recession Archives - Page 5 of 8 - The Automatic Earth

WikiLeaks’ data dump on Tuesday accounted for less than 1% of ‘Vault 7’, a collection of leaked CIA documents which revealed the extent of its hacking capabilities, the whistleblowing organization has claimed on Twitter. ‘Year Zero’, comprising 8,761 documents and files, was released unexpectedly by WikiLeaks. The organization had initially announced that it was part of a larger series, known as ‘Vault 7.’ However, it did not give further information on when more leaks would occur or on how many series would comprise ‘Vault 7’. The leaks have revealed the CIA’s covert hacking targets, with smart TVs infiltrated for the purpose of collecting audio, even when the device is powered off. The Google Android Operating System, used in 85% of the world’s smartphones, was also exposed as having severe vulnerabilities, allowing the CIA to “weaponize” the devices.

The CIA would not confirm the authenticity of the leak. “We do not comment on the authenticity or content of purported intelligence documents.” Jonathan Liu, a spokesman for the CIA, is cited as saying in The Washington Post. WikiLeaks claims the leak originated from within the CIA before being “lost” and circulated amongst “former U.S. government hackers and contractors.” From there the classified information was passed to WikiLeaks. End-to-end encryption used by applications such as WhatsApp was revealed to be futile against the CIA’s hacking techniques, dubbed ‘zero days’, which were capable of accessing messages before encryption was applied. The leak also revealed the CIA’s ability to hide its own hacking fingerprint and attribute it to others, including Russia. An archive of fingerprints – digital traces which give a clue about the hacker’s identity – was collected by the CIA and left behind to make others appear responsible.

The Trump bull is alive for now.

• US Private Sector Adds 298,000 Jobs In February – ADP (R.)

U.S. private employers added 298,000 jobs in February, well above economists’ expectations, a report by a payrolls processor showed on Wednesday. Economists surveyed by Reuters had forecast the ADP National Employment Report would show a gain of 190,000 jobs, with estimates ranging from 150,000 to 247,000. Private payroll gains in the month earlier were revised up to 261,000 from an originally reported 246,000 increase. The ADP figures come ahead of the U.S. Labor Department’s more comprehensive non-farm payrolls report on Friday, which includes both public and private-sector employment. Economists polled by Reuters are looking for U.S. private payroll employment to have grown by 193,000 jobs in February, down from 237,000 the month before. Total non-farm employment is expected to have changed by 190,000. The unemployment rate is forecast to tick down to 4.7% from the 4.8% recorded a month earlier.

How much of it will be put to good use, and how much merely siphoned off?

• Trump Begins to Map Out $1 Trillion Infrastructure Plan (WSJ)

President Donald Trump pushed his White House team on Wednesday to craft a plan for $1 trillion in infrastructure spending that would pressure states to streamline local permitting, favor renovation of existing roads and highways over new construction and prioritize projects that can quickly begin construction. “We’re not going to give the money to states unless they can prove that they can be ready, willing and able to start the project,” Mr. Trump said at a private meeting with aides and executives that The WSJ was invited to. “We don’t want to give them money if they’re all tied up for seven years with state bureaucracy.” Mr. Trump said he would was inclined to give states 90 days to start projects, and asked Scott Pruitt, the new head of the EPA, to provide a recommendation.

He expressed interest in building new high-speed railroads, inquired about the possibility of auctioning the broadcast spectrum to wireless carriers, and asked for more details about the Hyperloop, a project envisioned by Tesla founder Elon Musk that would rapidly transport passengers in pods through low-pressure tubes. “America has always been a nation of great promise, because we dream big,” Mr. Trump said. “We’re going to really dream big now.” The president called for a $1 trillion infrastructure plan last month in his address to a joint session of Congress and added that the projects would be financed through public and private capital. The White House was considering a repatriation tax holiday to generate about $200 billion in funding, but other sources also were being considered, a senior administration aide said.

In the meeting, the president said he aimed to win approval for an infrastructure plan once Congress finishes deliberations on health care and a reform of tax laws. Mr. Trump suggested that an infrastructure plan may be part of the tax-reform debate. “We’ll see what happens,” he said. Vice President Mike Pence, who sat across from the president during the meeting, said that Congress is “committed to the president’s vision.” “There’s a great of interest in Congress in doing this,” Mr. Pence said. “But there’s also just as much interest in listening to leaders in the private sector to identify the capital and identify the needs to be able to finance this in a way that really captures the energy of the American economy.”

Time to acknowledge demand isn’t coming back?

• US Oil Price Plunges Toward $50 As A Perfect Storm Brews (CNBC)

Oil is on track to break through the key psychological level of $50 a barrel after a ninth straight rise in U.S. crude stockpiles came at exactly the wrong moment, analysts said Wednesday. The amount of crude oil in U.S. storage rose to another record high on Wednesday, jumping 8.2 million barrels from the previous week, the Energy Information Administration reported. The increase was more than four times what analysts expected. Weekly figures also showed U.S. oil production continuing to tick up toward 9.1 million barrels a day, the highest level in more than a year. That provided further evidence that rising American output is confounding efforts by OPEC, Russia and 10 other exporters to reduce global oil inventories by curbing their own output. The data sent U.S. benchmark West Texas Intermediate crude prices plunging more than 5% to a nearly three-month low.

The plunge through a number of lows on Wednesday puts oil on a path to test the December low of $49.95 a barrel, said John Kilduff at energy hedge fund Again Capital. “From there you could accelerate,” he told CNBC, adding that $50 “was the fail-safe.” Kilduff’s downside target, once oil breaks below $50 a barrel, is $42. For the last three months, oil has traded in a range between $49.61 and $55.24. According to Kilduff, all the elements are in place for oil to break below its three-month range: lack of cohesion among OPEC members, bearish statements from oil ministers at CERAWeek conference by IHS Markit and subdued refinery activity as operators perform seasonal maintenance in the United States. On Tuesday, Saudi Oil Minister Khalid al-Falih warned at CERAWeek that the kingdom would only support OPEC’s intervention in markets for a “restricted period of time” and would not “underwrite the investments of others at our own expense and long-term interests.”

Snippets from an interview. The euro was doomed from the start because of conditions put on it.

• Professor Steve Keen On The Problem With Europe (DR)

But the trouble is, you see, they didn’t have to have a single currency combined with the 60% limit on government debt and the 3% limit on government deficits. If they simply had a currency and made no rules whatsoever about that, then it would have been feasible, potentially, to say okay, well it’s not working as well as we would like it to, but not imposing austerity on economies in a downturn, which is what they ended up doing courtesy of those rules. Maybe we need a treasury to make it work better, but it wasn’t just the fact that it was only the central bank, it was also the rules on government spending.

[..] another part of it, which is quite intriguing, I heard in Berlin just recently, is that also, one of the other rules they agreed to, or one of the other objectives they agreed to, not a rule, was to target a 2% rate of inflation. Now what you actually had happen was that Germany hit about 1%, France actually hit about 2%, Italy hit about 3%, the three major trading partners of course on the block. Well, that means, as a result, over every year, German manufacturers were gaining a 2% cost advantage over Italian manufacturers. Which ultimately means of course that people don’t buy Lamborghinis and Fiats anymore, they buy Mercedes, because for the same features they’re cheaper.

It’s not about labour productivity alone, it’s about the rate of inflation, which comes down to the rate of wage change, because the Germans suppressed the rate of wage change, the rate of inflation was lower, and that was 1% below the level they agreed to. Now, if they’d agreed to 2%, and France did 2%, and Italy maybe suppressed its wage change and they hit 2%, you wouldn’t have these imbalances. But they’ve built up over 15 – going on close to 20 years now – and those level of imbalances mean that, fundamentally, Italian industry can’t compete with German industry, not because of productivity differences so much but wage costs combined with that.

[..] That’s why Trump’s complaining about Germany having an undervalued currency, and he’s bloody right on that front. If you can run a 9% of GDP trade surplus, which is the level Germany’s now hit, a lot of that is with the rest of the world, the EU itself overall is balanced, so there’s a huge imbalance – Germany’s got a huge trade surplus with the rest of Europe, but it’s also got it with the rest of the world, and on that scale I think Germany’s trade balance now is the same scale as China’s. Now that’s ludicrous.

Perhaps the biggest problem with Europe is that transparency and the EU don’t mix. In this case it’s clear why: the ECB was used as a -very blunt- tool for political pressure. Their defense is basically: if we become transparent, we’re no longer independent. And people buy that?!

• Varoufakis Back In Brussels In Push For ECB Transparency (EUO)

Former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis has joined forces with the German left-wing MEP Fabio De Masi in a bid to clarify whether the ECB had a legal right to limit the liquidity of Greece’s banks in 2015. The duo told journalists in Brussels on Wednesday (8 March) that they were collecting signatures for a petition to ECB president Mario Draghi, asking him to disclose two legal opinions commissioned by the bank. The first study was ordered in February, before the ECB decided to limit the access of Greek banks to ECB funding and opted instead to open access to the emergency liquidity assistance (ELA) – a fund with more restrictive access conditions. The decision was taken a few days after the radical left-wing Syriza party came to power, with Varoufakis as finance minister.

The second study, in June 2015, was about the ECB’s decision to freeze the amount of money available through the ELA after the Greek government’s decision to hold a referendum on the bailout conditions required by the country’s creditors. The measure was taken over concerns that Greek banks would become insolvent because of the deadlock in bailout talks. It also put more pressure on the Greek government to accept the lenders’ conditions. To avoid a bank run, where large numbers of people withdraw money from their deposit accounts at the same time, the government introduced capital controls. This meant that Greek people were only able to withdraw a maximum of €60 per day. The measure prevented a capital run, but also put pressure on Athens to agree to creditors’ terms for a third bailout.

Varoufakis, who was finance minister at the time, said this was a breach of the independence of the bank. “The ECB has the capacity to close down all the banks of a member state. At the same time, it has a charter which grants it – supposedly – complete independence from politics. And yet, there is no central bank, at least in the West, which has less independence of the political process,” Varoufakis said. He said Draghi was “completely reliant” on the decisions of an “informal group of finance ministers”, referring to the fact that the Eurogroup, which gathers the finance ministers of the 19 eurozone countries, isn’t enshrined in EU treaties. “It is apparent that Draghi didn’t feel that the was on solid legal ground when proceeding with the closing of Greek banks,” Varoufakis said.

[..] In September 2015, Fabio De Masi already asked Draghi for the opinions. But the ECB chief, in a letter made public by the MEP, said the bank does not plan to publish the legal opinions because this would “undermine the ECB’s ability to obtain uncensored, objective and comprehensive legal advice, which is essential for well-informed and comprehensive deliberations of its decision-making bodies”. “Legal opinions provided by external lawyers and related legal advice are protected by legal professional privilege (the so-called ‘attorney-client privilege’) in accordance with European Union case law,” Draghi said. “Those opinions were drafted in full independence, on the understanding that they can only be disclosed by the addressee and only shared with people who need to know in order to take reasoned decisions on the issues at stake,” he added.

No cashless society there.

• Germans Really, Really Love the Euro (BBG)

As worries over the future of the euro zone heat up, the union’s biggest member is doubling down on the single currency in an underappreciated way. Germany’s central bank is by far the biggest issuer of cash in the bloc, with the Bundesbank the source of more euro banknotes in circulation than all of its peers combined. The size of the imbalance is underscored by new data from the ECB, showing nations’ contributions towards the Eurosystem’s consolidated financial statement. Each national central bank, or NCB, has a notional banknote allocation that’s tied to its share of Eurosystem capital. At the end of last year, there were €1.1 trillion euros ($1.25 trillion) in circulation, breaking down like this:

That accounts for how euro cash would be distributed in theory. In order to find out how much cash is actually issued you have to make adjustments that take into account variations in demand, which push the number higher in some countries and lower in others. The adjustments look like this:

The Bundesbank has, since the introduction of the euro in 2002, put a net €327 billion into circulation above its on-paper allocation. By combining the figures in the two charts, we arrive at a true picture of the origin of banknotes in the European economy:

“The mainstream media are not honorable independent people. They are big business not much different from the banks.”

• The Meltdown in Politics (Martin Armstrong)

The bias of the press is getting so bad, they are undermining everything they were supposed to stand for. This is a critical aspect in the decline and fall of an empire, nation, or city state. Once the news is compromised, confidence not just in the press, but in everything crumbles. The mainstream media are not honorable independent people. They are big business not much different from the banks. They lobby for their special deals and the support the status quo. The New York Times at least admitted their coverage of the election was biased. They apologized, but nothing has really changed. “As we reflect on the momentous result, and the months of reporting and polling that preceded it, we aim to rededicate ourselves to the fundamental mission of Times journalism. That is to report America and the world honestly, without fear or favor, striving always to understand and reflect all political perspectives and life experiences in the stories that we bring to you. It is also to hold power to account, impartially and unflinchingly.”

Even if Trump met with Putin, exactly what does that infer? Did it alter the election? No. Even Obama admitted that no hack altered the vote count. So what is the issue? The press aids the Democrats in trying to blame Putin for Hillary’s loss. But there is not a single shred of evidence that ANY of the leaked emails from the Democrats was ever altered or was fake. The Democrats simply got caught with their hand in the cookie jar and blame Putin. So what is all this Russia thing about? It seems to be just a diversion to discredit Trump and stop the agenda of any reform. A simple technical analysis of Democrat v Republican shows that the former is in a major decline and their agenda has been dying. In fact, look out for 2018-2019. Sheer chaos is coming.

In Europe, political forces are also in a state of denial. The EU is collapsing and the politicians refuse to surrender their goals. Instead, they lash out at what they are calling “populism” as with the election of Trump, BREXIT, and the developments in France. The will of the people is not worth anything when it goes against their dreams. So in both cases, we are witnessing the demise of the West. All of this political fighting is setting the stage for the shift from the West to the East of financial power. The wheel of fortune spins. We lost. What is accomplished by overthrowing Trump? What is accomplished by forcing Europe to remain in the EU with unelected people controlling everything from Brussels? If the press succeeds in overturning Trump, what is accomplished? Do they really think everything can go back to the way it was before?

[..] the media in the USA has degenerated to fake news, but in Europe the very same trend has emerged. This is a serious nail in our coffin and mainstream media has indeed become the sword of our own destruction. Can we prevent this outcome? No. All we can do is hopefully learn from our mistakes and this time try to create a system that prevents such an oligarchy from rising. All Republics historically collapse into oligarchies. As we head into 2018, this is going to get really bad. This is going to be a turning point of great importance in the political world.

A president without a party. Or a program. Doesn’t seem to add up.

• Macron Faces A Really Big Problem If He Becomes French President (Con.)

Currently riding high in the polls, Emmanuel Macron, the self-styled “beyond left and right” candidate for the French election, has been tipped to become the next president in May. But if he does, will he actually run the country? This question might sound odd but the nuances of the French political system put Macron in a spot of bother. The president derives their power from the support of a majority in the lower house of parliament, the National Assembly. Macron was a minister for the Socialist Party government but quit in 2016 to form his own political movement. Now he doesn’t even have a party, let alone a majority. Although the constitution of the French Fifth Republic, created by Charles De Gaulle in 1958, extended presidential powers, it did not enable the president to run the country.

There are only a few presidential powers that do not need the prime minister’s authorisation. The president can appoint a prime minister, dissolve the National Assembly, authorise a referendum and become a “temporary dictator” in exceptional circumstances imperilling the nation. They can also appoint three judges to the Constitutional Council and refer any law to this body. While all important tasks, this does not, by any stretch of the imagination, amount to running a country. The president can’t suggest laws, pass them through parliament and then implement them without the prime minister. The role of a president is best defined as a “referee”. Presidential powers give the ability to oversee operations and act when the smooth running of institutions is impeded.

So a president is able to step in if a grave situation arises or to unlock a standoff between the prime minister and parliament, such as by announcing a referendum on a disputed issue or by dismissing the National Assembly. So, why does everyone see the president as the key figure? In a nutshell, it’s because the constitution has never been truly applied. There lies the devilish beauty of French politics. A country known since the 1789 revolution for its inability to foster strong majorities in parliament has succeeded, from 1962, in providing solid majorities.

This is what happens everywhere, in varying ways. In France, both establishment blocks look to be cast aside.

• French Insurgents Thrust Establishment Aside in Crucial Election (BBG)

The old order is fading in France. Every election since Charles de Gaulle founded the Fifth Republic more than half a century ago has seen at least one of the major parties in the presidential runoff and most have featured both. With Republicans and Socialists consumed by infighting and voters thoroughly fed up, polls suggest that neither will make it this year. For the past month, survey after survey has projected a decider between Emmanuel Macron, a 39-year-old rookie who doesn’t even have a party behind him, and Marine Le Pen, who’s been ostracized throughout her career because of her party’s history of racism. “We’ve gone as far as we can go with a certain way of doing politics,” said Brice Teinturier, head of the Ipsos polling company and author of a book on voters’ disillusionment. “Everyone feels the system is blocked.”

Claude Bartolone, the Socialist president of the National Assembly, said in an interview with Le Monde Tuesday he may back Macron because he doesn’t “identify” with the more extreme platform put forward by his party’s candidate Benoit Hamon. De Gaulle’s latest standard-bearer Francois Fillon has spent the past week facing down rebellions in his party triggered by a criminal probe of his finances. Former Prime Minister Manuel Valls hasn’t campaigned for Hamon since losing to him in the primary and Socialist President Francois Hollande hasn’t even endorsed his party’s candidate either. Instead, senior figures from the Socialist camp are endorsing Macron, with former Paris Mayor Bertrand Delanoe the latest to offer his backing on Wednesday. “There’s a breakdown of parties in France,” Francois Bayrou, a two-time centrist candidate who is now backing Macron, said Tuesday on RMC Radio. “There are hostile battles between factions within each party, which has ruined the parties and ruined the image of politics.”

Crazy that such differences still persist.

• Iceland First Country In The World To Make Firms Prove Equal Pay (Ind.)

On International Women’s Day, Iceland became the first country in the world to force companies to prove they pay all employees the same regardless of gender, ethnicity, sexuality or nationality, The country’s government announced a new law that will require every company with 25 or more staff to gain a certificate demonstrating pay equality. Iceland is not the first country to introduce a scheme like this – Switzerland has one, as does the US state of Minnesota – but Iceland is thought to be the first to make it a mandatory requirement. Equality and Social Affairs Minister Thorsteinn Viglundsson said that “the time is right to do something radical about this issue.” “Equal rights are human rights. We need to make sure that men and women enjoy equal opportunity in the workplace. It is our responsibility to take every measure to achieve that,” he said.

The move comes as part of a drive by the Nordic nation to eradicate the gender pay gap by 2022. In October, thousands of female employees across Iceland walked out of workplaces at 2.38pm to protest against earning less than men. After this time in a typical eight-hour day, women are essentially working without pay, according to unions and women’s organisations. Iceland has been at the forefront of establishing pay equality, having already introduced a minimum 40% quota for women on boards of companies with more than 50 employees. The country has been ranked the best in the world for gender equality by the World Economic Forum for eight years running, but despite this, Icelandic women still earn 14 to 18% less than men, on average.

“Cleaning up the plant [..] is expected to take 30 to 40 years, at a cost Japan’s trade and industry ministry recently estimated at 21.5tr yen ($189bn).” Uh, no, it will cost far more than $189 billion, and it’s to NOT clean up the plant. They have no idea how to do it. It’s all just fantasy.

• Fukushima Clean-Up Falters 6 Years After Tsunami (G.)

Barely a fifth of the way into their mission, the engineers monitoring the Scorpion’s progress conceded defeat. With a remote-controlled snip of its cable, the latest robot sent into the bowels of one of Fukushima Daiichi’s damaged reactors was cut loose, its progress stalled by lumps of fuel that overheated when the nuclear plant suffered a triple meltdown six years ago this week. As the 60cm-long Toshiba robot, equipped with a pair of cameras and sensors to gauge radiation levels was left to its fate last month, the plant’s operator, Tokyo Electric Power (Tepco), attempted to play down the failure of yet another reconnaissance mission to determine the exact location and condition of the melted fuel. Even though its mission had been aborted, the utility said, “valuable information was obtained which will help us determine the methods to eventually remove fuel debris”.

The Scorpion mishap, two hours into an exploration that was supposed to last 10 hours, underlined the scale and difficulty of decommissioning Fukushima Daiichi – an unprecedented undertaking one expert has described as “almost beyond comprehension”. Cleaning up the plant, scene of the world’s worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl after it was struck by a magnitude-9 earthquake and tsunami on the afternoon of 11 March 2011, is expected to take 30 to 40 years, at a cost Japan’s trade and industry ministry recently estimated at 21.5tr yen ($189bn). The figure, which includes compensating tens of thousands of evacuees, is nearly double an estimate released three years ago. The tsunami killed almost 19,000 people, most of them in areas north of Fukushima, and forced 160,000 people living near the plant to flee their homes. Six years on, only a small number have returned to areas deemed safe by the authorities.

[..] Shaun Burnie, a senior nuclear specialist at Greenpeace Germany who is based in Japan, describes the challenge confronting the utility as “unprecedented and almost beyond comprehension”, adding that the decommissioning schedule was “never realistic or credible”. The latest aborted exploration of reactor No 2 “only reinforces that reality”, Burnie says. “Without a technical solution for dealing with unit one or three, unit two was seen as less challenging. So much of what is communicated to the public and media is speculation and wishful thinking on the part of industry and government. “The current schedule for the removal of hundreds of tons of molten nuclear fuel, the location and condition of which they still have no real understanding, was based on the timetable of prime minister [Shinzo] Abe in Tokyo and the nuclear industry – not the reality on the ground and based on sound engineering and science.”

And it will remain in recession for a long time.

• Eurostat: Greece Is The Only EU Country Still In Recession (NE)

Household consumption and a rebound in investment drove economic growth in the euro zone in the last three months of last year, the latest data from EU statistics office Eurostat shows. Eurostat confirmed its earlier estimate that the economy of the 19 countries sharing the euro grew 0.4% quarter-on-quarter and 1.7% year-on-year. It said household consumption added 0.2 % points to the final quarterly growth number and capital investment added another 0.1 points, rebounding from a 0.1 point negative contribution in the third quarter. Growing inventories added another 0.1 points and government spending another 0.1 points while net trade subtracted 0.1 points.

Greece was the only country that was in negative territory, with GDP declining by 1.1% compared with the last quarter of 2015 and by 1.2% compared to the third quarter of 2016. Combined, the eurozone continued steady recovery, with the economy growing by 1.7% year on year and 0.4% on a quarterly basis. Messages were positive in the eurozone core. Germany grew by 1.8% and France by 1.2%, while the third largest economy of the euro, Italy, increasing by 1%. Impressive was the growth of Spain as it reached 3%. Social protection spending in Greece represented 20.5 % of the country’s GDP in 2015.

This is slightly higher than both the Eurozone average ratio (20.1% of GDP) and the EU28 average ratio (19.2% of GDP). Social protection expenditure in EU member-states ranged from 9.6% of GDP in Ireland to 25.6% of GDP in Finland in that year. Eight member-states (Finland, France, Denmark, Austria, Italy, Sweden, Greece and Belgium) spent more than 20% of GDP on social protection while Ireland, the Baltic states, Romania, Cyprus, Malta and the Czech Republic spend less than 13%.

“Tax rates are expected to reach 26%, while pensions are being cut by as much as 22% by 2022.”

• Greek Farmers Clash With Riot Police In Athens Over Austerity (G.)

Farmers who travelled to Athens from Crete have clashed with riot police in the latest unrest on the streets of the Greek capital, prompted by the government’s austerity policies. The confrontation occurred outside the agriculture ministry, where farmers wielding staffs engaged with police firing teargas to prevent them from entering the building. More than 1,100 stockbreeders and farmers arrived on overnight ferries in the early hours of Wednesday, to protest against increases in tax and social security contributions demanded by the creditors keeping Greece afloat. Footage showed the farmers, many wearing black bandanas, smashing the windows of riot vans with shepherds’ staffs, setting fire to rubbish bins and hurling rocks and stones.

When the agriculture minister, Evangelos Apostolou, initially refused to meet a 45-member delegation representing protesters, anger peaked. “Dialogue is one thing, thuggery quite another,” the minister said, before attempts at further talks also foundered. Greek farmers, long perceived to be the privileged recipients of generous EU funds, have historically been exempt from taxation. However, the barrage of cuts and increases in the price of everything from fuel to fertilisers will hit them hard. Tax rates are expected to reach 26%, while pensions are being cut by as much as 22% by 2022. Prof George Pagoulatos, who teaches European politics and economy at the University of Athens, said: “Farmers, in many ways, are a classic example of one of Greece’s protected groups. “In certain rural constituencies, like Crete, they are also electorally very influential.”

Wages have become too low to pay for pensions. 23% unemployment. Almost half of Greeks depend on pensions to stay alive. More cuts are inevitable. The only way is down.

• It Takes 10 Workers In Greece To Pay One Pension (K.)

The constant decline in salaries and the rise of flexible forms of employment are undermining the sustainability of the country’s social security system despite the numerous interventions in terms of pensions. According to social security experts, the slide in the average salary means that it now takes the contributions of 10 workers to pay one pension; before the crisis it required the contributions of four workers. The deterioration of that ratio highlights the system’s viability problem. The main feature of that problem is that the contributions of today’s workers go in their entirety toward covering the pensions of today’s pensioners.

According to data from the new Single Social Security Entity (EFKA), the analysis of employers’ declarations from May 2016 showed that the average salary of 1.4 million workers with full employment amounted to €1,176 per month. The average monthly gross earnings of the 588,000 part-time workers amounted to just €394; their number increased by about 11% from a year earlier. The same data show that bigger enterprises pay higher salaries: Businesses with fewer than 10 employees have an average full-employment salary that amounts to just 58.9% of that paid to employees of companies with more than 10 workers.

Debt Rattle March 4 2017

Mar 042017

March 4, 2017 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 9:42 am Finance Tagged with: Brexit, ECB, Fed, ICE, QE, rate hike, recession, refugees, selloff, terrorism, Yellen 4 Responses »

DPC Pine Street below Kearney after the great San Francisco earthquake and fire 1906

• Yellen Points To March Rate Hike As Fed Signals End Of Easy Money (R.)

• The Fed Is Embarking On A Path That Usually Ends With A Recession (Udland)

• A Selloff Is Looming As Fear Stalks The Stock Market Rally (MW)

• Medicine In The USA Is A Hostage Racket (Jim Kunstler)

• Chevron Warns Future Oil Drilling May Be ‘Economically Infeasible’ (Ind.)

• Germany-Turkey War Of Words Escalates (BBC)

• UK Could Quit EU Without Paying A Penny (G.)

• Greece Should Be Added to ECB’s QE Bond-Buying List (BBG)

• To Solve Refugee Crisis, Stop Funding Terrorism – Tulsi Gabbard (TAM)

• Austria To Stop Giving Food, Shelter To Rejected Asylum Seekers (ZH)

• US Considers Separating Women And Children Who Enter Country Illegally (G.)

• Parents Fearing Deportation Pick Guardians For US Children (R.)

‘The end of easy money’ will only come through collapse.

• Yellen Points To March Rate Hike As Fed Signals End Of Easy Money (R.)

The U.S. Federal Reserve’s long-stalled ‘liftoff’ of interest rates may finally get airborne this year as policymakers from Chair Janet Yellen on Friday to regional leaders across the United States signaled that the era of easy money is drawing to a close. Yellen capped off a seemingly coordinated push from the central bank on Friday when she cemented the view that the Fed will raise interest rates at its next meeting on March 14-15, and likely be able to move faster after that than it has in years. It’s a welcome turn for the Fed chair, who has hoped to get rates off the ground throughout her three-year tenure, and now sees the economy on track and investors aligned around the idea.

“At our meeting later this month, the committee will evaluate whether employment and inflation are continuing to evolve in line with our expectations, in which case a further adjustment of the federal funds rate would likely be appropriate,” Yellen said at a business luncheon in Chicago. “The process of scaling back accommodation likely will not be as slow as it was in 2015 and 2016,” she added. Stocks were up slightly, and futures tied to rate-hike expectations moved little on Yellen’s remarks. The comments from Fed speakers this week had already pushed market pricing of a March hike to 80%. The Fed has struggled for the past three years to raise interest rates off the zero lower bound as the U.S. economy slowly healed after the Great Recession. Issues from sluggish inflation globally to the dampening effect of a strong dollar and low energy prices blew them off course. By contrast, 2017 may be the year the Fed is able to follow through on its forecast of three rate hikes.

Central bank manipulation is a craziness that can end in one way only.

• The Fed Is Embarking On A Path That Usually Ends With A Recession (Udland)

Stocks are at record highs. And while the Trump administration’s early days have been filled with internal political chaos, the market’s reaction has continued to remain positive. On Wednesday, when U.S. stocks had their best day of the year, the popular SPY ETF, which tracks the S&P 500, saw $8.2 billion in new inflows, its single-best day since December 2014. But something else happened on Wednesday that should have equity bulls quite a bit more concerned: markets got behind the idea the Federal Reserve will raise interest rates in March and, perhaps, be more aggressive about raising rates in than previously expected.On Friday, Fed Chair Janet Yellen signaled that a March rate hike is on the table and said the pace of the Fed raising rates in 2017 would likely exceed that seen in 2015 and 2016.

And while an accomodative Fed has been seen as a backstop for markets during the post-crisis bull run higher, a tighter Fed is bad news for stocks because when rates begin to rise, the end of the bull market has already been signaled. As we highlighted in our daily market outlook post, David Rosenberg at Gluskin Sheff wrote Thursday that, “Monetary policy is profoundly more important to the markets and the economy than is the case with fiscal policy, though all the Fed is doing now is removing accommodation.” Rosenberg added that, “there have been 13 Fed rate hike cycles in the post-WWII era, and 10 landed the economy in recession. Soft landing are rare and when they have occurred, they have come in the third year of the expansion, not the eighth.”

The gray bars mark recessions. Ahead of recessions, rates usually rise. Right now, rates are set to rise.

Fear vs greed.

• A Selloff Is Looming As Fear Stalks The Stock Market Rally (MW)

Wall Street’s so-called fear index has started to move in lockstep with stock prices and that has one money manager warning of an impending selloff even as market sentiment remains fairly stable. Jesse Felder, founder of the Felder Report and an alumni of Bear Stearns, on Friday shared a chart that showed an increasingly positive correlation between the S&P 500 and the CBOE Market Volatility Index. “Normally stocks and the VIX move in opposite directions…and it makes sense that rising stock prices mean less fear and vice versa,” said Felder. However, that reverse relationship has started to change in recent days as expectations of a market correction mount.

The VIX is a measure of the market’s expectation for volatility over the next 30 days and is calculated from the implied volatilities of S&P 500 index options. A low reading indicates a placid market while a higher number suggests elevated uncertainty. “The options market is pricing in greater volatility ahead even though stocks don’t yet reflect this same dynamic,” Felder told MarketWatch. “Over the past few years this signal has preceded anywhere from a 2% to a 10% correction.”

That this trend comes on top of the 10-year Treasury yield’s nearly 40% surge over the past year as the Federal Reserve prepares to tighten monetary policy suggest risky assets such as equities will face significant selling pressure. Analysts are projecting the Fed to raise interest rates three times this year, a view reinforced by comments from Fed Chairwoman Janet Yellen on Friday that a rate hike at the next Federal Open Market Committee in mid-March is likely. “The Fed looks like it will take its third step toward tightening here soon so it might pay to remember the old Wall Street adage ‘three steps and a stumble.’ For these reasons, I think the chance of a major reversal is higher than it has been in the past,” he said.

“Some things are too big to fail; some are too broken to fix.”

• Medicine In The USA Is A Hostage Racket (Jim Kunstler)

The ObamaCare quandary. A fiasco for sure. Under it, not uncommonly, a family pays $12,000-a-year for a policy that carries a $5,000 deductible. That’s an interesting number in a land were most people don’t even have enough ready cash for routine car repairs. The cruel and idiotic injustice of such a set-up could only happen in a society that has normalized pervasive lying, universal accounting fraud, and corporate racketeering. I personally doubt the existing health care system can be reformed. Anyway, we’re starting in the wrong place with it. The part that nobody talks about is the psychopathic pricing system that drives medicine. The average cost for a normal (non-surgical) hospital childbirth in America these days is $10,000. WTF? An appendectomy: between $9,000 and $20,000 depending on where. WTF?

These days, a hip replacement runs about $38,000. Of course, you will never find out what a treatment or procedure costs before-the-fact. They simply won’t tell you. They’ll say something utterly ridiculous like, “we just don’t know.” You’ll find out when the bills roll in. Last time I had a hip replacement, I received a single line-item hospital charge report from the insurance company that said: “Room and board, 36 hours… $23,000.” Say what? This was apart from the surgeon’s bill and the cost of the metal implant, just for occupying a bed for a day and a half pending discharge. They didn’t do a damn thing besides take my blood pressure and temperature a dozen times, and give me a few hydrocodone pills.

The ugly truth, readers, is that medicine in the USA is a hostage racket. They have you in a tight spot at a weak moment and they extract maximum payment to allow you to get on with your life, with no meaningful correlation to services rendered — just whatever they could get. Until these racketeers are compelled under law to post their prices openly and transparently, no amount of tweaking the role of insurers or government policy will make any difference. Note, too, that there is a direct connection between the outrageous salaries of hospital executives and their non-transparent, dishonest, and extortionist pricing machinations. The pharma industry is, of course, a subsidiary racket and needs to be subject to the kind of treatment the Department of Justice used to dispense to the likes of the Teamsters Union.

The healthcare system probably will not be reformed, but rather will collapse, and when it does, it will reorganize itself in a way that barely resembles current practice. For one thing, citizens will have to gain control over their own disastrous behavior, especially their eating, or else suffer the consequences, namely an early death. Second, the hospital system must be decentralized so that localities are once again served by small hospitals and clinics. The current system represents a mergers-and-acquisitions orgy that went berserk the past quarter century. The resulting administrative over-burden at every medical practice in the land is a perfectly designed fraud machine for enabling rackets. Preliminary verdict: congress will get nowhere in 2017 trying to fix this mess. Some things are too big to fail; some are too broken to fix. The coming debacle in finance, markets, and currencies will speed its demise.

Because of climate legislation.

• Chevron Warns Future Oil Drilling May Be ‘Economically Infeasible’ (Ind.)

In an industry first, one of the world’s biggest oil companies has warned it could face legal action over climate change. Chevron, the California-based multinational, admitted it could be the subject of “governmental investigations and, potentially, private litigation” because of its role in causing global warming. And the firm added that regulations designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions might also render the “extraction of the company’s oil and gas resources economically infeasible”. Environmentalists suggested the decision to admit the threat to the company could be a reaction to legal case brought last year against Exxon Mobil by the Boston-based Conservation Law Foundation, which alleges the fossil fuel company tried to discredit climate science despite knowing the risks in order to make money.

Chevron was one of a number of oil firms targeted in a campaign by the Union of Concerned Scientists in the US to “stop funding climate disinformation”. And, in an official filing about the state of its financial health to the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the company lays out possible reasons why it might have been in its interest to cast doubt on scientific evidence that its products are causing a problem. Laws requiring the reduction of emissions – like legislation that could be in the UK Government’s long-delayed Emissions Reduction Plan – “may result in increased and substantial … costs and could, among other things, reduce demand for hydrocarbons”, Chevron said in a section called “risk factors”.

“In the years ahead, companies in the energy industry, like Chevron, may be challenged by an increase in international and domestic regulation relating to greenhouse gas emissions,” it said. “Such regulation could have the impact of curtailing profitability in the oil and gas sector or rendering the extraction of the company’s oil and gas resources economically infeasible.”

Makes me fear for Greece.

• Germany-Turkey War Of Words Escalates (BBC)

A row between Ankara and Berlin over a series of cancelled Turkish political rallies in Germany is continuing to escalate. On Friday, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan accused Berlin of “aiding and harbouring” terror. He said a German-Turkish journalist detained by Turkey was a “German agent” and a member of the outlawed Kurdish militant group, the PKK. A source in Germany’s foreign ministry told Reuters the claims were “absurd”. Earlier German Chancellor Angela Merkel said she respected local authorities’ decisions to cancel rallies that Turkey’s justice and economy ministers had been scheduled to address. Turkey is trying to woo ethnic Turkish voters ahead of a key referendum. About 1.4 million Turks living in Germany are eligible to vote in the April referendum, in which President Erdogan aims to win backing for sweeping new powers.

The constitutional changes would boost Mr Erdogan’s presidency and significantly weaken parliament’s role. Turkish officials have been angered after local German officials withdrew permission for rallies in Gaggenau, Cologne and Frechen. Gaggenau authorities had said there was insufficient space for the rally, while Cologne officials said they had been misled about the purpose of the event. Turkish Justice Minister Bekir Bozdag, who had been due to speak in Gaggenau, said he saw “old illnesses flaring up” between the two Nato allies. Meanwhile, Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu accused the German government of backing opposition to Mr Erdogan’s planned constitutional changes. He said: “You are not Turkey’s boss. You are not a first class [country] and Turkey is not second class. We are not treating you like that, and you have to treat Turkey properly. “If you want to maintain your relations with us, you have to learn how to behave.”

Germany’s foreign ministry said the central government had nothing to do with the cancellations, and Ankara should refrain from “pouring oil on the fire”. The growing row is troubling for Chancellor Merkel because she persuaded Turkey to help block the surge of migrants – many of them Syrian refugees – into the EU. Separately, the Dutch government on Friday described plans for a Turkish referendum campaign rally in Rotterdam as “undesirable”. Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu was reportedly meant to attend the rally scheduled for 11 March. Ties between Berlin and Istanbul are also strained over Turkey’s arrest of Deniz Yucel, a journalist who works for Die Welt. Mr Yucel “hid in the German embassy as a member of the PKK and a German agent for one month”, Mr Erdogan said. “When we told them to hand him over to be tried, they refused.” German’s foreign ministry called the spy claims “absurd”. Ms Merkel, referring to the case earlier, told reporters in Tunis: “We support freedom of expression and we can criticise Turkey.”

The EU’s position in the talks will weaken as the union crumbles.

• UK Could Quit EU Without Paying A Penny (G.)

The UK could walk away from the European Union in 2019 without paying a penny, the House of Lords has said, in a report bound to raise tensions with Brussels in the run-up to Brexit talks. The British government would have no legal obligation to either pay a €60bn Brexit bill mooted by the European commission or honour payments into the EU budget promised by the former prime minister David Cameron, according to analysis by the House of Lords EU financial affairs sub-committee. In a report published on Saturday, the committee argues that the British government would be on strong legal ground if it chose to leave the EU without paying anything, adding that Brussels would have no realistic chance of getting any money.

The peers stress, however, that if the government wants goodwill from EU countries and a deal on access to European markets, agreement on the budget will be important. “The UK appears to have a strong legal position in respect of the EU budget post-Brexit and this provides important context to the article 50 negotiations,” said Lady Falkner of Margravine, the Liberal Democrat peer who chairs the sub-committee. “Even though we consider that the UK will not be legally obliged to pay into the EU budget after Brexit, the issue will be a prominent factor in withdrawal negotiations. The government will have to set the financial and political costs of making such payments against potential gains from other elements of the negotiations.”

[..] The peers’ argument will be toxic to the EU’s chief Brexit negotiator, Michel Barnier, whose staff drew up the mooted bill ranging from €55bn-€60bn. This covers the UK’s share of EU civil staff pensions, unpaid bills and decommissioning nuclear power plants. Barnier is expecting the UK to pay into the EU budget in 2019 and 2020, putting the UK on the hook for payments worth £12.4bn, agreed by Cameron in 2013. The EU’s €1tn, seven-year budget was negotiated in late 2013 by EU leaders including the British prime minister. It is due to expire at the end of 2020, although bills may be trickling in until 2023. This reflects that payments for EU-funded infrastructure projects, such as roads or airports, are not settled until two to three years after being promised.

There is no reason for the ECB not to include Greece. Never was. It’s pure economic strangulation.

• Greece Should Be Added to ECB’s QE Bond-Buying List (BBG)

Greece and its creditors look poised to strike a deal that will allow the nation to draw down aid and avoid defaulting on its debts in July. That sounds good, but it is, in fact, just a fudge. What’s needed instead is for the country to regain access to capital markets in its own right. To help make that happen, the European Central Bank should add Greek bonds to the list of securities eligible for purchase under its quantitative easing program.

The deal Greece is about to agree with its European partners and the IMF is the latest in a long line of compromises that have failed to address the core issue – that Greece’s debts, now 170% of economic output, are so burdensome they are preventing a recovery. The IMF is right to argue that Greece needs additional debt relief on the €174 billion it owes to the European Financial Stability Facility and the European Stability Mechanism. With elections looming this year in the Netherlands, France and Germany, however, details about that relief will probably have to wait until next year; voters don’t want to hear about Greek bailouts right now. But the ECB can act swiftly to include Greek bonds in its asset purchase program.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel has told ECB President Mario Draghi that she’s willing to let inclusion in his QE program be used as an incentive to persuade Greece to agree to the new deal, the Greek news service Kathimerini reported on Wednesday, without identifying the source of its information. Draghi has made a new agreement between Greece and its lenders a condition of adding Greek debt to the 60 billion euros of bonds the central bank will buy from April, as it scales back the monthly program from 80 billion euros. Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras told lawmakers last week that he’s hopeful the latest bailout review can be completed by March 20, when euro-region finance ministers are scheduled to meet in Brussels.

While Greek yields have declined in recent weeks, they remain too high for the country to attempt to tap the markets. Greece’s two-year borrowing cost of about 7%, for example, compares with just 2% for Italy and 1.7% for Spain, both of which have benefited from the support of ECB purchases:

“..never once laying blame to the U.S. military establishment for spending over $1 billion a year arming Syrian rebels.”

• To Solve Refugee Crisis, Stop Funding Terrorism – Tulsi Gabbard (TAM)

Democratic Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, the politician who previously accused the U.S. of arming ISIS, is still calling on the U.S. government to stop its disastrous regime change policies in the Middle East. According to a press release made public on Tuesday, Gabbard has again called for the U.S. to stop aiding terrorists like al-Qaeda and ISIS. Gabbard’s guest at the presidential address to Congress, a Kurdish refugee activist, also called for an end to the U.S. policy of “regime change in Syria.” Gabbard said:

“In the face of unimaginable heartbreak, Tima has been a voice for the voiceless, a champion for refugees worldwide, and a strong advocate for ending the regime change war in Syria. I am honored to welcome her to Washington tonight as we raise our voices to call on our nation’s leaders to end the counterproductive regime change war in Syria that has caused great human suffering, refugees, loss of life, and devastation. We urge leaders in Congress to pass the Stop Arming Terrorists Act and end our destructive policy of using American taxpayer dollars to provide direct and indirect support to armed militants allied with terrorist groups like al-Qaeda and ISIS in Syria, who are fighting to overthrow the Syrian government.”

Gabbard also reportedly told Russian state-owned news station RT: “For years, our government has been providing both direct and indirect support to these armed militant groups, who are working directly with or under the command of terrorist groups like Al-Qaeda and ISIS, all in their effort and fight to overthrow the Syrian government.” The activist, Tima Kurdi, is more widely known as the aunt of a three-year-old boy who drowned on the shores of Turkey in September 2015. The image went viral on social media and was easily manipulated by the mainstream media to further the United States’ agenda in the region, never once laying blame to the U.S. military establishment for spending over $1 billion a year arming Syrian rebels.

Welcome to Europe. It’s the same as America.

• Austria To Stop Giving Food, Shelter To Rejected Asylum Seekers (ZH)

In a bill aimed at encouraging asylum seekers to leave voluntarily, Austrian lawmakers are considering halting the provision of food and accommodation to migrants who are denied asylum and refuse to leave the country. Austria took in roughly 90,000 asylum seekers in 2015, more than 1 percent of its population, as it was swept up in Europe’s migration crisis when hundreds of thousands of people crossed its borders, most on their way to Germany. As Reuters notes, it has since tightened immigration restrictions and helped shut down the route through the Balkans by which almost all those people – many of them fleeing war and poverty in the Middle East and elsewhere – arrived. Asylum applications fell by more than half last year.

Asylum seekers in Austria get so-called basic services, including free accommodation, food, access to medical treatment and €40 pocket money a month. But now, Austria’s centrist coalition government on Tuesday agreed on a draft law which would allow authorities to stop providing accommodation and food to rejected asylum seekers who refuse to leave the country. “The first thing is basically that they don’t get anything from the Austrian state if they don’t have the right to stay here. Is that so hard to understand?” As Politico reports, Interior Minister Wolfgang Sobotka said the law, which will need approval by parliament, was designed to encourage rejected asylum seekers to leave voluntarily.

This is getting too absurd.

• US Considers Separating Women And Children Who Enter Country Illegally (G.)

Women and children crossing together illegally into the United States could be separated by US authorities under a proposal being considered by the Department of Homeland Security, according to three government officials. Part of the reason for the proposal is to deter mothers from migrating to the United States with their children, said the officials, who have been briefed on the proposal. The policy shift would allow the government to keep parents in custody while they contest deportation or wait for asylum hearings. Children would be put into protective custody with the Department of Health and Human Services, in the “least restrictive setting” until they can be taken into the care of a US relative or state-sponsored guardian.

Currently, families contesting deportation or applying for asylum are generally released from detention quickly and allowed to remain in the United States until their cases are resolved. A federal appeals court ruling bars prolonged child detention. Donald Trump has called for ending so-called “catch and release”, in which people who cross illegally are freed to live in the United States while awaiting legal proceedings. Two of the officials were briefed on the proposal at a 2 February town hall for asylum officers by US Citizenship and Immigration Services asylum chief John Lafferty. A third DHS official said the department was actively considering separating women from their children but has not made a decision. About 54,000 children and their guardians were apprehended between 1 October 2016, and 31 January 2017, more than double the number caught over the same time period a year earlier.

The sadness is deafening.

• Parents Fearing Deportation Pick Guardians For US Children (R.)

Parents who immigrated illegally to the United States and now fear deportation under the Trump administration are inundating immigration advocates with requests for help in securing care for their children in the event they are expelled from the country. The Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles (CHIRLA) advocacy group has been receiving about 10 requests a day from parents who want to put in place temporary guardianships for their children, said spokesman Jorge-Mario Cabrera. Last year, the group said it received about two requests a month for guardianship letters and notarization services. At the request of a nonprofit organization, the National Lawyers Guild in Washington D.C. put out a call this week for volunteer attorneys to help immigrants fill out forms granting friends or relatives the right to make legal and financial decisions in their absence.

In New Jersey, immigration attorney Helen Ramirez said she is getting about six phone calls a day from parents. Last year, she said, she had no such calls. “Their biggest fear is that their kids will end up in foster care,” Ramirez said. President Donald Trump’s administration has issued directives to agents to more aggressively enforce immigration laws and more immigrants are coming under scrutiny by the authorities. For parents of U.S. citizens who are ordered removed, the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency “accommodates, to the extent practicable, the parents’ efforts to make provisions” for their children, said ICE spokeswoman Sarah Rodriguez. She said that might include access to a lawyer, consular officials and relatives for detained parents to execute powers of attorney or apply for passports and buy airline tickets if the parents decide whether or not to take the children with them.

Randy Capps of the Migration Policy Institute (MPI), a Washington-based non-profit that analyzes the movement of people worldwide, said that while putting contingency plans in place is a good idea, he does not think the level of fear is justified. During the previous administration of President Barack Obama, a Democrat, the likelihood of both parents being deported was slim, Capps said. He doubts there will be a huge shift under Republican Trump toward deporting both parents. “The odds are still very low but not as low as they were – and this is just the beginning of the administration,” he said.

Debt Rattle January 25 2017

Jan 252017

January 25, 2017 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 11:16 am Finance Tagged with: bumblebee, environmentalism, EPA, EU, Greece, muzzle, New Deal, pensions, recession, refugees, Trump 13 Responses »

Jack Delano Family of Dennis Decosta, Portuguese Farm Security Administration client 1940

• US Demoted To ‘Flawed Democracy’ (CNBC)

• David Stockman: Prepare for Fiscal Bloodbath, Not Fiscal Stimulus (DR)

• Donald Trump Claims ‘Environmentalism Is Out Of Control’ (Ind.)

• Trump Administration Seeks To Muzzle US Agency Employees (R.)

• Trump Poised To Build Wall, Ban Many Middle East Immigrants (WSJ)

• Trump Pins Keystone, Dakota Pipeline Fate on Renegotiation (BBG)

• Pricier Oil Means China’s Foreign Reserves Will Shrink Even Faster (BBG)

• A $90 Billion Wave of Debt Shows Cracks in US Real Estate Boom (BBG)

• A New Deal to Save Europe (Varoufakis)

• The European New Deal (Varoufakis)

• Karl Rove’s Prophecy (Unz)

• Bumblebee Added to US Endangered Species List (VoA)

• Half Of Families In Greece Live On Pensions (Kath.)

• Cold Weather Reignites Fears For Refugees Poorly Sheltered In Greece (G.)

“..Washington can’t point fingers at President Donald Trump for the nation’s downgrade. “The U.S. has been teetering on the brink of becoming a flawed democracy for several years..”

• US Demoted To ‘Flawed Democracy’ (CNBC)

The U.S. has been demoted from a full democracy to a flawed democracy for the first time, according to the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU). Every year, the firm’s Democracy Index provides a snapshot of global democracy by scoring countries on five categories: electoral process and pluralism; civil liberties; the functioning of government; political participation; and political culture. Nations are then classified under four types of governments: full democracy, flawed democracy, hybrid regime and authoritarian regime.America’s score fell to 7.98 last year from 8.05 in 2015, below the 8.00 threshold for a full democracy, the EIU announced in a report on Wednesday. That put the world’s largest economy on the same footing as Italy, a country known for its fractious politics.

A flawed democracy is a country with free elections but weighed down by weak governance, an underdeveloped political culture and low levels of political participation, according to the EIU. Other flawed democracies in 2016 included Japan, France, Singapore, South Korea and India, the report said. However, Washington can’t point fingers at President Donald Trump for the nation’s downgrade. “The U.S. has been teetering on the brink of becoming a flawed democracy for several years, and even if there had been no presidential election in 2016, its score would have slipped below 8.00,” the report explained. Instead, dwindling trust in government, elected representatives and political parties is to blame.

“Trust in political institutions is an essential component of well-functioning democracies. Yet surveys by Pew, Gallup and other polling agencies have confirmed that public confidence in government has slumped to historic lows in the U.S. This has had a corrosive effect on the quality of democracy,” the report found. As other developed countries experience a similar trust deficit, contemporary democracy is undergoing a crisis, the EIU said. The increasing role played by non-elected technocrats, increased voter abstention and curbs on civil liberties are among the main symptoms of this global malaise, the EIU said, noting that almost half of the 167 countries covered by its index registered a decline in overall scores between 2006 and 2016.

“The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) baseline says there will be no recession through 2026. That is 206 months. The longest one we have ever had is about 100 months, under a much better circumstance.”

• David Stockman: Prepare for Fiscal Bloodbath, Not Fiscal Stimulus (DR)

“I have lots of hope and zero faith.” “Somehow the idea that Donald Trump is the second coming of Ronald Reagan has gotten in the mix. Wall Street has priced it in. It is just completely wrong.” David Stockman served within the Ronald Reagan administration as the director of the Office of Management and Budget from 1981-1985 and is a two term Congressman. Stockman is also the recent bestselling author of Trumped! His book hits at the heart of exactly what the incoming administration must do in order to correct the dangerous direction toward financial turmoil. Cavuto then pressed on fiscal stimulus and the Reagan approach, where Stockman replied, “We are not going to get big tax cuts. We are in a diametrically different position. In 1980 the public debt was $930 billion, that was 30% of GDP.

There was huge running room and an open balance sheet for the accidental Keynesian stimulus. This resulted from the tax cuts and the defense increase, along with a massive deficit.” “Ronald Reagan actually increased the public debt by $1.8 trillion, or two times more than had been generated by the first 39 presidents.” “Today we have used that all up. We are at $20 trillion of debt.” “The base case forecast is so optimistic, such a rosy scenario, that they are going to need reflow of extra economic growth to get back to where they started. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) baseline says there will be no recession through 2026. That is 206 months. The longest one we have ever had is about 100 months, under a much better circumstance.”

Yeah, we need more cars…

• Donald Trump Claims ‘Environmentalism Is Out Of Control’ (Ind.)

President Donald Trump has claimed that “environmentalism is out of control”. Mr Trump spent the morning meeting with auto executives as part of a push to bring jobs back to the US. Mr Trump told his guests at the White House that he was looking to ease regulations to help car companies and other businesses wishing to operate in the US. Among the attendees at the breakfast meeting were Ford chief executive Mark Fields, Fiat Chrysler chairman Sergio Marchionne and General Motors chief executive Mary Barra. Mr Trump called on car firms to increase production in the United States and boost American employment, adding that he hoped to see new auto plants built in the country. “We have a very big push on to have auto plants and other plants,” Mr Trump said.

Mr Trump has repeatedly criticised companies for building cars in Mexico and elsewhere and has threatened to impose 35 per cent tariffs on imported vehicles. The President often singled out Ford’s Mexico investments for criticism during his election campaign. The gathering was the first time the CEOs of the big three car makers have met jointly with a US president since a July 2011 session with former president Barack Obama to highlight a deal to raise fuel efficiency standards to 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025. White House spokesman Sean Spicer said on the eve of the meeting that Mr Trump was looking forward to meeting the CEOs and “hearing their ideas about how we can work together to bring more jobs back to this industry”.

This will only lead to more publicity.

• Trump Administration Seeks To Muzzle US Agency Employees (R.)

U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration has moved since he took office last week to curb the flow of information from several government agencies involved in environmental issues, in actions that may have been designed to discourage dissenting views. Employees at the Environmental Protection Agency, the Interior Department, the Department of Agriculture and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) have seen directives from the newly minted leadership seeking to limit how they communicate to the public, according to multiple sources. The moves have reinforced concerns that Trump, a climate change doubter, could seek to sideline scientific research showing that carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels contributes to global warming, as well as the career staffers at the agencies that conduct much of this research.

All of the agencies affected by the actions have some input on issues related to the environment and have been involved in various efforts related to climate change, including effects on natural resources and human health. On Tuesday, a source at the EPA said that staff had been told by members of the Trump administration not to speak to reporters or publish any press releases or blog posts on social media. EPA staff have also been asked not to publicize any talks, conferences, or webinars that had been planned for the next 60 days, the staffer said, asking not to be named. Asked if the EPA had been gagged, White House press secretary Sean Spicer said on Tuesday: “I don’t know … we’re looking into it. … I don’t think it’s a surprise we’re going to review the policies, but I don’t have any info at this time.”

No surprise here. That may come when these things become real.

• Trump Poised To Build Wall, Ban Many Middle East Immigrants (WSJ)

President Donald Trump was set to announce plans to expedite construction of his promised wall along the Mexican border, and was preparing orders banning entry to the U.S. of people from countries deemed risky and suspending the U.S. refugee program, people familiar with the planning said. Trump planned to travel Wednesday to the Department of Homeland Security, where he said he would be announcing his border security plans. Trump has given few details about his promise for a border wall, a project that is estimated to cost at least $10 billion and possibly much more.

Congressional Republicans have been mulling appropriating funds in spending legislation that must pass by April to keep the government funded, but Trump may be able to divert funds from other projects to begin work sooner. The other executive actions on immigration were possible for later in the week. That includes a ban on entry, which was expected to include Iraq, Iran, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Sudan and Libya, one person familiar with the planning said. During his presidential campaign, Trump initially said he would ban entry by Muslims but later modified his proposal to call for suspending visas to people from any place “where adequate screening cannot occur.”

“White House spokesman Sean Spicer cast that possible renegotiation of the Dakota Access project as a way to address concerns by stakeholders, including the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe..”

• Trump Pins Keystone, Dakota Pipeline Fate on Renegotiation (BBG)

President Donald Trump took steps to advance construction of the Keystone XL and Dakota Access oil pipelines, while demanding a renegotiation to get a better deal for the U.S. government. Trump stopped short of green lighting construction on either pipeline but put a deadline on the government’s review of TransCanada’s proposed Keystone XL to transport Alberta oil sands crude to U.S. refineries. Trump also announced policies to encourage the use of American-made products in U.S. pipeline projects and to curtail federal environmental reviews for major infrastructure projects. “If we’re going to build pipelines in the United States, the pipes should be made in the United States,” Trump said.

The moves, taken on Trump’s fourth full day in office, are a major departure from the Obama administration, which rejected the Keystone proposal in 2015 and has kept Dakota Access blocked since September. Environmentalists, concerned about climate change and damage to water and land, now face an executive branch that’s less sympathetic to their efforts. For the oil industry, it heralds more freedom to expand infrastructure and ease transportation bottlenecks. White House spokesman Sean Spicer cast that possible renegotiation of the Dakota Access project as a way to address concerns by stakeholders, including the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, which is concerned about Native-American cultural sites and the safety of its water supply.

As I said a while ago: throw in a major devaluation and see what you get then.

• Pricier Oil Means China’s Foreign Reserves Will Shrink Even Faster (BBG)

Much focus is on how China’s capital outflows will impact the world’s biggest pile of foreign-exchange reserves, but another issue in need of attention here is the rally in crude, argues Goldman Sachs. In a country where oil prices play “a disproportionate role” in the balance of payments – and China’s crude output is forecast to fall as much as 7% this year – the commodity’s bullish outlook poses a serious threat to reserves that have already shrunk more than 20% in the past two years. “The outlook for the balance of payments has deteriorated from a year ago, because oil prices are now on an upward trajectory, which could push the current-account surplus to around $200 billion this year, down from $331 billion as recently as 2015,” Goldman analysts Robin Brooks and Michael Cahill wrote in a Jan. 23 note.

That 40% slump is part of the picture for reserves, which contracted to $3.01 trillion at the end of 2016 from a record $3.99 trillion in mid-2014. A stronger dollar will also drive outflows. Goldman estimates the greenback will strengthen 15% by the end of 2019 against its major developed-market peers, so China is likely to keep weakening its currency fixing to maintain stability. The analysts reckon this could trigger a renewed pick-up in capital flight, which abated to $532 billion in 2016 from $736 billion in 2015. China even registered net inflows via its capital and financial accounts in December for the first time for 1 1/2 years.

Still, Goldman sees capital outflows slowing this year to $500 billion, and it expects reserve losses to accelerate to $394 billion from $369 billion in 2016 because the deterioration in the current account, led by surging oil prices, is “so sizable.”

Like this: “Extremely low interest rates over the last four or five years have forgiven a lot of sins.”

• A $90 Billion Wave of Debt Shows Cracks in US Real Estate Boom (BBG)

A $90 billion wave of maturing commercial mortgages, leftover debt from the 2007 lending boom, is laying bare the weak links in the U.S. real estate market. It’s getting harder for landlords who rely on borrowed cash to find new loans to pay off the old ones, leading to forecasts for higher delinquencies. Lenders have gotten choosier about which buildings they’ll fund, concerned about overheated prices for properties from hotels to shopping malls, and record values for office buildings in cities such as New York. Rising interest rates and regulatory constraints for banks also are increasing the odds that borrowers will come up short when it’s time to refinance. “There are a lot more problem loans out there than people think,” said Ray Potter, founder of R3 Funding, which arranges financing for landlords and investors. “We’re not going to see a huge crash, but there will be more losses than people are expecting.”

The winners and losers of a lopsided real estate recovery will be cemented as the last vestiges of pre-crisis debt clear the system. While Manhattan skyscraper values have surged 50% above the 2008 peak, prices for suburban office buildings still languish 4.8% below, according to an index from Moody’s Investors Service and Real Capital Analytics Inc. Borrowers holding commercial real estate outside of major metropolitan areas are now feeling the pinch as they attempt to secure fresh financing, Potter said. The delinquency rate for commercial mortgages that have been packaged into bonds is forecast to climb by as much as 2.4 percentage points to 5.75% in 2017, reversing several years of declines, as property owners struggle with maturing loans, according to Fitch Ratings. That sets the stage for bondholder losses.

Banks sold a record $250 billion of commercial mortgage-backed securities to institutional investors in 2007, and lax lending standards enabled landlords across the U.S. to saddle buildings with large piles of debt. When credit markets froze the following year, Wall Street analysts warned of a cataclysm, with $700 billion of commercial mortgages set to mature over the next decade. “At the depths of the panic, it was just that: panic,” said Manus Clancy, a managing director at Trepp, a firm that tracks commercial-mortgage debt. “That made people’s future expectations extremely bearish. Extremely low interest rates over the last four or five years have forgiven a lot of sins.”

Yanis ignores the role the decline of growth plays. That is a shame.

• A New Deal to Save Europe (Varoufakis)

“I don’t care about what it will cost. We took our country back!” This is the proud message heard throughout England since the Brexit referendum last June. And it is a demand that is resonating across the continent. Until recently, any proposal to “save” Europe was regarded sympathetically, albeit with skepticism about its feasibility. Today, the skepticism is about whether Europe is worth saving. The European idea is being driven into retreat by the combined force of a denial, an insurgency, and a fallacy. The EU establishment’s denial that the Union’s economic architecture was never designed to sustain the banking crisis of 2008 has resulted in deflationary forces that delegitimize the European project. The predictable reaction to deflation has been the insurgency of anti-European parties across the continent.

And, most worrying of all, the establishment has responded with the fallacy that “federation-lite” can stem the nationalist tide. It can’t. In the wake of the euro crisis, Europeans shudder at the thought of giving the EU more power over their lives and communities. A eurozone political union, with a small federal budget and some mutualization of gains, losses, and debt, would have been useful in 1999, when the common currency was born. But now, under the weight of massive banking losses and legacy debts caused by the euro’s faulty architecture, federation-lite (as proposed by French presidential hopeful Emmanuel Macron) is too little too late. It would become the permanent Austerity Union that German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble has sought for years. There could be no better gift to today’s “Nationalist International.”

Simply put, progressives need to ask a straightforward question: Why is the European idea dying? The answers are clear: involuntary unemployment and involuntary intra-EU migration. Involuntary unemployment is the price of inadequate investment across Europe, owing to austerity, and of the oligopolistic forces that have concentrated jobs in Europe’s surplus economies during the resulting deflationary era. Involuntary migration is the price of economic necessity in Europe’s periphery. The vast majority of Greeks, Bulgarians, and Spaniards do not move to Britain or Germany for the climate; they move because they must. Life for Britons and Germans will improve not by building electrified border fences and withdrawing into the bosom of the nation-state, but by creating decent conditions in every European country.

And that is precisely what is needed to revive the idea of a democratic, open Europe. No European nation can prosper sustainably if other Europeans are in the grip of depression. That is why Europe needs a New Deal well before it begins to think of federation. In February, the DiEM25 movement will unveil such a European New Deal, which it will launch the next month, on the anniversary of the Treaty of Rome. That New Deal will be based on a simple guiding principle: All Europeans should enjoy in their home country the right to a job paying a living wage, decent housing, high-quality health care and education, and a clean environment.

The practical measures in Yanis’ ’manifesto’.

• The European New Deal (Varoufakis)

The European New Deal should include five precise goals and the means to achieve them under existing EU treaties, without any centralization of power in Brussels or further loss of sovereignty:

· Large-scale green investment will be funded by a partnership between Europe’s public investment banks (the European Investment Bank, KfW, and others) and central banks (on the basis of directing quantitative easing to investment project bonds) to channel up to 5% of European total income into investments in green energy and sustainable technologies.

· An employment guarantee scheme to provide living-wage jobs in the public and non-profit sectors for every European in their home country, available on demand for all who want them. On condition that the scheme does not replace civil-service jobs, carry tenure, or replace existing benefits, it would establish an alternative to choosing between misery and emigration.

· An anti-poverty fund that provides for basic needs across Europe, which would also serve as the foundation of an eventual benefits union.

· A universal basic dividend to socialize a greater share of growing returns to capital.

· Immediate anti-eviction protection, in the form of a right-to-rent rule that permits homeowners facing foreclosure to remain in their homes at a fair rent set by local community boards. In the longer term, Europe must fund and guarantee decent housing for every European in their home country, restoring the model of social housing that has been dismantled across the continent. Both the employment scheme and the anti-poverty program should be based on a modern version of an old practice: public banking for public purpose, funded by a pragmatic but radical currency reform within the eurozone and the EU, as well as in non-EU European countries. Specifically, all seigniorage profits of central banks would be used for these purposes.

In addition, an electronic public clearing mechanism for deposits and payments (outside the banking system) would be established in each country. Tax accounts would serve to accept deposits, receive payments, and facilitate transfers through web banking, payment apps, and publicly issued debit cards. The working balances could then be lent to the fund supporting the employment and anti-poverty programs, and would be insured by a European deposit insurance scheme and deficits covered by central bank bonds, serviced at low rates by national governments. Only such a European New Deal can stem the EU’s disintegration.

“We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.”

• Karl Rove’s Prophecy (Unz)

In a famous exchange between a high official at the court of George W. Bush and journalist Ron Suskind, the official – later acknowledged to have been Karl Rove – takes the journalist to task for working in “the reality-based community.” He defined that as believing “that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” Rove then asserted that this was no longer the way in which the world worked: “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality – judiciously, as you will – we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.” (Ron Suskind, NYTimes Magazine, Oct. 17, 2004).

This declaration became popular as an illustration of the hubris of the Bush-Cheney government. But we could also see it as fulfilled prophecy. Fulfilled in a manner that no journalist at that time would have deemed possible. Yes, the neoconservatives brought disrepute upon themselves because of the disaster in Iraq. Sure, opposition to the reality Rove had helped create in that devastated country became a first rung on the ladder that could lead to the presidency, as it did for Barack Obama. But the neocons stayed put in the State Department and other positions closely linked to the Obama White House, where they became allies with the liberal hawks in continuing ‘spreading democracy’ by overthrowing regimes. America’s mainstream news and opinion purveyors, without demurring, accommodated the architects of reality production overseen by Dick Cheney.

[..] publications that used to be rightly known as quality newspapers have turned into unreadable rags. The newspaper that was my employer for a couple of decades used to be edited on the premise that its correspondents rather than authorities were always correct in what they were saying. Today greater loyalty to the reality created in Washington and Langley cannot be imagined. For much of northern Europe the official story that originates in the United States is amplified by the BBC and other once reliable purveyors of news and opinion like the Guardian, the Financial Times and the (always less reliable) Economist.

[..] How could Rove’s predictions so totally materialize? There’s a simple answer: ‘they’ got away with momentous lies at an early stage. The more authorities lie successfully the more they are likely to lie again in a big way to serve the purposes of earlier lies. The ‘they’ stands for those individuals and groups in the power system who operate beyond legal limits as a hydra-headed entity, whose coordination depends on the project, campaign, mission, or operation at hand. Those with much power got away with excessive extralegal use of it since the beginning of this century because systems of holding the powerful to account have crumbled on both sides of the Atlantic. Hence, potential opposition to what the reality architects were doing dwindled to almost nothing. At the same time, people whose job or personal inclination leads them to ferret out truth were made to feel guilty for pursuing it.

Your children’s children are going to love you for this.

• Bumblebee Added to US Endangered Species List (VoA)

A small insect is getting a lot of attention in the United States. The rusty patched bumblebee is the first of its species to be declared endangered in the lower 48 states – meaning every state except Alaska and Hawaii. The rusty patched bumblebee is named for a rust-colored line on its back. The U.S Fish and Wildlife Service announced this month it was adding the bee to its endangered species list. The insects are “on the brink of extinction,” according to the service. It said the bees were once found in 28 states. But there now are only small populations remaining in 13 states. The government agency will make a plan to help the dying bees recover. The agency said that such a plan might help other insects, like butterflies.

U.S. officials think land owners can take small steps to help the rusty patched bumble bee. They say land owners can be friendlier towards bees by using native plants in their gardens. The insects directly fertilize many kinds of fruit and vegetable crops. And they fertilize grain crops used to feed cattle and milk cows. It costs billions of dollars to duplicate the job the bees do for free. Land owners are also being urged to cut back on their use of pesticide products. The officials also suggest that gardeners leave their plants alone at the end of the summer instead of cutting them. That way, the bees will have a place to live over the winter. The Fish and Wildlife Service says the rusty patched bumblebee was added to the endangered species list partly because of habitat loss. Other reasons were disease, pesticides and climate change.

It gets worse by the day.

• Half Of Families In Greece Live On Pensions (Kath.)

Greek society is evolving into a sum of households surviving on pensions while its most dynamic section, young people aged between 18 and 35, are abandoning it or considering abandoning it to seek a better life abroad, a survey by the Small Enterprises Institute of the Hellenic Confederation of Professionals, Craftsmen and Merchants (IME GSEVEE) has concluded. The report published on Tuesday suggests that the long-term financial crisis, whose main victims are the middle class, is not only leading to a further decline in incomes and the broadening of inequalities, but also openly threatening social cohesion. The so-called therapy, with its constantly increasing direct and indirect taxes, may lead to primary budget surpluses but this is not returned to taxpayers in the form of public services, as at the same time public spending on health and education is also being reduced.

The survey, conducted between November 14 and 26, used a sample of 1,000 households across Greece. It found that more than three-quarters of households (75.3%) had endured significant declines in their income in 2016. Crucially, 37.1% of households said that they live on less than €10,000 per year, while 49.2% said that their main source of income is pensions. This was actually higher in December 2014 (at 52%), and the small decline is attributed to the cuts in pensions. Salaries are the main source of revenues for 37.9% of households, up from 37.3% in the 2015 survey, while 9% said that they mainly rely on incomes from businesses.

Almost one in every three households has an unemployed member, which amounts to 1.1 million households, while the long-term unemployed amount to 73.3% of all jobless. Financial problems are not limited to the unemployed though, as 22.4% of households also include an employee who earns less than the minimum monthly salary of €586 gross. No wonder 9.7% of respondents said at least one member of their family has left the country.

The entire aid industry must be overhauled, from EU to NGOs and ‘charities’, or this will continue. Brussels likes the agony because it thinks it’s a deterrent, the NGOs are profit seekers. The model is completely broken.

• Cold Weather Reignites Fears For Refugees Poorly Sheltered In Greece (G.)

A new bout of cold weather across southern Europe has reignited fears for thousands of refugees and migrants sheltered in deplorable conditions in Greece. Forecasts of freezing temperatures have also been met with trepidation by international agencies, aid groups and local mayors on islands. “Thousands of people are poised to suffer needlessly in conditions that are becoming increasingly desperate,” said Eva Cossé at Human Rights Watch. “Europe’s failed policies have contributed to immense suffering for people warehoused on the Greek islands.” Greece was the focus of public outcry this month after shocking footage emerged of refugees on Lesbos living in flimsy, snow-swamped tents as an arctic blast sent temperatures plummeting to -14C.

The outcry prompted the government to dispatch a naval ship to temporarily house up to 500 people detained at the island’s vastly overcrowded Moria reception centre. Others were moved into heated containers, hotel rooms and apartments. But the measures have proved inadequate and with more severe weather on the way officials, volunteers and human rights defenders fear the worst. Sub-zero temperatures are expected by Thursday. Since the closure of the Balkan route into Europe, more than 62,000 men women and children have been trapped in Greece, according to government figures. Every day a steady trickle continues to arrive on rickety boats from Turkey, placing increasing pressure on Lesbos and other eastern Aegean islands close to the Asia Minor coast. “It is not much talked about, but this month alone 900 people have reached Greece,” said Gianmaria Pinto, country director of the Norwegian Refugee Council.

“Right now I am on Chios and in one camp there are people living on the beach, in small tents, exposed to the wind and rain. They should be moved to better and more humane conditions and the structures and opportunity for that are only on the mainland.” Under a controversial deal agreed by the EU and Turkey to curb an influx that surpassed a million people in 2015, Greek authorities last year accepted the introduction of a policy of containment in order to process asylum seekers at accelerated rates. By restricting refugees to islands it was hoped “secondary movement” into Europe could be reduced and those undeserving of asylum easily repatriated to Turkey. Instead, the policy has backfired with thousands of refugees being forced to endure dire conditions in overcrowded camps while their asylum requests are processed slowly. Many have been in the facilities since March when the EU-Turkey accord was signed.

Debt Rattle December 27 2016

Dec 272016

December 27, 2016 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 9:47 am Finance Tagged with: bank run, Brexit, cheetah, crash, EU, Greece, Israel, Obama, recession, Trump, yuan 4 Responses »

Konstantinos Polychronopoulos, Athens Christmas Day 2016

• Recession, Market Crash Next Year, Expect Rate Cuts: Rickards (CNBC)

• Did Donald Trump Just Jump The ‘Dow 20,000’ Shark? (ZH)

• Yuan Trading Volume Has Been Surging In December (BBG)

• ECB: Monte dei Paschi Must Now Raise €8.8 Billion After Recent Withdrawals (R.)

• War & The Rejection of Peace (Rossini)

• Israel Claims ‘Evidence’ That Obama Orchestrated UN Resolution (G.)

• Corbyn Hits Back After Obama Suggests Labour Is ‘Disintegrating’ (G.)

• Hard Brexit ‘Could Boost UK Economy By £24 Billion’: Pro-Leave Group (Ind.)

• Mervyn King: Britain Should Be More Upbeat About Brexit (G.)

• EU Faces Two Major Problems – And Has Answers To Neither: King (Ind.)

• Exit, Hope and Change (Jim Kunstler)

• Cheetahs Heading Towards Extinction As Population Crashes (BBC)

• The Automatic Earth in Greece: Big Dreams for 2017 (Automatic Earth)

“..a “head-on collision” between perception and reality…”

• Recession, Market Crash Next Year, Expect Rate Cuts: Rickards (CNBC)

The Federal Reserve hiked interest rates just two weeks ago for the second time in a decade, but it will soon be cutting them again, said Jim Rickards on Tuesday. Speaking to CNBC’s Squawk Box, the director of The James Rickards Project said a stock market correction is coming as President-elect Donald Trump’s economic stimulus plans will not pan out, causing a “head-on collision” between perception and reality. “When the reality of no stimulus catches up with the perception of stimulus plus the Fed tightening: that’s the train wreck. Either we’re going to have a recession or a stock market correction,” he said. The markets have been rallying on the back of Trump’s win as investors bet on tax cuts and fiscal spending under the new administration.

However, “the stimulus is not going to come” as Trump’s proposed tax cuts will hit government revenue while the Congress is likely to block his stimulus plans as the U.S. is already $20 trillion in debt, Rickards added. This will lead to a recession or a “very severe correction” in the stock market, prompting rate cuts later next year, he said, prompting the Fed to cut rates. “They will raise (rates) in March and then something will hit the wall, either the economy or the stock market or both. Then the Fed will backpedal from there, starting with a forward guidance then perhaps a rate cut later in the year,” said Rickards, who recommends holding gold and U.S. 10-year Treasurys.

Ominous.

• Did Donald Trump Just Jump The ‘Dow 20,000’ Shark? (ZH)

It appears the sugar-high from holiday celebrations is still running through president-elect Trump's veins as his tweets took an even more narcisistic tone on this oh-so-aptly-named 'Boxing Day' in America. First Trump decided to take credit for the unprecedented short-squeeze in US stock markets – and the Christmas spending numbers…

The world was gloomy before I won – there was no hope. Now the market is up nearly 10% and Christmas spending is over a trillion dollars!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 26, 2016

We just wonder what he will sat if/when Goldman Sachs stops rising and stocks tumble ("never gonna happen", probably The Fed's fault after all), but perhaps even more importantly, how does he feel about the $1.2 trillion of value he has erased from global capital markets since his election?

The drop in global debt and equity values in Q4 2016 is very reminiscent of the drop into 2015's Fed rate hike… which did not end well…

But, the last time that global stocks and global bonds decoupled so aggressively was following the end of QE3… here's what happened next…

But it's probably different this time, right? China is fine (oh wait, failed auctions and liquidity crisis), Europe is fine (oh wait, Italian banks are collapsing), and the US economy is great (oh wait, automakers are shuttering plants due to credit-created excess inventory).

* * *

But Trump was not done there, he took on the arrogance of Obama, as we detailed earlier…

President Obama said that he thinks he would have won against me. He should say that but I say NO WAY! – jobs leaving, ISIS, OCare, etc.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 26, 2016

Invincible politician and stock market savior…Let's just hope nothing goes wrong to break that narrative in the next 4 years (or 4 weeks).

Beijing will be forced to take very unpopular decisions. Xi signaled tolerance for a lower growth target, and whoops goes the money. They’re stuck in their own bubbles.

• Yuan Trading Volume Has Been Surging In December (BBG)

The onshore yuan’s surging trading volume is another piece of evidence that capital is fleeing China at a faster pace. The daily average value of transactions in Shanghai climbed to $34 billion in December as of Monday, the highest since at least April 2014, according to data from China Foreign Exchange Trade System. That’s up 51% from the first 11 months of the year. The increase suggests quickening outflows, given that data in recent months showed banks were net sellers of the yuan, according to Harrison Hu at RBS This month’s jump in trading volume signals sentiment has kept deteriorating since November, when the nation’s foreign-exchange reserves shrank by the most since January.

The Chinese currency is headed for its steepest annual slump in more than two decades and when the year turns, authorities will be faced with a triple whammy of the renewal of citizens’ $50,000 conversion quota, prospects of further Federal Reserve interest-rate increases, and concern that U.S. President-elect Donald Trump may slap punitive tariffs on China’s exports to the world’s largest economy. “Capital outflow pressures will stay, and in near term, we should monitor the impact upon the reset of the annual quota,” said Frances Cheung at Societe Generale. The pressures will likely ease toward the end of the first quarter as foreign flows into China’s bond market quicken, she said.

If it quacks like a typical bank run… Don’t you think they could perhaps have done this deal in silence?

• ECB: Monte dei Paschi Must Now Raise €8.8 Billion After Recent Withdrawals (R.)

The ECB has told Monte dei Paschi it needs to plug a capital shortfall of €8.8 billion, higher than a previous €5 billion gap estimated by the bank, the lender said on Monday, confirming what sources told Reuters. Last Friday the Italian government approved a decree to bail out Monte dei Paschi after Italy’s No. 3 lender failed to win investor backing for a desperately needed €5 billion capital increase. The bank said on Monday it had officially asked the ECB last Friday for go ahead for a “precautionary recapitalization”. A precautionary recapitalization is a type of state intervention in a struggling bank that is still solvent. It means only a modest bail-in of investors though the government can buy shares or bonds only on market terms endorsed by EU state aid officials in Brussels.

In its reply, the ECB said it had calculated the capital it believed the bank needed on the basis of a shortfall emerging from European stress test of large lenders earlier this year. In those tests Monte dei Paschi was the only Italian bank to come short under an adverse scenario. The ECB said the lender was solvent but signaled the bank’s liquidity position had rapidly deteriorated between the end of November and December 21, Monte dei Paschi said. [..] The European Commission said on Friday it would work with Rome to establish conditions were met for a bailout of Monte dei Paschi. But on Monday ECB policymaker Jens Weidmann said plans for a state bailout of Monte dei Paschi should be weighed carefully as many questions remain to be answered.

“..He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, but ended up invading 7 countries. He also became the very first U.S. President to be at continuous war during his entire 8 years in office…”

• War & The Rejection of Peace (Rossini)

Try to think of a time in your life when the U.S. government was not militarily involved somewhere in the world. It’s a sad fact that a vast majority of us can’t recall such a time. [..] When war is all that a population knows to exist, the idea of peace becomes an anomaly. We all know that people are habitual. We cling to our habits (good and bad) and resist the unknown where change can occur. Well, in America the unknown has become peace! How sad to think that the idea of peace actually terrifies so many people both in and out of government. One can at least understand why governments would want to avoid peace. As Randolph Bourne famously pointed: “War is the health of the state.” During times of war, government capitalizes on the fear that it generates and concomitantly seizes unbelievable powers for itself.

We can at least see the benefit to government and those with a lust for power and the ability to dominate others. But what’s in it for the people? Here we can quote Samuel B. Pettengill who said: “War – after all, what is it that the people get? Why – widows, taxes, wooden legs and debt.” Sounds like a raw deal for the people. And yet, Americans have sat idly by, and have turned a blind eye to an incredible list of military interventions over the years. More war, less liberty …. More war, less liberty …. If it happens over an administration or two, it can be spun as government losing its way to a few bad apples. But 100+ years of more war, less liberty? That’s a system!

[..] There is a tremendous amount of upside to war for those who are in power. It provides them with an opportunity to swipe away liberties at an exponential pace. The populace will give up virtually everything. Is it any wonder that those in power run away from even the prospect of peace? We’re soon about to have a new president, and he’s coming into office with a lot of expectations. The outgoing president had high expectations as well. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, but ended up invading 7 countries. He also became the very first U.S. President to be at continuous war during his entire 8 years in office. Will this new president keep the boots of war firmly pressed against American throats? Will he continue the asphyxiation of the American Dream?

So far, when it comes to the insane idea of confronting a nuclear Russia, he has shown admirable qualities of restraint and cordial behavior. Will that continue through his presidential term? Or will he keep the century old American tradition of military adventurism overseas? The world is much bigger than Russia. There are plenty of other places that America can mire itself. There are other nuclear powers (like China) where trouble can be fomented. The president-elect has already shown that he has a bone to pick with the Chinese. Are we merely exchanging trouble with one nuclear power for another? Let’s hope that Donald Trump doesn’t repeat the mistakes of history. Let’s hope that he doesn’t become just another bad example for future generations to study.

Wouldn’t it be nice for Americans to someday be born into a life of liberty and peace? That was the original idea in the ‘land of the free’. A return to a foreign policy of non-interventionism and peace is desperately needed.

Quite the allegation.

• Israel Claims ‘Evidence’ That Obama Orchestrated UN Resolution (G.)

Israel has escalated its already furious war with the outgoing US administration, claiming that it has “rather hard” evidence that Barack Obama was behind a critical UN security council resolution criticising Israeli settlement building, and threatening to hand over the material to Donald Trump. The latest comments come a day after the US ambassador to Israel, Dan Shapiro, was summoned by Netanyahu to explain why the US did not veto the vote and instead abstained. The claims have emerged in interviews given by close Netanyahu allies to US media outlets on Monday after the Obama administration denied in categorical terms the claims originally made by Netanyahu himself.

However, speaking to Fox News on Sunday, David Keyes – a Netanyahu spokesman – said Arab sources, among others, had informed Jerusalem of Obama’s alleged involvement in advancing the resolution. “We have rather iron-clad information from sources in both the Arab world and internationally that this was a deliberate push by the United States and in fact they helped create the resolution in the first place,” Keyes said. Doubling down on the claim a few hours later the controversial Israeli ambassador to Washington, Ron Dermer, went even further suggesting it had gathered evidence that it would present to the incoming Trump administration. “We will present this evidence to the new administration through the appropriate channels. If they want to share it with the American people, they are welcome to do it,” Dermer told CNN.

Curious things for Obama to say. It’s not obvious enough yet that his own party has fallen apart?

• Corbyn Hits Back After Obama Suggests Labour Is ‘Disintegrating’ (G.)

A spokesman for Jeremy Corbyn has hit back after Barack Obama appeared to suggest that the Labour party has moved away from “fact and reality” and is disintegrating. The spokesman said the Labour leader “stands for what most people want” and suggested that the outgoing president’s Democratic party needed to “challenge power if they are going to speak for working people”. Obama had earlier said he was not worried when asked if the US Democrats could undergo “Corbynisation” and “disintegrate” like Labour in the wake of Hillary Clinton’s election defeat by Donald Trump. The departing US president was giving an in-depth interview, in which he also said he would have won the 8 November contest if he ran for a third term, to David Axelrod, formerly an adviser to Corbyn’s predecessor as Labour leader, Ed Miliband.

The 55-year-old compared the way the Labour party and the US Republicans had chosen to swing away from the middle ground and claimed even left-wing senator Bernie Sanders was a centrist compared to Corbyn. Asked about a potential “Corbynisation” of his party, he said: “I don’t worry about that partly because I think that the Democratic party has stayed pretty grounded in fact and reality.” He added: “[The Republican party] started filling up with all kinds of conspiracy-theorising that became kind of common wisdom or conventional wisdom within the Republican party base. That hasn’t happened in the Democratic party. I think people like the passion that Bernie brought, but Bernie Sanders is a pretty centrist politician relative to … Corbyn or relative to some of the Republicans.” In response Corbyn’s spokesman said: “Both Labour and US Democrats will have to challenge power if they are going to speak for working people and change a broken system that isn’t delivering for the majority.

They’re going to continue to fight over this for much longer.

• Hard Brexit ‘Could Boost UK Economy By £24 Billion’: Pro-Leave Group (Ind.)

The UK economy could benefit by £24bn a year – more than £450m a week – by leaving the European single market and customs union, a pro-Brexit pressure group has claimed. The Change Britain group said that the option – which it describes as “clean Brexit” – is likely to deliver annual savings of almost £10.4bn from contributions to the EU budget and £1.2bn from scrapping “burdensome” regulations, while allowing the UK to forge new trade deals worth £12.3bn. The group said its estimate was “very conservative” and that the benefits of withdrawal from the single market and customs union could be as much as £38.6bn a year. Even the lowest forecast within its range of likely outcomes was a boost of £20bn.

But the figure does not factor in the possibility of large-scale loss of exports to the remaining 27 EU nations, which advocates of a “soft Brexit” argue could happen if the UK faces tariff and non-tariff barriers to trade as a result of leaving the single market. Britain exported around £220bn of goods and services to the EU in 2015, while imports from the EU totalled around £290bn. Change Britain said that the biggest prize on offer was in potential trade agreements outside the EU which Britain could strike if it left the customs union, which requires it to take part only in deals negotiated by the European Commission. Depending on how many deals the UK secures, GDP could be boosted by between £8.5bn and £19.8bn, said Change Britain.

Might as well. It’s just that King has been ‘unlucky’ in his predictions for years.

• Mervyn King: Britain Should Be More Upbeat About Brexit (G.)

Britain may be better off going for a hard Brexit that would mean leaving the single market and customs union, Mervyn King, the former governor of the Bank of England, has suggested. Lord King, who has been more optimistic about leaving the EU than many economic commentators, acknowledged that Brexit would bring great political difficulties and would not be a “bed of roses”. Speaking to BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, he also said there would be many opportunities economically for the UK striking out on its own. The crossbench peer, who led the bank for a decade until 2013, said the UK should leave the European single market and warned there were “real question marks” over whether it should seek to remain in the customs union, which would limit its ability to forge trade deals on its own.

Theresa May’s cabinet is split on the issue of the single market and customs union, with the most pro-Brexit ministers seeking a clean break and others warning of the economic dangers of being cut adrift from the UK’s closest trading partners. King said before the referendum that warnings of economic doom about leaving the EU were overstated. Since then, he has welcomed the fall in the pound and said he believes Britain can be better off out than in the EU. He told the BBC on Boxing Day: “I think the challenges we face mean it’s not a bed of roses – no one should pretend that – but equally it is not the end of the world and there are some real opportunities that arise from the fact of Brexit we might take. “There are many opportunities and I think we should look at it in a much more self-confident way than either side is approaching it at present. Being out of what is a pretty unsuccessful European Union – particularly in the economic sense – gives us opportunities as well as obviously great political difficulties.”

At least he’s right on this.

• EU Faces Two Major Problems – And Has Answers To Neither: King (Ind.)

The European Union is facing “existential problems” over migration and the single currency for which it does not yet have the answers, former Bank of England governor Lord King has warned. Lord King said the scale of the crises was such that Brexit amounted to little more than “minor irritant” by comparison. And he suggested that the factor which could bring the problems to a head was German voters asking whether they want to remain part of a project which involves them propping up less competitive eurozone economies like Italy, Portugal and France. Lord King said that the single currency project was flawed from the start, and that it would probably have been better to create two monetary unions for “premier league” and “second division” economies. But he said it was too late to move to this model now.

Speaking to BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, the former governor said: “I think the EU is facing two existential problems and it has answers to neither of them. “The first is the fate of the monetary union, which even the ECB is saying is in a critical position and needs major reform. “Secondly, migration from outside the EU into the EU and the knock-on consequences of that for the free movement of people. “I don’t think they have answers for either of those issues and it is a real crisis for the EU. “British membership is irrelevant to these two questions and from that perspective I think they regard our decision to leave the EU as a minor irritant.” Lord King said it was impossible to put any timescale on when the problems of the eurozone might come to a head. But he said: “They simply haven’t put in place the framework to make it a success, desperately trying to struggle from one month to the next.

“For a long period they were relying on the confidence that financial markets had in the words of (ECB) president Mario Draghi that they would do ‘whatever it takes’. But I think words in the end run out and you need to back them up by actions. “The problem now is that people in Germany and other countries in the northern part of the EU are deeply reluctant – understandably – to pay for countries in the south. That wasn’t the prospectus they were offered when they joined the monetary union. “In the long run, it would make some sense to recognise that it was a mistake to go to monetary union as early as 1999. I think they might have been able to divide it into two divisions – a premier league and a second division – but I think it may be too late to do. If you look at economies like Italy, Portugal and even France, they are really struggling.

Excellent from Jim, and that’s before his predictions for 2017.

• Exit, Hope and Change (Jim Kunstler)

From the get-go, he made himself hostage to some of the most sinister puppeteers of the Deep State: Robert Rubin, Larry Summers, and Tim Geithner on the money side, and the Beltway Neocon war party infestation on the foreign affairs side. I’m convinced that the top dogs of both these gangs worked Obama over woodshed-style sometime after the 2008 election and told him to stick with the program, or else. What was the program? On the money side, it was to float the banks and the whole groaning daisy chain of their dependents in shadow finance, real estate, and insurance, at all costs. Hence, the extension of Bush Two’s bailout policy with the trillion-dollar “shovel-ready” stimulus, the rescue of the car-makers, and a much greater and surreptitious multi-trillion dollar hand-off from the Federal Reserve to backstop the European banks with counter-party obligations to US banks.

In April of 2009, Obama’s new SEC appointees, strong-armed by bank lobbyists, pushed the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) into suspending their crucial Rule 157, which had required publically-held companies to report their asset holdings based on standard market-based valuation procedures — called “mark-to-market.” After that, companies like Too-Big-Too-Fail banks could just make shit up. This opened the door to the pervasive accounting fraud that allowed the financial sector to pretend it was healthy for the eight years that followed. The net effect of their criminal fakery was to only make the financial sector artificially larger, more dangerously fragile, and more prone to cataclysmic collapse.

[..]in foreign affairs, there is Obama’s mystifying campaign against the Russian Federation. The US had an agreement with Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union that we would not expand NATO if they gave us a quantity of nuclear material that was in danger of falling into questionable hands in the disorder that followed the collapse. Russia complied. What did we do? We expanded NATO to include most of the former eastern European countries (except the remnants of Yugoslavia), and then under Obama, NATO began holding war games on Russia’s border. For what reason? The fictitious notion that Russia wanted to “take back” these nations — as if they needed to adopt a host of dependents that had only recently bankrupted the Soviet state. Any reasonable analysis would call these war games naked aggression by the West.

Then there was the 2014 US State Department-sponsored coup against Ukraine’s elected government and the ousting of President Viktor Yanukovych. Why? Because his government wanted to join the Russian-led Eurasian Customs Union instead of an association with European Union. We didn’t like that and we decided to oppose it by subverting the Ukrainian government. In the violence and disorder that ensued, Russia took back the Crimea — which had been gifted to the former Ukraine Soviet Socialist Republic (a province of Soviet Russia) one drunken night by the Ukraine-born Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. What did we expect after turning Ukraine into another failed state? The Crimean peninsula had been part of Russia for longer than the US had been a country. Its only warm water naval ports were located there.

One by one they leave us.

• Cheetahs Heading Towards Extinction As Population Crashes (BBC)

The sleek, speedy cheetah is rapidly heading towards extinction according to a new study into declining numbers. The report estimates that there are just 7,100 of the world’s fastest mammals now left in the wild. Cheetahs are in trouble because they range far beyond protected areas and are coming increasingly into conflict with humans. The authors are calling for an urgent re-categorisation of the species from vulnerable to endangered. According to the study, more than half the world’s surviving cheetahs live in one population that ranges across six countries in southern Africa. Cheetahs in Asia have been essentially wiped out. A group estimated to number fewer than 50 individuals clings on in Iran.

ZSL

Because the cheetah is one of the widest-ranging carnivores, it roams across lands far outside protected areas. Some 77% of their habitat falls outside these parks and reserves. As a result, the animal struggles because these lands are increasingly being developed by farmers and the cheetah’s prey is declining because of bushmeat hunting. In Zimbabwe, the cheetah population has fallen from around 1,200 to just 170 animals in 16 years, with the main cause being major changes in land tenure. [..] “The take-away from this pinnacle study is that securing protected areas alone is not enough,” said Dr Kim Young-Overton from Panthera, another author on the report. “We must think bigger, conserving across the mosaic of protected and unprotected landscapes that these far-reaching cats inhabit, if we are to avert the otherwise certain loss of the cheetah forever.”

We had a great Christmas Day live cooking event in Monastiraki square in Athens (see photos). I’ll get back to you on that. Donations through Paypal -top left hand corner of this page- of course remain welcome.

• The Automatic Earth in Greece: Big Dreams for 2017 (Automatic Earth)

Both Konstantinos and myself -and all the other volunteers at O Allos Anthropos- want to thank you so much for all the help you’ve given over the past year -and in 2015-. If I may make a last suggestion, please forward this ‘dream’ to anyone you know -and even those you don’t-, by mail, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, word of mouth, any which way you can think of. Go to your local mayor or town council, suggest they can help and get -loudly- recognized for it. There may be a dream involved for 2017, but that was our notion a year ago as well, and look what we’ve achieved a year later: it is very real indeed. And anyone, everyone can become part of that reality for just a few bucks. If the institutions won’t do it, perhaps the people themselves should. That doesn’t even sound all that crazy or farfetched. There’s a lot of us.

Konstantinos Polychronopoulos, Athens Christmas Day 2016

Debt Rattle December 22 2016

Dec 222016

December 22, 2016 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 10:06 am Finance Tagged with: bigly, bonus, data, debt, Greece, hacks, imports, Monte Paschi, recession, tax, Trump 2 Responses »

Shirley Temple Chrismas 1939

• Americans Are Now In More Debt Than They Were Before The Financial Crisis (MW)

• Americans Want To ‘Live Big’ In The Trump Era (CNBC)

• Percentage of Young Americans Living With Parents Rises to 75-Year High (WSJ)

• Republican Presidents Can’t Seem To Avoid Recessions (BBG)

• Plan To Tax US Imports Has Better Odds Of Becoming Law Than Many Think (CNBC)

• Home Ownership Among 25-Year-Olds In England, Wales Halved In 20 Years (G.)

• Monte Paschi Headed for Nationalization After Sale Failure (BBG)

• China’s Currency Outflows Are Much Larger Than They Appear (MW)

• Glenn Greenwald Weighs In On Election Hacks (MSNBC)

• EU To Boost Border Checks On Cash, Gold To Tackle ‘Terrorism Financing’ (R.)

• EU Court Says Mass Data Retention Illegal (R.)

• Greek Low-Pensioners Stand Long Queues For The Christmas Bonus (KTG)

• The Automatic Earth in Greece: Big Dreams for 2017 (Automatic Earth)

What a surprise.

• Americans Are Now In More Debt Than They Were Before The Financial Crisis (MW)

Americans may soon exceed the amount of credit-card debt they racked up during the Great Recession. The average household with credit card debt owes $16,061, up 10% from $14,546 10 years ago and $15,762 last year, according to a new analysis of Federal Reserve Bank of New York and U.S. Census Bureau data by the personal finance company NerdWallet. The amount of household credit card debt is still down from a recent high of $16,912 in 2008 at the height of the recession. The U.S. won’t hit pre-recession credit card debt levels until the end of 2019, NerdWallet’s analysis projects. Total debt (including mortgages, auto loans and student loans) is expected to surpass the amounts owed at the beginning of the Great Recession by the end of 2016, NerdWallet found, mostly due to mortgages and student loans.

Mortgage debt jumped from $159,020 per household in 2010 to $172,806 in 2016, and debt from auto loans grew from $20,032 in 2010 to $28,535 in 2016. Nationwide, total household debt (including mortgages, auto loans and student loans) now equals almost $12.4 trillion, up from about $11.7 trillion in 2010. Why the growth in debt, given that many consumers should be skittish about living beyond their needs after the credit bubble of the Great Recession? The reason concerns a problem that has long dogged Americans. Median household income has grown 28% over the last 13 years, said Sean McQuay, a personal finance expert at NerdWallet, but expenses have outpaced it significantly. Case in point: Medical costs increased by 57% and food and beverage prices by 36% in that period.

Many Americans find it difficult to stick to savings goals. And that’s even worse if you have a family. The amount that a two-parent, two-child family needs just to pay the bills (but not have money left over for savings) ranges from about $50,000 to more than $100,000 depending on where a family lives, according to data from the nonprofit and nonpartisan think tank the Economic Policy Institute. Rent has risen 3.9% in the last year alone, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. “The economy is doing better, but we’re really not seeing that trickle down to individual households the way we’d hope,” McQuay said. Rising living costs mean, if anything, consumers should pay extra attention to their budgets in the next year, he said. “We’re allergic to the idea of budgeting,” he said. “It sounds just as awful as dieting.”

No contradiction whatsoever with the article above.

• Americans Want To ‘Live Big(ly)’ In The Trump Era (CNBC)

In the Trump era, excess is in and modesty is out. After years of stealth wealth, humility and downsizing, the president-elect is ushering in a new era of living large, Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert Shiller said Wednesday. “We used to be more into modest living,” the Yale professor told CNBC, speaking about the years after the financial crisis. “Now people are thinking, ‘[that] doesn’t work.’ You know? You have to live big-league and you’re on your way. While there’s no empirical evidence pointing to this shift, Shiller said the excitement is visible at Trump rallies and in the stock market. Despite a slight dip on Wednesday, the Dow Jones industrial average remained near 20,000.

Shiller’s comments add to budding sentiment that America’s new billionaire-in-chief — with his gold-plated penthouse, private jumbo jet and multiple mansions — could shift American attitudes away from inequality and toward the 1980s-style aspiration and worship of wealth. That quest for the good life could also stimulate spending — particularly in housing, Shiller said. “Trump is a real estate man, right? He talks about living big, living large. I can imagine that this will boost housing demand as well, among at least those who are excited by Trump,” he said. Still, Shiller cautioned that investors shouldn’t get too comfortable, as the Trump rally could end up like Calvin Coolidge’s run nearly a century ago. Coolidge was president during the Roaring ’20s, before the decade-long Great Depression started in 1929. “It could be like … Coolidge prosperity. It went for a while and it ended badly,” he said.

“There’s a difference, though, between Calvin Coolidge and Donald Trump, if you haven’t noticed. Trump is way more controversial,” Shiller added.

But bigly.

• Percentage of Young Americans Living With Parents Rises to 75-Year High (WSJ)

Almost 40% of young Americans were living with their parents, siblings or other relatives in 2015, the largest percentage since 1940, according to an analysis of census data by real estate tracker Trulia. Despite a rebounding economy and recent job growth, the share of those between the ages of 18 and 34 doubling up with parents or other family members has been rising since 2005.

Back then, before the start of the last recession, roughly one out of three were living with family. The trend runs counter to that of previous economic cycles, when after a recession-related spike, the number of younger Americans living with relatives declined as the economy improved. [..] The share of young Americans living with parents hit a high of 40.9% in 1940, just a year after the official end of the Great Depression, and fell to a low of 24.1% in 1960. It hovered between about 31% and 33% from 1980 to the mid-2000s, when the rate started climbing steadily.

The result is that there is far less demand for housing than would be expected for the millennial generation, now the largest in U.S. history. The number of adults under age 30 has increased by 5 million over the last decade, but the number of households for that age group grew by just 200,000 over the same period, according to the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies. Analysts point to rising rents in many cities and tough mortgage-lending standards as the culprit, making it difficult for younger Americans to strike out on their own.

It’s been a while. Anything to do with QE?

• Republican Presidents Can’t Seem To Avoid Recessions (BBG)

Here’s a frightening factoid for Donald Trump as he prepares to take office next month: Every Republican president since World War II has been in power during at least one recession. Of course, as the saying goes, past performance is not necessarily indicative of future results and the billionaire developer may well avoid a downturn on his watch. But with the economic expansion soon to become the third-longest on record, the risk of a contraction occurring during his time in office can’t be cavalierly dismissed. “Republican presidents seemingly can’t do without” recessions, Joachim Fels, global economic adviser for PIMCO, wrote in a blog post dated Dec. 12. The same can’t be said of Democrats. Outgoing President Barack Obama did preside over an economic downturn in his first six months in office – one he inherited from his predecessor, Republican George W. Bush.

John F. Kennedy took office just before a recession ended. And the U.S. entered and exited slumps when Jimmy Carter and Harry Truman were in charge. But it was recession-free during the tenures of Democrats Lyndon Johnson in the 1960s and Bill Clinton in the 1990s. “The U.S. economy has performed better when the president of the United States is a Democrat rather than a Republican,” Princeton University professors Alan Blinder and Mark Watson wrote in a paper published in the American Economic Review this year. The difference isn’t due to more expansionary fiscal and monetary policies under Democrats, according to Blinder, who served in the Clinton White House, and Watson. Instead it appears to stem from less costly oil shocks, a more favorable international environment, productivity-boosting technological advances and perhaps more optimistic consumers, they wrote. Some of those disparities may be down to better policies, but luck also played a role.

It’ll happen.

• Plan To Tax US Imports Has Better Odds Of Becoming Law Than Many Think (CNBC)

A controversial proposal to tax all goods and services coming into the United States has a better chance of becoming law than many on Wall Street suspect. The so-called “border-adjusted” tax is part of the House tax overhaul plan that also would reduce the corporate rate from 35% to 20%. The idea is to tax goods as they come into the country from overseas, but to avoid taxing U.S. exports at all. For instance, a car imported into the U.S. from Mexico would be taxed, but the American-made steel sent to Mexico would not.

Proponents say the proposed “destination tax” would encourage more U.S. production of goods and create U.S. jobs. But opponents say it will send prices higher, unfairly cut profits for some sectors, particularly the retail industry, and could prompt retaliation. The idea is similar but not quite like a VAT, or value added tax, common in other countries. The stock market has been celebrating promises of lower corporate taxes that could boost business spending, but it has been ignoring proposals that could sting some companies’ bottom lines. Retailers, automakers and refiners are among the industries that could be hit if imports are taxed.

What you get from blowing bubbles. You destroy societies.

• Home Ownership Among 25-Year-Olds In England, Wales Halved In 20 Years (G.)

The proportion of 25-year-olds who own a home has more than halved over the past 20 years, according to a report that points to the generational impact of the housing crisis. Home ownership has dropped from 46% of all 25-year-olds two decades ago to 20% now, the Local Government Association said. The LGA, which represents more than 370 councils in England and Wales, said more homes for affordable or social rent are needed to allow people to save up for a deposit and get on the housing ladder. The LGA’s housing spokesman, Cllr Martin Tett, said: “Our figures show just how wide the generational home ownership gap is in this country. A shortage of houses is a top concern for people as homes are too often unavailable, unaffordable and not appropriate for the different needs in our communities.

“The housing crisis is complex and is forcing difficult choices on families, distorting places, and hampering growth. But there is a huge opportunity, as investment in building the right homes in the right places has massive wider benefits for people and places.” Analysis for the LGA by the estate agent Savills found that the construction of social rented homes – owned and managed by local authorities and housing associations – plunged by 88% between 1995-96 and 2015-16. The association warned that the sharp fall, combined with rents rising at a faster pace than incomes, meant that home ownership was becoming more difficult for an increasing number of people. Home ownership across all age groups has fallen by 4.4% since 2008, while private renters increased by 5.1%, the LGA said.

Beppe Grillo wants full nationalization. The political class just blunders on.

• Monte Paschi Headed for Nationalization After Sale Failure (BBG)

Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena SpA will probably fail to lure sufficient demand for a €5 billion capital increase, leading to what would be the country’s biggest bank nationalization in decades, said people with knowledge of the matter. No anchor investor has shown interest in the stocks sale, the Siena-based company said in a statement late Wednesday. Two debt-for-equity swap offers will raise about €2 billion, with investors converting bonds for about €2.5 billion, the lender said. The interest is probably insufficient to pull the deal off, said the people, who asked not to be identified before a final assessment. Qatar’s sovereign-wealth fund, which had considered an investment, hasn’t committed to buying shares, people with knowledge of the matter have said.

Other institutions that were considering buying shares have indicated that they would put funds in the troubled bank only if it’s able to raise €1 billion from cornerstone investors, according to the people. Monte Paschi Chief Executive Officer Marco Morelli had crisscrossed the globe looking for investors to back the bank’s reorganization plan, which included a share sale, a debt-for-equity swap and the sale of €28 billion worth of soured loans. A nationalization of Monte Paschi, the biggest in Italy since the 1930s, could be followed by rescues for lenders including Veneto Banca and Banca Popolare di Vicenza as part of a €20 billion government package. State intervention and a hit to bondholders is the most likely scenario for Monte Paschi, Manuela Meroni, an analyst at Intesa Sanpaolo SpA wrote in a note to clients Thursday. “The solution to the Monte Paschi issue could reduce the systemic risk for the sector,” Meroni wrote.

Monte Paschi shares failed to open in Milan on Thursday after being indicated lower. The shares have dropped 87% this year, trimming the bank’s value to €478 million. If government funds are used in the bank’s recapitalization, bondholders will probably have to take losses under European burden-sharing rules. The cabinet is considering a so-called precautionary recapitalization that may reduce the potential losses. A cabinet meeting may be held as early as Thursday evening to rescue Monte Paschi, newspaper La Stampa reported, without saying where it got the information.

Especially in the rear-view mirror.

• China’s Currency Outflows Are Much Larger Than They Appear (MW)

Investors have been drastically underestimating the pace at which money is leaving China. Since June, the People’s Bank of China has liquidated $1.1 trillion in foreign-currency reserves, according to a calculation by a team of analysts at Goldman Sachs. That’s nearly double the $540 billion reported by the PBOC, when adjusted for shifts in the yuan’s valuation, between August 2015 and November 2016. Goldman arrived at its figure by incorporating data provided by the State Authority on Foreign Exchange, the arm of the PBOC responsible for currency flows. That data details flows that are considered approved Chinese corporate demand, as well as money flowing through the offshore yuan market. If one factors in these outflows, the total amount of capital that has left China in that time period balloons from the reported $540 billion to $1.1 trillion, Goldman said. Goldman illustrates these flows in a chart, below:

“Since June, this data has continued to suggest significantly larger [foreign exchange] sales by the PBOC than is implied by FX reserve data [the gap is about $25 billion a month on average in the last several months],” said the team, led by MK Tang, executive director of global investment research Asia, in a research note released to the media on Monday. The PBOC has been selling its foreign currency reserves, which have declined for 14 straight months through November, to help support its rapidly weakened currency, the yuan. After selling off earlier in the year, the dollar has strengthened rapidly against most major currencies including the yuan. In fact, dollar gains accelerated following President-elect Donald Trump’s Nov. 8 electoral victory. Presently, the yuan, USDCNY, +0.0706% also known as the renminbi, is trading near its weakest level against the dollar since late 2008.

Greenwald is very clear. But help me out: does the interviewer try to imply that there is circumstantial evidence regardless of there not being any? That because a lot of so-and-so’s have said there is, that somehow means there must be?

• Glenn Greenwald Weighs In On Election Hacks (MSNBC)

Co-founding editor of The Intercept, Glenn Greenwald, talks to Ari Melber about the investigation into Russian hacks involving the 2016 election.

Never let a good crisis go to waste. Zero credibility.

• EU To Boost Border Checks On Cash, Gold To Tackle ‘Terrorism Financing’ (R.)

The European Commission proposed tightening controls on cash and precious metals transfers from outside the EU on Wednesday, in a bid to shut down one route for funding of militant attacks on the continent. The move follows Monday’s attack on a Christmas market in Berlin, where 12 people were killed as a truck plowed into a crowd. It is part of an EU “action plan against terrorist financing” unveiled after the bombings and shootings in Paris in November 2015. Under the new proposals, customs officials in EU states will be able to step up checks on cash and prepaid payment cards transferred via the post or through freight shipments.

Authorities will also be given the power to seize cash or precious metals carried by suspect individuals entering the EU. People carrying more than 10,000 euros ($10,391.00) in cash are already required to declare this at customs upon entering the EU. The new rules would allow authorities to seize money even below that threshold “where there are suspicions of criminal activity,” the EU executive commission said in a note. “With today’s proposals, we strengthen our legal means to disrupt and cut off the financial sources of terrorists and criminals,” the commission vice-president Frans Timmermans said.

Not every European is a complete fool yet.

• EU Court Says Mass Data Retention Illegal (R.)

The mass retention of data is illegal, the European Union’s highest court said on Wednesday, dealing a blow to Britain’s newly passed surveillance law and signaling that security concerns do not justify excessive privacy infringements. The Court of Justice of the European Union (ECJ) said its ruling was based on the view that holding traffic and location data en masse allowed “very precise conclusions to be drawn concerning the private lives of the persons whose data has been retained”. Such interference with people’s privacy could only be justified by the objective of fighting serious crime and access to data should be subject to prior review by a court or independent body except in urgent cases, it said.

The ruling is likely to upset governments seeking to deal with the threat of attacks such as those in Paris and Brussels and, on Monday, in Berlin. Those attacks have reinforced calls from governments for security agencies to be given greater powers to protect citizens, while privacy advocates – who welcomed the ruling – say mass retention of data is ineffective in the fight against such crimes. The perpetual debate over privacy versus security took on an extra dimension after Edward Snowden leaked details of mass spying by U.S. and British agents in 2013. The ECJ said governments could demand targeted data retention subject to strict safeguards such as limiting it to a particular geographic location but the data must be stored within the EU given the risk of unlawful access.

The court was responding to challenges against data retention laws in Britain and Sweden on the grounds that they were no longer valid after the ECJ struck down an EU-wide data retention law in 2014. A spokesman for Britain’s interior ministry said it was disappointed with the judgment and would be considering its potential implications in the case launched before Britain voted in June to quit the European Union. “Given the importance of communications data to preventing and detecting crime, we will ensure plans are in place so that the police and other public authorities can continue to acquire such data in a way that is consistent with EU law and our obligation to protect the public,” he said.

Pretty cold for Athens too.

• Greek Low-Pensioners Stand Long Queues For The Christmas Bonus (KTG)

Greece’s low-pensioners have been waiting for the extra Christmas bonus announced by Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras for days. The magic, sparkling moment was set as December 22nd. The money started to flow into bank accounts already since Wednesday afternoon. Defying the icy-cold weather and Schaeuble’s objections, dozens of elderly rushed to ATMs to withdraw the unexpected Christmas present together with the pension for January. Those unable to use cards rushed to the banks as early as possible in the morning and stood line for many hours before the doors opened. 1.6 million low-pensioners receive the Christmas bonus which is the difference of the pension and lump sum to the amount of €850.

If a pensioner receives €600, the Christmas bonus will be €250. Due to capital controls, the amount that can be withdrawn within two weeks is €840. At the same time, 240,000 low pensioners will see the poverty allowance (EKAS) cut by 50%. It means they will lose €1,380 per year. I asked a neighbor how will he spend the Christmas bonus. “I will have my bones warmed,” the 87-year-old answered with a bright smile. He has been living without heating for the last three years. He went broke and spent all his savings after austerity cuts in 2010 deprived him of the 13th and 14th pension. He lost €1,200 per year.

My article from yesterday. Please help us help.

• The Automatic Earth in Greece: Big Dreams for 2017 (Automatic Earth)

Both Konstantinos and myself -and all the other volunteers at O Allos Anthropos- want to thank you so much for all the help you’ve given over the past year -and in 2015-. We’re around $30,000 for 2016 alone, another $5000 since my last article 4 weeks ago. I swear, for as long as I live, this will never cease to amaze me. And then of course what happens is people start thinking and dreaming about what more they can do for those in peril. Wouldn’t you know…

A Merry Christmas to all of you, to all of us. Very Merry. God bless us, every one. Thank you for everything.

If I may make a last suggestion, please forward this ‘dream’ to anyone you know -and even those you don’t-, by mail, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, word of mouth, any which way you can think of. Go to your local mayor or town council, suggest they can help and get -loudly- recognized for it. There may be a dream involved for 2017, but that was our notion a year ago as well, and look what we’ve achieved a year later: it is very real indeed. And anyone, everyone can become part of that reality for just a few bucks. If the institutions won’t do it, perhaps the people themselves should. That doesn’t even sound all that crazy or farfetched. There’s a lot of us.

Konstantinos Polychronopoulos, Athens December 2016

Debt Rattle November 21 2016

Nov 212016

November 21, 2016 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 9:56 am Finance Tagged with: APEC, debt, exports, greed, Hillary, imports, Japan, recession, savings, TPP, Trump, Tsipras 3 Responses »

NPC Fordson tractor exposition at Camp Meigs, Washington DC 1922

• Japan Exports Drop 13th Month By 10.3%, Imports Down 22nd Month By 16.5% (WSJ)

• Negative Rates Are Failing to Halt Savings Obsession in Europe (BBG)

• More Than 1 in 3 European Workers Have Difficulty Making Ends Meet (ETUC)

• Now it Begins to Unravel (WS)

• Former UBS, Credit Suisse CEO: “A Recession Is Sometimes Necessary” (ZH)

• Big Shock In France’s Presidential Election As Sarkozy Eliminated (BBG)

• The EU’s New Bomb Is Ticking in the Netherlands (WSJ)

• APEC Summit Closes With Call for More Globalization, Free Trade (AP)

• Obama Says World Leaders Want To Move Forward With TPP (AFP)

• The Grey Champion Assumes Command – Part 1 (Quinn)

• The Silver Lining In This Disaster: Clinton & Co Are Finally Gone (G.)

• Disaffected Rust Belt Voters Embraced Trump. They Had No Other Hope (G.)

• Tsipras Ready To Give In On Labor Reform To Ensure Debt Relief (Kath.)

With trade growth goes globalization.

• Japan Exports Drop 13th Month By 10.3%, Imports Down 22nd Month By 16.5% (WSJ)

Japanese exports extended their losses to a 13th straight month in October, indicating that the world’s third-largest economy has yet to regain full fitness despite better-than-expected growth in the third quarter. Exports fell 10.3% from a year earlier in October to 5.870 trillion yen, figures released Monday by the Ministry of Finance showed. The reading came in worse than a 9.4% drop forecast by economists polled by WSJ. Exports decreased 6.9% in September. Despite the grim monthly figures, exports appear to be in better shape than in the spring, when Japan’s manufacturers were being buffeted by worries over a Chinese slowdown and other headwinds from abroad. Government estimates released last week showed that Japan’s economy grew 2.2% from the previous quarter in the July-September period, beating economists’ expectations.

Exports were stronger than in the previous three months. The near-term prospects for exports have also improved after Donald Trump’s victory of U.S. presidential election put the yen’s previous uptrend in reversal. The finance ministry said export volumes for October fell 1.4% from their year-earlier levels. That marked the first fall in three months. But seasonally adjusted month-on-month figures showed exports increased 1.6%. Imports declined 16.5% on year in October to Y5.374 trillion, the 22nd consecutive month of contraction, the ministry said. Japan’s trade balance came to Y496.2 billion in surplus, according to the data. Economists polled by the Nikkei expected a surplus of Y610.0 billion.

Anything reported as a ‘savings obsession’ can be filed under ‘fake news’. It takes this article a while to get to it, but then it does: “About 44% of all Europeans were unable to pay at least one bill on time during the last 12 months, mainly because of a lack of money..” Combine that with the accounting practice of filing ‘paying off debts’ under ‘saving’, and you know what’s really happening.

• Negative Rates Are Failing to Halt Savings Obsession in Europe (BBG)

After years of turbo-driven central bank stimulus, most Europeans still want to leave their spare cash in savings accounts, even if those accounts pay zero interest. That’s the finding of a survey by Europe’s biggest debt collector, Stockholm-based Intrum Justitia AB. “After the financial crisis, people have felt a need – even if they have small means – to create some kind of security,” CEO Mikael Ericson said in an interview in Stockholm on Nov. 16. “It can’t be that people save in a bank account because of the fantastic returns, so it must be about a sense of security, having money in the bank.” Some 69% of Europeans put their savings into bank accounts, according to Intrum Justitia’s European Consumer Payment Report.

The survey is based on feedback gathered in September and covers about 21,000 people in 21 countries. The survey also shows that 26% of Europeans prefer keeping their surplus funds in cash, while 16% hold stocks. Only 14% turn to investment funds, 8% invest in real estate and 8% in bonds. In Denmark and Sweden, where central bank benchmark rates are negative, almost 80% of people put their surplus cash in bank accounts. In France, the U.K. and the Netherlands, the figure is above 80%. [..] The survey also revealed how financially fragile many Europeans continue to be almost half a decade after the region’s debt crisis. About 44% of all Europeans were unable to pay at least one bill on time during the last 12 months, mainly because of a lack of money, the survey found. Greece was worst, with 76% of households failing to pay on time.

Yeah. Savings Obsession. Sure.

• More Than 1 in 3 European Workers Have Difficulty Making Ends Meet (ETUC)

According to the European Working Conditions Survey launched today more than one third of workers report some or great difficulty in making ends meet. This is the reality behind the rosier picture painted by the European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions which highlights an “increasingly skilled workforce, largely satisfied with work”. However, the study also reveals that • A shocking 1 in 5 workers “has a poor quality job with disadvantageous job quality features and job holders …. reporting an unsatisfactory experience of working life.” • Only 1 in 4 workers have “a smooth running job where most dimensions of job quality are satisfactory”.

Luca Visentini, General Secretary of the European Trade Union Confederation said “European workers are struggling to make ends meet. Work no longer assures a decent life. Is it any wonder that more and more voters are losing their faith in “the European Union and mainstream political parties? ”These results only strengthen the ETUC’s determination to fight for more public investment to create quality jobs, and for a pay rise for European workers to tackle poverty and drive economic recovery for all. Economic policies that result in 1 in 3 workers struggling to make ends meet are fundamentally wrong and must be radically changed.” “These are deeply worrying results that cannot be hidden by claiming that the world of work is increasingly complex. The survey actually shows that work is unsatisfactory or unrewarding for far too many workers.”

“The picture painted by the European Working Conditions Survey of widespread poverty in improving working conditions highlights the need for a comprehensive approach to tackle inequality across Europe. Improvements in labour markets and working conditions are modest and uneven at best; what’s more, these are being wiped out by spiralling costs of housing and austerity policies that drive insecurity for workers and their families.”

“Debt is good” is just another way of saying “Greed is good”.

• Now it Begins to Unravel (WS)

Debt is good. More debt is better. Funding consumer spending with debt is even better – that’s what economists have been preaching – because the consumed goods and services are gone after having been added to GDP, while the debt, which GDP ignores, remains until it is paid off with future earnings, or until it blows up. Corporations too have gone on a borrowing binge. Unlike consumers, they have no intention of paying off their debts. They issue new debt and use the proceeds to pay off maturing debts. Funding share-buybacks and dividends with debt is ideal. It’s called “unlocking value.” Debt must always grow. For that purpose, the Fed has manipulated interest rates to rock bottom. Actually paying off and reducing debt has the dreadful moniker, bandied about during the Financial Crisis, “deleveraging.”

It’s synonymous with “The End of the World.” At the institutional level, “debt” is replaced with more politically correct “leverage.” More leverage is better. Particularly if you can borrow short-term at near zero cost and bet the proceeds on risky illiquid long-term assets, such as real estate, or on securities that become illiquid without notice. Derivatives are part of this institutional equation. The notional value of derivatives in the US banking system is $190 trillion, according to the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. Four banks hold over 90% of them: JP Morgan ($53 trillion), Citibank ($52 trillion), Goldman ($44 trillion), and Bank of America ($26 trillion). Over 75% of those derivative contracts are interest rate products, such as swaps.

With them, heavily leveraged institutional investors that borrow short-term to invest in illiquid long-term assets hedge against interest rate movements. But Treasury yields and mortgage rates have moved violently in recent weeks, and someone is out some big money. These credit bubbles always unravel to the greatest surprise of those institutions and their economists. When they unravel, the above “End-of-the-World” scenario of orderly deleveraging turns into forced deleveraging, which can get messy. Assets that had previously been taken for granted are either repriced or just evaporate. But they’d been pledged as collateral. Suddenly, the collateral no longer exists….

“..the Swiss National Bank’s balance sheet now accounts for 100% of GDP. Japan is also 100%, but mainly invested in its own state paper. The ECB and the Fed are 30%.”

• Former UBS, Credit Suisse CEO: “A Recession Is Sometimes Necessary” (ZH)

Remember when bashing central banks and predicting financial collapse as a result of monetary manipulation and intervention was considered “fake news” within the “serious” financial community, disseminated by fringe blogs? Good times. In an interview with Swiss Sonntags Blick titled appropriately enough “A Recession Is Sometimes Necessary”, the former CEO of UBS and Credit Suisse, Oswald Grübel, lashed out by criticizing the growing strength of central banks and their ‘supremacy over the markets and other banks’. He claimed that the use of negative interest rates and huge positive balance sheets represent ‘weapons of mass destruction’. He calls for an end to the use of negative interest rates. Sounding more like a “tinfoil” blog than the former CEO of the two largest Swiss banks, Grübel warned that central banks have “crossed the point of no return” which will ultimately “end in a crash.”

Joining Deutsche Bank in slamming NIRP, Grubel said that banks are losing hundreds of millions of francs each year to negative interest rates paid to central banks. Worse, he warned that central banks will eventually lose their credibility in the markets but that this could take 10 years or more, at which point it will “all end in a crash.” What happens then? The former CEO believes that the final outcome will be wholesale financial nationalization: “after that all banks could belong to the state” Grubel also the doubted the wisdom of the Swiss National Bank’s balance sheet: “the Swiss National Bank’s balance sheet now accounts for 100% of GDP. Japan is also 100%, but mainly invested in its own state paper. The ECB and the Fed are 30%. Switzerland is far, far, far ahead. Is that wise?”

Grübel also touched on a point we have made ever since 2010 when we said that in a world of unprecedented political polarity, politicians now control the world almost exclusively through monetary policy, to wit: “After the financial crisis, politics has taken power in the banking sector: It has bound the banks into a regulatory corset and now they can no longer move. Politicians have told central banks: now you determine what is going on with the economy.” What are the implications of this power shift? “Previously, the risk was distributed to thousands of banks. They had to pay for their mistakes. The risk lay with the shareholders. Today, more and more the state carries the risk.” Which, of course, is another word for taxpayers. In other words, the next crash will be one where central – not commercial – banks are failing, and the one left with the bill will once again be the ordinary person in the street.

In a tangent, Grübel gave his thoughts on what makes a man rich: “rich is a man when he goes to bed in a carefree manner and wakes up without care.” He is then asked if, by that definition, a billionaire is rich to which he replied: “No. Money has little to do with wealth. The real rich are carefree. Those who are healthy, are not dependent. The greatest wealth is independence.”

“..the winner will be favorite to become president in May..”. Really? Then why am I thinking Le Pen is the favorite?

• Big Shock In France’s Presidential Election As Sarkozy Eliminated (BBG)

Former Prime Minister Francois Fillon, the new front-runner in France’s 2017 presidential election, is offering voters an economic-policy revolution inspired by Margaret Thatcher. Fillon, 62, vaulted from third position in most polls to win the first round of the Republican primary by 16 percentage points from the veteran Alain Juppe on Sunday with the most free-market platform among the seven candidates. They’ll face each other again in next Sunday’s runoff and the winner will be favorite to become president in May 2017. The lifelong politician is pledging to lengthen the work week to 39 hours from 35, to increase the retirement age to 65 and add immigration quotas. He’s vowed to eliminate half a million public-sector jobs and cut spending by €100 billion over his five years in office.

And he proposes a €40 billion tax-cut for companies and a constitutional ban on planned budget deficits. “Who is Fillon? The classic conservative, right-wing candidate,” Bruno Cautres, a political scientist at the Sciences Po Institute in Paris, said in an interview. “He wants a deep reform of the French model: shrinking the role of the state and cutting the welfare system.” Compared with the brash style of former boss, Nicolas Sarkozy, Fillon has a more low-key approach but he makes a virtue of telling it straight. When he took office as premier in 2007, he shocked even Sarkozy by announcing that France was a bankrupt state. Today he’s promising to reverse that, just like his role model when she became U.K. prime minister in 1979.

Europe and the scourge of direct democracy.

• The EU’s New Bomb Is Ticking in the Netherlands (WSJ)

If the European dream is to die, it may be the Netherlands that delivers the fatal blow. The Dutch general election in March is shaping up to be a defining moment for the European project. The risk to the EU doesn’t come from Geert Wilders, the leader of anti-EU, anti-immigration Party for Freedom. He is well ahead in the polls and looks destined to benefit from many of the social and economic factors that paved the way for the Brexit and Trump revolts. But the vagaries of the Dutch political system make it highly unlikely that Mr. Wilders will find his way into government. As things stand, he is predicted to win just 29 out of the 150 seats in the new parliament, and mainstream parties seem certain to shun him as a coalition partner. In an increasingly fragmented Dutch political landscape, most observers agree that the likely outcome of the election is a coalition of four or five center-right and center-left parties.

Instead, the risk to the EU comes instead from a new generation of Dutch euroskeptics who are less divisive and concerned about immigration but more focused on questions of sovereignty—and utterly committed to the destruction of the EU. Its leading figures are Thierry Baudet and Jan Roos, who have close links to British euroskeptics. They have already scored one significant success: In 2015, they persuaded the Dutch parliament to adopt a law that requires the government to hold a referendum on any law if 300,000 citizens request it. They then took advantage of this law at the first opportunity to secure a vote that rejected the EU’s proposed trade and economic pact with Ukraine, which Brussels saw as a vital step in supporting a strategically important neighbor. This referendum law is a potential bomb under the EU, as both Dutch politicians and Brussels officials are well aware.

Mr. Baudet believes he now has the means to block any steps the EU might seek to take to deepen European integration or stabilize the eurozone if they require Dutch legislation. This could potentially include aid to troubled Southern European countries such as Greece and Italy, rendering the eurozone unworkable. Indeed, the Dutch government gave a further boost to Mr. Baudet and his allies when it agreed to accept the outcome of the Ukraine referendum if turnout was above 30%, even though it was under no legal obligation to do so. This was a major concession to the euroskeptics, as became clear when strong turnout among their highly motivated supporters lifted overall turnout to 31%. With Mr. Wilders’s party, currently polling above 25%, and both Mr. Baudet and Mr. Roos having launched their own parties, Dutch euroskeptics are confident they will be able to reach the 30% threshold in future referendums.

Do they mean things would have been even worse without free trade? (if they do, let them say so): “..the benefits of trade and open markets need to be communicated to the wider public more effectively, emphasizing how trade promotes innovation, employment and higher living standards.”

• APEC Summit Closes With Call for More Globalization, Free Trade (AP)

Leaders of 21 Asia-Pacific nations ended their annual summit Sunday with a call to resist protectionism amid signs of increased free-trade skepticism, highlighted by the victory of Donald Trump in the U.S. presidential election. The Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation forum also closed with a joint pledge to work toward a sweeping new free trade agreement that would include all 21 members as a path to “sustainable, balanced and inclusive growth,” despite the political climate. “We reaffirm our commitment to keep our markets open and to fight against all forms of protectionism,” the leaders of the APEC nations said in a joint statement. APEC noted the “rising skepticism over trade” amid an uneven recovery since the financial crisis and said that “the benefits of trade and open markets need to be communicated to the wider public more effectively, emphasizing how trade promotes innovation, employment and higher living standards.”

Speaking to journalists at the conclusion of the summit, Peruvian President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski said the main obstacle to free trade agreements in Asia and around the world is the frustration felt by those left behind by globalization. “Protectionism in reality is a reflection of tough economic conditions,” said Kuczynski, the meeting’s host. Referring to Brexit and Trump’s election win in the U.S., he said those results highlighted the backlash against globalization in former industrial regions in the U.S. and Britain that contrasts with support for trade in more-prosperous urban areas and developing countries. “This is an important point in recent economic history because of the outcome of various elections in very important countries that have reflected an anti-trade, anti-openness feeling,” he said.

Fuhget about it.

• Obama Says World Leaders Want To Move Forward With TPP (AFP)

US President Barack Obama said Sunday that leaders from across the Asia-Pacific have decided to move ahead with a trade deal opposed by his successor Donald Trump. “Our partners made clear they want to move forward with TPP,” Obama said at a press conference after meeting leaders in Peru. “They would like to move forward with the United States.” It is unclear whether there is any future for the TPP, a vast, arduously negotiated agreement between 12 countries that are currently at different stages of ratifying it. It does not include China. Trump campaigned against the proposal as a “terrible deal” that would “rape” the United States by sending American jobs to countries with cheaper labor.

The agreement must by ratified in the US Congress – which will remain in the hands of Trump’s Republican allies when the billionaire mogul takes office on January 20. Without the United States, it cannot be implemented in its current form. However, some have suggested Trump could negotiate a number of changes and then claim credit for turning the deal around. Obama defended the increasing integration of the global economy at the close of his final foreign visit as president – a trade summit held against the backdrop of rising protectionist sentiment in the United States and Europe, seen in both Trump’s win and Britain’s “Brexit” vote. He said that “historic gains in prosperity” thanks to globalization had been muddied by a growing gap “between the rich and everyone else.” “That can reverberate through our politics,” he said.

Jim Quinn’s longtime series on the Fourth Turning continues. A problem might be that you can’t really know who’s who until afterwards. Maybe Mike Pence will turn out to be the real grey champion, or someone as yet unknown.

• The Grey Champion Assumes Command – Part 1 (Quinn)

In September 2015 I wrote a five part article called Fourth Turning: Crisis of Trust. In Part 2 of that article I pondered who might emerge as the Grey Champion, leading the country during the second half of this Fourth Turning Crisis. I had the above pictures of Franklin, Lincoln, and FDR, along with a flaming question mark. The question has been answered. Donald J. Trump is the Grey Champion. When I wrote that article, only one GOP debate had taken place. There were eleven more to go. Trump was viewed by the establishment as a joke, ridiculed by the propaganda media, and disdained by the GOP and Democrats. I was still skeptical of his seriousness and desire to go the distance, but I attempted to view his candidacy through the lens of the Fourth Turning. I was convinced the mood of the country turning against the establishment could lead to his elevation to the presidency. I was definitely in the minority at the time:

“Until three months ago the 2016 presidential election was in control of the establishment. The Party was putting forth their chosen crony capitalist figureheads – Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton. They are hand-picked known controllable entities who will not upset the existing corrupt system. They are equally acceptable to Goldman Sachs, the Federal Reserve, the military industrial complex, the sickcare industry, mega-corporate America, the moneyed interests, and the never changing government apparatchiks. The one party system is designed to give the appearance of choice, while in reality there is no difference between the policies of the two heads of one party and their candidate products. But now Donald Trump has stormed onto the scene from the reality TV world to tell the establishment – You’re Fired!!!”

Strauss and Howe wrote their prophetic tome two decades ago. [..] They did not know which events or which people would catalyze this Fourth Turning. But they knew the mood change in the country would be driven by the predictable generational alignment which occurs every eighty years. “Soon after the catalyst, a national election will produce a sweeping political realignment, as one faction or coalition capitalizes on a new public demand for decisive action. Republicans, Democrats, or perhaps a new party will decisively win the long partisan tug of war. This new regime will enthrone itself for the duration of the Crisis. Regardless of its ideology, that new leadership will assert public authority and demand private sacrifice. Where leaders had once been inclined to alleviate societal pressures, they will now aggravate them to command the nation’s attention. The regeneracy will be solidly under way.” – Strauss & Howe – The Fourth Turning

“This is a revolutionary moment. We must not allow them to shift the blame on to voters. This is their failure, decades in the making.”

• The Silver Lining In This Disaster: Clinton & Co Are Finally Gone (G.)

Hillary Clinton has given us back our freedom. Only such a crushing defeat could break the chains that bound us to the New Democrat elites. The defeat was the result of decades of moving the Democratic party – the party of FDR – away from what it once was and should have remained: a party that represents workers. All workers. For three decades they have kept us in line with threats of a Republican monster-president should we stay home on election day. Election day has come and passed, and many did stay home. And instead of bowing out gracefully and accepting responsibility for their defeat, they have already started blaming it largely on racist hordes of rural Americans. That explanation conveniently shifts blame away from themselves, and avoids any tough questions about where the party has failed.

In a capitalist democracy, the party of the left has one essential reason for existing: to speak for the working class. Capitalist democracies have tended towards two major parties. One, which acts in the interest of the capitalist class – the business owners, the entrepreneurs, the professionals – ensuring their efforts and the risks they took were fairly rewarded. The other party represented workers, unions and later on other groups that made up the working class, including women and oppressed minorities. This delicate balance ended in the 1990s. Many blame Reagan and Thatcher for destroying unions and unfettering corporations. I don’t. In the 1990s, a New Left arose in the English-speaking world: Bill Clinton’s New Democrats and Tony Blair’s New Labour. Instead of a balancing act, Clinton and Blair presided over an equally aggressive “new centrist” dismantling of the laws that protected workers and the poor.

[..] .. let us be as clear about this electoral defeat as possible, because the New Democratic elite will try to pin their failure, and keep their jobs, by blaming this largely on racism, sexism – and FBI director Comey. This is an extremely dangerous conclusion to draw from this election. So here is our silver lining. This is a revolutionary moment. We must not allow them to shift the blame on to voters. This is their failure, decades in the making. And their failure is our chance to regroup. To clean house in the Democratic party, to retire the old elite and to empower a new generation of FDR Democrats, who look out for the working class – the whole working class.

What happens when you think the economy means the rich.

• Disaffected Rust Belt Voters Embraced Trump. They Had No Other Hope (G.)

The industrial midwest is the vast sweep, from western Pennsylvania through eastern Iowa, that drove the American economy for nearly a century. The great industrial cities, such as Chicago and Detroit, led the way, but it spread into hundreds of small towns and cities – from the steel mills of Ohio to the auto parts factories of Michigan and Wisconsin and the appliance makers of Iowa and Illinois. This was Hillary Clinton’s blue wall, the states she had to win to become president. Of the 11 swing states that decided the election, five – Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin and Iowa – lie in this battered old industrial heartland. If, as expected, Trump’s lead in Michigan holds, she lost them all. How did it happen? There are many reasons. The Clinton team barely campaigned there and in Wisconsin until it was too late.

Misogyny played a role. So did Clinton’s personal unpopularity and the relatively low turnout. But the real reason is that the industrial era created this region and gave a good middle-class way of life to the people who worked there. That economy began to vanish 40 years ago, moving first to the sun belt and then Mexico, before finally China. The good jobs that were left increasingly went to robots. Factories closed. So did the stores and bars and schools around them. The brightest kids fled to universities and then to the cities – to New York or Chicago or the state capital. Those left behind worked two or three non-union jobs just to stay afloat. Families broke up. Drug use increased. Life spans shortened. And nobody seemed to care – until Trump. But does he really? Who knows? He said he did.

His tirades – against trade, against elites, against Obamacare, against immigrants, against the Clintons – sounded like unhinged rants in cities and on campuses, which never took him seriously. In the old industrial zones and withering farm towns, he echoed their own resentments. Mitt Romney couldn’t do this; neither could John McCain. But Trump did, and so they embraced him. Why was this such a surprise? It’s impossible to overstate the alienation between the two Americas, between the global citizens and the global left-behinds, between the great cities that run the nation’s economy and media, and the hinterland that feels not only cheated but, worse, disrespected.

Tsipras goes from one blunder to the next. Still, as long as he’s there, the streets are quiet, amazingly quiet for a society that’s under such economic fire. But he is soon going to be voted out in favor of someone, anyone, who will then see things get much worse in the streets. A smouldering powder keg.

• Tsipras Ready To Give In On Labor Reform To Ensure Debt Relief (Kath.)

Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras is prepared to make further concessions to Greece’s creditors in tough negotiations that are currently under way to ensure that there is no delay in launching crucial talks on relief for the country’s debt burden, Kathimerini understands. According to sources, Tsipras and his key ministers are ready to give in to calls by foreign auditors for more flexibility in the crucial area of labor laws. The government has already agreed to put off its demands for the restoration of collective wage bargaining, a key pledge of leftist SYRIZA before it came to power last year. It is unclear to what degree the Greek side is willing to concede on other issues – such as calls by foreign officials for facilitating mass layoffs for struggling employers and making it harder for unions to call strikes.

A source at the Labor Ministry said over the weekend that the Greek side has submitted its proposals for changes to labor laws and is awaiting the reaction of foreign officials. Tsipras is said to be set on a strategy of withdrawal despite the risks. The key danger is that cohesion in the ranks of leftist SYRIZA, which has already been tested by a series of concessions to foreign creditors, is further compromised, weakening the beleaguered coalition. The other risk is that the further concessions may boost the lead of conservative New Democracy over SYRIZA in opinion polls, which is already significant, thereby enhancing the sense that SYRIZA’s coalition with the right-wing Independent Greeks is on its way out.

Debt Rattle October 10 2016

Oct 102016

October 10, 2016 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 9:55 am Finance Tagged with: Brexit, central bankers, clowns, Iceland, IMF, Pentagon, recession, Russia, Trump, yuan 2 Responses »

Lewis Wickes Hine Newsies in St. Louis 1910

• Bank of America Has A Recession Warning That’s Downright ‘Scary’ (CNBC)

• The Truly Scary Clowns: Central Bankers (Forsyth)

• Far From Stepping Back, Top Central Banks Are Set To Double Down (R.)

• The World Bank and the IMF Won’t Admit Their Policies Are The Problem (G.)

• China Must Wean Itself Off Debt Addiction To Avoid Financial Calamity-IMF (Tel.)

• China Fixes Yuan at Six-Year Low Against the U.S. Dollar (WSJ)

• Iceland, Where Bad Bankers Go to Jail, Finds Nine Guilty in Historic Case (CD)

• Pound’s Pounding Helped U.K. Absorb Brexit Shock (WSJ)

• A Mile-High House Of Cards (IM)

• Oil Prices Fall Over Doubts That Non-OPEC Producers Will Cut Output (R.)

• Pentagon Spent Half a Billion On Fake Al-Qaeda Propaganda Videos (Ind.)

• Russia Says US Actions Threaten Its National Security (R.)

“.. if they follow the current trends they’re on, we’re going to hit a recession sometime in the second half of next year.”

• Bank of America Has A Recession Warning That’s Downright ‘Scary’ (CNBC)

There’s a chilling trend in the market, and it could wreak havoc on your portfolio, a top market watcher said. “We are seven years into a full-fledged, all out, central bankers doing everything they can to stimulate demand,” Bank of America-Merrill Lynch’s head of U.S. equity and quantitative strategy Savita Subramanian recently warned on CNBC’s “Fast Money.” “We looked at all of these indicators that have been pretty good at forecasting recessions and we extrapolated that if they follow the current trends they’re on, we’re going to hit a recession sometime in the second half of next year.” The most unsettling thing is that this recession risk isn’t discounted into the market at these levels, according to Subramanian.

The S&P is 1.8% away from its intraday all-time high of 2,193.81, hit on August 15. Subramanian’s year-end 2016 S&P 500 price target is 2000, about seven% lower than where it’s trading today. And, if she’s right, it’s about to get a lot worse next year. “What scares me is the market been so fragile. So, remember what happened in January? We got a whiff of bad news and all of the sudden the market is at 1800,” she said—a move that augured poorly for the near-term. “I think that speaks to the reaction function of the market. There are a lot of itchy trigger fingers. There’s lot of violent trades that can really roil a fairly complacent environment.”

Nice metaphor. Could be used for Trump and Hillary too.

• The Truly Scary Clowns: Central Bankers (Forsyth)

At a Grant’s Interest Rate Observer conference last week, Jeffrey Gundlach, DoubleLine’s CEO, commented on the growing belief that interest rates will “never” rise. When it’s said that something can “never” happen, it’s about to happen, he argued. Zero or negative interest rates are doing more harm than good, he continued, with the long decline in the stock of Deutsche Bank being an example. You can’t help the economy by bankrupting the banks, he contended, which is the effect of shrinking their net interest earnings. For these and other reasons, Gundlach suggested, the lows in bond yields were seen in the post-Brexit plunge in the 10-year Treasury to 1.36%, a hair under the nadir of 1.38% touched in 2012. (Some data providers have slightly different numbers, but they’re as close as “damn it” is to swearing.)

The more important inference is that major trend changes are at hand. As described by Bank of America Merrill Lynch global investment strategists led by Michael Hartnett, we may be witnessing “peak liquidity.” That is, the era of excess liquidity from central banks is ending, which is consistent with shifts in ECB and BOJ policies, the U.K. Prime Minister May’s criticism of QE, and the likelihood of a Fed interest-rate hike in December. In addition, the BofA ML strategists also point to “peak inequality,” which would spur fiscal actions, such as greater spending and income redistribution. Finally, they see “peak globalization,” as populism counters the “disinflationary free movement of capital, trade and labor.”

The sum is “peak returns” from financial assets, the BofA ML team concludes. In that scenario, they recommend “Main Street over Wall Street” for 2017, including small-capitalization stocks and commodities, real assets (including collectibles and real estate) over financial ones, and banks over capital markets. In particular, they suggest a shift from bond proxies, including utilities, telecoms, real estate investment trusts, and low-volatility stocks. These sectors, it should be noted, had tough times last week. Investors who have tilted strongly toward these investments, which have benefited from historically low interest rates, have been laughing all the way to the bank. In the future, they may be spooked by those creepy clowns, otherwise known as less-friendly central bankers.

What happens in one way streets and dead alleys.

• Far From Stepping Back, Top Central Banks Are Set To Double Down (R.)

Central banks’ repeated warnings that there are limits to what they can do to bolster the sputtering world economy could suggest they are about to pull back and pass the baton to governments. But a steady flow of research and a new tone in the debate among policymakers and advisers points in a different direction: rather than retreat, central banks are preparing for the day they may need to do more, even at the risk of antagonizing politicians who argue they already have too much power. The shift can be seen in the acknowledgment by Federal Reserve policymakers that their massive $4 trillion balance sheet will not shrink anytime soon, or that asset buying may become a “recurrent” tool of future monetary policy.

It can be seen in the comments of Bank of England officials who talk of crisis-fighting tools as now semi-permanent fixtures, or in the Bank of Japan developing a new monetary policy framework, in this case targeting long-term market interest rates. Driving those developments is an emerging consensus among policymakers who now acknowledge that the global financial crisis has led to a fundamental shift toward low inflation, tepid growth, lagging productivity and interest rates stuck near zero. “We could be stuck in a new longer-run equilibrium characterized by sluggish growth and recurrent reliance on unconventional monetary policy,” Fed Vice Chair Stanley Fischer said last week.

For years, Federal reserve and other policymakers have discounted such a scenario, arguing that temporary factors were slowing the recovery and plotting a return to conventional pre-crisis policies. Over the past months, though, that optimism has given way to an admission that such a return is increasingly elusive. Interest rates are set to stay low far longer than thought only a year ago and jumbo balance sheets accumulated through crisis-era asset purchases are now cast as a possibly permanent tool. At the annual Jackson Hole Fed conference in August the discussion had shifted from the mechanics and timing of “normalization,” to how and whether to expand the central bank footprint yet again.

They don’t talk to people telling them that.

• The World Bank and the IMF Won’t Admit Their Policies Are The Problem (G.)

The World Bank, IMF and WTO can sense that they are sitting on the edge of a volcano that could blow at any time. They fear, rightly, that a second big crash within a decade would create a backlash leading to protectionism and the rise of dark political forces that would be difficult, if not impossible, to control. That there are ingredients for a fresh crisis became apparent at various stages last week. According to the IMF, global debt has risen to a record level of $152tn – more than double global GDP – at a time when activity is sluggish. Collapsing commodity prices and weak demand from the west has meant that growth in sub-Saharan Africa is running at half the level of population increases. Companies in the emerging world loaded up on debt during the commodity boom and are vulnerable to rising US interest rates and any softening of the world economy. China is the most egregious example of debt being used to boost activity artificially.

The argument that rising debt is fine, because on the other side of ledger is an asset increasing in value, is specious. The only reason the assets are rising in price is because investors are taking on more debt to buy them. At some point, the asset bubble bursts, leaving borrowers with a major problem. This was the lesson of the sub-prime crisis and it is remarkable that memories are so short. The next big one could come from anywhere and it is good that the World Bank and IMF are aware of the risks. Even so, there was an air of unreality about the discussions in Washington last week. The reason was simple: there was not the slightest hint from the IMF or World Bank that the policies they advocated during the heyday of the so-called Washington consensus – austerity, privatisation and financial liberalisation – have contributed to weak and unequal growth, with all the political discontent that this has caused.

Even worse, Lagarde and Kim seemed oblivious to the fact that the Washington consensus approach is alive and well within their organisations. The IMF’s remedy for Greece and Portugal during the eurozone crisis has been straight out of the structural adjustment playbook: reduce public spending, cut salaries and benefits, insist that state-owned enterprises return to the private sector, reduce minimum wages and restrict collective bargaining. Between them, the IMF and the European authorities are turning Greece into a developing country. It would be fascinating to see what sort of response Lagarde would get if she tried talking about inclusive growth to homeless people huddled on the streets of Athens.

The IMF will pressure China now it’s in the basket. New meaning to ‘basket case’.

• China Must Wean Itself Off Debt Addiction To Avoid Financial Calamity-IMF (Tel.)

China is edging towards “financial calamity” and must wean itself off its debt addiction and reform if it is to avoid a crisis, the IMF has warned. Markus Rodlauer, deputy director of the IMF’s Asia-Pacific department, said the world’s second largest economy was approaching a tipping point where its rapidly growing financial sector and surge in shadow credit could undermine the state’s ability to contain the fallout from a crash. “The level of financial and corporate debt and the complexity of the financial system and rapid growth in shadow banking is on an unsustainable path,” he said. “While still manageable in its size given the size of the public assets under public control, the trend is dangerous and if it’s not corrected it will lead to a correction.

“The longer it lasts … the more serious the disturbance and the disruption might be. [The reaction could range] from a mild growth slowdown, to a sharp slowdown in growth to potentially a financial crisis.” Data show credit and financial sector leverage in China has continued to rise much faster than economic growth. The IMF’s latest World Economic Outlook said debt in China was rising at a “dangerous pace”, while its Financial Stability Report showed small Chinese banks were heavily exposed to shadow credit as a share of capital buffers, with exposure reaching nearly 600pc at some banks. Mr Rodlauer, who served as the IMF’s China’s mission chief for five years, said stronger trade ties and financial linkages between China and other countries meant the impact of a hard landing on the global economy could also be huge.

Been in the SDR basket for 10 days, and already there’s this.

• China Fixes Yuan at Six-Year Low Against the US Dollar (WSJ)

The Chinese yuan was guided toward a six-year low against the U.S. dollar on Monday, as the country’s markets returned after a weeklong holiday. In onshore trading, the currency was on track for its biggest one-day loss against the U.S. dollar since the Brexit in June. The yuan entered the basket of currencies backing the IMF’s special drawing rights, an international reserve currency, on Oct. 1. The PBOC set its daily reference rate for the yuan at 6.7008 against the U.S. dollar, a depreciation of 0.3% from its last fixing of 6.6778 on Sept. 30, before the National Day holiday. Monday’s fixing was the weakest level for the currency since September 2010.

Onshore, where the yuan is allowed to trade within 2% of the PBOC’s central reference point, the currency traded 0.5% weaker at 6.7032 in early trade. Offshore, the yuan traded 0.1% weaker at 6.7106. Many markets in Asia, including the largest offshore-yuan trading center in Hong Kong, are closed for a holiday Monday. The past week was characterized by volatility in foreign-exchange markets, including a flash crash in the British pound that saw it lose more than 6% shortly after 7 a.m. Hong Kong time Friday before recovering later in the trading day. The U.S. dollar, which accounts for about a quarter of the value of the basket of currencies the yuan tracks, has strengthened during the period.

The U.S. dollar index, which tracks its strength against a basket of six currencies, is up 1.1% so far this month. The weakness in the yuan fix reflects data released during the past week, including a faster-than-expected drawdown of $18.79 billion in China’s foreign-currency reserves during September, said Alex Wijaya, senior sales trader at CMC Markets. “For the past year, the Chinese government has been intervening in the currency and this has depleted some of its foreign-exchange reserves, and this could be one of the main contributions to the weakness in the yuan,” he said. “The U.S. dollar has been strengthening as well.”

Unlike the rest of the western world, Iceland had no austerity, but it did introduce capital controls and it did go after bankers.

• Iceland, Where Bad Bankers Go to Jail, Finds Nine Guilty in Historic Case (CD)

Iceland, which became a gold standard for corporate accountability in the wake of its 2008-2011 financial crisis, has found nine bankers guilty for market manipulation in one of the biggest cases of its kind in the country’s history. The verdict from Iceland’s Supreme Court, issued Thursday, overturns a June 2015 decision by the Reykjavik District Court, which found seven of the nine defendants guilty and acquitted two. No punishment has been handed down yet, although sentencing is set to come. The defendants worked at the major international firm Kaupthing Bank until it was taken over by the Icelandic government during the crash.

The bank’s former director Hreidar Mar Sigurdsson, who had been sentenced to five and a half years in 2013 in a separate Kaupthing case, had his punishment extended by six months in response to the verdict. The acquittals were overturned for former Kaupthing credit representative Björk Poraninsdottir and former Kaupthing Luxembourg CEO Magnuse Gudmondson, although no penalties have been meted out for them. According to the Iceland Monitor, the decision found that “[b]y fully financing share purchases with no other surety than the shares themselves, the bankers were accused of giving a false and misleading impression of demand for Kaupthing shares by means of deception and pretense.”

“..suffering Brexit’s pain through the currency may be more comfortable than through higher unemployment or other ills..”

• Pound’s Pounding Helped UK Absorb Brexit Shock (WSJ)

When the U.K. voted to leave the European Union in June, the pound took its worst beating in half a century. Many economists saw that as a good thing. Despite the shock of Brexit, more than three months later there are few tangible signs of economic distress in Britain: Employment is steady. The stock market has held up. Government bonds are strong. Houses are still being bought and sold. Consumers are still consuming. Credit, say economists, goes in large part to the decline of the British pound, which has acted as a giant shock absorber against Brexit. It fell 11% against the dollar in two trading days after the vote, and after another sudden slump last week is now down 16%. Seen from abroad, British people are one-sixth poorer and their economy is one-sixth smaller.

In the past week, figures from the IMF suggest, Britain has slid from the world’s fifth-largest economy to sixth, behind its millennium-old rival France. But suffering Brexit’s pain through the currency may be more comfortable than through higher unemployment or other ills—a luxury that wasn’t available to eurozone countries during the currency bloc’s debt crisis. Over the longer term, economic wisdom holds that a weaker currency will boost a nation’s sales abroad, so what the economy loses in the form of lower consumption—because consumers are poorer—will be recovered through higher exports. “It is important that you have a live release valve like this,” said Tim Haywood, an investment director at GAM Holding.

Italy pre-referendum.

• A Mile-High House Of Cards (IM)

According to Webster’s Dictionary, an economic depression is “a period of time in which there is little economic activity and many people do not have jobs.” Italy has had virtually no productive growth since it joined the euro in 1999. Today, the Italian economy (real GDP per person) is smaller than it was at the turn of the century. That’s almost two decades of economic stagnation. The economy today is 10% smaller than it was before its peak prior to the 2008 financial crisis. More than 25% of Italy’s industry has been lost since then. Unemployment is around 12%. Youth unemployment is around 36%. And these are only the official government statistics, which almost certainly understate the true numbers.

The IMF predicts it will take at least until 2025 for the Italian economy to return to its 2008 peak. Since nobody can accurately predict what’s going to happen next year, let alone nine years from now, the IMF is basically saying it has no idea how or when the Italian economy could ever recover. The mass media and establishment economists don’t dare call it a depression. But a depression it is. Italy’s populist Five Star Movement—or M5S, as it’s known by its Italian acronym—is now the country’s most popular political party. M5S blames Italy’s economic malaise squarely on the euro. I’d say a large plurality of Italians agree, and they have a point. They claim that, under the euro, Italian industry and exports have become uncompetitive. M5S believes a return to the lira could be the remedy.

Prior to joining the euro, Italy would regularly post large trade surpluses with Germany. Since joining, it has posted large trade deficits. Because of Italy’s structural economic problems, it should have a significantly weaker currency. But since Italy is wrapped in the euro straightjacket, it gets monetary conditions that are far too tight than appropriate for the country. [..] The Italian economy is made up of many small and medium-sized businesses. Those businesses have taken out loans from Italian banks. But as the economy is in a depression, many of those loans have gone bad or will go bad. This has created a crisis in the Italian banking system. It took years to build up, but now the situation is coming to a head. The Italian banking system is insolvent, and now everyone knows it. Shares of Italian banks have plummeted more than 50% so far this year.

No need to doubt: rest assured it’s not going to happen.

• Oil Prices Fall Over Doubts That Non-OPEC Producers Will Cut Output (R.)

Oil prices fell on Monday over doubts that an OPEC-led plan to cut output would rein in a global oversupply that has dogged markets for over two years. Brent crude futures were trading at $51.53 per barrel at 0511 GMT, down 40 cents or 0.77%, from their last settlement. WTI futures were down 44 cents or 0.88%, at $49.37 a barrel. OPEC plans to agree on an output cut by the time it meets in late November. The targeted range is to cut production to a range of 32.50 million barrels per day (bpd) to 33.0 million bpd. OPEC’s current output stands at a record 33.6 million bpd. To achieve such an agreement among its members, some of which like Saudi Arabia and Iran are political rivals, OPEC officials are embarking on a flurry of meetings in the next six weeks, starting in Istanbul this week.

However, analysts cautioned about too high expectations about the Istanbul talks this week. “A meeting between OPEC and non-OPEC producers (namely Russia) will add to oil headlines this week. Don’t expect a firm agreement from Russia, but headlines about cooperation are likely,” Morgan Stanley said on Monday. “It’s also worth noting that Iraq and Iran oil ministers will not be in attendance,” the U.S. bank added. Even if a deal is reached, analysts are unconvinced it would result in much higher prices, as doubts run high over the feasibility of a cut among rivaling members, a Reuters poll showed on Friday. Pouring cold water on expectations, OPEC’s second biggest producer Iraq said over the weekend that it wants to raise output further in 2017.

“The CDs were encoded to open the videos on RealPlayer software that connects to the Internet when it runs. It would issue an IP address that could then be tracked by US intelligence. ”

• Pentagon Spent Half a Billion On Fake Al-Qaeda Propaganda Videos (Ind.)

A former contractor for a UK-based public relations firm says that the Pentagon paid more than half a billion dollars for the production and dissemination of fake Al-Qaeda videos that portrayed the insurgent group in a negative light. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism reported that the PR firm, Bell Pottinger, worked alongside top US military officials at Camp Victory in Baghdad at the height of the Iraq War. The agency was tasked with crafting TV segments in the style of unbiased Arabic news reports, videos of Al-Qaeda bombings that appeared to be filmed by insurgents, and anti-insurgent commercials – and those who watched the videos could be tracked by US forces.

The report of Bell Pottinger’s involvement in the video hearkens back to more than 10 years ago, when the Washington-based PR firm Lincoln Group was revealed to have produced print news stories and placed them in Iraqi newspapers. According to the Los Angeles Times, who obtained the 2005 documents, the stories were intended to tout the US-led efforts in Iraq and denounce insurgent groups. Bell Pottinger was first tasked by the interim Iraqi government in 2004 to promote democratic elections. They received $540m between May 2007 and December 2011, but could have earned as much as $120m from the US in 2006. Lord Tim Bell, a former Bell Pottinger chairman, confirmed the existence of the contract with the Sunday Times.

The Pentagon also confirmed that the agency was contracted under the Information Operations Task Force, but insisted that all material distributed was “truthful”. However, former video editor Martin Wells, who worked on the IOTF contract with Bell Pottinger, said they were given very specific instructions on how to produce the fake Al-Qaeda propaganda films. “We need to make this style of video and we’ve got to use Al-Qaeda’s footage,” Mr Wells told the Bureau, recalling the instructions he received. “We need it to be 10 minutes long, and it needs to be in this file format, and we need to encode it in this manner.” According to Mr Wells’ account, US Marines would then take CDs containing the videos while on patrol, then plant them at sites during raids. “If they’re raiding a house and they’re going to make a mess of it looking for stuff anyway, they’d just drop an odd CD there,” he said.

Russis will not back down.

• Russia Says US Actions Threaten Its National Security (R.)

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Sunday he had detected increasing U.S. hostility towards Moscow and complained about what he said was a series of aggressive U.S. steps that threatened Russia’s national security. In an interview with Russian state TV likely to worsen already poor relations with Washington, Lavrov made it clear he blamed the Obama administration for what he described as a sharp deterioration in U.S.-Russia ties. “We have witnessed a fundamental change of circumstances when it comes to the aggressive Russophobia that now lies at the heart of U.S. policy towards Russia,” Lavrov told Russian state TV’s First Channel. “It’s not just a rhetorical Russophobia, but aggressive steps that really hurt our national interests and pose a threat to our security.”

With relations between Moscow and Washington strained over issues from Syria to Ukraine, Lavrov reeled off a long list of Russian grievances against the United States which he said helped contribute to an atmosphere of mistrust that was in some ways more dangerous and unpredictable than the Cold War. He complained that NATO had been steadily moving military infrastructure closer to Russia’s borders and lashed out at Western sanctions imposed over Moscow’s role in the Ukraine crisis. He also said he had heard that some policy makers in Washington were suggesting that President Barack Obama sanction the carpet bombing of the Syrian government’s military air fields to ground its air force. “This is a very dangerous game given that Russia, being in Syria at the invitation of the legitimate government of this country and having two bases there, has got air defense systems there to protect its assets,” said Lavrov.

Debt Rattle September 21 2016

Sep 212016

September 21, 2016 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 9:16 am Finance Tagged with: BoJ, deflation, Deutsche, Exxon, monarch, oil, recession, refugees, rigs, Wells Fargo Comments Off

Harris&Ewing Preparations for the inauguration of Woodrow Wilson, Court of Honor before White House 1913

• Unlike in 1986, This Time US Might Not Dodge a Recession: Deutsche Bank (BBG)

• Get Ready For The Mother Of All Stock Market Corrections (Tel.)

• Japan Exports Fall 11th Straight Month, 9.6% YoY, Imports Plunge 17.3% (R.)

• Bank of Japan Overhauls Policy Framework, Sets Yield Curve Target (R.)

• Bank of Japan Introduces Rate Target for 10-Year Government Bonds (WSJ)

• Could Germany Allow Deutsche Bank To Go Under? (Golem XIV)

• Keynesian Deflation Humbug (Mish)

• Nobody Has Ever Shut Down The World’s Best Drilling Rigs – Until Now (BBG)

• Crude Slips As Venezuela Says Market Is 10% Oversupplied (Dow Jones)

• SEC Probes Exxon Over Asset Valuation, Climate Change Accounting (WSJ)

• Court Says Hanjin Shipping Rehab Plan ‘Realistically Impossible’ (R.)

• Elizabeth Warren to Wells Fargo CEO: Resign, Return Earnings, Face Inquiry (G.)

• Mexico Police Raid Sawmills To Rescue Monarch Butterfly Refuge (AFP)

• Italy PM Renzi: Merkel Is ‘Lying To The Public’, Europe Is a ‘GHOST’ (Exp.)

• EU: Refugees Must Stay On Greek Islands Despite Lesbos Fire (AP)

There are few things more nonsensical than ‘experts’ saying things like “..there’s a 30% probability that the U.S. will succumb to a recession over the next 12 months..” Yet, people keep listening.

• Unlike in 1986, This Time US Might Not Dodge a Recession: Deutsche Bank (BBG)

Falling corporate margins, weakness in the U.S. labor market and rising corporate default rates — all features of the U.S. economy in 1986, a year it avoided a recession. Even if this year markets are largely shrugging off the deterioration in those key indicators and betting grim readings are down to temporary forces, Deutsche Bank strategists say to take little hope from a 30-year old precedent. Investors jittery over bleak readings on a slew of macro and corporate data have seized on 1986, when the same signals for a U.S recession were in place but the economy ended up growing 3.5% after inflation.

But bets on the continued expansion in U.S. output over the next year might be misplaced, according to European equity strategists at Deutsche Bank, since the economy is on a significantly weaker footing compared to the year that saw the release of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. They restate the bank’s call that there’s a 30% probability that the U.S. will succumb to a recession over the next 12 months. That compares pessimistically with the 20% that is the average expectations of analysts surveyed by Bloomberg — and even with other analysts at the bank.

…when central banks stop printing…

• Get Ready For The Mother Of All Stock Market Corrections (Tel.)

[..] According to Chris Watling at Longview Economics, a wide range of indicators confirm the message: recession risks are rising. And if a recession is indeed looming, it almost certainly means a bear market in equities. Looking at all the US recessions of the last 77 years, Mr Watling finds that there is only one (1945) which has not been accompanied by a stock market correction. Complicating matters further is an ever more worrisome phenomenon – that both bond and equity markets are being artificially propped up by central bank money printing. Further easing this week from the Bank of Japan would only deepen the problem. Yet eventually it must end, and when it does, share prices globally will return to earth with a bump. Only lack of alternatives for today’s ever rising wall of money seems to hold them aloft.

Over the last year, central bank manipulation of markets has reached ludicrous levels, far beyond the “quantitative easing” used to mitigate the early stages of the crisis. Through long use, “unconventional monetary policy” of the original sort has become ineffective, and, well, simply conventional in nature. To get pushback, central banks have been straying ever further onto the wild-west frontiers of monetary policy. Today it’s not just government bonds which are being bought up by the lorry load, but corporate debt, and in the case of the Bank of Japan and the Swiss National Bank (SNB), even high risk equities. [..] For global corporations at least, credit has never been so free and easy, encouraging aggressive share buy-back programmes.

This in turn further inflates valuations already in danger of losing all touch with underlying fundamentals. By the by, it also helps trigger lucrative executive bonus awards. Where’s the real earnings and productivity growth to justify the present state of stock markets? As long as the central bank is there to do the dirty work, it scarcely seems to matter. In any case, the situation seems ever more precarious and unsustainable. Conventional pricing signals have all but disappeared, swept away by a tsunami of newly created money. Globally, the misallocation of capital must already be on a par with what happened in the run-up to the financial crisis, and possibly worse given the continued build-up of debt since then.

World trade summed up.

• Japan Exports Fall 11th Straight Month, 9.6% YoY, Imports Plunge 17.3% (R.)

Japan’s exports fell 9.6% in August from a year earlier, posting an 11th straight month of decline, Ministry of Finance data showed on Wednesday, underscoring sluggish external demand. The fall compares with a 4.8% decrease expected by economists in a Reuters poll. It followed a 14.0% drop in July, the data showed. Imports fell 17.3% in August, versus the median estimate for a 17.8% decline. The trade balance swung to a deficit of 18.7 billion yen ($184 million), versus the median estimate for a 202.3 billion yen surplus. It was a first trade deficit in three months.

Who says Kuroda has no sense of humor? After failing to lift inflation for years, he now says he will “..allow inflation to overshoot its target..

• Bank of Japan Overhauls Policy Framework, Sets Yield Curve Target (R.)

The Bank of Japan added a long-term interest rate target to its massive asset-buying program on Wednesday, overhauling its policy framework and recommitting to reaching its 2% inflation target as quickly as possible. The central bank also said it will allow inflation to overshoot its target by maintaining an ultra-loose policy – beefing up its previous commitment to keep policy easy until the target was reached and kept in a stable manner. At the two-day rate review that ended on Wednesday, the BOJ maintained the 0.1% negative interest rate it applies to some of the excess reserves that financial institutions park with the central bank.

But it abandoned its base money target and instead adopted “yield curve control” under which it will buy long-term government bonds to keep 10-year bond yields at current levels around zero %. The BOJ said it would continue to buy long-term government bonds at a pace that ensures its holdings increase by 80 trillion yen ($781 billion) per year. Under the new framework that adds yield curve control to its current quantitative and qualitative easing (QQE), the BOJ will deepen negative rates, lower the long-term rate target, or expand base money if it were to ease again, the central bank said in a statement announcing the policy decision. “The BOJ will seek to lower real interest rates by controlling short-term and long-term interest rates, which would be placed as the core of the new policy framework,” it said.

But seriously, historians will look back on today wondering how on earth we could have all swallowed this continuing gibberish.

• Bank of Japan Introduces Rate Target for 10-Year Government Bonds (WSJ)

Japan’s central bank took an unexpected step Wednesday, introducing a zero interest-rate target for 10-year government bonds to step up its fight against deflation, after an internal review of previous measures that fell short of expectations. he adoption of a long-term target, the first such attempt in the BOJ’s history, came as global central banks struggle to find ways to get prices rising. Financial markets gyrated following the Bank of Japan’s announcement of what it called a “new framework” to overcome deflation. Some thought it illustrated the limits of the BOJ’s powers, since the decision didn’t include any direct new stimulus measures, while others were encouraged by the BOJ’s tone.

“Investors are showing a positive response as they got the feeling that the BOJ will do whatever it can do to tackle deflation,” said Kengo Suzuki at Mizuho Securities in reference to the yen’s fall following the BOJ action. The dollar was around 102.60 yen in afternoon Tokyo trading, compared with around 101.90 yen before the decision. The 10-year Japanese government bond yield had already been near zero in recent weeks. It was minus 0.06% just before the decision and was minus 0.03% in Tokyo afternoon trading hours after the decision. The new framework puts 10-year interest rates at the center of policy, a contrast to the BOJ’s approach for the last 3 1/2 years under Gov. Haruhiko Kuroda, when asset purchases and expanding the monetary base were the key policy tool.

Smart from Golem.

• Could Germany Allow Deutsche Bank To Go Under? (Golem XIV)

[..] public bail outs are supposed to be strictly temporary. No holding 80% of RBS for most of a decade. Really? But that’s not the point which is important for Deutsche Bank. The important point is that in any sale of the viable parts of Germany’s only G-SIB, the brutal fact of the matter is that there is no other German financial institution that could afford to buy any of it. Commerzbank? Allianz? Letting an insurer buy a bank? So imagine the situation for Germany. They lose their seat at the top table and then they watch as France, England, American or perhaps China buy the crown of German financial might. So I don’t think it will ever happen. Or at least it will only happen when Germany is truly out of any other options. So if Deutsche is not going to be declared “no longer viable” what are the alternatives?

One option is the UniCredit route. UniCredit was a trillion euro bank. It was Italy’s flag carrier. It had bought Bavaria’s banks and some of Austria’s as well. And yet it’s share price was always paltry. Just 7.6 Euros at the market top in May ’07. And since then it has been a hollow and enfeebled giant. Lumbering and ineffectual. It has been the laughing stock of European banks. But Italy doesn’t seem to mind. They seem content to let UniCredit be the quintessential Zombie bank. Would Germany be as sanguine to leave Deutsche to go the same way? This would, I suggest, be almost as injurious to German pride and industrial policy as letting Deutsche go down completely.

But if Germany decided it could not face the financial consequences of obeying the letter of the resolution law nor leave the bank to be a bloated and useless zombie then the alternatives bring in their train even greater political upheavals. Imagine the German government decides that not bailing out Deutsche just inflicts too much damage on Germany – potentially reducing Germany from the front rank of globally significant nations to something lesser. It becomes a matter of national pride if not of survival. So Germany ignores all the FSB rules and regulations and bails Deutsche bringing it into government ownership/protection – call it what you like. In so doing it demolishes the entirety of European policy regarding bail outs, government debts and austerity.

Where then all the German insistence on fiscal discipline it has forced upon Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Spain and Italy? The Bundesbank, Berlin and the ECB would have no authority at all. Every country would have a green light to do the same for their flag carriers. It would be the end the European experiment. Or the European system would have to try to continue without Germany. And that could only happen if all debts to Germany were repudiated. I realise all this is speculation. But Deutsche has lost 90% of its value. Only RBS has lost more. Deutsche has 7000 legal cases against it. Frau Merkel is losing her grip, Brexit rocked the complacent rulers of Euroland and Madame Marine Le Pen would like to push France to do the same.

Mish restates the obvious: “Keynesian theory says consumers will delay purchases if prices are falling. In practice, all things being equal, it’s precisely the opposite.”

• Keynesian Deflation Humbug (Mish)

Hip, hip, hooray! The CPI is up more than expected, led by a huge 1.1% month-over-month surge in medical care supplies. Medical care services jumped 0.9%, and shelter jumped 0.3%. This will not help the economy. And it will subtract from consumer spending other than Obamacare and rent, but economists are cheering.

Real World Happiness

Food at home -1.9%

Energy -9.2%

Gasoline -17.3%

Fuel Oil -12.8%

Electricity -.07%

Used cars -4.0%

Unreal World Happiness

Food Away From Home +2.8%

Medical Care Commodities +4.5%

Shelter +3.4%

Transportation Services +3.1%

Medical Care Services +5.1%

Keynesian Theory vs. Practice Keynesian theory says consumers will delay purchases if prices are falling. In practice, all things being equal, it’s precisely the opposite. If consumers think prices are too high, they will wait for bargains. It happens every year at Christmas and all year long on discretionary items not in immediate need.

Reality Check Questions

If price of food drops will people stop eating?

If the price of gasoline drops will people stop driving?

If price of airline tickets drop will people stop flying?

If the handle on your frying pan falls off or your blow-dryer breaks, will you delay making another purchase because you can get it cheaper next month?

If computers, printers, TVs, and other electronic devices will be cheaper next year, then cheaper again the following year, will people delay purchasing electronic devices as long as prices decline?

If your coat is worn out, are you inclined to wait another year if there are discounts now, but you expect even bigger discounts a year from now?

Will people delay medical procedures in expectation of falling prices?

If deflation theory is accurate, why are there huge lines at stores when prices drop the most?

Bonus Question

If falling prices stop people from buying things, how are any computers, flat screen TVs, monitors, etc., ever sold, in light of the fact that quality improves and prices decline every year?

Anyone who thinks soaring Obamacare and rent is a good thing and will help the economy is crazy.

Forget the OPEC output cut talks, here’s what’s really happening in oil.

• Nobody Has Ever Shut Down The World’s Best Drilling Rigs – Until Now (BBG)

In a far corner of the Caribbean Sea, one of those idyllic spots touched most days by little more than a fisherman chasing blue marlin, billions of dollars worth of the world’s finest oil equipment bobs quietly in the water. They are high-tech, deepwater drillships – big, hulking things with giant rigs that tower high above the deck. They’re packed tight in a cluster, nine of them in all. The engines are off. The 20-ton anchors are down. The crews are gone. For months now, they’ve been parked here, 12 miles off the coast of Trinidad & Tobago, waiting for the global oil market to recover. The ships are owned by a company called Transocean Ltd., the biggest offshore-rig operator in the world. And while the decision to idle a chunk of its fleet would seem logical enough given the collapse in oil drilling activity, Transocean is in truth taking an enormous, and unprecedented, risk.

No one, it turns out, had ever shut off these ships before. In the two decades since the newest models hit the market, there never had really been a need to. And no one can tell you, with any certainty or precision, what will happen when they flip the switch back on. It’s a gamble that Transocean, and a couple smaller rig operators, felt compelled to take after having shelled out millions of dollars to keep the motors running on ships not in use. That technique is called warm-stacking. Parked in a safe harbor and manned by a skeleton crew, it typically costs about $40,000 a day. Cold-stacking – when the engines are cut – costs as little as $15,000 a day. Huge savings, yes, but the angst runs high.

OPES helps the US bring Maduro to his knees.

• Crude Slips As Venezuela Says Market Is 10% Oversupplied (Dow Jones)

Oil prices dipped to a new one-month low Tuesday as hopes for any deal between OPEC countries and Russia to freeze production continued to fade. U.S. crude for October delivery recently fell 14 cents, or 0.3%, to $43.18 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange. The October contract expires at settlement, and the more actively traded November contract recently fell 27 cents, or 0.6%, to $43.59 a barrel. Brent, the global benchmark, fell 42 cents, or 0.9%, to $45.53 a barrel on ICE Futures Europe. Recent trade has been marked by fears that more OPEC members are intent on increasing production, even as leaders discuss the possibility of an output cap. Libya, Iran and Nigeria combined want to increase their output by about 1.5 million barrels a day this year.

Even Venezuela is raising exports, despite financial and production troubles, and the moves from all these countries are a clear message that none would be interested in agreeing to a cap, said Bjarne Schieldrop from Sweden’s SEB bank. He added that any deal would probably allow exceptions for Nigeria, Libya, Venezuela and Iran to lift production, possibly nullifying any agreement. “It doesn’t seem like any oil producers outside of North America are doing anything to control their production levels,” said Gene McGillian, research manager at Tradition Energy. Oil has been in a steady downtrend for the better part of two weeks with concerns over lingering oversupply. Prices are down 9.4% since they hit a high point for nearly the past month on Sept. 8.

The biggest drop came in two days last week after the International Energy Agency said a slowdown in global oil demand growth accelerated this quarter, sinking to 800,000 barrels a day – 1.5 million barrels a day lower than the third quarter of 2015. Despite that and talks of an output cap, data show OPEC members broadly producing near-record amounts of crude. “Fundamentals suggest the oil market is likely to remain in surplus for longer than many expected,” strategists at ING Bank said in a note.

Exxon has not: 1) written down valuations of reserves as prices plunged, and 2) accounted for the financial consequences of climate change regulations.

• SEC Probes Exxon Over Asset Valuation, Climate Change Accounting (WSJ)

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission is investigating how Exxon Mobil values its assets in a world of increasing climate-change regulations, a probe that could have far-reaching consequences for the oil and gas industry. The SEC sought information and documents in August from Exxon and the company’s auditor, PricewaterhouseCoopers, according to people familiar with the matter. The federal agency has been receiving documents the company submitted as part of a continuing probe into similar issues begun last year by New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, the people said.

The SEC’s probe is homing in on how Exxon calculates the impact to its business from the world’s mounting response to climate change, including what figures the company uses to account for the future costs of complying with regulations to curb greenhouse gases as it evaluates the economic viability of its projects. The decision to step into an Exxon investigation and seek climate-related information represents a moment in the effort to take climate change more seriously in the financial community, said Andrew Logan, director of the oil and gas program at Ceres, a Boston-based advocacy organization that has pushed for more carbon-related disclosure from companies.

“It’s a potential tipping point not just for Exxon, but for the industry as a whole,” he said. As part of its probe, the SEC is also examining Exxon’s longstanding practice of not writing down the value of its oil and gas reserves when prices fall, people familiar with the matter said. Exxon is the only major U.S. producer that hasn’t taken a write down or impairment since oil prices plunged two years ago. Peers including Chevron have lowered valuations by a collective $50 billion.

Shipping prices will plummet.

• Court Says Hanjin Shipping Rehab Plan ‘Realistically Impossible’ (R.)

The South Korean court overseeing Hanjin Shipping’s receivership said a rehabilitation plan is “realistically impossible” if top priority debt such as backlogged charter fees exceed 1 trillion won ($896 million), South Korea’s Yonhap newswire reported on Wednesday. Hanjin Shipping, the world’s seventh-largest container carrier, filed for receivership late last month in a South Korean court and must submit a rehabilitation plan in December. With debt of about 6 trillion won ($5.4 billion) at the end of June and the South Korean government’s unwillingness to mount a rescue, expectations are low that Hanjin Shipping will be able to survive. Top priority debt means claims for public interests, which are paid first to creditors and include cargo owners’ damages and unpaid charter fees, Yonhap reported citing the Seoul Central District Court.

Shouldn’t such an inquiry be as obvious as common sense??

• Elizabeth Warren to Wells Fargo CEO: Resign, Return Earnings, Face Inquiry (G.)

Wells Fargo chief executive John Stumpf should resign, return his pay and be criminally investigated over the bank’s illegal sales practices, Senator Elizabeth Warren said on Tuesday. The Massachusetts senator’s comments came moments after Stumpf said he was “deeply sorry” for the more than 2m unauthorized accounts his staff opened for the bank’s customers. The accounts, ranging from credit cards to checking accounts, were opened by thousands of the bank’s employees in an effort to meet Wells Fargo’s sales quotas and have already led to a record $185m fine. While testifying in front of the Senate banking committee, Stumpf said he was “deeply sorry” that the bank let down its customers and apologized for violating their trust.

“I accept full responsibility for all unethical sales practices in our retail banking business, and I am fully committed to doing everything possible to fix this issue, strengthen our culture, and take the necessary actions to restore our customers’ trust,” Stumpf said in his prepared remarks. Warren accused Stumpf of “gutless leadership”, telling him that his definition of being accountable is to push the blame on lower-level employees who do not have a PR firm to defend them. Warren questioned Stumpf’s compensation, asking him: “Have you returned one nickel of the millions of dollars that you were paid while this scam was going on?” “The board will take care of that,” Stumpf said after attempting to duck the question. He also told Warren that this “was not a scam”.

Warren pointed out that during the time that the unauthorized accounts were being opened, the share price of Wells Fargo went up by about $30. Stumpf personally owns about 6.75m shares of Wells Fargo stock and made more than $200m just off his stock during that time, Warren said. [..] At the hearing Stumpf pointed out that the lowest paid employees at Wells Fargo earn $12 an hour and that the employees let go for opening unauthorized accounts were making “good money”, earning $30,000 to $60,000 a year. “How much money did you make last year?” New Jersey senator Robert Menendez asked Stumpf. “$19.3m,” said Stumpf. “Now that’s good money,” said Menendez.

Kudo’s.

• Mexico Police Raid Sawmills To Rescue Monarch Butterfly Refuge (AFP)

A special Mexican police unit has raided seven sawmills near the monarch butterfly’s mountain sanctuary in a bid to prevent illegal logging threatening the insect’s winter migration, officials said Tuesday. Backed up by a helicopter, some 220 members of the country’s police force and 40 forestry inspectors participated in the September 12 operation in the western state of Michoacan. North American governments have taken steps since last year to protect the monarch butterfly, which crosses Canada and the United States each year to hibernate on the fir and pine trees of Mexico’s western mountains. Last week’s raid was the first since the government decided in April to add the police to protection efforts for the brilliant orange and black monarchs.

The force has been conducting foot patrols day and night, using drones and helicopters for surveillance when weather permits, Abel Corona, director of the special units, said at a news conference. [..] Illegal logging dropped by 40% between the 2014-2015 and 2015-2016 butterfly season, environmental protection authorities said last month. But March storms killed seven% of the monarchs. The cold spell came after authorities had reported a rebound in the 2015-2016 season, with the butterfly covering 4.01 hectares (9.9 acres) of forest, more than tripling the previous year’s figure.

Renzi in his referendum desperation finally tells the truth, somewhat.

• Italy PM Renzi: Merkel Is ‘Lying To The Public’, Europe Is a ‘GHOST’ (Exp.)

Angela Merkel has been lying to the public about European unity, Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi has said. In a brutal attack on his fellow EU members, he said the first EU summit without the UK amounted to no more than “a nice cruise on the Danube”. Having been excluded from a joint news conference by the German Chancellor, Mrs Merkel and French President Francois Hollande, he said he was dissatisfied with the Bratislava summit’s closing statement. The outspoken Italian premier hit out at the lack of commitments on the economy and immigration in the summit’s conclusions, despite signing it himself. In a fiery interview in Italian daily Corriere della Sera, Mr Renzi intensified his criticisms, although he remained vague on what commitments he would have liked the summit to produce.

The Prime Minister has staked his career on a referendum this autumn over plans for constitutional reform, promising to resign if he loses. Talking about his fellow leaders, he said: “If we want to pass the afternoon writing documents without any soul or any horizon they can do it on their own. “I don’t know what Merkel is referring to when she talks about the ‘spirit of Bratislava’. “If things go on like this, instead of the spirit of Bratislava we’ll be talking about the ghost of Europe.” Mr Renzi said he is preparing a 2017 budget which he claims will cut taxes despite a slowing economy and record high public debt. He added: “At Bratislava we had a nice cruise on the Danube, but I hoped for answers to the crisis caused by Brexit, not just to go on a boat trip.”

He was similarly belligerent about the Italian budget to be presented next month, saying there would be “no negotiation” with Brussels, and money he planned to spend on tackling immigration and making Italy safer from earthquakes would be excluded from EU rules on deficit limits. Other countries were more guilty than Italy of breaking budget rules and Italy had met its commitments on tackling the inflows of migrants crossing the Mediterranean, Renzi said. He said: “I’m not going to stay silent for the sake of a quiet life. “If someone wants to keep Italy quiet they have picked the wrong place, the wrong method and the wrong subject.”

In case anyone still had any doubts about this, here’s more proof that it’s the EU, not Greece, that is responsible for the expanding misery. Europe wants the islands to serve as holding pens, so richer Europe doesn’t have to face the consequences of the policies it itself dictates.

“To avoid secondary movement to the rest of Europe, that means keeping asylum seekers on the islands..”

• EU: Refugees Must Stay On Greek Islands Despite Lesbos Fire (AP)

Authorities on the island of Lesvos called for the immediate evacuation Tuesday of thousands of refugees to the Greek mainland after a fire gutted a detention camp following protests. But EU officials appeared cool to the idea. More than 4,000 people were housed at the camp in Moria on Lesvos where the fire broke out late Monday, destroying or damaging tents and trailers. No injuries were reported at the camp, about 8 kilometers north of the island’s main town. Nine migrants were arrested on public disturbance charges after the chaotic scenes. Families with young children hastily packed up their belongings and fled into the nearby fields as the fire raged after nightfall. Many were later given shelter at volunteer-run camps. “We have been saying for a very long time that overcrowding on the islands must be eased,” regional governor Christiana Kalogirou said.

“On the islands of the northeast Aegean, official facilities have a capacity of 5,450 places, but more than 10,500 people are there. There is an immediate need to take people off the islands because things will get even more difficult,” she said. More than 60,000 migrants and refugees are stranded in transit in Greece, and those who arrived after March 20 have been restricted to five Aegean islands under an EU-brokered deal to deport them back to Turkey. But the agreement has been fraught with delays. In Brussels, a spokeswoman for the European Commission, Natasha Bertaud, said the Greek government had described the situation as being under control. Transfers to the mainland, she said, would remain limited. “To avoid secondary movement to the rest of Europe, that means keeping asylum seekers on the islands for the most part,” Bertaud said.

Debt Rattle September 8 2016

Sep 082016

September 8, 2016 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 9:27 am Finance Tagged with: bad loans, cash, ECB, FBI, Fed, Fukushima, Hanjin, jobless, P2P, recession, SOE Comments Off

Harris&Ewing The Post Office building in Washington DC 1911

• US Recession Jitters Stoke Fears of Impotent Fed and Fiscal Paralysis (AEP)

• One In Six Prime-Age American Men Has No Job (NPR)

• GDP – Even Less Than Meets The Eye (720 Global)

• It Won’t Be Long Now – The End Game Of Central Banking Is Nigh (Stockman)

• China’s $1 Trillion Makeover Of Bloated SOEs Attracts Skeptics (BBG)

• China’s Massive Infrastructure Investment Is A Model To Avoid (MW)

• P2P Lenders Push Chinese Students To Borrow At Exorbitant Rates (BBG)

• Collapse Of Hanjin Leaves $14 Billion Worth Of Goods Adrift (BBG)

• EU Regulators: Bad Loans Are Systemic Challenge for European Banks (BBG)

• America’s Quiet War on Cash (TAM)

• FBI Records on Financial Crisis Requested by U.S. Lawmaker (BBG)

• Clinton Foundation: False Philanthropy (Ortel)

• Former Japan PM Accuses Abe Of Lying Over Fukushima (G.)

Picture of failure.

• US Recession Jitters Stoke Fears of Impotent Fed and Fiscal Paralysis (AEP)

An ominous paper by the US Federal Reserve has become the hottest document in high finance. It was intended to reassure us that the world’s hegemonic central bank still has ample firepower to overcome the next downturn. But the author was too honest. He has instead set off an agitated debate, and rattled a lot of nerves. David Reifschneider’s analysis – ‘Gauging the Ability of the FOMC to Respond to Future Recessions’ – more or less concedes that the Fed has run out of heavy ammunition. The Federal Open Market Committee had to cut interest rates by an average of 550 basis points over the last nine recessions in order to break the fall and stabilize the economy. It could not possibly do so right now, or next year, or the year after.

QE in its current form cannot compensate, and nor can forward guidance. They are largely exhausted in any case. “One cannot rule out the possibility that there could be circumstances in the future in which the ability of the FOMC to provide the desired degree of accommodation using these tools would be strained,” he wrote. This admission is painfully topical as a plethora of data suggest that the US economy may have hit a brick wall in August. The ISM gauge of manufacturing plunged below the boom-bust line to 49.4, and the services index dropped to a six-year low, with new orders crashing nine points. My own tentative view is that these ISM readings are rogue surveys. The Atlanta Fed’s ‘GDPNow’ tracker points to robust US growth of 3.6pc in the third quarter. The New York Fed version is coming in at 2.8pc.

Yet the US expansion is already long in the tooth after 87 months, and late-cycle chemistry is notoriously unpredictable. Warning signs certainly abound. Corporate profits have been slipping for six quarters, the typical precursor to an abrupt slump in business spending. “The only thing keeping the US out of recession is the US consumer. If consumption stalls then we really are in trouble,” says Albert Edwards from Societe Generale. I am willing to bet against him for now. The M1 money supply – often a good leading indicator – has picked up after a weak patch earlier this year and is now surging at a rate of 10.1pc. This pace would normally signal burst of torrid growth a few months later. It is in stark contrast to the monetary contraction before the Lehman crisis.

My presumption is that the day of reckoning has been pushed well into 2017, but in the dead of the night I have a horrible sweaty feeling that Mr Edwards may be right. It is not a time to be chasing stock markets already at vertiginous levels. The Reifschneider paper argues that the Fed can probably muddle through, so long as it succeeds in pushing interest rates back up to 3pc or so before the next recession hits. Even then it might have to launch a further $4 trillion of QE and stretch its balance sheet to a once unthinkable $8.5 trillion.

” In the 1960s, nearly 100% of men between the ages of 25 and 54 worked..”

• One In Six Prime-Age American Men Has No Job (NPR)

At 4.9%, the nation’s unemployment rate is half of what it was at the height of the Great Recession. But that number hides a big problem: Millions of men in their prime working years have dropped out of the workforce — meaning they aren’t working or even looking for a job. It’s a trend that’s held true for decades and has economists puzzled. In the 1960s, nearly 100% of men between the ages of 25 and 54 worked. That’s fallen over the decades. In a recent report, President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers said 83% of men in the prime working ages of 25-54 who were not in the labor force had not worked in the previous year. So, essentially, 10 million men are missing from the workforce.

“One in six prime-age guys has no job; it’s kind of worse than it was in the depression in 1940,” says Nicholas Eberstadt, an economic and demographic researcher at American Enterprise Institute who wrote the book Men Without Work: America’s Invisible Crisis. He says these men aren’t even counted among the jobless, because they aren’t seeking work. Eberstadt says little is known about the missing men. But there are factors that make men less likely to be in the labor force — a lack of college degree, being single, or being black. So, why are men leaving? And what are they doing instead?

“GDP as most commonly used can be a flawed measurement if one tries to infer that the size or growth of economic activity is well correlated to the prosperity of its people..”

• GDP – Even Less Than Meets The Eye (720 Global)

The most common statistic used to measure the size and growth rate of a nation’s economy is Gross Domestic Product (GDP). However, GDP as most commonly used can be a flawed measurement if one tries to infer that the size or growth of economic activity is well correlated to the prosperity of its people. Consider China and the United States for example. The U.S. has a GDP of approximately $16.5 trillion and a population of roughly 325 million while China has a GDP of nearly $11 trillion and a population of approximately 1.4 billion.

One could say that China’s economy is about two-thirds the size of the U.S. economy, however when one considers how that activity is spread amongst the citizens, China’s economy is only one-seventh that of the U.S. Accordingly, Chinese citizens are clearly less productive and prosperous than U.S. citizens GDP per capita (per citizen), as demonstrated above, is a valid way to measure the efficiency of one nation’s economic output versus another and is also an important statistic to gauge the productivity and prosperity trends in one country. We have frequently shown the declining trend in secular GDP growth in charts like those shown below.

Above, GDP is plotted on an absolute basis and does not take into account the amount of economic activity or economic growth per person. Below, we show the ten-year growth rate of GDP per capita.

As one easily notices GDP on a per capita basis is more worrisome than when viewed on a total basis as in the first two graphs. The economic growth rate per person is currently below one half of one%. More concerning, it is below levels seen during the great financial crisis in 2008 and it is still trending lower. This graph confirms our macroeconomic concerns and helps explain, in part, why so many U.S. citizens feel like they are being left behind. Factor in that many of the economic spoils are not evenly distributed, as assumed in this analysis, but are largely accruing to the wealthy, and the problem only worsens. As such, the growing social anxiety and trend towards populism, be it conservative or liberal leaning, will not likely dissipate if the aforementioned economic trends continue.

Centralization as a whole is going the way of the dodo.

• It Won’t Be Long Now – The End Game Of Central Banking Is Nigh (Stockman)

As Contra Corner readers recognize the only consistent way forward for America at this late stage of the game is a return to free markets, fiscal rectitude, sound money, constitutional liberty, non-intervention abroad, minimalist government at home and decentralized political rule. Unfortunately, that is not about to happen any time soon—–even if by some miracle Donald Trump is elected President. But what the book does claim is that the tide is turning against the failed Wall Street/Washington bipartisan consensus. I call this insurrection the “revolt of the rubes” in Flyover America. This uprising against the rule of the financial and political elites has counterparts abroad among those who voted for Brexit in the UK, against Merkel in the recent German elections in her home state, and among the growing tide of anti-Brussels sentiment reflected in polls throughout the EC.

Needless to say, the political upheaval now underway is largely an inchoate reaction to the policy failures and arrogant pretensions of the establishment rulers. Like Donald Trump himself, it does not reflect a coherent programmatic alternative. But my contention is that liberation from our current ruinous policy regime has to start somewhere—and that’s why the Trump candidacy is so important. He represents a raw insurgency of attack, derision, impertinence and repudiation. If that leads to throwing out the beltway careerists, pettifoggers, hypocrites, ideologues, racketeers, power seekers and snobs who have brought about the current ruin then at least the decks will be cleared.

So doing, the Trump candidacy—win or lose—is paving the way for an honest debate about the Fed’s war on savers and wage earners, the phony Bubble Finance prosperity it has bestowed on the bicoastal elites and Imperial Washington’s delusionary addiction to debt, war and special interest racketeering. In addition to the political revolt of the rubes, the establishment regime is now imperiled by another existential threat. To wit, the world’s central bankers have finally painted themselves into the mother of all corners. Literally, they dare not stop their printing presses because the front-runners and robo-traders have taken them hostage. Recent developments at all three major central banks, in fact, provide powerful evidence that the end of the current Bubble Finance regime is near.

Beijing control trumps efficiency, and that’s not going to change.

• China’s $1 Trillion Makeover Of Bloated SOEs Attracts Skeptics (BBG)

To grasp the scale of the challenges facing Chinese leaders in revamping their sprawling and inefficient state-owned enterprises, consider this: The combined revenue of 100-plus government-owned firms, spanning from train makers to banks and power companies, rivals Japan’s entire $4.1 trillion economy. China’s SOE sector, traditionally a source of political patronage and economic power for the Communist Party, accounts for about 40% of China’s industrial assets and 18% of total employment, according to Bloomberg Intelligence economists Fielding Chen and Tom Orlik. These government creations are also dragging down growth, with their return on assets in 2015 estimated to be at 2.8%, versus 10.6% for private sector-firms.

Cutting SOEs down to size and improving their profitability is critical to President Xi Jinping and Premier Li Keqiang’s signature economic policy of rebalancing the $10 trillion economy away from an over-reliance on debt-fueled infrastructure investment and exports to one powered more by services and consumer spending. One strategy has been to embrace mergers – about $1 trillion of asset combinations have been announced since late 2014. The broad government sector overhaul adds up to a major triage effort, keeping healthy or strategic state firms like banks, energy and telecoms under tight control while orchestrating supersized consolidation among ailing giants in shipping, cement and metals to improve efficiency and slash over-capacity. Without a major overhaul, China’s low labor productivity growth – now less than a tenth of European, Japanese and U.S. levels – isn’t likely to improve.

[..] Despite the pressure to turn around, there are about 50 or so “too-big-to-fail” state enterprises in energy, technology and defense that are deemed to be so strategic that they will continue to receive generous government support, according to Lin Boqiang, director of Xiamen University’s energy economics research center. For the rest, Xi’s SOE makeover will be a gradual process with progress coming in fits and starts. Combing two inefficient firms doesn’t necessarily create a healthy one without some forceful leadership to eliminate overlap and excess capacity, as could be the case in the steel industry. “When you combine BaoSteel and Wuhan Steel, two companies thousands of kilometers apart, I’m not sure what they could do together that they couldn’t do separately,” according to Lardy.

Too much wasted.

• China’s Massive Infrastructure Investment Is A Model To Avoid (MW)

Some leading U.S. politicians and economists including President Obama have admired China’s massive investment in new transportation projects and wished America could do the same. Yet a new research paper suggests China’s approach is “a model to avoid” and one that could trigger a global crisis unless dramatically altered. In a paper, four professors at Oxford University assert that a majority of large Chinese investment projects over the past three decades have underestimated costs, failed to deliver the promised benefits and played a smaller role than conventional wisdom suggests in making the country more prosperous.

“China is not a model to follow for other economies – emerging or developed – as regards infrastructure investing, but a model to avoid,” wrote professors Atif Ansar, Bent Flyvbjerg, Alexander Budzier and Daniel Lunn. Many Western lawmakers and economists have long praised China’s investment in new roads, rail, bridges and airports as means to improve the nation’s growth and reduce unemployment. Some have also suggested authoritarian governments are better able than democracies to get projects off the ground. “How do we sit back and watch China and Europe build the best bridges and high-speed railroads and gleaming new airports, and we’re doing nothing?” Obama complained in a speech several years ago urging Congress to spend more on infrastructure.

Jim Millstein, a former Treasury Department official from 2009-2011, makes a similar argument Wednesday, in a Washington Post column. “A well-designed program of new infrastructure spending can be just the catalyst the U.S. economy needs to get out of its rut,” he argued. Yet the Chinese approach is much costlier and less beneficial than it appears, the researchers contend. In many cases projects are subject to special-interest manipulation, poorly designed or shoddily implemented to meet political edicts. Quality, safety and environmental issues are not uncommon and the Chinese government is heavy-handed when obtaining land, even displacing masses of citizens from seized homes and property.

The power of shadow banks.

• P2P Lenders Push Chinese Students To Borrow At Exorbitant Rates (BBG)

Across college campuses in China, a small army of marketers is recruiting students to borrow money at interest rates many times that charged by the nation’s banks. Those without a credit history or parental approval can borrow money to buy a smartphone, pay for holidays, or get the latest sneakers through a raft of apps such as Fenqile. The market leader, whose name literally means Happy Installment Payments, has 50,000 part-time marketers across more than 3,000 universities and proudly touts the slogan “Wait no more; love what I love.” Welcome to the regulatory gray area where peer-to-peer lending meets e-commerce in China.

In the last three years, tens of millions of students have taken out micro-loans with the tap of a button to buy things. Once just the realm of startups, the sector has attracted heavy hitters in China’s online industry, including Alibaba’s finance affiliate and JD.com, which are pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into the lending model. In a nation with 37 million college students, the market is expected to reach $15 billion, according to the Beijing-based market research firm Analysys. While traditional banks, the biggest of which are state-owned, have long been regulated, such peer-to-peer lenders have not, though Fenqile at least says it welcomes more oversight.

Sounds like a huge global overcapacity. Which of course is in line with shrinking global trade.

• Collapse Of Hanjin Leaves $14 Billion Worth Of Goods Adrift (BBG)

Suppliers to companies such as Nike Inc. and Hugo Boss AG are scrambling to ensure their T-shirts and sneakers reach buyers in time for the year-end holiday season after the collapse of Hanjin Shipping Co. left an estimated $14 billion worth of goods adrift. Esquel Group, a Hong Kong-based manufacturer for fashion brands including Nike, Hugo Boss and Ralph Lauren, is hiring truckers to move four stranded containers of raw materials to its factories near Ho Chi Minh City as soon as they can be retrieved from ports in China. Liaoning Shidai Wanheng, a Chinese fabrics importer and a supplier to Marks & Spencer, has made alternative arrangements for shipments that were scheduled with Hanjin.

“Our production lines are waiting,” said Kent Teh, who runs Esquel’s Vietnam business. “We potentially have to take airfreight to deliver the garment items to clients in the U.S. and U.K.” Apparel, handbags, televisions and microwave ovens are among goods stranded at sea after Korea’s largest shipping company filed for bankruptcy protection last week, setting off a series of events that roiled the global supply chain. A U.S. Court on Tuesday provided a temporary reprieve, which may help vessels call on ports such as Los Angeles without the fear of getting impounded. Any major bottlenecks ahead of Thanksgiving and Christmas could put a dent in the two-month shopping season, which netted some $626 billion of sales last year in the U.S.

“The ratio varies widely, from close to 50% in Cyprus to around 1% in Sweden.” Italy is the big fish here.

• EU Regulators: Bad Loans Are Systemic Challenge for European Banks (BBG)

European regulators are sounding the alarm about the persistence of bad loans weighing on the balance sheets of banks in the region. In a report Wednesday on financial risks, the European Union agencies that set rules and technical standards for banks, insurers and markets called for a joint effort to tackle non-performing loans. “Insufficiently addressed asset quality concerns and persistent high level of NPLs are a significant driver of uncertainty in the EU banking sector,” they said. “Given the widespread, and thus systemic, nature of the significant challenges related to NPL, European supervisors, regulators and legislators should consider pursuing a coordinated, articulated and more decisive approach to this matter.”

Supervisors such as the European Central Bank need to raise pressure on banks to account for and reduce NPLs “in a more proactive and bold fashion,” the report says. Banks should adopt “a conservative provisioning policy, a prudent valuation of loans and collateral” and commit “to a NPL resolution plan with time-bound targets.” [..] European banks have the highest ratio of bad loans among developed countries, and progress to lower the share has been slow. According to the report, 5.7% of all loans were overdue on average in the first quarter, more than three times the ratio in the U.S. or Japan. The ratio varies widely, from close to 50% in Cyprus to around 1% in Sweden. High NPL levels are a capital constraint, hurt profits and limit new lending, according to the agencies.

In line with Nicole’s article series we’re currently running.

• America’s Quiet War on Cash (TAM)

Government campaigns of intimidation – like the wars on drugs, terror, and poverty – have been used to extort the public for decades. Despite the previous failures of institutional “wars,” a new war on cash is being waged that threatens freedom in a more subversive way than ever before. Banks and governments around the world are cracking down on the use of paper money, and in turn, eliminating any anonymity left in the current system. Through strict rules on cash transactions and civil asset forfeiture laws, for example, the system has already instituted penalties for using cash. But as payments evolve into a purely digital network, the consequences of this new paradigm are being brought into the spotlight.

The ability to track, record, and mediate transactions of all individuals is a power dictators throughout history could have only dreamed of. Those who value privacy are turning to alternatives like cash, cryptocurrencies, and precious metals, but these directly threaten central bank dominance. This ongoing tug-of-war in financial innovation will determine whether we enter an age of individual empowerment or centralized enslavement. As mundane as it may seem, the main reason for this push to go cashless is directly tied to what world central banks are doing to prop up their economies. The manipulation of interests rates to zero or even negative has left central banks no ammunition to fight off the next recession. Without the ability to cut interest rates even further, stimulating economic growth is nearly impossible.

The decisions made in response to the 2008 crisis have led to a perverted environment in which customers could be charged just for holding money in their accounts. As long as individuals have the ability to move their funds into paper currency and escape the losses, banks are still limited to how far they can push the envelope. Regardless, the federal government continues to pressure banks into issuing “Suspicious Activity Reports” for withdrawals of even as little as $5,000. That amount will undoubtedly decrease if and when more people resort to stuffing cash under their mattresses.

Perhaps a little late?

• FBI Records on Financial Crisis Requested by U.S. Lawmaker (BBG)

FBI files on the firms that contributed to the 2008 financial crisis should be released to help the public understand why no senior executives were charged, a U.S. congressman from New Jersey said. Democrat Bill Pascrell asked FBI Director James Comey for witness interview transcripts, notes, reports and memos from the agency’s probes into the crisis, according to a letter dated Tuesday. Pascrell said the FBI initiated criminal inquiries into at least 14 companies as part of its investigation into the origins of the crisis, which was ignited when prices of subprime-mortgage bonds plummeted after home-loan defaults soared. “Here we are eight years later – do you think the public knows how this happened? Do you think the public knows all of the recommendations made to the Justice Department?” Pascrell said Wednesday in an interview.

“Why are Hillary Clinton’s e-mails any more important?” The FBI earlier this month released a summary investigation and interview with Clinton to provide context on its recommendation that the Justice Department not prosecute Clinton or her aides for using a private e-mail system. The Democratic presidential nominee was interviewed by FBI agents and federal prosecutors for 3 1/2 hours on July 2 in Washington. Pascrell, who sits on both the budget and ways and means committees, said in many cases it would be too late to bring legal actions. Releasing the information would increase transparency and provide a public service, he said.

“..it is a case study in international charity fraud, of mammoth proportions…”

• Clinton Foundation: False Philanthropy (Ortel)

To informed analysts, the Clinton Foundation appears to be a rogue charity that has neither been organized nor operated lawfully from inception in October 1997 to date–as you will grow to realize, it is a case study in international charity fraud, of mammoth proportions. In particular, the Clinton Foundation has never been validly authorized to pursue tax-exempt purposes other than as a presidential archive and research facility based in Little Rock, Arkansas. Moreover, its operations have never been controlled by independent trustees and its financial results have never been properly audited by independent accountants.

In contrast to this stark reality, Bill Clinton recently continued a long pattern of dissembling, likening himself to Robin Hood and dismissing critics of his “philanthropic” post-presidency, despite mounting concerns over perceived conflicts of interest and irregularities. Normally, evaluating the efficacy of a charity objectively is performed looking closely into hard facts only -specifically, determining whether monies spent upon “program service expenditures” actually have furthered the limited, authorized “tax-exempt purposes” of entities such as the Bill, Hillary, and Chelsea Clinton Foundation, its subsidiaries, its joint ventures, and its affiliates (together, the “Clinton Charity Network”).

But, popular former presidents of the United States retain “bully pulpits” from which they certainly can spin sweet-sounding themes to a general audience and media that is not sufficiently acquainted with the strict laws and regulations that do, in fact , tether trustees of a tax-exempt organization to following only a mission that has been validly pre-approved by the Internal Revenue Service, on the basis of a complete and truthful application. This Executive Summary carries forward a process of demonstrating that the Clinton Foundation illegally veered from its IRS-authorized mission within days of Bill Clinton’s departure from the White House in January 2001, using publicly available information which, in certain cases, has been purposefully omitted or obscured in disclosures offered through the Clinton Foundation website, its principal public portal.

Fukushima is too big to be papered over. But that’s all that happens.

• Former Japan PM Accuses Abe Of Lying Over Fukushima (G.)

Japan’s former prime minister Junichiro Koizumi has labelled the country’s current leader, Shinzo Abe, a “liar” for telling the international community that the situation at the wrecked Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant is under control. Koizumi, who became one of Japan’s most popular postwar leaders during his 2001-06 premiership, has used his retirement from frontline politics to become a leading campaigner against nuclear restarts in Japan in defiance of Abe, a fellow conservative Liberal Democratic party (LDP) politician who was once regarded as his natural successor. Abe told members of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) in Buenos Aires in September 2013 that the situation at Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant was “under control”, shortly before Tokyo was awarded the 2020 Games.

IOC officials were concerned by reports about the huge build-up of contaminated water at the Fukushima site, more than two years after the disaster forced the evacuation of tens of thousands of residents. “When [Abe] said the situation was under control, he was lying,” Koizumi told reporters in Tokyo. “It is not under control,” he added, noting the problems the plant’s operator, Tokyo Electric Power (Tepco), has experienced with a costly subterranean ice wall that is supposed to prevent groundwater from flowing into the basements of the damaged reactors, where it becomes highly contaminated. “They keep saying they can do it, but they can’t,” Koizumi said. He went on to claim that Abe had been fooled by industry experts who claim that nuclear is the safest, cleanest and cheapest form of energy for resource-poor Japan.

“He believes what he’s being told by nuclear experts,” Koizumi said. “I believed them, too, when I was prime minister. I think Abe understands the arguments on both sides of the debate, but he has chosen to believe the pro-nuclear lobby.” After the Fukushima crisis, Koizumi said he had “studied the process, reality and history of the introduction of nuclear power, and became ashamed of myself for believing such lies”. [..] Koizumi, 74, has also thrown his support behind hundreds of US sailors and marines who claim they developed leukaemia and other serious health problems after being exposed to Fukushima radiation plumes while helping with relief operations

Brexit Redux: Quo Vadis Britannia?

Aug 042016

August 4, 2016 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 9:22 am Finance Tagged with: 2012, Brexit, Cameron, crisis, debt, decline, recession, UK 5 Responses »

Howard Hollem George Lane April 1942
“George Lane, served in the last war with the British Army from Vimy Ridge to the Occupation. Two of his sons are in the American Army, one with the Air Corps in Australia. His daughter volunteered for the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps. Seven of his nephews are in the British Army”

With the Bank of England about to announce its latest set of desperate measures today, the first since the Brexit, I accidentally stumbled upon an article I wrote on January 16 2012, well over 4 1/2 years ago, in the Automatic Earth’s last days at Blogger. Posting it again here seems appropriate 5 weeks after the Brexit, because the article shows you that the referendum result did not come out of nowhere, no matter what many people claim. The British economy was already doing very poorly, and already failing millions of people, going into 2012.

Note: of course not all predictions made back then played out the way they were made, but I’m more interested in the overall picture. For instance, unemployment numbers are not as dire as forecast, but that hides the deterioration in the quality of jobs, and what they actually pay, much as that happens in the US. Bubbles in stocks and housing hide a lot too. David Cameron’s rule has been hard on the poorer British people, and it will take a long time for that to be corrected. I changed the coding just a little bit (Blogger vs WordPress), nothing big, so it looks a bit different. Here’s from early 2012, happy time travel:

Ilargi: There is a relative silence in the international financial press when it comes to Britain. The economic situation of continental Europe gets almost all the attention. Every now and then someone in France or Germany states that Britain, too, should be downgraded, like when S&P cut the ratings of 9 European countries, but such statements attract hardly any interest at all. This might not be overly wise, though.

At the end of last year, Tyler Durden at ZeroHedge published a graph from Haver Analytics/Morgan Stanley that should probably have sounded alarm bells quite a bit louder than it did.

Still, this graph would seem to indicate that the only core issue in the UK is its outsize financial sector with its outsize debt. From time to time, however, news articles pop up that seem to indicate there’s more going on than trouble in the City of London.

I found this one alarmingly interesting, for instance, from James Hall in the Telegraph on January 4:

One million people take out emergency loans to pay mortgage

Almost one million Britons have taken out an emergency ‘payday’ loan to help pay their rent or mortgage in the last year, according to Shelter, the housing charity.

The high degree of borrowing highlights the ‘spiral of debt’ that people are falling into to keep a roof over their head, Shelter said. The charity also found that seven million Britons are relying on some form of credit to help pay their housing costs.

Campbell Robb, Shelter’s chief executive, said: ‘These shocking findings show the extent to which millions of households across the country are desperately struggling to keep their home.’

Ilargi: Payday loans to pay off your mortgage? Sounds like perhaps Britain has a substantial hidden real estate problem, a pre-shadow inventory one that could spiral out of control at a rapid clip.

On January 9, the same James Hall had this follow-up:

Six million households have only five days’ savings

Around six million households would be unable to survive for more than five days if they stopped being paid, such are the low levels of savings among Britons, new research shows.

A new report from First Direct, the bank, warns that one in three UK households have less than £250 in accessible savings. A fifth of all households have no savings at all.

The bank said that £250 is the equivalent of three days’ average monthly household take-home pay. With average monthly outgoing currently at £1,536, these savings would last just five days.

Ilargi: Obviously, the two groups, those that take out loanshark payday loans to keep a roof over their head, and those that live paycheck to paycheck, overlap each other to a large extent.

Still, what makes it striking is the sheer number of people affected. One million people need emergency loans to keep their families in their homes, while six million households have nothing whatsoever saved for a rainy day.

If we put the average household size at 2.5 people, that means that, out of 60 million living in Britain, 2.5 million are on the verge of losing their homes, and 15 million, or 25% of the population, risk having to cut on their basic needs, food and heating, if they hit even the slightest speedbump.

And what are the chances this situation will improve any time soon? It doesn’t look good; in fact it looks set to worsen. While there’s no lack of denial, an increasing number of voices admit that the British economy has already slipped back into recession. This is from the BBC this morning:

UK in recession say Item Club economic forecasters

The UK may have already slipped back into recession, economic forecaster the [Ernst&Young] Item Club has warned. The think tank said gross domestic product shrank in the final quarter of last year and would contract again in the current three-month period.

It said that even if the eurozone could resolve its problems the UK economy would grow by just 0.2% this year. It also predicted unemployment would rise by a further 300,000 to just below three million people. [..]

Meanwhile, the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development said unemployment would stay above 2.5 million until at least 2016, peaking at 2.9 million next year. Chief economic adviser John Philpott said the jobless rate would rise to 8.8% at the end of next year. [..]

Another forecast from the Centre for Economics and Business Research said the UK would actually shrink this year by 0.4% and by a full 1% if the eurozone broke up.

Ilargi: Nor is it hard to find an ironic twist in all this. In what depicts a fast growing chain of events, Zoe Wood reports for the Guardian:

Royal Bank of Scotland pulls out of deal to rescue Peacocks

More than 13,000 retail jobs are on the line at value fashion group Peacocks after Royal Bank of Scotland walked away from restructuring talks at the heavily indebted retail chain.

Peacocks may have to appoint administrators after the state-backed lender had an abrupt change of heart about a deal to refinance the retailer’s £600m debt pile, which would have involved risking more money in the business. RBS and Barclays were in the driving seat of the complex debt-for-equity negotiations – which were said to involve 18 funds and lenders – as they are owed the most. Both banks are owed more than £100m.

Peacocks’ advisers have been trying to put together a rescue deal for months, but talks broke down at the weekend, leaving the future of the store, which has 550 branches and employs around 10,000 staff, hanging in the balance. [..] “It’s quite a complex deal,” said one insider. “It was all going well until RBS walked away last week. There are still conversations going on.” [..]

RBS is facing a series of tough decisions this year as a number of struggling high-street chains, including HMV and Clinton Cards, are reliant on its largesse. “Each company restructure is judged on its own merits, but clearly the difficult conditions that retailers face is an important factor,” said an RBS spokesman. [..]

A string of high-street chains including La Senza, Blacks Leisure and Barratts Priceless have called in administrators in recent weeks as trading failed to produce enough cash to cover costs such as rent and interest payments on loans.

Ilargi: With the country in a recession, but hardly anyone willing to concede that to date, least of all its government, it’s no wonder that things like this happen, mostly hidden from sight.

The ironic twist to it is provided by that fact that RBS is 70% owned by the British government, which has poured billions of pounds into the bank, and then lets it make decisions that cost 10’s of 1000’s of jobs.

I don’t want to get into a political debate about this; however, protecting banks with taxpayer funds, but not jobs, is a decision that is of course as political as it is ironic. Letting bailed out bank executives make decisions that cut all these jobs and at the same time pay themselves multi-million dollar bonuses is way beyond ironic.

But all of the above is just today’s prologue. I received an article yesterday that outdoes it all, and then some.

John Ross, Visiting Professor at Antai College of Economics and Management at Jiao Tong University in Shanghai writes a real stunner on his blog Key Trends in Globalisation:

The incredible shrinking UK economy

The magnitude of the blow suffered by the UK economy since the beginning of the financial crisis is very considerably minimized by not presenting it in terms of a common international yardstick. Gauged by decline in GDP, using a common international purchasing measure, dollars, no other economy in the world has shrunk even remotely as much as the UK.

As most countries produce only annualized GDP data it will be necessary to wait before a comprehensive global comparison can be made for 2011. However it is clear no substantial growth in dollar terms took place in the UK economy during that year – GDP at national current prices rose only 1.4 per cent between the 1st and 3rd quarters and the change in the pound’s exchange rate against the dollar during the year was a marginal 0.3 per cent.

Therefore there will have been no significant recovery from the UK data set out in Table 1 below, and the gap between the UK and other European economies, which form the next worst performing major group, is too great to have been qualitatively affected by changes in the Euro’s exchange rate – the Euro declined against the pound by only 3.3 per cent in 2011.

Table 1 shows that the fall in UK GDP in 2007-2010 was $562 billion compared to the next worst performing national economy, Italy, with a decline of $65 billion – i.e. the decline in UK GDP in the common measuring yardstick of dollars was more than 8 times that of the next worst performing national economy. Table 1 shows the 10 national economies suffering the greatest declines in dollar GDP.

It is also extremely striking that the UK’s decline was more than two and a half times that of the entire Eurozone.

The UK accounted for a somewhat astonishing 77% of the EU’s decline.

Expressed in percentage terms the situation is no better. Of all economies for which World Bank data is available only Iceland, with a decline in dollar GDP of 38.4%, suffered a worst percentage fall than the UK – even bail out economy Ireland, with a fall of 18.4%, outperformed the UK economy.

Two trends intersected for the UK’s performance to be so much worse than that of any other economy. First, contrary to the government’s anti-European rhetoric, UK economic performance in constant price national currency terms has been significantly worse than the Eurozone during the financial crisis (Figure 2). [..]

… between the beginning of 2008 and the beginning of 2012, the pound’s exchange rate has fallen by 21.0% against the dollar compared to the Euro’s 11.4% drop in the same period. The multiplicative effect of the severity of the relative drop in constant price GDP and the fall in the pound’s exchange rate accounts for the unequalled decline in UK GDP in dollars.

As at present the UK economy shows no substantial sign of recovery, the present UK government, which maintains a steadfastly ostrich like attitude towards Europe in particular, and most other countries in general, may argue that a measure in terms of dollars at current exchange rates is irrelevant – the UK currency is the pound and what counts is constant price shifts. Such an argument is false and an attempt to disguise the true scale of the decline of the UK economy.

The internationally unmatched decline in UK dollar GDP is a huge fall in real international purchasing ability. The far higher than targeted inflation in the UK during the last two years, which has substantially eroded the population’s living standards, is itself in part a reflection of the decline in the UK’s exchange rate and consequent raising of import prices. In short, the decline in the international purchasing power of the UK’s economy translates into a direct fall in real incomes.

It may also be seen that the government’s claim that the UK is outperforming Europe and the Eurozone is entirely without foundation even in constant price national currency terms. But when measured in terms of real international comparisons, i.e. in dollars, the UK’s performance is incomparably worse than Europe’s.

It appears extremely unlikely that the UK’s economy will escape from this circle of decline in the next period. The austerity policies pursued by the present UK government have substantially slowed the economic recovery that was taking place in 2009 and the first part of 2010 – between the 3rd quarter of 2010 and the 3rd quarter of 2011 the UK economy grew by only 0.5%. [..]

Even if any partial recovery takes place, for example by some increase in the exchange rate of the pound against the Euro, the sheer magnitude of the decline in the UK economy makes it implausible that this could be on a scale sufficient to reverse the fall in its relative international position.

Ilargi: Britain lost 20% of GDP from 2007 – 2011. Against this backdrop, and don’t let’s forget the over-600% debt to GDP ratio just for Britain’s financial sector, which will inevitably lead to more – calls for – bailouts, what is the Cameron government’s response?

First of all, austerity measures. Which will hit those people very hard who are in the bottom 25% or so who already have no savings, no nothing, to fall back on. And which will also lead to a rise in unemployment, which in turn will exacerbate the vicious problem circle.

Cameron also distances himself, and his country, from continental Europe, even though that is Britain’s main export destination. How smart is that?

Britain is a country of relatively large regional disparities as well as wealth disparities. The already rich center increasingly sucks up the remaining wealth of the periphery of society. There is then only one possible outcome of those one million people paying their rents and mortgages with payday loans: the British housing bubble will burst sooner rather than later.

Tax revenue has only one way to go as well. Down. So what will Cameron use to support the banks? How will he attempt to prevent a large scale repeat of last year’s Tottenham riots?

Looking at all this, we also need to wonder how much longer, and why in the first place, Britain is perceived as a safe haven, with its sovereign bonds – gilts – much sought after. Sure, Britain has its own currency and central bank, it can “print”, it can do QE 1001, but it’s not as if it hasn’t already tried that route. And still lost 20% of GDP.

Whatever it decides to do, it seems safe to presume that Britain might well steal some of the limelight away from Greece and Italy in the not too distant future.

Me in 2016 again for a moment: after reading this -I wrote it 55(!) months ago-, does the Brexit still surprise you?

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