Sovereign Debt

Greek FinMin Varoufakis is meeting sovereign debt lawyer Lee Buchheit today, the ‘fairy godmother to finance ministers in distress’... The big questions concern not just the difference between on the one hand, economic issues and on the other, political ones. Syriza doesn’t have the mandate to take Greece out of the eurozone. That is a huge point. But neither does it have the mandate to give in to the troika’s insistence on pensions cuts. At a certain moment, it may come down to what can be explained to the Greek people, and how well it can be explained. This explanation will almost certainly have to come after the fact, since holding a referendum pre-Grexit would carry far too much potential risk of uncontrolled demolition of the entire Greek economy and banking system.

Back in November we chronicled the (quiet) death of the Petrodollar, the system that has buttressed USD hegemony for decades by ensuring that oil producers recycled their dollar proceeds into still more USD assets creating a very convenient (if your printing press mints dollars) self-fulfilling prophecy that has effectively underwritten the dollar’s reserve status in the post WWII era. Now, with oil prices still in the doldrums, oil producers are selling off their USD assets in a frenzy threatening the viability of petrocurrency mercantilism and effectively extracting billions in liquidity from the system just as the Fed prepares to hike rates.

To think it was just recently in September of last year when the S&P, seemingly unaware of the tragic reality facing Greece in just a few months (by reality we meen democratic elections which overthrew the previous regime which was merely a group of Troika picked technocrats), upgraded Greece to B and said "The upgrade reflects our view that risks to fiscal consolidation in Greece have abated." Well, the risks have unabated, and two months after S&P flipflopped and downgraded Greece back to B- on February 6, moments ago it downgraded it again, this time to triple hooks, aka the dreaded CCC+. But, as City AM reports, the biggest news is that the Greek Finance Minister "will on Friday meet with infamous sovereign debt lawyer Lee Buchheit, who has helped numerous countries restructure their debt. Buchheit is a partner at top US law firm Cleary Gottlieb."

"Mr Draghi during the press conference to stress the need for the full implementation of the expanded asset purchase programme as an important condition for the positive growth and inflation outlook to materalise," Goldman says, previewing the Draghi presser where the ECB chief will likely get more than a few questions about the possibility that the central bank will run out of bonds to purchase in the course of monetizing the entirety of euro net issuance.

To maintain its hegemony, the U.S. must by all means prevent the emergence of rival powers and impede possible current as well as future threats that could emanate from oil states. The ideal condition for enforcing its own goals at a low cost would be the fragmentation of antagonistic power centers through ethnic and religious strife, civil wars, chaos and deep-seated mistrust in the Middle East – always following the well-known premise of ‘divide and rule.’ In fact, we are currently experiencing tremendous changes towards such a chaotic state of affairs.

The dude that called the Pan-European Sovereign Debt Crisis in 2010 is making it clear that the ECB is playing with fire, but will never admit it's getting burned.

There are in fact problems that are too big for Central Banks to manage.

As many are increasingly coming to terms with the 'obvious failure of fiat currency', the inevitavble question arises "what next?" Earlier this year, we discussed the possibility of a Chinese- or Russian-currency backed by gold, amid the increasing calls (domestically and abroad) for an end to USD Reserve hegemony; but this weekend, as Bloomberg reports, Lord Meghnad Desai, chairman of The Official Monetary and Financial Institutions Forum, stated that IMF Special Drawing Rights (SDR) should contain some gold to help stabilize the currency.

"The policy actions that cause financial repression entail a number of unintended consequences. These include potential asset price bubbles, convergence in asset allocation strategies of otherwise heterogeneous financial market participants and an increase in economic inequality. With regards to the latter, the impact of foregone interest income for households and long-term investors is substantial. At the same time, the equity rally has predominantly benefited society’s wealthiest." The hit to US savers: nearly a half trillion.

What a wonderful and perfectly representative dichotomy of where monetarism stands. We have Bernanke - the former, massive practitioner of QE - telling the world how it does nothing much; while at the exact same time Draghi - the latest - tells the world its super-healing and supporting properties. What’s reconcilable about those two positions is simply asset bubbles, as they are what stand against the former and remain the only, dim hope of the latter.

Massive misallocations of capital stare at us like wild caged animals through the bars of a cage in the zoo!

In a new study, the IMF asks whether there's a global slump in real private investment (spoiler alert: yes there is and it's broad-based and endemic in advanced economies) and also suggests that productivity growth across the globe is likely to remain constrained for the foreseeable future.

A  simple discussion of what the ECB is buying and some of the potential implications.

The ECB’s €1 trillion plus in asset purchases should drive demand for euro corporate credit as yields on sovereign debt and SSAs are driven relentlessly lower. UBS is now forecasting €600 billion in supply for 2015, up a fifth from last year with up to €140 billion in HY issuance. With liquidity in the secodary market constrained by regulation, does this increase the risk that a tail event could trigger a bond market meltdown? 

Is it possible that capitalism’s underlying focus on profits, and the necessity for endless purchases of goods and services, has a practical limit?