Wednesday, July 31, 2013

Julian Assange on Bradley Manning’s Court Martial Verdict; Obama’s Promise to Protect Whistleblower Disappears

The statement of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange on Bradley Manning’s conviction. 

Today Bradley Manning, a whistleblower, was convicted by a military court at Fort Meade of 19 offences for supplying the press with information, including five counts of ’espionage’. He now faces a maximum sentence of 136 years.

The ’aiding the enemy’ charge has fallen away. It was only included, it seems, to make calling journalism ’espionage’ seem reasonable. It is not.

Bradley Manning’s alleged disclosures have exposed war crimes, sparked revolutions, and induced democratic reform. He is the quintessential whistleblower.

This is the first ever espionage conviction against a whistleblower. It is a dangerous precedent and an example of national security extremism. It is a short sighted judgment that can not be tolerated and must be reversed. It can never be that conveying true information to the public is ’espionage’.

President Obama has initiated more espionage proceedings against whistleblowers and publishers than all previous presidents combined.

In 2008 presidential candidate Barack Obama ran on a platform that praised whistleblowing as an act of courage and patriotism. That platform has been comprehensively betrayed. His campaign document described whistleblowers as watchdogs when government abuses its authority. It was removed from the internet last week.

Throughout the proceedings there has been a conspicuous absence: the absence of any victim. The prosecution did not present evidence that - or even claim that - a single person came to harm as a result of Bradley Manning’s disclosures. The government never claimed Mr. Manning was working for a foreign power.

The only ’victim’ was the US government’s wounded pride, but the abuse of this fine young man was never the way to restore it. Rather, the abuse of Bradley Manning has left the world with a sense of disgust at how low the Obama administration has fallen. It is not a sign of strength, but of weakness.

The judge has allowed the prosecution to substantially alter the charges after both the defense and the prosecution had rested their cases, permitted the prosecution 141 witnesses and extensive secret testimony. The government kept Bradley Manning in a cage, stripped him naked and isolated him in order to crack him, an act formally condemned by the United Nations Special Rapporteur for torture. This was never a fair trial.

The Obama administration has been chipping away democratic freedoms in the United States. With today’s verdict, Obama has hacked off much more. The administration is intent on deterring and silencing whistleblowers, intent on weakening freedom of the press.

The US first amendment states that "Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press". What part of ’no’ does Barack Obama fail to comprehend?
Oh by the way, US President Obama once promised to “protect whistleblowers” in one of his serial policy promises during the post 2008 elections

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Unfortunately such provision, previously published at the the Change.gov website, “which was set up by the Obama transition team after the election in 2008 has suddenly been scrubbed of all of its original content” according to the techdirt.com. (hat tip Gary North)

When promises will not be fulfilled, just erase the records and hope that the public's truncated memory will lead to its oblivion.

Will Record Rental Prices lead to Higher US Consumer Inflation? A Redux

Soaring property prices in the US has been prompting for a decline in homeownership.

From Bloomberg:
The U.S. homeownership rate, which soared to a record high 69.2 percent in 2004, is back where it was two decades ago, before the housing bubble inflated, busted and ripped more than 7 million Americans from their homes.
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This serves evidence of the unintended consequences from noble-sounding social redistributionist policies of promoting homeownership through debt and inflationism.

This homeownership program has spanned the Clinton administration (June 5, 1995)  “Today, all across the country, I say to millions of young working couples who are just starting out: By the time your children are ready to start the first grade, we want you to be able to own your own home”…

…and the Bush Administration’s Ownership society (October 15, 2002) “working together as a nation to encourage folks to own their own home”

So the push for more homes via redistribution has led to bubbles that eventually defeats the original intent; Americans have now LESS homes. 


The failed policy of promoting homeownership has began to put pressure on prices of rental properties.

On the demand side, from the same Bloomberg article: (bold mine)
The homeownership rate in the second quarter was unchanged from the prior three month period, according to Census Bureau data released today. It will hit bottom at about 64 percent in the next year as families leave the foreclosure pipeline and enter rental homes, according to a May analysis by London-based Capital Economics Inc. It’s currently the lowest in almost 18 years after averaging about 64 percent for 30 years through 1995.
The result of the switch to rental properties: soaring rental prices

From the Zero Hedge: (bold original, all chart excluding US Treasury yields theirs)
A record lot in fact: the median asking rent for US vacant housing units just hit an all time high of $735 per month.
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The price rental increases has been nationwide. But the rate of increases differs by region where the Northeast has posted the biggest increase

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Though there are more homeowners than renters, if the Fed fueled property boom persists and if income growth continues to stagnate (as shown by the above chart) then the shift to rentals could deepen, further undermining the homeownership levels

But what seems more important for now is the potential effect of higher rental prices to US CPI and to the financial markets.

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If rental prices continue to soar, then given that housing rents comprises the biggest weighing in the CPI calculation, then record rental prices will mean higher CPI as I raised before (chart from dshort.com). 

Rising inflation expectations will thereby add further pressures on the elevated yields of US treasuries

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While 5 year yields are off the highs, 10 and 30 year yields are knocking at new highs.

At the end of the day property boom will be threatened by the supply side response to prices…

From Wall Street Journal: (bold mine)
The speed with which prices have risen over the past year has taken many economists by surprise. Gains have been fueled by record-low mortgage rates, a slowly improving economy that has released pent-up demand and strong appetites from investors converting homes into rentals.
…and from higher interest rates or combination of both.

Again clearly policy induced boom bust cycles at work

Tuesday, July 30, 2013

Myanmar’s Seething Property Bubble, Redux

I was shocked to learn that office space rental prices in Myanmar has zoomed past their equivalent in New York’s Manhattan

From Bloomberg: (bold mine)
Sean Danley has spent the past six months scouting office space in Yangon after being sent to establish the Myanmar branch of his U.S.-based employer.

He looked in the city’s three sole 1990s-era towers, where annual rents have climbed to more than $100 a square foot, compared with less than $75 in downtown Manhattan, according to broker CBRE Group Inc. Too expensive, he said.

The villas he considered either didn’t have safety exits, weren’t clean, required sharing space with other companies or were in odd locations -- all unsuitable to the image of his $29 billion in revenue engineering and construction company, which he said he wasn’t authorized to identify. After seeing 10 places and losing one possibility to someone faster with his “bag of money,” Danley is still looking.
In 2011, I pointed out that Burma, which officially is known as Republic of the Union of Myanmar, has commenced to liberalize her previously closed political economy governed by military autocrats. Such structural change obviously should be a welcome development.

BUT the global yield chasing phenomenon has apparently seeped or spread into Myanmar’s economy, as evidenced by escalating the inflating property bubble as I earlier noted in June of 2012

One can sense mania when the investing public imprudently ignore risks. From the same Bloomberg article:
International developers will probably seek partnerships with local counterparts in a country where they’re not yet sure of rules and regulations, Pun said. For large-scale projects, some foreign companies bring their own workers from outside, while also using local resources available, he said.
Foreigners have been stampeding into Myanmar in the anticipation that foreigners will “no longer require a local partner to start a business in the country, and will be able to legally lease but not own property” based on a March 2012 draft foreign investment law (Wikipedia.org). 

But foreigners are prohibited to own land and immovable property (PWC).

So the massive influx of foreign investments on the non-property sectors has played a significant role in driving up Myanmar’s property prices to stratospheric heights.

Yet one would wonder how such eye-popping scale of property price inflation has been financed.

Myanmar has a dysfunctional, “outdated and debased” banking system as a result of decades of “abuse by the previous regime”. The banking system has effectively been “shunned by about 90% of the population” (CNN) where the average Burmese simply hold their savings or cash at home. 

Financial services such as loans, financial products, interbank operations and other forms of credit barely exists.

And the absence of a viable banking system and capital markets has prompted residents to turn into “real estate as a place to stash their cash” according to a Myanmar based finance analyst (Quartz). 

Myanmar is slated to open the Yangon Stock Exchange in 2015.

And because of the largely cash based nature of the transactions in the property sector, some analysts opine that the boom-bust cycle in Burma has been “overstated”.

I believe that the cash transaction segment of Myanmar’s markets sizzling hot property markets represents only part of the story. 

According to a survey conducted by an IFC report only 16% of households use the formal financial services. The other sources of loans emanates from family, friends and moneylenders [IFC: Microfinance in Myanmar Sector Assessment] So Myanmar has a huge shadow banking system which essentially eclipses the formal banking sector.

Importantly, the idea of the absence of leverage in Myanmar’s property boom may not entirely reflect on reality. 

Singapore has played a big role in providing financial services to Myanmar even when US sanctions were in place. According to Hans Vriens of the Insight Bureau Briefings, “Most overseas transactions are handled in Singapore, which acts like an off-shore banking platform for Myanmar and using the informal hundi system” 

Additionally, aside from the $2.4 billion of bilateral trade, there has been “significant business presence by Singaporean firms on Myanmar” as well as a “large Myanmar community in Singapore and a pool of Myanmar companies using Singapore as an intermediary hub to expand overseas”. 95% of Myanmar’s foreign transactions reportedly has been coursed through Singapore’s United Overseas Bank (UOB) (Asia One Business). 

So loans by the informal sector may have partly been financed by Singaporeans and or Myanmar based investors domiciled in Singapore.

This also implies that while property transactions may have mostly been executed through cash, the source of funding  may have been conducted through shadow banks, or through overseas lending via Singapore’s banks or both.

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Whatever the source of transactions, one thing is clear, Myanmar’s money supply has been exploding, according to the World Bank’s Data.

Myanmar’s excessively high property prices (or property bubble) is likely either to fall from its own weight or would likely recoil from the prospects of monetary tightening as consequence to ongoing instability in the global bond markets. 

It's unfortunate that central bank's inflationism will act as spoiler to what has generally been a positive development.

Monday, July 29, 2013

Chinese Government to Crack Down on Local Government Debt

China’s runaway credit financed property bubble will undergo scrutiny from Chinese national government, who will focus on reining debt levels of the local government

That’s according to a news from Bloomberg;
China will start a nationwide audit of government debt this week as the new Communist Party leadership investigates the threats to growth and the financial system from a record credit boom.

The State Council, under Premier Li Keqiang, requested the National Audit Office review, the office said in a statement yesterday without elaborating. The cabinet’s July 26 order was “urgent” and the office suspended other projects to work on the review and will send staff to provinces and cities this week, People’s Daily reported yesterday on its website, citing sources it didn’t identify.

The first full audit since an initial review two years ago underscores concern expressed by institutions such as the International Monetary Fund, which this month cited risks to the economy from borrowing by local governments and an expansion of non-traditional sources of credit. The new leadership oversaw a showdown with state-owned lenders last month as the People’s Bank of China engineered a cash squeeze to pressure banks to better manage their operations.
On the surface this looks impressive, but the question is how or on what basis will the national leadership apply controls? Will these be selective? Will the  political opposition bear the brunt of such crackdown?

The enormous leveraged exposure by local governments. From the same article:
The first audit of local-government debt found liabilities of 10.7 trillion yuan ($1.8 trillion) at the end of 2010, the National Audit Office said in June 2011…

Ding estimated China has at least 12 trillion yuan of local-government debt. The review may pave the way for future fiscal reforms, including changes to rules on local governments’ roles and responsibilities, Ding said.
I think that this goes beyond merely changing of rules, it is more likely that the problem lies, aside from the PBoC’s inflationary policies, on China’s top down political system and the command economy. 

China's centralized political framewok has previously used the statistical economy as a tool to promote the national political agenda. Moreover, the statistical economy has also been used as carrot and stick to manage the political careers of local government officials.

As explained by a paper from Cornell University (Derek Headey, Ravi Kanbur, Xiaobo Zhang) [bold mine]
Modern China has always had centralized merit‐based governance structure. In the planning economy era, the evaluation of cadres was largely based on political performance. However, since the China’s reforms initiated in 1978, political conformity gave way to economic performance and other competence‐related indicators as the new criteria for promotion. The promotion of China cadres’ is now largely based on yardstick competition in several key economic indicators, including economic and fiscal revenue growth rates, and some central mandates, such as family planning (Li and Zhou, 2005, Chapter 12, this volume). These indicators have been written into local leaders’ contracts. This creates tremendous pressure for local government personnel to compete with each other through superior regional performance.
In other words, the massive local government leverage has been a product of the political imperatives of the previous leaderships in generating high statistical economic growth regardless of the costs.

More. The Chinese government will allegedly cap spending…
Separately, China’s government has decided to cap the ratio of the fiscal deficit to gross domestic product at 3 percent in a bid to avert a downgrade of China’s credit rating by international rating companies, China Business News reported today, citing an unidentified person familiar with the matter.
So will the recently announced $85 billion railway stimulus be a limited one? This remains to be seen. I suspect that should China's economic slowdown intensify, spending caps may become an open spigot for stimulus. That's because a meltdown of the Chinese economy will likely jeopardize the power structure of the incumbent political system that would put to risks the grip on power by the incumbents.

Again chasing statistical growth at any cost by the local government has been previously powered by huge borrowing. 

As an aside, more than bubbles, as consequence from the politically driven growth strategy China suffers from a massive environmental degradation or pollution.

Again from the same Bloomberg article:
Local-government financing vehicles need to repay a record amount of debt this year, prompting Moody’s Investors Service to warn that Premier Li may set an example by allowing China’s first onshore bond default.

Regional governments set up more than 10,000 LGFVs to fund the construction of roads, sewage plants and subways after they were barred from directly issuing bonds under a 1994 budget law. A 4 trillion yuan stimulus plan during the 2008-09 financial crisis swelled loans to companies, which they have been rolling over or refinancing with new note sales.

LGFVs may hold more than 20 trillion yuan of debt, former Finance Minister Xiang Huaicheng said in April. Refinancing will be a challenge after corporate bond sales slumped to a two-year low in the second quarter and policy makers cracked down on shadow-banking activities that bypass regulatory limits on lending.
The obvious lesson here is that politically driven economic growth engenders massive imbalances. The boom of which are not only artificial and temporary, but eventually backfires.

Whether or not the national government pursues with tenacity the crackdown on local government and on the shadow banks, the above accounts appear as  deepening manifestations of the unfolding meaningful slowdown of the real (and not the inflated statistical) Chinese economy, the increasing hissing signs from China’s property bubbles and of the greater uncertainty over political direction and its ramifications.

In the face of a volatile global bond markets, these risks are likely to be amplified.

Interesting times indeed.

Phisix: BSP’s Tetangco Catches Taper Talk Fever

The BSP’s Version of Taper Talk

JUST a little over two weeks back, Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) Governor Amando Tetangco said that the low inflation environment, “gives us room to maintain interest rates and our current policy stance”[1].

In short, the easy money environment will prevail.

This week in an interview on Bloomberg TV, the gentle BSP governor signaled a forthcoming change in the BSP’s policy stance noting that since the Philippine economy is “strong”, “we don’t see any real need for stimulus at this point[2].

Oh boy, the BSP chief echoes on the ongoing predicament of US Federal Reserve of testing the “tapering” waters.

The BSP was cited by the same Bloomberg article as raising its price inflation forecasts by putting the burden of inflation risks on the weakening peso.

So the BSP essentially has begun to signal a backpedalling from easy money stance.

As I’ve noted in the past, similar to the Fed’s “taper talk”, the BSP’s subtle change in communication stance represents “tactical communications signaling maneuver to maintain or preserve the central bank’s “credibility” by realigning policy stance with actions in the bond markets.”[3]

While the BSP’s preferred culprit has been the weakening peso, the reality has been that higher yields in the global bond markets including emerging Asia and the Philippines has forced upon this discreet volte-face.

The attempt to substitute the influence of bond yields on domestic monetary policies with the weakening peso, the latter having been premised on alleged expectations of higher price inflation represents, as the stereotyped political maneuver of shifting of the blame on extraneous forces—the self-attribution bias.

The peso as culprit for general price inflation has been premised on the fallacious doctrine of balance of payments. The weak peso, according to the popular view, will prompt for an increase in price inflation via higher import prices. But in reality, rising import prices will lead to reduced demand for imports or on consumption of other goods, thereby offsetting any increase in general prices.

This means that the depreciation of the Peso represents a symptom rather than a cause where the principal cause has been due to domestic inflationary policies.

As the great Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises explained[4]
Prices rise not only because imports have become more expensive in terms of domestic money; they rise because the quantity of money was increased and because the citizens display a greater demand for domestic goods.
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Since 2001, the asset segment of the BSP’s balance sheet have ballooned by a Compounded Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 11% where International Reserves comprises 86% of the asset pie as of December 2012 based on the BSP’s dataset[5].

On the other hand, the gist of BSP’s liabilities or 73% has been on deposits. Special Deposit Accounts (SDA) constitutes 57% of total deposits with Reserve deposits from other deposit accounts signifying a 19% share and deposits from the Philippine treasury at 9%.

Meanwhile, currency issued, which had a 17.7% share of BSP’s liabilities, grew by 9.05% CAGR over the same period.

The rate of growth in the BSP’s balance sheet increased in 2006, but has been in acceleration in 2009 through today.

This also implies that the bulk of the credit expansion in the banking sector have ended up as deposits in the BSP.

The CAGR of BSP’s balance sheet at 11% has nearly been double the 5.97% CAGR of Philippine GDP at constant prices[6] over the same period.

Thus inflation pressures hardly emanates from imports but from the rising quantity of money and assets with moneyness functionality or money-substitutes[7].

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Of course, when the BSP governor referred to a “strong” economy as basis for the subtle change in his policy signaling of a reduced need for stimulus, he has actually been resorting to the anchoring bias (behavioral finance) and to the time inconsistent dilemma. That’s because “strong” conditions had all been predicated on the easy money environment.

And with the projection of higher interest rates in a system whose leverage has been rapidly building up over the recent years, as shown by the double digit growth of overall banking debt (left) and the surging rate of loans on what I suspect as the epicenter of the Philippine bubble (right), this means higher cost of servicing debt and higher cost of capital. This also means interest rate and credit risk will mount.

And for the financial world who are dependent on computing for Discounted Cash Flows[8] (DCF) analysis based mostly from Net Present Value[9] (NPV), changes in discount rates will impact heavily on the feasibility of projects and investments. New projects or investments built upon discount rates at current levels will likely be exposed to losses from miscalculations or errors brought about by the expectations of the perpetuity of the low interest rate regime when the BSP officially begins its tightening.

All these means that if the path of interest rates is headed higher, as the BSP chief implies, then conditions will materially change and such will likewise be reflected on risks premiums.

As I previously wrote[10], (bold original)
“Fundamentals” tend to flow along with the market, which is evidence of the reflexive actions of price signals and people’s actions. Boom today can easily be a recession tomorrow.
The Unwarranted Fixation on Credit Rating Upgrades

The continuing optimism by the BSP has been based on the fundamental assumption that changes in interest rates are likely to be gradual and stable.
This seems uncertain as the recent actions in the bond markets have been anything but gradual and stable.

Of course the BSP’s view has been consonant with the Philippine President’s Benigno Aquino III. Such concerted efforts are likely representative of a PR campaign to generate high approval ratings.

In his State of the Nation Address (SONA), the Philippine president blustered over the same 7.8% statistical GDP and of the recent “improvements” on trade competitiveness as key accomplishments of his administration. He also mentioned that current conditions should merit another credit rating upgrade.

Mr. Aquino declared[11] “For the first time in history, the Philippines was upgraded to investment-grade status by two out of the three most respected credit ratings agencies in the world, and we are confident that the third may follow”

Well the public just loves the visible which politicians gladly feed them with.

Yet people hardly realize that credit rating upgrades can even signify as the proverbial “kiss of death”.

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A historical overview of some sovereign ratings changes from Fitch Ratings[12] serves as great examples. The above table reveals to us that credit rating agencies hardly sees risks even when these have been staring at them on their faces.

From 1995-2008, Greece (upper pane) had a series of upgrades and positive watches (blue box) in both the long and short term of foreign and local currency ratings. The Fitch began a string of downgrades on Greece only when the country’s debt crisis imploded in 2009[13]. Today Greece has been rated junk “substantial credit risk[14]”, four years after the unresolved crisis.

The successions of credit upgrades basically helped motivate the Greek government to indulge in a borrowing spree which eventually unraveled.

Venezuela has a different story (lower pane). But again we the same credit rating upgrades on the socialist country in 2005, who today suffers from a hyperinflationary episode or a real time destruction of the country’s currency the bolivar[15].

The Fitch eventually regretted their decision, they downgraded Venezuela. Ironically hyperinflating Venezuela has a higher rating than deflating Greece where both defaults on their debts but coursed through different means.

The above examples reveal of how credit rating agencies align their assessment with unfolding market conditions. Rating agencies hardly anticipate them accurately.

So a manipulated asset boom may easily draw credit rating agencies to upgrade sovereign debt.

It is important to draw some very vital lessons from history where banking crises, sovereign debt defaults, currency crises, and serial debt defaults, as chronicled by Harvard’s Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, which spanned “more than 70 cases of overt default (compared to 250 defaults on external debt) since 1800”[16] the common denominator has been overconfidence and denigration of history[17] (will not happen to us) [bold mine]
The essence of the this-time-is-different syndrome is simple. It is rooted in the firmly held belief that financial crises are things that happen to other people in other countries at other times; crises do not happen to us, here and now. We are doing things better, we are smarter, we have learned from past mistakes. The old rules of valuation no longer apply. The current boom, unlike the many booms that preceded catastrophic collapses in the past (even in our country), is built on sound fundamentals, structural reforms, technological innovation, and good policy. Or so the story goes.
I would add my conspiracy theory. Credit rating upgrades have been tied with the US bases. The American government has been endeared with the incumbent administration because the President pursues the path of his mother, the former President the late Cory Aquino, who fought to retain US military bases here[18]

Today, using territorial disputes as an excuse or a bogeyman, the Aquino government has allowed and defended the so-called non-permanent access of “allies” on former US bases[19].

The Illusions of the Benefits from Government Spending

Another mainstream obsession today has been the devotion towards statistical economic figures which has been presumed as an accurate measurement of economic growth.

As explained last week[20], the statistical 7.8% growth has been mainly rooted on growth by the construction, real estate and financial sectors, as well as, government spending.

And much of the ballyhooed statistical growth in the private sector has been financed by an unsustainable credit bubble.

Yet the public has been mesmerized by the $17 billion of proposed investments by the incumbent government. 

If the government spending is the elixir, then why stop at $17 billion? Why not make it $1 trillion or even $ 10 trillion?

And if such assumption is true, then why has the communist models like China’s Mao and the USSR evaporated? 

Why has China’s recent economic growth been substantially slowing amidst a splurge of government spending in 2008-2009? The newly installed Chinese has announced another $85 billion of railway stimulus to allegedly stem the growth slowdown[21].

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With enormous money thrown as fiscal stimulus from the late 90s to the new millennium, why has Japan’s lost decade been extended to two decades+ three years?

Apparently this seemingly perpetual economic stagnation has prompted the new administration to launch the boldest monetary modern day experiment by a central bank which will be complimented by even more fiscal spending stimulus and on the minor side trade liberalization.

Yet growing internal dissension[22] on the risks of Abenomics even from within the ranks of the Bank of Japan has been hounding on the popular expectations of the success of such derring-do political program aside from the risks of a fallout from an economic hard landing in China.

No matter the glorification of mainstream media’s on the alleged success of such policies, Japan’s financial markets are saying otherwise. Has the denial rally in Japan’s major equity benchmark Nikkei fizzled? Japan futures suggest that Monday’s opening will likely break below the 14,000 threshold.

Obviously what government spends will have to be financed by debt, taxes or inflation. Or simply said, whatever government spends has to be taken from someone else’s savings and or productive output. Government spending represents thus a disequilibrating force, because the recourse to institutional compulsion to attain political objectives means a shift of resources from higher value (market determined) uses to lower value (politically determined) uses.

Importantly, since most of government services are institutionalized or mandated monopolies, the absence of market prices means that there hardly have been accurate measures to calculate on the cost-benefit utility of the services provided. And since there are no market price utilized, returns are non-existent. Government spending, hence, represents consumption and not investments.

So the contribution of government spending has mostly been negative rather than positive to real economic growth.

But this is a different story from the mainstream’s statistical aggregate demand management based point of view.

And relative to the statistical 7.8% growth, this only means two things, one—economic boom has largely been concentrated on a few sectors which has been benefiting from the zero bound rates induced credit fueled manic speculation on the asset markets, and two—beneficiaries from government spending have always been the political class, their politically connected affiliates and welfare beneficiaries

And regardless of the egging of the Philippine president, in the latest State of the Nation’s Address (SONA), on the Congress to revamp Presidential Decrees 1113 and 1894 which according to news has been a Marcos era legacy that favors “businessmen close to the dictatorial administration”[23], the politicization of economic opportunities, where the government “picks on the winner” means that cronyism and regulatory capture have been the natural consequences or outcome from such anti-competitive politically distributed economic arrangements.

Thus actions meant to purportedly sanitize projected “immorality” are good as photo opportunities or for Public Relations purposes.

The reactionary rant against officials[24] and personnel of the Bureau of Customs, Bureau of Immigration and Deportation and the National Irrigation Administration (NIA) whom the President severely criticized for an unabated smuggling in the SONA should be a great example. That’s because one of the tarnishes of the incumbent approval rating obsessed regime has been in smuggling, where critics have labeled the Philippines as “Asia’s smuggling capital”[25].

In the world of politics, moral order has mostly been a function of either populism or legalities.

Yet what is popular or legal have not always or frequently been moral. Venezuela’s late Hugo Chavez died a popular leader due to massive wealth redistribution even if he ran the Venezuelan economy aground. Adolf Hitler was also a popular leader until he was defeated in World War II.

In the eyes of populist politics, immorality has hardly been thought about as legal or institutional blemishes. It has always focused on personal virtues: the personality cult mentality.

As the 30th President of the US Calvin Coolidge aptly warned[26]:
It is difficult for men in high office to avoid the malady of self-delusion. They are always surrounded by worshipers. They are constantly and for the most part sincerely assured of their greatness. They live in an artificial atmosphere of adulation and exaltation which sooner or later impairs their judgment. They are in grave danger of becoming careless and arrogant.
So when politicians or political leaders impose some edict or restrictions, they mostly expect people to behave like sheep. Such arrogant leaders forget that social policies affect people’s real lives, not limited to commerce. 

And in response to such laws, thinking and acting man intuitively find ways to sustain their preferred way of living, and in many times, acting in defiance of arbitrary legislations or regulations or the “rule of men”.

So, for instance, when the Philippine government via the BSP raised sales taxes significantly on gold sales, over 90% of gold output has been smuggled out in reaction[27]: the law of unintended consequences.

The same political agenda goes for India, where gold has a deep cultural attachment. The profligate Indian government wants to ‘balance’ fiscal conditions by reining on gold sales. First they apply import tariffs then restrictions spread to banks, bullion banks, and finally to the retail sector[28]. Remember the Indian government essentially has been attacking India’s culture in the name of fiscal balance.

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The consequence: an explosion of gold smuggling. Cases of smuggling has shot up to 205 from 21 a year earlier, value of gold seized by officials has soared by 10 times or 270 million rupees compared to 25 million rupees over the same period, according to the Wall Street Journal[29]

So at the end of the day, the formal sector ends up in the informal ‘illegal’ sector. The government forced the average Indians to migrate underground to maintain tradition. Practicing tradition have now been rendered as illegitimate and a crime. Many will suffer from political oppression out of the insensitive and inhumane whims of the political leaders.

It is still nice to see that the average Indians still have practiced civil disobedience via smuggling. But if the political repressive dragnet intensifies, then perhaps it will not be farfetched to expect civil disobedience to transform into violent public protests, ala Turkey, Brazil, or Egypt.

The bottom line is politicization of the economy have been key sources of social strains. What the largely economically ignorant or politically blind public initially sees as a boon from interventionism and inflationism will mostly regret of their advocacies.

And another thing, in today’s euphoric phase, I even read a commentary proclaiming today’s boom as “unstoppable”.

Well Mr. Tetangco has just fired the warning shot across the proverbial bow. Yet if bond markets continue to unsettle, what has been bruited as “unstoppable”…will not only become stoppable, but they will likely stop soon.
Despite the recent advances, current environment remains risky.

Trade cautiously.



[1] Malaya.com Tetangco: We will stay the course July 10, 2013



[4] Ludwig von Mises 1. Inflation III. INFLATION AND CREDIT EXPANSION Interventionism An

[5] Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas Economic and Financial Statistics

[6] Tradingeconomics.com PHILIPPINES GDP CONSTANT PRICES

[7] Ludwig von Mises 11. The Money-Substitutes XVII. INDIRECT EXCHANGE Mises.org

[8] Wikipedia.org Discounted cash flow

[9] Wikipedia.org Net present value


[11] Inquirer.net Aquino: No stopping change July 23, 2013





[16] Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, This Time is Different Princeton University Press p. 111

[17] Ibid p. 15












[29] Wall Street Journal Gold Smuggling Takes Off in India July 26, 2013

Saturday, July 27, 2013

The Four Horsemen of the Financial Apocalypse

In the Book of Revelation in the Christian Bible, the end of the world or the ‘Last Judgment’ will be presided by the four horseman of the apocalypse. These figurative horsemen embodies conquest, war, famine and death.

While not exactly according to biblical prophesy, such allegorical omen may be seen as applicable to today’s modern day financial and monetary central bank based fractional reserve money system.

From the Sovereign Man’s prolific Simon Black (bold mine)
Today’s financial system is dominated by central bankers who have been awarded nearly dictatorial control of global money supply.

In allowing them to set interest rates, they are able to control the ‘price’ of money, thus controlling the price of… everything.

This power rests primarily in the hands of four men who control roughly 75% of the entire world money supply:

-Zhou Xiaochuan, People’s Bank of China
-Mario Draghi, European Central Bank
-Haruhiko Kuroda, Bank of Japan
-Ben Bernanke, US Federal Reserve

Four guys. And they control the livelihoods of billions of people around the world.

So, how are they doing?

We could wax philosophically about the dangers of fiat currency. Or the dangers of the rapid expansion of their balance sheets. Or the profligacy of wanton debasement through quantitative easing.

But let’s just look at the numbers.

In theory, a central bank is like any other bank. It has income and expenses, assets and liabilities.

For a central bank, assets are typically securities or commodities which have value in the international marketplace, such as gold or US Treasuries.

Central bank liabilities are all the trillions of currency units floating around… dollars, euros, yen, etc.

The difference between assets and liabilities is the bank’s equity (or capital). And this is an important figure, because the higher the capital, the healthier the bank.

Lehman Brothers famously went under in 2008 because they had insufficient capital. They had assets of $691 billion, and equity of just $22 billion… about 3%.

This meant that if Lehman’s assets lost more than 3% of their value, the company wouldn’t have sufficient cushion, and they would go under.

This is exactly what happened. Their assets tanked and the company failed.

So let’s apply the same yardstick to central banks and see how ‘safe’ they really are:

US Federal Reserve: $54 billion in capital on $3.57 trillion in assets, roughly 1.53%. This is actually less than the 1.875% capital they had in December. So the trend is getting worse.

European Central Bank: 3.69%
Bank of Japan: 1.92%
Bank of England: 0.843%
Bank of Canada: 0.532%

Each of these major central banks in ‘rich’ Western countries is essentially at, or below, the level of capital that Lehman Brothers had when they went under.
What does this mean?

Think about Lehman again. When Lehman’s equity was wiped out, it caused a huge crisis. The company’s liabilities instantly lost value, and almost everyone who was a counterparty to Lehman Brothers lost a lot of money because the company could no longer pay its debts.

Accordingly, if the US Federal Reserve’s assets unexpectedly lose more than 1.5% of their value, the Fed’s equity would be wiped out. This means that any counterparty holding the Fed’s liabilities (i.e. Federal reserve notes) would lose.

More specifically, that means everyone holding dollars.

Theoretically if a central bank becomes insolvent, it can be bailed out. It happened in Iceland a few years ago.

There’s just one problem with that thinking.

Iceland’s government wasn’t in debt at the time. So they were able to borrow money in order to bail out their central bank. Today the government is in debt over 100% of GDP, but the central bank is solvent.

But governments in the US, Europe, Japan, England, etc. are all too broke to bail out their central banks. These governments are already insolvent. So if the central bank becomes insolvent, there won’t be anyone to bail them out.

This is one of the strongest indicators of all that the financial system as we know it is finished. When central banks can no longer credibly issue liabilities, and their home government are too broke to bail them out, this paper currency standard can no longer function.

Such data really underscores the importance of owning real assets such as productive land and precious metals.

Given its nominal roller coaster ride lately, there has certainly been a lot of scrutiny and skepticism about gold.

But to paraphrase Tony Deden of Edelweiss Holdings, if you dispute the validity of gold as a hedge against declining fiat currency, that makes you, by default, a paper bug. Can you really afford to be confident in this system?
As been repeatedly noted here, QEs by major central banks have been meant to shore up asset markets which underpins the assets on the balance sheets of crony banks, and their guardians, the central banks. 

Of course QEs has fostered a low interest rate environment, which in effect, subsidizes debt financed government spending and the welfare warfare bureaucracy that the banking system, by virtue of Basel regulations, holds mainly as 'risk free' collateral.

And the same set of collateral have been used by crony banks to get loans from discount windows of central banks, and likewise, these collateral constitutes one of the major instruments used by central banks to conduct QE.

So all these ‘merry-go-around” or 'cul-de-sac' or 'loop-a-loop' arrangement has been designed to eliminate the threat of insolvencies of the cartelized unsustainable centralized debt-based political economic system

But there’s more. For the major economies, central banks can use changes in accounting methodologies to elude insolvencies, similar to the US Federal Reserve in January 2011.

As Austrian economist Robert Murphy noted, “It is now mathematically impossible for the Fed to become insolvent, through the magic of "negative liabilities."”

Ultimately central banks will tap the printing press should "bank runs” occur. 

Again Professor Murphy
But for the case of the Federal Reserve — with dollar-denominated liabilities — it is hard to see what actual constraints it would face, should its accountants suddenly announce its insolvency. Even if there is a "run on the Fed," where all of the commercial banks want to withdraw their electronic reserves on the same day, the central bankers need not panic: they can order the Treasury to run the printing press in order to swap paper currency for electronic checkbook entries. (This is a neat trick unavailable to the mere commercial bankers.)
The smaller central banks will not have the same privileges. Nonetheless, their assets are also anchored on assets of their major contemporaries.

I would like to further point out that aside from Iceland, another example of a bailed out insolvent central bank has been the defunct Central Bank of the Philippines (CBP)

As I wrote in June 2012
Central Bank of the Philippines, the predecessor of the BSP, suffered massive losses to the tune of an estimated Php 300 billion as consequence of the series of bailouts provided by then President Cory Aquino to her favorites.

The losses were eventually transferred to the central bank board of liquidators.
Don’t take just take it from me. Canadian monetary analyst JP Koning recently noted (bold mine) 
Consider the case of the Central Bank of Philippines (CBP), for instance. According to Lamberte (2002), the CBP was harnessed by the government in the 1980s to engage in off-balance sheet lending and to assume the liabilities of various government-controlled and private companies. All of this was to the benefit of the government as it lowered the deficit and kept spending off-budget. Later on these loans proved to be worthless, leaving the central bank holding the refuse. This has shades of Enron, which used various conduits and SPVs to hide its mounting losses.

The CBP was replaced in 1993 by the newly chartered Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP). The BSP took over the CPB's note and deposit liabilities, as well as its foreign reserves and other valuable assets (the bad assets were allocated elsewhere).
A non-partisan observation on the populist perception which sees political leadership then as a 'virtuous' regime.

Bottom line: Small central banks will be bailed out. But if troubles of the four biggest and the most important central banks aggravates, then as Mr. Black notes “the financial system as we know it is finished” or financial apocalypse from the biblical equivalent of the four horsemen.