Stress Test Archives - Page 2 of 2

“Bankruptcy? Repossession? Charge-offs? Buy the car YOU deserve,” says the banner at the top of the Washington Auto Credit website. A stock photo of a woman with a beaming smile is overlaid with the promise of “100% guaranteed credit approval”. On Wall Street they are smiling too, salivating over the prospect of borrowers taking Washington AutoCredit up on its enticing offer of auto financing. Every car loan advanced to a high-risk, subprime borrower can be bundled into bonds that are then sold on to yield-hungry investors. These subprime auto “asset-backed securities”, or ABS, have, like a host of other risky assets, been beneficiaries of six years of quantitative easing by the US Federal Reserve, which is due to come to an end this week. When the Fed began asset purchases in late 2008 the premise was simple: unleash a tidal wave of liquidity to force nervous investors to move out of safe investments and into riskier assets.

It is hard to argue that the tactic did not work; half a decade of low interest rates and QE appears to have sparked an intense scrum for riskier securities as investors struggle to make their return targets. Wall Street’s securitization machine has kicked back into gear to churn out bonds that package together corporate loans, commercial mortgages and, of course, subprime auto loans. At $359 billion sold last year, according to Dealogic data, issuance of junk-rated corporate bonds is at a record as companies take advantage of low rates to refinance debt and investors clamor to buy it. The question now is whether the rebound in sales of risky assets will prove to be a toxic legacy of QE in a similar way that the popularity of subprime mortgage-backed securities was partly spurred by years of low interest rates before the financial crisis. “QE has flooded the system with cash and you’re really competing with an entity with an unlimited balance sheet,” says Manish Kapoor of West Wheelock Capital. “This has enhanced the search for yield and caused risk appetites to increase.”

That’s the goal.

• Draghi QE May Help Europe’s Rich Get Richer (Bloomberg)

European Central Bank President Mario Draghi, fighting a deflation threat in the euro region, may need to confront a concern more familiar to Americans: income inequality. With interest rates almost at zero, Draghi is moving into asset purchases to lift inflation to the ECB’s target. The more he nears the kind of tools deployed by the Federal Reserve, the Bank of England and the Bank of Japan, the more he risks making the rich richer, said economists including Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz. In the U.S., the gap is rising between the incomes of the wealthy, whose financial holdings become more valuable via central bank purchases, and the poor. While monetary authorities’ foray into bond-buying is intended to stabilize economic conditions and underpin a real recovery, policy makers and economists are increasingly asking whether one cost may be wider income gaps – in Europe as well as the U.S.

“The more you use these unusual, even unprecedented monetary tools, the greater is the possibility of unintended consequences, of which contributing to inequality is one,” said William White, former head of the Bank for International Settlements’ monetary and economic department. “If you have all these underlying problems of too much debt and a broken banking system, to say that we can use monetary policy to deal with underlying real structural problems is a dangerous illusion.” The divide between rich and poor became part of a widespread public debate following the publication in English this year of Thomas Piketty’s “Capital in the Twenty-First Century.” He posited that capitalism may permit the wealthy to pull ahead of the rest of society at ever-faster rates.

“As James Grant recently observed, it’s quite remarkable how, thus far, savers in particular have largely suffered in silence.”

• Quantitative Easing Is Like “Treating Cancer With Aspirin” (Tim Price)

Shortly before leaving the Fed this year, Ben Bernanke rather pompously declared that Quantitative Easing “works in practice, but it doesn’t work in theory.” There is, of course, no counter-factual. We’ll never know what might have happened if the world’s central banks had not thrown trillions of dollars at the banking system, and instead let the free market work its magic on an overleveraged financial system. But to suggest credibly that QE has worked, we first have to agree on a definition of what “work” means, and on what problem QE was meant to solve. If the objective of QE was to drive down longer term interest rates, given that short term rates were already at zero, then we would have to concede that in this somewhat narrow context, QE has “worked”. But we doubt whether that objective was front and centre for those people – we could variously call them “savers”, “investors”, or “honest workers”. As James Grant recently observed, it’s quite remarkable how, thus far, savers in particular have largely suffered in silence.

So while QE has “succeeded” in driving down interest rates, the problem isn’t that interest rates were / are too high. Quite the reverse: interest rates are clearly too low – at least for savers. All the way out to 3-year maturities, investors in German government bonds, for example, are now faced with negative interest rates. And still they’re buying. This isn’t monetary policy success; this is madness. We think the QE debate should be reframed: has QE done anything to reform an economic and monetary system urgently in need of restructuring? We think the answer, self-evidently, is “No”. The answer is also “No” to the question: “Can you solve a crisis of too much indebtedness by increasing debt and suppressing interest rates?” The toxic combination of more credit creation and global financial repression will merely make the ultimate endgame that much more spectacular.

Good summary of – part of – the reasons the tests are such a joke. “… the 39 largest European banks would alone need up to €450bn in fresh capital”. That’s so close to the Swiss estimates I quoted on Sunday, it sounds quite credible. And so different from the €9.5 billion cited by the test results, it’s ridiculous. Off by a factor of 50…

• ECB Stress Tests Vastly Understate Risk Of Deflation And Leverage (AEP)

The eurozone’s long-awaited stress test for banks has been overtaken by powerful deflationary forces and greatly understates the risk of high debt leverage in a crisis, a chorus of financial experts has warned. George Magnus, senior advisor to UBS, said it was a “huge omission” for the European Central Bank to ignore the risk of deflation, given the profoundly corrosive effects that it can have on bank solvency. “Most of the eurozone periphery is already in deflation. They can’t just leave this out of their health check. It is a matter of basic due diligence,” he said. The ECB’s most extreme “adverse scenario” included a drop in inflation to 1pc this year, but the rate has already fallen far below this to 0.3pc, or almost zero once tax effects are stripped out. Prices have fallen over the past six months in roughly half of the currency bloc, and the proportion of goods in the EMU price basket in deflation has jumped to 31pc. “The scenario of deflation is not there, because indeed we don’t consider that deflation is going to happen,” said the ECB’s vice-president, Vitor Constancio.

The ECB had vowed to be tough in its first real test as Europe’s new super-regulator, promising to restore credibility after the fiasco of earlier efforts by the European Banking Authority in 2010 and 2011. The aim is to clean up the financial system once and for all, hoping that this will create more traction for the ECB’s mix of stimulus measures. Yet the bank has to walk a fine line since tough love would risk a further contraction of lending, and possibly a fresh crisis. The results released over the weekend suggest the ECB has opted for safety. Just 13 banks must raise fresh capital, mostly minor lenders in Italy and peripheral countries. They have nine months to find €9.5bn, a trivial sum set against the €22 trillion balance sheet of the lending system. Europe’s banks will have set aside an extra €48bn in provisions. Non-performing loans have jumped by €136bn.

Independent experts say the ECB has greatly under-played the threat of a serious shock. A study by Sachsa Steffen, from the European School of Management (ESMT) in Berlin, and Viral Acharya, at the Stern School of Business in New York, calculated that the 39 largest European banks would alone need up to €450bn in fresh capital. “The major flaw in the ECB test is that they don’t allow for systemic risk where there are forced sales and feedback effects, which is what happened in the Lehman crisis,” said Professor Steffen. Their study looked at levels of leverage rather than risk-weighted assets, which are subject to the discretion of national regulators and can easily be fudged. Most Club Med banks can defer tax assets, for example.

That’s just Basel, you could add a whole lot more criteria.

• Under Full Capital Rules, 36 EU Banks Would Have Failed Test (Reuters)

Europe’s banking health check has shown countries and lenders are implementing global capital rules at vastly different speeds, and 36 companies would have failed if new capital rules were fully applied. The euro zone is lagging behind countries outside the bloc in implementing the Basel III capital rules that are due to come into full force in 2019, potentially adding another challenge for the European Central Bank when it takes over supervision of euro zone lenders next month. “On a fully loaded basis, many banks have only passed the stress test by very thin margins or could be challenged in meeting the requirements, so they will be expected to do more,” said Carola Schuler, managing director for banking at ratings agency Moody’s. Some 25 European banks failed a health check of whether they could withstand a recession, and another 11 would have failed if the full Basel III rules had been applied, according to data from the European Banking Authority released on Sunday.

Europe had gained credibility, said Karen Petrou, co-founder of Federal Financial Analytics in Washington. But a similar exercise by the U.S. Federal Reserve was still tougher, among others because it requires banks to fully load Basel. “It’s still an easier and different one than the Fed stress test in many, many respects,” she said. “The Fed’s test is very qualitative. You can get all the numbers right and still fail.” The wider capital gap with fully implemented Basel rules could put pressure on more banks to improve the amount and quality of their capital, potentially impacting their profitability, growth plans and dividend payouts. Banks failed if they had common equity of 5.5% or less under a 2014/16 recession scenario. The EBA’s “stress test” was based on transitional capital rules, which vary by country, depending on how quickly they are phasing in rules. But for the first time, so-called ‘fully loaded’ Basel III ratios – applying all the new global rules – were released across Europe’s top 130 banks for analysts and investors to compare their capital strength.

30% seems low.

• 3 Reasons Why You Should Expect A 30% Market Meltdown (MarketWatch)

In a commentary for MarketWatch just over two months ago, I predicted that the U.S. stock faced at least a 20% correction. The signals now point to a 30% downturn. This recent market volatility is just the beginning. The declines that corrected prices more than 10% in both the Russell 2000 Index and the Nasdaq Composite Index encompassed the majority of the market, and these stocks have begun their descent. Meanwhile, both the Dow Jones Industrial Average, containing 30 stocks, and the S&P 500 have yet to correct 10%, but historically they are the last to fall. My proprietary indicator called the CCT gave an ominous sell signal in the summer. Since then, the sell signal has increased in intensity and entered a 30% correction zone. The CCT measures several internal market components. It is a leading indicator that actually can be quantified.

The strongest component is the duration of buying versus the duration of selling. A healthy bull market sees mostly buying, indicated by the NYSE tick. The longer the buying persists with NYSE Tick readings in the plus column, the stronger the share price advances. But what happens when prices increase and the duration of the plus-column NYSE tick is less than the duration of the minus tick? This is a divergence, indicating lessening volume dedicated to the buying of a wide array of stock sectors. This duration buying has been lessening since July. Every rally shows less broad participation in all sectors of NYSE stocks. This is what happens in bear markets. A second component of the CCT focuses on the NYSE “big block” buying and selling in isolated segments of time. This is different than the duration component, as it measures isolated situations of what fund managers are doing.

A strong bullish market has numerous big blocks of buying. A print on the NYSE tick in excess of +1000 signifies fund buying by numerous entities, which accompanies a healthy bull market. But what happens when prices are climbing but no +1000 NYSE ticks are printed? This is a divergence indicating lack of interest by fund managers to commit large amounts of cash. Prices are getting ahead of buying interest, and that divergence cannot persist. We saw this phenomenon frequently in September as the S&P 500 recorded all-time highs. This also occurs in bear markets. A third and final component is the cumulative number of the NYSE tick. Each day I record the amount of total plus tick, less the amount of minus tick, on the NYSE. A bull market has a tight correlation of a up day for stock prices corresponding to a plus day in the cumulative NYSE tick.

Why interest rates must and will rise.

• US Banks See Worst Outflow of Money in ETF Since 2009 (Bloomberg)

The Financial Select Sector SPDR (XLF), an exchange-traded fund targeting banks and investment firms, had the biggest withdrawal last week since 2009 amid concern that low interest rates and market swings will hurt profits. Investors pulled $913.4 million from the $17.5 billion ETF, whose top holdings include Berkshire Hathaway, Wells Fargo and JPMorgan Chase, a shift that turned its flow of funds negative for the year. About 143 million shares of the ETF have been borrowed and sold to speculate on declines, the most since June 2012, according to exchange data compiled by Bloomberg. Banks have waited for years for higher rates and more robust trading to boost revenue from lending and market-making.

Weaker-than-expected global growth could prompt the U.S. central bank to slow the pace of eventual interest-rate increases, Federal Reserve Vice Chairman Stanley Fischer said Oct. 11. The severity of market swings this month also boosts the risk that banks will incur losses while facilitating client bets, and it may slow mergers and acquisitions. “Investors should have less exposure to financials than the broader market because we don’t think the prospects are that strong,” said Todd Rosenbluth, director of mutual-fund and ETF research at S&P Capital IQ in New York, referring to interest rates. If the Fed keeps rates low, “the upside in these financials is taken away,” said Charles Peabody, an analyst at Portales Partners LLC in New York.

Is that even a question?

• The Great Recession Put Us in a Hole. Are We Out Yet? (Bloomberg)

In October 2007, U.S. stocks were hitting an all-time high, jobs were plentiful and homes were expensive. Two months later, the Great Recession began to eviscerate the economy, ultimately sucking $10 trillion out of U.S. stocks, collapsing a housing bubble and pushing the unemployment rate to 10%. A lot of talk of financial irresponsibility – people living beyond their means – followed. Seven years later, most Americans have put their finances in order, reducing all kinds of consumer debt. So it’s no small insult, after the injury of the recession, that many aren’t being rewarded for smarter spending. Americans are making a lot less money and own fewer assets, the Federal Reserve said last month, even as stocks reach new highs. Housing prices recovered, though they’re still 13% below 2007 levels. Fewer Americans own houses they can’t afford – sending rents up 16%, to an average of $1,100 per apartment in metro areas.

On the bright side, housing’s collapse taught consumers about the dangers of debt. Americans have shed $1.5 trillion in mortgage debt and $139.4 billion in credit card and other revolving debt over the last six years. They were pushed by tighter credit rules and enticed by the chance to refinance at lower rates. But they also saved more diligently. The U.S. savings rate has doubled since 2007, to 5.4% in September. Educational loans are up, by $2,500 for the median family paying off student loans. But that’s prompted by tuition increases and a surge of people going back to school. Post-secondary enrollment jumped 15%, or 2.8 million, from 2007 to 2010, according to the U.S. Department of Education. Jobs may be coming back, but good jobs are still scarce. More than 7 million people are working part-time jobs when they’d prefer a full-time gig, 57% more than in 2007. And more than 3% of adults have left the workforce entirely since 2007, according to the U.S. labor force participation rate.

What else are they faking?

• China Fake Invoice Evidence Serve To Inflate Trade Data (Bloomberg)

The gap between China’s reported exports to Hong Kong and the territory’s imports from the mainland widened in September to the most this year, suggesting fake export-invoicing is again skewing China’s trade data. China recorded $1.56 of exports to Hong Kong last month for every $1 in imports Hong Kong registered, leading to a $13.5 billion difference, according to government data compiled by Bloomberg. Hong Kong’s imports from China climbed 5.5% from a year earlier to $24.1 billion, figures showed yesterday; China’s exports to Hong Kong surged 34% to $37.6 billion, according to mainland data on Oct. 13.

While China’s government has strict rules on importing capital, those seeking to exploit yuan appreciation can evade the limit by disguising money inflows as payment for goods exported to foreign countries or territories, especially Hong Kong. The latest trade mismatch coincided with renewed appreciation of China’s currency, leading analysts at banks and brokerages including Everbright Securities Co. and Australia & New Zealand Banking Group Ltd. to question the export surge. “This is definitely another important piece of evidence of over-invoicing exports to Hong Kong to facilitate money inflow into China,” said Shen Jianguang, chief Asia economist at Mizuho Securities. in Hong Kong. “So we shouldn’t be too optimistic about recent export data from China.” Doubts over the data raise broader concerns, as a surge in exports was believed to have underpinned economic growth in the third quarter. Shen said the economic outlook is “challenging” and more easing is “necessary.”

Krugman wins again.

• Riksbank Cuts Key Rate to Zero as Deflation Fight Deepens (Bloomberg)

Sweden’s central bank ventured into uncharted territory as it cut its main interest rate to a record low and delayed tightening plans into 2016 in a bid to jolt the largest Nordic economy out of a deflationary spiral. “The Swedish economy is relatively strong and economic activity is continuing to improve,” the Stockholm-based bank said in a statement. “But inflation is too low.” The benchmark repo rate was lowered to zero from 0.25%, the third reduction in less than a year. The bank was seen cutting to 0.1% in a Bloomberg survey of 17 economists. Only two economists had predicted a cut to zero. The Riksbank said it won’t raise rates until mid-2016 compared with a September forecast for the end of 2015. The “assessment is that the repo rate needs to remain at this level until inflation clearly picks up,” the Riksbank said in a statement. “It is assessed as appropriate to slowly begin raising the repo rate in the middle of 2016.” The move follows calls from former board members, politicians and economists to do more to prevent deflation from taking hold.

Consumer prices have dropped in seven of the past nine months and inflation has stayed below the bank’s 2% target for almost three years. Governor Stefan Ingves, who’s also chairman of the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision, has been reluctant to lower rates out of fear of stoking a build-up in consumer debt. Ingves raised the benchmark rate quickly after the financial crisis showed signs of easing in 2010. His reluctance since then to cut rates prompted Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman in April to accuse the Riksbank of a “sadomonetarist” approach to policy he said risked creating a Japan-like deflation trap. Now, Ingves is shaping Swedish policy to reflect moves elsewhere and bringing rates in line with those at the European Central Bank, whose benchmark is 0.05 percent, and the U.S. Federal Reserve, which has held its key rate close to zero since 2008. The ECB and Fed have also expanded their balance sheets through asset purchases to further stimulate growth.

Don’t think they need the IMF to tell them they need to keep their young people satisfied or else.

• IMF Warns Gulf Countries Of Spending Squeeze (CNBC)

Oil exporters in the crude-rich Gulf need to rationalize spending amid a deteriorating global economic outlook, the International Monetary Fund has warned. “In the GCC (Gulf Co-operation Council), years of fast growth since the global financial crisis, rising asset prices, rapid credit growth in some countries, and accommodative global monetary conditions call for a return to fiscal consolidation,” the IMF said in its biannual economic outlook for the Middle East and Central Asia. But the fund also cautioned against immediate policy responses, especially given that GCC exporters were were well-placed to handle the current volatility in global energy markets. “It is not likely to have an effect on economic activity this year or the next. We don’t think that it would make sense to have a knee-jerk reaction,” Masood Ahmed, Director, Middle East and Central Asia Department at the IMF, told CNBC. “It’s important to gradually moderate the base of fiscal spending”. The fund expected the GCC oil exporters’ economies to grow by 4.4% in 2014, accelerating to 4.5% in 2015.

A sharp decline in oil prices over the past month has prompted fierce debate about potential policy responses from Gulf governments. Over the weekend, Kuwaiti Finance Minister Anas Al-Saleh Gulf Arab joined those calling for cuts in spending to cover the shortfall in income. Global prices fell to four-year lows earlier this month, putting at risk abundant fiscal surpluses and savings generated in recent years. OPEC members are due to meet on November 27 in Vienna. According to Mohamed Lahouel, Chief Economist at the Department of Economic Development in Dubai, current or lower oil prices for a period of around four months would elicit spark fiscal decisions on the part of regional government as they scramble to safeguard capital gains. Not all industry experts agree that low oil prices are here to stay. Mohamed Al-Mady, CEO of Saudi Basic Industries (SABIC), one of the world’s largest petrochemical companies, told reporters on Sunday in Riyadh the recent declines would prove to be temporary, and that demand growth was firmly underpinned.

Make sure to make them pay a sh*tload of money for the extension, see if they still want it.

• Shell Seeks 5 More Years for Arctic Oil Drilling Drive (Bloomberg)

Royal Dutch Shell is asking the Obama administration for five more years to explore for oil off Alaska’s coast, saying set backs and legal delays may push the start of drilling past the 2017 expiration of some leases. Shell, which has spent eight years and $6 billion to search for oil in the Arctic’s Beaufort and Chukchi seas, said in letter to the Interior Department that “prudent” exploration before leases expire is now “severely challenged.” “Despite Shell’s best efforts and demonstrated diligence, circumstances beyond Shell’s control have prevented, and are continuing to prevent, Shell from completing even the first exploration well in either area,” Peter Slaiby, vice president of Shell Alaska, wrote to the regional office of the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement. Shell’s plans to produce oil in the Arctic were set back in late 2012 by mishaps involving a drilling rig and spill containment system, and the company has been sued by environmental groups seeking to block the Arctic exploration.

The Hague-based company halted operations in 2012 to repair equipment and hasn’t resumed its maritime operations off Alaska’s northern coast. The July 10 letter from the company, released yesterday by the environmental group Oceana that got it after a public records request, seeks to pause Shell’s leases for five years. That would, in effect, extend the deadline to drill on its Beaufort and Chukchi leases. Leases issued by the government for the right to drill for oil in the Arctic expire in 10 years unless the holder can show significant progress toward development. Shell has left open the possibility of returning to Arctic drilling as soon as next year. Spokesman Curtis Smith said that timeline remains on the table. “We’re taking a methodical approach to a potential 2015 program,” Smith said in an e-mail. The U.S. has ordered that any drilling in the Arctic end each year before Oct. 1, when ice starts forming.

Not in centralized grid systems.

• Wind Farms Can ‘Never’ Be Relied Upon To Deliver UK Energy Security (Telegraph)

Wind farms can never be relied upon to keep the lights on in Britain because there are long periods each winter in which they produce barely any power, according to a new report by the Adam Smith Institute. The huge variation in wind farms’ power output means they cannot be counted on to produce energy when needed, and an equivalent amount of generation from traditional fossil fuel plants will be needed as back-up, the study finds. Wind farm proponents often claim that the intermittent technology can be relied upon because the wind is always blowing somewhere in the UK. But the report finds that a 10GW fleet of wind farms across the UK could “guarantee” to provide less than two per cent of its maximum output, because “long gaps in significant wind production occur in all seasons”. Modelling the likely output from the 10GW fleet found that for 20 weeks in a typical year the wind farms would generate less than a fifth (2GW) of their maximum power, and for nine weeks it would be less than a tenth (1GW).

Output would exceed 9GW, or 90% of the potential, for just 17 hours. Britain currently has more than 4,500 onshore wind turbines with a maximum power-generating capacity of 7.5GW, and is expected to easily surpass 10 GW by 2020 as part of Government efforts to tackle climate change. It is widely recognised that variable wind speeds result in actual power output significantly below the maximum level – on average between 25 and 30 per cent, according to Government data. However, the report from the Adam Smith Institute found that such average figures were “extremely misleading about the amount of power wind farms can be relied up to provide”, because their output was actually “extremely volatile”. “Each winter has periods where wind generation is negligible for several days,” the report’s author, Capell Aris, said. Periods of calm in winter would require either significant energy storage to be developed – an option not readily available – or an equivalent amount of conventional fossil fuel plants to be built.

No, really, the World Economic Forum pays people generous salaries to look into their crystal ball and tell us what the world will look like in 80 years time.

• Equal Footing For Women At Work? Not Till 2095 (CNBC)

Women may not achieve equal footing in the workplace until 2095, according to the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) new ‘Global Gender Gap’ report. The economic participation and opportunity gap between the sexes stands at 60% worldwide, an improvement of only 4 percentage points since WEF measurements began in 2006. The economic sub-index reflects three measurements: the difference between genders in labor force participation rates; wage equality; and the female-to-male ratio across a range of professions. The organization estimates it will take 81 years for the world to close this gap completely.

Two sub-Saharan African nations took top spots on the economic sub index: Burundi and Malawi ranked first and third respectively. Burundi is one of the few countries in the world to adopt a gender quota for its legislature – an attempt to promote the participation of women in politics. “Much of the progress on gender equality over the last ten years has come from more women entering politics and the workforce. In the case of politics, globally, there are now 26% more female parliamentarians and 50% more female ministers than nine years ago,” said Saadia Zahidi, head of the gender parity program at the World Economic Forum and lead author of the report.

Recovery.

• Lloyds Bank Confirms 9,000 Job Losses And Branch Closures As Profit Rises (BBC)

Lloyds Banking Group has confirmed 9,000 job losses and the closure of 150 branches over the next three years. The group, which operates the Lloyds Bank, Halifax and Bank of Scotland brands, reported pre-tax profits of £1.61bn for the nine months to 30 September. The group is setting aside another £900m to cover possible payouts for the PPI mis-selling scandal. The scandal has cost Lloyds, in total, about £11bn. Fines for the Libor rate-rigging scandal have topped £200m. The government still holds a 25% stake in the bank, but has reduced its holding from about 39% through two separate share sales since September last year.

Earlier this year, Lloyds spun off the TSB bank as a separate business to appease European Union competition authorities. The group also said it would invest £1bn in digital technology as more customers switch to mobile banking. But the banking group has returned to profitability under chief executive Antonio Horta-Osorio. On Monday, shares in Lloyds Banking Group fell 1.8% after the European Banking Authority’s results revealed that the bank only narrowly passed the test.

Not what the Founding Fathers had in mind for the land of the free.

• IRS Seizes 100s Of Perfectly Legal Bank Accounts, Refuses To Return Money (RT)

The Internal Revenue Service has been seizing bank accounts belonging to small businesses and individuals who regularly made deposits of less than $10,000, but broke no laws. And the government is refusing to return all the money taken. The practice, called civil asset forfeiture, allows IRS agents to seize property they suspect of being tied to a crime, even if no charges are filed, and their agency is allowed to keep a share of whatever is forfeited, the New York Times reported. It’s designed to catch drug traffickers, racketeers and terrorists by tracking cash deposits under $10,000, which is the threshold for when banks are federally required to report activity to the IRS under the Bank Secrecy Act. It is not illegal to deposit less than $10,000 in cash, unless it is specifically done to avoid triggering the federal reporting requirement, known as structuring.

Thus, banks are required to report any suspicious transactions to authorities, including patterns of deposits below that threshold.“Of course, these patterns are also exhibited by small businesses like bodegas and family restaurants whose cash-on-hand is only insured up to $10,000, and whose owners are wary of what would be lost in the case of a robbery or a fire,” the Examiner noted. Carole Hinders, a victim of civil asset forfeiture, owns a cash-only Mexican restaurant in Iowa. Last year, the IRS seized her checking account and the nearly $33,000 in it. She told the Times she did not know of the federal reporting requirement for suspicious transactions, and that she thought she was doing everyone a favor by reducing their paperwork.

“My mom had told me if you keep your deposits under $10,000, the bank avoids paperwork,” she said.“I didn’t actually think it had anything to do with the I.R.S.” And her bank wasn’t allowed to tell her that her habits could be reported to the government. If customers ask about structuring their deposits, banks are allowed to give them a federal pamphlet.“We’re not allowed to tell them anything,” JoLynn Van Steenwyk, the fraud and security manager for Hinders’ bank, told the Times. Last year, banks filed more than 700,000 suspicious activity reports, according to the Times. The median amount seized by the IRS. was $34,000, according to an analysis by the Institute for Justice, while legal costs can easily mount to $20,000 or more, meaning most account owners can’t afford to fight the government for their money.

Is it any wonder? This may be the only way to get rid of the IRS.

• Bulk Of Americans Abroad Want To Give Up Citizenship (CNBC)

A staggering number of Americans residing abroad are tempted to give up their U.S. passports in the wake of tougher asset-disclosure rules under the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA), according to a new survey. The survey by financial consultancy deVere Group asked expatriate Americans around the world “Would you consider voluntarily relinquishing your U.S. citizenship due to the impact of FATCA?” 73% of respondents answered that they had “actively considered it”, “are thinking about it” or “have explored the options of it.” On the other hand, 16% said they would not consider relinquishing their U.S. citizenship, and 11% did not know. The survey carried out in September 2014 polled almost 420 Americans living in Hong Kong, China, Indonesia, Thailand, Philippines, Japan, India, UK, UAE and South Africa. FATCA, which came into effect on July 1, requires foreign banks, investment funds and insurers to hand over information to the IRS about accounts with more than $50,000 held by Americans.

The controversial tax law is intended to detect tax evasion by U.S. citizens via assets and accounts held offshore. “For long-term retired U.S. expats, of which I am one, who are paying significant U.S. taxes, the value of U.S. citizenship often comes to mind,” a U.S. citizen residing in Bangkok told CNBC. “What do we get in return for our U.S. passport? Only three things in my opinion,” said the 69-year-old, who requested to remain anonymous. “First of all, a passport that is extremely convenient for worldwide travel, second we can vote in U.S state and national elections and third we can pay taxes on both our U.S. and foreign income. That’s it. When you add the new FATCA policies, it obviously adds more thought to the question: Is it worth keeping?” It’s alarming that nearly three quarters of Americans abroad said that they are going to or have thought about giving up their U.S. citizenship, said Nigel Green, founder and chief executive of deVere Group.

” … what happens now to the regularly issued treasury bonds and bills? Do they just sit in an accordian file on Jack Lew’s desk next to his Barack Obama bobblehead?”

• Tapering, Exiting, or Just Punting? (Jim Kunstler)

Oh, that sound you hear this morning is the distant roar of European equity markets puking after the latest round of phony bank “stress tests” — another exercise in pretend by financial authorities who understand, at least, the bottomless credulity of the news media and the complete mystification of the general public in monetary matters. I rather expect that roar to grow Niagara-like as US markets catch the urge to upchuck violently. Problem is, unlike Ebola victims, they can’t be quarantined. The end of the “taper” is upon us like the night of the hunter, conveniently just a week before the US election. If the Federal Reserve is politicized, the indoctrination must have been conducted by the Three Stooges. America’s central bank never did explain the difference between tapering and exiting their purchases of US treasury paper. I guess that’s because it has other interventionary tricks up its sleeves.

Three-card Monte with reverse repos… ventures into direct stock purchases… the setting up of new Maiden Lane type companies for scarfing up securities with that piquant dead carp aroma. Who knows what’s next? It’s amazing what you can do with money in a desperate polity with a few dozen lawyers. Of course, there is the solemn matter as to what happens now to the regularly issued treasury bonds and bills? Do they just sit in an accordian file on Jack Lew’s desk next to his Barack Obama bobblehead? The Russians don’t want them. The Chinese are already stuck with trillions they would like to unload for more gold. Frightened European one-percenters may want to park some cash in American paper to avoid bail-ins and other confiscations already rehearsed over there — but could that amount to more than a paltry few billion a month at the most?

What do the stock markets do without up to $85 billion a month (peak QE) sloshing around looking for dark pools to settle in? Can US companies keep the markets levitated by buying back their own shares like snakes eating their tails? Isn’t that basically over and done? And exactly how do interest rates stay suppressed when only a few French tax refugees want to buy American debt? I don’t think anybody knows the answer to these questions and the scenarios are too abstruse for the people who get paid for supposedly writing learned commentary in the sclerotic remnants of the press.

The chief investogator can’t get his hands on the evidence?!

• MH17 Might Have Been Shot Down From Air – Chief Dutch Investigator (RT)

The chief Dutch prosecutor investigating the MH17 downing in eastern Ukraine does not exclude the possibility that the aircraft might have been shot down from air, Der Spiegel reported. Intelligence to support this was presented by Moscow in July. The chief investigator with the Dutch National Prosecutors’ Office Fred Westerbeke said in an interview with the German magazine Der Spiegel published on Monday that his team is open to the theory that another plane shot down the Malaysian airliner. Following the downing of the Malaysian Airlines MH17 flight in July that killed almost 300 people, Russia’s Defense Ministry released military monitoring data, which showed a Kiev military jet tracking the MH17 plane shortly before the crash. No explanation was given by Kiev as to why the military plane was flying so close to a passenger aircraft. Neither Ukraine, nor Western states have officially accepted such a possibility.

Westerbeke said that the Dutch investigators are preparing an official request for Moscow’s assistance since Russia is not part of the international investigation team. Westerbeke added that the investigators will specifically ask for the radar data suggesting that a Kiev military jet was flying near the passenger plane right before the catastrophe. “Going by the intelligence available, it is my opinion that a shooting down by a surface to air missile remains the most likely scenario. But we are not closing our eyes to the possibility that things might have happened differently,” he elaborated. In his interview to the German media, Westerbeke also called on the US to release proof that supports its claims.

“We remain in contact with the United States in order to receive satellite photos,” he said. German’s foreign intelligence agency reportedly also believes that local militia shot down Malaysia Airlines flight MH17, according to Der Spiegel. The media report claimed the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND) president Gerhard Schindler provided “ample evidence to back up his case, including satellite images and diverse photo evidence,” to the Bundestag in early October. However, the Dutch prosecutor stated that he is “not aware of the specific images in question”. “The problem is that there are many different satellite images. Some can be found on the Internet, whereas others originate from foreign intelligence services.”

• MH17 Chief Investigator: No Actionable Evidence Yet In Probe (Spiegel)

SPIEGEL: Germany’s foreign intelligence agency, the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), believes that pro-Russian separatists shot down the aircraft with surface-to-air missiles. A short time ago, several members of the German parliament were presented with relevant satellite images. Are you familiar with these photos?

Westerbeke: Unfortunately we are not aware of the specific images in question. The problem is that there are many different satellite images. Some can be found on the Internet, whereas others originate from foreign intelligence services.

SPIEGEL: High-resolution images – those from US spy satellites, for example – could play a decisive role in the investigation. Have the Americans provided you with those images?

Westerbeke: We are not certain whether we already have everything or if there are more — information that is possibly even more specific. In any case, what we do have is insufficient for drawing any conclusions. We remain in contact with the United States in order to receive satellite photos.

SPIEGEL: So you’re saying there hasn’t been any watertight evidence so far?

Westerbeke: No. If you read the newspapers, though, they suggest it has always been obvious what happened to the airplane and who is responsible. But if we in fact do want to try the perpetrators in court, then we will need evidence and more than a recorded phone call from the Internet or photos from the crash site. That’s why we are considering several scenarios and not just one.

SPIEGEL: Moscow has been spreading its own version for some time now, namely that the passenger jet was shot down by a Ukrainian fighter jet. Do you believe such a scenario is possible?

Westerbeke: Going by the intelligence available, it is my opinion that a shooting down by a surface to air missile remains the most likely scenario. But we are not closing our eyes to the possibility that things might have happened differently.

It gets serious: “20% of men and 12% of women who want to have children cannot”.

• Having Babies New Sex Ed Goal as Danes Face Infertility Epidemic (Bloomberg)

Sex education in Denmark is about to shift focus after fertility rates dropped to the lowest in almost three decades. After years of teaching kids how to use contraceptives, Sex and Society, the Nordic country’s biggest provider of sex education materials for schools, has changed its curriculum to encourage having babies under the rubric: “This is how you have children!” Infertility is considered “an epidemic” in Denmark, said Bjarne Christensen, secretary general of the Copenhagen-based organization. “We see more and more couples needing to get assisted fertility treatment. We see a lot of people who don’t succeed in having children.” Denmark’s fertility rate is at its lowest in more than a quarter of a century, with one in 10 children conceived only after treatment. Health professionals are urging the government to do more to address the declining birth rate and prevent it becoming a bigger demographic problem. Declining fertility is affecting demographics across Europe, where the birthrate has hardly grown for two decades.

The trend has profound effects not only on individuals but also on the economy and the outlook for standards of life, with fewer young people supporting older, retired populations. The European Commission says it considers the growing gap between the number of young and old citizens one of the region’s biggest challenges. According to Christensen at Sex and Society, the issue needs to be addressed at the school level if there is to be change. “We hope to raise a discussion in society about how to advise young people,” said Christensen, whose group helps organize an annual Sex Week to focus schools’ attention on the subject. “It’s a problem that fertility in Denmark is reduced.” Sex and Society’s new focus, unveiled on Sunday, includes information for school children explaining what fertility is, when the best times to have children may be, and what the effects of aging are. [..] 20% of men and 12% of women who want to have children cannot, according to Dansk Fertilitetsselskab, a professional organization for health providers and researchers.

Stunning. You’d think there are contingency plans, but they seem to make it all up one step at a time.

• Medical Journal To Governors: You’re Wrong About Ebola Quarantine (NPR)

The usually staid New England Journal of Medicine is blasting the decision of some states to quarantine returning Ebola health care workers. In an editorial the NEJM describes the quarantines as unfair, unwise and “more destructive than beneficial.” In their words, “We think the governors have it wrong.” The editors say the policy could undermine efforts to contain the international outbreak by discouraging American medical professionals from volunteering in West Africa. “The way we are going to control this epidemic is with source control and that’s going to happen in West Africa, we hope. In order to do that we need people on the ground in West Africa,” says Dr. Jeffrey Drazen, editor-in-chief of the journal. Speaking to Goats and Soda, he says it doesn’t make any sense to “imprison” healthcare workers for three weeks after they’ve been treating Ebola patients. The editorial explains his rationale, arguing that healthcare workers who monitor their own temperatures daily would be able to detect the onset of Ebola before they become contagious and thus before they pose any public health threat to their home communities:

“The sensitive blood polymerase-chain-reaction (PCR) test for Ebola is often negative on the day when fever or other symptoms begin and only becomes reliably positive 2 to 3 days after symptom onset. This point is supported by the fact that of the nurses caring for Thomas Eric Duncan, the man who died from Ebola virus disease in Texas in October, only those who cared for him at the end of his life, when the number of virions he was shedding was likely to be very high, became infected. Notably, Duncan’s family members who were living in the same household for days as he was at the start of his illness did not become infected.”

Debt Rattle October 27 2014

Oct 272014

October 27, 2014 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 11:38 am Finance Tagged with: arctic, Big Oil, China, collapse, ebola, emerging markets, Italy, Spain, Stress Test 1 Response »

Unknown California State Automobile Association signage 1925

• Stock Markets Threatened By Collapse In Chinese Consumer Demand (Questor)

• Scariest Day For Market Looms, And It’s Not Halloween (CNBC)

• What Next After China’s Foreign Reserves Fall? (MarketWatch)

• 15 Big Oil Sell Signals That Warn Of A 50% Stock Crash (Paul B. Farrell)

• Oil Speculators Bet Wrong as Rebound Proves Fleeting (Bloomberg)

• Goldman Cuts Oil Forecasts as US Market Clout Increases (Bloomberg)

• A Scary Story for Emerging Markets (Worth Wray)

• Fed-Driven ‘Locomotive USA’ (Ivanovitch)

• U.S. Gains From ‘Good’ Deflation as Europe Faces the Bad and Ugly (Bloomberg)

• Spain’s Export-Led Recovery Comes At Price Of EU-Wide Deflationary Vortex (AEP)

• Europe’s Bank Test Celebrations Mask Mounting Challenges (Reuters)

• Europe Must Act Now To Avoid ‘Lost Decade (FT)

• Italy Under Pressure As Nine Banks Fail Stress Tests (FT)

• Italy’s Stress Test Fail: Attack Of The ‘Drones’ (CNBC)

• Italy Market Watchdog Bans Short Selling On Monte Paschi Bank Shares (Reuters)

• Europe’s Banks Are Still a Threat (Bloomberg)

• Draghi Sets Stimulus Pace as ECB Reveals Covered-Bond Purchases (Bloomberg)

• German Business Confidence Drops For 6th Straight Month (AP)

• Hundreds Give Up US Passports After New Tax Rules Start (Bloomberg)

• Arctic Ice Melt Seen Doubling Risk of Harsh Winters in Europe, Asia (Bloomberg)

• Nurse’s Lawyers Promise Legal Challenge to Ebola Quarantine (NBC)

I can repeat this every single day: China is in much worse shape than we know from official numbers.

• Stock Markets Threatened By Collapse In Chinese Consumer Demand (Questor)

The capitulation of the Chinese consumer threatens to drag stock markets around the world into a death spiral as one of the pillars of global growth is undermined. Figures from the world’s largest consumer goods groups last week laid bare the shocking weakness of consumer demand in China, which threatens to pull down global stock markets that have been priced to perfection by more than five years of extraordinary monetary policy and asset price inflation. For China to avoid a hard landing it was essential for consumer spending to pick up from where centrally planned infrastructure spending left off, but there are signs this simply isn’t happening. Unilever, the world’s third largest consumer goods company, said they were surprised by the “unusually rapid” slowdown in Chinese consumer demand. The company said that sales growth had slumped to about 2pc during the nine months ended September, down from about 8pc growth last year. The slowdown in Chinese sales growth to about 2pc is also an average – there are pockets where trading is far worse.

The company added that sales to the big hypermarkets in the country are less than 2pc or even negative in some cases. Nestle, the worlds largest food company, recently reported falling sales for the first nine months of the year and also warned of “challenging” Chinese trading conditions. The fear of China going backwards is now becoming a reality, as the Chinese consumer is not picking up from where capital investment left off. Immediately after the 2008 banking crisis China launched the largest stimulus package and infrastructure investment program the world has ever seen. China has used 6.6 gigatons of cement in the last three years compared to 4.5 gigatons the USA has used in 100 years. The stimulus package increased fixed capital investment to 50pc of GDP, while domestic consumption withered to only 35pc. The lopsided economy led Hu Jintao, the President of China until 2012, to call the period of growth “unstable, unbalanced, uncoordinated and unsustainable.” The hope was it would eventually kick start consumer spending.

• What Next After China’s Foreign Reserves Fall? (MarketWatch)

Should we be worried that China’s prodigious foreign-exchange accumulation has gone into reverse? Last week, China’s forex regulator reassured markets that there was no need to worry about a $100 billion fall in reserves in the third quarter — the largest such drop since 1996. China’s foreign reserve pile fell to $3.89 trillion from $3.99 trillion at the end of June. Guan Tao, head of China’s State Administration of Foreign Exchange’s balance-of-payments department, cited the end of the Federal Reserve’s quantitative easing policy as a main factor contributing to the decline, adding there were no risks or problems. But some analysts are less sanguine, especially when this rare dwindling of China’s cash pile coincides with the economy growing at its slowest pace in five years, according to third-quarter data.

Société Générale strategist Albert Edwards writes that a reserve decline of this magnitude reflects deteriorating Chinese competitiveness from its excessively strong real foreign-exchange rate. Daiwa Research, meanwhile, highlights the significance of these outflows in undermining the ability of the People’s Bank of China (PBOC) to expand its balance sheet. In recent decades, China’s reserve accumulation has been the fuel for its massive money-supply growth. Thanks to twin capital and trade surpluses, the PBOC was able to behave like a massive money-printing machine. Now, as reserve accumulation goes into reverse, so too does the money supply. M2 – which includes currency, checking deposits and some time deposits — grew at just at 12.9% year-on-year for September, versus 14.7% year-on-year for June. SocGen’s Edwards warns that China faces a looming credit crunch and is already on a deflationary precipice. China’s consumer inflation rate slowed to 1.6% in September, down from 2% previously.

Fed meeting to announce end of QE on Wednesday.

• Scariest Day For Market Looms, And It’s Not Halloween (CNBC)

The Federal Reserve in the coming week is expected to end its quantitative easing program – the much-anticipated action that’s been at the very heart of the market’s fears. After a two-day meeting, the Fed Wednesday is expected to announce the completion of its bond purchases, based on improvements in the economy. Markets will now look forward to the time – expected at some point next year—when the Fed believes the economy is strong enough for it to raise short-term interest rates from zero. The economic calendar also heats up in the week ahead, with durable goods Tuesday; third-quarter GDP Thursday, and income and spending and employment costs data Friday. All of the data becomes even more important as the markets attempt to interpret the Fed’s process of normalizing rates.

The Fed “tries to reinvigorate corporate risk taking, and finally we get to the point where corporate risk taking picks up again, and they’re supposed to remove the accommodation. That was just a bridge,” said Tobias Levkovich, chief equity strategist at Citigroup. While recent market volatility has been blamed on everything from Ebola to a global growth scare, one common thread going through all markets is the underlying concern that the Fed’s removal of its easing program will be the financial equivalent of taking off the training wheels. Markets already have stumbled, and analysts expect more volatility ahead as they continue to move closer to a world with more normal interest rate levels.

“Graham says the next bear will hit around election time 2016. The third $10 trillion stock crash early in this new 21st century.”

• 15 Big Oil Sell Signals That Warn Of A 50% Stock Crash (Paul B. Farrell)

Big Oil investors beware: “The day of the huge international oil company is drawing to a close,” warned the Economist last year. Since then, Big Oil sell signals have gotten louder, more frequent, confirming fears of a crash in Big Oil, in the entire energy industry, rippling through Wall Street stocks, the global economy. When? Before the new president is elected, in 2016. Scenario like 2008, when McCain lost. Yes, the overhyped shale boom was supposed to make America energy independent, investors happy. Wrong. Risks are rocketing, volatility increasing. Why? Big Oil is vulnerable, they’re running scared, making bigger, costlier, deadlier and dumber bets that threaten the global economy. Worse, Big Oil is in denial about their high-risk, self-destructive gambles.

Main Street’s also in denial. Yes, we’re in a rare historical event now. Two bulls back-to-back, with no bear market in between. Makes investors feel it’ll go forever, like 1999. True, stocks have been roaring since March 2009 when the bottom hit at 6,547 on the Dow after a 54% drop from the October 2007 high of 14,164. Since, a steady climb to a recent DJIA record at 17,279, with gains over 250%. But now our Double Bull has stopped roaring. But market giants are warning, bye-bye bull. Jeremy Grantham, founder of the $117 billion GMO money-management firm, predicts another megatrillion dollar crash, repeating the bears of 2000 and again in 2008. Wall Street lost roughly $10 trillion each time. Graham says the next bear will hit around election time 2016. The third $10 trillion stock crash early in this new 21st century.

“People came in and tried to pick the bottom, and they picked wrong.”

• Oil Speculators Bet Wrong as Rebound Proves Fleeting (Bloomberg)

Hedge funds rushed back into oil too quickly, boosting bullish bets amid a rebound last week, only to then watch surging U.S. crude supplies push prices right back down to a two-year low. The net-long positions in West Texas Intermediate futures rose 5.7% in the seven days ended Oct. 21, U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission data show. Short bets shrank 20%, the most in three months, while longs dropped 2.8%. After rising as analysts speculated prices had reached a floor, WTI sank again after stockpiles climbed nationally and at Cushing, Oklahoma, the delivery point for New York Mercantile Exchange futures. It fell to $80.52 on Oct. 22, the lowest settlement since June 2012, and ended the week down 24% from the year’s high.

The U.S. benchmark, which slipped into a bear market Oct. 9, may dip to $75 by the end of year, Bank of America Corp. said Oct. 23. The “swiftness of the selloff” attracted bargain hunters, John Kilduff, a partner at Again Capital, a New York-based hedge fund that focuses on energy, said by phone Oct. 24. “People came in and tried to pick the bottom, and they picked wrong.” U.S. oil inventories increased 7.11 million barrels in the seven days ended Oct. 17 to 377.7 million, the Energy Information Administration said Oct. 22. Supply has grown by about 21 million in three weeks.

A good call for once?

• Goldman Cuts Oil Forecasts as US Market Clout Increases (Bloomberg)

Goldman Sachs cut its forecasts for Brent and WTI crude prices next year on rising global supplies, predicting OPEC will lose influence over the oil market amid the U.S. shale boom. The bank is becoming more confident in the scale and sustainability of U.S. shale oil production and said U.S. benchmark prices need to decline to $75 a barrel for a slowdown in output growth. Brent will average $85 a barrel in the first quarter, down from a previous forecast of $100, and West Texas Intermediate will sell for $75 a barrel in the period, from an earlier estimate of $90, analysts including Jeffrey Currie wrote in a report. The biggest members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries are discounting supplies to defend market share rather than cutting production to boost prices that have collapsed into a bear market.

The highest U.S. output in almost 30 years is helping increase stockpiles as exporters including Saudi Arabia reduce prices to stimulate demand. “We believe that OPEC will no longer act as the first-mover swing producer and that U.S. shale oil output will be called upon to fill this role,” Goldman said in the report. “Our forecast also reflects the realization of a loss of pricing power by core-OPEC.” Any near-term OPEC production cut will be modest until there is sufficient evidence of a slowdown in U.S. shale oil production growth, according to the report. Global producers may need to cut almost 800,000 barrels a day of output next year to limit a build in inventories and ultimately balance the global oil market in 2016, Goldman said.

“the global debt drama would end with an epic US dollar rally, a dramatic reversal in capital flows, and an absolute bloodbath for emerging markets … ”

• A Scary Story for Emerging Markets (Worth Wray)

In the autumn of 2009, Kyle Bass told me a scary story that I did not understand until the first “taper tantrum” in May 2013. He said that – in additon to a likely string of sovereign defaults in Europe and an outright currency collapse in Japan – the global debt drama would end with an epic US dollar rally, a dramatic reversal in capital flows, and an absolute bloodbath for emerging markets. Extending that outlook, my friends Mark Hart and Raoul Pal warned that China – seen then by many as the world’s rising power and the most resilient economy in the wake of the global crisis – would face an outright economic collapse, an epic currency crisis, or both. All that seemed almost counterintuitive five years ago when the United States appeared to be the biggest basket case among the major economies and emerging markets seemed far more resilient than their “submerging” advanced-economy peers.

But Kyle Bass, Mark Hart, and Raoul Pal are not your typical “macro tourists” who pile into common-knowledge trades and react with the herd. They are exceptionally talented macroeconomic thinkers with an eye for developing trends and the second- and third-order consequences of major policy shifts. On top of their wildly successful bets against the US subprime debacle and the European sovereign debt crisis, it’s now clear that they saw an even bigger macro trend that the whole world (and most of the macro community) missed until very recently: policy divergence. Their shared macro vision looks not only likely, not only probable, but IMMINENT today as the widening gap in economic activity among the United States, Europe, and Japan is beginning to force a dangerous divergence in monetary policy.

In a CNBC interview earlier this week from his Barefoot Economic Summit (“Fed Tapers to Zero Next Week”), Kyle Bass explained that this divergence is set to accelerate in the next couple of weeks, as the Fed will likely taper its QE3 purchases to zero. Two days later, Kyle notes, the odds are high that the Bank of Japan will make a Halloween Day announcement that it is expanding its own asset purchases. Such moves only increase the pressure on Mario Draghi and the ECB to pursue “overt QE” of their own.
Such a tectonic shift, if it continues, is capable of fueling a 1990s-style US dollar rally with very scary results for emerging markets and dangerous implications for our highly levered, highly integrated global financial system.

“No other country buys more than it sells to the rest of the world”. The curse of the reserve currency.

• Fed-Driven ‘Locomotive USA’ (Ivanovitch)

No other country buys more than it sells to the rest of the world: America’s net contribution to the growth of the world economy in the first eight months of this year amounted to $480.8 billion, or about 3% of its GDP. And here is a striking contrast: Germany, the world’s fourth-largest economy, is currently getting a net contribution from the rest of the world to the tune of $280 billion – nearly 7% of its GDP. Not even China is sucking so much demand out of the world economy. In the year to the second quarter, China’s trade surplus is estimated at about 2% of its GDP. Those taking potshots at the U.S. government’s foreign policy have a point here that could strongly resonate with the American public, because exports directly or indirectly support more than 11 million American jobs, or close to one-tenth of the country’s latest employment numbers.

It might, therefore, be a good idea to help the Fed’s efforts to steady the economy by getting Germany, China and other large surplus countries to generate more growth from their domestic demand. We may then be able to sell them something instead of being their dumping ground: In the first eight months of this year, our trade deficits with Germany and China were up 14% and 4%, respectively, from the year earlier. But don’t hold your breath for such actions by Washington, or by multilateral agencies whose job it is to ensure balanced trade relationships in the world economy. Nothing of the sort will happen. As in the past, large trade surplus countries won’t budge. They know that during the forthcoming elections – starting with the mid-term Congressional elections next month and culminating with the U.S. presidential contest in 2016 – the Fed will do everything possible to keep economy and employment in a reasonably good shape.

That, of course, means that the locomotive USA will be an increasingly steady pillar of global output, and an expanding market for export-led economies. Germany’s sinking economy, for example, will continue to force local companies to seek salvation on external markets. An apparently rising political hostility with Russia seems to be turning German businesses toward an open, properly regulated and welcoming American market. Problems with China will also cause Germany to lower its formidable export boom on the U.S. That is a conclusion one may draw from the analysis of Sebastian Heilemann, a prominent German sinologist and a director of the Mercator Institute for China Studies (MERICS) in Berlin. Ominously, he is talking about the “dark clouds” in Chinese-German relations, saying that German companies are suffering from Chinese (get the euphemism) “reverse engineering,” and from increasing administrative difficulties of doing business in the Middle Kingdom.

There’s no such thing as good deflation.

• U.S. Gains From ‘Good’ Deflation as Europe Faces the Bad and Ugly (Bloomberg)

When it comes to deflation there’s the good – and there’s the bad and ugly. Europe faces the risk of the latter as it teeters on the edge of a recession that could trigger a debilitating dive in prices and wages. The U.S., meanwhile, may end up with the more benign version as surging oil and gas supplies push energy costs down and the economy ahead. “Bad deflation weakens growth,” Nancy Lazar, co-founder and a partner at Cornerstone Macro LP in New York, wrote in a report to clients this month. “Good deflation lifts growth.” Lazar also co-founded International Strategy & Investment Group LLC more than 20 years ago. That’s welcome news for U.S. investors. Billionaire Paul Tudor Jones, one of the most successful hedge-fund managers, said on Oct. 20 that U.S. stocks will outperform other equity markets for the rest of the year, according to two people who heard him speak at the closed-door Robin Hood Investors conference in New York.

Hedge fund manager David Tepper, who runs the $20 billion Appaloosa Management LP, told the same conference the following day that investors should bet against the euro, two people familiar with his remarks said. The Standard & Poor’s 500 Index has risen 6.3% so far this year, while the Stoxx Europe 600 Index has fallen 0.3%. The euro is down 7.8% against the dollar since the start of 2014. Treasuries have returned 5.3% this year, compared with 7.6% for German bunds and 15% for Greek debt, according to Bloomberg World Bond Indexes. The U.S. has the “best hand” among nations, while Europe is “the sick one,” Jamie Dimon, chief executive officer of JPMorgan Chase & Co. in New York, said at an Oct. 21 event held by the Urban Land Institute in New York.

Pushing wages down with unemployment at 27.5% is the easy part. In a currency union, you’re going to export those low wages too, though. And that will implode the EU.

• Spain’s Export-Led Recovery Comes At Price Of EU-Wide Deflationary Vortex (AEP)

[..] A deal reached with Renault after much soul-searching in 2012 cuts entry pay for new workers by 27.5pc, to roughly €17,000 a year (£13,400). Older workers keep their jobs at frozen pay, but with fewer holidays and tougher conditions. Joaquin Arias from the trade union federation CCOO said the terms amounted to blackmail. “The alternative was slow death. We would never have accepted such a plan if the crisis hadn’t been so bad.” Wage costs are now 40pc below levels in comparable French plants in France, the chief reason why Renault and Peugeot have cut their output of vehicles in their home country by half over the last decade. French unions may rage against “social dumping”, but they now face the asphyxiation of their industry unless they too knuckle under. “The French factories are going through exactly what we faced five years ago. It is very hard for everybody, but they too are having to follow the Spanish model,” said Mr Estevez. [..]

Fernando de Acuña, head of Spain’s top property consultancy RR de Acuña, warns that the country is going through an illusionary mini-bubble, with people betting on a fresh cycle in the housing market when the crippling effects of the last boom-bust cycle have yet to be cleared. “We think prices will fall by another 20pc over the next three years. There is still an overhang of 1.7m unsold homes in an annual market of around 230,000. The developers have 467,000 units on their books, and half of these are indirectly controlled by the banks. It is extend and pretend. There are another 150,000 in foreclosure proceedings that are backed up because the courts are saturated,” he said. “People don’t want to hear any of this. We were called criminals and terrorists when we warned in 2007 the country was going to Hell, but we were right, because we base our analysis on the facts and not on wishful thinking,” he said.

It has always been debatable whether Spain can hope to pull itself out of a low-growth trap by relying on exports alone, given that it still has a relatively closed economy with a trade gearing of just 34pc of GDP, far lower than Ireland at 108pc. The current account is already slipping back into deficit in any case as imports surge, suggesting that Spain is still nowhere near a competitive equilibrium within the eurozone. It is already “overheating” in a sense even with 5.6m people unemployed. The International Monetary Fund says Spain’s exchange rate is up to 15pc overvalued. Ominously, the export boom has been fading despite the success of the car industry. Total shipments rose just 1pc in the year to August compared with the same period in 2013, with falls of 11pc to Latin America, and of 13pc to the Middle East. Exports actually contracted by 5pc in August from a year earlier.

“One-fifth of European banks are at risk of insolvency … ”

• Europe’s Bank Test Celebrations Mask Mounting Challenges (Reuters)

Investors were spared immediate pain on Sunday after the European Central Bank’s landmark banking health check did not force massive capital hikes amongst the euro zone’s top lenders. But the sector’s long-term attractiveness has been damaged by revelations of extra non-performing loans and hidden losses that will dent future profits. The ECB said on Sunday the region’s 130 most important lenders were just €25 billion ($31.69 billion) short of capital at the end of last year, based on an assessment of how accurately they had valued their assets and whether they could withstand another three years of crisis. The amount of new money needed falls to less than €7 billion after factoring in developments in 2014, well shy of the €50 billion of extra cash investors surveyed by Goldman Sachs in August were expecting.

That means existing investors will only be asked for a fraction of the demand they expected in order to maintain their shareholdings. But, those who read the details of the ECB’s proclamation on the health of the euro zone banking sector would have seen more ominous signs too, as the ECB pointed to the amount of work that remains to be done to restore the region’s lenders. The review said an extra €136 billion of loans should be classed as non-performing – increasing the tally of non-performing loans by 18% – and that an extra €47.5 billion of losses should be taken to reflect assets’ true value. “Banks face a significant challenge as the sector remains chronically unprofitable and must address their €879 billion exposure to non-performing loans as this will tie-up significant amounts of capital,” accountancy firm KPMG noted.

Others took a bleaker view. “One-fifth of European banks are at risk of insolvency,” said Jan Dehn, head of research at Ashmore, referencing the fact that one-fifth of banks fell shy of the ECB’s pass mark at the end of last year. He added that the ECB’s efforts to boost the euro zone’s sluggish growth through pumping money into the economy would not work if banks were too poorly capitalised to lend. After the ECB adjusted banks’ capital ratios to reflect supervisors’ assessments of banks’ asset values, 31 had core capital below the 10% mark viewed by investors as a safety threshold, while a further 28 had ratios just 1 percentage point above.

That headline could just as well be 5 years old. Nothing changed. Just new shades of porcine lipstick.

• Europe Must Act Now To Avoid ‘Lost Decade (FT)

The bottom line is that none of the tools currently on the table will get the job done. There are not enough assets to purchase or finance and the timetable to get anything done is too long. Policy makers do not have the luxury of a year or two to figure this out. The ECB balance sheet shrinks virtually daily and as it shrinks, the monetary base of Europe is contracting and putting downward pressure on prices. Europe is clearly in danger of falling into the liquidity trap, if it is not already there. The likelihood of a “lost decade” like that experienced in Japan is rapidly increasing. The ECB must act and act quickly. How is this affecting the markets? The recent rally in US fixed income is materially different than when rates last approached 2%. Previously, the Federal Reserve was actively managing the yield curve to reduce long-term borrowing costs in order to stimulate the economy. The current rally is caused by a massive deflationary wave unleashed upon the US by beggar-thy-neighbour policies in Europe and Asia.

The precipitous decline in energy and commodity prices and competitive pressures on prices for traded goods will probably push inflation, as measured by the Fed’s favoured personal consumption expenditures index, back down toward 1%. This raises the likelihood that any increase in the policy rate by the Fed will be pushed into 2016 or later. With inflationary expectations falling and the relative attractiveness of US Treasury yields over German Bunds and Japanese government bonds, US long-term rates are likely to continue to be well supported with limited room to rise and a dynamic that could push them lower from here. In the real economy, the decline in energy prices should offset the effect of reduced exports, which is supportive of US growth in the near term. This will help equities recover from the recent storm of volatility as we move deeper into the fourth quarter, which is a time of seasonal strength for the stock market. However, this may prove to be the rally to sell. Results from currency translations for large, multinational companies will weigh heavily on S&P 500 earnings in the first half of 2015.

Leave the euro, and restructure all bank debt. It’s the only thing that makes any sense at all. But it’s not even considered.

• Italy Under Pressure As Nine Banks Fail Stress Tests (FT)

Italy’s central bank was thrown on the defensive on Sunday as its banking sector emerged as the standout loser in health checks aimed at restoring confidence in the euro area’s financial sector. Officials at the Bank of Italy criticised parameters in regulatory stress tests as unrealistically harsh on Italian banks and disputed the exact number of failures, after nine Italian lenders fell short in a comprehensive review unveiled by the European Central Bank. Across the euro area, some 25 banks emerged with capital shortfalls following an unprecedented regulatory effort aimed at dispelling the cloud of uncertainty surrounding the European banking sector’s health.

The announcement represents the culmination of more than a year of intensive work costing hundreds of millions of euros and involving thousands of officials and accountants – all aimed at restoring investor faith in European banks ahead of the launch of a unified banking supervisor in Frankfurt. The biggest failure was Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena, which has already hired bankers at Citigroup and UBS to advise on its options after it received takeover approaches. German banks emerged largely unscathed, with only one technical failure, while Spain clawed its way through with no shortfalls.

Italy’s “public debt-to-GDP ratio was 134% in the second quarter of 2014, compared to 94% for the euro zone as a whole”.

• Italy’s Stress Test Fail: Attack Of The ‘Drones’ (CNBC)

Italy’s report card was by far the worst from this weekend’s European bank stress tests, with nine of its 15 banks tested failing to reach the levels of capital required. The country’s relationship with European authorities could get increasingly fractious, with the European Commission yet to approve its 2015 budget. And tensions are set to continue as its banks look to raise more capital than any other country to reach ECB requirements at a time when the Italian economy is back in recession. There was a “surgical targeting of Italian banks with asset quality review (AQR) drones (by the ECB),” according to Carlo Alberto Carnevale-Maffe, professor of strategy at Italy’s Bocconi University. “The ECB targeted the banks with the lowest level of transparency and governance, and the highest links with the political system,” he told CNBC.

Unicredit and Intesa Sanpaolo, the country’s two biggest lenders, both passed the tests, but some of their smaller counterparts are struggling as the economy stagnates, and the level of sovereign debt on their balance sheets starts to look more worrying. While household debt levels in Italy are relatively low, its public debt-to-GDP ratio was 134% in the second quarter of 2014, compared to 94% for the euro zone as a whole. Federico Ghizzoni, chief executive of UniCredit, told CNBC he was “very satisfied” with his bank’s result and added: “For the system in general, the results including what has been done in 2014 is OK.” Ghizzoni predicted there will be an increase in mergers and acquisitions in the Italian banking sector as a result of the tests.

World’s oldest bank turns into merger target.

• Italy Market Watchdog Bans Short Selling On Monte Paschi Bank Shares (Reuters)

Italy’s Consob has banned short selling on Monte dei Paschi’s shares on Monday and Tuesday, the Italian market regulator said in a statement. Shares in Italy’s third biggest bank lost more than 17% on Monday after results from a pan-European health check of lenders showed on Sunday that Monte dei Paschi faced a capital shortfall of €2.1 billion – the biggest gap among the 130 lenders under scrutiny.

“In one way, the ECB had good reason to be strict.” Question is then, why didn’t it?

• Europe’s Banks Are Still a Threat (Bloomberg)

The European Central Bank has just published the results of new “stress tests” on European Union banks, hoping to convince financial markets that the banking system is now strong enough to weather another crisis. This latest exercise is a big improvement over previous efforts, which were widely derided as too soft – but it’s still not good enough. The test had two parts. The first was a detailed examination of loans, to see whether they were worth what the banks said. This found that most of 130 banks under review had overvalued their assets – by a total of €47.5 billion ($60 billion) at the end of last year. The second part asked, with assets correctly valued, whether the banks had enough capital to safely endure another recession and financial-market shock. It found that 25 did not, and 13 of those need to raise €9.5 billion in capital, over and above what they’ve added so far this year.

This closer scrutiny has helped. Deutsche Bank AG raised €8.5 billion in equity this year to boost its chances of passing. Weak institutions, such as Portugal’s Banco Espirito Santo and Austria’s Volksbanken network, are restructuring or shutting down. By strengthening the system and increasing confidence in it, the ECB’s tests might reverse a two-year slump in private-sector lending. That’s the hope, anyway. Trouble is, even the new tests were pretty soft. Economists at Switzerland’s Center for Risk Management at Lausanne, for example, have put the capital shortfall for just 37 banks at almost €500 billion – as opposed to the roughly €10 billion reported by the ECB for its sample of 130. This more stringent test used a method that mimics how the market value of equity actually behaves under stress.

In one way, the ECB had good reason to be strict. It had to contend with doubts aroused by the previous unpersuasive tests. Also, it takes over as the euro area’s supranational bank supervisor on Nov. 4, so any lingering issues will be its responsibility. But it knew that if it were too tough, the blow to confidence could have plunged the EU back into crisis. The euro area already has a stalled recovery and stands on the brink of deflation; an alarming report on the banks might have done more harm than good. So the design of the exercise was compromised. It used a measure of capital that relies on banks to weight assets by risk — an opportunity to fudge the numbers. It ignored the credit freezes, forced asset sales and contagion that can cause huge losses in bad times. The worst-case scenario projected a fall in euro-area output of just 1.4%in 2015 (in 2009, it dropped 4.5%). And no governments default.

It’s already crystal clear that there’s not enough to purchase: “In reality, it is what follows that will be important, or maybe more importantly, what doesn’t follow.”

• Draghi Sets Stimulus Pace as ECB Reveals Covered-Bond Purchases (Bloomberg)

Investors will be handed a clue today in to just how aggressive Mario Draghi is willing to be. At 3:30 p.m. in Frankfurt, the European Central Bank will reveal how much it spent on covered bonds last week after returning to that market for a third time as part of a renewed bid to stave off deflation. The central bank bought at least €800 million ($1 billion) of assets from Portugal to Germany in the three days since the program began on Oct. 20, traders said last week. Formal details will help them divine how quickly the ECB president can reach his target of expanding the institution’s balance sheet by as much as €1 trillion. “In terms of the ECB’s aspiration to expand its balance sheet, the market wants it all now,” said Richard Barwell, senior European economist at Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc in London.

“There’s scope for immediate disappointment to the scale of the purchases we see today.” With the economy stuttering and inflation forecast to have stayed below 1% for a 13th month in October, Draghi is under pressure to do more. While central banks from the U.S. to Japan used large-scale asset purchases to bolster their balance sheets and kick-start lending, the ECB has so far refrained from such a step. German opposition to sovereign-bond purchases means officials have chosen covered bonds and asset-backed securities as the latest tools to help expand the balance sheet. While policy makers say their plans will spark new issuance, economists at firms including Morgan Stanley and Commerzbank say the central bank will probably need to buy other assets to reach the target.

Of the region’s €2.6 trillion covered-bond market, the ECB will only buy assets eligible under its collateral framework for refinancing loans, denominated in euros and issued by credit institutions in the euro area. Purchases will be announced weekly, starting today, and the pool of bonds eligible is about €600 billion, ECB Vice President Vitor Constancio said this month. ABS buying is scheduled to begin later this quarter and there are about €400 billion of such assets eligible to buy, according to Constancio. “Covered bond and ABS purchases appear to be the line of least resistance for the ECB,” said Jon Mawby, a London-based fund manager at GLG Partners LP, which manages $32 billion. “In reality, it is what follows that will be important, or maybe more importantly, what doesn’t follow.”

Lowest in 22 months.

• German Business Confidence Drops For 6th Straight Month (AP)

Business confidence in Germany, Europe’s largest economy, has dropped for a sixth consecutive month as concerns over the turmoil in Ukraine and elsewhere continue to take their toll. The Ifo institute said Monday that its confidence index dropped to 103.2 points in October from 104.7 in September, as business leaders’ assessments of their current situation and their expectations for the next six months both fell. The government and independent economists have cut their growth forecasts for Germany after a string of disappointing industrial data for August. Economists warn if international crises escalate or Africa’s Ebola outbreak spreads the impact could become greater. Ifo’s survey is based on responses from about 7,000 companies in various sectors.

All your bucks are belong to us.

• Hundreds Give Up US Passports After New Tax Rules Start (Bloomberg)

The number of Americans renouncing U.S. citizenship increased 39% in the three months through September after rules that make it harder to hide assets from tax authorities came into force. People giving up their nationality at U.S. embassies increased to 776 in the third quarter, from 560 in the year-earlier period, according to Federal Register data published yesterday. Tougher asset-disclosure rules that started July 1 under the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, or Fatca, prompted more of the estimated 6 million Americans living overseas to give up their passports. The appeal of U.S. citizenship for expatriates faded further as more than 100 Swiss banks began to turn over data on American clients to avoid prosecution for helping tax evaders.

The U.S., the only Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development nation that taxes citizens wherever they reside, stepped up the search for tax dodgers after UBS paid a $780 million penalty in 2009 and handed over data on about 4,700 accounts. Shunned by Swiss and German banks and with Fatca starting, more than 9,000 Americans living overseas gave up their passports over the past five years. Fatca requires U.S. financial institutions to impose a 30% withholding tax on payments made to foreign banks that don’t agree to identify and provide information on U.S. account holders. It allows the U.S. to scoop up data from more than 77,000 institutions and 80 governments about its citizens’ overseas financial activities..

Winter time.

• Arctic Ice Melt Seen Doubling Risk of Harsh Winters in Europe, Asia (Bloomberg)

The decline in Arctic sea ice has doubled the chance of severe winters in Europe and Asia in the past decade, according to researchers in Japan. Sea-ice melt in the Arctic, Barents and Kara seas since 2004 has made more than twice as likely atmospheric circulations that suck cold Arctic air to Europe and Asia, a group of Japanese researchers led by the University of Tokyo’s Masato Mori said in a study published yesterday in Nature Geoscience. “This counterintuitive effect of the global warming that led to the sea ice decline in the first place makes some people think that global warming has stopped. It has not,” Colin Summerhayes, emeritus associate of the Scott Polar Research Institute, said in a statement provided by the journal Nature Geoscience, where the study is published.

The findings back up the view of United Nations climate scientists that a warmer average temperature for the world will make storms more severe in some places and change the character of seasons in many others. It also helps debunk the suggestion that slower pace of global warming in the past decade may suggest the issue is less of a problem. “Although average surface warming has been slower since 2000, the Arctic has gone on warming rapidly throughout this time,” he said.

The mess the US makes of its ebola response reaches staggering proportions. How is it possible that it has been so hugely unprepared?

Breaking: 5-year old boy monitired for ebola in NY.

• Nurse’s Lawyers Promise Legal Challenge to Ebola Quarantine (NBC)

Lawyers for a nurse quarantined in a New Jersey hospital say they’ll sue to have her released in a constitutional challenge to state restrictions for health care workers returning to New Jersey after treating Ebola patients in West Africa. Civil liberties attorney Norman Siegel said Kaci Hickox, who was quarantined after arriving Friday at the Newark airport, shows no symptoms of being infected and should be released immediately. He and attorney Steven Hyman said the state attorney general’s office had cooperated in getting them access to Hickox. Late Sunday, a spokesman for New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie issued a statement saying that people who had come into contact with someone with Ebola overseas would be subject to a mandatory quarantine at home. It did not explain why Hickox was being held at the hospital, though it did say, “Non-residents would be transported to their homes if feasible and, if not, quarantined in New Jersey.”

Hyman told NBC News he wasn’t sure what the statement meant for Hickox’s release. “I think we’re getting closer to it,” he said. He and Siegel, speaking earlier outside Newark University Hospital, where she is quarantined, said they spent 75 minutes with her on Sunday. They said she was being kept in a tented area on the hospital’s first floor with a bed, folding table and little else — they said she was able to get a laptop computer with wi-fi access only Sunday. But they said she is not being treated. “She is fine. She is not sick,” Hyman said. Photos they released showed her in hospital garb peering through a plastic window of the tented-off area.

Europe Redefines ‘Stress’

Oct 262014

October 26, 2014 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 9:17 pm Finance Tagged with: capital, confidence, ECB, France, Italy, shortfall, Stress Test 8 Responses »

Dorothea Lange Resettlement project, Bosque Farms, New Mexico Dec 1935

The EU and ECB claim they conducts their stress tests and Asset Quality Reviews to restore confidence in the banking sector. That is easier said than done. The problem with the confidence boosting game is that if the tests are perceived as not strong enough, nobody knows which banks to trust anymore. And, on the other hand, if the tests are sufficiently stringent, there’s a genuine risk not many banks are found healthy.

There’s the additional issue of quite a large group of banks having been declared ‘systemic’ by their mother nations, which is of course equal to Too Big To Fail, and, in layman’s terms, ‘untouchable’.

All in all, after the results were announced today, it’s hard not to have the feeling that Europe aims at restoring that confidence by not telling us the whole story. There are a lot of numbers, but there are even more questions. Which may well be because those answers the leaders of the political and the financial world would want to see are simply not available, other than by making the tests even less credible.

Letting the numbers sink in, would the markets really feel more confident about European banks, or would they simply continue to have faith in the ECB’s bail-out desire for as long as that lasts? When I read that the ‘Comprehensive Assessment’ issued today states that the stock of bad loans in Europe is estimated, after the tests, at €879 billion, but banks’ capital shortfall only at €25 billion, I wonder where the confidence should come from.

The data. Starting with a Bloomberg piece from last Wednesday.

Don’t Be Distracted by the Pass Rate in ECB’s Bank Exams

The largest impact may be on Italian lenders led by Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena, Unione di Banche Italiane and Banco Popolare, according to a report last month from Mediobanca analysts. They foresee a gap of more than 3 percentage points between the capital ratios published by the companies and the results of the ECB’s asset quality review. Deutsche Bank may see its capital fall by €6.7 billion, cutting its ratio by 1.9 percentage points, the analysts said.

The biggest lenders may see their combined capital eroded by about €85 billion in the asset quality review because of extra provisioning requirements, according to Mediobanca. That’s equivalent to a reduction of 1.05 percentage points in their average common equity Tier 1 ratio, the capital measure the ECB is using to gauge the health of the banks under study, the analysts said.

The AQR evaluates lenders’ health by scrutinizing the value of their loan books, provisioning and collateral, using standardized definitions set by European regulators. To pass, a bank must have capital amounting to at least 8% of its assets, when weighted by risk. The bigger the hit to their capital, the more likely lenders will need to take steps to increase it.

Banks the ECB will supervise directly already bolstered their balance sheets by almost €203 billion since mid-2013, ECB President Mario Draghi said this month, by selling stock, holding onto earnings, disposing of assets, and issuing bonds that turn into equity when capital falls too low, among other measures.

Those €203 billion the banks managed to acquire can be interpreted as positive, since they managed to do it, but it can also be seen as negative, because they needed it in the first place. It also raises the question whether another €203 billion would be just as easy. Not very likely, the low hanging fruit always goes first. Question then is, could they perhaps need another €200 billion? Brussels clearly says not, but Brussels is a figment of the imagination of politicians. Then, the New York Times today:

25 European Banks Fail Stress Test

Banks in Europe are €25 billion, or about $31.7 billion, short of the money they would need to survive a financial or economic crisis, the European Central Bank said on Sunday. That conclusion was a result of a yearlong audit of eurozone lenders that is potentially a turning point for the region’s battered economy. The E.C.B. said that 25 banks in the eurozone showed shortfalls in their own money, or capital, through the end of 2013.

Of the 25 banks [that failed the tests], 13 have still not raised enough capital to make up the shortfall, the central bank said. By exposing a relatively small number of sick banks – of the 130 under review – the central bank aims to make it easier for the healthier ones to raise money that they can lend to customers.

Italy had by far the largest number of banks that failed the review, with nine, of which four must raise more capital. Monte dei Paschi di Siena, whose troubles were well known, must raise €2.1 billion, the central bank said, the largest of any individual bank covered by the review.

… the review also uncovered €136 billion in troubled loans that banks had not previously reported. In addition, banks had overvalued their other holdings by €48 billion, the E.C.B. said.

That’s €184 billion in troubled loans and overvaluations. That leaves €19 billion of the €203 billion banks bolstered their balance sheets with, for all other shortcomings. Doesn’t sound like a lot. On to today’s Bloomberg summary:

ECB Finds 25 Banks Failed Stress Test

Eleven banks need more capital, including Monte Paschi with a gap of €2.1 billion. “Although this should restore some confidence and stability to the market, we are still far from a solution to the banking crisis and the challenges facing the banking sector,” Colin Brereton, economic crisis response lead partner at PwC, said. “The Comprehensive Assessment has bought time for some for Europe’s banks.”

Banks will have from six to nine months to fill the gaps and have been urged to tap financial markets first. The ECB’s stress test was conducted in tandem with the London-based European Banking Authority, which also released results today. The EBA’s sample largely overlaps the ECB’s, though it also contains banks from outside the euro area.

The ECB assessment showed Italian banks in particular are in need of more funds as they cope with bad loans and the country’s third recession since 2008. [..] “The minister is confident that the residual shortfalls will be covered through further market transactions and that the high transparency guaranteed by the Comprehensive Assessment will allow to easily complete such transactions,” Italy’s finance ministry said in a statement.

“The Comprehensive Assessment allowed us to compare banks across borders and business models,” ECB Supervisory Board Chair Daniele Nouy said in a statement. “The findings will enable us to draw insights and conclusions for supervision going forward.” The ECB said lenders will need to adjust their asset valuations by €48 billion, taking into account the reclassification of an extra €136 billion of loans as non-performing. The stock of bad loans in the euro-area banking system now stands at €879 billion, the report said.

Under the simulated recession set out in the assessment’s stress test, banks’ common equity Tier 1 capital would be depleted by €263 billion, or by 4 percentage points. The median CET1 ratio – a key measure of financial strength – would therefore fall to 8.3% from 12.4%. Nouy has said banks will be required to cover any capital shortfalls revealed by the assessment, “primarily from private sources.”

Striking to note that the ECB doesn’t rule out having to save more banks. Discomforting too. For taxpayers. But the main question mark remains the simulated recession: what were the assumptions under which is was conducted? Make them too rosy and you might as well not test or simulate anything. Unless of course window dressing is the only goal.

Bloomberg’s Mark Whitehouse writes about quite a different stress test, which quite different outcomes. Makes you think.

Testing Europe’s Stress Tests

What would a really tough stress test look like? Research by economists at Switzerland’s Center for Risk Management at Lausanne offers an indication. By simulating the way the market value of banks’ equity tends to behave in times of stress, they estimate how much capital banks would need to raise in a severe crisis. The answer, as of Oct. 17, for just 37 of the roughly 130 banks included in the ECB’s exercise: €487 billion ($616 billion). Deutsche Bank, three big French banks and ING Groep NV of the Netherlands are among those with the largest estimated shortfalls. Here’s a breakdown by bank:

And here’s a breakdown by country, as a percentage of gross domestic product:

The economists’ approach, based on a model developed at New York University, isn’t perfect. It could, for example, overestimate capital needs if the quality of banks’ management and assets has improved in ways that the market has yet to recognize.

And, because crises are rare, the modelers had scant historical data with which to build estimates of how banks might fare in future disasters. That said, this relatively simple model has some important advantages over the ECB’s much more labor-intensive stress tests. The Swiss group’s approach is free of the political considerations that constrain the ECB, which can’t be too harsh for fear of reigniting the European financial crisis. In addition, the model implicitly includes crucial contagion effects, such as forced asset sales and credit freezes, that the ECB’s exercise ignores.

A bit of back-testing suggests that the economists’ approach works relatively well. The NYU model’s projection for the largest U.S. banks’ stressed capital needs before the 2008 crisis, for example, comes pretty close to the roughly $400 billion that the banks actually had to raise. If the ECB’s number is a lot smaller than the figure the model comes up with, that won’t be a good sign.

The ECB’s Comprehensive Assessment says $203 billion was raised since 2013, leaving ‘only’ €25 billion yet to be gathered. The Swiss report says €487 billion is needed just for 37 of the 130 banks the ECB stress-tested. Of the banks the Swiss identify as having the greatest capital shortfalls, most passed the EU tests. Judging from the graph, the 7 banks in need of most capital have an aggregate shortfall of some €300 billion alone.

Among them the 3 main, and TBTF, French banks, who all passed with flying colors and got complimented for it by French central bank governor Christian Noyer today, but according to the Center for Risk Management are about €200 billion short between them. Which means France as a nation has a stressed capital shortfall of over 10% of its GDP, more than twice as much as the next patient.

Wouldn’t it better to let an independent bureau do these tests, instead of the ECB which obviously has huge political skin in the game? Or are we all too afraid of what might come out?

Will the markets actually feel more confident, or are they going to fake that too? Was this really a yearlong audit, or did it only take that long because the spin doctors needed to make sure the lipstick was applied correctly on the pig?

We all deserve better than a yearlong exercise in futile tepid air. But Europe’s taxpayers deserve it most of all.

Debt Rattle October 26 2014

Oct 262014

October 26, 2014 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 12:12 pm Finance Tagged with: Brazil, ebola, ECB, election, EU, Fed, quantum, Stress Test, Ukraine 6 Responses »

John Vachon Beer signs on truck, Little Falls, Minnesota Oct 1940

• 25 European Banks Fail Stress Test (NY Times)

• Testing Europe’s Stress Tests (Bloomberg)

• Europe Stess Tests Tests Could Trigger A Near-Term Crisis (MarketWatch)

• America Stems Flow Of Funds As China Stalls And Eurozone Retreats (Observer)

• Don’t Buy A Home (MarketWatch)

• Brazilians Vote for Leader as Polls Show Nation Divided (Bloomberg)

• Ukraine Votes in Wartime Ballot Set to Back Pro-EU Forces (Bloomberg)

• Stagnant Paychecks for US Workers Underlies Voter Discontent (Bloomberg)

• Record Number Of Britons In Low-Paid Jobs (Guardian)

• Nearly A Third Of British Voters Prepared To Support Ukip (Observer)

• 1 Million Italians Rally in Rome to Protest Labor Rules Change (Bloomberg)

• IMF Sets 0.05% Floor on Interest Rate on Special Drawing Right (Bloomberg)

• China State Economist Sees 2015 Growth Slowest in Over 2 Decades (Bloomberg)

• MH-17: The Untold Story (RT)

• You’re Powered By Quantum Mechanics. No, Really… (Observer)

• Nurse Held at N.J. Airport Calls US Reaction to Ebola ‘Disorganized’ (Bloomberg)

As expected. 9 banks in Italy alone is a big number.

• 25 European Banks Fail Stress Test (NY Times)

Banks in Europe are €25 billion, or about $31.7 billion, short of the money they would need to survive a financial or economic crisis, the European Central Bank said on Sunday. That conclusion was a result of a yearlong audit of eurozone lenders that is potentially a turning point for the region’s battered economy. The E.C.B. said that 25 banks in the eurozone showed shortfalls in their own money, or capital, after a review devised to uncover hidden problems and to test their ability to withstand a sharp recession or other crisis. The review looked at banks’ books through the end of 2013. Of the 25 banks, 13 have still not raised enough capital to make up the shortfall, the central bank said. The highly anticipated assessment of European banks was intended to remove a cloud of mistrust that has impeded lending in countries like Italy and Greece and left the eurozone struggling to avoid lapsing back into recession. By exposing a relatively small number of sick banks — of the 130 under review — the central bank aims to make it easier for the healthier ones to raise money that they can lend to customers.

Italy had by far the largest number of banks that failed the review, with nine, of which four must raise more capital. Monte dei Paschi di Siena, whose troubles were well known, must raise €2.1 billion, the central bank said, the largest of any individual bank covered by the review. Greece’s banking system was also hard hit, with three banks found short of capital. One, Piraeus Bank, has since raised enough capital to satisfy regulators. The other two are Eurobank, which must raise €1.76 billion, and National Bank of Greece, which must raise €930 million. The overall capital shortfall for the banks under review was in the middle of analyst estimates. However, the review also uncovered €136 billion in troubled loans that banks had not previously reported. In addition, banks had overvalued their other holdings by €48 billion, the E.C.B. said.

Stress tests may have failed 25 banks, but they’re not nearly strict enough.

• Testing Europe’s Stress Tests (Bloomberg)

On Sunday, the European Central Bank will publish the results of stress tests designed to restore much-needed confidence in the euro area’s financial system. To succeed, the ECB must convince investors that it has truly forced banks to recognize their losses and raise enough capital to be healthy. What would a really tough stress test look like? Research by economists at Switzerland’s Center for Risk Management at Lausanne offers an indication. By simulating the way the market value of banks’ equity tends to behave in times of stress, they estimate how much capital banks would need to raise in a severe crisis. The answer, as of Oct. 17, for just 37 of the roughly 130 banks included in the ECB’s exercise: €487 billion ($616 billion). Deutsche Bank, three big French banks and ING Groep NV of the Netherlands are among those with the largest estimated shortfalls. Here’s a breakdown by bank:

And here’s a breakdown by country, as a percentage of gross domestic product:

The economists’ approach, based on a model developed at New York University, isn’t perfect. It could, for example, overestimate capital needs if the quality of banks’ management and assets has improved in ways that the market has yet to recognize. And, because crises are rare, the modelers had scant historical data with which to build estimates of how banks might fare in future disasters. That said, this relatively simple model has some important advantages over the ECB’s much more labor-intensive stress tests. The Swiss group’s approach is free of the political considerations that constrain the ECB, which can’t be too harsh for fear of reigniting the European financial crisis. In addition, the model implicitly includes crucial contagion effects, such as forced asset sales and credit freezes, that the ECB’s exercise ignores.

A bit of back-testing suggests that the economists’ approach works relatively well. The NYU model’s projection for the largest U.S. banks’ stressed capital needs before the 2008 crisis, for example, comes pretty close to the roughly $400 billion that the banks actually had to raise. If the ECB’s number is a lot smaller than the figure the model comes up with — as early indications suggest it will be — that won’t be a good sign.

If only these tests were credible.

• Europe Stess Tests Tests Could Trigger A Near-Term Crisis (MarketWatch)

The European Central Bank is preparing a diagnosis of the eurozone’s banking. woes. Unfortunately, it has no power to write a prescription. In fact, the Sunday release of the results of new stress tests and the ECB’s Asset Quality Review could do more near-term harm than good, says Carl Weinberg, chief economist at High Frequency Economics. ECB President Mario Draghi’s 2012 pledge to do “whatever it takes” to preserve the euro and the ECB’s subsequent creation of a never-yet-utilized emergency bond-buying program put the debt crisis on the back burner. European stocks outperformed in the second half of last year as investors and commentators cheered a temporary pickup in growth. But the crucial area of lending across the eurozone remains lackluster. Many banks are nursing bruised balance sheets, and the degree to which lenders are hurting is likely to become more evident with this latest batch of tests.

Overall industrial and economic output remain below pre-crisis levels and unemployment across much of southern Europe remains at levels, unfathomable in the U.S., even during the worst of the Great Recession. The region is stumbling back toward recession, led by a German slowdown. Now, discussions of Europe’s long-running economic woes regularly use the term “depression,” Weinberg has been using the dreaded D-word for years. There isn’t a single accepted definition of a depression, but economists have usually described the phenomenon as one in that lasts several years and is characterized by a large rise in unemployment, falling credit and a big drop in economic output. The eurozone’s current woes appear to tick all those boxes. When it comes to the stress tests, the hope is that a more rigorous review led by the ECB will reassure investors that the region’s banking sector is in relatively solid shape. Of course, to be credible, some banks will have to fail, which will require them to scramble to shore up capital.

Bloomberg, citing a draft communique on Friday, reported that the ECB was set to fail 25 lenders. Weinberg worries that the tests could trigger a near-term crisis. The problem isn’t that the banks are being scrutinized, it’s that there’s no credible plan to fill in capital shortfalls and allow the banks to repair themselves via retained earnings. There is, for example, no equivalent to the controversial but successful Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP, that saw U.S. taxpayers effectively take temporary stakes in crippled banks that were eventually bought back from the Treasury. “If the AQR would get banks recapitalized and make them better able to lend, I would be delighted and that would be the end of this six-year-going-on-seven-year depression,” Weinberg said in an interview. Instead, the exercise is “nothing more than an evaluation.”

Emerging markets set to stop emerging.

• America Stems Flow Of Funds As China Stalls And Eurozone Retreats (Observer)

There is growing unease as the US central bank prepares to turn off its printing presses. Over five years the Federal Reserve has pumped almost $4.5 trillion into the US economy, in a desperate effort to counter the effects of recession and the collapse of hundreds of banks following the financial crash. Next week the Federal Reserve chief Janet Yellen will allocate the last tranche of new money, having wound down from a regular $85bn of quantitative easing (QE) a month to a final $15bn. Some analysts believe the decision to stop the extra spending is a reflection of the US economy’s robust recovery. Falling unemployment, a return to health across the banking sector and consistently strong manufacturing growth all conjure thoughts of a return to pre-recession normality. Given the huge amounts of money that poured into the US stock market last year, triggering a rise in the S&P 500 of almost 30%, most investors thought the same. But they have proved more cautious in 2014, restricting the S&P 500 to a 6% increase so far.

Disturbed by the lack of similar action in Brussels and in Frankfurt – home of the European Central Bank – investors fear that the eurozone is sliding ever closer to recession. They are also worried about a sharp slowdown in China, following moves by the ruling People’s party to tackle escalating state sector debts. Wild price swings in global stock markets earlier this month were a signal that investors remain ready to pull their funds at a moment’s notice. In this febrile atmosphere, the Fed’s next move could be crucial. Yellen appears ready to maintain the $4.5tn cache of bonds and mortgage-backed securities that make up the bulk of the Fed’s balance sheet. As the bonds mature, she will buy new ones to keep the balance steady. But she may be edging away from raising interest rates from 0.25%, a move pencilled in by many economists for February.

Best advice there is.

• Don’t Buy A Home (MarketWatch)

After an extended drought of credit available to consumers, it’s going to get easier to buy a home. The Federal Housing Finance Agency this week polished off a new set of guidelines that will allow government backing of loans that it had shunned since the mortgage crisis. And in a surprise move, the guidelines include a provision to consider some mortgages without down payments. And Mel Watt, the FHFA director, said earlier this week that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are planning to guarantee some loans with down payments of as little as 3%. That should help underwater homeowners. Let’s begin by saying that’s not necessarily a bad thing. There are instances where loans should be available to borrowers without the means to place a down payment. It’s just that I can’t think of any.

The FHFA and the Obama administration are both worried about the amount of credit available to the average American. It’s an epidemic problem. About a third of housing sales were to cash buyers in the first quarter, according to the National Association of Realtors. As I’ve written before, this is extraordinarily high, indicative of a housing market that favors the wealthy. So by lowering the standards of what types of loans are acceptable to the big mortgage giants, it’s obvious that the FHFA’s effort is about encouraging banks to provide more loans. The government is essentially saying: “Go ahead and lend; we’ll hold the paper.” But in trying to ease credit and turn a mythic housing recovery into a real one, the FHFA may be overreaching. That’s because you know exactly who’s going to be taking out those loans: people who can’t afford them. And because there will always be some people who believe that because they can borrow, they can afford these loans, you know how this new policy is going to play out.

Dark economic days ahead in Brazil no matter who wins. A stronger dollar and higher rates will hit it like a sledgehammer.

• Brazilians Vote for Leader as Polls Show Nation Divided (Bloomberg)

Brazilians vote today in a national election that pits President Dilma Rousseff, who says she wants to protect social gains achieved during 12 years of her Workers’ Party rule, against challenger Aecio Neves, who says the incumbent has driven the economy into recession. Voting stations open at 8 a.m. today and close at 5 p.m. in each of Brazil’s three time zones. Some opinion polls published yesterday showed Rousseff statically tied with Neves of the Brazilian Social Democracy Party, while others indicated either the incumbent or challenger with the lead.

Neves proposes to cut spending, slow inflation to target and attract more private investment, while keeping social welfare programs such as cash transfers to the poor and low-cost housing. While the economy in 2014 slipped into recession for the first time since 2009, Rousseff has gone on the attack, saying Neves’s policies jeopardize record-low unemployment and programs that lifted 35 million people out of poverty. “Brazil’s consumer-led consumption model has run its course and needs to be replaced with one based on investment and quality public services,” said Paulo Sotero, director of the Brazil Institute at the Washington-based Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. “Those who benefited from that model, and they weren’t few, feel that change could put at risk those advances.”

If Ukraine if serious about not letting Luhansk and Donetsk secede, how can it hold elections that do not include the regions, and still pretend to derive legitimacy from them?

• Ukraine Votes in Wartime Ballot Set to Back Pro-EU Forces (Bloomberg)

Ukrainians voted today in an election that’s being shaped by their nation’s conflict with pro-Russian insurgents and Vladimir Putin’s land grab in Crimea. Polling stations opened at 8 a.m. and will close at 8 p.m., after which exit polls are due. Backing for billionaire President Petro Poroshenko’s party and the Popular Front of his Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk tops 40%, while the Regions Party of deposed leader Viktor Yanukovych isn’t running. Poroshenko wants to build a coalition with other pro-European parties. “We’re likely to see a fairly stable majority” in an alliance led by Poroshenko’s bloc, Yuriy Yakymenko, an analyst at the Kiev-based Razumkov Center for Economic and Political Studies, which has tracked Ukrainian elections for two decades, said last week by phone. “

Lawmakers will unite behind plans for Ukraine’s future accession to the European Union.” The snap vote will vanquish the legislature elected under Russian-backed Yanukovych as Poroshenko seeks support to end the war, tackle the deepest recession in five years and revive the world’s worst-performing currency. Ukraine’s crisis has fixed the nation on a pro-EU trajectory and driven a wedge between Russia and its former Cold War foes.

It’s not as if they have any real alternatives to vote for. Both parties will squeeze them dry.

• Stagnant Paychecks for US Workers Underlies Voter Discontent (Bloomberg)

Eleven days before midterm elections comes fresh evidence of why voters are unhappy: even those with a full-time job are probably making less than they did before the recession. The typical American worker’s weekly earnings, adjusted for inflation, were lower during the July through September quarter than in the third quarter of 2007, the last such measurement before the recession started, Labor Department data released yesterday showed. Even as the unemployment rate dropped to 5.9% in September from a peak of 10% and a soaring stock market brought financial gains for the wealthy, there has been only sluggish improvement in the living standards of middle-class Americans during President Barack Obama’s administration.

The Labor Department said median usual pay for Americans employed full-time was $790 per week in the third quarter. That’s about a dollar less per week than in the third quarter of 2007, using the department’s adjustment for inflation. There’s been no net gain for those workers since 1999. The Labor Department pay data captures the experience of ordinary American full-time workers. Unlike some other income data reported by the government, it excludes the impact of joblessness, public assistance, investment income and workers forced to take part-time jobs because they cannot find full-time employment. In September, 7.1 million Americans worked part-time for economic reasons, down from a peak of 9.2 million in March 2010, though still higher than the 4.5 million who did so in November 2007, on the eve of the recession.

Combine this with the next article.

• Record Number Of Britons In Low-Paid Jobs (Guardian)

A record 5 million workers are now in low-paid jobs, according to a new report, sparking calls for government action to help tackle the problem. The Resolution Foundation said the numbers earning less than two thirds of median hourly pay – equivalent to £7.69 an hour – increased by 250,000 last year to reach 5.2 million. The increase partly reflected growth in employment, but there was also a reverse in the previous year’s slight fall in low-paid work, said the thinktank. The report said there was a serious problem of people being stuck in low-paid jobs, with almost one in four minimum wage employees still on that rate for the last five years. Workers in Britain are more likely to be low paid than those in comparable economies such as Germany and Australia, said the Resolution Foundation.

The thinktank’s chief economist, Matthew Whittaker, said: “While recent months have brought much welcome news on the number of people moving into employment, the squeeze on real earnings continues. While low pay is likely to be better than no pay at all, it’s troubling that the number of low-paid workers across Britain reached a record high last year. “Being low paid – and getting stuck there for years on end – creates not only immediate financial pressures, but can permanently affect people’s career prospects. A growing rump of low-paid jobs also presents a financial headache for the government because it fails to boost the tax take and raises the benefits bill for working people.

“All political parties have expressed an ambition to tackle low pay. Yet the proportion of low-paid workers has barely moved in the last 20 years. A focus on raising the minimum wage can certainly help the very lowest paid workers in Britain, but we need a broader low-pay strategy in order to lift larger numbers out of working poverty. “Economic growth alone won’t solve our low-pay problem. We need to look more closely at the kind of jobs being created, the industries that are growing and the ability of people to move from one job or sector to the other, if we’re really going to get to grips with low pay in Britain today.”

Combine his with the preceeding article.

• Nearly A Third Of British Voters Prepared To Support Ukip (Observer)

The phenomenal rise in support for Ukip is underlined by a new Opinium/Observer poll which shows almost one-third of voters would be prepared to back Nigel Farage’s party if they believed it could win in their own constituency. While the survey, which puts the Conservatives and Labour neck-and-neck on 33%, shows a substantial boost for the Tories (up five points on a fortnight ago), the rise of Ukip will be deeply alarming to the main parties. With just over three weeks to go before a crucial byelection in the normally safe Tory seat of Rochester and Strood, which Ukip threatens to seize, the poll puts Ukip on 18% of the national vote, with the Lib Dems on 6% and the Greens on 4%.

If the Ukip candidate Mark Reckless, who defected from the Tories last month, wins the byelection, the Conservatives fear there could be a rush of defections as MPs conclude that their chances of re-election are higher under Ukip colours. When asked to respond to the statement “I would vote for Ukip if I thought they could win in the constituency I live in”, 31% of voters said they agreed. This includes 33% of Tory voters, 25% of Liberal Democrats and 18% of Labour supporters. Voters were equally divided on whether a vote for Ukip was a wasted one, with 40% saying it was, and 37% saying it was not.

Renzi wants IMF-style reforms.

• 1 Million Italians Rally in Rome to Protest Labor Rules Change (Bloomberg)

Italians staged a massive rally in Rome to protest Prime Minister Matteo Renzi’s proposed overhaul of labor market rules. Italian television RAI said several hundred thousand people took part in the demonstration, while news agency Ansa cited CGIL union organizers as saying the number was closer to 1 million. Many of the protesters carried red balloons and waved red union banners under bright sunny skies. CGIL chief Susanna Camusso told the demonstrators the union is ready to continue its protest “with all necessary means” including a general strike. She shouted to the cheering crowd at the end of her speech in Piazza San Giovanni “onward to work, to the struggle!”

CGIL called the rally to protest Renzi’s Jobs Act, which includes measures to ease firing rules and make the labor market more flexible. Renzi has said that the plan is a way to attract investments at a time when youth unemployment was at a record high 44.2% in August. His proposals, which were approved by the Senate in a confidence vote this month, will have to be passed by the Chamber of Deputies. The Rome demonstration follows a separate 24-hour strike that disrupted air and ground transport in the country’s biggest cities yesterday. More disruptions are expected Nov. 14, when Alitalia’s staff and Easyjet’s flight attendants will go on strike, according to a statement posted on the Italian Transport Ministry’s website.

Special Drawing Rights should be abolished. So should the IMF itself.

• IMF Sets 0.05% Floor on Interest Rate on Special Drawing Right (Bloomberg)

The International Monetary Fund is setting a 0.05% floor on the interest rate used to determine borrowing costs for some of its loans. The executive board modified rules today to make the change, according to a statement today in Washington. The IMF’s Special Drawing Right, based on a basket of the dollar, yen, euro and pound, is the fund’s unit of account that serves as a supplemental reserve asset and was designed to improve global liquidity. The SDR interest rate was quoted on the IMF website at 0.03% today compared with 0.13% in April and more than 3% in August 2008, before central banks slashed borrowing costs to zero to boost growth in the aftermath of the financial crisis. The rate will be 0.05% on Oct. 27, the IMF said.

The board also approved changing the rounding convention for calculating the SDR rate to three decimal points from two, the statement said. The SDR interest rate is used to calculate interest charged to member nations for non-concessional loans and SDR allocations, and the rate paid to members for SDR holdings. It is calculated from a weighted average of the short-term money market rates of the SDR basket currencies. A floor will prevent the SDR rate from going negative, in the event that money market interest rates on some of the currencies in the underlying basket themselves go negative, an IMF official told reporters on condition of anonymity. The fund has no legal basis for charging a negative rate on SDRs.

China is not growing anywhere near 7% anymore, but it may take years before that is admitted.

• China State Economist Sees 2015 Growth Slowest in Over 2 Decades (Bloomberg)

China’s economic growth is expected to be at 7% in 2015 unless the central government imposes stronger-than-expected stimulus measures, according to Fan Jianping, chief economist at a state research institute. A decrease in exports and property development, two “engines” fueling China to be the world’s second-largest economy, will be the main cause of a slowing of growth, Fan, who works at the State Information Center under the National Development and Reform Commission, told an industry conference today. Fan’s forecast is in line with a median estimate of 51 analysts in a Bloomberg News survey as Chinese leaders have signaled they will tolerate a weaker expansion, leaving the economy heading for the slowest full-year growth since 1990. Chinese leaders will set a gross domestic product growth target of about 7% for 2015, according to 13 of 22 analysts polled by Bloomberg.

“I don’t rule out that we will see on-year expansion lower than 7% in some single quarters next year,” Fan said. He said his forecast was based on his agency’s research, which uses China’s industrial production as a key indicator to the economic growth. Fan’s remarks may cool down an improved sentiment in Chinese economy as GDP expanded by a better-than-forecast 7.3% in the third quarter from a year earlier. While the government has relaxed home-purchase controls and pumped liquidity to lenders, the economy also got support from a pickup in exports in September. “In at least six months, economic growth is unlikely to pick up remarkably,” Fan said in Shanghai. GDP expansion in three months from October is seen at 7.2 to 7.3%, which will lead the full-year growth to about 7.3% as reading in the fourth quarter has bigger weighting, he said. China set 2014 GDP growth target at 7.5%.

RT video seeking to make the case for a second plane – a Ukraine figher jet – near MH17.

• MH-17: The Untold Story (RT)

Three months after Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 was violently brought down from the skies over Ukraine, there are still no definitive answers to what caused the tragedy. Civil conflict in the area prevented international experts from conducting a full and thorough investigation. The wreckage should have been collected and scrupulously re-assembled to identify all the damage, but this standard investigative procedure was never carried out. Until that’s done, evidence can only be gleaned from pictures of the debris, the flight recorders or black boxes and eye-witnesses’ testimonies. This may be enough to help build a picture of what really happened to the aircraft, whether a rocket fired from the ground or gunfire from a military jet.

As we’ve known for 100 years.

• You’re Powered By Quantum Mechanics. No, Really… (Observer)

Every year, around about this time, thousands of European robins escape the oncoming harsh Scandinavian winter and head south to the warmer Mediterranean coasts. How they find their way unerringly on this 2,000-mile journey is one of the true wonders of the natural world. For unlike many other species of migratory birds, marine animals and even insects, they do not rely on landmarks, ocean currents, the position of the sun or a built-in star map. Instead, they are among a select group of animals that use a remarkable navigation sense – remarkable for two reasons. The first is that they are able to detect tiny variations in the direction of the Earth’s magnetic field – astonishing in itself, given that this magnetic field is 100 times weaker than even that of a measly fridge magnet. The second is that robins seem to be able to “see” the Earth’s magnetic field via a process that even Albert Einstein referred to as “spooky”. The birds’ in-built compass appears to make use of one of the strangest features of quantum mechanics.

Over the past few years, the European robin, and its quantum “sixth sense”, has emerged as the pin-up for a new field of research, one that brings together the wonderfully complex and messy living world and the counterintuitive, ethereal but strangely orderly world of atoms and elementary particles in a collision of disciplines that is as astonishing and unexpected as it is exciting. Welcome to the new science of quantum biology. Most people have probably heard of quantum mechanics, even if they don’t really know what it is about. Certainly, the idea that it is a baffling and difficult scientific theory understood by just a tiny minority of smart physicists and chemists has become part of popular culture. Quantum mechanics describes a reality on the tiniest scales that is, famously, very weird indeed; a world in which particles can exist in two or more places at once, spread themselves out like ghostly waves, tunnel through impenetrable barriers and even possess instantaneous connections that stretch across vast distances.

But despite this bizarre description of the basic building blocks of the universe, quantum mechanics has been part of all our lives for a century. Its mathematical formulation was completed in the mid-1920s and has given us a remarkably complete account of the world of atoms and their even smaller constituents, the fundamental particles that make up our physical reality. For example, the ability of quantum mechanics to describe the way that electrons arrange themselves within atoms underpins the whole of chemistry, material science and electronics; and is at the very heart of most of the technological advances of the past half-century. Without the success of the equations of quantum mechanics in describing how electrons move through materials such as semiconductors we would not have developed the silicon transistor and, later, the microchip and the modern computer.

Every single step takes in the US with regards to ebola seems ‘confused’. Or should that read ‘complacent’?

• Nurse Held at N.J. Airport Calls US Reaction to Ebola ‘Disorganized’ (Bloomberg)

A nurse who tested negative for Ebola said officials at Newark Airport in New Jersey appeared confused and disorganized, and gave her only a granola bar to eat while she was detained for more than six hours after arriving from Sierra Leone. In a first-person account in the Dallas Morning News, Kaci Hickox criticized the treatment she received after returning from a monthlong assignment with Doctors Without Borders in the country, one of three West African nations at the center of the current outbreak. “No one seemed to be in charge,” Hickox wrote in the account yesterday. “No one would tell me what was going on or what would happen to me.” Hickox said she was detained at the airport upon her arrival at 1 p.m. on Oct 24. At the time, her temperature was recorded at 98 degrees. Three hours later, after a confusing series of interactions with officials, her temperature was recorded at 101 degrees using a forehead scanner.

Hickox said she told officials that her skin temperature could have been elevated because her face was flushed with anxiety and asked them to test again using a more accurate oral thermometer. She was left alone for another three hours without her temperature being taken again before being transported with a police escort to a hospital. At the hospital, after being placed in an isolation tent, an oral thermometer recorded her temperature at a normal 98.6 degrees. Her blood was tested for Ebola, and came back negative. All the same, Hickox remains in quarantine for 21 days under rules imposed this week by New York and New Jersey officials. “I am scared about how health-care workers will be treated at airports when they declare that they have been fighting Ebola in West Africa,” Hickox wrote. “I am scared that, like me, they will arrive and see a frenzy of disorganization, fear and, most frightening, quarantine.”

40% of Eurozone Banks Are In Bad Shape

Oct 222014

October 22, 2014 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 7:07 pm Finance Tagged with: bonds, Draghi, ECB, Juncker, purchases, Reuters, Stress Test 2 Responses »

David Myers Theatre on 9th Street. Washington, DC July 1939

Reuters has had a busy day today reporting on Europe’s banks and the stress tests the European Banking Authority is set to unveil on Sunday. And which put the EU and ECB on a see-saw like balancing act between credibility and panic.

The news bureau started off in the early morning citing a report by Spanish news agency Efe, which said 11 banks would fail the tests:

11 Banks To Fail European Stress Tests

At least 11 banks from six European countries are set to fail a region-wide financial health check this weekend, Spanish news agency Efe reported, citing several unidentified financial sources. The results of the stress tests on 130 banks by the European Central Bank are due to be unveiled on Sunday.

Four banks in Greece, three Italian lenders and two Austrian ones are among those that preliminary data showed had failed the tests, Efe said. It gave no details of how much capital the banks would have to raise and said this could yet change as numbers could be revised at the last minute. The euro fell on the report. Efe also identified a Cypriot bank and possibly one from Belgium and one from Portugal.

That’s right, the journalist lists 12 banks there, not 11. But anyway, that text is, miraculously, not available anymore, since at the same URL you now get the following article. Jean-Claude ‘When it gets serious, you lie’ Juncker’s first act in his first day in office as European Commission head may well have been to give Reuters a call. Make that a shout.

ECB Cools Speculation Over Bank Health Checks Ahead Of Results

The European Central Bank cautioned on Wednesday against speculation over the outcome of its stress tests after a media report said at least 11 banks had failed the landmark financial health checks, driving some banking shares lower. Austria’s Erste Group rejected the report from Spanish newswire Efe, which said that it along with banks from Italy, Belgium, Cyprus, Portugal and Greece, had failed the ECB review based on preliminary data, but it gave no details of the size of the capital holes at the banks.

The ECB, which will publish the test outcomes for 130 banks on Sunday, said final results had not yet been sent to the lenders involved, and it could not comment on individual institutions. “Any inferences drawn as to the final outcome of the exercise would be highly speculative until the results are final on 26 October,” said an ECB spokesman. The European Banking Authority, the EU watchdog coordinating the Europe-wide stress test, said the results would not be final until they are endorsed on Sunday just prior to publication. It had no comment on individual lenders.

Erste told Reuters it had no reason to believe it would fail the test. Banks have already had some feedback on the outcome of the tests through ‘supervisory dialogs’ with the ECB. They get the results on Thursday, three days ahead of the public announcement. The ECB becomes supervisor of the euro zone’s banks on Nov. 4. “Out of the supervisory dialogue we have no indication we won’t pass,” an Erste spokesman said. [..]”The bigger, more important question is not which banks have failed but which banks have achieved only a marginal pass,” said Jeremy Batstone-Carr at Charles Stanley.

Sources told Reuters that German public sector lender HSH Nordbank – which was not named in the Efe report – was set to pass the health checks. HSH was seen as the German lender most likely to fall short of requirements. Other than Erste, the banks listed by Efe were Italy’s Banco Popolare, Monte dei Paschi and Banca Popolare di Milano; Greece’s Alpha Bank, Piraeus Bank and Eurobank; Portugal’s Millennium BCP and Belgium’s Dexia. The agency also said a second, unnamed Austrian bank and a Cypriot bank were set to fail.

Looks like Brussels thinks it’s free of leaks to the media. Look, it’s Wednesday, and the banks will get results tomorrow. These are known, and can and will therefore be leaked. It’s 2014. Get with it.

Do note the words I bolded. Banks that only just slipped through the test are a major topic in this. If only because they’ve all had many months to shore up their capital by whatever means possible.

Those who still fail after that should probably have been long gone, while those who make it by a narrow margin are in bad shape. There are many ways to shore up your capital, including some that are temporary, just shy of being 100% legal and/or simply based on accounting tricks.

And of course many problems will remain hidden, for now, behind the veil of ultra cheap credit, either from central banks or corporate bond investors. Because that’s one of the damaging effects of ZIRP: it keeps zombies alive.

Then later in the day Reuters followed up with this interview with Pimco global banking specialist Philippe Bodereau, who says 18 banks will fail. Juncker must have thrown a hissy fit, and then lied about it.

Pimco’s Banking Expert Expects 18 Lenders To Fail ECB Stress Test

Fixed income investment firm Pimco’s global banking specialist, Philippe Bodereau, expects 18 banks will be seen to have failed the European Central Bank’s stress test of 130 regional lenders when results are published by the ECB on Sunday. Bodereau said in an interview on Wednesday the failures would likely include some German and Austrian cooperative and public sector banks, as well as weak regional lenders in the southern periphery.[..]

Describing the exercise as a milestone for cleaning up the banks, he said the test was “reasonably credible” when compared with previous tests and provided investors with a starting point to evaluate banks. “It’s pretty clear that not that many banks are going to fail it. A fair amount of balance sheet strengthening has taken place over the last six to nine months in anticipation of this exercise,” Bodereau told Reuters.

Big national champions across northern Europe and also in Southern Europe should pass quite easily, he said, although he expected almost a third of those tested to pass by a narrow margin. This group would likely include many medium-sized banks. “Probably the market will ask questions about their dividend policies, about their ability to grow balance sheet, etcetera. They will be under pressure to remain quite conservative on capital management and on deleveraging,” said Bodereau. [..]

Given recent market volatility, he said it was more likely there would be a positive than negative market shock after the results are released, and that share prices for the region’s biggest banks could be a market winner on Monday.

130 banks are being tested. 12-18 will fail. And on top of that, almost a third of 130, that’s over 40, will pass while still getting their feet wet. That means anywhere between 40% and 44% of Eurozone banks either fail or are in bad shape. And Bodereau suggests this will lead to a positive market shock on Monday morning. You might want to ask yourself what market position he has taken, how short he is exactly, and what book he’s talking.

If 40% of your banks are either dead in the water or barely floating, I’d say you have a major problem. ECB head Mario Draghi is undoubtedly still stuck in misplaced confidence on account of how well his ‘whatever it takes’ speech worked out, and ‘fresh’ EC head Juncker is as we speak emptying several bottles of champagne at once to celebrate his new job. He’s known to like his drinky.

And the ECB, under current conditions, seems almost entirely powerless to do anything about this, since, as Tyler Durden, using Barclay’s numbers, summarizes, it can only purchase $10 billion or so in ABC/Covered bond purchases per month, and another $5 billion per month in corporate bonds. There is simply not more eligible debt available for it to buy. Its mandate would have to be changed in drastic ways, and that doesn’t seem to be in the cards at all.

To keep markets afloat, however, as Bloomberg notes, $200 billion a quarter in QE from the central bankers is needed. The Fed is almost out, China has mostly withdrawn, Japan has too many domestic problems to look out the window, and the ECB can do just $15 billion a month. Confused? You won’t be .. after next week’s episode of .. the Eurosoap.

We all know our world, be it politics or economics, consists almost exclusively of spin these days, but in the face of these numbers I very much wonder how many people will be willing to bet their own money that Europe can get away with another round of moonsmoke and roses come Monday.

Debt Rattle October 22 2014

Oct 222014

October 22, 2014 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 10:47 am Finance Tagged with: Big Oil, budget, China, deficit, ebola, ECB, EU, Fed, oil, Russia, Shale, Stress Test 2 Responses »

Russell Lee Migrant family in trailer home near Edinburg, Texas Feb 1939

• At Least 11 Banks To Fail European Stress Tests (Reuters)

• All the Markets Need Is $200 Billion a Quarter From the Central Bankers (BW)

• What Would It Take To Trigger The ‘Fed Put’? (MarketWatch)

• Currency Wars Evolve With Goal of Avoiding, Exporting Deflation (Bloomberg)

• Are Belgium, Finland And France The ‘New Periphery’ In Europe? (CNBC)

• EU To Warn France And Italy On Budget Plans (FT)

• US Shale Producers Cramming Wells in Risky Push to Extend Boom (Bloomberg)

• Oil at $80 a Barrel Muffles Forecasts for US Shale Boom (Bloomberg)

• How Wall Street Is Killing Big Oil (Oilprice.com)

• Investors Pile Into Oil Funds at Fastest Pace in 2 Years (Bloomberg)

• Markets Need To Accept Low Growth As ‘New Normal’ In China (Saxo)

• China to Let World in on Gauge Showing State of Economy (Bloomberg)

• UK Deficit Up 10% From Last Year, National Debt Rises £100 Billion (Guardian)

• The Moral Economy Of Debt (Robert Skidelsky)

• Fears Over Gas Supply As Russia-Ukraine Talks Fail (Reuters)

• New York Fed Caught Sight of London Whale and Let Him Go (Bloomberg)

• World’s Top-Ranked Pension Funds Probed for Hedge Fund Use (Bloomberg)

• How To Start A War And Lose An Empire (Dmitry Orlov)

• “Omenland” (James Howard Kunstler)

• WHO: Ebola Serum In Weeks And Vaccine Tests In Africa By January (Guardian)

This could make a whole lot of people really nervous.

• At Least 11 Banks To Fail European Stress Tests (Reuters)

At least 11 banks from six European countries are set to fail a region-wide financial health check this weekend, Spanish news agency Efe reported, citing several unidentified financial sources. The results of the stress tests on 130 banks by the European Central Bank are due to be unveiled on Sunday. Four banks in Greece, three Italian lenders and two Austrian ones are among those that preliminary data showed had failed the tests, Efe said. It gave no details of how much capital the banks would have to raise and said this could yet change as numbers could be revised at the last minute.

The euro fell on the report. Efe also identified a Cypriot bank and possibly one from Belgium and one from Portugal. The exercise is designed to see how banks would cope under various economic scenarios, including adverse ones, and is likely to reveal capital shortfalls at some entities. The ECB is carrying out the checks of how the biggest euro zone banks have valued their assets, and whether they have enough capital to weather another economic crash, before taking over as their supervisor on Nov. 4.

Anyone still realize how insane that is, or are our brains completely numb and dumbed down by now?

• All the Markets Need Is $200 Billion a Quarter From the Central Bankers (BW)

The central-bank put lives on. Policy makers deny its existence, yet investors still reckon that whenever stocks and other risk assets take a tumble, the authorities will be there with calming words or economic stimulus to ensure the losses are limited. A put option gives investors the right to sell their asset at a set price so the theory goes that central banks will ultimately provide a floor for falling asset markets to ensure they don’t take economies down with them. Last week as markets swooned again, it was St. Louis Federal Reserve President James Bullard and Bank of England Chief Economist Andrew Haldane who did the trick.

Bullard said the Fed should consider delaying the end of its bond-purchase program to halt a decline in inflation expectations, while Haldane said he’s less likely to vote for a U.K. rate increase than three months ago. “These comments left markets with the impression that the ‘central-bank put’ is still in place,” Morgan Stanley currency strategists led by Hans Redeker told clients in a report yesterday. Matt King, global head of credit strategy at Citigroup, and colleagues have put a price on how much liquidity central banks need to provide each quarter to stop markets from sliding. By estimating that zero stimulus would be consistent with a 10% quarterly drop in equities, they calculate it takes around $200 billion from central banks each quarter to keep markets from selling off.

With the Fed and counterparts peeling back their net liquidity injections from almost $1 trillion in 2012 toward that magic marker, King’s team said “a negative reaction in markets was long overdue.” “We think the markets’ weakness owes more to an almost belated reaction to a temporary lull in central bank stimulus than it does to any reduction in the effect of that stimulus in propping up asset prices,” they said in an Oct. 17 report to clients. Bank of America Merrill Lynch strategists said in a report today that another 10% decline in U.S. stocks might spark speculation of a fourth round of quantitative easing from the Fed. That would mimic how the Fed acted following equity declines of 11% in 2010 and 16% in 2011.

It would seem that all it takes is for other central bankers failing to put in those $200 billion four times a year. But that still pre-supposes that the Fed’s first priority is to support the markets. Whereas I suggest it’s to support the big banks. And that’s not one and the same thing.

• What Would It Take To Trigger The ‘Fed Put’? (MarketWatch)

Janet Yellen runs the Federal Reserve now, but that doesn’t mean that notions about what used to be known as the “Bernanke put,” named after her predecessor, Ben Bernanke, have expired. So far, there’s been little talk of a “Yellen put,” but the U.S. Federal Reserve still remains ready to bail out the markets if things get hairy, Bank of America Merrill Lynch analysts say. Actual financial puts give the holder the right but not the obligation to sell the underlying security at a set price, known as the strike price. Puts named after central bankers are figurative. They’re shorthand for the idea the Fed will rush in to rescue tanking markets, a notion denied by Alan Greenspan and Bernanke, but reinforced by the Fed’s aggressive actions following big market declines, most recently, during the 2008 crisis. The BofA Merrill analysts, in a Tuesday note, say recent market volatility shows that investors are now losing faith in what traders had dubbed the “Draghi put,” named after European Central Bank President Mario Draghi.

Investors are growing less certain the ECB will step in with a program of full-fledged quantitative easing of its own stave off deflationary pressures in the eurozone. “If this ECB option turns out to be worthless, the key question becomes how much protection does the Fed provide? In other words, approximately how big can an equity correction become before the Fed steps in again?” they write. They note that in 2010 and 2011, the Fed stepped in following equity corrections of 11% and 16%, respectively. Based on their assessment of last week’s market action, the analysts say it appears it would take a further 10% decline from the recent lows to trigger anticipation of what might be dubbed QE 4, or the fourth iteration of the U.S. central bank’s monetary stimulus measures.

Everywhere but America.

• Currency Wars Evolve With Goal of Avoiding, Exporting Deflation (Bloomberg)

Currency wars are back, though this time the goal is to steal inflation, not growth. Brazil Finance Minister Guido Mantega popularized the term “currency war” in 2010 to describe policies employed at the time by major central banks to boost the competitiveness of their economies through weaker currencies. Now, many see lower exchange rates as a way to avoid crippling deflation. Weak price growth is stifling economies from the euro region to Israel and Japan. Eight of the 10 currencies with the biggest forecasted declines through 2015 are from nations that are either in deflation or pursuing policies that weaken their exchange rates, data compiled by Bloomberg show.

“This beggar-thy-neighbor policy is not about rebalancing, not about growth,” David Bloom, the global head of currency strategy at HSBC which does business in 74 countries and territories, said in an Oct. 17 interview. “This is about deflation, exporting your deflationary problems to someone else.” Bloom puts it in these terms because, when one jurisdiction weakens its exchange rate, another’s gets stronger, making imported goods cheaper. Deflation is a both a consequence of, and contributor to, the global economic slowdown that’s pushing the euro region closer to recession and reducing demand for exports from countries such as China and New Zealand.

[..] Disinflationary pressures in the euro area are starting to spread to its neighbors and biggest trading partners. The currencies of Switzerland, Hungary, Denmark, the Czech Republic and Sweden are forecast to fall from 4% to more than 6% by the end of next year, estimates compiled by Bloomberg show, partly due to policy makers’ actions to stoke prices. “Deflation is spilling over to central and eastern Europe,” Simon Quijano-Evans, head of emerging-markets at Commerzbank, said yesterday by phone. “Weaker exchange rates will help” them tackle the issue, he said. Hungary and Switzerland entered deflation in the past two months, while Swedish central-bank Deputy Governor Per Jansson last week blamed his country’s falling prices partly on rate cuts the ECB used to boost its own inflation. A policy response may be necessary, he warned.

Interesting development. Forgot to ‘reform’ the core.

• Are Belgium, Finland And France The ‘New Periphery’ In Europe? (CNBC)

The improvement in competitiveness in southern euro zone nations has left some core countries such as Belgium and France lagging behind, posing the risk that they could become the “new periphery,” a new report warns. “A handful of core euro zone economies have registered pretty sharp increases in their unit labor costs (ULCs) over the past four years,” according to a report by Capital Economics published Monday. This was happening at the same time as those in many peripheral countries had been falling outright, it said. “While this process may help the peripheral economies regain relative competitiveness more rapidly, some core economies, including Belgium, now look at risk of falling behind, threatening to push the euro-zone’s periphery north,” Roger Bootle and Jonathan Loynes, managing director and chief European economist at Capital Economics respectively, said in their report. The report analysed changes in competitiveness in the euro zone by looking at unit labor costs (the average cost of labor to produce one unit of output) across the region.

On this metric it found that the southern peripheral economies comprised of Spain, Italy, Ireland and Portugal “have succeeded in cutting costs relative to the euro zone as a whole over the past few years.” However, in a handful of core economies, notably Belgium, Finland and France, ULCs have continued to rise, both in absolute terms and relative to the euro zone average. “In Belgium in particular, ULCs have risen sharply and are now the highest in the euro-zone. Belgium’s high costs already appear to be harming both investment and export growth, traditionally strong drivers of growth in the economy. And its current account has fallen into a sustained deficit for the first time in 30 years.” “All this suggests that Belgium’s recovery is unlikely to gather further pace [and] in contrast to governments in the south, we doubt that Belgian politicians will be prepared (or forced) to tackle these issues any time soon.” they added.

Rome and Paris will stare them down.

• EU To Warn France And Italy On Budget Plans (FT)

The European Commission will on Wednesday tell five euro zone countries, including France and Italy, that their budget plans risk breaching EU rules, say three officials briefed on the decision. The move comes a week after all euro zone countries submitted their budgets to Brussels for review as part of the EU’s new fiscal rules. Officially a request for more information, the commission’s move is the first step in a politically charged process of rejecting a euro zone nation’s budget and sending it back to national capitals for revision. A decision on rejection must be made by the end of the month. In addition to France and Italy, EU officials said similar requests will be sent to Austria, Slovenia and Malta. Simon O’Connor, a spokesman for Jyrki Katainen, the EU’s economic commissioner who is in charge of the evaluations, would not confirm the move. But he said it would not mean that Brussels had definitively decided to reject a country’s budget plan.

“Technical consultations with member states on the draft budget plans do not prejudge the outcome of our assessment,” O’Connor said. A formal request for revisions to the French and Italian budgets could prove politically explosive. Both governments are fending off rising anti-EU sentiment. Under the EU’s new budget rules, adopted at the height of the euro zone crisis, the commission is required to send a budget back to its government within two weeks of submission if it finds “particularly serious non-compliance” with EU budget rules. If the commission is contemplating such a move, the rules require it to notify the government in question within one week. Wednesday is the deadline for the one-week notification. EU officials said France and Italy may contravene different parts of the budget rules. France is required to get its deficit back under the EU ceiling of 3% of economic output by next year but its plan ignored that commitment, projecting a deficit of 4.3% of gross domestic product.

Right. We all know that by sticking two straws in a glass of soda, you get out twice as much as with one. And sure, a shale play is not exactly like a glass of water, but still close enough. I think this is not about getting out more, but about getting the same amount out faster. Doesn’t sound like a terrible solid business model, but it’s not at all surprising either, given how the shale industry operates.

• US Shale Producers Cramming Wells in Risky Push to Extend Boom (Bloomberg)

U.S. shale producers are cramming more wells into the juiciest spots of their oilfields in a move that may help keep the drilling boom going as prices plunge. The technique known as downspacing aims to pull more oil at less cost from each field, allowing companies to boost profit, attract more investment and arrange needed loans to continue drilling. Energy companies see closely-packed wells as their best chance to add billions more barrels of oil to U.S. production that’s already the highest in a quarter century. “We would be dealing with more than a decade of inventory,” said Manuj Nikhanj, co-head of energy research for ITG Investment Research in Calgary. “If you can go twice as tight, the multiplication effect is massive.”

To make downspacing work, the industry must first solve a problem that for decades has required producers to carefully distance their wells. Crowded wells may steal crude from each other without raising total production enough to make the extra drilling worthwhile. Too much of that cannibalization could propel the U.S. production revolution into a faster downturn. In the past, most wells were drilled vertically into conventional reservoirs, which act more like pools of oil or gas. Companies learned quickly that packing wells too closely together just drains the reservoirs faster without appreciably increasing production, like two straws in the same milkshake. Shale rock is different, acting more like an oil-soaked sponge.

Drilling sideways through the layers of shale taps more of the resource, while fracking is needed to crack the rock to allow oil and gas to flow more freely into the well. So far, early results from downspacing experiments by a handful of companies have been mixed. It’s “the billion-dollar question,” said Wood Mackenzie’s Jonathan Garrett, “Is downspacing allowing access to new resources, or is it drawing down the existing resources faster?” An analysis of a group of wells on the same lease in La Salle County, in the heart of Texas’s booming Eagle Ford formation, showed that closer spacing reduced the rate of return for drilling to 23% from a high of 62% for wells spaced further apart, according to a paper published in April by Society of Petroleum Engineers.

A sordid tale indeed.

• Oil at $80 a Barrel Muffles Forecasts for US Shale Boom (Bloomberg)

The bear market in oil has analysts reassessing the U.S. shale boom after five years of historic growth. The U.S. benchmark price dropped to $79.78 a barrel on Oct. 16, the lowest since June 2012. At that level, one-third of U.S. shale oil production would be uneconomic, analysts for New York-based Sanford Bernstein said in a report yesterday. Drillers would add fewer barrels to domestic output than the previous year for the first time since 2010, according to Macquarie, ITG Investment and PKVerleger. Horizontal drilling through shale accounts for as much as 55% of U.S. production and just about all the growth, according to Bloomberg Intelligence. The nternational Energy Agency predicted in November that the U.S. would pass Russia and Saudi Arabia to become the biggest producer in the world by 2015. Though some forecasts show oil rebounding or stabilizing, any slower increase in U.S. output would shake perceptions for the global market, said Vikas Dwivedi, an oil and gas economist in Houston for Sydney-based Macquarie.

“It would reshape the way everybody would think about oil,” Dwivedi said. Daily domestic production added a record 944,000 barrels last year and reached a 29-year high of 8.95 million barrels this month, according to the Energy Information Administration, the U.S. Department of Energy’s statistical arm. Output, much less growth, is difficult to maintain because shale wells deplete faster than conventional production. Oil production from shale drilling, which bores horizontally through hard rock, declines more than 80% in four years, more than three times faster than conventional, vertical wells, according to the IEA. New wells have to generate about 1.8 million barrels a day each year to keep production steady, Dwivedi said. At $80 a barrel, output would grow by 5%, down from a previous forecast of 12%, according to New York-based ITG. At $75 a barrel, growth would fall 56% to about 500,000 barrels a day, Dwivedi said. Closer to $70 a barrel, the growth rate would drop to zero, he said.

why

This has been going on for a number of years. Exxon will go the way of IBM. Or maybe Rosneft can do a hostile take-over. That would be so funny.

• How Wall Street Is Killing Big Oil (Oilprice.com)

Lee Raymond, the famously pugnacious oilman who led ExxonMobil between 1999 and 2005, liked to tell Wall Street analysts that covering the company would be boring. “You’ll just have to live with outstanding, consistent financial and operating performance,” he once boasted. For generations, Exxon and its Big Oil brethren, including Chevron, ConocoPhilipps, BP, Royal Dutch Shell and Total, dominated the global energy landscape, raking in enormous profits and delivering fat dividends to shareholders. Big Oil has long been an investor darling. Those days are over. Once reliable market beaters, Big Oil shares are lagging: Over the last five years, when the S&P 500 rose more than 80%, shares of Exxon and Shell rose just over 30%. The underperformance reflects oil majors’ inability to maintain steady cash flows and increase production in a world where much of the easy oil has already been found and project costs are rapidly escalating.

Last year, Exxon, Chevron and Shell failed to increase oil and gas production despite having spent US$500 billion over the previous five years, $120 billion in 2013 alone. Under pressure from investors, the world’s largest oil companies are now forced to cut capital expenditure and sell assets to boost cash flows. Big Oil is, in short, heading towards liquidation. And this process has set in motion a tectonic shift in the global energy balance of power away from western international oil companies, or IOCs, and towards state-owned national oil companies, NOCs, in emerging markets. Not only do the NOCs – companies like Saudi Aramco; Russia’s Gazprom and Rosneft; China’s CNOOC, CNPC and Sinopec; India’s ONGC; Venezuela’s PDVSA; and Brazil’s Petrobras – control approximately 90% of the world’s known petroleum reserves, they are also immune to the market pressures constraining Big Oil.

Betting that the Saudi’s will blink. Hey, it’s a casino out there.

• Investors Pile Into Oil Funds at Fastest Pace in 2 Years (Bloomberg)

Investors are putting money into funds that track oil prices at the fastest rate in two years, betting that crude will rebound from a bear market. The four biggest oil exchange-traded products listed in the U.S. have received a combined $334 million so far this month, the most since October 2012, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Shares outstanding of the funds, including the United States Oil Fund (DBO) and ProShares Ultra Bloomberg Crude Oil, rose to 55 million yesterday, a nine-month high. “There are investors who love to catch a falling knife,” said Dave Nadig, chief investment officer of San Francisco-based ETF.com. “It’s pretty easy to look at what’s been going on in oil and say ‘well, it has to bottom out somewhere.’ There are plenty of investors out there who still believe that the long-term trend of oil has to be $100.” Money has flowed into the funds as West Texas Intermediate and Brent crudes, the benchmarks for U.S. and global oil trading, each plunged more than 20% from their June highs, meeting a common definition of a bear market.

Wonder what the real number is at this point in time for China, the actual growth. Even 4% feels high.

• Markets Need To Accept Low Growth As ‘New Normal’ In China (Saxo)

Pauline Loong, Managing Director of Asia-analytica, gives us her assessment of the latest Chinese GDP figures: “The worst quarterly GDP performance in almost six years has raised hopes of a bolder policy response from Beijing. But more aggressive measures in the coming months might still not provide the hoped-for catalyst on stock prices or deliver the boost needed for a return to market-moving growth rates.” Pauline says we need to “be realistic” about China’s GDP and get used to lower numbers. For example 6.9% could be the “new normal” next year. China’s official GDP target for 2014 remains 7.5%, a number which looks increasingly out of reach. In response, Beijing has been “micro managing” stimulus, in Pauline’s view, going from sector to sector and even telling banks what size of business to lend to. Pauline Loong warns that China’s gear change from export driven economy to consumer driven market will take longer than most may imagine, it’s worth bearing in mind that Chinese GDP per capita is only just above Iraq in global rankings.

200 million migrant workers are missing from the official stats. That’s considerably more than the entire active US workforce. Remember, from the article above, that “Chinese GDP per capita is only just above Iraq in global rankings.”

• China to Let World in on Gauge Showing State of Economy (Bloomberg)

Chinese Premier Li Keqiang has an insider’s knowledge on the strength of the world’s second-largest economy that helps him determine when stimulus is needed. He’s about to share part of the secret. Li has said several times this year that slower growth is tolerable as long as enough jobs are created, often referring to a survey-based unemployment indicator that’s different from the registered urban jobless rate released every quarter. The published gauge excludes migrant workers who aren’t registered with local authorities, estimated at more than 200 million. The more comprehensive jobless rate will be released “very soon,” Sheng Laiyun, spokesman for the National Bureau of Statistics, said in Beijing yesterday. “The quality of the indicator, for now, looks very good. So, we are using it internally for policy decision-making references.”

China’s leaders have eschewed across-the-board stimulus and interest-rate cuts even as growth cooled to the weakest pace in more than five years last quarter, sticking to limited steps such as easing home-purchase controls. Having access to better barometers like the new unemployment measure would help economists estimate how deep a slowdown in gross domestic product the government will tolerate. “The lack of good unemployment data is the main reason why China still focuses so much on GDP,” said Zhu Haibin, chief China economist at JPMorgan Chase & Co. in Hong Kong. “In fact, the government is more concerned about employment and inflation, and that’s why they refrained from big stimulus.” Releasing the methodology, breakdown and samples for the new jobless rate in addition to the headline number, as the U.S. does, would also greatly help researchers, Zhu said.

He called China’s current registered unemployment rate “untrustworthy and unusable.” Sporadic revelations made by the government about the broader unemployment gauge, which surveys 31 cities, show about a 1 percentage-point divergence from the official rate this year. The surveyed rate fell for four straight months to 5.05% in June, the National Development and Reform Commission said on its website in July. In contrast, the official registered rate was 4.08% in the second quarter, unchanged from the previous three months. The new surveyed rate adopts a methodology following the guidance of the International Labour Organization, according to Cai Fang, vice director of the government-backed Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. “All eyes will be on it,” said Ding Shuang, senior China economist at Citigroup Inc. in Hong Kong. “It’s going to be really important, like that of the U.S.”

The UK government is a joke.

• UK Deficit Up 10% From Last Year, National Debt Rises £100 Billion (Guardian)

The chancellor’s plan to cut the deficit this year looks increasingly unrealistic after another jump in government borrowing in September pushed the deficit 10% higher in the first half of the year, lessening the chances of a pre-election giveaway at December’s autumn statement. Borrowing last month was £11.8bn, £1.6bn higher than in September 2013 and more than £1bn higher than City economists had forecast, official figures showed, as the tax take failed to keep pace with government spending despite the recovery in the economy. Tax receipts have disappointed over recent months partly due to unexpectedly weak pay growth and the increase in the personal allowance to £10,000. In the first six months of the tax year, between April and September, borrowing was £58bn, up £5.4bn on the first half of last year, according to the Office for National Statistics. Economists said it was looking increasingly likely George Osborne would miss his target of reducing the deficit by more than £12bn in 2014-15.

Alan Clarke, economist at Scotiabank, said that if the current trend continued, borrowing would come in about £10bn above the target. Howard Archer, chief UK economist at IHS Global Insight, said: “The chancellor is looking ever more unlikely to meet his fiscal targets for 2014/15. This means that Mr Osborne faces an awkward fiscal backdrop as he announces his autumn statement in December as the May 2015 general election draws ever nearer. This gives him little scope to announce any major sweeteners.” The Office for Budget Responsibility, the Treasury’s official forecaster, cautioned that although there was uncertainty over government borrowing in the second half of the fiscal year, tax receipts for the full year were likely to come in below forecast. “Factors such as weaker-than-expected wage growth, lower-than-expected residential property transactions and lower oil and gas revenues mean it is looking less likely that the full year receipts growth forecast will be met,” it said.

How is this not a criminal practice: “The US student loan provider, Sallie Mae, sells repackaged debt for as little as 15 cents on the dollar.”

• The Moral Economy Of Debt (Robert Skidelsky)

Every economic collapse brings a demand for debt forgiveness. The incomes needed to repay loans have evaporated, and assets posted as collateral have lost value. Creditors demand their pound of flesh; debtors clamour for relief. Consider Strike Debt, an offshoot of the Occupy movement, which calls itself “a nationwide movement of debt resisters fighting for economic justice and democratic freedom”. Its website argues that “with stagnant wages, systemic unemployment, and public service cuts” people are being forced into debt in order to obtain the most basic necessities of life, leading them to “surrender [their] futures to the banks”. One of Strike Debt’s initiatives, rolling jubilee, crowdsources funds to buy and extinguish debt, a process it calls collective refusal. The group’s progress has been impressive, raising more than $700,000 and extinguishing debt worth almost $18.6m. It is the existence of a secondary debt market that enables rolling jubilee to buy debt so cheaply.

Financial institutions that have come to doubt their borrowers’ ability to repay, sell the debt to third parties at knockdown prices, often for as little as five cents on the dollar. Buyers then attempt to profit by recouping some or all of the debt from the borrowers. The US student loan provider, Sallie Mae, sells repackaged debt for as little as 15 cents on the dollar. To draw attention to the often-nefarious practices of debt collectors, rolling jubilee recently cancelled student debt for 2,761 people enrolled at Everest College, a for-profit school whose parent company, Corinthian Colleges, is being sued by the US government for predatory lending. Everest’s loan portfolio was valued at almost $3.9m. Rolling jubilee bought it for $106,709.48, or about three cents on the dollar. But that is a drop in the ocean. In the US alone, students owe more than $1tn, or about 6% of GDP. And the student population is just one of many social groups that lives on debt.

Indeed, throughout the world, the economic downturn of 2008-09 increased the burden of private and public debt – to the point that the public-private distinction became blurred.In a recent speech in Chicago, Irish president Michael D Higgins explained how private debt became sovereign debt. He said: “As a consequence of the need to borrow so as to finance current expenditure and, above all, as a result of the blanket guarantee extended to the main Irish banks’ assets and liabilities, Ireland’s general government debt increased from 25% of GDP in 2007 to 124% in 2013.” The Irish government’s aim, of course, was to save the banking system. But the unintended consequence of the bailout was to shatter confidence in the government’s solvency.

One day a deal is announced, the next it’s denied.

• Fears Over Gas Supply As Russia-Ukraine Talks Fail (Reuters)

Russia and Ukraine failed to reach an accord on gas supplies for the coming winter in EU-brokered talks on Tuesday but agreed to meet again in Brussels in a week in the hope of ironing out problems over Kiev’s ability to pay. After a day of talks widely expected to be the final word, European Energy Commissioner Guenther Oettinger told a news conference the three parties agreed the price Ukraine would pay Russia’s Gazprom – $385 per thousand cubic metres – as long as it paid in advance for the deliveries. But Russian Energy Minister Alexander Novak said Moscow was still seeking assurances on how Kiev, which earlier in the day asked the EU for a further €2 billion ($2.55 billion) in credit, would find the money to pay Moscow for its energy.

Dependent on Western aid, Ukraine is in a weak position in relation to its former Soviet master in Moscow, though Russia’s reasons were unclear for wanting further assurances on finances, beyond an agreement to supply gas only for cash up front. Citing unpaid bills worth more than $5 billion, Russia cut off gas flows to Kiev in mid-June. The move added to East-West tensions sparked by Russia’s annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea and conflict in Russian-speaking eastern Ukraine. The two countries are fighting in an international court over the debt, but Oettinger noted that Ukraine had agreed to pay off $3.1 billion in two tranches this year to help unblock its access to gas over the winter. European Union states, many also dependent on Russian gas and locked in a trade war with Moscow over Ukraine, fear their own supplies could be disrupted if the issue is not resolved.

Boy oh boy, what a surprise.

• New York Fed Caught Sight of London Whale and Let Him Go (Bloomberg)

It seems pretty clear to me that JPMorgan’s London Whale episode, in which the bank’s Chief Investment Office lost $6.2 billion on poorly managed credit derivatives trades, was a huge win for U.S. banking regulators. Like, here is a rough model of banking regulation:

Banks tend to be better at banking than banking regulators are, so they are unlikely to want to defer to the regulators’ judgment in most circumstances.

You need the banks to buy into the regulation, and defer to the regulators, for the regulation to produce real broad-based risk reduction rather than mere check-the-box compliance efforts.

One way to get the banks to buy into regulation is for them to fail catastrophically and realize that they’re not as good at their jobs as they thought they were.

But catastrophic failure is precisely what, as a regulator, you want to prevent.

Because it’s bad.

But also because, if you allow a catastrophic failure, then you’re not a very good regulator either, so the failure provides no additional reason for a bank to listen to you.

So 2008 ushered in a new regulatory environment but at, you know, a certain cost, both to the world and to the regulators’ credibility.

At east the Danes have not yet fully been taken over.

• World’s Top-Ranked Pension Funds Probed for Hedge Fund Use (Bloomberg)

Denmark, home to the world’s top-ranked pension system, will toughen oversight of the $500 billion industry after regulators observed a surge in risk-taking linked in part to more widespread use of hedge funds. The Financial Supervisory Authority in Copenhagen will require pension funds to submit quarterly reports on their alternative investments to track their use of hedge funds, exposure to private equity and infrastructure projects. The decision follows funds’ failures to account adequately for risks in their investment strategies, according to an FSA report. The regulatory clampdown comes as Denmark deals with risks it says are inherent to a system due to be introduced across the European Union in 2016.

The new rules will allow pension funds to invest according to a so-called prudent person model, rather than setting outright limits. In Denmark, the approach has proven problematic for the only EU country to have adopted the model, said Jan Parner, the FSA’s deputy director general for pensions. “The funds are setting up for their release from the quantitative requirements, but the problem is, it’s not clear what a prudent investment is,” Parner said in an interview. “The challenge for European supervisors is to explain to the industry what prudent investments are before the opposite ends up on the balance sheets.” Denmark, which has almost two years of experience with the approach after its early adoption in 2012, says a lack of clear guidelines invites misinterpretation as firms try to inflate returns.

Great Orlov piece on Unkraine, US, Russia, NATO.

• How To Start A War And Lose An Empire (Dmitry Orlov)

A year and a half I wrote an essay on how the US chooses to view Russia, titled The Image of the Enemy. I was living in Russia at the time, and, after observing the American anti-Russian rhetoric and the Russian reaction to it, I made some observations that seemed important at the time. It turns out that I managed to spot an important trend, but given the quick pace of developments since then, these observations are now woefully out of date, and so here is an update. [..] … what a difference a year and a half has made! Ukraine, which was at that time collapsing at about the same steady pace as it had been ever since its independence two decades ago, is now truly a defunct state, with its economy in free-fall, one region gone and two more in open rebellion, much of the country terrorized by oligarch-funded death squads, and some American-anointed puppets nominally in charge but quaking in their boots about what’s coming next.

Syria and Iraq, which were then at a low simmer, have since erupted into full-blown war, with large parts of both now under the control of the Islamic Caliphate, which was formed with help from the US, was armed with US-made weapons via the Iraqis. Post-Qaddafi Libya seems to be working on establishing an Islamic Caliphate of its own. Against this backdrop of profound foreign US foreign policy failure, the US recently saw it fit to accuse Russia of having troops “on NATO’s doorstep,” as if this had nothing to do with the fact that NATO has expanded east, all the way to Russia’s borders. Unsurprisingly, US–Russia relations have now reached a point where the Russians saw it fit to issue a stern warning: further Western attempts at blackmailing them may result in a nuclear confrontation. The American behavior throughout this succession of defeats has been remarkably consistent, with the constant element being their flat refusal to deal with reality in any way, shape or form.

Just as before, in Syria the Americans are ever looking for moderate, pro-Western Islamists, who want to do what the Americans want (topple the government of Bashar al Assad) but will stop short of going on to destroy all the infidel invaders they can get their hands on. The fact that such moderate, pro-Western Islamists do not seem to exist does not affect American strategy in the region in any way. Similarly, in Ukraine, the fact that the heavy American investment in “freedom and democracy,” or “open society,” or what have you, has produced a government dominated by fascists and a civil war is, according to the Americans, just some Russian propaganda. Parading under the banner of Hitler’s Ukrainian SS division and anointing Nazi collaborators as national heroes is just not convincing enough for them. What do these Nazis have to do to prove that they are Nazis, build some ovens and roast some Jews? Just massacring people by setting fire to a building, as they did in Odessa, or shooting unarmed civilians in the back and tossing them into mass graves, as they did in Donetsk, doesn’t seem to work.

And my main man Jim was in Sweden.

• “Omenland” (James Howard Kunstler)

[..] too soon, I landed back in Newark Airport, Lord have mercy. I grabbed a taxi to the Newark train station to get to the Hudson River line out of New York City back upstate. Along the way on Route 21, I passed a graffiti on an overpass. It said “Omenland.” The anonymous genius who sprayed that there sure caught the US zeitgeist. Newark compares to Stockholm as an Ebola victim in the gutter compares to a supermodel at poolside. The scene in the Newark train station was like the barroom from Star Wars, a creature-feature extravaganza, intergalactic Mutt Central, wookies in hoodies with burning coals for eyes, ladies with pierced cheeks, crack-heads, winos, missing body part people, lopsided head people, and the scrofulous physical condition of the station is proof positive that Chris Christie is unqualified to be president. This is a gateway to New York, America’s greatest city, you understand, and it looks like the veritable checkpoint to the rectum of the universe. You know what occurred to me: maybe it is?

Guess it’s better than nothing.

• WHO: Ebola Serum In Weeks And Vaccine Tests In Africa By January (Guardian)

The World Health Organisation has announced it hopes to begin testing two experimental Ebola vaccines in west Africa by January and may have a blood serum treatment available for use in Liberia within two weeks. The UN’s health agency said it aimed to begin testing the two vaccines in the new year on more than 20,000 frontline health care workers and others in west Africa – a bigger rollout than previously envisioned. Dr Marie Paule Kieny, an assistant director general at the WHO, acknowledged there were many “ifs” remaining and “still a possibility that it [a vaccine] will fail”. But she sketched out a much broader experiment than was imagined only six months ago, saying the WHO hoped to dispense tens of thousands of doses in the first months of the new year. “These are quite large trials,” she said.

Kieny said in remarks reported by the BBC that a serum was also being developed for use in Liberia based on antibodies extracted from the blood of Ebola survivors. “There are partnerships which are starting to be put in place to have capacity in the three countries to safely extract plasma and make preparation that can be used for the treatment of infective patients. “The partnership which is moving the quickest will be in Liberia where we hope that in the coming weeks there will be facilities set up to collect the blood, treat the blood and be able to process it for use.” A WHO spokeswoman, Fadela Chaib, said the agency expected 20,000 vaccinations in January and similar numbers in the months afterwards using the trial products. An effective vaccine would still not in itself be enough to stop the outbreak but could protect the medical workers who are central to the effort. More than 200 of them have died of Ebola.

Debt Rattle October 14 2014

Oct 142014

October 14, 2014 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 10:50 am Finance Tagged with: 1%, carmageddon, ebola, Euro Referendum, GDP, inflation, loophole, new debt crisis, Stress Test 8 Responses »

Unknown Kewpee Hotels hamburger stand 1930

• Too-Big-to-Fail Banks Face Up to $870 Billion Capital Gap (Bloomberg)

• Richest 1% Of People Own Nearly 50% Of Global Wealth (Guardian)

• Poor Nations ‘Pushed Into New Debt Crisis’ (Guardian)

• US Oil Producers Could Drill Their Way Into Oblivion (BW)

• Speculators Push Oil Into Bear Market as Supply Rises (Bloomberg)

• Bond Market Convinced Fed Inflation Goal Unreachable This Decade (Bloomberg)

• America’s GDP Fetishism Is A Rare Luxury In An Age Of Vulnerability (Stiglitz)

• Thiel: We Are In A Government Bubble Of Massive Size (CNBC)

• The Great Lira Revolt Has Begun In Italy (AEP)

• Beppe Grillo Demands Euro Referendum As Italy’s Depression Drags On (AEP)

• ECB Dark Room Crunches Bank-Test Data Amid D-Day Nerves (Bloomberg)

• German Investor Morale Falls Sharply As Contraction Looms (CNBC)

• Euro Drop Seen as ECB Sends Yen Assets to US (Bloomberg)

• Draghi’s ‘Whatever It Takes’ Plan Faces Trial at EU Court (Bloomberg)

• UK Retail Sales Plummet To Financial Crisis Lows (CNBC)

• Ireland To Close ‘Double Irish’ Tax Loophole (Guardian)

• Venezuela Default Almost Certain, Harvard Economists Say (Bloomberg)

• Car-Maggedon: The $4.4 Trillion Traffic Problem (CNBC)

• Ebola Airport Checks: ‘A Net With Very Wide Holes’ (CNBC)

• UN Medical Official Dies Of Ebola In German Hospital (Guardian)

• “There Is Scientific Evidence Ebola Has The Potential To Be Airborne” (ZH)

The very definition of lowballing.

• Too-Big-to-Fail Banks Face Up to $870 Billion Capital Gap (Bloomberg)

Too big to fail is likely to prove a costly epithet for the world’s biggest banks as regulators demand they increase debt securities to cover losses should they collapse. The shortfall facing lenders from JPMorgan Chase to HSBC could be as much as $870 billion, according to estimates from AllianceBernstein, or as little as $237 billion forecast by Barclays. The range is so wide because proposals from the Basel-based Financial Stability Board outline various possibilities for the amount lenders need to have available as a portion of risk-weighted assets. With those holdings in excess of $21 trillion at the lenders most directly affected, small changes to assumptions translate into big numbers.

“The direction is clear and it is clear that we are talking about huge amounts,” said Emil Petrov, who heads the capital solutions group at Nomura in London. “What is less clear is how we get there. Regulatory timelines will stretch far into the future but how quickly will the market demand full compliance?” The FSB wants to limit the damage the collapse of a major bank would inflict on the world economy by forcing them to hold debt that can be written down to help recapitalize an insolvent lender. For senior bonds to suffer losses under present rules the institution has to enter bankruptcy, a move that would inflict huge damage on the financial system worldwide if it happened to a global bank.

And counting.

• Richest 1% Of People Own Nearly 50% Of Global Wealth (Guardian)

The richest 1% of the world’s population are getting wealthier, owning more than 48% of global wealth, according to a report published on Tuesday which warned growing inequality could be a trigger for recession. According to the Credit Suisse global wealth report, a person needs just $3,650 – including the value of equity in their home – to be among the wealthiest half of world citizens. However, more than $77,000 is required to be a member of the top 10% of global wealth holders, and $798,000 to belong to the top 1%. “Taken together, the bottom half of the global population own less than 1% of total wealth. In sharp contrast, the richest decile hold 87% of the world’s wealth, and the top%ile alone account for 48.2% of global assets,” said the annual report, now in its fifth year.

The report, which calculates that total global wealth has grown to a new record – $263tn, more than twice the $117tn calculated for 2000 – found that the UK was the only country in the G7 to have recorded rising inequality in the 21st century. Its findings were seized upon by anti-poverty campaigners Oxfam which published research at the start of the year showing that the richest 85 people across the globe share a combined wealth of £1tn, as much as the poorest 3.5 billion of the world’s population. “These figures give more evidence that inequality is extreme and growing, and that economic recovery following the financial crisis has been skewed in favour of the wealthiest. In poor countries, rising inequality means the difference between children getting the chance to go to school and sick people getting life saving medicines,” said Oxfam’s head of inequality Emma Seery.

This is how we’re making the poor our bitches. Even more than they have always been. It’s warfare.

• Poor Nations ‘Pushed Into New Debt Crisis’ (Guardian)

A sharp rise in lending to the world’s poorest countries will leave them with crippling debt payments over the next decade, a few years after many had loans written off, a report has warned. The Jubilee Debt Campaign said as many as two-thirds of the 43 developing countries it analysed could suffer large increases in the share of government income spent on debt payments over the next decade. Coinciding with the World Bank’s annual meeting in Washington, the anti-poverty campaigners accuse the international lender and other public bodies of “leading the lending boom” to poor countries without checking how repaying debts will divert resources from cutting poverty. The report highlights that for 43 poor countries, half of lending is from multilateral institutions such as the International Monetary Fund, World Bank and African Development Bank. Total lending to the group of poor countries has increased by 60% from $11.4bn (£7.1bn) a year in 2009 to $18.5bn in 2013.

“There is a real risk that today’s lending boom is sowing the seeds of a new debt crisis in the developing world, threatening to reverse recent gains in the fight against poverty and inequality,” said Sarah-Jayne Clifton, director of the Jubilee Debt Campaign. “The shocking thing is that public bodies like the World Bank are leading the lending boom, not just reckless private lenders hunting for returns.” The campaigners are calling for measures to make lending more responsible and for aid-giving to be shifted away from bodies like the World Bank that give loans towards sources that give it in the form of grants. The analysis uses IMF and World Bank data on developing country debts and projects the cost of payments under the following three scenarios: predictions of continuous high economic growth are realised; estimates of one economic shock over the next decade prove correct; and economic growth is lower than the standard prediction.

Even if high growth rates are achieved, 11 of the 43 poor countries would still see the share of government income spent on debt payments increase rapidly, or by more than five percentage points of government revenue, the report says. Under the second scenario, 25 countries are at risk. That rises to 29 countries under the third. The report highlights that aside from the rise in lending, on the other side of the equation government revenues are not rising to keep pace with repayments. As such, the campaigners are urging the UK government to push for policies that support developing countries in increasing their tax revenues by clamping down on tax avoidance and evasion.

“Back in July, Goldman Sachs estimated that U.S. shale producers needed $85 a barrel to break even. That’s about where we are right now. The futures market points to even lower prices next year, with contracts for oil next April trading at about $82 a barrel.”

• US Oil Producers Could Drill Their Way Into Oblivion (BW)

Remember the fall of 2008? As the world spun out of control and the price of everything crashed, a barrel of oil lost 70% of its value over about five months. Of course, prices never should’ve been as high as $146 that summer, but they shouldn’t have crashed to $40 by the end of that year either. As the oil market has recovered, there have since been three major corrections, when prices have fallen at least 15% over a few months. We’re now in the midst of a fourth, with oil prices down more than 20% since peaking in late June at around $115 a barrel. They’re now hovering in the mid-$80 range and could certainly go lower. That’s good news for U.S. consumers, who are finally starting to reap the rewards of the shale boom through low gasoline prices. But it could spell serious trouble for a lot of oil producers, many of whom are laden with debt and exaggerating their oil reserves. In a way, oil companies in the U.S. are perpetuating the crash by continuing to drill and push up U.S. oil production to its fastest pace ever.

Rather than pulling back in hopes of slowing the amount of supply on the market to try and boost prices, drillers are instead operating at full tilt and pumping oil as fast as they can. Just look at the number of horizontal rigs in the field: Over the past five years, the amount of horizontal rigs deployed in the U.S. has almost quadrupled, from 379 in early 2009 to more than 1,300 today. This is of course purely a fracking story. Almost all the recent gains in U.S. oil production are the result of horizontal drilling techniques being used across much of the Midwest, from Texas to North Dakota. Unlike conventional vertical wells, where more wells do not always equal more oil, the strategy in a shale field appears to be to drill as many as possible to unlock oil trapped in rock formations. As the number of horizontal drill rigs has exploded, the number of vertical rigs in the U.S. has gone in the opposite direction, falling almost 70% over the past seven years.

So will U.S. oil producers frack their way into bankruptcy? That’s a real possibility now. They’ve certainly gotten more efficient at drilling, and don’t need the same price they did to remain profitable. But we’re getting pretty close. Back in July, Goldman Sachs estimated that U.S. shale producers needed $85 a barrel to break even. That’s about where we are right now. The futures market points to even lower prices next year, with contracts for oil next April trading at about $82 a barrel. Certainly, some producers need higher prices than others. Those at the bottom of the cost curve could benefit from a potential wave of bankruptcy that spreads across the oil patch; they could then scoop up some assets on the cheap.

“Several big, smart commodity hedge funds said oil is going to zero …”

• Speculators Push Oil Into Bear Market as Supply Rises (Bloomberg)

Money managers reduced bets on rising oil prices by the most in five weeks, helping push U.S.- traded futures into a bear market. Hedge funds and other large speculators lowered net-long positions in West Texas Intermediate crude by 4.8% in the seven days ended Oct. 7, U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission data show. Short positions climbed 8%, the most in almost a month. WTI joined Brent, the European benchmark, in falling more than 20% from its June peak, meeting a common definition of a bear market. U.S. oil inventories rose the most since April in the week ended Oct. 3 as domestic production rose to a 28-year high and refineries shut units for maintenance. Demand nationwide will slip this year to the lowest since 2012, the government predicted Oct. 7. “The extended decline is compounded mainly by supply-driven concerns,” Harry Tchilinguirian, BNP Paribas SA’s London-based head of commodity markets strategy, said in an interview in New York on Oct. 10. “The U.S. is not short of crude oil.”

U.S. crude stockpiles climbed by 5.02 million barrels to 361.7 million in the seven days ended Oct. 3, according to the Energy Information Administration. Weekly production averaged 8.88 million barrels a day, the highest since March 1986. “Several big, smart commodity hedge funds said oil is going to zero,” Seth Kleinman, Citigroup’s global head of energy strategy, said Oct. 7 at the Energy Department’s Winter Energy Outlook Conference in Washington. “They are being somewhat dramatic, but they were incredibly bearish.” Output will climb to 9.5 million barrels a day next year, the most since 1970, the EIA estimated Oct 7. Production is surging as a combination of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, unlocks supplies from shale formations. Refineries processed 15.6 million barrels a day of crude in the week ended Oct. 3, down from 16.6 million in July, according to the EIA. U.S. refiners schedule maintenance for September and October as they transition to winter from summer fuels.

If you don’t understand what inflation is, how can you do what’s needed to influence it? What’s more, why are you trying in the first place?

• Bond Market Convinced Fed Inflation Goal Unreachable This Decade (Bloomberg)

When it comes to spurring inflation in the U.S. economy, the bond market is becoming convinced that the Federal Reserve has almost no chance of achieving its 2% target before the end of the decade. Inflation expectations have plummeted in the past three months, with yields of Treasuries implying consumer prices will rise an average 1.5% annually through the third quarter of 2019. In the past decade, those predictions have come within 0.1 percentage point of the actual rate of price increases in the following five years, data compiled by Bloomberg show. Even after the Fed inundated the economy with more than $3.5 trillion since 2008, bond traders are showing little fear of inflation. That may help influence U.S. monetary policy and make it harder for Fed officials to raise interest rates from close to zero as global growth weakens and the International Monetary Fund points to disinflation as a more imminent concern.

“The longer inflation rates stay below their targets, the longer the Fed’s going to stay on hold,” Gregory Whiteley, a money manager at DoubleLine Capital, said. “The burden of proof is more on the hawks and the people arguing for a rise in rates. They’re the people who have to make the case.” As the Fed winds down the most-aggressive stimulus measures in its 100-year history, the debate has intensified over how soon the central bank needs to raise rates and whether the shift will herald the long-awaited bear market in bonds. While Dallas Fed President Richard Fisher and Philadelphia Fed’s Charles Plosser dissented at the bank’s last meeting and have both warned that keeping rates too low for too long may trigger excessive inflation, the bond market’s predictive power helps to explain why U.S. government debt remains in demand. Instead of falling, as just about every Wall Street prognosticator predicted at the start of the year, Treasuries have returned 5.1% in 2014. The gains have outstripped U.S. stocks, gold and commodities this year.

“When economic inequality translates into political inequality – as it has in large parts of the US – governments pay little attention to the needs of those at the bottom.”

• America’s GDP Fetishism Is A Rare Luxury In An Age Of Vulnerability (Stiglitz)

Two new studies show, once again, the magnitude of the inequality problem plaguing America. The first, the US Census Bureau’s annual income and poverty report, shows that, despite the economy’s supposed recovery from the recession, ordinary Americans’ incomes continue to stagnate. Median household income, adjusted for inflation, remains below its level a quarter-century ago. It used to be thought that America’s greatest strength was not its military power but an economic system that was the envy of the world. But why would others seek to emulate an economic model by which a large proportion – even a majority – of the population has seen their income stagnate while incomes at the top have soared? A second study, the United Nations development programme’s human development report 2014, corroborates these findings. Every year, the UNDP publishes a ranking of countries by their human development index (HDI), which incorporates other dimensions of wellbeing besides income, including health and education.

America ranks fifth according to HDI, below Norway, Australia, Switzerland, and the Netherlands. But when its score is adjusted for inequality, it drops 23 spots – among the largest such declines for any highly developed country. Indeed, the US falls below Greece and Slovakia, countries that people do not typically regard as role models or as competitors with the US at the top of the league tables. The report emphasises another aspect of societal performance: vulnerability. It points out that while many countries succeeded in moving people out of poverty, the lives of many are still precarious. A small event – say, an illness in the family – can push them back into destitution. Downward mobility is a real threat, while upward mobility is limited. In the US, upward mobility is more myth than reality, whereas downward mobility and vulnerability is a widely shared experience. This is partly because of the US healthcare system, which still leaves poor Americans in a precarious position, despite Barack Obama’s reforms.

Those at the bottom are only a short step away from bankruptcy with all that that entails. Illness, divorce, or the loss of a job often is enough to push them over the brink. The 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (or “Obamacare”) was intended to ameliorate these threats – and there are strong indications that it is on its way to significantly reducing the number of uninsured Americans. But, partly owing to a supreme court decision and the obduracy of Republican governors and legislators, who in two dozen US states have refused to expand Medicaid (insurance for the poor) – even though the federal government pays almost the entire tab – 41 million Americans remain uninsured. When economic inequality translates into political inequality – as it has in large parts of the US – governments pay little attention to the needs of those at the bottom.

No doubt there.

• Thiel: We Are In A Government Bubble Of Massive Size (CNBC)

Silicon Valley venture capitalist Peter Thiel told CNBC on Monday that we are in a “government bubble of massive size,” and that the bond market is the most distorted of all the markets. In a wide-ranging interview on CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street,” Thiel also spoke about tech investing, the PayPal-eBay split, Alibaba, cybersecurity and Elon Musk. “I think the thing that is most distorted is the bond market and fixed income, and perhaps less on the equity side, but we certainly are back on a government bubble of massive size,” he said. Tech stocks are quite a different story, he added. “They’re somewhat overvalued but that’s not the core of the insanity,” he said. “Tech investors always overrate growth and always underrate durability. You can measure growth but you can’t measure durability.”

He said he thinks Airbnb is undervalued. “If I had to bet on one that would be the next hundred-billion- dollar company it would be Airbnb and the consumer space,” Thiel said. “It’s a giant market and it keeps growing very fast. Investors are very biased towards things that they understand.” He said that since investors tend to drive around in black cars and stay in five-star hotels, they are more comfortable with Uber than with a couch or house-sharing service. For that reason, he said, “Uber is overvalued, Airbnb is undervalued.” On the recently announced plan to split PayPal from eBay, Thiel said the companies have gone separate ways. “It makes sense for them to naturally spin it out again and for PayPal to focus 100% on payments,” he said.

Two curiously overlapping pieces by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, who’s been talking with Beppe Grillo’s right hand behind the scenes man Gianroberto Casaleggio. Interestingly, Ambrose is losing his former aggressive tone vs Grillo and the Cinque Stelle, though he still calls them Italy’s UKIP. They are not.

• The Great Lira Revolt Has Begun In Italy (AEP)

The die is cast in Italy. Beppe Grillo’s Five Star movement has launched a petition to drive for Italian withdrawal from Europe’s monetary union and for the restoration of economic sovereignty. “We must leave the euro as soon as possible,” said Mr Grillo, speaking at a rally over the weekend. “Tonight we are launching a consultative referendum. We will collect half a million signatures in six months – a million signatures – and we will take our case to parliament, and this time thanks to our 150 legislators, they will have to talk to us.” Ever since the pugnacious comedian burst on the political scene, the eurozone elites have comforted themselves that the party is not really Eurosceptic at heart, and certainly does not wish bring back the lira. This illusion has been shattered. A referendum itself would not be binding, but a “law of popular initiative” certainly would be. For the first time, a process is underway in Italy that will set off a national debate on monetary union and may force a vote on EMU membership that cannot easily be controlled.

Gianroberto Casaleggio, the party’s co-founder and economic guru, told me today that the Five Star Movement – or Cinque Stelle – had set out its demands in May, calling for the creation of Eurobonds to back up EMU, as well as the abolition of the EU Fiscal Compact. “Five months have gone by and we have had no reply. They have totally ignored us,” he said. The Fiscal Compact is economic insanity. It would force Italy to run massive fiscal surpluses for decades. These would cause an even deeper depression, pushing the debt ratio even higher, and would therefore be scientifically self-defeating. Historians will issue a damning verdict on the scoundrels who foisted this atrocity on Europe. My own view is that Italy could not restore viability within EMU even if Germany agreed to the two conditions (an impossible idea). It is already too late for that. Italy has lost 40pc in unit labour cost competitiveness against Germany since the Deutsche Mark and the lira were fixed in perpetuity in the mid 1990s.

What I also find interesting is that nobody ever mentions that Grillo is a trained accountant.

• Beppe Grillo Demands Euro Referendum As Italy’s Depression Drags On (AEP)

Italy’s Five Star Movement has launched a petition drive for withdrawal from the euro to lift the country out of depression and protect Italian democracy, a dramatic turn for a country that was passionately pro-European for sixty years. “We must leave the euro as soon as possible,” said Beppe Grillo, the combative comedian-politician and founder of the protest party that swept into Italy’s parliament last year with 26pc of the vote. “We will collect half a million signatures in six months – a million signatures – and we will take our case to parliament, and this time thanks to our 150 legislators, they will have to talk to us.” Gianroberto Casaleggio, the party’s economic strategist, said the movement had set out its minimum demands in May, calling for Eurobonds and the abolition of the EU Fiscal Compact, a straitjacket that will force Italy into decades of debt-deflation. “Five months have gone by and we have had no reply. They have totally ignored us,” he said.

Any referendum would not be binding but the party may be able to push through a “law of popular initiative” if eurosceptics in other parties join forces. Italians have become bitterly disenchanted with Europe after a 9pc fall in GDP over the last five and a half years, and a 24pc fall in industrial output. Most voters think it was a mistake to join the euro but are wary of withdrawal, fearing that a return to the lira would risk a crippling crisis. Even so Datamedia Ricerche poll in March found that 59pc would view a return to the lira as a good idea. Italy’s GDP has fallen back to levels first reached fourteen years ago, a catastrophic reversal unseen in any major country in modern times, even during the 1930s. It has lost 40pc in labour competitiveness against Germany since the mid-1990s, and is now trapped inside EMU with an over-valued exchange. It cannot cut easily cut wages with an “internal devalution” because this would cause havoc for debt dynamics.

Lip service.

• ECB Dark Room Crunches Bank-Test Data Amid D-Day Nerves (Bloomberg)

Deep in the European Central Bank’s Frankfurt headquarters, there’s a room sealed off from the world. In the Dark Room, as it’s referred to internally, staffers are combing through almost 39,000 points of data on the euro area’s 130 biggest banks before the results of the ECB’s Comprehensive Assessment are released on Oct. 26. The security precautions – no Internet connection or external phone lines – being taken are part of a plan to ensure that “Disclosure Day” arrives without leaks, lawsuits or glitches. When it starts to supervise euro-zone banks on Nov. 4, the ECB will embark on its biggest new mission since the introduction of the single currency, one that also poses the biggest threat to its reputation. The challenge between now and then is to publish the results of its year-long bank audit and convince the world that it’s tougher, fairer and more credible than any test that came before.

“The ECB understands that they’ve only got one chance at getting this right, and if they don’t their reputation will be severely damaged,” said Christian Thun, a senior director at Moody’s Analytics in Frankfurt. “It has been a massive undertaking, but I think they will achieve their aim of restoring confidence in the banking system.” The Comprehensive Assessment started in October 2013 as a way to ensure that when the ECB became the euro zone’s single supervisor it would know exactly what it was dealing with. Since then, at least 25 million data points have been collected on credit files, collateral and provisioning. This knowledge of asset quality has been fed into a stress test, an innovation the ECB says makes this better than previous tests run by the European Banking Authority. Banks will be required to show that their ratio of capital to risk-weighted assets can remain above 8% under current circumstances, and above 5.5% over three years after a hypothetical recession and bond-market collapse.

Germany’s troubles run the gamut, all the way into the political arena, and they run much deeper than anyone thought mere weeks ago.

• German Investor Morale Falls Sharply As Contraction Looms (CNBC)

German investor morale fell sharply in October, new data showed on Tuesday, raising fears that the euro zone engine could contact in the third quarter of 2014. Germany’s ZEW index of economic sentiment fell into negative territory for the first time since November 2012 as pessimism mounted over the outlook for the euro zone’s largest economy. The ZEW index fell to -3.6 points versus 6.9 points in September. The euro fell to a day’s low of $1.2666 following the data. ZEW, an influential center for European economic research, said the disappointing figures concerned incoming orders, industrial production and foreign trade.

“[These] have likely contributed to the growing pessimism among financial market experts,” ZEW President Professor Clemens Fuest remarked on the data. “ZEW’s financial market experts expect the economic situation in Germany to decline further over the medium term. Geopolitical tensions and the weak economic development in some parts of the euro zone, which is falling short of previous expectations, are a source of persistent uncertainty,” he added. The ZEW Indicator of Economic Sentiment for the euro zone also decreased in October. The respective indicator has declined by 10.1 points compared to the previous month, reaching 4.1 points.

The rising dollar will move mountains.

• Euro Drop Seen as ECB Sends Yen Assets to US (Bloomberg)

The European Central Bank’s record-low interest rates are pushing Japanese investors out of the region and into the U.S., and that’s weighing down the euro, according to Mizuho Bank Ltd. The CHART OF THE DAY shows Japanese investment managers were net sellers in August of German, French and Italian bonds while they snapped up U.S. Treasuries for a sixth-straight month. The 18-nation euro has weakened about 6% against Japan’s currency this year, while the dollar reached a six-year high of 110.09 yen this month. German 10-year yields tumbled to a record 0.858% last week from 1.93% on Dec. 31. “Yields in Europe are getting crushed, reducing the allure for foreign investors,” said Daisuke Karakama, a markets economist at Mizuho Bank in Tokyo. “Europe is forced to continue easing, and carry trades funded in euros will drag the common currency lower. It’s inevitable that the U.S. will be more attractive for investors.”

Carry trades involve borrowing in low interest-rate currencies to buy higher-yielding assets elsewhere. The Federal Reserve is on course to end its bond buying this month, even as the Bank of Japan maintains record stimulus. President Mario Draghi repeated over the weekend he’s ready to expand the ECB’s balance sheet by as much as 1 trillion euros ($1.3 trillion.) Japanese money managers offloaded 4.9 trillion yen ($45.7 billion) of German bonds this year, capping eight straight months of reductions with sales of 86.8 billion yen in August, data from Japan’s ministry of finance and central bank show. The traders offloaded more than 50 billion yen each of French and Italian securities in August and bought 789.8 billion yen of Treasuries.

“A ruling that would say the ECB’s Outright Monetary Transactions mechanism isn’t in line with the EU Treaty would be the end of the euro ..” [..] “Politically, they cannot do that.”

• Draghi’s ‘Whatever It Takes’ Plan Faces Trial at EU Court (Bloomberg)

European Central Bank President Mario Draghi’s pledge to do “whatever it takes” with a bond-buying plan to save the euro-area goes on trial before the European Union’s top judges today. The Court of Justice, the bloc’s highest court, will weigh whether Draghi’s ECB overstepped its powers in 2012 with the mechanism to buy the debt of stressed countries if needed. While Germany’s own top court earlier this year expressed doubts about the plan’s legality, the EU tribunal’s 15-judge panel is unlikely to overturn it, according to legal scholars. “A ruling that would say the ECB’s Outright Monetary Transactions mechanism isn’t in line with the EU Treaty would be the end of the euro,” said Pierre-Henri Conac, a professor of financial-markets law at the University of Luxembourg.

“Politically, they cannot do that. There is no real suspense about the way the ruling will go, but there will be suspense about the actual content of the decision.” The Frankfurt-based ECB announced the details of its unprecedented bond-purchase plan in September 2012 as bets multiplied that the euro area would break apart and after Draghi’s promise to do whatever was needed to save the currency. The calming of financial markets that the still-untapped OMT program produced helped the euro area emerge from its longest-ever recession in the first half of last year. From the statements, the ECB expects wide-ranging support for its argument that it should be allowed to determine independently how to reach its goal of price stability, a spokesman for the ECB said.

It’s the cold. No wait, it’s the heat. Summers hit sales, winters hit sales, and never is it people simply not having any money. “The prolonged Indian summer wilted retail sales in September, leaving clothing retailers hot under the collar. Selling woolly jumpers in warm weather is a tough ask…”

• UK Retail Sales Plummet To Financial Crisis Lows (CNBC)

U.K. retail sales fell to the lowest levels last month since December 2008, as food sales continued to decline and clothing and footwear sales hit record lows, according to widely followed report. In a monthly joint report, the British Retail Consortium (BRC) and KPMG noted that a very warm summer had resulted in exceptionally low demand for “winter” items such as boots and coats in September. This led to the lowest monthly fashion sales since April 2012. Retail sales last month were down 2.1% on a like-for-like basis from September last year, when they increased 0.7% on 2012 levels.

“The prolonged Indian summer wilted retail sales in September, leaving clothing retailers hot under the collar. Selling woolly jumpers in warm weather is a tough ask, even for the most talented of sales staff,” David McCorquodale, head of retail at KPMG, said in the report. Grocers also had a challenging month, with many announcing further price cuts. Earlier data from the BRC showed food inflation hit an all-time low in September, as supermarkets tried to attract customers with special offers. Fresh food prices remained flat in September, for the first time since February 2010.

Isn’t that timely?!

• Ireland To Close ‘Double Irish’ Tax Loophole (Guardian)

Apple and other multinationals based in Ireland are to be given a four-year window before the phasing out of a scheme that cuts their tax bills. Amid mounting international criticism of the arrangements, which save foreign companies billions of euros, Ireland’s finance minister, Michael Noonan, is expected to announce the end of the “double Irish” scheme when he delivers his budget on Tuesday. The European commission is investigating “sweetheart” tax deals between the Irish state and Apple, and last month Brussels provisionally found that the iPhone maker’s tax arrangements in Ireland were so generous as to amount to state aid. Noonan’s move may pre-empt measures hinted at by the UK chancellor last month, when he announced a crackdown on technology firms’ tax strategies at the Conservative party conference. George Osborne said: “Some of the biggest technology companies in the world … go to extraordinary lengths to pay little or no tax here … We will put a stop to it.”

Party officials briefed that he had companies using the double Irish scheme in his sights. On the international stage, the G20 group of powerful economies has commissioned the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development to produce a package of tax reforms to rein in multinationals. This work is expected to be completed by summer 2015. Accompanying a pledge to remove the tax loophole, Noonan’s budget is expected to contain incentives for multinationals, such as lower tax rates for companies that centre their research and development facilities on Ireland. The so-called “patent box” will reward foreign firms that base their technological developments in the Irish state. This echoes the UK’s regime, which has attracted criticism from other countries as well as the EU’s code of conduct committee.

The oil price drop can finish them off, those commies! Big Oil would love nothing more than to get access to the Orinoco, with arguably the biggest oil reserves on the planet.

• Venezuela Default Almost Certain, Harvard Economists Say (Bloomberg)

Venezuela will probably default on its foreign debt as a shortage of dollars makes it impossible for the government to meet its citizens’ basic needs, Harvard University economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff said. The economy is so badly managed that per-capita gross domestic product is 2% below 1970 levels, the professors wrote in an column published by Project Syndicate yesterday. A decade of currency controls has made dollars scarce in the country with the world’s biggest oil reserves, causing shortages of everything from deodorant to airplane tickets. “They have extensive domestic defaults and an economy that is really imploding,” Reinhart said in a telephone interview from Cambridge, Massachusetts. “What they really need to do is get their house in order. If an external default would trigger such a possibility, that’s not a bad thing.”

The suggestion that the country stop servicing its bonds comes a month after Harvard colleagues Ricardo Hausmann and Miguel Angel Santos wrote that Venezuela should consider defaulting given that it was piling up arrears to importers. Venezuela owes about $21 billion to domestic companies and airlines, according to Caracas-based consultancy Ecoanalitica. Venezuelan debt is the riskiest in the world, yielding 15.42 percentage points more than similar maturity Treasuries, according to data compiled by JPMorgan Chase & Co. The cost to insure the country’s bonds against default with credit-default swaps is also the highest for any government globally. “Given that the government is defaulting in numerous ways on its domestic residents already, the historical cross-country probability of an external default is close to” 100%, Reinhart and Rogoff wrote in their piece.

Man’s folly in all its glory.

• Car-Maggedon: The $4.4 Trillion Traffic Problem (CNBC)

Traffic congestion over the next 17 years is set to give the U.S. and the biggest economies in Europe a $4.4 trillion headache, according to a U.K.-based economic consultancy firm. France, Germany, the U.K and the U.S. will face a combined toll of $200.7 billion in 2013 across their whole economies and that figure is expected to rise to $293.1 billion by 2030, according to the Centre for Economics and Business Research (CEBR). This would mark a 46% increase in the costs imposed by congestion and is calculated from direct costs, like fuel and wasted time, as well as indirect costs like the inflated household bills passed on by idle freight traffic.”This report shows that advanced economies could be heading for ‘car-maggedon’,” said Kevin Foreman, the general manager of geoanalytics at INRIX who provided the data for the CEBR.

“The scale of the problem is enormous, and we now know that gridlock will continue to have serious consequences for national and city economies, businesses and households into the future,” he said in a press release on Tuesday. The U.K. is expected to see the biggest increase in costs due to congestion, with the U.S. in second place. Londoners faced the biggest impact – with a 71% rise – while Los Angeles is due for a 65% increase, according to the report. Road users spend, on average, 36 hours in gridlock every year in urban areas across these four economies, it added. It also noted that idle vehicles in these developed nations released 15,434 kilotons of carbon dioxide last year and forecast this to rise by 16% between 2013 and 2030.

Always seemed a pretty useless idea to me. What they don’t say is you’re suspect when you have a fever AND you’re black.

• Ebola Airport Checks: ‘A Net With Very Wide Holes’ (CNBC)

After Texas reported its second case of Ebola on Sunday, experts told CNBC that airport screening was unlikely to prevent another potential victim of the killer disease from entering the U.S. Last week, the U.S. government ordered five airports to start screening travelers for Ebola, following the first case on American soil—Thomas Eric Duncan, who died last week after arriving from Liberia in September. Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital has now announced that a female caregiver who treated Duncan has caught the disease. By instigating screening at five airports, including New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport, the U.S.’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) hopes to evaluate over 94% of travelers arriving from Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone—the countries worst hit by the outbreak. Visitors will have their temperature taken, be observed for symptoms of Ebola and asked questions to determine their risk of the disease.

Epidemiologists have warned that there is little evidence that this screening will prevent another victim from entering the U.S., or other countries, such as the U.K., which have also adopted screening. “Airport temperature screening is ‘a net with very wide holes’,” Ran Balicer, a policy adviser and infectious diseases expert at Ben-Gurion University, Israel, told CNBC. “If your perceived aim would be to prevent most cases of imported disease, you are likely to fail.” The epidemiologist noted that the gap between sufferers contracting Ebola and developing a fever could be as long as 21 days—meaning that the likelihood of potential patients being detected as they disembark was slim. “Beyond the logistical difficulties, there is also a serious issue of false alarms, especially in the flu/RSV season (respiratory syncytial virus) when random fever may be not infrequent among travelers.”

And so it spreads.

• UN Medical Official Dies Of Ebola In German Hospital (Guardian)

A UN employee infected with Ebola has died in Germany, officials say. The 56-year-old Sudanese man had been flown from Liberia to Leipzig last Thursday, where he received treatment at a specialist unit at the St Georg clinic. On his arrival, doctors at the hospital had described his condition as “highly critical, but stable”. On Tuesday morning the clinic confirmed in a statement that their patient had died on Monday night, “in spite of intensive medical measures and the best efforts on behalf of the medical staff”. The Leipzig clinic has assured the public that there is no risk of infection for people in the area. The man had arrived in Germany on a specially adapted Gulfstream jet with an isolation chamber, and had been treated on an isolation unit by staff wearing protective gear.

According to the World Health Organisation, around 8,400 people have been infected with Ebola after the current outbreak of the disease in Africa, out of which more than 4,000 people have died. The epidemic is still out of control in the west African states of Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone. The Sudanese man was the third Ebola victim to receive treatment in Germany. A doctor from Uganda is being treated in an isolation unit in Frankfurt, while a Senegalese man was recently released from a Hamburg clinic after a five-week treatment. The German government claims to be well prepared for an outbreak of Ebola in Germany. Isolation units at hospitals in Frankfurt, Berlin, Düsseldorf, Leipzig, Munich, Stuttgart and Hamburg could hold a total of 50 Ebola patients, it said. There are currently no plans to increase the number of stations.

Not a new suspicion, but good they go public with their research. Key word: Aerosols.

• “There Is Scientific Evidence Ebola Has The Potential To Be Airborne” (ZH)

When CDC Director Tim Frieden first announced, just a week ago and very erroneously, that he was “confident we will stop Ebola in its tracks here in the United States”, he hardly anticipated facing the double humiliation of not only having the first person-to-person transmission of Ebola on US soil taking place within a week, but that said transmission would impact a supposedly protected healthcare worker. He certainly did not anticipate the violent public reaction that would result when, instead of taking blame for another epic CDC blunder, one which made many wonder if last night’s Walking Dead season premier was in fact non-fiction, he blamed health workers for “not following protocol.”

And yet, while once again casting scapegoating and blame, the CDC sternly refuses to acknowledge something others, and not just tingoil blog sites, are increasingly contemplating as a distinct possibility: namely that Ebola is, contrary to CDC “protocol”, in fact airborne. Or as, an article posted by CIDRAP defines it, “aerosolized.” Who is CIDRAP? “The Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy (CIDRAP; “SID-wrap”) is a global leader in addressing public health preparedness and emerging infectious disease response. Founded in 2001, CIDRAP is part of the Academic Health Center at the University of Minnesota.” The full punchline from the CIDRAP report:

We believe there is scientific and epidemiologic evidence that Ebola virus has the potential to be transmitted via infectious aerosol particles both near and at a distance from infected patients, which means that healthcare workers should be wearing respirators, not facemasks.

In other words, airborne. And now the search for the next LAKE, i.e., a public company maker of powered air-purifying respirator (PAPR), begins.

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