Thursday, August 8, 2013

ALERT for all IRA account holders - IRS changing policy on self directed IRAs

Submitted by Simon Black via Sovereign Man blog [7],
I recently received some disturbing news that I felt critical to pass on to you.
As we’ve been writing for over four years now, it’s long been a common approach for government sliding into insolvency to confiscate wealth from their own citizens.
Charles I of England infamously commandeered 200,000 pounds of his own citizens’ gold right before the English Civil War in 1638. Roosevelt confiscated his entire nation’s gold holdings roughly three centuries later.
And of course, Cyprus raided domestic bank accounts earlier this year in a desperate attempt to bail-in the national banking system.
It’s foolish to think that these things cannot happen, especially when you look at the numbers.
The United States government is in debt to the tune of nearly $17 trillion. What’s more, Uncle Sam has to borrow money just to pay interest on the money they’ve already borrowed… and they’re still posting trillion-dollar annual deficits.
The only reason that the US government is still in business is because the Federal Reserve has been buying the vast majority of newly issued US Treasury bonds… in some cases as much as 90%.
The problem with this method, aside from being a completely fraudulent system, is that the Federal Reserve is quickly reaching the point of insolvency itself.
As we’ve explored in recent letters, the Fed’s capital ratio (a significant measure of it’s financial health) is at a laughably small 1.53%. And as the Fed continues to expand its balance sheet buying even more of the Treasury’s debt, its capital ratio gets smaller and smaller.
The government is soon going to be in a position to seek ‘other’ sources of funding, just as we saw in Cyprus earlier this year.
And as we’ve been saying for years, one of the most likely targets is retirement savings.
There are tens of trillions of dollars in the US retirement system, predominantly in 401(k) and IRA accounts managed by big financial institutions.
And it would be quite simple for the government to mandate that a portion of those retirement accounts be invested in the ‘safety and security’ of US Treasuries. The big institutions who manage the accounts would have no choice but to comply.
In fact, it wasn’t too long ago that the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau began talking about ‘helping’ Americans manage their retirement savings.
Jim Rogers and Ron Paul spoke about this at our event in Santiago, Chile – watch the video below:

One of the best solutions over the past few years, particularly for IRA account holders, was to set up a special type of self-directed IRA.
In this structure, your IRA exclusively owns a domestic LLC, and you as the IRA account holder become the manager of the LLC.
This gives you the authority to directly manage your retirement funds, allowing you a lot of flexibility to ship your savings overseas, invest in foreign real estate, etc. as long as you stay away from a clear set of ‘prohibited transactions’ that the IRS outlines.
These IRA structures are incredibly flexible, and I think one of the best ways for people to safeguard what they’ve worked their entire lives to build.
So here’s the disturbing news… and it’s something you won’t hear about anywhere else.
One of the attorneys that I work with routinely has specialized in setting up these types of structures. He’s an accomplished tax professional with decades of experience under his belt, and he recently told me that the IRS is no longer ‘allowing’ this type of structure.
More specifically, the IRS is refusing to issue tax ID numbers for single-member LLCs that are owned by an IRA… which is the specific structure that US taxpayers need to create in order to ship their retirement savings overseas.
Of course, no LAW has been passed. No vote has been conducted. The IRS simply decided by policy in its sole discretion to stop allowing Americans to create this structure, and hence, force them to keep their retirement savings in the US.
My attorney’s understanding of this policy is that the agency is trying to ‘protect’ taxpayers from potential consequences. But the end result is that US taxpayers now have one fewer option to safeguard their retirement savings abroad to keep from getting Cyprused.
My colleagues and I are working on another solution, and hopefully will receive some clarification on the matter from the IRS.
In the meantime, this underscores a critical point: there is a finite window of opportunity on many of these steps to safeguard your wealth, preserve your freedom, and ensure your family’s future security. And it’s important to take action while the window of opportunity closes.
Because, once it does, there may not be another option.

Greek Youth Unemployment Soars To Record 65%

RIP Greekovery.
What little hope there may have been that bad and/or deteriorating Greek economic data had peaked in the early part of 2013 and the country was set for a long overdue "recovery" was promptly extinguished following today's latest release of the Greek May labor force survey.
The headline news for the broader population was ugly:
  • The number of employed was 3,621,153, a decline of 14,889 from April, and down 171,356 from a year earlier
  • The number of unemployed was a record high 1,381,088, an increase of 43,467 from April, and up 193,668 from a year earlier
  • The unemployment rate was a record high 27.6%, up from 26.9% in April and 23.8% a year earlier
But that was the "good" news.
The bad news? Greek youth (15-24 year old) unemployment halted its decline over the past few months only to explode higher from 57.5% in April to a whopping 64.9% in May! Needless to say this is a record high, and means that two thirds of all eligible for work youths can not find a job. That this is the most combustible combination for social upheaval if not war, is well known to anyone who has opened even one history book.
Source: Elstat

Wednesday, August 7, 2013

USA Laboring Under A Conclave Of Would-Be Wizards

Submitted by James Howard Kunstler via Kunstler.com,
The world is swiftly moving to the dangerous place where nations won’t be able to do business with each other because they don’t trust the institutions that control wealth, which includes central banks, commercial banks, and governments. It will happen when the purveyors of international commodities, oil especially, refuse to accept the letters of credit issued by untrustworthy intermediaries. And when that dark moment arrives, nations will throw tantrums. The USA may be the loudest baby in the playpen.
The USA is veering into a psychological space not unlike the wilderness-of-mind that Germany found itself in back in the early 20th century: the deep woods of paranoia where our own failures will be projected onto the motives of others who mean to do us harm. Of course, even paranoiacs have enemies. There are quite a few others who would like to harm the USA, at least to bamboozle and paralyze us, to push back against our influence on their culture and economies. But the tendency here will be to magnify the supposed insults while ignoring our own suicidal behavior.
Historians will remark that it was a beautiful August with bright days and cool nights for sleeping, and the Hamptons were ablaze with self-satisfied egos, and that nobody was paying attention to all the mischief that was set in motion the previous spring, not to mention the many seasons of bad behavior that preceded it. And when they returned from vacation, lo, the world was in crisis. What a surprise.
The USA cannot come to terms with the salient facts staring us in the face: that we can’t run things as we’ve set them up to run. We refuse to take the obvious actions to set things up differently. Instead, we’ve tried to offset the accelerating losses of running our unrunable stuff with accounting fraud, aimed at pretending that everything still works. But the accounting fraud has only accelerated the gathering disorder in the banking system. That disorder has infected our currency and the infection is spreading to all currencies. What a surprise that the first pandemic to strike an overstressed global immune system was not bird flu after all, but a sickness of money.
Near the center of that money sickness was the blitzkrieg against gold and silver in the spring, when arrant serial selling dumps were executed against the money metals to un-money them. The net result was only that a lot of that ancient money flowed from the places pretending it was valueless to the places that never adopted that pretense. At stake in that rather massive movement was the supposed value of the other stuff that pretended to hold value, namely sovereign bonds, and especially the treasury paper issued by the USA. After all, US Treasury bonds and notes were, in the eyes of bankers, the functional equivalent of cash-in-hand. Alas, the world was starting to choke on it — not least the US central bank itself, which had been gorging at the monthly auction buffet for years and was now stuffed to the gills. In fact, it had grown too fat to even leave the room where the buffet had been set up.
Anyway you look at it, there is no escape from the looming crisis of confidence. The “primary dealer” banks and commodity exchanges behind the spring gold smash are out of tricks and out of gold to play tricks with. Their partner, the US Government has two tricks left: confiscation of gold in private hands a la Franklin Roosevelt’s ploy of 1933, or punitive taxes on private sales of gold. What worked in 1933 might not go over so well now, in a land full of preppers armed to the teeth and long-simmered in gall. It brings to mind the bumper-sticker about prying things from people’s cold dead hands. As for the tax gambit, I venture to say that many holders of gold hold it in expectation that there may shortly be no effective government left to depend on to do the wrong thing. Meanwhile, over in the land of paper wealth, the interest rate on the 10-year US Treasury bond clicks up a basis-point here, a basis-point there, like a remorselessly rising sea level. It won’t take many more clicks to put, for instance, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York under water.
I felt sorry for President Obama, going about the country trying to appear historically heroic without doing a damn thing, really, to face down to the monsters in our own midst. But then one hears the rumor of Larry Summers’ imminent appointment to chair the Fed, and it is no longer possible to feel sorry for Obama, but rather to feel sorry for the nation laboring under such a conclave of would-be wizards.
I just don’t see how the world financial system doesn’t blow up this fall, when the digested remains of the last miso-glazed oyster tidbit passes through the cloacal fundament of the prettiest girl in Sag Harbor. When it does blow, at least the NSA will have its prepared “to-do” list, and then perhaps all the unemployed can be enlisted at $8 an hour to harass the rest of the people trying to go about their daily lives. The roar you hear in the distance this September will be the sound of banks crashing, followed by the silence of business-as-usual grinding to a halt. After that, the crackle of gunfire.

Tuesday, August 6, 2013

STUDY: U.S. DEBT OBLIGATIONS $70 TRILLION

A new study by University of California-San Diego economics professor James Hamilton finds that the United States has over $70 trillion in off-balance sheet liabilities--an amount nearly six times the on-balance-sheet debt figure.

The Treasury debt outstanding is $16.74 trillion. Of that, $4.84 trillion is money the U.S. owes itself. For that reason, explains Matt Phillips of Quartz, “many analysts tend to focus on the $11.91 trillion in debt that is publicly available to be traded.”
Hamilton’s study, however, examined the federal liabilities that are not included in the government’s officially reported numbers. Specifically, he examined the federal government’s “support for housing, other loan guarantees, deposit insurance, actions taken by the Federal Reserve, and government trust funds.”
Not surprisingly, Hamilton found that Medicare and Social Security represent the bulk of future U.S. debt obligations, coming in at $27.6 trillion and $26.5 trillion respectively.
The study's $70 trillion debt estimate may actually be overly optimistic. Boston University economics professor Laurence J. Kotlikoff, who served on President Ronald Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisers, says the nation’s true debt obligations are three times that figure.
"If you add up all the promises that have been made for spending obligations, including defense expenditures, and you subtract all the taxes that we expect to collect, the difference is $211 trillion. That's the fiscal gap," Kotlikoff told National Public Radio. "That's our true indebtedness."
Hamilton concedes that other scholars may arrive at different figures.
“Some may argue that the current off-balance-sheet liabilities of the U.S. federal government are smaller than those tabulated here; others could arrive at larger numbers," writes Hamilton. "But one thing seems undeniable—they are huge.”

SPY volume lowest since 2007 while number of quotes reach all time high

Nanex ~ 05-Aug-2013 ~ SPY Lowest Volume Since 2007. On August 5, 2013, SPY recorded the lowest non-holiday volume since February 16, 2007. August 5th also turned in a record high quote/trade ratio, as High Frequency Quote Spam persists. Charts below show daily counts of quotes and shares during regular trading hours in SPY from January 3, 2005 through August 5, 2013.
1. SPY Trading Volume (millions of shares).
2. SPY Quote Counts (millions). No record low.
3. SPY - Quotes Per Trade - New All Time Record.
4. SPY - Quotes Per 100 Shares - This ratio leaps to record highs.

Monday, August 5, 2013

MetaQuotes releases app market for MT4

Many developers have been waiting for MetaTrader 4 application store, and it has finally happened: the Market for MetaTrader 4 trading platformapplications has been released in beta mode. You can register on the web site and offer your MQL4 programs for sale right now!
The updated version of MQL4 language having many MQL5 language features will also be released soon (approximately at the end of August). But we want you to start developing your MQL4 applications and uploading them to the Market right now. Why now? The answer is simple: several hundred applications should already be available in the database at the moment of the Market's full-fledged launch. Since the language update and the launch of MetaTrader 4 Market are serious matters, the tests are going to be detailed and comprehensive. So, the sooner you upload your program to the Market, the earlier the Market's final version is released. 
http://www.metaquotes.net/en/metatrader4/news/4016

Can the Stock Market Get Any Better Than This? Korean Black Swan?

What in the world is going on?! As I write this letter from the Maine woods, the S&P 500 has just cleared 1,700 for the first time. The German DAX continues to set all-time highs above 8,400. The United Kingdom’s FTSE 100 is quickly approaching its 1999 record high of 6,930, and its mid-cap cousin, the FTSE 250, just broke through to its all-time level above 15,000. And last but not least, Japan’s Nikkei 225 is extending its gains once more, toward 14,500. This weekend I am sitting around with some of the smartest economic and trading minds in the country. At Leen's Lodge, where we're fishing and eating where our phones don’t work, the question on our minds is, how long can this run go on? The debates can get intense in a room full of strong opinions.
So, with a little help, I did some research on what our forward-looking prospects are for the markets. Let me take this opportunity to introduce a new name to readers, one that will become familiar over the next few years. I have gotten to know Worth Wray, a young economist (though I should say that, as I stare 64 in the face, a lot of people are looking young these days) who has really impressed me with the breadth of his knowledge and insights. He was the former portfolio strategist for my good friends at Salient down in Houston, and they were kind enough to let me entice him to come to Dallas to work with me. This is a big move for both of us, and I am finding that it's one I should have undertaken a long time ago. Worth is really going to help me expand my abilities to do research and present my thoughts to you. I asked him a few questions, and he helped me tee up this week’s letter. Plus, we'll look across the Pacific, and I'll share some though ts I’ve had about an interesting black swan that could be developing in the Korean Peninsula. Let’s get started!

Can It Get Any Better Than This?

To many investors, developed markets appear healthier and stronger than they have in years. Major equity markets are rallying to record highs; corporate credit spreads are tight versus US Treasuries and getting tighter; and broad measures of volatility continue to fall to their lowest levels since 2007.
This kind of news would normally point to prosperity across the real economy and call for a celebration – but prices do not always reflect reality. Moreover, the combination of high and rising valuations, low volatility, and a weakening trend in real earnings growth is a proven recipe for poor long-term returns and market instability.
Let’s take the S&P 500 as an example. It returned roughly 42% from September 1, 2011, through August 1, 2013, as the VIX Index fell to its lowest levels since the global financial crisis. Over that time frame, real earnings declined slightly (down about 2% through Q1 2013 earnings season), while the trailing 12-month price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio jumped 44%, from 13.5x to 19.5x. That means the majority of the recent gains in US equity markets were driven by multiple expansion in spite of negative real earnings growth. This is a clear sign that sentiment, rather than fundamentals, is driving the markets higher.
Of course, the simple trailing 12-month P/E ratio can be misleading at critical turning points if you are trying to handicap the potential for long-term returns. For example, the collapse in real earnings during the global financial crisis sent the S&P 500’s trailing P/E multiple through the roof by March 2009. So, while trailing P/E is a useful tool for understanding what has already happened in the market, the “Shiller P/E” is far more useful for calculating a reasonable range of expected returns going forward. This approach won’t help you much with short-term market timing, but current valuations have historically proven extremely useful in forecasting long-term returns. In his book Irrational Exuberance (2005), Robert Shiller of Yale University shows how this approach “confirms that long-term investors – investors who commit their money to an investment for ten full years – did do well when prices were low rel ative to earnings at the beginning of the ten years. Long-term investors would be well-advised, individually, to lower their exposure to the stock market when it is high … and to get into the market when it is low.”
As you can see in Figure 6, compared to the more common trailing 12-month P/E ratio in Figure 5, the Shiller P/E metric essentially smooths out the series and helps us avoid false signals by dividing the market’s current price by the average inflation-adjusted earnings of the past ten years. Historically, this range has peaked and given way to major market declines at around 29x on average (or 26x excluding the dot-com bubble), and it has bottomed in the mid-single digits. Not only does today’s Shiller P/E of 24x suggest a seriously overvalued market, but the rapid multiple expansion of the last two years in the absence of earnings growth suggests that this market is also seriously overbought.
John Hussman helps us keep current valuations in historical perspective:
The Shiller P/E is now 24.4, about the same level as August 1929, higher than December 1972, higher than August 1987, but less extreme than the level of 43 that was reached in March 2000 (a level that has been followed by more than 13 years of market returns within a fraction of a percent of the return on Treasury bills – and even then only by revisiting significantly overvalued levels today). The Shiller P/E is presently moderately below the level of 27 at the October 2007 market peak. It’s worth noting that the 2000-2001 recession is already out of the Shiller calculation. Moreover, looking closely at the data, the implied profit margin embedded in today’s Shiller P/E is 6.3%, compared with a historical average of only about 5.3%. At normal profit margins, the current Shiller P/E would be 29.
While it may be impossible to accurately predict when this policy-driven market will break, history suggests it would be very reasonable for the secular bear to eventually bottom at a P/E multiple between 5x and 10x, opening up one of the rare wealth-creation opportunities to deploy capital at truly cheap prices. Some of these technical details are rather dry, but I hope you'll focus on the main idea: We are not talking about the potential for a modest 20% to 30% drawdown in the S&P 500. If history is any indication, we are talking about the potential for a 50%+ peak-to-trough drawdown and ten-year average annual returns as bad as -4.4%, according to the chart above from Cliff Asness at AQR. Such a result would fall in line with somewhat similar deleveraging periods such as the United States experienced in the 1930s and Japan has experienced since 1989. There is no way to sugarcoat it: too much equity risk can be unproductive and even destructive in this kind of economic environment.
But where there is danger, there is also opportunity. This is a terrific time to take some profits and diversify away from the growth-oriented risk factors that dominate most investors’ portfolios. Instead of concentrating risk in one asset class or one country, investors can boost returns and achieve more balance by taking a global view, by broadening the mix of core asset classes, and by weighting those return streams to achieve balance across potential economic outcomes (rather than trying to predict the future). Since equities and credit are essentially a directional bet on positive economic growth and benign inflation, you have a lot to gain from diversifying into other core market risks: commodities, which thrive when inflation, or more specifically expected inflation, is rising; and nominal safe-haven government bonds, which thrive as inflation gives way to deflation and the oth er assets typically decline. While each group of asset classes responds to economic conditions differently and exhibits low correlations to the others, each of them tends to offer similar risk-adjusted returns over long periods of time, thus warranting constant inclusion in any core portfolio.
It also makes sense to embrace truly diversifying alternative strategies that are either less correlated or negatively correlated. When valuations are expensive across the board, momentum-based strategies like managed futures can be a fantastic addition to a portfolio. Aside from government bonds, momentum is the only easily accessible strategy that tends to become more negatively correlated with broader markets during times of extreme stress and tends to deliver outsized returns when your other investments are losing money.
Of course, combining the asset classes into one portfolio is the hard part, but research going back to the early 1970s suggests that broadening this mix of core assets – so that you have some element of your portfolio that responds positively to every potential economic season – and managing the relative allocations to each economic scenario may be your biggest opportunity to add value in the investing process.  
You have a lot to gain from diversifying as broadly as possible, eliminating unrewarded costs, reducing your reliance on equity risk, and reining in the emotional mistakes that often lead investors to dramatically underperform. Remember, in a world characterized by deleveraging, changing demographics in aging populations, financial repression, and increasingly experimental monetary policy, every basis point counts and anything can happen.
With that, let’s end our discussion with a few words of advice from the world’s largest and arguably most successful hedge fund manager, Ray Dalio:
What I'm trying to say is that for the average investor, what I would encourage them to do is to understand that there's inflation and growth. It can go higher and lower and to have four different portfolios essentially that make up your entire portfolio that gets you balanced.  Because in every generation, there is some period of time, there's a ruinous asset class, that will destroy wealth and you don't know which one that will be in your life time. So the best thing you can do is have a portfolio that is immune, that is well diversified.  That is what we call an all-weather portfolio.  That means you don't have a concentration in that asset class that's going to annihilate you and you don't know which one it is.

A Korean Black Swan?

Last week I was in Newport, Rhode Island, at the Naval War College, where I participated in a summer study group focused on possible futures and how they might affect the strategy of the US Defense Department. The discussions were wide-ranging and mind-expanding, at least for me. As readers know, I believe that Japan has begun a long-term process of continually devaluing its currency. For reasons I have written about at length in previous letters, I think the yen could go to 200 to the dollar in the next five years. I don’t see a precipitous move, simply a steady erosion as Japan tries to bring back inflation and export its deflation.
While the yen at its current valuation is not a particular problem for the rest of the world, when it hits 120 we will start to see raised eyebrows and political speeches from the countries most affected. At 140 we could start to see serious reactions.
One of the countries that I think is put into a most difficult situation is South Korea. Their options for responding to a weakening yen are quite limited. If they respond by printing more of their own currency, they are likely to engender a debilitating inflation, which is of course not a good thing. Protectionism will have little real effect vis-à-vis Japan. Remember that the Japanese yen was 357 to the dollar about 40 years ago. The Japanese watched their currency rise by almost 400% in the decades since. The only real response available to them was to simply become more competitive and more productive as their currency got stronger, and to their great credit they did.
Honing their competitive edge may also be the only real option for South Korea. But it is not an easy one, of course, and you will hear lots of complaints from Korean politicians and businessmen. Not an easy environment, to be sure.
Now let’s shift our focus to North Korea. Everyone (including your humble analyst) is worried about the isolationist regime in North Korea having access to nuclear weapons and the ability to deliver them on missiles. But a few conversations I had this past week led me to think there is another scenario we should consider.
A side conversation at the study group began with an observation by a senior officer about the ability of the North Korean military to actually project power. As this information is nothing more than what you can find in the newspapers, I feel comfortable discussing it here. Everyone knows that North Koreans have been malnourished for multiple decades. Studies suggest that North Koreans may be up to three inches shorter than South Koreans and have diminished IQs because of malnourishment as children. The latter is a known effect on human beings anywhere who are subjected to a starvation diet. The North Korean population has suffered from severe diet restriction for decades.
How capable is the North Korean military of actually mounting an offensive when their soldiers are simply not physically able to withstand the pressures of combat? I was also able last week to visit with one of the great geopolitical strategists of our time, Professor Ian Bremmer of Columbia, who is the president and founder of Eurasia Group, with some 100 geopolitical analysts working for him. I shared with him my concerns about the Korean peninsula. He immediately said that he was more worried about the Korean peninsula than any other part of the world, including the Middle East. One of the interesting things that he shared is that an increasing number of cell phones are being smuggled into North Korea from China and that the North Koreans are beginning to get the real story about the world rather than just the propaganda fed to them by their government.
While there is little ability for the North Korean population to actually stage a revolution, as they do not have the weapons and hungry people really have difficulty mounting military operations, there is the possibility of the country becoming increasingly difficult to manage. Combine that with the potential for a disastrous food-production year, and the potential for the collapse of the government is not all that far-fetched.
There were not many people forecasting the collapse of the USSR in 1987. Yet as we look back, the confluence of causes that resulted in its collapse seems rather obvious. Probably, the current dictatorship will maintain its stranglehold on North Korea. That is the tendency with repression and tyranny – witness Cuba and any number of other countries. But one cannot dismiss the possibility of a collapse of the North Korean state.
If that were to happen it would be a humanitarian disaster. In the long run it might be better for the North Korean people, but in the short run it would be catastrophic. It is not unreasonable to expect that South Korea would have to do the bulk of the heavy lifting, especially after the first year or so. And should the world no longer have to focus on the ability of North Korea to create mischief with nuclear weapons, North Korea could soon become page 16 news.
No matter how positively you would want to view Korean unification, the process would be enormously expensive for South Korea. Assimilating a population long challenged by hardship into a new reality, not to mention incorporating it into a modern economic model, is a daunting challenge. I think the task would be more difficult and more expensive on a per-capita basis than the unification of Germany.
And this could happen while the attention of South Korea is focused on dealing with the devaluation of the yen and the need to become progressively more competitive to maintain its export and business model. There is also the possibility of massive refugee movements into China. That is a significantly different issue than worrying about a million-man army crossing the DMZ into South Korea.
I’m not saying this will happen, but it is a possibility we need to keep an eye on.

Did China Just Fire The First Salvo Towards A New Gold Standard?

In a somewhat shockingly blunt comment from the mouthpiece of Chinese officialdom, Yao Yudong of the PBoC's monetary policy committee has called for a new Bretton Woods system to strengthen the management of global liquidity. In an article in the China Securities Journal, Yao called for more power to the IMF as international copperation and supervision are needed. While comments seem somewhat barbed towards the rest of the world's currency devaluers, givenChina's growing physical gold demand and the fixed-exchange-rate peg that 'Bretton Woods' represents, and contrary to prevailing misconceptions that the SDR may be the currency of the future, China just may opt to have its own hard asset backed optionality for the future; suggesting the new 'bancor' would be the barbarous relic (or perhaps worse for the US, the Renminbi). Of course, the writing has been on the wall for China's push to end the dollar reserve supremacy for over two years as we have dutifully noted - since no 'world reserve currency' lasts forever.


Over the last two years, we have noted:









As a reminder, we noted here:
The question why China has been scrambling to internationalize the CNY has nothing to do with succumbing to Western demands at reflating its currency to appreciate it and thus to push its current account even lower in the country with the shallowest stock market and the most bank deposits (i.e., most prone to sudden, abrupt bursts of inflation), nearly double those of the US, and everything to do with preparing the world for the "final monetarism frontier", which will take place when the BOJ's reflation experiment fails, and last remaining source (at least before Africa, but that is the topic for another day) of credit formation - the PBOC - finally ramps up.
As we pointed out a few days ago when we discussed the accelerating Chinese credit impulse and its soaring 240% debt-to-GDP ratio:
 
What should become obvious is that in order to maintain its unprecedented (if declining) growth rate, China has to inject ever greater amounts of credit into its economy, amounts which will push its total credit pile ever higher into the stratosphere, until one day it pulls a Europe and finds itself in a situation where there are no further encumberable assets (for secured loans), and where ever-deteriorating cash flows are no longer sufficient to satisfy the interest payments on unsecured debt, leading to what the Chinese government has been desperate to avoid: mass corporate defaults.

At that point it will be up to the PBOC to do what the Fed, the ECB, the BOE and the BOJ have been doing: remove any pretense of money creation via the commercial bank complex (even if these are merely glorified government-controlled entities), and proceed to outright monetization of de novo created assets, thus flooding the system with as much money as is needed to preserve the illusion of growth. Naturally, with the Chinese stock market having proven itself to be a horrible inflation trap (and as a result the bulk of new levered money creation goes into real estate), the inflation explosion that would result would be epic.
And that, in a nutshell, is the reason why China is doing all it can to prepare for the moment when capital flows will soar once the PBOC no longer has the option to extend and pretend its moment of entry into the global reflation race. Yes, it will be caught between a rock (hyperinflation) and a hard place (a very hard crash landing), but the fact that neither of those outcomes has a happy ending will hardly stop the PBOC from at least preserving the alternative. That alternative will of course be to be ready and able to hit the switch when the BOJ's printer burns out, and someone else has to step in and fill its shoes in the global "money creation" strategy, which sadly is the only one the world has left.
Finally, the question then will be not if, or how long, the US Dollar will remain the world's reserve currency, when even the Developed world is forced to admit the PBOC's monetarist primacy over the Fed, but just how much unencumbered gold one has to hedge against what will be the final, global bout of hyperinflation, the one spurred by every single DM and EM central bank is forced to print for dear fiat status quo life, or else.

Dallas Fed's Fisher: "We Own A Significant Slice Of Critical Markets. This Is Something Of A Gordian Knot"

From "Horseshift! (With Reference to Gordian Knots [15])" - the prepared remarks by the Dallas Fed's Dick Fisher released moments ago, in which the Fed president with GLD holdings, gets folksy with the Fed's balance sheet.

Years of Extraordinary Measures

For six of my eight years at the Fed, we have been working to bring the nation’s economy out of recession. The fiscal authorities have for the most part been AWOL during this time, having left the parking brake on during their absence. This has placed the onus on the Bernanke-led Federal Reserve. We have undertaken extraordinary measures, first to get the economy out of the emergency room after the financial system seizure of 2008-09, and more recently, to goose up the private sector to expand payrolls. Toward this end, the Fed cut interest rates to their lowest levels in the nation’s 237-year history by initially cutting the base rate for overnight interbank lending—the “fed funds rate”—to near zero, and then by purchasing massive amounts of U.S. Treasuries and bonds issued or backed by U.S. government agencies (obligations of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and Sally Mae, and mortgage-backed securities).
This later program is referred to as quantitative easing, or QE, by the public and as large-scale asset purchases, or LSAPs, internally at the Fed. As a result of LSAPs conducted over three stages of QE, the Fed’s System Open Market Account now holds $2 trillion of Treasury securities and $1.3 trillion of agency and mortgage-backed securities (MBS). Since last fall, when we initiated the third stage of QE, we have regularly been purchasing $45 billion a month of Treasuries and $40 billion a month in MBS, meanwhile reinvesting the proceeds from the paydowns of our mortgage-based investments. The result is that our balance sheet has ballooned to more than $3.5 trillion. That’s $3.5 trillion, or $11,300 for every man, woman and child residing in the United States.
The theoretical mechanics behind QE are straightforward: When the Fed buys Treasuries and MBS, it pays for them, putting money into the economy. A key intent of this unprecedented program was to drive down interest rates to such a degree that businesses would achieve a financial comfort level that would induce them to put back to work the millions of Americans that were laid off in the Great Recession. Thus far, only 76 percent of the jobs lost during 2008-09 have been clawed back in the more than three and a half years of modest to moderate payroll gains. This 76 percent figure does not include the 3 million or so jobs that would normally be created to absorb growth in the working-age population.
The Challenge of Untying the Monetary Gordian Knot
The challenge now facing the FOMC is that of deciding when to begin dialing back (or as the financial press is fond of reporting: “tapering”) the amount of additional security purchases. In his press conference following our June FOMC meeting, speaking on behalf of the Committee, Chairman Bernanke made clear the parameters for dialing back and eventually ending the QE program. Should the economy continue to improve along the lines then envisioned by Committee, the market could anticipate our slowing the rate of purchases later this year, with an eye toward curtailing new purchases as the unemployment rate broaches 7 percent and prospects for solid job gains remain promising.
Kindly note that this does not mean that the Committee would envision raising the shorter term fed funds rate simultaneously; indeed, the Committee has said it expects this pivotal rate to remain between 0 and ¼ percent at least as long as the unemployment rate remains above 6.5 percent, intermediate prospects for inflation are reasonable, and longer-term inflationary expectations remain well anchored.
Having stated this quite clearly, and with the unemployment rate having come down to 7.4 percent, I would say that the Committee is now closer to execution mode, pondering the right time to begin reducing its purchases, assuming there is no intervening reversal in economic momentum in coming months.
This is a delicate moment. The Fed has created a monetary Gordian Knot. You can see the developing complexity of that knot in this sequence of slides tracing the change in our portfolio structure with each phase of QE.

Whereas before, our portfolio consisted primarily of instantly tradable short-term Treasury paper, now we hold almost none; our portfolio consists primarily of longer-term Treasuries and MBS. Without delving into the various details and adjustments that could be made (such as considerations of assets readily available for purchase by the Fed), we now hold roughly 20 percent of the stock and continue to buy more than 25 percent of the gross issuance of Treasury notes and bonds. Further, we hold more than 25 percent of MBS outstanding and continue to take down more than 30 percent of gross new MBS issuance. Also, our current rate of MBS purchases far outpaces the net monthly supply of MBS.
The point is: We own a significant slice of these critical markets. This is, indeed, something of a Gordian Knot.
Those of you familiar with the Gordian legend know there were two versions to it: One holds that Alexander the Great simply dispatched with the problem by slicing the intractable knot in half with his sword; the other posits that Alexander pulled the knot out of its pole pin, exposed the two ends of the cord and proceeded to untie it. According to the myth, the oracles then divined that he would go on to conquer the world.
There is no Alexander to simply slice the complex knot that we have created with our rounds of QE. Instead, when the right time comes, we must carefully remove the program's pole pin and gingerly unwind it so as not to prompt market havoc. For starters though, we need to stop building upon the knot. For this reason, I have advocated that we socialize the idea of the inevitability of our dialing back and eventually ending our LSAPs. In June, I argued for the Chairman to signal this possibility at his last press conference and at last week’s meeting suggested that we should gird our loins to make our first move this fall. We shall see if that recommendation obtains with the majority of the Committee.

Horseshift!

We needn’t be condemned to the glue factory. As I said, American companies publicly held and private—large, medium and small—have taken advantage of the cheap and abundant money made available by the Fed’s hyper-accommodative monetary policy to create lean and muscular balance sheets. In response to the deep recession and the challenges of fiscal and regulatory uncertainty, they have rationalized their cost structures and ramped up productivity, leveraging IT, just-in-time inventory management and new production structures to the max. I believe American businesses today are, far and away, the most efficient operators in the world. We have countless businesses in every sector of goods and service production that are the equivalents of the Secretariats, Man o’ Wars, Citations, Seabiscuits or any great thoroughbred that has ever graced the track. They just need to be let out of the starting gate.
That gate is controlled by Congress, working with the president. If they would just let 'em rip, we would have an economy that would soar. We would experience what, tongue firmly but confidently in cheek, I would call “horseshift”: from being the stuff of an economic glue factory to becoming the wonder-horse that would outpace the rest of the world, putting the American people back to work and renewing the wonder of American prosperity. If you and your fellow citizens from whatever state you hail from insist upon it, it will be done.


But why "let them rip" when Congress and the president can continue the charade, and pretend they are doing their political roles of sticking to their ideologies (i.e., no consensus on anything) when at the end of the day it is the Fed whose all enabling monetary policy provides the necessary impetus to keep the economy if not growing, then at least keep it from imploding (for now) even if it means record daily S&P highs and unseen splintering between America's uber rich and everyone else.
In other words good luck with all that.... folksy or not.

Sunday, August 4, 2013

'Havoc' as HSBC prepares to close diplomatic accounts

HSBC bank has reportedly asked more than 40 diplomatic missions to close their accounts as part of a programme to reduce business risks.
The Vatican's ambassadorial office in Britain, the Apostolic Nunciature, is among those said to be affected.
The head of the UK's Consular Corps told the Mail on Sunday the decision has created "havoc".
The Foreign Office has been in touch with HSBC, stepping in to help diplomats open other bank accounts.
HSBC said embassies were subject to the same assessments as its other business customers. They need to satisfy five criteria - international connectivity, economic development, profitability, cost efficiency and liquidity.
A spokesman said: "HSBC has been applying a rolling programme of "five filter" assessments to all its businesses since May 2011, and our services for embassies are no exception.
"We do not comment on individual customer relationships."
The Mail on Sunday reported that the High Commission of Papua New Guinea and the Honorary Consulate of Benin have also been asked to move their accounts within 60 days.
Bernard Silver, head of the Consular Corps, which represents consuls in the UK, told the paper: "HSBC's decision has created havoc.
"Embassies and consulates desperately need a bank, not just to take in money for visas and passports but to pay staff wages, rent bills, even the congestion charge."
John Belavu, minister at the Papua New Guinea High Commission, said: "We've been banking with HSBC for 22 years and for them to throw us off in this way was a bombshell."
Lawrence Landau, honorary consul of Benin, told the paper his mission had been having trouble finding a new bank.
He said: "We have been trying everyone but all the UK banks are clamming up."
Suspicious accounts
Embassies are treated like business customers by banks as they generally use services like cash and payroll management and can take out loans.
They also have to pay for ambassadorial accommodation and costs such as school fees for the children of diplomats - expenses that are difficult to meet without a valid UK bank account.
They are sometimes considered to be at risk of money laundering activities because of their political exposure and banks have been warned in the past for failing to flag up suspicious accounts.
The Riggs National Bank in Washington was fined and later sold off after a 2004 US Senate report revealed executives in its embassy business had helped Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet hide millions of dollars.
HSBC was fined $1.92bn (£1.26bn) by US authorities last year after it was blamed for alleged money laundering activities said to have been conducted through its Latin American operations by drug cartels.
The bank admitted at the time that it had failed to effectively counter money laundering.

Friday, August 2, 2013

Presenting Today's Blatant Bond Market Manipulation

Today is the second time in three months that someone, or something, either leaked the Non-farm payroll data just ahead of its official release, or if not leaked then a trading algorithm manipulated the bond market ahead of the official data release by launching a "momentum ignition" (see here [12]here [13]and here [14]for much more on how HFT uses this strategy over and over to set trading bands) launch higher just ahead of the official data release at 8:30:00:0000 am that desperately needed to push 10 Year yields, already on the verge of a 2 year breakout, lower.
The chart below shows how 3 seconds ahead of the official release someone started a buying spree before the actual reported BLS miss. This was followed by a trading halt in the bond complex as the machines reacted to the new "baseline" price in the 10 and 30 Year Treasury future, and proceeded to trade using the new momentum-ignited reference price as the reference level.
 [15]
Was this a leak, or was it simply a programmed momentum ignition event designed to provide a higher high in the 10Y futures, and drag the bond complex higher - after all we live in a world in which algos are buying just because other algos are buying - which ahead of the BLS print was threatening to surge above the 2.7535% 2 year high in yield, and finally wake up stocks that soaring yields are here.
As a reminder, this is precisely what happened June 7 when a BLS released resulted in yet another bond market ignition and subsequent halt as described in "Here Is Today's 482 Millisecond NFP Leak, The Subsequent Gold Slam And Trading Halts In Treasurys And ES [16]", although back then it was not nearly as blatant: the "momentum ignition" hit just 482 before the official release back then.
Here Is Today's 482 Millisecond NFP Leak, The Subsequent Gold Slam And Trading Halts In Treasurys And ES

What was more amusing was the action after the NFP release in both the eMini and the T-Bond futures, all of which had to be halted for a whopping 5 seconds until the algos, selling everything at first, got the memo out that good news today was in fact good news, and promptly ramped risk to the moon. Either that, or someone called in a code Red, made it so all selling was literally prohibited, and with the only path of no resistance up, resulted in today's epic melt up on what was initially a very bearish kneejerk response to the NFP print.

First: September 2013 T-Bond Futures trades and quote spread. The deluge of selling hits 482 milliseconds before the NFP release, leading to a 5 second circuit breaker and halting the OTR future contract of the world's largest bond market. Abe would be proud.



Meanwhile in equities, all liquidity disappeared. All of it.

 [17]
Fear not though: the CFTC is on top of it. You see, when bond trading is halted two times in three months alongside of the most important monthly economic release, someone has a fit, and they scream at the CFTC. The Goldman-alumnus headed CFTC. So what does the CFTC do? They "review" it. From Reuters [18]:
CFTC probing Treasury futures trading that led to halt at CME

U.S. futures regulators are reviewing trades that triggered a brief halt in trading at CME Group's markets for Treasury futures just as the U.S. government was poised to release key data on the jobs market.

"We are aware of it and will be doing a review of the trades, which is standard operating procedure for something like this," Commodity Futures Trading Commission commissioner Bart Chilton said in response to a query from Reuters.

CME Group halted trading in some Treasury futures for five seconds, beginning just before the 8:30 am ET (1230 GMT) release of the monthly jobs report.

Large trades in 10-year and 30-year Treasury futures were made just prior to the release of the report. Such trades and large market moves can trigger automatic stops in CME markets.
Of course, once the CFTC and CME both discover the ignition originated either at Liberty 33, at its proxy Citadel, or Goldman/JPM, the "review" will promptly fade into obscurity, or at best, the CFTC will "discover" that nothing actually happened contrary to irrefutable evidence to the contrary.
Just like in its investigation of silver manipulation. But at least Bart Chilton will sell more poetry books.

US Escalates: Issues Worldwide Travel Alert Following Embassy Closures

With US leaks about Israeli air strike on Syria, John Kerry stirring the civil war pot in Egypt, and the closure of US embassies across the Muslim world (Iraq, Afghanistan, Qatar, Bahrain, Oman, Kuwait, Bangladesh, Saudi Arabia, Libya, Yemen, UAE, Algeria, Mauritania, Sudan, Israel (Tel Aviv) and Jordan), it appears something is afoot. To add to the intrigue, the US State Department just issued a worldwide travel alert for US citizens.
  • *STATE DEPARTMENT WORLDWIDE TRAVEL ALERT EXPIRES AUGUST 31, 2013
  • *STATE DEPT ISSUES WORLDWIDE TRAVEL ALERT FOR U.S. CITIZENS
An Al-Qaeda threat has been posited but with no follow-up but we can't help but fear what we wondered about previously - the need for deficits to re-awaken (via some external event that no-one can 'un-patriotically' demur) providing more room for Bernanke to avoid his need for Taper.
The Department of State has instructed certain U.S. Embassies and Consulates to remain closed or to suspend operations on Sunday, August 4.  The Department has been apprised of information that, out of an abundance of caution and care for our employees and others who may be visiting our installations, indicates we should institute these precautionary steps.
On Egypt,
Demonstrators calling for the reinstatement of ousted former president Mohammed Morsi (2012-13) remained defiant on 1 August, a day after the interim cabinet authorised the police to dismantle their protest camps. The authorities in recent days have filed additional charges for incitement to violence against senior members of Morsi's Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist parties.

...

Accordingly, Embassy Cairo will be closed on Sunday, August 4.  U.S. citizens requiring emergency assistance should contact the Embassy switchboard which is manned 24/7 at 02-2797-3300.

Various media sources are reporting possible marches or demonstrations for Friday, August 2 and possibly throughout the weekend.  In addition, several media sources are reporting that the police have been given the authority to clear protestors from permanent gathering locations.  Should police move to clear these various locations, it may escalate into violent confrontations.  U.S. citizens should maintain a low profile and limit movements within their immediate residential neighborhoods.
On Saudi Arabia,
Department of State urges U.S. citizens to carefully consider the risks of traveling to Saudi Arabia. As the August 26, 2012, arrest of two terrorist cells by Saudi security authorities indicates, there remains an ongoing security threat due to the continued presence of terrorist groups, some affiliated with al-Qaida, who may target Western interests...

Why is Ben unhappy? Simple - as a reminder, the only reason Ben is even contemplating tapering has nothing to do with the economy. After all the Fed chairman (and/or his successor) is willing to send the stock market into stratospheric overdrive and would be very happy to add not subtract from the monthly QE $85 billion notional since it means more "wealth effect" and thus brings the US closer to the "Keynesian successful endgame" (that the logic here is completely inverted is well known to all but the most die-hard Keynesian fanboys and is not in the scope of this article).

However, the fact that the gross US debt issuance is declining (if only until the demographic and healthcare crunch hits in 2015 and deficits explode once more) means Bernanke has less primary issuance to monetize. Were Bernanke to maintain his monetization run rate into a lower deficit regime, the Chairman would destabilize the liquidity in the already increasingly illiquid Treasury market in which the Fed now holds over 30%of all 10 Year equivalents and its holdings increase by 0.3% every week. This illiquidity is manifesting itself most directly in the "special" repo rates that have become a norm in the past few months especially in the 10 Year, and which indicate an ongoing shortage of TSY collateral.

Of course, there is a very simple and elegant solution to declining defense spending, one which has been used time and again in US history when the US government needed to provide the Fed with more securities (i.e. deficit) to monetize: war.
Because, if in dire need to boost deficit spending, the chart below shows the most usual suspect: