The Big Picture - Macro Perspective on the Capital Markets, Economy, Technology, and Digital Media

Source: The Money and Wealth Show

Deploying Corporate Cash

Earnings Estimates and Valuation Drivers

Stock Valuation Measures: S&P 500 Index

Source: BLS, FactSet, J.P. Morgan Asset Management.
Data reflect most recently available as of 6/30/11.

Source: JP Morgan funds

Greece saves the day!? A merger of Eurobank and Alpha Bank, the 2nd and 3rd largest banks in Greece will merge. Qatar, the 2nd biggest shareholder already in Alpha Bank, will add more capital to the combination. The Greek stock market is up more than 11% in response as Greek banks are up 30%. Greek debt however remains under pressure as we await still a resolution on the collateral issue that many now want from Greece in return for loans. The Greek 2 yr yield is back above 45% and the 1 yr is above 60% for the 1st time. Italian yields are at 2 week highs ahead of auctions tomorrow as the impact of the ECB purchases wane with the reduced size of daily buys. While the ECB continues to purchase Italian and Spanish debt, the market is playing a game of chicken with them knowing that once the purchases end, yields are going right back up again. All Asian stocks rallied too except China where the Shanghai index responded negatively to Friday’s move on the part of the PBOC to increase the amount of bank assets subject to the 21.5% reserve requirement ratio. The Yuan also moved to a new high.

“The First Recorded Word For ‘Freedom’ In Any Human Language Is The Sumerian Amargi, A Word For Debt-Freedom … If Aristotle Were Around Today, He’d Probably Conclude That Most Americans Were, For All Intents And Purposes, Slaves”

I’ve previously noted that top economists say will have a never-ending depression unless we repudiate the mountains of bad debt choking the world, that repudiating bad debt is moral, legal, empowering and popular.

I’ve pointed out that debt always grows exponentially, while the real economy can only grow in an “s-curve”, and so periodic debt jubilees are needed. And that we have forgotten what the ancient Sumerians and Babylonians, the early Jews and Christians, the Founding Fathers and even Napoleon Bonaparte knew about money and debt.

And I’ve reported that the money of individuals, businesses, cities, states and entire nations is disappearing into the abyss of debt, and that – by choosing the pretend creditors over the little guy – the government is dooming both to failure.

Today, NakedCapitalism has a great interview with professor of social anthropology – and debt expert – David Graeber, touching on many of these themes.

Here are must-read excerpts from the interview:

Interviewer (Journalist Philip Pilkington): Most economists claim that money was invented to replace the barter system. But you’ve found something quite different, am I correct?

David Graeber: Yes there’s a standard story we’re all taught, a ‘once upon a time’ — it’s a fairy tale.

***

Rather than the standard story – first there’s barter, then money, then finally credit comes out of that – if anything its precisely the other way around. Credit and debt comes first, then coinage emerges thousands of years later and then, when you do find “I’ll give you twenty chickens for that cow” type of barter systems, it’s usually when there used to be cash markets, but for some reason – as in Russia, for example, in 1998 – the currency collapses or disappears.

***

This was the great social evil of antiquity – families would have to start pawning off their flocks, fields and before long, their wives and children would be taken off into debt peonage. Often people would start abandoning the cities entirely, joining semi-nomadic bands, threatening to come back in force and overturn the existing order entirely. Rulers would regularly conclude the only way to prevent complete social breakdown was to declare a clean slate or ‘washing of the tablets,’ they’d cancel all consumer debt and just start over. In fact, the first recorded word for ‘freedom’ in any human language is the Sumerian amargi, a word for debt-freedom, and by extension freedom more generally, which literally means ‘return to mother,’ since when they declared a clean slate, all the debt peons would get to go home.

***

Taxes are also key to creating the first markets that operate on cash, since coinage seems to be invented or at least widely popularized to pay soldiers – more or less simultaneously in China, India, and the Mediterranean, where governments find the easiest way to provision the troops is to issue them standard-issue bits of gold or silver and then demand everyone else in the kingdom give them one of those coins back again. Thus we find that the language of debt and the language of morality start to merge.

In Sanskrit, Hebrew, Aramaic, ‘debt,’ ‘guilt,’ and ‘sin’ are actually the same word. Much of the language of the great religious movements – reckoning, redemption, karmic accounting and the like – are drawn from the language of ancient finance. But that language is always found wanting and inadequate and twisted around into something completely different. It’s as if the great prophets and religious teachers had no choice but to start with that kind of language because it’s the language that existed at the time, but they only adopted it so as to turn it into its opposite: as a way of saying debts are not sacred, but forgiveness of debt, or the ability to wipe out debt, or to realize that debts aren’t real – these are the acts that are truly sacred.

How did this happen? Well, remember I said that the big question in the origins of money is how a sense of obligation – an ‘I owe you one’ – turns into something that can be precisely quantified? Well, the answer seems to be: when there is a potential for violence. If you give someone a pig and they give you a few chickens back you might think they’re a cheapskate, and mock them, but you’re unlikely to come up with a mathematical formula for exactly how cheap you think they are. If someone pokes out your eye in a fight, or kills your brother, that’s when you start saying, “traditional compensation is exactly twenty-seven heifers of the finest quality and if they’re not of the finest quality, this means war!”

Money, in the sense of exact equivalents, seems to emerge from situations like that, but also, war and plunder, the disposal of loot, slavery. In early Medieval Ireland, for example, slave-girls were the highest denomination of currency. And you could specify the exact value of everything in a typical house even though very few of those items were available for sale anywhere because they were used to pay fines or damages if someone broke them.

But once you understand that taxes and money largely begin with war it becomes easier to see what really happened. After all, every Mafiosi understands this. If you want to take a relation of violent extortion, sheer power, and turn it into something moral, and most of all, make it seem like the victims are to blame, you turn it into a relation of debt. “You owe me, but I’ll cut you a break for now…” Most human beings in history have probably been told this by their debtors. And the crucial thing is: what possible reply can you make but, “wait a minute, who owes what to who here?” And of course for thousands of years, that’s what the victims have said, but the moment you do, you are using the rulers’ language, you’re admitting that debt and morality really are the same thing. That’s the situation the religious thinkers were stuck with, so they started with the language of debt, and then they tried to turn it around and make it into something else.

PP: You’d be forgiven for thinking this was all very Nietzschean. In his ‘On the Genealogy of Morals’ the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche famously argued that all morality was founded upon the extraction of debt under the threat of violence. The sense of obligation instilled in the debtor was, for Nietzsche, the origin of civilisation itself.

***

DG: If however you ditch the whole myth of barter, and start with a community where people do have prior moral relations, and then ask, how do those moral relations come to be framed as ‘debts’ – that is, as something precisely quantified, impersonal, and therefore, transferrable – well, that’s an entirely different question. In that case, yes, you do have to start with the role of violence.
***

What do people who don’t use money actually do when things change hands? Anthropologists had documented an endless variety of such economic systems, but hadn’t really worked out common principles. What Mauss noticed was that in almost all of them, everyone pretended as if they were just giving one another gifts and then they fervently denied they expected anything back. But in actual fact everyone understood there were implicit rules and recipients would feel compelled to make some sort of return.

What fascinated Mauss was that this seemed to be universally true, even today. If I take a free-market economist out to dinner he’ll feel like he should return the favor and take me out to dinner later. He might even think that he is something of chump if he doesn’t and this even if his theory tells him he just got something for nothing and should be happy about it. Why is that? What is this force that compels me to want to return a gift?

This is an important argument, and it shows there is always a certain morality underlying what we call economic life.

***

Money has, for most of its history, been a strange hybrid entity that takes on aspects of both commodity (object) and credit (social relation.) What I think I’ve managed to add to that is the historical realization that while money has always been both, it swings back and forth – there are periods where credit is primary, and everyone adopts more or less Chartalist theories of money and others where cash tends to predominate and commodity theories of money instead come to the fore. We tend to forget that in, say, the Middle Ages, from France to China, Chartalism was just common sense: money was just a social convention; in practice, it was whatever the king was willing to accept in taxes.

***

The last time we saw a broad shift from commodity money to credit money it wasn’t a very pretty sight. To name a few we had the fall of the Roman Empire, the Kali Age in India and the breakdown of the Han dynasty… There was a lot of death, catastrophe and mayhem. The final outcome was in many ways profoundly libratory for the bulk of those who lived through it – chattel slavery, for example, was largely eliminated from the great civilizations. This was a remarkable historical achievement. The decline of cities actually meant most people worked far less. But still, one does rather hope the dislocation won’t be quite so epic in its scale this time around. Especially since the actual means of destruction are so much greater this time around.

***

In the past, periods dominated by virtual credit money have also been periods where there have been social protections for debtors. Once you recognize that money is just a social construct, a credit, an IOU, then first of all what is to stop people from generating it endlessly? And how do you prevent the poor from falling into debt traps and becoming effectively enslaved to the rich? That’s why you had Mesopotamian clean slates, Biblical Jubilees, Medieval laws against usury in both Christianity and Islam and so on and so forth.

Since antiquity the worst-case scenario that everyone felt would lead to total social breakdown was a major debt crisis; ordinary people would become so indebted to the top one or two percent of the population that they would start selling family members into slavery, or eventually, even themselves.

Well, what happened this time around? Instead of creating some sort of overarching institution to protect debtors, they create these grandiose, world-scale institutions like the IMF or S&P to protect creditors. They essentially declare (in defiance of all traditional economic logic) that no debtor should ever be allowed to default. Needless to say the result is catastrophic. We are experiencing something that to me, at least, looks exactly like what the ancients were most afraid of: a population of debtors skating at the edge of disaster.

And, I might add, if Aristotle were around today, I very much doubt he would think that the distinction between renting yourself or members of your family out to work and selling yourself or members of your family to work was more than a legal nicety. He’d probably conclude that most Americans were, for all intents and purposes, slaves.

PP: You mention that the IMF and S&P are institutions that are mainly geared toward extracting debts for creditors. This seems to have become the case in the European monetary union too. What do you make of the situation in Europe at the moment?

DG: Well, I think this is a prime example of why existing arrangements are clearly untenable. Obviously the ‘whole debt’ cannot be paid. But even when some French banks offered voluntary write-downs for Greece, the others insisted they would treat it as if it were a default anyway. The UK takes the even weirder position that this is true even of debts the government owes to banks that have been nationalized – that is, technically, that they owe to themselves! If that means that disabled pensioners are no longer able to use public transit or youth centers have to be closed down, well that’s simply the ‘reality of the situation,’ as they put it.

These ‘realities’ are being increasingly revealed to simply be ones of power. Clearly any pretence that markets maintain themselves, that debts always have to be honored, went by the boards in 2008. That’s one of the reasons I think you see the beginnings of a reaction in a remarkably similar form to what we saw during the heyday of the ‘Third World debt crisis’ – what got called, rather weirdly, the ‘anti-globalization movement’. This movement called for genuine democracy and actually tried to practice forms of direct, horizontal democracy. In the face of this there was the insidious alliance between financial elites and global bureaucrats (whether the IMF, World Bank, WTO, now EU, or what-have-you).

When thousands of people begin assembling in squares in Greece and Spain calling for real democracy what they are effectively saying is: “Look, in 2008 you let the cat out of the bag. If money really is just a social construct now, a promise, a set of IOUs and even trillions of debts can be made to vanish if sufficiently powerful players demand it then, if democracy is to mean anything, it means that everyone gets to weigh in on the process of how these promises are made and renegotiated.” I find this extraordinarily hopeful.

***

Eventually, there will have to be recognition that in a phase of virtual money, safeguards have to be put in place – and not just ones to protect creditors. How many disasters it will take to get there? I can’t say.

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This week’s Washington Post column is (finally) out, and its a look at the Buffett’s bailout of Bank of America, and what it means for the overall financial systems.

“Many investors assumed the Wall Street bailouts of Bank of America and the other big banks more or less healed the sector. All it took was few trillion dollars in liquidity and a few $100 billion in recapitalization. Voila!

In fact, the banking system was not saved. The massive injections of liquidity temporarily salved the day-to-day operations of banks, but they did not repair the more profound troubles. Indeed, pouring billions into nearly identical management teams that mismanaged risk, overleveraged exposure and drove banks off the cliff in the first place was an invitation for another crisis.

In past weeks, Bank of America has been under increasing pressure from investors. Its already damaged stock was cut in half, and commentators including myself argued that the bank was headed back toward the rocky shoals of insolvency.”

The rest is my regular “Go Swedish” rant . . .

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Source:
A how-to guide for fixing America’s banks
By Barry Ritholtz
Washington Post, August 27 2011
http://www.washingtonpost.com/a-how-to-guide-for-fixing-americas-banks/2011/08/26/gIQAdbUijJ_story.html

Bank Buffet PDF

Good Night Irene: Bullets Dodged.
August 28, 2011
David R. Kotok

~~~

Bullets dodged this week: earthquake, Bernanke, Irene. What a week.

We are always grateful when severe natural events result in minimal casualties. Amen.

One cannot control property damage or business interruption. We’ve seen and had both.

Cumberland is intact. There are some household wet basements in the north and temporary power outages (mine is back on). Thankfully, all parties are safe. The redundancy between the Sarasota office and the Vineland office meant uninterrupted business activity. Our IT system worked flawlessly as did the contingency planning. Hat tip to Cumberland’s Terri Pantalione and Sam Santiago. The tornado that passed near the New Jersey office was fortunately above ground level.

Irene hit a cold front and weakened. Whew! It maintained the storm track that could have been a disastrous rival to the 1938 experience. That one was a killer. Paul Walsh, of the Weather Channel and a personal friend, and I emailed frequently during the run-up to the weekend. We estimated that 1938-level storm damage, in present-day dollars, would approach $33 billion. Irene will cost several billion and was, and is, very disruptive. However, it is not a 1938-type experience.

Larry Kudlow asked for our economic assessment when we did an interview on his weekly radio show Saturday morning. Larry noted how this storm was tracking over the geography of about one-tenth of the nation’s GDP output and how it affected so many millions of people. Witness 3 million folks without electric power this Sunday.

Larry’s question was in economic terms and not in terms of personal loss of life or property, but he and I were both quick to bemoan and regret personal tragedy. It is always better not to have it.

Let’s get back to the question in economic terms. We are now upping our estimate of fourth-quarter GDP in the US economy. Billions will be spent on rebuilding and recovery. That will put some people back to work, at least temporarily. We speculate that Washington may set aside the usual destructive and divisive partisan political wrangling and act in the interest of the nation. That means there will be a flow of federal financial assistance to the disaster areas. We also suspect there will be a rapid response rather than Katrina-type delays. FEMA lives under a microscope these days.

We expect GDP growth in Q4 to exceed 2% and maybe approach 2.5% to 3%. This will be accomplished with low inflation and very low interest rates. The earthquake-hurricane rebuilding will pile on the recovery of the manufacturing sector. The Japan earthquake may have taken as much as a half point out of GDP in Q2 and Q3. The rebound from that tsunami natural disaster will also occur in Q4. Japanese supply-chain interruption was worldwide and impacted the US. We believe that Q4 economic measures will become a positive surprise to the gloom and doom purveyors who are forecasting a severe recession by yearend.

Coming out this week are commentaries by Bob Eisenbeis on the debt/deficit issues, by Bill Witherell on Germany, by John Mousseau on the hurricane defense we applied to managed Muni accounts, and by me on another obscure stock market indicator that is bullish. Check www.cumber.com list serve for details.

We are off for a Labor Day weekend where a few of us will reconvene at Leen’s Lodge for some quiet talk, casual fishing, and glorious post-hurricane Maine early foliage and delightful weather. Amen, again.

Come join us.

David R. Kotok, Chairman and Chief Investment Officer

It came down for 37 year, then the national debt went out-of-control the year the supply siders’ took power. Are we trapped between national debt and recession. The patriots of World War II showed us the way.

Source:
Ferrari 458 Spider
Classic Driver

Satyajit Das is author of Traders, Guns and Money: Knowns and unknowns in the dazzling world of derivatives (August 2006) and Extreme Money: The Masters of the Universe and the Cult of Risk (August 2011)
~~~

In Crosstown Traffic, Jimi Hendrix sang: “can’t you see my signals turn from green to red / And with you I can see a traffic jam straight up ahead.” In global financial markets, the signals have changed from green to red. But rather than a simple traffic jam, a full scale credit crash may be ahead.

In financial markets, facts never matter until they do but there are worrying indications.

Fact 1 – The European debt crisis has taken a turn for the worse.

There is a serious risk that even the half-baked bailout plan announced on 21 July 2011 cannot be implemented.

The sticking point is a demand for collateral for the second bailout package. Finland demanded and got Euro 500 million in cash as security against their Euro 1,400 million share of the second bailout package. Hearing of the ill-advised side deal between Greece and Finland, Austria, the Netherlands and Slovakia also are now demanding collateral, arguing that their banks were less exposed to Greece than their counterparts in Germany and France entitling them to special treatment. At least, one German parliamentarian has also asked the logical question, why Germany is not receiving similar collateral.

Of course, Greece, which does not have two Euros to rub together, doesn’t have this collateral and would need to borrow it.

Compounding the problem is Greece’s fall in Gross Domestic Production (“GDP”) was worse than forecast, even before the latest austerity measures become effective. The Greek economy has shrunk by around 15% since the crisis began. 2-year borrowing costs for Greece are now over 40%, pawnbroker levels. The next installment of Greece’s first bailout package is due to be released as at end September. Some members of the International Monetary Fund (“IMF”) are already expressing deep misgivings about further assistance to Greece, in the light of the seeming inability of the country to meet its end of the bargain.

A disorderly unwind of the Greek debt problem cannot be ruled out. Ireland and Portugal remain in difficulty. Spain and Italy also remain embattled with only European Central Bank (“ECB”) purchases of their bonds keeping their interest rates down. Concern about the effect of these bailouts on France and Germany is also intensifying.

Concerns about US and Japanese government debt are also increasing.

Official forecasts show that America’s national debt will increase by $3.5 trillion from its existing $14.5 trillion over the next decade. These forecasts are unlikely to be met unless the political deadlock over the budget is overcome and economic growth recovers. Japan was downgraded to AA- and its longer-term economic prognosis continues to be poor.

Facts 2 – Problems with banks have re-emerged.

Banks globally, especially European banks, are seen as increasingly vulnerable to European debt problems. The total exposure of the global banking system to Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Spain and Italy is over $2 trillion. French and Germany banks have very large exposures.

If there are defaults, then these banks will need capital, most likely from their sovereigns. As they are increasingly themselves under pressure, their ability to support the banking system is unclear. The pressure is evident in the share prices of French banks; Societe Generale’s share price has fallen by nearly 50% in a relatively short period of time.

In the US, concerns about Bank of America (“BA”) have emerged, with analysts suggesting that the bank requires significant infusions of capital. The major concerns relate to BA’s investment in US mortgage originator Countrywide including continuing litigation losses, exposure to European banks, loans to commercial real estate and the quality of other assets, such as mortgage servicing rights and goodwill resulting from its acquisition of Merrill Lynch.

BA claims that its exposure of $17 billion to European sovereigns was hedged. As the world discovered in 2008, it wasn’t whether you were hedged but who you were hedged with and whether they were financially able to perform that was the issue.

BA shares have fallen by roughly 40% price over the past month, compared to a 15% decline in the S&P 500. The cost of credit insurance on BA risk has also increased sharply.

BA decision to issue $5 billion in preference shares to Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway, now confirmed as the market’s lender of last resort, at distressed prices was not a statement of strength but weakness. BA needs more capital in any case and Buffett is betting on both BA and if things go wrong that the US taxpayer will bail him out as they did with his investment in Goldman Sachs.

BA’s woes confirm that problems in the banking system exist globally, not only in Europe.

Fact 3 – Money markets are seizing up

Banks and financial institutions are finding it increasingly difficult to raise funds. Costs have risen sharply.

Spanish and Italian banks have limited access to international commercial funding. Like Greek, Irish and Portuguese banks, they are heavily reliant on funding from local investors and central banks, including the ECB.

American money market funds, which manage around $1.6 trillion, historically invested around 40-45% ($600-700 billion) with European financial institutions. Over the last few months, the money market funds have reduced their exposure to European entities, especially Spanish and Italian banks. The funds have also decreased the term of their loans to the European entities that they are willing deal with to as little as 7 days at a time, in an effort to limit risk.

European banks are having to pay higher interest rates, if they can attract funds. The problems are not confined to European financial institutions. Despite limited known direct exposure to European sovereigns and their relatively strong financial positions, Australian banks’ credit costs in international money markets have increased by more than 1.00% in less than 3 months.

As a result, non-financial institutions are finding finance less readily available and more expensive. Anecdotal evidence suggest that businesses are having difficulty financing normal commercial transactions, recalling the credit problems of late 2008/ early 2009.

Banks are increasingly following Tennessee Williams’ advice for survival: “We have to distrust each other. It is our only defense against betrayal.”

Fact 4 – The broader economic environment is deteriorating.

The global economic recovery is stalling. The risk of a recession or minimal growth is significant.

The favourable stock market reaction to the latest report of growth in orders for durable goods in America misses an essential point. At around $200 billion an month, it is still around 20% below its peak in 2007 and only at 2000 levels.

Germany and emerging market economies, like China and India, which have contributed the bulk of global growth since 2008, are showing signs of slowing. The effects of the excessive credit expansion in China and India are showing up in bank bad debts.

Then there are pernicious feedback loops. Tighter money market conditions feed into lower growth, increasing the problems of government finances. Falling tax revenues and rising expenditures push up budget deficits, requiring greater borrowing. Lower growth feeds into greater business failures that increase bank bad debts, feeding further tightening in lending conditions and the cost of finance.

The rapid and marked deterioration in economic and financial conditions means that the risk of a serious disruption is now significant.

If market seize up again, then “this time it will be different“. There might just not be enough money to bail out everyone and every country that may need rescuing.

Government policy options are severely restricted. Government support is restricted because of excessive debt levels and the reluctance of investors to finance indebted sovereigns. Interest rates in most developed countries are low or zero, restricting the ability to stimulate the economy by cutting borrowing cost. Unconventional monetary strategies – namely printing money or quantitative easing – have been tried with limited success. Further doses, while eagerly anticipated by market participants, may not be effective.

The global economy may muddle through, but a second credit crash is now distinctly possible. But the trigger and timing is unknown. As John Maynard Keynes remarked: “The expected never happens; it is the unexpected always.”

~~~

-Satyajit Das
August 27, 2011

The Geopolitics of the United States, Part 1: The Inevitable Empire
John Mauldin
August 25, 2011

Take a good look at the image below. You’ll see how a picture is not only worth a thousand words, but can explain the success of an entire nation. Crops to rivers, rivers to ports – the trade foundation of a country can be summarized in a single image. Sure it stirs up memories of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn and the Mighty Mississippi, but this is the foundation of the US as a global power and a fascinating look at the backbone of the American economy.

We all remember junior high geography (well, some of it, anyway). But somehow it didn’t cover how critical geography is in the development of a nation… and that it is, for example, the primary reason the United States became a global power. The territory of the U.S. simply comprises all the right geographic elements to make its occupants an inevitable global force. Yesterday, STRATFOR, my favorite source for geopolitical analysis of world affairs, published The Inevitable Empire, part I of a fascinating assessment of the United States. In it you’ll learn how geography shaped the nation’s behavior throughout history, and what it means for U.S. foreign policy today. It’s a perfect example of the kind of insight STRATFOR provides that you won’t find anywhere else.

>> Join STRATFOR at the special rate for OTB readers << just in time for their release of The Geopolitics of the United States, Part 2: American Identity and the Threats of Tomorrow. In addition, you’ll get a copy of The Next Decade, the New York Times bestselling book released earlier this year by STRATFOR Founder and CEO George Friedman. But check it out now, I hear this deal only lasts until Monday.

Your proud to be an American analyst,

John Mauldin, Editor
Outside the Box

JohnMauldin@2000wave.com