Tyler Durden references Peter Tchir in an analysis of the latest European deal re Greece. Essentially, the debt restructuring will be defined in a way that does not trigger claims under Credit Default Swaps (failure-to-pay insurance).
Karl Denninger points out that if CDS contracts don't pay as and when expected, that uncertainty will be built into the price in future.
Marc Faber says that the fudging will continue until sovereign nations bust themselves. The delay will simply make things worse in the end.
Charles Hugh Smith agrees, and compares the "rescue" to a lifebuoy made of plutonium - lethally heavy and poisonous.
Austerity is not the solution, says David Malone, recalling an Irish TV programme host who embarrassed Minister of State Brian Hayes by comparing Ireland's 14% unemployment rate with Iceland's 7% rate. But crisis is coming anyway: the blogger says he has seen a document from ECFIN (the European Directorate for Economic Affairs), which forecasts that the Irish Treasury will run out of cash in March 2012 and so desperately needs the next instalment of the IMF/EU bailout.
In a separate post, Malone says a top Irish banker has told him that this Europe-wide general banking bailout is the last, and next time round selected banks will be saved and others allowed to go bust. I suppose the financial industry will place its bets accordingly, so watch for high volatility in bank shares in due course.
A propos, Reggie Middleton declares Bank of America (BAC) doomed. He also discusses moves by BAC derivatives traders to transfer contracts to a subsidiary that has a lot of depositors' cash, so if/when there is a major loss it will become a liability for the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. The FDIC won't have enough to cover and so Congress will be forced to commit more taxpayers' money, so the public will be on the hook again.
Matt Taibbi brilliantly and passionately maintains that it is this kind of outrageous cheating and cronyism, not inequality per se, that has caused people to occupy Wall Street and other places around the world.
Back to austerity, and profligacy as its supposed cause. Marshall Auerback and Rob Parenteau say it's not Greece's overspending that have caused their problem, but the failure to collect taxes, especially from the top 20%, the legacy of a deal between the rich and the military junta that ran the country not so very long ago. That sort of cosy arrangement between society's winners might ring a bell with Americans.
However, if we go down the deflationary route, it may not be quite so bad as feared, according to Ralph Musgrave, who says that a major component of consumer costs in a country is the cost of labour in that same country. So if wages are cut, prices will come down. And, he continues, international wage differentials aren't everything: is it not, perhaps, better to work shorter hours in Greece, than long hours in Germany?
That's not quite how I think things will go. As governments around the world are locked into asymmetric trading arrangements, the exporters have a strong incentive to keep their currencies pegged to those of the debtor countries, and meanwhile the debtors keep multiplying their stock of money in order to finance their health and welfare systems. Apparently there is not much relative currency movement, then.
But that is like skydivers linking hands as they fall. What cannot be increased at the same rate as the monetary base, is commodities,which is why Alasdair Macleod says "Commodity prices are reflecting the increased quantities of paper money and credit." He argues, as so many do now, for sound money. However, it's how you get there that matters. At the speed we're going, it will not be a blessing that the ground breaks our fall.
In the long run, as Faber and others have said so many times, fiat currencies tend to zero value. The path has many twists and I fear there may be a sharp banking dislocation before then, so as well as considering what physical things to put what cash we have into (and worrying about the degree to which their price is too high because of others' speculation), I also have to consider the merits of continuing to hold cash - and perhaps, a sensible supply of it outside the banking system.
The 1933 Congressional Finance Committee hearings, chaired by Senator Reed Smoot, heard testimony from Marriner S. Eccles, soon to become Chairman of the Federal Reserve. Eccles showed that the stock of money had declined, not merely because people had begun to hoard it but also (and even more so) because of a decline in the velocity of its circulation in the economy.
We are experiencing another such decline in velocity,which deficit the authorities are trying to supply by injections of extra liquidity. This is not working, partly because (Australian economist Steve Keen maintains, with the help of his computer model) giving it to the banks is far (by two-thirds) less effective than giving it directly to debtors.
Another reason for the failure is the very different circumstances in which we now find ourselves. In the 1930s, rafts of US banks had been allowed to go bust, yet there was plenty that needed doing and plenty of people and resources to do it. And there wasn't a huge overseas workforce that was set up to undercut any bid by local labour.
As far back as 1993, Sir James Goldsmith perceived that GATT put the West into the jaws of a trap, as he explained in a book with that title. He argued the case in a TV interview against a complacent Laura d'Andrea Tyson; much good it did him, or us, though she's still going strong, it seems. Goldsmith advocated a sort of regionalised protectionism, to allow the West to survive while the developing world caught up by trading with its peers.
Instead, the world market has been opened up rapidly, and (maybe this is why it was allowed to happen) made some almost inconceivably wealthy while withering so many others. By the way, this process is not necessarily good for the developing economies, either. And it may be the worse for the latter when the system unravels.
We're hearing much at present about Occupy Wall Street - and St Paul's in London, and more. As I've suggested in the previous post, it may be that people are beginning to understand (however fuzzily) that the emerging economies have been used as an instrument in the process of transferring wealth, not so much from West to East, as from below to above within the developed world. It's not the embassies they're picketing.
Economics is becoming politics. If there is not an honest debate soon, we are contemplating a class war begun from above, a struggle that mad, hate-filled Communists used to welcome because of the magically wonderful millenial age that would follow it - a theory to which I in no way subscribe.
If the world is to remain open, then wage rates will have to tend towards some global mean, and that will only be possible if vast quantities of debt are purged from the system. You cannot have sharply reduced wages while attempting to sustain high liabilities fixed in nominal terms. Unless inflation does the job for us; creditors will resist that vigorously, so it has to be debt forgiveness (or default, it doesn't matter). In a world where personal indebtedness hugely outweighs government debt, official austerity measures will, in my view, be either ineffective or (because of effects on consumer demand, welfare costs and tax revenues) actually counterproductive.
Since this consumer slump appears to coming our way faster than the emerging economies can develop regional demand to replace it, I think the East is in for at least as hard a landing as the West.
However, they have come so far in such a short time that they may be able to cope psychologically with the material setback. And with all the tools, factories and industrial knowhow we sold them, the sources of essential raw materials they have secured in e.g. Africa, and the skills base they have developed, I think the East will be the first to pick themselves up and that is when the balance of world economic power will be seen to have shifted suddenly and decisively.
Goodness knows what our 1% will do then, or the 99%.
INVESTMENT DISCLOSURE: None. Still in cash (and index-linked National Savings Certificates), and missing all those day-trading opportunities.
DISCLAIMER: Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content.
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