Category: zerohedge

Yesterday it was Carl Icahn explaining some uncomfortable truths to the mainstream media (who rapidly turned their cognitively dissonant backs on his status quo defying statements). Today, it is uber-bull Larry Fink’s turn to unleash truth-hell…

• *FINK SAYS PENSION FUNDS TO START SELLING STOCKS TO REBALANCE
• *FINK SAYS STRUCTURAL UNEMPLOYMENT GROWING
• *FINK SAYS QE NOT HELPING WITH STRUCTURAL UNEMPLOYMENT
• *FINK SAYS CENTRAL BANKS’ POWERS TO CREATE JOBS LIMITED

His remarks – coinciding with Europe’s close and the end of POMO (and this EURJPY’s levitation) has knocked half of this morning’s gains off stocks…

 

via Zero Hedge http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/zerohedge/feed/~3/RCmkMfugV58/story01.htm Tyler Durden

The Foreign Office has summoned the Spanish Ambassador amid a standoff over a ship that entered Gibraltar waters.

• *U.K. CITES `ONGOING INCURSION' INTO BRITISH GIBRALTAR WATERS
• *U.K. SUMMONS SPANISH AMBASSADOR OVER `CONCERNS' ABOUT GIBRALTAR

Sky reports, the Spanish survey ship has been in Gibraltar waters for more than 18 hours and repeatedly refused direct orders from the Royal Navy to leave. As a result, the Foreign Office has summoned Spanish Ambassador Federico Trillo to try and resolve the situation.

 

 

One can't help but wonder if this is Rajoy's cunning plan to get the youth back to work… conscription?

 

(h/t @chamioncapua)

via Zero Hedge http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/zerohedge/feed/~3/3hQFpOGjbAQ/story01.htm Tyler Durden

Submitted by Michael Snyder of The Economic Collapse blog,

You may find what is happening at one Wal-Mart in Ohio very hard to believe.  At the Wal-mart on Atlantic Boulevard in Canton, Ohio employees are being asked to donate food items so that other employees that cannot afford to buy Thanksgiving dinner will be able to enjoy one too.  You can see a photo of the donation bins that has been posted on Twitter right here.  On the one hand, it is commendable that someone at that Wal-Mart is deeply concerned about the employees that are so poor that they cannot afford to buy the food that they need for Thanksgiving.  On the other hand, this is a perfect example that shows how the quality of the jobs in this country has gone down the toilet. 

Wal-Mart is the largest employer in the United States and it had operating income of 26.5 billion dollars last year.  Wal-Mart is not required to pay their employees a decent wage, and it is very unlikely that anyone will force them to.  But they should.  Because Wal-Mart does not pay decent wages to their employees, the rest of us end up with the bill.  As you will see below, huge numbers of Wal-Mart employees end up on Medicaid and other government assistance programs.  Meanwhile, those that control Wal-Mart continue to enjoy absolutely massive profits.

The following is a short excerpt from a local news story about the donation bins that have been set out at the Wal-Mart in Canton, Ohio.  As the story notes, this does not appear to be a nationwide program, and the donation bins are only available in an employee-only area…

The storage containers are attractively displayed at the Walmart on Atlantic Boulevard in Canton. The bins are lined up in alternating colors of purple and orange. Some sit on tables covered with golden yellow tablecloths. Others peer out from under the tables.

 

This isn't a merchandise display. It's a food drive – not for the community, but for needy workers.

 

"Please Donate Food Items Here, so Associates in Need Can Enjoy Thanksgiving Dinner," read signs affixed to the tablecloths.

It just seems really crazy that the largest employer in the country pays so little that some of their employees cannot even afford to eat Thanksgiving dinner.

Is this what the future of America is going to look like?

According to official Wal-Mart numbers, more than half of their hourly workers make less than $25,000 a year.

That breaks down to about $2,000 a month before taxes.

Could you survive on that?

Could you afford to support a family on that?

It turns out that a lot of Wal-Mart employees simply cannot get by without financial help from the government, and the numbers are staggering.  A recent Businessweek article discussed one study that found that 300 employees at just one Wal-Mart in Wisconsin actually receive a combined total of nearly a million dollars a year in public assistance…

“A decent wage is their demand—a livable wage, of all things,” said Representative George Miller (D-Calif.). The problem with companies like Wal-Mart is their “unwillingness, not their inability, to pay that wage,” he said. “They hand off the difference to taxpayers.” Miller was referring to a congressional report (PDF) released in May that calculated how much Walmart workers rely on public assistance. The study found that the 300 employees at one Supercenter in Wisconsin required some $900,000 worth of public assistance a year.

And according to Politifact, in many states Wal-Mart employees represent the largest single group of people enrolled in the Medicaid program…

In Florida, Wal-Mart topped all companies operating in Florida with the largest number of employees and family members (12,300) eligible for Medicaid, according to a 2005 Tampa Bay Times story. Wal-Mart also ranked highly (No. 2) for dependents enrolled in Florida Healthy Kids or KidCare, trailing Miami-Dade County employees.

 

In Missouri, where Wal-Mart is the largest employer behind state government, the state’s social services department determined Walmart employees outnumbered all others with employees and family members enrolled in MO HealthNet, the state’s Medicaid plan, in the first quarter of 2011. However, at almost 14 percent, it did not represent the highest percentage of workers enrolled or responsible for an enrollee (Dollar General, for instance, was much higher at 42 percent).

 

And in Pennsylvania, a 2006 Philadelphia Inquirer investigation revealed the company had the highest percentage of employees enrolled in Medicaid. One in six of Walmart’s 48,000 Pennsylvania employees were enrolled in Medicaid, costing the state about $15 million a year (it’s likely higher because the Inquirer’s story did not cover employees’ dependents on Medicaid, or any other public assistance such as food stamps).

This is a disgrace.

Your taxes and my taxes are going to subsidize Wal-Mart.

The government has to take more money from all the rest of us because Wal-Mart will not pay their workers a decent wage.  Because Wal-Mart will not support them, we end up supporting them.

Meanwhile, the six heirs of Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton have as much wealth as the bottom one-third of all Americans combined.

So why do people still work there?

Well, because there is a huge shortage of jobs in this country.  As I noted yesterday, the total number of working age Americans without a
job has increased by 27 million since the year 2000.

Right now we have a growing unemployment crisis in this country that is being seriously downplayed by the mainstream media.

According to John Williams of shadowstats.com, if long-term discouraged workers were still included in the official government employment figures like they were back in 1994, then the broadest measure of unemployment would now be approaching 25 percent.  In fact, according to his charts unemployment in the U.S. is now worse than it was at any point during the last recession.

And even the New York Times is admitting that long-term unemployment in America is up by 213 percent since 2007.

At this point, there are millions upon millions of desperate Americans that will take just about any job that they can get.

Meanwhile, the quality of the jobs in this country continues to go downhill very rapidly.

For example, did you know that about 40 percent of all U.S. workers actually make less than what a full-time minimum wage worker made back in 1968?

And did you know that 65 percent of all American workers make less than $40,000 a year before taxes?

For much more on this, please see my previous article entitled "15 Signs That The Quality Of Jobs In America Is Going Downhill Really Fast".

At the same time, the good paying high tech jobs that our politicians have been promising us continue to disappear.  For instance, 19,507 biopharma jobs were eliminated between January 1, 2013 and October 31, 2013.  That is a 68 percent increase over the pace of biopharma job losses during the same period last year.

So are there any areas of the country that are actually doing well right now?

Well, yes there is.  In fact, the Washington D.C. region has added more "1 percent households" over the past decade than anyone else has…

The winners in the new Washington are not just the former senators, party consiglieri and four-star generals who have always profited from their connections. Now they are also the former bureaucrats, accountants and staff officers for whom unimagined riches are suddenly possible. They are the entrepreneurs attracted to the capital by its aura of prosperity and its super-educated workforce. They are the lawyers, lobbyists and executives who work for companies that barely had a presence in Washington before the boom.

 

During the past decade, the region added 21,000 households in the nation's top 1 percent. No other metro area came close.

I used to live in the D.C. area, and I can tell you that the folks out there are living the high life at your expense.

In one recent article, I noted that the average federal employee living in the Washington D.C. area received total compensation worth more than $126,000 in one recent year.

Of course you and I are paying the bill for this too.  The U.S. national debt is on pace to more than double during the eight years of the Obama administration, and our politicians seem to have no trouble continuing to steal about 100 million dollars from our children and our grandchildren every single hour of every single day.

Meanwhile, thousands of other communities all over the nation are slowly being transformed into rotting, festering hellholes.  The following is an excerpt from a recent CNBC article that discussed what is happening to Trenton, New Jersey…

When a city is badly broken, it can be very tough to fix.

 

Just ask Darren Green, president of a coalition of community groups in Trenton, N.J., where deep budget cuts in 2011 forced the city to lay off a third of its police force.

 

"We're at a place now where it's very dangerous to walk the streets," he said, his thoughts periodically interrupted by the distant sound of passing sirens. "The school system is dysfunctional and not working. You have young people who are robbing elders. Young people who are destroying communities. With no leadership and the community in disarray, there's a lot of bad here."

via Zero Hedge http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/zerohedge/feed/~3/fP9EraDqC80/story01.htm Tyler Durden

 

The big news that has somehow shocked the media is that the BLS was caught fudging the jobs numbers going into the 2012 election.

 

How on earth is this news? Anyone with a working frontal cortex is aware that CPI, the unemployment numbers, GDP and virtually everything else reported by the Federal Government is massaged to the point of being fraudulent.

 

Indeed, as far back as JULY 2013, the former head of the BLS stated point blank that real unemployment was around 10%

 

Keith Hall believes the US economy is a lot sicker than the 7.6 percent unemployment rate would lead you to believe.

 

And he should know.

 

Hall was, from 2008 until last year, the guy in charge of Washington’s Bureau of Labor Statistics, the agency that compiles that rate.

 

“Right now [it’s] misleadingly low,” says Hall, who believes a truer reading of those now wanting a job but without one to be more than 10 percent.

 

Source: NY Post

 

Then of course there is inflation. Anyone who actually shops for just about anything knows that prices are moving higher. Even if it’s not explicit (an actual price hike) we are paying higher prices through a slew of gimmicks corporations use to maintain margins in the face of rising costs.

 

Among these are:

 

1)   Substituting lower quality ingredients (coffee makers)

2)   Selling less product for the same price (across the board in food retail)

3)   Simply not filling a box all the way (how many times have you opened something to find it’s just 75% full?)

 

This is how you hide inflation. Corporations don’t simply raise prices because of price elasticity.

 

And it’s not as though the BLS is even good at measuring inflation. The former head of the organization reveals that to measure CPI it performs hundreds of thousands of surveys to see what consumers are buying and how much they paid. Then the BLS sends people into stores to determine how much these items cost.

 

So the Feds are relying on people:

 

1)   Remembering what they bought last month for groceries

2)   Remembering the price they paid

 

Do you remember how much the cheese you bought last week was? Well your answer helps determine inflation… which helps determine Fed policy.

 

An economic model is only as good as the inputs. Suffice to say the inputs for most of the Fed’s economic model are of QUESTIONABLE value and that’s putting it mildly.

 

And the stock market is trading based on all of this?

 

For a FREE Special Report on how to beat the market both during bull market and bear market runs, visit us at:

http://phoenixcapitalmarketing.com/special-reports.html

 

Best Regards

 

Phoenix Capital Research

 

 

 

 

via Zero Hedge http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/zerohedge/feed/~3/MjLNgkdV_dk/story01.htm Phoenix Capital Research

After having been considered to head of both the Federal Reserve and the Bank of Israel earlier this years, Lawrence Summers has been propelled back into the center of the broader economic dialogue with a speech at a recent IMF Economic Forum.

Essentially his argument is deceivingly simple and straight forward.  The natural or neutral interest rate, which is needed to achieve full employment is below zero.  Given the relationship between labor force growth and the natural rate of interest, the demographic outlook suggests that negative interest rates may be necessary for a prolonged period.  Moreover, for the past 30-years, it has been arguably debt-fueled bubbles that allow the economy to reach full employment and bolster the natural interest rate.  

There is little that is new in Summer’s argument, but it has captured much territory in traditional media and the blogosphere.  Economists have been fretting of a New Normal; of a new era of low growth and low interest rates since at least 2009.  Many have also highlighted the economic knock-on effect of the dramatic slowing of population growth.  In many ways then Summers retold an oft told narrative.  However,  way he recapitulated the argument and the timing appears to have struck a response chord for many.

He does seem to be among the most serious economists to embrace the possibility that the advanced high income economies may need bubbles to achieve full employment.  In the absence of bubbles, the natural interest rate may be negative.   Arguably, after the initial recovery from the double dip recession in the early 1980s, the expansion in the latter part of Reagan’s expansion was fueled excessive lending (and risk taking) by savings and loan banks to commercial real estate.  In the late part of the 1990s, there was the so-called “tech bubble”.    The 2003-2007 expansion was another bubble, with residential mortgages being the epicenter.

The rise in debt during the Great Moderation (1985-2007) did not fuel over-heated economies or inflation.  Summers considers this a prima facie argument against those who maintain that monetary policy was habitually too loose.  Bubble square the circle in Summers’ narrative.  With the increase in debt, interest rates would have been even lower.

His pessimism going forward draws on the work of his uncle the Nobel-prize winning economist Paul Samuelson.  Summers recognizes that the natural rate of interest is roughly equal to population growth.  The US labor market grew on average by about 2% annually between 1960 and 1985.  It is expected to slow to 0.2% over the next decade.

A few months ago, many observers argued that Yellen was more dovish than Summers.  However, Summers’ argument here that the US (and other high income economies) may need negative interest rates for much longer catapults him into a super dovish position.  He says, “We may well need in the years ahead to think about how to manage an economy where the zero nominal interest rate is a chronic and systemic inhibitor of economic activity…”

Summers suggests that the normal condition of the high income countries is one of inadequate demand, from which it can only achieve some semblance of full employment when being goosed by bubbles.    This is among the best that neo-liberalism has to offer.  However, it stops just where it needs to begin, but that requires an ideologically difficult question:  what is the source of chronic shortage of aggregate demand.

We have suggested that the heart of the problem is one of surplus capital (a 19th-century concept has fallen out of favor), which is partly expressed as redundant investment and excess capacity.  The problem grows out of the success not the failure market economies.   In aggregate, savings or accumulation outstrip profitable investment opportunities.  At the same time, ideological constraints prevent much re-distribution and this is reflected in the record corporate profits and wages that are not keeping up with inflation.

What the financial crisis marks the end of is the Reagan-Thatcher strategy of dealing with the surplus capital.  The solution that construct allowed for was  the deepening and broadening of the capital markets in the Anglo-American economies to absorb the world’s excess savings.  Through economic identities, this was reflected, for example, in large and persistent current account deficits in the US, UK and Australia.    Yet the crisis showed the limitations on this strategy as the surplus savings overwhelmed countries ability to recycle them.

Summers’ narrative does not prelude this extension into the surplus capital direction.  The return to capital, such as interest rates, is low because, as in other commodities, there is too much relative to demand.  Bubbles can only arise in conditions in which capital is in surfeit.

The problem is one characterized by the congestion of capital.  The main obstacle of truly addressing it is ideological.  Contemporary orthodox economists cannot envisage a situation in which capital is in surplus.  The dictates of market disciple deters more redistribution efforts.  Wars, traditionally, get rid of capital (people too), but the destructive power that is capable of being unleashed when science is applied to warfare provides powerful disincentives to large-scale use. 

This has produced a fissure between the philosophic conservatives and market fundamentalists.  Conservatives, like Edmund Phelps, the Nobel Prize winning economist, are not as antithetical to a more activist state. The conditions we associate with surplus savings, and Summers with the bubbles needed to achieve full employment, has threatened to undermine what conservatives like Phelps sees as our way of life:  the market and its mechanisms are means to the end, but the end is important.

Phelps explains in the speech he delivered upon receiving the Nobel Prize in economics (2006): “I have argued that…suitably designed employment subsidies would restore the bourgeois culture, revive the ethic of self-support and increase prosperity in low wage communities.”  

There is similar divide that appears to be taking shape in Europe.  We referred to this in yesterday’s note as a Thermidor.   This is a reference to the bourgeois pushing back against the extremists during the French Revolution, but also used by some historians to refer to the restoration of the southern landed elite in the US after the reconstruction that followed the Civil War.  

Germany’s ordo-liberalism is threatening the bourgeois social order, as exemplified by insufferably high unemployment and the rise of extreme nationalist movements.  While there may not be a coherent leftist response to the financial crisis, the split between the defenders of the bourgeois way of life and market fundamentalists, may be an under-appreciated key to policy developments in the period ahead. 

via Zero Hedge http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/zerohedge/feed/~3/j1kXk0-CO_o/story01.htm Marc To Market

The ECB tried to “do whatever it takes” this morning by floating QE rumors (Constancio – QE is a possibility but not discussed in any detail) with the endgame being a weaker EUR (since a stronger EUR has crushed Eurozone corporate earnings). But, the Fed was having none of that, and as POMO started it dominated the ECB’s “weak” kung-fu, ramping stocks and EURUSD to new highs… as we chronicled on Twitter… banging EURJPY (the all-important carry driver of all thinsg risk) to new 4-year highs).

 

Still think it’s about fundamentals?

 

 

EURJPY ramp 2.0. As expected

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) November 19, 2013

EURJPY HOD matching DJIA

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) November 19, 2013

EURJPY +16 pips on POMO start

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) November 19, 2013

EURJPY needs another 15 pips for green futs

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) November 19, 2013

 

Which all lifted EURJPY to new 4-year highs…

 

As EURUSD was dominated by POMO…

via Zero Hedge http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/zerohedge/feed/~3/JrZMx51iXOk/story01.htm Tyler Durden

The ECB tried to “do whatever it takes” this morning by floating QE rumors (Constancio – QE is a possibility but not discussed in any detail) with the endgame being a weaker EUR (since a stronger EUR has crushed Eurozone corporate earnings). But, the Fed was having none of that, and as POMO started it dominated the ECB’s “weak” kung-fu, ramping stocks and EURUSD to new highs… as we chronicled on Twitter… banging EURJPY (the all-important carry driver of all thinsg risk) to new 4-year highs).

 

Still think it’s about fundamentals?

 

 

EURJPY ramp 2.0. As expected

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) November 19, 2013

EURJPY HOD matching DJIA

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) November 19, 2013

EURJPY +16 pips on POMO start

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) November 19, 2013

EURJPY needs another 15 pips for green futs

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) November 19, 2013

 

Which all lifted EURJPY to new 4-year highs…

 

As EURUSD was dominated by POMO…

via Zero Hedge http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/zerohedge/feed/~3/JrZMx51iXOk/story01.htm Tyler Durden

The GOP’s normal press conference is hotting up:

• *BOEHNER SAYS OBAMACARE SHOWS `PATTERN OF BROKEN PROMISES’
• *BOEHNER SAYS OBAMACARE `NEEDS TO BE SCRAPPED NOW’

 

via Zero Hedge http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/zerohedge/feed/~3/rrYh0KFveKU/story01.htm Tyler Durden

The GOP’s normal press conference is hotting up:

• *BOEHNER SAYS OBAMACARE SHOWS `PATTERN OF BROKEN PROMISES’
• *BOEHNER SAYS OBAMACARE `NEEDS TO BE SCRAPPED NOW’

 

via Zero Hedge http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/zerohedge/feed/~3/rrYh0KFveKU/story01.htm Tyler Durden

Much is made of the expected hockey-stick – any quarter now – in US GDP growth (whether it's a lower fiscal drag or rise in CAPEX or any range of miracle-driven hope factors).

 

 

Credit Suisse is not so sure; not just in the short-term, but in the long-term of the potential for US GDP growth. They note that basic growth accounting provides links between potential GDP to the size of the labor force, its productivity, and the capital assets – both public and private – it has available to work with. The problem – longer-term for the US, is, as CS notes, the following four exhibits collectively speak to the recent slowdown in potential, and do not augur positively for future growth.

 

Exhibit 1 shows that ‘trend” productivity growth has slowed significantly – perhaps to less than 1%, from a local peak of about 3½% at the height of the late 90s technology boom.

 

Exhibit 2 plots the labor force participation rate, which has declined sharply. The demographics of an aging population will continue putting downward pressure on participation.

 

Exhibit 3 displays net business investment – or gross investment adjusted for depreciation – as a share of GDP. Think of this as a proxy for capital accumulation. This ratio fell to multi-decade lows in the wake of the Great Recession, and the rebound since has been tepid. Slower growth in capital accumulation today is a downside factor for productivity in future years.

 

Exhibit 4 shows public investment as a share of GDP, a proxy for public infrastructure spending. The 2009 federal stimulus bill supported infrastructure spending for a time in 2009 and 2010, but since then it has declined sharply as state and local finances deteriorated.

 

 

Charts: Credit Suisse

via Zero Hedge http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/zerohedge/feed/~3/gVuoJguRf88/story01.htm Tyler Durden