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Patriotism, Flags and Referendums

Sep 242017
 
 September 24, 2017  Posted by at 6:41 pm Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , ,  2 Responses »


Robert Frank London 1952-53

 

‘Tis the jolly time of elections, referendums, flags and other democracy-related issues. They are all linked in some way or another, even if that’s not always obvious. Elections, in New Zealand and Germany this weekend, referendums in Catalonia and Kurdistan the coming week, a looming Party Congress in China, quarrels about a flag in the US and then there’s always Brexit.

About China: the Congress is only in October, Xi Jinping looks sure to broaden his powers even more, and it ain’t all that democratic, but we should still follow it, if only because party officials will be either demoted or promoted, and some of them govern more people than most kings, queens, presidents and prime ministers. They say everything’s bigger in Texas, but in China everything really is. Including debt.

New Zealand: the election very early this morning didn’t bring a much hoped for win for Labour, or any clear winner at all, so don’t expect any grand changes in policy. New Zealand won’t wake up till its economy dives and the housing bubble pops.

Germany: Angela Merkel has set up today’s election so that she has no competition. Though she will see the ultra-right AfD enter parliament. Still, her main ‘rival’, alleged left wing Martin Schulz, is a carbon copy of Merkel when it comes to the main issues, i.e. immigration and the EU. An election that is as dull as Angela herself, even though she’ll lose 10% or so. The next one won’t be, guaranteed.

As for the US, no elections there, but another round of big words about nationalism, patriotism and the flag. Donald Trump is well aware that 75% or so of Americans say the flag must be respected, so criticizing people for kneeling instead of standing when the anthem gets played is an easy win for him. No amount of famous athletes is going to change that.

It all doesn’t seem very smart or sophisticated. But then, the US is the only western country I know of that plays the anthem at domestic sports games and has children vow a Pledge of Allegiance to it every single day. Other countries can’t even imagine doing that. They keep their anthems for special occasions. And even then only a few people stand up when it’s played. For most, it’s much ado about nothing but a strip of cotton.

What is perhaps interesting is that a whole list of NFL team owners donated a million dollars to Trump, and now speak out against him and ‘side with their players’, even though not one of them has offered Colin Kaepernick a job since he got fired for going down on one knee. Should I add ‘allegedly’? The only right way to handle the issue would seem to be to talk about why Kaepernick and others do what they do, not that they do it. There’s more than enough division in the country to warrant such talks.

Let Trump invite Kaepernick and Stephen Curry, maybe even Lebron and Stevie Wonder, to the White House with the very intention to talk about that. In the current hostile climate that is not going to happen though, even if Da Donald might want to. There’s a group of people who after 30 years of a deteriorating economy said ‘this is not my country anymore’, and voted for the only -apparent- alternative available, Trump, and another group who then said ‘this is not my president’.

And never the twain shall have a conversation. Somebody better find a way to get them to talk about it, or worse is to come. Far too many Americans identify themselves solely as not being someone else. Yeah, Trump too, but he’s been under constant siege from all sides, and of course he’ll fight back. No, that does not make me a Trump cheerleader, as some have suggested, but what’s happening today threatens to blow up the entire nation, after first having eroded the whole political system. This is a serious risk.

Now spymaster James Clapper is saying again that the whole Russia thing, for which there still is zero proof, could make the election invalid. Well, not without proof, Jimbo. And until you do have that proof, shut up, it’s poisonous (he knows). Instead, go help the 3.5 million literally powerless Americans in Puerto Rico. There are plenty issues to deal with that don’t involve bashing your president. Keep that for later.

 

(Proposed) referendums (referenda?) in Catalunya and ‘Kurdistan’ raise interesting questions about sovereignty and self determination. We’ll see a lot more of that going forward. I’ve repeatedly mentioned the issue of sovereignty when it comes to Greece, which cannot really be called sovereign anymore because others, foreigners, make all main decisions about its economy.

There may be plenty different definitions of sovereignty, but there can be no doubt it means that a domestic authority has control over a country. That also means that possible changes to that authority can only be made domestically. To come back to Greece briefly, I’m surprised that no constitutional lawyers or scholars have questioned respective governments handing de facto control to ‘outsiders’.

But that can be both deepened and broadened to the decision to join both first the EU, and later the euro. Have all 27 EU countries run these decisions by their constitutional lawyers and highest courts? I’ve never seen an opinion like that from any country. Does a country’s ruling authority have the power to sign away its sovereignty? I would bet in most cases it does not, or the constitution involved was/is either shoddily written or not worth much to begin with.

That any elected US president -or Congress, Senate- would have the power to sell the country to the highest bidder -or any part of it- sounds preposterous, even if I’m no constitutional lawyer or scholar. What countries CAN do, of course, is sign treaties and other agreements concerning defence or trade, among others. But any possible sovereignty violations would always need to be scrutinized at the highest domestically available level of judicial power.

Moreover, I would argue that sovereignty is not something that can be divided, split up or broken into separate parts. You’re either sovereign or you’re not. One country, indivisible, as the US Pledge of Allegiance states (but that doesn’t mean a group of people inside a country can’t seek its own sovereignty).

 

The ‘composition’ of the EU raises a lot of questions. Many countries have given up their rights to control over their currencies, and therefore their entire economic policies, and though the euro is undoubtedly beneficial in some areas, it has turned out to be a straight-jacket in others, when less sunny economic times arrived.

So what happens if those less sunny times are here to stay? Will countries like Greece continue to bend over for Germany, and for the ECB it controls, or will some of these countries (re-)examine their rights to sovereignty? How is this defined in the EU charter anyway? It has to be there, or many constitutions were violated to begin with when countries signed up. Sovereignty that is not properly defined is meaningless.

Another, non-economic, example concerns the Visegrad countries, Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia. It’s wonderfully ironic that Wikipedia says the Visegrad alliance (est. in 1991) was formed “for the purposes of furthering their European integration”, ironic because one might be tempted to think it does the opposite. The Visegrad countries refuse to be part of the EU’s scheme to resettle refugees.

And Brussels tries to force them to comply with that scheme, with threat after threat. But that too, no matter how one views the issue or where one’s sympathies lie, is in the end a sovereignty issue. And what use is it to force refugees upon a country that doesn’t want them? The bigger question is of course: why were they ever invited into the EU when they think that way, and that way is fundamentally different from that prevalent in Brussels and other member countries?

Or perhaps the even bigger question should be: how do you combine a country’s sovereignty with a political and economic union of nations that must sign away parts of their sovereignty -and therefore all of it, as argued before-. If you ask me, it’s not nearly as easy -let alone legal- as they try to make it look.

 

Catalunya and ‘Kurdistan’ are good examples – albeit from a different angle- of that same conundrum. A topic closely linked to sovereignty is self-determination. Wikipedia:

The right of people to self-determination is a cardinal principle in modern international law (commonly regarded as a jus cogens rule), binding, as such, on the United Nations as authoritative interpretation of the {UN] Charter’s norms. It states that a people, based on respect for the principle of equal rights and fair equality of opportunity, have the right to freely choose their sovereignty and international political status with no interference.

[..] on 11 February 1918 US President Woodrow Wilson stated: “National aspirations must be respected; people may now be dominated and governed only by their own consent.

‘Self determination’ is not a mere phrase; it is an imperative principle of action.

The Kurds have been denied that right for a very long time. For reasons related to divide and rule policies in a whole slew of different global powers both in the region and outside of it, and reasons related to oil. After being a major force in the fight against ISIS, and after seeing Turkey get ever more agressive against them -again-, the Kurds have -not for the first time- planned a referendum for a sovereign state. As the UN charter unequivocally says is their right.

The problem is, they want to establish their state on land that other countries claim is theirs. Even if the Kurds have lived there for a long time. And that’s a common theme in most of these ‘events’. Catalunya, Palestina, ‘Kurdistan’, they’re told they can perhaps have independence and sovereignty, but not on land where their people have lived for 1000s of years, because that land ‘belongs to us’.

And holding a referendum is therefore unconstitutional, says Spain, or whatever legal term is thrown out. But if the UN charter makes the international community’s position as clear as it does, how can it contradict a member nation’s constitution? Was that member not paying attention when it signed up to the Charter, or did the UN itself let that one slip?

 

 

Catalunya (Catalonia) is the northeast tip of Spain. Its people have long wanted independence and never gotten it. When present day Spain was formed, it was made part of Spain. And now the people want their own nation. It is not hard. But then again it is. We are now one week before October 1, the date the referendum was planned, and the Spanish government has done everything it could and then some to frustrate the referendum, and therefore the will of the people of Catalunya.

As the politicians who inhabit the EU and UN sit by idly, scared silly of burning their fingers. After arresting Catalan politicians and confiscating anything that could be used to hold the referendum, Spain has sent cruise ships full of police to Catalan harbors, and tried to take over control of the Catalan police force. But Catalan politicians and harbor crew have refused to let the ships dock, and Catalan police won’t obey Spanish orders.

It’s starting to look like Spain PM Rajoy wants to provoke a violent Catalan reaction, so he can send in his army and blame Barcelona and environs. What he doesn’t want to understand is that this will be the end of his government, his career, and of any chance Catalunya will remain part of Spain other than in the short term. It feels like Franco’s military, who, don’t forget, only relinquished control some 40 years ago, are still there in spirit if not physically.

For everybody’s sake, we can only hope someone does something to stop Rajoy and whoever’s behind his decisions, because if anyone ever wondered why the Catalans wanted to be independent, after those decisions there can be no question anymore. If he sends in the army, Spain as a whole will be something of the past. But first the referendum result, which was very doubtful all along, has now been settled: nearly all Catalans stand united against Rajoy today.

And Catalans are a mixed people. Many do not have their roots there, or even speak the language. But they will not turn on their friends and neighbors.

 

Kurdistan’s situation is even a lot more convoluted than Catalunya’s. Borders in the Middle East were drawn more or less at random by the French and British after the fall of the Ottoman Empire nearly 100 years ago. And the Kurds never got their independence, or their country. But now they want it. However, they live spread over 4 different countries, Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria. And some of the land they live on has oil. Lots of it. And the cradle of civilization, between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.

 

 

Just about everyone, including the US, all countries in the region, and the old colonial powers, have declared their resistance to the Kurdish referendum. Getting back to the UN charter et al, isn’t that a curious position? Politicians sign lofty declarations, but when their successors are called upon to uphold them, nobody’s home. And it’s not as if self-determination is such a difficult topic to understand.

The referendum will be held on September 25 in Iraq’s semi-autonomous Kurdish region, so not in other Kurdish regions. Therefore only 900,000 people, out of some 35 million Kurds, get to vote. But the question on the ballot will be:

“Do you want the Kurdistan region and the Kurdistani areas outside the region’s administration to become an independent state?”

And that of course means something much more, and much bigger. There’s a ‘Kurdistan’ in Iran, Syria and Turkey as well. Kurds there don’t get to vote, though.

Quoting Bloomberg: “The vote will be held in the three governorates officially ruled by the KRG, as well as in disputed areas currently controlled by Kurdish forces, known as the peshmerga. The Kurds expanded their domain in 2014 when, faced with Islamic State attacks, the Iraqi army deserted the oil-rich city Kirkuk.”

Here’s where the Kurds were living according to the 2014 CIA World Factbook:

 

 

As is the case in Catalunya, Iraq’s parliament and top court have declared the vote unconstitutional. That again raises the question: how can a vote violate a country’s constitution if and when that country has signed the UN charter which explicitly defines every people’s right to self-determination? Who’s been asleep when both documents were signed?

How could the UN let countries sign its charter whose constitutions violated that same charter? Have we all just been playing fast and loose all along? Or, more interestingly, what are we all going to do now that we know about this? Are we going to take self-determination away from people, and sign that into a whole new UN charter? Or are we going to make sure the charter is upheld and make countries change their constitutions to comply with it?

 

There is a third option (very much in favor): to not do anything. But that gets more dangerous all the time. The days that people could just be ignored are gone. Social media have probably played a large role in that. And so have changing power relationships.

The EU is blowing itself up through increasing calls for more Europe just as people want less. I’ve said it often before: centralization stops when and where economic growth does. And despite all the creative accounting we see, economic growth is definitely gone in Europe. Just ask Greece, Spain. Ask the people, not the politicians. People will only accept their decisions being made by far away ‘leaders’ if they perceive them as beneficial to their lives, the lives of their children.

Those days are gone, no matter the propaganda. That’s true all over Europe, and it’s true all across the US. The refusal by incumbent powers to recognize this, admit to it, is what gives us the likes of Trump and Brexit and countless other challengers. That Marine Le Pen and others have failed to date doesn’t mean the status quo wins; others will follow. In that vein I was surprised to see Yanis Varoufakis, whom I hold in very great esteem, declare in name of his DiEM 25 movement that:

“I am not taking sides on whether Catalonia should be independent or not” and “What we’re promoting in DiEM25 would solve the problem. We want a real European Union that becomes a single jurisdiction, a country if you want to call it that. In that scenario, it doesn’t matter if Catalonia is part of Spain!”

Europe will not be one country. Nor should it want to be. Europe has 1000 different ways to work together, and the EU has been an utter failure at that. While it has done a ton of good, it is being -predictably- destroyed by the power politics at its top levels. Nobody ever told Europeans that they would wind up living as German provinces. But that is what they are.

As Varoufakis himself makes abundantly clear is his book Adults in the Room. That’s why Germans have no real choice in today’s election: they have such utter control of the EU they would be crazy to vote against it. But at the same time, the rest of the ‘Union’ would be crazy to let them hold that power.

And I know that DiEM25 wants to change and reform the EU, but how will they do that knowing they need Germany, more than all other countries, to accomplish it, as Germany is sitting so pretty? Calls for a one-country Europe seem at the very least irresponsibly premature. That’s very far from reality. First things first. No cheating. You can’t say it doesn’t matter what happen to the Catalans today because ‘we’ have bigger plans for tomorrow. That means abandoning them. That’s not a new Europe: that’s what they already have today.

 

As for ‘Kurdistan’, what can we do but hope and pray? Hope that the old European colonial powers, as well as Turkey, Iraq and Iran, plus Russia and China, live up to the UN Charter they signed, and let the Kurds show they can be a force for peace in the region, which needs one so badly?! They have shown in no uncertain terms they can defend themselves, and their land, against anyone who threatens them. The Kurdish women army, YPJ, is all you need to know when it comes to that. They are the bravest amongst us.

If they had their own country, they would continue to do just that, and better. Which just goes to show that nationalism and patriotism are not of necessity negative emotions. It gives people an identity. Which is exactly why brighter heads than the present ones put the right to self-determination in the UN Charter, at a time, 1945, when the world had seen indescribable destruction.

There’s a lesson there. That we seem to have forgotten already. And now have to learn all over again. Through Colin Kaepernick, through the unbelievable Kurdish women’s YPG army, though the streets of Barcelona. Our world is screwed up, and we need to unscrew it.

 

 

Debt Rattle January 26 2017

Jan 262017
 
 January 26, 2017  Posted by at 10:32 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , ,  14 Responses »


Arthur Siegel Zoot suit, business district, Detroit, Michigan 1942

• Trump Loves Debt, But It Won’t Love Him Back (BBG)
• US Tax Reforms Could ‘Transform’ Global Oil Market (R.)
• Trump Prepares Orders Aiming at Global Funding and Treaties, UN (NYT)
• Trump Starts A ‘Sanctuary City’ War With Liberal America (BBC)
• Kyle Bass Calls Trump ‘Gasoline’ on Smoldering Fire in China (BBG)
• China Keeps 3% Budget Deficit Goal For 2017 As Debt Risks Grow (R.)
• China Is Becoming ‘Increasingly Risky’ Because Of Its Economy (CNBC)
• Dutch Respond To Trump’s ‘Gag Rule’ With International Safe Abortion Fund (G.)
• Why the Corrupt, Worker-Hating New Democrats Must Be Purged (Bill Black)
• Pippa Malmgren: The Social Contract In The West Is Broken (SLD)
• Seymour Hersh Blasts Media For Promoting Russian Hacking Story (IC)
• Austerity Economics Has Just Been Smashed. By The IMF. (GDB)
• The Super Rich Are Preparing For The End Of The World (CNBC)
• Rome Mayor Raggi Says She Received Summons From Prosecutors (BBG)
• Deal On Greek Bailout’s Second Review Possible At February Eurogroup (R.)
• “INAUGURATION DAY” (Bad Lip Reading)

 

 

Catch 20-something.

• Trump Loves Debt, But It Won’t Love Him Back (BBG)

President Donald Trump, the self-proclaimed king of debt, may end up with a revolt on his hands.He wants to spend billions of dollars to rebuild American highways and bridges to double economic growth to about 4% a year. He wants to preserve medical benefits for the poor and elderly. And he’s selected someone to oversee the national budget who’s fundamentally opposed to huge piles of debt and pledges to reduce the nation’s deficit.This recipe doesn’t add up, either in theory or practice. Even if Trump finances his promised infrastructure plans entirely by cutting other government services, the nation’s debt load is forecast to surge by trillions of dollars over the next decade.

Trump faces two big problems when grappling with the U.S. debt load: an aging population that’s becoming sicker and inauspicious bond math. If Trump succeeds in fostering substantially higher growth rates, as he’s promised, then interest rates will most likely rise much more than forecast. That’ll make it materially more expensive for the nation to service its debt.Even without much more growth, the U.S. deficit will likely increase as interest rates rise. That’s according to the Congressional Budget Office, a nonpartisan group that analyzes the U.S. economy, which just released its forecast for the nation’s deficit and debt load over the next decade.

Its baseline scenario calls for gradually rising benchmark borrowing costs, with 10-year Treasury yields leveling out at about 3.6% by 2022 from about 2.5% today. Even with that relatively modest projection, CBO analysts wrote that “the government’s interest payments on that debt rise sharply over the next 10 years — nearly tripling in nominal terms and almost doubling relative to GDP.”Interest expense will rise to $768 billion in 2027 from $270 billion in 2017 under the CBO’s base-case scenario.But let’s say Trump succeeds in his attempt to foster more economic growth. That’ll mean that inflation will rise, prompting investors to demand higher U.S. Treasury yields to offset steadily rising consumer prices. Jeffrey Gundlach, the bond guru who runs DoubleLine Capital, said after the election that U.S. 10-year government bond yields could reach 6% in five years. In that case, the interest expense would balloon much more than expected, substantially eating into the nation’s budget.

Read more …

“We expect WTI could move to a $10 per barrel premium to Brent from a $3 discount – a $13 (+25%) relative move immediately.”

• US Tax Reforms Could ‘Transform’ Global Oil Market (R.)

The push by Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives for a shift to border-adjusted corporate tax (BTA) could push U.S. crude prices higher than the global benchmark Brent, triggering large-scale domestic production, according to analysts at Goldman Sachs on Tuesday. The measure, known as border adjustment, intends to boost U.S. manufacturing by taxing imports while exempting U.S. business export revenues from corporate taxation. Goldman said it anticipates a 25% jump in the prices of U.S. crude futures, also known as West Texas Intermediate (WTI), and refined products in comparison to the global prices if the switch is implemented.

The investment bank, however, said that uncertainty on whether such a policy will go ahead is high due to concerns about WTO-non compliance and transition issues and oil futures currently only imply a 9% probability for such a shift. “If implemented, the impacts on the oil market would be significant,” Goldman said. “We expect WTI could move to a $10 per barrel premium to Brent from a $3 discount – a $13 (+25%) relative move immediately.” Brent crude futures were trading on Tuesday at a $2.40 per barrel premium to WTI. The appreciation in prices could be an incentive for producers to sharply increase activity, the bank said warning, that the ramp up in U.S. production in a market only starting to rebalance would create a renewed large oil surplus in 2018, which could lead to an immediate sharp decline in global oil prices.

Read more …

The UN is dysfunctional, but this risks cutting the few parts that do actually work.

• Trump Prepares Orders Aiming at Global Funding and Treaties, UN (NYT)

The Trump administration is preparing executive orders that would clear the way to drastically reduce the United States’ role in the United Nations and other international organizations, as well as begin a process to review and potentially abrogate certain forms of multilateral treaties. The first of the two draft orders, titled “Auditing and Reducing U.S. Funding of International Organizations” and obtained by The New York Times, calls for terminating funding for any United Nations agency or other international body that meets any one of several criteria. Those criteria include organizations that give full membership to the Palestinian Authority or Palestine Liberation Organization, or support programs that fund abortion or any activity that circumvents sanctions against Iran or North Korea.

The draft order also calls for terminating funding for any organization that “is controlled or substantially influenced by any state that sponsors terrorism” or is blamed for the persecution of marginalized groups or any other systematic violation of human rights. The order calls for then enacting “at least a 40% overall decrease” in remaining United States funding toward international organizations. The order establishes a committee to recommend where those funding cuts should be made. It asks the committee to look specifically at United States funding for peacekeeping operations; the International Criminal Court; development aid to countries that “oppose important United States policies”; and the United Nations Population Fund, which oversees maternal and reproductive health programs.

Read more …

Interesting power fight. But there are laws.

• Trump Starts A ‘Sanctuary City’ War With Liberal America (BBC)

Mr Trump’s border wall announcement will make most of the headlines today, given that it was a central focus of his presidential campaign and has increased diplomatic tension with the Mexican government. His plan to target US “sanctuary cities”, however, likely sets the stage for a much tougher, uglier domestic political fight. More than 400 jurisdictions across the country, including New York, Los Angeles, Boston and Seattle – major cities in left-leaning states that did not vote for Mr Trump – have enacted policies protecting undocumented immigrants within their boundaries. Officials in these designated areas, including local law enforcement, are not allowed to enquire as to an individual’s immigration status in the course of their duties.

Candidate Trump pledged to end this practice, and on Wednesday he put some teeth into his promise – authorising the federal government to withhold funds from cities that do not co-operate with immigration officials or comply with federal law. His executive order frames the issue as one of national security. “Sanctuary jurisdictions across the United States wilfully violate Federal law in an attempt to shield aliens from removal from the United States,” it reads. “These jurisdictions have caused immeasurable harm to the American people and to the very fabric of our republic.”

Read more …

Speeding up decline. Or exposing it, rather.

• Kyle Bass Calls Trump ‘Gasoline’ on Smoldering Fire in China (BBG)

Hedge fund manager Kyle Bass likened President Donald Trump’s trade and tax policies to gasoline — hastening an economic restructuring in China while stimulating capital investment and growth in the U.S. China has “recklessly built a system that’s going to need to restructure and that just so happens to be metastasizing right when Trump becomes elected,” Bass told Bloomberg TV. “This is a fire that’s been smoldering and it’s now starting to burn, and Trump is just more gasoline.” Imposing tariffs on Chinese imports could have “profound consequences” for the nation’s economy, where credit over the last 18 months has grown by $6.5 trillion while deposits expanded just $3 trillion, said Bass, founder of Hayman Capital Management.

Early last year, Bass called for a 30% devaluation in the yuan against the dollar, and he’s since opened two Asia-focused funds to wager on the imbalances in the region, which he said could extend to Hong Kong and Taiwan. “The idea that China is now the driving economic power in the world, I think, is illusory or somewhat of a fallacy,” he said. “It’s safe to say that the Asian theater is where we’ve been focused.” In the U.S., Bass said, border tax adjustments will help finance a lower corporate tax rate that Trump has proposed, which in combination with the repatriation of capital offshore will be “extremely stimulative.” He said Trump’s accelerated policies would lead to real capital investment, competitiveness and an improvement in productivity.

The impact will be “positive for the United States and slightly negative for the rest of the world,” he said. “But it’s not the globalist nightmare, in my opinion.” Inflation, set to increase in the U.S., will also spike in Germany, which will prompt a tapering of the ECB’s bond-buying program and possibly an increase in interest rates, he said. The move to do so will be sped up by Trump, he said.

Read more …

“Total fixed-asset investment rose 8.1% in 2016, the slowest pace since 1999, despite an 18.7% increase in investment by state entities..”

• China Keeps 3% Budget Deficit Goal For 2017 As Debt Risks Grow (R.)

China’s policymakers plan to keep their budget deficit target for 2017 at the same level as last year to underscore a focus on debt reduction and reform, though they have wiggle room to increase fiscal stimulus if the economy needs support again. A budget deficit target of 3% of GDP, unchanged from 2016, was endorsed by top leaders at the Central Economic Work Conference in December, according to sources with knowledge of the meeting’s outcome. After government investment propped up activity for much of 2016, policymakers are looking for a recovery in private investment through public-private partnership (PPP) infrastructure projects to drive growth this year. “Fiscal policy is clear. It’s necessary to maintain last year’s 3% deficit ratio, although there is room to increase it slightly,” said one of the sources, a policy adviser.

Preliminary finance ministry data this week implied an actual deficit of 3.8% of GDP in 2016. However, China’s budget accounting allows it to use unspent money from previous years and funds from a Central Budget Stabilization Fund so it can report a final deficit in line with the target. The world’s second-largest economy grew 6.7% last year, supported by higher government spending and record bank lending, though it was still the slowest growth in 26 years. Reuters reported last week that sources said the 2017 economic growth target would be around 6.5%, down from last year’s 6.5-7%. “If this year’s growth goal is not that high, there will be less pressure on the strength of policy support,” said a second policy source. [..] Total fixed-asset investment rose 8.1% in 2016, the slowest pace since 1999, despite an 18.7% increase in investment by state entities, as private investment grew just 3.2%, the weakest on record.

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A risk to the west, that is.

• China Is Becoming ‘Increasingly Risky’ Because Of Its Economy (CNBC)

A major risk to U.S. markets is looming, and it’s bigger than headlines and President Donald Trump’s tweets, Goldman Sachs’ Sharmin Mossavar-Rahmani told CNBC on Wednesday. The threat is the Chinese economy, the Goldman Sachs Private Wealth Management chief investment officer told “Squawk on the Street.” “We use the term that China could ‘submerge’ under the burden of its own debt,” Mossavar-Rahmani said. “If you look at any of the debt measures in China, they’re tremendously high.” Mossavar-Rahmani focused on the credit-to-GDP number from the BIS as a key measure of China’s accumulating debt. As of the second quarter of 2016, China’s ratio was 28.8%.

“China is about 30, the U.S. was at 12.4% just before the crisis. And if the U.S. didn’t avoid a financial crisis with all its strength, how can we assume that China will?” the wealth manager asked. China is still awaiting its 19th gathering of the National Congress of the Communist Party in the fall, which Mossavar-Rahmani said would weigh on the country’s economic position in 2018. The meeting will determine 370 of China’s Central Committee members for the next five years. “Then we have to see, in 2018, will they put structural reforms on the front burner or does it stay on the back burner?” Mossavar-Rahmani asked.

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The US has a large block of religious zealots. The rest of the west, not so much.

• Dutch Respond To Trump’s ‘Gag Rule’ With International Safe Abortion Fund (G.)

Up to 20 countries have indicated support for the Netherlands’ plan to set up an international safe abortion fund to plug a $600m funding gap caused by Donald Trump’s reinstatement of the “global gag rule”, the Dutch international development minister, Lilianne Ploumen, said on Wednesday. Ploumen took soundings from a number of her colleagues around the world on Tuesday evening after the Netherlands said it would act to mitigate the impact on hundreds of charities around the world. The “global gag rule”, also known as the Mexico City policy, was reimposed by Trump on Monday, and bans US federal funding for NGOs in foreign countries that provide abortion services or abortion advocacy. ‘We’re in talks with 15 to 20 countries and we’ve also spoken to foundations,” Ploumen told the Guardian.

“As well as contacting a number of European countries that we work with on these issues, we’re also in touch with countries in South America and Africa, as well as the foundations. It’s important to have the broadest possible support for the fund.” Ploumen did not identify which countries had been approached or how much money the Dutch government might commit to the scheme. She said the aim would be to continue support for existing programmes being run by organisations such as the United Nations Population Fund (UNPFA), the International Planned Parenting Federation and Marie Stopes International. “These are successful and effective programmes: direct support, distributing condoms, making sure women are accompanied at the birth, and making sure abortion is safe if they have no other choice,” she said.

Read more …

Damning. DO read.

• Why the Corrupt, Worker-Hating New Democrats Must Be Purged (Bill Black)

This article explains three critical reasons why the Democratic Party’s leaders are far more insane than all but a few Democrats understand. It focuses on the leaders of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and the New Democrats. The DNC leadership is composed of New Democrats. Debbie Wasserman Schultz had to resign in disgrace when the leaks proved that she was putting the DNC’s thumbs on the scale to favor Hillary Clinton (a New Democrat) in the presidential nomination contest against Bernie Sanders. Wasserman Schultz also took large contributions from big finance and, until she faced the prospect of a serious primary challenger, she supported efforts by predatory lenders to use Congress to bar the regulators from stopping their abuses.

Donna Brazile, a New Democrat, now runs the DNC. In this article, I show that Brazile denounced Democrats who refused to cheer President Bush’s invasion of Iraq (and his “Mission Accomplished” declaration) as so disloyal that when their country needed them they went “AWOL.” Not satisfied with that libel, she added the homophobic smear that voters would view Democrats who failed to cheer Bush’s lies and invasion as “effete.” Best of all, she said that Democrats should take as their role models Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, and Frank Gaffney – Bush’s “chicken hawks” that devised the campaign of lies that led to the disastrous invasion of Iraq. Gaffney is now spreading hate of Muslims – and advising President Trump.

The DNC is also in the news because it has just accepted a $20 million “donation” funded by Third Way, a Wall Street front group, to study why the white working class “abandoned” Hillary Clinton. Clinton is a leader of the New Democrats. Wall Street has long been the largest single funder of the New Democrats various institutions. The New Democrats, at the behest of Wall Street, have waged the “long war” against the working class since their formation in 1984. The New Democrats did not simply abandon the working class – they targeted it for scorn and assaulted it with policies that harmed many Americans, but caused the greatest harm to the working class.

Particularly in light of the Trump’s election, the logical reaction of the DNC would have been to refuse to take the Wall Street buyout and announce that the New Democrats would never again do Wall Street’s bidding. They would return to the Democratic Party’s historic role as the party that championed the rights of workers. Brazile, of course, ensured that the DNC eagerly took the $20 million Wall Street buyout. The New Democrats not only continue to be for sale (or rent) by Wall Street – they continue to show that they continue to for sale for chump change. The DNC does not need $20 million to figure out why the white working class “abandoned” the New Democrats. They can check out from their local library Tom Frank’s books warning that this would happen and explaining in detail why the New Democrats’ long war against the working class was making it happen.

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When growth could not be delivered. “There is always a deal between citizens and their governments. But now governments are defaulting on their citizens because of the debt problem. They can’t deliver retirement at 65.”

• Pippa Malmgren: The Social Contract In The West Is Broken (SLD)

Question: The inability of continental Europe to grow has been a clear part of the concern in Britain about Europe. What role has this played?

Malmgren: The British received more Foreign Direct Investment than any other locartion in the EU before Brexit. It was assumed this flow would fall after Brexit. But, I hear from my clients that they are even more interested in the UK now. That’s because money is like water. It flows to wherever it faces the least resistance – the lowest tax rates and least regulatory burden. I would challenge the British to end up with more regulation and higher taxes that the EU after Brexit. Frankly, that would take a huge effort! But the problems on the Continent are deeper than this; The real issue is that the social contract between citizens and governments in the West are being broken. There is always a deal between citizens and their governments. But now governments are defaulting on their citizens because of the debt problem. They can’t deliver retirement at 65. Now everybody has to work longer.

They can’t deliver the healthcare that had been expected. Frankly they can’t deliver police, fire departments or roads without potholes. The social contract in the EU is under even greater stress because growth has been so very poor. The night of the victory of Brexit, the markets attacked Italian banks, not British banks. What did the state in Italy do? They said they’d find 5b Euros to bail out the oldest bank which had lost 98% of its shareholder value. Meanwhile, they can’t find 5 cents for the young who are experiencing over 30% unemployment rates. This breaks the social contract and helps explain the new anti-EU sentiment. The Europeans are also increasingly uneasy about immigration issues. It was not part of the original deal in the European contract to have completely open borders. In my view, the British are not xenophobic, but want more process around immigration. They want a more secure movement of people within Europe.

The media talks all the time about the proposed Wall by Trump in the US with Mexico, but the reality is there a wall-building spree going on in Europe. Look at the new walls being constructed between Hungry and Serbia, between Germany and the Czech Republic, as well as new walls in Estonia, Poland and Lithuania are constructing one around Kaliningrad with watchtowers, etc. Frankly new walls will increasingly be digital. Processing of people will begin well before you get anywhere near what you think the border is. We will pass through borders without realizing we’ve already been assessed. We are in a period of history where the Europeans are fundamentally rethinking what they want Europe to stand for, the European Union to do, and how to generate economic growth again. As everywhere else, the public are questioning the establishment because they have failed to deliver on their promises.

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“I don’t think the notion of democracy is ever going to be as tested as it’s going to be now.”

The ‘media’ have lost so much credibility, and permamently. That is dangerous.

• Seymour Hersh Blasts Media For Promoting Russian Hacking Story (IC)

Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh said in an interview that he does not believe the U.S. intelligence community proved its case that President Vladimir Putin directed a hacking campaign aimed at securing the election of Donald Trump. He blasted news organizations for lazily broadcasting the assertions of U.S. intelligence officials as established facts. Hersh denounced news organizations as “crazy town” for their uncritical promotion of the pronouncements of the director of national intelligence and the CIA, given their track records of lying and misleading the public. “The way they behaved on the Russia stuff was outrageous,” Hersh said when I sat down with him at his home in Washington, D.C., two days after Trump was inaugurated.

“They were just so willing to believe stuff. And when the heads of intelligence give them that summary of the allegations, instead of attacking the CIA for doing that, which is what I would have done,” they reported it as fact. Hersh said most news organizations missed an important component of the story: “the extent to which the White House was going and permitting the agency to go public with the assessment.” Hersh said many media outlets failed to provide context when reporting on the intelligence assessment made public in the waning days of the Obama administration that was purported to put to rest any doubt that Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the hacking of the DNC and Clinton campaign manager John Podesta’s emails.

The declassified version of the report, which was released January 7 and dominated the news for days, charged that Putin “ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the U.S. presidential election” and “aspired to help President-elect Trump’s election chances when possible by discrediting Secretary Clinton and publicly contrasting her unfavorably to him.” According to the report, the NSA was said to have had a lower confidence level than James Clapper and the CIA about the conclusion that Russia intended to influence the election. Hersh characterized the report as full of assertions and thin on evidence.

“It’s high camp stuff,” Hersh told The Intercept. “What does an assessment mean? It’s not a national intelligence estimate. If you had a real estimate, you would have five or six dissents. One time they said 17 agencies all agreed. Oh really? The Coast Guard and the Air Force — they all agreed on it? And it was outrageous and nobody did that story. An assessment is simply an opinion. If they had a fact, they’d give it to you. An assessment is just that. It’s a belief. And they’ve done it many times.”

[..] While expressing fears about Trump’s agenda, Hersh also called Trump a potential “circuit breaker” of the two-party political system in the U.S. “The idea of somebody breaking things away, and raising grave doubts about the viability of the party system, particularly the Democratic Party, is not a bad idea,” Hersh said. “That’s something we could build on in the future. But we have to figure out what to do in the next few years.” He added: “I don’t think the notion of democracy is ever going to be as tested as it’s going to be now.”

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But it will just continue. Wanna bet?

• Austerity Economics Has Just Been Smashed. By The IMF. (GDB)

A powerful new report finally kills off any remaining intellectual veil for a broken economics that is breaking society. Sometimes an ideology is so brilliantly propagated that observers might not even notice it’s an ideology. In the corridors of power and in mainstream discussion, it ceases to be questioned. Then it goes catastrophically wrong. And it begins to seen again for the ideology it is. It becomes questioned again. And, if they are smart, leaders hear this and start to self-correct. This is where we’ve got to with neoliberalism, austerity, and rising inequality. Except for the self-correct part. Right now, instead of self-correction, we’re seeing many mainstream politicians unable to shift away from dead economics, and what seems in too many countries like the start of social breakdown.

Change is well overdue. Who can prompt leaders to drop the old economic nostrums are causing so much harm? Enter the IMF with a sledgehammer. Progressives duck in case in the sledgehammer is meant for them. But then the IMF demolishes the case for neoliberalism and austerity. It sounds extraordinary, and it is. Today the IMF will launch a new report, “Macro-Structural Policies and Income Inequality in Low-Income Developing Countries”, the latest in series that mark the intellectual journey the IMF research department has been travelling in recent years. Packed with detailed quantitative analysis it demonstrates that much of what elites have been advancing as unquestioned economics is demonstrably harmful both to economic growth and to public wellbeing.

Of course what makes this surprising, and what may make some progressives unenthusiastic about welcoming this, is also what makes it so powerful: an institution that has been, for far too long, a defender of the free market story and the Washington Consensus – the idea that liberalizing trade, privatizing everything possible and cutting down public spending was a one-size-fits-all solution to any government in trouble – has now refuted it. This paper is not the first by the IMF to take a stand on inequality, but it is notable because it claims in no uncertain terms that public spending – i.e. the opposite of the budget cuts that it once advocated for – decreases income inequality. They even have a formula – a 1% increase in public spending, they report, leads to a 2.3% decrease in inequality after 5 years. The paper also takes a strong stand against prioritizing indirect taxes, such as VAT, showing that they increase inequality.

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Bit sensationalist, perhaps?

• The Super Rich Are Preparing For The End Of The World (CNBC)

The Dow has hit 20,000 for the first time ever, but rather than celebrating, some of the richest of the rich are building bunkers to prepare for a potential apocalypse. These “preppers” are making other investments too. They’re buying houses in New Zealand, which has become a popular spot in case of calamity. Billionaire Peter Thiel just secured property and citizenship there. And they’re getting elective surgery. Steve Huffman, the 33-year-old co-founder and CEO of the online community Reddit, got Lasik so that he’d be able to be more independent in case of emergency. “If the world ends — and not even if the world ends, but if we have trouble — getting contacts or glasses is going to be a huge pain in the ass,” the San Francisco resident tells Evan Osnos as part of The New Yorker’s chronicle of the elite’s end-of-the-world preparations. “Without them, I’m f—ed.”

In addition to the eye surgery, Huffman has accumulated guns, ammunition and motorcycles so that he won’t get caught in traffic jams during an evacuation. The notion of “doomsday prepping” was popularized in the mainstream by the National Geographic channel’s show by the same name. The show’s website offers a quiz titled “How prepped are you?” so you can test your own likelihood of surviving an apocalypse. Former Facebook product manager Antonio García Martínez bought wooded land in the Pacific Northwest that he has stocked with generators, solar panels and ammo, The New Yorker reports. “You just need so many things to actually ride out the apocalypse,” García Martínez says. “I think people who are particularly attuned to the levers by which society actually works understand that we are skating on really thin cultural ice right now.”

In particular, the political climate has made many coastal elites anxious about the future. “I think, to some degree, we all collectively take it on faith that our country works, that our currency is valuable, the peaceful transfer of power — that all of these things that we hold dear work because we believe they work,” says Huffman. “While I do believe they’re quite resilient, and we’ve been through a lot, certainly we’re going to go through a lot more.”

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The war on Grillo will intensify.

• Rome Mayor Raggi Says She Received Summons From Prosecutors (BBG)

Rome Mayor Virginia Raggi, a member of the anti-establishment Five Star Movement, said she has received a summons from city prosecutors over a staff appointment. Raggi, a lawyer who was elected mayor last year, wrote in a post on Facebook that the summons concerns her nomination of Renato Marra as head of the tourism department, which she has revoked. She said she had informed Five Star co-founder Beppe Grillo and the city council of the summons. “I am very serene; I have full confidence in the judiciary, as ever,” Raggi wrote. “We are ready to give every clarification.” Raggi’s city hall administration has been plagued by resignations. Five Star, which wants a referendum on Italy’s membership in the euro area, has remained neck and neck with the Democratic Party of Prime Minister Paolo Gentiloni and his predecessor Matteo Renzi in national opinion polls.

Five Star has made denunciations of political corruption one of its main themes, often calling for elected officials to resign if they are placed under investigation, long before a case comes to court. But under new rules posted on Grillo’s blog earlier this month, Five Star officials do not have to resign automatically if they are investigated. Italian newswire Ansa said Raggi was under investigation for alleged abuse of office in the personnel matter. [..] Alessandro Di Battista, a senior Five Star lawmaker, told La 7 television that Raggi had a duty to explain why she had made the appointment. “This isn’t about public money, or decisions which affect a right of citizens,” Di Battista said. “This would involve mistaken signatures, a mistaken nomination which was immediately revoked.”

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If not in February, forget 2017.

• Deal On Greek Bailout’s Second Review Possible At February Eurogroup (R.)

Euro zone creditors could approve the completion of the second set of Greek bailout reforms at the next meeting of finance ministers in February, an euro zone official said on Wednesday. The approval of the outstanding reforms, mainly concerning Greek fiscal targets, the labor market and liberalization of the energy sector, would pave the way for further euro zone loans to Athens, which faces large repayments in the third quarter. Finance ministers of the 19 countries of the euro zone will meet on Thursday in Brussels but there hasn’t been sufficient progress in Greek reforms yet for them to sign off on a deal now, the senior official said, confirming what the EU economics commissioner Pierre Moscovici said on Tuesday.

Still, the ministers are likely to produce an agreement to continue talks with a view to concluding them at the next Eurogroup meeting on Feb. 20, according to the official. “There is a good chance” that an agreement will be reached on Thursday to send euro zone negotiators back to Athens so that a deal can be reached in February, the official said. “February is the last month in which there is no politically significant election in relevant member states,” the official said, and this meant “February is not formally but realistically the time when we need to reach a political agreement”. The Netherlands go to the polls in March, and the French will vote in presidential elections in April and likely also in May. Germany, the biggest economy in the euro zone, will hold a general election in September. A comprehensive deal for Greece will also have to involve the IMF, the official said.

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Pretty brilliant.

• “INAUGURATION DAY” (Bad Lip Reading)

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2017: Where The Truth Lies

Dec 272016
 
 December 27, 2016  Posted by at 10:01 pm Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , ,  13 Responses »


Joan Miró Caballo, Pipa y Flor Roja (Horse Pipe and Red Flower) 1920

 

I was surprised to see how surprised I was, like I’m sure millions of people were, to see the term ‘fake news’ pop up in what are still called ‘respectable’ (which is by now really just another word for ‘old’) news outlets.

Because a huge part of what they have been feeding their readers and viewers for years is that very thing: fake news. Who needs a bunch of bored highschool kids in small town Montenegro when you have the offices of America’s ‘official’ news sources at your disposal?

That there are still people trying to make a serious point by quoting anything at all published in the Washington Post -and to an only slightly lesser extent the New York Times- is beyond me. And not a little bit beyond. Well, that people still read these sheets is just as incredible, I grant you that.

I haven’t kept count of the number of ‘articles’ the WaPo has published over the past year or so -the election campaign- that referred to unsubstantiated reports emanating from anonymous US intelligence sources about Russian involvement in everything bad under the sun, but I’m dead certain that put together they would add up to a Christmas bestseller of respectable size. A chance missed there, gents. You could have had your own garbage lead your own bestseller lists. Snake, tail.

And it’s not as if it was a new thing for them either, what’s new is the sheer volume and the concerted campaign we’re talking about. We of course had a similar thing in 2003 with the Weapons of Mass Destruction ‘fantasy’. Now that I mention it, how is it possible that Colin Powell is still walking around free, and Cheney and W.?

When did it become de rigueur to lie to the people, let alone Congress and the UN? What have we become? When did that happen? Remember Ukraine, and the stories you were told about that, less than 3 years ago? Crimea? G-d I hope Trump will get rid of Victoria Nuland.

Trump called the UN a sad club for people to “get together, talk and have a good time”. Is he wrong? Really? If so, do tell, how wrong is he? Perhaps wrong in the same way that the IMF is wrong for letting Christine Lagarde keep her plush tax-free seat after being convicted for handing €400 million in French taxpayer money to a crony? That kind of wrong?

I’m thinking there are still awfully few people who understand what’s happening in the world. What’s changing. And I don’t hold out much hope that they will until it hits them smack upside the backs of their heads.

Why there’s Trump and Brexit, and why many more changes are in the offing. Well, it’s precisely because the UN and EU and IMF and Capitol Hill are self-serving ‘clubs’ filled with unaccountable and overpaid people who have turned the world into a godawful mess.

Not for themselves, they’re fine, thank you very much, they all have pensions from here to Rome and back again for the rest of their lives, but for everyone else. G-d I hope Trump will come through on his pre-election promise to limit the terms of American Congressmen and Senators. And that this is subsequently applied to all these ‘clubs’. Because if anything, it’s them who are the bane of this world. Public service…

There may be fine individuals among them, that’s not even -the worst of- the point, it’s the dilapidated, decayed, rotten to the core institutions that they ‘serve’ which are the problem. They serve themselves and they serve the institutions, the one thing they sure don’t serve is the people. You know who’s given (‘voted’) them those lavish pensions and benefits? They themselves did, and their predecessors.

The UN is supposed to keep the peace in the world. Well, works like a charm, doesn’t it? The IMF is tasked with keeping 200 or so nations in reasonably balanced economic conditions. Got it down. The US Congress was set up as a pillar of democracy, but it’s occupied by guys and gals who spend so much more time raising funds for their next campaign than representing those who voted them in, that they need lobbyists to tell them which way to vote.

As for the EU, is it even possible they’re the worst of the bunch? Europe is falling apart before all of our eyes, and they’re all in full tard denial about it. They are turning Greece into a third world country, they’re alienating Britain to the point where the English will, once they wake up to what’s going on, want to set Brussels on fire. And why? There’s no point left to any of it at all.

Italy’s a goner, once enough Italians realize what the ECB wants to do to their banks. France is such a key member nobody wants to even imagine it falling, so its broke banks are ignored. Holland will come very close to voting in Wilders, which means Nexit. Germany is destabilizing rapidly. Spain has been a hornets’ nest for years. Etc.

And again: why? Well, because the Obama/Merkel model has so dramatically failed. All these places where left and right work together to produce a shapeless blob somewhere in the center that has no identity and doesn’t speak out for anyone.

You just wouldn’t know it from reading the Washington Post. Or any comparable old and respected medium in any of these European countries. It’s not just the politics that have failed, it’s its propaganda machine too.

This is something that manifests itself differently in different places, but it shouldn’t be that hard to see the ties that bind it all together. For one thing, because, not even touched on so far, the amount of fake financial news that has been forced down our throats for decades, and increasingly so: the worse things get, the bigger the lie…

There is no economic recovery. Never was. Not in the US, not in Europe anywhere. It’s a fairy tale. There are plates shifting, sure. You can cherry pick a region stateside that does well if only you select the ‘right’ stats. Like you can say employment is on a roll, if you’re willing to discard the number of ‘newly created’ jobs that are part time.

And yes, if you just completely ignore that 94 million Americans are not counted at all in unemployment numbers, Obama has been a big success. It’s just that those 94 million have a vote, too. We will see that exact same dynamic, and we have already started, play out all across Europe.

It’ll be much messier, for instance because in Holland last time I looked 81 different political parties were vying to take part in the upcoming elections, but the end result will be the same. That is, the existing order will be voted out. Not everywhere, and it won’t be replaced by radically different parties and people in all places, but do please understand that it doesn’t have to.

In Europe, it’s not and/and, it’s if/or. As in, if either Italy or France or Holland vote in a party that wants to leave the EU or the Euro, it’s game over. The endgame will be almighty messed up because of all the laws and regulations the EU has invented, but eventually the walls of Brussels will crumble. Good riddance too.

I’ve said it a hundred times before, all the institutions mentioned before, EU, IMF, UN and yes, even Congress, exist by the grace of growth. People accept them only as long as they can show reasonable proof that they bring economic benefits. As soon as that’s gone (or I should say as soon as people figure it out), so are they.

People are going to vote for someone close to their own lives, their own world, to lead them in times of contraction. That is inevitable. It’s why Trump won, and it’s also why he’s set to fail. Isn’t that a lovely paradox? We’re going to split up into smaller entities, economic contraction guarantees it.

And while everyone tries to talk you into thinking that’s terrible, there’s no reason why it should be. We can work together in many different ways. All these supranational institutions have merely become straight jackets that serve only the people who work inside them and those outside who benefit from keeping up appearances and clinging to power.

That of course gets us back to the Washington Post and its comatose brethren. The US press has been a full accomplice with Washington in reporting fake news about the recovery, and it’s not there. Never has been. The Dow Jones says one thing, the votes for Trump say another. In the end, democracy is that simple. Same goes for Britain, same goes for continental Europe.

And there’s no doubt that Trump is an iceberg-sized gamble, but a change had to come. A change from the monsoon of fake news we have all been fed, but also initially a change that won’t be able to help itself from being replete with more fake news, from all sides.

Put it this way: in 2016, the engine of change got cranked up. In the new year, it will accelerate. That is 2017. That is what the new year will bring.

Merkel Must Call Highest Level UN Emergency Summit Over Refugees

Nov 092015
 
 November 9, 2015  Posted by at 1:33 pm Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,  7 Responses »


Giles Duley Afghan boy lands on Lesvos Nov 2015

German Chancellor Angela Merkel needs to do something, urgently, that should have been done months- if not more- ago. There has to be a UN emergency summit on the European refugee crisis, it has to involve leaders at the very highest levels, and it has to take place within weeks at the latest. Or else.

Of course any leader could call for the summit, and if Merkel waits too long -as she is wont to do- someone else should. But she is the best person for the job. No-one else who leads an entire continent looks ready to take this on, and moreover it’s her own country that quite possibly faces the gravest consequences of the crisis.

That is to say, for now Germany still comes in way after Greece in that regard, but if Alexis Tsipras would attempt to call such a summit, his appeal would fall on deaf ears, and at best lead to lots of international Merkel-style diddling (or ‘Merkeln’, as the Germans put it). And there’s already been far too much of that.

The renewed urgency comes from a number of directions. First, the continuing drownings of refugees in the Aegean sea. The lack of urgency with which those drownings have been met has become a huge and immediate threat to Merkel, if only because the entire European project has already died with the babies washing up on the shores of Greece.

Even if it will take a long time for people to recognize that, given the ideological ‘union’ blindness that pervades Brussels and European capitals. Angela’s legacy risks being not only her responsibility for thousands of deaths, but also the very demise of the EU. And that’s just for starters.

Secondly, It was Merkel herself last week who warned of renewed military conflicts in the Balkans if the approach to the refugee crisis wouldn’t change, and rapidly.

According to Merkel, if Balkan countries -continue to- build fences and razor wire barriers at their borders, one after the other, some countries risk ‘getting stuck’ with huge numbers of refugees on their territories that they are not in the least prepared for. Which makes Friday’s German announcement, mere days after Merkel’s warning, all the more ominous:

Germany Imposes Surprise Curbs On Syrian Refugees

Angela Merkel has performed an abrupt U-turn on her open-door policy towards people fleeing Syria’s civil war, with Berlin announcing that the hundreds of thousands of Syrians entering Germany would not be granted asylum or refugee status. Syrians would still be allowed to enter Germany, but only for one year and with “subsidiary protection” which limits their rights as refugees. Family members would be barred from joining them.

[..] the interior minister, Thomas de Maiziere, announced that Berlin was starting to fall into line with governments elsewhere in the EU, who were either erecting barriers to the newcomers or acting as transit countries and limiting their own intake of refugees.

[..] the suddenness of the move by the country that has been pivotal in the EU’s biggest ever immigration crisis will ripple across the region with unknown consequences, particularly in the transit countries of the Balkans and central Europe through which hundreds of thousands have been trekking towards Germany.

The German curbs will encourage these countries to establish barriers of their own to the refugee wave. Merkel is also pressing countries such as Croatia, Slovenia, and Serbia to establish “reception centres” or camps where refugees can be processed and screened before they reach Germany. The countries are resisting because no one knows what to do with those who are screened and do not pass muster for passage to Germany.

Around the same time that Germany pressures Balkan countries to establish ‘reception centers’, it votes down plans for ‘transit zones’ on its own territory. Some are more equal than others? Berlin had better beware.

The third ‘urgency’, curiously downplayed by media and politics, comes in the shape of a warning by the EU itself, albeit “buried in a 204-page report on the future of the European economy”.

European Union Predicts 3 Million More Refugees By End Of Next Year

The European Union predicted Thursday that up to 3 million additional asylum seekers could enter the 28-member bloc by the end of next year, suggesting the staggering pace of new arrivals in recent months shows no sign of abating. The forecast, buried in a 204-page report on the future of the European economy..

The EU expects 3 million refugees in 2016. This year, there will be ‘only’ 1 million. Of which resettlement deals have been made for 160,000, and at last count 116 have actually been resettled. Somebody better start taking this serious, or it will get very terribly out of hand. And that’s not to say it hasn’t already, with well over 3000 refugees having drowned in the Mediterranean, hundreds of them children.

This is a humanitarian disaster that nobody’s willing to recognize as one, and that is exactly what has to stop. The reason why this prediction is hushed up across the board is of course obvious: the 1 million refugees in 2015 have already strained resources, international relationships and indeed entire governments to such an extent, wars could start just because of that.

Add another 3 million, and the chances of a peaceful 2016 in Europe grow terribly slim. But not talking about it will of course slim down those chances further. And even if the total of 4 million refugees expected by the end of next year will be less than 1% of the EU’s 500 million population, someone better do something fast, or else.

The fact that Europe risks being strained to the point of military conflict, and there’s precious little reason to doubt Angela Merkel’s assessment of the situation, means that what needs to be done is to make the entire world aware that this is a global issue, not a regional one. And that’s where the UN emergency summit comes in.

Obviously, Germany is overwhelmed right now. But doing a U-turn on the open-door policy is not going to solve that problem. It will merely shift it, either within Germany itself, or towards the Balkan countries the refugees travel through to come to the Bundesrepublik.

Decision making by the EU Brussels has failed shamefully. And not only on the refugee crisis. But since Merkel is the no. 1 voice of power in Europe, that puts the shame on her as well. As we’ve said before, the only way to handle an issue such as this, is to put the people first.

You can’t let the people, the children, drown at random and expect to come away with your positions intact. And just because international politics these days focuses a lot on trying to deflect responsibilities by pointing to others, and to international bodies, blood on one’s hands doesn’t wash off easily, and in the end not at all.

Blaming the refugees themselves, as the head of EU border agency Frontex attempted once again by labeling them , is as useless as it is disgraceful. People fleeing war zones to save their lives are not ‘illegals’.

Blaming the ‘smugglers’, an even more popular EU pastime, makes no sense either. If the smugglers were Europe’s biggest concern, it would grant safe passage to refugees. That would stop ‘smuggling’ in one fell swoop. But it would demand a level of political courage that nobody, not Merkel either, possesses.

What drives policies across the board still comes down to the prevailing wish, fed to European populations by media and politics, to keep things as they are. To maybe invite the token refugee, but to prevent sudden or large changes in the society people happen to live in.

And while that may be understandable, it doesn’t mean it’s always realistic. Sometimes change is inevitable. We may find it easier to accept that when it comes to earthquakes and hurricanes than in the case of mass migrations, but all of these are regular occurrences throughout history. In the end, all we can do is make the best of it, in the most humane way we know of, or descend into mayhem.

One more thing that needs repeating time and again though politicians won’t like it: Europe’s leadership knew the refugee problem was coming. Angela Merkel was warned by her Bundespolizei at least eight months ago, but there were warnings even way before that. Everyone just chose to ignore them.

Refugee Crisis Was Not Unexpected, Top UN Official Says

Director-General of the United Nations office in Geneva, Denmark’s Michael Moller: [..] “The crisis we have today, we knew it was going to happen. The leaders of Europe were told it was going to happen at least two years ago.”

[..] there will be even greater problems, unless we sit down globally and figure out structures and ways to deal with this in the future. Not to reinvent the wheel every time that happens, but to rethink completely and strengthen the humanitarian system, because I guarantee you that it will happen again.

Moller say the same thing I do: “we need to sit down globally”. He doesn’t provide a timeframe, but between the lines it’s clear he doesn’t think either that there’s time to waste. A UN emergency summit may be all that stands between us and ‘anarchy’, in one way and shape or the other.

This summit must include the presidents and prime ministers of all major nations (and please leave out the EU). Obama, Putin, Xi Jinping and Merkel, but also the leaders of Greece, Turkey, Jordan, Lebanon (where the majority of Syrian refugees are) and all Balkan countries. Countries like Canada, Brazil and Australia can and must be called upon to grant asylum to many more refugees than they do now.

In this week’s issue of the New Yorker, George Packer describes how America took in more than a million refugees from South East Asia in one year 35 years ago, and how it can and should make such an effort once more:

America’s Apathy About The Syrian Refugees

[..].. the U.S. has accepted fewer than two thousand Syrians. In September, President Obama announced an increase in the quota for the coming year to ten thousand. That figure represents just half the monthly total of Indochinese refugees brought here in 1980. One refugee advocate called it “an embarrassingly low number.” And yet even this humble goal is unlikely to be reached.

The world has a narrow window left to prevent an already grave humanitarian disaster into something much worse, to prevent antagonism and military action that will set loose the evil genies of the Pandora’s box that is Europe’s past, once again, and genies of surrounding regions too. There is no need for that. Not yet.

The world, united in such a summit, must also look beyond the refugee crisis, and, as the UN’s Moller says, “rethink completely and strengthen the humanitarian system”. Because there are other dangers on the horizon, potentially much worse. Climate refugees are an obvious one, but even more, there’s the economic downturn nobody seems to be willing to acknowledge (at their own peril).

As I wrote a week ago, in an article quoted by Zero Hedge on Wednesday in their piece on German opposition parties warning of a domestic civil war:

Europe Will Never Be The Same; Neither Will The World

Ignorance and denial threatens to lead to a needless increase in nationalism, fascism, violence, misery, death and warfare. If we were to acknowledge that the change is inevitable, and prepare ourselves accordingly, much of this could be avoided.

There are two main engines of change that have started to transform the Europe we think we know. First, a mass migration spearheaded by the flight of refugees from regions in the world which Europeans have actively helped descend into lethal chaos. Second, an economic downturn the likes of which hasn’t been seen in 80 years or so (think Kondratieff cycle).

Negative ideas about refugees are already shaping everyday opinion and politics in many places, and this will be greatly exacerbated by the enormous economic depression that for now remains largely hidden behind desperate sleight-of-hands enacted by central bankers, politicians and media.

There are fine theories around coming from fine people, on how refugees can benefit a host country’s economic systems. But they are the kind of people who are perpetually looking at economic growth. And no such growth is guaranteed – to put it awfully mildly.

Therefore, it doesn’t really matter to the issue if refugees do or do not contribute ‘positively’ to a country’s economics, because all countries are facing a giant slowdown and depression caused by an inevitable debt deflation. And that makes it all the more urgent for people, and societies, to be prepared for all possible outcomes, including worst case scenarios.

The depression is guaranteed, and so are millions more people fleeing the ruins that were ones their homes, and their hopes for a decent future for their children.

Every day that Merkel loses in calling this highest-level, highest-urgency, UN summit, is a day that more people will drown. And that means one more day that we all will lose more of our own humanity, and of our claims for others to show us theirs.

In our own way, we’re all already drowning and washing up devoid of life, and of human values, somewhere on a cold and lonely distant beach.

Debt Rattle September 29 2015

Sep 292015
 
 September 29, 2015  Posted by at 8:46 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , , ,  1 Response »


Gottscho-Schleisner L Motors at 175th Street and Broadway, NYC 1948

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• Commodity Rout Beginning to Look Like a Full-Blown Crisis (Bloomberg)
• Glencore Shares Obliterated After Analysts Warn They Could Be Worthless (Tel.)
• Is Glencore Worth $26 Billion Or $98 Billion? Analysts Can’t Decide (Bloomberg)
• Global Stocks Set to Fall As $800 Billion Wipeout Boosts Yen, Bonds (Bloomberg)
• Three Major Trends that Shaped Global Economy for Decades Set to Change (BBG)
• Big Oil Faces Shrinking Prospects (FT)
• Why Shell Quit Drilling In Arctic After Spending $7 Billion On Single Well (BBG)
• Saudi Arabia Withdraws Billions From Markets to Plug Budget Deficit (BBG)
• The Collapse Of Saudi Arabia Is Inevitable (Nafeez Ahmed)
• Deutsche Bank Predicted To Cut 10,000 Jobs (Telegraph)
• UK Steel Industry Buckles Under The Weight Of Cheap Chinese Product (Guardian)
• VW Stock to Be Removed From Dow Jones Sustainability Indexes (Bloomberg)
• Tick Tick Tick (Jim Kunstler)
• Putin: West’s Rampant ‘Egotism’ To Blame For Syria, Ukraine, Isis (Guardian)
• Obama Deifies American Hegemony (Paul Craig Roberts)
• Barclays, HSBC Named In Swiss Precious Metals Price Fixing Investigation (TiM)
• It’s Time To Unpick Corporate Welfare (Kevin Farnsworth)
• Jamaica Seeks Billions Of Pounds In British Reparations For Slavery (Guardian)
• New Zealand’s New Ocean Sanctuary One Of World’s Largest Protected Areas (Gua.)
• More Than 1,100 Migrants Rescued Off Libyan Coast On Monday (DW)

Not beginning, continuing.

• Commodity Rout Beginning to Look Like a Full-Blown Crisis (Bloomberg)

The 15-month commodities free-fall is starting to resemble a full-blown crisis. Investors are reacting to diminished demand from China and an end to the cheap-money era provided by the Federal Reserve. A Bloomberg index of commodity futures has fallen 50% since a 2011 high, and eight of the 10 worst performers in the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index this year are commodities-related businesses. Now it all seems to be coming apart at once. Alcoa, the biggest U.S. aluminum producer, said it would break itself into two companies amid a glut stemming from booming production. Shell announced it would abandon its drilling campaign in U.S. Arctic waters after spending $7 billion.

And the carnage culminated Monday with Glencore, the commodities powerhouse that came to symbolize the era with its initial public offering in 2011 and bold acquisition of a rival in 2013, falling by as much as 31% in London trading. “With China slowing down and a lot of uncertainty, fears in the market have intensified, and the reduction in the pace of demand growth for all commodities has seemed to send everybody off the cliff,” said Ed Hirs, managing director of a small oil producer who teaches energy economics at the University of Houston. Peak prices in gold and silver are four years old, oil’s plummet since June 2014 has been pushed along by OPEC’s November decision to keep pumping despite excess supply and U.S. natural gas prices have fallen to less than a fourth of their 2008 value.

It’s about to get worse, according to analysts John LaForge and Warren Pies of Venice, Florida-based Ned Davis Research Group. Commodities may be in the fourth year of a 20-year “bear super-cycle,” according to an Aug. 14 research note. The analysts looked at commodity busts dating to the 18th century and found them driven by factors such as market momentum rather than fundamentals, LaForge said Monday in an interview.

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“More than 85% has been wiped off the stock so far this year..”

• Glencore Shares Obliterated After Analysts Warn They Could Be Worthless (Tel.)

Glencore shares plunged 30pc in afternoon trading to a new record low after analysts warned the stock could be worthless if commodity prices remain at current levels. The shares went into freefall after analysts at Investec issued a note warning that heavily indebted companies such as the Swiss-based mining and trading giant could see almost all their equity value eliminated under current commodity prices, leaving nothing for shareholders. Almost £2bn was wiped off the value of Glencore as investors panicked and dumped the stock. It puts further pressure on Glencore, which has already been hit hard by the slump in commodity prices. Earlier this month the miner was forced to raise $2.5bn through a share placement, selling 1.3 billion new shares at 125p apiece.

It has also has announced plans in recent weeks to suspend its dividend and sell off assets as part of debt reduction measures to bolster its balance sheet. Hunter Hillcoat, an analyst at Investec, said: “Mining companies gorged themselves on cheap debt in a race to grow production following the Chinese stimulus that occurred in the wake of the great financial crisis. “The consequences are only now coming home to roost, as mines take a long time to build. We expect commodity markets to remain subdued for several years to come given that excess supply has coincided with a slowdown in demand.”

Even a move by chief executive Ivan Glasenberg to instil confidence in investors by buying 110 million shares has had little effect on sentiment. More than 85pc has been wiped off the stock so far this year and it is trading far below its listing price in May 2011 of 530p. The analysis from Investec looked at the entire debt pile of Glencore, while the company itself has always argued its stockpiles of metals can quickly be sold to rapidly reduce the debt levels. However, the broker warned that: “If major commodity prices remain at current levels, our analysis implies that, in the absence of substantial restructuring, nearly all the equity value of both Glencore and Anglo American could evaporate.”

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How about nothing?

• Is Glencore Worth $26 Billion Or $98 Billion? Analysts Can’t Decide (Bloomberg)

Glencore, the commodity trader that lost about a third of its value Monday, is worth either $98 billion or $26 billion, depending on which analyst you ask. At Sanford C. Bernstein, price targets published by Paul Gait suggest the Baar, Switzerland-based resource company can rally sevenfold to 450 pence, the top end of predictions tracked by Bloomberg. At the bottom, Nomura Holdings’s 120-pence forecast implies a market value that is $72 billion lower. The dispersion shows the difficulty in valuing a company caught between China’s slowing economy and mounting concerns about its debt load.

In addition to diverging views on copper prices, questions about how to evaluate Glencore’s trading business, unique among big mining companies, are muddling the equation, according to Clarksons Platou Securities’ Jeremy Sussman. “Glencore does have a unique trading business that is different from their competitors, and it’s a much more difficult business to model than a straight ‘you mine it, you sell it, and take whatever margin’ one,” said Sussman, an analyst for Clarksons Platou in New York. He recommends holding the stock, which he estimates will rise to 190 pence. Analysts “with targets in the higher end are probably in the camp that think trading will return to levels where it had been in the past couple of years.”

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There goes your recovery. Not going to happen.

• Global Stocks Set to Fall As $800 Billion Wipeout Boosts Yen, Bonds (Bloomberg)

Global equities looked set to extend Monday’s $800 billion rout as U.S. and European index futures followed Asian stocks south amid a selloff in commodity-trading firms that’s sent investors toward the safety of the yen and sovereign bonds, while sending the cost of insuring debt skyward. Glencore dropped by a record in Hong Kong, tracking losses in London and dragging shares of Noble Group, Mitsui and BHP Billiton lower. The MSCI Asia Pacific Index is heading for its biggest quarterly loss since the global financial crisis, with every major benchmark in the region retreating on Tuesday. The yen was stronger against all 16 major peers, while the cost of insuring Asian debt jumped to the highest since October 2013. Australian and German bonds tracked Treasury gains.

A 15-month rout in raw materials and energy prices is colliding with surging corporate borrowing costs to challenge the business models of previously high-flying commodity firms such as Glencore, whose London shares have dropped 73% since June. The yield on U.S. non-investment grade corporate notes has risen for 11 straight days amid slowing Chinese growth and doubts about whether the U.S. economy is strong enough to handle higher Federal Reserve interest rates. “Glencore’s problems have heightened already deep concerns about the financial health of commodity companies,” said Win Udomrachtavanich at One Asset Management. “The outlook of commodity prices will continue to be very weak because of the prolonged global economic slowdown. Investors just face an even tougher environment with this as sentiment was already weakened by the U.S. interest-rate outlook.”

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Demographics. Cute, but very one-sided.

• Three Major Trends that Shaped Global Economy for Decades Set to Change (BBG)

Demographics can explain two-thirds of everything, University of Toronto professor David K. Foot famously quipped. And according to Charles Goodhart, professor at the London School of Economics and senior economic consultant to Morgan Stanley, demographics explain the vast majority of three major trends that have shaped the socioeconomic and political environments across advanced economies over the past few decades. Those three would be declining real interest rates, shrinking real wages, and increasing inequality. Goodhart & Co.’s contentions aren’t necessarily novel, with versions of these conclusions having been articulated by Toby Nangle, head of multi-asset management at Columbia Threadneedle Investments, and given a U.S. focus by Matt Busigin and Guillermo Roditi Dominguez, portfolio managers at New River Investments.

But Goodhart’s work is a particularly thorough and forceful manifesto. The conditions that fostered these three intertwined major developments are nearly obsolete, writes the former member of the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee and other analysts from Morgan Stanley, and this has profound implications for the framework of the global economy in the decades to come. Goodhart argues that since roughly 1970, the world has been in a demographic sweet spot characterized by a falling dependency ratio, or in plainer terms, a high share of working age people relative to the total population. At the same time, globalization provided multinational companies the ability to tap into this new pool of labor. This positive supply shock was a negative for established workers, forcing down the price of labor as capital flowed to these areas.

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“More worrying, from Shell’s point of view, is the prospect of a declining reserves base. In common with several of the other oil majors, it is pumping oil faster than it can book new reserves of bankable assets.”

• Big Oil Faces Shrinking Prospects (FT)

One hundred and fifty miles from the Alaskan coast lies what must be the most expensive oil well ever drilled. Shell’s decision to abandon the Burger J prospect, along with its entire Arctic exploration campaign, marks an outcome that many at the oil major must have dreaded since it bought the leases in 2008. That is not because of the cost — enormous though it is — of setting up remote platforms and drilling into rock that lies beneath 140ft of water. Shell is reckoned to have spent about $7bn on the exploration effort; some estimates put the figure even higher. But its balance sheet is strong enough to absorb the loss. Nor will the public ill-will generated by years of exploration in pristine Arctic waters last for ever.

Indeed, for some senior executives at Shell, the prospect of success in the Arctic was more worrying than the possibility of failure. Building the permanent facilities needed for actual production would have been far more contentious than the limited (if sometimes hapless) exploration work. Among the people on record as opposing Arctic drilling is Hillary Clinton, the frontrunner for the Democratic nomination for president. That is a battle that Shell will no longer have to fight. More worrying, from Shell’s point of view, is the prospect of a declining reserves base. In common with several of the other oil majors, it is pumping oil faster than it can book new reserves of bankable assets. This was the reason for pushing on in the Arctic against public criticism and deteriorating economic prospects for so long.

If, as some of the company’s executives believed, the Chukchi Sea blocks held about 35bn barrels of oil, Shell’s reserve base would have been secured and much effort would have been devoted to winning hearts and minds and pushing down costs. As it stands, the reserve base will continue to decline. Shell’s $70bn purchase of BG Group, if completed, will bring access to some identified resources — for instance off the coast of Brazil — but the cost of development is high and success is very uncertain. In the long run, this is little short of an existential challenge. Can the existing reserves base be replaced with resources that can be developed commercially? Or is a period of corporate decline inevitable? For the past three years Shell has failed to find sufficient resources to replace production despite heavy exploration expenditure. In 2014 it replaced only 26% of its oil and gas production. Over the past three years the figure is just 67%.

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How to spell desperation.

• Why Shell Quit Drilling In Arctic After Spending $7 Billion On Single Well (BBG)

Royal Dutch Shell’s abrupt announcement today that it would cease all offshore drilling in the Arctic is surprising for several reasons. One is the unusual degree of confidence the company expressed as recently as mid-August that it had identified 15 billion barrels of oil beneath the well known as Burger J it’s now abandoning. What on earth happened? After spending $7 billion over several years to explore a single well this summer, Shell said in a statement that it “found indications of oil and gas … but these are not sufficient to warrant further exploration.” This contrasts sharply with Shell officials’ statements as recently as July and August that based on 3D and 4D seismic analysis of core samples, its petroleum geologists were “very confident” drillers would find plentiful oil.

The geologists’ expectations were the main reason Shell spent all that money on a project that entailed much-higher-than-average operational risks and international environmental condemnation. Giving up has got to hurt at a company that prides itself on scientific and technical prowess. Shell said it would take an unspecified financial charge related to the folding of its Arctic operation, which carries a value of $3 billion on the company’s balance sheet. In late July, when Ann Pickard, Shell’s top executive for the Arctic, explained the economics of drilling in the Chukchi Sea, she readily acknowledged that if oil prices remained below $50 a barrel, the off-shore adventure would be for naught. At $70, Chukchi oil would be “competitive,” she told Bloomberg Businessweek, and at $110—a reasonable projection, according to the company’s economists—it would be a huge winner.

She was talking about prospective prices 15 years from now. Well, in recent weeks, Shell appears to have lost some of its bravado about where prices will be in 2030—according to a person familiar with the company’s thinking. Otherwise, it wouldn’t have given up altogether on the Chukchi, where it continues to hold 275 Outer Continental lease blocks. Indeed, Marvin Odum, director of Shell Upstream Americas, said in the written statement that the company “continues to see important exploration potential in the basin, and the area is likely to ultimately be of strategic importance to Alaska and the U.S.”

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Indeed: “None of this should come as much surprise..”

• Saudi Arabia Withdraws Billions From Markets to Plug Budget Deficit (BBG)

Saudi Arabia has withdrawn as much as $70 billion from global asset managers as OPEC’s largest oil producer seeks to plug its budget deficit, according to financial services market intelligence company Insight Discovery. “Fund managers we’ve spoken to estimate SAMA has pulled out between $50 billion to $70 billion from global asset managers over the past six months,” Nigel Sillitoe, chief executive officer of the Dubai-based firm, said by telephone Monday. “Saudi Arabia is withdrawing funds because it’s trying to cut its widening deficit and it’s financing the war in Yemen,” he said, declining to name the fund managers. Saudi Arabia is seeking to halt the erosion of its finances after oil prices halved in the past year.

The Saudi Arabian Monetary Authority’s reserves held in foreign securities have fallen about 10% from a peak of $737 billion in August 2014, to $661 billion in July, according to central bank data. The government is accelerating bond sales to help sustain spending.
“Foreign-exchange reserve depletion, rather than accumulation, is the new reality for Saudi Arabia,” Jason Tuvey, Middle East economist at Capital Economics, said in an e-mailed note Monday. “None of this should come as much surprise,” given the current-account deficit and risk of capital flight, he said. Saudi Arabia’s attempts to bolster its fiscal position contrast with smaller and less-populated nations in the Arabian peninsular such as Qatar.

The world’s richest nation on a per capita basis plans to channel about $35 billion of investment into the U.S. over the next five years as it seeks to move away from European deals. That’s on top of plans to set up a $10 billion investment venture with China’s Citic Group. With income from oil accounting for about 80% of revenue, Saudi Arabia’s budget deficit may widen to 20% of gross domestic product this year, according to the IMF. SAMA plans to raise between 90 billion riyals ($24 billion) and 100 billion riyals in bonds before the end of the year as it seeks to diversify its $752 billion economy, people familiar with the matter said in August.

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Theer are rumblings inside the House of Saud as we speak.

• The Collapse Of Saudi Arabia Is Inevitable (Nafeez Ahmed)

On Tuesday 22 September, Middle East Eye broke the story of a senior member of the Saudi royal family calling for a “change” in leadership to fend off the kingdom’s collapse. In a letter circulated among Saudi princes, its author, a grandson of the late King Abdulaziz Ibn Saud, blamed incumbent King Salman for creating unprecedented problems that endangered the monarchy’s continued survival. “We will not be able to stop the draining of money, the political adolescence, and the military risks unless we change the methods of decision making, even if that implied changing the king himself,” warned the letter. Whether or not an internal royal coup is round the corner – and informed observers think such a prospect “fanciful” – the letter’s analysis of Saudi Arabia’s dire predicament is startlingly accurate.

Like many countries in the region before it, Saudi Arabia is on the brink of a perfect storm of interconnected challenges that, if history is anything to judge by, will be the monarchy’s undoing well within the next decade. The biggest elephant in the room is oil. Saudi Arabia’s primary source of revenues, of course, is oil exports. For the last few years, the kingdom has pumped at record levels to sustain production, keeping oil prices low, undermining competing oil producers around the world who cannot afford to stay in business at such tiny profit margins, and paving the way for Saudi petro-dominance. But Saudi Arabia’s spare capacity to pump like crazy can only last so long. A new peer-reviewed study in the Journal of Petroleum Science and Engineering anticipates that Saudi Arabia will experience a peak in its oil production, followed by inexorable decline, in 2028 – that’s just 13 years away.

This could well underestimate the extent of the problem. According to the Export Land Model (ELM) created by Texas petroleum geologist Jeffrey J Brown and Dr Sam Foucher, the key issue is not oil production alone, but the capacity to translate production into exports against rising rates of domestic consumption. Brown and Foucher showed that the inflection point to watch out for is when an oil producer can no longer increase the quantity of oil sales abroad because of the need to meet rising domestic energy demand. In 2008, they found that Saudi net oil exports had already begun declining as of 2006. They forecast that this trend would continue. They were right. From 2005 to 2015, Saudi net exports have experienced an annual decline rate of 1.4%, within the range predicted by Brown and Foucher.

A report by Citigroup recently predicted that net exports would plummet to zero in the next 15 years. This means that Saudi state revenues, 80% of which come from oil sales, are heading downwards, terminally. Saudi Arabia is the region’s biggest energy consumer, domestic demand having increased by 7.5% over the last five years – driven largely by population growth. The total Saudi population is estimated to grow from 29 million people today to 37 million by 2030. As demographic expansion absorbs Saudi Arabia’s energy production, the next decade is therefore likely to see the country’s oil exporting capacity ever more constrained.

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Add Deutsche to Merkel’s bailout list. VW, refugees etc etc

• Deutsche Bank Predicted To Cut 10,000 Jobs (Telegraph)

Deutsche Bank’s new chief executive has to focus on rapid cost cuts if he wants to turn the struggling German giant around and win over investors, according to a top banking analyst’s assessment of the lender. JP Morgan’s Kian Abouhossein expects Deutsche’s John Cryan to announce plans to cut expenses at the bank by at least €2.5bn (£1.8bn) by 2018, chop 10,000 staff and cut back on 10,000 of the external consultants paid for by the group. Mr Cryan was given the top job in June following the departure of former co-chief executives Anshu Jain and Jurgen Fitschen, who quit after a three-year reign at the bank that was marred by the biggest ever Libor fine and a failure to impress shareholders. The bank’s stock shot up 8pc on the day it was announced that the co-chiefs were leaving, although the shares have since slide to 23.7 cents, which is 14pc below the price when Mr Cryan took over.

Mr Abouhossein believes the new boss has a difficult task ahead to prove his worth to shareholders, as the investor base has been let down repeatedly in the past by executives who have failed to turn the bank around. “In our view, DB [Deutsche Bank] management should focus on creating shareholder value by growing retained earnings and the key is to cut costs – a task which DB has failed to achieve in the past, and hence, on which we believe has little ‘goodwill’ with investors,” said the analyst in a research note to investors. He argued that “Deutsche Bank’s cost management has been poor historically”, resulting in a workforce of 84,000 full time staff plus an army of 30,000 external consultants, after excluding the group’s retail arm, Postbank.

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Globalization frees up everyone!

• UK Steel Industry Buckles Under The Weight Of Cheap Chinese Product (Guardian)

Britain’s steel industry has been in meltdown for years: slowing demand and a flood of cheap Chinese steel into the market has hammered high-cost western producers. About half of the 1.6bn tonnes of steel made globally each year now comes from China. But an already perilous situation for British steelmakers has exacerbated in the past year as the Chinese economy slowed sharply, forcing Beijing to aggressively chase foreign cash for its wares. Tom Blenkinsop, chairman of the all-party parliamentary group on steel and MP for Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland, summed up the dilemma: “China is pouring steel into the European and world market for any currency it can get.” Flooding the market with cheap Chinese product has forced the price of slab steel down by 45% in just 12 months, from $500 (£330) a tonne to about $280.

As a result, China’s steel exports have grown 53% in the last year. In Britain, imports of Chinese steel have ballooned from 2% of UK demand in 2011 to 8% this year. This influx of cheap steel is a threat to all but the fittest western players – bad news for SSI UK, which is one of the weakest. Britain’s second biggest steelmaker has confirmed plans to axe 1,700 jobs and mothball its Redcar plant. It threatens to bring the curtain down on 160 years of steelmaking in the Teesside region of north-east England. It is the latest grisly chapter for Britain’s once mighty steel industry. Steel produced on Teesside was used to build well-known UK structures including Birmingham’s Bullring and Canary Wharf in east London. However, the industry now employs about 20,000 workers, a 10th of the number employed in the sector during the 1970s.

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As if anyone cares apart from those who seek to turn green into green.

• VW Stock to Be Removed From Dow Jones Sustainability Indexes (Bloomberg)

Volkswagen AG’s stock will be removed from the Dow Jones Sustainability indexes after the automaker cheated on emissions tests. The Sept. 18 admission by VW that it systematically manipulated U.S. emissions tests prompted a review of its status, S&P Dow Jones Indices LLC and RobecoSAM said in a statement Tuesday. The stock will be pulled after the close of trading Oct. 5 from the DJSI World, DJSI Europe and all other related indexes, according to the statement. S&P Dow Jones Indices and RobecoSAM manage the Dow Jones sustainability indexes, which track the performance of companies that rank the best in their industries in terms of economic, environmental and social criteria.

The Dow Jones Sustainability World Index, introduced in 1999, was the first global such benchmark, according to the companies. Volkswagen’s stock has plunged 39% since Sept. 18, cutting the company’s market value by €27 billion, and prosecutors in Germany said Monday that they’ve started a criminal probe of the company that includes an investigation of former Chief Executive Officer Martin Winterkorn.

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Jim’s dead on on Putin.

• Tick Tick Tick (Jim Kunstler)

Did Charlie Rose look like a fucking idiot last night on 60-Minutes, or what, asking Vladimir Putin how he could know for sure that the US was behind the 2014 Ukraine coup against President Viktor Yanukovych? Maybe the idiots are the 60-Minutes producers and fluffers who are supposed to prep Charlie’s questions. Putin seemed startled and amused by this one on Ukraine: how could he know for sure? Well, gosh, because Ukraine was virtually a province of Russia in one form or another for hundreds of years, and Russia has a potent intelligence service (formerly called the KGB) that had assets and connections threaded through Ukrainian society like the rhizomorphs of the fungus Armillaria solidipes through a conifer forest. Gosh, Charlie, it’s like asking Obama whether the NSA might know what’s going on in Texas.

And so there is Vladimir Putin, a former KGB officer, having to spell it out for the American clodhopper super-journalist. “We have thousands of contacts with them. We know who and where, and when they met with someone, and who worked with those who ousted Yanukovych, how they were supported, how much they were paid, how they were trained, where, in which country, and who those instructors were. We know everything.” The only thing Vlad left out of course was the now-world-famous panicked yelp by Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland crying, “Fuck the EU,” when events in Kiev started getting out of hand for US stage-managers. But he probably heard about that, too. Charlie then voice-overed the following statement: “For the record, the US has denied any involvement in the removal of the Ukrainian leader.”

Right. And your call is important to us. And your check is in the mail. And they hate us for our freedom. This bit on Ukraine was only a little more appalling than Charlie’s earlier segment on Syria. Was Putin trying to rescue the Assad government? Charlie asked, in the context of President Obama’s statement years ago that “Assad has to go.” Putin answered as if he were explaining something that should have been self-evident to a not-very-bright high school freshman: “To remove the legitimate government would create a situation which you can witness in other countries of the region, for instance Libya, where all the state institutions have disintegrated. We see a similar situation in Iraq. There’s no other solution to the Syrian crisis than strengthening the government structure.”

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And Putin’s dead on when it comes to distorted western power games.

• Putin: West’s Rampant ‘Egotism’ To Blame For Syria, Ukraine, Isis (Guardian)

“Egotism” was a word Vladimir Putin used more than once as he gave a thinly veiled dressing down to the United States on Monday. His speech covered little new ground but sharpened his critique of the current world order and called on the world to come together to fight terrorism in the Middle East. Putin bemoaned “a world in which egotism reigns supreme” and railed against the arrogant hubris of the west. Putin has been giving much the same speech since he first laid out his grievances in February 2007: the “unipolar” world in which Washington dominates, he says, has led to a more dangerous world than that of the cold war, when an imperfect but useful balance stopped any one country from dominating.

This speech, his first to the United Nations general assembly since 2005, comes as Putin visits the US for the first time since the Ukraine crisis prompted acrimony, mistrust and sanctions. It was notable for its intonation. Putin adopted the tone of a wise elder, alternately angered by the bellicosity and saddened by the naivety of the west. “You want to ask the people who created this situation: ‘Do you at least understand what you’ve done?’ But I fear that the question would just hang in the air, because after all, they have not turned their back on policies based on self-certainty, a sense of superiority and impunity.” The chaos in the Middle East and the rise of the Islamic State? That was the fault of the west, who armed those it naively thought to be secular freedom fighters.

The military conflict in Ukraine (or, as Putin put it, the “armed coup organised from abroad followed by civil war”)? Also down to the meddling of the west. Washington, said Putin, was repeating the mistakes of the Soviet Union by trying to export its own model of development to other countries. It has forced post-Soviet countries to make a “false choice between east and west”, sowing chaos and prompting unrest, he said. It was a description of events that would not have gone down well with the Ukrainian delegation – though they were not there to hear it, having walked out before Putin took to the podium.

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Obama’s speech at the UN yesterday was an exercise in severe embarrassment to himself and the US.

• Obama Deifies American Hegemony (Paul Craig Roberts)

On this 70th anniversary of the UN, I have spent much of the day listening to the various speeches. The most truthful ones were delivered by the presidents of Russia and Iran. The presidents of Russia and Iran refused to accept the Washington-serving reality or Matrix that Obama sought to impose on the world with his speech. Both presidents forcefully challenged the false reality that the propagandistic Western media and its government masters seek to create in order to continue to exercise their hegemony over everyone else. What about China? China’s president left the fireworks to Putin, but set the stage for Putin by rejecting US claims of hegemony: “The future of the world must be shaped by all countries.” China’s president spoke in veiled terms against Western neoliberal economics and declared that “China’s vote in the UN will always belong to the developing countries.”

In the masterly way of Chinese diplomacy, the President of China spoke in a non-threatening, non-provocative way. His criticisms of the West were indirect. He gave a short speech and was much applauded. Obama followed second to the President of Brazil, who used her opportunity for PR for Brazil, at least for the most part. Obama gave us the traditional Washington spiel: “The US has worked to prevent a third world war, to promote democracy by overthrowing governments with violence, to respect the dignity and equal worth of all peoples except for the Russians in Ukraine and Muslims in Somalia, Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, and Pakistan.” Obama declared Washington’s purpose to “prevent bigger countries from imposing their will on smaller ones.”

Imposing its will is what Washington has been doing throughout its history and especially under Obama’s regime. All those refugees overrunning Europe? Washington has nothing to do with it. The refugees are the fault of Assad who drops bombs on people. When Assad drops bombs it oppresses people, but when Washington drops bombs it liberates them. Obama justified Washington’s violence as liberation from “dictators,” such as Assad in Syria, who garnered 80% of the vote in the last election, a vote of confidence that Obama never received and never will. Obama said that it wasn’t Washington that violated Ukraine’s sovereignty with a coup that overthrew a democratically elected government. It was Russia, whose president invaded Ukraine and annexed Crimera and is trying to annex the other breakaway republics, Russian populations who object to the Russophobia of Washington’s puppet government in Ukraine.

[..] Did the UN General Assembly buy it? Probably the only one present sufficiently stupid to buy it was the UK’s Cameron. The rest of Washington’s vassals went through the motion of supporting Obama’s propaganda, but there was no conviction in their voices. Vladimir Putin would have none of it. He said that the UN works, if it works, by compromise and not by the imposition of one country’s will, but after the end of the Cold War “a single center of domination arose in the world”—the “exceptional” country. This country, Putin said, seeks its own course which is not one of compromise or attention to the interests of others. In response to Obama’s speech that Russia and its ally Syria wear the black hats, Putin said in reference to Obama’s speech that “one should not manipulate words.” Putin said that Washington repeats its mistakes by relying on violence which results in poverty and social destruction. He asked Obama: “Do you realize what you have done?”

Read more …

UBS to get lenient treatment, squeal on all others in a LIBOR repeat.

• Barclays, HSBC Named In Swiss Precious Metals Price Fixing Investigation (TiM)

UK banks Barclays and HSBC are among seven financial institutions being investigated by Swiss officials amid allegations of price fixing in the precious metals market. According to the Bern-based Weko commission, the probe will look at possible collusion of bid/ask spreads in the metals market for gold, silver, platinum and palladium. Also under investigation are two Swiss banks, UBS and Julius Baer, as well as three foreign banks – Deutsche Bank, Morgan Stanley and Mitsui. Weko said in a statement: ‘We have indications that possible prohibited competitive agreements in the trading of precious metals were agreed among the banks mentioned.’ Weko said it was looking at what effects any possible collusion would have had on the Swiss market.

Findings are expected to be published by 2017 and banks found to have flouted Switzerland’s competition laws could be fined as much as 10% of revenue. Weko’s inquiry follows similar investigations by the European Commission and the US Department of Justice and is the latest in a long line of probes into manipulation of the precious metals and foreign exchange markets. Last year, Switzerland’s financial regulator FINMA said it had found a ‘clear attempt’ to manipulate precious metals price benchmarks during a cross-market investigation into trading at UBS. HSBC said this year that the US Department of Justice requested documents from the bank in November in relation to a criminal antitrust investigation in to precious metals.

In January, the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission also issued a subpoena to the bank, seeking documents relating to its precious metals trading operations. And in April, the European Commission issued a request for information related to HSBC’s precious metals operations and the bank is currently co-operating with authorities. The UK’s FCA has already taken action and last year fined Barclays £26million after an options trader was found to have manipulated the London gold fix.

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“I write “debated”, but this is too generous to some of those who have passed judgment on the work.”

• It’s Time To Unpick Corporate Welfare (Kevin Farnsworth)

I am the person behind the second most-debated figure of the Labour leadership race – the £93bn corporate welfare bill. I write “debated”, but this is too generous to some of those who have passed judgment on the work. Once Jeremy Corbyn had begun campaigning on the basis that some of the £93bn could be saved, proper analysis and discussion gave way to myth making and conjecture, and I didn’t recognise many of the arguments that were attributed to me. Despite being mentioned at some point by just about all of the media outlets, the only journalist who contacted me before writing about my research was Aditya Chakrabortty, who wrote the original front-page splash for the Guardian based on my report.

I’m hardly surprised then, if disappointed, that publications as venerable as the Economist have got basic things confused in their rush to write off Corbyn and my research. The report was published in July by the Sheffield Political Economy Research Institute and builds on years of researching and writing about public and social policies. Each category of corporate welfare I identify – made up of the various forms of state provision that service the needs of businesses – builds on the work of British and international academics, journalists, governmental organisations, politicians, policymakers and think tanks. Businesses could not do business without huge amounts of government support.

They require legal protections, a state-backed currency, the right frameworks to hire and fire and essential infrastructure. They depend on financial backing to exploit innovations and invest. And public policies operate to socialise various corporate risks. Employers need educated and healthy workers. Unemployment benefits and pensions increase labour market flexibility, making it easier to hire, fire and retire employees. The annual Global Competitiveness Report clearly illustrates the importance of comprehensive state provision to economic growth, productivity, profitability and national competitiveness. And it is published by the World Economic Forum – the organisation that runs the Davos gathering, so hardly a mouthpiece of the left.

The £93bn estimate, in fact, excludes most of the above. It is made up only of more direct benefits and services. It doesn’t include the indirect benefits that accrue to businesses from the social welfare system and the legacy costs linked to the bank bailouts. It doesn’t even include the cost of in-work tax credits, which have been labelled corporate welfare by others, including Conservative MPs. The more direct categories of corporate welfare identified in my report include official estimates of the cost of subsidies and grants to companies, worth about £15bn a year. Beyond this, the report identifies tax benefits as a major component of corporate welfare, at £44bn. Not surprisingly, this has proved to be the most controversial category of all.

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“You are a grandson of the Jamaican soil who has been privileged and enriched by your forebears’ sins of the enslavement of our ancestors … You are, Sir, a prized product of this land and the bonanza benefits reaped by your family and inherited by you continue to bind us together like birds of a feather..”

• Jamaica Seeks Billions Of Pounds In British Reparations For Slavery (Guardian)

David Cameron is facing calls for Britain to pay billions of pounds in reparations for slavery ahead of his first official visit to Jamaica on Tuesday. Downing Street said the prime minister does not believe reparations or apologies for slavery are the right approach, but the issue is set to overshadow his trade trip to the island, where he will address the Jamaican parliament. Ahead of his trip, Sir Hilary Beckles, chair of the Caricom Reparations Commission, has led calls for Cameron to start talks on making amends for slavery and referenced the prime minister’s ancestral links to the trade in the 1700s through his cousin six times removed, General Sir James Duff.

In an open letter in the Jamaica Observer, the academic wrote: “You are a grandson of the Jamaican soil who has been privileged and enriched by your forebears’ sins of the enslavement of our ancestors … You are, Sir, a prized product of this land and the bonanza benefits reaped by your family and inherited by you continue to bind us together like birds of a feather. “We ask not for handouts or any such acts of indecent submission. We merely ask that you acknowledge responsibility for your share of this situation and move to contribute in a joint programme of rehabilitation and renewal. The continuing suffering of our people, Sir, is as much your nation’s duty to alleviate as it is ours to resolve in steadfast acts of self-responsibility.”

Professor Verene Shepherd, chair of the National Commission on Reparation, told the Jamaica Gleaner that nothing short of an unambiguous apology from Cameron would do, while a Jamaican MP, Mike Henry, called on fellow parliamentarians to turn their back on Cameron if reparations are not on the agenda, noting that the Jamaican parliament has approved a motion for the country to seek reparation from Britain. “If it is not on the agenda, I will not attend any functions involving the visiting prime minister, and I will cry shame on those who do, considering that there was not a dissenting voice in the debate in parliament,” he told the newspaper.

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Sweet.

• New Zealand’s New Ocean Sanctuary One Of World’s Largest Protected Areas (Gua.)

New Zealand will create one of the largest marine protected areas in the world, spanning an area of 620,000 sq km. The Kermadec ocean sanctuary will be one of the world’s most significant fully protected ecosystems, the prime minister of New Zealand, John Key, told the UN general assembly in New York. The sanctuary is in the South Pacific Ocean, about 1000km north-east of New Zealand, and expands a marine reserve that surrounds a clutch of small islands. The area is considered crucial in terms of biodiversity, featuring nearly 35 species of whales and dolphins, 150 types of fish and three of the world’s seven sea turtle species. It is also geologically significant, encompassing the world’s longest chain of submerged volcanoes and the second deepest ocean trench, plunging to 10km underwater – deeper than Mount Everest is tall.

The scale of the sanctuary will dwarf any previous New Zealand protected area, spanning twice the size of the country’s landmass. It will cover 15% of New Zealand’s exclusive economic zone. Commercial and recreational fishing will be completely banned, as will oil, gas and mineral prospecting, exploration and mining. Key’s government aims to pass legislation establishing the sanctuary next year. “The Kermadecs is a world-class, unspoiled marine environment and New Zealand is proud to protect it for future generations,” Key said.

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Every single day our shame grows bigger.

• More Than 1,100 Migrants Rescued Off Libyan Coast On Monday (DW)

The Italian coast guard coordinated the rescue of 1,151 migrants in nearly a dozen separate operations on Monday off the coast of Libya, it said. In one instance, a coast guard ship picked up more than 440 people from four inflatable boats. Separately, the charity Doctors Without Borders (MSF) said one of its boats had rescued 373 people, tweeting a picture of a distressed 6-year-old child. Libya is one of the major crossing points for African migrants trying to get to Europe. The European Union is trying to combat people smuggling and will go after suspected traffickers in the international waters of the Mediterranean Sea as of next week. Beginning October 7, the next phase of what’s known as Operation Sophia will allow naval forces belonging to EU member states to board, search and seize suspicious vessels. The operation has so far centered on saving those drifting on the high seas, but will now include directly targeting trafficking operations.

Read more …

Europe’s Refugees Are A Global Crisis

Sep 232015
 
 September 23, 2015  Posted by at 2:24 pm Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,  19 Responses »


Dorothea Lange Depression refugee family from Tulsa, Oklahoma 1936

At the moment I start writing this, leaders of European nations are in a meeting in which they talk about refugees that, though it was announced over a week ago, was nevertheless labeled an ’emergency’ meeting. The only thing that truly tells you is that Europe still refuses to see the refugee situation as an emergency. And that’s not just semantics.

Of course there’ll be all sorts of bickering about the difference between migrants and refugees, and tons of words about how “we” should separate the two, and send people back, and strengthen European borders, and fight the human smugglers. None of which addresses reality, or at least at best a tiny sliver of it.

“Smugglers” are not the problem, it’s the people they “smuggle” that are. Or perhaps we should turn that around and admit that in fact it’s the European leaders who are the problem. It’s they who lack any courage or vision, or even a basic understanding of what is going on.

Angela Merkel has gotten a lot of accolades when she opened Germany’s borders to Syrians, even though that only lasted a few days. But people seem to forget that she is Europe’s most powerful politician, and that makes her responsible for a lot of the drowned children who lose their lives on a daily basis in a small stretch of the Mediterranean between Turkey and Greece.

Merkel should have acted much faster. She’s just as culpable as all the other jokers in Brussels and various EU capitals. They all were, and still are, hoping this issue would go away by itself. Instead, the issue has only just started, and the whole continent is woefully unprepared to this day.

German paper Die Welt ran a story this weekend (in German) that detailed how Merkel and her government were warned in Q1 by the German federal police (Bundespolizei) that a million refugees would be coming to Germany in 2015. And did nothing. The paper didn’t provide a precise date, but Q1 ended close to 6 months ago, so we know Merkel et al could have acted on this information -and prepared- at least half a year ago.

Have they? Given the chaos that developed within a few days of allowing refugees to enter the country, our money’s on a resounding NO. So those portraits we’ve seen with Angela dressed up as Mother Teresa can now be filed away as ludicrous.

The outcome of today’s meeting is very easy to predict. There will be promises of millions of dollars, and of saddling Greece and Italy with huge camps to house refugees in, far away from whoever is either too comfortable or too right-wing to deal with Europe’s new reality.

There will be nothing in writing that comes even close to what is needed, neither financially nor in practical terms. All politicians will feel free to pander to, and hide behind, their bigoted populations.

These talks should have taken place at least half a year ago. That might have saved children’s – and adults’- lives both in the meantime and in the future. That nothing of true value happened between the moment Merkel got her warning and last week’s announcement of this week’s “emergency” meeting not only tells you all you need to know about Merkel and her peers, it also is certain to both have made matters worse and to continue doing so going forward.

There is precious little to be expected from Europe’s leadership, because there is so little of it. They all like the power but skirt the responsibility. The EU apparently seeks to charge 14 nations with 19 cases of violating EU asylum treaties, but countries like Croatia and Hungary were so unprepared for what happened to them, this could only have led to panic and fences and police dogs. It’s a miracle nobody shot a whole bunch of refugees. Yet.

It could all have been prevented if Merkel had decided not to shelve that warning from her federal police force, and instead had called a high level summit then and there. But she was too busy whipping Greece into submission, and hoping, as all other did, that one morning it would all prove to have been a bad dream.

One would suspect that French secret services also had information on what was to come, but François Hollande is a dunce who spends his time counting votes and reading polls. David Cameron would probably prefer to drown and/or shoot that ‘swarm’, and the other heads of state either don’t count for much in terms of population numbers or elect to keep their mouths shut lest they risk the next election.

If Europe’s leaders don’t tackle the issue now, and in an effective way, we risk, with a likelihood bordering on certainty, much worse than we have seen so far. The refugees will not stop coming to Europe. But with autumn now on the doorstep, their journeys will become much more perilous, and deadly.

Europe is set to change, and in very sweeping ways. That cannot be altered. What can be done is to treat refugees like they are human beings, whose lives matter the way German and French lives matter.

Moreover, if Merkel had called that EU meeting in early spring, she would rapidly have concluded that it was not enough. That this is not a European problem. Very few of the refugees, after all, are European. It is, therefore, a global problem. And there is a political body to deal with those, the UN. Merkel would have called a UN meeting long ago if only she had called that EU meeting first.

Why the UN itself hasn’t even opened its mouth, other than to chide Europe, is a mystery. It’s on a fast track to becoming redundant.

The US has announced it will accept 10,000 Syrian refugees – who may take two years to be processed. For perspective: in the space of just three hours this morning, 2,500 arrived on the island of Lesbos alone. The US cannot deny its share of the blame for causing the crisis. It can still, however, start acting in a humane fashion.

Not like Hollande and Cameron whose main target today is increased bombing of the very places the refugees are fleeing from, not providing them with asylum away from those places.

The refugee question should be the top priority in the talks Obama has with the Pope in America in the next few days. As it should be in the meeting(s) with Chinese president Xi Jinping, who’s also in the country. But it doesn’t look as if that’s going to happen. It’ll be a sidenote at best.

Merkel has a narrow window to right her wrongs, and it’s closing fast. If she doesn’t act now, we’ll see Europe’s lack of humanity and abundance of disgrace bared even more, and increasingly so.

There will be blood.

Debt Rattle August 12 2015

Aug 122015
 
 August 12, 2015  Posted by at 9:15 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,  Comments Off on Debt Rattle August 12 2015


DPC Belle Isle Park Aquarium, Detroit 1905

• Greek Debt Deal Reached But Targets Branded ‘Utterly Unachievable’ (Telegraph)
• Dow Death Cross Is A Bearish Omen For The Stock Market (MarketWatch)
• China Stuns Financial Markets By Devaluing Yuan For Second Day Running (Guardian)
• China Roils Markets Second Day as Yuan Cut by 1.6%; Bonds Rally (Bloomberg)
• How The Dollar’s Rise Led To China’s Yuan Devaluation (MarketWatch)
• Roach Sees Currency Wars Just Getting Worse After Yuan Decision (Bloomberg)
• China’s Devaluation And The Impossible Trinity (Beckworth)
• Yuan Move Threatens to Add $10 Billion to China Inc.’s Debt Costs (Bloomberg)
• One of China’s Most Popular Trades May Be Coming to an End (Tracy Alloway)
• Goldman Says China Yuan Move Is Attempt to Get Ahead of the Fed (Bloomberg)
• The Fed Is In A Bind (Haselmann)
• An Economic Earthquake Is Rumbling (Livingston)
• The Social Cost of Capitalism (Paul Craig Roberts)
• Yanis Varoufakis Backs Wikileaks Bounty To Crack TTIP (Telegraph)
• Euromaniacs: An Addiction To Euroin (Diego Fusaro)
• PKK Leader: Turkey Is Protecting Islamic State By Attacking Kurds (BBC)
• 50,000: More Migrants Reached Greece In July Than During All Of 2014 (Quartz)
• Greece Sends Police Reinforcements To Kos In Migrant Crisis (Kathimerini)
• United Nations Failing To Represent Vulnerable People, Warn NGOs (Guardian)

Bill submitted to Greek parliament, vote due on Friday morning. Chances of a split in SYRIZA are large.

• Greek Debt Deal Reached But Targets Branded ‘Utterly Unachievable’ (Telegraph)

Greece has agreed the broad terms of a new three-year bail-out deal with its international creditors, though experts warned that severe austerity demands mean the country’s fiscal targets remained “utterly unachievable”. Technical details of the deal were finalised in the early hours of Tuesday morning, paving the way for Greece to unlock around €85bn in new loans. The measures include increases in the retirement age, opening up the energy and pharmaceutical industries and new taxes on shipping firms. More measures will follow in October. While Euclid Tsakalotos, Greece’s finance minister, said there were just “two or three” details remaining to reach an accord, Germany, the country’s biggest creditor, has called for more time to complete a deal.

Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor, is understood to have told Greek prime minister Alexis Tsipras that she would prefer to give Greece a second bridging loan rather than rush a deal through. Mr Tsipras rejected the idea, arguing that it would ride roughshod over an agreement with the eurozone that had been struck after marathon talks on July 12 and implemented by the Greek government. Under the terms of Greece’s third rescue package, the country will be required to post a primary deficit no larger than 0.25pc of GDP this year. In 2016, the country is required to post a surplus of 0.5pc of GDP rising to 1.75pc in 2017 and 3.5pc in 2018. Greece had previously proposed a primary surplus target of 1pc of GDP this year and 2pc in 2016.

Officials claimed the deal would reduce Greece’s obligations with regards to primary surpluses by 11pc of GDP over the next three years, meaning Greece would avoid austerity measures worth around €20bn over that period. The Greek parliament must now pass the reforms agreed with creditors, ahead of a meeting of eurozone finance ministers expected on Friday. However, Costas Lapavitsas, a Syriza MP and professor of economics at SOAS university in London, criticised the package, and suggested he would vote against it. “To lower the targets because the economy is in recession is one thing. To present this as lightening the recessionary burden is quite another and wrong. Nothing has been lightened because the tax rises have already been voted in,” he said.

Capital Economics described the fiscal targets as “fantasy” and “utterly unachievable”, while Raoul Ruparel, co-director at the think-tank Open Europe, said: “The new targets have not been so much negotiated as made inevitable by the recent economic destruction – claiming savings thanks to significant economic downturn has a touch of claiming success in cutting off your nose to spite your face,” he said.

Read more …

Moving averages intersect.

• Dow Death Cross Is A Bearish Omen For The Stock Market (MarketWatch)

A rare “death cross” appeared Tuesday in the chart of the Dow Jones Industrial Average, suggesting the stock market may have already begun a new long-term downtrend. Although chart watchers have seen the bearish technical pattern coming for some time, it can still send a chill down bulls’ spines when it is finally confirmed. The fact that the Dow industrials’ death cross follows the appearance of one in its sister index, the Dow Jones Transportation Average, warns that this one is more than a one-off event. A death cross is said to have occurred when the 50-day simple moving average, which many use to track the short-term trend, crosses below the 200-day moving average, which is widely used to gauge the health of the longer-term trend.

For the Dow industrials, it marked the first time the 50-day moving average, which ended Tuesday at 17,806.99, was below the 200-day moving average, at 17,813.42, since Dec. 30, 2011, according to FactSet. Therefore, many technicians see the death cross as marking the spot that a shorter-term pullback morphs into a longer-term downtrend. The Dow closed down 1.2% suffer an eighth loss in the past nine sessions. It has lost 5% since its record close of 18,312.39 on May 19. Some argue that death crosses have very little predictive value, since some previous ones have appeared right around market bottoms. For example, a death cross appeared on July 7, 2010, when the Dow closed at 10,018.28. The Dow’s closing low for the year had actually been hit two sessions earlier, at 9,686.48.

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One day after claiming it was a one-off.

• China Stuns Financial Markets By Devaluing Yuan For Second Day Running (Guardian)

China stunned the world’s financial markets on Wednesday by devaluing the yuan for the second day running, sparking fears that the world’s second largest economy is in worse shape than investors believed. The currency hit a four-year low on Wednesday after the People’s Bank of China set the yuan’s daily midpoint even weaker than in Tuesday’s devaluation. With the bank having said that Tuesday’s move was a “one-off depreciation”, the rapid drop in the value of China’s currency – around 4% in the last two days – dealt a blow to appetite for risky assets, and markets across the region plunged amid concerns that Beijing has embarked on a damaging currency war. Stocks, currencies and commodities came under heavy pressure as money managers feared it could ignite a currency war that would destabilise the global economy.

The Nikkei stock market index in Japan was down more than 1% while the Hang Seng in Hong Kong was down 1.64%. The Australian dollar, often seen as a proxy for the Chinese economy, fell again to a fresh six-year low of US$72.25c, having been sold off heavily on Tuesday. The US dollar, on the other hand, rose strongly again against all Asian currencies. Oil was hit, too, with Brent futures were down 31c at $48.87 per barrel at 0251 GMT. US crude was trading at $43.02 per barrel, down 6 cents from Tuesday when it marked its lowest settlement since March 2009. Key industrial and construction materials nickel, copper and aluminium also hit six-year lows. “China’s currency moves will hurt appetite for risky assets such as equities and commodities,” said Rajeev De Mello, head of Asian fixed income at Schroders in Singapore.

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Well, the IMF says they like it.

• China Roils Markets Second Day as Yuan Cut by 1.6%; Bonds Rally (Bloomberg)

China’s unexpected decision on Tuesday to devalue the yuan and shift to a more market-determined rate sparked concern that the world’s second-largest economy is faltering. Vietnam widened the trading band on its currency Wednesday, underscoring the risk of competitive devaluations. Traders are seeking safety in government debt as China’s move reduces inflation expectations and eases pressure on the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates. China’s government “is focused on domestic issues rather than global implications at the moment, employing all the possible means to stabilize the economy,” said Ronald Wan at Partners Capital in Hong Kong. “A weaker yuan means weaker consumption power and Chinese demand for foreign products and commodities will weaken.”

The yuan is heading for its biggest two-day drop since 1994 and has returned to levels last seen in August 2011. There’s no economic or financial “basis” for the exchange rate to fall continuously, the PBOC said in a statement Wednesday. Traders increased bets on further movement in the currency, with options volume surging to more than triple the 5-day average for the time of day, Depository Trust & Clearing Corp. data showed. China’s central bank said Tuesday that market-makers who submit prices for the reference rate will have to consider the previous day’s closing spot rate, foreign-exchange demand and supply, as well as changes in major currency rates. Previous guidelines made no mention of those criteria.

The IMF welcomed China’s move to devalue the yuan and said it doesn’t directly impact the country’s push to win reserve-currency status. The devaluation is aimed at buying China some flexibility against continued dollar appreciation as the Fed prepares to lift rates, according to Goldman Sachs.

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Beijing is way behind the ball.

• How The Dollar’s Rise Led To China’s Yuan Devaluation (MarketWatch)

The Obama administration, like many U.S. administrations before it, has long pushed China to allow the market to play a greater role in setting the exchange rate. U.S. officials have long argued that China’s currency is undervalued, giving the country’s exporters an unfair advantage over manufacturers in the U.S. and elsewhere. As recently as April, the Treasury Department praised China’s decision to allow the yuan to appreciate over recent years, but maintained the currency was still undervalued. But forex analysts note Beijing’s willingness to allow the yuan to appreciate over recent years, taking its cue from a rising U.S. currency. That’s made the yuan the second-best-performing emerging-market currency over the past 12 months, noted Jane Foley at Rabobank. China’s real effective exchange rate has been rising at the same time.

Kit Juckes, global macro strategist at Société Générale, noted that since the taper tantrum during the summer of 2013, the yuan has fallen 3% versus the dollar. But over the same time, the yen is down 23%, the euro is down 18% and other Asian currencies have dropped between 5% and 25%. Against the other so-called BRIC emerging market currencies—Brazil, Russia and India—the yuan has gained more than 50% over the last decade, Juckes said, in a note. The yuan’s valuation “has looked increasingly unsustainable as the others have seen their currencies tumble, and the 1.9% adjustment today is far too small to change that,” he said. “Via the dollar-yuan peg, China is in effective importing the Fed’s tighter policy bias at a time when its own economy is struggling,” said Rabobank’s Foley.

Much will depend on whether the devaluation is, as China says, a one-time move or if Beijing takes further action to weaken the yuan. “The renminbi will presumably come under additional downward pressure and a new gap has already opened up between the reference and market rates. But we expect the PBOC to resist this pressure—it has done over most of the past year—rather than continue to ratchet the reference rate lower,” said Julian Jessop at Capital Markets. “As well as the political sensitivities, allowing further big falls would encourage ‘one-way’ speculation and undermine the credibility of the description of today’s move as a one-time correction.” Nonetheless, China’s move is unwelcome news for its Asian neighbors, who saw their currencies knocked lower in the wake of the move. In that regard, China’s move is seen as a belated salvo in the so-called currency wars.

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No doubt.

• Roach Sees Currency Wars Just Getting Worse After Yuan Decision (Bloomberg)

China’s shock move to devalue the yuan risks opening a new front in a currency war that stretches from the euro zone to Japan as nations look to energize their economies. The People’s Bank of China slashed the yuan’s fixing by a record 1.9% on Tuesday, sparking the currency’s biggest one-day loss since the official and market exchange rates were united in 1994. It triggered the steepest selloff among Asian currencies in almost seven years, led by slides in South Korea’s won and the Taiwan and Singapore dollars. The euro and the yen tumbled 18% against the greenback in the past 12 months as monetary policies diverged in the U.S., Europe and Japan.

“In a weak global economy, it will take a lot more than a 1.9% devaluation to jump-start Chinese exports,” said Stephen Roach, a senior fellow at Yale University and former Morgan Stanley chairman in Asia. “That raises the distinct possibility of a new and increasingly destabilizing skirmish in the ever-widening global currency war. The race to the bottom just became a good deal more treacherous.” China’s devaluation shook global markets just as the currency war appeared to be losing steam in Asia, with Australia and New Zealand toning down calls for weaker rates and Japan refraining from expanding stimulus this quarter.

Even with almost all major currencies losing ground against the dollar this year amid rising expectations for increased borrowing costs in the U.S., China maintained a de facto peg since March amid a push for the yuan to win reserve status at the International Monetary Fund. “They built into the market an expectation that they were keeping the currency stable,” said Ray Farris at Credit Suisse. “Then all of a sudden they blinked. Because they blinked today, markets will continue to look for similar conditions in the future. If exports are falling off a cliff, then against the background of this development, markets will expect more” depreciation, he said.

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It’s like when you say you want a job done good, cheap and fast: pick two.

• China’s Devaluation And The Impossible Trinity (Beckworth)

So China devalued its currency peg almost 2% against the dollar. It happened just as I was wrapping up a twitter debate on this very possibility, a very surreal experience. Many more twitter discussions erupted after the announcement of this policy change and I got sucked into a few of them. My key takeaways from these discussions on the yuan devaluation are as follows. First, this devaluation was almost inevitable: the economic outlook in China had been worsening. The question is why? As I explained in my last post, the proximate cause is the Fed’s tightening of monetary conditions. China’s currency is quasi-pegged to the dollar and that means U.S. monetary policy gets imported into China.

The gradual tightening of U.S. monetary conditions since the end of QE3 has therefore meant a gradual tightening of Chinese monetary conditions. Recently, it has intensified with the Fed signalling its plans to tighten monetary policy with a rate hike. U.S. markets have priced in this anticipated rate hike and caused U.S. monetary conditions to further tighten. Through the dollar peg this tightening has also been felt in China and can explain the slowdown in economic activity. Consequently, China had to loosen the dollar choke hold on its economy via a devaluation of its currency.

There is, however, a more fundamental reason for the devaluation. China has been violating the impossible trinity. This notion says a country can only do on a sustained basis two of three potentially desired objectives: maintain a fixed exchange rate, exercise discretionary monetary policy, and allow free capital flows. If a country tries all three objectives then economic imbalances will build and eventually give way to some kind of painful adjustment. China was attempting all three objectives to varying degrees. It quasi-pegged its currency to the dollar, it manipulated domestic monetary conditions through adjustment of interest rates and banks’ require reserve ratio, and it allowed some capital flows. This arrangement could not last forever, especially given the Federal Reserve’s passive tightening of monetary policy.

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Talk about lowballing…

• Yuan Move Threatens to Add $10 Billion to China Inc.’s Debt Costs (Bloomberg)

The biggest offshore borrowers in Asia are about to understand the costs of a devaluation. Chinese companies, which have $529 billion in dollar and euro bonds and loans outstanding, could see their debt costs jump by $10 billion after the People’s Bank of China devalued the yuan by 1.9%, according to Bloomberg-compiled data. The weaker yuan increases expenses for firms that have to exchange it into those currencies to pay interest and principal on offshore borrowings. Chinese corporations have sold bonds and gotten bank loans offshore at a record pace and now are the biggest component of major fixed-income indexes in the region. A narrow trading band for their home currency meant that many did not hedge against exchange losses that Tuesday’s devaluation, the biggest in two decades, now threatens.

“Most Chinese companies don’t hedge their forex exposure,” said Ivan Chung, an analyst at Moody’s Investors Service. “The sudden devaluation in the currency will add pressure to those with offshore dollar debt, especially the property sector that relies heavily on offshore debt.” The central bank cut its daily reference rate for the currency by a record, triggering the yuan’s biggest one-day loss since China unified official and market exchange rates in January 1994. “Chinese property developers have lots of offshore debt outstanding – more than 20% of their total debt for some – and the majority of them have high leverage and weak cash flow,” said Christopher Lee at Standard & Poor’s in Hong Kong. “If the yuan depreciation sustains, they will face pressure on servicing their debt.”

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Carry me Carry.

• One of China’s Most Popular Trades May Be Coming to an End (Tracy Alloway)

Years of the Chinese yuan practically pegged to the U.S. dollar gave succor to a massive carry trade that involved mainland speculators borrowing from overseas banks at relatively low rates and then investing in higher-yielding renminbi-denominated assets. Pocketing the spread between the two netted hefty returns, but the era of “peak” China carry looks to be coming to an end following China’s move to devalue its currency. While the exact size of the carry trade is unknown, the Bank for International Settlements estimates that dollar borrowing in China jumped five-fold since 2008 to reach more than $1.1 trillion.

Global dollar borrowing is something like $6 trillion to $9 trillion, according to the BIS, thanks largely to an emerging market borrowing spree. The speed and nature of the China carry trade unwind will now depend largely on the pace of the dollar’s appreciation. It’s doubtful that Chinese authorities want to see a disorderly unwind of any sort. Still, the flipside is that China still has some pretty impressive foreign exchange reserves, which could soften the blow from an unwind of the carry trade. The devaluation may also have the added benefit of taking some of the froth out of a Chinese market that has arguably been overheated by foreign borrowing.

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Duh..

• Goldman Says China Yuan Move Is Attempt to Get Ahead of the Fed (Bloomberg)

China’s shock devaluation of its currency is designed to cushion it from rising along with the dollar after a projected interest-rate increase from the Federal Reserve, according to Goldman Sachs. “This is about Fed liftoff most obviously and further dollar strength,” Goldman Sachs chief currency strategist Robin Brooks wrote in a note to clients. “It certainly makes sense for China’s policy makers to buy some flexibility ahead of Fed liftoff, in particular since the fix had become very peg-like in its stability in recent months.” Goldman Sachs projects the dollar strengthening 20% on a trade-weighted basis by the end of 2017. The yuan fell the most Tuesday since China ended a dual-currency system in January 1994 after the central bank cut its daily reference rate by 1.9%.

China has stepped up efforts to boost old growth drivers as new ones fail to offset slowing investment and trade. Developing markets are feeling the strain as domestic growth slows while the U.S. nears its first interest-rate increase in almost a decade. Until Tuesday, China had kept the yuan steady against the dollar, effectively pushing it higher against other emerging-market currencies and hurting its exporters. While the change is reminiscent of Swiss abandonment of the franc’s ceiling versus the euro in January, which anticipated quantitative easing from the ECB, China isn’t looking to push the currency significantly lower, according to Brooks. The change is a one-time correction, a spokesman for the People’s Bank of China said Tuesday. “Our bias is that the move overnight was more about buying flexibility as opposed to the beginning of a large devaluation trend,” New York-based Brooks wrote.

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“..total credit outstanding (household, corporate, government and financial) has expanded by over $50 trillion in the past 30 years, while GDP has expanded by only $13 trillion.”

• The Fed Is In A Bind (Haselmann)

The intention of Fed policy over the past 30 years has been to self-correct business cycles into a ‘steadier state’ by easing interest rates into weakness and hiking them into strength. Unfortunately, there is political-asymmetry between easing and hiking which has resulted in the stair-stepping of official interest rates down to the zero lower bound. Interest rates that are held lower than the ‘natural or normal rate’ (discussed in a moment) may have short-term benefits, yet there are longer-term costs that aggregate and eventually need to be addressed. These costs are then typically dealt with by lowering interest rates even farther away from the normal or natural rate. Eventually the Fed ends up worsening the very business cycles they intended to smooth out.

The fact that rates today have reached zero means that the day of reckoning is quickly approaching, because monetary policy has reached the practical limits of what it can do. Thus, the multi-decade credit era is coming to an end. Credit-based consumption is unsustainable. US corporate issuance has broken a new record in four successive years. According to David Stockman, the amount of total credit outstanding (household, corporate, government and financial) has expanded by over $50 trillion in the past 30 years, while GDP has expanded by only $13 trillion. In addition, while the whole world has gotten significantly more indebted, it also has terrible demographics to contend with. The S&P over this same 30-year period has returned just over 6% adjusted for inflation, while real GDP has been just above 2%.

The market has risen 3 times faster than national output in real terms. A sizable equity market correction could happen merely because the bubble-blowing machine is losing its wind. Certainly, the magnitude of the monetary and debt-based fuel that has powered equities in the past will not be available going forward. An economy runs most efficiently in the long-run when the price of money, i.e., the official interest rate, does not veer too far from the level where savings and investment can find a clearing price (i.e., the natural rate of interest). This is called the Wicksellian Differential, i.e., the difference between the money rate and natural rate of interest. It postulates that when the natural rate is higher than the money rate, the disequilibrium will drive credit expansion.

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Debts have shifted but not disappeared.

• An Economic Earthquake Is Rumbling (Livingston)

While the people sleep, an economic earthquake rumbles underneath. The day that they begin to feel the quake draws near. History will record that in this decade more people will lose more money (forget about the trillions of dollars already lost) than at any time in our history, including during the Great Depression. At the same time, a very small group has made and will make huge sums of money. During the Y2K scare (a real hoax) many people stored food. Then, after Y2K, many people wanted to dump their cache; and some did. We advised readers at the time to store food simply because of the crisis world we live in, but to store those foods that you could rotate and consume. Stored food is a hedge against inflation. It’s a hedge against natural disaster. It’s a hedge against economic collapse.

It was our advice before, and it has been our advice since. This advice is still valid. People who don’t have some stored food don’t realize how dependent they are on the system and government. Of course, the system was designed and created to make the people dependent on government. That makes them easier to control. Many people have been in hard times since 2008, thanks to bursting housing and derivatives bubbles — both fueled by the Federal Reserve’s money printing and both predicted by meand by many other writers. For those of us who are not well-connected (those of us who are not in the 1%), there has been no relief. While the banksters got bailouts and Wall Street and the banksters benefited from the money printers, the middle class was impoverished. Savings were wiped out.

More working-age people than ever before are not working. More young workers than ever before are still living with their parents because they are either out of work or working at low-paying jobs. More people than ever before are on the government dole. Welfare pays more than most jobs. Retirement funds have been cashed out and spent on living expenses. [..] The default rate of companies with the lowest credit rating is at its highest level since 2013. The auto loan debt bubble is at $900 billion, fueled by easy credit and long-term loans (more than 60 months on even used cars) that put the car buyer upside down as he drives off the lot and keeps him there. U.S. mortgage holders are carrying the most non-mortgage debt they’ve had in more than 10 years; 81% of that is automobile debt. Student loan debt held by mortgage holders is the highest it’s ever been, with the average balance owed at nearly $35,000. Almost 5.7 million homeowners remain underwater on their mortgages.

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Externalities. Our economic systems’ highly destructive 800 pound gorilla.

• The Social Cost of Capitalism (Paul Craig Roberts)

Few, if any, corporations absorb the full cost of their operations. Corporations shove many of their costs onto the environment, the public sector, and distant third parties. For example, currently 3 million gallons of toxic waste water from a Colorado mine has escaped and is working its way down two rivers into Utah and Lake Powell. At least seven city water systems dependent on the rivers have been shut down. The waste was left by private enterprise, and the waste was accidentally released by the Environmental Protection Agency, which might be true or might be a coverup for the mine. If the Lake Powell reservoir ends up polluted, it is likely that the cost of the mine imposed on third parties exceeds the total value of the mine’s output over its entire life.

Economists call these costs “external costs” or “social costs.” The mine made its profits by creating pollutants, the cost of which is born by those who had no share in the profits. As this is the way regulated capitalism works, you can imagine how bad unregulated capitalism would be. Just think about the unregulated financial system, the consequences we are still suffering with more to come. Despite massive evidence to the contrary, libertarians hold tight to their romantic concept of capitalism, which, freed from government interference, serves the consumer with the best products at the lowest prices. If only. Progressives have their own counterpart to the libertarians’ romanticism. Progressives regard government as the white knight that protects the public from the greed of capitalists. If only.

[..] The two largest reservoirs, Lake Mead and Lake Powell, are at 39% and 52% of capacity. The massive lakes on which the Western United States is dependent are drying up. And now Lake Powell is faced with receiving 3 million gallons of waste water containing arsenic, lead, copper, aluminum and cadmium. Wells in the flood plains of the polluted rivers are also endangered. The pollutants, which turned the rivers orange, flowed down the Animas River from Silverton, Colorado through Durango into the San Juan River in Farmington, New Mexico, a river that flows into the Colorado River that feeds Lake Powell and Lake Mead. All of this damage from one capitalist mine.

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Makes a lot of sense.

• Yanis Varoufakis Backs Wikileaks Bounty To Crack TTIP (Telegraph)

Yanis Varoufakis, the former Greek finance minister, has donated to a $110,000 bounty to reward whoever leaks the text of a major EU-US trade deal. Mr Varoufakis was named yesterday as one of a number of public figures said to have donated to a fund set up by Wikileaks, the secret-sharing website, to encourage the leaks of documents surrounding Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). Others said to have donated to the fund include Vivienne Westwood, the fashion designer; Daniel Ellsberg, the Pentagon papers leaker; Slavoj Zizek, the philosopher; and Evgeny Morozov, the journalist. Julian Assange, the Wikileaks founder, was also named as a donor. So far some $24,000 dollars has been raised of the target.

Wikileaks wants the text of the proposed deal to be leaked. It is not clear whether such a single text exists. The deal will break down tariff and regulatory barriers between the EU and US, adding around £94 billion to the European economy and cutting the price of goods such as jeans and cars. David Cameron is a major advocate, seeing it as essential to save the EU s economies from decline, and has pledged to put rocket boosters under the deal. It has met stiff opposition from the left and radical right in Britain and the continent, who argue it will allow corporations to sue the Government for market access and force greater private provision in the NHS.

Some French farmers claim it will allow the spread of US “Frankenfoods”, such as chlorine-washed chicken, genetically modified crops and hormone-treated beef. Advocates say most controversial element the ability of companies to challenge governments in the courts is commonplace in global trade deals. Mr Assange said: “The secrecy of the TTIP casts a shadow on the future of European democracy. Under this cover, special interests are running wild, much as we saw with the recent financial siege against the people of Greece. The TTIP affects the life of every European and draws Europe into long term conflict with Asia. The time for its secrecy to end is now. Mr Varoufakis, an economist, had a toxic relationship with EU officials and European leaders, and he left office before a bailout deal could be signed. I shall wear the creditors loathing with pride, he said on resigning in July.

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Word of the week: Euroin.

• Euromaniacs: An Addiction To Euroin (Diego Fusaro)

Italy, and not only Italy but indeed all of the Eurozone countries should get out of the Euro as soon as possible because the Euro has proven to be a real financial coup d’état that has enabled the imposition of a neoliberal regime and the removal of all forms of social rights and the removal of any form of guaranteed healthcare and public ownership, all in favour of privatisation. The Euro has been the Trojan Horse with which neoliberalism has imposed its wishes and it’s a bit like a charging rhinoceros that is impossible to stop, to appease or for that matter to control in any way. You simply have to move out of its way before it tramples you! We simply have to get out of the Euro as soon as possible!

Generally speaking, and I use Gramsci’s words here, the Euro is a sort of Passive Revolution, in other words a revolution by which the dominant capitalist power after 1989 strengthened itself, strengthening its own structure and ridding itself of the ties and restrictions of the State and the public, of the Sovereign National Government, in order to impose the power of the unfettered economy, in other words the power of the banks and the Financial world no longer disciplined by the State and by what Hegel’s Philosophy would refer to as Ethical forces, i.e. those powers that are capable of disciplining the Economy and to place it at the service of the community. The Euromaniacs, and I am using this term that I have borrowed from my journalist friend Alessandro Montanari, are those people that are totally unable to overcome their absolute addiction to the Euro.

Just like drug addicts, these guys keeping on wanting more Euro and more Europe, even though the Euro continues to cause social and political catastrophes, including the end of public ownership, the end of social security and the downward spiral towards poverty here in Italy. They resort to using oracle-like, almost theological terminology such as: “What we need is more Europe! It’s paradoxical. No less paradoxical in fact than if someone were faced with the tragedy of a drug addict and said: “What we need are more drugs!Nowadays, anyone looking at the twin tragedies of Europe and the Euro and obsessively and compulsively repeats: “What we need is more Euro, more Europe!”is no more and no less than an addiction to Euroin.

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A huge powderkeg.

• PKK Leader: Turkey Is Protecting Islamic State By Attacking Kurds (BBC)

The man leading the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) has accused Turkey of trying to protect the Islamic State group by attacking Kurdish fighters. Cemil Bayik told the BBC he believed President Recep Tayyip Erdogan wanted IS to succeed to prevent Kurdish gains. Kurdish fighters – among them the PKK – have secured significant victories against IS militants in Syria and Iraq. But Turkey, like a number of Western countries, considers the PKK a terrorist organisation. A ceasefire in the long-running conflict with the group appeared to disintegrate in July, when Turkey began bombing PKK camps in northern Iraq, at the same time as launching air strikes on IS militants. Observers say PKK fighters have been on the receiving end of far more attacks than IS.

But Turkish officials deny that the campaign against IS group is a cover to prevent Kurdish gains. On Wednesday, Turkey said it was planning a “comprehensive battle” against IS. “The Turkish claim they are fighting Islamic State… but in fact they are fighting the PKK,” Cemil Bayik told BBC’s Jiyar Gol. “They are doing it to limit the PKK’s fight against IS. Turkey is protecting IS. “[President] Erdogan is behind IS massacres. His aim is to stop the Kurdish advance against them, thus advancing his aim of Turkishness in Turkey.”

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A 12-fold increase. And even now, where is the EU? This is sufficient reason NOT to remain a member: moral degenerancy.

• 50,000: More Migrants Reached Greece In July Than During All Of 2014 (Quartz)

It is a “crisis within a crisis.” That’s how prime minister Alexis Tsipras describes the massive influx of migrants to Greece, straining the resources of a country that is already strapped for cash. Nearly 50,000 migrants came to Greece in July—more than the whole of 2014. So far this year, more than 130,000 illegal border crossings have been made in Greece, according to Frontex, the EU’s border agency. The vast majority of migrants come from Syria and Afghanistan, seeking asylum in the EU after a treacherous journey in overcrowded, makeshift boats across the eastern Mediterranean—now the busiest route for people seeking a better life in Europe.

Even Greece’s shattered economy is better than what Afghans, Syrians, and others leave behind. But most migrants hope to travel further into Europe in search of jobs, stability, and states more receptive to asylum claims. But if they’re caught or rescued in Greece, in most cases they must be processed there. The UN recently described conditions for migrants in popular Greek landing spots as “total chaos,” with a severe lack of food, sanitation, and shelter. But an EU plan to distribute migrants more evenly across the bloc has stalled, with many countries rejecting proposed quotas. This weekend alone, the Greek coast guard pulled another 1,400 people out of the sea, according to reports. Tsipras recently called for urgent assistance from the rest of the EU: “This problem surpasses us,” he said.

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Better instruct them well.

• Greece Sends Police Reinforcements To Kos In Migrant Crisis (Kathimerini)

The Greek Police (ELAS) has sent additional officers to the eastern Aegean island of Kos to help deal with a burgeoning migrant crisis there which escalated into violent clashes Tuesday. ELAS chief Dimitris Tsaknakis has dispatched 12 officers from the force’s immigration unit to the island, including one Arab-speaking employee, to help accelerate the process of identifying some 7,000 immigrants there, most believed to be Syrian. Local authorities allocated a municipal gymnasium and an old soccer field for officers to interview the immigrants and issue them with documents allowing them to remain in the country for six months. The officers arrived on the island on Monday and had interviewed around 750 migrants by late last night, a police source told Kathimerini.

The process of identifying the arrivals was brusquely interrupted Tuesday when a fracas broke out between migrants and police officers as the former were being transferred to the old soccer stadium. Police used truncheons and even fire extinguishers to keep back the immigrants in an apparent bid to avert a stampede amid a crush to enter the stadium. Responding to the rising tensions, ELAS ordered two riot police units to be flown to the island on a C-130 military transport aircraft. Tsaknakis also ordered the transfer of some 250 additional officers to be stationed on Kos and other islands in the eastern Aegean such as Lesvos and Samos which have been besieged by large numbers of immigrants. Kos Mayor Giorgos Kyritsis said local authorities were overwhelmed and warned of “bloodshed if the situation degenerates.”

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UN equals special interests.

• United Nations Failing To Represent Vulnerable People, Warn NGOs (Guardian)

Vulnerable people are prevented from gaining representation at the United Nations by a committee dominated by countries with repressive regimes, according to concerned NGOs. Organisations have told the Guardian how they face lengthy hold-ups, bizarre questioning and intimidation as they negotiate with the UN committee on non-governmental organisations, the group which decides which organisations get official UN status, and is currently made up of countries including Cuba, China, Russia, Pakistan and Qatar. Last month, Freedom Now, which works with prisoners of conscience around the world, finally won a six year battle to get official status, in the face of fierce opposition from China.

It took an intervention from US ambassador Samantha Power, who said she was determined “to put an end to the inexcusable attempt to deny Freedom Now’s official NGO status”. But this case is far from unique, with NGO workers from around the world warning that vulnerable people are being denied representation at the UN by the dysfunctional nature of the NGO committee and its parent body the Economic and Social Council (Ecosoc), which produces policy and makes recommendations on economic, social and environmental issues at the UN. In order to work at the UN, make speeches and gain access to important officials, organisations need to submit applications for special consultative status to the NGO committee.

The UN offers no guidance or time limit on how long it takes for applications to be processed by the committee. The 19 members of the committee are elected by other states every four years. The committee must always contain a set number of countries from each region; with four from Asian states and five from African states, for example. Jessica Stern, from the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission which took three years to get special consultative status, told the Guardian that it is “almost impossible” for NGOs to operate in the UN as without this official status. She added that negotiating with the committee can be both costly and time-consuming, meaning that many organisations simply give up.

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A World Run On Broken Models

Nov 092014
 
 November 9, 2014  Posted by at 7:56 pm Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , , ,  10 Responses »


Wyland Stanley Peerless touring car, Bay Area 1923

As I was writing The Broken Model Of The Eurozone yesterday, I already knew there would have to be a sequel, because doing everything in one go would have been too much. And then, considerably less than two seconds later, it dawned on me that if I wanted to cover broken models and systems, a book would be the very least. But I don’t want to write a book, or, certainly, not here and now. Therefore, the best I think I can do is to sit down and let it flow, train of thought, stream of consciousness, probably the approach that suits me best to begin with.

There’s no question that the eurozone is by no means the only broken model, design, system, structure, in our world, though its built-in fatal flaws are perhaps easier to pinpoint than they are in other models. Everyone can see why having no mechanism to keep poor member nations from getting poorer must of necessity doom the eurozone, and the euro. Everyone, that is, but the people with the most vested interests.

That said, when you get to think about it, it’s hard to find a model, a system, in our ‘modern’ societies that is not broken, through similar design flaws. Just the past few days, we had the US midterm elections, and it doesn’t come more broken than that. As Ron Paul stated once again, US politics is a monopoly system, not a democracy. That part exists only in people’s dreams and in media stories. In reality, it’s pick your favorite identical twin. Yet for some reason, people still vote. Go figure.

Then there was the BLS unemployment report, which is no longer even a joke, but such an outright insult to Americans that it’s difficult to see why anyone looks at it anymore, other than for propagandistic reasons. A model designed to ignore the combined erosion in labor participation, wages and benefits that has taken place in the US since 2007, and the number of people who can’t make enough to pay their bills and feed their kids, is useless as a gauge for the American economy.

What these, and just about any other model I can think of that we use to run our world, have in common, is/are a number of flaws:

First, they were designed to operate exclusively in growing economies. Perhaps not even on purpose, but they sure don’t function in less glorious days, if only because no provisions were made for such days. It’s at least one reason why protagonists are so eager to point to growth even where there is none.

Second, whether in days of growth or of non-growth, they offer no protection from destructive exploitation of the natural world, either by nations, by corporations or by ourselves. A self defeating model.

Third, they are so far removed from the ‘human scale’ that we can’t internalize the ways they work and don’t work, other than perhaps in abstract theory. We can’t understand how the systems work that govern our lives, and therefore not why they fail.

These three characteristics guarantee inherent self limitation, self defeat and eventual self destruction. Sort of like the spy message that destroys itself 10 seconds after being read.

I was reading John Michael Greer’s recent Dark Age America: The End of the Market Economy, in which he reiterates how an increase in complexity of a society means ever more intermediaries take position in between productive economic participants, skimming off the fruits of other people’s daily labor. And how a decrease in complexity, such as the one we’re seeing today in our world, forced by diminishing economic returns, will lead to those intermediary positions disappearing, and a renewed form of feudalism taking the helm.

There are many shapes and sizes of these intermediaries active in our present societies, but none are more powerful, in more than one way, than politicians and traders/investors. The political world and financial world don’t produce anything of value, they owe their wealth and power solely to others who do.

The past century – or two – of ultra cheap fuels, which have enabled one single human being to produce as much as a thousand of her ancestors, created the space in which the financial and political intermediate powerholders operate. The debt machine gone haywire of the last few decades either created even more of that space or made up for what was lost due to rising fuel prices. Both fossil fuels and debt now stumble on their last legs, and society will need to be remolded, along principles that may indeed well resemble feudalism more than anything else.

To be sure, Greer doesn’t define feudalism along the lines of the bad rap it has gotten, but simply as a system in which rights and obligations for both lords and servant are clearly defined.

What he doesn’t specify, but I will, is that the feudal model operates on a human scale. That points to another aspect: the servant – for lack of a better word – in a balanced feudal system knows his master. We, today, do not. We only know a bunch of people pushed forward for their gift of gab and telegenic faces. The way our leaders are (pre-) selected is not much different from seeing how many second hand cars or tupperware bowls they can sell on a TV sales channel.

But then those leaders are (s)elected to head entities so far beyond the human scale it should be obvious to anyone that they cannot function properly no matter how much growth there is. Leaders of entities like the US, the EU or China have little in common with the people they supposedly represent, and they don’t have to, nobody expects them to. The US midterms were mostly a a battle of the bulge, as in candidates’ bulging wallets.

And on top large scale national politics we have created yet another, even more anonymous layer of power. UN, World Bank, IMF, NATO, there’s an ever growing collection of supra-national organizations that keep on guzzling up more power and more money every single day.

Like ‘smaller’ entities such as the US and EU, only more, the supra-nationals attract a certain kind of people, those that like to assert power without being held directly accountable. In structures that far exceed the human scale, they are like fish in water. And that’s why we should never accept having them in those positions. IMF and World Bank have a history of at best disputable and at worst very bloody interventions in nations across the globe.

We should have today celebrated the end of NATO along with that of the Berlin Wall 25 years ago. But it’s still there, and playing an active role in the flaring up of the Ukraine civil war. As for the UN, there should be a place for an organization like it, but not with the money gobbling corporate structure, serving shady interests, that it has today.

Our political systems don’t work. Our economic systems don’t work. We live on a steady – but hardly nutritious – diet of debt and propaganda. Our societies are no longer productive enough to allow for the numbers of intermediaries they have given birth to. But it’s the intermediaries who have more often than not taken up the most powerful positions in our societies. So they will fight, and initially often successfully, to keep their positions, at the cost of the more productive segments. It’s a mechanism that’s much easier to understand than it is to fight.

I tend to think that it’s easier to make the effort to get rid of things like models and systems and structures when you know they will need to go soon anyway. But that’s without counting in propaganda. Without including Freud and spin doctors and Edward Bernays and why detergent commercials work so well. When you do take all those into account, things don’t look so easy anymore.

What the EU has in common with all present day political and financial structures, bar none, is that it can, and indeed was built to, function only in times of growth. Take away growth and inherent flaws become exposed. Take away growth and panic ensues. Well, we no longer have growth, other than in our dreams and spin.

Or more accurately, there is indeed one thing that does still grow: our debt. It’s all we have left to keep up the pretense that we’re still growing. That and a pack of lies that grows more outrageous as time goes by. We run our societies on debt and propaganda. To a large extent, propaganda about why and how debt, and more debt, can’t hurt us.

Because as long as we believe that, we’ll leave our political and financial structures and power holders keep their plush seats. And as long as we believe it, they’re free to take more and more away from us. Something we feel powerless to stop, because we’re scared of what may happen when we stop believing. In broken models.

Wealth Inequality Is Not A Problem, It’s A Symptom

Oct 182014
 
 October 18, 2014  Posted by at 8:12 pm Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,  7 Responses »


NPC Dedication, George Washington Masonic Memorial, Alexandria, VA Nov 1 1923

A comment on an article that comments on a book. I don’t think either provides, for the topic they deal with, the depth it needs and deserves. Not so much a criticism, more a ‘look further, keep digging, and ye shall find more’. And since the topic in question is perhaps the most defining one of our day and age, it seems worth it to me to try and explain.

The article in question is Charles Hugh Smith’s Why Nations (and organizations) Fail: Self-Serving Elites, and the book he references is Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson.

Charles starts off by saying:

The book neatly summarizes why nations fail in a few lines:

(A nation) is poor precisely because it has been ruled by a narrow elite that has organized society for their own benefit at the expense of the vast mass of people. Political power has been narrowly concentrated, and has been used to create great wealth for those who possess it.

The Amazon blurb for the book states that the writers “conclusively show that it is man-made political and economic institutions that underlie economic success (or lack of it)”, and continues with examples used such as ancient Rome, North Korea, Zimbabwe, the Congo, to make the point that some countries get rich and others don’t, because of differences in leadership structures. That in itself certainly seems true, but that doesn’t necessarily make it the whole story.

In the case of the Congo, for instance, the perhaps richest place on earth when it comes to resources, there’s not only the devastating history it’s had to endure with incredibly cruel Belgian colonial powers, there’s to this day a lot of western involvement aimed at keeping the region off balance, and feed different tribes and peoples with weaponry up the wazoo, in order to allow the west to keep plundering it. It’s not just about national goings-on, it’s – also – a supra-national thing.

That’s one of two shortcomings in the material, the breadth and width of why nations and organizations fail their people but serve their masters. In the present day, national boundaries, whether they are physical or merely legal/political, are not the best yardsticks anymore by which to measure and gauge events.

The second shortcoming, in my view, is that inequality, a theme so popular that even Janet Yellen addressed it this week in what can only be seen as her worst possible impression of Marie Antoinette, and expressed her ‘worry’ about wealth inequality in America. The very person publicly responsible for that inequality thinks it’s ‘just awful’. Go bake a cake, gramps.

Wealth inequality is but a symptom of what goes on. Charles Hugh Smith has a few graphs depicting just how bad wealth inequality has become in the US. We all know those by now. It’s bad indeed. But where does that come from? Charles touches on it, but still hits a foul ball:

I submit that this dynamic of failure – the concentrated power and wealth of self-serving elites – is scale-invariant, meaning that it is equally true of communities, towns, cities, states, nations and empires alike: all fail when they’re run for the benefit of a narrow elite. There is a bitter irony in the ease with which American pundits discern this dynamic in developing-world kleptocracies while ignoring the same dynamic in America.

One would imagine it would be easier to see the elites-inevitably-cause-failure in one’s home country, but the pundits by and large are members of the Clerisy Upper Caste, well-paid functionaries, apparatchiks, lackeys, factotums, toadies, sycophants and apologists for the very elites that are leading America down the path of systemic failure as the ontological consequence of their self-serving consolidation of wealth and power.

Here’s the thing: especially after WWII, though before that already as well, the western world woke up to the need for international co-operation. Dozens of organizations were established to structure that co-operation. But then, in yet another fountain of unintended consequences, something man is better at than just about anything else, we let those organizations loose upon the world without ever asking what happened to what they were intended for, or whether the original grounds for founding them still existed, and whether they should perhaps be abolished or put on a tight leash.

These are questions that should be asked about any large-scale organization. Be they multinational corporations, global banks, Google or indeed the United States of America. We can’t just assume these powers, which gather more power as time goes by, share and serve the purposes of the people. What if they gradually come to serve only their own purpose, and it contradicts that of the people? Should we not get that leash out?

Turns out, we never do. If someone would suggest today to break up the USA, because its present status contradicts that which the Founding Fathers had in mind (and there are plenty of arguments to be made that such contradictions exist in plain view), (s)he would not even be sent to a nuthouse, because no-one would take him/her serious enough to do so.

But wealth inequality still rises rapidly within America, and it doesn’t serve the people. So why does it happen, and why do we let it? Because the inequality that matters most is not wealth, but power. And we’ve been made to believe that we still have that power, but we don’t. Voting in elections has the same function today as singing around a Christmas tree: everyone feels a strong emotional connection, but it’s all just become one giant TV commercial.

Even if families are genuinely happy to meet up and exchange gifts and stories, it’s all modeled after the building blocks handed to us by chain stores. It isn’t really our story anymore, and Jesus certainly wasn’t born in a manger: he was born in a MacMansion and the first thing the child saw was his mom’s fake boobs, a wall-sized TV and an iPhone.

In that same vein, we lost the stories bitterly fought and suffered for by our grandparents through two world wars and the brutal invasions of Vietnam and Iraq, the stories of how we can best keep ourselves safe and out of – international – trouble. Not just military trouble, but economic and political trouble. These things are no longer our decision. We founded supra-national, indeed global, institutions for that. And then let them slip out of our sight.

The US is a bit of an outlier here, simply because it’s older. But the IMF, the World Bank, UN, NATO and the EU absolutely all fit the picture of organizations that have – happily – grown beyond our range of view, and that exhibit the exact same inverted pyramid characteristics we see on wealth inequality, only for these organizations it’s not wealth that floats and concentrates increasingly from the bottom to the top, it’s power.

Wealth comes after that. And one shouldn’t confuse that order. Because power buys wealth infinitely faster than wealth buys power.

All these supra-national institutions were established with good intentions – at least from some of the founders. But then we forgot, ignored, to check on them, and they accumulated ever more power when we weren’t watching (we were watching TV, remember?)

And what we see now is that any effort, any at all, to break up the IMF, World Bank, UN, NATO and EU would be met with the same derision that an effort to break up the USA would be met with. We have built, in true sorcerer’s apprentice or Frankenstein fashion, entities that we cannot control. And they have taken over our lives. They serve the interests of elites, not of the people. So why do we let them continue to exist?

What powers do we have left when it comes to bailing out banks, invading countries, making sure our young people have jobs when they leave school? We have none. We lost the decision making power along the way, and we’re not getting it back unless we quit watching the tube (or the plasma) and fight for it. Until we do, power will keep floating to the top like so much excrement; it’s a law of – human – nature.

That the people we voluntarily endow with such control over our lives would also use that control to enrich themselves, is so obvious it barely requires mentioning. But that doesn’t mean this is about wealth inequality, that’s not the main issue, in fact it’s not much more than an afterthought. It’s about the power we have over our lives. Or rather, the power we don’t have.

Debt Rattle Sep 10 2014: Crisis And Self-Determination

Sep 102014
 
 September 10, 2014  Posted by at 9:06 pm Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , ,  3 Responses »


Harris & Ewing Texaco, Washington, DC 1920

What do you think the situation in Scotland would be like if an army acting on behalf of the London government had just killed thousands of Scots in Glasgow and Edinburgh over the past 6 months and destroyed their streets and homes and water and electricity grids, and if moreover that government had seized power after a violent coup and essentially been handpicked by Washington?

If you’re awake a little, one of the first things you would think is wow, those Scots must really have something those guys in London and Washington want, and badly too. And you would be right. Scotland has quite a bit of oil, for one thing. You would obviously also think: this doesn’t feel right.

In the same exact way Ukraine has a lot going for it economically. But it also has the added quality of bordering on Russia, which really has a lot of resources. And ‘our side’ wants them, and has figured that occupying Ukraine would be a great way to get closer to them.

So ‘we’ did when we saw our chance in the Maidan protests. But then there were a few million who won’t co-operate, so we started bombing and shelling them. Not out in the open, we had someone else do it for us. So they would get the blame, or, even better, the other side would. And we threw Russia into the blame game as the main perpetrator. It’s all just about media control, and our own media only. Who reads Russian media? That’s all just propaganda anyway, right?

We can start here: what the US and EU did in Kiev during Maidan (and well before) violates the principle of self-determination, as agreed in the Atlantic Charter, signed by FDR and Churchill in 1941 and subsequently adopted after WWII by the UN. The fact that this kind of meddling is as widespread and common as measles doesn’t change that. Wikipedia:

The right of nations to self-determination, or in short form, the right to self-determination, is a cardinal principle in modern international law (jus cogens), binding, as such, on the United Nations as authoritative interpretation of the Charter’s norms. It states that nations based on respect for the principle of equal rights and fair equality of opportunity have the right to freely choose their sovereignty and international political status with no external compulsion or interference [..]

Especially that last bit seems clear enough. How we define ‘nations’ is less obvious. 1941 being the age of the last great colonial powers, it should be no wonder that the terminology was kept opaque to an extent. Like so:

The principle does not state how the decision is to be made, or what the outcome should be, whether it be independence, federation, protection, some form of autonomy or even full assimilation. Neither does it state what the delimitation between nations should be — or even what constitutes a nation. In fact, there are conflicting definitions and legal criteria for determining which groups may legitimately claim the right to self-determination.

There were two intentions in the day: phrase a principle, a charter, a law that many voices clamored for, but at the same time insert enough loopholes for ‘our’ boys to jump through with impunity.

The Atlantic Charter wasn’t the first attempt. As early as 1918, Woodrow Wilson said:

“National aspirations must be respected; people may now be dominated and governed only by their own consent. Self determination is not a mere phrase; it is an imperative principle of action. . . . “

But that still leaves the term ‘nation’ as part of the definition, without defining the term itself.

In 1960, the UN went further in its Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples.

All peoples have the right to self-determination; by virtue of that right they freely determine their political status and freely pursue their economic, social and cultural development.

Now we have ‘peoples’, not just ‘nations’

But you just go ask entire scores of indigenous peoples how over the past 54 years UN member nations have ‘interpreted’ the principles they have signed up to. Not a great story. The reason why lies always in what resources are present on, and underneath, the land these peoples inhabit.

After the right to self-determination had been defined and chartered by the UN, it has been violated and ignored more often than it has been honored. But it’s still there. All we need to do is make sure it’s respected, always.

That means the Scots can have a referendum about independence from the UK. Though the feeling is there that they were granted it only because London thought it would fail, it is there. No such luck for the Catalans, who are simply refused the right to a vote by Madrid. The Basque have that right too, says the UN: ‘All peoples have the right to self-determination’. The Venetians. And countless others. The Cree and so many other First Nations in Canada. The list goes on.

Ukraine separated from the Soviet Union 25-odd years ago, as did many other parts of the failed empire. And now, if they want to, East Ukrainians should have the right to do the same. And present day Russia, i.e. what’s left of the Soviet Union, should have the right to be left alone by the US, EU and NATO, and not have missiles installed right outside its borders, the same way America wouldn’t accept those in Canada or Mexico.

The world needs a bigger and better and meaner definition of the right to self-determination, or just for all nations to adhere to the present one. It needs that because there are a lot of self-determination cases coming up as energy and credit crises will make the world a smaller and poorer place. With much less need or desire for centralized power.

While at the same time the centralized powers will scramble for more resources, not less. Just like once the Romans did.

As ultra cheap energy and ultra cheap credit run out, and they inevitably will, more people(s) will want to become master of their own domain. The UN says they have that right. But if we don’t make sure that right is generally accepted, that’s going to lead to 1001 ugly war theaters.

The world will decentralize. Sure, oil prices are low right now, but we all know oil is not in endless supply, and we also know it’s indispensable to our present economic models. So we’ll have to scale down. But that doesn’t have to be so bad if we prepare for it, starting with defining easy and non-violent ways for people to choose their own government on their own land. It’ll still take plenty adapting, but it doesn’t have to involve shelling and bloodshed.

The same goes for debt and credit. We’re way overstretched, and we’re never going to go back to the growth we once had. But so what, we’re over bloated as we are. The thing is to prevent people from fighting over it.

I know, it’s a tall order. But if saner minds take over than the ones we have in charge today, it can be done for most cases, most countries, most peoples. It’s where we can show we’re not just another spineless species.

• British PM Cameron Begs Scots: Don’t Rip Our ‘UK Family’ Apart (Reuters)

British Prime Minister David Cameron implored Scots on Wednesday to shun independence to keep the United Kingdom “family” intact as he scrambled to stem a steep rise in secessionist support ahead of the Sept. 18 vote. In a sign of panic within the British ruling elite, Cameron and opposition leader Ed Miliband scrapped their weekly question-and-answer session to visit Scotland on Wednesday to ask Scots not to ditch their 307-year union with England. “We do not want this family of nations to be ripped apart,” Cameron, 47, said in an opinion piece published in the Daily Mail newspaper. “The United Kingdom is a precious and special country.” But Cameron tempered the emotion with a clear warning: “If the UK breaks apart, it breaks apart forever.” Cameron has until now been largely absent from the debate after conceding that his privileged background and center-right politics mean he is not the best person to win over Scots, who are usually more left-wing than the English.

But if Scotland votes for independence, Cameron’s job will be on the line ahead of a national election planned for May 2015. Several opinion poll surveys have shown a surge in support for independence over recent weeks, spooking financial markets and raising the biggest internal challenge to the United Kingdom since Irish independence almost a century ago. Cameron, Miliband and Liberal Democrat Leader Nick Clegg will all visit Scotland on Wednesday in what nationalist leader Alex Salmond said was a sign of panic that could backfire. “If I thought they were coming by bus I’d send the bus fare,” Salmond said. The Scottish leader said Cameron was the most unpopular Conservative leader ever among Scots, and Miliband the most distrusted Labour leader.

Read more …

That’s what I’m hoping for.

• Scots Independence Genie Fires Separatist Dreams of EU Statehood (Bloomberg)

A short walk from Edinburgh Castle, past tourist stores hawking kilts and tartan scarves, a church hall is about to become a patch of Barcelona for the day. As Scotland votes next week on whether to break up the U.K. after more than three centuries, a group of about 100 Catalans will gather to watch the outcome unfold and ponder the implications for their own bid for freedom from Spain. “I get goose bumps just thinking about it,” said Raquel Gella, 25, a Catalan marketing manager who has lived in Scotland for five years after arriving as a student. “Who has the chance to see history made in two countries?” The Catalan interest is just the tip of the iceberg. Whether Scots choose to remain in the U.K. or call time on the 307-year-old union with England and Wales, the vote has already proved to separatists from Flanders to Venice that the dream of taking control of their own futures has a chance of becoming reality.

If the political spirits of the 18th and 19th centuries were dedicated to forging larger sovereign states, the referendum has opened up an alternative vision for the 21st century in which smaller national groups dismantle them. That reshaping of the map has ramifications for governments, finances, international relations, companies and investors. The pound dropped to the weakest since November against the dollar yesterday after polls showed the pro-independence campaign in Scotland had wiped out the No camp’s long-standing advantage, leaving the result too close to call. In Spain, bonds fell, with 10-year yields rising the most since May.

“The symbolic value of what is going to happen in Scotland is very important,” said Gerolf Annemans, president of Vlaams Belang, a Flemish party calling for Flanders to secede from Belgium. “Marching toward independence and the reshuffling of the older nation states is a logical evolution, and Scotland, Catalonia and Flanders are pieces of that new Europe.” The Scottish vote has sharpened the divide in Europe between competing schools of thought. One says that globalization and a hyper-connected world mean the continent should consign cultural and ethnic tensions to history. The other says the European Union is exactly the framework in which regions and provinces can assert their identities and thrive. That would mean “a Europe of peoples and regions where the Bavarians can be Bavarians instead of Germans,” Ibon Areso, the mayor of Bilbao, the economic capital of Spain’s Basque region, said in an interview. “A Europe that is more a Europe within which different identities can live together more easily.”

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Shut your face.

• Mark Carney Warns Scotland Over Pound (BBC)

Bank of England governor Mark Carney has told trade unions that currency union in the event of Scottish independence would be “incompatible with sovereignty”. Mr Carney told the TUC conference that a currency required a centralised bank and shared banking regulations. Common taxation and spending were also needed, he said. The SNP said currency union was “in the best interests of both an independent Scotland and the rest of the UK”. It added that currency union plans had been considered in detail. For their part, pro-union campaigners said a shared currency would be “bad for Scotland”. The Scottish National Party (SNP), which wants to keep the pound in the event of independence, said that its plans had been “considered in detail” by the Fiscal Commission, a working group of the Scottish government.

An SNP spokesperson for Scottish finance minister John Swinney said: “Successful independent countries such as France, Germany, Finland and Austria all share a currency – and they are in charge of 100% of their tax revenues, as an independent Scotland would be. At present under devolution, Scotland controls only 7% of our revenues.” The Conservatives, Labour, and the Liberal Democrats have all come out against a currency union with an independent Scotland. The SNP spokesperson said that “the political position of the three Westminster parties… will of course change after a Yes vote.” “And as the momentum builds behind the Yes campaign, their currency bluff has well and truly been called,” the spokesperson added.

Read more …

Scarecrow.

• Rogoff Fears ‘Horrible Disaster’ For Scotland (CNBC)

The economist who predicted the U.S. housing crisis has told CNBC that Scotland now faces a difficult period for investment regardless of the result of an upcoming independence referendum. “It’s certainly a disaster for Scotland, first and foremost, it’s going to be a horrible adjustment,” the Harvard economist Kenneth Rogoff, who has also served as chief economist and director of research at the International Monetary Fund, said. “Even if it doesn’t pass people are not going to want to invest there because they might do it again. People will migrate out of there.”

The uncertainty is also not good for the rest of the United Kingdom, he added, which has seen stellar economic data and has been applauded for being one of the fastest growing G-7 countries since the global financial crash. It’s also not good for the European Union, according to Rogoff, with the possibility of Scotland now joining the bloc meaning that other autonomous communities – like Catalonia in Spain – might also look for their own referendums on independence. “Other places in Europe (will) say, ‘Hey, we can do that too’,” Rogoff said. “So it’s certainly quite a wild card there.”

Read more …

• Cameron Rips Up Diary to Fight for Scotland in Knife-Edge Vote (Bloomberg)

Their schedules in shreds, their futures on a knife edge, Britain’s three most senior politicians arrive in Scotland today to beg voters to come back from the brink and reject independence. With polls saying the race to the Sept. 18 ballot is too close to call, and many Scots apparently undeterred by the threats about the future of their economy, London’s political establishment has decided to try showing a little love instead. Yesterday, the Scottish flag, the Saltire, was raised over government buildings in London. Today, Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron, his Liberal Democrat deputy, Nick Clegg, and Ed Miliband, leader of the opposition Labour Party, have canceled their planned appearances in Parliament, and will instead spread out to woo undecided voters.

“The right place for us to be today is in Scotland,” Cameron wrote in an article for today’s Scottish Daily Mail. “The United Kingdom is a precious and special country. That is what is at stake. Let no-one in Scotland be in any doubt: we desperately want you to stay; we do not want this family of nations to be ripped apart.” Since a Sept. 7 poll by YouGov put the nationalists just ahead, the world beyond Scotland has woken up to the possibility that the 307-year-old U.K. could break up. A second poll yesterday again put the two sides neck-and-neck. The pound has fallen, as have shares in businesses with large Scottish markets. A Yes vote would be the biggest crisis of Cameron’s premiership. He has already had to deny he would resign if it happened.

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Word.

• Scotland Is Now Separate, Even If Scots Vote No (Bloomberg)

In late summer 2011, three months after Alex Salmond secured an unprecedented majority in elections to the Scottish Parliament, officials from his party flew to Montreal to learn how to organize a referendum. There, the Scottish National Party delegation met with separatists from Parti Quebecois waging their own four-decade battle to split from Canada, fighting on after calling — and losing — two plebiscites in 1980 and 1995. Conscious of that failure, the Scots had one request: no media. “They didn’t want to be very close or be seen with people of the PQ and other sovereigntists of Quebec,” said Daniel Turp, a former legislator for the party who helped organize the visit. “They want to win and obviously the PQ did not win the two referendums they initiated.”

As the Sept. 18 Scottish referendum goes down to the wire, Quebec’s experience holds a lesson for campaigners and voters on either side of the debate: even if the bid for independence from the U.K. is lost, life will never be the same. Polls show the two sides are neck and neck. One by YouGov for the Sunday Times put the Scottish nationalists ahead on 51%, excluding undecided voters. Another, by Panelbase for the Yes campaign, put the anti-independence Better Together group four%age points ahead. “If the vote is close, the independence question may not disappear for long,” said Simon Wells, chief U.K. economist at HSBC Securities Inc. in London.

While Scotland’s nationalists first gained political traction in the 1970s, it took until 2011 and an unprecedented majority for the Scottish National Party in the semi-autonomous Edinburgh legislature for a referendum to become a reality. Even then, the prospects of a Yes vote looked slim. The gap closed over the past month as SNP leader Salmond portrayed independence as the only way to protect Scotland’s health service and free university education from a U.K. government led by the Conservatives, a party still blamed in Scotland for decimating heavy industry in the 1980s and with only a single lawmaker of the 59 Scottish electoral districts at the Westminster Parliament in London.

Read more …

• The Fed Gets Serious About The End To QE And ZIRP (WolfStreet)

There have been prior indications – though Wall Street brushed them off. During Fed Chair Janet Yellen’s testimony to the Senate Banking Committee in mid-July and in the Fed’s Monetary Policy Report, some of the most glaring bubbles that the Fed has so strenuously inflated since the Financial Crisis suddenly appeared on the Fed’s official worry radar. Yellen lamented “valuation metrics” of stocks that appeared “substantially stretched.” She pointed at biotech and social media. PE ratios were “high relative to historical norms.” She even acknowledged the greatest credit bubble in history by fretting about the “‘the reach for yield’ behavior by some investors” and how “risk spreads for corporate bonds have narrowed and yields have reached all-time lows.” And she bared the disconnect between the markets and the Fed: increases in the federal funds rate “likely would occur sooner and be more rapid than currently envisioned.”

Other Fed heads have chimed in with warnings of their own, telling the markets that rates could rise sooner and more rapidly than the markets were pricing in. But it all fell on deaf ears. Stocks have risen since, including the very sectors that Yellen tried to prick, and yields have dropped. But now the San Francisco Fed got down and dirty, using actual evidence of sorts to make the point that this isn’t just idle banter. It seems these folks are getting serious about manipulating the markets into acknowledging that QE Infinity was just temporary and that ZIRP – the foundation of the economy for so long that no one can even envision life without it – would fade away. And they chastised the markets that so eagerly believed all the promises of QE Infinity and eternal ZIRP for not believing the end of ZIRP. They’re worried about the market’s reaction if there is a sudden recognition, rather than a gradual one, that the endless manna would end. They’re worried about financial instability.

Read more …

Better run for the hills.

• The Buyback Party Is Over: Stock Repurchases Plunge in Q2 (Zero Hedge)

A few days ago, we reported that based on data by SocGen’s Albert Edwards, the “buyback party was over” in which Edwards said:

“Much has happened over the summer, but two landmark firsts have occurred only recently, with the S&P500 breaking above 2,000 and the 10y bund yield breaking below 1%. Our Ice Age thesis has long called for sub-1% bond yields and I see this extending to the US and UK in due course. It is the equity markets where I have been consistently surprised. QE has been an essential driver for the equity market, providing the fuel for the heavy corporate bond issuance being used for share buybacks. Companies themselves have been the only substantive buyers of equity, but the most recent data suggests that this party is over and as profits also stall out, the equity market is now running on fumes.”

We have now done the math and compiled the Q2 earnings for the S&P 500 and we can indeed confirm that (at least in the second quarter) the buyback part is not only over but has ended with a thud, with the total notional amount of buybacks completed in Q2 plunging by 27% in Q2 to “only” $117 billion – the lowest since Q1 of 2013!

Read more …

• Carney Can’t Escape Housing as Debt Colors Policy (Bloomberg)

Bank of England Governor Mark Carney can’t get away from the housing market. As he argues there is no immediate need to increase interest rates, central to his case is the mountain of debt financing property. Home loans account for almost 90% of the £1.45 trillion ($2.4 trillion) owed by U.K. households. In London, where the average home costs £500,000, first-time buyers are paying almost nine times their annual income to get onto the housing ladder. Such figures explain why Carney says that rate increases when they come will be “gradual and limited.” In comments to union leaders yesterday, he argued higher borrowing costs could pressure households with too much debt and prompt them to curtail spending. With inflation continuing to outstrip pay, Britons may find it hard to reduce the burden anytime soon. “A small increase in interest rates will cause serious debt-servicing problems in the U.K., including London,” said Ismail Erturk, a senior lecturer on banking at Manchester Business School.

“The current economic recovery in the U.K. is based on shifting sands, because it doesn’t improve wages.” While U.K. debt as a%age of gross disposable income has fallen from around 170% in 2007, it’s still at about 140%, the highest in the Group of Seven after Canada. Mortgage debt has risen by about £90 billion since then. Halifax, the mortgage unit of Lloyds Banking Group, estimates a £100 jump in monthly home-loan payments could force almost 40% of London mortgagees to pare spending on essentials including food and clothing. Values in the capital are more than a third above their previous peak in 2008 and double the national average. They surged 19% in the year through June, twice as fast as the U.K. as a whole, Office for National Statistics data show. “These extraordinary rates of house-price growth cannot continue in the current, more regulated mortgage environment, particularly in the face of likely interest-rate rises,” said Lucian Cook, head of residential research at broker Savills Plc.

Read more …

The high estimate.

• Italy Set For Zero Growth In 2014: PM Renzi (AFP)

Italy’s economy will register “around zero” growth over the course of 2014, Prime Minister Matteo Renzi admitted on Tuesday. It was the first time that Italy’s centre-left leader had put a figure on the likely impact of the economy slipping back into recession for the third time in less than a decade during the first two quarters of this year. “I am not optimistic,” Renzi said in a pre-recorded interview due to be broadcast on Tuesday evening. “We are expecting (a figure) more or less around zero. “It is not enough to restart. It is the end of the fall but it is not a recovery.”

The unexpected slowdown of Italy’s economy over the first half of this year has cast doubt on whether Renzi can deliver on his promise to comply with the budget rules that apply to members of the eurozone while also boosting growth and reversing the upward trend in unemployment. Renzi also used Tuesday’s interview to welcome the recent downward trend of the euro, arguing that a fall to around $1.20 (from a 14-month low of around $1.29 in trading Tuesday) would make European exports more competitive. “For our companies, for our world, this would be a very, very important factor,” Renzi added.

Read more …

• France Admits It Will Miss 2015 Deficit Target (Reuters)

French Finance Minister Michel Sapin announced on Wednesday that France will need until 2017 to bring its public deficit down to three% of output, breaking its promise to EU partners to reach that goal by 2015. It was the latest in a succession of missed deficit targets by Paris. Sapin told a news conference that France was not asking for any change in the European Union’s rules on budget limits, but that it wanted Brussels to take into account the continuing weakness of the euro zone’s second largest economy. “With growth and inflation weak, the deficit reduction we are planning for 2015 will be limited with a deficit around 4.3% of Gross Domestic Product in 2015 and coming under the 3% threshold in 2017,” Sapin said.

Sapin said the deficit would actually rise slightly to 4.4% this year and that the government would maintain the current plan for €21 billion of public spending savings in 2015 while not raising taxes during that year. He forecast that the French economy would grow 0.4% this year and 1.0% next. The announcement had been widely expected after a number of recent suggestions by the government that it was struggling to maintain its deficit commitments and calls for the European Union to use flexibility in applying its Stability and Growth Pact mechanism designed to keep a cap on national deficits. The yield on the benchmark French 10-year bond was largely unchanged at 1.37% after the announcement.

Read more …

Sure, let’s make it 2114.

• US Regulator ‘Would Welcome’ Delay Of EU Derivatives Clearing Rules (Reuters)

A top U.S. regulator said on Wednesday he would welcome a delay by the European Union that gave more time to resolve a conflict with Washington over making derivatives markets safer. Reuters reported last week that the EU is discussing whether to move a deadline by which U.S. clearing houses, which act as go-betweens for buyers and sellers, must meet EU rules when doing business there. “I am encouraged by that flexibility … it’s very important as we deal with this not to disrupt the market,” Tim Massad, the head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission derivatives regulator, told Reuters in an interview.

At the moment, Europe is sticking to its own rules for U.S. clearing houses rather than exempting them as it plans to do with Japan, Hong Kong and Australia, for example. Brussels has refused to grant similar treatment to the United States as long as the CFTC does not exempt European clearing houses. The current deadline is December 15, after which new capital requirements kick in, making it prohibitively expensive for European banks to do business with U.S. clearing houses. “I expected it would be maybe easier to get this done,” Massad said. “(It’s) an exercise we’re going through now. And I’m willing to explore (whether the U.S. can rely on EU rules to a greater extent).”

Read more …

• Restructuring Debt Restructuring (Barry Eichengreen)

Sometimes the worst intentions yield the best results. So it is, unexpectedly, with Argentine debt. The story begins with Argentina’s financial crisis in 2001-2002. There is no question that the crisis left the country unable to service its debts. But Argentina made no friends by waiting four years to negotiate with its creditors and then offering settlement terms that were stingy by the standards of previous debt restructurings. Still, the terms were acceptable to the vast majority of the country’s creditors, who exchanged their old claims for new ones worth 30 cents on the dollar. All, that is, except for a few holdouts who bought up the remaining bonds on the cheap and went to court, specifically to the US district court of the southern district of New York, asking to be paid in full.

This quixotic strategy met with unexpected success when Federal Judge Thomas Griesa ruled in the holdouts’ favour. Griesa idiosyncratically reinterpreted the pari passu, or equal treatment, clause in the debt contracts to mean that “vulture” funds refusing to participate in the earlier debt exchange should receive not 30 but 100 cents on the dollar. Griesa’s ruling threatened to hold the Bank of New York Mellon, the Argentine government’s agent, in contempt if it paid other bondholders without also paying the vultures. Effectively barred from servicing its debt on the renegotiated terms, Argentina had little choice but to default again.

This was not an episode from which anyone emerged smelling like a rose. Argentina’s hardball tactics and erratic policies did not endear it to investors. The vultures showed no scruples in profiting at the expense of Argentine taxpayers. They are now deploying the same strategy against the Democratic Republic of the Congo, one of the world’s poorest countries. Griesa, for his part, showed no compunction about upending a financial order in which market-based exchanges of old bonds for new ones are used to restructure the debts of countries unable to pay. By making it impossible for sovereigns to restructure, he effectively rendered them unable to borrow in the US. Ignoring precedent and all economic common sense, he threw international financial markets into turmoil.

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• Russia, China Agree To Settle More Trade In Yuan And Rouble (Reuters)

Russia and China pledged on Tuesday to settle more bilateral trade in rouble and yuan and to enhance cooperation between banks, Russia’s First Deputy Prime Minister Igor Shuvalov said, as Moscow seeks to cushion the effects of Western economic sanctions. Shuvalov told reporters in Beijing that he had agreed an economic cooperation pact with China’s Vice Premier Zhang Gaoli that included boosting use of the rouble and yuan for trade transactions. The pact also lets Russian banks set up accounts with Chinese banks, and makes provisions for Russian companies to seek loans from Chinese firms. “We are not going to break old contracts, most of which were denominated in dollars,” Shuvalov said through an interpreter. “But, we’re going to encourage companies from the two countries to settle more in local currencies, to avoid using a currency from a third country.”

Spurred on by their often fraught relations with the United States, Russia and China have long advocated reducing the role of the dollar in international trade. The quest to limit the dollar’s dominance became more urgent for Moscow this year when U.S. and European governments slapped sanctions on Russia to penalize the country for supporting separatist rebels in Ukraine. Washington and Brussels have excluded Russia’s state banks and top energy firms from capital markets, applying measures that mean even companies not blacklisted will struggle to raise large loans outside their domestic market. For China, curtailing dollar’s influence fits well with its ambitions to increase the clout of the yuan and turn it into a global reserve currency one day. With 32 percent of its $4 trillion foreign exchange reserves invested in U.S. government debt, Beijing wants to curb investment risks in dollar.

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Nah, print more!

• China Central Bank Adrift Without Policy Anchor Amid Credit Slump (Bloomberg)

China’s central bank chief is learning you can’t control what you can’t cut. The People’s Bank of China’s removal of state controls on borrowing costs last year has left Governor Zhou Xiaochuan struggling to influence rates with tools such as adjusting some banks’ reserve requirements and targeted liquidity injections. Those steps haven’t stopped new credit and money-supply growth from slowing. Economists forecast aggregate financing of 1.135 trillion yuan ($185 billion) for August, according to the median estimate in a Bloomberg survey ahead of data due by Sept. 15. Combined with July’s slump, that would be the weakest two months for China’s broadest measure of new lending since 2011.

“The central bank can lift the controls, but that doesn’t mean a market-based rate system will be in place,” said Chen Bingcai, a former China foreign-exchange official who’s now a researcher with the Chinese Academy of Governance, a Beijing-based training school for government officials. The PBOC may be “relatively powerless” until its new benchmark rates can take effect in the market, Chen said. The risk is that the PBOC will be hampered by ineffective tools just as dangers to growth multiply from a property slump, with figures this week showing the first back-to-back monthly drop in imports in a year. Options in the pared-back toolkit include reducing reserve requirements nationwide, lowering mortgage rates and lending for specific industries or projects.

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And that is all pure and simple Monopoly money. Which nobody should accept as payment for their assets. This distortion can only break economies.

• China’s Outbound Investment Reaches ‘Record High’ (BBC)

China was the world’s third largest investor in 2013 for the second year running, according to state news agency Xinhua. Outbound direct investment (ODI) from China reached a record high of $108bn (£66.98bn) last year, a 22.8% rise on ODI made in 2012, the agency said. Meanwhile, on Sunday the government said it would relax rules for Chinese companies making overseas investments. The new rules will take effect on October 6. Published by the Ministry of Commerce on Sunday, Xinhua said the new procedures for domestic companies were “aimed at allowing more freedom for outbound investment”. At the moment, any overseas investment project worth more than $100m needs to be approved by the ministry.

However, any investments made into projects overseas “in sensitive countries or regions, as well as in sensitive industries” would still require approval by the government, the agency said. China may have been the world’s third-largest investor in 2013, according its own data, but this year the numbers may change. According to figures collected by The Heritage Foundation, an American think tank, China’s investment around the world contracted in the first half of 2014. The foundation’s data covers large Chinese investments and contracts worldwide. Australia, the US, and Canada remain the most popular destinations for investment out of China, followed by Brazil and Indonesia. About half of all the money invested overseas by China and Chinese companies since 2005 has gone into the energy and power sector.

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Well, then we’re all saved, right?

• Bank of Japan Buys Government Debt at Negative Yield (WSJ)

Tuesday marked another milestone in the topsy-turvy world of monetary easing in Japan: The Bank of Japan bought short-term Japanese government debt at a negative yield for the first time, according to market participants. The BOJ scooped up some of the three-month No. 477 Treasury bill, which has traded at a negative yield for the past two trading days amid strong demand, the market participants said. Normally, people who buy debt expect to get their money back plus some interest. Negative yield means the buyer gets back less than he or she puts in. Why would the Bank of Japan buy under such conditions? Traders said the bank wanted to show the market that it would meet its asset purchase goals–literally at whatever the cost.

The BOJ buys Treasury discount bills as part of its asset purchase program aimed at reaching 2% inflation. The bank has a ¥270 trillion monetary base target it wants to reach by the end of the year. By purchasing the Treasury bills, it increases the amount of cash in the financial system, getting closer to the target. Market participants say the bank probably didn’t foresee buying Japanese debt at negative yields. But the European Central Bank’s easing has created demand for short-term Japanese debt from European investors, to the extent that interest rates have turned negative. “The BOJ probably didn’t expect this would happen, and T-bill rates staying negative should be a cause of concern for them,” said Shogo Fujita, chief Japan bond strategist at Merrill Lynch Japan Securities Co.

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Yeah, yeah.

• Japan Keeps Faith in Weaker Yen as Economy Struggles (Bloomberg)

Facing the prospect of the first growth-free fiscal year since the 2009 global recession, Japan’s policy makers are keeping faith that a weaker exchange rate will help the world’s third-largest economy. While the yen’s 26% slide against the dollar in the past two years has yet to stoke the nation’s exports and production, Japan’s central bank and economy chiefs in the past week both signaled a green light to a further decline. Koichi Hamada, an adviser to Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, said in an interview that a weak yen “is a positive for Japan’s economy.” The remarks underscore the chance of deeper depreciation as the U.S. Federal Reserve withdraws stimulus and Japan maintains it.

The dynamic means the Bank of Japan will get additional help in maintaining inflation, at the cost of a deeper erosion in purchasing power for consumers hit by a higher sales tax. “They’re definitely welcoming further weakness in the yen,” said Hideo Kumano, chief economist at Dai-ichi Life Research Institute in Tokyo and a former BOJ official. “Conditions aren’t as solid as they were. That’s why officials might be more strident in comments on exchange rates.” The yen, which traded at 106.14 per dollar at 9:07 a.m. in Tokyo, has fallen 3.4% in the past three weeks as the European Central Bank moved to add stimulus and Fed officials indicated they’re closer to tightening policy. The Japanese currency’s weakening to a six-year low offers fresh impetus to price pressures in Japan, which had waned in recent months.

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As long as you support banks instead of people, there is no other outcome possible.

• ‘Large And Persistent’ Jobs Shortfall Threatens The Global Recovery (CNBC)

The “large and persistent” shortfall in the number and quality of jobs in some of the world’s largest advanced and emerging economies is threatening economic recovery, a new report shows. Substantial job “gaps” and overall weakness in the labor market is stunting economic growth, a joint report prepared by the International Labour Organization (ILO), OECD and the World Bank Group found. The labor markets of the G20 countries are still struggling some six years after the financial crisis and the job shortage is set to continue until 2018 if growth continues at its current rate. As it stands, more than 100 million people are unemployed in the G20 economies and 447 million employees are “working poor” or living on less than $2 a day in emerging G20 economies, according to the report.

Echoing comments from Bank of England Governor Mark Carney, the report also said wage growth has significantly lagged behind productivity and real wages have stagnated or even fallen in most G20 countries. “We are seeing wage and income inequality widening in many G20 countries, and if the goal is stronger, sustained and balanced growth then inequality cannot be ignored,” Nigel Twose, senior director for jobs at the World Bank Group said. “Equally, the situation of young people who are out of work is acute, and countries that ignore their plight do so at their own peril. There is no magic formula to solve this jobs crisis but we do know that it requires a ‘whole of government’ approach, involving the active collaboration of many ministries,” he said. The members of the G20 comprise of a mix of the world’s largest developed and developing economies, making up 66% of the world’s population and over 75% of global trade.

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A problem waiting to explode.

• Couples Retiring Now Have ‘More Income And Wealth Than Necessary’ (Guardian)

Britain’s retiring workers have never had it so good, according to an analysis by the Institute of Fiscal Studies which shows that the vast majority of couples born in the 1940s are maintaining their former living standards into retirement – and nearly a half enjoy a greater income in retirement than average real earnings. The IFS research looked at the income and wealth of couples at retirement compared with their average earnings when they were 20- to 50-years-old. It found that 80% of couples born in the 1940s had an income at age 65 from both state and private pensions that was equal to two-thirds of their average working-life earnings, and that 40% enjoyed incomes higher than their average real working-life earnings. Economists used two-thirds of former earnings as the benchmark for living standards in retirement as pensioners typically no longer have to support children, have generally paid off mortgages, and do not have to put aside any of their income to pay into a pension.

Once housing wealth is added to the equation – which reflects the huge gains made by people who bought their first home in the 1970s and 1980s – the IFS found that pensioners are awash with cash, suggesting that the “median surplus” wealth held by pensioners in excess of their needs is £220,000. The IFS said: “92% of couples born in the 1940s have accumulated more wealth than the model suggests they need to maintain their standards of living into and through retirement. The surpluses are substantial on average – the median surplus being over £220,000, which would be enough to produce around £7,000 a year of income if used to buy an index-linked annuity. Even excluding housing wealth, 75% of couples have more wealth than the model suggests they need to maintain their standards of living. The median surplus is over £120,000.”

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… why not let the US state department force the decision upon Russia?

• Ukraine’s Choreographed Civil War, As Revealed By Wikileaks (Zero Hedge)

Think the deadly events in a civil-war ridden Ukraine are proceeding unscripted, and without US supervision and/or direction? Think again. Below is an excerpt from a formerly confidential memo, leaked by Wikileaks, and authored by former US ambassador to Russia, William J. Burns, to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The punchline: the memo is dated February 1, 2008.

Ukraine and Georgia’s NATO aspirations not only touch a raw nerve in Russia, they engender serious concerns about the consequences for stability in the region. Not only does Russia perceive encirclement, and efforts to undermine Russia’s influence in the region, but it also fears unpredictable and uncontrolled consequences which would seriously affect Russian security interests. Experts tell us that Russia is particularly worried that the strong divisions in Ukraine over NATO membership, with much of the ethnic-Russian community against membership, could lead to a major split, involving violence or at worst, civil war. In that eventuality, Russia would have to decide whether to intervene; a decision Russia does not want to have to face.

So, if Russia does “not want to face” said decision which could and has led to the violence and civil war that is now a daily staple of market-moving newsflow out of Eastern Europe, why not let the US state department force the decision upon Russia?

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Does Tokyo have a choice energy wise? Then again, do the people have a choice?

• Japan Nuclear Watchdog Confirms Clearance to Restart Reactors (WSJ)

Japan’s nuclear watchdog gave official confirmation Wednesday that two reactors on the southern island of Kyushu meet stricter regulations created after the Fukushima nuclear accident. The decision follows preliminary clearance for the units given in July. The move puts the two reactors at the Sendai nuclear power plant first in line for restarting though it still remains unclear when they might go back online. The two units at plant operated by Kyushu Electric Power are among Japan’s 48 reactors that have been kept idle after the disaster in March 2011.

Now that the two units have gained safety clearance, the biggest obstacle they face before they can be restarted is lingering antinuclear sentiment among the general public. It also remains unclear who will make the final decision to restart the reactors and how long it will take to reach that decision, as Kyushu Electric and pronuclear policy makers are reluctant to take final responsibility for restarting the reactors. Yuko Obuchi, the newly appointed trade and industry minister, issued a short statement saying she has “no objection” to the decision by the Nuclear Regulation Authority and that her ministry would make efforts to “obtain understanding and cooperation from local communities and other stakeholders for restarting.”

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