Washington, D.C.
Ilargi: I think I need to emphasize, in case you still don't understand, that what Stoneleigh states below in a few words off the cuff has taken dozens upon dozens of people in the ostensible know, your professional investors, bankers, politicians, experts, analysts and journalists, y'all know their names, all those in important places, forever and a day to define, and they've still come up way short, every single one of them, to date.
That's why it's time for everyone to start paying attention "to THIS space", as Stoneleigh likes to say. Oh, and that’s right, we had our 2nd anniversary on January 22. And we missed it, sort of. But I still want my Barbie doll! And my cake.
Stoneleigh: The headlines will get much worse from here. Negative t-bill rates are coming in a much bigger way, but always less negative than would yield a low real rate of interest, so the liquidity trap persists. Negative t-bill rates will make cash on hand look better than bonds, even of the shortest duration, as cash won't have a built in depreciation. T-bills will still be a good deal relative to most things, but cash on hand will be better. That will increase the likelihood of cash withdrawals leading to bank runs.
What is coming, I think, is a nominal short term interest rate that is moderately negative - an official Fed rate rather than a market rate as at present (as the Fed follows the market). This means people will be paying to own t-bills, but this will still be one of the best options available for short term capital preservation. The capital will be far less likely to be lost there than in a bank, and the return OF capital is the important thing. Despite a negative nominal rate, the real rate (the nominal rate minus negative inflation) will still be high as deleveraging continues and accelerates.
It won't be as high as it would have been at a nominal rate of zero, but there would still be a real return on top of greater capital security than most other options. I think a lot of investors will be happy to buy t-bills even where the nominal rate is negative. The US dollar appreciation relative to other currencies will be a significant bonus as well.
Of course cash on hand would be an even better option in terms of return, because that would have a higher nominal rate, zero percent, and therefore a higher real rate as well. The real rate will apply even outside a bank, reflecting the greater domestic purchasing power of liquidity. It isn't practical to hold really large sums of money in cash though. The main risk for cash is reissuance of the currency in a different form.
In the US they wouldn't need to make conversion difficult as they did in Russia, because there's not that much cash under the nation's beds (unlike in Russia where there was a chronic mistrust of banks). Requiring people to convert would require them to reveal what they had though, and this would probably result in windfall tax bills (i.e. extortion) for those who had been foresighted.
For T-bills the main risk is that the government could convert short term debt instruments into long term ones, and then default on them later like Argentina did. I think the risk of that for domestic investors is higher than for foreign, as it is foreign bond market participants that the government will not want to rattle, for fear of losing access to international debt financing.
The domestic ones could be strung a line about it being their patriotic duty to invest in their country. I don't think the risk is high at the moment, which is why I still recommend them for the next couple of years. The risk is non-zero, but lower than for almost anything else in a high risk environment.
Eventually one will want to get into hard assets, even if asset prices still have further to fall. Liquidity can be as hard to hang on to as it sounds, and is therefore not a long term bet. A couple of years should be enough to ride out the worst of an asset price collapse while still being in a relatively low risk position regarding liquidity.
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Elizabeth Warren: They work best behind closed doors
Why trade war is very likely to break out this year
by Michael Pettis
For two years some commentators have been arguing that the contraction in global demand set off by the 2008 crisis would lead almost inevitably to a trade war, following much the same path that the world took in the 1930s. With anger already being expressed over disordered currency markets by several leaders before the meeting of the Group of Seven wealthy nations in Iqaluit, Canada, next month, it is beginning to look as if 2010 will be the year that proves them right.
This should cause alarm. A breakdown in trade will slow the global recovery and create hostility and mistrust between major economies, making a resolution of important global problems, including the environment, terrorism and nuclear proliferation, unlikely. If trade issues are to be resolved optimally, policymakers in the leading economies must begin by understanding how difficult the problems are for their counterparts. Like the US before the 1930s Great Depression, China has benefited from a decade of surging productivity growth and an undervalued currency to claim an outsize share of global manufacturing and a relatively small share of global consumption, which requires it to export the surplus abroad.
As long as global demand surged, this was not a problem. But the global financial crisis set off a contraction in debt and of excess demand in overconsuming countries. China, like the US in 1930, has done everything it can to maintain its ability to export excess production, but Asian trade rivals and western importers, like Europe in 1930, are having none of it. The result is that trade is increasingly the centre of conflict, as it was after 1930. Since, as in 1930, each side has misunderstood or underestimated the others’ problems, it is hard to imagine trade disputes being resolved optimally. Escalating tensions, aggressive actions and reactions and a slower global recovery are more likely.
China’s problem is that it cannot change its reliance on foreign net demand quickly enough. Rebalancing the economy away from overproduction and towards domestic consumption is a long and difficult process. The historical precedents are clear. But it is also politically unacceptable for trade-deficit countries, especially in the developed west, to accept the high unemployment consistent with leakage of demand to trade-surplus countries. With 10 per cent US unemployment – and higher in some European countries – few will see the benefits of permitting domestic demand to be absorbed abroad to maintain employment in China.
Beijing needs to understand that the world cannot continue indefinitely accepting policies, such as an undervalued exchange rate and excessively low financing costs, that force China’s consumers to subsidise its exporters. Washington and Brussels must understand that China cannot possibly rebalance quickly without causing massive disruptions to its own economy. Unless they expect Beijing willingly to engineer a transition that causes domestic manufacturing to collapse and unemployment to surge, the west cannot expect a quick resolution.
Things will get worse before they get better. The massive monetary expansion engineered by the world’s major economies to protect themselves from the effects of the financial crisis has temporarily reduced the economic pain, but perhaps only at the cost of exacerbating the underlying imbalances. The US and European governments have postponed the necessary rise in savings. China has pumped money into increased production or into economically unviable infrastructure investment, which, since it must be paid for by China’s long-suffering consumers, will continue to inhibit consumption growth.
As a result the trade imbalances are more necessary than ever to justify increased investment in surplus countries, but rising unemployment makes them politically and economically unacceptable in deficit countries. Rising savings in the US will collide with stubbornly high savings in China. Unless a long-term solution is jointly worked out immediately, trade conflict will worsen and it will become increasingly hard to reverse offensive policies. Most importantly, if deficit countries demand structural change faster than surplus countries can manage, we will almost certainly finish with a nasty trade dispute that will slow the global recovery and poison relationships for years. Our new decade should not start out so badly.
The writer is a finance professor at Peking University and an associate with the Carnegie Endowment
Banks must raise billions to fend off crisis, says IMF
The world's biggest banks face an impending funding crisis, with a "wall of maturities" fast approaching, and must raise billions more in capital in the coming years, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has warned. In comments which will reignite fears of a relapse into a second financial crisis, the IMF said that banks have yet to bolster their balance sheets sufficiently and could be vulnerable to a whole range of shocks in the coming months. It also indicated that with governments including the UK and the US borrowing so much in the next few years, there was an increasing chance of a sovereign debt crisis, something which could trigger chaos for public and private sectors alike.
The warnings formed part of the IMF's update to its Global Financial Stability Report and World Economic Outlook, which its managing director, Dominique Strauss-Kahn is planning to roadshow at the World Economic Forum in Davos this week. The Fund said that, despite the remaining risks to the economic and financial system, policy-makers had "forestalled another Great Depression", and raised its growth forecasts for almost every economy in the world both this year and the next.
It lifted its world growth forecast this year by 0.75pc to 3.9pc, and in an unexpected boost to the Chancellor, Alistair Darling, it lifted its UK forecast by 0.4pc points this year to 1.3pc, putting it in line with the Treasury's own projection. However, the good news was overshadowed by its fresh warnings about the vulnerability of the banking system. It said that although it was likely to revise its estimate of losses derived from the global financial crisis from its October $3.4 trillion (£2.1 trillion) estimate, banks had still failed to reinforce their balance sheets sufficiently.
It said: "Even though some bank capital has been raised, substantial additional capital may be needed to support the recovery of credit and sustain economic growth under expected new Basel capital adequacy standards". Banking analysts recently estimated that Barclays would need to raise an extra £17bn in capital to comply with the new rules, with other banks facing similarly large bills. With some insiders suggesting that even the new stricter Basel rules on capital do not go far enough, the potential cost could be higher still.
The IMF also warned that banks face "a wall of maturities looming ahead through 2011–13" in their shorter-term funding. It added: "A future retrenchment in confidence therefore could severely weaken banks' ability to roll over this debt." However, it is not merely the banks themselves that have caused the IMF concern. It name-checked the UK as one country facing particular scrutiny over the state and sustainability of its public finances, saying the extra debt raised by the Government could, at the very least, "crowd out private sector credit growth, gradually raising interest rates for private borrowers and putting a drag on the economic recovery."
European states need to borrow $3.1 trillion
European governments will need to borrow a record €2,200bn ($3,100bn) from capital markets this year to finance budget deficits. The projected borrowing is a 3.7 per cent increase on the €2,120bn raised in 2009, according to Fitch Ratings, as governments continue to issue sovereign bonds and short-term bills. This will put pressure on public finances as yields and volatility are set to rise. The ratings agency said France would be the biggest issuer this year, raising an estimated €454bn, then Italy at €393bn, Germany at €386bn and the UK at €279bn.
As a percentage of gross domestic product, borrowing is expected to be the largest in Italy, Belgium, France and Ireland - at about 25 per cent. Fitch warned over a rise in issuance of short-term Treasury bills in France, Germany, Spain and Portugal, "as it increases market risk faced by governments, notably exposure to interest rate shocks". Fitch said 2010 was likely to see greater volatility as the liquidity premium enjoyed by sovereign issuers diminished as the recovery gathered pace. This meant a material risk of a rise in government funding costs as yields rose.
"Combined with concerns over the medium-term fiscal and inflation outlook, this will likely cause government bond yields to rise, potentially quite sharply." But Fitch said high-grade sovereigns would not have problems accessing markets, though they would have to pay higher rates. It said one of the most striking developments was the scale of deterioration in public finances, with every European country in budgetary deficit and four with deficits of more than 12 per cent of GDP.
"This reflects not only the cyclical effect of the recession and the discretionary easing of fiscal policy but also deterioration in the underlying health of the public finances," it said. "Although debt markets have not imposed binding funding restraints on European governments, relative pricing is much more dispersed between countries since the onset of the financial crisis. This trend will continue."
Fitch, ECB sound alarm on European national debts
The Fitch credit rating agency and the European Central Bank issued strong warnings on Tuesday about the weight of European government debt threatening financial markets and economic recovery this year. Fitch said that on average nearly one fifth of national output would be absorbed by debt costs, but in some countries such as Italy, France and Ireland it would be about one quarter. But the biggest and best borrowers should attract lenders without undue problems but at higher interest rates, Fitch said.
An associate director for sovereign debt at Fitch, Douglas Renwick, said: "The increase in the stock of short-term debt is a source of concern to Fitch as it increases market risk faced by governments, notably exposure to interest rate shocks." And at the ECB in Frankfurt, which is responsible for eurozone monetary policy and interest rates, chief economist Juergen Stark said: "We are seriously concerned about forecasts of strong rises in government deficits and the indebtedness of countries in the eurozone." He warned in a speech that this trend could lead ratings agencies to further downgrade government debt bonds and to further negative reaction in financial markets.
Two weeks ago, another leading ratings agency, Moody's, warned that 2010 would be a "difficult" year for European government debt ratings. In November, it had warned that global goverment debts had risen by nearly 45 percent from 2007 to 2010, or by 15.3 trillion dollars (10.86 trillion euros) and in 2010 would total 49.3 billion dollars. The increase was equivalent to 100 times the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe after World War II. These concerns highlight an accumulation of past annual budget deficits, together forming national debts, which have risen sharply with the costs of rescuing economies during the financial crisis.
Fitch estimated that 15 of the 27 countries in the European Union, and Switzerland, would have to borrow the equivalent of 19 percent of their annual national production this year to finance budget overspending and roll over existing debt. The warnings came amid concern about cohesion of the eurozone owing to a debt crisis in Greece and strains in other eurozone countries, notably Portugal and Ireland, that analysts say have contributed to a recent fall of the euro. There is also concern about a sharp worsening of public finances in Britain, a member of the EU but not of the eurozone.
However, Fitch said that in absolute terms, the country with the biggest problem was France, followed by Italy and Germany, the biggest eurozone economy, with Britain some way behind. Fitch estimated that the European countries surveyed would have to borrow 2.2 trillion euros, or the equivalent of 19 percent of their annual economic production, this year to cover deficits and extend existing debt. This was a marginal increase from the 2009 figure "which Fitch estimates to have been close to 2.12 trillion euros (17 percent of GDP) -- itself the largest borrowing requirement seen in decades."
Fitch said that in looking at 15 EU countries and Switzerland it found that gross borrowing "in absolute terms is projected to be largest in France (454 billion euros), Italy (393 billion euros), Germany (386 billion euros), and the UK (279 billion euros)." But as a percentage of gross domestic product, the ratio was biggest in Italy, Belgium, France and Ireland, all at about 25 percent. However, its differing credit ratings for these countries were currently stable. These ratings are critical for governments when they issue bonds, carrying a fixed interest or yield, to borrow on international capital markets.
A rating ranks perceived risk. If it falls, the country's bonds tend to fall, pushing up the yield relative to the new price, signalling that the borrowing country must offer a higher return on its next bond issue. Fitch said that European governments had increased their overall debt in 2009 by 20 percent from the level in 2008. Referring to risk aversion at the height of the crisis, it said that conditions had been favourable because of heavy demand for such debt and low interest rates.
This year, concern over national budgets and inflation, and a recovery in risk appetite, meant that "government bond yields are likely to rise, potentially quite sharply." However, big countries with strong ratings were unlikely to experience problems in raising money "albeit at more expensive rates", but a widening of the differences in national yields would persist, Fitch forecast.
Swaps Trading Surges as National Deficits Rise
Traders are buying protection against defaults on sovereign debt at more than five times the rate of company bonds as governments fund ballooning deficits. The net amount of credit-default swaps outstanding on 54 governments from Japan to Italy jumped 14.2 percent since Oct. 9, compared with 2.6 percent for all other contracts, according to Depository Trust & Clearing Corp. data. European countries led the increase, with the amount of protection on Portugal climbing 23 percent, Spain 16 percent and Greece 5 percent.
Rising use of derivatives to insure against defaults or speculate on government bond prices is spilling over into the corporate debt market, stemming a rally that drove yields to the lowest relative to sovereign benchmarks since December 2007, according to BNP Paribas SA. The global financial system remains “fragile,” with sovereign debt posing a risk to markets, the Washington-based International Monetary Fund said yesterday in its Global Financial Stability Report.
The perception of rising risk “can puncture a country’s ability to access the capital markets,” said Scott MacDonald, head of credit and economics research at Stamford, Connecticut- based Aladdin Capital Management LLC, which oversees $11.9 billion. “Maybe it’s not an end-all be-all indicator. But when these countries get into a position where they need to raise capital, it becomes a confidence game,” he said. Credit swaps on Greece jumped 48 basis points today to a record 373 basis points, according to CMA DataVision in London. Contracts on Spain rose 17 basis points to 127 basis points, Portugal swaps increased 18.5 to 149 and Italy jumped 10 to 114, CMA prices show.
Elsewhere in credit markets, the Markit CDX North America Investment Grade Index rose its first increase this week, climbing 2 basis points to 96 basis points as of 10:05 a.m. in New York, according to broker Phoenix Partners Group. The index, a benchmark gauge of credit risk that’s linked to 125 companies, rises as investor confidence deteriorates. Yesterday, the extra yield investors demand to own corporate bonds instead of Treasuries held at 164 basis points, or 1.64 percentage points, Bank of America Merrill Lynch’s Global Broad Market Corporate Index showed. The spread has widened from this year’s low of 160 basis points on Jan. 14. Spreads on high-yield securities increased for the sixth day yesterday, the longest period since August. The gap on junk bonds widened to an average of 644 basis points from 642 basis points on Jan. 25 and the low this year of 599 basis points on Jan. 11, according to the Bank of America U.S. High Yield Master II index.
Bond sales by U.S. and European companies have slowed this week as spreads widen, falling to $14.6 billion, down 20 percent from the $18.3 billion of issuance in the same period a week ago, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The market for mortgage-backed and asset-backed securities, one of the last parts of the credit market to recover from the worst financial crisis since the 1930s, is showing signs of improving. Lloyds Banking Group Plc is selling $2.4 billion of bonds in euros, pounds and dollars in Europe’s first issue of mortgage-backed debt aimed partly at U.S. investors since credit markets began to seize up in 2007. Ford Motor Co.’s finance unit plans to offer $1 billion of bonds backed by auto leases, according to a person familiar with the offering who declined to be identified because the terms aren’t set. Yesterday, Discover Financial Services sold $750 million of bonds backed by credit-card payments, boosting the sale from $500 million.
Unprecedented fiscal and monetary stimulus programs have “come at the cost of significant increase of risk to sovereign balance sheets and a consequent increase in sovereign debt burdens that raise risks for financial stability in the future,” the IMF said in the report. The Markit iTraxx SovX Western Europe Index, which measures the cost of credit-default swap protection on the debt of 15 governments from Germany to Greece, rose 9.25 basis points to a record 87.25 basis points, according to CMA DataVision prices. That means it costs $87,250 a year to insure against losses on $10 million of debt for five years.
Default swaps tied to Greece’s sovereign debt have more than tripled since Sept. 30 as the government struggles to reduce a budget deficit that’s 12.7 percent of gross domestic product, CMA DataVision prices show. Greece sold 8 billion euros ($11.3 billion) of bonds this week at a premium to yields on outstanding securities in the first issue since the country was downgraded last month by Standard & Poor’s, Moody’s Investors Service and Fitch Ratings. The net notional amount of credit swaps on Greece has increased to $8.8 billion, according to DTCC data.
Contracts on Portugal bonds have jumped to $9.6 billion since Oct. 9, the data show, as the nation faces a budget shortfall that’s more than twice the European Union’s limit. The cost of protection on Portugal has more than doubled since September, according to CMA. Bets on Italy have jumped 13 percent to $25.4 billion, while the net amount of swaps on Spain climbed 16 percent to $15.2 billion. Traders “are not necessarily betting there’s a default,” said Brian Yelvington, head of fixed-income strategy at Greenwich, Connecticut-based broker-dealer Knight Libertas LLC. “But rather that the credit risk profiles differ enough that they certainly shouldn’t trade right on top of each other.” Credit swaps on Spain have jumped to 92.5 basis points more than Germany, from 31 basis points on Sept. 30, CMA data show.
The surge in trading of sovereign debt swaps comes as the cost to protect against losses on government debt exceeds that of companies in some cases. Swaps on almost a third of the 125 companies in the benchmark Markit iTraxx Europe Index are trading for less than the governments of the countries where they’re based, BNP analyst Andrea Cicione in London said in a report last week. In the U.S., swaps on 8 companies in the Markit CDX North America Investment Grade Index were quoted for less than contracts on Treasuries, according to CMA data. The U.K. is selling index-linked bonds due March 2040 that may yield 2 basis points to 4 basis points less than the 2037 inflation-protected gilt, according to Deutsche Bank AG, one of the issue managers.
The cost of protecting against losses on European corporate bonds rose today, with the high-yield Markit iTraxx Crossover Index of default swaps climbing 17 basis points to 456, the highest level since Dec. 21, according to JPMorgan Chase & Co. prices. The Markit iTraxx Japan index fell 4 basis points to 138, BNP Paribas prices show, the biggest drop since Jan. 7. Lloyds, the U.K.’s biggest provider of home loans, is offering the first dollar-denominated mortgage bonds backed by European assets since July 2007, Deutsche Bank AG data show. Britain’s mortgage-backed bond market shut in 2007 when securities linked to U.S. subprime loans slumped, causing investors to shun hard-to-value assets.
A portion of top-rated notes in dollars with an average life of 2.95 years may yield about 115 basis points more than the London interbank offered rate, or Libor, said three people with knowledge of the deal who declined to be identified before the transaction is completed. The bonds, backed by prime U.K. mortgages, will be issued by Lloyds’s Permanent Master Issuer Plc, the people said. Lloyds, 43 percent-owned by U.K. taxpayers, is tapping dollar-based investors as prices on U.S. mortgage securities increase from record lows. The most-senior notes backed by U.S. option adjustable-rate mortgages traded last week at about 54 cents on the dollar from 33 cents in March, Barclays Capital Inc. data show.
Ford’s sale of asset-backed bonds comes three weeks after the Dearborn, Michigan-based automaker’s finance unit issued $1.25 billion of so-called floorplan bonds, which are linked to loans that finance cars on dealer lots. Nissan Motor Co. plans to offer $500 million of bonds backed by payments from dealers, according to a person familiar with the offering. The top-rated debt is eligible for the Federal Reserve’s Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility, said the person. A “robust” recovery in the commercial mortgage-backed securities market in Europe is unlikely this year, with only “sporadic issuance” of about 15 billion euros expected, Moody’s said in a report today.
U.S. junk bonds have returned 1.41 percent on average this month, compared with 1.79 percent for investment-grade company debt, Bank of America indexes show. Junk bonds are rated below Baa3 by Moody’s and less than BBB- by S&P. Junk bonds weakened yesterday even as reports in the U.S. showed home prices and consumer confidence both climbed. The S&P/Case-Shiller home-price index increased 0.2 percent in November and the Conference Board’s confidence gauge rose this month to the highest level in more than a year. The U.S. Federal Open Market Committee is likely to keep its target interest rate for lending between banks unchanged in a statement at about 2:15 p.m. today, after completing its two- day policy meeting. The Fed probably won’t raise rates from its range of zero to 0.25 percent target until November, according to the median of 51 forecasts in a Bloomberg survey of economists.
Don't invest in Britain: The UK economy sits 'on a bed of nitroglycerine', investors warned
Gordon Brown's election strategy was dealt a further blow today after the boss of the world's biggest bond house warned investors to avoid the UK economy.
Bill Gross, who runs Pacific Investment Management Co mutual fund, said the British economy was lying on 'a bed of nitroglycerine'. In his monthly newsletter, Mr Gross said: 'The UK is a must to avoid. Its gilts are resting on a bed of nitroglycerine.'High debt with the potential to devalue its currency present high risks for bond investors. 'In addition, its interest rates are already artificially influenced by accounting standards that at one point last year produced long-term real interest rates of 0.5 per cent and lower.'
The warning comes a day after it was revealed that Britain had limped out of recession with an anaemic return to growth that raised fears of a second downturn. Economists said the fragile recovery suggested a real risk of a 'double dip', in which the economy plunges back into the red. Output rose by 0.1 per cent in the final three months of last year. Production shrank a calamitous 4.8 per cent over the whole of 2009 and is down 6 per cent since 2008, making the recession the worst since the 1930s. And separate figures from the International Monetary Fund showed the downturn was six times worse than the global average.The most vulnerable countries in 2010 are shown in PIMCOs chart 'The Ring of Fire'. These red zone countries are ones with the potential for public debt to exceed 90% of GDP within a few years time, which would slow GDP by 1 per cent or more. The yellow and green areas are considered to be the most conservative and potentially most solvent, with the potential for higher growth
Mr Gross recommended shifting assets to Asia and developing countries and on the sovereign debt front said he favored Canada. The G7 industrialised nations have 'lost their position as drivers of the global economy' and will likely reel for years from the effects of increasing indebtedness, Mr Gross added.But Britain was a 'must avoid'. Mr Gross's warning is doubly embarrassing for Labour because Pimco's European investment team is headed by Andrew Balls, brother of Mr Brown's closest ally the Schools Secretary Ed Balls.
The weak growth figures, which were well below City forecasts, are a major blow to Mr Brown, who has pinned his election hopes on an economic recovery. There was speculation last night that the Prime Minister could even call a snap general election next month to avoid the need for a Budget and pre-empt the next set of growth figures, due in April. Downing Street said he was 'confident but cautious' about growth. Alistair Darling raised eyebrows yesterday by insisting that he 'absolutely' stood by forecasts that growth would hit 1-1.5 per cent this year. The Chancellor said the figures underlined the need to continue Government spending to support the economy.
He said Tory plans to cut spending now would 'end up wrecking the recovery'. He said: 'There are many bumps along the way, we are not out of the woods yet, so I think my caution is right. What I would say though is these figures, which show modest growth, demonstrate the need for us to maintain support for the economy now.' Mr Darling said there were many reasons to be confident about the recovery, including lower than expected unemployment and fewer home repossessions.Last night he conceded it would take years before the economy recovered to the level it was at before the financial crisis, warning: 'It's growth, but the figures are very modest. I said at the Budget that we had probably lost about five per cent of out capacity.'
But George Osborne accused Labour of making the recession worse by failing to prepare the economy for the downturn and by destroying business confidence. The Shadow Chancellor said: 'After this great recession, any signs of growth are welcome, but these very weak growth figures show that Gordon Brown's Government left us badly prepared for the recession and badly prepared for the recovery. 'We urgently need a new model of economic growth that includes a credible deficit reduction plan that keeps mortgage rates low, creates jobs and doesn't choke off recovery.' LibDem Treasury spokesman Vince Cable said the economy was still too reliant on consumer spending, debt and the struggling financial sector.
James Knightley, an economist at ING bank, said: 'It is certainly possible we get a double dip, because incomes are not going up and there will be more strain from fiscal measures. 'We could yet see a return to negative growth in 2010. It is possible that it will happen as soon as the first quarter, although it may be more of a risk for the second half of the year.' Analysts warned that the marginal growth recorded at the end of 2009 could be revised down by the Office for National Statistics next month. John Hawksworth, an economist for PricewaterhouseCoopers, said: 'Given the normal margin of error for such preliminary GDP estimates, the difference between 0.1 per cent and zero growth is statistically insignificant.'
The UK's 4.8 per cent slump was six times larger than the 0.8 per cent contraction across the world economy, according to the IMF. Output fell by 2.5 per cent in the U.S. and by 3.9 per cent in the euro zone. The outlook for 2010 is also decidedly sub-par for Britain, according to the Washington-based fund. It predicted the economy will expand 1.3 per cent in 2010, well below the 2.1 per cent growth expected across advanced economies and the 2.7 per cent gain forecast for the U.S. Experts said the Bank of England may now keep interest rates at 0.5 per cent for much longer.
The GDP figures sparked heated exchanges between Business Secretary Lord Mandelson and former Tory chancellor Ken Clarke on Channel 4 News last night. Lord Mandelson said the recession was now behind us and the growth figures would be revised up. He claimed: 'The economy has emerged more strongly and more intact than was predicted.' Mr Clarke countered: 'That's not true. This is the deepest and longest recession we have ever seen.' As both men raised their voices, Mr Clarke at one point said: 'For heaven's sake behave yourself.' Presenter Jon Snow intervened to urge them to call a truce.
Why we should expect low growth amid debt
by Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff
As government debt levels explode in the aftermath of the financial crisis, there is ?growing uncertainty about how quickly to exit from today’s extraordinary fiscal stimulus. Our research on the long history of financial crises suggests that choices are not easy, no matter how much one wants to believe the present illusion of normalcy in markets. Unless this time is different – which so far has not been the case – yesterday’s financial crisis could easily morph into tomorrow’s government debt crisis.
In previous cycles, international banking crises have often led to a wave of sovereign defaults a few years later. The dynamic is hardly surprising, since public debt soars after a financial crisis, rising by an average of over 80 per cent within three years. Public debt burdens soar owing to bail-outs, fiscal stimulus and the collapse in tax revenues. Not every banking crisis ends in default, but whenever there is a huge international wave of crises as we have just seen, some governments choose this route.
We do not anticipate outright defaults in the largest crisis-hit countries, certainly nothing like the dramatic de facto defaults of the 1930s when the US and Britain abandoned the gold standard. Monetary institutions are more stable (assuming the US Congress leaves them that way). Fundamentally, the size of the shock is less. But debt burdens are racing to thresholds of (roughly) 90 per cent of gross domestic product and above. That level has historically been associated with notably lower growth.
While the exact mechanism is not certain, we presume that at some point, interest rate premia react to unchecked deficits, forcing governments to tighten fiscal policy. Higher taxes have an especially deleterious effect on growth. We suspect that growth also slows as governments turn to financial repression to place debts at sub-market interest rates.
Fortunately, many emerging markets are in better fiscal shape than advanced countries, particularly with regard to external debt. While many advanced countries took on massive increases in external debt during the run-up to the crisis, many emerging markets were busy deleveraging. Unfortunately, this is not the case in emerging Europe, where external debt burdens average over 100 per cent of GDP; external (again including public plus private) debt levels in troubled Greece and Ireland are even higher. Will the typical wave of post-financial crisis defaults follow in the next few years? That depends on many factors.
One factor that is different is the huge expansion of the International Monetary Fund initiated last April. IMF programmes can mitigate outright panics and will help those countries that genuinely make an effort to adjust. For some countries, however, debt burdens will prove politically intractable even after IMF loans. They will eventually require restructuring. Indeed, the IMF must ensure that it does not simply enable countries to dig deeper holes that lead to more destructive defaults, as occurred in Argentina in 2001. Having imposed very lax conditions in response to the financial crisis, the IMF now faces its own difficult exit strategy. How this unfolds will affect the timing of defaults, though debt downgrades and interest rate spikes have already started to unfold.
Another big unknown is the future path of world real interest rates, which have been trending downwards for many years. The lower these rates are, the higher the debt levels countries can sustain without facing market discipline. One common mistake is for governments to “play the yield curve” – as debts soar, shifting to cheaper short-term debt to economise on interest costs. Unfortunately, a government with massive short-term debts to roll over is ill-positioned to adjust if rates spike or market confidence fades.
Given these risks of higher government debt, how quickly should governments exit from fiscal stimulus? This is not an easy task, especially given weak employment, which is again quite characteristic of the post-second world war financial crises suffered by the Nordic countries, Japan, Spain and many emerging markets. Given the likelihood of continued weak consumption growth in the US and Europe, rapid withdrawal of stimulus could easily tilt the economy back into recession. Yet, the sooner politicians reconcile themselves to accepting adjustment, the lower the risks of truly paralysing debt problems down the road. Although most governments still enjoy strong access to financial markets at very low interest rates, market discipline can come without warning. Countries that have not laid the groundwork for adjustment will regret it.
Markets are already adjusting to the financial regulation that must follow in the wake of unprecedented taxpayer largesse. Soon they will also wake up to the fiscal tsunami that is following. Governments who have convinced themselves that they have done things so much better than their predecessors had better wake up first. This time is not different.
US New Home Sales Drop 7.6 % In December
New home sales posted an unexpected drop in December, capping the industry's worst year on record and fueling concern that the housing market turnaround could falter. Last month's results were the weakest since March and were only 4 percent above the bottom last January. The data showed the housing recovery remains limp despite newly expanded tax incentives to spur sales. Many in the industry, however, expect sales to pick up as the April 30 deadline for the tax credit nears.
Some builders are nervous. "If we don't see better data in March and April, we're going to have a big problem," said John Wieland, CEO of Atlanta-based John Wieland Homes and Neighborhoods. But traffic from potential buyers has picked up in recent weeks, he said, and will increase even more if consumers become more confident in the economy's recovery. "People are looking ahead and saying, 'This recession has gone on a long time and I'm going ahead with my life,'" Wieland said.
Nationwide, new home sales for December fell 7.6 percent to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 342,000 from an upwardly revised November pace of 370,000, the Commerce Department said Wednesday. Economists surveyed by Thomson Reuters had forecast a pace of 370,000 for December. "Another wheezing home sales report," wrote JPMorgan Chase economist Michael Feroli. Tom Brown, co-owner of Summerville, S.C.-based Crown Home Builders, was not surprised that last month was so poor for the industry. Buyers are having trouble meeting tough criteria for mortgage loans, he said. And though builders are cutting prices, the shaky economy and weak job market are keeping home shoppers away. "People are holding on to what they have," he said.
Housing remains one of the weakest links for the economic recovery. On Wednesday afternoon, Federal Reserve policymakers wrapped up a two-day meeting but did not repeat previous assertions that the housing market is improving.
The central bank maintained its pledge to hold interest rates it charges banks at a record low to nurture the economic recovery. The Fed made no changes to its $1.25 trillion program that has held down mortgage rates. It is still scheduled to end by March 31. Rates appeared to be holding steady. Of 130 lenders tracked by mortgage broker Jim Sahnger, just seven had changed rates up or down Wednesday afternoon. "There's a lot of anxiety, but nothing really right now that would impact the consumer," said Sahnger, a broker with Palm Beach Financial Network in Jupiter, Fla.
Only 374,000 new homes were sold last year, down 23 percent from a year earlier and the weakest year on records dating back to 1963. December's sales were nearly 9 percent below the same month last year. This year, the National Association of Home Builders is forecasting more than 500,000 sales. Even if that happens, "it hardly makes you ecstatic," said Bernard Markstein, senior economist at the trade group, noting that the industry clocked more than 1 million sales a year from 2003 through 2006.
Home sales have had a rocky recovery from their four-year slide. December's sales pace for new homes was up 4 percent from the bottom in January 2009, but down 75 percent from the peak in July 2005. The median sales price of $221,300 in December was down nearly 4 percent from $229,600 a year earlier, but up about 5 percent from November's median of $210,300. New home sales varied widely across the country. Sales of new homes plummeted by 41 percent in the Midwest and fell by 7 percent in the south. But they skyrocketed 43 percent in the Northeast and rose 5 percent in the West. "You have some builders that are still struggling while others are doing well," said Brad Hunter, chief economist with Metrostudy, a real estate research and consulting firm.
And any housing recovery this year is likely to be slow and labored. So far, the housing recovery has been fueled mainly by hundreds of billions in federal spending that has pushed down mortgage rates and propped up demand. Congress decided last year to extend a tax credit of up to $8,000 for first-time buyers until the end of April. Homeowners who have lived in their current properties for at least five years can claim a tax credit of up to $6,500 if they move.
Executives at Meritage Homes Corp., at Scottsdale, Ariz.-based builder, said the tax credit extension led to a slowdown in sales in the final three months of last year compared with the summer. Still, Meritage CEO Steven Hilton said the company is ramping up construction, anticipating that the incentive will boost sales in the coming months. "We are gearing up for the 2010 spring selling season," he said. There were 231,000 new homes for sale at the end of December, down about 2 percent from November and the lowest inventory level since April 1971. But at the current lackluster sales pace, that still represents 8 months of supply – above a healthy level of around 6 or 7 months. John Freer, president of Riverworks Inc., a custom home builder in Missoula, Mont. who builds environmentally sustainable homes, said traffic and sales have been picking up. Along with the tax credit, he said, "I think people are a little bit more optimistic than they were last year."
Robert Prechter sees the next leg down
Roubini Sees Policy Risks to `U-Shaped Anemic Recovery'
In an interview from Davos today, economist Nouriel Roubini told Bloomberg Television that the global economy could endure a second recession if governments withdraw too quickly from their stimulus policies. But extending the stimulus too long is also dangerous, Roubini predicted, and could run up the deficit, lead to inflation and ultimately end in a "fiscal train wreck":"My main scenario is one of a U-shaped economic recovery rather than a double-dip W, so I see the high probability of a slow recovery in advanced economies. But I also see risk of a double-dip rising, especially if there's a policy mistake like exiting too soon from the stimulus, or exiting too late, so that's a tough choice for policymakers."Roubini said he is confident that policymakers in the U.S. won't end their stimulus policy too quickly. But he fears the risk of an early exit in the Eurozone, where monetary policy has been tighter. And he indicated that the global recovery hinges in large part on how and when China withdraws from its stimulus. If China tightens too much, Roubini said, "there's going to be a market correction throughout Asia and also in other parts of the world."
Banks Help Employees With Wall Street Pay
Despite their tough talk about clamping down on pay, banks and securities firms are using other financial perks to ease the toll on employees. Bank of America Corp. and Citigroup Inc. are doling out shares that employees can sell within monthsmuch sooner than normally allowed. Other giant banks, including Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Royal Bank of Scotland Group PLC, let certain employees borrow money to relieve personal cash crunches. And some U.K. banks have considered raising base, or cash salariesfunds that won't be subject to the country's new 50% tax on bonuses.
Such moves are a contrast to concessions recently made by large financial firms in hopes of defusing public anger, and political retaliation, over the comeback of sky-high compensation. Many banks and securities firms are paying bonuses with a bigger percentage of stock. Goldman, for example, sharply reined in pay and benefits during the fourth quarter. This week, the firm told partners that 60% of their 2009 bonuses will be in the form of restricted stock. The new pay culture is squeezing bankers with hefty mortgage payments and private-school tuition billsand has prompted some companies to find ways to assist cash-squeezed employees. "I know it sounds ridiculous to Main Street, but it's a hardship," says Gary Goldstein, who runs Whitney Group, a financial-services job-search firm in New York. "So firms are trying to help out any way they can."
Loans are the most popular form of financial aid for traders and investment bankers. Gustavo Dolfino, a senior managing director at recruiting firm Accretive Solutions, says loans "are happening all over" Wall Street. They include a type of bridge loan made to tide over employees whose fixed expenses outstrip available cash resources. Such loans aren't new, experts say, but they are becoming more common. Unlike normal borrowers, bankers and traders sometimes can get below-market rates on loans or face lighter collateral requirements, industry officials say.
A rise in favorable employee loans could fuel new resentment over the pay culture at financial companies. Many banks remain tight about lending to consumers and small businesses. Loan balances at U.S. banks shrank by 2.8% in last year's third quarter, the largest decline in at least 25 years, according to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. Royal Bank of Scotland is setting up a program for employees who want to borrow against a portion of their deferred compensation at market rates. A spokesman at RBS says few employees tapped the bank's loan program when it was offered last year.
UBS AG issued loans to more than a dozen employees who faced a cash crunch last year. The firm is weighing whether to offer similar in-house credit this year, a person familiar with the situation says. Goldman has let a small number of employees take out loans through the company's banking unit. A spokesman says the loans don't carry bargain interest rates, aren't forgivable, and aren't connected to compensation. Steven Eckhaus, a partner at law firm Katten Muchin Rosenman LLP in New York, says he recently worked on two cases in which banks explored employee loans. He expects to see more such inquiries. "You're seeing a lot more flavors of compensation and the way pay is structured," Mr. Eckhaus says.
Citigroup officials have told some investment-banking employees that the company was considering offering loans to cash-strapped workers, according to people familiar with the matter. Citigroup decided not to launch a special loan program but is continuing to offer forgivable loans to a handful of employees, primarily as a recruiting and retention tool. Employees typically aren't required to repay forgivable loans unless they leave the company. Some banks are easing the restrictions on restricted stock, making the shares nearly as liquid as cash. At Bank of America, restricted stock being distributed at the investment-banking unit can be sold as soon as August. Citigroup is issuing $1.7 billion of stock units that employees can sell in April.
Banking regulators globally have encouraged banks to make their pay deferral periods longer, at least a year or more. Citigroup last week said it has capped most cash bonuses at $100,000 per employee. But that limit doesn't count "deferred cash" awards, which some investment bankers and traders are getting. Those payments are locked up in Citigroup interest-bearing accounts for a few years before employees can get their hands on the cash. A person familiar with the situation says Citigroup employees generally will get about 25% to 60% of their compensation as long-term deferred stock or cash.
In the U.K., banks are looking for ways to maneuver around the one-time bonus tax, despite warnings from U.K. Treasury and tax officials that any attempt to pay a bonus after the tax year ends in April would result in an extension of the law. Because base salaries aren't subject to the levy, some banks have looked at jacking them up temporarily, according to U.K. tax officials and pay consultants. Some U.S. banks took a similar step last year after Congress clamped down on bonuses. British officials have blessed the shift to higher salaries, saying they help rein in risky decision-making. But the salary increases must be permanent, or they will be taxed like a bonus. "A significant, one-off leap in salary is something we'll be keeping an eye on," says Paul Franklin, a spokesman for the U.K.'s tax service. In December, Barclays PLC decided to raise salaries across the bank, backdating them to July. Credit Suisse Group AG, Morgan Stanley, UBS and Citigroup also have raised the base salaries of some employees.
George Soros warns gold is now the 'ultimate bubble'
Gold is now "the ultimate bubble", billionaire investor George Soros has declared, sparking fears that prices for the precious metal may soon suffer a tumble. Mr Soros, arguably the most famous hedge fund manager in history, warned that with interest rates low around the world, policymakers were risking generating new bubbles which could cause crashes in the future. In comments delivered on the fringe of the World Economic Forum, Mr Soros said: "When interest rates are low we have conditions for asset bubbles to develop, and they are developing at the moment. The ultimate asset bubble is gold."
Gold prices last month reached a record level of just over $1,225 per ounce, having risen around 40pc last year. Investors are piling into the metal amid fears both of potential inflation and fading faith about the stability of previously-assumed safe assets such as government debt. However, the chairman of Barrick Gold, the world's biggest producer, Peter Munk, said he expected the metal's upward march to continue. Mr Soros added that by proposing imminent "exit strategies" from the unprecedented support handed out to troubled banks and consumers, governments around the world could be in danger of triggering a double-dip in the global economy. In comments which will reinforce Labour's plan to fight the next election on promises not to start raising taxes or cutting spending too soon, he said that it was still too early to slash budget deficits.
He said: "I think that since the adjustment process to the recession is incomplete, there is a need for additional stimulus. Some countries, like the US and European countries, have plenty of room to increase their deficits. The political resistance to doing so increases the chances of a double dip in the economy in 2011 and after that." The Conservatives have pledged to start cutting public spending almost immediately after this year's election, but their promise was weakened earlier this week by an International Monetary Fund report warning that it may still be too early to begin this process. Mr Soros also came out in favour of Barack Obama's plan to split up large US banks, but said that proposals to tax the banking system could also endanger the recovery.
California Teachers Pension Fund $42.6 Billion Short
The California State Teachers Retirement System, the second biggest U.S. public pension, will need to ask taxpayers for more money after investment losses left it underfunded by $42.6 billion. The pension's unfunded liability, the difference between assets and anticipated future costs, almost doubled from $22.5 billion in June 2008, according to a report Chief Executive Officer Jack Ehnes will deliver to the board Feb. 5. The fund will ask lawmakers next year for an increase of as much as 14 percent to what the state and school districts already pay toward employee retirement benefits, said the report, which was posted on the fund's Web site today.
Calstrs, as the $156 billion pension fund is known, lost 25 percent in the fiscal year that ended June 30, led by a 43 percent decline in its real estate portfolio and 27.6 percent drop in private equity. The California Public Employees Retirement System, the largest public pension in the U.S., with $202 billion in assets, lost 23 percent in its fiscal year and also had to increase how much local governments must pay to finance retirement benefits. "With some levels of loss, it is plausible that future investment returns could mitigate most or all" of the unfunded liability, Ehnes said in the report. "Given the magnitude of these losses, that is not practical."
Ehnes said the fund would have to earn more than 20 percent, more than twice as much as it says is feasible, in each of the next five years to make up the gap without higher taxpayer subsidy. The pension fund plans on waiting until 2011 to seek a rate increase from the Legislature because lawmakers would not be receptive while trying to find a way to erase a $20 billion gap in the state budget, said the report. Increased public attention to the growing costs of government-worker retirement benefits and to pay-to-play scandals at other pensions also would make it more difficult to win contribution increases before 2011, according to the report. Any increase could be spread out across a number of years, the report said.
California: America’s First Failed State
Sometime last summer—around the time California's budget crisis led it to begin paying state workers in scrip—a meme took off in the media, that of California as a "failed state." Of course, it is nothing like the textbook definition of a failed state, a nation whose central government does not possess a monopoly on military force within its borders. But it was a humbling comedown for the Golden State to bear the stigma of the lowest credit rating in the nation, with a government virtually immobilized by its experiment with direct democracy, staggering under the incompatible demands of decades of citizen ballot initiatives.
The latest Intelligence Squared US debate at New York University focused on the proposition: "California Is the First Failed State." Arguing for the proposition were Andreas Kluth, the California correspondent for The Economist; Bobby Shriver, a Santa Monica city councilman, activist and brother-in-law of California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger; and Sharon Waxman, journalist and founder of TheWrap.com. On the other side were former California Gov. Gray Davis, who lost his job in a recall referendum in 2003; Van Jones, a human-rights and environmental activist; and Lawrence O'Donnell Jr., a television writer and producer and MSNBC senior political analyst. The moderator was ABC correspondent John Donvan. Edited excerpts:
Kluth: If a state can no longer address or solve the problems it faces, then it has failed. California easily meets that criterion. Prisons: California has the worst recidivism rate in the country. Water: it's an infrastructure and a climate issue but it's also a governance issue. Education: California built the best public university system in the country, which it is currently dismantling because it is now a failed state. Budgets: a state is supposed to have a budget, to pass it on time, and California never does. That started well before the recession. Our opponents may argue that as soon as there's a recovery these problems will recede. It's not true. Warren Buffett says it's only when the tide goes out that you learn who's swimming naked. Calfornia has been undressing since the 1970s…since the infamous Proposition 13. This is something called direct democracy that the founders of the nation were very afraid of. Twenty-four states have [citizen] initiatives. Only one does not allow its legislature to amend initiatives that its voters have passed, no matter how insane. In only one state do the inmates run the asylum.
Davis: Let me acknowledge there are problems in Sacramento. But the shortcomings of our elected officials should not detract from the creative contributions of our 37 million citizens. Our [gross domestic product] is $1.9 trillion, the eighth largest in the world, larger than Russia, India, or Canada. With all of its problems it still managed to nurture some of the most innovative companies in the world: Google, Apple, Hewlett-Packard, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Cisco, Intel, Disney, eBay, and many others. California is all about change: it likes to get there first, and it frequently does. It was the first state to regulate greenhouse gases, to allow full-scale stem-cell research, to establish renewable energy portfolio standards. Our electricity growth has been nada, zero, over 30 years as we became the largest state in America.
Waxman: Let's start with the area I know best, that I deal with every day, Hollywood, a symbol to the world of California's industry, creativity, prosperity, and the values of American culture. Here's the only problem with that. Hollywood's not in Hollywood anymore. It's gone to New Mexico, Arizona, New York, Vancouver, and London. Avatar, the movie breaking all box-office records, was filmed in New Zealand, and Twilight was filmed in Vancouver. Film production is down to half what it was in California in 1996.
One of my big observations about California, after having lived around the world for much of my adult life, is that there isn't a sense of connectedness, of community. In California we live largely in gated communities, we live in isolation. You can go to a place like Koreatown which has the largest ethnic community of Koreans outside Korea: 800,000 people. That community feels extremely Korean, connected to the country of their ancestors. I don't think they feel Californian. And I think that's true of many of the ethnic groups that have come to live in enclaves in California, and I see that as a failure of the state to create a sense of identity.
Jones: What our [opponents] haven't told you is that every single one of the problems, structural and otherwise, they have pointed to, have solutions, and the solutions are on the way. We are the biggest state, we have some of the biggest problems and we also have the largest number of problem solvers. To say that California is a failed state is different from saying it has some failings.
Shriver: I want to point out that the answers are on the way, they are not here now. In local government, where I serve, things are bad. In Santa Monica, our redevelopment agency had a budget this year of $30 million—the state took $22 million of that. How can you work on that basis?
There is no art education in the state in the public schools. We are the last among all the 50 states. We are below Guam in arts education.
In Los Angeles, we have the biggest homeless population in America, 80,000-plus people. In little old Santa Monica, a man burnt to death in a dumpster, a homeless man. And a senior official of the state said to me, Bob, why are you so hopped up about this homeless thing? I said, I'm afraid my mom, God rest her soul, is going to hear that a homeless guy burnt to death in a dumpster in my jurisdiction, and she would be enraged.
The L.A. County Jail is the largest mental-health facility in the world. If you went there you would be sickened. You can't have that many homeless people, you can't have that underfunding of education and say that the state has created a culture of political compassion.
O'Donnell: As we sit here in the lower end of Manhattan, is it conceivable that a homeless person has died in gruesome circumstances in this ZIP code? Ever? Or, maybe, how often? The delicious irony of having this debate in this state. Today's New York Times has one in a seemingly endless editorial series called "The Failed State." It stars, as usual: Albany.
I worked with Sen. [Daniel Patrick] Moynihan. We discovered that New York sends more money to the federal government than it gets back, hence all of its budget problems. Well, the problem is much worse in California. California gets 79 cents back for every dollar it sends to the federal government. So the reason you don't have 40 other so-called failed states is that California tax money is paying for Alabama, it's paying to keep Alaska running, it's paying to keep Arkansas afloat.
There are 43 states that have cut their enacted budgets for 2009. Tomorrow's newspaper will reveal that the governor's latest idea—New York's governor—is the largest cut in school aid in more than two decades. And in searching for new areas of revenue, the brilliant idea that your governor in New York is proposing is to legalize Ultimate Fighting. Congratulations.
Donvan: A question to the team that is arguing that California is the first failed state. You have been arguing primarily that this is a political failure, and the other team is listing successes in innovation, in technology, in the environment. Andreas [Kluth], what's wrong with that argument?
Kluth: Let's take a larger period of history, a few hundred years. The most elegant leather shoes come from a town near Bologna in northern Italy. The best violins come from another town in northern Italy. It's been that way for hundreds of years. Would you make the case that in postwar Europe Italy was not a failed state within the European Union because they had a great shoe industry and a great violin industry?
Davis: But the state is not an abstraction. It is the sum total of the energy and the innovation of 37 million people. It is an exciting place to live because when we have problems we say we're going to figure it out, we're going to do something different.
As in all Intelligence Squared US debates, the audience was polled twice, before and after the debate, and the side that swung the most votes to its side was declared the winner. Before the debate, 31 percent of the audience agreed that California was the first failed state, 25 percent disagreed, and 44 percent was undecided. At the end, the vote was 58 percent agreeing, 37 percent disagreeing, and 5 percent undecided.
Chinese central banker Zhu Min warns of new Asian crisis
China's deputy central bank chief Zhu Min warned that tighter US monetary policy could spark a sudden outflow of capital from emerging markets, evoking the 1990s Asian financial crisis. A rapid withdrawal of funds would not only cause volatility in the currency exchange markets, but could also generate currency moves similar to those during the Asian crisis of over a decade ago. "Capital flows - it's a real risk this year for the economy," Zhu Min told participants at the World Economic Forum's annual meeting in Davos.
Mr Zhu noted that investors are increasingly borrowing the cheap US dollar, and investing the borrowed funds in emerging markets, where interest rates are higher, and therefore generating a better return than saving in the dollars. This phenomenon called carry trade in the US dollar is a "massive issue today," said Mr Zhu. "It's bigger than the Japanese yen carry trade 12 years ago," he said. However, if the United States were to tighten its lax monetary policy, making borrowing more costly, funds could then flow out just as suddenly from emerging markets, back into the US market. This could cause a collapse in emerging markets' currencies, and spark a repeat of the 1997-1998 Asian financial crisis.
Then, the Japanese yen was cheap and investors were borrowing it and investing in South-east Asian economies, fueling strong growth in the region. But as exports slumped amid a global demand slowdown, speculators began attacking the South-east Asian currencies, believing that they were overvalued. Thailand was first to crack and it abandoned its fixed exchange rate and float its currency against the US dollar. Other currencies followed suit and crashed under crippling debt levels and amid soaring interest rates. "It's what we learnt from the Asian financial crisis. Because the yen went back to the Tokyo market," said Mr Zhu.
"Everyone is concerned about the direction which the capital flow will move. It's an absolute real risk for the year," he said. He also defended China's stance on the yuan, saying that a stable yuan was crucial. "It's very important to have a stable yuan particularly in this very volatile market," he said. Beijing has been under fire for deliberately undervaluing its currency. However, Mr Zhu said that a stable yuan was "good for China, it's also good for the world."
Stiglitz: The Big Mistake Is The Way We Bailed Out The Banks
Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz gives his reaction to President Barack Obama's State of the Union address on Bloomberg TV from Davos. Some quick hits:
- "The focus on jobs is welcome, needed, a little late."
- "I would say we can't afford not to (intervene more) because if we don't the economy's going to be weaker, the deficit's going to be larger. The real issue is how do we spend the money?"
- "The big mistake is the way we bailed out the banks where we gave them money; we barely got anything out of it... When we put the banks on welfare and gave them hundreds of billions of dollars, we didn't put any conditions like -- they ought to lend."
Elizabeth Warren: They work best behind closed doors
University Endowments: Worst Year Since Depression
Plunging stocks, fewer donors, and risky investments resulted in average losses of 18.7% last year. Now endowments are spending far more than they earn. The nation's college and university endowments, struggling with declining gifts and massive investment losses, suffered their worst year since the Great Depression, sustaining an average loss of 18.7% in the year ending June 30, 2009, according to a new study.
The study of 842 endowments by the National Association of College & University Business Officers (NACUBO) and the Commonfund Institute confirmed what many already knew—that the global economic crisis has taken a brutal toll. The vast majority of endowments will likely recover somewhat in 2009-10, as equity markets rebounded sharply in the latter half of last year. The Standard & Poor's 500-stock index surged nearly 65% since Mar. 9. "It's going to be considerably better," says John S. Griswold, executive director of the Commonfund Institute, which manages $25 billion in assets for more than 1,500 nonprofit institutions, including schools. "I think it will repair a lot of the damage done."
The recessionary downdraft that hit endowments hard last year was an equal-opportunity problem, hammering public schools and privates, the smallest funds and the largest. The biggest of the big endowments, Harvard University, fell by nearly $11 billion, or 29.8%, to $25.7 billion. That was the greatest drop in asset value among the 53 endowments valued at $1 billion or more. Not far behind was Yale University, whose endowment was shaved by $6.5 billion, or 28.6%, to $16.3 billion. In recent years, large endowments such as those at Harvard, Yale, and elsewhere pursued a similar investment strategy, relying more and more on alternative investments that included private equity, venture capital, hedge funds, derivatives, distressed debt, and more. Attracted by double-digit returns, many smaller endowments followed suit. Today, more than half of all endowment assets are in such investments.
But in 2008-2009, many of those investments went south. According to the NACUBO-Commonfund study, while endowment holdings in all alternative investments fell by 17.8%, private-equity real estate investments dropped 30.2% and commodities and managed futures fell by 36.7%. The hardest-hit asset class of all was international equities, which fell by 27.6%, followed by domestic stocks with a 25.5% decline. John Nelson, the managing director who oversees university ratings for Moody's (MCO), said the big endowments have gone overboard on alternative investments—particularly hedge funds, which in many cases proved impossible to cash out of when their value plummeted at the height of the crisis. "The percent allocated to these strategies was just much too high," Nelson says. "Ironically, the people most effected were the big endowments."
Many smaller endowments were among those that fared well last year. Examples include Elon University (up 1.5%, to $81.8 million), Utah State (up 3.8%, to $151.2 million), and the University of South Alabama (up 30.1%, to $95 million). The endowments that ended the year more or less intact were those that played it safe. On average the top performers in the study had nearly a third of their assets in fixed-income investments, which generated a 3% gain for the year, and 11% in cash, which returned 0.8%. On the whole, though, it was a tough year to be running an endowment, and not just because of investment losses. In all, 60% of the institutions in the study reported a decline in gifts in fiscal year 2009, with a median decrease of 45.7%. With many endowments forced to borrow to raise cash, three out of four institutions are carrying debt, with the average debt load up 53.8%, to $167.8 million.
And spending is up, too. Overall, 43% of colleges and universities in the study reported an increase in their endowment spending rate; on average, institutions withdrew 4.4% of endowment assets in fiscal year 2009, up from 4.3% in 2008. For those in the $1 billion-plus category, the spend rate was 4.6%, up from 4.2% the year before. Griswold says he believes gifts will recover quickly, but spending rates will remain high or drift higher in coming years as schools grapple with the long-term effects of the economic crisis. With 47 states facing budget deficits and with increased cutbacks in state funding, many schools have been forced to dip deeper into their endowments to cover the shortfall. Others are increasing financial aid to students. That's not going to change for a while, he says.
The result: With the exception of the very largest funds, endowments are now spending far more than they're earning. Over the last 10 years, according to NACUBO-Commonfund, the median annual gain for all endowments was 3.3%. During the same period, the average annual spending rate for all endowments ranged from 4.3% in 2008 to 5.1% in 2004. Throughout the recession, schools have pursued a three-pronged approach to closing their budget gaps. In addition to tapping endowments, many have raised tuition and cut costs. Harvard has reduced staff and athletic programs, while Yale has trimmed 600 jobs through voluntary resignations and firings, postponed a new science building, and delayed construction of new undergraduate dorms.
With endowments in distress, such belt-tightening is likely to continue for the foreseeable future, says Nelson. "On a long-term basis, the demand for higher education just keeps going up globally," Nelson says. "It's not like 'Oh my God, the sky is falling.' It's more like we can't do everything we want to do. We have to make some tough choices."
Airlines suffered record drop in traffic in 2009: IATA
International airlines suffered their biggest decline in traffic since 1945 last year as passenger demand fell 3.5 percent, the International Air Transport Association said Wednesday. Freight also fell, by 10.1 percent, as "full-year 2009 demand statistics for international scheduled air traffic that showed the industry ending 2009 with the largest ever post-war decline," IATA said in a statement. "In terms of demand, 2009 goes into the history books as the worst year the industry has ever seen," said Giovanni Bisignani, director general of the world's biggest airlines' association. "We have permanently lost 2.5 years of growth in passenger markets and 3.5 years of growth in the freight business," he added.
How The AIG Bailout REALLY Worked
Republicans make new claim about Bernanke and AIG
Federal Reserve staff recommended against bailout of insurer, politicians say
Republican politicians made a new claim Wednesday about Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke's involvement in the 2008 bailout of insurance giant American International Group, one day before a vote on his re-nomination for a second term at the central bank. Sen. Jim Bunning, a member of the Senate Banking Committee, said he read documents that show Fed staff recommended against bailing out AIG, leaving the insurer to file for bankruptcy like Lehman Brothers.
"His staff didn't agree with him," Bunning said, according to a transcript of a Tuesday interview with CNBC. "I'm talking about an e-mail that he sent his staff after his staff recommended that the Federal Reserve not touch AIG just like Lehman Brothers." The government ended up committing more than $100 billion to save AIG in multiple bail outs that have become among the most controversial aspects of the financial crisis.
Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif. said his office received "important information from a whistleblower" confirming Sen. Bunning's comments, according to a letter Issa sent on Tuesday to Rep. Edolphus Towns, chairman of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. "According to the whistleblower, the documents reveal troubling details about Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke's personal involvement in the original decision to bail out AIG in September 2008," Issa wrote.
Issa said his staff tried to get the documents, but Fed staff didn't return their phone calls. Issa also asked Towns to subpoena the Fed to obtain the documents. The claims come as the Senate prepares to vote on the re-nomination of Bernanke to a second term as Fed chairman. Several senators have said they will vote against him, increasing concern about his position. Bernanke's term as Fed chairman expires on Jan. 31.
Darrell Issa's Special Report On AIG Could Be The End Of Geithner
We are currently going through the recently released Special Report by Darrell Issa: "Public Disclosure As A Last Resort:
How the Federal Reserve Fought to Cover Up the Details of the AIG Counterparties Bailout From the American People," and a cursory perusal indicates that this could be proverbial end for Tim Geithner...and Sarah Dahlgren is, not surprisingly, mentioned rather prominently...as is Davis Polk.We will post more comments later but this section is critical:
Next:GEITHNER’S ROLE IN THE AIG COVER UP REMAINS UNCLEAR
When asked directly if he was involved in the efforts by the FRBNY to prevent disclosure of the AIG counterparty payments, Secretary Geithner responded, “I wasn’t involved in that decision.” On January 8, 2010, FRBNY General Counsel Thomas Baxter wrote Ranking Member Issa to clarify the role of then-President Geithner:
[M]atters relating to AIG securities law disclosures were not brought to the attention of Mr. Geithner …. In my judgment as the New York Fed’s chief legal officer, disclosure matters of this nature did not warrant the attention of the president.
Mr. Baxter reiterated this claim in an interview with Committee staff. Questions of securities disclosure, Baxter said, were “legal stuff,” and Baxter did not bring legal stuff to the attention of then-President Geithner. However, Baxter said that “on significant policy issues, of course I would go” to Geithner.
However, documents received by the Committee suggest that Secretary Geithner was, at a minimum, engaged personally in reviewing what information about the AIG bailout would be revealed to Congress and the public. On November 6, 2008, SarahDahlgren, the FRBNY’s lead staff member in AIG’s operations, e-mailed Geithner with a proposed statement regarding AIG’s upcoming equity capital raise for Geithner’s approval:
[I]n terms of saying something publicly about our intentions, we … think that saying something that conveys the following … makes sense:
It is our (Federal Reserve/Treasury) continued intention to put the company in a sound capital position and exit the facility/preferred securities/common stock ownership as soon as practicable…
[I]f you are good with this, …we would also make sure that the company sticks to this line (echo)…. [emphasis added]
On November 13, 2008, Geithner received a report on AIG’s restructuring that would be sent to Congress, which Geithner had asked to personally review. Sophia Allison, a staff member of the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors, e-mailed the draft congressional report to several Federal Reserve staff:
Attached is a draft Congressional report for the restructuring package for AIG announced on Monday, November 10. …I tried to take everything in the report from publicly available documents, such as press releases, the prior AIG Congressional Report, and AIG’s most recent 10-Q. If there is anything in the report that you believe should not be publicly disclosed, please specifically point that out. [emphasis added]
Michael Nelson, a staff member of the FRBNY, forwarded Allison’s email to Geithner with the following message:
Tim – this is the draft EESA-required filing on AIG that the Board owes the Hill, as you requested. [emphasis added]
In addition, Secretary Geithner’s meeting logs from his tenure as President of the FRBNY show that he was regularly engaged with top AIG officials and the FRBNY officials directly responsible for AIG’s disclosures to the SEC. Geithner’s schedule shows that he had at least six formal meetings with top FRBNY staff members about AIG-related issues between November 4, 2008, and November 21, 2008. It is unclear whether AIG’s disclosure obligations were discussed in these meetings.
At a minimum, the cover-up of the details about AIG’s counterparty payments began on Secretary Geithner’s watch, and the culture of the FRBNY in which this behavior occurred reflected his leadership. Secretary Geithner needs to explain his role in the cover-up, and if he thinks the behavior of his staff at the FRBNY was appropriate.
And, at long last, Davis Polk is accused of interference with the disclosure processGEITHNER’S CLAIMS RAISE QUESTIONS ABOUT PURPOSE OF AIG BAILOUT
Secretary Geithner’s claim to SIGTARP that the backdoor bailout of AIG’s counterparties had nothing to do with the health of AIG’s counterparties also raises questions about why AIG was bailed out in the first place. As the Wall Street Journal notes:
[I]f Mr. Geithner now says the AIG bailout wasn’t driven by a need to rescue CDS counterparties, then what was the point? Why pay Goldman [Sachs] and even foreign banks like Societe Generale billions of tax dollars to make them whole?
Secretary Geithner now claims that the point of AIG’s bailout was to protect AIG’s insurance policy holders:
AIG was providing a range of insurance products to households across the country. And if AIG had defaulted, you would have seen a downgrade leading to the liquidation and failure of a set of insurance contracts that touched Americans across this country and, of course, savers around the world.
However, as the Wall Street Journal further explains:
Yet, if there is one thing that all observers seemed to agree on last year, it was that AIG’s money to pay policyholders was segregated and safe inside the regulated insurance subsidiaries. If the real systemic danger was the condition of these highly regulated subsidiaries – where there was no CDS trading – then the Beltway narrative implodes.
Secretary Geithner’s inconsistent statements and apparent contradictions raise important questions about the decision to not only funnel billions of taxpayer dollars to AIG’s counterparties, but also the decision to bail out AIG itself.
The conclusionThe FRBNY and its attorneys at Davis Polk interfered with AIG’s securities disclosures in several ways. They edited AIG’s SEC filings in ways that made it more difficult for investors and the public to understand the ML3 transactions. They contacted the SEC directly and pressured it to treat AIG’s filings differently from other companies’ filings. In addition, they appear to have forced AIG to cancel a compensation-related filing that it was required to make. The FRBNY’s edits of AIG’s filings and the FRBNY’s pressure on the SEC were intended to serve the Fed’s interests by obscuring embarrassing details about the FRBNY’s backdoor bailout of AIG’s counterparties. Investors cannot be protected by a disclosure system that only requires full transparency when the Federal Reserve’s embarrassment is not at stake. The special SEC procedures established via FRBNY pressure also demonstrate that bailouts lead to enforced favoritism.
Full Special ReportFinally, the secrecy, concealment, and lack of transparency in the conduct of the Federal Reserve have serious implications for the continued health of democracy and free markets. The Federal Reserve’s payment of par to AIG’s counterparties and the subsequent cover-up of information about these payments raise concerns about the accountability of the unelected bureaucrats within the Federal Reserve System. The fact that a quasi-government agency, unaccountable to the American people, likely wasted billions of taxpayer dollars and went to great lengths to prevent Congress and the American people from learning about these actions demonstrates the threat that the Federal Reserve poses to basic principles of American democracy.
Paulson, in Memoir, Defends Bailout
In his new memoir, former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson portrays himself as a fierce champion of free markets, while defending the decision to bail out American International Group and other Wall Street firms. "The intervention we undertook I would have found abhorrent at any other time," he writes in "On the Brink," which is set to hit bookstores Feb. 1. "As first responders to an unprecedented crisis that threatened the destruction of the modern financial system, we had little choice" but to bail out the banks.
As for the collapse of Lehman Brothers, Mr. Paulson stands by his position that the government had no legal authority to save the investment bank and couldn't find a buyer for the bank. He describes frustration with the U.K.'s Financial Service Authority, which was reluctant to approve a prebankruptcy deal for Barclays PLC to acquire Lehman. "The British screwed us," Mr. Paulson said he blurted out when he learned the deal had fallen through. The highly anticipated book, the first by a major player in the financial crisis, doesn't add many new details to what has already been written about the darkest days of the financial crisis. The book does give some personal detail of Mr. Paulson's experience.
Mr. Paulson, a Christian Scientist, said his faith helped him through the financial crisis. During the weekend of Lehman's collapse, he called his wife, Wendy, and told her, "I am really scared." She said he shouldn't be afraid, that his "job is to reflect God, Infinite Mind, and you can rely on Him."
In another scene, an exhausted, stressed-out Mr. Paulson wrestled with taking a sleeping pill, a move that would have violated his religious beliefs. He instead flushed it down the toilet, deciding "to rely on prayer, placing my trust in a higher power." Mr. Paulson said he raised concerns about a looming Wall Street crisis during his first meeting with President George W. Bush's economic staff in August 2006, and was early in warning the White House about the dangers of derivatives and leverage. But he confessed to missing the housing bubble, and he regretted saying in a speech in April 2007 that subprime mortgage problems were "largely contained." "We were just plain wrong," he writes.
AIG's collapse snuck up on Mr. Paulson. Though he knew the insurer had issues, he said it was only on the weekend before the government bailed it out that he learned of the deeper problems. Mr. Paulson said he had to convince a reluctant Mr. Bush that saving AIG was the right decision. "Like the president, I understood that we had to hold our noses and save the company."
Mr. Paulson's book spends little time on his life before he joined the Bush administration, compressing his first 60 years into a chapter. His 23-year career at Goldman Sachs Group Inc., where he served as chief executive officer from 1998 to 2006, is reduced to a handful of pages. His clash with former New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine, whom Mr. Paulson ousted as Goldman CEO in a boardroom coup, only gets two paragraphs.There are some candid assessments of political figures. In the opening chapter, Mr. Paulson delivers a dim view of Sarah Palin. During a telephone conversation with Ms. Palin during the crisis, the vice-presidential candidate annoyed him by calling him "Hank."
"Right away she started calling me Hank," writes Mr. Paulson. "But for some reason the way she said it over the phone like that, even though we'd never met, rubbed me the wrong way. I'm also not sure she grasped the full dimensions of the situation I had sketched out—or so some of her comments made me think." As for Barack Obama, Mr. Paulson said he was impressed with him during the campaign as being "well-informed," but "the day after the election, Obama abruptly stopped talking to me." Mr. Paulson said he didn't miss Washington. "I don't wake up mornings wishing that I were still Treasury secretary," he writes. "For one thing, I am finally getting a good night's sleep again."
How Paulson's People Colluded With Goldman to Destroy AIG And Get A Backdoor Bailout
Too Big To Fail is revelatory, though not in the way Andrew Ross Sorkin intended. The book offers startling evidence that Hank Paulson and his deputies colluded with Goldman to create a liquidity crisis at AIG, and to manipulate the government funding a backdoor bailout of AIG's CDO counterparties, most notably Goldman. It's not that Sorkin's sources recounted the truth. Quite the opposite. Rather, they told him stories that were so transparently dishonest that the truth emerges by way of negative implication.
To understand what happened, you need to remember that the top guys at Goldman are really, really smart. They are like champion chess players who anticipate the possible moves of their opponent. The guys at Goldman can quickly grasp how pieces of a financial transaction work together, like the pieces on a chessboard, to game out different scenarios. This attribute is not unique to the guys at Goldman; it's an essential quality of every good banker. But it does mean that the guys at Goldman cannot credibly profess to being oblivious.
The other thing that you must remember is that the dagger hanging over AIG and Goldman -- the eventual payout to the CDO counterparties -- was a zero-sum game between the two financial giants. On June 30, 2008, AIG's net worth was $79 billion and its CDO obligations totaled $62 billion. On August 27, 2008 Goldman's net worth was $42 billion and its share of the infamous CDO portfolio was $22 billion. The stakes were huge.
Also, none of the critical elements that led to AIG's demise were obscure. In retrospect they seem quite obvious. Unfortunately, few in the financial media have attempted to understand those critical elements. Before we get to the liquidity crisis at AIG, we need to go back to that special relationship between Goldman and AIG...
Goldman bought credit protection exclusively from AIG because:
Like its peers, Goldman underwrote billions of dollars of toxic securities known as subprime collateralized debt objections, or CDOs, and simultaneously bought credit protection on those CDOs in the form of credit default swaps. But Goldman was unique in that it only bought protection from AIG Financial Products, or AIGFP, and no one else. Under normal standards of risk management, this approach is imprudent; a bank should diversify its risk exposures whenever it can. Given that AIG was Goldman's biggest client, and that the CDO exposure at AIG was a huge part of Goldman's equity base, it's inconceivable that Hank Paulson, Goldman's CEO until June 2006, would not have been regularly briefed on this matter. The same goes for Goldman's board of directors. It's a very basic and essential part of any bank's risk management and corporate governance.
It's also a basic tenet of risk management to game out the different scenarios under which Goldman might seek recovery under its credit default swaps. Based on that analysis, the choice to deal exclusively AIG, in retrospect, seems very obvious, for four reasons set forth below.
1) AIG Financial Products was not regulated, whereas the monolines were;
This is one of those really basic things that few in the media seems to grasp. The other large companies offering credit protection on the CDOs were the monoline insurance companies, names like MBIA or AMBAC. AIGFP was not regulated, whereas the monolines were. A regulator can order an insurer to withhold any payout that might impair that company's ability to service its other policyholders. That's precisely what the New York State Insurance Department did last April, when it ordered Syncora, the monoline formerly known as XL Capital Assurance, to suspend payments. This state's regulatory authority to interfere with the terms of a contract proved to be a powerful hammer. It incentivized the CDO banks to negotiate haircuts on their claims throughout 2008.
A lot of people compare the settlements with the monolines with those at AIGFP and wonder why the monolines negotiated better deals. But in fact, they are comparing apples and oranges. The only government entity legally authorized to interfere with AIGFP's contracts was a bankruptcy court. But even that authority had been seriously curtailed.
2) AIGFP was willing to post cash collateral, which was outside the grasp of a bankruptcy judge;
Here's another very basic thing. The credit protection sold by the monolines included financial guarantees as well as credit default swaps, whereas AIGFP extended only credit default swaps. A credit default swap is a financial derivative. One of the common, and insidious, attributes of financial derivatives is that a counterparty may need to post margin, or cash collateral, whenever the spot value of its contractual claim turns negative. Here's an overly simple example: Suppose AIG promised to sell Goldman one barrel of oil on January 25, 2011 for $80, and then on June 25, 2010 spot price is $100 (i.e. an implicit $20 loss). AIG would post $20 in collateral with Goldman. If the spot price falls to $65 on July 25, then AIG would get its $20 collateral returned, and also receive $15 in collateral deposited by Goldman.
As a rule the monolines were unwilling to sign any contract that required them to post collateral. They accrue insurance reserves and, again, insurance regulation is predicated on the idea that one policyholder 's recovery not should leapfrog ahead of all the others. But that's precisely the idea behind posting collateral on a derivative. If AIGFP filed for bankruptcy, Goldman would be entitled to immediately liquidate the credit default swap and permanently keep its cash collateral; a bankruptcy judge could not touch it. The recently amended bankruptcy code clarified the special priority given to derivative counterparties over other creditors.
So, as you would expect, It wasn't simply the support of the regulators that gave the monolines the upper hand in negotiating with the CDO counterparties; it was also the fact they they held the cash.
3) AIGFP would have been wiped out by a bankruptcy filing, because it was active in financial trading;
There's another reason why the monolines had the upper hand, whereas AIGFP did not. Bankruptcy was always a viable option for the monolines, whereas it was not for AIGFP. Aside from its book of business providing credit support for CDOs, AIGFP was very active in all sorts of financial trading of all sorts of derivatives. The monolines were not really involved in that business.
The vast bulk of business done by financial traders is hedged, meaning there are always two back-to-back contracts. Another overly simple example: If AIG promised to sell Goldman one barrel of oil on January 25, 2011 for $80, AIG would simultaneously contract with Morgan Stanley to buy one barrel of oil on January 25, 2011 for $78, and lock in the $2 profit. Throughout the next 12 months, any profit from one contract would correspond to the loss on the other. But if AIG filed for bankruptcy on June 25, 2010, Goldman could choose to liquidate its contract and hold on to its collateral, whereas Morgan Stanley might still insist of selling the oil on the later delivery date. The hedge would then become unwound, and suddenly expose AIG to a huge trading loss.
The preferential treatment given to derivatives subverts the entire purpose of a bankruptcy filing, which is to buy time for an orderly restructuring. For AIGFP, the downside risk of a bankruptcy filing was vast and unknown, which was not the case for the monolines.
Because Goldman is very savvy about trading risk, it must have mapped out an endgame enabling it to declare "checkmate" once AIG were backed into a corner.
4) AIG did not understand what it was doing; it relied on the rating agencies.
But if Goldman was so smart, how could AIG be so dumb? There's a short answer and a long answer. The short answer is three little letters: AAA. The long answer gets to the same result; it just takes a longer while to get there.
According to Michael Lewis's reporting in Vanity Fair, the guys at AIGFP were clueless:Toward the end of 2005, Cassano [the head of AIGFP] promoted Al Frost, then went looking for someone to replace him as the ambassador to Wall Street's subprime-mortgage-bond desks. As a smart quant who understood abstruse securities, Gene Park was a likely candidate. That's when Park decided to examine more closely the loans that A.I.G. F.P. had insured. He suspected Joe Cassano didn't understand what he had done, but even so Park was shocked by the magnitude of the misunderstanding: these piles of consumer loans were now 95 percent U.S. subprime mortgages. Park then conducted a little survey, asking the people around A.I.G. F.P. most directly involved in insuring them how much subprime was in them. He asked Gary Gorton, a Yale professor who had helped build the model Cassano used to price the credit-default swaps. Gorton guessed that the piles were no more than 10 percent subprime. He asked a risk analyst in London, who guessed 20 percent. He asked Al Frost, who had no clue, but then, his job was to sell, not to trade. "None of them knew," says one trader. Which sounds, in retrospect, incredible. But an entire financial system was premised on their not knowing--and paying them for their talent! [Emphasis added.]
It seems less shocking if you understand how these CDOs were put together and sold. Take a few minutes and glance over the prospectus for Davis Square Funding VI, one of the dozens of CDOs structured by Goldman before the risk was laid off on AIG. You could spend all day studying the document, but you will never be able to answer the question, "What am I buying?" The document doesn't tell you. That's the point. It's evident in every aspect of this document and the offering circulars for most of the other CDOs. The business purpose, the essence of the deal, can be summarized in one word: obfuscation.
Goldman argued that these CDOs were put together to meet market demand, but demand for what? These subprime CDOs were not financing anything (the underlying mortgages and mortgage securities had already been financed), nor were they promoting liquidity in the marketplace (they couldn't be traded because nobody knew what was in them).
If you wanted to invest in a diversified pool of subprime mortgages, there was no reason to waste hours and hours studying the impenetrable documentation of a CDO. Instead, you could look into any subprime mortgage deal, like MASTR Asset Backed Securities Trust 2005-NC2. Skim the prospectus for five minutes, and you know that the deal is comprised of 3,380 subprime mortgages, all of which were originated by New Century Financial, 55% of which were in California, 100% of which are interest only, 60% of which closed with second liens, 58% of which relied on "stated documentation," and 83% of which had prepayment penalties. If you don't like MASTR 2005-NC2, you can easily compare it with hundreds of other stellar transactions.
Remember, AIGFP only assumed risk exposure on the "super senior" classes, or tranches, of these CDOs. They only assumed the risk on paper that was rated AAA. Therein lies the faulty assumption that AIG and almost everyone else made before they ever started slogging through the impenetrable documentation. It's rated AAA so you don't need to worry about the details. The offering circular for Davis Square Funding VI is just like the offering circular for Davis Square Funding VII and countless other CDOs. It tells you Moody's Expected Loss Rate on a credit rated AAA. After 20 years, the cumulative loss is 0.02 percent. It doesn't tell you that the deal was structured to make a sham of the due diligence process.
People who bought these CDOs looked at the ratings and almost nothing else. They relied on Goldman and the rating agencies to make sure that everything was OK.
Which again brings us to the issue of posting collateral. As a matter of policy, financial institutions rated AAA or AA almost never agree to post collateral on their derivative trades. (That's one reason why big banks find trading to be so profitable.) The only reason why the guys at AIGFP would have ever agreed to post collateral back in 2005 or 2006 is because they thought there was no way in hell that these CDO tranches rated AAA would never be valued at anything below par.
But Goldman's credit default swaps would not trigger a bankruptcy, because there was no way to figure out their market value.
Goldman started harassing AIGFP to start posting cash collateral as early as August 2007, when the matter went to the "highest levels" at Goldman Sachs.
But Goldman met with limited success, for obvious reasons. The idea that these CDOs could be marked to market is a joke. There never was any real market of buyers and sellers of these things. AIG's auditor, PricewaterhouseCoopers, and the Fed's auditor, Delloite & Touche, determined under fair value accounting rules that there was no way that the CDO obligations could be valued according to any market benchmark.
AIG and Goldman had spirited talks over the amount of posted collateral for over a year, but those talks had remained at an impasse. No one could agree on the CDOs' "market value." So long as AIG was solvent, the inability to quickly ascertain the CDOs' value worked in AIG's favor. Later, when AIG faced a liquidity crisis, the inability to quickly ascertain the CDOs' value worked against AIG.
Various side deals mask the true magnitude of Goldman's participation in AIG's CDO portfolio.
According to the AIG memo on CDO exposures, dated November 27, 2007, obtained by CBS News, Goldman's CDOs represented about a third of the $67 billion total. But that may have been understating Goldman's role in building up the portfolio. About 16 of Societe Generale's trading positions were for CDOs that were arranged by Goldman. Apparently, one way that Goldman would offload CDOs would be to sell them, along with credit protection from AIG, as a package deal. In other words, some of the banks never seriously intended to hold the CDOs in the first place. But Goldman used them as a front for its own syndicating efforts.
Later, around the time Tim Geithner was brought in to settle the CDO matter, Goldman pulled another stunt to make it appear as if its CDO exposure to AIG was smaller than it actually was. The transaction is alluded to in a couple of obfuscatory paragraphs (pages 16 and 17) in Neil Barofsky's SIGTARP report on the AIG bailouts. It appears as if Goldman suddenly sold $8 billion in CDOs to Deutsche Bank, so that it would appear as if Goldman's share of the total would look smaller. But the only way that Deutsche Bank would have bought the stuff is if there were no risk involved.
On September 15, 2008, the rating agencies thought that AIG's CDO portfolio looked just fine.
The Washington Post printed a 2,700-word article about AIG's internal e-mails during 2007, when the guys at AIGFP kept insisting that the CDOs did not present any kind of troublesome risk. But the Post left out a critical element in the narrative. At that time, virtually all of the 148 CDO trades, listed in a November 27, 2007 memo obtained by CBS, were still rated AAA.
In fact, most of these CDOs were first downgraded in May 2008, the same month that AIG was downgraded from Aa2 to Aa3. At the time, the CDO downgrades were fairly insignificant. Of course we don't know why the CDO downgrades occurred when they did, because we don't really know what's inside of them. But consider how bad the damage was by May 2008. Among the subprime bonds that comprised the ABX 2006-1 index, the average foreclosure rate was already 25%.
Was AIG really too big to fail? Maybe if you worked for Goldman.
The party line, expressed in Too Big To Fail and elsewhere, is that an AIG bankruptcy posed a greater systemic risk than a Lehman bankruptcy, because AIG was so much bigger. But that analysis is highly superficial and very misleading. AIG itself was a holding company, which guaranteed the debt of its unregulated financial subsidiary, AIGFP. The lion's share of AIG's revenues and profits, and about 80% of its consolidated assets, were concentrated among its different insurance company subsidiaries. Those insurance companies were solvent. They did not pose any systemic risk. In fact, it's quite likely that they would have continued to operate outside of bankruptcy.
The only subsidiary with major problems was AIGFP, whose financial obligations were guaranteed by the parent. But AIGFP was only about one-third the size of Lehman. It's almost impossible to see how AIGFP ever posed a systemic risk, unless everyone's intention to provide a backdoor bailout to the banks. Put another way, it seems that the only reason that the government needed to step in for AIG was to provide a backdoor bailout to its banks.
Goldman's scheme to create a liquidity crisis at AIG, in order to manipulate the government into paying CDO counterparties 100 cents on the dollar
Because of laws that emasculated regulatory oversight, Goldman's trading positions in credit derivatives with AIG had escaped the scrutiny of the Fed until September 11 or 12, 2008, when AIG told the New York Fed that it would soon run out of cash. The CDOs did not trigger a liquidity crisis at AIG, at least, not directly. Rather, it was the imminent cash drain from anticipated downgrades, from AA- to A-, which would trigger $30 billion in new collateral postings on AIGFP's trading positions. In addition, someone at the company had screwed up. They had invested billions in cash collateral, intended for someone else, in highly rated mortgage securities, for which there was suddenly no liquid market. So AIG needed to come up with the cash right away.
Simultaneously, of course, Lehman Brothers was imploring the government for support, and Paulson's position, at least on September 12, 2008, was that the Federal government would provide no support of any kind to bail out a private company like Lehman or AIG. Private bankers must come up with a private solution on their own.
On September 15, 2008, the same morning that Lehman's bankruptcy sent shockwaves, Geithner had convened a meeting with JPMorgan Chase and Goldman to work on an emergency bridge financing for AIG. Why include Goldman? Traditionally, the bank with the largest credit exposure to distressed borrower helps arrange the debt restructuring. Geithner opened the meeting, and left soon thereafter, leaving Paulson's deputy, Dan Jester, in charge. Jester was a former Goldman banker whom Paulson had plucked in July 2008 to work on matters that concerned Paulson.
September 15, 2008: Paulson's deputy sabotages efforts to negotiate a private bank deal.
Sorkin describes the opening of the Monday morning meeting:"Look, we'd like to see if it's possible to find a private-sector solution," Geithner said addressing the group. "What do we need to do to make this happen?"
For the next ten minutes the meeting turned into a cacophony of competing voices as the banks tossed out their suggestions: Can we get the rating agencies to hold off on the downgrade? Can we get other state regulators of AIG's insurance subsidiaries to allow the firm to use those assets as collateral?
Geithner soon got up to leave, saying, "I'll leave you with Dan," and pointed to Jester, who was Hank Paulson's eyes and ears on the ground. "I want a status report as soon as you come up with a plan."
A critical point here is that Pauslon's deputy, not Geithner, sat at the table to lead government negotiations.
Job 1 was to persuade the rating agencies to forestall their anticipated downgrades, which would have burned up billions because of increased calls to post collateral. This task was assigned to the government's representative, Dan Jester."He was as useless as tits on a bull." [AIG CEO] Bill Willumstad, normally a calm man, was in an uncharacteristic rage as he railed about Dan Jester of Treasury, while telling Jamie Gamble[a lawyer at Simpson Thatcher] and Michael Wiseman [a lawyer at Sullivan & Cromwell] about his and Jester's call to Moody's to try to persuade them to hold off on downgrading AIG.
Willlumstad had hoped that Jester, using the authority of the government and his powers of persuasion as a former banker, would have been able to finesse the task easily.
Willumstad explained that the original plan "was that the Fed was going to try to intimidate these guys to buy us some time." Instead, when Jester finally got on the phone, "he didn't want to tell them." Clearly uncomfortable with playing the heavy, Willumstad told them that Jester could only bring himself to say, "We're all here, and, you know, we got a big team of people working and we need an extra day or two."
If Jester spoke to Moody's the way Willumstad said he did, then there is no doubt in my mind that Jester intended to sabotage the deal. No other explanation is plausible. The importance of the phone call was not unlike that of a death row lawyer seeking a last minute stay of execution. Jester had been the Deputy CFO at Goldman. It would have been his job to deal with the rating agencies regularly. There is no way that he would not have known what to say. All he would need to say is that since AIG's last meeting with Moody's, the situation is evolving in a way so Treasury and the Federal Reserve are feeling increasingly confident that the deal being hammered out will significantly ameliorate the company's liquidity issues. Everyone knows that the rating agencies do not like to abruptly pull the trigger when a situation is still evolving. Everyone also knows that the rating agencies are acutely aware of their chicken/egg role they play in determining a firm's liquidity situation. (A company has access to the capital markets because of its rating, but its rating reflects its access to the capital markets.) Also, as Janet Tavakoli once mentioned, investment banks train their analysts about how to place pressure on the rating agencies. Finally, it would not have been indelicate to allude to the agencies' no-so-clean hands in building up the AAA pyramid scheme known as AIGP's CDO portfolio.
An in case there were any doubt that Jester's refusal to act as an advocate for AIG made the critical the difference, here's how Jimmy Lee, of JPMorgan Chase, tallied the numbers on the morning following the downgrades. "They [AIG] have $50 billion in collateral and they need $80 to $90 billion. I don't know how we can bridge the gap." Because of the ratings downgrades, AIG posted an additional $32 billion by quarter's end. In other words, they would have needed about $32 billion less if the downgrades had not taken place.
Minutes after Jimmy Lee briefed his boss, Jamie Dimon. Geithner, Jester Lee and the people from Goldman sat down to figure out what to do next.
September 16, 2008: Paulson installs a CEO at AIG who will favor Goldman.
And a few minutes after Goldman, JPMorgan Chase and the government tried to figure out what was next, at 9:40 a.m., September 16, Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein placed a call to Hank Paulson, which Paulson took, even though such communication was illegal. According to Sorkin's sources, they discussed Lehman and not AIG. Just at the moment when the government was deciding whether to step in and save AIG, Blankfein never mentioned that an AIG collapse could have easily wiped out $15 billion in Goldman's equity and caused everyone to scrutinize the dodgy CDOs underwritten during Paulson's tenure. Do you think they just forgot?
As it happened, a few minutes after Paulson got done speaking with Blankfein, Geithner briefed Paulson about a tentative proposal for the government to extend AIG an $85 billion facility. The conversation with Geithner ended at 10:30 a.m.
Sorkin's sources fabricated a tall tale about what took place afterward:However resistant Hank Paulson had been to the idea of a bailout, after getting off the phone with Geithner, who had walked him through the latest plan, he could see where the markets were headed and that it scared him. Foreign governments had already been calling Treasury to express their anxiety about AIG's failing.
Jim Wilkinson [Paulson's deputy, formerly of the White House Communications office] asked incredulously," are you really going to rescue an insurance company?"
Paulson just stared at him as if to say only a madman would stand by and do nothing.
Ken Wilson, his special advisor, raised an issue they had yet to consider. "Hank, how the hell can we put $85 billion into this entity without new management?"-- a euphemism for how the government could fund this amount of money without firing the current CEO and installing its own. Without a new CEO, it would seem as if the government was backing the same inept management that had created this mess.
"You're right. You've got to find me a CEO. Drop every other thing you are doing," Paulson told him. "Get me a CEO."
Their choice: Ed Liddy, the former CEO of Allstate and Goldman board member.
The "same inept management that had created this mess"? It's impossible to overstate the mendacity embedded in that brief passage from Sorkin's book. If Paulson actually spoke what was on his mind at the time, the words would have been something like this:
"So if we don't bail out AIG, then Goldman takes a $15 billion hit to its equity and faces shareholder lawsuits for actions taken under my watch. And Willumstad, the new AIG CEO who joined management after all these toxic CDOs were booked, will find it very convenient to also point the finger of blame at Goldman. [Willumstad joined AIG's board in April 2006, and became CEO in June 2008.] The AIG bankruptcy trustee might even sue Goldman for making fraudulent claims about the CDOs, the same way that HSH Nordbank sued UBS and M&T Bank sued Merrill.
"But if we bail out the company, there's still no guarantee that Goldman can recover on the CDOs. And Willumstad can still point the finger at Goldman. So before we agree to anything we've got to get rid of Willumstad ASAP and replace him with someone who will make sure that Goldman's interests are being looked after. Let's use Ed Liddy. He's a Goldman board member, so he will never disclose anything that makes Goldman look bad. If he wants to preserve the value of his Goldman stock, he'll discreetly pay off the CDOs before anyone figures out what's happening. So I decided Willumstad's replacement will be Liddy, beginning tomorrow, and I don't give a damn that my unilateral decision to change CEOs overnight is a complete travesty of corporate governance or government accountability. Our story will be that we are replacing the management that created this mess."
How do I know that this was on Paulson's mind and that these were his motivations? As noted at the beginning, the guys at Goldman are very smart, and they knew that the CDO settlement was a zero-sum game. Remember, AIG was Goldman's biggest client and the issue of collateral postings had been in dispute for over a year. Up until June 2008, Ken Wilson was CEO of Goldman's Financial Institutions Group. There is absolutely no way that Wilson did not know what was going on with AIG's management, and that Goldman, not Willumstad was primarily culpable for building up the CDO portfolio.
Also, I've been a round the block a few times. Whenever faced with a crisis, senior people immediately think about how the situation will reflect on them. And they promptly think about damage control. And like many people who rise to the top, Paulson knows how to avoid leaving fingerprints. He probably learned his lesson decades earlier, working as John Erlichman's assistant. Like those other famous CEOs, Bernie Madoff and Donald Rumsfeld, Paulson never used e-mail at work. The day after he fired Willumstad, Paulson spoke on the phone with Blankfein five times.
Whoever bore the blame for creating the mess at AIG, it's extraordinarily reckless, during the middle of a crisis, to immediately install a CEO with no prior experience at the company, which is a huge sprawling conglomerate. That's especially true when that new CEO has a conflict of interest the size of the Grand Canyon.
Sorkin also makes clear that it was Jester, not Geithner, who took control in structuring AIG;s bailout facility. Before Geithner gets on a conference call with Bernanke:Jester and [Paulson's assistant Jeremiah] Norton were poring over all the terms. They had just learned that Ed Liddy had tentatively accepted the job of AIG's CEO and was planning to fly to New York from Chicago that night. To draft a rescue deal on such short notice, the government needed help, preferably from someone who already understood AIG and its extraordinary circumstances. Jester knew just the man: Marshall Huebner, the co-head of insolvency and restructuring at David Polk & Wardell who was already working on AIG for JP Morgan and who happened to be just downstairs.
Months later, Paulson's spokesman told The New York Times that, "Federal Reserve officials, not Mr. Paulson, played the lead role in shaping and financing the A.I.G. bailout."
October 7, 2008: Paulson's appointee unnecessarily pays out $18.7 billion to the CDO counterparties in exchange for nothing.
Actions speak louder than words, and AIG's new CEO acted in a way that removed any doubt that he would make decisions in favor of Goldman. Remember, there was no need to hand over anything to the CDO counterparties, because there was no agreed-upon market value for the CDOs, which were all still highly rated. On October 7, 2008, AIG paid out $18.7 in cash in exchange for nothing. Before that October 7, only 26% of the CDOs' face value had been paid out as cash collateral. Immediately afterward, counterparties hold cash for 56% of the CDOs' face value of $62.1 billion. All of a sudden, the banks, not AIG, had the upper hand.
November 6, 2008: Only at the point when AIG is once again running out of cash and running out of time, and the CDO banks now hold the upper hand, Geithner is brought in to settle a matter when the government is backed into a corner. (Checkmate anyone?)
On November 5, 2008 only $24 billion remained available under the government's revolving credit facility, though that cash could have been used up overnight if AIG were downgraded below A-. But, as S&P said, "if mortgage-related losses continue to worsen, then we could lower the ratings into the 'BBB' category."
The CDOs, (which would all be downgraded into the CCC category in a few months), remained a dagger hanging over AIG's liquidity situation. The only way to restore confidence in the company would be to remove that risk.
But the banks now had the upper hand, since they held most of the cash. Time was not on Geithner's side, and protracted negotiations over the CDOs' underlying value could have taken forever. Also, 29% of the remaining CDO exposure belonged to two French banks, whose regulator advised Geithner that it was illegal for them to settle at less than par. Challenging another country's bank regulator would have opened up a whole can of worms at a point when the risk of global financial panic was very real.
Geithner's attempts to drive a harder bargain would have created a crisis in confidence that could have likely triggered a further ratings downgrade. The $27 billion to remove the CDO albatross off of AIG's books was only 15% of the entire $180 billion bailout package.
November 12, 2008: Following public disclosure of the backdoor bailout, Paulson announces his big bait-and-switch: his refusal to use TARP funds to stabilize the mortgage markets.
The collective amnesia of mainstream media notwithstanding, there was full contemporaneous public disclosure of the backdoor bailout of the banks at the time the deal was cut. The bailout package had a lot of moving parts, so it took The Wall Street Journal a day or so before it figured out precisely hat was going on. "New AIG Rescue Is Bank Blessing," printed on page C1, explained that banks "will be compensated for the securities' full, or par, value in exchange for allowing AIG to unwind the credit-default swaps." And for anyone who was slow on the uptake, the Journal printed a picture:
Once the public learned that the CDOs no longer posed a risk to AIG, Paulson announced his his big bait-and-switch: his refusal to use TARP funds to stabilize the mortgage markets. This about face causes the value of all mortgage securities to plummet, imposing an additional loss on Maiden Lane III (and triggering the insolvency of Merrill Lynch).
But Paulson's coup de grace was to use one of his appointees to fabricate a false history of the backdoor bailout. But that's for another piece.
Addendum: January 26, 2010 12:50 Bloomberg's New Puff Piece for Goldman
Once again, Bloomberg has come out with a story that has almost no real facts but plenty of misleading soundbites. From, "Goldman Sachs Drove Most Costly AIG Bargain, Document Shows":A month before the September 2008 rescue, Goldman Sachs approached AIG about tearing up contracts protecting the bank against losses on collateralized debt obligations, or holdings backed by mortgages, according to a BlackRock Inc. presentation dated Nov. 5, 2008. Goldman Sachs was the only counterparty willing to cancel the credit-default swaps and bear the risk of further CDO losses, provided that AIG make payments based on the bank's larger-than-average estimate of market declines.
Tear up the contracts in exchange for what? Par? How much less than par? If you don't have the number, you don't have a story. Goldman and AIG had been arguing over collateral postings for over a year. A phrase like, "payments based on the bank's larger-than-average estimate of market declines," is a meaningless term. Real journalists would put up or shut up.
Instead, we story is padded with lots of empty filler, all of which are used to make Goldman look good. Stuff like:"We had always made it clear that we were prepared to tear up contracts, it just had to be at the right price," Lucas van Praag, a spokesman for Goldman Sachs in New York, said in an interview...Goldman Sachs, which created securities tied to home loans and serviced debt on residential properties, "would have had a very decent view of what the underlying mortgage bonds were and what they thought they were worth," said Thomas J. Adams, a partner at law firm at Paykin Krieg & Adams LLP in New York... "Goldman was not Pollyanna on what the underlying mortgage bonds were worth," said Adams, who was a senior managing director in charge of the CDO business at FGIC Corp. from 2006 to 2008. "They were fairly realistic."
Let's hope that Bloomberg updates the story with something real.
102 comments:
* Ecclesiastes in Simplified Modern English
-I saw = Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion
-that = that
-the battle = success or failure in competitive activities
-is not to = exhibits no tendency to be comensurate with
-the strong = innate capacity
-but = but
-chance = a considerable element of unpredictability
-happeneth to all = must invariably be taken into account
The Sonnets of Shakespeare in beautiful Modern English soon to follow
* If you are a leader, obfuscation is your friend; 'True' has a different meaning in different Science dialects; TAEese to Old High Friesian dictionary to be added to Primers
* Couples share houses in Vancouver; Real estate bubble is still inflated in Scotland but may deflate in the fall; Britain facilitates insanely high home prices
* Britain is way past carrying capacity and consumes enough for China or India; Britain is out of recession; Blood glued opus
* Housing market is having a Wile E Coyote moment; Those who bought recently thinking the bottom was in will get a kicking as they fall; Sale price should be 16x rental amount; It is 50-100 in Casa Rica
* Four types of home buyers: 1) Oblivious 2) Scammers 3) Deluded 4) Informed, honest, realistic doomers
* El G tracks down missing pump; Wall street can only peform in a vacuum
* Government runs faster and faster to stay in the same place; 2010 will see first real resource shock for Usacos; It won't be a financial failure but a distribution failure (note: this sounds like Orlov's second phase of collapse)
* Its no longer about getting back in bed with the whore, it's about avoiding the four horsemen; Get off your butt and help others; Prepare even if it means consorting with Mormons; Time is running out; Katrina everywhere means relief from nowhere
* Pissing on the TPTB and power lines can be iffy; Zander explains his uneven gait; Weasel dog buys choco-ration futures
* Suspending Money Market redemptions is now legal; Dow is back to November 2009; Invested money is not yours; What's good for Bernanke is good for America
* Health and employment are uncontrollable; Age at your own risk; Not all can retire at once; Some suggest rotating retirement where we take turns emptying each other's bed pans
* Summary of useful information for those who missed the SOTU address:
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-
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I reckon TAE should have polls! You know like a weekly question just for fun. Could be anything, who wins the world cup? Is beer better than whiskey? What sort of money system do you prefer?
That sort of thing! Would be a neat little addition. Maybe we can have a real time bull/ bear poll for visitors on the site.
I'm thinking we can have a poll right now:
What has VK been drinking?
a) a 2-4 of Miller's light
b) a quarter of Jack's
c) less than Stoneleigh
d) more than Ilargi
I'd have to figure out the button thingies for a real poll. And no, thank you very much there's no hurry on that one.
Ilargi,
I would like to think that my handsome and extremely bright Grandson drinks something better than Miller or Jack, though I will have to find out. I am a little bothered that he still shows a belief in the usefulness of polls. I shall have to see if I can school him on that.
That will be somewhat more easily accomplished if he and I can talk off-line. To that end I am shortly going to send you an email, which I ask that you forward to VK.
Thanks.
And there's Bernake being reconfirmed by the bought little sheep who are purported to (HA!) "represent us"...
It's only a question of like what Marvin the Martian used to ask:
"Where's the KABOOM? There was supposed to be an Earth-shattering KABOOM!"
TAE Summary
I volunteer for the 2024 shift of bedpan emptiers coming out of retirement.
Mad TV actually had an iPad commercial five years ago:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WK2drIylnDw
but Apple removed many of the most important features.
Link to Horizon.
This is a public affairs program on KAET Arizona PBS. It's a good way to keep track of what's happening in our state government.
Tonight they had a show that was pretty riveting--well, I thought it was.
They discussed the current Governors proposal to do away with the state supported statutes for mentally, including severely mentally ill persons, as a way of cutting into the budget deficit.
There was discussion of how these laws came into being around 1980; the number of people affected, how communities will be affected by the cuts, if they take place. Because of lack of any other support for the mentally ill, they also discussed how much more money it will cost in crisis management for those mentally ill who have no meds or structured support. The cost in police calls, emergency room management and other public costs would be then charged to a different jurisdiction than the state in many cases, county or city budgets. This of course does not begin to calculate the intangible human suffering and grief involved.
They finally came to the point that the result of this would be going backwards, not just in monetary terms, but human/humane terms. The host of the show seemed genuinely shocked by the logical progression that this budget proposal would lead to, if it happens. The two other panel members involved in services to the mentally ill community, of course, were well aware of the implications of the situation.
So far, most discussions I have seem on PBS or other media like this have been so theoretical and not yet “real” for the program participants. At least, I haven’t seen it so starkly like I saw it on the faces of these people. It was really quite horrible and I almost didn’t watch it but I had the feeling of being a Cassandra watching the great wave of things coming in the future and no one is seeing the same stuff yet—BUT it’s getting closer to more people seeing it all the time in front of them as it happens.
For myself, I think the Arizona legislature will be no closer to finding a budget solution at the end of June, traditional end of the session, than they are now.
I think it will be such an ugly political election year.
@ VK, On a brighter note: Please, VK, don't drink Miller light!! There are so many more worthy beers in the world to drink! :)
peace to all,
Shamba
Best blog headline of the day from Zero Hedge
PIIGS Fly As Greek Rescue By Germany Contemplated
I believe he's been drinking more than Ilargi.
Please no polls. :[
The one year borrowing requirement of the EU States, 20% of GDP, to fund the expenses of the people, who ultimately do the work for themselves, points out the severity of the mismatch between the financial structure and the "real" economy. Japan and the US are in no better position. The retiring boomers are walking toward the cartoon cliff right now. A lot of that unsupportable debt is their pensions. The only thing that I can see is that a vast debt repudiation needs to happen, followed by a grocery and rent floor for everybody involved, a sadly meager floor, but a great equalizer. The alternative would be global war,in an age where armies have the weapons of the Gods. As for me, I ride a bike to work, and will until I'm 90,if I can. Best blessings to all.
My handsome and extrememly bright Grandson VK said...
Surely there were a few captains of the good ship lollipop that not only knew a barnacle but got down below the hull and scrapped em clean!
I'm thinking men like Andrew Jackson and Roosevelt. Or how about Lincoln? JFK, Carter even! The US didn't get to being top doG in the world just like that.
Now I know they weren't without their flaws but which man isn't?
Certainly not this one.
Whether the men you listed or any other Presidents knew of the barnacles and whether they scraped any wasn't the point I was making. I said they never told the crew. It might have frightened them.
Not that having the crew frightened was itself a problem. In fact, throughout our existence they have always made sure we were afraid of something. As long as we never feared that the ship might be in any danger of sinking. That would be bad. Probably helps to explain why we get trolls here.
In the beginning it was the Red Man (indigenous Americans) that our ancestors were taught to fear. I'll get to Andy Jackson in a moment. Later it was the freed Black Man. And of course, in the modern age we had or have the following to fear.
Fascists, Communists, Socialists, Democrats, Republicans, Homosexuals, Kids with purple hair, ... the list is long.
Irrespective of what Old Hickory (Jackson) may or may not have done to or with the banksters, he was a lout and a genocidal monster.
Lincoln was I believe a relatively good and decent man. His election was I think relevant to triggering the civil war, in that southern politicians were getting a little desperate over the growing northern movement to abolish slavery and convinced themselves he would do it. And of course, they then made it easy for him to do it. Therefore he can't be anything but great. BTW, it might interest you to know that you are now distantly connected by marriage to his family.
Both Roosevelts did important things for the country. Teddy kind of enjoyed killing things and I think he rather enjoyed the Spanish-American War a little too much.
JFK might have done some good things, but as el g has said, he apparently pissed off the wrong people.
Carter was, I think, beside Lincoln the only genuinely decent man ever to live in the White House. We will have to wait awhile to see if Obama might fit that category. The trouble is, as you might have discovered in the final story on today's front page, near the top this is not a country for decent men.
As for how we got to be lead dog, I've been having some thoughts on that, which I very much want to discuss with you once we are in email contact.
NZSanctuary said...
Ok, I prefer salty dog talk to Turin...
Well, why didn't you say so before? Arrrh!
Shamba,
Thank you for taking an interest in VK's choice of drink. Especially when you and your state are facing really stark choices. Reminds me of Saint Ronnie closing the mental hospitals in California. His main achievement as governor.
The Most Interesting Man In The World, doesn't always drink beer, but when he does, he drinks Dos Equis. VK is a very interesting man. I shall have to see if Dos Equis is sold in Kenya. :)
BTW, I drink it sometimes, but I'm not terribly interesting at all. I just like the taste.
Ilargi,
If you were to develop an interest in polls, whateveritisimagainstit.blogspot.com
has polls that are provided by twiigs.com, which supplies a javascript widget that you embed into your page. That's all I know, but you might want to check it out.
My friends and I just spent $147 drinking a group of extremely worthy Dogfish Head beers at the local pub.
Could someone stop the room, I'd like to get off now?
Shamba, I.M., it's not just in California where Reagan destroyed the mental health system. Let me take you back to the late 1980s, when I was a newspaper reporter working for the Tampa Tribune in its bureau in Arcadia, Florida.
There was a 1,000-bed state mental hospital on a former Air Force base in that county. It was like Bedlam in the sunshine, where hopelessly insane people were warehoused and drugged into stupors. I had some inside sources who fed me stories about how things were going. There was a Pulitzer Prize waiting to be won with enough investigation, but my editors were more interested in having me churn out a page-filling diet of county commission and murder trial stories instead of spending more time on a blockbuster issue.
Still, I was happy when an advocacy group came from Washington with a federal court lawsuit to bust up the mental hospital. They seemed like do-gooders, and I got a lot of column inches from their efforts. Their stated aim was to downsize the sprawling rural mental hospital and have patients treated in community care centres nearer their home communities. A noble goal.
I should have been suspicious because this advocacy group was well-funded, and the Reagan administration and Republican governor did not resist its efforts. Since when do groups working on behalf of the mentally ill have enough money for federal-level lawyers, and why didn't the right-wing officials reflexively fight anything that challenged what the government was doing?
But as cynical as I was then, it was only tactical-level cynicism, not root-level "Oh my doG, we're living in 'The Matrix'!" level strategic cynicism. I now realize that Reagan and then-Gov. Bob Martinez were like Brer Rabbit and the Briar Patch: "Oh please Brer Wolf, don't make us close the mental hospital!"
Because it DID shut down over the next few years. And most of the promised community treatment centres never materialized. (Ironically, once I changed careers and became a nurse, I worked for a few years at one of the Potemkin projects they did put up for patients that had been halfway-housed out of the big hospital, but that's another long-winded story.)
So the Reagan administration (which was actually Bush the First running things from behind the scenes) emptied many mental hospitals. Where did the patients go? To sleep under highway bridges, or wind up in prison for stealing, or get sick and die from drunkenness and disease. The infirm old ones got turfed out to several hideous nursing homes in the area (I worked temporarily at some of them, too) where they died of neglect.
Sorry to sound like Starcade, but that's the ultimate aim of reducing the money spent on mental health -- DEATH. Eliminate the useless eaters. If you don't work, go die. Maybe some of the people pushing for this can't admit it to themselves, like the Good Germans in Munich circa 1933-45. But the shrewd sociopaths who plan it know what's going on. And they don't care.
So, the TV station "Russia Today" reported a Spanish newspaper quoting Hugo Chavez, who said that America used an earthquake machine against Haiti.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q9QtZkT8OBQ
I checked this out, and Russia isn't lying. Spain's ABC did report Chavez's quote, and if you search the .ve domains like i did, Chavez's claim is everywhere and rarely disputed.
This is starting to get pretty weird. Until this month, this kind of stuff was strictly for tinfoil Internet losers.
@ the community
Wasn't in at the start, but congrats on cotton anniversary, this is what "higher" education is all about:)
Everyone donate!
Z.
Bukko: I'm sorry you have to be sorry to sound like me, but understand this: When that happens, I'm one of the first to go.
"Wasn't in at the start, but congrats on cotton anniversary, this is what "higher" education is all about:)
Everyone donate!
Z.
"
Thanks, Zander
Well, we do need to get Stoneleigh a new laptop 2 months from now, so that all by itself might warrant a donation. And do visit our advertisers as well, that's what they place ads for.
(e) None of the above. He imported some Kentucky "shine."
But he's a good kid!
@Stoneleigh
Your comments are profound and brilliant as usual!
Snuffy, on "Community"
I think cohesion hasn't happened largely because it requires at least informal concensus to achieve a common narrative. We simply don't have one. From my discussions in forums such as this one, I think this is still a bit off in the distance timewise unless something dramatic catalizes us.
For a common frame of reference, in Joe Bageant's latest broadcast, which I call the "State of the Tea Party" address (SOTP for the acronymphos among us), he raises some really good points on how we everyday folks get manipulated by the oligarchs everytime...
Want to keep the peasants from uniting over class warfare
Teach the alpha males (or blog dogs nowadays) the scripted fighting words and wave fresh meat in front of them. Sadly, we continue to allow that sort of barking to substite for true democratic speech... to the point where the facade replaces autheniticity simply because it's screaming repeatedly on every channel.
Yes, many of us know this, BUT until we can get more of us willing to dialog "in good faith" thought we disagree idealogically, we are truly hosed. You know how it goes... Group X wants their version of reality to dominate, but Group Y wants exclusive rights and Group Z would rather die first... and so it goes!
How many neighbors sleeping in the streets before we all are willing to admit "There goes the neighborhood!"
I keep telling myself to be patient, meanwhile I learn that another homeless military veteran has frozen to death and I howl "Add THIS to the goddamned story, people!"
I wonder where we will finally draw the line.
Mr nobody'
Fear of "the red menace"both native and European was instilled in one of my grandfather as a boy ,growing up in the mountains of Idaho.The Indian wars had just reached their tragic conclusion 20-25 years previously and their was still raw memories on both sides that could/would lead to fatal encounters,the winner decided on number on-site.
We are no better ,or worse,than any country I think...To grasp the reins of raw,near total power,just to be in the position to attain such power,requires certain sociopathic tendencies.I believe it was Eisenhower who once said when meeting certain leaders of other countries,he felt like making sure he could "use The chair he sat on" to crack the skull of some of the strange/dangerous ones he met[would love to know of whom he was referring to.]While doing "negotiations".
I remember the "freeing "of the mentally ill many years ago,to live in the "community centers".It seems to me that was about the time the term "Homeless"began to be used in our lexicon...the stories of misery that were "exposed"in many places...the real snakepits that existed...and the ones imagined.
It is one of the greatest shames of our nation,The treatment of those who cannot understand why the world is nothing by pain,and hunger,and misery.The self medication of those whom were broken by the Vietnam conflict and now incredible % amount of the homeless who are the veterans of foreign wars should be thrown in the face of everyone who wears a lapel pin of a American flag,while voting to cut vet mental health benefits.
If there be a Hell,I'm sure there is a special place for them...
The "Regression" of our nation has just started.That "The future is here now,just not spread evenly" should be well-kept in everyone's mind.
snuffy
WGS - You hit the nail right on top! And square.
I can't find anyone who is particularly happy about the way things are going, but as an adjunct to that, I can find no two people who agree on what needs to be done!
There are the various blame-throwers, who say it's the ... "illegals", the "liberals", the "Bible thumpers" the "Neocons", whatever.
There are the "its the war machine" or "it's the entitlements" that is killing us.
There is mass ignorance and confusion about energy, fossil fuels, and depletion rates.
There is indeed almost total ignorance of the corrosive economic structures and policies as well (and I am somewhat included in these, but learning).
So, as the old farmer said... "we have too many horses going in too many directions!"
I fall into some of these camps, - the war machine, the banksters, etc. I find it impossible to fall in with the flag waving libertarians, but at the same time I agree with Ron Paul on many issues!
This is a part of the complexity dilemma and the lack of a cohesive and well structured media structure. Everyone listens to their own propaganda source!
On Mish's blog today re SCOTUS:
If corporations are persons and there is no limit on how much these persons can spend to buy politicians to write laws favoring corporate persons, if a corporate person buys another corporate person, is that slavery?
From the perspective of logical progression, where does this end?
Cut Out The Middle Man
The logical thing to do would be to cut out the middle man, and simply vote for corporate lobbyists directly. They write almost all the legislation anyway.
What a coincidence !!!
Yesterday I said ...
"Stock markets are down ... again.
Could Bernake be sending a message ... ME OR ELSE!"
---
Today ... Bernake got re nominated!
The US markets are up!
Could he be back in the stock market control/manipulation seat to prevent the market from going down to their "free market" trading range?
One day one of those quad guys is going to write a book detailing the twist and turns of the bowels of the flow of money.
Its going to smell like roses.
jal
"Today ... Bernanke got re nominated!"
That was yesterday.
"The US markets are up!"
Most of the upswing is gone (Nasdaq already in the red), and it ain't even noon yet.
snuffy said...
We are no better ,or worse,than any country I think...To grasp the reins of raw,near total power,just to be in the position to attain such power,requires certain sociopathic tendencies.
I think that statement is entirely correct. The problem is that those sociopaths find it advantageous to achieving their ends to convince, as best they can, their populace that they and only they are the salt of the earth. The situation with regard to Usanistan is not that we are worse than other countries. We are also not noticeably better than other countries, the blather of Propaganda Ministry not withstanding. What we are is the most dangerous country.
Regarding the original "red menace", that I directed toward VK last night about Andy Jackson being a genocidal monster was a reference to the deadly expulsion of southeastern tribes via a death march to points west of the Mississippi. Many to Oklahoma Territory. If you're not familiar with it, look up the trail of tears.
When the civil war broke out, my Great Grandfather enlisted in a Union Militia and served briefly as a teamster. His Dad was a well connected Republican. After a few months of service, Great Grandpa was mustered out and given some kind of provisional commission as a Captain. His orders were to proceed to Oklahoma and recruit an Indian Militia to fight the new owners of their former land. Not surprisingly, they were not interested.
El G,
About the Supreme Corp, the WSJ has a nice piece on foreign corporations with US subsidiaries lobbying for the same right to buy politicians that US firms now have. Anything less will be labeled protectionism.
Stoneleigh,
I'm an economics novice but doesn't this look like the moves you predict have all ready been played on the practice chessboard.
http://www.jamaica-gleaner.com/gleaner/20100128/lead/lead1.html Any advice for us?
@IMNobody,
Oh, I like Dos Equis is an excellent beer! Your brilliant and handsome grandson certainly deserves such a beer. ;)
also, I'm personally in much better shape financially than my state is.
@Bukko, I think a lot of people will die of just plain shock at everything falling apart ...
@thirdcoast, why do beer brands have the most interesting names?
Hope your room stoped spinning.
@ilargi, PUHLEEZE no polls, unless it's about beer! ;)
peace, shamba
Regarding Bryan McNett's comment @2:48 AM:
Yes, I've been reading about it and it's pretty weird and scary, but most likely true. Let's remember and acknowledge that the US empire is capable and willing to commit the most atrocious acts in the history of humanity. Indeed, nothing is off the table.
Here's more:
"Stranger Than Fiction?
Report: US Weapon Test Aimed at Iran Caused Haiti Quake"
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article24488.htm
AND
"HAARP and Earthquakes"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OcHPAR_5TEc
Celestial Phenomena Just Before 2008 China Earthquake:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KKMTSDzU1Z4
It’s funny how the US Senate is perfectly able to get something done when their Wall Street buddies want it. And for those around the Portland area, Senator Wyden voted in favor, so remember that come election time.
The intellectual dishonesty of people like Paulson never ceases to amaze me. Really, one would have thought I’d learned by now.
And more of the “Doing God’s Work”...ugh...
Obama is a decent man???? Please give me a break!
This is the same Obama who kneels before the bankers. This is the same Obama who continues to support Geithner despite TurboTax Timmy's tax cheating and now confirmed perjury to the US Congress.
Obama is a Chicago machine politician, slick, smooth, fast talking, and you are a sucker if you believe his line.
In the historical category of presidents I personally like but didn't always agree with or think were perfect, you can add Harry Truman. Truman was handed a bag of crap by the sleazeball FDR, whose only saving grace is he was less of a sleazeball than those who wanted to turn the US into Germany Version 2.
"Most of the upswing is gone (Nasdaq already in the red), and it ain't even noon yet."
----
Dammm!
Just goes to show that you can't trust a snake.
(Or my forecasting abilities. hehehe)
jal
@Shamba
I guess the way I wrote that comment might have made it seem like I was saying something about your personal finances. Not intended at all, I have my flaws as a writer. I am pleased to learn that neither of us is yet in danger of starving. What was trying to say is that when a state is screwed, its residents are collectively getting screwed as well.
Iowa is apparently not that bad off yet, but I expect we will get there. We're usually behind on these things. :)
@Greyzone
You were kind enough not to attribute that to me, but I suppose everyone remembers who wrote it. In truth, I don't believe Barack has any chance of being remembered as a decent man.
Irrespective of whether or not he is one. Stoneleigh has it right, he will be Herbert Hoover. Who BTW was born just a few miles from where I sit. I tend to think that he took care of Iowa's chance of ever birthing another President. By the accounts that I'm aware Herb was thought to be a great humanitarian. Lot of good that did him.
Truman is not too high on my list. Oh, I liked his way of speaking, but he did unnecessarily nuke two good sized cities, just to prove we could.
But to the question of Barack and the banksters, I take it you do not embrace the Golden Rule. That rule being that them with the Gold (money in this case) gets to make the rules. Have you observed any violations of this rule? If so, please point them out.
To put things in perspective. I would have a beer with Barack. If forced to drink with Bush, make mine hemlock. Now that I know her taste, I'd much prefer to have a beer with Shamba.
Here's an interesting (albeit loooooong) article from the New York Times that ties together mental illness, climate change and industrial devastation of the landscape. Plus it's got an Australian angle, and I like that.
It even taught me a new word -- "solastalgia;" the sense of unease you get when your comfortable life and country has been altered. That's part of the reason my wife and I left Australia. Similar as it is to America in so many ways, Oz was too odd and far away from everything she knew. I bloody well loved the place, but it was still vaguely unsettling when we'd drive into the countryside and it was all dry and dusty and filled with strangely shaped trees...
PS
If you think Gerbert Goover was a humanitarian, check out what he did to Europe and Russia after WWI. As a matter of fact, he nearly starved my father to death as a child in Austria after the armistice. I still bear the scars from his deprivation. (This crap is passed down the generations).
Nikola Tesla concieved the earth as a conductor of acoustical resonance.
Across the board, at TAE
Where Snuffy’s, Shambas, Greenpa’s be
Buzzards and Bluebirds share the tree
With V.K. and I. M. Nobody
Remember as you post and read
That StoneLady and Ilargi
Aren't even awed by Gravity
And all Coyotes aren't Wile E.
;-)
@Ahimsa,
The suspicious refractive clouds do seem indicative of a highly localized magnetic anomaly, unlike a rainbow, perhaps involving magnetized metallic particles suspended in condensed water droplets arranging themselves in magnetically reconnected discrete field bundles, though naturally occuring earthquakes should also be capable of causing this phenomenon under certain conditions.
That is, the naturally occuring buildup of tectonic stresses resulting in earthquakes should also be capable of inducing highly localised magnetic field anomalies that may incidentally produce visible atmospheric effects.
Only the artist, not the fool, discovers that which nature hides.
Re: Good Ship Lollypop-
nah.
It is obviously the Good Ship Polylop.
I'm aware of most of the excellent questions and stuff yesterday; not ignoring, just way over my ears in real life stuff just now. soon, I hope.
@ Shamba:
I think the room finally stopped around 10:43 AM Eastern time.
Dogfish Head even has interesting names for its brews such as, Midas Touch, Pangaea, Life n' Limb, Theobroma, and Immort Ale.
Now, I should point out that my friends and I have $147 to drop on microbrews (and a spot of dinner) because we work in the defense industry.
As you might imagine, our industry has been a weird oasis of calm in this economic storm. There are a few other awakened souls at my firm, but none of us have the moral courage to stand up and seriously question the imperial project.
I suppose we've grown too comfortable in our lives. The technical class is well and truly bought.
Howdy
I've reading TAE for what, 3 years now. And tonight I donated. Why? Because of what Stoneleigh has written today. Maybe she's wrong. Like she says it's a high risk environment. Still, my money, literally, goes with what she is saying.
Don't get me wrong. I've read/scanned TAE most days. But tonight it is short, to the point. It rings bells all around.
A great perspective. Much appreciated.
I ain't rich but Stoneleigh backs up my thinking and that makes me feel good about what I'm doing with what I have got.
Thanks guys.
p.s. even after all three years I didn't know you folks had a cosy thing going on down here :)
@thethirdcoast
Best to remember the prime directive for those who are bought.
Stay bought.
The last thing the empires always give up is their power to make war. Best to try thinking of yourself as one lucky devil.
Just returned from enjoying a few Dos Equis. Ain't TAE wonderful? Sex, booze, politics we've got it all.
@el gallinazo
I think it was a bit of a stretch to come up with a claim that I thought he was a humanitarian. It seems pretty clear that I said they (whoever they are) said he was. Since the first things one ever heard about Hoover, when I was young, were quite uncomplimentary, I never bothered to learn much about him.
I think I'll just reiterate my original conjecture that none of them have been worth the powder to blow'em to hell. It seems to me remarkable that humans cannot, for some reason, produce leaders anywhere near comparable to those regularly selected by the so called lower animals.
@IMN said "@Shamba
I guess the way I wrote that comment might have made it seem like I was saying something about your personal finances. Not intended at all,"
No Worries, IMNObody. I didn't take it that way at all. :)
@thirdcoast,
glad you're feeling better.
peace, Shamba
peace, Shamba
@VK
Miller Light isn't a beer.
Being a direct liquid byproduct of the Corporate Personhood, it is literally Corporate Piss.
Friends don't let friend drink Corporate Personhood.
Keep your hands 10 & 2 on the wheel son.
Comment I sent in to NPR, All Things Considered:
Guess you picked David Horowitz to comment because Adolf Hitler was unavailable. What a shame! When George W. Bush dies and you use Hugo Chavez to compose his obit, at that point I might consider donating again.
Remember the Fall of 08 slide? Buckle-up..
Fifteen Bank Closures In 2010 After Six More U.S. Banks Fail - Update
1/29/2010 9:26 PM ET
(RTTNews) - The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation or FDIC announced Friday the shuttering of the 15th U.S. bank in 2010, after the 140 bank closures in 2009, following the closure of Bainbridge Island, Washington-based American Marine Bank by the Washington Department of Financial Institutions. Another five banks were also closed on Friday by the regulators, with the assets of the failed banks beings assumed by other banks in an FDIC assisted transaction.
The other five banks that closed on Friday are Carrollton, Georgia-based First National Bank of Georgia, Immokalee, Florida-based Florida Community Bank, Hallock, Minnesota-based Marshall Bank, National Association, Cornelia, Georgia-based Community Bank and Trust, and Los Angeles, California-based First Regional Bank.
The FDIC estimates that the cost to the Deposit Insurance Fund (DIF) by the six bank closures will be a total of $1.86 billion.
With six more banks closing shutters on Friday, the total bank closures for 2010 has reached 15. An average of 12 banks have failed per month in 2009, with bank closures for 2009 totaling 140, which is nearly six times the number that were closed in 2008 of 25 bank failures. It's the highest total bank failures in a year since 1992, when 181 banks failed. Only three banks failed in 2007. But the all time record for bank closures was in 1989 when 534 banks closed.
@Scandia, from yesterday re: SOTU from Usaco viewpoint.
John Rutherford says it better than I can express.
As national borders dissolve in the face of spreading globalization, the likelihood increases that our Constitution, which is the supreme law of America, will be subverted in favor of international laws. What that means is that our Constitution will come increasingly under attack.
The corporate media, increasingly acting as a mouthpiece for governmental propaganda, no longer serves a primary function as watchdogs, guarding against encroachments of our rights. Instead, much of the mainstream media has given itself over to mindless, celebrity-driven news, which bodes ill for our country. It doesn't matter whether you're talking about tabloid news, entertainment news or legitimate news shows, there's very little difference between them anymore. Unfortunately, most Americans have bought into the notion that whatever the media happens to report is important and relevant. In the process, Americans have largely lost the ability to ask questions and think analytically. Indeed, most citizens have little, if any, knowledge about their rights or how their government even works. For example, a national poll found that less than one percent of adults could name the five freedoms protected in the First Amendment.
Finally, I have never seen a country more spiritually beaten down than the United States. We have lost our moral compass. A growing number of our young people now see no meaning or purpose in life. And we no longer have a sense of right and wrong or a way to hold the government accountable. We have forgotten that the essential premise of the American governmental scheme, as set forth in the Declaration of Independence, is that if the government will not be accountable to the people, then it must certainly be accountable to the "Creator."
As a frequent international traveller since the mid 60s, I have always felt extreme embarrassment about the conduct of most Americans visiting in foreign lands. In my mind, the US lost its "moral compass" at the point in time that the majority of its citizens accepted the idea of exceptionalism.
Mind you, I grew up in the era of the beat generation and the hippies, so my recollections can get muddled at times. But I would venture that 1980, or thereabouts, was the beginning of the formative years in which american exceptionalism took hold. Perhaps it was earlier and I would defer to other demonstrated opinions. In any event, I feel that until the US eradicates itself of that belief, it has no sustainable future.
A reminder from gravity...Piezoelectric-electric"pressure" resonating into mechanical energy.The earth and sky still hold secrets we have not a inkling off,and effects of nature we still can not explain ...yet.
We are only a generation or 2 away from our silliest beliefs...and our culture still has enough ignorance and bone headed thinking to make a any reasonably bright person who pays attention...despair.
There is no "cure" for cultural stupidity,nor for a species that barely attempts to buck a couple of hundred thousand years of selective breeding. Certain "survival tendency's" and tribal forms that represent the "best" methods,are hangovers from our red-toothed ape days,and will have to be controlled...somehow,if we are to succeed.
It would be nice if our species gets at least one mature human civilization before we go back into the void.
I am quite familiar of the Trail of Tears,and the various,genocidal actions taken by all "sides" of my family...
I honestly do not know any way out of the box the folks at the top have built[they spent close to 30 years taking over,and are not about to let go w/o a helluva fight]....but I know how flimsy the construction is,and how dependent it is on propaganda,lies,and the greatest media machine ever built.
And I see no way of it not ending ....badly
sleep,no dreams
would be a good thing
snuffy
Stoneleigh's dire pronouncement didn't come with any indication of what evidence suggests it will happen now rather than later. Is it Eliot wave analysis or something else?
Another 6 banks failed.
Here is a story about one of them.
http://www.heraldtribune.com/article/20100129/BREAKING/100129640/0/newssitemap
Bank with ties to Venice home builder fails
Florida Community Bank, the bank that had $21 million in loans to Venice home builder Jacques Cloutier, was closed by state and federal regulators on Friday.
The Immokalee-based bank was taken over by Miami’s Premier American Bank, which is assuming all its $795.5 million in deposits.
The bank will maintain its name.
Since September 2006, Cloutier has defaulted on 20 loans totaling $115.5 million from nearly a dozen lenders. The $21 million from Florida Community was in six different loans.
Florida Community reported $197 million in bad loans on its books at the end of September, representing nearly a third of its entire loan portfolio. The bank had only $21 million in equity capital left at that time.
It was unclear what the status of Cloutier’s loans were. He would not address the topic with the Herald-Tribune in written communications and bank officials did not return several calls for comment.
State and federal banking regulators had issued orders requiring the Florida Community to clean up its bad loans and make sure it is adequately capitalized.
>none of us have the moral courage
>to stand up and seriously
>question the imperial project.
There are two issues here: understanding the imperial project, and opposing it. They are not related.
Any thinking person should try to understand what's really going on in their world. Not everyone who does is obligated to protest.
This is one problem I have with Chomsky and Democracy Now! and all those guys - they can't seem to separate the two ideas. I can't even find a web site where anyone can successfully separate them.
Oh this is already all beyond repair: Of Mortgage Brokers, ARMs, Attrition and Marathons
The most divisive piece of vermin the UK has ever produced pronounced yesterday he has no regrets, no regrets for the dead Iraqis, no regertes for the dead soldiers, no regrets about the oil now being looted, no regrets about the fact we are now a prime target for vengeance, no regrets about the cholera and typhoid killing children in large numbers due to the fact that infrastructure has been totally destroyed in certain areas, (hey, they got a vote now!!!) I could go on forever about his lack of regrets, sadly a number of my fellow countrymen are similarly regretless.
I am talking about about Anthony Blair of course, and his evidence at the kangaroo Iraq enquiry, and not only is he without regret he is out there actively encouraging another similar venture in Iran.
The man is a dictionary definition sociopath and I for one hope he DIES a long and painful death such is my utter hatred of him, sadly some people bring out the worst in human nature.
Never let it be said this man was led by Bush, Bush was a semi imbecilic chimpanzee ( with all due respect to our tree dwelling brethren) Blair is clever cold and calculating. Strike him from the earth.
Z.
@ Zander
He was elected by the public 3 times! But what exactly are the other options that the UK public has? The Tories aren't exactly clean, the Labour party was against the war and it was only with the support of the Tories that the war vote went through.
If Gordon Brown is thrown out of parliament, he'll be replaced by Cameron who is just going to another banker puppet. Are the Lib Dems going to grow a spine? I think not.
That is why I fear that the BNP is going to make huge inroads, if not in this election than definitely the next one. Overpopulation, economic decline and fear are a potent mix for lunatics to exploit.
I can only wish that in the US someone like Kucinich or Nader was heard loud and clear and voted in, is there an equivalent politician in the UK? I'm not aware of them as yet. George Galloway? LOL.
@ Frank re SCOTUS the argument that globalization will erode the constitution is a good one. When Bush visited Canada( I hid under my bed when he was in the country)he sneered that Canada still has a flag, sovereignty. What more could we want! Our military is now controlled by the US, our environmental policy is led by America,etc. and those corporate persons are making quite a mess with the tar sands landscape. You fear losing your constitutional rights as an American. I fear losing Canadian rights to America.
As I look at the discord in the EU I wonder how it will ever be possible to maintain a world order without force? Perhaps the TPTB position is to let us all keep and wave our flags of national identity.
Enough for the underclass?
@Zander, I was going to mention Tony Blair when I saw his face at Davos. If he is receiving a welcome at Davos we should all be very afraid!
I wanted to tune into the enquiry into Blair's role in the Iraq war but could not muster a "cognitive override ". I simply get triggered into an all consuming rage at the mention of his name, at the sight of his face, at the sound of his voice. Blair's face is the poster boy face of evil. Ya, I know I am not thinking here. Only feeling,feeling,feeling...
Comrades;
I&S, I want you to know I coughed up some cash for your paypal account. It wasn't a whole lot, but under the current restrained circumstances of the economy, I hope you understand that it's the most I can give at present. I greatly appreciate the work that you all do, as well as the wit, wisdom and insight from the others that post here as well (for a buzzard, El G sure seems like a pretty smart old bird). My knowledge of finance and economics remains a rudimentary and unsophisticated one, but I do understand that Politics and Ponzi schemes, it would seem, can keep things going indefinitely...until some day, they don't.
But fellow Automatiacs: Rejoice! Good times are now at hand. The economy has rebounded in a spectacular fashion!
"Economy in U.S. Grew at 5.7% Pace, Most in Six Years" cries the jolly lads at Bloomberg
(http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=a2w0EDAkgBlc&pos=1)
And they should know. After all, peace and prosperity is just around the corner. It must be all those green shoots I heard about last year, just now coming into flower. Oops, I'm sorry. I got that confused with the ganja plants my neighbor is growing in his upstairs bedroom. Ever since he got laid off from his 6 figure mortgage brokers job, he's had to revert to growing and selling dope to finance his POS McMansion he bought at the peak of the market. He assures me it's only a matter of time until prices rebound and he'll be able to go back to selling toxic loans to rubes hooked on The American Dream. Personally, I think he's smoking more product than he is selling, but to each their own, I say.
Pete Deer
Frank A.
"For example, a national poll found that less than one percent of adults could name the five freedoms protected in the First Amendment."
Shit! I couldn't remember petition. Guess I am in the 99+% of idiots :-(
Zander
The fact that "Labor" Party Blair and Repug Party W were such asshole buddies tells one all one needs to know about 21st century Anglo American politics.
VK
I see the UK being the first of the so-called western democracies sinking into total, police state fascism. I think, like Stoneleigh, Orwell was a little premature in his predictions.
Hi Scandia,
While I whole heartedly agree that most politicians are vile and puerile. So far in the Western World they've been elected according to the wishes of the people. Even Dubya got 50Mn+ votes and so did Obama.
The troubling thing is that, people on both sides of the political aisle are so caught up in the little trivialities that they forget the bigger picture. And for this they have themselves to blame, in one of John Michael Greer's recent posts, he talked about how the people won against the railroad corporations in the 1880's against all the odds.
A great deal of environmental legislation, women's rights, equality rights etc have also been enacted due to political pressure.
That pressure has really been devoid when it comes to financial issues and climate change as there is no real movement, no inspirational leader to get behind or maybe if there is, he is blocked!
Like in the US, if people really educated themselves, there are some decent politicians, I can think of Dennis Kucinich and Raplh Nader who gets it totally. But there is no real will to elect them, they hardly get any national attention.
Yes the political machine is well oiled and slick but there is a general apathy and ignorance as well, best summed up by the like, "Don't know, Don't care".
At some point, personal responsibility has to come into the fray. Millions of people elected Bush, elected Blair. As long as they had cheap gas and home prices were going up, people were loving it. Iraq? Who cared as long as the party went on.
Nobody forced people to load up on all that debt, nobody forced anyone to buy a McMansion, use their HELOC's, buy expensive cars and yachts and go on fancy holidays. Yes, in the US, healthcare costs are a big issue and a lot of people get screwed over there due to a lack of insurance so I can't berate them.
But overall, there exists this gluttony, this short termism, of not caring about the future because we can't relate to it. Otherwise why would parents spend hundreds of thousands of dollars more per house to educate their kids in the best public schools or private schools and not worry about saddling their kids with a broken economy and a broken planet.
Something, somewhere has deeply gone wrong and we can't simply pin it on one man or a few politicians. There is also a shared responsibility.
How many people do you know, would vote for a 50% income tax?
Would vote for their energy costs to go up three-fold to save the future?
Would vote for being far worse off materially today, so that 3 generations later people still have some sort of functional civilization?
People vote in self-interest, sometimes just to feel good without knowing the real issues. The twin sins of apathy and ignorance are at the heart of our current predicament and this plays right into the hands of those fiddlers who love power, who are addicted to it - double or nothing - and the perverts.
I have a doomstead question for the board. My wife may be in line to inherit about a 100 acres near Sebastopol here [google maps]. We are somewhat familiar with southern culture and such, and she has cousins in the area. It has a ruined farmhouse and barn on it, and is grow up in trees from about 40 years of absence and neglect.
From a Global Warming perspective, and other perspectives, what would be the survival value of this land? We discussed thorny barrier plants a while back, and I'm thinking maybe the wild rose "Mermaid".
And I know, I'm about 17 years behind Snuffy in making it livable...
Stoneleigh:
I don't personally think negative short rates are too predictive by themselves - the world as we know it is coming to an end for other reasons than negative rates. The 'zero bound' is powerful. At the same time, Sweden's central bank carried a negative rate with no ill effects. Greg Mankiw made a case for negative rates last year. Interpretors of the Taylor Rule suggest a strongly negative rate of perhaps -5%. My own prescription for putting Greece on its feet calls for a local Greek currency based on Euros that is a defacto negative carry currency. Quantitative Easing - which doesn't work long term - is a form of negative rates. Without QE, Japan would have crashed a decade ago. As the current deleveraging leg takes hold, look for more Fed QE to push rates effectively negative.
You are right about one thing; negative rates are a market phenomenon that reflects the new, super- hard dollar. Liquidity matters and the fact of the rates' existence right now suggests that the demand for cash dollars is becoming very strong. The ''Niewe Petrodollar' is the new gold standard!
Stoneleigh senses the deflation sure to come.
Considering the increasing real cost of fuel is what is driving the unwinding, paying anything to rent money is a simple tax on productivity: fuel costs being added to money costs. Only 'super- soft' money - bearing a negative rate or a cost to hold (hoard) - can make business profitable/competitive as other input costs increase. Since this is not likely to happen - the idea cuts across all that bankers live for - the result is what you describes; a series of outflanking tactics by and between cash arbs.
Cross- trading and speculations between gold and currency traders was a primary propellant of the Great Depression. Maybe it's different this time ...
... or, maybe not.
Yes! Your are mainstream!
Do you want to hear the discussions that we are having, every day at TAE, being addressed by the very people that are influential?
If you do not get to see the live broadcast then you can get it from ...
http://www.bbcworldnews.com/Pages/ProgrammeMultiFeature.aspx?id=196
BBC WORLD DEBATE FROM DAVOS
2010: Dodging the Double Dip
PANEL
Sharan Burrow: President of the Australian Council of Trade Unions and President of the International Centre for Trade Union Rights as well as the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions
Barney Frank: US Congressman for Massachusetts and Chairman of the Financial Services Committee
Pascal Lamy: Director-General, World Trade Organization
Gerard Lyons: Standard Chartered Bank, Chief Economist and Group Head, for Global Research
Hirotaka Takeuchi: Dean, Graduate School of International Corporate Strategy, Hitotsubashi University
The debate, presented by Nik Gowing, will be broadcast on BBC World News on January 30th and 31st 2010
-----
I especially enjoyed the squirming of everyone when Barney Frank named the size and role of the military as one of the big problems that we have and will be required to address. (A taboo subject)
jal
@VK,
I'm SNP, who are in for the first time in Scotland, they are way the best of an admittedly bad bunch, all regions of the UK have a big minority who want to leave the cesspit London far behind them.
BTW, SNP are not right wing, and were against both wars from day one.
@Scandia
Exactly , exactly, I'm glad you said that, 'Coz I come over in an uncontrollable rage whenever the man in any way, shape or form intrudes into my life, he taints me. Also I want to physically harm anyone who supports him and that is very wrong, but is a measure of the bad karma that surrounds this almost reptilian entity, did you SEE him?? man, I'm no Icke-esque conspiracy theorist but if any one can shape shift he's your man, many, many people over here have commented on how utterly evil he looked during that enquiry.
It's the new kid threat.... "stop that or you be sent upstairs to watch uncle Tony's evidence" we now have the best behaved children in western europe :)
@ElG.
Indeed so sir.
Z.
@VK
With all due respect to JM Greer and with a fervent wish that we the people could, in fact, make those persons known as corporations behave themselves, I think we should consider that the people might have had a little outside help on that railroad victory.
Initial construction on the Panama Canal began in 1881, under a French company. If completed, it promised to make maritime shipping very competitive with the transcontinental railroads. I don't know what was going on in the Union Pacific Boardroom at that time, but I wouldn't totally discount a suggestion that it might have refocused their minds a little bit. Possibly, they hoped to discourage the French from continuing the project by making it look less profitable.
DIYer, be sure you have good water. From it's location you should be able to grow fruits and veggies without any problems. I suspect the biggest concern would be a Gulf Hurricane. Preparation and hard work will provide you far more than most folks can imagine. Like many do you prepare for the worst and hope for the best, and you become use to people being critical and ignore them. Good Luck, John
VK@10.52
that is a quite brilliant post sir, with some bullseye observations on the malaise of our now parasitical society, I ditto 99%.
... and now I'm off out for a Guinness or two, just to revisit one of this weeks hot topics... is there a better drink?
stay safe all.
Z.
PS,
Really excellent article by John mauldin in Biz Insider today " were all screwed" or something, too thirsty to link it ;)
Z.
Shamba said...
Link to Horizon.
This is a public affairs program on KAET Arizona PBS. It's a good way to keep track of what's happening in our state government.
Tonight they had a show that was pretty riveting--well, I thought it was.
They discussed the current Governors proposal to do away with the state supported statutes for mentally, including severely mentally ill persons, as a way of cutting into the budget deficit.
I am somewhat hesitant to do a "drive by comment" (I use to watch Horizon on a somewhat regular basis but not so much recently)...
I did a search and didn't see anyone mentioning it here (only did a quick scan over the article itself) the current "quibble" over who's going to pay for helping all those unfortunate souls in Haiti. If you can pay for healthcare then you get healthcare... if you can't pay then you don't get healthcare so much. Just one of the many things that the future holds.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100130/ap_on_re_us/us_medical_airlift_haiti
MIAMI – The U.S. military has halted flights carrying Haitian earthquake victims to the United States, apparently in a dispute over medical care costs.
The evacuations were temporarily suspended Wednesday, said Capt. Kevin Aandahl, spokesman for U.S. Transportation Command. The flights were halted a day after Florida Gov. Charlie Crist asked the federal government to help pay for care.
"There were some critical cases that were recommended stateside facility care or follow-up care," Aandahl said Saturday. "As I understand it, there were some states that were unwilling to approve transportation for that follow-up. We can't fly anyone without an accepting hospital on the other end."
Stoneleigh's opening motivated me to get back into 30 day Treasuries. Through TreasuryDirect you can 'park' money at the treasury in a holding account so it is available for purchasing bills and bonds. If the short term rate ever goes negative it would seem best just to park it there and buy nothing. Of course it could still be confiscated and to get it out you will have to have the internet plus a solvent bank.
Here is a prediction...if they ever got close to the levers of power,both Kucinich,or Nader would be whacked by the powers that be,or this would be the scenario
First day in office,a mover and shaker has a meeting at the White house.At this meeting with the president,certain films are shown of the Kennedy assassination that have never been seen before.At the end of the meeting,the new president asks?"What is my agenda" [!!!]
They will never allow another populist in office in our lifetime.
DIY
You can knock a few years off your time by using "specimen" trees that are 7/8" to 1.5"dia.,and choosing varieties that are "precocious".My favorites are m-27 rootstock w/ spartan liberty, akane for apples,beauty plums,and umbillen or bosc pears.I usually us any good semi-dwarf rootstock that resists whatever local problems you have with soil
The advantage of old farm places is I will bet you have old fruit trees onsite that can be rescued by some pruning by someone who knows what they are doing,as well as old field that have been stoned...if your place is the one directly down on that link,it looks like you have a creek running right though the place.
Places like that can be gems in the rough for a doomstead if you do things like terraform permiculture ,and hide evidence of your existence from the road...I have seen some example that made me jealous over the years of places you could walk by ,and never even know they existed
It is time to take my grandson to OMSI...later folks
snuffy
Snuffy,
The place is toward the lower left corner of the link, but yes it does have a creek. Interesting you mention fruit trees -- I have a picture somewhere from our visit a couple years ago. There was a 30' pear tree, grown out from rootstock or sprouted from a seed.
It was groaning under the weight of a crop of tiny sour pears that year. They were a big hit with the possums and raccoons and such. Though they weren't edible pears, the soil and climate obviously favored the fruit.
DrabMatter
If T-Bills go nominal negative, treasurydirect.gov will face a problem with their C of I sweep (which has no interest), as that would be where the smart money would park their funds. I theory, it is equivalent to a one minute T-Bill. High potential turnover.
DIYer said...
"I have a doomstead question ... It has a ruined farmhouse and barn on it, and is grow up in trees from about 40 years of absence and neglect."
Sounds like 40 years of growth you don't have to wait for, and 40 years of someone not tampering with the land... I don't know the geographical implications of the area, but 40 years of "neglect" sounds good to me.
@soundsofslience,
I heard about those flights of injured from Haiti being stopped in florida on the radio in car today. this was after I'd read it here in your post.
peace, shamba
SOS,
Helping these survivors is exactly why people are sending $$$.
In fact, there are many people who dont have much to begin with sending money to help. If hospitals in the US are refusing, then we should demand that they use the peoples donations to send these people to nations that will accept them.
There is no excuse!
Now Summers says its 'statistical recovery' and 'human recession'.
Recession is not statistical; statistics are not humane.
But seriously, reducing the signal to noise ratio here with my regular nonsense is becoming increasingly unprofitable, yet there should be additional functions which might prove beneficial, besides the underwhelming awesomeness of my not donating even once in all this time. I'll click on some ads then.
How does that work exactly, is there a certain limit per ad, or does wholesale clicking on any ad equal income?
Y'all,
"... there should be additional functions which might prove beneficial, besides the underwhelming awesomeness of my not donating even once in all this time. I'll click on some ads then.
How does that work exactly, is there a certain limit per ad, or does wholesale clicking on any ad equal income?"
Visiting each advertiser you stumble upon one or twice per day will be highly appreciated. 100 times will not, the mighty gugal has detectors for that.
.
@Stoneleigh
"The main risk for cash is reissuance of the currency in a different form."
This could eventually happen in the US, at least, as that mythical Amero thing was supposed to emerge at some point this decade, the logistical planning for any reissuance is likely complete, and this should coincide with devaluation.
Do you see any chance of this happening in the eurozone, with reissuance of physical currency?
I would think the chance of reissuance happening for the euro would be negligible, besides perhaps in countries such as Greece, unless a digitization of all physical currency would be forcefully pursued for some reason.
Drabmatter and El G - I also use the TreasuryDirect 'C of I' holding area to purchase and redeem short term Treasury Bills. What concerns me is that the 'C of I' is not personally owned by me like a Treasury Bill. I'm wondering that when times turn sour that the government will first take the unowned money in the 'C of I' and use it for its government operations.
Ilargi said...
Y'all,
"... there should be additional functions which might prove beneficial, besides the underwhelming awesomeness of my not donating even once in all this time. I'll click on some ads then.
How does that work exactly, is there a certain limit per ad, or does wholesale clicking on any ad equal income?"
Visiting each advertiser you stumble upon one or twice per day will be highly appreciated. 100 times will not, the mighty gugal has detectors for that.
I haven't been able to donate as of yet either, but I will do my "homework" per your suggestion. Thanks for the advice! I have no problem with being a "lurker" and pulling my own weight.
To Bluebird
From redheaded bird
Well, either way you are taking a chance. As you know, you have two choice when your bill matures, send it to C&I or send it to your corresponding bank. It sits in C&I until the next auction which could be a week or more. When it arrives at your bank, they say, nice of you to loan us that money. It's ours now.
I am glad you brought this up, because what if your bank folds while you are holding the bond? Can you redirect the money in mid-maturity to either C of I or any other bank? I have two signed up and working on a third next time I go back to Usacistan. Additional banks are hard to sign up for security reasons. I'll look into it and report.
Blogger VK said...
"Like in the US, if people really educated themselves, there are some decent politicians, I can think of Dennis Kucinich and Raplh Nader who gets it totally. But there is no real will to elect them, they hardly get any national attention."
Perhaps this article will enlighten as to the reasons why Kucinich and Nader hardly get any national attention.
¨I would think the chance of reissuance happening for the euro would be negligible, besides perhaps in countries such as Greece, unless a digitization of all physical currency would be forcefully pursued for some reason.¨
Living in Spain, also on the watch list, I´d be interested in predictions as to devaluations and risks to money in banks over here. We have our savings spread through 3 different banks, but I´m concerned. I looked into gov bonds, but national default comes up more regularly over here and I´m not sure that´s as good an option, as well as seeming complicated for an individual to buy except through said questionable banks. We´ll keep looking for a rural property but it´s frustrating with prices refusing to come down.
Going to click through ads now.
Cheers.
http://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2010/01/unofficial-problem-bank-list-increases_29.html
Unofficial Problem Bank List increases to 599
The 26 institutions added this week have aggregate assets of $25.9 billion.
GEE! I thought that Dec. was suppose to be really good.
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Do you remember this story???
http://www.heraldtribune.com/article/20100129/BREAKING/100129640/0/newssitemap
Bank with ties to Venice home builder fails
Florida Community Bank, the bank that had $21 million in loans to Venice home builder Jacques Cloutier, was closed by state and federal regulators on Friday.
The Immokalee-based bank was taken over by Miami’s Premier American Bank, which is assuming all its $795.5 million in deposits.
The bank will maintain its name.
Since September 2006, Cloutier has defaulted on 20 loans totaling $115.5 million from nearly a dozen lenders. The $21 million from Florida Community was in six different loans.
Florida Community reported $197 million in bad loans on its books at the end of September, representing nearly a third of its entire loan portfolio. The bank had only $21 million in equity capital left at that time.
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Maybe the loan officers are going to too many parties that are sponsored by the leading community leaders and are doing BAD loan decisions.
jal
Holy &#@$*&*!!
The EU needs $3.1 Trillion just to finance their deficits? Are they joking, insane!? And I thought that the US budget deficit financing was horrible.
The US with 305 million people, needs to borrow around $1.4 Trillion from the world while Europe with about 400 million people needs to borrow $3.1 Trillion!!!
That amounts to $7,750 per person and for the US it's $4,590 per person. Ridiculous really.
The US looks conservative when compared to the craziness going on in Europe and China.
VK said...
Holy &#@$*&*!!
Grandson, that expletive was not nearly long enough. :)
Those numbers must be a lot more frightening if divided by the employed populations. Years ago, Senator Everett Dirksen of Illinois was quoted as having said, "A billion here, a billion there, after awhile it adds up to real money". To which we may now respond, nah that's chicken feed.
VK,
The US looks conservative when compared to the craziness going on in Europe and China.
Indeed. The European housing bubbles were generally worse (although there was substantial local variation and Germany didn't have a housing bubble at all), and their banks are far more over leveraged. Europe is in for a world of hurt in the not too distant future.
IMO this will either take the euro down eventually of at least greatly reduce the number of countries using it. Without a true sense of national cohesion (ie where one would be European first and, say, French second), the euro is really just another Exchange Rate Mechanism. Fixed currency pegs do very badly when things go very wrong (think Argentina in 2001).
We've only just begun to see the kind of regional tensions that will put tremendous stress on European unity. There may initially be bailouts, but it will not be possible to bailout everyone. The dynamic is like a bank run. The first casualties get treatment, but not those who follow, and when a critical mass of difficulties is reached, the fault lines rupture.
IMO the euro will fall further than almost anyone can imagine against the US dollar, as euro weakness and dollar strength combine.
By the way, I say this not as a typical British eurosceptic, but as a long-standing europhile. I greatly value European unity, but reality doesn't care what I, or anyone else, value.
Stoneleigh with high debt levels in ALL European nations (compared to US, Canada, etc.) and high capital needs it is no wonder that Europe is going to splinter.
What do you see in terms of territorial integrity in the United States?
BTW VK do you have a link on the EU deficit funding needs?
This pertains more to discussions earlier re: corporate personhood, vis a vis . Thom Hartman has a thorough, and well researched, recapitulation of the circumstances, and peculiarities, surrounding this historic "ruling" which essentially gave 14th amendment rights (individual rights) to corporations.
Full disclosure, this is a long dissertation, but one which should interest the historically inclined, of which I think there are many here.
For those less interested in historical minutae, what can I say? I think you should read Harmann's piece anyway. Because the ruling last week by the SCOTUS allowing unlimited contributions by Corporate "citizens" has everything to do with the earlier Santa Clara v. Southern Pacific RR, 1886 ruling.
Ironically, the original petition by the Southern Pacific RR was essentially based upon County taxing procedures and fences. You just can't make this stuff up!!
@$$$Dollar$$$
I am thinking that breaking up Usanistan is a whole different ball of wax from splintering Europe. The European States retained most of their sovereignty. Even the founding 13 states had not known very much sovereignty before ratifying the federal republic. The other 37 have known little or no sovereignty.
The Southern Secession seems to have been a pretty undignified mess, notwithstanding the war. We have a well established history of trying things whether they make much sense or not. It has been rumored that someone acting as an advisor to California's government investigated the possibility of seeking a return to Territorial Status as a possible way to escape their problems. As chaos looms, we might see a mechanism legislated for states to rescind their constitution and subject themselves to a federally appointed Territorial Governor. Who I suspect would bear a marked resemblance to a pocket dictator.
As singer Neil Sedaka said in song, Breaking Up Is Hard To Do.
Onion Exclusive!
Bald Eagle Talks To Reporters
From an area newspaper - A laughable and ridiculous perspective that just proves the point that the Limbaighs and Hannitys are getting their point across! (Obama waging "class warfare" against the banks!) ;-)
http://tinyurl.com/y96a3yj
New post up.
How (not) to lift the value of your home
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