Tag: news

With all eyes squarely focused on US equity markets daily impersonation of the Caracas Stock Index, BofAML is growing increasingly concerned about China. Since the start of December, Chinese equities have been under significant pressure with the Shanghai Composite on the edge of completing a 3-month Double Top. A break of 2079 would confirm this move, exposing considerable downside in the weeks ahead.

 

This could also prove to be the catalyst that ends the 17-month downtrend for USDCNY.

 

Since late October the pair has shown tentative signs of basing. A sustained break of 17m trendline resistance (6.0747) would confirm a medium term turn in trend, exposing the Aug/Sep highs at 6.1225 and potentially beyond.

 

BofAML concludes with one word… “Beware”

via Zero Hedge http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/zerohedge/feed/~3/0fuS7TTYLWk/story01.htm Tyler Durden

Despite the recent sharp narrowing in the U.S. federal budget deficit, the U.S. fiscal policy outlook carries financial stability risks, driven by three factors (aacording to the OFR – aka, The Treasury). First, a rapid pace of deficit reduction carries economic costs. Second, a clear resolution of the nation’s long-term fiscal challenges is still lacking. Finally, the political process for implementing sustainable fiscal adjustments has become more uncertain.

(click for large legible version)

Chart: Goldman Sachs

But this substantial fiscal adjustment carries two risks. First, it has created a fiscal drag on an economy that remains weak. Second, it creates an extra burden on other policy levers to support the economy. A policy mix that keeps short-term interest rates and unconventional monetary policy tools in place for an extended period potentially increases future risks to financial stability, whether through excessive risk-taking in credit markets or through volatility and interest rate shocks.

Delays in addressing long-term challenges could have longer-term, and potentially permanent, adverse financial stability consequences.

 

While everyone is still bleating over the success’ of the budget deal (despite its betrayal), the next few months have plenty of potential mines for fiscal fragility.

via Zero Hedge http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/zerohedge/feed/~3/bfQJyV6lijE/story01.htm Tyler Durden

For the first time in 3 weeks, the PBOC un-tapered and added CNY 29 billion liquidity (via reverse repo). Despite the Chinese governments denial of any liquidity crisis, the decision to “fold” reflects a clear indication that, as Monex strategist Eimear Daly notes, “China’s attempting to incrementally liberalize markets and to allow instabilities to unwind with minimal damage; and spikes in interbank lending rates show authorities are struggling to manage this task.”

The liquidity was provided at 4.1% (not a particularly low rate but overnight repo is well off the highs of the last week) but 7-day repo rates (though down 3.5%) remain high at 5.5% (150bps above the ‘normal’ levels of July to October).

The night is young though as we suspect, just as yesterday, the big banks will soak up the first juice and leave the small banks (who need the most) floundering…

 

 

Chart: Bloomberg

via Zero Hedge http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/zerohedge/feed/~3/Vi5MdF9kbBQ/story01.htm Tyler Durden

For the first time in 3 weeks, the PBOC un-tapered and added CNY 29 billion liquidity (via reverse repo). Despite the Chinese governments denial of any liquidity crisis, the decision to “fold” reflects a clear indication that, as Monex strategist Eimear Daly notes, “China’s attempting to incrementally liberalize markets and to allow instabilities to unwind with minimal damage; and spikes in interbank lending rates show authorities are struggling to manage this task.”

The liquidity was provided at 4.1% (not a particularly low rate but overnight repo is well off the highs of the last week) but 7-day repo rates (though down 3.5%) remain high at 5.5% (150bps above the ‘normal’ levels of July to October).

The night is young though as we suspect, just as yesterday, the big banks will soak up the first juice and leave the small banks (who need the most) floundering…

 

 

Chart: Bloomberg

via Zero Hedge http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/zerohedge/feed/~3/Vi5MdF9kbBQ/story01.htm Tyler Durden

It seems US sailors aren’t the only ones who three short years after the Fukushima disaster are being stricken by cancers and other radiation-induced diseases. For once, the media blackout surrounding the Japanese nuclear power plant tragedy appears to have crumbled, and at least a portion of the truth has been revealed. Hong Kong’s SCMP reports that fifty-nine young people in Fukushima prefecture have been diagnosed with or are suspected of having thyroid cancer. Notably, all of newly diagnosed were younger than 18 at the time of the nuclear meltdown in the area in March 2011. They were identified in tests by the prefectural government, which covered 239,000 people by the end of September.

And while it is not rocket surgery to put two and two together, now that the data is in the public domain, here come the experts to explain it away.

On one hand, there are those who seemingly have not been bribed by the Abe government to “bend” reality just a bit in the name of confidence. People such as Toshihide Tsuda, a professor of epidemiology at Okayama University who has called upon the government to prepare for a possible increase in cases in the future. “The rate at which children in Fukushima prefecture have developed thyroid cancer can be called frequent, because it is several times to several tens of times higher,” Japan’s Asahi Shimbun quoted him as saying.

He compared the figures in Fukushima with cancer registration statistics throughout Japan from 1975 to 2008 that showed an annual average of five to 11 people in their late teens to early 20s developing cancer for every 1 million people.

And then come those who probably would still be touting the great job Tepco is doing in containing the worst nuclear catastrophe in history, even though Tepco itself has now admitted the exploded nuclear power plant is out of control.  

Tetsuya Ohira, a professor of epidemiology at Fukushima Medical University, disagreed. It was not scientific to compare the Fukushima tests with cancer registry statistics, he argued. Scientific? Or not politically feasible for a prime minister who is desperate to restart domestic nuclear power plants, since Abenomics is getting monkeyhammered thanks to soaring energy and food import costs (and, among other factors, leading to a crash in Abe’s popularity rating), and any reality leaking, pardong the pun, from Fukushima will end both that ambition, and his political career prematurely.

Shockingly, a month ago, prefectural officials deemed it unlikely that the increase in suspected and confirmed cases of cancer was linked to radiation exposure. Their “logic” is that in the Chernobyl disaster of 1986, it was not until four or five years after the accident that thyroid cancer cases surged. Apparently the thought that the local cancer victims may have been subject to radiation orders of magnitude higher than Chernobyl thanks to a lying government which consistently repeated that “all is well” has not crossed anyone’s mind.

“It is known that radioactive iodine is linked to thyroid cancer. Through the intake of food, people may absorb and accumulate it inside glands,” said Dr Choi Kin, a former president of the Hong Kong Medical Association.

 

Children might absorb more of it than adults because they were still growing, he said, but it remained to be proven that the radioactive iodine came from the nuclear disaster instead of the normal environment.

Bottom line “experts” are divided about whether the Fukushima cancers are caused by nuclear radiation… which, perhaps, is why they are experts. As everyone else knows, a surge in thyroid cancer in a population in close proximity to an exploded power plant, can only be due to one thing: non-participation in the ponzi stock market. So start buying stocks, or else the p53 mutations are coming for you too!

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

With most stock indices breaking record highs (and even the NASDAQ back to 13+ year highs), we thought a time of reflection and giving (as opposed to receiving Fed liquidity) required a look at the bigger picture. The following 13 charts of the last 13 years cover everything from collapsing SAT scores to record high prices of alcohol and from surging gun background checks to record high food stamp recipients, this is not your great grandma’s depression-“recovery”…

(click image for massive legible version)

 

PDF available here (h/t @Not_Jim_Cramer )

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Submitted by Michael Krieger of Liberty Blitzkrieg blog,

The last aggressive anti-Bitcoin tirade I recall from Paul Krugman was written on April 14th of this year. It was such an irrational piece of drivel that I decided to respond to his Op-ed nearly paragraph by paragraph in my piece, Paul Krugman Goes on the Attack: Calls Bitcoin “Antisocial,” which I strongly suggest you read if you haven’t already.

What is most interesting about that previous article in hindsight is that he wrote it right after Bitcoin experienced its first major crash of 2013 (there have been two thus far, both after greater than 10-fold increases in the price). While I know Krugman periodically attacks Bitcoin, it’s interesting that this latest Bitcoin hit piece also came directly after the second crash. For those who are holders of Bitcoin, this should be taken as a very positive price signal going forward. Krugman’s prior article was written the day before the absolute low price for the decline was reached at $50/btc on April 15th. It seems that Krugman becomes particularly comfortable slamming Bitcoin only after a price crash.

In any event, his latest Op-ed is almost as bad as the first one, and so I thought it’d be worthwhile to highlight his ignorance, irrationality and blatant use of statist propaganda once again. So let’s go.

From the New York Times:

This is a tale of three money pits. It’s also a tale of monetary regress — of the strange determination of many people to turn the clock back on centuries of progress.

 

The first money pit is an actual pit — the Porgera open-pit gold mine in Papua New Guinea, one of the world’s top producers. The mine has a terrible reputation for both human rights abuses (rapes, beatings and killings by security personnel) and environmental damage (vast quantities of potentially toxic tailings dumped into a nearby river). But gold prices, while down from their recent peak, are still three times what they were a decade ago, so dig they must.

 

The second money pit is a lot stranger: the Bitcoin mine in Reykjanesbaer, Iceland. Bitcoin is a digital currency that has value because … well, it’s hard to say exactly why, but for the time being at least people are willing to buy it because they believe other people will be willing to buy it. It is, by design, a kind of virtual gold. And like gold, it can be mined: you can create new bitcoins, but only by solving very complex mathematical problems that require both a lot of computing power and a lot of electricity to run the computers.

In the three paragraphs above, Krugman in employing a strategy that anti-gold people have used for years if not decades. That it is wasteful and environmentally destructive to mine for gold since it has no real purpose. Interesting. What purpose do diamonds have Paul? Did you buy your wife a diamond ring for your engagement? Did you make sure it wasn’t a blood diamond? Aren’t people likely raped and exploited in the mining of diamonds? I wonder how many articles Krugman has written on the destructiveness of diamond mining, a gem that isn’t even rare to begin with.

I tend to notice a huge hypocrisy from statists that in reality hate gold because it is a competing monetary asset, but then attempt to explain away their disdain using another, more publicly palatable rationale such as environmental destruction. After all, gold should get some credit for having at least has two hugely significant historical purposes. It has been valued for both its beauty and durability as jewelry, as well as for its monetary attributes. Diamonds have one primary purpose only recently established due to extensive marketing efforts (also in drills but you get the point), which is as a status or wealth symbol, so you’d think Krugman and other statists would get far more hot and bothered about blood diamonds than gold; but do they? No, they don’t. The hypocrisy is obvious.

The second thing Krugman does in the latest Op-Ed is to take this faux criticism and then attach it to Bitcoin. See the following paragraph:

Hence the location in Iceland, which has cheap electricity from hydropower and an abundance of cold air to cool those furiously churning machines. Even so, a lot of real resources are being used to create virtual objects with no clear use.

No clear use? Really, Krugman? There is nothing useful about essentially costless transfers of value on a peer-to-peer basis? There is no value to monetary transfers that eliminate expensive and parasitic middlemen? There is no value to using a public key as a way to ask for payment, thus reducing  enormous security concerns caused by providing all your private information to hundreds of merchants using credit cards? No value to being able to send millions of dollars across the globe in minutes rather than days? No value to free market currencies competing with state currencies? No value to economic freedom?

There are plenty of valid criticisms of Bitcoin, and a clear and thoughtful expression of those criticisms can only help the marketplace improve free-market crypto currencies in the future. Yet the irrational, ramblings of a statist who clearly hasn’t taken two minutes to objectively analyze Bitcoin is of no use to anyone and a disgrace to a supposedly highbrow newspaper like the New York Times.

His full Op-Ed is here if you have the stomach.

via Zero Hedge http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/zerohedge/feed/~3/wRWXj2mMEO8/story01.htm Tyler Durden

Submitted by Michael Krieger of Liberty Blitzkrieg blog,

The last aggressive anti-Bitcoin tirade I recall from Paul Krugman was written on April 14th of this year. It was such an irrational piece of drivel that I decided to respond to his Op-ed nearly paragraph by paragraph in my piece, Paul Krugman Goes on the Attack: Calls Bitcoin “Antisocial,” which I strongly suggest you read if you haven’t already.

What is most interesting about that previous article in hindsight is that he wrote it right after Bitcoin experienced its first major crash of 2013 (there have been two thus far, both after greater than 10-fold increases in the price). While I know Krugman periodically attacks Bitcoin, it’s interesting that this latest Bitcoin hit piece also came directly after the second crash. For those who are holders of Bitcoin, this should be taken as a very positive price signal going forward. Krugman’s prior article was written the day before the absolute low price for the decline was reached at $50/btc on April 15th. It seems that Krugman becomes particularly comfortable slamming Bitcoin only after a price crash.

In any event, his latest Op-ed is almost as bad as the first one, and so I thought it’d be worthwhile to highlight his ignorance, irrationality and blatant use of statist propaganda once again. So let’s go.

From the New York Times:

This is a tale of three money pits. It’s also a tale of monetary regress — of the strange determination of many people to turn the clock back on centuries of progress.

 

The first money pit is an actual pit — the Porgera open-pit gold mine in Papua New Guinea, one of the world’s top producers. The mine has a terrible reputation for both human rights abuses (rapes, beatings and killings by security personnel) and environmental damage (vast quantities of potentially toxic tailings dumped into a nearby river). But gold prices, while down from their recent peak, are still three times what they were a decade ago, so dig they must.

 

The second money pit is a lot stranger: the Bitcoin mine in Reykjanesbaer, Iceland. Bitcoin is a digital currency that has value because … well, it’s hard to say exactly why, but for the time being at least people are willing to buy it because they believe other people will be willing to buy it. It is, by design, a kind of virtual gold. And like gold, it can be mined: you can create new bitcoins, but only by solving very complex mathematical problems that require both a lot of computing power and a lot of electricity to run the computers.

In the three paragraphs above, Krugman in employing a strategy that anti-gold people have used for years if not decades. That it is wasteful and environmentally destructive to mine for gold since it has no real purpose. Interesting. What purpose do diamonds have Paul? Did you buy your wife a diamond ring for your engagement? Did you make sure it wasn’t a blood diamond? Aren’t people likely raped and exploited in the mining of diamonds? I wonder how many articles Krugman has written on the destructiveness of diamond mining, a gem that isn’t even rare to begin with.

I tend to notice a huge hypocrisy from statists that in reality hate gold because it is a competing monetary asset, but then attempt to explain away their disdain using another, more publicly palatable rationale such as environmental destruction. After all, gold should get some credit for having at least has two hugely significant historical purposes. It has been valued for both its beauty and durability as jewelry, as well as for its monetary attributes. Diamonds have one primary purpose only recently established due to extensive marketing efforts (also in drills but you get the point), which is as a status or wealth symbol, so you’d think Krugman and other statists would get far more hot and bothered about blood diamonds than gold; but do they? No, they don’t. The hypocrisy is obvious.

The second thing Krugman does in the latest Op-Ed is to take this faux criticism and then attach it to Bitcoin. See the following paragraph:

Hence the location in Iceland, which has cheap electricity from hydropower and an abundance of cold air to cool those furiously churning machines. Even so, a lot of real resources are being used to create virtual objects with no clear use.

No clear use? Really, Krugman? There is nothing useful about essentially costless transfers of value on a peer-to-peer basis? There is no value to monetary transfers that eliminate expensive and parasitic middlemen? There is no value to using a public key as a way to ask for payment, thus reducing  enormous security concerns caused by providing all your private information to hundreds of merchants using credit cards? No value to being able to send millions of dollars across the globe in minutes rather than days? No value to free market currencies competing with state currencies? No value to economic freedom?

There are plenty of valid criticisms of Bitcoin, and a clear and thoughtful expression of those criticisms can only help the marketplace improve free-market crypto currencies in the future. Yet the irrational, ramblings of a statist who clearly hasn’t taken two minutes to objectively analyze Bitcoin is of no use to anyone and a disgrace to a supposedly highbrow newspaper like the New York Times.

His full Op-Ed is here if you have the stomach.

via Zero Hedge http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/zerohedge/feed/~3/wRWXj2mMEO8/story01.htm Tyler Durden

While global currency wars have esclataed over the last 4 years (as we noted here), the potential return to fund outflows triggered by the Fed taper, combined with higher demand for funds ahead of Chinese New Year, means there will be continued pressure for China’s money market rates to stay high heading into January. With China’s reform and rate liberalization plans, it seems 2014 may be the year of the Taper Wars.

None of this should come as a big surprise (given we covered the debt problem is great detail here)… but bringing us up to date on the impact of the Fed’s tapering and liquidity flows, WSJ reports,

Analysts said the short-term cash injection didn’t help the underlying problem of banks struggling with funding, in part because the injections go to bigger banks and the funding problems are mostly at midsize and smaller lenders. “It’s mostly meant to prevent financial institutions from suffering an exhaustion of their cash supply, but it doesn’t represent an easing in funding conditions,” said Wu Sijie, senior analyst at Guangfa Bank.

 

…

 

During the squeeze in June, there were rumors that a bank had defaulted on a loan to another bank, but no bank admitted it. However, ahead of its initial public offering in Hong Kong last week, China Everbright Bank disclosed in its prospectus that two of its branches failed to pay 6.5 billion yuan of interbank loans due on June 5. Everbright Bank said it had the cash on hand to repay the loans, but a failure by its branches to tell headquarters that they were short meant the bank was unable to cover the loans before the end of the day.

and Bloomberg’s Tom Orlik,

The beginning of the end of QE3, marked by the U.S. Federal Reserve’s decision to taper its purchases of bonds, could trigger a reversal in China’s capital flows and compound the year-end cash crunch. China’s money market rates pushed above 7 percent Thursday. That conjured flashbacks of June’s liquidity squeeze and forced the People’s Bank of China to wade into the market with a liquidity injection. As of Friday early afternoon, conditions remained tight.

The year-end cash crunch is unexpected because December typically sees massive inflows of cash from the spend-down of fiscal deposits, which approached a trillion yuan in previous years. Capital inflows from September through November, tracked by Bloomberg’s new China Estimated Capital Flow index {CNNMHTMY Index <GO>}, should also have improved liquidity conditions.

Against that backdrop, the current squeeze is a reminder of stressed conditions in China’s financial sector. Chinese banks now rely more on the interbank market for funding because of increased competition for deposits — the result of bottom-up interest rate liberalization and pressure from rolling over non-performing loans.

The central bank retains enormous resources to prevent a liquidity squeeze from turning into something more severe. The PBOC sits on about twenty trillion yuan of reserve deposits, which could be released into the system.

At the same time, the PBOC also wants to tamp down credit growth, and teach banks to manage liquidity without relying on the central bank’s eleventh-hour interventions. A complex market in which big banks attempt to manipulate the system to get higher returns on their excess deposits adds to the difficulty and increases the chance of missteps.

Cross-border capital flow is a key factor affecting China’s interbank market. Inflows add to liquidity and push rates down. Outflows can add stress as funds exit the market.

To track those flows, Bloomberg has created the China Estimated Capital Flow index. The monthly series takes the sum of FX purchases by banks and change in FX deposits as total flows into the country. Netting out the monthly trade and direct investment balances provides an estimate of portfolio flows.

With a current account surplus and controlled capital account, China does not suffer from the volatility introduced into other emerging markets by international capital flows. Still, over the course of 2013, the index illustrates the impact the Fed’s policies have on China’s capital flows and on the mainland’s money markets.

In May and June, the suggestion of a taper in the Fed’s asset purchases saw rates in the U.S. rise. That triggered a sharp reversal for China’s cross border flows, with an exodus of capital contributing to the spike in money market rates. Since September, the delay in U.S. tightening seems to have stimulated a return of capital inflows.

A potential return to fund outflows triggered by the Fed taper, combined with higher demand for funds ahead of Chinese New Year, means there will be continued pressure for China’s money market rates to stay high heading into January.

A far-reaching commitment to reform by China’s leaders has buoyed confidence in the outlook for 2014 and beyond. December’s surge in rates is a reminder that there’s no easy fix for an over-extended financial system. Necessary shifts such as interest rate liberalization can add to the pressure. With rates high, credit growth is likely to decelerate, and equities may extend their lackluster run into the New Year.

via Zero Hedge http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/zerohedge/feed/~3/h75-mXGbh4M/story01.htm Tyler Durden

While global currency wars have esclataed over the last 4 years (as we noted here), the potential return to fund outflows triggered by the Fed taper, combined with higher demand for funds ahead of Chinese New Year, means there will be continued pressure for China’s money market rates to stay high heading into January. With China’s reform and rate liberalization plans, it seems 2014 may be the year of the Taper Wars.

None of this should come as a big surprise (given we covered the debt problem is great detail here)… but bringing us up to date on the impact of the Fed’s tapering and liquidity flows, WSJ reports,

Analysts said the short-term cash injection didn’t help the underlying problem of banks struggling with funding, in part because the injections go to bigger banks and the funding problems are mostly at midsize and smaller lenders. “It’s mostly meant to prevent financial institutions from suffering an exhaustion of their cash supply, but it doesn’t represent an easing in funding conditions,” said Wu Sijie, senior analyst at Guangfa Bank.

 

…

 

During the squeeze in June, there were rumors that a bank had defaulted on a loan to another bank, but no bank admitted it. However, ahead of its initial public offering in Hong Kong last week, China Everbright Bank disclosed in its prospectus that two of its branches failed to pay 6.5 billion yuan of interbank loans due on June 5. Everbright Bank said it had the cash on hand to repay the loans, but a failure by its branches to tell headquarters that they were short meant the bank was unable to cover the loans before the end of the day.

and Bloomberg’s Tom Orlik,

The beginning of the end of QE3, marked by the U.S. Federal Reserve’s decision to taper its purchases of bonds, could trigger a reversal in China’s capital flows and compound the year-end cash crunch. China’s money market rates pushed above 7 percent Thursday. That conjured flashbacks of June’s liquidity squeeze and forced the People’s Bank of China to wade into the market with a liquidity injection. As of Friday early afternoon, conditions remained tight.

The year-end cash crunch is unexpected because December typically sees massive inflows of cash from the spend-down of fiscal deposits, which approached a trillion yuan in previous years. Capital inflows from September through November, tracked by Bloomberg’s new China Estimated Capital Flow index {CNNMHTMY Index <GO>}, should also have improved liquidity conditions.

Against that backdrop, the current squeeze is a reminder of stressed conditions in China’s financial sector. Chinese banks now rely more on the interbank market for funding because of increased competition for deposits — the result of bottom-up interest rate liberalization and pressure from rolling over non-performing loans.

The central bank retains enormous resources to prevent a liquidity squeeze from turning into something more severe. The PBOC sits on about twenty trillion yuan of reserve deposits, which could be released into the system.

At the same time, the PBOC also wants to tamp down credit growth, and teach banks to manage liquidity without relying on the central bank’s eleventh-hour interventions. A complex market in which big banks attempt to manipulate the system to get higher returns on their excess deposits adds to the difficulty and increases the chance of missteps.

Cross-border capital flow is a key factor affecting China’s interbank market. Inflows add to liquidity and push rates down. Outflows can add stress as funds exit the market.

To track those flows, Bloomberg has created the China Estimated Capital Flow index. The monthly series takes the sum of FX purchases by banks and change in FX deposits as total flows into the country. Netting out the monthly trade and direct investment balances provides an estimate of portfolio flows.

With a current account surplus and controlled capital account, China does not suffer from the volatility introduced into other emerging markets by international capital flows. Still, over the course of 2013, the index illustrates the impact the Fed’s policies have on China’s capital flows and on the mainland’s money markets.

In May and June, the suggestion of a taper in the Fed’s asset purchases saw rates in the U.S. rise. That triggered a sharp reversal for China’s cross border flows, with an exodus of capital contributing to the spike in money market rates. Since September, the delay in U.S. tightening seems to have stimulated a return of capital inflows.

A potential return to fund outflows triggered by the Fed taper, combined with higher demand for funds ahead of Chinese New Year, means there will be continued pressure for China’s money market rates to stay high heading into January.

A far-reaching commitment to reform by China’s leaders has buoyed confidence in the outlook for 2014 and beyond. December’s surge in rates is a reminder that there’s no easy fix for an over-extended financial system. Necessary shifts such as interest rate liberalization can add to the pressure. With rates high, credit growth is likely to decelerate, and equities may extend their lackluster run into the New Year.

via Zero Hedge http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/zerohedge/feed/~3/h75-mXGbh4M/story01.htm Tyler Durden