Month: March 2014

Via JPMorgan CIO Michael Cembalest,

After digesting all the hyperbole and the pessimism, my biggest concern is not that Bitcoin will fail, but that it or one of its many virtual currency competitors will one day succeed.

In the extreme, Bitcoin may lead to economic activity moving from the regulated economy to the underground “shadow” economy (after all, one of its primary selling points lay in its inability to be traced), even if some Bitcoin recipients faithfully declare it as income.

If this were to happen, the tax burden would fall disproportionately on the regulated economy that remains, creating a lot of unwelcome distortions.

 

Perhaps this is why there is a clear inverse relationship between the size of a country’s shadow economy and its wealth per capita. In other words, no one likes paying taxes, but when no one actually does pay them, everyone suffers.

Libertarianism has its limits.

via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/1lH4QP4 Tyler Durden

Submitted by Michael Snyder of The Economic Collapse blog,

The U.S. government and the Russian government have both been forced into positions where neither one of them can afford to back down.  If Barack Obama backs down, he will be greatly criticized for being "weak" and for having been beaten by Vladimir Putin once again.  If Putin backs down, he will be greatly criticized for being "weak" and for abandoning the Russians that live in Crimea.  In essence, Obama and Putin find themselves trapped in a macho game of "chicken" and critics on both sides stand ready to pounce on the one who backs down.  But this is not just an innocent game of "chicken" from a fifties movie.  This is the real deal, and if nobody backs down the entire world will pay the price.

Leaving aside who is to blame for a moment, it is really frightening to think that we may be approaching the tensest moment in U.S.-Russian relations since the Cuban missile crisis.

There has been much talk about Obama's "red lines", but the truth is that Crimea (and in particular the naval base at Sevastopol) is a "red line" for Russia.

There is nothing that Obama could ever do that could force the Russians out of Sevastopol.  They will never, ever willingly give up that naval base.

So what in the world does Obama expect to accomplish by imposing sanctions on Russia?  By treaty, Russia is allowed to have 25,000 troops in Crimea and Russia has not sent troops into the rest of Ukraine.

Economic sanctions are not going to cause Putin to back down.  Instead, they will just cause the Russians to retaliate.

In a letter that he sent to Congress this week, Obama claimed that the Ukrainian crisis is an "unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States."

Language like that is going to make it even more difficult for Obama to back down.

On Thursday, Obama announced "visa restrictions" on "those Russians and Ukrainians responsible for the Russian move into Ukraine's Crimean Peninsula", and a House panel passed a "symbolic resolution" that condemned Russia for its "occupation" of Crimea.

But those moves are fairly meaningless.  Leaders from both political parties are now pushing for very strong economic sanctions against Russia, and there does not appear to be many members of Congress that intend to stand in the way.

If the U.S. does hit Russia with harsh economic sanctions, what is going to happen?

Is Russia going to back down?

No way.

So let's just play out the coming moves like a game of chess for a moment…

-The U.S. slaps economic sanctions on Russia.

-Russia seizes the assets of U.S. companies that are doing business in Russia.

-The U.S. seizes Russian assets.

-The Russians refuse to pay their debts to U.S. banks.

-The U.S. government hits Russia with even stronger sanctions.

-Russia starts dumping U.S. debt and encourages other nations to start doing the same.

-The U.S. gets Europe to also hit Russia with economic sanctions.

-Russia cuts off the natural gas to Europe.  As I noted the other day, Russia supplies more than half the natural gas to a bunch of countries in Europe.

-The United States moves troops into western Ukraine.

-Russia starts selling oil for gold or for Russian rubles and encourages other nations to start abandoning the U.S. dollar in international trade.

Of course the order of many of these moves could ultimately turn out to be different, but I think that you can see the nightmare that this game of "chicken" could turn out to be.

And what would be the final result?

Nothing would be resolved, but the global economy would greatly suffer.

What makes all of this even more complicated is that about 60 percent of the people living in Crimea are actually ethnic Russians, and a majority of the population appears to want to leave Ukraine and be reunited with Russia.  The following comes from a Reuters article…

Crimea's parliament voted to join Russia on Thursday and its Moscow-backed government set a referendum on the decision in 10 days' time in a dramatic escalation of the crisis over the Ukrainian Black Sea peninsula.

 

The sudden acceleration of moves to bring Crimea, which has an ethnic Russian majority and has effectively been seized by Russian forces, formally under Moscow's rule came as European Union leaders held an emergency summit groping for ways to pressure Russia to back down and accept mediation.

The Obama administration is calling the upcoming referendum "illegal" and says that it will not respect the will of the Crimean people no matter how the vote turns out.

But the people of Crimea are very serious about this, and of course they never would be pushing for reunification with Russia if they had not gotten approval from Putin…

The decision, which diplomats said could not have been made without Putin's approval, raised the stakes in the most serious east-west confrontation since the end of the Cold War.

 

The vice premier of Crimea, home to Russia's Black Sea Fleet in Sevastopol, said a referendum on the status would take place on March 16. All state property would be "nationalized", the Russian ruble adopted and Ukrainian troops treated as occupiers and forced to surrender or leave, he said.

There is no way that the U.S. government is going to accept Crimea becoming part of Russia, and there is no way in the world that Russia is going to back down at this point.  Just consider what geopolitical expert Ian Bremmer of the Eurasia Group recently had to say…

"Russia is not going to back down from Crimea, irrespective of U.S. pressure. Which means if the U.S. wants to find any resolution here, they’re going to have to find a way to come to terms with that. Now that the Crimean parliament has voted — clearly with Russian assent — we’ll have a referendum … and then further militarization of the peninsula by the Russians."

What we need is someone with extraordinary diplomatic skills to defuse this situation before it spirals out of control.

Unfortunately, we have Barack Obama, Valerie Jarrett and John Kerry running things.

What a mess.

So why is Ukraine such a big deal anyway?

In a recent article, Peter Farmer explained succinctly why Ukraine is so incredibly important…

The Ukraine is strategically-important for a number of reasons. It sits astride enormous petroleum and natural gas deposits found in the Black Sea region. The nation is also home to an extensive network of liquid natural gas pipelines which crisscross it; control the Ukraine and you control its pipelines – and thus the flow of energy into the hugely-lucrative European market. Western energy firms such as Exxon-Mobil, BP-Amoco and Chevron are locked in competition with the Russian energy giant Gazprom – for control/exploitation of as-yet-undeveloped petroleum deposits not only in the Ukraine, but in neighboring Poland and Romania. Fracking technologies and other new extraction methods have only added urgency to the competition. Income from fossil fuels development is the lifeblood of the new Russian economy. Threats to the regional hegemony of Gazprom are likely to be treated by Putin and Russia with the utmost urgency and seriousness.

 

The Crimean Peninsula is also home to the Black Sea fleet of the Russian navy, which leases its base at Sevastopol from the Ukrainian government. Since the Black Sea – via the Dardanelles – provides the only warm-water base with access to the Mediterranean Sea – it is of enormous importance to Russia. Its loss would be a crippling blow to the Russian fleet.

 

Finally, the Ukraine – once known as the "bread basket of Europe" – is home to arguably the finest temperate agricultural region in the world. Its topsoil is widely-acknowledged by agronomists to be among the world's best. Control the Ukraine and you control the grainery of Europe – and can exert tremendous leverage upon worldwide grain agricultural commodities prices.

If the U.S. insists on playing a game of brinksmanship over Ukraine, the consequences could be disastrous.

For one thing, as I mentioned above, the status of the petrodollar could be greatly threatened.  The following is how Jim Willie is analyzing the situation…

If the Kremlin demands Gold bullion (or even Russian Rubles) for oil payments, then the interventions to subvert the Ruble currency by the London and Wall Street houses will backfire and blow up in the bankster faces. Expect any surplus Rubles would be converted quickly to Gold bullion. If the Chinese demand that they are permitted to pay for oil shipments in Yuan currency, then the entire Petro-Dollar platform will be subjected to sledge hammers and wrecking balls. The new Petro-Yuan defacto standard will have been launched from the Shanghai outpost. If the Saudis curry favor to the Russians and Chinese by accepting non-USDollar payments for oil shipments, then the Petro-Dollar is dead and buried.

In addition, if Russia starts dumping U.S. debt and gets other nations (such as China) to start doing the same, that could create a nightmare scenario for the U.S. financial system very rapidly.

So let us hope and pray that cooler heads prevail….

But if the United States and Russia do declare "economic war" on each other, all hell could start breaking loose.

Unfortunately, there does not appear to be much hope of anyone backing down at this point.  In an editorial for the Washington Post, Henry Kissinger stated that it "is incompatible with the rules of the existing world order for Russia to annex Crimea."

Very interesting word choice.

So this is the situation we are facing…

-The U.S. government seems absolutely determined to "punish" Russia until it leaves Crimea.

-Russia is never going to leave Crimea, and has promised to "respond" harshly to any sanctions.

Most Americans are not paying much attention to what is going on in Ukraine, but this is a very, very big deal.

In the end, it could potentially affect the lives of virtually every man, woman and child on the planet.

via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/1n42nzT Tyler Durden

When the drug-selling website Silk Road was shut down in October 2013, the event made international news. What didn’t make the news was how much the site’s purchasing clients were paying for the substances they were buying. Substance abuse comes with many costs. Emotional, health and career costs are just a few that we can name.

However, Silk Road added yet another cost on top of its substance users’ problems: spending costs. For example, the buying price of heroin on Silk Road was nearly 2x greater than heroin’s average street price.

What’s more, drug users of nearly every single state would have saved more money buying drugs on the street as opposed to buying them on Silk Road. Drug users from roughly 1/5 of the country overpaid by more than $100 and North Dakota was the only state to see a decrease in drug costs for users who bought drugs on Silk Road. Silk Road offered everything from mushrooms, to marijuana, to DMT and even heroine. But at what costs?

 

Infographic by Clarity Way Rehab Center

via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/1ldMVfS Tyler Durden

Having expressed her perspective of Russia Today’s “whitewashed” coverage of Putin’s invasion of Russia, Liz Wahl resigned live on air yesterday. This came on the heels of her colleague Abby Martin’s recent comments voicing here disagreements with Russian policies on the same state-funded network. Russia Today has responded… “When a journalist disagrees with the editorial position of his or her organization, the usual course of action is to address those grievances with the editor…But when someone makes a big public show of a personal decision, it is nothing more than a self-promotional stunt.”

 

Russia Today full statement:

Ms. Wahl’s resignation comes on the heels of her colleague Abby Martin’s recent comments in which she voiced her disagreement with certain policies of the Russian government and asserted her editorial independence.

Abby Martin’s comments…

The difference is, Ms. Martin spoke in the context of her own talk show, to the viewers who have been tuning in for years to hear her opinions on current events – the opinions that most media did not care about until two days ago. For years, Ms. Martin has been speaking out against US military intervention, only to be ignored by the mainstream news outlets – but with that one comment, branded as an act of defiance, she became an overnight sensation. It is a tempting example to follow.

When a journalist disagrees with the editorial position of his or her organization, the usual course of action is to address those grievances with the editor, and, if they cannot be resolved, to quit like a professional. But when someone makes a big public show of a personal decision, it is nothing more than a self-promotional stunt.

We wish Liz the best of luck on her chosen path.

via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/1n3S92o Tyler Durden

Submitted by Pater Tenebrarum of Acting-Man blog,

The 'Deflation Danger' Should Abate …

What is it with this perennial fear the chief money printers have of falling prices? Not that we are likely to see it happen, but if it does, what of it? Bloomberg reports on the recent ECB decision with the following headline: “Draghi Says Deflation Danger Should Abate as Economy Revives”

The headline alone is a hodge-podge of arrant nonsense. First of all, 'deflation' (this is to say, falling prices), is not a 'danger'. Speaking for ourselves and billions of earth's consumers: we love it when prices fall! It means our incomes go further and our savings will buy more as well. What's not to love?

The problem is of course that when prices decline, the 'wrong' sectors of society actually benefit, while those whose bread is buttered by the inflation tax would no longer benefit at the expense of everybody else. But they never say that, do they? Has Draghi ever explained why he believes deflation to be a danger? No, we are just supposed to know/accept that it is.

Secondly, the 'as economy revives' part makes no sense whatsoever. Why and how should a genuinely reviving economy produce inflation? Economic growth occurs when more goods and services are produced. Their prices should, ceteris paribus, fall (of course, we are not supposed to inquire too deeply into which ceteris likely won't remain paribus if Draghi gets his wish).

 

From Bloomberg:

 

“ European Central Bank President Mario Draghi signaled that deflation risks in the euro region are easing for now after new forecasts showed that inflation will approach their target by the end of 2016.

 

The news that has come out since the last monetary policy meeting are by and large on the positive side,” he told reporters in Frankfurt today after the central bank kept itsmain interest rate at 0.25 percent. He also indicated that money markets are under control at the moment, lessening the need for emergency liquidity measures.

 

Draghi is facing down the threat of deflation in an economy still recovering from a debt crisis that threatened to rip it apart less than two years ago. New ECB forecasts today underscore his view that the 18-nation bloc will escape a Japan-style period of falling prices as momentum in the economy improves.”

 

(emphasis added)

We have highlighted the sentence above because we keep reading about the 'Japan-style deflation trap' for many, many years now. You would think that Japan was a third world country by now the way this keeps being portrayed as a kind of monetary evil incarnate that destroys the economy. Of course, nothing could be further from the truth.

 

Inflation is Not Equivalent to Economic Growth

'Inflation' is not the same as 'economic growth' – on the contrary, it both causes and frequently masks economic retrogression. How much inflation has there been in the euro area over time? Let's have a look.

 

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The euro area's true money supply since 1980. One can only shudder at this depiction of 'deflation danger' in action – click to enlarge.

 

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What about prices though? Let's have a look-see:

 

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Since 1960, there was exactly one year during which prices according to the 'CPI' measure actually fell, namely in 2009, by a grand total of 0.5% – click to enlarge.

 

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As Austrian economists have long explained, it is simply untrue that prices must rise for the economy to grow. Consumers obviously benefit from falling prices (only Keynesian like Paul Krugman don't realize that, as their thought processes are evidently unsullied by logic and/or common sense). All of us can easily ascertain how beneficial the decline in computer prices, cell- and smart phone prices, prices for TV screens, etc. is. Naturally, it would be even better if all prices fell, not only those on a select group of consumer goods.

What about producers? Won't they suffer? By simply looking at the share prices and earnings of the companies that make all the technological gadgets the prices of which have been continually declining for decades, everybody should realize immediately that the answer must be a resounding NO. This is by the way not only true of the firms that are in the final stages of the production process, i.e. the stages closest to the consumer. It is obviously also true for the firms in the higher stages of the capital structure. But why? It is quite simple actually: prices are imputed all along the chain of production. What is important for these companies to thrive are not the nominal prices of the products they sell, but the price spreads between their input and output.

In fact, the computer/electronics sector is the one that comes closest to showing us how things would likely look in a free, unhampered market economy.

Of course, in said free, unhampered market economy, Mr. Draghi and a host of other central planners would have to look for a new job.

via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/O3LWUk Tyler Durden

The head of China’s sovereign wealth fund noted in 2009: “both China and America are addressing bubbles by creating more bubbles”.

He’s right …

Global credit excess is worse than before the 2008 crash.

The U.S. and Japan have been easing like crazy, but – as Zero Hedge notes  [if you missed it when Tyler Durden first posted this] – China has been much worse:

 Here is just the change in the past five years:

You read that right: in the past five years the total assets on US bank books have risen by a paltry $2.1 trillion while over the same period, Chinese bank assets have exploded by an unprecedented $15.4 trillion hitting a gargantuan CNY147 trillion or an epic $24 trillion – some two and a half times the GDP of China!

 

Putting the rate of change in perspective, while the Fed was actively pumping $85 billion per month into US banks for a total of $1 trillion each year, in just the trailing 12 months ended September 30, Chinese bank assets grew by a mind-blowing $3.6 trillion!

 

Here is how Diapason’s Sean Corrigan observed this epic imbalance in liquidity creation:

Total Chinese banking assets currently stand at some CNY147 trillion, around 2 ½ times GDP. As such, they have doubled in the past four years of increasingly misplaced investment and frantic real estate speculation, adding the equivalent of 140% of average GDP – or, in dollars, $12.5 trillion – to the books. For comparison, over the same period, US banks have added just less than $700 billion, 4.4% of average GDP, 18 times less than their Chinese counterparts – and this in a period when the predominant trend has been for the latter to do whatever it takes to keep commitments off their balance sheets and lurking in the ‘shadows’!

Indeed, the increase in Chinese bank assets during that breakneck quadrennium is equal to no less than seven-eighths of the total outstanding assets of all FDIC-insured institutions! It also compares to 30% of Eurozone bank assets.

Truly epic flow numbers, and just as unsustainable in the longer-run.

And here:

So what’s the problem?

Well, the world’s most prestigious financial agency – the central banks’ central bank, called the Bank of International Settlements or “BIS”  –  has long criticized the Fed and other central banks for blowing bubbles.  The World Bank and top economists agree.  So do many others.

As such, it was easy for us to predict a crash in China when the bubble collapses.

We argued in 2009 that China’s period of easy credit was analogous to America’s monetary easing starting in 2001 … and Rome’s in 11 B.C.

We noted in 2009 and against in 2011 that China is suffering from a lot of the same malaises as the American economy, including corruption, crony capitalism, and failure to disclose bad debt.

In 2010, we asked “When Will China’s Bubble Burst?”

China’s $23 Trillion Dollar Credit Bubble Is Bursting

International Business Times noted last year that China’s debt-laden steel industry was on the verge of bankruptcy.

Quartz reported in December that a huge coal company called Liansheng Resources Group declared bankruptcy with 30 billion yuan ($5 billion) in debt.

Chinese Business Wisdom argues (via China Gaze) that waves of bankruptcies are striking in 10 Chinese industries: (1) shipbuilding; (2) iron and steel: (3) LED lighting; (4) furniture; (5) real estate development; (6) cargo shipping; (7) trust and financial institutions; (8) financial management; (9) private equity; and (10) group buying.

AP notes today:

Chinese authorities have allowed the country’s first corporate bond default, inflicting losses on small investors in a painful step toward making its financial system more market-oriented.

 

A Shanghai manufacturer of solar panels paid only part of 90 million yuan ($15 million) in interest [it owed] …

 

Until now, Beijing has bailed out troubled companies to preserve confidence in its credit markets. But the ruling Communist Party has pledged to make the economy more productive by allowing market forces a bigger role.

Time asks whether China has reached its “Bear Stearns moment”:

A dangerous build-up of debt and an explosion of risky and poorly regulated shadow banking have raised serious concerns about the health of China’s economy. That’s why the Chaori default — the first ever in China’s domestic corporate bond market — has sparked fears that the country could be headed for a full-blown economic crisis like the one that slammed Wall Street in 2008. “We believe that the market will have reached the Bear Stearns stage,” warned strategist David Cui and his team at Bank of America-Merrill Lynch in a report to investors.

 

The concern of Cui and others is that the Chaori default will be the tip-off point for an unravelling of China’s financial system. The default could wake investors and bankers to the realization that companies they thought were safe bets are potentially not, and they could begin to reassess other loans and investments to other corporations. In other words, they might start redefining what is and is not risky. That could then lead to a credit crunch, when nervous bankers become wary of lending money, or lending at affordable interest rates. More bankruptcies could result. That eventually causes the financial markets to lock up — and we end up transitioning from a Bear Stearns moment to a Lehman Brothers moment, when the financial sector melts down. “We think the chain reaction will probably start,” Cui wrote. “In the U.S., it took about a year to reach the Lehman stage when the market panicked … We assess that it may take less time in China.”

The Financial Post reported in January:

The U.S. and Europe learned the hard way about the dangers of shadow banks in the financial crisis but, five years later, China appears set to get its own painful lesson about what can happen when large capital flows get diverted to unregulated corners of the financial system.

 

***

 

“We estimate that 88% of the revenues of Chinese trust companies is at risk in the long term,” said McKinsey and Ping An.

 

***

Billionaire investor George Soros recently wrote on a popular news website that the impending default and the growing fear reflected in Chinese markets has “eerie resemblances” to the global crisis of 2008.

The big picture:  the $23 trillion dollar Chinese credit bubble is starting to collapse.

As Michael Snyder wrote in January:

It could be a “Lehman Brothers moment” for Asia.  And since the global financial system is more interconnected today than ever before, that would be very bad news for the United States as well.  Since Lehman Brothers collapsed in 2008, the level of private domestic credit in China has risen from $9 trillion to an astounding $23 trillion.  That is an increase of $14 trillion in just a little bit more than 5 years.  Much of that “hot money” has flowed into stocks, bonds and real estate in the United States.  So what do you think is going to happen when that bubble collapses?

 

The bubble of private debt that we have seen inflate in China since the Lehman crisis is unlike anything that the world has ever seen.  Never before has so much private debt been accumulated in such a short period of time.  [Note: Private debt is much more dangerous than public debt.] All of this debt has helped fuel tremendous economic growth in China, but now a whole bunch of Chinese companies are realizing that they have gotten in way, way over their heads.  In fact, it is being projected that Chinese companies will pay out the equivalent of approximately a trillion dollars in interest payments this year alone.  That is more than twice the amount that the U.S. government will pay in interest in 2014.

 

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As the Telegraph pointed out a while back, the Chinese have essentially “replicated the entire U.S. commercial banking system” in just five years…

Overall credit has jumped from $9 trillion to $23 trillion since the Lehman crisis. “They have replicated the entire U.S. commercial banking system in five years,” she said.

 

The ratio of credit to GDP has jumped by 75 percentage points to 200pc of GDP, compared to roughly 40 points in the US over five years leading up to the subprime bubble, or in Japan before the Nikkei bubble burst in 1990. “This is beyond anything we have ever seen before in a large economy. We don’t know how this will play out. The next six months will be crucial,” she said.

As with all other things in the financial world, what goes up must eventually come down.

 

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The big underlying problem is the fact that private debt and the money supply have both been growing far too rapidly in China. 

 

According to Forbes, M2 in China increased by 13.6 percent last year…

And at the same time China’s money supply and credit are still expanding.  Last year, the closely watched M2 increased by only 13.6%, down from 2012’s 13.8% growth.  Optimists say China is getting its credit addiction under control, but that’s not correct.  In fact, credit expanded by at least 20% last year as money poured into new channels not measured by traditional statistics.

Overall, M2 in China is up by about 1000 percent since 1999.  That is absolutely insane.

 

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But I am not the only one talking about it.

 

In fact, the World Economic Forum is warning about the exact same thing…

Fiscal crises triggered by ballooning debt levels in advanced economies pose the biggest threat to the global economy in 2014, a report by the World Economic Forum has warned.

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What has been going on in the global financial system is completely and totally unsustainable, and it is inevitable that it is all going to come horribly crashing down at some point during the next few years.

 

It is just a matter of time.

via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/1ikLH4W George Washington

Presented with no comment…

 

 

h/t @Not_Jim_Cramer

via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/1k1pJS0 Tyler Durden