone counterparts with his lecturing style and divisive words, hampering Greece’s efforts to secure a bailout from partners. The one-time political rock star has since steadily attacked the bailout programme that prime minister Alexis Tsipras subsequently signed up to and the austerity policies that go with it, rebelling against his former boss in parliament.

“I’m not going to take part in these sad elections,” Mr Varoufakis told Reuters by telephone when asked about the vote likely to be held on September 20th. Mr Tsipras’s Syriza party, which hopes to return to power with a strengthened mandate, says it will not allow Mr Varoufakis and others who voted against the bailout to run for parliament under the Syriza ticket anyway. “Not only him but other lawmakers who did not back the bailout will not be part of the ticket,” a party official said. Mr Tsipras has poured scorn on Mr Varoufakis, telling Alpha TV on Wednesday that he had realised in June that “Varoufakis was talking but nobody paid any attention to him” at the height of Greece’s negotiations with IMF and EU lenders.

“They had switched off, they didn’t listen to what he was saying,” Mr Tsipras said. “He didn’t say anything bad but he had lost his credibility among his interlocutors.” Mr Varoufakis, in turn, likened Mr Tsipras to the mythical Sisyphus condemned to push a rock uphill only to have it roll back down, telling Australia’s ABC Radio the prime minister had embarked on “pushing the same rock of austerity up the hill” against the laws of economics and ethical principles. The 54-year-old Mr Varoufakis has already dismissed speculation that he would join the far-left Popular Unity party that broke away from Syriza last week, telling ABC that he had “great sympathy” but fundamental differences with them and considered their stance “isolationist”.

Instead, he told Reuters he wanted to set up a European network aimed at restoring democracy that could eventually become a party, but at the moment was just an idea that he had seen a lot of support for. “Instead of having national parties that run on a national level it will be a European network which is active on a national level,” he said. “It’s not something immediate. It’s something slow-burning … something that gradually grows roots across Europe.”

Hunderds die every day now. Blame Brussels.

• For Those Trying to Reach Safety in Europe, Land can be as Deadly as Sea (HRW)

More gruesome details will undoubtedly emerge, but we already know enough to be horrified: Up to 50 people died in what were surely agonizing deaths, locked in a truck parked on an Austrian highway, leading to Vienna. That so many should die in a single episode, so close to a European capital where ministers are meeting to discuss migration in the Western Balkans, has made this international news. But the land route into the European Union trekked by migrants and asylum seekers has claimed thousands of victims over the years. In March, two Iraqi men died of hypothermia at the border between Bulgaria and Turkey. In April, 14 Somalis and Afghans were killed by a high-speed train in Macedonia as they walked along the tracks. Last November, a 45-day-old baby died with his father on those same tracks.

While deaths in the Mediterranean capture much of the attention, the list of those who have died of suffocation, dehydration, and exposure to the elements at land borders is unconscionably long. One count puts the overall death toll at EU borders at more than 30,000 since 2000. The smugglers directly responsible for deaths and abuse should be brought to justice. Ill-treatment by border guards and police in Macedonia and Serbia adds to the perils of the journey. But there’s lots of blame to spread around. Failed EU policies, which place an unfair burden on countries at its frontiers, and Greece’s inability to handle the numbers of migrants, have contributed to the crisis at EU borders.

Instead of erecting fences, as Hungary is, the EU should expand safe and legal alternatives for people seeking entry, especially those fleeing persecution and conflict. This means increasing refugee resettlement, facilitating access to family reunification, and developing programs for providing humanitarian visas. It also requires EU governments to meet their legal obligations to provide access to asylum and humane conditions for those already present. EU countries should step up to alleviate the humanitarian crisis in debt-stricken Greece, where 160,000 migrants have arrived since the start of the year. The umbrella group European Council on Refugees and Exiles (ECRE) has called for EU countries to relocate 70,000 asylum seekers from Greece within a year, double the insufficient relocation numbers agreed by governments for both Greece and Italy in July.

Many of those traveling along the Western Balkans route and into Austria are from Syria, Somalia, Iraq, and Afghanistan – countries experiencing war or generalized violence. Others are hoping to improve their economic prospects and the lives of their children. None of them deserve to be exploited, abused, or to die.

Debt Rattle August 19 2015

Aug 192015

August 19, 2015 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 8:43 am Finance Tagged with: asylum, Brazil, China, fracking, FX, Japan, oil, refugees, shadow banks, shares, yuan 7 Responses »

Lewis Wickes Hine Newsies in St. Louis 1910

• Asian Shares Plunge To Two-Year Lows As China Stocks Continue To Fall (Guardian)

• Do Markets Determine The Value Of The Renminbi? (Michael Pettis)

• China’s Devaluation May Be Bad News For FX Industry (Reuters)

• China Shadow Banks Appeal For Government Bailout (FT)

• China’s Richest Traders Are Fleeing Stocks as the Masses Pile In (Bloomberg)

• US Lacks Ammo for Next Economic Crisis (WSJ)

• Abe Aide Says Japan Needs $28 Billion Economic Package (Bloomberg)

• Europe, Listen to the IMF and Restructure the Greek Debt (NY Times Ed.)

• The Hot Thing for Wall Street Banks: Capital-Relief Trades (WSJ)

• Oil Goes Down, Bankruptcies Go Up – The 5 Frackers Next To Fall (Forbes)

• Brace For More Dividend Cuts As Canada’s Oil Patch Runs Out Of Cash (Bloomberg)

• Brazil’s Political Crisis Puts the Entire Economy on Hold (Bloomberg)

• Immigration – Issue of the Century (Patrick J. Buchanan)

• Hungary Deploys ‘Border Hunters’ to Keep Illegal Immigrants Out (WSJ)

• Europe Struggles To Respond As Migrants Numbers Rise Threefold (Reuters)

• Germany May Receive Up To 750,000 Asylum Seekers This Year (Reuters)

Note: Shanghai plunge protection came in in late trading. It ended up 1.23%.

• Asian Shares Plunge To Two-Year Lows As China Stocks Continue To Fall (Guardian)

Asian shares on Wednesday struggled at two-year lows after Chinese stocks extended their fall, stoking fears about the stability of China’s economy. The Shanghai Composite Index retreated 3.9% a day after worries that the central bank could be in no hurry to ease policy further pushed it down 6.1%. The plunge dented hopes of Chinese share markets stabilising after Beijing effectively pulled out all the stops to stem the rout. Japan’s Nikkei fell 0.5% and South Korea’s Kospi lost 1.3%. “Investors care about these two things: China’s economy and the timing of a US rate hike. These two concerns dominate their minds now,” said Masaru Hamasaki, head of market and investment information department at Amundi Japan.

MSCI’s broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan slid to a two-year low and was last down 0.1%. Australian stocks bucked the trend and climbed 1.2%. Shares of importers and firms with high US dollar-denominated debt have been under pressure following last week’s yuan devaluation. The spectre of a slowdown in China’s economic growth and a US interest rate hike has hit asset markets in emerging economies hardest. MSCI’s emerging market index fell to its lowest level since October 2011. It has dropped more than 20% from the year’s peak it hit in April. Wall Street shares also retreated overnight, with the S&P 500 sliding 0.26%, pressured by weak earnings from retail giant Wal-Mart.

Must read from Pettis.

• Do Markets Determine The Value Of The Renminbi? (Michael Pettis)

One of the main questions being batted around is whether, under the new system, the value of the RMB is finally going to be determined by the market. If it is, it almost certainly means that the value of the RMB will decline. Why? Because the balance of payments, which is the sum of the current account surplus and the capital account deficit, is in deficit if we exclude PBoC interventions. At current prices there is more RMB selling than there is buying, and the PBoC has to sell reserves and buy RMB in order to keep the currency from depreciating. This, many people argue, proves that the RMB is overvalued. The “market”, they claim, has spoken, and it has told us that the RMB is overvalued. They are wrong. The “market” is not telling us that the RMB is overvalued.

It is telling us only that there is more supply of RMB than there is demand for RMB at the current exchange rate. Because “overvaluation” and “undervaluation” usually refer to the fundamental value of a currency, this excess of supply over demand would only imply an overvaluation of the RMB if supply and demand were driven primarily by economic fundamentals. Excluding central bank intervention, which is mainly a residual contributed automatically by the PBoC to balance supply and demand for foreign currency, all purchases or sales of foreign currency in China can be divided into current account activity, which mostly consists of the trade account, along with other transactions including tourism, royalty payments, interest payments, etc., and capital account activity, which consists of direct investment, portfolio investment, and official flows.

Imbalances in both the current account and the capital account can be driven by economic fundamentals, in which case it might make sense to say that the RMB’s “correct” exchange rate is broadly equal to the clearing price at which supply is equal to demand. In this case if the central bank were to purchase RMB, reserves would decline and it would be reasonable to assume that PBoC intervention would cause the RMB to become overvalued, while PBoC sales of RMB would cause reserves to increase and the RMB to become undervalued. But neither the current account nor the capital account is necessarily driven only by economic fundamentals. As an aside, most people, including unfortunately most economists, typically assume that the current account is independent and the capital account, if they think of it at all, simply adjusts to maintain the balance, but this is an extremely confused way to think about the balance of payments.

“Her credit markets are fragile and they are unwinding what has been the world’s biggest ever credit boom, and capital outflows are meaningful..”

• China’s Devaluation May Be Bad News For FX Industry (Reuters)

China’s currency devaluation should give a shot in the arm to global foreign exchange volumes as traders take advantage of and protect themselves against the surprise surge in volatility, but its longer-term impact on market activity may not be so benign. Investors with longer-term horizons than a day’s trading profit, from pension funds seeking stable returns to companies considering expanding overseas, will be alarmed by the prospect of wild swings in exchange rates triggered by another round of “currency wars”. Former Brazilian finance minister Guido Mantega coined the term “currency wars” in 2010. It refers to countries trying to make their exports more competitive – and ultimately boost their growth – at the expense of rivals, by weakening their exchange rates.

Policymakers fear Beijing’s move could accelerate this race to the bottom, particularly as most countries, including those in the developed and industrialized world, have few growth-boosting policy tools left open to them. It’s a worry for a troubled foreign exchange industry. After years of rapid growth, which made it the world’s largest financial market and a money-spinner for big banks, trading volumes are slowly shrinking and jobs are being lost. Tighter regulation, increased automation, greater competition, and a global market-rigging scandal all suggest its glory days are over. The depressive impact on investment of a lengthy currency war would do little to restore its fortunes. “Any prolonged uncertainty in the market resulting from this, and real-money players such as pension and mutual funds will be less inclined to invest,” said Neil Mellor at Bank of New York Mellon.

As analysts at Morgan Stanley point out, China accounts for 21% of the trade-weighted dollar index used by the Federal Reserve. It is the biggest single component of the equivalent euro trade-weighted index at around 23%. So what happens to the yuan has a growing influence on dollar and euro flows. Analysts at Cross Border Capital say China’s credit markets have grown 12-fold since 2000 and are now worth around $25 trillion – roughly the same size as U.S. credit markets. “Her credit markets are fragile and they are unwinding what has been the world’s biggest ever credit boom, and capital outflows are meaningful,” they wrote in a report last month. “China remains the key risk and reward for global investors.” In that, the foreign exchange industry is no exception.

The 800 pound blind spot in Beijing’s financial Ponzi politics comes back to haunt it.

• China Shadow Banks Appeal For Government Bailout (FT)

The collapse of a state-owned credit guarantee company in China’s rust belt has shone a new spotlight on risk from bad debt and moral hazard in the country’s shadow banking system. As China’s economy slows, concerns are mounting over rising defaults, especially on loans from non-bank lenders, which provide credit to risky borrowers at high interest rates. Eleven shadow banks have written an open letter to the top Communist party official in northern China’s Hebei province asking for a bailout that would enable the bankrupt credit guarantee company to continue to backstop loans to borrowers. If the guarantor cannot pay, it could spark defaults on at least 24 high-yielding wealth management products (WMPs).

Analysts worry that a series of bailouts in recent years has encouraged irresponsible lending by fuelling the perception the government will not tolerate default. The latest appeal for a bailout will again force officials to choose between ensuring short-term financial stability or imposing market discipline on investors, which should improve lending practices in the long term. Hebei Financing Investment has guaranteed Rmb50bn ($7.8bn) in loans from nearly 50 financial institutions, according to Caixin, a respected financial magazine. More than half of this total is from non-bank lenders, mainly trust companies, who lent to property developers and factories in overcapacity industries. The letter appeals directly to the government’s concern about social stability and the fear of retail investors protesting the loss of “blood and sweat money”.

The 11 companies sold 24 separate WMPs worth Rmb5.5bn. “The domino effect from the successive and intersecting defaults of these trust products involves a multitude of financial institutions, an immense amount of money, and wide-ranging public interests,” 10 trust companies and a fund manager wrote to Zhao Kezhi, Hebei party secretary. “In order to prevent this incident from inciting panic among common people and creating an unnecessary social influence, we represent more than a thousand investors, more than a thousand families, in asking for a resolution.” Most trust products are distributed through state-owned banks, leaving unsophisticated investors with the impression that the bank and ultimately the government stands behind them, even when the fine print says otherwise.

There has been a series of technical defaults on bonds and high-yield trust products in recent years, but bailouts have shielded retail investors from losses in most if not all cases, often following public protests by angry investors at bank branches. Trust lending has exploded since 2010 amid a pullback by traditional banks. Trusts sell WMPs to investors, marketing the products as a higher-yielding alternative to traditional savings deposits. They use the proceeds for loans to property developers, coal miners and manufacturers in overcapacity sectors to which banks are reluctant to lend. Trust loans outstanding rose from Rmb1.7tn in 2011 to Rmb6.9tn at the end of June. Hebei Financing stopped paying out on all loan guarantees in January, when its chairman was replaced and another state-owned group was appointed as custodian.

Much of it is fleeing abroad.

• China’s Richest Traders Are Fleeing Stocks as the Masses Pile In (Bloomberg)

The wealthiest investors in China’s equity market are heading for the exits. The number of traders with more than 10 million yuan ($1.6 million) of shares in their accounts shrank by 28% in July, even as those with less than 100,000 yuan rose by 8%, according to the nation’s clearing agency. While some of the drop is explained by falling market values, CLSA Ltd. says China’s rich have taken advantage of state buying to cash out after the nation’s record-long bull market peaked in June. Investors with the most at stake are finding fewer reasons to own Chinese shares amid weak corporate earnings and some of the world’s highest valuations.

With this month’s devaluation of the yuan adding to outflow pressures, bulls have started to question whether there’s enough buying power to prop up prices once the government pares back its unprecedented rescue effort – a concern that contributed to the Shanghai Composite Index’s 6% plunge on Tuesday. “The high net worth clients are the ones who moved the market,” Francis Cheung, the head of China and Hong Kong strategy at CLSA, wrote in an e-mail. “They tend to be more savvy.” The median stock on mainland bourses traded at 72 times reported earnings on Monday, more expensive than any of the world’s 10 largest markets. The ratio was 68 at the peak of China’s equity bubble in 2007, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

More than 62% of companies in the Shanghai Composite trailed analysts’ 2014 earnings estimates as the economy expanded at its weakest pace since 1990. Profits at Chinese industrial firms declined by 0.3% in June, versus a 0.6% gain in the previous month. “There is not a lot of fundamental support for the A-share market,” Cheung said. “Earnings are weak.” “This lack of a clear trend in the market causes overreactions by investors” The ranks of investors with at least 10 million yuan in stocks dropped to about 55,000 in July from 76,000 in June. Those with between 1 million yuan and 10 million yuan declined by 22%, according to data compiled by China Securities Depository and Clearing Corp. “Wealthy investors, who have been through bear markets, are better at exiting,” said Hu Xingdou, an economics professor at the Beijing Institute of Technology.

From Fed mounthpiece Hilsenrath.

• US Lacks Ammo for Next Economic Crisis (WSJ)

The U.S. over the past quarter century regularly turned to the Fed to provide stimulus when the economy stumbled. In the most recent recession, short-term interest rates were pushed to near zero, then the central bank embarked on massive—and controversial—bond-buying programs to drive down long-term interest rates. The Fed also promised to keep short-term interest rates low for an extended period. The tactics were meant to make it easier for households to pay off debts, encourage new borrowing and promote risk-taking; officials hoped that would push investment and consumer spending higher.

The next downturn could further expand Fed bondholdings, but with the central bank’s balance sheet already exceeding $4 trillion, there are limits to how much more the Fed can buy. Mr. Bernanke said he was struck by how central banks in Europe recently pushed short-term interest rates into negative territory, essentially charging banks for depositing cash rather than lending it to businesses and households. The Swiss National Bank, for example, charges commercial banks 0.75% interest for money they park, an incentive to lend it elsewhere. Economic theory suggests negative rates prompt businesses and households to hoard cash—essentially, stuff it in a mattress. “It does look like rates can go more negative than conventional wisdom has held,” Mr. Bernanke said.

Others, including Sen. Bob Corker (R.,Tenn.), see only the Fed’s limits. “They have, like, zero juice left,” he said. Many economists believe relief from the next downturn will have to come from fiscal policy makers not the Fed, a daunting prospect given the philosophical divide between the two parties. Republicans doubt federal spending expands the economy, and they seek to shrink rather than grow government. Democrats, meanwhile, say government austerity hobbles the economy, especially in a downturn. At issue is how much the U.S. can afford to borrow and spend to goose the economy out of the next recession. The experience of the past recession has set off sharp disagreement among economists.

Federal debt has grown to 74% of national output, from 39% in 2008. To restrain short-term budget deficits, Congress and the White House agreed earlier this decade on a mix of spending cuts and tax increases. In all, total state, local and federal government spending, adjusted for inflation, shrank 3.3% since the recovery began in 2009, compared with an average increase of 23.5% over comparable periods in past postwar expansions.

Sure, throw some more oil on the fire.

• Abe Aide Says Japan Needs $28 Billion Economic Package (Bloomberg)

Japan needs an economic injection of as much as 3.5 trillion yen ($28 billion) to shore up consumption and stave off a further economic contraction, said Etsuro Honda, an economic adviser to Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. “Households feel their income has been reduced,” Honda, 60, said in an interview Tuesday at the Prime Minister’s Office in Tokyo. “The negative legacy of the previous tax hike is waning, but increases in wages are lower than expected and prices of food and daily commodities are rising.” The world’s third-biggest economy shrank an annualized 1.6% in the three months through June as households and businesses cut spending and exports tumbled.

While the tailwind from the weaker yen and the Bank of Japan’s unprecedented monetary stimulus have helped propel stocks to an eight-year high, consumer confidence has slumped. Honda said a package of 3-3.5 trillion yen is needed to help lower-income households and pensioners. He suggested it should be delivered as subsidies such as child-care support or coupons, rather than spending on public works. Additional spending can be funded from higher-than-expected tax revenues, rather than issuing new government bonds, he said. Economy Minister Akira Amari said Monday he doesn’t expect to add fiscal stimulus, and Bank of Japan Governor Haruhiko Kuroda is counting on growth returning this quarter as he pursues a distant 2% inflation target with unprecedented monetary stimulus.

Honda said fiscal stimulus would be more effective than further central bank easing right now because it kicks in quicker. He said additional central bank easing wasn’t needed now, but didn’t rule it out later should inflationary expectations fall. “We should be on alert. There should be some possibility, of course, for the BOJ to pursue its next round” of easing, he said. Honda, a former Ministry of Finance official, has known Abe since they met at a wedding reception around 30 years ago. They played golf together at the weekend.

Everyone knows what should happen, but that doesn’t mean it will.

• Europe, Listen to the IMF and Restructure the Greek Debt (NY Times Ed.)

The IMF is doing the right thing by not participating in a deeply flawed loan agreement that European leaders have negotiated with Greece. Years of misguided economic policies sought by Germany and other creditors have helped to push Greece into a depression, left more than a quarter of its workers unemployed and saddled it with a debt it cannot repay. The latest European attempt to bail out Greece will make the situation even worse by requiring the country’s government to cut spending and raise taxes while increasing the country’s debt to 200% of its GDP, from about 170% now. The IMF, which joined European countries in their first two loan programs for Greece, says it cannot lend more money because Greece’s debt has become unsustainable.

In a statement on Friday, the fund’s managing director, Christine Lagarde, said Greece’s creditors had to provide “significant debt relief” to the country. Last month, the fund said creditors needed to either reduce the amount of money Greece owes or extend the maturity of that debt by up to 30 years. This is a much tougher position than the IMF has taken before. In 2010, it did not insist that Greek debt be restructured. That was a big mistake because it left Greece with more debt than it had before the crisis and reduced the government’s ability to stimulate the economy. What Ms. Lagarde, a former French finance minister, says matters because European leaders like Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany want the fund to be a part of the loan program since it has extensive expertise in dealing with financial crises.

European officials have said only vaguely that they might be willing to consider debt relief. Many lawmakers and voters in other European nations oppose providing more help because they think the Greek government has failed to carry out the economic and fiscal reforms that would make the country more productive. There is no question that Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras of Greece needs to do more to raise economic growth. But even if he does everything European leaders are asking him to do — a list that includes cutting pensions, simplifying regulations, privatizing state-owned businesses — the country will still not be able to pay back the €300 billion it owes. Rather than go through a messy default in a few years, it is in Europe’s interest to heed the IMF’s advice and restructure Greece’s debt now.

There are still plenty instruments available to hide risks and losses.

• The Hot Thing for Wall Street Banks: Capital-Relief Trades (WSJ)

Faced with new global regulations requiring them to strengthen their capital, big lenders in the U.S. and Europe have turned to a trading tactic that flatters their positions without actually raising extra funds. Banks that have done such “capital-relief trades” include some of the largest in the world: Citigroup, Bank of America, Deutsche Bank and Standard Chartered. But the Office of Financial Research, a U.S. Treasury office created to identify financial-market risks, is suggesting the trades run the risk of “obscuring” whether a bank has adequate capital and pose other “financial stability concerns.” The Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Reserve also have also voiced concerns about the trades.

Capital-relief trades are opaque, little-disclosed transactions that make a bank look stronger by reducing its ” risk-weighted” assets. That boosts key ratios that measure the bank’s capital as a%age of those assets, even as capital itself stays at the same level. In a capital-relief trade, a bank can keep a risky asset on the balance sheet, using credit derivatives or securitizations to transfer some of the risk to a hedge fund or other investor. The investor potentially gets extra yield and the credit risk of smaller borrowers in a way it would be hard for them to get otherwise, while the bank gets to remove part of the asset’s value from its closely watched “risk-weighted asset” count. Banks say the trades help them manage their risk, even if they don’t go as far as a bona fide asset sale, and are just one tool among many they are using to meet new capital requirements.

Some say the Office of Financial Research is mischaracterizing the transactions, or that the trades didn’t significantly affect their capital ratios. Bank of America, for example, disclosed $11.6 billion in purchased capital protection in 2014 regulatory filings, but said the impact of the trades on its capital ratios was less than 0.01 %age point. Critics fear the trades can spread risk to unregulated parts of the financial system–just as similar trades did before the financial crisis. “It just seems like another repackaging of risk to mask who’s holding the bag,” said Arthur Wilmarth, a George Washington University law professor and banking expert.

Pretty funny: “KKR and its partners might at least feel cold comfort that some of their cash is going to a good cause.”

• Oil Goes Down, Bankruptcies Go Up – The 5 Frackers Next To Fall (Forbes)

With West Texas Intermediate crude now below $42 a barrel, the edifice of America’s oil and gas boom is finally crumbling. The number of companies in bankruptcy or restructuring has increased, and the clouds will only grow darker in the months ahead. Declining revenues, evaporating earnings and shrinking values of oil and gas reserves will put the crunch on oil companies’ ability to refinance loans, let alone borrow new cash or sell shares. Last week two companies showed that having a heroic name is no defense. Hercules Offshore, a Gulf of Mexico drilling contractor, announced it had reached a prepackaged bankruptcy with creditors to convert $1.2 billion in debt into equity and raise $450 million in new capital.

While Samson Resources on Friday said it is negotiating a restructuring that will see second lien holders inject another $450 million into the company in return for all the equity in the reorganized company. Samson is the biggest bankruptcy of the oil bust so far, and a huge black eye to private equity giant KKR, which in 2011 led a $7.2 billion leveraged buyout of the company. The deal was a classic LBO: about $3 billion in equity backed by more than $4 billion in debt. It seemed like a good idea at the time. Tulsa, Oklahoma-based Samson, founded in the 1970s by Charles Schusterman, had grown to be one of the biggest privately owned oil companies in the nation. It held vast swaths of acreage in North Dakota, Texas and Louisiana seemingly ripe for redevelopment.

The sophisticated KKR team assumed it could squeeze a lot of value out of Samson, which since Schusterman’s death in 2001 had been run by his daughter Stacy. Charles would be proud of her for inking the deal of a lifetime, selling the family jewels at what turned out to be the top of the market for shale-y acreage. It didn’t take long for KKR and its equity partners to realize they had overpaid tremendously. The pain has been spread around. Japan’s Itochu Corp. put up $1 billion in the LBO for a 25% equity stake. Two months ago it sold back its shares to Samson for $1. KKR and its partners might at least feel cold comfort that some of their cash is going to a good cause. The Schusterman family, led by matriarch Lynn, contributed $2.3 billion of their windfall to the Charles & Lynn Schusterman Foundation, which is devoted to Jewish charities and education projects in Tulsa.

Dying breaths?!

• Brace For More Dividend Cuts As Canada’s Oil Patch Runs Out Of Cash (Bloomberg)

Dividend cuts among Canadian energy producers are poised to accelerate as cost reductions fail to boost shrinking cash flow. Companies from Canadian Oil Sands to Baytex Energy are in line for deeper payout decreases, according to analysts, after Crescent Point Energy Corp. slashed its dividend for the first time last week as crude sank to a six-year low. Just 38% of the 63 energy companies in Canada’s Standard & Poor’s/TSX Energy index had positive free cash flow, defined as operating cash flow minus capital expenditures, as of Aug. 17. That’s down from 43% in 2013, data compiled by Bloomberg show. The dwindling cash flow comes even after Canadian companies joined some US$180 billion in global cutbacks this year, the most since the oil crash of 1986, according to Rystad Energy.

“There’s so much cash being spent on dividends,” said Greg Taylor at Aurion Capital Management in Toronto. “You can get increased cash flow by cutting costs but that’s not a sustainable model. The idea dividends are a sacred cow, that’s being put on the backburner.” Companies most likely to cut their dividends include Canadian Oil Sands, Baytex and Pengrowth Energy, said Sam La Bell at Veritas Investment in a telephone interview in Toronto. All three have already cut their dividends, though Baytex and Pengrowth will become more vulnerable if oil prices remain low as their hedges begin to roll off as soon as the second half of this year, La Bell said.

Canadian Oil Sands, which chopped its payout by 86% in January, may be better off canceling the dividend altogether as it struggles to generate cash, he said. “We know the dividend is important to our investors, but even more so is protecting the long-term value of their investment,” said Siren Fisekci, a spokeswoman at Canadian Oil Sands, in an e-mailed response. “We will continue to consider dividends in the context of crude oil prices and Syncrude operating performance.”

Wile E.

• Brazil’s Political Crisis Puts the Entire Economy on Hold (Bloomberg)

In Brazil, General Motors has been halting factories and laying off thousands. Latam Airlines, the region’s biggest, is cutting flights. And the world’s third-largest planemaker, Embraer, is delaying its biggest new aircraft. In the midst of its deepest economic and political crisis in a generation, Brazil is contending with a business climate so punishing that major projects across numerous sectors are being frozen or shrunk, while small businesses slash prices and shift focus. “Political instability is enormous, and it’s paralyzing Brazil,” said Eduardo Fischer, co-CEO at homebuilder MRV Engenharia, in an Aug. 5 interview. In Brasilia, the nation’s capital, “decisions and actions that need to be taken are being delayed, questioned or defeated, and nothing happens.” Even luncheonettes are hurting.

Carambola’s, a juice and sandwich shop in Sao Paulo’s financial district, saw a 30% drop during lunch starting a couple of months ago. The corner store fired two employees, and closes earlier as customers stop coming in after-hours. “People are bringing lunch from home,” Rafael Bruno da Silva, the afternoon manager, said on a recent day as a lone customer sipped coffee. “We’ve lowered the prices of juice, but it doesn’t seem to be making much of a difference.” Opposition lawmakers and many in the public are calling for the resignation of President Dilma Rousseff, whose popularity has sunk to a record low. The senate and lower house presidents are being investigated in an alleged kickback scheme that funneled money from state-run Petrobras, the world’s most indebted oil company, to political parties in the biggest corruption scandal in history.

On top of that, inflation is above the central bank’s target and unemployment is at a five-year high. Moody’s Investors Service said in a report Monday the economy will contract about 2% in 2015. Brazil’s real is the worst-performing major currency in the world this year. The crisis is reminiscent of the 1990s, when clerks were hired to re-sticker prices at grocery stores throughout the day because of hyperinflation. For others, it is a new and frightening experience. “Younger generations haven’t lived through any volatility,” said Fernando Perlatto, a professor of sociology at the federal university of Juiz de Fora. “That contributes to uncertainty. People are cutting costs, not getting married, and such. At the university, we’re not booking any conferences, trips or academic events.”

A view from the right.

• Immigration – Issue of the Century (Patrick J. Buchanan)

“Trump’s immigration proposals are as dangerous as they are stunning,” railed amnesty activist Frank Sharry. “Trump … promises to rescind protections for Dreamers and deport them. He wants to redefine the constitutional definition of U.S. citizenship as codified by the 14th Amendment. He plans to impose a moratorium on legal immigration.” While Sharry is a bit hysterical, he is not entirely wrong. For the six-page policy paper, to secure America’s border and send back aliens here illegally, released by Trump last weekend, is the toughest, most comprehensive, stunning immigration proposal of the election cycle. The Trump folks were aided by people around Sen. Jeff Sessions who says Trump’s plan “reestablishes the principle that America’s immigration laws should serve the interests of its own citizens.”

The issue is joined, the battle lines are drawn, and the GOP will debate and may decide which way America shall go. And the basic issues — how to secure our borders, whether to repatriate the millions here illegally, whether to declare a moratorium on immigration into the USA — are part of a greater question. Will the West endure, or disappear by the century’s end as another lost civilization? Mass immigration, if it continues, will be more decisive in deciding the fate of the West than Islamist terrorism. For the world is invading the West. A wild exaggeration? Consider. Monday’s Washington Post had a front-page story on an “escalating rash of violent attacks against refugees,” in Germany, including arson attacks on refugee centers and physical assaults.

Burled in the story was an astonishing statistic. Germany, which took in 174,000 asylum seekers last year, is on schedule to take in 500,000 this year. Yet Germany is smaller than Montana. How long can a geographically limited and crowded German nation, already experiencing ugly racial conflict, take in half a million Third World people every year without tearing itself apart, and changing the character of the nation forever? Do we think the riots and racial wars will stop if more come? And these refugees, asylum seekers and illegal immigrants are not going to stop coming to Europe. For they are being driven across the Med by wars in Libya, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and Yemen, by the horrific conditions in Eritrea, Ethiopia, Somalia and Sudan, by the Islamist terrorism of the Mideast and the abject poverty of the sub-Sahara.

According to the U.N., Africa had 1.1 billion people by 2013, will double that to 2.4 billion by 2050, and double that to 4.2 billion by 2100. How many of these billions dream of coming to Europe? When and why will they stop coming? How many can Europe absorb without going bankrupt and changing the continent forever? Does Europe have the toughness to seal its borders and send back the intruders? Or is Europe so morally paralyzed it has become what Jean Raspail mocked in “The Camp of the Saints”? The blazing issue in Britain and France is the thousands of Arab and African asylum seekers clustered about Calais to traverse the Eurotunnel to Dover. The Brits are on fire. Millions want out of the EU. They want to remain who they are.

The ugly side of the response.

• Hungary Deploys ‘Border Hunters’ to Keep Illegal Immigrants Out (WSJ)

Hungary’s government said Tuesday it will deploy police units of “border hunters” at its frontier with Serbia to keep illegal immigrants out of the country amid a flood of refugees from the Middle East and North Africa. The head of the prime minister’s office said several thousand police will be placed along Hungary’s 175-kilometer border with non-European Union member Serbia, where most of the migrants enter the country. Hungary “is under siege from human traffickers,” Janos Lazar told a press briefing, adding that the police “will defend this stretch of our borders with force.” The government will also tighten punishments for illegal border crossing and human trafficking, steps aimed at “defending the country,” he said.

“[Migrants’] demands to be let in to then take advantage of the EU’s asylum system are on the rise, aggressiveness is increasing. Police have seen that on several occasions,” Mr. Lazar added. The majority of the migrants, whom the government labels as illegal immigrants, are refugees from war-torn Afghanistan, Syria and Iraq, according to human-rights groups. Hungary has registered some 120,000 asylum requests so far this year, an increase of almost 200% from last year. This year’s total could reach 300,000, the country said last week. “Hungary is joining Italy and Greece as the member states most exposed, on the front line” of migration, Dimitris Avramopoulos, EU commissioner in charge of migration, said Friday.

Last week, Hungary requested €8 million from the European Commission in emergency assistance to expand its capacities to house migrants. Brussels will treat the request without delay, Mr. Avramopoulos said. With an estimated 4,500 migrants housed in its overflowing immigration camps, Hungary is a transit country for the vast majority of the migrants. Once in Hungary—and thus within the EU’s Schengen zone where internal borders aren’t guarded—the migrants typically travel on to countries such as Germany and Sweden. Hungary is now building a double fence on its border with Serbia to reduce the number of migrants crossing the border through woods and meadows.

Europe is in desperate need of leadership on the issue, but there ain’t none.

• Europe Struggles To Respond As Migrants Numbers Rise Threefold (Reuters)

More than three times as many migrants were tracked entering the European Union by irregular means last month than a year ago, official data showed on Tuesday, many of them landing on Greek islands after fleeing conflict in Syria. While the increase recorded by the European Union’s border control agency Frontex may be partly due to better monitoring, it highlighted the scale of a crisis that has led to more than 2,000 deaths this year as desperate migrants take to rickety boats. Italian police said they had arrested eight suspected human traffickers that they said had reportedly forced migrants to stay in the hold of a fishing boat in the Mediterranean as 49 of them suffocated on engine fumes.

Some of those traffickers were accused of kicking the heads of the migrants when they tried to climb out of the hold as the air became unbreathable, prosecutor Michelangelo Patane told a news conference in Catania, Sicily. The dead migrants were discovered last weekend, packed into a fishing boat also carrying 312 others trying to cross the Mediterranean to Italy from North Africa. It was the third mass fatality in the Mediterranean this month: last week, up to 50 migrants were unaccounted for when their rubber dinghy sank, a few days after some 200 were presumed dead when their boat capsized off Libya.

Greece appealed to its European Union partners to come up with a comprehensive strategy to deal with what new data showed were 21,000 refugees landed on Greek shores last week alone. A spokesman for the United Nations refugee agency UNHCR in Geneva said the European Union should help Greece but that Athens, which is struggling with a debt crisis, also needed to show ‘much more leadership’ on the issue. Greek officials said they needed better coordination within the European Union. “This problem cannot be solved by imposing stringent legal processes in Greece, and, certainly, not by overturning the boats,” said government spokeswoman Olga Gerovassili. Nor could it be addressed by building fences, she said.

Merkel’s inaction now leads to her being completely overwhelmed. That’s her fault, her failure.

• Germany May Receive Up To 750,000 Asylum Seekers This Year (Reuters)

Germany expects up to 750,000 people to seek asylum this year, a business daily cited government sources as saying, up from a previous estimate of 450,000, as some cities say they already cannot cope and hostility towards migrants surges in some areas. The influx has driven the issue of asylum seekers high up Germany’s political agenda. Chancellor Angela Merkel has tried to address fears among some voters that migrants will eat up taxpayers’ money and take their jobs. The number of attacks on refugee shelters has soared this year. The interior ministry declined to comment on the figures reported in the Handelsblatt but is set to issue its latest predictions this week. Its previous estimate for asylum applications in 2015 was already double those recorded in 2014.

Germany is the biggest recipient of asylum seekers in the European Union, which has been overwhelmed by refugees fleeing war and poverty in countries such as Syria, Iraq and Eritrea. There is also a flood of asylum seekers from Balkan countries. Almost half of the refugees who came to Germany in the first half of the year came from southeast Europe. Along with a shortage of refugee lodgings in cities including Berlin, Munich and Hamburg, Germany also struggles to process applications, which can take over a year. Merkel has long said this must be accelerated.

On Tuesday, the finance ministry seconded 50 customs officials to the National Office for Migration and Refugees for six months to get through the backlog. After Germany, Sweden is the next most generous recipient of asylum seekers in Europe. In 2014, it recorded 81,200 application and anti-immigration sentiment is on the rise.

Central Banks Upside Down

Jan 162015

January 16, 2015 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 10:23 pm Finance Tagged with: central banks, Draghi, ECB, Fed, foreign exchange, FX, QE, Swiss 7 Responses »

Unknown Gurley-Lord service station, San Francisco 1929

The Swiss have unleashed a pretty wild storm in financial markets. All sorts of companies and people today are licking their wounds, and quite a few will simply have to fold. It’s no exception to be so leveraged in foreign exchange wagers that a move of a few percent can wipe you out, let alone one of 30%. Leverage makes sure that right off the bat a whole bunch of foreign exchange brokers, including FXCM, the biggest, are literally dead in the water – FXCM stock fell 90% -.

We’ll hear about the real losses in the days and weeks to come, but rest assured they’ll be very substantial. Banks like Goldman, Deutsche and Barclays were heavily short the franc, and therefor of course, so were their clients. Many private investors have lost everything and then some. As if the losses from oil’s jump off the cliff weren’t damaging enough yet to the realm of finance. But, you know, the CHF franc was pegged to the slumping euro, so what did everybody really expect? The timing may have been a surprise, but come on ..

There’s number of lessons in this, but I don’t feel confident that they will be learned. If only because we’ve gotten so used to living in an upside down world that it has become a solid new normal, especially for those who’ve made a killing off of it. But everything, says physics, tends back to equilibrium. And we were many miles removed from that.

The world of finance decries the fact that the Swiss central bank didn’t ‘telegraph’ beforehand that they were going to get rid of the euro peg. And that’s completely upside down, right there. Even apart from the fact that the SNB move wouldn’t have worked if it had indicated it beforehand, what’s the idea behind central banks having to tell you anything at all? Just look at this from Bloomberg:

SNB Officials Eating Words Risk Lasting Investor Aches

Switzerland’s central bank officials have just eaten their words, risking lingering indigestion in financial markets. Just three days after Swiss National Bank (SNBN) Vice President Jean-Pierre Danthine called the franc cap a “pillar” of monetary policy, the SNB yesterday dropped the minimum exchange rate of 1.20 per euro. The shock abandonment of the SNB’s primary policy of the past three years may now leave investors warier of taking officials’ words at face value, according to economists including Karsten Junius, chief economist at Bank J. Safra Sarasin. By scrapping one tool, the franc cap, SNB President Thomas Jordan risks blunting the effects of another. “The SNB’s credibility has suffered a bit,” said Junius, a former economist at the International Monetary Fund.

“Statements will get read in the future with a bit more caution. Verbal interventions will hardly work any more.” The central bank’s regular pledge to defend the franc cap with “utmost determination” had become part of the institution’s brand, not least because of the success of that policy in protecting the country’s domestic economy. “They’ve lost part of their credibility, I think, ”Han De Jong, chief economist at ABN Amro told Angie Lau on Bloomberg TV. “Whatever they will say, markets will not trust them very much.” George Buckley at Deutsche also argues the SNB’s words are hard to reconcile with the SNB’s new policy stance. “Their commentary now means nothing,” he said. “This is not utmost determination, is it?”

Bank of England Governor Mark Carney has suffered similar criticism. He was labeled an “unreliable boyfriend” by one U.K. lawmaker last year for giving conflicting messages on the possible timing of interest-rate increases in the U.K. SNB President Jordan yesterday defended his surprise move, saying that a tool like the cap would always need to be abandoned unexpectedly. Anatoli Annenkov at SocGen agrees. “It’s something we aren’t used to anymore because most central banks are talking about warning markets, improving communication, not surprising anymore,” Annenkov said by phone from London. “But in such circumstances, there’s basically no other way to do this. Markets would have speculated, positioned themselves beforehand.”

There’s this sense of entitlement seeping through from this that makes you want to, I don’t know, shout, puke? Traders and journalists that chide a central bank for not giving them what they want, when they want it? On what logical basis? That Greenspan and Bernanke did it for years, and so screwed up the entire US financial system? That information from central banks is now some god-given right for traders and bankers? Are you nuts? Are we all? We now know the Swiss are not, or let’s say that for whatever reason they did what they did, they’re not completely off their rockers.

So how about other central bankers? Everyone seems to be sure now that Draghi at the ECB has more reason than ever, after the SNB move, to launch full tilt QE. And I’m thinking, I don’t know kiddos, perhaps he has less reason now, because the markets’ faith in central banks has taken a jolt, because the effectiveness of that QE, which has been in the works forever, has already been priced in by those markets, and because the Germans are sure to contest it all throughout their court system(s). What use would a Draghi QE be at this point? Close to zero. He might still do it, but that would just expose him as a tool. And he can resign and become Italy’s new president right after. And it’s not just Draghi:

The Swiss Just Made Japan’s Job Harder

Haruhiko Kuroda’s monetary “bazooka” just got outgunned by the Swiss. Since April 2013, Japan’s central banker has been pumping trillions of dollars into the economy in an attempt to generate 2% inflation. But in a mature, aging economy like Japan’s, the effort is 95% about confidence. In order to “drastically convert the deflationary mindset,” as Kuroda puts it, the Bank of Japan must transform sentiment among households and businesses. Kuroda’s massive bond purchases mean little if the Japanese don’t trust that better days lay ahead. The Swiss National Bank’s move to abandon the franc’s cap against the euro may have blown a hole in Kuroda’s strategy.

By reneging on a promise made time and time again that he wouldn’t ditch the policy, SNB President Thomas Jordan “has undermined the credibility of central banks,” says Simon Grose-Hodge of LGT. Now, at central banks around the globe, he adds, “the unthinkable is entirely possible. You can’t rule anything out.” Even if the BOJ issues another blast of quantitative-easing after its two-day policy meeting next week, the question is how effective the move would be. Kuroda’s Oct. 31 shock-and-awe stimulus announcement worked for a time by bolstering perceptions that steady inflation was within reach. But this time, with even Economy Minister Akira Amari admitting “it will probably be difficult” for the BOJ to succeed, markets are likely to be more skeptical of the bank’s staying power.

It’s not really the Swiss, central bank credibility was already shot through the past decade, if not more. You have no credibility as a central banker if you serve the interests of one particular niche. Like traders. You need to serve the interests of the entire nation you ‘serve’, or your time will come. No matter how much Draghi, Kuroda or Bernanke were tempted by the omnipotence narrative, deep down they must have known it wouldn’t last.

And now they have to face a new world, one they’re not used to at all. One in which their credibility is shot. I’m guessing that means they understand their ‘normal’ course of action, QE up the wazoo, no longer works. So what then?

Look, Draghi may well come up with that QE of his, but it’ll be stillborn. It’ll only be yet another transfer of money from the public to the private sector. Let’s buy a trillion worth of bonds! Yeah, that worked great for everyone else… But can Draghi still do that? Yes, it’ll bring down the euro for a bit, but the euro is going down no matter what he does. This is turning into a game of whodunnit. And then, of course, there’s the Fed:

Yellen Signals She Won’t Babysit Markets in Turmoil

Janet Yellen is leaving the Greenspan “put” behind as she charts the first interest-rate increase since 2006 amid growing financial-market volatility. The Federal Reserve chair has signaled she wants to place the economic outlook at the center of policy making, while looking past short-term market fluctuations.

To succeed, she must wean investors from the notion, which gained currency under predecessor Alan Greenspan, that the Fed will bail them out if their bets go bad – just as a put option protects against a drop in stock prices. “The succession of Fed puts over the years has led to a wide range of distortions in financial markets,” said Lawrence Goodman at the Center for Financial Stability. “There have been swollen asset values followed by sharp declines. This is a very good time for the Fed to move away.”

We’re getting back to normal, and though normal’s going to hurt – and far more than you realize yet-, it’s hugely preferable to upside down; you hang uprise down long enough, it makes your brain explode. The price of oil was the first thing to go, central banks are the next. And then the whole edifice follows suit. The Fed has been setting up its yes-no narrative for months now, and that’s not without a reason.

But everyone’s still convinced there won’t be a rate hike until well into this new year. And the Swiss central bank said, a few days before it did, that it wouldn’t. And then it did anyway. The financial sectors’ trust in central banks is gone forever. And none too soon. Now they’ll have to cover their own bets. If anything spells deflation, it’s got to be that. But not even one man in a thousand understands what deflation is.

We have a ways to go before we solve this puzzle. But we are, at least and at last, on our way.

Debt Rattle November 13 2014

Nov 132014

November 13, 2014 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 11:57 am Finance Tagged with: Abe, casino, China, deflation, FX, gold, oil, oligarchs, rate rise, rigging 2 Responses »

John Collier Trucks on highway en route to Utica, New York Oct 1941

• With Regret And Sadness We Announce The Death Of Money On Nov 16 2014 (Rapier)

• Spreading Deflation Across East Asia Threatens Fresh Debt Crisis (AEP)

• Gold Demand in China Slumps 37% Amid Drive to Root Out Graft (Bloomberg)

• Carney-Yellen Neck-and-Neck on Being First to Raise Rates (Bloomberg)

• Fed’s Dudley: Expectations For Mid-2015 Rate Lift-Off Reasonable (Reuters)

• Abe Poised to Gamble Political Future on Snap Election (Bloomberg)

• US Companies Now Stashing $2 Trillion Overseas (CNBC)

• Barclays May Face Massive New Penalty Over Currency Rigging (Guardian)

• Rig A Market, Go To Jail (Bloomberg ed.)

• Fines Don’t Deter Bad Banks. So Ban Them From Trading (Guardian)

• G-20 Stimulus Plans May Boost Growth by Extra 2.1%, OECD Says (Bloomberg)

• China Slowdown Deepens as Leaders Said to Mull Cutting Growth Target (Bloomberg)

• China’s Central Bank Resists Calls For Stimulus (FT)

• Stockman: Central Banks Setting Up World for Bad Time (Bloomberg)

• Cash-Burning Bets on Oil Rebound Surge in U.S. ETF Market (Bloomberg)

• Saudi Oil Minister: There Is No ‘Price War’ (CNBC)

• Oil Tankers Stream Toward China as Price Drop Sparks Boom (Bloomberg)

• Russia-China Gas Accord to Pressure LNG in Canada, Australia (Bloomberg)

• ‘What’s Happening in Britain at the Moment Is Really Ugly’ (Spiegel)

• Twilight of the Oligarchs (Dmitry Orlov)

Do take note.

• With Regret And Sadness We Announce The Death Of Money On Nov 16 2014 (Rapier)

It is with regret and sadness we announce the death of money on November 16th 2014 in Brisbane, Australia.

In the musical Cabaret, Sally Bowles and the Emcee sing about money from the perspective of those witnessing its collapse in value in real terms in the great German hyperinflation of 1923. Less than a decade later, and a continent away, a young lawyer from Youngstown, Ohio noted on July 25th 1932 how money’s value could also fall in nominal terms:

“A considerable traffic has grown up in Youngstown in purchase and sale at a discount of Pass-Books on the Dollar Bank, City Trust and Home Savings Banks. Prices vary from 60% to 70% cash. All of these banks are now open but are not paying out funds.”
– The Great Depression – A Diary: Benjamin Roth (1932, first published 2009)

In Youngstown the bank deposit, an asset previously referred to as “money”, had fallen by up to 40% relative to the value of cash. The G20 announcement in Brisbane on November 16th will formalize a “bail in” for large-scale depositors raising the spectre that their deposits are, as many were in 1932, worth less than banknotes. It will be very clear that the value of bank deposits can fall in nominal terms. On Sunday in Brisbane the G20 will announce that bank deposits are just part of commercial banks’ capital structure, and also that they are far from the most senior portion of that structure. With deposits then subjected to a decline in nominal value following a bank failure, it is self-evident that a bank deposit is no longer money in the way a banknote is. If a banknote cannot be subjected to a decline in nominal value, we need to ask whether banknotes can act as a superior store of value than bank deposits? If that is the case, will some investors prefer banknotes to bank deposits as a form of savings? Such a change in preference is known as a “bank run.”

[UK] deposits larger than £85,000 will rank ahead of the bond holders of banks, but they will rank above little else. Importantly, both borrowings of the banks of less than 7 days maturity from other financial institutions and sums owed by banks in their role as counterparties to OTC derivatives will rank above large deposits. Large deposits at banks are no longer money, as this legislation will formally push them down through the capital structure to a position of material capital risk in any “failing” institution. In our last financial crisis, deposits were de facto guaranteed by the state, but from November 16th holders of large-scale deposits will be, both de facto and de jure, just another creditor squabbling over their share of the assets of a failed bank.

If we have another Lehman Brothers collapse, large-scale depositors could find themselves in the courts for years before final adjudication on the scale of their losses could be established. During this period would this illiquid asset, formerly called a deposit and now subject to an unknown capital loss, be considered money? Clearly it would not, as its illiquidity and likely decline in nominal value would make it unacceptable as a medium of exchange. From November 16th 2014 the large-scale deposit at a commercial bank is, at best, a lesser form of money, and to many it will cease to be money at all as its nominal value can fall and it could cease to be accepted as a medium of exchange.

“Some 82pc of the items in the producer price basket are deflating in China. The figure is 90pc in Thailand, and 97pc in Singapore. These include machinery, telecommunications, and electrical equipment, as well as commodities.”

• Spreading Deflation Across East Asia Threatens Fresh Debt Crisis (AEP)

Deflation is becoming lodged in all the economic strongholds of East Asia. It is happening faster and going deeper than almost anybody expected just months ago, and is likely to find its way to Europe through currency warfare in short order. Factory gate prices are falling in China, Korea, Thailand, the Philippines, Taiwan and Singapore. Some 82pc of the items in the producer price basket are deflating in China. The figure is 90pc in Thailand, and 97pc in Singapore. These include machinery, telecommunications, and electrical equipment, as well as commodities. Chetan Ahya from Morgan Stanley says deflationary forces are “getting entrenched” across much of Asia. This risks a “rapid worsening of the debt dynamic” for a string of countries that allowed their debt ratios to reach record highs during the era of Fed largesse. Debt levels for the region as a whole (ex-Japan) have jumped from 147pc to 207pc of GDP in six years.

These countries face a Sisyphean Task. They are trying to deleverage, but the slowdown in nominal GDP caused by falling inflation is always one step ahead of them. “Debt to GDP has risen despite these efforts,” he said. If this sounds familiar, it should be. It is exactly what is happening in Italy, France, the Netherlands, and much of the eurozone. Data from Nomura show that the composite PPI index for the whole of emerging Asia – including India – turned negative in September. This was before the Bank of Japan sent a further deflationary impulse through the region by driving down the yen, and before the latest downward lurch in Brent crude prices. The Japanese know what it is like to be on the receiving end. A recent study by Naohisa Hirakata and Yuto Iwasaki from the Bank of Japan suggests that China’s weak-yuan policy – a polite way of saying currency manipulation to gain export share – was the chief cause of Japan’s deflation crisis over its two Lost Decades.

The tables are now turned. China itself is now one shock away from a deflation trap. Chinese PPI has been negative for 32 months as the economy grapples with overcapacity in everything from steel, cement, glass, chemicals, and shipbuilding, to solar panels. It dropped to minus 2.2pc in October. The sheer scale of over-investment is epic. The country funnelled $5 trillion into new plant and fixed capital last year – as much as Europe and the US combined – even after the Communist Party vowed to clear away excess capacity in its Third Plenum reforms. Old habits die hard. Consumer prices are starting to track factory prices with a long delay. Headline inflation dropped to 1.6pc in October. This is so far below the 3.5pc target of the People’s Bank of China that it looks increasingly like a policy mistake. Core inflation is down to 1.4pc.

So how does deflation link with gold? Ugly numbers, and certainly not all manipulation.

• Gold Demand in China Slumps 37% Amid Drive to Root Out Graft (Bloomberg)

Gold demand in China shrank for a third quarter as slumping prices failed to boost the purchases of bars, coins and jewelry in the world’s biggest user and officials pressed on with a nationwide anti-graft campaign. Buying by Asia’s largest economy tumbled 37% to 182.7 metric tons in the three months to September from the same period in 2013 as last year’s price-driven surge in demand wasn’t repeated, the World Gold Council said in a report today. India was the only Asian economy tracked by the producer-funded group that bought more bullion than China as usage across the biggest consuming region contracted 15% to 473.4 tons. An anti-graft drive in China this year hurt demand for luxury goods including bullion, while volatility that sank to a four-year low damped interest in the metal as an alternative investment.

Banks including Goldman Sachs expect prices to extend losses, in part as the buying frenzy that accompanied gold’s drop into a bear market in April 2013 hasn’t been sustained. China surpassed India as the world’s largest gold user last year as prices retreated 28%. “The scale of 2013’s exceptional buying continued to overshadow the market,” the London-based council said in the quarterly report that surveys global demand patterns. “The quiet environment provided China’s notoriously price-savvy investors with a further reason to stay out of the market.” Jewelry consumption in China fell 39% to 147.1 tons in the quarter, while demand for bars and coins slid 30% to 35.6 tons, the council said. Usage in the nine months to September was 638.4 tons, according to Bloomberg calculations based on figures in quarterly WGC reports in May, August and today. Last year, mainland demand was a record 1,275.1 tons, according to the council at a briefing in Shanghai today.

“China’s jewelry market continued to normalize following last year’s rapid expansion,” the council said. “Chinese investment demand this year has paused to catch its breath. Fourth-quarter bar and coin demand is shaping up to be much the same – steady, but unremarkable.” Buying in Indonesia, Southeast Asia’s largest economy, plunged 45% in the period as the Presidential election in July created a degree of political instability, according to the council. Japan’s bullion purchases fell 45% as a new sales tax damped demand, while consumption in Thailand fell 42% amid the unstable political climate, it said.

A lot of these ‘experts’ are going to get duped, and their clients hammered.

• Carney-Yellen Neck-and-Neck on Being First to Raise Rates (Bloomberg)

Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen may just beat Bank of England Governor Mark Carney to the first interest-rate increase since the financial crisis. Investors extended bets yesterday on how long the BOE will keep its benchmark at a record-low 0.5% after officials cut their growth and inflation forecasts. Markets are now pricing in a quarter-point increase by November next year, Sonia forwards show. As recently as August, wagers were for around February. In the U.S., the Fed is seen acting by September. “This is almost going to be like a horse race to the finish line on who’s going to go first now, whereas only three or four months ago that wouldn’t have even been close,” said Andrew Goldberg, a global market strategist at JP Morgan Asset Management in London. “The key in both countries is going to be to see what happens in wages and because of that the U.S. is now in the lead.”

Presenting the BOE’s quarterly Inflation Report, Carney cited the “specter of economic stagnation” in the euro area, the biggest market for British exports, and said U.K. inflation could slow to below 1% within months. [..] “Whereas in the middle of the year the BOE was happy to go ahead of the Fed, now we’re in a world where the BOE will likely follow the Fed,” said Mike Amey, a fund manager at Pimco in London. Investors are betting the first rate increase from the Fed will come in 10 months, Morgan Stanley index data show. Policy makers have kept their benchmark target for overnight lending between banks in a range of zero to 0.25% since December 2008. “We are behind the Fed in terms of timing,” said Ian Winship, head of sterling bond portfolios at BlackRock the world’s biggest money manager with more than $4 trillion of assets. In the UK, “we’re looking at September or October for a full hike,” he said. “The impact of the disappointment we’ve had globally is having an impact on U.K. monetary policy.”

Better do it when nobody expects it.

• Fed’s Dudley: Expectations For Mid-2015 Rate Lift-Off Reasonable (Reuters)

Market expectations that U.S. interest rates will start to lift off sometime in mid-2015 are reasonable, New York Federal Reserve President William Dudley said on Thursday. Dudley, answering questions at a luncheon hosted by the United Arab Emirates central bank in Abu Dhabi, also said recent U.S. non-farm payrolls data had been very consistent with previous releases, and had not changed his policy outlook in any meaningful way. “What I can tell you is that we are making progress toward our objectives but there is considerable further progress still to go,” he said. “I think the market expectations that expect us to lift off sometime around the middle or somewhat later next year are reasonable expectations.”

Dudley said, however, that he could not give the likely timing for when the Fed would start raising interest rates, as it would depend on how the U.S. economy was evolving and how financial markets were reacting. “No, I cannot give you more specifics and the long answer is: because I do not know. It really depends on how the economy evolves and how we progress toward our objectives of maximum sustainable employment in the context of price stability.”

I wouldn’t discount the option that Abe WANTS to lose an election, and save at least some face while the Japanese economy plummets further. If he’s not PM when the whip really comes down, he can claim innocence. Only, the opposition in Japan is so weakened it seems unlikely he can lose even if he tried. Either way, Japan is not a good place to be for the foreseeable future. A deepening deflationary recession, nationalist rhetoric and gun-slingering, the restart of nuclear plants in a shaky quaky setting, it doesn’t add up to a nice living environment.

• Abe Poised to Gamble Political Future on Snap Election (Bloomberg)

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is poised to gamble his political future on a plan to call a snap election next month, halfway into his current term. “It’s always risky to dissolve the house when you’re the prime minister,” said Robert Dujarric, director of the Institute of Contemporary Asian Studies at Temple University in Tokyo. “Unless you win a crushing victory, you have nowhere to go but down.” Abe is likely to go to the people on Dec. 14 after postponing an unpopular sales-tax increase slated for October 2015, according to people with knowledge of his plan, who asked not to be identified because they aren’t authorized to speak. Abe is less than two years into his four-year term and elections aren’t due until 2016.

For Abe, postponing the tax would buy him goodwill with voters, increasing his chances of winning a broader mandate to push through unpopular security legislation next year. The risk is that Abe’s strategy backfires and rather than increasing his majority in the lower house, his ruling Liberal Democratic Party loses seats. That would leave him vulnerable to a leadership challenge from within his own ranks. “It’s far from certain,” he will pick up support, said Koichi Nakano, professor of political science at Sophia University in Tokyo. “His government may end up with fewer seats, and he may even face calls to step down as prime minister as a result.” Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga yesterday denied reports that Abe told party leaders he planned to dissolve the Diet and delay the tax increase.

” .. during the 2004 tax holiday “most of that cash was used to fund dividend payouts and share buybacks rather than to boost investment.” A Democratic congressional report indicated that the biggest companies receiving the benefits of $360 billion in repatriated funds actually cut a net 20,000 jobs”.

• US Companies Now Stashing $2 Trillion Overseas (CNBC)

U.S. companies are for the first time holding more than $2 trillion overseas, according to an analysis that paints a bleak picture of whether that money will make its way home and the limited economic impact it would have even if it does. Corporate cash has hit $2.1 trillion, a sixfold increase over the past 12 years, Capital Economics said, citing its own database as well as that of Audit Analytics and other sources. There is no official total, but the firm also used regulatory filings that included “indefinitely reinvested foreign earnings” to glean the total sitting outside U.S. borders. “The latest signs suggest that, as business confidence improves in light of the continued economic recovery, U.S. firms are starting to hold less cash domestically,” Capital economists Paul Dales and Andrew Hunter said in a report for clients. “However, the foreign cash piles of the largest firms have almost certainly continued to grow.”

That total, while daunting in its own right, is now greater than the amount held on U.S. shores, which totals just under $1.9 trillion, according to the latest Federal Reserve flow of funds tally. Such numbers are bound to get attention in Washington, which for years has been debating so-called repatriation measures that would allow companies to bring their cash back home at drastically reduced tax rates. The new Republican-controlled Congress is expected to take up the issue quickly when it convenes in January. But the Capital analysis provides little optimism in that regard. Dales and Hunter pointed out that during the 2004 tax holiday “most of that cash was used to fund dividend payouts and share buybacks rather than to boost investment.” A Democratic congressional report indicated that the biggest companies receiving the benefits of $360 billion in repatriated funds actually cut a net 20,000 jobs, and that the holiday cost Treasury coffers $3.3 billion.

“I don’t know if corruption is a strong enough word for it”.

• Barclays May Face Massive New Penalty Over Currency Rigging (Guardian)

Barclays could face a huge new penalty for rigging currency markets after pulling out at the 11th hour from the settlement talks that led to £2.6bn of fines being slapped on six other big players in the currency markets. Barclays will not be eligible for the 30% discount on the fines handed to its rivals in exchange for settling early after its surprise move not to participate in the settlement with US and UK regulators. The bank, which was the first to be fined for rigging Libor in 2012, is reported not to have agreed to the settlement with the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority and the US commodity futures trading commission because of continuing talks with another US regulator. It was the only one of the banks involved in talks over the ground-breaking settlement that is also regulated by the New York State department of financial services (DFS), run by Benjamin Lawsky, the American attorney who has in the past taken a tough stance over wrongdoing at banks.

Barclays said it had considered a settlement with the FCA and the CFTC on terms similar to the other banks – Royal Bank of Scotland, HSBC, UBS, JP Morgan and Citigroup. “However, after discussions with other regulators and authorities, we have concluded that it is in the interests of the company to seek a more general coordinated settlement,” the bank said. [..] In Britain, UBS was handed the biggest fine, at £233m, followed by £225m for Citibank, JP Morgan at £222m, RBS at £217m and £216m for HSBC. In the US, the regulator fined Citibank and JP Morgan $310m (£196m) each, $290m (£184m) each for RBS and UBS, and $275m (£174m) for HSBC. The Swiss regulator – which also found issues with UBS’s metal trading – also punished the Swiss bank for having failed to investigate warnings of currency market manipulation. Another US regulator, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, also imposed fines on JP Morgan, Citi and Bank of America, taking the day’s tally to £2.6bn.

The banks face further fines from regulators whose investigations are continuing. The FCA and the CFTC published hundreds of pages of documents alongside their findings against five banks. Chatroom talk between traders showed them discussing information about their clients’ orders with names such as “3 musketeers” and the “A-team”. The City minister, Andrea Leadsom, said those who had done wrong “will not be back in a dealing room on a big salary”. She told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “It’s completely disgusting. I think taxpayers will be horrified … I don’t know if corruption is a strong enough word for it.”

Well, there’s a plan.

• Rig A Market, Go To Jail (Bloomberg ed.)

Regulators in the U.K., the U.S. and Switzerland have moved with impressive speed to extract about $4.3 billion from some of the world’s largest banks for their role in rigging global currency markets. Now comes the hard part: identifying and punishing the people who actually did the manipulating. The settlements with six banks – UBS, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Royal Bank of Scotland and HSBC – paint a picture that has become depressingly familiar from previous market-manipulation scandals, ranging from commodities to interest rates. Foreign-exchange traders profited at their clients’ expense by abusing information about orders, and they conspired to influence London-based financial benchmarks that affected trillions of dollars in transactions and investments worldwide. The relevant transgressions went on from 2008 through late 2013, persisting even as some of the same banks were reaching settlements over the rigging of the London interbank offered rate, or Libor.

At least one more bank, Barclays, is still working on a deal with authorities. Details presented by regulators illustrate just how commonplace the manipulation of global benchmarks had become. Traders formed groups – with names such as “the players,” “the 3 musketeers” and “the A-team” – that focused on specific currencies. Using private chat rooms, they routinely shared information about their clients’ orders with the aim of pushing the WM/Reuters benchmark exchange rates, set at 4 p.m. London time, in the desired direction. “Hooray nice team work,” one trader wrote after an apparently successful attempt to “whack” the British pound. Misbehavior on such a scale could not have happened without the participation – or at least the willful blindness – of numerous actual people, most likely including senior managers. So it’s encouraging that the U.K. Serious Fraud Office and the U.S. Department of Justice are conducting criminal investigations, which the latter expects to result in charges sometime next year.

Unfortunately, the prosecutors won’t be able to build cases as strong as they could have been. They came late to the game, starting their investigations only after Bloomberg News published its first reports on the manipulation in 2013. Beyond that, London’s foreign-exchange markets have existed in a legal gray area, where no laws expressly prohibit manipulation.

Ban them from trading and break them up. What are we waiting for?

• Fines Don’t Deter Bad Banks. So Ban Them From Trading (Guardian)

The rigging of foreign exchange markets is a bigger scandal than Libor. It lacks the element of surprise since it is no longer news that some traders will lie and cheat when inadequately supervised. But that’s what makes it bigger. Forex-rigging continued to happen after the Libor scandal broke. Note the end-date of the investigations overseen by the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) and the US’s commodities futures and trading commission: 15 October 2013. The deterrent impact of Libor seems to have been zero. What were these banks’ managements doing to honour their worthy words about cleansing the rotten culture in trading rooms? As FCA chief executive Martin Wheatley noted wearily, monitoring employees’ chat rooms “is not a complex thing to do”. Quite. The existence of potential conflicts of interest between a bank and its clients is obvious in currency markets. So too is the scope for collusion.

You do not have to be Sherlock Holmes to suspect that chat-room exchanges such as these might indicate dodgy practices: “how can I make free money with no fcking heads up”; “just about to slam some stops”; “lets double team em”. Yet this garbage was bandied about for years. Did managements really not know, or even suspect, something was wrong? Did they just turn a blind eye? Or did they take comfort in the false notion that the forex market is so big and so liquid that it would be impossible to rig? All possible explanations are alarming. In a rational world, the customers would move their business to firms with higher standards. That is not going to happen because investment banking is almost a closed shop. The five firms involved in today’s settlement plus Barclays, which is yet to settle, are six of the biggest banks in the world. But if fines (paid by shareholders anyway) don’t improve behaviour, and if bank managements can’t, or won’t, police their trading floors competently, what’s left?

Criminal convictions for fraudulent behaviour are one great hope – rightly so because the threat of time in jail is the surest way to concentrate minds on trading floors. We wait to see what the Serious Fraud Office delivers. But regulators must also look beyond endless fines. The FCA, we are told, considered imposing suspensions on the banks from trading forex on behalf of clients but decided against. Some of the offending acts were considered too ancient and there was a fear of disrupting a critical financial market. OK, but a three-month temporary ban on trading forex would improve behaviour faster than any fine. Managements would fear being sacked. Shareholders might wake up and demand proof of root-and-branch reform. Or big banks might break themselves up into easier-to-manage units. Heavy-handed? You bet, but six years after the financial crash, some of the world’s biggest banks are still out of control. In other fields, firms with shoddy practices fear the loss of their licence to operate. Big banks don’t, but should.

The prediction nonsense takes on grotesque forms.

• G-20 Stimulus Plans May Boost Growth by Extra 2.1%, OECD Says (Bloomberg)

Group of 20 economies will surpass their 2% additional growth target if stimulus plans are fully implemented, according to the OECD. Global GDP could expand by an additional 2.1% by 2018, OECD Secretary-General Angel Gurria said today in Brisbane, where the G-20 summit takes place this weekend. “The big ‘if’ is full implementation, and that’s not always something that one can assume,” he said in an interview. G-20 members have submitted plans to achieve the target of lifting the group’s collective GDP by an additional 2%, or more, over five years. Australian Treasurer Joe Hockey said at a meeting of finance ministers in September that measures proposed at that time by member economies had brought the G-20 about 90% of the way to achieving the target. “There is a heavy burden on the shoulders of leaders and finance ministers to deliver on the plan to grow economic growth right across the world, and therefore create jobs for millions and millions of people,” Hockey told reporters in Brisbane today.

Beijing feeds its people the misery one bite at a time.

• China Slowdown Deepens as Leaders Said to Mull Cutting Growth Target (Bloomberg)

China’s slowdown deepened in October as policy makers refrained from economy-wide stimulus, with industrial output and investment trailing estimates. Factory production rose 7.7% from a year earlier, the second weakest pace since 2009, a government report showed today. Investment in fixed assets such as machinery expanded the least since 2001 from January through October, and retail sales gains also missed economists’ forecasts last month. The government has kept to targeted steps to shore up the economy this year, rather than a broader response such as nationwide interest-rate cuts, to avert a repeat of a buildup in debt from the record 2008-2009 credit surge. With the focus instead on structural changes, leaders have discussed lowering their economic growth target for 2015.

“The data highlights downward pressure,” said Dariusz Kowalczyk, senior economist at Credit Agricole SA in Hong Kong. “It will encourage further monetary easing.” After the figures, reports spread of a fresh initiative by the central bank to target liquidity injections. The People’s Bank of China is gauging city commercial banks’ demand for funds to support lending to small enterprises, according to an official with knowledge of the matter. The PBOC didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment. Financial institutions in some provinces, including Jiangsu and Zhejiang, are submitting applications for collateralized central bank loans, according to the official. The PBOC will later decide the total size of the injections, which could run into tens of billions of yuan, the official said.

After all, what good would it do?

• China’s Central Bank Resists Calls For Stimulus (FT)

Even as Japan and the EU embark on fresh rounds of quantitative easing to ward off deflation, the People’s Bank of China (PBoC) is holding the line against major stimulus. China’s central bank is resisting a rising chorus appealing for more aggressive easing to arrest a slowdown in the economy. Instead it is taking a gritted-teeth approach that accepts short-term pain as the price of structural reform that will support sustainable long-term growth. At first glance calls for easing in China appear justified. Consumer price inflation remained mired near a five-year low in October, while the government’s purchasing managers’ index hit a five-month low. That followed growth in economic output in the third quarter that was the slowest since the financial crisis.

Yet a year after the Communist party revealed a landmark economic reform blueprint, the PBoC wants to avoid steps that would be viewed as undermining the effort to reduce the economy’s reliance on debt and investment to fuel growth. “The central bank has become wary of using its traditional monetary tools like cuts in the required reserve ratio and benchmark interest rates. They’ve basically shelved them,” says Wang Yingfeng, investment director at Shanghai Yaozhi Asset Management, which runs a bond fund. The shifting approach is in part a matter of style over substance. Even as it held off on a reserve ratio cut, in September and October the PBoC injected Rmb770 billion ($125 billion) into the banking system via a new monetary policy tool called the Medium-term Lending Facility.

That is more money than would have entered the system through a 0.5 percentage-point RRR cut, traditionally the central bank’s main tool for managing the money supply. But the low-key nature of these fund injections – which went unannounced at the time – allows the central bank to avoid sending a strong easing signal. “The PBoC can lower actual market rates by injecting liquidity without cutting bank benchmark rates,” Lu Ting, chief China economist at Bank of America-Merrill Lynch, wrote in a note last week. “Cutting rates is perceived as anti-reform and kind of politically incorrect.”

” .. what does Bill Dudley and the rest of the Fed have wrong? They have wrong the idea that 2% inflation is going to accomplish anything. There is no historical or scholastic basis.”

• Stockman: Central Banks Setting Up World for Bad Time (Bloomberg)

It has gotten worse. Much worse. The Bank Of Japan trumps all with massive accommodation. They try to reverse deflation and spur growth. That brings us to my chart of the year. This is from the team’s strategic. This is back to the Draghi speech of 2012. All you need to know is one of the banks, it is not like the others. The austerity of the ECB and everybody else has a punch bowl seal – filled to the brim. This is the method. None of this is in the textbook. This is monetary madness off the deep end. They started with 50%. They will be adding 80 trillion to the balance sheet. What is the purpose? To trash the yen. They have a process started that is going to up end – what does Bill Dudley and the rest of the Fed have wrong? They have wrong the idea that 2% inflation is going to accomplish anything. There is no historical or scholastic basis.

All the world is no longer a stage as it was in Shakespeare’s day, it’s a casino.

• Cash-Burning Bets on Oil Rebound Surge in U.S. ETF Market (Bloomberg)

While calling a bottom in oil is proving a tricky, and costly, exercise for contrarian investors, they are undeterred. After pouring the most money into funds that track oil prices in two years last month, investors are ramping up the bet even further this month, moving cash in at twice the October pace. The four biggest U.S. exchange-traded products tied to oil had 70.5 million shares outstanding yesterday, the most since May 2013, according to exchange data compiled by Bloomberg. More than 1 million shares in the ETFs are being created on average each day this month, the result of soaring demand.

The trade has gone terribly since investors first started adding to oil ETF positions at the start of October. West Texas Intermediate, the U.S. crude benchmark, has tumbled 15% over that time, swelling its selloff since a June peak to 28% as soaring U.S. output and a slowdown in global demand growth created a supply glut. “Price momentum is still negative, and yet someone is buying,” said Stoyan Bojinov, a Chicago-based analyst at ETF Database. “Either they are wrong and they are hoping for the reversal, or they are establishing a position while everybody else is still selling.” The inflows have almost been non-stop since Oct. 1, with more shares being added to the four biggest oil ETFs than redeemed on all but four days.

It’s just business.

• Saudi Oil Minister: There Is No ‘Price War’ (CNBC)

Saudi Arabia’s oil minister publicly knocked talk of an OPEC “price war” but did little in the way of clarifying what the cartel will do about falling prices.Ali al-Naimi, speaking in Mexico, said Saudi oil policy is not changing and has been stable for decades. He said the market, not Saudi Arabia, sets prices, and that the kingdom is doing what it can with other producers to ensure stability, according to Reuters.The oil market has become laser focused on the Nov. 27 OPEC meeting, and there is speculation its much-divided members will have to agree to cut production if they want to see the roughly 30% decline in prices start to reverse.Oil prices continued to grind lower Wednesday, with Brent crude futures falling further after Naimi spoke, breaking $80 per barrel for the first time since September, 2010. Brent ended the day at $80.38, down 1.6%, and U.S. West Texas Intermediate was also lower, falling more than 1% to $77.18 per barrel.

Given its slowing economy, one should wonder if China now does with oil what it did with copper. With that economy set to keep slowing, that would mean much less Chinese demand for oil going forward, further pressuring prices..

• Oil Tankers Stream Toward China as Price Drop Sparks Boom (Bloomberg)

Add oil shippers to the list of winners from this year’s collapse in crude. The price plunge has spurred China, the world’s second-biggest importer after the U.S., to accelerate bookings of oil cargoes. It will also shave almost $20 billion a year in fuel costs across the maritime industry if prices that dropped 18 percent since last November hold around current levels, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. While the oil slide is hurting nations from Saudi Arabia to Iran that depend on energy for revenues, companies including airlines and cement makers are benefiting as their fuel costs decline. Ship owners serving the industry’s benchmark Middle East-to-Asia trade routes are reaping the best returns from charters in years as the slump drives down the industry’s single biggest expense.

“We’ve seen the Chinese buying a lot from the Middle East and that’s really let rates cook,” Erik Stavseth, an analyst at Arctic Securities in Oslo whose recommendations on shippers returned 15 percent in the past year, said by phone Nov. 11. “With oil prices low going into winter, that’s likely to continue.” The number of supertankers sailing toward China’s ports matched a record on Oct. 17 and is still close to that level now. The increase reflects China taking advantage of falling prices to fill its Strategic Petroleum Reserve, according to Richard Mallinson, a London-based analyst at Energy Aspects Ltd.

LNG is not a great business to be in. Upfront investment has been huge, and look now.

• Russia-China Gas Accord to Pressure LNG in Canada, Australia (Bloomberg)

Russia’s move to broaden its energy ties to China is clouding the outlook for natural gas export projects on the drawing board in the U.S., Canada and Australia. Companies looking to approve liquefied natural gas plants in the next couple of years and start shipments at the end of the decade will probably experience delays, according to energy consultants Tri-Zen International Inc. Gas-supply agreements between Russia, the world’s largest energy exporter, and China, the biggest consumer, are adding to pressure on projects that are already facing increasing competition, rising costs and the prospect of lower prices.

“It’s just bad news generally” for LNG around the world, said Peter Howard, president of the Canadian Energy Research Institute. “It’s going to get really crowded.” China and Russia signed an initial gas accord two days ago, after a $400 billion deal earlier this year. The tie-up means that only one-in-20 proposed LNG projects targeting the 2020 market will be needed, while one-in-five seeking 2025 sales will be required, according to a Macquarie Group Ltd. report. “It’s not good news for projects hoping to get to a final investment decision in the next year or two,” Tony Regan, a consultant at Singapore-based Tri-Zen, said today. “Those developers will need to think about the post 2020 market.”

Historical fiction writer Hilary Mantel (“The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher”) doesn’t like what she sees.

• ‘What’s Happening in Britain at the Moment Is Really Ugly’ (Spiegel)

SPIEGEL: How is the Britain of today different from the country you grew up in?

Mantel: I was born into a working class family in a village near Manchester. My grandmother worked as a weaver in a mill when she was 12, my mother at 14. That was what you did: As soon as you left school, you had to work in the mill. By the time I was a child, the mills were closing and I was lucky to get a government grant for university. In the years after the war, both big parties, Labour and the Conservatives, were becoming ever-more centrist, drawing together on a social democratic path — a period known as the postwar consensus. Maybe it couldn’t have lasted, but we perceive Ms. Thatcher as the person who knocked it down. Going to university is a seriously expensive business now.

SPIEGEL: It seems as though Britain today wants to retreat from the world, as though it has become war-weary, disinterested in global affairs and obsessed with immigration. Where does this come from?

Mantel: It’s a retreat into insularity, into a mood of harshness. When people feel they’re being mistreated, they lash out against people who are weaker than themselves, immigrants for example. What’s happening here at the moment is really ugly. The government portrays poor and unfortunate people as being morally defective. This is a return to the thinking of the Victorians. Even in the 16th century, Thomas Cromwell was trying to tell people that a thriving economy has casualties and that something must be done by the state for people out of work. Even back then, you saw the tide turning against this idea that poverty was a moral weakness. Who could have predicted that it would come back into style? It’s myth making on a grand scale, and it’s poisonous.

Dmitry looks at the future.

• Twilight of the Oligarchs (Dmitry Orlov)

Last week I published a brave prediction: “I see the political elites and their oligarch puppet-masters becoming endangered species in the United States before too long as the populace, including their own bodyguards, turns against them.” As usual, I made no attempt to specify what I mean by “before too long” because making predictions as to timing is a fool’s game. And, as usual, I got a flurry of emails expressing a wide range of rationalizations but all adding up to the same sentiment: “not any time soon.” Some people thought that the populace, consisting as it does of zombified overfed clowns addicted to Facebook and internet porn is unlikely to stage the revolution.

Others thought that the oligarchy will manage to manipulate financial markets, destroy one country after another in order to drain all remaining wealth out of the world and consume it, and by so doing manage to placate the populace with bread and circuses, well into the future. The bodyguards are unlikely to rebel, some said, because they are so well paid. Getting back to basics, it is a fairly obvious and increasingly well-recognized fact that the American empire, the empire of military bases, the Federal Reserve, the IMF and the World Bank, is on its way out. And it is a well-known fact about empires that when they fail those who held positions of power and privilege within them are quickly recycled into punching bags and pincushions. Oddly, nobody mentioned any of the mechanisms by which this transformation tends to take place, so I thought I’d mention them briefly.

First, when empires start falling apart, this is manifested in a few ways. One is loss of control over the periphery, as a shrinking pool of resources is used to shore up the center. Another is loss of control over the use of violence, as a wide variety of violent entrepreneurs enter the scene and the center is forced to play them against each other and make deals with them. And as the unraveling progresses, the violent entrepreneurs develop agendas of their own, which, inevitably, involve having the cooperation flow the other way: instead of cooperating with those formerly in charge, they demand that those formerly in charge start cooperating with them. And it is here that the scene turns bloody.

Debt Rattle November 12 2014

Nov 122014

November 12, 2014 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 12:28 pm Finance Tagged with: Abe, China, cities, family, FX, jobs, QE, recession, rising seas, Shale, steel, subsidy, war games 3 Responses »

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

• What the Economy Has Done to the Family (Bloomberg)

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

• US Cities Struggle to Recover From Recession (Bloomberg)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• What the Economy Has Done to the Family (Bloomberg)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• US Cities Struggle to Recover From Recession (Bloomberg)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Duh!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s a dog eat dog world.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not even 10 times that would be enough.

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

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

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

FX trading eats people.

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

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

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

How did we get there from here?

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

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

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

Behold your children’s world.

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

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

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

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

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