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Stock Market Crash of 1987

October 19, 2018

The first contemporary global financial crisis unfolded in the autumn of 1987 on a day known infamously as “Black Monday.”¹ A chain reaction of market distress sent global stock exchanges plummeting in a matter of hours. In the United States, the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) dropped 22.6 percent in a single trading session, a loss that remains the largest one-day stock market decline in history.² At the time, it also marked the sharpest market downturn in the United States since the Great Depression.

The Black Monday events served to underscore the concept of “globalization,” which was still quite new at the time, by demonstrating the unprecedented extent to which financial markets worldwide had become intertwined and technologically interconnected. Black Monday led to a number of noteworthy reforms, including exchanges developing provisions to pause trading temporarily in the event of rapid market sell-offs. In addition, the Federal Reserve’s response set a precedent for the central bank’s use of “liquidity” to stem financial crises.³

Events Leading Up to the Crash

Stock markets raced upward during the first half of 1987. By late August, the DJIA had gained 44 percent in a matter of seven months, stoking concerns of an asset bubble.⁴ In mid-October, a storm cloud of news reports undermined investor confidence and led to additional volatility in markets. The federal government disclosed a larger-than-expected trade deficit and the dollar fell in value. The markets began to unravel, foreshadowing the record losses that would develop a week later. Beginning on October 14, a number of markets began incurring large daily losses.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Stock Market Just Crashed In Italy, And Argentina Has Panic-Raised Interest Rates To 65 Percent

September 28, 2018

The Stock Market Just Crashed In Italy, And Argentina Has Panic-Raised Interest Rates To 65 Percent

In the 9th largest economy in the world, the financial markets are crashing, and in the 21st largest economy in the world the central bank just raised interest rates to 65 percent to support a currency that is completely imploding. While the mainstream media in the United States continues to be obsessed with all things Kavanaugh, an international financial crisis threatens to spiral out of control. Stock prices are falling and currencies are collapsing all over the planet, but because the U.S. has been largely unaffected so far the mainstream media is mostly choosing to ignore what is happening. But the truth is that this is serious. The financial crisis in Italy threatens to literally tear the EU apart, and South America has become an economic horror show. The situation in Brazil continues to get worse, the central bank of Argentina has just raised interest rates to 65 percent, and in Venezuela starving people are literally eating cats and dogs in order to survive. How bad do things have to get before people will start paying attention?

On Friday, Italian stocks had their worst day in more than two years, and it was the big financial stocks that were on the cutting edge of the carnage…

Shares in Italian banks .FTIT8300, whose big sovereign bond portfolios makes them sensitive to political risk, bore the brunt of selling pressure, sinking 7.3 percent as government bonds sold off and the focus turned to rating agencies.

Along with the main Italian stock index .FTMIB, the banks had their worst day since the June 2016 Brexit vote triggered a selloff across markets.

Italian bonds got hit extremely hard too. The following comes from Business Insider…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Albert Edwards: Why We Are Destined To Repeat The Mistakes Of The Past

September 13, 2018

Albert Edwards: Why We Are Destined To Repeat The Mistakes Of The Past

With everyone and their grandmother opining on the 10 year anniversary of the start of the global financial crisis, it was inevitable that the strategist who predicted the great crash (and according to some has been doing the same for the past decade) – SocGen’s Albert Edwards – would share his thoughts on what he has dubbed the “10th anniversary of chaos.”

In it, the SocGen skeptic slams the trio of Bernanke, Geithner and Paulson who have been not only penning op-eds in recent days, but making the media rounds in a valiant attempt to redirect the spotlight from the culprits behind the crisis, writing that “they just never recognized beforehand that the economy was a massive credit bubble, just like it is now” and points to central bank arrogance as the “main reason why we should still be scared.”

Of course, just like 10 years ago, as long as the market keeps going up, nobody is actually “scared” and instead everyone is enjoying the ride (just as the legion of crypto fans who are no longer HODLing). The “fear” only comes when the selling begins, and by then it’s always too late to do anything about the final outcome as yet another bubble bursts.

Below we excerpt some of the observations from Edwards’ “A thought on the 10th anniversary of chaos”

Central Bank arrogance is one of the main reasons why we should still be scared. As a former official at the NY Fed, Peter Fisher, recently noted, “The Fed has acknowledged no failures. All the experiments have been successful, every one: no failures, no negative side-effects, no perverse consequences, only diminishing returns.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

James Grant Responds To The Bernanke-Paulson-Geithner Op-Ed

September 10, 2018

James Grant Responds To The Bernanke-Paulson-Geithner Op-Ed

Wealth defect

Over the weekend, Global Financial Crisis-era policymakers Ben Bernanke, Timothy Geithner and Henry Paulson brought the band back together to pen a New York Times opinion piece. After sharing their self-exonerating analysis of the events of 2007-2009 and subsequent response (which one of the three did the fact checking?), Bernanke et al. argue for greater regulatory powers, or as they put it, “adequate firefighting tools,” to resolve future financial crises.

Blanket guarantees of bank debt by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the Fed’s emergency lending capabilities and the Treasury department’s guarantee of money market funds are among the mechanisms cited by the authors as necessary for crisis prevention and mitigation.

The trio write:

We need to make sure that future generations of financial firefighters have the emergency powers they need to prevent the next fire from becoming a conflagration. We must also resist calls to eliminate safeguards as the memory of the crisis fades. For those working to keep our financial system resilient, the enemy is forgetting.

Alternatively, the monetary mandarins could take a cue from Peter Fisher, former executive vice-president at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and senior fellow at the Tuck School of Business. Speaking on policy normalization at the Grant’s spring conference on March 15, 2017, Fisher offered a commanding critique of the crisis-era response led by the authors of this weekend’s Times piece. Written 18 months ago, the below passage could serve as a direct rebuttal to the authors, particularly former Fed chair Bernanke:

Curiously, the Fed has acknowledged no failures. All the experiments have been successful, every one: no failures, no negative side effects, no perverse consequences, only diminishing returns.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Oil Prices Have Been Rising And $4 A Gallon Gasoline Would Put Enormous Stress On The U.S. Economy

September 4, 2018

Oil Prices Have Been Rising And $4 A Gallon Gasoline Would Put Enormous Stress On The U.S. Economy

Thanks to increasing demand and upcoming U.S. sanctions against Iran, oil prices have been rising and some analysts are forecasting that they will surge even higher in the months ahead. Unfortunately, that would be very bad news for the U.S. economy at a time when concerns about a major economic downturn have already been percolating. In recent years, extremely low gasoline prices have been one of the factors that have contributed to a period of relative economic stability in the United States. Because our country is so spread out, we import such a high percentage of our goods, and we are so dependent on foreign oil, our economy is particularly vulnerable to gasoline price shocks. Anyone that lived in the U.S. during the early 1970s can attest to that. If the average price of gasoline rises to $4 a gallon by the end of 2018 that will be really bad news, and if the average price of gasoline were to hit $5 a gallon that would be catastrophic for the economy.

Very early on Tuesday, the price of U.S. oil surged past $70 a barrel in anticipation of the approaching hurricane along the Gulf Coast. The following comes from Fox Business…

U.S. oil prices rose on Tuesday, breaking past $70 per barrel, after two Gulf of Mexico oil platforms were evacuated in preparation for a hurricane.

U.S. West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude futures were at $70.05 per barrel at 0353 GMT, up 25 cents, or 0.4 percent from their last settlement.

If we stay at about $70 a gallon, that isn’t going to be much of a problem.

But some analysts are now speaking of “an impending supply crunch”, and that is a very troubling sign. For example, just check out what Stephen Brennock is saying…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The “Next” Financial Crisis

August 4, 2018

The “Next” Financial Crisis

Photo source Financial Crisis | CC BY 2.0

In this episode of The Hudson Report, we speak with Michael Hudson about the implications of the flattening yield curve, the possibility of another global financial crisis, and public banking as an alternative to the current system.

‘The Hudson Report’ is a Left Out weekly series with the legendary economist Michael Hudson. Every week, we look at an economic issue that is either being ignored—or hotly debated—in the press that week.

Paul Sliker: Michael Hudson welcome back to another episode of The Hudson Report.

Michael Hudson:It’s good to be here again.

Paul Sliker: So, Michael, over the past few months the IMF has been sending warning signals about the state of the global economy. There are a bunch of different macroeconomic developments that signal we could be entering into another crisis or recession in the near future. One of those elements is the yield curve, which shows the difference between short-term and long-term borrowing rates. Investors and financial pundits of all sorts are concerned about this, because since 1950 every time the yield curve has flattened, the economy has tanked shortly thereafter.

Can you explain what the yield curve signifies, and if all these signals I just mentioned are forecasting another economic crisis?

Michael Hudson: Normally, borrowers have to pay only a low rate of interest for a short-term loan. If you take a longer-term loan, you have to pay a higher rate. The longest term loans are for mortgages, which have the highest rate. Even for large corporations, the longer you borrow – that is, the later you repay – the pretense is that the risk is much higher. Therefore, you have to pay a higher rate on the pretense that the interest-rate premium is compensation for risk. Banks and the wealthy get to borrow at lower rates.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Carmot Capital: “The Next Crisis Won’t Be A Flash Crash; It Will Be A Flash Flood”

February 5, 2018

Carmot Capital: “The Next Crisis Won’t Be A Flash Crash; It Will Be A Flash Flood”

THE STRAIGHT FLUSH CRASH

AN ILLUSION OF SIMPLICITY, AN ENTANGLEMENT OF COMPLEXITY

Lately, there has been talk of so-called “elevated” markets. Equity markets, real estate markets and bond markets are indeed reaching new highs regularly. But how long will this last? Can it last indefinitely? Or as is often said, “It’s different this time,”; is it really? We posit that it is not different this time. In fact, there are very real parallels that should concern every investor. What could catalyze the next global financial crisis (“GFC II”)? We suggest that it won’t be a “Flash Crash.” Instead it will be a flash flood that could be caused by very real systemic risk. In other words, the system will flush itself of the market detritus accumulated over the last 8-9 years. We are calling it The Straight Flush Crash. This paper will explain why.

For anyone that has studied the sequence of events leading up to the Global Financial Crisis (“GFC”) of 2008-09, it would not be hard to put together the shape of the new crisis. The first GFC began with the New Century Financial bankruptcy that caused the first market hiccup on February 27, 2007 (when the VIX indicator jumped a record 60% in one day) and escalated to Bear Stearns, to Lehman Brothers, then to the whole GFC debacle. In our opinion, the market blip on August 24, 2015 (affectionately known as the ETF Flash Crash) was the first indication of the shape of things to come. During each crisis, a flashpoint has ignited the existing structure, which then toppled and in turn caused enormous losses for investors. For example, in the GFC of 2008-09, subprime lending was a small fraction of lending which ignited the whole structured finance pyramid and caused the liquidity crisis that bankrupted multiple banks.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Coming Market Crash Will Set Off The Biggest Gold Panic Buying In History

January 26, 2018

The Coming Market Crash Will Set Off The Biggest Gold Panic Buying In History

The leverage in the economic system has become so extreme; investors have no idea of the disaster that is going to take place during the next stock market crash. The collapse of the U.S. Housing and Investment Banking Industry in 2008 and ensuing economic turmoil was a mere WARM-UP for STAGE 2 of the continued disintegration of the global financial and economic system.

While the U.S. and the global economy have seemingly continued business as usual since the Fed and Central Banks stepped in and propped up the collapsing markets in 2008, this was only a one-time GET OUT OF JAIL free card that can’t be used again. What the Fed and Central Banks did to keep the system from falling off the cliff in 2008 was quite similar to a scene in a science fiction movie where the commander of the spaceship uses the last bit of rocket-fuel propulsion in just the nick of time to get them back to earth on the correct orbit.

Thus, the only way forward, according to the Central banks, was to increase the amount of money printing, leverage, asset values, and debt. While this policy can work for a while, it doesn’t last forever. And unfortunately, forever is now, here….or soon to be here. So, it might be a good time to look around and see how good things are now because the future won’t be pretty.

To give you an idea the amount of leverage in the markets, let’s take a look at a chart posted in the article, A Market Valuation That Defies Comparison. The article was written by Michael Lebowitz of RealInvestmentAdvice.com. I like to give credit when credit is due, especially when someone puts out excellent analysis. In the article, Lebowitz stated the following:

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Ken Rogoff Warns “China Will Be At The Center Of The Next Global Financial Crisis”

January 25, 2018

Ken Rogoff Warns “China Will Be At The Center Of The Next Global Financial Crisis”

Having warned in Davos today that:

“If interest rates go up even modestly, halfway to their normal level, you will see a collapse in the stock market,”

“I don’t know how everything from art and bitcoin to stock prices will react as interest rates go up.”

Kenneth Rogoff, Professor of Public Policy at Harvard University, explains to Finanz Und Wirtschaft’s Christoph Gisiger why the long economic slump is finally over and what the biggest risks for the future are.

Few people know as much about financial crises as Kenneth Rogoff. Together with his colleague Carmen Reinhart, the highly influential professor at Harvard University is the author of «This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly», one of the most important studies on the financial crisis of 2008 and its impact on the economy and society. So what’s the big lesson nearly ten years after the traumatic fall of the investment bank Lehman Brothers? In which way was this crisis different than other big shocks in the history of finance? Und most importantly: What’s next for the global economy?

Professor Rogoff, since the outbreak of the financial crisis nearly ten years have passed. How do grade this recovery when you look at other big busts in the history of finance?
In my research with Carmen Reinhart we found that after a deep systemic financial crisis, it often takes the economy eight to ten years to recover. Now, it’s been a decade and I think we are in a recovery period where we are going to get some reversion to mean in terms of productivity growth and other things. That means we are going to get above average productivity growth and rising investments for several years as the economy normalizes.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Inescapable Reason Why the Financial System Will Fail

December 30, 2017

girardatlarge.com

The Inescapable Reason Why the Financial System Will Fail

Credit cannot expand faster than fundamentals forever

Modern finance has many complex moving parts, and this complexity masks its inner simplicity.

Let’s break down the core dynamics of the current financial system.

The Core Dynamic of the “Recovery” and Asset Bubbles: Credit

Credit is the foundation of the current financial system, for credit enables consumers to bring consumption forward, that is, buy more stuff today than they could buy with the cash they have on hand, in exchange for promising to pay principal and interest with their future income.

Credit also enables speculators to buy more assets than they otherwise could were they limited to cash on hand.

Buying goods, services and assets with credit appears to be a good thing: consumers get to enjoy more stuff without having to scrimp and save up income, and investors/speculators can reap more income from owning more assets.

But all goods/services and assets are not equal, and all credit is not equal.

There is an opportunity cost to any loan (i.e. credit), as the income that will be devoted to paying principal and interest in the future could have been devoted to some other use or investment.

So borrowing money to purchase a product or an asset now means foregoing some future purchase.

While all products have some sort of payoff, the payoffs are not equal. If I buy five bottles of $100/bottle champagne and throw a party, the payoff is in the heady moments of celebration. If I buy a table saw for $500, that tool has the potential to help me make additional income for years or even decades to come.

If I’m making money with the table saw, I can pay the debt service out of my new earnings.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Bean counters: Lost in Paradise

December 11, 2017

Bean counters: Lost in Paradise

Long before the Paradise Papers, or the Panama Papers, the Enron scandal, Savings and Loan crisis, WorldCom, and the Global Financial Crisis, governments in the US, UK and Australia were colluding with the world’s biggest banks and their clients using aggressions dynamics not to defeat but to suborn the controls of the supposedly independent professionals: The accountants.

The great swathes of coverage being given to the Paradise Papers largely focuses attention on its beneficiaries and the specialised offshore marketers of the schemes, but scant attention has been directed towards The Big Four global accounting firms like Pricewaterhouse Coopers (PWC), Ernst & Young (EY), Deloitte and KPMG, that enabled tax dodging by aggressively marketing schemes in Luxembourg, Panama, Jersey, the Cayman Islands and the British Virgin Islands to their clients using firms like Appleby as conduits.

Long before the Paradise Papers, or the Panama Papers, the Enron scandal, Savings and Loan crisis, WorldCom, and the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) governments in the United States, the UK and Australia were colluding with the world’s biggest banks and their clients using aggressions dynamics not to defeat but to suborn the controls of the supposedly independent professionals: The accountants.

They aren’t just designing new tax avoidance schemes the likes of which feature in the Paradise and Panama Papers. The Big Four accountancy firms are lobbying for and directly drafting the very regulations and loopholes that enable them.

How to run a control fraud

The best way to run a control fraud is to turn the independent professionals that provide internal and external controls – auditors, appraisers, and credit ratings agencies – into allies, and use their reputation, alleged professionalism and independence to assist you in convincing the victims of your fraud, to trust you.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Weekly Commentary: “Not Clear What That Means”

November 18, 2017

Weekly Commentary: “Not Clear What That Means”

November 15 – Bloomberg (Nishant Kumar and Suzy Waite): “Hedge-fund manager David Einhorn said the problems that caused the global financial crisis a decade ago still haven’t been resolved. ‘Have we learned our lesson? It depends what the lesson was…’ Einhorn said he identified several issues at the time of the crisis, including the fact that institutions that could have gone under were deemed too big to fail. The scarcity of major credit-rating agencies was and remains a factor, Einhorn said, while problems in the derivatives market ‘could have been dealt with differently.’ And in the ‘so-called structured-credit market, risk was transferred, but not really being transferred, and not properly valued.’ ‘If you took all of the obvious problems from the financial crisis, we kind of solved none of them,’ Einhorn said… Instead, the world ‘went the bailout route.’ ‘We sweep as much under the rug as we can and move on as quickly as we can,’ he said.”

October 12 – ANSA: “European Central Bank President Mario Draghi defended quantitative easing at a conference with former Fed chief Ben Bernanke, saying the policy had helped create seven million jobs in four years. Bernanke chided the idea that QE distorted the markets, saying ‘It’s not clear what that means’.”

Once you provide a benefit it’s just very difficult to take it way. This sure seems to have become a bigger and more complex issue than it had been in the past. Taking away benefits is certainly front and center in contentious Washington with tax and healthcare reform. It is fundamental to the dilemma confronting central bankers these days.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Today the music stops

September 20, 2017

Today the music stops

Today’s the day.

After months of preparing financial markets for this news, the Federal Reserve is widely expected to announce that it will finally begin shrinking its $4.5 trillion balance sheet.

I know, that probably sound reeeeally boring. A bunch of central bankers talking about their balance sheet.

But it’s phenomenally important. And I’ll explain why-

When the Global Financial Crisis started in 2008, the Federal Reserve (along with just about every central bank in the world) took the unprecedented step of conjuring trillions of dollars out of thin air.

In the Fed’s case, it was roughly $3.5 trillion, about 25% of the size of the entire US economy at the time.

That’s a lot of money.

And after nearly a decade of this free money policy, there is more money in the financial system than ever before.

Economists have a measure for money supply called “M2”. And M2 is at a record high — nearly $9 trillion higher than at the start of the 2008 crisis.

Now, one might expect that, over time, as the population and economy grow, the amount of money in the system would increase.

But even on a per-capita basis, and relative to the size of US GDP, there is more money in the system than there has ever been, at least in the history of modern central banking.

And that has consequences.

One of those consequences is that asset prices have exploded.

Stocks are at all-time highs. Bonds are at all-time highs. Many property markets are at all-time highs. Even the prices of alternative assets like private equity and artwork are at all-time highs.

But isn’t that a good thing?

Well, let’s look at stocks as an example.

As investors, we trade our hard-earned savings for shares of a [hopefully] successful, well-managed business.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Does Government Spending Create More Economic Growth?

September 5, 2017

Does Government Spending Create More Economic Growth?

After the 2007-2009 global financial crisis, fears of ballooning public debt and worries about the drag on economic growth pushed authorities in some countries to lower government spending, a tactic that economists now think may have slowed recovery. Note that in the United States the total debt to GDP ratio stood at 349 in Q1 this year.

In a paper presented at the Kansas City Federal Reserve’s annual economic symposium on August 26 2017, Alan Auerbach and Yuriy Gorodnichenko from the University of California suggested that “expansionary fiscal policies adopted when the economy is weak may not only stimulate output but also reduce debt-to-GDP ratios”. (Fiscal Stimulus and Fiscal Sustainability, August 1,2017, UC – Berkley and NBER).

Some commentators are of the view that these findings may be welcome news to central bankers who face limited options of their own to combat a future downturn, given existing low interest rates and low inflation rates in their economies. “With tight constraints on central banks, one may expect — or maybe hope for — a more active response of fiscal policy when the next recession arrives,” the University of California researchers wrote.

These findings are in agreement with Nobel Laureate in economics Paul Krugman, and other commentators that are of the view that an increase in government outlays whilst the economy is relatively subdued is good news for economic growth.

Can increase in government outlays strengthen economic growth?

Observe that government is not a wealth generating entity as such — the more it spends, the more resources it has to take from wealth generators. This in turn undermines the wealth generating process of the economy.

The proponents for strong government outlays when an economy displays weakness hold that the stronger outlays by the government will strengthen the spending flow and this in turn will strengthen the economy.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Fighting the Next Global Financial Crisis

May 18, 2016

Fighting the Next Global Financial Crisis

NEW HAVEN – What do people mean when they criticize generals for “fighting the last war”? It’s not that generals ever think they will face the same weapon systems and the same battlefields. They certainly know better. The error, to the extent that the generals make it, must operate at a more subtle level. Generals are sometimes slow to get around to developing plans and ordnance for those new weapon systems and battlefields. And just as important, they sometimes assume that the public psychology, and the narratives that influence the morale that is so important in achieving victory, is the same as in the last war.

That is also true for regulators whose job is to prevent financial crises. For the same reasons, they may be slow to change in response to new situations. They tend to be slow to adapt to changing public psychology. The need for regulation depends on public perceptions of the last crisis, and, as George Akerlof and I argued in Animal Spirits, these perceptions depend heavily on changing popular narratives.

Central Banking’s Final Frontier?

Anatole Kaletsky weighs the views of Raghuram Rajan, Adair Turner, Stephen Roach, and others on how far today’s increasingly exotic monetary policies can and should go.

The latest progress reports from the Financial Stability Board (FSB) in Basel outline definite improvements in stability-enhancing financial regulations in 24 of the world’s largest economies. Their “Dashboard” tabulates progress in 14 different regulatory areas. For example, the FSB gives high marks for all 24 countries in implementing the Basel III risk-based capital requirements.

But the situation is not altogether reassuring. These risk-based capital requirements may not be high enough, as Anat Admati and Martin Hellwig argued in their influential book The Bankers New Clothes. And there has been much less progress in a dozen other regulatory areas that the FSB tabulates.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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