spotfxtrader

Cable has finally hit this big level at 1.1563 and has been trading sideways along it for the last few hours. Watching price action carefully for signs of a low.

From Zero hedge – Originally published by Michael Snyder via The Economic Collapse blog,

Get ready for another major worldwide credit crunch. Today, the entire global financial system resembles a colossal spiral of debt. Just about all economic activity involves the flow of credit in some way, and so the only way to have “economic growth” is to introduce even more debt into the system. When the system started to fail back in 2008, global authorities responded by pumping this debt spiral back up and getting it to spin even faster than ever. If you can believe it, the total amount of global debt has risen by $35 trillion since the last crisis. Unfortunately, any system based on debt is going to break down eventually, and there are signs that it is starting to happen once again.

For example, just a few days ago the IMF warned regulators to prepare for a global “liquidity shock“. And on Friday, Chinese authorities announced a ban on certain types of financing for margin trades on over-the-counter stocks, and we learned that preparations are being made behind the scenes in Europe for a Greek debt default and a Greek exit from the eurozone. On top of everything else, we just witnessed the biggest spike in credit application rejections ever recorded in the United States. All of these are signs that credit conditions are tightening, and once a “liquidity squeeze” begins, it can create a lot of fear.

Over the past six months, the Chinese stock market has exploded upward even as the overall Chinese economy has started to slow down. Investors have been using something called “umbrella trusts” to finance a lot of these stock purchases, and these umbrella trusts have given them the ability to have much more leverage than normal brokerage financing would allow. This works great as long as stocks go up. Once they start going down, the losses can be absolutely staggering.

That is why Chinese authorities are stepping in before this bubble gets even worse. Here is more about what has been going on in China from Bloomberg…

China’s trusts boosted their investments in equities by 28 percent to 552 billion yuan ($89.1 billion) in the fourth quarter. The higher leverage allowed by the products exposes individuals to larger losses in the event of stock-market drops, which can be exaggerated as investors scramble to repay debt during a selloff.

In umbrella trusts, private investors take up the junior tranche, while cash from trusts and banks’ wealth-management products form the senior tranches. The latter receive fixed returns while the former take the rest, so private investors are effectively borrowing from trusts and banks.

Margin debt on the Shanghai Stock Exchange climbed to a record 1.16 trillion yuan on Thursday. In a margin trade, investors use their own money for just a portion of their stock purchase, borrowing the rest. The loans are backed by the investors’ equity holdings, meaning that they may be compelled to sell when prices fall to repay their debt.
Overall, China has seen more debt growth than any other major industrialized nation since the last recession. This debt growth has been so dramatic that it has gotten the attention of authorities all over the planet…

Wolfgang Schaeuble, Germany’s finance minister says that “debt levels in the global economy continue to give cause for concern.”

Singling out China in particular, Schaeuble noted that “debt has nearly quadrupled since 2007″, adding that it’s “growth appears to be built on debt, driven by a real estate boom and shadow banks.”

According to McKinsey’s research, total outstanding debt in China increased from $US7.4 trillion in 2007 to $US28.2 trillion in 2014. That figure, expressed as a percentage of GDP, equates to 282% of total output, higher than the likes of other G20 nations such as the US, Canada, Germany, South Korea and Australia.
This credit boom in China has been one of the primary engines for “global growth” in recent years, but now conditions are changing. Eventually, the impact of what is going on in China right now is going to be felt all over the planet.

Over in Europe, the Greek debt crisis is finally coming to a breaking point. For years, authorities have continued to kick the can down the road and have continued to lend Greece even more money.

But now it appears that patience with Greece has run out.

For instance, the head of the IMF says that no delay will be allowed on the repayment of IMF loans that are due next month…

IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde roiled currency and bond markets on Thursday as reports came out of her opening press conference saying that she had denied any payment delay to Greece on IMF loans falling due next month.
Unless Greece concludes its negotiations for a further round of bailout money from the European Union, however, it is not likely to have the money to repay the IMF.
And we are getting reports that things are happening behind the scenes in Europe to prepare for the inevitable moment when Greece will finally leave the euro and go back to their own currency.

For example, consider what Art Cashin told CNBC on Friday…

First, “there were reports in the media [saying] that the ECB and/or banking authorities suggested to banks to get rid of any sovereign Greek debt they had, which suggests that maybe the next step will be Greece exiting,” Cashin told CNBC.
Also, one of Greece’s largest newspapers is reporting that neighboring countries are forcing subsidiaries of Greek banks that operate inside their borders to reduce their risk to a Greek debt default to zero…

According to a report from Kathimerini, one of Greece’s largest newspapers, central banks in Albania, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Romania, Serbia, Turkey and the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia have all forced the subsidiaries of Greek banks operating in those countries to bring their exposure to Greek risk — including bonds, treasury bills, deposits to Greek banks, and loans — down to zero.
Once Greece leaves the euro, that is going to create a tremendous credit crunch in Europe as fear begins to spread like wildfire. Everyone will be wondering which nation will be “the next Greece”, and investors will want to pull their money out of perceived danger zones before they get hammered.

In the past, other European nations have been willing to bend over backwards to accommodate Greece and avoid this kind of mess, but those days appear to be finished. In fact, the finance minister of France openly admits that the French “are not sympathetic to Greece”…

Greece isn’t winning much sympathy from its debt-wracked European counterparts as the country draws closer to default for failing to make bailout repayments.
“We are not sympathetic to Greece,” French Finance Minister Michael Sapin said in an interview at the International Monetary Fund-World Bank spring meetings here.
“We are demanding because Greece must comply with the European (rules) that apply to all countries,” Sapin said.
Yes, it is possible that another short-term deal could be reached which could kick the can down the road for a few more months.

But either way, things in Europe are going to continue to get worse.

Meanwhile, very disappointing earnings reports in the U.S. are starting to really rattle investors.

For example, we just learned that GE lost 13.6 billion dollars in the first quarter…

One week following the announcement that it would dismantle most of its GE Capital financing operations to instead focus on its industrial roots, General Electric reported a first quarter loss of $13.6 billion.

The results were impacted by charges relating to the conglomerate’s strategic shift. A year ago GE reported a first quarter profit of $3 billion.
That is a lot of money.

How in the world does a company lose 13.6 billion dollars in a single quarter during an “economic recovery”?

Other big firms are reporting disappointing earnings numbers too…

In earnings news, American Express Co. late Thursday said its results were hurt by the strong U.S. dollar, which reduced revenue booked in other countries. Chief Executive Kenneth Chenault reiterated the company’s forecast that 2015 earnings will be flat to modestly down year over year. Shares fell 4.6%.

Advanced Micro Devices Inc. said its first-quarter loss widened as revenue slumped. The company said it was exiting its dense server systems business, effective immediately. Revenue and the loss excluding items missed expectations, pushing shares down 13%.
And just like we saw just before the financial crisis of 2008, Americans are increasingly having difficulty meeting their financial obligations.

For instance, the delinquency rate on student loans has reached a very frightening level…

More borrowers are failing to make payments on their student loans five years after leaving college, painting a grim picture for borrowers, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

Student debt continues to increase, especially for people who took out loans years ago. Those who left school in the Great Recession, which ended in 2009, had particular difficulty with repayment, with many defaulting, becoming seriously delinquent or not being able to reduce their balances, the New York Fed said today.

Only 37 percent of borrowers are current on their loans and are actively paying them down, and 17 percent are in default or in delinquency.
At this point, the American consumer is pretty well tapped out. If you can believe it, 56 percent of all Americans have subprime credit today, and as I mentioned above, we just witnessed the biggest spike in credit application rejections ever recorded.

We have reached a point of debt saturation, and the credit crunch that is going to follow is going to be extremely painful.

Of course the biggest provider of global liquidity in recent years has been the Federal Reserve. But with the Fed pulling back on QE, this is creating some tremendous challenges all over the globe. The following is an excerpt from a recent article in the Telegraph…

The big worry is what will happen to Russia, Brazil and developing economies in Asia that borrowed most heavily in dollars when the Fed was still flooding the world with cheap liquidity. Emerging markets account to roughly half of the $9 trillion of offshore dollar debt outside US jurisdiction.

The IMF warned that a big chunk of the debt owed by companies is in the non-tradeable sector. These firms lack “natural revenue hedges” that can shield them against a double blow from rising borrowing costs and a further surge in the dollar.
So what is the bottom line to all of this?

The bottom line is that we are starting to see the early phases of a liquidity squeeze.

The flow of credit is going to begin to get tighter, and that means that global economic activity is going to slow down.

This happened during the last financial crisis, and during this next financial crisis the credit crunch is going to be even worse.

This is why it is so important to have an emergency fund. During this type of crisis, you may have to be the source of your own liquidity. At a time when it seems like nobody has any cash, those that do have some will be way ahead of the game.

The Dollar Pegs are Next
Posted on January 18, 2015 by Martin Armstrong
Dollar-Peg

The next crisis will be the currency pegs against the dollar. Here we have pegs from Hong Kong to the Middle East. We will have the same problem for as the dollar is driven higher, thanks to the implosion in the Euroland, these nations will import DEFLATION from a rising dollar. This will break their backs and force pegs to collapse around the world. Keep in mind that this will unfold probably after September 2015 and help to spiral the world economy into the worst depression in centuries. Start preparing for a rainy day.

These idiots are raising taxes when they should be lowering them as even Keynes suggested. Unfortunately, we are in a major crisis because of their insane mismanagement of the economy. There is nothing they will not steal. They are the type of people who are pocketing soap on the cart of the maid as they leave the hotel room. This level of corruption is turning into a feeding frenzy, which is our doom.

The rise in the dollar, will be the key to breaking the post-war economy. It was the flight of capital from Euroland into the Swiss that broke that peg. We will see in the months ahead the same crisis unfold in the Middle East and in Asia. This will be accelerated by the emerging economies who have issued $6 trillion in dollar debt since 2007. As the dollar rises, they will be forced into the same position as Greece – unable to pay their debts because the debt keeps rising in cost.

What will futurity make of the [so-called] Ph.D. standard [that runs our world]?

Likely it will be even more baffled than we are. Imagine trying to explain the present-day arrangements to your 20-something grandchild a couple of decades hence – after the crash of, say, 2016, that wiped out the youngster’s inheritance and provoked a cenral bank response so heavy-handed as to shatter the confidence even of Wall Street in the Federal reserve’s methods…

I expect you’ll wind up saying something like this:

“My generation gave former tenured economics professors discretionary authority to fabricate money and to fix interest rates.

We put the cart of asset prices before the horse of enterprise.

We entertained the fantasy that high asset prices made for prosperity, rather than the other way around.

We actually worked to foster inflation, which we called ‘price stability’ (this was on the eve of the hyperinflation of 2017).

We seem to have miscalculated.”

a recent update from gains, pains and capital.

China Just Threatened a Currency War If the Fed Doesn’t Stop Printing

The tension between Central Banks that we noted yesterday continues to worsen. This time it was China and the EU, not just Germany, that fired warning shots at the US Fed.

A senior Chinese official said on Friday that the United States should cut back on printing money to stimulate its economy if the world is to have confidence in the dollar.

Asked whether he was worried about the dollar, the chairman of China’s sovereign wealth fund, the China Investment Corporation, Jin Liqun, told the World Economic Forum in Davos: “I am a little bit worried.”

“There will be no winners in currency wars. But it is important for a central bank that the money goes to the right place,” Li said.

Speaking at the same session, French Finance Minister Pierre Moscovici voiced concern that the euro was becoming overvalued as a result of quantitative easing and other stimulus actions taken by other nations’ central banks.

“Certainly, the level of the euro is high and creates some problem,” he said, attributing the single currency’s recent gains partly to the return of confidence created by the European Central Bank and euro zone governments in starting to overcome Europe’s debt crisis.

Source: Reuters.

So first Germany begins pulling its Gold reserves from the US, and now China and the EU are saying publicly that the Fed’s policies are damaging confidence in the US Dollar.

This does not bode well for the financial system. The primary role of Central Banks is to maintain confidence in the system. If the Central Banks begin to turn on one another it is only a matter of time before the system breaks down.

Remember, every time the Fed debases the US Dollar it forces the Euro and other currencies higher, hurting those countries’ exports. The Fed has recently announced it will be printing $85 billion every month until employment reaches 6.5% (obviously the Fed is ignoring the mountains of data that indicate QE doesn’t create jobs).

How long will the other Central Banks tolerate this before they initiate a currency war? Both Germany and China have fired warning shots at the Fed. And we all know that just beneath the veneer of goodwill, tensions are building between the primary players of the global financial system.

originally posted here and here

Authored by Detlev Schlichter; originally posted at DetlevSchlichter.com,

We are now five years into the Great Fiat Money Endgame and our freedom is increasingly under attack from the state, liberty’s eternal enemy. It is true that by any realistic measure most states today are heading for bankruptcy. But it would be wrong to assume that ‘austerity’ policies must now lead to a diminishing of government influence and a shrinking of state power. The opposite is true: the state asserts itself more forcefully in the economy, and the political class feels licensed by the crisis to abandon whatever restraint it may have adhered to in the past. Ever more prices in financial markets are manipulated by the central banks, either directly or indirectly; and through legislation, regulation, and taxation the state takes more control of the employment of scarce means. An anti-wealth rhetoric is seeping back into political discourse everywhere and is setting the stage for more confiscation of wealth and income in the future.

War is the health of the state, and so is financial crisis, ironically even a crisis in government finances. As the democratic masses sense that their living standards are threatened, they authorize their governments to do “whatever it takes” to arrest the collapse, prop up asset prices, and to enforce some form of stability. The state is a gigantic hammer, and at times of uncertainty the public wants nothing more than seeing everything nailed to the floor. Saving the status quo and spreading the pain are the dominant political postulates today, and they will shape policy for years to come.
Unlimited fiat money is a political tool

A free society requires hard and apolitical money. But the reality today is that money is merely a political tool. Central banks around the world are getting ever bolder in using it to rig markets and manipulate asset prices. The results are evident: equities are trading not far from historic highs, the bonds of reckless and clueless governments are trading at record low interest rates, and corporate debt is priced for perfection. While in the real economy the risks remain palpable and the financial sector on life support from the central banks, my friends in money management tell me that the biggest risk they have faced of late was the risk of not being bullish enough and missing the rallies. Welcome to Planet QE.

I wish my friends luck but I am concerned about the consequences. With free and unlimited fiat money at the core of the financial industry, mis-allocations of capital will not diminish but increase. The damage done to the economy will be spectacular in the final assessment. There is no natural end to QE. Once it has propped up markets it has to be continued ad infinitum to keep ‘prices’ where the authorities want them. None of this is a one-off or temporary. It is a new form of finance socialism. It will not end through the political process but via complete currency collapse.

Not the buying and selling by the public on free and uninhibited markets, but monetary authorities – central bank bureaucrats – now determine where asset prices should be, which banks survive, how fast they grow and who they lend to, and what the shape of the yield curve should be. We are witnessing the destruction of financial markets and indeed of capitalism itself.

While in the monetary sphere the role of the state is increasing rapidly it is certainly not diminishing in the sphere of fiscal policy. Under the misleading banner of ‘austerity’ states are not rolling back government but simply changing the sources of state funding. Seeing what has happened in Ireland and Portugal, and what is now happening in Spain and in particular Greece, many governments want to reduce their dependence on the bond market. They realize that once the bond market loses confidence in the solvency of any state the game is up and insolvency quickly becomes a reality. But the states that attempt to reduce deficits do not usually reduce spending but raise revenues through higher taxes.
Sources of state funding

When states fund high degrees of spending by borrowing they tap into the pool of society’s savings, crowd out private competitors, and thus deprive the private sector of resources. In the private sector, savings would have to be employed as productive capital to be able repay the savers who provided these resources in the first place at some point in the future. By contrast, governments mainly consume the resources they obtain through borrowing in the present period. They do not invest them in productive activities that generate new income streams for society. Via deficit-spending, governments channel savings mainly back into consumption. Government bonds are not backed by productive capital but simply by the state’s future expropriation of wealth-holders and income-earners. Government deficits and government debt are always highly destructive for a society. They are truly anti-social. Those who invest in government debt are not funding future-oriented investment but present-day state consumption. They expect to get repaid from future taxes on productive enterprise without ever having invested in productive enterprise themselves. They do not support capitalist production but simply acquire shares in the state’s privilege of taxation.

Reducing deficits is thus to be encouraged at all times, and the Keynesian nonsense that deficit-spending enhances society’s productiveness is to be rejected entirely. However, most states are not aiming to reduce deficits by cutting back on spending, and those that do, do so only marginally. They mainly replace borrowing with taxes. This means the state no longer takes the detour via the bond market but confiscates directly and instantly what it needs to sustain its outsized spending. In any case, the states’ heavy control over a large chunk of society’s scarce means is not reduced. It is evident that this strategy too obstructs the efficient and productive use of resources. It is a disincentive for investment and the build-up of a productive capital stock. It is a killer of growth and prosperity.
47 percent, then 52 percent, then 90 percent…

Why do states not cut spending? – I would suggest three answers: first, it is not in the interest of politicians and bureaucrats to reduce spending as spending is the prime source of their power and prestige. Second, there is still a pathetic belief in the Keynesian myth that government spending ‘reboots’ the economy. But the third is maybe the most important one: in all advanced welfare democracies large sections of the public have come to rely on the state, and in our mass democracies it now means political suicide to try and roll back the state.

Mitt Romney’s comment that 47% of Americans would not appreciate his message of cutting taxes and vote for him because they do not pay taxes and instead rely on government handouts, may not have been politically astute and tactically clever but there was a lot of truth in it.

In Britain, more than 50 percent of households are now net receivers of state transfers, up 10 percent from a decade ago. In Scotland it is allegedly a staggering 90 percent of households. Large sections of British society have become wards of the state.

Against this backdrop state spending is more likely to grow than shrink. This will mean higher taxes, more central bank intervention (debt monetization, ‘quantitative easing’), more regulatory intervention to force institutional investors into the government bond market, and ultimately capital controls.
Eat the Rich!

In order to legitimize the further confiscation of private income and private wealth to fund ongoing state expenditure, the need for a new political narrative arose. This narrative claims that the problem with government finances is not out-of-control spending but the lack of solidarity by the rich, wealthy and most productive, who do not contribute ‘their fair share’.

An Eat-the-Rich rhetoric is discernible everywhere, and it is getting louder. In Britain, Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg wants to introduce a special ‘mansion tax’ on high-end private property. This is being rejected by the Tories but, according to opinion polls, supported by a majority of Brits. (I wager a guess that it is popular in Scotland.) In Germany, Angela Merkel’s challenger for the chancellorship, Peer Steinbrueck, wants to raise capital gains taxes if elected. In Switzerland of all places, a conservative (!) politician recently proposed that extra taxes should be levied on wealthy pensioners so that they make their ‘fair’ contribution to the public weal.
France on an economic suicide mission

The above trends are all nicely epitomized by developments in France. In 2012, President Hollande has not reduced state spending at all but raised taxes. For 2013 he proposed an ‘austerity’ budget that would cut the deficit by €30 billion, of which €10 billion would come from spending cuts and €20 billion would be generated in extra income through higher taxes on corporations and on high income earners. The top tax rate will rise from 41% to 45%, and those that earn more than €1 million a year will be subject to a new 75% marginal tax rate. With all these market-crippling measures France will still run a budget deficit and will have to borrow more from the bond market to fund its outsized state spending programs, which still account for 56% of registered GDP.

If you ask me, the market is not bearish enough on France. This version of socialism will not work, just as no other version of socialism has ever worked. But when it fails, it will be blamed on ‘austerity’ and the euro, not on socialism.

As usual, the international commentariat does not ‘get it’. Political analysts are profoundly uninterested in the difference between reducing spending and increasing taxes, it is all just ‘austerity’ to them, and, to make it worse, allegedly enforced by the Germans. The Daily Telegraph’s Ambrose Evans-Pritchard labels ‘austerity’ ‘1930s policies imposed by Germany’, which is of dubious historical and economic accuracy but suitable, I guess, to make a political point.

Most commentators are all too happy to cite the alleged negative effect of ‘austerity’ on GDP, ignoring that in a heavily state-run economy like France’s, official GDP says as little about the public’s material wellbeing as does a rallying equity market in an economy fuelled by unlimited QE. If the government spent money on hiring people to sweep the streets with toothbrushes this, too, would boost GDP and could thus be labelled economic progress.

At this point it may be worth adding that despite all the talk of ‘austerity’ many governments are still spending and borrowing like never before, first and foremost, the United States, which is running the largest civil government mankind has ever seen. For 5 consecutive years annual deficits have been way in excess of $1,000 billion, which means the US government borrows an additional $4 billion on every day the markets are open. The US is running budget deficits to the tune of 8-10% per annum to allegedly boost growth by a meagre 2% at best.
Regulation and more regulation

Fiscal and monetary actions by states will increasingly be flanked by aggressive regulatory and legislative intervention in markets. Governments are controlling the big pools of savings via their regulatory powers over banks, insurance companies and pension funds. Existing regulations already force all these entities into heavy allocations of government bonds. This will continue going forward and intensify. The states must ensure that they continue to have access to cheap funding.

Not only do I expect regulation that ties institutional investors to the government bond market to continue, I think it will be made ever more difficult for the individual to ‘opt out’ of these schemes, i.e. to arrange his financial affairs outside the heavily state-regulated banking, insurance, and pension fund industry. The astutely spread myth that the financial crisis resulted from ‘unregulated markets’ rather than constant expansion of state fiat money and artificially cheap credit from state central banks, has opened the door for more aggressive regulatory interference in markets.
The War on Offshore

Part and parcel of this trend is the War on Offshore, epitomized by new and tough double-taxation treaties between the UK and Switzerland and Germany and Switzerland. You are naïve if you think that attacks on Swiss banking and on other ‘offshore’ banking destinations are only aimed at tax-dodgers. An important side effect of these campaigns is this: it gets ever more cumbersome for citizens from these countries to conduct their private banking business in Switzerland and other countries, and ever more expensive and risky for Swiss and other banks to service these clients. For those of us who are tax-honest but prefer to have our assets diversified politically, and who are attracted to certain banking and legal traditions and a deeper commitment to private property rights in places such as Switzerland, banking away from our home country gets more difficult. This is intentional I believe.

The United States of America have taken this strategy to its logical extreme. The concept of global taxation for all Americans, regardless where they live, coupled with aggressive litigation and threat of reprisal against foreign financial institutions that may – deliberately or inadvertently – assist Americans in lowering their tax burden, have made it very expensive and even risky for many banks to deal with American citizens, or even with holders of US green cards or holders of US social security numbers. Americans will find it difficult to open bank accounts in certain countries. This is certainly the case for Switzerland but a friend of mine even struggled obtaining full banking services in Singapore. I know of private banks in the UK that have terminated banking relationships with US citizens, even when they were longstanding clients. All of this is going to get worse next year when FATCA becomes effective – the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, by which the entire global financial system will become the extended arm of the US Internal Revenue System. US citizens are subject to de facto capital controls. I believe this is only a precursor to real capital controls being implemented in the not too distant future.

When Johann Wolfgang von Goethe wrote that “none are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free” he anticipated the modern USA.

And to round it all off, there is the War on Cash. In many European countries there are now legal limits for cash transactions, and Italy is considering restrictions for daily cash withdrawals. Again, the official explanation is to fight tax evasion but surely these restrictions will come in handy when the state-sponsored and highly geared banking sector in Europe wobbles again, and depositors try to pull out their money.
“I’ve seen the future, and it will be…”

So here is the future as I see it: central banks are now committed to printing unlimited amounts of fiat money to artificially prop up various asset prices forever and maintain illusions of stability. Governments will use their legislative and regulatory power to make sure that your bank, your insurance company and your pension fund keep funding the state, and will make it difficult for you to disengage from these institutions. Taxes will rise on trend, and it will be more and more difficult to keep your savings in cash or move them abroad.

Now you may not consider yourself to be rich. You may not own or live in a house that Nick Clegg would consider a ‘mansion’. You may not want to ever bank in Switzerland or hold assets abroad. You may only have a small pension fund and not care much how many government bonds it holds. You may even be one those people who regularly stand in front of me in the line at Starbucks and pay for their semi-skinned, decaf latte with their credit or debit card, so you may not care about restrictions on using cash. But if you care about living in a free society you should be concerned. And I sure believe you should care about living in a functioning market economy.

This will end badly.

This is from Graham Summers of Phoenix Capital Research via zerohedge here

As noted in yesterday’s piece concerning how and why Europe could bring about systemic risk, EU banks are likely leveraged at much, much more than 26 to 1.

Indeed, considering how leveraged and toxic US banks’ (especially the investment banks’) balance sheets became from the US housing bubble, the chart I showed you should give everyone pause when they consider the TRUE state of EU bank balance sheets.

This fact in of itself makes the possibility of a systemic collapse of the EU banking system relatively high. Let me give you an example to illustrate this point.

Let’s assume Bank XYZ in Europe has a loan portfolio of €300 million Euros and equity of €30 million Euros. This means the bank is “officially” leveraged at 10 to 1 (this would be a great leverage ratio for a European bank as most of them are leveraged to at least 26 to 1 or worse).

So… let’s say that 10% of the bank’s loans (read: assets) are in fact worth 50% of the value that the bank claims they’re worth (not unlikely if you’re talking about a PIIGS bank). This means that the bank’s actual loan portfolio is worth €285 million (10% of 300 is 30 and 50% of 30 is 15).

With equity of only €30 million, the bank, at some point, will have to take writedowns or one time charges on its loan portfolio that would erase HALF of its equity. At this point, the bank becomes leveraged at 19 to 1 (€285 million in assets on €15 million in equity).

This announcement would result in:

Depositors pulling their funds from the bank (thereby rendering it even more insolvent)
The bank’s shares plunging on the market (raising its leverage levels even higher as equity falls further).

Thus, at a leverage ratio of 10 to 1, even a 50% hit on 10% of a bank’s loan portfolio can result in the bank needing a bailout or even collapsing.

Now, what if that €300 million in loans is actually the amount the bank’s in-house risk models believe to be “at risk” and the REAL loan portfolio is around €800 million?

Immediately, we realize that the bank is in fact leveraged at 26 to 1. At this level even a 4% drop in asset prices erases ALL equity rendering the bank insolvent.

And yet, based on Basel II requirements, this bank can claim in all public disclosures that it is only leveraged at 10 to 1. With this in mind, you should understand why the banks lobbied so hard against a rapid implementation of Basel III capital requirements (which would require equity and capital equal to 10.5% of all of risk-weighted assets.)

Indeed, Basel III requirements which were meant to go in effect at the end of 2012 will now gradually begin to be implemented in 2013. And banks will have until 2015 to adjust to the new capital requirements and until 2019 conservation buffers in place.

With that in mind, take my XYZ bank example, apply it to all of Europe, assume leverage ratios of 26 to 1 at the very minimum (Lehman blew up when it was leveraged at 30 to 1), and take another look at the housing bubbles in the above chart.

In simple terms Europe’s entire €46 trillion banking system is in far worse shape than even the US investment banks were going into 2008. And this is based on their leverage ratios alone.

Sovereign Man
Notes from the Field

Originally posted here

Date: February 28, 2012
Reporting From: London, England

[Editor’s note: Tim Price, a frequent Sovereign Man contributor and Director of Investment at PFP Wealth Management in London, is filling in for Simon today.]

In December last year, the poet Alice Oswald withdrew from the TS Eliot poetry prize on the grounds that the prize was being sponsored by an investment company (Aurum, a fund of hedge funds manager).

How you feel about this principled stance may depend on whether you are a UK taxpayer. If you are a UK taxpayer, you will probably feel relieved that your tax pounds are no longer being squandered on the Arts Council’s sponsorship of the prize in question “a tiny victory” but a victory nevertheless against the arrogant dissipations of the state.

Ms Oswald seems to believe that poetry prizes should be funded with everybody else’s money, rather than by a private patron grown-up enough to be responsible for its discretionary expenditure (private patronage being what you might call “traditional” in the arts).

As a graduate in English Language and Literature, this commentator has no animus against poets. But I am not sure we want them in charge of the economy. They are notorious for starving in garrets for a reason.

Ms Oswald’s “protest” is part of a wider intellectual malaise that lazily conflates government spending with the real economy and which conveniently ignores the fact that without a flourishing private sector, there would be no government and certainly no government spending to speak of.

It is part of that lazy thinking that inspires journalists to keep speaking of “the government” spending money on this or that, as if “the government” were somehow sitting on an infinitely large pile of “government money” that most of the time it was unreasonably withholding from worthy causes.

The reason our economy is knackered is because successive governments have indeed pandered to subjective worthy causes with money that those governments did not possess.

Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, taxpayers will be paying the bill. It is not government money because the government doesn’t have any. It has liabilities only. It is taxpayers’ money.

The finest achievement to date of the UK’s coalition government has been a triumph of PR’ as one might expect, given that PR appears to comprise the only work experience our current Prime Minister has ever had outside politics.

A myth has arisen, polished frequently by an ignorant media, that the British government has started to deal with the grotesque debt inherited from the previous government. But as Prosperity Capital’s chief economist Liam Halligan points out, government spending was actually higher for the fiscal year 2010/11 than under the last year of the last government.

The UK debt figures are also much worse than conventionally believed because 2011 debt including “interventions” stood at ~£2,270 billion as at September 2011, or 150% of UK GDP. To this we should add public sector pensions (~£1,100bn+), PFI (~£400bn+) and sundry other off-balance-sheet obligations of the state.

Liam Halligan’s bleak summary is that after five years of supposed austerity, UK government spending will be back to 2005 levels… but with twice as much debt.

Just as there has been no real austerity in the UK, yet’ there has been no real deleveraging in the global economy at an aggregate level. Paul Marson of Lombard Odier points out that global credit market debt stands at $220 trillion, having grown by 11% annually since 2002, versus 8% nominal GDP growth:

[Credit Market & Debt to GDP]

In debt markets we are seeing a catastrophic example of the law of diminishing returns. As Marson makes clear, it takes greater amounts of debt to have the same marginal impact on GDP. The marginal effectiveness of debt has collapsed during the period since the end of the Second World War.

For the USA, for example, 1 unit of debt generated 0.63 units of GDP between 1953 and 1984; that same 1 unit of debt generated 0.24 units of GDP between 1985 and 2000; since 2000, 1 unit of debt has generated just 0.08 units of GDP.

The problem is insuperable. More debt has been created in the past forty years than will ever realistically be paid back… which leads us to the existential financial problem of our time:

The modern, debt-based economy requires constant economic expansion if only to service all that debt. So what happens when the modern economy goes ex-growth and stops expanding?

Iceland already found out. Greece is in the process of discovering. But we will all get a chance to participate in this lesson.

Runaway fiscal and monetary stimulus throughout the western economies is in the process of destroying the concept of creditworthiness at the centre of the modern monetary system. Private investors, we suspect, have little or no conception of the extent to which the state is now the predominant player in the financial markets.

Central banks control the money supply and interest rates. Central banking and commercial banking interests have essentially become fused.

The ECB’s long-term refinancing operations are banking bailouts by the back door. Central banks are now also the swing players in government bond markets which directly influences the price for corporate credit. Central bank monetary stimulus also directly influences equity market direction and confidence.

Be careful, be very careful about the sort of government debt you hold. You may well end up being paid in whole- but in such depreciated terms that being “kept whole” will be meaningless in real terms.

In all other respects, our investment choices remain what they have always been: high quality, high yielding defensive equities; uncorrelated systematic trend-following funds; gold, silver, and gold and silver mining companies.

There will come a point, and it may admittedly be some time in coming, when a major government bond market goes bang. Perhaps Japan, some peripheral market in the euro zone, some core market in the euro zone, the UK, or even the US.

You will hear the echo throughout the world. We intend to be a very long way away when that time comes.

Great Post on zero hedge here from Brandon Smith from ALT Market

One of the most frustrating issues to haunt the halls of alternative economic analysis is the threat of misrepresentative terminology. For instance, when the U.S. government decided to back the private Federal Reserve in lowering the interest rates on lending windows to European banks last month, they did not call this a bailout, even though that’s exactly what it was. They did not call it quantitative easing, or fiat printing, or a hyperinflationary landmine; rarely does bureaucracy ever apply honest terminology to their subversive activities. False terminology is the bane of every honest analyst, because in order for them to educate and awaken those who are unaware of the truth, they must first battle through the daunting muck of the general public’s horrifically improper perceptions and vocabulary.

The chain of financial events taking place over the past decade in Asia have been correspondingly mislabeled and misunderstood. What some economists see as total collapse is actually a new and decidedly prophetic (or engineered) transition. What some naively see as the “natural” progression of globalism, is actually a distinctly deliberate program of centralization meant to further the goals of world economic and political totalitarianism. Asia, and most especially China, is a Petri dish for elitist psychopaths. What we see as suffocating collectivism in this region of the world today is the exact social schematic intended for the West tomorrow. Call it whatever you will, but on the other side of the Pacific, like the eerie smile of a sinister clown, sits fabricated fate.

The genius of globalization is not in how it “works”, but in how it DOESN’T work. Globalization chains mismatched cultures together through circumstance and throws us into the deep end of the pool. If one sinks, we all sink, enslaving us with interdependency. The question one must ask, then, is if all sovereign economies are currently tied together in the same way? The answer is no, not anymore. Certain countries have moved to insulate themselves from the domino effect of debt implosion, one of the primary examples being China.

Since at least 2005, China has been taking the exact steps required to counter the brunt of a global debt collapse; not enough to make it untouchable, but enough that its infrastructure will survive. One could even surmise that China’s actions indicate a foreknowledge of the events that would eventually escalate in 2008. How they knew is hard to say, but if the available evidence causes you to lean towards collapse as a Hegelian creation (and it should if you are paying any attention), then China’s activity begins to make perfect sense. If a globalist insider told you that in a few short years the two most powerful financial empires in the world were going to topple like bowling pins under the weight of their own liabilities, what would you do? Probably separate yourself as much as possible from the diseased dynamic and construct your own replacement system. This is what China has done…

China started with the circulation of Yuan denominated bonds, like T-Bonds, meant to securitize Chinese debt, creating an outlet for the currency to go global. China’s considerable forex and bond reserves make this move a rather suspicious one. With so much savings at their disposal, why bother to issue bonds at all? Why threaten the traditional export based economy and the uneven trade advantage that the country had been thriving on for decades? The success of Chinese bonds would mean the internationalization of the Yuan, a floating valuation of the currency, and the loss of the desirable trade deficit with the U.S. Back in 2005, this all would surely seem like a novelty that was going nowhere fast. Of course, today China’s actions suggest an unprecedented push to convert to a consumer hub at the center of a massive trading bloc. To put it simply; China knew ahead of schedule that the U.S. was no longer going to be a viable customer, and reliance on such a country would spell disaster. They have been preparing to break away from America’s consumer markets and the dollar for some time.

In 2008, after China announced the use of the Yuan in cross border trade on a limited basis, I began to write about the possibility that China was preparing to break from the Greenback. For the past few years my primary focus in terms of finance has been the East as a kind of warning bell for the state of the global economy. In 2009 and 2010, it became absolutely clear that China (with the help of global corporate entities) was developing the skeleton of a new system; a trade network that that had the capacity to supplant the U.S. and end the dollar’s world reserve status.

Since then, Yuan bonds have spread across the planet, China has dropped the dollar in bilateral trade with Russia, the ASEAN trading bloc has formed into a tight shell of export partners, and that is just the beginning. Two major announcements in 2011 have solidified my belief that a complete dump of the dollar by eastern interests is near…

First was the announcement that China was actively and openly pursuing the establishment of a central bank for the whole of ASEAN, with the Yuan utilized as the reserve currency instead of the dollar:

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/10/27/us-china-asean-financial-idUST…

This news, of course, has barely been reported on in the mainstream. As I discussed at the beginning of this article, the terminology surrounding economic developments has been diluted and twisted. When China states that an ASEAN central bank is in the works, we need to point out what this really means; the ASEAN trading bloc is about to become the Asian Union. The only missing piece of the puzzle is something that I have been warning about for at least a couple years, ever since my days at Neithercorp (see “Migration Of The Black Swans” as a recent example). This key catalyst is the inclusion of Japan in ASEAN, something which many said would take five to ten years to unfold. News released this Christmas speaks otherwise:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-12-25/china-japan-to-promote-direct-trading-of-currencies-to-cut-company-costs.html

Japan has indeed entered into an agreement to drop the dollar in currency exchange with China and has expressed interest in melting into ASEAN. Japan has also struck somewhat similar though slightly more limited deals with India, South Korea, Indonesia, and the Philippines almost simultaneously:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-12-28/japan-india-seal-15-billion-currency-swap-arrangement-to-shore-up-rupee.html

This means that the two largest foreign holders of U.S. debt and Greenbacks will soon be in a position to tap into an export market far more profitable than that of America, and that all of this trade will be facilitated by currencies OTHER THAN THE DOLLAR. It means the end of the dollar as the world reserve and probably the end of the dollar as we know it.

Japan’s inclusion in this process was inevitable. With its economy already in steep deflationary decline, the Yen skyrocketing in value against the dollar making exports difficult, as well as the ongoing nuclear meltdown problem at Fukushima, the island nation has been on the edge of complete collapse. Its only option, therefore, is to sink into the chaotic sees, or float like a buoy tied to an Asian Union. There can be absolutely no doubt now that Japan will soon implement the latter solution.

The dilemma at this point becomes one of timing. Now that we are certain that two of the largest economies in the world are about the dump the Greenback, what signals can we watch when preparing for the event? My belief is that the trigger will come squarely from the U.S. and the Federal Reserve, either as legislation to heavily tax Asian imports, a renewed threat of further credit downgrades like that which S&P brought down in August, or the announcement of more open quantitative easing. Any and all of these issues could very well arise in the course of the next 6-12 months, QE3 being a basic no-brainer. ASEAN could, certainly, drop the dollar immediately after their central bank apparatus is put in place, resulting in a much more volatile trade war atmosphere (also useful for full global centralization later down the road). The point is, we are truly at a place in our economic life when ANYTHING is possible.

My hope is that as our predictions in the alternative economic community are proven correct with every passing quarter, more Americans will take note, and prepare. I can say quite confidently that we have entered the first stages of the catastrophic phase of the economic implosion. All the fantastic and terrible consequences many once considered theory or science fiction, are about to become reality. Practical solutions have been offered by myself and many others. The only thing left now is to take action, or ride the tidal wave of destruction like so much driftwood. We can help to determine the outcome, or we can be idle spectators. In everything, there is a choice…