On war in Europe

The optimists were wrong

By Daily Collateral

“Even on the eve of world war I, however, there was still considerable optimism that the peace would hold. Europe had experienced several decades without a major war, and in the meantime, industrialization and relatively free international trade had produced rapidly rising standards of living. A war that would destroy the fruits of this progress seemed irrational.

Many people believed, moreover, that the rising international solidarity of the labor movement would undermine support for a war entered into by imperialistic capitalist powers. Although financial markets were retrenching, they gave no sign that a cataclysm lay ahead. The optimists were wrong.”

                             – Gary M. Walton and Hugh Rockoff, History of the American Economy, Eleventh Edition, p. 380

The Bang! Moment is Here

It's either a Fiscal Union or a Break Up

By John Mauldin

The Distant End Game

"All folly must end eventually. Greece's ELA folly will end with the cash gone abroad and the collateral turning out worthless.

"Along the way, the rest of Europe will grow increasingly nervous. ELA loans are guaranteed by the Greek central bank, which is in turn guaranteed by the Greek government. And the Greek government already can't pay its debts without help from the rest of Europe.

"As the pile of ELA loans grows, northern European governments will likely begin agitating for limits to be placed on Greek use of ELA, or to cut it off altogether. If the Greek government threatens to default on its debts to Europe, the question of cutting off Greek ELA would likely be raised at the same time.

Greece will be forced out of the euro regardless of who wins the Sunday elections

The Greek Civil War. Old against Young.

By Daily Collateral

New Democracy. Syriza. Doesn't matter. 

According to Citi's senior political analyst Tina Fordham, chief economist Willem Buiter, and global economist Ebrahim Rahbari, "any new Greek government, regardless of its composition, will struggle with implementation challenges related to the imposition of further austerity measures demanded by the Troika in exchange for further assistance," and as a result, they "consider it likely that a new troika deal would ultimately fall apart and lead to Grexit."

Citi notes that there is growing sense among European leaders that "promotion of economic growth can no longer be subordinated completely, even in fiscally unsustainable euro area member states, to the requirements of fiscal austerity," but no one has any idea what that means.

This seems to be the current thinking, according to Citi:

The only operational, practical consensus on growth is that austerity policies should not be unnecessarily pro-cyclical. If a deficit target is overshot because of bad luck (economic activity and government revenues are weaker than expected despite full adherence to all conditionality) rather than bad faith (there has been a failure to implement agreed measures or policies), the shortfall will not have to be made up immediately – in the original time frame. More time will be given to achieve the original objectives without the need for deeper and faster austerity than originally envisaged. Bad faith (non-compliance) will, for incentive-compatibility or moral hazard reasons, continue to be punished with demand for enhanced and faster austerity.

Never In Doubt

We are at the tail end of a forty year credit bubble

By Chris Martenson

What has never been in doubt in my mind is that thin-air money printing and the bailing out of banks and financial institutions would be tried and tried again.  The alternative is unthinkable to those in power, because it involves living within one's means and letting those who took the risks eat the losses. 

Here we are at the tail end of a forty year credit bubble in which everybody participated (although China and India were late to the event) and nobody wants that party to end.  It is simply so much easier to simply borrow, spend and kick the can down the road.

As noted here repeatedly, we have an exponential credit system which, by extension, gives us an exponential money system.  Until and unless the credit markets can be coerced back onto an exponential trajectory, nothing will work quite right to the point that systemic financial collapse is a distinct possibility.

Given that possibility, nobody in power has even the slightest wish to test out the odds and so they will opt to print, print, print.

Just yesterday the UK opted for another round of printing but look how they applied it:

£100bn plan for UK economyJun 14, 2012George Osborne on Thursday night announced plans for a £100bn support programme for the British economy, as he battened down the hatches for a worsening  “eurozone debt storm”.

Monday Will Not Be The End Of The World, Sorry

The European Union is sinking under its own weight

By Mark Grant

It was January 13, 2010 when I first wrote in my commentary that I thought Greece would go belly up. It was in May 2010 when they first needed to be bailed out. This small country with a giant debt of $1.3 trillion has engaged the markets ever since. Sunday the country votes and whoever wins I expect no massive explosion in the short term. The new Greek government will try to renegotiate the terms and conditions of their bailouts and we shall see just how far anyone is willing to go. It will be a game of chicken with Germany in the end and a solution perhaps will be found but no good one as Greece could not pay back their current debts if Hercules arrived to help; much less any new debts which will be required to keep the country afloat. Any “Big Bang,” if it comes, will not come on Monday morning as that will just be the beginning of the process to scream and shout and dance around like some Opa bar with Ireland, Portugal and Spain demanding equal terms and, oh yes, Spain will be in the hand-out line soon enough along with their banks. 

Just government, and bureaucracy, and regulation, unto national bankruptcy

Earthly woes mount as Obama's rhetoric soars

By Mark Steyn

Round about this time in the election cycle, a presidential challenger finds himself on the stump and posing a simple test to voters: "Ask yourself – are you better off now than you were four years ago?"

But, in fact, you don't need to ask yourself, because the Federal Reserve Board's Survey of Consumer Finances has done it for you. Between 2007 and 2010, Americans' median net worth fell 38.8 percent – or from $126,400 per family to $77,300 per family. Oh, dear. As I mentioned a few months ago, when readers asked me to recommend countries they could flee to, most of the countries worth fleeing to Americans can no longer afford to live in.

Hayekian Moments in Life

Joining the Dots

By Jeffrey Tucker

I never tire of looking out the windows of airplanes. For all of human history until just about the day before yesterday, no living person saw the world like this. People could climb up to the top of mountains and see the valleys below. But to see that whole view looking straight down was the privilege of birds and God. Then about 100 years ago, this changed and we could see what we never really experienced directly.

It’s not raw nature that enthralls me. It’s cities. It’s the small towns. It’s the lights. It’s the vast, cultivated farmland. It’s the seeming orderliness of human civilization that was no one’s plan, but rather emerges through the bit-by-bit creation of minds. Everything we see was once an idea, and then it was made real through action.

Despite all the pretense by the government and the arrogance of its officials and the planning mindset of its bureaucrats, what you see out the window of a plane is essentially ordered anarchy, the evidence of what millions of explosive units of creativity (also known as people) can build when they are all cooperating in pursuit of their own self-interest.

I’m also intrigued by the gargantuan swaths of seeming nothingness that stretch between east and west in the U.S., and it causes me to marvel about the talk over “overpopulation” or how we are running out of room. Under the right conditions, the whole planet could fit in this space with plenty of breathing room. Oh, and remember that talk some years ago about how we are running out of landfill space? Nuts!

That’s not the only lesson to be drawn to this bird’s-eye view. There is a scene in the 1949 movie The Third Man, set in Vienna after the Second World War, when the criminal bandit Harry Lime and the visiting author Holly Martins are at the top of a Ferris wheel. They look down, and Holly asks Harry if he has ever seen one of his victims. Harry answers as follows:

“Victims? Don’t be melodramatic. Look down there. Tell me. Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever? If I offered you 20,000 pounds for every dot that stopped, would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money, or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spare?”

The Ultimate Resource

Human Mind

By Mark Perry
Here's a good example of the "ultimate resource": human ingenuity, innovation, know-how and creativity, which is the one resource that is truly infinite and unlimited.  

If 6 was 9

European Geography 101

1. “Spain is not Greece.”

Elena Salgado, Spanish Finance minister, Feb. 2010

2. “Portugal is not Greece.”
The Economist, 22nd April 2010.

3. “Ireland is not in ‘Greek Territory.’”
Irish Finance Minister Brian Lenihan.

4. “Greece is not Ireland.”
George Papaconstantinou, Greek Finance minister, 8th November, 2010.

5. “Spain is neither Ireland nor Portugal.”
Elena Salgado, Spanish Finance minister, 16 November 2010.

6. “Neither Spain nor Portugal is Ireland.”
Angel Gurria, Secretary-general OECD, 18th November, 2010.

7. "Spain is not Uganda"
Rajoy to Guindos... Last weekend!

8. "Italy is not Spain"
Ed Parker, Fitch MD, 12 June 201

The EU Smiled While Spain’s Banks Cooked the Books

Big Time Crooks

By Jonathan Weil 

Only a few years ago, Spain’s banks were seen in some policy-making circles as a model for the rest of the world. This may be hard to fathom now, considering that Spain is seeking $125 billion to bail out its ailing lenders.

But back in 2008 and early 2009, Spanish regulators were riding high after their country’s banks seemed to have dodged the financial crisis with minimal losses. A big reason for their success, the regulators said, was an accounting technique called dynamic provisioning.

By this, they meant that Spain’s banks had set aside rainy- day loan-loss reserves on their books during boom years. The purpose, they said, was to build up a buffer in good times for use in bad times.

This isn’t the way accounting standards usually work. Normally the rules say companies can record losses, or provisions, only when bad loans are specifically identified. Spanish regulators said they were trying to be countercyclical, so that any declines in lending and the broader economy would be less severe.

What’s now obvious is that Spain’s banks weren’t reporting all of their losses when they should have, dynamically or otherwise. One of the catalysts for last weekend’s bailout request was the decision last month by the Bankia (BKIA) group, Spain’s third-largest lender, to restate its 2011 results to show a 3.3 billion-euro ($4.2 billion) loss rather than a 40.9 million-euro profit. Looking back, we probably should have knownSpain’s banks would end up this way, and that their reported financial results bore no relation to reality.

Is it game over for Greece?

All eyes are on Sunday's election results in Greece

By Laurence Knight

It has been cast as a referendum on the country's future membership of the eurozone.

But could it be that the result no longer matters?

The steady withdrawal of cash by depositors from the Greek banks has reportedly accelerated in recent days.

And if this apparent bank run gets out of hand, there is a danger that Greece could find itself forced out the euro, whichever way its citizens vote.

Out of cash

Nobody knows who will win the elections - there has been an official polling blackout since 2 June - although, whatever the outcome, it will most probably be followed by many days of coalition negotiations.

The big question is whether the radical left-wing upstarts of Syriza will pip the established centre-right New Democracy to first place.

That would give Syriza a bonus 50 seats, making it by far the biggest party in the 300-seat parliament, though probably without a majority.

Syriza has vowed to reject the austerity programme agreed with Greece's rescue lenders in the eurozone and at the IMF.

It is happening right now

Passing the Bailout Buck

by Philipp Bagus

Recently, there has been an intense debate in Europe on the TARGET2 system (Trans-EuropeanAutomated Real-time Gross Settlement ExpressTransfer System 2), which is the joint gross clearing system of the eurozone.[1] The interpretation of this system and its balances has provoked divergent opinions. Some economists, most prominently Hans-Werner Sinn, have argued that TARGET2 amounts to a bailout system. Others have vehemently denied that. Jürgen Stark of the European Central Bank (ECB) even said that some commentators could lose their reputation as serious academics by claiming that TARGET2 functions as a bailout system.

Indeed, TARGET2 debits and credits have been built up since the beginning of the financial crisis. While peripheral countries accumulated TARGET2 debits, in April 2012 TARGET2 claims of the Bundesbank amounted to almost €644 billion. That is almost €8,000 per German.

A prophet of nostalgia

Ray Bradbury RIP

Where most sci-fi writers create an alternative present or imaginary future, the great Bradbury longed for a future that would recapture the past.

by Patrick West 

As a general rule, science fiction tends to be located in an imagined future or alternative present. The settings may be utopian or dystopian and the themes innumerable, but a constant hallmark is that of potentiality: how the world could be different to how it is now. This is why, in death, science-fiction writers are often lauded as prophets. Isaac Asimov explored the domains of robotic artificial intelligence before it started to become a reality; Arthur C Clarke is credited with devising the idea of the geostationary artificial satellite; and Philip K Dick doubted objective reality before postmodernism and cyberspace came along.

Ray Bradbury, the author of The Martian Chronicles (1950) and Fahrenheit 451 (1953), who died earlier this month, leaves a more peculiar legacy. Paradoxically, his work longed for a future which would recapture the past. He was a prophet of nostalgia.

Bradbury’s work did have the familiar sci-fi staples of his era – spacecraft, aliens, revolutionary technology – and he superficially embraced modernity. He was, for instance, a lifelong champion of manned spaceflight, as he explained in 1979: ‘Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four came out 30 years ago this summer. Not a mention of spaceflight in it, as an alternative to Big Brother, a way to get away from him. That proves how myopic the intellectuals of the 1930s and 1940s were about the future. They didn’t want to see something as exciting and soul-opening and as revelatory as space travel. Because we can escape, we can escape, and escape is very important, very tonic, for the human spirit. We escaped Europe 400 years ago and it was all to the good.’ This theme of escape pervades Ray Bradbury’s oeuvre. And this avowal to escape was the consequence of a desire to escape the modern world.

Compassion – Killer Of Society?

Expectations have been created that cannot be met and that cannot now be undone

by Rex van Schalkwyk

In politics, it is the idea that counts. So also in philosophy, pop music, pedantry and philanthropy. The idea is everything. And between the idea and the reality, there lies that vast uncharted terrain of promises unfulfilled, of lies and deceit and of naked hypocrisy, all of which account for the failure of the public discourse and of public life. In short, this self-inflicted deception accounts for the failure of society.

Bertrand Russell, who is said by some to have been the greatest philosopher of the 20^th century, and a notable socialist, proposed that in the one-world society he envisaged, the supply of food should be used as a lever to ensure social compliance. This is what he wrote on the need to prevent the increase of the world's population: "If this is to be done otherwise than by wars, pestilence and famines, it will demand a powerful international authority. This authority should deal out the world's food to the various nations in proportion to their population at the time of the establishment of the authority. If any nation should subsequently increase its population, it should not on that account receive more food…"

In this way, the philosopher would have contrived a one-world totalitarian dictatorship in a perpetual state of starvation. Russell did not even consider where the world's food, without which people were to be starved into submission, would realistically be produced. The most extraordinary thing of all is that he could suggest such an idea in pursuit of his ideal of the utopian life. Were it not for the fact that his work, The Impact of Science on Society, is no laughing matter, it might have been read as a malicious satire.

‘The Sunrise’ in a globalized century

Asia must rise and shine

By Maria Monica Wihardja

There is a Japanese saying: “The name speaks for itself”. This appears to be true in reflecting the current global economic and geopolitical landscape. Asia, meaning “sunrise” in Greek and “East” in Assyrian, is clearly rising, and its time has come to be dubbed as the “Asian Century”. 

At the other end of the spectrum, the word Europe comes from the Phoenician word EROB, which means “where the sun sets”, reflecting the now crumbling Europe due to its economic meltdown. America’s Germanic origin means “ever-powerful in battle”, which aptly reflects the US as the omnipresent military might. 

What will the Asian Century be like against the backdrop of the crumbling Europe and the US’ military might? Will the sun keep rising in the East? Or will the Asian Century, like a comet, disappear all too soon, never to return for a very long time? There are at least two ways to look at how the Asian Century will turn out: How Asia strengthens itself as a region and how Asia interacts with other powers within the global system.

Although power is not equal to strength, Asia’s strength will only come if there is a balance of power in the region. However, there is still a great deal of misunderstanding, confusion and mistrust, as well as uncertainty, among individual countries and in regards to the state of the region, which leads to a rivalry of power with one country trying to dominate the others instead of trying to find a balance.

Will Globalization Go Bankrupt?

Globalization is primarily a monetary phenomenon in which expanding liquidity induces investors to take more risks

by John Eagle

“Only the young generation which has had a college education is capable of comprehending the exigencies of the times,” wrote Alphonse, a third-generation Rothschild, in a letter to a family member in 1865. At the time the world was in the midst of a technological boom that seemed to be changing the globe beyond recognition, and certainly beyond the ability of his elders to understand. As part of that boom, capital flowed into remote corners of the earth, dragging isolated societies into modernity. Progress seemed unstoppable.

Eight years later, however, markets around the world collapsed. Suddenly, investors turned away from foreign adventures and new technologies. In the depression that ensued, many of the changes eagerly embraced by the educated young — free markets, deregulated banks, immigration — seemed too painful to continue. The process of globalization, it seems, was neither inevitable nor irreversible.

What today we call economic globalization — a combination of rapid technological progress, large-scale capital flows, and burgeoning international trade — has happened many times before in the last 200 years. During each of these periods (including our own), engineers and entrepreneurs became folk heroes and made vast fortunes while transforming the world around them. They exploited scientific advances, applied a succession of innovations to older discoveries, and spread the commercial application of these technologies throughout the developed world. Communications and transportation were usually among the most affected areas, with each technological surge causing the globe to “shrink” further.

NINJA credits: "No income, no job, no assets."

Europe's surrender of resources similar to U.S. spending on wars

By HANS-WERNER SINN

Once upon a time, stocks were risky and collateralized securities were safe. That time is over, as the breakdown of the American mortgage securitization market has shown.

For years, hundreds of billions of new mortgage-backed securities (MBSs) and collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) generated from them were sold to the world to compensate for the lack of savings in the United States and to finance American housing investment.

Now virtually the entire market for new issues of such securities — all except 3 percent of the original market volume — has vanished.

To compensate for the disappearance of that market, and for the simultaneous disappearance of nonsecuritized bank lending to American homeowners, 95 percent of U.S. mortgages today are channeled through the state institutions Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and Ginnie Mae. Just as there was a time when collateralized securities were safe, there was a time when economies with so much state intervention were called socialist.

Most of these private securities were sold to oil-exporting countries and Europe, in particular Germany, Britain, the Benelux countries, Switzerland and Ireland. China and Japan shied away from buying such paper.

As a result, European banks have suffered from massive write-offs on toxic American securities. According to the International Monetary Fund, more than 50 percent of the precrisis equity capital of Western Europe's national banking systems, or $1.6 trillion, will have been destroyed by the end of this year, with the lion's share of losses of U.S. origin.

Thus the resource transfer from Europe to the U.S. is similar in size to what the U.S. has spent on the Iraq war ($750 billion) and the Afghanistan war ($300 billion) together.

Americans now claim caveat emptor: Europeans should have known how risky these securities were when they bought them. Even AAA-rated CDOs, which the U.S. ratings agencies had called equivalent in safety to government bonds, are now only worth one-third of their nominal value. Europeans trusted a system that was untrustworthy.

The Terrible End of Europe's Nanny State

If Germany does not keep up the lending, it will be a sad day, for Germany

By David Warren

Austerity is the mot-du-jour almost everywhere at the moment. It reigns in Spain, for instance. (“Austeridad.”)

As Jim Flaherty said, in hailing the Spanish bank bailout, it “doesn’t solve the problem but it’s a step in the right direction.”

Let us examine that statement for the briefest moment, leaving aside such interesting but tangential questions as, whose money is bailing?

The problem is structural, not fiscal. The fiscal solution does not really get at the problem. Instead, it kicks the problem down the road.

If gentle reader managed somehow to run up a credit card debt, beyond the ability of his grandchildren to pay, the problem wouldn’t be the balance (or shall we say, imbalance) revealed in his bank statement. That would be a symptom of the problem.

Not to comment on his lifestyle; but he must be using this credit card to buy things, even if he is merely kiting his debts from one card to another. (“Financial services” count as “goods,” statistically.) At some point he presumably bought something — or some things — he could not afford.

If his bank then intervened, to raise his credit limit in return for gentle reader’s solemn sovereign promise to start living within his means, we might say the move “doesn’t solve the problem but it’s a step in the right direction.”

We can understand why the bank would be so obviously naive. The alternative is to call in the card, and cut its losses. Those losses — multiplied by the million others lured by easy credit into playing the same game — would take the bank down, today. Better that the cows come home, tomorrow.

The solution is not an “austerity plan,” per se. This is anyway a solution that is not being seriously tried. The Spaniards, and Italians, are using the word “austerity” a lot, but their new, fiscally-conservative governments, aren’t delivering on their promises. They’re just using the word to soothe the nerves of international bankers and investors.

Spanish Bailout Shows Europe Still Doesn’t Get It

Europe must break the link between the banks and the government

By Malcom Steed

The challenge of bailing out Spain’s banks is compelling Europe’s leaders to confront a question they had hoped never to contemplate: How to prevent financial and economic malaise from overwhelming the euro area’s fourth- largest economy.

So far, their actions suggest they’re sticking with the strategy they pursued in Greece and expecting different results. They’d better think again.

The agreement last weekend to provide as much as 100 billion euros ($125 billion) to Spain’s banks shows Europe’s leaders are at least beginning to recognize the magnitude of the task. The amount matches some of the higher estimates of the capital the banks will need to offset heavy losses related to Spain’s real estate bust. As such, it might help inspire the confidence necessary to slow the flow of money out of the country and lower the odds of an all-out bank run, particularly if Sunday’s Greek parliamentary elections set that country on a path to leave the euro.

The deal, though, fails to address a fundamental issue that has been spooking markets: This is the worst possible time for Spain to borrow 100 billion euros. Under the agreement, any amount used to bail out Spain’s banks will be added to the country’s government debt, potentially pushing it to a net 70 percent of gross domestic product, from about 60 percent today. Spain is already struggling to sell its government bonds to anyone other than its own banks; the sudden increase in debt could completely cut it off from private financing.

Market Lockout

A market lockout would force Spain to ask the troika -- the European Union, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund -- for the money it needs to cover its budget deficit, one of the euro area’s largest. If Greece is any indicator, that assistance would come with tough conditions, requiring Spain to exercise extreme austerity as its economy is mired in recession and its unemployment rate is approaching 25 percent. The Greek fiasco shows how well that works.

Italy Struggles to Break Out of Downward Spiral

Euro Crisis Deepens

By Hans-Jürgen Schlamp

Claudio Pesaro actually had big plans for this year. The 35-year-old Italian, who still lives at home, wanted to buy his own place, marry his girlfriend and have children. But even though he has saved more than a third of the purchase price for a property, he can't find a bank that is willing to lend him the rest. His job is also at risk, as his company is making losses. As a result, he will have to put his plans on ice for now.

Marco Michelli wanted to go into business for himself, starting a microbrewery complete with pub. Beer is popular in Italy, especially among the young. But the municipal authorities hampered him with conditions and fees, and the bank withdrew its commitment to fund his business. That was the end of his project.

These are just two typical stories from Italy, which is currently in the fourth year of its crisis. The mood in the country is depressed. The number of people committing suicide for economic reasons is increasing. The enthusiasm with which Italy greeted the introduction of the euro has long vanished. Now, around 65 percent of the population are skeptical of the common currency.

Hence, Italians were relatively tranquil in their reactions to the latest "Black Monday" on the stock markets, when stocks fell sharply following the announcement that the Italian economy had contracted by 0.8 percent in the first quarter of 2012. They have come to expect such plunges. The focus of the euro crisis is, after Spain, shifting again to Italy. Italian share prices have plummeted, and yields on Italian government bonds jumped back over the dangerously high 6 percent mark. Stock markets insiders report that hedge funds are investing large sums of money in bets against the country, on the assumption that yields will continue to rise -- and are thereby fueling the downward spiral.