Baltic Dry Index. 724 +07
LIR Gold Target by 2019: $30,000. Revised due to QE programs.
“Those who don't know history are destined to repeat it.”
Edmund Burke.
Stay long physical precious metals, and
plenty of cash ahead of this weekend. Unexpectedly the ECB’s top Italian has
cancelled his junket to the Fed’s annual extravaganza ay Jackson Hole, Wyoming.
Something big like a European bank holiday might lie ahead. Europe’s public
trough feeders never ever pass up freebies, unless crisis events force their
hand. While Greece has already been written off by
Germany, my guess is that the new twist in the never ending crisis is that
Spain has gone super critical. The work and tax shy states of Club Bad, have
passed the point of meaningful rescue. Events in China too, are making a Euro
rescue moot. For more on that scroll down to Crooks Corner.
Below, it’s every man for himself, as the SS
Euroland starts splitting apart.
"When it becomes serious, you have to lie"
Jean-Claude Juncker. Luxembourg Prime Minister and president of the Euro Group of Finance Ministers. Confessed liar.
Debt crisis: Mario Draghi cancels Jackson Hole appearance
European Central Bank president Mario Draghi will not attend the US Federal Reserve's Jackson Hole gathering of central bankers later this week due to a heavy workload, a spokesman said Tuesday.
12:28PM BST 28 Aug 2012
The
absence of the ECB president will raise speculation that the central bank is
ready to unveil further details of the bond buying plans it announced earlier
this month.
No
Executive Board member will attend the conference, the ECB said.
However,
Bundesbank president Jens Weidmann, who is vehemently against ECB bond buying,
will attend, a spokesman confirmed on Tuesday.
Mr
Draghi’s commitments next week include a debate on a pan-European banking union
at the European Parliament’s Economic and Monetary Affairs Committee in
Brussels next Monday, as well as the ECB's monthly interest rate meeting and
press conference next Thursday.
The
annual symposium would have been Mr Draghi's first Jackson Hole conference
since he became ECB president in November. He had been scheduled to participate
in an event on Saturday.
More
Deposit flight from Spanish banks smashes record in July
Spain has suffered the worst haemorrhaging of bank deposits since the launch of the euro, losing funds equal to 7pc of GDP in a single month.
Data from
the European Central Bank shows that outflows from Spanish commercial banks
reached €74bn (£59bn) in July, twice the previous monthly record. This brings
the total deposit loss over the past year to 10.9pc, replicating the pattern
seen in Greece as the crisis spread.
It is
unclear how much of the deposit loss is capital flight, either to German banks
or other safe-haven assets such as London property. The Bank of Spain said the
fall is distorted by the July effect of tax payments and by the expiry of
securitised funds.
Julian
Callow from Barclays Capital said the deposit loss is €65bn even when adjusted
for the season: “This is highly significant. Deposit outflows are clearly
picking up and the balance sheet of the Spanish banking system is contracting.”
Economy
secretary Fernando Jimenez Latorre said Spain is in the eye of the storm right
now with the “worst falls” in economic output yet to come in the second half of
the year.
Meanwhile,
the Spanish statistics office said the economic slump has been deeper than
feared, with lower output through 2010 and 2011. The economy slid back into
double-dip recession in the third quarter of last year, three months earlier
than thought.
----
Separately, Portugal’s tax revenues fell 3.5pc in July despite higher tax
rates, raising concerns that the country is tipping into a contraction spiral.
It is now certain that Portugal will fail to meet this year’s deficit target of
4.5pc of GDP under its €78bn rescue from the EU-IMF troika. Morgan Stanley said
the country will need a “second bail-out” in the autumn.
Catalonia asks for €5bn bailout from Spain
Spain's north-eastern region of Catalonia, which represents around a fifth of the country's economic output, will tap a state liquidity facility for just over €5bn, a spokeswoman for the region's economy head has said.
1:41PM BST 28 Aug 2012
"We will not accept political conditions for the aid," she added.
Of Spain's 17 regions, Valencia and Murcia have also said they would need
recourse to the fund. The government announced in July it was setting up a new liquidity mechanism to help the regions repay their debts, using funds from the state lottery and bank loans. But the facility is still not up and running.
Some six regions are expected to need the aid from the central government to be able to meet strict deficit targets and pay providers.
Catalonia has called over the past year for the introduction of some form of mutualisation of debt for Spain's regions to help bring down its financing costs.
Catalonia, which is heavily indebted, insists its fiscal position would be better if it were able to create its own tax agency, which it hopes to esatblish in the future.
The region's announcement coincided with a visit by
European Union president Herman Van Rompuy for the first of a series of
meetings held by Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy to grapple with the crisis
More
August 28, 2012, 6:21 AM
The Calm Before the Euro-Zone Storm
Talk is
cheap, as European leaders will soon find out.
For the
last few months, they have been able to keep the euro relatively stable with
promises.
From the
European Central Bank’s pledge at the start of the summer to do all that is
necessary to save the single currency to the promise by German Finance Minister
Wolfgang Schäuble on Monday that he and his French counterpart will form a
working group on bilateral cooperation, all their comments were taken at face
value and provided an excuse not to sell the euro.
But as
August draws to an end and financial markets return to normal, politicians will
have to start replacing words with action.
The next
few weeks will be critical in more than one way. For a start, the euro-zone
debt crisis is now unfolding against a much weaker economic background than it
has previously, with new data showing that Germany is now being affected by the
problems of its weaker neighbors.
Monday’s
IFO survey from Berlin may not have proved quite as weak as some had feared,
but the decline in the expectations index is now down at levels consistent with
recession, according to analysts.
Rising
tension in financial markets is also evident in the VIX volatility index, which
has been rising steadily since the middle of the month.
“The rise
in equity volatility suggests that the relative calm experienced over the
summer may be ending,” said Mitul Kotecha, head of global foreign-exchange
strategy with Crédit Agricole in London.
The two
key areas on which the market will start to demand action are Greece and the
ECB.
In the
case of Greece, fears are that the country will miss fiscal targets when the
troika submits its latest report next month.
This
means that, technically, the country won’t be eligible for the next tranche of
bailout funds and, according to the latest estimates for Athens, this means it
will run out money by the middle of October.
What
happens then is anyone’s guess. Despite Chancellor Angela Merkel’s promises to
help Greece, there is no reassurance that Germany will provide more funds if
the troika report proves as damning as expected.
More
"The most puzzling development in politics during the last decade is the apparent determination of Western European leaders to re-create the Soviet Union in Western Europe."
Mikhail Gorbachev
At the Comex silver depositories Tuesday final figures were: Registered 36.45
Moz, Eligible 104.05 Moz, Total 140.50 Moz.
Crooks and
Scoundrels Corner
The bent,
the seriously bent, and the totally doubled over.
Today, more
on China. Just how bad is bad?
Credit crisis in China’s richest province Zhejiang
Earlier this summer, a team of Chinese policemen arrived at the Wyndham Grand Plaza Royale, a five-star hotel on the north-east shores of Hangzhou’s West Lake.
They were
there to arrest Yu Zhongjiang, a balding 47-year-old former taxi driver with a
small goatee beard, who happened to also be the hotel’s owner.
They
arrested him for fraud: his company owed 8bn yuan (£800m) and investigators
believe he had fabricated a number of loan applications.
In 2008,
he had financed his purchase of the Wyndham almost entirely through loans, including
issuing IOUs to his own employees, it has been reported.
His
arrest, and the bankruptcy of Zhongjiang Group, had a domino effect in
Hangzhou, an affluent city of 9m residents on China’s east coast. Mr Yu had
guaranteed the loans of several other companies and the banks rushed to demand
repayment. One of China’s biggest lenders, Construction Bank (CCB), apparently
loaned a total of 3bn yuan to companies tied to Zhongjiang and is now facing
what has been described as its “largest ever loan crisis”.
Between
2010 and this year, CCB’s loan book to Zhongjiang tripled in size, despite the
company’s deteriorating financial position. Even when other banks started to
recall their loans in panic, CCB kept lending. Webs of loan guarantees are
common in Zhejiang, the export-led province that has become China’s wealthiest,
on a per capita basis. “The local economy is tightly interlocked,” said Yang
Yiqing, the head of the research centre of the Zhejiang Business Association.
“Many companies in the province form industry chains, with one firm providing
raw materials, another the logistics, another the finished product, and so on.
Often, the companies inside the chain will all guarantee each other’s loans to
the bank.”
Access to
capital remains a challenge for private businesses. State-owned Chinese banks
prefer to lend to large state-owned firms, who are implicitly underwritten by
the government. The banks lend according to policy and often, for good reasons,
do not trust the financial statements of small and medium-sized firms.
To get a
loan, private firms have to comply with impossible demands and often can only
succeed by arranging credit guarantees. Private credit guarantee companies have
also sprung up to service the market, taking a cut to underwrite the loans.
Credit guarantees have multiplied so rapidly in the past two years that the
International Monetary Fund has warned that the rapid growth could pose a
systemic risk.
Patrick
Chovanec, a professor of business studies at Tsinghua University in Beijing, said:
“The explosion that we have seen in this shadow banking over the past two years
has essentially been a conflict between the People’s Bank of China, which was
trying to rein in credit in order to fight inflation, and the insatiable demand
for credit to fuel the investment boom.”
The
system has left firms vulnerable to an economic slowdown, especially as export
markets in the United States and Europe dry up.
Mr Yang
said: “When the economy turns sour and an industry as a whole is affected, all
the companies in a chain can go bankrupt.”
China Retailers Lose Steam, Deepening Wen’s Challenges
By Bloomberg News - Aug 29, 2012 4:54 AM GMT
China’s retailers from clothing to computers are reporting weaker sales
growth, undermining Premier Wen Jiabao’s goal of relying more on consumer
spending for expansion as the economy cools. Passenger-vehicle sales trailed analysts’ estimates in July. Sportswear seller Li Ning Co. shut 1,200 stores in the first half and department-store chain Parkson Retail Group Ltd. (3368)’s same-store sales rose at less than a quarter the pace of a year earlier. Gome Electrical Appliances Holding Ltd. (493) said it would report a first-half loss on lower sales.
---- “The pressure on retail sales is growing bigger and bigger,” said Shen Jianguang, Hong Kong-based chief Asia economist at Mizuho Securities Asia Ltd. “When exports are fragile and investment is weak, if companies started to reduce their production or workforce, how can it be possible for consumer spending to stay strong?”
Retail sales missed economists’ forecasts in three of the last four months and Mizuho said they will stay weak.
More
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-08-28/china-retailers-lose-steam-deepening-wen-s-challenges.html
There can be few fields of human endeavour in which history counts for so little as in the world of finance. Past experience, to the extent that it is part of memory at all, is dismissed as the primitive refuge of those who do not have the insight to appreciate the incredible wonders of the present.
J. K. Galbraith.
The monthly
Coppock Indicators finished July:
DJIA: +65 Up. NASDAQ: +75 Up. SP500: +48 Up. All
three indicators have reversed from down to up, though only marginally. Last
week’s ECB relief rally probably made the difference.
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