IMF Warns on $18 Trillion in Emerging-Market Corporate Debt, Saudi Arabian Government Sells Equity Holdings

Yet again even the mainstream can see the world’s most vulnerable spots. And the surging dollar will continue to expose this weak link.

From the Wall Street Journal Real Time Economics Blog, (bold mine)

Emerging markets should brace for a rise in corporate failures as a debt-bloated firms struggle with souring growth and climbing borrowing costs, the International Monetary Fund warned Tuesday in a new report.

From sugar firms in Brazil to pipe makers in Russia, firms in developing countries bulked up on cheap debt as central banks gassed the easy-money pedal in the wake of the financial crisis.

Then, emerging markets were the drivers of global growth. Developing-country firms quadrupled their borrowing from around $4 trillion in 2004 to well over $18 trillion last year, with China accounting for a major share.

Now, prospects in industrializing economies are weakening fast even as the U.S. Federal Reserve is getting set to raise interest rates for the first time in nearly a decade, a move that will raise borrowing costs around the world. The burden of 26% larger average corporate debt ratios and higher interest rates come as commodity prices plummet, a staple export for many emerging-market economies. Compounding problems, many firms borrowed heavily in dollars. As the greenback surges against the value of local currency revenues, it makes repaying those loans increasingly difficult.

That massive debt build-up means it is “vital” for authorities to be increasingly vigilant, especially to threats to systemically important companies and the firms they have links to, including banks and other financial firms, the IMF said.

“Monitoring vulnerable and systemically important firms, as well as banks and other sectors closely linked to them, is crucial,” said Gaston Gelos, head of the fund’s global financial stability division.

Shocks to the corporate sector could quickly spill over to the financial sector “and generate a vicious cycle as banks curtail lending,” the IMF said.

And emerging markets should also be prepared for the eventuality of corporate failures, it warned: “Where needed, insolvency regimes should be reformed to enable rapid resolution of both failed and salvageable firms.”

Oh by the way the IMF reported substantial outflows from emerging markets last quarter

From the same report

The Institute of International Finance on Tuesday estimated global investors have sold roughly $40 billion worth of emerging-market assets in the third quarter of the year, which would make it the worst quarter of net-capital outflows since late 2008. The IIF represents around 500 of the world’s largest banks, hedge funds and other financial firms.

Besides the petroleum sector, where borrowing didn’t anticipate the nosedive in prices, the construction industry is particularly exposed to the changing business climate, the IMF said.

Worried about the building risks, investors have been selling out of many emerging markets, pushing down equity and exchange-rate prices, and pushing up borrowing costs. That market turmoil is exacerbating their economic woes.

In Latin America’s six largest economies, for example, the average growth rate has fallen from 6% in 2010 to around 1% this year. Brazil’s central bank last week said the country’s recession is far worse than expected.

China’s recent market turmoil and faster-than-expected economic slowdown is in large part fed by worries over the massive rise in China’s borrowing and whether the economy is vulnerable to a host of credit-driven bubbles in real estate, construction and other sectors.

Rapid credit growth has been a harbinger of previous emerging market crises. While economists say many countries have learned from the past by building up currency reserves and allowing flexible exchange rates to buffer against downturns, the mounting risks for many emerging markets are fueling worries across the globe.

Further complicating emerging market problems, the changing structure of financial markets leaves many developing economies exposed to major outflows of capital as investors scramble to exit. That can lead to fire sales and a breakdown in markets.

And to compound to the stream of emerging market outflows, pressured by how low oil prices has been impacting their fiscal conditions, the Saudi government has not only been selling forex reserves, they have reportedly been pulling out its money from global equities.

From the Financial Times

Saudi Arabia has withdrawn tens of billions of dollars from global asset managers as the oil-rich kingdom seeks to cut its widening deficit and reduce exposure to volatile equities markets amid the sustained slump in oil prices.

The Saudi Arabian Monetary Agency’s foreign reserves have slumped by nearly $73bn since oil prices started to decline last year as the kingdom keeps spending to sustain the economy and fund its military campaign in Yemen.

The central bank is also turning to domestic banks to finance a bond programme to offset the rapid decline in reserves.

This month, several managers were hit by a new wave of redemptions, which came on top of an initial round of withdrawals this year, people aware of the matter said.

“It was our Black Monday,” said one fund manager, referring to the large number of assets withdrawn by Saudi Arabia last week.

Institutions benefited from years of rising assets under management from oil-rich Gulf states, but are now feeling the pinch after oil prices collapsed last year.

Nigel Sillitoe, chief executive of financial services market intelligence company Insight Discovery, said fund managers estimate that Sama has pulled out $50bn-$70bn over the past six months.

Step by step, the obverse side of a credit fueled mania is a crash-bust.

Arab Stock Markets Crushed!

Interesting start of the week. 

Stock markets of members of Gulf Cooperating Council (GCC) have just taken a beating.

The above table represents an overview of last night's performance of Arab stock markets (all charts from ASMAINFO.com). 

Below are charts of the national stock markets

Kuwait

Saudi Arabia

Oman's Muscat

Qatar

United Arab Emirates

Bahrain

With oil at $40, these indices are south bound.

More Chinese Government Massaging of the Stock Market: The Hong Kong-Shanghai Connect; Added Symptoms of HK’s Bubble: Prison Cell condos

I have been posting here how the Chinese government has been attempting to stoke a stock market bubble (directly or indirectly) in order to camouflage the ongoing deterioration of her overleveraged domestic real economy.

 

The Chinese government has launched “targeted easing” last June, has resorted to selective bailouts of firms which almost defaulted last July, imposed price controls on stock market IPOs last August, injected $125 billion over the last two months and yesterday announced the definite schedule of the Hong Kong-Shanghai stock market link.

From the Nikkei Asia:

With the debut of the Shanghai-Hong Kong stock exchange link next week, China is expected to see inflows of money from investors across the globe -- retail and institutional alike.

Chinese securities regulators said Monday that foreign investors will be given access to Shanghai-listed stocks via Hong Kong, starting Nov. 17. Also, investors in mainland China will be allowed to invest in issues listed in Hong Kong. Limits will be placed on daily and total trading volumes between the two markets.

The Shanghai-Hong Kong link marks an important step for China's efforts to make the yuan a key global currency and open up its capital markets.

China has until now strictly limited cross-border trading for the sake of market stability, giving exceptions only to financial institutions designated under its qualified foreign institutional investor program. But obtaining this status is difficult, and foreign investors have long bought Chinese stocks that are listed in both Hong Kong and the mainland.

Let me say that I am in FAVOR of cross listings. That’s because in theory this allows savings to finance investments or simply connects capital with economic opportunities regardless of state defined boundaries. 

But with the way central banks across the globe has been distorting capital markets, cross listing (part of financial globalization) has become conduits of bubbles. Therefore I am suspicious of the timing of such liberalization. 

The "Hong Kong-Shanghai connect" was initially announced late August. Yet this has benefited China’s Shanghai index more than Hong Kong’s HSI as the latter has been influenced by the October meltdown. As shown above, despite the risk ON environment, HK's HSI continues to substantially underperform.  This is an oxymoron given the HK dollar's peg to the US dollar.

There has been a similar stock market "liberalization" story of late. 

Last July, Saudi Arabia's government announced of the opening of her stock market to foreigners in 2015. The outcome had been a miniature boom-bust cycle. Whatever gains from the “liberalization”, as seen from Saudi’s Tadawul index, has now been completely erased in the face of collapsing oil prices.

Given the short term nature of government pump, the Chinese government would need more gimmicks to keep the stock market bubble inflating.

Yet here is prediction: when this global bubble blows up, the blame will go to foreign money flows or the liberalization that accommodated the bubble rather than central bank policies. 

Even the Philippine central bank, the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas, has been conditioning the public on this, as I recently wrote “foreigners are being conditioned publicly as scapegoats to what truly has been an internal imbalance problem only camouflaged by inflated statistics.” 

Oh, as a side note, the underperformance of Hong Kong stocks may be due to concerns of property bubbles. The current fad: prices of prison cells condos running amok!

From another Nikkei Asia article: (bold mine)

Cramped condominiums are increasingly hot properties in Hong Kong, prompting pundits to sound the alarm about an overheating real estate market. 

Large apartments, not to mention single-family homes, are beyond the reach of many in the city, where 7.2 million people reside in an area half the size of Tokyo. But condo buyers are showing a willingness to compromise on space, and major developers are moving to cash in.

Cheung Kong Holdings has drawn attention with its Mont Vert condominium. The smallest studio starts at 1.77 million Hong Kong dollars ($232,861), exceptionally low for the local market. The catch: It measures 16 sq. meters. When the company announced the project, a Hong Kong newspaper compared the studio to a typical solitary-confinement prison cell, which measures 7.4 sq. meters…

The government's index for private-sector housing prices testifies to the popularity of small apartments.

In August, the most recent month with available data, the index hit 260, with 1999 used as a baseline of 100. Look at only condos of less than 40 sq. meters and the index comes to 283; for the 40- to 160-sq.-meter range it registers at 240 to 250.

Flats of less than 40 sq. meters have logged the steepest price increases since the beginning of the year. New highs were set in the four months through August.

Much of the activity stems from speculation. Investors, fed up with prolonged low interest rates, are treating small condos as readily accessible investment tools. Chinese Estates said 80% to 90% of its small flats have been purchased for that purpose.

A senior official at Midland Realty, a leading real estate agency, said investors account for more than 50% of buyers of small flats over the past several months. Up until the middle of last year, the ratio was around 10%…

Some experts worry all of this could spell trouble, since monetary policy in Hong Kong tends to mirror that in the U.S.

Easy money leads to malinvestments, which has been spreading and intensifying everywhere.

Saudi’s Welfare State In Jeopardy

The resource curse which has spawned Saudi Arabia’s welfare economy seems in jeopardy.

From the Business Insider,

The share of Saudi workers employed by the government increased to 90 percent in 2010, up from 83 percent in 2000, according to a profile in The Economist (via @steven_strauss).

Saudi Arabia also increased unemployment benefits and other handouts during the Arab Spring.

The combination of the resource curse and relatively low oil prices and geopolitical tensions is bad for the regime. Says The Economist:

Saudi Arabia’s rulers are painfully aware that, should the region’s democratic wave leave lasting change and a new order in its wake, the kingdom will stand out as a peculiar and seemingly untenable anomaly. Even if the wave recedes leaving nothing but a mess, it has undermined any assumptions of rule by divine right. At the same time the kingdom’s most important alliance, with America, may face increased pressure. The United States is no longer reliant on Saudi Arabia for more than a small fraction of its energy needs. It has pulled out of Iraq and, soon, Afghanistan. It abandoned Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak. This raises doubts about its strategic intentions.

Oil prices at $80 below, for a prolonged period, will exert tremendous financial pressure on the oil dependent welfare based political economy of Saudi Arabia. This is yet another example of how the abundance of resources prevents economies from being competitive and productive.

Also the shale oil revolution will alter the dimensions of geopolitical relationships.

The Business Insider also has an interesting presentation of conflicts that had been caused by the geopolitics of oil.

The Implications of Cuts in Saudi Arabia’s Oil Production and Exports

In the light of $100 oil, Saudi Arabia, the world’s largest oil producer and exporter has reportedly cut production.

The CNBC reports,

The world’s top oil exporter, Saudi Arabia, appears to have cut both its oil production and export in December, according to the latest update by the Joint Organizations Data Initiative (JODI), an official source of oil production, consumption and export data.

The OPEC heavyweight saw production decline by 237,000 barrels per day (bpd) from three-decade highs of 10.047 million bpd in November, the JODI data showed on Sunday.

The draw-down was sharper for the actual amount exported, declining by 440,000 bpd, or 5.6 percent, to come in at 7.364 million bpd, the data also showed. The level would still be similar to exports after a steep ramp-up last June.

In its monthly report on February 10, the IEA put Saudi Arabia’s production number for December slightly lower at 9.55 million bpd, a disparity of 260,000 bpd versus the JODI data.

The actions of the Saudi Arabian government have profound implications.

Could it be that Saudi Arabia has been responding to the threat of Shale oil revolution? Recently Saudi halted a planned $100 billion expansion of productive capacity.

And considering that Saudi’s fiscal budget breakeven level stands at an equivalent of $90 oil, with current prices only marginally above the critical threshold, Saudi’s political stewards seem to anxiously sense of the growing risks to political stability or a threat to their grip on power. Hence the move to reduce oil production aimed at the preservation of the status quo or the incumbent welfare state.

Chart from Energy Insights

It could also be that Saudi’s reserve and production may also have reached a “peak”.

Last year, Wikileaks reported that cable correspondence by key officials from Saudi Arabia suggested that the kingdom may have bloated their estimated reserves by nearly 40%. Thus cuts in exports and production have merely been exposing the chicanery of oil politics.

The bottom line is that Saudi Arabia seems desperate to see higher oil prices.

So aside from production cuts, the bias for inflationary policies, the other alternative would be to promote a war on Iran using the obsession “with the need to prevent Iran getting nuclear weapons” as cover. The same applies to other autocratic Middle East oil producing welfare states.

Thus political languages conveyed by political authorities can be deceiving as they may not reflect on the realities intended.

As George Orwell warned,

Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind

MENA Uprisings: Iran Sends Flotilla To Bahrain

If there is one risk that seems to have been overlooked by the marketplace is this: a potential escalation of Middle East tensions.

The Reuters reports,

Shi'ite-ruled Iran sent a flotilla to Bahrain on Monday to show solidarity with mainly Shi'ite Muslim protesters, escalating tensions with the island kingdom that is home to the U.S. Navy's Fifth Fleet.

It was not clear when the convoy might reach Bahrain, which has a majority Shi'ite population but is ruled by a Sunni king.

Bahrain, which has cracked down on pro-democracy protesters in recent weeks, has criticised the decision to send the flotilla and accused non-Arab Iran of interfering its affairs.

Iran's English-language Press TV said 120 activists, including professors, students and clerics, were aboard the convoy, sent to condemn the killing of Bahraini protesters.

The MENA unrest has earlier spread to Bahrain from which Saudi Arabia earlier sent troops to help quash the mounting opposition.

Kuwait has likewise declared in the same article that

“Kuwait will not hesitate to defend the Kingdom of Bahrain against any danger that may threaten its security," the al-Watan daily quoted an unnamed senior Kuwaiti source as saying.”

Ruling autocracies has been linking arms in the face of growing dissent from her constituencies.

Moreover this isn’t about Christian-Muslim conflict but about Muslim inter-religious or sectarian schism. The point I would to make is for those who tunnel on the view that the world operates as religious black and white conflict, obviously this isn’t one of them.

In addition, the Bahrain episode is more of a consequence of foreign meddling on what is a local political disorder. And the meddling of Saudi Arabia has similarly triggered a counter response: Iran implicitly applies symbolical intervention by sending a flotilla.

What used to be a local problem has now gravitated to a regional predicament a risk I earlier pointed out.

We hope that this won’t turn into a full scale conflagration, because if it does, there will be much turmoil especially in the energy markets.

This is one development that requires vigil.

Saudi Arabia’s Unsustainable Welfare State

The Wall Street blog reports, (bold highlights mine)

Another reason to brace for higher oil prices in coming years: big oil exporters are increasingly dependent on the income.

Saudi Arabia, due to higher government spending this year, will need its oil to sell for $88 a barrel in 2011 for its government to break even–up from $68 last year, according to a new estimate from the Institute of International Finance, a global bankers’ trade group.

The kingdom, in response to the unrest spreading throughout the Middle East and North Africa, is boosting government spending to provide new social benefits for its people. The support for housing units, unemployment benefits and wage hikes for public workers (among a long list of measures) will contribute to a 31% increase in government spending in 2011 from a year earlier.

Aside from the prospects of reducing oil supply to allegedly generate more income (i.e. by manipulating markets), this exemplifies how the welfare state, which works for the benefit of a few, will NOT last.

Like substance abuse, bribing the citizenry would only grow overtime (from demographics and from the feedback loop of the deepening of the dependency culture--which translates to more demand for welfarism).

Importantly, this also shows how the welfare state contributes to inflation and to high oil prices, aside from showing more proof that the global oil markets are vastly manipulated and distorted from the ratchet effect (irreversible expansion) of government interventions.

Lastly like a house of cards, once oil prices collapse, Saudi’s political leadership will most likely suffer from a political backlash which may end their grip on power.

At the end of the day, Saudi’s welfare state could only buy the political leaders some time before the day of reckoning arrives. What is unsustainable won’t last.

Saudi Arabia Led GCC Intervention In Bahrain

As everyone seems fixated on Japan, which seems to have eclipsed most of the world’s problems, here is one important development: Arab dictators appear to have closed ranks.

The Bloomberg reports, (bold emphasis mine)

Saudi Arabian troops moved into Bahrain as part of a regional force from the Gulf Cooperation Council, the first cross-border intervention since a wave of popular uprisings swept through parts of the Arab world.

“This is war against the unarmed Bahraini people,” said Matar Ebrahim Ali Matar, a member of al-Wefaq, the largest Shiite opposition party.

Mainly Shiite protesters in Bahrain have been demonstrating since Feb. 14, demanding democracy through free elections from their Sunni monarch. Shiites comprise as much as 70 percent of the population. King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa has offered a national “dialogue” toward changes in response, which hasn’t quieted protesters. Clashes escalated on Sunday with more than 100 people injured.

The deployment signals that the Bahraini regime has lost confidence it can deal with the protests and underscores Saudi Arabian concerns about uprisings at home, according to Christopher Davidson, a scholar in Middle East politics at Durham University and author of “Power and Politics in the Gulf Monarchies,”

“It is in Saudi’s interest that nothing serious happens in Bahrain, because it would embolden similar protests in its eastern provinces,” Davidson said in a telephone interview late yesterday.

Why is this important?

We get some clues from the same Bloomberg article,

The protests in the tiny kingdom have fueled fears of a regional Shiite uprising supported by mainly Shiite Iran. Many Shiite Bahrainis retain cultural and family ties with Iran and with Shiites in eastern Saudi Arabia; Bahrain’s Sunni ruling family has close links with Saudi Arabia, which holds 20 percent of the world’s oil reserves.

The U.S. is urging Bahrain, home to the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet, to allow nonviolent protests and encouraging Gulf nations to use restraint, White House spokesman Jay Carney told reporters at the White House.

If the revolutions were merely local then we would be dealing with residual common factor risks, or event risk that is limited to a specific nation.

However, when domestic events includes international political interventions, then the risk factor transforms into systematic or market risk.

This is more a problem, for me, than that of Japan’s risk of a full blown nuclear meltdown (which on my assumption would eventually be resolved as others before it).

The key difference between the event risks of Japan and Bahrain is one of technical (Japan’s nuclear power woes) relative to social (religion based geopolitics).

The GCC intervention into Bahrain could well play into rival Islam Shiite-Sunni sect belligerency, particularly Saudi versus Iran, and possibly dragging more participants. At worst, there could be a regional conflagration.

This is a very important variable that needs to be monitored because further deterioration can extrapolate to a shift in the tide of the underlying market trends.

Peak Oil Represents Government Failure

The beauty of the internet is that it has been leveling the playing field between the public and the governments in terms of information.

The web has placed much of government’s stealth activities in jeopardy.

A good example is the controversial Wikileaks which has recently revealed that Saudi Arabia could have been exaggerating the declaration of her oil reserves. Translation: Expect higher oil prices soon.

The Business Intelligence reports,

Saudi Arabia, the world's largest crude oil exporter, is unable to pump enough oil to keep prices from rising, the Guardian reported, citing confidential cables from the US embassy in Riyadh.

The cables from 2007 to 2009 made public by the website Wikileaks, urge Washington to take seriously a warning from a senior Saudi government oil executive that the kingdom's crude oil reserves may have been overstated by as much as 300 billion barrels, nearly 40%.

The report cites comments attributed to Saudi Aramco geologist and former exploration chief, Sadad al-Husseini, that Aramco couldn't reach the 12.5-million-barrel daily capacity needed to keep prices from rising.

According to the cables, which date between 2007-09, Husseini said "Saudi Arabia might reach an output of 12 million barrels a day in 10 years but before then – possibly as early as 2012 – global oil production would have hit its highest point." This crunch point is known as "peak oil".

Peak oil adherents may be quick to say “I told you so”.

However as we previously said,

While peak oil (via Hubbert Peak Theory) may be a valid engineering theory, it is a poor economic concept for the simple reason that engineering theories (like quant models) do not capture people’s behaviour.

The Wikileaks exposé only serve as a concrete example of how governments have steadfastly tried to manipulate every politically sensitive markets...and this includes the oil markets.

To consider, given the stranglehold control over oil supplies by different oil producing states, which accounts for more than 80% of the world’s proven reserves, if governments had the ascendancy to establish “equilibrium” then we won’t be bothered by prospective risks of shortages (via “Hubbert Peaks”) or suffer from elevated oil prices at all.

Graphs from the US EIA (includes BP Statistical Review and PRC Energy)

But obviously this hasn’t been the case.

Since governments are comprised by people—only that these elites have been politically mandated (which means they hold the barrel of the gun on us)—they suffer from the same frailties as anyone else.

Yet governments have been demonstrated:

-to lack access to the technology required to efficiently and productively utilize their oilfields,

-have had inadequate financing to invest to satisfy consumer demand,

-has revealed administrative incompetence in operating national firms or in the supervision of the 'choked’ industry, and

-most importantly, had been exposed for the paucity of knowledge to implement “equilibrium”.

It is worth emphasizing that with over 80% of proven oil reserves (supplies) controlled by global governments, this means there has hardly been a functioning free market in oil!

If Saudi officials are indeed guilty of withholding information then this reinforces the problems of the massive distortions in the oil markets which would likely implode on our faces-a negative externality as a result of government failure.

Otherwise, dynamic price signals in a free market would have reflected on the balance of demand and supply from which the marketplace would have adjusted accordingly.

What you have, instead, are vastly distorted oil markets that has been amassing intensive structural “supply-side” imbalances compounded by the manipulation of money supply by global central banks that has been contorting the “demand side”. A perfect storm in the making.

So what elevated oil prices suggest is not a validation of peak oil theory but one of the massive failure of government intervention or controls.