Gambling

What would we do without Zero Hedge?  Does anyone else notice the rapid deterioration of financial news media, especially in the US?  OK, we are not naive, there are biases in the media, traders from big ibanks talking up their positions, and trading is all about information arbitrage.  But financial news used to be really serious.  Traders could turn on a TV to see what the markets were doing.

With still more than half the homeowners with a mortgage in the state of Nevada underwater on their mortage and a hoped for recovery in prices now petering out as 'investors' realize banks have completed foreclosures and are set to unload their huge inventories, fear is growing that Las Vegas (and for that matter Atlantic City) could be the next Detroit. However, as FoxNY reports, the nascent dreams of the good old days face an even bigger headwind - that of gambling regulation easements (online gambling for instance) and globalization which are impacting their biggest industries. Time will tell if these two cities will end up like Detroit.

"Step right up and try your luck...spin the wheel and watch where she lands...everybody's a winner" - sometimes if you listen hard enough you can almost hear the Carney coaxing unwary investors to step up and try their luck in a game that has been rigged against them. During the last two decades, we have been amazed to watch as individuals strolled through the doors of the Wall Street casino to try their luck by betting "against the house" for a dream of riches. Just as with anyone who has ever gone to Vegas - you will win sometimes but the "house" wins most of the time. However, there are always the "professional gamblers" that can do better than the average most of the time. Why? Because they understand "risk" in its various forms...

The so-called Volcker Rule for policing banking practices, approved by a huddle of federal regulating agency chiefs last week, is the latest joke that America has played on itself in what is becoming the greatest national self-punking exercise in world history. The Glass Steagall Act of 1933 was about 35 pages long, written in language that was precise, clear, and succinct. It worked for 66 years. The Volcker rule comes in the form of nearly 1,000 pages of incomprehensible legalese written with the “help” of lobbyist-lawyers furnished by the banks themselves. Does this strain your credulity? Well, this is the kind of nation we have become: anything goes and nothing matters. There really is no rule of law, just pretense.

• J.P. Morgan to Pay Over $1 Billion to Settle U.S. Criminal Probe Related to Madoff (WSJ)
• Ford board aims to pin down CEO Mulally's plans (Reuters)
• Raising Minimum Wage Is a Bad Way to Help People (BBG)
• Japan Lawmakers Demand Speedy Pension Reform (WSJ)
• EU reaches landmark deal on failed banks (FT)
• In which Hilsenrath repeats what we said in August: Fed Moves Toward New Tool for Setting Rates (WSJ)
• Senators Vow to Add to Iran Economic Sanctions in 2014 (BBG)
• Centerbridge in $3.3bn LightSquared bid (FT)
• Banks, Agencies Draw Battle Lines Over 'Volcker Rule' (WSJ)

• Wall Street Exhales as Volcker Rule Seen Sparing Market-Making (Bloomberg)
• GM to End Manufacturing Down Under, Citing Costs (WSJ)
• U.S. budget deal could usher in new era of cooperation (Reuters)
• Ukraine Police Back Off After Failing to Stop Protest (WSJ)
• First Walmart, now Costco misses (AP)
• Dan Fuss Joins Bill Gross Shunning Long-Term Debt Before Taper (BBG)
• China New Yuan Loans Higher Than Expected (WSJ)
• China bitcoin arbitrage ends as traders work around capital controls (Reuters)
• Blackstone’s Hilton Joins Ranks of Biggest Deal Paydays (BBG)

And so it is done (as we detailed here)... and due to be put in place as of April1st 2014 (rather ironically). The 100-plus-pages of rules and regulations prohibit two activities of banking entities: (i) engaging in proprietary trading; and (ii) owning, sponsoring, or having certain relationships with a hedge fund or private equity fund. But the kicker...

"requires banking entities to establish an internal compliance program designed to help ensure and monitor compliance with the prohibitions and restrictions of the statute and the final rule."

Great! Because self-regulation worked so well in the past for the financial services industry.

The too big to fail banks have a larger share of the U.S. banking industry than they have ever had before.  So if having banks that were too big to fail was a "problem" back in 2008, what is it today? The total number of banks in the United States has fallen to a brand new all-time record low and that means that the health of the too big to fail banks is now more critical to our economy than ever.  In 1985, there were more than 18,000 banks in the United States.  Today, there are only 6,891 left, and that number continues to drop every single year.  That means that more than 10,000 U.S. banks have gone out of existence since 1985.  Meanwhile, the too big to fail banks just keep on getting even bigger.

Japan – Like the U.S. – Turns to Censorship

More than 100,000 protesters congregated at Democracy Monument in Bangkok yesterday to protest Thai PM Yingluck Shiniwatra’s consideration of an amnesty bill to pardon her banned brother Thaksin Shiniwatra, the former Thai PM ousted from the country in a 2006 coup.

• When it fails, do more of it - Bank of Japan hints at extending ultra-loose monetary policy (FT)
• PBOC Says No Longer in China’s Interest to Increase Reserves (BBG)
• Fed casts about for endgame on easy-money policy  (Hilsenrath)
• Big trucks still rule Detroit in energy-conscious era (Reuters)
• Debt Limit Rise May Not Be Needed Until June, CBO Says (BBG)
• Some Insurance Regulators Turn Down White House Invitation (WSJ)
• Say Goodbye to the Car Salesman (WSJ)
• U.S. drone kills senior militant in Pakistani seminary (Reuters)
• French business sector contracts sharply (FT)
• How Germany's taxman used stolen data to squeeze Switzerland (Reuters)
• Fed casts about for endgame on easy-money policy (WSJ)
• France, Italy call for full-time Eurogroup chief (Reuters)

Economics is all about making rational decisions given some set of likes and dislikes. It doesn’t presume to tell you what you should like or dislike, and it assumes that you do in fact know what you like or dislike. Or at least that’s what economic theory used to proclaim. Today economic theory is used as the intellectual foundation for a political stratagem that goes something like this: you do not know what you truly like, and in particular you do not know your economic self-interest, but luckily for you we are here to fix that. This is the common strand between QE and Obamacare. The former says that you are wrong to prefer safety to risk in your investments, and so we will fix that misconception of yours by making it extremely painful for you not to take greater investment risks than you would otherwise prefer. The latter says that you are wrong to prefer no health insurance or a certain type of health insurance to another type of health insurance, and so we will make it illegal for you to do anything but purchase a policy that we are certain you would prefer if only you were thinking more clearly about all this.

Just in case anyone thought the entire world's wasn't going to the tenth, centrally-planned circle of hell in a handbasket, here comes the head of the Indian FBI to disabuse everyone out of such childish sentiments, thanks to a comment that not even the PR brain trust behind #AskJPM could have conceived. To wit: "India’s top police official was under fire Wednesday for saying, “If you can’t prevent rape, you might as well enjoy it.” And scene.

"Debt matters... even if it is possible to pretend for many years that it doesn't," is the painful truth that, author of "Avoiding The Fall", Michael Pettis offers for the current state of most western economies. Specifically, Pettis points out that Japan never really wrote down all or even most of its investment misallocation of the 1980s and simply rolled it forward in the form of rising government debt. For a long time it was able to service this growing debt burden by keeping interest rates very low as a response to very slow growth and by effectively capitalizing interest payments, but, as Kyle Bass has previously warned, if Abenomics is 'successful', ironically, it will no longer be able to play this game. Unless Japan moves quickly to pay down debt, perhaps by privatizing government assets, Abenomics, in that case, will be derailed by its own success.

If ever there was a symptom of the instant gratification meme of the new normal (why wait when you can have it all now?), it is 'vice'. That is why Southbay Research's Vice Index (composed of prices paid, volume, and frequency of sales in liquor sales, gambling, and prostitution) is so worrisome, as WSJ reports, "it's signalling that consumer spending growth is about to drop and stay subdued for a few months." Southbay's Zatlin notes that measuring this kind of discretionary spending provides a window into the true state of the economy - which fits with recent macro data on retail sales (and forecasts for the holiday season as hope of the 'second-half' recovery fade quietly into next year.