Belgium

Time after time, it appears, in Europe 'beggars can be choosers'. That is, it seems, until Cyprus, when the Merkel hammer was brought down and a new 'template' to avoid German taxpayers implictly taking on the burden of southern European largesse. The initial pro-Euro indifference to the bailouts has turned increasingly to resentment in Germany - and, as we noted here, the rise of anti-Euro parties in the very heart of the political project. The following Bloomberg Briefs chart explains the tension and why the German 'five-wise-men' are pushing for a broad-based 'wealth tax' across Europe's periphery. Simply put, the Germans bearing the burden are 'poorer' than the peripheral nations as the chart of median wealth so clearly indicates. Combine this with the fact that Germany has the lowest rate of home ownership in Europe and it is little wonder that 'Alternative-for-Germany' party is already at a 3% polling? However, as discussed below, this is misleading since wealth is very unequally distributed in Germany, creating a perception among less wealthy Germans that these transfers are unfair.

"In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.”

– Benjamin Franklin

In most cases, Mr. Franklin's statement would be correct. However, as you will see below, there are some countries in the world where you can be certain you won't pay taxes. With the year 2013 marking the 100th anniversary of the income tax and the Federal Reserve in the US (two of the most powerful tools the government uses to extract wealth), we thought it would be useful to look at when Tax Freedom Day occurs across the world to gain some perspective. Tax Freedom Day (TFD) is the day of the year that the average person has in theory earned enough money to pay his or her annual tax bill.

As of later this month, we’ll receive the final picture on China’s U.S. bond sales over late 2011 and early 2012, and the reaction isn’t likely to be much different than it was last year. But, we argue that there’s actually quite a lot to see. Namely, there’s a brand new reason to be concerned about America’s access to foreign capital. In a nutshell, America needs foreigners to be both willing and able to buy its bonds. China is able but much less willing than it used to be. (Treasury data that isn’t shown here suggests its interest in U.S. securities recovered somewhat in late 2012, but remains far short of the levels of two years ago.) Other countries are willing but not nearly as able as China, notwithstanding the sharp increase in purchases in the recent period. And overall, the message in the preliminary TIC data is more worrisome than it may appear on the surface. Should the final report on April 30th confirm the message, consider it a warning of a potentially disastrous future decline in foreign purchases of U.S. debt.

Disparities, bailouts, and a slow-motion blowup.

Now that the 3:30 pm pump has been exposed to the world, and having been priced in and frontran (such as yesterday) it changed to the 3:30 dump, algos are desperately searching for another daily calendar trading opportunity. It appears the opening of Europe and Japan for trading are just these two much needed "fundamental" catalysts. As the charts below show, it appears there is nothing more bullish for the two key carry pairs, the USDJPY and the EURUSD, than Japan opening at 8pm Eastern, and then Europe opening next, at 3:30 am Eastern.

A big picture look at the drivers of the global capital markets.

There is no hope whatsoever of so-called U.S. "energy indepedence" unless three things happen. First, environmental rules have to be wound back to 1970 standards -- in other words, disband the EPA and make civil plaintiffs show actual harm, not just hypothetical harm because someone goofed on a sheaf of mandated paperwork. Second, stop wasting taxpayer money on nonsense like $25 per gallon biofuel. Third and most urgently, stop subsidizing Wall Street. Let the market decide what interest rates make sense, rewarding companies who can find and produce oil, instead of gorging themselves sick on artificially cheap junk bonds that money-losing shale swindlers will never pay off.

The ever-changing rules of the French 'tax-the-rich' socialist state have mad eyet another unintended consequence. Bloomberg reports that Prime Minister Jean-March Ayrault confirmed this evening that France's professional soccer players will be liable for the 75% 'surcharge' on salaries above EUR1 million. After the country’s top administrative court said any rate above 66% could be rejected as confiscatory, Hollande revived the tax, saying the rate would remain 75%, though it would be paid by corporations, not individuals, circumventing the courts’ objections. That solution left open the question of whether self- employed artists and athletes would be taxed - Ayrault confirmed it today. We suspect the transfer window will be wide open as soon as possible as "with these crazy labor costs, France will lose its best players, our clubs will see their competitiveness in Europe decline, and the government will lose its best taxpayers." Paris St. Germain, David Beckham's current team, has over a dozen players/coaches paid more than EUR1mm and with Zlatan Ibrahimovic at EUR15mm per year, we suspect the Swede will be heading back to England as soon as possible - or maybe Cyprus needs some players?

Some people believe that by imposing losses on investors and reducing the Cyprus banking system liabilities, the European powers have addressed the problems in Cyprus (if harshly). A dangerous dynamic has been set in motion, which will likely bring many unintended consequrences.

When all is said and done, what happened in Cyprus over the past two weeks, is nothing but the culmination of re-marking the "assets" in the country's financial system (which as noted previously, were a preponderance of worthless Greek bonds and countless other non-performing loans), long priced at assorted "myth" levels, to a long overdue reality. As a result of delaying resolving the mismatch between non-performing assets and liabilities for years, the resolution was one which saw some €16 billion of the total asset base impaired, which in turn necessitated the impairment of billions of deposits: the primary liability funding the Cypriot financial system. Furthermore, as a result of the "Freudian Slip" by the Eurogroup's new head earlier this week, we know that Cyprus will be the template for all future bank resolutions, which seek to avoid a government vote and proceed to restructuring the banking sector a la carte, by liquidating bad banks and impairing liabilities to the point where the balance sheet is once again viable (however briefly). The bottom line is that at its core, it is all simply a bad debt problem, and the more the bad debt, the greater the ultimate liability impairments become, including deposits. Which means that the real question in Europe is: how much impairment capacity is there in the various European nations before deposits have to be haircut? Thanks to Credit Suisse we now know the answer.

So, relocate all manufacturing plants from Sweden to Bulgaria?

Up until just a week or so ago, the euro, the market seems to be telling us, has been saved, and peripheral Europe is widely seen as being out of the woods. Thanks to the ECB - who are willing to pump as much liquidity into the markets as it needs - it seems rising debt levels, greater political fragmentation, and a worsening economy somehow don't really matter and it is impolitic to sound pessimistic. But is peripheral Europe really suffering primarily from a liquidity crisis? It would help me feel a lot better if I could find even one case in history of a sovereign solvency crisis in which the authorities didn’t assure us for years that we were facing not a solvency crisis, but merely a short-term problem with liquidity. A sovereign solvency crisis always begins with many years of assurances from policymakers in both the creditor and the debtor nations that the problem can be resolved with time, confidence, and a just few more debt rollovers. The key point is that bankers are not stupid. They just could not formally acknowledge reality until they had built up sufficient capital through many years of high earnings – thanks in no small part to the help provided by the Fed in the form of distorted yield curves and free money – to recognize the losses without becoming insolvent.

French government study: cost would be over three times GDP. Financially, France would cease to exist as we know it

Just like yesterday, it will be up to the US session to provide the perfectly expected, VIXterminating, volumeless ramp as the rest of the world just did not have it in i to take the S&P to all time highs in overnight trading. To summarize: currency talkfare out of Asia, hope springs eternal out of Europe despite the usual spate of ugly numbers, PIIGS bond auctions backstopped by the ECB and always "that much better" than the expected, a UK economy that is just imploding to provide an alibi for more open-ended QE and a crushed pound, and with the US due to make everything better by sending the SP to its all time high (just 9 points away) on the one week anniversary of the record high DJIA, as the NY Fed clobbers the VIX to a 10 handle or lower on even more ugly, unadjusted economic data.

Though much has been written about the popping of the housing bubble in the U.S. and Ireland, remarkably little has been written about the many housing bubbles that remain unpopped. As a rule, speculative bubbles pop and revert to their pre-bubble levels, so we can anticipate the eventual popping of all remaining housing bubbles. Given the dearth of investment options open to households in China seeking to invest their prodigious savings, it is unsurprising that China's housing bubble continues expanding. Every proponent of housing during bubbles confidently proclaims that "this time it's different," and a decade later the dazed survivors shift through the financial rubble, wondering what went wrong with "guaranteed" fundamentals, trends, valuations, collateral and wealth.