"Gas station, Edcouch, Texas"
Stoneleigh: As the world has become a smaller and smaller place over the last few decades, we think less about the differences between locations. Global trade has allowed us to circumvent many local constraints, evening out surpluses and shortages in a more homogenized world.
We have a just-in-time world built on comparative advantage, in the name of economic efficiency. Under this economic principle, every location should specialize in whatever activity it executes most efficiently and the resulting products from all areas would then be traded. The idea is that all will then be better off than they would have been had they attempted to cover all bases themselves for reasons of self-sufficiency.
Where countries had been inclined towards more expensive self-sufficiency, market forces have often made this approach untenable, as large cost differences can make countries or industries uncompetitive. Local production has been progressively out-sourced as a result.
By 'better off', economists mean that goods will be cheaper for all, thanks to global wage arbitrage and economies of scale. Globalization has indeed delivered falling prices for many consumer goods, particularly electronics. In an era of massive credit expansion (effectively inflation), such as we have lived through for decades, one would normally have expected prices to rise, as a lagging indicator of money supply expansion, but prices do not always follow money supply changes where other major complicating factors exist.
In recent years, the major complicating factors have been the ability to produce goods in places where wages are exceptionally low, the ability to transport those goods to consumer markets extremely cheaply and ready access to letters of credit.
For nominal prices (unadjusted for changes in the money supply) to fall during an inflationary period, real (inflation adjusted) prices must be going through the floor. This has been the effect of trade as we have known it, and it is all many of us have known. What we are not generally aware of is the vulnerability of the global trade system, due to the fragility of the critical factors underpinning it.
By producing goods, particularly essential goods, in distant locations, we create long and potentially precarious supply lines. While relative stability reigns, this vulnerability does not cause trouble and we enjoy cheap and plentiful goods. However, if these supply lines are disrupted, critical shortages could result. In a very complex just-in-time system, this may not take very long at all. Such as system is very brittle, as it has almost no redundancy, and therefore almost no resilience. When Jim Kunstler refers to efficiency as "the straightest path to hell", it is this brittleness he is referring to.
The most ephemeral critical factor for trade is the availability of letters of credit. These became scarce during the first phase of the credit crunch in 2008, and the result was goods stuck in port even though there was robust demand for them elsewhere. Goods simply do not move without letters of credit, and these can dry up extremely quickly as a systemic loss of confidence results in a systemic loss of liquidity. In a very real way, confidence IS liquidity.
The Baltic Dry shipping index fell 96% in 2008 as a result, meaning that shipping companies were suffering. Although the index has recovered slightly during the recent long rally, it is still very depressed in comparison with its previous heights. Now that the rally appears to be over, on the balance of probabilities, letters of credit for shipping will come under renewed pressure, and goods will once again have difficulty moving. As demand also starts to fall, due to the loss of purchasing power in the depressionary era we are moving into, this will get far worse.
In a depression, trade is very adversely affected. One reason for this a highly protectionist beggar-thy-neighbour economic policies. For instance, the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930 in the US, which drastically raised tariffs on imports, lead to retaliation by trading partners, and the resulting trade war dropped global trade by 66% between 1929 and 1934.
Thanks to globalization, we are much more dependent on trade than people were in the 1930s. The combination of credit drying up on the one hand and global trade wars on the other is an extreme threat to our vulnerable supply lines. Add to that the general upheaval created by severe economic disruption, which can easily lead to increased physical risks to transporting goods, and the longer term potential for much higher energy prices, and we could see an outright collapse of global trade in the approaching years.
The benefits of self-sufficiency will be seen in places where it still exists. So long as the whole supply chain is local, localized production means being able to maintain access to essential goods at a time when obtaining them from overseas may be difficult or impossible. It is currently more expensive, but the relative security it can provide can be priceless in a dangerous world. The ability to produce locally does not arise overnight however, especially where there are no stockpiles of components. In places where it has been lost, it will take time to regain. There is no time to lose.
We will be returning to a world of much greater diversity as we lose the homogenizing effect of trade. That means the existing disparities between areas will matter far more in the future than they have in the recent past. We will need to think again about the pros and cons of our local regions - what they can provide and what they cannot, and for how many people. Some areas will be in a great deal of trouble when they lose the ability to compensate for deficiencies through trade. As the global village ceases to exist, the world will once again be a very large and variable place.
Credit Crunch 2010?
by Michael Snyder - The Economic Collapse
Over the past several decades, one of the primary engines of U.S. economic prosperity has been a constantly expanding debt spiral. As long as the U.S. government, state governments, businesses and American consumers could all continue to borrow increasingly large amounts of money, the economy was going to continue to grow and “the greatest party on earth” could continue.
But many of us knew that if anything ever came along and significantly interrupted that debt spiral, it could cause a credit crunch even more severe than we saw at the beginning of the Great Depression back in the 1930s. You see, back in the “roaring 20s”, American businesses and consumers had leveraged themselves like never before. Debt soared to record levels and when the credit spigot was suddenly turned off the whole thing came crashing down and it took an entire decade and a world war to recover. Well, today things are frighteningly similar.
Over the past 30 years we have piled up unprecedented mountains of debt. In fact, today our entire economic system is based on debt. So what would a credit crunch do to an economy based on debt? Well, it would absolutely devastate it of course. So are we facing a credit crunch in 2010? Yes. Consumer credit in the United States has already contracted during 15 of the past 16 months, and there is every indication that things are about to get even worse.The truth is that once a deflationary cycle starts, it tends to feed on itself. People quit spending money, banks quit making loans and everyone starts hoarding cash. And right now there is a lot of fear out there. According to one major indicator, consumer sentiment declined in early July to its lowest in 11 months.
U.S. consumers are starting to pay down debt and are holding on to their money. Others can’t spend more money because they are out of work or are completely tapped out. But without more spending, the U.S. economy won’t get revved up again. And if the U.S. economy does not get going soon, there are going to be more foreclosures, more bankruptcies and even more jobs lost.
In a recent article for The Telegraph, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard set out some of the statistics that show that the U.S. economy is in really, really bad shape right now….
The US workforce has shrunk by a 1m over the past two months as discouraged jobless give up the hunt. Retail sales have fallen for the past two months. New homes sales crashed to 300,000 in May after tax credits ran out, the lowest since records began in 1963. Mortgage applications have fallen by 42pc to 13-year low since April. Paul Dales at Capital Economics said the “shadow inventory” of unsold properties has risen to 7.8m. “The double dip in housing has begun,” he said.
It seems like almost everyone is using the words “double dip” these days. It is almost as if it was already a foregone conclusion. But the truth is that this would have just been one long economic decline if the U.S. government (and many of the other governments around the globe) had not pumped so much “stimulus” into their economies over the past several years.
Now that governments around the world are pulling back and are beginning to implement austerity measures, the “sugar rush” of the stimulus money is wearing off and the original economic decline is resuming. All that the trillions in “stimulus” did was to give the world economy a temporary boost and get us into a whole lot more debt.
In his recent article entitled “The U.S. Is On The Edge Of A Growing Deflationary Sinkhole”, Lorimer Wilson did a really good job of detailing how all of this debt has gotten us into a complete and total mess…. Capitalism cannot function unless its constantly compounding debt is serviced and/or paid down. Today, the U.S., the world’s largest debtor, can no longer pay what it owes except by rolling its debt forward and borrowing more [in] what the late economist Hyman Minsky called ponzi-financing, financing common in the final stages of mature capital systems.
The amount of outstanding U.S. debt, according to Martin D. Weiss, www.moneyandmarkets.com, has now reached levels that can never be paid off. The United States government and its agencies have, by far,
- the largest pile-up of interest-bearing debts ($15.6 trillion),
- the largest accumulation of unsecured obligations (over $60 trillion),
- the largest yearly deficit ($1.6 trillion), and
- the greatest indebtedness to the rest of the world ($4.8 trillion).The truth is that the United States is in the early stages of a truly historic financial implosion.
Earlier this year, all of the focus was on the European sovereign debt crisis, but now all eyes are turning back to the U.S. once again. David Bloom, currency chief at HSBC, recently remarked that world financial markets are extremely concerned about the state of the U.S. economy right now….“We’re in a world of rotating sovereign crises. The market seems to become obsessed with one idea at a time, then violently swings towards another. People thought the euro would break-up. Now we’re moving into a new phase because we’re hearing alarm bells of a US double dip.”
Without direct intervention from the U.S. government, the U.S. financial system is headed for a world of hurt. The truth is that the credit markets are freezing up, and without efficiently operating credit markets, the economic system we have constructed simply will not work.The following information comes courtesy of the Consumer Metrics Institute. If you have never visited their site, you should, because it is packed full of excellent data. In their most recent report, they do a good job of detailing the astounding credit contraction that we have been witnessing….
During the past week there has been a flurry of Federal Reserve reports and commentary concerning the levels of credit in the current economy. The two most notable were:
• On July 8th they reported that the level of seasonally adjusted outstanding U.S. Consumer Credit (their G.19 report) decreased during May by $9.1 billion, representing an annualized rate of credit contraction of 4.5%. Although even this change is above the average for the preceding twelve months, it is much smaller than a quiet revision to the previously published April U.S. Consumer Credit figure — which is now reported to have decreased by $14.9 billion (a 7.3% annualized contraction rate).
The Federal Reserve fails to put these numbers into perspective:
1) Consumer credit has contracted during 15 of the past 16 reported months, and it is down a record total $148 billion over that time span.
2) The $14.9 billion in credit ‘lost’ during just April is the second highest monthly amount in history, second only to the $23.4 billion ‘lost’ during November, 2009.
3) And the nearly 6% cumulative reduction in consumer credit over the past 16 months is the largest (on a percentage basis) for any 16 month span since September 1944 — when FDR was still in the White House and people were buying War Bonds instead of tightly rationed consumer goods.
• On July 12th Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke noted that small businesses were not getting the loans that they need to create new jobs. The Federal Reserve’s own data reports that lending to small businesses dropped to below $670 billion in Q1 2010, down about $40 billion (5.6%) from two years ago.
The New York Times reported Mr. Bernanke wondered: “How much of this reduction has been driven by weaker demand for loans from small businesses, how much by a deterioration in the financial condition of small businesses during the economic downturn, and how much by restricted credit availability? No doubt all three factors have played a role.”
Small businesses, which account for over 60% of gross job creation, are not - for whatever reason - tapping into the credit necessary to create those jobs.
If you know anything about economics, the excerpt that you just read should be chilling you to your bones right about now.
Without loans, businesses can’t start or expand, consumers cannot buy homes or vehicles and retail spending will be in the toilet. But, as a recent USA Today article pointed out, part of the problem is that so many Americans now have very, very low credit scores….
Figures provided by FICO show that 25.5% of consumers - nearly 43.4 million people - now have a credit score of 599 or below, marking them as poor risks for lenders. It’s unlikely they will be able to get credit cards, auto loans or mortgages under the tighter lending standards banks now use.
As I recently pointed out on The American Dream blog, historically only about 15 percent of Americans have had credit scores that low.
So can the U.S. economy fully recover if the number of Americans that are a bad credit risk has nearly doubled? That is a very good question. As I noted in a previous article, the truth is that the retail sector is already a huge mess, and if we don’t get the American people pulling out their credit cards soon this holiday season may not be very jolly at all….
Vacancies and lease rates at U.S. shopping centers continued to get even worse during the second quarter of 2010. In fact, in some of the most depressed areas of the United States, many malls and shopping centers could end up looking like ghost towns by the time Christmas rolls around.
So this is the point where Barack Obama comes riding in on his white horse and rescues the U.S. economy, right?
Well, at this point Obama has joined with the other G20 leaders in pledging to get government spending under control. So right now there are not any plans for new stimulus packages.
But as the U.S. economy starts sinking into a deflationary depression, the temptation to pump up the economy with even more government spending will become too great. This will especially be true the closer to the election of 2012 that we get. By the time election season rolls around, Obama will likely be much more willing to pile up even more debt for a short-term economic boost.
So yes, we are headed for a complete and total economic nightmare, but exactly how it all plays out is going to depend a lot on what Barack Obama, the Federal Reserve, other world leaders and other central banks decide to do. For the moment, we are heading for an absolutely brutal credit crunch, and if something is not done quickly, it is going to dramatically slow down the world economy.
The Real Reason Geithner Is Afraid of Elizabeth Warren
by John R. Talbott - Huffington Post
As reported on HuffPost last week, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has expressed opposition to the possible nomination of Elizabeth Warren to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, according to a source with knowledge of Geithner's views.
One can assume that Geithner, being very close to the nation's biggest banks, is concerned that Warren, if chosen, will exercise her new policing and enforcement powers to restrict those abusive practices at our commercial banks that have been harmful to consumers and depositors.
Certainly, Warren is not the commercial banking industry's first pick to serve in this new role. And unlike other legislation in which an industry's lobbying effort would naturally slow or cease once the legislation is passed, the new financial reform bill is continuing to attract enormous lobbying action from the banks. The reason is simple. The bill has been written to put a great deal of power as to how strongly it is implemented in the hands of its regulators, some of which remain to be chosen. The bank lobby will work incredibly hard to see that Warren, the person most responsible for initiating and fighting for the idea of a consumer financial protection group, is denied the opportunity to head it.
But this is not the only reason that Geithner is opposed to Warren's nomination. I believe Geithner sees the appointment of Elizabeth Warren as a threat to the very scheme he has utilized to date to hide bank losses, thus keeping the banks solvent and out of bankruptcy court and their existing management teams employed and well-paid.
To see how this scheme works during the current crisis we must go back and examine previous crises and recessions in order to understand their cause. As Kenneth Rogoff explains in his new book, This Time is Different, most crises are preceded by a boom or bubble period in which asset classes, such as homes in this case, reached unsustainable pricing levels. The main driver of most of these asset bubbles is loose bank lending in which banks offer money to asset buyers on very liberal terms, thus guaranteeing that asset prices will inflate abnormally. Eventually, all bubbles burst, and in the worst cases we are led into financial crises. The banks make things even more difficult because as prices fall the banks end up with substantial increases in problem loans.
To deal with this increase in problem loans, the banks typically pull back on all lending, not just lending in the affected sector. The banks, now primarily concerned with their own survival if they wrote off the problem loans, literally stop almost all new lending, thus driving the economy into a deep recession. It is difficult to sustain economic activity when there is no credit being supplied by the banking system. The banks, instead of lending to businesses and consumers, shift their investments to very safe instruments like US Treasury securities. The result is a risk-free cash flow that over time eventually repairs the banks' balance sheets by increasing their profitability and thus restoring their book equity.
Typically, during crises, the Federal Reserve also lowers interest rates and the cost of bank borrowing so as to make this risk-free profit spread to banks even greater. In the current financial crisis, the Federal Reserve has lowered interest rates to almost zero percent per annum thus assuring that the banks can profit enormously by doing almost nothing, not lending and sitting on risk free Treasury investments. While good for the banks, one can see how damaging this lack of credit extension can be to an economy trying to recover from an economic crisis.
What is most damaging about this approach to an economy attempting to recover from a recession is that it ensures that the policy of tight money from the banks will continue for some time. Time is needed for the banks to earn their way out of their loan losses and insolvency problems if they decide not to quickly write off the bad loans. In Japan, after their banking crisis of 1994, it took more than a decade for the banks to repair their balance sheets and resume normal lending thus retarding economic growth for decades.
This is exactly the plan that Geithner and Larry Summers have proposed for the current crisis. If you remember, Hank Paulson, the Treasury Secretary at the time, had announced that the $700 billion TARP funds would be used to buy toxic assets like bad mortgage loans from the commercial banks. But this never happened and now the amount of bad bank loans has increased in the trillions. Immediately after receiving authorization of the funding for TARP from Congress, Paulson reversed direction and decided to make direct equity investments in the banks rather than using the TARP funds to acquire their bad loans.
So where are the trillions of dollars of bad loans that the banks had on their books? They are still there. The Federal Reserve took possession temporarily of some of them as collateral for lending to the banks in an attempt to clean up the banks for their supposed" stress tests". But as of now, the trillions of dollars of underwater mortgages, CDO's and worthless credit default swaps are still on the banks books. Geithner is going to the familiar "bank in crisis" playbook and hoping that the banks can earn their way out of their solvency problems over time so the banks are continuing to slowly write off their problem loans but at a rate that will take years, if not decades, to clean up the problem.
And this is where defeat of the nomination of Elizabeth Warren becomes critical for Geithner. For Geithner's strategy to work, the banks have to find increasing sources of profitability in their business segments to balance out their annual loan loss recognition from their existing bad loans in an environment in which they continue to recognize new losses in prime residential mortgages, commercial real estate lending, sovereign debt investments, bridge loans to private equity groups, leverage buyout lending and credit card defaults.
The banks have made no secret as to where they will find this increase in cash flow. They intend to soak their small retail customers, their consumer and small business borrowers, their credit card holders and their small depositors with increased costs and fees and are continuing many of the bad mortgage practices that led to the crisis (ARM's, option pay deals, zero down payments, second mortgages, teaser rates, etc). American and Banking Market News reports this week that the rule changes in the financial reform bill may lead banks to start implementing fees that had essentially disappeared from the industry early in the new millennium, such as fees for not meeting minimum balance requirements on a checking account, or reinstituting fees for certain online banking transactions that are currently free or charging to receive a paper statement or to talk to a live teller as Bank of America's CEO has recently proposed.
It is exactly these types of unwarranted fees on small consumers and poorly designed products that Elizabeth Warren will fight against as head of the new consumer finance protection group. And it is why Geithner sees her as so threatening. Unless the banks are allowed to raise fees and charges on their smaller consumer customers, Geithner's and Summers' scheme for dealing with the banking crisis by hiding problem loans permanently on the banks' balance sheets will be exposed for what it is, an attempt at preserving the jobs of current bank executives at the cost of dragging out this recovery needlessly for years in the future. For the investment banks without small consumers and depositors to soak, Geithner and Summers have offered an environment with fewer competitors, more dominant market shares for the surviving firms and near monopoly pricing of their investment banking and derivative products to corporate clients and institutional investors to ensure continued and increasing profitability and growth.
Warren's appointment wouldn't just be a setback, it would devastate Geithner's entire plan on how to deal with trillions of bad assets the banks still won't recognize as losers. That is why I think she is going to face enormous resistance, even inside of the administration. The next one to oppose Warren after Geithner will be Larry Summers for this very reason. Then they will see if they can get Bernanke and finally Obama on board. The pitch to Obama and Bernanke will not be personal, it will be the same phony argument that Paulson and Bernanke used to justify TARP to congress, they will say that if Warren is appointed the entire world of banking and finance as we know it will come to an end.
I am reminded of when Bernie Sanders offered an amendment to audit the Fed to the financial reform bill earlier this year. While it was just one of many amendments being considered, the administration came out and said it was not against any of the amendments being discussed, with one exception, they would fight the "audit the Fed" idea to the death (me thinks the lady doth protest too much). Why? The same reason, a complete audit of the Fed would show that we have still not dealt with the bad loans on the banks' books.
As to the other two potential nominees on Obama's short list for the position, Michael S.Barr is Geithner's boy currently working for him as an Assistant Secretary at Treasury. More importantly, he is Bob Rubin's boy, having served as Rubin's assistant in the Clinton administration. If you are Rubins' boy, you are the bank lobby's boy as this position of Rubin's boy was previously held by Summers and then Geithner. Eugene Kimmelman seems like a nice enough person who has no background in finance. If the banking lobby can't get their guy in, the next best thing is to get a completely clueless person in who is too afraid to act boldly given he couldn't tell a CDO from a CEO. He has been the top lobbyist for the Consumers Union, so he is pro-lobbying and as a positive comment, really understands how toasters and garage door openers work.
Elizabeth Warren won't just protect consumers, her Oklahoma bred sense of honesty, fairness and decency just might reinvigorate and redirect a government and a banking industry that for too long has seen the average American taxpayer and the typical small consumer as the enemy to be taken advantage of at every turn.
If you want to help make sure Elizabeth Warren is appointed to head the new consumer finance protection agency, please take a minute and sign this online petition that will be presented to the President and then use the accompanying email opportunity to invite your friends to do the same.
John R. Talbott is the bestselling author of eight books on economics and politics that have accurately detailed and predicted the causes and devastating effects of this entire financial crisis including, in 2003, "The Coming Crash in the Housing Market", in January 2006, "Sell Now! The End of the Housing Bubble" and in 2008, "Contagion: The Financial Epidemic that is Sweeping the Global Economy".
US Treasury under fire on impact of car rescues
by Stephanie Kirchgaessner - Financial Times
The US Treasury faces criticism that it did not sufficiently weigh the impact of tens of thousands of job losses when it pushed General Motors and Chrysler to close hundreds of car dealerships rapidly as a condition of the government’s $81bn bail-out of the comtwo Detroit carmakers.panies. The criticism comes at a difficult time for the Obama administration, which has said that the bail-out was an undesirable but necessary intervention that ensured the companies’ long-term viability.
Suggestions that the administration’s decisions encouraged tens of thousands of job losses will also sting the White House at a time when it is already under fire over high unemployment. A report to be released on Monday by the special inspector-general for the troubled asset relief programme will find that the Treasury neglected its responsibility to protect the broader US economy when in March last year it rejected initial plans by the two carmakers to close dealerships gradually.
Under pressure from the government, the companies sped up that process, with GM announcing plans to wind down 1,454 dealerships by this October, and Chrysler terminating 789 dealerships in 2009. "The Treasury should have taken every reasonable step to ensure that accelerating the dealership terminations was truly necessary for the long-term viability of the companies and should have at least considered whether the benefits ... outweighed the costs to the economy," the special inspector-general found.
Administration officials rejected the report on Sunday, saying the Treasury’s actions had saved 1m jobs and paved the way for both companies to thrive. The plan would have failed, they argued, without shared "sacrifices" from all stakeholders. "From the very beginning, the president understood and explained that a responsible approach to these companies was not to simply just continue kicking the problems down the road. Those jobs were unsustainable," one official said.
The report’s findings were seized on by Darrell Issa, a Republican congressman and one of the administration’s most outspoken critics. "This sobering report should serve as a wake-up call as to the implications of politically orchestrated bail-outs," Mr Issa said. The US Treasury decision to force the companies to accelerate the closure of dealerships was based on a theory that, with fewer dealerships, the companies would be more profitable.
Obama Omits Jobs Killed or Thwarted from Tally
by Caroline Baum - Bloomberg
Can you believe they’re still touting that silly metric? When I heard last week that the White House would be announcing the number of "jobs created or saved" as a result of the 2009 American Reinvestment and Recovery Act, my first reaction was embarrassment.
Imagine how Christina Romer must feel. The chairman of the President’s Council of Economic Advisors was dressed in a cheery, salmon-colored jacket, a complement to the upbeat news she had to deliver on July 14. The $787 billion stimulus enacted in February 2009, which subsequently grew to $862 billion, increased gross domestic product by 2.7 percent to 3.4 percent relative to where it would have been, and added anywhere from 2.5 million to 3.6 million jobs compared with an ex-stimulus baseline.
"By this estimate, the Recovery Act has met the president’s goal of saving or creating 3.5 million jobs -- two quarters earlier than anticipated," Romer said with a straight face. (More than 2.5 million non-farm jobs have been lost since ARRA was enacted in February 2009, all of them in the private sector, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.) How does the CEA arrive at these numbers? It uses two methods, Romer said. The first is a standard macroeconomic forecasting model that estimates the multiplier effect of fiscal policy. (The government’s spending is someone else’s income.) The second method is statistical, using previous relationships between GDP and employment to project future behavior.
Model Imperfection
These numbers might just as well have been pulled out of a hat. Recall that it was the same model and method the administration used in January 2009 to predict an unemployment rate of 7 percent in the fourth quarter of 2010 with the enactment of the fiscal stimulus and 8.8 percent without. The unemployment rate now stands at 9.5 percent. This same model convinced policy makers that the subprime crisis was contained, encouraged the rating companies to slap AAA ratings on collateralized garbage, and led banks to believe they had adequately managed their risks and reserved for potential losses.
Econometric models rely on the assumption that $1 of government spending generates more than $1 of GDP, the so-called multiplier effect. There is no allowance for the negative multiplier on the other side. Sure the government can spend money and generate GDP growth in the short run: Government spending is a component of GDP! What it giveth it taketh away from the private sector via taxation or borrowing. Every dollar the government spends is a dollar the private sector doesn’t spend, an investment it doesn’t make, a job it doesn’t create. This is what is unseen, as Frederic Bastiat explained in an 1850 essay.
Hiring Disincentives
"If the administration wants to take credit for ‘jobs created or saved,’ it should also accept responsibility for ’jobs destroyed or prevented,’" said Bill Dunkelberg, chief economist at the National Federation of Independent Business. Ignoring the flaws in the stimulus for the moment, Congress raised the hurdle for hiring entry-level workers when it refused to delay the third step in a three-stage minimum wage increase last year.
And the Department of Labor cracked down on unpaid internships, outlining six criteria that businesses had to satisfy in order to hire someone willing and able to work for nothing to get the experience. For example, the employer must derive "no immediate advantage from the activities of the trainees, and on occasion the employer’s operations may actually be impeded." You can’t make this stuff up.
Recession’s Advantage
At the White House briefing last week, Romer touted the leveraging of public investment with private funds, with $1 of Recovery Act funds partnering with $3 of outside spending. Romer said this public spending "saved or created 800,000 jobs" in the second quarter alone. Once again, what would have happened in the absence of the government’s targeted intervention?
According to a June 2009 study by the Kauffman Foundation in Kansas City, Missouri, well over half of the companies on the Fortune 500 list, and almost half of the fastest growing companies in America, were started during a recession or bear market. Dunkelberg calls this phenomenon "negative push starts." People might not be willing to quit their jobs, but if they get laid off during a recession and were thinking about starting a business, they might seize the day, he said. "When people ask me when the best time to start a company is, I tell them the day before the recession ends," Dunkelberg said. "They can do it on the cheap, and the next day you get cash flow."
Model That!
What’s more, firms less than five years old are responsible for all of the net new jobs created in the U.S., the Kauffman study found. Job creation by start-ups is more stable, less sensitive to the business cycle. So, if the goal is to create more jobs, and start-ups are the ones that create them, why is the Obama administration partnering up with existing firms? "Job-creation policies aimed at luring larger, established employers will inevitably fail," said Tim Kane, Kauffman Foundation senior fellow in research and policy and author of a follow-up study released this month.
Not to worry. The White House has a model that turns failure into success.
Housing outlook clouded by expiration of tax credit
by Rex Nutting - MarketWatch
For the first time in more than two years, the U.S. housing market is standing on its own, without extraordinary help from the government. It hasn't been pretty. Following the expiration of the home-buyers' tax credit, home building, home sales, and home prices have fallen. It could be months before a clear view of the housing market is revealed.
In the coming week, four major housing indicators will be released. Although everyone expects the numbers in the medium-term to be consistent with a very weak housing market, economists are more uncertain than usual about which way the latest numbers will swing. The other big newsmaker of the week will be Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, who will go to Capitol Hill for two days of testimony about the economy and what should be done to make it better. The Fed has marked down its economic forecast and there's talk that the Fed could try more unconventional policy moves if the economy weakens further. Bernanke will surely be asked about what the trigger would be for further easing, and the lawmakers will want to know what, if anything, Congress should be doing.
Housing
The big housing number of the week will come on Tuesday when the Commerce Department reports on housing starts for June. Starts dropped 10% (including a 17% drop in single-family houses) in May after the deadline for the tax credit expired at the end of April. The median forecast of economists surveyed by MarketWatch calls for a further 2% decline in starts in June to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 583,000, which would bring new construction back to the levels of last summer, well above the record low of 477,000 in April 2009, but about 75% below the peak of 2006.
The median forecast hides a wide divergence of opinion, with forecasts ranging from 525,000 to 620,000. "There is very little demand for housing of any kind," economists at Capital Economics wrote. "New construction activity will remain quite depressed for some time," said Meny Grauman, an economist for CIBC World Markets. Some economists are slightly more upbeat about June's figures. "The decline may have overshot the mark," wrote Peter D'Antonio, an economist for Citigroup Global Markets, who nonetheless agrees that "the housing market remains weak." "The noise associated with the credit has made assessing the housing market difficult," D'Antonio said.
Homebuilders themselves say they are very pessimistic about the market going forward. The home builders' sentiment index fell from 22 in May to 17 in June. Economists think it may have fallen back to 16 in July. On Thursday, the National Association of Realtors will report on June's home resales. Economists are looking for a 9% drop in existing-home sales to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 5.15 million, with estimates ranging from 4.48 million to 6.20 million.
To qualify for the tax credit, a buyer had to sign a sales contract by the end of April, and close on the sale by the end of June (this has now been extended to the end of September). Existing-home sales are recorded at the time of closing, so June's closings would qualify. It takes a month or two to close on the loan in normal times, but realtors and lenders have reported long delays related to appraisals, higher lending standards and administrative backlogs. That's why the deadline was extended.
The number of sales contracts plunged about 30% in May, while mortgage applications for purchase loans also fell by about 30%. It seems as if demand may have started to weaken even before the tax credit expired. Economists at Credit Suisse look for a "fierce correction" in home sales, with sales of existing homes falling into the mid-4 million range in coming months. That would take sales all the way back to the lows hit in late 2008 and early 2009, when the crisis was at its full fury. Also on Thursday, the Federal Housing Finance Agency will report on home prices for May. Prices rose 0.8% in April compared with March, but were down 1.5% compared with a year earlier.
Home prices are likely to continue falling as sales dry up. The freefall in sales "appears destined to apply additional downward pressure on home prices," said Michael Gregory, senior economist for BMO Capital Markets. Housing has fallen so far that it's simply too small to have much impact on growth, said Joseph LaVorgna, chief U.S. economist for Deutsche Bank. Housing now accounts for a record-low 2.4% of gross domestic product, he said. LaVorgna may be right when considering the contribution housing makes to investment and employment, but the impact that falling home prices could have on consumer sentiment, consumer spending and bank balance sheets could still be considerable.
US homebuilders losing confidence in the recovery
by Alan Zibel - AP
Homebuilders are feeling increasingly pessimistic about their industry, more evidence that the economic recovery is slowing. The National Association of Home Builders said Monday that its monthly reading of builders' sentiment about the housing market sank to 14 — the lowest level since March 2009. Readings below 50 indicate negative sentiment about the market.
The weak job market and an increasing number of foreclosed properties have prompted builders to limit construction of new homes. A modest revival in sales over the past year ended in May after federal tax credits expired at the end of April. Conditions are not likely to improve soon. Reports this week on new home construction and previously owned home sales in June are expected to show the housing market remains deeply hobbled. An update on the Obama administration's effort to help those in danger of losing their homes is also expected Tuesday.
While the overall economy appears unlikely to fall back into recession, many analysts expect housing to struggle for some time. "With growth slumping again, and unemployment hovering near the double digits, we simply don't have the necessary ingredients for a sustainable recovery in housing," said Mike Larson, real estate and interest rate analyst at Weiss Research. Builders have sharply scaled back construction in the face of a severe housing market bust. The number of new homes up for sale in May fell to 213,000, the lowest level in nearly 40 years. And, at the current sales rate, it would take 8.5 months to exhaust that supply. In a healthy economy, new home inventory takes about six months to exhaust.
Five years ago, at the peak of the housing boom, there were about 460,000 unsold homes on the market. And because of the frenzied pace of sales, it would have taken a little more than four months to exhaust that supply. In some ways, it could be good news that builders are scaling back. It means they won't add to the supply of homes on the market and that could create more demand for the current stock.
But it won't help the job market. Each new home built creates, on average, the equivalent of three jobs for a year and generates about $90,000 in taxes paid to local and federal authorities, according to the builders' trade group. The impact appears in multiple industries, from makers of faucets and kitchen appliances to lumber yards. New home sales in May dropped 33 percent to the slowest pace in the 47 years records have been kept. The number of buyers who signed contracts to purchase previously occupied homes tumbled 30 percent in May. The drop-off came immediately after the tax incentives to sign a contract on a home ended on April 30.
Still, the trade group's latest survey of 502 residential builders nationwide suggests the market will remain sluggish for the rest of the year. The index is broken into three separate readings. Its index measuring expectations for the next six months fell one point to 21. Current sales conditions fell two points to 15 and foot traffic from prospective buyers sank to 10. Even if homebuilders keep construction to a minimum, it could be three years before the supply of housing comes into balance with demand, said Paul Dales, U.S. economist for Capital Economics. "The supply of housing remains very high and could rise even further," Dales said. "It's going to be a very long time before all the excess supply is worked off."
An Outspoken Fund Manager With Contrarian Views
by Julia Werdigier - New York Times
Hugh Hendry has a big mouth, as Hugh Hendry will tell you. With a sharp wit and a sharper tongue, Mr. Hendry, a plain-spoken Scot, has positioned himself as the public contrarian thinker of London’s very private hedge fund community.
The euro? It’s finished, Mr. Hendry proclaims. China? Headed for a fall. President Obama? "If there was a way to short Obama, I would," Mr. Hendry said.
Mr. Hendry runs the successful hedge fund firm Eclectica Asset Management. It is an old-school macroeconomic fund company with a big-think, globe-straddling style more akin to the Quantum Fund, of George Soros fame, than to the high-tech razzle-dazzle of Wall Street’s math-loving quant analysts. "Hugh is an anachronism," said Steven Drobny, a founder of Drobny Global Advisors. "He reminds one of the original hedge fund managers from the ’70s and ’80s." At 41, Mr. Hendry is also emerging from the normally secretive world of hedge funds to captivate fans and foes with a surprising level of candor.
Last May, on British television, he verbally sparred with Jeffrey D. Sachs, director of the Earth Institute at Columbia and perhaps the best-known economist writing on developmental issues. Before that, he took on Joseph E. Stiglitz, the Nobel laureate, about the future of the euro. "Hello, can I tell you about the real world?" Mr. Hendry interjected at one point. It was a huge hit on YouTube.
His verbal pyrotechnics have won Mr. Hendry a reputation for challenging the economics establishment. He is regarded and appreciated by many as overly pessimistic about, well, just about everything. His big worry lately has been China. Like James Chanos, a prominent hedge fund manager in the United States, Mr. Hendry says he believes China’s days of heady growth are numbered. A crisis is coming, he insists.
"He’s an original thinker, and he’s definitely not afraid of saying what he thinks, even if he’s not always right," said Jacob H. Schmidt, founder of Schmidt Research Partners. Mr. Hendry has made — and sometimes lost — money for his investors. Eclectica’s flagship fund, the Eclectica Fund, is up about 13 percent this year, besting by far the average 1.3 percent loss among similar funds. But returns have been erratic — "too much sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll" for some investors, he concedes. In 2008, the Eclectica Fund was up 50 percent one month and down 15 percent another. Mr. Hendry plans to change that.
The firm bet correctly that the financial troubles plaguing Greece would eventually ripple through to the market for German bonds, considered the European equivalent of ultra-safe United States Treasury securities. But the firm lost money betting on European sovereign debt in the first quarter of last year.
Last week, Mr. Hendry was musing about the financial world in his office behind a scruffy shopping mall in the Bayswater section of London. No Savile Row here: He was sporting a white oxford shirt, jeans and blue Converse Chuck Taylor sneakers, along with a three-day stubble and hipster horn-rim glasses. His latest obsession is China. He likens the country to Starbucks: good at growing quickly but not so good at creating wealth. "The idea is that things would happen today that are commonly thought of as impossible, most notably a significant reversal of China," Mr. Hendry said.
Maps cover the walls of his office. On one, blue magnetic pins plot his recent trip through China. He filmed himself there in front of huge, empty office buildings and giant new bridges in the middle of nowhere — signs, he said, of a credit bubble. Along with his fund co-manager Espen Baardsen, a former goalie for the Tottenham Hotspur soccer team, Mr. Hendry is devising ways to bet on a spectacular deterioration of China’s economy. He declined to divulge any details.
Mr. Hendry’s outspokenness has won him both fans and detractors. Marc Faber, the money manager known as Doctor Doom for his bearish views, calls Mr. Hendry "a deep thinker." "He has strong views and expresses them, not to get publicity but because he has a great understanding of the markets," Mr. Faber said. Some London investors are less charitable. Two declined to comment on Mr. Hendry, saying they did not want to "get into a fight" with him.
Mr. Hendry certainly does not fit the stereotype of a discreet London moneyman. The son of a truck driver, he was the first in his family to attend a university — Strathclyde, in Glasgow, not Oxbridge. He studied accounting and joined Baillie Gifford, a large Edinburgh money manager. Frustrated that he could not challenge the investment strategies of his bosses, he jumped to Credit Suisse Asset Management in London. There, a chance meeting with an equally opinionated hedge fund manager, Crispin Odey, led to a job. Before long, Mr. Hendry struck out on his own.
The inspiration for his investment approach comes from an unlikely source: "The Gap in the Curtain," a 1932 novel by John Buchan that is borderline science fiction. The plot centers on five people who are chosen by a scientist to take part in an experiment that will let them glimpse one year into the future. Two see their own obituaries in one year’s time. Mr. Hendry calls the novel "the best investment book ever written" because it taught him to envision the future without neglecting what happened leading up to it, a mistake many investors make, he said.
Mr. Hendry hopes Eclectica will grow to $1 billion — still relatively small by hedge fund standards. But neither admirers nor rivals expect him to change his plain-talking ways. "I’ve got such a big mouth," he said, "I have to be very careful what I say."
Europe freezes out Goldman Sachs
by Elena Moya - The Observer,
European governments are turning their backs on Goldman Sachs, the all-conquering investment bank that has suffered a series of blows to its reputation, capped by the biggest ever fine imposed on a Wall Street firm. According to data from Dealogic, Greece, Spain, France and Italy have all denied the bank a lead role in their recent sovereign bond sales. Last Thursday, Goldman agreed to pay a $550m fine to settle US regulators' claims that the bank misled investors in a mortgage-backed security. Goldman admitted that its marketing materials were incomplete, because they failed to state that the same third party that helped choose the assets had taken a bet against them.
But governments have also been shocked at the emergence of past transactions between Goldman and Greece and Italy, where products the bank helped to sell aided both in hiding government debt. Greece, which used Goldman in a bond sale this year, is practically at war with the bank. A sharp contrast with the situation months before, when Goldman bankers dined with the prime minister in a private meeting overlooking the Acropolis. The relationship broke down, though, after news leaked earlier this year that Goldman was about to strike a bond sale deal with China's sovereign fund – which never materialised.
Spain, which used Goldman among its top 10 bookrunners last year, has not done so in 2010, while Italy has not given the bank a leading role since 2007. France has not used Goldman in any lead position over the past three years, and it seems doubtful that it will do so in the near future. "French people would riot in the streets if we chose Goldman," said a person familiar with the French treasury.
The French government has said it will only use banks that cap management and traders' bonuses. This year, Goldman limited the pay and bonus compensation to its London partners at £1m, though other bankers and traders can receive much more, provided they are not partners. Goldman has also been criticised of for taking short positions, or betting on a price fall, against some European sovereign bonds – after taking part in a bond sale, a person involved in sovereign debt sales said. The bank says it has presence in the European sovereign bank market and that it has recently participated in deals in Britain, Portugal and Belgium.
Countries such as Spain and France have also shied away from Goldman because their traditionally conservative treasury departments prefer to steer clear of risky investments. The French treasury, for instance, only issues debt in euros, staying away, like Spain, from the complex foreign exchange or swap deals that brought trouble to Greece and Italy. "The Spanish treasury can't justify in parliament why, if things go wrong, they have a multimillion-euro position in Indian rupees, for example," a sovereign bond banker said.
Governments also stick to plain-vanilla deals, with little complexity, in order to keep their prized AAA rating, reducing their borrowing costs as much as possible, a source familiar with the French Tresor said. IKB, the failed bank bailed out by the German government, recently considered suing Goldman because of its exposure to the structured products sold by the US bank. Following the settlement between Goldman and the SEC, the US securities regulator, last week, IKB said the German lender was "reviewing the settlement documents". Germany has only made one syndicated bond sale in the last three years, in 2009, when it appointed Deutsche Bank, Citibank, HSBC and BofA-Merrill Lynch as lead managers.
SEC Split Over Goldman Deal
by Kara Scannell And Susanne Craig - Wall Street Journal
The Securities and Exchange Commission split in its decision to settle its landmark lawsuit against Goldman Sachs, The Wall Street Journal has learned, in a dispute over the agency's move to levy a $550 million fine even after diluting its fraud allegations against the giant bank. The 3-2 decision on party lines Thursday came after a 30-minute closed-door session where the SEC's two Republican commissioners voted against settling, said people familiar with the matter. Mary Schapiro, the SEC chairman appointed by President Obama, cast the deciding vote, the people said.
Thursday's settlement—in which Goldman agreed to pay a $550 million fine, but didn't have to admit it committed fraud—capped one of the most closely watched cases in the SEC's 76-year history. The agency had charged Goldman with intentionally duping clients by selling a mortgage-security product that secretly was designed by another Goldman client betting that the housing market would crash. People familiar with the matter say Republican Commissioner Kathleen Casey questioned the SEC staff Thursday on their decision to abandon the strongest fraud charge and strike a settlement involving a lesser allegation, and given that, how the SEC could justify such a large penalty on a lesser charge.
The political split over the case comes at a time when the agency remains under fire for its policing of the financial markets during the financial crisis. The SEC commissioners often split on party lines over policy decisions, but rarely do so on such high-profile enforcement cases. The disclosure of the dispute also raises fresh questions about how strong a case the SEC had against Goldman. Russell Ryan, a former SEC enforcement lawyer, said the negotiation to drop the strongest fraud charge is "usually a strong indication the SEC had some doubt whether it could prove intentional fraud." Mr. Ryan, now a defense lawyer at King & Spalding, said the SEC typically insists a defendant settle on the strongest allegation made in its complaints. Watering down the toughest charge, as in this case, is unusual.
Neither Ms. Casey nor the other Republican commissioner, Troy Paredes, returned calls to comment. Ms. Schapiro, the two other Democratic commissioners and an SEC spokesman declined to comment. The SEC initially alleged that Goldman violated a rule—known as Rule 10b of securities laws—which contains a sweeping antifraud provision covering trading in securities. The charge is one of the most serious the SEC can make, and carries greater stigma for a financial firm than the lesser charge included in the settlement. The lesser charge Goldman settled on comes under a rule known as 17a. These charges can involve intentional and unintentional fraud, as well as negligence.
The SEC staff, led by Kenneth Lench, head of the agency's structured-products unit, told the commission the shift stemmed from the settlement negotiations, a person familiar with the matter said. The staff also was asked how the size of the proposed penalty—one of the largest in SEC history—fit in with other cases, this person said. Mr. Lench declined to comment.
Lorin Reisner, deputy director of the SEC's enforcement division, said "Section 10b and Section 17a1 are functional equivalents. Section 17a1 is a more appropriate claim in the context of a fraud in connection with the offering of securities." He declined to comment on why the agency dropped the 10b charge. In April, Ms. Casey and Mr. Paredes had voted against filing the fraud case in the first place, concerned that the agency didn't have the strongest case and risked losing it in court, people familiar with the matter say.
The division in the settlement vote casts a cloud over what the SEC had claimed on Thursday was a major victory. Investors had expected any SEC fine in the case to be $1 billion or more. Goldman's shares have jumped since Thursday. As part of the settlement, which has to be approved by a New York federal court, Goldman was required to issue a statement saying it made "a mistake" by not disclosing the role of hedge fund Paulson & Co. to investors for helping to arrange the mortgage deal. Goldman pledged to toughen oversight of mortgage securities, certain marketing materials and employees who create or pitch such securities. It neither admitted nor denied the charges.
Thursday's settlement came together quickly after months of tense talks. The tensions began April 16, when, Goldman says, the SEC filed the fraud charges without even an hour's heads-up, a notice regulators typically give before charges are brought. The charges rocked Wall Street and wiped $12 billion off the firm's stock market value that day. The firm, ordinarily prepared for public announcements, had no initial response. Seventy-nine minutes later, Goldman said in a statement the accusations are "completely unfounded in law and fact."
In a conference call, Goldman executives agreed that giving in at all would cast doubt on every mortgage-derivatives deal arranged by the company, according to a person familiar with the call. But the firm soon reached out to the SEC, people familiar with the matter say. In early May the two sides met face to face. Little progress was made. The talks picked up this month. Goldman pushed the SEC for a deal to resolve both the fraud lawsuit against Goldman and some of the agency's lower-profile probes of the firm's mortgage department, say people familiar with the situation.
The strategy: Combining a settlement of the SEC suit with a resolution of related SEC probes could calm Goldman's restive clients and investors, while shielding the firm from information that could be used against Goldman in private litigation. Goldman's paramount concern was removing the more serious fraud charge rather than knocking down the size of the fine, say people familiar with the matter. But in order to agree to a settlement, the SEC insisted it reserve the right to revisit the cases if new damaging evidence arises, the people familiar with the matter say.
On Wednesday, upon learning The Wall Street Journal was preparing an article on catch-all settlement talks, SEC enforcement chief Robert Khuzami grew furious and blasted Goldman. He accused the firm of leaking a story that suggested Goldman had bested the SEC, a person familiar with the matter says. Mr. Khuzami didn't return calls for comment. Worried about further leaks, the SEC decided to move fast. After the commission's Thursday vote, Mr. Khuzami and his staff made their way down to the basement of the SEC's Washington headquarters, unveiling the settlement to reporters.
Growing outrage over Goldman Sachs settlement
After Goldman Sachs settlement, SEC looking at exotic financial products
by Zachary A. Goldfarb - Washington Post
The new Securities and Exchange Commission unit that obtained a $550 million settlement from Goldman Sachs in a fraud suit is pressing ahead with investigations into wrongdoing during the financial crisis by big banks, but is also turning its attention to exotic financial products that might be used to harm average investors, officials said.
The Structured and New Products Unit, one of several specialty groups in the agency's enforcement division, filed the landmark suit against Goldman and later negotiated with the powerful Wall Street bank's lawyers on a settlement. A source familiar with the unit's work, who was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly and spoke on the condition of anonymity, said that while it is looking at wrongdoing by other big firms, it's unclear whether the Goldman case will be replicated with other Wall Street firms.
Agency veteran Kenneth Lench, chief of the 40-person unit, said the agency is looking to examine exotic financial products that might be used to deceive or defraud ordinary investors. The investors allegedly defrauded by Goldman were Scottish and German banks. "While the Goldman case -- which is the first case out of the unit -- involved larger institutional victims, we also are looking at products that are marketed and sold to retail or less sophisticated investors," Lench said in an interview Friday. "We are looking forward, looking around the corner for what's next. We assign small teams of people to do a deep dive into a new product that hasn't been around all that long."
Historically, the SEC has launched probes based on a specific tip about wrongdoing at a company or when a whistleblower comes forward. The Structured and New Products Unit will sometimes be more aggressive, scanning the marketplace for securities that seem unduly risky for investors, then examining those products and the companies that might be trading them. For example, the group could target securities that have been touted by financial firms as ultra-safe for investors who have been burned by the ups and downs of financial markets.
A few months ago, when the SEC filed its suit against Goldman, it would have been hard to anticipate that the unit would obtain a settlement so soon and be free to focus on other cases. The Wall Street bank at first slammed the SEC and said it had done nothing wrong. Sources close to the case said that about a month after the SEC filed its fraud suit, however, Goldman changed its attitude and began to seem much more serious about considering a settlement.
At the time, Goldman was facing a new Justice Department criminal probe and harsh questions from Congress about its conduct. Televised hearings put senior Goldman executives, including chief executive Lloyd Blankfein, through the gantlet. The SEC case wiped billions of dollars off the firm's market value. A source familiar with Goldman's deliberations who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe an internal matter said the bank determined it was important to put the SEC case behind it and preserve its reputation, despite the costs involved. On Friday, Goldman's stock closed up 95 cents, or 0.7 percent, after rising several dollars in morning trading on the news of the settlement. The gains came despite a broad market sell-off that weighed on financial shares.
To win the settlement, the Structured Products unit not only had to reach an agreement with Goldman but also had to convince the agency's five commissioners. Just as they had when the SEC filed the lawsuit against Goldman, the two Republican commissioners voted against the settlement, according to a source familiar with the vote who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the proceeding was not public. But SEC Chairman Mary Schapiro and the two Democratic commissioners voted for it.
The SEC team moved on two fronts in recent months, building a court case against Goldman while negotiating with the firm over a settlement. The agency wanted Goldman to pay more than a fine. It wanted the bank to admit some sort of guilt and to undertake remedial actions. Such prescriptive settlements are being embraced by the SEC more commonly than in the past. The agency required a series of changes to how Bank of America runs its business in a settlement earlier this year. SEC officials said they expect both Goldman's statement of regret and the remedial actions to serve as a template for future settlements. The SEC has long faced criticism that its settlements allow firms to pay a fine but avoid any sort of culpability.
Under the settlement, Goldman must review the role and responsibilities of company lawyers and compliance executives in the preparation of marketing materials for mortgage securities. Goldman employees in the mortgage business must receive additional education and training. Those changes put more pressure on Goldman to increase the vetting of disclosures that accompany products the bank sells to clients. The deal let both the SEC and Goldman claim a share of victory. The SEC was able to secure its largest penalty ever against a financial firm, make Goldman acknowledge it had made mistakes and strike at an issue at the heart of the financial crisis. For Goldman, the company was able to put the matter behind it, pay a fine that won't make a big dent in its bottom line and avoid officially admitting wrongdoing.
Timing of Goldman Sachs settlement seems suspect
Lloyd Blankfein's Days Are Numbered as Chairman of Goldman Sachs
by Charlie Gasparino - Zero Hedge
It's a testament to the odd world in which we live that when a Wall Street firm pays a $550 million fine by conceding negligence in how it dealt with clients, its stock surges, adding billions of dollars in market value for the firm's shareholders. But that's what's happening to Goldman Sachs, as it reached its long awaited settlement with the Securities and Exchange Commission over how it sold a basket of mortgage related debt to investors in 2007.
Back when the SEC brought the case, the conventional wisdom on Wall Street and the financial media was that Goldman didn't have to settle -- the case was weak and Goldman is, after all, Goldman. As I wrote on these pages back then, Goldman would have to settle because: (a) the SEC dug up some real questionable activity; and (b) no Wall Street firm, not even one with the ties to government that Goldman possesses can go to war with its primary regulator.
Now that Goldman has indeed settled, the news is being spun, again mostly by the financial media, that the deal with the SEC was a victory for Goldman's CEO Lloyd Blankfein, who survived the investigation largely unscathed, paying a measly $550 million to the government (equivalent to a few days trading gains at Goldman) and without having to give up any power, such as relinquishing his role as chairman of the board, as senior executives both inside Goldman and at competing firms believed would be part of any settlement.
Well, if history is any guide, Blankfein may not go tomorrow, or even next month, but sometime in 2011, Blankfein will at the very least no longer be chairman of Goldman, and may also be forced out of the firm altogether. If you don't believe me ask former Citigroup CEO Sandy Weill. Like Blankfein, Weill (at least on paper) was a good CEO from an operational standpoint. Following the creation of Citigroup in 1998, shares of the big bank soared. The bank was what's known as a Wall Street darling for its strong earnings and a surging stock price, and Weill was regarded as the King of Wall Street, having engineered the largest financial deal ever when he merged his company, the Travelers Group brokerage, insurance and investment banking empire, with commercial banking powerhouse Citicorp.
At the height of his power, Weill suddenly popped up on the radar screen of New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer. Before Spitzer got involved with hookers and became a TV host, he was the sheriff of Wall Street, looking to right wrongs from the last great scandal, the internet bubble where firms sold worthless dotcom and tech stocks to unsuspecting investors. Emails he uncovered showed that Weill at least did something stupid, if not fraudulent: He pressured an analyst, Jack Grubman, to inflate his stock rating on telecom giant AT&T, which was an investment banking client (Weill also sat on AT&T's board, while AT&T CEO Michael Armstrong sat on Citi's board)
Grubman wrote in an email that as a favor for upgrading the stock, Weill got his kids in an exclusive pre-school. The scandal, was described by the Wall Street Journal, as a "kid pro quo." Weill continued to deny wrongdoing and was never charged. Citigroup, however, was charged with fraud and ended up paying a $400 fine to settle the matter, but Weill appeared to have retained his control of the bank. The initial reaction in the press and among his peers in the financial business was that Weill had won, by having the bank pay a relatively small fine, and his status as CEO and the King of Wall Street secure.
Not quite. A few months later, Citigroup announced that Weill was stepping down as CEO, handing that job to Chuck Prince, who basically negotiated the settlement package. Citigroup maintained that the two moves were unrelated. But people in Spitzer's office told me they really weren't: While negotiating the settlement, Citigroup's board made it clear to investigators that Weill's days were numbered at the top of the firm that he founded. Spitzer was merely affording Weill a graceful exit in an effort to end the case.
Full disclosure: I have no knowledge that Goldman's board has tacitly agreed to pull a Weill on Blankfein and has plans for him to step aside, but the circumstances involving the two men are so remarkably similar. While Blankfein wasn't directly involved in the questionable trade that landed Goldman in trouble, he is responsible for remaking Goldman into predatory trading culture that has caught the attention of regulators, Congressional committees (recall Sen. Carl Levin badgering Goldman traders for selling "shitty" investments to their clients) and hurt Goldman's once stellar reputation, as Weill's actions hurt Citigroup's.
Some would say that's where the comparisons end; Citigroup deals with the general public that buys stocks through its brokerage unit (Smith Barney) and makes deposits in its branch banking offices. Goldman deals with large sophisticated investors who couldn't care less how Darwinian the company behaves. That used to be true, but no more. Goldman's image has been battered, not as bad as say a company like BP, but not far behind. And image does count these days given the scrutiny and oversight placed on Wall Street and the banks following the financial collapse-induced bailouts.
Now that financial reform has been passed, Goldman will have to cut back on some of that aggressive trading that powered its earnings and was Blankfein's forte. That means it will have to devote more and more resources to developing its client business and relationships, convincing blue chip companies that it is the right firm to handle delicate negotiations involving mergers, acquisitions, and other corporate financing assignments.
More and more, these clients do care about image (ask yourself why has so many top companies embraced the useless but politically correct "green agenda"). In fact some have already jettisoned Goldman as scrutiny of the firm grew over the past year. Who is the right guy to change Goldman's image to fit the new paradigm it faces? It's not Lloyd Blankfein and that's why he won't survive.
Holding Bankers’ Feet to the Fire
by Gretchen Morgenson - New York Times
Kudos to the Federal Housing Finance Agency, overseer of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the crippled mortgage finance giants. While some in Washington have continued to coddle the big banks even after they drove our economy into the ditch, this agency seems serious about recovering money for taxpayers by holding bad financial actors to account.
The agency announced last Monday that it had issued 64 subpoenas to a throng of unidentified financial services institutions, seeking documents related to mortgage securities that Fannie and Freddie bought from Wall Street during the boom years. The subpoenas are designed to tell the agency what many of us want to know: How did Wall Street package and sell private-label mortgage securities to investors, even though the nature and quality of some of the loans crammed inside those tidy little packages were, at best, suspect?
Once that question has been answered, Fannie and Freddie can force the institutions that sold the securities to repurchase the improper loans, allowing taxpayers to recover some of the losses they’ve swallowed on Fannie’s and Freddie’s federal bailout.
Investigating this aspect of the mortgage mess seems a pretty logical step for a regulator. But in the topsy-turvy world of Washington, the housing finance agency’s move is unusually aggressive. Edward J. DeMarco, its acting director, seems to be that rarity — a regulator who not only talks about looking out for the taxpayer, but actually does something about it.
The subpoenas went to companies that act as trustees for mortgage pools or that service the loans in them. The housing finance agency wants to see loan files and transaction documents related to those pools, including mortgage applications and property appraisals. Recipients of the subpoenas have 30 days to produce the requested documents. Additional subpoenas may follow, it said. The agency had to resort to subpoenas, it said, because when it asked the institutions for the records it got nowhere for many months. "Difficulty in obtaining the loan documents has presented a challenge to the enterprises’ efforts" to ascertain whether losses at the companies are the responsibility of others, its press release said.
Fannie and Freddie bought only the highest-rated pieces of these deals, but they bought buckets of them. During 2006-7, these entities bought $294 billion of so-called private-label securities. Not all of these purchases are under scrutiny, the agency said. It is clearly turning up the heat on the major players in mortgage servicing and securitization. Among the bigger trustees in the business are Deutsche Bank and the Bank of New York, while loan servicers include Bank of America and many more. None of the banks would confirm if they had received subpoenas.
Fannie and Freddie played pivotal roles in the housing market by buying mortgages from banks that issued them so the banks could turn around and lend even more. After both companies overindulged in the mortgage frenzy they nearly collapsed, prompting the federal rescue. Since then, the government has continued to use the firms to buttress a shaky housing market. In the immediate aftermath of a government takeover of Fannie and Freddie, the companies were persistent in seeking to recover money from the estates of Lehman Brothers and other defunct lenders related to dubious loans.
But more recently, they have ratcheted up their buyback requests of the banks with which they continue to do business. Last March, for example, Freddie said it had submitted $4.8 billion in repurchase requests to such banks, up from $3.8 billion at the end of 2009. Generating actual money from these requests, however, takes time and effort. While Fannie and Freddie can point to a borrower’s misstatements on a loan application as reason for a buyback, the banks often counter these requests with arguments that some borrowers are defaulting because they have lost their jobs or suffered other woes — not because they originally lied on their loan applications about their income and finances. As a result, these can be lengthy and testy negotiations.
But there is a big difference between recovering on loans that were contractually improper versus those that involved fraud. And the subpoenas suggest that officials at the Federal Housing Finance Agency believe that there are large numbers of loans that fall into the latter category. Mr. DeMarco would not comment further on the subpoenas. But he appears to be taking a fairly literal approach to the agency’s role as conservator of Fannie and Freddie — because the taxpayers own these companies, it must conserve their assets and get money back where it is owed.
"Most or all of our conservatorship actions are taken to minimize further taxpayer losses," Mr. DeMarco said last week in an interview. He pointed to the agency’s effort on foreclosure prevention, which "minimizes losses on seriously delinquent loans and provides greater stability to neighborhoods." But Mr. DeMarco has also barred Fannie and Freddie from entering new businesses and, according to people briefed on the discussions, was behind Fannie’s new and aggressive approach to combat so-called strategic defaulters — borrowers who can afford to pay their mortgages but stop doing so to get out of their obligations. Last month, Fannie said it would deny access to a government-backed mortgage for seven years to those defaulters.
A career government official, Mr. DeMarco was appointed acting director of the agency in September 2009; he spent 10 years at the Treasury Department, beginning in 1993. For seven of those years he oversaw public policy analysis involving Fannie, Freddie and other financial institutions. As a result, he had a front-row seat for Fannie’s and Freddie’s aggressive growth years, when they routinely strong-armed their regulators and bashed their critics. Those days are over, thankfully, but taxpayers are still on the hook for the mess those practices wrought. At least we now seem to have a strong cop on the Fannie and Freddie beat, someone who genuinely cares about the taxpayers’ losses and is working hard to stanch them.
Citigroup Profit Declines 37%
by Randall Smith - Wall Street Journal
Citigroup Inc. reported a second-quarter profit of $2.7 billion and beat analysts' earning expectations, but its stock fell on sluggish expected revenue growth, a product of the bank's more risk-averse profile after its near-death experience in 2009. Citigroup's per-share profit of nine cents topped the five cents expected by analysts. Still, the profit was down 37% from a year earlier, when Citigroup avoided a loss only with a $6.7 billion gain on the sale of its Smith Barney brokerage.
The stock was down 26 cents, or 6.3%, to $3.90 at 4 p.m. in New York Stock Exchange trading amid a market-wide decline, as analysts focused on the bank's lack of revenue growth. The $22.1 billion of revenue was down 33% from a year earlier and 13% from the first quarter. Chief Executive Vikram Pandit attributed that decline partly to the impact of "the market environment" on securities and banking. "Top-line growth is the main issue here," said Mike Mayo, a bank analyst at Credit Agricole Securities (USA) Inc. "The patient is out of the hospital bed, just walking around the hallways."
Citigroup said net interest margin, a closely watched gauge of how much banks earn on assets compared with funding costs, narrowed to 3.15% from 3.32% in the first quarter, "mainly reflecting de-risking of the loan portfolios." Deposits fell 2% from the first quarter to $814 billion, while loans fell 3.3% to $710 billion. Citigroup Chief Financial Officer John Gerspach said demand for new loans is weak. While there is "some demand" in Asia, he said overall there is "not a lot of new demand for loans" among corporations. "If you're going to make less risky loans and less loans generally," profit margins will decline, Mr. Mayo said.
Citigroup buttressed its profit by releasing $1.5 billion from the reserves set aside for losses on loans, reflecting the fourth consecutive quarter of lower net credit losses. Credit charge-offs declined 5%, nonperforming assets fell 9%, and 30-day credit-card delinquencies fell slightly from the first quarter. Still, expenses rose slightly, reflecting the impact of a tax on bankers' bonuses on the U.K.
Citigroup made progress in whittling down its basket of unwanted assets by $38 billion to $465 billion, which Mr. Pandit noted is now less than one quarter of the entire company's $1.9 trillion balance sheet. When it received a new round of government aid in January 2009, Citigroup said it would exit noncore businesses and shed its riskiest assets. The businesses, dubbed Citigroup Holdings, generated $1.2 billion in second-quarter losses, compared with the profit of $3.8 billion at the remaining core Citicorp unit.
As it tries to revive growth, the bank is making investments to boost its stock trading and underwriting business, its transaction-services division and its banking business in emerging markets such as Asia and Latin America, Mr. Gerspach said. Asia and Latin America are contributing less than 40% of revenue but 70% of profit, he said. The impact of rocky markets, with the stock market down 10% in the quarter, was felt in Citigroup's institutional securities business. Revenue from stocks fell 65% to $620 million from a year earlier, while fixed-income revenue slid 40% to $3.5 billion and investment-banking revenue fell 42% to $674 million.
Mr. Gerspach attributed the declines to "increasing investor uncertainty and volatility during the quarter." The bank has also pulled back in its institutional business to focus on profitability as opposed to market share, Citigroup officials say. Its rank in first-half global underwriting fell to seventh from third the first half of 2009, according to Dealogic.
Stress-testing Europe's banks won't stave off a deflationary vortex
by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard - Telegraph
Euroland's authorities are inflicting a triple shock of fiscal, monetary, and currency tightening on a broken economy. They are doing so in a region where industrial output is still 14pc below its peak, where growth barely scraped above zero over the winter "recovery", and where youth unemployment is at 40pc in Spain, 35pc in Slovakia, 29pc in Italy, and 26pc in Ireland.
They seem unaware that China is slowing and the US is tipping into a second leg of the Long Slump. Last week's collapse in America's ECRI leading indicator to -9.8 marks the end of the V-shaped rebound. If this means what it normally means - recession within three months - Europe must take immediate action to prevent being drawn into a deflationary vortex. Spiralling public debt precludes further Keynesian spending, so this must come from central bank stimulus. Tight fiscal policy offset by ultra-loose money is the only option for Europe, the US, and Japan.
No student of Milton Friedman is surprised by the US relapse. The Fed has allowed M3 money to contract at a 10pc pace for much of this year - the Great Depression rate. The economy has hit the wall with the usual lag. Textbook stuff. Never ignore the quantity theory of money. The US Conference Board's indicator is not yet flashing a red alert, but that is because it gives weight to "yield curve inversion", where long rates fall below short rates. This indicator is meaningless in a Japan-style bust where policy rates are zero.
I suspect that Fed chair Ben Bernanke knows the economy buckled around the Ides of June, but is stymied by hawks at the regional Feds. All he can do for now is to talk down credit costs through hints of more quantitative easing, or QE2. In this he has succeeded. The yield on two-year Treasuries fell to an all-time low of 0.5765pc on Friday. It's Weimar, all right: circa 1931, not 1923.
So what is the European Central Bank doing to prevent southern Europe asphyxiating from debt-deflation, and knowing that M3 contracted in February (-0.3pc), March (-0.1pc), April (-0.2pc) and May (-0.2pc)? It is tightening, as it did in mid-2008 when the eurozone was already tanking. Far from taking steps to offset Club Med austerity, it is winding down its €60bn (£50bn) purchase of government bonds - "sterilized" in any case to prevent net stimulus. It is draining liquidity fast. The ECB's loans to credit institutions fell from €870bn to €635bn in the two weeks to July 9.
"This is the equivalent in central banking of the Charge of the Light Brigade," said Tim Congdon from International Monetary Research. Cash reserves in the interbank market have fallen by a third in days. No wonder three-month Euribor (the stress gauge) has risen to an 11-month high of 0.86pc. The funding squeeze has turbo-charged the euro rally, pushing the currency to 8.67 Chinese yuan. German exporters can take the pain. It is the strappado for Spain and Latin Europe. They are smiling in Guangdong.
Perhaps the stress tests for Europe's banks will clear the air and unblock the credit system. But such tests worked in the US only because that was a banking crisis. Few questioned whether the US Treasury could stand behind the system, or whether the US would hold together as a political entity. In Europe, sovereign states are themselves the risk, and a dysfunctional EMU is the Achilles heel. A memo from Germany's regulator BaFin earlier this year said the worry is contagion from "collective difficulties" in Club O'Med, not an isolated default. Once under way, the crisis might turn into a conflagration. Investors know this.
It is why the simulation test by RBS adjusts for €400bn of losses in Spain and €1.3 trillion for the eurozone, and called for "overwhelming policy intervention" by the ECB to stop this happening. Will the EU carry out such tests? Of course not. All now hangs on the credibility of the EU's €440bn rescue fund or Stability Facility (EFSF), itself subject to challenges in Germany's constitutional court. Will the EU stress test the "non-negligible" risk that the court will block it? No.
The EFSF is a bluff that Italy could provide its rescue share for Portugal, Spain, and Ireland, on top of Greece, in the context of a serious crisis without suffering its own debt run. Is this credible? Should any rating agency give this body a AAA grade given that 10 of the 16 states are rated lower, and knowing that Germany has refused to allow pre-funding so that it cannot raise money until matters are already out of hand? Besides, euroland solidarity goes only so far. Slovakia's new government has agreed to the EFSF but withdrawn from the Greek bail-out, refusing to uphold of the pledge of the last lot.
The loss of money does not matter. The politics do matter. We see again that the eurozone is a network of democracies, each subject to its own political rhythm. Any country may change its mind and walk away, at any time. Especially Germany.
Germany's Hypo Real Estate Said to Fail EU Banking Stress Test
by Aaron Kirchfeld, Oliver Suess and Jann Bettinga - Bloomberg
Hypo Real Estate Holding AG, the German lender taken over by the government following the financial crisis, failed a Europe-wide banking stress test, two people familiar with the results said. Hypo Real Estate didn’t pass a stress scenario on its capital that assumes an economic slowdown and sovereign-debt losses, said the people, who declined to be identified before an announcement on July 23. The Munich-based lender is probably the only German bank to fail the test, one person said.
European Union regulators are examining the strength of banks as they seek to reassure investors about the firms’ resilience to potential losses amid the region’s sovereign-debt crisis. The tests are being applied to 91 of Europe’s biggest banks, including 14 German lenders. "The government won’t let Hypo Real Estate collapse," said Andreas Plaesier, a banking analyst at M.M. Warburg in Hamburg. An official at Hypo Real Estate declined to comment.
Banks may be required to have a Tier 1 capital ratio, a key measure of financial strength, of at least 6 percent under the EU stress tests, the same threshold U.S. lenders faced last year, said two people briefed on the talks. Hypo Real Estate’s Tier 1 capital ratio was 7.7 percent at the end of March, according to a presentation on its website dated June 2010. The lender holds 72.1 billion euros ($93.4 billion) of debt in Greece, Italy and Spain, it said in May.
Bad Bank
Germany’s Soffin bank-rescue fund had provided Hypo Real Estate with 7.87 billion euros in funds by the end of March. The state-owned lender has said it may require a total of 10 billion euros from the fund. The lender said on July 8 that it received approval to establish a so-called bad bank to transfer as much as 210 billion euros of investments consisting of "non-strategic assets and risk positions." The assets will be transferred in the second half of this year, according to the German Financial Markets Stabilization Agency, which manages the bank-rescue fund.
Hypo Real Estate has said it doesn’t expect to return to profit before 2012. The lender needed a total of 103.5 billion euros in credit lines and debt guarantees from the state and financial institutions to save the company from collapse in 2008 after the lender’s Dublin-based Depfa Bank Plc unit couldn’t raise financing when the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. froze credit markets.
Test Results
A summary of results of the stress tests will be released on July 23 at 6 p.m. CET, the Committee of European Banking Supervisors said in a statement on its website today. According to CEBS, the other German lenders tested are Deutsche Bank AG, Commerzbank AG, Deutsche Postbank AG, Landesbank Baden-Wuerttemberg, Bayerische Landesbank, Norddeutsche Landesbank Girozentrale, WestLB AG, HSH Nordbank AG, Landesbank Hessen-Thueringen Girozentrale, Landesbank Berlin AG, DZ Bank AG, WGZ Bank AG and DekaBank Deutsche Girozentrale.
Hungary Refuses Further Austerity After IMF Talks End
by Edith Balazs - Bloomberg
Hungary’s government won’t impose further austerity measures even after falling out with its international creditors, Economy Minister Gyorgy Matolcsy said, expressing confidence a new loan agreement will "eventually" be reached. The government, which faces local elections on Oct. 3, is committed to a tax on financial institutions for three years and seeks to raise 200 billion forint ($893 million) from the levy in 2010, Matolcsy said on M1 television today. "The alternative to the bank tax would be austerity measures which would restrain growth even more," he said.
The International Monetary Fund and European Union ended talks with Hungary at the weekend without endorsing the budget plans. The EU demanded "tough decisions, notably on spending," to meet deficit requirements. The IMF said the planned tax will have a negative impact on lending and growth. The suspension of talks is rattling investor trust in Hungary barely a month after politicians from the ruling Fidesz party compared the nation to Greece, roiling international markets. The government, which swept to power in a landslide victory in April, may delay spending cuts until after autumn municipal elections, analysts said.
New ‘Gaffe’
"The new government has not learned its lessons from the previous gaffe, while the market is in no mood to overlook any fiscal laxity," Timothy Ash, head of emerging market research at Royal Bank of Scotland Plc in London, wrote in a note today. Hungary’s credit rating could come under threat as the country seems "to be going off-piste. Without IMF financing over the longer term, we doubt that Hungary can finance itself."
The forint slumped as much as 2.7 percent per euro and was trading 2.2 percent lower at 288.72 at 10:27 a.m. in Budapest from 282.10 on July 16. The currency is at its weakest since June 7. The benchmark BUX stock index fell 2.3 percent, the most since June 29, and credit default swaps, the price of insuring against a default rose 47.5 basis points to 370, according to UBS AG.
Hungary, the recipient of a 20 billion-euro ($25.8 billion) emergency bailout, is enduring its fifth consecutive year of austerity. The economy last year suffered its biggest decline in almost two decades, shrinking 6.3 percent. The government agreed to keep this year’s budget deficit target at an IMF-approved 3.8 percent of gross domestic product while indicating it wanted more fiscal room in 2011.
‘Force the Government’
"We believe market reality will finally force the government to take the necessary measures but this might not come before October," Gyula Toth, an emerging-market strategist at UniCredit SpA in Vienna, wrote in a note today. The Cabinet may be forced to announce some measures ahead of the elections, he said.
The IMF will return to Hungary in September to continue negotiations and an agreement with the Washington-based lender will eventually be reached, Matolcsy said at a conference in Vienna today. The suspension of IMF payments doesn’t endanger Hungary’s economic stability, he said. Concluding the review is a condition for disbursing funds from the bailout loan. Hungary has 5.7 billion euros of the package available. The government refrained from tapping it this year because it was able to finance spending through debt sales.
‘Funding May Freeze’
Hungary is seeking a new "precautionary" loan agreement with the IMF from next year as its current bailout expires in October. Even without the need to use the available funds, the backing of international creditors helps reassure markets and allows the government to borrow on the market, said analysts including Eszter Gargyan at Citigroup Inc. in Budapest. "The government has been planning to extend the current program until year-end and set up a new precautionary" loan " "from 2011, which in our view is an important assurance for the market," Gargyan said in a note to clients today. "The lack of agreement means Hungary’s access to market funding may freeze, especially if European financing conditions deteriorate."
The central bank may be forced to raise interest rates if the government fails to act quickly and currency weakness persists, Gyorgy Kovacs, an economist at UBS AG in London, wrote in a note today. "Financial markets might not grant the government breathing space until the municipal elections in October, and in this case the Hungarian government will have to present measures earlier to soothe investor sentiment," Kovacs said. The central bank left the benchmark rate unchanged at 5.25 percent today.
Ireland's debt downgraded by Moody’s
by Julia Kollewe - Guardian
Credit ratings agency Moody's has downgraded Ireland's debt rating, adding to investor jitters about the state of Europe's heavily indebted economies. The agency cut Ireland's sovereign bond rating by one notch to Aa2 this morning, citing weaker growth prospects and the high cost of rebuilding the country's crippled banking system. It added that the outlook was stable. But the downgrade comes after the International Monetary Fund and the European Union pulled a €20bn (£17bn) financing deal for Hungary over the weekend. Talks broke down on Saturday after the European commission voiced concerns over the newly elected Hungarian government's budget plans.
This means Hungary will not have access to remaining funds of €5.5bn in its €20bn credit line, agreed two years ago, until a review is completed. Gary Jenkins at Evolution Securities noted that Moody's also placed Spain's ratings on review at the end of last month. "Nothing on Italy yet, but considering that there is a two-notch differential between Moody's and S&P it would not be a major surprise if Moody's didn't take a look at Italy next," he added.
Europe's governments are rushing to shore up their finances after a spate of ratings downgrades – most notably to Greece, Spain and Portugal – plunged stock markets into turmoil. So-called austerity measures are being pushed through parliaments across the continent and in the UK, ranging from increasing retirement ages to slashing public sector wages and jobs.
Hungary's economy minister was defiant on this morning, ruling out further austerity measures, and insisting that the government would push through a new financial sector tax this year. "Hungary has experienced a programme of austerity over the past five years, we inherited this from the previous governments and we would like to do away with the unfortunate consequences of these steps," Gyorgy Matolcsy told public television station m1. "We have told our partners that further austerity packages were out of the question."
The IMF insisted on Saturday that Hungary will need to take additional measures to meet its deficit targets this year and next. In a separate statement, the European commission said reducing Hungary's deficit by next year "will require tough decisions, notably on spending". However, Matolcsy wants to cut Hungary's budget deficit to 3.8% of GDP mainly with funds raised from the planned tax on banks.
European shares fell for a third session this morning, led lower by banks, and the euro slipped off two-month highs. It bought $1.2925 this morning in early European trading, down from $1.2947 in New York on Friday night. In London, the FTSE 100 index traded down about 18 points at 5140.74. Market players are eagerly awaiting the results of stress tests on 91 European banks, which are due to be published on Friday.
What Germany Knows About Debt
by Tyler Cowen - New York Times
In many countries, including the United States, there are calls for the government to spend more to jump-start the economy, and to avoid the temptation to cut back as debts mount. Germany, however, has decided to cast its lot with fiscal prudence. It has managed rising growth and falling unemployment, while putting together a plan for a nearly balanced budget within six years. On fiscal policy and economic recovery, Americans could learn something from the German example.
Twentieth-century history may help explain German behavior today. After all, the Germans lost two World Wars, experienced the Weimar hyperinflation and saw their country divided and partly ruined by Communism. What an American considers as bad economic times, a German might see as relative prosperity. That perspective helps support a greater concern with long-run fiscal caution, because it is not assumed that a brighter future will pay all the bills.
Even if this pessimism proves wrong more often than not, it is like buying earthquake or fire insurance: sometimes it comes in handy. You can’t judge the policy by asking whether your house catches on fire every single year. Keynesians have criticized fiscal caution at this point in the economic cycle, arguing that fiscal stimulus will give economies more, not less, protection against adverse events. But is that argument valid?
Certainly, in Germany, the recent history of fiscal stimulus wasn’t entirely positive. After reunification in 1990, the German government borrowed and spent huge amounts of money to finance reconstruction and to bring East German living standards up to West German levels. Millions of new consumers were added to the economy. These policies did unify the country politically but were not overwhelmingly successful economically. An initial surge was followed by years of disappointing results for output and employment. Germany’s taxes remain high, and overall West German living standards failed to rise at the same rate as those of most other wealthy countries.
Persuading former East Germans to spend more as consumers turned out to be less important than making sure that they had the skills to mesh with the economic expansion of the country. It is no surprise that many Germans are now skeptical about debt-financed government spending or excessive reliance on domestic consumers.
In recent times, Germany has shown signs of regaining a pre-eminent economic position. Policy makers have returned to long-run planning, and during the last decade have liberalized their labor markets, introduced greater wage flexibility and recently passed a constitutional amendment for a nearly balanced budget by 2016, meaning that the structural deficit should not exceed 0.35 percent of gross domestic product.
Amid the sluggish economies of much of Europe, Germany has booming exports and is nearing full capacity utilization. And many of its workers are postponing vacations to produce, and earn, more. The unemployment rate in Germany is 7.5 percent — below that of the United States — and falling. Far from embracing this social democratic model, American Keynesians have criticized it for relying too heavily on exports and not enough on spending and debt. Yet it is not just the decline in the euro’s value that supports the German resurgence.
Most of the other euro-zone economies are not having comparable success because they did not make the appropriate investments and reforms. Moreover, the euro is still stronger than its average value since 2001, which suggests that the recent German success is not attributable only to a falling currency. In any case, the Germans are exporting much quality machinery and engineering (not just glitzy autos), which can help other nations recover. It is an odd state of affairs when the relatively productive nations are asked to change successful policies because of an economic downturn.
The German government is also making credible long-term commitments to reduce its debt. Germany’s ratio of debt to G.D.P. has been hovering in the unhealthy range of more than 70 percent, and the country has one of the lowest birth rates in the developed world, which raises the question of how to pay for future pensions. Yet many investors consider German bonds a haven, in part because the government has a reputation for addressing fiscal issues promptly and responsibly. It is working to cut government spending, although not in crucial long-term areas of research and education.
Germany is likely to continue having a higher relative level of government spending than the United States. But the German civil service has a stronger hand in writing legislation — a role that limits the sort of waste and short-term thinking that Congress injects into American law. It is also well understood in German political discourse that tax cuts need to be paid for.
The German economy is far from perfect. In addition to high taxes and a low birth rate, there are potential solvency problems in German banks, and these institutions lack transparency. Furthermore, poorer countries may need a looser monetary policy from the European Central Bank than Germany wishes to support. Nonetheless, it’s a common German attitude that adding debt, whether private or public, will not solve those problems. In fact, debt can provide the illusion of relief and thus postpone their resolution. Increased spending is a quick fix for what are very often more fundamental difficulties.
The point is not that Americans can or should copy Germany. But are German policy makers so wrong in their long-term orientation? We can lecture, or we can listen. The choice is ours.
Tyler Cowen is a professor of economics at George Mason University.
IMF seeks $250 billion boost to resources
by Christian Oliver and Alan Beattie - Financial Times
The International Monetary Fund is seeking commitments by as early as November to boost its lending resources to $1,000bn from $750bn to build safety nets that could prevent financial crises.
Instead of responding solely to crises with conditional loan packages, the IMF wants financing agreed in advance and specially tailored to individual countries, to cool market nerves over any nation facing an imminent liquidity crunch.
"Even when not in a time of crisis, a big fund, likely to intervene massively, is something that can help prevent crises," Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the IMF managing director told the Financial Times. "Just because the financing role decreases, doesn’t mean we don’t need to have huge firepower ... a $1,000bn fund is a correct forecast." South Korea, as this year’s president of the Group of 20 leading economies, is helping craft the plan. Seoul hopes to convince the G20 countries to back the increased IMF funding at a summit in South Korea in November. The G20 meeting in London in 2009 tripled IMF resources from $250bn. A US official said Washington was sympathetic to improved safety nets but needed more details on the Korean-IMF plan.
South Korean economists forged the plan because of their own bitter experience of their currency and stock market plunging in 2008. In spite of robust economic fundamentals, Seoul needed to be rescued from a dangerous liquidity shortfall by swaps from the US, Japan and China. To avoid a repetition of this, markets need to know there are pre-arranged facilities at the IMF backing a country up, said Shin Hyun-song, adviser on international economy to South Korea’s president. "This is meant to mitigate the type of liquidity spiral that we saw after the Lehman episode of 2008," Mr Shin said.
He said a "global stabilisation mechanism" being discussed could involve drawing up a risk curve for nations, with the least risky enjoying a status akin to platinum or gold credit card holders. These would be entitled to financing such as the IMF’s flexible credit lines, already used by Mexico, Poland and Colombia. They could be deployed before a crisis struck and would impose practically no conditions. Countries further down the curve would face tougher conditions. Loans to them would be called "precautionary credit lines".
Still, Mr Shin added that tighter regulation would be needed to avoid the moral hazard of countries taking greater risks because of the safety net. He also said discussions would need to resolve how not to put certain countries in speculators’ sights by revealing that they only had second tier protection. Eswar Prasad, a former head of the IMF’s China division and a professor at Cornell University, said this new lending scheme could simply shift the problem "from one place to another" and doubted that the plan would encourage many emerging markets to cut back their bumper reserves.
"If you have a country that is on the brink of trouble and the IMF says it does not qualify, then it will undoubtedly come under more pressure," he said. Mr Shin stressed the plan should still be complemented by the type of swaps that had proved so valuable to South Korea in the past.
Hedge Funds to Boost Use of Trading Algorithms for Stocks
by Nina Mehta - Bloomberg
Asset managers such as hedge funds will probably increase their use of computer programs known as algorithms to execute their stock trades in 2011, according to securities-industry research firm Tabb Group LLC. The proportion of orders processed by algorithms will probably amount to 35 percent next year, up from 29 percent in 2010, according to a report from Tabb analyst Cheyenne Morgan and director of research Adam Sussman. Human traders at broker- dealers will execute 35 percent of orders in 2011, down from 39 percent this year, the report said.
The growth during the past decade of electronic trading that allows investment firms to exert greater control over their orders has diminished the importance of sales traders at securities firms. Sales desks will generate $9.5 billion of the $15.3 billion in equity commissions paid to brokers this year, compared with almost $3 billion paid for algorithms, Tabb said. Algorithms break larger orders into pieces, executing them over a set time period to help ensure customers get the best prices. "In 2008 and the beginning of 2009, buy-side traders turned more to sales traders for guidance and advice about how to navigate the market, but that trend has reversed," Morgan said in an interview. "During the financial crisis they also became more comfortable with how algorithms performed."
Record VIX
Expectations for volatility in U.S. equities peaked in November 2008, two months after Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. filed the biggest bankruptcy in the nation’s history. The Chicago Board Options Exchange Volatility Index, or VIX, which measures the cost of using options to protect against declines in the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index, closed at a record 80.86 on Nov. 20, 2008, and has retreated about 67 percent since then.
The Tabb study is based on interviews with 66 head traders at investment management firms with a total of $12.1 trillion in assets and 57 head traders at hedge funds with $182.1 billion. In the former group, 52 percent managed less than $50 billion, compared with 36 percent in 2009, New York-based Tabb said. Large firms, defined as investment companies overseeing more than $150 billion and hedge funds with more than $3 billion, accounted for 86 percent of total assets in each group.
The top five providers of algorithms to asset managers and hedge funds are Credit Suisse Group AG, Investment Technology Group Inc., Bank of America Corp., Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and UBS AG. Credit Suisse trading strategies are used by 69 percent of firms, the study found. Algorithms from Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. are used by 19 percent of firms and those from Weeden & Co. by 13 percent. The report described the latter two firms as "winners" among mid-tier brokers.
Commissions
The estimated $15.3 billion asset managers and hedge funds will pay brokers in equity commissions this year is up slightly from $14.9 billion last year, the report said. The firms paid $17.2 billion in 2008. Asset managers accounted for 73.3 percent of those fees, down from 74.6 percent in the two previous years. Traders at the firms surveyed will manage 9 percent of their volume themselves next year -- the same as this year -- by placing orders directly on exchanges in what’s called direct market access, the report said. Their use of crossing networks and dark pools, or private venues that don’t display quotes publicly, will rise 1 percentage point to 13 percent in 2011, Tabb said.
Brokers get 3.2 cents per share from hedge funds using their sales trading desk, compared with 2.9 cents paid by asset managers. Hedge funds pay higher commissions than asset managers for sales trading, direct market access, dark pool executions and baskets of stocks sent to so-called program desks at broker- dealers. The only category in which hedge fund rates are lower is algorithms, for which they pay an average 0.9 cents per share, compared to 0.7 cents paid by asset managers.
Low Touch
Commissions to sales desks have "probably hit bottom" while investment firms are likely to "demand more services on the low-touch side," Morgan said. Low touch refers to the use of electronic trading tools. Sales traders at some brokers will need to provide more guidance to customers about how and when to use algorithms, while at others that advice may come from people staffing electronic desks, she said. "The buyside will also want more market color from low-touch desks," she added.
Goldman’s Sigma X dark pool is used by 33 percent of the study participants, followed by Credit Suisse’s Crossfinder at 24 percent. Aqua, a system for transacting larger trades than are sent to stock exchanges, and UBS’s PIN dark pool are used by 20 percent of firms. Morgan Stanley’s MS Pool has connections to 17 percent of the firms surveyed, Tabb said.
Pensions: how to defuse the Britain's savings time bomb
by Louisa Peacock - Telegraph
Life is full of little ironies. Steve Webb spent years in opposition with a smart office in the Houses of Parliament overlooking the River Thames. Now the Liberal Democrat MP has finally made it into office as the Minister of State for Pensions, he has been booted out of his riverside suite into a dingy little room baked in artificial yellow light. So much for power. Thrust into the biggest attempted pensions reform since the post-war years, Webb has his work cut out. Decades of lucrative final salary pension schemes and rising life longevity have caused liabilities to swell to an estimated £1.2 trillion in the public sector and about £239bn in the private sector.
In a week where the state was told it faced a £23bn pensions bill if BT ever went bust, Webb promised to consider how people can dip into their pension pots early and the Government vowed to ban the requirement to buy an annuity at 75. In both the public and private sector, pressure has now built up to boiling point to provide a system that works and is affordable. At the same time, there is now evidence that not enough people are saving for retirement and that up to 10m workers have no pension plan. Employers will be forced to offer all staff workplace pensions from 2012, a costly measure, and staff will be automatically enrolled in schemes unless they opt out.
Surely one of the consequences of all this is that people will have to work into their 70s before they can draw their state pension, right? Wrong, according to Webb. "The Secretary of State, Iain Duncan Smith, has already said 70 is nonsense," he says. "What we've said is, we'll look at 66 in the autumn, and then 67, and then 68."
If anyone can dispute the idea of having to wait until 70 before drawing a state pension, Webb can. He has more than seven years combined experience of working on pension matters for the Lib Dems prior to taking a seat in the coalition Government, but can he actually make pension reform work? He doesn't underestimate the scale of the challenge when he says the whole pensions system is often completely confusing. "There are corners of it that are profoundly utterly baffling. How can we expect people to understand what they'll get?" he asks. "People don't know what they're getting from the state, they don't know what private pension pots they're going to get. We need to set about all of that."
At the top of his to-do list, he tells me, is getting workers into occupational pension schemes. "In a few years' time, if you've got a situation where big swathes of the workforce are building up [pension] provision on top of the state pension, that would be one heck of an achievement," he says. "We need to get people that are historically unpensioned and under-pensioned into something that works for them, and it becomes a positive thing."
Webb concedes that to do this will be a "real cultural shift" – businesses already have concerns about the new auto-enrolment system, due to come into force in 2012 and currently under review. But the pensions minister insists the Government is serious about reform. "One of the things that's striking about the Coalition agreement is that you've got page one: world peace, and page two: automatic enrolment of workplace pensions. So the commitment to automatic enrolment is clear."
Under the plans, which were drawn up under Labour and could remain unchanged, the Government is set to introduce a new workplace pension scheme called the National Employment Savings Trust (Nest), formerly known as "personal accounts". This is designed for employers who do not have a pension scheme, but can be used by companies with an existing scheme. Employers will eventually be required to pay 3pc in contributions, although this will be introduced in stages, with a further 1pc coming from tax relief and 4pc from the employee.
One of the key concerns is that small firms, struggling to recover in a tough economic climate, cannot shoulder the extra costs. Webb agrees it is too early for small businesses. "It will be big employers going in first," he says. "It's several years then before we get to the smallest ones." But what about the potential problem facing all companies: the possibility that from day one of employment, workers can start accruing pension rights even if they are contractors? Webb assures me the review, due to report its recommendations in September, will address this.
Also up for debate is whether the lowest paid workers who can less easily afford contributions can be exempt from auto-enrolment. Webb hints this is unlikely. "The version we've inherited [from Labour] of auto-enrolment is terribly comprehensive, which means that in terms of having to enforce any of this, it's quite straight forward. As soon as you start moving the thresholds and so on, then you're drawing lines that people fall either side of."
To some extent Webb is relying on word of mouth and a bit of "trial and error" during the first few months, if not years, of the new auto-enrolment system for it to become a success. As with the National Minimum Wage legislation, there will be fines for employers who don't comply. But the approach is one of carrot rather than stick. It's a risky strategy, given that all the forthcoming state pension age changes – including the rise from 60 to 65 for women – and the phasing out of the default retirement age are "quite messy" for employers. What's to stop businesses getting so confused they just give up and carry on doing what they've always done?
The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development adds fuel to this fire when it warns organisations "face a range of challenges", not least communicating and educating staff about the "complex" pensions system. "It's early days," Webb says. "I've been in place about eight weeks or so. I'm not being too hard on myself just yet." However, Webb admits employers could end up ignoring the new Nest scheme altogether. "One of the first things we think will happen is that those employers [with occupational pension schemes] will put their current workers into schemes already up and running and that will improve workplace pension coverage in a very simple way."
He sums up the Government's expectation on employers when he says: "We will expect people to auto-enrol their workers over the next few years into a workplace pension." Whether it's Nest or any other scheme, it doesn't seem to matter. What will matter to a huge number of employers that currently offer schemes is whether they can take advantage of the Government's recent decision to wipe as much as £100bn off the final salary pensions deficit, by linking retirement payments to a lower price of inflation. From next April, the Government will allow employers to use the Consumer Prices Index to calculate retirement promises, rather than the Retail Prices Index, a typically higher measure of inflation.
Although the changes are intended to be positive for business, experts have warned they create a "big headache" for about 50pc of employers whose pension plans refer expressly to RPI and cannot be changed by law. Many employers could miss out on the savings unless the Government changes the law. Webb neatly sidesteps this issue. "We will try to resolve all these matters as soon as we can," he says. "A scheme is entirely free to carry on... so it's only a burden if they want to change things." But doesn't that defeat the point? "We're not obliging anybody to do that. If you as an employer see RPI as part of the package you're offering, you may not want to switch."
Looking ahead on the pensions horizon, radical European Commission proposals could force British companies to inject an extra £500bn into their final salary pension schemes to meet a new funding demand, according to the CBI. Webb promises to fight against any unnecessary EU regulation that won't work in the UK. "There isn't a one-size-fits-all on these things," he says. "We're keen that anything that comes out of that final process is very much allowing members states to have schemes that fit their own needs."
Will Thousands Of Police Layoffs Unleash Chaos And Anarchy Across America?
by Michael Snyder - The Economic Collapse
Thousands of police officers have been laid off all across America since the current economic crisis began. Thousands more are getting ready to be laid off. So could we be on the verge of a new era of chaos and anarchy in America as crime runs wild and there are just far too few police to respond to it all? That is the message that one blood-smeared billboard in Stockton, California is trying to get across. Paid for by the Stockton, California police union, the message of the billboard is chillingly clear: "Welcome to the 2nd most dangerous city in California. Stop laying off cops." As state, city and local governments across the United States continue to be devastated by the ongoing economic crisis, budget cuts are becoming much deeper and police forces have suddenly become a very popular target.Officer Steve Leonesio, the president of the Stockton Police Officers Association, has announced that the police union plans to spend approximately $20,000 on at least 20 more billboards.
Why is the union putting up all of these billboards?
Well, it turns out that Stockton has been considering a plan to lay off 53 police officers in an effort to eliminate a $23 million budget deficit.
But law enforcement in Stockton has already been cut to the bone. Recently, the Stockton Police Department dropped this bombshell....
"We absolutely do not have any narcotics officers, narcotics sergeants working any kind of investigative narcotics type cases at this point in time."
Do you think drug dealers will be flocking to Stockton after they hear that?
But the truth is that so many of these local governments around the nation are just flat broke at this point.
Even major cities are having to admit that they have accumulated such large debts that they cannot even afford to provide the most basic services any longer.
In Oakland, California the battle over police layoffs has made national headlines over the past couple of weeks. Oakland has laid off 80 police officers, and now the police chief says that there are some crimes that his department simply will not be able to respond to.
In fact, Chief Anthony Batts has compiled a list of exactly 44 situations, including grand theft, burglary, car wrecks, identity theft and vandalism, that his officers will not be available to handle any longer.
What in the world?
Once upon a time in America you could get a police officer to come out for just about anything - including for getting a cat down out of a tree.
But those days are long gone.
Today it is very hard to get a police officer to come out for anything short of murder.
The following is a partial list of crimes that police officers in Oakland will no longer be responding to....
- burglary
- theft
- embezzlement
- grand theft
- grand theft: dog
- identity theft
- false information to peace officer
- required to register as sex or arson offender
- dump waste or offensive matter
- discard appliance with lock
- loud music
- possess forged notes
- pass fictitious check
- obtain money by false voucher
- fraudulent use of access cards
- stolen license plate
- embezzlement by an employee (over $ 400)
- extortion
- attempted extortion
- false personification of other
- injure telephone/power line
- interfere with power line
- unauthorized cable tv connection
- vandalism
Not that Oakland wasn't already a mess, but now how long do you think it will be before total chaos and anarchy reigns on the streets of Oakland?
But Oakland is far from alone.
The sheriff's department in Ashtabula County, Ohio has been slashed from 112 to 49 deputies, and there is now just one vehicle remaining to patrol all 720 square miles of the county.
So what are the citizens of that county supposed to do to protect themselves?
Well, when asked about what they should do, Judge Alfred Mackey gave this stunning piece of advice....
"Arm themselves."
So is that what we are left with?
Is American society degenerating into a "Road Warrior-style" wasteland where we are all left to fend for ourselves?
It gets really frightening when you start considering just how many police are actually being laid off across the United States....
*Acting State Police director Jonathon Monken has announced that the Illinois State Police will lay off more than 460 troopers and close five regional headquarters by this fall.
*Atlantic City Mayor Lorenzo Langford has proposed a plan to lay off 40 police officers.
*The police department in Vallejo, California will temporarily suspend its K-9 and SWAT programs at the end of the month in a move to delay officer layoffs.
*Last year, 18 special police units in Toledo, Ohio - including the gang task force and the mounted patrol - were eliminated or downsized in an effort to replace the 130 patrol officers who were laid off because of a $20.7 million budget deficit.
*Of 315 municipalities the New Jersey State Policemen's union canvassed, more than half indicated that they were planning to lay off police officers.
*Four police officers in one town in New Jersey were greeted at work this past Monday morning with notices informing them that they will be laid off on August 31st.
*Police in Phoenix, Arizona have been told that more than 400 officers could be impacted by layoffs if "the worst case scenario" plays out.
*Police and firefighters in Flint, Michigan decided that layoffs were preferable to taking a 15 percent pay and benefits cut.
*The city of Maywood, California laid off all 68 of its employees July 1st and is now "contracting out" police services.
*In Colorado Springs, dozens of police positions are going unfilled and the police helicopters were put up for sale on the Internet.
The sad thing is that as local police forces across America are being stripped down or dismantled, many communities are opening their arms wide to increased federal law enforcement "assistance".
In recent years, we have seen a large number of examples where the U.S. military is being used for domestic law enforcement, which is supposed to be against the law. In addition, federal government agencies are increasingly taking over the financing, training and even command of local police.
But is this "federalization" of local law enforcement a good thing?
Of course not.
Unfortunately we live at a time when almost everything is being centralized under federal government control. Of course this is completely contrary to everything that our founders intended, but most of our "officials" don't seem too concerned about actually following the Constitution these days.
RICO law made to combat Mafia used in BP lawsuits
by Curt Anderson - AP
Using a law originally enacted to combat the Mafia, attorneys are filing lawsuits accusing BP PLC and Transocean Ltd. of committing a longterm series of crimes by concealing flaws in deepwater drilling plans and lacking safeguards to contain a catastrophic Gulf of Mexico spill. BP has been named in at least three lawsuits brought under the federal law known as RICO, which stands for Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organizations. Transocean, which leased the ill-fated Deepwater Horizon drilling rig to BP, has been named in two lawsuits filed in Louisiana and Florida.
The lawsuits accuse both companies of committing wire and mail fraud over a number of years by filing false documents with the U.S. government, and by misleading investors through other documents and falsehoods. They also claim both companies are guilty of bribery because they are part of an overall oil and gas industry effort to "infiltrate" federal regulators by providing favors such as alcohol and drugs, sex, golf and ski trips, concert and sports tickets, and more.
"The pattern of racketeering activity engaged in by defendants involves a scheme to fraudulently create a pretense of safety to the public while, at every turn, seeking to avoid the costs associated with actually conducting their operations in a safe manner," claims a lawsuit filed by Louisiana attorney Daniel Becnel and others on behalf of a restaurant seeking to represent a huge class of businesses suffering economic loss from the oil spill.
RICO, passed by Congress in 1970, contains both a civil and criminal component, but both of them rely on proof of longterm violations of at least two specific crimes from a lengthy list. The attraction of the civil portion, which are being used in the current lawsuits, is that any damages would be tripled. In the past, civil RICO cases have often been followed by criminal prosecutions. The Justice Department has not ruled out using RICO in its ongoing criminal investigation of the Deepwater Horizon explosion, which killed 11 rig workers and triggered a massive oil spill that has affected five Gulf Coast states.
Criminal convictions can lead to prison sentences of 20 years on each racketeering count, plus hefty fines and forfeiture of ill-gotten gains. "We are investigating any possible violations of the law," said Justice Department spokeswoman Hannah August.
Florida attorney Peter Prieto, a former federal prosecutor, said it might be a stretch for the Justice Department to bring a criminal RICO case when there might be easier-to-prove offenses. "If it's a simpler crime, that's what they are going to do. Prosecutors are going to use RICO when it is truly applicable or when it involves organized crime," said Prieto, who is not involved in the oil spill cases. "It is kind of a hammer, but if the facts fit RICO, you can use RICO."
Even as use of RICO in criminal cases has waned somewhat, it's become increasingly popular on the civil side. This year alone, RICO lawsuits have been filed against the Roman Catholic Church over priest abuses; Toyota over its sudden acceleration problems; a group of title insurers over alleged overcharges; and online cigarette vendors over lost tax revenue. In March, pharmaceutical giant Pfizer was ordered by a Boston jury to pay $142 million in damages for wrongly marketing the epilepsy drug Neurontin as treatment for migraines and bipolar disorder.
The difficulty in the BP and Transocean cases, some experts say, is finding evidence tying the companies' actions to damages caused by the spill. On the criminal side, a prosecutor would have to have ironclad proof of criminal intent, not just negligence or stupidity. "The problem is just connecting the dots," said Thomas Walker, an Idaho attorney who has tried about 20 civil RICO cases and maintains a blog on RICO. "The fraudulent communications, if they were fraudulent, went from BP to the government. The damage was not caused by the letter, it was caused by the oil spill."
The RICO lawsuits are among more than 200 filed against BP, Transocean and other companies seeking damages for economic losses, environmental damage and shareholder losses. A federal judicial panel will meet July 29 in Boise, Idaho, to consider whether to consolidate some or all of them for pretrial purposes. Potential damages from those lawsuits would come on top of the $20 billion BP has pledged to set aside to pay claims and other spill cleanup costs.
Most of the criminal allegations in the RICO lawsuits are taken from testimony and documents produced by congressional investigations of the spill, documents filed with financial regulators and investors, and even investigative news articles by The Associated Press and other news outlets. For example, the Louisiana complaint charges that:
• According to an AP story, an independent firm hired by BP in 2009 found the company was violating its own policies by failing to have key engineering documents aboard the deepwater drilling rig Alantis. The study was never disclosed to regulators.
• BP filed documents showing it had a solid response plan for a catastrophic oil spill, when in fact it "lacked any meaningful ability" to resond.
• BP repeatedly failed to disclose to the U.S. Interior Department a range of safety concerns about the Deepwater Horizon, including use of a risky well cementing technique and problems with pockets of flammable natural gas.
• Transocean assured investors and regulators that it had an excellent safety record, when in fact it was responsible for an increasing number of accidents on deepwater drilling rigs.
• Both companies are part of an oil industry effort to prevent the Minerals Management Service — now renamed the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management — from imposing tough rules, in part through industry events where government officials were given cocaine, marijuana and alcohol, had sex with company executives and received gifts ranging from exotic travel to concert tickets.
Matt Simmons still says BP covering up MASSIVE HOLE miles away, cap test is absurd
What If He's Right?
by James Howard Kunstler
Just when America was celebrating the provisional end of BP's Macondo oil blowout, and getting back to important issues like Kim Kardashian's body-suit collection, along comes Matthew Simmons with a rather strange and alarming outcry on doings in the Gulf of Mexico that contradicts the mood of renewed festivity, as well as just about every shred of reportage from any media outlet, mainstream or otherwise.
Matt Simmons Houston-based company has been the leading investment bank to the US oil industry for a long time, financing exploration and drilling in places like the Gulf of Mexico. Simmons, 68, recently retired from day-to-day management of the company. For much of the decade he has been what may be described as a peak oil activist. His 2005 book, Twilight in the Desert, warned the public that Saudi Arabia's oil production had reached its limits and, more generally, that an oil-dependent world was entering a zone of serious trouble over its primary resource. He took this aggressive stance despite risking the ire of the people he did business with.
Matt Simmons is a sober individual and a very nice man (I've met him twice over the years), a button-downed corporate executive who's been around the oil business for forty years. His knowledge is deep and comprehensive. From the beginning of the BP Macondo blowout incident in April, he's taken the far out position that the well-bore is fatally compromised and that BP has been consistently lying about their operations to stop the flow of oil. Perhaps most radically, Simmons claims that an oil "gusher" is pouring into the Gulf some distance from the drilling site itself.
Last week, Simmons came on Dylan Ratigan's MSNBC financial show, but he did a longer interview over at the King World News website. Simmons's current warning about the situation focuses on the gigantic "lake" of crude oil that is pooling under great pressure 4000 to 5000 feet down in the "basement" of the Gulf's waters. More particularly, he is concerned that a tropical storm will bring this oil up - as tropical storms and hurricanes usually do with deeper cold water - and with it clouds of methane gas that will move toward the Gulf shore and kill a lot of people. (I really don't know the science on this and welcome any reader to correct me, but I suppose that the oil "lake" deep under the Gulf waters contains a lot of methane gas dissolved at pressure, and that as the oil rises toward the ocean's surface, and lower pressures, the gas will bubble out of solution.)
Simmons makes two additional points that are pretty radical: he says that several states along the Gulf ought to begin systematic evacuations in counties along the shore now. From his experience in Houston with Hurricane Rita (2005), he says a last-minute evacuation is bound to be a disaster -- the highways jammed hopelessly, drivers ran out of gas, and then the gas stations ran out of gas. Based on where the nation's collective state-of-mind is these days, I can't imagine that any Gulf state governor or mayor will heed this warning and begin preparing an evacuation now. (The practical problems are obvious for householders but what if it really is a matter of life and death?)
Secondly, Simmons maintains - as he has from near the beginning of the blowout - that the US military should take over operations from BP and ought to set off a "small" nuclear device down in the well-bore to fuse the rock into glass and seal the site permanently. Simmons says, based on his experience growing up in Utah near the government's underground nuclear testing sites in neighboring Nevada, where scores of very large atomic bombs were set off for years with no measurable consequences above ground, that a small nuclear explosion down in the Macondo well is unlikely to have any effect above the undersea rock surface. I have no idea, personally if this is true.
Matt Simmons is taking a position so "out there" that even the radical peak oil website theoildrum.com won't comment on his remarks (at least not as of early Monday morning July 19). I don't know how to evaluate Simmons's contentions myself, except to say that I don't believe Simmons is a nut, or that he's lost his marbles. We also must suppose that someone in his position is able to talk with an awful lot of the best people in the oil industry. Simmons has put his reputation on the line. A lot of bystanders and commentators are treating him as a fool. Simmons himself is painfully aware of his lonely stance and seems, in his public appearances, to be a very regretful messenger.
In the past twenty-four hours, BP has reported some possible leaks coming out of the seabed some distance from the well-bore. Nobody has been able to confirm yet exactly what is happening down there. One other thing Simmons said is that BP should be barred from the media airwaves since, he says, they have lied consistently in order to cover up their criminal negligence and culpability. The company itself cannot be saved because the claims against it are much greater than the value of its assets - but the people running the company could be sent to jail, so the incentive to keep lying remains high.
Jesse at the Jesse's Café Américain website makes an excellent point that if Matt Simmons is correct, and it turns out that the US government has been played by BP, then remaining public trust in the competence and legitimacy of government could evaporate. This is not a happy thing to contemplate at a time when the state of the nation and its economy are so fragile. What follows could make the current political situation seem like little more than, well, than a tea party, compared to the politics-to-come.
Readers here at Clusterfuck Nation are probably well aware of my past declarations of being allergic to conspiracy theories and crazy ideas generally. I'm not really equipped to evaluate Matt Simmons's warnings about the exact nature of the Macondo blowout and what might happen in the months ahead. But I am confident, having met the guy and corresponded with him and read his books, that he is a straight shooter. I'm sure that he is sincere in proclaiming his extreme discomfort with the position he's taken.
73 comments:
"China overtook the US last year to become the world’s biggest energy user, the International Energy Agency revealed on Monday.
Beijing’s new status is expected to make it even more influential in global energy markets, in determining prices and how it is used."
FT.
One Empire in ascendancy, the other in decline. Though China will face a severe setback as Hugh Hendry outlines.
Apologies if this has been brought up before.
Would it help free up the credit markets if finance firms that are borrowing at basically zero interest from the Fed were prohibited from purchasing Treasuries (thereby forcing them to invest in private entities)? Or, considering the flip side of this coin, should companies that receive bailout cash be prevented from borrowing from the Fed until their federal debts are repaid (thus keeping them from pulling a GM by borrowing at zero interest and using the proceeds to claim that they've paid back their TARP indebtedness)?
Just wondering...
What's the status of the website changes?
Some thoughts on preparation.
Stoneliegh's article points out rightly how as we lose the homogenizing influence of world trade, we will see a more hetergeneous world emerge. This heterogeneity complicates planning for doomsteads/lifeboats.
Securing the essentials of life (food, energy, community) is going to be a different challenge, depending on where you live.
We all have limited abilities and capital. Not everything can be fully prepared, so where should we concentrate our energy?
For example, I am working under the assumption that NZ will have a functional electrical grid for some time to come (a very large fraction already comes from wind, hydro and geothermal, and those sectors and building rapidly- all resources that cannot be stolen in a long emergency). So I am not looking at a wind turbine for our place, rather I am putting that time and money into other areas.
My question is: how can we effectively research the strengths and weaknesses of the regions we live in? How can we then share that knowledge with one another?
This could become vital as things start to unwind, and we have to make increasingly difficult choices (stay or go, what to stockpile, etc).
@chusaca,
Even simpler would be a return to Glass-Steagall, separating investment firms from savings banks where only savings banks can borrow from the Fed. This was proposed by Paul Volcker but shot down by Wall Street friendly politicians like Senator Chris Dodd.
This would deny easy money to the gambling firms but provide low cost support to true savings banks.
There is more that should be done, of course, but none of it will be. Right now the big investment firms have the best of all worlds - corporate welfare if they take a bad step but permission to keep all the winnings when they win big, even at your expense. A wonderfully perverse system in which we live, no?
I love Hendry.. he's like the loud, spastic kid on the block that was always right. His interview with the BBC six months ago with Stiglitz was spot on; the good Professor & Nobel laureate was left on the dustpile of history that night as events proved Hendry right.
The Jim Kunstler piece on Clusterfuck Nation this week sort of lays out the Big Choice 'citizens' of the U.S. must make.
Which Side Are you On?
Bp's version of the spill or Matt Simmon's?
There is no day light between these two diametric accounts.
BP, in the true spirit of 'Merika's Casino Gulag Gestalt Mentality, has 'doubled down' on it's initial Rosy Scenario Big Lie and basically gone all or nothing.
Simmons, as Jim has pointed out, seems like a real 'straight shooter' and reiterated his contention that the 'Guster', located several miles away from the ROV camera, is the real menace. It is not the BOP freak show BP has been using to misdirect/redirect attention from the real hemorrhage in the ocean floor.(if anything, The Cap is producing back pressure and accelerating the real leak)
The Whitehouse has just sat there for two months with it's finger up it's ass.
This is not nuance or splitting of hairs, it's BP's Nuremberg Rally Staged Press Event vs the leading banker to the oil industry for the last 40 years or so.
BP's liability for the Gulf Holocaust easily out strips any assets it has. They secretly knew that even before the last pieces of the exploded Deep Water Horizon rig had finished falling from the sky and hitting the Gulf's waters.
The game has been to keep the BP share price up long enough so the upper echelons of the company can dump them and move to Dubai.
So, which side are you on?
.
I read Kunstler this morning.
This whole thing with Simmons talking about this gusher oil leak away from the Macondo well has had me scratching my head for the past two weeks. He's certainly been consistent in his story for the better part of 3 months but there hasn't been much to substantiate what he's said.
On the other hand, I know he's not a nutcase, unless the whole peak oil and oil volcano has driven him a little nutty. I seriously doubt that has happened to him. I've been reading his stuff for the past 5 or so years and he's no fringe commentator on the oil business and resource depletion.
I hate to see him dissed so when he might turn out to be so right, yet I hope desperately he won't be!
peace, Shamba
Hendrys is the only hedge fund type of guy I think would make a good ,interesting dinner guest.I would love to see the exchange between our own dear stoneleigh,and him ,after 2 glasses of wine.They would probably come to some interesting "conclusions"...[!]
On a bit more serious note..
I spent some research time on the gulf disaster this day,as I wondered whether I could put it in back of all else going on...think of it as a disaster,but not ongoing...not something to pay less of my so limited net time time to...
wrong
The was a post at the oil drum that has me thinking many dark thought about the next few months/rest of the year.
{ http://www.theoildrum.com/node/6593#comment-648967}
This was almost a month old,and it might be the reason that TOD has a sudden influx of BP sympathetic type posters...newbies that are quick to discount any hint of doomer type posting.They all came at the same time..7 weeks to the day...The poster,dougr,has been at TOD 4 + years,and painted a bleak,carefully documented,terrifying analysis of whats happening. If his take is right,worst case is not possible,its probable .Soon.Their own words have damned them,as its been pointed out that they have let slip the fact there is significant damage to the pipe way,way,down there.This is why the "top kill" didn't take,as the bore pipe is damaged.Think of what happens when you have a leak in a garden hose...when running[open] the leak is minimal,[less pressure]...but close the end of your hose,and pressurize the line,and the leak is very evident.His long term evaluation is the well,and the gulf,are doomed.Total collapse,which will slime every beach in the gulf,and deal a deathblow to the USA economically.I cannot see any holes in his evaluation.Look for yourself.
Lots of talk trying to discount Matt Simmons,calling him a crackpot instead of the guy who sat with dick cheney and company and made US energy policy .
Looks like a corporation has screwed us all in spades.My worry is that this will trigger more financial instability.And what action May/will be taken to try and wag the dog{assign blame}
This is a very real concern of mine,as I could see the power structure being very inclined to look desperately for a target for the rage of the American public to blame[like Iran]...especially the thousands and thousands ...millions of refugees that could result from a energetic hurricane season,and a runaway blowout that will completely empty a 2.4 BILLION barrel reserve.{yes,I got the numbers from TOD}.Read that post.This could well be the trigger/spark for the coming fireworks.
I don't see much sleep tonight I think.
Bee good,or
Bee careful.
snuffy
@Top Hat Cat,
People here know I am and remain very concerned about the Deepwater Horizon spill. However, I have looked and looked and can find ZERO independent confirmation of anything Simmons has said. Not one BP, Halliburton, or Transocean employee has broken ranks to support his statement. Not one government employee has blown the whistle. None of the data presented thus far supports Simmons position. Frankly, I am not sure what to think about Matt Simmons at this point.
I do not trust BP but there should be some sort of confirmation possible of his observations if they are as large, catastrophic, and important as he states. Yet I've found nothing thus far to support him.
I am sorry, but I simply do not find him believable at this point in time. And mind you, I like Matt Simmons.
The spill is truly horrible and we are seeing ecological damage on a massive scale that may take decades from which to recover or even longer if they cannot effectively cap this well. It pains me to say this but Simmons so far has sounded like someone completely out of touch with reality.
I find myself in a similar position to Greyzone on Matt Simmons and the oil spill. I have read Mr Simmons work and found it very valuable. However, when I heard him speak at ASPO last year, out of touch with reality was what came to mind as I heard him say that the world would be fine thanks to wind power and ammonia, and that he credit crunch was a thing of the past. I don't dismiss his view, but I do question it.
The spill is an environmental disaster of truly epic proportions, but whether it can go on to create the kind of catastrophe that some are mentioning (earthquakes, sea-floor implosions, tsunamis, massive fireballs etc) is not clear. I wouldn't entirely discount the possibility as I do not have enough information to draw such a conclusion, but these stories sound to me like fear speaking at this point. Fear speaks very loudly in a major bear market, and the tendency to over-react to runaway collective fear at such times is built into humanity. The over-reaction can exacerbate the impact of the initial problem.
We need to keep an open mind in relation to the spill, as there is a great deal of misinformation and disinformation muddying the waters (so to speak). It will clearly soil all the beaches of the Gulf, kill unbelievable numbers of plants and animals both in the sea and on land and ruin the livelihoods of millions of people. The toxic effect (and fire risk) of inevitable hurricanes spreading oil all over the land will have a tremendous impact. The sensitive marsh ecosystem that protects the coast from the effect of storms is highly threatened.
The wildcard appears to me to be methane. It is not clear to me what the scale of the methane emission is, or what its impact will ultimately be. There is the potential for tipping point events I think, but I can't judge the probability. We will have to wait and see on this one, but we should keep our heads and try hard to find real data rather than run with conjecture. People will be very prone to become headless chickens during times like these as fear is so very catching.
Stonleigh, you said that you
"heard him speak at ASPO last year, out of touch with reality was what came to mind as I heard him say that the world would be fine thanks to wind power and ammonia,"
Ammonia? could you explain that please? I have no idea what he was referring to there ... ???????
I'm just going to have to keep the open mind option on Matt Simmons' statements on the gulf oil mess. So many things that "would never happen" have happened in the past 2-3 years, I can hardly believe when I look back!
peace to you all,
hoping for rest ful sleep myself,
shamba
Matt is either not in touch with reality or is doing everything in his power to destroy BP because of it's atrocious safety record.
Either way, a lot of what he is saying is drivel.
Methane is not poisonous for instance.
There is nowhere near enough methane available to make an explosive fuel/air mix.
If there is a huge methane bubble in the formation that lets go and rises to the surface, well that could be a tsunami sort of event. We would be able to detect that with seismic and sonar.
Hurricanes do not bring up cold water from more than about 500 feet down.
Some of the stuff he's saying about what happened to drill strings and well liners are just not mechanically feasable.
Let me regurgitate something he said a few days ago (top of head)
"I went down to such and such a place to these two hospitals rhat were supposedly full of oil toxin victims and there were national guardmen stationed outside preventing entry. I'm pretty sure they were BP employees that were told to wear their military uniforms"
COMPLETELY DELUSIONAL RAVINGS.
Lovely bloke buy the kangaroos are loose in the top paddock.
Having said that I'm not going to be sleeping much till the concrete that they plug it up with, once the relief well is complete, has cured.
Big disaster still possible, and a potential hurricane developing off Cuba that will arrive around July 30 - August 1.
Arch Crawfords spooky day.
I found the Wiki explanation of the Baltic Dry index useful.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baltic_Dry_Index
The BDI is a very inelastic indicator and changes dramatically in response to small changes in demand for the bulk cargo carrying capacity of certain categories of large ships . " ...,e.g.if you have 100 ships competing for 99 cargoes, rates go down, whereas if you've 99 ships competing for 100 cargoes, rates go up. In other words, small fleet changes and logistical matters can crash rates ... By October of 2009 the index had recovered to around 2,900, a level that is more historically normal..."
Perhaps though more interesting points in the Wiki description are the BDI is an un-massaged indicator of global trade and that large ships are very expensive (can not be parked 'economically' like a surplus airliner)and there were huge knock on effects on orders from ship yards, bankruptcies and etc and Stoneleigh's point about a complex industrial world tied to credit is only too real. As a footnote ... a farmer in England told me 2 years ago that if his giant John Deere tractor breaks down, then a part is flown same day from Texas.
@Stoneleigh, Excellent intro to-day! Something useful for a change:) Useful in that an aspect of preparation is to be aware of what is local, what can be produced locally. A great field of opportunity for the entreprenurial types!I would say my town is fairly conscious as to food supply, protecting the water supply. However I, at least, have no idea what other goods are produced or manufactured locally. Judging by the not so polite discourse on highway expansion I would say our council is planning for the trucks to do on time deliveries per usual.
@ Snuffy
disaster
Snuffy,
1. The reason for the DougR flap is that Keith Olberman of MSNBC picked it up and ran it with little to no fact checking.
2. Both Rockman and Heading Out have given their professional opinions that DougR's theory is preposterous.
Simmons was on King World News this past Saturday and gave a much more detailed interview. You can listen to the MP3 of the broadcast here.
If you listen to it you will hear, among many other interesting things, that he is getting info from insiders (potential whistle blowers) who are intimately involved in trying to resolve the mess. Is this factual? Should we not take him at his word?
There is precious little information of a scientific nature getting out that is not pre-washed by both BP and .gov. Any access to the Gulf, or even the soiled beaches, has been heavily restricted under penalty of severe fines and consequences. But there is an abundance of anecdotal "evidence" and reasoned opinions available:
1) Alexander Higgins has been blogging tirelessly since the start of the crisis. He is collecting news reports, videos, interviews and eyewitness accounts of fishermen, etc. on a daily basis.
2) GeorgeWashington2Blog has been following events (and many non-events that should have been events) on a daily basis. These articles are more in the muckrakinng style of a investigative reporter.
3) Kindra Arneson's address at the Gulf Emergency Summit last month revealed what the priorities of BP (and presumably .gov) truly are with respect to this catastrophe.
(con't)
(con't from above)
At this point, I find myself first accepting conspiracy theories rather than official spin. For me it is far, far easier to accept Simmons than anything that BP or Thad Allen has to say.
So, I think a variant of Kunstler's question is most appropriate. What if Simmons is even partially right? Accordingly, wouldn't it behoove us to assume that Simmons is right and then put and equal effort in to prove just how wrong he might be?
But that is not how plutocracies work, is it?
The longshoremen at the Port of Montreal are on strike. Goods sitting at the dock undelivered.
This event does underscore Stoneleigh's point about vulnerable supply lines.
The longshoremen are looking for job security. What with the Baltic Dry Index at record lows how can they ask for guarantees? Is it possible that the union does not know about this index?
I reason I brought up the Simmons vs BP dilemma is that it has parallels to the financial story chasm in that what is being told the Public vs what has been illuminated right here at TAE as the real state of financial affairs.
It's a huge disparity. It's truly Orwellian in it's scope in fact.
So is the Climate Change situation. Simply huge differences in the perceived Reality with rival factions battling each other to the Death for the Herd's TAS (tiny attention span).
Not a recipe for survival of the species.
So how do you spit the difference in the Gulf? The well bore was fatally damaged during the initial explosion, BP did not admit that up front, Simmons said so very earlier on. BP now hinting that yes, the well bore isn't up to snuff, but not to worry, it's just a detail for now. Bp saying, yeh, there is some seepage from cracks in the ocean floor near by, not to worry, Simmons says run for your life.
The point is, in the absence of official information, not from the perpetrators of the event = BP, but from the central government that the catastrophe occurred in, wild rumor and very dangerous formations of misinformation grow and spread like a contagion.
Obummer is saying the government is deferring to BP's almost God like 'knowledge' of oil drilling and that calling in second and third parties to independently assess the situation is not needed. Nothing happening here kids, just move on.
Sounds like the position on accounting rules for toxic assets doesn't it?
From the Gulf to the Financial Collapse to PO and the impending Climate Change, the Big Lie is really out there first and foremost to handle each one of them as what looks like sub-sets of the Shock Doctrine.
They are connected by the shear raw majesty of their Truthiness as it relates to the fatally inferior process power of what I prefer to think of from now on as Herd-manity.
.
@Frank, Simmons has more credibility with me as well. I just finished an exchange with an American friend who has family/friends in the Gulf area. Her husband absolutely trusts MSM and gov't.He believes MSM will issue a timely warning if there is any real danger. He thinks I am a crazy conspiracy theorist.
It will all be revealed eventually but in the meantime I still think it is prudent to be away from the Gulf during hurricane season. At least those who can manage to stay with friends or family living elsewhere.
The Matt Simmons discussion certainly seems a worthy one to have. Obviously, caution is warranted. However, we also need to realize that both BP and the US government have been lying from day one, and to this day are actively obstructing both media and independent scientists from accessing and reporting on what's going on in the Gulf.
In that light, Glenjeff, to state that "..a lot of what he is saying is drivel." is not very helpful, and that's the best I can make of it. The genuine drivel has so far come from the Thad Allen's and Tony Hayward's in this theater.
"Methane is not poisonous for instance."
I'm not sure what you refer to here, I'm guessing something Matt said. Define it as you wish, methane is certainly toxic. Not to mention lethally dangerous.
"There is nowhere near enough methane available to make an explosive fuel/air mix."
Given that the whole -above seabed- shebang started with a methane explosion, that's somewhat of a weird claim.
What I think is more pertinent is that chances are that methane explosion damaged far more than just the wellhead casing and the BOP. I wouldn't dare rule out the option that the whole structure was irreparably incapacitated down to considerable depths.
Whenever your own democratically elected government treats you to a modern day version of Beckett and Ionesco, saying that any other actor in the play is the one that's spouting nonsense is always akin to adding to the absurdity.
.
@Shamba
Ammonia?
In the Simmons context it is a fuel, made by converting off-shore wind. Ammonia doesn't present the storage/handling difficulties that Hydrogen does. But there is that pesky issue of building out massive infrastructure...
Peak Oil Solution: The Simmons Plan
Stoneleigh notes the three factors that facilitate Globalization are low wages, cheap transport and ready credit. Loose either credit availability or low cost shipping and global wage arbitrage no longer pays so handsomely; trade declines.
”Our biggest export is our jobs” says Dr. Paul Craig Roberts talking about the United States. The so called “off-shoring” takes much more than just its products with it. When production moves to low wage locales the former local support infrastructure disappears; entire attendant businesses and skill sets leave, or wither away.
“The benefits of self-sufficiency will be seen in places where it still exists. So long as the whole supply chain is local, localized production means being able to maintain access to essential goods at a time when obtaining them from overseas may be difficult or impossible.” -- Stoneleigh
Support LOCAL if you’ve still got some. I'd suggest starting with food.
Frank A said:
At this point, I find myself first accepting conspiracy theories rather than official spin. For me it is far, far easier to accept Simmons than anything that BP or Thad Allen has to say.
Agree. Ultimately, everything is a conspiracy theory, isn't it? The version of the GoM disaster coming from the government and BP is the OFFICIAL conspiracy theory. I don't trust it! They have lied to us so many times. Why else would BP & the feds only allow embedded journalists and scientists in the Gulf area? I tend to go along more with Simmons' UNOFFICIAL conspiracy theory. Simmons has said that he is in contact with insiders in the oil industry, DC, and whistleblowers. I don't accept Simmons' proposal to nuke the well, though. Absurd in my view, but perhaps he says that out of desperation, knowing that there are no solutions. He did say early on that there is no technology available to address the GoM disaster.
Ilargi and others,
Just to inject a little common sense (tempered with an education in the 'hard' sciences) into this discussion of Mr. Simmons, ...
First, methane is not a gas at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico. It exists as a solid there. It might exist as a supercritical fluid if buried at some depth, in the absence of water. And we already know that the floor of the Gulf is riddled with hydrocarbon deposits. If some of this solid methane breaks off, or if the solid 'clathrate' is formed as it escapes from the bottom, it will drift upward, dissociate, and dissolve into the water. A really big piece could make some bubbles. The result is that it -tends- to spread over a wide area and rarely gets above a 5% mixture with air. No guarantees, but the process is less violent than popularly portrayed. Methane -is- a potent greenhouse gas, but that effect takes place over decades.
I was convinced that Mr. Simmons was not making sense when he kept insisting that they need to 'nuke it'. This after going on about how there's this enormous ocean of hydrocarbons under an eggshell-thin crust at the bottom of the Gulf. I suppose if we could make the Sun go nova, then that would also make BP's wild well irrelevant, but hopefully neither catastrophic event will occur.
BTW, I found the answer to my question by accident reading the drumbeat today at TOD This is the link to what Simmons thinks we can do with ammonia.
http://www.energyandcapital.com/articles/beyond-oil-is-ammonia-the-key/1215
peace, shamba
Oh, and as for making ammonia fuel using power from a wind or solar farm, yes it can be done. Yes it's a convenient way to store electrolytic hydrogen. It can be burned like natural gas (though it's a bit more dangerous and tricky to handle [quite toxic]), it produces N2 and H2O, completely nonpolluting.
But the likelihood of it replacing oil and gas is zero, as we just can't ever make 20 million BOE a day of it. The electrolytic and Bosch processes for making ammonia are thermodynamically inefficient. It might find a place as a niche fuel in an energy constrained world.
The best use of wind or solar energy is to use it in the form of electricity, and store it by some means other than ammonia, like in a sodium-sulfur battery. But even so, it's going to be a niche energy source. As they say in the utility bidniss, it "doesn't scale".
"The Killing Fields of Multi-National Corporations"
by Vandana Shiva
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/07/19-5
Excerpt:
"From Bhopal to pesticides to GMOs to nuclear plants, there are two lessons we can draw. One is that corporations introduce hazardous technologies like pesticides and GMOs for profits, and profits alone. And second lesson, related to trade, is that corporations are seeking to expand markets and relocate hazardous and environmentally costly technologies to countries like India.
Corporates seek to globalise production but they do not want to globalise justice and rights. The difference in the treatment of Union Carbide and Dow Chemical in the context of Bhopal, and of BP in the context of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico shows how an apartheid is being created. The devaluation of the life of people of the Third World and ecosystems is built into the project of globalisation. Globalisation is leading to the outsourcing of pollution - hazardous substances and technologies - to the Third World. This is at the heart of globalisation - the economies of genocide.
Lawrence Summers, who was the World Bank's chief economist and is now chief economic adviser to the Obama government, in a memo dated December 12, 1991, to senior World Bank staff, wrote, "Just between you and me, shouldn't the World Bank be encouraging more migration of the dirty industries to the less developed countries?"
Another article published today regarding the effects of the Macondo blowout, BP Oil Poisons the Gulf of Mexico Food Chain.
Shellfish in the Gulf of Mexico grow with drops of petroleum inside them, coyotes eat oil-soaked birds, and sharks suffocate when the oil coats their gills.
Oil droplets have been found beneath the shells of tiny post-larval blue crabs drifting into Mississippi coastal marshes from offshore waters, says Harriet Perry, director of the University of Southern Mississippi Gulf Coast Research Laboratory.
Many kinds of fish and shore birds feed on those young crabs. And this is just one of the many examples of how the crude oil that began to spill Apr. 20 from British Petroleum's (PB) Deepwater Horizon well has already taken its toll on the Gulf's food chain.
Henderson explained to this reporter that oil-soaked birds are being eaten by coyotes, which are then later eaten by alligators further inland.
Article also reports on sunken oil and its unknown effects. (i.e.- Simmons deepwater "lakes of oil" and the earlier confirmed "plumes" of crude in the water column.) If I were a coastal resident of the Gulf, I would be hoping that this catastrophe is not connected to Arch Crawford's cardinal climax.
I listened to a podcast of Simmons energy solution (ages ago - so very vague), which, far as I recall, consisted of extracting ammonia from seawater, piping it inland from disused offshore pipelines and using the liquid ammonia as a surrogate fuel source for christ knows all what,.... it all sounded a bit iffy to me, but what do I know.
I'm also sure I remember a good source reporting the underwater oil plumes, whether they were as big as the figure Simmons is suggesting is moot, however, Frank.A.'s point stands, that even if he is partially right extreme caution should be the bywords for ALL decisions taken regarding this horror show, the fast and loose approach up 'till now in dealing with the leak have undoubtedly made things so much worse (if they could be that is !!)
Lets assume he's right and laugh at ourselves for being so precious at a later date, with a big caveat on the nuke option of course.
Z..
One of the problems that comes from knowing too much is that it harshes your buzz during otherwise good times.
Mrs. Bukko and I were having a picnic yesterday afternoon at Spanish Beach in the Vancouver area and looking at the freighters moored in English Bay. They were riding high -- empty of cargo, and there were about twice as many as the 4 or 5 I can usually see from the west-facing windows of the hospital ward where I work. Instead of marvelling at the snow-capped Tantalus Mountains in the distance, we started talking about the Baltic Dry Index and what that implied about the ship scene in front of us. No wonder no one wants to invite our depressing selves to parties...
Re: "Doug R" and Simmons -- I was rocked by Doug's long comment when it came out, and learned some new concepts from it, such as how the blowout preventers are like lead weights balancing on the end of long straws poked down through hundreds of feet of muddy seabed. Mrs. Bukko hadn't paid any attention to The Oil Drum before that, but she's a steady reader now.
Parts of the science behind Doug R's comment have been rebutted by people who aren't obvious BP shills (and lord knows there are plenty of the latter at TOD now.) Doug came on and offered a few half-hearted, partially off-topic defences of what he said that got so much outside attention. But mostly he absented himself.
So I don't give full credibility to what he said. But parts might be true, and his explanations expanded my understanding of how things work. In a world of spin and bullshit, one must reach their own conclusions, winnowing the truth from chaff. I don't totally believe any one source, not even I&S.
Ditto for Simmons. Based on my layman's understanding of science, I'm not worried about fuel-air methane explosions -- I think he's FOS (full of s...) on that one. But Simmons raises other good points, especially the likelihood of leaks from other places on the seabed.
There are 36,000 well holes in the GoM. How are they capped? How many are near the Deepwater Horizon hole? Did that drilling expedition have false starts, abandoned holes, diversions when it was going down followed by "pull-back-ups" and re-starts from another angle? Could the well bore have been broken apart by flying pipes during the blowout, and the hole eroded by high presssure sand and methane ice crystals? Is pressurized oil/methane forcing its way into a permeable mud layer and glooping to the sea floor in unpredictable new places? All of this is suggested by Simmons.
Even though I don't buy all of what he says, there are grains of truth in many overblown tales. I have noticed this week that "seepage" is now being used in mainstream media reports of what's happening in the Gulf. Nobody in the MSM was talking about that before, just fringers like Doug R and Simmons. As events bear out some of what they said, I rate their viewpoints higher on the credibility scale. Just not all of what they said.
This board seems to represent the debate...Which is cool.Stoneleigh,I think that Matt Simmons,as insulated in many ways as he is,probably has a few "wires crossed" as to what every one else feels are rational responses to what changes Peak will bring.Also his attitude about the credit situation might be explained by the fact the guy is a BANKER...and as far as the banks are concerned...the official line is "everything is fine ,move along."I do not particularly like the guys attitude in some respects,however he is very very well connected in this particular field.The insiders know what the stakes are,especially if "worse case" is reality.He is buddies with the same people who have made this disaster a reality,and ,while he might be nut,I still think he was one of the few who would speak truth about peak to the public.By the same coin,I think he has talked to someone,or some group of someones,who spooked him pretty good as to the depth and breadth of this disaster.Time will tell.
We will not know until more data comes in,but there has been such a blackout of real news,as others have pointed out,as well as restrictions of independent scientific observers,that it is difficult to assess what the plain-vanilla truth is.BP is struggling for their very existence,literally,as well as hundreds of billion of dollars of liability.Its pretty clear from what I can see between the lines,that they wish to save this discovery in the hope of using the oil they recover from it to offset the horrific [as they see it]cost to their stockholders.Their actions are tempered with the desire to find a way to pull profit out of this mess.That still governs their actions...which bodes ill for rest of us as long as they are in charge of controlling it.
Greyzone,I understand your concerns,but,as I have no pipeline to the inside of this catastrophe,and as I have seen Mr Simmon act in what I consider a relatively honest manner concerning peak issues in general[which is say,hes one of the few inside the top echelons who will admit it as a reality]I have to take his dire warning as a possibility.
I really hope I am wrong.
I have a new front gate[big] I promised my wife I would build today so I have to scoot.
Bee good or
Bee careful
snuffy
@Bigelow,
thanks for the answer about ammonia. I had no idea about ammonia being used as a fuel till I read that article and you answered my question.
peace to you and all,
Shamba
I read a piece featuring Simmons a while back where, as a side topic to energy and such, he was promoting the growing of heirloom veggie seeds and encouraging friends and family to learn how to grow food locally. He cited that in the U.S., there was only three days food supply due to 'just in time' supply chains. Any disruptions and no food for a lot of people.
My initial reaction was 'good for him',that seems smart enough but having tried for years to warn my own extended family and getting nothing but 'deer in the headlight' reactions and laughs, I couldn't imagine what a prominent oil banker's extended family would think of him for saying stuff like that.
It also struck me that men like Simmons who are now retiring in large numbers, who had their noses to the grindstone of corporate careers for decades, are only now waking up to how totally phucked the world is and the prospects for their own grandchildren. Better late than never, aye?
It also looks like the same pattern of behavior I see in local transition town meetings were Newbies are so freaked out about stuff that's been old news for years to the 'old timers' of ecology. It's the 5 stages of grief thing and Simmons, while not a new comer to PO, probably never thought about the details and implications of The Big Picture in his own personal life until retirement rolled around and he had time to study it in depth. I've become a jaded hardcore cynic by working with this stuff over the years and never cease to be amazed by so called successful intelligent people who finally start focusing on Peak Everything issues and panic at the vast panoramic scope of the Clusterfuck.
.
Stoneleigh - I have been intimately involved in several "localization of production" projects around the US, primarily but not limited to food production.
It has become very clear that there are multiple elements coming together which are diametrically opposed to perpetuating localization.
In essence it is not possible to build and grow production of goods which are invariably 2 to 10 times more expensive than what the big box stores sell them for, while at the same time consumers purchasing power in under pressure and declining.
Many will argue that local is better, healthier, supports community, etc. all of which is true but mean nothing to 95% of the population.
I have become convinced that unless localization, at least of food production, is creatively and significantly subsidized nothing meaningful can be accomplished.
I would be very interested in your analysis of what I call the "economics of localization".
I'm still looking forward to video of James Carville riding a flaming alligator on a tidal wave of tarry crude.
Or Matt Simmons riding a flaming ROV ...
DIYer said:
"I'm still looking forward to video of James Carville riding a flaming alligator on a tidal wave of tarry crude.
Or Matt Simmons riding a flaming ROV ..."
LMAO, when did you first get the urge?
@Eeyores Enigma
I came across this article over the weekend. It just emphasizes how difficult it will be to localize AND stay below the radar of TPTB. Seems to me that at some point, society will have to confront TPTB in other ways than the voting booth.
@Bukko
Agree about too much info. Thankfully my wife still discusses things with me, but all other friends and family just feel like there is nothing you can do about it anyway, so why worry?
Frank A. said "there is nothing you can do about it anyway, so why worry?"
That is typical of the people I know also.
Thanks for the article on the farm raids, interesting comments there.
Gail has posted the following. It could be the answer to the future “green zones”, after the reset.
Do read the comments to get additional info.
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/6751#more
Possibilities for Small Modular Nuclear Reactors?
Frank A,
It was from xkcd:
http://xkcd.com/748/
First, Matt Simmons: He's offered invaluable info on oil industry under-investment and the posting of false reserves by Middle Eastern producers and others. He called the peak of physical (conventional) crude production in 2005. He is a 'go to' source of petroleum information, he's earned his creds.
He's also a bit hysterical as he was a couple of years ago after a couple of Gulf hurricanes shut in production leading to local shortages. He predicted a nationwide collapse.
He could rest on his laurels but he doesn't.
Is he right this time?
Compared to the lying sacks of shit BP and the US government, Simmons is 'Mr. Infallible'. I'll wait until the next BP snafu before passing judgement on Simmons.
Second, DougR: I agreed with him (and still do) with regard to what happened to the casings during and after DWH blew up and sank. I believe the casing string is broken under the seabed, only the weight of the wellhead assembly is keeping the 'cork on the bottle'.
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/6659#comment-661110
Third, the ongoing New Depression: this is a set of economic difficulties wrapped in a cultural conflict.
Energy availability being the catalyst and final determinant. Less energy = no economy.
"The Great Depression was both a finance crisis as well as a social and cultural crisis. In the 1930's the developed world was torn between continuing community- level economic activities that had sustained the United States for 150 years - and the rest of the world for centuries - or embrace the 'New' Big Business commercial/industrial model that had emerged at the turn of the 20th century. By 1929, the excesses of capitalist monopolies had shattered the virtuous self- funding cycle that promised unlimited prosperity on one hand, but delivered it with the other to the monopolists' themselves. The outome was a smoldering revolt of the public vs. the rentiers. "
http://economic-undertow.blogspot.com/2010/07/bette-davis-eyes.html
I second the thanks frank,I intend to keep low profile,and they had some good pointers on recognizing "finks"
Temp new gate on front of driveway to property.I built the hinges in such a way I can cut the temp tin gate off,and put a monster on,and still use the triple-extra-heavy hinges[20$ each,ouch]that took me a hour to set perfectly level.Gate needed to keep geese/dog/ducks out of neighbors Koi pond.They have many many,many ,HUGE Koi and catfish in these 1/2 acre pond,Out of curiosity I checked what the they might be worth,and now have made very,very,sure my geese& ducks stayed far,far away...
Wally,while usually the type neighbor who will feel insulted if you don't ask his help on a big projects,has growled a few time when various critters wander over to the delicious looking flowerbeds & bushes ,or when Mimosa,my night-watch dog has left "dog logs"on a carefully manicured lawn.
Very true statement that good fences[and gates]make good neighbors.
Local food production is my "hobby"job right now.One of the few things that gives me a small certain comfort is knowing the small liferaft I have put together here is a low-footprint,not visible-from-the-road,food machine.
Filled with passive food producers[bearing fruit trees] of every kind that does well here,as well as a good spring and pond,the base structure now exists to continue polishing as time, circumstance and bread allow.[Fate willing,and the creek don't rise]
16 years of hard,bone-breaking work,and every spare nickle I could lay my hands on,have resulted in a place I cherish. I still have another batch of trees to set out this fall,but,my "core 40" are all mature and bearing.Even with this cold wet&nasty spring my bees left their card games back at the hive,and gave me a small batch of pears,apples,and medlar....
I am fading out fast...need sleep zzzzzzzzzzz
Bee good,or
Bee careful
snuffy
Wau, just wau,
I have just read that in my country (Slovakia), the number of mortgages had surpassed the pre-crisis period... some other countries? :-(
Tero,
In order to use ammonia as fuel, you're talking about wholesale replacement of the gasoline infrastructure. For example, natural gas is an abundant fuel here in Texas, yet there are only a handful of places you can fill up with it, and it's hard to find cars and appliances that run on it.
On the benefit side, ammonia is non-polluting as a fuel. On the not-so-much side, if you get a little dab of it on your skin, it'll kill you, farmers are the only ones having equipment that will handle it, and only a few eccentric experimenters have engines tuned to run on it. Note that we're talking anhydrous ammonia here, not the "Mr Clean" dilute aqueous solution.
"Sigh"...
So sorry [*] to see The Automatic Earth enthusiastically turning toward the denier-conspiradroid ranks which infest The Peak Community (TPC).
I've foolishly donated money to this site. A mistake I won't make again.
Matthew "if global warming is real" Simmons, while not on the same level of sheer repulsiveness as Michael "the supremely odious" Ruppert, is nevertheless full of it.
There are more than enough reputable, sober, science- and reality-based primates for TPC and TAE to analyze and share.
Resorting to lauding and lending credence to global-warming-deniers and nine-eleven-was-an-inside-job-conspiradroids is simply not acceptable. It's a despicable practice; offensive, unconscionable, pseudoscientific and counterproductive.
--
[*] But not in the least surprised. It is, unfortunately and unforgivably, par for TPC course to revel in and promulgate denier-conspiradroid bullshit.
and about those batteries -- the NaS battery is just a suggestion. There are many ways to store electricity at a much higher efficiency than an ammonia plant.
There's other battery technology: lithium, lead-acid, vanadium redox, nickel-iron, zinc-whatever. Pick any two columns in the periodic table and you can build a battery around them. I just like NaS because when I mention less abundant elements, everybody jumps in about the "strategic supply of glarpium"... And then there's pumped hydro, compressed air, and so forth.
But as I said above, I expect all of these things to be local niche phenomena as the big centralized utilities succumb to entropy and depletion.
Is there a shell game or a musical chair game?
Does Apache sit on $7 Billion of money just waiting for an investment?
OR
Is Apache being used, (By unknown party), as the conduit for the acquisition of some assets, (at a low price), that could prove to generate a good future cash flow?
Where is Apache getting the money to do this purchase of BP assets?
http://investor.apachecorp.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=490040
Apache to Acquire BP Assets in Permian Basin, Canada and Egypt For $7 Billion
The effective date of the transaction is July 1, 2010. Closing is subject to certain preferential rights as well as normal regulatory approvals and conditions in the United States, Canada, Egypt and the European Union. As a part of the acquisition, Apache will advance $5 billion of the purchase price to BP on July 30, 2010, ahead of the anticipated closing. This advance will be returned to Apache or applied to the purchase price at closing. Apache intends to finance the acquisition with a combination of debt and equity securities as well as cash on hand. The company has also obtained a $5 billion bridge loan facility to backstop any financing requirements.
Apache expects the transaction to be modestly accretive to cash flow and per-share production and reserves and neutral to earnings per share in the first full year.
Apache's financial advisors for these transactions were Goldman, Sachs & Co., BofA Merrill Lynch, Citi and J.P. Morgan.
http://investor.apachecorp.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=490054
Apache to Offer 21 Million Shares of Common Stock and $1.1 Billion of Mandatory Convertible Preferred Stock
Goldman, Sachs & Co., BofA Merrill Lynch, Citi and J.P. Morgan will act as joint book-running managers for the offerings.
recently someone posted a link to a youtube video with a guy discussing good vs evil (using Gitmo as his example)
I cannot find that link. Could someone please remind me who he was
@ ~J~
Philip Zimbardo
"Why ordinary people do evil ... or do good"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OsFEV35tWsg
If I remember correctly, link was provided by Top Hat Cat. :)
When researching or discussing peak oil, Simmons' material often served as a good reference point for analysis and a makeshift appeal to professional authority, his reputation of a trustworty and knowledgeable oilman with valuable peak-related insights must be at least partially deserved.
Some of his latest suggestions do seem a bit dubious, especially his repeated insistence on utilising nuclear detonations of some sort to seal the rift. It appears somewhat misplaced for someone in his position to seriously entertain this idea in public, although theoretical subsets of conditions that would call for such an extreme strategy are imaginable, even Simmons should not have sufficient inside knowledge of circumstances to ascertain the feasibility or risk of such a strategy. Specific advocation towards that end is therefore uncharacteristically miscalculated unless he's certain of its application or the emotive semantic need for suggesting extreme measures, practicality notwithstanding.
His concerns about methane release and exposure seem to be poorly elaborated or misunderstood, maybe he's actually referring to byproducts of methane that could be formed in greater quantities, such as methylene chloride, or the associated release of other primordial gasses from the reservoir, hydrogen sulphide or so. Methane itself doesn't seem to be toxic, but people do manage to suffocate themselves in ovens on occasion.
From a biological perspective the reported presence of dissolved methane up to 1,000,000 times normal concentration, and the abnormal oceanic oxygenation profiles (again no confirmation whatsoever) should warrant concern, but such observations even if substantiated do not by themselves suggest this methane is coming from other places than the official site.
Simmons is apparently correlating these rumored factoids, perhaps on the basis of more substantial inside info, so that the presence of unnatural methane saturation is directly linked to some unknown fissure somewhere, which would be expelling mostly methane.
The idea of a hidden fissure site is most controversial, Simmons has indirectly suggested on numerous occasions that the rough dimensions of the surface slick and its measured expansion over time indicate a proportional volume of expelled oil that cannot logically have been released only through the official rupture, at offical flowrates, thus necessitating additional discharge sources, although the properties of oil containing dissolved methane may change the volume correlation. The vectors of supposed submersed plumes could also indicate any additional sources. It may be possible to confirm or dismiss this possibility with sufficient data, but so far these speculations rely on his sources being able to calculate or precisely guesstimate the volume of the visible oilslick and the averaged flowrate of the official leak.
So far, he's said some disturbing things, but its difficult to ascribe deviant motivations to his conduct. I read he's a CFR-member, which might limit the flowrates of both truthfulness and nonsense he would be allowed to present in public under their auspices, by self-censorship or centralised mechanisms. Such speech regulation wouldn't require an extensive conspiratorial framework, just the usual coercive agendas in conjunction with retractable privileges. Accordingly it has been suggested and conspiracised that he would not be mandated to make wild claims or serious allegations like these unless for deliberate misdirection or disinfo dissemination, perhaps to further some dialectic. Conversely, I would think any membership status likely has little bearing on his personal speech in these matters.
@LonerPhrique
I find BP and the governments explanations of the GoM ecocide "despicable...offensive, unconscionable, pseudoscientific and counterproductive" to paraphrase you.
The fact that Simmons seems to be the only one challenging the Official Big Lie in the Gulf story doesn't mean I believe any of the other aspects or positions he takes in other areas.
Karl Denninger has brilliant analysis on certain financial subjects and I use him in those aspects to my advantage. Otherwise, outside those areas, I find him "despicable...offensive, unconscionable, pseudo scientific and counterproductive"
The enemy of my enemy is not my friend, you should be familiar with that drill. I don't throw the baby out with the bath water and often find Pearls among the Swine.
Try it sometime, it will broaden your narrow information gathering window.
Simmons could well be just 'talking his book' as they say in financial circles and have huge short positions out on BP. From the moment the rig blew up, the financial types probably wrote off BP as a long range viable operation and went immediately into thinking of them as the oil industry equivalent of Lehman or Bear Stearns. There is lots of money to be made ripping BP to pieces, dumping the liability on the public and looting the remaining assets for the privileged few.
Simmons certainly knows oil finance and could royally kick the ass of Anyone on TOD, editors or posters, on that subject. Follow the money when uncertain.
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@Gravity
One post on another blog said that no one from the research vessel 'Thomas Jefferson" has spoken up to contradict Simmons but I don't think anyone on the ship or connected to it has shared too much about anything. Know any links to any reputable researchers (not on BP's payroll) contradicting Simmons?
BP might be a fatally wounded entity but I imagine few scientist wanting to slag them off from fear their careers would be gorged from the thrashing crazed dying BP-beast.
I noted the CFR connection and that is pushing me more towards the money angle for his speaking out and not the 'concerned citizen (I have grandchildren) public safety' angle as regards Simmons.
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KPFK Radio interviews Matt Simmons (18 minutes; details and insider's names provided)
http://archive.kpfk.org/parchive/mp3/kpfk_100715_170004dbriefing.MP3
Re Matt Simmons and Ammonia
Once again the focus is changed from how to produce energy to how to store it. This confuses a lot of scientifically unsophisticated people, probably intentionally - thus the "hydrogen car" or the electric car. I regard storing energy as a far smaller issue than sourcing it. We can always power pumps to reverse the flow of the Niagra River when the wind blows or the sun shines :-)
@ Ahimsa - thanks for the name and link :)
@THC
Did a brief search for additional sources that independently corroborate the Jefferson's observations, haven't seen anything that either confirms or disproves the account, although I'm not sure what they allegedly found, was it the excess of methane or lack of oxygen, or something else?
Certain criticisms of BP's actions and attitude do have direct financial motivationality, but Simmons hasn't disparaged BP for keeping methane expulsion or postulated fissure sites secret. Rather he seems to suggest BP's corporate hierarchy suffers from epistemological impairment in some sense; valid information about the situation is not adequately processed between compartmentalised managerial layers, creating threaded mirages of misinformation which reference non-existent or outdated facts, resulting in lagging situational awareness that isn't synchronised with the speed at which the situation is changing.
Exclusively monetary motivations for assaulting BP are not entirely sensible for the methane or the hidden fissure angles, missubstantiation of which could easily lead to a grave disruption cascade making incidental gains on shorting BP a distant secondary consideration even in the sociopathic hierarchy of fancies. Although sensationally terrifying at passing glance, the media-relatable culpability implications of an unsealable fissure or methanogenous catastrophe may not directly harm BP's position any further, and wouldn't make Simmons' special brand of fuels more lucrative or viable by eliminating the competition.
If these claims were ultimately proven false, Simmons' reputation and professional prestige would surely suffer irreparable damage, so he would have to gain enough to compensate for the ruin of his trustwortyness and investability if engaged in conscious deception.
I suppose there could be collectivised ecocentric or ecofascist narrational motives for exaggerating the environmental aspects in a doubly-reverse psychology setup, but no immediate profit mechanisms are apparent.
Bernacke describes conditions as " unusually uncertain". NO SHIT!
I have a feeling of dread as to what his unusual responses might be.
As The Empires Crumble Dept.:
http://tinyurl.com/2a6dqpg
Quite a few rural highways in the US are lapsing from paved back to gravel. No money.
This article is an early warning to all gold bugs. This was buried in "health care reform" legislation. Does anyone want to volunteer to read the 10's of thousands of pages of legislation issued in DC each year in order to warn the public of the various land mines contained therein? Sainthood and eternal gratitude is promised in return.
jal said...
Gail has posted the following. It could be the answer to the future “green zones”, after the reset. Do read the comments to get additional info... Possibilities for Small Modular Nuclear Reactors?
I'm inclined to see this as a bargaining essay – BAU or some variation of it. Techo-hopefuls typically show little understanding of complexity or the current seriousness of the damage we have already done to the biosphere. Concerns related to these are shrugged off as minor or explained away with future improvements in systems, political will, corporate responsibility, etc., ad infinitum.
el g,
Pumping water against Niagara Falls strikes me as an even lossier storage method than manufacturing NH3.
@Frank A.
There is already a bill HR 5141 to repeal the requirement to issue an IRS 1099 on ANY buy or sell over $600 slipped into the Health law you mentioned. Fill out a 1099 if you buy a lawn mower for more than $600. Or a coin or home gym. The paperwork alone will kill what is left of small business. Bastards!
New post up.
The Big Picture According to TAE - An Updated Primer Guide
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