Mar 272020
 


Rembrandt van Rijn Portrait of his father 1628-29

 

I was following the numbers all afternoon, because I knew this was going to be the day that the US would become the no. 1. The no. 1 loser, that is. Here’s some of what I wrote in the Automatic Earth Comments section as we went along:

500,000 global cases was at noon EDT. 3.5 hours later there were another 20,000. [..] At 12.38 pm the US was 6,300 cases behind China. That is now 1,200.

God’s Own Country will take the definite no. 1 position sometime this afternoon, and then run away with it. The US has many fewer fatalities so far, but there, too, it will come out on top.

All this is why America pronounced Nicolas Maduro a drug trafficker and narco-terrorist today.

The US took the topspot at about 3pm. That done and achieved, I realize I’ve been so busy lately documenting the spread of the coronavirus and -some of- its consequences that the next steps in the demise, though clearly visible, risk going unnoticed.

But then I saw that the US is charging Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro with drug trafficking (narco-terrorism?!), and I was wide awake again. Why does the US, on the verge of becoming the worst hit “corona country”, charge him now, of all possible times, when they could have done it any given day for the past 7 years? Well, exactly because of the corona threat.

And I don’t think this is Trump; he may take a political hit, but he only has to do better than Joe Biden, and anybody could do that. This smells much more like some deep state thing, Mike Pompeo and his crew.

 

In their phone alerts, CNN had a few real howlers as the day went by.

“Health officials say the peak is yet to come”

“Stocks see third day of gains”

Meanwhile, it took them hours to clue into the fact that the US had become the no. 1. But it’s that second point that warrants scrutiny. In the expectation and the “fulfillment” of the $6 trillion “stimulus” package, stocks managed to rise. Yay! But that no. 1 position won’t leave any of that standing. No sirree.

The US is no longer capable of formulating and negotiating adequate legislation even in times of real crisis. And it’s not that it’s GOP against Dems, and one would do everything so much better than the other. It’s one set of special interests against another, and in the end both win. And there is no escape left from that.

I said earlier about the stimulus that such a package in the US today is possible only provided that the rich get 1000 times what the poor get. That’s the only way to get those $1,500 checks to people who actually need them. For every such check a million bucks goes to the rich and powerful.

And if only they were also 1000 times more likely to catch the coronavirus, at least we would have a sense of justice. But no such luck.

 

What the stimulus will really end up doing is it will expose the Fed. You can talk about unlimited QE all you want, but talk enough and it will lose all meaning. I’ve long said that there are no markets left because there is no price discovery, and lately I’ve seen many people saying exactly that, just much later.

The stimulus really only serves to take even more price discovery away, if that was still possible. And that’s it. The rich will be handed hundreds of billions with nowhere to go. The losses in the stock “markets” lately have been staggering, trillions were lost. But then you look at a graph and you think holy sh*t, there’s so much more to go, so much more downside before we get to anything resembling normal. This was two weeks ago:

 

 

Markets as they -used to- exist under capitalism can be an awesome instrument, because there is such a multitude of participants. However, when you start trying to control the “markets” because sometimes they fall a little and you don’t like that, you unleash formidable forces that are also part of that instrument. Like so many natural phenomena, they will tend towards a balance, and you can’t stop that. Not for long.

The process that looks like it may end soon started under Alan Greenspan and the housing bubbles he blew, and the seeds of the demise were sown right then and there. Now that $6 trillion has been thrown at the wall that won’t stick, what is next?

The Fed policies (and I include most other central banks under that moniker) worked for a while because the QE’s and the ultra low rates supported banks and other enterprises that were essentially zombies. They also “zombified” many other companies that might have been able to survive without them. Look at Boeing.

Look at Apple. They look like a great company but what are their shares worth? Nobody knows, because they bought back too many of them to make price discovery viable. So at least part of Apple looks great only because of trickery, not because of great products. Steve Jobs is turning in his grave as we speak.

 

And now the zombies may be killed off by a virus. Just not if the Fed can help it. But if America runs away with that top spot hard enough, if tens of thousands of new cases become a daily occurrence (we’re at 17,000 so far today), and the first ten thousand fatalities are counted, the country will be locked down and the “markets” will fall off a cliff.

Unless, and that what I’m starting to fear may happen, the powers that be see no other choice than to close the “markets”. That will mean the entire financial system is on the brink of collapse. It would be announced as temporary, but the damage would be done. Everything would turn into one giant margin call, banks would be forced to close, the works, a real depression.

Let’s hope that none of this happens, but the signs are not favorable. America appears much less prepared for a pandemic than even Lombardy was, with too little or too late of everything, ventilators, masks, protective clothing, medicine, you name it. You can’t run an economy in a setting like that.

But at least you’ll be rid of the zombies. It’s a shame, really, that there is no virus that kills only zombies, that so much else must be destroyed with them. The thing is, we did have these instruments to kill zombies, they were called central banks. Should have used them when we had the chance.

 

Our readership is up a lot, but ad revenue only keeps dropping. I’ve said it before, it must be possible to run a joint like the Automatic Earth on people’s kind donations. These are no longer the times when ads pay for all you read, your donations have become an integral part of it. It has become a two-way street; and isn’t that liberating, when you think about it?

You heard it here first, like so many other things. And no, though it would be far more lucrative financially, the Automatic Earth will not adopt any paywalls, not here and not on Patreon. But you can still support us there, as well as right here. It’s easy. Thanks everyone for your donations overnight.

 

 

 

 

 

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Jun 192019
 


Gustave Courbet The village maidens 1852

 

I intentionally start writing this mere minutes away from Fed chair Jay Powell’s latest comments. Intentionally, because the importance ascribed to those comments only means we have gotten so far removed from what capitalism and free markets are supposed to be about, that it’s pathetic. The comments mean something for rich socialists, but nothing for the man in the street. Or, rather, they mean that the man in the street will get screwed worse for longer.

And it’s not just the Fed, all central banks have it and do it. They play around with rates and definitions and semantics until the cows can never come home again. And they have such levels of control over their respective societies and economies that the mere use of the word “markets” should result in loud and unending ridicule. There are no markets, because there is no price discovery, the Fed and ECB and BOJ got it all covered. Any downside risks, that is.

But it doesn’t, because the people who pretend they’re in those markets hang on central banks’ every word for their meal tickets. These are the same people we once knew as traders and investors, but who today function only as rich socialists sucking the Fed’s teats for ever more mother’s milk.

Our economic systems have been destroyed by our central bankers. Who pretend they’re saving them. And we all eat it up hook line and sinker. Because the rich bankers and their media have no reasons to counter Fed or ECB actions and word plays, and because anyone who’s not a rich banker or investor is kept by the media from understanding those reasons.

 

What the Fed and ECB have done, and the BOJ, between Greenspan and Bernanke and Yellen and Powell and Draghi and Kuroda, is they have made it impossible for economies to let zombies go to die as they should. They have instead kept those zombies, banks, corporations, alive to the point where they are today a very big live threat to those economies, and growing. Look at Deutsche Bank.

How healthy do you think your economy can be if all the wealthy people are focused on whether Powell uses the word “patient” or not in his notes? Why would a vibrant company or entrepreneur give a flying damn about whether he does or not use a certain word? There is no reason.

But we have let our central banks take over, and that’s what they did. And it will be very hard to take back that power, but we will have to. Because central banks, while pretending to guard over the entire economy, in fact only protect the interests of commercial banks, and rich “investors”. And then tell you it’s the same difference.

There’s a case to be made that Paul Volcker was right when he raised US interest rate in the 1980s, but after Volcker it’s only been one big power and money grab for Wall Street, starting with Alan Greenspan and the housing bubble he blew. The Oracle my behind.

 

Japan is only just beginning to assess the damage Kuroda and Abenomics have done, and that’s at a point where both these men are still in power, and hell bent on doing more of the same. Something all central banks have in common; there are very few tools in their boxes, so they just repeat and repeat even as they fail. And that failure, by the way, is inevitable.

The Bank of Japan by now owns half the country, and they just want to do more. Kuroda’s plan to get rid of deflation was to force the Japanese to spend their money/savings. But the fully predictable result was that the grandmas did the exact opposite: they clued into the fact that if he wanted that, they had reason to be afraid, and so they sat on their money. And now it’s ten years later.

 

Draghi is going to leave in a few months’ time, and he’ll lower rates even more (towards 0º Kelvin), even if he knows that’s a really bad idea (it is), because at this point it’s about his legacy (after me, the flood). Same thing that Bernanke, Yellen did, clueless intellectuals who told themselves they had a grip on this. They never came near. That’s why they were elected, for being clueless. Wall Street doesn’t want Fed heads who know.

The pivotal moment was when Bernanke said they were running into “uncharted territory”, and then never looked back and started pretending he knew where he was. He didn’t and none of them ever did since. But they have academic degrees, and they’re willing to sell their souls for money, so there you are.

 

Central banks, or let’s say handing them the powers that we have, are the worst thing we have ever invented, and that’s saying something in the age of Pompeo and Bolton and Trump and the Clintons. The latter may take us into war with Iran, or any other country from a long list, but central banks are set to destroy our societies and economies from within.

It’s real simple: your central bank does NOT serve your interests. So get rid of it. Don’t wonder whether it’ll use the word “patient” or raise or lower rates by 25 or 50 points, get rid of the entire thing. There’s nothing there that benefits you, it only ever benefits bankers.

Now, of course, if you’re a banker…..

 

Note: I knicked the headline from something Tyler Durden said yesterday, that central banks are back to square minus zero. Too good to let go. Draghi back to square one, but then again not. Central banks should be abolished.

 

 

 

 

 

Jan 062019
 


Rembrandt van Rijn Man with a falcon on his wrist (possibly St. Bavo) 1661

 

This Fed thing just keeps going on, and it needs to stop. There is nothing in the discussion about the Federal Reserve these days that has any value other than it provides even more proof that the Fed has killed off the most essential elements of what once made the US economy function. All markets, stocks, bonds, housing markets, all price discovery, all murdered. No heartbeat. Pining for the fjords.

And instead of addressing that, and I’m not even talking about addressing fixing what is wrong, all I see is neverending stuff about Jay Powell using, or not using, terms such as “patient” or “accommodative”. Like any of it means anything coming from him and his ilk. Other than for making ‘investors’ a quick buck. Like a quick buck could ever trump the survival of entire market systems.

People discussing whether Jay Powell is doing a good job all miss the point. Because Powell should not be doing that job in the first place. The Fed should not have the power to manipulate the US economy anywhere near as much as it does. Because that power is perverting America like nothing else, and the US economy will never recover as long as the Fed holds that power. Is that clear enough? Do we understand that at least?

 

Powell apparently changed his tune Friday in order to let the mirage that the stock market has become, live another day. Almost literally a day, since it will come crumbling down no matter what he does, just a day or so later. It’s all some message hidden in his use of “patience” or “accommodative”. Nothing he does will have any effect in the medium or longer term, and he knows it.

The entire US economy today is about the quick buck. It’s about tomorrow morning only because nobody has the guts to look at 10 years from now. That makes Jay Powell and his whole Federistas staff worse than useless. It makes no difference if perhaps jobs are doing well; the pre-Powell Fed launched a bubble and that bubble will burst one day, a whole series of them will.

The only good thing he can do is get out of the way and let the markets be the markets, to let them discover prices by letting people interact with people. But who exactly in the US has the power to make the Fed go away?

If you were one of the people who thought Jerome Powell was different from the rest of the Fed head honchos, the ones who preceded him, and I’m by no means just talking Greenspan, Bernanke and Yellen, you can now consider yourself corrected.

Powell is not going to keep hiking rates if a bunch of zombie markets keep falling like they did in December 2018, even though that’s just what we should want zombies to do, and even if hiking is the only way to resurrect a degree of normality and functionality into the markets.

Greenspan, Bernanke and Yellen, by the way, like Powell, just serve(d) to give the beast a human face, and one that the actual power brokers can hide behind. Over the past nigh 106 years since the blinded wagons rode to Jekyll island, the individual brokers may have died their natural deaths, but the institution they represented and served blindly, never did.

Seen in that light, the Fed was/is a kind of a forerunner of the 2010 Citizens United legislation that granted corporations the same rights as individual citizens. The -perverse- sense, that is, in which citizens do die, but corporations do not. So they are much more, and much more powerful, than citizens. Citizens Limited should have set a time limit, like the ones all corporations used to have, and the Fed should have had the shortest and strictest limit of all.

And you were worried about Brett Kavanaugh being named to the Supreme Court…

 

Just as an example of how wrong we get these things these days, Let’s turn to Sven Henrich’s piece in MarketWatch this weekend. Henrich is the founder and lead market strategist of NorthmanTrader.com, and g-d bless him, I’m sure he means well, but he gets things so upside down it’s not funny. He writes about that quick buck only, and doesn’t see the future.

It’s like Danielle DiMartino Booth writing on Twitter Friday: “In one word Powell CAVED to pressure 16 days after a taking hard line. The one thing he did do he should have done after last FOMC meeting was convey that the Fed would truly be data dependent going forward. “Gradual” needs to go. Winner: Stock Market. Loser: Powell’s Credibility”.

Danielle is great, and probably much smarter than I am, but she’s also a former Fed employee, and that brings a shade of blindness with it. What are the odds that she will state anytime soon that the Fed can only, possibly, make things worse for the American economy? I don’t think those odds are good.

Back to Sven Henrich. In essence, it’s ridiculous that a news outlet like MarketWatch still has the guts to publish a piece like his, or that someone like him has the guts to write it. Because it means there still are people, perhaps the author(s) and editors among them, who haven’t yet understood what has happened, even after 10 years and change. They are people who think the Fed can do right, that they can fix things if only they find the right policies.

We have to get rid of this illusion because the Fed will not, can not, fix what is wrong with the economy, or the ‘markets for that matter. Quite the contrary, the Fed can only make things worse. We know this because the only way the markets can be fixed, brought back to life indeed, is to let them function, and the only way they can function is when they can discover what things, stocks, bonds, homes etc., are worth, without some unit with unlimited financial power interrupting.

Central banks are founded for one reason only: to save banks from bankruptcy, invariably at the cost of society at large. They’ll bring down markets and societies just to make sure banks don’t go under. They’ll also, and even, do that when these banks have taken insane risks. It’s a battle societies can’t possibly win as long as central banks can raise unlimited amounts of ‘money’ and shove it into private banks. Ergo: societies can’t survive the existence of a central bank that serves the interests of its private banks.

Henrich:

 

Stock-Market Investors, It’s Time To Hear The Ugly Truth

For years critics of U.S. central-bank policy have been dismissed as Negative Nellies, but the ugly truth is staring us in the face: Stock-market advances remain a game of artificial liquidity and central-bank jawboning, not organic growth. And now the jig is up. As I’ve been saying for a long time: There is zero evidence that markets can make or sustain new highs without some sort of intervention on the side of central banks. None. Zero. Zilch. And don’t think this is hyperbole on my part. I will, of course, present evidence.

In March 2009 markets bottomed on the expansion of QE1 (quantitative easing, part one), which was introduced following the initial announcement in November 2008. Every major correction since then has been met with major central-bank interventions: QE2, Twist, QE3 and so on. When market tumbled in 2015 and 2016, global central banks embarked on the largest combined intervention effort in history. The sum: More than $5 trillion between 2016 and 2017, giving us a grand total of over $15 trillion, courtesy of the U.S. Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank and the Bank of Japan:

When did global central-bank balance sheets peak? Early 2018. When did global markets peak? January 2018. And don’t think the Fed was not still active in the jawboning business despite QE3 ending. After all, their official language remained “accommodative” and their interest-rate increase schedule was the slowest in history, cautious and tinkering so as not to upset the markets.

With tax cuts coming into the U.S. economy in early 2018, along with record buybacks, the markets at first ignored the beginning of QT (quantitative tightening), but then it all changed. And guess what changed? Two things. In September 2018, for the first time in 10 years, the U.S. central bank’s Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) removed one little word from its policy stance: “accommodative.” And the Fed increased its QT program. When did U.S. markets peak? September 2018.

[..] don’t mistake this rally for anything but for what it really is: Central banks again coming to the rescue of stressed markets. Their action and words matter in heavily oversold markets. But the reality remains, artificial liquidity is coming out of these markets. [..] What’s the larger message here? Free-market price discovery would require a full accounting of market bubbles and the realities of structural problems, which remain unresolved. Central banks exist to prevent the consequences of excess to come to fruition and give license to politicians to avoid addressing structural problems.

 

is it $15 trillion, or is it 20, or 30? How much did China add to the total? And for what? How much of it has been invested in productivity? I bet you it’s not even 10%. The rest has just been wasted on a facade of a functioning economy. Those facades tend to get terribly expensive.

Western economies would have shrunk into negative GDP growth if not for the $15-20 trillion their central banks injected over the past decade. And that is seen, or rather presented, as something so terrible you got to do anything to prevent it from happening. As if it’s completely natural, and desirable, for an economy to grow forever.

It isn’t and it won’t happen, but keeping the illusion alive serves to allow the rich to put their riches in a safe place, to increase inequality and to prepare those who need it least to save most to ride out the storm they themselves are creating and deepening. And everyone else can go stuff themselves.

And sure, perhaps a central bank could have some function that benefits society. It’s just that none of them ever do, do they? Central banks benefit private banks, and since the latter have for some braindead reason been gifted with the power to issue our money, while we could have just as well done that ourselves, the circle is round and we ain’t in it.

No, the Fed doesn’t hide the ugly truth. The Fed is that ugly truth. And if we don’t get rid of it, it will get a lot uglier still before the entire edifice falls to pieces. This is not complicated stuff, that’s just what you’re made to believe. Nobody needs the Fed who doesn’t want to pervert markets and society, it is that simple.

 

 

Dec 192018
 
 December 19, 2018  Posted by at 10:01 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , ,  7 Responses »


Francisco Goya Fire at night 1793-94

 

Fed Expected To Move Forward With Rate Hike, Despite Trump (CNBC)
Has “BTFD” Become “STFR”? (Roberts)
Oil Slump Could Get Much Worse Amid Oversupply Concerns (CNBC)
Alan Greenspan Has A New Warning For Investors: ‘Run For Cover’ (CNBC)
Revenge Of The Spies: Flynn Case Shows Extent Of Anti-Trump #Resistance (Malic)
This Radical Plan to Fund the ‘Green New Deal’ Just Might Work (Ellen Brown)
Thousands Of British Troops On Standby For No-Deal Brexit (Ind.)
New ‘Integrity Initiative’ Leaks: Military Ties, Infiltration of European Media (RT)
Either The EU Ditches Neoliberalism Or Its People Will Ditch The EU (Wight)
Belgian PM Charles Michel Resigns After No-Confidence Motion (G.)
France, Hungary, Serbia: Is Half Of Europe Protesting? (DW)
Hungary’s Opposition Plans More Protests After ‘Slave Law’ Passes (G.)
One of Earth’s Largest Living Things Even Bigger Than Previously Thought (Ind.)

 

 

As long as Powell hints that hikes will be slower, the ‘markets’ will cheer.

Fed Expected To Move Forward With Rate Hike, Despite Trump (CNBC)

The Federal Reserve is expected to raise interest rates by a quarter point Wednesday and also signal it will not be raising rates as much as it had previously forecast. Strategists say that may soothe volatile financial markets, but the Fed has a tough task in terms of explaining its actions in a way that will not sound too alarmist about the economy or too unconcerned about deteriorating financial conditions. The Fed will be taking the fed funds rate range to 2.25 to 2.50 percent, and Fed watchers expect it to remove language in its post-meeting statement that says it will continue with ‘gradual’ rate increases.

According to its forecast, the Fed was expected to raise interest rates three more times next year, but economists now expect that will change to show two more hikes next year, with another possible in 2020. “The economy is decelerating. They were too optimistic on their outlook, but by the same token, they’re going to have to walk a fine line that they’re not overly concerned. They’re just going to take it down a notch,” said George Goncalves, head of fixed income strategy at Nomura. The Fed’s rate hike is coming against a backdrop of financial market turbulence. Markets have been reacting to concerns about rising interest rates as well as concerns trade wars and weaker global data could lead to a recession.

Fed Chairman Jerome Powell, unlike other Fed chairs, has also faced a stream of criticism from the White House, with President Donald Trump protesting rate hiking policy and in a tweet on Tuesday, the Fed’s balance sheet policy. “I do think the Fed will try and likely succeed in sending a comforting tone to the equity market. I think the market is forcing the Fed to deliver a very dovish hike. We think 2019 dots will come to two. 2020 will show one hike but just above 3 percent. The Fed will make some changes to show they are less on a pre-set course and more data dependent,” aid Mark Cabana, head of U.S. short rate strategy at Bank of America Merrill Lynch.

Read more …

“..what happens when these algo’s reverse course and rather than “buying the f***ing dip,” they begin to “sell the f***ing rallies” instead..?”

This is where I leave Lance Roberts behind. That graph simply tells me, to the extent that further graphs lose their meaning, that every single thing, the only thing, that happened since 2009 was central banks.

Has “BTFD” Become “STFR”? (Roberts)

Kevin Wilson recently penned a piece for Seeking Alpha that made a great point about where the markets are currently. To wit: “Famous market observer Art Cashin mentioned a metaphor in October 2017 that resonated with me. He said (words to the effect that) at that moment, market players had only the protection provided by pictures of lifeboats, not the lifeboats themselves. This is just like the Titanic, whose measly 16 lifeboats looked nice, but left many hundreds on board with no means of escape when the ship sank. That is the current market situation in a nutshell. Players seem to believe that their positions are diversified enough to protect them in a downturn, and in any case, many appear to expect no major drawdown in spite of many months of extreme volatility. I would argue that the risk is far greater than perceived by many, and the protections most have in place are quite inadequate.”

Indeed, that is the case. As I noted in this past weekend’s newsletter, while the S&P 500 has declined only marginally for 2018, the devastation across markets has been dramatically worse. In other words, traditional diversification, which is considered the “defacto” portfolio protection strategy by the mainstream media, has not worked. Over the last several weeks, I have been discussing the transition of the market from “bullish” to “bearish.” “The difference between a ‘bull market’ and a ‘bear market’ is when the deviations begin to occur BELOW the long-term moving average on a consistent basis.”

Read more …

There goes the Saudi budget: ‘Uncertainty and volatility reign once again. ‘

Oil Slump Could Get Much Worse Amid Oversupply Concerns (CNBC)

Oil prices are likely to fall even further over the coming weeks, analysts told CNBC Tuesday, as a sharp sell-off in global equities combines with intensifying fears about a market that could soon to be awash with crude. The latest wave of energy market selling comes amid reports of swelling inventories and forecasts of record U.S. and Russian output. Heightened worries of a possible economic slowdown in 2019 have also added downward pressure to the value of a barrel of oil. “The only way is down,” Tamas Varga, senior analyst at PVM Oil Associates, said in a research note published Tuesday.

“There are lots of variables regarding next year’s oil balance but based on available data, information and sentiment, it is fair to say that any price rally will be met by fierce resistance from the sellers’ side,” Varga said. Brent crude fell as much as 4 percent to as low as $57.20 a barrel on Tuesday, on track to register its third consecutive session of declines. The international benchmark has since trimmed some of its losses to trade down 2.7 percent. Meanwhile, U.S. West Texas Intermediate (WTI) dipped further below $50 a barrel on Tuesday, after settling below the psychologically important level for the first time in more than a year in the previous session. U.S. crude stood at $47.94 at around 11:00 a.m. ET, trading 4 percent lower.

Read more …

Scrooge and the Grinch in one person.

Alan Greenspan Has A New Warning For Investors: ‘Run For Cover’ (CNBC)

Alan Greenspan, the former Federal Reserve chief who called out the tech-fueled rally of the mid-1990s as “irrational exuberance,” is now giving investors a new warning. In a CNN interview, Greenspan said it was unlikely that the current market would stabilize and then take another big leg higher. “It would be very surprising to see it sort of stabilize here, and then take off again,” Greenspan said. Markets could still go up, but “at the end of that run, run for cover.” Greenspan told CNN the bull market is over, pointing to how stocks have fumbled in recent days.

On Tuesday, stocks rallied but they tumbled on Monday and have been in a decline since October, weighed by concerns over global trade conflict and slowing global economies. The S&P was on track, as of Monday’s close, for the worst December since 1931. [..] In the CNN interview, Greenspan said the U.S. could be headed into “stagflation,” an economy characterized by high inflation and high unemployment such as was seen in the 1970s. “How long it lasts or how big it gets, it’s too soon to tell.”

Read more …

Strangest thing for me yesterday was the judge accusing Flynn of treason, only to apologize for that accusation minutes later.

Revenge Of The Spies: Flynn Case Shows Extent Of Anti-Trump #Resistance (Malic)

President Donald Trump’s ill-fated first national security adviser Michael Flynn will twist in the wind for another three months or more, before he can face a sentence for getting caught in a FBI ambush while doing his job. Flynn was supposed to be sentenced on Tuesday, ending the year-long legal saga that destroyed his reputation, nearly bankrupted him, and even endangered his family. Then, in a bizarre last-minute twist, his lawyers asked for a delay. The next status hearing will be in March, with the actual sentencing who knows when. At one point in the hearing, Judge Emmett Sullivan urged Flynn to reconsider his guilty plea, telling him that the violation he was admitting to amounted to treason – only to walk back the comments minutes later.

The media, predictably, gave far more coverage to the original statement than the retraction. It’s the perfect example of the collective hysteria that has followed Flynn’s case from the very beginning. Despite the publication of FBI documents showing that agents interviewing Flynn in January 2017 did not think he misled them, intentionally or otherwise, about the content of his conversations with Russian ambassador to the US Sergey Kislyak, Flynn chose to stand by his guilty plea from a year ago. His reasons for this are a mystery. What is not a mystery, however, is how the people involved in railroading Flynn are the same ones implicated in the institutional #Resistance to the Trump administration.

[..] In the orgy of sensationalist reporting that has gripped the US mainstream media for the past two years, Flynn’s actual transgression has been lost to the din of shouting “treason” and “RUSSIA.” What he pleaded guilty to is lying to FBI investigators about his calls with Kislyak. The contacts themselves were right and proper, mind you: it was literally his job to reach out to foreign diplomats on behalf of the president-elect. So, why was the FBI even probing them?

That is where things get interesting. Somebody from the Obama administration – we still don’t know who – “unmasked” Flynn’s name from the classified NSA intercepts of his conversations with the Russian ambassador. This somehow got to Acting Attorney General Sally Yates, who testified that she reached out to the White House with concerns about Flynn being blackmailed. It also somehow got to the Washington Post. There was talk of the Logan Act, an obscure 200-year-old law never used to prosecute anyone.

Read more …

I have a bunch of questions and doubts, but I like Ellen Brown.

Question 1: Is it a good idea to spend trillions on Green New Deals? How much of it would be geared towards decreased energy use?

Question 2: Is Abenomics really the success Ellen claims it is?

This Radical Plan to Fund the ‘Green New Deal’ Just Might Work (Ellen Brown)

[..] the “Green New Deal” promoted by Rep.-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., appears to be forging a political pathway for solving all of the ills of society and the planet in one fell swoop. Her plan would give a House select committee “a mandate that connects the dots” between energy, transportation, housing, health care, living wages, a jobs guarantee and more. But even to critics on the left, it is merely political theater, because “everyone knows” a program of that scope cannot be funded without a massive redistribution of wealth and slashing of other programs (notably the military), which is not politically feasible.

A network of public banks could fund the Green New Deal in the same way President Franklin Roosevelt funded the original New Deal. At a time when the banks were bankrupt, he used the publicly owned Reconstruction Finance Corp. as a public infrastructure bank. The Federal Reserve could also fund any program Congress wanted, if mandated to do so. Congress wrote the Federal Reserve Act and can amend it. Or the Treasury itself could do it, without the need to even change any laws. The Constitution authorizes Congress to “coin money” and “regulate the value thereof,” and that power has been delegated to the Treasury. It could mint a few trillion-dollar platinum coins, put them in its bank account and start writing checks against them.

What stops legislators from exercising those constitutional powers is simply that “everyone knows” Zimbabwe-style hyperinflation will result. But will it? Compelling historical precedent shows that this need not be the case. Michael Hudson, professor of economics at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, has studied the hyperinflation question extensively. He writes that disasters such as Zimbabwe’s fiscal troubles were not due to the government printing money to stimulate the economy. Rather, “Every hyperinflation in history has been caused by foreign debt service collapsing the exchange rate. The problem almost always has resulted from wartime foreign currency strains, not domestic spending.”

As long as workers and materials are available and the money is added in a way that reaches consumers, adding money will create the demand necessary to prompt producers to create more supply. Supply and demand will rise together and prices will remain stable. The reverse is also true. If demand (money) is not increased, supply and GDP will not go up. New demand needs to precede new supply. Infrastructure projects of the sort proposed in the Green New Deal are “self-funding,” generating resources and fees that can repay the loans. For these loans, advancing funds through a network of publicly owned banks would not require taxpayer money and could actually generate a profit for the government. That was how the original New Deal rebuilt the country in the 1930s at a time when the economy was desperately short of money.

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The title of my article yesterday very much reflects Brexit: Chaos in 2018, Mayhem in 2019.

Thousands Of British Troops On Standby For No-Deal Brexit (Ind.)

Thousands of troops have been put on standby to handle any fallout of Britain crashing out of the European Union without having secured a withdrawal deal. The government has said that, with 100 days to go until Brexit day on 29 March, it will implement all of its no-deal planning “in full” – following a clash in cabinet reflected in the wider Tory Party. Senior ministers went head-to-head, with one group demanding “no deal” become Britain’s central planning assumption, while others including the chancellor branded departing without an agreement a “unicorn” idea. Jeremy Hunt, foreign secretary, is said to have told colleagues their party would never be forgiven if it fails to deliver Brexit, but other Conservatives vowed to do everything in their power to stop a no-deal scenario.

In yet another day of Brexit high drama, defence secretary Gavin Williamson revealed he had made 3,500 troops ready to “support any government department on any contingencies they may need”. While he told MPs there had been no request for the troops yet, he said “What we are doing is putting contingency plans in place, and what we will do is have 3,500 service personnel held at readiness, including regulars and reserves, in order to support any government department on any contingencies they may need.” The Ministry of Defence later confirmed the troops would be put on alert in addition to the 5,000 already on standby to deal with potential terror attacks.

[..] Ministers have already announced plans to stockpile food and medicines, chartering ferries to bring in extra supplies and providing extra resources for border agencies. Downing Street said that advice on no-deal preparations would also be going out to households by various channels over the coming weeks. The Treasury will supply an additional £2bn on top of the £2bn already provided, with the Home Office receiving £500m for border security and handling the settlement scheme for EU nationals who want to remain in the country. Another £400m will go to Defra, the environment department, for projects including ensuring clean drinking water, which the UK treats with chemicals and gases imported from the EU.

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More British troops, just with different weapons.

“The goal was to establish “key influencers” on social media and determine who is “friendly” to the UK.”

New ‘Integrity Initiative’ Leaks: Military Ties, Infiltration of European Media (RT)

It’s been over a month since hackers began exposing the Scotland-based ‘Integrity Initiative’ as a UK government-funded propaganda outfit — and gradually new details of the organization’s clandestine activities have come to light. The documents were leaked by a group which claims to be associated with the Anonymous hackers. The first batch of leaks revealed the Integrity Initiative (II) was stealthily operating “clusters” of influencers across Europe working to ensure pro-UK narratives dominate the media. The second batch showed that the organization was also running disinformation campaigns domestically — specifically a smear campaign against Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn; all done under the guise of combatting “Russian propaganda.”

Now, a third batch of leaks has exposed that the project allegedly operated much like a modern-day version of Operation Mockingbird — a secretive 1950s project whereby the CIA worked hand-in-glove with willing journalists in major media outlets to ensure certain narratives were adhered to. Only this time, it’s a UK-funded organization with deep links to the intelligence services and military passing itself off as a non-partisan “charity.”

[..] 3. Skripal ‘monitoring campaign’ The II leapt into action after the poisoning of ex-Russian spy Sergei Skripal in March and supposedly put together a proposal to monitor social media discussion to “evaluate how the incident is being perceived” across Europe. The goal was to establish “key influencers” on social media and determine who is “friendly” to the UK. Lists of tweets on the Skripal affair were put together, along with country reports detailing how journalists in Europe were responding, the leak suggests. One report noted that in Italy, doubts about the UK narrative had been raised by “high-quality newspapers” and suggested that an “effective, discrete and articulated information campaign” must be directed at key figures in Italian politics and media.

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Neoliberalism simply failed to rise people’s living standards, so why should they support it any longer?

Either The EU Ditches Neoliberalism Or Its People Will Ditch The EU (Wight)

De Gaulle took a dim view of the UK in the postwar period, considering London a proxy of Washington. It was a view that gained common currency within French political circles after the debacle known to history as the Suez Crisis, when in 1956 the French and British entered into an ill-fated military pact with Israel to seize control of the Suez Canal from Egypt and effect the overthrow of the country’s Arab nationalist president Gamal Abdul Nasser. President Eisenhower forced the British into a humiliating retreat, threatening a series of punitive measures to leave London in no doubt of its place in the so-called special relationship. The French had been eager to continue with the Suez operation and were disgusted at London’s craven climb down in the face of Eisenhower’s intervention.

In 1958, two years after the Suez debacle, De Gaulle entered the Elysee Palace as French president. Thereafter, the humiliation of Suez still raw, he embarked on an assertion of the country’s independence from Washington that contrasted with Britain’s slavish and unedifying subservience. The French leader withdrew France from NATO’s integrated command and twice blocked Britain’s entry into the European Economic Community (EEC) – the previous incarnation of today’s EU – on the basis that London would be a US Trojan horse if admitted. There is, given this history, delicious irony in the fact that the country responsible for injecting the poison of neoliberalism into the EU – the UK under its fanatical leader Margaret Thatcher – is currently embroiled in a messy divorce from the bloc.

The EU in its current form is a latter-day prison house of nations locked inside a neoliberal straitjacket and single currency. Not only can’t it survive on this basis, but it also does not deserve to. Ultimately, either Europe’s political establishment decouples from Washington and its works – the Trump administration notwithstanding – or its peoples will decouple from them and theirs. As things stand, the latter proposition is far more likely.

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Belgian Cabinets are notorious for taking forever to form.

Belgian PM Charles Michel Resigns After No-Confidence Motion (G.)

Belgium’s government of four years has fallen on the issue of migration after the country’s parliament rejected an appeal from prime minister, Charles Michel, for its support for a minority administration. Michel was forced to offer his resignation to the King of the Belgians, Philippe, after the Socialist party, with support from the Greens, proposed a vote of no confidence in his administration. The country is now braced for a snap election in January. The head of Michel’s party said the opposition had rejected the government’s “fair offer” in order to secure a political scalp. “The Socialist opposition and Greens wanted a trophy and have it”, said David Clarinval, chairman of the liberal Reform Movement party.

[..] The N-VA, a Flemish nationalist party with hardline views on immigration, walked out of the government earlier this month over Michel’s signature to a UN migration pact providing for a common global approach to migrant flows. The draft UN accord lays down 23 objectives to open up legal migration and better manage a global flow of 250 million people, 3% of the world population. The US dropped out of talks on the pact last year and countries including Italy, Hungary, Austria, Poland, Bulgaria, Slovakia and Australia have rejected it. The deal is expected to be ratified at the UN headquarters in New York on 19 December.

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Employers can ‘ask’ employees to work 400 hrs of overtime per year without compensation.

France, Hungary, Serbia: Is Half Of Europe Protesting? (DW)

People have taken to the streets to protest against a labor law in Hungary, against tuition costs in Albania and against state violence in Serbia. Germany, meanwhile, has seen its first “yellow vest” style demonstration. Looking at the photos, one could mistake the sea of lights in Budapest for a festive holiday event. The people who gathered in Hungary’s capital Sunday night weren’t holding candles, however, but smartphones. And their message is political, not religious. They are demanding Prime Minister Viktor Orban take back a law that allows companies to ask their employees to work 400 hours overtime per year.

Since the measure was passed in parliament last Wednesday, more and more people have been protesting what has been called a “slave law.” In some cases, the rallies were overshadowed by violence. The protests on Sunday started off peaceful, but police later resorted to teargas again. With around 10,000 or even 15,000 participants, Sunday’s rally was the biggest event so far in a series of protests the likes of which Hungary hasn’t seen during Orban’s eight years in power. France is experiencing similar unrest with the “yellow vest” protests. Is the climate in Europe’s streets growing more heated?

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Of course Orban blames it all on Soros. He may come to regret ignoring his people’s anger. Same feelling as with Macron.

Hungary’s Opposition Plans More Protests After ‘Slave Law’ Passes (G.)

Hungary’s beleaguered political opposition has vowed to keep up the pressure on the country’s far-right prime minister, Viktor Orbán, after a week of protests in which thousands came on to the streets of Budapest, and four MPs were roughed up by security guards after attempting to get their demands across on state television. The protests were triggered by a so-called “slave law”, passed amid chaotic scenes in the Hungarian parliament last Wednesday, which allows employers to force employees to work overtime, and lets them delay payment for up to three years. It was passed together with legislation that provides for greater government control over the court system, the latest move by Orbán’s Fidesz party to capture independent state institutions.

A number of different opposition parties are cooperating on a joint strategy to keep pressure on the government. “We’re closely cooperating on a daily basis, and are planning roadblocks and further demonstrations if the president signs this into law,” said Tímea Szabó, of the opposition LMP party. She also said the opposition would announce civil disobedience action, though she refused to specify what it had in mind.

[..] “Brace yourselves for a new kind of democracy, one born of a carefully managed revolution by remote control,” wrote government spokesman Zoltán Kovács in a blogpost about the protests. “The revolution unfolds with protest leaders from a band of the usual suspects, many of them trained abroad and with close ties to Soros networks.” Kovács also pointed the finger at the international media, claiming they were overselling the protests, and at the “stomach-churning opportunism” of the liberal Belgian politician Guy Verhofstadt, who tweeted his support for the protests and used the hashtag #O1G, which refers to a Hungarian meme insulting Orbán in vulgar language. Kovács described Verhofstadt as “one of Soros’s henchmen in Brussels”.

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Living organisms that are 1000s of years old and span 100s a of acres.

One of Earth’s Largest Living Things Even Bigger Than Previously Thought (Ind.)

A giant honey mushroom considered a contender for the largest organism on the planet is both much larger and much older than previously thought. Scientists first studied the enormous fungus, which lives deep underground in a Michigan forest, in 1992. Then they estimated it was 1,500 years old, and the extensive mass of underground fibres and mushrooms that formed it weighed 100,000kg and stretched 15 hectares. Returning to the site, the same team used more rigorous testing to estimate the fungus was in fact closer to 2,500 years old.

They also discovered that it weighed 400,000kg and stretched over 70 hectares. This makes the enormous honey mushroom, which mostly consists of an underground network of tendrils wrapped around tree roots, heavier than three blue whales. “I view these estimates as the lower bound… The fungus could actually be much older,” said Professor James Anderson, a biologist at the University of Toronto who undertook both studies. [..] While the Michigan fungus is large, it is outclassed by another honey mushroom from Oregon that is even larger. There is also the Pando aspen in Utah, a forest originating from a single underground parent clone that is thought to weigh up to 6 million kg.


Armillaria mellea, Honey Fungus, taken in Whitewebbs Wood, Enfield, UK

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Feb 012018
 
 February 1, 2018  Posted by at 11:03 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , ,  1 Response »


Frederic Edwin Church The Parthenon 1871

 

FBI Opposes Memo Release Due To “Inaccurate Information” (ZH)
Alan Greenspan Sees Bubbles in Stocks and Bonds (BBG)
Janet Yellen’s Fed Era Ends With Unanimous Vote of No Rate Hike (BBG)
Two Out Of Three UK Pension Schemes Are In The Red (Yahoo)
Secret Price Fixing Among German Carmakers (Spiegel)
Germany Reaches Limit of Support for Macron’s Europe Plans (BBG)
Hungary Rejects Macron’s ‘Arrogance’ as EU Reform-Fight Looms (BBG)
More Than One Million Greeks Trapped In Tax Payment Scheme Nightmare (K.)
Planting Wildflowers Across Farm Fields Could Cut Pesticide Spraying (G.)
Earth’s Magnetic Field Is Shifting, Poles May Flip (ZH)
‘Super Blue Blood Moon’ Rises Over The Acropolis (K.)
Latest Rhino Poaching Figures Show A Decade Of Bloodshed (Ind.)

 

 

Bad theater. But not releasing the memo is no longer an option.

FBI Opposes Memo Release Due To “Inaccurate Information” (ZH)

Update 1240ET: In what CNN described as a “rate public warning,” the FBI released a statement Wednesday saying it has “grave concerns” over the accuracy of the House Intel Committee’s memo describing purportedly egregious FISA abuses. “With regard to the House Intelligence Committee’s memorandum, the FBI was provided a limited opportunity to review this memo the day before the committee voted to release it. As expressed during our initial review, we have grave concerns about material omissions of fact that fundamentally impact the memo’s accuracy,” the FBI said in a statement.
* * *
Update 1130ET: Bloomberg reports that FBI Director Christopher Wray told the White House he opposes release of a classified Republican memo alleging bias at the FBI and Justice Department because it contains inaccurate information and paints a false narrative, according to a person familiar with the matter. Of course, given the allegedly terrible picture the memo paints of The FBI, it is perhaps not entirely surprising that Wary would oppose its release, however, if this sourced reporting proves correct, it plays very badly for Republicans as it would seem to confirm Rep. Schiff’s accusations.
* * *
As we detailed earlier, just before President Trump headed to the Capitol for last night’s “State of the Union”, the Washington Post reported that top Justice Department officials made a last-ditch plea on Monday to White House Chief of Staff John Kelly about the dangers of publicly releasing the memo. Shortly before the House Intelligence Committee voted to make the document public, Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein warned Kelly that the four-page memo prepared by House Republicans could jeopardize classified information and implored the president to reconsider his support for making it public. But those pleas from Rosenstein – who isn’t exactly the West Wing’s favorite lawman, and whose name apparently appears in the memo – have apparently fallen on deaf ears.

Last night, President Trump promised a lawmaker that the memo would “100%” be released now that the House Intel Committee has voted to approve its release. And during a Fox News Radio interview with Brian Kilmeade, Chief of Staff John Kelly added that the memo would be publicly released “pretty quick.” “I’ll let all the experts decide that when it’s released. This president wants everything out so the American people can make up their own minds,” he said.

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He should know, he created them both.

Alan Greenspan Sees Bubbles in Stocks and Bonds (BBG)

The man who made the term “irrational exuberance” famous says investors are at it again. “There are two bubbles: We have a stock market bubble, and we have a bond market bubble,” Alan Greenspan, 91, said Wednesday on Bloomberg Television with Tom Keene and Scarlet Fu. Greenspan, who led the Federal Reserve from 1987 until 2006, memorably used the phrase to describe asset values during the 1990’s dot-com bubble. Greenspan’s comments come as stock indexes remain near record highs, despite selling off in recent days, and as the yields on government notes and bonds hover not far from historic lows. Interest rates are expected to move up in coming years as the Fed continues with a campaign to gradually tighten monetary policy.

“At the end of the day, the bond market bubble will eventually be the critical issue, but for the short term it’s not too bad,” Greenspan said. “But we’re working, obviously, toward a major increase in long-term interest rates, and that has a very important impact, as you know, on the whole structure of the economy.” The Fed on Wednesday opted to leave rates unchanged and markets are pricing in an increase at the central bank’s March meeting. Greenspan sounded an alarm on forecasts that the U.S. government deficit will continue to climb as a share of GDP. He said he was “surprised” that President Donald Trump didn’t specify how he would fund new government initiatives in Tuesday’s State of the Union speech. The president last month signed into law about $1.5 trillion in tax cuts that critics say will further balloon the budget gap.

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The nonsense is deafening. Great solid economy, but no rate hikes.

Janet Yellen’s Fed Era Ends With Unanimous Vote of No Rate Hike (BBG)

Federal Reserve officials, meeting for the last time under Chair Janet Yellen, left borrowing costs unchanged while adding emphasis to their plan for more hikes, setting the stage for an increase in March under her successor Jerome Powell. “The committee expects that economic conditions will evolve in a manner that will warrant further gradual increases in the federal funds rate,” the policy-setting Federal Open Market Committee said in a statement Wednesday in Washington, adding the word “further” twice to previous language. The changes to the statement, collectively acknowledging stronger growth and more confidence that inflation will rise to their 2% target, may spur speculation that the Fed will pick up the pace of interest-rate increases.

Officials also said inflation “is expected to move up this year and to stabilize” around the goal, in phrasing that marked an upgrade from their statement in December. At the same time, the Fed repeated language saying that “near-term risks to the economic outlook appear roughly balanced.” “It opens the door to four hikes for them, but I don’t think they have walked through it,” said Michael Gapen at Barclays in New York. “It closes the door to two hikes.” Fed officials penciled in three rate moves this year in quarterly forecasts they updated last month, according to their median projection.

With her term ending later this week after President Donald Trump chose to replace her, Yellen is handing the reins to Powell, who has backed her gradual approach and is widely expected to raise interest rates at the FOMC’s next meeting for the sixth time since late 2015. Fed officials are hoping to keep a tight labor market from overheating without raising borrowing costs so fast that it would stifle the economy. “Gains in employment, household spending and business fixed investment have been solid, and the unemployment rate has stayed low,” the Fed said, removing previous references to disruptions from hurricanes. “Market-based measures of inflation compensation have increased in recent months but remain low.”

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People won’t understand their pensions are Ponzis until there are no payments.

Two Out Of Three UK Pension Schemes Are In The Red (Yahoo)

Two out of three pension funds are in the red – to the tune of a combined £210 billion, it has been revealed. Some 3,710 schemes are in deficit according to the Pension Protection Fund watchdog, putting a serious question mark over the retirement plans of millions of workers. The PFF has been called into action on two high profile occasions of late – working with Toys R Us to secure a near £10m injection into its ailing fund to protect the company’s short-term future and also sorting through the debris of the Carillion collapse. The giant contractor folded earlier this month with debts of above £1.3bn, including an estimated £800m hole in its pension fund. The PFF monitors the health of 5,588 pension pots, with some of the biggest names on the FTSE 100 running schemes with major shortfalls.

The biggest include £9.1billion at BT, as well as deficits of £6.9billion at Royal Dutch Shell, £6.7billion at BP and £6.6billion at both Tesco and BAE Systems. Sir Steve Webb, a former pensions minister under the recent coalition government, said Carillion would not be the last big company to fold leaving its pension scheme in jeopardy. “The question isn’t if there will be another Carillion – it’s when,” said Webb, who is now director of policy at pensions group Royal London. “With two-thirds of schemes in deficit it is inevitable there will be more insolvencies and more schemes ending up in the PPF.”

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They had more than 60 active working groups.. And thought it’d remain secret? Anyone going to jail?

Secret Price Fixing Among German Carmakers (Spiegel)

The Federal Cartel Office suspects that major carmakers and a few of their suppliers have been fixing prices for years, and possibly even decades. It’s not the prices at which the companies sell their cars or car parts that is at issue, but rather a significant component of the prices they pay for steel. “The aim of the suspected collusion,” the court ruling that granted the search warrants read, was to “unify the purchasing price for steel in the automobile industry and, by doing so, create a commonality of costs.” The Federal Cartel Office believes that the alleged collusion existed back in the 1990s and that “it existed again from March 2007 until February 2013.” Investigators have also found indications there may have been collusion in 2016.

Collusion of that nature is the antithesis of competition. It means that VW, Daimler and BMW were no longer competing to buy steel cheaper than their rivals and passing their savings down to customers – as is normally the case in a functioning market economy. And steel is one of the most important supplies purchased by carmakers. The nationwide searches didn’t remain secret, with the media quickly reporting on them. But until now, the background and details of the raids have remained largely unknown, the case having been overshadowed by a European Commission investigation into another case that also involves the automobile industry – a case that DER SPIEGEL exposed last summer.

That case was triggered when Daimler and Volkswagen essentially admitted wrongdoing, and since then the Brussels authority has been looking into suspicions that the companies engaged in collusion for several years with BMW, Porsche and Audi, in the form of more than 60 working groups covering areas such as technological development, suppliers and how to deal with environmental protection authorities. The companies had created working groups for almost every part of a vehicle. They existed for “gasoline engines,” “diesel engines,” “car body,” “chassis,” “total vehicle” and many more areas. With five brands involved – Daimler, BMW, Audi, Porsche and VW – the groups were referred to internally as “groups of five.” All together, they met more than 1,000 times in past years.

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Say no more: “Desired ambiguities..”

Germany Reaches Limit of Support for Macron’s Europe Plans (BBG)

French President Emmanuel Macron will be disappointed if he expects Germany’s next government to drum up more goodwill for his European reform plans in this week’s talks, according to four people familiar with the current coalition negotiations. Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union-led bloc and its prospective Social Democratic Party partner are not planning any fundamental changes to their proposals on Europe’s future as set out in a preliminary agreement reached Jan. 12, according to the people, who represent all three parties involved in the talks. All asked not to be named as the negotiations are private and ongoing. Representatives of Merkel’s CDU, its Christian Social Union sister party and Martin Schulz’s Social Democrats met in the Chancellery in Berlin on Wednesday to discuss Europe policy.

While Schulz hailed the outcome as a “fresh start” for Europe, details were in short supply. The negotiators didn’t go much beyond those measures already agreed, one of the people attending the meeting said. These include higher German contributions to the EU budget; expanding the European Stability Fund (ESM) into a European Monetary Fund; and a European framework for minimum wages. The SPD proposed giving the EU its own means to raise revenue, whether by taxes or tolls, prompting Merkel’s bloc to warn against a debate over tax increases. On a visit to Macron in Paris on Jan. 19, Merkel said the coalition’s common Europe plans contained “desired ambiguities,” since any attempt to agree on the final details now would reduce the room to negotiate.

In reality, her CDU/CSU and the SPD, as the Social Democrats are known in German, have different interpretations of the proposals, and these divergent positions are likely to bubble up in the coming months in the debate over euro-area reform.

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Hungary won’t be easy to strong-arm. But Brussels will try. The only people who want more Europe are politicians.

Hungary Rejects Macron’s ‘Arrogance’ as EU Reform-Fight Looms (BBG)

French President Emmanuel Macron’s plan to bring to heel renegade European Union nations as part of a drive to reform the bloc smacks of arrogance and will fail, a senior Hungarian ruling party official said. Unanimity is required both to change the EU constitution and approve a multi-year, post-2020 EU budget. That means proposed sanctions on countries like Hungary and Poland for alleged rule-of-law violations won’t gain traction, according to Gergely Gulyas, parliamentary leader of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s Fidesz party. Governments are drawing battle lines as the EU mulls plans to re-invent itself, with some members saying the euro crisis, Brexit, the biggest refugee influx since World War II and ex-communist members ditching the bloc’s liberal values have necessitated a revamp.

Macron has presented the most ambitious proposals, with a plan to deepen integration in everything from defense to the economy. He has also called for sanctions against member states seen as backsliding on democracy. “If we’re going to play the game that western European countries want to launch rule-of-law procedures against eastern European countries because of differences over values, then that’s not going to work,” said Gulyas, 36. “That would destroy the Union.” Hungary received 3.6 billion euros ($4.5 billion) in net EU funding in 2016. That made it the fourth-biggest beneficiary in the 28-member bloc after Poland, Romania and Greece and underscores the risk to its economy if Macron can make good on his pledge. Gulyas dismissed proposals aimed at punishing Hungary and Poland, arguing that France has for years failed to meet EU spending limits yet has escaped penalties for fiscal offenders.

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Under an alleged left-wing government.

More Than One Million Greeks Trapped In Tax Payment Scheme Nightmare (K.)

More than 1 million Greeks are now trapped in programs to pay off their tax and social security dues in installments, a situation likely to continue for years to come. On Wednesday the Finance Ministry announced taxpayers can apply for a 12- or 24-installment payment scheme, which under certain circumstances can include non-expired dues, on the website of the Independent Authority for Public Revenue. Citizens are resorting to various payment programs offered by the ministries of Finance and Labor because they would otherwise be unable to meet their obligations. In many cases taxpayers are forced to pay additional installments in order not to default on their plans.

The million-plus taxpayers and businesses that are trapped in the various schemes they have entered to pay off the tax authorities and the social security funds have no other choice but to keep paying, otherwise they will have their assets confiscated. The payment schemes are the outcome of the growth in taxation and of social security contributions in recent years. Worse, as of this year, if anyone delays the payment of an installment by more than 24 hours, the debt will be classified as overdue and the process of the monitoring mechanism will be triggered for the state to safeguard its interests. Particularly in the case of the 100-payment program for dues to the tax authorities, missing a deadline means the entire amount due is classified as expired and becomes immediately payable along with fines and penalties.

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You mean, monoculture is not the greatest thing ever?!

Planting Wildflowers Across Farm Fields To Cut Pesticide Spraying (G.)

Long strips of bright wildflowers are being planted through crop fields to boost the natural predators of pests and potentially cut pesticide spraying. The strips were planted on 15 large arable farms in central and eastern England last autumn and will be monitored for five years, as part of a trial run by the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology (CEH). Concern over the environmental damage caused by pesticides has grown rapidly in recent years. Using wildflower margins to support insects including hoverflies, parasitic wasps and ground beetles has been shown to slash pest numbers in crops and even increase yields. But until now wildflower strips were only planted around fields, meaning the natural predators are unable to reach the centre of large crop fields.

“If you imagine the size of a [ground beetle], it’s a bloody long walk to the middle of a field,” said Prof Richard Pywell, at CEH. GPS-guided harvesters can now precisely reap crops, meaning strips of wildflowers planted through crop fields can be avoided and left as refuges all year round. Pywell’s initial tests show that planting strips 100m apart means the predators are able to attack aphids and other pests throughout the field. The flowers planted include oxeye daisy, red clover, common knapweed and wild carrot. In the new field trials, the strips are six metres wide and take up just 2% of the total field area. They will be monitored through a full rotation cycle from winter wheat to oil seed rape to spring barley.

“It’s a real acid test – we scientists are having to come up with real practical solutions,” said Pywell, who led a landmark study published in 2017 showing that neonicotinoids insecticides damage bee populations, not just individual insects. In the new trials, the researchers will be looking out for any sign that drawing the wild insects into the centre of fields, and therefore closer to where pesticides are sprayed, does more harm than good.

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Old threat. But a real one.

Earth’s Magnetic Field Is Shifting, Poles May Flip (ZH)

[..] scientists from the University of Colorado in Boulder are sounding the alarm that the Earth’s magnetic poles are showing signs of reversing. Although the pole reversal, in and of itself, isn’t unprecedented, the solar winds that would take out the power grid and make parts of the globe uninhabitable could cause widespread disasters. The Earth has a fierce molten core that generates a magnetic field capable of defending our planet against devastating solar winds. This magnetic field is vital to life on Earth and has weakened by 15 percent over the last 200 years. This protective field acts as a shield against harmful solar radiation and extends thousands of miles into space and its magnetism affects everything from global communication to power grids.

Historically, Earth’s North and South magnetic poles have flipped every 200,000 or 300,000 years. However, the last flip was about 780,000 years ago, meaning our planet is well overdue. The latest satellite data, from the European Space Agency’s Swarm trio which monitors the Earth’s magnetic field, suggest a pole flip may be imminent. The satellites allow researchers to study changes building at the Earth’s core, where the magnetic field is generated. Their observations suggest molten iron and nickel are draining the energy out of the Earth’s core near where the magnetic field is generated. While scientists aren’t sure why exactly this happens, they describe it as a “restless activity” that suggests the magnetic field is preparing to flip.

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A lot more timeless than most other pics of this.

‘Super Blue Blood Moon’ Rises Over The Acropolis (K.)

A ‘super blue blood moon’ rises behind the 2,500-year-old Parthenon temple on the Acropolis hill in Athens on Wednesday evening, when thousands of city residents took to the streets and balconies to witness the rare spectacle. People in many parts of the world caught a glimpse of the moon as a giant reddish globe thanks to a rare lunar phenomenon that combines a total eclipse with a blue moon and super moon. The spectacle – the first in 152 years – has been coined a ‘super blue blood moon’ by NASA. [Petros Giannakouris/AP]

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Just refuse to do any trade with any country that imports the horns. For starters.

Latest Rhino Poaching Figures Show A Decade Of Bloodshed (Ind.)

Dr Ian Player, the veteran South African game ranger and doyen of global rhino conservation, would be turning in his grave today were he to discover that another 1,000 rhinos had been slaughtered in the last calendar year. The African-wildlife warrior died just over three years ago aged 87, at a point when poaching had just exploded to record levels in South Africa – with nearly three rhinos gunned down daily. Annual government statistics announced last week complete the picture of 7,130 rhino carcasses piled up in South Africa over the last decade. Shortly before his death, I visited Player at his home in the KwaZulu-Natal Midlands to ask him about his thoughts on the poaching crisis and the future of one of the “big five” (lion, leopard, rhinoceros, elephant and Cape buffalo) species he devoted most of his life to protecting.

Frail and dispirited, he had reached a point in life where he should have been taking things easy, after more than six decades of service to nature conservation. Instead, his cellphone rang incessantly as colleagues from all corners of the country reported the discovery of yet another rhino butchered for its horns. Having worked so hard to save rhinos from extinction once before, there was no way Player could hang up his conservation boots amidst this new crisis. He also told me about a dream that haunted him. “My dream was about a young white rhino which came to lie down next to me and then gently placed its head on my shoulder. That does not need too much interpretation – the rhinos still need our help more than ever before,” he explained.

Player first came across a rhino in Imfolozi Game Reserve in the early 1950s when he joined the Natal Parks Board as a learner game ranger. A disciple of Carl Jung and Sir Laurens van der Post, Player went on to spearhead a global operation to safeguard the world’s second-largest land animal from extinction. Less than a decade ago, poaching deaths were limited to roughly 20 rhinos per year in South Africa, the country that provides sanctuary to 93% of Africa’s white rhinos and nearly 40% of the continent’s black rhinos. In 2007, only 13 rhinos were poached in South Africa. But in 2008 that tally rose steeply to 80 deaths; to 333 in 2010 and then to a record level of 1,205 during 2014. Last year the death toll topped the 1,000 mark for the fifth year in a row.

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Nov 032017
 
 November 3, 2017  Posted by at 8:59 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,  8 Responses »


Edward S. Curtis Tipi in the snow 1908

 

Social Security Can Never Run Out Of Money – Just Ask Alan Greenspan (BI)
Inside Hillary Clinton’s Secret Takeover of the DNC (Donna Brazile)
Jay Powell – A Quiet Leader (DDMB)
Why Would Anyone Want The Fed Job? (Crudele)
The Borrower Is The Slave To The Lender (Lance Roberts)
US Manufacturing Worker Productivity Crashes Most In 8 Years (ZH)
Bitcoin Is the ‘Very Definition’ of a Bubble – Credit Suisse CEO (BBG)
One Bitcoin Transaction Now Uses as Much Energy as Your House in a Week (MBV)
The Hidden Danger Bulls Are Missing (Rickards)
As Credit Booms, Citi Says Synthetic CDOs May Reach $100 Billion (BBG)
China Issues Guidelines On Overseas Investment Amid Crackdown On Deals (R.)
US Spends $250 Million Per Day For The War On Terror (TeleS)
Barcelona Council Says Catalan Government Legitimate, Independence Is Not (CN)
Kim Dotcom Wins Settlement From New Zeland Police Over 2012 Dawn Raid (NZH)
Monsanto Halts Launch Of Chemical After Farmers Complain Of Rashes (R.)

 

 

“The United States can pay any debt it has because it can always print money to do that, so there is zero probability of default.”

Social Security Can Never Run Out Of Money – Just Ask Alan Greenspan (BI)

I asked Kelton why, given her counterintuitive argument that deficits don’t really matter, Americans should take her word for it. Her reply: Don’t. Instead, listen to what Alan Greenspan, the prominent Republican former Federal Reserve chairman who is a purported deficit hawk, had to say on the matter. In March 2005, he was pressed by a young congressman named Paul Ryan about the need for privatizing Social Security because of the prospect of a looming “entitlements crisis.” Greenspan replied rather bitingly that there was no such thing or even a remote possibility. “I wouldn’t say that the pay-as-you-go benefits are insecure in the sense that there’s nothing to prevent the federal government to create as much money as it wants and pays it to somebody,” Greenspan told an incredulous Ryan. “The question is how do you set up a system that assures that the real assets are created which those benefits are employed to purchase.

So it’s not a question of security — it’s a question of the structure of the financial system.” That’s what Democrats should be saying, rather than regurgitating the old Republican rouse — which even the GOP is willing to abandon when it’s convenient — about a looming government debt crisis that never comes. “Instead of repeating talking points that reinforce the idea that Social Security is somehow financially unsustainable, Democrats should play Greenspan’s remarks on a loop. They should call attention to what Greenspan said — under oath — about the program’s long-term sustainability,” Kelton said. “Instead of accepting the premise that Social Security is in trouble, Democrats should accept Greenspan’s challenge — put forward an agenda that will do more to promote future growth than anything the Republicans are offering.”

The financial crisis was instructive on this count. Many critics of both the federal government’s fiscal stimulus and the Federal Reserve’s bond purchases worried that the country was getting so deep into debt that one of two things was bound to happen: a crisis in the Treasury market or a bout of runaway inflation. Nine years into the recovery, Treasury yields remain near historic lows and inflation is not only contained but remains worryingly low. That last point is key: It’s not that folks like Kelton and Baker believe there is no risk to government spending. They simply argue that the only risks are the misallocation of resources and inflation — not some amorphous “debt crisis” or default of the sort some politicians and market analysts have shouted about.

Unlike Greece, which actually did default on its debt because of a lack of control over its own currency, the US could default only by choice. Trump flirted with that choice once as a candidate — but quickly backed away from the threat after he realized the catastrophic market and economic consequences such a debacle would have. In August 2011, after the US’s credit rating was downgraded for the fist time following a prolonged impasse over the US debt ceiling, Greenspan was asked during a “Meet the Press” interview about the issue of “unfunded liabilities” and “entitlements.” His response again spoke volumes: “The United States can pay any debt it has because it can always print money to do that, so there is zero probability of default.”

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Quite a reversal. Brazile was fired from CNN a year ago when it was discovered she fed the Clinton campaign debate questions. Still, what a mess. Will they clean it up or try to ignore?

Inside Hillary Clinton’s Secret Takeover of the DNC (Donna Brazile)

When I got back from a vacation in Martha’s Vineyard I at last found the document that described it all: the Joint Fund-Raising Agreement between the DNC, the Hillary Victory Fund, and Hillary for America. The agreement—signed by Amy Dacey, the former CEO of the DNC, and Robby Mook with a copy to Marc Elias—specified that in exchange for raising money and investing in the DNC, Hillary would control the party’s finances, strategy, and all the money raised. Her campaign had the right of refusal of who would be the party communications director, and it would make final decisions on all the other staff. The DNC also was required to consult with the campaign about all other staffing, budgeting, data, analytics, and mailings. I had been wondering why it was that I couldn’t write a press release without passing it by Brooklyn. Well, here was the answer.

When the party chooses the nominee, the custom is that the candidate’s team starts to exercise more control over the party. If the party has an incumbent candidate, as was the case with Clinton in 1996 or Obama in 2012, this kind of arrangement is seamless because the party already is under the control of the president. When you have an open contest without an incumbent and competitive primaries, the party comes under the candidate’s control only after the nominee is certain. When I was manager of Gore’s campaign in 2000, we started inserting our people into the DNC in June. This victory fund agreement, however, had been signed in August 2015, just four months after Hillary announced her candidacy and nearly a year before she officially had the nomination.

I had tried to search out any other evidence of internal corruption that would show that the DNC was rigging the system to throw the primary to Hillary, but I could not find any in party affairs or among the staff. I had gone department by department, investigating individual conduct for evidence of skewed decisions, and I was happy to see that I had found none. Then I found this agreement. The funding arrangement with HFA and the victory fund agreement was not illegal, but it sure looked unethical. If the fight had been fair, one campaign would not have control of the party before the voters had decided which one they wanted to lead. This was not a criminal act, but as I saw it, it compromised the party’s integrity.

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We’ll go with Danielle DiMartino Booth for now. Powell’s no PhD, and not a Yellen clone. But he’s been at the Fed for 5 years already, which doesn’t make him an obvious agent for change.

Jay Powell – A Quiet Leader (DDMB)

The sheer breadth of Powell’s experience is refreshing compared to what we’ve had for the past 30 years. Powell has a deep understanding of the law and politics. He worked in the Treasury Department under Nicholas Brady and was confirmed as Undersecretary of the Treasury under George H.W. Bush. His background in politics and the experience he has had at the Fed thus far have prepared him well for his role as liaison to Congress and the White House. Powell’s experience as an investment banker was critical in his carrying out the investigation and sanctioning of Salomon Brothers. Understanding the entirely different type of politics that exists in big banks will bode well for his capacity to regulate the banks. This attribute especially will dilute the power traditionally exerted by the NY Fed in recent years, a District that has a long history of conflicts of interest vis-à-vis the banks it regulates.

A stronger regulator as Fed chair in the years leading up to the financial crisis. At the Carlyle Group, Powell founded and ran the Industrial Group within the Buyout Fund. A separate missing characteristic among Fed leaders for the past 30 years has been a woeful lack of understanding as to how Fed policy effects corporations and the decisions CEOs and CFOs make driven by Fed policy, the most obvious of which has been debt-financed share buybacks at the expense of capital expenditures. Some in the media have questioned Powell’s being the wealthiest individual at the Fed. That is an extremely strong attribute. In his work between 2010 and 2012 at a bipartisan think tank, Powell worked for a salary of $1 per year to carry out his mission to raise the debt ceiling. His wealth affords him the luxury of having no preset agenda. His history of working for his country to its best end exemplifies that he is at the Fed because he truly believes he is doing a greater good in servicing his country.

Powell’s work on Too Big to Fail banks also speaks to his ability to be independent and objective in his approach to regulating big banks with deep-pocketed lobbyists who hold huge sway over politicians. If he is willing to go up against the biggest banks, he will hopefully prove to be a leader cast in the mold of William McChesney Martin, the longest serving Fed Chairman famous for testifying to Congress that it was the Fed’s job to take away the punch bowl just as the party gets going. [..] His experience in the financial markets suggests he will be less apt to keep rates too low for too long as has been the case with his three predecessors. Powell was not in favor of the third round of QE, but voted for its nevertheless. This is his biggest black eye and why market participants perceive him to be as dovish as they do.

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Savings and pensions need higher rates, fast. But…

Why Would Anyone Want The Fed Job? (Crudele)

No matter who is appointed, the next Fed chairman has a problem. Right now, the economy is looking healthy. The stock market is booming. Consumer confidence is high. Home prices are soaring. And some economic indicators seem to say, “Happy days are here again.” Just Wednesday, for instance, the Atlanta Federal Reserve raised its forecast for economic growth in the fourth quarter to a booming 4.5% annual rate. The nation’s gross domestic product, the standard for measuring economic growth, rose at a healthy 3% annual rate in the third quarter. That 3% figure was puzzling because hurricanes should have stunted growth, which means that number might be revised downward once better-quality statistics come in.

Or it could mean that growth is darn good, despite the weather. Nevertheless, the 4.5% estimate for the fourth quarter — on top of the 3% growth in the July to September quarter — is going to force whoever ends up running the Fed to seriously consider raising interest rates faster than usual. But that’s where it gets tricky. Once rates increase, the economy could slow because borrowing costs will rise for both consumers and companies. When the cost of borrowing money increases, people and companies tend to cut back on spending. But there’s another possible twist that could complicate the job of the next Fed boss even more. The relatively impressive growth in the third-quarter GDP and the even better performance in the fourth quarter could turn out to be another fake-out.

The GDP, for instance, rose by a 4.6% annual rate in the second quarter of 2014 and by a 5.2% rate in the third quarter of that year, only to collapse back to subpar growth in the next eight quarters. Also, the New York Fed, which is more influential, doesn’t agree with the Atlanta Fed. It had current GDP at closer to 3%. With all that’s going on, why would anyone want the Fed job?

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When anyone tells you the economy has recovered, show them any of these graphs.

The Borrower Is The Slave To The Lender (Lance Roberts)

Despite the bullish economic optics, the reality for the majority of Americans is they simply have not yet recovered from the financial crisis. As the chart below shows, while savings spiked during the financial crisis, the rising cost of living for the bottom 80% has outpaced the median level of “disposable income” for that same group. As a consequence, the inability to “save” has continued.

I discussed previously the problem of rising debt. Beginning in 1990, the gap between the “standard of living” and real disposable incomes went negative with the resultant “gap” filled through the use of debt. However, since the financial crisis, this has no longer been the case. I modified the previous chart with the savings rate which tells the same story, as the cost of living began outpacing incomes the difference came from savings, and a continuous increase in debt. Again, despite the temporary uptick in the savings rate following the financial crisis, the real cost of living continues to erode the middle class.

You can see the erosion of the savings rate more clearly when you look at the rate of Personal Consumption Expenditure (PCE) growth as compared to debt growth. As spending and debt accelerated, the savings rate declined. More importantly, in 2000 the growth rate of debt sharply accelerated above PCE growth. This debt-fueled consumption, however, has not led to stronger rates of economic growth.

Debt is a negative thing for the borrower. It has been known to be such a thing even in biblical times as quoted in Proverbs 22:7: “The borrower is the slave to the lender.” Debt acts as a “cancer” on an individual’s wealth as it siphons potential savings from income as those funds are diverted to debt service. Rising levels of debt means rising levels of debt service which reduces actual disposable personal incomes that could be saved or reinvested back into the economy. The mirage of consumer wealth has been a function of surging debt levels. “Wealth” is not borrowed but “saved” and as shown in the chart below, this is a lesson that too few individuals have learned. The reality is that since “savings” are the cornerstone of economic growth longer-term, as savings provide for productive investment and lending, it should be of NO surprise that, as shown in the next chart, there is a very high correlation between the savings rate, GDP, and PCE.

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What happens when you don’t make stuff anymore.

US Manufacturing Worker Productivity Crashes Most In 8 Years (ZH)

US worker productivity rose at 3.0% QoQ in Q3 – the best since 2014.

Unit labor costs rose at 0.5% annualized rate in Q3 (est. 0.4%) following 0.3% pace in Q2. Output rose at a 3.8% rate following 3.9%. Hours worked rose at a 0.8% pace after 2.4%. The latest figure compares with a 1.2% average over the period spanning 2007 to 2016. Weak productivity helps explain why companies are reluctant to raise workers’ wages, even as profit margins have improved. However, among manufacturers, productivity crashed 5% QoQ – the biggest drop since Q1 2009, when the economy was in recession – after rising 3.4% in Q2. Let’s hope that is storm-related.

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Insert your opinion here: “From what we can identify, the only reason today to buy or sell bitcoin is to make money, which is the very definition of speculation and the very definition of a bubble,..”

Bitcoin Is the ‘Very Definition’ of a Bubble – Credit Suisse CEO (BBG)

The speculation around bitcoin is the “very definition of a bubble,” Credit Suisse CEO Tidjane Thiam said as the currency exceeded $7,000 for the first time. “From what we can identify, the only reason today to buy or sell bitcoin is to make money, which is the very definition of speculation and the very definition of a bubble,” he said at a news conference in Zurich Thursday. He added that in the history of finance, such speculation has “rarely led to a happy end.” The digital currency got new impetus this week after CME, the world’s largest exchange owner, said it plans to introduce bitcoin futures by the end of the year, citing pent-up demand from clients. That pushes bitcoin closer to the mainstream by making it easier to trade without the hassles of owning bitcoin directly. Other bankers are also sounding warnings about the currency.

JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon has called bitcoin “a fraud” that will eventually blow up. UBS Chairman Axel Weber said last month that bitcoin has no “intrinsic value” because it’s not secured by underlying assets. Bankers also are steering clear of bitcoin for fear that criminals could use its anonymity to hide their activities, Thiam said. “Most banks in the current state of regulation have little or no appetite to get involved in a currency which has such anti-money laundering challenges,” he said. While bitcoin remains a no-go with the industry, banks are racing to develop blockchain, the technology underpinning the currency. Thiam said blockchain may have many applications in banking. Credit Suisse is among more than 100 banks are working within the R3, a consortium created to find ways to use blockchain as to track money transfers and other transactions.

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It’s by design, and that remains worrisome.

One Bitcoin Transaction Now Uses as Much Energy as Your House in a Week (MBV)

Bitcoin’s incredible price run to break over $6,000 this year has sent its overall electricity consumption soaring, as people worldwide bring more energy-hungry computers online to mine the digital currency. An index from cryptocurrency analyst Alex de Vries, aka Digiconomist, estimates that with prices the way they are now, it would be profitable for Bitcoin miners to burn through over 24 terawatt-hours of electricity annually as they compete to solve increasingly difficult cryptographic puzzles to “mine” more Bitcoins. That’s about as much as Nigeria, a country of 186 million people, uses in a year. This averages out to a shocking 215 kilowatt-hours (KWh) of juice used by miners for each Bitcoin transaction (there are currently about 300,000 transactions per day).

Since the average American household consumes 901 KWh per month, each Bitcoin transfer represents enough energy to run a comfortable house, and everything in it, for nearly a week. On a larger scale, De Vries’ index shows that bitcoin miners worldwide could be using enough electricity to at any given time to power about 2.26 million American homes. Expressing Bitcoin’s energy use on a per-transaction basis is a useful abstraction. Bitcoin uses x energy in total, and this energy verifies/secures roughly 300k transactions per day. So this measure shows the value we get for all that electricity, since the verified transaction (and our confidence in it) is ultimately the end product. Since 2015, Bitcoin’s electricity consumption has been very high compared to conventional digital payment methods. This is because the dollar price of Bitcoin is directly proportional to the amount of electricity that can profitably be used to mine it.

As the price rises, miners add more computing power to chase new Bitcoins and transaction fees. It’s impossible to know exactly how much electricity the Bitcoin network uses. But we can run a quick calculation of the minimum energy Bitcoin could be using, assuming that all miners are running the most efficient hardware with no efficiency losses due to waste heat. To do this, we’ll use a simple methodology laid out in previous coverage on Motherboard. This would give us a constant total mining draw of just over one gigawatt. That means that, at a minimum, worldwide Bitcoin mining could power the daily needs of 821,940 average American homes. Put another way, global Bitcoin mining represents a minimum of 77KWh of energy consumed per Bitcoin transaction.

Even as an unrealistic lower boundary, this figure is high: As senior economist Teunis Brosens from Dutch bank ING wrote, it’s enough to power his own home in the Netherlands for nearly two weeks. As goes the Bitcoin price, so goes its electricity consumption, and therefore its overall carbon emissions. I asked de Vries whether it was possible for Bitcoin to scale its way out of this problem. “Blockchain is inefficient tech by design, as we create trust by building a system based on distrust. If you only trust yourself and a set of rules (the software), then you have to validate everything that happens against these rules yourself. That is the life of a blockchain node,” he said via direct message.

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“Earnings are likely to fall short of expectations, which can lead to a correction. Once that happens, multiples can shrink as well. Soon you’re in a full-scale bear market with stock prices down 20% or more.”

The Hidden Danger Bulls Are Missing (Rickards)

Bull markets in stocks seem unstoppable right up until the moment they stop. Then comes a rapid crash-and-burn phase. Is there ever any warning that a collapse is about to happen? Of course there is. Analysts warn about it all the time and provide mountains of data and historical evidence to back up their analysis. The problem is that everyone ignores them! You can talk about the dangers represented by CAPE ratios, margin levels, computerized trading, persistent low volatility and complacency all you want, but nothing seems to slow down this bull market. Yet there is one thing that can stop a bull market in its tracks, and that’s corporate earnings. The simplest form of stock market valuation is to project earnings, apply a multiple and, voilà, you have a valuation. Multiples are already near record highs, so there’s not much room for expansion there.

The only variable left is projected earnings and that’s where Wall Street analysts are having a field day ramping up stock prices. Earnings did grow significantly in 2017 on a year-over-year basis, but that’s mainly because earnings were weak in 2016, so the year-over-year growth was relatively easy. Now comes the hard part. How do you expand earnings again in 2018 when 2017 was such a strong year? Wall Street just uses a simple extrapolation and says next year will be like this year, only better! But there is every reason to doubt that extrapolation. This is from a recent Bloomberg article:

“Ominously, Weekly Leading Index growth turned down early this year and is now at a 79-week low. Such cyclical downturns have historically telegraphed [growth-rate cycle] GRC downturns. That shows very clearly that economic growth is about as good as it gets and that a fresh growth slowdown may be on the way… ” “Over time, we find that stock price corrections — big and small — have historically clustered around GRC downturns. In other words, the risk of corrections rises around economic slowdowns… Today, there are rising rates, with quantitative tightening about to begin. This will take place during an economic slowdown, implying a likely downswing in corporate profit growth, delivering a proverbial one-two punch.”

Earnings are likely to fall short of expectations, which can lead to a correction. Once that happens, multiples can shrink as well. Soon you’re in a full-scale bear market with stock prices down 20% or more. That’s without even considering a war with North Korea and all of the dangers others have already mentioned. This may be your last clear chance to lighten up on listed equity exposure before the bubble bursts.

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Complex derivatives. What do they make you remember?

As Credit Booms, Citi Says Synthetic CDOs May Reach $100 Billion (BBG)

The comeback in complex credit derivatives blamed for exacerbating the global financial crisis is picking up pace. That’s according to new research this week from Citigroup, one of the biggest arrangers of so-called synthetic collateralized debt obligations. Sales of the products may jump to as much as $100 billion this year from about $20 billion in 2015, Citigroup analysts wrote in an Oct. 31 report. While investors suffered billions of dollars in losses on similar bets a decade ago, the leverage offered by synthetic CDOs is luring back buyers in an era of low yields and dwindling volatility. “It would seem as if the low spread-low vol environment, similar to back in 2006-2007 (when investors couldn’t get enough of levered synthetic tranches) has revived some interest in portfolio credit risk,” Citigroup analysts led by Aritra Banerjee wrote.

“Investors may not have necessarily wanted to add leverage, but, simply put, they have had to, given the lack of alternatives.” While post-crisis deals are typically tied to corporate credit as opposed to the mortgage debt that helped spur the credit crunch, the return of synthetic CDOs is likely to generate unease among investors who worry that markets are too frothy. The controversial product’s resurgence coincides with a boom in other types of credit wagers, including options on credit derivative indexes and exchange-traded funds that provide quick and easy access to a broad swath of credit. There are some key differences in today’s synthetic CDOs versus the pre-crisis vintage. Citigroup said it has created over 50 “full capital structure” deals in recent years, which vary from the single-tranche bespoke deals that dominated before and just after the crunch.

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“China’s non-financial outbound direct investment (ODI) fell 41.9% in January-September from a year earlier to $78.03 billion. For September alone, it plummeted 42.5% on-year to $9.31 billion..”

China Issues Guidelines On Overseas Investment Amid Crackdown On Deals (R.)

After years of rapid growth, China’s outbound investment has slumped so far in 2017 as authorities crack down on “irrational” overseas deals which are suspected of being used to bypass capital controls and move money offshore, pressuring the yuan currency. The draft regulations, released to the public to solicit feedback until Dec. 3, aim to improve oversight, safeguard national security and increase support, according to a post on the website of the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC). Some administrative hurdles, such as a rule requiring that Chinese companies investing over $300 million overseas seek approval from the state planner, would be reduced or removed under the new rules, the post said.

At the same time, the new rules would also increase oversight on investments by overseas subsidiaries of Chinese companies, as well as for investments in sensitive sectors and countries, it said. Sensitive projects listed in the rules include those in countries that are at war, that do not have diplomatic ties with China or where investment is restricted by China’s commitments to international treaties, resolutions or requirements. Media organizations, weapons manufacturing, companies involved in multi-national water resources exploitation or those that China’s national macro policies restrict investment in were listed as sensitive sectors. A full list of sensitive areas would be released by the state planner in future, it said.

Punishments for companies that use dishonest measures to invest overseas, engage in unfair competition or damage national security will be increased, the rules said. The statement said that the new draft builds on previous regulations released in 2014. China’s non-financial outbound direct investment (ODI) fell 41.9% in January-September from a year earlier to $78.03 billion. For September alone, it plummeted 42.5% on-year to $9.31 billion, according to Reuters calculations.

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As Americans live paycheck to paycheck. Problem is, both parties support this lunacy.

US Spends $250 Million Per Day For The War On Terror (TeleS)

The Department of Defense’s “cost of war” report suggests that the U.S. has spent $250 million per day for the past 16 years on ‘defense.’ According to a newly published United States Department of Defense (DoD) “cost of war” report, U.S. taxpayers have shelled out $1.46 trillion for war since September 11, 2001, when the War on Terror began. This amounts to around $250 million per day. The report was published by the Federation of American Scientists Secrecy News blog and covers the period of September 11, 2001 to mid-2017. As the report notes, nearly $1.3 trillion of the total cost spent on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars alone. On top of this, continuing operations in Afghanistan and the U.S.-led air campaign in Iraq and Syria has totalled $120 billion.

U.S. President Donald Trump promised to rebuild America’s military which he sees as less extravagant than it ever has been. “Our active-duty armed forces have shrunk from 2 million in 1991 to about 1.3 million today,” he said in a speech. “The Navy has shrunk from over 500 ships to 272 ships during this same period of time. The Air Force is about one-third smaller than 1991. Pilots flying B-52s in combat missions today. These planes are older than virtually everybody in this room.” Part of Trump’s plan to ‘rebuild’ the U.S.’ military is to make sure that the military is “funded beautifully.” The Trump administration has proposed a $603 billion defense budget, which well exceeds the cap of $549 billion, and would require the U.S. Congress to make spending cuts in other areas.

In July, the House of Representatives approved $696.5 billion in defense spending, which includes a base budget of $621.5 billion and $75 billion in ‘Overseas Contingency Operations dollars’, commonly referred to as ‘war money’. Conversely, the Senate passed a $640 billion base defense budget with a $60 billion allocation for war money. Both versions of the budget well exceed the Trump administration’s proposal, making this defense budget, by far, the largest defense budget in U.S. history. While the U.S.’ current and proposed military spending is massive, the DoD’s “cost of war” report did not take into account other collateral costs of war, including veteran’s benefits and other related costs.

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Will Belgium extradite Puidgemont? 8 of his ministers are already in jail.

Barcelona Council Says Catalan Government Legitimate, Independence Is Not (CN)

Barcelona City Council has declared that the government dismissed by Spain after the application of Article 155 is “legitimate,” although it does not recognize Catalonia as an official republic. After meeting on Thursday, the council approved the proposal put forth by pro-independence party Esquerra Republicana (ERC) to “recognize the government that emerged from the polls on September 27 as the legitimate government of Catalonia,” with votes in favour from Barcelona en Comú (BeC), ERC, PDeCAt, and the anti-capitalist party CUP. Votes against came from the Socialists (PSC), the Catalan People’s Party (PP), and Ciutadans (Cs).

CUP also proposed a motion to “recognize the proclamation of the Catalan Republic approved by the Parliament of Catalonia on October 27.” Although this motion received support from ERC, PDeCAT, and the CUP, it received more votes against from BeC, Cs, PSC, and PP. Alfred Bosch, president of ERC warned that “the fact that the Catalan government has been dismissed, and its powers passed on to the Spanish government, will have an effect on Barcelona.” Barcelona’s mayor, Ada Colau, received criticism from CUP representative María José Lecha, who said the mayor cannot be “neutral or equidistant” in the face of the judicial persecution of the October 1 referendum, and that she must side either with “the oppressor or the oppressed.”

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What a story this still is.

Kim Dotcom Wins Settlement From New Zeland Police Over 2012 Dawn Raid (NZH)

Kim Dotcom and his former wife Mona have accepted a confidential settlement from the police over the raid which saw him arrested, saying he did so to protect their children and because the Government “recently changed for the better”. He said that their previous desire to see accountability had been trumped by wanting to “do what was best for our children” by bringing an end to the court case. The settlement came after a damages claim was filed with the High Court over what was considered an “unreasonable” use of force when the anti-terrorism Special Tactics Group raided his $30 million mansion in January 2012. The raid was part of a worldwide FBI operation to take down Dotcom’s Megaupload file-sharing website which was claimed to be at the centre of a massive criminal copyright operation.

Dotcom and three others were arrested and await extradition to the United States on charges which could land them in prison for decades. The NZ Herald has learned earlier settlements were reached between police and others arrested, including Bram van der Kolk and Mathias Ortmann. It was believed their settlements were six-figure sums and it is likely Dotcom would seek more as the main target in the raid. He was also the focus of risk assessments used to justify the use of the anti-terrorism squad which carried out a helicopter assault at dawn. Those assessments included photographs of Dotcom carrying shotguns – pictures taken while clay pigeon shooting – and descriptions of him as violent despite a lack of evidence to support the claim.

The court challenge also questioned “visual surveillance” which had not been authorised by the court. Evidence has emerged in court hearings of police watching the Dotcom Mansion from neighbouring properties, and scouting the mansion interior with a hidden camera carried on to the property by a local police officer on a goodwill meeting the day before the raid.

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Ban it. Ban the whole industry. We cannot afford this to continue. Let’s feed ourselves without poisoning ourselves in the process.

Monsanto Halts Launch Of Chemical After Farmers Complain Of Rashes (R.)

Monsanto put on hold the launch of a chemical designed to be applied to crop seeds on Wednesday following reports it causes rashes on people, in the latest instance of complaints about a company product that was approved by U.S. environmental regulators. Monsanto froze plans for commercial sales of the product called NemaStrike, which can protect corn, soybeans and cotton from worms that reduce yields. The company said it conducted three years of field tests across the United States in preparation for a full launch and that more than 400 people used it this year as part of a trial. The delayed launch of what Monsanto calls a blockbuster product is another setback for the company, which is already battling to keep a new version of a herbicide on the market in the face of complaints that it damaged millions of acres of crops this summer.

“There have been limited cases of skin irritation, including rashes, that appear to be associated with the handling and application of this seed treatment product,” Brian Naber, U.S. commercial operations lead for Monsanto, said in a letter to customers about NemaStrike. Some users who suffered problems may not have followed instructions to wear protective equipment, such as gloves, company spokeswoman Christi Dixon said. The company expected NemaStrike to launch across up to 8 million U.S. crop acres in fiscal year 2018, Chief Executive Hugh Grant said on a conference call last month. The product was “priced at a premium that reflects its consistent yield protection” against worms known as nematodes, he said.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) did extensive evaluations of the product before approving it for use, according to Monsanto, which has described NemaStrike as “blockbuster technology.” [..] “The technology is effective and can be used safely when following label instructions,” Monsanto said. The EPA last year approved use of Monsanto’s new version of a weed killer using a chemical known as dicamba on crops during the summer growing season.Problems have also emerged with the herbicide since the agency’s approval. Farmers have complained it evaporates and drifts from where it is applied, causing damage to crops that cannot resist it.

Read more …

Aug 122017
 
 August 12, 2017  Posted by at 8:39 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,  4 Responses »


Giorgio de Chirico The Enigma of the Hour 1910

 

The Logic of War (Jim Rickards)
Russia Says Bellicose Rhetoric On North Korea Is ‘Over The Top’ (R.)
US ‘Volatility Index’ Spikes To Highest Level Since Election (G.)
Chinese Foreign Real-Estate Spending Plunges 82% (ZH)
Battle of the Behemoths (Jim Kunstler)
US Poised To Become World’s Largest Public-Private Partnership Market (IBT)
The Fed Has 6,200 Tons of Gold in a Manhattan Basement—Or Does It? (WSJ)
UK Risks International Court Case Over Theresa May’s Brexit Plans (Ind.)
Greenspan’s Legacy Explains Current Conundrums (DDMB)
Social Security Requires Bailout 60x Greater Than 2008 Bank Bailout (Black)
All Is Not As It Seems In Venezuela (Ren.)
Asylum Seekers At Canada Border Tents Unfazed By Delays, Uncertainty (R.)
People Smugglers Pushing Refugees To Their Deaths At Sea Off Yemen (Ind.)

 

 

There are different kinds of logic. I hope for once Rickards is wrong.

The Logic of War (Jim Rickards)

This was the week that the logic of war collided with the illogic of bubbles. So far, the bubble is winning, but that’s about to change. The “logic of war” is an English translation of a French phrase, la logique de la guerre, which refers to the dynamic of how wars begin despite the fact that the war itself will be horrendous, counterproductive, and possibly end in complete defeat. [..] Given these outcomes, “logic” says that war should be prevented. This would not be difficult to do. If North Korea verifiably stopped its weapons testing and engaged in some dialogue, the U.S. would meet the regime more than halfway with sanctions relief and some expanded trade and investment opportunities.

The problem is that the logic of war proceeds differently than the logic of optimization. It relies on imperfect assessments of the intentions and capabilities of an adversary in an existential situation that offers little time to react. North Korea believes that the U.S. is bluffing based in part on the prior failures of the U.S. to back up “red line” declarations in Syria, and based on the horrendous damage that would be inflicted upon America’s key ally, South Korea. North Korea also looks at regimes like Libya and Iraq that gave up nuclear weapons programs and were overthrown. It looks at regimes like Iran that did not give up nuclear weapons programs and were not overthrown.

It concludes that in dealing with the U.S., the best path is not to give up your nuclear weapons programs. That’s not entirely irrational given the history of U.S. foreign policy over the past thirty years. But, the U.S. is not bluffing. Trump is not Obama, he does not use rhetoric for show, he means what he says. Trump’s cabinet officials, generals and admirals also mean what they say. No flag officer wants to lose an American city like Los Angeles on his or her watch. They won’t take even a small chance of letting that happen. The Trump administration will end the North Korean threat now before the stakes are raised to the nuclear level. Despite the logic of diplomacy and negotiation, the war with North Korea is coming. That’s the logic of war.

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It is crucial that Trump communicate with Putin and Lavrov. And Washington does all it can to prevent it. Let’s hope they’ve found a back channel.

Russia Says Bellicose Rhetoric On North Korea Is ‘Over The Top’ (R.)

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Friday the risks of a military conflict over North Korea’s nuclear program are very high, and Moscow is deeply worried by the mutual threats being traded by Washington and Pyongyang. “Unfortunately, the rhetoric in Washington and Pyongyang is now starting to go over the top,” Lavrov said. “We still hope and believe that common sense will prevail.” Asked at a forum for Russian students about the risks of the stand-off escalating into armed conflict, he said: “The risks are very high, especially taking into account the rhetoric.” “Direct threats of using force are heard… The talk (in Washington) is that there must be a preventive strike made on North Korea, while Pyongyang is threatening to carry out a missile strike on the U.S. base in Guam. These (threats) continue non-stop, and they worry us a lot.”

“I won’t get into guessing what happens ‘if’. We will do whatever we can to prevent this ‘if’.” “My personal opinion is that when you get close to the point of a fight breaking out, the side that is stronger and cleverer should take the first step away from the threshold of danger,” said Lavrov, in remarks broadcast on state television. He encouraged Pyongyang and Washington to sign up to a joint Russian-Chinese plan, under which North Korea would freeze its missile tests and the United States and South Korea would impose a moratorium on large-scale military exercises. “If this double freezing finally takes place, then we can sit down and start from the very beginning – to sign a paper which will stress respect for the sovereignty of all those parties involved, including North Korea,” Lavrov said.

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And that’s a good thing. Ultra low VIX means no price discovery.

US ‘Volatility Index’ Spikes To Highest Level Since Election (G.)

A US stock market gauge known as the “fear index” has spiked to its highest level since Donald Trump was elected president in a sign that his brinkmanship with North Korea is starting to unnerve investors. The Vix index has been at record lows in recent weeks but has been rattled by the remarks Trump has been making about North Korea. A breakthrough in Pyongyang’s weapons programme prompted Trump to warn on Tuesday that he would unleash “fire and fury like the world has never seen” on North Korea if the regime continued to threaten the US. On Friday the US president tweeted that US military options were “locked and loaded” for use if Pyongyang “acted unwisely”. The Vix index measures expectations of volatility on the S&P 500 index of the US’s largest publicly quoted companies.

Its rise in the early hours of Friday prompted Neil Wilson, a senior market analyst at financial firm ETX Capital, to comment: “Volatility is back.” “The Vix just popped to its highest since the election of Donald Trump as jitters about North Korea roil risk sentiment. It’s about time the market woke up – nothing like the prospect of a nuclear standoff to sharpen mind of investors who had become a tad complacent,” said Wilson. oshua Mahony, a market analyst at IG, said: “For a week that has been largely devoid of major economic releases, Donald Trump’s confrontational stance with North Korea has raised volatility across the board, pushing the Vix from a rock-bottom reading on Tuesday, to the highest level in almost a year. “This has been a week of two halves, with complaints over a lack of volatility giving way to complaints over unpredictable volatility,” he added.

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Does that cover all housing bubbles? Well, not Holland and Scandinavia, probably.

Chinese Foreign Real-Estate Spending Plunges 82% (ZH)

Earlier this month, Morgan Stanley warned that commercial real estate prices in New York City, Sydney and London would likely take a hit over the next two years as Chinese investors pull out of foreign property markets. The pullback, they said, would be driven by China’s latest crackdown on capital outflows and corporate leverage, which they argued would lead to an 84% drop in overseas property investment by Chinese corporations during 2017, and another 18% in 2018. Sure enough, official data released by China’s Ministry of Commerce have proven the first part of Morgan Stanley’s thesis correct. Data showed that outbound investment in real estate was particularly hard hit during the first half of the year, plunging 82%. “According to official data, outbound investment by China’s real estate sector fell 82% year-on-year in the first half, to comprise just 2% of all outbound investment for the period.”

Overall, outbound direct investment to 145 countries declined to $48.19 billion, an annualized drop of 45.8%, according to China Banking News. The decline is a result of a crackdown by Chinese authorities after corporations went on a foreign-acquisition spree that saw them spend nearly $300 billion buying foreign companies and assets, with China’s four most acquisitive firms accounting for $55 billion, or 18%, of the country’s total. The acquisitions aggravated capital outflows, creating a mountain of debt and making regulators uneasy. Late last month, Chinese authorities ordered Anbang Insurance Group to liquidate its overseas holdings. In June, authorities asked local banks to evaluate whether Anbang and three of its peers posed a “systemic risk” to the country’s financial system. As Morgan Stanley noted, these firms were responsible for billions of dollars of commercial real-estate investments in the US, UK, Australia and Hong Kong.

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“..a great deal of American suburbia will have to be abandoned..”

Battle of the Behemoths (Jim Kunstler)

This has been a sensational year for retail failure so far with a record number of brick-and-mortar store closings. But it is hardly due solely to Internet shopping. The nation was vastly over-stored by big chain operations. Their replication was based on a suicidal business model that demanded constant expansion, and was nourished by a regime of ultra-low interest rates promulgated by the Federal Reserve (and its cheerleaders in the academic econ departments). The goal of the business model was to enrich the executives and shareholders as rapidly as possible, not to build sustainable enterprise. As the companies march off the cliff of bankruptcy, these individuals will be left with enormous fortunes — and the American landscape will be left with empty, flat-roofed, throwaway buildings unsuited to adaptive re-use. Eventually, the empty Walmarts will be among them.

Just about everybody yakking in the public arena assumes that commerce will just migrate to the web. Think again. What you’re seeing now is a very short term aberration, the terminal expression of the cheap oil economy that is fumbling to a close. Apart from Amazon’s failure so far to ever show a corporate profit, Internet shopping requires every purchase to make a journey in a truck to the customer. In theory, it might not seem all that different from the Monkey Ward model of a hundred years ago. But things have changed in this land. We made the unfortunate decision to suburbanize the nation, and now we’re stuck with the results: a living arrangement that can’t be serviced or maintained going forward, a living arrangement with no future. This includes the home delivery of every product under sun to every farflung housing subdivision from Rancho Cucamonga to Hackensack.

Of course, the Big Box model, like Walmart, has also recruited every householder in his or her SUV into the company’s distribution network, and that’s going to become a big problem, too, as the beleaguered middle-class finds itself incrementally foreclosed from Happy Motoring and sinking into conditions of overt peonage. The actual destination of retail in America is to be severely downscaled and reorganized locally. Main Street will be the new mall, and it will be a whole lot less glitzy than the failed gallerias of yore, but it will represent a range of activities that will put a lot of people back to work at the community level. It will necessarily entail the rebuilding of local and regional wholesale networks and means of distribution that don’t require trucking.

Read more …

But then combine Jim Kunstler’s piece with this:

US Poised To Become World’s Largest Public-Private Partnership Market (IBT)

As the debate over infrastructure policy intensifies, there is no dispute that the Trump administration’s initiative could open up a huge new market for financial firms on Wall Street. The American Society of Civil Engineers estimates that there are $4.6 trillion worth of needed investments to maintain and upgrade infrastructure throughout the U.S. In light of that, recent reports from Moody’s and AIG project a financial jackpot for private investors, with the latter predicting that America “is poised to become the largest public-private partnership market in the world for infrastructure projects.” That market appears to be a ripe profit opportunity for politically connected firms. On top of Pence’s overtures to investors in Australia, a country that has aggressively embraced privatization, Trump recently secured a pledge from Saudi Arabia’s government to invest billions in American infrastructure.

The Saudi money is slated to flow through the private equity firm Blackstone, which has been eyeing opportunities to profit from American infrastructure privatization since its CEO, Stephen Schwarzman, was named by Trump to run a White House economic advisory panel shaping federal infrastructure policy. At the same time, Cohn’s former employer, Goldman Sachs, has said in its financial filings that it too has plans to expand investment in privatized infrastructure. (Neither Schwarzman or Cohn have recused themselves from working on White House infrastructure policy that could benefit the firms, even though both own stakes in the companies.)

In the United States, the recent enthusiasm for public-private partnerships has stemmed from the visible success of several late-1990s toll road projects such as California’s State Route 91, the first fully-automated toll road with electronic transponders in the U.S., and Virginia’s Dulles Greenway, according to Robert Poole, the director of transportation policy at the libertarian Reason Foundation. More recently, he noted, states like Florida have enacted laws streamlining the legislative approval process for public-private partnership transportation projects. Both the GOP and Democratic Party listed infrastructure spending as objectives in their 2016 platforms. The Republican platform explicitly embraced public-private partnerships and “outside investment.” Prominent Democrats from former President Barack Obama to Bill and Hillary Clinton have also warmed to the idea of public-private partnerships — and the party’s officials have led some of America’s earliest precedent-setting privatization projects.

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Do we send in Dan Brown and Tom Hanks?

The Fed Has 6,200 Tons of Gold in a Manhattan Basement—Or Does It? (WSJ)

Eighty feet below the streets of lower Manhattan, a Federal Reserve vault protected by armed guards contains about 6,200 tons of gold. Or doesn’t. The Fed tells visitors its basement vault holds the world’s biggest official gold stash and values it at $240 billion to $260 billion. But “no one at all can be sure the gold is really there except Fed employees with access,” said Ronan Manly, a precious-metals analyst at gold dealer BullionStar in Singapore. If it is all there, he said, the central bank has “never in its history provided any proof.” Mr. Manly is among gold aficionados who wonder if the bank is hiding something about what it’s hiding. Other theorists suspect the gold beneath the New York Fed’s headquarters at 33 Liberty St. may be gold-plated fakes. Some conspiracy-minded investors think the Fed has been secretly leasing out the gold to manipulate prices.

“There has to have been a central bank spewing their gold into the market,” said John Embry, an investment strategist for Sprott Asset Management in Toronto until 2014 who once managed its gold fund. “The gold price didn’t act right” during the time he was watching it and the likely explanation for the movement was Fed action, said Mr. Embry. Fed officials have heard theories about their gold holdings for many years and don’t think much of them. After this article was published, a Fed spokeswoman said the Fed doesn’t own any of the gold housed at the New York Fed, which “does not use it in any way for any purposes including loaning or leasing it out.” The Fed has been selective in giving details about the contents of the vault and in the past has said it can’t comment on individual customer accounts due to confidentiality agreements.

[..] The Fed gives some information about the vault on a website and offers tours. A guide on one tour gave some details: Inside is enough oxygen for a person to survive 72 hours, should someone get trapped; custodians wear magnesium shoe covers to help prevent injuries, should they drop 27-pound bars; the Fed charges $1.75 a bar to move gold but nothing to store it; most of the gold is owned by foreign governments. [..] Visitors on vault tours see only a display sample and can’t verify bars up close. “All you see is the front row of gold bars,” said James Turk, co-founder of Goldmoney, a gold custodian. “There’s no way of knowing how deep the chamber is or how many rows there are.” Mr. Turk, based in London, believes much of the gold has been “hypothecated,” or lent out to other parties, and then rehypothecated, or lent to multiple parties at once. In doing so, he says, “central banks actually own less gold than people believe.”

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A phenomenal mess lies in your future. Wait till various courts get involved, representing entirely different jurisdictions, different laws.

UK Risks International Court Case Over Theresa May’s Brexit Plans (Ind.)

Britain risks a new Brexit fight in international courts if it tries to quit the EU’s single market without giving other countries official notice, The Independent can reveal. Legal experts, including one who advised the Treasury, agree Theresa May will leave the UK open to legal action in The Hague if she pulls out of the European Economic Area (EEA) without formally telling its other members 12 months in advance, to avoid disrupting their trade. The notice is demanded by an international agreement, but ministers do not intend to follow the process because, insiders believe, they want to avoid a Commons vote on staying in the EEA – and, therefore, the single market – that they might lose. As well as the a court battle, experts warn the stigma from breaking the agreement could also make it harder for Britain to secure the trade deals it desperately needs to secure the economy after Brexit.

Pro-EU MPs hope the legal opinion will help persuade the Commons to force and win the vote on staying in the EEA planned for the autumn. The Government has insisted EEA membership will end automatically with EU withdrawal but former Treasury legal adviser Charles Marquand, said: “A failure by the UK to give notice of its intention to leave would, I think, be a breach of the EEA Agreement, which is an international treaty.” The barrister said it was difficult to predict how another EEA states might seek to take action, if it believed its single market rights had been removed wrongly. But he added: “I believe there is a potential for international proceedings. One possibility is the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague.”

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Are we going to lock him up?

Greenspan’s Legacy Explains Current Conundrums (DDMB)

On Aug. 11, 1987, the U.S. Senate confirmed Alan Greenspan as chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. Thirty years later, the fallout from that occasion is still being felt around the world as the central bank’s focus shifted under Greenspan from economics and the banking system to the financial industry. Greenspan’s first speech as Fed chairman took place less than a month into his tenure when he dedicated the Jacksonville, Florida, branch of the Atlanta Fed. Some 73 miles north of where he stood was Jekyll Island, Georgia, where the foundations of the Fed were first laid in November 1910. Rather than look back at the Fed’s roots, however, Greenspan peered into its future: “We have entered the age of the truly global marketplace. Today the monetary policy decisions of our nation reverberate around the globe.”

Those words resonate today as policy makers worldwide struggle to extricate themselves from extraordinary levels of market intervention. How did we get to the point where central bankers endeavor to resolve structural issues with the power of the printing press? Greenspan’s legacy provides the answers. It is notable that in the days before the Senate vote, President Ronald Reagan cited the “banking system” as one of the Fed’s primary responsibilities. While Greenspan included banking system stability as one of the “instrumentalities” of the government’s designs of the Fed, he emphasized that the Fed was “NOT just another federal agency.” The Fed was also a leader “within the financial industry.” It wouldn’t take long for the financial system to stress test Greenspan’s resolve. On Oct. 19, 1987, the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 22.6% in what remains the steepest one-day loss on record. From his first day in office to that October closing low, the Dow was down by 35%.

Few recall that Greenspan was in the air on his way to Dallas during the worst of Black Monday’s selloff, where he was scheduled to address the American Bankers Association convention the next morning. It wasn’t until he landed that he learned of the day’s events. Against his wishes, Greenspan never made it to the podium; he thought the better way to communicate calm was by maintaining his scheduled appearance. Compelled back to Washington due to the gravity of the situation, Greenspan issued the following statement in his name at 8:41 a.m. that Tuesday, less than an hour before stocks opened for trading: “The Federal Reserve, consistent with its responsibilities as the Nation’s central bank, affirmed today its readiness to serve as a source of liquidity to support the economic and financial system.”

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Best reason ever for a Universal Basic Income.

Social Security Requires Bailout 60x Greater Than 2008 Bank Bailout (Black)

A few weeks ago the Board of Trustees of Social Security sent a formal letter to the United States Senate and House of Representatives to issue a dire warning: Social Security is running out of money. Given that tens of millions of Americans depend on this public pension program as their sole source of retirement income, you’d think this would have been front page news… and that every newspaper in the country would have reprinted this ominous projection out of a basic journalistic duty to keep the public informed about an issue that will affect nearly everyone. But that didn’t happen. The story was hardly picked up. It’s astonishing how little attention this issue receives considering it will end up being one of the biggest financial crises in US history. That’s not hyperbole either– the numbers are very clear.

The US government itself calculates that the long-term Social Security shortfall exceeds $46 TRILLION. In other words, in order to be able to pay the benefits they’ve promised, Social Security needs a $46 trillion bailout. Fat chance. That amount is over TWICE the national debt, and nearly THREE times the size of the entire US economy. Moreover, it’s nearly SIXTY times the size of the bailout that the banking system received back in 2008. So this is a pretty big deal. More importantly, even though the Social Security Trustees acknowledge that the fund is running out of money, their projections are still wildly optimistic. In order to build their long-term financial models, Social Security’s administrators have to make certain assumptions about the future. What will interest rates be in the future? What will the population growth rate be? How high (or low) will inflation be?

These variables can dramatically impact the outcome for Social Security. For example, Social Security assumes that productivity growth in the US economy will average between 1.7% and 2% per year. This is an important assumption: the higher US productivity growth, the faster the economy will grow. And this ultimately means more tax revenue (and more income) for the program. But -actual- US productivity growth is WAY below their assumption. Over the past ten years productivity growth has been about 25% below their expectations. And in 2016 US productivity growth was actually NEGATIVE.

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Venezuela is dead simple. It has the largest oil reserves on the planet. Chavez kept Exxon and CIA out. Now they’re moving back in.

All Is Not As It Seems In Venezuela (Ren.)

An opposition backed by Exxon Mobil, a failed military coup that killed 40 people, staged photo-propaganda designed to create the perception of a failed state: Foreign powers have conspired to create the perfect conditions for yet another western ‘humanitarian’ intervention, this time in Venezuela. Former US Army solider turned documentary-maker, Mike Prysner, says the reality of Venezuela is very different from what we are being fed by the western press. [..] When I heard that Jeremy Corbyn had condemned violence on both sides in Venezuela, I was angry at first – because 80% or more of the violence is being committed by anti-government protesters. Their violence has far surpassed anything committed against them – and what has been done to them has been deliberately provoked. But then I began to recognise the skill in his statement – forcing everyone to confront the reality of what’s happening on the ground there. The reality bears little resemblance to what’s being presented to people.

The BBC is responsible for some of the most disingenuous portrayals. They’re showing violent protesters as if they’re some kind of defenders of peaceful protesters against a repressive police force, but in reality peaceful protests have been untouched by police. What happens is that the Guarimbas (violent, armed opposition groups) follow the peaceful protests and when they come near police, they insert themselves in between the two. They then push and push and push until there’s a reaction – and they have cameras and journalists on hand to record the reaction, so it looks like the police are being aggressive. We were once filming a protest and a group of Guarimbas challenged us. If we’d said we were with teleSur, at the very least they’d have beaten us and taken our equipment. But we told them we were American freelance journalists – they need Americans to film them and publicise them, so we were accepted.

The battles with police are actually quite small, but they’re planned, co-ordinated to disrupt different area each day to maximise their impact – but in most places life is pretty normal. It’s all about the portrayal. The US media mobilise everything for Guarimbas – there will be maybe 150 people but it’s made to look bigger and tactics are 100% violent – trying to provoke a response. And the level of police restraint is remarkable – the government knows the world is watching. One evening protesters were burning buildings for around two hours, with no intervention by the police. They only react when the protesters start throwing petrol bombs at the police or military, or their bases – but as soon as they do react, the Guarimbas film as if they’re victims of an unprovoked attack.

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Over 200 a day into Québec alone.

Asylum Seekers At Canada Border Tents Unfazed By Delays, Uncertainty (R.)

Asylum seekers, mainly from Haiti, clambering over a gully from upstate New York into Canada on Friday were undeterred by the prospect of days in border tents, months of uncertainty and signs of a right-wing backlash in Quebec. More than 200 people a day are illegally walking across the U.S. border into Quebec to seek asylum, government officials said. Army tents have been erected near the border to house up to 500 people as they undergo security screenings. Over 4,000 asylum seekers have walked into Canada in the first half of this year, with some citing U.S. President Donald Trump’s tougher stance on immigration. The cars carrying the latest asylum seekers begin arriving at dawn in Champlain, New York, across from the Canadian border.

On Friday, the first groups included two young Haitian men, a family of five from Yemen and a Haitian family with young twins. “We have no house. We have no family. If we return we have nowhere to sleep, no money to eat,” said a Haitian mother of a 2-year-old boy, who declined to give her name. Each family pauses a moment when a Royal Canadian Mounted police officer warns them they will be arrested if they cross the border illegally, before walking a well-trodden path across the narrow gully into Canada. Asylum seekers are crossing the border illegally because a loophole in a U.S. pact allows anyone who manages to enter Canada to file an asylum claim and stay in Canada while they await their application outcome.

Because the pact requires refugees to claim asylum in whatever country they first arrive, they would be turned back to the United States at legal border crossings. They Haitian family is arrested immediately and bussed to the makeshift camp. Border agents led a line of about two dozen asylum seekers on Friday into a government building at Saint-Bernard-de-Lacolle to be processed. The Red Cross is providing food, hygiene items and telephone access, spokesman Carl Boisvert said. He estimated the fenced-off camp, which has been separated into sections for families and single migrants, is about half full. Border staff and settlement agencies are straining to accommodate the influx, which has been partly spurred by false rumors of guaranteed residency permits.

Read more …

The values of our own lives are set by how we value other people’s lives.

People Smugglers Pushing Refugees To Their Deaths At Sea Off Yemen (Ind.)

At least 19 migrants are presumed to have drowned after 160 people were forced from a boat into rough seas off the coast of Yemen by smugglers in what may be a worrying new trend, the UN migration agency has said. The report from the International Organisation for Migration came less than a day after it said up to 50 migrants from Ethiopia and Somalia were “deliberately drowned” by smugglers who pushed them from a separate boat off the coast of Shabwa province in southern Yemen. “We’re wondering if this is a new trend,” Olivia Headon, an IOM spokesperson, told The Independent. “The smugglers are well aware of what’s happening in Yemen, so it may just be they’re trying to protect their own neck while putting other people’s lives at risk.” Six bodies were found on the beach, while 13 remain missing, presumed dead, Ms Headon said.

Read more …

Aug 012017
 
 August 1, 2017  Posted by at 8:45 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , ,  2 Responses »


Paul Cézanne Young Italian Woman at a Table c1900

 

How Can The Richest Nation On Earth Be Lagging So Far Behind Its Peers? (BBG)
With LIBOR Dead, $400 Trillion In Assets Are Stuck In Limbo (ZH)
Amazon And The 110% Surge In US Retail Bankruptcies (ZH)
No Bubble in Stocks But Look Out When Bonds Pop, Greenspan Says (BBG)
Trump Got This One Right: Shutting Down The CIA’s Ghost War In Syria (WS)
The Tweet That Is Shaking the War Party (David Stockman)
Pentagon Offers To Arm Ukraine, McCain Delighted (ZH)
Killing Them is Killing Us (Robert Gore)
Scaramucci’s China Dealings Pushed Him Out Of White House – Rickards (CNBC)
Unsecured UK Consumer Credit Tops £200 Billion For First Time Since 2008 (G.)
Moody’s Warns Of Growing UK Household Debt As Brexit Downturn Looms (Ind.)
Facebook AI Creates Its Own Language In Creepy Preview Of Our Future (F.)
Narratives Are Not Truths (Jim Kunstler)
Aid Groups Snub Italian Code Of Conduct On Mediterranean Rescues (G.)

 

 

I blame Darwin.

How Can The Richest Nation On Earth Be Lagging So Far Behind Its Peers? (BBG)

What do the economists at the IMF see when they look at the U.S.? An economy in the midst of a long expansion (“its third longest expansion since 1850”), with “persistently strong” job growth, “subdued” inflation and something close to “full employment.” But also this: For some time now there has been a general sense that household incomes are stagnating for a large share of the population, job opportunities are deteriorating, prospects for upward mobility are waning, and economic gains are increasingly accruing to those that are already wealthy. This sense is generally borne out by economic data and when comparing the U.S. with other advanced economies. The IMF then goes on to compare the U.S. with 23 other advanced economies in the OECD in this chart:

[..] the overall point is that the U.S. has been losing ground relative to other OECD members in most measures of living standards. 1 And in the areas where the U.S. hasn’t lost ground (poverty rates, high school graduation rates), it was at or near the bottom of the heap to begin with. The clear message is that the U.S. – the richest nation on Earth, as is frequently proclaimed, although it’s actually not the richest per capita – is increasingly becoming the developed world’s poor relation as far as the actual living standards of most of its population go. This analysis is contained in the staff report of the IMF’s annual “consultation” with the U.S., which was published last week. Another IMF report released last week, an update to its World Economic Outlook that downgraded short-term growth forecasts for the U.S. and U.K., got a lot more attention. But the consultation report is more interesting.

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With Libor shut down to prevent revelations of involvement in manipulation by ‘higher-ups’, what will these same ‘higher-ups’ opt to use instead? Who has the political clout to make the decisions?

They better hurry: “moving an existing $9.6 trillion retail mortgage market, $3.5 trillion commercial real estate market, $3.4 trillion loan market and a $350 trillion derivatives market is a herculean task.”

With LIBOR Dead, $400 Trillion In Assets Are Stuck In Limbo (ZH)

In an unexpected announcement, earlier this week the U.K.’s top regulator, the Financial Conduct Authority which is tasked with overseeing Libor, announced that the world’s most important, and manipulated, benchmark rate will be phased out by 2021, catching countless FX, credit, derivative, and other traders by surprise because while much attention had been given to possible LIBOR alternatives across the globe (in a time when the credibility of the Libor was non-existent) this was the first time an end date had been suggested for the global benchmark, which as we explained on Thursday, had died from disuse over the past 5 years.

Commenting on the decision, NatWest Markets’ Blake Gwinn told Bloomberg that the decision was largely inevitable: “There had never been an answer as to how you get market participants to adopt a new benchmark. It was clear at some point authorities were going to force them. The FCA can compel people to participate in Libor. What can ICE do if they’ve lost the ability to get banks to submit Libor rates?” And while the rationale for replacing Libor is well understood (for those unfamiliar, read David Enrich’s “The Spider Network”), there are still no clear alternatives. Ultimately, as Bank of America calculates, “moving an existing $9.6 trillion retail mortgage market, $3.5 trillion commercial real estate market, $3.4 trillion loan market and a $350 trillion derivatives market is a herculean task.”

And with nearly half a quadrillion dollar in securities referncing a benchmark that is set to expire in under 5 years, the biggest problem is one of continuity: as Bloomberg calculated last week, in addition to the hundreds of trillion in referencing securities, there is also currently an open interest of 170,000 eurodollar futures contracts expiring in 2022 and beyond – contracts that settle into a benchmark that will no longer exist. “What are existing contract holders and market makers supposed to do?” Then there is the question of succession: with over $300 trillion in derivative trades, and countless billions in floating debt contracts, referening Libor, the pressing question is what will replace it, and how will the transition be implemented seamlessly?

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Tech monopolies are devastating economies.

Amazon And The 110% Surge In US Retail Bankruptcies (ZH)

As Amazon flirts with a $500 billion market cap, letting Jeff Bezos try on the title of world’s richest man on for size if only for a few hours, for Amazon’s competitors it’s “everything must go” day everyday, as the bad news in the retail sector continue to pile up with the latest Fitch report that the default rate for distressed retailers spiked again in July. According to the rating agency, the trailing 12-month high-yield default rate among U.S. retailers rose to 2.9% in mid-July from 1.8% at the end of June, after J. Crew completed a $566 million distressed-debt exchange. Meanwhile, with the shale sector flooded with Wall Street’s easy money, the overall high-yield default rate tumbled to 1.9% in the same period from 2.2% at the end of June as $4.7 billion of defaulted debt – mostly in the energy sector – rolled out of the default universe.

In a note, Fitch levfin sr. director Eric Rosenthal, said that “even with energy prices languishing in the mid $40s, a likely iHeart bankruptcy and retail remaining the sector of concern, the broader default environment remains benign.” He’s right: after the energy sector dominated bankruptcies in the first half of 2016, accounting for 21% of Chapter 11 cases, in H1 2017 the worst two sectors for bankruptcies are financials and consumer discretionary. And if recent trends are an indication, the latter will only get worse as Fitch expects Claire’s, Sears Holdings and Nine West all to default by the end of the year, pushing the default rate to 9%. “The timing on Sears and Claire’s is more uncertain, and our retail forecast would end the year at 5% absent these filings,” Rosenthal wrote. Putting the retail sector woes in context, Reorg First Day has calculated that retail bankruptcies soared 110% in the first half from the year-earlier period, accounting for $6 billion in debt.

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Oracle dementia.

No Bubble in Stocks But Look Out When Bonds Pop, Greenspan Says (BBG)

Equity bears hunting for excess in the stock market might be better off worrying about bond prices, Alan Greenspan says. That’s where the actual bubble is, and when it pops, it’ll be bad for everyone. “By any measure, real long-term interest rates are much too low and therefore unsustainable,” the former Federal Reserve chairman said in an interview. “When they move higher they are likely to move reasonably fast. We are experiencing a bubble, not in stock prices but in bond prices. This is not discounted in the marketplace.” While the consensus of Wall Street forecasters is still for low rates to persist, Greenspan isn’t alone in warning they will break higher quickly as the era of global central-bank monetary accommodation ends.

Deutsche Bank’s Binky Chadha says real Treasury yields sit far below where actual growth levels suggest they should be. Tom Porcelli, chief U.S. economist at RBC Capital Markets, says it’s only a matter of time before inflationary pressures hit the bond market. “The real problem is that when the bond-market bubble collapses, long-term interest rates will rise,” Greenspan said. “We are moving into a different phase of the economy – to a stagflation not seen since the 1970s. That is not good for asset prices.” Stocks, in particular, will suffer with bonds, as surging real interest rates will challenge one of the few remaining valuation cases that looks more gently upon U.S. equity prices, Greenspan argues. While hardly universally accepted, the theory underpinning his view, known as the Fed Model, holds that as long as bonds are rallying faster than stocks, investors are justified in sticking with the less-inflated asset.

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How on earth can Obama and Hillary have supported this?

Trump Got This One Right: Shutting Down The CIA’s Ghost War In Syria (WS)

Earlier this year, President Donald Trump was shown a disturbing video of Syrian rebels beheading a child near the city of Aleppo. It had caused a minor stir in the press as the fighters belonged to the Nour al-Din al-Zenki Movement, a group that had been supported by the CIA as part of its rebel aid program. The footage is haunting. Five bearded men smirk as they surround a boy in the back of a pickup truck. One of them holds the boy’s head with a tight grip on his hair while another mockingly slaps his face. Then, one of them uses a knife to saw the child’s head off and holds it up in the air like a trophy. It is a scene reminiscent of the Islamic State’s snuff videos, except this wasn’t the work of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s men. The murderers were supposed to be the good guys: our allies.

Trump wanted to know why the United States had backed Zenki if its members are extremists. The issue was discussed at length with senior intelligence officials, and no good answers were forthcoming, according to people familiar with the conversations. After learning more worrisome details about the CIA’s ghost war in Syria—including that U.S.-backed rebels had often fought alongside extremists, among them al Qaeda’s arm in the country—the president decided to end the program altogether. On July 19, the Washington Post broke the news of Trump’s decision: “a move long sought by Russia,” the paper’s headline blared. Politicians from both sides of the aisle quickly howled in protest, claiming that Trump’s decision was a surrender to Vladimir Putin.

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I said it before: Stockman’s had enough.

The Tweet That Is Shaking the War Party (David Stockman)

Most of the Donald’s tweets amount to street brawling with his political enemies, but occasionally one of them slices through Imperial Washington’s sanctimonious cant. Indeed, Monday evening’s 140 characters of solid cut right to the bone: “The Amazon Washington Post fabricated the facts on my ending massive, dangerous, and wasteful payments to Syrian rebels fighting Assad…..” Needless to say, we are referencing not the dig at the empire of Bezos, but the characterization of Washington’s anti-Assad policy as “massive, dangerous and wasteful”. No stouter blow to the neocon/Deep State “regime change” folly has ever been issued by an elected public official. Yet there it is – the self-composed words of the man in the Oval Office. It makes you even want to buy some Twitter stock! Predictably, the chief proponent of illegal, covert, cowardly attacks on foreign governments via proxies, mercenaries, drones and special forces, Senator McWar of Arizona, fairly leapt out of his hospital bed to denounce the President’s action: “If these reports are true, the administration is playing right into the hands of Vladimir Putin.”

That’s just plain pathetic because the issue is the gross stupidity and massive harm that has been done by McCain’s personally inspired and directed war on Assad – not Putin and not Russia’s historic role as an ally of the Syrian regime. Since 2011, Senator McCain has been to the region countless times. There he has made it his business to strut about in the manner of an imperial proconsul – advising, organizing and directing a CIA recruited, trained and supplied army of rebels dedicated to the overthrow of Syria’s constitutionally legitimate government. At length, several billions were spent on training and arms, thereby turning a fleeting popular uprising against the despotic Assad regime during the 2011 “Arab spring” into the most vicious, destructive civil war of modern times, if ever. That is, without the massive outside assistance of Washington, Saudi Arabia and the emirates, the Syrian uprising would have been snuffed out as fast as it was in Egypt and Bahrain by dictators which had Washington’s approval and arms.

As it has happened, however, Syria’s great historic cities of Aleppo and Damascus have been virtually destroyed – along with its lesser towns and villages and nearly the entirety of its economy. There are 400,000 dead and 11 million internal and external refugees from an original population of hardly 18 million. The human toll of death, displacement, disease and disorder which has been inflicted on this hapless land staggers the imagination. Yet at bottom this crime against humanity – there is no other word for it – is not mainly Assad’s or Putin’s doing. It can be properly described as “McCain’s War” in the manner in which (Congressman) Charlie Wilson’s War in Afghanistan during the 1980’s created the monster which became Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda.

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And of course they just go on.

Pentagon Offers To Arm Ukraine, McCain Delighted (ZH)

The WSJ reports that, in what appears to be the next gambit by the U.S. Military-Industrial Complex (or “deep state” for those so inclined) to force Trump to “prove” that he did not, in fact, collude or have any ties with Russia or Vladimir Putin, Pentagon and State Department officials have devised plans to hit Russia where it hurts the most, and supply Ukraine with antitank missiles and other weaponry, and are now seeking White House approval at a time when ties between Moscow and Washington are as bad as during any point under the Obama administration. American military officials and diplomats say the arms, which they characterized as defensive, are meant to deter aggressive actions by Moscow, which the U.S. and others say has provided tanks and other sophisticated armaments as well as military advisers to rebels fighting the Kiev government.

The question of course is, “why now?” Since the start of the Crimean conflict, which in turn was the byproduct of a State Department-facilitiated presidential coup in Ukraine, the US has been supporting Russian-speaking insurgents in the country’s east however Washington, wary of escalating the conflict, has largely limited its support for Kiev’s military to so-called non-lethal aid and training. So one attempt at “why now”, is because with Trump reeling, and having already caved on the latest Congressional anti-Russia bill, why not push the president to escalate the Russia conflict to a point where not even his predecessor dared to take it. For now, Trump is unaware of the plan: “A senior administration official said there has been no decision on the armaments proposal and it wasn’t discussed at a high-level White House meeting on Russia last week. The official said President Donald Trump hasn’t been briefed on the plan and his position isn’t known.”

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“The blood never washes away.”

Killing Them is Killing Us (Robert Gore)

There is something eerily fascinating about cold-blooded murderers – a staple of Hollywood thrillers and crime dramas—killing without emotion or remorse. Ordinary humans, afflicted with guilt for minor, not even criminal transgressions, can’t conceive of pulling the trigger and then sitting down for dinner. In real life, the number of people who can is glancingly small. Even for those few, actions have consequences. The blood never washes away. “Live and let live,” is, in American mythology, a benevolent and almost uniquely American attitude. We destroyed Japan and Germany in World War II and then helped rebuild them. Live and let live goes down well with the living, the winners. However, it’s often nothing more than balm for an uneasy conscience, hand sanitizer for bloodstained hands.

A century and a half later, many Southerners lack this “unique” American attitude towards their conquerers in the War of Northern Aggression. The war on terror has laid waste to large swaths of the Middle East and Northern Africa. Cities, towns, and villages have been reduced to smoking, bombed-out rubble, chaos reigns, the carnage is ubiquitous. The US military keeps count of its own personnel wounded and killed, a number in the thousands. Civilian casualties —or collateral damage as the military calls it—across Chaostan (Richard Maybury’s apt coinage) are in the millions, as are the number of people displaced (an estimated 11 million in Syria alone).

Imagine the American fury and media sensationalism if a small US town was carpet-bombed by a foreign power. YouTube’s servers would melt from the overflow of viewers watching videos of parents pulling their dead children from collapsed homes. The war on terror’s refugee flows threaten to upend civic order and submerge the cultures of the countries receiving them. It’s a vicious act of intellectual corruption to maintain that the war on terror does not create terrorists, that those killed, wounded, or displaced have no friends or family who will exact what they consider justified vengeance. The terrorism we see now is lava trickling from a volcano of hatred that has boiled, bubbled, and occasionally erupted for centuries, and will continue to do so. There will be no live and let live. Blood will have blood, not banalities.

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A different perspective.

Scaramucci’s China Dealings Pushed Him Out Of White House – Rickards (CNBC)

The abrupt dismissal of White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci less than two weeks after his appointment may be linked to the outspoken financier’s China dealings. The firing has been widely attributed to Scaramucci’s verbal tirade to a reporter in addition to orders from new chief of staff John F. Kelly. But there’s a third issue that may have played into the decision, Jim Rickards, editor of investment newsletter Strategic Intelligence, told CNBC. The sale of Scaramucci’s hedge fund, SkyBridge Capital, to HNA Capital, a subsidiary of Chinese conglomerate HNA Group, was a red flag for Washington, according to Rickards. The acquisition, which was finalized in January and reportedly values SkyBridge at around $200 million, is currently pending approval from the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States – or CFIUS – a government panel that reviews foreign purchases of American companies for national security risks.

Officially chaired by Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, CFIUS involves multiple U.S. agencies, including the defense, commerce and state departments. Rickards, who previously worked with intelligence officials on CFIUS regarding foreign acquisitions of U.S. financial services firms, said he believes the Skybridge deal was “a sleeper story waiting to come back to haunt the White House.” HNA’s purchase is likely to get rejected amid concerns of Chinese control over U.S. hedge funds and investment banks — a decision that wouldn’t bode well for President Donald Trump’s administration, he said. “My recommendation would have been for CFIUS to turn the deal down…we had always warned ‘don’t let our adversaries such as China or Russia get plugged into the U.S. financial system’…When I was involved, this deal would have not gone through,” he said.

“In some ways, the White House is probably relieved to get rid of Scaramucci because now, no matter what happens to that deal, that burden won’t be with the White House,” Rickards continued. “Using the [New Yorker] interview was great cover to get rid of Scaramucci before the hedge fund deal and national security review blew up in his face.”

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Oh well, someone will always say it’s because of confidence…

Unsecured UK Consumer Credit Tops £200 Billion For First Time Since 2008 (G.)

The financial watchdog has announced fresh measures to protect consumers from spiralling debt as official data showed that borrowing through credit cards, overdrafts and car loans has topped £200bn for the first time since the global financial crisis. The Financial Conduct Authority said it was cracking down on the high cost of overdrafts and reviewing the booming car loan market. The regulator’s latest intervention came as credit ratings agency Moody’s also warned about the growing household debt mountain, saying that some borrowers would struggle to repay their debt as the economy weakened and inflation ate into their salaries. Unsecured consumer credit, which includes credit cards, car loans and overdrafts, peaked in the autumn of 2008 – just as the banking crisis was taking hold.

It fell in subsequent years, but has been rising again since 2014 and is now in touching distance of the pre-crisis lending boom. Data from the Bank of England on Monday showed that it grew by 10% in the year to June, to almost £201bn. The last time outstanding debt was above £200bn was December 2008. In a paper published on Monday, the FCA said that one in six people with debt on credit cards, personal lending and car loans – 2.2 million – were in financial distress. They are more likely to be younger, have children, be unemployed and less educated than others. As households grapple with rising living costs, charities and policymakers have raised concerns that consumers are increasingly turning to loans amid worrying signs of a return to reckless lending by the banks.

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… but in reality it’s not confidence, but poverty that rules Britannia.

Moody’s Warns Of Growing UK Household Debt As Brexit Downturn Looms (Ind.)

A credit rating agency has warned that soaring levels of household debt could leave Britain’s lower-income families dangerously exposed amid signs of an economic downturn linked to Brexit. Moody’s said the UK’s weak economic climate meant it had to downgrade four of the five consumer finance sectors to negative. The agency’s warning over credit came as the Bank of England revealed that the amount borrowed by UK consumers through credit cards, loans and overdrafts had reached £200bn for the first time since the financial crash of 2008. Inflation, triggered by the low pound, is now rising faster than wage growth and has put growing pressure on households, squeezing budgets and causing credit card spending to increase and savings to fall.

In this context, the Bank of England has expressed concerns over surging levels of unsecured consumer borrowing on credit cards, which is going up by more than 10 per cent a year and outstripping income. Moody’s analyst Greg Davies said: “Household debt is high and still growing, leaving consumers vulnerable to an economic downturn, while higher inflation, weaker wage growth and levels of indebtedness leaves those in lower-income brackets the most exposed. “An additional challenge is that households’ capacity to draw on savings to maintain consumption and/or service their consumer debts has significantly diminished.” The credit rating agency has also warned in recent weeks of the potential economic damage if the UK fails to secure an exit trade deal with the EU.

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“Our entire world is wired and connected. An artificial intelligence will eventually figure that out – and figure out how to collaborate and cooperate with other AI systems. Maybe the AI will determine that mankind is a threat, or that mankind is an inefficient waste of resources – conclusions that seems plausible from a purely logical perspective.”

Facebook AI Creates Its Own Language In Creepy Preview Of Our Future (F.)

Facebook shut down an artificial intelligence engine after developers discovered that the AI had created its own unique language that humans can’t understand. Researchers at the Facebook AI Research Lab (FAIR) found that the chatbots had deviated from the script and were communicating in a new language developed without human input. It is as concerning as it is amazing – simultaneously a glimpse of both the awesome and horrifying potential of AI. Artificial Intelligence is not sentient—at least not yet. It may be someday, though – or it may approach something close enough to be dangerous. Ray Kurzweil warned years ago about the technological singularity. The Oxford dictionary defines “the singularity” as, “A hypothetical moment in time when artificial intelligence and other technologies have become so advanced that humanity undergoes a dramatic and irreversible change.”

To be clear, we aren’t really talking about whether or not Alexa is eavesdropping on your conversations, or whether Siri knows too much about your calendar and location data. There is a massive difference between a voice-enabled digital assistant and an artificial intelligence. These digital assistant platforms are just glorified web search and basic voice interaction tools. The level of “intelligence” is minimal compared to a true machine learning artificial intelligence. Siri and Alexa can’t hold a candle to IBM’s Watson. Scientists and tech luminaries, including Elon Musk, Bill Gates, and Steve Wozniak have warned that AI could lead to tragic unforeseen consequences. Eminent physicist Stephen Hawking cautioned in 2014 that AI could mean the end of the human race. “It would take off on its own and re-design itself at an ever increasing rate. Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn’t compete, and would be superseded.”

Why is this scary? Think SKYNET from Terminator, or WOPR from War Games. Our entire world is wired and connected. An artificial intelligence will eventually figure that out – and figure out how to collaborate and cooperate with other AI systems. Maybe the AI will determine that mankind is a threat, or that mankind is an inefficient waste of resources – conclusions that seems plausible from a purely logical perspective.

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Racketeering.

Narratives Are Not Truths (Jim Kunstler)

The American polity is not thriving. It has been incrementally failing to meet its needs for quite a while now, playing games with itself to pretend that it is okay while its institutional organs and economic operations decay. It turns this way and that way ever more desperately, over-steering like a drunk on the highway. It is drunk on the untruths it tells itself in the service of playing games to avoid meeting its real needs. Narratives are not truths. Here is a primary question we might ask ourselves: do we want to live in a healthy society? Do we want to thrive? If so, what are the narratives standing in the way of turning us in the direction? Let’s start with health care, so called, since the failure to do anything about the current disastrous system is so fresh. What’s the narrative there?

That “providers” (doctors and hospitals) can team up with banking operations called “insurance companies” to fairly allocate “services” to the broad population with a little help from the government. No, that’s actually not how it works. The three “players” actually engage in a massive racketeering matrix — that is, they extract enormous sums of money dishonestly from the public they pretend to serve and they do it twice: once by extortionary fees and again by taxes paid to subsidize mitigating the effects of the racketeering. The public has its own narrative, which is that there is no connection between their medical problems and the way they live. The fact is that they eat too much poisonous food because it’s tasty and fun, and they do that because the habits-of-life that they have complicitly allowed to ev0lve in this country offers them paltry rewards otherwise.

They dwell in ugly, punishing surroundings, spend too much time and waste too much money driving cars around it in isolation, and have gone along with every effort to dismantle the armatures of common social exchange that afford what might be called a human dimension of everyday living. So, the medical racket ends up being nearly 20 percent of the economy, while the public gets fatter, sicker, and more anxiously depressed. And there is no sign that we want to disrupt the narratives.

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Well, they got the NGOs fighting each other now. Mission accomplished.

Aid Groups Snub Italian Code Of Conduct On Mediterranean Rescues (G.)

Five aid groups that operate migrant rescue ships in the Mediterranean have refused to sign up to the Italian government’s code of conduct, the Interior Ministry said, but three others backed the new rules. Charity boats have become increasingly important in rescue operations, picking up more than a third of all migrants brought ashore so far this year against less than one percent in 2014, according to the Italian coastguard. Italy, fearing that the groups were facilitating people smuggling from North Africa and encouraging migrants to make the perilous passage to Europe, proposed a code containing around a dozen points for the charities. Those who refused to sign the document had put themselves “outside the organised system of sea rescues, with all the concrete consequences that can have”, the ministry said.

Italy had previously threatened to shut its ports to NGOs that did not sign up, but an source within the Interior Ministry said that in reality those groups would face more checks from Italian authorities. Doctors Without Borders (MSF), which has taken part in many of the rescues of the 95,000 migrants brought to Italy this year, attended a meeting at the Interior Ministry but refused to sign the code. MSF objected most strongly to a requirement that aid boats must take migrants to a safe port themselves, rather than transferring people to other vessels, which allows smaller boats to stay in the area for further rescues. “Our vessels are often overwhelmed by the high number of [migrant] boats … and life and death at sea is a question of minutes,” MSF Italy’s director, Gabriele Eminente, wrote in a letter to the interior minister, Marco Minniti.

“The code of conduct puts at risk this fragile equation of collaboration between different boats,” he continued, adding that MSF still wanted to work with the ministry to improve sea rescues. [..] “For us, the most controversial point … was the commitment to help the Italian police with their investigations and possibly take armed police officers on board,” Jugend Rettet coordinator Titus Molkenbur said. “That is antithetical to the humanitarian principles of neutrality that we adhere to, and we cannot be seen as being part of the conflict.”

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Jul 252017
 
 July 25, 2017  Posted by at 1:31 pm Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , ,  6 Responses »


Walter Langley Never morning wore to evening but some heart did break 1894

 

If there’s one myth -and there are many- that we should invalidate in the cross-over world of politics and economics, it‘s that central banks have saved us from a financial crisis. It’s a carefully construed myth, but it’s as false as can be. Our central banks have caused our financial crises, not saved us from them.

It really should -but doesn’t- make us cringe uncontrollably to see Bank of England governor-for-hire Mark Carney announce -straightfaced- that:

“A decade after the start of the global financial crisis, G20 reforms are building a safer, simpler and fairer financial system. “We have fixed the issues that caused the last crisis. They were fundamental and deep-seated, which is why it was such a major job.”

Or, for that matter, to see Fed chief Janet Yellen declare that there won’t be another financial crisis in her lifetime, while she’s busy-bee busy building that next crisis as we speak. These people are now saying increasingly crazy things, and that should make us pause.

Central banks don’t serve people, or even societies, as that same myth claims. They serve banks. Even if central bankers themselves believe that this is one and the same thing, that doesn’t make it true. And if they don’t understand this, they should never be let anywhere near the positions they hold.

You can pin the moment central banks went awry at any point in time you like. The Bank of England’s foundation in 1694, the Federal Reserve’s in 1913, the ECB much more recently. What’s crucial in the timing is where and when the best interests of the banks split off from those of their societies. Because that is when central banks will stop serving those societies. We are at such a -turning?!- point right now. And it’s been coming for some time, ‘slowly’ working its way towards an inevitable abyss.

Over the past few years the Automatic Earth has argues repeatedly, along several different avenues, that American society was at its richest between the late 1960s and early 1980s. Yet another illustration of this came only yesterday in a Lance Roberts graph:

 

 

Anyone see a recovery in there? Lance uses 1981 as a ‘cut-off’ date, but the GDP growth rate as represented by the dotted line doesn’t really begin to go ‘bad’ until 1986 or so. At the tail end of the late 1960s to early 1980s period, as the American economy was inexorably getting poorer, Alan Greenspan took over as Federal Reserve governor in 1987. A narrative was carefully crafted by and for the media with Greenspan as an ‘oracle’ or even a ‘rock star’, but in reality he has been instrumental in saddling the economy with what will turn out to be insurmountable problems.

Greenspan was a major driving force behind the repeal of Glass-Steagall, which was finally established through the Gramm-Leach-Bliley act of 1999. This was an open political act by the Federal Reserve governor, something that everyone should have then protested, and still should now, but didn’t and doesn’t. Central bankers should be kept far removed from politics, anywhere and everywhere, because they represent a small segment of society, banks, not society as a whole.

Because of the ‘oracle’ narrative, Greenspan was instead praised for saving the world. But all that Greenspan and his accomplices, Robert Rubin and Larry Summers, actually did in getting rid of the 1933 Glass-Steagall act separation between investment- and consumer banking was to open the floodgates of debt, and even more importantly, leveraged debt. All part of the ‘financial innovations’ Greenspan famously lauded for saving and growing economies. It was all just more debt on top of more debt.

 

 

Greenspan et al ‘simply’ did what central bankers do: they represent the best interests of banks. And the world’s central bankers have never looked back. That most people still find it hard to believe that America -and the west- has been getting poorer for the past 30-40 years, goes to show how effective the narratives have been. The world looks richer instead of poorer, after all. That this is exclusively because of rising debt numbers wherever you look is not part of the narratives. Indeed, ruling economic models and theories ignore the role played by both banks and credit in an economy, almost entirely.

Alan Greenspan left as Fed head in 2006, after having wreaked his havoc on America for almost two decades, right before the financial crisis that took off in 2007-2008 became apparent to the world at large. The crisis was largely his doing, but he has escaped just about all the blame for it. Good PR.

With Ben Bernanke, an alleged academic genius on the Great Depression, as Greenspan’s replacement, the Fed just kept going and turned it up a notch. It was no longer possible in the financial world to pretend that banks and people had the same interests, so the former were bailed out at the expense of the latter. The illusionary narrative for the public, however, remained intact. What do people know about finance, anyway? Just make sure the S&P goes up. Easy as pie.

The narrative has switched to Bernanke, and Yellen after him, as well as Mario Draghi at the ECB and Haruhiko Kuroda at the Bank of Japan, saving the world from doom. But once again, they are the ones who are creating the crisis, not the ones saving us from it. They are saving the banks, and saddling the people with the costs.

In the past decade, these central bankers have purchased $20-$50 trillion in bonds, securities and stocks. The only intention, and indeed the only result, is to keep banks from falling over, increase their profits, and maintain the illusion that economies are recovering and growing.

They can only achieve this by creating bubbles wherever they can. Apart from the QE programs under which they bought all those ‘assets’, they used -and still do- another tool: lowering interest rates to the point where borrowing money becomes so cheap everyone can do it, and then do it some more. It has worked miracles in blowing stock market valuations out of all realistic proportions, and in doing the same for housing markets in locations all over the globe.

The role of China’s central bank in this is interesting too, but it is such an open and obvious political tool that it really deserves its own discussion and narrative. Basically, Beijing did what it saw Washington do and thought: why hold back?

 

Fast forward to today and we see that we’ve landed in a whole new, and next, phase of the story. The world’s central banks are all stuck in their own – self-created – bubbles and narratives. They all talk about how they solved all the issues, and how they will now return to normal, but the sad truth is they can’t and they know it.

The Fed stopped purchasing assets through its QE program a while back, but it could only do that because Frankfurt and Japan took over. And now they, too, talk about quitting QE. Slowly, yada yada, because of control, yada yada, but they know they must. They also know they can’t. Because the entire recovery narrative is a mirage, a fata morgana, a sleight of hand.

And that means we have arrived at a point that is new and very dangerous for the entire global economy and all of its people.

 

That is, the world’s central bankers now have an incentive to create the next crisis. This is because they know this crisis is inevitable, and they know their masters and protégés, the banks, risk suffering immensely or even going under. ‘Tapering’, or whatever you might call the -slow- end to QE and the -slow- hiking of interest rates, will prick and blow up bubbles one by one, and often in violent fashion.

When housing bubbles burst, economies lose the primary ingredient for maintaining -let alone increasing- their money supply: banks creating money out of thin hot air. Since the money supply is one of the key components of inflation, along with velocity of money, there will be fantastic outbursts of debt deflation. You’ve never seen -let alone imagined- anything like it.

The worst part of it is not government debt, though that, when financed with bond sales, is not not an instrument to infinity and beyond either. But the big hit to economies will be private debt. Where in many bubble areas, and they’re too numerous too mention, eager potential buyers today fret over affordable housing supply, it’ll all turn on a dime and owners won’t be able to sell without being suffocated by crippling losses.

Pension funds, which have already suffered perhaps more than any other parties because of low interest ZIRP and NIRP policies, have switched en masse to riskier assets like stocks. Well, another whammy, and a bigger one, is waiting just outside the door. Pensions will be so last century.

 

That another crisis is waiting to happen, and that politics and media have made sure that just about no-one at all is aware of it, is one thing. We already knew this, a few of us. That the world’s main central bankers have an active incentive to bring about the crisis, if only by sitting on their hands long enough, is new. But they do.

Yellen, Draghi and Kuroda may opt to leave before pulling the trigger, or be fired soon enough. But whoever is in the governor seats will realize that unleashing a crisis sooner rather than later is the only option left not to be blamed for it. Let the house of dominoes crumble now, and they can say “nobody could have seen this coming”, while at the same time saving what they can for the banks and bankers they serve. That option will not be on the table for much longer.

We should have never given them, let alone their member/master banks, the power to conjure up trillions out of nothing, and use that power as a political tool. But it is too late now.

 

 

Jun 282016
 
 June 28, 2016  Posted by at 9:20 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,  5 Responses »


Walker Evans Saint Charles Street. Liberty Theatre, New Orleans 1935

Stocks Halt Brexit Selloff as Pound Rebounds With Commodities (BBG)
Asian Stocks Erase Losses as Japan Shares Gain on Stimulus Bets (BBG)
Jim Rogers On Brexit: Worse Than Any Bear Market You’ve Seen In Your Life (Y!)
Greenspan Warns A Crisis Is Imminent, Urges A Return To The Gold Standard (ZH)
European Banks Crash To Worst 2-Day Loss Ever As Default Risk Soars (ZH)
Brexit Is the Sum of China’s Fears (Balding)
Brexit To ‘Drive Tectonic Plate Shifts In European Bank Investing’ (R.)
Italy Eyes €40 Billion Bank Rescue As First Brexit Domino Falls (AEP)
Preparing For Brexit, Britain May See New PM By Early September (R.)
S&P Strips UK of Last Top-Notch Credit Rating After Brexit (R.)
UK Credit Default Swap Rates Spike After Wave Of Rating Downgrades (CNBC)
The Reaction to Brexit Is the Reason Brexit Happened (Matt Taibbi)
Some Bad And Some Worse News For Stock Buybacks (ZH)

And all of your problems are solved. It was only a dream….

Stocks Halt Brexit Selloff as Pound Rebounds With Commodities (BBG)

The pound, European stocks and commodities were all headed for their first gains since Britain’s shock vote to leave the European Union, while Asian shares erased losses amid signs policy makers are taking steps to limit any economic fallout. Sterling and the Stoxx Europe 600 Index both rebounded after tumbling 11% in the last two trading sessions. A gauge of the greenback’s strength snapped its steepest rally since 2011. The Bloomberg Commodity Index climbed from a three-week low as oil rose to about $47 a barrel and industrial metals rose. Sovereign bond yields plumbed new lows in Australia, Japan and South Korea as futures indicated that the next move in U.S. interest rates is now likely to be a cut.

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What? “Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said he wants his finance minister and the central bank governor to watch markets more closely.” You mean they didn’t?

Asian Stocks Erase Losses as Japan Shares Gain on Stimulus Bets (BBG)

Asian stocks erased losses and most Tokyo shares rose amid speculation policy makers will move to shore up financial markets after Britain’s vote to leave the European Union. The MSCI Asia Pacific Index was little changed as of 4 p.m. in Tokyo after being down as much as 1.2% earlier. Most Japanese shares rose after a drop in the Nikkei 225 Stock Average below 15,000 spurred buying. South Korea’s Kospi index rose 0.5%, reversing a decline of 1%. Investors are watching closely for signs that central banks and governments will help to ease the post-Brexit market turmoil.

Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said he wants his finance minister and the central bank governor to watch markets more closely. Toshihiro Nikai, chairman of the ruling party’s general council, proposed a 20 trillion yen ($196 billion) package to Abe, the Nikkei newspaper reported. South Korea said it’s planning a fiscal stimulus package of more than 20 trillion won ($17 billion). “We are probably going to have looser policy settings than before the vote,” said Tim Schroeders at Melbourne-based Pengana Capital. “You’d have to suspect that the bias is to the downside for global growth and as a result that stimulus remains in light of increased uncertainty.”

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“The bear case is the pound disappears…” “The EU as we know it will not exist,” he said. “The euro as we know it will not exist…”

Jim Rogers On Brexit: Worse Than Any Bear Market You’ve Seen In Your Life (Y!)

The UK’s decision to leave the European Union will lead to an economic crisis more severe than what the world faced in 2008, according to legendary investor Jim Rogers, chairman of Rogers Holdings. “This is going to be worse than any bear market you’ve seen in your lifetime,” he said. “2008 was bad because of debt. The debt all over the world is much, much higher now. Stocks in the US, for instance, have been going sideways for 18 months to 24 months. That’s called a distribution by many people. When you have distribution for a year and a half, it usually leads to bad things.” Rogers – who cofounded the Quantum Fund with George Soros in the 1970s – believes the “leave” movement’s victory last week may threaten the British union.

While any negotiated deal may help assuage the market’s Brexit fears, Rogers foresees a “bad case scenario” where Scotland and Northern Ireland leave the UK and London’s clout diminishes significantly as financial institutions move towards continental Europe. “The UK already has huge international debts and it has balance of trade problems and budget problems,” he said. “The bear case is the pound disappears. England becomes Spain or Poland or Italy or something.” While he doesn’t see an immediate collapse of England’s economy, Rogers anticipates a long-term decline in the country’s prospects.

“The deterioration will continue and make stocks go down a lot,” he warned. Brexit’s win will also embolden other countries to leave the EU and separatist movements to break up a few states, Rogers predicted. That could make the world to look significantly different in just a half a decade. “The EU as we know it will not exist,” he said. “The euro as we know it will not exist.

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But no mea culpa. he wants to die a revered oracle.

Greenspan Warns A Crisis Is Imminent, Urges A Return To The Gold Standard (ZH)

On Friday afternoon, after the shocking Brexit referendum, while being interviewed by CNBC Alan Greenspan stunned his hosts when he said that things are about as bad as he has ever seen. “This is the worst period, I recall since I’ve been in public service. There’s nothing like it, including the crisis — remember October 19th, 1987, when the Dow went down by a record amount 23%? That I thought was the bottom of all potential problems. This has a corrosive effect that will not go away. I’d love to find something positive to say.” Strangely enough, he was not refering to the British exodus but to America’s own economic troubles.

Today, Greenspan was on Bloomberg Surveillance where in an extensive, 30 minutes interview he was urged to give his take on the British referendum outcome. According to Greenspan, David Cameron miscalculated and made a “terrible mistake” in holding a referendum. That decision led to a “terrible outcome in all respects,” Greenspan said. “It didn’t have to happen.” Greenspan then noted that as a result of Brexit, “we are in very early days a crisis which has got a way to go”, and point to Scotland which he said will likely have another referendum on its own, predicting the vote would be successful, and Northern Ireland would “probably” go the same way.

His remarks then centered on the Eurozone which he defined as a truly “vulnerable institution,” primarily due to Greece’s inclusion in its structure. “Get Greece out. They’re a toxic liability sitting in the middle of a very important economic zone.” Ironically, the same Eurozone has spent countless hours doing everything in its power to show just how unbreakable the union is by preserving Greece, while it took the UK just one overnight session to break away. Luckily the UK was not part of the monetary union or else it would be game over. But speaking of crises, Greenspan warned that fundamentally it is not so much an issue of immigration, or even economics, but unsustainable welfare spending, or as Greenspan puts it, “entitlements.”

“The issue is essentially that entitlements are legal issues. They have nothing to do with economics. You reach a certain age or you are ill or something of that nature and you are entitled to certain expenditures out of the budget without any reference to how it’s going to be funded. Where the productivity levels are now, we are lucky to get something even close to two% annual growth rate. That annual growth rate of 2% is not adequate to finance the existing needs. I don’t know how it’s going to resolve, but there’s going to be a crisis. This is one of the great problems of democracy. It goes back to the founding fathers. How do you handle a situation like this? And it’s very troublesome, but eventually you get things like Margaret Thatcher showing up in Britain.”

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Enter Captain Fantastic.

European Banks Crash To Worst 2-Day Loss Ever As Default Risk Soars (ZH)

So much for George “Panic-Monger” Osborne’s calming statement this morning, European banks have collapsed this morning to close down between 20% and 30% since the Brexity vote. The last 2 days plunge in EU banks (down 23%) is the largest in history (double the size of Lehman) and pushes European bank equity market cap to its lowest (in USD terms) ever. Worst. Drop. Ever…

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Giving people a vote in their lives is not Xi’s idea of fun…

Brexit Is the Sum of China’s Fears (Balding)

In voting to leave the EU, the U.K. has confirmed many of the Chinese Communist Party’s worst fears about democracy. Now the question is whether Brexit will also impede its attempts at economic reform. At least one major target of “Leave” campaigners in the U.K. – an unaccountable bureaucracy in Brussels, enjoying the fruits of power – will certainly resonate with Chinese citizens. Despite a recent corruption crackdown, dissatisfaction with officials is simmering in many parts of China – over land grabs, unpaid wages, layoffs and more. For the Communist Party, a popular rejection of distant bureaucrats isn’t to be taken lightly. Brexit also confirms the party’s fears about the capriciousness of the people. As an editorial in the Global Times, a state-run tabloid, put it, Brexit is a “Pandora’s box,” a “lose-lose situation” and a “major setback.”

The Chinese people, it went on, “will continue to watch the consequence of Britain’s embracing of a `democratic’ referendum.” Such skepticism of the wisdom of crowds is widespread in Beijing’s halls of power – and it has real-world consequences for democracy advocates. A deeper worry for the party is instability. The political and business classes in China are extremely risk-averse. Banks lend to state-owned enterprises in the belief that the government stands behind them, students from the best schools aspire to the civil service, and changes to policy flow from on high. Party technocrats tend to see political and financial instability as intimately linked. And as Premier Li Keqiang stressed repeatedly yesterday at the World Economic Forum, Brexit has increased both.

The immediate economic consequences for China are likely to be minimal. As Bloomberg economists Tom Orlik and Fielding Chen have pointed out, only 2.6% of Chinese exports head to the U.K. But the indirect consequences could be substantial. After Britain voted out, the yuan suffered the biggest one-day drop since its devaluation last August. In the worst case, Brexit may act as a long-term drag on China’s exports, increase its spare capacity, spur capital flight, impede foreign direct investment and generally weaken the forces that have sustained its growth over the past few decades. Amid that kind of pressure, expect China’s leadership to double down on economic and financial policies intended to keep growth humming and minimize any disruption, no matter what the price.

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“The FTSE 100 ended 2.6% lower [..] ..wiping off nearly $132 billion since the referendum results early on Friday..”

Brexit To ‘Drive Tectonic Plate Shifts In European Bank Investing’ (R.)

Britain’s top share index extended the previous session’s steep losses on Monday as the country’s vote last week to leave the European Union hurled it into political and economic uncertainty, hitting banks, housebuilders and airlines hard. Some investors took refuge in firms producing gold, seen as a safe-haven asset, with Fresnillo closing up 7% after hitting a three-year high and Randgold Resources gaining 9%. The FTSE 100 ended 2.6% lower at 5,982.20 points, taking total losses to 5.6% in two sessions and wiping off nearly 100 billion pounds ($132 billion) since the referendum results early on Friday. Shares in easyJet recorded their biggest one-day percentage drop in 12 years.

The domestically-focused mid-cap index .FTMC lost nearly 7% after reaching its lowest since late 2014 following growing concerns about the country’s growth and earnings outlook after the poll outcome. “These uncertainties pose significant risks for the investment outlook,” said Larry Hatheway, chief economist and head of multi-asset portfolio solutions at GAM. “Against the backdrop of an already slowing UK economy, Brexit anxiety could precipitate a large enough reduction in consumer and business spending to tip the UK economy into recession.” British financial stocks declined the most, with the sector index ending 7.3% weaker after a seven-year low. RBS and Barclays dropped 15% and 17.3% respectively, also hit by broker downgrades and by JP Morgan’s cutting its rating on all domestic banks.

The mid-cap bank Shawbrook plummeted 30%. “The UK’s vote to leave the EU will drive tectonic plate shifts in European bank investing. We move to a slow growth/modestly recessionary scenario for UK banks,” analysts at Jefferies said in a note, downgrading RBS to “hold” and Barclays to “underperform”. Investors seemed to ignore finance minister George Osborne’s assertion on Monday that the British economy remained strong, his first public statement on the Brexit vote.

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“Italian officials are studying a direct state recapitalisation of the banks, to be funded by a special bond issue.” Remember Cyprus. Italy wants to change bail-in rules, but it can’t.

Italy Eyes €40 Billion Bank Rescue As First Brexit Domino Falls (AEP)

Italy is preparing a €40bn rescue of its financial system as bank shares collapse on the Milan bourse and the powerful after-shocks of Brexit shake European markets. An Italian government task force is watching events hour by hour, pledging all steps necessary to ensure the stability of the banks. “Italy will do everything necessary to reassure people,” said premier Matteo Renzi. “This is the moment of truth we have all been waiting for a long time. We just didn’t know it would be Brexit that set the elephant loose,” said a top Italian banker. The share price of banks crashed for a second trading day, with Intesa Sanpaolo off 12.5pc, and falls of 12pc for Banka MPS, 10.4pc for Mediobana, and 8pc for Unicredit. These lenders have lost a third of their value since Britain’s referendum.

“When Britain sneezes, Italy catches a cold. It is the weakest link in the European chain,” said Lorenzo Codogno, former director-general of the Italian treasury and now at LC Macro Advisors. The country is the first serious casualty of Brexit contagion and a reminder that the economic destinies of Britain and the rest of Europe are intimately entwined. Morgan Stanley warned in a new report that eurozone GDP would contract by almost as much as British GDP in a “high stress scenario”. Italian officials are studying a direct state recapitalisation of the banks, to be funded by a special bond issue. They also want a moratorium of so-called ‘bail-in’ rules and bondholder write-downs, but these steps are impossible under EU laws.

Mr Renzi raised the subject urgently at a meeting with Merkel and Hollande at a Brexit summit in Berlin on Monday. “There has to be a suspension of the bail-in rules and state aid rules at the highest political level in the EU, otherwise I don’t see how this can work,” said Mr Codogno. Unlike the eurozone debt crisis in 2011-2012, there is no serious trouble yet in the sovereign debt markets. The ECB is effectively capping yields under quantitative easing. The stress gauge in this episode is the health of the private banks. The Euro STOXX index of bank stocks has collapsed by half since last July, and is now probing depths seen in the white heat of the debt crisis. British bank shares have also plummeted since Brexit but this has no systemic implication so far.

It chiefly reflects recession fears, and potential loss of access to the EU market for business. Italy’s banks are the Achilles Heel of the eurozone financial system. Non-performing loans have ratcheted up to 18pc of total balance sheets as a result the country’s slide into depression after the Lehman crisis. The new bail-in reform this year has brought matters to a head, catching EU authorities off guard. It was intended to protect taxpayers by ensuring that creditors suffer major losses first if a bank gets into trouble, but was badly designed and has led to a flight from bank shares. The Bank of Italy has called for a complete overhaul of the bail-in rules. It is now almost impossible for Italian banks to raise capital.

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Lots of bitter infighting will ensue. Sort of a cross between Coronation Street and Absolutely Fabulous.

Preparing For Brexit, Britain May See New PM By Early September (R.)

Britain could have a new prime minister by early September, the ruling Conservative Party said on Monday, after David Cameron started laying the groundwork for his successor to trigger the country’s exit from the EU. The government is under pressure to fill a vacuum left when Cameron announced he would resign by October after Britain ignored his advice and voted to leave the 28-member bloc in last week’s referendum. Triggering a leadership battle that could draw in some of his closest advisers, Cameron urged ministers to work together in the meantime. But he also formed a separate unit, staffed by public servants, to help advise Britain on its departure and its options for a future outside the EU. “Although leaving the EU was not the path I recommended, I am the first to praise our incredible strengths as a country,” Cameron told parliament.

“As we proceed with implementing this decision and facing the challenges that it will undoubtedly bring, I believe we should hold fast to a vision of Britain that wants to be respected abroad, tolerant at home, engaged in the world.” Asked about the possibility of a second EU referendum, Cameron said the result of Thursday’s vote must be accepted. Graham Brady, chair of the “1922 Committee” of Conservative lawmakers, which sets the party’s ground rules in parliament, said the group had recommended that the leadership contest should begin next week and conclude no later than Sept. 2. That recommendation will almost certainly be passed. “Both the Conservatives and the country more generally really want certainty. We would like a resolution and we think it would be a good thing to conclude this process as soon as we practicably can,” Brady told Sky News.

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There are so few AAAs left that it doesn’t matter much anymore. And to label Britain AAA is of course silly to begin with.

S&P Strips UK of Last Top-Notch Credit Rating After Brexit (R.)

Ratings agency Standard & Poor’s stripped Britain of its last remaining top-notch credit rating on Monday, slashing it by two notches from AAA and warning more downgrades could follow after Britons voted to leave the European Union last week. “In our opinion, this outcome is a seminal event, and will lead to a less predictable, stable, and effective policy framework in the UK,” S&P said in a statement, adding it saw a higher risk of Scotland breaking away from the United Kingdom. S&P had warned that Britain’s coveted top-notch credit rating was no longer tenable after last Thursday’s referendum result.

The loss of the last remaining “AAA” rating represents a fresh blow to Britain’s economic standing after the referendum, with sterling tanking to a 31-year low against the dollar and the country’s stock markets plunging. Rival ratings agencies Fitch and Moody’s stripped Britain of their AAA ratings long before the referendum campaign began. They too have warned of further cuts to their gradings of Britain’s creditworthiness. Protecting Britain’s credit rating was a top priority of Conservative finance minister George Osborne when he came to power in 2010.

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The kind of thing that can get very expensive very fast.

UK Credit Default Swap Rates Spike After Wave Of Rating Downgrades (CNBC)

In case you’re wondering how Brexit impacts the U.K.’s creditworthiness, the derivatives market may offer different clues than the bond market. The cost of buying protection against a default on British sovereign debt using credit default swaps rose to a three-year high on Tuesday, after rating agencies rushed to slash the U.K.’s debt rating following last week’s vote to leave the EU. It now costs $48,500 a year to protect $10 million of U.K. sovereign debt for five years, compared with levels near $32,000 before the June 23 referendum. This came despite a sharp fall in yields on U.K. government debt, or gilts. On its own, the absolute cost of insurance remains low, especially when compared with euro zone countries such as Italy and Spain.

The sharp pace of the increase, however, underscored how uncertainty over the U.K.’s position in Europe had undermined its credit-worthiness. Sterling has already plunged to more-than-30-year lows and stock markets have tumbled. On Monday Standard & Poor’s downgraded the U.K.’s debt rating by two notches, from AAA to AA, citing last week’s referendum that approved a British exit from the EU, depriving the U.K. of its last triple A rating. Fitch Ratings, meanwhile, moved its rating from AA+ to AA. “In our opinion, this outcome is a seminal event, and will lead to a less predictable, stable, and effective policy framework in the U.K. We have reassessed our view of the U.K.’s institutional assessment and now no longer consider it a strength in our assessment of the rating,” S&P said in a news release.

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“It’s become perilously fashionable all over the Western world to reach for non-democratic solutions whenever society drifts in a direction people don’t like…”

The Reaction to Brexit Is the Reason Brexit Happened (Matt Taibbi)

Were I British, I’d probably have voted to Remain. But it’s not hard to understand being pissed off at being subject to unaccountable bureaucrats in Brussels. Nor is it hard to imagine the post-Brexit backlash confirming every suspicion you might have about the people who run the EU. Imagine having pundits and professors suggest you should have your voting rights curtailed because you voted Leave. Now imagine these same people are calling voters like you “children,” and castigating you for being insufficiently appreciative of, say, the joys of submitting to a European Supreme Court that claims primacy over the Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights. The overall message in every case is the same: Let us handle things. But whatever, let’s assume that the Brexit voters, like Trump voters, are wrong, ignorant, dangerous and unjustified.

Even stipulating to that, the reaction to both Brexit and Trump reveals a problem potentially more serious than either Brexit or the Trump campaign. It’s become perilously fashionable all over the Western world to reach for non-democratic solutions whenever society drifts in a direction people don’t like. Here in America the problem is snowballing on both the right and the left. Whether it’s Andrew Sullivan calling for Republican insiders to rig the nomination process to derail Trump’s candidacy, or Democratic Party lifers like Peter Orszag arguing that Republican intransigence in Congress means we should turn more power over to “depoliticized commissions,” the instinct to act by diktat surfaces quite a lot these days. “Too much democracy” used to be an argument we reserved for foreign peoples who tried to do things like vote to demand control over their own oil supplies.

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A dead end street after all.

Some Bad And Some Worse News For Stock Buybacks (ZH)

For those 17-year-old hedge fund managers used to BTFD on hopes corporate buybacks will “have their back” and provide the bid on which momentum-chasing HFT algos will piggyback, we have some bad news and some worse news. The bad news is that we are entering yet another quiet period for buybacks. This means that for the next 45 days, the biggest – and supposedly only – buyer of stocks will be mostly out of the market, and bank buyback desks will not be able to provide much needed support during distressed (read: more sellers than buyers) times. The worse news is that even without the buyback blackout period, following months of surging stock repurchasing activity by corporate treasurers… buybacks have now ground to a virtual halt.

According to TrimTabs, stock buyback announcements by U.S. companies have fallen sharply, sending a longer-term negative signal for U.S. equities. “Corporate America announced $2.8 trillion in stock buybacks in the past five years, and these buybacks have provided a key source of fuel for the bull market,” said David Santschi, chief executive officer of TrimTabs. “Corporate actions this year suggest this support is going to diminish.” In a research note, TrimTabs reported that U.S. companies have announced a mere $11.8 billion in stock buybacks in June through Friday, June 24. This month’s pace is the lowest this year. Only four companies have announced plans to repurchase at least $1 billion this month.

“Even if some of the too-big-to-fails roll out buybacks after the release of the second part of the Fed’s stress test results, this month’s volume is likely to be among the lowest in the past three years,” noted Santschi. TrimTabs also explained that stock buyback announcements by U.S. companies have totaled $291.7 billion this year, which is 32% lower than the $432.0 billion in the same period last year. “The sharp decline in buyback announcements suggests corporate leaders are becoming more cautious, and it doesn’t bode well for the U.S. stock market,” said Santschi.

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