Bank of Japan

Update: China readies new bailout mechanism - pooling CNY2 Trillion of Pension funds for "investment"

A busy night in AsiaPac before China even opens. Vietnam had a failed bond auction, Japanese data was mixed (retail sales good, household spending bad, CPI just right), Moody's downgrades China growth (surprise!), China re-blames US for global market rout, and then the big one hits - China's bailout fund needs more money (applies for more loans from banks) - in other words - The PBOC just got a margin call. China margin debt balance fell for 8th straight day (although the short-selling balance picked up to 1-week highs). China unveiled some economic reforms - lifting tax exemption and foreign real estate investment rules. PBOC fixesds the Yuan 0.15% stronger - most since March, but even with last night's epic intervention, SHCOMP looks set for its worst week since Lehman.

This will not be a one-off event. With the Fed and other Central banks now leveraged well above 50-to-1, even those entities that were backstopping an insolvent financial system are themselves insolvent.

Hong Kong's Hang Seng index is now down over 21% from the highs, having fallen over 9% in the last week, and Taiwan's TAIEX is down over 20% from April highs, joining Chinese stocks, both joining Chinese stocks in official bear markets. Japanese markets are down over 6% in the last few days (which Amari simply brushes off, blaming the global selloff stemming from China), a JGB trading volumes slump to a record low. Tensions in Korea are not helping. With all eyes on China's flash PMI (though why we are not sure since PBOC is already full liquidity-tard with CNY350bn this week alone), The PBOC fixed Yuan at 6.3864, up from yesterday's biggest strengthening in 3 months to 6.3915 (the biggest 2 day strengthening since April), and margin debt fell for the 3rd day. Gold is surging in the Asia session, near $1160.

Asset price inflation, a disease whose source always lies in monetary disorder, is not a new affliction. It was virtually inevitable that the present wild experimentation by the Federal Reserve - joined by the Bank of Japan and ECB - would produce a severe outbreak. And indications from the markets are that the disease is in a late phase, though still short of the final deadly stage characterized by pervasive falls in asset markets, sometimes financial panic, and the onset of recession.

The significance of these developments cannot be overstated. Central Banks will be increasingly acting against one another going forward. There will more surprises and more volatility across the board. Eventually it will culminate in a Crash that will make 2008 look like a picnic.

To help remind readers of what happens when the entire world engages in wholesale currency war, here is a complete list of all the recent FX interventions, courtesy of Stone McCarthy.

As we first warned in March, and as became abundantly clear over the weekend Beijing had no choice but to join the global currency wars, as the yuan's dollar peg will ultimately prove to be too painful going forward. And sure enough this evening the PBOC weakens the Yuan fix by the most on record. 

There are so many parallels between the current period since 2007 in the U.S. (The Great Recession), the period since 1990 in Japan (Japan’s 2+ lost decades), and the period after 1929 in the US (The Great Depression) because they are all periods of a ‘balance-sheet recession’ (or similarly, ‘secular stagnation'; that it is next to impossible to dismiss the comparison. Using this, there is an important lesson for the Fed to consider now in weighing whether to raise rates.

Japan's all important real wages, even those including bonuses and special payments, once again failed to keep up with inflation, and in June crashed by a whopping 2.9% reflecting a 0.5% yoy increase in the CPI excluding imputed rent. As the chart below shows, there has now been 24 consecutive months without a single Y/Y monthly increase in real wages. What's worse is that when one adjusts the inflationary surge from the consumption tax hike last April, which has now been fully anniversaried and is no longer part of the base effect, this was the largest decline in Japan's real wages since December 2009, or the biggest monthly plunge in 6 years!

A non-bombastic analysis of the events and data in the week ahead, with insulting anyone or resorting to conspiracy theories.

Why I've come to thinking that Kyle Bass' short JGB premise may well be wrong

"How would US Treasury bulls in the private sector react if they knew in advance that the second largest owner of Treasuries, the PBOC, was a forced seller of Treasuries. Such compelled selling would be obvious before US markets opened each morning as downward pressure on the RMB exchange rate in Asia forced the PBOC to liquidate foreign currency assets to defend the fixed exchange rate. Would even Treasury bulls stand in the way of such a large and predictable liquidation? If they didn’t then the second phase of The Great Reset would come to pass and the decline of EM external deficits would force tighter monetary policy in both EM and DM."

Less than a decade after a housing/derivatives bubble nearly wiped out the global financial system, a new and much bigger commodities/derivatives bubble is threatening to finish the job. So... the central banks will panic. Again. Countries that retain some control over their monetary systems will see their interest rates fall to zero and beyond, while those that don’t will be thrown into some kind of new age hyperinflationary depression. Not 2008 all over again; this is something much stranger.

Deflation is back on the front burner and it's going to destroy all of the careful central planning and related market manipulation of the past 6 years. Clear signs from the periphery indicate that a destructive deflationary pulse has been unleashed. After years of suppression, the forces of reality are threatening to overwhelm our managed global ""markets"'. And it's about damn time.

"The modern financial animal is wont to assume that he or she lives in an age of science. The truth is we live in an age of pseudoscience. Far from dealing in science, central bankers, and, to a degree, investment bankers and security analysts, employ magical thinking... For an individual to fix Libor is a crime. For a central bank to suppress European bond yields is an act of financial statesmanship..."