Archive - Dec 6, 2010

• Bernanke says Fed may take more action to curb joblessness.
• Euro Finance Chiefs meet today as Belgium seeks bigger crisis fund.
• Most Asian stocks climb as commodity prices gain; Canon leads drop by exporters.
• Qatar shares surge to 2-year high on winning World Cup 2022 bid.
• US, S Korea, in finalizing a sweeping free-trade agreement.
• White House officials and congressional Republicans closing in on a deal that would extend current income-tax rates for all Americans.
• BofA says it has met condition of Tarp exit; close to raising required $3B via asset sales.

In another superficial attempt to demonstrate that things are stabilizing in the European bond market, LCH Clearnet has just lowered margins on Irish bonds to 30% from the 45% it had raised margins to on November 25. Presumably all it takes for a clearer to get confidence back in a given market is just a few billion in purchases by a given central bank. Perhaps instead of being concerned with a few short sellers distorting the market, LCH should actually consider what would happen to its entire clearing market in European bonds should the ECB bid be pulled. Of course, fudging with margins is so much easier to pretend control over the situation than to really go to the heart of the key destabilizing factor...

Last night, in a less than surprising Op-ed in the FT, Jean-Claude Juncker and Giulio Tremonti, prime minister and treasury minister of Luxembourg and Italy’s minister of economy and finance respectively, once again floated the idea that the time has come for a joint European bond issuance mechanism, because apparently lack of individual monetary policy is not enough, European countries now have to surrender their fiscal decision making to a bunch of dogmatic bureaucrats in Brussels. The desperate duo, which knows all too well, that they could well be next on the bond vigilantes radar, write: " The European Council could move as early as this month to create such an agency, with a mandate gradually to reach an amount of outstanding paper equivalent to 40 per cent of the gross domestic product of the European Union and of each member state." We ridiculed the idea last night, noting that this proposal would only happen over Germany's dead body, which already sees as contributing far too much to keeping the European experiment alive and getting only dirty looks from its voters. Today, Germany steps up and confirms: "Germany on Monday rejected the idea of increasing the size of the European Union's safety net and ruled out a proposal to issue a joint euro zone bond." And additionally recent pressure to hike the rescue fund by the IMF and internally were also promptly shut down by Germany, which as we pointed out last week threatened to pull out of the Euro if the political wrangling by pathological liars such as the Greek elite continued: "We see no reason at all at the moment for an increase in the size of the euro rescue shield -- no reason at all." Which means that with no recourse to do anything structural, the ECB is back to buying up Portuguese bonds in a fake bid to create a sense of normalcy in the bond market, which everyone with half a brain knows will collapse the second the ECB pulls out or runs out of paper.

Look at any international comparison of taxes to GDP, and one can always find the United States at the bottom of the table. The average amount of tax paid by the top 400 US tax payers came to under 17%, less than half the maximum Federal rate of 35%. Why Warren Buffet pays a much lower tax rate than his secretary. My plan for balancing the budget.

RANsquawk European Morning Briefing - Stocks, Bonds, FX etc. – 06/12/10

Folker Hellmeyer, the chief analyst with the Bremer Landesbank, gives an exclusive interview to chaostheorien.de on his take on the global currency wars and China's role in the global economy moving forward.

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