Recession

It was a bad week for freedom loving people, but I believe there are enough patriots left in this country to change our course. We are being buried under a blizzard of lies on a daily basis. We have a choice. We can support the existing corrupt crony capitalist establishment (Obama & Romney) or we can declare war on lies, deceit and misinformation by rallying behind the only person who would truly attempt to reverse decades of corruption, sleaze, incompetence, bloat, debt accumulation, and a warped version of free market capitalism – Ron Paul. He is the only public figure willing to level with the American people and tell them the truth. Will we let the concept of truth fade out of the world? The choice is ours. 

“In our age there is no such thing as ‘keeping out of politics.’ All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia. The very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. Lies will pass into history.” –   George Orwell

The complacency of the markets is amazing given the risks at hand. I don't think I'm that smart, so is it that so many others are that stupid? It can't be, can it?

UBS' economics research group do not believe that Greece is saved but hope that it is at best ring-fenced. In an excellent Q&A follow up, Stephane Deo and his team address the role of the EFSF, the IMF package and its austerity measures, the ECB's participation, and finally the likelihood of the PSI being successful and its fallout. As Greek 2Y yields break 200% (obviously price is the critical part but these yields are stupendous) and bridge loan discussions appear for the March 20th maturity, perhaps UBS view of the IMF 'walking away' is more credible if they manage to ring-fence a recap of the banking sector. We would be surprised if contagion was contained and, as we have seen before, that risk leaks out somewhere and unintended consequences (or unknown unknowns) tend to pop up just when we least expect them. Perhaps the FT's note this morning (which incidentally confirms the everything that Zero Hedge warned about almost a month earlier) that deadlines are slipping rapidly is the bright yellow canary in the Piraeus coal-mine as 'time is running out' for a solution here very quickly (as seemingly is the desire).

• Europe ushers in the recession: Euro-Area Economy Contracts for the First Time Since 2009 (Bloomberg)
• Greek conservative takes bailout pledge to the wire (Reuters)
• China Pledges to Invest in Europe Bailouts (Bloomberg) - as noted last night, the half life of this nonsense has come and gone
• Japan's Central Bank Joins Peers in Opening the Taps (WSJ)
• EU Moves on Greek Debt Swap (EU)
• EU Divisions Threaten Aid For Greece (FT)
• Athens Woman facing sacking threatening suicide (Athens News)
  
• King Says Euro Area Poses Biggest Risk to UK’s Slow Recovery (Bloomberg)
• Sarkozy to Seek Second Term, Banking on Debt Crisis to Boost Bid (Bloomberg)

Earlier, you heard it from Jeff Gundlach, whom one can not accuse (at least not yet) of sleeping on his laurels and/or being a broken watch, who told his listeners to "reduce risk right now" especially in the frenzied momo stocks. Now, it is David Rosenberg's turn who tries to refute the presiding transitory dogma that 'things are ok" and that a Greek default will be contained (no, it won't be, and if nobody remembers what happened in 2008, here is a reminder of everything one needs to know ahead of the "controlled", whatever that is, Greek default). Alas, it will be to no avail, as one of the dominant features of the lemming herd is that it will gladly believe the grandest of delusions well past the ledge. On the other hand, they don't call it the pain trade for nothing.

While the government propaganda machine chugs along and tells us to move along, there is nothing to see in the plunging labor participation rate, it is just 50 year olds pulling a Greek and retiring (fully intent on milking those 0.001% interest checking accounts, CDs and 3 Year Treasury Bonds for all they are worth - they are after all called fixed "income" not "outcome") there is more than meets the eye here. Yet while we will happily debunk any and all stupidity that Americans actually have the wherewithal to retire in droves as we are meant to believe (with the oldest labor segment's participation rate surging to multi-decade highs), there is a distinct subset of the population that migrates from being a 99-week'er to moving to merely yet another government trough - disability. Art Cashin explains.

While we mock and ridicule the corrupt and often times purposefully obtuse Greek politicians, we often ignore the human cost in the equation (and so does the rest of the world). Unfortunately this is becoming an ever greater issue for a country that is rapidly devolving to sub-3rd world status. Because while we have previously discussed the miserable conditions for a country where ever more people are sliding out of the middle class and into poverty status, in reality it is far worse. Spiegel has profiled the new Misery in Athens where "aid workers and soup kitchens in Athens are struggling to provide for the city's "new poor." Since the economic crisis has taken hold, poverty has taken hold among Greece's middle class. And suicide rates have nearly doubled." Just like in the US, those in misery are growing exponentially, but the last thing anyone needs is a reminder of their existence. Yet perhaps they should, because when the Bastille moment hits, the spark to overthrow tyranny, especially that masking under the guise of democracy, will come precisely from the slums of the impoverished and disenfranchised, from those who have nothing left to lose. In Greece, with 28% of the population living "at risk of poverty or social exclusion" this moment may arrive any second.

James Grant, of Grant's Interest Rate Observer makes some thought-provoking statements in his must-listen Bloomberg Radio interview with Tom Keene today. While noting America's exceptionalism (h/t Clint Eastwood?), he perhaps doesn't mean all Americans as he takes the Fed and Treasury to task over their actions in recent years (and in fact for decades). His long-held view that rates should be higher and follow generational cycles raises concerns for him that government intervention is in fact 'prolonging the symptoms' of the recession. In considering Tom Keene's well-thought-out question of why the US does not take advantage of low rates and issue exceptionally long-dated bonds, Grant agrees with the odd premise that they do not but then goes on to what would be sounder policy. "Why not issue bonds backed by gold bullion? Gold is a better money and is grounded in something besides the power of the people that print the dollar bills." The interview goes on to discuss population growth as a more potent 'fix' for housing in the US than QE, that the US is a preferable investment environment (given valuations) than Germany or Japan, the drastic drop in NYSE volumes, and the "leeching out of excitement, hope, and expectation of improvement (particularly for the young)." His compare and contrast of the 1920-21 depression to the current Great Recession (which seems not to end), focused on the fiscal and monetary actions, is an eye opener that its just possible the present-day orthodoxy is wrong. Urging that we maintain our sense of shock at the size of our 'peacetime' deficits, Grant worries that we are in a secular stagnation.

A number of readers kindly forwarded additional data sources to me as followup on last week's entry describing sharply lower deliveries of gasoline. The basic thesis here is that petroleum consumption is a key proxy of economic activity. In periods of economic expansion, energy consumption rises. In periods of contraction, consumption levels off or declines. This common sense correlation calls into question the Status Quo's insistence that the U.S. economy has decoupled from the global ecoomy and is still growing. This growth will create more jobs, the story goes, and expand corporate profits which will power the stock market ever higher.... Here are links and charts of petroleum consumption, imports/exports, and electricity consumption. Let's start with a chart of total petroleum products, which includes all products derived from petroleum (distillates, fuels, etc.) provided by Bob C. The chart shows the U.S. consumed about 21 million barrels a day (MBD) at the recent peak of economic activity 2005-07; from that peak, "product supplied" has fallen to 18 MBD. The current decline is very steep and has not bottomed.

There had been some hopes for Greece following the Q3 GDP number which slowed the decline in the country's economy when it dropped by just 5%, following drops of 8% and 7.3% in Q1 and Q2. These may have to be doused following a report that Q4 GDP came in at a disappointing -7%. As Athensnews reports: "The country's economic slump is headed towards a record annual plunge close to 7 percent in 2011, the fourth consecutive year of a deepening recession.  After an official confirmation by the Hellenic Statistical Authority (Elstat) on Tuesday that GDP dropped 7 percent year-on-year in the fourth quarter of 2011, the economy has shrunk by an average of 6.8 percent.  The latest quarterly contraction followed a slight slowdown of the depression in the preceding quarter, with GDP shrinking 5 percent due to the customary seasonal surge of tourist revenues in the summer." The full year drop was a record 6.8%, compared to the expected 6% projected in the 2012 budget. No comment there.

Earlier today we got another indication that Europe's recession will hardly be a "technical" or "transitory" or whatever it is that local spin doctors call it, after the European December Industrial Output declined by 1.1% led by a whopping 2.7% drop by European growth dynamo Germany, which slid by 2.7% compared to November (which in turn was a 0.3% decline). This was worse than the Greek number which saw a 2.4% drop, however starting at zero somewhat limits one's downside. Yet even as the German economic decline accelerated, German ZEW investor expectations, which just like all of America's own consumer "CONfidence" metrics are driven primarily off the stock market, which in turn is a function of investor myopia to focus only on nominal numbers and not purchasing power loss - a fact well known to central bankers everywhere - do not indicate much if anything about the economy, and all about how people view the DAX stock index, which courtesy of the ECB's massive balance sheet expansion, has been going up. And if there has been any light at all in an otherwise dreary European tunnel, it has been the dropping EURUSD, which however has since resumed climbing, and with it making German industrial exports once again problematic. Which in turn brings us back to the primary these of this whole charade: that Germany needs controlled chaos to keep the EURUSD low - the last thing Merkel needs is a fixed Europe. It is surprising how few comprehend this.

ZeroHedge’s post on the apparent breakdown of Okun’s “Law” highlights the ongoing tragicomedy of how the science of central economic planning eventually confounds, and then consumes itself. Economics is, after all, a social “science”, an elaborate study of human beings and, most importantly, human interactions. Robert Okun, for his part, merely observed in 1962 that when “output” (whatever statistical measure is en vogue) rises by 3%, the unemployment rate seems to fall by 1%. For some reason, economics assumes that if it is true in the past, it will be true forever, so it was written into the canon of orthodox economic practice. Economics has inferred causation into that relationship, giving it a layer of permanence that may not be warranted. Econometrics has always had this inherent flaw. The science of modern economics makes assumptions based on certain data, and then extrapolates them as if these assumptions will always and everywhere be valid. There is this non-trivial postulation that correlation equals causation. In the case of Okun’s Law, it seems fully logical that there might be causation since it makes intuitive sense – more economic activity should probably lead to more jobs, and vice versa. But to assume a two-variable approach to something that should be far more complex is more than just dangerous, it is unscientific. In fact, Okun’s Law has already been adjusted somewhat, most famously by Ben Bernanke and Andrew Abel in their 1991 book. It was upgraded to a 2% change in output corresponding with a 1% inverse change in unemployment. Apparently with the economic “success” of that period, Okun needed a re-calibration.

You know there is a reason why Europe just came crawling with an advance handout looking for US assistance: Moody's just went apeshit on Europe.

• Austria: outlook on Aaa rating changed to negative
• France: outlook on Aaa rating changed to negative
• Italy: downgraded to A3 from A2, negative outlook
• Malta: downgraded to A3 from A2, negative outlook
• Portugal: downgraded to Ba3 from Ba2, negative outlook
• Slovakia: downgraded to A2 from A1, negative outlook
• Slovenia: downgraded to A2 from A1, negative outlook
• Spain: downgraded to A3 from A1, negative outlook
• United Kingdom: outlook on Aaa rating changed to negative

In other news, we wouldn't want to be the company that insured Moody's Milan offices.

It seems like it was only yesterday [technically it was September] that David Bianco "departed" his latest employee, Bank of America, where he landed following his "departure" from UBS back in 2007. Today, courtesy of Business Insider we learn that following an extended garden leave, or just a rather choppy job market, Bianco his finally found a new happy place: right in the cave of joy and happiness, also known as Deutsche Bank (aka the bank whose assets are about 80% of German GDP and which recently 'magically' recapitalized itself). Here he will be joined by the two other pillars of perspicacity - Binky Chadha and Joe LaVorgna. What to expect? Who knows - but lots of twisted humor is certainly in store. For the sake of simplicity we present some of the salient soundbites from Bianco and his colleagues over the past 5 years.

Okun's rule-of-thumb relates the long-term empirical finding that a country's unemployment rate is closely related to a country's output (or GDP) - perfectly sensible and comprehensible. In fact to be a little more explicit, it is the change in unemployment that is more notable in its relationship to the potential GDP (the output gap). His original work noted that a 3% increase in output corresponds to a 1% decline in unemployment rates (and/or rise in labor force participation, rise in hours worked, and rise in labor productivity) but as Goldman Sachs notes this week, Okun's Law has broken. As they point out, even though US real GDP growth has averaged a meager 2.5% pace since the end of the recession, the unemployment rate has fallen almost two percentage points from its peak. There are three implications, in our view: the unemployment rate is hopelessly miscalculated (and is much higher); potential growth is much lower than economists have been expecting (not such good news for real growth); and the multiplier effect of money has dropped structurally (in other words the implied money flow from more workers is not circulating the way it empirically has to juice growth). It seems to us that none of these are good for growth as the reality of a higher unemployment rate (BLS adjustments aside) is negative, lower potential for growth impacts earnings expectations (as we are already seeing in company and analyst outlooks which has perplexed those market watchers pinning their hopes on the jobless rate), and the balance sheet recessionary impacts of the 'employed' minimizing debt rather than maximizing potential gain is a further drag. Either way, as Goldman notes the potential growth rate going forward (2012 and 2013) is likely to remain quite weak, in the neighborhood of 2% in line with the CBO's dismal views and this could be further exacerbated by the drop in labor force participation we have noted vociferously.