Baltic Dry Index. 1855 -06 Brent Crude 59.42 Spot Gold 1490
Never ending Brexit now October 31,
maybe. 11 days away.
Trump’s Nuclear China Tariffs
Now In Effect.
The USA v EU trade war starts October
18. In effect.
Well, fancy giving money to the Government!
Might as well have put it down the drain.
Fancy giving money to the Government!
Nobody will see the stuff again.
Well, they've no idea what money's for-
Ten to one they'll start another war.
I've heard a lot of silly things, but,
Lor'!
Fancy giving money to the Government!
A.P. Herbert. 1931, Too
Much.
With the chaotic, dysfunctional, UK
Parliament blocking Brexit at yesterday’s anarchic, Saturday Session, where is
Guy Fawkes when he’s really needed, European stock markets, (and Sterling,) are
in for a lively week.
Adding to that likely lively week for
stocks, gloom and doom for the meetings in Washington of the IMF and World
Bank. “We’re effectively out of ammo, with negative rates likely here forever,”
seems to be the message and “plan.”
But as yesterday’s weekend update
showed, negative interest rates forever, bankrupts banks, pension plans and annuities,
and probably ends capitalism as we’ve known it, and the prosperity it brought. Time to have maximum future insurance in
fully paid up physical precious metals. That maximum, depends on the personal
circumstances of each individual and family.
Negative rates forever? Central bankers look for an exit
October 20, 2019 / 12:40 AM
WASHINGTON
(Reuters) - The world’s most powerful policymakers are struggling to alleviate
the pain of a slowing global economy with few levers left to pull and growing
concern that one of them, negative interest rates, already is creating problems
of its own.
In an ideal
world, elected officials would pull more of the weight with fiscal programs and
structural reforms that would improve growth and allow interest rates to rise.
But over
three days of conversation here, the dilemma has become clear: Whether it is
the U.S.-China trade war, tightfisted spending in Germany, or the drawn-out
Brexit, broader government policies are moving in the other direction - driving
central bankers to mount further rescue efforts, and likely leading to even
more negative yielding debt.
“We still
have tools which could be used as necessary,” said Bank of Japan Governor
Haruhiko Kuroda. “I don’t think the effect of monetary policy has declined
significantly or materially.” Still, Kuroda said that a prolonged low interest
rate situation could have “side effects on the financial system. You have to be
careful.”
Negative
interest rates are now a fact of life in Europe and Japan, and multiple other
countries including the United States are lowering their target policy rates.
“It is not
really clear how we are going to get out of this,” Stanford University
economics professor John Taylor said at a meeting of the Institute of
International Finance.
He spoke at
a central banking panel that showed just how much the landscape has shifted in
the decade since the 2007 to 2009 financial crisis. Far from debate over
whether unconventional policies are appropriate or not, the discussion is now
about whether traditional central banking can even survive - or whether
oddities like negative rates have become self-reenforcing, and whether central
banks will need to begin overtly financing government programs to get the
fiscal spending that may provide an exit from them.
“We have got
to make it easier for politicians to run fiscal policy when monetary policy is
essentially not operating well,” said former Federal Reserve vice chair Stanley
Fischer, now a senior adviser with investment management firm BlackRock.
TILTED TO THE DOWNSIDE
Conversation at the International Monetary Fund and World Bank meetings this week was dominated by two concerns - a global economic slowdown driven by “policy shocks” that might have been avoided, and the risks to pension funds, banks, and overall financial stability posed by the roughly $15 trillion, estimated by the IMF, in bonds that now pay a negative interest rate.With easier monetary policy being used to dampen the impact of the trade war and other risks, some analysts worry about the moral hazard of central bankers underwriting the very policies they feel are slowing growth.
“There is a kind of benign view that central banks are just kind of doing their best to offset the damage done by one set of policymakers in one side of the government,” said Brian Coulton, chief economist at Fitch Ratings. “There is a real danger in misplaced faith in the capacity of central banks to fix all these growth challenges.”
More
Fallout from Trump's trade wars felt by economies around the world
October 19, 2019 / 11:14 PM
WASHINGTON
(Reuters) - The collateral damage of the United States’ trade wars is being
felt from the fjords of Iceland to the auto factories of Japan.
Central bank governors and finance ministers traded grim tales of suffering economies at the International Monetary Fund and World Bank fall meetings in Washington this week. Some also noted how far U.S. policy had shifted from the 1940s, when Washington co-founded the IMF.
At that time, “the world economy had been hammered for over a decade by high tariff barriers, depression and war,” prompting then-U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau to champion a global economic system, World Bank President David Malpass told attendees at a session this week.
The U.S. message then, Malpass said, was: “First, there’s no limit to prosperity. Second, broadly shared prosperity benefits everyone.”
As the IMF’s gathering of 189 member-nations drew to a close, the unintended negative impacts of the trade wars were becoming clear, IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva said. “Everybody loses.”
The United States, the world’s largest importer, started a bitter tariff war with China, the world’s largest exporter, 15 months ago. U.S. President Donald Trump is also in the midst of renegotiating, and sometimes upending, trade relationships with many of Washington’s top trading partners.
The fallout will slow global growth in 2019 to 3.0%, the slowest pace in a decade, the IMF estimated this week.
This pain is not being shared equally. The United States remains the least exposed of the world's 20 largest economies to a drop in exports in part because of its massive domestic consumer spending base. (Here's a graphic that shows the impact of tariffs in the United States and around the world. tmsnrt.rs/2OZJQba)
EUROPE’S PAIN
The damage is being particularly felt in European countries which “rely on exports and are open to trade,” the European Union’s Economic and Financial Affairs Commissioner Pierre Moscovici said.More than 40% of Germany’s GDP was derived from exports in 2018, the most of any major global economy. Uncertainty in the business community is widespread, German Finance Minister Olaf Scholz told reporters.
German trade group BGA recently revised down its growth forecast for German exports in 2019 to just 0.5%, from 1.5%. As a result, many companies are scaling back their investment plans, something that will have repercussions for years to come.
Scholz said concerns over Britain’s impending departure from the EU and the bloc’s trade dispute with the United States were clearly dampening global economic growth.
“The most important problem remains those factors that we cannot measure – specifically the reluctance to invest,” Scholz said.
The pain is being felt in countries that don’t rely on exports too, such as Iceland, which became the first developed economy to seek aid from the IMF after a 2008 banking collapse. Since then, it has rebuilt its economy in what’s been called a miraculous recovery. Now, that is threatened.
“We have become dependent on tourism,” explained Ásgeir Jónsson, the governor of Iceland’s central bank, with annual visitors growing five-fold to 2.5 million since the crisis. Foreign arrivals, however, have plummeted since the trade wars started, and are down 15.6% this summer from the year before.
---- NO AMERICAN IMMUNITY
On Friday, Japan’s Cabinet Office, which helps coordinate government policy, downgraded its assessment of factory output in October.The softness in production was largely due to car exports to the United States turning weaker, after growing steadily until the spring, a government official said at a briefing.
“The pick-up in global growth is being delayed,” Bank of Japan Governor Haruhiko Kuroda said. “Japan’s economy is seeing exports weaken significantly and that’s affecting factory output.”
The United States hasn’t been immune from the impact of the trade wars. American farmers have been particularly hurt by Chinese tariffs on U.S. agricultural products, prompting the Trump administration to give billions in aid to the farm belt.
Washington’s imposition of steel and aluminium tariffs and uncertainty about passage of a new North American free trade deal - the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement - have also stalled local economic development.
More
"Tariffs
don't work. If anything, they hurt the economy because if you're a typical
American worker, you have a finite amount of income to spend. If you have to
spend more on the necessity products that you need to live, you have less to
spend on the services that you want to buy. And you definitely don't have
anything left over to save.”
Gary Cohn. President Trump's former director of the
National Economic Council.
The monthly Coppock Indicators finished September
DJIA: 26,917
+57 Up. NASDAQ: 7,999 +62 Up. SP500: 2,977 +61 Up.
Another inconclusive month, but all three moved up weakly. I
would not rely on nor take such a weak buy signal.
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