Baltic Dry Index. 1821 +102
LIR Gold Target by 2019: $30,000. Revised due to QE programs.
"We
hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office."
Aesop.
We open
December with good news from China, iffy news from Japan, and downright bad
news from Europe. And this is as good as it gets with every central bankster
generating mountains of new currency. Just wait until they stop.
"When it becomes serious, you have to lie"
Jean-Claude Juncker. Ex-Luxembourg Prime Minister and ex-president of the Euro Group of Finance Ministers. Confessed liar.
China Manufacturing Beats Estimates as Output Rises
By Bloomberg News - Dec 2, 2013 2:02 AM GMT
Chinese manufacturing growth beat
analyst estimates in November, indicating the nation’s economic recovery is
sustaining momentum amid government efforts to rein in credit growth.
The Purchasing Managers’ Index
was 51.4, the National Bureau of Statistics and China Federation of Logistics
and Purchasing said yesterday, exceeding 24 out of 26 estimates in a Bloomberg
News survey. A separate gauge from HSBC Holdings Plc and Markit Economics today
was 50.8, topping all 13 analysts’ projections. Numbers above 50 signal
expansion.
Stability in manufacturing in the world’s second-biggest economy may give Premier Li Keqiang more room to implement policy changes laid out after a Communist Party meeting last month. While industrial investment is picking up and retail sales have increased 13 percent so far this year, China faces headwinds that include factory overcapacity, excessive corporate debt and slower export demand.
----Economists estimate growth in gross domestic product will slow to 7.5 percent next year from 7.6 percent this year, according to the median projection in Bloomberg News surveys last month. The government set a target for 7.5 percent expansion in 2013.
Premier Li said in October that
China needs annual growth of 7.2 percent to keep unemployment stable after
indicating in July his “bottom line” for expansion was 7 percent.
More
Abe Support Falls Below 50% for First Time Amid Secrecy Push
By Chikako Mogi & Yuriy Humber - Dec 2, 2013 6:25 AM GMT
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s public support dropped below 50 percent for the
first time amid a campaign to strengthen Japan’s secrecy
laws, a decline that risks eroding his political capital to enact economic
reforms. The cabinet’s approval rating fell to 49 percent, according to a Nov. 30 to Dec. 1 survey by the Asahi newspaper, down 4 percentage points from a month earlier. It showed 50 percent of those surveyed opposed a bill passed by the Diet’s lower house last week that boosts penalties for leaking confidential government information. Abe plans to pass the legislation in the upper house this week.
Unease over the bill accompanies an emergence of inflation in the world’s third-largest economy that threatens to damage further Abe’s public backing unless companies begin to raise base wages. The drop in support precedes action on the reforms that economists say would give businesses the biggest incentive to increase spending at home: freer labor laws and lower taxes.
“If the support rating continues to fall and touches 30 percent, past patterns show the government will collapse within a year,” said Shogo Fujita, a strategist at Bank of America Merrill Lynch in Tokyo.
More
Eurozone M3 money plunge flashes deflation alert for 2014
Eurozone in danger of Japanese-style deflation, crippling Club Med nations, as money supply drops to record low levels, ECB monetary data shows
Eurozone money supply growth
plummeted in October and loans to firms contracted at a record rate,
heightening the risk of a stalled recovery and Japanese-style deflation next
year.
The European Central Bank said M3
money growth fell to 1.4pc from a year earlier, lower than expected and far
below the bank's own 4.5pc target deemed necessary to keep the economy on an
even keel.
Monetarists watch the M3 data --
covering cash and a broad range of bank accounts -- as an early warning signal
for the economy a year or so in advance. “This a large dark cloud hanging over
the eurozone in 2014; it means the public debt ratios in Southern Europe are at
greater risk of exploding,” said Tim Congdon from International Monetary
Research.
Loans to non-financial companies shrank
at an accelerating pace of 3.7pc, but with drastic differences between North
and South. Yacine Rouimi from Societe Generale said total credit plunged by
5.7pc in Italy, 6.6pc in Portugal, and by an “alarming” 19.3pc in Spain.
----The dire credit data may force the ECB to take bolder measures. The Süddeutsche Zeitung said the bank is exploring a variant of the Bank of England’s funding for lending, offering credit lines to banks provided loans are passed on to credit-starved firms.
“The ECB needs to cut rates to
zero and launch quantitative easing (QE) to head off deflation, but they are
not there yet,” said Lars Christensen from Danske Bank. “The debt problem in
Italy will be much worse if they let nominal GDP fall, leading to yet more
austerity.”
----The ECB’s own policies appear to be in
contradiction. Its latest Financial Stability Review warned that bond tapering
by the US Federal Reserve could lead to an interest rate shock, with a sharp
rise in bond yields. Yet it has been slow to mitigate the dangers with
pre-emptive stimulus.
More
Foreign-currency loans and systemic risk in Europe
Pınar Yeşin, 26 November 2013Before the onset of the financial crisis, European households and non-financial firms were borrowing heavily in lower-yielding foreign currencies to finance their home mortgages or business investments, even though they did not necessarily have a steady income in the currency concerned. Five years after the financial crisis, banks still hold a substantial amount of foreign currency loans to unhedged borrowers on their balance sheets. This column quantifies the systemic risk that these foreign currency loans pose to the European banking sector.
------Before the onset of the financial crisis,
foreign currency loans to the non-banking sector in Europe became remarkably
prevalent. In particular, households and non-financial firms were taking bank
loans denominated in lower-yielding foreign currencies and investing in
high-yielding domestic currencies (e.g., in the form of home mortgages or
business investments), even though these agents did not necessarily have a
steady income in the foreign currency concerned. Therefore these retail foreign
currency loans were usually dubbed 'small men’s carry trade'. Since the crisis,
the outstanding volumes of foreign currency loans to the non-banking sector have
been slowly declining in some countries due to macro-prudential measures,
deleveraging of banks, and the continued slowdown of European economies.
Nevertheless a substantial fraction of households and firms still have foreign
currency bank loans.
The chart below shows that as of the second quarter
of 2013 the majority of the outstanding loans to the non-banking sector in many
non-Eurozone countries continue to be denominated in a foreign currency. For
example, in Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Croatia, Serbia, and Latvia, between
60% and 88% of the outstanding loans to the non-banking sector are denominated
in a foreign currency.
While foreign currency loans offer some advantages
to borrowers – such as lower interest rates and longer maturities compared to
domestic currency loans – they also carry a significant exchange rate risk. A
sharp depreciation of the domestic currency can prevent unhedged borrowers from
being able to service their foreign currency loans. As a result, these loans are
now creating a substantial systemic risk to the European banking sector. Banks
could fail jointly as a result of their exposure to unhedged households and
non-financial firms which default on their loans when the domestic currency
depreciates sharply.
Systemic risk measures show that foreign currency
loans to the non-banking sector create substantial risks to the banking sector
from a 'common market shock 'perspective. High persistence and low volatility
of the systemic risk measures indicate that short-term policies would be unable
to swiftly reduce this risk.
More
In US news
this morning, America’s banksters are preparing for the end of the Fed’s final
bubble. Getting out of US Treasuries early, ahead of any Fed move to start
scaling back on QE Forever and ZIRP, beats the mad dash full scale panic that
likely occurs the moment the Fed even hints that QE Forever has ended. Well
aware of the havoc to come, the Fedster’s are about to move the goalposts, says
Forbes magazine. Whether “Gross Output” will turn out to be a better statistic
than GDP remains to be seen, but my guess is that it will be manipulated to the
hilt in an ever more desperate attempt to keep the Great Nixonian Error of fiat
money from coming to its long overdue end.
"Liquidation sometimes is orderly, but more frequently
degenerates into panic as the realization spreads that there is only so much
money, not enough to enable everyone to sell out at the top."
Charles P. Kindleberger,
Manias, Panics and Crashes.
Citigroup to BofA Spurn Treasuries to Hoard Cash on Taper Risk
By Cordell Eddings & Daniel Kruger - Dec 2, 2013 12:45 AM GMT
Never before have America’s banks been so wary of risking their cash
deposits on U.S. government debt. After holdings of U.S. debt surged to a record $1.89 trillion in 2012, lenders from Citigroup Inc. to Bank of America Corp. and Wells Fargo & Co. (WFC) are culling for the first time in six years and amassing dollars. Banks’ $1.8 trillion of the bonds now equal less than 70 percent of their cash, the least since the Federal Reserve began compiling the data in 1973.
With net interest margins falling to the lowest since 2006, banks are spurning Treasuries and hoarding unprecedented amounts of cash on prospects that loan demand will revive as a strengthening economy leads the Fed to reduce its own debt purchases. Five years of cheap-money policies also have depressed yields and made it less attractive for banks to buy Treasuries as a way to bolster income.
“Banks reluctant to lend were large holders of Treasuries,” Jeffrey Klingelhofer, a money manager at Thornburg Investment Management Inc., which oversees $89 billion, said in a telephone interview from Santa Fe, New Mexico. “Like a lot of other people who have been moving out of fixed income, it’s largely to avoid the fallout from tapering.”
----After banks boosted Treasuries and bonds issued by federal agencies by 69 percent in the last five years as the crisis depressed lending and regulations designed to limit risk-taking increased, they have pulled back on speculation the Fed will curtail its bond buying as soon as March.
Banks’ stakes of Treasuries and federal agency bonds have declined more than $80 billion in 2013, data compiled by the Fed show. That would be the first annual decrease since 2007. At the same time, cash held by banks has surged by a record $882 billion this year to an all-time high of $2.59 trillion.
Government bonds now represent 69 percent of banks’ cash, which would be the lowest on record and the first time lenders ended a year with a smaller proportion of U.S. debt relative to cash since 1980, the data show.
More
Beyond GDP: Get Ready For A New Way To Measure The Economy
This story appears in the December 16, 2013 issue of Forbes.
By Mark Skousen
Starting in spring 2014, the
Bureau of Economic Analysis will release a breakthrough new economic statistic
on a quarterly basis. It’s called Gross Output, a measure of total sales
volume at all stages of production. GO is almost twice the size of GDP, the
standard yardstick for measuring final goods and services produced in a year.
This is the first new economic
aggregate since Gross Domestic Product (GDP) was introduced over fifty years
ago.
More
"Those entrapped by the herd instinct are drowned in the deluges of history. But there are always the few who observe, reason, and take precautions, and thus escape the flood. For these few gold has been the asset of last resort."
Antony C. Sutton
At the Comex
silver depositories Friday
final figures were: Registered 45.86 Moz, Eligible 124.32 Moz, Total 170.18 Moz.
Crooks and Scoundrels Corner
The bent, the seriously bent, and the totally
doubled over.
Today it’s the banksters again. They just can’t
help themselves. They can resist everything but the temptation to lie, cheat
and steal. Below, this year’s scandal that’s going to explode into the scandal
of scandals in 2014.
Old Ebenezer Squid had one-way pockets. He would
walk ten miles in the snow to chisel an orphan out of tuppence.
With apologies to P.G. Wodehouse and
the Duke of Dunstable.
FCA Faces Calls for More Disclosure on Currency-Rigging
By Gavin Finch, Suzi Ring
& Sarah Jones - Dec 2, 2013 12:01 AM GMT
The U.K.’s Investment Management Association, whose members oversee
about 4.5 trillion pounds ($7.4 trillion) of assets, is pressing regulators to
provide more information about the alleged manipulation of the foreign-exchange
market, said two people with knowledge of the matter. The trade group wrote to the Financial Conduct Authority in recent weeks, asking how it should respond to clients’ inquiries about whether currency markets are being rigged, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the correspondence is private. The FCA replied that it couldn’t comment on a current investigation, one of the people said.
Fund managers are among the biggest
clients of banks’ foreign-exchange desks and are at risk of being the biggest
losers from any rigging of the $5.3 trillion-a-day market. The FCA opened a
formal probe on Oct. 16, four months after Bloomberg News reported that some
traders had pooled information about their positions with counterparts at other
firms and tried to manipulate the benchmark WM/Reuters rates.
----The WM/Reuters rates are used by asset managers and index tracker funds to determine what they pay for currencies and to compute the day-to-day value of their holdings, and by index providers such as FTSE Group and MSCI Inc. (MSCI) that track stocks and bonds in multiple countries.
The rates are published hourly for 160 currencies and half-hourly for the 21 most traded. They are the median of all trades in a minute-long period starting 30 seconds before the beginning of each half-hour. Rates for less-widely traded currencies are based on quotes during a two-minute window.
The data are collected and distributed by World Markets Co., a unit of Boston-based State Street Corp., and Thomson Reuters Corp. Bloomberg LP, the parent company of Bloomberg News, competes with Thomson Reuters in providing news and information as well as currency-trading systems.
The FCA is working with regulators including the U.S. Department of Justice and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission to investigate the market. At least 12 traders have been suspended and at least 11 banks, including New York-based Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and London-based Barclays Plc (BARC), have said they’ve been contacted by authorities.
More
Banks are an almost irresistible attraction for that element of our society which seeks unearned money.
J. Edgar Hoover.
The monthly
Coppock Indicators finished November:
DJIA: +190 Up. NASDAQ: +281 Up. SP500: +232 Up. The Fed’s final bubble
continues to grow, until QE Forever isn’t forever. Up will remain up, until one
fine day out of the blue the Fed finally loses control, or the next Lehman
hits.
• NBCC awards Rs 524 crore order to Simplex Infra for construction of IIT buildings in Bhubaneswar.Commodity tips
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