Home » Posts tagged 'emerging markets' (Page 7)

Tag Archives: emerging markets

QUESTION: Marty; You mentioned that you met with a board member of the IMF. It certainly seems you are having a much larger impact than you may realize. The IMF is now warning of a crash. Do you think you can help reverse the trend if given the chance?

Thank you for caring

ANSWER: I absolutely could mitigate the crisis. There would be much I could stop in 30 days or less. But the trend is the trend. The system is collapsing. It is not because of some derivatives bubble. It is not because of fiat. This is because of the debt gone wild and governments run by politicians who are clueless and assume that they can bully their way through this by writing laws. LaGarde is now warning that we have not fixed the problems from the last crisis and we have another one brewing.

Yet the IMF is focused on the rising risk of a global financial crash because of a slowdown in China, which undermines the stability of highly indebted emerging economies. The IMF is not saying much other than there are three crisis epic centers within the emerging market crisis including China, Brazil, Turkey, and Malaysia. This could shave 3% off of global GDP, which would devastate Europe in particular. Then there is the chaos of debt in Europe because of the failed euro, but that is a political problem and means politicians need to admit error. The IMF has warned about the battered global markets that have experienced a sharp decline in liquidity since 2007 and are more likely to transmit shocks rather than cushion the blow.

These three areas that the IMF is warning about are the symptoms rather than the causes. The IMF has not identified the root cause of this chaos and that is all emerging from the fact that governments borrow, owe debt, and in turn raise taxes, which lowers growth and reducing living standards. Wait for the pension crisis to hit. A further decline will undermine the European banks and will cause a real meltdown.

Macroeconomic Instability For Emerging Markets Thanks To Commodity Bust

October 12, 2015

Macroeconomic Instability For Emerging Markets Thanks To Commodity Bust

The bust in commodity prices is sending ripples through the world of emerging markets.

Countries depending on resource extraction and exports of commodities have run into a brick wall this year the prices collapsed for all sorts of materials – oil, gas, coal, gold, copper, and more. The bust presents macroeconomic risks to these countries, and the risks are greater for economies that are less diversified and more dependent on commodities.

Already, we have seen the sharp loss in value for currencies in emerging markets. China devalued its currency over the summer, sending a wave of panicthrough emerging markets. The currencies of commodity exporters (Russia, Brazil, Mexico, Nigeria, and Iraq, just to name a few) were already under pressure before China’s devaluation, but China’s decision threw the weaknesses of emerging markets into sharp relief.

Related: Has Oil Finally Bottomed?

Commodities tend to go through booms and busts. The seeds of the latest “supercycle” for commodities were planted around a decade ago. Capitalizing off of the scorching growth in China, capital-intensive resource extraction projects were planned around the world. Between 2005 and 2014, a staggering $745 billion worth of investment flowed into new oil, gas, and mining projects. The sum peaked in 2008 and 2009, when petroleum and mining projects accounted for 10 to 12 percent of total foreign direct investment around the world.

Of course, an oil project, or a new coal mine takes several years to build and to bring online. That explains the massive volume of new capacity for all types of commodities that came online in the last two years or so. In other words, the run up in commodity prices between 2005 and 2010 sparked a wave of investment, but all that new capacity came online in 2013-2014, popping the bubble in commodity prices.

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

The world economic order is collapsing and this time there seems no way out

October 11, 2015

The world economic order is collapsing and this time there seems no way out

Europe has seen nothing like this for 70 years – the visible expression of a world where order is collapsing. The millions of refugees fleeing from ceaseless Middle Eastern war and barbarism are voting with their feet, despairing of their futures. The catalyst for their despair – the shredding of state structures and grip of Islamic fundamentalism on young Muslim minds – shows no sign of disappearing.

Yet there is a parallel collapse in the economic order that is less conspicuous: the hundreds of billions of dollars fleeing emerging economies, from Brazil to China, don’t come with images of women and children on capsizing boats. Nor do banks that have lent trillions that will never be repaid post gruesome videos. However, this collapse threatens our liberal universe as much as certain responses to the refugees. Capital flight and bank fragility are profound dysfunctions in the way the global economy is now organised that will surface as real-world economic dislocation.

The IMF is profoundly concerned, warning at last week’s annual meeting in Peru of $3tn (£1.95tn) of excess credit globally and weakening global economic growth. But while it knows there needs to be an international co-ordinated response, no progress is likely. The grip of libertarian, anti-state philosophies on the dominant Anglo-Saxon political right in the US and UK makes such intervention as probable as a Middle East settlement. Order is crumbling all around and the forces that might save it are politically weak and intellectually ineffective.

The heart of the economic disorder is a world financial system that has gone rogue. Global banks now make profits to a extraordinary degree from doing business with each other. As a result, banking’s power to create money out of nothing has been taken to a whole new level. That banks create credit is nothing new; the system depends on the truth that not all depositors will want their money back simultaneously.

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

The Hidden Debt Burden of Emerging Markets

October 10, 2015

The Hidden Debt Burden of Emerging Markets

As central bankers and finance ministers from around the globe gather for the International Monetary Fund’s annual meetings here in Peru, the emerging world is rife with symptoms of increasing economic vulnerability. Gone are the days when IMF meetings were monopolized by the problems of the advanced economies struggling to recover from the 2008 financial crisis. Now, the discussion has shifted back toward emerging economies, which face the risk of financial crises of their own.

While no two financial crises are identical, all tend to share some telltale symptoms: a significant slowdown in economic growth and exports, the unwinding of asset-price booms, growing current-account and fiscal deficits, rising leverage, and a reduction or outright reversal in capital inflows. To varying degrees, emerging economies are now exhibiting all of them.

The turning point came in 2013, when the expectation of rising interest rates in the United States and falling global commodity prices brought an end to a multi-year capital-inflow bonanza that had been supporting emerging economies’ growth. China’s recent slowdown, by fueling turbulence in global capital markets and weakening commodity prices further, has exacerbated the downturn throughout the emerging world.

These challenges, while difficult to address, are at least discernible. But emerging economies may also be experiencing another common symptom of an impending crisis, one that is much tougher to detect and measure: hidden debts.

Sometimes connected with graft, hidden debts do not usually appear on balance sheets or in standard databases. Their features morph from one crisis to the next, as do the players involved in their creation. As a result, they often go undetected, until it is too late.

Indeed, it was not until after the eruption of the 1994-1995 peso crisis that the world learned that Mexico’s private banks had taken on a significant amount of currency risk through off-balance-sheet borrowing (derivatives).
Read more at https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/hidden-debt-burden-emerging-markets-by-carmen-reinhart-2015-10#EU5Q4DVCDEzO1msE.99

High Priests of Global Finance Stoke Emerging Market Fears

October 5, 2015

High Priests of Global Finance Stoke Emerging Market Fears

Two of the most important guardians of global finance, the IMF (International Monetary Fund) and the IIF (Institute of International Finance), gave their verdict on the current state of the global economy this week. And their message could not be clearer: beware the dreaded fate of emerging markets.

The World According to A Prestigious Club of Global Banks

The IIF warned this week that hot money is pouring out of emerging markets at a startling rate, primarily on the back of China’s crunching slowdown and rising fears of a looming US rate hike.

Before we go any further, here’s a caveat: The IIF is a prestigious “club of global banks.” After the Club of 30, it is arguably the most powerful financial lobby association on the planet. It is also one of the strongest proponents of self-regulation in banking, a major cause of the Global Financial Crisis. Could an organization like the IIF have ulterior motives?

This year capital outflows from emerging economies will surpass inflows for the first time since 1988. Residents sending cash out of the emerging markets has accelerated amid recent financial market volatility while at the same time foreign investment is set to nearly halve from $1,074 billion in 2014 to just $548 billion this year.

The countries most at risk are those with high current account deficits, pronounced levels of corporate debt denominated in foreign currencies, and extreme political uncertainty. Brazil, whose currency has suffered a 30% currency depreciation this year, and Turkey (15%) are among the nations “in this situation,” the report warns. The nation most at risk is Venezuela, which (according to estimates by US financial firms) is currently suffering annual inflation of 120%. The country’s risk of default is “extremely high” and could even happen as early as 2016, warns the IIF.

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

How Bad Can This Get, And How Fast?

October 3, 2015

How Bad Can This Get, And How Fast?

There’s so much negative real bad economic and financial news out there that it’s hard to choose a ‘favorite’, but I guess I’m going to have to go with what underlies and ‘structures’ it all, the IIF stating that for the first time since 1988 and the Reagan presidency, there’s more money flowing out of emerging markets than there’s flowing in. That is for sure a watershed moment.

And no, that trend is not going to be reversed either anytime soon. Emerging economies, even if they wouldn’t include China -but they do-, have relied exclusively on selling ‘stuff’ to the rich world which combined cheap commodities with cheap labor, and now they see their customer base shrink rapidly just as they were preparing to harvest the big loot.

Now, I hope I can be forgiven for thinking from the get-go that this was always a really dumb model. That emerging nations would provide the cheap labor, and the west would kill of its manufacturing base and turn into a service economy.

This goes very predictably wrong if and when we figure out that A) economies that don’t manufacture anything can’t buy much of anything, and B) that we can sell those services our economies are ‘producing’ only to ourselves, as long as the emerging nations maintain a low enough pay model to make their products worth our while to import.

It makes one wonder how many 6 year-olds would NOT be able to figure this out. In the same vein, how many of them would be hard put to understand that our economies, overwhelmed by, and drowning in, debt, cannot be rescued by more debt? Here’s thinking the sole reason so many of us don’t get it is that we’ve been told it’s terribly hard to grasp, and you need a 10-year university course to ‘get it’.

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

In Latest Sign Of EM Chaos, Turkey’s FX Reserves Fall Below Key Threshold Ahead Of Pivotal Elections

October 2, 2015

In Latest Sign Of EM Chaos, Turkey’s FX Reserves Fall Below Key Threshold Ahead Of Pivotal Elections

One of the key things to understand about the veritable meltdown that’s unfolded across emerging markets is that there’s more to the story than the headline risk factors.

That is, while the list of proximate causes that includes a decelerating China, collapsing commodity prices, and uncertainty over when or even if the Fed will hike goes a long way towards explaining the carnage that’s unfolded across EM, each country has its own set of unique circumstances to grapple with. Indeed, the idiosyncratic political risks playing out across emerging economies have taken center stage as Brazil attempts to navigate congressional gridlock, Malaysia struggles with the 1MDB scandal, and Turkey faces new elections in November.

While there’s no question that the political situation in Brazil is particularly troubling, it would be difficult to imagine a more precarious scenario than that which exists in Turkey, where President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has managed to subvert the democratic process by starting a civil war, and thanks to the strategic significance of Incirlik, the effort is co-sponsored by the US and NATO.

Of course extreme political uncertainty, a bloody civil war, and an unfolding proxy war just across the border do not inspire much confidence, which helps to explain the fact that Turkey’s FX reserves have now fallen below $100 billion for the first time since 2012:

And here’s an updated look at the lira which is in the midst of a rather epic decline (which threatens to destabilize inflation) thanks to everything noted above combined with a central bank that either i) doesn’t understand the gravity of the situation, or ii) is loathe to hike rates going into the election:

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

Look Out Below: Corporate Debt In Emerging Markets Has QUADRUPLED Since 2004

September 30, 2015

Look Out Below: Corporate Debt In Emerging Markets Has QUADRUPLED Since 2004

Debt has skyrocketed globally. And see this.

Governments have – of course – dramatically increased their debt since 2008 to fund questionable actions.

But 141 years of history shows that excessive private debt in and of itself can cause depressions.

American corporations are piling on record amounts of debt. And see this.

Private debt has also gone absolutely ballistic in China recently.

But it’s not just the U.S. and China …

The Telegraph reports today:

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) … said corporate debts in emerging markets ballooned to $18 trillion (£12 trillion) last year, from $4 trillion in 2004 as companies gorged themselves on cheap debt.

It said the quadrupling in debt had been accompanied by weaker balance sheets, making companies more vulnerable to US rate rises.

What could possibly go wrong?

Dying Petrodollar Ripples Through Markets As Asset Managers Bemoan Loss Of Saudi Bid

September 28, 2015

Dying Petrodollar Ripples Through Markets As Asset Managers Bemoan Loss Of Saudi Bid

One of the key things to understand about China’s liquidation of hundreds of billions in US paper is that far from being a country-specific phenomenon, it actually marks the continuation of something that’s been taking place in other emerging markets for some time.

As we outlined in “Why It Really All Comes Down To The Death Of The Petrodollar,” the forced sale of Beijing’s UST reserves is simply the most dramatic example of what Deutsche Bank has called “quantitative tightening.” For years, reserve managers in the world’s emerging economies worked to accumulate war chests of USD-denominated paper in an effort to ensure that in a crisis, they would have sufficient firepower to guard against speculative attacks on their currencies and/or accelerating capital outflows. Slumping commodity prices and the threat of a supposedly imminent Fed hike have conspired to put pressure on these reserves and outside of China, nowhere is this dynamic more apparent than in Saudi Arabia. Indeed it was the Saudis who dealt the deathblow to the great EM reserve accumulation.

By intentionally killing the petrodollar, Riyadh effectively ensured that the pressure on commodity currencies would continue unabated, but as we’ve documented exhaustively, that was and still is considered an acceptable outcome if it means bankrupting the US shale complex and securing market share. But for Saudi Arabia, this is all complicated by three things: 1) the necessity of preserving the lifestyle of everyday citizens, 2) spending associated with the proxy war in Yemen, and 3) defense of the riyal’s dollar peg. All of those factors have served to weigh heavily on the county’s already depleted petrodollar reserves, and if the “lower for longer” crude thesis plays out, Riyadh may see further pressure on its current and fiscal accounts which are now both squarely in the red.

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

From ZIRP to NIRP

September 26, 2015

From ZIRP to NIRP

The sudden end of the Fed’s ambition to raise interest rates above the zero bound, coupled with the FOMC’s minutes, which expressed concerns about emerging market economies, has got financial scribblers writing about negative interest rate policies (NIRP).

Coincidentally, Andrew Haldane, the chief economist at the Bank of England, published a much commented-on speech giving us a window into the minds of central bankers, with zero interest rate policies (ZIRP) having failed in their objectives.

Of course, Haldane does not openly admit to ZIRP failing, but the fact that we are where we are is hardly an advertisement for successful monetary policies. The bare statistical recovery in the UK, Germany and possibly the US is slender evidence of some result, but whether or not that is solely due to interest rate policies cannot be convincingly proved. And now, exogenous factors, such as China’s deflating credit bubble and its knock-on effect on other emerging market economies, are being blamed for the deteriorating economic outlook faced by the welfare states, and the possible contribution of monetary policy to this failure is never discussed.

Anyway, the relative stability in the welfare economies appears to be coming to an end. Worryingly for central bankers, with interest rates at the zero bound, their conventional interest rate weapon is out of ammunition. They appear to now believe in only two broad options if a slump is to be avoided: more quantitative easing and NIRP. There is however a market problem with QE, not mentioned by Haldane, in that it is counterpart to a withdrawal of high quality financial collateral, which raises liquidity issues in the shadow banking system. This leaves NIRP, which central bankers hope will succeed where ZIRP failed.

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

Fed’s “Doom Loop” Locks Us On Course for Another Crisis

September 23, 2015

Fed’s “Doom Loop” Locks Us On Course for Another Crisis

Too Much of a Good Thing

PARIS – We’ve seen at least three articles explaining why the Fed failed to increase interest rates last Thursday. One says Goldman Sachs is calling the shots now. Another says China has the Fed under its thumb. Still another claims the Fed is a victim of its own policies and is now stuck in a “doom loop”…

All of them are right. All of the powers that be – including the Fed – want the party to continue. All know that if the Fed starts going around and turning off the lights and unplugging the music, the party is over.

romans Partying in ancient Rome – against the wishes of the guests, this party ended too …
Painting by Thomas Couture

As we tried to understand in our recent book, Hormegeddon: How Too Much of a Good Thing Leads to Disaster. Public policies create their own support. When they’re big enough, and go on for long enough, they become unstoppable.

On Monday, the Dow rose by 125 points, recovering just under half of Friday’s losses. But the bigger picture shows a stock market cut off from reality –pretending to “party on” while desperately trying to ignore that the rest of the revelers have gone home.

A report in the Financial Times on a conversation with hedge fund manager John Burbank of Passport Capital begins:

“The world economy is locked on a course toward an emerging markets crisis and a renewed slowdown in the U.S., despite the Federal Reserve’s decision last week to hold off on a rise in rates.”

The Brazilian real, weekly. The currency of the “B” in the famous “BRICS” acronym already appears to be in crisis. Only a few years ago, Brazil’s finance minister was still complaining about its strength… click to enlarge.

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

“Emerging Markets Are On The Verge Of Liquidation” Top Performing Hedge Fund Manager Warns; “QE4 Is Coming”

September 22, 2015

“Emerging Markets Are On The Verge Of Liquidation” Top Performing Hedge Fund Manager Warns; “QE4 Is Coming”

Until recently, John Burbank’s Passport Capital was one of the top 15 performing hedge funds in 2015. Recent events have only led to an even higher YTD P&L making Burbank one of the top performing managers of 2015: the $2.1bn Passport Global fund was up 14.6% at the end of August and the concentrated “special opportunities” fund was up 30.6%. The reason: in recent months Passport placed numerous commodity and emerging market shorts: trades which have generated substantial returns even as the rest of the “hedge” fund peanut gallery blamed either Bridgewater, or – in the case of Bridgewater – blamed the Fed.

Burbank did not blame anyone, and instead shorted the one company we said in March of 2014 would be the best bet on China’s collapse: Glencore. He has made a killing since, with both GLEN CDS soaring, and its stock price crashing 55% in 2015 alone to all time lows.

More apropos, having accurately foreseen the current events instead of just levering up on even more beta and praying the BTFDers return and bail out his underwater positions, Burbank’s opinion actually matters as does his outlook on what happens next.

What he foresees is not pleasant.

In an interview with the FT, Burbank said years of QE had caused a misallocation of capital across the world, while the end of QE last year triggered a dollar rally with consequences that were only now beginning to be realized.

“The wrong people got the capital — emerging markets countries and corporates and a lot of cyclical companies like mining and energy, particularly shale companies — and this is now a major problem for the credit markets,” he said.

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

Rousseff Coup Could Sink Brazil, Emerging Markets

September 20, 2015

Rousseff Coup Could Sink Brazil, Emerging Markets

Dolls in likeness of Lula da Silva, Rouseff. Source: The Guardian

Brazil’s President Dilma Rousseff’s approval rating has plummeted to 8% amid the country’s worst recession in two decades. Her job is at risk too. Earlier this week opponents filed a petition to impeach Rousseff due to allegations of corruption by former president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva at oil giant Petrobras of nearly $2 billion:

This week opponents of Ms Rousseff, incensed by allegations that “pixulecos” mostly involving ruling coalition politicians have cost Petrobras at least R$6bn (US$1.5bn), took their campaign to congress by filing a petition for impeachment with the speaker of the lower house Eduardo Cunha … The petition from Mr [Helio] Bicudo, which was backed by the opposition in congress, marks the start of what could be a long process to try to topple the former Marxist guerrilla only nine months into her second four-year term.

Rousseff – hand-picked by Lula da Silva to succeed him – appears to be caught up in da Silva’s backdraft. Opposition parties also claim she violated Brazil’s fiscal responsibility law when she doctored government accounts to allow more public spending prior to the October election last year. Rousseff in turn described the attempt to use Brazil’s economic crisis as an opportunity to seize power a modern day coup.

Inopportune Time For A Coup

Petrobras In Dire Straits

Political turmoil could not have come at a worst time. The Petrobras debacle has been a point of contention for the populace. While the elite profited from bribes and kickbacks at the state-owned oil giant, Petrobras is laying off workers and cutting supplier contracts in order to stem cash burn.

And those efforts may still not be enough to stave off bankruptcy. With $134 billion in debt – $90 billion of it dollar-denominated – Petrobras is the world’s most-indebted oil company. With oil prices 60% below their Q2 2014 peak, Petrobras will likely crumbleunder its debt load.

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

Riding ZIRP Into The Doom Loop—–Monetary Central Planning’s Dead End

September 19, 2015

Riding ZIRP Into The Doom Loop—–Monetary Central Planning’s Dead End

What the Fed really decided Thursday was to ride the zero-bound right smack into the next recession. When that calamity happens not too many months from now, the 28-year experiment in monetary central planning inaugurated by a desperate Alan Greenspan after Black Monday in October 1987 will come to an abrupt and merciful halt.

Why? Because Keynesian money printing is in a doom loop. The Fed’s ZIRP policies guarantee another financial crash, which will trigger still another outbreak of panic in the C-suites of corporate America and a consequent liquidation of excess inventories and labor on main street. That’s the new channel of monetary policy transmission, and it eventually leads to recession.

This upcoming recession, in turn, will prove beyond a shadow of doubt that in today’s financialized global economy you can’t manage the GDP of a single country as if it were isolated in an economic bathtub surrounded by high walls; nor can you attain domestic macro-targets for employment and inflation through the blunderbuss instruments of pegged money market rates and wealth effects levitation of the stock market.

Instead, the Fed’s falsification of financial asset prices simply subsidizes gambling in secondary markets; enables daisy chains of collateral to be endlessly hypothecated and re-hypothecated; causes vast misallocations and malinvestments of corporate resources, especially stock buybacks and other financial engineering; and sends money managers scrambling for yield without regard to risk, such as in junk bonds and EM debt.

What it doesn’t do is get households all jiggy, causing them to boost their leverage and spend up a storm. That’s because they reached “peak debt” at the time of the financial crisis, and have been struggling to reduce debt ever since. In the most recent quarter, in fact, household debt posted at $13.6 trillion or 3% lower than in early 2008.

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

World Is Now “More Exposed than Ever” to Explosive Dollar

September 15, 2015

World Is Now “More Exposed than Ever” to Explosive Dollar

One of the craziest financial creations on earth, available only near the peak of enormous credit bubbles when nothing can ever go wrong, became available this spring: 100-year bonds issued by governments or companies in emerging countries, in currencies they don’t control.

Yield hungry investors in developed markets who purposefully had been driven to near-insanity and drunken benightedness by the zero-interest-rate policies of central banks around the globe jumped on them. For them, it was the way to nirvana.

At the peak of Draghi’s QE hype in April, Mexico, which has a long history of debt crises, was able to sell €1.5 billion of 100-year bonds denominated in euros because yields were even lower in the Eurozone and bond fund managers there even more desperate and insane; at a ludicrously low yield to maturity of 4.2%.

Even more inexplicable was just how Petrobras, Brazil state-controlled oil company, was able to bamboozle investors on June 2 into buying its 100-year dollar-denominated bonds.

At the time, the company had just ended a five-month delay in releasing its financial statements. It’s tangled up in a horrendous corruption scandal that has reached the highest echelons of political power. It’s backed by the Brazilian government whose credit rating, as everyone had been expecting for months, was cut to junk last week by Standard and Poor’s. To top it off, Brazil has been facing a deep recession and a plunging currency, which makes paying off dollar-denominated debt prohibitively expensive.

And it renders that debt toxic.

Petrobras, whose credit rating was cut to junk the day after Brazil’s – though Moody’s had cut it to junk seven months ago – faces other, even bigger problems: over $130 billion in debt, the most of any oil company, and the terrific collapse in oil prices.

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

Tag Archives: emerging markets

Content

Post categories

Economic Links

Energy/Resource Links

Environmental Links

Geopolitical Links

Liberty Links

News Links

Other Links

Survival Skills

Post Archives by Category

The World According to A Prestigious Club of Global Banks

Post navigation

Latest Posts