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Mario Draghi said the euro-area economy is strong enough to overcome increased risk, and therefore this justifies the European Central Bank’s decision to end bond purchases bringing to an end a decade-long failed experiment. The truth behind this statement is starkly different than being portrayed in the press. Draghi also pledged to keep interest rates unchanged at current record lows until his personal term is finished next year. There is the contradiction for if the ECB stops buying debt, who will do so at artificially low rates of interest?

Draghi knows full well that he has utterly destroyed the bond markets in Europe. The ECB has also made it clear that they will REINVEST when the bonds previously purchased mature. The Federal Reserves has taken the opposite position and will NOT reinvest allowing their balance sheet to shrink.

If the economy is that strong, then why not end the QE right now? The fallacy here is that this has nothing to do with the economy. The ECB has simply had the member states on life-support. Interest rates will soar in Europe on long-term debt or there will be no buyers. Pension funds cannot buy 10-year bonds at even 3% when they need 8% to cover liabilities.

The statement by Draghi is creating a total paradox. You cannot keep short-term interest rates where they are and charge negative rates for deposits and simultaneously end QE and expect to sell bonds to the public at insanely low levels.

The press interprets this as the ECB with ending QE because they are “betting that the euro-area economy is robust enough to ride out an apparent slowdown amid risks including U.S. trade tariffs and nervousness that Italy’s populist government will spark another financial crisis” reported Bloomberg.

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

A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall

June 16, 2018

A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall

The prospects for the rest of the year are awful

Après moi, le déluge

~ King Louis XV of France

A hard rain’s a-gonna fall

~ Bob Dylan (the first)

As the Federal Reserve kicked off its second round of quantitative easing in the aftermath of the Great Financial Crisis, hedge fund manager David Tepper predicted that nearly all assets would rise tremendously in response.

“The Fed just announced: We want economic growth, and we don’t care if there’s inflation… have they ever said that before?”

He then famously uttered the line “You gotta love a put”, referring to the Fed’s declared willingness to print $trillions to backstop the economy and financial makets.

Nine years later we see that Tepper was right, likely even more so than he realized at the time.

The other world central banks followed the Fed’s lead. Mario Draghi of the ECB declared a similar “whatever it takes” policy and has printed nearly $3.5 trillion in just the past three years alone. The Bank of Japan has intervened so much that it now owns over 40% of its country’s entire bond market. And no central bank has printed more than the People’s Bank of China.

It has been an unprecedented forcefeeding of stimulus into the global system. And, contrary to what most people realize, it hasn’t diminished over the years since the Great Recession. In fact, the most recent wave from 2015-2018 has seen the highest amount of injected ‘thin-air’ money ever:

Total Assets Of Majro Central Banks

In response, equities have long since rocketed past their pre-crisis highs, bonds continued rising as interest rates stayed at historic lows, and many real estate markets are now back in bubble territory. As Tepper predicted, financial and other risk assets have shot the moon.

And everyone learned to love the ‘Fed put’ and stop worrying.

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

Central Banking: It’s Alive!!

June 12, 2018

CENTRAL BANKING: IT’S ALIVE!!

In his recent posting on Linked In, entitled, ‘The death of macro-prudential’, Stuart Trow of the EBRD delivered a well-aimed broadside at the pitiable conduct of the Bank of England and elaborated on some of the malign consequences of its catalogue of errors. Without wishing to single him out unduly for criticism for a piece with whose broad outlines I concur, I see it as a prime example of where even those who are not wholly in thrall to the cult of ‘Whatever it Takes’ often miss the critical features of that cult’s essential evil. Left unaddressed, therefore, I fear this lack can only leave the intellectual soil fertile for a continued harvest of malign outcomes on the part of our clay-footed idols in the central banks.

Where better to start than with the following bold assertion of the author, viz., that ‘…if only policymakers had been allowed to exercise their judgement, crises could have been anticipated and avoided…’?

In my eyes, that heroic presumption of policymakers’ qualities of ‘judgement’ almost vitiates the argument from the off. Irrespective of whether one can be persuaded that Mario Draghi, Jerome Powell, Divus Marcus Carney and the like are the most intelligent, most far-sighted – most impartially Olympian – beings on the planet, the reality is that neither their fervid number-crunching of rows of abstracted, statistical time-series nor the GIGO output of their horribly over-specified macroeconomic ‘models’ can possibly substitute for the particular judgement and uniquely individual preferences of untold millions of men and women interacting, every minute of every day, every where in the market.

No, the best the central bankers can hope to achieve – in finest Hippocratic fashion – is that their own meddling does not send too any wrong signals, conjure up too many wrong incentives, or encourage too many, ultimately self-defeating behaviours among the innocent millions over whom they have been almost divinely-appointed to hold sway and over whom they hold seemingly limitless power.

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

ECB & Bonds – People Believe What They Want to Believe

June 11, 2018

ECB & Bonds – People Believe What They Want to Believe

QUESTION: the ECB is arguing that given the low free float of EU bonds (especially German), bonds not owned by the ECB or other central banks, the impact of an end to APP purchases will be nowhere comparable to the tapering sell-off in the US in 2013. Bank research teams are hanging on to this idea to make positive forecasts in the EUR exchange rate versus the USD. They say an end-date for the APP programme may not result in a higher risk/term premium in the European government bond market.
Could you comment on this, please? Many thanks for all your work,
GM

ANSWER: The ECB knows it has to stop the QE program. They also know that Yellen was correct in lecturing them that interest rates had to be “normalized” so they know there is a real meltdown coming. That is inevitable. Pension funds cannot buy 10-year bonds at 1.5% or even 3% locking in losses for 10 years. I really fail to see that claiming there is such a small float, because the ECB has been the 800-pound gorilla buying everything, that interest rates will not rise. That is just complete fallacy. There is a small float because they have DESTROYED the bond market in Europe.

Draghi has proved something incredibly important – Demand-Side Economics has been a complete and utter failure. After 10 years of manipulating interest rates, that they want to put private bankers in prison for under the Libor Scandal, the ECB has failed completely. In just 7 days, the German bunds dropped from 16415 to 15939 – that was 5.9%. The 2013 decline in US 30-year Treasuries back in 2013 was 16%. So what the Bunds did in 7 days in their decline based upon events in Italy reflect that the ECB is trying to paint a picture that yes – rates will rise and bonds will decline.

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

Draghi Admits “Growth May Have Peaked”; ECB To Delay QE Unwind

April 20, 2018

Draghi Admits “Growth May Have Peaked”; ECB To Delay QE Unwind

As we have showed repeatedly over the past month, the European economic imploding, and nowhere is this more obvious than the Citi Eurozone Economic Surprise Index why will soon hit its post financial crisis lows.

It appears that after weeks of dithering, someone at the ECB also figured out how to pull up this chart on their Bloomberg because moments ago, and one month after the ECB first admitted that things are not ok when the central bank cut its 2019 inflation forecast, arguably due to protectionism concerns…

… Mario Draghi finally admitted what we all know:

ECB’S DRAGHI EURO-AREA GROWTH CYCLE MAY HAVE PEAKED

To be sure, Draghi also brought up the usual spate of platitudes he mentions every time, including that: “Notwithstanding the latest economic indicators, which suggest that the growth cycle may have peaked, the growth momentum is expected to continue”, that protectionism “may have already had some negative impact on global sentiment indicators” and that “while our confidence in the inflation outlook has increased, remaining uncertainties still warrant patience, persistence and prudence with regard to monetary policy.”

His conclusion was the punchline: “An ample degree of monetary stimulus remains necessary.”

Which leads us to the second point. As Draghi was speaking, Bloomberg reported the latest ECB “trial balloon” according to which Central Bank policymakers “see scope to wait until their July meeting to announce how they’ll end their bond-buying program”, according to euro-area officials familiar with the matter.

In other words, so much for the ECB tightening, or being able to tighten, any time soon.

More details:

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

ECB Minutes Reveal Fears About Currency Wars, Euro Slides

February 22, 2018

ECB Minutes Reveal Fears About Currency Wars, Euro Slides

There were two distinct reactions in the Euro to today’s ECB Minutes, released this morning.

At first, the EUR jumped following initial headlines that the ECB acknowledged that revisiting the guidance would be “part of a the regular reassessment” going forward, but noting that any changes are premature at this stage.

In this context, it was remarked that communication on monetary policy would continue to develop according to the evolving state of the economy in line with the ECB’s forward guidance, with a view to avoiding abrupt or disorderly adjustments at a later stage. However, changes in communication were generally seen to be premature at this juncture, as inflation developments remained subdued despite the robust pace of economic expansion.

* * *

The language pertaining to the monetary policy stance could be revisited early this year as part of the regular reassessment at the forthcoming monetary policy meetings. In this context, some members expressed a preference for dropping the easing bias regarding the APP from the Governing Council’s communication as a tangible reflection of reinforced confidence in a sustained adjustment of the path of inflation. However, it was concluded that such an adjustment was premature and not yet justified by the stronger confidence.

Predictably, this hawkish take prompted a kneejerk move higher in the EUR as algos bought the EUR.

However, what traders focused on next was a rather explicit ECB concern over the weakness of the dollar, as the statement once again highlighted fears that the US administration was deliberately trying to engage in currency wars, something which Mario Draghi famously remarked on during the Q&A in the last ECB press conference, when asked for his response to Mnuchin’s statement.

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

Economic Collapse: Will Cryptocurrency Save the Financial System?

January 31, 2018

Economic Collapse: Will Cryptocurrency Save the Financial System?

In the second article of my three part series, I addressed how we got to the current state of this financial chaos. In this last article, I explain where we are heading and how cryptocurrency could be the last chance to create a sustainable economic system.

Where to go from here?

If trust and sustainability were the two conditions that allowed for the transition from physical gold to paper currency, it is from this basis that we must start to analyze where we are going and what effects the next economic crisis could have.

In 2008, confidence in central banks saved the global economy. But as Mario Draghi said, the bazooka of quantitative easing was fired and a second hit during a crisis would have proved ineffective. The reason is complex and must be clearly explained. Most people are paid in a currency deposited in the bank, because that is where one keeps one’s currency, able to withdraw it at any time. But in the event of an economic crisis, priority is given to the banks, whatever remaining liquidity being for the customers. The reason why there was no bank run in 2008, which would have led to the collapse of the global banking system, lies in the trust that ordinary people continued to place in the financial system, courtesy of what the corporate-controlled media told them.

The problem concerns the next financial crisis and how the world population will react. The path already seems to be traced, especially in geopolitical terms. Countries like China and Russia have created their own alternative banking and financial system to escape dollar sanctions; but they have also begun to de-dollarize by accumulating gold and using different payment methods to the US currency.

…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…

Draghi Speech: Everything Is Awesome In Europe, No Signs Of Systemic Risks

November 17, 2017

Draghi Speech: Everything Is Awesome In Europe, No Signs Of Systemic Risks

Mario Draghi gave the keynote speech at the Frankfurt European Banking Congress this morning in which he focused on the strong outlook for the Eurozone economy and how his monetary policy is playing a vital role. The speech was peppered with upbeat phrases and adjectives like solid, robust, unabated, endogenous propagation, resilient, remarkable and ongoing. According to Draghi.

The euro area is in the midst of a solid economic expansion. GDP has risen for 18 straight quarters, with the latest data and surveys pointing to unabated growth momentum in the period ahead. From the ECB’s perspective, we have increasing confidence that the recovery is robust and that this momentum will continue going forward.

Draghi is confident that future growth will be unabated for three reasons.

Previous headwinds have dissipated;
Drivers of growth are increasingly endogenous rather than exogenous; and
The Eurozone economy is more resilient to new shocks.

In terms of previous headwinds, Draghi notes that global growth and trade have recovered, while the eurozone has de-leveraged.

For some years global growth and world trade have been a drag on the recovery. Now, we are seeing signs of a sustained expansion. Global PMIs remain strong. The share of countries in which growth has been improving relative to the previous three years has risen from 20% in mid-2016 to 60% today. And this has fed through into a rebound in world trade, which is growing at its strongest annual rate in six years, and may well become a tailwind going forward.

Domestically, a key headwind in the past has been the necessary deleveraging by firms and households. But this is also now diminishing as debt returns to more sustainable levels.

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

Is There a Way Out of the ECB’s Trap?

November 15, 2017

IS THERE ANY WAY OUT OF THE ECB’S TRAP?

The ECB faces the Devil’s Alternative that Frederick Forsyth mentioned in one of his books. All options are potentially riskly. Mario Draghi knows that maintaining the so-called stimuli involves more risks than benefits, but also knows that eliminating them could make the eurozone deck of cards collapse.

Despite the massive injection of liquidity, he knows that he can not disguise political risks such as the secessionist coup in Catalonia. The Ibex reflects this, making it clear that the European Central Bank does not print prosperity, it only puts a floor to valuations.

The ECB wants a weak euro. But it is a game of juggling to pretend a weak euro and at the same time a strong economy. The European Union countries export mostly to themselves. Member countries sell more than two-thirds of their goods and services to other countries in the eurozone. Therefore, the more they export and their economies recover, the stronger the euro, and with it, the risk of losing competitiveness. The ECB has tried to break the euro strength with dovish messages, but it has not worked until political risk reappeared. With the German elections and the prospect of a weak coalition, the results of the Austrian elections and the situation in Spain, market operators have realized – at last – that the mirage of “this time is different “in the European Union was simply that, a mirage.

A weak euro has not helped the EU to export more abroad. Non-EU exports from the member countries have been stagnant since the monetary stimulus program was launched, even though the euro is much weaker than its basket of currencies compared to when the stimulus program began. The Central Bank Trap, which I explain in my new book.

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

European Banking Crisis

November 13, 2017

There is intense resistance building against the stricter new rules on bad loans among the European banks. This will hit Italy hard and may push off the edge more than one Italian bank. With the elections coming next year in Italy, the banking rules may be the straw that breaks the back.

The background to the dispute is the demand of the ECB’s banking supervisor that banks must withhold higher reserves for the default-prone loans in their portfolios. The crisis stems from the fact that as taxes have increased, the economy has declined. The total bad loans in the Eurozone add up to about €844 billion euros. About 25% of this figure is concentrated in Italian banks.

A good stiff wind may blow over the European banking system

Is There Any Way Out of the ECB’s Trap?

November 10, 2017

Is There Any Way Out of the ECB’s Trap?

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

Dear Mario Draghi: About Your Victory Over Deflation Speech in March

November 2, 2017

Dear Mario Draghi: About Your Victory Over Deflation Speech in March

In March, ECB President Mario Draghi declared victory over deflation. Let’s take a look at Eurozone inflation since his victory speech.

On March 10, 2017, I reported ECB Declares Victory Over Deflation: Hallelujah!

My lead-in comment was “ECB President Mario Draghi Declares Victory Over Deflation. That’s much like shouting hallelujah when you miss the game-winning field goal.”

In the Eurozone, consumer price inflation is measured by the Harmonised Index of Consumer Prices (HICP). Harmonized means all the countries in the Eurozone use the same methodology. HICP is essentially the same as the CPI in the US.

Core HICP excludes food, energy, alcohol, and tobacco. In the US, core CPI excludes food and energy.

It’s been seven months since Draghi’s victory speech. Let’s investigate details from the October Fash Estimate of Eurozone HICP.

Year-over-year Inflation in services is down from 1.5% to 1.2%. The core HICP is down from 1.1% to 0.9%. Thus most of the decline in the core is due to a drop in the rate of inflation in services.

Mario Draghi, like his counterparts at the Fed, are not pleased with such results. Like all economic illiterates, the Central Banks are happiest when your money decreases in value every month.

Meanwhile, consumers are happy to see prices decline. It takes years of brainwashing to believe rising prices are a good thing.

Must Stop Digging

October 28, 2017

Must Stop Digging

Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Intel and Draghi all handily beat expectations. Booming technology earnings confirm the degree to which Bubble Dynamics have become entrenched within the real economy. Draghi confirms that central bankers remain petrified by the thought of piercing Bubbles.

There is a prevailing view that Bubbles reflect asset price gains beyond what is justified by fundamental factors. I counter with the argument that the inflation of underlying fundamentals – revenues, earnings, cash-flow, margins, etc. – is a paramount facet of Bubble Dynamics (How abruptly did the trajectory of earnings reverse course in 2001 and 2009?).

With extremely low rates, loose corporate Credit Availability, large deficit spending, inflating asset prices and a glut of “money” sloshing about, there is bountiful fodder for spending and corporate profits. And with technology one of the more beguiling avenues to employ the cash-flow bonanza – and tech start-ups, the cloud, AI, Internet of Things, robotic, cybersecurity, etc. white-hot right now – the Gargantuan Technology Oligopoly today luxuriates at the Bubble Core.

By this time, expanding global technology capacity is a straightforward endeavor, while the industry for now enjoys booming demand and outsized margins. This confluence of extraordinary attributes provides “tech” the latitude to operate as a powerful black hole absorbing global purchasing power (throughout economies as well as financial markets). As such, it has been a case of the greater the scope of the Bubble, the more supply of “tech” available to weigh on overall goods and services pricing pressures. Central bankers continue to misconstrue this dynamic, instead perceiving irrepressible disinflationary forces that they are compelled to counter (with year after year after year of flagrant monetary stimulus).
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Weekly Commentary: Arms Race in Bubbles

October 21, 2017

Weekly Commentary: Arms Race in Bubbles

The week left me with an uneasy feeling. There were a number of articles noting the 30-year anniversary of the 1987 stock market crash. I spent “Black Monday” staring at a Telerate monitor as a treasury analyst at Toyota’s US headquarters in Southern California. If I wasn’t completely in love with the markets and macro analysis by that morning, there was no doubt about it by bedtime. Enthralling.

As writers noted this week, there were post-’87 crash economic depression worries. In hindsight, those fears were misplaced. Excesses had not progressed over years to the point of causing deep financial and economic structural maladjustment. Looking back today, 1987 was much more the beginning of a secular financial boom rather than the end. The crash offered a signal – a warning that went unheeded. Disregarding warnings has been in a stable trend now for three decades.

Alan Greenspan’s assurances of ample liquidity – and the Fed and global central bankers’ crisis-prevention efforts for some time following the crash – ensured fledgling financial excesses bounced right back and various Bubbles hardly missed a beat. Importantly, financial innovation and speculation accelerated momentously. Wall Street had been emboldened – and would be repeatedly.

The crash also marked the genesis of government intervention in the markets that would evolve into the previously unimaginable: negative short-term rates, manipulated bond yields, central bank support throughout the securities markets, Trillions upon Trillions of central bank monetization and the perception of open-ended securities market liquidity backstops around the globe. Greenspan was the forefather of the powerful trifecta: Team Bernanke, Kuroda and Draghi. Ask the bond market back in 1987 to contemplate massive government deficit spending concurrent with near zero global sovereign yields – the response would have been “inconceivable.”

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

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