The Economist

All you need to read.

An engineer, a biologist and an economist are washed ashore on a desert island. After a few days without food they are starving. Eventually, they stumble on a can of beans on the beach. They spend a few minutes considering how they might feed themselves. The engineer is the first to speak: "We could hit the can with a rock until it opens." The biologist counters, "We could suspend the can in a seawater solution and wait for erosion to work its magic." The economist is last to contribute: "Let's just assume we have a can-opener." OK, so it's not the funniest joke in the universe. But it has the ring of truth.

German lawmakers are to review Bundesbank controls of and management of Germany’s gold reserves.  Parliament’s Budget Committee will assess how the central bank manages its inventory of Germany’s gold bullion bars that are believed to be stored in Frankfurt, Paris, London and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, according to German newspaper Bild.  The German Federal Audit Office has criticised the Bundesbank’s lax auditing and inventory controls regarding Germany’s sizeable gold reserves – 3,396.3 tonnes of gold or some 73.7% of Germany’s national foreign exchange reserves. There is increasing nervousness amongst the German public, German politicians and indeed the Bundesbank itself regarding the gigantic risk on the balance sheet of Germany's central bank and this is leading some in Germany to voice concerns about the location and exact amount of Germany’s gold reserves. The eurozone's central bank system is massively imbalanced after the ECB’s balance sheet surged to a record 3.02 trillion euros ($3.96 trillion) last week, 31% bigger than the German economy, after a second tranche of three-year loans. The concern is that were the eurozone to collapse, Bundesbank's losses could be half a trillion euros - more than one-and-a-half times the size of the Germany's annual budget. In that scenario, Germany’s national patrimony of gold bullion reserves would be needed to support the currency – whether that be a new euro or a return to the Deutsche mark.  The German lawmakers are following in the footsteps of US Presidential candidate Ron Paul who has long called for an audit of the US’ gold reserves. It is believed that some 60% of Germany’s gold is stored outside of Germany and much of it in the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

Just as market regulators were finally getting wise to the fact that they have no clue how how modern market works, what modern market topology is, or how High Frequency Trading impacts the stock market (think Flash Crash), here comes Certichron, the supplier of a time service center at a Savvis market center in Weehakwen, which says it has now mastered sub-nanosecond readouts which are now "compliant with the FINRA Order Audit Trail System and is likely to be compliant with any Consolidated Audit Trail that might be specified by the Securities and Exchange Commission." In other words, here come sub-nanosecond markets.

Back in October, when Greece was rewarded with further bond haircuts for progressively missing its economic targets, even after having gotten caught on at least one occasion making its economy appear worse than it was, we said that it is only a matter of time before "Portugal, Ireland, Spain and Italy will promptly commence sabotaging their economies (just like Greece) simply to get the same debt Blue Light special as Greece." In the aftermath of this statement, we got the Irish and the Portuguese proceeding to slowly but surely do just that. Today, it was Spain's turn to make it 3 out of 4 after as Reuters noted so appropriately, "Spain defies Brussels on deficit target" clarifying that "Spain set itself a softer budget target for 2012 on Friday than originally agreed under the euro zone's austerity drive, putting a question mark over the credibility of the European Union's new fiscal pact. Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy insisted he was acting within EU guidelines because the plan was still to hit the European Union public deficit goal of 3 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) in 2013." That Italy is sure to follow is absolutely guaranteed, however just because the ECB is now indirectly monetizing BTPs the true impact will be delayed far more, and instead of taking prompt steps to remedy the situation, the European complacency will be accentuated by the fact that bond yields are very low, and supposedly indicates the true state of the economy. No. All it indicates is the conversion of future inflation (courtesy of €1 trillion in new money in the past 3 months) for a very temporary respite before all hell ultimately breaks loose as countries pretend everything is ok as bond yields are pushed artificially low. And in doing nothing, the fundamentals in the economy only get worse and worse. Germany knows this very well, and the Economist explains the reaction to Spain's surprising statement today perfectly...

Could Sweden or Finland be the scene of the next European financial crisis? It is actually far likelier than most people realize. While the world has been laser-focused on the woes of the heavily-indebted PIIGS nations for the last couple of years, property markets in Northern and Western European countries have been bubbling up to dizzying new heights in a repeat performance of the very property bubbles that caused the global financial crisis in the first place. Nordic and Western European countries such as Norway and Switzerland have attracted strong investment inflows due to their perceived economic safe-haven statuses, serving to further inflate these countries’ preexisting property bubbles that had expanded from the mid-1990s until 2008. With their overheated economies and ballooning property bubbles, today’s safe-haven European countries may very well be tomorrow’s Greeces and Italys.

At bottom, centralization is the foundation for the collectivist fallacy; that there is a “greater good” that must be maintained by the establishment.  This process makes the establishment indispensable in the minds of the public.  The elites in power today have chosen environmental dogma as their version of the “greater good”, because the “end of the world as we know” can be used to rationalize almost any brand of despotic behavior, from food and water rationing as a method for social conditioning, to population control or even depletion in the name of “saving the planet”.  Always beware the true motivations of any governing institution that seeks to assert itself as the purveyor of all that is “best” for the people.  Such groups are rarely if ever what they seem…

While nothing is more certain than death and taxes (and central bank largesse), David Rosenberg of Gluskin Sheff uncovers The Unlucky Seven major tax-related uncertainties facing households and businesses that will likely lead to multiple compression in markets (rather than the much-heralded multiple expansion 'story' which appears to have topped the talking-head charts - just above 'money on the sidelines' and 'wall of worry', as 'earnings-driven' arguments are failing on the back of this quarter). As he notes the radically changed taxation climate in 2013 and beyond will have an impact on all economic participants as they will probably opt to bolster their cash reserves in the second half of the year in preparation for the proverbial rainy day.

A certain flavor of econometric model dominates conventional portfolio management and financial analysis. This model can be paraphrased thusly: seasonally adjusted economic data such as the unemployment rate and financially derived data such as forward earnings and price-earnings ratios are reliable guides to future economic growth and future stock prices....If this model is so accurate and reliable, why did it fail so completely in 2008 when a visibly imploding debt-bubble brought down the entire global economy and crashed stock valuations? Of the tens of thousands of fund managers and financial analysts who made their living off various iterations of this econometric model, how many correctly called the implosion in the economy and stock prices? How many articles in Barrons, BusinessWeek, The Economist or the Wall Street Journal correctly predicted the rollover of stocks and how low they would fall? Of the tens of thousands of managers and analysts, perhaps a few dozen got it right (and that is a guess--it may have been more like a handful). In any event, the number who got it right using any econometric model was statistical noise, i.e. random flecks of accuracy. The entire econometric model of relying on P-E ratios, forward earnings, the unemployment rate, etc. to predict future economic trends and future stock valuations was proven catastrophically inadequate. The problem is these models are detached from the actual drivers of growth and stock valuations.

While today's market session has been broadly calm for the time being, that has not prevented Oil from falling back to its old norm of being impacted by the merest rumor of geopolitical tensions, of which we have had quite a few of already, following car explosion attacks targeting Israel embassy officials in India and Georgia. While Iran has yet to make any announcement on these events, which oddly enough resulted in no deaths, Israel has already blamed Iran for everything. From Reuters: "Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel's  arch-foe Iran "stands behind" bombers who targeted Israeli embassy cars in India and Georgia on Monday. Netanyahu linked the incidents  to reports of foiled attacks in Thailand and Azerbaijan last month for  which, he said, Iran and its Lebanese guerrilla "proxy" Hezbollah were  responsible."Iran, which stands behind these attacks, is the  largest exporter of terror in the world," Netanyahu said, addressing his  Likud party faction in parliament." It appears that when it comes to car bomb assassination plots, Iran still has to learn from those which targeted its own nuclear scientist successfully a few weeks ago. Yet this latest escalation in attempted provocations is not unexpected: it comes on the heels of the announcement of a US Naval Official who said that "Iran is building up its forces in the Persian Gulf and has prepared speedboats loaded with explosives." Whether it actually has or has not is irrelevant: all that matters is that the US navy 'says so.'

Over the weekend, we commented on Dylan Grice's seminal analysis which excoriates the central planning "fools", who are perpetually caught in the "lost pilot" paradigm, whereby the world's central planners increasingly operate by the mantra of “I have no idea where we’re going, but we’re making good time!” and which confirms that in the absence of real resolutions to problems created by a century of flawed economic models, the only option is to continue doubling down until terminal failure. Basically, the take home message there is that once "economists" get lost in trying to correct the errata their own models output as a result of faulty assumptions (which they always are able to "explain away" as one time events), they drift ever further into unknown territory until finally we end up with such monetary aberrations as "liquidity traps", "zero bound yields" and, soon, NIRP (which comes after ZIRP), if indeed the Treasury proceeds with negative yields beginning in May under the tutelage of the Goldman-JPM chaired Treasury Borrowing Advisory Committee. Today, it is Bill Gross who takes the Grice perspective one step further, and looks at implications for liquidity, and the lack thereof, in a world where one of the three primary functions of modern financial intermediaries - maturity transformation (the other two being credit and liquidity transformation) is terminally broken. He then juxtaposes this in the context of Hyman Minsky's monetary theories, and concludes: "What incentive does a US bank have to extend maturity to a two- or three-year term when Treasury rates at that level of the curve are below the 25 basis points available to them overnight from the Fed? What incentive does Pimco or banks have to buy five-year Treasuries at 75bp when the maximum upside capital gain is two per cent of par and the downside substantially more?" In other words, Pimco is finally grasping just how ZIRP is punking it and its clients. It also means that very soon all the maturity, and soon, credit risk of the world will be on the shoulders of the Fed, which in turn labor under a false economic paradigm. And one wonders why nobody has any faith left in these here "capital markets"...

Update: literally seconds after this article was posted, we receive news that the IMF will seek Saudi contribution to the European bailout fund. There you have it - you enjoy that implicit US protection Saudi emirs? It is about to cost you.

While it is best to pray that NASA will find some very rich and not so intelligent life on Mars so it can bail out the world as it sinks deeper and deeper into a untenable debt hole (which somehow can be "filled" only by issuing more debt at least according to tenured economists at ivy league institutions), a strategy of planning for a realistic outcome may not be a bad idea. The question then is who in the world has some/any spare leverage capacity to incur even more debt and use the proceeds to fund a Eurozone-American-Chinese collapse. Enter the Economist's "wiggle-room index." The publication, best known for recently introducing the "shoe thrower index" (remember the Arab Spring and how Fed induced runaway inflation generated a "democratic" revolution across MENA?) has compiled a list of those developing world countries which still have capacity to provide credible global bailout capital (in fiat form of course - after all that is the only thing that the Ponzi understands) or as the Economist says, the "emerging economies that have the most monetary and fiscal firepower." So if you are on this list (ahem China, Indonesia and Saudi Arabia) - our condolences - you are about to be dragged into the epic slow-motion ongoing collapse of the developed world, kicking and screaming, with some 44 caliber persuasion if needed, but you will be there, before it all falls apart. The time to repay all favors to Uncle Sam is coming.

Round up for ZH readers ...

In this very informative interview between The Browser and Peter Boettke, the professor of economics discusses the contributions made by the Austrian School, and explains the various nuances of the economic school by way of recent books by "Austrians." He also explains what we can learn from Mises and Hayek, and argues that economics is the sexiest subject.

Mario Draghi once again mistakes a Solvency issue for one of Liquidity