"In the Incarnation the whole human race recovers the dignity of the image of God. Thereafter, any attack, even on the least of men, is an attack on Christ, who took on the form of man, and in his own Person restored the image of God in all. Through our relationship with the Incarnation, we recover our true humanity, and at the same time are delivered from that perverse individualism which is the consequence of sin, and recover our solidarity with all mankind." Dietrich Bonhoeffer
"Life is a School of Probability." Walter Bagehot
This note just received from a metals trader:
"Today is first notice day for the silver futures contract. The open interest as of the end of yesterday is a good approximation for the number of contracts that will stand for delivery, as brokers typically require any longs not funded for delivery to be sold or rolled forward by the end of trading the day before 1st Notice (some require this up to 3 days before).
Comex May silver Open Interest as of yesterday's close was 4365. I don't think this includes the old CME contract, which is the NYSE Liffe contract, so this number ultimately may be low.
These 4365 contracts equate to 21.8 million ounces, or 33% of the amount of silver on the Comex that is registered for delivery. Not enough to do real damage to the Comex inventory, but probably enough raise some eyebrows around the world. I am absolutely convinced that part of this week's pure paper attack on silver was designed to discourage longs from taking delivery."
Do not get in front of this rally on the short side. It appears to be the end of month tape painting, but the primary short term trend is still up.
If we break key supports it may drop quickly.
This 'could be' an official reflation, supported by the Treasury and the Fed, such as we saw from the bottom of the market in 2003 that provoked the housing bubble. But the economy is now so crippled that we doubt they can sustain this latest attempt to cover over the rotting Potemkin economy with paper and paint.
These fellows leading us are like a more sophisticated and polished version of Bernie Madoff, full of smooth talk, impressive results and short term gains that lead to worse problems and staggering losses.
How many times can we be fooled? How many times will the world fall for this fraudulent printing of wealth?
You are not wrong; you are not alone in your thoughts. Madness is madnesss, no matter how popular it may be, appearing attractive, clever, well-presented, and enticing in the short term.
After many years of credit binging and monetary mismanagement, the sorcerer's apprentices at the Fed are having to bail hard as the credit tsunami crashes.
Thanks to Sean Corrigan of Diapason Commodities Management for this chart.
Do you need to buy a vowel?
Again?
Keep the possibility of a significant monetary inflation in mind, with no advance in real terms but a handsome nominal rally.
Yes, they are that desperate and reckless and short-sighted. That's what they did in 2003 in creating the housing bubble to save Wall Street and the financial markets.
But the greater probability remains that this is an engineered short squeeze that will fail about this level and fall back to the bottom of the trend channel.
Bloomberg
Insider Selling Jumps to Highest Level Since ‘07 as Stocks Gain
By Michael Tsang and Eric Martin
April 24 (Bloomberg) -- Executives and insiders at U.S. companies are taking advantage of the steepest stock market gains since 1938 to unload shares at the fastest pace since the start of the bear market.
... While the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index climbed 26 percent from a 12-year low on March 9, CEOs, directors and senior officers at U.S. companies sold $353 million of equities this month, or 8.3 times more than they bought, data compiled by Washington Service, a Bethesda, Maryland-based research firm, show. That’s a warning sign because insiders usually have more information about their companies’ prospects than anyone else, according to William Stone at PNC Financial Services Group Inc.
“They should know more than outsiders would, so you could take it as a signal that there is something wrong if they’re selling,” said Stone, chief investment strategist at PNC’s wealth management unit, which oversees $110 billion in Philadelphia. “Whether it’s a sustainable rebound is still in question. I’d prefer they were buying.”
Insiders Sell
Insiders from New York Stock Exchange-listed companies sold $8.32 worth of stock for every dollar bought in the first three weeks of April, according to Washington Service, which analyzes stock transactions of corporate insiders for more than 500 mostly institutional clients.
That’s the fastest rate of selling since October 2007, when U.S. stocks peaked and the 17-month bear market that wiped out more than half the market value of U.S. companies began. The $42.5 million in insider purchases through April 20 would represent the smallest amount for a full month since July 1992, data going back more than 20 years show. That drop preceded a 2.4 percent slide in the S&P 500 in August 1992....
The S&P 500 has rallied 26 percent over 32 trading days, the sharpest rally since 1938, as speculation increased that the longest contraction since World War II will soon end....
Ben had suspected they were cheating when he found gold dust on their collar...
Financial Post
China admits to building up stockpile of gold
Alfred Cang and Tom Miles, Reuters
Friday, April 24, 2009
SHANGHAI/BEIJING - China revealed on Friday that it had secretly raised its gold reserves by three-quarters since 2003, increasing its holdings to 1,054 tonnes - or a pot worth about US$30.9-billion - and confirming years of speculation it had been buying.
Hu Xiaolian, head of the State Administration of Foreign Exchange, told Xinhua news agency in an interview that the country's reserves had risen by 454 tonnes from 600 tonnes since 2003, when China last adjusted its state gold reserves figure.
The confirmation of its surreptitious stockpiling is likely to fuel market talk about Beijing's ability to buy secretly and its ambitions for spending its nearly US$2-trillion pile of savings. And not just in gold: copper and other metals markets are booming thanks to China's barely-visible hand.
Speculation has gathered speed over the last year, since the tumbling dollar has threatened to weaken China's buying power - and give it yet more reason to diversify into gold, oil and metals.
Gold prices jumped on the news of Chinese buying and were up more than 1% on the day at US$912.05 an ounce at 0715 GMT. By a Reuters calculation, China's holding of gold would be worth around US$30.9-billion at current prices.
That accounts for only about 1.6% of China's total foreign exchange holdings and is little more than one-tenth of the value of the U.S. gold reserve, the world's biggest. It also means gold has slipped as a share of China's total reserves from about 2%, based on end-2003 prices.
Only six countries hold more than 1,000 tonnes, and China is ranked fifth, having leap-frogged Switzerland, Japan and the Netherlands with its announcement.
However, the International Monetary Fund and the SPDR Gold Trust exchange traded fund are even bigger, leaving China with the world's seventh-biggest pot of gold.
Several gold market participants said they thought China had bought on the international market, helping to absorb hundreds of tonnes sold off by central banks and the International Monetary Fund in recent years.
"China has been buying via government channels from South Africa, Russia and South America," said Ellison Chu, director of precious metals at Standard Bank in Hong Kong.
But Hu said the increase in China's stocks was achieved by buying on the domestic market and from domestic producers.
China is the world's largest gold producer and does not permit exports of gold ingots, only jewellery, leaving plentiful supplies for the domestic market.
China produced 282 tonnes of gold last year, meaning the state bought around one quarter of domestic production, assuming 454 tonnes increase in state purchases were spread out over the six years since China last reported a change in its holdings.
Despite the rumours, buying by the state was partially obscured by soaring demand for gold as an investment, especially after the bursting of the Shanghai stock market bubble last year.
Investment demand in China rose to 68.9 tonnes from 25.6 tonnes in 2007. But that was still less than one third of retail demand in India, where total bullion consumption topped 660 tonnes last year.
Hu said China recently reported the change in its gold holdings to the International Monetary Fund and would include the latest change in central bank reports and balance of payment statistics.
She did not say when China notified the IMF.
Although gold rose after Hu's comments were published, the price move was not a huge one for the highly liquid market. Prices had jumped by US$13 in the space of an hour on Thursday.
Gold market participants said the news signalled likely further buying by China.
"The comments indicate that China will buy more gold as reserve to improve its foreign reserve portfolio. This is a trend," said Yao Haiqiao, president of Longgold Asset Management.
Hou Huimin, vice general secretary of the China Gold Association, said China should build its reserves to 5,000 tonnes.
"It's not a matter of a few hundred, or 1,000 tonnes. China should hold more because of its new international status, and because of the financial crisis," he said.
"The financial crisis means the U.S. dollar value is changing fast, and it may retreat from being the international reserve currency. If that happens, whoever holds gold will be at an advantage."
The European Central Bank recommends its member banks hold 15% of their reserves in gold, but among Asian nations the percentage is far smaller, said Albert Cheng, World Gold Council managing director for the far east.
Word of the Day for Friday, April 24, 2009
gainsay \gayn-SAY; GAYN-say\, transitive verb:
1. To deny or dispute; to declare false or invalid.
2. To oppose; to contradict.
In our present, imperfectly postmodern world, where most information still takes the potentially embarrassing form of printed matter lurking in archives, liars still must position themselves so that the historical record may not easily gainsay them.
-- Thomas M. Disch, The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of
But, owing to government's cynical policy of inaction, suppression and hoping the problem would go away, there was nothing to gainsay it either.
-- Mary Riddell, New Statesman, July 26, 1996
The market is being supported in a reflationary ramp. The volumes are light, and the action is being dominated by traders who are skittish, and not determined buyers with the conviction to hold.
Is the government involved in propping this market? Are Ben and his friends at Treasury trying to mask the weakness in the banking system?
Of course they are. The proper question is really how long can they hide their errors and mismanagement, and the damage they have caused and are causing to the national economy, if not that of the globe?
These are frightened men, many of whom have compromised their integrity already. Do not underestimate the rationales they will apply to justify actions you, the ordinary person, might consider inconceivable.
The action in the SP futures market has been particularly heavy handed and blatant since the heads of the money center banks met with the Community-Organizer-in-Chief at the White House. This market is being shoved around like a gaijin granny on the Tokyo subway in rush hour.
To our minds, it is just as likely that we are being set up for a terrific leg down. In our experience the big dogs tend to dominate certain portions of the short side at the apogee of a stock market pump. Our target for a failure point on the SP June futures is about 858-864.
This market is utterly overbought according to the McClellan Summation Index. Let's see if they can keep it floating up. This does not look like a sustained ramp however, but the pump that sets up the dump.
At some point the equity market will start moving higher and keep going, to fantastic levels perhaps, if a serious inflation sets in. The stock markets in the Weimar Republic were spectacular, if one ignored the reality behind the appearance. We think it is far too early in the game for this, but are keeping an open mind to all possibilities.
The best probability is that we are seeing a pump and dump, in order to provide some income to the beleaguered banks through their proprietary trading desks. We have not been tracking it, but one has to wonder if Goldman Sachs fully placed its large secondary equity offering designed to pay back their TARP funds. The markets often miraculously levitate in sympathetic conjunction with key IPOs and equity tranches.
The banks must be restrained, and the financial system must be reformed, before there can be any sustained economic recovery.
SPY Have Become Hard To Borrow
Posted by Tyler Durden at 9:33 AM
Developing story: Traders confirm several locations indicating SPDRs are no longer automatic borrow and have made their way to the Hard To Borrow list: pre-borrow call is needed versus automatic short prior, as not enough underlying inventory.
Have fun hedging the market when you can not short. Wholesale market squeeze is being orchestrated.
This just in from Dave the Bond Trader.
We would not have minded this bit of accounting chicanery so much, if Wells had not accompanied their earnings with so much "master of the universe" bravado and bluster about their superior banking management.
But we suppose when you are down on your chips and running a bluff, you have to give out the right sort of attitude and moral high ground to make it work, to hide the fact that you are just crooking the books like everyone else.
That smoke you feel being blown up your backside is nothing more than legalized accounting fraud being presented to the world in the form of Wells Fargo's 1st Qtr 2009 earnings release. As suspected, the infamous "record profits" preannounced 2 weeks ago by Wells Fargo are nothing more than a result of our Wall Street-financed Governmnet, including our President, forcing the FASB to change the way big banks account for toxic assets. As per WFC's earnings release today:
"The net unrealized loss on securities available for sale declined to $4.7 billion at March 31, 2009, from $9.9 billion at December 31, 2008. Approximately $850 million of the improvement was due to declining interest rates and narrower credit spreads. The remainder was due to the early adoption of FAS FSP 157-4, which clarified the use of trading prices in determining fair value for distressed securities in illiquid markets, thus moderating the need to use excessively distressed prices in valuing these securities in illiquid markets as we had done in prior periods"
Essentially, what WFC did was post $5.2 billion mark to fantasy gains, which were then added into its revenues, by reversing out previous charges expensed against their securities and loans held for sale. Without this gain, Wells Fargo loses a couple billion.
In looking at WFC's balance sheet, I see that their "securities held for sale" miraculously jumped to 27% of their net loans vs. being only 21% of loans at the end 2008. This is obviously WFC taking full advantage of the new mark to fantasy accounting standard and piling as much toxic waste into this category and marking the price levels up substantially. Be really interesting to see what kind of worthless crap was conveniently moved into this category.
This advice from Simon Johnson, Joe Stiglitz, and Thomas Hoenig can almost be characterized as common sense, apparent to almost any objective and informed observer.
So why is it not happening? It is not happening because it is not in the narrow interest of a few Wall Street Banks who are dominating the discussion in this country and in our Congress.
This is the kind of betrayal by an oligarchy that we saw in the USSR after their financial crisis and breakup.
With all the conflicts of interests and million dollar payments how can we not assume that the decision makers in the Obama administration have been bought, and that we are being betrayed?
Bloomberg
Fed's Hoenig: Let insolvent financial firms fail
By Alister Bull
Tue Apr 21, 2009 4:31pm BST
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Insolvent financial firms must be allowed to fail regardless of size, a top Federal Reserve official said on Tuesday, as two prominent economists urged Congress to break up the biggest U.S. banks.
In blunt criticism of the government Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City President Thomas Hoenig told Congress' Joint Economic Committee that the design of a $700 billion bank bailout last year sowed uncertainty and slowed recovery.
Citing the costs of the economic crisis, Nobel economic laureate Joseph Stiglitz and former IMF chief economist Simon Johnson also told the panel that it was in the interest of taxpayers to dissolve the largest U.S. financial institutions.
"The United States currently faces economic turmoil related directly to a loss of confidence in our largest financial institutions because policymakers accepted the idea that some firms are just 'too big to fail.' I do not," Hoenig said.
"Yes, these institutions are systemically important, but we all know that in a market system, insolvent firms must be allowed to fail regardless of their size, market position or the complexity of operations," said Hoenig, who will be a voter on the Fed's policy-setting committee next year.
U.S. anti-trust rules should be used to break up the biggest banks to safeguard the economy, said Johnson, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He added the costs of the financial crisis already dwarf the damage done by industrial monopolies in the last century.
"The use of anti-trust (laws) to break up the largest banks will be essential," he said. "This is a very serious, imminent danger that needs to be addressed."
Stiglitz made a similar point, arguing that the American people had not received anything like sufficient benefits from allowing such large financial firms to grow, versus with the costs of the crisis.
"They should be broken up unless a compelling case can be made not to that," Stiglitz, a Columbia University professor, told the committee.
The biggest 19 U.S. banks are being subjected to a battery of so-called stress tests to restore confidence in their soundness, with guidelines on the process due on Friday and the results on May 4.
Stocks fell sharply on Monday amid fear that some of them still face massive losses, as the severe U.S. recession forces loan default rates to continue rising.
U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has signaled that no firms will 'fail' the stress tests, but Hoenig said this would be a mistake.
"Actions that strive to protect our largest institutions from failure risk prolonging the crisis and increasing its cost," Hoenig said.
"Of particular concern to me is the fact that the financial support provided to firms considered "too big to fail" provides them a competitive advantage over other firms and subsidizes their growth and profit with taxpayer funds," he said.
Nodding to anger among ordinary Americans over multi-billion dollar bailouts for rich bankers, Hoenig said some of these firms were simply too complicated, and too well-connected in Washington, for the good of the country.
"These "too big to fail" institutions are not only too big, they are too complex and too politically influential to supervise on a sustained basis without a clear set of rules constraining their actions. When the recession ends, old habits will reemerge," he said.
Hoenig also criticized the government's Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP, which was also separately chided on Tuesday by the Treasury's watchdog.
"In the rush to find stability, no clear process was used to allocate TARP funds among the largest firms. This created further uncertainty and is impeding recovery," Hoenig said.
This morning before Congress Treasury Secretary Turbo Tax Tim said that the stress test results show that the 'vast majority' of US banks have more capital than they need.
Right. Most real banks, who do banking, have sufficient capital and have been well managed.
Its only the five or six largest money center banks that have trillions in bad debt and toxic derivatives that threaten to soak up all the available capital in the real economy.
Its the vast majority of banks who have been sound in their credit expansion and risk management who are paying the price through higher FDIC fees, along with the taxpayers, as Tim and Larry support the Wall Street oligarchs.
The action in the equity markets ahead of Tim's remarks was about as blatant as it gets. This is getting to be disgusting.
Market manipulation and rampant financial speculation with public funds will continue until we are confident that the economy has improved. When the electricity fails because of malinvestment in the real world economy, the Obama people can have public service community organizers deliver pamphlets door to door telling us how good things are becoming.
April 21 (Bloomberg) -- Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner told a congressional panel that the “vast majority” of U.S. banks have more capital than needed.
He also said there are signs of thawing in credit markets and some indication that confidence is beginning to return.
“Indicators on interbank lending, corporate issuance and credit spreads generally suggest improvements in confidence in the stability of the system and some thawing in credit markets,” Geithner said in prepared testimony to the committee overseeing the Troubled Asset Relief Program.
Earlier today, Geithner said the program has enough money for bank rescues even under “conservative” estimates.
Geithner reiterated the Treasury’s view that about $135 billion is still available for bank rescues, out of $700 billion originally authorized by Congress.
The total includes about $590 billion that has been allocated so far for various TARP activities, leaving $110 billion remaining. Also, the Treasury expects $25 billion in repayments this year, leading to the total projection of $135 billion available.
“We believe that even under the conservative estimate of available funds described here, we have the resources to move forward implementing all aspects of our Financial Stability Plan,” Geithner said in a letter to Elizabeth Warren, the chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel.
May Have More
The Treasury first put forward these estimates in late March. In the letter, Geithner said it’s possible the Treasury may have even more money remaining, depending on how many banks repay TARP and whether the housing program uses its full allocation.
“Our projections anticipate only $25 billion will be repaid” over the next year, Geithner said. This figure is “lower than many private analysts expect,” he said.
Geithner’s letter comes on the same day as a separate report on the rescue program prepared by Neil Barofsky, the special inspector general for TARP. Barofsky said his office has six audits underway about various elements of the program.
One of these inquiries is looking into federal assistance to Bank of America, which has benefited from three different bank rescue programs, and Treasury’s decision to extend aid in connection with Bank of America’s acquisition of Merrill Lynch. The audit was expanded to include the other eight large banks that received TARP funding in October 2008, the report said.
The reporters on this story: Rebecca Christie in Washington
Falling aggregate Demand and the weaker dollar have finally broken the back of the parabolic growth of imports and the US trade deficit.
As one can see, imports have been hit much harder than exports. This is why Japan and China will be struggling with their export driven GDPs.
This is the worst decline in retail sales in the post World War II era.
The US consumer has finally hit the wall. The folks in DC think they can crank this Frankenstein monster of reckless consumption back up again, given the right jolts of liquidity and spin.
To think that consumers will start borrowing and buying again without a meaningful change in the dynamic of their cashflows implying an increase in the median wage, is a hard to believe. Even for the reckless American consumer, this episode has been daunting to their over-confidence, and rightfully so.
Let's hope they don't just patch this bubble and blow it back up again. But it certainly appears as though Larry, Ben and Tim are going to try and take it to the limit one more time.
Nothing you have not heard here before, and frequently.
But this is a Nobel Prize winner in Economics saying it, and a Democratic appointee to boot.
"The people who designed the plans are either in the pocket of the banks or they’re incompetent."
This is the tip of the iceberg, still the early stages of failures in the real economy which has been distorted beyond all reason by the outsized financial sector, a failed regulatory regime under the influence of Wall Street, and reckless financial engineering by the Fed.
AP
Mall operator General Growth Properties files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy
Alex Veiga, AP Real Estate Writer
Thursday April 16, 2009, 3:14 pm EDT
LOS ANGELES (AP) -- The nation's second-largest shopping mall owner, General Growth Properties, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection Thursday in a tough bargaining move to restructure its $27 billion in debt.
General Growth, which owns more than 200 malls including four in Colorado, said shoppers at its malls will not be affected by its bankruptcy filing.
The Chicago-based company is paying the price for its aggressive expansion at the height of the real estate boom. General Growth, like many homeowners during the frenzy, bought several properties at top dollar and now is finding lenders unwilling to refinance.
The real estate crisis has been slow to affect the market for retail, hotels and office buildings. But the delinquency rate for commercial loans, while still relatively low, is creeping up and could deepen the economic recession.
"While we have worked tirelessly in the past several months to address our maturing debts, the collapse of the credit markets has made it impossible for us to refinance maturing debt outside of Chapter 11," Chief Executive Adam Metz said in a statement.
The news sent the real estate investment trust's stock down 16 cents, or 15 percent, to 89 cents in midmorning trading. The stock traded last spring as high as $44.23.
The move by the General Growth had been widely anticipated since the fall, when the company warned it might have to seek bankruptcy protection if it didn't get lenders to rework its debt terms. Efforts to negotiate with its creditors ultimately fell short late last month.
Chapter 11 protection typically allows a company to hold off creditors and operate as normal while it develops a financial reorganization plan.
The company had about $29.6 billion in assets at the end of the year, according to documents filed with the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in the Southern District of New York.
The company noted that some subsidiaries, including its third party management business and joint ventures, were not part of the bankruptcy petition.
General Growth said it intends to reorganize with the aim of cutting its corporate debt and extending the terms of its mortgage maturities. The company has a financing commitment from Pershing Square Capital Management of about $375 million to use to operate during the bankruptcy process.
Last month, General Growth said it got lenders to waive default on a $2.58 billion credit agreement until the end of the year.
But its Rouse Co. subsidiary failed to convince enough holders of unsecured notes worth $2.25 billion as of Dec. 31 to accept a proposal that would let the unit avoid penalties for being behind on its debt payments and give it some time to refinance its debt load.
In February, the company reported lower-than-expected fourth-quarter funds from operations and a dip in revenue amid weaker retail rents.
The company has suspended its dividend, halted or slowed nearly all development projects and cut its work force by more than 20 percent. It also has sold some of its non-mall assets.
Here is a clear and simple explanation of why we may have already passed the point at which the Fed and Treasury will have no choice but to substantially devalue the bonds and reissue a 'new US dollar' as part of a managed default on our sovereign debt.
Ben's Un-shrinkable Balance Sheet
Delta Global Advisors
April 14, 2009
As he stated again clearly today, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve has deluded himself into thinking that when the time comes, he will be able to shrink the size of the Fed's balance sheet and reduce the monetary base with both ease and impunity. He also has deluded himself into thinking inflation will be easily contained.
It is very important that he does not fool you as well.
The Fed believes low interest rates should not be the result of a high savings rate, but instead can exist by decree, a conviction which has directly led consumers to believe their spending can outstrip disposable income.
The result of such thinking has been a rise in household debt from 47% of GDP in 1980 to 97% of total output in Q4 2008. As a result of this ever increasing burden, the Fed has been forced into a series of lower lows and lower highs on its benchmark lending rate. Keeping rates low is an attempt to make debt service levels manageable and keep the consumer afloat. Problem is, this endless pursuit of unnaturally low rates has so altered the Fed's balance sheet that Mr. Bernanke will be hard-pressed to substantially raise rates to combat inflation once consumer and wholesale prices begin to significantly increase.
Banana Ben Bernanke has grown the monetary base from just $842 billion in August 2008 to a record high of $1,723 billion as of April 2009. But it's not only the size of the balance sheet that is so daunting; it's the makeup that's becoming truly scary.
Historically speaking, the composition of the Fed's balance sheet has been mostly Treasuries. And the Federal Open Market Committee would typically raise rates by selling Treasuries from its balance sheet into the market to soak up excess liquidity. However, because of the Fed's decision to purchase up to $1 trillion in Mortgage Backed Securities (and other unorthodox holdings), it will not be selling highly-liquid US debt to drain reserves from banks. Rather, it will be unwinding highly distressed MBS and packaged loans to AIG. Not to mention the fact the Fed would have to break its promise of being a "hold-to-maturity investor" of such assets.
Moreover, not only are the new assets on the Fed's balance sheet less liquid but the durations of the loans are being extended. According to Bloomberg, the Fed is contemplating extending TALF loans to buy mortgaged backed securities to five years from three after pressure it received from lobbyists and a failed second monthly round of auctions. That means when it finally decides it's time to fight inflation, the Fed will find it much more difficult to reverse course.
But because of the extraordinary and unprecedented (some would say illegal) measures Mr. Bernanke has implemented, only $505 billion of the $2 trillion balance sheet is composed of U.S. Treasury debt. Today, most Fed assets are derived from the alphabet soup of lending programs including $250 billion in commercial paper, $312 billion of Central Bank liquidity swaps and $236 billion in mortgage-backed securities.
Thus, our economy has become more addicted than ever to low interest rates. But because bank assets will now be collecting income at record low rates, when and if the Fed tries to raise rates it will only be able to do so on the margin. If Bernanke raises rates substantially to fight inflation, banks will be paying out more on deposits than they collect on their income streams. Couple that with their already distressed balances sheets and look out!
Additionally, not only do the consumers need low rates to keep their Financial Obligation Ratio low, but the Federal government also needs low rates to ensure interest rates on the skyrocketing national debt can be serviced. Our projected $1.8 trillion annual deficit stems from the belief that the government must expand its balance sheet as the consumer begins to deleverage. In fact, both the consumer and government need to deleverage for total debt relief to occur, else we're just shuffling debts around and avoiding a healthy deleveraging entirely.
In order to have viable and sustainable growth total debt levels must decrease, savings must increase and interest rates must rise. But that would require an extended period of negative GDP growth-a completely untenable position for politicians of all stripes. Ben Bernanke would like you to believe inflation will be quiescent and he can vanquish it if it ever becomes a problem. Just make sure you don't invest as though you believe him.
That canny crew at Goldman Sachs does it again.
Last night in a surprise move Goldman announced their earnings early, showing a surprising profit of $1.8 billion, beating the Street estimate handily. The bulk of their profit purportedly came from speculative trading for their own accounts, using 'cheap FDIC guaranteed funds.'
Goldman also took the opportunity to announce a new stock issue designed to allow shareholders to help them pay back their government TARP funds. Since Goldman is putting aside 50% of its profits for employee bonuses even now, while they are still holding government subsidies, the reasons for this are obvious.
What was not reported last night is that Goldman had changed their reporting periods to begin the 1st quarter in January 2009 when they declared themselves to be a bank holding company. Prior to that, their fiscal 2008 year ended on November 30.
This made the month of December 2008 an 'orphan month' that was ignored in the financial headlines.
Goldman took this opportunity to realize some hefty writedowns in that December one month report, to the tune of approximately $1.3 Billion in pre-tax losses.
So, to earn an impressive $1.8 Billion in the first quarter, Goldman disposed of their losses in a largely ignored December filing. This facilitated their share offering with the 'wonderful earnings news' which Matt Miller of Bloomberg referred to approximately every five minutes as "blowing away their numbers."
However, this morning, Matt did mumble something about Goldman "maybe not blowing away their numbers."
Goldman did nothing illegal in their management of their earnings, both in the way in which they parsed the losses into a 'stub month' which was ignored, or in their decision to time an early announcement of 'exceptional profits' with a stock offering. But the financial press handled this badly, and considering the huge debt and forebearance Goldman owes to the government and the public it was not befitting a major institution with strong ties to the Obama administration.
The only thing getting blown away around here are the shareholders, taxpayers, and anyone else who buys what Wall Street in general is selling these days.
The banks must be restrained and the financial system reformed before we can have a genuine economic recovery.
This rally looks increasingly artificial and is led by buying in the SP futures, which was the trademark intervention established when Robert Rubin was Treasury Secretary.
This does not mean it cannot go higher, as the markets are awash in liquidity with no productive outlets that can compete with the easy returns of the hot money speculation machine.
Goldman Sachs, for example, is taking cheap money from the Fed and from funds guaranteed by the FDIC and turning them into profits by gaming the commodity and equity markets. This is what passes for banking in the US in this time of excess and imbalance.
It does imply that on news this rally could turn lower with some serious momentum.
What is lacking is solid volume underneath this rally. If buying appears from real investors as opposed to speculators then it may continue.
For now this rebound in US equities a slow short squeeze probably led by the momentum traders and by the bankers who met with Obama at the White House.
We'll know more when Obama produces the details of his discussions with them in keeping with the transparency he has promised. Or are the bankers to Obama what the oil companies were to Cheney?
The banks must be restrained, and the financial system reformed, before we can have a meaningful economic recovery.
Goldman Sachs released their earnings early tonight after hours, instead of tomorrow morning.
Goldman solidly beat both earnings and revenue expectations, and has indicated that they intend to pay back their TARP borrowings as soon as possible.
Matt Miller of Bloomberg TV has used the term 'blowing away' their numbers at least thirty times since they announced their numbers after the close.
The major source of profit for Goldman Sachs was from speculative trading.
There will be no recovery in the real economy until the financial system is reformed and banks are restrained into productive functions within our society.
Goldman posts $1.7 billion profit, plans $5 billion offer
Monday April 13, 2009, 4:28 pm EDT
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Goldman Sachs Group Inc posted first-quarter earnings of $1.66 billion, a higher-than-expected profit helped by strong trading revenue, and said it planned to raise $5 billion of common shares.
The New York-based bank reported net income applicable to common shareholders for the quarter ended March 27 of $3.39 a share. For the quarter ended February 29, 2008, the company posted net income for common shareholders of $1.47 billion, or $3.23 a share.
Analysts had on average expected earnings of $1.49 a share, according to Reuters Estimates.
Goldman said it planned to use proceeds of its share offering plus additional funds to repay the $10 billion of capital it received from the U.S. government under the Troubled Assets Relief Program.
This interview with William Black in Barron's is an articulate and reasonably detailed summary of our own view of the current crisis from an exceptionally well-informed and experienced source.
The big question in our own mind is the depth of complicity and the motivations of the government, the media and major institutions in continuing to support this financial corruption through silence or participation.
Is Obama really merely listening to the wrong advice from highly placed sources in the Democratic Party? And how sincere are they? The record of corruption in the Obama Administration in the form of conflicts of interest and tax evasion is already the smoke that warns of fire.
All good questions, more relating to the length of time to a cure rather than its essential character.
The banks must be restrained, the financial system must be reformed, before there can be a sustained economic recovery.
Barron's
The Lessons of the Savings-and-Loan Crisis
By Jack Willoughby
11 April 2009
AN INTERVIEW WITH WILLIAM BLACK: The current bank scandal dwarfs the 1980s savings-and-loan crisis -- and could destroy the Obama presidency.
WILLIAM BLACK CALLS THEM AS HE SEES THEM, which is why we enjoy talking with him. Black, 57 years old, was a deputy director at the former Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corp. during the thrift crisis of the 1980s, and now serves as an associate professor, teaching economics and law at the University of Missouri, Kansas City. At FSLIC, a government agency that insured S&L deposits, Black prevailed in showdowns with the powerful Democratic Speaker of the House, Jim Wright, and helped identify the infamous Keating Five, a group of U.S. senators (including Sen. John McCain, the Arizona Republican who lost his bid for the presidency in 2008) who tried to quash his attempt to close Charles Keating's Lincoln Savings & Loan. Wright eventually resigned amid unrelated ethics charges, and the senators were reprimanded for poor judgment. Keating went to jail for securities fraud.
For Black's provocative thoughts on the current financial crisis, read on.
Barron's: Just how serious is this credit crisis? What is at stake here for the American taxpayer?
Black: Mopping up the savings-and-loan crisis cost $150 billion; this current crisis will probably cost a multiple of that. The scale of fraud is immense. This whole bank scandal makes Teapot Dome [of the 1920s] look like some kid's doll set. Unless the current administration changes course pretty drastically, the scandal will destroy Barack Obama's presidency. The Bush administration was even worse. But they are out of town. This will destroy Obama's administration, both economically and in terms of integrity.
So you are saying Democrats as well as Republicans share the blame? No one can claim the high ground?
We have failed bankers giving advice to failed regulators on how to deal with failed assets. How can it result in anything but failure? If they are going to get any truthful investigation, the Democrats picked the wrong financial team. Tim Geithner, the current Secretary of the Treasury, and Larry Summers, chairman of the National Economic Council, were important architects of the problems. Geithner especially represents a failed regulator, having presided over the bailouts of major New York banks.
So you aren't a fan of the recently announced plan for the government to back private purchases of the toxic assets?
It is worse than a lie. Geithner has appropriated the language of his critics and of the forthright to support dishonesty. That is what's so appalling -- numbering himself among those who convey tough medicine when he is really pandering to the interests of a select group of banks who are on a first-name basis with Washington politicians.
The current law mandates prompt corrective action, which means speedy resolution of insolvencies. He is flouting the law, in naked violation, in order to pursue the kind of favoritism that the law was designed to prevent. He has introduced the concept of capital insurance, essentially turning the U.S. taxpayer into the sucker who is going to pay for everything. He chose this path because he knew Congress would never authorize a bailout based on crony capitalism.
Geithner is mistaken when he talks about making deeply unpopular moves. Such stiff resolve to put the major banks in receivership would be appreciated in every state but Connecticut and New York. His use of language like "legacy assets" -- and channeling the worst aspects of Milton Friedman -- is positively Orwellian. Extreme conservatives wrongly assume that the government can't do anything right. And they wrongly assume that the market will ultimately lead to correct actions. If cheaters prosper, cheaters will dominate. It is like Gresham's law: Bad money drives out the good. Well, bad behavior drives out good behavior, without good enforcement.
His plan essentially perpetuates zombie banks by mispricing toxic assets that were mispriced to the borrower and mispriced by the lender, and which only served the unfaithful lending agent.
We already know from the real costs -- through the cleanups of IndyMac, Bear Stearns, and Lehman -- that the losses will be roughly 50 to 80 cents on the dollar. The last thing we need is a further drain on our resources and subsidies by promoting this toxic-asset market. By promoting this notion of too-big-to-fail, we are allowing a pernicious influence to remain in Washington. The truth has a resonance to it. The folks know they are being lied to.
I keep asking myself, what would we do in other avenues of life? What if every time we had a plane crash we said: 'It might be divisive to investigate. We want to be forward-looking.' Nobody would fly. It would be a disaster.
We know that with planes, every time there is an accident, we look intensively, without the interference of politics. That is why we have such a safe industry.
Summarize the problem as best you can for Barron's readers.
With most of America's biggest banks insolvent, you have, in essence, a multitrillion dollar cover-up by publicly traded entities, which amounts to felony securities fraud on a massive scale.
These firms will ultimately have to be forced into receivership, the management and boards stripped of office, title, and compensation. First there needs to be a clearing of the air -- a Pecora-style fact-finding mission conducted without fear or favor. [Ferdinand Pecora was an assistant district attorney from New York who investigated Wall Street practices in the 1930s.] Then, we need to gear up to pursue criminal cases. Two years after the market collapsed, the Federal Bureau of Investigation has one-fourth of the resources that the agency used during the savings-and-loan crisis. And the current crisis is 10 times as large.
There need to be major task forces set up, like there were in the thrift crisis. Right now, things don't look good. We are using taxpayer money via AIG to secretly bail out European banks like Société Générale, Deutsche Bank, and UBS -- and even our own Goldman Sachs. To me, the single most obscene act of this scandal has been providing billions in taxpayer money via AIG to secretly bail out UBS in Switzerland, while we were simultaneously prosecuting the bank for tax fraud. The second most obscene: Goldman receiving almost $13 billion in AIG counterparty payments after advising Geithner, president of the New York Fed, and then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, former Goldman Sachs honcho, on the AIG government takeover -- and also receiving government bailout loans.
What, then, is staying the federal government's hand? Have the banks become too difficult or complex to regulate?
The government is reluctant to admit the depth of the problem, because to do so would force it to put some of America's biggest financial institutions into receivership. The people running these banks are some of the most well-connected in Washington, with easy access to legislators. Prompt corrective action is what is needed, and mandated in the law. And that is precisely what isn't happening.
The savings-and-loan crisis showed that, too often, the regulators became too close to the industry, and run interference for friends by hiding the problems.
Can you explain your idea of control fraud, and how it applies to the current banking and the earlier thrift crisis?
Control fraud is when a seemingly legitimate corporation uses its power as a weapon to defraud or take something of value through deceit.
In the savings-and-loan crisis, thrifts engaged in control frauds in order to survive. Accounting trickery proved to be the weapon of choice. It is at work today with the banks, and it is their Achilles heel. You report that you are highly profitable when you engage in accounting-control fraud, not only meeting but exceeding capital requirements. These accounting frauds create huge bubbles, which in turn create large bonuses, which in turn lead to huge losses.
Why then is there so much smoke and so little action?
First, they are inundated by the problem. They are trying to investigate the major problems with severely depleted staffs. Honestly. We have lost the ability to be blunt. Now we have a situation where Treasury Secretary Geithner can speak of a $2 trillion hole in the banking system, at the same time all the major banks report they are well-capitalized. And you have seen no regulatory action against what amounts to a $2 trillion accounting fraud. The reason we don't see it -- aren't told about it -- is that if they were honest, prompt corrective action would kick in, and they would have to deal with the problem banks.
Are there any parallels between the current crisis and the savings-and-loan crisis that give you hope?
Of course. Objectively, our case was even more hopeless in the S&L debacle than in the current crisis. If we were able to do it in such an impossible circumstance back then, we have reason for hope in the current crisis. I know how easily things can get off course and how quickly things can turn back again. The thrift crisis went through several lengthy courses and distortions before it finally was resolved under the leadership of Edwin Gray, the chairman of the Federal Home Loan Bank Board, which oversaw FSLIC.
We went through almost a decade of cover-ups by a Washington establishment intent on helping thrift owners. Back then, we had the Justice Department threatening to indict Gray, the head of a federal agency, for closing too many thrifts. Next, there were those so-called resolutions, where the regulators worked day and night -- to create even bigger problems for the FSLIC. Years later, these so-called resolution deals had to be unwound at great expense by closing down even larger failures. Or how about the bill to replenish the depleted thrift-insurance fund that was blocked and delayed by then-Speaker of the House, Texas congressman Jim Wright?
You say the evidence of a breakdown in the regulatory structure comes from the fact that America avoided an earlier subprime crisis in the 1990s.
Exactly. Why had no one heard of the subprime crisis back in 1991? Because America's regulators also faced down the crisis early. The same thing happened with bad credits being securitized in the secondary market. Remember the low-doc or no-doc mortgages done by Citibank? Well, the problem didn't spread -- because regulators intervened.
Obama, who is doing so well in so many other arenas, appears to be slipping because he trusts Democrats high in the party structure too much.
These Democrats want to maintain America's pre-eminence in global financial capitalism at any cost. They remain wedded to the bad idea of bigness, the so-called financial supermarket -- one-stop shopping for all customers -- that has allowed the American financial system to paper the world with subprime debt. Even the managers of these worldwide financial conglomerates testify that they have become so sprawling as to be unmanageable.
What needs to be done?
Well, these international behemoths need to be broken down into smaller units that can be managed effectively. Maybe they can be broken up the way that the Standard Oil split up back in the early 1900s, through a simple share spinoff.
The big problem for the last decade is that we have had too much capacity in the finance sector -- too many banks have represented a drain on our talent and resources. All these mergers haven't taken capacity out of the system. They have created even bigger banks that concentrate risk to the taxpayer, and put off dealing with problems.
And a new seriousness must be put into regulation. We don't necessarily need new rules. We just need folks who can enforce the ones already on the books.
The bank-compensation system also creates an environment that leads to mismanagement and fraud. No one has to tell someone they have to stretch the numbers. It is all around them. It is in the rank-or-yank performance and retention systems advocated by top business executives. Here, the top 20% get the bulk of the benefits and the bottom 10% get fired. You don't directly tell your employees you want them to lie and cheat. You set up an atmosphere of results at any cost. Rank or yank. Sooner rather than later, someone comes up with the bright idea of fudging the numbers. That's big bonuses for the folks who make the best numbers. It sends the message -- making the numbers is what is most important. There is a reason that the average tenure of a chief financial officer is three years.
Compensation systems like I have just described discourage whistleblowing -- the most common way that frauds are found in America -- because the system draws upon the cooperation of everyone.
The basis for all regulation and white-collar crime is to take the competitive advantage away from the cheats, so the good guys can prevail. We need to get back to that.
Thanks, Bill.
The production of real goods in the developed nations is plummeting. Even the mighty export driven economy of Japan appears to be heading lower as though it had fallen off a cliff.
Countries must begin to encourage consumption in their own economies. To do this, they ought not to be stimulating the old credit/speculation machine called the neo-liberal financial system.
Real economic growth is to be found in a broad employment and consumption, and an increase of the median wage.
This is the deep flaws in much of the third world economies, especially in Asia and Latin America. Economic health can be measured by the size and well being of the middle class in a relatively free society.
The reason is simple. Individuals can only borrow so much before they are unable to service the debt. And the greedy few can only spend so much on consumption using the wealth which the tax and financial system has delivered to them from the many.
Gaming the system so that it overtaxes the income of the many for theincreasing benefit of a few has natural limitations, unless one can enforce a type of involuntary servitude. This model has its roots far back in history, in empires like Rome, Egypt, and Sparta.
As the elite few accumulate real assets using their surplus, they will find that holding on to their wealth as the rest of society deteriorates in a downward spiral of privation can be a bit of a challenge.
Until the financial system is reformed and the economy is brought back into a balance, there will be no recovery, and the fabric of order will remain fragile.
If things continue on as they are, despite all the stimulus and fine rhetoric, the madness will once again be unleashed on the earth, and the people will wonder from whence it came, as they do each time it rises from the same sources and ravages civilization: unbridled greed, malinvestment, and corruption.
Thanks to Diapason Trading for this chart.
Chevron needs to lose their preoccupation with fossil fuels and move into banking and financial services. Fossils. LOL.
Perhaps they can convert their gas stations into drive through ATMs. Don't they have a credit card business?
Why don't they become a bank holding company? The one page EZ application forms are now online at the New York Federal Reserve website. Or you can just call 1-800-BEN-BANKS. Press 2 for 'Habla Español.'
I am working on developing a personal bank. How does Banc of One sound? I modified the old Banc One logo myself for cost efficiency.
The business plan is to borrow ten billion dollars from the Fed at .5 percent and to buy Treasuries paying 2.5 percent. Since there are no employees to lay off or complex record-keeping we (the kids are the Board of Directors) think we are ahead of the curve on this one. If the Treasuries default we can always apply for one of the toxic asset buyback plans. Stress test? LOL. Stress this.
Banc of One is announcing record earnings expectations, but don't look for a 10 Q yet (it worked for Wells Fargo). I'm waiting while the little rotating egg timer on the Fed site evaluates the consolidated application for holding company status and loans of less than 50 billion dollars. Be sure to click the boxes for automatic campaign contributions. Oh, there it is. Approved. Sweet!
As for Boeing, the obvious solution is a strategic move from airplane engines to internet search engines. Those propeller heads are too 'practical' to be financiers.
Manufacturing is so yesterday. We make our money by printing it, and the details of distribution are a government function.
See you at the TARP window.
Chevron Issues Interim Update for First Quarter 2009
SAN RAMON, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Chevron Corporation (NYSE:CVX) today reported in its interim update that earnings for the first quarter 2009 are expected to be sharply lower than in the fourth quarter 2008. Upstream earnings are expected to decline substantially, in part due to lower prices for crude oil and natural gas. Downstream earnings are also anticipated to be much lower than in the previous period, with average margins on the sale of refined products off significantly.
Boeing Cuts 1Q Guidance, Slows Production On Customer Delays
Boeing Co. (BA) said first-quarter earnings were hurt as the company trimmed twin-aisle airplane production plans in response to customer requests to delay deliveries amid "unprecedented declines in global passenger and air-cargo volumes."
Kevin Phillips is a brilliant and insightfuly political commentator, and we have featured his videos and writings here many times.
His latest essay is worth reading over the long weekend.
"This is a much grander-scale disaster than anything that happened in 1929-33. Worse, it dwarfs the abuses of debt, finance and financialization that brought down previous leading world economic powers like Britain and Holland...
But for the moment, let me underscore: the average American knows little of the dimensions of the financial sector aggrandizement and misbehavior involved. Until this is remedied, there probably will not be enough informed, focused indignation to achieve far-reaching reform in the teeth of financial sector money and influence. Equivocation will triumph. This will not displease politicians and regulators leery of offending their contributors and backers."
It is ironic that Joe Biden predicted that our Community-Organizer-in-Chief would be tested severely in his first days in office. At the time everyone thought it would be some foreign power, some military machine which would temper the character of this new leader with a significant threat to the national welfare.
Little did we suspect that the test of our sovereign republic would come from the Wall Street and the money center banks.
Table for One - TPMCafe
The "Disaster Stage" of U.S. Financialization
By Kevin Phillips
April 7, 2009, 3:34PM
Thirty to forty years ago, the early fruits of financialization in this country - the first credit cards, retirement accounts , money market funds and ATM machines - struck most Americans as a convenience and boon. The savings and loan implosion and junk bonds of the 1980s switched on some yellow warning lights, and the tech bubble and market mania of the nineties flashed some red ones. But neither Wall Street nor Washington stopped or even slowed down.
In August, 2007, the housing-linked crisis of the credit markets predicted the arriving disaster-stage, the Crash of September-November 2008 confirmed the debacle, and now an angry, fearful citizenry awaits a further unfolding. There is probably no need to fear a second coming of nineteen-thirties Depression economics. This is not the same thing; the day-to-day pain shouldn't be as severe.
Indeed, for all that the 1930s evoke national trauma, that decade was in fact a waiting room for national glory and wellbeing. World War Two ushered in American global ascendancy, the "Happy Days" of the 1950s and an unprecedented middle-class prosperity.
Today's disaster stage of American financialization - the bursting of the huge 25-year, almost $50 trillion debt bubble that helped underwrite the hijacking of the U.S. economy by a rabid financial sector -- won't be nearly so kind. It is already ushering in the reverse: a global realignment in which the United States loses the global economic leadership won in World War Two. The ignominy deserved by Wall Street after 1929-1933 is peanuts compared with the opprobrium the U.S. financial sector and its political and regulatory allies deserve this time.
My 2002 book, Wealth and Democracy, in its section on the "Financialization of America" noted that the "finance, insurance and real estate (FIRE) sector overtook manufacturing during the 1990s, moving ahead in the national income and GDP charts by 1995. By the first years of the next decade, it had taken a clear lead in actual profits. Back in 1960, parenthetically, manufacturing profits had been four times as big, and in 1980, twice as big." Hardly anyone was paying attention.
By 2006, the FIRE sector, its components mixed together like linguine by the 1999 repeal of the old New Deal restraints against mergers of commercial banks, investment firms and insurance, had ballooned to 20.6% of U.S. GDP versus just 12% for manufacturing. The FIRE Sector, now calling itself the Financial Services Sector, lopsidedly dominated the private economy. A detailed chart appears on page 31 of Bad Money. Some New York publications and politicians try to insist that finance per se is only 8%, but the post-1999 commingling makes that absurd.
This represented a staggering transformation of the U.S. economy - doubly staggering now because of the crushing burden of its collapse. You would think that that opinion molders and the national media would have been probing its every aperture and orifice. Not at all.
Thus, it was pleasing to read MIT economics professor Simon Johnson's piece in the April Atlantic fingering financial "elites" who captured the government for the latterday financial debacle. This is broadly true, and judging from my e.mail, even some conservatives accept Johnson's analysis and indictment. After the furor over the AIG bonuses, the public and some politicians may be ready to start identifying and blaming culprits. This would be useful. Having an elite to blame is a often prerequisite of serious reform.
Nevertheless, the extremes of financialization, together with the havoc we now know it to have wrought, represent a much more complicated historical and economic genesis, one which U.S. leaders must be obliged to confront if not fully acknowledge. Elite avarice and culpability has multiple and longstanding dimensions. It has been fifteen years since Graef Crystal, a wellknown employment compensation expert, brought out his incendiary In Search of Excess: the Overcompensation of American Executives. The data was blistering. Over the last decade, New York Times reporter David Cay Johnston has published two books - Perfectly Legal and Free Lunch - describing how the U.S. tax code, in particular, has been turned into a feeding trough for the richest one percent of Americans (especially the richest one tenth of one percent).
The backstop to avarice provided by a wealth culture and market mania from the late 1980s through the Clinton years to the George W. Bush administration, prompted another set of indictments that still resonate: William Greider's Secrets of the Temple: How the Federal Reserve Runs The Country (1987), Robert Kuttner's Everything For Sale (1997), Thomas Frank's One Market Under God (2000) and John Gray's False Dawn (1998). More recently, Paul Krugman's books have been equalled or exceeded in timeliness by his New York Times columns blasting the perversity of the Obama-Geithner financial bail-out and the malfeasance of the financial sector.
James K. Galbraith, in his 2008 book The Predator State, has elaborated the valid point that too many conservatives over last few decades betrayed their free market rhetoric by supporting a relentless use of state power and government financial bail-outs to advance upper-income and corporate causes. On the other hand, some conservative economists of the Austrian school make related indictments of liberal bail-out penchants.
This could be a powerful framework. All of these critiques have merit, and ideally they might converge as earlier indictments of elite and governmental abuse did during the Progressive and New Deal eras. But I have to return to whether the public will ever be given full information on the fatal magnitude of financialization, who was responsible, and how it failed and crashed in 2007-2009. So far, political and media discussion has been so minimal that the early 21st century American electorate has much less readily available information on what took place than did the electorates of those earlier reform eras.
Towards this end, my initial emphasis in the new material included in the 2009 edition of Bad Money is on what techniques, practices and leverage the financial sector used between the mid-1980s and 2007 to metastasize early-stage financialization into an economic and governmental coup and, ultimately, a national disaster.
Perhaps not surprisingly, I found that the principal building blocks that the sector used to enlarge itself from 10-12% of Gross National Product around 1980 to a mind-boggling 20.6% of Gross Domestic Product in 2004 involved essentially the same combination of credit-mongering, massive sector borrowing, highly leveraged speculation, reckless, greedy pioneering of new experimental vehicles and securities (derivatives and securitization) and mega-trillion-dollar abuse of the mortgage and housing markets that became infamous as hallmarks of the 2007-2009 disaster. During Alan Greenspan's 1987-2006 tenure as Federal Reserve Chairman, financial bubble-blowing became a Washington art and total credit market debt in the U.S. quadrupled from $11 trillion to $46 trillion.
To try to put 20-30 pages into a nutshell, the financial sector hyped consumer demand - from teen-ager credit cards to mortgages for the unqualified - to make credit into one of the nation's biggest industries; nearly $15 trillion was borrowed over two decades to leverage de facto gambling at 20:1 and 30:1 ratios; banks, investment firms, mortgage lenders, insurers et al were all merged together to do almost anything they wanted; exotic securities and instruments that even investment chiefs couldn't understand were marketed by the trillions. To achieve fat financial-sector profits, the housing and mortgage markets might as well have been merged with Las Vegas.
The principal inventors, hustlers , borrowers and culprits were the nation's 15-20 largest and best known financial institutions - including the ones that keep making headlines by demanding more bail-out money from Washington and giving huge bonuses. These same institutions got much of the early bail-out money and as of December 2008 they accounted for over half of the bad assets written off.
The reason these needed so much money is that they government had let them merge, speculate, expand and experiment on dimensions beyond all logic. That is why the complicit politicians and regulators have to talk about $100 billion here and $1 trillion there even while they pretend that it's all under control and that the run-amok financial sector remains sound.
This is a much grander-scale disaster than anything that happened in 1929-33. Worse, it dwarfs the abuses of debt, finance and financialization that brought down previous leading world economic powers like Britain and Holland (back when New York was New Amsterdam). I will return to these little-mentioned precedents in another post this week.
But for the moment, let me underscore: the average American knows little of the dimensions of the financial sector aggrandizement and misbehavior involved. Until this is remedied, there probably will not be enough informed, focused indignation to achieve far-reaching reform in the teeth of financial sector money and influence. Equivocation will triumph. This will not displease politicians and regulators leery of offending their contributors and backers.
The paid for opinion pundits are touting a new bull market on the Bloomberg today.
Is this a bottom? Well perhaps, but until we see some positive change in the economic indicators that are not paper exercises in thinly veiled accounting fraud we choose to remain in cash and precious metals, while trading the ins and outs on a daily basis, trying to stay out of the way of the antics of the Wall Street wisenheimers.
So far this feels like a distribution rally before a retest of the lows. It is the timing of things that is the challenge, and the ability to spot a genuine change in character in the long market trend.
This is probably not the place for any investors to enter the markets, since the risk is still so historically high, although a little lower by recent standards.
Time will tell. The Fed fooled us in 2004 with their willingness to intentionally create a housing bubble to avoid the near term consequences. Perhaps Treasury and the Fed will cast caution to the wind and do it again, setting us up for a larger, more destructive collapse on the next group's watch.
But the character of this 'bull market' strikes us as the same as that of those who are our financial and political leaders: shallow, false, short-sighted, manipulated by dark forces, self-serving, a pleasant appearance over an underlying rot, and a in sum a terrible disappointment and lapse of the discovery and disclosure of things as they are.
