May 112017
 
 May 11, 2017  Posted by at 8:49 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , , ,  2 Responses »


Paul Almasy Les Halles, Paris 1950

 

Trump and Lavrov Meeting Round-Up (TASS)
$9 Trillion Question: What Happens When Central Banks Stop Buying Bonds? (WSJ)
Draghi Stays Calm on Stimulus as Dutch MPs Warn of Risks With Tulip (BBG)
It’s Not Just The VIX – Low Volatility Is Everywhere (R.)
Six Canadian Banks Cut by Moody’s on Consumers’ Debt Burden (BBG)
China Holds Giant Meeting On Spending Billions To Reshape The World (CNBC)
‘Stagnant’ Buyer Demand Puts The Brakes On UK Housing Market (G.)
UK Labour Party’s Plan To Nationalise Rail, Mail And Energy Firms (G.)
Panic! Like It’s 1837 (DB)
Italy Financial Regulator Threatens EU with Return to “National Currency” (DQ)
Greek Capital Controls To Stay Till At Least End Of 2018 (K.)
Greek PM Tsipras Heralds ‘Landmark’ Plan For Healthcare (K.)
Turkish Coast Guard Publishes Maps Claiming Half Of The Aegean Sea (KTG)
Libya Intercepts Almost 500 Migrants After Sea Duel (AFP)
Where Have All The Insects Gone? (Sciencemag )

 

 

The presence of a TASS reporter when Lavrov visited the White House was critized in the US media. Here’s what he wrote.

Trump and Lavrov Meeting Round-Up (TASS)

Before meeting with Donald Trump, Sergey Lavrov held talks with the US top diplomat Rex Tillerson. Lavrov’s talks with the US president lasted for about 40 minutes behind closed doors. Moscow and Washington can and should solve global issues together, Lavrov said following his meetings with US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and US President Donald Trump. “I had a bilateral meeting with Rex Tillerson, then the two of us were received by President Trump,” the Russian top diplomat said. “We discussed, first and foremost, our cooperation on the international stage.” “At present, our dialogue is not as politicized as it used to be during Obama’s presidency. The Trump administration, including the president himself and the secretary of state, are people of action who are willing to negotiate,” the Russian top diplomat pointed out.

Lavrov said agreement reached with Tillerson to continue using diplomatic channel to discuss Russian-US relations. According to Lavrov, the current state of bilateral relations is no cause for joy. “The reason why our relations deteriorated to this state is no secret,” the Russian top diplomat added. “Unfortunately, the previous (US) administration did everything possible to undermine the basis of our relations so now we have to start from a very low level.” “President Trump has clarified his interest in building mutually beneficial and practical relations, as well as in solving issues,” Lavrov pointed out. “This is very important,” he said. Lavrov believes Syria has areas where US might contribute to operation of de-escalation zones. “We are ready for this cooperation and today have discussed in detail the steps and mechanisms which we can manage together,” Lavrov said.

“We have confirmed our interest in the US’ most active role in those issues,” Lavrov said. “I imagine the Americans are interested in this too.” “We proceed from the fact they will take up the initiative,” he added. “We have thoroughly discussed the Syrian issue, particularly the ideas related to setting up de-escalation zones,” the Russian top diplomat said. “We share an understanding that this should become a common step aimed at putting an end to violence across Syria,” he added.

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One word: mayhem.

$9 Trillion Question: What Happens When Central Banks Stop Buying Bonds? (WSJ)

Central banks have been the world’s biggest buyers of government bonds, but may soon stop—a tidal shift for global markets. Yet investors can’t agree on what that shift will mean. Part of the problem is that there is little agreement about how the massive stimulus policies, known as quantitative easing or QE, affected bonds in the first place. That makes it especially hard to assess what happens when the tide changes. Many expect bond yields could rise and shares fall, some see little effect at all, while others suggest it is riskier investments, such as corporate bonds or Italian government debt, that will bear the brunt. But recently, yields on European high-yield corporate bonds hit their lowest since before the financial crisis, in one potential sign that the threat of tapering has yet to affect markets.

When the unwinding begins money managers may not be positioned for it, and markets could move swiftly. In the summer of 2013, investors suddenly got spooked about the Federal Reserve withdrawing stimulus, leading to a swift bond sell off that sent yields on the 10-year Treasury up by more than 1%age point. By buying bonds after the 2008 financial crisis, central banks across the developed world sought to push yields lower and drive money into riskier assets, reducing borrowing costs for businesses. “If it’s unclear what benefits we’ve had in the buying, it’s unclear what will happen in the selling,” said Tim Courtney, chief investment officer at Exencial Wealth Advisors.

Recent data showed that the ECBholds total assets of $4.5 trillion, more than any other central bank ever. The Fed and the Bank of Japan each have $4.4 trillion, although the BOJ isn’t expected to wind down QE soon. With the world economy finally recovering, investors believe that holdings at the Fed and ECB have peaked. U.S. officials are discussing how to wind down their portfolio, which they have kept constant since 2014. The ECB’s purchases of government and corporate debt are now more likely to be tapered later in the year, analysts say, after pro-business candidate Emmanuel Macron’s victory in the French presidential election Sunday.

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Dutch politicians either don’t care about their European Union peer Greece, or they don’t know about it. Neither is a good option. They are doing so well over the backs of the Greeks they want Draghi to enact policies that will make them even richer, and the Greeks even more miserable. Oh, and of course “The euro is irrevocable” only until it isn’t.

Draghi Stays Calm on Stimulus as Dutch MPs Warn of Risks With Tulip (BBG)

Mario Draghi kept his cool in the Netherlands – at least on monetary policy. Repeatedly pressed by Dutch lawmakers to say when he’ll start winding down euro-area monetary stimulus, the Ecb president replied that it’s still too soon to consider, despite a “firming, broad-based upswing” in the economy. “Is it time to exit? Or is it time to start thinking about exit or not? The assessment of the Governing council is that this time hasn’t come yet.” His reward was a gift of a plastic tulip in a reminder of a past European financial crisis. Draghi’s voluntary appearance at the hearing on Wednesday put him front and center in one of the nations most critical of the ECB’s ultra-loose policies, which are seen by opponents as overstepping the institution’s mandate, burdening savers and pension providers, and stoking asset bubbles.

Legislators did appear occasionally to get under his skin. The tension rose when he was quizzed multiple times him on the possibility that a government will one day have to restructure its debt, while on the topic of a nation leaving the currency bloc – as Greece came close to doing in 2015 – Draghi’s response was blunt. “The euro is irrevocable. This is the Treaty. I will not speculate on something that has no basis.” The intense questioning underscored the gap between relatively rosy economic data and the discontent among individuals who can’t see the fruits of the ECB’s €2.3 trillion bond-buying program and minus 0.4% deposit rate. It’s a challenge for Draghi, who reiterated his concern that underlying inflation remains feeble and falling unemployment has yet to boost wage growth. The region is far from healing the scars of a double-dip recession that wiped out 9 million jobs and helped the rise of anti-euro populists such as Marine Le Pen, who lost this month’s French presidential election but still managed to pick up more than a third of the vote.

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The silence before.

It’s Not Just The VIX – Low Volatility Is Everywhere (R.)

The current slump in expectations of market volatility is not just a stock market phenomenon – it is the lowest it’s been for years across fixed income, currency and commodity markets around the world. It shows little sign of reversing, which means market players are essentially not expecting much in the way of shocks or sharp movements any time soon. It’s an environment in which asset prices can continue rising and bond spreads narrow further. The improving global economy, robust corporate profitability, ample central bank stimulus even as U.S. interest rates are rising, and some fading political risk from elections have all contributed to create a backdrop of relative calm.

There is little evidence of investors hedging – or seeking to protect themselves – from adverse conditions. It is most notably seen in the VIX index of implied volatility on the U.S. S&P 500 stock index, the so-called “fear index”. But implied volatility across the G10 major currencies is its lowest in three years, and U.S. Treasury market volatility its lowest in 18 months and close to record lows. The VIX, meanwhile, has dipped to lows not seen since December 2006, is posting its lowest closing levels since 1993, and is on a record run of closes below 11. By comparison, it was at almost 90 at the height of the financial crisis. Not much current “fear”, then.

Implied volatility is an options market measure of investors’ expectation of how much a certain asset or market will rise or fall over a given period of time in the future. It and actual volatility can quickly become entwined in a spiral lower because investors are less inclined to pay up for “put” options – effectively a bet on prices falling – when the market is rising. If a shock does come the cost of these “puts” would shoot higher as investors scramble to buy them. Surging volatility is invariably associated with steep market drawdowns. According to Deutsche Bank’s Torsten Slok, an investor betting a year ago that the VIX would fall – shorting the index – would have gained around 160% today. Conversely, an investor buying the VIX a year ago assuming it would rise would have lost 75%.

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What’s that rumbling sound in the distance?

Six Canadian Banks Cut by Moody’s on Consumers’ Debt Burden (BBG)

Six of Canada’s largest banks had credit ratings downgraded by Moody’s Investors Service on concern that over-indebted consumers and high housing prices have left lenders vulnerable to potential losses on assets. Toronto-Dominion Bank, Bank of Montreal, Bank of Nova Scotia, Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, National Bank of Canada and Royal Bank of Canada had their long-term debt and deposit ratings lowered one level, Moody’s said Wednesday in a statement. It also cut its counterparty risk assessment for the firms, excluding Toronto-Dominion. “Expanding levels of private-sector debt could weaken asset quality in the future,” David Beattie, a Moody’s senior vice president, said in the statement.

“Continued growth in Canadian consumer debt and elevated housing prices leaves consumers, and Canadian banks, more vulnerable to downside risks facing the Canadian economy than in the past.” A run on deposits at alternative mortgage lender Home Capital has sparked concern over a broader slowdown in the nation’s real estate market, at a time when Canadians are taking on higher levels of household debt. The firm’s struggles have taken a toll on Canada’s biggest financial institutions, which have seen stocks slide on concern about contagion. In its statement, Moody’s pointed to ballooning private-sector debt that amounted to 185% of Canada’s GDP at the end of last year. House prices have climbed despite efforts by policy makers, it said. And business credit has grown as well.

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Straight from the Monopoly printing press.

China Holds Giant Meeting On Spending Billions To Reshape The World (CNBC)

[..] the most populous nation on the planet wants to increase its influence by digging further into its pockets — flush with cash after decades of rapid growth — to splash out with its “One Belt, One Road” policy. President Xi Jinping first announced the policy in 2013; it was later named one of China’s three major national strategies, and morphed into an entire chapter in the current five-year plan, to run through 2020. [..] The plan aims to connect Asia, Europe, the Middle East and Africa with a vast logistics and transport network, using roads, ports, railway tracks, pipelines, airports, transnational electric grids and even fiber optic lines. The scheme involves 65 countries, which together account for one-third of global GDP and 60% of the world’s population, or 4.5 billion people, according to Oxford Economics.

This is part of China’s push to increase global clout — building modern infrastructure can attract more investment and trade along the “One Belt, One Road” route. It could be beneficial for western China, which is less developed, as it links up with neighboring countries. And in the long run, it will help China shore up access to energy resources. The policy could boost the domestic economy with demand abroad, and might also soak up some of the overcapacity in China’s heavy industry, but analysts say these are fringe benefits. Experts say China has an opportunity to step into a global leadership role, one that the U.S. previously filled and may now be abandoning, especially after President Donald Trump pulled out of a major trade deal, the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

It’s clear China wants to wield greater influence — Xi’s speech in January at the World Economic Forum in Davos touted the benefits of globalization, and called for international cooperation. And an article by Premier Li Keqiang published shortly after also called for economic openness. But despite all the talk of global connectivity, skeptics highlight that China still restricts foreign investment, censorship continues to be an issue and concerns remain over human rights. [..] In 2015, the China Development Bank said it had reserved $890 billion for more than 900 projects. The Export-Import Bank of China announced early last year that it had started financing over 1,000 projects. The China-led Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank is also providing financing.

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The British should be happy for housing prices returning to more normal levels.

‘Stagnant’ Buyer Demand Puts The Brakes On UK Housing Market (G.)

The UK housing market is continuing to slow down, with falling property sales, “stagnant” buyer demand and general election uncertainty all adding up to one of the most downbeat reports issued by surveyors since the financial crash. In its latest monthly snapshot of the market, the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (Rics) said momentum was “continuing to ebb,” with no sign of change in the near future. Its report is the latest in a series of recent surveys suggesting that the slowdown is getting worse as household budgets continue to be squeezed and affordability pressures bite. It comes days after the Halifax said house prices fell by 0.1% in April, which meant they were nearly £3,000 below their December 2016 peak. Nationwide reported a bigger decline in April – it said prices fell by 0.4%, following a 0.3% drop in March.

Some parts of London appear to have been hit particularly hard, with estate agents and developers resorting to offering free cars and other incentives to try to tempt buyers. Rics said its members had reported that sales were slipping slightly following months of flat transactions. A lack of choice for would-be buyers across the UK appears to be one of the major factors putting a dampener on sales: the latest report said there was “an acute shortage of stock,” with the typical number of properties on estate agents’ books hovering close to record lows. New instructions continue to drop, which could make the situation worse: the flow of fresh listings to agents remained negative for the 14th month in a row at a national level, said Rics, though it added that the situation had apparently improved slightly in London.

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How dead is the left? Nice contest.

UK Labour Party’s Plan To Nationalise Rail, Mail And Energy Firms (G.)

Jeremy Corbyn will lay out plans to take parts of Britain’s energy industry back into public ownership alongside the railways and the Royal Mail in a radical manifesto that promises an annual injection of £6bn for the NHS and £1.6bn for social care. A draft version of the document, drawn up by the leadership team and seen by the Guardian, pledges the phased abolition of tuition fees, a dramatic boost in finance for childcare, a review of sweeping cuts to universal credit and a promise to scrap the bedroom tax. Party sources said Corbyn wants to promise a “transformational programme” with a package covering the NHS, education, housing and jobs as well as industrial intervention and sweeping nationalisation. But critics said the policies represented a shift back to the 1970s with the Conservatives describing it as a “total shambles” and a plan to “unleash chaos on Britain”.

Corbyn’s leaked blueprint, which is likely to trigger a fierce debate of Labour’s national executive committee and shadow cabinet at the so-called Clause V meeting at noon on Thursday, also includes:
• Ordering councils to build 100,000 new council homes a year under a new Department for Housing.
• An immediate “emergency price cap” on energy bills to ensure that the average duel fuel household energy bill remains below £1,000 a year.
• Stopping planned increases to the pension age beyond 66.
• “Fair rules and reasonable management” on immigration with 1,000 extra border guards, alongside a promise not to “fan the flames of fear” but to recognise the benefits that migrants bring.

On the question of foreign policy, an area on which Corbyn has campaigned for decades, the draft document said it will be “guided by the values of peace, universal rights and international law”. However, Labour, which is facing Tory pressure over the question of national security, does include a commitment to spend 2% of GDP on defence. The draft manifesto, which will only be finalised after it is agreed on Thursday, also makes clear that the party supports the renewal of Trident, despite Corbyn’s longstanding opposition to nuclear weapons.

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Cycles.

Panic! Like It’s 1837 (DB)

180 years ago today, everyone panicked. On May 10, 1837, New York banks finally realized that the easy money they were lending was unsustainable, and demanded payment in “specie,” or hard money like gold and silver coin. They had previously been accepting paper currency that for every $5 was backed by only $1 in silver or gold. Things culminated to that point after years of borrowing the paper currency to expand west, buy land, and build infrastructure. As silver came in from Mexico, banks lent out five times the amount of their deposits–fractional reserve banking. At the same time, the value of silver was falling because its supply was increasing in America. Great Britain, which had been lending much of the money, was less interested in silver because they could pay for trade with China in opium.

So even though Britain had a year earlier begun demanding payment in specie, the abundant silver in America did not hold the same weight, so to speak, it had previously. Now, reflect on this for a second. The USA was depending on loans from a country that they had successfully revolted and seceded from fewer than 50 years earlier. Britain had also provoked The War of 1812 just 25 years earlier when they wouldn’t stop attacking American ships. But somehow it still seemed like a good idea to depend on British banks to form the foundation of American development. So at the same time when American banks had to backstep their risky practices, Britain also just so happened to need 25% less cotton, which was the foundation of the American economy. This only exacerbated the trade deficit.

But still, despite whether or not Britain’s actions were nefarious, the whole situation would have been remarkably cushioned if fractional reserve banking had not been used. Because of this “easy money,” land was bought at enormous rates on credit, but credit that was not backed by actual value–only 1/5 of the actual value existed of what was being lent! President Andrew Jackson was not entirely without blame either. When he deconstructed the federal bank, he deposited the money into state banks, and encouraged them to go ahead and lend, lend, lend! Of course, when the time came for the banks to return the deposits, the money was gone. So when this massive real estate bubble burst in 1837, it caused a panic and ensuing recession that lasted until 1844. Does any of this sound familiar to you?

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The moment the ECB is allowed to buy Greek bonds again is also the moment it decides to quit its bond-buying program.

Italy Financial Regulator Threatens EU with Return to “National Currency” (DQ)

Despite trillions of euros worth of QE, Italy has continued to suffer a 30% loss in competitiveness compared to Germany during the last two decades. And now Italy must begin to prepare itself for the biggest nightmare of all: the gradual tightening of the ECB’s monetary policy. “Inflation is gradually returning to the area of the 2% target, while in the United States a monetary tightening is taking place,” Vegas said. The German government is exerting mounting pressure on the ECB to begin tapering QE before elections in September. So, too, is the Netherlands whose parliament today treated ECB President Mario Draghi to a rare grilling. The MPs ended the session by presenting Draghi with a departing gift of a solar-powered tulip, to remind him of the country’s infamous mid-17th century asset price bubble and financial crisis.

For the moment Draghi and his ECB cohorts refuse to yield, but with the ECB’s balance sheet just hitting 38.7% of Eurozone GDP, 15 %age points higher than the Fed’s, they may ultimately have little choice in the matter. As Vegas points out, for Italy (and countries like it), that will mean having to face a whole new situation, “in which it will no longer be possible to count on the external support of monetary leverage.” This is likely to be a major problem for a country that has grown so dependent on that external support. According to the Bank for International Settlements, in 2016, international banks in particular those in Germany reduced their exposure to Italy by 15%, or over $100 billion, half of it in the last quarter of the year. ECB intervention helped plug the shortfall, at least for a while.

But the ECB has already reduced its monthly purchases of European sovereign debt instruments, from €80 billion to just over €60 billion. As the appetite for Italian government debt falls, the yields on Italian bonds will rise. The only market participants seemingly still willing and able (for now) to increase their purchase of Italian debt are Italian banks. In his address, Vegas proposed introducing a safeguard threshold of €100,000 for the banks’ bondholders, many of whom are ordinary Italian citizens, with combined holdings worth some €200 billion, who were told by the banks that their bonds were a secure investment. Not any more. “The management of crises may require timely intervention that is not compatible with the mechanisms in Frankfurt and Brussels,” Vegas added.

To get his point across, he issued a barely veiled threat in Frankfurt and Brussels’ direction — that of Italy’s exit from the Eurozone, a prospect that should not be altogether discounted given the recent growth of anti-euro sentiment and rising political instability in Italy. So he threatened: “Merely the announcement of a return to a national currency would provoke an immediate outflow of capital that would seriously jeopardize Italy’s ability to refinance the world’s third biggest public debt.”

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In other words: any positive numbers you may read about Greek GDP are false.

Greek Capital Controls To Stay Till At Least End Of 2018 (K.)

Greece will spend at least three-and-a-half years under the restrictions of capital controls as their abolition is not expected to come any earlier than the end of 2018, according to a competent credit sector source. The next step in terms of their easing will come after the completion of the bailout review and the disbursement of the funding tranche, provided banks see some recovery in deposits. Sources say that the planning provides primarily for helping enterprises by increasing the limit on international transactions concerning product imports or the acquisition of raw materials. Almost two years after the capital controls were imposed, by next Tuesday, according to the agreement with the creditors, the Bank of Greece and the Finance Ministry have to present a road map for the easing of restrictions.

The road map is already being prepared and according to sources it will not contain any dates for the easing of controls but rather will record the conditions necessary for each step to come. Kathimerini understands that the conditions will be the following: the return of deposits, the reduction of nonperforming loans, the state’s access to money markets, the country’s inclusion in the ECB’s QE program, and the settlement of the national debt. “Ideally, by end-2018 we will be able to speak of an end to the controls. In any case, the restrictions on deposits will be the last to be lifted,” notes a senior banking source, referring to the cash withdrawal limit that currently stands at €840 per 14 days. The Hellenic Bank Association’s Executive Committee will meet on Wednesday to discuss proposals for the gradual easing of restrictions.

The bankers’ proposals will constitute an updated version of those tabled in November 2016; they will likely include the introduction of a monthly limit of 2,000 euros for cash withdrawals and an increase in the withdrawal limit for funds originating from abroad from 30% to 60%. The drop in deposits over the first quarter of the year will make it harder for such proposals to be implemented for the time being.

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Saving the healthcare system from Troika-induced collapse is a good idea. Not sure this is the way.

Greek PM Tsipras Heralds ‘Landmark’ Plan For Healthcare (K.)

Speaking of an “institutional intervention of landmark significance,” Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras heralded on Wednesday the creation of a new primary healthcare system to be based on local health centers staffed with general practitioners. The aim is to set up 239 such centers by the end of the year, employing 3,000 family doctors and nursing staff, Tsipras said in a speech at a health center in Thessaloniki. The first 60 of those centers are to start operating by the summer, the premier said, noting that poorer areas will be prioritized. “If you were to ask me what I want to be left behind after the years of governance by SYRIZA and ANEL,” he said, referring to junior coalition partner Independent Greeks, “I would say a very essential landmark health sector reform with the creation of primary healthcare.”

Tsipras also took the opportunity to lash out at the political opposition, accusing previous governments of having a plan for “the passive privatization of the health sector.” As for the national federation of Greek hospital workers (POEDIN), which has railed against the current government for cutbacks in the health sector, Tsipras hit back, calling it “a trade union that has secured privileges.” The prime minister added that his government remained determined to fight corruption in the health sector, referring to alleged scandals embroiling the Hellenic Center for Disease Control and Prevention (KEELPNO) and the Swiss pharmaceuticals firm Novartis. “Everything will come to light,” he said.

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Erdogan’s at the White House today, or is that tomorrow?!

Turkish Coast Guard Publishes Maps Claiming Half Of The Aegean Sea (KTG)

The Turkish Coast Guard published alleged official maps and documents claiming half of the Aegean Sea belong to Turkey. In this sense, Ankara claims to won dozens of Greek islands, the entire eastern Aegean from the island of Samothraki in the North to Kastelorizo in the South. The maps and claims have been uploaded on the website of the Turkish Coast Guard in the context of a 60-page report about the activities of the TCG in 2016. On page 7 and 13 of the report, the maps allegedly show Turkey’s Search And Rescue responsibility area. The maps show half of the Aegean Sea and also a very good part of the Black Sea, where Turkey’s SAR area coincides with the Turkish Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ). Turkey did not signed the convention in order to not be obliged to recognize the Greek EEZ.

The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), also called the Law of the Sea Convention or the Law of the Sea treaty, is the international agreement that resulted from the third United Nations Conference on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS III), which took place between 1973 and 1982. The Law of the Sea Convention defines the rights and responsibilities of nations with respect to their use of the world’s oceans, establishing guidelines for businesses, the environment, and the management of marine natural resources. The most significant issues covered were setting limits, navigation, archipelagic status and transit regimes, exclusive economic zones (EEZs), continental shelf jurisdiction, deep seabed mining, the exploitation regime, protection of the marine environment, scientific research, and settlement of disputes. Turkey started to claim areas in the Aegean Sea after 1997 when a Turkish ship sank near the Greek islet of Imia and Ankara sent SAR vessels.

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Sea Watch seems to go a bit far.

Libya Intercepts Almost 500 Migrants After Sea Duel (AFP)

Libya’s coastguard on Wednesday intercepted a wooden boat packed with almost 500 migrants after duelling with a German rescue ship and coming under fire from traffickers, the navy said. The migrants, who were bound for Italy, were picked up off the western city of Sabratha, said navy spokesman Ayoub Qassem. The German non-governmental organisation “Sea-Watch tried to disrupt the coastguard operation… inside Libyan waters and wanted to take the migrants, on the pretext that Libya wasn’t safe,” Qassem told AFP. Sea-Watch posted a video on Twitter of what it said was a Libyan coastguard vessel narrowly cutting across the bow of its ship.

“This EU-funded Libyan patrol vessel almost crashed (into) our civil rescue ship,” read the caption. Qassem also said the coastguard had come under fire from people traffickers, without reporting any casualties. The 493 migrants included 277 from Morocco and many from Bangladesh, said Qassem, and 20 women and a child were aboard the boat. All were taken to a naval base in Tripoli. There were also migrants from Syria, Tunisia, Egypt, Sudan, Pakistan, Chad, Mali and Nigeria, he added. According to international organisations, between 800,000 and one million people, mostly from sub-Saharan Africa, are currently in Libya hoping to make the perilous Mediterranean crossing to Europe.

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No insects, no bats, no birds, etc etc.

Where Have All The Insects Gone? (Sciencemag )

Entomologists call it the windshield phenomenon. “If you talk to people, they have a gut feeling. They remember how insects used to smash on your windscreen,” says Wolfgang Wägele, director of the Leibniz Institute for Animal Biodiversity in Bonn, Germany. Today, drivers spend less time scraping and scrubbing. “I’m a very data-driven person,” says Scott Black, executive director of the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation in Portland, Oregon. “But it is a visceral reaction when you realize you don’t see that mess anymore.” Some people argue that cars today are more aerodynamic and therefore less deadly to insects. But Black says his pride and joy as a teenager in Nebraska was his 1969 Ford Mustang Mach 1—with some pretty sleek lines. “I used to have to wash my car all the time. It was always covered with insects.”

Lately, Martin Sorg, an entomologist here, has seen the opposite: “I drive a Land Rover, with the aerodynamics of a refrigerator, and these days it stays clean.” Though observations about splattered bugs aren’t scientific, few reliable data exist on the fate of important insect species. Scientists have tracked alarming declines in domesticated honey bees, monarch butterflies, and lightning bugs. But few have paid attention to the moths, hover flies, beetles, and countless other insects that buzz and flitter through the warm months. “We have a pretty good track record of ignoring most noncharismatic species,” which most insects are, says Joe Nocera, an ecologist at the University of New Brunswick in Canada. Of the scant records that do exist, many come from amateur naturalists, whether butterfly collectors or bird watchers.

Now, a new set of long-term data is coming to light, this time from a dedicated group of mostly amateur entomologists who have tracked insect abundance at more than 100 nature reserves in western Europe since the 1980s. Over that time the group, the Krefeld Entomological Society, has seen the yearly insect catches fluctuate, as expected. But in 2013 they spotted something alarming. When they returned to one of their earliest trapping sites from 1989, the total mass of their catch had fallen by nearly 80%. Perhaps it was a particularly bad year, they thought, so they set up the traps again in 2014. The numbers were just as low. Through more direct comparisons, the group—which had preserved thousands of samples over 3 decades—found dramatic declines across more than a dozen other sites.

Such losses reverberate up the food chain. “If you’re an insect-eating bird living in that area, four-fifths of your food is gone in the last quarter-century, which is staggering,” says Dave Goulson, an ecologist at the University of Sussex in the United Kingdom, who is working with the Krefeld group to analyze and publish some of the data. “One almost hopes that it’s not representative—that it’s some strange artifact.”

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Jun 232016
 
 June 23, 2016  Posted by at 8:48 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , ,  4 Responses »


Harris&Ewing Horse and Motor Oil, Washington, DC 1918

World’s Central Bankers Will Be Holed Up In Basel For Brexit Fallout (BBG)
Who Is The “European Movement”? (Werner)
Vancouver Proposes Tax on Empty Homes If Province Fails to Act (BBG)
IMF Warns The US Over High Poverty (BBC)
China’s Xi Lauds New Silk Road (R.)
Tesla: Incessant Cash Burn, Looming Competition No Trillion-Dollar Formula (WSJ)
Tesla Bid For Solarcity ‘Shameful’: Jim Chanos (BBC)
ECB Restores Bond Waiver, Lets Greek Banks Tap Cheap Credit (AP)
European Commission To Freeze Payments To Greece (NE)
Erdogan Says Referendum Might Be Held On Turkey’s Negotiations With EU (TM)
EU Approves Common Border Agency (WSJ)

Won’t be sleeping peacefully.

World’s Central Bankers Will Be Holed Up In Basel For Brexit Fallout (BBG)

Bank of Japan Governor Haruhiko Kuroda will be in Switzerland as the results are announced of the U.K.’s June 23 vote on whether to remain in the European Union. Kuroda will be traveling from June 23 to June 28 to attend meetings of the Bank for International Settlements, where other central bankers also will gather, the BOJ said Wednesday. Given the travel time between Europe and Japan, Kuroda would be unable to chair an emergency meeting if the central bank decides to hold one Friday Tokyo time in the event the U.K. votes to leave the EU. “This raises the likelihood of the BOJ not taking drastic measures right after the results come out,” said Daiju Aoki, an economist at UBS in Tokyo.

“Kuroda probably sees the benefit of being with other central bankers where they could talk about coordinated action.” In a press conference June 16, Kuroda declined to comment about whether he’d convene an emergency meeting after the Brexit vote and said the central bank was in touch with counterparts including the Bank of England amid Brexit concerns he said had had an impact in the bond market. The BOJ can hold an emergency meeting without the governor, according to the bank’s rules. In May 2010, then-Deputy Governor Hirohide Yamaguchi led an emergency gathering in the absence of Governor Masaaki Shirakawa, who was traveling in Europe.

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A comprehensive overview of things EU for those who can still stomach more.

Who Is The “European Movement”? (Werner)

Prime Minister David Cameron, together with the heads of the IMF, the OECD and various EU agencies have given dire warnings that economic growth will drop, the fiscal position will deteriorate, the currency will weaken and UK exports will decline precipitously. George Osborne, the chancellor of the exchequer has threatened to cut pensions if pensioners dare to vote for exit. But what are the facts? I have been trained in international and monetary economics at the London School of Economics and have a doctorate from the University of Oxford in economics. I have studied such issues for several decades. I have also recently tested, using advanced quantitative techniques, the question of the size of impact on GDP from entry to or exit from the EU or the eurozone.

The conclusion is that this makes no difference to economic growth, and everyone who claims the opposite is not guided by the facts. The reason is that economic growth and national income are almost entirely determined by a factor that is decided at home, namely the amount of bank credit created for productive purposes. This has sadly been very small in the UK in recent decades, thus much greater economic growth is possible as soon as steps are taken to boost bank credit for productive purposes – irrespective of whether the UK stays in the EU or not (although Brexit will make it much easier to take such policy steps).

We should also remember that a much smaller economy like Norway – thought more dependent on international trade – fared extremely well after its people rejected EU membership in a referendum in 1995 (which happened against the dire warnings and threats from its cross-party elites, most of its media and the united chorus of the heads of international organisations). Besides, Japan, Korea, Taiwan and China never needed EU membership to move from developing economy status to top industrialised nations within about half a century. The argument of dire economic consequences of Brexit is bogus.

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10 years late. We called it Hongcouver by then.

Vancouver Proposes Tax on Empty Homes If Province Fails to Act (BBG)

Vancouver, home of Canada’s priciest housing market, is proposing a tax on empty homes to help address an “unprecedented” low vacancy rate as residents struggle to find affordable housing. Vancouver’s preferred option is to have the provincial government of British Columbia create a new tax for empty or under-occupied residential homes, Mayor Gregor Robertson said in a statement Wednesday. Failing that, the city plans to impose a business tax on empty homes held as investment properties. The city wants a response from the province by Aug. 1.

“Vancouver housing is first and foremost for homes, not a commodity to make money with,” Robertson said. “We need a tax on empty homes to encourage the best use of all our housing, and help boost our rental supply at a time when there’s almost no vacancy.” Prices in Vancouver are the highest in Canada, topping C$1.5 million ($1.2 million) for a detached home in May, a 37% rise over the prior year, according to that city’s real estate board. At 0.6%, the current vacancy rate means there are only 330 purpose-built rental apartments available at a given time, Robertson said. That’s in a municipal region of about 2.5 million people.

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Lagarde’s just a lot of emptiness.

IMF Warns The US Over High Poverty (BBC)

The US has been warned about its high poverty rate in the International Monetary Fund’s annual assessment of the economy. The fund said about one in seven people were living in poverty and that it needed to be tackled urgently. It recommended raising the minimum wage and offering paid maternity leave to women to encourage them to work. The report also cut the country’s growth forecast for 2016 to 2.2% from a previous prediction of 2.4%. Slower global growth and weaker consumer spending were blamed. US economic growth slowed to an annual pace of 0.5% during the first three months of the year, down sharply from 1.4% in the last three months of 2015.

But the stronger labour market meant that overall “the US economy is in good shape”, said the IMF’s managing director Christine Lagarde. May’s unemployment figures showed the rate at an eight-year low of 4.7%. However Ms Lagarde warned that “not only does poverty create significant social strains, it also eats into labour force participation, and undermines the ability to invest in education and improve health outcomes”. “Our assessment is that, if left unchecked, these four forces – participation, productivity, polarisation and poverty – will corrode the underpinnings of growth and hold back gains in US living standards,” she added.

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All the things monopoly money can buy.

China’s Xi Lauds New Silk Road (R.)

Chinese companies invested nearly $15 billion in countries participating in Beijing’s new Silk Road initiative last year, up one-fifth from 2014, President Xi Jinping said in Uzbekistan, lauding a scheme that is one of his key foreign policy. Under the program, announced by Xi in 2013, and also known as the “One Belt, One Road” program, China aims to invest in infrastructure projects including railways and power grids in central, west and southern Asia, as well as Africa and Europe. China has dedicated $40 billion to a Silk Road Fund and the idea was the driving force behind the establishment of the $50 billion Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.

In comments carried by state media late on Wednesday, Xi said China’s trade with countries participating in the new Silk Road exceeded $1 trillion in 2015, accounting for a quarter of its total foreign trade. “The Belt and Road Initiative’s primary planning and deployment has been completed and is now stepping onto the stage of taking root and intensive cultivation for sustained development,” Xi told the Uzbek parliament. Regions like the Balkans and Central Asia are key to the project, the government has said. Xi’s trip to Uzbekistan followed trips to Serbia and Poland. The initiative envisages the revival of the ancient Silk Road routes from China to Europe to open new trade markets for its firms as the domestic market slows.

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Musk has easy access to the green bubble.

Tesla: Incessant Cash Burn, Looming Competition No Trillion-Dollar Formula (WSJ)

Visions of a future dominated by electric cars have long powered Tesla Motors’ stock price. Sooner or later, the reality of corporate finance is likely to intervene. Tesla’s offer to acquire solar-energy company SolarCity brings this issue to the forefront. Though details on the financial benefits of the proposed tie-up are scant, Tesla CEO Elon Musk was his usual bold self on a conference call with analysts on Wednesday. He said the proposed deal could help Tesla become the world’s first company with a trillion-dollar market capitalization. That would require a more than 30-fold increase from today’s value. Yet that boast may not be the most jarring one Mr. Musk has offered of late.

Powered by the new Model 3 mass-market sedan, Tesla aims to deliver 500,000 vehicles in 2018, Mr. Musk said last month. That target is two years ahead of the previous goal. Tesla forecasts 80,000 to 90,000 deliveries this year. In a world of slow growth and cautious corporate management teams, bold ambition is a central part of Tesla’s appeal to investors. But reaching for the stars has proven expensive. Tesla’s core business has burned more than $3 billion in cash over the past six quarters. Capital needs are expected to further intensify over the coming years. No surprise there; automobile manufacturing is a low-return, capital-intensive business.

The SolarCity transaction could further pressure Tesla’s financial profile. Mr. Musk said Wednesday that Tesla would be willing to provide a bridge loan to SolarCity before the deal closes if needed, although he thought such a scenario to be unlikely. Still, even the possibility of such a loan should raise eyebrows. Mr. Musk said he expects SolarCity to be cash-flow positive within three to six months. That could be the case in a given quarter, but analysts at Barclays forecast 2016 free cash flow at negative-$1.8 billion. As for Tesla, Barclays expects the auto maker to burn $2.1 billion without much improvement over the coming two years. The combined company could burn as much as $3.4 billion in 2018, before factoring in the financial impact of the merger.

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Always funny how close shameful and shameless are in the English language.

Tesla Bid For Solarcity ‘Shameful’: Jim Chanos (BBC)

Tesla’s bid to buy struggling solar energy firm SolarCity has been called “shameful” by financier Jim Chanos. Mr Chanos, who is betting against the shares of both firms, described the bid as a “shameful example of corporate governance at its worst”. Tesla made a $2.8bn (1.9bn) offer for SolarCity on Tuesday. Tesla’s chief executive Elon Musk said the deal, which will be paid for in Telsa shares, was a “no brainer”. The two firms have close ties. Mr Musk owns 22% of SolarCity and sits on the company’s board. SolarCity’s chief executive Lyndon Rive and Mr Musk are cousins. “As a combined automotive and power storage and power generation company, the potential is there for Tesla to be a trillion-dollar market cap company,” Mr Musk said.

Mr Chanos has taken short positions in both Tesla and SolarCity. When investors take short positions they borrow shares of a company, sell those shares and try to buy them back at a lower price. Mr Chanos said SolarCity was “headed toward financial distress,” and neither company could handle the burden of a tie-up. “[SolarCity] is burning hundreds of millions in cash every quarter, a burden that now Tesla shareholders will have to bear, at a total cost of over $8bn,” he said.

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Why now?

ECB Restores Bond Waiver, Lets Greek Banks Tap Cheap Credit (AP)

The ECB has restored a key waiver that will let Greek banks tap emergency central bank credit, one step toward putting the country’s financial institutions back on their feet. The decision announced Wednesday permits Greek government bonds to be used by banks as collateral to get cheap money from the ECB — even though those bonds are rated too low under the usual rules. Greek banks were shattered by the country’s financial and debt crisis which has led to three bailouts since 2010. They have been relying on more expensive financing from the Greek national central bank to do business. The ECB restored the waiver after the Greek government got a €7.5 billion installment on its latest bailout, ensuring the government can pay its bills for now.

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Still a very corrupt country. And not given the time to do something about it; ‘reform’ has eaten that away.

European Commission To Freeze Payments To Greece (NE)

The European Commission will stop all payments of the European Regional Development Fund/Cohesion fund to Greece for the 2014-2020 programmes. This is confirmed by an internal letter obtained by New Europe signed by Walter Deffaa, Director-General for Regional Development. The reason for the Commission’s pause is an investigation of the Greek competition authority, which concerns possible manipulation of tendering procedures for major infrastructure projects. While the letter was circulated internally on June 17, it is expected that the decision will not be announced until after the European Commission President, Jean-Claude Juncker, has concluded his trip to the Greek capital, but possibly before the competition authority will examine the case on July 21.

The European Commission did not immediately respond to New Europe on whether the President had discussed the issue with Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, or as to the amount of money that would be affected by this decision. According to the letter, the Greek authorities working on the case have “already identified companies participating in the cartel as all major constructions companies and large foreign companies present in Greece.” The cartel was allegedly active for over 27 years from 1989, to this year, in the domain of road construction, railroads, metro, and concession projects. The Director-General confirms that some of these projects “will certainly have been co-financed by EU funds”.

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We’ll file this under entertainment…

Erdogan Says Referendum Might Be Held On Turkey’s Negotiations With EU (TM)

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has said that Turkey might hold a referendum on whether to end or continue negotiations with European Union (EU). Erdogan commented on Turkey’s EU accession negotiations during a graduation ceremony of Fatih Sultan Mehmet Foundation University on Wednesday. “Just like United Kingdom, we could also ask our people whether to continue or end negotiations with EU”, Erdogan said.

“Turkey is not after visa-free travel or the shipping back [to Turkish territory of migrants who arrive in Greece]. However, you are after Turkey right now. You are thinking about what would happen if Turkey was to open the gates and let the refugees pass. You are losing your temper because Erdoan throws off your mask and reveals your true, ugly face. That’s why you are thinking of ways to get rid of Erdogan. Europe, you do not want us only because the majority of our people are Muslims”, Erdogan added.

Erdogan’s remarks came after European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker said that the only person standing in the way of Turkey’s visa-free travel to EU was Erdogan. “If Turks cannot travel to EU without a visa right now, that is because they have not fulfilled the necessary criteria. If Erdogan breaks the deal, he has to explain his people why they can’t travel to EU [without a visa]”, Juncker said.

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Foreign armed ‘soldiers’ operating in another country’s sovereign territory. Is that what people want?

EU Approves Common Border Agency (WSJ)

The European Union on Wednesday agreed on setting up a common external border agency and coast guard to be deployed in countries struggling with a massive influx of migrants. The plan was originally put forward in December and has been pushed by Germany and France in response to the migration crisis that saw over one million asylum seekers arrive via Greece last year, and the threat from Islamic State terrorists mingling with the stream of refugees. Sovereignty concerns raised by some EU governments have been addressed in a compromise whereby a majority of governments would have to approve any deployment of EU border guards, including the country where the external border is deemed too porous and an intervention needed.

If an EU country which belongs to the Schengen border-free area refuses to accept such a deployment, and its failure to protect the common border is considered to endanger the border-free area, other countries can erect borders to isolate themselves from it. The U.K. and Ireland won’t be part of the new agency, as they are not part of the Schengen area. The compromise deal, approved Wednesday by the bloc’s 28 ambassadors, still requires the formal adoption by EU governments and the European Parliament, but EU officials say this is a formality that will likely happen in the coming weeks. The European Border and Coast Guard will build on an existing EU agency—Frontex—which is based in Warsaw and currently only has limited powers when it comes to patrolling land and sea borders—a national prerogative.

The new agency will also comprise a network of national authorities responsible for border management and will have a reserve pool of 1,500 border guards to be deployed in emergency cases within a week. But setting up the pool of 1,500 will take time and resources, as EU countries aren’t equally motivated to see this project come to life, EU officials say. In previous years, EU countries were slow in dispatching border guards to Greece and Italy, whose governments requested EU assistance for search and rescue missions at sea or for patrolling the land border between Greece and Turkey. This is partly because some EU countries need the guards back home and also because polyglot border guards are rare.

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Nov 262015
 
 November 26, 2015  Posted by at 10:46 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , ,  5 Responses »


G.G. Bain Scramble for pennies – Thanksgiving, New York Nov 1911

China’s Desperate Commodity Sector Demands State Buy Up Surplus Metals (ZH)
China’s New Silk Road Dream (Bloomberg)
End of EU Border-Free System Could See Euro Fail, Warns Juncker (WSJ)
ECB Alternatives Could Include Penalties On Banks Hoarding Cash (Reuters)
UK Mortgage Lending Hit Seven-Year High In October (Guardian)
Osborne Plans To Eradicate Deficit Dissolve Into Puddle Of Excuses (Bell)
George Osborne Delays The Fiscal Pain But It Will Still Be Ferocious (AEP)
Osborne Quietly Cuts Funding For All Of Britain’s Opposition Parties (Ind.)
Big Banks Accused Of Interest Rate-Swap Fixing In Class Action Suit (Reuters)
Turkish President Erdogan’s Son Major Smuggler Of Illegal ISIS Oil (Engdahl)
How Walmart Keeps an Eye on Its Massive Workforce (Bloomberg)
Fossil Fuel Companies Risk Wasting $2 Trillion Of Investors’ Money (Guardian)
Germany Gives Greece Names Of 10,000 Suspected Tax Dodgers (Guardian)
Greek Residential Property Price Slide Gains Pace In Third Quarter (Reuters)
Dutch Court Rules Migrants’ Right To Food, Shelter Not Unconditional (Reuters)
Good Thing Native Americans Didn’t Treat Pilgrims Like We Treat Syrians (Nevius)

I smell international trouble.

China’s Desperate Commodity Sector Demands State Buy Up Surplus Metals (ZH)

China, which as documented extensively in the past, has clammed down on its unprecedented credit creation now that its debt/GDP is well over 300% and as a result conventional industries are dying a fast and violent death. In fact, months ago we, jokingly, suggested that what China should do, now that it has scared sellers and shorters to death, is to launch QE where it matters – the commodity space. That joke has become a reality according to Reuters, which reports that China’s aluminum and nickel producers have asked Beijing to buy up surplus metal, sources said, the first coordinated effort since 2009 to revive prices suffering their worst rout since the global financial crisis.

The state-controlled metals industry body, China Nonferrous Metals Industry Association, proposed on Monday that the government scoop up aluminum, nickel and minor metals including cobalt and indium, an official at the association and two industry sources with direct knowledge of the matter said. The request was made to the state planner, the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC). One Reuters source familiar with the producers’ request said the China Nonferrous Metals Industry Association had suggested that the state buys 900,000 tonnes of aluminum, 30,000 tonnes of refined nickel, 40 tonnes of indium, and 400,000 tonnes of zinc. In other words, everything that is plunging because there is simply no end-demand should simply be bought by the state.

And why not: in “developed” countries, the same thing is being done by central banks, only instead of directly “monetizing” metals, the central banks indirectly push up stock prices which is where 70% of household net worth is located. For China, and largely investment driven economy, the same can be said about commodity prices. Furthemore, as reported two months ago, at current commodity prices, more than half of all companies with debt in the space are unable to make even one interest payment using organic cash flow which makes the decision for Beijing moot: either buy up the excess metals or reap the consequences of mass defaults.

Reuters: “In the United States, aluminum smelters have blamed ballooning exports from China for hurting international prices. Nickel prices on the London Metal Exchange, which sets the benchmark for global trade, plunged to their lowest in more than a decade on Monday amid concerns about waning demand from China, the world’s second-largest economy. Few, if any smelters, are making a healthy profit at prices as low as $8,200 per tonne, down almost 60% since last year. Aluminum prices have fallen nearly 30% over the past year.”

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“..about a quarter of all overseas investments and construction and engineering projects undertaken by Chinese companies from 2005 to 2014—worth $246 billion—have been stalled by snafus or failed.”

China’s New Silk Road Dream (Bloomberg)

[..] At home, Beijing is attempting to decrease the economy’s dependence on astronomical levels of credit-driven investment for growth, and that spells tougher times for Chinese construction companies, equipment makers, and other businesses that had gorged on the country’s building boom. A key motivation behind Beijing’s big infrastructure schemes is to find fresh outlets for these companies overseas. China understandably expects that its own companies will take the lead in planning, constructing, and supplying projects it’s also funding. In fact, a study by London-based merchant bank Grisons Peak showed that 70% of the overseas loans it examined from two Beijing policy banks were made on the condition that at least part of the funds be used to purchase Chinese goods.

Even with China’s banks and special funds running full tilt, it’s uncertain where all of the money will come from to finance the Silk Road scheme. A report on Chinese state media says the number of projects under its umbrella has already reached 900, with an estimated price tag of $890 billion. With many projects destined for economically weak countries with dubious governance, China’s money could get lost to corruption or wasted in poorly conceived plans. Chinese companies already have a suspect record of implementing such projects. According to data compiled by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), about a quarter of all overseas investments and construction and engineering projects undertaken by Chinese companies from 2005 to 2014—worth $246 billion—have been stalled by snafus or failed.

Almost half were in transport and energy—just the sort of projects that will be key to One Belt, One Road. “China is currently trying to create the story of an economic success, and if it has some public failures, that could be damaging to its brand,” says Homi Kharas, deputy director of the Global Economy and Development program at the Brookings Institution. Nor is there any guarantee that China’s cash will win it camaraderie. In Africa, where China has a long record of investment, a Gallup poll released in August showed the approval rating of Beijing’s leaders had dropped among Africans in 7 of the 11 countries included in the survey. “The goodwill expressed at the highest levels doesn’t trickle down into warm sentiments,” says J. Peter Pham, director of the Africa Center at the Atlantic Council, a think tank based in Washington. “Chinese soft power is relatively weak.”

China’s infrastructure bonanza also presents dangers to its own economy. Local governments are jumping on the bandwagon, announcing a slew of projects aimed at connecting their provinces to Silk Road routes. In an April report, HSBC estimated that the projects already planned within China could total $230 billion. That may help sustain growth in the short run but delay the economy’s crucial transition away from investment-led growth, which would lead to even harder times in coming years. In fact, One Belt, One Road is in its essence the export of China’s old growth strategy—using state banks to fund investment by Chinese companies on foreign soil.

None of these concerns is likely to matter in the end. China’s international infrastructure push is, after all, a diplomatic endeavor, one to which the reputation of the state has become intimately tied. “The Chinese are going to work very hard—throw money at any and all problems—to make sure prized ‘belt and road’ projects all work out,” says Derek Scissors, an AEI scholar. That could turn China’s grand Silk Road dreams into an even grander disappointment.

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Not could but will.

End of EU Border-Free System Could See Euro Fail, Warns Juncker (WSJ)

The head of the European Union’s executive said Wednesday that the region’s Schengen border-free system was under threat and warned that if it fails, the single currency could fall with it. Speaking in the European Parliament in Strasbourg about the recent terror attacks in Paris, European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker acknowledged that the “Schengen system is partly comatose.” “If the spirit of Schengen leaves us…we’ll lose more than the Schengen agreement. A single currency doesn’t make sense if Schengen fails,” he said. “You must know that Schengen is not a neutral concept. It’s not banal. It’s one of the main pillars of the construction of Europe.”

Faced with the biggest migration influx since the aftermath of the World War II and the recent terror attacks in Paris, a number of countries, including Germany, France and others have tightened controls of their borders. Member states are also looking to revise Schengen’s rules to tighten control of the EU’s external border and to change the way the free movement rules apply to asylum seekers. The Schengen Agreement, an arrangement that allows the free movement of European citizens between 26 countries across the continent, is under threat. The Wall Street Journal’s George Downs explains why. Schengen currently has 26 members, including several non-EU countries. It allows freedom of movement across the region and therefore plays a key role in underpinning the EU’s single market of goods, services and labor.

Mr. Juncker said that following the Nov. 13 Paris attacks, European politicians must resist the temptation to “mix up” asylum seekers and terrorists. He said those inciting violence in Europe’s capitals “are the same people who are forcing the unlucky of this planet to flee” Syria and other places. Mr. Juncker called for stepped-up coordination between intelligence agencies—a promise, he said, that had been made in the past but never followed up on. He confirmed the commission would make a proposal in December for an EU-wide border guard system and he pressed lawmakers to toughen the proposed EU passenger name records legislation to include people taking flights within the bloc. EU interior and justice ministers last week demanded this measure be included in the legislation which has been long delayed by the European Parliament.

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Yeah, we know that works…

ECB Alternatives Could Include Penalties On Banks Hoarding Cash (Reuters)

Euro zone central bank officials are considering options such as whether to stagger charges on banks hoarding cash or to buy more debt ahead of the next European Central Bank meeting, according to officials. Little over a week before the meeting to set the ECB’s policy course, numerous alternatives are open, from snapping up the bonds of towns and regions to introducing a two-tier penalty charge on banks that park money with the ECB. Officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that even buying rebundled loans at risk of non-payment has been discussed in preparatory meetings, although such a radical step is highly unlikely for now. The ECB declined to comment. “They are still trying to figure out what will be in the package. A lot of people have different views,” said one official with knowledge of talks that have put ECB president Mario Draghi at loggerheads with sceptical German policy-makers.

“There are some who say you should surprise markets. But you cannot surprise indefinitely. Sooner or later, you are bound to disappoint.” A virtually stagnant euro zone economy and a heightened sense of concern at the ECB sets the backdrop for a series of high-level meetings of central bank officials in Frankfurt that take place this week. “We have deflation, so you have to do something,” said a second person. “How this all looks in a few years, nobody knows.” Yet after many weeks of discussion about what measures are needed to address persistently low price inflation, however, divisions are making it difficult to sign off any package to enhance quantitative easing and rock-bottom interest rates. Failing to do so risks disappointing investors who expect ECB policy setters to bolster a one-trillion-euro plus program of quantitative easing when they meet on December 3, in a move so significant it has been dubbed ‘QE2’.

Draghi has made it clear that he would be willing to extend ECB money printing, now used to buy chiefly government bonds, as well as increase the charge on banks holding money at the ECB – known as the negative deposit rate. In order to soften the impact of this on banks, officials are discussing a split-level rate, a contested step that would impose a higher charge on banks depending on the amount of cash they deposit with the ECB. “It could be combined with a ceiling, so that from a certain point onwards liquidity can only be parked overnight at a stronger rate,” said a second official. “Whether and how to shape a deposit rate cut in December is in discussion.” Any such staggered approach would blunt a straightforward increase in the charge, which would particularly hit banks from Germany or France, who park most with the ECB. Banks hold roughly €170 billion with the ECB in this way.

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Ponzi’s bubble.

UK Mortgage Lending Hit Seven-Year High In October (Guardian)

Britain’s banks lent more money through mortgages in October than at any point since the summer of 2008, figures show, as low interest rates and rising incomes tempted more people into the market. Gross mortgage lending hit £12.9bn during the month, 26% higher than in October 2014 and the highest figure since August 2008, according to the latest data from the British Bankers’ Association (BBA). Mortgage lending for house purchases slowed in the latter half of 2014, but has been growing again this year, and in October there were 77,951 approvals – 21% more than in the same month last year. Remortgaging was up by 34% year on year, at 24,275 approvals. The BBA said the average value of mortgages approved for house purchases was £175,600, while remortgagers typically borrowed £172,800.

Recent months have seen a price war among mortgage lenders, which has led to some of the cheapest deals on record. Borrowers looking to fix their mortgage for five years can pay as little as 2.14%, while those fixing for two years can get a rate as low as 1.15%. Richard Woolhouse, chief economist at the BBA, said: “These statistics show that housing market activity remained strong in October, with gross mortgage borrowing 26% higher than a year ago and at its highest level for seven years. “Consumers remain confident and their incomes are growing. Mortgage rates are at multi-year lows and people are snapping up the competitive deals being offered by banks.” Personal loan rates have also been plummeting, leading to a rise in borrowing, which the Bank of England warned on Tuesday “ultimately might be an issue that the financial policy committee might want to look at fairly carefully”.

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“For the record, yet again: this Chancellor has missed every economic target he ever proclaimed.”

Osborne Plans To Eradicate Deficit Dissolve Into Puddle Of Excuses (Bell)

War is the great distraction. Right or wrong, foolish or wise, it suspends all the usual political and economic rules. Suddenly a chancellor who has spent five and a half years telling us “there is no money” can find ready billions for warfare. Though he might not wish it, George Osborne has been luckier than most. In what passed until recently for normal times, he would have approached today’s Autumn Statement under a black cloud of derision. To follow the tax credits debacle with the worst October borrowing figures in six years is more than just another bit of bad luck. Even in his own, narrow terms, Mr Osborne is bad at his job. Carnage and fear have, reasonably enough, given us other things to worry about. A chancellor’s task in an international crisis is to ensure that his Prime Minister has sufficient funds with which to keep the islands safe.

It is not (or not directly) Mr Osborne’s job to say whether F-35 Stealth aircraft are a lousy buy, or whether increasing billions should be earmarked for a Trident system that could be hacked by a laptop jockey. He just finds the cash. Recently, however, the Chancellor has taken to saying that you can’t have national security without economic security. It isn’t a new proposition, but Mr Osborne tried it for size again during his latest chat with the BBC’s Andrew Marr. Convoluted logic had him claiming, in essence, that you can’t fight terrorism unless he “balances the books”. It was a bold claim, not least because you could turn it on its head. Various police chiefs have stepped up to say that another round of Mr Osborne’s cuts will leave them ill-prepared to deal with events of the sort witnessed in Paris.

How’s that for a “long-term economic plan”? The funding for defence the Chancellor has meanwhile just discovered in the Treasury accounts in large part reinstates cash he has already cut. How’s that for shrewd economic management? The point is that the observation does not just apply to defence. Mr Osborne is improvising, even as his plans to eradicate a budget deficit – it was supposed to be gone by now – dissolve into a pile of excuses. So today, reportedly, he “finds” £3.8 billion to hold a politically-inconvenient winter crisis in NHS England at bay, as though winter has just been discovered. The reality is that the Chancellor is bringing forward one part of the £8.4bn the English NHS was meant to spend a couple of years from now.

And that sum – part of it still devoted to breaking junior doctors – was only supposed to keep the service alive while trusts edge towards insolvency. There is nothing “long-term” about this: it’s ad hoc, another skinned rabbit from a battered hat. Mr Osborne clings to the assumption that the only answer to a big borrowing problem is to cut spending hard and fast. When that doesn’t work, you cut again. If you meanwhile wish to lead the Tory Party and win a general election, you aim for an absurd budget surplus, detrimental to the wider economy, that might give scope for tax cuts circa 2020. And where does this austerity lead? To an £8.2bn government borrowing requirement in October, despite all previous cuts in state spending.

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Ambrose wants to embrace Osborne, but even he finds it hard.

George Osborne Delays The Fiscal Pain But It Will Still Be Ferocious (AEP)

George Osborne has wisely pulled back from a fiscal cliff and a welfare crisis next year but the austerity measures planned until the end of the decade will nevertheless be draconian. Citigroup and RBS both estimate that net retrenchment will be 3.5pc of GDP over the coming three years, roughly what we have already endured since the Lehman crisis. Much of it is from higher taxes – normally the reflex of Labour or the French socialists. This is in stark contrast to the eurozone, where policy is finally on a neutral setting after the bloodbath of 2011-2013. The US is even going into a period of net fiscal stimulus as state and local governments launch a blitz of spending. Unfortunately, Britain needs its bitter medicine. Cyclically-adjusted net borrowing is 3.4pc of GDP this year, the highest in the Western world.

This is courting fate at such a late stage of the economic cycle, leaving no safety margin against an external shock or a global recession. The current account deficit is the worst in the OECD club at 5.1pc of GDP. The country is systematically borrowing from global investors to fund a lifestyle beyond its means. The Bank of England warned in its Stability Report that the deficit leaves the UK vulnerable to a sudden cut-off at any time, if the mood changes. “We’re selling off assets to finance excessive spending,” said Philip Rush from Nomura. “Foreigners may be comfortable to do this now but what happens if the economy rolls over or there is a vote for Brexit?” Plundering the family silver has led to a slow deterioration of Britain’s “net international investment position”, now -25pc of GDP and ever closer to the danger line of 30pc flagged by the IMF.

Fiscal contraction is one way to deal with this, so long as the axe falls on over-consumption, and not on the pockets of spending that boost productivity. Osborne’s latest retreat on welfare ensures that it will not go beyond the correct therapeutic dose and bring the economy to a screeching halt. The lesson from Europe’s double-dip recession is that fiscal overkill is counter-productive, since the contraction of nominal GDP causes the debt ratio to rise even faster. One can only smile at Osborne’s mellifluous suggestion that he can ditch two-thirds of the spending cuts penciled in a recently as March, yet still achieve a budget surplus of £10.1bn by 2019-2020. [..] What Osborne has failed to do yet again in this Autumn Statement is to grasp the nettle of reform and start to sort out the chronic pathologies of the British economy.

That means a shift in the entire tax and regulatory system to reward output, to curb our proclivity to import and to raise the rate of savings and investment. It means a radical assault on Britain’s dire productivity levels, our lack of skills and our bad infrastructure, even if this means that the deficit comes down more slowly in the short run. We know the problems. They are listed in the World Economic Forum’s index of competitiveness. The UK ranks 126 for savings, 63 for maths and science in schools, 62 for days to start a business, 57 for procedures, 44 for government procurement of hi-tech products, 42 for business costs of crime, 33 for work incentives, 30 for quality of roads and so on. What we have is a typical British story: manufacturing stagnation and dismal exports, with economic growth once again reliant on a deeply unhealthy property market. Household debt ratios are about to take off again. We all know how this will end.

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“The UK already spends just a tenth of the European average on funding parties..”

Osborne Quietly Cuts Funding For All Of Britain’s Opposition Parties (Ind.)

The Government has moved to make sharp cuts to state funding to Britain’s opposition parties. So-called “short money”, an annual payment that has been paid to opposition parties since the 1970s, will be cut by 19% subject to parliamentary approval. Short money is not received by parties in Government and was introduced to allow oppositions to “more effectively fulfil their parliamentary functions”. It is generally used to employ parliamentary staff and meet political office costs. The cut will affect Labour the most and also take significant chunks of funding from the SNP, Green Party and smaller regional parties. The cut was not mentioned by George Osborne in his speech to the House of Commons but emerged later when full documentation was released.

“The government has taken a series of steps to reduce the cost of politics, including cutting and freezing ministerial pay, abolishing pensions for councillors in England and legislating to reduce the size of the House of Commons,” the spending review says. “However, since 2010, there has been no contribution by political parties to tackling the deficit. Subject to confirmation by Parliament, the government proposes to reduce Short Money allocations by 19%, in line with the average savings made from unprotected Whitehall departments over this Spending Review.” The payments will then be frozen in cash terms for the rest of the Parliament, removing automatic rises with inflation.

Grants for policy development will also be cut by the same amount. The Government says the cost of short money has risen from £6.9 million in 2010-11 to £9.3 million in 2015-16. Katie Ghose, chief executive of the Electoral Reform Society, which campaigns for democratic reform, said the cut would be likely to damage government accountability. “The decision to cut public funding for opposition parties by 19% is bad news for democracy. The UK already spends just a tenth of the European average on funding parties,” she said. “Short Money is designed to level the playing field and ensure that opposition parties can hold the government of the day to account. This cut could therefore be deeply damaging for accountability.”

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If governments won’t do it…

Big Banks Accused Of Interest Rate-Swap Fixing In Class Action Suit (Reuters)

A class action lawsuit, filed Wednesday, accuses 10 of Wall Street’s biggest banks and two trading platforms of conspiring to limit competition in the $320 trillion market for interest rate swaps. The class action lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Manhattan, accuses Goldman Sachs, Bank of America Merrill Lynch, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Credit Suisse, Barclays, BNP Paribas, UBS, Deutsche Bank, and the Royal Bank of Scotland of colluding to prevent the trading of interest rate swaps on electronic exchanges, like the ones on which stocks are traded. As a result, the lawsuit alleges, banks have successfully prevented new competition from non-banks in the lucrative market for dealing interest rate swaps, the world’s most commonly traded derivative. The banks “have been able to extract billions of dollars in monopoly rents, year after year, from the class members in this case,” the lawsuit alleged.

The suit was brought by The Public School Teachers’ Pension and Retirement Fund of Chicago, which purchased interest rate swaps from multiple banks to help the fund hedge against interest rate risk on debt. The plaintiffs are represented by the law firm of Quinn, Emanuel, Urquhart, & Sullivan LLP, which has taken the lead in a string of antitrust suits against banks. As a result of the banks’ collusion, the suit alleges, the Chicago teachers’ pension and retirement fund overpaid for those swaps. The suit alleged that since at least 2007 the banks “have jointly threatened, boycotted, coerced, and otherwise eliminated any entity or practice that had the potential to bring exchange trading to buyside investors.” “Defendants did this for one simple reason: to preserve an extraordinary profit center,” the lawsuit said.

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Doesn’t seem to be much doubt left on the Turkey-ISIS connection.

Turkish President Erdogan’s Son Smuggler Of Illegal ISIS Oil (Engdahl)

In October 2014 US Vice President Joe Biden told a Harvard gathering that Erdogans regime was backing ISIS with hundreds of millions of dollars and thousands of tons of weapons& Biden later apologized clearly for tactical reasons to get Erdogans permission to use Turkey’s Incirlik Air Base for airstrikes against ISIS in Syria, but the dimensions of Erdogan’s backing for ISIS since revealed is far, far more than Biden hinted. Erdogans involvement in ISIS goes much deeper. At a time when Washington, Saudi Arabia and even Qatar appear to have cut off their support for ISIS, they remaining amazingly durable. The reason appears to be the scale of the backing from Erdogan and his fellow neo-Ottoman Sunni Islam Prime Minister, Ahmet Davutoglu.

The prime source of money feeding ISIS these days is sale of Iraqi oil from the Mosul region oilfields where they maintain a stronghold. The son of Erdogan it seems is the man who makes the export sales of ISIS-controlled oil possible. Bilal Erdogan owns several maritime companies. He has allegedly signed contracts with European operating companies to carry Iraqi stolen oil to different Asian countries. The Turkish government buys Iraqi plundered oil which is being produced from the Iraqi seized oil wells. Bilal Erdogans maritime companies own special wharfs in Beirut and Ceyhan ports that are transporting ISIS smuggled crude oil in Japan-bound oil tankers.

Girsel Tekin, vice-president of the Turkish Republican Peoples Party, CHP, declared in a recent Turkish media interview: “President Erdogan claims that according to international transportation conventions there is no legal infraction concerning Bilal’s illicit activities and his son is doing an ordinary business with the registered Japanese companies, but in fact Bilal Erdogan is up to his neck in complicity with terrorism, but as long as his father holds office he will be immune from any judicial prosecution.” Tekin adds that Bilal’s maritime company doing the oil trades for ISIS, BMZ Ltd, is a family business and president Erdogans close relatives hold shares in BMZ and they misused public funds and took illicit loans from Turkish banks.

French geopolitical analyst, Thierry Meyssan [..] claims that the Syria strategy of Erdogan was initially secretly developed in coordination with former French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe and Erdogans then Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, in 2011, after Juppe won a hesitant Erdogan to the idea of supporting the attack on traditional Turkish ally Syria in return for a promise of French support for Turkish membership in the EU. France later backed out, leaving Erdogan to continue the Syrian bloodbath largely on his own using ISIS.

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1984 as the new normal.

How Walmart Keeps an Eye on Its Massive Workforce (Bloomberg)

In the autumn of 2012, when Walmart first heard about the possibility of a strike on Black Friday, executives mobilized with the efficiency that had built a retail empire. Walmart has a system for almost everything: When there’s an emergency or a big event, it creates a Delta team. The one formed that September included representatives from global security, labor relations, and media relations. For Walmart, the stakes were enormous. The billions in sales typical of a Walmart Black Friday were threatened. The company’s public image, especially in big cities where its power and size were controversial, could be harmed. But more than all that: Any attempt to organize its 1 million hourly workers at its more than 4,000 stores in the U.S. was an existential danger.

Operating free of unions was as essential to Walmart’s business as its rock-bottom prices. OUR Walmart, a group of employees backed and funded by a union, was asking for more full-time jobs with higher wages and predictable schedules. Officially they called themselves the Organization United for Respect at Walmart. Walmart publicly dismissed OUR Walmart as the insignificant creation of the United Food and Commercial Workers International (UFCW) union. “This is just another union publicity stunt, and the numbers they are talking about are grossly exaggerated,” David Tovar, a spokesman, said on CBS Evening News that November.

Internally, however, Walmart considered the group enough of a threat that it hired an intelligence-gathering service from Lockheed Martin, contacted the FBI, staffed up its labor hotline, ranked stores by labor activity, and kept eyes on employees (and activists) prominent in the group. During that time, about 100 workers were actively involved in recruiting for OUR Walmart, but employees (or associates, as they’re called at Walmart) across the company were watched; the briefest conversations were reported to the “home office,” as Walmart calls its headquarters in Bentonville, Ark.

The details of Walmart’s efforts during the first year it confronted OUR Walmart are described in more than 1,000 pages of e-mails, reports, playbooks, charts, and graphs, as well as testimony from its head of labor relations at the time. The documents were produced in discovery ahead of a National Labor Relations Board hearing into OUR Walmart’s allegations of retaliation against employees who joined protests in June 2013. The testimony was given in January 2015, during the hearing. OUR Walmart, which split from the UFCW in September, provided the documents to Bloomberg Businessweek after the judge concluded the case in mid-October. A decision may come in early 2016.

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But so do ‘renewable’ energy companies.

Fossil Fuel Companies Risk Wasting $2 Trillion Of Investors’ Money (Guardian)

Fossil fuel companies risk wasting up to $2tn (£1.3tn) of investors’ money in the next decade on projects left worthless by global action on climate change and the surge in clean energy, according to a new report. The world’s nations aim to seal a UN deal in Paris in December to keep global warming below the danger limit of 2C. The heavy cuts in carbon emissions needed to achieve this would mean no new coal mines at all are needed and oil demand peaking in 2020, according to the influential thinktank Carbon Tracker. It found $2.2tn of projects at risk of stranding, ie being left valueless as the market for fossil fuels shrinks. The report found the US has the greatest risk exposure, with $412bn of projects that could be stranded, followed by Canada ($220bn), China ($179bn) and Australia ($103bn).

The UK’s £30bn North Sea oil and gas projects are at risk, the report says, despite government efforts to prop up the sector. Shell, ExxonMobil and Pemex are the companies with the greatest sums potentially at risk, with over $70bn each. The failure of the fossil fuel industry to address climate change is laid out in a second report on Wednesday, in which senior industry figures state there is “a significant disconnect between the changes needed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to the [2C] level and efforts currently underway”. Lord John Browne, former BP boss, Sir Mark Moody-Stuart, former Shell and Anglo American chair and others say there must be “fundamental reassessment of the fossil fuel industry’s business models” and that companies should seize commercial opportunities in low-carbon energy.

The Carbon Tracker report looked at existing and future projects being considered by coal, oil and gas companies up to 2025 and determined which could proceed if carbon emissions are cut to give a 50% chance of keeping climate change under 2C. Many high-cost projects, including Arctic and deepwater drilling, tar sands and shale oil are unneeded and therefore uneconomic in the 2C scenario, the report found, although some are required to replace fields that are already depleting.

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It’s been over 5 years since the Lagarde list.

Germany Gives Greece Names Of 10,000 Suspected Tax Dodgers (Guardian)

Germany has handed Athens the names of more than 10,000 of its citizens suspected of dodging taxes with holdings in Swiss banks. The inventory, which details bank accounts worth €3.6bn – almost twice the last instalment of aid Athens secured from creditors earlier this week – was given to the Greek finance ministry in an effort to help the country raise tax revenues. “This is an important step for the Greek government to create more honesty regarding tax in the country,” said Norbert Walter-Borjans, finance minister of the regional state of North Rhine-Westphalia. The state disclosed the data through Germany’s federal tax office. Greece’s leftist-led government vowed it would go after tax dodgers as one of the many policy commitments it signed up to when a €86bn bailout between Athens and its partners was agreed after months of wrangling in July.

The financial lifeline was the third since Athens’ near economic meltdown following the first revelations of runaway deficits in May 2010. A total of 10,588 depositors were said to be on the list, including private individuals and companies. Sources said it resembled a “who’s who” of the well-heeled upper echelons of Greek society – able to spend Christmas in villas in Gstaad in Switzerland and summer at sea in luxury pleasure boats. Prime minister Alexis Tsipras, who won snap polls in September pledging to do away with the “old order”, has promised to dismantle Greece’s oligarchical establishment. Mired in a sixth year of recession, with unprecedented levels of poverty and unemployment, it is ordinary Greeks hit by ever-increasing taxes who have borne the brunt of the country’s long-running economic crisis.

New levies are at the basis of the savings Athens agreed to make in exchange for its latest international bailout. With affluent Greeks spiriting their money abroad, the German chancellor Angela Merkel has seen fit to publicly chastise them for failing to pitch in. Tryfon Alexiadis, the deputy finance minister in charge of tax revenues, said the list would be acted on as quickly as possible – even if the government had to assume the innocence of those revealed to be on it. “It will not stay in a drawer for three years,” he told reporters outside parliament on Wednesday. “The list will be evaluated … and we will see what is hidden behind it. All the services of the ministry of finance and the ministry of justice will cooperate so that we have results as soon as possible.”

In October 2010 Greece was given a similar inventory by Christine Lagarde, then French finance minister, of more 2,000 Greeks with deposits at the Geneva branch of HSBC. Successive governments did little to follow up on it with Tsipras accusing predecessors of deliberately keeping the data in a drawer. Estimated at more than $35bn a year, tax dodging is thought to be the biggest drain on the Greek economy. Last month, Alexiadis got a letter in the post with a bullet in it and a note comparing him to a collaborator with Germany’s Nazi forces. Berlin has been the biggest contributor of the €326bn in bailout funding Athens has received to date.

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There is no market left.

Greek Residential Property Price Slide Gains Pace In Third Quarter (Reuters)

Greek residential property prices fell at a faster pace in the third quarter compared to the previous three-month period as economic contraction hit household income and employment, knocking values on banks’ outstanding real estate loans. Property accounts for a large chunk of household wealth in Greece, which has one of the highest home ownership rates in Europe – 80% versus a European Union average of 70%, according to the European Mortgage Federation. Bank of Greece data showed apartment prices fell by 6.1% in the third quarter of 2015 from a year earlier, with the annual pace of price declines accelerating from 5.0% in the second quarter. The price slide had started to ease after a 10.8% fall in 2013 up until the first quarter of 2015. Greece’s real estate market has been hit by property taxes to plug budget deficits, a tight credit market and a jobless rate hovering around 25%.

Residential property prices have dropped by 41.2% from a peak hit in 2008, when the country’s recession began. Greece has been pushed to the brink of default by a debt crisis that at one stage put into question its membership of the eurozone single currency bloc. Its economic prospects have improved after it signed up to a new bailout package worth up to 86 billion euros this summer. Apart from their negative effect on wealth, falling property prices also affect collateral values on banks’ outstanding real estate loans. Greece’s economy shrank 0.5% in the third quarter compared with the first three months of 2015, contracting by a milder-than-expected pace. The EC projects Greece will see a 1.4% recession this year, but the left-wing government expects the €173 billion economy to flatline.

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Slippery slope with regards to UN treaties. But what else is new?

Dutch Court Rules Migrants’ Right To Food, Shelter Not Unconditional (Reuters)

A Dutch high court on Thursday upheld a government policy of withholding food and shelter to rejected asylum-seekers who refuse to be repatriated, giving legal backing to one of Europe’s toughest immigration policies. The Raad van State or Council of State, which reviews the legality of government decisions, found that the new policy of conservative Prime Minister Mark Rutte does not contravene the European Convention on Human Rights. A rejected asylum seeker does not have the right to appeal to the European Social Charter, it said. The Dutch government “has the right, when providing shelter in so-called locations of limited freedom, to require failed asylum-seekers to cooperate with their departure from the Netherlands,” a summary of the ruling said.

As the Netherlands toughened its stance on newcomers in recent years, Dutch policy toward asylum-seekers and immigrants has been criticized by NGOs and the United Nations as overly strict. Thursday’s ruling counters an August report by the U.N.’s Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, which told the Dutch they should meet migrants’ basic needs unconditionally. “As long as they are in The Netherlands, they have to enjoy minimum standards of living,” co-author Ion Diaconu, wrote at the time. The EU’s leading human rights forum, the 47-nation Council of Europe admonished the Netherlands in 2014 for placing asylum seekers in administrative detention and leaving many “irregular immigrants” in legal limbo and destitution.

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“..they were leaving a homeland where they were fined, jailed and sometimes even executed for their views.”

Good Thing Native Americans Didn’t Treat Pilgrims Like We Treat Syrians (Nevius)

Thanksgiving is as known for being a day to delicately navigate talking to relatives with vastly different political beliefs as it is for overeating. And the hot-button topic certain to be on everyone’s lips will be what do about Syrian refugees. If it were up to 25 Republican governors and the US House of Representatives, the answer would be to keep them out. This is ironic. Today’s Syrian refugees today don’t look, sound or worship like us, but the Pilgrims that landed on Plymouth Rock 400 years ago also didn’t look, sound or worship like we do – and certainly neither looked, sounded nor worshipped like the native inhabitants of America do. They brought Calvinist determination to this country, and we celebrate that, but that determination came pre-packaged with with bigotry and narrow-mindedness.

What came to be known as the Protestant work ethic was driven by the same zeal that caused some of the British exiles who landed on American shores to persecute anyone already here, or who came here after, who wasn’t like them. We praise the Pilgrims’ work ethic as part of our American DNA, but rarely acknowledged the work ethic and determination of the people who already lived here, nor what the Pilgrims and those who came after them did to destroy the indigenous people they met. Though we may never know exactly what transpired on that First Thanksgiving, let’s never forget that it was the Native Americans’ land – and that they brought the food.

If we continue to celebrate the Pilgrims – or even just to use them as an excuse to eat too much pie – we and our lawmakers should acknowledge that turning our backs on Syrian refugees is akin to turning our back on our own foundations. While it’s true that the Pilgrims weren’t exactly fleeing a war-torn country, they were leaving a homeland where they were fined, jailed and sometimes even executed for their views. Calling themselves “saints” or “the godly”, the Pilgrims were religious separatists who argued for a complete break from the state-run Church of England, which ran them afoul of the law and the king. After a decade of exile in the Netherlands that saw “sundry of them taken away by death” and their children tempted by “the great licentiousness of youth in that country”, the Pilgrims partnered with financial backers in England to help them outfit the Mayflower for the long voyage.

In return, they agreed to work for the company to repay their debts. Then they sailed across the pond, exploited the locals and paved the way for the America we have today. Though their behavior in “the new world” was far from saintly, the Pilgrims were still refugees. But today’s conservatives – some of whom would go so far as to float the idea of World War II-style internment camps for Syrian refugees or registration lists for Muslims – can’t stomach the idea that if the Pilgrims were to show up today, the Republican Party would turn would them back at the border. They actually were a lot of what conservatives are mistakenly accusing Syrian refugees of being.

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townhall.com

Oct 132015
 
 October 13, 2015  Posted by at 8:45 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , ,  3 Responses »


Russell Lee Columbia Gardens outdoor amusement resort, Butte, Montana 1942

US Debt Markets Shaken Amid More Corporate Downgrades And Defaults (WSJ)
Why US Banks Soon Will Be Singing The Blues (CNBC)
China Imports Slump 20% Amid Falling Commodity Prices, Weak Demand (Guardian)
China Trade Data Unsettle Asian Bourses (FT)
China’s Stock Rally-to-Rout Is About to Repeat (Bloomberg)
KKR Warns About Renewed Commodity, Emerging-Market Rout on China (Bloomberg)
Pimco’s Bear Case Only Gets Stronger as Emerging Currencies Jump (Bloomberg)
Switzerland to Impose 5% Leverage Ratio on Biggest Banks (Bloomberg)
Europeans Move To Undercut Global Bank Capital Rules (FT)
The Failure to Learn From Boom-Bust Cycles (WSJ)
Higher Interest Rates Would Throw Bank Profits a Lifeline (Bloomberg)
China’s Great Game: A New Silk Road To A New Empire (FT)
Angus Deaton Showed We’re Helping the Wrong People (Bloomberg)
US Annual Oil Output to Drop for First Time Since 2008 (WSJ)
Oil Sands Boom Dries Up in Alberta, Taking Thousands of Jobs With it (NY Times)
German Brand Dealt ‘Hammer Blow’ By VW Scandal And Weakening Economy (Telegraph)
Emissions Test Changes Could Make Diesels ‘Unaffordable’ (BBC)
Home Flipping Frenzy in Sydney Sparks Warnings on Housing Risks (Bloomberg)
TTIP Deal Would Remove People’s Rights To Access Basic Human Needs (Ind.)
Merkel Seeks Turkey’s Aid on Borders to Stem Refugee Flow to EU
Athens Rules Out Joint Sea Patrols With Turkey (Kath.)
Marine Food Chains At Risk Of Collapse (Guardian)
Antarctic Ice Melts So Fast Whole Continent May Be At Risk By 2100 (Guardian)

“Credit-rating firms are downgrading more U.S. companies than at any other time since the financial crisis..”

US Debt Markets Shaken Amid More Corporate Downgrades And Defaults (WSJ)

Falling profits and increased borrowing at U.S. companies are rattling debt markets, a sign the six-year-long economic recovery could be under threat. Credit-rating firms are downgrading more U.S. companies than at any other time since the financial crisis, and measures of debt relative to cash flow are rising. Analysts expect profits at large companies to decline for a second straight quarter for the first time since 2009. The market for riskier debt has become snarled, raising fears that companies could have trouble repaying their obligations following several years of record debt issuance, low corporate defaults and persistently low interest rates. Reflecting those concerns, investors are now demanding more yield to own corporate bonds relative to benchmark U.S. Treasury securities.

The softening U.S. corporate fundamentals have been largely overlooked as investors focused on sharp declines in the shares, bonds and currencies of many emerging-markets nations. Many analysts say the health of China remains the largest source of uncertainty in the global economy. But rising downgrades and an increase in U.S. corporate defaults indicate “some cracks on the surface” of the domestic-growth outlook, said Jody Lurie, corporate credit analyst at financial-services firm Janney Montgomery Scott LLC. Many investors closely monitor debt-market trends as an indicator of U.S. economic health. In August and September, Moody’s Investors Service issued 108 credit-rating downgrades for U.S. nonfinancial companies, compared with just 40 upgrades.

That’s the most downgrades in a two-month period since May and June 2009, the tail end of the last U.S. recession. Standard & Poor’s Ratings Services downgraded U.S. companies 297 times in the first nine months of the year, the most downgrades since 2009, compared with just 172 upgrades. Meanwhile, the trailing 12-month default rate on lower-rated U.S. corporate bonds was 2.5% in September, up from 1.4% in July of last year, according to S&P. About a third of the downgrades targeted oil and gas companies or firms in other commodity-linked industries, following a plunge in oil prices in the second half of 2014, said Diane Vazza, head of global fixed-income research at S&P.

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“S&P 500 financials are expected to show a 3.8% annualized growth in profits [..] As recently as July analysts had been forecasting 9.9% growth..”

Why US Banks Soon Will Be Singing The Blues (CNBC)

With Wall Street banks about to report on how much money they’ve been making, estimates are moving in the wrong direction. Coming off a quarter in which the industry collectively reported $43 billion in profits, analysts had been hoping a rising rate environment and increasing demand would keep things moving for the $15.1 trillion sector. However, fading hopes for a rate hike in 2015 and other factors are making analysts nervous about just how the quarterly profit reports will shape up. JPMorgan Chase gets things started for the Big Four on Tuesday, with Bank of America and Wells Fargo on tap Wednesday and Citigroup due Thursday. Goldman Sachs reports Thursday as well and PNC will report Wednesday.

As a sector, S&P 500 financials are expected to show a 3.8% annualized growth in profits, according to S&P Capital IQ. While that’s better than the 5.1% decline projected for the entire index, it’s a big comedown from initial projections. Revenue is expected to grow 4.4%. As recently as July analysts had been forecasting 9.9% growth, and a year ago that expectation was a gaudy 27%. So even if results come in better than expected, they likely will remain well below the initially lofty hopes for financials, which were supposed to be 2015’s best-performing sector. Individual companies have seen substantial revisions in recent days.

Analysts have cut MetLife estimates from 88 cents a share to 77 cents, Goldman Sachs from $3.46 to $3.20 and Morgan Stanley from 68 cents to 63 cents, according to FactSet. Earnings expectations have been reduced for 53 of the 88 companies in the S&P 500’s financial sector. The weakness comes as loan growth has held fairly steady thanks to a robust climate in commercial real estate. The sector jumped 9.7% in the third quarter, its best of the year after rising 6.7% in 2014, according to Federal Reserve data. Investment banking also has been fairly solid throughout the year. While global revenue is down 10% year over year, it’s been flat at $28 billion in the U.S., thanks to a record $9.7 billion haul in mergers and acquisition revenue, according to Dealogic.

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Imports down 17.7% in yuan, over 20% in USD. Different numbers reflect the difference between calculations in yuan and in dollars.

China Imports Slump 20% Amid Falling Commodity Prices, Weak Demand (Guardian)

China’s imports fell heavily in September, official figures said, keeping pressure on policymakers to do more to stave off a sharper economic slowdown. Although exports fell less than expected by 3.7% from the same period last year, the value of imports tumbled more than 20% to register the 11th straight month of falls. Imports plunged 20.4% in September from a year earlier to $145.2bn, customs officials said, due to weak commodity prices and soft domestic demand. These factors will complicate Beijing’s efforts to stave off deflation, one of the headwinds threatening the world’s second biggest economy. Highlighting persistent weakness in demand at home and abroad, China’s combined exports and imports fell 8.1% in the first nine months of the year from the same period in 2014, well below the full-year official target of 6% growth.

“In general, there are no green shoots in this set of data,” said Zhou Hao, senior economist at Commerzbank in Singapore. “The growth of [trade] volume still remains low.” However, monthly figures were much more rosy. Exports to every major market except Taiwan rose from August, as did imports. Julian Evans-Pritchard of Capital Economics said monthly trends showed a steady rise to most major export markets in the US and Europe over the summer. “Basically, exports have been doing better since the second quarter, but that recovery trend has been masked on a year-on-year basis because the second half of 2014 was so strong.” Evans-Pritchard also said that import data had become unreliable given massive swings in prices due to the commodity downturn and a divergence between prices and trading volumes.

“For the major commodities like oil, copper, etc. we’re actually seeing a pretty healthy trend in import volumes.” Import volumes are a leading indicator for exports in China, given a large share of materials and parts re-exported as finished goods. “September’s import figure does not bode well for industrial production and fixed asset investment,” wrote ANZ economists in a research note reacting to the figures. “Overall growth momentum last month remained weak and third quarter GDP growth to be released [on 19 October] will likely have edged down to 6.4%, compared with 7% in the first half.” China posted trade surplus of $60.34bn for the month, the general administration of Customs said on Tuesday, higher than forecasts for $46.8 billion.

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China has a record surplus. Sounds good. Exports down ‘only’ 1.1% (still curious if you want to grow GDP by 7%). Imports down 17.7%. That will be largely raw materials. So what will they be able to produce for export next year?

China Trade Data Unsettle Asian Bourses (FT)

Chinese trade data rattled Asian markets as a bigger-than-expected fall in imports offset the cheer afforded by a record mainland trade surplus and slower pace of decline in exports. The Shanghai Composite was down 0.4% and the tech-focused Shenzhen Composite was up 0.3% after data showed China posted its biggest-ever trade surplus, in renminbi terms, of Rmb376.2 in September, up from Rmb368bn in August and comfortably ahead of economists’ expectations of Rmb292.4bn. That was underpinned by exports declining by 1.1% last month from a year earlier, an improvement from August’s 6.1% pace of decline. Economists expected exports to drop by 7.4%.

Imports fell 17.7% in September from a year ago, a bigger-than-forecast drop and larger than August’s 14.3% decline – less than encouraging in the context of China’s goal to shift its growth model from export-driven to consumption-based. Ahead of the trade data release, economists at ANZ said: “China’s exports have likely contracted in September, but its strong trade surplus should ease the pressure of capital outflows.” They reckon economic activity on the mainland remained sluggish in September, leading to their forecast of 6.4% economic growth in the third quarter. China’s official gross domestic product data are due on October 19, and analysts are increasingly bearish, tipping real growth at 6.7%, according to a Bloomberg survey of 25 economists, lower than the official full-year target of “around 7%”. Among other equities benchmarks, Hong Kong’s Hang Seng was down 0.3% and Australia’s S&P/ASX 200 was down 0.9%. Japan’s Nikkei, reopening after a long weekend, was down 0.9%.

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“As oil starts to move and materials follow, investors will by default feel more positive about China,” he said. “This is a bear market rally.”

China’s Stock Rally-to-Rout Is About to Repeat (Bloomberg)

In August, Thomas Schroeder correctly predicted a rebound in Chinese stocks wouldn’t last. Now, he says, the benchmark equity gauge will plumb new lows as a bear-market rally fails. The Shanghai Composite Index will climb to 4,100 in the next three months before slumping as much as 41% to 2,400 in early 2016, Schroeder, founder and managing director of Chart Partners, said. The benchmark index added 3.3% to close at 3,287.66 on Monday. Schroeder, a former Asian technical analysis chief at UBS, cited triangle and wedge patterns in making his call. The Shanghai Composite tumbled 29% in the third quarter, the biggest slump among benchmark global gauges, as a stock boom turned to bust amid concern about the slowdown in China’s economy and a crackdown on using borrowed money to buy equities.

The bottoming of oil prices and a rebound in emerging market currencies will help bolster a rally in the nation’s equities in the next two months, which will reverse as the Federal Reserve starts raising interest rates, Schroeder said. “As oil starts to move and materials follow, investors will by default feel more positive about China,” he said. “This is a bear market rally.” Schroeder predicted in August that the Chinese equity rout will worsen, with the Shanghai Composite likely sliding below 3,100 within two months. The measure fell to as low as 2,927.29 on Aug. 26. Technical analysts use past patterns to try to predict future movements. [..] “We haven’t seen a major low for the emerging markets,” said Schroeder, whose Chart Partners Group is a provider of trading strategies linked to technical analysis. “There’s likely to be more pain next year as the U.S. starts lifting rates.”

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Squeeze.

KKR Warns About Renewed Commodity, Emerging-Market Rout on China (Bloomberg)

There are few reasons to get excited about the recent rebound in commodities and emerging-market assets, according to KKR which correctly forecast the stock selloff in developing countries five months ago. China will continue to rein in credit growth, reducing the investments in factories and machinery that have been among the key drivers for the commodity boom in recent years, Henry McVey, global head of macro and asset allocation at KKR, one of the world’s largest private equity firms, wrote in a note posted on its website. “Many hard commodity prices are likely to suffer another leg down,” McVey and Frances Lim, who visited Asia recently, said in the note. “We would view any recovery as a bounce, not a sustained re-acceleration in the Chinese economy, as the structural headwinds remain significant.”

The MSCI Emerging Markets Index rose Monday to a two-month high, while commodities are trading around 6% above a 16-year low set in August, on speculation that China will take steps to shore up its faltering economy. The emerging-market stock gauge has still lost about 10% this year, heading for its third annual decline, as lower raw-material prices and the Chinese economic slowdown undermines exports in countries from Brazil to Malaysia. While some “targeted stimulus” in housing and infrastructure in recent months may help stabilize China’s economy, it won’t alter a slowing trajectory because the government needs to reduce debt and production overcapacity, McVey said. KKR,which manages $102 billion in assets, expects growth in China to slow to 6% in 2018, from 6.8% this year, which would be the least since 1990.

McVey, who previously worked as chief investment strategist at Morgan Stanley and a managing director at Fortress Investment, told investors in May to stay away from most of the publicly traded emerging-market companies. He said a buildup in debt and weakening currencies in emerging countries will lead to underperformance in stocks, a call foreshadowing an over 20% decline in the MSCI benchmark gauge over the next four months. McVey said growth in China’s fixed-asset investments, the biggest driver in the country’s rise over the past decade, will decline to as little as 5% a year, from 11% in August, and down from a peak of 34% in 2009.

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Dead cats bouncing all over the place.

Pimco’s Bear Case Only Gets Stronger as Emerging Currencies Jump (Bloomberg)

Pacific Investment Management Co. is sticking with its pessimistic outlook on emerging-market currencies, saying the biggest rally in 17 years has only bolstered the case for making bearish wagers. “These currencies look more interesting to be underweight from here than they were a week ago,” Luke Spajic, an emerging markets money manager at Pimco, whose developing-nation currency fund has outperformed 97% of peers during the past five years, said in a phone interview on Monday. Pimco, which oversees $1.52 trillion, said in an Oct. 1 report that it had short positions in currencies such as Malaysia’s ringgit, the Thai baht and the South Korean won. Emerging-market currencies surged last week, recording the biggest rally since 1998 as traders pushed back expectations for when the U.S. Federal Reserve will start raising interest rates.

While Spajic said he doesn’t know how long the rebound will last, he sees a “wave of deflationary pressure” across Asia that will eventually weigh on currencies as exports and economic growth projections decline. Pimco’s concerns echo those of the IMF, which cut its 2015 outlook for the global economic expansion to 3.1% on Oct. 6 from a July forecast of 3.3%. The fund cited a slowdown in emerging markets, saying the following day that high debt levels at banks and other companies have left developing economies susceptible to financial stress and capital outflows.

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Switzerland does as US does.

Switzerland to Impose 5% Leverage Ratio on Biggest Banks (Bloomberg)

Switzerland’s finance ministry will require the country’s biggest banks to have capital equal to about 5% of total assets after UBS Group AG and Credit Suisse Group AG sought to win easier terms, according to people briefed on the deliberations. The decision would mimic the U.S. leverage ratio for its biggest banks, which exceeds the 3% minimum set in a global agreement by the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision, according to the people, who asked not to be identified because the talks aren’t public. The Swiss government will also align its calculation of the ratio with the method employed in the U.S., resulting in fewer types of debt counting toward capital, one of the people said. The measure of financial strength has gained importance since the 2008 financial crisis as a means of making big banks less prone to collapse.

A government-appointed expert panel recommended in December that Switzerland follow the lead of the U.S., which in recent years has introduced some of the world’s toughest capital requirements. Zurich-based UBS and Credit Suisse reported Basel III leverage ratios of 3.6% and 3.7% at the end of the second quarter, indicating they would be more than 1%age point short of the new target. “Higher requirements mean that the banks will have fewer funds to return to shareholders,” said Andreas Brun at Zuercher Kantonalbank. “For UBS, whose investment case is based on rising dividend expectations, this is a big issue. For Credit Suisse, whose capital situation is worse, this means a higher dilution because of a bigger requirement of a capital increase.”

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Meanwhile in the EU, banks are still holier than thou.

Europeans Move To Undercut Global Bank Capital Rules (FT)

Several European countries are taking action to water down new global capital rules for their top financial institutions, causing concern among investors and EU officials. France is set to become the latest country to introduce legislation that would save its leading banks from having to issue tens of billions of euros of new bonds to meet the rules agreed by global regulators a fortnight ago, people familiar with the situation said. Brussels officials are so worried with the divergence in policies that they have started talks with EU countries on a more co-ordinated stance, two EU officials said. Market insiders said that investors were frustrated and that all banks could end up paying more when they issue debt.

The rules on “total loss absorbing capital” (TLAC) agreed on September 25 by the Financial Stability Board are one of the final pieces of a wave of post-crisis regulation designed to ensure there is never a repeat of the bank bailouts of recent times. The rules apply only to the world’s largest banks but have wider reach, according to Laurent Frings, analyst at Aberdeen Asset Management. “The view from investors to a large degree is that local regulators will force domestically important banks to work to the sale rules,” said Mr Frings. In the UK and Switzerland, banks such as UBS, Credit Suisse and Barclays are building up their “loss absorbing capital” by issuing new debt from bank holding companies that can be “bailed in” in a crisis. The banks will have to issue tens of billions of the new bonds to meet their TLAC requirements.

In Germany and Italy, however, legislators are passing laws to make traditional senior debt easier to bail in. This frees their banks of the obligation to issue new debt for TLAC. Several people close to the situation said that France would also propose a solution to help its banks. “Being a European authority we would always argue that it’s a good idea to put in place a European solution, and not try to come up with 19 or 28 solutions on that,” said Elke Koenig, president of the Single Resolution Board, the new EU-wide resolution authority for failing banks. “We’ve clearly given our support to the basic idea [of the German bank law] at the same time saying it would be preferential longer term to have a European solution.”

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Or the failure to see that this is not a boom-bust cycle?

The Failure to Learn From Boom-Bust Cycles (WSJ)

The plunge in commodity prices is thumping oil exporters around the globe. The scale of the beating rests largely on whether governments heeded the lessons from prior boom-bust cycles. Norway and Saudi Arabia built up sizable rainy-day funds and managed their windfalls from high prices conservatively. Now they’ve got considerable buffers against a downturn. Nigeria and Venezuela splurged and made few economic overhauls as prices surged. They’re now suffering as growth skids. The commodity bust is weighing heavily on resource-rich countries that represent 20% of the world’s economic output. The oil-price decline is supporting some of the largest consumers, such as the U.S. and Europe, that are key to keeping the global economy out of recession.

But it is providing less of an overall global boost than predicted just a year ago, while forcing more vulnerable economies to scramble in an uncertain environment. “The oil price drop came as a surprise,” said Angolan finance minister Armando Manuel. “It captured my country in a state in which we were not sufficiently diversified.” The commodity collapse and its effect on emerging economies drew wide attention in Lima, where the world’s finance ministers and central bankers gathered for the IMF’s annual meeting, which ended Sunday, against a backdrop of dimming global growth. The problem isn’t isolated to oil, fueling a much broader slump in major emerging markets from Brazil to South Africa.

Metal prices are in a long-term funk, hitting exporters of iron, copper and similar industrial commodities. Oil exporters are showing what may be in store for other major commodity exporters. Nigeria, which got nearly 65% of its government revenue from crude exports before the price plunge, has seen its projected 2015 growth slashed to less than 4% from more than 6% a year ago, according to the IMF. Kazakhstan’s growth rate has tumbled to 1.5% this year from 6% before the petroleum collapse. In Venezuela, where the state gets half its revenue from oil sales, the economy is shriveling by 10%.

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That’s the number 1 reason the Fed would love to hike rates.

Higher Interest Rates Would Throw Bank Profits a Lifeline (Bloomberg)

Having bailed them out and then helped to repair their balance sheets with record-low interest rates and bond-buying, policy makers may assist the financial industry once more when the U.S. Federal Reserve begins tightening monetary policy. That’s according to two recently published reports by the Bank for International Settlements and McKinsey & Co., both of which have highlighted the downsides of ultra-easy borrowing costs in the past. Based on seven years of data from 109 large international banks in 14 countries, the BIS confirmed a relationship between short-term rates and the slope of the curve for bond yields with bank profitability.

The conclusion drawn by Claudio Borio, the head of the monetary and economic department at the BIS, and colleagues is that the positive impact of being able to earn income by lending money out for higher rates over time is bigger than the hit of defaults and income that doesn’t carry interest. Even better news for the banks is that the effect is strongest when rates are lower and the yield curve isn’t that steep, as is now the case. That provides another reason for the BIS’s economists to again decry the unintended side-effects of accommodative monetary policy. They reckon that between 2011 and 2014, the average bank of those studied lost one year of profits as a result of low rates. “All this suggests that over time, unusually low interest rates and an unusually flat term structure erode bank profitability,” said Borio et al in the report, which was published on Oct. 1.

Return on equity at 500 global lenders was unchanged in 2014 at 9.5%, about the average of the last 35 years, according to the Sept. 30 study by McKinsey. Profit margins also continued a steady decline, dropping by 185 basis points in 2014, in part because of lower rates. It reckons tighter policy would boost return on equity by about 2 %age points. “Many in the industry are waiting for an interest rate rise or some other structural lift to profits,” McKinsey said. There is a sting in the tail. It warned that even if rates do rise, profit margins may still not return to their pre-crisis highs. “Much of the benefit will get competed away, and risk-costs will likely increase, especially in economies where the recovery is still fragile,” McKinsey said.

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China doesn’t, and won’t, have sufficient growth to execute these plans.

China’s Great Game: A New Silk Road To A New Empire (FT)

The granaries in all the towns are brimming with reserves, and the coffers are full with treasures and gold, worth trillions, wrote Sima Qian, a Chinese historian living in the 1st century BC. “There is so much money that the ropes used to string coins together rot and break, an innumerable amount. The granaries in the capital overflow and the grain goes bad and cannot be eaten”. He was describing the legendary surpluses of the Han dynasty, an age characterised by the first Chinese expansion to the west and south, and the establishment of trade routes later known as the Silk Road, which stretched from the old capital Xi an as far as ancient Rome.

Fast forward a millennia or two, and the same talk of expansion comes as China’s surpluses grow again. There are no ropes to hold its $4tn in foreign currency reserves -the world’s largest- and in addition to overflowing granaries China has massive surpluses of real estate, cement and steel. After two decades of rapid growth, Beijing is again looking beyond its borders for investment opportunities and trade, and to do that it is reaching back to its former imperial greatness for the familiar Silk Road metaphor. Creating a modern version of the ancient trade route has emerged as China’s signature foreign policy initiative under President Xi Jinping.

“It is one of the few terms that people remember from history classes that does not involve hard power …and it s precisely those positive associations that the Chinese want to emphasise”, says Valerie Hansen, professor of Chinese history at Yale University. If the sum total of China s commitments are taken at face value, the new Silk Road is set to become the largest programme of economic diplomacy since the US-led Marshall Plan for postwar reconstruction in Europe, covering dozens of countries with a total population of over 3bn people. The scale demonstrates huge ambition. But against the backdrop of a faltering economy and the rising strength of its military, the project has taken on huge significance as a way of defining China’s place in the world and its relations -sometimes tense- with its neighbours.

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Winner of the Fauxbel. Yawn.

Angus Deaton Showed We’re Helping the Wrong People (Bloomberg)

Presidential candidates from both parties are focusing, as usual, on the middle class. But what’s that? And why, exactly, does it deserve such attention? Princeton’s Angus Deaton, who on Monday was announced as the latest winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize for economics, has offered some intriguing answers. The most important is this: If you care about how people actually experience their lives, you should be concerned about people who earn less than $75,000 per year. Above that amount, Deaton’s evidence suggests that more money may not particularly matter. To understand why, we need to distinguish between two very different measures of human well-being. Researchers have traditionally proceeded by asking people to evaluate their overall life-satisfaction (say, on a scale of 1 to 10).

More recently, researchers have tried to capture people’s actual experiences in a more refined way, for example by asking them about their levels of stress, sadness, happiness and enjoyment during the day (again on a scale of 1 to 10). A key question: Does money buy happiness? Deaton, along with his coauthor Daniel Kahneman (a Nobel Prize winner in 2002), found that in the United States, the answer depends on which question you use. If people are asked about their overall life-satisfaction, money definitely matters. As people’s annual earnings go up, their self-reported life-satisfaction increases as well. But the same is not true for actual experiences. More income is definitely associated with less sadness and more happiness up to $75,000, but above that level people’s experienced happiness is the same regardless of income.

In terms of stress, another important indicator of people’s well-being, it’s a lot worse to earn $20,000 than $60,000 – but above $60,000, stress levels are not reduced by more money. What’s going on here? Deaton and Kahneman don’t exactly know, but they speculate that above a certain threshold, increases in income do not much affect people’s ability to engage in activities that matter most – which include spending time with friends, enjoying good health and taking time off from work. They also suggest that beyond that threshold, more money might have some negative effects, such as a reduced ability to enjoy small pleasures. But below the $75,000 threshold, many of life’s misfortunes have a much bigger negative impact. For the poor, getting divorced, having asthma, and being alone have far more severe effects. Even the benefits of the weekend turn out to be lower.

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Let’s see how much banks have buried away in shale loans.

US Annual Oil Output to Drop for First Time Since 2008 (WSJ)

U.S. oil output will decline in 2016 for the first time in eight years as producers slash spending, OPEC said Monday, while the producer group continues pumping at high levels. In its closely watched monthly oil market report, OPEC slashed its U.S. oil production forecast by 280,000 barrels a day next year, to 13.538 million barrels a day, a number that includes natural gas liquids. That would be about 60,000 barrels a day less than in 2015, the first decline since 2008. The finding is consistent with what the U.S. Energy Information Administration said last week, predicting that U.S. crude production would average about 8.9 million barrels a day in 2016, down from 9.2 million barrels a day in 2015.

OPEC said lower oil prices were forcing U.S. oil producers to cut spending and causing their wells to deplete faster than expected. OPEC producers continued to pump at high rates, the report said, with Saudi Arabia at 10.226 million barrels a day—slightly down from last month—and Iraq producing a near-record 4.143 million barrels a day. Overall the producer group was pumping 31.571 million barrels a day, the highest reported level since April 2012. The increasing levels of OPEC production—and the forecast declines in the U.S.–are part of a new order for the world’s petroleum industry since crude prices collapsed from over $100 a barrel last year to less than $50 this year.

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“We see kind of a lot of volatility over the next four or five years..”

Oil Sands Boom Dries Up in Alberta, Taking Thousands of Jobs With it (NY Times)

FORT McMURRAY, Alberta — At a camp for oil workers here, a collection of 16 three-story buildings that once housed 2,000 workers sits empty. A parking lot at a neighboring camp is now dotted with abandoned cars. With oil prices falling precipitously, capital-intensive projects rooted in the heavy crude mined from Alberta’s oil sands are losing money, contributing to the loss of about 35,000 energy industry jobs across the province. Yet Alberta Highway 63, the major artery connecting Northern Alberta’s oil sands with the rest of the country, still buzzes with traffic. Tractor-trailers hauling loads that resemble rolling petrochemical plants parade past fleets of buses used to shuttle workers.

Most vehicles carry “buggy whips” — bright orange pennants attached to tall spring-loaded wands — to help prevent them from being run over by the 1.6-million-pound dump trucks used in the oil sands mines. Despite a severe economic downturn in a region whose growth once seemed limitless, many energy companies have too much invested in the oil sands to slow down or turn off the taps. In addition to the continued operation of existing plants, construction persists on projects that began before the price fell, largely because billions of dollars have already been spent on them. Oil sands projects are based on 40-year investment time frames, so their owners are being forced to wait out slumps.

“It really is tough right now,” said Greg Stringham, the vice president for markets and oil sands at the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, a trade group that generally speaks for the industry in Alberta. “We see kind of a lot of volatility over the next four or five years.” After an extraordinary boom that attracted many of the world’s largest energy companies and about $200 billion worth of investments to oil sands development over the last 15 years, the industry is in a state of financial stasis, and navigating the decline has proved challenging. Pipeline plans that would create new export markets, including Keystone XL, have been hampered by environmental concerns and political opposition.

The hazy outlook is creating turmoil in a province and a country that has become dependent on the energy business. Canada is now dealing with the economic fallout, having slipped into a mild recession earlier this year. And Alberta, which relies most heavily on oil royalties, now expects to post a deficit of 6 billion Canadian dollars, or about $4.5 billion. The political landscape has also shifted. Last spring, a left-of-center government ended four decades of Conservative rule in Alberta. Federally, polls suggest that the Conservative party — which championed Keystone XL and repeatedly resisted calls for stricter greenhouse gas emission controls in the oil sands — is struggling to get re-elected in October.

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Merkel will find it harder to impose her will.

German Brand Dealt ‘Hammer Blow’ By VW Scandal And Weakening Economy (Telegraph)

The VW emissions scandal has dealt a “hammer blow” not just to Volkswagen’s reputation but potentially to the entire German national brand, according to a consultancy that calculates brand worth. The revelations that as many as 11 million diesel vehicles have been fitted with software designed to deceive emissions testers has damaged the German repuation of efficiency and reliability, said the report from Brand Finance. As a result, the value of the ‘Made in Germany’ brand has fallen 4pc – or $191bn – to $4.2 trn this year. The report added the scandal threatens to undo decades of accumulated goodwill and cast doubt over the efficiency and reliability of German industry.

However, the authors said Germany has attracted worldwide admiration for its sympathetic stance to migrants escaping Syria and other war-torn countries, which is boosting the country’s positive image. Not only has the county benefited from goodwill perceptions, but the migrants will also boost the economy, said the report. The country’s birth rate has been flagging and the influx of generally young people and families will boost Germany’s labour force, encouraging investment in Europe’s largest economy. Germany’s birth rate has collapsed to the lowest level in the world. A study by the World Economy Institute in Hamburg earlier this year said the country’s workforce will start plunging at a faster rate than Japan’s by the early 2020s due to the declining birth rate, seriously threatening the long-term viability of Europe’s leading economy.

Data last week showed German exports suffered their worst month since the global recession, as global demand slowed. Exports in Europe’s largest economy collapsed by 5.2pc in August – their largest drop since January 2009, according to figures from the country’s Federal Statistics Office. Overall the US remains the world’s most valuable national brand, having benefited from a large, wealthy market wanting to “buy American”. The country is worth $19.7 trn, when combining its strength as a brand with GDP data. Fast-growing superpower China, which has previously threatened to knock the US off the top spot, has instead been rocked by the recent stock market turbulence and slowing economic growth. Its brand worth slipped 1pc to $6.3 trn, when compared to the previous year. The UK comes in at fourth place, worth $3bn, a rise of 6pc from last year.

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Diesel is dead for luxury cars. French carmakers will be hit very hard, if only because Paris MUST scrap its huge diesel subsidies.

Emissions Test Changes Could Make Diesels ‘Unaffordable’ (BBC)

Making European emissions tests more stringent could make some diesel vehicles “effectively unaffordable”, a trade body has warned. The European Commission is trying to get vehicle makers to agree to bigger cuts in emissions from diesel engines. The pressure comes in the wake of the Volkswagen emissions scandal. The European Automobile Manufacturers’ Association (ACEA) said car companies needed enough time to implement changes to emissions testing. Diesel vehicles have been encouraged in many European markets because they can produce less carbon dioxide – a major greenhouse gas – than those with petrol engines.

The trade body said diesel was an important part of meeting future CO2 targets and it was important for the Commission to let manufacturers plan and implement necessary changes. The VW scandal, in which saw the German car maker admit rigging emissions tests, has put significant pressure on diesel vehicle manufacturers. Diesel engines emit higher levels of nitrogen oxide and dioxide (NOx) that are harmful to human health. European government officials have set out plans to introduce real-world measurements of NOx emissions rather than rely on laboratory tests. The new testing regime is due to start early next year, with the results coming into effect in 2017.

However, talks between officials in Brussels last week to discuss the plans are reported to have stalled. The ACEA said it would continue “to stress the need for a timeline and testing conditions that take into account the technical and economic realities of today’s markets”. The trade body added: “Without realistic timeframes and conditions, some diesel models could effectively become unaffordable, forcing manufacturers to withdraw them from sale.” Such a move would hit both consumers and jobs in the automotive sector, it said.

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They’ve denied the bubble for so long now, why not do it a while longer?

Home Flipping Frenzy in Sydney Sparks Warnings on Housing Risks (Bloomberg)

Sydney home prices soared 44% in the three years ended September, enticing speculators who’ve been partly inspired by home renovation shows on how to spruce up and sell homes for quick profits. The frenzy surrounding Sydney’s property boom, reminiscent of the exuberance in U.S. real estate before the 2008 financial crisis, has prompted regulators and Goldman Sachs to warn the market is overheated, while Bank of America Merrill Lynch on Monday said it expects prices to fall. Since September 2013, more than 1,500 houses and 800 apartments have been resold in less than a year in Sydney, for about 20% more on average, according to online property listing firm Domain Group. That compares with about about 530 houses and almost 400 apartments in the previous two years.

People need to be careful because “house prices aren’t going to continue to rise much more quickly than income; debt levels can’t keep rising faster than income,” Reserve Bank of Australia Deputy Governor Philip Lowe said at a conference in Sydney Tuesday. “Ideally, we’ll now go through a period of quite modest house price growth. I think that would de-risk household balance sheets a little and would probably be good for the economy.” Rushing to buy and sell homes is underscoring a build-up of mortgage risks as households take on record debt, lured by home-loan costs at the lowest in five decades. The housing debt to income ratio touched a record high of 132.8% in the three months ended June 30 up from 119.4% three years earlier, according to government data.

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That is the ultimate danger.

TTIP Deal Would Remove People’s Rights To Access Basic Human Needs (Ind.)

People’s access to basic rights such as water and energy could be at the mercy of multinational corporations, according to a new report into two controversial EU free trade deals. The report claims that the agreements could allow all public services to be locked into commercial deals that would place profit above the rights of individuals to access basic services – regardless of any possible consequences for welfare. According to the report, Public Services Under Attack, such deals would be “effectively irreversible.” They would allow multinational corporations to sue governments that try to regulate the cost of public services if it could be proved companies’ profits would be harmed.

The two trade agreements, the CETA (Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement) with Canada and the TTIP (Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership) with the US, are currently being negotiated. In their current state, it is claimed, all public services including health, education and energy could be at risk of privatisation. Under current WTO agreements, access to water is regarded as a basic human right. The new trade agreements would effectively undermine this, according to John Hilary, the executive director of War on Want, one of the campaign groups behind the report . He claims that in a worst-case scenario, if individuals were unable to pay their water bill, they would be denied access to it.

“Suddenly, instead of water being considered a human right, it would be treated as a commodity and people could be cut off if they can’t afford it,” Mr Hilary told The Independent. Previously, the UK Government has insisted that public services such as education and the NHS would be protected from such action. In November last year, the UK Government published a document on the deal, Separating Myth from Fact, in which it states: “TTIP will not change the way that the NHS, or other public services, is run. “The European Commission is following our approach that it must always be for the UK to decide for itself whether or not to open up our public services to competition.”

But Mr Hilary believes the public should be sceptical of such assurances. He said: “There is no truth in the government’s claim that public services are safe in TTIP. “Corporate lobbyists have made sure that key services such as health, education, post, rail and water are to be opened up to the private sector, and treaties such as TTIP will lock in that privatisation for ever. “As a result of the lobbying by these special interest groups in the services sector, it’s quite clear that public services are in the frame and any claim to the contrary is bogus.”

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Children are stil drowning, Angela. That should be your priority, not borders or camps.

Merkel Seeks Turkey’s Aid on Borders to Stem Refugee Flow to EU

German Chancellor Angela Merkel said Turkey needs to help stem the flow of Syrian refugees to Europe, setting the tone for her talks with Turkish leaders this week. “It’s necessary to look not just at the European dimension, but also to talk with Turkey about sensible border controls,” Merkel said Monday in a speech to party members in Stade near Hamburg. “We have to start getting more involved internationally. That’s why I will go to Turkey on Sunday.” With a record 800,000 or more refugees and migrants expected to arrive in Germany this year, Merkel is under pressure to offer solutions to an increasingly skeptical public as her approval ratings decline and she says Germany can’t stop the stream on its own. “We don’t know how many there will be,” she said.

In her speech to members of her Christian Democratic Union, Merkel said for the first time that her government is considering screening at Germany’s borders. This way, “we could possibly decide immediately” which people are economic migrants who wouldn’t qualify to stay in Germany as asylum seekers, Merkel said. While saying that all 28 European Union countries need to help stem the continent’s biggest refugee crisis since World War II, Merkel singled out Turkey as part of the solution. After EU leaders discuss the crisis at a summit in Brussels on Thursday, Merkel plans to travel to Ankara on Oct. 18 for talks with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, her first official trip to Turkey since February 2013.

In Turkey, control over the border with EU member Greece “was given up at some point” because Turkey felt overwhelmed and its economy “isn’t doing so well anymore,” leaving Greece and the EU’s border patrol mission to deal with the refugee flow, Merkel said. “Naturally, we need to talk to Turkey about that.”

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And the ideas won’t fly anyway. Next. Bring in the German navy?!

Athens Rules Out Joint Sea Patrols With Turkey (Kath.)

Diplomatic sources in Athens Monday ruled out the prospect of Greek and Turkish naval forces conducting joint patrols in the eastern Aegean in a bid to curb a dramatic influx of migrants and refugees. Speaking to Kathimerini, the same sources from the Greek Foreign Ministry stated that no official European documents raise the issue of joint sea patrols – which was first reported in the German press ahead of the draft action plan signed last week between the European Union and Turkey on the support of refugees and migration management.

According to the plan, Turkey will “strengthen the interception capacity of the Turkish Coast Guard, notably by upgrading its surveillance equipment, increasing its patrolling activity and search and rescue capacity, and stepping up its cooperation with the Hellenic Coast Guard.” In an interview with Germany’s Bild newspaper published Monday, Chancellor Angela Merkel heralded closer cooperation between Greece, Turkey and EU border agency Frontex. “In the Aegean Sea, between Greece and Turkey, both NATO members, traffickers do whatever they want,” she told the paper. Diplomatic circles in Athens suggest that Ankara is tempted to use the refugee crisis as a tool for prompting additional EU aid, concessions on the issue of EU visas, or the creation of a buffer zone behind the Syrian border.

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Acidification.

Marine Food Chains At Risk Of Collapse (Guardian)

The food chains of the world’s oceans are at risk of collapse due to the release of greenhouse gases, overfishing and localised pollution, a stark new analysis shows. A study of 632 published experiments of the world’s oceans, from tropical to arctic waters, spanning coral reefs and the open seas, found that climate change is whittling away the diversity and abundance of marine species. The paper, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found there was “limited scope” for animals to deal with warming waters and acidification, with very few species escaping the negative impact of increasing carbon dioxide dissolution in the oceans. The world’s oceans absorb about a third of all the carbon dioxide emitted by the burning of fossil fuels.

The ocean has warmed by about 1C since pre-industrial times, and the water increased to be 30% more acidic. The acidification of the ocean, where the pH of water drops as it absorbs carbon dioxide, will make it hard for creatures such as coral, oysters and mussels to form the shells and structures that sustain them. Meanwhile, warming waters are changing the behaviour and habitat range of fish. The overarching analysis of these changes, led by the University of Adelaide, found that the amount of plankton will increase with warming water but this abundance of food will not translate to improved results higher up the food chain.

“There is more food for small herbivores, such as fish, sea snails and shrimps, but because the warming has driven up metabolism rates the growth rate of these animals is decreasing,” said associate professor Ivan Nagelkerken of Adelaide University. “As there is less prey available, that means fewer opportunities for carnivores. There’s a cascading effect up the food chain. “Overall, we found there’s a decrease in species diversity and abundance irrespective of what ecosystem we are looking at. These are broad scale impacts, made worse when you combine the effect of warming with acidification. “We are seeing an increase in hypoxia, which decreases the oxygen content in water, and also added stressors such as overfishing and direct pollution. These added pressures are taking away the opportunity for species to adapt to climate change.”

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Run away.

Antarctic Ice Melts So Fast Whole Continent May Be At Risk By 2100 (Guardian)

Antarctic ice is melting so fast that the stability of the whole continent could be at risk by 2100, scientists have warned. Widespread collapse of Antarctic ice shelves – floating extensions of land ice projecting into the sea – could pave the way for dramatic rises in sea level. The new research predicts a doubling of surface melting of the ice shelves by 2050. By the end of the century, the melting rate could surpass the point associated with ice shelf collapse, it is claimed. If that happened a natural barrier to the flow of ice from glaciers and land-covering ice sheets into the oceans would be removed. Lead scientist, Dr Luke Trusel, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, US, said: “Our results illustrate just how rapidly melting in Antarctica can intensify in a warming climate.”

“This has already occurred in places like the Antarctic Peninsula where we’ve observed warming and abrupt ice shelf collapses in the last few decades. “Our model projections show that similar levels of melt may occur across coastal Antarctica near the end of this century, raising concerns about future ice shelf stability.” The study, published in the journal Nature Geoscience, was based on satellite observations of ice surface melting and climate simulations up to the year 2100. It showed that if greenhouse gas emissions continued at their present rate, the Antarctic ice shelves would be in danger of collapse by the century’s end..

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