US Stocks: Disappointing Job Reports Spurs Frantic Buying on Expectations of Monetary Heroin; Atlanta Fed’s 3Q GDP Chopped to .9%

US stocks experienced an incredibly wild round trip yesterday.

(from stockcharts.com)

For instance, the Dow Jones Industrials was sharply down at the early session (by 259 points), but rallied furiously back to close the day at the session high with an astounding 200.36 point advance.

The report from Reuters gives us a clue on what transpired and inspired the day’s action: (bold mine)

Bond prices climbed on Friday after a weak U.S. employment report increased worry about slowing global growth, while global equities were able to rebound from an initial selloff to close with strong gains.

The economy created 142,000 jobs in September, well short of the 203,000 forecast, and August numbers were revised sharply lower to show only 136,000 jobs, the U.S. Labor Department said.

Bond prices jumped, with benchmark U.S. Treasury yields falling to their lowest level in slightly over 5 months. The 10-year U.S. Treasury note was last up 17/32 in price to yield 1.9824 percent.

U.S. stocks managed to rebound from sharp declines, buoyed by gains in the beaten down energy and materials sector.

"These numbers are weaker than expected, but not alarmingly weak," said Brad Lipsig, senior portfolio manager at UBS Wealth Management in New York.

"The risk is that they continue on a weakening trajectory. This could mean that weakness in overseas economies is now affecting the U.S. economy."

Years of cheap central bank cash after the 2007-2008 financial crisis have supported asset prices, but recent signs of a slowdown in global economic growth, and the Fed's decision last month to postpone raising interest rates, have unnerved investors betting on a return to more normal policy. 

The weak jobs report likely pushes out the timeline for the Fed to raise interest rates for the first time in nearly a decade. Fed funds futures implied traders see nearly no chance the U.S. central bank would end its near-zero rate policy in October, according to CME Group's FedWatch program, with a hike likely to occur in March 2016.

So the initial response to the disappointing job reports had been a sell down. Apparently, the stock market realized that such bad data entailed that the FED will backed them up. This means that bad news will push back the Fed's liftoff farther down the road.

Thus, BAD NEWS is GOOD NEWS! That’s because the Fed’s monetary heroin provided by ZIRP, in support of stocks, will prevail. (add to this: Asian currencies also rallied strongly)

Nonetheless, here is what bad "job" news looks like based on Wall Street Journal’s report and charts

JOBS: 142,000

U.S. employers added a seasonally adjusted 142,000 jobs in September, well below economists’ expectations for a gain of 200,000 jobs. Payroll readings in the prior two months were also revised down by a total of 59,000. Employers added 136,000 jobs in August and 223,000 in July. The average job gain over the past three months was 167,000, a marked slowdown from the August three-month average. September marked the 60th consecutive month of job gains, the longest stretch on record.

JOBLESS RATE: 5.1%

The headline unemployment rate was unchanged at 5.1% last month, holding the jobless rate at its lowest level since April 2008. But that partly reflects a shrunken labor force. The unemployment rate is down from its peak of 10% at the end of 2009, and is just above the 5% reading recorded when the recession began in late 2007. The current rate is within the range Federal Reserve officials view as the likely long-run average.

WAGES: $25.09

Average hourly earnings of private-sector workers declined by 1 cent to $25.09 last month. That’s a 2.2% increase from a year earlier. The average work week also decreased by 0.1 hour last month, to 34.5 hours. Wages had been advancing at a modest 2% pace or barely higher during much of the expansion. Many economists blame the slow gains for lackluster consumer spending and sluggish economic growth.

LABOR-FORCE PARTICIPATION: 62.4%

The labor-force participation rate fell last month to 62.4%, after registering at 62.6% for the previous three months. The latest reading is the result of the labor force shrinking by 350,000 people last month. The participation rate—the share of the population either working or actively looking for work—has been dropping for several years and is near levels last consistently recorded in the late 1970s, a time when women were still entering the workforce in larger numbers.

Let me add the other day’s data on job cuts from Challenger, Gray & Christmas last September

From the firm’s Press Release

The third quarter ended with a surge in job cuts, as U.S.-based employers announced plans to shed 58,877 in September, a 43 percent increase from the previous month, according to a report released Thursday by global outplacement consultancy Challenger, Gray & Christmas, Inc.

The September total was third largest of the year behind July (105,696) and April (61,582). It was 93 percent higher than the 30,477 planned layoffs announced the same.

The Top 5 industries plagued by job cuts as shown above.

All these jobs data--the seeming inflection on the rate of jobs growth, declining wages, the sharp reduction of labor participation (at record), slowing gains in employment to population ratio--hardly supports a “robust” economy or even earnings growth.

Add to this last night’s August factory order report which slumped by 1.7%. The drop, according to CNBC, accounted for the largest amount in eight months, led by a drop in demand for commercial airplanes and weakness in a key category that tracks business investment spending.

Moreover, the Zero Hedge points out that: (bold italics original): For the 10th month in a row, US Factory Orders dropped year-over-year - the longest streak outside of a recession in history. Against expectations of a 1.2% decline MoM, August dropped 1.7% which is the worst MoM drop since Dec 2014, with a 24% drop MoM in defense new orders and capital goods. Most worrying however is the rise in the inventories-to-shipments ratio once again to cycle highs after a hopeful dip lower in July.

The slump in factory orders compounds on the US manufacturing conditions based on several survey conducted by the FED.

Bloomberg notes (October 1) that “America's Manufacturers Got Crushed in September” as “Seven of these surveys have been released over the course of the month, and only one, the Dallas Fed Manufacturing Index, has exceeded economists' expectations. All these regional surveys pointed to shrinking manufacturing sectors, with some prints coming in at their worst levels since the Great Recession:

The Bloomberg explains: The Empire State manufacturing index earlier this month indicated back-to-back months of contraction, with the employment sub-index and six-month forward outlook hitting multiyear lows. In part due to a market retreat in new order volumes, the Richmond Fed's Manufacturing Survey posted its lowest reading since the start of 2013. The Kansas City Fed's index has been stuck in negative territory since March, with new orders, shipments, employment, and exports all declining in September…On Wednesday, two regional indices confirmed that the pain is widespread.”

All these points to the periphery to the core in motion where emerging market troubles have now spread to affect the core (developed economies).

And a domestic periphery-to-the-core dynamic have likewise become evident in terms of job cuts, as well as on manufacturing. Job losses have now diffused to technology, retail and industrial goods.

Incidentally the Atlanta Fed abruptly chopped their projected 3Q GDP from 1.8% to just .9% as of October 1.

Why? The Atlanta FED explains (bold mine)

The GDPNow model nowcast for real GDP growth (seasonally adjusted annual rate) in the third quarter of 2015 is 0.9 percent on October 1, down from 1.8 percent on September 28. The model's nowcast for the contribution of net exports to third-quarter real GDP growth fell 0.7 percentage points to -0.9 percentage points on September 29 following the advance report on U.S. international trade in goods from the U.S. Census Bureau.

Periphery to the core.

As I wrote in February 2014: 

Even when the exposure would seem negligible, if the adverse impact of emerging markets to the US and developed economies won’t be offsetby growth (exports, bank assets and corporate profits) in developed nations or in frontier nations, then there will be a drag on the growth of developed economies, which would hardly be inconsequential. Why? Because the feedback loop from the sizeable developed economies will magnify on the downside trajectory of emerging market growth which again will ricochet back to developed economies and so forth. Such feedback mechanism is the essence of periphery-to-core dynamics which shows how economic and financial pathologies, like biological contemporaries, operate at the margins or by stages.

The above only reveals of the unsustainable divergence in motion—the seeming deterioration in the real economy relative to actions at the financial markets.

Eventually soon, divergences (internal conflicts) will be resolved as convergence.

Russia’s Putin Defense of Syria: Why the US is Against it and Why Putin Acted

Well the war against the ISIS has taken a dramatic twist. 

Russia’s Putin has joined the war by initially by conducting airstrikes against ISIS targets. But they are doing this independently from US and the latter’s allies. 

Russia has reportedly expanded air operations to cover other Syrian rebels which includes those supported by the US. 

The Chinese government reportedly will be sending warplanes in support of Russia’s campaign as Russia’s warplanes will be allowed access to Iraq’s air base. Finally, Iran and the Hezbollah have reportedly been preparing to launch ground troops on Syria.

In short, Russia and her allies have launched a coordinated campaign not only to flush out the ISIS but also to secure Syria’s Assad regime. 

And it’s not that Russia has been trying to get the goat of the US. Russia’s reportedly earlier asked for the “America and its allies to agree to coordinate their campaign against the terrorist group with Russia, Iran and the Syrian army, but according to Bloomberg, the Obama administration has so far resisted.”

Now why the US government is against Russia

From Daniel McAdam’s at the Lew Rockwell Blog offers an explanation: (bold mine)

The Obama Administration is not happy about this development.

The US has been bombing Syria for a year without permission from the Syrian government and without a UN Security Council resolution authorizing an attack on a sovereign nation. That means US strikes on Syrian soil are illegal according to international law. However the first US response to the Russian strikes against ISIS in Syria was to condemn the Russian government for not coordinating its strikes with the US.

Unsurprisingly, the US mainstream media once again rushed to carry water for the US administration, with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour pondering whether Russia answering the legitimate Syrian government’s request for assistance would open itself up to war crimes charges! In Amanpour’s world there is no crime in a year of bombing a sovereign state with not even a fig leaf UN resolution to back it up. The only crime is to resist the US empire. No wonder in a world of media austerity, Amanpour is a well-compensated regime propagandist.

Rather than welcoming Russian efforts against ISIS and al-Qaeda, the US claims that unless Russia also focuses on removing the Assad government from power its efforts are “doomed to failure.” The US claims to be concerned that the Russians are attacking the “moderate” Syrian rebels trained by the United States — but even US generals have admitted that group consists of a grand total of four or five individuals. So it’s hard to understand the sudden concern. Each new batch of “moderates” the US churns out seems to defect to al-Qaeda or ISIS within minutes of deployment in Syria.

What is interesting is that the US-led coalition dropping bombs on Syria for the past year has yet to even consider the mounting civilian body count from its attacks. Not a word from the US government about large numbers of civilians it has killed in Syria. Yet there is plenty of evidence that the civilian toll taken by American bombs is exceedingly high. The moment the Russians join the fight against ISIS and al-Qaeda in Syria, however, the US suddenly becomes obsessed with civilian deaths — even as no evidence has arisen aside from suspicious reports from opposition-friendly “human rights” organizations that any civilians have been killed in the first day of Russian strikes.

What “evidence” exists of civilian casualties in the Russian strikes comes from the war machine funded Institute for the Study of War (ISW), headed by Victoria Nuland‘s sister-in-law Kimberly Kagan. ISW’s Genevieve Casagrande — a former dolphin expert who quite frankly does not look like a seasoned foreign policy expert —  claimed to know that Russia’s airstrikes “did not hit ISIS militants and rather resulted in a large number of civilian casualties.” Based on what? Only the unquestioning mainstream media could tell us. But of course they do not.

The bottom line is this: the US is opposing Russia’s attacks on ISIS and al-Qaeda — two branches of the same tree that are a proven threat to the US homeland — because Russia is not also attacking the Assad government, which could never be a threat to the United States.

Who really is protecting us? Obama with his ongoing Assad obsession?

Danger ahead!

Meanwhile, conservative author Pat Buchanan says that Russia’s Putin has only been adroitly responding to the interventionist US foreign policy predicated on the latter's aversion to national self-determination.

From Lew Rockwell.com (bold mine)

So Vladimir Putin in his U.N. address summarized his indictment of a U.S. foreign policy that has produced a series of disasters in the Middle East that we did not need the Russian leader to describe for us.

Fourteen years after we invaded Afghanistan, Afghan troops are once again fighting Taliban forces for control of Kunduz. Only 10,000 U.S. troops still in that ravaged country prevent the Taliban’s triumphal return to power.

A dozen years after George W. Bush invaded Iraq, ISIS occupies its second city, Mosul, controls its largest province, Anbar, and holds Anbar’s capital, Ramadi, as Baghdad turns away from us — to Tehran.

The cost to Iraqis of their “liberation”? A hundred thousand dead, half a million widows and fatherless children, millions gone from the country and, still, unending war.

How has Libya fared since we “liberated” that land? A failed state, it is torn apart by a civil war between an Islamist “Libya Dawn” in Tripoli and a Tobruk regime backed by Egypt’s dictator.

Then there is Yemen. Since March, when Houthi rebels chased a Saudi sock puppet from power, Riyadh, backed by U.S. ordinance and intel, has been bombing that poorest of nations in the Arab world.

Five thousand are dead and 25,000 wounded since March. And as the 25 million Yemeni depend on imports for food, which have been largely cut off, what is happening is described by one U.N. official as a “humanitarian catastrophe.”

“Yemen after five months looks like Syria after five years,” said the international head of the Red Cross on his return.

On Monday, the wedding party of a Houthi fighter was struck by air-launched missiles with 130 guests dead. Did we help to produce that?

What does Putin see as the ideological root of these disasters?

“After the end of the Cold War, a single center of domination emerged in the world, and then those who found themselves at the top of the pyramid were tempted to think they were strong and exceptional, they knew better.”

Then, adopting policies “based on self-conceit and belief in one’s exceptionality and impunity,” this “single center of domination,” the United States, began to export “so-called democratic” revolutions.

How did it all turn out? Says Putin:

“An aggressive foreign interference has resulted in a brazen destruction of national institutions. … Instead of the triumph of democracy and progress, we got violence, poverty and social disaster.

Nobody cares a bit about human rights, including the right to life.”

Is Putin wrong in his depiction of what happened to the Middle East after we plunged in? Or does his summary of what American interventions have wrought echo the warnings made against them for years by American dissenters?

Putin concept of “state sovereignty” is this: “We are all different, and we should respect that. No one has to conform to a single development model that someone has once and for all recognized as the right one.”

The Soviet Union tried that way, said Putin, and failed. Now the Americans are trying the same thing, and they will reach the same end.

Unlike most U.N. speeches, Putin’s merits study. For he not only identifies the U.S. mindset that helped to produce the new world disorder, he identifies a primary cause of the emerging second Cold War.

To Putin, the West’s exploitation of its Cold War victory to move NATO onto Russia’s doorstep caused the visceral Russian recoil. The U.S.-backed coup in Ukraine that overthrew the elected pro-Russian government led straight to the violent reaction in the pro-Russian Donbas.

What Putin seems to be saying to us is this:

If America’s elites continue to assert their right to intervene in the internal affairs of nations, to make them conform to a U.S. ideal of what is a good society and legitimate government, then we are headed for endless conflict. And, one day, this will inevitably result in war, as more and more nations resist America’s moral imperialism.

Nations have a right to be themselves, Putin is saying.

They have the right to reflect in their institutions their own histories, beliefs, values and traditions, even if that results in what Americans regard as illiberal democracies or authoritarian capitalism or even Muslim theocracies.

There was a time, not so long ago, when Americans had no problem with this, when Americans accepted a diversity of regimes abroad. Indeed, a belief in nonintervention abroad was once the very cornerstone of American foreign policy.

Wednesday and Thursday, Putin’s forces in Syria bombed the camps of U.S.-backed rebels seeking to overthrow Assad. Putin is sending a signal: Russia is willing to ride the escalator up to a collision with the United States to prevent us and our Sunni Arab and Turkish allies from dumping over Assad, which could bring ISIS to power in Damascus.

Perhaps it is time to climb down off our ideological high horse and start respecting the vital interests of other sovereign nations, even as we protect and defend our own.

The Syrian war has already spawned a Syrian refugee crisis

Importantly, cross your fingers that these two major opposing alliances won’t cross each other's path, because this may be worse than a global stock market crash or economic/financial crisis, as the Syrian war may be the trigger to World War III. 

Example of Gambler’s Fallacy: The US Stock Market’s Rip on a Traditionally Down Day of September 30

I reiterate here that neither statistics nor seasonality determines the market’s outcome. 

The Bespoke Invest notes that one of the trading sessions with a notorious bias for negative performance has been September 30^th

While March 30th has traditionally been the day where the S&P 500 has been up the least, 9/30 is tied for fifth at 38%.  Since 1945, the S&P 500 has declined an average of 0.15% (median: -0.25%) with positive returns just 38% of the time on 9/30.  While the long-term performance of the S&P 500 on the last day of September has been poor, in recent years it has been even worse.  In the current bull market, if the stock market has been open on 9/30, it has traded down

Well, it turns out that positive returns of just 38% of the time on 9/30 prevailed last night…

Even more, US stocks came out strongly…

Why? According to this CNBC report which quotes an expert:"Nothing has changed fundamentally from yesterday to today except that most of the globe is rallying with weaker-than-expected data points, with the hope of more stimulus from central banks," said Ryan Larson, head of U.S. equity trading at RBC Global Asset Management.

Ah there you have it again…stimulus. So expectations of stimulus may have partly powered last night’s bounce.

The basic premise: Each session is different from any other session in the past. And all past sessions have different factors of influences in shaping the day’s outcome. So unless these sessions share same influences, those ‘trending’ numbers can be seen as just coincidental. 

This fascination with “trending” numbers, most especially applied to seasonality, in projecting future outcomes can be seen as the Gambler’s Fallacy

Investopedia explains: When an individual erroneously believes that the onset of a certain random event is less likely to happen following an event or a series of events. This line of thinking is incorrect because past events do not change the probability that certain events will occur in the future.

As example, again Investopedia: Consider a series of 20 coin flips that have all landed with the "heads" side up. Under the gambler's fallacy, a person might predict that the next coin flip is more likely to land with the "tails" side up.This line of thinking represents an inaccurate understanding of probability because the likelihood of a fair coin turning up heads is always 50%. Each coin flip is an independent event, which means that any and all previous flips have no bearing on future flips.

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.

Quotes of the Day: How Four Popes Viewed Socialism

From AEI’s Mark Perry: (bold and italics original)

Some historical perspective on what four of the last five previous popes had to say about socialism over the last 50 years (emphasis added)……

1. Pope John XXIII (1958-1963)

Pope Pius XI further emphasized the fundamental opposition between Communism and Christianity, and made it clear that no Catholic could subscribe even to moderate Socialism. The reason is that Socialism is founded on a doctrine of human society which is bounded by time and takes no account of any objective other than that of material well-being. Since, therefore, it proposes a form of social organization which aims solely at production; it places too severe a restraint on human liberty, at the same time flouting the true notion of social authority.

~Radio message to the Katholikentag of Vienna, September 14, 1952 in Discorsi e Radiomessaggi, Vol. XIV, p. 314

2. Pope Paul VI (1963-1978)

Too often Christians attracted by socialism tend to idealize it in terms which, apart from anything else, are very general: a will for justice, solidarity and equality. They refuse to recognize the limitations of the historical socialist movements, which remain conditioned by the ideologies from which they originated.

~Apostolic Letter Octogesima Adveniens, May 14, 1971, n. 31

3. Pope John Paul II (1978-2005)

The fundamental error of socialism is anthropological in nature. Socialism considers the individual person simply as an element, a molecule within the social organism, so that the good of the individual is completely subordinated to the functioning of the socio-economic mechanism. Socialism likewise maintains that the good of the individual can be realized without reference to his free choice, to the unique and exclusive responsibility which he exercises in the face of good or evil. Man is thus reduced to a series of social relationships, and the concept of the person as the autonomous subject of moral decision disappears, the very subject whose decisions build the social order. From this mistaken conception of the person there arise both a distortion of law, which defines the sphere of the exercise of freedom, and an opposition to private property. A person who is deprived of something he can call “his own,” and of the possibility of earning a living through his own initiative, comes to depend on the social machine and on those who control it. This makes it much more difficult for him to recognize his dignity as a person, and hinders progress towards the building up of an authentic human community.

Encyclical Centesimus Annus − On the 100^th anniversary of Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum, May 1, 1991, n. 12

4. Pope Benedict XVI (2005 – 2013)

The State which would provide everything, absorbing everything into itself, would ultimately become a mere bureaucracy incapable of guaranteeing the very thing which the suffering person—every person—needs: namely, loving personal concern. We do not need a State which regulates and controls everything, but a State which, in accordance with the principle of subsidiarity, generously acknowledges and supports initiatives arising from the different social forces and combines spontaneity with closeness to those in need. The Church is one of those living forces.

~Encyclical Letter of Pope Benedict XVI

Bonus..

Cato Institute’s graph comparing Pope Francis’ Argentina and the US. Writes Cato’s  Ian Vasquez 

It shows that in 1896, income per person in the United States and Argentina, two of the richest countries in the world, was about identical. Argentina subsequently eschewed the free market, replacing it with trade protectionism and other corporatist policies intended to help the poor by redistributing wealth. By 2010, Argentine income was a third of that of the United States.