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Debt Rattle August 27 2016

Aug 272016

August 27, 2016 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 9:22 am Finance Tagged with: BleachBit, Brexit, future, Hillary, Jackson Hole, pensions, religion, stimulus, trust 10 Responses »

Jack Delano Mother of three, wiper at the roundhouse. Chicago & North Western R.R.” 1943

• America’s Biggest Economic Problem: Nobody Is Investing For Tomorrow. (MW)

• The Stimulus Our Economy Needs (Da Costa)

• Grim Employment Prospects For Young People Around The World (Economist)

• Fed’s Jackson Hole Circus

• Bill Gross Says Yellen’s Economy ‘May Never Walk Normally Again’ (BBG)

• Losses Piling Up for S&P 500 as Weekly Drop Is Worst Since June (BBG)

• World’s Biggest Pension Fund Loses $52 Billion in Q2 Stock Rout (BBG)

• Why No One Trusts China’s Markets (Balding)

• Theresa May Will Trigger Brexit Negotiations Without Commons Vote (Tel.)

• BleachBit Brags It “Stifled FBI Investigation” Of Hillary Clinton (ZH)

• Majority Of Greek Properties Valued Under €50,000 (Kath.)

• We Don’t Know What We Are Talking About When We Talk About Religion (Taleb)

“America’s Investment In Its Own Future Is In A Depression”. As epitomized by share buybacks. Which in turn are simply an expression of ‘the thing that shall not be mentioned’: a lack of confidence in growth, and in the economy as a whole. Why invest when there will be no return?

• America’s Biggest Economic Problem: Nobody Is Investing For Tomorrow. (MW)

The U.S. economy, by some measures, has recovered from the Great Recession: The unemployment rate is only half what it was at the worst, real gross domestic product is about 10% larger than the previous peak, and personal wealth has risen by more than $20 trillion as the stock market and the housing market have bounced back. But everyone knows the recovery has been uneven. Total employment may have grown by 6 million since the recession began in 2008, but employment in manufacturing is down nearly 1.5 million. Real disposable incomes may be up by 16%, but because most of the increase has been captured by the richest sliver of society, the median family’s annual inflation-adjusted income is still down more than $3,000.

Most troubling, there’s still very little investment in the buildings, equipment and intellectual property that we ought to be putting into place today as the foundation of our prosperity tomorrow. Who’s preparing the United States for the 21st century? Nobody, really. Not the 22 million private businesses, not the 118 million households, and not the 90,000 state, local or federal government agencies. Since the recession, investments have fallen sharply, and they haven’t gotten back up again. It seems that everyone is still scarred by the Great Recession, and by the collapse of asset bubbles in 2000 and 2006. Gross domestic investment totaled about $3.6 trillion in the second quarter of 2016, about 20% of gross domestic product. That may seem a large sum, but it’s the lowest share of GDP, except during recessions, since 1947.

And, unfortunately, even that weak number grossly exaggerates the actual contribution of this investment in creating new productive capacity for the economy. Why is the figure exaggerated? Because these data are reported on a gross basis, without subtracting the depreciation of capital assets such as equipment, buildings, software and the like. After you subtract the capital that’s used up, net investment totaled only about $750 billion in the second quarter, or 4% of GDP, about half of the average over the post-war period. In fact, net investment has been running at the lowest rates since the Great Depression of the 1930s, suggesting that U.S. investment itself is in a depression.

Makes some sense, but relies too much on the assumption that policy makers know what they do. They don’t.

• The Stimulus Our Economy Needs (Da Costa)

All told, nearly 9 million jobs were lost during the 2007-2009 slump, not counting the new jobs that were needed to keep up with population growth. The unemployment rate more than doubled to a peak of 10.2% in October 2009 and took seven years to get back to around 5%, seen as normal. Even the current 4.9% rate is seen as a poor depiction of the U.S. labor market’s actual ongoing weakness. So what would a constructive pro-jobs policy of employment insurance look like? It could take many forms, and, despite any central bank role in funding the stimulus, the decision on how to spend the money would remain fully accountable to the democratic process — in the hands of elected lawmakers.

One approach might see Congress adopt a mandate similar to the one it assigned the Fed itself — to maintain low and stable prices while striving for maximum sustainable employment. Such a goal would offer clearer guidelines for when a program of budget spending aided by central bank intervention might be needed, like determining what thresholds of economic pain might trigger its launch. Rather than relying on a spotty, limited system of jobless benefits that can leave the unemployed in or close to poverty, wouldn’t it be better to directly create government jobs in areas where the private sector appears to be falling short?

Employer-of-last-resort-type policies, as proposed by the economist Hyman Minsky, where the government generates employment in socially useful sectors that are underserved by the private sector alone — including infrastructure, education, health care, child and elderly care, and the arts — could be optimal. After all, most people would agree instinctively with Article 23 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the U.N. in 1948, which states, “Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favourable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment.”

Same difference: no investments in the future.

• Grim Employment Prospects For Young People Around The World (Economist)

A new report from the International Labour Organisation has provided a snapshot of job prospects for young people around the world. Things have worsened this year following a period of slight improvement. Unemployment among 15-24-year-olds has risen to 13.1% in 2016 and is close to its historic peak of 2013. The rate is highest in Arab countries, at 30.6%, and lowest in East Asia, at 10.7%. The report also finds that even where jobs are available to young people, they often fail to provide secure incomes.

Youth unemployment is typically lower in poorer countries than in rich ones. This is because workers in less-developed countries have to take work just to make ends meet and, with few choices, end up in low-paid jobs with no security. Even in richer countries, the young often end up in less-secure employment than the older generation. In 2015, 25% of young workers in OECD countries were in temporary jobs and 26% were employed part-time, often on an involuntary basis. Those rates are more than twice as high as for workers aged 25 to 54.

In fact, young people with jobs are now at greater risk of living in poverty than the elderly in some rich countries. This is especially true in places where there has been a sharp economic shock, such as Greece, Romania and Spain. The need to work to supplement household income in the short-term creates a vicious cycle in which the young forgo training in the skills required for better long-term job prospects. Given the bleak future faced by many, it is little surprise that 40% of 15-29-year-olds in Africa, eastern Europe and Latin America would countenance a permanent move abroad.

“Friday, almost six years to the day, marked the anniversary of former Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke’s address to the Jackson Hole confab, at which he outlined the second phase of quantitative easing [..] Since then, Wilshire Associates estimates the value of U.S. equities has increased by over 100%, some $13.3 trillion..”

• Fed’s Jackson Hole Circus

The Fed has fueled the populism that has thrown this year’s U.S. elections into an unprecedented tizzy, the Journal wrote in more considered terms in a page-one feature on Friday. While the central bank dealt forcefully with the 2007-08 financial crisis, it failed to anticipate it and subsequently failed to bring about a recovery worthy of the name. What it has accomplished is a massive inflation, not of consumer prices—as officially measured, at least—but of asset prices. Friday, almost six years to the day, marked the anniversary of former Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke’s address to the Jackson Hole confab, at which he outlined the second phase of quantitative easing (central bank–speak for securities purchases to pump money into the financial system), which was popularly dubbed QE2.

Since then, Wilshire Associates estimates the value of U.S. equities has increased by over 100%, some $13.3 trillion. Since Bernanke outlined QE3 in September 2012, U.S. equities are up about 50%, or $8.6 trillion, by Wilshire’s reckoning. In the process, interest rates have hovered at or near record-low levels, tonic for asset values but poison for savers. The uneven impact of the Fed’s policies among the haves and have-nots has further stoked resentment against the monetary authorities. Low yields and inflated asset prices mean modest future returns for all. But though it is equally illegal for the beggar and the king to sleep under the bridge, low returns are less of a burden for those who have already accumulated wealth than for those who have not.

None of this sociology and politics should influence the Fed, but it is an inescapable backdrop to policy decisions. Based on the data on which the central bank professes to depend, the “case for an increase in the federal-funds rate has strengthened in recent months,” Yellen said in her much-anticipated address to the Jackson Hole gathering.

“Credit-enhanced cycles come to worse ends than the normal kind.”

• Bill Gross Says Yellen’s Economy ‘May Never Walk Normally Again’ (BBG)

Bill Gross, the billionaire Janus Capital Group Inc. money manager, criticized Fed Chair Janet Yellen’s suggestion that she could consider further asset purchases as the equivalent of “providing a walker or a wheelchair for an ailing economy.” Yellen, speaking Friday at a conference of central bankers and economists in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, said while the U.S. economy has strengthened to the point that interest rate hikes are possible, further asset purchases must remain part of the Fed’s toolkit. Gross, who runs the $1.5 billion Janus Global Unconstrained Bond Fund, has long criticized central bankers in the U.S., Europe and Japan for keeping interest rates ultra-low and artificially inflating asset prices without adding sustainable economic growth.

“She is opening the door to creating even greater asset bubbles as have the BOJ and ECB and SNB by purchasing corporate bonds and stocks,” Gross wrote Friday in an e-mail response to questions. “This is not capitalism. This is providing a walker or a wheelchair for an ailing economy. It may never walk normally again if monetary policy continues in this direction.” Gross said Yellen’s comments didn’t take a September rate hike off the table, especially if job growth is healthy. The Labor Department reports August employment data on Sept. 2. The probability of a hike at the Sept. 21 Fed meeting has risen to 38% from 15% two weeks ago, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

“To the extent that next month we see a decent job growth number, then I think for sure or close to for sure, you know, in September we’re going to see a Fed hike of 25 basis points,” Gross said in an interview on CNBC. “The market hadn’t expected that.” Tad Rivelle, chief investment officer of fixed income at TCW Group, warned that central bank intervention to keep rates low and prop up asset prices may worsen the impact of an inevitable end to the current credit cycle. “Every cycle in human history has ultimately come to an end,” Rivelle, who helps oversee $195 billion for TCW, said in a Bloomberg Television interview Friday. “Credit-enhanced cycles come to worse ends than the normal kind.”

“Not since the presidential administration of Lyndon B. Johnson have stocks done so little for so long.”

• Losses Piling Up for S&P 500 as Weekly Drop Is Worst Since June (BBG)

What had been just a sleepy August is turning into an increasingly painful one for U.S. equity market bulls. Notwithstanding an hour-long burst of optimism that followed Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen’s policy speech Friday, the buoyancy that lifted stocks for the first half of the summer has now been missing for the better part of a month. The S&P 500 Index fell 0.7% to 2,169.04 this week, the biggest drop since June, to erase its August gains. Not since the presidential administration of Lyndon B. Johnson have stocks done so little for so long. Unable to break out of a 1.5% band for more than 30 days, the market is locked in its tightest trading range since the end of 1965 amid confusion about Federal Reserve policy and the outlook for earnings.

While losses remain tiny day to day, they’re starting to pile up, with the S&P 500 declining in five of the last six sessions. The Dow Jones Industrial Average slipped 157.17 points in the week to 18,395.4, while the Nasdaq Composite Index retreated 0.4% to 5,218.92. At about 5.8 billion shares, daily volume in U.S. exchanges was lower this week than in any non-holiday period since June 2015. “Once we dug into the report from Yellen, it was kind of a non-event, and we’re ending in the same range we started the week,” Chris Gaffney, president of world markets at St. Louis-based EverBank, said by phone. “The data we got this week was mixed. There’s no clear direction and that’s why we’re sitting in these ranges.”

Guess the Japanese simply don’t understand what Abe does to their pensions.

• World’s Biggest Pension Fund Loses $52 Billion in Q2 Stock Rout (BBG)

The world’s biggest pension fund posted a $52 billion loss last quarter as stocks tumbled and the yen surged, wiping out all investment gains since it overhauled its strategy by boosting shares and cutting bonds. Japan’s Government Pension Investment Fund lost 3.9%, or 5.2 trillion yen ($52 billion), in the three months ended June 30, reducing assets to 129.7 trillion yen, it said in Tokyo on Friday. That erases a 4.1 trillion yen investing return for the previous six quarters starting October 2014, the month it decided to put half its assets into equities. The quarterly decline follows a 5.3 trillion yen loss in the fiscal year through March, the worst annual performance since the global financial crisis.

After benefiting from a surge in Japanese equities and a weaker yen earlier in Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s term, GPIF has posted losses as domestic stocks tumble and gains in the currency reduce the value of overseas assets. Still, for Sumitomo Mitsui Trust Bank Ltd., that’s no reason to veer from the current approach. “Since its investments are tied to market moves, it’s natural that this would happen and there’s no point looking at it with a short-term view,” said Ayako Sera, a Tokyo-based market strategist at the bank. “GPIF is so big that its losses look huge even though the fluctuations in its investments just mirror the market.”

“Regulators assess a company’s balance sheet and history, mandate an offering price, and then let the market figure out who might be lying or hiding things.”

• Why No One Trusts China’s Markets (Balding)

When China’s top securities regulator said recently that it plans to delist Dandong Xintai Electric for falsifying initial public offering documents, it didn’t grab many headlines. But it suggested some far-reaching changes may be afoot. Xintai is the first company to be expelled from Shenzhen’s ChiNext board for such an offense, and one of only a handful that have ever been delisted in China. Its expulsion suggests that regulators are facing up to some unfortunate truths about China’s capital markets. Those markets are, in important ways, only superficially market-like. In the stock market, the government has intervened on a huge scale to prop up prices. Investment in the bond market is overwhelmingly directed to state-owned enterprises. There’s no derivatives market to speak of.

Financial disclosures are often implausible, suspicions of insider trading are rife and doubts about corporate governance are widespread. All these are symptoms of a common ailment: a regulatory system focused not on disclosure and market mechanics but on setting asset prices and allocating returns. In most countries, when companies are considering an IPO, regulators require them to accurately disclose information, then let markets dictate prices. In China, the reverse holds true: Regulators assess a company’s balance sheet and history, mandate an offering price, and then let the market figure out who might be lying or hiding things. The result is that investors, both domestic and foreign, have lost confidence in China’s markets.

Foreign portfolio investment into China is down 60%, year over year, through July. MSCI has repeatedly declined to include China’s domestic equities in its benchmark indexes. Even the much-celebrated Chinese retail investor is staying on the sidelines: Individual investment accounts holding less than 500,000 yuan declined to 46.8 million last month, from 47.4 million in July 2015. This credibility deficit affects all areas of the markets. Major Chinese commercial banks have been trading at a price-to-equity ratio of about five – compared to an average of about 12 for commercial banks elsewhere – because investors think their loan portfolios are much worse off than they’re letting on.

Somone will try to stop her.

• Theresa May Will Trigger Brexit Negotiations Without Commons Vote (Tel.)

Theresa May will not hold a parliamentary vote on Brexit before opening negotiations to formally trigger Britain’s withdrawal from the European Union, The Telegraph has learned. Opponents of Brexit claim that because the EU referendum result is advisory it must be approved by a vote in the Commons before Article 50 – the formal mechanism to leave the EU – is triggered. However, in a move which will cheer Eurosceptics, The Telegraph has learned that Mrs May will invoke Article 50 without a vote in Parliament It had been suggested – by Tony Blair, the former Labour Prime Minister, and Owen Smith, the Labour leadership candidate, among others – that Remain-supporting MPs could use a Parliamentary vote to stop Brexit.

But sources say that because Mrs May believes that “Brexit means Brexit” she will not offer opponents the opportunity to stall Britain’s withdrawal from the EU. A Downing Street source said: “The Prime Minister has been absolutely clear that the British public have voted and now she will get on with delivering Brexit.” Mrs May has consulted Government lawyers who have told the Prime Minister she has the executive power to invoke Article 50 and begin the formal process of exiting the European Union without a vote in Parliament. Her decision will come as a blow to Remain campaigners, who had been hoping to use Parliament to delay or halt Brexit entirely.

And it will yet get crazier.

• BleachBit Brags It “Stifled FBI Investigation” Of Hillary Clinton (ZH)

Yesterday we noted that South Carolina Representative Trey Gowdy revealed that Hillary had used a software called “BleachBit” to wipe her servers clean. Gowdy, appearing on Fox News, suggested that using a software like “BleachBit” undermines her claims that she only deleted innocuous “personal” emails from her private server. Specifically, Gowdy told Fox News:

“If she considered them to be personal, then she and her lawyers had those emails deleted. They didn’t just push the delete button, they had them deleted where even God can’t read them. “They were using something called BleachBit. You don’t use BleachBit for yoga emails.” “When you’re using BleachBit, it is something you really do not want the world to see.”

Now, the BleachBit team is using the whole controversy as a marketing tool with a note on their website entitled “BleachBit stifles investigation of Hillary Clinton.” The site even incorporates the now-famous Clinton gaffe where she asked reporters if they wanted to know whether she had wiped her servers clean “like with a cloth or something” pointing out that “it turns out now that BleachBit was that cloth.”

Last year when Clinton was asked about wiping her email server, she joked, “Like with a cloth or something?” It turns out now that BleachBit was that cloth.

The BleachBit team also points out that they have not been served with any warrants or subpoenas at this time even though it doesn’t really matter because the “cleaning process is not reversible.”

As of the time of writing BleachBit has not been served a warrant or subpoena in relation to the investigation. BleachBit is free of charge to use in any environment whether it is personal, commercial, educational, or governmental, and the cleaning process is not reversible.

Finally, BleachBit points out they’re receiving overwhelming interest from folks looking to permanently erase yoga and bridesmaid emails and/or other similar incriminating information.

Compare that to other EU nations.

• Majority Of Greek Properties Valued Under €50,000 (Kath.)

74% of real estate owners in Greece have property whose taxable value does not exceed 100,000 euros, according to data published on Friday by the Finance Ministry. More precisely, one in two own property that is valued by tax authorities at 50,000 euros or less, while just 8% of real estate owners have property worth between 100,000 and 200,000 euros. The total taxable value of the properties owned by the two groups has been calculated by the ministry, respectively, at 63.6 billion euros and 132 billion euros.

Taleb targets Salafism.

• We Don’t Know What We Are Talking About When We Talk About Religion (Taleb)

People rarely mean the same thing when they say “religion”, nor do they realize that they don’t mean the same thing. For early Jews and Muslims, religion was law. Din means law in Hebrew and religion in Arabic. For early Jews, religion was also tribal; for early Muslims, it was universal[i]. For the Romans, religion was social events, rituals, and festivals –the word religio was a counter to superstitio, and while present in the Roman zeitgeist had no equivalent concept in the Greek-Byzantine East[ii]. Law was procedurally and mechanically its own thing, and early Christianity, thanks to Saint Augustine, stayed relatively away from the law, and, later, remembering its foundations, had an uneasy relation with it. For instance, even during the Inquisition, a lay court handled the sentencing.

The difference is marked in that Christian Aramaic uses a different word: din for religion and nomous (from the Greek) for law. Jesus, with his imperative “give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar”, separated the holy and the profane: Christianity was for another domain, “the kingdom to come”, only merged with this one in the eschaton. Neither Islam nor Judaism have a marked separation between holy and profane. And of course Christianity moved away from the solely-spiritual domain to embrace the ceremonial and ritualistic, integrating much of the pagan rites of the Levant and Asia Minor.

For Jews today, religion became ethnocultural, without the law – and for many, a nation. Same for Syriacs, Chaldeans, Armenians, Copts, and Maronites. For Orthodox and Catholic Christians religion is aesthetics, pomp and rituals, plus or minus some beliefs, often decorative. For most Protestants, religion is belief with neither aesthetics, pomp nor law.

Further East, for Buddhists, Shintoists and Hindus, religion is practical and spiritual philosophy, with a code of ethics (and for some, cosmogony). So when Hindu talk about the Hindu “religion” they don’t mean the same thing to a Pakistani as it would to a Hindu, and certainly something different for a Persian. When the nation-state idea came about, things got much, much more complicated. When an Arab now says “Jew” he largely means something about a creed; to Arabs, a converted Jew is no longer a Jew. But for a Jew, a Jew is someone whose mother is a Jew. (This has not always been the case: Jews were quite proselytic during the early Roman empire). But Judaism, thanks to modernism, somewhat merged into nation-state, and now can also mean a nation.

Debt Rattle August 15 2016

Aug 152016

August 15, 2016 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 8:45 am Finance Tagged with: Abenomics, Brexit, buybacks, cash, ECB, G20, pensions, QE, stimulus, visa, wind 2 Responses »

NPC R.P. Andrews fire, 628 D Street N.W, Washington, DC 1912

• Younger Generation In UK Face Overwhelming Pensions Bill (G.)

• British Millennials Are ‘Collateral Damage’ as Pension Gap Grows (BBG)

• A Simple Test to Dispel the Illusion Behind Stock Buybacks (NYT)

• The Bank of Japan’s Unstoppable Rise to Shareholder No. 1 (BBG)

• Japan’s Economy Stalls In April-June, Casts Doubts On Abe’s Policies (R.)

• China Is Hoarding Cash At The Fastest Pace Since Lehman (ZH)

• China Signals Growth, Not Political Disputes, Should Dominate G20 (R.)

• Cheap Money Fuels Boom In Germany, But Fails To Lift France And Italy (CNBC)

• Enough Austerity. More Fiscal Stimulus, Please (BBG Ed.)

• London Set To Bear Brunt Of Post-Brexit Downturn (G.)

• Give Us EU Visa Freedom In October Or Abandon Migrant Deal, Turkey Says (R.)

• Britain’s Vast National Gamble On Wind Power May Yet Pay Off (AEP)

“.. it leaves young people paying twice, saving for their own pensions while also paying for the pensions of older generations through taxation.”

“Since 2007, the real disposal income of pensioners has risen by almost 10%. Those over the age of 65 have harvested fully two-thirds of that £2.7tn increase in national wealth. By contrast, since 2007, working-age households with children have achieved income gains of only about 3%, while the incomes of those without children have fallen by 3%,” he said.

This can only go horribly wrong, there is no other possible outcome, but it’s a topic politicians either don’t understand or don’t want to touch. Which is why I wrote Basic Income in The Time of Crisis a month ago. There is not much time left.

• Younger Generation In UK Face Overwhelming Pensions Bill (G.)

Older people have saddled the younger generation with an excessive bill for state pensions while grabbing an ever-greater share of NHS spending, according to a report that calls for intergenerational rebalancing. The report from the Intergenerational Foundation (IF) said spending promises on state and public sector pensions are “overwhelming young people’s prospects”. The thinktank is calling on the prime minister, Theresa May, to abandon triple lock protection, which promises that the state pension will rise each year by whatever is highest out of inflation measured by the consumer price index, average earnings growth or 2.5%. The former pensions minister Ros Altmann has called for the triple lock to be scrapped. The Department for Work and Pensions has declined to rule out a review of the “totemic” policy in the coming months.

The report estimates that workers are paying £2,846 a year each to cover the cost of paying state pensions. Public sector pension liabilities, for schemes such as retired civil servants, have risen by 12% to nearly £44,000 per worker, with total liabilities at £1.4tn, it added. Angus Hanton, the co-founder of IF, said: “Public sector pensions represent one of the largest unfunded burdens for younger taxpayers, who will not retire at the same age, or on the same terms, while having to contribute more to their own pensions. “Increasing retirement ages and moving to career average pensions will not be enough to stall the pension burden avalanche that is bearing down on the young.

Auto-enrolment is an apparent success, except that it leaves young people paying twice, saving for their own pensions while also paying for the pensions of older generations through taxation.” But charity Age UK said the vast majority of pensioners have contributed throughout their life to the state pension, which remains lower than the amount paid in many other western countries. Caroline Abrahams, the charity director at Age UK, pointed out that 1.6 million older people live in poverty in the UK. “A strong pensions system that provides a decent quality of life in retirement is central to a civilised society and in the best interests of us all,” she said.

“Postal-service operator Royal Mail said last week it may not be able to keep its program running beyond 2018. That’s because its annual contributions could more than double to over £900 million.”

• British Millennials Are ‘Collateral Damage’ as Pension Gap Grows (BBG)

Britain’s millennials, already suffering for the economic mistakes of the past, now face the prospect of having to pay for the country’s future. Pension-fund liabilities in the U.K. increased to a record £1 trillion ($1.3 trillion) after the Bank of England’s interest-rate cut this month, hurt by quantitative easing and razor-thin yields. It’s Britain’s version of what Duquesne Chairman Stanley Druckenmiller calls “Generational Theft” in the U.S. Plunging bond yields have caused pension liabilities to balloon and it could get even worse because the BOE will probably reduce interest rates further this year. Deficits for defined-benefit-pension funds already rose by more than 40% in the two months through July, following the vote to leave the EU and the central bank’s subsequent decision to increase quantitative easing, according to consulting firm Mercer.

“The Bank of England clearly believes that the effect on our pension system is acceptable long-term collateral damage” to prevent a short-term recession, said David Blake, professor of pension economics at London’s Cass Business School. Younger workers will “have to save more – which they appear reluctant to do – or be prepared to work much longer.” The increased bond-purchase program has had a relatively limited impact on pension deficits, according to the minutes of the BOE’s Monetary Policy Committee meeting on Aug. 3. While the fund managers have to move into riskier assets, that helps to support the economy, Governor Mark Carney said Aug. 4. “That makes it less likely that we will have a very long period of high unemployment, low output, and very low interest rates,” Carney said.

Money managers, however, appear to be unwilling to offload their higher-yielding gilts because they’re worried about generating enough returns to pay their members. The BOE last week failed to find enough investors who were prepared to sell their longer-maturity gilts, a slice of the credit market dominated by pensions and insurers. Companies that run defined-benefit pension funds are also starting to worry. Postal-service operator Royal Mail said last week it may not be able to keep its program running beyond 2018. That’s because its annual contributions could more than double to over £900 million.

“..who really wants to own a company in the process of liquidating itself?”

• A Simple Test to Dispel the Illusion Behind Stock Buybacks (NYT)

Stock investors have had one sweet summer so far watching the markets edge higher. With the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index at record highs and nearing 2,200, what’s not to like? Here’s something. As shares climb, so too do the prices companies are paying to repurchase their stock. And the companies doing so are legion. Through July of this year, United States corporations authorized $391 billion in repurchases, according to an analysis by Birinyi Associates. Although 29% below the dollar amount of such programs last year, that’s still a big number. The buyback beat goes on even as complaints about these deals intensify. Some critics say that top managers who preside over big stock repurchases are failing at one of their most basic tasks: allocating capital so their businesses grow.

Even worse, buybacks can be a way for executives to make a company’s earnings per share look better because the purchases reduce the amount of stock it has outstanding. And when per-share earnings are a sizable component of executive pay, the motivation to do buybacks only increases. Of course, companies that conduct major buybacks often contend that the purchases are an optimal use of corporate cash. But William Lazonick, professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, and co-director of its Center for Industrial Competitiveness, disagrees. “Executives who get into that mode of thinking no longer have the ability to even think about how to invest in their companies for the long term,” Mr. Lazonick said in an interview. “Companies that grow to be big and productive can be more productive, but they have to be reinvesting.”

[..] The net profit test, said Gary Lutin, a former investment banker who heads the forum, “cuts through to the essential logic of comparing a process that grows a bigger pie – reinvestment – to a process that divides a shrunken pie among fewer people: share buybacks. “It’s pretty obvious,” he continued, “that even mediocre returns from reinvesting in the production of goods and services will beat what’s effectively a liquidation plan.” Investors may be dazzled by the earnings-per-share gains that buybacks can achieve, but who really wants to own a company in the process of liquidating itself? Maybe it’s time to ask harder questions of corporate executives about why their companies aren’t deploying their precious resources more effectively elsewhere.

And if companies don’t buy stocks, central banks will. It’s the only way left to delay a giant crash.

• The Bank of Japan’s Unstoppable Rise to Shareholder No. 1 (BBG)

The Bank of Japan’s controversial march to the top of shareholder rankings in the world’s third-largest equity market is picking up pace. Already a top-five owner of 81 companies in Japan’s Nikkei 225 Stock Average, the BOJ is on course to become the No. 1 shareholder in 55 of those firms by the end of next year, according to estimates compiled by Bloomberg from the central bank’s exchange-traded fund holdings. BOJ Governor Haruhiko Kuroda almost doubled his annual ETF buying target last month, adding to an unprecedented campaign to revitalize Japan’s stagnant economy. While bulls have cheered the tailwind from BOJ purchases, opponents say the central bank is artificially inflating equity valuations and undercutting efforts to make public companies more efficient.

Traders worry that the monetary authority’s outsized presence will make some shares harder to buy and sell, a phenomenon that led to convulsions in Japan’s government bond market this year. “Only in Japan does the central bank show its face in the stock market this much,” said Masahiro Ichikawa at Sumitomo Mitsui Asset Management. “Investors are asking whether this is really right.” While the BOJ doesn’t acquire individual shares directly, it’s the ultimate buyer of stakes purchased through ETFs. Estimates of the central bank’s underlying holdings can be gleaned from the BOJ’s public records, regulatory filings by companies and ETF managers, and statistics from the Investment Trusts Association of Japan. Forecasts of the BOJ’s future shareholder rankings assume that other major investors keep their positions stable and that policy makers maintain the historical composition of their purchases.

[..] Japan’s government bond market offers a guide to the risks of further intervention in stocks, said Akihiro Murakami, the chief quantitative strategist for Japan at Nomura in Tokyo. JGB volatility soared to the highest level since 1999 in April, while trading volume has slumped as the central bank’s holdings swelled to about a third of the market. It’s still buying at an annual rate of 80 trillion yen. “If the BOJ does not sell stocks, then liquidity will disappear,” Murakami said. “As liquidity falls, the number of shares you can buy starts to decline – the same thing that’s happening in the JGB market.” The central bank owned about 60% of Japan’s domestic ETFs at the end of June, according to Investment Trusts Association figures, BOJ disclosures and data compiled by Bloomberg. Based on a report released on Friday by the Investment Trusts Association, that figure rose to about 62% in July.

Abenomics is way beyond doubts.

• Japan’s Economy Stalls In April-June, Casts Doubts On Abe’s Policies (R.)

Japan’s economic growth ground to a halt in April-June after a stellar expansion in the previous quarter on weak exports and capital expenditure, putting even more pressure on premier Shinzo Abe to come up with policies that produce more sustainable growth. The world’s third-largest economy expanded by an annualized 0.2% in the second quarter, less than a median market forecast for a 0.7% increase and a marked slowdown from a revised 2.0% increase in January-March, Cabinet Office data showed on Monday. The weak reading underscores the challenges policymakers face in putting a sustained end to two decades of deflation with the initial boost from Abe’s stimulus programs, dubbed “Abenomics,” fading. “Overall it looks like the economy is stagnating. Consumer spending is weak, and the reason is low wage gains.

There is a lot of uncertainty about overseas economies, and this is holding back capital expenditure,” said Norio Miyagawa, senior economist at Mizuho Securities. “The government has already announced a big stimulus package, so the next question is how the Bank of Japan will respond after its comprehensive policy review, which is sure to lead to a delay in its price target.” On a quarter-on-quarter basis, GDP marked flat growth in April-June, weaker than a median market forecast for a 0.2% rise. Private consumption, which accounts for roughly 60% of GDP, rose 0.2% in April-June, matching a median market forecast but slowing from a 0.7% increase in the previous quarter. Capital expenditure declined 0.4% in April-June after a 0.7% drop in the first quarter, the data showed, suggesting that uncertainty over the global economic outlook and weak domestic markets are keeping firms from boosting spending.

One word: FEAR.

• China Is Hoarding Cash At The Fastest Pace Since Lehman (ZH)

The last few months have seen trillions of dollars of fresh credit puked into existence in China to enable goal-seeked growth numbers to creep lower (as opposed to utterly collapse). The problem is… the Chinese are hoarding that cash at the fastest pace since Lehman as liquidity concerns flood through the nation. China’s M2, a broad gauge of money supply including savings deposits, rose at the slowest pace in 15 months and trailed the government’s full-year target of +11% in July. But, as Bloomberg details, by contrast, M1, the total of cash, checks and demand deposits, rose at the quickest pace in six years…

That shows companies “are holding all this cash, but investment returns are low and there are few options for projects,” said Liu Dongliang, a senior analyst at China Merchants Bank Co. in Shenzhen.

In fact, no matter what has been done since the Chinese stock market crashed, the Chinese have been hoarding cash…

In fact, the hoarding of cash in China corresponded with the top in 1999/2000, and the top in 2007…

“..If people don’t feel like they are beneficiaries of economic development, if they don’t think their lot in life is improving, that’s when they start getting all kinds of ideas.” We wouldn’t want that, would we?

• China Signals Growth, Not Political Disputes, Should Dominate G20 (R.)

China expects next month’s summit of the G20 which it is hosting will focus on boosting economic growth and other financial issues rather than disputes like the South China Sea, senior officials said on Monday. The summit of the world’s 20 biggest economies in the eastern city of Hangzhou will be the highlight of President Xi Jinping’s diplomatic agenda this year, and the government is keen to ensure it proceeds smoothly. The Sept 4-5 leaders’ meeting comes as clouds continue to hover over global growth prospects and worries about China’s own slowing economy. Last month’s meeting of G20 policymakers was dominated by the impact of Britain’s exit from Europe and fears of rising protectionism.

Yi Gang, a vice governor of the People’s Bank of China, said the summit will focus on how to stimulate sluggish global economic growth through open, inclusive trade and the development of robust financial markets. “We need to instil market confidence and ensure there are no competitive devaluations but rather let the market determine exchange rates,” Yi told a news briefing, adding this would be the first G20 to discuss foreign exchange markets in such detail. The G20 will also discuss how to better monitor and respond to risks presented by global capital flows, he said. Despite increasingly protectionist rhetoric around the world, the G20 is strongly opposed to anti-trade and anti-investment sentiment, Vice Finance Minister Zhu Guangyao said.

“We really do need to make sure that the people, the public, benefit from economic development and growth. If people don’t feel like they are beneficiaries of economic development, if they don’t think their lot in life is improving, that’s when they start getting all kinds of ideas.”

Why the euro is hammering the EU. And will be the end of it.

• Cheap Money Fuels Boom In Germany, But Fails To Lift France And Italy (CNBC)

Germany, for example, does not want zero interest rates and those trillions of euros created through ECB’s massive asset purchases. Germany is a fully-employed economy with balanced public finances and an exploding current account surplus of 9% of GDP. With a 1.8% annual growth in the first half of this year, the economy is running almost an entire percentage point above its potential and noninflationary growth. [..] Now, for a sharp contrast, take a look at Italy. On a quarterly basis, there has been virtually no growth in the first half of this year. In fact, the economy has been declining and stagnating over the last four years, and is currently experiencing a price deflation. Italy’s 3 million of unemployed in June (10.6% of the labor force) are only slightly below that level in the same month of last year. A shocking 36.5% of the country’s youth is out of work.

[..] Germany, close to one-third of the euro area’s products and services, does not need, and does not want, the ECB’s extraordinarily loose monetary policy. But the hard-pressed economies of France, Italy, Spain, Portugal and Greece – another 50% of the euro area output – need that oxygen to survive. Easy money is all they got. Their budget deficits of 2-5% of GDP, and their rising public debt of 120-185% of GDP, leave no room for fiscal policy to support demand, output and employment. The EU authorities, whoever they are, have relented from imposing penalties on Spain and Portugal – and have looked the other way in the case of France – for transgressing the euro area budget deficit commitments. But they continue to insist on labor market deregulations and on other socially and politically sensitive measures that act as short-term growth and employment killers.

Bloomberg editorials blow wherever the wind does.

• Enough Austerity. More Fiscal Stimulus, Please (BBG Ed.)

Budget deficits may be coming out of retirement. With economies all over the world growing too slowly and little scope left for new monetary stimulus, governments are turning their attention back to fiscal policy. This shift in thinking is overdue. In many countries, though not all, fiscal expansion is not just possible but also necessary. A resumption of budget activism, if it happens, won’t be riskless, so caution will be needed. A stubborn commitment to fiscal austerity, though, would be riskier still. The immediate response to the 2008 crash included fiscal easing – sometimes deliberate and sometimes the automatic consequence (higher public spending, lower tax revenues) of slumping activity. In most cases, expansionary budgets lessened the impact of collapsing demand, but they also pushed up public debt.

Before long, governments started tightening their budgets to get debt back under control. With demand still lacking, the hope was that monetary expansion would be enough to support recovery. It wasn’t. Governments have found that monetary policy is losing its potency. Interest rates are close to zero in many countries, and in some even negative. Huge bond-buying programs – QE – have delivered an additional monetary punch, but again with diminishing effects, and with a growing risk of financial instability as well. So fiscal policy, despite the recent growth of public debt, is back on the agenda. Central banks have been leading the call. In June, Fed Chair Janet Yellen told the Senate Banking Committee that U.S. fiscal policy had “not played a supportive role.”

In July, the ECB’s chief economist, Peter Praet, said “monetary policy cannot be the only remedy to our current economic challenges.” Governments are responding. Following the U.K.’s decision to quit the EU, the new Chancellor of the Exchequer, Philip Hammond, has promised a break with his predecessor’s approach and says he will “reset” fiscal policy. Added investment in infrastructure is under consideration as part of a new industrial strategy.

Blame it on the bubble, not the Brexit. That would be shooting the messenger.

• London Set To Bear Brunt Of Post-Brexit Downturn (G.)

London could bear the brunt of a post-Brexit vote downturn, according to economic indicators in the weeks since the EU referendum pointing to job cuts, falling house prices and a decline in business activity in the capital. London’s economy was relatively unaffected by the previous downturn, compared with other UK regions, but early signs from the latest bout of turmoil suggest that it might not get off so lightly again, economists have said. This could have consequences for the government’s tax receipts and overall growth, given the city’s contribution to the UK economy. One key concern about the impact on London of the vote to leave the EU stems from the capital’s dependence on financial services.

London could lose its status as Europe’s financial capital if the UK leaves the single market and City banks are stripped of their lucrative EU “passports” that allow them to sell services to the rest of the bloc. Samuel Tombs, the chief UK economist at consultancy Pantheon Macroeconomics, said: “London was unscathed by the last recession, but its dependence on finance now is its achilles heel.” He highlighted a potential change of fortunes for London in a note to clients after surveys showed that companies in the capital had taken a hit from the referendum result. London has been the UK’s growth star for the past two decades, outperforming the rest of the country, Tombs said. “Surveys since the referendum, however, indicate that the capital is at the sharp end of the post-referendum downturn.” added.

London was the worst performer out of 12 regions on one measure of business activity for the weeks following 23 June, the day of the referendum. Companies in the capital cut jobs and suffered the sharpest fall in output since early 2009, when the UK was mired in recession, according to the Lloyds Bank regional purchasing managers’ index. Clients appeared reluctant to commit to new contracts, London businesses said, leading to a slump in order books. “The capital was hit harder than any other UK region,” said Paul Evans, the regional director for London at Lloyds commercial banking.

How deep a whole will Merkel dig this time around?

• Give Us EU Visa Freedom In October Or Abandon Migrant Deal, Turkey Says (R.)

The EU should grant Turks visa-free travel in October or the migrant deal that involves Turkey stemming the flow of illegal migrants to the bloc should put be put aside, Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu told a German newspaper. Asked whether hundreds of thousands of refugees in Turkey would head to Europe if the EU did not grant Turks visa freedom from October, he told Bild newspaper’s Monday edition: “I don’t want to talk about the worst case scenario – talks with the EU are continuing but it’s clear that we either apply all treaties at the same time or we put them all aside.” Visa-free access to the EU – the main reward for Ankara’s collaboration in choking off an influx of migrants into Europe – has been subject to delays due to a dispute over Turkish anti-terrorism legislation and Ankara’s crackdown after a failed coup.

When Ambrose starts talking about energy -or anything other than finance, for that matter- I brace myself. He tends to go into cheerleading mode. In this piece, the only problem he sees is intermittency, and even that mostly as not a real issue. Advancements in technology, don’t you know…

• Britain’s Vast National Gamble On Wind Power May Yet Pay Off (AEP)

Wind power has few friends on the political Right. No other industry elicits such protest from the conservative press, Tory backbenchers, and free market economists. The vehemence is odd since wind generates home-made energy and could be considered a ‘patriotic choice’. It dates back to the 1990s and early 2000s when the national wind venture seemed a bottomless pit for taxpayer subsidies. Pre-modern turbines captured trivial amounts of energy. The electrical control systems and gearboxes broke down. Repair costs were prohibitive. Yet as so often with infant industries, early mishaps tell us little. Costs are coming down faster than almost anybody thought possible. As the technology comes of age – akin to gains in US shale fracking – the calculus is starting to vindicate Britain’s vast investment in wind power.

The UK is already world leader in offshore wind. The strategic choice now is whether to go for broke, tripling offshore capacity to 15 gigawatts (GW) by 2030. The decision is doubly-hard because there is no point dabbling in offshore wind. Scale is the crucial factor in slashing costs, so either we do it with conviction or we do not do it all. My own view is that the gamble is worth taking. Shallow British waters to offer optimal sites of 40m depth. The oil and gas industry knows how to operate offshore. Atkins has switched its North Sea skills seamlessly to building substations for wind. JDR in Hartlepool sells submarine cables across the world. Wind power is a natural fit.

Debt Rattle May 16 2016

May 162016

May 16, 2016 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 9:28 am Finance Tagged with: CERN, China, Lincoln, Nigeria, NIRP, overvalued, particle economics, refugees, steel, stimulus, Trump Comments Off

Harris&Ewing Ford Motor Co. New medical center parking garage, Washington, DC 1938

• Goldman: The Median Stock Has NEVER Been More Overvalued (ZH)

• The Business Of Corporate America Is No Longer Business – It Is Finance (FT)

• Stockman: Trump Will Scare The Hell Out Of The Markets, But That’s OK (CNBC)

• Trump’s ‘Print the Money’ Proposal Echoes Franklin and Lincoln (E. Brown)

• India’s Central Bank Governor Warns On Stimulus Overuse (FT)

• Average Asking Price For UK First-Time Buyer Home Jumps 6.2% In A Month (G.)

• CERN Discovers New Particle Called The FERIR (Steve Keen)

• Isn’t it Time to Stop Calling it “The National Debt”? (Steve Roth)

• Forget the Saudis, Nigeria’s the Big Oil Worry (BBG)

• China Housing Revival Props Up Economy (WSJ)

• China’s Record $26 Billion Buyout Deals at Risk of Unraveling (BBG)

• China Private Sector Investment Is Declining (R.)

• China’s Record Daily Steel Output Bodes Ill for Global Industry (BBG)

• How Investors Are Duped Each Earnings Season (MW)

• Battle Brews in Spain, Portugal Over Negative Mortgage Rates (WSJ)

• Refugee Numbers Returned To Turkey Fall Short Of EU ‘Expectations’ (FT)

In some places, this would be called a bubble.

• Goldman: The Median Stock Has NEVER Been More Overvalued (ZH)

When Goldman warned on Friday that a “big drop” in the market is possible before the S&P hits the firm’s year end price target of 2,100, one of the bearish reasons brought up by the firm’s chief strategist David Kostin is that stocks are now massively overvalued. In fact, according to Goldman , while the aggregate market is more overvalued than 86% of all recorded instances, the median stocks has never been more overvalued, i.e., is in the 100% valuation percentile, according to some key metrics such as Price-to-Earnings growth and EV/sales.

This is what Goldman said: “Valuation is a necessary starting point of any drawdown risk analysis. At 16.7x the forward P/E multiple of the S&P 500 index ranks in the 86th percentile relative to the last 40 years. Most other metrics paint a similar picture of extended valuation. The median stock in the index trades at the 99th percentile of historical valuation on most metrics (see Exhibit 3).” Goldman’s conclusion: “The most likely future path of US equities involves a lower valuation.”

America no longer makes much of anything anymore.

• The Business Of Corporate America Is No Longer Business – It Is Finance (FT)

One of the great ironies of business today is that the richest and most powerful companies in the world are more involved than ever before in the capital markets at a time when they do not actually need any capital. Take Apple, which has around $200bn sitting in the bank, yet has borrowed billions of dollars in recent years to buy back shares in order to bolster its stock price, which has lagged recently. Why borrow? Because it is cheaper than repatriating cash and paying US taxes, of course. The financial engineering helped boost the California company’s share price for a while. But it did not stop activist investor Carl Icahn — who had manically advocated borrowing and buybacks — from dumping the stock the minute revenue growth took a turn for the worse in late April. Apple is not alone in eschewing real engineering for the financial kind.

Top-tier US businesses have never enjoyed greater financial resources. They have $2tn in cash on their balance sheets – enough money combined to make them the tenth largest economy in the world. Yet they are also taking on record amounts of debt to buy back their own stock, creating a corporate debt bubble that has already begun to burst (witness Exxon’s recent downgrade). The buyback bubble is only one part of a larger trend, which is that the business of corporate America is no longer business – it is finance. American firms today make more money than ever before by simply moving money around, getting about five times the revenue from purely financial activities, such as trading, hedging, tax optimisation and selling financial services, than they did in the immediate postwar period. No wonder share buybacks and corporate investment into research and development have moved inversely in recent years.

It is easier for chief executives with a shelf life of three years to try to please investors by jacking up short-term share prices than to invest in things that will grow a company over the long haul. It is telling that private firms invest twice as much in things like new technology, worker training, factory upgrades and R&D as public firms of similar size — they simply do not have to deal with market pressure not to. Indeed, the financialisation of business has grown in tandem with the rise of the capital markets and the financial industry itself, which has roughly doubled in size as a percentage of gross domestic product over the past 40 years (even the financial crisis did not keep finance down; the industry itself shrank only marginally and the largest institutions that remained became even bigger). As finance grew, so did its profits — the industry creates only 4% of US jobs yet takes around 25% of the corporate profit share.

“..Why would you hang in a boiling pot where the upside is 2% and the downside is 40?”

• Stockman: Trump Will Scare The Hell Out Of The Markets, But That’s OK (CNBC)

Former Reagan administration aide David Stockman has a message for the next president: The markets are going down for the count and you can’t do anything about it! President Ronald Reagan’s director of the Office of Management and Budget said in a recent CNBC interview it doesn’t matter if Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump gets elected in November — neither will be able to stop the economic meltdown that’s looming. Wall Street seems to have its mind made up about which candidate it prefers. More than 70% of respondents to a recent Citigroup poll of institutional clients said the former secretary of state, first lady and New York senator would likely become the U.S.’s 45th president. Just over 10% gave Trump the nod, and small business owners appear to be divided between the GOP and Democratic standard bearers.

Stockman, however, doesn’t believe either one can prevent what may be on the horizon. “There’s no way the next president can stop a recession that’s already baked into the cake,” Stockman said Thursday in the “Futures Now” interview. Stockman has been calling for a major market downturn and global recession for some time, but he is more certain than ever that it could happen during this political cycle. He pointed to depleting earnings, peaked auto sales, inventory ratios and issues in the freight and rail space as some key indicators that the U.S. economy is more unstable than people would like to believe. “The idea that this economy is somehow going to get stronger in the second half, or that the next president can stall a recession I think is wrong,” he said.

According to Stockman, there is “plenty of evidence” that the U.S. will slip into a recession by year-end or shortly after. And as he sees it, that could send the S&P 500 spiraling to levels not seen since 2012. “The market can easily drop to 1,300,” Stockman warned. That represents a nearly 40% fall from where the large-cap S&P 500 Index is currently trading. “We have been trading in a range for the last 600 days plus or minus days 2,060 on the S&P 500. … Why would you hang in a boiling pot where the upside is 2% and the downside is 40?” Stockman noted that if given a choice between Trump and Clinton, he certainly would not want another Clinton in the White House. Instead, he said America needs a disruptor like Trump to “break the chains of the status quo” and manage the country in a different way than what has been done in the last decade.

It’s time this becomes a serious discussion.

• Trump’s ‘Print the Money’ Proposal Echoes Franklin and Lincoln (E. Brown)

“Print the money” has been called crazy talk, but it may be the only sane solution to a $19 trillion federal debt that has doubled in the last 10 years. The solution of Abraham Lincoln and the American colonists can still work today.
“Reckless,” “alarming,” “disastrous,” “swashbuckling,” “playing with fire,” “crazy talk,” “lost in a forest of nonsense”: these are a few of the labels applied by media commentators to Donald Trump’s latest proposal for dealing with the federal debt. On Monday, May 9th, the presumptive Republican presidential candidate said on CNN, “You print the money.”

The remark was in response to a firestorm created the previous week, when Trump was asked if the US should pay its debt in full or possibly negotiate partial repayment. He replied, “I would borrow, knowing that if the economy crashed, you could make a deal.” Commentators took this to mean a default. On May 9, Trump countered that he was misquoted:

People said I want to go and buy debt and default on debt – these people are crazy. This is the United States government. First of all, you never have to default because you print the money, I hate to tell you, okay? So there’s never a default.

That remark wasn’t exactly crazy. It echoed one by former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, who said in 2011:

The United States can pay any debt it has because we can always print money to do that. So there is zero probability of default.

Paying the government’s debts by just issuing the money is as American as apple pie – if you go back far enough. Benjamin Franklin attributed the remarkable growth of the American colonies to this innovative funding solution. Abraham Lincoln revived the colonial system of government-issued money when he endorsed the printing of $450 million in US Notes or “greenbacks” during the Civil War. The greenbacks not only helped the Union win the war but triggered a period of robust national growth and saved the taxpayers about $14 billion in interest payments. But back to Trump. He went on to explain:

I said if we can buy back government debt at a discount – in other words, if interest rates go up and we can buy bonds back at a discount – if we are liquid enough as a country we should do that.

Apparently he was referring to the fact that when interest rates go up, long-term bonds at the lower rate become available on the secondary market at a discount. Anyone who holds the bonds to maturity still gets full value, but many investors want to cash out early and are willing to take less. As explained on MorningStar.com:

If a bond with a 5% coupon and a ten-year maturity is sold on the secondary market today while newly issued ten-year bonds have a 6% coupon, then the 5% bond will sell for $92.56 (par value $100).

“..central banks “cannot claim to be out of ammunition because immediately that would create the wrong kind of expectations..”

• India’s Central Bank Governor Warns On Stimulus Overuse (FT)

Central banks and governments of rich countries are running out of ammunition for stimulating their economies, says Raghuram Rajan, the head of the Indian central bank — but they can never admit as much. Speaking to the Financial Times at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business in London, Mr Rajan criticised efforts to use fiscal and monetary policy and infrastructure programmes to boost growth rates in advanced economies. Long a critic of low interest rates in rich countries that can drive hot-money flows to poorer parts of the world, the governor of the Reserve Bank of India suggested that loose policies were also weakening the underlying performance of advanced economies.

Although Mr Rajan said there were limits on stimulus, he said central banks “cannot claim to be out of ammunition because immediately that would create the wrong kind of expectations, so there’s always something up their sleeves”. Mr Rajan said he was a supporter of stimulus policies to “balance things out” over short periods when households or companies were proving excessively cautious with their spending. But eight years after the financial crisis, we “have to ask ourselves is that the real problem?”. “I have this image of stimulus as a bridge,” he said. “As the economy goes down, there is an expectation it will come up. Stimulus is a bridge which smoothes over the growth rate of the economy and prevents damaging expectations from building up.”

If stimulus went on for a long time, if it did not work, he said, the adjustment would be sharp, indicating there was little room for further stimulus. Mr Rajan warned governments not to rely too much on fiscal stimulus through cutting taxes or increasing public spending. “If your debt to GDP is over 100%, [and you] do more fiscal stimulus, you’d better have a pretty high rate of return in mind, otherwise your younger and middle-aged generations are thinking ‘This thing is not going to return enough, but I’m going to have to pay for it’.”

Want to know how to bankrupt a society?

• Average Asking Price For UK First-Time Buyer Home Jumps 6.2% In A Month (G.)

The average asking price of a typical first-time buyer home leapt by 6.2% in a month after buy-to-let investors rushed to buy properties before last month’s stamp duty increase, according to figures on Monday. The average for properties coming on to the market in England and Wales with two bedrooms or fewer was £11,298 higher in May than in April, at £194,224, according to data from the property website Rightmove. The figures, based on properties listed during the month, showed that across the UK the average price of a first-time buyer property had risen by 11.4% since May 2015. In hotspots such as Croydon, Dartford and Luton – all towns within easy commuting distance of central London – asking prices were up by more than 18% over the year.

The figures do not include inner-London homes. The website said strong demand from investors keen to buy before the introduction of the surcharge on second homes had caused a “property drought” at the lower end of the market, putting upwards pressure on prices for those homes that were being made available. However, Rightmove’s director, Miles Shipside, said: “It remains to be seen if these prices can be achieved and there may be some over pricing in the market. It is also a reflection of better quality property coming to market in this sector which is now targeting owner-occupiers rather than landlords.”

Brilliantly hilarious must read.

• CERN Discovers New Particle Called The FERIR (Steve Keen)

CERN has just announced the discovery of a new particle, called the “FERIR”. This is not a fundamental particle of matter like the Higgs Boson, but an invention of economists. CERN in this instance stands not for the famous particle accelerator straddling the French and Swiss borders, but for an economic research lab at MIT—whose initials are coincidentally the same as those of its far more famous cousin. Despite its relative anonymity, MIT’s CERN is far more important than its physical namesake. The latter merely informs us about the fundamental nature of the universe. MIT’s CERN, on the other hand, shapes our lives today, because the discoveries it makes dramatically affect economic policy.

CERN, which in this case stands for “Crazy Economic Rationalizations for aNomalies”, has discovered many important sub-economic particles in the past, with its most famous discovery to date being the NAIRU, or “Non-Accelerating Inflation Rate of Unemployment”. Today’s newly discovered particle, the FERIR, or “Full Employment Real Interest Rate”, is the anti-particle of the NAIRU. Its existence was first mooted some 30 months ago by Professor Larry Summers at the 2013 IMF Research Conference. The existence of the FERIR was confirmed just this week by CERN’s particle equilibrator, the DSGEin. Asked why the discovery had occurred now, Professor Krugman explained that ever since the GFC (“Global Financial Crisis”), economists had been attempting to understand not only how the GFC happened, but also why its aftermath has been what Professor Summers characterized as “Secular Stagnation”.

Their attempts to understand the GFC continued to fail, until Professor Summers suggested that perhaps the GFC had destroyed the NAIRU, leaving the ZLB (“Zero Lower Bound”) in its place. This could have happened only if there was a mysterious second particle, which was generated when a NAIRU equilibrated with a GFC. Rather than remaining in equilibrium, as sub-economic particles do in DSGEin, NAIRU apparently vanished instantly when the GFC appeared. Something else must have taken its place. DSGEin was unable to help here, since it rapidly returned to equilibrium—while the real world that it was supposed to simulate clearly had not. CERN’s attempts to model this phenomenon in DSGEin were frustrated by the fact that a GFC does not exist inside a DSGEin—in fact, the construction of the DSGEin was predicated on the non-existence of GFCs.

The ever-practical Professor Krugman recently suggested a way to overcome this problem. Why not turn to the real world, where GFCs exist in abundance, and feed one of those into the DSGEin? Unfortunately, the experiment destroyed the DSGEin, since the very existence of a GFC within it put it through an existential crisis. However, before it broke down (while mysteriously singing the first verse of “Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do”), the value for the NAIRU in DSGEin suddenly turned negative. This led Professor Summers to the conjecture that perhaps there was a negative anti-particle to the NAIRU, which he dubbed the FERIR.

It’s all in the eye of the beholder.

• Isn’t it Time to Stop Calling it “The National Debt”? (Steve Roth)

Fourteen. Trillion. Dollars. That’s how much the U.S. government “owes.” You hear that massive number all the time, right? And people are forever telling you that you and your family are on the hook to pay off that scary huge number. There are 125 million U.S. households. You do the arithmetic. The horror. What those scare-mongers don’t tell you, and generally don’t even understand: it actually makes almost no sense to call that figure “the national debt.” And no, you’re not on the hook to pay it back. Imagine this: you’re the queen or king of a sovereign country. You decide to mint and issue a bunch of tin coins that your people will find useful. You use those coins to buy stuff from people in the private sector, and pay them to do work. Voilà, the people have money.

Is your government now in “debt” as a result of that “deficit spending”? Does it have to “pay” something to somebody at some point in the future? Do you have to redeem those coins for wheat or pigs or anything else? Obviously not. There’s just a bunch of money out there that people can use. You’ve made no promise that your treasury will ever redeem those coins for anything. They just circulate. Those government-issued assets, held by the private sector, are only “liabilities” to the government in the most pettifogging accounting sense. If you “owed” some money that you would never, ever have to pay, would you put that on your balance sheet as a liability? Would it be anything beyond a pro forma entry designed to satisfy some obsessive impulse for accounting closure? A debt that will never be paid off is a very questionable “liability.”

That’s essentially the situation with the U.S. national “debt.” The U.S. issues money by deficit spending. It puts more money into private accounts than it takes out via taxes. The private sector has more balance-sheet assets (but no more liabilities, so it has more “net worth,” the balancing item on the righthand side of its balance sheet). The treasury has made no promises to redeem that new money for…anything (except maybe…different government-issued assets). It’s just out there. Now it’s true that the U.S. et al operate under an arguably archaic and purely self-imposed rule: their treasuries are required to issue bonds equal to that deficit spending. This is a straightforward asset swap: the private sector gives checking-account deposits (back) to the government, and the government gives bonds in return.

Private sector assets and net worth are unaffected by that accounting swap; it just changes the private-sector portfolio mix — more bonds, less “cash.” (Treasury “forces” the private sector to make that collective portfolio-adjusting swap through the simple expedient of selling bonds at an attractive price — a point or two below similar deals in the private sector.) The same kind of asset swap happens when the Fed “prints money” for quantitative easing. The private sector gives bonds (back) to the government, and the Fed gives “reserves” in return — deposits in banks’ Fed accounts. Sure, the Fed creates those reserves ab nihilo, but they’re not a money injection into the private sector, like deficit spending. They’re just swapped for bonds. That accounting event doesn’t increase private-sector assets or net worth. It just changes the private-sector portfolio mix (more reserves, less bonds).

In any case, the private sector is holding government-issued assets. Whether they consist of bonds, “cash,” or reserves, is it realistic to call that money originally spent into private accounts a “debt” for the government? Is it in any real sense a government “liability” if it will never be redeemed for anything?

Big Oil’s decades of criminal activity come home to roost.

• Forget the Saudis, Nigeria’s the Big Oil Worry (BBG)

Drag your attention away from the Middle East for a moment. While policymakers have been focused on Saudi Arabia’s oil market machinations, what really matters right now is happening 3,000 miles away in the Niger River delta. The country that was, until recently, Africa’s biggest crude producer is slipping back into chaos. A wave of attacks and accidents have hit infrastructure, taking Nigeria’s output down to 20-year lows. Oil prices are responding, rising to their highest in more than six months. Part of this is explained by the IEA lifting demand estimates this week. But taking both things together, it’s easy to doubt whether current oil surpluses are sustainable. With no solution in sight to the problems that beset the delta’s creeks and mangrove swamps, production from onshore and shallow-water oil fields looks vulnerable.

If the latest group of freedom fighters seeks to outdo its predecessors, then deepwater facilities may be at risk too.The Niger Delta Avengers have certainly been busy, forcing Shell’s Forcados terminal to shut in about 250,000 barrels of daily exports; and breaching an offshore Chevron facility in the 160,000 barrels per day Escravos system. In April, ENI had to declare force majeure – letting it stop shipments without breaching contracts – on exports of its Brass River grade after a pipeline fire. It’s hard to see any long-term let-up given Nigeria’s record on fixing this problem. The previous wave of discontent, which hit a peak in 2009, only came to an end when President Yar’Adua offered amnesty, training programs and monthly cash payments to nearly 30,000 militants, at a yearly cost of about $500 million.

Some leaders of the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND), the militant group, got lucrative security contracts. But the failure to properly address local grievances means it was only a matter of time before another wave of angry young men took up the fight for a better deal for southern Nigeria. The crisis has been hastened by new president Muhammadu Buhari’s termination of the ex-militants’ security contracts and his seeking the arrest of former MEND leaders. The Avengers now say they want independence for the Niger River delta. And it’s not as if Nigeria’s oil woes are limited to the militants. Exxon had to declare force majeure on Qua Iboe exports after a drilling platform ran aground and ruptured a pipeline, while Shell did similar with Bonny Light exports after a leak from a pipeline feeding the terminal.

Beijing will flood in enough money to ‘reach its targets’ while talking about clamping down.

• China Housing Revival Props Up Economy (WSJ)

China’s housing market is showing nascent signs of recovery after a two-year downturn, helping to counter a slowdown in the broader economy but prompting fresh warnings about a buildup of debt. Property prices and sales have risen in recent months, driven by looser lending policies, accompanied by a sustained advance in new construction. That occurred even though China is weighed down by unsold homes with enough square footage to fill seven Manhattan islands. “Property developers’ appetite has returned,” said Xia Qiang, a senior partner at Yi He Capital, which provides loans to property firms. “Just two weeks ago four developers from Fujian and Zhejiang asked if there were any projects they could invest in in Shanghai.”

From January to April, housing sales rose 61.4% to 2.41 trillion yuan ($369 billion) from a year ago, the National Bureau of Statistics said on Saturday. Property investment in the first four months of this year rose 7.2% to 2.54 trillion yuan. Construction starts gained 21.4% to 434.3 million square meters. But the rosy statistics present a quandary for Chinese officials. After engineering a credit-fueled property upturn, Beijing has started tapping the brakes amid concern that it has overshot, economists say. Among the fixes Beijing has imposed are a decrease in bank lending and more purchase restrictions on some of the hottest property markets, including Shanghai and Shenzhen. A column in the official People’s Daily recently criticized debt-fueled growth policies, warning that China faces a “property bubble.”

The zigzag policy reflects China’s tough balancing act in a nation where empty apartment towers ring many smaller cities. It wants to boost the property sector enough to hit its 6.5%-plus growth target for 2016 without making its overcapacity and debt problems too much worse, economists said. “New loans are pouring into the real-estate sector,” said Alicia Garcia-Herrero, economist with investment bank Natixis, part of France’s Groupe BPCE. “But the elephant in the room is credit risk.”

This is about money that doesn’t at all want to move back home, no matter how lucrative that may seem.

• China’s Record $26 Billion Buyout Deals at Risk of Unraveling (BBG)

The great retreat of Chinese companies from the U.S. stock market is hitting a snag. Concern last week that Chinese regulators may restrict overseas-traded companies from returning home helped erase more than $5 billion in the market value of firms seeking to do so. Shares of companies from Momo to 21Vianet have plunged at least 20% since May 6 amid speculation that the management-led investor groups may back away from the buyout deals or lower their purchase prices. The selloff marks another twist in the saga of U.S.-listed Chinese companies seeking to go private, lured by the prospect of relisting at higher valuations in Shanghai or Shenzhen. More than 40 have received buyout offers worth at least $35 billion since the beginning of 2015.

About three quarters of the deals are still pending, including Qihoo 360, whose $9.3 billion offer is the largest. The unraveling started on May 6 when the China Securities Regulatory Commission said that it’s studying the impact of companies seeking to relist domestically after withdrawing from overseas. The regulators are concerned the valuations estimated for some domestic backdoor listings are too high and could affect the stability of the stock market, according to the people familiar with matter. Policy makers also want to avoid encouraging more buyouts that could prompt capital outflows, the people said.

The one sector Beijing cannot control is the biggest there is. “Pushing on a string” comes to mind. “Interest rates are low, but investment is declining, which shows that the overall market – domestic and overseas market – is not good,” he said.”

• China Private Sector Investment Is Declining (R.)

Xia Xiaokang and Bruno Chen, who both run private-sector companies, are the sort of businessmen that Chinese leaders are increasingly concerned about as economic growth slows. Beijing is counting on the private sector to invest more in the economy and take up the slack as the government tries to engineer a shift away from largely state-run heavy industry to more entrepreneurial and services-led growth. Unfortunately, just when China needs the private sector to step up, they look to be stepping back. “We plan to downsize our business rather than expand,” said Chen, who runs Ningbo Tengsheng Garments Co in the coastal export hub of Zhejiang province in eastern China. “We cannot feel any improvement in the economy,” he said.

Xia, general manager of Wenzhou Kingsdom Sanitary Ware, some 400 km from Shanghai, similarly lacks confidence in the economy. “We have hardly made any fixed-asset investment since last year and we now plan to rent out part of our factory building because it’s too big,” he said. After March data suggested that economic activity was finally picking up after a long slowdown, April figures released at the weekend suggested otherwise. Overall investment, factory output and retail sales all grew more slowly than expected. Private-sector investment for January to April grew just 5.2%, its weakest pace since the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) started recording the data in 2012. More worrying, private-sector investment is decelerating sharply from rates near 25% in 2013, to just 10% last year and now just over 5%.

Damn the torpedoes!

• China’s Record Daily Steel Output Bodes Ill for Global Industry (BBG)

China’s record daily steel output in April bodes ill for an embattled global steel industry already reeling from a deluge of exports from the world’s top producer. Crude steel output over the month rose 0.5% to 69.42 million metric tons from a year earlier, the National Bureau of Statistics said on Saturday. The gains came after mills ramped up production to take advantage of a spurt higher in prices that has given them the best profits this decade. While below March’s record monthly figure of 70.65 million tons, the daily rate of 2.314 million tons was higher due to fewer producing days and surpassed the previous best set in June 2014. “Given how high margins went, we’ve been expecting to see a supply response like this,” Ian Roper at Macquarie said in a WeChat message. “Chinese mills will likely look back to the export market as domestic oversupply reappears.”

China’s overseas sales in the first four months were already running 7.6% higher than a year earlier, piling on the pressure after the nation shipped a record 112 million tons in 2015. Output remaining at such elevated levels “definitely adds to oversupply risks and exports may continue to rise,” said Helen Lau, Hong Kong-based analyst at Argonaut Securities. In a sign that China is recommitting to the reform of its bloated state sector, its top producer, Hebei Iron & Steel, said Friday it’ll cut 5.02 million tons of capacity. That still leaves a way to go. Japan’s biggest mill, Nippon Steel & Sumitomo Metal, also said Friday that it would take control of a smaller domestic steelmaker in a bid to weather a “rapid deterioration of the business environment” caused in part by overcapacity in China of some 400 million tons.

It’s all so sad it’s funny.

• How Investors Are Duped Each Earnings Season (MW)

A year ago, we explained the many ways companies make reading their quarterly earnings reports a miserable task. We weren’t just whining. We wanted to remind companies that our readers regularly tell us they struggle to understand earnings announcements, and our job is to decode them for investors. Making that difficult isn’t helping anyone. We noted that some of their tactics – inventing or manipulating numbers, using meaningless jargon, distributing lame executive quotes, and more — can be outright damaging, eroding investor trust and creating skepticism. We hoped they’d change their ways. We’re sorry to say that today, as another earnings season draws to a close, things are even worse.

“Companies are definitely less transparent than they used to be,” said Leigh Drogen, founder and chief executive of Estimize, which crowdsources earnings estimates. They are “using accounting schemes that are more specific to … how they want investors to perceive their results.” Earnings are a crucial quarterly update for investors, as they provide the “best unbiased” view of what’s going on with companies, sectors and the economy, said Karyn Cavanaugh, senior market strategist at Voya Investment Management. “Earnings discount all the noise,” she said. But today, according to FactSet, more than 90% of S&P 500 companies use their own metrics in an attempt to make their numbers look better. Some conceal revenue and other key numbers in hard-to-access tables.

And a recent NYSE rule change has led some companies to report very early in the morning and pushed others to join the posse reporting after the closing bell, creating bottlenecks. While all this has meant more stress for reporters and analysts, it’s also made things harder for everyday investors trying to do due diligence on the companies they own. Experts say more companies seem to be breaking the most fundamental pact they have with their co-owners: to keep them informed of the true state of their business. “It’s a holographic presentation bubble distorting underlying operational reality,” said analyst Nicholas Heymann at William Blair. “Companies are working all the angles.”

What you get when decision makers don’t understand their fields.

• Battle Brews in Spain, Portugal Over Negative Mortgage Rates (WSJ)

As interest rates in Europe fall near or below zero, lawmakers and consumer advocates in Spain and Portugal are attacking an ancient tenet of finance by insisting that lenders can owe money to borrowers. Banks in the two countries, struggling to recover from recessions that shook their financial systems, are fighting back, with billions of dollars in mortgage interest payments potentially at stake. Portugal’s central-bank governor, in a reversal, has rushed to defend the banks against a proposed law that would require them to pay borrowers when interest rates turn negative. Banks in both countries are rewriting new mortgage contracts to warn homeowners that they could never profit from subzero rates.

In Spain and Portugal, banks typically tie interest rates on mortgages to the euro interbank offered rate, or Euribor, a fluctuating rate banks pay to borrow from each other. In addition, interest rates in both countries include a fixed percentage of the loan, called the spread. In much of Europe, by contrast, fixed mortgage rates are common. Euribor began turning negative last year after the ECB cut interest rates below zero—charging lenders to hold deposits—to stimulate the Continent’s economies. That has pulled mortgage rates into negative territory in a few isolated cases in Portugal.

The vast majority of Spanish and Portuguese mortgage holders still pay interest, because Euribor hasn’t dropped enough to wipe out the spreads. But while lenders consider further steep drops unlikely, they are taking steps to protect themselves just in case. Europe already has a precedent: Banks in Denmark are paying thousands of borrowers interest on their home loans, nearly four years after the central bank introduced negative interest rates. Danish banks have increased some fees to compensate but never mounted serious legal objections. In Spain and Portugal, bank executives said they would pay borrowers when pigs fly.

Europeans have established the ultimate NIMBY.

Another EU plan that goes predictably off track. “Brussels wants to see group returns but Greece is looking at applications for asylum on a case-by-case basis.”

• Refugee Numbers Returned To Turkey Fall Short Of EU Expectations (FT)

The number of migrants being sent back to Turkey from Greece has fallen well short of EU expectations, prompting fears that a fresh wave of arrivals could overwhelm the Aegean Islands during this summer. Fewer than 400 of the 8,500 people who have arrived on the Greek islands since the March 20 EU deal with Ankara — aimed at reducing migrant flows — have been returned to Turkey, according to figures from the Greek government’s migration co-ordination unit. Instead, Athens has approved more than 30% of the 600 asylum applications from Syrians that have been assessed since March 20, a significantly higher percentage than anticipated, according to European officials and aid workers. While the slow pace of returns will irk many in Brussels, Greek officials say it reflects their own policy on asylum requests.

They dismiss fears that the deal between the EU and Turkey could collapse if the trend continues – leading to a fresh influx – and stress that Greece’s migration laws do not recognise Turkey as a safe third country for refugees. Maria Stavropoulou, a former UN official who heads the Greek asylum service, said: “We fully understand the [EU] concerns but if you look at it from the perspective of the rule of law, it is going exactly as it should. “We have many vulnerable people on the islands … a lot of very sick people. By law they are exempt from the return process.” Epaminondas Farmakis of Solidarity Now, a refugee charity funded by the billionaire investor George Soros, said: “Brussels wants to see group returns but Greece is looking at applications for asylum on a case-by-case basis.”

Debt Rattle December 18 2015

Dec 182015

December 18, 2015 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 10:15 am Finance Tagged with: China, commodities, EU, Fed, Greece, IMF, Japan, NatGas, oil, refugees, shipping, stimulus 3 Responses »

James F. Gibson Tent of A. Foulke, Horse Artillery, Brandy Station, Virginia 1864

• Sell The Bonds, Sell The Stocks, Sell The House – Dread The Fed! (Stockman)

• Oil Below $35, Set For Third Weekly Loss As Supply Glut Seen Relentless (BBG)

• Natural Gas Falls to All-Time Inflation-Adjusted Low (WSJ)

• This Year’s Worst Commodity Is One You Probably Can’t Pronounce (BBG)

• Slowing Boats From China Provide Clue to Health of World Trade (BBG)

• Fed Will Have To Reverse Gears Fast If Anything Goes Wrong (AEP)

• The ‘Rate Hike’ Means More Looting By The 1% (Paul Craig Roberts)

• Japan To Craft $27 Billion Extra Stimulus Budget To Spur Growth (Reuters)

• Beijing Probes Architects of Stock-Market Rescue (WSJ)

• China Beige Book Shows ‘Disturbing’ Economic Deterioration (BBG)

• IMF’s Lagarde to Face Trial for ‘Negligence’ in Tapie Case (BBG)

• IMF Admits Mistakes Over Greece’s Bailout Program (GR)

• Beijing Grinds To Halt As Second Ever ‘Red Smog Alert’ Issued (Reuters)

• EU Puts Blame On Greece, Turkey At Refugee Summit (Kath.)

• EU To Fast-Track Border Control Plans (RTE)

• Greece Risks Becoming A ‘Black Box’ For Stranded Migrants (FT)

Got to love it when Stockman gets mad.

• Sell The Bonds, Sell The Stocks, Sell The House – Dread The Fed! (Stockman)

There is going to be carnage in the casino, and the proof lies in the transcript of Janet Yellen’s press conference. She did not say one word about the real world; it was all about the hypothecated world embedded in the Fed’s tinker toy model of the US economy. Yes, tinker toys are what kids used to play with back in the 1950s and 1960s, and that’s when Janet acquired her school-girl model of the nation’s economy. But since that model is so frightfully primitive, mechanical, incomplete, stylized and obsolete, it tells almost nothing of relevance about where the markets and economy now stand; or what forces are driving them; or where they are headed in the period just ahead. In fact, Yellen’s tinker toy model is so deficient as to confirm that she and her posse are essentially flying blind.

That alone should give investors pause – especially because Yellen confessed explicitly that “monetary policy is an exercise in forecasting”. Accordingly, her answers were riddled with ritualistic reminders about all the dashboards, incoming data and economic system telemetry that the Fed is vigilantly monitoring. But all that minding of everybody else’s business is not a virtue – its proof that Yellen is the ultimate Keynesian catechumen. This stupendously naïve old school marm still believes the received Keynesian scriptures as penned by the 1960s-era apostles James (Tobin), John (Galbraith), Paul (Samuelson) and Walter (Heller). But c’mon.Those ancient texts have no relevance to the debt-saturated, state-dominated, hideously over-capacitated global economy of 2015.

They just convey a stupid little paint-by-the-numbers simulacrum of what a purportedly closed domestic economy looked like even back then. That is, before Richard Nixon had finally destroyed Bretton Woods and turned over the Fed’s printing presses to power aggrandizing PhDs; and before Mr. Deng had thrown out Mao’s little red book in favor of a central bank based credit Ponzi. As you listened to Yellen babble on about the purported cyclical “slack” remaining in the US economy, the current unusually low “natural rate” of federal funds, all the numerous and sundry “transient” factors affecting the outlook, and the Fed’s fetishly literal quest for 2.00% inflation (yes, these fools apparently think the can hit their inflation target to the second decimal place), only one conclusion was possible. To wit, sell the bonds, sell the stocks, sell the house, dread the Fed!

“Crude stockpiles surged to 490.7 million barrels, the highest for this time of year since 1930..”

• Oil Below $35, Set For Third Weekly Loss As Supply Glut Seen Relentless (BBG)

Oil traded below $35 a barrel and headed for a third weekly decline amid a worsening U.S. supply glut and the first interest rate increase by the Federal Reserve in almost a decade. Futures held losses in New York after closing Thursday at the lowest in almost seven years, and were down 2.2% this week. Crude stockpiles surged to 490.7 million barrels, the highest for this time of year since 1930, according to the Energy Information Administration. Goldman Sachs warned of “high risks” that prices may sink further as supplies swell. The Fed decision bolstered the dollar, diminishing the investment appeal of commodities.

Oil is trading near levels last seen during the global financial crisis on signs the surplus will be exacerbated. OPEC abandoned output limits at a Dec. 4 meeting while the White House announced its support Wednesday for a deal reached by congressional leaders that would end the nation’s 40-year restrictions on crude exports. “The major driver this week has been U.S. dollar strength against a backdrop of ongoing refusal to respond rationally to the current market surplus on the supply side,” Michael McCarthy, a chief markets strategist at CMC Markets in Sydney, said by phone. “We’re just not seeing the normal production cuts we’d expect given the plummet in prices.”

Blame it on the weather.

• Natural Gas Falls to All-Time Inflation-Adjusted Low (WSJ)

Natural-gas fell to the lowest ever inflation-adjusted price in its history of Nymex trading on Wednesday as extremely warm weather continues to limit demand. Prices for the front-month January contract settled down 3.2 cents, or 1.8%, at $1.79 a million British thermal units on the New York Mercantile Exchange. That is the lowest settlement since March 24, 1999. Gas prices have been falling precipitously in recent weeks because of the combination of record-high stockpiles and a December that could be the worst for heating demand in history. Prices have fallen 25% in just one month and have dropped 39% from their high in August. Wednesday settlement put gas below the inflation-adjusted low of $1.801 that had been in place since January 1992.

Gas did make a move up to small gains in after-hours trading, but many traders and brokers had little explanation for that rebound. The trader Marc Kerrest said he noticed prices and spreads moving higher for months far away, a sign front-month prices could follow. He closed out some of his bearish bets before settlement, he said. “But in no way would I consider going [bullish on] gas just because of what it’s done,” in recent weeks, said Mr. Kerrest, who manages his own gas-focused fund, Cornice Trading. Warm weather in the U.S. caused by the El Niño weather phenomenon has sharply limited demand for the heating fuel this year. The natural-gas market is oversupplied, and some traders and analysts say the industry could run out of storage space for gas by mid-2016.

Production was so high and demand was so soft that storage levels likely shrank by just 41 billion cubic feet last week, according to the average forecast of 17 analysts, brokers and traders surveyed by The Wall Street Journal. That is only a third of their five-year average drawdown for the week. If the forecast is correct, stockpiles on Dec. 11 would have been 16% above levels from a year ago and 8.9% above the five-year average for the same week.

We’re just getting started.

• This Year’s Worst Commodity Is One You Probably Can’t Pronounce (BBG)

An obscure metal used to make steel has become this year’s worst-performing commodity, after China’s stumbling economy and a collapse in the energy industry drove outsized losses. Molybdenum – that’s mo.lyb.de.num for the uninitiated – is used in many steel building materials and to help harden the drills used to extract oil and natural gas from deep underground. Prices plunged 49%, the most among 79 raw materials tracked by Bloomberg, as the white metal was undermined by the flagging demand and oversupply that plagued global commodity markets throughout 2015. Use of the metal tumbled 5.1% this year, the biggest contraction since 2009, driven by a slowdown in China, the world’s biggest metals and energy consumer, according to Macquarie.

Prices have dropped for eight straight months, the longest slump since 2011, weighing on returns for mining companies including Freeport-McMoRan Inc., the world’s top producer. “It’s like a poster child for the commodity bear market,” said Paul Christopher atWells Fargo Investment Institute. “We don’t have a positive outlook on metals, including molybdenum, because they’ve been overproduced. They will continue to do the worst, not just because China’s demand is slipping still, but also because there’s not been enough supply adjustment.” Prices for molybdenum oxide tumbled to a 12-year low of $4.616 a pound in November, according to monthly data from Metal Bulletin. The drop exceeded the 34% decline for crude oil and the 27% slide in the Bloomberg Commodity Index, a gauge of returns from 22 items that is headed for its biggest annual decline since the recession in 2008.

Molybdenum for immediate delivery traded on the London Metal Exchange slumped 43% this year to $11,628 a metric ton ($5.27 a pound). About half of molybdenum is produced as a byproduct of extracting other metals, mainly copper. Because it makes up a small portion of revenue for mining companies, suppliers are slower to respond with output cuts when prices tumble, said Mu Li at CPM Group in New York. Production topped demand by 40.9 million pounds in 2015, the biggest surplus since at least 2002, according to Bank of America. The market will remain oversupplied through 2020, the bank estimates.

No hurries, mate.

• Slowing Boats From China Provide Clue to Health of World Trade (BBG)

If you want to know how China’s economy is doing, take a slow boat from one of its ports. Even with fuel at its cheapest price in almost a decade, the ships that carry goods around the world have been reducing speed in line with the slowdown in China, the biggest exporter. Shipping companies have been “slow steaming” since the global financial crisis in 2008, as a way to save costs and keep as many ships active as possible. Vessels are now operating at an average of 9.69 knots, compared with 13.06 knots seven years ago, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. That means Nike sneakers and Barbie dolls made in China can now take two weeks to arrive in Los Angeles and a month to reach Le Havre, France – a week longer than if the ships were moving at full speed.

And there’s scope for ships to go even slower, according to A.P. Moeller-Maersk. “This is the new norm,” said Rahul Kapoor at Drewry Maritime Services. “The overall speed of the industry has gone down and there’s no going back.” In the boom years before the 2008 financial crisis, shipping lines expanded fleets and ran ships as fast as they could to keep up with the surging demand for goods manufactured half a world away. As demand dropped, the lines were left with too many vessels, and customers eager to reduce inventory, who would rather pay a lower rate to receive goods than guarantee quick delivery. “In 2003, if you were on a tanker, container ships would zoom past and in a matter of a few minutes you couldn’t see them on the horizon,” Kapoor said.

“Since 2008, it’s been a different story.” Fuel costs are the biggest expense for shipping lines and the drop in oil has given them some relief from plunging freight rates driven lower by overcapacity and sluggish global growth. Reducing a ship’s speed by 10% can cut fuel consumption by as much as 30%, according to ship assessor Det Norske Veritas.

Lots of things will go wrong.

• Fed Will Have To Reverse Gears Fast If Anything Goes Wrong (AEP)

The global policy graveyard is littered with central bankers who raised interest rates too soon, only to retreat after tipping their economies back into recession or after having misjudged the powerful deflationary forces in the post-Lehman world. The European Central Bank raised rates twice in 2011, before the economy had achieved “escape velocity” and just as the Club Med states embarked on drastic fiscal austerity. The result was the near-collapse of monetary union. Sweden, Denmark, Korea, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Israel and Chile, among others, were all forced to reverse course, and some have since swung into negative territory to compensate for the damage. The US Federal Reserve has waited longer before pulling the trigger, and circumstances are, in many ways, more propitious.

Four years of budget cuts and fiscal drag are finally over. State and local spending will add stimulus worth 0.5pc of GDP this year. The unemployment rate has dropped to 5pc. Payrolls have risen by 509,000 over the past two months. The rate of job openings is the highest since the peak of the dotcom boom in 2000. The M1 and M2 money supply figures have switched from green to amber but are not flashing the sort of stress warnings so clearly visible in mid-2008. Yet it is a very murky picture. This is the first time the Fed has ever embarked on tightening cycle when the ISM gauge of manufacturing is below the boom-bust line of 50. Nominal GDP growth in the US has been trending down from 5pc in mid-2014 to barely 3pc. Danny Blanchflower, a Dartmouth professor and a former UK rate-setter, said the US labour market is not as tight as it looks.

Inflation is nowhere near its 2pc target and the world economy is still gasping for air. He sees a 50/50 chance that the Fed will have to pirouette and go back to the drawing board. “All it will take is one shock,” said Lars Christensen, from Markets and Money Advisory. “It is really weird that they are raising rates at all. Capacity utilization in industry has been falling for five months.” Mr Christensen said the rate rise in itself is relatively harmless. The real tightening kicked off two years ago when the Fed began to slow its $85bn of bond purchases each month. This squeezed liquidity through the classic quantity of money effect. Fed tapering slowly turned off the spigot for a global financial system running on a “dollar standard”, with an estimated $9 trillion of foreign debt in US currency.

China imported US tightening through its dollar-peg, compounding the slowdown already under way. It was the delayed effect of this crunch that has caused the “broad” dollar index to rocket by 19pc since July 2014, the steepest dollar rise in modern times. It is a key cause of the bloodbath for commodities and emerging markets. Mr Christensen said the saving grace this time is that Fed has given clear assurances – like the Bank of England – that it will roll over its $4.5 trillion balance sheet for a long time to come, rather than winding back quantitative easing and risking monetary contraction.

The big banks will be alright.

• The ‘Rate Hike’ Means More Looting By The 1% (Paul Craig Roberts)

The Federal Reserve raised the interbank borrowing rate today by one quarter of one% or 25 basis points. Readers are asking, “what does that mean?” It means that the Fed has had time to figure out that the effect of the small “rate hike” would essentially be zero. In other words, the small increase in the target rate from a range of 0 to 0.25% to 0.25 to 0.50% is insufficient to set off problems in the interest-rate derivatives market or to send stock and bond prices into decline. Prior to today’s Fed announcement, the interbank borrowing rate was averaging 0.13% over the period since the beginning of Quantitative Easing. In other words, there has not been enough demand from banks for the available liquidity to push the rate up to the 0.25% limit.

Similarly, after today’s announced “rate hike,” the rate might settle at 0.25%, the max of the previous rate and the bottom range of the new rate. However, the fact of the matter is that the available liquidity exceeded demand in the old rate range. The purpose of raising interest rates is to choke off credit demand, but there was no need to choke off credit demand when the demand for credit was only sufficient to keep the average rate in the midpoint of the old range. This “rate hike” is a fraud. It is only for the idiots in the financial media who have been going on about a rate hike forever and the need for the Fed to protect its credibility by raising interest rates.

Look at it this way. The banking system as a whole does not need to borrow as it is sitting on $2.42 trillion in excess reserves. The negative impact of the “rate hike” affects only smaller banks that are lending to businesses and consumers. If these banks find themselves fully loaned up and in need of overnight reserves to meet their reserve requirements, they will need to borrow from a bank with excess reserves. Thus, the rate hike has the effect of making smaller banks pay higher interest expense to the mega-banks favored by the Federal Reserve. A different way of putting it is that the “rate hike” favors banks sitting on excess reserves over banks who are lending to businesses and consumers in their community. In other words, the rate hike just facilitates more looting by the One%.

Their debt is not high enough yet.

• Japan To Craft $27 Billion Extra Stimulus Budget To Spur Growth (Reuters)

Japan’s cabinet is set to approve on Friday an extra budget worth $27 billion to fund stimulus spending for the current fiscal year ending in March to rev up the flagging economy, government sources told Reuters. The 3.3213 trillion yen ($27.14 billion) extra stimulus budget includes spending for steps to support elderly pensioners with cash benefits and farmers seen hit by the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade deal, the sources said on condition of anonymity because the plan has not been finalised. In a show of efforts to fix dire public finances, the government will fund the stimulus without resorting to fresh borrowing, while tapping cash reserves left from the previous year’s budget and higher-than-expected tax revenue, they said.

These funding sources will allow the government to reduce its plans to issue new bonds by 444.7 billion yen from the initially planned 36.9 trillion yen, they said. The government revised up the tax revenue estimate for this fiscal year by 1.899 trillion yen to a 24-year high of 56.4 trillion yen, reflecting increase in corporate tax payments on the back of rising profits. Non-tax revenue was cut by 346.6 billion yen from an initial estimate of 4.95 trillion yen, due to expected cuts in the Bank of Japan’s payment into the government’s coffers because of the bank’s plan to replenish its reserves. The extra budget will be sent to parliament for approval early next year, along with an annual budget for the coming fiscal year that starts in April.

“..investigating whether officials inside the China Securities Regulatory Commission used their knowledge of the rescue effort to enrich their friends or themselves..”

• Beijing Probes Architects of Stock-Market Rescue (WSJ)

Having already investigated investors and brokerages in connection with a bungled summer stock-market rescue totaling more than $200 billion, Beijing is now probing the rescuers. Communist Party graft busters are investigating whether officials inside the China Securities Regulatory Commission used their knowledge of the rescue effort to enrich their friends or themselves, say agency officials familiar with the probe. In recent weeks, they have been taking officials, one by one, to a hotel close to the agency’s headquarters to press them to come clean or report on others, the officials say. The investigators also have set up shop on the top floor of the agency’s 22-story headquarters in downtown Beijing, banned agency officials from leaving China and set up a hotline and red mailbox in the lobby for anonymous tips, the officials say.

Already two top CSRC officials have been removed from their posts and placed under investigation on suspicion of leaking the government’s moves to private investors who used it to reap profits, according to officials with knowledge of the probe. The officials familiar with the probe told The Wall Street Journal that one focus is suspected chummy ties between the regulators and those they regulate. “They’re trying to determine what went wrong with the action to save the market this summer,” one of the officials said. “Was there anyone who inappropriately profited from the action?” [..]

The investigation was sparked by a stock-market rescue effort that called into question China’s ability to manage a market-driven economy, a stated national goal. That effort included a massive government-led buying binge, with a state lender plowing 1.2 trillion yuan ($188 billion) into the stock market and brokerages vowing to spend 120 billion yuan more, while other state-backed companies spent an undisclosed amount. Chinese officials have said those unprecedented measures were necessary to preventing the stock rout from spreading to other parts of China’s financial system.

The not-official numbers.

• China Beige Book Shows ‘Disturbing’ Economic Deterioration (BBG)

China’s economic conditions deteriorated across the board in the fourth quarter, according to a private survey from a New York-based research group that contrasted with recent official indicators that signaled some stabilization in the country’s slowdown. National sales revenue, volumes, output, prices, profits, hiring, borrowing, and capital expenditure were all weaker than the prior three months, according to the fourth-quarter China Beige Book, published by CBB International. The indicator is modeled on the survey compiled by the Federal Reserve on the U.S. economy, and was first published in 2012. The world’s second-largest economy lacks the kind of comprehensive data available on developed nations, making it harder for investors to get a clear read – particularly as China transitions from reliance on manufacturing and investment toward services and consumption.

Official data on industrial production, retail sales and fixed-asset investment all exceeded forecasts for November, while consumer inflation perked up and a slide in imports moderated. The Beige Book’s profit reading is “particularly disturbing,” with the share of firms reporting earnings gains slipping to the lowest level recorded, CBB President Leland Miller wrote in the release. While retail and real estate held up reasonably well, manufacturing and services performed poorly, with revenues, employment, capital expenditure and profits weakening. The survey shows “pervasive weakness,” Miller wrote in the report. “The popular rush to find a successful manufacturing-to-services transition will have to be put on hold for a bit. Only the part about struggling manufacturing held true.”

After efforts including six interest-rate cuts since late 2014 failed to revive growth, policy makers are switching focus to fix problems like overcapacity on the supply side. President Xi Jinping – seeking to keep growth at a minimum 6.5% a year through 2020 – is juggling short-term stimulus with long-term prescriptions to avoid the middle-income trap that has ensnared developing nations after bouts of rapid growth before they became wealthy. China’s leaders convene their annual economic work meeting Friday, according to the People’s Daily. Officials typically set the growth target for the coming year at the conference, which lasts a few days.

“She shares the prosecutors’ view that there is no basis for any charge against her.”

• IMF’s Lagarde to Face Trial for ‘Negligence’ in Tapie Case (BBG)

IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde will be tried for “negligence” in relation to a settlement the French government reached with businessman Bernard Tapie during her time as finance minister, a French court said Thursday. Lagarde, 59, has repeatedly denied wrongdoing and will appeal the decision to put her on trial, her lawyer said. The decision was made by a special commission of the court against the advice of the prosecutor, a court official said. The trial concerns Lagarde’s 2008 decision to allow an arbitration process to end a dispute between Tapie, a supporter of then-French President Nicolas Sarkozy, and former state-owned bank Credit Lyonnais. The court has been looking into whether she erred in agreeing to the arbitration, which resulted in the tycoon being awarded about €403 million.

Having to face trial in France could have serious implications for Lagarde’s future at the helm of the IMF, though her job may not be in any immediate danger. Her five-year term as managing director expires in July. At the fund’s annual meeting in Lima in October, Lagarde said she’d be open to serving another term. “I assume this would probably go quickly, if only to remove the cloud of suspicion over her,” said Christopher Mesnooh, a Paris-based lawyer at Field Fisher Waterhouse, who isn’t involved in the Lagarde case. “Everyone knows the importance of Christine Lagarde to the world economy. They won’t want to leave this unresolved.”

Lagarde reaffirms that she “acted in the best interest of the French State and in full compliance with the law,” according to an e-mailed statement from her attorney Yves Repiquet. “She shares the prosecutors’ view that there is no basis for any charge against her.” The IMF board said Thursday that it sees Lagarde as still able to do her job. “The Executive Board continues to express its confidence in the managing director’s ability to effectively carry out her duties,” IMF spokesman Gerry Rice said in an e-mailed statement. “The board will continue to be briefed on this matter.”

Banks are more important than countries.

• IMF Admits Mistakes Over Greece’s Bailout Program (GR)

The IMF acknowledged that it made mistakes and omissions in the Greek bailout program approved in May 2010, as it did not include debt restructuring. The IMF Board of Directors approved the evaluation report on the programs during the economic crisis. An independent committee will examine the issue, especially on debt restructuring, which, as highlighted on the report, multiplied difficulties in Greece. According to a Mega television report, the Board expects the report of the Independent Office Fund Evaluation on the role played by its members on the Eurozone crisis. However, the report will be delayed at the request of Poul Thomsen, on the grounds that “the program is still running.”

Regarding the restructuring of the Greek debt, the report states that there was no restructuring because of the fear that the crisis would spread to other Eurozone countries. There was also the fear of exposure of European banks to the Greek debt. Only when the ECB intervened to protect the Eurozone and two years of uncertainty passed, then the Eurozone was secure, the report says. When it was decided to restructure private debt (PSI) the “haircut” was great for the creditors compared to others, but at the same time chances that it would prove insufficient to restore debt sustainability were increased, the report says, according to Mega.

Regarding restructuring of the Greek debt, it is implicitly admitted in the report that it was absolutely necessary in 2010. It is also admitted that for the 2010 and 2012 programs, internal devaluation through reforms in labor and product markets was the main goal. To this end, they decided measures such as reducing nominal wages and benefits in the public sector, reducing minimum wages, the reform of the collective bargaining system, promoting privatization, reducing bureaucracy and promoting competition.

This can not end well. A revolt is building.

• Beijing Grinds To Halt As Second Ever ‘Red Smog Alert’ Issued (Reuters)

China’s capital city issued a “red alert” for pollution on Friday, hard on the heels of its first-ever such warning earlier in December, as Beijing’s leadership vowed to crack down on often hazardous levels of smog. Authorities in the Chinese capital warned the city would be shrouded by heavy pollution from Saturday until next Tuesday, prompting the highest-level warning that leads to emergency responses such as limiting car use and closing schools. After decades of unbridled economic growth, China’s leadership has vowed to tackle heavy air, water and soil pollution, including the thick smog that often blankets major cities. Beijing’s second red alert comes after a landmark climate agreement was reached in Paris in December, setting a course to move away from a fossil fuel-driven economy within decades in a bid to arrest global warming.

The city’s first red alert was issued on 7 December, restricting traffic and halting outdoor construction. The Beijing Meteorological Service said in a statement vehicle use would be severely restricted, and that fireworks and outdoor barbecues would be banned. It also recommended schools cancel classes. City residents have previously criticised authorities for being too slow to issue red alerts for heavy smog, which often exceeds hazardous levels on pollution indices. The environmental protection minister, Chen Jining, vowed in December to punish agencies and officials for any failure to implement a pollution emergency response plan quickly, the state-run Global Times tabloid said. Many cities around China suffer high levels of pollution, with Shanghai schools banning outdoor activities and authorities limiting work at construction sites and factories earlier this week.

In the eyes of the richer Europeans, they are the victims, not the refugees or Greece.

• EU Puts Blame On Greece, Turkey At Refugee Summit (Kath.)

EU leaders meeting in Brussels on Thursday pressed Turkey to curb the flow of migrants entering the bloc via Greece and urged Athens to speed up its efforts to accommodate and repatriate migrants. Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras met his Turkish counterpart Ahmet Davutoglu on the sidelines of the mini-summit in Brussels which brought together 11 EU leaders and Davutoglu. According to sources, Tsipras urged European officials to ensure that a recent agreement between the EU and Turkey to stem migrant flows is being observed. Tsipras repeated Greece’s position that refugees should be transferred directly from Turkey to other EU member-states. But, according to sources, several EU leaders made it clear to Davutoglu that refugee relocations from Turkey would not begun until Ankara makes good on commitments to the EU to curb the flow of migrants to the EU via Greece.

Turkey was not the only country to come under pressure at the summit, which is to continue on Friday. Greece was criticized, chiefly by German Chancellor Angela Merkel, for delays in completing a series of screening centers for migrants on Aegean islands, dubbed hot spots. Merkel also complained about the slow rate of repatriations of migrants from Greece. Tsipras countered that Greek authorities face problems in returning migrants to countries such as Pakistan where authorities are not always cooperative. As for a proposal for the creation of an EU border force with stronger powers, the majority of leaders present, including Tsipras, backed the idea in principle. The leaders of Hungary, Malta and Poland were the most cautious while Tsipras insisted that any upgraded border force should not compromise national sovereignty. Meanwhile back in Athens, Greek authorities continued their efforts to accommodate hundreds of migrants in temporary accommodation centers.

But many appeared reluctant to stay in the designated facilities. Of some 1,300 migrants who have been staying in the Tae Kwo Do Stadium in Palaio Faliro, only 235 were at the old Olympic hockey venue in nearby Elliniko following a relocation on Thursday night. It is unclear where the rest of the migrants went though large numbers have been gathering in squares in central Athens since the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia tightened its border with Greece. Athens Mayor Giorgos Kaminis on Thursday expressed concern at the presence of thousands of migrants who do not merit refugee status, from countries such as Morocco, Algeria and Pakistan, stuck in the capital and other Greek cities. “We do not want these people to be wandering around unable to survive, with no prospects,” he said, adding that he had called on authorities to make use of abandoned military facilities as temporary accommodation.

This can only end badly. Someone get a good lawyer before this mess gets any bigger.

• EU To Fast-Track Border Control Plans (RTE)

EU leaders have pledged to fast-track the establishment of an EU border and coast guard force. At a summit in Brussels, they last night urged each other to implement measures agreed this year to curb migration across the Mediterranean. By the middle of next year, they decided, they would agree the details of the new border force which was proposed by the EU executive earlier this week. Some leaders, including Greek PM Alexis Tsipras, made clear, however, that they wanted to strike out a controversial element of the proposal which would give Brussels power to send in EU border guards without a country’s consent. Summing up the three-hour discussion, European Council President Donald Tusk, said leaders had agreed there was a “delivery deficit” in making good on a series of measures agreed over recent months to stem chaotic movements that have put Europe’s Schengen open-borders area in jeopardy.

“Over the past months, the European Council has developed a strategy aimed at stemming the unprecedented migratory flows Europe is facing,” the final agreement read. “However, implementation is insufficient and has to be speeded up. “For the integrity of Schengen to be safeguarded it is indispensable to regain control over the external borders.” Greece and Italy are under pressure to do more to manage and identify those arriving, a million or more so far this year, while governments in general have yet to make good on promises to help take in asylum seekers and deport unwanted migrants. There are only two fully operational “hotspots” for screening of migrants arriving to Italy and Greece from 11 that are supposed to be set up.

Exactly what Berlin and brussels hope to achieve.

• Greece Risks Becoming A ‘Black Box’ For Stranded Migrants (FT)

Greece risks becoming a vast holding pen for tens of thousands of migrants arriving by boat from Turkey as neighbouring countries close their borders, prime minister Alexis Tsipras has warned. Mr Tsipras also expressed frustration with plans to create a new EU border force that could be deployed to the bloc’s external borders even against the objections of the relevant national government. “Greece stands accused of not being able to protect its border but they [other EU countries] don’t tell us what they expect us to do,” Mr Tsipras told the FT. “We have to rescue people in danger of losing their lives [at sea crossing from Turkey]. If they want us to carry out pushbacks, they must say so,” he added.

He was speaking as the European Commission unveiled its proposal for the new border force, which is widely viewed as a means to address a porous Greek frontier that has become an entry point for hundreds of thousands of migrants seeking to reach Germany and other, more prosperous parts of the EU. Greece only reluctantly accepted 400 officials from the EU’s current border agency, Frontex, to help police its frontier with Macedonia, and the issue of sovereignty cuts deep in a nation that has lost control of much of its economic policymaking as a consequence of its international bailouts. Crossings to Greece’s eastern islands have slowed somewhat of late – possibly because of bad weather – but still averaged about 3,400 per day this month.

According to a EU report on Turkey’s efforts to stem the flow, sent to national capitals on Wednesday, Brussels remains unconvinced the reduction was owing to any new efforts by Ankara following a pledge last month to crack down in exchange for €3bn in EU aid. The report comes ahead of a meeting between Turkey’s prime minister and a group of EU prime ministers on the sidelines of a two-day Brussels summit. That meeting, hosted by Austria and including Mr Tsipras and Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, concerns a voluntary programme in which refugees currently in Turkey would be resettled among willing member states. While Berlin had hoped the scheme would total as many as 500,000 refugees, it is likely to include only about 50,000, according to estimates from officials involved in the talks. They also made clear the scheme will not go ahead unless Turkey manages to cut the number of people entering Europe.

Athens has become increasingly concerned that it will be stuck in the middle – with Ankara failing to stop the influx and countries to the north blocking those migrants they believe are motivated by economic despair and therefore would not qualify as war refugees. For the past four weeks, only migrants fleeing wars and violence in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan have been allowed to cross Greece’s northern border into Macedonia and continue the journey to central Europe. “Greece is in danger of becoming a black box [for refugees] if these flows don’t decrease,” Mr Tsipras said. “Slovenia, Croatia, the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, all took the decision to filter people by nationality, for example, not accepting those from north African countries and Iran. This is not correct,” he added.

Debt Rattle December 5 2015

Dec 052015

December 5, 2015 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 10:17 am Finance Tagged with: bonds, debt, derivatives, ECB, euro, OPEC, Schengen, SEC, stimulus Comments Off

DPC “Broad Street and curb market, New York” 1906

• US, EU Bond Markets Lose $270 Billion In One Day (BBG)

• US Corporate Debt Downgrades Reach $1 Trillion (FT)

• UK Call For ‘Multicurrency’ EU Triggers ECB Alarm (FT)

• Why the Euro Is A Dead Currency (Martin Armstrong)

• ‘There Cannot Be A Limit’ To Stimulus, Says ECB president Mario Draghi (AFP)

• SEC to Crack Down on Derivatives (WSJ)

• Banks Said to Face SEC Probe Into Possible Credit Swap Collusion (BBG)

• Enough Of Aid – Let’s Talk Reparations (Hickel)

• 20 Billionaires Now Have More Wealth Than Half US Population (Collins)

• OPEC Fails To Agree Production Ceiling As Iran Pledges Output Boost (Reuters)

• Germany Rebukes Own Intelligence Agency for Criticizing Saudi Policy (NY Times)

• Germany Sees EU Border Guards Stepping In For Crises (Reuters)

• EU Considers Measures To Intervene If States’ Borders Are Not Guarded (I.ie)

” In the old days, this would have been a one-week trade. In the new world, and in the less liquid market we live in today, it takes one day for the repricing.”

• US, EU Bond Markets Lose $270 Billion In One Day (BBG)

December has been a bruising month for bond traders and we’re only four days in. The value of the U.S. fixed-income market slid by $162.5 billion on Thursday while the euro area’s shrank by the equivalent of $107.5 billion as a smaller-than-expected stimulus boost by the European Central Bank and hawkish comments from Janet Yellen pushed up yields around the world. A global index of bonds compiled by Bank of America Merrill Lynch slumped the most since June 2013. The ECB led by President Mario Draghi increased its bond-buying program by at least €360 billion and cut the deposit rate by 10 basis points at a policy meeting Thursday but the package fell short of the amount many economists had predicted.

Fed Chair Yellen told Congress U.S. household spending had been “particularly solid in 2015,” and car sales were strong, backing the case for the central bank to raise interest rates this month for the first time in almost a decade.”A lot of people lost money,” said Charles Comiskey at Bank of Nova Scotia, one of the 22 primary dealers obligated to bid at U.S. debt sales. “People were caught in those trades. In the old days, this would have been a one-week trade. In the new world, and in the less liquid market we live in today, it takes one day for the repricing.” The bond rout on Thursday added weight to warnings from Franklin Templeton’s Michael Hasenstab that there is a “a lot of pain” to come as rising U.S. interest rates disrupts complacency in the debt market.

“A lot of investors have gotten very complacent and comfortable with the idea that there’s global deflation and you can go long rates forever,” Hasenstab, whose Templeton Global Bond Fund sits atop Morningstar Inc.’s 10-year performance ranking, said this week. “When that reverses, there will be a lot of pain in many of the bond markets.”

“The credit cycle is long in the tooth..”

• US Corporate Debt Downgrades Reach $1 Trillion (FT)

More than $1tn in US corporate debt has been downgraded this year as defaults climb to post-crisis highs, underlining investor fears that the credit cycle has entered its final innings. The figures, which will be lifted by downgrades on Wednesday evening that stripped four of the largest US banks of coveted A level ratings, have unnerved credit investors already skittish from a pop in volatility and sharp swings in bond prices. Analysts with Standard & Poor’s, Moody’s and Fitch expect default rates to increase over the next 12 months, an inopportune time for Federal Reserve policymakers, who are expected to begin to tighten monetary policy in the coming weeks. S&P has cut its ratings on US bonds worth $1.04tn in the first 11 months of the year, a 72% jump from the entirety of 2014.

In contrast, upgrades have fallen to less than half a billion dollars, more than a third below last year’s total. The rating agency has more than 300 US companies on review for downgrade, twice the number of groups its analysts have identified for potential upgrade. “The credit cycle is long in the tooth by any standardised measure,” Bonnie Baha at DoubleLine Capital said. “The Fed’s quantitative easing programme helped to defer a default cycle and with the Fed poised to increase rates, that may be about to change.” Much of the decline in fundamentals has been linked to the significant slide in commodity prices, with failures in the energy and metals and mining industries making up a material part of the defaults recorded thus far, Diane Vazza, an analyst with S&P, said. “Those companies have been hit hard and will continue to be hit hard,” Ms Vazza noted. “Oil and gas is a third of distressed credits, that’s going to continue to be weak.”

Some 102 companies have defaulted since the year’s start, including 63 in the US. Only three companies in the country have retained a coveted triple A rating: ExxonMobil, Johnson & Johnson and Microsoft, with the oil major on review for possible downgrade. Portfolio managers and credit desks have already begun to push back at offerings seen as too risky as they continue a flight to quality. Bankers have had to offer steep discounts on several junk bond deals to fill order books, and some were caught off guard when Vodafone, the investment grade UK telecoms group, had to pull a debt sale after investors demanded greater protections. Bond prices, in turn, have slid. The yield on the Merrill Lynch high-yield US bond index, which moves inversely to its price, has shifted back up above 8%. For the lowest rung triple-C and lower rated groups, yields have hit their highest levels in six years.

Draghi apparently doesn’t think very highly of the euro: “Eurozone countries won’t want to give a competitive advantage to those outside and will use it as an excuse. That is what worries him.”

• UK Call For ‘Multicurrency’ EU Triggers ECB Alarm (FT)

David Cameron’s push to rebrand the EU as a “multicurrency union” has triggered high-level concerns at the European Central Bank, which fears it could give countries such as Poland an excuse to stay out of the euro. The UK prime minister wants to rewrite the EU treaty to clarify that some countries will never join the single currency, in an attempt to ensure they do not face discrimination by countries inside the eurozone. Mario Draghi, president of the ECB, is worried the move could weaken the commitment of some countries to join the euro. Beata Szydlo, the new Polish premier, has previously described the euro as a “bad idea” that would make Poland “a second Greece”.

Mr Draghi shares concerns in Brussels that the EU single market could be permanently divided across two regulatory spheres, with eurozone countries facing unfair competition if there were a lighter-touch regime on the outside. The idea of rebranding the EU as a “multicurrency union” was raised during a recent meeting in London between George Osborne, the UK chancellor, and Mr Draghi. Mr Osborne said last month that Britain wanted the treaty to recognise “that the EU has more than one currency”. Under the existing treaty, the euro is the official currency of the EU and every member state is obliged to join — apart from Britain and Denmark, which have opt-outs. The common currency is used by 19 out of 28 member states.

Sluggish growth and a debt crisis have made the euro a less-attractive proposition in recent years, and Mr Draghi’s concern is that a formal recognition that the EU is a “multicurrency union” could make matters worse. “He’s worried that people would resist harmonisation by arguing that the UK and others were gaining an unfair advantage,” said a British official. The ECB said the bank had no formal position on the issue. British ministers are confident that the ECB’s concerns can be addressed, possibly with a treaty clause making clear that every EU member apart from Britain and Denmark is still expected to join the euro.

One official involved in the British EU renegotiations said that any safeguards for Britain must not “permanently divide the ins and outs” or force countries to pick camps. “Whatever we do cannot impair the euro in any way. The single currency must be able to function,” the official said. Since the launch of the single currency in 1999, the ECB has consistently argued that a single market and currency must have common governance and institutions. One European adviser familiar with Mr Draghi’s views said: “Eurozone countries won’t want to give a competitive advantage to those outside and will use it as an excuse. That is what worries him.”

“The Troika will shake every Greek upside down until they rob every personal asset they have.”

• Why the Euro Is A Dead Currency (Martin Armstrong)

I have been warning that government can do whatever it likes and declare anything to be be a criminal act. In the USA, not paying taxes is NOT a crime, failing to file your income tax is the crime. The EU has imposed the first outright total asset reporting requirement for cash, jewelry, and anything else you have of value stored away. As of January 1st, 2016, ALL GREEKS must report their personal cash holdings, whatever jewelry they possess, and the contents of their storage facilities under penalty of criminal prosecution. The dictatorship of the Troika has demanded that Greeks will be the first to have to report all personal assets.

Why the Greek government has NOT exited the Eurozone is just insanity. The Greek government has betrayed its own people to Brussels. The Troika will shake every Greek upside down until they rob every personal asset they have. Greeks are just the first test case. All Greeks must declare cash over € 15,000, jewelry worth more than 30,000 euros and the contents of their storage lockers/facilities. This is a decree of the Department of Justice and the Ministry of Finance meaning if you do not comply, it will become criminal. The Troika is out of its mind. They are destroying Europe and this is the very type of action by governments that has resulted in revolutions.

The Greek government has betrayed its own people and they are placing at risk the viability of Europe to even survive as a economic union. The Troika is UNELECTED and does NOT have to answer to the people. It has converted a democratic Europe into the Soviet Union of Europe. The Greek people are being stripped of their assets for the corruption of politicians. This is the test run. Everyone else will be treated the same. Just how much longer can the EU remain together?

Thus putting QE on par with stupidity. Sounds about right.

• ‘There Cannot Be A Limit’ To Stimulus, Says ECB president Mario Draghi (AFP)

Mario Draghi has said the European Central Bank would intensify efforts to support the eurozone economy and boost inflation toward its 2pc goal if necessary. Speaking a day after the ECB’s moves to expand stimulus fell short of market expectations, the central bank president said that he was confident of returning to that level of inflation “without undue delay”. “But there is no doubt that if we had to intensify the use of our instruments to ensure that we achieve our price stability mandate, we would,” he said in a speech to the Economic Club of New York. “There cannot be any limit to how far we are willing to deploy our instruments, within our mandate, and to achieve our mandate,” he said.

On Thursday the ECB sent equity markets tumbling, and reversed the euro’s downward course, after it announced an interest rate cut that was less than investors had expected and held back from expanding the size of its bond-buying stimulus. The bank cut its key deposit rate by a modest 0.10 percentage points to -0.3pc, and only extended the length of its bond purchase program by six months to March 2017. Critics said that was not strong enough action to counter deflationary pressures on the euro area economy. Some analysts believed a desire for stronger moves, like an expansion of bond purchases, was stymied by powerful, more conservative members of the ECB governing council, including Bundesbank chief Jens Weidmann.

But Mr Draghi insisted that there was “very broad agreement” within the council for the extent of the bank’s actions. And, he added, it would do more if necessary: “There is no particular limit to how we can deploy any of our tools.” He acknowledged some market doubts that central banks are proving unable to reverse the downward trend in inflation, saying that, even if there is a lag to the impact of policies in place, they are working. “I would dispute entirely the notion that we are powerless to reach our objective,” he said. “The evidence at our disposal shows, on the contrary, that the instruments we are currently deploying are having the effect intended.” Without them, he added, “inflation would likely have been negative this year”.

Derivatives will continue to be advertized as ‘insurance’, but what they really do is keep the casino going by keeping losses -and risks- off the books.

• SEC to Crack Down on Derivatives (WSJ)

U.S. securities regulators, under pressure to demonstrate they have a handle on potential risks in the asset-management industry, are about to crack down on the use of derivatives in certain funds sold to the public, worried that some products are too precarious for retail investors. The restrictions, which the Securities and Exchange Commission is set to propose next Friday, are expected to have an outsize effect on a small but growing sector that uses the complex instruments to try to deliver double or even triple returns of the indexes they track. Some regulators say these products—known as “leveraged exchange-traded funds”—can be highly volatile, and expose investors to sudden, outsize losses.

The proposed restrictions could adversely affect in particular firms like ProShare Advisors, a midsize fund company that has carved out a niche role as a leading leveraged-ETF provider. The Bethesda, Md., firm is mounting a behind-the-scenes campaign to persuade the SEC to scale back the proposal, arguing that regulators’ concerns are overblown, according to people familiar with the firms’ thinking. Exchange-traded funds hold a basket of assets like mutual funds and trade on an exchange like a stock. At issue is the growing use by some ETFs of derivatives, contracts that permit investors to speculate on underlying assets—such as commodity prices—and to amplify the potential gains through leverage, or borrowed money. But those derivatives also raise the riskiness of those investments, and can also magnify the losses.

SEC officials have said the increasing use of derivatives by mutual funds to boost leverage warrants heightened scrutiny, saying that the agency’s existing investor protection rules haven’t kept pace with industry practices. Some of the existing guidance goes back more than 30 years, long before the advent of modern derivatives.

CDS have developed into de facto instruments to hide one’s losses behind. It’s the only way the world of finance can keep churning along in the face of deflation.

• Banks Said to Face SEC Probe Into Possible Credit Swap Collusion (BBG)

U.S. regulators are examining whether banks colluded in setting prices in the derivatives market where investors speculate on credit risk, according to a person with knowledge of the matter. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission is probing whether firms acted in unison to distort prices in the $6 trillion market for credit-default swaps indexes, said the person, who asked not to be identified because the investigation is private. The regulator is trying to determine if dealers have misrepresented index prices, the person said. The credit-default swaps benchmarks allow investors to make bets on the likelihood of default by companies, countries or securities backed by mortgages. The probe comes after successful cases brought against Wall Street’s illegal practices tied to interest rates and foreign currencies.

Those cases showed traders misrepresented prices and coordinated their positions to push valuations in their favor, often through chat rooms – practices that violate antitrust laws. The government has used those prosecutions as a road map to pursue similar conduct in different markets. Credit-default swaps, which gained notoriety during the financial crisis for amplifying losses and spreading risks from the U.S. housing bust across the globe, have since come under more scrutiny by regulators. Trading in swaps index contracts has increased in recent years as investors look for easy ways to speculate on, say, the health of U.S. companies, or the risk that defaults will increase as seven years of easy-money policies come to an end.

Toward the end of each trading day, benchmark prices for indexes are tabulated by third-party providers based on dealer quotes, creating a level at which traders can mark their positions. This process is similar to how other markets that don’t trade on exchanges set benchmark prices. That includes the London interbank offered rate, an interest-rate benchmark. In the Libor scandal, regulators accused banks of making submissions on borrowing rates that benefited their trading positions. A group of Wall Street’s biggest banks have traditionally dominated trading in the credit swaps, acting as market makers to hedge funds, insurance companies and other institutional investors. Those dealers send quotes to clients over e-mails or on electronic screens showing at which price they will buy or sell default insurance. Those values rise and fall as the perception of credit risk changes.

A very interesting theme. “It was like the holocaust seven times over.”

• Enough Of Aid – Let’s Talk Reparations (Hickel)

Colonialism is one of those things you’re not supposed to discuss in polite company – at least not north of the Mediterranean. Most people feel uncomfortable about it, and would rather pretend it didn’t happen. In fact, that appears to be the official position. In the mainstream narrative of international development peddled by institutions from the World Bank to the UK’s Department of International Development, the history of colonialism is routinely erased. According to the official story, developing countries are poor because of their own internal problems, while western countries are rich because they worked hard, and upheld the right values and policies. And because the west happens to be further ahead, its countries generously reach out across the chasm to give “aid” to the rest – just a little something to help them along.

If colonialism is ever acknowledged, it’s to say that it was not a crime, but rather a benefit to the colonised – a leg up the development ladder. But the historical record tells a very different story, and that opens up difficult questions about another topic that Europeans prefer to avoid: reparations. No matter how much they try, however, this topic resurfaces over and over again. Recently, after a debate at the Oxford Union, Indian MP Shashi Tharoor’s powerful case for reparations went viral, attracting more than 3 million views on YouTube. Clearly the issue is hitting a nerve. The reparations debate is threatening because it completely upends the usual narrative of development. It suggests that poverty in the global south is not a natural phenomenon, but has been actively created. And it casts western countries in the role not of benefactors, but of plunderers.

When it comes to the colonial legacy, some of the facts are almost too shocking to comprehend. When Europeans arrived in what is now Latin America in 1492, the region may have been inhabited by between 50 million and 100 million indigenous people. By the mid 1600s, their population was slashed to about 3.5 million. The vast majority succumbed to foreign disease and many were slaughtered, died of slavery or starved to death after being kicked off their land. It was like the holocaust seven times over. What were the Europeans after? Silver was a big part of it. Between 1503 and 1660, 16m kilograms of silver were shipped to Europe, amounting to three times the total European reserves of the metal. By the early 1800s, a total of 100m kg of silver had been drained from the veins of Latin America and pumped into the European economy, providing much of the capital for the industrial revolution.

To get a sense for the scale of this wealth, consider this thought experiment: if 100m kg of silver was invested in 1800 at 5% interest – the historical average – it would amount to £110trn ($165trn) today. An unimaginable sum. Europeans slaked their need for labour in the colonies – in the mines and on the plantations – not only by enslaving indigenous Americans but also by shipping slaves across the Atlantic from Africa. Up to 15 million of them. In the North American colonies alone, Europeans extracted an estimated 222,505,049 hours of forced labour from African slaves between 1619 and 1865. Valued at the US minimum wage, with a modest rate of interest, that’s worth $97trn – more than the entire global GDP.

Any economy that has such traits must fail, by definition. And it will.

• 20 Billionaires Now Have More Wealth Than Half US Population (Collins)

When should we be alarmed about so much wealth in so few hands? The Great Recession and its anemic recovery only deepened the economic inequality that’s drawn so much attention in its wake. Nearly all wealth and income gains since then have flowed to the top one-tenth of America’s richest 1%. The very wealthiest 400 Americans command dizzying fortunes. Their combined net worth, as catalogued in the 2015 Forbes 400 list, is $2.34 trillion. You can’t make this list unless you’re worth a cool $1.7 billion. These 400 rich people – including Bill Gates, Donald Trump, Oprah Winfrey, and heirs to the Wal-Mart fortune – have roughly as much wealth as the bottom 61% of the population, or over 190 million people added together, according to a new report I co-authored.

That equals the wealth of the nation’s entire African-American population, plus a third of the Latino population combined. A few of those 400 individuals are generous philanthropists. But extreme inequality of this sort undermines social mobility, democracy, and economic stability. Even if you celebrate successful entrepreneurship, isn’t there a point things go too far? To me, 400 people having more money than 190 million of their compatriots is just that point. Concentrating wealth to this extent gives rich donors far too much political power, including the wherewithal to shape the rules that govern our economy. Half of all political contributions in the 2016 presidential campaign have come from just 158 families, according to research by The New York Times.

The wealth concentration doesn’t stop there. The richest 20 individuals alone own more wealth than the entire bottom half of the U.S. population. This group – which includes Gates, Warren Buffet, the Koch brothers, Mark Zuckerberg, and Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, among others – is small enough to fit on a private jet. But together they’ve hoarded as much wealth as 152 million of their fellow Americans.

Debt deflation is real. And it’s felt first in the world’s prime commodity. “The world is already producing up to 2 million bpd more than it consumes.”

• OPEC Fails To Agree Production Ceiling As Iran Pledges Output Boost (Reuters)

OPEC members failed to agree an oil production ceiling on Friday at a meeting that ended in acrimony, after Iran said it would not consider any production curbs until it restores output scaled back for years under Western sanctions. Friday’s developments set up the fractious cartel for more price wars in an already heavily oversupplied market. Oil prices have more than halved over the past 18 months to a fraction of what most OPEC members need to balance their budgets. Brent oil futures fell by 1 percent on Friday to trade around $43, only a few dollars off a six year low. Banks such as Goldman Sachs predict they could fall further to as low as $20 per barrel as the world produces more oil than it consumes and runs out of capacity to store the excess.

A final OPEC statement was issued with no mention of a new production ceiling. The last time OPEC failed to reach a deal was in 2011 when Saudi Arabia was pushing the group to increase output to avoid a price spike amid a Libyan uprising. “We have no decision, no number,” Iranian oil minister Bijan Zangeneh told reporters after the meeting. OPEC’s secretary general Abdullah al-Badri said OPEC could not agree on any figures because it could not predict how much oil Iran would add to the market next year, as sanctions are withdrawn under a deal reached six months ago with world powers over its nuclear program. Most ministers left the meeting without making comments. Badri tried to lessen the embarrassment by saying OPEC was as strong as ever, only to hear an outburst of laughter from reporters and analysts in the conference room.

[..] Iran has made its position clear ahead of the meeting with Zangeneh saying Tehran would raise supply by at least 1 million barrels per day – or one percent of global supply – after sanctions are lifted. The world is already producing up to 2 million bpd more than it consumes.

They will soon be forced to change their stand on Saud. Information on support for terrorist groups will become available.

• Germany Rebukes Own Intelligence Agency for Criticizing Saudi Policy (NY Times)

The German government issued an unusual public rebuke to its own foreign intelligence service on Thursday over a blunt memo saying that Saudi Arabia was playing an increasingly destabilizing role in the Middle East. The intelligence agency’s memo risked playing havoc with Berlin’s efforts to show solidarity with France in its military campaign against the Islamic State and to push forward the tentative talks on how to end the Syrian civil war. The Bundestag, the lower house of the German Parliament, is due to vote on Friday on whether to send reconnaissance planes, midair fueling capacity and a frigate to the Middle East to support the French. The memo was sent to selected German journalists on Wednesday.

In it, the foreign intelligence agency, known as the BND, offered an unusually frank assessment of recent Saudi policy. “The cautious diplomatic stance of the older leading members of the royal family is being replaced by an impulsive policy of intervention,” said the memo, which was titled “Saudi Arabia — Sunni regional power torn between foreign policy paradigm change and domestic policy consolidation” and was one and a half pages long. The memo said that King Salman and his son Prince Mohammed bin Salman were trying to build reputations as leaders of the Arab world. Since taking the throne early this year, King Salman has invested great power in Prince Mohammed, making him defense minister and deputy crown prince and giving him oversight of oil and economic policy.

The sudden prominence of such a young and untested prince –he is believed to be about 30, and had little public profile before his father became king — has worried some Saudis and foreign diplomats. Prince Mohammed is seen as a driving force behind the Saudi military campaign against the Iranian-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen, which human rights groups say has caused thousands of civilian deaths. The intelligence agency’s memo was flatly repudiated by the German Foreign Ministry in Berlin, which said the German Embassy in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, had issued a statement making clear that “the BND statement reported by media is not the position of the federal government.”

This is too crazy.

• Germany Sees EU Border Guards Stepping In For Crises (Reuters)

Germany’s interior minister expects the EU executive to propose new rules for protecting the bloc’s frontiers that would mean European border guards stepping in when a national government failed to defend them. Thomas de Maiziere spoke as he arrived on Friday for an EU meeting in Brussels where ministers will discuss how to safeguard their Schengen system of open borders inside the EU and Greece’s difficulties in controlling unprecedented flows of people arriving via Turkey and streaming north into Europe. Calling for the reinforcement of the EU’s Frontex border agency, whose help Greece called for on Thursday after coming under intense pressure from other EU states, de Maiziere said he expected an enhanced role for Frontex in proposals the European Commission is due to make on borders on Dec. 15.

“The Commission should put forward a proposal … which has the goal of when a national state is not effectively fulfilling its duty of defending the external border, then that can be taken over by Frontex,” he told reporters. EU states’ sovereign responsibility for their section of the external border of the Schengen zone is protected in the Union’s treaties. But the failure of Greece’s overburdened authorities to control migrant flows that have then triggered other states to reimpose controls on internal Schengen frontiers has driven calls for a more collective approach on the external frontier. Following diplomatic threats that it risked being shunned from the Schengen zone if it failed to accept EU help in registering and controlling migrants, Greece finally activated EU support mechanisms late on Thursday.

De Maiziere noted a Franco-German push for Frontex, whose role is largely to coordinate national border agencies, to be complemented by a more ambitious European border and coast guard system. He did not say whether new proposals would strengthen the EU’s ability to intervene with a reluctant member state. A Commission spokeswoman said the EU executive would make its proposal on Dec. 15 for a European Border and Coast Guard. German officials noted that the existing Schengen Borders Code provides for recommendations to member states that they request help from the EU “in the case of serious deficiencies relating to external border control.” Other ministers and the Commission welcomed Greece’s decision to accept more help from Frontex.

Austrian Interior Minister Johanna Mikl-Leitner said: “Greece is finally taking responsibility for guarding the external European border. I have for months been demanding that Greece must recognise this responsibility and be ready to accept European help. This is an important step in the right direction.”

1984.

• EU Considers Measures To Intervene If States’ Borders Are Not Guarded (I.ie)

The European Union is considering a measure that would give a new EU border force powers to intervene and guard a member state’s external frontier to protect the Schengen open-borders zone, EU officials and diplomats said yesterday in Brussels. Such a move would be controversial. It might be blocked by states wary of surrendering sovereign control of their territory. But the discussion reflects fears that Greece’s failure to manage a flood of migrants from Turkey has brought Schengen’s open borders to the brink of collapse. Germany’s Thomas de Maiziere, in Brussels for a meeting of EU interior ministers, said he expected proposal from the EU executive due on December 15 to include giving responsibility for controlling a frontier with a non-Schengen country to Frontex, the EU’s border agency, if a member state failed to do so.

“The Commission should put forward a proposal … which has the goal of, when a national state is not effectively fulfilling its duty of defending the external border, then that can be taken over by Frontex,” de Maiziere told reporters. He noted a Franco-German push for Frontex, whose role is largely to coordinate national border agencies, to be complemented by a permanent European Border and Coast Guard – a measure the European Commission has confirmed it will propose. Greece has come under heavy pressure from states concerned about Schengen this week to accept EU offers of help on its borders. Diplomats have warned that Athens might find itself effectively excluded from the Schengen zone if it failed to work with other Europeans to control migration.

Earlier this week, Greece finally agreed to accept help from Frontex, averting a showdown at the ministerial meeting in Brussels. EU diplomats said the proposals to bolster defence of the external Schengen frontiers would look at whether the EU must rely on an invitation from the state concerned. “One option could be not to seek the member state’s approval for deploying Frontex but activating it by a majority vote among all 28 members,” an EU official said. Under the Schengen Borders Code, the Commission can now recommend a state accept help from other EU members to control its frontiers. But it cannot force it to accept help – something that may, in any case, not be practicable. The code also gives states the right to impose controls on internal Schengen borders if external borders are neglected.

As Greece has no land border with the rest of the Schengen zone, that could mean obliging ferries and flights coming from Greece to undergo passport checks. Asked whether an EU force should require an invitation or could be imposed by the bloc, Swedish Interior Minister Anders Ygeman said: “Border control is the competence for the member states, and it’s hard to say that there is a need to impose that on member states forcefully.”On the other hand,” he said, referring to this week’s pressure on Greece, “we must safeguard the borders of Schengen, and what we have seen is that if a country is not able to protect its own border, it can leave Schengen or accept Frontex. It’s not mandatory, but in practice it’s quite mandatory.”

Debt Rattle May 25 2015

May 252015

May 25, 2015 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 10:11 am Finance Tagged with: central banks, China, G7, GMO, Greece, lifeboat, Monsanto, plankton, Spain, stimulus, vote Comments Off

Harris&Ewing District National Bank, Washington, DC 1931

• Memorial Day: Our Soldiers Died For The Profits Of The Bankers (Smedley Butler)

• Europe’s Biggest Debt Collector: Central Banks’ Stimulus Has Failed (Bloomberg)

• “It’s A Coup D’Etat”, “Central Banks Are Out Of Control” – David Stockman (ZH)

• Unemployment Is a Big Threat to Eurozone Economy, Central Bankers Warn (WSJ)

• HSBC Fears World Recession With No Lifeboats Left (AEP)

• Did China Just Launch World’s Biggest Spending Plan? (Gordon Chang)

• G7 Finance Ministers To Address Faltering Global Growth (Reuters)

• Schaeuble Expects Conflict at Dresden G-7 Over Austerity Policy (Bloomberg)

• Greece Hasn’t Got The Money To Make June IMF Repayment (Reuters)

• Greece’s Misery Shows We Need Chapter 11 Bankruptcy For Countries (Guardian)

• Greeks Back Government’s Red Lines, But Want To Keep Euro (AFP)

• The Truth About Riga (Yanis Varoufakis)

• The Bloodied Idealogues vs. The Bloodthirsty Technocrats (StealthFlation)

• Spain’s Ruling Party Battered In Local And Regional Elections (EUObserver)

• Catalan Independence Bid Rocked by Podemos Victory in Barcelona (Bloomberg)

• Auckland Nears $1 Million Average House Price (Guardian)

• Monsanto’s GMO Cotton Problems Drive Indian Farmers To Suicide (RT)

• ‘Incredibly Diverse’, Endangered Plankton Provide Half The World’s Oxygen (SR)

Smedley Butler knew it way back in 1933.

• Memorial Day: Our Soldiers Died For The Profits Of The Bankers (Smedley Butler)

Memorial Day commemorates soldiers killed in war. We are told that the war dead died for us and our freedom. US Marine General Smedley Butler challenged this view. He said that our soldiers died for the profits of the bankers, Wall Street, Standard Oil, and the United Fruit Company. Here is an excerpt from a speech that he gave in 1933:

“War is just a racket. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of people. Only a small inside group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few at the expense of the masses. I believe in adequate defense at the coastline and nothing else. If a nation comes over here to fight, then we’ll fight. The trouble with America is that when the dollar only earns 6% over here, then it gets restless and goes overseas to get 100%. Then the flag follows the dollar and the soldiers follow the flag. I wouldn’t go to war again as I have done to protect some lousy investment of the bankers. There are only two things we should fight for. One is the defense of our homes and the other is the Bill of Rights. War for any other reason is simply a racket.

There isn’t a trick in the racketeering bag that the military gang is blind to. It has its “finger men” to point out enemies, its “muscle men” to destroy enemies, its “brain men” to plan war preparations, and a “Big Boss” Super-Nationalistic-Capitalism. It may seem odd for me, a military man to adopt such a comparison. Truthfulness compels me to. I spent thirty-three years and four months in active military service as a member of this country’s most agile military force, the Marine Corps. I served in all commissioned ranks from Second Lieutenant to Major-General. And during that period, I spent most of my time being a high class muscle- man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.”

“A rate that is too low, or a rate that many of us have never experienced, is so extraordinary that it doesn’t create any stability or faith in the future at all..”

• Europe’s Biggest Debt Collector: Central Banks’ Stimulus Has Failed (Bloomberg)

The head of Europe’s biggest debt collector says the historic wave of stimulus spilling out of central banks has failed to fuel investment growth. Lars Wollung, the chief executive officer of Intrum Justitia AB, warned that record-low interest rates “don’t seem to lead to investments that create jobs,” in an interview in Stockholm. “A rate that is too low, or a rate that many of us have never experienced, is so extraordinary that it doesn’t create any stability or faith in the future at all,” he said. “Rather the opposite: one feels insecure and waits with expansion plans and to hire more people.” The comments mark a blow to central banks who have resorted to everything from negative rates to bond purchases to aid growth.

A study by Intrum Justitia shows 73% of the almost 9,000 European firms surveyed between February and April said low interest rates brought about “no change in investments.” Some even reported a decline. In Sweden, where the central bank’s main rate is minus 0.25%, 82% of companies said it made no difference to their investments. What companies need if they’re “to believe in the future” is certainty that their bills will be paid, Wollung said. That means clearer payments legislation and more incentives for borrowers to repay their debts on time, he said. Intrum Justitia has devoted resources to lobbying officials in Brussels in an effort to bring across its point, Wollung said.

In Germany and Scandinavia, where companies and borrowers can refer to clear and robust legal systems, unemployment is low and economic growth strong, he said. A German firm waits 17 days on average to get paid by a client company. In Italy, it takes 80 days, Intrum figures show. The survey indicates that about 8 million European companies would hire more people if they got their payments faster. “Late payments are a significant problem for companies,” Wollung said. Having a stable cash flow is “probably more important than if interest rates are at 1% or 0.5%,” he said.

No holds barred.

• “It’s A Coup D’Etat”, “Central Banks Are Out Of Control” – David Stockman (ZH)

We’re all about to be taken to the woodshed, warns David Stockman in this excellent interview. The huge wealth disparity is “not because of some flaw in capitalism, or Reagan tax cuts, or even the greed of Wall Street; the problem is central banks that are out of control.” Simply put, they have “syphoned financial resources into pure gambling” and the people that own the stocks and bonds get the huge financial windfall. “The 10% at the top own 85% of the financial assets,” and thus, thanks to the unleashing of almost limitless money-printing, which has created a massive worldwide financial inflation, “the central banks have created and exaggerated the wealth gap.” Stockman concludes, rather ominously,

“it’s a coup d’etat, the central banks have taken over – unconstitutional domination of the entire economy.” “Everywhere, misleading distorted signals are being given to both public and private sector players about financial values… the prices have been falsified by The Fed. We can’t print our way to prosperity… The Fed is now petrified that Wall Street will have a hissy-fit when they tighten.”

Well, they caused it.

• Unemployment Is a Big Threat to Eurozone Economy, Central Bankers Warn (WSJ)

High and divergent unemployment rates in Europe pose a serious threat to the region’s long-term economic health, central bankers and economists warned during a weekend conference held by the European Central Bank. But they stopped short of offering specific advice on the best steps to take. The ECB’s seminar, the second of what it plans as an annual conference in the resort town of Sintra on Portugal’s western coast, brought together central bankers and economists from Europe, the U.S. and Asia to examine the root causes of high unemployment and persistently weak inflation in Europe. The attendees dwelled extensively on an economic concept known as “hysteresis,” a reduction in economic output brought on by weak growth that gives rise to long-term unemployment.

The remedies to such problems, however, lie partly with fiscal-policy officials and not central bankers, who don’t set labor and other economic policies. The conference largely lacked representatives from finance ministries and businesses. But ECB President Mario Draghi signaled that the stakes were too high for central bankers to keep silent, particularly in the 19-member eurozone, where diverse countries ranging from powerful Germany to recession-ravaged Greece set their own economic and fiscal policies but share a single currency and monetary policy. “In a monetary union you can’t afford having large and increasing structural divergences between countries,” Mr. Draghi said on Saturday. “They tend to become explosive; therefore they are going to threaten the existence of the monetary union.”

The eurozone is the world’s second-biggest economy after the U.S. But in recent years it has emerged as one of the global economy’s main trouble spots, having struggled through a pair of recessions since 2009 that pushed the bloc’s unemployment rate into double digits. The region has started to recover, but the damage has resulted in huge gaps in unemployment across the eurozone. “Unemployment in Europe, notably youth unemployment, is not only unbearably high. It is also unbearably different across nations belonging to an economic and monetary union,” Tito Boeri, professor at Bocconi University, and Juan Jimeno of the Bank of Spain wrote in a conference paper.

“JP Morgan estimates that the US economy contracted at a rate of 1.1pc in the first quarter..” “China accounted for 85pc of all global growth in 2012, 54pc in 2013, and 30pc in 2014. This is likely to fall to 24pc this year.”

• HSBC Fears World Recession With No Lifeboats Left (AEP)

The world economy is disturbingly close to stall speed. The United Nations has cut its global growth forecast for this year to 2.8pc, the latest of the multinational bodies to retreat. We are not yet in the danger zone but this pace is only slightly above the 2.5pc rate that used to be regarded as a recession for the international system as a whole. It leaves a thin safety buffer against any economic shock – most potently if China abandons its crawling dollar peg and resorts to ‘beggar-thy-neighbour’ policies, transmitting a further deflationary shock across the global economy. The longer this soggy patch drags on, the greater the risk that the six-year old global recovery will sputter out. While expansions do not die of old age, they do become more vulnerable to all kinds of pathologies.

A sweep of historic data by Warwick University found compelling evidence that economies are more likely to stall as they age, what is known as “positive duration dependence”. The business cycle becomes stretched. Inventories build up and companies defer spending, tipping over at a certain point into a self-feeding downturn. Stephen King from HSCB warns that the global authorities have alarmingly few tools to combat the next crunch, given that interest rates are already zero across most of the developed world, debts levels are at or near record highs, and there is little scope for fiscal stimulus. “The world economy is sailing across the ocean without any lifeboats to use in case of emergency,” he said.

In a grim report – “The World Economy’s Titanic Problem” – he says the US Federal Reserve has had to cut rates by over 500 basis points to right the ship in each of the recessions since the early 1970s. “That kind of traditional stimulus is now completely ruled out. Meanwhile, budget deficits are still uncomfortably large,” he said. The authorities are normally able to replenish their ammunition as recovery gathers steam. This time they are faced with a chronic low-growth malaise – partly due to a global ‘savings glut’, and increasingly to a slow ageing crisis across most of the Northern hemisphere. The Fed keeps having to defer its first rate rise as expectations fall short.

Each of the past four US recoveries has been weaker than the last one. The average growth rate has fallen from 4.5pc in the early 1980s to nearer 2pc this time. The US fiscal deficit has dropped to 2.8pc but is expected to climb again as pension and health care costs bite, even if the economy does well. The US cannot easily launch a fresh New Deal. Public debt was just 38pc on GDP when Franklin Roosevelt took power in 1933, and there were few contingent liabilities hanging over future US finances. “Fiscal stimulus – a novel idea at the time – may have been controversial, but the chances of it working to boost economic activity were quite high given the healthy starting position. Today, it is much more difficult to make the same argument,” he said.

” The reason for the fall in new loans is clear. There is a fundamental lack of demand in China.”

• Did China Just Launch World’s Biggest Spending Plan? (Gordon Chang)

Beijing has just initiated a round of accelerated government spending, and it will, in all probability, end up as the biggest such effort today. Wednesday, the Chinese central government announced both the allocation of 1.13 trillion yuan ($185.8 billion) for upgrading internet infrastructure and the creation of a 124.3 billion yuan fund for affordable housing. These expenditures follow Monday’s authorization of six new rail lines costing 250 billion yuan. This month, as Xinhua News Agency reports, Beijing has unveiled a “pro-growth measure” at the rate of one every two days. April was a banner month for Beijing’s spenders as well. The Ministry of Finance reported a 33.2% increase in fiscal spending compared with same month in 2014.

For the last several years, Beijing has been using fiscal stimulus in varying amounts to keep the economy humming. No one, however, thought Premier Li Keqiang, generally considered a reformer, would resort to the old-line, anti-reform tactic of massive government spending. There were two principal reasons for this belief. First, many thought Beijing had finally opted for fundamental restructuring to grow the economy. Analysts hailed the issuance of the Communist Party’s November 2013 Third Plenum decision, which promised substantial reforms, as proof of the political victory of those favoring progressive change.

Fiscal spending, on the other hand, has been considered the antithesis of reform because investment-led growth—the result of that spending—would only take China further away from the ultimate goal of reform, a consumption-based economy. Second, analysts believed just about everyone in Beijing had come to the inescapable conclusion that former Premier Wen Jiabao’s crash stimulus program, authorized in late 2008, was a huge mistake, largely because it had resulted in grossly inefficient usage of capital, large asset bubbles, and far too much debt. Yet the universally accepted view that there would be no large stimulus was premised on the assumption that the economy would respond to small-scale stimulus.

The economy, unfortunately, has not. Perhaps the most indicative statistic to come out of Beijing in recent days is that, despite all the monetary loosening since the end of last year, there were only 707.9 billion yuan of new loans in April, down from 1.18 trillion yuan in March. The reason for the fall in new loans is clear. There is a fundamental lack of demand in China.

“..a preliminary Reuters poll last week predicted adjusted Q1 U.S. GDP numbers due on Friday would be massively revised down and show a 0.7% contraction..”

• G7 Finance Ministers To Address Faltering Global Growth (Reuters)

Finance ministers from the world’s largest developed economies meet in Germany this week against a backdrop of faltering global growth, scant inflationary pressures and a bond market in turmoil. High on their agenda – even if unofficially – will be Greece and how it can stay in the troubled euro zone. Figures due on Friday from the United States that will almost certainly show the world’s biggest economy contracted last quarter are also likely to feature. “With the negotiations between Greece and the rest of the euro area at an impasse, an impatient German Chancellor Merkel has warned that an agreement must be reached before the end of the month,” said Thomas Costerg, senior economist at Standard Chartered.

Greece cannot make a payment to the IMF due on June 5 unless foreign lenders disburse more aid, a senior ruling party lawmaker said on Wednesday, the latest warning from Athens it is on the verge of default. Analysts largely agree the country’s cash squeeze is increasingly acute and fresh aid will be needed sooner or later to avoid bankruptcy. Merkel and French President Francois Hollande held talks on Thursday with Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras on the sidelines of a European Union summit in Riga, hoping to speed the resolution of Athens’ debt crisis. With business growth slowing in the euro zone and factory activity contracting again in China, market watchers have been looking to the United States to drive a pick-up in growth.

But a preliminary Reuters poll last week predicted that adjusted first quarter U.S. GDP numbers due on Friday would be massively revised down and show a 0.7% contraction in the first three months of this year. “The poor Q1 2015 performance follows growth of just 2.2% in Q4 2014, so there has been very little growth over the last couple of quarters,” said Joseph LaVorgna, chief U.S. economist at Deutsche Bank. “As a result, market participants have started to wonder again whether the U.S. economy might be in an extended period of secular stagnation.”

And there should be.

• Schaeuble Expects Conflict at Dresden G-7 Over Austerity Policy (Bloomberg)

German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble expects a political tussle with his partners over austerity policy when G-7 finance ministers meet on May 27-May 29 in Dresden. Germany’s advocacy of budget cuts to heal euro-zone woes will come under attack at the meeting, Schaeuble said in a pamphlet distributed Saturday. The German government will face “demand-side” opponents of its policy in Dresden, he said without mentioning France or Italy or the U.S. “’Demand-side’ advocates will make clear in Dresden that cutting public spending leads to weaker demand for goods and services,” the minister said in a pamphlet distributed in the Dresden newspaper Saechsische Zeitung.

Germany’s position is that “solid public finance” boosts investment and growth, he said. Risks to Europe’s economic outlook stemming from the unresolved Greek crisis as well concern over the U.S. trade gap may fuse an alliance of France, Italy and the U.S. in Dresden. All three states fret that Germany’s rigorous advocacy of budget austerity may be holding back economic growth in Europe. U.S. Treasury Secretary Jacob J. Lew urged Germany to boost public investment to spur imports from Europe and spark a cycle of economic growth that would also benefit the U.S.

The U.S. trade gap widened in March to the biggest in more than six years while Germany in 2014 again reported a record surplus. The U.S. has also called for a quicker fix of Greece’s problems in a sign that it views Germany’s unmoving insistence that Greece fulfill bailout terms as a risk. Lew said Friday that failure to reach a deal quickly would create hardship for Greece, uncertainties for Europe and the global economy. Schaeuble remains adamant that Germany’s stance on sound budgeting is the right one, if unpopular. “Further convincing needs to be done” at Dresden, he said in his pamphlet.

Next weekend is a holiday weekend in Greece. Fears of capital controls.

• Greece Hasn’t Got The Money To Make June IMF Repayment (Reuters)

Greece cannot make debt repayments to the IMF next month unless it achieves a deal with creditors, its interior minister said on Sunday, the most explicit remarks yet from Athens about the likelihood of default if talks fail. Shut out of bond markets and with bailout aid locked, cash-strapped Athens has been scraping state coffers to meet debt obligations and to pay wages and pensions. With its future as a member of the 19-nation euro zone potentially at stake, a second government minister accused its international lenders of subjecting it to slow and calculated torture. After four months of talks with its euro zone partners and the IMF, the leftist-led government is still scrambling for a deal that could release up to 7.2 billion euros ($7.9 billion) in remaining aid to avert bankruptcy.

“The four installments for the IMF in June are €1.6 billion. This money will not be given and is not there to be given,” Interior Minister Nikos Voutsis told Greek Mega TV’s weekend show. Voutsis was asked about his concern over a ‘credit event’, a term covering scenarios like bankruptcy or default, if Athens misses a payment. “We are not seeking this, we don’t want it, it is not our strategy,” he said. “We are discussing, based on our contained optimism, that there will be a strong agreement (with lenders) so that the country will be able to breathe. This is the bet,” Voutsis said. Previously, the Athens government has said it is in danger of running out of money soon without a deal, but has insisted it still plans to make all upcoming payments.

The unbalance of global power.

• Greece’s Misery Shows We Need Chapter 11 Bankruptcy For Countries (Guardian)

Alexis Tsipras, Greece’s combative prime minister, is facing yet another week of fraught negotiations as he and his team struggle to agree a shopping list of economic reforms stringent enough to appease the country’s creditors, but different enough from the grinding austerity of the past five years to satisfy the Greek electorate. And all the while, bank deposits will leach out of the country, investment plans will remain on hold and consumers hammered by years of austerity will continue living hand to mouth. Change the actors – and the stakes – and it’s a tired plotline familiar to many governments across the world. According to Eurodad, the coalition of civil society groups that campaigns on debt, there have been 600 sovereign debt restructurings since the 1950s – with many governments, including Argentina for example, experiencing one wrenching write-off after another.

Many of these countries plunged deeper into recession as a result of the uncertainty and delay inherent in this bewildering process and the punishing austerity policies inflicted on them, with a resulting collapse in investor and consumer confidence. Argentina defaulted in 2001. Fourteen years later, it is still being pursued through the courts by so-called vulture funds, which buy distressed countries’ debts on the cheap and use every legal device they can to reclaim the money. Yet while the world’s policymakers have expended countless hours since the crisis of 2008 rewriting regulations on bonuses, mortgage lending, derivatives and too-big-to-fail banks, little attention has been paid to what should happen when a government is on the brink of financial meltdown.

Sacha Llorenti, the Bolivian ambassador to the UN, is currently touring the world’s capitals trying to change that. “We’re not just talking about a financial issue; it’s an issue related to growth, to development, to social and economic rights,” he says. The UN is not the obvious forum for discussing debt restructuring: unlike the IMF, it is not a lender of last resort with emergency cash to disburse, and doesn’t have a seat around the table when countries have to go to their creditors to ask for help. Yet also unlike the IMF, the UN general assembly is not dominated by the world’s major powers: each member country has one vote.

When Argentina tabled a motion calling for the UN to examine the issue of sovereign debt restructuring last autumn, 124 countries voted for it; 11, including the UK and the US, with their powerful financial lobbies, voted against; and there were 41 abstentions. Llorenti, who is chairing the UN “ad hoc committee” set up as a result of that vote, says the 11 countries that objected hold 45% of the voting power at the IMF. He believes they would prefer the matter to be tackled there, where they can shape the arguments: “It’s a matter of control, really.”

Support for Syriza is still very high. But people are afraid to.

• Greeks Back Government’s Red Lines, But Want To Keep Euro (AFP)

Cash-strapped Greeks remain supportive of the leftist government’s tough negotiating style, according to a new poll published Sunday, but hope for a deal with creditors that will keep the euro in their wallets. The poll conducted in May by Public Issue for the pro-government newspaper Avgi, shows 54% backing the SYRIZA-led government’s handling of the negotiations despite the tension with Greece’s international lenders. A total 59% believe Athens must not give in to demands by its creditors, with 89% against pension cuts and 81% against mass lay-offs. The SYRIZA-led government is locked in talks with the EU, ECB and the IMF to release a blocked final €7.2-billion tranche of its bailout.

In exchange for the aid, creditors are demanding Greece accept tough reforms and spending cuts that anti-austerity Syriza pledged to reject when it was elected in January. According to reports, creditors are demanding further budget cuts worth €5 billion including pension cuts and mass lay-offs. Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras made clear on Saturday however that his government “won’t budge to irrational demands” that involve crossing Syriza’s campaign “red lines”. Greece faces a series of debt repayments beginning next month seen as all but impossible to meet without the blocked bailout funds. Failure to honour those payments could result in default, raising the spectre of a possible exit from the euro. That is a scenario Greeks hope to avert, with 71% of those polled wanting to keep the euro while 68% said a return to the drachma could worsen the economic situation.

Yanies takes aim at the media.

• The Truth About Riga (Yanis Varoufakis)

It was the 24th of April. The Eurogroup meeting taking place that day in Latvia was of great importance to Greece. It was the last Eurogroup meeting prior to the deadline (30th April) that we had collectively decided upon (back in the 20th February Eurogroup meeting) for an agreement on the set of reforms that Greece would implement so as to unlock, in a timely fashion, the deadlock with our creditors. During that Eurogroup meeting, which ended in disagreement, the media began to report ‘leaks’ from the room presenting to the world a preposterously false view of what was being said within. Respected journalists and venerable news media reported lies and innuendos concerning both what my colleagues allegedly said to me and also my alleged responses and my presentation of the Greek position.

The days and weeks that followed were dominated by these false stories which almost everyone (despite my steady, low-key, denials) assumed to be accurate reports. The public, under that wall of disinformation, became convinced that, during the 24th April Riga Eurogroup meeting, my fellow ministers called me insulting names (“time waster”, “gambler”, “amateur” etc. were some of the reported insults), that I lost my temper, and that, as a result, my Prime Minister later “sidelined” me from the negotiations. (It was even reported that I would not be attending the following Eurogroup meeting, or that I would be ‘supervised’ by some other ministerial colleague.) Of course none of the above was even remotely true.

My fellow ministers never, ever addressed me in anything other than collegial, polite, respectful terms.
• I did not lose my temper during that meeting, or at any other point.
• I continue to negotiate with my fellow ministers of finance, leading the Greek side at the Eurogroup.
• Then came a New York Times Magazine story which raised the possibility of a recording of that Eurogroup meeting. All of a sudden, the journalists and news media that propagated the lies and the innuendos about the 24th April Eurogroup meeting changed tack. Without a whiff of an apology for the torrent of untruths they had peddled against me for weeks, they now began to depict me as a ‘spoof’ who had “betrayed” the confidentiality of the Eurogroup.

This morning I went on the record on the Andrew Marr television show (BBC1) on this issue. I am taking this opportunity to commit the truth in writing also here – on my trusted blog. So here it goes:

Bruno is dead on.

• The Bloodied Idealogues vs. The Bloodthirsty Technocrats (StealthFlation)

On the grave Greek question, it appears that the moment of truth is finally upon us. After nearly four months of frenetic, fruitless and often feckless high level deliberations and negotiations, both sides remain essentially at an impasse, right where they started. The technocrats in Brussels want to see their austerity driven reform program carried forward and implemented unconditionally. As for the idealogues in Athens, they have pledged to put forth their own enlightened approach to rescue their sinking society. The Technocrats hold the purse strings, but the Ideologues hold the heart strings. For what it’s worth, that is typically a highly combustible combination, tick tock. With their recent cocksure bravado, are the Technocrats entirely misreading the desperate determination of the Idealogues?

Get ready for yet another Euro Summer swoon.. Everyone agrees that Greece, under a corrupt political oligarchy, grossly abused its privileges as a Eurozone member. In fact, with the help of a few sleazy sophisticated Goldman Sachs financiers, they actually cheated on their application forms in order to join the exclusive club to begin with. The illegitimate Ionian books were cooked from the get go, and it only got worse and worse over time. The self serving political elites and their self-seeking sponsors at multinational banks and corporations ran up a massive tab, while their ill-fated nation did not have the wherewithal to pay the astronomical bills. That is essentially what happened here. Oh, and the parties specifically involved all happened to personally get rather wealthy themselves along the way.

National elections at the end of the year could reinforce the changes.

• Spain’s Ruling Party Battered In Local And Regional Elections (EUObserver)

Spain took a turn towards the new left in Sunday’s regional and local elections, putting an end to the dominating two-party system. Despite having won the most votes in the elections across Spain on Sunday (24 May), Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy’s centre-right PP party has lost all of its absolute majorities and will now often depend on coalitions and pacts with other parties. Compromises and coalitions between parties is new in Spain where more than 30 years of alternating power between the socialists and the conservatives is being challenged by an ncreasingly fragmented political system including anti-austerity party Podemos and centrist Ciudadanos.

The biggest changes have been the move towards the new left parties in Barcelona and maybe also in Madrid – depending on a possible pact between a Podemos-supporting coalition called Ahora Madrid and the Social Democrats (PSOE). It would be the first time the Spanish capital would have a leftwing Mayor in the last 25 years. “It is clear that a majority for change has won,” said Manuela Carmena, the 71 year-old emeritus judge of the Spanish Supreme Court who wants to become Madrid’s new mayor. She is one seat short of Madrid’s former conservative Mayor Esperanza Aguirre. However, with the support of Social Democrats – who came third – the two left-wing parties could together hold the absolute majority in Madrid. Barcelona’s new Mayor Ada Colau calls for “more social justice” and leads a coalition of left-wing parties and citizens’ organisations called ‘Barcelona en Comú’, which includes members of Podemos.

“We are proud that this process hasn’t just been an exception in Barcelona, this is an unstoppable democratic revolution in Catalonia, in [Spain] and hopefully in southern Europe,” Colau said last night after it became clear that she had won a small majority in the Catalan capital. Colau, a former anti-eviction activist, was one of the founders of a platform for people affected by mortgages – Plataforma Afectados por la Hipoteca (PAH) – which won the European Parliament’s European Citizens’ Prize in 2013. The PAH was set up in response to the hike in evictions caused by abusive mortgage clauses during the collapse of the Spanish property market eight years ago. Colau herself entered politics last year calling for “more and better democracy” and a clean-up of corruption in politics.

Curious development?!

• Catalan Independence Bid Rocked by Podemos Victory in Barcelona (Bloomberg)

Catalan President Artur Mas’s bid to win independence from the rest of Spain was gasping for air on Sunday as voters in Barcelona ousted his party from city hall. Voters in the regional capital picked Podemos-backed activist Ada Colau as their next mayor, as the pro-independence parties Mas is aiming to lead to an overall majority in Catalonia won 45% of the vote. The regional leader has pledged to call an early regional election this year to prove to officials in Madrid the support for leaving Spain. “Mas is in deep trouble,” said Ken Dubin, a political scientist at the Instituto de Empresa business school in Madrid and Lord Ashcroft International Business School in Cambridge, England.

Colau, 41, gained national prominence during the financial crisis leading a campaign to stop banks evicting families from their homes after they defaulted on their mortgages. She joined forces with anti-austerity party Podemos, an ally of Greece’s governing party Syriza, for her assault on city hall. Her coalition, Barcelona en Comu, won 25% of the vote and 11 representatives in the 41-seat city assembly, the Spanish Interior Ministry said on its website. CiU won 10 seats compared with 14 in 2011. Barcelona accounts for about a third of the Catalan economy and hosts all the major regional institutions. “This result adds uncertainty to the planning process because it wasn’t considered a possibility,” said Jaume Lopez, a pro-independence political scientist at Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona. “We will see whether that uncertainty becomes a problem.”

So screwed…

• Auckland Nears $1 Million Average House Price (Guardian)

Economists in New Zealand have expressed alarm at a housing market boom which could soon see average prices of property in the country’s largest city pass the $1m mark. In Auckland, the cost of an average domestic property has risen from $550,000 during the last property boom in 2007 to nearly $810,000 now. House prices increased at a rate of 14% last year, while the rest of the country’s index remained stable. Some houses are increasing in value by $1,000 every day while 36 suburbs in the city now have an average house value of $1m or more. And at current rates the whole city’s average will be $1m within a year-and-a-half.

The National government has in part recognised the boom and taken action for the first time to tackle what many believe is a housing crisis. It announced a multimillion dollar development plan to build affordable homes, a move added to a previously announced tax on property speculators. But some economists believe more needs to be done, and while growth is expected to slow, that will merely move the $1m mark back a month or two. Small, one–bedroom apartments are selling for $800,000 and delapidated wrecks in barely desirable suburbs are fetching more than $1m. Senior research analyst Nick Goodall of property analytics company CoreLogic said: “It is inevitable the average price in Auckland will be $1m.”

In the past 15 years housing has seen a phenomenal investment in Auckland, as huge demand and limited supply has increased prices at record levels. Expensive land, and restrictions on building new and denser housing, has seen limited new stock come on the market. And a strong economy, record net migration, especially to Auckland, and banks happy to lend money in a market with significant capital gains, has seen people paying over the top of each other. “The narrative goes because it has been good in the last 10 or 15 years, it must be good forever,” said Shamubeel Eaqub, principal economist at the Institute of Economic Research. But it is impossible for this to continue, he says. “Auckland is in a massive bubble.”

“.. it’s 8000% more expensive than normal cotton seed. But normal cotton seed is largely unavailable to Indian farmers because of Monsanto’s control of the seed market..”

• Monsanto’s GMO Cotton Problems Drive Indian Farmers To Suicide (RT)

Hundreds of thousands of farmers have died in India, after having been allegedly forced to grow GM cotton instead of traditional crops. The seeds are so expensive and demand so much more maintenance that farmers often go bankrupt and kill themselves. “Nationally, in the last 20 years 290,000 farmers have committed suicide – this as per national crimes bureau records,” agricultural scientist Dr. G. V. Ramanjaneyulu of the Center For Sustainable Agriculture told RTD, which traveled to India to learn about the issue. A number of the widows and family members of Indian farmers with whom the journalists have spoken have the same story to share: in order to cultivate the genetically modified cotton, known as Bt cotton, produced by American agricultural biotech giant Monsanto, farmers put themselves into huge debt.

However, when the crops did not pay off, they turned to pesticides to solve the problem – by drinking the poison to kill themselves. “My husband took poison. [On discovering him dead], I found papers in his pocket – he had huge debts. He had mortgaged our land, and he killed himself because of those debts,” one widow told RTD. “[He killed himself] with a bottle of pesticide… All because of the loans. He took them for the farm. He told our kids he was bankrupt,” another widow said. “He worked all day, but it was hard to make the field pay,” her daughter added. Farming GM crops in rural India requires irrigation for success. However, since rich farmers often distribute the seeds directly to the poorer ones, many smaller, less educated farmers are not aware of the special conditions Bt cotton requires to be farmed successfully.

“Bt cotton has been promoted as something that actually solves problems of Indian farmers who are cultivating cotton. But something that has been promoted as a crisis solution, creates even more problems,” agricultural scientist Kirankumar Vissa said. “There are many places where it is not suitable for cultivation. On the seed packages, Bt cotton seed companies say that it is suitable for both irrigated and non-irrigated conditions – this is basically deception of the farmers,” the scientist said, adding that Monsanto also spends huge amounts of money on advertising in India, with paid for publications not always clearly marked as such.

Saying that only Bt cotton is available in India, Alexis Baden-Mayer, political director of Organic Consumers Association, says this crop requires many inputs. “It is incredibly expensive; it’s 8,000% more expensive than normal cotton seed. But normal cotton seed is largely unavailable to Indian farmers because of Monsanto’s control of the seed market,” she told RTD, adding that India is now the fourth largest producer of genetically modified crops.

Genetic diversity is huge.

• ‘Incredibly Diverse’, Endangered Plankton Provide Half The World’s Oxygen (SR)

After a three-and-a-half year, sometimes harrowing, sea voyage covering some 87,000 miles of ocean, a team of researchers from the Tara Oceans Consortium is revealing details of “the most complete description yet of planktonic organisms to date,” co-author of a study published in the journal Science, Dr. Chris Bowler from the National Center for Scientific Research in Paris, told BBC News. Plankton is the term for a myriad of microscopic species that are at the ground floor of the oceans’ food chain. One type, zooplankton, gives sustenance to larger organisms, which are then consumed by larger animals, and so on. Without the tiny zooplankton, marine life could not sustain itself. Another type of plankton, called phytoplankton, produce their own food the same way plants do: through photosynthesis.

This process not only sucks up heat-trapping carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, it produces oxygen upon which life on planet Earth depends. The researchers report collecting 35,000 samples from 210 sites around the world’s oceans. Their analyses reveal not only an astounding genetic diversity among the plankton—about 40 million genes, which is about four times more than are found in the human gut—but that these organisms contribute about 50% of all the world’s oxygen, according to report by Tech Times. “Plankton are much more than just food for the whales,” said Dr. Bowler, in a report by Reuters. “Although tiny, these organisms are a vital part of the Earth’s life support system, providing half of the oxygen generated each year on Earth by photosynthesis and lying at the base of marine food chains on which all other ocean life depends.”

But what worries scientists is that climate change and warming oceans are causing some plankton to die off, according several studies, including by researchers at two universities in the UK who published their 2013 study in the journal Nature Climate Change. This is because as oceans warm, the natural cycles of nitrogen, phosphorous, and carbon dioxide are disturbed—a disruption that negatively affects the plankton. Dr. Bowler and his team also found that many marine microorganisms are sensitive to variations in temperature, “and with changing temperatures as a result of climate change we are likely to see changes in this community,” he told the BBC. Because of the massive amount of DNA data now made available to scientists everywhere by the newly released study—only 2% so far has been analyzed, Bowler says—future research is sure to shed more light on the way marine ecosystems function.

Debt Rattle November 29 2014

Nov 292014

November 29, 2014 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 12:13 pm Finance Tagged with: asylum seekers, credit, debt, deflation, gold, oil, QE4, slaves, stimulus 6 Responses »

DPC The Mammoth Oak at Pass Christian, Mississippi 1900

• Market Rout As Oil Slide Rocks Energy Groups (FT)

• Could Oil Collapse Cause Next Credit Crisis? (CNBC)

• OPEC Gusher to Hit Weakest Players, From Wildcatters to Iran (Bloomberg)

• Oil Drop Is Big Boon For Global Stock Markets, If It Lasts (AEP)

• Oil Countries Wasted Chance To Build Strong Economies (Guardian)

• OPEC Has Ushered In QE4 (MarketWatch)

• Inside OPEC Room, Naimi Declares Price War On US Shale Oil (Reuters)

• Will The US Give The Dutch Their Gold Back? (CNBC)

• Swiss, French Call To Bring Home Gold As Dutch Move 122 Tons Out Of US (RT)

• Fed’s Latest Invention Holds Promise For Controlled Rate Rise (Reuters)

• In Show Of Confidence, Americans Take On More Debt (Reuters)

• Wells Fargo Accused of Predatory Lending in Chicago Area (Bloomberg)

• Does a Generation Burdened by Debt Care About Government Spending? (Bloomberg)

• Eurozone Inflation Slows as Draghi Tees Up QE Debate (Bloomberg)

• Why Italy’s Stay-Home Shoppers Terrify The Eurozone (Reuters)

• Economic Devastation In Italy Prompts New Wave Of Migration To Australia (ABC)

• Animal Extinctions From Climate Rival End of Dinosaurs (Bloomberg)

• Fracking As Deadly As Thalidomide, Tobacco And Asbestos (Guardian)

• Traffickers Profit as Asylum Seekers Head for Europe (Spiegel)

• Up To 13,000 People Working As Slaves In UK (Guardian)

” .. with US crude at or below $70, “no [shale] basin is safe” from cuts in drilling activity.”

• Market Rout As Oil Slide Rocks Energy Groups (FT)

Shares in the world’s biggest energy groups have tumbled in a market rout as plunging oil prices put at risk billions of dollars of investment and jeopardised future supplies of crude. The sharp slide in the price of Brent oil after Opec’s decision not to cut output triggered warnings that oil companies would cut as much as $100bn of capital spending in response, imperilling the US shale bonanza and threatening much Arctic oil exploration. Meanwhile oil’s fall continued to play havoc with the currencies of oil exporting countries, especially Russia. At one point on Friday, the rouble slid to a record low.

Leonid Fedun, vice-president of Lukoil, Russia’s second largest crude producer, told the Financial Times that Opec was trying to turn the US shale oil “boom” into a “bust” for smaller producers. He compared the surge in North American shale to the dotcom and subprime mortgage booms, and said Opec’s objective now was “to get small producers with large debts and low efficiency to pack up and leave the market”. Opec said on Thursday that it was leaving its output ceiling of 30m barrels a day unchanged, prompting a swift 8% drop in the oil price, which was already down by nearly 40% since mid-June. The move showed that Saudi Arabia, Opec’s largest producer and effective leader, had decided to relinquish its traditional role of balancing the oil market by increasing or reducing output, letting prices do the job instead, analysts said. “We cannot overstate what a dramatic and fundamental change this is for the oil market,” said Mike Wittner, senior oil analyst at Société Générale.

Friday’s brutal sell-off in the US and across Europe hit shares in the oil majors, the big oil services companies that supply them, as well as the smaller explorers most exposed to the plunge in crude. ExxonMobil fell 4.3%, Chevron 5.4% and oilfield services group Halliburton 11.1%. They recovered slightly by the close. But the slide could bring relief for motorists. The price fall has sent a chill through the US shale sector, which had driven US oil production to its highest level in more than three decades. Analysts at Tudor Pickering Holt, the energy investment bank, warned that, with US crude at or below $70, “no basin is safe” from cuts in drilling activity. WTI, the US benchmark, is currently trading below $67 a barrel. The Bakken shale of North Dakota and the Mississippian Lime region of Oklahoma would be among the regions bearing the initial brunt of the slowdown, they said.

“It’s not just the Saudis who could get much poorer from the oil price free fall. Everyone could suffer if the collapse triggers a wave of defaults through the high-yield debt market, and in turn, hits stocks.”

• Could Oil Collapse Cause Next Credit Crisis? (CNBC)

It’s not just the Saudis who could get much poorer from the oil price free fall. Everyone could suffer if the collapse triggers a wave of defaults through the high-yield debt market, and in turn, hits stocks. The first to fall: the banks that were last hit by the housing crisis. Why could that happen? Well, energy companies make up anywhere from 15 to 20% of all U.S. junk debt, according to various sources. In fact, they’ve been the most prolific issuers of high-yield debt over the years, as their share of that market was just 5% in 2005. The oil bull market we once knew filled their coffers and made executives feel confident they could borrow more and more money.

Much of that high-yield debt is now on the books of banks, asset managers and pension funds. What’s more, banks are even more dependent on a happy junk market as they make a market in the bonds. Any collapse in prices could cause bidders to run and liquidity to dry up. They also issue high-yield debt exchange-traded funds, which have been wildly popular with investors over the last decade. If that popularity turns into heavy selling, the banks may not be able to sell the bonds fast enough to meet the pricing demands of the ETF, traders said. “I’ve no doubt the (high-yield) sector will get bad, but the worry is that because of the general lack of liquidity in high yield overall that it could be an environment that makes contagion very much a possibility,” said James Farro of Coghlan Capital.

There are cracks, but certainly no contagion yet. From its high above $100 this June, WTI crude is down more than 36% and counting. The Credit Suisse High Yield Bond Fund, one of the many proxies for junk debt, is off 6% over that period. Yet stocks in the bank sector are up more than 8% since June. And the Dow Jones industrial average is more than 6% higher. “This is the one thing I’ve seen over and over again,” said Larry McDonald, head of U.S strategy at Newedge USA’s macro group. “When high yield underperforms equity, a major credit event occurs. It’s the canary in the coal mine.” [..] During the last high-yield collapse, which centered around debt tied to the housing sector, Citigroup lost 63% of its value in the following 60 days, Kensho [a quantitative analytics tool] shows. Bank of America was cut in half.

Bloomberg doesn’t expect too much brain activity in its readers: ” ..only about 4% of shale production needs $80 or more to be profitable”.

• OPEC Gusher to Hit Weakest Players, From Wildcatters to Iran (Bloomberg)

The refusal of Saudi Arabia and its OPEC allies to curb crude oil output in the face of plummeting prices has set the energy world on a painful course that will leave the weakest behind, from governments to U.S. wildcatters. A grand experiment has begun, one in which the cartel of producing nations – sometimes called the central bank of oil – is leaving the market to decide who is strongest and how to cut as much as 2 million barrels a day of surplus supply. Oil patch executives including billionaire Harold Hamm have vowed to drill on, asserting they can profit well below $70 a barrel, with output unlikely to fall for at least a year. Marginal producers in less profitable U.S. shale areas, as well as countries from Iran to Russia and operations from Canada to Norway will see the knife sooner, according to analyses by Wells Fargo, IHS and ITG Investment Research. “We’re in a very nerve-wracking environment right now and will be for probably the next couple of years,” Jamie Webster, senior director at IHS said today in a phone interview.

“This is a different game. This isn’t just about additional barrels, this is about barrels that are going to keep coming and keep coming.” Investors punished oil producers, as Hamm’s Continental fell 20%, the most in six years, amid a swift fall in crude to below $70 for the first time since 2010. Exxon Mobil fell 4.2% to close at $90.54. Talisman was down 1.8% at 3:00 p.m. in Toronto after dropping 14% yesterday. A production cut by12-member OPEC would have been the quickest way to tighten the world’s oil supplies and boost prices. In the U.S., supply is expected either to remain flat or rise by almost 1 million barrels a day next year, according to International Energy Agency and ITG. That’s because only about 4% of shale production needs $80 or more to be profitable. Most drilling in the Bakken formation, one of the main drivers of shale oil output, returns cash at or below $42 a barrel, the IEA estimates.

Key sentence: “provided the chief cause is a surge in crude supply rather than a collapse in economic demand”. Ambrose needs to do some thinking.

• Oil Drop Is Big Boon For Global Stock Markets, If It Lasts (AEP)

Tumbling oil prices are a bonanza for global stock markets, provided the chief cause is a surge in crude supply rather than a collapse in economic demand. HSCB says the index of world equities rose 25pc on average over the twelve months following a 30pc drop in oil prices, comparable to the latest slide. Equities rose 19pc in real terms. Data stretching back to 1876 is less emphatic but broadly tells the same tale. The S&P 500 index of Wall Street stocks rose by 11pc on average. The equity rally of 1901 was a corker. Yet there were big exceptions. Stock markets continued to fall by 23pc in 1930 after the oil price crash. Much the same happened after the dotcom bust in 2001. On both occasions the forces of global recession overwhelmed the stimulus or “tax cut” effect for consumers and non-oil companies of lower energy costs. Roughly one third of the current oil slump is a shortfall in expected demand, caused by China’s industrial slowdown and Europe’s austerity trap.

The other two thirds are the result of a sudden supply glut, which Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states have so far chosen not to offset by cutting output. This episode looks relatively benign. Nick Kounis from ABN Amro says it will add $550bn of stimulus to world markets. “That is fantastic news for the global economy,” he said. But it comes at a time when stocks are already high if measured by indicators of underlying value. The Schiller 10-year price earnings ratio is at nose-bleed levels above 27. Tobin’s Q, a gauge based on replacement costs, is stretched to near historic highs. Andrew Lapthorne from Societe Generale says the MSCI world index of stocks has risen 38pc over the last three years but reported profits have risen just 3pc. “Valuations, as measured by median price to cash flow ratios, are near historical highs. As US QE has come to an end, depriving the world of $1 trillion printed dollars a year, there are plenty of reasons to be nervous,” he said.

Past patterns may not prove a useful guide this time. Zero rates and QE have distorted all the normal signals. So has the emergence of China as the swing force in global commodity demand. Nor is it certain that this fall in oil prices will endure. Morgan Stanley said the over-supply in the market is “vastly overstated”. Much of the immediate glut is due to a supply surge of 800,000 barrels a day in Libya after export terminals were reopened over the early summer following a truce by tribal militias. This truce is already unravelling. Output has dropped by 400,000 barrels a day since September. “Libya is getting worse by the day,” said Alastair Newton, head of political risk at Nomura. “Iraq is producing at the top of its band, and Russia’s output always goes down in the winter for weather reasons. The 2m barrel surplus could disappear in no time.”

Oil has created welfare states with fast surging populations, but no industrial base, no jobs.

• Oil Countries Wasted Chance To Build Strong Economies (Guardian)

Many of the large oil-producing nations such as Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Venezuela have squandered their chance to build strong and sustainable economies on the proceeds of high oil prices, a leading energy analyst has warned. Fadel Gheit, an oil expert at the Oppenheimer brokerage in New York, said prices at $90 a barrel had allowed nations to temporarily prosper without regard to the cyclical nature of commodity prices. “Many of these countries have failed to diversify their economies. They are welfare states, dependent on high-cost oil without any other real manufacturing, industry or even tourism and now the oil bubble has burst,” he said. Gheit, a former Mobil Oil executive, said the oil producers should have followed the examples of countries such as Japan and South Korea which had built vibrant economies without any natural resources.

The damning view of some of the largest energy producers came as the price of benchmark Brent crude continued to fall and the Oppenheimer analyst believes it will not stop at $70. There is growing concern about the political implications for oil-producing countries of a prolonged slump in prices, especially Iran, Algeria and Venezuela, which have high-cost production and heavy public spending commitments. Russia, which derives half its budget revenue from oil and gas, is already struggling with a collapse in the value of the rouble and an economy fast moving into recession. The Kremlin, which is also struggling with western sanctions over Ukraine, is thought to need an oil price of $105 to balance its budget, according to some estimates.

Iran, also hit by sanctions in the past over its nuclear programme, is heavily dependent on its energy exports and is said to need $140 a barrel to balance its budget. Meanwhile, oil accounts for 95% of Venezuela’s exports. Harvard economists claim its per capita gross domestic product is 2% lower than it was in the 1970s when oil prices were 10 times lower. Gheit says oil producers have been blind to consuming nations reducing their energy intensity and even more importantly that US shale is turning the supply map upside down. “They have failed to see that fracking is like a virus and it’s going to proliferate and it will eventually spread even to Russia and Saudi Arabia.”

And deflation.

• OPEC Has Ushered In QE4 (MarketWatch)

Welcome to the new era of QE4. As if on cue, OPEC stepped in just as monetary policy (at least the Fed’s) has dried up. Central bankers have nothing on the oil cartel that did just what everyone expected, but has still managed to crush oil prices. Protest away about the 1% getting richer and how prior QE hasn’t trickled down to those who really need it, but an oil cartel is coming to the rescue of America and others in the world right now. It’s hard to imagine a “more wide-reaching and effective stimulus measure than to lower the cost of gas at the pump for everyone globally,” says Alpari U.K.’s Joshua Mahoney. “For this reason, we are effectively entering the era of QE4, with motorists able to allocate more of their money towards luxury items, while firms are now able to lower costs of production thus impacting the bottom line and raising profits.”

The impact of that could be “bigger than anything that has come before,” says Mahoney, who expects that theory to be tested and proved, via sales on Black Friday and the holiday season overall. In short, a consumer-spending explosion as we race to the malls on a full tank of cheap gas. Tossing in his own two cents in the wake of that OPEC decision, legendary investor Jim Rogers says it’s a “fundamental positive for anybody who uses oil, who uses energy.” Just not great if you’re from Canada, Russia or Australia, he says. Or if you’re the ECB, fretting about price deflation. Or until it starts crushing shale producers.

I don’t know what to think of this. I still don’t believe the Saudis would do anything the Americans don’t want them to. But it works as an argument to convince the rest of OPEC, even if he doesn’t mean it.

• Inside OPEC Room, Naimi Declares Price War On US Shale Oil (Reuters)

Saudi Arabia’s oil minister told fellow OPEC members they must combat the U.S. shale oil boom, arguing against cutting crude output in order to depress prices and undermine the profitability of North American producers. Ali al-Naimi won the argument at Thursday’s meeting, against the wishes of ministers from OPEC’s poorer members such as Venezuela, Iran and Algeria which had wanted to cut production to reverse a rapid fall in oil prices. They were not prepared to offer big cuts themselves, and, choosing not to clash with the Saudis and their rich Gulf allies, ultimately yielded to Naimi’s pressure. “Naimi spoke about market share rivalry with the United States. And those who wanted a cut understood that there was no option to achieve it because the Saudis want a market share battle,” said a source who was briefed by a non-Gulf OPEC minister after Thursday’s meeting.

A boom in shale oil production and weaker growth in China and Europe have sent prices down by over a third since June. “You think we were convinced? What else could we do?” said an OPEC delegate from a country that had argued for a cut. Secretary General Abdullah al-Badri effectively confirmed OPEC was entering a battle for market share. Asked on Thursday if the organization had a answer to rising U.S. production, he said: “We answered. We keep the same production. There is an answer here”. OPEC agreed to maintain – a “rollover” in OPEC jargon – its ceiling of 30 million barrels per day, at least 1 million above its own estimate of demand for its oil in the first half of next year. Analysts said the decision not to cut output in the face of drastically falling prices was a strategic shift for OPEC. “It is a brave new world. OPEC is clearly drawing a line in the sand at 30 million bpd. Time will tell who will be left standing,” said Yasser Elguindi of Medley Global Advisors.

The Swiss vote on gold tomorrow apparently touches Holland as well: some $2 billion worth of gold, bought by the Swiss when the Nazis stole it from the Dutch central bank, has never been returned. The vote aims at banning the Swiss central bank from letting gold leave the country.

• Will The US Give The Dutch Their Gold Back? (CNBC)

As the Dutch central bank looks to repatriate some of its gold reserves back from the New York Federal Reserve, Dennis Gartman, the editor and publisher of The Gartman Letter, has questioned what reputational damage this could cause for the U.S. The Dutch central bank last week confirmed that it was shipping gold from the U.S. to the Netherlands to “spread its gold stock in a more balanced way”, adding that it would have a “positive effect on public confidence”. It comes after the Germans made a similar move in 2013, indicating that it would transfer 300 tons from New York by 2020. The Bundesbank has surprised many in the industry, however, by only moving 5 tons last year in what it called a “run-up phase of gold repatriation”.

Gartman stressed that it was a complicated issue which “is made all the more complicated by the fact that the Germans have talked about repatriation but have repatriated only a very small sum”. He added that there was a “reputational” problem for the New York Federal Reserve, which could have been quickly and easily handled by a press conference by the bank. Instead, the closely-watched commodities analyst – who conceded that he was not a gold bug – said the silence from the bank concerned him. The Dutch central bank is set to cut the amount of its stock held in New York from 51% to 31%, but keep its reserves in London and Canada unchanged. The bank has been vague on whether the move had already been completed and a spokesperson for the bank couldn’t comment on the proceedings due to the security issues associated with such an operation.

“Were I the Dutch, or the Germans or any country housing gold in the U.S. I’d be asking questions about my gold and I’d be remiss were I not doing so,” Gartman told CNBC via email. “In the end, I suspect that the gold is indeed there; that the Germans will ask for and get their gold repatriated; that the rumors are ill founded and ill advised.” Gartman’s concerns were put to an official at the Bundesbank in February by Germany’s Handelsblatt newspaper. Executive Board Member Carl-Ludwig Thiele refuted rumors that the gold in New York was no longer there, or that the Germans had been given limited access to it. Thiele called it “absurd” and said he had personally seen the reserves.

Are the Somali pirates paying attention?

• Swiss, French Call To Bring Home Gold As Dutch Move 122 Tons Out Of US (RT)

The financial crisis in Europe is prompting some nations to repatriate their gold reserves to national vaults. The Netherlands has moved $5 billion worth of gold from New York, and some are calling for similar action from France, Switzerland, and Germany. An unmatched pace of money printing by major central banks has boosted concerns in European countries over the safety of their gold reserves abroad. The Dutch central bank – De Nederlandsche Bank – was one of the latest to make the move. The bank announced last Friday that it moved a fifth of its total 612.5-metric-ton gold reserve from New York to Amsterdam earlier in November. It was done in an effort to redistribute the gold stock in “a more balanced way,” and to boost public confidence, the bank explained.

“With this adjustment the Dutch Central Bank joins other banks that are keeping a larger share of their gold supply in their own country,” the bank said in a statement. “In addition to a more balanced division of the gold reserves…this may also contribute to a positive confidence effect with the public.” Dutch gold reserves are now divided as follows: 31% in Amsterdam, 31% in New York, 20% in Ottawa, Canada and 18% in London. Meanwhile, Switzerland has organized the ‘Save Our Swiss Gold’ referendum, which is taking place on November 30. If passed, it would force the Swiss National Bank to convert a fifth of its assets into gold and repatriate all of its reserves from vaults in the UK and Canada.

“The Swiss initiative is merely part of an increasing global scramble towards gold and away from the endless printing of money. Huge movements of gold are going on right now,” Koos Jansen, an Amsterdam-based gold analyst for the Singaporean precious metal dealer BullionStar, told the Guardian. France has also recently joined in on the trend, with the leader of the far-right National Front party Marine Le Pen calling on the central bank to repatriate the country’s gold reserves. In an open letter to the governor of the Banque de France, Christian Noyer, Le Pen also demanded an audit of 2,435 tons of physical gold inventory. Germany tried and failed to adopt a similar path in early 2013 by announcing a plan to repatriate some of its gold reserves back from the US and France.

“If left in place over the long term, segregated central bank cash accounts could radically remake the ways in which liquidity services are provided to the public ..” Does the public have a vote in this?

• Fed’s Latest Invention Holds Promise For Controlled Rate Rise (Reuters)

The Federal Reserve’s latest market proposal could help it smoothly raise interest rates and bring far more banks into direct contact with the U.S. central bank in a way that another tool, unveiled last year, could not. Analysts have applauded a draft Fed idea to offer lenders segregated cash accounts to be used as collateral for transactions with private investors. Such accounts could be an “additional supplementary tool” as the central bank returns to a more normal policy stance, according to minutes of the Fed’s Oct. 28-29 policy meeting, which were released last week. The move would increase competition for funds in the short-term overnight market as smaller domestic banks would have far more access to the Fed’s offered rate on excess reserves, analysts said.

It could also help stabilize the financial system when demand surges for liquid funds. “If left in place over the long term, segregated central bank cash accounts could radically remake the ways in which liquidity services are provided to the public,” wrote Wrightson ICAP Chief Economist Lou Crandall. While Crandall estimated the program could eventually expand to “several trillion dollars” in balances, UBS economists said it would be $400-$550 billion in earlier stages. The brief, surprise mention of segregated accounts in the minutes suggests that the Fed’s overnight reverse repurchase facility, a fixed-rate full-allotment tool known as “ON RRP” that has been tested since last year, could again be relegated in the Fed’s toolbox.

Fed officials once telegraphed ON RRP, also meant to mop up excess reserves, as the primary tool for keeping a floor under rates when the time comes to tighten policy. But earlier this year the Fed said the rate it pays on excess reserves (IOER) would be the “primary” tool. It is unclear how important segregated accounts would be, if implemented. Central bankers want as much control over market rates as possible when they raise the key federal funds rate from near zero, where it has been since late 2008. The worry is that the trillions of dollars in newly created bank reserves could complicate that tightening. But adding segregated accounts could boost the supply of quality money-market instruments, lifting borrowing costs. Simon Potter, head of the New York Fed’s market operations, mentioned at the meeting possible next steps to investigate any issues with carrying out the program, the minutes said.

Is this a joke? ” .. a survey by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, which pronounced the end of the crisis-era “deleveraging process.”

• In Show Of Confidence, Americans Take On More Debt (Reuters)

Total U.S. household debt rose slightly in the third quarter to a total of $11.7 trillion, according to a survey by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, which pronounced the end of the crisis-era “deleveraging process.” The increase of $78 billion from the previous quarter was driven by auto and student loans and credit card balances, and continues a general trend since the middle of last year. While household indebtedness is still 7.6% below its peak six years ago, when a financial crisis set off the worst recession in decades, economists said the survey pointed to increased confidence among Americans. The report on household debt and credit showed that mortgages, the largest slice of debt, edged up by 0.4%. Mortgage originations rose a bit to $337 billion, well below historical norms, while auto loan originations hit the highest level since 2005 at $105 billion. Credit card limits rose by 0.9% from the previous quarter.

“In light of these data, it appears that the deleveraging period has come to an end and households are borrowing more,” New York Fed economist Wilbert van der Klaauw said in a statement. Some 11% of student loans were 90-plus days delinquent or in default, the highest in the last three quarters, according to the New York Fed survey that draws from a nationally representative consumer credit sample. The share of mortgage balances that were delinquent eased slightly. The report is “another step in the evolution toward more normal credit market functioning,” said Credit Suisse economist Dana Saporta. The “willingness of households to take on more debt at this juncture – particularly credit card debt – (is) a positive sign of confidence in future income prospects.”

“The bank’s tactics start at home-loan origination and continue through refinancing and foreclosure, the county said, a process its lawyers summarized in the complaint as “equity stripping.“

• Wells Fargo Accused of Predatory Lending in Chicago Area (Bloomberg)

Wells Fargo targets black and Latino borrowers for more costly home loans than their white counterparts in the Chicago area, helping to prolong a local and national foreclosure crisis, the biggest county in Illinois said. Cook County, which has a population of more than 5 million and includes the third-biggest U.S. city, accused the bank of engaging in predatory lending in a complaint filed yesterday in Chicago federal court, following similar efforts by municipal governments in Los Angeles and Miami. The bank’s tactics start at home-loan origination and continue through refinancing and foreclosure, the country said, a process its lawyers summarized in the complaint as “equity stripping.” The process may have involved as many as 26,000 loans, the county said. “Equity stripping is an abusive form of ‘asset based lending’ that maximizes lender profits based on the value of the underlying asset and onerous loan terms, while in disregard for a borrower’s ability to repay,” according to the complaint.

Aimed also at minority women, the bank’s fee structure and its practice of bundling mortgages to sell as securities allowed the lender to make money off loans even in the event of a foreclosure, the county said. The county is seeking a court order halting the practice and money damages that may exceed $300 million. Tom Goyda, a spokesman for the San Francisco-based bank, in an e-mailed statement called the county’s case “baseless” and said Wells Fargo would vigorously defend itself. ‘It’s disappointing they chose to pursue a lawsuit against Wells Fargo rather than collaborate together to help borrowers and home owners in the county,’’ Goyda said. “We stand behind our record as a fair and responsible lender.”

“The conventional wisdom is that young voters aren’t interested in fiscal issues, and it’s just not true,” Schoenike said. “It’s that no one is talking to them.”

• Does a Generation Burdened by Debt Care About Government Spending? (Bloomberg)

The political arguments for reducing the national debt often focus on the disastrous results awaiting our children and grandchildren. But do the kids even care? A Washington-based nonprofit known as The Can Kicks Back set out to answer that question by testing an interactive, online ad campaign in two U.S. House races this year. That data, provided to Bloomberg Politics, show younger voters may indeed be willing to engage on federal spending. “Growing up in the recession has had a real effect on how they view this stuff,” said Ryan Schoenike, executive director of the group. “We have to be fiscally conservative with our own finances, so we expect that from our government, too.” That rings true to Corie Whalen Stephens, the 27-year-old spokeswoman for another youth-focused political group, Generation Opportunity. “For a lot of people my age, it’s been hard to find jobs, get out of debt from college, save up,” she said. “We have to be fiscally conservative with our own finances, so we expect that from our government, too.”

To assess millennials’ interest in spending issues, The Can Kicks Back deployed a set of online ads in California’s 5th Congressional District, just north of San Francisco, where Democratic Representative Mike Thompson easily won reelection; and in New York’s 1st District in eastern Long Island, where Republican Lee Zeldin unseated Democratic Representative Tim Bishop. The group identified the two districts as having relatively high rates of millennials (which they’re defining as 18- to 34-year-olds). The marketing campaign exceeded expectations with response rates that topped average Google benchmarks for political ads, according to an analysis from CampaignGrid, the online advertiser. The data showed that millennials were more likely to click on animated ads about the nation’s debt issues as opposed to more dramatic or comedic spots. Women were more likely to watch the ads than men, while the click rate among Hispanic viewers skewed higher compared to blacks, Asians and whites.

Democrats, Republicans and independents all clicked through the ads at comparable rates, an indication to Schoenike that there may be bipartisan interest in the issue. “The conventional wisdom is that young voters aren’t interested in fiscal issues, and it’s just not true,” Schoenike said. “It’s that no one is talking to them.” The group’s research could give some hints on how campaigns can engage young voters, who didn’t turn out in the numbers they did in 2012. A report from Pew Research in March showed millennials are generally unattached to organized politics and religion, laden with debt, and more likely than older generations to say they support an activist government. A poll released in October by the Institute of Politics at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government indicated that the youth vote is now up for grabs and could be a critical swing vote.

It’s starting to feel strange to see ‘Europe’ and ‘inflation’ used in the same sentence.

• Eurozone Inflation Slows as Draghi Tees Up QE Debate (Bloomberg)

Euro-area inflation slowed in November to match a five-year low, prodding the European Central Bank toward expanding its unprecedented stimulus program. Consumer prices rose 0.3% from a year earlier, the European Union’s statistics office in Luxembourg said today. That was in line with the median forecast of 41 economists in a Bloomberg News survey. Unemployment held at 11.5% in October, Eurostat said in a separate report. Continued low inflation is keeping pressure on the ECB to add to its existing package of measures aimed at reviving the economy. While the slowdown is partly related to a drop in oil prices, President Mario Draghi, who may unveil more pessimistic forecasts after a meeting of policy makers on Dec. 4, says he wants to raise inflation “as fast as possible.” “

The scale of the disinflation problem facing the ECB becomes increasingly concerning as time progresses,” said Colin Bermingham, an economist at BNP Paribas SA in London. “Downward revisions to their inflation and growth forecasts will be key to justifying an expansion of their asset purchase programs.” The Eurostat report showed that energy prices fell 2.5% in November from a year earlier. Crude oil has plunged more than 30% in the past three months. Food, alcohol and tobacco prices increased 0.5%. Core inflation, which strips out volatile items such as energy, food, tobacco and alcohol, stayed at 0.7% in November, according to Eurostat.

“The only crumb of comfort for the ECB – and it is not much – is that November’s renewed drop in inflation was entirely due to an increased year-on-year drop in energy prices,” said Howard Archer, chief European economist at IHS Global Insight in London. The data are “worrying news” for the central bank, he said. Data yesterday showed Spanish consumer prices dropped 0.5% this month from a year ago, matching the fastest rate of deflation since 2009. In Germany, Europe’s largest economy, inflation slowed to the weakest since February 2010. Euro-area inflation has been at less than half the ECB’s goal of just below 2% for more than a year.

“Italy is stuck in a rut of diminishing expectations.” And soon the whole world will follow.

• Why Italy’s Stay-Home Shoppers Terrify The Eurozone (Reuters)

“Three for the price of two” used to be the most common special offer in Giorgio Santambrogio’s supermarket chains. It has barely been used this year. The reason explains why efforts to resuscitate Italy’s moribund economy are failing. “People aren’t stocking up because they know prices will be lower in a month’s time,” says Santambrogio, chief executive of Vege, a Milan-based association covering 1,500 supermarkets and specialist stores. “Shoppers are demanding steeper and steeper discounts.” Italy is stuck in a rut of diminishing expectations. Numbed by years of wage freezes, and skeptical the government can improve their economic fortunes, Italians are hoarding what money they have and cutting back on basic purchases, from detergent to windows. Weak demand has led companies to lower prices in the hope of luring people back into shops. This summer, consumer prices in Italy fell on a year-on-year basis for the first time in a half-century, and they have barely picked up since.

Falling prices eat into company profits and lead to pay cuts and job losses, further depressing demand. The result: Italy is being sucked into a deflationary spiral similar to the one that has afflicted Japan’s economy for much of the past two decades. That is the nightmare scenario that policymakers, led by European Central Bank chief Mario Draghi, are desperate to avoid. The euro zone’s third-biggest economy is not alone. Deflation – or continuously falling consumer prices – is considered a risk for the whole currency bloc, and particularly countries on its southern rim. Prices have fallen for 20 months in Greece and five in Spain, for example. Both countries are suffering through deep cuts in salaries and state welfare. Yet Italy, a large economy with a huge public debt, is the country causing most worry. Part of the reason deflation is seen differently across southern Europe is cultural.

Greeks and Spaniards are historically big spenders. The Spanish economy surged for a decade thanks to a property and consumption bubble that crashed in 2008. Greece grew strongly in the same period, before being brought to its knees in 2009 by its government’s clandestine finances. This year, falling prices are helping these economies sell more of their products at home and abroad, fuelling a nascent recovery. Italians, however, are historically big savers.

“It’s a phenomenon that we think is probably going to smooth out as soon as the economic recovery starts in Italy.” Ha ha ha!

• Economic Devastation In Italy Prompts New Wave Of Migration To Australia (ABC)

Australia is witnessing a new wave of migration from Italy in numbers not seen in half a century, as thousands flee the economic devastation in Europe. The explosion of numbers saw more than 20,000 Italians arrive in Australia in 2012-13 on temporary visas, exceeding the number of Italians that arrived in 1950-51 during the previous migration boom following World War Two. The research group Australia Solo Andata (Australia One Way) is made up of Italians in Australia and has been tracking the trend using figures from the Department of Immigration and Border Protection. Spokesman Michele Grigoletti said he has been surprised by just how many of his countrymen are making the move to Australia. “Italians are coming to Australia in numbers we could not expect,” Mr Grigoletti said.

“We already have the first six months of data from 2013-14 and we know that the trend of Italians [arriving] is on the increase again.” Between 2011 and 2013, there was a 116% increase in the number of Italian citizens in Australia with a temporary visa. Data showed working holiday visas were the most popular visa issued to Italian citizens between the ages of 18 and 30. Almost 16,000 of the visas were granted in 2012-13, up 66% on the previous financial year. Italy’s Consul General in Sydney, Sergio Martes, said the figures were not surprising. “We have seen similar figures in northern Europe, with Italians going to Germany and England. They are probably the two main countries receiving our young people at the moment,” he said. “It’s a phenomenon that we think is probably going to smooth out as soon as the economic recovery starts in Italy.” The data revealed residents of the United Kingdom, Germany and France were issued the biggest number of working holiday visas for Australia in 2012-13.

This is who we are. Nothing is more characteristic of the human race. Not even the fact that we deny it.

• Animal Extinctions From Climate Rival End of Dinosaurs (Bloomberg)

Animals are dying off in the wild at a pace as great as the extinction that wiped out the dinosaurs about 65 million years ago because of human activity and climate change. Current extinction rates are at least 12 times faster than normal because people kill them for food, money or destroy their habitat, said Anthony Barnosky, a biology professor at the University of California-Berkeley. “If that rate continues unchanged, the Earth’s sixth mass extinction is a certainty,” Barnosky said in a phone interview. “Within about 200 to 300 years, three out of every four species we’re familiar with would be gone.” The findings, due to air in a documentary on the Smithsonian Channel on Nov. 30, add to pressure on envoys from some 190 countries gathering next week at a United Nations conference in Peru to discuss limits on the greenhouse gases blamed for global warming.

“We might do as much damage in 400 years as an asteroid did to the dinosaurs,” Sean Carroll, a biologist who leads the Department of Science Education at Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Bethesda, Maryland, said in an interview. He was also interviewed for the documentary. Temperatures already have increased by 0.85 of a degree since 1880 and the current trajectory puts humanity on course for a warming of at least 3.7 degrees Celsius, the UN estimates. That’s quicker than the shift in the climate when the last ice age ended about 10,000 years ago. “We would have an extinction crisis without climate change simply through how we use land and water and population growth,” Carroll said. “But now you add to that this global force of climate change and that changes relationships between species and ecosystems in unpredictable ways.”

Warmer temperatures are having a perverse impact on some animals. Grizzly bears and red foxes move north and come in contact with polar bears and arctic foxes, said Elizabeth Hadly, a biology professor at Stanford University who specializes in animal diversity, another subject of the documentary. The arctic fox is now in decline because red foxes are more aggressive, Hadly said by phone. Grizzly bears and polar bears sometimes mate, and that produces offspring with neither camouflage for the snow nor the ability to hunt in the woods. The number of animals in the wild has about halved in the past 40 years mainly because humans have moved into habitats, competing for space and water supplies, according to a report by the environmental group WWF and the Zoological Society of London released in September.

And it loses money too.

• Fracking As Deadly As Thalidomide, Tobacco And Asbestos (Guardian)

Fracking carries potential risks on a par with those from thalidomide, tobacco and asbestos, warns a report produced by the government’s chief scientific adviser. The flagship annual report by the UK’s chief scientist, Mark Walport, argues that history holds many examples of innovations that were adopted hastily and later had serious negative environmental and health impacts. The controversial technique, which involves pumping chemicals, sand and water at high pressure underground to fracture shale rock and release the gas within, has been strongly backed by the government with David Cameron saying the UK is “going all out for shale”. But environmentalists fear that fracking could contaminate water supplies, bring heavy lorry traffic to rural areas, displace investment in renewable energy and accelerate global warming.

The chief scientific adviser’s report appears to echo those fears. “History presents plenty of examples of innovation trajectories that later proved to be problematic — for instance involving asbestos, benzene, thalidomide, dioxins, lead in petrol, tobacco, many pesticides, mercury, chlorine and endocrine-disrupting compounds…” it says. “In all these and many other cases, delayed recognition of adverse effects incurred not only serious environmental or health impacts, but massive expense and reductions in competitiveness for firms and economies persisting in the wrong path.” Thalidomide was one of the worst drug scandals in modern history, killing 80,000 babies and maiming 20,000 babies after it was taken by expectant mothers. Fracking provides a potentially similar example today, the report warns: “… innovations reinforcing fossil fuel energy strategies – such as hydraulic fracturing – arguably offer a contemporary prospective example.”

This is a silent human drama of epic proportions.

• Traffickers Profit as Asylum Seekers Head for Europe (Spiegel)

Behind the La Grotta bar, Italy comes to an end. But a narrow road continues onward across the border into France, hugging a cliff above the sea. It is a bottleneck for illegal immigrants and traffickers. Hidden behind agave bushes, three young men from Mali are crouching on the steep slope, staring at the border. Just a few meters away, a group of Syrian refugees are camped out in front of La Grotta, like pilgrims searching for a hostel: men carrying backpacks, women wearing headscarves and a little boy. Ahmad, as he asked to be called, is the gray-bearded spokesman of the illegal immigrants. Formerly a software developer in Damascus, he left his wife and children behind. Ahmad pulls a crumpled piece of paper out of his jacket pocket, the official certification of his arrival in Italy – as refugee number 13,962.

But this number is a reflection of statistics kept in merely one place – the police headquarters in Crotone, located in southern Italy’s Calabria region. All in all, more than 150,000 migrants and refugees have landed on Italy’s shores nationwide since January and almost half of them – more than 60,000 men, women and children – were never registered in the European Union’s Eurodac database. They have long since disappeared, heading north toward the rest of Europe. There was an unwritten rule after the tragic shipwreck off the island of Lampedusa on Oct. 3, 2013, in which 366 people drowned: Rome sends naval ships and coast guard vessels into the Mediterranean as part of the “Mare Nostrum” rescue operation, but it lets most of the migrants continue northward without further ado, so that they will not apply for political asylum in Italy as the country of their arrival, as required under the Dublin II agreement.

But in late September, Italy changed course. In a confidential communiqué, which SPIEGEL has seen, Interior Minister Angelino Alfano ordered that henceforth migrants “always” be identified and fingerprinted. Alfano noted that various EU countries have, “with increasing insistence,” complained that the immigrants are left to continue their “journey to northern European countries” without being challenged by Italian authorities. Preferred destinations include Sweden, Germany and Switzerland, countries with social welfare and the possibility of political asylum. Italy, on the other hand, as confirmed once more by a Nov. 4 ruling by the European Court of Human Rights, cannot even guarantee suitable accommodations for asylum applicants. More than ever, the Dublin system is degenerating into a farce, with only about 6% of all asylum seekers in Germany actually being returned to the country where they first set foot in the EU.

” .. the protections which the government has put in place are not worth the paper they’re written on ..”

• Up To 13,000 People Working As Slaves In UK (Guardian)

Between 10,000 and 13,000 people in Britain are victims of slavery, up to four times the number previously thought, analysis for the government has found. The figure for 2013 is the first time the government has made an official estimate of the scale of modern slavery in the UK, and includes women forced into prostitution, domestic staff, and workers in fields, factories and fishing. The National Crime Agency’s Human Trafficking Centre had previously put the number of slavery victims in 2013 at 2,744. Launching the government’s strategy to eradicate modern slavery, the home secretary, Theresa May, said the scale of abuse was shocking. “The first step to eradicating the scourge of modern slavery is acknowledging and confronting its existence,” she said.

The estimated scale of the problem in modern Britain is shocking and these new figures starkly reinforce the case for urgent action.” The data was collated from sources including the police, the UK Border Force, charities and the Gangmasters Licensing Authority. The Home Office described the estimate as a “dark figure” that may not have come to the NCA’s attention. The modern slavery bill going through parliament will provide courts in England and Wales with powers to protect victims of human trafficking. Scotland and Northern Ireland are planning similar measures. May said: “Working with a wide range of partners, we must step up the fight against modern slavery in this country, and internationally, to put an end to the misery suffered by innocent people around the world.”

The Home Office said the UK Border Force would introduce specialist trafficking teams at major ports and airports to identify potential victims, and the legal framework would be strengthened for confiscating the proceeds of crime. But Aidan McQuade, the director of the Anti-Slavery International charity, questioned whether the government’s strategy went far enough. He told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “If you leave an employment relationship – even if you’re suffering from any sort of exploitation up to and including forced labour, even if you’re suffering from all sorts of physical and sexual violence – you’ll be deported. “So that [puts] enormous power in the hands of unscrupulous employers. And frankly, the protections which the government has put in place are not worth the paper they’re written on in order to prevent this sort of exploitation once they’ve given employers that sort of power.”

Japan Is Dying And We Still Don’t Get It?!

Nov 182014

November 18, 2014 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 8:30 am Finance Tagged with: Abe, Banks, deflation, Draghi, GDP, Japan, QE, spending, stimulus 6 Responses »

Dorothea Lange Miserable poverty, Hooverville, Elm Grove, Oklahoma County, OK Aug 1936

What is it with us? Don’t we WANT to understand? Japan announced on Monday that its economy is in hopeless trouble and back in recession (as if it was ever out). And what do we see? ‘Experts’ and reporters clamoring for more stimulus. But if Japan has shown us anything over the past years, and you’re free to pick any number between 2 and 20 years, it’s that the QE-based kind of stimulus doesn’t work. Not for the real economy, that is.

The land of the setting sun has during that time thrown so much stimulus into its financial system that Krugman-esque calls for even more of the same look even more ludicrous today than they did all along. Abenomics is a depressing failure, just as we knew it would be since it started almost two years ago. It’s not complicated, and it never was.

Japan’s stimulus has achieved the following: banks get to pretend they’re healthy and stocks rise to heights that are fundamentally disconnected from underlying real values. On the flipside of that, citizens are being increasingly squeezed and ‘decide’ not to spend (not much of a decision if you have nothing to spend). Since Japan’s ‘consumer’ spending makes up about 60% of GDP, things can only possibly get worse as time passes. If ‘consumers’ don’t spend, deflation is the inevitable result – and that has nothing to do with the much discussed sales tax, it’s been going on for decades -.

Therefore, the sole thing QE stimulus has achieved is a wealth transfer from poorer to rich. And that’s not only the case in Japan. Mario Draghi yesterday hinted – again – at all the stuff he could start buying next year, including sovereign bonds, even though that would violate EU law. And whether or not Germany will let him in the end, the fact that he keeps the option alive even if only in theory, tells us plenty about the mindset at the ECB.

That is, it’s the same as in Japan. And doing the same can only lead to the same results. A poorer population, a richer toplayer and an economy that continues to shrink, which will and must lead to the same deflationary trend. The idea that an economy can be rescued by pushing public funds into its finance system and stock markets has been forever thrown out by Japan’s experiences.

Draghi said yesterday that ‘monetary policy has done a lot’, and while that may be correct, it says nothing about WHAT it has done. From where I’m sitting, Germany’s recent drift into negative territory and the ongoing record unemployment rates around the Mediterranean certainly tell us a lot about what it has NOT done. QE, no matter how big and how crazy, doesn’t heal real economies, it makes them sicker.

If consumer spending makes up 60% of GDP, as in Japan, or even 70%, as in the US, then you need to boost that spending. And you don’t do that by handing over what financial wiggle room you have left, to banks so they can pile it on to the reserves they hold at central banks.

It is accepted as gospel that it’s a good thing to give banks free money, but it would be the devil’s work to give it to consumers. Instead, the latter must be squeezed from all sides, through austerity, the loss of services, benefits, wages and jobs, in order to prop up the financial system. How and where is it not clear what that will result in? There’s only one possible outcome.

The reason why all governments and central banks keep following the failed QE stimulus path regardless lies in the relative political powers that different parts of a society have. In today’s world, saving the banks, which equals saving the rich, is not only the priority, it’s the only deliberation.

And if you might be under the impression that what is true in Japan and Europe does not hold in the US, why not start with this graph from Doug Short, and take it from there.

If and when an economy is as deep in the doldrums as all major economies today are, you can’t rescue it by taking from the poor to save the rich. It’s fundamentally impossible. You need the bottom 90%’s spending in order to generate enough GDP to stay out of deflation. Money must move through an economy for it to stay sufficiently ‘lubricated’. And the only people who can keep that money moving are the bottom 90%. It’s Catch-22.

Any stimulus must be directed at the bottom, or it must of necessity fail. Nothing commie or socialist about it, but simply the way economies work. And it’s not just some difference of ideal or insight or something, it’s very simply that an economy cannot function without its poorer 90% of citizens spending.

Anything else is simply Grand Theft Auto. Both Japan and Europe are preparing for more of it.

The Broken Model Of The Eurozone

Nov 082014

November 8, 2014 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 9:13 pm Finance Tagged with: debt, euro, Germany, Greece, Italy, poverty, stimulus 3 Responses »

Alfred Palmer White Motor Company, Cleveland Dec 1941

I stumbled upon these few words in an Ambrose Evans Pritchard article the other day, and they hit me almost like some sort of epiphany, which in turn made me feel a little stupid, because it’s all so obvious. What Ambrose wrote (and this time I’m not making fun of him), was about the eurozone (EMU), of which he said:

The North is competitive. The South is 20% overvalued.

And I realized that’s all you need to know about the eurozone, and about why it will fail. Or has already failed, to put it more accurately. There’s no other information required. Other than a bit of context perhaps to clarify.

Before the euro, and the eurozone, countries like Greece, Spain, Italy, Portugal, would perform 20% or more lower economically than Germany or Holland would. And that was kind of alright, because periodically, their governments and central banks would revalue (devaluate) their currencies down against for instance the Deutschmark by those same 20% or so.

Of course Germany hated this to an extent, since it made it harder for its industries to compete against Greek and Italian companies. Which may by the way well be a mostly hidden reason for them to push the eurozone on the Mediterranean. Devaluation still worked for many years, though, and as we presently find, it was the only thing that could have worked.

Today, because they now have the same currency, and devaluation is thus impossible, and southern Europe also still underperforms the north, there’s only one possible outcome: the south keeps getting poorer all the time. It’s inevitable. Unless Greece starts outproducing the Germans, and we all start driving Hellas quality cars, but that’s not in the cards.

The fatal flaw in the eurozone model is that there’s no way, no escape clause, to rectify the inherited differences between north and south. Moreover, because there isn’t, the differences must and will get bigger. There’s nothing any kind of stimulus by the ECB or EU can do about that.

Unless they directly tax the Germans and Dutch and Finns with the stated purpose of handing what they raise directly to the Greeks. Not going to happen. And there was never any intention of doing such a thing. The Germans wanted to expand their distribution markets, and the Greeks were promised they’d get richer by default if they joined the shared currency.

Neither side thought this through, not with a longer – or even medium – term view. The Greeks et al are the first to pay the price, but the Germans will end up paying as well, no matter how the growing tensions and differences end up being resolved.

All anyone ever considered was a tide to lift all boats. But there is no such tide now. There is no economic growth, other than perhaps in a few niche markets (and they will fall too). And no provisions or plans were ever drafted for this to happen.

Ambrose’s 20% may be underestimating things, or overestimating them. It makes no difference other than perhaps in the timing of events. And not all southern nations will be overvalued – and underachieving – vis a vis Germany – by the same percentage. But that doesn’t matter either down the line.

All countries that entered the EU in the past received large sums of money for things like infrastructure projects. But that money is long gone. Now it’s back to the same performance ratios that have existed for many decades, if not for centuries.

The only thing that might help southern Europe here would be debt restructuring on a massive scale. Still, that would be considered far too costly by the north, provided it even could be achieved in a globalized finance system (look at Argentina).

What makes this interesting is that there is now a question of responsibility. Are only the Greeks accountable for their debts, or is the entire eurozone, given that they share a common currency? These are issues that should have been resolved in times of plenty; in times of less they will prove extremely hard if not impossible to solve.

Northern Europeans see their lifestyles being cramped from many sides in the ongoing crisis, and they would not accept more being taken from them to be handed to Greece. Even if 50%+ of young Greeks have no jobs, and over 40% of Greek children grow up in poverty. That’s not how the union was explained to them. And they would not have agreed if it had been.

The fact that Brussels has attracted a highly dubious breed of politician and bureaucrat certainly hasn’t helped, and still doesn’t. But it’s not the core problem. The core is that there never was a mechanism to reconcile the 20% differences, which means we’re fast on our way to 30% and more. Nothing anybody can do about that other than to leave the union.

The EU was founded on ideals of peace. But unless someone does something, fast, it will be the source of bitter and bloody fighting. Better wisen up now, guys (and I don’t mean the leadership, they’ll go on till the end). In math, there are things that just don’t add up. This is one of them.

Debt Rattle Jun 3 2014: A Few More Days To Dream About A Better World

Jun 032014

June 3, 2014 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 7:43 pm Finance Tagged with: central banks, Draghi, QE, stimulus, zombie 2 Responses »

Arthur Rothstein General store closed on account of the drought, Grassy Butte, ND July 1936

Everyone expects Mario Draghi’s ECB to announce stimulus measures on Thursday. If the forward guidance, if we can call it that, which was ‘leaked’ by Draghi and his minions is accurate, we’ll see the bank’s main refinancing rate lowered, and the deposit rate perhaps even turned negative, with a less obvious set of measures that may include asset purchases also in the offing. The main goal must be to drive down the euro, which is still way too expensive from the point of view of exports and which therefore holds back ‘recovery’ in the eyes of policy makers, pundits and economists. But it would have to be driving down the euro without driving down stock markets at the same time.

There are a lot of things in just that one simple paragraph that are accepted as gospel, no questions asked, without having been tested or even really thought about. Now, I think that making the deposit rate negative is fine. Why would anyone want banks to be paid to store money with a central bank? Just tell them they can’t park a single eurocent with the ECB without paying a reasonable price to do so. And while you’re at it, the long-term refinancing operation (LTRO) could do with a revision. The stated aim for LTRO is to provide liquidity for banks that hold illiquid assets, but isn’t that perhaps just counter productive? If assets are still illiquid 5-6 years into the crisis, maybe it’s better to simply get rid of them, write them down, not aid and abet banks in holding onto them. It just makes it harder for anyone to know what a bank is truly worth if you help them hide their liabilities, and who needs that? Well, yes, bankers, but if you can’t get your ship and your gambling debts in order in 6 years, who needs you, really?

So trim down LTRO. And then do nothing else at all. Send a message to the world that you’re not intending to play the same game the US, Japan and China have been engaging in. If only because, well, look at where these countries find themselves. What’s to be jealous about there? And if Draghi announces “nothing else at all”, wouldn’t that drive down the euro all by itself? And yes, although we’ve seen markets ‘counter intuitively’ rise a few times recently on bad news, stock markets and other asset markets will probably get hit, perhaps even hard. But isn’t that what this world needs, isn’t it quite simply a good thing if as much of the free and cheap and zombie and ultimately empty stimulus money as possible is driven out of the system?

Zombie money is the biggest scourge of our times and our economies, not its savior, but just about everyone seems to have that completely upside down. The stated idea behind QE and other stimuli is to bring recovery through achieving an escape velocity that could help manage the debt load through – very – rapid growth, but there are no signs, other than some handpicked ones, that it is working. As long as it isn’t, the not-so-stated fact is that things are deteriorating, and quite rapidly too, since huge layers of additional debt are poured onto the already existing debt. Obviously, financial institutions and their shareholders are doing just fine at the cost of those who will have to pay back the debts.

But how does that fit in with Mario Draghi’s job description? What we have is rising stock markets and home prices – in many regions – combined with rising poverty, unemployment and not-in-the-labor-force rates. In what book is that a good direction to go in? How is creating an ever bigger divide in our societies going to help us in a recovery, or in life in general for that matter? If Draghi starts buying up sovereign bonds or asset backed paper, that may help banks and investors for a while, but at what price for the poorest in Greece, Spain or even Germany? And despite that price, there are no guarantees whatsoever that the benefits such actions may have will last. How much road to nowhere do we need to travel before we actually get there?

Tyler Durden ran a piece from The Diplomat written by Yang Hengjun today, Why Do China’s Reforms All Fail? . The reasons Yang gives, which are solidly interlocked, are the exact same as why present day central bank stimulus doesn’t work.

… all the reforms in Chinese history aimed to perpetuate the current system

… almost all of China’s reforms were done purely for the benefit of the ruler

Central banks seek to perpetuate a system that is already in place, even if it has failed dramatically and is even beyond repair, because central banks are not independent at all, no matter how much they are supposed to be. They instead control the money and credit supply of entire nations or associations of nations for the benefit of the rulers of the existing paradigm, be they political, financial and/or social. Central banks exist to make sure that if existing powers are broke or in danger, they get to feed off the wealth of the people. Therefore, while we may have democratic systems, though that is by no means assured from a political viewpoint anymore, these systems are really moot, since central bankers decide who rules and who pays for that rule, and they always pick yesterday’s favorites to hang on for another day. So if you’re looking for recovery and progress and sanity, you’re out of luck as long as Yellen and Draghi have the powers they do.

But don’t let me get ahead of myself. Draghi may still choose the way of the wiser, and do nothing on Thursday but to cut off a bunch of broke banks’ long overdue lifelines. And cause the very crisis that is the only way to get our economies and societies back on the way to real health, not the zombified kind we’ve been “living” for 6 years now. Hey, I can still dream and hope for another two days …

That’s what I said: they spent it all! No pent-up demand anywhere in sight.

• Heloc Payment Jump to Take Bite Out of Consumer Spending (WSJ)

Another bill is coming due from America’s decade-old borrowing binge as payments jump on a number of home-equity credit lines taken out during the boom. Economists worry the new burden could reignite loan-payment troubles and dent consumer spending at an iffy moment in the economic recovery. At issue are home-equity lines of credit, known as Helocs, which allow homeowners to tap their equity to fund home improvement, college tuitions and other expenses. Those loans typically let borrowers make interest-only payments for the first 10 years before requiring principal payments as well. That reckoning will come this year for an estimated 817,000 borrowers owing more than $23 billion in Helocs, more than double last year’s level, according to estimates by Equifax, the credit-reporting firm, and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. An average of about $50 billion in loans will reset in each of the next three years.

“These resets are a very serious issue,” said Amy Crews Cutts, chief economist at Equifax. “It’s a nontrivial number of people who get smacked with a higher payment.” The added bite is another reminder of how the home-equity borrowing boom that juiced spending during the past decade still impedes the sluggish U.S. economic recovery. The problems could squeeze states such as California, Arizona, Nevada and Florida that saw the biggest surges in home prices—and borrowing—a decade ago. Equifax data show Heloc delinquency rates have doubled on loans that have already reached the end of their interest-only period. With home prices now rising, banks have begun to increase Heloc lending.

But new originations are a fraction of levels during the peak of the housing boom. And many borrowers with 10-year-old Helocs can’t readily refinance—which could extend their interest-only periods—because many home prices are below where they were when they signed the loans. A homeowner who owes $100,000 on a Heloc carrying a 3.5% interest rate would see payments rise to $715 from $292 when the interest-only loan converts to a 15-year amortizing mortgage. If interest rates were to rise by three%age points, payments would go up an additional $150. “The giant sucking sound is all of that money being taken out of consumer spending,” said Richard Redmond, a mortgage banker in Larkspur, Calif.

The generational divide steadily grows.

• Cash Deals for Homes Reach Record With Boomers Retiring (Bloomberg)

Mike Trafton bought a house in a suburb of Boise, Idaho, where he plans to retire. He made the deal without signing a stack of mortgage papers. Trafton, 55, and his wife Cindy, 54, paid $400,000 in cash for the 3,200-square-foot house in Eagle after selling their 4,400-square-foot home in a Portland, Oregon, suburb for $680,000. Like a growing number of baby boomers, born between 1946 and 1964, the Traftons had no desire to get a mortgage. “I feel better about owning my home outright,” said Trafton, who’s moving to a region with an average of 200 sunny days a year and skiing in the winter. “At this stage in our lives, we can afford it, and it’s better than having a monthly mortgage payment hanging over us.” U.S. home-price gains have restored $3.8 trillion of value to owners since the beginning of the real estate recovery in 2012, according to Federal Reserve data.

A record number of Americans are using that equity to pay cash for properties, avoiding a mortgage process that has become even more onerous in the wake of the 2007 housing collapse. In the first quarter, 29% of non-investment homebuyers used cash, the highest on record for the period, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The majority of people making all-cash deals are baby boomers mostly because America’s largest-ever generation is beginning to retire, said Lawrence Yun, chief economist of the National Association of Realtors. In 2012, there were a record 61.8 million Americans over the age of 60, according to the Census. That compares with 46.6 million in 2000. “Cash purchases are on the rise because older homeowners who have decades of home-equity accumulation don’t want the hassle of a mortgage,” Yun said. “With the economy improving and the stock market at record highs, boomers are the ones who are driving the market.”

A lot of trouble’s brewing below the surface.

• Over 40% of 2 Million Modified Loans Facing Resets are Underwater (Mish)

Kostya Gradushy, Black Knight’s manager of Loan Data and Customer Analytics: “While the national negative equity rate as of April stands at 9.4% of active mortgages, the share of underwater modified loans facing interest rate resets is much higher — over 40%. In addition, another 18% of modified borrowers have 9% equity or less in their homes. Given that the data has shown quite clearly that equity — or the lack thereof — is one of the primary drivers of mortgage defaults, these resets may indeed pose an increased risk in the years ahead. “From a broader perspective, it’s also important to note that more than one of every 10 borrowers is in a ‘near negative equity’ position, meaning the borrower has less than 10% equity in his or her home.”

Underwater loans facing reset is one major problem. A second problem is the declining volume of new originations and home sales. A chart of new single-family homes sold will highlight the second problem.

Not spending.

• US Velocity Of Money Falls To All-Time Record Low (M. Snyder)

Let’s take a look at M2. It includes more things in the money supply. The following is how Investopedia defines M2…

A measure of money supply that includes cash and checking deposits (M1) as well as near money. “Near money” in M2 includes savings deposits, money market mutual funds and other time deposits, which are less liquid and not as suitable as exchange mediums but can be quickly converted into cash or checking deposits.

This is a highly deflationary chart. It clearly indicates that economic activity in the U.S. has been steadily slowing down. And if we are honest, we have to admit that we are seeing signs of this all around us. Major retailers are closing down stores at the fastest pace since the collapse of Lehman Brothers, consumer confidence is down, trading revenues at the big Wall Street banks are way down, and the steady decline in home sales is more than just a little bit alarming. In addition, the employment situation in this country is much less promising than we have been led to believe. According to a report put out by the Republicans on the Senate Budget Committee, an all-time record one out of every eight men in their prime working years are not in the labor force…

“There are currently 61.1 million American men in their prime working years, age 25–54. A staggering 1 in 8 such men are not in the labor force at all, meaning they are neither working nor looking for work. This is an all-time high dating back to when records were first kept in 1955. An additional 2.9 million men are in the labor force but not employed (i.e., they would work if they could find a job). A total of 10.2 million individuals in this cohort, therefore, are not holding jobs in the U.S. economy today. There are also nearly 3 million more men in this age group not working today than there were before the recession began.”

Never before has such a high percentage of men in their prime years been so idle. But since they are not counted as part of “the labor force”, the government bureaucrats can keep the “unemployment rate” looking nice and pretty. Of course if we were actually using honest numbers, the unemployment rate would be in the double digits, our economy would be considered to have been in a recession since about 2005, and everyone would be crying out for an end to “the depression”. And now we are rapidly approaching another downturn. [..] And now Fed officials are slowly scaling back quantitative easing because they apparently believe that the economy is getting “back to normal”. We shall see. Many are not quite so optimistic. For example, the chief market analyst at the Lindsey Group, Peter Boockvar, believes that the S&P 500 could plummet 15 to 20% when quantitative easing finally ends. Others believe it will be much worse than that.

Since 2008, the size of the Fed balance sheet has grown from less than a trillion dollars to more than four trillion dollars. This unprecedented intervention was able to successfully delay the coming deflationary depression, but it has also made our long-term problems far worse. So when the inevitable crash does arrive, it will be much, much worse than it could have been. Sadly, most Americans do not understand these things.

I’ve covered this many times.

• QE At Work: Pouring Cheap Debt Into The Shale Ponzi (Alhambra)

In Bernanke’s explanation, investors swap high quality MBS or Treasuries for high quality corporate bonds but reality has seen something a bit different. From 1996 to 2006, a bit over $1 trillion in junk bonds were issued. It took only 3 years to match that total in the QE era. What is more disturbing is that a large portion of that junk debt (and a lot more that isn’t reported via the bank lending channel) is being issued to fund oil and gas exploration companies for the fracking of oil and natural gas. Shale debt has at least doubled over the last four years. Why is that disturbing? Isn’t shale supposed to lead us to the nirvana of energy independence? Well, maybe not. I’ve been a critic of the industry since the boom first started and not because I’m concerned about the environmental impact (although that probably deserves more of my attention). My criticism has focused on the economics of shale.

There are two pieces of the economic puzzle when it comes to shale. First is that most shale oil deposits are not profitable to extract except at current high prices. This drilling/extraction method is not cheap. Breakeven prices vary by region but it is safe to say that no shale oil deposits are profitable below $50/barrel and most areas require much higher prices. An average might be in the range of $65 and there are plenty of areas where the price needs to be above $80 before anyone makes a nickel. I would just note that oil traded, albeit briefly, at $34 in the last recession. Second is the production profile of shale wells; production drops off rather precipitously after the first year (in contrast with traditional wells which deplete over much longer time frames). Combine high extraction costs with rapid depletion and the economics of shale become not only dubious but frankly insane.

But there is none at the moment.

• Why Central Banks Need More Volatility (Zero Hedge)

Will volatility become a policy tool? The PBOC decided that enough was enough with the ever-strengthening Yuan and are trying to gently break the back of the world’s largest carry trade by increasing uncertainty about the currency. As Citi’s Stephen Englander notes, this somewhat odd dilemma (of increasing uncertainty to maintain stability) is exactly what the rest of the world’s planners need to do – Central banks will need more FX and asset market volatility in order to provide low rates for an extended period… here’s why. Via Citi’s Stephen Englander:

Will central banks need volatility to restrain asset prices?

• Cyclical and trend growth pessimism is leading central banks to guide expectations of rates downward
• The more credible the guidance, the more risk will be bought
• To prevent asset market overheating while keeping rates low, central bankers may have to introduce more volatility into asset markets…
• …emphasizing risk and vigilance and central bank readiness to raise rates if needed

Central banks will need more FX and asset market volatility in order to provide low rates for an extended period. The argument goes like this:

1) Low realized and implied volatility have come as a surprise to investors
2) Investors are underinvested out of skepticism that the low rates, low volatility environment will persist
3) If the central bank mantra of “low rates, low vol forever” persists in asset markets, investors will buy high beta assets and add leverage
4) Asset prices will respond much more to rates incentives than (so-called) rates sensitive sectors of the economy
5) Central banks want to keep the low rates without creating an asset bubble and will purposely induce volatility to calm speculation

The big surprise this year is the reduction in FX and asset market volatility (Figures 1, 2) Realized USDBRL volatility over the last month is where EURUSD vol was in Q1 2013. Since it was unexpected, investors were underinvested and even wrongly positioned as volatility declined.

People are not spending.

• Eurozone Inflation Dives To 0.5% As ECB Poised To Act (Reuters)

Euro zone price inflation fell unexpectedly in May, increasing the risks of deflation in the currency area and sealing the case for the European Central Bank to act this week. Annual consumer inflation in the 18 countries sharing the euro fell to 0.5% in May from 0.7% in April, the EU’s statistics office Eurostat said on Tuesday. A clutch of senior sources told Reuters earlier this month that the ECB was preparing a package of policy options for its meeting on Thursday, including cuts in all its interest rates and targeted measures aimed at boosting lending to small– and mid-sized firms (SMEs). The weak rate of May price rises would seem to cement expectations that the ECB will now deliver a series of measures to make it even cheaper to borrow and help the economy.

May’s reading is back at levels last seen in March – the lowest level since November 2009 and reflecting low inflation in Germany. Inflation in the 9.5 trillion euro economy is stuck in the ECB’s ‘danger zone’ of below 1%, a sign of the fragile recovery. The ECB says it stands ready to use all tools available to fend off deflation risks and aid the economy. Core inflation, excluding energy, food, alcohol and tobacco, fell to 0.7% in May from 1.0% in April. Energy prices were flat on the year, showing no decline for the first time in five months. Global financial markets have been buoyed by the odds of cheaper money in the bloc and could react sharply if the ECB does not deliver on Thursday.

The lowest yields in 200 years. How does that rhyme with the state our economies are in?

• Napoleonic Yields No Comfort to Draghi Fighting Deflation (Bloomberg)

Europe’s lowest government bond yields since the Napoleonic Wars are signaling investors want more action from Mario Draghi. Instead of a vote of confidence, the most pronounced rally in 200 years suggests the European Central Bank president needs to stave off the risks of stagnation and deflation. Austria, Belgium, France (GFRN10) and Germany can borrow at lower rates than the U.S. as inflation less than half the ECB’s target stokes concern the euro zone will take many years to recover from its longest-ever recession. While bond, currency and derivative markets show an abatement in the contagion that began in Greece in 2009 before engulfing Spain and Italy, a closer look reveals high debt and deficits that have yet to be addressed, unemployment near record levels and a banking system still to be fixed.

ECB policy makers will share their outlook in two days, when they probably will lower the 18-nation currency bloc’s official rate toward zero and take the deposit rate negative for the first time. “The outright level of yields is suggesting an incredibly weak outlook for growth,” Russell Silberston, a London-based money manager at Investec Asset Management, which oversees $110 billion, said in a May 30 phone interview. “It’s a powerful signal telling you policy is too tight and that there’s complacency toward the risks. Not a great deal has been solved. We’ve still got bank stress tests to come, too low growth and too low inflation.”

In times of pleanty, differences can be papered over. When they turn lean, not so much.

• The Most Worrying Chart For Europe’s Stability (Zero Hedge)

While we have historically noted the explosion of youth unemployment as a key factor for instability in Europe, there appears to be an ever more concerning indicator of the potential fragility of the European Union. As Bloomberg’s Maxime Sbahi notes, the difference in economic performance (and mood) between France and Germany, often referred to as the European “engine,” is at a record high. This disparity is likely to weaken France and isolate Germany further, heightening political tensions and indecision in the euro area. And the “mood” of the people – perhaps even more contentiously – is near 30 year highs…

Via Bloomberg Brief: “The political consequences of these economic gaps are growing clearer, though the differences in underlying policy choices have been visible for some time. Last week’s European Parliament elections provided a first glimpse of the political shakeout, with the victory of the National Front in France. The country will send a record 24 euroskeptic members to the European Parliament in a total delegation of 74, compared with seven out of 96 from Germany. Disagreements between the two EU founding members are likely to intensify as past common interests are now strained by increasing economic divergence. Recently, France has repeatedly argued for a relaxation of fiscal targets and called on the European Central Bank to be more proactive to weaken the euro. Germany has retorted by insisting on the ECB’s independence and respect for fiscal discipline, directly warning France against non-compliance with budget commitments.

If the French economy continues its slide from the euro area’s core to the profile of a periphery member, new standoffs are likely to materialize, weakening the Franco-German relationship that has provided leadership in the past. This might slow down the functioning of the euro area, where decisions are mostly made between heads of government in summits. Over the long term, one of the most disturbing consequences is a potential lack of a common strategic view for the euro area’s future at a time when direction is needed more than ever. If its historic partner is downgraded to a junior status, Germany may grow even more powerful on the European stage. The country may find itself in a more isolated and uncomfortable position.”

Profit from central banks giving away your children’s futures. What a great concept.

• Buy With Central Banks Is U.S.-Japan Lesson for ECB QE Scenario (Bloomberg)

[..] … how should investors react if the ECB finally starts buying assets? Societe Generale analysts looked to the U.S. and Japan for clues. They found three patterns in both the Japanese purchase of asset-backed securities from August 2003 to September 2006 and the three rounds of quantitative easing deployed by the Federal Reserve from November 2008 to now. First, QE triggered a reallocation from bonds to equities, In Japan, that proved enough to push up the MSCI Index Japan by 76% over the three period during which the bank spent 3.8 trillion yen ($37 billion). In the U.S., the Standard & Poor’s Index 500 rose 36% in the first wave of buying until March 2010, 24% in the second round from August 2010 to the following June and 29% in QE3 since September 2012, Societe Generale strategists Alain Bokobza and Gaelle Blanchard said in a report last month.

Second, 10-year bond yields were pushed higher, to the tune of 71 basis points in Japan and a cumulative 212 basis points in the U.S. over their respective quantitative-easing periods. While that may sound counterintuitive if the central banks are buying bonds, the resulting spur to economic growth and inflation boosted long-term yields, according to Bokobza. Third, QE supported the banking sector. Japanese bank stocks improved strongly once the BOJ started quantitative easing, reducing the sector’s credit risk after bad loans had hurt their balance sheets. In the U.S., the buying helped stabilize the share performance of banks.

Such a blueprint has Societe Generale making some early recommendations if Draghi’s ECB follows the BOJ and the Fed. Investors should bet on euro-region equities to outperform rivals elsewhere. In the U.S., industrials and consumer discretionary stocks did better than the market in every QE episode, while consumer staples, utilities and telecommunications systematically underperformed. The stocks and bonds of crisis countries such as Greece and Spain and maybe even less-infected France should do well as asset purchases supports their equity markets by aiding economic activity. It’s also worth preparing for the banking outlook to turn more positive, with Societe Generale favoring Credit Agricole SA, BNP Paribas and Unicredit SpA. All that’s needed now is for Draghi to start writing checks.

• Why Do China’s Reforms All Fail? (The Diplomat)

To simplify, there are three common factors.

First, as opposed to other reforms recorded in world history, almost all of China’s reforms were done purely for the benefit of the ruler (the emperor). The reforms adjusted the ruler’s policies on how to control the people, how to manage the four classes (scholars, peasants, artisans and merchants), how to exploit the peasants’ land, and how to fill the treasury with taxes. None of the reforms touched on philosophies of holding power, or the methods of governance, much less centered around public interests.

China’s reformers saw the interests of the common people as objects of reform, rather than reforming the regime in order to benefit the people. As a result, these reforms never touched the ruling dynasty, but only caused power struggles between the interest groups involved. Compared to revolutions (which are either loved or feared), the people were generally indifferent to “reform.” And reforms without public support fail utterly once they encounter counterattacks from interest groups and opposition parties. For the common people, the failure of the reforms was nothing to mourn.

Second, many vigorous reforms in Chinese history had one thing in common: The reformers were not the highest ruler (the emperor). Many had been (provisionally) selected by the emperor to act as pioneers for the reforms — and as scapegoats when reforms failed. Reformers like Shang Yang, Wang Anshi and the late Qing Westernization school all suffered this fate. The people who held supreme power were usually governing from behind the scenes. They maintained a certain distance from the reform, which left plenty of room to maneuver. If the reforms succeed, those in charge will take the credit; if the reforms fail, they will sacrifice the reformers. Under these circumstances, the reforms would be half-hearted from the beginning — so much for “top-down” reforms. By contrast, the series of reforms conducted directly by Emperor Wu in the Han dynasty and by Tang dynasty emperors were more effective.

Third, all the reforms in Chinese history aimed to perpetuate the current system, rather than changing the existing regime. Some reforms failed, and the reformers were dismembered (like Shang Yang) or died in disgrace (Wang Anshi). But even then, leaders kept the parts of the reform policies that could help maintain the existing system, turning the reforms into cogs in the authoritarian machine.

Oh yes it is.

• China’s Debt Reckoning Is Coming (Bloomberg)

It took China to prove Friedrich Nietzsche wrong. What didn’t kill the Communist Party hasn’t made it stronger. It’s only making the inevitable crash bigger, more spectacular and needlessly dangerous. China’s debt reckoning is coming. Maybe not this quarter or this year, but Chinese President Xi Jinping’s unbridled effort to keep growth from falling below the official 7.5% target is cementing China’s fate. China is investing just as much as it did in 2008 and 2009, when authorities were desperately trying to avert a slowdown. Just as debt troubles in Japan, Europe and the U.S. ended badly, so will China’s. Why, then, with so many clear examples of financial excess leading to ruin, is Xi continuing down this road? Blame it on the ghosts of Tiananmen Square.

In the aftermath of the crackdown on student protesters on June 4, 1989, China’s leaders made a bargain with their people: We will make you richer, as long as you no longer dissent. After the crash of Lehman Brothers, the regime had to go to extraordinary lengths to keep up its end of the bargain, pumping up what was already the world’s highest investment rate. In doing so, China itself became a Lehman economy – powered by shadowy funding sources, off-balance-sheet investing and unconvincing claims that all remained well. For a while this rampant investment growth seemed to make China stronger; now that strategy is its main vulnerability. Yet Xi and Premier Li Keqiang apparently can’t bring themselves to roll back those policies and rebalance the economy away from exports and toward more consumption.

They know that if they do so, growth will slow a lot, challenging the post-Tiananmen compact — and in the Internet age, no less. As anger grows over any slowdown, Chinese censors won’t be able to delete text messages and microblog entries fast enough. It’s often said that when the U.S. sneezes, the entire world catches a cold. But the eventual popping of China’s $23 trillion credit bubble could send many nations to the emergency room. Any crash would make deflation China’s biggest export. China’s brawn is widely misunderstood. Take Donald Trump’s recent musings to Fox News about China’s rising economic dominance and the tragedy of the U.S. borrowing from Beijing to service a debt “no one ever dreamt possible.” You would think a man with Trump’s track record of bankruptcies would understand that losses from debt don’t disappear. When a company, or nation, rolls over unpaid debts without resolving them, profits – or GDP – are overstated, as China’s is today.

“Wall Street’s biggest firms can’t get a break in the bond business.” So?

• Bond Bankers Have 144 Reasons to Fret Over Underwriting Frenzy (Bloomberg)

Wall Street’s biggest firms can’t get a break in the bond business. With trading profits dwindling, more dealers than ever are fighting for assignments managing U.S. corporate-bond sales, one of the few bright spots in fixed income. Companies from the most-creditworthy to the most-indebted have been selling trillions of dollars of debt, locking in record-low borrowing costs ahead of the anticipated rise in interest rates. The increased competition is bad for JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup Goldman Sachs and Barclays because the top five banks won the smallest share of the assignments this year for any comparable timeframe, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. A record 144 underwriters for the period have split an estimated $4.2 billion of fees on U.S. sales, the data show.

“One business is challenged, so people have become aggressive in other businesses,” said Alison Williams, a senior financials analyst with Bloomberg Industries. While the biggest firms are still dominant, they’re losing their hold on a reliable profit center in an increasingly bleak fixed-income world. The five most-active corporate-debt underwriters this year landed 47% of the business, the smallest share on record. That’s down from 59% of the assignments for all of 2009. Smaller firms see an opportunity to break into the business as Wall Street’s behemoths unload inventories of riskier securities in the face of higher capital requirements and limits imposed by the U.S. Dodd-Frank Act’s Volcker Rule on the amount of their own money they can use to trade.

Hey, PIMCO makes a killing on zombie money.

• Pimco: Blithering About Minsky Moments And Free Money Forever (Stockman)

The single most dangerous meme now extant among the Cool-Aid drinkers is that we already had something called the Minsky Moment in 2008—so six years on its still too early for another. Fittingly, CNBC trotted out one of Pimco’s retired bond peddlers, Paul McCulley, to explain this, and why it is therefore safe to load up on bonds. That is, bonds which Bill Gross has already bought and which McCulley now invites the mullets to bid higher. After all, in a world of monetary central planning appearing on bubblevision to egg on the mullets is what bond fund economists do for a living: ‘We don’t have to be worried about the Big One. We had the Big One, and you don’t have another Big One after you have had the Minsky moment,’ he said.” Now lets see. Either the last Big One came crashing into Wall Street on the tail of a comet from deep space—in which case we need to consult the astronomical charts about the timing of the next one— or it was enabled, fueled and cheered on by the denizens of the Eccles Building.

If the latter, then it is obvious that they have done nothing differently in the last six years and, in fact, have actually doubled down and then some on Greenspan’s housing bubble maneuver. Indeed, the Fed has pegged interest rates in the money markets at essentially zero for the past 66 months—a condition that has never before happened during the history of modern financial markets. That makes Greenspan’s 24 month experiment with 1% money during 2003-2005 pale by comparison. Yet free or nearly free funding to the carry trades always and everywhere has the same effect: it incites massive leveraged speculation in the financial markets as gamblers seek to capture easy profit spreads between zero cost liabilities and “risk assets” which generate a positive yield or appreciation.

Now deep into year six of a monetary policy that is the mother’s milk of financial bubbles, there are warning signs everywhere. Margin debt reached historic peaks a few months ago; momentum driving hysteria of dotcom era intensity afflicted the bio-tech, cloud and social media stocks until they rolled-over recently; the Russell 2000 is trading at 85X reported income; junk bond issuance is at record levels and cov lite loans and booming CLO issuance–the hallmarks of the 2007-2008 blow-off top—have made an even more virulent reappearance; the LBO kings are busy strip-mining cash from portfolio companies already groaning under the weight of unrepayable debt via the device of “leveraged recaps” –another proven sign of a speculative top; and now the LBO houses are furiously buying and selling among themselves what have become permanent debt-mule companies by scalping cash from buyers who then reload more of the same debt on the sellers.

Turn it upside down and see what it looks like.

• On The False Idea That Money Is A Resource (Lisa Wade)

Watts makes a truly profound argument about what money really is. I’ll summarize it here and you can watch the full three-and-a-half minute video below if you like. Watts notes that we like to talk about “laws of nature,” or “observed regularities” in the world. In order to observe these regularities, he points out, we have to invent something regular against which to compare nature. Clocks and rulers are these kinds of things. All this is fine but, all too often, the clocks and the rulers come to seem more real than the nature that is being measured. For example, he says, we might think that the sun is rising because it’s 6AM when, of course, the sun will rise independently of our measures. It’s as if our clocks rule the universe instead of vice versa.

He uses these observations to make a comment about wealth and poverty. Money, he reminds us, isn’t real. It’s an invented measure. A dollar is no different than a minute or an inch. It is used to measure prosperity, but it doesn’t create prosperity any more than 6AM makes the sun rise or a ruler gives things inches. When there is a crisis — an economic depression or a natural disaster, for example — we may want to fix it, but end up asking ourselves “Where’s the money going to come from?” This is exactly the same mistake that we make, Watts argues, when we think that the sun rises because it’s 6AM. He says:

They think money makes prosperity. It’s the other way around, it’s physical prosperity which has money as a way of measuring it. But people think money has to come from somewhere… and it doesn’t. Money is something we have to invent, like inches. So, you remember the Great Depression when there was a slump? And what did we have a slump of? Money. There was no less wealth, no less energy, no less raw materials than there were before. But it’s like you came to work on building a house one day and they said, “Sorry, you can’t build this house today, no inches.” “What do you mean no inches?” “Just inches! We don’t mean that… we’ve got inches of lumber, yes, we’ve got inches of metal, we’ve even got tape measures, but there’s a slump in inches as such.” And people are that crazy!

• Coasting Toward Zero (Jim Kunstler)

In just about any realm of activity this nation does not know how to act. We don’t know what to do about our mounting crises of economy. We don’t know what to do about our relations with other nations in a strained global economy. We don’t know what to do about our own culture and its traditions, the useful and the outworn. We surely don’t know what to do about relations between men and women. And we’re baffled to the point of paralysis about our relations with the planetary ecosystem. To allay these vexations, we just coast along on the momentum generated by the engines in place — the turbo-industrial flow of products to customers without the means to buy things; the gigantic infrastructures of transport subject to remorseless decay; the dishonest operations of central banks undermining all the world’s pricing and cost structures; the political ideologies based on fallacies such as growth without limits; the cultural transgressions of thought-policing and institutional ass-covering.

This is a society in deep danger that doesn’t want to know it. The nostrum of an expanding GDP is just statistical legerdemain performed to satisfy stupid news editors, gull loose money into reckless positions, and bamboozle the voters. If we knew how to act we would bend every effort to prepare for the end of mass motoring, but instead we indulge in fairy tales about the “shale oil miracle” because it offers the comforting false promise that we can drive to WalMart forever (in self-driving cars!). Has it occurred to anyone that we no longer have the capital to repair the vast network of roads, streets, highways, and bridges that all these cars are supposed to run on? Or that the capital will not be there for the installment loans Americans are accustomed to buy their cars with? The global economy is withering quickly because it was just a manifestation of late-stage cheap oil. Now we’re in early-stage of expensive oil and a lot of things that seemed to work wonderfully well before, don’t work so well now.

Good, simple, clear video.

• The Federal Reserve Explained In 7 Minutes (Zero Hedge)

As members of the world’s central banks (most importantly Draghi and the ECB this week) are held up as Idols on mainstream business TV, despite their disastrous historical performances and inaccuracies, we thought it time to dust off the dark ‘reality’ behind the Federal Reserve – the uber-central bank … perhaps summed up nowhere better than in the words of former Fed Chair Alan Greenspan himself … “There is no other agency of government which can over-rule actions that we take.”

The growth monster now lives everywhere.

• India Growth Below 5% Adds Pressure on Modi to Spur Investment (Bloomberg)

India’s economy grew less than 5% for a second quarter, adding pressure on Prime Minister Narendra Modi to spur investment after winning the strongest electoral mandate in 30 years. Gross domestic product rose 4.6% in the three months ended March from a year earlier, unchanged from the previous quarter, the Central Statistical Office said in a statement in New Delhi yesterday. The median of 42 estimates in a Bloomberg News survey had been for a 4.7% gain. GDP expanded 4.7% in the fiscal year that ended March 31, compared with the previous period’s decade-low 4.5%.

Reviving growth is the new government’s immediate challenge while the central bank works to lower inflation, Reserve Bank of India Governor Raghuram Rajan said in Tokyo yesterday. The first single-party parliamentary majority in India since 1984 puts Modi in a position to take politically sensitive decisions such as cutting subsidies and hastening project approvals. “There is euphoria over the new government and some consumption uptick can happen,” said Indranil Pan, an economist at Kotak Mahindra Bank Ltd. in Mumbai. “You can’t expect a sudden turnaround. There could be some limitations in clearing projects faster as some were stuck over court jurisdictions.” India’s GDP has been below 5% in seven of the last eight quarters. Over the last decade, growth has averaged about 8%.

• Top US CEOs Make 330 Times More Than Average Employees (RT)

The average employee in the US will have to work 331 years to earn the annual salary of an average Fortune 500 CEO, according to the AFL-CIO’s 2013 Executive Paywatch. The ratio of CEO pay to worker pay has increased by more than 500 percent in the last thirty years. In 1983, the average CEO made 46 times the average worker’s pay packet. The ratio quadrupled through the decade to 195 times in 1993. Highly paid CEOs of companies employing low wage earners are fueling economic inequality, which continues to grow.

The CEO salary data was sourced from the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) data for the latest fiscal years, covering around 3,000 corporations, most listed in the Russell 3000 Index. America is considered to be the land of opportunity, however in recent decades, corporate CEOs have been taking a greater share of the economic pie. The wage of chief executives is constantly growing, while the salary of the average worker has stagnated and unemployment remains high.

How much energy does it take to keep an ice wall going for decades or even hundreds of years?

• TEPCO Starts Work On Fukushima Underground Ice Wall (RT)

Aiming to isolate radioactive water build-up, Fukushima nuclear plant’s operator, TEPCO, has started constructing a huge underground ice wall around the facility. The ambitious project will have to be maintained for well over a century to reach its goal. Tokyo Electric Power Company has launched work on the 1.5 kilometer underground ice wall, which is to be built around four reactors at the crippled Fukushima Daiichi No. 1 nuclear power plant, Kyodo news agency reports. According to Kyodo, 1,550 pipes will now be inserted into the ground to circulate coolant around the reactors, keeping the surrounding soil constantly frozen. The government funded project, which will cost an estimated 32 billion yen (US$314 million), is scheduled for completion by the end March 2015. It will then take a few more months to fully freeze the soil after the coolant starts circulating, according to TEPCO.

The work started days after Japan’s Nuclear Regulation Authority (NRA) granted the go-ahead for the project, despite earlier reservations. TEPCO reportedly managed to convince the watchdog that the ice wall – which might cause some ground to sink – will not have any significant effect on the stability of the reactor buildings. However, some experts remained skeptical of TEPCO’s plan, which is the latest move in the company’s struggle to contain the fallout of the March 2011 nuclear disaster triggered by a strong earthquake. TEPCO’s efforts have been overshadowed by revelations that the company repeatedly concealed the true radiation levels at the plant and “misreported” the radiation risks to US servicemen helping to contain the disaster. New evidence also allegedly shows that some 90% of workers were not present at the plant when the meltdown started.

While the frozen wall may indeed help to at least reduce the escape of contaminated liquid into the groundwater, it will still take decades – if not hundreds of years – for record-high radiation levels to clear away in the area, including in the ocean. Michio Aoyama, a professor at Fukushima University’s Institute of Environmental Radioactivity, told Kyodo that the Fukushima plant contains radiation equivalent to “14,000 times” the amount released in the atomic bomb attack on Hiroshima 68 years ago, and has seriously affected the ocean and the coastal area. The problem is thus left for the coming generations to tackle, stretching the impact of the accident into the future. Japan, meanwhile, is eyeing the resumption of work on some of its 20 nuclear power plants suspended or shut down after the 2011 earthquake, despite public protests. As of June, two units at Oi nuclear power plant are the only operating Japanese nuclear facilities.

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