Archive - Dec 2014

Friday's jobs data proves it - America is back baby!!! Or is it all totally manipulated statistical shenanigans? A quick glimpse at the following charts two rather uncomfortably 'non-recovery-like' lines - of structural unemployment and the percent of the US population of Food Stamps - would suggest that for much of America, the recovery never happened... and in fact has got worse...

Who says macroprudential regulation doesn't work: according to the BIS, notional amounts of outstanding OTC derivatives contracts fell by 3% to "only"
$691 trillion at end-June 2014. This is also roughly equal to the total derivative notional outstanding just before the Lehman collapse, when global central banks volunteered taxpayers to pump a few trillion in capital to meet global variation margin calls. Clearly the system, in the immortal words of Jim Cramer, is "fine."

The slump in oil prices has BP "concentrating minds on making the organisation more efficient" which means, as The FT translates, the 'unequivocally good news' of lower oil prices is accelerating plans for the oil giant to reduce its headcount. The Sunday Times reports, BP is to ax middle managers and freeze projects as Brian Gilvary, the finance director, said: "what you’ll see with this simplification plan is that headcounts are starting to come down across all of our activities in upstream, downstream and in the corporate centres — essentially the layers above operations." Gilvary added that the company would slash the oil price assumption used to set its day-to-day budget.

"I find it extremely odd and troubling that starting with January 2013, the Establishment Survey started moving in nearly an exactly straight line (benchmarks are important). That observation is made more curious by a memo that was just sent out by the Census Bureau to its field offices (the BLS crunches the numbers, but contracts out with the Census Bureau to actually conduct the surveys)... In other words, they were told that there would be penalties for cheating on the surveys, which apparently is tied to suggestions of a rash of field workers completing surveys for people never actually surveyed. The reason for doing so, spelled out by the New York Post, is that compensation is tied to a 90% completion rate."

Be careful what you wish for... Russia matters. It mattered in 1998 when the shock waves from its debt default reverberated around the world. And it would matter again should the plunging oil price lead to economic collapse. That’s despite the fact that Russia is a massive land mass with a relatively small economy. It accounts for only 3% of global GDP and it is dominated by an energy sector that is responsible for 70% of exports. But there are at least five ways in which a crisis for Russia could spread.

Currently there is probably no other great divide in opinions than the current state of oil and all it entails. Not only do many not remember the early 80’s when U.S. oil producers went haywire, but they seem to have forgotten just how quickly in the sheer speed of panic, bankruptcies, and more that took place in the southern regions of the U.S. and Texas in-particular.

A few nations may indeed be forced to sell some of their official gold reserves as a result of plunging oil prices. It seems however not likely at this juncture that Russia will be one of them, there is a good chance that Venezuela will eventually be forced to sell some of its official gold holdings. However, the impact - short term psychological impact - on the gold market should be quite limited.

All it takes is a few public beatings to dissuade others from openly considering other factors when researching or discussing climate change.

At the end of 2012, 'economists' looked to 2014 as the year global growth would break out above the 3% trend and the world could rest back in Utopia... that never happened. At the end of 2013, 'economists' looked to 2015 as the year global growth would break out above the 3% trend and the world could rest back in Utopia... that expectation has now collapsed back to a mere 2.88%. And now, at the end of 2014, guess what...

And ringing in the Swinder's Bonus Season...

A dispassionate look at the week ahead.

The last time Israel ignored Syrian sovereignty and attacked Bashar al Assad's nation without fear of reprisals was in the spring of 2013, when the US was eager to launch an all out war, and tear apart the last country that stood in the path of the Qatari natural gas pipeline to Europe. As a result of last minute Russian intervention, the war was avoided in the last summer, but not before Syria had declared Israel's attack An "Act Of War.' Moments ago, following a year and a half hiatus, Israel, which had not made many headlines on the geopolitical arena in recent months, launched another bomb raid on Syria, and as AP reports, Israeli warplanes carried out two airstrikes Sunday near Damascus, one near the city's international airport and a second outside a town close to the Lebanese border, Syria's state news agency said.

"... we seem to have miscalculated..."

You almost have to step outside of economics, even out of the financial world as a whole, to pose what is the most elementary question about our economy today. That can’t be right.  The most elementary question is not how we can achieve growth, it’s whether we need growth, and what we would need it for that is important enough to destroy our entire societies and economies for.... We’re in dire need of fresh blood and smart new ideas to clean up the mess the present ideologies and their puppets and puppetmasters have created.

... It is hard to sum up a conference featuring fifty-eight different sessions spread across eight different streams: everyone’s impressions will inevitably be personal. Ours, though, is that investors remain united in their faith in the central banks – if not for their ability to create growth, then at least in their ability to push up asset prices. And yet the limits of that faith are increasingly on display. Not only are there signs of trouble at individual corporates on the ground. There is also a growing realization that the central bankers themselves – be it the ECB today, or the past and present Chairs of the Fed – subscribe to different theologies.