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Government Influence Over Asset Prices Growing

Government Influence Over Asset Prices Growing

The facts are OECD stocks have fell in October, not increased. That runs against the generally accepted belief that storage capacity is full and we are oversupplied by around 2 million barrels per day (mb/d). That suggests that the IEA is underestimating demand and grossly exaggerating inventory levels.

Further, the EIA has consistently overstated supply in its weekly data release, “adjusting” inventory up by seemingly arbitrary amounts. Now, according to Cornerstone Analytics, last week we find that the EIA is under-sampling small producers whose production is rapidly declining. Also, monthly production figures continue to be inflated. This conclusion from Cornerstone Analytics is noteworthy:

“On the USA, one point we will leave you with is that there appears to be some scope for the DOE to revise down American oil production figures for the past few months. Our sense is that the monthly survey numbers for production have ‘undersampled’ output from small independent producers whose output has been more negatively impacted from the activity fall-off as compared with the larger producers.”

The problem these days is that markets are controlled by people who don’t take care to delve deep into numbers and simply don’t question numbers being fed to them by media or government agencies. Instead they trade off headlines and care less about their validity because it suits their agenda, ideology or, even more likely, unconscious bias, reinforced by propaganda.

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

Oil Prices Testing August Lows As Inventories Swell

Oil Prices Testing August Lows As Inventories Swell

There has been little in the way of economic data out overnight, leaving comments from European Central Bank President Mario Draghi to clobber the euro, propel the dollar higher. As the prospect of a US rate hike in December sits around ~70%, the WTI December contract is charging lower ahead of its contract expiry today.

The chart below shows the combined rising production from two leading sources since 2012, the US and Iraq, plotted versus OECD oil inventories. Production from the two has risen nearly 60% over the near-four year time-frame, with them currently pumping the equivalent of 4.88 billion barrels a year. In comparison, OECD inventories have only risen 10%, or 314 million barrels, as stronger demand and weaker supply elsewhere have offset the rampant additions from the two nations.

Looking ahead to next year, we are set to see aggregate production from the two countries drop, as modest rising supply from Iraq will not be enough to offset falling US production.

Below is another nifty graphic from the folks over at Bloomberg, which shows the share of deepwater oil fields for various African governments. Six out of the ten largest global oil discoveries in 2013 were made in Africa, but the drop in oil prices over the last year and a half means two out of three investment projects on the continent are not viable at a price below $50. African production is already 19% below its peak in 2008 at 10.2 million bpd, and is set for a third consecutive drop this year.

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

Ex-World Bank chief economist exposes “failure” of austerity, deregulation

Ex-World Bank chief economist exposes “failure” of austerity, deregulation

Joseph Stiglitz, a senior OECD expert, slams OECD’s own policies to prevent global slowdown


In a little-known speech at the United Nations University, renowned Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz criticised Western approaches to addressing the global economic crisis for being obsessed with market solutions that cannot work.

His remarks were made just two months before the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) issued its latest forecast of a “deeply concerning” slowdown in global trade, which the group says has dropped perilously close to levels “associated with global recession.”

The OECD’s chief economist, Catherine Mann, said that: “Policy actions are already being implemented that will help to address the weak underlying trends.”

Professor Stiglitz of Columbia University, who chairs the High-Level Expert Group on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress (HLEG) at the OECD, contradicted this reassuring promise in his UN University address in September.

Describing standard neoclassical and behavioural models of economics as “wrong” on the basis of new advances in economic research, Stiglitz blamed ongoing economic stagnation on the so-called “Washington Consensus” — a set of neoliberal policies advocated most strongly by the US and Britain.

The Washington Consensus (WC) consists of a string of interlinked policies requiring reductions in public spending; rampant deregulation to reduce restrictions on banks, corporations and other financial actors; extensive privatisation of social and public services; and liberalisation based on reducing taxes, tariffs and non-tarrif barriers to trade.

All this is believed to drive growth and enhance the distribution of wealth.

In reality, as Stiglitz told an audience at the UN University’s World Institute for Development Economics Research, it has done the opposite.

Thirty years ago, he said, “the focus was on limiting the role of the government — getting it out of the way…

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

Is GDP Over?

Is GDP Over?

(Photo: World Bank Photo Collection / Flickr)

Organizers of October’s fifth OECD World Forum on Statistics, Knowledge, and Policy could barely contain their sense of satisfaction when the three-day event opened in Guadalajara, Mexico.

Why all the good cheer? Officials at the OECD, the official economic research agency of the developed world, feel they haven’t just been organizing gabfests since the first of these triennial forums in 2004. They believe they’ve been helping change how the world — or at least the global public policy community — thinks about inequality.

And that belief, prominent independent observers believe, reflects a healthy dose of reality.

“We now have a broad consensus that more equal societies perform better,” as Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz put it in his World Forum keynote address to the over 1,000 government statisticians, academics, and civil society analysts on hand in Guadalajara.

The OECD, Stiglitz observed, deserves much of the credit for this new consensus. The agency’s efforts have helped shift the global analytical mainstream off a mindless fixation on GDP — an economy’s total output of goods and services — and onto the importance of developing a sustainable “prosperity for all.”

In the United States today, pundits and politicians still regularly dismiss worries about our contemporary global prosperity for just a few as little more than do-gooder posturing. But at the World Forum in Guadalajara, no one treated inequality as anything less than a dangerous social pathology.

“Inequality is becoming unbearable,” former Inter-American Development Bank president Enrique Yglesias pronounced. Our economic chasms have reached “obscene proportions.”

Deeply unequal nations like Britain, lamented Catrina Williams of the UK Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission, stand “on the brink of being permanently divided” as the offspring of the most affluent increasingly occupy most of the key levers of power in everything from the judiciary to the media.

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

Schadenfreude – How the US Is Helping China Create a New Financial Order

Schadenfreude – How the US Is Helping China Create a New Financial Order

Here we have an image of a Chinese banknote, featuring Chairman Mao, followed by a seemingly incongruous German word – schadenfreude. Is there an error here?

Happily, no. We’ll begin with the word, schadenfreude, which means “harm-joy.” It’s used to express an occurrence that’s destructive, yet brings about happiness.

This would seem to be a conflict in terms, but, looked at a bit more deeply, it could be said that the killing of an enemy may mean that peace will soon prevail – and so the event brings happiness. Or, another analogy: the bulldozing of an old structure may mean that a new one – a better one – will soon be under construction.

And that’s the case here. The world’s most powerful (and most oppressive) political/economic power structure has begun to go under the bulldozer. Its replacement will hopefully be a better one.

The Brussels SWIFT system is currently the largest economic settlement system in the world. Almost all financial transfers are made possible through this system. As such, those who control SWIFT have the power to threaten financial institutions and sovereign nations that, if they don’t do as they’re told, can be denied access to the system.

The controllers of SWIFT have been far from fair in making these judgements. Much of their agenda has been provided by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), a cabal made up of many of the world’s most powerful nations, but primarily Europe and the US. The US is the heavy here and they’ve used their power to create FATCA, a means of applying draconian economic pressures on their own citizens. In doing so, they’ve also succeeded in creating a global shakedown racket aimed at financial institutions. If a bank anywhere in the world is found to have a US citizen as a client and the bank fails to regulate that client sufficiently, the bank itself is “held up” – the US imposes a massive fine on the bank.

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

Pension “Armageddon” Got Closer Today

Pension “Armageddon” Got Closer Today

The IMF fears underfunded pension funds could be encouraged to chase returns through riskier investments such as direct credit exposure or by engaging in securities lending in order to improve their funding ratios….The IMF’s comments echoed similar warnings from the OECD in May, when the Paris-based body said pension funds’ move towards riskier asset classes could result in their solvency position being “seriously compromised” in turbulent markets.  The Financial Times

Yesterday I published a post in which I outlined the reasons why pension fund underfunding is likely much worse than the level admitted by the funds themselves and industry professionals.  The biggest culprit is “mark to market” of illiquid investments into which pension managers have “shoe-horned” themselves in order to give the appearance of rates of return that are higher on paper than in reality.  A good friend and colleague of mine, who happens to be very bright, had this comment in response to my post:

Pension funds are collectively insolvent.  Basically the asset managers running these funds have refused to MTM them properly, expecting the assumed X% annual return to normalize.  Sorry, buddy: this IS the new normal (which is why the unfunded situation gets worse every year… assume 8% and get 0% for enough years and the chasm only widens… in fact, by the rule of 72, your funding gap will double every 9 years if that 8% gap is reality).  This is where the rubber hits the road, the issue which is going to punch the middle class in the gut like a steel 2×4.

This is the same dynamic that torpedoed the big bank balance sheets when the housing/subprime credit bubble popped, as big chunks of home equity, mortgage and other credit products were marked close to par when in reality most of it was worth zero. And this is one of the primary reasons that the Fed is devoting significant resources to keeping the stock market propped up:  pension fund insolvency is at risk.

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

There Are 800 Fossil Fuel Subsidies Around The World

There Are 800 Fossil Fuel Subsidies Around The World

There are 800 different programs around the world that subsidize fossil fuels, according to a new report from the OECD. The OECD released the report ahead of the international climate change negotiations set to take place in Paris in December, where the world has a “moral imperative to reach an ambitious and actionable agreement.”

Tackling climate change will be a monumental task, but key to the effort will be scrapping “lose-lose” fossil fuel subsidies, as the OECD calls them. Subsidizing oil, natural gas, and coal leads to distortions in prices, contributes to overconsumption of energy, and saps developing countries of revenues that could be used for much better investments in education and infrastructure.

They also lead to environmental fallout, with capital flowing to pollution-heavy industry and energy extraction. These investments, once made, can last for decades, essentially “locking-in” pollution for a long time to come. That is one of the glaring downsides to subsidizing fossil fuels. “Because they change the stream of income investors expect to receive for holding a particular asset, those subsidies influence investment choices and change the allocation of capital across sectors. In the case of certain fossil-fuel subsidies, there is therefore the risk that investors end up favouring sectors that produce fossil fuels or use them intensively, at the expense of cleaner forms of energy and other economic activities more generally,” the OECD wrote.

Related: Peak Oil Has More To Do With Oil Prices Than You May Think

The report only surveyed the OECD member countries (consisting of Western Europe, Japan, Korea, North America, and a few other rich countries), plus Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Russia, and South Africa. All told, the OECD concludedthat the world subsidized fossil fuels to the tune of $160 to $200 billion per year between 2010 and 2014, across 800 subsidy programs. That is much more than the $121 billion that renewable energy receives each year.

 

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

Why Johnny can’t understand climate: functional illiteracy and the rise of “unpropaganda”

Why Johnny can’t understand climate: functional illiteracy and the rise of “unpropaganda”

Image from OECD Skills Outlook 2013. http://dx.doi.org/10.1787/9789264204256-en. These data show that most people in OECD countries have very limited capabilities of managing contrasting information. This lack of skill is the source of traditional propaganda (presenting to people a single side of the issue) but also of the rise of “unpropaganda;” that is, presenting to people so much contrasting information that they can’t arrive to a firm conclusion. The result is uncertainty and inaction. Unpropaganda has been used with great effect on the issue of climate change. 

The “official” story that you normally find about “literacy” is that people all over the world are becoming more and more literate, that is, more and more able to read and write. Yet, there is another side to literacy: it is the concept termed, “literacy proficiency” that classifies people according to their ability to understand what they read.

A recent survey on this point has been published by OCSE. It is a massive document of 460+ pages that examines the abilities of understanding and processing text by citizens of OCSE countries. The result is a subdivision in 5 “literacy levels,” as you see in the figure at the beginning of this post. You can find the exact definition of these levels on page 64 of the document, but, summarizing, the lowest levels, below 1, 1, and 2, are relative to people able to arrive only at the simplest levels of understanding of a text. Even at level 3, one may be able to perform inferences based on the text being read, but the texts are said to contain “no conflicting information”. Only at levels 4 and 5, some capability of critically discerning data from competing information is required.

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

 

Dictators and Billionaires Demand Creation of UN Tax Agency

Dictators and Billionaires Demand Creation of UN Tax Agency

Dictators and Billionaires Demand Creation of UN Tax Agency

As globalist forces and the international institutions they control openly prepare to plunder humanity’s wealth, Third World dictators and tax-funded “civil society” groups havestepped up their demands for a United Nations tax authority — supposedly to ensure that they all get their “fair share” of the loot from Western taxpayers and businesses. The coalition to create the proposed UN tax regime includes more than 130 national governments and dictatorships involved in the G77, which recently demanded a “New World Order to Live Well,” along with various shadowy front groups funded by the European Union and globalist billionaires such as Bill Gates. Key elements of the plot were unsuccesful, this time, but the global-tax agenda and those pushing it are not going away any time soon — and they did manage to create “Tax Inspectors Without Borders.”

The radical proposal to further empower the UN on tax issues faced some resistance at a recent UN summit in Ethiopia aimed at extracting trillions of dollars each year from humanity to shower on dictators, global governance, and “sustainable development” schemes. However, opponents of creating the UN tax agency were hardly arguing from a principled position. Instead, they were arguing in favor of further empowering other globalist outfits, such as the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), to impose the global tax regime on humanity. That is already underway, and the differences are largely irrelevant.

But while the proposal for a full-fledged UN tax agency was defeated at the summit, global taxation apparatchiks did make some major progress moving the agenda forward. Among other schemes, delegates at the UN Financing for Development Conference in Addis Ababa last week approved a motion to have a UN Committee of Experts on International Tax Matters meet twice a year. 

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

Global Youth Unemployment Hits 35 Million As Recent Grads Lean On Parents

Global Youth Unemployment Hits 35 Million As Recent Grads Lean On Parents

We’ve documented the pitiable plight of America’s recent college graduates on a number of occasions over the last several months. The Class of 2015 is officially the most heavily-indebted graduating class in the history of US higher education, as each student will leave college with an average debt load of more than $35,000. These proud new graduates will enter a job market where they’ll quickly discover that the idea of a US economic ‘recovery’ is, as Steve Wynn recently put it, “a complete dream”. In fact, high unemployment rates among recent graduates was recently cited by Moody’s as a contributing factor to the ratings agency’s decision to place some $3 billion in student loan-backed ABS on review. This state of affairs is made all the more perilous by the fact that nearly half of college graduates only manage to land a low-wage job which, as the OECD has recently shown, likely won’t pay enough to allow one’s family to subsist above the poverty line.

Now, the same OECD is out with a new report which looks at the world’s youth unemployment problem in an effort to determine why it is that 35 million people between the ages of 16 and 29 are jobless. Spoiler alert: it turns out $35,000 doesn’t buy a very good education.

From the OECD:

More than 35 million young people, aged 16-29, across OECD countries are neither employed nor in education or training (NEET). Overall, young people are twice as likely as prime-age workers to be unemployed.  

The OECD Skills Outlook 2015 says that around half of all NEETs in the OECD are out of school and not looking for work and are likely to have dropped off the radar of their country’s education, social, and labour market systems (ZH: recall the case of America’s “vanishing worker”)

 

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

Economic inequality: 10 reasons why we can’t beat it

Economic inequality: 10 reasons why we can’t beat it

Even the OECD says inequality is bad. But making it go away is much tougher

It almost feels like an old story. Ever since the economy crashed in 2008 a growing chorus of voices has warned that inequality was wiping out the middle class and damaging society.

This week the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, the rich countries` think-tank, made headlines for declaring that growing inequality is not only bad for social cohesion, but is actually cutting points off economic growth.

If we all agree, why is it such an intractable problem? The story is complex, but here are just a few reasons why inequality is so hard to fix.

1. Equality where?

While inequality within rich countries has been getting worse, many point out that global inequality has been shrinking.

Countries like the U.S. and Canada used to consume a majority of the world’s wealth. As the rich and middle class in places like China and India get a bigger piece of the action, some argue that morally, increasing global equality outweighs a relative decline in wealth by some people in the rich world.

2. Free trade and globalization

The push to create open trade between countries means that the low- and unskilled workers of rich countries are increasingly competing directly with workers in China, Bangladesh, Vietnam and India. Even within North America, industrial jobs often move to where wages are lowest, meaning middle class industrial jobs disappear.

3. Automation

Even in developing countries, manufacturers are replacing jobs withrobots and automation. Here in North America, computerized processes are already taking jobs done by factory workers, clerical workers and even professionals as clever software learns to search legal titles and write simple news stories.

 

 

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

 

“We Reached The Tipping Point”: Income Inequality Is Highest Since Records Began

“We Reached The Tipping Point”: Income Inequality Is Highest Since Records Began

While soaring stock prices do nothing to boost the economy, because as 7 years of hard facts have shown, the only thing “trickle down” QE has done is forced economists to jump the shark and demand not one but two seasonal adjustments to goal seek collapsing economic data, the S&P hitting new all time highs on a daily basis has certainly succeeded in one thing: pushing inequality around the globe, and especially in the US, to new record highs.

And earlier today the latest OECD report confirmed just that, when it reported that gap between the rich and poor in most of the world’s advanced economies is at record levels.

In most of the 34 countries in the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development the income gap is at its highest level in three decades, with the richest 10 percent of the population earning 9.6 times the income of the poorest 10 percent.

In the 1980s this ratio stood at 7 to 1, the OECD said in a report.

The wealth gap is even larger, with the top 1 percent owning 18 percent and the 40 percent only 3 percent of household wealth in 2012.

“We have reached a tipping point. Inequality in OECD countries is at its highest since records began,” said OECD Secretary-General Angel Gurria.

Keep in mind this only looks at earnings, which have actually slowed down in recent years, and ignores the massive imbalance in accumulated assets: assets which almost exclusively are controlled by the top 10%. As for the bottom 10%, 50% and even 90%? Well they have “liabilities.”

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

 

 

In Most Countries, 40 Hours + Minimum Wage = Poverty

In Most Countries, 40 Hours + Minimum Wage = Poverty

Last week, we noted that Democratic lawmakers in the US are pushing for what they call “$12 by ’20” which, as the name implies, is an effort to raise the minimum wage to $12/hour over the course of the next five years. Republicans argue that if Democrats got their wish and the pay floor were increased by nearly 70%, it would do more harm than good for low-income Americans as the number of jobs that would be lost as a result of employers cutting back in the face of dramatically higher labor costs would offset the benefit that accrues to the workers who are lucky enough to keep their jobs.

Regardless of who is right or wrong when it comes to projecting what would happen to low-wage jobs in the face of a steep hike in the minimum wage, one thing is certain: many working families depend on government assistance to make ends meet, suggesting it’s tough to persist on minimum wage in today’s economy and indeed, a new study by the OECD shows that in 21 out of the 26 member countries that have a minimum wage, working 40 hours per week at the pay floor would not be sufficient to keep one’s family out of poverty.

Here’s more from Bloomberg:

A global ranking out Wednesday by the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development painted a grim picture of the situation in member countries straddling continents. The 34-member organization found that a legal minimum wage existed in 26 countries and crunched the numbers to see how they compared.
Forget taking a siesta in Spain. There, you’d have to work more than 72 hours a week to escape the trappings of poverty. Turns out that is the norm, not the exception. In the 21 countries highlighted with blue bars in the chart below, a full 40-hour work week still won’t lift families out of relative poverty. This list includes France, home to the 35-hour work week, which almost met the threshold. Minimum wage workers there who are supporting a spouse and two children need to work 40.2 hours to get their families out of poverty.  (The poverty line is defined as 50 percent of the median wage in any nation.)
 

 

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