Phisix: Repositioning for a ‘Risk On’ Environment

Bubble behavior can be seen as rational, even if market participants know they are seeing a bubble. After all, as long as one catches a bubble on the way up, buying low and selling high, one can make money. Furthermore, bubbles burst precisely because investors recognize that the asset prices at the top of the bubble are out of balance with market fundamentals; it is just that these things do not happen with the mathematical precision and smoothness of the mathematical models, so many academic economists simply turn away from looking at things as they really are. Professor William L. Anderson

The parameters for my repositioning or for undertaking additional risk exposure to markets has been specified last week[1]

To see signs of improvement, we need a significant expansion of Peso volume trades, a broad based bullish or optimistic market breadth which should be supported by an improvement in chart price actions.

But most importantly, outside the local context, we need to see strong evidences of recoveries from our neighbors’ bourses, and similarly from the commodity markets.

Such recovery should likely be accompanied by signs of consolidation or parallel enhancements of the price actions in developed economy contemporaries.

Only from the above developments can we say that we have successfully sailed through the Greek mythological treacherous waters of Scylla and Charybdis

The notable improvements in the commodity and developed nation’s equity markets seem to have satisfied two very significant conditions.

Regional Confirmation

Now we need to see how our neighbors have been responding to the recent “shock and awe” policy steroids

Like their developed economy contemporary, the ASEAN-4 bourses have all been manifesting material signs of recuperation even prior to the Euro Bazooka bailout deal.

The Philippine Phisix seems as having the best chart picture among the four. The PSEC is the only chart that has yet to transition to a bearish ‘death cross’ pattern. The current buoyant actions by the domestic bellwether will likely widen the spread of the 50-day (blue line) and 200 moving averages (red line) that should signal a clearance from the bear market hurdle or a pivotal move away from the recent critical test. Importantly, sustained upside momentum should highlight the resumption of the bull market.

Three of our neighbors have still been scourged by the bearish ‘death crosses’ patterns, where only Indonesia’s IDDOW have successfully breached both 50 and 200 day moving averages. The implication is that, like the PSEC, should the IDDOW persist to the upside, the ‘death cross’ pattern will transform into a whipsaw, which serves as another evidence of chart pattern failure.

And I believe that a buoyant PSEC and IDDOW will eventually translate to the same market actions for benchmarks of Malaysia (MYDOW) and Thailand’s (SETI)

Moreover, Asian currencies as reflected by the ADXY or Bloomberg-JP Morgan’s basket of Asian currencies have likewise made a dramatic turnabout.

Again the above only reinforces my repeated assertions that actions of global policymakers have been directing price movements of international markets.

The external environment as seen by the price actions of the commodity markets, developed equity markets and ASEAN-Asian markets have resonated conditions that seem to justify an environment increasingly ripe for renewed risk taking activities.

More Confirmations: Market Internals and the Philippine Peso

At the Philippine Stock Exchange, market internals appear to be on the mend too.

This week’s average volume has exploded to the upside. But this has mostly been due to the special block sales which accounted for 56% of the total.

The market breadth has also gradually been improving.

Sectoral performances have all strongly recovered from the recent lows. Services (bright green) lifted by PLDT appears to lead the way, with the other sectors Mining (teal) Property (brown), Holding (orange) and Banking (blue) also up but whose performances has relatively varied.

What seems as the most impressive has been the action of the Philippine Peso

The Euro Bazooka bailout deal may have prompted for a stunning breakaway gap for the Philippine Peso. The jump in the Peso essentially reflects on the Asian currencies.

Nevertheless the Peso has been firming up even prior to Friday’s breakaway run (in spite of BSP’s interventions). The gap, if sustained, could signal even more strength for the Peso and the Phisix ahead.

I would reckon that the Peso’s improvement has been immensely supported by expanding net foreign inflows to the PSE.

ALL of the parameters or conditionalities on my checklist appear to have been satisfied. This implies for a graduated re-entry for me.

Although I would still deem that China’s highly uncertain environment could pose as a black swan risk worthy of continuing vigil, inflationary developments globally may be providing a cushion from which may have alleviated the risk environment in China. Again this has to be proven or established.

Learning from this episode, what worries me is that many people seem to have acquired the mentality where all selloffs should be seen as buying opportunities, premised on what seems to be a deepening assumption that governments will always successfully moderate any prices decline.

We understand this outlook as representative of moral hazard, or even as the Bernanke Put[2]—the expectations that central banks will ‘fight market falls’.

This is also symptomatic of the market’s intensifying bubble psychology shaped by intensifying bubble-bailout policies[3].

In the fullness of time, again markets will be prove that interventions as unsound, tenuous and subject to bust dynamics similar to 2008.

It must be impressed upon everyone that inflation is a policy that cannot last.

---

[1] See The Philippine Phisix at Crossroads, October 23, 2011

[2] Bernanke Put Wikipedia.org, Greenspan Put

[3] See A Primer On Stock Markets-Why It Isn’t Generally A Gambling Casino, January 18, 2009

Video: Richard Epstein on US Inequality

New York University Law Professor Richard Epstein at the PBS Hour talks about "inequality"...

Watch Does U.S. Economic Inequality Have a Good Side? on PBS. See more from PBS NewsHour.

Here are some noteworthy quotes, (transcript here)

Inequality as drivers for innovation...

What's good about inequality is if, in fact, it turns out that inequality creates an incentive for people to produce and to create wealth, it's a wonderful force for innovation. So let's just go and take somebody like Bill Gates again or any entrepreneur.

Guy earns $50 billion, right? How much consumer welfare has he created by selling products? We can estimate the amount of gains to purchases, because everybody who buys one of his products or one of Steve Jobs' products, in effect, values it more than he receives.

The social gain from inequality to consumers of those goods probably dwarfs the entrepreneurial gain by a factor of 10-1 or 20-1.

Non-neutrality of tax policies.

You can tell the difference between a liberal and conservative by the following test. A liberal believes that changes in taxes have very little effect on production, but huge effects favorable on distribution.

Folks like myself believe it's exactly the opposite. Very high tax rates or even small changes in taxes have very adverse effects on production, and they do very little to produce redistribution, because the money gets dissipated and taken away through the political process in the ways that even the most ardent supporters of redistribution will not like.

Difference between then and now...

First of all, the highest marginal tax rates were also accompanied with tax shelters for everybody in those rates. The second thing is that the monies that were being spent in those days were being spent in much more intelligent ways. That is, if you go and you look at either state or federal budgets and see the amount of money that is spent on what we would call standard infrastructure improvements, and spent well, like the interstate highway program in 1956, that was very high.

The money that is spent today on infrastructure improvements of a good variety is a tiny fraction of what it was then. And the amount of money that is spent essentially on transfer payments has mushroomed enormously.

The fundamental truth is, the tax system is more redistributive than it was before, which will lead to a reduction in efforts, and the regulatory burden on the economy is vastly greater, and we would expect lower levels of growth.

How profits advance overall welfare...

It's the possibility of earning a high rate of return which does it.

And what happens is, if you let people go through voluntary transactions that produce mutual gain, you will increase overall welfare, you will improve the position of those on the bottom. But increased overall welfare will produce greater skews in income, because in a world with genuine opportunities, you will create billionaires.

In a world without it, the people at the bottom will remain where they were, there will be nobody at the top to subsidize them, so everybody will turn out to be worse off.

The Myth of the Poor as Borrowers, Rich as Lenders

“The Poor are Borrowers and the Rich are lenders” has been one of the enduring myths which the left uses to champion the Keynesian policies of the “euthanasia of the rentier” and central banking.

David Gordon quotes the great Murray Rothbard,

Often, this turns out to be the reverse of the truth. "Debtors benefit from inflation and creditors lose; realizing this fact, older historians assumed that debtors were largely poor agrarians and creditors were wealthy merchants and that therefore the former were the main sponsors of inflationary nostrums. But of course, there are no rigid 'classes' of creditors and debtors; indeed, wealthy merchants and land speculators are often the heaviest debtors" (p. 58).

Even the conditions of nations today do not support this argument.

Based on the 2010 NIIP or Net International Investment Position statistics by the IMF, which has been defined as a country’s domestically owned assets minus foreign assets, the table above reveals that the US stands as the world’s largest borrower or debtor. (source: Financial Sense)

Yet there has been NO rigidity in classes—some rich countries are creditors while some rich countries are debtors.

Class based borrowing and lending is simply based on fantasy.

As individuals, we act (save, consume or invest) based on our unique value scales and time preferences and not because of the abstraction of being “rich or poor”.

Also it would be equally naïve to say that rescuing Wall Street was about “the poor”, that’s because Wall Street thrived upon unsustainable debt acquired from rampant speculation.

It is the reason why the largest US investment banks vanished from planet earth in 2008, and is the reason for the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) and the explosion of the US Federal Reserve’s balance sheet in 2008, who absorbed toxic assets from the banking and finance industry by transferring the risk to US taxpayers.

From the US Federal Reserve of Cleveland

These debts were held NOT by the poor but the real estate, financial and banking class elites who profited from Keynesian policies of the euthanasia of the rentier aimed at attaining “permanent quasi booms”, which eventually backfired.

Besides, current political institutions have NOT been designed to protect the poor.

Apart from taxes, the banking system funnels savings of ordinary citizens to finance the government through sovereign securities (treasuries) as mandated by bank capital regulations. Central banks puts a backstop on this.

And politicians spend the savings of the average citizenry partly on vote generating welfare programs and substantially on special interest groups (e.g. green jobs, military industrial complex, banking and finance, foreign dictators) which have not mainly been about the protection of the poor. The poor have perennially been used as an unfortunate tool to justify the political mulcting of society.

Going back to rescuing Wall Street, coincidentally, Wall Street houses the largest number of people who are considered as super rich.

From the Wall Street Journal Blog

Bottom line: to argue that the “euthanasia of the rentier” is required to redistribute wealth from the rich to the poor has exactly been the reverse—the politically endowed rich benefits from “privatize profits and socialize losses” policies at the expense of society.

As a reminder not all of the rich are cronies. Those who depend on political privileges should be distinguished from those who generate wealth by serving the consumers.

Importantly, those who argue from the above faulty premises are either engaged in self-deception, or if, not hopelessly bereft of reasoning arising from the obsession to politics.

Entrepreneurial Knowledge and Failure as Virtue

Entrepreneurial knowledge and the societal acceptance of failure should be seen as stepping stones or building blocks to economic progress.

From the Wall Street Journal Blog (bold emphasis mine)

Economists at Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology have just released what they claim to be the crystal ball of economics: a model for predicting a nation’s future growth more accurately than any other techniques out there.

“The Atlas of Economic Complexity” ranks 128 nations based on their “productive knowledge” — the skills, experience and general know-how that a given population acquires in producing certain goods. Countries with a high score in the report’s “economic complexity index” have acquired years of knowledge in making a variety of products and goods and also have lots of room for growth. Essentially, the more collective knowledge a country has in producing goods, the richer it is — or will be.

The 364-page report, a study led by Harvard’s Ricardo Hausmann and MIT’s Cesar A. Hidalgo, is the culmination of nearly five years of research by a team of economists at Harvard’s Center for International Development.

“The essential theory … is that countries grow based on the knowledge of making things,” Mr. Hausmann said in a phone interview. “It’s not years of schooling. It’s what are the products that you know how to make. And what drives growth is the difference between how much knowledge you have and how rich you are.”

The above seems quite applicable to the Philippines. As I have been pointing out, four out ten college graduates are unemployed and about 13% of college graduates emigrate.

The Philippine economic predicament has hardly been about the lack of education but mainly the inadequacy of the relevant entrepreneurial knowledge or “knowledge to make things”. And most importantly, a conducive environment for entrepreneurs to underwrite on such risks.

And because risk-taking is an integral part of the market economy, the outcome of either success or failure is indispensable. Failure should also be seen as capitalist virtue from which entrepreneurs can build on, learn and innovate from.

This excerpt from an insightful article by Professor Steve Horwitz and Jack Knych at thefreemanonline.org (bold emphasis mine)

Economists, especially those of the Austrian school, often emphasize how entrepreneurs discover new knowledge and better ways of producing things. But entrepreneurial endeavors frequently fail and the profits thought to be in hand often don’t materialize. According to the U.S. Small Business Administration, over half of small businesses fail within the first five years. But failed entrepreneurial activity is just as important as successful entrepreneurial activity. Markets are desirable not because they lead smoothly to improved knowledge and better coordination, but because they provide a process for learning from our mistakes and the incentive to correct them. It’s not that entrepreneurs are just good at getting it right; it’s also that they (like all of us) can know when they’ve got it wrong and can obtain the information necessary to get it right next time.

On this view failure drives change. While success is the engine that accelerates us toward our goals, it is failure that steers us toward the most valuable goals possible. Once failure is recognized as being just as important as success in the market process, it should be clear that the goal of a society should be to create an environment that not only allows people to succeed freely but to fail freely as well.

The seeming preference by the Philippine society to focus on mass ‘public’ education and on the growing web of regulations will serve as constant source of perpetual socio-economic frustrations because these policies have not been dealing with the fundamentals of the problem: Mass graduates in a political environment that seems unfriendly to business or to entrepreneurship which only places additional strains on current unemployment figures.

Yet fear of failure converted into public policies known as public goods or safety nets encourages political dependency, abdication of personal responsibility, indolence and importantly the curtailment of civil liberties.

From the economic dimension, this implies diversion of scarce resources from productive activities. The obverse side of each safety net underwritten or regulation imposed means employment losses somewhere.

In focusing on the wrong factors evidently we get the wrong outcomes. Worst, since current woes reflect on the failures of political policies, the effect has been noticeably widespread. Yet politicians tend to pass the blame on someone else.

Unfortunately, accountability from these policy failures has practically been absent or are imperceptible from the public’s perspective. In other words, the opportunity cost from each political action have been intangible, unseen or unnoticed by the public.

Thus, the underlying populist tendency to the current social ills has been to ask for more of the same wrong prescriptions or ‘doing the same thing and expecting different results’ a quote on insanity prominently attributed to Albert Einstein.

In politics, a culture of ‘insanity’ seems to be the norm.

The Morality of the Keynesian Monetary Dogma: The Euthanasia of the Savers

The US Federal Reserve and central bankers around the world have conjointly been applying artificially low interest policies (Zero Bound Interest Rates-ZIRP) pretty much in adherence to John Maynard Keynes’ dogma of the “euthanasia of the rentiers”—the idea where capital can be made plentiful by merely tinkering with interest rates.

Since every political decision entails a moral dimension, Professor Robert Higgs eloquently explains how the Keynesian prescription, which in reality signifies a nostrum that resembles the Philosopher’s stone—the alchemy of turning lead into gold—hurts the average citizens. (bold emphasis mine)

In short, the highest yield available to ordinary investors who seek a simple, low-risk investment of their funds is, at best, roughly equal to the rate of inflation—and then, with a 30-year term to maturity, only with substantial risk of capital loss if interest rates should rise. To put the matter another way, all ordinary investors are now being progressively impoverished because the nominal return on their investments falls short of the loss of purchasing power of the dollar during the term of the investment. Getting a positive real rate of return is effectively impossible for the proverbial widows and orphans. Only investors with the knowledge of how to invest in gold, crude commodities, and other such esoteric assets stand any chance of earning positive real returns, and then only with great risk of substantial capital losses.

Given that the Fed’s official policy is to drive all interest rates to near zero, one may conclude that the Fed seeks to impoverish the widows, orphans, retired people, and all other financially untutored people who rely on interest earnings to support themselves in their old age or adversity. Can a crueller official policy be imagined, short of grinding up these unfortunate souls to make pet food or fertilizer?

The politicians constantly bark about their solicitude for those who are helpless and in difficulty through no fault of their own. Yet, the scores of millions of people who saved money to support themselves in old age now find themselves progressively robbed by the very officials who purport to be their protectors. There are many reasons to oppose the Fed’s policy. The reason brought to mind by the official enthanasia of the nation’s small savers deserves far more attention than it has received to date.

Bottom line:

Keynesian policies have been designed at propping up the privileges of the INSIDERS (the central banking-banking-political elites) all at the expense of the outsiders or the ordinary people of the world (this includes me).

Although such policies are camouflaged by rationalizations from academic gibberish as ‘aggregate demand’ and ‘liquidity trap’, the mantra “privatize profits and socialize losses” represents as its implicit ethical framework.

Despite coordinated actions to attain such an environment, which instead has led to higher consumer prices, and that has been explicitly expressive of the policymakers’ intents that deserves the public’s reprobation, ironically there has hardly been a popular uproar.

Instead protestations today have been misdirected at the effects—financial sector deliberately being sustained by the political class.

No wonder politicians and their bureaucrats can afford to keep bamboozling us. Nevertheless, eventually or at the fullness of time, there is no escaping the laws of scarcity.

Global Stock Markets: The Euro Bazooka Deal and the Boom Bust Cycle

I used to think that the stock market has generally NOT been a form of gambling. But events have been tilting the odds to favor “high risk high volatility” or excessive speculative activities.

Here is what I wrote in my stock market primer, (bold original)

government interventions can tilt or distort any markets away far from its price signaling efficiency. This is where the level of the playing field or the distribution share of the odds are skewed to favor one party over the others, mostly the recipients or beneficiaries from these interventions. Where the governments assume the role as the HOUSE and the beneficiaries as the DEALERS, then all other participants operate as PLAYERS, hence your basic description of a gambling casino.

There seems no other solid proof or validation of this hypothesis than what has transpired today.

tables above from Bloomberg

Last night, major equity markets skyrocketed following the long awaited culmination for a Bazooka approach to the Euro debt crisis which obviously has 'gratified' the global financial markets deeply addicted to bailouts.

Bespoke calls this a ‘crazy market’

They write,

You know this market has gotten crazy when 100% of Financial sector stocks are trading above their 50-days!

But as I have pointed out since, this has really been more of a boom bust cycle than just an irrational market.

Another of Bespoke’s chart exhibits the dramatic turnaround of the market breadth of the S&P 500. The S&P 500 is clearly being driven by tidal flows.

Importantly, the S&P’s 500 chart has popped above the 200-day moving averages which should put pressure on the bearish ‘death cross’ if the bullish momentum holds.

In downplaying the predictive value of chart patterns, I recently wrote,

The prospective actions of US Federal Reserve’s Ben Bernanke and European Central Bank’s Jean-Claude Trichet represents as the major forces that determines the success or failure of the death cross (and not statistics nor the pattern in itself). If they force enough inflation, then markets will reverse regardless of what today’s chart patterns indicate. Otherwise, the death cross could confirm the pattern. Yet given the ideological leanings and path dependency of regulators or policymakers, the desire to seek the preservation of the status quo and the protection of the banking class, I think the former is likely the outcome than the latter.

The Euro ‘shock-and-awe’ deal plus a money supply charged economic momentum in the US, suddenly seems to have switched the risk reward tradeoff conditions to a ‘risk ON’.

Boom bust cycle indeed.

Quote of the Day: Paradigm Restriction

From Robert Ringer,

Metaphorically speaking, we are all restricted by our unique mental paradigms. It’s difficult to comprehend ideas and circumstances we are not accustomed to hearing and seeing within the invisible parameters that surround our lives.

Thus, one of the causes of our differing perceptions of reality is that we all start from our own set of assumptions. To break through one’s Paradigm Restriction requires a willingness to let go of comfortable, long-held beliefs and look at the world the way it is today rather than the way it was ten or twenty or thirty years ago.

In short, paradigm restriction is a close mind or a tunnel vision.

Cartoon of the Day: The Greedy 1%

From Bob Gorrell (hat tip Mark Perry)

Bank of Japan Expands QE

The Bank of Japan (BoJ) has announced an increase of their version of Quantitative Easing (QE) or central bank asset purchases.

From Bloomberg, (bold emphasis added)

The Bank of Japan expanded stimulus as Europe’s sovereign-debt crisis caused an appreciation in the yen that may endanger a recovery from the March earthquake, tsunami and nuclear crisis.

Governor Masaaki Shirakawa and his policy board expanded their credit and asset-purchase programs to a total of 55 trillion yen ($724 billion) from 50 trillion yen in an 8 to 1 vote, the central bank said in a statement in Tokyo today. It also kept the overnight lending rate between zero and 0.1 percent.

Central banks from Brazil to Russia have cut borrowing costs and India signaled this week it was done with rate increases as nations turn to shelter their economies from the global slowdown. Economists said today’s policy boost was too small to address the strengthening yen and the BOJ may be forced to take further action if overseas economies deteriorate.

“In a word, this was disappointing,” said Masaaki Kanno, a former senior official at the Bank of Japan and now chief economist at JPMorgan Chase & Co. in Tokyo. "They could have taken more active policies to give the market a positive surprise rather than moving little by little."

This only goes to show how addicted the global financial sector has been for bailout policies, such that they would use absurd premises to rationalize on such political actions.

Euro’s Bailout Deal: Rescue Fund Jumps to $1.4 Trillion and a 50% haircut on Greece bondholders

From Bloomberg (bold emphasis mine)

European leaders persuaded bondholders to take 50 percent losses on Greek debt and boosted the firepower of the rescue fund to 1 trillion euros ($1.4 trillion), responding to global pressure to step up the fight against the financial crisis.

Ten hours of brinkmanship at the second crisis summit in four days delivered a plan that the euro area’s stewards said points the way out of the debt quagmire, even if key details are lacking. Last-ditch talks with bank representatives led to the debt-relief accord, in an effort to quarantine Greece and prevent speculation against Italy and France from ravaging the euro zone and wreaking global economic havoc.

“The world’s attention was on these talks,” German Chancellor Angela Merkel told reporters in Brussels at about 4:15 a.m. today. “We Europeans showed tonight that we reached the right conclusions.”

Measures include recapitalization of European banks, a potentially bigger role for the International Monetary Fund, a commitment from Italy to do more to reduce its debt and a signal from leaders that the European Central Bank will maintain bond purchases in the secondary market.

So the money destruction from recapitalization of European banks will be offset by the ECB’s bond purchases.

In addition, the deal transforms the EFSF into an insurance fund. As I earlier noted

In the Eurozone, a proposal being floated to ring fence the region’s banking system will be through the conversion of the EFSF into an insurance like credit mechanism, where the EFSF will bear the first 20% of losses on sovereign debts, but allows the banks to lever up its firepower fivefold to € 2 trillion

Yet the lack of real resources, insufficient capital by the ECB, highly concentrated and the high default correlation of underlying investments could be possible factors that could undermine such grandiose plans. Besides, such plans appear to have been tailor fitted to reduce credit rating risks of France and Germany aside from allowing the ECB to monetize on these debts.

The Eurozone’s rescue will rely heavily on the ECB’s QE program.

The rest of the world will also participate in the Euro bailout via the IMF which should not only dampen global economic performance overtime, but would also reduce available resources when the next crisis arises.

And China is also being asked to contribute more.

From another Bloomberg article,

French President Nicolas Sarkozy plans to call Chinese leader Hu Jintao tomorrow to discuss China contributing to a fund European leaders may set up to bolster their debt-crisis fight, said a person familiar with the matter.

The investment vehicle was one of the options being considered by European leaders at a summit tonight to expand the reach of its 440 billion-euro ($612 billion) European Financial Stability Facility.

Sarkozy’s plea to his Chinese counterpart would come the day before a planned visit to Beijing by Klaus Regling, chief executive officer of the EFSF, to court investors.

Should China give in to the request to support the Euro, this means a weaker US dollar.

Nevertheless, current events in the Eurozone reveals how privileged the US and Euro banking class have been, who are supported by their domestic and regional political patrons, and indirectly the US through the US Federal Reserve whose swap lines to the Eurozone which have tallied $1.85 billion, and the world through the IMF.

Yet all these centralized rescue plans seem to be anchored on hope which only buys time before next episode of this continuing crisis resurfaces.

For the meantime, the QE starved financial markets will likely get another boost. Thus the boom bust cycles.

No Liquidity Trap, US Economy Picks Up Steam

From the Wall Street Journal Blog (bold highlights mine)

U.S. businesses are unsure where the economy is headed, but that has not stopped them from going ahead with capital spending projects. The dichotomy echoes consumer behavior, which finds consumers feeling pessimistic but still shopping.

The big difference: unlike consumers who have seen little wage growth, the U.S. business sector has piles of money to buy new equipment, modernize plants and retrofit office space. Now they just need to add workers.

Shipments of non-defense capital goods excluding aircraft jumped at a healthy 16.7% last quarter. That was the largest gain in five quarters and suggests third-quarter gross domestic product growth was solid (GDP data will be released Thursday).

In addition, new orders for capex goods increased last quarter, meaning business investment will keep growing into 2012.

Company executives are approving spending plans, while at the same time growing more uncertain about the U.S. economy.

The third-quarter Manufacturing Barometer done by business consulting firm PwC shows a plunge in the percentage of U.S. manufacturers who feel good about the economy.

Kontra popular analysts whose incantations have been about an alleged liquidity trap that has been plaguing the US economy, the empirical data above disproves this highly fallacious but popular theory.

To add, signs of economic strength seems to defy the 'animal spirits'.

Instead, as what I have been saying, exploding money supply growth appear to be permeating into the US economy where the next possible risk could escalating inflation.

Gold prices appears to be signaling this, where a break above the 50-day moving averages would imply that the bull market in gold remains intact and would likely reaccelerate.

And if US consumer price inflation is to ramp up, then the attendant symptoms would be a recovery in the broader spectrum of commodity markets and the stock markets.

Nevertheless, we still need to see the feedback loop effects of the unfolding events in China and the Eurozone.

Globalization Fuels the Africa’s Moment

Globalization has been fueling Africa’s renascence.

From the Economist, (bold emphasis mine)

AFRICA has made a phenomenal leap in the last decade. Its economy is growing faster than that of any other continent. Foreign investment is at an all-time high; Senegal has lower borrowing costs than Ireland. The idea of a black African billionaire—once outlandish except for kleptocratic dictators—is commonplace now. At the same time an expanding African middle class (similar in size to those in India and China) is sucking in consumer goods. Poverty, famine and disease are still a problem but less so than in the late 20th century, not least thanks to advances in combating HIV and malaria.

Africa’s mood is more optimistic than at any time since the independence era of the 1960s. This appears to be a real turning point for the continent. About a third of its growth is due to the (probably temporary) rise in commodity prices. Some countries have been clever enough to use profits to build new infrastructure. The arrival of China on the scene—as investor and a low-cost builder—has accelerated this trend. Other Asian economies are following its lead, from Korea to Turkey.

Yet factors unconnected to resources have been equally or even more important. Africans are taking a greater interest in each other. Regional economic cooperation has improved markedly—borders are easier to cross now, especially in the east. Technology helps too. Africa has 400m mobile phone users—more than America. Such tools boost local economies, especially through mobile banking and the distribution of agricultural information.

As the rest of the world struggles with economic meltdown, Africa is for once enjoying a moment in the sun. Even political violence, long an anti-reformist cancer, is simmering down. Many long-running civil wars have (more or less) ended: Sudan, Congo, Angola. Bad governance is still holding back many countries, but markets are becoming more open thanks to privatisation. Examples of the old Africa (destitute, violent and isolated) are becoming more rare.

The above article echoes on the earlier observations of the McKinsey Quarterly in June of 2010 (bold emphasis mine)

The key reasons behind this growth surge included government action to end armed conflicts, improve macroeconomic conditions, and undertake microeconomic reforms to create a better business climate. To start, several African countries halted their deadly hostilities, creating the political stability necessary to restart economic growth.

Next, Africa’s economies grew healthier as governments reduced the average inflation rate from 22 percent in the 1990s to 8 percent after 2000. They trimmed their foreign debt by one-quarter and shrunk their budget deficits by two-thirds.

Finally, African governments increasingly adopted policies to energize markets. They privatized state-owned enterprises, increased the openness of trade, lowered corporate taxes, strengthened regulatory and legal systems, and provided critical physical and social infrastructure. Nigeria privatized more than 116 enterprises between 1999 and 2006, for example, and Morocco and Egypt struck free-trade agreements with major export partners. Although the policies of many governments have a long way to go, these important first steps enabled a private business sector to emerge.

In short, Africa has greatly reduced dependence on the political distribution of resources (which has reduced wars), has vastly improved property rights, which has enabled free trade and importantly embraced economic freedom.

Basic lessons which Filipinos ought to learn and emulate.

Quote of the Day: The Fading Religion of Global Warming

From Michael Barone (hat tip Matt Ridley)

All the trappings of religion are there. Original sin: Mankind is responsible for these prophesied disasters, especially those slobs who live on suburban cul-de-sacs and drive their SUVs to strip malls and tacky chain restaurants.

The need for atonement and repentance: We must impose a carbon tax or cap-and-trade system, which will increase the cost of everything and stunt economic growth.

Ritual, from the annual Earth Day to weekly recycling.

Indulgences, like those Martin Luther railed against: private jet-fliers like Al Gore and sitcom heiress Laurie David can buy carbon offsets to compensate for their carbon-emitting sins.

Corporate elitists, like General Electric's Jeff Immelt, profess to share this faith, just as cynical Venetian merchants and prim Victorian bankers gave lip service to the religious enthusiasms of their days. Bad for business not to. And if you're clever, you can figure out how to make money off it.

Believers in this religion have flocked to conferences in Rio de Janeiro, Kyoto and Copenhagen, just as Catholic bishops flocked to councils in Constance, Ferrara and Trent, to codify dogma and set new rules.

But like the Millerites, the global warming clergy has preached apocalyptic doom -- and is now facing an increasingly skeptical public. The idea that we can be so completely certain of climate change 70 to 90 years hence that we must inflict serious economic damage on ourselves in the meantime seems increasingly absurd.

If carbon emissions were the only thing affecting climate, the global-warming alarmists would be right. But it's obvious that climate is affected by many things, many not yet fully understood, and implausible that SUVs will affect it more than variations in the enormous energy produced by the sun.

Hoaxes will eventually get exposed for what they truly are.

Apple Jumps Into the TV Industry

A Steve Job-less Apple won’t be inhibited from their innovative ways, they’re moving into integrating TV with their current line of products.

From Bloomberg,

Apple Inc. (AAPL) is turning to the software engineer who built iTunes to help lead its development of a television set, according to three people with knowledge of the project.

Jeff Robbin, who helped create the iPod in addition to the iTunes media store, is now guiding Apple’s internal development of the new TV effort, said the people, who declined to be identified because his role isn’t public.

Robbin’s involvement is a sign of Apple’s commitment to extending its leadership in smartphones and tablets into the living room. Before his Oct. 5 death, Apple co-founder Steve Jobs told biographer Walter Isaacson that he had “finally cracked” how to build an integrated TV with a simple user interface that would wirelessly synchronize content with Apple’s other devices.

“It will have the simplest user interface you could imagine,” Jobs told Isaacson in the biography “Steve Jobs,” released yesterday by CBS Corp. (CBS)’s Simon & Schuster.

Trudy Muller, a spokeswoman for Cupertino, California-based Apple, declined to comment. Outside of Jobs’s remarks in the book, Apple hasn’t acknowledged that it’s developing a TV set. And according to one person, it’s not guaranteed that Apple will release a television.

Until now, the company’s TV efforts have been limited to Apple TV, a small $99 gadget that plugs in to a television and gives users access to content from iTunes, Netflix Inc. (NFLX)’s streaming service and YouTube. Jobs had called it Apple’s “hobby,” rather than something designed to be a serious moneymaker.

The relentless pursuit of profits forces producers to earnestly work to satisfy the consumers, partly through innovation. If they fail, then they lose money. It’s a calculated risk for them that comes with no guarantees.

For consumers this means more choices and access to products at lower prices.

That’s the beauty of free markets.

Poll: Occupy Wall Street versus Tea Party, Cut Between Partisan Party Lines

Each day that passes, my theory about Occupy Wall Street as a re-election campaign strategy for President Obama has been generating more confirmations.

From Pew Research (bold emphasis mine)

About four-in-ten Americans say they support the Occupy Wall Street movement (39%), while nearly as many (35%) say they oppose the movement launched last month in New York’s financial district.

By contrast, more say they oppose the Tea Party movement than support it (44% vs. 32%), according to the latest survey by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press and The Washington Post, conducted Oct. 20-23 among 1,009 adults. One-in-ten (10%) say they support both, while 14% say they oppose both.

Partisanship plays a strong role in attitudes about the two movements. About six-in-ten Republicans (63%) say they support the Tea Party. That jumps to 77% among Republicans who describe themselves as conservative. Just 13% of Democrats support the Tea Party movement, while 64% are opposed.

About half of Democrats (52%) – and 62% of liberal Democrats – say they support the Occupy Wall Street movement. Among Republicans, 19% say they support the anti-Wall Street protests, while more than half (55%) oppose them.

Independents have mixed opinions of the Occupy Wall Street movement: 43% support the movement and 35% are opposed. By contrast, the balance of opinion among independents toward the Tea Party is much more negative: Just 30% support the Tea Party movement while 49% are opposed.

Pew Research essentially confirms the Gallup survey who also showed earlier that only a segment of the American population has been in favor of Occupy Wall Street.

We must remember that the Tea Party has served as a critical influence in turning the tide to favor Republicans during the 2010 Congressional elections.

In the realization that election season nears and that the approval ratings for both Congress and the President are at record lows, which in essence diminishes the odds of the re-election of the Democrat incumbents, thus the seeming urgency for the beleaguered Democrats (through their allies) to organize, mobilize, finance and expand a populist movement that could neutralize the Tea Party forces.

So the Occupy Wall Street movement basically rests on the political gimmickry of class warfare which advocates the expansion of government control in the delusional belief that the ends will justify the means.

Importantly, the Pew survey above has been exhibiting how Occupy Wall Street and the Tea party movement appear to be galvanizing across partisan party lines, which essentially has been confirming my theory.

So far on this account, the survey suggests that Occupy Wall Street as rather a new movement that rides on fancy noble but unattainable abstract goals has been achieving their objective as a prominent counterbalance to the Tea Party movement.

But this has yet to spillover to President Obama’s approval ratings or to his re-election odds.

The Intrade prediction market says that as of this writing Obama’s re-election odds is at 48.7%.

It is interesting and fascinating to witness how people have been so gullible as to be unwittingly used and manipulated to support political causes whose benefits only accrues to politicians seeking office. This also clearly shows how politics can strip or rob people of their common sense.

Chart of the Day: The US TV Media Industry

From Wall Stats.com

For a larger view, please press on this link which should redirect you to the source page

By the way here is a link showing the list of the largest players in US media (cable, TV, Print, Telecom and Radio)

Doing Business 2012: Philippines Ranking Down

The World Bank in conjunction with the International Financial Corporation recently released Doing Business 2012

Doingbusiness.org attempts to measure how business friendly an economy is.

A fundamental premise of Doing Business is that economic activity requires good rules—rules that establish and clarify property rights and reduce the cost of resolving disputes; rules that increase the predictability of economic interactions and provide contractual partners with certainty and protection against abuse. The objective is regulations designed to be efficient, accessible to all and simple in their implementation. In some areas Doing Business gives higher scores for regulation providing stronger protection of investor rights, such as stricter disclosure requirements in related-party transactions.

Doing Business takes the perspective of domestic, primarily smaller companies and measures the regulations applying to them through their life cycle. This year’s report ranks economies on the basis of 10 areas of regulation—for starting a business, dealing with construction permits, getting electricity, registering property, getting credit, protecting investors, paying taxes, trading across borders, enforcing contracts and resolving insolvency (formerly closing a business). In addition, data are presented for regulations on employing workers.

Here is the current ranking:

Unfortunately the Philippine fell two notches from 134 last year to 136th. Notice how ‘unfriendly’ the domestic business environment has been. The other implication is that the local business environment has been uncompetitive and requires a high hurdle rate to attract investors, which why jobs are inadequate.

Here is the measure of progress by 183 nations monitored by the institution.

For the Philippines, there has hardly been any progress from 2005. This implies that the deluge of media based politicking has resulted to little progress.

The only reform, doingbusiness.org has identified is the passing of a law on ‘Resolving insolvency’. Yet we don’t even know how ‘fair’ or ‘equitable’ and enforceable this law is.

Finally here is overall scorecard. Except for trading across the borders (globally ranked 51st) and getting electricity (54), most of the other metrics has been dismal: starting a business (158), dealing with construction permits (102), registering property (117), getting credit (123), protecting investors (133), paying taxes (136), enforcing contract (112) and resolving insolvency (163).

If there is any important lesson that can be gleaned from the above is that the Philippines political economy remains firmly hamstrung or plagued by the lack of property rights. Obviously, this has been the result of excessive politicking or overdependence on political resolution of socio-economic problems.

Filipinos hardly realize that politicians don’t care about our property rights, what they care about is the usurpation and the expansion of their political control and the privileges that accompanies this.

We can fantasize about so and so politician delivering us from our economic woes. However, economic reality will only persistently frustrate us, because there are NO miracles from redistributionist policies.

Forcibly taking resources from Pedro’s pockets and to give to Juan is not only a ZERO sum activity that leads to a waste of resources, but importantly also promotes a culture of sloth and dependency, which politicians and their media accomplices has been perennially parroting—control here, control there and control everywhere. Yet the only thing that needs controlling should be their loquacious economically abstract 'noble' sounding mouths.

Progress would have to come from our respect for property rights which serves as the foundation for economic freedom. Ultimately the path to progress starts from us, and not from politicians-a reality which most can't comprehend.