sábado, 17 de febrero de 2018

FEB 17 18 SIT EC y POL



FEB 17 18 SIT EC y POL
ND denounce Global-neoliberal debacle y propone State-Social + Capit-compet in Econ

Today Must Read:
1- Painful explanation of neoliberal collapse world-wide:
Read key extracts in WORLD ISSUES below
2-
3- Press the blue
Market Volatility & Inflation by Edward Harrison via Credit Writedowns  By Ed Harrison
….

ZERO HEDGE  ECONOMICS
Neoliberal globalization is over. Financiers know it, they documented with graphics


"The dirty secret of Keynesian central banking is that under current circumstances its interventions have almost no impact on its famous dual mandate - stable prices and full employment on main street."

The dirty secret of Keynesian central banking is that under current circumstances its interventions have almost no impact on its famous dual mandate stable prices and full employment on main street.

That's because goods and services inflation is a melded consequence of global central banking. The capital, trade, financial and exchange rate movements which result from the tug-and-haul of worldwide central banking policies generate incessant shape-shifting impacts on the CPI; and the ebb and flow of these forces completely dwarfs FOMC actions in the New York money and bond markets.

In today's world, there is no such thing as inflation in one country. In that regard, the traditional Fed tool of pegging the funds rate is especially obsolete, impotent and ritualistically mindless. After all, if the 2.00% inflation target is meant as a long haul objective, it was achieved long ago. The CPI index for January 2018 at 249.2compared to a level of 169.3 back in January 2000, thereby representing exactly a 2.17% compound annual gain over the 18 year period.

On the other hand, if 2.00% is meant as a short-run target, how much more evidence do we need? Since the Fed shifted to deep pegging at or near the zero bound in December 2008, there has been no inflation rate correlation with the funds rate whatsoever.
See  Chart Effective Federal Funds Rate at the source of this Art

In the sections below we will resolve the inflation matter once and for all by demonstrating that the very idea of 2.00% inflation targeting (or any other target) is singularly stupid and destructive. What the free market actually calls for is just the opposite: That is, consistent, secular DEFLATION so that domestic prices, wages and costs---which are perched near the top of global cost curves----can be brought into better competitive alignment.

By the same token, the full employment objective is equally vestigial. That's because the channels of monetary policy transmission to the real main street economy are broken and done.

With households at Peak Debt, cheap interest rates do not stimulate incremental borrowing and consumption spending: Households have been left with only their paychecks to spend, and what remaining raining day funds (savings) they have not already tapped.
The current levels and risk spreads on unsecured personal loans, in fact, show exactly why the credit channel to households is frozen solid.

With more than $15 trillion of total household debt and other liabilities, it is now all about credit risk. Even in the case of the very highest credit scores, unsecured personal loan interest rates are essentially prohibitive and are designed to recover huge, predictable losses for dodgy credits, not stimulate a tsunami of new consumer borrowing and spending.

At length, of course, the car loan boom will crumble as used car prices plunge on a cyclical basis. So auto debt will soon join the no growth mortgage market. At that point, the entirety of household collateral will soon be tapped-out, thereby insuring the complete shutdown of the household credit channel of monetary policy transmission.
The fact that virtually every channel of household credit has already been blocked or become highly congested by Peak Debt is self-evident in the household debt data. According to the flow of funds report, household debt doubled between the 2000 peak and mid-2008, growing at a 9.1% annual rate.
By contrast, the growth rate of total household credit from all sources during the last nine years has been just 0.5% per annum
See Chart: Household and non-profit Organizations at the bottom Art’ source

Needless to say, 0.5% per annum does not a consumption spending boom make. Our monetary politburo can declaim until the cows come home about how it "stimulated" the US economy back to full-employment health. But consumption spending growth has been tepid since the pre-crisis peak, and what did occur originated mainly in Say's Law, not the Eccles Building.
To wit, real consumption spending (PCE) grew at a 1.7% rate between Q4 2007 and Q4 2017, while real wages gained about 1.4% per annum over the period. Clearly production and income came first and was the source of most of the spending gain (as it should in a healthy sustainable economy).

By contrast, real PCE grew at a considerably more robust 2.8% annual rate during the 2000-2007 peak-to-peak cycle compared to just 1.7% for real wages and salaries. This means that upwards of 40% of the gain during the Greenspan mortgage/credit boom was accounted for by borrowing and other unearned sources of spending power.

Continue reading at this source
----
----

"The problem is when equity valuations become very high and interest rates get very low it’s difficult for that strategy to continue to perform very well. All else being equal. Now, however, if you add modest inflation into the formula, that portfolio actually becomes pretty toxic..."

This growth-constrained scenario that Peters envisions, will create major problems for risk parity funds as the new economic environment causes stocks and bonds to plunge, creating a scenario for risk parity funds where deleveraging leads to a vicious feedback loop.
See Chart:

In summary, while Peters doesn’t envision a return to 1970s-style inflation, given the structural shifts in the US economy, combined with anti-globalist policies instituted by politicians across the West, markets are looking extremely precarious, and investors who are optimistic about the growth prospects of the Trump administration’s fiscal policies should keep this in mind.
----
----


... 10y UST yields at 4.5%+, EUR at 1.40, JPY at 95, oil at $95-100 and US HY credit 650-700bp over USTs as tail risks.
Assuming yields break 3% decisively this year, the base in yields will have taken seven years to complete so the target needs only be hit by say mid-2025. And the same economists who will now say it’s impossible to go above 4% were also saying in 2007 that a move from 5% to 2% was impossible when technicians made that call from the top of the channel.
See Chart:
See more charts at
----
----

After shutting down more than 5,000 stores in 2017, store-closings are accelerating in 2018 with news of the  potential bankruptcy of Winn-Dixie chain parent, and plans to shut almost 200 stores as part of the move - either before or after the filing.
Another big one:
Bi-Lo is laboring under more than $1 billion in debt following its 2005 buyout by Lone Star Funds.
See chart:

Lone Star piped in $150 million when the grocer exited Chapter 11 the first time, and invested $275 million to help fund the purchase of Winn-Dixie in 2012. But it probably will still come out ahead, having paid itself at least $800 million since 2012, along with management fees it’s collected, according to regulatory filings.

Southeastern Grocers, based in Jacksonville, Florida, says it’s the fifth-largest supermarket chain, with more than 700 stores and 50,000 employees. It also operates the Harveys and Fresco y Mas chains.
….
----
----

"The Federal Reserve is ruining us...As bad as the damage done so far has been, the real pain has not yet begun..."
----
----
POLITICS
Seudo democ y sist  duopolico in US is obsolete; it’s  full of frauds & corruption. Urge cambiarlo


"Is it worth one more American life to try to build a nation for people unwilling to fight for their own country?"
----
----

The torrent of reckless false accusations against Russia made by the US and its NATO allies is hitting warp speed...
----
----
WORLD ISSUES and M-East
Global depression is on…China, RU, Iran search for State socialis+K- compet. D rest in limbo

Painful explanation of neoliberal collapse world-wide:

After years of forced hibernation, brought about by suspension of traditional trading rules by the central banks, the markets are facing a painful process of re-emancipation.
See Chart:

As a reminder, the Fed's "negative convexity" inflation problem was highlighted recently by none other than Ray Dalio,  who pointed out that "it would only take a 100 basis point rise in Treasury bond yields to trigger the worst price decline in bonds since the 1981 bond market crash. And since those interest rates are embedded in the pricing of all investment assets, that would send them all much lower." Goldman showed this latent risk exposure last week in the following chart:
See Chart:

Predictably, it was the spike in wage inflation - and the resulting shift in market sentiment - on Feb 2. that culminated in a 666 points drop in the Dow and the VIX shock just one trading day later. It is also inflation that remains the "weakest link" in the Fed's strategy to perpetuate the "state of exception" indefinitely. It is what Kocic calls the "Icarus effect."

Inflation is producing an Icarus effect: Although negative convexity of inflation is a far OTM risk, it is significant even at remote distances from the strike, due to its enormous size. The accumulation of relatively illiquid long-dated bonds on retail balance sheets is at toxic levels and a substantial rise in inflation, to which there is no adequate policy response, could threaten to trigger a bond unwind that the market would be unable to absorb.

Rising inflation ultimately acts via two distinct pathway with unique consequences on risk assets: real rates and breakevens. The main problem for risk assets, would be rising real rates:
"Having UST bonds with strong dollar or high real yields will be more attractive than holding US stocks, which means accelerated de-risking and higher volatility in the stock market. Higher inflation, on the other hand, would be supportive for equities and could cause another leg of selloff in bonds."

However even here, a self-defeating feedback loop from the more benign increase in breakevens emerges:
What complicates things is that the behavior of real rates at this point is also a function of expected inflation: Higher inflation warrants a more hawkish Fed and therefore pricing in higher real rates. The reaction of stocks is a non-linear function of inflation – although risk assets might “like” higher inflation, this would remain true only up to a certain point.

It is this rising inflation - whether through breakevens or real rates - that takes us back full circle to the paradoxical moves observed last week in the three key risk assets categories whose convergent started in 2011 and ended with a bang last week, prompting more than one trading desk to explode at the associated complications of trading this market: complications resulting form the ongoing unwind of central bank policy.

Putting it together, Kocic notes "the following three observations which summarize the ongoing complications associated with stimulus unwind and the conflicts they create in the context of economic recovery."
  1. Unwind of stimulus is a mirror image of the QE trade
2.       Risk is asymmetrically distributed between rates and risk assets.
3.       Volatility plays an essential role in the policy unwind.  .. volatility-reducing – the unwind of financial repression is withdrawal of convexity supply and a vol-enhancing mode.
... which takes us to his prediction of what comes next. The simple answer: "PAIN."
After years of forced hibernation, brought about by suspension of traditional trading rules by the central banks, the markets are facing a painful process of re-emancipation.

Finally, for those "confused and anxious" about the catalyst for the next cycle of pain, look no further than volatility, and specifically where it goes from here - its trajectory will determine the fate of not only the market but also the economy, to wit: "In the subsequent months, a particular pattern of volatility, in terms of its breakdown across different assets, will determine the mode of risk rebalancing. In that context, volatility will play a decisive role in determining the success and timing of the recovery and a particular economic trajectory."
----
----


"All of them suffer the same symptoms of suffocation, malaise, itching skin and burning in the eyes." 
----
----


GLOBAL RESEARCH
Geopolitics & Econ-Pol crisis that leads to more business-wars:  its profiteers US-NATO


----
----
----
----
----


COUNTER PUNCH 


----
John W. Whitehead   War Spending Will Bankrupt America
----
----
----
----
----


SPUTNIK and RT SHOWS
Geopolitics & the nasty business of US-NATO-Global-wars uncovered ..


RELATED:
----
----
----
----
----
----
----
----
----
----
RT SHOWS
Keiser Report  Episode 1190. Max and Stacy discuss JP Morgan’s ‘bitcoin bible’ as a plea for help from central banks to protect their fractional reserve banking monopoly model.
----
----
----
----
----
----
----


NOTICIAS IN SPANISH
Latino America looking for alternatives to neoliberalism to break with Empire: 


JJOO      Bajo la sombra de la guerra   Will Morrow
----
ALC        -Revitalizar pensamiento crítico en América Latina  Decio Machado
                -Perú:   Una payasada indigna  Gustavo Espinoza

----
USA       - despiadada crueldad del presupuesto de Trump  AG y DM Ado Polit no obliga al Gob a gastar fondos según lo acordado. El diablo se esconde en los detalles: WW3?
----
FEM       “El feminismo es el sujeto político más potente"  Sara Montero. Cierto .. y más cierto aún que  desperdiciar esa fuerza en lucha anti-machista es dogma medieval. Sistema y guerra son hoy el tema.
----
Cult        -Pelíc: The Party, de Sally Potter. Gaucha divina… negra y salvaje Coment: Maniel Ligero
- Bob Marley y 460 años de cimarronismo  Juan Montaño.
Más libre que mi cimarrona no hay: me dio una hijita negra y un hijito gringo. Muy lindos los dos, pero nosotros somos latinos y del mero sur. Cuando le dije: como explicamos esto?. LOS GENES NO TIENEN CÁMARA, me dijo. Tu no eres médico y yo tampoco, y nuestros hijos si lo son. Aún si  decimos ‘los adoptamos’, nosotros los criamos, los amamos y son nuestros hijos. Me re-convenció. Cierto: los genes no tienen cámara.. pero tienen cama. Ojalá esas camas no tengan cámara.. me auto-respondí. Los mire a mis hijos y me dije a mi mismo.. SI, SI y Si..son muy parecidos a mí. Total, cuando nos quedamos solos luego que nuestros hijos se fueron a dif Univ , me visito una maestra de Cuba y mi cimarrona dijo: que linda esta negrita.. por que no tienes un hijo con ella y lo adoptamos como “foster-parents”, ella se queda con nosotros y  le daría de mamar y si quiere regresar a Cuba le pagamos los pasajes cada mes para que lo visite al niño. Él tendría dos mamas y dos nacionalidades porque también seria bautizado allí y nosotros  también podríamos viajar a Cuba. Ella acepto, hice el intento, pero no la cogí en su ovulación. Ella tenía que regresar a la escuela y por el bloqueo que se agravó, jamás pudo volver al US  ni Nos visitar la Isla. Yo si tengo un hijito en una morena de aquí y una hijita en una gringa, que SI son latinos, pero las dos son casadas con americano. Por todo esto llegué a la conclusión de que por algo nos dicen LATINOS: no nos parecemos a nadie en este mundo. Somos un tipo especial de cimarrones: Amamos la vida y la gozamos como viene.
----
Ecol        -Nos oponemos al avance del litio: “No comemos baterías”  D Aranda
                - Fin de temporada de caza: A Matar perros ahora. del Gbno? Cecilia
----
Mund    Foro Social Mundial 2018:"Siempre afirman  otro mundo es posible"
----
Ecuad    -Gral J J Flores, 1er Presid de Ec:  Inocente por donde se lo mire  R B
                -"Ofensiva megaminera ": Contra el despojo minero Ileana Almeida
----
                - 22 cosas que probablemente no sabías de Cuba Mauricio Leandro
----
COL        -Mesa de Quito:  Falta voluntad y capacidad para alcanzar la paz BD
                -1año de Mesa Quito:  Por un nuevo y mejor cese bilateral varios
----
----
----
----
----
----
----
----
----
----


PRESS TV
Global situation described by Iranian observers..


----
Trump blasted for receiving NRA funds  National Rifle Association
----
----
----
----
----
----
----
----
----
----
----
----
===

No hay comentarios:

Publicar un comentario