Bulls, Bears & Bucks #69 Peak Debt

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Op zondag 15 mei 2011 22:08 schreef JimmyJames het volgende:
Zimbabwe Says Days Of The US Dollar Are Numbered, Pushes For Gold-Backed Local Currency
http://www.zerohedge.com/(...)acked-local-currency

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Op maandag 16 mei 2011 21:13 schreef LXIV het volgende:

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Wat de VS moet doen is heel simpel: belastingen omhoog (nog ruimte genoeg) en uitgaven omlaag (ook ruimte genoeg). Op de een of andere manier willen ze in hun eentje net zoveel aan defensie uitgeven als de rest van de wereld samen, maar betalen ze hun leraren niet. Op termijn wreekt dat zich. Dat is op zich veel erger dan die schuld zelf.

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Capitalists Who Fear Free Markets

In “free-market-based capitalism” — or at least the version they used to teach when I went to business school — lenders and shareholders were supposed to monitor the risks taken by companies. They would benefit if the company prospered and suffer if it failed.

By not spending more money on safety, Tepco was taking a risk. That risk did not work out. The question now is who will pay the bill. If it is the investors, that would serve as a powerful incentive to the other nuclear plant operators to make changes. If it is the government, with investors protected, we are left with only the hope of better regulation to prevent a recurrence.

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Fed Gave Banks Crisis Gains on $80 Billion Secretive Loans as Low as 0.01%

Credit Suisse Group AG (CS), Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) and Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc (RBS) each borrowed at least $30 billion in 2008 from a Federal Reserve emergency lending program whose details weren’t revealed to shareholders, members of Congress or the public.

The $80 billion initiative, called single-tranche open- market operations, or ST OMO, made 28-day loans from March through December 2008, a period in which confidence in global credit markets collapsed after the Sept. 15 bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.

Units of 20 banks were required to bid at auctions for the cash. They paid interest rates as low as 0.01 percent that December, when the Fed’s main lending facility charged 0.5 percent.

“This was a pure subsidy,” said Robert A. Eisenbeis, former head of research at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta and now chief monetary economist at Sarasota, Florida-based Cumberland Advisors Inc.

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'Europese bankregels soepeler'

BRUSSEL (AFN) - De kapitaaleisen voor Europese banken worden mogelijk minder aangescherpt dan in het Basel III-akkoord is afgesproken. De Britse krant Financial Times meldde vrijdag dat een conceptvoorstel van de Europese Commissie op enkele punten soepeler is dan de Basel III regels.

Volgens de krant zouden banken meer van het kapitaal in hun verzekeringsdochters mogen bijtellen bij hun eigen kapitaal. De afspraak onder Basel III is dat dit maximaal 10 procent van het kapitaal van de bank mag zijn. Onder het Europese voorstel zouden banken deze regel kunnen omzeilen.

Banken met een grote verzekeringstak zouden flink profiteren van de regels. De krant noemde in dit verband de grote Franse banken Société Générale en BNP Paribas en het Britse Lloyds.

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On the positive side, the Netherlands has seen its default risk fall the most of any country so far in 2011 with a decline of 52.05%. Austria ranks second at -36.04%, followed closely by Denmark at -36%.

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Op vrijdag 27 mei 2011 14:02 schreef JimmyJames het volgende:
http://www.bespokeinvest.(...)bt-default-risk.html

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Toch opmerkelijk.

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Op vrijdag 27 mei 2011 14:02 schreef JimmyJames het volgende:
http://www.bespokeinvest.(...)bt-default-risk.html

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Toch opmerkelijk.

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Op vrijdag 27 mei 2011 19:40 schreef tjoptjop het volgende:

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Ik vind het altijd wel vermakelijk dat ze dat soort getallen tot de honderdste procent hebben

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Op vrijdag 27 mei 2011 21:02 schreef LXIV het volgende:

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Volgens mij is dit gewoon bepaald aan de hand van de marktprijzen. Dus dat kan inderdaad. Het is niet zo dat dit percentage exact het werkelijke default-risk weergeeft, maar de interpretatie van de markt hiervan.

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Op vrijdag 27 mei 2011 14:02 schreef JimmyJames het volgende:
http://www.bespokeinvest.(...)bt-default-risk.html
Toch opmerkelijk.

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Op vrijdag 27 mei 2011 21:25 schreef pberends het volgende:

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Inderdaad, laat die investeerders maar niet horen wat onze hypotheekschuld is .

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Op vrijdag 27 mei 2011 21:50 schreef Bolkesteijn het volgende:

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Ik denk dat het voor een belangrijk deel, naast het effect dat de markt een toevlucht zoekt in zeer veilige obligaties, komt omdat Nederland laat zien dat het de staatsschuld echt serieus neemt. Er is politiek commitment om de overheidsfinanciën gezond te houden/maken. Dat betaalt zich uit in de daling van het risico van een default.

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Die schuld zit bij particulieren, niet bij de overheid.

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Pentagon concerned about Libya vote in U.S. House

SINGAPORE, June 2 (Reuters) - Approval of a resolution in the U.S. House of Representatives directing President Barack Obama to withdraw from NATO operations against Libya would send an "unhelpful message of disunity" to allies and foes alike, the Pentagon said on Thursday.

Pentagon Press Secretary Geoff Morrell said that "once military forces are committed, such actions by Congress can have significant consequences," particularly on relations with members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

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A Flight Plan for the American Economy
The good news is that the American economy is back to its precrisis size. The U.S. GDP is now about $13.5 trillion, a bit above what it was in 2007, before the financial crisis. The bad news is that we are producing the same amount of goods and services as in 2007 with 7 million fewer workers. […] Most new jobs are for part-time work at wages that average $19,000, less than half the median income. […] the actual number of Americans without a real full-time job would be closer to 24 million.

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President Obama's budget assumes that the economy will create 20 million jobs over the next 10 years. That would be an almost magical acceleration. Over the past 10 years, it has produced only 1.7 million. […]

Usually, productivity gains translate into higher economic output, higher incomes and thus rising employment. That was the experience in the 1990s. This time, we've achieved productivity gains almost entirely by cutting jobs, finding ways of making the same products with fewer people. At many major companies, profits have returned to 2007 levels but with thousands fewer workers. "We've found ways to do more with fewer people," says Klaus Kleinfeld, the chairman and CEO of Alcoa.

Two powerful drivers have allowed for this new productivity. The first is technology, which is producing massive efficiencies across industries. […] The second force is, of course, globalization. There is now a single world market for many goods […] But the average American, who has seen his or her wages decline over the past decade, simply cannot find a good job. […] argue that "growth and employment are set to diverge" for decades in the U.S. They point out that over the past decade, most job growth was in two sectors — government and health care — and that neither is likely to grow dramatically over the next decade.

The bottom line: forget about the debt ceiling, Pakistan and Afghanistan. The crisis of our times is the employment crisis. And there are solutions to it. We need to focus on five areas that will create jobs.

Manufacturing. The image we all have in our heads when we think of bringing back good jobs is manufacturing. And such jobs fill a crucial space in the economy, allowing people with good skills but limited college education to earn a decent living. The trouble is, many of those people are now in places like China and Vietnam. But there is a way to keep manufacturing jobs in wealthy countries. Germany has managed to do so, bringing unemployment down sharply to an astonishing 20-year low in the midst of a global recession.

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The German path is simple to describe but harder to follow. Focus on technical education, technical institutes and polytechnics, as well as apprenticeship programs. Specialize in high-end, complex manufactured products that can command a premium price. Call it the BMW model. Or, for that matter, the Pratt & Whitney model.

Retraining. There are millions of Americans in industries like automobile parts in which lost jobs are unlikely to ever come back, certainly not at the pay they once commanded. That means people — many in their 40s or 50s — need to find new jobs. We need to create retraining programs for an entire generation of workers. Nothing we have done so far matches the scale of the problem. We need a program as ambitious as the GI Bill, which put returning veterans through college after World War II and prepared a generation of Americans for good jobs. Like the GI Bill, it would have to be a program in which government paid a large share of the costs while educational institutions provided the services. […]

Growth industries. […]

Our contentious health care debate aside, the U.S. is a destination for people around the world who seek top-quality medical care. Why not try to double or triple the number of people who go to the U.S. for treatment? Similarly, tourism accounts for millions of jobs, yet we have no plan to think about it as an industry and to increase its size. Unlike almost every other major country, the U.S. has no department of tourism, no growth plan, no coordination, no national ad campaigns. Far from trying to get more people to visit America, we spend a great deal of time, energy and effort scaring them away. It works. In surveys by the U.S. Travel Association, an industry group, foreigners said the most important deterrent to traveling in the U.S. is an unfriendly visa and immigration process.

Small businesses. The Kauffman Foundation has found that from 1980 to 2005, nearly all net job creation in the U.S. occurred in firms that were less than five years old. That suggests that we should focus on improving the ecosystem for start-ups and small businesses by funding basic research, streamlining the patent process, limiting regulation and encouraging venture-capital and private-equity companies that fund new ventures. […]

Jobs for now. While all the policies I have outlined above are important, they will take years to develop and take effect. The crisis, however, is with us now, and we need a short-term policy too. The bulk of the job losses in the past few years have been in construction and housing. We have armies of unemployed or underemployed workers in these fields. And we know America's infrastructure is crumbling. The American Society of Civil Engineers gave U.S. infrastructure a grade of D and estimated that we need to spend $2.2 trillion to fix our airports, bridges, highways and train systems. Senators John Kerry and Kay Bailey Hutchison have made innovative proposals that would fund infrastructure projects through a national bank, allowing the private sector to participate, as it does in many countries.

Our entire economic conversation these days is about the country's debt, which is understandable and appropriate because our debt is unsustainable in the long run. But we also need to find ways to solve the unemployment problem, or everything else, including the debt problem, will get much worse. Without more workers, we will never have the tax revenue we need to fund even limited government. Right now we have our priorities badly skewed. We spend far too much on retirement and health care programs for the elderly, the Defense Department and tax exceptions and deductions for the middle and upper classes. […]

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Johann Hari: It's not just Dominique Strauss-Kahn. The IMF itself should be on trial

Sometimes, the most revealing aspect of the shrieking babble of the 24/7 news agenda is the silence. Often the most important facts are hiding beneath the noise, unmentioned and undiscussed.

So the fact that Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the former head of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), is facing trial for allegedly raping a maid in a New York hotel room is – rightly – big news. But imagine a prominent figure was charged not with raping a maid, but starving her to death, along with her children, her parents, and thousands of other people. That is what the IMF has done to innocent people in the recent past. That is what it will do again, unless we transform it beyond all recognition. But that is left in the silence.

To understand this story, you have to reel back to the birth of the IMF. In 1944, the countries that were poised to win the Second World War gathered in a hotel in rural New Hampshire to divvy up the spoils. With a few honourable exceptions, like the great British economist John Maynard Keynes, the negotiators were determined to do one thing. They wanted to build a global financial system that ensured they received the lion's share of the planet's money and resources. They set up a series of institutions designed for that purpose – and so the IMF was delivered into the world.

The IMF’s official job sounds simple and attractive. It is supposedly there to ensure poor countries don’t fall into debt, and if they do, to lift them out with loans and economic expertise. It is presented as the poor world’s best friend and guardian. But beyond the rhetoric, the IMF was designed to be dominated by a handful of rich countries – and, more specifically, by their bankers and financial speculators. The IMF works in their interests, every step of the way.

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Op vrijdag 27 mei 2011 21:50 schreef Bolkesteijn het volgende:

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Ik denk dat het voor een belangrijk deel, naast het effect dat de markt een toevlucht zoekt in zeer veilige obligaties, komt omdat Nederland laat zien dat het de staatsschuld echt serieus neemt. Er is politiek commitment om de overheidsfinanciën gezond te houden/maken. Dat betaalt zich uit in de daling van het risico van een default.

[..]

Die schuld zit bij particulieren, niet bij de overheid.

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Op woensdag 8 juni 2011 04:10 schreef Drugshond het volgende:
Is SetLang nog actief ?!... We gaan dippen trouwens. Het (EU) kruit is op. Worden weer leuke tijden.
[ afbeelding ]

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Op woensdag 8 juni 2011 07:25 schreef Perrin het volgende:

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Jazeker, hij is nog actief.. postgeschiedenis.

En wat betreft de leuke tijden, dat zit er wel weer aan te komen. Wordt 't QE3 of een nieuwe aanval?

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What If the U.S. Treasury Defaults?

'A financial crisis is surely going to happen as big or bigger than the one we had in 2008 if we continue to behave the way we're behaving," says Stanley Druckenmiller, the legendary investor and onetime fund manager for George Soros. Is this another warning from Wall Street that Congress must immediately raise the federal debt limit to prevent the end of civilization?

No—Mr. Druckenmiller has heard enough of such "clamor and hyperbole." The grave danger he sees is that politicians might give the government authority to borrow beyond the current limit of $14.3 trillion without any conditions to control spending.

One of the world's most successful money managers, the lanky, sandy-haired Mr. Druckenmiller is so concerned about the government's ability to pay for its future obligations that he's willing to accept a temporary delay in the interest payments he's owed on his U.S. Treasury bonds—if the result is a Washington deal to restrain runaway entitlement costs.

"I think technical default would be horrible," he says from the 24th floor of his midtown Manhattan office, "but I don't think it's going to be the end of the world. It's not going to be catastrophic. What's going to be catastrophic is if we don't solve the real problem," meaning Washington's spending addiction.

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FT: The dismal science is bereft of good ideas

I fail to see the point of professional economists. They purport to know about trade and finance, about markets and credit, but I struggle to identify the actual benefits of all their expensive advice and esoteric debates.

For example, they really should be able to provide the answers we need about job creation, but where are they? How are new jobs created, by whom and under what conditions? Countries such as Spain are crippled with 40 per cent youth unemployment: what pragmatic solutions do the economists offer to this disaster?

No doubt most economists believe that policymakers, financiers and entrepreneurs should listen better to their forecasts and ideas. Yet where were the widespread predictions of the credit crisis? How many called the US housing bust correctly? Armies of brilliant economists were paid magnificent salaries by all the banks that almost destroyed the west. Did none of these geniuses warn their master? Instead, they produced flawed models that encouraged stupidity. Most impressive business managers ignore the volumes of statistics churned out by economists: they know that what matters is not how the market in general is doing, but if your customers are happy and your margins are sufficient.

One of the more extraordinary aspects of the discipline of economics is that a surprising proportion of practitioners is employed by the state. They pronounce on capitalism for a living, yet do not participate in the world of private enterprise, its underlying engine. This means they have a distorted perspective on how business actually functions.

The best move for the world’s economists would be to each start their own business. Then they would experience at first hand the challenges of capitalism on the front line. And for those who couldn’t cope with such a brave step, perhaps they could turn to philosophy, and teach us all how to lead more moral lives. I’m sure that would be more useful than what they do now.

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The Banking Emperor Has No Clothes

In a major speech earlier this week to the American Bankers Association’s international monetary conference, Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner laid out his view of what went wrong in the financial sector before 2008, how the crisis was handled 2008-10 and what is needed to reform the system. As chairman of the Financial Stability Oversight Council and the only senior member of President Obama’s original economic team remaining in place, Mr. Geithner’s influence with regard to the banking system is second to none.

Unfortunately, Mr. Geithner’s speech contained three major mistakes: his history is completely wrong, his logic is deeply flawed, and his interpretation of the Dodd-Frank reforms does not mesh with the legal facts regarding how the failure of a global megabank could be handled. Together, these mistakes suggest that one of our most powerful policy makers is headed very much in the wrong direction.

There is no cross-border resolution mechanism or other framework that will handle the failure of a bank like Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase or Goldman Sachs in an orderly manner. The only techniques available are those used by Mr. Geithner and his colleagues in September 2008 –- a mad scramble to find buyers for assets, backed by Federal Reserve and other government guarantees for creditors.

The right conclusion for Mr. Geithner should be: huge cross-border financial operations are immune from orderly resolution; such companies should therefore be run on a completely segmented basis, with separate capital requirements and no recourse to parent companies.

Consequently, capital requirements should be much higher than currently proposed by any official, for capital is the buffer that stands between bad management decisions and taxpayer bailouts when bank resolution is not possible. Real estate trusts that are not too big to fail routinely finance their assets with 30 percent equity and 70 percent debt. In a volatile world, this makes complete sense. We should move all our big banks, as well as the rest of our financial system, in that direction.