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The people running states like New Jersey and cities like Chicago know they’re broke. Ridiculously generous public employee pensions – concocted by elected officials and union leaders who had to have understood that they were writing checks their taxpayers couldn’t cover – are bleeding them dry, with no political solution in sight.

They also know that they have only two possible outs: bankruptcy, or some form of federal bailout. Since the former means a disgraceful end to local political careers while the latter requires some kind of massive crisis to push Washington into a place where a multi-trillion dollar state/city bailout is the least bad option, it’s safe to assume that mayors and governors – along with public sector union leaders – have been hoping for such a crisis to save their bacon.

And this year they got their wish. The country is on lockdown, unemployment is skyrocketing and mayors and governors now have a plausible way to rebrand their criminal mismanagement as a “natural disaster” deserving of outside help.

Here, for instance, is an estimate of how high unemployment will spike for various states. Note that overall it’s brutal, but the distribution isn’t what you might expect:

And here’s a table of state rainy day funds (i.e., cash on hand). To their credit, oil-producing states had the discipline to save against that commodity’s inevitable price fluctuations. Other states apparently didn’t see the need:

Illinois, which has the most underfunded pensions but, interestingly, a relatively healthy labor market, apparently had its natural disaster bailout plan prepped and printed before COVID-19 was invented and released. Because governor Gov. J.B. Pritzker almost instantly had his hand out for – get this – $41 billion, a sum equal to three times the state’s estimated pandemic-related revenue loss in the coming year. Overall, governors have asked for about $500 billion in aid.

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

Civil Unrest Is The New Normal Out There

November 18, 2019

Civil Unrest Is The New Normal Out There

This is getting ridiculous. Every few days another country blows up, as their citizens take to the streets with little warning and no apparent interest in a quick settlement. Here’s the first part of the “War…Civil Unrest” section of today’s DollarCollapse.com links list. As you can see the peasants have grabbed their pitchforks and besieged their betters on four continents over a wide range of issues, which implies that the stated cause in each case is just an excuse.

DollarCollapse.com links list civil unrest

The real grievance is the sense that an unresponsive elite are sucking up all the available wealth, leaving the vast majority with (at best) zero upward mobility and at worst a return to the servitude their parents only recently escaped. To test the truth of this, watch what happens when a chastened government caves on the initial issue — and instead of heading back home the protesters ramp it up.

Who even remembers what pulled France’s Yellow Vests into the streets? The Macron government has spent months apologizing and offering big new spending programs aimed at the protesters’ stated concerns. Yet today’s headline is about water cannons and flipped cars. Hong Kong repealed the law that ignited its riots back in June, yet today the story is protesters shooting police with arrows (!) and Chinese soldiers deploying to help “clean up the streets.” Uh huh.

Why is this happening now? Because artificially easy money enriches the people who own the stocks, bonds and real estate that rise in value when interest rates go down. This expands the already painfully wide gap between rich and poor and turns the already high level of background resentment into a powder keg. Then it’s just a matter of a provocation. And there’s always another provocation coming.

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

Here Comes The Housing Bust “Reverse Wealth Effect,” Australia Edition

October 27, 2018

Here Comes The Housing Bust “Reverse Wealth Effect,” Australia Edition

For the past few years, homeowners just about everywhere have been able to finesse life’s problems by thinking “at least my house is going up.” This home equity accretion allowed them to buy stuff on credit, safe in the knowledge that even as they maxed out yet another credit card their net worth continued to rise. They felt smart and confident, in other words, and so continued to behave in ways that the modern world defines as normal and natural.

But now that’s ending. Home prices have stopped rising in many places and in a few canaries in the financial coal mine have begun to plunge. Here’s what “plunge” means for Australians:

House prices ‘falling by over $1,000 a week’ in Sydney and Melbourne, Deloitte says

The boom time is over and we’re now officially experiencing the “house price fall we had to have”, according to Deloitte Access Economics’s latest business outlook.

It has found what many had been predicting: prices are dipping as interest rates are rising, with our biggest cities feeling the winds of change most keenly.

“Our house prices here in Australia had streaked past anything sensible by way of valuation,” said Deloitte partner Chris Richardson.
“Now, finally gravity has caught up with that stupidity and prices are falling.

“In Sydney and Melbourne, housing prices are falling by over $1,000 a week.”

Prices had surged across the country over the past five years as historically low interest rates have driven Australians to load up on debt, while investors had also cashed in.

Not if, but by how much
Housing forecasts have gone from disagreement over whether home prices will fall to debates about how much they’ll decline.

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

Rising Interest Rates Start Popping Bubbles — The End Of This Expansion Is Now In Sight

October 10, 2018

Rising Interest Rates Start Popping Bubbles — The End Of This Expansion Is Now In Sight

Towards the end of economic expansions, interest rates usually start to rise as strong loan demand bumps up against central bank tightening.

At first the effect on the broader economy is minimal, so consumers, companies and governments don’t let a slight uptick in financing costs interfere with their borrowing and spending. But eventually rising rates begin to bite and borrowers get skittish, throwing the leverage machine into reverse and producing an equities bear market and Main Street recession.

We are there. After a year of gradual increases, interest rates are finally high enough to start popping bubbles. Consider housing and autos:

Mortgage Rates Up, Affordability Down, Housing Party Over

The past few years’ housing boom has been relatively quiet, but a boom nonetheless. Mortgage rates in the 3% – 4% range made houses widely affordable, so demand exceeded supply and prices rose, eventually surpassing 2006 bubble levels in hot markets like Denver and Seattle.

But this week mortgages hit 5% …

… and people have begun to notice. Here’s an example of the resulting media coverage:

Mortgage rates top 5 percent, signaling more home price cuts

Some of us out there still remember when the average rate on the 30-year fixed mortgage hit 9 percent, but we are not the bulk of today’s buyers. Millennials, now in their prime homebuying years, may be in for the rude awakening that credit isn’t always cheap.

The average rate on the 30-year fixed loan sat just below 4 percent a year ago, after dropping below 3.5 percent in 2016. It just crossed the 5 percent mark, according to Mortgage News Daily. That is the first time in 8 years, and it is poised to move higher. Five percent may still be historically cheap, but higher rates, combined with other challenges facing today’s housing market could cause potential buyers to pull back.

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

From Buenos Aires To Nashville: The Emerging Market Crisis Spreads From Periphery To Core

September 10, 2018

From Buenos Aires To Nashville: The Emerging Market Crisis Spreads From Periphery To Core

This is the last emerging market crisis story for a while, promise. But one angle – exactly how a plunging currency in a far-off place affects supposedly stable markets like the US – is worth exploring because it’s happening right this minute.

Let’s start with the choices facing an American or European investor who needs a decent return, but who finds that interest rates have fallen to the point where traditionally safe things like bonds and bank accounts no longer yield enough.

Such an investor has two choices: 1) Stick with what they know and accept sub-par returns (which might mean being fired if you’re a pension fund manager, or – if you’re a retiree – having to spend your golden years as a Walmart greeter), or 2) Branch out into more exotic but higher-yielding instruments and hope for the best.

Option number 2 has been pushed by financial planners and pension advisors for the past few years, with emerging market securities being the exotica of choice. The sales pitch went something like this: Developing country stocks are cheaper relative to earnings and dividend yields than their rich country counterparts, while their bonds yield quite a bit – frequently two or three times – more than US Treasuries for only marginally more risk, so they’re a great way to diversify while goosing returns.

Many, many investors swallowed this and bought emerging market stock and bond funds. And for a while they reaped the promised high returns, allowing retirees to spend time with their grandkids and pension managers to keep cashing their massive paychecks.

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

Even Mortgage Lenders Are Repeating Their 2006 Mistakes

September 9, 2018

Even Mortgage Lenders Are Repeating Their 2006 Mistakes

You’d think the previous decade’s housing bust would still be fresh in the minds of mortgage lenders, if no one else. But apparently not.

One of the drivers of that bubble was the emergence of private label mortgage “originators” who, as the name implies, simply created mortgages and then sold them off to securitizers, who bundled them into the toxic bonds that nearly brought down the global financial system.

The originators weren’t banks in the commonly understood sense. That is, they didn’t build long-term relationships with customers and so didn’t need to care whether a borrower could actually pay back a loan. With zero skin in the game, they were willing to write mortgages for anyone with a paycheck and a heartbeat. And frequently the paycheck was optional.

In retrospect, that was both stupid and reckless. But here we are a scant decade later, and the industry is headed back towards those same practices. Today’s Wall Street Journal, for instance, profiles a formerly-miniscule private label mortgage originator that now has a bigger market share than Bank of America or Citigroup:

The New Mortgage Kings: They’re Not Banks

One afternoon this spring, a dozen or so employees lined up in front of Freedom Mortgage’s office in Mount Laurel, N.J., to get their picture taken. Clutching helium balloons shaped like dollar signs, they were being honored for the number of mortgages they had sold.

Freedom is nowhere near the size of behemoths like Citigroup or Bank of America; yet last year it originated more mortgages than either of them, some $51.1 billion, according to industry research group Inside Mortgage Finance. It is now the 11th-largest mortgage lender in the U.S., up from No. 78 in 2012.

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

Another Way Of Looking At The Pension Crisis, As “A Stealth Mortgage on Your House”

August 7, 2018

Another Way Of Looking At The Pension Crisis, As “A Stealth Mortgage on Your House”

Money manager Rob Arnott and finance professor Lisa Meulbroek have run the numbers on underfunded pension plans and come up with an interesting – and highly concerning – new angle: That they impose a “stealth mortgage” on homeowners. Here’s how the Wall Street Journal reported it today:

The Stealth Pension Mortgage on Your House

Most cities, counties and states have committed taxpayers to significant future unfunded spending. This mostly takes the form of pension and postretirement health-care obligations for public employees, a burden that averages $75,000 per household but exceeds $100,000 per household in some states. Many states protect public pensions in their constitutions, meaning they cannot be renegotiated. Future pension obligations simply must be paid, either through higher taxes or cuts to public services.

Is there a way out for taxpayers in states that are deep in the red? Milton Friedman famously observed that the only thing more mobile than the wealthy is their capital. Some residents may hope that they can avoid the pension crash by decamping to a more fiscally sound state.

But this escape may be illusory. State taxes are collected on four economic activities: consumption (sales tax), labor and investment (income tax) and real-estate ownership (property tax). The affluent can escape sales and income taxes by moving to a new state—but real estate stays behind. Property values must ultimately support the obligations that politicians have promised, even if those obligations aren’t properly funded, because real estate is the only source of state and local revenue that can’t pick up and move elsewhere. Whether or not unfunded obligations are paid with property taxes, it’s the property that backs the obligations in the end.

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

A Bull Market For The History Books — Bear Market To Follow Shortly

March 12, 2018

A Bull Market For The History Books — Bear Market To Follow Shortly

If you’re getting the sense that stocks always go up, that’s because they’ve been doing so for a really, really long time. From CNBC today:

On the bull market’s ninth birthday, here’s how it stacks up against history

• The Dow has quadrupled during the bull market, which turned 9 on Friday.

• This is the biggest and longest bull market for the Dow post-WWII, according to Leuthold Group.

The bullish run in the Dow Jones industrial average — which celebrates its ninth birthday Friday — is the longest ever and the greatest percentage gain since World War II, according to Leuthold Group.

The corresponding run by the S&P 500, notes LPL Financial, is that benchmark’s second-largest and second-longest bull market ever, with only the 1990s stock market run led by technology stocks in the way.

Despite a more than 10 percent correction in equities last month following a burst of bullish activity, Leuthold’s Doug Ramsey doesn’t think the bull is done yet.

“Assuming the Dow Jones industrial average can exceed its late-January high on March 9th or thereafter, this cyclical bull market will become the first one ever to last nine years,” said Ramsey, his firm’s chief investment officer. “Historically, cycle momentum highs are usually followed by a push to even higher price highs over the next several months.”

The Dow hit an all-time high of 26,616.71 on Jan. 26, the same day the S&P 500 clinched its own record of 2,872.87. The major indexes are off their record highs 6.4 percent and 4.6 percent respectively.

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

Consumers In Surprising Places Are Borrowing Like Crazy

February 28, 2018

Consumers In Surprising Places Are Borrowing Like Crazy

The Money Bubble is inflating at different speeds in different places. But apparently no culture is immune:

Household Debt Sees Quiet Boom Across the Globe

(Wall Street Journal) – A decade after the global financial crisis, household debts are considered by many to be a problem of the past after having come down in the U.S., U.K. and many parts of the euro area.But in some corners of the globe—including Switzerland, Australia, Norway and Canada—large and rising household debt is percolating as an economic problem. Each of those four nations has more household debt—including mortgages, credit cards and car loans—today than the U.S. did at the height of last decade’s housing bubble.

At the top of the heap is Switzerland, where household debt has climbed to 127.5% of gross domestic product, according to data from Oxford Economics and the Bank for International Settlements. The International Monetary Fund has identified a 65% household debt-to-GDP ratio as a warning sign.

In all, 10 economies have debts above that threshold and rising fast, with the others including New Zealand, South Korea, Sweden, Thailand, Hong Kong and Finland.

In Switzerland, Australia, New Zealand and Canada, the household debt-to-GDP ratio has risen between five and 10 percentage points over the past three years, paces comparable to the U.S. in the run-up to the housing bubble. In Norway and South Korea they’re rising even faster.

The IMF says a five percentage-point increase in household debt over a three-year period is associated with a hit to GDP growth of 1.25 percentage points three years down the road. The historical record suggests that large debts lead to a short-term economic boost but long-term struggles, as a greater share of the economy’s resources go to servicing the spending binge associated with high debts. The IMF also finds rising household debts are associated with greater risks of banking crashes and financial crisis.

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

The World Embraces Debt At Exactly The Wrong Time

February 16, 2018

The World Embraces Debt At Exactly The Wrong Time

Self-destruction usually happens in stages. At first there’s a binge in which the thrill outweighs the sense of transgression. This is usually followed by remorse, acknowledgement of risks, and an attempt to reform.

But straight-and-narrow is exhausting, and because of this is frequently just temporary, eventually giving way to a kind of capitulation in which the addict drops even the pretense of self-control.

2018 is apparently the year in which the world enters this final stage of its addiction to debt. Wherever you look, leverage is soaring as governments, corporations and individuals just give up and embrace the idea that borrowing is no longer a necessary evil, but simply necessary. Some recent examples:

China January new loans surge to record 2.9 trillion yuan, blow past forecasts

(Reuters) – China’s banks extended a record 2.9 trillion yuan ($458.3 billion) in new yuan loans in January, blowing past expectations and nearly five times the previous month as policymakers aim to sustain solid economic growth while reining in debt risks.

Net new loans surpassed the previous record of 2.51 trillion yuan in January 2016, which is likely to support growth not only in China but may underpin liquidity globally as major Western central banks begin to withdraw stimulus.

Corporate loans surged to 1.78 trillion yuan from 243.2 billion yuan in December, while household loans rose to 901.6 billion yuan in January from 329.4 billion yuan in December, according to Reuters calculations based on the central bank data.

Outstanding yuan loans grew 13.2 percent in January from a year earlier, also faster than an expected 12.5 percent rise and compared with an increase of 12.7 percent in December.

———————–

Total US household debt soars to record above $13 trillion

(CNBC) – Total household debt rose by $193 billion to an all-time high of $13.15 trillion at year-end 2017 from the previous quarter, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s Center for Microeconomic Data report released Tuesday.

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

The Fed’s Impossible Choice, In Three Charts

February 11, 2018

The Fed’s Impossible Choice, In Three Charts

Critics of “New Age” monetary policy have been predicting that central banks would eventually run out of ways to trick people into borrowing money. There are at least three reasons to wonder if that time has finally come:

Wage inflation is accelerating
Normally, towards the end of a cycle companies have trouble finding enough workers to keep up with their rising sales. So they start paying new hires more generously. This ignites “wage inflation,” which is one of the signals central banks use to decide when to start raising interest rates. The following chart shows a big jump in wages in the second half of 2017. And that’s before all those $1,000 bonuses that companies have lately been handing out in response to lower corporate taxes. So it’s a safe bet that wage inflation will accelerate during the first half of 2018.

The conclusion: It’s time for higher interest rates.

The financial markets are flaking out
The past week was one for the record books, as bonds (both junk and sovereign) and stocks tanked pretty much everywhere while exotic volatility-based funds imploded. It was bad in the US but worse in Asia, where major Chinese markets fell by nearly 10% — an absolutely epic decline for a single week.

Normally (i.e., since the 1990s) this kind of sharp market break would lead the world’s central banks to cut interest rates and buy financial assets with newly-created currency. Why? Because after engineering the greatest debt binge in human history, the monetary authorities suspect that even a garden-variety 20% drop in equity prices might destabilize the whole system, and so can’t allow that to happen.

The conclusion: Central banks have to cut rates and ramp up asset purchases, and quickly, before things spin out of control.

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

The Middle East Is Blowing Up

June 20, 2017

The Middle East Is Blowing Up

Every day brings another scary headline from the Middle East — which makes it easy to treat them as background noise rather than a clear and present danger. But the latest batch is reminiscent of the Balkans circa 1914, which means it may be time to tune back in. Some examples:

A US Navy jet shot down a Syrian warplane.Syria is a Russian client state, so this puts the US and Russia on opposite sides in a shooting war.

Russia warned the US that it takes the destruction of its client’s military assets seriously. It suspended the hot line Washington and Moscow have used to avoid collisions in Syrian airspace and threatened to target US aircraft.

Iran has begun launching missiles into Syria targeting ISIS. This is new in at least two ways: 1) Iran hasn’t used those particular missiles in decades, and 2) it was not previously active in Syria. This escalation from advising the Assad regime to actually killing people and blowing things up adds another player on Russia’s side against the US.

Iran and the US trade threats. US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson accused Iran of destabilizing the region and promised that the United States would support “those elements inside the Islamic Republic which would bring about peaceful government transition.” Iran called those remarks “unwise and clear meddling in Iran’s internal affairs.”

Saudi Arabia claimed to arrest members of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard who were attacking a Saudi offshore oil facility, and said that three of the attackers were being interrogated. One day later Iran accused Saudi Arabian border guards of opening fire on Iranian fishermen in the area, killing one of them.

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

Unintended Consequences, Part 2: Easy Money = Overcapacity = Trade Wars

May 29, 2016

Unintended Consequences, Part 2: Easy Money = Overcapacity = Trade Wars

It’s unclear what China was thinking when it was borrowed all those trillions to quadruple its capacity to make steel, cement and other basic industrial products. There’s no record of it checking in with the other countries that have such industries to see if a sudden surge of cheap imports was okay with them.

Turns out that it’s not. The US in particular seems to lack a sense of humor where the death of its steel industry is involved:

US hits China and others with more steep steel duties

(CNBC) – The U.S. Department of Commerce has imposed more duties on corrosion-resistant steel imports from China and elsewhere in an effort to protect its industry from a glut of steel imports from around the world.On Wednesday, the department’s International Trade Administration, which has conducted an investigation into the “dumping” of steel products into U.S. markets, said it had found the “dumping of imports of corrosive-resistant steel (CORE) products from China, India, Italy, Korea and Taiwan” by various steel producers that it named within those countries.

As a result, the department said that Chinese corrosion-resistant steel would be subject to a final anti-dumping duty of 210 percent and anti-subsidy duty of between 39 percent and up to 241 percent.

China’s low-cost metal producers have been widely cited as the main culprit for a glut in global steel production that has pushed down prices. Last week, the U.S. slapped tariffs of more than 500 percent on Chinese cold-rolled steel, which is used mainly in car production and appliances.

China has been accused by the U.S. and leading figures in the steel industry of “dumping” that cheap steel on to global markets due to a slowdown in domestic demand and a bid to gain global market share at any cost.

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

How Stupid Do You Have To Be To Let This Happen?

March 28, 2016

How Stupid Do You Have To Be To Let This Happen?

So how do we explain this: After World War II most European countries set up generous entitlement systems including government pensions designed to offer dignified retirements to citizens who had worked hard and paid taxes and obeyed the rules for a lifetime. BUT they didn’t bother putting anything aside for the inevitable — and mathematically predictable — retirement of the immense baby boomer generation. Here’s an excerpt from a recent Wall Street Journal article outlining the problem:

Europe Faces Pension Predicament

State-funded pensions are at the heart of Europe’s social-welfare model, insulating people from extreme poverty in old age. Most European countries have set aside almost nothing to pay these benefits, simply funding them each year out of tax revenue. Now, European countries face a demographic tsunami, in the form of a growing mismatch between low birthrates and high longevity, for which few are prepared.Europe’s population of pensioners, already the largest in the world, continues to grow. Looking at Europeans 65 or older who aren’t working, there are 42 for every 100 workers, and this will rise to 65 per 100 by 2060, the European Union’s data agency says. By comparison, the U.S. has 24 nonworking people 65 or over per 100 workers.

“Western European governments are close to bankruptcy because of the pension time bomb,” said Roy Stockell, head of asset management at Ernst & Young. “We have so many baby boomers moving into retirement [with] the expectation that the government will provide.”

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

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