Richard Blumenthal on Obama’s speech


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I respectfully do not agree with his prescription to ‘protect our economic future.’

“I welcome the President’s acknowledgement of the economic pain felt widely and deeply and look forward to reviewing his plans to help middle class Americans, who are still hurting economically. We must enable Americans to find and keep good jobs with fair pay. And, to protect our economic future, we need vigorous, sustained fiscal discipline that enables deficit cutting.”


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Inflation in China?


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The circumstantial evidence builds that there’s already an inflation problem, politically, probably due to those up and coming kids with the western educations at the finest schools pestering their elders about it.

And, if so, when foreign direct investment loses its profitability due to rising domestic costs, the currency fundamentals could work to drive it lower, taking away the presumed option of reducing the cost of imports by letting it float higher.

An early warning might be a shrinking of the size of the premium in the currency forwards.

It seems possible that Chinese officials could allows their currency to strengthen in the first two weeks of Feb prior to the beginning of the Chinese New Year holidays. If there is one thing that Chinese officials fear the most it is inflation – inflation is the only thing that can touch everyone in China and continued low inflation is the best way to prevent social unrest. Clearly they are looking to any way they can to tighten financial conditions and stronger fx would be one component. It is interesting that recent press reports stated that Chinese officials wanted to call back January loans made to recent borrowers, possibly reducing the windfall speculative borrowers would get in a one time revaluation.


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the President’s speech and markets


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The speech made it clear there has been a shift to ‘fiscal responsibility’ with plans to pay back the 2 trillion in new debt, all well down the road. The spending freeze will pay half of it over time, and the rest from less specified sources that included tax increases for people making over 250,000, banks, etc. The health care plan is also supposed to reduce the deficit and paygo may be back.

And no additional fiscal relaxation of consequence apart from the current jobs bill working its way through congress.

The jobs initiatives mentioned were minor.

And rather than come up with a way for congressman inherently uncooperative due to the current institutional structure, there was simply a call for them to somehow act in the public interest.

So it looks like the economy is on its own for the most part, with an agonizingly slow and irregular recovery, and neither side coming up with substantially better ideas.

This isn’t a bad environment for stocks, as there’s nothing to suggest negative earnings shocks, and productivity gains can keep supporting at least modest earnings growth, and high unemployment helps keep down costs, and helps keep interest rates low which helps valuations.

The announced export push would be a negative for our standard of living and real terms of trade, but pretty good for stocks as well.

And clearly there’s nothing more the Fed can do, as it’s becoming increasingly clear the moves they have already made have had no positive impact on aggregate demand. They have only restored ‘market functioning.’

Removing some of their liquidity measures does mean there’s again a chance the pressures will appear in libor settings if something starts shaking the tree.

Like Greece, or Iran, or something like that.

Each time the President speaks I’m hoping for some meaningful new ideas but have yet to hear any.

But, again, not a bad environment for stocks, and interest rate forwards continue to look reasonably cheap as well, particularly as concerns about QE and 0 rates as causes of inflation subside.


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Tea Party Plan for Dems- Cut to the Front with Tax Cuts


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Tea Party Plan for Democrats — Cut to the Front with Tax Cuts

At Saturday’s Tea Party conference in Dallas I’ll be outlining how Tea Party Democrats can run against Obama administration policies that are counter to both Tea Party and traditional Democratic values. It is the Washington elite that have moved away from the ideals of Jefferson and Jackson with policies that are, at best, regressive, elitist, and destructive to our quality of life. And who’s benefiting? Not the millions who voted Democratic who are losing their jobs and their homes. And with GDP now moving higher while unemployment rises, all that additional wealth is flowing up to the top. This Democratic President and Congress was not elected to enrich the bankers, insurance executives, drug companies, and union leaders at the expense of the rest of us, in a perversion of true core Democratic values. Unfortunately, the so-called economic experts have confused themselves and their political masters with contrived explanations for the way the economy works, and their limited vision has limited the range of policy choice. The result has been a monumental economic and social disaster caused by an obvious shortage of aggregate demand. The spending power needed to make mortgage payments, car payments, and do a bit of shopping- all of which would fix the economy and end the financial crisis- just isn’t there.

The answer is a full payroll tax holiday, where the US Treasury would make all FICA payments for both employees and employers that regressively remove 15% of every pay check from dollar one up to $106,800 of income. The take home pay of a husband and wife with a combined income of $100,000 per year would increase by over $650 a month, and quickly restore output and employment. Rather than funding the banks from the top down with an improbable trickle down theory that would have made Reagan blush, this tax cut restores the incomes necessary to support all economic activity from the bottom up. Instead of funding the financial sector with $trillions, the payroll tax holiday instead simply stops taking $trillions away from people working for a living.

Unfortunately, the Democratic elite has been not only against this kind of tax cut, even though it is a tax so regressive that no self respecting Democrat should tolerate for a single moment, because they think the Federal Government has to actually get revenue to be able to spend. However, that anachronistic gold standard reality has long been replace by our current, non convertible currency regime and floating exchange rate policy. Chairman Bernanke told Congressman Pelley exactly how the Federal Government spends today last May:

(PELLEY) Is that tax money that the Fed is spending?
(BERNANKE) It’s not tax money. The banks have– accounts with the Fed, much the same way that you have an account in a commercial bank. So, to lend to a bank, we simply use the computer to mark up the size of the account that they have with the Fed.

Our govt has only one way to spend- they ‘mark up’ numbers in bank accounts. The funds don’t ‘come from’ anywhere any more than the 6 points for a touchdown posted on scoreboard at a football game ‘come from’ anywhere. Nor does govt. get anything when it taxes- the IRS just changes numbers down in our bank accounts.

The fact is, the US Government never has nor doesn’t have dollars. It’s the scorekeeper for the dollar. It just changes numbers in bank accounts.

So why tax? To regulate aggregate demand. Taxation is the thermostat. When the economy is too hot, raise taxes to cool it down. When it’s too cold, like it surely is today, a payroll tax holiday will warm it back up to operating temperature.

The Democratic elite have it wrong and their wrongheaded ways are doing serious damage to the US economy and the people struggling under their failed economic agenda. And their latest moves towards what they call ‘fiscal responsibility’ will only cut demand further and make things worse.

Tea Party Democrats can lead the way towards true fiscal responsibility, which means setting taxes at the right level needed to sustain output and employment. And today that means a full payroll tax holiday.


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China bank halts roll-over of some loans


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Lending expansion often follows inflation, as higher asset prices and higher incomes support larger loan balances.

Cutting lending as this article implies can set off downward spirals and rising unemployment if domestic demand isn’t somehow supported by
enhancing consumer incomes.

3-Top China bank ICBC halts roll-over of some loans

ICBC says lending pace has slowed at end of January

* Latest signal of tightening that may rein in growth

* Official newspaper says some banks have recalled loans

* Chinese regulator renews demand for even pace of lending


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Fed transparency


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Zaid Reply:
January 27th, 2010 at 4:08 am

Hi Tom,

I had a different read on this whole transparency issue. If Bernanke is taking a lesson from the 1930s, one event that made the the whole banking system shut down was the publication of the names of banks that had received loans from the Reconstruction Finance Corporation. That happened in January 1933. In the weeks following the publication, there were many bank runs on the banks that were perceived as being weak by the public. In March, the whole banking system was shut down by Executive Order… and well, the rest is history.

I don’t mean to imply that Bernanke’s worries are warranted. They shouldn’t be if the Fed lends in unlimited quantities to meet withdrawals by the public, but then again, we already know how much he really knows about how the system really operates under a non-convertible floating exchange rate regime.


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Goldman Sachs trying to broker Greek bonds to China


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I went to high school with Chris Powell where he was a good friend of mine, then lost touch.
We’ve had a few emails discussing GATA. Seems their beef is that the Fed is conspiring to keep the price of gold down, which wrongly hurts the GATA supporters.
Didn’t make a lot of sense to me, but whatever.

Regarding China and the euro-

Note China already owns some Greek bonds, highlighted below?

I was discussing this a while back when China was ‘diversifying reserves’ in that one of the problems with the buying the euro is you have to take national govt credit risk, as there is nothing equivalent to the ‘federal’ securities of the other nations of the world with non convertible currencies where the issuer of the currency is your counter party.

Also, when the likes of China stops buying, say, the $US or the yen, it’s not a credit event for the US like it is when they stop buying the euro, where the national govt’s solvency is a function of their ability to sell their securities.

So the lack of euro buying by sovereigns who were willing to take national govt credit risk puts the entire eurozone at risk of a liquidity crisis beginning with its ‘weakest link.’ Hence the Greek ‘road trips’ to China, which do make sense, in contrast to the Obama/Clinton/Geithner road trips to China which reinforce the notion that they don’t understand the monetary system.

I’ve also passed along the idea that if Greek bonds were to have default provisions that allowed them to be used to pay Greek taxes in the event of default it should lower their interest rates. Don’t know if that got anywhere- no way for me to check.

Goldman Sachs trying to broker Greek bonds to China

Athens Invites Beijing to Buy Bonds

By Kerin Hope and Jamil Anderlini

Link

Greece is wooing China to buy up to E25 billion of government bonds, a move that underlines Beijing’s growing financial power, as Athens struggles to fund soaring public debt.

Goldman Sachs, the US investment bank, has been promoting a Greek bond sale to Beijing and the State Administration of Foreign Exchange (SAFE), which manages China’s $2,400 billion foreign exchange reserves, said people familiar with the issue.

Gary Cohn, Goldman Sachs chief operating officer, has made two trips to Athens — last November and this month — to meet George Papandreou, prime minister, and senior officials.

Beijing has not agreed to such a purchase. Meanwhile, Athens has rejected a suggestion that a Chinese bank should acquire a strategic stake in National Bank of Greece, the country’s flagship commercial lender, according to officials contacted by the Financial Times.

But a more modest deal of about E5 billion-E10 billion ($7 billion-$14 billion) appeared possible after Mr Cohn’s second trip to Athens, officials said on Tuesday.

George Papaconstantinou, finance minister, told the FT he would visit China on a road show next month, but “no target is set” for a debt placement.

China’s foreign exchange reserves grew $130 billion in the last quarter of 2009 alone. But people close to Safe said China already held a “significant amount” of Greek debt and was wary of adding to that.

A senior Greek finance ministry official said Athens would welcome Chinese buyers of its bonds. The official declined to specify an amount, though a figure of E20 billion-E25 billion was raised in talks with Goldman Sachs.

A E5 billion syndicated loan issue by Greece this week attracted bids worth more than E20 billion, but Greece continues to face pressure in financial markets.

Goldman Sachs mooted the sale of equity in NBG to Bank of China, the country’s third-largest commercial lender by assets, and made a similar proposal to China Investment Corp., China’s sovereign wealth fund, according to officials.

Chinese officials said CIC was not interested and that regulators would not let BoC make such a risky investment. Goldman Sachs and CIC declined to comment. A Bank of China spokesman said: “I haven’t heard anything about it.”


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What losses?


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From MS:

The table below from CBO office shows the banks have already repaid TARP in full plus interest…

Even AIG has accounts for only 10% of the total TARP “loss” outstanding.

According to the table, the government has a net profit on it’s investment in the banks.

The majority of losses are stemming from Auto industry loans of -47bln and Home Affordability Mtg Program -20bln…

Yet the government wants to impose a tax to “get their money back” from the banks for 90-120bln???

Hmm… seems to be another agenda at foot here.

CBO’s Baseline Estimates of Federal Funding for the TARP (As of mid-December 2009)(Billions of dollars)

And the funds to the banks necessarily never even went anywhere. They just sat on the fed’s books as excess reserves. The govt can’t ‘spend money’ on bank capital, it’s been and can only be thinly disguised regulatory forbearance.

Seems no one up there has a grasp on simple monetary operations. They still get QE wrong continuously at all levels.


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giving up on the Fed


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We’re getting closer to the point discussed a few weeks ago about markets giving up on the Fed.

At the time the 10 year was maybe 3.75-3.80, gold had gone about 1,200, the dollar was near the lows, crude was back over 80, stocks were up, all based on the belief the Fed had the power to ‘reflate’ and was ‘printing money’ through trillions of ‘quantitative easing’ which was, sooner or later, hyper inflationary, along with 0 interest rates and ‘record deficits’ which would drive up interest rates, risk default and a sudden breakdown of the $US, all contributing to the same inflationary collapse.

Now that the bets have been placed, and none of that is happening, it’s all starting to erode. Crude is back below 75 (the Saudis’ actual target/range?), gold is selling off, the dollar is edging higher, the 10 year just traded at 3.57, stocks are selling off, etc.

The next step is for first markets and then policy makers to realize the Fed has no tools to inflate. That 0 rates and qe don’t cut it. Nor are deficits large enough to reflate. Bernanke was asked by Time magazine late last year if he had any tools left. He said yes. When asked what they were, he had no specific answer. Well, if he does have more tools, with 10% unemployment and weak prices and a dual mandate for full employment and price stability, what’s he waiting for?

Should market psychology turn to the notion that the Fed has no tools to inflate, and we have a Congress dead set against larger deficits, it can all get very ugly very quickly in the race to the exit from the inflation plays (including steepeners) currently on the books.


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JAPAN’S OUTLOOK `NEGATIVE’ S&P SAYS


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The blind leading the blind.

I thought S&P knew better.

Sadly, they remain deficit terrorists and part of the problem and not part of the answer for a world suffering from an acute shortage of aggregate demand.

*JAPAN’S OUTLOOK `NEGATIVE’ S&P SAYS
*S&P SAYS JAPAN FISCAL FLEXIBILITY HAS DIMINISHED

5y JAPAN SOV CDS moves from 85 mids to 87 / 90 market at the
moment

USDJPY spiked from 89.60 to 90.15 but has since recovered back to 89.70

JGB futures traded down -11c from the 3pm close after the announcement
but are only 3 cents weaker currently


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