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Debt is back but this time its corporate

October 31, 2018

Debt is back but this time its corporate

On Wednesday Feb 7th 2007 HSBC issued a profit warning.  It was the first in its 142 year history. The bank told its share holders it would have to take an unprecedented charge of $10.5 billion because one of its units, its sub prime lender, was in deep trouble. And so began the sub prime crisis.

Today GE issued a profit warning and cut its dividend to share holders from 12 cents to 1 cent. It is only the third time since the Great Depression that GE has reduced its dividend in this way. It told its share holders it would be taking a $22 Billion charge because one of its units, its power unit, is in deep trouble. GE has about $116 billion in debt.

In 2007 the banks had flooded the global market with sub-prime loans. The banks were also holding many of those same loans themselves or had transferred them to Special Purpose Vehicles (SPVs) they had set up, staffed and lent money to.

Today it is not the banking world which stands at the centre of the storm but the corporate world. In the last years they have flooded the market with junk rated bonds. At the same time they are also burdened with high yielding, leveraged and covenant- lite loans. Taken together they are about $2.4 Trillion of debt.

2007 sub prime loans. 2018 corporate junk bonds and leveraged loans. 2007 banks and SPVs funded by the banks. 2018?

Where is this sub-prime corporate debt sitting today?

 

Nearly half sits in Insurance Companies and Pension funds.

Given the close ties between insurance and pensions this is not a happy picture.

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

Lebanon – the next front in the Great Gas War.

November 8, 2017

Lebanon – the next front in the Great Gas War.

The Great Gas War has already two distinct fronts: The now relatively quiet Northern Front in Ukraine and the Southern Front in Syria in which the Western empire has been losing. It looks to me that Lebanon is being targeted as the next front, where the West hopes its loses might be recouped.

Yesterday, November 6th,  Reuters reported,

Saudi Arabia said on Monday that Lebanon had declared war against it because of attacks against the Kingdom by the Lebanese Shi‘ite group Hezbollah.

This comes after Israel, Saudi’s long time though largely un-offical best friend in the region,  has been very publicly preparing to renew its own war with Lebanon – or more accurately with Hezbollah.  As the American news journal Newsweek put it recently,

ISRAEL PREPARES FOR ANOTHER WAR WITH HEZBOLLAH AS IDF PRACTICES LEBANON INVASION.

Why now and why Lebanon?  Well the rulers of Saudi, a Sunni dominated country, will tell us that it is because Hezbollah is a Shia terrorist organisation. “Hezbollah” literally means the “Party of Allah” or “Party of God”.  Saudi Gulf affairs minister Thamer al-Sabhan yesterday pointedly referred to Hezbollah as, “the Lebanese Party of the Devil”.  Saudi is not alone of course, Hezbollah has also been listed as a terrorist organisation by America, Israel, the Arab League, the UK and the EU. It is also, however, part of the popular government of Lebanon having seats in its parliament.

I suggest, however, a powerful reason that a new war with Hezbollah may be in the offing is because Lebanon is the next link in any gas pipeline that could potentially bring Iranian Gas to Europe. That was the reason the West decided to “liberate” the Syrian people and it will be why they decide to enforce the same salvation upon the people of Lebanon.

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

China’s rise, America’s fall

October 26, 2017

China’s rise, America’s fall

Will the rise of China mean the fall of America?  In a word, yes. Although decline might be more accurate.

Why do I think this?  Because China is about to launch the PetroYuan and when it does the demand for dollars and for dollar denominated debt will shrink. When it does, I question whether the world will be so sanguine about the level of debt that America carries. If that happens then the value of the dollar is in question.

At the moment no matter what level of debt America carries, other countries need dollars. Dollars to pay for oil, since oil is traded in dollars.  Dollars for their financial system so their banks can settle contracts for goods and services traded in dollars.

But over the last few years China has been systematically putting in place everything it needs to launch the Yuan as not only a rival to the dollar in trading and settling oil contracts but as a rival to the dollar as the world’s reserve currency.  At the moment the only rival to the dollar is the Euro. I think it fair to say the relationship between the two currencies and their issuing powers, has been… ‘delicate’.  The news that Sadam Hussein was going to start trading his oil in Euros came just a few months before America and its lap dog GB, decided Sadam was a threat to world peace and went to war with him.  Something similar happened to Colonel Qaddafi.

Under Qaddafi Libya’s currency was backed by the country’s large holdings of gold and silver. This had allowed Qaddafi to finance, for example, the entire construction of the Great Man Made River without going to Western banks for a single loan. Libya was debt free and owned its own resources and infrastructure.

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

The Narrative of Fear and Insecurity

September 5, 2017

The Narrative of Fear and Insecurity

On March 4 1933 FDR in his inaugural address to the American people said,

“…the only thing we have to fear is…fear itself….”

And it’s true. It is fear more than anything else that prevents people from turning away from what has failed them and stays their hand from picking up the tools which would allow them to build what would work better.  And precisely because it is true, every politician, banker, judge and general has realised that if they wished to stop change from weakening their grip on power and wealth, then what they need above all else is …more fear.

As FDR went on to say, it is

“…nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes….”

So if you want to control a people and contain their desire to replace the system which benefits you, with one that benefits them, then you need to feed them fear and the more of it and the more slippery and inscrutable it seems to them, the better.

A looming, shadowy foreign power lurking just beyond the borders is always good.  Russia, China, Communists in general, or if they are too far away, then any kind of socialist will do at a pinch.  In 1983 Margaret Thatcher famously branded British miners and their union as  ‘The enemy within.”  Terrorists are a wonderful new fear.  They are everywhere, much like Red’s used to be under every bed.

All these are good and have been used, still are used, to good effect. But there is a new fear, one closer to the fear FDR was talking about. And the currency of that fear is Debt.  Here is a very short history, in just a few sentences, of how debt became the currency of fear.

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

Panama partners in crime

April 8, 2016

Panama partners in crime

“We have broken no laws and cooperated with the government at all times.”

Variations of that statement seem to be the default defence of everyone from bankers to politicians when their names come up in the Panama Papers.

In the UK the latest to resort to some version of it, was first Downing Street on behalf of the Prime Minister David Cameron, and then HSBC on behalf of it’s notorious Swiss subsidiary.  The former because his father who lived in the UK, set up an off-shore company which has never paid any taxes in the UK, and the latter because it turns out HSBC has once again been handling dirty money, this time holding and moving money for off-shore companies owned by relatives of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

Now HSBC is a well known money laundering bank. They have been indicted and convicted of money laundering so many times in so many different countries.  The best known case was in 2012 when HSBC were found guilty of  laundering drug money out of Mexico. HSBC were tried in the US and fined $1.9 billion. They paid and said how sorry they were, and their group Chief Executive Stuart Gulliver accepted responsibility for their past mistakes, but assured everyone they had now put all that behind them and had even,

spent $290m on improving its systems to prevent money laundering,

That was 2012. In 2015 HSBC all that was found to be blather. HSBC were caught laundering  – again. This time it was HSBC’s Swiss subsidiary which had laundered

the proceeds of political corruption and accepted deposits from arms dealers while helping wealthy people evade taxes.

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

Re-branding Dissent

January 2, 2016

Re-branding Dissent

I am one of those who thinks that democracy is being destroyed.  I know its fashionable to play cynical one-upmanship and say – ‘we’ve never had democracy’, or, ‘it was destroyed long ago’,  but that game aside, I think its worth actually thinking about how, many forms of democratic expression, effective dissent and peaceful self-determination are being buried.

In “The Next Crisis” I argued that the Global Over-Class have decided that Democracy is a threat to their wealth and power and have more than likely given some thought to how best to neuter it while appearing to do no such thing.  I suggested they would wish to keep the outward form of democracy, so as to keep us reassured and entertained, but remove any substance from it, leaving us with an empty but colourful stage show.

In part two  of the series, I offered a list of the various ways this could be done (a sort of manifesto for the Over Class or, as I have called them elsewhere, The Disloyal and noted how many of those things were clearly already underway.

For example item three of the manifesto said,

3) professionalized Governance. Democracy can be and must be neutered, and an effective way of doing this is to insist that amateur, elected officials MUST take the advice of professional (read corporate) advisors. Expand current law to enforce this.

If this seems monstrous now, their argument, I suspect,  will be that in an increasingly crowded, interconnected and globalised world we can no longer leave critically important decisions in the hands of the uneducated, in-expert and amateur.  We must, of course, still be free to choose but must, from now on, be helped to choose ‘wisely’. And how can we choose wisely if we aren’t given wise choices to choose from?  Oh, the Orwellian beauty of it! No prizes for guessing who will decide what is and what is not wise.

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

Tick Tock

September 13, 2015

Tick Tock

8 years to fix the malfunctioning heart of the world’s financial and legal systems but nothing was actually done … and now the clock is ticking and  there is hardly any time left.

The number of red lights now blinking at us, largely ignored by those who are supposed to be flying this thing, is growing all the time.  It is not that any one of them is a clear harbinger of the end but taken together they paint a dismal and coherent picture – of a system eating itself.

What I mean is that every political and financial system, every bureaucracy, public or private is originally set up to do a necessary job. And the duty of those who work in it is to make sure the system doe that job. But when the challenges facing the system change so that the system begins to no longer be able to do its job, those in it have two choices: they can work for the greater good and help change the old system into a new one better fit to the new challenges, or they can ignore the problems, and forget the reason they and the system were created in the first place and instead seek merely to get as much as they can from the failing system before it implodes.

It seems obvious to me that is where we are today,  both politically and financially. We are living in the End Times not because some angry supernatural being is coming to punish us, but because we are living in a system, a machine, which we built and therfore can change, but we have forgotten this. Some time in the recent past we crawled inside our machine, closed the last hatch to the outside behind us, and then forget there was an outside.

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

 

 

Greece, China, and Russia – a Plan B for Greece

July 5, 2015

Greece, China, and Russia – a Plan B for Greece

If the Greeks were to vote ‘No’ what would happen next?  Well no one can say. But here is a quick thought on what I hope the Greek government might have been exploring if they are excluded from the euro. It’s just food for thought nothing more.

They have to be prepared to have a currency that does not depend on Europe supplying Euros. So they will need another currency – hopefully their own.  I think we can be sure no western company has been printing them. There are few such companies and there is, I think, no possibility that they would be able to keep secret a contract from Greece.  But both Russia and China can print notes. So would it not have been prudent to ask Putin to print up plane loads of Drachma and be prepared to fly them in?

Who would back this currency?  Greece is not Great Britain with a long established reasonably trusted currency backed by a big slice of global financial trade. So I do not think they could launch an orphan currency which the drachma would be if it did not have some relation to a major clearing or reserve currency.

For all Obama has, apparently, lobbied the EU to be more conciliatory towards Greece I am not sure he would leap at the chance to help Greece with its debt. He might of course. A chance to reenforce US power in that part of the world. But he already has power there so I doubt he would be willing to ‘pay’ much. Russia and China, however would gain much more by having Greece as a beach head in to the EU and, more importantly, into Nato.

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

 

 

 

Olduvai IV: Courage
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Olduvai II: Exodus
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