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Winslow Homer Mending the nets 1881

Yes, it’s 10 years ago today, on January 22 2008, that Nicole Foss and I published our first article on the Automatic Earth (the first few years on Blogger). And, well, obviously, a lot has happened in those 10 years.

For ourselves, we went from living in Ottawa, Canada to doing a lot of touring starting in 2009, to support Nicole’s DVDs and video downloads. We visited Sweden, Slovakia, Czech Republic, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Spain, Austria, Denmark, US of course, with prolonged stays in France, Britain, New Zealand, Australia, times that I miss a lot here and there, to now with Nicole settled in New Zealand and my time divided between Athens, Greece and the Netherlands.

We met so many people both online and in the flesh in all these countries it’s impossible to remember everyone of them, and every town we found ourselves in. Overall, it was a humbling experience to have so many people share their views and secrets, especially since we never stayed at hotels (or very rarely), we were always invited to stay with our readers. Thank you so much for that.

Since we started publishing 8 months before the fall of Bear Stearns, and we very much predicted the crisis that followed (we had been doing that before as well, since 2005 at the Oil Drum), we were the first warning sign for many people that things were going off the rails.

There are still to this day people expressing their gratitude for that. Others, though, not so much. And that has to do with the fact that governments, media and central banks came together to create the illusion of an economic recovery, something many if not most people still believe in. Just read the headlines and the numbers, on housing markets, stocks, GDP, jobs. Unfortunately, it was an illusion then and it still is now.

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

The Darkest Hours

December 18, 2017

The Darkest Hours

The Tax “Reform” bill working its way painfully out the digestive system of congress like a sigmoid fistula, ought be re-named the US Asset-stripping Assistance Act of 2017, because that’s what is about to splatter the faces of the waiting public, most of whom won’t have a personal lobbyist / tax lawyer by their sides holding a protective tarpulin during the climactic colonic burst of legislation.

Sssshhhh…. The media has not groked this, but the economy is actually collapsing, and the nova-like expansion of the stock markets is exactly the sort of action you might expect in a system getting ready to blow. Meanwhile, the more visible rise of the laughable scam known as crypto-currency, is like the plume of smoke coming out of Vesuvius around 79 AD — an amusing curiosity to the citizens of Pompeii below, going about their normal activities, eating pizza, buying slaves, making love — before hellfire rained down on them.

Whatever the corporate tax rate might be, it won’t be enough to rescue the Ponzi scheme that governing has become, with its implacable costs of empire. So the real aim here is to keep up appearances at all costs just a little while longer while the table scraps of a four-hundred-year-long New World banquet get tossed to the hogs of Wall Street and their accomplices. The catch is that even hogs busy fattening up don’t have a clue about their imminent slaughter.

The centerpiece of the swindle, as usual, is control fraud on the grand scale. Control fraud is the mis-use of authority in applying Three-Card-Monte principles to financial accounting practice, so that a credulous, trustful public will be too bamboozled to see the money drain from their bank accounts and the ground shift under their feet until the moment of freefall.

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

Chinese Banks Push Back On Shadow Banking Regulations – Expose “Catch-22” For Financial System

December 12, 2017

Chinese Banks Push Back On Shadow Banking Regulations – Expose “Catch-22” For Financial System

In November, we discussed how the post-Party Congress measures to deleverage and crackdown on the worst abuses in China’s credit bubble took an important step forward with the announcement of a new era of regulation for China’s $15 trillion shadow banking and asset management industry. See “A New Era In Chinese Regulation Means Turmoil For $15 Trillion In China’s Shadows”. In particular, the authorities turned their sights on wealth management products (WMPs).

On the way out are “guaranteed returns” and “capital pools” which had turned the $4 trillion sector into a leveraged Ponzi scheme. We joked that in a “radical and shocking” departure from the norm, financial institutions would have to offer yields based on the risk and returns of the underlying assets. Paying out guaranteed returns with new funds from depositors would no longer be allowed.

Commentators at the time described it as “a new era of regulation” which would lead to tighter risk control and slower but higher quality growth in the Chinese economy, blah, blah. However, our interest was piqued by the implementation date for the new rules. This is slated for the end of June 2019, providing Chinese banks and the entire shadow banking system a grade period to get their house in order. As we suggested.

We can only guess the delay reflects the enormity of the problems discovered by China’s regulators when they finally looked under the hood.

We didn’t have to wait long for confirmation that our cynicism was justified. It turns out that there was a “closed-door meeting” last week during which Chinese banks laid out the systemic risk if the regulators pursue their reform plan. According to Reuters.

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

It Begins: Pension Bailout Bill To Be Introduced This Week

November 9, 2017

It Begins: Pension Bailout Bill To Be Introduced This Week

Over the past year we have provided extensive coverage of what will likely be the biggest, most politically charged, and most significant financial crisis facing the aging U.S. population: a multi-trillion pension storm, which was recently dubbed “one of the most heated battles of a lifetime” by John Mauldin. The reason, in a nutshell, why the US public pension problem has stumped so many professionals is simple: for lack of a better word, it is an unsustainable Ponzi scheme, in which satisfying accrued pension and retirement obligations requires not only a constant inflow of new money, but also fixed income returns, typically in the 6%+ range, which are virtually unfeasible in a world where global debt/GDP is in the 300%+ range. Which is why we, and many others, have long speculated that it is only a matter of time before the matter receives political attention, and ultimately, a taxpayer bailout.

That moment may be imminent. According to Pensions and Investments magazine, Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown from Ohio plans to introduce legislation that would allow struggling multiemployer pension funds to borrow from the U.S. Treasury to remain solvent.

The bill, which is co-sponsored by another Democrat, Rep. Tim Ryan, also of Ohio, could be introduced as soon as this week or shortly after. It would create a new office within the Treasury Department called the Pension Rehabilitation Administration. The funds would come from the sale of Treasury-issued bonds to financial institutions. The pension funds could borrow for 30 years at low interest rates. The one, and painfully amusing, restriction for borrowers is “they could not make risky investments”, which of course will be promptly circumvented in hopes of generating outsized returns and repaying the Treasury’s “bailout” loan, ultimately leading to massive losses on what is effectively a taxpayer-funded pension bailout.

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

The Biggest Ponzi in Human History

November 1, 2017

The Biggest Ponzi in Human History

Jean-Léon Gérôme Slave market 1866Here’s the story in a nutshell: Ultra low interest rates mark a shift away from people’s wealth residing in their savings and pension plans, and into to so-called wealth residing in their homes, which are bought with ever growing levels of debt. When interest rates rise, they will lose that so-called wealth.

It is grand theft auto on an unparalleled scale, and it’s a piece of genius, because while people are getting robbed in plain daylight, they actually think they’re winning. But as I wrote back in March of this year, home sales, and bubbles, are the only thing that keeps our economies humming.

We haven’t learned a thing since March, and we haven’t learned a thing for many years. People need a place to live, and they fall for the scheme hook line and sinker. Which in a way is a good thing because the economy would have been dead without that ignorance, but at the same time it’s not because it’s a temporary relief only and the end result will be all the more painful for it.

Whatever Yellen decides as per rates, or Draghi, it doesn’t really matter anymore, this sucker’s going down something awful. This is a global issue. Housing bubbles have been blown not only in the Anglosphere, though they are strong there, many other countries have them as well, Scandinavia, Netherlands, even Germany and France. It’s what ultra low rates do.

First, here’s what I said in March:

Our Economies Run On Housing Bubbles

What we have invented to keep big banks afloat for a while longer is ultra low interest rates, NIRP, ZIRP etc. They create the illusion of not only growth, but also of wealth. They make people think a home they couldn’t have dreamt of buying not long ago now fits in their ‘budget’. That is how we get them to sign up for ever bigger mortgages. And those in turn keep our banks from falling over.

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

The Consent of the Conned

October 9, 2017

The Consent of the Conned

Every single line item in our entire Bernie Madoff scam of a system is cooked.

My theme this week is The Great Unraveling, by which I mean the unraveling of our social-political-economic system of hierarchical, centralized power. Let’s start by looking at how the basis of governance has transmogrified from consent of the governed to consent of the conned.

In effect, our leadership leads by lying. As we know, when it gets serious, you have to lie to preserve the perquisites and power of those atop the wealth-power pyramid, and well, it’s serious all the time now, so lies are the default setting of the entire status quo.

But all too many of us are willing to accept the lies because they’re what we want to hear.

As any competent con-man knows, you can only con those who want to be conned. You can only scam the marks who want to believe that what’s obviously too good to be true is in fact true.

The story of scams such as Bernie Madoff’s isn’t that canny Bernie victimized helpless wealthy people; the untold story is that all those “victims” wanted to believe that something that was obviously too good to be true–incredibly high returns, logged month after month and year after year like clockwork–was in fact true because their greed made them more than just vulnerable to being scammed–they wanted to be bamboozled by Bernie.

Victims of scams naturally deny their own culpability. It’s extremely uncomfortable to admit that greed didn’t just blind us to a patently impossible yield; we wanted to be conned because it felt so wonderful to believe we richly deserved unearned wealth.

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

My prediction: the coming collapse of China’s Ponzi scheme economy

August 27, 2017

My prediction: the coming collapse of China’s Ponzi scheme economy

So much production in industries like steel is based on demand for more production, but should that demand falter, the whole system could come crashing down

Steel was recently targeted for a reduction in capacity. Photo: Reuters

Friends who have a greater interest than I do in reading the tea leaves in Beijing tell me that the emphasis in relations with Hong Kong from now on will be on one country rather than two systems.I think this phrases things the wrong way. The one country bit was never in issue.

What they actually mean to say is that Beijing’s system of state command of the economy will become dominant and Hong Kong’s more freewheeling system will fade away.

I don’t think it will happen.

In my view human society is so dynamic that no command system can last long in charge of an economy. Attempts at this particular form of hubris inevitably end in either war or financial crisis. For the Soviet Union it was financial crisis. I think the same fate awaits Beijing.

Consider crude steel production, a test-tube example of how command economies get it wrong. In the mainland this stood in June at an all time monthly record of 73 million tonnes, five times the total production in all of Europe.

Steel was recently targeted for a reduction in capacity but then a regime of easy money intended to help the industry overcome a difficult period of contraction instead stimulated production.

As long as it keeps growing everything is fine. When it stops growing it collapses

It has happened across the mainland’s rust belt industries.

Why is so much steel needed?

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

Cracks in Ponzi-Finance Land

April 22, 2017

Cracks in Ponzi-Finance Land

Retail Debt Debacles

The retail sector has replaced the oil sector in a sense, and not in a good way. It is the sector that is most likely to see a large surge in bankruptcies this year. Junk bonds issued by retailers are performing dismally, and within the group the bonds of companies that were subject to leveraged buyouts by private equity firms seem to be doing the worst (a function of their outsized debt loads). Here is a chart showing the y-t-d performance of a number of these bonds as of the end of March:

Returns of several of the worst performing junk bonds issued by retailers in Q1 2017. This is rather impressive value destruction for a single quarter – click to enlarge.

Note the stand-out Neiman Marcus, a luxury apparel retailer, the bonds of which have been in free-fall this year. The company was bought out in an LBO and was saddled with a mountain of debt in the process. Investors buying this debt have now come to regret their purchases, particularly as it is debt of the “creative” kind.

Investor demand for junk bonds continues to be brisk, with inflows from retail investors said to be particularly strong. As we have pointed out on previous occasions, this surge in demand has resulted in creditors accepting ever softer loan covenants.

A long period of extremely low interest rates not only leads to a pronounced distortion of relative prices and the associated malinvestment of capital, it also tends to make a growing number of debtors increasingly vulnerable to rising rates and other disruptions. Over time, the number of companies forced to regularly roll over debt if they want to remain among the quick will inevitably increase.

These companies then depend on high investor confidence, which is now faltering in the retail sector. The out look seems appropriately grim: Fitch expects the default rate in the sector to spike to 9% this year.

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

Will Trump Accept Responsibility When This Shitshow Implodes?

April 16, 2017

WILL TRUMP ACCEPT RESPONSIBILITY WHEN THIS SHITSHOW IMPLODES?

Donald J. Trump has taken credit for making America’s economy great again. He’s been crowing about all the jobs being created, the soaring consumer confidence and record highs in the stock market. It’s all because the Donald has inspired Americans about our glorious future.

But, a funny thing has been happening in the real world. The economy has gone into the shitter and GDP will be lucky to reach 1% in the first quarter of his presidency. The bullshit consumer confidence surveys mean absolutely nothing. Feelings don’t mean shit. What consumers do is what matters.

67% of the US economy is dependent upon Americans spending money they don’t have on shit they don’t need. And they’ve dramatically reduced that spending. If consumers are so confident, why are a record number of major retailers going bankrupt and closing 3,500 stores in 2017? Mom and pop retailers have been shuttering for years.

If the narrative about a dramatically improving housing market was true, why would furniture store sales and building material store sales be falling? They wouldn’t. It seems even the spendthrift millennials have run out of dough, as restaurant sales are in free fall. Restaurant chains have begun closing units now. It has only just begun.

The auto industry ponzi scheme has come to an end, as billions in subprime loans to deadbeats is finally coming home to roost. If you lend money to idiots with no means to repay you, the loans will go bad. Auto sales have begun to fall and will continue to fall for the next couple years, as this house of cards built on the Fed’s easy money collapses.

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

The Pension Crisis is Global

September 23, 2016

The Pension Crisis is Global

The worldwide pension crisis is the next great notch in the belt of the collapse of socialism. If anyone in the private sector promised workers pensions and did not fund them, they would go to jail and be labelled as a fraud. Yet, this is standard operating procedure for government. Government claims to be some hero for reforming a Ponzi scheme and expects to be hailed by the media whom typically gives them a gold star.

Canadians are now being forced to save more for their retirement, and it does not matter what they want to do personally. As always, the scam involves forcing others to pay more so they can pay today what they promised. Ultimately, what they have done to Canadians is compel changes to benefits from 25% of covered earnings to a third. They also raised the ceiling on covered earnings from what would have been $72,500 in 2025 to $82,700. The bottom-line is rather stark. Some Canadian workers will actually be paying as much as 40% more in CPP contributions by that date.

There is no way they want to revisit this issue again because it created too much kick-back. So the Trudeau government has proclaimed the crisis is over and all is well. These schemes are outright illegal in any private context. This is why Obamacare is also collapsing. He sought to FORCE the youth to buy health insurance that they did not need to pay for others who couldn’t afford it. The scheme is always the same: take from one pocket to pay another.

Negative Interest Rates and the War on Cash (1)

September 10, 2016

Negative Interest Rates and the War on Cash (1)

Irving Underhill City Bank-Farmers Trust Building, William & Beaver streets, NYC 1931

It’s been a while, but Nicole Foss is back at the Automatic Earth -which makes me very happy-, and for good measure, she starts out with a very long article. So long in fact that we have decided to turn it into a 4-part series, if only just to show you that we do care about your health and well-being, as well as your families and social lives. The other 3 parts will follow in the next few days, and at the end we will publish the entire piece in one post.

Here’s Nicole:

Nicole Foss: As momentum builds in the developing deflationary spiral, we are seeing increasingly desperate measures to keep the global credit ponzi scheme from its inevitable conclusion. Credit bubbles are dynamic — they must grow continually or implode — hence they require ever more money to be lent into existence. But that in turn requires a plethora of willing and able borrowers to maintain demand for new credit money, lenders who are not too risk-averse to make new loans, and (apparently effective) mechanisms for diluting risk to the point where it can (apparently safely) be ignored. As the peak of a credit bubble is reached, all these necessary factors first become problematic and then cease to be available at all. Past a certain point, there are hard limits to financial expansions, and the global economy is set to hit one imminently.

Borrowers are increasingly maxed out and afraid they will not be able to service existing loans, let alone new ones. Many families already have more than enough ‘stuff’ for their available storage capacity in any case, and are looking to downsize and simplify their cluttered lives. Many businesses are already struggling to sell goods and services, and so are unwilling to borrow in order to expand their activities.

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

Essential history: ‘Forever debt’ Federal Reserve system invented to pay interest without ever ever ever repaying debt – definition of ‘Ponzi scheme’

February 26, 2016

Essential history: ‘Forever debt’ Federal Reserve system invented to pay interest without ever ever ever repaying debt – definition of ‘Ponzi scheme’

Posted on February 25, 2016 by Carl Herman

Ponzi scheme: criminal fraud of paying existing “investors” only and always from new “investors.” Collapse occurs without new “investors” and/or existing “investors” panic to cash-in.

The US Federal Reserve is based on the 1694-created Bank of England because this model allows government finance with debt that is never meant to be repaid. It is an “investment” model that pays interest guaranteed through tax collection. Its invention was to finance England’s government and military in a history of continuous centuries of war.

It’s cleverness allowed British finance to fund a short-term empire over rival European powers.

Although we can appreciate this historical manipulation, this is a Ponzi scheme because the system collapses without new “investors” of government debt securities.

This Ponzi scheme model is our US Federal Reserve System today:

not “US Federal” but admitted privately-owned,
without “Reserve” other than creating what is used for money out of nothing,
not a “System” but literal criminal fraud because it doesn’t create its claimed “monetary supply,” but the Orwellian opposite of a “debt supply” that is adding negative numbers forever.

US Treasury securities of bills, notes, and bonds continuously mature and must be repaid if the owner chooses to cash-in rather than renew the debt security. The US federal government debt is now $19 trillion, having risen over a trillion each year of the Obama administration.

This amount of total debt compared with ~100 million US households means that the average US household of ~$50,000 annual income owes ~$190,000 each should investors withdraw from this US government funding scheme. If your household income is more than $50,000, then use this ratio to estimate your share for repayment; for example, a $150,000 annual family income would owe $570,000 if US Treasury holders requested repayment rather than continue rolling-over their loans to the US government.

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

This Is What Central Bankers Think Of Retail Investors

February 3, 2016

This Is What Central Bankers Think Of Retail Investors

We previously covered the recently burst mega-Ponzi scheme fraud, Ezubao, the biggest in Chinese history which conned more than 900,000 investors out of $7.6 billion in less than two years under the guise of being a P2P lending platform, in this is what happens when “Chinese Investors Find Out They Got Fleeced By A $7 Billion Ponzi Scheme” and in “We Need To Rise Up”: Bilked Chinese Investors Call For Nationwide Uprising After Massive Ponzi Uncovered.”

Of course this being China, even the Ponzi schemes are next level: as we noted before, police had to use two excavators and dug for 20 hours to unearth 80 bags of evidence that Ezubo executives had buried six meters underground on the outskirts of Hefei, a city in the eastern province of Anhui.

Then overnight, Reuters added some more juicy details to this epic fraud: executives at Ezubao’s parent company, Yucheng Group, now say it was “a complete Ponzi scheme”, which used investor funds to support a lavish lifestyle, the official Xinhua News Agency reported this week.

Among gifts that Yucheng Chairman Ding Ning gave his president, Zhang Min, were a $20 million Singapore villa, a $1.8 million pink diamond ring, luxury limousines and watches and more than $83 million in cash, Xinhua stated.

Amazing, but the real question is just how many other Ezubao are lurking. The short answer: many.

China’s P2P and the online finance industry also serve as a critical channel for the emerging small business and consumer market, which is often ignored by banks and mainstream financial institutions. iResearch predicts China’s unsecured consumer finance market alone will triple in size by 2019, reaching outstanding loans of over $1.7 trillion.

By November, there were over 3,600 P2P platforms as the industry raised more than 400 billion yuan, according to the China Banking Regulatory Commission (CBRC). More than 1,000 of those were problematic, it said.

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

Slouching Toward The Dark Side

February 2, 2016

Slouching Toward The Dark Side

Last Wednesday we noted there is something rotten in the state of Denmark, meaning that the world’s great potemkin village of Bubble Finance is unraveling. The evidence piles up by the day.

To wit, now comes still another story about the Red Paddy Wagons rolling out in China. This time they are rounding-up the proprietors of a $7.6 billion peer-to-peer (P2P) lending Ponzi called Ezubao Ltd.

The particulars of this story are worth more than a week of bloviating by the Wall Street economists, strategists and other shills who visit bubblevision the whole day long. That’s because it exposes the rotten foundation on which the entire Red Ponzi and the related world central bank regime of Bubble Finance is based.

Needless to say, these dangerous, unstable and incendiary deformations are not even visible to the Keynesian commentariat and policy apparatchiks. They blithely assume that what makes modern economies go is the deft monetary, fiscal and regulatory interventions of the state. By their lights, not much else matters——and most certainly not the condition of household, business and public balance sheets or the level of speculation and leveraged gambling prevalent in financial markets and corporate C-suites.

As that pompous fool and #2 apparatchik at the Fed, Stanley Fischer, is wont to say—–such putative bubbles are just second order foot faults. These prosaic nuisances are not the fault of monetary policy in any event, and can be readily minimized through a risible scheme called “macro-prudential” regulation.

After all, if the Keynesians had any inkling that debt was a problem they wouldn’t have attempted to radically subsidize it with 84 straight months of ZIRP.

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

Square Holes and Currency Pegs

January 24, 2016

Square Holes and Currency Pegs

When David Bowie died, everybody, in what they wrote and said, seemed to feel they owned him, and owned his death, even if they hadn’t thought about him, or listened to him, for years. In the same vein, though the Automatic Earth has been talking about deflation (for 8 years, it’s our anniversary today) and the looming China Ponzi disaster for a long time, now that these things actually play out, everybody talks as if they own the story, and present it as new (because, for one thing, well, after all for them it is new…).

And that’s alright, it’s how people live, and function, they always have, and no-one’s going to change that. It’s just that for me, I’ve been wondering a little about what to write lately, because I’ve already written the deflation and China stories, many times, before most others tuned into them. But still, it’s strange to now, as markets start plunging, read things like ‘Deflation is Here’, as if deflation is something new on the block.

Deflation has been playing out for years. Central bank largesse has largely kept it at bay in the public eye, but that now seems over. Debt deflation is inevitable when -debt- bubbles burst, and when these bubbles are large enough, there’s nothing that can stop the process, not even miracle growth. But you’re not going to understand this if and when you look only at falling prices as the main sign of deflation; they’re merely a small part of the process, and a lagging one at that.

A much better indicator of deflation is the velocity of money, the speed at which ‘consumers’ spend money. And velocity has been going down for years. That’s where and how you notice deflation, when combined with the money and credit supply.

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

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