Asia is in Collapse. The Next Fed Chairman Doesn't Matter

The big news is what’s going on in Asia.

The US financial media continues to focus on who will be the next Fed Chairman, which is unimportant in the grand scheme of things. Greenspan created the biggest asset bubble in history. Bernanke bankrupted the republic and created an even bigger bubble trying to prove his misguided theories. Whoever takes over the reins at the Fed next will simply have the honor of being in the driver’s seat when the whole mess goes over the cliff.

Ignore the next Fed Chairman debate, the world has much bigger problems to worry about.

Let’s start with China.

China’s economy is based on fraud, not actual growth. The talking heads believe China will hit 7% GDP growth this year. Their electricity consumption is only up 2.9%. Can anyone explain how a country can be consuming electricity at 2.9% growth and hit GDP growth at 7%?

Take a look at the Chinese stock market. We’ve just taken out the “recovery” trendline going back to 2009. And we’ve done this at a time when China has just pumped $1.6 trillion in new credit (that’s 21% of GDP) into its economy in the last two quarters…

When you put an amount equal to 21% of your GDP into your banking system in six months and the stock market still falls, it’s GAME OVER.

Take a look at Japan. Abenomics (print even more money faster) was supposed to bring about growth. Instead, all it’s done is increase consumer prices. This in turn hurts incomes. And that implodes an economy (one which hasn’t seen major growth in 20+ years I might add).

The Abenomics bubble has burst. The Nikkei has failed to reclaim its trendline. This bull market is OVER.

So the second and third largest economies in the world are in collapse with stock market crashes.

What are the odds the world is somehow going to continue to grow through this? What are the odds that the next Fed Chairman will be able to manage this mess?

The Great Crisis, the one to which 2008 was just a warm up, is approaching. The time to prepare for it is BEFORE the US stock market bubble bursts.

We offer a free special report outlining how to prepare your portfolio for the coming crisis. You can pick up a copy at:

http://gainspainscapital.com/protect-your-portfolio/ [9]

7 Charts Of The Market's Complete Divorce From Reality

Submitted by Michael Snyder via The Economic Collapse blog [10],
The mainstream media would have us believe that the U.S. economy must be in great shape since the stock market has been setting new all-time record highs this month.  But is that really true?  Yes, surging stock prices have enabled sales of beach homes in the Hamptons to hit a brand new record high [11].  However, the reality is that stock prices have not risen dramatically in recent years because corporations are doing so much better than before.  In fact, the growth in stock prices has been far, far greater [12] than the growth of corporate revenues.  The only reason that stock prices have been climbing so much is because the Federal Reserve has been flooding the financial system with hundreds of billions of dollars that it has created out of thin air.  The Fed has created an artificial stock market bubble that is completely and totally divorced from economic reality.
Meanwhile, everything is not so fine [13] for the rest of the U.S. economy.  Economic growth projections have been steadily declining [14] over the past two years, and the growth rate of personal income in the United States has been on a huge downward trend [15] since 2008.  The U.S. economy actually lost 240,000 full-time jobs last month [16], and the middle class continues to shrink.
So welcome to the "new normal" where most Americans struggle at least part of the time.  According to one recent survey [17], "four out of 5 U.S. adults struggle with joblessness, near poverty or reliance on welfare for at least parts of their lives".  Things are tough out there, and they are steadily getting tougher.
Yes, the boys and girls up on Wall Street are doing great (for the moment [18]), but most of the rest of the country is really struggling.  We have never even come close to recovering from the last major economic crisis, and now another one is rapidly approaching.
The other day, Chartist Friend from Pittsburgh [19] sent me an email and told me that he had some charts that he wanted to share with me and asked if I wanted to see them.  I said sure, send them over right away.  These charts show very clearly that the stock market has become completely divorced from reality.
In a normal market, stock prices would only rise dramatically if the overall economy was healthy and growing.  Unfortunately, our economy is far from healthy and has been decliningfor a very long time [20].  If the financial markets were not being pumped up by so much money printing and so much debt [21], there is no way that stock prices would be this high.
If we truly did have a free market financial system, stock prices should be a reflection of the overall economy.  Instead, we have a very sick economy and financial markets that have been very highly manipulated.
For example, just check out the first chart that I have posted below.  If the economy was actually getting better, the percentage of working age Americans with a job should be increasing.  Sadly, that is not happening...
 [22]
This next chart shows how the average duration of unemployment has absolutely skyrocketed in recent years.  Yes, the duration of unemployment has improved slightly in recent months, but we are still very far from where we used to be.  Meanwhile, the stock market has been soaring to new all-time record highs...
 [23]
Traditionally, there has been a high degree of correlation between stock prices and real disposable personal income.  From the chart below, you can see that this relationship held up quite well through the end of the last recession, and then it started breaking down.  This is especially true at the very end of the chart.  Real Disposable income has started to decline sharply but stock prices just continue to soar...
 [24]
When an economy is healthy, money tends to circulate through that economy at a healthy pace.  That is why the chart below is so alarming.  The velocity of money is the lowest that it has been in modern times, and this indicates that economic activity should be slowing down.  But the Federal Reserve has enabled the bankers [25] to thrive by pumping massive amounts of money into the financial system...
 [26]
When an economy goes into recession, freight shipments tend to go down.  In the chart below, you can see that this happened during the past two recessions.  Unfortunately, we have never even come close to returning to the level that we were at before the last recession, and yet the stock market has been able to soar to unprecedented heights...
 [27]
When an economy is growing and people are able to get good jobs, they tend to go out and buy new homes.  Yes, we have seen a bit of an increase in the number of new homes sold recently, but we are still a vast distance away from the level we were at before the last recession.  And now mortgage rates are starting to rise steadily [28], and this is likely going to cause the number of new homes sold to start going back down.  The chart below clearly shows us that the real estate market is far from healthy at this point...
 [29]
For most middle class Americans, their homes are their primary financial assets.  So the fact that home prices have declined so much is absolutely devastating for many families.  But stocks are primarily held by the top 5 percent of all Americans, and as the chart below shows, they have benefited greatly from the antics of the Federal Reserve in recent years...
 [30]
There is no way in the world that the stock market should be this high.  The economic fundamentals simply do not justify it.  As a society, we consume far more than we produce, our debt is growing at an exponential pace [31], our economic infrastructure is being absolutely gutted and our financial system is a giant Ponzi scheme that could collapse at any time [32].
And no market can stay divorced from reality forever.  At some point this bubble is going to burst, and when financial bubbles burst they tend to do so very rapidly.
As Marc Faber recently said [33], "one day, this financial bubble will have to adjust on the downside."
When it does "adjust", we are likely going to see a financial panic even worse than we witnessed back in 2008.  Credit will freeze up, economic activity will grind to a standstill and millions of Americans will lose their jobs.
Don't assume that the bubble of false prosperity that we are enjoying right now will last forever.
It won't.
Use the time that you have right now to prepare for what is ahead.
A great storm is rapidly approaching, and I don't see any way that it is going to be averted.

http://www.zerohedge.com/print/476978

Are We Investing Or Are We Just Dodging Thieves?

Submitted by Charles Hugh-Smith of OfTwoMinds blog,

The individual with complete control of all his assets is the only truly wealthy person in a kleptocracy.

 

Correspondent Jeff W. recently posed a deeply insightful question: are we investing or are we really just trying to dodge thieves?

 

This question slices right through the carefully cultivated illusion of trust and prosperity and plunges straight into the heart of our cartel-state financial system.

 

Here are Jeff's initial thoughts on the question:

 

 

---

"As we try to preserve capital and earn a return on it, are we investing today or are we really just trying to dodge thieves?

First of all I question how much real investing is going on in America today. We continue to lose manufacturing in this country, so in manufacturing, disinvestment is what is going on. People speak of investing in houses, but today’s McMansions, if you look at how they are built, do not qualify as long-term investments. They are built more to allow their owners to participate in a real estate asset bubble rather than to live in and enjoy for generations (which is the purpose houses would be built for in a sane and honest world).

Investments in strip malls and big-box stores do not increase the wealth of the nation. When you have enough retailing, it is enough. You don’t need any more. Adding more retail space is malinvestment. A lot of retail space that is being added now will have to close down if The Federal Reserve ever starts tapering in a serious way.

So there is reason to suspect that not very much productive investment is really taking place in American at all. Regardless of that, investors still have to dodge the ubiquitous thieves who are swarming all over the landscape.

If you leave your money parked in cash, you will lose it to inflation. As you have pointed out, each person experiences a differing inflation rate; for some people, today’s rate could easily be 10%-15%. That’s how much they lose if they stay in cash.

If you buy commodities futures, you are at the mercy of the thieves who suppress prices with massive naked shorting. Price manipulation is a form of stealing, and many precious metal investors have been victimized lately by the thieves who do it.

If you buy bonds, you are likely buying at the top of a bubble. Running Ponzis in the form of asset bubbles is, of course, another kind of theft.

How about stocks? Looking at the disinvestment going on in the U.S., an investor might think that Chinese stocks would be the way to go. That’s where manufacturing is booming. But if an investor were to go that route in recent years, he would also have been burned. I believe that Chinese stocks, like commodity prices, have been manipulated in recent years by the Powers That Be.

Does it make sense that Chinese stocks should have lost 40% of their value since 2010 if their economy is growing 8-10% a year? Does it make sense that U.S. stocks should have gone up as they have? The whole investment environment today stinks of price manipulation.

So the skill we need today is not traditional investing skill; it is thief-dodging skill. It consists of knowing the thieves’ techniques and whom they are targeting, of knowing the bad neighborhoods to avoid, knowing how to avoid being a target, trying to stay one jump ahead of them as they target new victim groups. These are skills people had back in the Dark Ages, and as we enter a new Dark Ages, these are skills we need again.

Millions of middle class Americans are being wiped out by thieves, and millions more will be wiped out as trends continue. But those who can successfully dodge the thieves can continue to maintain some civilized standards as they hope for better days."
 

---

Thank you, Jeff, for posing a thought-provoking question and commentary.

How do we avoid thieves when the financial system itself is theft? The obvious answer is to peel away from the crowd of lemmings running full tilt for the cliff edge of asset bubbles.

This requires substituting skepticism for blind faith. Please glance at this chart and ask yourself if this bubble is different and boom will not be followed by bust for the first time in human history:

The first step to avoid losing to thieves is avoid being a mark in the thieves' game.To some degree, this may mean absorbing a smaller, known loss (inflation by holding cash) to avoid the thieves' high-risk asset-bubble games where a potential loss of 40% of one's capital is not just possible but the unstated purpose of the game.

Another is to remove as many assets as possible from exposure to the thieves' systems. This means withdrawing your capital from Too Big to Fail Banks, pulling capital out of Wall Street, and limiting the amount of cash you hold in any one bank to limit losses from "bail-ins" where your cash is stolen to pay off banking-sector thieves.

The cartel-state debtocracy indentures the unwary with debt. Debt is the thieves' poisoned-sugar method of addiction and servitude. The high from debt is like the high from crack cocaine: it seems so "cheap" at first, and then the addiction kicks in and withdrawal becomes impossibly painful.

Welcome to the Thieves' Den of Debtocracy.

Since the system yokes those with high earned incomes into teams of tax donkeys, one way to minimize one's time on the tax donkey team is to reduce one's earned income, either by working less or by deploying one of the vanishingly few incontestably legal tax shelters open to the lower 99.9% (for example, socking away money for retirement).

The cartel-state Den of Thieves will naturally skim and steal what is most easily stolen, which is money and assets held in their own systems (banks, Wall Street, Treasury bonds, etc.).

This explains the popularity of the coffee-tin/glass-jar bank in kleptocracies: the cost to the authorities of trying to locate and confiscate millions of coffee-tin banks is prohibitive, and prone to marginal returns. Stealing money from depositors via a "bail-in" is effortless and essentially cost-free to the state, as is requiring all retirement funds be invested in Treasury bonds ("for your own good," of course).

No matter how desperate the cartel-state thieves are for more cash, they know that confiscating the serfs' tools and land without the cover of taxes and debt would trigger revolt. So assets that are physical objects or immaterial assets such as human and social capital are beyond the easy reach of the cartel-state thieves.

Taxes and debt are the two methods used for wholesale thievery via confiscation.Can't pay your mortgage or property taxes? Oops, your assets, land and home are confiscated. The ideal situation is not have a mortgage or any other debt, as debt is what gives the thieves leverage over you. The only protection against wholesale theft via suddenly higher property taxes is a limit on annual tax increases (a.k.a. Prop 13).

Our financial system is structurally a kleptocracy. The less exposure one has to Wall Street and the financial debtocracy, the lower one's exposure to the thieves.

It's called opting out, or voluntary poverty. Poverty is of course a relative term. If all one's assets are real-world possessions and immaterial assets such as skills, personal integrity and networks of trusted associates, one is indeed poor in financial assets. But if control of one's assets is the only real measure of wealth, then the individual with complete control of all his assets is the only truly wealthy person in a kleptocracy.

Japan: From Quagmire To Abenomics To Collapse

This blog post was originally posted at Bawerk.net [16]. You may also follow us on twitter @EBawerk [17]

Part I: Toward the abyss

Japan has been in a stable, but unsustainable, equilibrium for years. Its leaders know it is unsustainable and in their immense wisdom, decided to manage the whole system in order to achieve a sustainable development. However, this will prove fraught with danger since moving an unsustainable system away from its steady-state runs the risk of unleashing a gale wave of unintended consequences. The problem of course is that the people now in charge of moving the Japanese system from its current constellation have absolutely no idea on how to get it from where it is back on sound footing. The reason is simple, as with most policy quacks they are taught by other quacks. Some of the teachers even have Ph.D.’s.  in quackery to prove to lesser quacks who truly master the art of quacking; we call them economists.

Economists are a group of people that look upon the social structure called the economy with condescension and arrogance. They see it as their task to manipulate other people in order to build confidence. If confidence is high, then economic growth, prosperity and bliss will come automatically. The problem is that when people feel down they do not spend money. And when people do not spend money, economic growth turns into contraction and people feel even worse in what turns out to be a self-reinforcing cycle of less growth, less confidence and even less growth and so on in perpetuity.

This is basically how Prime Minister Abe and his newly installed lackeys at the Bank of Japan see as the situation in Japan today. In the early 1990s people lost confidence for some unexplained reason, and because the supposedly omniscient masters did not do enough manipulation back then, confidence was never regained; which essentially explains the predicament Japan is in now.  

The real reason is more fundamental though and we will explain what happened in Japan. Before we do so, it is of the utmost importance for the reader to know what gross domestic production, or gross domestic consumption (GDC) as we call it, really is. It is essentially the amount of money spent on goods and services over a specified period of time. In other, and more “technical terms”, we can say that GDC is comprised of the monetary base * leverage in the fractional reserve banking system * money circulation.

The central bank manufactures monetary base at its own discretion. However, the broader money supply is dependent on a solvent banking system. If banks under the jurisdiction of the central bank are insolvent they cannot increase their balance sheet, or leverage up on the base money. After a financial crisis it is therefore hard for the central bank to create inflation since legacy assets held by the banks will weigh on their ability to create additional demand deposits. In addition, as banks hold back on money creation, transactions will inevitably drop. As you can see, it is actually true that an activist monetary policy can create growth in gross domestic production, but only because the very concept measures inflation of broad money supply and nothing else. From this follows a surprisingly well hidden fact; the debt to GDC ratio is important only because it measures whether debt is created at a rate faster or slower than monetary inflation.  This is why it has become so important for the new Japanese administration to create nominal GDC growth. They are desperate to inflate away the big pile of debt they have accumulated of which there is zero chance of ever being repaid. Put bluntly, they want to default covertly through inflationary resource confiscation.

If we look at the monetary breakdown of Japanese GDC we see a negative velocity effect. That means only a fraction of existing money circulates during the period of measurement (one year). However, by raising it to something greater than one – ceterius paribus – Japan could lift its GDC from the current level of Yen500tr to Yen800tr and simultaneously reduce the debt ratio from 230 per cent to 140 per cent! Alternatively, they could double the monetary base and again – ceterius paribus – reduce the debt ratio to around 100 per cent.

Please note that none of this creates any value at all, but only help to redistribute real wealth to the government which can squander it as the ruling class see fit.

Source: Bank of Japan (BoJ), Cabinet Office (CAO), own calculations

The second thing the reader needs to know about economics is that debt can have a positive or a negative effect on wealth creation, depending on what kind of deb. If the debt is made with the intent of making a subsequent sale, id est. a business loan, it will help increase capital accumulation. However, if the debt is taken on to fund current consumption it will decumulate the capital stock and make society poorer. In our work, we usually divide between good, bad and destructive debt. Good debt consists of business loans. Bad debt is defined as household and financial sector loans while government debt fit right into our category called destructive debt. Basically, debt need to have an intrinsic yield high enough to pay back the resources it helped claim from society, plus interest, for it to be considered good. Note, debt that is dependent on others yield or production, such as taxpayers, is not self-sufficient and cannot create prosperity.  With this in mind we look at what happened to Japan before and after it crashed in the 1990s

 

Source: Bank of Japan – Flow of Funds (BoJ), own calculations

Japan in the 1980s and 1990s show a remarkable resemblance to the US during the 2000s. In the midst of bubble finance, the system funded bad debt in droves. This pulled capital out of the system without replenishing it. Conventional wisdom tells you that the 1980s was a decade of spectacular growth for Japan, but truth be told they actually got a lot poorer by consuming capital. When the Bank of Japan (BoJ) felt compelled to raise interest rates sharply from 1989 to 1990 the malinvestments could no longer be funded. The bust was inevitable.

When the bubble finally burst as a consequence of the misaligned capital structure, the government stepped in and bailed out the bad debt by adding destructive debt. Of course, this policy benefitted the corporative part of the economy, such as big banks and politically connected businesses, but at the expense of zombifying the economy. Bad investments continued to drain the system of scarce capital, while the government doubled down in a desperate attempt to kick-start money multipliers and velocity.

But money multipliers could not be expanded because the banking system was rendered unable to increase base money leverage since they continued to fund capital projects that bled the economy dry.

In a desperate attempt to rectify the lack of “private sector” initiative the Japanese leaders schooled in Keynesian multipliers knew that their wasteful spending would at one point fund itself through higher tax income. Now, that did not work out as they hoped as spending soared while income kept falling.

Source: Ministry of Finance (MoF), own calculations and projections

Note that bond issuance has been larger than tax revenues since 2009 and under very conservative assumption will continue to be so for the foreseeable future. Japan has ended up in a rather peculiar situation in which revenue abide by the” laws” of deflation while spending reflects that of a system in inflation.

Conclusion

In an attempt to bail out unsound investments, Japan cemented an economic structure that was unsustainable. This lead directly to persistent capital consumption and a “lost decade(s)”

Part II: From quagmire to Abenomics.

Unsurprisingly the policy lead to a massive increase in debt levels. In order to feed the unsustainable system, consecutive Japanese governments threw money at it with the perverted consequence of depriving corporations of capital. Government debt grew inexorably while corporations got squeezed.   

Source: Bank of Japan – Flow of Funds (BoJ), Cabinet Office (CaO), own calculations

The central bank reacted by lowering interest rates from a peak of 6 per cent in the winter of 1990/91 to a low of 0.5 per cent in 1995. In addition they expanded their balance sheet by lending to banks against legacy assets.  The insolvent banking system and the overleveraged household sector did not crave liquidity for more than refinancing outstanding bad debt, so the increased base money ended up as excessive reserves in the BoJ deposit account. Sounds familiar?

Source: Bank of Japan (BoJ)

Source: Bank of Japan – Flow of Funds (BoJ), own calculations

Now, the initial measures taken may seem tepid compared to what we have been accustomed to today, but these were dramatic and unprecedented steps back then. It is also striking to see how similar the development prior to the bust and response taken after was compared to what we see across the western world today. Needless to say, it does not bode well for the future.

As Japan moved forward in the 1990s and 2000s it became obvious, even to the policy makers, that the situation was unsustainable, with nothing less than a Greek style fiscal Armageddon on the horizon. Tax revenues were dropping and bond issuance rising. New taxes introduced to fund the rapidly growing state harmed private capital accumulation even more. The corresponding spending growth was found mostly in debt service- and social costs. Those two categories account today for more than 50 per cent of total spending, and bar a default or dramatic cut in transfers to a rapidly ageing population, will only continue to eat into the overall budget.

Source: Ministry of Finance (MoF), own calculations

For Japan is not only in a dire fiscal situation, they are also the oldest country in the world. Social spending is growing exponentially and the demographic dividend they enjoyed up to the mid-1990s is now turning against them. There will be many more dependents and far fewer breadwinners as we move forward. The demographics in Japan would overwhelm the country even if their fiscal situation was sound.

Source: US Census Bureau, own calculations

Source: Ministry of Finance (MoF), own calculations

The only thing clueless policy makers could come up with in this dire situation was even more of the same. With the election of Shinzo Abe in December 16^th the people of Japan elected a man based on a promise of shake up the Bank of Japan. The resemblance to William Jennings Bryan and his famous “Cross of Gold” speech is eerie. The Japanese would not be “crucified on a cross of gold” any more. They elected a man who promised to free them of the shackles from a strong yen and save the day with creation of paper wealth. This is the perfect recipe for disaster.

 Conclusion:

Public debt is reaching ridiculous levels and spending will only grow from here. When big bulges of old people start to retire they will be dissaving and it will be impossible for the big banks to use excess deposits to roll over government debt. Collapse is at this stage inevitable.

Part III has recently been submitted to Bawerk.net [18]

The Exquisite Art Of Marketing To Pauperized Consumers (By Hiding Inflation)

Wolf Richter   www.testosteronepit.com   www.amazon.com/author/wolfrichter

While workers in the upper income categories, those who don’t have to worry about the price of toilet paper, have seen their incomes rise sharply over the years, the rest have been in a long downward spiral. To take just one measure: median household income, adjusted for inflation, has dropped 7.8% since 2000 (chart). The drop has been steeper for the lower income categories. These are the folks who do worry about the price of toilet paper. And for them, Kimberly-Clark Corp. and other tissue makers have a special strategy: “Desheeting.”

A word that top executives of personal-care conglomerates are proudly bandying about because it speaks of their corporate spirit of relentless innovation. And it cropped up during Kimberly-Clark’s second-quarter earnings call.

CFO Mark Buthman set the scene when he extolled “organic” sales growth of a whopping 3% in the second quarter, though actual sales, at $5.267 billion, were down fractionally year over year. A continuation of a worsening trend: in 2011, sales rose 5.5%. In 2012, sales rose only 1.0%, not even keeping up with inflation – a topic that came up a lot during the earnings call. In 2013, revenues look to be even more lackadaisical.

One exasperated analyst wanted to know with regards to the healthcare division, “Why do we have four quarters in a row of negative sales growth?”

“Yes. A couple of things,” retorted CEO Tom Falk, sticking to the rule of answering hairy questions with a yes; it would bamboozle everyone into having a positive attitude about the answer. “I think everybody in the healthcare space is trying to figure that out,” he said because his company wasn’t the only one with that problem. He ascribed it to high-deductible healthcare plans that encouraged consumers to make smart decisions; and to healthcare providers that pushed for “alternate therapies” before venturing into surgery. These efforts to tamp down on ballooning healthcare costs were giving his revenue-challenged company conniptions.

Yet Kimberly-Clark continues to eke out “adjusted earnings” growth – 8% per share in the second quarter. What gives? All manner of cost cutting, product-mix changes, and that word.

“Well, we took some desheeting in the quarter,” explained Mr. Buthman. The company was reducing the sheets on each roll of toilet paper and in each box of Kleenex. He called it an “innovation” that would lead to a “more positive” price. At the same time, volume, which the company counted in thousands of sheets, would decline. “Which net net, for us, works out to be a positive,” he said.

Citing the improved Cottonelle toilet paper line, he told an analyst, “It’s a great product, great category, growing rapidly. We will have to get you some, Connie, to try it.”

His strategy: “identifying and delivering cost savings in areas that our consumers and customers don’t care about....”

Because it’s tough out there. No revenue growth. Input prices that are increasing. Customers who can’t afford price increases. “Adjusted earnings” that have to increase. Solution: desheeting – rolls and boxes with fewer sheets. Consumers “don’t care about” that because they’re not supposed to notice.

Part of the innovation is to fluff up the tissue without adding more materials – 15% “bulkier,” it said on a box of Kleenex that had 13% fewer sheets in it, the Wall Street Journal discovered. In the Cottonelle line, sheet counts dropped by 5.7% to 9.6%. Fewer but fluffed up sheets, lower input costs for the company, and consumers who “don’t care about” that. A perfect solution – and a variation on an ancient theme – for hiding hefty price increases.

Other tissue makers are doing it too. They’re cutting the number of sheets per roll or box, they cutting the size of the sheets, and they’re fluffing up sheets to give consumers, as Mr. Buthman explained so eloquently in an interview, a “better, stronger, tissue so that you need fewer sheets to get the job done.”

But the math of getting “the job done” doesn’t quite work out that way. If someone for a particular “job” normally uses two sheets, he isn’t going to suddenly use 1.95 sheets for the same job to compensate for a 5% cut in sheet count, regardless of how fluffy and improved that innovative sheet may be. He’s going to use two sheets as before, and he’s going to buy more rolls and spending more money. If Kimberly-Clark’s cost-cutting and pricing strategy is working, he’ll never notice, though he might start wondering after a while where all his money is going.

Kimberly-Clark knows where his money is going. It’s propping up “adjusted earnings.” This is the high art of marketing to consumers who have been pauperized in small, nearly unnoticeable increments by over a decade of wage increases – for the lucky ones – that haven’t kept up with what the Fed is so passionate about creating: moderate inflation.

But the Fed has a problem. Foreigners have been big buyers of Treasuries. That buying collapsed during the financial crisis. Now, worried foreigners are once again bailing out. So far, the Fed has been picking up the slack. But what if the Fed were to “taper” those purchases, and long-term rates were to jump? Read....  Rising US Interest Rates Could Create An Economic Death Cycle. So Can The Fed Actually Taper QE?

Economics Cannot Trump Mathematics

Originally posted at Monty Pelerin's World blog [4],

Extreme Fear Is Reasonable
It is nearly impossible to convince people that an economic ending is likely, perhaps inevitable. It is beyond anything they have seen or can imagine. I attribute that to a normalcy bias, an inherent weakness of experiential learners. For many, accepting something that has not occurred during their time on the planet is not possible. The laws of economics and mathematics may shape history but they are not controlled by history.
The form of cataclysm and its timing is indeterminable. Political decisions continue to shape both. The madmen who are responsible for the coming disaster continue to behave as if they can manage to avoid it.  Violating Einstein’s definition of insanity, they continue to apply the same poison that caused the problem. These fools believe they can manage complexities they do not understand. We are bigger fools for providing them the authority to indulge their hubris and wreak such damage.
Apocalypse In One Picture
James Quinn [5] provided the following graph. If a picture is worth a thousand words, this graph is worth millions. The route to economic demise is depicted below:
 [6]

The relationships in this graph are terrifying! Debt is shown relative to GDP. GDP growth has been one-third the growth in debt for the period. That is, the economy required $3 of debt to produce $1 more in real GDP. In recent years diminishing returns to debt required $6 of debt to increase GDP a $1. Whatever the benefits of debt, they have clearly diminished, almost to zero. Debt expansion has gone exponential in order to salvage the weak growth in GDP.
To put this into a perspective the average reader can understand, think of GDP as a household’s spending. The “family” depicted above has to borrow each year in order to maintain its spending level. Imagine the condition of your family if you borrow ed 6 times the amount of incremental spending each year. Then imagine the condition of your family after forty years of continuously increasing your debt levels substantially in excess of your income.
It is impossible for a family without a printing press and a cooperative Federal Reserve to engage in such behavior. The government is different, you say? Surely it is, but not necessarily in a meaningful financial manner. Just as you would not survive such behavior, governments cannot either. History is full of examples of government collapses resulting from excessive debt and overspending. A printing press only provides the luxury of more time before the failure.
 [7]

You may object that a macroeconomy is different from a family. Debt (parroting the political claim) makes an economy grow faster. The evidence shown to the right does not support this claim. Government reported GDP growth rates are shrinking as the debt expansion accelerates. Since 1965 the growth rate of the economy has been declining.
Even if you accept government GDP reporting, the chart to the right shows a trend this is pointing to an average declining standard of living. That point will be reached when the GDP growth falls below the population growth.
The US economy has been underperforming since the 1970s according to government’s statistics. That is after all the games have been played with these numbers. How much longer can these trends continue and what happens at the end? No one can reasonably answer either of these questions.
What Is Known And Not Known
Two things are known:

• So long as borrowing increases faster than GDP, the ability to repay diminishes. That has been occurring for more than forty years and the differential growth rates have widened dramatically in recent years. 
• Not borrowing at this pace would likely have decreased reported GDP dramatically. While that may have been a proper economic response, it is now politically impossible (or highly unlikely).

Continuing to increase debt at a rate greater than GDP ensures financial collapse. Stopping or slowing down at this point likely leads to the same point. This country has maneuvered itself into a no-escape situation.
What would happen to GDP and the standard of living if borrowing were dramatically reduced? How much of the last $10 trillion in debt borrowed between 2000 and 2009 went directly into reported GDP?  Is it possible that reported GDP for this period could have been $10 trillion lower? If there is indeed a monetary/fiscal multiplier as Keynesians insist, then results would have been worse.
Answers to these questions are speculative. Those in favor of more debt argue that a calamity would have occurred had the massive rise in debt and its accompany stimulative effects not happened. For the Paul Krugmans of the world, more debt and stimulus is always the answer. All problems look like nails when you own only a hammer.
Rapidly increasing amounts of debt since 1965 have been accompanied by falling rates of growth. One may speculate what this growth would have been with different rates of debt expansion. Whether the rate of debt expansion increased or decreased the rate of real GDP is moot. Economists can use their competing paradigms to duel over this issue, but cannot come to a conclusion that is acceptable to most.
Mathematics, on the other hand, is definitive. There are mathematical limits that control the ability to service debt. Once these limits have been breached, some amount of the debt will be defaulted on. The breach point is referred to as a debt death spiral. The US has passed this mathematical point and is in a death spiral.
The political class in America, either via misguided economic policies or a deliberate attempt to hide the true condition of the country, has put us here. They will continue to employ whatever policies they believe will keep things going for a while longer. The tragic ending has been cast. Economics cannot trump mathematics.
http://www.zerohedge.com/print/476917

Detroit's Fallout: Muni Illiquidity And Full-Faith-And-Credit Failure

Municipal finance is in sharp focus after Detroit filed the largest municipal bankruptcy in history. Detroit’s filing is arguably an isolated case and its fiscal problems are not indicative of the broader municipal credit landscape; but, the outcome of the bankruptcy process will dictate whether the value of the full faith and credit pledge backing GO bonds will be diminished going forward. The global hunt for yield has probably chased new investors into the Muni market who may not fully understand that in recent years it has become an ‘ownership not rental’ market.  In other words, it is unlikely holders of Munis can sell what they own, as liquidity in the secondary
market is almost non-existent.

 [9]

Via Guy Haselmann (ScotiaBank),

Municipal finance is in sharp focus after Detroit filed the largest municipal bankruptcy in history and with analyst Whitney warning of more to come.  At the moment, Detroit’s (relatively small) $18 billion in GO (general obligation) bonds have had few ripple effects on the $3.7 trillion US municipal market, or on the $100 trillion of global fixed income securities.  However, this bankruptcy could eventually lead to significant reappraisals of credit risk, higher funding costs, and legal precedents pertaining to debt creditors and pension ‘guarantees’.

Many fiscal stresses have roots originating from the duplicitous incentive system of elected officials who over the past several decades promised future perks to state and local public employees, but who leave the fulfillment of those promises to successor governors or mayors.  In New Jersey for instance, Governor Chris Christie inherited an underfunded pension, mostly caused by 22 years in a row of preceding Governors not paying into the pension system the full amount allocated in the State’s annual budget.  Part of Christie’s high popularity in NJ and across the US is due to his plan to save the pension system – a plan that passed the state legislature with bi-partisan support.

Most US cities and states have not made much progress in addressing the legacies of those future promises.  Making matters worse is the fact that municipal finances (in recent years) have run deficits despite constitutions that require balanced budgets.  Reduced federal subsidies and low economic growth rates after the 2008 financial crisis have further impaired budgets.  To bridge the gap, spending cuts are often made to basic social services such as education, road and park maintenance, infrastructure projects, or police and fire.  Cuts to pensions or bond creditors are typically skirted due to legal protections.

Michigan’s governor appointed an emergency manager who proposes paying Detroit’s GO bondholders less than 20 cents on the dollar.  As for the pensioners, the state constitution refers to accrued pension benefits as “contractual obligations which shall not be diminished or impaired”; yet, with a $9 billion underfunded gap, pensioners expect cuts.  At some point, a judge is likely to make a ruling on the legality of cuts to creditors or pensions which could have an impact on market premiums and other public pensions. (The PEW Research Center estimates US pension underfunding as high as $3 trillion).

GO bonds are viewed as relatively safe securities because they are seen as being in the first lean position and ‘guaranteed’ by the taxing authority of the municipality.  When problems develop, cuts in services happen, even as taxes rise.  The combination drives out residents and businesses.  The erosion to basic social services often leads to drops in home values and rising crime, further setting off a negative feedback loop.  Therefore, the ability to tax or cut service has its limitations and should not be seen as a solution to ‘guarantee’ creditors, because they destructively undermine the sustainability of the city or state.

The global hunt for yield has probably chased new investors into the Muni market who may not fully understand that in recent years it has become an ‘ownership not rental’ market.  In other words, it is unlikely holders of Munis can sell what they own, as liquidity in the secondary market is almost non-existent.

Via George Friedlander (Citi),

The Detroit bankruptcy filing is no surprise, given that its financial distress can be traced as far back as 1992, when Moody’s downgraded the City’s debt to junk. While ratings did bounce back to IG levels for brief periods, the City has essentially faced worsening budget deficits and liquidity challenges over the last decade.

The Detroit Emergency Manager’s proposal for creditors was unprecedented, at least as far as municipals are concerned, as it essentially tried to flatten the debt priority structure by attempting to impose the same treatment for GO bonds as other forms of debt which are deemed unsecured, including pension obligations, OPEBs, leases and COPs.

The Emergency Manager’s restructuring plan was unlikely to succeed via bilateral agreements and just on the face of it, the Chapter 9 filing could be viewed as mild positive for GO bond holders (especially unlimited GO bondholders) as now more control rests with the bankruptcy judge and standard Chapter 9 rules could apply.

However, the Emergency Manager retains the exclusive rights to file an adjustment plan (unlike Chapter 11, there is no provision in Chapter 9 for creditors to end this exclusivity or propose a competing plan). Thus, the original restructuring plan could serve a baseline for the ultimate settlement and recovery process.

It is still early in the process to predict recovery rates but the unlimited tax GO bond structure provides creditors with a stronger lien on the issuer’s resources and thus recovery rates on this class of debt could be somewhat higher vs. limited tax GOs and other forms of debt which are deemed unsecured. Again, it’s early in the process and there is no precedent for a large city with this level of financial distress.

Detroit’s filing is an isolated case and its fiscal problems are not indicative of the broader municipal credit landscape, in our view. But, the outcome of the bankruptcy process will dictate whether the value of the full faith and credit pledge backing GO bonds will be diminished going forward.

http://www.zerohedge.com/print/476855

Feds tell Web firms to turn over user account passwords

The U.S. government has demanded that major Internet companies divulge users' stored passwords, according to two industry sources familiar with these orders, which represent an escalation in surveillance techniques that has not previously been disclosed.

If the government is able to determine a person's password, which is typically stored in encrypted form, the credential could be used to log in to an account to peruse confidential correspondence or even impersonate the user. Obtaining it also would aid in deciphering encrypted devices in situations where passwords are reused.

"I've certainly seen them ask for passwords," said one Internet industry source who spoke on condition of anonymity. "We push back."

A second person who has worked at a large Silicon Valley company confirmed that it received legal requests from the federal government for stored passwords. Companies "really heavily scrutinize" these requests, the person said. "There's a lot of 'over my dead body.'"

Some of the government orders demand not only a user's password but also the encryption algorithm and the so-called salt, according to a person familiar with the requests. A salt is a random string of letters or numbers used to make it more difficult to reverse the encryption process and determine the original password. Other orders demand the secret question codes often associated with user accounts.

"This is one of those unanswered legal questions: Is there any circumstance under which they could get password information?"
--Jennifer Granick, Stanford University

A Microsoft spokesperson would not say whether the company has received such requests from the government. But when asked whether Microsoft would divulge passwords, salts, or algorithms, the spokesperson replied: "No, we don't, and we can't see a circumstance in which we would provide it."

Google also declined to disclose whether it had received requests for those types of data. But a spokesperson said the company has "never" turned over a user's encrypted password, and that it has a legal team that frequently pushes back against requests that are fishing expeditions or are otherwise problematic. "We take the privacy and security of our users very seriously," the spokesperson said.

A Yahoo spokeswoman would not say whether the company had received such requests. The spokeswoman said: "If we receive a request from law enforcement for a user's password, we deny such requests on the grounds that they would allow overly broad access to our users' private information. If we are required to provide information, we do so only in the strictest interpretation of what is required by law."

Apple, Facebook, AOL, Verizon, AT&T, Time Warner Cable, and Comcast did not respond to queries about whether they have received requests for users' passwords and how they would respond to them.

Richard Lovejoy, a director of the Opera Software subsidiary that operates FastMail, said he doesn't recall receiving any such requests but that the company still has a relatively small number of users compared with its larger rivals. Because of that, he said, "we don't get a high volume" of U.S. government demands.

The FBI declined to comment.

Some details remain unclear, including when the requests began and whether the government demands are always targeted at individuals or seek entire password database dumps. The Patriot Act has been used to demand entire database dumps of phone call logs, and critics have suggested its use is broader. "The authority of the government is essentially limitless" under that law, Sen. Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat who serves on the Senate Intelligence committee, said at a Washington event this week.

Large Internet companies have resisted the government's requests by arguing that "you don't have the right to operate the account as a person," according to a person familiar with the issue. "I don't know what happens when the government goes to smaller providers and demands user passwords," the person said.

An attorney who represents Internet companies said he has not fielded government password requests, but "we've certainly had reset requests -- if you have the device in your possession, than a password reset is the easier way."

Source code to a C implementation of bcrypt, a popular algorithm used for password hashing.

(Credit: Photo by Declan McCullagh)

Cracking the codes
Even if the National Security Agency or the FBI successfully obtains an encrypted password, salt, and details about the algorithm used, unearthing a user's original password is hardly guaranteed. The odds of success depend in large part on two factors: the type of algorithm and the complexity of the password.

Algorithms, known as hash functions, that are viewed as suitable for scrambling stored passwords are designed to be difficult to reverse. One popular hash function called MD5, for instance, transforms the phrase "National Security Agency" into this string of seemingly random characters: 84bd1c27b26f7be85b2742817bb8d43b. Computer scientists believe that, if a hash function is well-designed, the original phrase cannot be derived from the output.

But modern computers, especially ones equipped with high-performance video cards, can test passwords scrambled with MD5 and other well-known hash algorithms at the rate of billions a second. One system using 25 Radeon-powered GPUs that was demonstrated at a conference last December tested 348 billion hashes per second, meaning it would crack a 14-character Windows XP password in six minutes.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57595529-38/feds-tell-web-firms-to-turn-over-user-account-passwords/

Goldman And JPMorgan Probed Over Metals Warehouse Manipulations

Following our initial uncovering of the manipulation and monopolization of the metals warehousing business two years ago, the last few days have seen the public's attention grabbed by the reality of what the banks are actually doing. Following this week's hearing, as the Fed reconsiders banks roles in non-banking businesses (and the 'societal benefit'), it seems the CFTC has woken up. As the WSJ reports, the Department of Justice has opened an initial probe into the metals warehousing industry and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission has also sent letters to some firms telling them to preserve documents, in what is likely the beginning stages of an investigation.

Via WSJ,

...

The probe comes amid growing concern in Washington over banks' ownership of metals warehousesand other commodity assets.

...

Banks that trade physical commodities have come under attack by government officials, companies and consumer groups, who worry about the ability of the financial sector to exert influence over markets for raw materials.

...

Mr. Brown held a hearing on the subject this week at which some company officials alleged banks are deliberately creating shortages of aluminum and other raw materials for financial gain.

The Federal Reserve has said it is reconsidering the permission it granted to banks over the past decade to participate in physical commodity markets. The permission expires later this year.

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-07-25/goldman-and-jpmorgan-probed-over-metals-warehouse-manipulations