Creditors

History may eventually decide the "New World Order" started on September 28, when Russian President Vladimir Putin and US President Barack Obama had a 90-minute face off at the UN in New York. Irrespective of spin – “productive” according to the White House, “tense” according to a source close to the Kremlin – facts on the ground accumulated almost immediately.

"The only way to get velocity to pick up in a benign way is to write off the debt by a meaningful amount. That would have helped in the 2008 global financial crisis if more losses had been imposed on creditors.  But that obviously did not happen in 2008 as the policymakers demonstrated that they did not believe in capitalism. Otherwise, the only other way velocity picks up is by an unhealthy hyperinflationary surge reflecting a loss of confidence in central banks, an outcome that becomes more plausible the more extreme the resort to quantitative easing."

Wwith oil volatility surging in recent months, oil producers needed to take advantage of a rally, technical or otherwise, and an oil vol lull to reestablish hedges, even if it meant at far lower prices than recent benchmarks.  This is precisely what happened in the past week following one of the most torrid surges in the price of oil seen in recent years.

The market is prone to temporary fits of shared enthusiasm – for emerging-market debt, for Internet stocks, for residential mortgage-backed securities, for Greek government debt. Traders need not wait to see when or whether the profits materialize. IBGYBG, they say – I’ll be gone, you’ll be gone. There are numerous routes to bezzle and febezzle...  traders borrowed money from the future. And then the future came, as it always does, turning the bezzle into a bummer.

The US has now joined Canada, Cyprus, New Zealand, the UK, and Germany with plans to seize bank accounts during the next financial crisis. 

For many years now, it’s been clear that China would soon be pull­ing the strings in the U.S. financial system. In 2015, the American people owe the Chinese government nearly $1.5 trillion. Of course, the Chinese aren’t stupid. They realize we are both trapped.China has recently put into place a covert plan to get back as much of its money as possible - by extracting colossal sums from both the United States government and ordinary citizens, like you and me.

Unfortunately, we are used to politicians saying whatever they think they need to say to be elected president, and falling way short of their campaign promises on the job. Even scarier would be the notion of selling America to the craftiest bidder. The election may be more than a year away, but isn’t it time to dig beneath the carefully crafted persona that is Trump and unearth the person and the full spectrum of his business dealings? To see the real Donald Trump is to plunge into all the conflicts of interest he denies, the financial tricks he dispenses, the crucial details he obfuscates, and the flimflam he offers up day in, day out.

The results from Portugal's elections are beginning to trickle in and according to exit polls, Coelho's coalition has prevailed. According to Bloomberg, the ruling coalition of Prime Minister Pedro Passos Coelho has won 38%-43% of vote and 108-116 seats.

Once again the reactions of desperate government policies looks like creating an even worse situation thanks to unintended (though entirely foreseeable) consequences. Amid the prospect of sharply higher shipping taxes in Greece - designed to increase revenues and 'fix' the debt-ridden nation, WSJ reports many of Greece’s world-leading shipowners are actively exploring options to leave their home country. With Greece controlling 20% of the world's shipping fleet, the 'quadriga' of Greek creditors' demands to raise taxes (because debt restructuring is out of the question) on such an 'easy target' as the world's largest shipping industry appears likely to backfire as an entire industry's revenues move out of reach of government taxers.

The US Federal Reserve orchestrated an artificial boom from 2001 to 2007 through artificially low interest rates and has resumed doing so once again. Entrepreneurs operating under faulty market signals created by the Federal Reserve malinvested hundreds of billions of dollars into capital intensive projects primarily in the housing sector. We paid for our boom with millions of destroyed jobs, wasted labor, and wasted resources. The Chinese Central Bank learned nothing from the Fed’s catastrophic experiment. They will reap the same rewards.

According to the Fed, there is about $60 trillion of US Dollar credit or claims for US dollars. Also according to the Fed, there are about $12 trillion US dollars.  So, the data show plainly there are five times as many claims for US dollars as US dollars in existence. Does this matter to investors? Well, yes, it matters a lot.

It was a tale of two markets overnight: Asia first - where all commodity hell broke loose - and then Europe (and the US), where central banks did everything they could to stabilize the already terrible sentiment.

The divergence theme is likely to strengthen in the week ahead.  

"This is a monetary moment... we are looking at the beginning of the world’s reappraisal of the words and deeds of central bankers like Janet Yellen and Mario Draghi. You see monetary disorder manifested in super low interest rates, in the mispricing of credit broadly and you see it in the escalation of radical monetary nastrums that are floating out of the various central banks and established temples of thought: Negative real rates, negative nominal rates and the idea of helicopter money. So you need some hedge against things not going according to the script and that makes gold and gold mining equities terrifically interesting now."

Are some Chinese banks ramping up their exposure to shadow conduits on the way to obscuring massive amounts of credit risk? Moody's says yes...