GROWING WORRIES IN ATHENS
A Greek Default Would Hit the ECB Hard
Hopes that Greece can be saved are dwindling. Athens had hoped to reach a deal with its creditors on a 50 percent debt haircut, but banks have now made it clear that efforts to reach an agreement could fail. Should the country go bankrupt, the European Central Bank stands to lose the most.
DeGaulle On the Fiat Reserve Currency
Opinion: GOP’s ‘alternate universe’ Matt Stoller, Politico
An intellectually honest conservative faction might be arguing that this is what it seeks — a revolutionary change.
Meanwhile, Republicans assert that unemployment benefits are what’s stopping the nation’s jobless from finding work, though the U.S. lost millions of jobs in the economic crisis and employment is now higher than 9 percent.
So there is little discussion about extending unemployment insurance, even as benefits run out, because the deficit is the GOP’s gravest economic emergency. There’s no debate about ways to address high unemployment — just deny reality and enforce it with the Leninist-style propaganda arm of Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck.
But there is a big problem. America is simply not set up to handle one political party that bases its political organizing on an alternate reality and the raw power of propaganda. The U.S. government, and our public debates, are organized around the idea that there’s some measure of good faith in both parties, some common basis on which to make decisions.
I do not think most Republicans realize this is how their party operates — but the more cynical high-level operatives certainly do.
When George W. Bush ran for president in 2000, one of his campaign promises was to avoid nation-building. His presidency, of course, shifted America toward endless war and occupation of foreign countries — based on overt deceptions, like implying there was a link between the Sept. 11 terrorists and Saddam Hussein. Bush had his secretary of state, Colin Powell, hold up a vial of powder at the U.N. to show we had allegedly solid intelligence about Hussein’s weapons capabilities.
Back in 2004, a Bush administration official laid out what is now clearly the Republican Party’s guiding philosophy. The official spoke to a journalist as though he were from a foreign land — since he hailed from “what we call the reality-based community.”
“When we act,” the official said, “we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
It’s unclear whether the Republicans want to, or even can, leave this alternate universe that they have constructed. Unfortunately, it’s also unclear whether our society can survive it.
Matt Stoller worked on the Dodd-Frank financial reform law and Federal Reserve transparency issues as a staffer for Rep. Alan Grayson (D-Fla.). He is now a fellow at the Roosevelt Institute.
During the Depression bankers became so unpopular that bank robbers, such as Bonnie and Clyde, became folk heroes.[54]
The reasons for the lull suggest it should be temporary. First, the tsunami in Japan sent its GDP tumbling and disrupted supply chains, and thus industrial output, around the world, particularly in April. But just as that slump shows up in the economic statistics, more forward-looking evidence points to a rebound. The summer production schedules of American car firms, for instance, indicate that the pace of annualised GDP growth there will accelerate by at least a percentage point.
Second, demand was dented by a sudden surge in oil prices earlier this year. More income is being shifted from cash-strapped consumers in oil-importing countries to producers who tend to sit on their treasures. Costlier fuel has knocked consumer confidence, particularly in gas-guzzling America. And there is still an uncomfortable possibility that further instability in the Arab world will send prices soaring again. Nonetheless, at least for now, the pressure is waning. America’s average petrol price, though still 21% higher than at the beginning of the year, has started to fall. That should boost shoppers’ morale (and their spending).
Third, many emerging economies have tightened monetary policy in response to high inflation. China’s consumer-price inflation accelerated to 5.5% in the year to May. India’s wholesale prices leapt by 9.1%. Slower growth is, in part, a welcome sign that their central banks have taken action, and that those measures are beginning to work. There is no evidence that they have gone too far, even in China, where the worries about bringing the economy down with a bump are loudest. The bigger risk is that nervousness about a weakening world economy leads to a premature pause in the tightening. With monetary conditions still extraordinarily loose, such a loss of resolve would make higher inflation and an eventual crash far more likely.
A growth lull may be just what most emerging markets need, but it is the last thing that any advanced economy wants at the moment. The recovery in the rich world is weak and vulnerable, as recoveries tend to be after balance-sheet recessions. This lull is particularly dangerous because it coincides both with a move away from fiscal and monetary stimulus and with an outbreak of risky political brinkmanship on both sides of the Atlantic.
Pig-Headed Economic Policy May Still Lead to Disaster – The Economist
10/09/10 Stockholm, Sweden – Just this week an inevitable milestone came to pass, the Federal Reserve surged ahead of Japan as the second largest owner in the world of US debt… second only to China. Of course, the funds used to generate that massive debt position have only been made possible through the smoke and mirrors of quantitative easing. Zero Hedge notes this, and two other generally under-reported US debt facts, in a recent post.
Here’s the short version:
“#1: The US Fed is now the second largest owner of US Treasuries… Setting aside the fact that this is abject lunacy, this policy is trashing our currency which has fallen 13% since June… as in four months ago…
“#2: ‘There are only about $550 billion of Treasuries outstanding with a remaining maturity of greater than 10 years.’ [...] the US has entered a debt spiral: a time in which fewer and fewer investors are willing to lend to us for any long period of time… at the exact same time that we must roll over trillions in old debt and issue an additional $100-150 billion in NEW debt per month in order to finance our massive deficit… So we’re talking about TRILLIONS of old debt coming due in the next decade…
“#3: The US will Default on its Debt… either that or experience hyperinflation. There is simply no other option. We can NEVER pay off our debts. To do so would require every US family to pay $31,000 a year for 75 years… Obviously that ain’t going to happen…”
The last point should be no surprise to any regular…Read more…
Related Article:
The Fed is proposing another round of “quantitative easing,” although the first round failed to reverse deflation. It failed because the money went into the coffers of banks, which failed to lend it on. To reverse deflation, the money needs to be funneled directly to state and local economies.
HOW TO REVERSE A DEFLATION: HELICOPTER BEN NEEDS TO DROP SOME MONEY ON MAIN STREET Web of Debt (hat tip reader John D)
By most counts, the U.S. economy started growing in the middle of last year. For many Americans, though, it does not feel as if the Great Recession has ended—unemployment and underemployment are still alarmingly high, and job growth is weak. Many causes have been suggested for both the economic collapse and mediocre recovery, but one that is hardly ever mentioned is income inequality. This is a mistake. Growing income inequality in the United States and the policy responses it has spawned have done tremendous damage to our economy. And because we continue to ignore this underlying problem, the risks of our policies leading to another calamity will not go away, no matter what we do to reform the financial sector.
Since 1968, income inequality has been steadily increasing in the United States. I am not referring to the Croesus-like income of a John Paulsen, the hedge fund manager who in 2008 netted over $3 billion, about 75,000 times the average household income. I refer to a more worrying everyday phenomenon that confronts most Americans, the disparity in income growth rates between a manager at the local supermarket and the typical factory worker or office assistant. Since the 1970s, the wages of the former, typically workers at the 90th percentile of the wage distribution in the United States, have grown much faster than the wages of the latter, the typical median worker. Or consider the table below, which shows that the wages of occupation groups that are paid more than the national average in 2002 have grown much faster since then than the wages of occupation groups below the average:
The Inequality Gap Is Ruining the American Economy—and Bernanke Is Just Making it Worse Raghuram G. Rajan
Imagine a world where prices of all sorts of goods and services just keep moving down.
Your weekly grocery bill shrinks. Your hairstylist gladly accepts 15% less, just to get the business. At long last, movie theaters even stop gouging you on popcorn.
Good times? Sure — until your employer cuts your salary or fires you to cope with the need to reduce prices. Suddenly, the economy is in the grip of a vicious spiral, as falling consumption forces prices lower, driving unemployment up, which in turn drives consumption and prices down further.
That’s the deflation scenario that has, yet again, become one of the hottest topics on Wall Street.
Fear of a broad-based, sustained decline in prices — the textbook definition of deflation — was rampant at the height of the credit crisis in late 2008.
That concern faded last year as the economy and financial markets recovered. By early this year many big investors were warning of the opposite risk: They saw the continued ballooning of government budget deficits, and central banks’ easy-money policies, as setting the scene for an eventual surge in inflation.
Now, we’ve come full circle: With the U.S. economy clearly slowing, deflation worries have revived.
“The U.S. economy is at the doorstep of deflation,” Nomura Securities economist Zach Pandl warned clients in a lengthy report this month.
A number of Federal Reserve officials have echoed that concern in recent weeks, although in the usual Fed manner — i.e., without using an alarmist tone.
For the moment, however, the story still is one of disinflation rather than deflation. Prices overall are rising, but the year-over-year rate of increase has fallen sharply since August 2008.
The government’s consumer price index for June, reported Friday, showed that core inflation — prices for everything except food and energy — was up 0.9% from a year earlier, the slowest pace in 44 years.
Still, the core CPI rose 0.2% in June from May, the biggest monthly increase since October. Prices of used cars, clothing and medical care rose at a faster rate last month than the previous month.
No wonder the average consumer will wonder what this deflation chatter is about. People aren’t seeing it in most of what they buy.
But with the year-over-year core CPI skating closer to zero, the risk is that a slowing economy could tip the scales to deflation.
Optimism about the recovery suffered another blow Friday, when the Reuters/University of Michigan national consumer confidence index for July fell more than expected, to the lowest level since August.
It matters more what people actually do with their money than what they say about their confidence or lack of it. But plummeting confidence preceded the financial crisis and economic crash of late 2008. And the government’s report this week of disappointing June retail sales added to concerns that consumers’ willingness or ability to spend is waning.
Revitalizing consumption has been the great challenge all along in the wake of the devastating recession, of course. A large chunk of the global economy’s capacity to produce goods and services has been idled since 2007. That means many businesses’ pricing power already is severely limited. If demand falls again, serious price-cutting may be the only option companies would have to try to maintain sales.
“A renewed downturn in the economy at the current low level of resource utilization opens up the possibility that disinflation will turn into outright deflation,” said Steven Ricchiuto, an economist at Mizuho Securities USA in New York.
So what? If you have a job, plenty of cash and relatively little debt, deflation would be paradise. Many of your favorite things would cost less. What could be better?
If you’re heavily in debt, however, deflation would make that load even more onerous.
What’s more, the deflation scenario terrifies companies, governments and central bankers because it raises the possibility of a downward economic spiral that can’t easily be reversed.
If consumers adopt a deflationary mind-set, and figure that prices will only get cheaper if they wait to buy, they’ll probably be right. But the end result could be a recession even worse than the one we just climbed out of, if demand sinks and companies react in part by slashing their payrolls again.
That is why deflation and depression often are mentioned in the same breath in economic discussions. From July 1929 to March 1933, as the Great Depression deepened, U.S. consumer prices plummeted 27%.
If we look to financial markets today for guidance on deflation risks, the messages aren’t encouraging. U.S. stock prices have tumbled since April, when worries about the economy began to intensify. Rally attempts have just given way to more selling, as on Friday, when the Dow industrials slumped 261 points, or 2.5%, to 10,097.
Gold, considered the classic inflation hedge, has fallen 5.5% since reaching an all-time high in mid-June.
And the one asset likely to be coveted in a deflationary period — Treasury bonds, with their guaranteed interest — has seen ravenous demand for the last three months. The 10-year T-note yield has fallen below 3% in recent weeks for the first time since April 2009.
Skating Dangerously Close to Deflation – Tom Petruno, Los Angeles Times
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| Flagging: a US sailor stands on the flight deck of the aircraft carrier USS George Washington |
If a week is a long time in politics, a decade is starting to look like an age in geopolitics. Comparing the America that began the 21st century with the America of today is to witness a country that has in some ways quite radically altered its view of itself and its relationship to the world.
In short, the metallic rust of decline has crept into the American soul. “You could argue that the first decade of the 21st century was the last decade of the American century,” says David Rothkopf, a former Clinton administration official and student of US foreign policy. “We are now entering the multipolar century.”
Paul Romer wants to make sure that we understand the importance of Elinor Ostrom’s “work on one of the deepest issues in economics”:
Skyhooks versus Cranes: The Nobel Prize for Elinor Ostrom. by Paul Romer: Most economists think that they are building cranes that suspend important theoretical structures from a base that is firmly grounded in first principles. In fact, they almost always invoke a skyhook, some unexplained result without which the entire structure collapses. Elinor Ostrom won the Nobel Prize in Economics because she works from the ground up, building a crane that can support the full range of economic behavior.
When I started studying economics in graduate school, the standard operating procedure was to introduce both technology and rules as skyhooks. If we assumed a particular set of rules and technologies,… then we economists could describe what people would do. Sometimes we compared different sets of rules that a “social planner” might impose… Crucially, we never even bothered to check that people would actually follow the rules we imposed.
A typical conclusion was that rules that assign property rights and rules that let people trade lead to good outcomes. What’s the skyhook? That people will follow the rules. Why would they respect the property rights of someone else? … We might have had in mind something like this: police officers will arrest people who don’t follow the rules. But this is just another skyhook. Who are these police officers? Why do they follow rules? … Elinor showed that there are lots of important cases where people follow rules about ownership without police officers. One of the central challenges in understanding failures of economic development is that in many places, police officers don’t follow the rules they are meant to enforce.
Elinor’s fieldwork, followed up by her experimental work, pointed us in exactly the right direction. To understand BOTH why we don’t need police officers in some cases AND why police officers don’t follow the rules in other cases, we have to expand models of human preferences to include a contingent taste for punishing others. In reaching this conclusion, she … spelled out the program that economists should follow. To make the rules … emerge as an equilibrium outcome instead of a skyhook, economists must extend our models of preferences and gather field and experimental evidence on the nature of these preferences.
Economists who have become addicted to skyhooks … think that they are doing deep theory but are really just assuming their conclusions… If we fail to explore rules in greater depth, economists will have little to say about the most pressing issues facing humans today – how to improve the quality of bad rules that cause needless waste, harm, and suffering.
Cheers to the Nobel committee for recognizing work on one of the deepest issues in economics. Bravo to the political scientist who showed that she was a better economist than the economic imperialists who can’t tell the difference between assuming and understanding.
Related Article:
Ostrom & Williamson Win “Ironic” Nobel in Economics by Barry Ritholtz
The evidence is building that global growth has stalled. And it’s about to get much worse.
I think the most notable development this week was Thursday’s big release of global factory activity surveys. It wasn’t pretty. Overall, the JP Morgan Global Manufacturing PMI dropped for the third straight month and fell below the 50 level — the line of demarcation between growth or contraction in monthly factory activity — for the first time since recession was descending upon us back in early 2008. Scary stuff.
Although U.S. activity was buoyant (no doubt a remnant of the sentiment tailwinds enjoyed from the market rally in October), we cannot remain an island of tranquility as Asia and Europe fall into the abyss.
Here are the highlights (any reading under 50 indicates a drop in activity):
*Brazil PMI: 48.7 vs. 46.5 prior
*Ireland PMI: 48.5 vs. 50.1 prior
*Sweden PMI: 47.6 v. 49 estimated
*Norway PMI: 48.6 vs. 50.2 estimated
*Denmark PMI: 47.7 vs. 43.6 prior
*Poland PMI: 49.5 vs. 51.7 prior
*Spain PMI: 42.8 vs. 43.9 prior
*Swiss PMI: 44.8 vs. 46.6 estimated
*Czech PMI: 48.6 vs. 51.7 prior
*Italy PMI: 44 vs. 42.8 estimated
*France PMI: 47.3 vs. 47.6 estimated
*Germany PMI: 47.9
*Greece PMI: 40.9 vs. 40.5 prior
*South Korea PMI: 47.1 vs. 48 prior
*Taiwan PMI: 43.9 vs. 43.7 prior
And, now for the big boys:
*Eurozone PMI: 46.4 — lowest reading since recession ended in July 2009
*U.K. PMI: 47.6 vs. 47 estimated — lowest since June 2009
*China PMI: 49 vs. 49.8 estimated — lowest reading since February 2009
*China HSBC PMI: 47.7 vs. 51 prior — 32-month low
In addition to signs of economic weakness — which was enough for a Chinese vice finance minster to say the global economy faces a “worse situation” than in 2008 — there was evidence that the financial system remains under severe stress despite the freak out over Wednesday’s move by the Federal Reserve to lower dollar funding costs for foreign banks (which, as I discussed at the time, wasn’t really a game changer). The European Central Bank reported that eurozone banks borrowed nearly €9 billion in overnight emergency cash — up from €2.7 billion earlier this week. Not good.
Other signs of strain could be seen in the way German 12-month bill yields dropped below zero on Wednesday as European investors were willing to pay Berlin for the luxury of lending it money. The motivation is that, if you’re holding a big wad of euros, German short-term debt is one of the few “sure bets” left out there. It’s a sign of extreme risk aversion and fear.
Of course, the epicenter for all this is Europe.
Adding to concerns were comments this week from new ECB chief Mario Draghi that while downside risks to the economic outlook have increased, he cannot ride to Europe’s rescue by engaging in unmitigated money printing and bond buying; instead, it must adhere to its founding principles, including an inability to engage in monetary financing of government debts (exactly what the likes of Italy would love right now).
Draghi’s comments were akin to yelling “fire” in a crowded theater before announcing all the fire extinguishers are empty. Whoops.
According to the team at Capital Economics, based in London, the eurozone economy is on track to contract by 1% next year and by 2.5% in 2013, with risks to the downside for both forecasts. Recession will only deepen the budget deficits at the center of the eurozone debt crisis. The only way out is growth. And the only way the likes of Greece, Portugal, and Italy can restore growth is via massive currency depreciation and domestic inflation — something that’s not going to happen as long as they’re in the eurozone.
Sure, there will be distractions like Wednesday’s move by the Fed or additional stimulus measures out of places like China and Brazil. That’s just how the market gods like it. All the better to keep the masses confused and complacent as the fundamentals just get worse and worse.
To put it differently: When you look around the theater, everyone’s still focused on center stage blissfully unaware what’s happening around them. Turn around. The balcony level is in flames.
The Economy Is About To Get A Lot Worse – Anthony Mirhaydari, MSNBC