Archive - Feb 16, 2014 - Story

"As proud citizens of the ‘Middle Kingdom’ the Chinese feel a strong sense of chosenness and are extremely proud of their ancient and modern achievements. This pride is tempered, however, by the lasting trauma seared into the national conscious as a result of the country’s humiliating experiences at the hands of Western and Japanese imperialism. After suffering a humiliating decline in national strength and status, the Chinese people are unwavering in their commitment to return China to its natural state of glory, thereby achieving the Chinese Dream."

While correlation is not causation, the coincidental timing of the tumble in virtual currencies and the surge in physical (alternative) currencies suggests another great rotation may be occurring... with gold at fresh 3-month highs (and Silve rup 16% in February alone) as Bitcoin presses 3-months lows...

We take certain liberties with the title: we realize that since one is dealing with human individuals, particularly human individuals stuck in an insolvent, soon to re-default nation, stupidity can never peak per se, as the next day will without doubt bring some peak-er instance of even more profound idiocy. However, at this particular moment, this may be it. What happened is that on Friday, Argentina fined supermarket chains including Wal-Mart, the world’s largest retailer, and Carrefour for "failing to maintain adequate stocks of price-controlled goods." This happened after the country shocked everyone in late January by devaluing the peso by 18 percent, effectively wiping out the purchasing power of its population by the same amount and forcing a mad scramble by the population into retail outlets, such as Wal-Mart, where the people were desperate to convert their increasingly more worthless pieces of paper for tangible goods resulting in a "run on the Wal-Mart" and depleting store shelves of virtually all goods, price-controlled or otherwise.

China is now the second largest economy in the world and for the last 30 years China's economy has been growing at an astonishing rate, wowing the world, as spending and investment has been undertaken on a scale never seen before in human history - 30 new airports, 26,000 miles of motorways and a new skyscraper every five days have been built in China in the last five years. But as we (and Michael Pettis, George Soros, and Jim Chanos - among many others) have warned, it is all eerily reminiscent of what happened in the West... the vast majority of it has been built on credit. This has now left the Chinese economy with huge debts and questions over whether much of the money can ever be paid back (spoiler alert: it can't and it won't).

Get long 'Depends' may be the most befitting headline for tonight's massive macro miss in Japan. For the 3rd quarter in a row, Japanese GDP missed expectations with a meager +1.0% annualized growth (versus a +2.8% expectation), and a tiny 0.3% Q/Q change vs expectations of a 0.7% increase, this is the biggest miss and slowest growth since Abe retook the economic throne after his chronic-diarrhea-prone first attempt to save the nation. No matter how hard they try to spin this, there's no silver lining as consumer and business spending missed expectations notably and the only Tokyo snow fell just last week so long after the quarter was over... and this is before a tax hike that is aimed at showing how fiscally responsible the nation and not simply an insolvent ponzi scheme alive through the good graces of the greater fools of leveraged carry trades.

While the only fun-durr-mentals that matter appear to be global central bank liquidity injections (and thus the level of leverage entrusted to the JPY carry trade), the crowd is swayed by truthisms and "common knowledge" memes that recovery is here, that things are improving, that earnings are 'solid', that markets are still cheap, and that historical analogs are different this time. However, with monetary policy at a turning point, we also appear (fundamentally and technically) to be at "the inflection point from self-reinforcing speculation to fragile instability."

As one might expect, the economic decline of a nation into rule by a handful of corrupt oligarchs will have many other negative repercussions. One of these is a loss of civil rights and freedoms that many of us have taken for granted. Reporters Without Borders puts out their Press Freedom Index every year, and the 2014 ranking came out today. It was not a good showing for the USSA. Specifically, the U.S. registered one of the steepest falls of all nations, down 13 slots to the #46 position. As the screen shot shows, just above Haiti and just below Romania.

Global financial and commodity markets are warning that the US Dollar is in for a bout of trouble, warns BofAML's Macneil Curry. Across asset classes, Curry points out that Gold was the first to make its low against the US Dollar, doing so back on Dec-15. The second market to turn against the US Dollar was US Treasuries, with Ten year note futures turning bullish back on Dec-26. Currently, the FX market - most specifically GBP - is breaking out and pressuring the US Dollar. Finally, the Japanese stock market continues to suffer, putting downward pressure on USDJPY and thus US Dollar weakness.

Those campaigning for a substantial jump in the minimum wage all assert that the purpose is to help working families. Unfortunately, careful students of the evidence come to a different conclusion. As Mark Wilson summarized it, “evidence from a large number of academic studies suggests that minimum wage increases don’t reduce poverty levels.” Some workers lose jobs (high minimum-wage states have among the highest unemployment rates); others have hours cut. The least-skilled get competed out of the jobs that remain (e.g., the minimum wage hits teenage employment hardest). It crowds out on-the-job training, impeding workers’ ability to learn their way out of poverty. And those effects are worse in a recession. It also raises costs and prices that workers pay as consumers. How can we explain support for a policy that harms many of those supporters say they wish to help? We explain it by focusing not on low-income workers, but their substitutes.

Protests in Venezuela continue (despite President Maduro's proclamation that the nation is in "absolute calm"), with both the government and the opposition holding rallies, leaving several streets and subway stations in Caracas closed. 10 students who were arrested amid violent protests last week have been released, though 6 students remain in custody. Demonstrators do not yet have the numbers or support base to unseat President Nicolas Maduro's administration, but as Stratfor notes, these protests could mark a turning point as the economic situation deteriorates there is a chance that protests like this could begin to generate additional social momentum in rejection of the status quo.

Actually, according to the first detailed estimate of international purchase activity in London by Knight Frank, the percentage of all central London homes that sold for more than 1 million pounds to foreigners in the 12 months through June 2013, was 49% to be exact. And as we showed yesterday when we put China's loan creation in the context of US and Japanese QE, keeping in mind the use of proceeds of all this newly created inside money has to ultimately go somewhere - that somewhere in this case being London and other global luxury real estate, said percentage is only going to get higher. Especially when one adds Russian, the middle east and other various regions whose oligarchs are desperate to park their money in "safe" havens.

Becoming more like Europe is not a good thing.  But that is the path that we are currently on.  For the most part, Europeans live in a socialist “Big Brother” system in which the government completely dominates your life from the cradle to the grave.  Of course there are differences from country to country, but generally speaking the lives of most Europeans are very tightly regulated.  You see, the truth is that high levels of individual liberty and freedom are considered to be “dangerous” by the European elite.  They believe that if we are all allowed to just do whatever we want that it would result in utter chaos.  They are convinced that life is better when those that are smarter (them) control the lives of everyone else.

While the propaganda surrounding Europe's "recovery" has reached deafening levels, what is going on behind the scenes is quite the opposite, and in the latest example that Europe is increasingly formalizing a regime of implicit capital controls, we learn that Italy has just ordered banks to withhold a 20% tax on all inbound wire transfers: a decree which on to of everything will apply retroactively to February 1. As Il Sole reports, "the deductions will be automatic (unless prior request for exclusion), and then it will be up to the taxpayer to prove that the money is not in the nature of compensation "income." In other words, as of this moment, but really starting two weeks ago, all Italians are money launderers unless proven innocent.

Amidst this sea of uncertainty we can be certain of this: humans will continue down an unsustainable path that inevitably leads to a tragic end until they succeed in destroying themselves or they reach a point of no return and abruptly change  course. That process of clinging to the present arrangement "because I can't live any other way" until that arrangement collapses is the primary narrative of our era. It is truly remarkable how humans will cling to a visibly self-destructive, no-exit arrangement because they see no alternative, and then after the present arrangement crumbles and the wreckage is cleared, we somehow manage to find some other arrangement. Sadly, we only rouse ourselves to change when there is no other choice, that is, after we've destroyed the previous arrangement.