China's Economic Strategy To Become The World's Biggest Superpower

China is taking advantage of the global recession to position themselves to eventually become the world's number 1 superpower. They are lending out massive amounts of money to countries like the US, and stockpiling gold in order to prepare for the possible fall of the dollar. Tony Straka from The Prudent Investor explains China's economic strategy and why we should all be watching very closely.

Shocked by the fact that lamestream media and Twitter are all about Michael Jackson's death from what appears to be a drug overdose, I enjoy being the spoiler for a world that seemingly does not know how to set its priorities anymore. While 33 of the 42 commercial media I regularly read headline with Jacko, it is Chinese media that published the truly important news of the day.

Here's the executive version of Chinese economic news picked from the English language People's Daily Online.

1. China takes public ownership as the main body and the other (issue) is to adhere to the common growth of economy belonging to diverse forms of ownership.
2. The People's Bank of China (PBoC) will stick to an appropriately easy monetary policy but will ensure reasonable growth in money and credit, the central bank said yesterday.
3. New credit in the first half of 2009 will definitely surpass 6 trillion yuan, and some experts even predict the figure to be up to 6.5 trillion yuan. This means that total credit in the first half of this year will be more than the total amount invested in any year since China was founded.
4. China should buy more gold because the dollar is poised for a fall and the metal is needed to support the greater international role envisaged for the yuan, a senior researcher with the ruling Communist Party said.

You can now go back to watch CNN's US propaganda broadcast and remain in the "don't worry, be happy" camp which still has a solid majority in the Western world. Or would you prefer to gather a little more intel on the next #1 power in the world? Then read on.
Bullet point #1 appears to point to a struggle of ideologies in the Chinese communist party. Chinese entrepreneurs certainly favor a more liberal business climate but one must not forget that there is still a gap as wide as the Amazon river between the Ferrari driving riches in towns and a rural hinterland where oxcarts and bicycles remain to be seen as signs of prosperity. In order to prevent social upheaval China needs to bridge this gap or it risks falling apart. The anonymous commenter in the People's Daily reminds the world that China still favors a hands-on approach:

Taking public ownership as the mainstay is a fundamental principle of socialism. In a socialist country like China, where people have become masters of their own destiny, it is imperative to keep public ownership of means of production as a basis of the socialist economic system. So, adherence to public ownership as the main body is of vital importance in giving play to the superiority of the nation's socialist system, increasing the nation's economic strength and promoting social harmony in the country.

Pointing out, that 26 of the 500 largest companies in the world as of 2008 are state-controlled Chinese corporations, the most populous nation on earth insists that it is not so much about ownership-ideology but about keeping up a harmonious people.

In a nutshell, it is imperative and essential to consolidate and develop the public ownership economy, to encourage, support and guide the growth of the non-public sector economy, and to maintain the right to equal access of property resources, so that a brand-new situation will emerge, in which all economic sectors will "vie with each other" on an equal footing so as to spur their economic activity for mutual advancement.

Confronted with a global economic downturn China's central bank made it clear this week that it will emphasize an easy monetary policy to keep its economy humming despite declining exports. In a stark contrast to the indebted western world China sits on roughly $2 trillion in assets, enabling it to conduct stimulus policies no country in the Western hemisphere could afford. Read their opinion on bullet point #2 in their own words as it also signals a concern about the environment:

In a summary of the conclusions drawn at its second-quarter monetary policy committee meeting, the central bank said yesterday that it would ensure reasonable growth in money and credit but would strictly control lending to polluting, energy-intensive industries...
"The top priority at the moment is to stop the explosive growth in lending at the end of the month and quarter," China Banking Regulatory Commission said in a recent notice to lenders, pointing to the phenomena of banks racing to offer loans before June to meet their half-year lending targets.

The Eastern dragon so far performs much better than any recession-stricken nation in the West, where money supply has rocketed to potentially fatal (hyper inflationary) levels. Covering bullet point #3 in their own words, China plays its monetary muscle.

People's Bank of China Monetary Policy Committee recently held a regular meeting on the second quarter of 2009. The conference studies the orientation of monetary policy and measures for the coming future, concluding that we need to implement moderately easy monetary policy and maintain the continuity and stability of policies to guide a reasonable growth in monetary credit.
It is learned that in the first five months, RMB loans increased by 5.84 trillion yuan. June figures have not yet been released, but according to past experience, new credit in the first half of 2009 will definitely surpass 6 trillion yuan, and some experts even predict the figure to be up to 6.5 trillion yuan. This means that total credit in the first half of this year will be more than the total amount invested in any year since China was founded.

2 Ways Through a Recession: China Can Afford It Because of Savings
Show me a Western country that could shell out a trillion Euros/dollars from its full pockets! There is no such thing. All stimulus packages Western politicians promise are only backed by the hope of future tax payments. China can dive through a recession on its savings whereas the so called first world has nothing else to show than debts that are enough of a burden for the two next generations.

Wouldn't we all love to have the same economic discussion as the Chinese where economists argue whether the economy has bottomed out at a growth rate of 6.1% in Q1 2008 or whether one should be skeptical about a possible GDP growth rate of 9%?

Diving into recent history (i.e. this blog's archive) China can actually see the global downturn as a benefit that helps keeping the economy from overheating. BTW, why are we actually concerned with "overheating" economies? Don't we all want to become rich by tomorrow? But I won't digress, this is an entirely different discussion best to be had over a bottle of good plum wine.

Let's better proceed to bullet point #4: China's growing role in forex markets.
Reuters staffers Zhou Xin and Alan Wheatley direct my attention to the fact that China sees a much bigger role of gold in global currency policy after surprising the world with the fact that it had domestically purchased gold and now sits on a hoard of 1,054 tonnes after publishing a figure of 660 tonnes since 2003.

Buy Gold Before China Buys It All

The communist party's chief economist told Reuters the following strategic goals (found on GATA's website):

China should buy more gold because the dollar is poised for a fall and the metal is needed to support the greater international role envisaged for the yuan, a senior researcher with the ruling Communist Party said on Thursday.
Li Lianzhong, who heads the economic department of the party's policy research office, said China should use more of its $1.95 trillion in foreign exchange reserves to buy energy and natural resource assets.
Speaking at a foreign exchange and gold forum, Li also said that buying land in the United States was a better option for China than buying U.S. Treasury securities.
"Should we buy gold or U.S. Treasuries?" Li asked. "The U.S. is printing dollars on a massive scale, and in view of that trend, according to the laws of economics, there is no doubt that the dollar will fall. So gold should be a better choice."

Following the nuances of Chinese official-speak it is clear that China sees itself superior in monetary policy but is left with a problem it shares with all creditors in the world: Its forex reserve stash consists mainly of unbacked Federal Reserve Notes (FRNs), a fiat currency backed by nothing else than the belief it will buy you the same amount of goods and services in the future as it did in the past.

China takes appropriate steps at its own rhythm to secure a bigger role for the Yuan in the future. Looking at the Yuan's slow revaluation so far China has made good on its promises to the bankrupt USA.

The Reuters story sums it up correctly:

Li cited the high share of gold in the foreign exchange reserves of the United States, Italy, Germany, and France to argue that China's gold holdings, which account for about 1.6 percent of its reserves, are too small.
China does not disclose the composition of its currency reserves, but bankers assume around 70 percent is held in dollar assets.
China is the largest single holder of U.S. Treasuries, with $763.5 billion at the end of April, according to U.S. Treasury data.
Analysts say this data set understates the true number as it does not capture paper bought through dealers in London or elsewhere.
Li said a second reason for buying more gold would be in anticipation of the yuan one day becoming a reserve currency.
The yuan is not convertible on the capital account, meaning it cannot be freely traded for other currencies for financial transactions that are not related to trade. This rules out the yuan's use as an international reserve currency, for central banks would not be able to convert it quickly if necessary.
But in a very preliminary step toward that goal, China is paving the way for greater use of the yuan beyond its borders.
The People's Bank of China has arranged currency swap deals with six countries since December totalling 650 billion yuan ($95 billion) so that trade and investment with China can be conducted in yuan, not dollars.
And China will soon allow selected firms in the southern province of Guangdong that trade with Hong Kong to settle their transactions in yuan, or renminbi.
"If the yuan should go international or become a reserve currency, China needs more gold to back that," Li said.

One must not forget that China's political state supports long term strategies for which Western leaders who want to get reelected every 4 years have no leeway.
Reuters fills in here very well too:

When the yuan does become an international currency, which Li acknowledged was a long way off, he said the composition of the SDR should be reformed to include the Chinese currency.
Ideally, in the long term, the SDR would be made up of the dollar, euro, sterling, yen, and yuan, each with a weighting of 20 percent, Li said.
The SDR is currently made up of the dollar (with a weighting of 44 percent), the euro (34 percent), the yen (11 percent), and sterling (11 percent)
The four currencies in the SDR, which must be convertible, are those issued by fund members with the largest share of global trade. The weights assigned by the IMF are based on the value of exports and the amount of reserves denominated in those currencies.
The composition of the basket is reviewed every five years. the next review is due in 2010.

Rest assured that the dragon will blow some hot air down the Western world's spine in the run-up to this review.

This was reposted from Tony Straka's blog, The Prudent Investor.

Obama's Proposal For Requiring Bank "Funeral Plans"

An arguably much needed change outlined in the Obama administration's financial regulation overhaul proposal is the requirement of a "rapid resolution plan". This would provide the government with important information in the event that a systemically important financial institution faces collapse. For more, see the following post by economist Mark Thoma, author of Economist's View.

No disagreement with this. The failure to have dissolution plans for systemically important institutions on the shelf and ready to go turned out to be costly, so credible dissolution plans are certainly needed. However, the argument seems to assume that too big and too interconnected firms cannot be avoided, something I'm not ready to concede:

A sound funeral plan can prolong a bank’s life, by Anil Kashyap, Commentary, Financial Times: Buried within the 88-page Obama administration proposal to overhaul financial regulation is an overlooked option called a “rapid resolution plan”. It mandates that systemically important financial companies be required regularly to file a “funeral plan”: a set of instructions for how the institution could be quickly dismantled should the need to do so arise. ... It could be implemented now, without the need for legislative action. Regulators should do so immediately.

The first benefit is that regulators would gain a stronger negotiating position with a dying institution. Throughout this crisis the authorities have had to intervene without knowing exactly what hidden traps might emerge if a bank were to be closed down. The bankers know this and can exploit the fear of the unknown to press for bail-outs.

It is remarkable that such rules do not already exist. ... The crisis has shown us that the sudden unwinding of a large, complex financial institution is terrifying for the financial system. ...

A second immediate benefit would be to force bank managers to think much more carefully about the complex financial structures they have created. If bankers had to explain every single step needed (and the associated consequences) to shut down their subsidiaries in all the various jurisdictions in which they operate, they would have a big incentive to simplify their organisations. ...

Over the medium term, there would be additional benefits. The headline component of the plan would be the requirement for banks to estimate the number of days it would take to shut down. Banks that require longer to close would have to hold more capital. This would place management under serious pressure to improve their plans...

Senior members of the management team and the board would have to understand the funeral plan. Crucially, they would be forced to sign off on its accuracy. This might also lead to closer scrutiny of new products or lines of business if they jeopardised an orderly unwinding. ...

This proposal is far from a cure-all. One big problem is that resolution rules themselves, especially when multiple legal systems are involved, are quite complicated. But the plan has an extremely high benefit-to-cost ratio and could be put in place right away. ...

This post was republished from Mark Thoma's blog, Economist's View.

Is It Okay To Not Pay The Mortgage If You Are Significantly Underwater?

With large numbers of homeowners in the US underwater on their mortgages, more individuals are choosing to walk away from their mortgage even if they can afford to pay it. It may make financial sense if mortgage principal is $500,000 when the home is valued at $400,000, but is it right to not pay back a loan under these circumstances? The following post from The Mess That Greenspan Made, explores that question.

The Economist looks at the phenomenon of U.S. homeowners who can pay their mortgage, but who choose not to. Apparently, changing cultural norms are playing as big a part on the way down as they did on the way up for the U.S. housing market.

New research based on a survey of 1,000 homeowners suggests that one in four mortgage defaults are “strategic”—by people who could meet their payments but who choose not to. The main drivers of strategic default are the scale of negative equity, and moral and social considerations. Few would opt to renege on their mortgage if the equity gap were below 10% of their home’s value, the authors find, partly because of the costs of moving. But one in six would bail out if loans were underwater by a half.
...
Anger about bail-outs of banks or carmakers does not weaken the moral barrier to default. But people who live in neighbourhoods where home repossessions are frequent are more likely to welsh on loans. Homeowners who know someone who has defaulted strategically are 82% more likely to say they would do so, too. The likelihood of strategic default rises more quickly once the rate of local home foreclosures reaches a critical level. That hints at a vicious cycle of foreclosures that both depress home prices and weaken the social and economic barriers to further defaults.

Cocktail party chatter sure has changed dramatically in the last four or five years - from discussions of "$10,000 a month in appreciation" to how to "walk-away".

This blog post can also be viewed at The Mess That Greenspan Made.

Are The Positive Economic Signs Artificially Created?

Could the signs of economic improvement be a mirage created by the artificial propping up of the economy by unprecedented government intervention? James Picerno from The Capital Spectator explains why we should be suspicious of numbers like the 1.6% increase in disposable personal income.

One day we'll look back on 2009 and wonder what all the confusion was about. All will become clear and we'll know when the recession ended, when the bull market began anew and how and why the cycle turned. Meanwhile, we're wondering if the data du jour can be trusted.

Judging by the numbers of late, clarity is upon us, or so it seems. Income and spending are up among consumers. What's not to like? If this keeps up, we'll be back to the good old days by, oh, let's say the third week of September.

As for what we know today, disposable personal income jumped 1.6% last month on a seasonally adjusted basis, the Bureau of Economic Analysis reports this morning. That's the biggest monthly gain in a year. Not bad for what we've repeatedly been told is the deepest recession since the Great Depression.



That's only half the fun. The government also advises that personal consumption expenditures gained 0.2% in May, the best since February.

Is it a miracle? No, it's just your tax dollars at work. As the BEA noted in its press release today, "the pattern of changes in personal income and in DPI reflect, in part, the pattern of increased government social benefit payments associated with the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009." In other words, the guys and gals in Washington continue to print money and distribute it, creating a revival that otherwise doesn't exist. The extent of the government's intervention can be surmised once we recognize that wages and salaries actually fell by 0.1% last month.

There are two ways to interpret the news. The optimistic view is that the government's stimulus efforts will steady an otherwise anxious consumer. By putting more money into his pocket, the incentive to spend is heightened and the odds improved that a return to old consumption habits is near. The government payments are a bridge until the day when the private sector can resume more of the burden of financing consumption.

The darker view is that government-financed consumption is a tenuous lifeline that's a pale replacement for the real McCoy. As such, the burning question is one of asking when the labor market will revive? By that standard, there' still reason to be cautious about the remainder of 2009. The recession may be technically over, as we've discussed. But even making that leap of faith offers no short cut to good times.

The job market, after all, is typically the last to show convincing signs of recovery. For that reason, the National Bureau of Economic Research shuns employment trends for putting official dates on business cycle turning points. Minting new jobs, in other words, is usually the response to other economic stimuli. Conventional recoveries, then, don't begin with the labor market. Then again, this isn't a conventional business cycle.

Clearly, the government has moved heaven and earth to keep the economy afloat. Ours is an era of triumph for public-financed consumption. In both magnitude and timeliness, no government has ever acted with greater speed and depth in keeping the forces of contraction at bay. But that raises a question of whether Washington can keep the engineered consumption going long enough to wait for a bonafide economic recovery. We'll have an answer, perhaps soon. But at the moment we're still knee-deep in the first great macroeconomic experiment of the 21st century.

This blog post can also be viewed at The Capital Spectator.

Who Should Be Blamed For Big Bonuses

Many Americans are outraged right now of the report that Goldman Sachs is planning to pay out record bonuses. Although Goldman Sachs denies the report, many are asking how this could possibly happen. Martin Hutchinson from Money Morning explains who deserves the blame.

It’s been in the news the last couple of days. Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (NYSE: GS) bankers are headed for record bonuses. The Financial Times reports that bankers’ pay in the London market is already right back to 2007 levels and going higher. Banks are poaching each others’ best staff, and are offering huge pay packages to staffers willing to make the leap.

It’s enough to make you succumb to the Two Minutes’ Hate.

But let’s face the truth. As egregious as salary escalation seems - coming as it does on the tail of the worst U.S. banking crisis since the Great Depression - the reality is that this is the U.S. government’s fault. After all, it was the U.S. Federal Reserve and the Obama administration that created all the bailouts and the special-loan-subsidy schemes for banks that would otherwise have been on their last legs.

In a truly free market, ex-Citibankers (NYSE: C) would be on every street corner of Manhattan - selling apples - and that would properly hold down the pay of those bankers still lucky enough to have a job.

The sudden rebound in demand for bankers is a symptom of overall market conditions right now. The U.S. stock market is way up from its lows, there are three Chinese initial public offerings (IPOs) due to come to market this week (one of them for a company with no earnings), the volume of home mortgage refinancing has been running at record levels, the FHA index of home prices has dropped only 0.3% this year and the volume of new corporate debt issuance is also high. Commodity prices are well off their lows, and oil prices are again close to $70 a barrel, which would have been considered an excessively high level only three years ago. That’s not a picture of a financial market - or a global economy - in deep recession.

Far from it.

To some extent, this is good news. A revival of the financial system and its ability to finance businesses and home purchases is exactly what the huge monetary and fiscal stimulus was meant to produce. A modest revival in world trade, as inventories cease being wound down and Chinese production ramps up again, is also a necessary precondition for economic recovery.

As the banking bonus news suggests, however, much of the activity is coming in some pretty funny places, where the excesses of the past decade were concentrated and where you wouldn’t expect to see such a quick revival.

That gives us a clear indication of just what the problem is. Because bankruptcies weren’t allowed to happen back in September and October - as they would have in a free market - there are more institutions in the market than there should be, Citigroup and Merrill Lynch most notable among them.

Moreover, in a true free market, the entire credit-default-swap (CDS) business - a product that caused $180 billion of losses to the financial system through American International Group Inc. (NYSE: AIG) - would be nothing but a smoking ruin. But in the market we are living in, those $180 billion worth of losses have been transferred to the tab of the taxpayers of America.

With Citigroup and Merrill Lynch bankers mooching around on street corners, financial sector salaries would be forced down to a more reasonable level. As it is, the few unemployed unfortunates who worked at Lehman Brothers are not enough to depress the market. Likewise, credit default swaps have caused huge pain to the unfortunate employees of Abitibi-Bowater Inc. (NYSE: ABH), General Growth Properties (OTC: GGWPQ), and Six Flags Inc. (OTC: SIXFQ), each of which went bust partly because their creditors were playing in the CDS market and had no incentive to find an alternative to bankruptcy. Had CDS caused the pain they should have to financiers, the product would no longer exist, to the considerable benefit of the rest of us.

Inevitably, we are going to have to pay the price for all the bailouts. The financial sector will eventually shrink to its proper size, as will its members’ earnings. CDS will eventually be sharply restricted, to prevent their holders from forcing random companies into Chapter 11. Interest rates will have to rise, to accommodate the huge debt-funding needs the government has incurred. Money will have to be kept tight, to pay for the indulgences that Fed Chairman Ben S. Bernanke granted during the bubble, as well as for the even greater-indulgences of the bust.

Which is probably why you don’t want to hold U.S. stocks right now.

This article was reposted from Money Morning. You can also view this article at Money Morning's investment news site.

Greenspan Says Stock Market Recovery Could Lift Economy

Alan Greenspan, writing in the Financial Times, argues that a continued recovery by the stock market could lift up the economy. A healthy stock market helps supply banks with capital for lending, increases household spending, and spurs new capital investment, he argues. See below for more on Greenspan's thinking.

Maybe there was a Greenspan put after all?:

Inflation - the real threat to sustained recovery, by Alan Greenspan, Commentary, Financial Times: The rise in global stock prices from early March to mid-June is arguably the primary cause of the surprising positive turn in the economic environment. The $12,000bn of newly created corporate equity value has added significantly to the capital buffer that supports the debt issued by financial and non-financial companies. Corporate debt, as a consequence, has been upgraded and yields have fallen. Previously capital-strapped companies have been able to raise considerable debt and equity in recent months. Market fears of bank insolvency, particularly, have been assuaged.

Is this the beginning of a prolonged economic recovery or a false dawn? There are credible arguments on both sides of the issue. ...[T]he crisis will end when ...[there is] a stabilisation of home prices or a further rise in newly created equity value available to US financial intermediaries...

Global stock markets have rallied so far and so fast this year that it is difficult to imagine they can proceed further at anywhere near their recent pace. But what if, after a correction, they proceeded inexorably higher? That would bolster global balance sheets with large amounts of new equity value and supply banks with the new capital that would allow them to step up lending. Higher share prices would also lead to increased household wealth and spending, and the rising market value of existing corporate assets (proxied by stock prices) relative to their replacement cost would spur new capital investment. Leverage would be materially reduced. A prolonged recovery in global equity prices would thus assist in the lifting of the deflationary forces that still hover over the global economy.

I recognise that I accord a much larger economic role to equity prices than is the conventional wisdom. From my perspective, they are not merely an important leading indicator of global business activity, but a major contributor to that activity, operating primarily through balance sheets. ...

Stock prices, to be sure, are affected by the usual economic gyrations. But ... a significant driver of stock prices is the innate human propensity to swing between euphoria and fear, which, while heavily influenced by economic events, has a life of its own. In my experience, such episodes are often not mere forecasts of future business activity, but major causes of it. ...

He also gives his view of the future inflation threat. I'll just note that I quite agree with Greenspan's assertion that he accords "a much larger economic role to equity prices than is the conventional wisdom."

This was reposted from Mark Thoma's blog, Economist's View.

Why Are Republicans Attacking The Republican Fed Chairman?

Why would Republican law makers want to attack Bernanke, a Republican appointed by President Bush? If Bernanke resigns, Obama could appoint a Democrat as Fed Chairman. Economist Mark Thoma from Economist's View, attempts to explain this counter-intuitive strategy.

The GOP is targeting Bernanke as "a champion of government intrusion and an ally of President Obama":

G.O.P. to Paint Bernanke as Ally of Big Government, by Edmund L. Andrews and Louise Story, NY Times: In a peculiar role reversal, Republican lawmakers are mounting a ferocious attack on the Republican chairman of the Federal Reserve, while Democrats are coming to his defense.

Ben S. Bernanke ... will be grilled on Thursday by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee about his role in orchestrating Bank of America’s controversial takeover of Merrill Lynch late last year.

The House investigation is heavily colored by partisanship. President Obama is proposing to give the Federal Reserve formidable new powers to regulate giant institutions, including Bank of America, that could pose risks to the financial system.

Republicans, along with some Democrats, argue that the Fed already has too much power.

Unhappy about the huge bank bailouts that the Fed arranged with the Treasury Department during the Bush administration, many Republicans are even more displeased that Mr. Bernanke is now working hand-in-glove with the Obama administration.

The result is a set of dueling narratives and agendas, all of which will be on full display when Mr. Bernanke testifies on Thursday. ...

Despite Mr. Bernanke’s Republican roots, and the fact that President Bush nominated him to be Fed chairman, the Republican memo prepared for the hearing on Thursday describes Mr. Bernanke as a champion of government intrusion and an ally of President Obama. ...

I don't think this is an attempt to negatively influence Obama's decision on Bernanke's reappointment as Fed chair as some have been hinting because that would not be in the GOP's best interest. There are open positions on the Federal Reserve Board, so even if Bernanke didn't resign as is customary in the event he was not reappointed - and nothing says he must - Obama would still be free to appoint a new Fed Chair from outside the present Board membership.

Obama would certainly appoint someone who shares his regulatory vision, and that person would likely be confirmed (e.g. someone like Janet Yellen would likely be confirmed even if there was lots of grumbling), so I don't see how the appointment of a new Fed chair would do anything but strengthen the support for the type of regulatory oversight the administration envisions. That's not what the GOP wants.

Instead, this looks much more like an attempt to by the GOP to maintain its usual anti-regulatory, anti-government stance by arguing that the Fed should not to be trusted with the powers envisioned in the proposed regulatory reform legislation. So the real goal is the Fed as an institution, Bernanke is simply the target being used to make that the point. E.g.:

The vast extent of the Fed’s actions in the past two years to commit trillions of dollars in government money to support the economy has raised significant concerns on Capitol Hill, some of which will be aired on Thursday when Bernanke testifies before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

Congressional investigators have been looking into the Fed’s role in encouraging Bank of America to purchase Merrill Lynch... Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), ranking member on the Oversight Committee, said on Wednesday that the Fed engaged in a “cover-up” and hid details about the merger, completed in January 2009, from other federal agencies.

Meanwhile, lawmakers from both parties are raising questions about Obama’s proposal to grant the Fed broad new powers to prevent another crisis.

Those concerns could make the next confirmation process far more contentious than the six that have occurred in the last two decades.

And:

Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) said, “It won’t be my decision whether he is held over or not, but right now I’m concerned that they have lost their independence and are too cozy with Treasury.”

It looks like we are going to get some version of a strategy that has the GOP saying that given what happened to the financial system, of course we need more oversight and regulation of the financial system. But any particular piece of legislation that is proposed will be fought tooth and nail by the GOP as being far too intrusive, granting the government too much power, and generally going far beyond what is needed to solve the problem. The fact that the will for reform will diminish with time works in their favor, and if they can string things out long enough with this strategy, the result will be that the legislation eventually passes in a much weaker form, or it won't ever pass at all.

Just ignore them. Altering a few words:

The Republicans, with a few possible exceptions, have decided to do all they can to make the Obama administration a failure. Their role in the financial regulation debate is purely that of spoilers who keep shouting the old slogan — Government is always the problem, never the solution! — hoping that someone still cares.

This article was reposted from Mark Thoma's blog, Economist's View.

Warren Buffett Shares His Wisdom On The Current Economic Environment

The amazing Warren Buffett says he likes to spend $5 on lunch, but lunch with Buffett can cost much more. Last year a Chinese businessman bid $2.1 million to have lunch with Buffett. However, you can get some of Mr. Buffett's wisdom for free in the following post.

Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett talks with FOX Business Network’s Liz Claman about expensive lunches, his Goldman Sachs investments, the economy, and more.



Some highlights from the Oracle of Omaha after a $5 hamburger...

On whether he will cash out of Goldman Sachs:

No, no, no. I will keep those Goldman warrants right through their full -- they've got four and a quarter years or so to run. But I think we'll make a lot of money out of those.

On the possibility of the United States losing its AAA Rating:

As long as you're issuing money and you're issuing debt in your own currency, you can print money. The U.S. -- no, I think we will have a AAA for not only as long as I live, but as long as you live, which is more important.

Here's part 2...


On whether unemployment will continue to rise:

It’s going higher—business has not bounced back. We have not come off the bottom yet. It will work out in the end. Since 1776 it’s been a mistake to bet against America . America solves its problems. How soon, nobody knows. But we have not come off the bottom yet. And it will work out in the end.

On inflation in the United States :

What we’re doing raises the probability significantly of very significant inflation down the road—not this year or next year or the year after that, but we’ve taken actions and they were appropriate actions… it will have consequences and nobody knows exactly what they will be and how effective we will be at draining a system we’ve been flooding, but the probability of significant inflation has gone up.

Housing Metrics Improved In May But Could Be Temporary

There are some positive numbers coming out of the housing market from May. Sales of existing home prices rose, inventory decreased, and median sales price rose. But will this improvement last in the face of rising mortgage rates? Tim Iacono elaborates on the latest numbers.

The National Association of Realtors reported slightly higher sales of existing homes last month, up 2.4 percent to a seasonally adjusted, annualized rate of 4.77 units in May after a downwardly revised total of 4.66 million units in April.



Inventory declined modestly as the months of supply metric fell from 10.1 months to 9.6 months, still about double the historical average.

The median sales price rose 3.8 percent in May to $173,000, but the year-over-year change worsened to a decline of 16.8 percent. The realtors' trade group also reported a sharp decline in the number of distressed sales, falling to about one-third of all sales versus the 40 to 50+ percent in recent months.

The increase in sales was less than expected due to "poor" appraisals (i.e., ones that come in too low for the bank to confidently make a loan), NAR Chief Economist Lawrence Yun noting:

Lenders are using appraisers who may not be familiar with a neighborhood, or who compare traditional homes with distressed and discounted sales. In the past month, stories of appraisal problems have been snowballing from across the country with many contracts falling through at the last moment. There is danger of a delayed housing market recovery and a further rise in foreclosures if the appraisal problems are not quickly corrected.

It sounds as though not being familiar with the neighborhood might be a good thing if the aim is to get an objective appraisal and that using distressed sales is exactly the right thing to do since these dominate overall sales activity in many areas.

You just can't win as a real estate appraiser in the 21st century...

Importantly, the now two-month long move up in home sales has occurred during a time that mortgage rates were "freakishly" low. In May, the national average for a 30-year fixed-rate home loan was just 4.86 percent, up slightly from the 4.81 percent average in April, but significantly below the current rate of closer to 5.5 percent.

Next month's report should be full of intrigue regarding if and how higher mortgage rates are affecting the sales of existing homes.

This article can also be viewed at Tim Iacono's blog, The Mess That Greenspan Made.

Preventing Regulators From Favoring Commercial Interests

Is Obama's proposal for regulation doing enough to prevent regulators from acting in the best interest of financial companies? That is the question that is posed by WSJ columnist Thomas Frank. Economist Mark Thoma responds to Frank's criticism.

Thomas Frank says the administration's regulatory overhaul plan is not putting enough emphasis on the problem of regulatory capture:

Obama and 'Regulatory Capture', by Thomas Frank, Commentary, WSJ: ...We have just come through the most wrenching financial disaster in decades, brought about in no small part by either the absence of federal regulation or the amazing indifference of the regulators.

This is the moment for a ringing reclamation of the regulatory project. President Barack Obama is clearly the sort of man who could do it. But ... a white paper his administration released on the subject last week ... uses bland, impersonal explanations for the current crisis. Regulatory agencies were ill-designed... Their jurisdictions overlapped. They had blind spots. They had been obsolete for years.

All of which is true enough. What the report leaves largely unaddressed, however, is the political problem. ... The people who filled regulatory jobs in the past administration were asleep at the switch because they were supposed to be. ...

The reason for that is simple: There are powerful institutions that don't like being regulated. Regulation sometimes cuts into their profits... So they have used the political process to sabotage, redirect, defund, undo or hijack the regulatory state since the regulatory state was first invented.

The first federal regulatory agency, the Interstate Commerce Commission, was set up to regulate railroad freight rates in the 1880s. Soon thereafter, Richard Olney, a prominent railroad lawyer, came to Washington to serve as Grover Cleveland's attorney general. Olney's former boss asked him if he would help kill off the hated ICC. Olney's reply ... should be regarded as an urtext of the regulatory state:

"The Commission . . . is, or can be made, of great use to the railroads. It satisfies the popular clamor for a government supervision of the railroads, at the same time that that supervision is almost entirely nominal. Further, the older such a commission gets to be, the more inclined it will be found to take the business and railroad view of things. . . . The part of wisdom is not to destroy the Commission, but to utilize it."

The George W. Bush administration elevated this strategy to a snickering, sarcastic art form. It gave us a Food and Drug Administration that sometimes looked as though it was taking orders from Big Pharma, an Environmental Protection Agency that could never rouse itself from the recliner, an energy policy that might well have been dictated by Enron, and a Consumer Product Safety Commission that moved like a rusty wind-up toy.

And it created a situation where banking regulators posed for pictures with banking lobbyists while putting a chainsaw to a pile of regulations. ...

Misgovernment of this kind is not a partisan phenomenon, of course. Democrats have been guilty of it as well as Republicans. ... Yet today we talk around this problem, with its nose-on-your-face obviousness, as though it didn't exist. It's not until page 29 of the Obama administration's densely worded white paper that you find a reference to "regulatory capture," and then it is buried in a list of items to be considered by a future Treasury working group. ...

[T]he administration must go further. ... After all, the Bush team was only able to install the dreadful regulators it did because the governance of federal agencies was rarely a topic of public debate in those days. Mr. Obama should make it an unavoidable subject, something that future politicians will be required to address. The issue cries out for it. And the nation, for once, is listening.

I see this a little bit different. I think the regulatory capture that helped to open the door for the current crisis had more to do with the adoption and promotion of free market ideology and the culture that ideology brought about within the regulatory bodies than to direct capture by regulated industries.

The financial industry certainly promoted the free market, self-healing, self-regulating approach since it coincided with their interests in shedding regulatory constraints, and they also aided politicians who promoted these ideas. Those politicians, in turn, made appointments to key positions within regulatory agencies that were designed to further this ideology and that, too, contributed to the changing culture within the regulatory bodies.

But the idea that, in almost all cases cases markets will self-correct and self-regulate, and that society is best served with a hands off approach to these markets, did not originate within industry. It came from a dominant strain of economic thought supported by theoretical models and empirical evidence. Without the support of these models, the empirical evidence, and the many economists who carried the message - and most of the profession did - it would have been much more difficult for industry to successfully promote the "deregulation is good for everybody always and everywhere" within the political and regulatory arenas.

I don't want to be mistaken here, I still believe that most markets function well with minimal regulation, and that a hands off approach is generally best. But I hope we have learned that financial markets are not among the markets for which this is true. I also hope that, as a profession, we will be more receptive to the idea that markets can fail, and can do so catastrophically, that we will build models that help us to better understand how to minimize the risk that markets will break down, and more importantly that we will interpret data with this in mind. All of the data in the world is useless if you cannot see, refuse to see, or cannot accept what it is trying to tell you.

This article was reposted from Mark Thoma's blog, Economist's View.

Why A 'Jobless Recovery' Is Likely

Yesterday the World Bank warned of a long and painful recovery in most developed economies, echoing Bernanke's hints of a "Jobless Recovery". Martin Hutchinson from Money Morning gives 4 reasons that suggest a painfully slow economic recovery. See his argument below.

When the Labor Department recently reported that U.S. payrolls fell by 345,000 jobs in May - the lowest total in eight months - commentators were suddenly spotting “green shoots” of economic recovery virtually everywhere they looked.

Given that more than $800 billion of federal money has been earmarked for U.S. “stimulus” projects, one would actually expect that the frightening job losses of the past six months would quickly reverse, and that the U.S. economy would soon start creating the 3 million jobs that U.S. President Barack Obama has promised.

Unfortunately, that has not been the case.

That’s not to say that the outlook is for a Great Depression, an economic reversal in which a country’s output plummets by 25% or more from its peak level. While the current U.S. recession may well be the “worst since the Great Depression,” it’s becoming clear that the peak-to-trough output decline will be something like 5% - worse than the recessions of 1973-75 and 1980-82, both of which saw output declines of about 3.5%, but not all that much worse.

After all, the money supply has not been allowed to collapse as it did during the 1930s and there has been no repetition of the infamous Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, though the “Buy America” provisions in the original stimulus outline and the corresponding “Buy China” provisions in China’s corresponding package indicate that “Smoot-Hawleyism” still lurks just beneath the surface.

However, the following four factors make it almost certain that the U.S. economy will be slow:

• Record-low interest rates make it impossible for the U.S. central bank to use rate cuts to jump-start growth.

• The huge U.S. budget deficit will force the federal government to continue its heavy borrowing - potentially “crowding out” private-sector players seeking loans to finance their own growth.

• The growing size and influence of the U.S. public sector.

• And an over-growth of government regulation.

Let’s consider each one.

First and foremost, the U.S. Federal Reserve has loosened money supply inordinately over the last year, with short-term interest rates at 0.00% and money supply growth at 15% per annum. Thus, there is no Fed loosening available to spur employment.

Interest-rate-sensitive sectors - especially housing and construction - are likely to remain depressed for years. These sectors are major employers of low-skilled and semi-skilled labor, which will not be picking up their normal slack.

A second adverse factor is the exceptionally large federal budget deficit - expected to reach $1.85 trillion, or 13% of the U.S. economy, in this year alone, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO). That deficit will stretch several years into the future, thanks to the stimulus package and various bailouts initiatives.

In the short term, these rescue-oriented provisions have helped U.S. employment, not the least by allowing federal and state governments to do some hiring. But in the longer term, the federal borrowing they have caused will restrict the private sector’s access to the capital markets. That will hinder small businesses in particular. Indeed, the private sector will find it difficult to fund capital expansion, and again the result is likely to be a dearth of hiring.

A third adverse factor is the expansion of the public sector itself. To some extent, it does not matter how budget deficits are financed; the important consideration is the transfer of resources from the private sector - allocated by the automatic optimization of the so-called “price mechanism” - into the public sector, where no such considerations apply.

It’s not just a question of government itself; it’s now clear, for example, that Chrysler LLC and General Motors Corp. (OTC: GMGMQ) are to be controlled by the government - with subsidies - at our expense.

When General Motors announces, as the company did Wednesday, that it will build automobiles on the basis of an assumed oil price of $100-$120 per barrel, one sees at once a politically motivated strategy; GM will cease making the large cars that in the past have been its principal source of profit. If oil prices average $50 or less, as is perfectly possible in a long period of sluggish global growth, General Motors will be a mess - and will need to be bailed out by us again.

The late William F. Buckley Jr. once claimed that 500 names chosen at random from the Boston telephone book could do a better job of running the country than Congress; I wouldn’t mind betting that such a random selection would also make a better job of running General Motors than the government.

Related to the growth in government is the growth in regulation. For example, President Obama’s “cap-and-trade” plan to address global warming will impose a new tranche of costs on the U.S. economy, without any great offsetting spurs to employment. In areas such as energy production and heavy industry, employment will be depressed by the additional cost burdens those areas bring, as well as by the simple difficulty of complying with the new regulations.

To see where a larger state sector and more regulation can lead, one need only look at the European Union (EU). Whereas U.S. unemployment was below 5% for much of the last decade, the lowest rate reached since 2000 was 8.8% in the EU. What’s more is that certain areas of the EU have much worse records than this.

In Spain, for example, unemployment was close to 20% for much of the 1980s and 1990s, and has now soared once again to no less than 18.2%. The EU is not ensconced in a Great Depression and Spain remains a relatively wealthy country; nevertheless, the rigidities in the European system are such that unemployment remains persistently high, with adverse social effect, such as the rioting in the Paris banlieus.

The European Commission (EC) recognized this problem as early as the 1980s, and has been gradually pushing Europe towards the more open U.S. labor market, with only moderate success.

Because of over-loose money, excessive budget deficits, growing government and impending regulation, it is thus unlikely that the U.S. economy and its job market will bounce back as quickly as it has in the past.

The investment “takeaway” from this is obvious, I fear: A substantial part of one’s money should be invested in the free-market economies of East Asia, where regulation and taxation are lower, so even though a recession has also hit, recovery is likely to be much more robust.

This article can also be viewed at Money Morning's investment news site.

Big Week For US Dollar and Euro

How will the sell off of a record $104 billion in US Treasury notes affect the strength of the dollar? Meanwhile in Europe, Germany is facing a record debt of it's own. Forex expert Kathy Lien tells us what we should watch for this week in the foreign exchange market.

German business confidence improved marginally which should have been bullish for the euro, but unfortunately the most actively traded currency pair in the forex market has remained under pressure throughout the European and U.S. trading sessions. So if the EUR/USD is not responding to economic data then what is driving it lower?

Five factors:

1. U.S. Treasury Auction

One of the big focuses of foreign exchange traders this week is the massive Treasury auction. The U.S. government will be issuing a record $104 billion of 2 year, 5 year and 7 year Treasury notes between Tuesday and Thursday. The reason why currency traders are watching these auctions is because of its scale and also because it will shed some light on investor’s willingness to fund the U.S.’ large and growing budget deficit. The auctions will be a big hurdle for the U.S. dollar this week because if demand comes up short, the dollar could get hit but it is not that simple because at the same time, weak demand could drive up yields, which is dollar positive. Either way, over the next couple of days, there will be a lot of focus on the Treasury auctions.

2. First ever 12 month ECB refinancing

The ECB refinancing is the biggest story for the EUR/USD this week because the 12 month offer is seen by bond traders as a quasi quantitative easing effort by the ECB because the operations are most likely going to be collateralized by government bonds which can then be posted as collateral to the ECB for funding. Although ECB President Trichet warned that their monetary policy actions can be easily unwound if needed, he also said that policy makers must remain alert despite signs that the slump is decelerating because “there are still risks of a sudden emergence of unexpected financial turbulence.”

3. Fears that German Debt Could Explode

As for Germany, Deputy Finance Minister Werner Gatzer said that total new debt could exceed EUR100 billion next year, which would be much larger than this year’s record financing needs of EUR80 billion. Looking ahead, we could see further weakness in the EUR/USD if Tuesday’s PMI figures fall short of expectations. Despite the improvement in business confidence, which was driven entirely by the expectations component of the report, current conditions remain weak.

4. Comments from ECB President Trichet

Although ECB President Trichet warned that their monetary policy actions can be easily unwound if needed, he also said that policy makers must remain alert despite signs that the slump is decelerating because “there are still risks of a sudden emergence of unexpected financial turbulence.” These bearish comments came after ECB member Nowotny said this morning that interest rates could remain unchanged into 2010.

5. Tuesday’s PMI numbers

However in the near term, weaker economic data could keep the EUR/USD pressured. German industrial production, factory orders and retail sales have all declined which could prevent a meaningful pickup and possibly even deterioration in manufacturing and service sector PMI.

This article can also be viewed at Kathy Lien's foreign exchange blog.

Why Deflation Is More Likely Than Inflation

While many fear the possibility of inflation, Alan S. Blinder, Princeton professor and former economic adviser to President Clinton, explains why he is not worried about inflation. He argues that deflation is currently a greater danger. To learn why see the following from Economist's View.

Alan Blinder isn't worried about inflation:

Why Inflation Isn’t the Danger, by Alan S. Blinder, Economic View, NY Times: Some people with hypersensitive sniffers say the whiff of future inflation is in the air. ... Concluding that the Fed is leading us into inflation assumes a degree of incompetence that I simply don’t buy. Let me explain.

First, the clear and present danger, both now and for the next year or two, is not inflation but deflation. ... Core inflation near zero, or even negative, is a live possibility for 2010 or 2011.

Ben S. Bernanke ... and his colleagues have been working overtime to dodge the deflation bullet. To this end, they cut the Fed funds rate to virtually zero last December and have since relied on a variety of extraordinary policies known as quantitative easing to restore the flow of credit. ... But quantitative easing is universally agreed to be weak medicine compared with cutting interest rates. So the Fed is administering a large dose — which is where all those reserves come from.

The mountain of reserves on banks’ balance sheets has, in turn, filled the inflation hawks with apprehension. ... Will the Fed really withdraw all those reserves fast enough as the financial storm abates? If not, we could indeed experience inflation. Although the Fed is not infallible, I’d make three important points:

• The possibilities for error are two-sided. Yes, the Fed might err by withdrawing bank reserves too slowly, thereby leading to higher inflation. But it also might err by withdrawing reserves too quickly, thereby stunting the recovery and leading to deflation. I fail to see why advocates of price stability should worry about one sort of error but not the other.

• The Fed is well aware of the exit problem. It is planning for it... It might miss and produce, say, inflation of 3 percent or 4 percent at the end of the crisis — but not 8 or 10 percent.

• The Fed will start the exit process when the economy is still below full employment and inflation is below target. So some modest rise in inflation will be welcome. The Fed won’t have to clamp down hard.

...But if the inflation outlook is so benign, why have Treasury borrowing rates skyrocketed in the last few months? Is it because markets fear that the Fed will lose control of inflation? I think not. Rising Treasury rates are mainly a return to normalcy.

In January, the markets were expecting about zero inflation over the coming five years, and only about 0.6 percent average inflation over the next decade. The difference between then and now is that markets were in a panicky state in January, braced for financial Armageddon; they have since calmed down.

My conclusion? The markets’ extraordinarily low expected inflation in January was both aberrant and worrisome — not today’s. As long as expected inflation doesn’t rise much further, you should find something else to worry about. Unfortunately, choices abound.

This post can also be read at Economist's View.

What Decreasing Continuing Claims Mean For The Economy

Could the unexpected decline in continuing claims be evidence that the economy is turning around? Looking back at data from past recessions can uncover patterns that foreshadow the end of a recession. Kathy Lien has found such a pattern that may be good reason for optimism.

We had a number of surprises in U.S. economic data this morning including the Philly Fed index and leading indicators, but the biggest surprise was definitely the decline in continuing claims. Since the beginning of the year, continuing claims, which measures the number of people continuing to claim unemployment benefits rose week after week, forecasting the rapidly rising unemployment rate. Initial jobless claims are important as well, but they can be noisy and volatile.

There are 2 reasons why continuing claims has fallen - 1) people who have been on the unemployment rolls for a long time are falling off because they are no longer eligible for unemployment benefits 2) less companies are firing and more companies are hiring. I think that the latest improvement is a combination of both but regardless, a peak continuing claims always coincides with an end to the recession.

In the following chart, I have highlighted the trend of continuing claims at the end of each U.S. recession over the past 3 decades. As you can see, claims have always stabilized or peaked at the end of the recession. The lag between the end of the recession and the official peak in claims has ranged from 0 to 3 months.



This leads to the question of how the dollar performs after a recession. I did some research into this a month ago and posted my take on FX360.com (How Does the Dollar Perform after a Recession?):

In the past 30 years, there have been 3 recessions. The most recent lasted from March 2001 to November 2001, a period of 8 months. The one prior to that was in the early 1990s which lasted from July 1990 to March 1991. The current recession has been most commonly compared to the recession in the 1980s, which started in July 1981 and lasted until November 1982, a period of 14 months. We thought it would be interesting to see if there was a consistent trend in dollar after recessions and unfortunately based upon the limited data set of 3 recessions, we have found that the only pattern is the weakness of the dollar against the Japanese Yen 12 months after the recession. When the 2001 recession ended, the dollar traded higher against both the euro and Japanese Yen for the first 3 months but then gave back its gains over the next 8 months. In the 1990s, the dollar traded higher against the euro but lower against the Japanese Yen the first 3 months after the recession ended. The dollar fell further against the Yen but recovered its losses against the euro over the next 8 months. In the 1980s, the dollar fell in the first 3 months after the recession and continued to fall over the next 8 months against the Yen but recovered its losses against the euro.

This post can also be viewed at Kathy Lien's blog.

Healthcare Reform Could Push The US Over The Edge

Kenneth Rogoff, Harvard professor and former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, warns that expensive healthcare reform could lead to a financial crisis worse than we are currently experiencing. However, University of Oregon economics professor Mark Thoma disagrees with the assumption that reform would necessarily increase costs. See the following for a summary of Rogoff's commentary and Thoma's response in the following post from The Economist's View.

Kenneth "The Hawk" Rogoff:

America should also look to its fiscal health, by Kenneth Rogoff, Commentary, Financial Times:
America desperately needs a better framework for providing healthcare and Barack Obama’s administration is right to press on for change... Yet given the explosion of the federal debt, it is extremely important to craft a plan that will not excessively risk the government’s own fiscal health. The risks cannot easily be overstated.

The US government is already entering a prolonged period where it is extremely vulnerable to a loss in investor confidence from the Chinese and other main holders of its Treasury securities. Foreign investors are rightly concerned about the deeply ingrained reluctance of Americans to tax themselves. The last thing the US needs is to be viewed as one giant California, rich but unwilling to pay enough taxes to fund the services its citizens demand. A sharp rise in taxes to pay for healthcare initiatives could potentially weaken the credibility of the government’s promise to raise taxes as needed to pay off debtors. ...

[I]n principle, fixing the imbalances in the Social Security and, especially, the Medicare programmes could provide a powerful offset to the huge increase in debt burdens visited by the financial crisis.

Unfortunately, the idea that healthcare reform will alleviate debt problems rather than exacerbate them is far-fetched..., many proposed healthcare reforms are more likely to worsen the government’s budgetary health than to improve it. This should hardly be surprising, given that a main purpose of reform is to help provide better care for Americans who cannot afford insurance.

Higher taxes to pay for healthcare are also likely to reduce US growth, making it far more difficult to escape the debt trap. This comes at a time when other policy initiatives, such as tackling environmental degradation and income inequality, are also likely to imply higher tax burdens... In addition, the continuing weakness of the financial sector weighs on growth, and it is by no means clear yet when and how some semblance of normality will be restored. ...

All of these considerations appear to underscore the importance of finding ways to keep the new health plan from being overly burdensome, and to avoid unduly optimistic projections on efficiency savings. Healthcare reform is no substitute for finding a credible path to fiscal sustainability. ...

Make no mistake, the US and much of the developed world is in a frighteningly precarious fiscal state. ... It is a disgrace that the world’s richest country cannot provide reliable basic care for its poorest citizens. But if the politics of reform produces too extravagant a plan when the nation’s fiscal health is already so weak, the US may experience a form of financial crisis even more virulent than the one it is recovering from. Any healthcare plan would then be dead on arrival.

Setting the fear mongering about the future aside - and there's no evidence in long-term interest rates that financial market participants are worried about these issues - here are a few things to keep in mind when thinking about health care reform First, it is not a demographic problem. This graph is from a CBO presentation on this point, and is fairly self-explanatory:



Second, rising health care costs is not just an issue for Medicare and Medicaid, the same rise in costs is also projected to hit private sector health care. Again, from the CBO:



Projected Spending on Health Care Under an Assumption That Excess Cost Growth Continues at Historical Averages (Percentage of GDP)

Going back to the question of the effect of health care reform on the long-run budget, though expanding coverage will expand increase the total amount of medical care that is provided, and hence increase costs, there seems to be some confusion between expanding overall coverage and simply moving the dividing line between the public and private sectors upward so that the public sector expands and the private sector contracts by the same amount. Changing the dividing line, all else equal, simply changes how the bills are paid, it has no effect at all on the overall health care burden that people face (it moves the dividing line in a graph like the one above showing the public and private sectors explcitly without changing the total area). So it's hard to see why higher taxes driven by this type of a change would have the negative economic effects Rogoff is worried about.

But he is more worried that expanding the size of the public sector both by moving the dividing line up and by including more people - the latter in particular - will increase increases health care costs and add to the debt burden, which in turn would require higher taxes. Is that true? It would if the only effect of the expansion of the public sector was to increase the number of people receiving care, and his claim that costs won't fall, or at least not by much, presumes this is how it will work. But when we look at other countries that have substantially expanded the public sector we see lower costs - on the order of 50% lower - and no reduction in the quality of the care that people receive. That's a huge reduction in costs, a reduction large enough to allow a significant expansion of coverage without increasing costs at all. I don't think we'll reduce costs by that magnitude, 50% seems like a lot to hope for, but it does imply that it's possible to reform the system without compromising quality or experiencing the dire consequences Rogoff fears.

This article has been reposted from the Economist's View. The full post can also be viewed on the Economist's View.

Adjustable Rate Mortgages Could Fuel The Next Wave Of Foreclosures

The record number of foreclosures may not include a large pool of adjustable rate mortgages that are scheduled to increase in the next few years. This ticking time bomb could cause an aftershock of foreclosures hitting the market in the future, even after the current wave ends. Dan Rafter from Mortgage Roadmap explains.

I'd like to think that we've seen the worst of the foreclosure crisis. I'd like to think that we'll be seeing fewer homes fall into foreclosure, and fewer homeowners missing their mortgage payments.

I'd like to think all that. Unfortunately, I can't.

What I really think is that the number of housing foreclosures is only going to rise in the coming months. And, unfortunately, many economic analysts agree with me.

A story in the Miami Herald focuses on the plight of homeowners who during the housing boom took out option adjustable rate mortgages. In these type of loans, borrowers can decide to pay less than what their monthly balance is. The difference is simply added to borrowers' outstanding loan balances.

The big problem — other than the fact that too many borrowers have delayed paying down the principal on their mortgage loans by using these products — is that many of these option adjustable rate mortgages are set to adjust to higher interest rates between 2009 and 2012. Many homeowners won't be able to make the higher monthly mortgage payments that result. At the same time, they won't be able to refinance because they won't have paid off enough on their home loans.

Because home values have fallen drastically over the last two years, many homeowners with these mortgage products will actually owe more on their homes than what they are worth.

Some financial experts believe that the wave of foreclosures we'll see from these loans will rival or better the wave we're seeing now.

This, of course, is just more bad news for an industry that's already reeling.

This article can also be viewed at Mortgage Roadmap.

Why Hyperinflation Is Unlikely

While there have been concerns about hyperinflation of late, there hasn't been much evidence of actual inflation. Tim Iacono from The Mess That Greenspan Made argues that we will probably never see an annual double-digit inflation rate. See the following article to find out why.

Some looked at the inflation statistics released by the Labor Department earlier today and said, "See? Deflation is here!"

Others looked at the same set of price data and replied, "See? Inflation is stirring".

They can't both be right, but they can both be wrong (or at least early).

The annual rate of inflation, measured against the price level of May 2008 (back when gasoline and other commodity prices were soaring), came in at less than minus one percent causing deflationists around the world to rejoice, yet stop short of getting out the bubbly.

Why?

Because, so far, this deflation is the Japanese variety, a wimpy version of the much more serious double-digit deflation as seen in the 1930s which, unfortunately, most deflationists fail to understand is no longer within the realm of the possible, unless of course we go back to something like a gold standard instead of printing up new money by the trillions of dollars to replace the dollars that are being vaporized in the ongoing waves of credit destruction.

Then again, since the Consumer Price Index has been effectively neutered by a 25 percent weighting of owners equivalent rent that, while purportedly representing homeownership costs, instead serves to dampen reported inflation. No matter what home prices or mortgage payments do, owners equivalent rent always seems to rise at an annual rate of two percent (even when home prices are falling by ten times that amount) serving as an anchor on the government inflation data.

Due to owners' equivalent rent, the U.S. may never see another double-digit annual rate of inflation - positive or negative.

These days, as far as government reported inflation is concerned, it's all about energy prices and, there, those seeing deflation have something to look at.



Most of the year-over-year change in the overall consumer price index is either directly or indirectly related to the energy price peak last summer and comparisons to it, serving to distort whatever meaning the price index still contains.

But, the intriguing aspect of this morning's report on consumer prices is that you can see in-flation in the data too. After all, gasoline prices have soared more than 70 percent from about six months ago demonstrating the very real difference between $35 a barrel oil and the much more dear $70 type.

Inflationists (and the much more rabid "hyper-inflationists") look at this recent rise in energy prices and figure it to be a sure sign of things to come, what with all the government money printing that has occurred lately - a lot of the newly printed money seems to be going into the black goo.



Anything that doubles in price over a six month period should grab your attention and, whether or not crude oil prices remain lofty in the months ahead is anything but assured, but it's important to remember that present day oil prices are still more than 200 percent higher than the average of the last few decades.

That was the era of modest inflation that many people naively think we're about to return to.

But, that period was really just a fluke.

Never again will the world have cheap, plentiful oil at the same time that clothes, electronics, and other goods are produced at cut-rate prices in the East, only to be sold in the West, and subsequently included in the West's inflation data.

Those seeing inflation in today's data see a world where prices are very different than they were in the latter years of the 20th century, the late-2008 plunge in prices being just a temporary setback to the inevitable higher prices to come.

In the scheme of things, what happened from early-2008 to early-2009 will probably prove to be quite irrelevant - either a blip that quickly fades from memory or a blip that is eventually dwarfed by other much larger blips.

It's way too early to tell.

However, what is quite easy to discern after the last year or so of price data, is that we've entered a very different world of consumer prices and even owners' equivalent rent may not be able to dampen the effects of the price moves in the years ahead.

We probably won't know for sure until sometime in 2010 whether we'll get debilitating deflation or hyper-inflation, though both remain unlikely, at least in my view.

The current inflation numbers are largely meaningless and anyone who reads too much into them does so at their own peril.

This post can also be viewed on themessthatgreenspanmade.blogspot.com.

A Period of Economic Transition

With the prevailing wisdom pointing toward an economic recovery in the near future, the economy is likely entering a transitional period. The longer than average recession will probably mean a longer than usual transitory period. James Picerno from The Capital Spectator discusses what this transitory state could look like.

Flat to a slight upside bias. That about sums up the prevailing state of inflation at the moment, based on this morning's latest from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Seasonally adjusted consumer inflation rose 0.1% last month, up from zero the month before and a modest decrease in March. On its face, that's good news, as it suggests that the risk of deflation, if not quite passed, is looking more and more like a shadow of its formerly threatening self. Meanwhile, inflation as a clear and present danger also remains thin as an imminent menace.

We are in a transitory state, passing from severe danger to something less so. Anything's possible, of course, especially in the current climate. But barring some extraordinary and largely unexpected event, we're likely to press on through what we'll call a pre-recovery period, when the economic numbers improve relative to the recent past yet the numbers don't quite show the traditional bounce that typically accompanies the end of recessions.

"The economy seems to be out of intensive care," says David Shulman, senior economist at UCLA Anderson School of Management. "The freefall stage in dropping output and employment seems to be over, but the economy is still sick."

The prospect of false starts in the data looks quite high in the months ahead. The good news on one day will be reversed by bad news the next, and quite a bit of treading water at other times. The transition state that carries us from recession to growth, in short, will last longer than usual. The evidence will be particularly obvious in the lagging indicators, employment being the most conspicuous example. Indeed, the labor market is still shrinking and will probably continue to do so in the months ahead, perhaps followed by an extended bottoming-out period over several quarters. The economy's capacity to create jobs is likely to come later and be more tepid than has typically been the case following the end of recessions in the post-war era.

Extending the medical metaphor, Bruce Kasman, chief economist for JPMorgan Chase, predicts in BusinessWeek.com yesterday that "the economy will return to growth but not to health."

Last week we wrote of the "technical end" of the recession and our expectation that NBER would eventually get around to declaring the downturn's finish at, well, right about now, give or take a few months. That's good news relative to the recent standard of economic activity. But the technical demise of the recession isn't likely to bring easily recognizable good news on Main Street anytime soon.

As frustrating as that outlook is, it's even more hazardous than is generally recognized. If we're facing an unusually long transition period, there are specific risks linked to this abnormal state of affairs. That includes figuring out how and when to adjust monetary policy to balance two conflicting forces: deflation and inflation. As the former gives way, the latter isn't likely to suddenly pop out and yell "boo." Nonetheless, the future inflation risk isn't trivial, given the massive liquidity that's been created of late and the historical lessons that go with fiat currencies. As we discussed on Monday, the elevated risk this time around will be one of deciding magnitude and timing in adjusting monetary policy going forward. That's always a challenge, although it's likely to be especially problematic in the quarters ahead. Tightening monetary policy too soon may risk choking off a nascent but weak recovery; waiting too long to raise interest rates may give inflation a solid foundation to thrive, an especially troubling thought, given the massive amount of debt incurred over the last 12 months or so.

Overall, economic analysis faces unusually tough times in reading the incoming data and drawing reasonable conclusions about the implications for the future. As a basic example, our proprietary index of economic indicators, published in each issue of The Beta Investment Report, is currently flashing a robust sign of recovery, although this may be misleading because much of the rise has come from monetary policy and, so far, isn't convincingly corroborated in the real economy.

In short, interpreting the economic outlook promises to be quite difficult going forward, much more so than usual. Beware: The risk of false dawns is rising.

This post can also be viewed on capitalspectator.com.

George Soros and Robert Reich: How To Reform The Financial System

Two very smart financial minds, legendary currency trader George Soros and former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich, share how they would reform the financial system. The people in charge of this momentous task would be wise to listen to what Soros and Reich propose. See the following post by Economist Mark A. Thoma from The Economist's View.

First, Robert Reich:

The Three Essentials of Financial Reform, by Robert Reich: As the White House unveils its long-awaited proposals to prevent another Wall Street meltdown in the future, keep a lookout for three essentials. Without them the Street will revert to its old ways as soon as the coast clears. ...

1. Stop bankers from making huge, risky bets with other peoples’ money. At the least, require they back their bets with a large percentage of their own capital, and bar them from raising money off their balance sheets through derivative trades. Also require they take their pay in stock options or warrants that can’t be cashed in for at least three years, so they’ll take a longer-term view. Best of all would be a requirement that investment banks return to being partnerships and the capital on their books be their own, not yours or your pension fund’s. When investment banks were partnerships, every partner took an active interest in what every other partner and trader was doing. The real mischief started once they started selling shares to the public.

2. Prevent any bank from becoming too big to fail. Separate commercial from investment banking... Combining the basic utility with the casino only made bankers far richer and subjected you and me to risks we didn’t bargain for. If separating commercial from investment banking isn’t enough to bring all banks down to reasonable size, use antitrust laws to break them up.

3. Root out three major conflicts of interest. (1) Credit-rating agencies should no longer be paid by the companies whose issues are being rated; they should be paid by those who use their ratings. (2) Institutional investors like pension funds and mutual funds should not be getting investment advice from the same banks that profit off their investments... (3) the regional Feds that are responsible for much bank oversight should no longer be headed by presidents appointed by the region’s bankers; non-bankers should have the major say, and the regional presidents should have to be confirmed by the Senate.

..[T]he big bankers will fight every one of these with all guns blazing, and their lobbyists in full force. ... Bottom line: Genuine financial reform will be almost as difficult to achieve as real universal health care. Immense private interests are amassed against the public interest in both cases because staggering amounts of money are at stake. ...

Second, George Soros:

The three steps to financial reform, by George Soros, Commentary, Financial Times: ...I am not an advocate of too much regulation. ... While markets are imperfect, regulators are even more so. ... Three principles should guide reform. First, since markets are bubble-prone, regulators must accept responsibility for preventing bubbles from growing too big. Alan Greenspan ... expressly refused that responsibility. ...

Second,... we must also control the availability of credit..., we must ... use credit controls such as margin requirements and minimum capital requirements. ... Margin and minimum capital requirements should be adjusted to suit market conditions ... to forestall ... bubbles.

Third, we must reconceptualise the meaning of market risk. The efficient market hypothesis postulates that markets tend towards equilibrium and deviations occur in a random fashion...

But the efficient market hypothesis is unrealistic. Markets are subject to imbalances... If too many participants are on the same side, positions cannot be liquidated without causing a discontinuity or, worse, a collapse. In that case the authorities may have to come to the rescue. That means that there is systemic risk ... in addition to the risks most market participants perceived prior to the crisis.

The securitisation of mortgages added a new dimension of systemic risk. Financial engineers claimed they were reducing risks through geographic diversification: in fact they were increasing them by creating an agency problem. The agents were more interested in maximising fee income than in protecting the interests of bondholders. ...

To avert a repetition, the agents must have “skin in the game” but the five per cent proposed by the administration is more symbolic than substantive. ...

It is probably impractical to separate investment banking from commercial banking as the US did with the Glass Steagull Act of 1933. But there has to be an internal firewall...

Finally, I have strong views on the regulation of derivatives. The prevailing opinion is that they ought to be traded on regulated exchanges. That is not enough. The issuance and trading of derivatives ought to be as strictly regulated as stocks. ... Custom made derivatives only serve to improve the profit margin of the financial engineers designing them. In fact, some derivatives ought not to be traded at all. ... Consider the recent bankruptcy of AbitibiBowater and that of General Motors. In both cases, some bondholders owned CDS and stood to gain more by bankruptcy than by reorganisation. It is like buying life insurance on someone else’s life and owning a licence to kill him. CDS are instruments of destruction that ought to be outlawed.

Third, in response to this, and more generally to the recent argument that calls to extend regulation to the shadow banking sector are unfounded because this sector had nothing to do with the crisis (which is incorrect), for the second time recently here's well-know socialist sympathizer Robert Lucas, the Nobel prize winning economist at the University of Chicago. It seems he also favors extending regulation to the unregulated banking sector:

The regulatory structure that permitted these events to occur will have to be redesigned... The regulatory problem that needs to be solved is roughly this: The public needs a conveniently provided medium of exchange that is free of default risk or "bank runs." The best way to achieve this would be to have a competitive banking system with government-insured deposits.

But this can only work if the assets held by these banks are tightly regulated. If such an equilibrium could be reached, it would still be possible for an institution outside this regulated system to offer deposits that are only slightly more risky but that also pay a higher return than deposits at the regulated banks. Some consumers and firms will find this attractive and switch their deposits. But if everyone does, the regulations will no longer protect anyone. The regulatory structure designed in the 1930s seemed to solve this problem for 60 years, but something else will be needed for the next 60.

And you don't need everyone to switch, just enough to create systemic risk.

This article has been reposted from the Economist's View. The full post can also be viewed on the Economist's View.