Draghi Boxes Himself Into a Corner

"Damned if he does and damned if he doesn’t"

By Jana Randow and Lukanyo Mnyanda 

Spanish and Italian bond markets rallied yesterday as investors cheered Draghi’s signal that the ECB is prepared to intervene to reduce soaring yields. Now he has to deliver, or face deep disappointment on financial markets, analysts said. The risk in doing so is alienating key policy makers on the ECB council, such as Bundesbank President Jens Weidmann. The Bundesbank reiterated its opposition to bond purchases today.

“Draghi is damned if he does and damned if he doesn’t,” said Carsten Brzeski, senior economist at ING Group in Brussels. “He maneuvered himself into an extremely difficult situation. Expectations are very high.”

The ECB is under pressure to lower borrowing costs after three interest-rate cuts since November failed to stop bond yields soaring in Spain and Italy, threatening the survival of the euro. The Frankfurt-based central bank shelved its bond- purchase program in March as dissatisfaction with it among council members grew, and some economists doubt it will be revived any time soon.

“I don’t believe you will see government bond purchases yet,” said Jacques Cailloux, chief European economist at Nomura International Plc in London. “But there are other things they can do that will help, such as lowering the haircut on sovereign bonds they accept as collateral or buying private sector securities.”

Rate Cuts

ECB policy makers next meet on Aug. 2. They cut the benchmark rate to a record low of 0.75 percent this month and took the rate on overnight deposits to zero.

Nathan Duszynski's zoning problems

The State As A Fantasy

by James E. Miller

If there were a prize for the best “do as I say, not as I do” politician, the latest winner would be California Senator Dianne Feinstein.  Senator Feinstein, who is currently leading a crusade to plug the White House’s recent spring of classified military leaks, is the Chairwoman of the powerful Select Committee on Intelligence. Because of her position of power, she has become “deeply disturbed by the continuing leaks of classified information to the media.”   In other words, Ms. Feinstein finds it appalling that the American public is finding out about the not-so-glamorous doings of its own government.  Her scorn for disinfecting sunlight has inspired her to call for the prosecution of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange for espionage.

This talk of super secretive government would be all fine and good for a minion of the security state except for one thing: Senator Feinstein is one of the biggest leakers in Congress herself.  And it just so happens that her husband has benefited financially from contracting with the U.S. military.  For all her talk of protecting the American people, Feinstein is just another well-connected thief in the societal racket known as the state.  As Salon’s Glenn Greenwald trenchantly observes:

That the powerful Senator who has devoted herself to criminally punishing low-level leakers and increasing the wall of secrecy is herself “one of the biggest leakers in Congress” is about as perfect an expression as it gets of how the rule of law and secrecy powers are sleazily exploited in Washington

Are You Loving Your Servitude Yet?

The Central State has the power via welfare (individual and corporate) and bailouts to buy complicity

Aldous Huxley imagined a world in which the Status Quo satisfies its lust for power by "suggesting people into loving their servitude."

by Charles Hugh Smith

I have discussed in the past the Convergence of Marx, Orwell and Kafka as a means of understanding the global crisis. It's not just financial fraud on a vast scale, or debt or leverage or derivatives or a hundred other arcane mechanisms of parasitic predation; it's the partnership of a mindlessly expansive Central State with Monopoly Capital and the media machine that serves them.

I considered including Aldous Huxley in the convergence, as he too anticipated the essential nature of modern life. But perhaps his insights are more complementary than convergent, for he understood the media and State's capacity to not only present a deranged and destructive Status Quo as "normal" but to persuade the serfs to embrace it.

Aldous Huxley foresaw a Central State that persuaded its people to “love their servitude” via propaganda, drugs, entertainment and information-overload. In his view, the energy required to force compliance exceeded the "cost" of persuasion, and thus the Powers That Be would opt for the power of suggestion.

He outlined this in a letter to George Orwell:

"My own belief is that the ruling oligarchy will find less arduous and wasteful ways of governing and of satisfying its lust for power, and these ways will resemble those which I described in Brave New World.

Within the next generation I believe that the world’s rulers will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging and kicking them into obedience."

A free society requires a decent respect for a wide range of opinion without penalty by the state

Don't cross the forces of tolerance

By MARK STEYN

To modify Lord Acton, power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely, but aldermanic power corrupts all der more manically. Proco "Joe" Moreno is Alderman of the First Ward of Chicago, and last week, in a city with an Aurora-size body count every weekend, his priority was to take the municipal tire-iron to the owners of a chain of fast-food restaurants. "Because of this man's ignorance," said Alderman Moreno, "I will now be denying Chick-fil-A's permit to open a restaurant in the First Ward."

"This man's ignorance"? You mean, of the City of Chicago permit process? Zoning regulations? Health and safety ordinances? No, Alderman Moreno means "this man's ignorance" of the approved position on same-sex marriage. "This man" is Dan Cathy, president of Chick-fil-A, and a few days earlier he had remarked that "we are very much supportive of the family – the biblical definition of the family unit. We are a family-owned business, a family-led business, and we are married to our first wives" – which last part suggests he is as antipathetic to no-fault divorce and other heterosexual assaults on matrimony as he is to more recent novelties such as gay marriage. But no matter. Alderman Moreno does not allege that Chick-fil-A discriminates in its hiring practices or in its customer service. Nor does he argue that business owners should not be entitled to hold opinions: The Muppets, for example, have reacted to Mr. Cathy's observations by announcing that they're severing all ties with Chick-fil-A. Did you know that the Muppet Corporation has a position on gay marriage? Well, they do. But Miss Piggy and the Swedish Chef would be permitted to open a business in the First Ward of Chicago because their opinion on gay marriage happens to coincide with Alderman Moreno's. It's his ward, you just live in it. When it comes to lunch options, he's the chicken supremo, and don't you forget it.

The Ballooning Cyprus Fiasco

Another Eurozone Country Bites the Dust

By Wolf Richter 

The government of Cyprus is desperate. It is deliberately slowing down paying its contractors. “We are talking about final payments and settling of bills for work that was carried out and passed through the inspections, and for which an order was issued for payment,” said Nicos Kelepeshis, head of the Federation of Associations of Building Contractors. 120 days, and more. The government also told inspectors to delay inspections in order to slow down payments.

In June, Cyprus had held its nose and requested aid from the Troika, those despised austerity thugs made up of the European Union, the European Central Bank, and International Monetary Fund that have, in Cypriot eyes, wreaked havoc in neighboring Greece. And this week, once again, these despised Troika inspectors are swarming over Cyprus to find out how much money the banks would need to deal with their putrefying balance sheets, and how much the government would need to stay afloat.

If a deal is reached—sticking point are the conditions, namely structural reforms, budget cuts, privatizations, and tax increases—the first bailout money might arrive in October. But Cyprus is bankrupt now! So, the government is raiding the “semi-state“ sector. Last week, it pilfered €101 million from the Cyprus Telecommunications Agency, €50 million from the Ports Authority, and €24 million from the Human Resource Development Authority. Now it’s going after the pension fund of the Electricity Authority to get a couple hundred million. This place is seriously out of money.

At first, it was just a funding crisis. After markets closed the door, Cyprus went begging to Russia and got €2.5 billion. That money has now evaporated.

Then it was the banks. In June, the Bank of Cyprus needed €500 million and Popular Bank €1.8 billion—in total €2.3 billion. A black hole in their regulatory capital had developed when they were forced to write down the defaulted Greek government bonds on their balance sheets [“We owed it to our children and grandchildren to rid them of the burden of this debt,” sneered Greek Finance Minister Evangelos Venizelos at the time as private sector investors got whacked with a 74% loss. Read.... “A harder Default To Come”].

Europe sinks into Collective Madness

Bernanke And Draghi Are Dangerous

What is being sacrificed to maintain the euro and the E.U./U.S. banking cartel? Everything of value: liberty, democracy and sovereignty.

by Charles Hugh Smith

Today we present the culmination of the previous entries ( Global Crisis: the Convergence of Marx, Orwell and Kafka and Are You Loving Your Servitude Yet?): A brief commentary by longtime correspondent Harun I. on Mario Draghi's market-moving statement: “Within our mandate, the ECB is ready to do whatever it takes to preserve the euro. And believe me, it will be enough.”

Nice, Mr. Draghi, but at what cost? And who will ultimately bear this cost? It is already far beyond the measure of mere money; democracy, truth and sovereignty have all been destroyed to prop up the central bankers' Status Quo. We can presume Mr. Bernanke and the Federal Reserve are in on the propaganda campaign, and so we need to examine the words and promises of these two central bankers, as well as what they have not said.

Is talking about printing money as good as actually printing money? It would seem so. Is promising to "do whatever it takes" as good as actually doing whatever it takes? Once again, it seems so; global markets leaped at the "news" that the financial Status Quo was going to be "saved" yet again.

What if it is beyond saving?

What if the cost in treasure, blood, liberty, sovereignty and truth is not worth the 'saving" of a broken, unsustainable, corrupted, parasitic, predatory system? Do we get to choose, or are we just passengers on the train as the central bankers accelerate toward the chasm ahead?

Here is Harun's commentary:

Words have meaning and people should choose them carefully. Nigel Farage commented that what he saw in the faces of EU officials was "madness". We should not underestimate his assessment.

At some point these individuals have to be viewed as dangerous. If we peer beyond terms such as QE, printing money out of thin air, stimulate, etc, and understand their effect, they begin to appear not so benign.

What if central bank officials came out and said, "We are going to raise your taxes", or "we are going to reduce your purchasing power", or, down to its essential point, "we are going to take money out of your pocket"? We know that there would be an uproar.

ECB may take losses in second Greek debt restructuring

The "Last" last chance, after the last one and before the next one,  for Greece

By Jan Strupczewski and John O'Donnell and Luke Baker

European policymakers are working on "last chance" options to bring Greece's debts down and keep it in the euro zone, with the ECB and national central banks looking at taking significant losses on the value of their bond holdings, officials said.

Private creditors have already suffered big writedowns on their Greek bonds under a second bailout for Athens sealed in February, but this was not enough to put the country back on the path to solvency and a urther restructuring is on the cards.

The latest aim is to reduce Greece's debts by a further 70-100 billion euros, several senior euro zone officials familiar with the discussions told Reuters, cutting its debts to a more manageable 100 percent of annual economic output.

This would require the European Central Bank and national central banks to take losses on their holdings of Greek government bonds, and could also involve national governments also accepting losses.

The favored option is for the ECB and national central banks to carry the cost, but that could mean that some banks and the ECB itself having to be recapitalized, the officials said.

The ECB declined comment on Friday.

Planning is in the early stages and no formal discussions have yet taken place. But there is an awareness that Greece is way off-track in improving its finances and that aggressive action is needed to keep the country inside the euro zone.

Officials described a further restructuring of Greek debt as a last chance to restore the country to solvency, with the agreed goal of cutting its debt to 120 percent of GDP by 2020 already seen as far beyond reach.

The International Monetary Fund, a party to the two rescue packages Greece has so far received, is in favor of overhauling Athens's official-sector loans - a process policymakers refer to as "OSI" or official-sector involvement.

"If I were to assign a percentage chance to OSI in Greece happening, I would say 70 percent," one euro zone official involved in the deliberations told Reuters.

Connecting the dots

The Governing Elite Are The Greatest Threat To the World's Middle Class

By Charles Kadlec

The crisis of the governing class is intensifying. Last week:

• The 100 billion euro bailout of Spanish banks and massive tax increases to narrow the government’s budget deficit are followed by a rise in interest rates on Spanish government bonds to a euro-record high.  
• San Bernardino became the third California city in the past month to file for bankruptcy.
• Faced with a budget crisis that threatens to eliminate thousands of teachers, California’s government voted to spend more than $3 billion on a high-speed train to nowhere.

New research showed strong evidence that increased government spending reduces economic growth.

Their effort to refashion society by redistributing income and regulating markets is now hitting the reality of insufficient cash flow. Even worse, the governing elite’s self-love, sense of noble entitlement and arrogant belief that their good intentions trump bad results have led to a series of policy blunders that have destroyed jobs and businesses in the productive private sector, intensifying the government debt crises here and abroad.  

The Killing Machine

Che Guevara, from Communist Firebrand to Capitalist Brand

by Alvaro Vargas Llosa

Che Guevara, who did so much (or was it so little?) to destroy capitalism, is now a quintessential capitalist brand. His likeness adorns mugs, hoodies, lighters, key chains, wallets, baseball caps, toques, bandannas, tank tops, club shirts, couture bags, denim jeans, herbal tea, and of course those omnipresent T-shirts with the photograph, taken by Alberto Korda, of the socialist heartthrob in his beret during the early years of the revolution, as Che happened to walk into the photographer’s viewfinder—and into the image that, thirty-eight years after his death, is still the logo of revolutionary (or is it capitalist?) chic. Sean O’Hagan claimed in The Observer that there is even a soap powder with the slogan “Che washes whiter.”

Che products are marketed by big corporations and small businesses, such as the Burlington Coat Factory, which put out a television commercial depicting a youth in fatigue pants wearing a Che T-shirt, or Flamingo’s Boutique in Union City, New Jersey, whose owner responded to the fury of local Cuban exiles with this devastating argument: “I sell whatever people want to buy.” Revolutionaries join the merchandising frenzy, too—from “The Che Store,” catering to “all your revolutionary needs” on the Internet, to the Italian writer Gianni Minà, who sold Robert Redford the movie rights to Che’s diary of his juvenile trip around South America in 1952 in exchange for access to the shooting of the film The Motorcycle Diaries so that Minà could produce his own documentary. Not to mention Alberto Granado, who accompanied Che on his youthful trip and advises documentarists, and now complains in Madrid, according to El País, over Rioja wine and duck magret, that the American embargo against Cuba makes it hard for him to collect royalties. To take the irony further: the building where Guevara was born in Rosario, Argentina, a splendid early twentieth-century edifice at the corner of Urquiza and Entre Ríos Streets, was until recently occupied by the private pension fund AFJP Máxima, a child of Argentina’s privatization of social security in the 1990s.

Uncertainty and the Keynesians

Expectations and Investment

by Chidem Kurdas

At the current economic juncture two camps offer diametrically opposed macro policy prescriptions. Economists on the Keynesian side such as Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman advocate further monetary easing by the Federal Reserve and massive new federal deficit spending. The opposing camp includes Austrians and monetarists. Among its distinguished members is Allan Meltzer, who in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed column argues against monetary stimulus and favors reduced government spending.

These correspond to two ways of understanding the sluggishness of the US economy, explanations based on different time horizons and levels of analysis. For Keynesians, the key is demand, which needs to be boosted by government action. For the other side, the key to slow growth and job creation is heightened uncertainty.

Don't Mention Argentina and Greece In the Same Breath!

Global renegades

By James K. Glassman

Judging from conversations I had in Europe a few weeks ago with journalists, academics, and policymakers (including at least one foreign minister), I’d say there’s growing worry about two countries being used in the same breath: Argentina and Greece.

These Europeans are deeply concerned that Greece – not to mention Spain and Italy — will follow Argentina’s example in renouncing debts, flouting international norms, and getting rewarded for its irresponsibility.

Argentina holds the record for the largest sovereign debt default in history. In 2001, the nation presented creditors with “a take-it-or-leave-it offer of 35 cents on the dollar,” as The Economist magazine put it, on about $80 billion in loans. Creditors “considered this derisory: previously, delinquent countries had typically paid 50-60 cents.”

Still, Argentine lenders had no choice, and many foreigners accepted. Others, however, refused. According to Graham Mather, president of the European Financial Forum in London, Argentina still owes $15 billion to private individuals – including tens of thousands of Italian pensioners and several institutional investors — and over $6 billion to the Paris Club of government creditors.

Worse, Argentina has ignored more than 100 court decisions around the world. Thomas Griesa, a U.S. District Court judge who handled many of the cases, has called Argentina’s stiffing of its creditors “immoral.” Argentina has also thumbed its nose at awards to creditors by the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID), the World Bank’s arbitration mechanism.

Why Greece will be let go and more

Two Events Will Shape The Next Tragic Act In Europe

By Raúl Ilargi Meijer

I don't really know why it is, but as much as I see pundits and experts and everyone in between address the euro mudbath lately, nobody seems to have caught on to the two main events (inflexion points?!) that shape the latest reincarnation of said bath. So here's for them, and you, and anyone who's not yet tired of the story:

Event no. 1: it’s not so much that it's an entirely new notion, it's the realization that it has come to pass that is new. And even then it will take a while for most pundits and experts to understand the significance.

It is not economics that will determine the end of the European fantasy but politics

As A Matter Of Evidence

"Circumstantial evidence is a very tricky thing. It may seem to point very straight to one thing, but if you shift your own point of view a little, you may find it pointing in an equally uncompromising manner to something entirely different."

                                                                         -Sherlock Holmes

by Mark Grant

The article referenced the tremendous shrinkage in lending of the banks of Europe. It pointed specifically to the French banks and how they were setting up for all funding to be at the local level and to stop funding from the parent banks in France. The article concentrated on the notion that the French banks were setting up for some kind of break-up in the Eurozone. To me, though, there was ever more than met the eye at first thinking, meaning what happens after reading. It is relatively simple to read some headline or story and absorb it; much more complicated and useful to think through the meaning of what is presented. Here, past the obvious, was a rather large indicator for the Emerging Markets and their bonds as these entities are primarily funded by the European banks so that lending here, one may realistically surmise, is shrinking dramatically so that first the Emerging Markets will shrink as funding dries up and then their bonds will spike in yield and their equities fall as their main basis of support is pulled. I think now that whatever play anyone got in the Emerging Markets is now done and I would be pulling in my horns from these markets. As Europe bounces off various walls and as the American banks will have little to do with these areas; the play is over and I suggest a thoughtful retreat.

The Dark Knight

Evil and Human Liberty

by Jeffrey Tucker

The problem of evil is a big theme for a movie, and certainly for a movie based on a comic book, but Batman: The Dark Knight deals with it expertly, and with a message that offers profound support to the idea of human liberty.

It does so in two ways: it supports the view that human beings are capable of cooperating toward the social good, and it shows the unpredictable level of evil that state intervention unleashes. Yes, I know it sounds implausible, but please hear me out.

Occupy Gotham?

The Dark Knight Rises

By Zach Foster

One of the remarkable things about this Batman series is the way Hollywood — a bastion of tired, often-rehashed, leftist propaganda — has unwittingly allowed an obscenely wealthy capitalist who lives a decadent bourgeois lifestyle (when not fighting crime) to be the hero! It was noted somewhere that Murray Rothbard was a fan of the James Bond films partly because Bond was unrepentantly bourgeois and knew how to live it up in style. I think Rothbard — who has forgotten more about Austro-libertarianism than I could ever hope to learn in my lifetime — would have liked Christian Bale's portrayal of Bruce Wayne, neither afraid to make large investments nor afraid to be seen driving the ladies around in his European sports cars.

Decadence Destiny

How New Orleans got that way

By NICOLE GELINAS

New Orleans’s American tourists often feel that they’ve arrived in a foreign country, and they’re not entirely wrong. The city’s history dates back to its status of uneasy observer of the nation’s founding. As the 13 colonies were forging a nation, the elite Spanish subjects in New Orleans looked on not with elation, but with unease, Tulane professor Lawrence N. Powell writes in The Accidental City, his chronicle of the Big Easy’s pre-1812 history. Plantation owners and wealthy merchants worried about what kind of message their slaves would absorb from the inconvenient republican rhetoric up north. New Orleans has always been just a bit different, and those differences endure to this day.

The Crescent City’s location is its original sin—but the sinners, like many of their lot, had their reasons. In the early eighteenth century, the French crown, Louisiana’s first royal sponsor, needed money to pay off its massive debts, and it hoped tobacco might wean the populace off British-controlled imports. “New Orleans was founded as a company town,” writes Powell. Impresarios of the royally chartered Company of the West, which would administer the new colony, found an easy mark at Versailles, as French colonial policy under Louis XIV “was largely one of aimlessness and drift.”

The Convergence of Marx, Orwell And Kafka

It would be impossible to loot this much wealth if the State didn't exist to enforce the "rules" of parasitic predation

The global crisis is not merely economic; it is the result of profound financial, sociological and political trends best captured by Marx, Orwell and Kafka.

by Charles Hugh Smith

The global crisis is best understood as the convergence of the modern trends identified by Marx, Orwell and Kafka. Let's start with Franz Kafka, the writer (1883-1924) who most eloquently captured the systemic injustices of all powerful bureaucracies--the alienation experienced by the hapless citizen enmeshed in the bureaucratic web, petty officialdom's mindless persecutions of the innocent, and the intrinsic absurdity of the centralized State best expressed in this phrase: "We expect errors, not justice."

If this isn't the most insightful summary of the Eurozone debacle, then what is? A lawyer by training and practice, Kafka understood that the more powerful and entrenched the bureaucracy, the greater the collateral damage rained on the innocent, and the more extreme the perversion of justice.

The entire global financial system is Kafkaesque: the bureaucracies of the Central State have two intertwined goals: protect the financial Elites from the consequences of their parasitic predation, and protect their own power and perquisites.

Why Listen To Keynes In The First Place?

A “how to” guide on winning elections

by James E. Miller

In a recent BBC News article, philosopher John Gray asks the quaint but otherwise vain question of what would John Maynard Keynes do in today’s economic slump.  I call the question vain because practically every Western government has followed Keynes’ prescribed remedy for the so-called Great Recession.  Following the financial crisis of 2008, governments around the world engaged in deficit spending while central banks pushed interest rates to unprecedented lows.  Nearly four years later, unemployment remains stubbornly high in most major countries.

Even now in the face of the come-down that inevitably follows any stimulus-induced feelings of euphoria, certain central banks have taken to further monetary easing.  The Bank of England recently announced an extension of its quantitative easing program by £50bn.  Not to be outdone, both the People’s Bank of China and the European Central Bank cut interest rates in an effort to boost consumer borrowing.  Still, these new rounds of monetary stimulus don’t appear to be doing the trick.  The Keynesian miracle cure has been a spectacular dud thus far.  All that modern day disciples of Keynes can do is scratch their heads and say “more should have been done.”  They never allude to how many more trillions of paper dollars should have been created or spent; just call it the excuse that keeps on giving.

The sharks are still circling other bodies in the water

Why France is on the road to becoming the new Greece

By Thomas Pascoe

The euro is headed south today against all comers except The Great British Krona  which is engaged in a nosedive of its own. The reason this time? Spanish 10 year debt is yielding 7.5pc, half of what it ought to yield but enough to spook markets not yet ready to face the inevitable deflation of what has long been a bond super-bubble.

This bubble is particularly evident in France. The debt levels which the country has are as unsustainable as Britain’s, yet its policies are more irresponsible and its remedies more restricted. Although it is considered a core country in the eurozone, France’s economic profile now bears more resemblance to Greece’s the Germany’s.

Public debt in France is at 86.1pc of GDP (146 pc if ECB liabilities and bank guarantees are included). The projected budget deficit this year is 4.5pc, with France having exempted itself from the EU’s instruction to bring deficits down to 3pct by the end of the year.

A Greek Exit Announcement Would Probably Come On A Sunday Night

An Interview with Niall Ferguson

By Matthew Boesler

Harvard economic historian Niall Ferguson went on Fareed Zakaria GPS on Sunday to discuss the euro crisis and how a Greek exit from the common currency would play out.

Ferguson told Zakaria it would go down on a Sunday night:

So, what you would be talking about would be an announcement, presumably on a Sunday night, along the lines of "news just in, those euros that you have in your bank from tomorrow, will be drachma. There'll be a little bit of a teething problem because the ATMs won't work for a few days while we get the drachmas into place, but don't panic. There's going to be a bank holiday until, let's say, Thursday."

However, this would cause panic to spread across Europe as everyone begins to ask, "who's next," said Ferguson. And listening to his stories, you would think Europe is primed for panic.