Aug 102016
 


Dorothea Lange Youngest little girl of motherless family 1939

 

We can, every single one of us, agree that we’re either in or just past a -financial- crisis. But that seems to be all we can agree on. Because some call it the GFC, others a recession, and still others a depression. And some insist on seeing it as ‘in the past’, and solved, while others see it as a continuing issue.

I personally have the idea that if you think central banks -and perhaps governments- have the ability and the tools to prevent or cure financial crises, you’re in the more optimistic camp. And if you don’t, you’re a pessimist. A third option might be to think that no matter what central bankers do, things will solve themselves, but I don’t see much of that being floated. Not anymore.

What I do see are countless numbers of bankers and economists and pundits and reporters holding up high the concept of globalization (a.k.a. free trade, Open Society) as the savior of mankind and its economy.

And I’m thinking that no matter how great you think the entire centralization issue is, be it global or on a more moderate scale, it’s a lost case. Because centralization dies the moment it can no longer show obvious benefits for people and societies ‘being centralized’. Unless you’re talking a dictatorship.

This is because when you centralize, when you make people, communities, societies, countries, subject to -the authority of- larger entities, they will want something in return for what they give up. They will only accept that some ‘higher power’ located further away from where they live takes decisions on their behalf, if they benefit from these decisions.

And that in turn is only possible when there is growth, i.e. when the entire system is expanding. Obviously, it’s possible also to achieve this only in selected parts of the system, as long as if you’re willing to squeeze other parts. That’s what we see in Europe today, where Germany and Holland live the high life while Greece and Italy get poorer by the day. But that can’t and won’t last. Of necessity. It’s an inbuilt feature.

Schäuble and Dijsselbloem squeezed Greece so hard they could only convince it to stay inside the EU by threatening to strangle it to -near- death. Problem is, they then actually did that. Bad mistake, and the end of the EU down the road. Because the EU has nothing left of the advantages of the centralized power; it no longer has any benefits on offer for the periphery.

Instead, the ‘Union’ needs to squeeze the periphery to hold the center together. Otherwise, the center cannot hold. And that is something those of us with even just a remote sense of history recognize all too well. It reminds us of the latter days of the Roman Empire. And Rome is merely the most obvious example. What we see play out is a regurgitation of something the world has seen countless times before. The Maximum Power Principle in all its shining luster. And the endgame is the Barbarians will come rushing in…

Still, while I have my own interests in Greece, which seems to be turning into my third home country, it would be a mistake to focus on its case alone. Greece is just a symptom. Greece is merely an early sign that globalization as a model is going going gone.

Obviously, centralists/globalists, especially in Europe, try to tell us the country is an exception, and Greeks were terribly irresponsible and all that, but that will no longer fly. Not when, just to name a very real possibility, either some of Italy’s banks go belly up or the upcoming Italian constitutional referendum goes against the EU-friendly government. And while the Beautiful Brexit, at the very opposite point of the old continent, is a big flashing loud siren red buoy that makes that exact point, it’s merely the first such buoy.

But Europe is not the world. Greece and Britain and Italy may be sure signs that the EU is falling apart, but they’re not the entire globe. At the same time, the Union is a pivotal part of that globe, certainly when it comes to trade. And it’s based very much on the idea(l) of centralization of power, economics, finance, even culture. Unfortunately (?!), the entire notion depends on continuing economic growth, and growth has left the building.

 

 

Centralization/Globalization is the only ideology/religion that we have left, but it has one inbuilt weakness that dooms it as a system if not as an ideology. That is, it cannot exist without forever expanding, it needs perpetual growth or it must die. But if/when you want to, whether you’re an economist or a policy maker, develop policies for the future, you have to at least consider the possibility, and discuss it too, that there is no way back to ‘healthy’ growth. Or else we can just hire a parrot to take your place.

So here’s a few graphs that show us where global trade, the central and pivotal point of globalization, is going. Note that globalization can only continue to exist while trade, profits, benefits, keep growing. Once they no longer do, it will go into reverse (again, bar a dictator):

Here’s Japan’s exports and imports. Note the past 20 months:

 

 

Japan’s imports have been down, in the double digits, for close to 3 years?!

Next: China’s exports and imports. Not the exact same thing, but an obvious pattern.

 

 

If only imports OR exports were going down for specific countries, that’d be one thing. But for both China and Japan, in the graphs above, both are plunging. Let’s turn to the US:

 

 

Pattern: US imports from China have been falling over the past year (or even more over 5 years, take your pick), and not a little bit.

 

 

And imports from the EU show the same pattern in an almost eerily similar way.

Question then is: what about US exports, do they follow the same fold that Japan and China do? Yup! They do.

 

 

And that’s not all either. This one’s from the NY Times a few days ago:

 

 

And this one from last year, forgot where I got it from:

 

 

Now, you may want to argue that all this is temporary, that some kind of cycle is just around the corner and will revive the economy, and globalization. By now I’d be curious to see how anyone would want to make that case, but given the religious character of the centralization idea, there’s no doubt many would want to give it a go.

Most of the trends in the graphs above have been declining for 5 years or so. While at the same time the central banks in these countries have been accelerating their stimulus policies in ways no-one could even imagine they would -or could- just 10 years ago.

All of the untold trillions in stimulus haven’t been able to lift the real economy one bit. They instead caused a rise in asset prices, stocks, housing, that is actually hurting that real economy. While NIRP and ZIRP are murdering 95% of the people’s hope to retire when they thought they could, or ever, for that matter.

No, it’s a done deal. Globalization is pining for the fjords. But because it’s become such a religion, and because its high priests have so much invested in it, it’ll be hard to kill it off even just as an -abstract- idea. I’d say wherever you live and whenever your next election is, don’t vote for anyone who promotes any centralization ideas. Or growth. Because those ideas are all in some state of decomposing, and hence whoever promotes them is a zombie.

 

 

Lastly, The Economist had a piece on July 30 cheerleading for both Hillary Clinton and ‘Open Society’, a term which somehow -presumably because it sounds real jolly- has become synonymous with globalization. As if your society will be hermetically sealed off if you want to step on the brakes even just a little when it comes to ever more centralization and globalization.

The boys at Saxo Bank, Mike McKenna and Steen Jakobsen, commented on the Economist piece, and they have some good points:

Priced Out Of The ‘Open Society’

[..] The biggest problem facing globalism, however, is neither its hypocrisy nor its will-to-power – these are ordinary human failings common to all ideologies. Its biggest problem is much simpler: it’s very expensive. The world has seen versions of the wealthy, cosmopolitan ideal before. In both Imperial Rome and Achaemenid Persia, for example, societies characterised by extensive trade networks, multicultural metropoli and the rule of law (relative to the times) eventually succumbed to rampant inequality, inter-community strife, and expensive foreign wars in the case of Rome and a death-spiral of economic stagnation and constant tax hikes in the case of Persia.

That’s the center vs periphery issue all empires run into. US, EU, and all the supra-national organizations, IMF, World Bank, NATO, (EU itself), etc, they’ve established. None of that will remain once the benefits for the periphery stop. McKenna is on to this:

It seems near-axiomatic that, in the absence of the sort of strong GDP growth that characterised the post-World War Two era, the pluralist ideal might begin to show strains along the seams of its own construction. Such strains can be inter-ethnic, ideological, religious, or whatever else, but the legitimacy of The Economists’s favoured worldview largely came about due to the wealth and living standards it was seen to provide in the post-WW2 and Cold War era. Now that this is beginning to falter, so too are the politicians and institutions that have long championed it. In Jakobsen’s view, the rising tide of populist nationalism is in no way the solution, but it is a sign that globalisation’s elites have grown distant from the population as a whole.

I’d venture that the elites were always distant from the people, but as long as the people saw their wealth grow they either didn’t notice or didn’t care.

“The world has become elitist in every way,” says Saxo Bank’s chief economist. “We as a society have to recognise that productivity comes from raising the average education level… the key thing here is that we need to be more productive. If everyone has a job, there is no need to renegotiate the social contract.” Put another way, would the political careers of Trump, Le Pen, Viktor Orban, and other such nationalist leaders be where they are if the post-crisis environment had been one of healthy wage growth, inflation, an increase in “breadwinner” jobs, and GDP expansion?

Here I have to part ways with Steen (and Mike). Why do ‘we’ need to be more productive? Why do we need to produce more? Who says we don’t produce enough? When we look around us, what is it that tells us we should make more, and buy more, and want more? Is there really such a thing as “healthy wage growth”? And what says that we need “GDP expansion”?

Most people do not spend a great deal of time imagining ideal economic and political systems. Most just want to live satisfying lives among their friends and family, and to feel as if their leaders are doing all they can to enable such a situation. What matters are the data, and if these are not made to become more encouraging, calls for this particular empire’s downfall will come with the same fervour and the same increasing frequency that they have throughout history.

The problem is not that people are choosing the wrong system, it is that they are unhappy enough to want to change course at all. Unless the developed world can find a way to reform itself out of its present malaise, no amount of media-class vituperation over xenophobia, insularity or “the uneducated” will be sufficient to turn the tide.

McKenna answers my question, unwillingly or not. Because, no, ‘Most just want to live satisfying lives among their friends and family..’ is not the same as “they want GDP expansion”, no matter how you phrase it. That’s just an idea. For all we know, the truth may be the exact opposite. The neverending quest for GDP expansion may be the very thing that prevents people from living “satisfying lives among their friends and family”.

How many people see the satisfaction in their lives destroyed by the very rat race they’re in? Moreover, how many see their satisfaction destroyed by being on the losing end of that quest? And how many simply by the demands it puts on them?

The connection between “satisfying lives” and “GDP expansion” is one made by economists, bankers, politicians and other voices driven by ideologies such as globalization. Whether your life is satisfying or not is not somehow one-on-one dependent on GDP expansion. That idea is not only ideological, it’s as stupid as it is dangerous.

And it’s silly too. Most westerners don’t need more stuff. They need more “satisfying lives among their friends and family”. But they’re stuck on a treadmill. If you want to give your kids decent health care and education anno 2016, you better keep running to stand still.

Mike McKenna and Steen Jakobsen seem to understand exactly what the problem is. But they don’t have the answer. Steen thinks it is about ‘more productivity’.

And I think that may well be the problem, not the solution. I also think it’s no use wanting more productivity, because the economic model we’re chasing is dead and gone. A zombie pushing up the daisies.

But since it’s the only one we have, and even smart people like the Saxo Bank guys can’t see beyond it, it seems obvious that getting rid of the zombie idea may take a lot of sweat and tears and, especially, blood.

 

 

May 302016
 
 May 30, 2016  Posted by at 7:59 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , ,  9 Responses »


Jack Delano Foggy night in New Bedford, Massachusetts 1941

The Mystery of Weak US Productivity (Luce)
China Default Chain Reaction Threatens Products Worth 35% of GDP (BBG)
China’s Veiled Loans May Prove Lethal (BBG)
How Many Bad Loans Might China Have? (BBG)
Easy Money = Overcapacity = Trade Wars = Deflation (Rubino)
Negative Rates Fail to Spur Investment for Corporate Europe (BBG)
Saudi Arabia’s Petrodollar Reserves Fall to 4-Year Low (BBG)
CEO of No. 1 Asian Commodity Trader Noble Group Resigns In Surprise Move (R.)
Japan Must Delay Sales-Tax Rise to Recover, Abe Aide Says (BBG)
The Butterfly Effect: Cheap Oil Means Fewer Nose Jobs (BBG)
The Source of Failure: We Optimize What We Measure (CH Smith)
30.4% Of Americans Were Obese In 2015 (Forbes)
Tory Turmoil Escalates With Open Call For Cameron To Quit (G.)
Half Of Central, Northern Great Barrier Reef Corals Are Dead (SMH)

“This year, for the first time in more than 30 years, US productivity growth will almost certainly turn negative..”

“Unless we become smarter at how we work, growth will start to exhaust itself too.” Er, no, that has already happened.

“For the first time the next generation of US workers will be less educated than the previous..”

The Mystery of Weak US Productivity (Luce)

Look around you. From your drone home delivery to that oncoming driverless car, change seems to be accelerating. Warren Buffett, the great investor, promises that our children’s generation will be the “luckiest crop in history”. Everywhere the world is speeding up except, that is, in the productivity numbers. This year, for the first time in more than 30 years, US productivity growth will almost certainly turn negative following a decade of sharp slowdown. Yet our Fitbits seem to be telling us otherwise. Which should we trust — the economic statistics or our own lying eyes? A lot hinges on the answer. Productivity is the ultimate test of our ability to create wealth. In the short term you can boost growth by working longer hours, for example, or importing more people.

Or you could lift the retirement age. After a while these options lose steam. Unless we become smarter at how we work, growth will start to exhaust itself too. Other measures bear out the pessimists. At just over 2%, US trend growth is barely half the level it was a generation ago. As Paul Krugman put it: “Productivity isn’t everything, but in the long run it is almost everything.” It is possible we are simply mismeasuring things. Some economists believe the statistics fail to capture the utility of setting up a Facebook profile, for example, or downloading free information from Wikipedia. The gig economy has yet to be properly valued. Yet this argument cuts both ways. Productivity is calculated by dividing the value of what we produce by how many hours we work — data provided by employers.

But recent studies — and common sense — say our iPhones chain us to our employers even when we are at leisure. We may thus be exaggerating productivity growth by undercounting how much we work. The latter certainly fits with the experience of most of the US labour force. It is no coincidence that since 2004 a majority of Americans began to tell pollsters they expected their children to be worse off — the same year in which the internet-fuelled productivity leaps of the 1990s started to vanish. Most Americans have suffered from indifferent or declining wages in the past 15 years or so. A college graduate’s starting salary today is in real terms well below where it was in 2000. For the first time the next generation of US workers will be less educated than the previous, according to the OECD, which means worse is probably yet to come. Last week’s US productivity report bears that out.

Read more …

“All the risks are accumulating in an overcrowded financial system.”

China Default Chain Reaction Threatens Products Worth 35% of GDP (BBG)

The risk of a default chain reaction is looming over the $3.6 trillion market for wealth management products in China. WMPs, which traditionally funneled money from Chinese individuals into assets from corporate bonds to stocks and derivatives, are now increasingly investing in each other. Such holdings may have swelled to as much as 2.6 trillion yuan ($396 billion) last year, based on estimates from Autonomous Research this month. The trend has China watchers worried. For starters, it means that bad investments by one WMP could infect others, causing a loss of confidence in products that play an important role in bank funding. It also suggests WMPs are struggling to find enough good assets to meet their return targets.

In the event of widespread losses, cross-ownership will create more uncertainty over who’s vulnerable – a key source of panic in 2008 when soured U.S. mortgage securities triggered a global financial crisis. Those concerns have become more pressing this year after at least 10 Chinese companies defaulted on onshore bonds, the Shanghai Composite Index sank 20% and China’s economy showed few signs of recovery from the weakest expansion in a quarter century. “There’s abundant liquidity in the financial system, but a scarcity of high-yielding assets to invest in,” said Harrison Hu, the chief Greater China economist at RBS in Singapore. “All the risks are accumulating in an overcrowded financial system.”

Issuance of WMPs, which are sold by banks but often reside off their balance sheets, exploded over the past three years as lenders competed for funds and fees while savers sought returns above those offered on deposits. The products, which offer varying levels of explicit guarantees, are regarded by many as having the implicit backing of banks or local governments. The outstanding value of WMPs rose to 23.5 trillion yuan, or 35% of China’s gross domestic product, at the end of 2015 from 7.1 trillion yuan three years earlier, according to China Central Depository & Clearing Co. An average 3,500 WMPs were issued every week last year, with some mid-tier banks, such as China Merchants Bank and China Everbright Bank, especially dependent on the products for funding.

Interbank holdings of WMPs swelled to 3 trillion yuan as of December from 496 billion yuan a year earlier, according to figures released by the clearing agency last month. As much as 85% of those products may have been bought by other WMPs, according to Autonomous Research, which based its estimate on lenders’ public disclosures and data on interbank transactions. The firm speculates that in some cases the products are being “churned” to generate fees for banks. “We’re starting to see layers of liabilities built upon the same underlying assets, much like we did with subprime asset-backed securities, collateralized debt obligations, and CDOs-squared in the U.S.,” Charlene Chu, a partner at Autonomous who rose to prominence in her former role at Fitch Ratings by warning of the risks of bad debt in China, said in an interview on May 17.

Read more …

“The unconsolidated structured entities managed by the Group consist primarily of collective investment vehicles (“WMP Vehicles”) formed to issue and distribute wealth management products (“WMPs”), which are not subject to any guarantee by the Group of the principal invested or interest to be paid.”

China’s Veiled Loans May Prove Lethal (BBG)

Credit is a risky business, but loans that dare not speak their name? They are possibly even more dangerous, as China is about to find out.As many as 15 publicly traded Chinese lenders, large and small, report roughly $500 billion of such debt between them, which they hold not as loans but as receivables from shadow banking products. While the traditional credit business of these banks is 16 times bigger, receivables have jumped sixfold in three years. Explosive growth of this type usually ends badly. It’s hard to see why it’ll be different for the People’s Republic. Before they can brace themselves – or embrace the risk, if they think the rewards are worth it – equity investors need to know where to look. Flitting from one explanatory note to another in dense annual reports isn’t everybody’s idea of a day well spent.

But the effort may be worth it. For instance, page 184 of Agricultural Bank’s 2015 annual report informs us that the bank has 557 billion yuan ($85 billion) worth of assets tied in “debt instruments classified as receivables.” On page 245, we further learn that most of this is old hat, and the only fast-growing portion is an 18.7 billion yuan chunk helpfully titled as “Others.” A footnote adds that the category primarily consists of “unconsolidated structured entities managed by the group.” Give up? Then you miss the big reveal that occurs 34 pages later: “The unconsolidated structured entities managed by the Group consist primarily of collective investment vehicles (“WMP Vehicles”) formed to issue and distribute wealth management products (“WMPs”), which are not subject to any guarantee by the Group of the principal invested or interest to be paid.” That’s broadly how Chinese lenders disclose their cryptic linkages with shadow banks.

The names keep changing, from “investment management products under trust scheme” and “investment management products managed by securities companies” to “trust beneficiary rights” and “wealth management products.” The latter have swelled to the equivalent of 35% of GDP, and account for 3 trillion yuan of interbank holdings. The common thread to these products is that they’re all exposed to corporate credit and designed to get around lenders’ minimum capital requirements and maximum loan-to-deposit norms, with scant loss provisioning in case things go wrong.There’s plenty that could. The reported nonperforming loan ratio of 1.75% is a joke. CLSA says bad loans have already snowballed to 15 to 19% of the loan book; Autonomous Research partner Charlene Chu estimates the figure will reach 22% by the end of this year. A 20% loss on a $500 billion portfolio of loans masquerading as receivables would wipe out 58% of annual profit of the 15 banks under our scanner.

Read more …

” In the basic resources sector, 46% of loans are with firms without enough income to cover interest payments. ”

How Many Bad Loans Might China Have? (BBG)

How many of China’s loans could turn bad? The official data show a non-performing loan ratio of 1.75%, but that’s widely believed to reflect optimistic accounting. Bloomberg Intelligence Economics has estimated the %age of “at risk” loans – those where the borrower doesn’t have sufficient earnings to cover interest payments. The results show 14% of corporate borrowing at risk of default, up from a low of 5% in 2010. By sector, the basic resources, retail and industrial sectors are among the highest risk. In the basic resources sector, 46% of loans are with firms without enough income to cover interest payments.

Telecommunications, utilities, and travel and leisure sectors look more secure, reflecting stronger earnings and lower debt. The methodology is based on an approach used by the IMF. For a universe of 2,865 Chinese listed firms (excluding financial companies), we screened for firms with interest costs higher than their EBITDA. We then calculated total debt of those firms as a %age of total debt of all listed firms. We assume that the ratio of “at risk” loans for the corporate sector as a whole is the same as for listed companies.

Read more …

“..over-investment produces slow growth and falling prices while ever-more-aggressive monetary policy distorts markets beyond recognition and encourages new over-investment in different sectors, which then proceed to follow oil and steel into the deflationary abyss.”

Easy Money = Overcapacity = Trade Wars = Deflation (Rubino)

So what happens to all that Chinese steel that was on its way to the US and EU before slamming into those prohibitively high tariffs? One of three things: Either it’s sold elsewhere, probably at even steeper discounts, thus pricing US and EU steel exports out of those markets. Or it’s stockpiled in China for future use, thus lowering future demand for new steel production and, other things being equal, depressing tomorrow’s prices. Or many of China’s newly-built steel mills will close, and China will eat the losses related to this malinvestment. Each scenario results in lower prices and financial losses somewhere. Put another way, as far as steel is concerned, the world’s fiat currencies are rising in value, which is the common definition of deflation.

And since steel is just one of many basic industries burdened with massive overcapacity, it’s safe to assume that the process which began with oil and recently spread to steel will continue to metastasize throughout the developed and developing worlds. Next up: real estate. “Modern” monetary policy, designed to achieve exactly the opposite outcome (that is, rising prices for real things), will in response be ratcheted up to ever-more-extreme levels — which in this analytical framework is like trying to douse a fire with gasoline. The result is a world in which past over-investment produces slow growth and falling prices while ever-more-aggressive monetary policy distorts markets beyond recognition and encourages new over-investment in different sectors, which then proceed to follow oil and steel into the deflationary abyss. And so on, until the system collapses under the weight of its own absurdity.

Read more …

Because they are deflationary.

Negative Rates Fail to Spur Investment for Corporate Europe (BBG)

A prolonged period of negative interest rates is failing to revive investment at Europe’s companies, with the vast majority of businesses in the region saying the stimulus measures have had no affect at all on their growth plans. Some 84% of the 9,440 companies surveyed by Swedish debt collector Intrum Justitia AB for its European Payment Report 2016 say low interest rates haven’t affected their willingness to invest. And perhaps more alarmingly, the number is up from 73% last year. “Creating economic growth requires stability and optimism,” Intrum Justitia Chief Executive Officer Mikael Ericson said in the report. “Evidently, the strategy of keeping interest rates record low for more than a year has not created the much sought-after stability.”

Signs of stalling investment mark a blow to central banks hoping to revive growth across Europe through negative rates and quantitative easing. Europe needs its businesses to invest more if it’s to create the jobs needed to spur growth. In the euro area, where interest rates have been negative since mid-2014, gross domestic product will slow to 1.6% this year, compared with 2.3% in the U.S., the European Commission estimates. “A calculation of an investment includes assumptions of the future,” Intrum said. “To get the calculation to go together those assumptions need to include a belief in stability and prosperity in that future. Perhaps the negative interest rates do not signal that stability at all – rather that we are still in an extraordinary situation?”

The survey also identified another threat to growth, namely late payments. Some 33% of survey participants said they regard not being paid on time as a threat to overall survival while 25% said they are likely to cut jobs if clients pay late or not at all. That problem is more pronounced among Europe’s 20 million small and medium-sized companies, with many reporting that bigger firms are forcing them to accept late payments. “It is a market failure that costs job opportunities for millions of Europeans that big corporations deliberately force SMEs to finance their cash flow,” Ericson said. “As much as two out of five SMEs say late payments prohibit growth of the company. That large corporations use their much smaller sub-suppliers to act as financier of their own cash-management processes is not only wrong, it also creates an imbalance in society.”

Read more …

Might as well devalue now.

Saudi Arabia’s Petrodollar Reserves Fall to 4-Year Low (BBG)

Saudi Arabia’s net foreign assets fell for a 15th month in April, as the kingdom announced its “vision” for a post-oil future. The Saudi Arabian Monetary Agency said on Sunday net foreign assets declined 1.1% to $572 billion, the lowest level in four years. The slump in crude prices has forced the government to sell bonds and draw on its currency reserves, still among the world’s largest. Net foreign assets fell by $115 billion last year, when the kingdom ran a budget deficit of nearly $100 billion.

The fiscal crunch has pushed Saudi Arabia’s rulers to look beyond oil, consider new taxes, and plan an initial public offering of state giant Saudi Arabian Oil Co. Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman sketched out the planned changes dubbed Saudi Vision 2030 on April 25. The strain on reserves has also fueled speculation that the kingdom will adjust its decades-old riyal peg to the dollar. New central bank Governor Ahmed Alkholifey told Al-Arabiya on Thursday that Saudi Arabia doesn’t plan to change its exchange rate policy.

Read more …

Firesale. Given what’s happened in commodities the past year, not surprising.

CEO of No. 1 Asian Commodity Trader Noble Group Resigns In Surprise Move (R.)

Embattled commodity trader Noble Group announced the surprise resignation of CEO Yusuf Alireza on Monday and said it planned to sell a U.S. unit to bolster its balance sheet as it seeks to regain investor confidence. Alireza, a former Goldman Sachs banker had steered Asia’s biggest commodity trader to sell assets, cut business lines and take big writedowns as it battled weak commodity markets and the fallout from an accounting dispute. “With this transformation process now largely complete, Mr. Alireza considered that the time was right for him to move on,” Noble said in a statement. It appointed senior executives William Randall and Jeff Frase as co-chief executive officers and said it would begin a sale process for Noble Americas Energy Solutions, “expected to generate both significant cash proceeds and profits to substantially enhance the balance sheet.”

Noble came under the spotlight in February last year when it was accused by Iceberg Research of overstating its assets by billions of dollars, claims which Noble rejected. Its shares have since plunged by about 75% and its debt costs have risen as the company has been hit hard by credit rating downgrades and weak investor confidence. “The first task is to stabilize the situation and convey stability and continuity,” said Nirgunan Tiruchelvam at Religare Capital Markets. “That would be the immediate task of somebody in this business which has volatility,” he said. Noble won the backing of banks earlier this month to refinance its debt. In February, Noble reported its first annual loss since 1998, battered by a $1.2 billion writedown for weak coal prices. The company’s shares slumped 65% last year, knocking it out of the benchmark Straits Times index.

Read more …

So a delay in the tax hike would trigger elections. And Abe counts on the Japanese to be blind enough to re-elect him.

Japan Must Delay Sales-Tax Rise to Recover, Abe Aide Says (BBG)

Japan needs to delay increasing its sales tax until late 2019 to sustain its economic recovery, an aide to Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said Sunday. There is a possibility that such a move could trigger a general election. The government will probably hold off raising the tax because it needs to give priority to economic growth, Abe aide Hakubun Shimomura said on Fuji television. Japan’s lower house of parliament would need to be dissolved for a general election if the planned increase is delayed again, Finance Minister Taro Aso was cited by Kyodo News as saying on Sunday at a meeting of the ruling party’s members. Abe has said he’ll make a decision before an upper-house election this summer on whether to go ahead with a planned increase in the levy next April to 10%, from 8% at present.

He had previously said the matter would be decided at an appropriate time and that it would be postponed only if there was a shock on the scale of a major earthquake or a corporate collapse like that of Lehman Brothers. An increase in the levy in 2014 pushed Japan into a recession. “We have no other options but to postpone the sales-tax increase,” Shimomura said. “If the increase means a decline in tax revenue for the government, that would threaten the achievement of the goals under Abenomics.” The prime minister told Finance Minister Taro Aso and LDP’s Secretary General Sadakazu Tanigaki on Saturday to delay the sales-tax increase to October 2019, NHK reported.

Aso advised the prime minister to be cautious about the idea, NHK said. “If the tax increase is delayed, a general election is needed to put the plan to the public,” Aso was quoted by Kyodo News as saying on Sunday. Kyodo reported later that Abe doesn’t plan to call snap elections on the same day as the Upper House vote. If Abe fails to go ahead with his plan of raising the tax in April, it means his economic policies have failed and he and his cabinet members should resign to take responsibility, Tetsuro Fukuyama, vice secretary general of the opposition Democratic Party of Japan, said in a program aired by public broadcaster NHK on Sunday.

Read more …

Unexpected advantages.

The Butterfly Effect: Cheap Oil Means Fewer Nose Jobs (BBG)

Oil slumps. Middle Eastern patients cancel treatments abroad. Thai hospital stocks slide. It’s the butterfly effect in action. Weak growth outlooks in the Gulf states are prompting greater competition from local clinics, stemming the flow of visitors to the world’s top medical tourism destination. That’s clouding the outlook for Thailand’s health-care shares, which surged more than 800% over the past seven years, as valuations start to look stretched amid the falling demand. Bangkok’s Bumrungrad Hospital, known as the grandaddy of international clinics, has slumped 16% since early March after patient volumes from the United Arab Emirates, its second-biggest source of overseas visitors, fell 20% in the first quarter.

Thailand attracted as many as 1.8 million international patients in 2015, many of whom stayed on afterward for a beach holiday. More than one in three foreigners treated at Bumrungrad are from the Gulf states and Kasikorn Securities says declining growth in the region and a rise in competition from clinics in the U.A.E., where the government is encouraging its citizens to stay home for medical care, are curbing demand. “In the short term, the economic slowdown in the the Middle East will weaken some investors’ confidence on earnings growth for domestic hospital operators,” said Jintana Mekintharanggur at Manulife Asset Management. “We are still bullish on the sector” in the long term as it will benefit from growth in countries like Myanmar and Vietnam that have less-developed health systems, she said.

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Hey, look, we are born as liars. And we will lie to ourselves about that, too.

The Source of Failure: We Optimize What We Measure (CH Smith)

The problems we face cannot be fixed with policy tweaks and minor reforms. Yet policy tweaks and minor reforms are all we can manage when the pie is shrinking and every vested interest is fighting to maintain their share of the pie. Our failure stems from a much deeper problem: we optimize what we measure. If we measure the wrong things, and focus on measuring process rather than outcome, we end up with precisely what we have now: a set of perverse incentives that encourage self-destructive behaviors and policies. The process of selecting which data is measured and recorded carries implicit assumptions with far-reaching consequences. If we measure “growth” in terms of GDP but not well-being, we lock in perverse incentives to boost ‘growth” even at the cost of what really matters, i.e. well-being.

If we reward management with stock options, management has a perverse incentive to borrow money for stock buy-backs that push the share price higher, even if doing so is detrimental to the long-term health of the company. Humans naturally optimize what is being measured and identified as important. If students’ grades are based on attendance, attendance will be high. If doctors are told cholesterol levels are critical and the threshold of increased risk is 200, they will strive to lower their patients’ cholesterol level below 200. If we accept that growth as measured by GDP is the measure of prosperity, politicians will pursue the goal of GDP expansion.

If rising consumption is the key component of GDP, we will be encouraged to go buy a new truck when the economy weakens, whether we need a new truck or not. If profits are identified as the key driver of managers’ bonuses, managers will endeavor to increase net profits by whatever means are available. The problem with choosing what to measure is that the selection can generate counterproductive or even destructive incentives. This is the result of humanity’s highly refined skill in assessing risk and return. All creatures have been selected over the eons to recognize the potential for a windfall that doesn’t require much work to reap.

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Can’t leave out the ones that are diabetic without knowing it. Oh, and: “..these obesity rates are calculated from self-reported heights and weights.”

30.4% Of Americans Were Obese In 2015 (Forbes)

If recent headlines are to be believed, we are rapidly approaching the future depicted in Wall-E, with a morbidly obese population that can get from place to place only with the help of a hover-scooter. “Americans are fatter than ever, CDC finds,” trumpets CNN. “This Many Americans Need To Go On A Diet ASAP, According To New CDC Report,” content farm Elite Daily smugly proclaims. But is it really that cut-and-dried? The report both articles refer to is succinctly titled “Early Release of Selected Estimates Based on Data from the National Health Interview Survey, 2015.” It was released on Tuesday, and it provides an early look at annual data from the titular survey on 15 different points, from health insurance and flu shots to smoking rates and, yes, obesity.

The publication says 30.4% of Americans were obese in 2015, with a 95% confidence interval (so somewhere between 29.62% and 31.27%). That’s compared to 19.4% in 1997. Obesity rates were higher among middle-aged people (ages 40 to 59), with the rate for that group hitting 34.6%. Ages 20 to 39, perhaps predictably, were the least obese, with 26.5% of that population having a BMI of 30 or more. Obesity was highest for black women (45%), followed by black men (35.1%), Latina women (32.6%), Latino men (32%), white men (30.2%) and white women (27.2%). The data in the release didn’t provide any information on other ethnic or racial groups, nor did it break obesity rates down by household income.

In concert with rising obesity rates, Americans are getting more diabetic. In 1997, 5.1% of U.S. adults had been diagnosed with diabetes. By 2015, that number had nearly doubled, to 9.5%. Although, again, the data here don’t break everything down to my satisfaction–there are no numbers for each specific type of diabetes, for instance–it’s safe to say that these correlations are the consequence of rising obesity, as 95% of people diagnosed with diabetes have type 2.

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Managed to monopolize the entire Brexit debate, but they can’t leave well enough alone…

Tory Turmoil Escalates With Open Call For Cameron To Quit (G.)

David Cameron’s hopes of being able to avoid terminal damage to Conservative party unity after the EU referendum campaign were dented on Sunday when two rebel MPs openly called for a new leader and a general election before Christmas. The attacks came from Andrew Bridgen and Nadine Dorries – both Brexiters, and longstanding, publicity-hungry opponents of the prime minister – and their claim that even winning the EU referendum won’t stop Cameron facing a leadership challenge in the summer was dismissed by fellow Tories. But their comments coincided with the ministers in charge of the leave campaign launching some of their strongest personal attacks yet on Cameron, prompting Labour’s Alan Johnson to say that the Tory infighting was getting “very ugly indeed”.

Bridgen told the BBC’s 5 Live that Cameron had been making “outrageous” claims in his bid to persuade voters to back remain and that, as a consequence, he had effectively lost his parliamentary majority. “The party is fairly fractured, straight down the middle and I don’t know which character could possibly pull it back together going forward for an effective government. I honestly think we probably need to go for a general election before Christmas and get a new mandate from the people,” he said. Bridgen said at least 50 Tory MPs – the number needed to call a confidence vote – felt the same way about Cameron and that a vote on the prime minister’s future was “probably highly likely” after the referendum.

Dorries told ITV’s Peston on Sunday she had already submitted her letter to the chairman of the Tory backbench 1922 committee expressing no confidence in the prime minister. “[Cameron] has lied profoundly, and I think that is actually really at the heart of why Conservative MPs have been so angered. To say that Turkey is not going to join the European Union as far as 30 years is a lie.”

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Australia will keep debating this while the last bits die off.

Half Of Central, Northern Great Barrier Reef Corals Are Dead (SMH)

More than one-third of the coral reefs of the central and northern regions of the Great Barrier Reef have died in the huge bleaching event earlier this year, Queensland researchers said. Corals to the north of Cairns – covering about two-thirds of the Great Barrier Reef – were found to have an average mortality rate of 35%, rising to more than half in areas around Cooktown. The study, of 84 reefs along the reef, found corals south of Cairns had escaped the worst of the bleaching and were now largely recovering any colour that had been lost. Professor Terry Hughes, director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies at James Cook University, said he was “gobsmacked” by the scale of the coral bleaching which far exceeded the two previous events in 1998 and 2002.

“It is fair to say we were all caught by surprise,” Professor Hughes said. “It’s a huge wake up call because we all thought that coral bleaching was something that happened in the Pacific or the Caribbean which are closer to the epicentre of El Nino events.” The El Nino of 2015-16 was among the three strongest on record but the starting point was about 0.5 degrees warmer than the previous monster of 1997-98 as rising greenhouse gas emissions lifted background temperatures. Reefs in many regions, such as Fiji and the Maldives, have also been hit hard. Bleaching occurs when abnormal conditions, such as warm seas, cause corals to expel tiny photosynthetic algae, called zooxanthellae. Corals turn white without these algae and may die if the zooxanthellae do not recolonise them.

The northern end of the Great Barrier Reef was home to many 50- to 100-year-old corals that had died and may struggle to rebuild before future El Ninos push tolerance beyond thresholds. “How likely is it that they will fully recover before we get a fourth or a fifth bleaching event?” Professor Hughes said. The health of the reef has been a contentious political issue, with Environment Minister Greg Hunt pledging more funds in the May budget to improve water quality – one aspect affecting coral health. But Mr Hunt has also had to explain why his department instructed the UN to cut out a section on Australia from a report that dealt with the threat of climate change to World Heritage sites including the Great Barrier Reef and Kakadu.

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May 262015
 


Walker Evans Vicksburg, Mississippi. “Vicksburg Negroes and shop front.” 1936

We Must Protect Our Children From Austerity (Guardian)
Greek Hospitals Out Of Painkillers, Scissors And Sheets Due To Austerity (RT)
The Key To A Greek Economic Revival Has To Be An End To Austerity (Münchau)
Austerity Is the Only Deal-Breaker (Yanis Varoufakis)
Greece Is All But Bankrupt (NY Times)
The World Is Drowning In Debt, Warns Goldman Sachs (Telegraph)
Investors Are Playing A ‘Greater Fool’ Game (George Magnus)
Weak Productivity Turns Into A Problem Of Global Proportions (FT)
Greece, the EU and the IMF Are Dancing With Death (Coppola)
Greek PM Convenes Emergency Meeting Of His Bailout Team (Guardian)
Greece’s Governing Left Divided Over Debt Terms (WSJ)
IMF’s Blanchard Says Greek Budget Proposals Will Not Provide (Reuters)
Germany And France Agree Closer Eurozone Ties Without Treaty Change (Guardian)
UK’s Cameron Tells EC President That Europe Must Change (Reuters)
Banks as Felons, or Criminality Lite (NY Times)
China Warned Over ‘Insane’ Plans For New Nuclear Power Plants (Guardian)
Yesterday’s Tomorrowland (Jim Kunstler)
Flawed Science Triggers U-Turn On Cholesterol Fears (Daily Mail)
EU Dropped Pesticide Laws Due To US Pressure Over TTIP (Guardian)

I think it’s more that we need to protect them from our own greed.

We Must Protect Our Children From Austerity (Guardian)

The definition of a decadent society is one that destroys its own future, knowing full well the terrible consequences. On that basis, Britain is truly degenerate. Just look at how it trashes its children and teenagers. Our young are the very people on whom the rest of us will one day come to depend – to care for us, and to earn the country’s income. Rather than mere lifestyle accessories, to be slotted in alongside handbags and cars, they represent our best hope. This human truth has sustained societies around the world and down the ages. Yet in austerity Britain, children have been chucked to the bottom of the pile. They have been robbed of their rightful benefits. And the support they could once draw upon – everything from Sure Start centres to youth clubs to mental-health workers – has been hacked back.

Hyperbole? I really wish it were. Instead, I am merely repeating what professionals in field after field, from social care to mental health, are saying – and what the expert analysis shows. The landmark study of the social effects of David Cameron’s austerity was produced at the start of this year by a team of academics led by Professor John Hills at the London School of Economics. They found that the biggest victims of the spending cuts made since 2010 were children, and their parents: “Tax-benefit reforms hit families with children under five harder than any other household type. Those with a baby were especially affected.” None of this was accidental. Treasury officials stick each prospective change in tax and benefits under a Whitehall microscope – which is why so few budgets are an omnishambles.

When making their cuts, Cameron and George Osborne would have known that children and babies would suffer most – and proceeded regardless. Remember that next time you catch some commentator talking with great gravitas but little policy detail about the new compassionate Conservatism. Two things stand out in Cameron’s assault on children: it is precisely the opposite of what he promised, and exactly the reverse of what he himself knows any prime minister should be doing. Before coming to office, the Conservative leader unveiled a poster of a handsome tot: “Dad’s nose, mum’s eyes, Gordon Brown’s debt.” The whole point of cuts was “because we believe children like this deserve better”. One parliament later, the Trussell Trust reports that more than a third of the one million food parcels it gave out last year were for children.

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Due to our own lack of morals?!

Greek Hospitals Out Of Painkillers, Scissors And Sheets Due To Austerity (RT)

Hospitals across Greece are lacking the most essential supplies, including painkillers, scissors and sheets, as years of economic meltdown have left the country’s healthcare system in a desperate state. The number of uninsured Greeks has reached 2.5 million compared to 500,000 in the pre-crisis year of 2008, the Times reported. Healthcare spending has dropped by 25% since 2009, leading to shortages of medical equipment and a lack of funds to pay nurses’ salaries. The country spends around €11 billion annually on its public healthcare system, which is one of the lowest rates in the EU.

According to media reports, some Greek patients have had to undergo painful medical procedures without anesthetics. People have also been turned away from hospitals, as they didn’t even have the equipment to measure their blood pressure, the newspaper learned. On one occasion, a patient was even asked to bring his own sheets to the infirmary from home. A trainee surgeon at KAT state hospital in Athens described the situation at his hospital as being at the “breaking point”. “There is no money to repair medical equipment, no money for ambulances to use for petrol, no money to hire nurses and no money to buy modern surgical supplies,” he told the Times.

In April, the new Syriza government vowed to battle the “barbaric conditions” in public hospitals, as well as corruption in the healthcare sector. Despite money shortages, Greek authorities abolished the €5 fee to visit state hospitals and have pledged to hire an additional 4,500 healthcare workers. “We want to turn the health sector from a victim of the bailouts, a victim of austerity, into a fundamental right for every resident of this country and we commit to do so at any cost,” Alexis Tsipras, the Greek Prime Minister, said. “We will not tolerate the exploitation of human pain,” Tsipras stressed.

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“..the creditors are responsible for the current mess by insisting on an economically illiterate adjustment programme.”

The Key To A Greek Economic Revival Has To Be An End To Austerity (Münchau)

It is all up to Alexis Tsipras now. The Greek prime minister will decide soon whether or not he wants a deal with his creditors that would allow Athens to service its debt. If he says “no”, Greece will default. At that point, it is possible the country will have to leave the eurozone. What should he do? He will know his own political constraints. I will focus on the economics. The short answer is: if the deal is reasonable, he should accept. So where is the line between reasonable and unreasonable? The rough answer is whatever it takes to end the uncertainty. No investor is going to put their money into Greece so long as there is a threat of Grexit – a Greek exit from the eurozone. For an agreement to be viable, it would need to reduce the probability of Grexit to zero.

The same applies to the policies needed if Mr Tsipras says “no”. On that day he would need a brilliant economic plan. So what economic criteria should he apply to evaluate any offer? The single most important part of the agreement concerns the fiscal adjustment that Greece’s creditors are asking Athens to undertake. The variable to look out for is the primary surplus – the fiscal balance before payment of interest on debt: essentially the money a country has for debt servicing. There is no such thing as an objectively right or wrong number. But experience shows that large primary surpluses are politically unsustainable. It was the unsustainability of the previous agreement between Greece, its European creditors and the IMF that brought Syriza to power.

I heard a respected expert on this issue recently proclaim that a primary surplus of 2.5% of gross domestic product would probably work. The Greeks have demanded 1.5%, which is a reasonable opening bid. One of the so-called “non-papers” – the documents officials leak without leaving fingerprints – that are circulating among the negotiators had mentioned a figure of 3.5%, which strikes me as too high. A primary surplus of 4.5%, as was demanded from 2016 onwards by the previous loan agreement, is plainly ludicrous.

Greek economic mismanagement brought about the crisis in 2010, but the creditors are responsible for the current mess by insisting on an economically illiterate adjustment programme. They had not taken into account the fact that Greece is a relatively closed economy. This means that most of its GDP is produced and consumed at home. If you force such an economy into extreme austerity during a recession, it stays trapped. The key to a Greek economic revival has to be an end to austerity. This is why Grexit is not necessarily a solution, either, since it might bring even more fiscal consolidation. Greece would be cut off from international capital markets and unable to run a deficit.

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” Relative to the rest of the countries on the eurozone periphery, Greece was subjected to at least twice the austerity. There is nothing more to it than that.”

Austerity Is the Only Deal-Breaker (Yanis Varoufakis)

A common fallacy pervades coverage in the world’s media of the negotiations between the Greek government and its creditors. The fallacy, exemplified in a recent commentary by Philip Stephens of the Financial Times, is that, “Athens is unable or unwilling – or both – to implement an economic reform program.” Once this fallacy is presented as fact, it is only natural that coverage highlights how our government is, in Stephens’s words, “squandering the trust and goodwill of its eurozone partners.” But the reality of the talks is very different. Our government is keen to implement an agenda that includes all of the economic reforms emphasized by European economic think tanks.

Moreover, we are uniquely able to maintain the Greek public’s support for a sound economic program. Consider what that means: an independent tax agency; reasonable primary fiscal surpluses forever; a sensible and ambitious privatization program, combined with a development agency that harnesses public assets to create investment flows; genuine pension reform that ensures the social-security system’s long-term sustainability; liberalization of markets for goods and services, etc. So, if our government is willing to embrace the reforms that our partners expect, why have the negotiations not produced an agreement? Where is the sticking point?

The problem is simple: Greece’s creditors insist on even greater austerity for this year and beyond – an approach that would impede recovery, obstruct growth, worsen the debt-deflationary cycle, and, in the end, erode Greeks’ willingness and ability to see through the reform agenda that the country so desperately needs. Our government cannot – and will not – accept a cure that has proven itself over five long years to be worse than the disease. Our creditors’ insistence on greater austerity is subtle yet steadfast. It can be found in their demand that Greece maintain unsustainably high primary surpluses (more than 2% of GDP in 2016 and exceeding 2.5%, or even 3%, for every year thereafter).

To achieve this, we are supposed to increase the overall burden of value-added tax on the private sector, cut already diminished pensions across the board; and compensate for low privatization proceeds (owing to depressed asset prices) with “equivalent” fiscal consolidation measures. The view that Greece has not achieved sufficient fiscal consolidation is not just false; it is patently absurd. The accompanying figure not only illustrates this; it also succinctly addresses the question of why Greece has not done as well as, say, Spain, Portugal, Ireland, or Cyprus in the years since the 2008 financial crisis. Relative to the rest of the countries on the eurozone periphery, Greece was subjected to at least twice the austerity. There is nothing more to it than that.

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Heart rendering. “Maybe the crisis makes us better people — but these better people will die if the crisis continues.” “They can take their money,” he said, using an expletive. “I feel ashamed to be a European.”

Greece Is All But Bankrupt (NY Times)

Bulldozers lie abandoned on city streets. Exhausted surgeons operate through the night. And the wealthy bail out broke police departments. A nearly bankrupt Greece is taking desperate measures to preserve cash. Absent a last-minute deal with its creditors, the nation will run out of money early next month. Two weeks ago, Greece nearly defaulted on a debt payment of €750 million to the IMF. For the rest of this month, Greece should be able to cover daily cash deficits of around €100 million, government ministers say. Starting June 5, however, these shortfalls will rise sharply, to around €400 million as another I.M.F. obligation comes due. They will then double in size on June 8 and 9. “At that point it is all over,” said a senior Greek finance official.

On Sunday, the interior minister, Nikos Voutsis, said that there would not be enough money to pay the I.M.F. if there was no deal by June 5. In a society that has lived off the generosity of the government for decades, the cash crisis has already had a shattering impact. Universities, hospitals and municipalities are struggling to provide basic services, and the country’s underfunded security apparatus is losing its battle against an influx of illegal immigrants. In effect, analysts say, Greece is already operating as a bankrupt state. The government’s call to conserve funds has been far-reaching. All embassies and consulates — as well as municipalities throughout the country — have been told to forward surplus funds to Athens. Hospitals and schools face strict orders not to hire doctors and teachers.

And national security officials complain they are under intense pressure to keep air and sea missions to a minimum, at a time when migrants from Africa and the Middle East are rushing to Greece’s shores. Even the swelling ranks of investment bankers, lawyers and consultants advising the Finance Ministry have been told that, for now at least, their work is to be considered pro bono. Since its first bailout in 2010, Greece has been forced by its creditors to cut spending by €28 billion — quite a sum in a €179 billion economy. A proportional dose of austerity applied to the United States, for example, would come to $2.6 trillion.

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Sitting at his desk at the start of yet another 20-hour-plus workday, Theodoros Giannaros, the head of Elpis Hospital in Athens, chain-smoked cigarettes and signed off on a pile of spending requests that he said he knew would not be fulfilled. Since he started work at the hospital in 2010, Mr. Giannaros has seen his salary shrink to €1,200 a month, from €7,400. His annual budget, once €20 million, is now €6 million, and the number of practicing doctors has been reduced to 200 from 250. Like almost everyone in Greece, he is making do with less. The hospital recycles instruments; buys the cheapest surgical gloves on the market (they occasionally rip in the middle of operations, he says); and uses primarily generic drugs. “We have learned that we can live with a lot of money and survive with nothing,” he said.

“Maybe the crisis makes us better people — but these better people will die if the crisis continues.” Mr. Giannaros, who is 58, says he recently suffered a heart attack from the constant stress. But he says it is his surgeons he worries about most. In aging, depression-ridden Greece, treating the 150 or so patients that come to his hospital each day has put an extraordinary strain on his shrinking corps of doctors. The fact that many have begun to strike because they are not getting paid for overtime makes matters worse. Striding across the hospital grounds, Mr. Giannaros waved over his star surgeon, Dimitris Tsantzalos. How many operations did you do last year, he asked. “About 1,500,” said Dr. Tsantzalos, who, with his strapping build, seems younger than his 63 years. Recently he says he put in a month of consecutive 20-hour days and, not surprisingly, confesses to exhaustion. “I am burnt out,” he said. “It’s very dangerous for the patients.”

A week later, a tragedy struck Mr. Giannaros: His 26-year-old son, Patrick, committed suicide by jumping in front of an Athens subway train. “There was just an emptiness in front of him,” Mr. Giannaros said between wrenching sobs in a brief telephone conversation. “The emptiness of the future they have taken away from us.” His son had finished university studies and, unable to find work in a country where more than half the young are jobless, was helping Mr. Giannaros at the hospital. “He saw no future, no way to help his family,” Mr. Giannaros said. “Now God has found him a job — as an angel.” While Mr. Giannaros said he understood the importance of staying current with important creditors like the I.M.F., he said enough was enough. “They can take their money,” he said, using an expletive. “I feel ashamed to be a European.”

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Nothing new.

The World Is Drowning In Debt, Warns Goldman Sachs (Telegraph)

The world is sinking under too much debt and an ageing global population means countries’ debt piles are in danger of growing out of control, the European chief executive of Goldman Sachs Asset Management has warned. Andrew Wilson, head of Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA), said growing debt piles around the world posed one of the biggest threats to the global economy. “There is too much debt and this represents a risk to economies. Consequently, there is a clear need to generate growth to work that debt off but, as demographics change, new ways of thinking at a policy level are required to do this,” he said.

“The demographics in most major economies – including the US, in Europe and Japan – are a major issue – and present us with the question of how we are going to pay down the huge debt burden. With life expectancy increasing rapidly, we no longer have the young, working populations required to sustain a debt-driven economic model in the same way as we’ve managed to do in the past.” Mr Wilson used Japan, where gross government debt has climbed above 200pc of gross domestic product (GDP), as an example of where the ageing population could demographics were working against them. “[This] is evidently not sustainable over the long term,” he said.

The Organisation of Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has also sounded out a warning about Japan’s growing debt pile. The think-tank said gross government debt was on course to balloon to more than 400pc by 2040 if the government did not carry out reforms. Angel Gurria, the OECD’s secretary-general, said monetary stimulus and stronger growth alone would not be enough to haul the economy out of its two-decade malaise. “Japan’s future prospects depend on ensuring fiscal sustainability over the long term. With a budget deficit of around 8pc of GDP, the debt ratio is set to rise further into uncharted territory,” he said.

Others have warned privately that Japan’s debt mountain is unsustainable. “The crunch point is when it starts to run a current account deficit,” said one senior banker. “When they stop running a current account surplus and they need our money to survive, we’re not going to lend to them at 30 or 40 basis points.”

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Why insist on calling them investors?

Investors Are Playing A ‘Greater Fool’ Game (George Magnus)

Speculative euphoria, even when encouraged by central banks, is defined by the way it ends — not with a whimper but with a bang. In this context, the so-called Bund “tantrum” may be no more than a hiccup in the context of deeply anomalous financial market conditions. Investors are still chasing low or negative yields in bond markets, fairly or fully valued equity markets, and rising property markets. Yet, it seems increasingly that, long-term investors aside, they are playing a greater fool game. One of the biggest anomalies in global financial markets is the persistence of zero real, or inflation-adjusted, policy rates in most advanced economies and zero or negative real bond yields alongside a surge in the volume of public and private debt that shows no sign of subsiding.

The Bank for International Settlements has mapped a 50% rise in debt outstanding in the world’s 12 largest economies since 2007 to more than $125tn at the end of 2014. A recently published McKinsey report on debt, covering 47 countries, highlighted an increase over the same period of $57tn to about $200bn, or a rise of about 20% of GDP to just under 290% of GDP. While developed markets accounted for the lion’s share of the build-up in debt up to the financial crisis and still dominate the aggregate debt-to-GDP league table, it is in emerging countries, least affected by the financial crisis, that debt has erupted since 2008. The most significant shift has occurred in Asia ex Japan, especially China, where aggregate debt to GDP has quadrupled over the past decade and the limits to debt capacity are fast approaching.

While domestic credit rises at twice the rate of money GDP growth, the toxic combination of rising leverage and slowing growth will continue to erode the nation’s ability to sustain debt accumulation. Eventually the authorities will have to clamp down on credit expansion. Global bond and equity markets remain largely oblivious to the relentless rise in indebtedness. The commonly accepted but also questionable narrative is that the Fed is severely constrained when it comes to raising policy rates, the ECB and the Bank of Japan remain committed to quantitative easing, and China is accelerating the pace of monetary accommodation. Cheap money, therefore, is around for the foreseeable future, and asset price inflation, even with occasional wobbles, is a given.

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A problem only for the perpetual growth crowd. Why should productivity always grow? That just leads to tinkering with things like our food.

Weak Productivity Turns Into A Problem Of Global Proportions (FT)

Output per worker grew last year at its slowest rate since the millennium, with a slowdown evident in almost all regions, underscoring how the problem of lower productivity growth is now taking on global proportions. The Conference Board, a think-tank, said that based on official data on output and employment from most countries, only India and sub-Saharan Africa enjoyed faster labour productivity growth last year. Globally, the rate of growth decelerated to 2.1% in 2014, compared with an annual average of 2.6% between 1999 and 2006, it said.

Bart van Ark, the Conference Board’s chief economist, said total factor productivity, which takes account of skill levels and investment as well as the number of workers, fell 0.2% in 2014. “This is a global phenomenon and so we have to take it very seriously,” he said. Economists are increasingly identifying the problem of low global productivity as one of the greatest threats to improved living standards, in rich and poor countries alike. The fact that companies have become less efficient at converting labour, buildings and machines into goods and services is beginning to trouble policy makers around the world.

Janet Yellen cited weak US productivity as a cause of “the tepid pace of wage gains in recent years” on Friday. Also last week, George Osborne, UK chancellor, set higher productivity as the most important economic priority of the new government. “Our future prosperity depends on it,” he said. Raising productivity is seen as one of the only ways to improve living standards, at a time when advanced and some emerging economies are seeing ageing populations and a rapidly increasing retirement rate. Without stronger productivity growth, the world may have to get used to much lower rates of economic expansion.

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“Two years later, debt restructuring was on the table. And there it remains.”

Greece, The EU And The IMF Are Dancing With Death (Coppola)

Over the last few months, the world has been watching with interest and growing concern the intricate moves in the deadly dance of Greece, the EU and the IMF. The latest move in the dance comes from Greece itself. The Interior Minister has announced that Greece cannot meet scheduled debt repayments to the IMF in June. This does not mean that Greece intends not to pay. Rather, it is warning that intransigence by the EU may force it into an IMF default. It is not the first time Greece has used the “IMF default” tactic. At the beginning of May, Greece said it couldn’t pay an IMF loan repayment. Then, in a surprising move, it drained its SDR reserve account at the IMF to make the payment.

This is effectively a short-term loan at a low interest rate from the IMF to Greece. And it is Ponzi finance – lending to a borrower so that he can service existing debts to the same lender. Using the SDR account solved Greece’s immediate cash shortfall, buying time for further negotiations. But it stores up further problems in the future. The SDR account will have to be topped up at some point. Interestingly, the IMF appears to have advised Greece to use the SDR account for the payment. And this makes me wonder what strategy the IMF is playing. It seems to have decided to cooperate with Greece. Superficially, the IMF’s aim is to recover the money it has already lent to Greece. But it has another, much larger concern. The Greek crisis is threatening the IMF’s own credibility.

The IMF’s involvement in the Greek bailout was controversial from the start. It broke its own rules in order to lend to Greece in 2010, arguing that systemic risks justified lending to a country whose debt was not by any stretch of the imagination sustainable over the medium-term. It was severely criticized by members of its own board of directors, notably by emerging-market representatives who were understandably miffed at what appeared to be special treatment accorded to Greece, or more accurately, to the Eurozone’s banks. The Brazilian representative, Paulo Nogueiro Batista, observed that the program: …may be seen not as a rescue of Greece, which will have to undergo a wrenching adjustment, but as a bailout of Greece’s private debtholders, mainly European financial institutions.

And the Swiss representative tellingly asked why debt restructuring with losses for creditors was not on the table. Two years later, debt restructuring was on the table. And there it remains. The 2012 “private sector involvement” (PSI) restructuring wrote down up to 80% of the net present value of Greece’s private sector debts. But much of the debt had already been transferred to the public sector, not only as a result of the 2010 bailout but also through subsequent IMF and EU loans and ECB support of Greece’s banks. The PSI restructuring reduced Greece’s debt to just over 150% of its GDP. Everyone knew that this was inadequate. Everyone knew that the official sector would have to suffer a haircut as well, and the longer it was delayed, the more costly it would be.

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One every day.

Greek PM Convenes Emergency Meeting Of His Bailout Team (Guardian)

The high-stakes game of brinkmanship between Greece and its creditors intensified on Monday after the Greek prime minister convened an emergency meeting of his political negotiating team to avert a looming financial crisis. Amid mounting fears that Athens is close to running out of money, Alexis Tsipras said technical talks would resume to find a deal. To defuse tensions, he announced that Greece would honour its debts, though he failed to give details about how he would find the €1.6bn (£1.14bn) needed in two weeks’ time to repay an IMF loan. “We are very close to a deal,” the finance minister, Yanis Varoufakis, told reporters in Athens.

“There are many different Germans, just as there are many different Greeks,” Varoufakis added, responding to reports that Berlin would not be prepared to retreat in what has become an all-out tug of war between the two governments. Technical teams tasked with negotiating the framework of a cash-for-reform deal to keep the debt-stricken nation afloat, are now scrambling to break the deadlock of almost four months of fruitless talks. Both sides have signalled they will focus on VAT increases, expected to raise as much as €1bn for the Greek economy, when they reconvene in Brussels on Tuesday. Also on the table are pension reform, labour deregulation and the ever-incendiary topic of the primary surplus. Tsipras’s anti-austerity administration has argued vociferously that demands for a budget surplus higher than 1.5% will exacerbate the country’s economic death spiral.

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The ‘hard left’ already almost won the day. Tsipras’ room to move is shrinking.

Greece’s Governing Left Divided Over Debt Terms (WSJ)

As financial pressure mounts on Greece to sign a deal with its foreign lenders, Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras is facing what may be his biggest problem yet: the struggle within the ruling Syriza party over whether to swallow creditors’ tough terms or default. Dissent is spreading within left-wing Syriza against the economic policies Greece is likely to have to enact in return for fresh bailout funding from other eurozone governments and the IMF. The Syriza-led coalition government holds only a thin majority of 12 seats in Greece’s 300-seat Parliament, so a rebellion against a deal could easily cost Mr. Tsipras his governing majority.

Greece’s lenders are particularly worried about vocal threats by Syriza’s Left Platform, a hard-line leftist faction within the party, to reject any deal that crosses ideological “red lines” by cutting pensions or workers’ rights. Mr. Tsipras’s difficulty in selling a painful compromise to Syriza’s hard left, as well as to other parts of his ideologically diverse party, has become the largest obstacle to a deal. European officials and analysts -and privately even Greek government officials- say they don’t know whether the roughly 30 lawmakers who make up Left Platform will vote as defiantly as they talk if creditors’ terms are put before the Athens Parliament. Greece needs to agree on a list of economic policies with lenders in time to avoid defaulting on a series of loan repayments to the IMF in mid-June.

Although the government probably has enough cash to repay a €300 million loan due June 5, it almost certainly can’t meet three further payments totaling about €1.25 billion on June 12, 16 and 19, European officials say. Greece needs a deal as soon as possible so it can service its IMF debts, government spokesman Gabriel Sakellaridis told reporters on Monday. “To the extent that we are in a position to pay our obligations, we will pay our obligations,” he said, adding: “It’s the government’s responsibility to be in a position to pay its obligations.” The European Central Bank has told eurozone governments it would allow Greek banks to buy more short-term Greek government debt if an economic-overhaul agreement between Athens and creditors is imminent. That would allow Greece to survive until July, when further debts fall due and fresh bailout loans will be needed.

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That’s just lip service. We all know by now it’s about politics only.

IMF’s Blanchard Says Greek Budget Proposals Will Not Provide (Reuters)

Greece’s budget proposals are not enough to ensure a surplus this year, the IMF’s chief economist was quoted as saying on Monday. Greece was supposed to have a 3% budget surplus in 2015, but that looks unrealistic now, Olivier Blanchard told the French financial newspaper Les Echos in an interview. Lowering that surplus would lead to new financing needs, for which Greece would again need European help. That could work only if, in exchange, Greece presented a coherent programme, he said. “Considering that the most recent estimates mention a substantial budget deficit, we need credible measures to transform this into a surplus and maintain this surplus in the future,” Blanchard was quoted as saying. “This is far from being the case at the moment.”

Three weeks ago, the European Commission slashed Greek growth and surplus projections and said it expected Greece’s primary surplus – the budget balance before debt servicing costs – would be only 2.1% this year, rather than the 4.8% projected just three months earlier. It also expects the 2015 headline budget balance will deteriorate from a 1.1% surplus to a 2.1% deficit and expects the 1.6% surplus forecast for 2016 will turn into a 2.2% deficit unless policies change. “What is obvious is that the (Greek) pension system is often too generous and that there are still too many civil servants,” Blanchard told the newspaper at a central bankers’ meeting in Sintra, Portugal.

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“..French and German leaders do not have much in common with David Cameron”.

Germany And France Agree Closer Eurozone Ties Without Treaty Change (Guardian)

Germany and France have forged a pact to integrate the eurozone without reopening the EU’s treaties, in a blow to David Cameron’s referendum campaign. Sidestepping Britain’s demands to renegotiate the Lisbon treaty and Britain’s place in the EU, the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, and the French president, François Hollande, have sealed an agreement aimed at fashioning a tighter political union among the single-currency countries while operating within the confines of the existing treaty. The Franco-German proposals are to be put to an EU summit in Brussels next month, where Cameron is also to unveil his shopping list of changes needed if he is to win support for keeping Britain in the EU.

The Franco-German accord, disclosed by Le Monde newspaper, calls for eurozone reforms in four areas “developed in the framework of the current treaties in the years ahead”. Cameron has persistently called for a reopening of the treaties to enable the eurozone to integrate more closely while providing the British with a chance to reshape the UK’s relations with the EU and repatriate powers from Brussels. EU members and senior officials in Brussels have repeatedly voiced their reluctance to reopen the Lisbon treaty – the EU’s fundamental constitutional document. The Franco-German initiative, likely to be endorsed by the 25 June summit, would definitively close the door on treaty renegotiation.[..]

The Franco-German pact, agreed as the Greek debt crisis comes to a head, was finalised last week on the fringes of the EU summit in Latvia and sent to Juncker at the weekend, Le Monde reported. The summit in Riga last Friday was Cameron’s first opportunity since re-election to present his ideas to fellow EU leaders. But it appeared that Merkel and Hollande had bigger fish to fry. Juncker is preparing policy options for the June summit on how to integrate the eurozone fiscally and politically as it struggles to emerge from more than five years of crisis. The Franco-German proposals are likely to settle the direction of policy.

They talk of economic, fiscal and social convergence, combining German insistence on monetary stability with French demands for greater investment. “Additional steps are necessary to examine the political and institutional framework, common instruments and the legal basis” (of the eurozone) by the end of next year, said the document, according to Le Monde. The following year, 2017, Germany and France have general elections, narrowing the scope for negotiations with Britain. The Franco-German policy proposal, said Le Monde, “shows that French and German leaders do not have much in common with David Cameron”.

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Brexit gets closer.

UK’s Cameron Tells EC President That Europe Must Change (Reuters)

British Prime Minister David Cameron told the president of the European Commission that the country needed a new deal on Europe, before he presses his case for reforms to the bloc with other national leaders this week. Talks between Cameron and EC President Jean-Claude Juncker over dinner on Monday focused on reforming the European Union and renegotiating the UK’s ties with Brussels, a government spokeswoman said. “The prime minister underlined that the British people are not happy with the status quo and believe that the EU needs to change in order to better address their concerns,” she said. Juncker reiterated he wanted to find a “fair deal for the UK and would seek to help”, she said, and they agreed more discussions would be needed to find a way forward.

Cameron promised before the British national election earlier this month he would renegotiate Britain’s role in Europe, and hold a referendum on the country’s continuing membership of the bloc by the end of 2017. He launched his reform drive at a summit of EU and ex-Soviet states in Latvia last week, saying he was confident of winning concessions although it would not be easy. Cameron has said changes to rules on welfare benefits were an absolute requirement in any renegotiation. He wants to force EU migrants to wait four years before accessing a range of welfare benefits in Britain, and to win the power to deport out of work EU jobseekers after six months.

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“..bringing criminal charges against individuals and even sending some of them to jail would not disrupt the economy.”

Banks as Felons, or Criminality Lite (NY Times)

As of this week, Citicorp, JPMorgan Chase, Barclays and Royal Bank of Scotland are felons, having pleaded guilty on Wednesday to criminal charges of conspiring to rig the value of the world’s currencies. According to the Justice Department, the lengthy and lucrative conspiracy enabled the banks to pad their profits without regard to fairness, the law or the public good. Besides the criminal label, however, nothing much has changed for the banks. And that means nothing much has changed for the public. There is no meaningful accountability in the plea deals and, by extension, no meaningful deterrence from future wrongdoing.

In a memo to employees this week, the chief executive of Citi, Michael Corbat, called the criminal behavior “an embarrassment” — not the word most people would use to describe a felony but an apt one in light of the fact that the plea deals are essentially a spanking, nothing more. As a rule, a felony plea carries more painful consequences. For example, a publicly traded company that is guilty of a crime is supposed to lose privileges granted by the Securities and Exchange Commission to quickly raise and trade money in the capital markets. But in this instance, the plea deals were not completed until the S.E.C. gave official assurance that the banks could keep operating the same as always, despite their criminal misconduct. (One S.E.C. commissioner, Kara Stein, issued a scathing dissent from the agency’s decision to excuse the banks.)

Also, a guilty plea is usually a prelude to further action, not the “resolution” of a case, as the Justice Department has called the plea deals with the banks. To properly determine accountability for criminal conspiracy in the currency cases, prosecutors should now investigate low-level employees in the crime — traders, say — and then use information gleaned from them to push the investigation up as far as the evidence leads. No one has thus far been named or charged. Nor has there been any explanation of how such lengthy and lucrative criminal conduct could have gone unsuspected and undetected by supervisors, managers and executives. The plea deals leave open the possibility of further investigation, but the prosecutors’ light touch with the banks makes it doubtful they will follow through.

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By their own main scientist.

China Warned Over ‘Insane’ Plans For New Nuclear Power Plants (Guardian)

China’s plans for a rapid expansion of nuclear power plants are “insane” because the country is not investing enough in safety controls, a leading Chinese scientist has warned. Proposals to build plants inland, as China ends a moratorium on new generators imposed after the Fukushima disaster in March 2011, are particularly risky, the physicist He Zuoxiu said, because if there was an accident it could contaminate rivers that hundreds of millions of people rely on for water and taint groundwater supplies to vast swathes of important farmlands.

China halted the approval of new reactors in 2011 in order to review its safety standards, but gave the go-ahead in March for two new units, part of an attempt to surpass Japan’s nuclear generating capacity by 2020 and become the world’s biggest user of nuclear power a decade later. Barack Obama, the US president, recently announced plans to renew a nuclear cooperation deal with Beijing that would allow it to buy more US-designed reactors, and potentially pursue the technology to reprocess plutonium from spent fuel. The government is keen to expand nuclear generation as part of a wider effort to reduce air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions, and cut dependence on imported oil and gas.

He, who worked on China’s nuclear weapons programme, said the planned rollout is going far too fast to ensure it has the safety and monitoring expertise needed to avert an accident. “There are currently two voices on nuclear energy in China. One prioritises safety while the other prioritises development,” He told the Guardian in an interview at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, where he is still working aged 88. He spoke of risks including “corruption, poor management abilities and decision-making capabilities”. He said: “They want to build 58 (gigawatts of nuclear generating capacity) by 2020 and eventually 120 to 200. This is insane.”

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“These are the only choices for the masses: whether to be a “doomer” or a “wisher.”

Yesterday’s Tomorrowland (Jim Kunstler)

America takes pause on a big holiday weekend requiring little in the way of real devotions beyond the barbeque deck with two profoundly stupid movie entertainments that epitomize our estrangement from the troubles of the present day. First there’s Mad Max: Fury Road, which depicts the collapse of civilization as a monster car rally. They managed to get it exactly wrong. The present is the monster car show. Houston. Los Angeles. New Jersey, Beijing, Mumbai, etc. In the future, there will be no cars, gasoline-powered, electric, driverless, or otherwise. Mad Max: Fury Road is actually a perverse exercise in nostalgia, as if we’re going to miss being a nation of savages in the driver’s seat, acting out an endless and pointless competition for our little place on the highway.

The other holiday blockbuster is Disney’s Tomorrowland, another exercise in nostalgia for the present, where the idealized human life is a matrix of phone apps, robots, and holograms. Of course, anybody who had been to Disneyland back in the day remembers the old Tomorrowland installation, which eventually had to be dismantled because its vision of the future had become such a joke — starting with the idea that the human project’s most pressing task was space travel. Now, at this late date, the monster Disney corporation — a truly evil empire — sees that more money can be winkled out of the sore-beset public by persuading them that techno-utopia is at hand, if only we click our heels hard enough.

Another theme running through both films is the idea that girls can be what boys used to be, that it’s “their turn” to be masters-of-the-universe, that men are past their sell-by date and only exist to defile and humiliate females. That this message is really only a mendacious effort to rake in more money by enlarging the teen “audience share” for the reigning wishful fantasy du jour is surely lost on the culture commentators, who are so busy these days celebrating the triumph and wonder of transgender life. The reviewers are weighing these two movies on the popular pessimism / optimism scale. These are the only choices for the masses: whether to be a “doomer” or a “wisher.” Both positions are cartoon world-views that don’t provide much guidance for continuing the project of civilization, in case anyone is actually interested in that.

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“We got the dietary guidelines wrong. They’ve been wrong for decades.”

Flawed Science Triggers U-Turn On Cholesterol Fears (Daily Mail)

For decades they have been blacklisted as foods to avoid, the cause of deadly thickening of the arteries, heart disease and strokes. But the science which warned us off eating eggs – along with other high-cholesterol foods such as butter, shellfish, bacon and liver – could have been flawed, a key report in the US has found. Foods high in cholesterol have been branded a danger to human health since the 1970s – a warning that has long divided the medical establishment. A growing number of experts have been arguing there is no link between high cholesterol in food and dangerous levels of the fatty substance in the blood. Now, in a move signalling a dramatic change of stance on the issue, the US government is to accept advice to drop cholesterol from its list of ‘nutrients of concern’.

The US Department of Agriculture panel, which has been given the task of overhauling the guidelines every five years, has indicated it will bow to new research undermining the role dietary cholesterol plays in people’s heart health. Its Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee plans to no longer warn people to avoid eggs, shellfish and other cholesterol-laden foods. The U-turn, based on a report by the committee, will undo almost 40 years of public health warnings about eating food laden with cholesterol. US cardiologist Dr Steven Nissen, of the Cleveland Clinic, said: ‘It’s the right decision. We got the dietary guidelines wrong. They’ve been wrong for decades.’ Doctors are now shifting away from warnings about cholesterol and saturated fat and focusing concern on sugar as the biggest dietary threat.

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Regard: your future.

EU Dropped Pesticide Laws Due To US Pressure Over TTIP (Guardian)

EU moves to regulate hormone-damaging chemicals linked to cancer and male infertility were shelved following pressure from US trade officials over the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) free trade deal, newly released documents show. Draft EU criteria could have banned 31 pesticides containing endocrine disrupting chemicals (EDCs). But these were dumped amid fears of a trade backlash stoked by an aggressive US lobby push, access to information documents obtained by Pesticides Action Network (PAN) Europe show. On 26 June 2013, a high-level delegation from the American Chambers of Commerce (AmCham) visited EU trade officials to insist that the bloc drop its planned criteria for identifying EDCs in favour of a new impact study.

Minutes of the meeting show commission officials pleading that “although they want the TTIP to be successful, they would not like to be seen as lowering the EU standards”. The TTIP is a trade deal being agreed by the EU and US to remove barriers to commerce and promote free trade. Responding to the EU officials, AmCham representatives “complained about the uselessness of creating categories and thus, lists” of prohibited substances, the minutes show. The US trade representatives insisted that a risk-based approach be taken to regulation, and “emphasised the need for an impact assessment” instead.

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Mar 192015
 
 March 19, 2015  Posted by at 1:09 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , ,  5 Responses »


John M. Fox National Peanut Corp. store on Broadway, NY 1947

Let’s start with defining what an ‘investor’ really is. A reasonable definition of an investor seems to be ‘someone who puts money into risk bearing assets that promise to produce financial gains through – increased – productivity’.

If we can agree on that, then furthermore I think we can all agree that investors need markets. And not only that, but they need functioning markets. What defines ‘functioning’ here is that ‘investors’ need to be able to discern what the value is of the assets they have already purchased and/or are thinking of purchasing in the future.

But we haven’t had any functioning markets since at least 2008. There is no price discovery left, nobody knows the actual value of anything anymore, and ‘traders’ pour money into all sorts of ‘assets’ without having one single clue as to what they are really worth. They don’t even care about the real value of the ‘assets’ they purchase. They don’t have to, because the game’s so obviously rigged and distorted.

There is no risk left in the assets, productivity – i.e. the added value – has long since ceased to be an issue, and that leaves financial gains as the only point of our definition above. But that must of necessity also mean that whoever trades in these non-functioning markets – preferably with ‘money’ borrowed on the cheap -, is not an investor.

So what are the people who do trade, while still calling themselves investors? Are they then mere ‘traders’? That doesn’t quite seem to fit.

What are they then? It may sound a bit harsh to claim they are all just plain grifters, but maybe that’s not too far off the truth after all.

One might conclude, when looking at the excessive attention ‘everyone’ paid yet again today to Janet Yellen and the Fed, waiting breathlessly to see if she utters the word ‘patience’, that those people who call themselves ‘investors’ are not even grifters, they’re nothing but yet another group of lazy bums waiting for government – and/or central bank – hand-outs.

Just much bigger hand-outs than people receive who are on foodstamps (and now you know where that much maligned inequality comes from). But they’re still hand-outs.

Nobody puts money into worthy (for lack of a better term), innovative, productive projects anymore, everyone just waits for what the Fed says and plays it safe (hand-outs). The Fed has thus eroded the investment world, and indeed the entire investment market model.

And that will come back to bite everyone. There is no more money flowing into any ‘worthy’ initiatives, it’s all going into whatever makes most money fastest, screw – increased – productivity. And since price discovery no longer exists, worthy initiatives will receive funding only through some freak accident (like a billionaire with Alzheimer’s), not by design, not through the inherent benefits of the investment model. Which is all but dead.

This cannot but have far reaching consequences, because we no longer have a model in which the best and brightest and hardest working amongst us can and will get funding to build their dreams. All money goes into either ‘Tech Boom The Sequel’, or is spent betting against whatever trend looks fit to fall first. Or a combination of the two.

The smarter amongst you, and I have to doubt that there are too many, will understand that the Fed ‘protection racket’ that has existed for years, is about to come to an end. It’s you against Wall Street now, and most of you don’t stand a chance in that arena.

A rate hike, any rate hike, or two, is the (re-)start of price discovery, at a time when everyone is ‘invested’ in ‘assets’ for which price discovery was never even considered at the time of purchasing. How fast can you unload? Who’s going to be the buyer? Are there enough fools greater than you left?

Maybe I should feel better knowing how much y’all stand to lose soon, but I don’t, because I also know how much everyone else stands to lose who already don’t have anything but debt. Emerging markets are going to get obliterated, all sorts of funds and levels of government, domestic and abroad, are going to get crushed – resulting in more services getting cut for the poor -, and so, whether you like it or not, are most Americans and Europeans who fancy calling themselves ‘investors’.

They’re not. They’re just a bunch of grifters and bums. They couldn’t (have) survive(d) in a marketplace that has actual price discovery. They couldn’t have borne the losses and recuperated. Not the way real investors do.

I found this a good and somewhat amusing summary of the feeling before Yellen’s speech today, as expressed yesterday via MarketWatch:

‘Hell Will Break Loose’ If Fed Loses Patience

It could go either way, according to the Fly from the iBankCoin blog, who spoke of extremes. “If we find out this Wednesday that [Janet Yellen] is not, in fact, patient, hell will break loose and 66 seals of hell will be broken — paving way for actual centaurs to roam, wall-kicking people in the faces with their hooves,” he wrote. “On the other hand, if Janet is patient and says so, we’re all going to make an absurd amount of money.”

Having a rigged, distorted system that fakes being a market and makes a bunch of grifters a lot of money, is not how you build a functioning society.

Oh, and you know what the worst thing of all is – if it can get any worse -? If the Fed and other central banks, post-2008, would have simply let the markets sort things out, most of the ‘money’ that has now been so horribly dislocated and mis-invested and debt-riddled, would never have existed in the first place.

The S&P would have been at 500 or so, bonds would have ‘normal’ prices and yields, actual investors would have taken their losses, and we would have had at least some sparks of brightness to look forward to. As things are, there’s only the headlights of that highspeed train coming at us from the other side of the tunnel.