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The Fed is Fighting the Wrong Battle Again… And Creating Yet Another Crisis | Zero Hedge
The Fed is Fighting the Wrong Battle Again… And Creating Yet Another Crisis | Zero Hedge.
A critical element for investors to consider is that the Fed is not forward thinking when it comes to monetary policy. Indeed, if we reflect on the last 15 years, we see that the Fed has been well behind the curve on everything.
First and foremost, recall that Alan Greenspan was concerned about deflation after the Tech Crash (this, in part is why he hired Ben Bernanke, who was considered an expert on the Great Depression).
Bernanke and Greenspan, both fearing deflation (Bernanke’s first speech at the Fed was titled “Deflation: Making Sure It Doesn’t Happen Here”), created one of the most extraordinary bouts of IN-flation the US has ever seen.
From 1999 to 2008, oil rose from $10 per barrel to over $140 per barrel. Does deflation look like it was the issue here?
Over the same time period, housing prices staged their biggest bubble in US history, rising over three standard deviations away from their historic relationship to incomes.
Here are food prices during the period in which Greenspan and then Bernanke saw deflation as the biggest threat to the US economy:
The message here is clear, the Greenspan/ Bernanke Fed was so far behind the economic curve, that it created one of the biggest inflationary bubbles in history in its quest to avoid deflation.
Indeed, by the time deflation did hit (in the epic crash of 2007-2008), the Fed was caught totally off guard. During this period, Bernanke repeatedly stating that the subprime bust was contained and that the overall spillage into the economy would be minimal.
Deflation reigned from late 2007 to early 2009 with the Fed effectively powerless to stop it. Then asset prices bottomed in the first half of 2009. From this point onward, generally speaking, prices have risen.
The Fed, however, continued to battle deflation in the post-2009 era, unveiling one extraordinary monetary policy after another. They’ve done this at a period in which stocks and oil have skyrocketed:
Home prices bottomed in 2011 and have since turned up as well (in some areas, prices now exceed their bubble peaks):
Which brings us to today. Inflation is once again rearing its head in the financial system with the cost of living rising swiftly in early 2014.
Rents, home prices, food prices, energy prices, you name it, they’re all rising.
And the Fed is once again behind the curve. Indeed, Janet Yellen and Bill Evans, two prominent members what is now the Yellen Fed (Bernanke stepped down in January), have both recently stated that inflation is too low. They’ve also emphasized that rates need to remain at or near ZERO for at least a year or two more.
Investors should take note of this. The Fed claims to be proactive, but its track record shows it to be way behind the curve with monetary policy for at least two decades. Barring some major development, there is little reason to believe the Yellen Fed will somehow be different (Yellen herself is a huge proponent of QE and the Fed’s other extraordinary monetary measures).
Which means… by the time the Fed moves to quash inflation, the latter will be a much, much bigger problem than it is today.
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Phoenix Capital Research
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The Fed is Fighting the Wrong Battle Again… And Creating Yet Another Crisis | Zero Hedge
The Fed is Fighting the Wrong Battle Again… And Creating Yet Another Crisis | Zero Hedge.
A critical element for investors to consider is that the Fed is not forward thinking when it comes to monetary policy. Indeed, if we reflect on the last 15 years, we see that the Fed has been well behind the curve on everything.
First and foremost, recall that Alan Greenspan was concerned about deflation after the Tech Crash (this, in part is why he hired Ben Bernanke, who was considered an expert on the Great Depression).
Bernanke and Greenspan, both fearing deflation (Bernanke’s first speech at the Fed was titled “Deflation: Making Sure It Doesn’t Happen Here”), created one of the most extraordinary bouts of IN-flation the US has ever seen.
From 1999 to 2008, oil rose from $10 per barrel to over $140 per barrel. Does deflation look like it was the issue here?
Over the same time period, housing prices staged their biggest bubble in US history, rising over three standard deviations away from their historic relationship to incomes.
Here are food prices during the period in which Greenspan and then Bernanke saw deflation as the biggest threat to the US economy:
The message here is clear, the Greenspan/ Bernanke Fed was so far behind the economic curve, that it created one of the biggest inflationary bubbles in history in its quest to avoid deflation.
Indeed, by the time deflation did hit (in the epic crash of 2007-2008), the Fed was caught totally off guard. During this period, Bernanke repeatedly stating that the subprime bust was contained and that the overall spillage into the economy would be minimal.
Deflation reigned from late 2007 to early 2009 with the Fed effectively powerless to stop it. Then asset prices bottomed in the first half of 2009. From this point onward, generally speaking, prices have risen.
The Fed, however, continued to battle deflation in the post-2009 era, unveiling one extraordinary monetary policy after another. They’ve done this at a period in which stocks and oil have skyrocketed:
Home prices bottomed in 2011 and have since turned up as well (in some areas, prices now exceed their bubble peaks):
Which brings us to today. Inflation is once again rearing its head in the financial system with the cost of living rising swiftly in early 2014.
Rents, home prices, food prices, energy prices, you name it, they’re all rising.
And the Fed is once again behind the curve. Indeed, Janet Yellen and Bill Evans, two prominent members what is now the Yellen Fed (Bernanke stepped down in January), have both recently stated that inflation is too low. They’ve also emphasized that rates need to remain at or near ZERO for at least a year or two more.
Investors should take note of this. The Fed claims to be proactive, but its track record shows it to be way behind the curve with monetary policy for at least two decades. Barring some major development, there is little reason to believe the Yellen Fed will somehow be different (Yellen herself is a huge proponent of QE and the Fed’s other extraordinary monetary measures).
Which means… by the time the Fed moves to quash inflation, the latter will be a much, much bigger problem than it is today.
For a FREE Special Report on how to protect your portfolio from inflation, swing by
Best Regards
Phoenix Capital Research
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Here come the wage and price controls
Here come the wage and price controls.
March 13, 2014
Belize City, Belize
Nearly four thousand years ago, King Hammurabi of Babylon laid out his eponymous “Hammurabi’s Code”, a series of laws that is still famous to this day.
Most people know Hammurabi’s Code as “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth”. Yet what few realize is that the code was actually one of the original attempts at government wage and price controls.
Hammurabi’s Code decreed, for example, that the daily rate of pay for a tailor would be five grains of silver, and a farm laborer would be six grains of silver. The cost of hiring a small animal for field work would be four bushels of corn. Etc.
Of course, Hammurabi’s attempts to control prices didn’t work one bit. In his book The Old Babylonian Merchant: His Business and Social Position (published 1950), historian W.F. Leemans writes:
“Prominent and wealthy tamkaru [merchant traders] were no longer found in Hammurabi’s reign. Moreover, only a few tamkaru are known from Hammurabi’s time and afterwards . . .”
Despite the economic failures of Hammurabi’s experiment, though, wage and price controls have been tried again and again throughout history.
2,000 years later, Emperor Diocletian of the failing Roman Empire issued his Edict on Wages and Prices. The ancient Athenians tried (and failed) to set grain prices, and even had a small army of regulators to oversee the price controls. So did the the Zhou dynasty in ancient China.
Today you can see various forms of wage and price controls all over the world– from the blatant (Argentina) to the subtle.
Major farm subsidies in the United States, for example, are a form of price controls. Monetary policy (especially keeping interest rates at effectively zero) are a form of price controls.
Yet today President Obama is set to lauch another far more obvious form.
The central planner-in-chief is going to sign an Executive Order to require employers to expand overtime pay in the Land of the Free. This, on top of his recent proposal to increase the minimum wage 39% to $10.10 per hour (not that there’s any inflation).
Obviously this ‘decree by executive order’ strategy shows the political system for what it is: there is no republic, there are no checks and balances, there is no adherence to the Constitution.
They do whatever they want, however they want, with total immunity.
The troubling part about this executive order (aside from being yet another soon-to-fail wage control) is that it essentially abrogates millions of work contracts across the country.
Employers and their workers have long since agreed to terms of employment that may or may not include overtime pay.
Today President is unilaterally voiding any specific provisions about overtime pay in existing employment contracts, all in his sole discretion, and all without Congressional oversight.
The rule of law means nothing.
And even though any high school economics student can tell you that wage and price controls don’t work, the government is pressing ahead with vigor, damn the consequences.
Given their continued destruction of the middle class, perhaps it’s time we bring back ‘an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.’
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G-20 Agrees To Grow Global Economy By $2 Trillion, Has No Idea How To Actually Achieve It | Zero Hedge
Apparently all it takes to kick the world out of a secular recession and back into growth mode, is for several dozen finance ministers and central bankers to sit down and sign on the dotted line, agreeing it has to be done. That is the take home message from the just concluded latest G-20 meeting in Syndey, where said leaders agreed that it is time to finally grow the world economy by 2% over the next 5 years.
The final G-20 communiqué announced its member nations would take concrete action to increase investment and employment, among other reforms. “We will develop ambitious but realistic policies with the aim to lift our collective GDP by more than 2 percent above the trajectory implied by current policies over the coming 5 years,” the G20 statement said.
Australian Treasurer Joe Hockey, who hosted the meeting, sold the plan as a new day for cooperation in the G20.
“We are putting a number to it for the first time — putting a real number to what we are trying to achieve,” Hockey told a news conference. “We want to add over $2 trillion more in economic activity and tens of millions of new jobs.”
And to think all it took was several dozen of politicians sitting down for 2 days in balny Syndey and agreeing. So over five years after the start of the second great depression the G-20 has finally agreed and decided it is time to grow the economy: supposedly the reason there was no such growth previously is because the G-20 never willed it…
There is only one problem: the G-20 has absolutely no idea how to actually achieve its goal of boosting global output by more than the world’s eighth largest economy Russia produces in a year. Nor does it have any measures to prod and punish any laggards from this most grand of central planning schemes. From Reuters:
There was no road map on how nations intend to get there or repercussions if they never arrive. The aim was to come up with the goal now, then have each country develop an action plan and a growth strategy for delivery at a November summit of G20 leaders in Brisbane.
“Each country will bring its own plan for economic growth,” said Hockey. “Each country has to do the heavy lifting.”
Agreeing on any goal is a step forward for the group that has failed in the past to agree on fiscal and current account targets. And it was a sea change from recent meetings where the debate was still on where their focus should lie: on growth or budget austerity.
So who is the mastermind behind this grand plan? Why the IMF of course: “The growth plan borrows wholesale from an IMF paper prepared for the Sydney meeting, which estimated that structural reforms would raise world economic output by about 0.5 percent per year over the next five years, boosting global output by $2.25 trillion.”
The same IMF whose “forecasts” can best be summarized in the following chart (which will be revised lower shortly to account for all the snow in the Northeast US):
Aside from this idiocy, the other topic under boondoggle discussion was the fate of the taper, and specifically how emerging markets will (continue to) suffer should the Fed continue to withdraw liquidity. Here, once again, the developed nations won out, leaving the EMs, and particularly India’s Raghuram Rajan – who has been pleading for far more coordination between central banks in a time of globla tightening – high and dry.
- RBI’S RAJAN: POLICY TIGHTENING MUSTN’T UPSET GLOBAL ECONOMY
- RAJAN SAYS INFLATION IS HURTING GROWTH
- INDIA’S RAJAN SAYS BRINGING DOWN INFLATION BIGGEST CHALLENGE
- RAJAN: DEVELOPED, EM NATIONS AGREE ON NEED TO CALIBRATE POLICY
What inflation? As for coordination, here is what the G-20 did agree on: whatever Yellen says, goes:
Financial markets had been wary of the possibility of friction between advanced and emerging economies, but nothing suggested the meeting would cause ripples on Monday. “The text of the communiqué indicates that the standard U.S. line that what is good for the core of the world economy is good for all seems to have won out,” said Huw McKay, a senior economist at Westpac, noting there was nothing that could be taken as “inflammatory” about recent volatility in markets.
There was a nod to concerns by emerging nations that the Federal Reserve consider the impact of its policy tapering, which has led to bouts of capital flight from some of the more vulnerable markets.
“All our central banks maintain their commitment that monetary policy settings will continue to be carefully calibrated and clearly communicated, in the context of ongoing exchange of information and being mindful of impacts on the global economy,” the communiqué read. There was never much expectation the Fed would consider actually slowing the pace of tapering, but its emerging peers had at least hoped for more cooperation on policy.
Hockey said there had been honest discussions among members on the impact of tapering and that newly installed Fed Chair Janet Yellen was “hugely impressive” when dealing with them.
Indeed, in the three weeks that Yellen has been Chairmanwoman, she has been truly hugely impressive. It’s the next three years that may be more problematic.
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“The Pig In The Python Is About To Be Expelled”: A Walk Thru Of China’s Hard Landing, And The Upcoming Global Harder Reset | Zero Hedge
By now everyone knows that the Chinese credit bubble has hit unprecedented proportions. If they don’t, we remind them with the following chart of total bank “assets” (read debt) added since the collapse of Lehman: China literally puts the US to shame, where in addition to everything, the only actual source of incremental credit growth over the same time period has been the Fed as banks have used reserves as margin for risk purchases instead of lending.
Everyone should also know that like a metastatic cancer, the amount of non-performing, bad loans within the Chinese financial system is growing at an exponential pace.
Finally, what everyone learned over the past month, is that as the two massive, and unresolvable forces, come to a head, the first cracks in the facade are starting to appear as first one then another shadow-banking Trust product failed and had to be bailed out in the last minute.
However, as we showed last week, and then again last night, the default party in China is only just beginning as Trust failures in the coming months are set to accelerate at a breakneck pace.
The $64K question is will the various forms of government be able to intercept and bail these out in time, as they have been doing so far despite their hollow promises of cracking down on moral hazard: after all, everyone certainly knows what happened when Lehman was allowed to meet its destiny without a bailout – to say that the CNY10 trillion Chinese shadow banking industry will not have far more dire consequences if allowed to fall without government support is simply idiotic.
But what could be the catalyst for this outcome which inevitably would unleash the long-overdue Chinese hard landing, and with it, a new global depression?
Ironically, the culprit may be none other than the Fed with the recently instituted taper, and the gradual, at first, then quite rapid unwind of the global carry trade.
Bank of America explains:
QE and the Emerging Markets carry trade
The QE channel has worked through Emerging Markets and China is a key vehicle. By lowering the US government bond yields to a bare minimum, and zero –ish at the short end, a search for yield globally ensued. Emerging market banks and corporates have gone on an international leverage binge, yet another carry trade, the third in 20 years. The first one was driven by European banks, financing East Asian capex – that ended in 1997. The second one was global banks and equity-FDI supporting mainly capex in the BRICs. That ended in 2008. This time, it is increasingly non-equity: commercial banks and more importantly, the bond market – often undercounted in the BoP and external debt statistics that conventional analysis looks at.
Chart 9 shows the rise of EM external loans and bond issuance (both by residence and nationality). Since, end-3Q2008 to end-3Q2013, external borrowing from banks and bonds has risen USD1.9tn. Bank loans have risen by USD855bn and bond issuance in foreign currencies by nationality is up USD1,042bn. In the prior five-year period (i.e. end-3Q2003 – end-3Q2008), forex bond issuance rose only USD432bn. Clearly, the importance of external bond issuance is rising. See Table 5 for details.
In China, since, end-3Q2008 to end-3Q2013, outstanding external borrowing from banks and bonds has gone from USD207bn to USD849n – a net rise of USD655bn. Outstanding bank loans are up from USD161bn to USD609bn – a net rise of USD464bn. Bond issuance in foreign currencies by nationality is up from USD46bn to USD240bn – a net rise of USD191bn. In the prior five-year period (ie, end-3Q2003 – end-3Q2008), forex bond issuance rose only USD28bn in China. Clearly, the importance of external bond issuance is rising in China.
There is more to this story.
As mentioned earlier, for externally-issued bonds, USD1,042bn has been raised by the nationality of the EM borrower since end-3Q 2008, but USD724bn by residence of the borrower – a gap of USD318bn, or 44%. This undercount is USD165bn in China, USD100bn in Brazil, USD62bn in Russia, and USD37bn in India. The carry trade this time around was helped substantially by access to the bond market, especially from overseas affiliates of EM banks and corporations.
There are a lot of moving parts in the balance of payments that finally affect the change in international reserves at any EM central bank – eg, the current account, portfolio equity investment and direct equity investment, and debt flows – both from the bond market and lending from banks. We focus on the link between these debt flows and the international reserves in China. As Table 5 below shows, China’s external debt – from bond issuance and forex borrowing from banks – rose USD655bn during 3Q08-3013.
We posit that this large rise was in part driven by the carry trade offered up by QE – China banks and corporates issued substantial forex-denominated bonds, and borrowed straight loans from international banks. We recognize the caveat that correlation does not imply causation. The USD655bn rise in China debt issuance is highly correlated to the Fed’s balance sheet since late-2008. As Chart 11 shows, the rise in China debt issuance of USD 655bn has (along with FDI and the C/A surplus), boosted international reserves by USD1,773bn since late-2008. Also, as Chart 11 shows, the USD1,773bn rise in China international reserves mirrors the rise of USD2,585bn in the EM monetary base. Lastly, the rise of China’s monetary base of USD2,585bn correlates well with the USD10.9tr rise in China’s broad money expansion.
As the Fed tapers, and the size of its balance sheet stabilizes/contracts, we should expect this sequence to reverse. Confidence is a fragile membrane. Not only does the Fed’s balance sheet matter as a source of funds, but we believe so does the attractiveness of the recipient of the carry trade – and the trust in its collateral. As Gary Gorton puts it…
The output of banks is money, in the form of short-term debt which is used to store value or used as a transaction medium. Such money is backed by a portfolio of bank loans in the case of demand deposits, or by collateral in the form of a specific bond in the case of repo. The backing is designed to make the bank debt as close to riskless as possible — in fact, so close to riskless than nobody wants to really do any due diligence on the money, just transact with it. But the private sector cannot produce riskless debt and so it can happen that the backing collateral is questioned. This typically happens at the peak of the business cycle. If its value is questioned, it loses its “moneyness” so no one wants it, and cash is preferred. But as we know, if everyone wants their cash at the same moment, their demands cannot be satisfied. In this sense, the financial system is insolvent. (interview with the FT)
What makes sense for an individual carry trade – borrow low, invest at higher rates – falls prey to the fallacy of composition, when too many engage in the same carry trade. And eventually question the underlying collateral, now huge, and potentially suspect. China is a case in point. If our colleagues David Cui and Bin Gao are right, the trust sector in Chinacould create rollover risks that reverse a gluttonous carry trade within China, but partly financed overseas. In China’s case, this trade was between low global interest rates, low Chinese deposit rates, expectations of perpetual RMB appreciation on the one hand, and higher investment returns promised by Trusts on the other. A part of the debt funds raised overseas, we suspect were put to work in this Trust carry trade. The HK-based banks are big participants in intermediating the China carry trade – as Chart 12 shows, their net lending to China went from 18% of HK GDP in 2007 to 148% in late-2013.
There are always fancy names given to carry trades – financial liberalization of capital accounts, the Bangkok International Banking Facility, currency internationalization, etc. We remain skeptics of these buzzwords.
The potential consequences of Trust defaults and a China carry trade unwind
1. If the EM carry trade diminishes as a consequence of a changed Fed policy and/or less attractive risk-adjusted returns in EMs as collateral quality is questioned, the sources of China’s forex reserve accumulation will need to change. Perhaps to bigger current account surpluses, more equity FDI and portfolio investment through privatization and more open equity markets. If that does not happen, expanding the Chinese monetary base might require PBOC to increase net lending to the financial system and/or monetize fiscal deficits (this last part has not worked so well in EMs).
2. Potential asset deflation is a risk, as the carry trades diminish/unwind. Property prices are at risk – the collateral value for China’s financial systems. This is not a dire projection – it simply seeks to isolate the US QE as a key driver of China’s monetary policy and asset inflation, and highlights the magnitudes involved, and the transmission mechanism. Investors should not imbue stock-price movements and property price inflation in China with too much local flavor – this is mainly a US QE-driven story, in our view.
3. Currently, China’s real effective exchange rate is one of the strongest in the world. Concerns about China’s Trust sector, and its underlying collateral value, sees some of this carry trade unwound, the RMB could be under pressure.
4. Given HK’s role in the China carry trade, HK property prices and its banking system should be watched carefully for signs of stress.
5. UK, US, and Japan banking systems have been active lenders to China since QE. They should be on watch if the Trust rollover risk materializes and creates a growth shock in China. See Chart 15.
6. Safe haven bids for DM government bonds, overseas property and precious metals might emerge from China.
Could the party go on? Yes, if for some reason a significant deterioration in the US labor market, or a deflationary shock from China, or any other surprise that could lead to a cessation of the US tapering could prolong this carry trade. This is not the house base case. We believe it is better to start preparing for a post-QE world. As one of our smartest clients told us: “the main theme in the past five years was QE. If that is coming to an end, investments and themes that worked in the past five years must therefore be questioned.” We agree.
* * *
Yes, Bank of America said all of the above – every brutally honest last word of it.
The question, however, in addition to “why”, is whether the Fed also agrees with BofA’s stunningly frank, and quite disturbing conclusion, perhaps finally realizing that aside from the US, the biggest house of cards that would topple once the “flow”-free emperor is exposed in his nudity, is that of the world’s largest “growth” (and credit) dynamo of the past two decades – China.Because, as noted above, if Lehman’s collapse was bad, a deflationary collapse brought on by Chinese hard landing coupled with a full unwind of the global carry trade, would be disastrous and send the world into a depression the likes of which have never before been seen.
Finally, for those who want the blow by blow, here is BofA’s tentative take of what the preliminary steps of the next global great depression will look like:
If we do experience a sizable default, the knee-jerk market reaction will be cash hoarding since it will strike as a big surprise. Thus, we expect the repo rate to rise first, while the long term government bond would get bid due to risk aversion flows.
However, what follows will be quite uncertain, aside from PBoC injecting liquidity and easing monetary policy to help short term rate come down. It has been proven again and again the Chinese government will get involved and be proactive. The bond market reaction will be different depending on the government solution.
Alas, at that point, not even the world’s largest bazooka will be enough.
At this point one should conclude that reality – through massive, unprecedented liquidity injections – has been deferred long enough. It is time to let the markets finally return to some semblance ofuncentrally-planned normalcy: there is a reason why nature abhors a vacuum. Even if it means the eruption of the very painful grand reset, washing away decades of capital misallocation, lies and ill-gotten wealth, so very overdue.
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Hayek On Keynes: “Economics Was A Sideline For Him” | Zero Hedge
Hayek On Keynes: “Economics Was A Sideline For Him” | Zero Hedge.
Keynes will be remembered as “a man with a great many ideas that knew very little economics,” Friedrich Hayek notes in this brief interview and when challenged on his ‘parochial’ knowledge of economic history he was “not sheepish in the least… he was much too self-assured.” Hayek’s perspective casts Keynes in a very different light than his fan’s apostolic adoration might suggest, “he wasutterly contemptuous of anything that had been done before.” While Hayek describes Keynes as one of the most intelligent people he had known, he perhaps sums up the man’s work in this brief phrase – “economics was just a side-line for him.” As we note below, many describe Keynesian policy as ‘dumb’, however a more appropriate word would be ‘foolish’.
Hayek On Keynes
Keynesian Policies: Not Dumb, Just Foolish (via the Ludwig von Mises Institute of Canada)
A lot of my Austrian friends refer to Keynesian policies as “idiotic,” “stupid,” etc., but that’s not really accurate. Indeed, the Keynesian policy prescriptions are so counterintuitive–they so defy common sense–that only very intelligent people with plenty of schooling could have the confidence to utter them with a straight face.
Rather than describing Keynesian policies as “dumb,” I think a more appropriate word is foolish, because the technical analyses of IS/LM curves, talk of the “liquidity trap” and so on, utterly ignore political realities. A great example of this is Matt Yglesias and his handling of Argentina. Back in May 2012–not that long ago, by any stretch–Yglesias held up Argentina as a model for the eurozone countries. He wrote:
Spain is in a complete economic crisis…But perhaps there is a way out, one suggested by the recent experience of Argentina, a nation that’s currently enjoying full employment.
…[W]hen the world economy hit a snag in 2001, trouble emerged for Argentina. Unrelated hidden risks were revealed elsewhere in the global investment landscape and everywhere people got nervous. The foreign capital began to abandon Argentina, reducing investment, employment, and incomes. This in turn sharply reduced the Argentine government’s tax revenues and led to calls for sharp budgetary consolidation…Protesters and rioters took to the streets. President Fernando de la Rua’s party took a beating at the polls. Argentina defaulted on its external debt, broke the rigid linkage between the peso and the dollar, and went back to pursuing an independent monetary policy….
Default and devaluation were hardly a party. They destroyed the country’s banking system and wiped out many Argentines’ savings. But it did work. Argentina has grown rapidly in subsequent years and its unemployment rate has fallen steadily…
So Yglesias was recommending that Spain and other troubled countries ditch the euro and default on their sovereign debts, so they could free their printing press from the shackles of Brussels. The obvious Austrian (and generally free-market) response would be to warn that debasing the currency is hardly the path to prosperity, and that “solving” a crisis in this way would merely sow the seeds of a greater problem down the road. The prosperity coming from the printing press was an illusion.
Well, the economy in Argentina is now “melting down”–Yglesias’ own term. But our fearless Keynesian pundit has nothing for which to apologize. He explains in a January 2014 post:
With Argentina’s economy melting down, I’ve gotten various queries from people asking whether I regret having praised the country’s successful 2002 devaluation and default back in 2012 as an example for Spain and Greece to emulate.
The answer is: absolutely not!
Argentina is a country that has not, historically speaking, been well-governed. In fact one reason that the 2002 default was necessary was that Argentina previously embarked on a deeply misguided currency board scheme. To say that Argentina’s 2002 default and devaluation was the right thing to do and that there are important lessons to be learned from it is not to say that all countries should always emulate Argentina in all respects.
So there you have it, folks: Countries that historically have been ill-governed should follow Argentina’s lead by defaulting on their debts and debasing their currencies, but they should stop right before the bad consequences of these actions come home to roost. Simple as pie. Sort of like giving a bottle of Jack Daniels to some frat guys and sending them to the library to study–what could possibly go wrong?
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Commentary: Russia’s Sliding Ruble | The National Interest
Commentary: Russia’s Sliding Ruble | The National Interest.
As if Russia did not already have enough worries, with the security issues associated with the Sochi Olympics and the growing unrest next door in Ukraine, it now faces severe downward pressure on its currency. Any currency crisis flirts with economic opportunity and political disaster at the same time. The falling ruble can address some of Russia’s structural economic shortcomings, but only if other financial resources are made available in the process.
Russia is not alone in seeing its currency plunge. Turkey, South Africa, Argentina and Thailand have all experienced precipitous declines in their respective currencies since the beginning of 2014.
A common refrain runs through all these cases. The end of the U.S. program of quantitative easing and foreign investors’ rapid retreat from emerging markets has jolted the currency market, creating uncertainty in its wake. Throw in Russia’s low growth rate, high levels of capital flight and endemic corruption and one has all the conditions for a perfect currency storm.
January was a particularly bad month for the Russian ruble, with the currency falling more than 6 percent against the euro-dollar basket. The ruble rebounded a bit in early February, but it has again resumed its downward trend, with many experts speculating that the currency has yet to find its bottom.
The currencies of Russia’s post-Soviet neighbors also are in freefall, most notably in Ukraine, where currency controls have been introduced to save the hryvnia from total collapse. Kazakhstan, meanwhile, preemptively devalued the tenge by 19 percent in an attempt to keep its economy—and its exports—competitive.
To date the Russian government’s response to its currency woes has been reasonably restrained, unlike during the 2008-09 crisis when the Central Bank quickly went through $200 billion in reserves to defend the ruble. Russia currently possesses almost $500 billion in foreign exchange reserves. So to the extent that Russia has a rainy day fund, it is not raining hard enough, from the Central Bank’s perspective, to justify a major intervention to slow the ruble’s slide.
A falling ruble, in fact, solves several problems for the Russian government while setting the stage for a potential economic recovery. President Putin made several big campaign promises in 2012, especially in terms of increased social spending, that put significant strains on the Russian budget last year. Since the Russian government can make these payments with cheaper rubles, the burden on the budget has shrunk.
The decline in the ruble’s value also presents opportunities for Russian exporters, since their products naturally become more competitive abroad as the ruble declines. Though it appears unlikely that most Russian companies are in a position to profit from this changing dynamic, Russia’s wheat exports are up dramatically thanks to the declining ruble.
Russia brings other advantages to this crisis as well, including a balanced budget and a steady stream of hard-currency earnings that are not tied to value of the ruble, thereby allowing the state to replenish its coffers at a consistent rate. So one can clearly identify the scenario where Russia not only survives this devaluation but theoretically comes out in a better place than where it started.
But not all currency crises have happy endings. A weaker ruble portends a lower standard of living for many Russians. The specter of inflation further hovers over Russia as its citizens invariably will now chase after imported consumer products with cheaper rubles.
But the big unknown is whether Russia is flexible enough to benefit from the current financial crisis. As the ruble weakens and the price of labor and other inputs fall, Russia should be in a position to replace expensive imports with more affordable Russian-made goods. Such substitution occurred after the 1998 currency crisis and ultimately contributed to Russia’s sustained recovery.
Yet today, it remains an open question whether Russia possesses adequate financial and human capital to spark such business investment. Over the past decade, Russia’s entrepreneurial spirit has been snuffed out through excessive government regulation, corruption, and the steady rise of state-owned enterprises. The legal environment is so suffocating that Russia may not have sufficient reserves of entrepreneurs willing to assume the risk and invest in the Russian market.
Russia also still suffers from disastrous capital outflows. More than $60 billion dollars left the country last year for various destinations in the offshore banking system—and this money is exactly what Russia requires to buy equipment and otherwise invest in domestic business in order to take advantage of the falling ruble. Yet there is no sign that this money is returning onshore any time soon, especially if the government continues to talk about taxing Russian offshore companies doing business in Russia.
No supplemental investment means no sustained economic turnaround and the growing likelihood that a falling ruble will mirror a weakening economy, as opposed to reversing it. And as recent events in Argentina and Turkey suggest, such a development is a recipe for political failure. In both of these countries, a collapsing currency has fueled speculation as to the long-term prospects of their leaders. President Cristina Fernandez and Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan are floundering, in part because to address the currency crisis means to question the very economic policies that have sustained their popularity during their many years in power.
President Putin has not had to face this choice as of yet, but that day of reckoning may be approaching if Russians realize that basic Western consumer goods, foreign travel, and other perks of Russian capitalism are now beyond their reach.
Russians have weathered several currency crises over the past thirty years; so far, no one is shouting that the sky is falling. However, a currency crisis that is not contained could easily spill into politics, something that Putin wants to avoid at all costs. If the latter occurs, then it will be officially raining in Russia, and money will be no obstacle in any attempt to stabilize the ruble.
Will Pomeranz is the acting director of the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies at the Wilson Center in Washington D.C.
Image: RIA Novosti archive, image #978876 / Alexey Kudenko / CC-BY-SA 3.0
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China’s Liquidity Bubble Hits A Record: China Banks Issue 50% More Loans Than Fed And BOJ QE Combined | Zero Hedge
Overnight the PBOC released the latest Chinese bank loan and liquidity data for the month of January. Those who have been following our recent series on Chinese liquidity injections will know that when it comes to the real source of global liquidity, it is China that is the true unprecedented juggernaut, putting both the Fed and the BOJ’s puny QE programs to shame (see “Chart Of The Day: How China’s Stunning $15 Trillion In New Liquidity Blew Bernanke’s QE Out Of The Water“, “Some Stunning Perspective: China Money Creation Blows US And Japan Out Of The Water“). And January’s data was simply the final exclamation mark in a decade-long series in which China’s prosperity has been simply the result of an exponentially increasing amount of loan and liquidity creation by the Chinese semi-national and government backstopped financial system.
Here are the numbers:
Total Chinese loan creation in January was CNY 1.32 trillion, or $218 billion. While January traditionally sees a pick up in loan creation (and demand), the 174% increase in bank loans from December was an unprecedented number, was above the CNY 1.1 trillion, and CNY 250 billion more than a year ago. More notably, this was the largest monthly bank loan injection since January 2010. The last time China scrambled to inject massive amounts of bank loans was in late 2008 and early 2009 when the world was ending, and it was China’s money that stabilized the global financial system far more so than the Fed’s whose QE 1 did not begin in earnest until March 2009.
The far broader monetary aggregate, Total Social Financing, which is the most encompassing calculation of credit and liquidity created in China in any one month, rose to CNY 2.58 trillion. This was more than double the December’s $1.23 trillion, and beat last January’s CNY 2.545 trillion. In fact, this month’s broad liquidity creation was the largest monthly amount in China’s history!
Here is what Reuters had to say about the overnight data:
January’s lending surge aside, China’s central bank has consistently signaled in recent months that it wants to temper credit growth to slow a rapid rise in debt levels across the economy.
It has focused in particular on keeping short-term interest rates elevated to force banks to stop lending to speculators or high-risk borrowers.
Analysts polled by Reuters in January said they expect China’s economy to grow 7.4 per cent this year, an enviable performance for a major economy, but still the worst for China in 14 years. The economy grew 7.7 per cent last year.
Here’s the problem: one can’t put the January lending surge aside, as it came at a time when for the second time in six months the PBOC tried to taper, only to be forced to not only bail out its money markets, but is on the verge of a bankruptcy tsunami involving its shadow banking products, the first of which it also bailed out despite repeated warnings this time it means business and would let it die. In this context, the January number is precisely what it appears: the bank’s logical response to a liquidity crunch as the Chinese regime finds itself in the same spot that the Fed has been in for the past 5 years – it must keep the monetary spice flowing, or else the party is over. And just like the Fed, and now the BOJ, so too does China not want to deal with the fall out if all it takes to created yet another quarter of increasingly subpar economic growth is another record of funny money conceived out of thin air.
The only problem is that it is becoming increasingly difficult to hide all the pieces of funny money, most of which result in bad and otherwise impaired loans, under the rug. And just to show the problem in its context, here is how China’s banks created some 50% more in bank loans in January than the QE credit money created by both the Fed and the BOJ combined.
And finally, here is China’s nearly half a trillion in total liquidity added to the system in just one month (some deleveraging, right?) looks compared to the Fed and the BOJ’s much maligned and unprecedented uncovnentional monetary policy.
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Goldilocks And The Dog That Didn’t Bark | Zero Hedge
Goldilocks And The Dog That Didn’t Bark | Zero Hedge.
Submitted by Ben Hunt of Epsilon Theory
Det. Gregory: Is there any other point to which you would wish to draw my attention?
Holmes: To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.
Det. Gregory: The dog did nothing in the night-time.
Holmes: That was the curious incident.
— Arthur Conan Doyle, “Silver Blaze”
Goldilocks And The Dog That Didn’t Bark
The market was down more than 2% last Monday. Why? According to the WSJ, CNBC, and all the other media outlets it was “because” investors were freaked out (to use the technical term) by poor US growth data. Disappointing ISM number, car sales, yada, yada, yada. But then the market was up more than 2% last Thursday and Friday (and another 1% this Tuesday), despite a Friday jobs report that was more negative in its own right than the ISM number by a mile. Why? According to those same media arbiters, investors were now “looking through” the weak data.
Please. This is nonsense. Or rather, it’s an explanation that predicts nothing, which means that it’s not an explanation at all. It’s a tautology. What we want to understand is what makes investors either react badly to bad news like on Monday or rejoice and “look through” bad news like on Friday. To understand this, I sing the Epsilon Theory song, once more with feeling … it’s not the data! It’s how the data is molded or interpreted in the context of the dominant market Narratives.
We have two dominant market Narratives – the same ones we’ve had for almost 4 years now – Self-Sustaining US Growth and Central Bank Omnipotence.
The former is pretty self-explanatory. It’s what every politician, every asset manager, and every media outlet wants to sell you. Is it true? I have no idea. Probably yes (technological innovation, shale-based energy resources) and probably no (global trade/currency conflict, growth-diminishing policy decisions). Regardless of what I believe or what you believe, though, it IS, and it’s not going away so long as all of our status quo institutions have such a vested interest in its “truth”.
The latter – Central Bank Omnipotence – is something I’ve written a lot about, so I won’t repeat all that here. Just remember that this Narrative does NOT mean that the Fed always makes the market go up. It means that all market outcomes – up and down – are determined by Fed policy. If the Fed is not decelerating an easy money policy (what we’ve taken to calling the Taper), the market goes up. If the Fed is decelerating its easy money policy, the market goes down. But make no mistake, the Common Knowledge information structure of this market is that Fed policy is responsible for everything. It was Barzini all along!
How do Narratives of growth and monetary policy come together? Well, there’s one combination that the stock market truly and dearly loves – the Goldilocks scenario. That’s when growth is strong enough so that there’s no fear of recession (terrible for stocks), but not so strong as to whip the flames of inflation (not necessarily terrible for stocks, but sure to provoke the Fed tightening which is terrible for stocks).
Over the past few years the Goldilocks scenario has changed. Inflation is … well, let’s be straight here … inflation is dead. I know, I know … our official measures of inflation are all messed up and intentionally constructed to keep the concept of “inflation” and the Inflation Narrative in check. I get that. But it’s the Narratives that I care about for trying to predict market behaviors, not the Truth with a capital T about inflation. If you want to buy your inflation hedge and protect yourself from the ultimate wealth-destroyer, go right ahead. At some point I’m sure you’ll be right. But I’m in a business where the path matters, and I can’t afford to make a guess about where the world may be in 5 to 10 years and just close my eyes. The Inflation Narrative is, for the foreseeable future, dead. It’s a zombie, as all powerful Narratives are, so it will return one day. But today Goldilocks has nothing to do with inflation.
The Goldilocks scenario today is macro data that’s strong enough to keep the Self-Sustaining US Growth Narrative from collapsing (ISM >50 and positive monthly job growth) but weak enough to keep the market-positive side of the Central Bank Omnipotence Narrative in play. That’s the scenario we’ve enjoyed for the past few years, particularly last year, and it’s the scenario that our political, economic, and media “leaders” are desperate to preserve. So they will.
On Monday we had bad macro data on the heels of the Fed establishing a focal point of $10 billion in additional Taper cuts per FOMC meeting, a clear signal that monetary easing is decelerating on a predictable path. This is the market-negative side of the Central Bank Omnipotence coin, which turns bad macro news into bad market news. And so we were down 2%. And so the Powers That Be started to freak out. Did you see Liesman on CNBC after the Monday debacle? He was adamant that the Fed needed to reconsider the path and pace of the Taper.
And then we had Friday. Honest to God, I thought Liesman was going to collapse of apoplexy, what my Grandmother would have called a conniption fit, right there on the CNBC set. The Fed MUST reconsider its Taper path. The Fed MUST do everything in its power to avoid even a whiff of deflationary pressures. Heady stuff. By 10 am ET that morning the WSJ was running an online lead story titled “U.S Stocks Rise as Focus Returns to Fed”, acknowledging and promulgating the dynamic behind bad macro news driving good market news.
It’s not necessary (and is in fact counter-productive from a Narrative construction viewpoint) to switch the Fed trajectory 180 degrees from Taper to no-Taper. What’s necessary is to inject ambiguity into Fed communication policy, particularly after the non-ambiguous FOMC signal of two weeks ago that led directly to Monday’s horror show. The need for ambiguity is also something I’ve written a lot about so won’t repeat here. But this is why Hilsenrath and Zandi and all the rest of the in-crowd are writing that the Taper is still on track … probably. Unless, you know, the data continues to be weak. What you’re NOT seeing are the articles and statements by the Powers That Be placing a final number on QE3, extrapolating from the last FOMC meeting to a projected QE conclusion. And that’s the dog that didn’t bark. It’s the projection that Yellen won’t be asked about in her testimony; it’s the article that won’t be written in the WSJ or the FT. Is the Taper still on? Two weeks ago the common knowledge here was “Yes, and how.” Today, after a stellar bout of Narrative construction, the answer is back to “Yes, but.” That’s the ambiguous, “data dependent” script that Yellen and all the other Fed Governors now have the freedom to re-assert.
If I’m right, what does this mean for markets? It means that our default is a Goldilocks scenario between now and the next FOMC meeting in mid-March. It means that bad macro news is good market news, and vice versa. If the next ISM manufacturing number (no one cares about ISM services) is a big jump upwards, the market goes down. Ditto for the February jobs number. If they’re weak, though, that’s more pressure on the Fed and another leg up for markets.
Place your bets, ladies and gentlemen, the croupier is about to spin the roulette wheel. Pardon me if I sit this one out, though. My crystal ball is broken.
If I’m right, what does this mean for the real world? It means an Entropic Ending to the story … disappointing, slow and uneven growth as far as the eye can see, but never negative growth, never an honest assignment of losses to clear the field or cull the herd. That’s not my vision of a good investment world, but who cares? I’ve got to live in the world as it is, even if it’s a long gray slog.
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Paul Singer’s “Vision” Of The Coming “Riot Point” And The Fed’s “Formula For Destruction” | Zero Hedge
We sympathize with traditional stock and bond investors, who are faced with extremely poor choices today. QE has distorted the prices of all traditional asset classes to such an extent that none currently promises a fair return with modest risk…. Because the dominant force in securities-price movements today is government policy, particularly the governmental buying of bonds and stocks, there is a vulnerability to all trading and investing prospects that cannot be assessed or measured with confidence… Since there is no history of Americans losing confidence in the basic soundness of their currency and their government, and since monetary policy today is so manipulative and large, it will be hard to parse the reasons for any particular market moves in 2014.
– Paul Singer, Elliott Management
As always, perhaps the best periodic commentary on the state of the “markets” (even if such a thing has not existed for the past 5 years) and global economy comes from the person whose opinion has not been swayed by fly-by-night screechers and book-peddling pundits who fit in CNBC’s octobox and who come fast and are forgotten even faster, and whose 37 year track record at Elliott Management, whose assets he has grown from $1.3 million to $23 billion, speaks for itself: Paul Singer.
Below are the key excerpts from his January letter.
VISION
Imagine how mainstream experts would have reacted to the following set of predictions in 2006: “In two years Lehman will be bankrupt; Merrill and Bear will be acquired in distressed takeunders; Citicorp, AIG, Chrysler, GM, Delphi, Fannie and Freddie will be taken over by the government facing possibly hundreds of billions of dollars of losses; and only 13 global megabanks will survive.”
The 2008 crisis had a lasting and profound impact on virtually the entire developed world. The financial system was brought to the brink of collapse; conditions were created for the radical monetary policy of the past five years and a severely distorted recovery; the plans and dreams of hundreds of millions of people were disrupted, in some cases catastrophically; and societal values were significantly twisted away from individual responsibility toward dependency. In fact, the consequences of the bubble, the bust and the policy aftermath are not yet in full historical view. Despite all the pain, policymakers
refuse to take responsibility for the bubble, the distortions of the bubble years, the ensuing failure to lay the groundwork for strong post-bust growth, the continued riskiness and fragility of the major financial institutions, the lack of appropriate policies to deal with the bust, or their total inability to deal with competitive and technological challenges in the labor market.
It is not that the path toward destruction was impossible to see. On the contrary, a number of people saw the disaster coming, even if they did not all see the timing or the shape of it. The strangest part of the whole series of events is that only a few large professional investors noticed the smoke and shouted “fire.” Policymakers, particularly at the Fed and including (importantly) Janet Yellen, paid some small lip service to the building risks, but they were wedded to their primitive “models” and had a completely inadequate grasp of modern financial instruments, leverage and the interconnectivity of financial institutions. Not only did policymakers fail to understand what was happening and how to deal with the crisis and its aftermath, but also many of those same policymakers, and ALL of the structures and assumptions that prevailed pre-crash, are still in place today. No apologies have been issued. There has been a great deal of partisan back-and-forth and successful lobbying, but sadly the financial system is still not sound. This may be impossible to prove until the next crisis, but you could have said the same about conditions leading up to the last one.
Policymakers were and remain asleep at the wheel. The lack of introspection at the Treasury, the Fed, Congress, the White House and other regulatory bodies is astounding. Instead of taking reasonable and conservative steps to strengthen the financial system and to reach consensus on what is necessary to generate growth, there has been a series of cronyist, ideological, punitive steps that have neither catalyzed the growth that this country needs nor made financial institutions safe. At the same time, the Administration has allowed (and encouraged) the Fed to carry the ball all by itself, heaping praise on it for saving the world at the very time that the White House is shirking its own responsibilities. The Fed’s “dual mandate” (to promote “maximum employment” as well as “price stability”) is bunk in today’s context. It seems as if the entire world is acting as if the Fed actually has a “total mandate” and the rest of the federal government gets to stand around and applaud its heroic efforts. In fact, what we have now is a lopsided recovery, gigantic price risk in financial markets because of QE, and unknown but potentially massive risks of inflation and the ultimate loss of confidence in the major paper currencies, all because the federal government is more interested in ideology than in getting the country back on track, and the Europeans are more interested in preserving the euro than promoting the prosperity of the sovereign nations of Europe.
* * *
For private investment firms like hedge funds, leverage in the modern world is a matter of semi-volition. True, it is much more readily available than in the past, but there are credit departments and initial margins limiting the size of positions. The big financial institutions, on the other hand, found themselves in an environment starting a couple of dozen years ago in which leverage was entirely voluntary, subject to no real constraint because they were not required to post initial margins with each other. Since many of their positions were “hedges” in similar securities, they risk-underwrote those trades using models that projected very little possibility of generating losses. As a result, the entire system has become super-leveraged, super-interconnected and very brittle. Given the benefits of hindsight, we do not have to prove the proposition that the limits of leverage were exceeded in the recent past and that the system was improperly risk-managed by governments and by the managements of financial institutions. It is frustrating, therefore, that no meaningful de-risking of the financial system has occurred since the crisis. You will see a system primed for a rerun of 2008, perhaps even faster and more intense this time.
***
MONETARY POLICY GOING FORWARD
QE has created asset price booms, but historically high excess bank reserves are still generally not being lent, and monetary velocity remains relatively low. But last spring, we witnessed the first tangible sign that the Fed may be trapped in its current posture. The Fed cannot retreat due to excessive debt in the system, the fragility of major financial institutions (still opaque and overleveraged) and the prospect that a collapse of bond prices could lead to a quick, deep recession. This situation may be the early stages of a phase in which the Fed is afraid to act because it has the “tiger by the tail,” and perhaps is beginning to realize that the current situation carries significant risks. QE has not generated a sharp upsurge of sustaining and self-reinforcing growth thus far. What it has done is lift stock and asset prices and exacerbate inequality. If investors lose confidence in paper money, as evidenced by either a hard sell-off in one of the major currencies or a sharp fall in bond prices, the Fed and other major central bankers will be in a pickle. If they stop QE and/or raise short-term rates to deal with the loss of confidence, it could throw global markets into a tailspin and the worldwide economy into a severe new recession. However, if they try to deal with the loss of confidence by stepping up QE or keeping interest rates at zero, there could be an explosion in commodity and other asset prices and a sharp acceleration in inflation. What would be the “exit” from extraordinary Fed policy at that point? The current, benign-looking environment (low inflation and
stable economies) is by no means ordained to be the permanent state of things. At the moment, “tapering” is expected to get underway, but that prospect represents a tentative, slight diminution of bond-buying. It contains no real promise of normalizing monetary conditions. If the economy does not light up, the impact of another year of full-bore QE is impossible to predict. Five years and $4 trillion have created economic and moral distortions but very little sustainable value. Maybe the sixth year will produce the “riot point.” Nobody knows, including the Fed.
As we and others have said, the Fed is overly reliant upon models that do not account for real-world elements of instruments, markets and traders in the derivatives age. Models cannot possibly take into account unpredictable interactions among huge positions and traders in new and very complicated instruments. Thus, the Fed should be careful, humble and conservative. Instead, it is just blithely plowing ahead as if it knows exactly what is going on. Intelligent captains sail uncharted waters with extra caution and high alert; only fools think that each mile they sail without sinking the vessel further demonstrates that they are wise and the naysayers were fools. This is a formula for destruction. The crash of 2008 should have been smoking-gun evidence of the folly of this approach, but every mistake leading up to the crash, especially excessive and “invisible” leverage and interest rates that were too low, has been doubled down upon in the years since.
Olduvaiblog: Musings on the coming collapse 