Baltic Dry Index. 779 -13
LIR Gold Target by 2019: $30,000. Revised due to QE programs.
“We’re
living a better life now at the expense of future generations.”
Axel
Weber, chairman of UBS and the former president of the Bundesbank. Davos.
We open today’s chapter in The Decline and Fall of
Euroland with some refreshingly honest commentary from Davos by Russia’s Prime
Minister. With roughly 200 billion of US dollars invested in Eurobonds, “we already
have enough euro risk,” says Dmitry Medvedev. Worse Russia is thinking of
selling out! The logic is that they want to get out before interest rates start
to rise, and there’s a mass rush for the exit as bond prices fall. Getting out
first and early looks an attractive thing to do.
Of course it all adds to the problems of the ECB, where
the Italian running the shop, once dubbed “super-Mario,” has now been dragged
into the growing Monte dei Paschi di Siena bank scandal, losing the “super” along the
way. Mr Draghi now appears to just be a very ordinary, regular dodgy Italian
bankster.
“The problem with Europe is, they’ve got a German
in the Vatican and an Italian in the ECB.”
Anon.
Russia shuns euro bonds on North-South rift, rotates into stocks
Russia has no intention of buying any more eurozone bonds and may start to run down its holdings, warning that it is far from clear whether monetary union can hold together.
“We
already have enough euro risk,” said premier Dmitry Medvedev. “Right now we don’t
have any plans to buy these bonds.”
Russia
has the world’s third biggest foreign reserves, worth an estimated $500bn, with
a growing share in eurozone bonds to diversify away from the US dollar.
“We now
have a different mission: 42pc of our reserves are euros, so we could get rid
of them by investing in equities,” Mr Medvedev told the German daily Handelsblatt.
It was
left vague whether he intends to switch the proceeds into EMU stock markets or
leave the eurozone altogether. He said efforts to stabilize the euro structure
had dragged on too long, leaving the currency bloc in a “miserable condition”.
The
Russian leader said Europe had launched a risky experiment – “never seen before
in the world history” – by lashing weak and powerful economies together under a
strong currency, warning that the Club Med bloc may not survive the ordeal.
“They
will either have to get stronger or leave the euro,” he said.
The
warning came as fresh money supply and credit data for the eurozone pointed to
a weak recovery at best, with a risk growing that the region could remain mired
in slump. Loans to companies and households both fell in December, with
mortgage lending in Spain down 31pc and no end in sight yet for the housing
crash.
“The
economic situation remains very fragile,” said Martin van Vliet from ING.
Eurozone
“broad” M3 money shrank in December for the second month, dropping €42bn to
€9.74 trillion. “Narrow” M1 money stalled again after brisk growth over the
autumn.
Monetarists
watch M3 for clues on economic growth a year or so ahead, and watch M1 for a
short-term signal of future spending.
----Mr
Medvedev said the world needs a multi-legged currency system with China’s yuan
playing a role. Russia has been buying gold, aiming to push bullion to 10pc of
its total holdings.
More
Elsewhere in the Decline and Fall, capital to turn
austerity into growth is still drying up. Stay long physical precious metals.
If this isn’t reversed soon, the Davos Spring will turn into the shortest
spring on record.
Eurozone lending contracts for eighth month as cheap borrowing fail to revive spending
Loans to companies and households in the eurozone contracted for the eighth month running in December, showing low official borrowing costs are having little success in reviving investment and spending.
11:26AM GMT 28 Jan 2013
Loans to
the private sector fell 0.7pc from the same month a year ago, European Central
Bank data
showed.
The
monthly flow of loans to non-financial firms fell €22bn in December after
falling by €7bn in November.
The monthly flow of loans to households showed a
drop of €3bn after a rise of €6bn in the previous month.
The cheap
funds the ECB is pumping through the monetary system are still not reaching
households and businesses evenly across the euro zone as some countries
struggle to get their stricken economies back on track, though progress has
been made.
On a
country-by-country basis, the data showed a €22bn drop in private-sector
lending in Spain, the largest monthly fall since July. In Portugal,
private-sector lending fell by €2.6bn, the biggest drop in a year.
More
Spain's crisis strategy under fire as economy buckles again
Spain’s economy has tipped into an accelerating downturn as sales data and the money supply flash serious warnings, calling into question Madrid’s high-risk strategy of refusing an EU-IMF rescue.
The
country’s retail sales plunged 10.7pc in December from a year earlier as
austerity bites deeper, one of the worst months since the crisis began.
The
Spanish car lobby (Anfac) said the country’s output of vehicles has fallen
below 2m for the first time since 1993, crashing 17pc last year. The industry
has shrunk by a third since the boom.
Ominously,
car exports plunged even faster at 18pc, dimming hopes that foreign trade can
lift the economy out of slump as internal demand shrinks. While Spanish exports
have been a bright spot over the past three years - keeping pace with German
exports - the momentum has faltered due to lack of investment.
Citigroup
said it now expects Spain's economy to contract by 2.2pc this year and another
2pc in 2014, pushing unemployment to 28pc.
The
effects of the slump will overpower any gains from fiscal austerity. The bank
said public debt will surge from 88pc to 110pc of GDP in just two years.
Professor
Luis Garicano from the London School of Economics said the recovery of EMU
sovereign debt markets has not fed through to the real economy, leaving Spanish
firms starved of credit and investment. “Credit constraints are forcing Spanish
companies to eat up their future,” he said.
The loan
crunch has put Spanish firms at a “severe competitive disadvantage” with rivals
in the EMU-core, further widening the North-South gap. German firms such as
Volkswagen are conquering market share across southern Europe by offering cheap
credit for sales.
There has
been little relief for Spanish firms since the European Central Bank agreed to
back-stop Spanish debt in the summer. Private loans contracted by a further
€30bn in December alone, even after stripping out distortions.
More
We end today’s chapter of The
Decline and Fall of Euroland, with more of the ever growing scandal in Italy,
that’s now dragged in both of Italy’s Super-Mario’s, Monti and Draghi. Super
Mario’s no more, both are looking more like super-incompetents, or worse stereo
typical, regular dodgy Italian banksters. You have to ask yourself, would you
really want to stay in a club that includes Italy? Thankfully, when the time
comes as it will, bailing out Italy is Germany’s problem.
The whole history of civilization is strewn with creeds and institutions which were invaluable at first, and deadly afterwards.
Walter Bagehot.
MPS saga not just a local affair
By Hugo Dixon January 28, 2013
The Monte
dei Paschi di Siena saga is not just an Italian affair. Revelations that
complex financial transactions used by the country’s third largest bank had the
effect of hiding losses are causing a political storm in Italy.
With a
general election only weeks away, Silvio Berlusconi looks like being the main
winner from the political spat. The former prime minister’s camp has attacked
Pierluigi Bersani’s Democratic Party, which is leading in the opinion polls, for
being close to Monte dei Paschi (MPS). It has also criticised Mario Monti, the
current prime minister, who agreed to increase MPS’s bailout to 3.9 billion
euros.
The
scandal won’t be enough to get Berlusconi back as prime minister. But it could
prevent a Bersani-Monti coalition from running the country with a solid
majority in both houses of parliament. If so, fears about Italian political
risk could return to haunt the markets.
The
still-murky saga has also put Mario Draghi under the spotlight because the ECB
president ran the Bank of Italy when MPS was getting into such a mess. Giulio
Tremonti, who was finance minister in Berlusconi’s last government, tweeted
that it was “stupefying” that Draghi had failed to discover or prevent the
complex transactions.
More
We end for the day with China. How do you compete
with a crooked nation like China, where the state, i.e. the Communist Party,
get to play fast and loose with the “rules.” Sadly, just like the Fed, the ECB
and the BOE.
China averts local government defaults
By Simon Rabinovitch in Beijing January 29,
2013 1:55 pm
Chinese banks have rolled over at least three-quarters of all loans to local
governments that were due to mature by the end of 2012, an indication of the
immense challenge facing China in working down its debt load.Local governments borrowed heavily from banks to fuel China’s stimulus programme during the global financial crisis and are now struggling to generate the revenue to pay them back, a shortfall that could cast a shadow over Chinese economic growth.
Banks extended at least Rmb3tn ($482bn) – and perhaps more – of the roughly Rmb4tn in loans plus interest that local governments were to have paid them by the end of last year, according to Financial Times calculations based on official data.
The calculations are imprecise because the Chinese bank regulator only announces figures for total outstanding loans to local governments, and does not publish details about interest payments or refinancing arrangements.
Nevertheless, three separate economists said the numbers confirmed that Chinese banks had implemented rollovers on a massive scale to stave off defaults.
---- Shang Fulin, China’s top bank regulator, said total
outstanding loans to local governments were Rmb9.2tn at the end of 2012,
according to reports in local media on Tuesday. At the end of 2010 such loans
had reached Rmb9.1tn.
In the intervening two years, 41 per cent of all local government debts had
been scheduled to mature, according to the national audit office. Moreover,
Beijing had effectively blocked all new lending to local governments.The implication of a stable outstanding loan volume is that the vast majority of local government loans that were to come due over the past two years have simply been extended. Accounting for interest payments of 6 per cent a year, local governments have paid back a maximum of about Rmb1tn.
More
A permanent Governor of the European Central Bank would be one of the greatest men in Euroland. He would be a little `monarch` in every City; he would be far greater than the Elected Leaders. He would be the personal embodiment of the ECB; he would be constantly clothed with an almost indefinite prestige. Every nation in business would bow down before him and try to stand well with him, for he might in a panic be able to save almost anyone he liked, and to ruin almost anyone he liked. A day might come when his favour might mean prosperity, and his distrust might mean ruin. A position with so much real power and so much apparent dignity would be intensely coveted.
With Apologies to Walter Bagehot. Lombard Street. 1873.
At the Comex silver depositories Tuesday final figures were: Registered 38.06
Moz, Eligible 115.31 Moz, Total 153.37 Moz.
Crooks and
Scoundrels Corner
The bent, the seriously bent, and the totally
doubled over.
Today, meet the banksters again. How the bankster traders at JP Morgan
turned cannibal. JP Morgan shareholders might want to consider taking action
against what is clearly an out of control, too big to fail, mega “bank.”
"If the financial system goes down, our business is going down and, trust me, yours and everyone else's is going down, too."
Lloyd Blankfein. CEO Goldman Sachs. November 8, 2009
Exclusive: JPMorgan bet against itself in "Whale" trade
NEW YORK |(Reuters) - There is a new twist in the London Whale trading scandal that cost JPMorgan Chase $6.2 billion in trading losses last year. Some of the firm's own traders bet against the very derivatives positions placed by its chief investment office, said three people familiar with the matter.
The U.S. Senate Permanent Committee on Investigations, which launched an inquiry into the trading loss last fall, is looking into the how different divisions of the bank wound up on opposite sides of the same trade, said one of the people familiar with the matter.
The committee is expected to release a report on its investigation in the next few weeks.
The people familiar with the situation did not comment on the dollar value of the opposing trades placed by JPMorgan Chase & Co's (JPM.N) investment bank traders, which was much smaller than the total positions put on by the CIO.
The intra-bank trading was not mentioned in a 129-page report JPMorgan released on January 16, which chronicled some of the bank's risk management failures. The scandal has led to a number of management changes at JPMorgan and has sullied CEO Jamie Dimon's image as a hands-on risk manager.
Kristin Lemkau, a spokeswoman for JPMorgan, declined to comment on the investment bank's trading positions.
A spokeswoman for the Senate committee, led by Michigan Sen. Carl Levin, a Democrat, declined to comment on its investigation.
It was widely known that a group of about eight credit-focused hedge funds, such as BlueMountain Capital Management and Saba Capital Management, were on the other side of the trades that JPMorgan's London-based Whale team made on an index tied to corporate default rates. But the role JPMorgan's own investment bank may have played in the messy unwinding of the derivatives trade has not come out until now.
One of the three people familiar with the matter claimed that JPMorgan managers discussed merging the two sets of trades in an attempt to offset some of the CIO's losses. Those talks ended about a month before Bloomberg News first reported the CIO trades on April 5 last year, the source said.
JPMorgan's Lemkau said that this "never came up in our exhaustive internal investigation."
Last July, the bank fired the three London-based traders in the CIO most closely tied to the trading, including Bruno Iksil, dubbed the London Whale by hedge fund traders because of the size of the trades he placed for the CIO.
Two people familiar with Iksil and his boss, Javier Martin-Artajo, said the two CIO employees complained about the investment bank's actions in the spring of 2012, accusing its traders of deliberately trying to move the market against the CIO by leaking information on its position to hedge funds. Iksil made his complaint to a member of JPMorgan's compliance department, one of the people said.
More
"We shouldn't pour cold water on everything. We, the eight or nine players in global investment banking, have a very good future."
Deutsche Bank, CEO Josef Ackermann. Davos, January 2007.
The monthly Coppock Indicators finished December:
DJIA: +100 Down. NASDAQ: +123 Unch. SP500: +129 Up.
All three indexes are giving different
signals. A time for caution.
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