Friday, August 2, 2013

The Snowden Time-Bomb

Authored by Harold James, originally posted at Project Syndicate,
In the aftermath of the global financial crisis, world leaders repeated a soothing mantra. There could be no repeat of the Great Depression, not only because monetary policy was much better (it was), but also because international cooperation was better institutionalized. And yet one man, the American former intelligence contractor Edward Snowden, has shown how far removed from reality that claim remains.
Prolonged periods of strain tend to weaken the fabric of institutional cooperation. The two institutions that seemed most dynamic and effective in 2008-2009 were the International Monetary Fund and the G-20; the credibility of both has been steadily eroded over the long course of the crisis.
Because the major industrial economies seem to be on the path to recovery – albeit a feeble one – no one seems to care very much that the mechanisms of cooperation are worn out. They should. There are likely to be many more financial fires in various locations, and the world needs a fire brigade to put them out.
The IMF’s resources were extended in 2009, and the organization was supposed to be reformed in order to give emerging markets more voice. But little progress has been made.
The Fund was the centerpiece of the post-1945 global economic system. It subsequently played a central role in the management of the 1980’s debt crisis and in the post-communist economic transition after 1989. But every major international crisis since then has chipped away at its authority. The 1997-1998 Asian financial crisis undermined its legitimacy in Asia, as many governments in the region believed that the crisis was being exploited by the United States and US financial institutions.
The post-2007 Great Recession discredited the IMF further for three reasons. First, the initial phase of the crisis looked like an American phenomenon. Second, the IMF’s heavy involvement in the prolonged euro crisis looked like preferential treatment of Europe and Europeans. In particular, the demand that, because the world was focused on Europe, another European (and another French national) should succeed the IMF’s then-managing director, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, was incomprehensible to the large emerging-market countries. Eventually, as in the Asian crisis, European governments and the European Commission fell out with the Fund and began to blame its analysis for having confused and unsettled markets.
On the big issues underlying the global financial crisis – the problem of current-account imbalances and deciding which countries should adjust, and reconciling financial reform with a pro-growth agenda – the IMF cannot say much more, or say it more effectively, than it could before the crisis.
The G-20 was the great winner of the financial crisis. The older summits (the G-7 or, with the addition of Russia, the G-8), as well as the G-7 finance ministers’ meetings, were no longer legitimate. They consisted of countries that had actually caused the problems; they were dominated by the US; and they suffered from heavy over-representation of mid-sized European countries.
The G-20, by contrast, brought in the big emerging markets, and its initial promise was to provide a way to control and direct the IMF. The new mood of global economic regime change was captured in the official photograph that was widely used in coverage of the most successful of the G-20 summits, held in London in April 2009.
In the short term, the London summit mitigated financial contagion emanating from southern Europe; gave the World Bank additional resources to deal with the problem of trade finance for emerging-market exports; appeared to give the IMF more firepower and legitimacy; and seemed to catalyze coordinated fiscal stimulus to restore confidence.
But only the more technical of these four achievements – the first two – stood the test of time. Everything else that was agreed at the London summit turned sour. The follow-up summits were lame. The idea of coordinated fiscal stimulus became problematic when it became obvious that many European governments could not take on more debt without unsettling markets and pushing themselves into an unsustainable cycle of increasingly expensive borrowing.
And yet, however limited the London summit’s achievements proved to be, the summit process itself was not fully discredited until Snowden’s intelligence revelations. It may be that leaders and their staffs were naive in believing that their communications were really secure. But Snowden’s revelations that the London summit’s British hosts allegedly monitored the participants’ communications make it difficult to imagine that the genuine intimacy of earlier summits can ever be recreated. And, with the espionage apparently directed mostly at representatives of emerging economies, the gulf between the advanced countries and those on the rise has widened further.
World leaders appear partly ignorant and partly deceptive in responding to the allegations. They are probably right to emphasize how little they really know about surveillance. It is in the nature of complex data-gathering programs that no one really has an overview.
But the lack of transparency surrounding data surveillance and mining means that, when a whistleblower leaks information, everyone can subsequently use it to build their own version of how and why policy is made. The revelations thus encourage wild conspiracy theories.
The substantive aftermath of the London summit has already caused widespread disenchantment with the G-20 process.The Snowden affair has blown up any illusion about trust between leaders – and also about leaders’ competence.By granting Snowden asylum for one year, Russian President Vladimir Putin, will have the bomber in his midst when he hosts this year’s summit in Saint Petersburg.

Thursday, August 1, 2013

44 facts about the death of middle class that every American should know

What is America going to look like when the middle class is dead? Once upon a time, the United States has the largest and most vibrant middle class in the history of the world. When I was growing up, it seemed like almost everyone was "middle class" and it was very rare to hear of someone that was out of work. Of course life wasn't perfect, but most families owned a home, most families had more than one vehicle, and most families could afford nice vacations and save for retirement at the same time. Sadly, things have dramatically changed in America since that time. There just aren't as many "middle class jobs" as there used to be. In fact, just six years ago there were about six million more full-time jobs in our economy than there are right now. Those jobs are being replaced by part-time jobs and temp jobs. The number one employer in America today is Wal-Mart and the number two employer in America today is a temp agency (Kelly Services). But you can't support a family on those kinds of jobs. We live at a time when incomes are going down but the cost of living just keeps going up. As a result, the middle class in America is being absolutely shredded and the ranks of the poor are steadily growing. The following are 44 facts about the death of the middle class that every American should know: 

1. According to one recent survey, "four out of five U.S. adults struggle with joblessness, near poverty or reliance on welfare for at least parts of their lives". 

2. The growth rate of real disposable personal income is the lowest that it has been in decades

3. Median household income (adjusted for inflation) has fallen by 7.8 percent since the year 2000. 

4. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the middle class is taking home a smaller share of the overall income pie than has ever been recorded before. 

5. The home ownership rate in the United States is the lowest that it has been in 18 years

6. It is more expensive to rent a home in America than ever before. In fact, median asking rent for vacant rental units just hit a brand new all-time record high

7. According to one recent survey, 76 percent of all Americans are living paycheck to paycheck. 

8. The U.S. economy actually lost 240,000 full-time jobs last month, and the number of full-time workers in the United States is now about 6 million below the old record that was set back in 2007. 

9. The largest employer in the United States right now is Wal-Mart. The second largest employer in the United States right now is a temp agency(Kelly Services). 

10. One out of every ten jobs in the United States is now filled through a temp agency. 

11. According to the Social Security Administration, 40 percent of all workers in the United States make less than $20,000 a year. 

12. The ratio of wages and salaries to GDP is near an all-time record low

13. The U.S. economy continues to trade good paying jobs for low paying jobs. 60 percent of the jobs lost during the last recession were mid-wage jobs, but 58 percent of the jobs created since then have been low wage jobs. 

14. Back in 1980, less than 30% of all jobs in the United States were low income jobs. Today, more than 40% of all jobs in the United States are low income jobs. 

15. At this point, one out of every four American workers has a job that pays $10 an hour or less

16. According to one study, between 1969 and 2009 the median wages earned by American men between the ages of 30 and 50 declined by 27 percent after you account for inflation. 

17. In the year 2000, about 17 million Americans were employed in manufacturing. Today, only about 12 million Americans are employed in manufacturing. 

18. The United States has lost more than 56,000 manufacturing facilities since 2001. 

19. The average number of hours worked per employed person per year has fallen by about 100 since the year 2000. 

20. Back in the year 2000, more than 64 percent of all working age Americans had a job. Today, only 58.7 percent of all working age Americans have a job. 

21. When you total up all working age Americans that do not have a job, it comes to more than 100 million

22. The average duration of unemployment in the United States isnearly three times as long as it was back in the year 2000. 

23. The percentage of Americans that are self-employed has steadily declined over the past decade and is now at an all-time low. 

24. Right now there are 20.2 million Americans that spend more than half of their incomes on housing. That represents a 46 percent increase from 2001. 

25. In 1989, the debt to income ratio of the average American family was about 58 percent. Today it is up to 154 percent

26. Total U.S. household debt grew from just 1.4 trillion dollars in 1980 to a whopping 13.7 trillion dollars in 2007. This played a huge role in the financial crisis of 2008, and the problem still has not been solved. 

27. The total amount of student loan debt in the United States recently surpassed the one trillion dollar mark

28. Total home mortgage debt in the United States is now about 5 times larger than it was just 20 years ago. 

29. Back in the year 2000, the mortgage delinquency rate was about 2 percent. Today, it is nearly 10 percent

30. Consumer debt in the United States has risen by a whopping 1700% since 1971, and 46% of all Americans carry a credit card balance from month to month. 

31. In 1999, 64.1 percent of all Americans were covered by employment-based health insurance. Today, only 55.1 percent are covered by employment-based health insurance. 

32. One study discovered that approximately 41 percent of all working age Americans either have medical bill problems or are currently paying off medical debt, and according to a report published in The American Journal of Medicine medical bills are a major factor in more than 60 percent of all personal bankruptcies in the United States. 

33. Each year, the average American must work 107 days just to make enough money to pay local, state and federal taxes. 

34. Today, approximately 46.2 million Americans are living in poverty. 

35. The number of Americans living in poverty has increased by more than 15 million since the year 2000. 

36. Families that have a head of household under the age of 30 have a poverty rate of 37 percent

37. At this point, approximately 25 million American adults are living with their parents. 

38. In the year 2000, there were only 17 million Americans on food stamps. Today, there are more than 47 million Americans on food stamps. 

39. Back in the 1970s, about one out of every 50 Americans was on food stamps. Today, about one out of every 6.5 Americans is on food stamps. 

40. Right now, the number of Americans on food stamps exceeds the entire population of the nation of Spain

41. According to one calculationthe number of Americans on food stamps now exceeds the combined populations of "Alaska, Arkansas, Connecticut, Delaware, District of Columbia, Hawaii, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Oregon, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Utah, Vermont, West Virginia, and Wyoming." 

42. At this point, more than a million public school students in the United States are homeless. This is the first time that has ever happened in our history. That number has risen by 57 percent since the 2006-2007 school year. 

43. According to U.S. Census data, 57 percent of all American children live in a home that is either considered to be "poor" or "low income". 

44. In the year 2000, the ratio of social welfare benefits to salaries and wages was approximately 21 percent. Today, the ratio of social welfare benefits to salaries and wages is approximately 35 percent

And not only is the middle class being systematically destroyed right now, we are also destroying the bright economic future that our children and our grandchildren were supposed to have by accumulating gigantic mountains of debt in their names. The following is from a recent articleby Bill Bonner:
Today, the U.S. lumbers into the future with total debt equal to about 350% of GDP. In Britain and Japan, the total is over 500%. Debt, remember, is the homage that the future pays to the past. It has to be carried, serviced... and paid. It has to be reckoned with... one way or another.

And the cost of carrying debt is going up! Over the last few weeks, interest rates have moved up by about 15% - an astounding increase for the sluggish debt market. How long will it be before long-term borrowing rates are back to "normal"?

At 5% interest, a debt that measures 3.5 times your revenue will cost about one-sixth of your income. Before taxes. After tax, you will have to work about one day a week to keep up with it (to say nothing of paying it off!).

That's a heavy burden. It is especially disagreeable when someone else ran up the debt. Then you are a debt slave. That is the situation of young people today. They must face their parents' debt. Even serfs in the Dark Ages had it better. They had to work only one day out of 10 for their lords and masters.
We were handed the keys to the greatest economic machine in the history of the planet and we wrecked it. 

As young people realize that their futures have been destroyed, many of them are going to totally lose hope and give in to despair. 

And desperate people do desperate things. As our economy continues to crumble, we are going to see crime greatly increase as people do what they feel they need to do in order to survive. In fact, we are already starting to see this happen. Just this week, CNBC reported on the raging epidemic of copper theft that we are seeing all over the nation right now:
Copper is such a hot commodity that thieves are going after the metal anywhere they can find it: an electrical power station in Wichita, Kan., or half a dozen middle-class homes in Morris Township, N.J.Even on a Utah highway construction site, crooks managed to abscond with six miles of copper wire.

Those are just a handful of recent targets across the U.S. in the $1 billion business of copper theft.

"There's no question the theft has gotten much, much worse," said Mike Adelizzi, president of theAmerican Supply Association, a nonprofit group representing distributors and suppliers in the plumbing, heating, cooling and industrial pipe industries.
The United States once had the greatest middle class in the history of the world, but now it is dying. 

This is causing a tremendous amount of anger and frustration to build in this nation, and when the next major wave of the economic collapse strikes, a lot of that anger and frustration will likely be unleashed. 

The American people don't understand that these problems have taken decades to develop. They just want someone to fix things. They just want things to go back to the way that they used to be. 

Unfortunately, the great economic storm that is coming is not going to be averted. 

Get ready while you still can. Time is running out.

http://www.sott.net/article/264559-44-facts-about-the-death-of-middle-class-that-every-American-should-know

The Most Important Number In The Entire U.S. Economy

Submitted by Michael Snyder of The Economic Collapse blog [18],
There is one vitally important number that everyone needs to be watching right now, and it doesn't have anything to do with unemployment, inflation or housing.  If this number gets too high, it will collapse the entire U.S. financial system.  The number that I am talking about is the yield on 10 year U.S. Treasuries.
When that number goes up, long-term interest rates all across the financial system start increasing.  When long-term interest rates rise, it becomes more expensive for the federal government to borrow money, it becomes more expensive for state and local governments to borrow money, existing bonds lose value and bond investors lose a lot of money, mortgage rates go up and monthly payments on new mortgages rise, and interest rates throughout the entire economy go up and this causes economic activity to slow down. 
On top of everything else, there are more than 440 trillion dollars worth of interest rate derivatives sitting out there, and rapidly rising interest rates could cause that gigantic time bomb to go off and implode our entire financial system.  We are living in the midst of the greatest debt bubble in the history of the world [19], and the only way that the game can continue is for interest rates to stay super low.  Unfortunately, the yield on 10 year U.S. Treasuries has started to rise, and many experts are projecting that it is going to continue to rise.
On August 2nd of last year, the yield on 10 year U.S. Treasuries was just 1.48%, and our entire debt-based economy was basking in the glow of ultra-low interest rates.  But now things are rapidly changing.  On Wednesday, the yield on 10 year U.S. Treasuries hit 2.70% before falling back to 2.58% on "good news" from the Federal Reserve.
Historically speaking, rates are still super low, but what is alarming is that it looks like we hit a "bottom" last year and that interest rates are only going to go up from here.  In fact, according to CNBC [20] many experts believe that we will soon be pushing up toward the 3 percent mark...
Round numbers like 1,700 on the S&P 500 are well and good, but savvy traders have their minds on another integer: 2.75 percent

That was the high for the 10-year yield this year, and traders say yields are bound to go back to that level. The one overhanging question is how stocks will react when they see that number.

"If we start to push up to new highs on the 10-year yield so that's the 2.75 level—I think you'd probably see a bit of anxiety creep back into the marketplace," Bank of America Merrill Lynch's head of global technical strategy, MacNeil Curry, told "Futures Now" on Tuesday.

And Curry sees yields getting back to that level in the short term, and then some. "In the next couple of weeks to two months or so I think we've got a push coming up to the 2.85, 2.95 zone," he said.
This rise in interest rates has been expected for a very long time - it is just that nobody knew exactly when it would happen.  Now that it has begun, nobody is quite sure how high interest rates will eventually go.  For some very interesting technical analysis, I encourage everyone to check out an article by Peter Brandt that you can find right here [21].
And all of this is very bad news for stocks.  The chart below was created by Chartist Friend from Pittsburgh [22], and it shows that stock prices have generally risen as the yield on 10 year U.S. Treasuries has steadily declined over the past 30 years...
CFPGH-DJIA-20 [23]
When interest rates go down, that spurs economic activity, and that is good for stock prices.
So when interest rates start going up rapidly, that is not a good thing for the stock market at all.
The Federal Reserve [24] has tried to keep long-term interest rates down by wildly printing money and buying bonds, and even the suggestion that the Fed may eventually "taper" quantitative easing caused the yield on 10 year U.S. Treasuries to absolutely soar a few weeks ago.
So the Fed has backed off on the "taper" talk for now, but what happens if the yield on 10 year U.S. Treasuries continues to rise even with the wild money printing that the Fed has been doing?
At that point, the Fed would begin to totally lose control over the situation.  And if that happens, Bill Fleckenstein told King World News [25] the other day that he believes that we could see the stock market suddenly plunge by 25 percent...
Let’s say Ben (Bernanke) comes out tomorrow and says, ‘We are not going to taper.’ But let’s just say the bond market trades down anyway, and the next thing you know we go through the recent highs and a month from now the 10-Year is at 3%. And people start to realize they are not even tapering and the bond market is backed up...

They will say, ‘Why is this happening?’ Then they may realize the bond market is discounting the inflation we already have.

At some point the bond markets are going to say, ‘We are not comfortable with these policies.’ Obviously you can’t print money forever or no emerging country would ever have gone broke. So the bond market starts to back up and the economy gets worse than it is now because rates are rising. So the Fed says, ‘We can’t have this,’ and they decide to print more (money) and the bond market backs up (even more).

All of the sudden it becomes clear that money printing not only isn’t the solution, but it’s the problem. Well, with rates going from where they are to 3%+ on the 10-Year, one of these days the S&P futures are going to get destroyed. And if the computers ever get loose on the downside the market could break 25% in three days.
And as I have written about previously [26], we have seen a huge spike in margin debt in recent months, and this could make it even easier for a stock market collapse to happen.  A recent note from Deutsche Bank explained precisely why margin debt is so dangerous [27]...
Margin debt can be described as a tool used by stock speculators to borrow money from brokerages to buy more stock than they could otherwise afford on their own. These loans are collateralized by stock holdings, so when the market goes south, investors are either required to inject more cash/assets or become forced to sell immediately to pay off their loans – sometimes leading to mass pullouts or crashes.
But of much greater concern than a stock market crash is the 441 trillion dollar interest rate derivatives bubble [28] that could implode if interest rates continue to rise rapidly.
Deutsche Bank is the largest bank in Europe, and at this point they have 55.6 trillion euros [29] of total exposure to derivatives.
But the GDP of the entire nation of Germany is only about 2.7 trillion euros for a whole year.
We are facing a similar situation in the United States.  Our GDP for 2013 will be somewhere between 15 and 16 trillion dollars, but many of our big banks have exposure to derivatives that absolutely dwarfs our GDP.  The following numbers come from one of my previous articles entitled "The Coming Derivatives Panic That Will Destroy Global Financial Markets[30]"...
JPMorgan Chase
Total Assets: $1,812,837,000,000 (just over 1.8 trillion dollars)
Total Exposure To Derivatives: $69,238,349,000,000 (more than 69 trillion dollars)

Citibank
Total Assets: $1,347,841,000,000 (a bit more than 1.3 trillion dollars)
Total Exposure To Derivatives: $52,150,970,000,000 (more than 52 trillion dollars)

Bank Of America
Total Assets: $1,445,093,000,000 (a bit more than 1.4 trillion dollars)
Total Exposure To Derivatives: $44,405,372,000,000 (more than 44 trillion dollars)

Goldman Sachs
Total Assets: $114,693,000,000 (a bit more than 114 billion dollars - yes, you read that correctly)
Total Exposure To Derivatives: $41,580,395,000,000 (more than 41 trillion dollars)

That means that the total exposure that Goldman Sachs has to derivatives contracts is more than 362 times greater than their total assets.
And remember, the biggest chunk of those derivatives contracts is made up of interest rate derivatives.
Just imagine what would happen if a life insurance company wrote millions upon millions of life insurance contracts and then everyone suddenly died.
What would happen to that life insurance company?
It would go completely broke of course.
Well, that is what our major banks are facing today.
They have written trillions upon trillions of dollars worth of interest rate derivatives contracts, and they are betting that interest rates will not go up rapidly.
But what if they do?
And the truth is that interest rates have a whole lot of room to go up.  The chart below shows how the yield on 10 year U.S. Treasuries has moved over the past couple of decades...
10 Year Treasury Yield [31]
As you can see, the yield on 10 year U.S. Treasuries was hovering around the 6 percent mark back in the year 2000.
Back in 1990, the yield on 10 year U.S. Treasuries hovered between 8 and 9 percent.
If we return to "normal" levels, our financial system will implode.  There is no way that our debt-addicted system would be able to handle it.
So watch the yield on 10 year U.S. Treasuries very carefully.  It is the most important number in the entire U.S. economy.
If that number gets too high, the game is over.