hunger Archives - Page 2 of 2 - The Automatic Earth

China’s GDP grew at 6.7% year on year in the second quarter of 2016, at least officially. However, most analysts don’t believe the official figures. “The official figure is still around 7%, but those data are made in the statistical kitchen,” says Willem Buiter, the chief economist of Citigroup. He thinks China is not growing at more than 4%. After reporting 6.7% growth over the year in the first quarter of 2016, analysts were looking for 6.6% growth in the second quarter compared to the second quarter of 2015, so China managed to engineer a small beat and create the illusion of stability. Quarterly growth even picked up from 1.1% in the first quarter to 1.8% in the second quarter.

“The speed of growth that it points to is increasingly hard to believe given the clear structural drags that the economy is facing,” research firm Capital Economics writes in a note. The analysts think China grew 4.5% based on a proprietary activity index, roughly the same as in the first quarter. Private investment was the biggest drag on growth, it just expanded 1% in May, down from 15% in early 2015. State companies have picked up the slack. A survey of thousands of companies by the China Beige Book (CBB) released earlier in July paints a similar picture. CBB says most indicators improved in the second quarter, although activity is roughly flat over the year. In most cases, less than 50% of survey respondents report an improvement in sales, hiring, capital expenditure, or bank lending.

The harder they come…

• Asian Shares Rise To Eight-Month Highs (R.)

Asian shares extended gains to eight-month highs on Friday, on track for a solid weekly rise, as better-than-expected economic data from China lifted risk sentiment that was already buoyant after record highs on Wall Street. China’s economy grew 6.7% in the second quarter from a year earlier, steady from the first quarter and slightly better than expected as the government stepped up efforts to stabilize growth in the world’s second-largest economy.

Industrial output and retail sales also beat forecasts, which helped alleviate fears of slowing momentum, though fixed-asset investment growth slipped and missed market expectations. “The data showed the signs of stabilisation, which is very encouraging,” said Julian Wang, economist for Greater China at HSBC. “However, public sector investment and housing market are slowing down. So the challenges still loom quite large in the second half of the year.”

Well, that’s a surprise….

• US Exporters’ Gains From Chinese Economic Growth Shrink Further (WSJ)

China’s economic roller coaster is taking a bite out of American exporters, hurting U.S. industries ranging from mining equipment to cotton producers and adding to criticism that China is getting more than it gives in trade with the U.S. The U.S. shipped just $42.4 billion to China in the first five months of the year, or 8.2% less than the year-earlier period and 13.8% below the peak export year of 2014, according to the Census Bureau. The export drop comes as China’s economy, while slowing, is still officially expanding at more than 6% a year. That growth is driven in part by the mountain of goods—worth $174 billion so far this year—the U.S. imports from China. That is quadruple the size of its exports to China during those months, and only slightly less than 2014 levels.

The slowdown in U.S. exports could exacerbate accusations in the 2016 presidential campaign that China is engaged in unfair trade practices. Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, has cited the trade gap with China in threatening to slap new tariffs on the country if he becomes president. U.S. companies have grown increasingly vocal in criticizing Beijing for allegedly dumping subsidized steel and other products on world markets and for refusing to open major parts of its economy to foreign investment—a roadblock that almost certainly hinders two-way trade.

No doubt it could. But Brussels will first try and turn it into Greece….

• Could Italy Bring Down The Euro? (Kern)

[..] M5S’s Luigi Di Maio, who, polls show, has a very good chance of succeeding Renzi as prime minister, has reiterated his party’s long-standing call for a referendum on the euro: “We want a consultative referendum on the euro. The euro as it is today does not work. We either have alternative currencies or a ‘euro 2.’ We entered the European Parliament to change many treaties. The mere fact that a country like Great Britain even held a referendum on whether to leave the EU signals the failure of the European Union.” A referendum on the euro would be “consultative” because Italian law does not allow such plebiscites to change international treaties, including those that involve Italy’s relations with the European Union.

But Grillo is seeking a legislative change to allow an “ad hoc” exception, similar to the one in June 1989, when Italy held a consultative referendum on whether to transfer certain powers to the European Parliament. The exception would presumably be approved if M5S wins the prime minister’s office. Meanwhile, analysts are warning that the turmoil in Italy could spread to the rest of the eurozone. The risk of contagion is due to the so-called “doom loop” that exists between European governments and European banks, which have more than doubled the holdings of their own governments’ debt from a low of €355 billion in September 2008 to €791 billion today. International banks have lent Italy more than €500 billion, according to Die Welt, which reports that French banks alone hold €250 billion of Italian debt.

German banks hold €84 billion of Italian bonds. The only question, according to analysts, is whether taxpayers or bondholders will be left holding the tab. Wolfgang Münchau warned of the consequences of a disorderly Italian exit from the euro: “An Italian exit from the single currency would trigger the total collapse of the eurozone within a very short period. It would probably lead to the most violent economic shock in history, dwarfing the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy in 2008 and the 1929 Wall Street crash.” As Ambrose Evans-Pritchard of the Telegraph has pointed out, however, Italy must choose between the euro and its own economic survival. Leaving the euro “may be the only way to avert a catastrophic deindustrialization of the country before it is too late.”

…like here.

• EU Finance Ministers Get Tough With Italian Bank Trying For Third Bailout (G.)

The idea of modern banking was born in Siena in 1624, when the Medici Grand Duke decided to guarantee accounts held at Monte dei Paschi, the world’s oldest bank, with the proceeds of pasture he held in the Maremma in south-western Tuscany. Nearly 400 years later, the principle established by the Tuscan ruler – that account holders and investors are protected by the state – lies at the heart of a crisis at Monte dei Paschi di Siena (MPS) that is worrying financial markets around the world. The country’s third-largest lender has already been bailed out twice in modern Italian history but is likely to need a third multibillion-euro intervention by the Italian government – a move that would need Brussels to break new rules designed to prevent such taxpayer bailouts after the 2008 global financial crisis.

So the question of who will pay for the inevitable rescue of MPS, whose share value has fallen 80% over the past year, has yet to be answered. Three weeks after the news that Britain has voted to leave the European Union shocked the markets, a debate over the fate of MPS and the economic and political repercussions of inaction is raging from Rome to Brussels and Paris to Berlin. The welfare of thousands of Italian households is at stake, as well as the political fortune of Italy’s prime minister, Matteo Renzi, who is facing the toughest political challenge of his career. It is also testing Italy’s credibility among foreign investors. “There is no way they will let the bank go and create a systemic effect,” said Wolfango Piccoli, co-president of Teneo Intelligence. “The mechanics are still unclear but there will be a third bailout of Monte dei Paschi.”

[..] Unlike the US, Spanish and Irish financial crises, the Italian banking crisis is not the result of a speculative property bubble. While other issues have exacerbated the turmoil at Monte dei Paschi’s – including a poorly judged €9bn acquisition – the primary reason the bank is in trouble is because it doled out billions of euros in loans to small businesses at a time when the scale of the recession facing Italy was gravely underestimated. From 2007 to 2013, Italy lost about a quarter of its industrial production and tens of thousands of companies collapsed. In 2013 more than 150 shops closed every day. Construction and home sales slumped and none of the sectors has recovered fast enough.

Central banks are the only buyers left.

• Who’s Buying It? (Roberts)

With the market breaking out to all-time highs, the media has started to once again reach for their party hats as headlines suggest clear sailing for investors ahead. While I certainly do not disagree the breakout is indeed bullish, and signals a continuation of the long-term bullish trend, there are more than sufficient reasons to remain somewhat cautious. Earnings are still weak, there is little evidence of economic resurgence and inflationary pressures globally remain nascent. But, for now, a rash of global Central Banks continue to support asset prices by increasing accommodative policies either through additional reductions in interest rates or direct injections of liquidity. As Matt King from Citi recently noted: “It has been a surge in net global central bank asset purchases to their highest level since 2013.”

With the ECB in full QE mode, the BOC now using $300 billion in Pension Funds to prop up prices, and the BOJ now moving towards an additional $130 billion in QE as well, the liquidity push continues. Interestingly, despite the push by Central Banks to loft asset prices higher, individual market participants as measured by the Investment Company Institute (ICI) have a different idea. As shown in the chart below, despite asset prices ringing all-time highs, net equity inflows have turned decisively negative. This was much the same case following the 2012 market rout and it wasn’t until the launch of QE3 in 2013 that investors began to once again chase the markets.

Trudeau needs to act, and very fast, or he’ll be staring a monster in the face.

• Canada New Home Prices Grow At Fastest Pace In Nearly 9 Years (R.)

Canadian new home prices in May grew at their fastest pace in almost nine years, soaring 0.7% from April on strength in the booming markets of Toronto and Vancouver, Statistics Canada said on Thursday. Analysts polled by Reuters had predicted a 0.2% advance. May’s increase was the largest since the 1.0% jump recorded in July 2007. The Liberal government is concerned about rapidly rising prices in Toronto and Vancouver and is mulling more restrictions on mortgages. The combined region of Toronto and Oshawa – which accounts for 27.92% of the entire Canadian market – posted a 1.9% gain, the highest in 27 years.

Builders cited market conditions and the price of land. Market conditions also helped drive up new home prices in Vancouver by 1.1%. Overall, housing prices increased by 2.7% from May 2015, the largest year-on-year rise since the 2.7% advance seen in September 2010. The new housing price index excludes apartments and condominiums, which the government says are a particular cause for concern and which account for one-third of new housing.

A feature, not a bug.

• UK MPs Decry ‘Failed’ Effort To Stop London Property Money Laundering (G.)

Government attempts to stop the UK property market being exploited by international money launderers are “totally inadequate” and the country has instead “laid out a welcome mat” to criminals, the House of Commons home affairs committee has said. The influential panel of MPs, chaired by the Labour backbencher Keith Vaz, said it was disgraceful that at least £100bn was being laundered through the UK every year and astonishing that just 335 out of 1.2m property transactions last year were deemed to be suspicious by law enforcement officials. That means only 0.01% of the 2.4 million buyers and sellers in the UK generated suspicious activity reports at the National Crime Agency (NCA), whose system, Vaz said, was not fit for purpose.

“The proceeds of crime legislation has failed,” Vaz said. “London is a centre for money laundering, and its standing as a global financial centre is dependent on proactively and effectively tackling money laundering. Investment in London properties is a major route which tarnishes the image of the capital. Supervision of the property market is totally inadequate.” The NCA’s system gathers suspicious activity reports from lawyers, accountants, bankers and other professionals but is overwhelmed with more than 380,000 reports per year, when it is designed to handle 20,000. [..] The MPs said it remained “far too easy for someone intent on laundering money to buy a property with their ill-gotten gains, and rent it out in a very buoyant and robust letting market and take in clean money in perpetuity”.

As I said many times before: when growth goes, so does centralization. It seems hard to make that connection.

• McKinsey Slams Globalization: “The Resentment Will Explode” (ZH)

The IMF is getting nervous, and what it appears to be most concerned about, is a collapse of the status quo. Moments ago, in a speech in Washington, IMF head Christine Lagarde said that “The greatest challenge we face today is the risk of the world turning its back on global cooperation—the cooperation which has served us all well. We know that globalization – and increased integration – over the past generation has yielded many economic benefits for many people.” The IMF is not alone: for years, consultancy giant McKinsey towed the party line as well saying in 2010 that “the core drivers of globalization are alive and well” and adding as recently as 2014 that “to be unconnected is to fall behind.”

That appears have changing, and cracks are starting to form behind the cohesive push for globalization, at least among those who benefit the most from globalization. In a stunning study released today, one which effectively refutes all its prior conclusions on the matter, McKinsey slams the establishment’s status quo thinking and admits that the economic gains of changes in the global economy have not been widely shared lately, especially in the developed world. In the report titled “Poorer Than Their Parents? Flat or Falling Incomes in Advanced Economies” it finds that prospects for income growth have deteriorated significantly since the financial crisis, and that the benefits from globalization are now over:

This overwhelmingly positive income trend has ended. A new McKinsey Global Institute report finds that between 2005 and 2014, real incomes in those same advanced economies were flat or fell for 65 to 70% of households, or more than 540 million people. And while government transfers and lower tax rates mitigated some of the impact, up to a quarter of all households still saw disposable income stall or fall in that decade.

As Bloomberg reports, Britain’s vote to exit the European Union exemplifies what happens when people feel like the system is letting them down, Richard Dobbs, the co-leader of the research, said in an interview Wednesday, ahead of the report’s release. He likened the buildup of resentment over globalization to a dangerous natural gas leak in a row of houses. “One of them will explode. I did not think that it would be the U.K. first,” said Dobbs, a senior partner of McKinsey and a member of the McKinsey Global Institute Council in London. “When we launch a new policy, let’s think about the impact on those groups” who have been left behind, Dobbs said. Sometimes the goals of fairness and efficiency can conflict, he said. “Are we prepared to damage competitiveness a bit to reduce the risk of an explosion?”

Brandon Smith on one of my ‘hobby horses’. More good stuff in the article.

• Globalism vs. “Populism” (Smith)

The globalists have used the method of false dichotomies for centuries to divide nations and peoples against each other in order to derive opportunity from chaos. That said, the above dichotomy is about as close to real as they have ever promoted. As I explained [earlier], the recent passage of the Brexit referendum in the U.K. has triggered a surge of new propaganda from establishment media outlets. The thrust of this propaganda is the notion that “populists” are behind the fight against globalization and these populists are going to foster the ruin of nations and the global economy. That is to say – globalism good, populism bad. There is a real fight between globalists and those who desire a free, decentralized and voluntary society.

They have just changed some of the labels and the language. We have yet to see how effective this strategy will be for the elites, but it is very useful for them in certain respects. The wielding of the term “populist” is about as sterilized and distant from “freedom and liberty” as you can get. It denotes not just “nationalism,” but selfish nationalism. And the association people are supposed to make in their minds is that selfish nationalism leads to destructive fascism (i.e. Nazis). Therefore, when you hear the term “populist,” the globalists hope you will think “Nazi.” Also, keep in mind that the narrative of the rise of populism coincides with grave warnings from the elites that such movements will cause global economic collapse if they continue to grow.

Of course, the elites have been fermenting an economic collapse for years. We have been experiencing many of the effects of it for some time. In a brilliant maneuver, the elites have attempted to re-label the liberty movement as “populist” (Nazis), and use liberty activists as a scapegoat for the fiscal time bomb THEY created. Will the masses buy it? I don’t know. I think that depends on how effectively we expose the strategy before the breakdown becomes too entrenched. The economic collapse itself has been handled masterfully by the elites, though. There is simply no solution that can prevent it from continuing. Even if every criminal globalist was hanging from a lamp post tomorrow and honest leadership was restored to government, the math cannot be changed and decades of struggle will be required before national economies can be made prosperous again.

By Manuela Cadelli, President of the Magistrates’ Union of Belgium. Bit older, but interesting reasoning.

• President of Belgian Magistrates: Neoliberalism Is A Form Of Fascism (DDP)

Every totalitarianism starts as distortion of language, as in the novel by George Orwell. Neoliberalism has its Newspeak and strategies of communication that enable it to deform reality. In this spirit, every budgetary cut is represented as an instance of modernization of the sectors concerned. If some of the most deprived are no longer reimbursed for medical expenses and so stop visiting the dentist, this is modernization of social security in action! Abstraction predominates in public discussion so as to occlude the implications for human beings. Thus, in relation to migrants, it is imperative that the need for hosting them does not lead to public appeals that our finances could not accommodate. Is it In the same way that other individuals qualify for assistance out of considerations of national solidarity?

Social Darwinism predominates, assigning the most stringent performance requirements to everyone and everything: to be weak is to fail. The foundations of our culture are overturned: every humanist premise is disqualified or demonetized because neoliberalism has the monopoly of rationality and realism. Margaret Thatcher said it in 1985: “There is no alternative.” Everything else is utopianism, unreason and regression. The virtue of debate and conflicting perspectives are discredited because history is ruled by necessity. This subculture harbours an existential threat of its own: shortcomings of performance condemn one to disappearance while at the same time everyone is charged with inefficiency and obliged to justify everything. Trust is broken. Evaluation reigns, and with it the bureaucracy which imposes definition and research of a plethora of targets, and indicators with which one must comply. Creativity and the critical spirit are stifled by management.

In general, everywhere native people get an actual say, things improve.

• In New Zealand, Lands and Rivers Can Be People -Legally Speaking- (NYT)

Can a stretch of land be a person in the eyes of the law? Can a body of water? In New Zealand, they can. A former national park has been granted personhood, and a river system is expected to receive the same soon. The unusual designations, something like the legal status that corporations possess, came out of agreements between New Zealand’s government and Maori groups. The two sides have argued for years over guardianship of the country’s natural features. Chris Finlayson, New Zealand’s attorney general, said the issue was resolved by taking the Maori mind-set into account. “In their worldview, ‘I am the river and the river is me,’” he said. “Their geographic region is part and parcel of who they are.”

From 1954 to 2014, Te Urewera was an 821-square-mile national park on the North Island, but when the Te Urewera Act took effect, the government gave up formal ownership, and the land became a legal entity with “all the rights, powers, duties and liabilities of a legal person,” as the statute puts it. “The settlement is a profound alternative to the human presumption of sovereignty over the natural world,” said Pita Sharples, who was the minister of Maori affairs when the law was passed. It was also “undoubtedly legally revolutionary” in New Zealand “and on a world scale,” Jacinta Ruru of the University of Otago wrote in the Maori Law Review.

Personhood means, among other things, that lawsuits to protect the land can be brought on behalf of the land itself, with no need to show harm to a particular human. Next will be the Whanganui River, New Zealand’s third longest. The local Maori tribe views it as “an indivisible and living whole, comprising the river and all tributaries from the mountains to the sea — and that’s what we are giving effect to through this settlement,” Mr. Finlayson said. It is expected to clear Parliament and become law this year.

How crazy is this? ‘Misinformation is also information’.

• Obama Expected to Sign Industry-Backed GMO Label Bill Into Law (EW)

Looks like we’re finally getting GMO labels on food products—just not the kind you can actually read. President Obama is expected to throw his weight behind a controversial bill that allows businesses to use a smartphone scannable QR code instead of clear, concise wording that informs consumers if a product contains genetically modified ingredients. The bill would also nullify state-by-state GMO labeling mandates such as Vermont’s landmark law that took effect on July 1. “While there is broad consensus that foods from genetically engineered crops are safe, we appreciate the bipartisan effort to address consumers’ interest in knowing more about their food, including whether it includes ingredients from genetically engineered crops,” White House spokeswoman Katie Hill told Bloomberg in an e-mail.

“We look forward to tracking its progress in the House and anticipate the president would sign it in its current form.” The House of Representatives is voting today on legislation from the Senate, which voted 63 to 30 in favor of the bill on July 7, less than a week after Vermont enacted its GMO label law. The bipartisan “compromise” bill was conceived after years of negotiations by Democrat Sen. Debbie Stabenow and Republican Sen. Pat Roberts and is supported by the very industry that produces and profits from such products, including the powerful Grocery Manufactures Association and world’s largest seed producer and pesticide giant Monsanto. UPDATE: The U.S. House of Representatives passed the bill by a 306-117 vote Thursday. The bill now heads to President Obama’s desk.

Can’t stop the brilliance of the human brain.

• Biodiversity Is Below Safe Levels Across More Than Half Of World’s Land (G.)

The variety of animals and plants has fallen to dangerous levels across more than half of the world’s landmass due to humanity destroying habitats to use as farmland, scientists have estimated. The unchecked loss of biodiversity is akin to playing ecological roulette and will set back efforts to bring people out of poverty in the long term, they warned. Analysing 1.8m records from 39,123 sites across Earth, the international study found that a measure of the intactness of biodiversity at sites has fallen below a safety limit across 58.1% of the world’s land. Under a proposal put forward by experts last year, a site losing more than 10% of its biodiversity is considered to have passed a precautionary threshold, beyond which the ecosystem’s ability to function could be compromised.

“It’s worrying that land use has already pushed biodiversity below the level proposed as a safe limit,” said Prof Andy Purvis, of the Natural History Museum, and one of the authors. “Until and unless we can bring biodiversity back up, we’re playing ecological roulette.” Researchers said the study, published in the journal Science on Thursday, was the most comprehensive examination yet of biodiversity loss. The decline is not just bad news for the species but in the long term could spell problems for human health and economies. “If ecosystem functions don’t continue, then yes it affects the ability of agriculture to sustain human populations and we simply don’t know at which point that will be reached,” said Dr Tim Newbold, lead author of the work and a research associate at University College London. “We are entering the zone of uncertainty.”

There’s a man and then there’s ‘a mensch’.

• Gleaning: Harvesting Spain’s Unwanted Crops To Feed The Hungry (G.)

Under a blazing Catalan sun, Abdelouahid wipes the sweat from his brow in a cabbage patch full with clouds of white butterflies. “It’s really not warm today,” he says. “It’s only hot if you stop working.” Around him, unemployed workers and environmentalists squat in green bibs, black gloves and hats, plucking cabbages that would otherwise be threshed, to distribute at food banks around Barcelona. A 39-year-old Moroccan emigré with two small children, Abdelouahid began “gleaning” – harvesting farmers’ unwanted crops – with the Espigoladors (gleaners) after losing his job in the construction industry four years ago. It is Ramadan and he is fasting but still smiling as he cuts at the green jewels.

“I don’t like to spend my days at home, sending CVs to employers, waiting for their rejection letters, or going around the restaurants trying to find food,” he says. “I prefer to do something positive. A lot of people need this food. It is better to collect it than to leave it.” Europe wastes some 88m tonnes of food each year – around 173 kg per person – with costs estimated at €143bn (£113bn). Advocates of the new gleaning movements say that its collection could reduce pressure on land use, improve diets, feed the hungry and provide work for the socially excluded.

For now, most of its recovered foods go to food banks, but the Espigoladors social enterprise has launched an “Es Imperfect” (is imperfect) brand of jams, soups and sauces made from recovered produce. The line is growing so fast that the day after the cabbage picking, the project’s founder, Mireia Barba, was called to a meeting of Cotec, King Felip VI’s national development foundation. Another fruit of the gleaning project has been an “I’m imperfect too” advertising campaign which challenges conventional ideas of food and beauty, by using photos of ordinary people holding painted fruit. The idea was to change misconceptions about browned, soft or unusually shaped fruit and veg being any less tasty.

Debt Rattle May 22 2016

May 222016

May 22, 2016 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 9:29 am Finance Tagged with: drought, G7, Greece, hunger, IMF, Monsanto, stabilize, Vienna, yen Comments Off

Unknown Medical supply boat Planter, General Hospital wharf on the Appomattox, City Point, VA 1865

• G-7 Warns on Weak Global Growth as Japan Bristles Over Yen (BBG)

• Jeremy Corbyn Calls For New Economics To Tackle ‘Grotesque Inequality’ (G.)

• “We Are Becoming Convinced That The System Won’t Stabilize” (Matt King)

• Greece Braces for More Austerity Amid EU-IMF Quarrel About Debt (BBG)

• This Time, The IMF Comes Bearing Gifts For The Greeks (G.)

• Europe Should Heed The Lessons of 1913 (Horvat)

• New Evidence About The Dangers Of Monsanto’s Roundup (Intercept)

• Technology Is Changing Our Hands (G.)

• The Worst Famine Since 1985 Looms Across Africa (G.)

The US risks forcing Japan into a position it cannot afford to be in.

• G-7 Warns on Weak Global Growth as Japan Bristles Over Yen (BBG)

Finance chiefs from the world’s biggest developed economies meeting in Japan underscored concerns that global growth is flagging and reaffirmed a pledge not to deliberately weaken their currencies, even as Japan again warned on the yen’s surge. At the end of two days of talks, Group of Seven central bank governors and finance ministers highlighted risks from terrorism, refugee flows, political conflicts and the potential for a U.K. exit from the EU. While officials agreed not to target currencies to stoke growth and warned of the negative consequences from disorderly moves in exchanges rates, host Japan repeated a stance that recent trading in the yen has been one sided and speculative.

Comments on the yen’s moves by Finance Minister Taro Aso hint at a growing frustration inside Japan’s government about the impact on exporters after the currency surged 9% this year, spurring speculation that the government may intervene. Aso raised the issued in a meeting with U.S. Treasury Secretary Jacob J. Lew on Saturday. “I told him that one-sided, abrupt, and speculative moves were seen in the FX market recently, and abrupt moves in the currency market are undesirable and the stability of currencies is important,” Aso said to reporters. Tensions over the yen were evident over the course of the meetings, which were held at a hot springs resort in the country’s north. As Japan warned about the impact of disorderly trading, Lew repeated his view that the yen’s movement hasn’t been overly volatile.

“It’s a pretty high bar to have disorderly conditions,” Lew told reporters. To be sure, Japan remains a long way from its first intervention since 2011, when the G-7 sanctioned selling the yen to aid the country’s recovery after a devastating earthquake, tsunami and nuclear meltdown. A strengthening dollar amid rising bets that the Federal Reserve may lift interest rates over coming moths is helping ease pressure on Japan’s exporters. Aso also made it clear that the difference of opinion with the U.S. is manageable. “They have an election and we have an election and we both have TPP talks,” Aso said. “There are various things on our plates and we of course have to say various things as that’s our jobs.”

Still, by choosing to be so vocal on the yen, Aso is both attempting to jawbone the currency lower and put a marker down in the event the currency again starts to appreciate rapidly. “There’s no sign that Japan and the U.S. will move closer together,” said Hiroaki Muto, chief economist at Tokai Tokyo Research Center.

Left, right, everyone wants growth. But what if that is quite literally a broken record? What if the ‘New Economics’ should be one that questions perpetual growth? After all, growth is no more than an assumption, and there are others.

• Jeremy Corbyn Calls For New Economics To Tackle ‘Grotesque Inequality’ (G.)

Jeremy Corbyn said the UK needed a serious debate about wealth creation, as he called for a new style of economics to tackle Britain’s “grotesque inequality”. Closing a Labour state of the economy conference in central London on Saturday, the party’s leader said: “Wealth creation is a good thing: we all want greater prosperity. But let us have a serious debate about how wealth is created, and how that wealth should be shared.” Corbyn also said a Labour government would “chase down the tax avoiders and the tax evaders” and ensure HMRC had the resources it needed to do so. Labour needed to be ambitious and bold to win the next election, he said. In the meantime, he insisted that the party could make a difference despite the frustrations of being in opposition.

“We must continue to stand up against the Conservative six-year record of mismanagement of the economy – and stand up for the vital services on which we all depend.” George Osborne had vowed six years ago that austerity would wipe out the deficit, Corbyn said. “That’s the wonderful thing about George Osborne’s five-year plans: they’re always five years away,” he added. Shopfloor workers, entrepreneurs and technicians should be put in the driving seat, the Labour leader said. “We want to see a genuinely mixed economy of public and social enterprise, alongside a private sector with a long-term private business commitment, that will provide the decent pay, jobs, housing, schools, health and social care of the future. Labour will always seek to distribute the rewards of growth more fairly. But to deliver that growth demands real change in the way the economy is run,” Corbyn said.

Citi’s Matt King on markets that are supposed to self-stabilize, a still popular notion. Despite the fact that, as Minsky noted quite a while ago, stability breeds instability.

• “We Are Becoming Convinced That The System Won’t Stabilize” (Matt King)

Take market liquidity, for example. Despite near-record notional volumes on TRACE, and policymakers’ protestations that nothing has really changed, market participants continue to lament that bid-offer is misleading, and depth is not what it used to be. Worse, many managers have struggled to make money on the basis of traditional single-name fundamentals, and poor performance is contributing to a steady leakage of flows away from traditional benchmarked funds towards totalreturn funds, indices and ETFs. The shift is not unique to credit: in European equities, futures-to-cash ratios – one convenient measure of index trading versus single-name trading – have reached all-time highs, for example (Figure 1).

Traditional thinking would not read too much into this. A decline in active single-name trading by some market participants should lead to greater dislocations, and hence greater opportunities for others. As index, or asset class, or factor investing becomes more popular, so it should become harder to make money there, and money should return to single-name trading. The system should stabilize. We are becoming more and more convinced this is wrong. In ways that were underappreciated at the time, the pre-crisis era of unlimited leverage led to a veritable bonanza for sellside and buyside alike, in which trading begat more trading, and liquidity begat liquidity. Cyclicals vs non-cyclicals. Value vs momentum. On-the-runs vs off-the-runs. Cash vs CDS. Single names vs indices. The constant arbitraging of relative value relationships led to regular patterns of mean reversion, which in turn encouraged more investors to trade.

In the post-crisis era, this process is running in reverse. Yet what started as a simple desire by regulators to curtail excesses of leverage risks is having much more farreaching repercussions. The curtailment of the hedge fund bid means that many relationships which previously mean reverted are now failing to do so, or at a minimum are doing so much more erratically. Cyclicals vs non-cyclicals. Value vs momentum. On-the-runs vs off-the-runs. Cash vs CDS. Single names vs indices. In principle, these aberrations do constitute trading opportunities – but only for investors with sufficiently strong stomachs and long time horizons, which these days nobody has. Central bank distortions have exacerbated these movements, making investor interest more one-sided and leading one market after another to exhibit more bubble-like tendencies, rising exponentially and then falling back abruptly.

More broken records.

• Greece Braces for More Austerity Amid EU-IMF Quarrel About Debt (BBG)

Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras braces for yet another vote on additional austerity measures, as European creditors remain at loggerheads with the IMF about how much debt relief the country will get for its pain. Lawmakers in Athens are scheduled to vote Sunday evening on an omnibus bill that includes measures ranging from the taxation of diamond dust and coffee to the transfer of thousands of real estate assets from the state to a new privatization fund. The debate will test the resilience of Tsipras’s three-seat parliamentary majority, as euro-area states resist calls from the IMF to set less ambitious fiscal targets and hand Greece more generous debt relief.

Approval of the measures is one of the prior actions Greece has to fulfill to unlock the next tranche of emergency loans from the European Stability Mechanism, the currency bloc’s crisis-fighting fund. The Eurogroup of 19 finance ministers will convene Tuesday to assess the country’s compliance with its latest bailout agreement struck in the summer of 2015. A positive assessment is also a condition for the Eurogroup to ease the servicing terms for over €200 billion of bailout loans handed to the country since 2010.

[..] The Washington-based IMF proposed that interest and principal payments on Greece’s European bailout loans be deferred until 2040, and that maturities on those loans will be extended to 2080, according to a document obtained by Bloomberg News. Even though European counter-proposals acknowledge that current Greek debt dynamics are unsustainable, they fall short of what the IMF wants, according to people familiar with the discussions that took place between government officials over the past week. Instead, the euro area expects Greece to maintain a budget surplus level which the IMF has said is a “far-fetched fantasy.”

Really? Are you sure IMF and EU are not playing good cop bad cop here?

• This Time, The IMF Comes Bearing Gifts For The Greeks (G.)

Another Sunday, another vote in the Greek parliament, another self-imposed punishment beating as the parliament in Athens votes through fresh austerity measures. There will be higher VAT and an increase in taxes on all the pleasures of life: coffee, booze, fags, gambling, even pay TV. And just in case Greece might need to tighten its belt by another couple of notches to meet stringent budget targets, there will be additional measures that will kick in if there is any fiscal slippage over the next couple of years. George Harrison started his song Taxman with the words: “Let me tell you how it will be/There’s one for you, nineteen for me.” The Greeks know exactly what he meant. Greece’s predicament is simple. It has debt repayments to make this summer and it doesn’t have the money to pay the bills.

David Simonds/Observer

The EU can solve this acute cashflow problem by unlocking the funds pledged to Greece under the terms of last summer’s bailout agreement, but it will only do so if Athens demonstrates that it is serious about sorting out its budget. Austerity today will lead to generosity from EU finance ministers when they meet on Tuesday. That, at least, is the hope of Alexis Tsipras, Greece’s prime minister, who is looking for a package in which he gets debt relief in return for austerity. Here’s where things get interesting. The difference between this Sunday and all the other tension-packed Sundays that have studded the Greek crisis over the past six and a half years is that, this time, the battle is not between Greece and the “troika” of the European commission, the ECB and the IMF. Instead, there is a face-off between Europe and the IMF.

The Europeans badly want the fund to be part of Greece’s bailout and to contribute money to it. But Christine Lagarde, the IMF’s managing director, says her support is conditional on two things: a credible deficit reduction plan and a decent slug of debt relief. Hardline EU governments, led by Germany, have resisted this idea, fearing the Greeks will interpret any writedown of its debts as a sign of weakness that Athens will exploit to avoid meeting its budgetary commitments.

“Back to 1913. Isn’t it one of the most curious facts that all these historical figures [Tito, Hitler, Stalin, Trotsky, Freud and Franz Ferdinand] lived at the same time at the same place, maybe only a few hundred metres apart? Did any of them ever meet? Were they drinking coffee at the same place? Would the world history look different if Hitler had been psychoanalysed by Freud?”

• Europe Should Heed The Lessons of 1913 (Horvat)

Imagine the following group of curious characters living in the same city: a worker from Croatia, one unsuccessful painter, two Russians, a guy who analyses dreams and a young Austrian soldier and trophy hunter. Tito, Hitler, Stalin, Trotsky, Freud and Franz Ferdinand might make for unusual neighbours but, as Charles Emmerson describes in his recent book, 1913: In Search of the World Before the Great War, they spent plenty of time in the same two square miles of the capital of the Austro-Hungarian empire, Vienna, in 1913. Only one year later, Franz Ferdinand would become the Archduke of the empire, and his assassination in Sarajevo would lead to the first world war. In 1917, the two Russians became the leading figures of the October revolution and, about the same time, Tito – who would soon become leader of Yugoslavia – became active in the communist movement too.

Sixteen years later, on 30 January 1933, the unsuccessful painter became German Reichskanzler – the second world war was just around the corner. And Freud? After Nazi Germany annexed Austria in 1938, the Gestapo came after him and he became a refugee in London. In short, 1913 was one in which the course of history could have altered significantly. I am in no doubt that now might be another such period. At its collapse, the Austro-Hungarian empire consisted of 15 nations and more than 50 million inhabitants. The EU consists of 28 member states – with some now threatening to exit – and a population of 500 million.

Today’s Austria is facing one of its biggest political crises with the resignation of its chancellor, Werner Faymann, a second round of presidential elections looming on 22 May – which will in all likelihood result in a turn to the right – and, at the same time, nationalist calls for a referendum on Tyrol unification. We don’t know if some future Stalin or Hitler is living in Vienna, but the whole of Europe seems to be on the verge of an abyss. Recent news about a Syrian refugee who was shot by guards on the border between Slovakia and Hungary, and Turkish forces using live bullets to drive away Syrian refugees fleeing violence in their home towns point in that direction. If countries such as Denmark and Switzerland start to seize refugees’ assets, what is left of the European project nominally based on solidarity and brotherhood (“Alle Menschen werden Brüder …”, as the official anthem of the EU claims)?

The refugee crisis wasn’t – and can’t be – solved by investing €6bn in Turkey and “outsourcing” the “redundant humans” to the periphery of Europe again. Moreover, the case of German comedian Jan Boehmermann, who was charged for allegedly insulting the Turkish president, Recep Erdogan, shows that the EU’s only foreign policy is something we might call “export-import”. First we export wars (to Libya or Syria), then we import refugees. Then we export the refugees again (to Turkey), and then we import authoritarian values from Turkey, which is now killing one of the foundations of the European project – free speech. And humour.

And there’s more…

• New Evidence About The Dangers Of Monsanto’s Roundup (Intercept)

Some European governments have already begun taking action against one {Roundup’s] co-formulants, a chemical known as polyethoxylated tallowamine, or POEA, which is used in Monsanto’s Roundup Classic and Roundup Original formulations, among other weed killers, to aid in penetrating the waxy surface of plants. Germany removed all herbicides containing POEA from the market in 2014, after a forestry worker who had been exposed to it developed toxic inflammation of the lungs. In early April, the French national health and safety agency known as ANSES took the first step toward banning products that combine glyphosate and POEA. A draft of the European Commission’s reregistration report on glyphosate proposed banning POEA.

[..] manufacturers of weed killers are required to disclose only the chemical structures of their “active” ingredients — and can hide the identity of the rest as confidential business information — for many years no one knew exactly what other chemicals were in these products, let alone how they affected health. In 2012, Robin Mesnage decided to change that. A cellular and molecular toxicologist in London, Mesnage bought nine herbicides containing glyphosate, including five different formulations of Roundup, and reverse engineered some of the other components. After studying the chemicals’ patterns using mass spectrometry, Mesnage and his colleagues came up with a list of possible molecular structures and then compared them with available chemical samples.

“It took around one year and three people (a specialist in pesticide toxicology, a specialist of chemical mixtures, and a specialist in mass spectrometry) to unravel the secrets of Monsanto’s Roundup formulations,” Mesnage explained in an email. The hard work paid off. In 2013, his team was able not only to deduce the chemical structure of additives in six of the nine formulations but also to show that each of these supposedly inert ingredients was more toxic than glyphosate alone. That breakthrough helped scientists know exactly which chemicals to study, though obtaining samples remains challenging. “We still can’t get them to make experiments,” said Nicolas Defarge, a molecular biologist based in Paris. Manufacturers of co-formulants are unwilling to “sell you anything if you are not a pesticide manufacturer, and even less if you are a scientist willing to assess their toxicity.”

So when Defarge, Mesnage, and five other scientists embarked on their most recent research, they had to be creative. They were able to buy six weed killers, including Roundup WeatherMax and Roundup Classic, at the store. But, finding pure samples of the co-formulants in them was trickier. The scientists got one from a farmer who mixes his own herbicide. For another, they went to a company that uses the chemical to make soap. “They were of course not aware that I was going to assess it for toxic and endocrine-disrupting effects,” said Defarge. András Székács, one of Defarge’s co-authors who is based in Hungary, provided samples of the other three co-formulants studied, but didn’t respond to inquiries about how he obtained them.

In February, the team published its findings, which showed that each of the five co-formulants affected the function of both the mitochondria in human placental cells and aromatase, an enzyme that affects sexual development. Not only did these chemicals, which aren’t named on herbicide labels, affect biological functions, they did so at levels far below the concentrations used in commercially available products. In fact, POEA — officially an “inert” ingredient — was between 1,200 and 2,000 times more toxic to cells than glyphosate, officially the “active” ingredient.

Interesting thoughts. Long article. Not sure how fast our hands could change, though, and quite sure our present tech push will be interrupted.

• Technology Is Changing Our Hands (G.)

The new era of the internet, the smartphone and the PC has had radical effects on who we are and how we relate to each other. The old boundaries of space and time seem collapsed thanks to the digital technology that structures everyday life. We can communicate instantly across both vast and minute distances, Skyping a relative on another continent or texting a classmate sitting at the next table. Videos and photos course through the web at the touch of a screen, and social media broadcast the minutiae of both public and private lives. On the train, the bus, in the cafe and the car, this is what people are doing, tapping and talking, browsing and clicking, scrolling and swiping.

Philosophers, social theorists, psychologists and anthropologists have all spoken of the new reality that we inhabit as a result of these changes. Relationships are arguably more shallow or more profound, more durable or more transitory, more fragile or more grounded. But what if we were to see this chapter in human history through a slightly different lens? What if, rather than focusing on the new promises or discontents of contemporary civilisation, we see today’s changes as first and foremost changes in what human beings do with their hands? The digital age may have transformed many aspects of our experience, but its most obvious yet neglected feature is that it allows people to keep their hands busy in a variety of unprecedented ways.

The owner of the Shakespeare and Company bookshop describes the way young people now try to turn pages by scrolling them, and Apple have even applied for patents for certain hand gestures. Patent application 7844915, filed in 2007, covered document scrolling and the pinch-to-zoom gesture, while the 2008 application 7479949 covered a range of multitouch gestures. Both were ruled invalid, not because gestures can’t be patented, but because they were already covered by prior patents. At the same time, doctors observe massive increases in computer- and phone-related hand problems, as the fingers and wrist are being used for new movements that nothing has prepared them for.

Changes to both the hard and soft tissues of the hand itself are predicted as a consequence of this new regime. We will, ultimately, have different hands, in the same way that the structure of the mouth has been altered, it is argued, by the introduction of cutlery, which changed the topography of the bite. The edge-to-edge bite that we used to have up to around 250 years ago became the overbite, with the top incisors hanging over the lower set, thanks to new ways of cutting up food that the table knife made possible. That the body is secondary to the technology here is echoed in the branding of today’s products: it is the pad and the phone that are capitalised in the iPad and iPhone rather than the “I” of the user.

The world risks reaching crisis fatigue. Largely because of how the media present them.

• The Worst Famine Since 1985 Looms Across Africa (G.)

Countries are just waking up to the most serious global food crisis of the last 25 years. Caused by the strongest El Niño weather event since 1982, droughts and heatwaves have ravaged much of India, Latin America and parts of south-east Asia. But the worst effects of this natural phenomenon, which begins with waters warming in the equatorial Pacific, are to be found in southern Africa. A second consecutive year without rain now threatens catastrophe for some of the poorest people in the world. The scale of the crisis unfolding in 10 or more southern African countries has shocked the United Nations. Lulled into thinking that Ethiopia in 1985 was the last of the large-scale famines affecting many millions, donor countries have been slow to pledge funds or support. More than $650m and 7.9m tonnes of food are needed immediately, says the UN. By Christmas, the situation will have become severe.

The scale of the crisis unfolding in 10 or more southern African countries has shocked the United Nations. Lulled into thinking that Ethiopia in 1985 was the last of the large-scale famines affecting many millions, donor countries have been slow to pledge funds or support. More than $650m and 7.9m tonnes of food are needed immediately, says the UN. By Christmas, the situation will have become severe. Malawi, Mozambique, Lesotho, Zimbabwe, Namibia, Madagascar, Angola and Swaziland have already declared national emergencies or disasters, as have seven of South Africa’s nine provinces. Other countries, including Botswana and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, have also been badly hit. President Robert Mugabe has appealed for $1.5bn to buy food for Zimbabwe and Malawi is expected to declare that more than 8 million people, or half the country, will need food aid by November.

More than 31 million people in the region are said by the UN to need food now, but this number is expected to rise to at least 49 million across almost all of southern Africa by Christmas. With 12 million more hungry people in Ethiopia, 7 million in Yemen, 6 million in Southern Sudan and more in the Central African Republic and Chad, a continent-scale food crisis is unfolding. “Food security across southern Africa will start deteriorating by July, reaching its peak between December 2016 and April 2017,” says the UN’s office for humanitarian affairs. The regional cereal deficit already stands at 7.9m tonnes and continues to put upward pressure on market prices, which are already showing unprecedented increases, diminishing purchasing power and thereby reducing food access. As food insecurity tightens and water scarcity increases due to the drought, there are early signs of acute malnutrition in Madagascar, Malawi, Mozambique and Zimbabwe.

The Automatic Earth is Back in Athens, Again

Feb 012016

February 1, 2016 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 8:21 pm Finance Tagged with: Athens, donations, generosity, Greece, homeless, hunger, money, needy, refugees 2 Responses »

Konstantinos Polychronopoulos 2016

Time does indeed fly; I’ve already been back in Athens for a week, but I still haven’t told you about it -a nasty flu now in its 4th day is a partial excuse-, and also haven’t even written the story of my last trip in Nov-Dec. Don’t think it’s Zika, though that’s a weird story; from what I gather someone was testing a GMO fly back in the Caribbean that caused this mutation and now someone wants to fight it with another GMO fly?! Ain’t we smart.

Anyway, the stunning generosity of the Automatic Earth readers left me no choice but to visit the city again so soon, really. Which is I think a really good thing.

I wrote an article on December 22 2015, An Urgent Christmas Call To The Finance Blogosphere. There has been close to no reaction from rest of that blogosphere, to my -just a tad disgruntled- surprise, but a lot from our own readers.

In the article, I made an appeal for help for the work of my new best friend Kostas (Konstantinos Polychronopoulos), who has devoted his entire life to helping the poor and homeless of Athens (an ever faster ever growing group of people), starting with providing at least a decent meal. I first talked about Kostas’ work in July just after I first met him in AE for Athens Fund 2nd Donation: The Man Who Cooks In The Street.

In that follow-up, An Urgent Christmas Call To The Finance Blogosphere, I said:

I was saying before how ‘The Other Human’ [O Allas Anthropos] social kitchen had grown at least 5-fold. That is a bit of an understatement. There are now 5 different ‘kitchen teams’ running (vs 1-2 before), and they hand out over 3000 meals a day today instead of the 300 earlier in the year. There simply is that much need. The Greeks themselves are getting poorer, fast, and refugees have become a major ‘target’ group as well. Kostas began running operations on Lesbos over the summer, and has a team in place there now as well as on Salimani island and 3 different locations in the Athens area. And there’s no doubt he would like to do more.

Before, costs would be covered by food donations and sympathizers giving €5 or €10 a month from what little they have. Between pensions cuts, pay cuts and capital controls, the number of Greeks who have next to nothing rises fast. It’s no exception for former supporters to now come to rely on Kostas for their own food. Nor is it exceptional for grandmothers to still insist on giving $5 from the €400 that’s all that’s left of their pension. Greeks do solidarity well.

But the numbers are getting out of hand, so many people need help, and it promises to get much worse in 2016, looking at the new austerity measures the troika is forcing upon the country, and the expected numbers of refugees arriving. The donations that used to run ‘The Other Human’ are simply not enough to cover operations any longer, let alone expand them where most needed.

And while the €1000 I donated earlier this year went a -relatively- long way, the second €1000, though at least as much appreciated, won’t go nearly as far. When I was told ‘The Other Human’ have been forced to cancel some cooking events now -for the cold and hungry homeless, for crying out loud, who are increasingly people that used to have jobs and homes and all until recently-, simply because they can’t afford to feed the poor, that actually hurt, and stung. That felt personal.

Turns out, since then, more has been added (‘the need is so great’). As per a quite hilarious email from Kostas 10 days ago, when I hadn’t arrived in Greece yet:

My friend Raul; By Wednesday I am here and the kitchen of lesbian, hope to see a third or fourth. Tells other people that the social kitchen has grown, we speak has seven and prepared in other two cities in Greece.

Yeah, that made me laugh. Still don’t know if he intended that ‘lesbian kitchen’ thing. He did seem to find it awfully funny when I remarked on it, though, in person the other day. On a more serious note, what he’s saying is that in the past month, he went from 5 to 7 social kitchens, and is adding 2 more. Or trying to.

‘That Wednesday’ was 5 days ago. We had a meeting then with a few people to coordinate how we’re going to make the entire situation as clear and transparent as we can to you, Automatic Earth readers, who’ve already donated over another $8000 (!) -it’s truly stunning- since December 22 (on top of the first AE for Athens fund I started in spring 2015, for which $12,000 came in and which has $7000 left in it).

Allow me to repeat: I never had the slightest idea, I thought I’d get a few hundred bucks when I first brought this up, in spring 2015, even before I met Kostas, and that’d be it. It’s more humbling than I can put into words to have you trust me with so much. There’s not an inch of me that isn’t constantly aware of that.

Those kind of amounts take it from being something nice, to being a serious responsibility, in my view. And Kostas agrees completely. So this Wednesday we’re going to have a big gathering with lots of the people who work for ‘The Social Kitchen’, in the various locations the organization operates in, have a big get-together, take lots of pictures, hopefully have a party -which all the volunteers truly deserve-, and exchange more detailed information.

Moreover, we’re going to -try to- spell out exactly -up to a point- what your money is being spent on. And, of course, talk about what we can do to increase the funding, and -especially- how to make it more structural -once every week, month or year-. I realize full well that there is a limit to what the Automatic Earth and its readers can do, but I guess we’re simply going to keep pushing with what we have, and see where it ends.

I don’t know enough about crowdfunding and crowdsourcing and the like to get that up and going with enough confidence in either the outcome or the process itself -but I’m very open to suggestions-, and I apparently don’t know enough about how to get the rest of the finance blogosphere going either. What a shame, there’s so much money on the one side, and so much need on the other. But that doesn’t mean I intend to stop pushing.

More on Kostas and O Allas Anthropos later this week. There are a few other things I would like to share with you. First, something I noticed last month in supermarkets here -the ones I see in the center are not all that big-, that flashed a big red sign and made me think of Eastern European stores I’ve seen.

Troika-imposed austerity and taxes have had a double whammy impact. People have much less to spend on basic needs, and what is still available has become expensive, even in western European terms. So what you get is a lot of empty shelves:

I’ve seen stores where I swear I saw half the employees being busy making those shelves look less empty by spreading what is still for sale, across the empty spaces. At least these people still have a job, though I must wonder what they pay.

Those are pictures I took in December, of something I don’t remember seeing in June/July on my first trip here. I was in a large Carrefour -major French chain- supermarket where I didn’t take pictures, and it was even more evident there. Empty shelves. Near to the center of a large city in the western world.

Then, there’s another organization that I need to tell you about, since I donated $1000 of your money to it, from the AE fund for Athens that I started with last spring.

I was introduced by a friend to Myrto Lemos, a woman who started doing field work in New York City in the late 1970s (she must be in her 70s now). Upon her return to Athens in the 1980s, she began working with -‘socially excluded’- street children in central Athens’ poorest areas, specifically those from Greek muslim and Roma backgrounds. In 1997, she established the Support Center for Children and Families for them. It is run -as so many things are in Greece these days- entirely by volunteers.

Here’s Myrto with Kostas, I didn’t know they knew each other, and neither did the people who introduced me to her, but turned out they did:

The children Myrto has devoted her whole life to -I have so much admiration for people with that dedication- would typically sell flowers, balloons and trinkets on the street all day every day (for generations, basically), there was never a culture of going to school or anything like that. Myrto decided it was time to change that.

And she did. The best example, I found, was a young girl who now works as a social worker at the Support Center, but who had never even been to school before the age of 12, who couldn’t read or write, nothing. And now there she is on the left answering the phone, a fully educated social worker (imagine how proud Myrto is):

The Center provides food (a big thing) and education for the children, makes sure they go to school, and gives -badly needed- social and legal help to their families (where no-one can read or write). I’ve got to say, to me, this was an entirely unexpected corner of society, and the needs existing within it.

But Athens, and Greece in general, have of course been on a crossroads of cultures and societies for thousands of years, so it should be no surprise to find parts of them anchored -left behind?!- inside the city, albeit largely forgotten.

Greece is known as one of the best educated countries on the planet – though that can’t possible have improved over the past 5-10 austerity years-, and then you still find entire cultures that never went to school. Ironically, it’s the austerity policies that force more of these kids back out into the streets peddling their trinkets and not attending school, just so their families can eat. A major issue and worry for Myrto, who wants them at school.

Here’s the pretty much nondescript building the Center is housed in at the corner of Aristonos 6-8 & Pierias, Kolonos:

Plus, the lovely grand map of the world that covers an entire wall in one of the homework rooms, with divers and dolphins and kangaroos and elephants and turtles and whales and hidden treasures, what a great way to learn about the world you live in, when no-one ever told you:

And the inevitable lovely adorable far too cute and far too smart little girl doing her homework, who, lest we forget, if not for Myrto would probably have been peddling balloons on the streets -or worse- without ever having learned to read or write, for the rest of her life. Now, she has a shot at being a person, a woman in her own right.

It’s an honor and a privilege to be able to meet these people, and be able to do something very useful for them, thanks to you, Automatic Earth readers.

I see so much passing by each and every day in the financial press about allegedly successful people, and what makes them successful, and it’s always about the amount of money they make or have made.

But for me, success is defined by what a person does for others, it’s about helping people, not helping yourself. And I, through a twist of fate I had never planned or even imagined, get to meet these people here in a pretty much derelict society, where not much runs any longer as it once did, and where worse is on the horizon.

And that’s where you get to see who people really are, where you find people who say: ‘it’s not about me’. In the world of finance, it’s always only about ‘me’, and about money, and the seemingly unbreakable umbilical cord between the two.

Do you think the markets are going to rise? Here’s how to make money. Do you think they will fall? Here’s how to make money off of that. It’s all only about me and my money, but it’s a life that’s barely even breathing, and barely moving at that, a bunch of automatons thinking they prove their smarts if they pick the ‘right’ swing of a one-dimensional pendulum.

If that’s all people are about, and what you and I are about, why bother? Just so maybe one day we can sit our asses down at a pool in the Caribbean and say ‘we got it made’, while millions of others elsewhere in the world grovel in the dirt and wind up burying the children they love, in that same dirt?

It’s the quintessential difference between what you have and what you are. And about who has sufficient faith in what they are, and doesn’t feel the need to hide behind what they have. Who doesn’t think that if the whip comes down and the whole debt circus tent gets blown away in a wicked storm, they’ll still be fine if only they bought enough gold or bitcoin or whatever in advance.

But that’s a hard nut to crack in today’s world. So we’ll instead let it seep in drop by drop. Same difference. Though that’ll still be denied too.

If in the meantime, sorry but my cold won’t let me do much of anything right now, you want to contribute to the Social Kitchen project, the way to do it is still through the Automatic Earth‘s Paypal widget, top left hand corner of every page. Amounts ending in $0.99 or $0.37 go towards the Social Kitchen, others towards supporting the Automatic Earth (which is also highly needed, and without which we couldn’t do the whole thing, regardless.)

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to find myself a hole to reside in until my cold is over. And I’ll be back with more on this later in the week.

Debt Rattle January 21 2016

Jan 212016

January 21, 2016 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 9:43 am Finance Tagged with: China, default, derivatives, diabetes, EM, EU, hunger, hypothermia, IMF, oil, refugees 8 Responses »

Harris&Ewing Goodyear Blimp at Washington Air Post ,DC 1938

• Global Shareholders Have $27 Trillion Locked in Bear Markets (BBG)

• US Futures Drop With Asia Stocks as Oil Falls (BBG)

• Emerging Markets Lost $735 Billion in 2015, $2 Trillion in 2016 (BBG)

• US Oil Posts Biggest One-Day Percentage Loss Since September (WSJ)

• Energy Sector’s Default Risk Higher Than In Great Recession (MW)

• Some Bankrupt Oil and Gas Drillers Can’t Give Their Assets Away (BBG)

• PBOC Injects Most Cash in Three Years in Open-Market Operations (BBG)

• China Stock Rout Seen Getting Uglier as Derivative Trigger Looms (BBG)

• China Is Drowning In Private Sector Debt (Ormerod)

• Deutsche Bank Shares Fall 6% On News Of €2.1 Billion Loss (BBG)

• One In 6 Americans Go Hungry, One In 3 Kids Will Develop Diabetes (Ind.)

• For the Sake of Capitalism, Pepper Spray Davos (Yra Harris)

• 6 Years Suffering The Violence Of A 1,000 Economic Cuts (DI)

• We’ve Hugely Underestimated The Overfishing of The Oceans (WaPo)

• Italy’s Blockbuster Quo Vado? Draws On Bitter Economic Reality (Guardian)

• EU Chief Tusk Gives Refugee Plan 2 Months To Work (AP)

• ‘We Will Come To Athens And Burn Them All’: Protest Returns To Greece (Guardian)

• IMF Cancels Systemic Exemption Rule Created In 2010 To Bail Out Greece (AFP)

• Greece Re-Opens Refugee Camp On Border in Sub-Zero Weather (Kath.)

• Two Refugees –One 5-Year Old Child– Die Of Hypothermia Off Lesvos (Kath.)

Losses to date estimated at $15 trillion.

• Global Shareholders Have $27 Trillion Locked in Bear Markets (BBG)

At least 40 stock markets around the world with a total value of $27 trillion are in bear territory, as investors witness the worst start to a year on record. The U.K. was the latest market to fall 20% from its peak, while India is 1% away from crossing the threshold that traders describe as the onset of bear market. Nineteen countries with $30 trillion have declined between 10% and 20%, thereby entering a so-called correction, according to data compiled by Bloomberg from the 63 biggest markets.

“People are just bottom-fishing.”

• US Futures Drop With Asia Stocks as Oil Falls (BBG)

U.S. index futures declined after a rally in Asian stocks reversed, pushing a gauge of global equities back to the brink of a bear market. Oil fell and the yen strengthened. Benchmark share measures in Tokyo, Shanghai and Manila slumped at least 2.8%, while Standard & Poor’s 500 Index contracts erased early gains to trade 0.9% lower. European index futures slid after the region’s stocks plunged the most since August on Wednesday. China’s equitiesfell despite a drop in money-market rates as the People’s Bank of China injected the most cash via open-market operations since 2013. The yen approached a one-year high reached Wednesday. Copper pared an advance.

Volatility has coursed through financial markets in 2016, amid turmoil in Chinesemarkets and the almost uninterrupted selloff in crude oil. The S&P 500’s plunge Wednesday triggered a technical signal indicating U.S. stocks were oversold, spurring a paring of losses that prevented the MSCI All-Country World Index from entering a bear market. The ECB meets Thursday, the first major monetary authority to review interest rates and policy since turmoil gripped markets at the start of the year. “The ground right now is so unstable, and there’s so much anxiety,” said Ayako Sera at Sumitomo Mitsui Trust. “We saw a rally, but I wouldn’t say that we’re in a full rebound yet. People are just bottom-fishing.”

“The 31 biggest developing markets have lost a combined $2 trillion in equity values since the start of 2016.”

• Emerging Markets Lost $735 Billion in 2015, More to Go (BBG)

Global investors and companies pulled $735 billion out of emerging markets in 2015, the worst capital flight in at least 15 years, the Institute of International Finance said. The amount was almost seven times bigger than what was recorded in 2014, the Washington-based think tank said in a report on Wednesday. China was the biggest loser, with $676 billion leaving its markets. The IIF predicted investors may withdraw $348 billion from developing countries this year. Emerging-market stocks are trading at the lowest levels since May 2009 and a gauge of 20 currencies has slumped to a record. A meltdown in commodity prices and concern over the slowdown in China’s growth to the weakest since 1990 are spurring investors to dump assets from China to Russia and Brazil.

The 31 biggest developing markets have lost a combined $2 trillion in equity values since the start of 2016. “We’ve seen massive outflows from emerging markets to the benefit of the euro zone and Japan,” said Ibra Wane at Amundi Asset Management. “Institutional investors have been more attracted by these regions.” Wane said the shift in flows is a result of monetary-policy changes, as the Federal Reserve raised interest rates in December for the first time in almost a decade, which is also partly to blame for the volatility in emerging-market currencies. “I’d rather look first at stabilization of currencies,” Wane said. “If this were to come true, then probably also flows would come on top of it.”

All 24 emerging-market currencies tracked by Bloomberg have depreciated against the dollar in the past year, with the Argentine peso, the Brazilian real and the South African rand getting hit the worst. “Countries with large current-account deficits, high levels of foreign-exchange corporate indebtedness and questionable macro policy frameworks would come under particular pressure in the event of further emerging-market retrenchment,” the IIF report said. “At-risk countries include Brazil, South Africa and Turkey.” The Chinese yuan’s 5.5% drop in the past 12 months was one of the drivers of outflows from the world’s second biggest economy, according to the IIF report. “The 2015 outflows largely reflected efforts by Chinese corporates to reduce dollar exposure after years of heavy dollar borrowing, as expectations of persistent RMB appreciation were replaced by rising concerns about a weakening currency,” the report said.

If global equities lost $15 trillion so far, what’s the tally for oil?

• US Oil Posts Biggest One-Day Percentage Loss Since September (WSJ)

The selloff in oil prices accelerated Wednesday, intensifying a slide in global financial markets as investors worried that oil’s relentless downdraft signaled global economic gloom. The front-month U.S. oil contract settled down 6.7%, posting the biggest one-day loss since September. Oil prices have dropped more than 25% this year. Much of the 19-month oil-market selloff has been driven by concerns about ample supplies. What’s increasingly weighing on investors is the fear that demand growth is wilting, particularly in China, which could reflect deeper economic woes. “Global economic forces appear to be driving down demand for commodities, ” Citigroup said in a note. “There is no doubt that declining expectations of global growth are exacerbating the results of oversupply across commodity markets.”

Light, sweet crude for February delivery settled down $1.91 to $26.55 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange. The February contract expires at settlement Wednesday. Brent, the global benchmark, fell 82 cents, or 2.9%, to $27.94 a barrel on ICE Futures Europe, also on track for the lowest settlement since 2003. Oil investors fear that demand in China, which consumes about 12% of world’s crude, may falter as the country shifts to a less energy-intensive economic model. On Tuesday, the Chinese authorities announced the country’s gross domestic product rose 6.9% in 2015, its slowest pace in 25 years. ESAI Energy said Wednesday that the pace of demand growth in China from 2015 to 2030 will be 60% slower than the pace of demand growth from 2000 to 2015.

Spring cleaning?!

• Energy Sector’s Default Risk Higher Than In Great Recession (MW)

Markets are pricing in a higher default risk for the energy sector than they did at the peak of the Great Recession, according to data from Schwab and Barclays. As continued concerns about oil’s global supply glut pushed crude futures below $27 a barrel, sparking a global stock selloff, energy spreads surpassed their 2009 peak. A spread is a yield differential between the index and comparable risk-free Treasurys. Widening spreads mean investors are pricing in more risk for the energy sector and require a higher yield as compensation for their risk. As the following chart shows, the spread on the energy sector of the Barclays U.S. Corporate High-Yield Bond Index, a widely followed gauge of market-priced risk, reached 1,530 basis points as of Tuesday’s close, compared with 1,420 basis points reached during the height of the financial crisis seven years ago. One basis point is equivalent to 0.01% or one hundredth of a percentage point.

Credit-market spreads are often viewed as a leading indicator for equity markets. Spreads in the energy sector have been widening since the summer of 2014, and spiked over the past few months amid the recent rout in oil prices. That dynamic has certainly played out lately. Stocks followed oil’s decline, weighed by sinking shares of energy companies. The energy sector was the worst performer on the S&P 500 on Wednesday, and is down nearly 15% since the beginning of the year. Meanwhile, energy companies led decliners among the Dow industrials. Widening credit spreads imply that “the market is clearly expecting the default rate to pick up, as the balance sheets of some of the riskier energy companies won’t be able to sustain this drop in oil prices” said Collin Martin, director of fixed-income strategy for the Schwab Center for Financial Research.

Orderly way down or mayhem?

• Some Bankrupt Oil and Gas Drillers Can’t Give Their Assets Away (BBG)

Oil is in free fall and Terry Clark couldn’t be happier. In mid-2014, when the crude price topped $100 a barrel, Clark made an offer to buy properties from Dune Energy, a small driller with money trouble. Dune turned him down. A year later, as oil plunged to $60 a barrel, Dune filed for bankruptcy and Clark’s White Marlin Oil & Gas picked up the assets at auction at a deep discount. “What we offered versus what we got it for, it’s a great price,” Clark said. “We’re going to continue to play these bankruptcies. We’re participating in two more right now.” Winners and losers are emerging from the energy bust. What’s a meal for Clark is indigestion for banks that financed the boom using oil and gas properties as collateral. The four biggest U.S. banks – Bank of America, Citigroup, JPMorgan and Wells Fargo – have set aside at least $2.5 billion combined to cover souring energy loans and have said they’ll add to that if prices stay low.

There’s plenty to keep Clark bargain-hunting. Last year, 42 U.S. energy companies went bankrupt, owing more than $17 billion, according to a report from law firm Haynes & Boone. Dune went belly up owing $144.2 million. Its assets sold for $20 million. In May, American Eagle filed for bankruptcy with debts of $215 million. Its properties sold for $45 million in October. BPZ Resources owed $275.2 million. Its assets fetched about $9 million. Endeavour went into bankruptcy owing $1.63 billion. The company sold some assets for $9.65 million and handed over the rest to lenders. ERG Resources opened an auction with a minimum bid of $250 million. Response? No takers. “A lot of people got into this business and didn’t really understand the ups and downs of price cycles,” said Becky Roof, a managing director for turnaround and restructuring with the consulting firm AlixPartners. “They’re getting a very bad dose of reality right now.”

It worked for mere hours. Reminiscent of Bernanke’s 2008 moves.

• PBOC Injects Most Cash in Three Years in Open-Market Operations (BBG)

The People’s Bank of China injected the most cash in almost three years in its open-market operations, helping ease a cash squeeze as the coming Chinese New Year holiday spurs demand for funds at a time when capital outflows are mounting. The central bank said it conducted 110 billion yuan ($16.7 billion) of seven-day reverse-repurchase agreements and 290 billion yuan of 28-day contracts. That compares with 160 billion yuan of contracts that matured and resulted in a net cash injection of 315 billion yuan for this week’s two auctions. Other lending tools were used to add about 700 billion yuan this week for terms ranging from three days to a year.

China is trying to hold borrowing costs down to support its economy without spurring an exodus of funds that drove the yuan to a five-year low this month. Gross domestic product rose last year at the slowest pace in a quarter century and intervention to prop up the exchange rate led to a record $513 billion plunge in the nation’s foreign-exchange reserves. The Chinese New Year holiday – a period for feasting and exchanging gifts – will shut China’s financial markets throughout the week starting Feb. 8. “The market is a bit nervous and liquidity is also needed to cover the Chinese New Year,” said Frances Cheung, Hong Kong-based head of rates strategy for Asia ex-Japan at Societe Generale.

“The fact that they are going for longer tenors on reverse repos and its MLF does add to market expectations for a delay in a reserve-ratio cut, which in itself could be linked to the currency market performance.” The central bank injected 410 billion yuan into the banking system via three- and 12-month loans under its Medium-Term Lending Facility this week, while Short-term Liquidity Operations were used to add 55 billion yuan of three-day loans on Monday and another 150 billion yuan of six-day funds on Wednesday. The PBOC also auctioned 80 billion yuan of treasury deposits on behalf of the Ministry of Finance this week.

“Many of those products have a “knock-in” feature at the 8,000 level that will spur banks to cut futures positions..”

• China Stock Rout Seen Getting Uglier as Derivative Trigger Looms (BBG)

If Bank of America is right, Chinese stocks in Hong Kong are poised for a fresh wave of selling. That’s because the benchmark Hang Seng China Enterprises Index is approaching a level that forces investment banks to pare back their bullish futures positions, according to William Chan, the head of Asia Pacific equity derivatives research at BofAML in Hong Kong. The trades, tied to banks’ issuance of structured products, are likely to start unwinding when the index falls through 8,000, a level it briefly breached on Wednesday. The gauge dropped 1% to 7,932.24 at 1:05 p.m. local time on Thursday. Banks have purchased futures on the gauge of so-called H shares to hedge exposure to structured products that they’ve sold to clients, according to Chan.

Many of those products have a “knock-in” feature at the 8,000 level that will spur banks to cut futures positions to maintain the effectiveness of their hedges, he said. Additional pressure points may also come at lower levels, Chan said. “As the market goes lower from here, the downward move may accelerate,” he said. “There will be a large amount of hedging in futures which dealers need to unwind.” While the opaque nature of structured products makes it difficult to gauge how much money is riding on any particular level of the Hang Seng China index, Chan came to his conclusion by analyzing regulatory data from South Korea, one of the few countries that publicizes such figures.

The nation is among the region’s biggest markets for structured products and there’s currently a notional value of about $34 billion from Korea linked to the Hang Seng China measure, according to Chan. When banks sell the structured products to investors, they take on an exposure that’s similar to purchasing a put option on the index, Chan said. To hedge against the possibility of a rally, the banks buy Hang Seng China index futures. If the stock gauge falls below knock-in levels for the structured products – the price at which investors begin to lose their principal – the sensitivity of the bank’s position to index swings gets smaller, and banks respond by selling futures to reduce their hedge.

Along with everyone else.

• China Is Drowning In Private Sector Debt (Ormerod)

The eyes of the financial and economic worlds are now fixed on China, with focus predominantly on Chinese stock markets and the country’s GDP figures. A fascinating perspective was provided last week in the leafy borough of Kingston upon Thames. The university there has recruited the Australian Steve Keen as head of its economics department, and it was the occasion of his inaugural lecture. Keen was one of the few economists to highlight the importance of private sector debt before the financial crisis began in 2008. The title of the lecture itself was exciting: “Is capitalism doomed to have crises?” Judging by the beards and dress style of the audience, many may have expected a Corbynesque rant. Instead, we heard an elegant exposition based on a set of non-linear differential equations.

Private sector debt is the sum of the debts held by individuals and companies, excluding financial sector firms like banks. Keen pointed out that, in the decade prior to the massive crash of 1929, the size of private debt relative to the output of the economy as a whole (GDP) rose by well over 50%. The increase from the late 1990s onwards meant that debt once again reached dizzy heights. In ten years, it rose from being around 1.2 times as big as the economy to being 1.7 times larger. This may seem small. But American GDP in 2007 was over $14 trillion. If debt had risen in line with the economy, it would have been about $17 trillion. Instead, it was $24 trillion, an extra $7 trillion of debt to worry about. Japan experienced a huge financial crash at the end of the 1980s.

The Nikkei share index lost no less than 80% of its peak value, and land values in Tokyo fell by 90%. During the 1980s, private sector debt rose from being some 1.4 times as big as the economy to 2.1 times the size. In China, in 2005, the value of private debt was around 1.2 times GDP. It is now around twice the size. Drawing parallels with the previous experiences of America and Japan, a major financial crisis is not only overdue but it is actually happening. And Keen suggests there is still some way to go. So is it all doom and gloom? Up to a point, Lord Copper. High levels of private sector debt relative to the size of the economy do indeed seem to precede crises. But there is no hard and fast rule on the subsequent fall in share prices.

Japanese shares fell 80% and have not yet recovered their late 1980s levels. In the 1930s, US equities fell 75%, and took until 1952 to bounce back. In the latest financial crisis, they fell by 50% but are even now above their 2007 high. Equally, output responds to these falls in completely different ways. In the 1930s, American GDP fell by 25%, compared to just 3% in the late 2000s. Japan has struggled, but never experienced a major recession. Still, Keen’s arguments leave much food for thought.

World’s biggest bank. Huge derivatives holdings.

• Deutsche Bank Shares Fall 6% On News Of €2.1 Billion Loss (BBG)

Deutsche Bank AG, Germany’s biggest lender, expects to post a €2.1 billion loss for the fourth quarter after setting aside more money for legal matters and taking a restructuring charge. The stock is at the lowest since 2009. About €1.2 billion were earmarked for litigation and €800 million for restructuring and severance costs, mainly in the private and business clients division, the Frankfurt-based firm said Wednesday in a statement. “Challenging market conditions” also hurt earnings at the investment bank during the quarter, cutting group revenue to about €6.6 billion, it said. The bank had reported €7.8 billion of net revenue a year earlier. Co-CEO John Cryan has been seeking ways to restore investor confidence and earnings growth battered by costs tied to past misconduct.

Under his overhaul, Deutsche Bank plans to shrink headcount by 26,000, or a quarter of the workforce, by 2018 while planning to suspend the dividend to help shore up capital buffers. “A real fresh start means even lower stated net profits for some time,” Daniele Brupbacher at UBS in Zurich who has a neutral rating on the shares, wrote in a note on Thursday. Conditions for the company will probably “remain challenging” in the first quarter, he wrote. The stock fell as much as 6% and was down 3.5% at 17.10 euros as of 9:16 a.m. in Frankfurt, the biggest decline in the 46-member Stoxx Europe 600 Banks Index. Deutsche Bank’s 24% decline this year means it’s the worst-valued global bank.

“..obesity and poverty “are neighbours”

• One In 6 Americans Go Hungry, One In 3 Kids Will Develop Diabetes (Ind.)

Film director Lori Silverbush has spoken out on hunger in the US and says it is still a massive problem three years after making a documentary on the subject. The US faces staggering statistics on food poverty – the highest under the current government administration since the 1970s when hunger was almost eradicated in the US. One in six Americans are hungry, while 30% of Americans are described as “food insecure” – meaning they can’t guarantee they can always put food on the table. Mrs Silverbush’s film “A Place At The Table”, which she co-directed alongside Kristi Jacobsen, reveals that 44 million Americans rely on food stamps, which are worth around $3 to $4 per day.

Insufficient funds mean that people can’t afford to buy fresh fruit or vegetables, which have gone up in price by 40% since the obesity crisis began, according to author Marion Nestle, and instead they rely on cheap, processed foods. As a result, obesity and poverty “are neighbours”, said End Hunger Network founder Jeff Bridges. Speaking at the Brooklyn Historical Society on Tuesday evening, Mrs Silverbush said her “blood boiled” when she realized that food poverty is a result of politics. The government has spent $0.75 trillion since 1995 on subsidies to wealthy agriculture companies that are responsible for processed foods, a policy that started during the Great Depression of the 1930s.

“We didn’t know there was hunger in every county or that there were millions of working families that were hungry,” she said. “Malnutrition and hunger cause a cascade of terrible, life-long consequences for kids.” The film also revealed that one in three children born in the year 2000 will be diagnosed with type 2 diabetes. Hunger is expensive. It costs the US government $167 billion a year, according to the film. One interviewee, Barbie Izquierdo, lives in Philadelphia with two children, and her food stamps were taken away once she secured full time employment, leaving her without enough money to feed her family. “Define starving,” she said. “Are you starving if you don’t eat for a day?“

Can’t we just ignore it instead?

• For the Sake of Capitalism, Pepper Spray Davos (Yra Harris)

Please, PEPPER SPRAY ALL THE ATTENDEES OF DAVOS in order to halt the rape of taxpayers and consumers across the globe. This annual conclave is responsible for more wealth destruction and the widening disparity in GINI coefficients than any public policy. I believe that the cost of attending Davos is priced at such an extravagant rate because it is a giant insider scam. Hobnob with politicians and policy makers in an effort to be part of the “smart money” crowd. It was the great moral philosopher and economist Adam Smith who so presciently noted: “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for the merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.” The conspiracy against the public has been the financial repression of the global middle class in an effort to bail out those who are attached themselves to the public treasury to maintain the “animal spirits” of crony capitalism.

The cost of an entrance pass to this private/public congress of mover and shakers should sound an alarm to all those who desire transparency in financial markets. In contemporizing the words of Adam Smith, Samuel Huntington was credited in the online research cite, Acton Commentary, as creating the phrase DAVOS MAN: “A soulless man, technocratic, nationless and cultureless, severed from reality. The modern economics that undergirded Davos capitalism is equally soulless, a managerial capitalism that reduces economics to mathematics and separates it from human action and human creativity.”

Friday’s release of the 2010 FOMC transcripts reveals that Chair Bernanke raised concerns “… about inappropriate access to information by outsiders other than the media, including consultants, market people and so on.” It was earlier revealed that Bernanke had held discussions with ECB President Trichet about the seriousness of the European sovereign debt crisis. The Reuters story post-transcript release–“Fed Helped ECB With Swaps after Trichet ‘Personal Appeal’”–quotes Chairman Bernanke: “Yesterday [ECB Chief] Jean-Claude Trichet called me and made what I would characterize as a personal appeal to re-open the swaps that we had before,” Bernanke told his colleagues at the UNSCHEDULED meeting.”

In a further analysis by Reuters, the article notes, “The transcripts, which are released after five years, show how closely Bernanke worked with Trichet, who shared ‘highly confidential’ information about the ECB’s part in a trillion-dollar ‘shock and awe’ rescue plan launched by EU leaders to combat an escalating financial crisis in Europe.” Ten months later Chairman Bernanke is openly warning FOMC members about leaks from its meetings. Curious about how much the DAVOS crowd made from the whispers emanating from the Fed Board Room? It costs more than $600,000 to be a strategic partner at Davos and be allowed into the most high-level meetings with the most important CEOs and policy makers. But if the inside scoop is info beyond the ears of mere mortals PRICE IS NO OBJECT BUT INSIDER PROFITS CERTAINLY ARE. More pepper spray to stop the rapes.

H/t Steve Keen.

• 6 Years Suffering The Violence Of A 1,000 Economic Cuts (DI)

“My generation can’t afford houses. My generation can’t afford to have children. My generation are either leaving the country or jumping in rivers. That’s my generation, man,” Blindboy said on RTE’s Late Late Show on 8 January. “My generation is dealing with neoliberalism [sic] economic policies that are similar enough to the economic liberalism at the time of the Famine,” he said. “It’s a laisse-faire system, where our resources of the country are being sold for private interests and our generation, my generation is screwed.” When I saw that, it got me thinking: negative perceptions of the working class are so strong in Irish society that people who use food banks would rather call themselves “poor” than “working class”. This is the result of successful divide-and-conquer tactics.

Because the truth is that these days – the poor, the working poor, the working class, the middle-class – almost all of us are screwed. The wealth is trickling upwards to a very few. You can see it in a survey the Dublin think tank TASC released in December, which laid out the division of wealth in Ireland. The top 20% are the ones squeezing everybody’s middle: they have almost 73% of Ireland’s wealth. So if we look at a financial definition of working class, rather than a cultural one, the majority of us fit right in there together, even those notionally middle-class people who would recoil if you tried to tell them they were working class. Given this situation, I would expect to see howls of protest in the mainstream media, all the time. But I don’t see this kind of media outcry, and I wonder why.

Maybe it’s because the mainstream media usually take the side of the market, seeing issues from a market perspective. And I guess the market doesn’t care if our generation is screwed. It might actually be a good thing, from a market perspective, because it ensures there’s a steady supply of young people desperate for jobs, which keeps demand for wages and benefits to a minimum. And that would be rather attractive to multinationals looking for cheap workers. Meanwhile, journalists are just trying to survive too. Most of them are in precarious positions, and, unless they want a ticket to the hunger games, it’s human nature for them to keep their heads down and go with the status quo.

Eat jellyfish.

• We’ve Hugely Underestimated The Overfishing of The Oceans (WaPo)

The state of the world’s fish stocks may be in worse shape than official reports indicate, according to new data – a possibility with worrying consequences for both international food security and marine ecosystems. A study published Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications suggests that the national data many countries have submitted to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has not always accurately reflected the amount of fish actually caught over the past six decades. And the paper indicates that global fishing practices may have been even less sustainable over the past few decades than scientists previously thought. The FAO’s official data report that global marine fisheries catches peaked in 1996 at 86 million metric tons and have since slightly declined.

But a collaborative effort from more than 50 institutions around the world has produced data that tell a different story altogether. The new data suggest that global catches actually peaked at 130 metric tons in 1996 and have declined sharply – on average, by about 1.2 million metric tons every year – ever since. The effort was led by researchers Daniel Pauly and Dirk Zeller of the University of British Columbia’s Sea Around Us project. The two were interested investigating the extent to which data submitted to the FAO was misrepresented or underreported. Scientists had previously noticed, for instance, that when nations recorded “no data” for a given region or fishing sector, that value would be translated into a zero in FAO records – not always an accurate reflection of the actual catches that were made.

Additionally, recreational fishing, discarded bycatch (that is, fish that are caught and then thrown away for various reasons) and illegal fishing have often gone unreported by various nations, said Pauly. “The result of this is that the catch is underestimated,” he said. So the researchers teamed up with partners all over the world to help them examine the official FAO data, identify areas where data might be missing or misrepresented and consult both existing literature and local experts and agencies to compile more accurate data. This is a method known as “catch reconstruction,” and the researchers used it to examine all catches between 1950 and 2010. Ultimately, they estimated that global catches during this time period were 50% higher than the FAO reported, peaking in the mid-1990s at 130 million metric tons, rather than the officially reported 86 million. As of 2010, the reconstructed data suggest that global catches amount to nearly 109 million metric tons, while the official data only report 77 million metric tons.

Bigger than Star Wars.

• Italy’s Blockbuster Quo Vado? Draws On Bitter Economic Reality (Guardian)

A comedy that captures Italians’ love for il posto fisso – a job for life – has become an unlikely blockbuster hit in Italy. Quo Vado? – or Where Am I Going? – is close to overtaking Avatar as the highest-grossing film in Italian box office history, having generated €59m since its opening on New Year’s Day and beaten international rivals such as Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Even Matteo Renzi, the energetic Italian prime minister, is said to have seen the film with his children. He told one newspaper that he laughed “from the beginning to the end”. The success of Quo Vado? reflects a relatively recent change in Italy: the cushy public sector jobs promising steady income and great benefits that were a staple of the country’s economic engine are now considered a thing of the past.

In their place has come high unemployment – which, while improving, is still at 11.3% – and job insecurity, which has hit young workers particularly hard. Alessandro Giuggioli, a film-maker who produced an independent film, In Bici Senza Sella (On a Bike Without a Saddle), about precarious jobs, said the posto fisso was like the holy grail in Italy: “You know it is a possibility and that you are never going to reach it.” While his parents’ generation enjoyed lifelong job security, Giuggioli said young people in Italy today had to make do with rolling short-term contracts, which have become the new normal. He partly blames Italy’s tax system and bureaucracy. “If an employer wants to hire you for €1,000 (£770) a month, they end up paying €2,500 a month. It’s crazy. And so they hire you for three months instead, paying €600,” he said.

Tusk is the bottom of the barrel, he represents the lowest the EU has to offer. Brussels is setting itself up for a world of pain.

• EU Chief Tusk Gives Refugee Plan 2 Months To Work (AP)

The European Union’s top official warned Tuesday the bloc has just two months to get its migration strategy in order amid criticism that its current policies are putting thousands of people in danger and creating more business for smugglers. “We have no more than two months to get things under control,” European Council President Donald Tusk told EU lawmakers, warning that a summit of EU leaders in Brussels on March 17-18 “will be the last moment to see if our strategy works.” The EU spent most of 2015 devising policies to cope with the arrival of more than 1 million people fleeing conflict or poverty but few are having a real impact. A refugee sharing plan launched in September has barely got off the ground and countries are still not sending back people who don’t qualify for asylum.

A package of sweeteners earmarked for Turkey – including €3 billion, easier visa access for Turkish citizens and fast-tracking of the country’s EU membership process – has borne little fruit. The failure has raised tensions between neighbors, particularly along the Balkan route used by migrants arriving in Greece to reach their preferred destinations like Germany or Sweden further north. Tusk warned that if Europe fails to make the strategy work “we will face grave consequences such as the collapse of Schengen,” the 26-nation passport-free travel zone.

2016 can only be a hot year.

• ‘We Will Come To Athens And Burn Them All’: Protest Returns To Greece (Guardian)

Farmers’ roadblocks, ferries immobilised in ports, pensioners taking to the streets: protest has returned to Greece in what many fear could be the beginning of the crisis-plagued country’s most confrontational winter yet. From the Greek-Bulgarian frontier to the southern island of Crete, farmers are up in arms over the spectre of more internationally mandated austerity. “It’s war,” says Dimitris Vergos, a corn grower speaking from the northern town of Naoussa. “If they [politicians] go on pushing us to the edge, if they want to dehumanise us further, we will come to Athens and burn them all.” With the rhetoric at such levels, prime minister Alexis Tsipras’s leftist-led administration has suddenly found itself on the defensive. Faced with a series of demonstrations – fishermen and stockbreeders will join blockades on Thursday when public and private sector workers also take to the streets – analysts say any honeymoon period Tsipras may once have enjoyed is over.

On Wednesday, convoys of tractors in Thessaly, the nation’s breadbasket, blocked the road at Tempi, effectively cutting the country’s main north-south highway. Hundreds more lined the seafront in Thessaloniki while, further north, police were forced to fire rounds of tear gas at protestors barricading Evangelos Apostolou, the agriculture minister, in an administrative building as fierce clashes erupted in Komotini. The focus of their fury was proposed pension and tax measures, the latest in a battery of reforms set as the price of the debt-stricken nation receiving a third, €86bn, bailout last summer. For farmers, the draft policies are tantamount to the kiss of death. “We are going for all out confrontation,” said the prominent unionist Yannis Vangos, warning that by Friday roadblocks would be erected across a large swath of the county.

“It seems we can’t see eye to eye at all. Things are out of control. It’s not just one thing we have to negotiate.” Six years into Athens’ economic crisis, even more Greeks claim they have been pushed to the point where they can no longer survive the rigours of austerity. With an unprecedented 1.2 million people unemployed – more than 25% of the population – many have been pauperised by the biting effects of keeping bankruptcy at bay. Pensioners, whose incomes have been reduced 12 times at the behest of the EU and IMF, this week also upped the ante taking to the streets. Creditors argue that at 17% of GDP, Greece’s pension system is Europe’s costliest and to great degree the generator of its fiscal dysfunction. But those who stand to be affected by the overhaul counter the changes go too far. For farmers, the reforms will not only raise social security contributions from 6.5% to 27%, but double income tax payments from 13% to 26%, eradicating more than three quarters of their annual earnings.

How can AFP write this without questioning what the IMF did to bail out Ukraine?

• IMF Cancels Systemic Exemption Rule Created In 2010 To Bail Out Greece (AFP)

The IMF abolished Wednesday a rule created in 2010 that allowed it to participate in an international bailout of Greece despite doubts about the country’s debt sustainability. “Today the executive board of the IMF approved an important reform to the Fund’s exceptional access lending framework, including the removal of the systemic exemption,” IMF spokesman Gerry Rice said in a brief statement. The “systemic exemption” amounted to a loophole in the IMF’s longstanding policy that required the crisis lender to judge a member country’s public debt to be sustainable with “high probability” before it could provide financial assistance that exceeds a member’s contribution to the institution.

Reeling from budget and banking crises in 2010, deeply indebted Greece did not meet the sustainability condition and the IMF decided that a debt restructuring could pose severe negative spillovers on the rest of the eurozone. The IMF thus created the “systemic exemption” provision which paved the way for it to join the EU and the ECB in the so-called “troika” of international lenders throwing a lifeline to Greece. For the IMF, that amounted to 30 billion euros ($32.7 billion) in May 2010, then an additional 18 billion euros in a second bailout two years later. The systemic exemption was used more than 30 times to permit loan payments to Greece but also for Ireland and Portugal, two other eurozone members receiving assistance from the troika, by end-May 2014.

Its use, nevertheless, has stirred criticism, notably from some emerging-market countries that saw it as giving favorable treatment to European states in response to pressure from Western powers. With the elimination of the loophole, the IMF is seeking to close a controversial chapter in its recent history as it decides whether to join the EU and ECB in a third bailout of Greece launched last August. In a sign that the abolition of this “systemic exemption” was already effectively in place, the IMF is demanding this time, before unblocking any new loans, that the Europeans first agree to ease Greece’s debt burden to ensure its sustainability.

Greece needs to protest much louder in Brussels.

• Greece Re-Opens Refugee Camp On Border in Sub-Zero Weather (Kath.)

Some 350 refugees and migrants, including many children, had gathered by Wednesday night in freezing conditions near Idomeni on Greece’s border with the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM) after the latter closed its borders. Greek officials said that the border has been closed since Tuesday night, leaving dozens of people unable to cross into FYROM and continue their journeys to Central and Northern Europe. Seven coaches full of refugees and migrants that had traveled north from Greece’s Aegean islands arrived at the border on Wednesday, prompting the government to allow the camp in Idomeni that had been constructed by nongovernmental organizations during the summer to be used to provide shelter and medical assistance to the migrants. Over the last few weeks, officials had refused to allow the camp to be used due to fears that hundreds of people would start gathering at the border again. The cold weather has also made conditions difficult on the islands.

Neverending?!

• Two Refugees –One 5-Year Old Child– Die Of Hypothermia Off Lesvos (Kath.)

Two refugees – one a 5-year-old child – died from hypothermia on Lesvos on Wednesday. The child died after the dinghy it was traveling in capsized off the island. It was taken to a medical center on Lesvos but doctors were unable to save its life. The coast guard rescued 46 people. The other person who died was a woman who reached the island safely but succumbed to the subzero temperature. Authorities said that despite the worsening weather, about 1,000 people arrived on Lesvos on Tuesday and another 1,000 reached the island on Wednesday.

Debt Rattle September 15 2015

Sep 152015

September 15, 2015 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 9:43 am Finance Tagged with: Banks, borders, Brazil, China, EU, FX, hunger, internment, layoffs, refugees, stocks, Syria 6 Responses »

John Vachon Rain. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania Jun 1941

• China Stocks Sink Again: Shanghai Down 3.52% (Bloomberg)

• China Sells Record FX In August, Shows Pressure After Devaluation (Reuters)

• China Spending Surge Means Debts Will Only Get Larger (WSJ)

• China Grabs Unused Funds To Spend On New Projects As Growth Slows (Reuters)

• Brazil Downgrade Leaves Firms With $270 Billion Debt Hangover (Bloomberg)

• Pimco, Fidelity Stung by Collapse of Petrobras’s 100-Year Bond (Bloomberg)

• Deutsche Bank To Cut 23,000 Jobs, A Quarter Of Its Workforce (Reuters)

• UniCredit, Italy’s Biggest Bank, Plans To Cut Around 10,000 Jobs (Reuters)

• ‘Syria Is Emptying’ (WaPo)

• Refugees Confounded By Merkel’s Decision To Close German Borders (Guardian)

• Thousands Of Refugees To Lose Right Of Asylum Under EU Plans (Guardian)

• EU Plan To Share 120,000 Refugees Has Fallen Apart (FT)

• Border-Free Europe Unravels As Migrant Crisis Hits Record Day (Reuters)

• Europe Fortifies Borders as Germany Predicts 1 Million Refugees (Bloomberg)

• EU Governments Set To Back New Internment Measures (Guardian)

• Hungary Transports Refugees To Austria Before Border Clampdown (Guardian)

• Cameron Invents The Humanitarian Offside Rule (Frankie Boyle)

• US Officials Cover Up Housing Bubble’s Scummy Residue (David Dayen)

• Defining Neoliberalism (Jeremy Smith)

• One In Six Americans Go Hungry. We Can’t Succeed On An Empty Stomach (Guardian)

It just keeps going. Nobody in China trusts stocks anymore, because Beijing has failed to restore that trust.

• China Stocks Sink Again: Shanghai Down 3.52% (Bloomberg)

China’s stocks slumped for a second day in thin turnover amid concern government measures to support the world’s second-largest equity market and economy are failing. The Shanghai Composite Index dropped 3.5% to 3,005.17 at the close, led by commodity producers and technology companies. About 14 stocks declined for each one that rose on the gauge, while volumes were 36% below the 30-day average. The index completed its biggest two-day loss in three weeks with a decline of 6.1%.

Mainland Chinese equity funds lost 44% of their value at the end of last month compared with July, data showed Monday, as unprecedented state measures to stop a $5 trillion selloff failed to avert redemption. Data this month showed five interest-rate cuts since November and plans to boost state spending have yet to revive an economy weighed down by overcapacity and producer-price deflation. Yuan positions at the central bank and financial institutions fell by the most on record in August, a sign that policy makers stepped up intervention to support the currency.

Intervening in all asset markets at the same time…

• China Sells Record FX In August, Shows Pressure After Devaluation (Reuters)

China’s central bank and commercial banks sold a net 723.8 billion yuan ($113.69 billion) of foreign exchange in August, by far the largest on record, highlighting how capital outflows intensified in the wake of the yuan’s devaluation last month. The previous largest outflow, in July, totaled 249.1 billion yuan ($39.13 billion). The figures are based on Reuters calculations using central bank data, the latest of which was released on Monday. The figures show the price China is paying to keep its currency from falling further in the face of concerns about the health of the economy and as financial markets anticipate a rise in U.S. interest rates. Shen Jianguang, an economist at Mizuho Securities in Hong Kong, said the figures suggest selling pressure on the yuan remains strong.

“It also shows that the central bank will continue to intervene in the FX market in the coming months as depreciation expectation is still there,” Shen said. Still, traders said the net outflow was within market forecasts. Some had expected a net outflow of $130 billion, said a senior trader at a Chinese commercial bank in Shanghai. This person declined to be identified. “Purchases are likely to fall from September on but uncertainties remain, including the yuan’s own volatility and the dollar’s performance in global markets in line with the Fed’s policy moves,” the trader said. China’s central bank, the People’s Bank of China, surprised global markets on Aug 11 by devaluing the yuan by nearly 3%.

Since the devaluation, China has scrambled to keep the yuan steady, running down its foreign exchange reserves by a record amount in August to stabilize the onshore rate. The central bank has instituted a raft of new policies aimed at discouraging speculation on further yuan depreciation and traders suspect it also intervened in offshore yuan markets. Authorities have also frantically tried to prevent a precipitous slide in equities markets from turning into a market crash with a flurry of policies to prop up prices and restore confidence.

It starts to smell of desperation. But then, Xi and Li have nothing to lose but their heads.

• China Spending Surge Means Debts Will Only Get Larger (WSJ)

China is falling back on infrastructure spending to stimulate its sputtering economy. The move may support growth, but it is also a setback to getting the country’s debt load under control. Government agencies have publicly confirmed a new willingness to spend on infrastructure in recent weeks. Already in August, infrastructure investment rose 21% from a year earlier, up from 15.8% growth in July, according to calculations by SocGen. That far outpaced total fixed-asset-investment growth, which clocked in at just 9.2%. What is less clear is where the money is coming from. In recent years, much of the infrastructure development has been funded chiefly by off-balance sheet local government financing platforms, which helped get around limits on public borrowing.

This avenue seemed to be cut off by a new budget law in late 2014, which ostensibly banned new borrowing by such financing vehicles. But it quickly became clear that this amounted to a kind of fiscal cliff for the economy. Beijing quietly backtracked, and is now allowing the platforms to keep borrowing for approved projects. Still, China will be eager to keep a lid on borrowing by provinces and towns. An official audit of total local government debt, released earlier this month, found it reached 24 trillion yuan ($3.8 trillion) at the end of 2014, up 34% over 18 months. Beijing doesn’t want to see that pace of growth continue. It is already working hard to clean up the last infrastructure spending boom with its 3.2 trillion yuan program to allow local government-linked high-cost loans to be swapped into lower interest bonds with longer durations.

But this merely reduces financing costs on previous projects. The amount that it frees up for new spending is minimal. So if the central government wants more infrastructure spending, it has to find another way. The plan appears to be to rely on government-controlled policy banks, including China Development Bank and the Agricultural Development Bank. These lenders can access loans directly from the central bank. For fresh funding, they have also issued over 1.8 trillion yuan ($280 billion) of bonds this year, up more than 70% from all of last year, according to Nomura.

Something tells me those funds were already in use, for instance as collateral for the shadow banks.

• China Grabs Unused Funds To Spend On New Projects As Growth Slows (Reuters)

Chinese authorities have seized up to 1 trillion yuan ($157 billion) from local governments who failed to use their budget allocations, sources said, as Beijing looks for ways to spend its way out of an economic slowdown. The exclusive Reuters report came after China’s stocks fell following data suggesting economic growth was running below the 2015 target level of about 7%, heightening concerns about the health of the world’s second largest economy. “China’s economy faces relatively big downward pressure, so investor sentiment remains weak,” said Gu Yongtao, strategist at Cinda Securities. Two sources close to the government said budget funds repossessed from local governments would be used to pay for other investments.

The huge underspend, linked to officials’ reluctance to splash out on big-ticket projects while authorities crack down on corruption, supports the argument of some economists that Chinese state investment has grown too slowly this year. “In the past, local governments had asked for the money. Money was given, but no one acted,” said one of the two sources. On Monday, China’s powerful economic planner, the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), said it had approved feasibility studies for two road projects worth a total of 6.2 billion yuan ($973.65 million). Last week, the NDRC gave the green light for railway, highway and bridge projects worth a combined $23 billion, in a sign authorities are focusing on infrastructure spending rather than deeper reforms to shore up growth in the short term.

Brazil is in for a very deep fall.

• Brazil Downgrade Leaves Firms With $270 Billion Debt Hangover (Bloomberg)

Brazilian companies that piled on $270 billion in international debt during the boom years are seeing their funding costs rise after the nation’s credit rating was cut to junk. The spread for five-year credit-default swaps to protect against a government default, one benchmark for setting what Brazilian companies must pay for external funding, has jumped 7.5% to 400 basis points since the downgrade, the highest since 2009. Adding to the pain, the dollar surged to a 13-year high, making principal and interest on international borrowing more costly for local firms. “Even very small, unknown companies issued international bonds when Brazil was considered one of the most promising economies after the 2008 financial crisis,” Salvatore Milanese at Pantalica Partners said in Sao Paulo. “Now many of them are facing the consequences.”

Standard & Poor’s last week lowered Brazil’s sovereign credit rating one level to BB+ and said it might cut it further in response to the administration’s inability to shore up fiscal accounts as the economy falters. President Dilma Rousseff has failed to win support for her initiatives amid an investigation into corruption at the state-controlled oil company, some of which allegedly occurred while she was its chairwoman, sending her popularity to a record low and generating calls for her impeachment. Federal, state and municipal governments oversaw only modest increases in external debt during the seven years Brazil had an investment-grade credit rating, increasing it 4.5% from December 2007 to March 2015, to $69 billion, according to central bank data. For banks and non-financial companies, the story is different: They more than doubled their dollar-denominated debt to $154 billion and $114.7 billion, respectively.

Because 100-year bonds never looked stupid?

• Pimco, Fidelity Stung by Collapse of Petrobras’s 100-Year Bond (Bloomberg)

When Petroleo Brasileiro SA sold 100-year bonds in June, the move was largely seen as a sign the corruption-tainted oil producer had put the worst of its problems behind it. For investors like Pimco, Fidelity and Capital Group – the three biggest holders of the securities – that turned out to be a costly miscalculation. Since the $2.5 billion offering, the bonds have tumbled 15%. That’s four times the average loss for emerging-market company debt. The plunge deepened last week, when the securities sank to a record-low 69.5 cents on the dollar after Petrobras, as the Brazilian company is known, had its credit rating cut to junk by Standard & Poor’s. The world’s most-indebted major oil producer was stripped of its investment grade by Moody’s Investors Service seven months earlier as a widening probe into alleged bribes paid to former executives at the state-controlled oil company caused it to delay reporting earnings.

“Everything was priced for perfection, and sadly, except for soccer players, Brazil seldom achieves perfection,” Russ Dallen, the head trader at Caracas Capital Markets, said from Miami. Pimco didn’t respond to e-mailed requests for comment. Fidelity and Capital Group declined to comment. Petrobras didn’t respond to an e-mail seeking comment on the performance of its bonds. The company has already borrowed enough to finance its projects for the medium term, it said in a statement Sept. 10. Yields on Petrobras’s 6.85% bonds, which mature in 2115, have soared 1.5 percentage points to a record 9.86% since they were issued on June 2, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

Of things to come.

• Deutsche Bank To Cut 23,000 Jobs, A Quarter Of Its Workforce (Reuters)

Deutsche Bank aims to cut roughly 23,000 jobs, or about one quarter of total staff, through layoffs mainly in technology activities and by spinning off its PostBank division, financial sources said on Monday. That would bring the group’s workforce down to around 75,000 full-time positions under a reorganization being finalised by new Chief Executive John Cryan, who took control of Germany’s biggest bank in July with the promise to cut costs. Cryan presented preliminary details of the plan to members of the supervisory board at the weekend. Deutsche’s share price has suffered badly under stalled reforms and rising costs on top of fines and settlements that have pushed the bank down to the bottom of the valuation rankings of global investment banks. It has a price-book ratio of around 0.5, according to ThomsonReuters data.

The bank unveiled a broad restructuring plan in April but co-chief executives Anshu Jain and Juergen Fitschen quit shortly afterwards, handing over its execution to Cryan. “This is the first time ever that you had the feeling that somebody is talking straight,” said one of the sources. “But the problem is he has to deliver soon.” Deutsche is mainly reviewing cuts to the parts of its technology and back office operations that process transactions and work orders for staff who deal with clients. A significant number of the roughly 20,000 positions in that area will be reviewed for possible cuts, a financial source said. Back-office jobs in the group’s large investment banking division will be concentrated in London, New York and Frankfurt, the source said.

No coincidence.

• UniCredit, Italy’s Biggest Bank, Plans To Cut Around 10,000 Jobs (Reuters)

Italy’s biggest bank by assets, is planning to cut around 10,000 jobs, or 7% of its workforce, as it seeks to slash costs and boost profits, a source at the bank told Reuters on Monday. The planned cuts will be concentrated in Italy, Germany and Austria, several sources said, adding that they include 2,700 layoffs in Italy that have already been announced. A UniCredit spokesman declined comment beyond noting that the bank’s CEO Federico Ghizzoni had on Sept. 3 said there were no concrete numbers on potential lay-offs, after a report said it was considering eliminating 10,000 positions in coming years.

Ghizzoni is reworking a five-year strategic plan, unveiled only last year, that will aim to boost revenue and cut costs. The revised plan is expected to be announced in November. “The plans are for 10,000 job cuts,” the bank’s insider said, speaking on condition of anonymity. “They will be mainly in Italy, Austria and Germany.” UniCredit, which has 146,600 employees across 17 countries, is under pressure to boost its profits as low interest rates are expected to keep hurting its earnings in coming years.

Why Putin wants to talk to Obama.

• ‘Syria Is Emptying’ (WaPo)

A new exodus of Syrians is fueling the extraordinary flow of migrants and refugees to Europe as Syria’s four-year-old war becomes the driving force behind the greatest migration of people to the continent since World War II. Syrians account for half of the 381,000 refugees and migrants who have sought asylum in Europe so far this year, which is in turn almost a doubling of the number in 2014 — making Syrians the main component of the influx. The continued surge through Europe prompted Hungary, Austria and Slovakia to tighten border controls Monday, a day after Germany projected that in excess of a million people could arrive by year’s end and began to impose restrictions on those entering the country.

How many more Syrians could be on the way is impossible to know, but as the flow continues, their number is rising. In July, the latest month for which figures are available, 78% of those who washed up on inflatable dinghies on the beaches of Greece were Syrian, according to the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees. Some were already among the 4 million refugees who have sought sanctuary in neighboring countries, but many also are coming directly from Syria, constituting what Melissa Fleming of the UNHCR called a “new exodus” from the ravaged country. They are bypassing the refugee camps and heading straight for Europe, as the fallout from what President Barack Obama once called “someone else’s civil war” spills far beyond Syria’s borders.

More are on the way. Syrians are piled up on the streets of the Turkish port city of Izmir waiting for a place on one of the flimsy boats that will ferry them across the sea to Greece, and they say they have friends and family following behind. “Everyone I know is leaving,” said Mohammed, 30, who climbed three mountains to make his way across the Turkish border from the city of Aleppo with his pregnant wife, under fire from Turkish border guards. “It is as though all of Syria is emptying.” Analysts say it was inevitable it would come to this, that Syrians would eventually tire of waiting for a war of such exceptional brutality to end. At least 250,000 have been killed in four ferocious years of fighting, by chemical weapons, ballistic missiles and barrel bombings by government warplanes that are the biggest single killer of civilians, according to human rights groups.

Men on both sides die in the endless battles between the government and rebels for towns, villages and military bases that produce no clear victory. The Islamic State kills people in the areas it controls with beheadings and other brutal punishments. The United States is leading a bombing campaign against the Islamic State but has shown scant interest in solving the wider Syrian war, which seems destined only to escalate further with the deepening involvement of Russian troops. “It should surprise no one. Hopelessness abounds,” said Fred Hof, a former State Department official who is now with the Atlantic Council. “Why would any Syrian with an option to leave and the physical ability to do so elect to stay?”

“Everybody is coming,” said Iyad, a Syrian student. “They are coming, coming, coming.”

• Refugees Confounded By Merkel’s Decision To Close German Borders (Guardian)

Angela Merkel, Germany’s chancellor, has cut a chequered figure this summer: scorned for taking Greece to the wall, and praised for welcoming large numbers of Syrians to Germany. But nowhere and at no time has she been more of an enigma than she was in Vienna’s central station on Monday where crowds of refugees struggled to reconcile how the same “Mama Merkel” had opened Germany’s borders one week, and closed them again barely eight days later – leaving those at the station stranded. “She said she will bring big boats from Turkey to rescue Syrians!” said Maria, a Syrian who fled the bombs of Damascus six weeks ago. “And now why has she closed the border?” asked Maria’s daughter.

For a week, refugees had been able to freely board trains to Germany from Vienna – but Sunday’s developments returned the status quo to how it was in late August. Station staff said on Monday that the rail border had reopened at 7am, less than a day after Germany had stopped all inbound rail services. But the ticket machines would not let people book journeys to German destinations. And while some had managed to get fares from the ticket office, it was unclear to many people whether the border had reopened or not. Pacing around the concourse with her two children, Galbari al-Hussein saw the constant changes in border policy as a cruel game played at the expense of vulnerable refugees.

“We’ve travelled so far, thousands of kilometres, and now they’re closing the borders,” said Hussein, who reached Vienna barely a week after escaping Islamic State territory, hidden in an unfamiliar niqab. “Is it open, is it closed? It’s very unfair.” Among Syrians, there lingered the suspicion that their chances had been spoilt by people hoping to piggyback on the generosity shown by Germany to the victims of the Syrian civil war. “Not everyone here is Syrian,” said Josef, from Damascus, who disclosed his exact address in an attempt to prove his nationality. “People say they are Syrians, but they are from somewhere else. And that’s why this is happening..” [..] As rumours swirled, even non-Syrian refugees couldn’t help but wonder whether they were the real targets of the German border shenanigans. Hany, an Iraqi engineering student, smiled wistfully. “Germany is very good to Syrians,” he said. “It wants all the Syrians to come, but maybe not the Iraqis.”

There was one thing on which everyone could agree. Whatever Germany does or doesn’t do with its border, refugees will still keep fleeing to Europe. “Everybody is coming,” said Iyad, a Syrian student. “They are coming, coming, coming. My brother will leave Syria in two days.” Iyad’s friend Amal nodded in agreement. “The only people who will stay are those who don’t have any money,” said Amal. “People are selling their cars and homes to come here.”

How to use a crisis.

• Thousands Of Refugees To Lose Right Of Asylum Under EU Plans (Guardian)

European governments are aiming to deny the right of asylum to innumerable refugees by funding and building camps for them in Africa and elsewhere outside the European Union. Under plans endorsed in Brussels on Monday evening, EU interior ministers agreed that once the proposed system of refugee camps outside the union was up and running, asylum claims from people in the camps would be inadmissible in Europe. The emergency meeting of interior ministers was called to grapple with Europe’s worst modern refugee crisis. It broke up in acrimony amid failure to agree on a new system of binding quotas for refugees being shared across the EU and other decisions being deferred until next month.

The lacklustre response to a refugee emergency that is turning into a full-blown European crisis focussed on “Fortress Europe” policies aimed at excluding refugees and shifting the burden of responsibility on to third countries, either of transit or of origin. The ministers called for the establishment of refugee camps in Italy and Greece and for the detention of “irregular migrants” denied asylum and facing deportation but for whom “voluntary return” was not currently “practicable”. The most bruising battle was over whether Europe should adopt a new system of mandatory quotas for sharing refugees. The scheme, proposed by the European commission last week, is strongly supported by Germany which sought to impose the idea on the rejectionists mainly in eastern Europe.

Hungary’s hardline anti-immigration government said it would have no part of the scheme, from which it would benefit, while Thomas de Maizière, the German interior minister, complained that the agenda for the meeting was inadequate. The ministers agreed “in principle” to share 160,000 refugees across at least 22 countries, taking them from Greece, Hungary, and Italy, but delayed a formal decision until next month, made plain the scheme should be voluntary rather than binding and demanded ‘flexibility’. De Maizière, by contrast, called for precise definitions of how refugees would be shared. Luxembourg, chairing the meeting, signalled that there was a sufficient majority to impose the quotas, but that the meeting had balked at forcing a vote.

They’ll pull aid funds from whoever won’t comply.

• EU Plan To Share 120,000 Refugees Has Fallen Apart (FT)

EU efforts to agree a binding plan to share out 120,000 refugees fell apart after a minority of countries led by Czech Republic and Hungary objected to a heavily watered down proposal. After six hours of argument, member states failed to reach unanimous agreement on the plan, although a majority — including France and Germany — supported the scheme. Countries in favour of the plan will now try to force through a deal with a qualified majority at another meeting in October, setting the stage for a bitter diplomatic fight in the intervening period. Although qualified majority votes are acceptable under EU law, they are rarely used to force through decisions on politically sensitive topics against vocal opposition.

Hungary was supposed to be one of the beneficiaries of the scheme but has opposed it, arguing that it is not a front-line country and that it has only suffered a huge influx of migrants because Greece has failed to manage its borders. Officials also say that it would risk turning the country into a holding pen for migrants who do not want to stay there. French interior minister Bernard Cazeneuve criticised those countries opposed to the measures. “Europe is not Europe a la carte. If Europe wants to surmount this humanitarian challenge, it is necessary that all countries live up to their responsibilities.” The Czech Republic also refused to sign up to the proposals, saying that it would oppose efforts to introduce an automatic relocation scheme. Romania and Slovakia were also against the scheme.

7,437 migrants recorded entering Hungary from Serbia yesterday. Times 365 equals 2.7 million.

• Border-Free Europe Unravels As Migrant Crisis Hits Record Day (Reuters)

Two decades of frontier-free travel across Europe unraveled on Monday as countries re-established border controls in the face of an unprecedented influx of migrants, which broke the record for the most arrivals by land in a single day. Germany’s surprise decision to restore border controls on Sunday had a swift domino effect, prompting neighbors to impose checks at their own frontiers as thousands of refugees pressed north and west across the continent while Hungary sealed the main informal border crossing point into the European Union. A majority of EU interior ministers, meeting in Brussels, agreed in principle to share out 120,000 asylum seekers on top of some 40,000 distributed on a voluntary basis so far, EU president Juncker said.

But details of the deal, to be formalized on Oct. 8, were vague with several ex-Communist central European states still rejecting mandatory quotas. Austria said it would dispatch its military to help police carry out checks at the border with Hungary after thousands of migrants crossed on foot overnight, filling up emergency accommodation nearby, including tents at the frontier. Thousands more raced across the Balkans to enter Hungary before new rules take effect on Tuesday, which Budapest’s right-wing government says will bring a halt to the illegal flow of migrants across its territory. By 1400 GMT on Monday, police said 7,437 migrants had been recorded entering Hungary from Serbia, beating the previous day’s record of 5,809.

Then helmeted Hungarian police, some on horseback, closed off the main informal crossing point, backed by soldiers as a helicopter circled overhead. A goods wagon covered with razor wire was moved into place to block a railway track used by migrants to enter the EU’s Schengen zone of border-free travel. Hungary later declared the low-level airspace over its border fence closed but allowed a trickle of refugees to enter the country at an official crossing point. As the shockwaves rippled across Europe, Slovakia said it would impose controls on its borders with Hungary and Austria. The Netherlands announced it would make spot checks at its borders. Other EU states from Sweden to Poland said they were monitoring the situation to decide whether controls were needed.

“If Germany carries out border controls, Austria must put strengthened border controls in place,” Vice Chancellor Reinhold Mitterlehner told a joint news conference with Chancellor Werner Faymann. “We are doing that now.” The army would be deployed in a supporting role.

How the end begins.

• Europe Fortifies Borders as Germany Predicts 1 Million Refugees (Bloomberg)

One day after Germany curbed the freedom of movement in the region by temporarily reinstating border controls, the country’s vice chancellor estimated that as many as 1 million refugees may arrive by the end of the year as other nations moved to fortify their frontiers. The prediction from Sigmar Gabriel, who leads the Social Democrats, underscored how quickly the numbers fleeing to Germany are spiraling upward. The official government estimate, released just a few weeks ago, is for roughly 800,000 in 2015, nearly four times the 2014 figure.

European Union interior and justice ministers will try to bridge a divide over the region’s worst refugee crisis since World War II when they meet Monday in Brussels to hammer out an agreement over binding quotas redistributing 160,000 migrants who have flooded into Hungary, Greece and Italy. Eastern European countries including Poland and the Czech Republic have opposed such measures. Germany, which supports the EU proposal, on Sunday introduced the temporary controls on the southern border with Austria, where thousands of migrants have been crossing into the country. Austria responded Monday by sending 2,200 troops to its frontier with Hungary, while Slovakia reinstated checks along its border with both countries.

“Of course, the idea is not to prolong this, but it’s a short-term measure that should be in place for as short a time as possible,” Felix Braz, the justice minister of Luxembourg, which currently holds the rotating EU presidency — said in an interview. “A lot will depend on what comes out of Brussels this afternoon.” Germany’s move risks creating widespread disruption as governments weigh a further tightening of frontier controls across Europe.

EU leaders are a much bigger threat to the union than refugees.

• EU Governments Set To Back New Internment Measures (Guardian)

EU governments are expected to back radical new plans for the internment of “irregular migrants”, the creation of large new refugee camps in Italy and Greece and longer-term aims for the funding and building of refugee camps outside the EU to try to stop people coming to Europe. A crunch meeting of EU interior ministers in Brussels, called to grapple with Europe’s largest refugee crisis since the second world war, was also expected to water down demands from the European commission, strongly supported by Germany, for the obligatory sharing of refugees across at least 22 countries. A four-page draft statement, prepared on Monday morning by EU ambassadors before the ministers met, focused on “Fortress Europe” policies amid increasing confusion as a number of countries set up border controls in the Schengen free-travel area that embraces 26 countries.

The draft statement, obtained by the Guardian, said “reception facilities will be organised so as to temporarily accommodate people” in Greece and Italy while they are identified, registered, and finger-printed. Their asylum claims are to be processed quickly and those who fail are to be deported promptly, the ministers say in the draft statement. “It is crucial that robust mechanisms become operational immediately in Italy and Greece to ensure identification, registration and fingerprinting of migrants; to identify persons in need of international protection and support their relocation; and to identify irregular migrants to be returned.” The Europeans are to set up “rapid border intervention teams” to be deployed at “sensitive external borders”. Failed asylum seekers who are expected to try to move to another EU country from Greece or Italy can be interned, the statement says.

“When voluntary return is not practicable and other measures on return are inadequate to prevent secondary movements, detention measures … should be applied.” The European commission demanded last week that at least 22 EU countries accept a new system of quotas for refugees, with 160,000 redistributed from Greece, Italy and Hungary under a binding new system. Germany is insisting on the binding nature of the proposed scheme and its unilateral decision on Sunday to re-establish national border controls within the Schengen area was widely seen as an attempt to force those resisting mandatory quotas to yield. The resistance is strongest in eastern and central Europe.

TEXT

• Hungary Transports Refugees To Austria Before Border Clampdown (Guardian)

Hungary is transporting thousands of refugees by train and dumping them on the border with Austria, the UN refugee agency has said, as EU states scrambled to follow Germany’s lead and introduce new controls on their borders. Special trains were taking refugees on a four-hour journey from camps in southern Hungary directly to Austria, the UNHCR said. There are signs that Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orban, wants to empty refugee camps before a law comes into force on Tuesday criminalising the act of crossing or damaging a newly built border fence. At least three trains carrying 2,000 people left on Sunday from the Hungarian town of Röszke, the UNHCR’s regional representative Erno Simon said. He added: “During the night our colleagues saw police waking people up at the [Hungarian] border collection point.”

Austria said it was sending troops to its border to help with security. The numbers entering from Hungary had reached overwhelming levels, police said, with 14,000 arriving on Sunday and another 7,000 by mid-Monday, and more expected. Austria’s vice-chancellor, Reinhold Mittelehner, said: “If Germany carries out border controls, Austria must put strengthened border controls in place. We are doing that now.” Slovakia said it was introducing checks on its borders with Hungary and Austria and would deploy 220 extra officers. Polandd’s prime minister, Ewa Kopacz, said Warsaw would restore border controls in response to “outside threats”.

On Sunday Berlin announced new controls on its border with Austria and halted train traffic between Austria and Germany. Germany’s interior minister, Thomas de Maizière, said the measures were necessary because record numbers of refugees, many of them from Syria, had stretched the system to breaking point. The measures are likely to remain in place for weeks if not months, German officials have indicated. Police patrols have been set up on road crossings between Austria and Bavaria, leading to four-mile tailbacks on Monday. Similar measures will be rolled out in the federal state of Saxony, on the border with the Czech Republic.

“I certainly don’t want to see Islamic State in a war with our troops because – let’s be honest – they are just impressionable young men who have been manipulated into a life of murder by those who teach hate, and Isis isn’t much better.“

• Cameron Invents The Humanitarian Offside Rule (Frankie Boyle)

David Cameron visited a refugee camp in Lebanon on Monday. Our prime minister, a man who can normally muster all the moral authority of Roman Polanski’s penis, has discovered his soul. Amazing what a three-week break away from parliament can do. It only took David Cameron six years to finally come out and take a moral stand, and all it took was the death of one toddler. You may call the Tories’ glacial crawl towards respecting human life a political and personal train crash. I call it compassion. In Europe we have the stereotype that Africans view life cheaply, but we’ve spent much of the summer watching van loads of Syrians being washed in by the tide and all we worried about was whether this meant the beach might be closed during the October holidays.

There were Greek kids incorporating human remains into their sandcastles and yet the big story here was that the drinks trolley didn’t make it down the Eurostar. One dog locked in a car on a sunny day – Britain goes apeshit. Seventy-one dead migrants roasted in a truck – oh that reminds me, Bake Off’s on tonight. It seems we are naive about the workings of this modern culture, where people Skype each other masturbating before a first date, and forget that the general populace now don’t believe children are dying unless you show them a closeup picture of a dead child. The Kurdi family were trying to get from Turkey to Kos, so many people said, “Why would they want to leave Turkey? Turkey is nice!”

Turkey is nice if you’re a sunburnt Brit with a taste for overpriced kebabs, cheap jeans and waterslides. It’s not so nice for a member of their oppressed minority who speak a language that’s been banned by law. What we haven’t heard is that children get washed up on the shore at Bodrum every single day. What are Turkish journalists doing? Generally about two to four years’ hard labour. Of course there are many people who say we shouldn’t be helping refugees when there are homeless people here that we can do nothing to help first. Indeed Britain may have entirely forgotten how to be welcoming. We’ll probably welcome refugees by putting the word Syrian in the sidebar of xHamster. We are only taking people from camps – we don’t want refugees already in Europe as they cheated and didn’t wait to shout “What’s the Time Mr Wolf?” We don’t want any refugees who are already close to us, like there’s some kind of humanitarian offside rule.

Fraudulent Foreclosure Documents

• US Officials Cover Up Housing Bubble’s Scummy Residue (David Dayen)

Every day in America, mortgage companies attempt to foreclose on homeowners using false documents. It’s a byproduct of the mortgage securitization craze during the housing bubble, when loans were sliced and diced so haphazardly that the actual ownership was confused. When the bubble burst, lenders foreclosing on properties needed paperwork to prove their standing, but didn’t have it — leading mortgage industry employees to forge, fabricate and backdate millions of mortgage documents. This foreclosure fraud scandal was exposed in 2010, and acquired a name: “robo-signing.” But while some of the offenders paid fines over the past few years, nobody cleaned up the documents. This rot still exists inside the property records system all over the country, and those in a position of authority appear determined to pretend it doesn’t exist.

In two separate cases, activists have charged that officials and courts are hiding evidence of mortgage document irregularities that, if verified, could stop thousands of foreclosures in their tracks. Officials have delayed disclosure of this evidence, the activists believe, because it would be too messy, and it’s easier to bottle up the evidence than deal with the repercussions. “All they’re doing is making a mockery of our judicial system,” said Bill Paatalo, a private investigator and one of the activists. Like many other anti-foreclosure activists, Paatalo got involved with the issue through a case involving his own property — in Absarokee, Montana. Like many homeowner loans purchased during the housing bubble, Paatalo’s was packaged into a mortgage-backed security.

The process worked like this: The loans were eventually sold into a tax-exempt REMIC (Real Estate Mortgage Investment Conduit) trust; the REMIC trust received monthly mortgage payments from homeowners; and the payments were passed along to investors in the mortgage-backed securities. The trust where Paatalo’s mortgage ended up is known as “WaMu Mortgage Pass-Through Certificates Services 2007-OA3 Trust.” When he faced foreclosure, the trust, as the nominal owner of the mortgage, was the plaintiff. In doing research for his own trial, Paatalo discovered that all “foreign business trusts” established outside of Montana have to register with the Secretary of State in order to transact business, under Title 35-5-201 of the Montana code. Trustees must file an application, along with legal affidavits affirming its trust agreement and identifying all trustees, and pay a $70 filing fee. WaMu Mortgage Pass-Through Certificates Services 2007-OA3 Trust – based in Delaware — didn’t.

“Neoliberalism’s ultimate purpose, and its finality, is that of transformation to a single global economy and society governed and disciplined by finance capital.”

• Defining Neoliberalism (Jeremy Smith)

In a twitter exchange today, involving Duncan Weldon, Tony Yates, George Magnus, Jo Michell and PRIME’s Ann Pettifor, the question arose (not for the first time!) over the definition of “neoliberalism.” It is often argued that the term has no distinct or discernible meaning, and certainly Wikipedia’s entry for Neoliberalism only adds to confusion. Ann tweeted this: “puzzle over definition of “neoliberalism. Definition elastic? Insult? Help Twitter..” Well I’m not going to try and make my offer via twitter, because I can’t manage a decent definition in the allotted 140 characters. But I am convinced that neoliberalism does have a clear meaning – and offer the following as my contribution to the discussion:

Neoliberalism: The utopian politico-economic system and ideology, under constant and conscious construction by its “priesthood”, under which the interests of society are to be subordinated to the interests of actors in financial markets and the dominance of finance capital, minimally regulated and flowing unfettered across frontiers. Under this system, the role and remit of the state and public sphere, beyond protection and furtherance of those interests and that dominance, are to be reduced to their practical minimum. Neoliberalism’s ultimate purpose, and its finality, is that of transformation to a single global economy and society governed and disciplined by finance capital.

My definition owes much to Karl Polanyi’s approach. In “The Great Transformation” Polanyi wrote:

This paradox [of the need for a strong central executive under laissez-faire] was topped by another. While laissez-faire economy was the product of deliberate state action, subsequent restrictions on laissez-faire started in a spontaneous way. Laissez-faire was planned; planning was not. If ever there was conscious use of the executive in the service of a deliberate government-controlled policy, it was on the part of the Benthamites in the heroic period of laissez-faire. (p.141)

Polanyi also draws attention to the disastrous contribution of “economic liberalism at its height” in the 1920s. He argues (p.142):

The repayment of foreign loans and the return to stable currencies were recognized as the touchstones of rationality in politics; and no private suffering, no infringement of sovereignty was considered too great a sacrifice for the recovery of monetary integrity. The privations of the unemployed made jobless by deflation; the destitution of public servants dismissed without a pittance; even the relinquishment of national rights and the loss of constitutional liberties were judged a fair price to pay for the fulfilment of the requirements of sound budgets and sound currencies, these a priori of economic liberalism.

This nicely captures the consciousness of the creation of globalising “economic liberalism”, as well as – once programmed correctly – the way it rolled out the consequences automatically, via a kind of austerity algorithm. This coincides with what we see today in the way neoliberalism works. And that is why I call it both an ideology (or philosophy if you feel kinder) and a system.

We just don’t care.

• One In Six Americans Go Hungry. We Can’t Succeed On An Empty Stomach (Guardian)

As millions of kids head back to school this month, some of them are missing summer, but many are excited to once again receive regular meals. Many low-income children are able to get the food they need through the federal nutrition programs such as free school lunches. But, only half of these kids also get a nutritious school breakfast. And 75% of them struggle over the summer to get enough to eat. One child out of every five in the United States is fighting to learn, grow and prosper while combating the gnawing stress of hunger. In fact, kids make up nearly half of all people living in households struggling with hunger. That’s why lawmakers on Capitol Hill are currently working to reauthorize the laws that govern, among other things, whether or not more kids have access to summer meal programs.

Last month, a bipartisan group of six senators introduced the “Hunger Free Summer for Kids Act.” If the policies in this bill make it into law this year, it could mean as many as 6.5 million can get the nutrition they need during the summer holidays. These nutrition laws expire on September 30th, so Congress needs to act quickly. And we need to be doing more. Hunger impacts every American. According to the latest “food insecurity” numbers by the United States Department of Agriculture, 14% of all households struggle to have enough to eat. That’s 48 million of our friends, neighbors and fellow Americans. And that is one in six Americans — not just in the inner city, but in the suburbs, rural areas and every primary and battleground state across the country. These numbers show how many American households struggle to consistently provide all of its family members enough food for an active, healthy lifestyle. It could mean some days the cupboards are completely bare.

It could mean a mother is skipping meals to ensure food for her son at night. It could mean a family is choosing between food and medicine, or food and rent. It does mean there is never enough. Hunger has a devastating effect on the food insecure, but, it is not just those with empty bellies who suffer. Hunger impacts education, health and the economy at large. Children struggling with hunger struggle with schoolwork and tend to have lower test scores and are less likely to graduate. People are not getting the nutrition they need, and are at higher risk for expensive, avoidable health conditions, like diabetes, heart disease and asthma. As a nation, we spend billions on the fall-out from hunger, including avoidable health care costs and the rising cost of poor education outcomes, all while losing productivity in the workplace.

Debt Rattle February 16 2015

Feb 162015

February 16, 2015 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 10:40 am Finance Tagged with: American Empire, apocalypse, ECB, Eurogroup, Greece, Grexit, hunger, Syriza, Ukraine, war 1 Response »

DPC “Steamer loading grain from floating elevator, New Orleans 1906

• The USA – All Systems Go? (Steve Keen)

• ‘China Must Guarantee Minimum 6.5% Annual GDP Growth In 5 Year Plan’ (Reuters)

• Greece And Ukraine Are The Hot Spots Of A New War For Supremacy (Salon)

• The Great War of the American Empire or Great War II (Michael S. Rozeff)

• Greece Sticks To No-Austerity Pledge (Reuters)

• Austerity Is ‘Complete Horsesh*t’ (Alternet)

• Greek Postwar Alliances Show Europe Has More to Lose Than Money (Bloomberg)

• Greeks Show Support for Tsipras on Eve of Brussels Talks (Bloomberg)

• Greece, Creditors Extend Talks on Eve of Eurogroup Meeting (Bloomberg)

• Greece May Win Compromise Offer From EU Bailout Fund (WSJ)

• Syriza Leader Confident Ahead Of Eurozone Crunch Talks In Brussels (Guardian)

• Greek Euro Exit Risk Signals Inadequate ECB QE Safeguards (Bloomberg)

• US And Greece Helping To Save The Euro (CNBC)

• Shoot Bank Of America Now – The Case For Super Glass-Steagall (David Stockman)

• Low-Pay Britain, Where Working Families Have To Rent A Fridge (Guardian)

• How Kids Company Feeds Britain’s Hungry Children (Observer)

• Rolls-Royce Accused In Petrobras Scandal (FT)

• Famous Soviet Football Champ Refuses To Fight For Kiev In East Ukraine (RT)

• Why I’m Not Breaking Up with America This Valentine’s Day (John Whitehead)

• Online Bank Robbers Steal as Much as $1 Billion (Bloomberg)

• Spy Agencies Fund Climate Research In Hunt For Weather Weapon (Guardian)

• 12 Likely Causes Of The Apocalypse, As Seen By Scientists (RT)

“..the country with the bigger deficit would have the bigger problem. And conventional belief would expect this to be state-oriented France, rather than the free-enterprise-oriented USA. Guess again..”

• The USA – All Systems Go? (Steve Keen)

The contrast today between Europe—the subject of my first few posts on Forbes—and the USA could not be more extreme. The crisis, when it began in 2007/08, was seen initially as a purely American phenomenon—and by some, proof that the deregulated American (and more generally, the Anglo-Saxon) model of capitalism had failed, while Europe’s more collectivist version was still going strong. One of the most voluble putting that argument was then French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who asserted that the crisis proved that the American deregulated version of finance was kaput: “A page has been turned,” he said, on the “Anglo Saxon” financial model. “Even our Anglo-Saxon friends are now convinced that we must have reasonable rules.” Well that was then. Now, it’s the European system—and its very peculiar rules—that are looking decidedly poor, while the USA seems to be powering ahead.

A simple comparison of unemployment rates tells that story well. The US unemployment rate, which briefly exceeded France’s at the depth of the crisis in 2009-2010, is now falling rapidly, while France’s rate has stagnated, and is in excess of the worst that the USA experienced during the crisis. So does the resurgence of the USA and Europe’s stagnation make the opposite point to the one Sarkozy reached in such haste? Is the deregulated US model really the superior one, in that while it succumbed to crisis, its recovery was that much more robust that rule-bound Europe? I am sure that many commentators will reach that conclusion in the next few years. But I think they will prove to be as misguided—or rather as wrongly focused—as was Sarkozy.

There’s a cliché in statistics that “correlation isn’t causation”. I’ve often seen this used to simply dismiss an argument that the interjector doesn’t like, but its spirit applies here: people often draw inferences from the correlation of two factors—American model, recovery; European model, stagnation—when there’s actually a third causal factor at work that is the real explanation. [..] part of the reason for the divergence is that the EU’s policy of austerity—which began in mid-2010—has made the crisis much worse. On that front, the conventional wisdom—as enshrined in the European “Growth and Stability Pact”—is that the country with the bigger deficit would have the bigger problem. And conventional belief would expect this to be state-oriented France, rather than the free-enterprise-oriented USA. Guess again.

While the printing press is stuttering.

• ‘China Must Guarantee Minimum 6.5% Annual GDP Growth In 5 Year Plan’ (Reuters)

China needs to guarantee a “bottom line” of 6.5% annual economic growth for its 13th five-year-plan, a state newspaper quoted the director of the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) Department of Planning, Xu Lin as saying. That would mark the lowest annual growth rate since 1990. The comments by Xu, made on Feb. 14 at the “50 Forum Annual Meeting” – a gathering of Chinese economists – is also an acknowledgment that China is switching to a more sustainable pace of growth from the double-digit rates of the recent past. If this year’s GDP growth is 7%, then the “bottom line” for annual GDP growth in the 13th five-year-plan needs to be at least 6.5%, the China Securities Journal quoted Xu as saying.

China’s economy grew at 7.4% in 2014, its slowest pace in 24 years, dragged down by cooling property prices, slowing inflation and deteriorating domestic and foreign demand. Beijing is set to unveil China’s 13th five-year-plan after the National People’s Congress in March. The plan is an important document that outlines national priorities and sets targets for economic and social development. The International Monetary Fund said last year that China should set a less ambitious growth target of 6.5-7% in 2015 and refrain from stimulus measures unless the economy threatens to slow sharply from that level. China also needs to prioritize the systemic reform of property rights, taxation, banking, finance and rule of law, among other national priorities, Xu said.

“There is something tragically irrational driving both of these crises. The genesis of each, at least nominally, is the question of whether markets serve society or it is the other way around.”

• Greece And Ukraine Are The Hot Spots Of A New War For Supremacy (Salon)

Europe’s confrontation with Greece, the West’s with Russia as the Ukraine crisis runs nearly out of control: Why is it more useful by the week to think of these together? They are both very large, moments of history. There is this. They both reach critical moments this week, as if in concert. The outcomes in each case will be consequential for all of us. As noted with alarm last week, most Americans have by now surrendered to a blitz of propaganda wherein Russia and its leadership are cast as Siberian beasts, accepting as truth tales the National Enquirer would be embarrassed to run. In Europe, Greeks and Spaniards show us up, indeed, as a supine, spiritless people incapable of response or any resistance to the onslaught. There is this, too.

At writing, Yanis Varoufakis, Greece’s imaginative new finance minister, has just made his first formal effort to present European counterparts with new ideas to get foreign debts of €240 billion off the books and the Greek economy back in motion. These ideas can work. Even creditor institutions acknowledge that Greece cannot pay its debts as they are now structured. But at a session in Brussels Wednesday, the European Union’s arms remained folded. Also at writing, the Poroshenko government in Ukraine appears to have recommitted to a cease-fire signed last September in Minsk and promptly broken. It is not surprising given Kiev’s very evident desperation on all fronts. But neither would it be if Poroshenko once again reneges. There is a sensible solution on the table now, but these are not people who have so far been given to one.

There is something tragically irrational driving both of these crises. The genesis of each, at least nominally, is the question of whether markets serve society or it is the other way around. Economic conflict, then, has been transformed into humanitarian disasters. This is what Greece and Ukraine have most fundamentally in common. It is in search of a logical explanation of the illogic at work in these two crises that something else, something larger, emerges to bring them into a coherent whole. Washington has so many wars going now, none declared, one can hardly keep the list current. But the most sustained and havoc-wreaking of them is unreported. This is the war for neoliberal supremacy across the planet. Greece and Ukraine are best viewed as two hot fronts in this war, a sort of World War III none of us ever imagined.

“Upon close inspection, all of these rationales fall apart. None is satisfactory. The interventions are too widespread, too long-lasting and too unsuccessful at what they supposedly accomplish..”

• The Great War of the American Empire or Great War II (Michael S. Rozeff)

The Great War of the American Empire began 25 years ago. It began on August 2, 1990 with the Gulf War against Iraq and continues to the present. Earlier wars involving Israel and America sowed the seeds of this Great War. So did American involvements in Iran, the 1977-1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran, and the Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988). Even earlier American actions also set the stage, such as the recognition of Israel, the protection of Saudi Arabia as an oil supplier, the 1949 CIA involvement in the coup in Syria, and the American involvement in Lebanon in 1958. Poor (hostile) relations between the U.S. and Libya (1979-1986) also contributed to a major sub-war in what has turned out to be the Great War of the American Empire.

The inception of Great War II may, if one likes, be moved back to 1988 and 1989 without objection because those years also saw the American Empire coming into its own in the invasion of Panama to dislodge Noriega, operations in South America associated with the war on drugs, and an operation in the Philippines to protect the Aquino government. Turmoil in the Soviet Union was already being reflected in a more military-oriented foreign policy of the U.S. Following the Gulf War, the U.S. government engages America and Americans non-stop in one substantial military operation or war after another. In the 1990s, these include Iraq no-fly zones, Somalia, Bosnia, Macedonia, Haiti, Zaire, Sierra Leone, Central African Republic, Liberia, Albania, Afghanistan, Sudan, and Serbia.

In the 2000s, the Empire begins wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya, and gets into serious military engagements in Yemen, Pakistan, and Syria. It has numerous other smaller military missions in Uganda, Jordan, Turkey, Chad, Mali, and Somalia. Some of these sub-wars and situations of involvement wax and wane and wax again. The latest occasion of American Empire intervention is Ukraine where, among other things, the U.S. military is slated to be training Ukrainian soldiers. Terror and terrorism are invoked to rationalize some operations. Vague threats to national security are mentioned for others. Protection of Americans and American interests sometimes is made into a rationale. Terrorism and drugs are sometimes linked, and sometimes drug interdiction alone is used to justify an action that becomes part of the Great War of the American Empire.

On several occasions, war has been justified because of purported ethnic cleansing or supposed mass killings directed by or threatened by a government. Upon close inspection, all of these rationales fall apart. None is satisfactory. The interventions are too widespread, too long-lasting and too unsuccessful at what they supposedly accomplish to lend support to any of the common justifications. Is “good” being done when it involves endless killing, frequently of innocent bystanders, that elicits more and more anti-American sentiment from those on the receiving end who see Americans as invaders? Has the Great War II accomplished even one of its supposed objectives?

“Any new bailout program might require several national parliamentary ratifications and could also bring Germany’s Constitutional Court into play.”

• Greece Sticks To No-Austerity Pledge (Reuters)

Greek government spokesman Gabriel Sakellaridis showed no sign that Greece was backing off on its core demand. “The Greek government is determined to stick to its commitment towards the public … and not continue a program that has the characteristics of the previous bailout agreement,” he told Greece’s Skai television. He later said: “The Greek people have made it clear that their dignity is non-negotiable. We are continuing the negotiations with the popular mandate in our hearts and in our minds.” Some of the problems facing the Eurogroup are semantic. The Greeks, for example, will not countenance anything that smacks of an “extension” to the old bailout, preferring something new called a “bridge” agreement.

This is political. Tsipras rode into power on a wave of anti-austerity and anti-bailout anger last month and would have a hard time explaining a row-back so soon. Thousands of Greeks massed outside parliament in Athens on Sunday to back his strategy. But even a cosmetic change of labels could have practical consequences. An “extension” may not require many national ratifications unless it involves additional financial commitments from euro zone governments. Any new bailout program, on the other hand, might require several national parliamentary ratifications and could also bring Germany’s Constitutional Court into play. Among those requiring a parliamentary vote on a new bailout are Germany, Slovakia, Estonia and Finland, all identified by one veteran of EU meetings as part of a hard core of opponents to Greece’s plan.

The Eurogroup’s main debate with Greece’s “no austerity” stance will revolve around the funding of a bridge program, Greece’s request to reduce the ‘primary’ budget surpluses, excluding interest payments, that it is required to reach, and privatizations and labor reform. Greece said on Saturday that it was reviewing a €1.2 billion deal for Germany’s Fraport to run 14 regional airports, one of the biggest privatization deals since Greece’s debt crisis began in 2009. It has also pulled the plug on the privatization of the ports of Piraeus and Thessaloniki. On the question of liberalizing labor markets, government spokesman Sakellaridis remained tough: “We will discuss it with workers and with pensioners. Whatever we do, we will do through dialogue. We will not legislate at the sole behest of outside factors.”

” Europe’s been expanding up to the borders of Russia and there’s a country called Ukraine, and, essentially, that means that Europe is writing a put option, which Ukraine has now decided to cash in. Which is why, basically, Europe’s now on the hook for all the crap that is Ukraine. That’s a put option contract.”

• Austerity Is ‘Complete Horsesh*t’ (Alternet)

What is it about austerity that you take personally?

Part of it is because what I think the financial crisis is best seen as — and we’re still dealing with the aftermath of it, whether we like it or not — is that there’s a class-specific put option. Let me explain what I mean by this: A put option is a contract that’s very common in finance where essentially someone is selling insurance and the other person is taking the income for payments. At some point, they get to basically cash in the put. One way to think about this is, Europe’s been expanding up to the borders of Russia and there’s a country called Ukraine, and, essentially, that means that Europe is writing a put option, which Ukraine has now decided to cash in. Which is why, basically, Europe’s now on the hook for all the crap that is Ukraine. That’s a put option contract.

What has this got to do with the financial crisis and why do I feel passionately about it? Well, remember all those banks that got bailed [out]? In order to get bailed out you need to have assets, and my liabilities are the bank’s assets. The bank doesn’t give a damn about my condo because they’ve got an income stream coming from the mortgage. The assets and liabilities of the bank and the private sector sum up to zero, so when you bail that out, what you’re doing is you’re bailing out the private sector’s assets, which basically means the top 20% – if not about the top 10%, the top 1% – of the income distribution.

How do you pay for those bailouts? You pay for those bailouts with cuts. And who are the people that use government services? Well, it’s not the top 20% or above of the income distribution, it’s the bottom 70% and below. That’s what I mean by a class-specific put option. The people at the top get their assets bailed; the government says, Oh my God, look at all that spending! It’s out of control! We need to cut policemen and fire brigades and healthcare and various public services.

Strategic considerations may expose EU’s bluff.

• Greek Postwar Alliances Show Europe Has More to Lose Than Money (Bloomberg)

As Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras focuses on the economic arguments for a new bailout deal for Greece, the country’s strategic importance to the European Union may do as much to persuade Germany to grant him concessions. With war in Syria to the east, the failure of the Libyan state to the south and a nascent cease-fire in Ukraine to the north adding to the perennial tensions between Israel and its neighbors, the value of Greece as a NATO member and its ports on the eastern Mediterranean is rising. “One would be justified to ask whether Europe, the U.S. and NATO could afford the creation of a security vacuum and a black hole in a critical region,” Thanos Dokos, director of the Hellenic Foundation for European and Foreign Policy said. “That may not be “an acceptable loss for an EU with any ambitions to play a meaningful global and regional role,” he said.

The diplomatic effort that persuaded Russia to halt the violence in Ukraine was punctuated by Tsipras’s own, far more amicable exchanges with President Vladimir Putin. It signaled to German Chancellor Angela Merkel that European powers have more than just 195 billion euros ($223 billion) of bailout funds at stake in its standoff with Greece. The country, among a handful that complies with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s defense spending recommendations, has more than 200 fighter jets and 1,000 tanks. NATO facilities include a military base in Crete that was used during the airstrikes on Libya in 2011. That role may be Tsipras’s strongest weapon in negotiations with the rest of the euro area, according to Dimitris Kourkoulas, a former deputy foreign minister. “This is probably the last bargaining card Tsipras has,” Kourkoulas said.

Western powers recognized Greece’s strategic importance during and after World War II. The country’s resistance to Italy under Benito Mussolini scored the first allied ground victories against the axis powers and is marked annually by a national holiday in Greece on Oct. 28. The U.S. and Britain then intervened in the civil war to help defeat the communists as the rest of eastern Europe fell under the influence of the Soviet Union. The Greeks joined NATO in 1952, three years before the Federal Republic of Germany and at the same time as Turkey. In 1981, Greece became the 10th member of the EU, joining before countries like Spain and Austria, and adopted the euro two decades later.

An important signal going into the new talks.

• Greeks Show Support for Tsipras on Eve of Brussels Talks (Bloomberg)

Thousands of Greeks gathered in central Athens Sunday in support of Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras’s government, as officials prepared for a crunch meeting with creditors aimed at breaking an impasse over financing Europe’s most indebted state.
Police said more than 20,000 people assembled in front of the Greek Parliament as of about 8 p.m. in Athens, with more expected to join during the evening. The show of support was directed at a government delegation led by Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis that will return to Brussels early Monday to try and negotiate a bridge agreement with euro-area peers that allows time and financing to discuss Greece’s post-bailout era. Greek stocks and bonds rose on Friday as officials on both sides signaled a willingness to compromise.

With Greece’s current bailout running out at the end of February, discussions continued at technical level into the weekend to prepare the ground for the Brussels meeting of finance chiefs. “We’re looking at difficult negotiations on Monday,” Tsipras was cited as saying in a weekend interview with Germany’s Stern magazine. “Nevertheless, I’m full of confidence.” Talks took place on Saturday between officials from Greece’s finance and foreign ministries and technical delegations from the Troika. The focus was on identifying common ground and those areas of divergence rather than on negotiating, according to Greek and EU officials. Varoufakis said that both sides have agreed on many issues already, according to an interview with Kathimerini newspaper published on Saturday.

It still isn’t certain that a final agreement will be reached Monday, the Greek official said. Tsipras’s Syriza party was elected Jan. 25 on a platform of ending austerity, a partial debt writedown and no more audits by the troika of the commission, the ECB and the IMF. It is seeking a bridge agreement for the next six months that will replace its current bailout, which it blames for the country’s economic hardship, and secure the country’s financing needs to give officials time to discuss “a new deal” with the euro area, Tsipras said last week. The government is “determined to abide by its commitment to the Greek people and its fresh mandate to end austerity,” government spokesman Gabriel Sakellaridis told Skai TV Sunday.

“We need time rather than money to put into effect our reform plan,” [..] “I promise you, within six months Greece will then be a different country.”

• Greece, Creditors Extend Talks on Eve of Eurogroup Meeting (Bloomberg)

Greek officials and the country’s creditors extended discussions through the weekend, as they raced to make progress ahead of the meeting of euro-area finance ministers in Brussels on Monday. While negotiators sought an agreement, government leaders back home reiterated their markers. For Greece, that means no discussions to continue its current bailout program, government spokesman Gabriel Sakellaridis told Skai TV this morning. French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius, meantime, said that even as officials hold talks over Greece’s debt load, they aren’t willing to write it off. The government is “determined to abide with its commitment to the Greek people and its fresh mandate” for ending austerity,’’ Sakellaridis said.

Meetings dragged on in Athens, where the government held preparative discussions, and Brussels, where officials from Greece’s Finance and Foreign Ministries held “technical” talks with the EU, IMF and ECB, with the goal of laying the groundwork for a successor program. Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras said it’s too early to say if there’s a deal in the making. Since coming to power in an election last month, Tsipras has maintained his pledge to help Greeks by reversing the austerity imposed under the country’s bailout. That’s led to clashes with other European governments. Germany, the biggest country contributor to bailouts, has led calls for Greece to stick to its political promises regardless of any change in government, while France and Italy have been more sympathetic to Greece’s efforts to secure bridge financing while it works out a longer-term plan.

In the face of opposition, the Greek government has already watered down its position on the debt, ditching a pre-election pledge for a writedown in its nominal value. Greece has more than €320 billion euros in debt outstanding, about 175% of GDP, mostly in the form of bailout loans from the euro area and the IMF. Frustration over the insurmountable pile of debt – even after the world’s biggest-ever restructuring in 2012 – and the dismal economic state helped Tsipras and his anti-austerity Syriza party topple former PM Samaras’s New Democracy in last month’s elections. “We’re looking at difficult negotiations on Monday,” Tsipras told Germany’s Stern magazine. “Nevertheless, I’m full of confidence.” [..] “We need time rather than money to put into effect our reform plan,” Tspiras said after convening a meeting of his cabinet in Athens Friday night, Stern reported. “I promise you, within six months Greece will then be a different country.”

“An exit from the eurozone would be “the most expensive solution both for Greece and for the euro area..”

• Greece May Win Compromise Offer From EU Bailout Fund (WSJ)

A Greek exit from the eurozone would be the worst of all options for everybody involved, the head of the European bailout fund said in a televised interview aired Sunday, signaling willingness to compromise over some conditions that have been linked to the country’s existing bailouts. The comments come a day before a crucial meeting of eurozone finance ministers in Brussels, where officials will aim to lay the foundation of a financing deal for struggling Greece, whose existing bailout expires at the end of February. An exit from the eurozone would be “the most expensive solution both for Greece and for the euro area,” said Klaus Regling, the head of the European Stability Mechanism, in a transcript of an interview with German broadcaster Phoenix. “That’s why we try to prevent precisely this.”

Greece’s new leftist government wants to end the austerity course and reduce the country’s debt burden, and is refusing to complete the existing bailout program. Instead of extending its current program, Athens wants a bridge arrangement to keep it afloat until September while it negotiates less onerous terms for long-term assistance. “That a newly elected government has different priorities than the previous government is understandable and nothing new,” said Mr. Regling. “We have for instance seen this too when the government in Ireland changed in the middle of the [bailout] program. It was also possible there to change individual measures but the main direction was kept in place.”

He stressed that countries must embrace reforms to help generate more economic growth in the medium term. “The European Central Bank’s monetary measures can of course be supportive and have an effect,” he said. “With its recent decisions, the ECB has done the maximum to buy time. Now it’s up to the governments.”

“If our so-called partners insist, in any way, on extending the existing programme, that is to say the sinful memorandum because that is what they mean by the programme, there can be no agreement,”

• Syriza Leader Confident Ahead Of Eurozone Crunch Talks In Brussels (Guardian)

Greece’s new prime minister Alexis Tsipras is “full of confidence” his country can secure a deal to ditch strict austerity measures while still satisfying Athens’ international creditors, despite warning that crunch talks in Brussels today would be “difficult”. As a key deadline approaches for Greece to either agree to stick to its existing bailout programme or reach a compromise with its lenders, eurozone finance ministers meet again on Monday in an attempt to hammer out an agreement. The new leftist Greek government is arguing for an end to relentless cuts imposed as a condition of the country’s rescue funding and wants more time to prove that a more pro-growth approach will work better. But it faces opposition from other eurozone countries, most notably Germany, which have pushed for the strict terms of Greece’s €240bn bailout programme to stay in place.

Talks in Brussels last week made no headway in resolving the standoff. But Tsipras also faces growing criticism from hard-left militants in his own party for appearing to row back on some pre-election pledges to ditch austerity measures. Asked about the Brussels talks, the 40-year-old prime minister told German news magazine Stern: “I expect difficult negotiations on Monday. But I am full of confidence. “I am in favour of a solution where everyone wins. I want a win-win solution. I want to save Greece from tragedy and Europe from a split.” “I promise you: Greece will, in six months’ time, be a completely different country,” he said. His finance minister Yanis Varoufakis told Greek newspaper Kathimerini at the weekend that a deal between Athens and the eurozone will be found, even if that may well be at the last minute.

But Tsipras not only has to persuade Berlin that debt-stricken Athens will keep along the path of reform, but assure his own hard-left militants that red lines will not be crossed in any compromise. There was mounting disquiet at the weekend that Varoufakis had gone too far by saying the new government was willing to implement 70% of the hated memorandum outlining Greece’s bailout accords. Firing a warning shot over the government’s bows, the energy minister Panagiotis Lafazanis, who represents Syriza’s radical wing, said there could be no solution if foreign lenders insisted on Athens adopting the “sinful memorandum”. “If our so-called partners insist, in any way, on extending the existing programme, that is to say the sinful memorandum because that is what they mean by the programme, there can be no agreement,” he told the state news agency ANA-MPA on Sunday.

“Should a nation build up liabilities and then leave the currency union, the remaining members may have to share the bill.”

• Greek Euro Exit Risk Signals Inadequate ECB QE Safeguards (Bloomberg)

Mario Draghi’s assurance that the European Central Bank has ring-fenced the risks of its bond-buying program has a caveat. While the ECB president says the euro area’s 19 national central banks will buy and hold their own country’s debt, the money they create – at least €1.1 trillion – can flow freely across borders through the region’s Target2 payment system. Should a nation build up liabilities and then leave the currency union, the remaining members may have to share the bill. The risks have been thrown more sharply into focus by the standoff between European governments and a newly elected Greek administration, which has prompted a deposit flight and put the country’s future in the euro in doubt.

As ECB officials join politicians gathering in Brussels on Monday to seek a solution to the crisis, Greece ultimately threatens to expose the weakness of measures to address legal constraints and public concern over central-bank stimulus. “There’s a political signal that comes out of the suspension of risk sharing: there’s no willingness in the ECB to build up fiscal risks via the back door if politicians aren’t,” said Nick Matthews at Nomura in London. “At the same time, asset purchases will create reserves that permeate through the Target2 system. The question of what happens if a country exits hasn’t been addressed.” Whatever happens in Brussels on Monday, Draghi and his Governing Council will meet in Frankfurt on Wednesday to nail down the details of quantitative easing.

Before buying starts in March, policy makers must sign off on the legal act and decide on key elements such as how assets will be bought and how to calculate self-imposed limits. ECB-style QE will be more complicated than programs by the Federal Reserve and Bank of England because it’ll happen in a currency union that isn’t backed by a fiscal union, with debt mutualization and central-bank financing of governments banned. That makes Target2, the Eurosystem’s financial plumbing, a potential indicator of where risks are building up.
When a lender in one country settles an obligation with a counterparty in another, the assets and liabilities are registered on the central-bank balance sheets. Those balances are aggregated each business day at the ECB, the Eurosystem’s hub, and reflected in Target2.

All five bailout countries are running negative Target2 balances, as are six others including Italy and France, according to data compiled by Germany’s Osnabrueck University. Greece had liabilities of 49 billion euros at the end of last year. The biggest creditor is Germany, which saw claims on the ECB jump to 515 billion euros at the end of January from 461 billion euros the previous month.

“Is the euro zone just a branch office of the Federal Republic of Germany?”

• US And Greece Helping To Save The Euro (CNBC)

Greece’s pleas to stop the “fiscal waterboarding” of its devastated economy are substantively no different from President Obama’s repeated warnings to Germany to stop bleeding the euro area economy with excessive fiscal austerity. Sadly, the president’s reportedly more than a dozen phone calls to the German Chancellor Merkel in 2011 and 2012 urging supportive economic policies in the euro area fell on deaf ears. These calls were not just brushed aside; they were plainly ridiculed as Chancellor Merkel kept telling the media that “it made no sense to be adding new debt to old debt.” But – worrying about one-fifth of U.S. exports going to Europe – Washington kept trying.

The former U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner went as far as visiting his German counterpart Wolfgang Schaeuble at his summer retreat on a North Sea island on July 30, 2012 to talk about relief to euro area economies. That’s where Geithner was in for a big shock. He writes in his book “Stress Test: Reflections on Financial Crises” that he was “frightened” by the German talk of Greece leaving (i.e., being pushed out of) the monetary union. President Obama, he says, was “deeply worried” about Berlin’s designs. In the end, Geithner had to settle for his host’s assurances that everything was going to plan, and that the heavily indebted euro area countries were making progress on their structural reforms.

Indeed they were: At the time of that meeting, the Greek economy was sinking at a rate of 6.9%, followed by economic downturns of 3.5% in Portugal, 2.4% in Italy, 1.6% in Spain and a continuing economic stagnation in France. These five countries represent 53.1% of the euro area economy, but Germany would not relent in its firm insistence on fiscal retrenchment. For the German Chancellor, these countries’ plight was just a case of self-inflicted wounds because “they did not respect the budget rules and failed to supervise their banks.” That message played well with domestic audience in the run-up to German elections in September 2013. Obviously, it was important to be seen as a stern guardian of German finances bent on protecting taxpayers from southern spendthrifts and fiscal miscreants.

That policy exasperated so much Jean-Claude Juncker to push him into an unheard of attack on German leadership. Currently serving as the president of the European Commission (EU’s executive body), Mr. Juncker was Luxembourg’s prime minister and the chairman of the Eurogroup (a forum of the euro area finance ministers) when he aired his concerns on July 29, 2012. Here is what he said: “… how can Germany have the luxury of playing domestic politics on the back of the euro? If all other 16 euro area countries did the same thing, what would remain of our common project? Is the euro zone just a branch office of the Federal Republic of Germany?”

“In this case, the abuse consisted of BAC funded and enabled tax avoidance schemes with respect to stock dividends – arrangements which happen to be illegal in the US.”

• Shoot Bank Of America Now – The Case For Super Glass-Steagall (David Stockman)

The mainstream narrative about “recovery” from the financial crisis is a giant con job. And nowhere does the mendacity run deeper than in the “banks are fixed” meme—an insidious cover story that has been concocted by the crony capitalist cabals that thrive at the intersection of Wall Street and Washington. So this morning comes yet another expose in the Wall Street Journal about the depredations of Bank of America (BAC). Not surprisingly, at the center of this latest malefaction is still another set of schemes to grossly abuse the deposit insurance safety net and enlist the American taxpayer in the risky business of financing high-rolling London hedge funds. In this case, the abuse consisted of BAC funded and enabled tax avoidance schemes with respect to stock dividends – arrangements which happen to be illegal in the US.

No matter. BAC simply arranged for them to be executed for clients in London where they apparently are kosher, but with funds from BAC’s US insured banking entity called BANA, which most definitely was not kosher at all. As to the narrow offense involved – that is, the use of insured deposits to cheat the tax man – the one honest official to come out of Washington’s 2008-2009 bank bailout spree, former FDIC head Sheila Bair, had this to say: “I don’t think it’s an appropriate use.. Activities with a substantial reputational risk… should not be done inside a bank. You have explicit government backing inside a bank. There is taxpayer risk there.” She is right, and apparently in response to prodding by its regulator, BAC has now ended the practice, albeit after booking billions in what amounted to pure profits from these illicit trades.

But that doesn’t end the matter. This latest abuse by BAC’s London operation is, in fact, just the tip of the iceberg – the symptom of an unreformed banking regime that is rotten to the core and that remains a clear and present danger to financial stability and true economic recovery. And not by coincidence there stands at the very epicenter of that untoward regime a $2 trillion financial conglomerate that is a virtual cesspool of malfeasance, customer abuse, operational incompetence, legal and regulatory failure, downright criminality and complete and total lack of accountability at the Board and top executive level. In short, BAC’s six-year CEO, Brian Moynihan, is guilty of such chronic malfeasance and serial management failure that outside the cushy cocoon of TBTF he would have been fired long ago.

“In 2012 one in five children lived in a home that was cold or damp; one in 10 lacked a necessary clothing item, such as a warm winter coat; and one in 20 households couldn’t afford to feed their kids properly.”

• Low-Pay Britain, Where Working Families Have To Rent A Fridge (Guardian)

There’s a minor domestic crisis in any family when the fridge-freezer breaks down. Wasted food; no fresh milk; pools of water on the kitchen floor. But for some households, the demise of the washing machine, the tumble dryer or the telly is more than a hiccup – it throws up a major financial challenge. That’s where firms like BrightHouse come in: pop into one of its 291 stores, and instead of having to find several hundred pounds up front, you can replace a busted appliance for a much more manageable £10-£15 a week. Except there’s a sting in the tail. When MPs on the all-party parliamentary group on debt and personal finance looked into these “rent-to-own” retailers, of which BrightHouse is the leader, they found that by the time delivery charges, insurance and servicing are loaded on, consumers who can ill afford it end up paying several times over.

One fridge-freezer with a five-year service plan, which sells for £644 at middle-class favourite John Lewis, ended up costing £1,716. They have now asked the regulator, the Financial Conduct Authority, to investigate. But, like disgraced payday lender Wonga, BrightHouse’s appeal is a sharp reminder of the precariousness of many families’ lives. Perhaps BrightHouse’s customers should have read the small print. But signing up to a usurious loan deal because of the temptingly low upfront payment is hardly a rare mistake in today’s credit-fuelled economy. Many rent-to-own customers – half of whom receive benefits, and who have on average £19 a week spare for one-off costs – have little or no alternative. According to Breadline Britain, a salutary new book from poverty researchers Stewart Lansley and Joanna Mack, a growing proportion of families are unable to afford the things – such as a working fridge – that most of us would define as essential.

In 2012, their large-scale research project found, one in five children lived in a home that was cold or damp; one in 10 lacked a necessary clothing item, such as a warm winter coat; and one in 20 households couldn’t afford to feed their kids properly. These children’s chances are hobbled long before they reach the school gates – and in many cases their parents are not in the dole queue, but juggling jobs. Many of the adults suffering this kind of “deprivation poverty” – more than half, in fact – are in work. Yet these are the people who have been on the receiving end of a pernicious rhetorical onslaught since 2010. In the Tory lexicon, they are the “troubled families” whose behaviour blights their neighbourhoods: the “skivers”, rather than “strivers”; the people whose blinds are down when their “hardworking” neighbours drag themselves out to work in the morning.

No rich western society should ever be allowed to stoop this low: “Normal. It’s like… don’t know… it’s normal.”

• How Kids Company Feeds Britain’s Hungry Children (Observer)

Kids Company is a rare children’s charity in that the people it feeds and looks after are self-referring. Children come to them by themselves, and later they bring others who are also in need. “Between 2011 and 2012 we saw a 233% increase in these self-referrals,” Guinness says. As a result they launched the Plate Pledge, a fundraising drive built around the £2 cost of a meal. While they get some funding from central government they get none from the boroughs of Lambeth or Southwark whose kids they look after, and still have to raise more than £24m a year to keep services running. The Plate Pledge has meant they have been able to serve another half a million meals. “But we’re not meeting demand,” Guinness says.

Not that anyone is clear what that demand actually is, because it’s hard to get definite numbers. “We tried to get real hard figures on child food poverty when we were researching our report into school food,” says Henry Dimbleby, founder of the Leon healthy fast-food chain, who co-authored the recent School Food Plan. “We found it impossible to do so.” It requires getting deep inside the private domain, into the tight weft and weave of the home and that is a very secretive and emotionally charged place. A team from Reading University recently conducted interviews with children who came to Kids Company, which painted a dismal portrait of need. One child, asked how they deal with hunger, said, with a brutal logic, “I just want to sleep cos… when I [go] to bed hungry and sleep, I’m not hungry.”

Another child, asked how common she found cupboards empty when she got home from school, just shrugged. It was, she said, “Normal. It’s like… don’t know… it’s normal.” Guinness is dismissive of the idea that it’s impossible to get data on these experiences. He has an email from a Department of Health official who admits that, while they do undertake nutrition surveys of the population, they don’t analyse the lowest income groups because “the sample size is too small”. Guinness knows from the demand they are seeing that the sample cannot be too small. I ask him, slightly desperately, if there is any sunlight in this story. “Yes, of course. When you feed a child, when you provide a family-like environment, they thrive. They turn in to fine young people. And it doesn’t cost much.”

Expect many more to follow.

• Rolls-Royce Accused In Petrobras Scandal (FT)

Rolls-Royce has been accused of involvement in a multibillion-dollar bribery and kickback scheme at Petrobras, Brazil’s state-controlled oil producer, as more foreign companies are dragged into the country’s largest corruption scandal. The British engineering company, which makes gas turbines for Petrobras oil platforms, allegedly paid bribes via an agent in exchange for a $100 million contract as part of a scheme in operation during much of the past decade, according to testimony from a former Petrobras executive. Pedro Barusco, the Petrobras veteran who has emerged as one of the investigation’s key informants, told police he personally received at least $200,000 from Rolls-Royce — only part of the bribes he alleged were paid to a ring of politicians and other executives at the oil company.

The admission was buried in more than 600 pages of documents released by Brazil’s federal court system this month, detailing the testimonies of Mr Barusco who struck a plea bargain in November. Responding to Mr Barusco’s accusations, Rolls-Royce said: “We want to make it crystal clear that we will not tolerate improper business conduct of any sort and will take all necessary action to ensure compliance.” The accusations come as Rolls-Royce also faces a Serious Fraud Office investigation in the UK over allegations of bribery and corruption in China and Indonesia. They also come as the company is undergoing a painful restructuring, revealing its first fall in underlying sales in a decade and predicting a bigger than expected fall in profits in 2015.

Kiev is losing on all fronts except the IMF and EU/US.

• Famous Soviet Football Champ Refuses To Fight For Kiev In East Ukraine (RT)

Soviet football legend Aleksandr Zavarov said he will not fight in the eastern Ukraine conflict, after reports surfaced that a draft notice bearing the 53-year-old’s name was delivered to the Football Federation of Ukraine (FFU) last week. Zavarov, who was born in Lugansk, has categorically refused to comply with the notice. “I will say one thing, I will never fight where my family and kids live, where my parents are buried,” the assistant coach for the Ukraine national team said. “I just want peace.” In 1986, Zavarov was named the best football player in the USSR, and is widely considered to be one of the best players in Soviet history. The FFU received a conscription notice for 89 members of the organization, Ukrainian sports papers reported last week.

FFU representative Pavel Ternovoy confirmed the reports to R-Sport agency. “I can confirm that many members of the Football Federation of Ukraine received draft notices. Alexandr Zavarov and Yuriy Syvukha were among them,” he said. Yuriy Syvukha is a former goalkeeper and current assistant coach for the Ukraine national team. Ternovoy said that each conscript will have to decide for himself how to respond to his notice. “There is a war going on right now. Every citizen should understand what’s going on. What those who got the notices will do is entirely up to them,” he said. In January, Ukraine began a multi-stage military draft in the hope of enlisting 100,000 new recruits.

Reserve servicemen between the ages of 25 and 60 are eligible under the new guidelines. However, a Ukraine army spokesperson admitted late last month that the new draft has faced some problems as potential conscripts attempt to dodge the wave of mobilization. “The fourth wave of mobilization is problematic,” Vladimir Talalay said. “The biggest difficulties are seen in Sumy, Kharkov, Cherkassy, Ternopol, Zakarpatye, and other regions.” Almost 7,500 Ukrainians are already facing criminal charges for evading military service. Russian President Vladimir Putin has said that Ukrainian draft dodgers are welcome in Russia. He has promised to legalize longer stays in the Russian Federation for those facing conscription.

“.ot only do we put up with a laundry list of tyrannies that make King George III’s catalogue of abuses look like child’s play, but most actually persist in turning a blind eye to them..”

• Why I’m Not Breaking Up with America This Valentine’s Day (John Whitehead)

Almost every week I get an email from an American expatriate living outside the country who commiserates about the deplorable state of our freedoms in the United States, expounds on his great fortune in living outside the continental U.S., and urges me to leave the country before all hell breaks loose and my wife and children are tortured, raped, brutalized and killed. Without fail, this gentleman concludes every piece of correspondence by questioning my sanity in not shipping my grandchildren off to some far-flung locale to live their lives free of fear, police brutality, and surveillance. I must confess that when faced with unmistakable warning signs that the country I grew up in is no more, I have my own moments of doubt.

After all, why would anyone put up with a government that brazenly steals, cheats, sneaks, spies and lies, not to mention alienates, antagonizes, criminalizes and terrorizes its own citizens and then justifies it in the name of safety, security and the greater good? Why would anyone put up with militarized police officers who shoot first and ask questions later, act as if their word is law, and operate as if they are above the law? Why would anyone put up with government officials, it doesn’t matter whether they’re elected or appointed, who live an elitist lifestyle while setting themselves apart from the populace, operate outside the rule of law, and act as if they’re beyond reproach and immune from being held accountable?

Unfortunately, not only do we put up with a laundry list of tyrannies that make King George III’s catalogue of abuses look like child’s play, but most actually persist in turning a blind eye to them, acting as if what they don’t see or acknowledge can’t hurt them. The sad reality, as I make clear in my book A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, is that life in America is no bed of roses. Nor are there any signs that things will get better anytime soon, at least not for “we the people,” those of us who belong to the so-called “unwashed masses”—the working class stiffs, the hoi polloi, the plebeians, the rabble, the riffraff, the herd, the peons and the proletariats.

And that’s just the one(s) we actually hear about. Most will never be told.

• Online Bank Robbers Steal as Much as $1 Billion (Bloomberg)

A hacker group has stolen as much as $1 billion from banks and other financial companies worldwide since 2013 in an “unprecedented cyber-robbery,” according to computer security firm Kaspersky Lab. The gang targeted as many as 100 banks, e-payment systems and other financial institutions in 30 countries including the U.S, China and European nations, stealing as much as $10 million in each raid, Kaspersky Lab, Russia’s largest maker of antivirus software, said in a report. The Carbanak gang members came from Russia, China, Ukraine and other parts of Europe, and they are still active, it said The criminals infected bank employees’ computers with Carbanak malware, which then spread to internal networks and enabled video surveillance of staff.

That let fraudsters mimic employee activity to transfer and steal money, according to Kaspersky Lab, which said it has been working with Interpol, Europol and other authorities to uncover the plot. “These bank heists were surprising because it made no difference to the criminals what software the banks were using,” said Sergey Golovanov, principal security researcher at Kaspersky Lab’s global research and analysis team. “It was a very slick and professional cyber-robbery.”

Criminals also used access to banks’ networks to seize control of ATMs and order them to dispense cash at certain times to henchmen, Kaspersky Lab said. In some cases the gang inflated the balance of certain accounts and pocketed the extra funds without arousing immediate suspicion, according to the report. U.S. President Barack Obama convened a national summit on Friday to encourage cooperation between federal and private security specialists to combat hackers and data breaches. The event included executives and security officials from companies such as Microsoft, Google, Yahoo! and Facebook and followed hacks at companies including Sony and JPMorgan last year.

‘We are working for the CIA and we’d like to know if some other country was controlling our climate, would we be able to detect it?’ Meaning: could we control their climate?

• Spy Agencies Fund Climate Research In Hunt For Weather Weapon (Guardian)

A senior US scientist has expressed concern that the intelligence services are funding climate change research to learn if new technologies could be used as potential weapons. Alan Robock, a climate scientist at Rutgers University in New Jersey, has called on secretive government agencies to be open about their interest in radical work that explores how to alter the world’s climate. Robock, who has contributed to reports for the intergovernmental panel on climate change (IPCC), uses computer models to study how stratospheric aerosols could cool the planet in the way massive volcanic eruptions do. But he was worried about who would control such climate-altering technologies should they prove effective, he told the American Association for the Advancement of Science in San Jose.

Last week, the National Academy of Sciences published a two-volume report on different approaches to tackling climate change. One focused on means to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, the other on ways to change clouds or the Earth’s surface to make them reflect more sunlight out to space. The report concluded that while small-scale research projects were needed, the technologies were so far from being ready that reducing carbon emissions remained the most viable approach to curbing the worst extremes of climate change. A report by the Royal Society in 2009 made similar recommendations. The $600,000 report was part-funded by the US intelligence services, but Robock said the CIA and other agencies had not fully explained their interest in the work.

“The CIA was a major funder of the National Academies report so that makes me really worried who is going to be in control,” he said. Other funders included Nasa, the US Department of Energy, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The CIA established the Center on Climate Change and National Security in 2009, a decision that drew fierce criticism from some Republicans who viewed it as a distraction from more pressing terrorist concerns. The centre was closed down in 2012, but the agency said it would continue to monitor the humanitarian consequences of climate change and the impact on US economic security, albeit not from a dedicated office. Robock said he became suspicious about the intelligence agencies’ involvement in climate change science after receiving a call from two men who claimed to be CIA consultants three years ago. “They said: ‘We are working for the CIA and we’d like to know if some other country was controlling our climate, would we be able to detect it?’

People’s favorite topics.

• 12 Likely Causes Of The Apocalypse, As Seen By Scientists (RT)

Filmmakers, authors, and media have widely speculated about how human life on Earth will end. Now scientists have come up with the first serious assessment, presenting 12 possible causes of the Apocalypse. Scientists from Oxford University’s Future of Humanity Institute and the Global Challenges Foundation have compiled the first research on the topic, drawing a list of 12 possible ways that human civilization might end. The idea of the study is not quite new. However, due to its treatment in popular culture, the possibility of the world’s infinite end provokes relatively little political or academic interest, making a serious discussion harder, according to researchers. “We were surprised to find that no one else had compiled a list of global risks with impacts that, for all practical purposes, can be called infinite,” said co-author Dennis Pamlin of the Global Challenges Foundation. “We don’t want to be accused of scaremongering but we want to get policy makers talking.”

Below is the list of threats, ranked from least to most probable.
• Asteroid impact Probability: 0.00013%
• Super-volcano eruption Probability: 0.00003%
• Global pandemic Probability: 0.0001%
• Nuclear war Probability: 0.005%
• Extreme climate change Probability: 0.01%
• Synthetic biology Probability: 0.01%
• Nanotechnology Probability: 0.01%
• Unknown consequences Probability: 0.1%
• Ecological collapse Probability: N/A
• Global system collapse Probability: N/A
• Future bad governance Probability: N/A

And lastly, the most probable of all the mentioned causes of the Apocalypse is…
• Artificial Intelligence Probability: 0-10%

Debt Rattle December 28 2014

Dec 282014

December 28, 2014 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 12:28 pm Finance Tagged with: climate change, crash, Greece, hunger, Japan, Mexico, oil, OPEC, pope 4 Responses »

DPC Cuyahoga River, Lift Bridge and Superior Avenue viaduct, Cleveland, Ohio 1912

• Pope Francis Climate Change Encyclical To Anger Deniers, US Churches (Observer)

• Hungry Britain: Millions Struggle To Feed Themselves, Face Malnourishment (Ind.)

• Decline in Oil Could Cost OPEC $257 Billion in 2015 (Daily Finance)

• US Oil-Producing States See Budgets, Jobs at Risk as Price Falls (NY Times)

• China’s 3.5% Trade Growth in 2014 Falling Far Short Of 7.5% Target (Reuters)

• Japan Approves $29 Billion Stimulus Plan, Impact In Doubt (Reuters)

• Japan Approves $29 Billion Spending Package to Boost Economy

• The Keynesian End Game Crystalizes In Japan’s Monetary Madness (Stockman)

• How Central Banks Saved The World (Stocks) In 2014 (Zero Hedge)

• Now Whitehall’s Crazy Eco Zealots Want To Ban Your Gas Cooker (Daily Mail)

• Mexico Withdraws $3.4 Billion From Pemex as Oil Revenue Shrinks (Bloomberg)

• Greece Faces New ‘Catastrophe’ As PM Battles To Avert Snap Elections (Observer)

• Challenging UK Party Games Ahead As Greece Threatens 2nd Debt Crisis (Observer)

• You Can Put The Next Crash On Your 2016 Calendar Now (Paul B. Farrell)

• 2014: The Year The Internet Came Of Age (Guardian)

• China Needs Millions of Brides ASAP (Bloomberg)

• Rising Oceans Force Bangladeshi Farmers Inland for New Jobs (Bloomberg)

• Siberian Dog Allowed To Stay In Hospital Where Owner Died 1 Year Ago (RT)

A Papal Encyclical is a big deal.

• Pope Francis Climate Change Encyclical To Anger Deniers, US Churches (Observer)

He has been called the “superman pope”, and it would be hard to deny that Pope Francis has had a good December. Cited by President Barack Obama as a key player in the thawing relations between the US and Cuba, the Argentinian pontiff followed that by lecturing his cardinals on the need to clean up Vatican politics. But can Francis achieve a feat that has so far eluded secular powers and inspire decisive action on climate change? It looks as if he will give it a go. In 2015, the pope will issue a lengthy message on the subject to the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics, give an address to the UN general assembly and call a summit of the world’s main religions. The reason for such frenetic activity, says Bishop Marcelo Sorondo, chancellor of the Vatican’s Pontifical Academy of Sciences, is the pope’s wish to directly influence next year’s crucial UN climate meeting in Paris, when countries will try to conclude 20 years of fraught negotiations with a universal commitment to reduce emissions.

“Our academics supported the pope’s initiative to influence next year’s crucial decisions,” Sorondo told Cafod, the Catholic development agency, at a meeting in London. “The idea is to convene a meeting with leaders of the main religions to make all people aware of the state of our climate and the tragedy of social exclusion.” Following a visit in March to Tacloban, the Philippine city devastated in 2012 by typhoon Haiyan, the pope will publish a rare encyclical on climate change and human ecology. Urging all Catholics to take action on moral and scientific grounds, the document will be sent to the world’s 5,000 Catholic bishops and 400,000 priests, who will distribute it to parishioners. According to Vatican insiders, Francis will meet other faith leaders and lobby politicians at the general assembly in New York in September, when countries will sign up to new anti-poverty and environmental goals.

In recent months, the pope has argued for a radical new financial and economic system to avoid human inequality and ecological devastation. In October he told a meeting of Latin American and Asian landless peasants and other social movements: “An economic system centred on the god of money needs to plunder nature to sustain the frenetic rhythm of consumption that is inherent to it. “The system continues unchanged, since what dominates are the dynamics of an economy and a finance that are lacking in ethics. It is no longer man who commands, but money. Cash commands. “The monopolising of lands, deforestation, the appropriation of water, inadequate agro-toxics are some of the evils that tear man from the land of his birth. Climate change, the loss of biodiversity and deforestation are already showing their devastating effects in the great cataclysms we witness,” he said.

Dickens never died.

• Hungry Britain: Millions Struggle To Feed Themselves, Face Malnourishment (Ind.)

Millions of the poorest people in Britain are struggling to get enough food to maintain their body weight, according to official figures published this month. The Government’s Family Food report reveals that the poorest 10% of the population – some 6.4 million people – ate an average of 1,997 calories a day last year, compared with the average guideline figure of about 2,080 calories. This data covers all age groups. One expert said the figures were a “powerful marker” that there is a problem with food poverty in Britain and it was clear there were “substantial numbers of people who are going hungry and eating a pretty miserable diet”. The use of food banks in the UK has surged in recent years. The Trussell Trust, a charity which runs more than 400 food banks, said it had given three days worth of food, and support, to more than 492,600 people between April and September this year, up 38% on the same period in 2013.

Based on an annual survey of 6,000 UK households, the Family Food report said the population as a whole was consuming 5% more calories than required. Tables of figures attached to the report reveal the average calorie consumption for the poorest 10%, but the report itself did not highlight this. Chris Goodall, an award-winning author who writes about energy, discovered the figures while investigating human use of food resources. “The data absolutely shocked me. What it shows is for the first time since the Second World War, if you are poor you cannot afford to eat sufficient calories,” he said. He also highlights a widening consumption gap between rich and poor. In 2001/2, there was little difference, with the richest 10th consuming a total of 2,420 calories daily, about 4% more than the poorest. But in 2013, the richest group consumed 2,294 calories, about 15% more than the poorest. The report, published by the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs, also found that the poorest people spent 22% more on food in 2013 than in 2007 but received 6.7% less.

2012 revenues: $900 billion. 2015: $446 billion.

• Decline in Oil Could Cost OPEC $257 Billion in 2015 (Daily Finance)

Falling oil prices are giving a huge boost to the U.S. economy just in time for the holidays, and the reprieve from high gas prices doesn’t look like it will stop anytime soon. But elsewhere around the world, the drop in oil might not be looked upon so kindly. Most of OPEC’s 12 member countries rely on oil as a major source of revenue, not only supporting their domestic economies but also balancing national budgets. The amount of potential revenue they’ve lost as crude oil prices have fallen is staggering. If you’re a country like Saudi Arabia, Kuwait or Iraq, which rely on oil as a major revenue source, the drop in oil prices can impact your country dramatically. The U.S. Energy Information Administration just estimated that next year’s OPEC oil export revenue (excluding Iran) will drop an incredible $257 billion to $446 billion. That’s off its peak of nearly $900 billion in 2012.

The chart above shows the scale of OPEC’s potential revenue drop and the chart below shows who has the most at stake. Interestingly, Saudi Arabia is leading the charge against cutting OPEC’s production, which is keeping oil prices low, despite having the most money at stake. The reason may be a long-term need for greater market share in the oil market.

“Nothing is off the table at this point.”

• US Oil-Producing States See Budgets, Jobs at Risk as Price Falls (NY Times)

States dependent on oil and gas revenue are bracing for layoffs, slashing agency budgets and growing increasingly anxious about the ripple effect that falling oil prices may have on their local economies. The concerns are cutting across traditional oil states like Texas, Louisiana, Oklahoma and Alaska as well as those like North Dakota that are benefiting from the nation’s latest energy boom. “The crunch is coming,” said Gunnar Knapp, a professor of economics and the director of the Institute of Social and Economic Research at the University of Alaska Anchorage. Experts and elected officials say an extended downturn in oil prices seems unlikely to create the economic disasters that accompanied the 1980s oil bust, because energy-producing states that were left reeling for years have diversified their economies. The effects on the states are nothing like the crises facing big oil-exporting nations like Russia, Iran and Venezuela.

But here in Houston, which proudly bills itself as the energy capital of the world, Hercules Offshore announced it would lay off about 300 employees who work on the company’s rigs in the Gulf of Mexico at the end of the month. Texas already lost 2,300 oil and gas jobs in October and November, according to preliminary data released last week by the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics. On the same day, Fitch Ratings warned that home prices in Texas “may be unsustainable” as the price of oil continues to plummet. The American benchmark for crude oil, known as West Texas Intermediate, was $54.73 per barrel on Friday, having fallen from more than $100 a barrel in June. In Louisiana, the drop in oil prices had a hand in increasing the state’s projected 2015-16 budget shortfall to $1.4 billion and prompting cuts that eliminated 162 vacant positions in state government, reduced contracts across the state and froze expenses for items like travel and supplies at all state agencies. Another round of reductions is expected as soon as January.

And in Alaska – where about 90% of state government is funded by oil, allowing residents to pay no state sales or income taxes – the drop in oil prices has worsened the budget deficit and could force a 50% cut in capital spending for bridges and roads. Moody’s, the credit rating service, recently lowered Alaska’s credit outlook from stable to negative. States that have become accustomed to the benefits of energy production — budgets fattened by oil and gas taxes, ample jobs and healthy rainy-day funds — are now nervously eyeing the changed landscape and wondering how much they will lose from falling prices that have been an unexpected present to drivers across the country this holiday season. The price of natural gas is falling, too. “Our approach to the 2016 budget includes a full review of every activity in every agency’s budget and the cost associated with them,” said Kristy Nichols, the chief budget adviser to Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana. “Nothing is off the table at this point.”

“.. according to a report on the Ministry of Commerce’s website that was subsequently revised to remove the numbers.”

• China’s 3.5% Trade Growth in 2014 Falling Far Short Of 7.5% Target (Reuters)

China’s trade will grow 3.5% in 2014, implying the country will fall short of a current 7.5% official growth target, according to a report on the Ministry of Commerce’s website that was subsequently revised to remove the numbers. The initial version of the report published on the website on Saturday, which quoted Minister of Commerce Gao Hucheng, was replaced with a new version that had identical wording but with all the numbers and percentages removed. The Commerce Ministry did not answer calls requesting comment on the reason for the change. China’s trade figures have repeatedly fallen short of expectations in the second half of this year, providing more evidence that China’s economy may be facing a sharper slowdown. Foreign direct investment will amount to $120 billion for the year, the earlier version of Ministry of Commerce report said, in line with official forecasts.

The earlier version of the report also said outward non-financial investment from China could also come in around the same level. That would mark the first time outward flows have pulled even with inward investment flows in China, and would imply a major surge in outward investment in December given that the current accumulated level stands slightly below $90 billion. The earlier version of the report also predicted that retail sales growth would come in at 12% for 2014, in line with the current average growth rate. In a separate report, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences predicted that real estate prices in Chinese cities would continue to slide in 2015, with third- and fourth-tier cities hit hardest. But it said the market would have a soft landing as local governments take action to provide further policy support to the market.

“.. the government will avoid fresh debt issuance and fund the package with unspent money from previous budgets and tax revenues that have exceeded budget forecasts due to economic recovery ..”

• Japan Approves $29 Billion Stimulus Plan, Impact In Doubt (Reuters)

Japan’s government approved on Saturday stimulus spending worth $29 billion aimed at helping the country’s lagging regions and households with subsidies, merchandise vouchers and other steps, but analysts are skeptical about how much it can spur growth. The package, worth 3.5 trillion yen ($29.12 billion) was unveiled two weeks after a massive election victory by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s ruling coalition gave him a fresh mandate to push through his “Abenomics” stimulus policies. The government said it expects the stimulus plan to boost Japan’s GDP by 0.7%. Given Japan’s dire public finances, the government will avoid fresh debt issuance and fund the package with unspent money from previous budgets and tax revenues that have exceeded budget forecasts due to economic recovery.

With nationwide local elections planned in April which Abe’s ruling bloc must win to cement his grip on power, the package centers on subsidies to regional governments to carry out steps to stimulate private consumption and support small firms. Of the total, 1.8 trillion yen will be spent on measures such as distributing coupons to buy merchandise, providing low-income households with subsidies for fuel purchases, supporting funding at small firms and reviving regional economies. The remaining 1.7 trillion yen will be used for disaster-prevention and rebuilding disaster-hit areas including those affected by the March 2011 tsunami. Tokyo will also seek to bolster the housing market by lowering the mortgage rates offered by a governmental home-loan agency. “It’s better than doing nothing, but I don’t think this stimulus will have a big impact on boosting the economy,” said Masaki Kuwahara, a senior economist at Nomura Securities.

Shopping vouchers?

• Japan Approves $29 Billion Spending Package to Boost Economy

Japan’s government approved a 3.5 trillion yen ($29 billion) fiscal stimulus package to boost the economy after April’s sales tax hike caused consumption to slump. The measures include shopping vouchers, subsidized heating fuel for the poor and low interest loans for small businesses hurt by rising input costs, and will boost gross domestic product by 0.7%, the government estimates. The spending will be paid for with tax revenue and unspent funds and won’t need new bond issuance, Economy Minister Akira Amari said today in Tokyo. Unexpected falls in output and retail sales in November underscore the continued weakness in the economy. With little sign of a rebound in domestic demand, getting growth back on a recovery track is a priority for Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.

“This will support private consumption and boost regional economies, so that the virtuous economic cycle spreads to all corners of the nation,” Abe said in Tokyo after the decision. About 1.7 trillion yen will be spent on public works in areas damaged by natural disasters and to improve disaster preparedness, with 600 billion yen for revitalizing regional economies and 1.2 trillion yen to support people and small businesses hurt by the current economic situation, according to documents released by the Cabinet Office. The package is part of an extra budget for the fiscal year through March which will be adopted by the cabinet on Jan. 9, Finance Minister Taro Aso said in Tokyo today. The budget then needs to be approved by parliament, which is controlled by the ruling coalition.

Abe last month delayed the planned further hike in the sales tax by 18 months after data showed the economy fell into recession. GDP shrank an annualized 1.9% last quarter, more than initially estimated, after a 6.7% contraction in the three months from April, when the levy was raised for the first time since 1997. The postponement fueled concern about the government’s effort to rein in the world’s heaviest debt and prompted Moody’s Investors Service to cut its credit rating on Japan.

“Japan’s work force of 80 million will drop to 40 million by 2060.”

• The Keynesian End Game Crystalizes In Japan’s Monetary Madness (Stockman)

If the BOJ’s mad money printers were treated as monetary pariahs by the rest of the world, it would at least imply that a modicum of sanity remains on the planet. But just the opposite is the case. Establishment institutions like the IMF, the US treasury and the other major central banks urge them on, while the Keynesian arson squad led by Professor Krugman actually faults Japan for being too tepid with its “stimulus”. Now comes several new data points that absolutely confirm Japan is a financial mad house – even as its policy model is embraced by mainstream officials and analysts peering from a distance. Front and center is the newly reported fact from the Cabinet Office that Japan’s household savings rate plunged to minus 1.3% in the most recent fiscal year, thereby entering negative territory for the first time since records were started in 1955.

Indeed, Japan had been heralded as a nation of savers only a generation ago. During the era before it’s plunge into bubble finance in the late 1980s, households routinely saved 15-25% of income. But after nearly three decades of Keynesian policies, Japan has now stumbled into an insuperable demographic/financial trap; and one that is unusually transparent and rigidly delineated, to boot. Since Japan famously and doggedly refuses to accept immigrants, its long-term demographics are rigidly baked into the cake. Accordingly, anyone who will make a difference over the next several decades has already been born, counted, factored and attrited into the projections.

Japan’s work force of 80 million will thus drop to 40 million by 2060. At the same time, its current 30 million retirees will continue to rise, meaning that its retiree rolls will ultimately exceed the number of workers. Given those daunting facts, it follows that on the eve of its demographic bust Japan needs high savings and generous interest rates to augment retirement nest eggs; a strong exchange rate to attract foreign capital to help absorb its staggering $12 trillion of public debt, which already stands at a world leading 230% of GDP; and rising real incomes in order to shoulder the heavy taxation that is unavoidably necessary to close its fiscal gap and contain its mushrooming public debt.

With its debilitating Keynesian fiscal and monetary policies now re-upped on steroids under Abenomics, however, it goes without saying that nearly the opposite conditions prevail. Most notably, no household or institution anywhere in Japan can earn anything on liquid savings. The money market rate which determines deposit money yields was driven from a “high” of 100 basis points (as ridiculous as that sounds) at the time of the financial crisis to 10 basis points today, which is to say, nothing. But what is even more astounding is that the yield on the 10-year JGB dipped to an all-time low of 0.31% in recent trading. Given the militant insistence of the BOJ that it will hit its 2% inflation target come hell or high water, it is accurate to say that the official policy of Abenomics is to cause holders of the government’s long-term debt to loose their shirts.

“Escape velocity”. Hadn’t heard that in while.

• How Central Banks Saved The World (Stocks) In 2014 (Zero Hedge)

2014 was awash with potentially status quo destabilizing ‘realities’ to the “we’re back on track and world economic growth is about to reach escape velocity” meme… but time after time, the well-conditioned ‘investor’ was rescued… here’s how… Because – fun-durr-mentals.

Love the picture.

• Now Whitehall’s Crazy Eco Zealots Want To Ban Your Gas Cooker (Daily Mail)

As many as 14 million households slid their turkey into a gas oven yesterday, then waited for a succulent, browned and delicious meal to emerge. But such a familiar festive scene will be a thing of the past just a few years down the line, if the Government has its way. As for turning up the thermostat to ensure our gas boiler keeps our home snug and warm on a chilly festive morning – that simple action too, is under threat, even though some 90% of all homes in Britain are heated by gas. Householders across the country will be horrified to learn that, over the next decade or two, the Government plans to phase out all our gas-fired cookers and heating systems – forcing us to replace them at a cost of untold billions. Official documents reveal the Government is seriously contemplating that, within 25 years or so, gas will be all but banned — along with petrol and diesel.

The intention is that not only our cooking and heating but much else, including our cars and most of the vehicles on Britain’s roads, will have to be powered by electricity. The Government admits this astonishingly ambitious plan will be the most far-reaching energy revolution since electricity itself was discovered. But it is not being planned because our gas and oil supplies will have run out – or even because of any looming shortage. On the contrary, the world is now facing a glut of gas and oil, thanks in part to the ‘shale gas revolution’ led by the U.S., a country which almost overnight, has become the world’s largest natural gas producer as a result of a process called fracking – where water and sand are fired at high pressure into shale rock to release the oil and gas inside. This has led to plummeting prices, and prompted many industries to switch to gas.

Yet our own rulers want to abandon it. Astonishingly, the plan to change the way we cook our food and heat our homes is being instigated by the Government as the only way by which we can meet a statutory requirement under the Climate Change Act. This particular piece of legislative folly was pushed through Parliament six years ago by Ed Miliband, as our first ever Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, and decreed that Britain must cut its emissions of carbon dioxide from fossil fuels by a staggering 80% within 35 years. When this Act passed almost unanimously through Parliament in 2008, not a single MP, let alone Mr Miliband, had the faintest idea how we could actually meet such an improbable target.

Got to admire the spin: “.. to “make management of public-sector finances more efficient ..”

• Mexico Withdraws $3.4 Billion From Pemex as Oil Revenue Shrinks (Bloomberg)

Mexico’s Finance Ministry took out 50 billion pesos ($3.4 billion) from the state oil company Petroleos Mexicanos, according to a statement sent to the Mexican Stock Exchange. The payment this month was meant to “make management of public-sector finances more efficient,” according to the filing from the oil company, known as Pemex. The withdrawal marks a departure from the government’s usual methods of obtaining revenue from Pemex, which include taxes and royalties.

Pemex typically provides about a third of the federal budget, and its contributions dropped this year as the oil company faced production declines and falling crude prices. During the first 11 months of 2014, taxes paid by Mexico City-based Pemex declined by about 260 billion pesos, or 22%, from the same period of 2013, according to records. The withdrawal shows “a near addiction to Pemex’s revenue by the ministry,” Fluvio Ruiz, a board member of the oil company’s petrochemical unit, said in a phone interview. He said he had no prior knowledge of the disclosure through his role at the company.

I don’t think he still believes in it.

• Greece Faces New ‘Catastrophe’ As PM Battles To Avert Snap Elections (Observer)

Greece’s embattled prime minister, Antonis Samaras, issued an eleventh-hour appeal to parliamentarians on Saturday in an attempt to avert snap elections that would almost certainly plunge the eurozone into renewed crisis. In an impassioned plea, he urged MPs to rid the country of “menacing clouds” gathering over it by supporting the government’s presidential candidate when they gather for the final round of a three-stage vote on Monday. Failure would automatically trigger elections that radical leftists would be likely to win. The ballot has therefore electrified Greece, rattled markets and unnerved Europe. “I am once again appealing to all MPs, of all parties, to vote for the president of the republic,” Samaras told state television. “If we don’t elect a president the responsibility will hang heavily over those who don’t vote for [him]. They will be remembered by everyone, especially history.”

Samaras’s high-stakes gamble of calling the poll two months early has brought him face-to-face with the spectre of losing power if he fails to convince 12 MPs to back Stavros Dimas, his choice for the presidential post. A former European commissioner, Dimas received 168 ballots in a second round of voting last week – well short of the 200 required. On Monday he must amass 180 to be elected. Following a Christmas of frantic behind-the-scenes politicking, the prime minister warned of the perils of taking the debt-stricken country down the road of “absurd adventure” if deputies failed to endorse Dimas. “People do not want early elections… We gave sweat and blood in recent years to keep Greece standing upright.”

Understatement of the day/week/month/year: “With so much cheap money sloshing around the global markets, a second financial crisis cannot be ruled out.”

• Challenging UK Party Games Ahead As Greece Threatens 2nd Debt Crisis (Observer)

Europe. Emerging markets. Earnings. Equality. And the election. Look out, because 2015 is going to be the year of the five Es. In the UK, it will be the election that dominates the economic and business scene, particularly in the first half of the year and for much longer if the result is inconclusive. The prospect of a minority government living from hand to mouth would certainly unsettle the markets. But the election result will be influenced by the four other Es, starting with Europe, where the first crunch moment comes tomorrow in Greece with the third and final chance for the government of Antonis Samaras to get its choice of a new president through parliament. If he fails to secure 180 votes, there will be a snap election that the anti-austerity Syriza party is currently favourite to win. That would prompt fears of a fresh leg to Europe’s debt crisis, which began in Greece more than six years ago. This is something Europe can ill afford. The eurozone economy is barely growing; the German locomotive is slowing; and falling oil prices bring with them the threat of deflation.

The issue for the European Central Bank in 2015 is whether to take the plunge with a quantitative easing programme, something the Germans have resisted up until now. Berlin’s hardline stance has, however, softened in recent months as the situation in Russia – the key emerging market to watch – has deteriorated. Europe’s trade links with Russia are not all that important, but there are two big concerns. The first is of heightened geopolitical risk. Russia is being squeezed by western sanctions and now faces the inevitability of a deep recession in 2015. This might make Vladimir Putin more willing to come to terms over Ukraine, but it might not. The second risk is that the collapse of the rouble puts intolerable strain on Russian companies and Russian banks, with corporate losses ricocheting through the entire global financial system through the sort of highly leveraged derivatives trades that caused the 2007 meltdown. With so much cheap money sloshing around the global markets, a second financial crisis cannot be ruled out.

The third E is equality, brought to prominence in the past year not just by the bestselling book Capital by the French economist Thomas Piketty, but by evidence from the IMF and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development that inequality is bad for growth. Standing trickle-down economics on its head, the OECD said recently that UK growth in the two decades from 1990 to 2010 would have been nine percentage points higher had it not been for widening inequality. Given that the trend towards greater inequality has been evident for the past three decades, it is worth asking why it has become a political issue now. The answer is simple. In the years leading up to the financial crisis, incomes were rising across the board. People on low and middle incomes didn’t mind all that much that the bankers and hedge fund owners were earning stratospheric sums when their own pay packets were going up.

Think it’ll take that long?

• You Can Put The Next Crash On Your 2016 Calendar Now (Paul B. Farrell)

With the recent budget bill, the too-big-to-fail banks were handed even more of what they’ve wanted: a further delay of the Volcker Rule, which could effectively kill it, and, worse, a rollback of Dodd-Frank provisions that protected taxpayers against abusive gambling in the shadowy global derivatives casino using Main Street depositors’ money. It’s as if we’re back to 1999, when the banks got Congress to erase the Glass-Steagall Act, which for 80 years protected Main Street by separating retail banks and investment banking. Now the banks are back to their speculation and gambling, exposing the economy to great risk, just as they were before the 1929 crash. As MarketWatch’s David Weidner put it, Yellen’s Fed looks to have forgotten that banks caused the Great Recession: that hellish era that was set off by the Bear Stearns, Lehman, Countrywide, AIG, Merrill, Freddie, Sallie and the other disasters.

Now Yellen’s Fed and our too-big-to-fail banks and their mainly Republican co-conspirators have set another big trap. A huge trap. As Stephen Roach, former chairman of Morgan Stanley Asia, wrote for Project Syndicate, Yellen’s Federal Reserve “is headed down a familiar — and highly dangerous — path.” “Steeped in denial of its past mistakes, the Fed is pursuing the same incremental approach that helped set the stage for the financial crisis of 2008-2009. The consequences,” writes Roach, “could be similarly catastrophic.” The next crash is due in 2016, around the presidential election. Why? Yellen’s brain is trapped in the same myopic capitalist dogma that blinded Greenspan for 18 years, forcing him to confess he “really didn’t get it till very late,” long after the $10 trillion market loss was a reality.

Same with Yellen. It will happen again. Losses bigger than 2000 and 2008 combined. Think I’m kidding? Bet against this at your peril. Jeremy Grantham’s already on record predicting that “around the presidential election or soon after, the market bubble will burst, as bubbles always do, and will revert to its trend value, around half of its peak or worse.” That could translate to the DJIA crashing – which on Friday posted the week’s (and history’s) second close above the 18,000 level – to around 10,000. The Dow crashing all the way back down to 10,000? Wow. Unimaginable. No wonder our brains tune out. Instead, we prefer the happy talk that will just keep coming out of Wall Street and Washington till 2016. We’ll keep denying reality … till it’s too late, and another $10 trillion loss is in the books.

So the question is: did the internet facilitate the rise in propaganda?

• 2014: The Year The Internet Came Of Age (Guardian)

The best we can say about 2014 is that it was the year when we finally began to have a glimmer of what the internet might mean for society. Not the internet that we fantasised about in the early years, but the network as it has evolved from an exotic curiosity into the mundane underpinning of our lives – a general-purpose technology or GPT. And, in a way, the timescale is about right. The internet that we use today was switched on in January 1983, but it didn’t really become a mainstream medium until the web began to explode in 1993. So we’re about 21 years into the revolution. And what we know from the history of other GPTs is that it generally takes at least two decades before they form the unremarked-upon backdrops to everyday life.

In 1999, Andy Grove, then the CEO of Intel, the dominant chip-maker of the time, made a famous prediction. In five years’ time, he said, “companies that aren’t internet companies won’t be companies at all”. He was widely ridiculed for this pronouncement at the time. But in fact he was just being prescient. What he was trying to communicate was that the internet would one day become like the telephone or mains electricity – something that we take for granted. Grove’s point was that companies that boasted that they “were now on the internet” in 2004 would already be regarded as ridiculous. And so indeed they were.

Could we live without the net? Answer: on an individual level possibly, but on a societal level no – simply because so many of the services on which industrialised societies depend now rely on internet connectivity. In that sense, the network has become the nervous system of the planet. This is why it now makes no more sense to argue about whether the internet is good or bad than to debate whether oxygen or water are desirable. We’ve got it and we’re stuck with it. Which means that we’re also stuck with its downsides. While offline crime has decreased dramatically – car-related theft has reduced by 79% since 1995 and burglary by 67%, for example, what’s happened is that much serious crime has now moved online, where its scale is staggering, even if the official statistics do not count it.

The same goes for industrial espionage (at which the Chinese are currently the world champions) and counter-espionage and counter-terrorism (at which the NSA and GCHQ currently top the international league tables). And we’re just getting started on cyberwarfare. So here we are at the end of 2014, finally wising up to what we’ve got ourselves into: an internet that provides us with much that we love and value and would be hard put to do without. But an internet that is also dangerous, untrustworthy and comprehensively monitored. The question for 2015 and beyond is whether we can have more of the former and less of the latter. Happy New Year!

A problem still in its infancy.

• China Needs Millions of Brides ASAP (Bloomberg)

In the villages outside of Handan, China, a bachelor looking to marry a local girl needs to have as much as $64,000 – the price tag for a suitable home and obligatory gifts. That’s a bit out of the price range of many of the farmers who live in the area. So in recent years, according to the Beijing News, local men have been turning to a Vietnamese marriage broker, paying as much as $18,500 for an imported wife, complete with a money-back guarantee in case the bride fled. But that fairy tale soon fell apart. On the morning of November 21, sometime after breakfast, as many as 100 of Handan’s imported Vietnamese wives – together with the broker – disappeared without a trace. It was a peculiarly Chinese instance of fraud. The victims are a local subset of a fast-growing underclass: millions of poor, mostly rural men, who can’t meet familial and social expectations that a man marry and start a family because of the country’s skewed demographics.

In January, the director of China’s National Bureau of Statistics announced that China is home to 33.8 million more men than women out of a population exceeding 1.3 billion. China’s vast population of unmarried men is sure to pose an array of challenges for China, and perhaps its neighbors, for decades to come. What’s already clear is that fraudulent mail-order wives are only the start of a much larger problem. The immediate cause of China’s gender imbalance is a long-standing cultural preference for boys. In China’s patrilineal culture, they’re expected to carry on the family name, as well as serve as a social security policy for aging parents. In the 1970s, China’s so-called One Child policy transformed this preference into an imperative that parents fulfilled via sex selective abortions (made possible by the widespread availability of ultrasounds). As a result, millions of girls never made it onto China’s population rolls.

In 2013, for example, the government reported 117.6 boys were born for every 100 girls. (The natural rate is 103 to 106 boys to every 100 girls.) In the countryside, the ratio can run much higher — Mara Hvistendahl, in her 2011 book, Unnatural Selection, reports on a town where ratios run as high as 150 to 100. Long-term, such imbalances can create an excess of males that might reach 20% of the overall male population by 2020, according to one estimate. Of course, social expectations aren’t just confined to boys. In China, daughters are expected to marry up – and in a country where men far outnumber women, the opportunities to do so are excellent, especially in the cities to which so many of China’s rural women move. The result is that bride prices – essentially dowries paid to the families of daughters – are rising, especially in the countryside. One 2011 study on bride prices found that they’d increased seventy-fold between the 1960s and 1990s in just one representative, rural hamlet.

Very real. Not some theory.

• Rising Oceans Force Bangladeshi Farmers Inland for New Jobs (Bloomberg)

About seven years ago, Gaur Mondol noticed he couldn’t grow as much rice on his land as salty water seeped in from the Passur River, which stretches from his home in Bangladesh’s interior all the way to the Indian Ocean. Now the rice paddies are completely inundated, leaving the land barren. To find work, he must walk for miles each day to other villages. His annual income has fallen by half to 36,000 taka ($460). He makes about $4 a day if he’s lucky, and most of that goes to buy food for his family of four. “I’m always worried that my house will be washed away someday,” Mondol said from his home in Mongla sub-district, pointing to a river-side tamarind tree with water swirling around its exposed roots. “My family is constantly under threat as the river creeps in.” Rising sea levels are one of the biggest threats to the $150-billion economy over the next half a century, with farmers like Mondol already facing the consequences.

Bangladesh, which needs to grow at 8% pace to pull people out of poverty, stands to lose about 2% of gross domestic product each year by 2050, according to the Asian Development Bank. “The sea-level rise and extreme climate events are the two ways that salinity intrudes into the freshwater system,” Mahfuzuddin Ahmed, an adviser in the ADB’s regional and sustainable development department, said by phone from Manila. “The implication for food security is quite big.” Bangladesh is one of the world’s most densely populated countries, with half the U.S. population crammed into an area the size of New York state. About 50% of its citizens are directly dependent on agriculture for their livelihoods, a quarter live in the coastal zone, and 21% of these lands are affected by an excess of salinity.

The proportion of arable land has fallen 7.3% between 2000-2010, faster than South Asia’s 2% decline, with geography playing a large role. Bangladesh is nestled at a point where tidal waves from the Indian Ocean flow into the Bay of Bengal. While these create the Sundarbans mangroves, home to the endangered Bengal tiger, winds and currents cause saline water to mix with upstream rivers. Global weather changes worsen this. Bangladesh’s average peak-summer temperature in May has climbed to 28.1 degrees Celsius (83 Fahrenheit) in 1990-2009 from 26.9 in 1900-1930, and could rise to 31.5 degrees in 2080-2099, World Bank data show. Average June rainfall has dropped to 467.1 millimeter from 517.5 in that time.

Wonderful.

• Siberian Dog Allowed To Stay In Hospital Where Owner Died 1 Year Ago (RT)

The holiday spirit is alive and well in a hospital in Siberia, where Masha, Russia’s own ‘Hachiko’ dog was given permanent residence status. For a whole year the loyal pet kept ‘dogging’ the hospital, waiting for her owner who had passed away. Despite a number of attempts to have Masha adopted, the heartbroken pooch kept running away and coming back to the Novosibirsk District Hospital Number One, where she last saw her owner in December, 2013. “Masha will always stay here, because she is waiting for her owner. I think that even if we took her to his grave, she wouldn’t believe it. She’s waiting for him alive, not dead,” nurse Alla Vorontsova told the Siberian Times.

The dog’s heartbreaking story has gathered quite a bit of attention in Russia and even abroad, after it went viral in the media. The sad dachshund was adopted a number of times, but all unsuccessfully. “People in Russia tried to adopt her three times, but she always came back. I also heard that a number of foreigners wanted to adopt her too, but it is impossible – she doesn’t want to leave the hospital. And besides, we love her and she loves us. How could she live somewhere far away? She would just pine away,” Vorontsova said. For a year, hospital workers fed and walked Masha, and now they have finally managed to make it official; Masha has her own cozy spot inside the building.

“Here all the patients come to her, stroke her and give something tasty, especially the older people. She warms their hearts,” the nurse added. Masha’s elderly owner was admitted to the hospital and his dog was his sole visitor there. Masha’s loyalty earned her the media nickname Hachiko – in reference to the famous story of a Japanese Akita dog. Agricultural science professor Hidesaburo Ueno got Hachiko in 1924. The dog would greet the owner at the station every day. After Ueno passed away, Hachiko kept returning to the train station for 10 years, waiting for him to come back. The amazing story turned the pet into a national hero and later inspired a Hollywood movie, ‘Hachiko: A Dog’s Tale,’ starring Richard Gere.

Debt Rattle December 7 2014

Dec 072014

December 7, 2014 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 11:53 am Finance Tagged with: archbishop, heat, hunger, MH17, modern art, oil, Russia, sociopathy, Ukraine, Vatican 6 Responses »

Arthur Rothstein Accident on US 40 between Hagerstown and Cumberland, Maryland Nov 1936

• OPEC And American Shale Keep The Oil Price Spiralling Downwards (Guardian)

• Oil Poised to Extend Drop After Hitting Five-Year Low (Bloomberg)

• Fossil Fuel Companies “The Sub-Prime Assets Of The Future” (Telegraph)

• Osborne Oversees Biggest Fossil Fuel Boom Since North Sea Oil (Guardian)

• Delinquent US Car Loans Up 27% From Last Year (NY Times)

• Goldman Needs Volcker Delay to Avoid Private-Equity Losses (Bloomberg)

• Wells Fargo Breaks Citigroup’s 2001 Record for Bank Value (Bloomberg)

• Russia Braces For An Economic Winter (Observer)

• Why A Moscow Meltdown Could Spread Around The Globe (Observer)

• Clashes At Greek Protests To Mark Police Shooting (BBC)

• Angry Families Of MH17 Crash Victims Seek UN Investigation (Reuters)

• Ukraine’s Made-in-USA Finance Minister (Robert Parry)

• Prosecutor Freezes Accounts Of Former Vatican Bank Heads (Reuters)

• Australian Banks Seen Needing $25 Billion After Inquiry (Bloomberg)

• Minimum Viable Sociopathy (Dmitry Orlov)

• Archbishop Calls For £150 Million State-Backed Food Bank System (Daily Mail)

• Hunger in UK Shocks Me More Than Africa (Archbishop Of Canterbury)

• Has Modern Art Exhausted Its Power To Shock? (BBC)

• California’s ‘Hot Drought’ Ranks Worst in at Least 1,200 Years (Bloomberg)

” .. the Chicago Mercantile Exchange reported a huge increase in the number of investors hedging on crude hitting $40.

• OPEC And American Shale Keep The Oil Price Spiralling Downwards (Guardian)

Oil prices were back near five-year lows – below $70 per barrel – at the end of last week as commodity traders, analysts and governments struggled to come up with new forecasts for 2015. The benchmark, Brent blend, had recovered from a major drop in the aftermath of last month’s meeting of the oil producers’ cartel, Opec. However, it was back down at $69.17 on Friday as the market bet on a prolonged low in prices. Igor Sechin, Russia’s most senior oil official, warned that Opec’s unwillingness to cut production could push oil down to $60, while the Chicago Mercantile Exchange reported a huge increase in the number of investors hedging on crude hitting $40. Forecasting the future price of oil has always been fraught.

There were few warnings in the first half of the year that prices were set to plunge by 40% from a June high of $115. Analysts at Citi are now expecting Brent to average $80 over the next 12 months, while their counterparts at Natixis believe it could fall as low as $74 – and that the US benchmark, West Texas Intermediate, will slump below $70. Standard Chartered described Opec’s decision to keep the production target unchanged as “extremely negative for oil prices for 2015” and has cut next year’s Brent price forecast by $16 a barrel to $85. The reasons for the cuts are faltering growth in demand as the global economy continues to stutter, plus soaring production from the shale fields of Texas and Pennsylvania.

Lower prices have also been supported by a relatively benign geopolitical environment, because energy supplies have not been endangered by the Russian stand-off with the west over Ukraine or Islamic State’s advances in Syria. A divided Opec is now hoping that falling prices will be devastating for higher-cost US frackers, forcing them to shut down output and gradually bring balance to the wider oil markets. But according to Paul Stevens, oil expert at Chatham House, a similar strategy in the late 1980s did not encourage North Sea and other producers to halt production and the price continued to slide downwards.

“We’re way oversold in both Brent and WTI, not to mention the products, and the market’s not responding ..”

• Oil Poised to Extend Drop After Hitting Five-Year Low (Bloomberg)

West Texas Intermediate and Brent crudes are poised to decline from the lowest closing levels in more than five years after shrugging off a sign that the market has dropped too fast. The 14-day relative strength index (BCOM) for WTI slipped to 27.0364 yesterday, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Investors typically start buying contracts when the reading is below 30. The 14-day RSI for Brent slipped to 23.6843. The move highlights the extent of the bear market in the face of technical support. “We’re way oversold in both Brent and WTI, not to mention the products, and the market’s not responding,” Bob Yawger, director of the futures division at Mizuho Securities said by phone yesterday. “A market that ignores these bullish signals is heading much lower.”

Futures fell 1.5% in New York and 0.8% in London yesterday. State-run Saudi Arabian Oil extended its discount for Arab Light sales to Asia next month to $2 a barrel below a regional benchmark, according to a company statement Dec. 4. That’s the lowest in at least 14 years. The slide in prices accelerated as the dollar surged to a five-year high, curbing the appeal of commodities as a store of value. WTI for January delivery dropped 97 cents to $65.84 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange yesterday. It was the lowest settlement since July 29, 2009. Prices are down 33% this year.

There’s a lot of uncertainty about how and to what extent climate agreements will result in stranded assets. Investment in fossil fuels carries a lot of risk, for yet another reason.

• Fossil Fuel Companies “The Sub-Prime Assets Of The Future” (Telegraph)

Investing in fossil fuels is becoming increasingly risky because global action to tackle climate change will curb demand, forcing companies to leave unprofitable reserves in the ground, Ed Davey, the energy secretary, has warned. Financial authorities must examine the risks posed by coal, oil and gas companies to prevent pension funds investing in what could become “the sub-prime assets of the future”, Mr Davey said. The comments are Mr Davey’s first intervention into the debate over the “carbon bubble”, the theory that the world’s existing fossil fuel reserves are overvalued because the majority must be left unburned in the ground if extremes of global warming are to be avoided.

Mr Davey told the Telegraph: “One has got to worry about the investments for pensioners. “If pension funds are investing in companies or banks have on their balance sheets huge amounts of assets in fossil fuels, and those assets don’t give the return that people expect – because of changes in technology where low-carbon becomes cheaper or because of the world having to take action against carbon emissions – one has got to protect those pensioners and those investments.”

Keeping global warming within 2C (3.6F), the level scientists say is necessary to prevent catastrophic climate change, will require the world to slash its carbon dioxide emissions, phasing out the unabated burning of fossil fuels for electricity. UN talks are ongoing in Lima this week with the aim of achieving a global emission reduction agreement next year. Mr Davey singled out coal – the dirtiest of the fossil fuels – as “the short-term biggest worry by a long way” as countries including China commit to cap their coal use. “Investing in new coal mines is going to get very risky,” he said.

The timing is exquisite.

• Osborne Oversees Biggest Fossil Fuel Boom Since North Sea Oil (Guardian)

George Osborne has sparked the biggest boom in UK fossil fuel investment since the North Sea oil and gas industry was founded in the 1970s. Analysis of new Treasury data also shows investment in clean energy has plummeted this year and is now exceeded by fossil fuels, while road and airport building is soaring. After years of coalition infighting over green energy, the stark shift marks a major victory for the chancellor. But it conflicts with David Cameron’s recent statement that climate change is “a threat to our national security and to economic prosperity” and his 2010 pledge to the lead the “greenest government ever”. UK ministers are currently at UN climate talks in Peru arguing for strong action against global warming.

In Wednesday’s autumn statement, Osborne added £430m to the billions in tax breaks he has granted the fossil fuel sector since 2012. Taxpayers will also now fund seismic exploration to help companies find more oil and gas and will pay £31m for shale gas research drilling plus another £5m to “ensure the public is better engaged” with fracking. Osborne said the North Sea tax breaks “demonstrate our commitment to the tens of thousands of jobs that depend on this great British industry”. Joan Walley MP, who heads parliament’s environmental audit committee, said: “Taxpayers should not be propping up the fossil fuel industry in the 21st century.

Tax breaks should be used to support firms that come up with innovative clean energy solutions, not to keep us drilling for the fossil energy fuelling climate change.” Matthew Spencer, the director of the thinktank Green Alliance, whose experts performed the new analysis, accused Osborne of political manoeuvring before the general election. “A series of short-term tactical decisions have reversed what was a very encouraging picture for UK infrastructure. These stark figures show that you can’t focus on oil extraction and road building and expect to deliver a cleaner, leaner economy.”

But all is well?!

• Delinquent US Car Loans Up 27% From Last Year (NY Times)

An increasing number of borrowers are falling behind on their car payments, even as the total amount of outstanding debt reaches new heights, according to the latest report by Experian, the credit and research firm. In a presentation on Wednesday, Experian said the balance of loans that were 60 days delinquent increased 27%, to roughly $4 billion, in the third quarter from the same period a year ago. Signs of trouble in the market come after a significant increase in lending to people with damaged credit and limited financial means. Analysts have warned that a loosening of underwriting standards for subprime auto loans could cause widespread losses in the financial system because much of the debt has been securitized and bought by investors around the globe. Some of the highest delinquency rates in the quarter are concentrated across the South in Mississippi, South Carolina and Alabama. North Dakota had the lowest delinquency rate.

Finance companies, which tend to focus more on subprime customers than traditional banks, had the largest increases in delinquencies in the third quarter. As the delinquencies have mounted, so has the regulatory scrutiny. Subprime auto lenders have faced an onslaught of scrutiny from regulators and prosecutors, worried that the high-cost loans take advantage of some of the nation’s most vulnerable borrowers. The examinations have touched on virtually every player in the broader subprime auto lending ecosystem from used car dealers to lenders. In the latest chapter, the American Honda Finance Corporation, a lending unit of the automaker, disclosed on Tuesday that the company was bracing for an enforcement action from the Justice Department and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau over concerns that it gives more costly loans to minority borrowers. The authorities, the company said in a regulatory filing on Tuesday, notified the lender last month about the looming action.

Here’s betting they’ll get it.

• Goldman Needs Volcker Delay to Avoid Private-Equity Losses (Bloomberg)

Goldman Sachs has $7 billion invested in private equity that it might have to sell at a loss. For Morgan Stanley, it’s $2.5 billion. The big sums explain why Wall Street has been lobbying regulators to delay a July deadline for complying with the Volcker Rule, which restricts banks from investing in private equity as part of a ban on making market bets with their own capital. Banks argue that if they dump holdings quickly, they will have to accept discount prices. Analysts and lawyers for the financial industry say Wall Street’s concerns have begun to make headway with the Federal Reserve, which plans to decide on an extension soon. “There’s considerable pressure the Fed is feeling in that they don’t want institutions to have a bloodbath trying to divest funds,” said Kevin Petrasic, a partner at Paul Hastings in Washington. “The Fed has been indicating flexibility.”

The Volcker deadline underscores the tension regulators face between enforcing rules meant to curb risk-taking and responding to banks’ complaints that many Dodd-Frank Act reforms aren’t workable. The Fed is deciding what to do after lawmakers lambasted it at congressional hearings last month for weak oversight of Wall Street. Before the 2008 financial crisis, banks purchased shares in thousands of private-equity and venture-capital funds. The money invested was used to buy stakes in private companies, meaning it’s locked up for years until the businesses are sold. When Congress included the Volcker Rule in the 2010 Dodd-Frank law, it realized banks might have difficulty dumping holdings. As a result, lawmakers authorized the Fed to put the deadline off for several years. Banks want an extension until 2022, which would allow them to keep their private-equity investments until they expire. Fed General Counsel Scott Alvarez told a conference of banking lawyers last month that the central bank will make a decision soon.

Hardly a recovery, if there’s one at all, but banks are worth more than before the crisis. This is us. This is what we do.

• Wells Fargo Breaks Citigroup’s 2001 Record for Bank Value (Bloomberg)

Wells Fargo finished trading yesterday as the most valuable U.S. bank ever, surpassing Citigroup’s 2001 record. Wells Fargo closed with a market capitalization of $285.5 billion, based on 5.19 billion shares outstanding on Oct. 31, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. That beats the previous record set by Citigroup on Feb. 5, 2001, when its value reached $283.4 billion, the data show. Wells Fargo, which counts Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway as its largest shareholder, doubled its size in 2008 by outmaneuvering New York-based Citigroup to purchase Wachovia Corp. Chief Executive Officer John Stumpf made one of out every four U.S. mortgages last year and now oversees the most U.S. bank branches.

“Our focus is on doing what is right for our customers every day, and we are pleased our investors place their confidence in Wells Fargo,” Ancel Martinez, a bank spokesman, said in a statement. Wells Fargo rose 1% to $55.03 in New York, and the stock’s 21% gain this year tops the 7.7% advance for the KBW Bank Index of 24 U.S. lenders. Berkshire’s stake in the San Francisco-based bank is valued at more than $25 billion, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

Russia will act when it’s had enough of this.

• Russia Braces For An Economic Winter (Observer)

A website that was going viral on Russian social networks last week shows the rouble-dollar exchange rate, the rouble-euro exchange rate and the price of Brent crude changing in real time against a backdrop of slowly breaking waves, as soothing music plays in the background. “Russian zen: meaningless and merciless”, reads the bottom of the page Zenrus.ru. It is a play on a famous quote that Russian revolt is “meaningless and merciless.” A zen-like calm is probably hard to come by for those watching the exchange rate and the price of oil: the rouble fell to new all-time lows of more than 54 to the dollar last week after the Opec oil producers’ group decided not to reduce production, which would have bolstered sinking oil prices. Russia is especially vulnerable to those prices, since energy exports make up half of its budget, and on Monday its currency recorded its largest single-day decline since the Russian financial crisis of 1998.

In all, the rouble has sunk by more than 40% this year as Russia has been buffeted by sanctions over its role in the Ukraine crisis and steep falls in the oil price. By the end of the week Brent was hovering below $70 a barrel, down from more than $105 at the start of the year. The picture of Russia’s economic future is grim, despite the rosy outlook President Vladimir Putin tried to put on it in his annual address to the federal assembly on Thursday. Inflation has been rising, and recession next year is all but certain. On Tuesday, the economic development ministry reduced its GDP growth forecast for 2015 from 1.2% to –0.8%. State-owned banks have sought help from the government after the Ukraine sanctions cut them off from the western financial industry and its cheaper credit.

According to Vladimir Tikhomirov, an economist at Russian bank BKF, the two main factors responsible for Russia’s economic woes – sanctions and a low oil price – probably won’t change any time soon. “Oil has a stronger effect on the economy than sanctions, and the oil price and sanctions are speeding up macroeconomic processes that were already there,” Tikhomirov says. “The economy was slowing down due to structural difficulties even when oil prices were high. I think that next year there won’t be new sanctions but the current sanctions will remain; I think next year the oil price will be around $80 a barrel; and I think that the economy will shrink.”

Merkel herself has said it would be a bad thing if Russia goes into a financial crisis.

• Why A Moscow Meltdown Could Spread Around The Globe (Observer)

Russia matters. It mattered in 1998 when the shock waves from its debt default reverberated around the world. And it would matter again should the plunging oil price lead to economic collapse. That’s despite the fact that Russia is a massive land mass with a relatively small economy. It accounts for only 3% of global GDP and it is dominated by an energy sector that is responsible for 70% of exports. To an extent, the structure of Russia’s economy should mitigate contagion risks. Lacking a modern manufacturing sector, it is not vital for global supply chains and, in theory, any other energy producer could make good the disruption to oil and gas supplies in the event of a deep and damaging recession. But there are at least five ways in which a crisis for Russia could spread. Russia’s immediate problems have been caused by the sharp drop in the price of crude and it is not the only one to be suffering. Venezuela and Iran are finding it hard to cope with oil down at $70 a barrel. If Russia goes, it will be a case of: who’s next?

Second, Russia still has close economic links with eastern Europe, so a collapse would have serious consequences for countries such as Poland and an already imploding Ukraine. Western Europe, too, would be affected if for any reason gas supplies through Russia’s pipeline were cut off. Third, confidence would be hit. Germany’s weak economic performance since the spring can, in part, be attributed to the gloomier economic mood. The slowdown in the rest of the eurozone has probably had a bigger impact on German activity but the tension between Moscow and Kiev has certainly not helped. Russia might be enough to tip Germany into recession, which in turn would be enough to ensure that the European Central Bank began a quantitative easing programme.

Fourth, nobody is quite sure how Vladimir Putin, pictured, would respond to the most challenging economic circumstances since 1998. Any confidence effects from an economic crisis would be exacerbated by the knowledge that Russia is controlled by a president able to make felt his country’s still considerable geo-political and military clout. Finally, the assumption is that financial market exposure to Russia is relatively limited given that overseas banks had $209bn (£134bn) of loans to Russia when sanctions were imposed in March. On the face of it, western investors do not look all that vulnerable and have had time to get their money out. But that was also the assumption in 1998, when Barclays had to set aside £250m to cover its Russian losses. Financial trades are now so complex and leveraged, it is impossible to know for sure how big losses might be this time.

Is Greece set to explode again?

• Clashes At Greek Protests To Mark Police Shooting (BBC)

Clashes have erupted in the capital of Greece during protests marking six years since police shot dead an unarmed teenager. At least 5,000 demonstrators marched in Athens on Saturday. Some attacked shops and hurled petrol bombs at riot police. Police officers used tear gas and a water cannon to disperse protesters. The demonstrators had been marking the anniversary of 15-year-old Alexis Grigoropoulos’ death. He was shot by an officer who has since been jailed. Mr Grigoropoulos’ killing on 6 December 2008 sparked violent riots across Greece, with cars being set alight and shops looted in a number of cities. Clashes have also broken out on previous anniversaries of his death. On Saturday, anti-establishment protesters attacked banks and damaged shops and bus stops.

At one point, demonstrators looted a clothes shop and set fire to the merchandise in the street, the Associated Press news agency reported. According to Reuters, police said they detained close to 100 protesters. Clashes primarily took place in Athen’s Exarchia neighbourhood, but violence was also reported in Thessaloniki, in northern Greece. No injuries were reported in either city. Protesters have also been expressing support for Nikos Romanos, a friend of Mr Grigoropoulos who witnessed his death. Romanos, 21, has been jailed for attempted bank robbery. He is currently on hunger strike, demanding study leave after he was accepted onto a university course.

WHile the government can’t stop blabbing about respect for vistims and their families, the familes themselves say: “The Netherlands “has completely botched” the fact-finding investigation and the legal framework of the case..” “There is no coordination, there is no leadership whatsoever (by) Holland.”

• Angry Families Of MH17 Crash Victims Seek UN Investigation (Reuters)

Relatives of MH17 crash victims, angered by what they see as Dutch mishandling of inquiries into the disaster, want a special U.N. envoy to launch an international investigation. A letter sent to Prime Minister Mark Rutte on Friday, a copy of which was seen by Reuters, said Dutch officials had failed to build a case. They asked that inquiries by the Safety Board and prosecution service be handed over to the United Nations. Rutte should “request the U.N. to appoint a special envoy to take over,” said the letter written by Van der Goen Attorneys. Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 was downed on July 17 over eastern Ukraine, killing all 298 passengers and crew, two-thirds of them Dutch. Experts say the most likely cause was a ground-to-air missile fired from territory held by pro-Russian separatists. The Dutch launched the largest criminal investigation in their history after the crash. This week, trucks are carrying pieces of the plane home, but much of the wreckage still lies in Ukrainian fields.

Dutch investigators, leading a case involving 11 countries, have not concluded how the plane was shot down or identified suspects. The Netherlands “has completely botched” the fact-finding investigation and the legal framework of the case, said the letter, sent on behalf of 20 relatives from Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands and the United States. Dutch prosecutors have been unable to access the crash site, in a war zone disputed by Ukrainian troops and Russian-backed rebels, or not met international requirements to secure evidence, the letter said. “Nobody knows who is doing what,” said Bob van der Goen, a spokesman for the law firm. “There is no coordination, there is no leadership whatsoever (by) Holland.” Rutte said on Friday the Dutch teams were returning to the Netherlands. “We have done everything we could. In view of the safety situation and the weather, we cannot do anything more right now,” he said. An international inquiry is the only way to identify who shot down the plane and ensure they are brought to court, the letter said.

What a story, the recent – foreign – additions to the Kiev government.

• Ukraine’s Made-in-USA Finance Minister (Robert Parry)

Ukraine’s new Finance Minister Natalie Jaresko, a former U.S. State Department officer who was granted Ukrainian citizenship only this week, headed a U.S. government-funded investment project for Ukraine that involved substantial insider dealings, including $1 million-plus fees to a management company that she also controlled. Jaresko served as president and chief executive officer of Western NIS Enterprise Fund (WNISEF), which was created by the U.S. Agency for International Development (U.S. AID) with $150 million to spur business activity in Ukraine. She also was cofounder and managing partner of Horizon Capital which managed WNISEF’s investments at a rate of 2 to 2.5% of committed capital, fees exceeding $1 million in recent years, according to WNISEF’s 2012 annual report.

The growth of that insider dealing at the U.S.-taxpayer-funded WNISEF is further underscored by the number of paragraphs committed to listing the “related party transactions,” i.e., potential conflicts of interest, between an early annual report from 2003 and the one a decade later. In the 2003 report, the “related party transactions” were summed up in two paragraphs, with the major item a $189,700 payment to a struggling computer management company where WNISEF had an investment. In the 2012 report, the section on “related party transactions” covered some two pages and included not only the management fees to Jaresko’s Horizon Capital ($1,037,603 in 2011 and $1,023,689 in 2012) but also WNISEF’s co-investments in projects with the Emerging Europe Growth Fund [EEGF], where Jaresko was founding partner and chief executive officer.

Jaresko’s Horizon Capital also managed EEGF. From 2007 to 2011, WNISEF co-invested $4.25 million with EEGF in Kerameya LLC, a Ukrainian brick manufacturer, and WNISEF sold EEGF 15.63% of Moldova’s Fincombank for $5 million, the report said. It also listed extensive exchanges of personnel and equipment between WNISEF and Horizon Capital. Though it’s difficult for an outsider to ascertain the relative merits of these insider deals, they could reflect negatively on Jaresko’s role as Ukraine’s new finance minister given the country’s reputation for corruption and cronyism, a principal argument for the U.S.-backed “regime change” that ousted elected President Viktor Yanukovych last February.

Small fish.

• Prosecutor Freezes Accounts Of Former Vatican Bank Heads (Reuters)

The Vatican’s top prosecutor has frozen €16 million in bank accounts owned by two former Vatican bank managers and a lawyer as part of an investigation into the sale of Vatican-owned real estate in the 2000s, according to the freezing order and other legal documents. Prosecutor Gian Piero Milano said he suspected the three men, former bank president Angelo Caloia, ex-director general Lelio Scaletti, and lawyer Gabriele Liuzzo, of embezzling money while managing the sale of 29 buildings sold by the Vatican bank to mainly Italian buyers between 2001 and 2008, according to a copy of the freezing order reviewed by Reuters. The money in the three men’s bank accounts “stems from embezzlement they were engaged in,” Milano said in the October 27 sequester order.

Milano’s investigation follows an audit of the Vatican bank by non-Vatican financial consultants commissioned last year by the bank’s current management. The Vatican bank earlier this year also filed a legal complaint against the three men. The men have not been charged. The Vatican spokesman on Saturday issued a statement confirming the freezing but gave no names, amounts or other details. The Vatican bank said in a separate statement that it had pressed charges against the three as part of its “commitment to transparency and zero tolerance, including with regard to matters that relate to a more distant past”. The bank statement also gave no details, citing “the ongoing judicial enquiry”.

For starters.

• Australian Banks Seen Needing $25 Billion After Inquiry (Bloomberg)

Commonwealth Bank of Australia and its three main competitors may need as much as A$30 billion ($25 billion) after a government-commissioned inquiry called for “unquestionably strong” capital levels, analysts said. The shortfall is based on lenders needing to boost levels to within the top quartile of their global peers and set aside additional funds against potential losses on home mortgages, as recommended by the Financial Systems Inquiry report released today in Sydney by Treasurer Joe Hockey. Australia’s major lenders hold about 10% to 11.6% of their assets as Tier 1 capital compared with at least 12.2% at the world’s safest banks, the government’s first inquiry into the financial system since 1997 said. Given banks’ reliance on overseas investors for debt funding, the financial system must be robust, the report said,

“The onus on capital is in line with global changes and Australia has to fall in line,” John Buonaccorsi, a Sydney-based analyst at CIMB Group Holdings Bhd. said in a phone interview after the report was released. “I don’t expect a straight capital raising yet.” Australia’s largest banks are initially more likely to resort to dividend reinvestment plans, where investors swap all or part of their dividend for new shares, and limiting increases in payout ratios, he added. Buonaccorsi expects a shortfall between A$25 billion and A$30 billion. Omkar Joshi, who helps oversee A$1 billion as an investment analyst at Watermark Funds Management, estimated a A$15 billion to A$20 billion gap. Their predictions were based on an average mortgage risk weight of 25% to 30% and systemically important bank buffer of 2%.

“.. if the progress of our lives starts looking too much like a random walk, then we tend to start asking ourselves difficult questions, like “What’s it all about?” and drinking too much. And that causes our walk to get even closer to random. ”

• Minimum Viable Sociopathy (Dmitry Orlov)

If you simply wander aimlessly through life, breathing oxygen and eating and excreting organic matter, then you will still get somewhere. Statistically, a blind-drunk sailor who walks out of a bar will, on average, while stumbling along on his way to nowhere in particular, cover the distance of √n steps for every n steps he takes. This is known as a random walk, or Brownian motion, which is fine for molecules at anything above 0ºK, and perhaps for drunken sailors too, but most of us sentient beings want our lives to have a bit of meaning. And if the progress of our lives starts looking too much like a random walk, then we tend to start asking ourselves difficult questions, like “What’s it all about?” and drinking too much. And that causes our walk to get even closer to random. And therein lies a great danger, because this sort of downward spiral inevitably ends with somebody else telling you “What’s it all about” and what it is you have to do, supposedly for your own good, though it hardly ever is.

There is also the opposite danger. If you keep your eyes fixed on your goal and make a concerted effort to make n steps of progress in its direction for every n steps you take, then you will quickly happen upon a wall with a gate in it, and a guard at that gate will demand to see your permit, degree, qualification or certificate before letting you pass through that gate. And the process of you getting that permit, degree, qualification or certificate will end with somebody else telling you what your goal ought to be. The goal is, universally, to accumulate things: dollars or stripes on your uniform or publications and citations, or earwax. Details don’t matter, but what matters is that these things never have much of anything at all to do with your original goal.

We need more people like Welby.

• Archbishop Calls For £150 Million State-Backed Food Bank System (Daily Mail)

A new row over food banks erupted last night after a report backed by the Archbishop of Canterbury called for a £150 million state-backed system to combat hunger in Britain. The Most Reverend Justin Welby appeared to be on course for a clash with David Cameron after calling on the Prime Minister to reverse his decision not to take European funds to boost UK food banks. Writing in today’s Mail on Sunday, Archbishop Welby makes a powerful call for more help to prevent families going hungry. The Archbishop is to launch a Parliamentary report in Westminster tomorrow, and calls on the Government to take ‘quick action’ to implement its recommendations in full. Separately, this newspaper has obtained details of the report’s radical proposals, which call for:

A new publicly funded body, Feeding Britain, involving eight Cabinet Ministers, to work towards a ‘hunger free Britain’.

Bigger food banks, called Food Banks Plus, to distribute more free food and advise people how to claim benefits and make ends meet.

A rise in the minimum wage and the provision free school meals during school holidays for children from poor families.

New measures to make it harder to strip people of benefits for breaking welfare rules – including soccer style ‘yellow cards’ instead of instant bans.

Action to make supermarkets give more food to the poor.

The report by the All-Party Parliamentary Inquiry into Hunger in Britain comes amid an intense debate over welfare and poverty. Experts claimed that Chancellor George Osborne’s Autumn Statement last week would mean massive cuts in welfare in the coming years. Praising food bank volunteers who have rescued the poor from hunger, the Welby-backed report says they have achieved the ‘equivalent to a social Dunkirk.’ Notably, it adds: ‘This extraordinary achievement has been done without the assistance of central government. If the Prime Minister wants to meet his Big Society it is here.’

The growing poverty in Britain is indeed a disgrace.

• Hunger in UK Shocks Me More Than Africa (Archbishop Of Canterbury)

In one corner of a refugee camp in the Democratic Republic of Congo was a large marquee. Inside were children, all ill. They had been separated from family, friends, those who looked after them. Perhaps, mostly having disabilities, they had been abandoned in the panic of the militia attack that drove them from their homes. Now they were hungry. It was deeply shocking but, tragically, expected. A few weeks later in England, I was talking to some people – a mum, dad and one child – in a food bank. They were ashamed to be there. The dad talked miserably. He said they had each been skipping a day’s meals once a week in order to have more for the child, but then they needed new tyres for the car so they could get to work at night, and just could not make ends meet. So they had to come to a food bank.They were treated with respect, love even, by the volunteers from local churches. But they were hungry, and ashamed to be hungry. I found their plight more shocking. It was less serious, but it was here.

And they weren’t careless with what they had – they were just up against it. It shocked me that being up against it at the wrong time brought them to this stage. There are many like them. But we can do something about it. Two weeks ago, people in churches up and down the land listened to the passage in St Matthew’s Gospel where Jesus describes who will enter the Kingdom of Heaven. When Christ returns, He will say: ‘Come, you that are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom… for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink.’ The good people are surprised, they don’t remember helping anyone so powerful, and think He has mixed them up with someone else. Jesus tells them: ‘Just as you did it to one of the least of these… you did it to me.’ Those who did not give food to the hungry or a drink to the thirsty find out God has taken their lack of kindness into account too.

Art reflects society before society reflects upon itself.

• Has Modern Art Exhausted Its Power To Shock? (BBC)

Modern art’s desire to shock and to defy cliche has become a cliche in itself, and spawned a culture of fakery, argues Roger Scruton. “To thine own self be true,” says Shakespeare’s Polonius, “and thou canst be false to no man.” Live in truth, urged Vaclav Havel. “Let the lie come into the world,” wrote Solzhenitsyn, “but not through me.” How seriously should we take these pronouncements, and how do we obey them? There are two kinds of untruth – lying and faking. The person who is lying says what he or she does not believe. The person who is faking says what he believes, though only for the time being and for the purpose in hand. Anyone can lie. It suffices to say something with the intention to deceive. Faking, however, is an achievement. To fake things you have to take people in, yourself included. The liar can pretend to be shocked when his lies are exposed, but his pretence is part of the lie. The fake really is shocked when he is exposed, since he has created around himself a community of trust, of which he himself is a member.

In all ages people have lied in order to escape the consequences of their actions, and the first step in moral education is to teach children not to tell fibs. But faking is a cultural phenomenon, more prominent in some periods than in others. There is very little faking in the society described by Homer, for example, or in that described by Chaucer. By the time of Shakespeare, however, poets and playwrights are beginning to take a strong interest in this new human type. In Shakespeare’s King Lear the wicked sisters Goneril and Regan belong to a world of fake emotion, persuading themselves and their father that they feel the deepest love, when in fact they are entirely heartless. But they don’t really know themselves to be heartless – if they did, they could not behave so brazenly. The tragedy of King Lear begins when the real people – Kent, Cordelia, Edgar, Gloucester – are driven out by the fakes.

The fake is a person who has rebuilt himself, with a view to occupying another social position than the one that would be natural to him. Such is Molière’s Tartuffe, the religious impostor who takes control of a household through a display of scheming piety. Like Shakespeare, Moliere perceives that faking goes to the very heart of the person engaged in it. Tartuffe is not simply a hypocrite, who pretends to ideals that he does not believe in. He is a fabricated person, who believes in his own ideals since he is just as illusory as they are. Tartuffe’s faking is a matter of sanctimonious religion. With the decline of religion during the 19th Century there came about a new kind of faking. The romantic poets and painters turned their backs on religion and sought salvation through art. They believed in the genius of the artist, endowed with a special capacity to transcend the human condition in creative ways, breaking all the rules in order to achieve a new order of experience. Art became an avenue to the transcendental, the gateway to a higher kind of knowledge.

At least.

• California’s ‘Hot Drought’ Ranks Worst in at Least 1,200 Years (Bloomberg)

Record rains fell in California this week. They’re not enough to change the course of what scientists are now calling the region’s worst drought in at least 1,200 years. Just how bad has California’s drought been? Modern measurements already showed it’s been drier than the 1930s dustbowl, worse than the historic droughts of the 1970s and 1980s. That’s not all. New research going back further than the Viking conquests in Europe still can’t find a drought as bad as this one. To go back that far, scientists consulted one of the longest records available: tree rings.

Tighter rings mean drier years, and by working with California’s exceptionally old trees, researchers from University of Minnesota and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute were able to reconstruct a chronology of drought in southern and central California. They identified 37 droughts that lasted three years or more, going back to the year 800. None were as extreme as the conditions we’re seeing now. One of the oddities of this drought is that conditions aren’t just driven by a lack of rainfall. There have been plenty of droughts in the past with less precipitation. (The drought of 1527 to 1529, for example, was killer.) What makes this drought exceptional is the heat. Extreme heat.

Higher temperatures increase evaporation and help deplete reservoirs and groundwater. The California heat this year is like nothing ever seen in modern temperature records. The chart above shows average year-to-date temperatures in the state from January through October for each year since 1895. California’s drought has withered pastures and forced farmers to uproot orchards and fallow farmland. It may cost the state $2.2 billion this year, with 17,100 jobs lost and 428,000 acres of land left unplanted. Tensions are still running high between farmers and salmon fishers, who rely on the same waters. Young salmon even qualified for migration assistance this year – via tanker truck – when river levels were too low to make the swim. The effects of prolonged drought are cumulative. Maps from the U.S. Drought Monitor below show the worsening of conditions over the last three years.

More than half of the state remains in “exceptional drought” (crimson). It’s a distinction marked by crop and pasture losses and water shortages that fall within the top two percentiles. Record rainfalls recorded across the state this week — including in San Francisco and Los Angeles — did little to overcome the state’s moisture deficit, the National Drought Mitigation Center reported yesterday.

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