Sunday, March 20, 2016

Phisix 7,300: A Return to the Bull Market or Bull Trap? Bangladesh Cyber Heist: A Preview of Global Cyber Financial Warfare?

The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.—Edward Bernays

In this issue
Phisix 7,300: A Return to the Bull Market or Bull Trap? Bangladesh Cyber Heist: A Preview of Global Cyber Financial Warfare?
-Bangladesh Cyber Heist-RCBC Scandal: The Popular Misconceptions
-Bangladesh Cyber Heist: A Preview of Global Cyber Financial Warfare?
-RCBC Scandal Exposes on BSP’s Fragility: The Emperor Has NO Clothes!
-Robust Domestic Demand? January OFW Remittances Sputter Again!
-PSA’s Self Contradiction on Employment Data
-Phisix 7,300: A Return to the Bull market? Or Just Another Violent Bull Trap?
-Has Central Banks Forged a Shanghai Accord to Push Down the USD and to Stoke a Pump on Risk Assets?
-VLL’s Fantastic Self Acquisition of Starmalls!

Phisix 7,300: A Return to the Bull Market or Bull Trap? Bangladesh Cyber Heist: A Preview of Global Cyber Financial Warfare?
Bangladesh Cyber Heist-RCBC Scandal: The Popular Misconceptions
A splendid example of how populist media deliberately misdiagnose cause and effect through the misreading forest from trees has been the controversial “cyber heist” which involved a domestic bank as facilitator of the encashment of money looted from abroad.

Labeled as “money laundering” by the establishment, the general idea has been that the paucity of regulations ‘caused’ and or paved way for the immoral transfer of stolen funds abroad to several entities.

And as expected, the knee jerk response has been to seek more “reforms” (more interventions) and to amplify shrill politically correct (PC) clamor to ease on bank secrecy laws. The predicated assumptions from these (PC) prescriptions should translate to the mechanical banishment of unscrupulous bank activities.
For instance, domestic casinos came under fire for being recipients of the stolen funds. Because they have been exempt from AMLA, populist demand has been for the industry to be subjected to increased regulations. Yet curiously it has not been established whether the casinos acted as an auxiliary to the crime or had been mere unfortunate victims of circumstances. By virtue of logical fallacies, casinos were publicly condemned!
Surprisingly, a quote from an anonymous international observer by a media outlet seems to capture the essence: “imposing anti-money laundering restrictions on casinos, beyond the relatively strict operating guidelines they already have to follow, essentially criminalizes the industry,” he added. “That sounds harsh, but that’s exactly what it boils down to: Transactions above a certain amount are presumed to be illicit and must be reported, and possibly investigated. As I said, that may still be the way to go. But if that’s the case, it’s going to put a limit on investment in that sector…you’re as much as telling investors, ‘There’s a limit on how much money we’ll let you make.’ At least that’s how it will come across. And given the Philippines’ enthusiasm for trying to build up its casino sector, I’m not sure that’s the message they want to convey.”1
Yet casinos serve as a convenient scapegoat for populist politics.

Take Macau’s casinos as conduit for Chinese capital flight as example.

To be clear, I show below how casinos have served instruments or tools to a given purposive action: capital flight. Pls don’t confuse means as the end.
In 2014, Chinese residents increasingly used state backed payment card, China Union Pay, to illegally ship money out of China. Chinese regulators eventually recognized this, and along with Macau authorities, both swiftly clamped down on the card to stem capital movements.

Let me add that some of the huge sums of money exiting China have allegedly been from illicit sources or “corruption” or have been part of the crackdown on the assets of the political opposition—which makes “capital flight” partly “money laundering” as per the definition of incumbent Chinese government. As I pointed out earlier, the crackdown on the state card had only aggravated on the financial conditions of Macau’s casino bubble.

Yet has the Chinese government been able to stop the capital flight (part of which was money laundering) through suppression means of transfer through the Union Pay card? Technically, yes. But generally, NO. Why? Because China’s capital flight only crescendoed! As much as $1 Trillion has been estimated to have fled China’s financial system in 2015.
Many Chinese denizens devised alternative creative ways to siphon money out of the country, e.g. by use relatives to hand carry cash, through the use checks from underground banks, through Hong Kong’s money changer, through buying of overseas assets financed by mortgages, or buying goods of abroad through credit or debit card.


Commercial entities likewise resort to the inflation of import receipts. The bigger firms have channeled capital flow through a huge surge in outbound foreign direct investments which now includes Anbang Insurance’s overpriced $13 billion bid for Starwood Hotels.
So from Union Pay card to many alternative routes. At the end day, Chinese capital flight continues.
The point is: it would be a big misperception to believe that prohibition and regulation on the means would justify the end.

Knee jerk or short term oriented reactions will come with unintended long term consequences.
Bangladesh Cyber Heist: A Preview of Global Cyber Financial Warfare?
Yet the mainstream forgot the real cause.

And the real cause has been a large scale international financial theft from, most possibly, a computer hacking syndicate combined with insider operations.

Said differently, the NYFED-Bangladesh heist seems to represent an elaborate plan to infiltrate and steal from the global financial system through the SWIFT system.

Could this have been a part of a grand plan to undermine and discredit the SWIFT system????
Note that the cyber heist operation originally consisted of $1 billion which apparently was bungled from a misspelling or typo error.

And here is the most important overlooked factor: That the involved parties were CENTRAL BANKS!
The New York Fed operates as a custodian of US dollar accounts for many central banks. Meanwhile, the fraud’s victim, the Bangladesh central bank has dollar accounts in the custody of the NY FED. Apparently the latter’s SWIFT codes had been compromised by hackers possibly located overseas.
Add to this list the indirect participant, which media has been uncannily silent about, the Philippine central bank, the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP).

Not only has been the BSP functioned as the main supervising authority for the bank, RCBC, where some of the personnel may have participated as accessories to the robbery, but the dollar remittances, usd to peso conversion, payments and settlement all operate under the BSP’s system.
In short, the scope of operations had been complex and global
The Bangladesh Central Bank believed that this was an insider job. Part of that conviction emanated from the possible sabotage or the disabling of printer that was supposed to print the SWIFT transactions for the day that suddenly malfunctioned. The absence of the report blinded the Bangladesh authority to the heist in action. Possibly as part of the investigation, an IT expert in Bangladesh has reportedly “gone missing”.

The Bangladesh central bank has commissioned the FBI to assist in the investigation. Though the NY FED denies the earlier charges made by the Bangladesh Central Bank that the former had been also at fault, last week a NY FED employee pleaded guilty for leaking confidential documents to his former employer, Goldman Sachs. While the latter has barely had any direct relationship with the former, what the latter shows has been the bureaucracy’s vulnerability to external influences and to corruption. So it would be too premature to dismiss the likelihood of the involvement of an insider at the NY FED in the Bangladesh incident.

By the way, NY FED’s president William Dudley is also an alumnus of Goldman Sachs. Talk about political revolving doors.
The cyber crime appears to have been a well-planned operation. The timing of execution was almost impeccable. It was done when the aforementioned central banks were most vulnerable. From the Financial Times: Sunday February 7, the start of the week in Bangladesh, was not a working day for banks in the US, and the Bangladeshis failed to reach their New York counterparts despite trying to communicate by email, fax and telephone on Saturday and Sunday. Monday February 8, furthermore, was a holiday for the Chinese new year in the Philippines, where many business people are of Chinese origin2.
In short, the security networks of central banks, as national central planners of the financial system, whose institutions have large command over their respective nation’s resources, have been seriously challenged. The question is by who?

Moreover, reports from two cyber security firms, FireEye Inc. and World Informatix, appointed by Bangladesh Central Bank noted that their monetary system had been “stalked” or had been under cyber attack for two weeks through the commission of the crime.
And worst, the cyber intrusion into the SWIFT system has been reported to be a possible dry run for more or even larger scale operation. From Bloomberg3: (bold mine)
"Malware was specifically designed for a targeted attack on Bangladesh Bank to operate on SWIFT Alliance Access servers," the interim report said. Those servers are operated by the bank but run the SWIFT interface, and the report makes it clear the breach stretches into other parts of the bank’s network as well. "The security breach of the SWIFT environment is part of a much larger breach that is currently under investigation."
SWIFT is a member-owned cooperative that provides international codes to facilitate payments between banks globally. It can’t comment on the investigation, according to Charlie Booth from Brunswick Group, a corporate advisory firm that represents SWIFT.
More from the same Bloomberg report:
The assessment found the first suspicious log-in came on Jan. 24 and lasted less than a minute. On Jan. 29, attackers installed “SysMon in SWIFTLIVE" in what was interpreted as reconnaissance activity, and appeared to operate exclusively with “local administrator accounts.”
Operator logs showed the hackers logged in for short periods of time until Feb. 6, according to the report. The four transfers that went to the Philippines occurred on Feb. 4. The report said the hackers have already hit other FireEye clients, though it’s unclear if those include other central banks.
As of March 16, the FireEye team was about half-way through the examination of the central bank’s computer network.
"Complex malwares have been identified with advanced features of command & control communication, harvesting of credentials and to securely erase all traces of activity after accomplishing its task," the report said. It identified 32 "compromised assets" that “were used for reconnaissance and to gain control of the SWIFT servers and related assets."
If the accounts are true, then will we see more attack on the SWIFT member-users?
This brings to the point where the Bangladesh Cyber Heist could be part of a grand plan to discredit the SWIFT system.

Could it be that theft was only of subsidiary importance? And that real issue was to strain and undermine the SWIFT system?
Yet who are competitors of the SWIFT? There could be two I know of. The Chinese government has an alternative to SWIFT, it is called Cross-Border Inter-Bank Payments System (CIPS). Russia has reportedly been developing its own SWIFT version.
Has the Bangladesh Cyber Heist incident represented the opening salvo of global cyber warfare?
Moreover, the Bangladesh Cyber Heist exposes on a paradox; governments wants to impose war on cash allegedly to forestall money laundering, yet the bigger laundering comes from the cyberspace!
RCBC Scandal Exposes on BSP’s Fragility: The Emperor Has NO Clothes!
Going back to the Philippines.

The magnitude of the amount involved has been so enormous for a piddling branch (RCBC Jupiter) to actually handle the portions of “cash” withdrawals. Such cash requirements (most especially the USD tranches) must have been collated from several branches of the same bank or has originated from the bank’s head office and or from the bank head office deposits at the BSP.
And such likely means that the illicit transactions had permission or had a ‘go signal’ from the upper echelons or that the approval process had been perverted.

In short, this seems no work of a lone wolf or a bunch of small time crooks. There is more than meets the eye.
Curiously, lost in the Philippine political bedlam and grandstanding has been WHY the recipient bank (Pan Asian Bank) in Sri Lanka has been able to return the $20 million pelf.

Has it been because of Sri Lanka has a “surfeit” of AMLA regulations and or a lax bank secrecy laws? Or has it been because Sri Lankan bank officials had THE COMMON SENSE to discern and distinguish irregular transactions to put a stop on them? Officials from Pan Asian Bank noted “that the transaction as too big for a country like Sri Lanka”, so they reported the anomaly to the nation’s routing bank, Deutsche Bank, which subsequently put a freeze to the withdrawal request!
Additionally, all these transactions were channeled through the BSP’s financial system. Here is the BSP’s FAQ on foreign exchange operations and transactions: “The PvP links two real-time gross settlements systems– the BSP’s Philippine Payments and Settlements System (PhilPaSS) for the peso transactions and the Philippine Domestic Dollar Transfer System (PDDTS) for dollar transactions–with the Philippine Depository and Trust Corporation (PDTC) as designated clearing entity for peso-dollar transactions of commercial banks under the BAP. The PDDTS is a local clearing and electronic communications system operated by the BAP, the Philippine Clearing House Corporation (PCHC), Philippine Securities and Settlements Corp. (PSSC) and Citibank, Manila. The PDDTS provides the banking industry with a facility to move US dollar funds from one Philippine bank to another on the same day without having to go through correspondent banks in the US. The system allows online, real-time gross settlement of domestic interbank US dollar transfer and third party account-to-account US dollar transfers. In addition, it provides a facility for online inquiry and settlement of foreign exchange transactions, where the PDDTS participants enter interbank US dollar and Philippine peso transfer instruction in a single screen.”

While it is true that PDDTS represents a consortium of private corporations, they operate under the supervision of the BSP. So the BSP remains responsible for all USD dollar transactions.

Moreover, given the colossal amount of peso transfers, this means that the BSP’s Philpass has most likely been a conduit for the peso leg of such transactions.

So before the BSP calls for the easing of bank secrecy laws or other bank reforms, they should first impose discipline on their own bureaucracy and fix their operating system, as well as, on their private sector subsidiary agents—or operators of the PDDTS.

It would be of little merit to substitute incompetence with even more incompetence by adding more regulations that would likely spawn even more bureaucracy, heightened complexities, and consequently result to more loopholes from which the likelihood of corruption will only expand, and where scalawags will gladly use to such conditions to their advantage that will only increase the system’s fragility.
Maybe the BSP should learn from Sri Lanka and pass a regulation that mandates the use of common sense for bank officials!
It is important to note of the ironies and lessons from current events.

The BSP has been portrayed as having been IN TOTAL CONTROL of the banking system from which the latter’s operating condition has been sold to the public as “SOUND”, yet such grand scale of misconduct surfaces. The Bangladesh CYBER HEIST-RCBC Scandal essentially flies on their face.

Worst, it reveals that the emperor, the BSP, has no clothes!

And to add to the current paradox, there are only 41 universal and commercial banks based on the BSP’s latest directory, yet the BSP goes on to defend its position by saying that the RCBC scandal has been “isolated case” therefore not reflective of the banking system.

With the proliferation of no down-payment and ultra-low interest loans, here is a guess, the BSP has SPARSE idea of the real conditions of banking system, and importantly, how individual banks have been running in circles around their regulations.
Remember last year state owned DBP was accused of market manipulation?

Yet like cockroaches, one scandal may be a symptom of more scandals ahead.

Robust Domestic Demand? January OFW Remittances Sputter Again!
The Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas reported on January remittances which had an uninspiring tone. Reason? 
 


After splendidly hiding the October-November collapse through a revamp on the two year dataset, December’s rebound seems to have sputtered anew as January data has fallen less than its predecessor.

From a monthly basis, the former lows have now become the resistance levels for both personal and cash remittance growth rates.

On a cumulative basis, it’s been an awful start for a usually robust January for both factors.
And even when Januarys has usually been seasonally robust, the monthly growth rate trend has been in a decline for the last two years (lowest window).
So with a foundering income supporting final consumption just where will domestic demand come from?
PSA’s Self Contradiction on Employment Data
More self contradictory data from the Philippine government.
 

Online job placements disagree. Monster’s January job placements have fallen by another 33% on a year to year basis. (left) Remember, January’s 2015’s data was already down relative to 2014. So 2016’s decline compounds on 2015 data. Monster’s Job openings have been on a decline for the entire 2015.
The other online job website has shown similar dynamic. While it has bounced last January, numbers has been significantly down from May 2015, that’s when I started tabulating them every Thursday (which tends to be the strongest day of the week). My impression has that May’s numbers have been less than January 2015.

Diminished investments extrapolate to reduced job openings. So this is why online job openings have slowed. This is unless corporations have channeled job recruitment through other means (newspaper or viral).

Yet the government’s own job data contradicts their own employment report.
Let me reiterate the government Q3 employment index4: Total Employment Index increased at 2.8 percent growth slower from its 4.0 percent growth in the same quarter last year. Trade pulled down the index with a 1.4 percent drop from the previous year. The rest of the industries slowed down: Real Estate at 5.7 percent (from 11.2 percent); Private Services at 4.4 percent (from 6.3 percent); Manufacturing at 3.6 percent (from 4.0 percent); Mining and Quarrying with 2.7 percent (from 3.2 percent); Finance with 2.1 percent (from 10.0 percent); and Transportation and Communications with 0.1 percent (from 3.9 percent). Only Electricity and Water rebounded from a drop of 2.2 percent to positive 0.4 percent this year. (bold mine)
So the government’s own survey shows of significant broad based decline in jobs growth in 3Q yet their annual employment index points to a big recovery!
And if jobs in the trade industry had been a NEGATIVE in 3Q, where trade represents the largest share of the service employment at (34.8% DOLE 2014), just which sector has managed to buoy employment figures for the whole year???? The service sector accounted for 53.7% of jobs in 2014. This was followed by agriculture at 30.08% and industry at 15.6%.
Agriculture and manufacturing has been stagnating. Exports have been in a recession. Performance of PSE listed companies has been dismal through Q3 which should translate to less aggressiveness in capex. Remittances have also been materially slowing.

So just which industry will do most hiring to more than offset the drag from the noted sectors? Or has growth numbers been derived from models which just pop out of the computer screens?
Phisix 7,300: A Return to the Bull market? Or Just Another Violent Bull Trap?
Such statistical smoke and mirrors only reveals how desperate the government has been in trying to maintain the façade of the boom.
With an upsurge of 2.93%, the PSEi posted another scintillating week in favor of the bulls. Substantial gains from three consecutive weeks have accrued to a whopping 7.7%!
Add this to the gains from the January 21 lows, cumulative returns have now reached a stunning 20.09% in 39 trading sessions! So technically, PSEi at 7,300 extrapolates to a return of a bullmarket! That’s in the condition that such gains can at least be maintained.
And because of the ferocity of the recoil from the January troughs, current market actions have portrayed a precipitous or drastic V-shape recovery (green V-lines).

Yet the current rally (evidenced by the steepening slope) has shown to be more violent than the crash! The implication: greed (fear of missing out) has become mightier than fear!
Nonetheless, extreme accounts of volatility hardly have been suggestive of continuity of the current trend but of the risk of another vicious reversal. In short, volatility usually begets volatility.

Also moves from the past three weeks have brought the PSEi to severe overbought conditions.
And because the odds of a full recovery from a V-shape rebound seem small, based on the PSEi’s 50 year history, the bullish premise will depend on the fruition of ‘this time is different’.

Yet this week’s big move have accounted for as an extension of eight biggest market cap issues which continues to drive the headline index.

Some of the biggest market caps have virtually gone B-A-L-L-I-S-T-I-C!

Today, every decline have been seen as a taboo. So buying rampages occurs on the next sessions.
At 7,300, 3 issues stormed to fresh records from a vertical ramp. The three issues: SM, AEV and JGS.

For SM which soared by an astonishing 6.85% this week, be reminded that the same largest firm of the PSEi had posted ZERO net income growth in 2015, has a PER of about 28+ (as of Friday), has seen considerable decline on topline growth rate for two straight years, has ballooning debt, and has been emitting symptoms of excess capacity (e.g. ballooning vacancy rates at malls and increasing real estate inventories as sales slowdown).
Nonetheless, my hunch is that SM will soon announce the IPO of SM Retail at the coming stockholders meeting. The hope is that financial engineering will drive SM’s G-R-O-W-T-H! Can’t deliver growth from ordinary course of business? Then use financial magic to mesmerize the public!
Yet SM’s previous aerial acrobatics in 2013, which were a lot less in degree than today, has only led to crashes.

And now it’s more than the FANTASTIC EIGHT.

In a complete reversal of sentiment, equity prices of the telecom duopoly skyrocketed: TEL by 16.08% and GLO by 23.73%! The belated surge in telecom issues can be construed as a spillover effect or the rising tide phenomenon from the eight issue index pump
And with mania spreading to the telecom duopoly, the service sector led the sectoral gainers.

The 10.12% expansion by the service sector eclipsed the considerable gains by the financials, the holding and the property sector which posted 2.44%, 2.56% and 2.45% advances respectively.
Essentially, the bidding rampage on the four of the top 5 biggest market caps had been reflected on the stupendous near vertical ascent of the PSEi. The combined market share weighting of the four of the biggest issues was 32.577% as of Friday.
With this week’s runup, PLDT regained its top 5 ranking.
Of course, the idea of pumping the index is to spread the sentiment, so three other index issues have virtually gone berserk: RLC, MBT and GLO
Yes some people have come to believe in the impossible: that the markets will provide free money!
So will current momentum present itself as This Time is Different?
We shall see.
Has Central Banks Forged a Shanghai Accord to Push Down the USD and to Stoke a Pump on Risk Assets?
I have previously pointed out that the PSEi’s chart has eerily resonated with Brazil’s Bovespa. Current actions have only reinforced such relationship as shown in the above chart.
Since April 2015, the undulations of the Bovespa’s price trend appear to resonate with the PSEi. While the consonance of the chart trends may manifest sheer coincidence, both the PSEi and Bovespa have virtually characterized actions of bourses of the Emerging Market sphere.

Aside from the abrupt reaction from the brutal selloffs last January, the key fundamental influence to the current rally has been central bank actions.

Central banks have launched what seems as coordinated strike on the bears or an orchestrated move to shore up the markets.

The other week the ECB deployed its latest bazooka (new TLTRO, expanded QE, 0% for marginal lending facility and negative rates for deposit facility).

This week, the US Federal Reserve cited “global economic and financial developments continue to pose risks”, as well as, a downgrade on growth forecast.

Such outlook has rationalized the deferment on the move to raise rates.

Construed as “one of its most dovish decisions of the new millennium”, the effect of the FED’s non-action and the material decline in expectations for the Fed to further conduct tightening measures this year, have been to crash the USD (left).

The USD dropped 1.2% this week!

With the exception of Indonesia’s rupiah, Asian currencies rallied furiously (right) led by the South Korean won, Taiwan dollar and Singapore dollar. The USD won crashed by 2.57%, USD Taiwan dollar slumped by 1.34% and USD Singapore dollar tumbled by 1.1%.
Based on official rates, the USD Philippine peso stumbled by .56% to 46.36.


In essence, the US FED has been perceived to have implicitly EASED conditions!
It was not just the US FED, China’s central bank, the PBOC, aggressively fixed her currency the yuan to a 3 month high. However, the USD rose against the yuan on Friday to partially erase early gains by the yuan.



BoJ’s Governor Haruhiko Kuroda also said last week that “there is room to cut interest rates further” even when the BoJ kept present policies intact. Despite Mr Kuroda’s assurance for more easing, the yen soared against the USD by a remarkable 2.0%!
The seeming orchestrated central bank activities have been suspected by some as an outcome of an implicit adoption of a modern day version the Plaza Accord or the contemporaneous Shanghai Accord in the wake of the G-20 meeting last February at Shanghai.

So the concerted measures adapted by major central bankers over the past few weeks has reinforced on the risk ON conditions that sent stocks, bonds, commodities and emerging market assets flying!
But understand too that for the US stock markets, there has been only ONE BUYER which has kept the bullmarket alive. That ONE BUYER: Corporate BUYBACKS!!! (see left)
From Bloomberg5: Standard & Poor’s 500 Index constituents are poised to repurchase as much as $165 billion of stock this quarter, approaching a record reached in 2007. The buying contrasts with rampant selling by clients of mutual and exchange-traded funds, who after pulling $40 billion since January are on pace for one of the biggest quarterly withdrawals ever. (bold mine)
And paradoxically, rising US markets have occurred as earnings growth continues to plunge. From the Factset6: For Q1 2016, the estimated earnings decline is -8.4%. If the index reports a decline in earnings for Q1, it will mark the first time the index has seen four consecutive quarters of year-over-year declines in earnings since Q4 2008 through Q3 2009. (bold added)
So like the Philippines, US stock market prices have been departing from fundamentals.
Central banks continue to destroy stock markets so it can persist on its subsidies to the political elites and their cronies.
VLL’s Fantastic Self Acquisition of Starmalls!
Horizontal property developer Vista Land released its annual report last week.

And again I find the same dynamics that plagues the sector.
One, despite the “record” income, topline growth has been dramatically falling over the past two years. Sales growth for real estate dropped below 10% to only 9.77% in 2015. That’s lower than 11.36% in 2014 and more than half below the 22.7% rate in 2013.

But because political entrepreneur Manny Villar owned VLL “acquired” another Manny Villar owned Starmalls for Php 33 billion last December which was largely financed by debt, topline sales of Starmalls padded up on VLL’s overall sales picture. Gross revenues increased by 12.47% in 2015, from 11.15% in 2014 and from 31.95% in 2013.

So STR added only 1.32% to VLL’s topline.
Second, like her other peers, record income has been cash deficient. That’s because the topline (as well as income) has been financed by vendor financing through receivables expansion. In 2015, receivables growth ballooned by 18.67% which has been more than double than the 7.27% in 2014 but lower than 34.24% in 2013.
Third, the company continues to massively grow her real estate inventories. Inventories bulged by 27.5% in 2015 which has been double the 13.32% rate in 2014 and more than triple the 7.23% growth in 2013.
So inventories continue to grow MORE than sales. This means massive excess capacity in the making, if not already existing through unsold supplies.
There is nothing more that generates my interests than to see how such adventurism had been financed.
This leads to the fourth factor: DEBT
Total non current liabilities has skyrocketed by 63.12% to Php 60.73 billion in 2015 compared to Php 37.225 billion in 2014. Yet much of that loan had been used to finance the Starmall acquisition.

Yet hasn’t it been ironic for VLL to borrow tons of money (billions) just to generate an additional 1.32% G-R-O-W-T-H in the firm’s NGDP/Gross revenues?
Well why not? Since Starmall and VLL have been owned by the same entity, would lavishing on a self-acquisition with borrowed money not make sense?

Anyway, borrowed money comes from poor depositors who not only will get miniscule returns but also take on the risks by the owners. So if the company losses money, it would be the poor depositors who will likely take the brunt of the losses.
After all, that’s what zero bound rates have been made for: Through the funneling of the resources of the masses, the hope that by enriching the elites via wealth inflation such would “trickle down” back to the masses.

And that’s what “record” income has been about!
___

1 Manila Times Uncomfortable truths about the RCBC scandal March 18, 2016
4 Philippine Statistics Authority Total Gross Revenue Index of Industries grew by 4.3% in Q3 2015 February 24, 2016
6 Factset EARNINGS INSIGHT March 18, 2016

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Saturday, March 19, 2016

Infographics: Canada's Hissing Housing Bubble

“Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.” – John Maynard Keynes

The last time we gave a good run down of Canada’s housing market was in May 2015, when we noted that The Economist gave it the dubious title of the most overvalued housing market in the world. Since then, in just 10 months, prices in Vancouver and Toronto have soared to marks that are 14.1% and 8.7% higher respectively.

Frothy prices, million-dollar shacks, and buying frenzies have prompted world-class short-sellers to come out of the woodwork. For a speculator such as Marc Cohodes, who advises hedge funds on Wall Street that want to bet against the Canadian housing market, this type of classic bubble behavior is music to his ears.

“The cross currents are beyond crazy in Vancouver — it’s a mix of money laundering, speculation, low interest rates,” says Cohodes, who was once profiled as Wall Street’s highest-profile short-seller by the New York Times. “A house is something you live in, but in Vancouver you guys are trading them like the penny stocks on Howe Street.”

Mr. Cohodes has recently said that Canadian real estate has reached “peak insanity”, and it’s part of the reason that investors around the world are trying to find a way to bet against the market.

Home Capital Group, one of Canada’s largest financial institutions, is now the most-shorted stock on Canadian exchanges. The same alternative mortgage lender recently also came under scrutiny for suspending 45 of its brokers for falsifying borrower income.

DOMINOS FALLING

Just as falling oil prices helped to drag the Canadian dollar down, the “lower for longer” price environment for crude has had a similar effect on house prices in the Prairies. Homes in Fort McMurray, the epicenter of the Canadian oil sands, have crashed an average of $117,000 in just a year.

Meanwhile, price tags in the once-strong housing market of Calgary have declined from their peak in October 2014 by -5.4%. The city, which is a financial center for Canadian energy, is bracing for a particular tough year ahead as well. Houses are spending more time on the market, and sales volume and prices continue to fall.

But it’s not just Canada’s oilpatch that is starting to see the writing on the wall. Toronto, which has helped to buoy the rest of the country’s housing growth for years, has also started to cool down.

According to the Teranet – National Bank House Price Index, prices have risen just 0.3% since October in Canada’s largest real estate market. With the prospect of rising interest rates in the future, it’s not expected to heat back up, either. In fact, TD Bank expects that Toronto will have a “moderate” decline in 2017.

AND THEN THERE WAS ONE…

For investors bullish on near-term gains in Canada’s housing sector, there is one last hope that resides on the West Coast.

Vancouver’ housing market sailed again in February, shooting up a record 3.2% in just one month. This is the best month for the market since August 2006. It was so good, in fact, that it single-handedly propped up Canada’s national index for housing.

Canada’s market as a whole saw gains of 0.6% in the month, but it would have dropped to a lacklustre -1.1% without the inclusion of Vancouver in the 11-city index.

The only problem?

The city, which has been a primary beneficiary of rampant foreign buying, is continually cited as the market most ripe for a deep correction, as it continues to defy all common sense.

While Keynes is right in that markets can remain irrational for longer than one can stay solvent, it seems that Canadian housing has turned a corner: regional markets in other parts of the country have stumbled, and the last remaining pillar is Vancouver.

It may continue to buck the trend for now, but it is a wobbly pillar at best.
It's not just Canada, like stocks, debt financed housing bubbles as consequence from ZIRP, QE and NIRP have almost been everywhere.

Courtesy of: Visual Capitalist
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Friday, March 18, 2016

Infographics: Deaths of Roman Emperors vs. Coinage Debasement (Inflationism)

The Visual Capitalist showcases on the death of Roman emperors with that of inflationism. 
The Money Project is an ongoing collaboration between Visual Capitalist and Texas Precious Metals that seeks to use intuitive visualizations to explore the origins, nature, and use of money.

Correlation does not necessarily imply causation.

In other words, just because two sets of data may follow a similar pattern, it does not mean there is any direct causal relationship.

However, as we were assembling our previous research on Currency and the Collapse of the Roman Empire, we noticed something that was too uncanny to skip past: during the 113-year stretch of time from 192 to 305 AD, an astonishing amount of Roman emperors (84%) were either brutally murdered or assassinated.

This, of course, was a particularly troubled period for the Romans. During the Crisis of the Third Century (235 to 284 AD) specifically, the combined pressures of invasion, civil war, plague, and economic depression threatened to bring down the Empire.

Coincidentally, during this same time frame, the silver denarius went from having 2.7 grams silver to being “silver” in name only. Base metals such as bronze and copper were added to the silver coins to debase the currency, and by the year 300 AD, a silver denarius (or its equivalent) had only a trace of silver left.

Notes on the Data

Data on Roman Emperor deaths is from this resource, and the debasement of silver coinage was previously covered by Armstrong Economics.

Roman Emperor deaths or abdications included in the visualization are ones that occurred between the birth of the Empire (27 BC) to the fall of the Western Roman Empire (476 AD). It’s also worth noting that, according to the source, there is a significant amount of emperors who had fates that are unclear or died under mysterious circumstances, and therefore the list may not be entirely accurate.
This has not just been correlation. The main untoward effects of inflationism is the destruction of society. And the destruction of society entails not only economic hardships but such decay spreads to the socio-political spectrum as well. So political unrest, revolts and wars are consequences of inflationism. Of course, since inflationism is political, funding wars or military campaigns could be a reason why governments indulge on this.

Two important quotes

From John Maynard Keynes (The Economic Consequence of Peace):  (emphasis added)
Lenin was certainly right. There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose.
From Ludwig von Mises (Theory of Money and Credit): (bold mine)
A government always finds itself obliged to resort to inflationary measures when it cannot negotiate loans and dare not levy taxes, because it has reason to fear that it will forfeit approval of the policy it is following if it reveals too soon the financial and general economic consequences of that policy. Thus inflation becomes the most important psychological resource of any economic policy whose consequences have to be concealed; and so in this sense it can be called an instrument of unpopular, i.e. of anti-democratic, policy, since by misleading public opinion it makes possible the continued existence of a system of government that would have no hope of the consent of the people if the circumstances were clearly laid before them. That is the political function of inflation. It explains why inflation has always been an important resource of policies of war and revolution and why we also find it in the service of socialism. When governments do not think it necessary to accommodate their expenditure to their revenue and arrogate to themselves the right of making up the deficit by issuing notes, their ideology is merely a disguised absolutism.


Courtesy of: The Money Project

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Quote of the Day: More Socialism Means Less Real Democracy

From economic professor Sandy Ikeda at the FEE.org:
The greater the degree of central planning, the less the authority can put up with deviation and individual dissent. I also realize that there is more than one dimension along which you can trade off self-direction for direction by others, and some of these dimensions do not involve physical coercion. For example, groups can use social or religious pressure to thwart a person’s plans or shrink her autonomy, without resorting to physical aggression.

But there is no denying that along the dimension of physical coercion, which is the dimension along which governments have traditionally operated, the more coercive control there is by an outside agency, the less self-direction there can be. Coercion and self-direction are mutually exclusive. And as government planning supplants personal planning, the sphere of personal autonomy weakens and shrinks and the sphere of governmental authority strengthens and grows. More socialism means less real democracy.

Democratic socialism, then, is not a doctrine designed to protect the liberal values of independence, autonomy, and self-direction that many on the left still value to some degree. It is, on the contrary, a doctrine that forces those of us who cherish those liberal values onto a slippery slope toward tyranny.
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Thursday, March 17, 2016

US Pollitics: Will Donald Trump Spur the Demise of the GOP? Will a New US Political Structure Emerge?

The Donald Trump phenomenon seems to have caused a Richter scale 7.0 earthquake on establishment politics... 


Caricature from Ben Garrison/hat tip zero hedge

Here are some noteworthy quotes on 'The Donald Phenomenon'

From analyst Martin Spring: (bold mine)
Without Ohio’s 66 delegates, Trump now faces an extremely difficult path to reach the majority of delegates he needs to avoid a “contested” GOP convention. So the establishment looks like it will win and no candidate will enter the convention with a majority of delegates locked up. So after the first ballot, they are free to vote for whoever the establishment wants. It looks like the computer may be right after all. This is beginning to appear to be a very insane situation. The last time no candidate had the required amount for a nomination was 1976. Under the rules of the GOP, all these primaries were pointless. Delegates can choose one of the candidates who ran, or someone else entirely – Romney?

With the people voting for Trump, the Republican Party may have to face a huge, strong anger backlash from his supporters. We are more likely to see a third party candidacy from Trump himself. The establishment will not have an outsider in that office so Trump might as well run third party to illustrate the corruption. The Republicans prefer Hillary to Trump any day of the week. The establishment fears ending elections that cannot be bought by their supporters, for their families might get fired from cushy jobs. Trump would not just sign whatever bill was put before him...

Someone like Trump presents a huge threat to the establishment. They would have to assassinate him because he got in their way. The establishment might try blaming Cuba again or someone else they really do not like. The talk behind the curtain is clear— hand it to Hillary and everything remains intact.

So a Republican split is looking more likely. They have drawn the line in the sand. By no means will they accept Trump. He might as well begin forming a third party. What is going to be exposed is that we do not live in a Democracy. As long as the people vote for their groomed candidates, the pretense is fine. Now when it threatens their existence, well it’s time to bring the grapes of wrath down upon everyone. Their mistake: they assume this will all blow over. Where they are wrong is that to defeat Trump, they must expose the truth. It’s their game and they make the rules. Your vote really means nothing to them. I suspect this is step one in what the computer warns will be an entirely new political system ahead.
From Libertarian author Robert Ringer: (bold added)
But make no mistake about it — all members in both wings of the party fully understand the importance of the theater aspect of the political game, never losing sight of the fact that their overarching, joint objective is to stay in power. Everything else about the game is secondary. The unspoken understanding among Demopublicans is, “You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours. And if you refuse to play the game, you can be sure that you won’t be around long.”

Nevertheless, the Republican wing of the party has been dying a slow death since the end of the Calvin Coolidge era. Coolidge was the last great U.S. president, a fervent believer that the government’s role was to stay the hell out of the way, hence his slogan: “The business of America is a business.”

But when Coolidge handed the freedom baton to Herbert Hoover, the downward spiral began. Hoover was the George W. Bush of his time, offering little resistance to the big spenders in the Democratic wing of the party and paving the way for Franklin D. Roosevelt, the first president to fundamentally change America.

Like the stock market, there have been a few upticks here and there, most notably under Ronald Reagan, but the long-term trend line for America has been downward. And since the first anti-American president appeared on the scene in 2009, members of the Republican wing of the Demopublican Party have not even made a pretense of opposing policies that are specifically intended to collapse the economy.

As a result, everything has been going along just fine for the anti-American crowd for seven years, with the Demopublicans moving ever closer to fascist control of the populace. Then, suddenly, from out of nowhere that damn Donald Trump came along and started threatening to burst the Beltway bubble. Of course, the establishment didn’t take him seriously at first, which is likely to go down in history as their Waterloo mistake.

Like Napoleon, they were breathtakingly arrogant and, as a result, completely miscalculated the strength of their sworn enemy — the American people. Now that Republicans realize they made a terrible mistake in mocking and dismissing the chosen leader of the masses, The Donald, they have become increasingly frantic.

It’s become a real-life version of Road Runner (Trump) and Wile E. Coyote (establishment Republicans). Every time the latter thinks they’ve convinced Republican voters that Trump is a fraud, a phony, and/or an unknowledgeable fool, they wake up in the middle of the night to the haunting sounds of “Beep! Beep!”

I’m hoping that Trump’s great contribution to America will be the official end of the pompous Republican wing of the Demopublican Party — the wing that has brought us such frauds as Recreant Romney, Mush McCain, Mooch McConnell, and, more recently, Robo Rubio. Make no mistake about it, the power brokers behind the scenes are still determined to maintain the status quo, but there’s a good chance that their long-running scam is finally coming to an end
Will the Trump phenomenon expose on the populist fraud called Democracy which the establishment has used as camouflage to protect their interests?

From conservative author Pat Buchanan (emphasis mine)
What the co-conspirators of Sea Island were up at the Cloisters was about as religious as what the Bolsheviks at that girls school known as the Smolny Institute were up to in Petrograd in 1917.

From what has been reported, it would not be extreme to say this was a conspiracy of oligarchs, War Party neocons, and face-card Republicans to reverse the results of the primaries and impose upon the party, against its expressed will, a nominee responsive to the elites’ agenda.

And this taxpayer-subsidized “Dump Trump” camarilla raises even larger issues.

Now America is not Russia or Egypt or China.

But all those countries are now moving purposefully to expose U.S. ties to nongovernmental organizations set up and operating in their capital cities.

Many of those NGOs have had funds funneled to them from U.S. agencies such as the National Endowment for Democracy, which has backed “color-coded revolutions” credited with dumping over regimes in Serbia, Ukraine and Georgia.

In the early 1950s, in Iran and Guatemala, the CIA of the Dulles brothers did this work.

Whatever ones thinks of Vladimir Putin, can anyone blame him for not wanting U.S. agencies backing NGOs in Moscow, whose unstated goal is to see him and his regime overthrown?

And whatever one thinks of NED and its subsidiaries, it is time Americans took a hard look at the tax-exempt foundations, think tanks and public policy institutes operating in our capital city.

How many are like AEI, scheming to predetermine the outcome of presidential elections while enjoying tax exemptions and posturing as benign assemblages of disinterested scholars and seekers of truth?

How many of these tax-exempt think tanks are fronts and propaganda organs of transnational corporations that are sustained with tax-deductible dollars, until their “resident scholars” can move into government offices and do the work for which they have been paid handsomely in advance?

How many of these think tanks take foreign money to advance the interests of foreign regimes in America’s capital?

We talk about the “deep state” in Turkey and Egypt, the unseen regimes that exist beneath the public regime and rule the nation no matter the president or prime minister.

What about the “deep state” that rules us, of which we caught a glimpse at Sea Island?
Has the Trump phenomenon been the "karma" from US foreign imperialist backdoor policies or US government's meddling abroad?

Or could it be that the Donald may be just be another Trojan horse?

From Bill Bonner: (underscore mine)
But we find it hard to imagine that The Donald hasn’t already made a deal with the “powers that be.”

His career was forged in the white heat of the building trade – with mafia-run unions, along with banks and regulators in Las Vegas and New York hammering him.

He denies it. But he depends on all of them – the government, the banks, and the system of Bubble Finance – to keep his fortune intact.

He knows how important they are. And he knows how they operate.

Donald claims to be one of the greatest dealmakers in history. It is hard to imagine that he hasn’t made the most important deal of his life.
Central bank inflationism seem to have spread to drastically affect even the political spectrum. 

And yet the Trump, Europe's refugee crisis, Europe's rise of right wing politics, territorial disputes, Middle East crisis, Brexit and many more seems just the appetizer.
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Charts of the Day: Emerging Market Debt: Up Up Up and Away!



With the world's zero bound standard PLUS NIRP for developed economies, ballooning debt should be a natural consequence to such policies.

Writes the Financial Times: (bold fonts added)
Levels of debt in emerging markets continue to rise and are becoming a source of “significant concern”, the Institute of International Finance warned on Wednesday.

Total government, household, financial sector and corporate debt in emerging markets rose $1.6tn last year to $62tn, or more than 210 per cent of gross domestic product, according to the IIF, which represents global banks and other financial institutions. It happened even as developed markets reduced their overall debt by an estimated $12tn last year, to about $175tn.

“Total debt in EMs is high and getting higher,” said Hung Tran, the IIF’s executive managing director. “This will inhibit the ability to borrow to support growth, and the need to delever in the future will be a strong headwind to future growth.”

Mr Tran said the IIF’s figures were consistent with those of the Bank for International Settlements, which said recently that dollar-denominated lending to EMs had peaked in the middle of last year and subsequently fallen for the first time since the global financial crisis.

The BIS, the central bank of central banks, warned of a vicious circle of deleveraging, financial market turmoil and a global economic downturn.

“Many non-financial corporations in emerging markets and especially in China have paid down their foreign currency debts so the BIS is correct,” said Mr Tran. “But they have increased their local currency debts by more than the amount they have paid down so net on net the stock of debt continues to increase everywhere, particularly in China.”

Companies in developed markets reduced their level of debt to GDP by 0.4 percentage points during 2015 to 87.4 per cent, the IIF’s figures show, while those in emerging markets added 6.7 points to reach 101.3 per cent of GDP. The IIF’s figures are for 19 emerging markets; in those countries taken together, corporate debt rose more than $1.9tn in 2015, to more than $25tn.
Surging debt on lower growth: have these not been ingredients which crisis are made of?

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