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Saudi Arabia’s Oil-Price War Is With Stupid Money
Saudi Arabia’s Oil-Price War Is With Stupid Money
Saudi Arabia is not trying to crush U.S. shale plays. Its oil-price war is with the investment banks and the stupid money they directed to fund the plays. It is also with the zero-interest rate economic conditions that made this possible.
Saudi Arabia intends to keep oil prices low for as long as possible. Its oil production increased to 10.3 million barrels per day in March 2015. That is 700,000 barrels per day more than in December 2014 and the highest level since the Joint Organizations Data Initiative began compiling production data in 2002 (Figure 1 below). And Saudi Arabia’s rig count has never been higher.
Figure 1. Saudi Arabian crude oil production and Brent crude oil price in 2015 U.S. dollars. Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, EIA and Labyrinth Consulting Services, Inc.
Market share is an important part of the motive but Saudi Minister of Petroleum and Mineral Resources Ali al-Naimi recently emphasized that “The challenge is to restore the supply-demand balance and reach price stability.” Saudi Arabia’s need for market share and long-term demand is best met with a growing global economy and lower oil prices.
That means ending the over-production from tight oil and other expensive plays (oil sands and ultra-deep water) and reviving global demand by keeping oil prices low for some extended period of time. Demand has been weak since the run-up in debt and oil prices that culminated in the Financial Collapse of 2008 (Figure 2 below).
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The Committee To Destroy The World
The Committee To Destroy The World
Last month, the world mourned the death of beloved actor Leonard Nimoy. Mr. Nimoy, of course, was renowned for his portrayal of the iconic character Mr. Spock on the 1960s television series Star Trek. One of the most memorable Star Trek inventions was the transporter that allowed human beings to be beamed through space and time like light and energy. Investors expecting central bankers to solve the world’s economic problems might as well believe that Janet Yellen is capable of beaming them straight into the Marriner S. Eccles Building in Washington, D.C. Their failure to acknowledge that the Fed is failing to generate sustainable economic growth while contributing to income inequality and crushing debt burdens is inexplicable. Central banks that purport to be promoting financial stability are actually undermining it – with the able assistance of regulators who have drained liquidity from the world’s most important markets.
Negative interest rates on $3 trillion of European debt are an obvious sign of policy failure, yet the policy elite stands mute. Actually that’s not correct – the cognoscenti is cheering on Mario Draghi as he destroys the European bond markets just as they celebrated Janet Yellen’s demolition of the Treasury market. Negative interest rates are not some curiosity; they represent a symptom of policy failure and a violation of the very tenets of capitalist economics. The same is true of persistent near-zero interest rates in the United States and Japan. Zero gravity renders it impossible for fiduciaries to generate positive returns for their clients, insurance companies to issue policies, and savers to entrust their money to banks. They are a byproduct of failed economic policies, not some clever device to defeat deflation and stimulate economic growth.
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The Fed Has Failed the Nation, in One Chart
The Fed Has Failed the Nation, in One Chart
There is only one way to end the financial tyranny of the Federal Reserve–abolish it, and put an end to the predatory pathologies of its policies.
The Federal Reserve has failed not just the nation and the U.S. economy, but more importantly, the American people that it supposedly serves. It has also failed the world, by showing other central banks that they can reward private banks and top .01% with absolute impunity.
The supposed goal of the Fed’s zero-interest rate policy (ZIRP) and quantitative easing (QE) was to make borrowing easier for both corporations and consumers, the idea being companies would borrow to invest in new productive capacity and consumers would buy the new goods and services being produced with cheap credit.
The secondary publicly stated goal was to spark a rally in stocks, bonds and real estate that would spark awealth effect: as households saw their net worth rise, they would feel wealthier and thus more likely to buy goods and services they didn’t need on credit.
The real reason for ZIRP and QE was to rebuild the balance sheets and profits of banks on the backs of savers who have earned near-zero thanks to the Fed’s manipulation of markets. But setting aside the obvious success of the Fed’s real goals–enriching the banks and the super-wealthy who have access to near-zero interest credit–let’s see what corporations did with the Fed’s nearly-free money.
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Did The Fed. Just Whisper “Fire” In A Crowded Market?
Did The Fed. Just Whisper “Fire” In A Crowded Market?
This past Friday saw what many like myself can only describe as a blatant example of just what’s wrong with both the economy – as well as the markets.
At precisely 15 minutes before the closing bell on Wall Street the now Chair of the Federal Reserve, Janet Yellen gave a press conference detailing further insights into upcoming monetary policy. I guess two days worth of FOMC discussions, along with a press conference detailing all that was discussed immediately after, followed by a question and answer session about all those “insights and decisions” wasn’t enough. For the markets remained red for the week while losing all its post FOMC pop which in itself is an ominous sign.
At first blush some might contend, “Well, that’s a good thing they decided to communicate even more. Best to have any and all the information available as soon as possible. After all: more information is always better for the markets – no?”
Yes it is, however, when it exposes just how cozy (as well as frightened) monetary policy setting has moved from the appearance of setting beneficial policies that help ensure a free and open capitalistic system – to one hell-bent on serving a newer more dominant form of crony styled capitalism rampant within our markets. Where winners and losers are decided solely on their ability to manipulate their bottom line earnings “beat” via access to resources made possible only via the Fed.’s current zero bound stance. (i.e., ZIRP) I don’t believe that was their original intent.
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Some Folks At The Fed Are Lost——No Juice To The Macros, Part 1
Some Folks At The Fed Are Lost——No Juice To The Macros, Part 1
Yesterday we demonstrated that stock market valuations are not merely “on the high side” as Janet Yellen averred last week. Instead, they are positively in the nose-bleed section of history.
You don’t get the Russell 2000 trading at 90X honest-to-goodness GAAP earnings or 125 biotechs with aggregate LTM losses of $10 billion sporting a combined market cap of $280 billion unless you are deep into bubble land. In fact, the chart on the median PE multiple for all NYSE stocks bears repeating.
Recall this graph is based on trailing GAAP earnings for all companies with positive income. But that was for the LTM period ending in June 2014. Since then the market is up by 7%, yet reported earnings have basically flat-lined. S&P 500 earnings for the June 2014 LTM period, for example, were $103 per share——-a level that has now dropped to $102 per share for the December LTM period.
In short, the median NYSE valuation multiple is now at upwards of 22X—a level far above even the dotcom and housing bubble peaks. It is no wonder, therefore, that even a certified Cool-Aid drinker like St Louis Fed head, James Bullard, has now confessed that he fears a “violent” Wall Street sell-off when the Fed finally ends an 80 month streak of ZIRP sometime this fall.
So what are they waiting for? Actually, this morning’s
Wall Street Journal expressed it about as plaintively as it comes. In a word, the monetary politburo is waiting for zero interest rates, massive debt monetization and its wealth effects promises and “puts” to goose the macros:
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From Yellen Put To Yellen Massacre
From Yellen Put To Yellen Massacre
I think I’ll just give you a slew of quotes, and then you can figure out if you can figure out why I chose to call this the Yellen Massacre. Which consists, by the way, of two separate but linked parts, not quite the Siamese twin perhaps, but close. What links them is the upcoming Fed decision to raise interest rates, and the timing of the announcement of that decision. It will blow up both bond markets and a large swath of emerging markets. People keep saying ‘the Fed won’t do it’, or ask ‘why would they do it’, but arguably they’re already quite late. It must be half a year ago now that I wrote it would hike rates, and also told you why: Wall Street banks. First, here’s a fine little ditty published at Econmatters:
Six Days Until Bond Market Crash Begins
Early on Thursday morning, realizing this was going to be a robust selloff in equities, the ‘smart money’, i.e., the big banks, investments banks, hedge funds and the like, ran to the old staple of buying bonds hand over fist with little regard for the yield they are getting paid for stepping in front of the freight train of rate rises coming down the tracks.
Just six days away from the most important FOMC meeting in the last seven years, and another 300k employment report in the rear view mirror, this looks like an excellent place to hide for nervous investors who have far more money than they have grains of common sense. Newsflash for these investors, yes markets are over-valued, and you need to get out of Apple, and about 100 other high flying overpriced momentum stocks, but you can`t hide out in bonds this time.
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The End of the Great Debt Cycle
The End of the Great Debt Cycle
“It’s the end of the great debt cycle,” says hedge fund manager Ray Dalio of Bridgewater Associates, taking the words out of our mouth.
Bond fund manager Bill Gross adds context:
In the past 20 to 30 years, credit has grown to such an extreme globally that debt levels and the ability to service that debt are at risk. […] Why doesn’t the debt supercycle keep expanding? Because there are limits.
Neither Mr. Dalio nor Mr. Gross nor we know precisely where those limits are. But the Europeans and the Japanese are rushing toward them.
A Poke in the Eye for Lenders
In Europe, bond yields are lower than they’ve ever been. Between $2 trillion and $3 trillion in sovereign and corporate bonds now trade at negative nominal yields. We don’t need to tell you that it is unnatural and perverse for lenders to accept a poke in the eye for giving up their valuable savings. But that’s just part of the perversity of the present system – no real savings are involved. The money never existed in the first place. Getting a negative yield seems almost appropriate, if nevertheless incomprehensible.
Today, banks create “money” from thin air, in the form of new deposits, when they make loans.
As our friend Richard Duncan explains in his book The New Depression: The Breakdown of the Paper Money Economy, by the turn of the new millennium the reserve requirement – whereby banks are forced to hold some cash or gold in reserve against new loans – was so low that it played “practically no role whatsoever in constraining credit creation.”
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Get Ready for a “Zero Returns” World…
Get Ready for a “Zero Returns” World…
Dear Diary,
Where is that old and tattered “Crash Alert” flag?
Many times since the start of the rally in US stocks in 2009, we hoisted it. And many times has it failed to give us a useful signal.
But we will bring it out again, if a bit sheepishly… and let it wave, in the warm Argentine air.
Why? Do we know a crash is coming?
No, of course not.
Is our flag a good indicator of what will happen?
Apparently not.
But we regard it like the “Shark Alert” flags you see on the beaches of Australia. (Down Under is the only country in the world to have a chief of state who was eaten by a shark.)
The “Shark Alert” flag doesn’t mean you can’t go swimming. It means if a shark takes a bite out of you, it’s your own damned fault.
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Bill Gross Interview: ZIRP Causes Too Much Debt, Too Many Zombies, Not Much Trickle-Down, Busted Pensions
Bill Gross Interview: ZIRP Causes Too Much Debt, Too Many Zombies, Not Much Trickle-Down, Busted Pensions
In an Bloomberg Television interview Bill Gross of Janus Capital spoke with Bloomberg Television’s Trish Regan about the outlook for Federal Reserve policy, the U.S. economy and his objectives at Janus Capital.
Key Quotes
- “Not even thin gruel is being offered to our modern-day Oliver Twist investors. You have to pay to come to the dinner table and then sit there staring at an empty plate.”
- “The interest rate can’t be raised substantially even over the next two to three years.”
- “The US has escaped the liquidity trap that euroland and Japan are in. But, not necessarily for all time.”
- “[Low interest rates] keeps zombie corporations alive because they can borrow at 3 and 4 percent, as opposed to the 8 or 9 percent. It destroys business models. It’s destroying the pension industry and in the insurance industry.”
- “ultimately, [low interest rates] destroy the capitalistic model at the margin. Instead of investing in the real economy, [corporations] can now simply borrow at close to 0 percent and buy their own stocks, which yield 2 or 3 percent on a dividend basis and provide a return of 6 or 7 percent on an earnings to price ratio basis.”
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Housing Industry Frets About the Next Brick to Drop
Housing Industry Frets About the Next Brick to Drop
Cashing out of the “Bet on America” might get messy.
Stephen Schwarzman, CEO and co-founder of Blackstone Group, the world’s largest private-equity firm with $290 billion in assets under management, made $690 million for 2014 via a mix of dividends, compensation, and fund payouts, according to a regulatory filing. A 50% raise from last year.
The PE firm’s subsidiary Invitation Homes, doped with nearly free money the Fed’s policies have made available to Wall Street, has become America’s number one mega-landlord in the span of three years by buying up 46,000 vacant single-family homes in 14 metro areas, initially at a rate of $100 million per week, now reduced to $35 million per week.
As of September 30, Invitation Homes had $8.7 billion worth of homes on its balance sheet, followed by American Homes 4 Rent ($5.5 billion), Colony Financial ($3.4 billion), and Waypoint ($2.6 billion). Those are the top four. Countless smaller investors also jumped into the fray. Together they scooped up several hundred thousand single-family houses.
A “bet on America,” is what Schwarzman called the splurge two years ago.
The bet was to buy vacant homes out of foreclosure, outbidding potential homeowners who’d actually live in them, but who were hobbled by their need for mortgages in cash-only auctions. The PE firms were initially focused only on a handful of cities. Each wave of these concentrated purchases ratcheted up the prices of all other homes through the multiplier effect.
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In “Paranormal” Europe, Banks Will Pay You To Borrow, And Charge You To Save
In “Paranormal” Europe, Banks Will Pay You To Borrow, And Charge You To Save
A month ago, we wrote about a bizarre situation involving Denmark’s now totally broken monetary system, where as a result of an unprecedented scramble to weaken the currency in order to preserve the peg to the Euro the central bank unleashed a historic rate-cutting scramble, where in 4 consecutive rate cuts its pushed the interest rate to an unheard of -0.75% (while at the same time being the first modern central bank to unveil what we dubbed “Bizarro Backdoor QE“). The culmination of this series of events was the surreal realization by some debtors that the bank would now pay them the interest on their new or existing mortgage.
The insanity was only compounded when one considers that in the vast majority of European countries, depositors are already (or will soon) pay for the “privilege” of providing banks with unsecured funds (in the US, JPM recently also started charging some customers – mostly corporate and hedge funds- for holding their deposits).
In short, this is what Europe has become: savers – those who diligently put away the fruits of their labor – are now forced to pay, using banks as an intermediary, and subsidize the the debtor: spenders, who live beyond their means, and who in increasingly more frequent situations are now paid to take out even more debt! Call it monetary socialism.
Which is probably why with a one month delay, none other than the NYT decided to cover precisely this topic with “In Europe, Bond Yields and Interest Rates Go Through the Looking Glass.”
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Kick-The-Can Has Morphed Into A Blatant Farce
Kick-The-Can Has Morphed Into A Blatant Farce
Kick-the-can has morphed into a blatant farce. Everywhere in the world central banks and financial officialdom are engaging in desperate, juvenile maneuvers to buy time—–amounting to hardly a few weeks at a go. Never before has the debt-saturated, speculation-ridden global casino rested upon such a precarious foundation.
This week, for instance, Janet Yellen will again waste two days of Congressional hearings in forked-tongue equivocations about an absolutely stupid issue. Namely, the exact date when money market interest rates will be permitted to blip upward from the zero bound by even 25 basis points.
But this “lift-off” drama is flat-out surreal. How could it possibly matter whether ZIRP will have been in place by 80 months or 83 months from its inception point way back in December 2008? There is not a single household or business on main street America which will change its behavior in the slightest during the next year regardless of whether the federal funds rate is 5 bps, 30 bps or 130 bps.
The whole Kabuki dance in the Eccles Building is about hand signals to Wall Street carry traders; its a reflection of the desperate fear of our monetary politburo that having inflated for the third time this century the mother of all financial bubbles, they must now keep it going literally one meeting at a time—lest it splatter again and destroy the illusion that an egregious spree of money printing has saved the main street economy.
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What ‘Escape Velocity’? December Business Sales And Inventories Repudiate The Money Printers’ Myth
What ‘Escape Velocity’? December Business Sales And Inventories Repudiate The Money Printers’ Myth
It is plain as day that massive central bank money printing and perpetual ZIRP do not rejuvenate the main street economy under conditions of “peak debt”. And the reason is so obvious that only Keynesian economists can’t grasp it.
To wit, if the balance sheets of households and businesses are tapped out—–then artificially suppressing interest rates cannot induce them to borrow even more money. Accordingly, spending is constrained to what can be funded from current income and cash flow after any set aside for new savings. In contrast to the four decades of the great credit expansion between 1970 and 2008, therefore, GDP can no longer be stimulated by incremental outlays derived from hocking household and business balance sheets.
The graph below of the long-term trend of household leverage—measured as total mortgage, credit card and other consumer debt compared to wage and salary income—–demonstrates the new normal. During the long period of credit expansion, the Fed’s resort to low interest rates to stimulate borrowing and spending worked because households started the period with relatively clean balance sheets. As a result, central bank monetary stimulus caused leverage ratios to be ratcheted higher and higher in response to each round of rate cutting.
Self-evidently that ratcheting process has stopped, and household leverage ratios have fallen, albeit to levels which are still aberrantly high by historical standards. What this means is that after the peak debt inflection point was reached, the constraint on borrowing would not be the interest rate, as had been the case during the great credit inflation, but the availability of income to leverage.
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Audit The Fed——And Shackle It, Too
Audit The Fed——And Shackle It, Too
The reason to be fearful about the economic and financial future is that we are in the thrall of a mainstream consensus that is downright meretricious. In attacking Rand Paul’s audit legislation, for instance, one of the time-servers on the Fed Board of Governors, Jerome H. Powell, let loose the following gem:
“As recent U.S. history has shown, elected officials have often pushed for easier policies that serve short-term political interests…..”
Perhaps Mr. Powell is a descendent of Rip Van Winkle—–and missed the last 20 years of history while doing LBOs at the Carlyle Group and helping Congress improve upon its enviable record of fiscal management while at the Bipartisan Policy Center. But whatever he was doing—snoozing or otherwise distracted—- it most assuredly was not gathering evidence that “elected officials” were putting undue pressure on the Fed for “easier policies”.
For crying out loud there is exactly zero evidence that “politicians” had anything to do with zero interest rates. And ZIRP defines the ultimate level of “ease” according to Bernanke himself, who famously described his policies as positioned at the “zero bound”.
Indeed, given the very earliest expected date for “lift-off” in June, the Fed will have pinned the money market rate at zero for 80 months running. This unprecedented tsunami of “easy money”, of course, happened with nary a Congressman or Senator darkening the door at the Eccles Building.
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A Very Pernicious Partnership: Keynesian Money Printers And Wall Street Gamblers
A Very Pernicious Partnership: Keynesian Money Printers And Wall Street Gamblers
No sooner was the January jobs report released than the Wall Street Journal posted a succinct headline: “Hiring, Wages Pick Up as Job Market Nears Full Health”.
Whether the job market is actually as red hot as the BLS’ headline numbers is a debatable topic, but it is absolutely clear that the “emergency” the Fed cited 73 months ago when its pegged the money market rate a zero has long since vanished. Indeed, by the standards of all prior history, ZIRP was a death bed remedy. Prior to December 2008, the Fed had never, ever pegged the funds rate at zero—not even during the Great Depression.
So if the US economy did generate new jobs at the 4 million annual rate implicit in the November-January average, how is it that not only is the money market still pinned to the zero bound, but that the Fed continues to energetically waffle over how many more months it will remain there? Don’t these people know what the words “emergency” and “extraordinary measures” mean in plain English?
Not that it really matters. The truth is, the stubborn and unaccountable continuance of a crisis era monetary policy in the face of a purportedly booming labor market reflects something altogether different than economic common sense. Namely, it is the product of a pernicious partnership of convenience between the Keynesian money printers who dominate the Fed and the gamblers who inhabit the Wall Street casino. Together they virtually smoother any recognition that the current juxtaposition is just plain nuts.
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