Big US Banks Make Laughable Excuses for Preserving Failed Universal Bank Model

In today’s lead story at the Financial Times, Big US banks defy calls that they should be broken up, American megabanks make clear that they don’t think much of the financial savvy of investors or the business press. In quarterly earning calls, bank analysts were pressing executives on the news reports that former Goldman exec, now director of the National Economic Council Gary Cohn told senators last week told a group of senators that he was in favor of Glass-Steagall break-up-the-banks style legislation.

Our comments:

Wake me up when this gets serious. Cohn made it clear that he supported a breakup bill. While Trump has also said he wanted to revive Glass-Steagall, he didn’t say that very often on the campaign trail and there are many things he did say often and pretty consistently, like questioning why the US is carrying so much of the cost of NATO, he’s either reversed himself or is now backing a weak-tea version that his base regards as a sellout, such as Trump’s promises about NAFTA. Plus any Glass-Steagall type bill gets passed only over rabid anti-regulation House Financial Services committee chairman Jeb Hensarling’s dead body.

Don’t buy Jamie Dimon’s Brooklyn Bridge. Big complicated banks are not good for investors, no matter how much banks put their hands on their hearts and try to convince you otherwise. Here was the argument, per the pink paper:

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Tech Stocks Experience Their Longest Losing Streak In 5 Years As Panic Begins To Grip The Market

S&P 500 tech stocks have now fallen for 9 days in a row.  The last time tech stocks declined for so many days in a row was in 2012, and that was the only other time in history when we have seen such a long losing streak.  As I have stated before, the post-election “Trump rally” is officially done, and the market is starting to roll over as investors begin to realize that all of the buying momentum has completely evaporated.  Tech stocks tend to be particularly volatile, and so the fact that they are starting to lead the way down should definitely be alarming to many in the investing community.

Of course it isn’t just tech stocks that are falling.  The Dow was down another 59 points on Wednesday, and the S&P 500 has closed beneath its 50 day moving average for the very first time since the election.  For those that have been waiting for a key technical signal before getting out of the market, there is one for you.

The price of gold was up again, and that is definitely not surprising in this geopolitical environment.  The closer we get to war the higher gold and silver prices will go, and if we actually get into a major conflict we will see them blast into the stratosphere.

Another key indicator that I am watching very closely is the VIX.  On Wednesday it shot up above 16 for the very first time since the day after Trump’s election victory, and many believe that it could soon go much higher.  The following is an excerpt from a CNBC report…

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IMF Blames Fall of Middle Class on Globalization and Technology

This sort of orthodoxy-reinforing narrative is deeply frustrating, particularly since the research side of the IMF, unlike the program side, often does very good work.

One of the big problem of reports like this is they never consider the question that income distribution is a function of political and social arrangements, and in particular, the rights of capital versus labor. It is hardly an accident that labor stopped sharing in the benefits of productivity gains in the mid 1970s, well before globalization and technology would have played much of a role. The big culprit was loss of labor bargaining power, which become official policy due to Volcker committing the Fed to creating more labor slack to keep inflation as close to his preferred target of zero as possible, and the Reagan/Thatcher “free market” fetish.

Now in fairness, some of the problems with a report like this are the difficulty of unpacking critical issues. For instance, as we’ve discussed regularly, the amount of offshoring of jobs that took place was considerably more than was justified by profit concerns. Direct factory labor is a small percentage of wholesale product cost; savings there are offset by greater managerial, finance, and transport costs, plus higher risks. In others words, offshoring and outsourcing are often, if not mainly, a transfer from low level workers to management rather than a bona-fide plus to the business. So while it is narrowly correct to say that globalization has been a big driver of middle class losses, analyses like that are misleading because they focus on proximate causes, not ultimate causes.

This report also misses another increasingly recognized driver of inequality, which is the lack of anti-trust enforcement which in turns leads to monopoly and oligopoly rent extraction. And it ignores a huge transfer from ordinary citizens to the capital-owning classes via subsidies. The banking industry is a huge example, where as we’ve written repeatedly, its operations are purely extractive (the cost of periodic crises greatly exceeds the value of the enterprises) and it enjoys such large subsidies that it should not be regarded as private enterprise. Banks should be regulated as utilities.

Similarly, an op ed in Links today describes the magnitude of subsidies extracted by WalMart: roughly $50 per American household per year. That is equivalent to 1/4 of its 2014 pre-tax profits, and an even higher percentage of its US pretax profits.

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Rent Control Makes For Good Politics And Bad Economics

One needn’t read very much about public policy before coming across some statement to the effect that “bad economics makes good politics.” This statement is clearly untrue when good politics is defined as furthering mutually beneficial arrangements, as good economics is central to that task. But the statement is often true when good politics is defined as attracting 50%-plus-one votes on some issue or candidate, which is a much different standard, leaving plenty of room for government-imposed harms to be imposed on citizens.

Few issues reflect this divergence between “good” politics and bad economics more clearly than rent control. One of the most universally accepted propositions among economists is that rent control produces a host of adverse social consequences with its large involuntary redistribution of wealth and suppression of market prices as communicators of information and incentives. Despite that, it has been adopted as policy in many places and times — and now is a good time to revisit these issues, as efforts are currently underway in several states (including California, Oregon, Washington, and Illinois) to repeal existing statewide restrictions on rent control.

How Rent Control Destroys Value 

Rent control takes a large portion of the value of residential properties from landlords. It does so by removing owners’ rights to accept offers willingly made by potential renters. And the value of the rights involved are large. For example, after Toronto imposed rent control in 1975, affected building values fell by 40% over five years, and a decade ago, such losses were estimated at $120 million annually in Santa Monica. A law like rent control, which can take half or more of each apartment’s value from the landlord, harms them just as much taking away half of their apart­ments, even though the latter is recognized as theft. Those stripped property values are given to current tenants, whose resulting bonanzas are shown by the fact that those under strict rent control almost never leave.

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The Debt Crisis Of 2017: Once Their Vacation Ends, Congress Will Have 4 Days To Avoid A Government Shutdown On April 29

April 2017 could turn out to be one of the most important months in U.S. history that we have seen in a very long time.  On April 6th, Donald Trump attacked Syria on the 100th anniversary of the day that the U.S. officially entered World War I, and now at the end of this month we could be facing an unprecedented political crisis in Washington.  On Friday, members of Congress left town for their two week “Easter vacation”, and they won’t resume work until April 25th.  What this means is that Congress will have precisely four days when they get back to pass a bill to fund government operations or there will be a government shutdown starting on April 29th.

Up to this point, there has been very little urgency by either party to move a spending bill forward.  It is almost as if everyone is already resigned to the fact that a government shutdown will happen.  The Democrats will greatly benefit from a government shutdown because they can just blame the entire mess on the Republicans.  But for the GOP, this is essentially the equivalent of political malpractice.

To me, there is simply no way that Congress is going to be able to agree on a bill that funds the entire government in just four days.  And it turns out that this upcoming deadline comes exactly on the 100th day of Trump’s presidency…

The U.S. government is poised to shut down on Day 100 of Donald Trump’s presidency, unless Congress can pass a new spending bill or a continuing resolution before the current one expires on April 28.

Since Congress is currently on a two-week recess, there will be a sense of urgency to get a new bill passed once they reconvene on April 25. Leaders in both chambers would have four days to craft a new proposal that each side can agree on and get it on the president’s desk for Trump to sign.

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Amazon Discovers the High Cost of Being Poor

Sometimes financial services industry mouthpieces inadvertently give the game away. When this happens – and a tame bank-friendly publication runs a story which aims to fulfil their role as boosters and palliatives for what outside their bubbles is an industry which is beyond redemption – the results are often amusing. If they try to brush the problems big finance causes to media darlings like Amazon under the rug, they look even more ridiculous when their attempts at finessing them away draws even more attention back to the underlying issue.

Once such example comes from big finance’s Mrs. Malaprop, the American Banker. To save weary readers from having to parse the whole article, in this piece American Banker made even by their standards a risible effort to re-tread Amazon’s press release in which Amazon announced to an eager public how it was going to “help” customers give founder Jeff Bezos (who in my mind is living proof of what happens when you cross breed a unicorn and a bunny boiler) even more money.

To cut American Banker’s long story short — by which I am sure I am performing a community service — Amazon now offers customers a means of crediting their Amazon account with funds which they deposit at a range of partner bricks-and-mortar retail outlets. There are some shenanigans with a smartphone app, bar codes, optional Apple Pay or Android Pay snooping, trips to the store to pay in cash and so forth which you can read about in American Banker’s explanation but — to cut to the chase — the new service means that if you have cash, you can get that cash into your Amazon account without needing to have access to a credit or debit card.

The unintentionally amusing aspect of this rah-rah’ing from Amazon and American Banker is that it accidentally highlights a significant issue for so-called New Economy players such as Amazon. The problem for non-traditional retailers and service providers who lack physical premises is that it is very difficult for them to be able to handle customers who either don’t want to pay by credit or debit card or, more intractably, don’t have a debit or credit card in the first place.

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Euro Saves Germany, Slaughters the PIGS, & Feeds the BLICS

The change in nations Core populations (25-54yr/olds) have driven economic activity for the later half of the 20th century, first upward and now downward.  The Core is the working population, the family forming population, the child bearing population, the first home buying, and the credit happy primary consumer.  Even a small increase (or contraction) in their quantity drives economic activity magnitudes beyond what the numbers would indicate.

To highlight the linkage of Core populations to economic activity, the chart below shows the European 25-54yr/old population vs. the best indicator of economic activity, total energy consumption (data available starting from 1980).  The implications are pretty straightforward.  European economic activity (& resultant energy consumption) will contract for decades, at a minimum, with the declining Core population.  The pie is shrinking and now it's simply a fight for who gets bigger slices.

Given this, consider Germany was well aware of it's post WWII collapsing birth rate and the impact of this on economic growth as this shrinking population of young made it's way into the Core.  Consider Germany's Core population peaked in 1995 and it's domestic consumer base has been shrinking since, now down over 3.3 million potential consumers (about a 9% Core decline...remember a depression is a 10% decline in economic activity, which a 9% and growing decline in German consumers would have almost surely induced).

GERMANY

The chart below shows Germany's Core population from 1950-->2040...but understand this is no guestimate through 2040.  This is simply taking the existing 0-24yr/old population (plus anticipated immigration) and sliding them into the Core through 2040.  Germany's Core population is set to fall by over 30% or 10+ million by 2040 (far more than the 7 million Germans of all ages who died in WWII).

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"We Have A Serious Problem": For Jamie Dimon, This Is The Most Troubling Chart About The US Economy

As discussed earlier, Jamie Dimon's annual letter this year was a departure from his usual optimistic sermons about the state of nation, dedicating an entire section in the 45 page letter to  describe that "something is wrong" with the US. And of all the items mentions, the following aspect of the US economy is what was most troubling to the JPM CEO. Not surprisingly, it deals with two of the biggest threats facing the US currently: demographics and labor, and shows the at least in one key economic metric, the US is now the worst among the entire universe of developed countries.

This is what Dimon said:

Labor force participation in the United States has gone from 66% to 63% between 2008 and today. Some of the reasons for this decline are understandable and aren’t too worrisome – for example, an aging  population. But if you examine the data more closely and focus just on labor force participation for one key segment; i.e., men ages 25-54, you’ll see that we have a serious problem. The chart below shows that in America, the participation rate for that cohort has gone from 96% in 1968 to a little over 88% today. This is way below labor force participation in almost every other developed nation. 

Labor force participation in the United States has gone from 66% to 63% between 2008 and today. Some of the reasons for this decline are understandable and aren’t too worrisome – for example, an aging  population. But if you examine the data more closely and focus just on labor force participation for one key segment; i.e., men ages 25-54, you’ll see that we have a serious problem. The chart below shows that in America, the participation rate for that cohort has gone from 96% in 1968 to a little over 88% today. This is way below labor force participation in almost every other developed nation.

If the work participation rate for this group went back to just 93% – the current average for the other developed nations – approximately 10 million more people would be working in the United States. Some other highly disturbing facts include: Fifty-seven percent of these non-working males are on disability, and fully 71% of today’s youth (ages 17–24) are ineligible for the military due to a lack of proper education (basic reading or writing skills) or health issues (often obesity or diabetes).

Incidentally, Dimon's key concern was initially flagged here back in 2013 and most recently, last summer. For the remainder of the US economic problems listed by Dimon, please refer to the original article.

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The Next Subprime Crisis Is Here: 12 Signs That A Day Of Reckoning Has Arrived For The U.S. Auto Industry

In 2008, subprime mortgages almost single-handedly took down the entire financial system, and now a new subprime crisis is here.  In recent years, the auto industry has been able to boost sales by aggressively pushing people into auto loans that they cannot afford.  In particular, auto loans made to consumers with subprime credit have been accounting for an increasingly larger percentage of the market.  Unfortunately, when you make loans to people that should not be getting them, eventually a lot of those loans are going to start to go bad, and that is precisely what is happening now.  Meanwhile, automakers and dealers are starting to panic as sales have begun to fall and used car prices have started to crash. If you work in the auto industry, you might remember how horrible the last recession was, and this new downturn could eventually turn out to be even worse.  The following are 12 signs that a day of reckoning has arrived for the U.S. auto industry…

#1 Seven out of the eight largest automakers in the United States fell short of their sales projections in March.

#2 Overall, U.S. auto sales so far in 2017 have been described as a “disaster” despite record spending on consumer incentives by automakers.

#3 Dealer inventories are now at the highest level that we have seen since the last financial crisis.  Why this is so troubling is because there are a whole lot of unsold vehicles just sitting there doing nothing, and this is becoming a major financial problem for many dealers.

#4 It now takes an average of 74 days before a dealer is able to sell a new vehicle.  This number is also the highest that it has been since the last financial crisis.

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What Is America Going To Look Like When Stocks, Home Prices And Even Used Cars All Crash By At Least 50 Percent?

Have you ever thought about what comes after the bubble?  In 2008 we got a short preview of what life will be like, but most Americans seem to have come to the conclusion that the last financial crisis was just a minor bump in the road toward endless economic prosperity.  But of course the truth is that the ridiculously high debt-fueled standard of living that we are enjoying now is not sustainable, and after this bubble bursts it will be an extremely painful adjustment for our society.

Since the last financial crisis, the U.S. national debt has nearly doubled, corporate debt has doubled, stock valuations have reached exceedingly ridiculous extremes, the student loan debt bubble has surpassed a trillion dollars, we are facing the largest unfunded pension crisis in U.S. history, and in many parts of the country (particularly the west coast) we are facing a housing bubble that is even worse than the one that burst in 2007 and 2008.

And even with all of these bubbles, U.S. GDP growth has been absolutely anemic.  Even if you believe the grossly manipulated numbers that the federal government puts out, the U.S. economy grew at a “miserably low” rate of just 1.6 percent in 2016…

In terms of GDP, the fourth quarter was revised up slightly, but there were adjustments for prior quarters, and overall GDP growth for the year 2016 remained at a miserably low 1.6%. We’ve come to call this the “stall speed.” It’s difficult for the US economy to stay aloft at this slow speed. As Q4 gutted any hopes for a strong finish, GDP growth in 2016 matched the worst year since the Great Recession.

And corporate profits, despite a stock market that has been surging for years, are even worse. A lot worse. They’ve declined for years. In fact, they declined for years during the prior two stock market bubbles, the dotcom bubble and the pre-Financial-Crisis bubble. Both ended in crashes.

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The Ticking Time Bomb That Will Wipe Out Virtually Every Pension Fund In America

Are millions of Americans about to see the big, juicy pensions that they were counting on to fund their golden years go up in flames in the biggest financial disaster in U.S. history? When Bloomberg published an editorial entitled “Pension Crisis Too Big for Markets to Ignore“, it simply confirmed what a lot of people already knew to be true.  Pension funds all over America are woefully underfunded, and they have been pouring mind boggling amounts of money into very risky investments such as Internet stocks and commercial mortgages.  Just like with subprime mortgages in 2008, this is a crisis that everyone can see coming well in advance, and yet nothing is being done about it.

On a day to day basis, Americans generally don’t think very much about pensions.  Most of those that have been promised pensions simply have faith that they will be there when they need them.

Unfortunately, the truth is that pension plans all over the country are severely underfunded, and this has already resulted in local fiascos such as the one that we just witnessed in Dallas.

But what happened in Dallas is just the very small tip of a very large iceberg.  According to Bloomberg, unfunded pension obligations on a national basis “have risen to $1.9 trillion from $292 billion since 2007″…

As was the case with the subprime crisis, the writing appears to be on the wall. And yet calamity has yet to strike. How so? Call it the triumvirate of conspirators – the actuaries, accountants and their accomplices in office. Throw in the law of big numbers, very big numbers, and you get to a disaster in a seemingly permanent state of making. Unfunded pension obligations have risen to $1.9 trillion from $292 billion since 2007.

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You Know It's A Global Debt Bubble When...

With analysts noting that markets are "taking the Fed's tightening policy in their stride," demand for emerging-markets debt is so strong that Bloomberg reports one of Asia's poorest nations is mulling a debut dollar-bond sale... Papua New Guinea.

The southwest Pacific nation plans to raise $500 million in five-year bonds, central bank governor Loi Martin Bakani said Tuesday at the Credit Suisse Asian Investment Conference in Hong Kong. The country would join Mongolia among sub-investment grade issuers in 2017. Sales of high-yield bonds total almost $15 billion so far this year, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

“There is strong appetite for frontier issues -- and markets have taken the Federal Reserve tightening policy in their stride,” Stuart Culverhouse, chief economist at Exotix Partners LLP in London, said by phone. Issuers in the single-B tier -- the second-highest in the junk rating scale -- have found yields “are not prohibitively high for their financing needs,” he said.

Papua New Guinea aims to woo buyers from Asia, Europe and the U.S. for its bond sale in the second half of the year. This isn’t the country’s first attempt, after it hired banks in 2013 for an issue of dollar-denominated securities that didn’t pan out, despite the same confidence from bankers...

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EURUSD, Bond Yields Tumble After ECB Walks Back Policy Shift: "Wary Of Upsetting Investors"

The Euro and European bond yields tumbled this morning after Reuters reported 'sources' saying the ECB is wary of fresh policy change (i.e. the expected quasi-tightening) before the June meeting, because it is worried about bond yield spikes.

Via Reuters:

European Central Bank policymakers are wary of making any new change to their policy message in April after small tweaks this month upset investors and raised the specter of a surge in borrowing costs for the bloc's indebted periphery.

One ECB source said the bank has been overinterpreted by markets at its March 9 meeting.

Taken aback when markets started to price in an interest rate hike early next year, policymakers are keen to reassure investors that their easy-money policy is far from ending, suggesting reluctance change message before June, six sources in and close to the Governing Council indicated.

While the current level of bond yields remains acceptable, a further increase would be problematic, particularly in places like Italy, Spain and Portugal, where debt payments are a major cost item and rising yields would curb spending and thwart growth.

With the euro zone economy on its best run in almost a decade and conservative policymakers# keen to start winding down stimulus, the ECB gave a small nod to improvement with a tweak of its guidance in early March, axing a reference to being ready to act with all available instruments.

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Leaving The EU's Customs Union Is The Only Logical Step For A Truly "Global Britain"

As UK Prime Minister Theresa May prepares to trigger the Article 50 EU exit mechanism on Wednesday, Open Europe has published a new report, entitled, ‘Nothing to declare: A plan for UK-EU trade outside the Customs Union.’

The study concludes that leaving the EU’s Customs Union is the only logical step for the UK to pursue an independent trade policy and achieve a truly ‘Global Britain’ outside the EU. Open Europe assesses different models of collaboration outside a customs union, and argues that the UK and the EU should aim for full cooperation on the practicalities and administration of customs as part of a comprehensive UK-EU free trade deal.

A dozen key points on customs

The UK should leave the EU’s Customs Union (EUCU). The UK Government has stated its intention to leave key parts of EUCU (the Common External Tariff and the Common Commercial Policy). Open Europe’s assessment is that leaving these and EUCU overall is correct. Brexit means the UK must be able to shape its own trade policy. It can only do so outside of EUCU.

The UK should not seek a ‘half-in, half-out’ arrangement, which would be the worst of all worlds. The UK should leave EUCU entirely to maximise opportunities. Prime Minister Theresa May has suggested that she is open to being an “associate member” of EUCU or remaining a signatory to elements of it. Open Europe believes that, while it is sensible to keep an open mind, no ‘half-in’ option is better than being fully out. Nonetheless, the UK should consider retaining membership of some relevant conventions.

It is in both the UK’s and EU’s interest quickly to secure full cooperation on the practicalities and administration of customs as part of a comprehensive Free Trade Agreement (FTA). Such an agreement could be a chapter in a UK-EU FTA or an accompanying, discrete customs facilitation agreement. The EU already has agreements on customs facilitation with non-members, including Switzerland and Canada. A comprehensive UK-EU FTA will ensure the continuation of tariff-free UK-EU trade and minimise customs delays.

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Your Pension Will Be At The Center Of America's Next Financial Crisis

I’m not a fan of the “greed is good” mentality of Wall Street investment firms. But the next financial crisis that rocks America won’t be driven by bankers behaving badly. It will in fact be driven by pension funds that cannot pay out what they promised to retirees. According to one pension advocacy organization, nearly 1 million working and retired Americans are covered by pension plans at the risk of collapse.

The looming pension crisis is not limited by geography or economic focus. These including former public employees, such as members of South Carolina’s government pension plan, which covers roughly 550,000 people — one out of nine state residents — and is a staggering $24.1 billion in the red. These include former blue collar workers such as roughly 100,000 coal miners who face serious cuts in pension payments and health coverage thanks to a nearly $6 billion shortfall in the plan for the United Mine Workers of America. And when the bill comes due, we will all be in very big trouble.

It’s bad enough to consider the philosophical fallout here, with reneging on the promise of a pension and thus causing even more distrust of bankers and retirement planners. But I’m speaking about a cold, numbers-based perspective that causes a drag on many parts of the American economy. Consider the following.

According to a Bureau of Labor Statistics report from 2015, the average household income of someone older than age 75 is $34,097 and their average expenses exceed that slightly, at $34,382. It is not an exaggeration, then, to say that even a modest reduction in retirement income makes the typical budget of a 75-year-old unsustainable — even when the average budget is far from luxurious at current levels. This inflexibility is a hard financial reality of someone who is no longer able to work and is reliant on means other than labor to make ends meet.

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