Transparency

• US braced as cuts deadline passes (FT)
• U.S. stares down start of steep "automatic" budget cuts (Reuters)
• Yeltsin-Era Tycoons Sell Resources for Distance From Kremlin (BBG)
• Italy's center-left leader rules out coalition with Berlusconi (Reuters)
• Apple Required Executives to Hold Triple Their Salary in Stock (WSJ)
• BOJ Seen Spiking Punchbowl in April Under New Chief Kuroda (BBG)
• Diplomatic fallout from EU bonus cap (FT)
• Italy’s Stalemate Jeopardizes Resolution of Crisis, Finland Says (BBG)
• Chinese trader accused of busting Iran missile embargo (Reuters)
• JPMorgan No. 1 Investment Bank Amid a Flurry of New Deals (BBG)
• Eurotunnel’s Ferry Strategy at Risk as Rivals Cry Foul (BBG)
• Telepathic rats team up across continents (FT)

Just days before the UK's Barclays bank is set to unveil the number of staff who earned more than GBP1 million last year in its annual report, as part of a push for more transparency, the FT reports that a provisional EU deal - set to go into place in January 2014, will bring the most severe pay crackdown since the 2008 crisis began. European Bankers' bonuses (and their US subsidiaries) are to be capped at two times bankers' salaries and banks will be subject to a strict transparency regime after a late Wednesday European parliament vote secured agreement on a mandatory 1:1 ratio on salary relative to variable pay, which can rise to 2:1 with explicit shareholder approval. With the UK 'threatening' referenda in the future, the deal, if confirmed, is a major victory for the EU parliament negotiators, who insisted on pay curbs as their price for passing Basel; and a sign of London’s relative isolation on some financial services issues. As far as a workaround, the EU commissioner responsible for the reforms, said it was "difficult to imagine now that we would scrap this compromise," though we are sure they will find a way, especially as MEPs want the tougher version eventually to apply to hedge funds and investment managers.

Those who listened to Bernanke's three hour oratory before the House Committee today noticed something different: the Chairman's tone was far more resigned, and as noted previously, on occasion devolved into incoherent, illogical ramblings that may be satisfactory for an introductory economics class at Clown College (aka Princeton), but certainly are inappropriate for the man who runs the world's most important printer. And while as expected the bulk of the Q&A session focused on the sequester, there were enough pearls one could shake a GDP hockeystick at. We have extracted the best of these exchanges below. However, the definitive five minutes comes from this fiery confrontation between Sean Duffy and the Chairman, in which the republican has obviously had enough with the monetary policy chief coming in Congress and telling Congress how to conduct fiscal policy, when it is Bernanke's deficit-monetizing actions that allow zero-cost borrowing and thus profligate, indiscriminate spending to result in such lunacy as total US debt just hitting a record 16,618,701,810,927.77.  From the negative jobs impact resulting from cutting Moroccan Pottery Classes, no longer handing out Obamaphones, stopping the payment of travel expenses for the watermelon queen in Alabama, and most importantly preventing shrimp from running on a treadmill, to Bernanke explaining how a 2% cut in the budget would result in mass mayhem, in the context of a 1% interest rise resulting in $100 billion in additional interest expense, and much, much more, the Chairman ties it all together.

Market reform still has a ways to go but the turn around on special order types is welcomed and comes with a warning to the SEC to not sit back in front Brazzers for long as more work still needs to be done. 

All Capitalist Systems Have Some Inequality.  We Don’t Want To Prevent All Inequality … Just Economy-Wrecking Levels

Sickcare is unsustainable for a number of interlocking reasons: defensive medicine in response to a broken malpractice system; opaque pricing; quasi-monopolies/cartels; systemic disconnect of health from food, diet and fitness; fraud and paperwork consume at least 40% of all sickcare funds; fee-for-service in a cartel system; employers being responsible for healthcare, and a fundamental absence of competition and transparency. If you set out to design a corrupt, inefficient, wasteful, unfair, deranged and unreformable system, you would arrive at U.S. healthcare. The neutron bomb has gone off, unseen by politicos and the Elites who wrote the bill.

As we speculated from the very beginning, and as was reaffirmed in "Is Nigeria, And Its Light Sweet Crude, About To Be Drawn Into The Mali "Liberation" Campaign?", the "French" (with complete and fully-comped US support) Mali campaign is slowly but surely migrating to its intended target: Nigeria, and rather its holdings of light sweet crude. And while the US presence in this latest resource land grab, this time in Africa, was so far rather stealthy, it appears the time for foreplay is over and moments ago Obama told congress has has dispatched 40 more American troops to Niger this week, bringing the total U.S. military presence in the west African country to 100. Let's hear it for the full retroactive transparency demanded by the War Powers Resolution.

The Obama drone program has been shrouded in secrecy, but after the leaking of the 'kill list' white papers, Russia Today notes, many critics are demanding transparency from the administration when it comes to the exact number of causalities. Due to the confidentiality of drone strikes abroad, it has proven difficult to get an accurate figure - until now. As Wired.com reports, US Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) has estimated that 4,700 people have been killed. As of now it is unclear how he obtained that figure, but his 'approving' comments raise questions about the accuracy of these attacks: "Sometimes you hit innocent people, and I hate that, but we're at war, and we've taken out some very senior members of al-Qaida." Graham did not offer an estimate of how many innocent people the drones have killed. Given the 430 or so strikes known about, this would imply around 10 kills per strike - but judging from the context of his remarks, Wired.com suspects, he's not counting the strikes in Iraq and Afghanistan. It wouldn’t be the first time that a U.S. senator has offhandedly revealed specific and unacknowledged information about the drones, following Diane Feinstein's 2009 gaffe, but Graham’s disclosure underscores the extraordinary secrecy around the centerpiece of U.S. counterterrorism efforts - a military action in all but name, operated by an agency that need not explain to the public how it carries out the program.

At this point everyone in the world knows what a drone is: some have been bombarded by one, others, thousands of miles away, have done the bombardment, and everyone else is split whether or not this remote-controlled form of international retribution and global Pax Americna should be allowed over the territory of the US - either for purely peaceful, or outright military, as was the case with the Chris Dorner manhunt, purposes.  And as with most issues that polarize US society, the approach is one of form opinion first, and investigate the underlying facts later. To that end on Friday, the Government Accountability Office, or GAO, issued testimony on Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS, or also Drones), titled "Continued Coordination, Operational Data, and Performance Standards Needed to Guide Research and Development" which while full of largely useless information, does have an informative section detailing which entities received Certificates of Waiver or Authorization (COA) or said otherwise "permissions to drone" for a period , from the FAA, which is the ultimate authority granting UAS flyovers in the US. Among the agencies seeking and being granted such permissions are all domestic military; public (academic institutions, federal, state, and local governments including law enforcement organizations); and civil (private sector entities). So which entity engaged most actively in US-based droning in 2012? It will come as no surprise that of the 391 COAs issued in the past year, the Department of Defense accounted for 201 or, well over half of all authorized droning operations. One can rest assured that America is truly well defended, if mostly from enemies domestic.

if Europe were a single house, it would be rotten to its core with termites and mold. It should have been condemned years ago, but the one thing that has kept it “on the market” was the fact that its owners were all very powerful, connected individual. We are now finding out that the owners not only knew that the home should have been condemned but were in fact getting rich via insider deals while those who lived in the house were in grave danger. 

A German pope may be vacating the Vatican but a German lawyer is about to head its bank, an institution some say is as important if not more, and whose shady dealing some say may have been the reason for the pope premature departure. Per Reuters, "The Vatican appointed German lawyer Ernst von Freyberg to be the new president of its bank on Friday, filling a post left vacant since May when the previous head was ousted from the scandal-tainted institution. The appointment was made by a commission of cardinals and approved by Pope Benedict and is likely to be one of his last major decisions before he resigns at the end of the month. The Vatican has been trying to shed a reputation for a lack of financial transparency at the bank, officially known as the Institute for Works of Religion (IOR), but has been dogged by scandals for decades." And no, apparently he does not work for Goldman.

The great trade, capital flow and debt imbalances that were built up over the preceding two decades must reverse themselves. Michael Pettis notes, however, that these imbalances can continue for many years, but at some point they become unsustainable and the world must adjust by reversing those imbalances. One way or the other, in other words, the world will rebalance. But there are worse ways and better ways it can do so. Pettis adds that, any policy that does not clearly result in a reversal of the deep debt, trade and capital imbalances of the past decade is a policy that cannot be sustained. It is likely to be political considerations that determine how quickly the rebalancing processes take place and whether they do so in ways that set the stages for future growth or future stagnation. Pettis' guess is that we have ended the first stage of the global crisis, and most of the deepest problems have been identified. In 2013 we will begin to see how policymakers respond and what the future outlook is likely to be. The following 10 themes are what he will be watching this year in order to figure out where we are likely to end up.

We have gone from a supply and demand market to a funds flow market and this really sucks for consumers. 

Corruption only works as long as the benefits of being “on the take” outweigh the consequences of getting caught. As soon as the consequences become real (namely someone gets in major trouble), then everyone starts to talk. This process has now begun in Spain.