Nationalism

Nationalism, like any political idea, is a spectrum of views not an absolute. As UBS notes in an interesting article today, the policies of Golden Dawn are not the policies of the True Finns of Finland, or the Freedom Party of Austria. However, there is undoubtedly a trend within the Euro area in favour of those parties that promote nationalistic policies (perhaps defined as the aggressive pursuit of domestic or indigenous interests over regional interests) and this trend raises considerable questions over the future of the Euro. The first and most obvious consequence of a rise of nationalism within the Euro area is that it will make managing the Euro crisis ever more complex to resolve. The other issue that arises from the rise of nationalist parties in the Euro area takes us away from the specifics of the Euro integration. Nationalism very readily turns into prejudice against others. UBS' Paul Donovan adds that the Euro area will work best when it recognises and uses its economic resources (people in this instance) to the best advantage. Festering resentment and nationalism is unlikely to produce that sort of a climate. Given how important it is to restore competitiveness to the Euro area economy, this is not a negligible economic cost.

While the Spanish government feverishly attempts to wrap up the country’s euphemistic financial system reform, the ever-expanding black holes, multiple balance-sheets restructuring with infinite amounts of public funds and reiterated calls for the need to further consolidate financial institutions seem to be setting up the stage for a self-fulfilling prophecy of Mayan proportions.  Hopefully, this time around, we can learn from the not-so-ancient Mesoamericans’ hard-learnt lessons of the dangers implied in the state breaking the rules of free market capitalism when bailing out institutions and interest groups at the taxpayers’ expense. If we don’t, at least the endgame should not take anyone by surprise.

As Americans mindlessly celebrate another Memorial Day with cookouts, beer and burgers, the U.S. war machine keeps churning. As we brutally enforce our will on foreign countries, we create more people that hate us. They don’t hate us for our freedom. They hate us because we have invaded and occupied their countries. They hate us because we kill innocent people with predator drones. They hate us for our hypocrisy regarding democracy and freedom. Just when we had the opportunity to make a sensible decision by leaving Iraq and exiting the Middle East quagmire, Obama made the abysmal choice to casually sacrifice more troops in the Afghan shithole. We have thrown over $1.3 trillion down Middle East rat holes over the last 11 years with no discernible benefit to the citizens of the United States. George Bush and Barack Obama did this to prove  they were true statesmen. The Soviet Union killed over 1 million Afghans, while driving another 5 million out of the country and retreated as a bankrupted and defeated shell after ten years. Young Americans continue to die, for whom and for what? Our foreign policy during the last eleven years can be summed up in one military term, SNAFU – Situation Normal All Fucked Up. These endless foreign interventions under the guise of a War on Terror are a smoke screen for what is really going on in this country. When a government has unsolvable domestic problems, they try to distract the willfully ignorant masses by proactively creating foreign conflicts based upon false pretenses.  General Douglas MacArthur understood this danger to our liberty.

“I am concerned for the security of our great Nation; not so much because of any threat from without, but because of the insidious forces working from within.”

Put another way, those Greek bondholders who DIDN’T go for the Second Bailout, just got their money back at 100 cents on the Dollar (compared to those who DID go for the Second Bailout and lost 70% of their money). This has shown the ECB and EU bureaucrats to be complete and total liars. It also shows the entire bailout/ austerity measures process to be garbage. 

Translating Germany's standard line on joiontly-backed European bonds is simple: "We don't want to pay" - it is as simple as that so you can ignore the rest of the rhetoric. France at the next EU summit is going to push for Eurobonds and Germany will resist in what may be a quite unpleasant stand-off. From Germany’s perspective we can easily understand their feelings about this matter because the consequences of Eurobonds are very negative for them. Eurobonds are quite clearly a “transfer union” where Germany is the primary source of funding then for the rest of Europe. If Eurobonds are ever enacted we would suggest selling any/all of the “AAA” countries and buying the periphery ones as the correct play in the intermediate term. In fact, Eurobonds are the crux where Federalism comes head to head with Nationalism and where the rhetoric gives way to actualization.

When it came time to vote in round one, more French youth voted for a party whose leader wants to break up the Euro, who wants to deal with immigration by ending dual citizenship, affirmative action, and by kicking out any immigrant who cannot adhere to French principles or who commits a crime, and who once compared the legal French tolerance of Muslims praying in the streets to putting up with Nazi occupation.

So we know that the pro-bailout parties in Greece have failed to form a coalition, and that this will either mean an anti-bailout anti-austerity government, or new elections, and that this will probably mean that the Greek default is about to become extremely messy (because let’s face it the chances of the Greek people electing a pro-austerity, pro-bailout government is about as likely as Hillary Clinton quitting her job at the State Department and seeking a job shaking her booty at Spearmint Rhino). It was said that the E.U.’s existence was justified in the name of preventing the return of nationalism and fascism to European politics. Well, as a result of the austerity terms imposed upon Greece by their European cousins in Brussels and Frankfurt, Greeks just put a fully-blown fascist party into Parliament.

Now that France has a Socialist President the story is not over, not even close to over as the next French elections, for Parliament, will roust the nation once more into the spotlight as Ms. Le Pen and her allies assume a new role, a higher ground, and as the financial situation in France deteriorates they may get an even bigger slice of the pie than thought at present. It is not just that Europe is going to be governed in a different fashion but that France will be run differently and with more difficulties I predict than currently thought. The recession and the anger directed at Germany are rousing the spirits once thought dead; France for the French, the Netherlands for the Dutch, Greece for the Greeks and soon we may find the same dreaded tale in Germany as Nationalism rings in the death knell for European unity and for the political parties that flaunted it. It is a rolling thunder all across Europe, that much is known, and the implications of it all will be felt by the people of each separate country. The dream is fading into the reality of a different sun and daylight will mask that which was dared to be dreamed years before.

"In a financed financial system, collateral is money"

Sunday marks the day in Greece, France, parts of Italy and Spain. May 6 will stand out perhaps as the day when the fortunes of Europe were reversed and if not reversed; re-programmed. There has been a lot of talk about this of course and a lot of speculation in the Press and, one would think, that it had all been discounted by the markets but not so fast. The discount will only go as far as the political implications are generally understood and we would submit that the particularities of the European elections are not well understood at all. We think the markets’ reaction is a first blush notion which does not get close to the more pressing questions of what some of the potential changes in power will mean past the revelry of the election night parties. Mr. Hollande, in fact, represents the wave that is sweeping all across Europe which is a return to Nationalism, to tribal pride, to economic self-protection as the European Recession, as driven by the “austerity measures” and fiscal restrictions imposed by Berlin deepen both the economic travails and the reaction to finding your nation under the economic jack boots of Berlin. All of the changes of guard in Europe are going to have a profound effect upon the marketplace in my view. There will be a widening of credit/risk spreads, a decline in the equity markets, a decline of the Euro against the Dollar as Fear climbs back in the driver’s seat and as uncertainty is the prevalent theme of each day.
 

The recent LTRO by the ECB provided lquidity; but at a cost. It is apparent that the banks in Europe pushed up the prices for European sovereigns in the short term but also increased their own risks by doing so. Recent data suggests that almost 10% of foreign buyers exited many of the weaker sovereign credits in Europe while their domiciled banks picked up the slack but, in doing so, increased their own risk and as yields have gapped back out in Italy, Spain et al the banks are facing significant losses on their balance sheets. It is quite possible now that with this weekend’s elections in Europe that Germany will find itself backed into a corner and nationalism could become a self-centered affair in Berlin with surprising consequences that could result from finding itself backed up against the wall. As much of Europe now finds itself in recession I note the continuing possibility of social unrest that could burst at any time as the unemployment numbers for much of the youth in Europe are abysmal and idleness can ignite in the most controlled of societies.

In this case we really do hate to say we-told-you-so but our concerns over social unrest and the rise of extreme nationalism (here, here and here) in an austerity-focused and massively unemployed Europe appear to becoming ever more prescient. Just last week we saw extreme parties in France of all places receive high levels of votes and in a note today from BBC News, the leader of the Greek Socialist Pasok party, Mr. Creosote himself - Evangelos Venizelos, told a rally in Patras that voters should not allow neo-Nazis to "goose-step into Parliament with Hitler salutes". 

There have been many grand experiments in social engineering during the past several centuries. We have witnessed the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the American Civil War, Communism and finally 1999 and the founding of the European Union. It is an interesting exercise to consider the long view as I have wondered what the world looked like in 1789 which was thirteen years after the commencement of the American experiment. It seems then historically that thirteen years after America began we were in a process of formation and working towards national goals as a coalition of individual States while we find the European Union, thirteen years after its inception, following quite a different route. May 6 may mark the date when the sleeper finally awakens as Greece and France may both vote in such a manner as to significantly change the political landscape on the Continent. We submit that we are quickly coming to a major reversal in both equities and in credit/risk assets and that instead of being aggravated that it took so long that you should be thankful that you had the luxury of time to prepare for it.

Between credible and non-credible political and fiscal policies and a reflationary or deflationary monetary policy aimed at the financial system, Morgan Stanley provides a quick-and-dirty 'map' of where Europe finds itself and the four different scenarios that await this troubled region. The 'Quantum Leap' of credible fiscal integration with term liquidity support and even easier monetary policy is where everyone hoped we would be by now (especially post the October 26th Grand Plan decisions). However, the sad truth in reality is the drop in credibility of political will (or direct nationalism emerging) combined with some concerns over inflation and the dramatic fading of the liquidity impact of the ECB's latest actions means we are drifting rapidly towards 'Debt Crisis Derailment' as the elite continue to confuse insolvency and illiquidity and stick their heads in the sand with regard the reality they face under the restrictions of Maastricht. With implicit monetary conditions dramatically easy and peripheral banks over-stuffed with sovereign debt, there is little room for anything but more encumbrance or ECB-Treaty-busting direct printing (which is the rumor floating all boats this morning).

Trading in Goldman Sachs Group Inc.’s gold ETF in India surged almost 11 fold, leading an advance in gold securities, as investors bought gold to mark the auspicious Hindu festival of Akshaya Tritiya. Volumes in GS Gold BeEs, India’s biggest exchange-traded fund backed by gold, was 937,816 units on the National Stock Exchange of India Ltd. at 4:54 p.m. in Mumbai, up from 85,376 units yesterday and more than the 101,914 average daily volumes in the last six months through yesterday, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. This is significant volume. Each unit represents about 1 gram of physical gold and therefore 937,816 units is the equivalent of some 29,170 ounces of gold which at today’s prices is some $47 million of daily volume for just one gold ETF in India. The Goldman Sachs India gold ETF is just one of many new ETFs in India. Trading in Kotak Gold ETF jumped more than eightfold to 226,032 units. Gold demand in India, the world’s biggest importer, may climb as much as 25% to 15 metric tons on Akshaya this year, according to Rajesh Exports Ltd., the country’s biggest gold-jewelry exporter. Assets held by local gold funds reached a record 98.9 billion rupees ($1.87 billion) at the end of March, according to the Association of Mutual Funds in India. GS Gold BeEs had assets worth 29.6 billion rupees (some $563 million (USD)) as of March 31, data from the association showed. Trading in UTI-Gold Exchange Traded Fund climbed more than fivefold, while volumes in Reliance Gold ETF, the second-biggest fund, was up more than sixfold, data shows.