Archive - Apr 28, 2013 - Story

In the 3-d plot, we see that the current trajectory (near the bottom of the graph) is quite a bit below the trajectory during the crisis of 2008. It may be that the 2008 financial crisis was one of financial institution solvency, whereas our current crisis is starting to look like one of financial system failure. If this is the explanation for the differing trajectories then my projection is that we are going to see something we haven't seen before.  The gold-silver ratio has the potential to rise to heights never before seen. The reason is that major crises encourage hoarding and flight; and it is much easier to flee with a million dollars in gold than a million dollars in silver.

The man who is the chief advisor to the US Treasury on its debt funding and issuance strategy was just promoted to the rank of second most important person at the biggest commercial bank in the US by assets (of which it was $2.5 trillion), and second biggest commercial bank in the world. And soon, Jamie willing, Matt is set for his final promotion, whereby he will run two very different enterprises: JPMorgan Chase and, by indirect implication, United States, Inc.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how you take over the world.

Never forget, the “achilles heel” of anyone who’s driving aim in life is to CONTROL the lives of other people is his or her aching need to be taken “seriously”. No tyrant on any level can handle derision, it deflates them utterly by reducing their stature to its proper level in a way which they cannot escape. Imagine if they held an election and everybody laughed - and then went on about their IMPORTANT business. In essence, the people who matter in the world are fully confident that they have earned the status of adult human beings and get exasperated with those who insist on treating them as children. There are times when this tiresome tendency can grate very sharply. But most of the time, it really is screamingly funny and really should be treated as such. As Soviet dissenter Vladimir Bukovsky pointed out in his wonderful autobiography - To Build A Castle - one of the most potent weapons wielded by all those who stood up against the tyranny which surrounded them was the political joke. It won a great victory in the end.

A few hours ago, Greek lawmakers approved a reform law to unlock about €8.8 billion of rescue loans from the European Union and the International Monetary Fund. The law, which was a condition for further aid installments, passed easily with the solid backing of the three parties comprising Greece's ruling coalition, by 168 to 123 votes. Next, euro zone officials will meet on Monday to approve overdue payment of 2.8 billion euros ($3.65 billion) in rescue loans, finance minister Yannis Stournaras said. Euro zone finmins will then meet on May 13 to release a further 6 billion euro installment, he added. The use of proceeds? To have enough cash to pay salaries and pensions, and of course to pay Mario Draghi for a bond that matures on May 20. The fact that Europe has gotten the green sign to hand over some pocket change to Greece, so Greece can pay for the maturity on Greek bonds by the ECB was the good news (for someone, unclear exactly who). The bad news, for Greece, starts now. As BBC reports, some 15,000 state workers will lose their jobs by the end of next year. Naturally, in light of the recent epic backlash against austerity (or fauxterity as penned previously) whose corpse has already promptly been trampled in Spain, and now in Italy, Greece would like to get back on the gravy train as well. Yet they are being denied, and the result is indignation at what the people rightfully see as B-class European citizen treatment.

While suicides out of desperation had long been a tragic, if recurring, staple in depressionary Europe, so far popular anger had been directed at within, with few if any murderous outbursts targeted at other people, and certainly not at politicians (or financiers). This obviously has been a critical aspect of the current economic collapse in Europe - one needs but recall that it was a political assassination that sparked World War I in Sarajevo, and indirectly, via the Weimar collapse of Germany, set the stage for World War II, leading to the death of tens of millions around the globe. Today we came close. As the AP reports, during today's swearing in ceremony of Italy's new pseudo-technocrat yet anti-austerity government which has the blessings of Berlusconi, an "unemployed Italian gunman shot and seriously wounded two policemen Sunday in a square outside the premier's office in Rome, but he "wanted to shoot politicians," Rome prosecutor Pierfilippo Laviani said.

We have commented numerous times on the inexorable rise in Spanish non-performing loans (NPLs). Since the Spanish economy started to weaken at the end of 2006, NPLs have been rising sharply; but the subsequent collapse of the Spanish property market exacerbated the matter further, causing a spike in NPLs in 2007 and 2008. Since then, the Euro area crisis and subsequent sharp rise in unemployment have led NPLs at Spanish banks to make new record highs. However, they are not alone. Italian banks did not suffer a property market collapse and so the rise in NPLs started later than in Spain and was not as severe. However, as JPMorgan notes, the sharp rise in unemployment we have seen since mid 2011 has led to an acceleration in NPLs at Italian banks. What should be most worrying for incoming PM Letta, is that from the respective troughs for each country (the trough for Spain was a lot earlier than for Italy, about two years in actual fact), Italy is looking eerily similar. The rise in NPLs at Spanish banks over the past two years has had a lot to do with the recession and rise in unemployment. To the extent that Italian unemployment has only started to rise sharply a year and a half ago, the future path for NPLs at Italian banks looks set to follow that of Spain. So why aren't bond spreads blowing wider? Answer below...

Curious what the Cypriot people think just over a month after the most dramatic European banking sector collapse in years, and subsequent first bank sector bail-in and depositor impairment ever? Courtesy of Bloomberg, which summarizes a poll conducted via Symmetron and posted in Kathimerini Cyprus we now have an idea of what the still stunned Cypriot population thinks.

Having lost your older son in an stand off with the police, the younger one gravely wounded and recently moved to maximum security prison, while alleging both have been set up by the FBI in the recent Boston Marathon bombing, what do you do? Abandon all plans to see them, apparently, despite announcing just a few days ago that burying your dead and "finding out the truth" is the main priority. At least that is that case if you are Anzor Tsarnaev, father of the Boston Marathon bombing suspects. From Reuters: "The father of the Boston Marathon bombing suspects has abandoned plans to travel to the United States to bury one son and help in the defense of the other, he told Reuters on Sunday in an interview in southern Russia."

US commercial bank loans and leases flat since Lehman, and yet US GDP higher by $2 trillion since the biggest bankruptcy in history. How does one reconcile this monetary and growth quandary? Simple. Enter the Fed.

In what has been a banner weak for the many serial inflationists and fans of Big Government out there, equity markets have largely reversed the declines of the previous period on the hope for – what else? – yet more pump priming. On the fiscal front, much heart has been taken at EU Commission President Barroso’s assertion that the time has come to move beyond an exclusive reliance on ‘austerity’ and to begin to focus on encouraging growth. Needless to say [Barroso's actual words, were] far less radical than anything whipped up by the journalists. In the circumstances, however, the wilful desire to over interpret (if not actively misinterpret) the message was far too powerful to resist, especially in the wake of the academic catfight going on over the state of Reinhardt and Rogoff’s Excel skills. For those who have real lives to lead, the briefest of synopses of this spat will suffice and, indeed, it is only introduced here to illustrate the heedless Flucht nach Vorne mentality of the Krugmanites, ever eager as they are to peddle the line that the only reason stimulus has ‘failed’ is because there has been nowhere near enough of it. But other than this war of the scholastics, the whole debt issue surely misses the crucial point that debt only swells in a polity where not only is government over large to begin with, but where it is serially profligate – i.e,. where the political class persists in spending more than it dares ask its electors to contribute to their whims.

After reading the Spiegel article below, which reveals so much about German thinking, it becomes very clear that not only is Cyprus the "benchmark", but that the second some other PIIG country runs into trouble again, and its soaring non-performing loans inevitably demand a liability "resolution" a la Cyprus, it will be Germany once again at the helm, demanding more of the same equity, unsecured debt and ultimately depositor impairment. As the following punchline from Spiegel summarizes, "It would be more sensible -- and fairer -- for the crisis-ridden countries to exercise their own power to reduce their debts, namely by reaching for the assets of their citizens more than they have so far. As the most recent ECB study shows, there is certainly enough money available to do this." And that is the crux of the wealth-disparity demand of the European Disunion.