29 July 2007

Be wary of buy and Hold

Those receiving conventional buy-and-hold advice from their brokers and advisors should be leery. We referenced Barton Biggs', former Chief Global Strategist with Morgan Stanley, book Hedgehogging in our April 2006 issue, Losers: Why We Invest with Them.

"Secular cycles, both in markets and sectors of the market, make a big investment management firm a very conflicting enterprise to manage if you are a businessperson, because the rational things to do to maximize short-term profitability are exactly the wrong things from both an investment and a long-term profitability point of view. For example, during 2000, even as the bubble was bursting, Morgan Stanley Investment Management, which has a business-dominated management, acted like businessmen: they heavily promoted the underwriting of technology and aggressive growth stock funds because those were the funds the salespeople could sell and that the public would buy. Management was not evil; they were doing what they thought was right. Large amounts of public money were being raised and very quickly lost. Short-term sales profits were collected at the expense of, not only the public, but the firm's long-term credibility and profitability."

Those who are looking for warnings from our "trusted" government officials should consider their track record. On July 12th of this year, U.S. Treasury Secretary Paulson declared, "This is far and away the strongest business economy that I have seen in my lifetime." Several days prior, on July 2nd, he stated, "In terms of housing, most of us believe that we are at or near the bottom."

If the truth is not already obvious to us, history can be instructive. With the help of Dr. Mark Thornton, of the Ludwig Von Mises Institute, one needn't look far to find examples of misleading statements at major market and economic turning points. Paul Warburg, an early advocate of the Federal Reserve, was on the Federal Reserve Board when he made this statement in January of 1930.

"Happily, we have now turned our backs upon the events of this unfortunate event."

Even more incredulously, on November 22nd of 1929, William Green, President of the American Federation of Labor, stated:


As a final word of warning, we leave you with the words of Dr. Carroll Quigley, a noted historian, former professor of history at Georgetown University, and consultant to the U.S. Defense Department, the Smithsonian Institute, and NASA. His tome, Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time was used as a resource in our December 2006 issue: Mind Games.

"All past history shows that espionage has been generally successful and intelligence has been generally a failure. By this I mean that no country had much success in keeping secrets, in the twentieth as in all earlier centuries,but neither has any other country had much success in evaluating or in interpreting the secrets it obtained. The so-called 'surprises' of history have emerged not because other countries did not have the information, but because they refused to believe it. The date of Hitler's attack on the West in May 1940 had been given to the Netherlands by the German Counterintelligence Office as soon as it was decided; the Western countries refused to believe it. The same was true of every one of Hitler's surprises. Stalin was given the date of the German attack on the Soviet Union by a number of informants, including the United States Department of State, but he refused to believe. Both the Germans and Russians had the date of D-Day, but ignored it. The United States had available all the Japanese coded messages, knew that war was about to begin, and that a Japanese fleet with at least four large carriers was loose (and lost) in the Pacific, yet Pearl Harbor was a total surprise."

While the evidence of trouble has just begun to surface in U.S. equity prices, the love affair with credit, as demonstrated by record profits in the banking and brokerage industries, has only made investors, especially large institutional investors, more attached to this bullish run than ever. But, with the continuing contraction in the housing sector, and its impact on borrowing, the early warning signals are blowing.

The following is an excerpt from the email we sent our subscribers last Thursday, July 19th, regarding our latest issue of The Investor's Mind:

"We are releasing this month's Investor's Mind early because a variety of technical indicators are pointing to an end to the bull market run that began in the fall of 2002. I thought it important to release this piece on three high-level financial meetings that have taken place over the last few months, which I believe make it clear that those at the top of the money game have known for some time that the end of this period will bring massive shifts to the global capital markets."

Doug Wakefield

Banks burnt by credit meltdown

Credit derivatives markets saw a strong bout of further heavy selling on Thursday in both Europe and the US, with the widely watched indices of riskier credits bearing the brunt of the pain.

Behind the headline numbers, banks and other financials have been among the worst affected as investors worry about their exposure to a range of problem areas from mortgage markets to the leveraged loans that fund private equity buy-out deals.

The iTraxx Crossover index, the key barometer of appetite for credit risk in Europe, saw the cost of protecting €10m ($13.7m) of mostly junk rated corporate debt jump above €400,000 per year on the five-year contract for the first time in almost two years.

The index at 400 basis points is more than twice the level at the start of June. Its US cousin also traded at record levels, hitting 326bp.

The perceived credit risk of owning the debt of US banks, which has soared in recent weeks, jumped to new highs yesterday as investors reacted to revelations that Wall Street had been left saddled with billions of dollars of unsold corporate debt.

Analysis by the Financial Times shows that investment banks in the US and Europe could have already been forced to retain more than $40bn worth of high-yield debt that they intended to sell in recent weeks.

Investor appetite for high-risk, high-yield debt has significantly diminished – illustrated this week by the failure to place about $20bn worth of loans for just two companies, Chrysler and Alliance Boots.

US banks especially had already seen both their stock prices and credit default swaps – which provide a kind of insurance against non-payment of debt – under heavy pressure owing to their exposure to US subprime mortgage crisis and to the hedge funds that were invested in related products.

“A lot of people are spooked that the [credit] lines extended to hedge funds have created massive counterparty risk,” said Christian Stracke, a senior analyst at CreditSights. “We can’t really have a great sense for what counterparty exposure is – and these players are beginning to drop off like flies under the weight of subprime.”

However, he added that the market was nervous more because of uncertainty than because banks were obviously in dire straits.

JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs postponed on Wednesday the sale of $12bn of debt financing for Cerberus’s purchase of Chrysler. The US carmaker has agreed to hold $2bn, leaving the banks with a hefty $10bn on their books.

The two banks’ CDS hit their highest levels since 2003 yesterday. JPMorgan’s CDS was at 75bp, an increase of 25bp on the day, according to data from broker Phoenix Partners Group.

The bank is Wall Street’s biggest underwriter of leveraged loans, according to Bloomberg data, and its cost of protection in CDS markets has tripled in the past five weeks.

Meanwhile, Goldman’s CDS jumped as much as 18bp to 85bp.

However, one of the worst hit is Bear Stearns, the largest US underwriter of mortgage-backed bonds, which saw its CDS rise to 105bp from 83.50bp on Wednesday. This is five times the level seen at the beginning of this year, and the highest of any bank on the Street.

Most of these banks have also seen their stock prices stumble. Bear is down 23 per cent this year after falling another 3.7 per cent to $124.49 on Thursday. JPMorgan is down 8.5 per cent and Lehman 16 per cent.

The S&P investment bank index tumbled 3.7 per cent on Thursday and is down 9.1 per cent in 2007.

Another barometer of bank stress and a leading indicator for credit market weakness is the interest rate swaps market, which is now at the widest levels over US Treasury yields since February 2002.

11 reasons to freak out

"Total world stock market capitalization was about $37 trillion in 1990; it grew to about $51.225 trillion in March 2007. According to Morgan Stanley, the total world nominal value of derivatives stood at around $5.7 trillion in 1990; it grew to $415 trillion at the end of 2006.

Doing the math, it means the $ value of derivatives are about 8 times larger than stocks now, whereas in 1990 stocks were 6.5 times larger than derivatives. Hmmm!
1) There are too many derivatives in the world
2) The parceling out of those derivatives into smaller bundles for all to play the game doesn't seem to be reducing risks as “experts” expected.
3) They have never faced a serious test in this cycle
4) They have become increasingly complicated to price
5) Ratings agencies (S&P and Moody's) preferred fees to due diligence
6) Private equity is more interlinked to derivatives than most realize
7) Stress testing a derivatives portfolio can be tricky if you don't know whether or not the
counterparty (maybe one of the 3,000 hedge funds) will be in business
8) One wonders why stock prices aren't a lot higher given that massive amount of leverage
i.e. liquidity manufactured across the globe
9) Tied to point #7: It sets the stage for a massive global deflation, though everyone seems
to think inflation is the problem. (If we accept that inflation is too much money chasing
too few goods, then why isn't it higher with so much money generated since 1990?
Maybe the massive deflationary pump of billions of new labor market entrants and
overcapacity is stronger than experts realize.) A debt default is deflationary. And it
leads to forced savings, which adds deflationary pressures in a world driven by “drunken
sailor spending.”
10) There could be much, much further to go “on the downside” as funds rush for the rapidly
narrowing exits.
11) We want to pull the cover over our heads and go back to bed when we contemplate the
potential for a real market cleansing. We use the words “real market cleansing” because
we think the relative stimulus from central banks through rate cutting, in a world where
$415 trillion in credit craters, ain't going to have much impact.
So, if your friend turns to you today, or anytime in the near future, and says this: “You know
something, there are going to be some real bargains in the market soon!”—we suggest its time
to find a new friend."
From http://www.blackswantrading.com

27 July 2007

Gold will soon sparkle again

Telegraph Blogs : Business : Ambrose Evans-Pritchard : July 2007: "A lot of readers have asked why I duck the issue of gold when talking about the dollar crisis and the M3 monetary blow-off.

So here we go:

I started buying gold mining shares in September 2001, missing the bottom by four months. I still hold some shares (mostly duds, since I am the village idiot when it comes to picking stocks). Gold’s 15 to 20 year upward cycle is alive and well.

For those who don’t follow bullion, gold hit $252 an ounce in the Spring of 2001 in a final capitulation sell-off when Gordon Brown began his Treasury sales. It rose to a peak of $730 in May 2006.


What unnerves me is the way gold has tended to move in sympathy with global stock markets. Whenever risk appetite rises, it rises. When investors shun risk, it falls. In other words, it has become correlated with all the speculative trades - notably the yen and franc carry trades - responding to abundant global liquidity. This liquidity is now being drained as the BoJ, ECB, SNB, BoE, Riksbank, and Chinese Central Bank, etc, turn off the tap. So be careful.

While the pattern appears to have changed over the last couple of weeks, this is not long enough to establish a “paradigm change”, excuse the ghastly term. My concern is that gold will fall hard along with everything else (except the yen and the Swissie) in any market crash/correction.

At some point it will decouple, as it did during the 1987 crash when it fell hard, found a ledge, and then recovered hard, while the DOW kept falling. But, I would rather hold Swissies or Yen until gold finds that ledge in a downturn, resuming its old role as a safe store of value. This may happen quite quickly in a crisis. (Of course, I may also be left behind right now in an accelerating rally, but that is a risk I accept)

Ultimately, gold will surge, once it becomes clear that the euro lacks the staying power to serve as an alternative to the dollar. To restate a point I have made many times, the euro-zone is an ill-assorted mix of 13 unconverged national economies – with national treasuries, debt structures, taxes, pensions, and labour laws - that are not ready to share a currency, and are drifting further apart by the day.

(Lest anybody forgets, the motive behind monetary union was PURELY political. The economists at the European Commission warned that the project could not survive over time if it included a Latin Bloc of countries with an unreformed culture of high inflation, rising wage costs, and an export base exposed to Asian competition [unlike Germany’s, which is complimentary] – unless it were backed by a full superstate. They were ignored. Indeed, any future crisis was to be welcomed as the “beneficial crisis”, a chance to force through full political integration that would otherwise have not been possible, as Romano Prodi so candidly admitted when he was Commission chief).


Goldman Sachs, by the way, is already 'shorting' Italian and French bonds, while going 'long' on German bunds to play the divergence (the opposite of the euro-zone 'convergence play' that made the banks rich in the 1990s).

We may have a situation where sharp dollar falls caused by impending rate cuts by the Fed sets off a systemic crisis for Euroland. If so, politics will quickly take over from economics and begin to dictate events in Europe. The ECB will have to stop raising rates (whatever Berlin wants), and the euro will become a structurally weak currency tilted to the need of the weakest players. If it doesn’t, the EU itself will blow up. So the ECB will have to change tack to support the union. And the European Court will interpret the treaties in such a way as to force the ECB to do so.


We are not there yet. Timing is not my forté, but 2008 looks ripe. Watch the Spanish housing market. Watch the French trade data. Watch Chinese inflation. And, of course, watch the US jobs market – the bogus prop to the alleged US recovery

26 July 2007

Absolute Capital Hedge Fund Suspends Withdrawals

By Laura Cochrane and Stuart Kelly

July 26 (Bloomberg) -- Absolute Capital Group Ltd., an Australian hedge fund that invests in collateralized debt obligations, suspended withdrawals from two of its funds after forecasting losses amid a rout in U.S. subprime mortgages.

The firm froze its Yield Strategies Fund and Yield Strategies Fund NZD, which together have about A$200 million ($177 million) under management, Chief Investment Officer Bill Entwistle said in an interview today. The Sydney-based company is 50 percent owned by ABN Amro Holding NV's Australian unit

Absolute Capital, which says it doesn't invest in the riskiest portion of CDOs, is suffering from the widening impact of delinquencies on U.S. home loans to people with poor credit. Basis Capital Fund Management Ltd., another Australian hedge fund battered in the North American market, has hired Blackstone Group LP to negotiate with bankers to help it limit losses.

``Because of the contagion from subprime, all of the credit sectors are re-pricing,'' Sydney-based Entwistle said. ``There are lots of sellers and no buyers, the market has to settle down before we can get some clarity.''

The Yield Strategies Fund returned 6.4 percent the past year while the Yield Strategies Fund NZD, which started in May, gained 0.2 percent to June 30.

Australia's hedge fund industry has been rocked by losses at Basis Capital, which has said the value of its Yield Alpha Fund may plunge more than 50 percent if its assets are sold at distressed prices. Sydney-based Mariner Bridge Investments Ltd. on July 20 wrote down the value of its U.S. residential mortgage-backed securities.

Biggest Investors

The nation's 20 million people are the world's biggest investors per capita and Australia has the fourth-largest managed funds industry. Unlike in the U.S., where only qualified investors can place money in hedge funds, Australia allows individuals to invest in the vehicles.

Australian hedge fund managers directly controlled A$41 billion in assets as of July last year, the most in Asia, according to AsiaHedge. Assets almost tripled in the two years to June 2006 as money from compulsory pension savings, tax breaks, a new state-owned investment fund and takeovers boosted fund inflows, according to government data.

Absolute Capital said it won't process any requests for withdrawals until Oct. 25, estimating it may take three months for enough buyers to return to the CDO market.

Repackaged Debt

CDOs pool assets ranging from investment-grade debt to high-yield loans, and repackage them into bonds. Different portions of a single CDO have their own rating, ranging from as high as AAA to nothing at all.


Basis Capital's investments included the unrated portions of CDOs, the first in line for losses when borrowers fall behind on mortgage payments.

``There's probably more pain to come,'' said Michael Birch, who helps manage $133 million at Wallace Funds Management, a Sydney-based hedge fund. ``We need more clarity as to the scale of the writedowns at Basis and Absolute. It might take six months for the full impact to come out.''

The sting from U.S. subprime mortgage delinquencies that hit a decade-high this year is being felt across businesses, regions and asset classes.

Buyers Vanish

Almost 40 companies have reworked or abandoned debt offerings in the past three weeks as after struggling to find buyers. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke said July 19 there will be ``significant financial losses'' from risky mortgages, pointing to estimates as high as $100 billion.

Bear Stearns Cos., the fifth-largest U.S. securities firm, on July 18 told investors in its two failed hedge funds they'll get little if any money back after ``unprecedented declines'' in the value of subprime mortgage securities.

Investors earlier this month were demanding an extra 10.5 percentage points in yield over benchmark rates to own some of the lower investment-grade rated parts of CDOs, up from about 3.1 percentage points in July 2006, according to data compiled by Morgan Stanley.

Sales of CDOs surged to $503 billion last year, compared with 2003. Investor appetite for the securities is now waning. Analysts at New York-based JPMorgan Chase & Co. said CDO sales in the U.S. this month reached just $9.1 billion at July 20, compared with $42 billion for all of June.

Ratings Criticized

Ratings companies have been criticized by investors for not acting quickly enough to the subprime mortgage crisis. Leah Rhodes, a Melbourne-based director of structured finance at Standard & Poor's, today said losses from U.S. subprime loans ``did exceed our expectation.''

A spokeswoman for the Australian Securities and Investments Commission, the corporate regulator, didn't immediately return telephone calls seeking comment on Absolute Capital.

Kim Ivey, chairman of the Australian Alternative Investment Management Association, which represents 80 of the nation's hedge fund managers, said there will be more hedge funds hurt by the subprime market.

``I expect that it will be contained to just a handful,'' he said. ``More of a concern is what will happen once the fallout moves from the subprime sector to more senior debt, when many more managers have exposure.''

23 July 2007

Trouble in Hedgefundistan



Not quite. The plumes of smoke are all that's left of two major hedge funds which blew up just weeks ago leaving nothing behind but a few smoldering embers and a mound of black soot.

The compiled assets of the Bear Sterns High-Grade Structured Credit Strategies Fund—nearly $20 billion—have vanished into the miasma of cyber-space where they will soon be joined by $1.4 trillion of other, equally worthless, Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDO).


Is this how it all ends? The first whiff of trouble in the housing market and then—in a flash--all the funds in “Hedgistan” begin teetering towards earth?

“No Value”-“No Bids”

According to Bloomberg News, Bear Sterns announced last week that there's “little value left” in one of its funds and “no value left” in the other.

Nothing, nada, zippo.


What does it all mean?

Does that mean that the entire hedge fund empire—which is built on a foundation of dodgy loans and quicksand---may be headed for the crapper?

No one really knows. But a pall has settled-in over downtown Manhattan where gloomy-looking men in pinstriped suits are waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Y'see, the hedge fund industry is based on the bizarre notion that one does not have to produce anything of value to make boatloads of money. You don't even need assets any more---just a risky loan that can be transformed into an investment grade security through the magic of “securitization” a sprinkling of Wall Street snake oil.

Abrah Kadabra---presto-chango!

It's like taking shards of bottle-glass and selling it as the Hope Diamond. Who's gonna notice?

The only catch is that--now that these toxic CDOs are going to auction--there are no bids. That's a bad thing.

“No bids” means that $1.4 trillion of shaky investments have no discernable market-value. The CDOs were graded “mark to model” which translates into “mark to fantasy”. It means that the investment bankers and hedge fund managers got together over Martinis one night and pulled a number out of a hat.

Now no one wants to buy them. They're worthless.

The skydiving hedge funds just pulled the CDO rip-chord and nothing came out but confetti.


And that's just half the story. There's trillions of dollars in derivatives riding on these shaky CDOs. That's enough to bring down the whole market in a heap once interest rates rise or liquidity dries up. Now it's just a matter of “when” now, not “if”.

This illustrates an important point, though. It shows what it takes to be a good hedge fund manager:

Take a shabby sub-prime mortgage; chop it into “investment”, “mezzanine” and “equity” tranches. Bundle it with other equally suspect mortgage backed securities (MBS). Decide (arbitrarily) what the CDOs are worth Tell your banker. Leverage at a ratio of 10 o 1. Take 2% “off the top” plus salary for your efforts. Buy a summer home in the Hampton's and a Lexus for the wife. Wait for the crash. Then repeat.

Congratulations; you are now a successful hedge fund manager!

Oh yeah; and don't forget to prepare a few soothing words for the investors who just lost their entire life savings and will now be spending their evenings squatting beneath a nearby freeway off-ramp.

“We're so very sorry, Mrs. Jones. Can we get you some cardboard-bedding to keep off the rain?”

The problems that are appearing in the stock and bond markets all started at the Federal Reserve when Fed-Chief Alan Greenspan opened the sluice-gates in 2003 and lowered interest rates to 1%. (Way below the rate of inflation) Since then, trillions of dollars have flooded into the markets creating multiple equity bubbles in real estate, stocks and credit.

Serial bubble-maker Greenspan is to finance-capitalism what Wrigley is to chewing gum. The greatest flim-flam man of all time.

The Fed has tried to conceal the massive increase to the money supply, but the evidence is everywhere. (Many analysts now calculate that inflation is running at roughly 13%) Food and energy have skyrocketed. Housing prices have soared. Everything has gone up except the cheapo imports which the Fed uses to manipulate the inflation stats.

The gigantic housing bubble is mostly Greenspan's doing. After printing-up mountains of cash and creating artificial demand through low interest rates; he promoted his product-line with the typical huckster sales-pitch. “Maestro” advised us that the extension of credit to all-God's creatures, worthy or not, is a good thing.

Here's a clip of Alan praising subprime lending in a speech on April 8, 2005:

"With these advances in technology, lenders have taken advantage of credit-scoring models and other techniques for efficiently extending credit to a broader spectrum of consumers. . . . As we reflect on the evolution of consumer credit in the United States, we must conclude that innovation and structural change in the financial services industry have been critical in providing expanded access to credit for the vast majority of consumers, including those of limited means. . . . This fact underscores the importance of our roles as policymakers, researchers, bankers and consumer advocates in fostering constructive innovation that is both responsive to market demand and beneficial to consumers."

Yes, of course, with all these “advances in technology” and new-fangled “credit-scoring models” why would we need to verify a loan-applicant's income or require that he scrape together a measly $5,000 for a $450,000 mortgage?

That's all so 20th Century!


It may sound trite, but “inflation is theft”. Unfortunately, inflation is also part of the ruling class' strategy to rob the poor, fuel the stock market with cheap credit, and move jobs overseas. It is the autocrat's method of “social engineering”---shifting wealth from one class to another by simply printing more money and pumping it through the system via low interest rates. Remember, bankers know that people will ALWAYS borrow money if lending standards are relaxed and the money is cheap enough. At 1%, the Fed was basically losing money on every transaction, but persisted with their plan anyway.

Anyone who cares to go back and trace interest rates moves for the last 7 years will see that the Fed is really a political organization that decides monetary policy entirely on the basis an elite agenda that supports endless war, outsourcing of American jobs, and domestic repression.

Are you surprised?

Now, a bad situation is about to get a whole lot worse. Consumer credit rose last month by a whopping 12.9%---credit card debt by 9.8%! Since housing prices have flattened out, homeowners can no longer borrow on their dwindling equity (Mortgage Equity Withdrawal; MEWs) which is forcing the maxed-out American consumer to use plastic even though rates are averaging from 18% to 27% monthly.

Automobile repos have also hit historic highs. But the real damage is showing up in the subprime market where the percentage of defaults continues to rise unabated.

In itself, a correction in real estate is not enough to bring down the whole economy. Unfortunately, the contagion from the subprime meltdown has spread to the stock market, the insurance industry, banking and pensions. Not even Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Paulson or Fed-master Ben Bernanke are claiming that the subprime problems are “contained” anymore. Just this week, the scholarly looking Bernanke said to Senators on the Hill that the housing market has “deteriorated significantly”.

It's about time. If anyone still has any doubts about the magnitude of fiasco, I recommend they look over these eye-popping charts which tell the whole story. The housing blowdown will spread the carnage from “sea to shining sea”. http://www.itulip.com/forums/showthread.php?p=12232#post12232

The faltering housing market has drawn attention to an even more colossal credit bubble that is limping towards earth as loan requirements tighten and liquidity dries up.

The prevailing fear on Wall Street is that we may be seeing the beginning of a global credit crunch.

The danger is not just the subprime loans or even the mortgage companies that made the loans, but the overall risk to the secondary market where these loans have been sold as CDOs to the tune of $1.8 trillion.

In this new deregulated environment, the banks don't have to rely on savings anymore to make the loans. They simply originate the loans, take their commission, and sell the debt as CDOs. They're even allowed to sell the risk of default through credit default swaps (CDS) which are a form of insurance that minimizes the banks exposure. These weird innovations have spawned riskier and riskier loans and increased the likelihood of damage to the broader market.

The Toxic Cycle of Debt?

Economics correspondent, Stephen Long, explains it like this:

“The problem that arises from the subprime mortgage collapse is that it creates a toxic cycle of debt. Banks originate loans or bundle up loans that mortgage companies have made and sell the risk on to the hedge funds. Then the hedge funds say, ‘Hey, we've got this product that has an investment grade rating so we'll borrow against it from the banks.' (oftentimes leveraged at a ratio of 10 to 1) Now the hedge funds are trying to buy the original loans to stop them from going into default.”(The hedge funds are forced to slow the rate of foreclosures so they won't go bankrupt.)

So, what happens when these shaky bonds (CDOs) are “down-graded”?

Will the hedge funds fall like dominos just like the subprime mortgage-lenders? Will we see liquidity evaporate in the broader market triggering a plunge in the stocks and a massive sell-off in the bond market?

CDOs were conjured up with the idea that vast amounts of money could be made on very meager assets through a complex expansion of leverage. They were promoted as “limiting risk” by spreading it to a greater number of investors and providing extra protection through derivatives. Mortgage Backed Securities were sliced and diced into “more risky” and “less risky” tranches depending on investor appetite. Only now—to everyone's surprise---“collateralized debt obligations with stellar Triple-A ratings have been getting hit by the subprime market's woes.” (Wall Street Journal, “Bernanke revises subprime outlook”) On top of that, the ABX derivative index “has started showing pronounced weakness at the top of its ratings structure.” (ibid WSJ, 7-19-07)

Get it? In other words, even the VERY BEST of these multi-trillion dollar investments are beginning to falter. The contagion is spreading through the entire market. The CDOs are worthless. No one wants them. In fact, the whole new regime of exotic debt-instruments which emerged from 2000-on, is barely hanging on by a thread. One minor downturn in the stock market and the hedge funds will go freefalling through open space.

A speech by Robert Rodriguez of First Pacific Advisors (CFA) gives us a good idea of the enormity of the money involved. In his “Absence of Fear” address in Chicago on June 28, 2007 he states:


If Rodriguez's “eye-popping” numbers are accurate and the market slumps a mere 5%, “the value of a hedge fund's assets could lead to a forced sale of as much as 25% of its assets”. If the market falls just 10%, the fund would get a 50% haircut!

Yikes! That just shows how over-exposed the industry really is.

As the requirements on mortgages gets tougher and the subprime market continues to languish; bankers will naturally become more hesitant to loan zillions of dollars to hedge funds and private equity firms. When credit gets tighter, the hedge funds will begin to nosedive which will send the stock market in a long-term swoon. That's what happens when a market is this over-leveraged. It's unavoidable.

The markets are now perfectly poised for a full-system breakdown. FDIC Chairman Sheila Bair expects a CDO time bomb. She summed it up like this:

"Its going to get worse before it gets better. How much worse, I don't know."

14 July 2007

Presentation to CFA association, New York











Wall Street Chasing Performance through Chemistry

“It’s like they’re chasing a dream. Even when they make tremendous profits, they’re still worried,” he said.


“When things are really good, they feel invulnerable,” Cass said. “That can lead to adultery, substance abuse, problems with the law.”

When it comes to profits, things are really good.

Six of the largest U.S. investment banks — Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, Citigroup, JPMorgan & Chase Co., Morgan Stanley and Bear Stearns — combined for $17.6 billion in first-quarter profit this year. That’s after shelling out $28.8 billion for pay and benefits, financial statements show.

Those profit and pay figures are more than double those seen in the first quarter of 2000, the last days before the dot-com bubble burst. New York’s comptroller estimates Wall Street’s 2006 bonuses will generate $1.6 billion in state tax revenue.

Cocaine and hillbilly heroin
“To my knowledge, we have not seen an uptick in drug use,” Morgan Stanley spokeswoman Jean Marie McFadden said.



“That’s what has changed from previous booms on Wall Street,” he said.



Big bonuses and the need to blow off steam have helped invigorate demand for cocaine in Manhattan, according to two junior bankers who did not want to be named.

Juan Rodriguez, convicted of selling drugs to investment bankers and other professionals, said his clients never complained about the price of cocaine, even as it escalated.

“My customers were all business individuals,” Rodriguez said, citing Morgan Stanley bankers as among his clients.

Morgan Stanley said the company has a strong policy against substance abuse and uses random drug testing.

Passing the test

“Our drug test is not so much a test of whether you actually take drugs as it is an intelligence test to see if you can figure out how long it takes to get traces of the drug out of your system,” said the manager, who asked not to be named.

The hiring manager said his employer also had a policy of random drug tests for employees but that in several years he had never encountered anyone subjected to such a test.

Drugs are not the only reason for executive meltdowns.

Overwhelming pressure and anxiety to meet profit goals undid star trader David Becker as he rose the Citigroup ladder.

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Nine months after becoming global commodities chief, Becker found himself on the fast track to prison. The largest U.S. bank discovered in 2004 that Becker and others conspired to overstate profits by $20 million.

Becker, 41, pleaded guilty and is serving a 15-month sentence in federal prison. He declined to comment.

Before he committed his crime, he sought psychiatric help to deal with the pressure of balancing family and career, court papers show.

A metaphor for his life was a painting he owned depicting a man being pulled by all four limbs, Becker’s psychiatrist, Dr. Barbara Deutsch, wrote to the judge in the case.

“He felt enormous pressure to make the group’s budget at all costs,” Deutsch wrote. “He felt identified with this tortured man.”

13 July 2007

Australian hedge fund warns about withdrawals

The resets are just starting and detailed information about Basis Capital's positions would be interesting to look at. Basis report that they avoided 2006 vintage loans but it's likely that 2005 isn't far behind. Anyway this report in from the Financial Times.

FT.com / Capital markets - Australian hedge fund warns about withdrawals: "An Australian hedge fund manager with $1bn in structured credits and junk-rated loans warned investors yesterday it could restrict withdrawals to ensure its survival as it reported losses of 14 per cent in one fund in June.

Basis Capital, based in Sydney, said in a letter to investors it had been hit by “indiscriminate” repricing of “otherwise fundamentally sound collateral” amid the crisis in US home loans to less creditworthy investors. It said it had deliberately avoided the worst-hit 2006 subprime loans.

The warning that redemptions can be restricted comes as a series of hedge funds in the US and UK have run into trouble from the collapse in price of illiquid, or hard-to-trade, securities linked to subprime loans.

Restrictions on redemptions are closely monitored by hedge fund investors as an indication of trouble."

Swinging the Market - Calvin Bear

NEW 7/12/2007 4:08:50 PM
Two politically independent factors affect what happens in the share market – one is the real market price of money, and the other is the range of competitive options available for the equity dollar, in other words, comparative risk values.

Three politically dependent factors affect what happens in the market – whether or not the investment bankers who have supported their political candidates feel they have control of these politicians, whether they are individually extracting an evenhanded distribution of favours and money between their ranks from their political ‘slaves,' whether they have sufficient control over the minds and actions of the voting public.

There is only a very small handful of investment banks that exert that much control over the White House. But they control by far the largest dollar push in the equities markets virtually worldwide.

Whereas the judiciary is not politically independent in the USA, it is very very much independent in Israel – and consequently, there is a dynamic that is not much referred to even among those Jewish Banking Conspiracy ‘nutjobs' which often produces disturbances and wide differences of opinion among the operators in the bullfight ring who normally ‘should' be going along a consistent and collusive pathway; except that they don't regularly. This condition innately part of the Israel Lobby, allows for sudden dark volatility in almost every function of policy coming out of the White House, and equivalently it is the root cause of unheralded volatility within the share market collusive banking cartels who operate at the top of capital flow decisions in New York.

Although it is true that there has been for a long time a total lack of discipline surrounding the extending of money from the US Treasury to a small handful of investment banks and their associated interests – this cannot completely overcome the forces of money worldwide that really are the drivers of the interest rate; notwithstanding that it is also due to the trade currency status of the US Dollar and its link to the policy decisions of Japanese banks and the Japan Government, that the Treasury can get away with its bizarre belief in the printing press over the minting press.

Although I find it extremely odd for me to be making references to Lyndon Larouche, nevertheless he is an exact example of a brand name thinker whose printed body of recent work draws from so much excellent historical background, yet still manages to say that dead people are behind the active decisions of today's money and capital managers: it is perfectly true that there was a London City merchant base of corruption and greed that developed into a collusive trans-Atlantic elite two or three hundred years – but these people suffered just as much decimation through all the major wars since Napoleon and there is no evidence they still exist today.

In the same way, it is perfectly possible that Henry Kissinger was part of a globally powerful elite that includes Rumsfeld and Cheney – an elite that directed the current wars in the Middle East – it is not at all certain these people fully control all the complexities of US political reality and there is far more evidence that Congress is swinging brutally strongly AWAY from this clique and its interests.

The investment banks that are not aligned with the Kissinger ideologues currently running the White House, could already be operating on a long term plan to undo the present Republican ruling faction, and these banks will far prefer to create a BIG BUBBLE that can be pinned on the current Bush administrations negligence. Consequently you are more likely to see the share market withdrawals closer to the elections and not quite yet, so that the ‘problems' are fresh in the minds of voters and hot in the media AT THE TIME OF VOTING, and not sooner.

Kissinger is an old man, and Cheney is past his best aggressive years. Olmert is a political dead man walking. These people are dancing their swan songs, not their Bolero Fire Dances!

I mean career fund managers out of the establishment business schools can jump on all the bandwagons they want to but the fact will remain that they have no real access to private equity or hedge fund knowledge no matter how many new IPOs they set up.
ALL debt is supposed to have collateral supporting its downside risks – why should the phrase ‘collateralised debt obligation' suddenly imply an intrinsically self-immolating investment structure?

There is private equity that can NEVER be looked into by the SEC no matter it tries to do – there are secrets of financing and funding that simply are not in the public arena of knowledge. And there are hedge operations that can build or destroy any currency and these have nothing whatsoever to do with the types of leverage and derivative positions and the CREDIT DEFAULT SWAPS (which are totally different to CDOs in essence).

The sub-prime lenders are called sub-prime because everyone always knew they could not meet their repayment schedules – why is it surprising to the professional investor that these will default? It might be surprising that the packaged funds that sell such sub-prime bundles to pension funds collapse with such regularity – but not to me. The fact is, the pension fund contributers are not collapsing; THEY are still making payments to someone, anyone, and probably just the next risky fund that replaced the collapsed one!

The only time there will be a market crisis is when the pension holders start making large scale capital calls… But this might conceivably be actuarily defeated as a ‘problem' if a lot of pensioners simply die. Which they inevitably will at some point.

No. The equity market will not fall just because idiot hedge fund managers or CDOs fail the investor. The equity market will only start to become a slide downwards when the quiet private equity investment bankers sell their equity positions in large scale in order to take up a position in a more competitive investing position. And this will require interest rates closer to 7 per cent than to 5.

Calvin J. Bear

12 July 2007

Does neo-classical Economics make sense?

July 11, 2007
In Economics Departments, a Growing Will to Debate Fundamental Assumptions
NY Times


But in recent months, economists have engaged in an impassioned debate over the way their specialty is taught in universities around the country, and practiced in Washington, questioning the profession's most cherished ideas about not interfering in the economy.




That attitude, the critics argue, has seriously harmed the discipline, suppressing original, creative thinking and distorting policy debates. “You lose your ticket as a certified economist if you don't say any kind of price regulation is bad and free trade is good,” said David Card, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley, who has done groundbreaking research on the effect of the minimum wage.

Most economists are still devoted to what is known as the neoclassical model. Philip J. Reny, chairman of the economics department at the University of Chicago — the temple of free-market economics — said the theory and methods were “taught to avoid personal biases and conclusions that aren't found in the data.” Like any science, he said, the field changes course slowly: “It requires evidence, and if evidence is there, it will accumulate and positions will move.” He added, “I personally have a lot of faith in the discipline.”

But as issues like income inequality, free trade and protectionism have become part of the presidential candidates' stump speeches, more thinkers have joined the debate. In addition to Mr. Blinder, other eminent economists like Lawrence H. Summers and the Nobel Prize-winner George A. Akerlof have pointed out what they see as the failings of laissez-faire economics.



Meanwhile, critics have also pointed out the limits of standard cost-benefit accounting to measure items like the cost of inequality or damage to the ecosystem.

The degree to which economists wander from the mainstream varies widely.

Dani Rodrik, an economist at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, for instance, said, “I fall into the methods of the mainstream, but not the faith,” which he defines as the belief that more markets and free trade are always good and government regulation is always bad. Thinkers like these may come up with controversial ideas but are hardly marginalized. Other economists, however, go much further, and try to chip away at the field's underlying theoretical foundations. So while Mr. Blinder, Mr. Card and Mr. Rodrik might be considered mere heretics, this second group has earned the label “heterodox.”

Although the meaning of the term is slippery, Frederic S. Lee, an economist at the University of Missouri-Kansas City who edits the Heterodox Economics Newsletter, says it refers to those who reject the neoclassical model, which Milton Friedman helped create, and which Ronald Reagan championed when he took over the White House.

Mr. Reny and others point out that the increasing popularity in the mainstream of behavioral economics, which looks at people's complex psychological reactions to events, has offered a fuller picture of how consumers operate in the marketplace. Still, Mr. Lee criticizes neoclassical economics for maintaining that the market, if left alone, would ultimately find a happy balance. He also takes the discipline to task for relying on abstract theories and mathematical modeling instead of observation and sociological analysis.

In Mr. Lee's view, for example, oil companies — not the natural workings of the market — determine gas prices, and the federal deficit is a meaningless term because the federal government prints money in the first place.

According to his estimates, 5 to 10 percent of America's 15,000 economists are heterodox, which includes an array of professors on the right and the left (post-Keynesians, Marxists, feminists and social economists).

Heterodox economists complain that they are almost completely shut out by their more influential neoclassical colleagues who dominate most American university departments and prestigious peer-reviewed journals that are essential to gaining tenure. There are a few university departments where these iconoclasts are welcome, like Amherst in Massachusetts, the New School in New York and Professor Lee's home, the University of Missouri-Kansas City, but these are exceptions.


When Mr. Card's graduate students went on job interviews, he said other economists would ask questions like “What's wrong with your adviser? Has he started drinking?”


Criticizing the approach that currently dominates the field, Mr. Blinder said economists must look more closely at the real world instead of modeling it in the lab. “Economics is insufficiently scientific,” he said. “Mathematics may be useful, but mathematics is not scientific. It doesn't generate refutable hypotheses.” In a recent issue of The Nation, Christopher Hayes spurred an energetic debate on the Web by suggesting that some precepts of heterodoxy were being incorporated into the mainstream — even if many heterodox economists were not.

Max B. Sawicky at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, a nonprofit research organization that is a bulwark of heterodoxy, wrote in a discussion on tpmcafe.com that, “The duty of orthodoxy is clear: deny departmental positions and resources to inferior research programs and purify the top journals of incorrect thinking, all understood as maintaining high standards.”

This is the point where Mr. Rodrik, who has written extensively on the downside of globalization, departs from both Mr. Sawicky and Mr. Blinder. Although he acknowledged that inflexible rules about how one makes an argument and what counts as evidence can create blind spots, but insisted that once those rules were accepted, there was tremendous openness inside the academy.

The problem is outside, where economists are expected to “regurgitate ideas” about the glories of the free market. Most mainstream economists think that voicing any skepticism or doubt provides “ammunition to the barbarians,” he said, and allows narrow-minded people to “hijack any argument to suit their purpose.”


“And I've slept a lot better since.”

The trader as Hero -- A must read

Courage is more exhilarating than fear, and in the long run it is easier. We do not have to become heroes overnight … just one step at a time, meeting each new thing that comes up, seeing it not as dreadful as it appears and discovering we have the strength to stare it down — Eleanor Roosevelt

Seasons come and go, markets change and evolve, but human behavior, which is hardwired into the brain, has not really changed much over many generations. Each of us looks and acts differently, but these are outward manifestations which are subject to societal pressures and ever-changing cycles of fashion and trends. Inwardly, we are all classic, fragile and captivating human beings. We have wants, needs, hopes, dreams, fears, joys and tears. Even now, when we have come so far in time and space of evolution, we are still enchantingly and ever-fascinatingly human. It is simply wonderful!

Every one of you who is reading this wants to learn how to make money from the markets. Over the years, I have provided a number of guidelines and principles to put you on the path to trading mastery. While simple, they are certainly not easy. Take personal responsibility for your trades, cut your losses quickly, stay healthy in mind and body, always practice good risk management , plan your trade and trade your plan, master your emotions, strengthen your neuropsychological capital, learn patience, stay with what is working, and take profits on a regular and radical basis. That sounds all well and good, but the majority struggle daily to figure out how to do it. Most continue to search for this or that method or this or that indicator or newsletter which will give them the answer they seek.

I cannot emphasize too strongly that there is one immutable fact which underlies all successful trading: The answer is within you. It is not out “’there” somewhere. It is about your brain (your true trading system) and how, not what, you think. Traders, with few exceptions, are made, not born. Anyone, given the passion, determination and willingness to work hard, lose, fall down and keep getting up, can learn to trade successfully. I assure you, if I can do it, you can do it. Now I will tell you secret that only a few know: I have two Ph.D. degrees, one in Brain Anatomy, and one in Futures Market Losses. I had to get the latter in order to get a true grip on who I was as a person, and turn myself around completely onto a path of success and consistent profitability. It’s a long story, but it took five years and was the most gut-wrenching and painful period I can recall. Would I change one single minute of the excruciating process? Absolutely not! Not one second of it, because all of those seconds brought me to where I am today.

How important it is for us to recognize and celebrate our heroes and she-roes!... Maya Angelou

The point is this… If I can do it, you can do it.

How? You must totally believe that you are called to trading, that it is the one thing about which you are completely passionate and that you are willing to forego many things in order to succeed. If you can take these steps, you will make it. It’s not easy. If it were, everyone would be doing it. But it can be done, and it is within the reach of every one of you who is reading this. You can do it, but you must be willing to sacrifice everything you are for everything you can and will become. You must be willing to change key elements about yourself, particularly the way you think and act in real time when bombarded with conflicting information in an environment where you have total freedom of choice and where the only thing you can control is yourself. Moreover, you must learn to make decisions involving varying degrees of risk in an atmosphere of real time and total unpredictability. You must learn to change the way you think and what you have been taught about right and wrong and good and bad. You must entrain the qualities of being counterintuitive and peripatetic. You must become a chameleon, and a great actor, an acrobat on the largest and most intimidating stage in the world. Most of all, you must be absolutely determined and passionate about it.

And then what? What do you have left in your life once you have made it? What happens when you finally do "get" it, and trading becomes relatively effortless and you are consistently making more than you are losing? What is up with the trader who is wildly successful, has all the” stuff” he or she needs, and yet keeps trading? Why is that? Is it greed, and the need to keep making more and more money in the face of abundance? Yes, in part it is. But there is much more and on an intensely deeper level.

Why do we trade? Why do successful and wealthy traders keep trading, some of them into their 80's or until death? Passion. Challenge. Continual striving to be better and better with each passing day. Mastery. Freedom. And what do most of these great traders have in common, besides the ability to amass (and keep) large amounts of money?

The answer may surprise you as much as it delights me. They have in common: an attitude of gratitude, humility, manifestation of kindness to themselves and others and an intense understanding of their personal neuropsychology and the mass neuropsychology of the markets. They have learned from the greatest and most brutally honest psychotherapist in the world: the financial markets. They have suffered, been beaten down, brutally battered, lost money, but kept the therapy going because they knew that somewhere inside of them was the person they wanted to be. After intense personal pain and internal searching, they found out who they really are and embraced it without fear. They went to the darkest recesses of their souls and emerged as their own hero. Now, they bring flowers to themselves instead of waiting for someone to send them flowers.

Their wants have been met, so they work on their needs. For them, trading becomes an activity which nourishes and uplifts the spirit. They approach the markets with humility and passion, yet can be fierce ambushing wolverines while in the trading moment. They can be sharks, waiting to feed on the poor little fishes. Yet, they are chameleons. For the master, trading is a game to be played to the ultimate scope of his or her ability. He/she never forgets the ones that got away, the Ph.D. in losses, the missed opportunities, the times when he/she was the little fish. A master remembers these bitter, gut-wrenching times and has them etched in the hippocampal memory so as to never forget.

Masters have rich and full lives outside of trading, especially those who took the time to keep family and friends in some degree of intactness. They cherish relationships and put people before money. People first, money second and "stuff" third. They value and reward those who have supported and loved them. They cherish and love themselves. They are kind to themselves and others and recognize that kindness is the greatest gift we give to each other. Even the most successful traders and investors with the highest degree of longevity approach the markets with humility. They are non-confrontational and go flexibly with the flow. They are in sheer joy with the moment. It is the perfect moment, and they are always in it. They are in gratitude for the privilege of partaking of the gifts which they receive from the market. For them, trading is a spiritual activity!

My greatest hope for each of you is that you never forget this. In the end, it is always about gratitude, humility, kindness and love. Love what you do, and those who nurture and sustain you. Focus on yourself, who you are, and what you want and need and then practice and keep practicing. Do what you truly love, and the money will always follow. In the process, you will begin to see that you are evolving and growing your capital: financial capital, mental capital, emotional capital, and — as the topic of this essay — spiritual capital.

Thank you for the opportunity to share with you my experience, strength and hope. I wish each of you everything and more that you wish for yourself.

When you feel like all is gone, look inside you and be strong. And you'll finally see the truth, that a hero lies in you… from” Hero”, Mariah Carey

© 2007 Janice Dorn, MD, PhD

11 July 2007

The Crack up boom!

Safe Haven | TedBits: "he Crack Up Boom series is exploring the unfolding 'Indirect Exchange' (as detailed by Ludvig Von Mises), that dollar holders will be using to exit their holdings now and eventually is will be followed by all holders of fiat currency holdings no matter which country is perpetrating the 'crime' of confiscation of wealth through the printing and credit creation process that all such monetary schemes evolve into. The 'Crack Up Boom' will drive an inflationary global expansion to inconceivable heights over the coming years. Asset prices will skyrocket as people do what they always do when threatened they will modify their behavior and do the things necessary for 'SELF PRESERVATION' of their families, countries, economies and their wealth. Let's take a look at Von Mises's description of the CRACK UP BOOM once again:


Bloomberg.com: Worldwide

Bloomberg.com: Worldwide: "A total of 11 percent of the loan collateral for all subprime mortgage bonds had payments at least 90 days late, were in foreclosure or had the underlying property seized, according to a June 1 report by Friedman, Billings, Ramsey Group Inc., a securities firm in Arlington, Virginia. In May 2005, that amount was 5.4 percent.

Investors depend on guesswork by Wall Street traders for valuing their bonds because there is no centralized trading system or exchange for subprime mortgage securities. Credit rating companies supported high prices because they failed to downgrade the debt as delinquencies accelerated.

Headed Lower

While there's no consensus on prices, traders agree that the bonds are headed lower. Some of the securities have already declined by more than 50 cents on the dollar in the past few months, according to data compiled by Merrill Lynch & Co.

One subprime mortgage bond, Structured Asset Investment Loan trust 2006-3 M7, is valued at about 91 cents on the dollar to yield 9.5 percent, according to the securities unit of Charlotte, North Carolina-based Wachovia Corp. Merrill Lynch in New York puts the price of the same security at 67 cents to yield 18 percent."

9 July 2007

The Crashing U.S. Economy Held Hostage

The Crashing U.S. Economy Held Hostage: "Remember when the U.S. was the world’s greatest industrial democracy? Barely thirty years ago the output of our producing economy and the skills of our workforce led the world.





7 July 2007

$ONE:AFBIX - SharpCharts 2 from StockCharts.com

$ONE:AFBIX - SharpCharts 2 from StockCharts.com: "I took the inverse of the AFBIX (which is a short ETF following credit spreads) and logged that with the $SPX in the background. Notice the nice corrolation up to April. After April, there is divergence meaning one has become detached from the other. Does it mean that credit spreads no longer matter? I don't think so. I think the market is trying to decide what's acceptable.

I've been in the financial market for a long time....this is erilly like the 1986/1987 timeframe."

charles hugh smith-Weblog and wEssays




'There are buyers but they can't agree on price,' said Jared Herman, co-founder of Bahamas-based Hedgebay.


Market participants estimate the CDOs the Bear funds held would sell for at least 10 per cent less than the values calculated by lenders. 'Where things transact is still many points below where dealers have been marking them,' said one manager of CDOs and hedge funds. 'That is the big ugly se" Market participants estimate the CDOs the Bear funds held would sell for at least 10 per cent less than the values calculated by lenders. "Where things transact is still many points below where dealers have been marking them," said one manager of CDOs and hedge funds. "That is the big ugly secret of this market."


Comments on Liquidity boom and looming crisis - iTulip.com Forums

Comments on Liquidity boom and looming crisis - iTulip.com Forums: "Comments on 'Liquidity Boom and Looming Crisis'

by John Craig - Centre for Policy and Development Systems, Queensland (CPDS)

Editor's Note: John Craig qualified initially as a civil engineer and has had over 30 years involvement in strategic policy R&D, the majority of it working in government agencies in Queensland. This has particularly involved a systems approach to both organizational and economic development. His commentary on Henry Liu's analysis of the potential for a global liquidity crisis is mainly based on study of the different ways Western and East Asian societies have developed, and the implications that this has for their economic, financial and monetary systems.

John has generously provided his thought provoking commentary, from the perspective of an economic policy professional based in Australia, for iTulip readers.

In May 2007 Henry C K Liu produced an interesting and challenging analysis of the possibility that a 'liquidity trap' (which can arise if few want to borrow even at very low interest rates) could prevent the US Fed from again protecting the 'real' economy from an imminent financial crisis - so that the prevailing global financial market boom and sustained pattern of economic growth could be seriously disrupted (Liquidity boom and looming crisis, Asia Times Online, 9 May")
In brief Henry Liu's article seems to argue that:

* US economic growth is slowing;
* there is a 10 year cycle of financial crises (ie the US market crash of 1987 and the 1997 Asian financial crisis), which have similar causes (ie dubious leveraged international short term funding of long term investments);
* another financial crisis could be looming associated with the spreading effect of weaknesses in US sub-prime mortgage markets which adversely affects demand, while at the same time Fed responses are constrained by both inflation risks and a potential liquidity trap (ie an inability to increase liquidity if few want to borrow);
* the wealth effect which is now disappearing has been driven by international capital flows (linked to US current account deficits) over which US authorities have little control;
* the difficulties are compounded by: the mal-distribution of wealth and growing unemployment (which constrain consumer demand) and financial market techniques such as securitization (which increase systemic risks);
* China faces difficulties associated with current account imbalances and $US hegemony, but has little scope to pick up the slack as US demand declines - and can only try to isolate itself from the coming financial crisis;
* in 1980, before dollar hegemony allowed the US to finance current account deficits from a capital account surplus, the Fed had to raise interest rates to nearly 20% to curb the stagflation resulting from the US trade deficit. The Plaza Accord tried to force a revaluation of the Yen to cut that deficit - and this forced Japan into a deflationary depression from which it it has not really recovered;
* the subsequent liquidity boom (under which growth has been driven largely by increasing asset values) has its origin in Fed policies, $US denominated structured finance and $US hegemony;
* the liquidity boom requires many things to be just right and could easily be disrupted, resulting in a prolonged bear market. Thus a global financial crisis is inevitable.

This article presents the present writer's summary of Henry Liu's paper interspersed with comments which suggest that, while the potential risk is real, it originates as much in East Asian economic strategies and financial/monetary systems as anything else, and that the prospects that others can be isolated from the consequences are much less than Henry Liu's paper suggests.

In brief, CPDS' comments suggest that:

* the most obvious common feature of both the 1987 and 1997 financial crises was that they were triggered by large-scale withdrawal of Japanese capital;
* the liquidity boom (whose bursting could dislocate global growth) is partly a consequence of the need for trade surpluses by major economies in East Asia to protect financial institutions that have poor balance sheets due to a lack of commitment to the profitable use of capital;
* Japan's need to stimulate its economy (long at risk because of weak consumer demand and business investment) is another key factor in the liquidity boom - and arose because of its failure to properly reform its financial system after the 1980s property bubble burst;
* some of Henry Liu's interpretations of past events, and of financial market imperfections, seem to need refinement;
* the key question is how to unwind trades imbalances, capital transfers and easy money policies that have been associated with the emergence of a liquidity bubble. This seems to require international collaboration in reform of global and national trading, financial and monetary regimes.

CPDS Comments
on a Summary of Liquidity boom and looming crisis
(Henry C K Liu, Asia Times Online, 9 May 2007)

Economic growth in the US slowed to 1.3% in the first quarter of 2007, the worst performance in four years of an overextended debt bubble. Yet the The DJIA is now 82% higher than its low in 2002, during which US GDP grew only 38%.

There is a 10-year cycle of financial crises. This included the 30% US market crash of 1987 which was set off by the 1985 Plaza Accord (to push down the Japanese yen so as to cut the US trade deficit with Japan) and the Asian financial crisis of 1997.

COMMENT: Presumably this includes an inadvertent mis-statement. The Plaza Accord was surely intended to increase (not reduce) the value of yen (and other currencies) relative to the $US.

While there seemed to be many causes of the 1987 US market crash including a bubble linked to rapid growth associated with high rates of public spending and a very large budget deficit, the trigger for the crash seemed to be Japan's sudden large withdrawal of capital from the US (by sale of about $US 400bn in assets) - which resulted in rapid rises in interest rates. Such a withdrawal of capital would be expected to reduce the value of $US relative to the yen - though whether this was done in the Plaza Accord context or as a result of Japan's domestic financial predicament (noting that Japan's 1980s' real-estate bubble subsequently burst) or for other reasons is unknown.

The 1987 market crash was unexpectedly prevented from affecting the real economy because the US Fed boosted liquidity to support distressed financial institutions in ways that would traditionally have been impossible (ie before the gold standard was abandoned, this action would have led to a current account crisis).

The Asian financial crisis of 1997 was associated with unproductive use of capital under 'crony capitalism' arrangements - and appeared to be triggered (as in 1987) when Japan suddenly withdrew large amounts of capital from elsewhere in Asia (Hartcher P. ‘Look East, Dr Mahathir, for the source of Asia’s decline’, Australian Financial Review, 25-26/10/97).

A wave of deflation spread over all of Asia from which Japan has yet to fully recover. Now in 2007, a debt-driven financial crisis threatens to end the liquidity boom associated with the flow of trade deficits into capital-account surpluses which US dollar hegemony has permitted.

COMMENT: The liquidity boom is also due to the circular flow of (mainly) Asian trade surpluses and capital deficits (which are the mirror image of the US trade deficit/capital surplus). It is also due to creation of cheap credit (a) by Japan to stimulate its domestic economy otherwise long at risk of deflation due to low consumer demand and stagnant business investment and (b) by the US and others to maintain global growth to compensate for the (mainly) Asian demand deficit - an initiative that had been made possible with limited inflation risk by cheap imports.

Asset bubbles have appeared in Asia (driven by trade surpluses and easy credit) just as they have elsewhere (driven by easy credit).

The financial crisis that could be looming is partly a feature of East Asian economies in which return on capital has not been taken seriously - and financial institutions are often burdened with bad debts. The consequence of any US inability to drive global demand will be an end of East Asian current account surpluses, and thus an urgent need for (say) Japan's and China's banks to have the sound credit rating needed to borrow internationally.

While details differ, these financial crises have similar causes - leveraged short-term borrowing of low-interest currencies financing high-return long-term investments in high-interest currencies through "carry trade" and currency arbitrage, with projected future cash flow supporting share prices.

COMMENT: As noted above, the situations were not all that similar and there were other factors involved.

Eventually the rise in asset prices beyond market fundamentals ended. On one occasion a steady fall in the value of the US dollar, the main reserve currency, caused a sudden market meltdown that spread across national borders through selling in strong markets to try to save hopeless positions in distressed markets.

COMMENT: A fall in the value of the $US was not involved in both 1987 and 1997.

The strength, not the weakness, of the $US was its only impact on the 1997 Asian financial crisis. Countries such as Indonesia tried to maintain a fixed exchange rate with $US without the large current account surpluses that Japan and China (for example) used to prevent the weak balance sheets of their financial institutions from being exposed.

As noted above, the most obvious common feature in triggering these events seemed to be a sudden large withdrawal of Japanese capital.

Such a point is now again imminent - given weak US GDP growth associated with a housing slump caused by a meltdown in the subprime mortgage sector. This has not bottomed, and its full global impact has not yet been felt.

COMMENT: Fair point.

Deprived of expanding wealth by falling home prices, US consumer spending was up only 0.3% in April 2007. The US Federal Reserve and Treasury have denied that a recession is likely - though former Fed chief Alan Greenspan has put the odds at one in three. Inflation pressure continues to complicate Fed policy deliberations.

While the Fed views inflation as the main danger, it hopes that inflation will fall as monetary policy remains tight. The Fed's stated goal is to cool the economy to limit inflation without provoking a recession. Yet in an age of derivatives, the Fed's interest-rate policy does not dictate the supply of liquidity. Virtual money created by structured finance has reduced central banks to the status of players not controllers of financial markets. A liquidity boom that allows rising equity markets while the economy slows can turn toward stagflation, with slow growth and high inflation.

COMMENT: Fair point about Reserve Banks' limited influence.

However 'stagflation' (in the 1970s) was associated with increasing wages and consumer prices while the economy stalled - rather than with asset price inflation. It is not clear that asset inflation driven by a liquidity boom must lead to wage and consumer price inflation.

The wealth effect from rising equity prices has been caused by a debt bubble fed by liquidity created beyond the Fed's control, by the US trade deficit denominated in dollars returning as capital-account surpluses.

COMMENT: The liquidity boom - which is global rather than confined to US - has been driven by others' trade surpluses as much as by US trade deficits (as these are simply mirror images of the same thing).

Also, the wealth effect has not been broadly distributed, resulting in a boom in the luxury consumer market while the general consumer market stalls.

COMMENT: Fair point - though it is noted that restraint on wage earnings has been due significantly to international competition from economies who workers' increasing skills and education have perversely not yet properly increased their wages.

While the DJIA rose 5.9% in Q1 2007 with inflation at 2.2 %, wages and benefits grew by only 0.8%.

COMMENT: Presumably the DJIA (etc) reflects corporate earnings which derive increasingly from global, not simply US, operations.

By acting as the dominant HQ for global businesses, the US may be best positioned for flow-on of corporate profits to the rest of the workforce.

There was concern in the 1980s that the benefits of US high tech industries would not be widely shared - then in the 1990s the emergence of the 'new' (knowledge/network) economy allowed those benefits to be shared. Perhaps something like this effect will occur with respect to globalization of operations.

Labor's share of the US GDP growth of 1.3% was -2.6% (after a 3.4% inflation) while capital's share was +2.5%. If labor's share of GDP growth remains negative, companies won't be able to sell their products and will be forced to lay off workers, thus further slowing growth.

COMMENT: This further demonstrates why stronger demand in Europe and Asia, and the reforms of trading, financial and monetary systems needed to make this possible, are vital to maintaining global growth.

US job creation has slowed, and unemployment has risen. The slowdown in job creation reflects recent economic weakness but is likely to be viewed perversely by the Fed as a sign that wage inflation pressures are easing.

COMMENT: Presumably a recession is possible, but 4.5% unemployment is by no means high by international and historical standards.

Before the age of securitization, risk was evenly spread and all mortgages shared the cost of default. Securitization through collateralized debt obligations (CDO) permits the unbundling of risk into tranches of increasing risk and return levels, while squeezing additional value out of the mortgage pool by increasing risk / return efficiency.

COMMENT: Arguably value was genuinely 'created' by this means. The unbundling of risk leaves the debt instrument holder initially in the same position - i.e., with an overall risk and return package the same as before. It is just that the components are separately worth more to others.

This extra value, when siphoned off repeatedly from the overall mortgage pool, requires an ever larger supply of risky subprime mortgages, thus increasing the systemic risk further.

COMMENT: Why are sub-prime mortgages needed to make this arrangement work? Surely any set of mortgages can be used.

Subprime borrowers are no longer just low-income borrowers. The extra risk-premium value taken out of the mortgage sector increases liquidity to feed the debt market further, further reducing credit standard of subprime lending. When prime-credit customers have borrowed to their limits, growth can only come from lowering credit standards.

COMMENT: This seems a bit simplistic. The 'value taken out' through this function is no different to the value-added in any other business dealing. The goal of any marketing strategy is to identify where others value goods or services a great deal more than they cost to produce.

And 'value-added' through securitization does not go only to increasing liquidity. It may for example be used to pay wages or taxes, and thus ultimately increase demand and improve real returns on capital.

This is the structural unsustainability of CDO securitization.

COMMENT: For reasons suggested above, perhaps this suggestion is in need of more development.

China's foreign-reserves data showed as much as $US73 billion in unexplained new reserves. If these funds were swaps, this would have only minor economic implications, but if they were $US inflows this could further stimulate an overheated economy.

Dollar inflows would require further monetary tightening by the PBoC to reduce the risks of an equity bubble fuelled by expanded money supply. China has been raising required bank reserves, reducing funds available for lending trying to cool an investment boom that could spark a financial crisis. The effort has had only limited success. China's international balance-of-payments problem is boosting excessive liquidity in its economy.

COMMENT: Fair point. The solution presumably is more balanced trade (which in turn requires more determined efforts to strengthen financial systems in trade-surplus countries).

Chinese global trade surplus increased 74% to $177.5 bn in 2006 - though, ignoring $73 billion of capital inflow and $60 billion in returns on foreign capital, the net trade surplus was only about $40 billion (less than Japan's $168 bn and Germany's $146 bn surpluses).

COMMENT: Why take away capital inflow and returns on capital? China's trade surplus was still $177bn.

And the trade surplus of China plus that of countries to which component production for products finished in China is sub-contacted was presumably much greater.

The US trade deficit with China widened to $233 billion in 2006, out of a global total of $857 billion. If the US trade deficit with China falls, China will reduce its own trade deficit with other trading partners, with little effect on the US global trade deficit.

COMMENT: Fair point. The problem is unbalanced trade generally, not exclusively that with China.

The question is how trade surpluses in countries such as China, Japan and Germany can be reduced, and how US deficits can be reduced.. This might require changes to global and national trade, financial and monetary systems, as all seem to be involved in this imbalance.

Dollar hegemony is hurting the Chinese economy. As the $US-denominated trade surplus mounts, the PBoC must tighten domestic monetary measures to neutralize the increased yuan money supply which results from buying up the surplus dollars in the Chinese economy with yuan.

COMMENT: Fair point.

However presumably the $US has hegemony for a reason - partly as a result of history, and partly because US financial markets take more seriously than many others the business of producing a return on invested capital,

The solution to this is (perhaps) more attention to the profitable use of capital elsewhere.

The new yuan money doesn't finance interior development but is attracted by speculative real estate and equities, pushing prices up beyond fundamentals.

COMMENT: Fair point. However the asset bubbles are as much due to demand deficits / trade surpluses in East Asia, as they are to trade deficits that lead to capital account surpluses in US.

Led by China and Japan, all the exporting economies are fuelling a global liquidity boom focused on the importing economies (led by the US).

COMMENT: Fair point.

China has kept the global cost of manufacturing too low by not paying adequately for pollution control and worker wages and benefits. Domestic political pressure is forcing the government to normalize production costs, and boost global inflation.

COMMENT: Fair point.

Financial globalization has not banished inflation, nor ended the business cycle - though the cycle now lasts longer than 7 years. To avoid a market collapse, anti-inflation measures need to be implemented slowly - making a crash inevitable as a system that requires ever rising asset values can't survive years of slow growth.

Bonds will be the first asset class to fall in this anti-inflation cycle, and others will follow. Deflation can't be cured by printing more dollars, as this would merely convert price deflation into monetary devaluation. Globalization and hedging have merely postponed, not eliminated, inflation.

The bursting of the tech bubble, the September 11 shock, and outsourcing caused disinflation in 2002 which neutralized debt-driven dollar inflation. Then, facing dollar deflation, the Fed cut its Funds Rate to 1% in July 2003 while the Bank of Japan maintained a zero interest rate. This led to a massive liquidity boom that increased the US trade deficit.

COMMENT: It is unrealistic to suggest that the Fed's actions were solely based on US domestic considerations.

Its actions were also presumably motivated by a desire to maintain global growth in the face of the deflationary demand deficit implicit in the export driven economic strategies of major East Asian economies - on the not unrealistic assumptions that (a) those economies would simply have to continue financing the resulting US current account deficit or themselves face economic disaster and (b) cheap imports would keep inflation in check.

In 1980, before the emergence of dollar hegemony, which allowed the US to finance it trade deficit with a capital-account surplus, the Fed had to raise its Funds Rate to 19.75% to curb stagflation caused by its trade deficit. In 1985, the Plaza Accord aimed to revalue the Japanese yen against the dollar to curb the US trade deficit with Japan. This pushed Japan's economy into a deflationary depression from which it has not yet fully recovered.

COMMENT: Why suggest that stagflation in the 1970s was due to a trade deficit? It seemed to be due to inflationary shocks associated with (a) rapid increases in oil prices, that were transmitted without restraint into a wage-price spiral, and (b) serious difficulties in maintaining productivity (due to Japanese and Asian tiger competition in capital intensive manufacturing) which could not be overcome without huge structural adjustment (that took market liberalization and many years to achieve).

Why suggest that the $US was not the dominant global currency before 1980? If it was not, what was its competition, and why did that competition subsequently lose ground?

Japan's deflationary depression was not due to the Plaza Accord. Japan had a massive property bubble in the 1980s, funded by the government dominated banking system, and the bubble burst. Japan then endured many years of deflation and slow growth because, rather than writing off losses and reforming its financial institutions as was common elsewhere, those problems were covered up - presumably because the bureaucratic elite, who govern Japan behind a democratic facade, would otherwise have lost control of Japan's financial system.

The source of the global liquidity boom (which has boosted demand by inflating asset values) is the increased supply of US dollars, both as a result of Fed monetary policy and of $US-denominated structured finance under dollar hegemony.

COMMENT: As indicated above, the liquidity boom also has its genesis in: recycling of trade surpluses back into investment in $US assets - which is heavily associated with a defensive approach to weakness in the balance sheets of East Asian banks; and cheap credit generated in Japan which is cycled through the carry trade into US financial markets.

Moreover, the hegemony of the $US reflects the weakness of financial systems in countries that might otherwise challenge its role.

Liquidity is affected by the monetary environment created by central-banks. It can be increased by lower interest rates or easing money-supply relative to nominal economic activity. However availability of money alone does not create liquidity. There must also be a market in which assets can be traded without regulatory restrictions or causing big shifts in price levels. The demand for assets relative to their supply also affects liquidity.

COMMENT: Fair points. However, a key factor in increasing the demand for assets (and thus increasing liquidity) has been the large capital inflow associated with recycling of trade surpluses and the Yen carry trade.

Hedge funds contribute significantly to the increase of liquidity by enlarging investor appetite for risk-taking.

COMMENT: Hedge funds only increase liquidity because they are seen to be using capital profitably. These arrangements may, however, increase systemic risk.

The liquidity boom requires all these factors to continue - as even slight changes could end it. A sudden fall in the $US could trigger market sell-offs, as it did after the Plaza / Louvre Accords of 1985 and 1987, first to push down and later push up the $US, which contributed to the 1987 crash.

COMMENT: Good point regarding potential instability.

However there seems to be a need to further justify claims about the effect of a fall and rise in $US in the 1980s.

In 2007, the market won't cause the $US to fall rapidly in value unless there is something to take its place - eg the currency of a country whose financial markets take profitability in the use of financial assets more seriously than the US does. A serious $US crisis could also be triggered by politically motivated action by large holders of $US assets - a step that would be most damaging to the interests of economies that rely on exports to US.

Other causes of the 1987 crash were proposals for changes to tax legislation that would have disadvantaged investors.

COMMENT: As noted above, there were many other factors that contributed to that situation.

There are many ways in which the current liquidity boom could turn into a liquidity bust (eg hedge fund regulation, rapid revaluation of yuan, imbalance between assets and credit).

COMMENT: Fair point. The Bank of International Settlements has argued that global financial imbalances - which are central to the emergence of the liquidity boom - represents the world's key economic problem.

Dislocation in the real economy could also potentially end the liquidity boom rather than the other way around (eg consider the effect of a pandemic (a more dangerous successor to SARS and Bird Flu) or disruption of global oil supplies as a result of political instability in the Middle East).

Financial globalization and the dominance of derivative plays by hedge funds and private-equity firms could turn a minor disruption into a crisis. The main uncertainty in the coming adjustment is the effect (perhaps beneficial or destabilizing) that these new players could have on international markets as liquidity recedes. Alternatively, the global growth boom and bull market may simply run out of steam.

The liquidity boom has allowed growth through asset inflation without much expansion of the real economy. Unlike real physical assets, virtual financial mirages can evaporate without warning.

COMMENT: It is unwise to assume that 'real physical assets' are more solid than financial assets. The symbolic economy is vital to coordination of actions within the 'real' economy. If the symbolic economy were to fail, those with 'real' assets would often be left with piles of rusting junk for which they had no use.

The emphasis that many in East Asia place on a strong 'real' economy with disregard for the symbolic economy is a major cause of (a) their need for current account surpluses to protect their weak financial institutions (b) global trade imbalances and (c) the emergence of the liquidity boom and asset bubbles that have the potential to be economically disastrous.

Massive fund flows from less experienced investors into hot-concept funds have caused a financial mania that must unwind.

Inflationary pressure in OECD economies makes a bear market inevitable and an orderly unwinding unlikely. Central banks can't ease because of a liquidity trap - that arises when banks can't find creditworthy borrowers at any interest rate or, when interest rates are near zero, people don't expect positive investment returns and so hoard cash.

COMMENT: While a liquidity trap is possible, why will this necessarily happen now? Certainly the fact that some asset values have been high and are likely to devalue suggest the possibility than few will want to borrow, but could not new asset classes be identified (e.g., in alternative energy) that make borrowing profitable and so re-generate liquidity?*

As the decade-long US consumption boom collapses, an ongoing bear market will arise. Asia's growth has been driven by low-wage exports, so it will not be ready fill in as the growth engine in time to prevent a crash. China is just starting to change its development model to boost worker incomes and consumption. Its only option is to insulate itself by resisting US pressure to open its financial markets. Its purchasing power is too low to save the global economy from a deflationary depression.

COMMENT: It isn't only China that needs to do more to boost domestic demand to prevent a global crisis. Japan (and various other countries whose positions are not constrained by low income levels) also need to make a major contribution.

It seems most unlikely that China would be able to protect itself from a global economic meltdown - because of its export dependence. Moreover, the political 'legitimacy' of ruling elites seems to depend heavily on continued economic growth - so any disruption could lead to political instability as well.

A global financial crisis is inevitable and this could trigger a global economic hard landing. Global financial markets look like a pyramid game (noting complex derivative products catering to short-term trading strategies and that, in the absence of good returns in the US, investors allocate funds to emerging-market and commodity specialists - whose investment in small and illiquid stocks has been all that has supported the latter's rise in value). Rising leverage has also artificially boosted liquidity in hot markets.

Before financial globalization, if short-term $US interest rates were higher than longer-term rates, US Treasury bonds could not be boosted by carry trades. Now however this is routine. More profitable still has been borrowing in Japanese yen to invest in Brazilian or Turkish bonds, using various derivatives to hedge currency or credit risk.

Financial markets experienced minor shocks recently when the BOJ soaked up a lot of liquidity and hinted at the need to commence a rate-hike program. A liquidity boom will continue as long as a central bank with large foreign reserves, such as the BOJ, price short-term credit at low levels and lends to all comers.

COMMENT: Fair point. The BoJ deserves close attention in this respect - especially given that withdrawal of Japanese capital seemed to play a role in triggering both the 1987 and 1997 financial crises.

The People's Bank of China also contributes to the global liquidity boom.

COMMENT: Fair point.

The US current-account deficit is the key driver of the liquidity boom. Those who call for a cut in the US trade deficit are calling for a US recession.

COMMENT: As noted above the US current account deficit does not exist in isolation - but is a reflection of economic strategies and financial institutions elsewhere - especially in Asia.

Given sounder balance sheets in (say) Japanese and Chinese financial institutions, there would be no reason that the US capital account surplus / current account deficit could not be reduced without a recession - because stronger demand in Asia would then compensate for a reduction in US demand.

When the meltdown in the subprime mortgage market spreads to other parts of the credit markets, the Fed will be forced to try a monetary ease. But a liquidity trap will complicate matters - as long-term rates may fall faster than the Fed Funds Rate. When demand for bank reserves falls because of a slump in loan demand, then the Fed will have to destroy bank reserves to prevent the Fed Funds Rate falling to zero.

A liquidity trap can be a serious problem because the world is still plagued with excess liquidity potential. A global liquidity trap with $50 trillion of currently idle assets will implode like a doomsday machine.


In summary, it seems to be being predicted that:

* Many factors could trigger a liquidity "bust" which brings an end to to the asset boom and strong demand associated with rapidly expanding liquidity;
* Inflationary pressures will lead to a bear market which reserve banks won't be able to stop by monetary easing, because few will want to borrow creating a 'liquidity trap';
* US demand will collapse - and Asia's export-oriented economies will be structurally incapable of filling the gap;
* A global financial crisis is inevitable;
* Derivate products and globalization (which encourage funds to flow to illiquid emerging markets, and create 'hot' money via carry trades) increase the potential damage in a financial crisis;.
* Japan has moved towards higher interest rates to soak up liquidity;
* Any reduction in the US trade deficit will result in recession;
* Poor credit quality in subprime mortgages will spread, forcing the US Fed to ease monetary policy - but this will not be effective in stopping a liquidity bust.

All these things could happen, but are not guaranteed.

This paper has presented it's author's perspective on a diverse range of current economic parameters - and these comments have attempted to present another point of view on them.

The paper predicts a plausible, but not inevitable, financial crisis that would have severe economic consequences (i.e., a collapse in demand and a recession/depression) with attendant global social pain and political instability.

Clearly it behoves political and financial authorities to collaborate more effectively in developing global and national trade, financial and monetary regimes in which these risks are reduced.

* This point will resonate with iTulip Select readers. John did not get his thoughts on our theories on a future Alt Energy and Infrastructure bubbles from reading iTulip nor did we get these ideas from John. His belief that a deflationary bust does not necessarily follow a global asset bubble is also consistent with ideas we have developed independently over the years. Given John's background, experience, and location, we find the areas of agreement most intriguing.