qe

QE: the slogan masquerading as serious policy. Marshall Auerback.

The U.S. Federal Reserve signaled the end of its controversial $600 billion bond-buying program as planned. And not a moment too soon. This was probably the most over-hyped event since the launching of the Titanic. Frankly, I’m not surprised by the lack of impact of QE2. I’ve always regarded it as a slogan, rather than a policy, and contended that its effects were oversold and predicated on a fundamental misunderstanding of basic monetary operations. The Fed introduced a program whose central thesis was that the unprecedented central bank intervention would reboot bank lending. Yet three years later, total bank loans are lower than they were before the Fed undertook quantitative easing.


The inability of monetary policy initiatives to do anything more than stabilize a very shaky financial system was always clear from the outset, if only policy makers truly understood what the problem was. There wasn’t a shortage of credit nor were interest rates punitive with respect to intended borrowing. People just didn’t want to borrow because the economy was collapsing and they were carrying too much debt.

As Stephen Randy Waldman has noted, the mainstream belief that quantitative easing would stimulate the economy sufficiently to put a brake on the downward spiral of lost production and increasing unemployment was nonsensical and based on a completely wrongheaded understanding of basic monetary/banking operations. He quotes from Winterspeak:

People believe that fractional reserve banking, in some weird way, has banks taking deposits, multiplying it (through what seems like a strange and fraudulent process), and then making a larger quantity of loans. In fact, banks make whatever loans they think make sense from a credit perspective, and then borrow the money they need from the interbank market to meet their reserve requirements. If the banking sector as a whole is net short of deposits, it can borrow the extra money it needs from the Fed. If you think this is a weird and pointless regulation you are correct. Canada, for example, has no reserve requirements and yet seems to have a banking sector. The quantity banks can loan out is constrained by capital requirements and credit assessments.

Reserves, then, are like a bank’s checking account at the Fed. A bank can lend those reserves only to another institution that is allowed to hold reserves at the Fed. Banks do lend reserves to one another in the fed funds market, but since banks already have more than a trillion dollars in excess reserves, there is no need to give them more in order to encourage them to lend to one another.

Those who point to the success of QE2 make the following observations: In the US, growth accelerated after the implementation of QE2 from a 1.7% annualized pace in the second quarter to 2.6% in the third quarter and 3.1% in the fourth quarter. Inflation expectations ceased falling and began rising back to normal levels. Confidence rose. And the pace of hiring improved meaningfully. In both February and March, private firms added over 200,000 jobs. Since the Fed’s policy began, the unemployment rate has fallen a full percentage point.

But just because a rooster crows first thing in the morning doesn’t prove that this is what causes the sun to rise. These are two separate occurrences with no underlying causation. The very deficits now decried so loudly by the deficit hawks and ratings agencies are likely what engendered recovery, not QE2.

So what has QE2 actually achieved? Little in the way of positive impact, but much in terms of its deleterious impact by fomenting additional speculative activity, notably in the commodities complex — gas and food prices. Obviously, with other determinants of aggregate demand in question, commodity prices and the gasoline price in particular now matter. The price of gasoline is almost as high as it was at its brief peak in May-July 2008. In the past, increases in expenditures on gasoline could be managed by consumers because they had access to credit. That is certainly less true today. Rising fuel prices could tip the economy towards greater weakness. As it now stands, the U.S. economy has been growing around trend (2.7%) and the first quarter was probably below that. Tipping the economy towards weakness would bring growth way below the current optimistic above trend consensus.

Though it cannot be proved, in the minds of many the current wave of speculative and investment demands is tied to the Fed’s emergency measures of ZIRP and QE. Within the Fed itself, a number of inflation hawks have reflected this belief, notably Dallas Fed President Richard Fisher and former Kansas President Tom Hoenig. If so, this inadvertent adverse consequence of QE means that the Fed might be hoisted on its own petard.

In sum, whether one wants to focus on the bank reserves or the deposits created by QE2, it does not increase the “ability” of banks to create loans or the private sector to spend that did not exist before. In both cases, the effect of QE2 is to replace a longer-dated treasury with shorter-term investments within private portfolios, which on balance reduces income received by the private sector. Whether or not that increases spending would depend on whether the private sector wishes to borrow more or to reduce saving out of current income (things they can do anyway with or without QE2). Again, it makes little sense to encourage households and firms to increase debt or to reduce saving within the current context of record private sector debt. But the current prevailing deficit hysteria is, perversely, encouraging precisely that state of affairs.

Ultimately, QE2 screwed savers by robbing them of income through the Fed’s treasury purchases, undermined banks’ earnings by in effect swapping a higher yielding treasury with bank reserves that today yield a mere .25%, and eviscerated the living standards of the middle class by helping to spike the speculative punch bowl in the commodities space. Not a bad trifecta for a Fed Chairman who claims to be doing everything in his power to prevent us from becoming the next Japan but who in fact is hastening our arrival at that very destination.

A pros and cons analysis of QE3. Peter Tchir.

I’m a little concerned that much of what I read and hear tends to view re-investment as a continuation of QE2. I don’t see it that way. Any re-investment of proceeds from a treasury redemption is merely keeping the status quo. No new money is being created nor being pumped into the system, its no different than if the Fed had originally purchased this longer dated bond....


Certainly the argument that ‘it worked’ would be difficult to make, the reality would be that just like so many other programs is that it increased current economic activity at the expense of future economic activity. 

Apparently QE2 is "disappointing". Cullen Roche.

March 30

QOTD:

Won't it be cool if subsequent versions of QE are referenced with Roman numerals like the Super Bowl?
John Roque, WSJ.

The unbelievable truth about Ireland and its banks. BBC.

To prevent Irish banks toppling over one after another, the European Central Bank has lent 117bn euros to them and the Central Bank of Ireland has lent them a further 71bn euros. So that's 188bn euros of loans from the eurozone's taxpayers to Ireland's banks - which makes the 67.5bn euros lent directly by the eurozone and IMF to the Irish government look like peanuts. And a further 20bn euros of bank bonds - another form of bank debt - is still guaranteed by the Irish state through the Eligible Guarantee Scheme. So that is 208bn euros of taxpayer loans to Ireland's banks - equivalent to a remarkable 154% of GDP.

[Irish] Bank bailout cost (so far). Corner Turned.

The 'grand bargain' is just a start. Martin Wolf, FT.

It would be helpful – and honest – for the German government and the governments of other creditor countries to tell their people that they are rescuing their own savings in the guise of rescuing peripheral countries. The alternative is to write off loans and recapitalise their banks directly. To admit this would be to admit their policies have been at fault. That would surely be helpful.

Europe needs debt relief, not decades of austerity. The Guardian.

From Donegal to the Algarve, to the streets of Athens, voters on Europe's "periphery", as economists dismissively call it, are slowly waking up to a sobering truth – they face years of austerity, yet wage cuts, job losses and crumbling public services will not extricate them from financial crisis. In fact, by driving their economies into an ever deeper slump, it may even make things worse. The pain could just bring more pain....

Markets and voters across the eurozone have grown wearily accustomed to watching the cycle of a looming fiscal crisis as bond yields rocket, followed by just enough action from Brussels to jolt investors out of panic mode, followed by another bout of the jitters as they realise the rhetoric from euro leaders isn't matched by reality.

As Steen Jakobsen, chief economist at Saxo Bank, put it in a note on Friday: "It's clear that the electorates are beginning to realise that all solutions offered by the policymakers are based on the promise to do something in the future, and never right here, right now."

But time is running out, and Europe has two choices. It can continue hammering the economies of Greece, Ireland and soon Portugal deeper into crisis, while their already furious voters become increasingly resentful about the pain being imposed by their European "partners"; or it can accept that the scale of debts has simply become unsustainable, and open negotiations now about an orderly default.

As Obama and Congress fiddle, America liquidates housing sector. Chris Whalen.

the current national policy mix of more regulation, decreased government subsidies and, to add further urgency, a shrinking banking system, is the perfect storm for the housing, which is now down six months in a row. Despite my long-held desire to see market-based reform in the US housing sector, I think all parties need to be aware of the precarious situation facing the American economy and banks as home prices collapse for lack of credit....

The net, net here is that the available pool of credit available for the housing sector is shrinking and thus prices must also decline to adjust for that supply of credit. This fact of continued decline in home prices is going to have a chilling effect...

I estimate that Fannie and Freddie alone are hiding $200 billion worth of bad loans on their books simply because there is no market for these foreclosed homes. Ditto for the largest servicer banks such as Wells Fargo, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase and Citigroup. To clean up this mess with finality is going to cost $1 trillion or so in round numbers. But nobody in Washington wants to go there.

Where the bailout went wrong. Neil Barofsky, NY Times Op-Ed.
As per James Kwak:

Back in late 2008 and early 2009, there was a lot of talk about how a true solution for the problems of the banking system would require a solution for the problems of homeowners, since the banks’ losses were largely the result of mortgage defaults. One of the major technical achievements of the administration was showing that it was possible to stabilize the financial system and restore the banks to short-term profitability without doing much for homeowners.

The Federal Open Mouth Committee is back in action. Pater Tenebrarum.

Hawks (relatively speaking) and doves within the Fed are busy trading slightly contradictory statements in public again, in a performance that is eerily reminiscent of the 'exit talk' (exit from unusual monetary accommodation measures that is) that proliferated about one year ago.....

led to this campaign of advance burying of 'QE3' by means of 'QE2' funeral eulogies. Surely 'QE3' won't be talked about so much anymore if even 'QE2' comes under official scrutiny. Since the current QE program is slated to end in June, market participants are given fair warning not to expect more 'coups de whiskey' for the stock and commodity markets immediately thereafter. This in turn means that the times are set to become slightly more interesting. Given that there is not the slightest evidence yet that private sector deleveraging has run its course, a cessation of excessive monetary pumping may end up stopping various bubble activities in their track in very short order. This is to say, both financial markets as well as the economy may slump again fairly quickly....

Helicopter pilot Ben Bernanke has been rather quiet, letting the rest of the board spread the message. Alas, we suspect he's personally still firmly in the pro easy money camp. At least this is what we would have to conclude considering his well known views on the Great Depression as well as Japan's post bubble era. His usual refrain was that policy makers were 'too timid' in these instances, but as it were, the BoJ is a veteran of two (now 2.5) QE programs as well, so if one wants to be 'less timid', then 'QE1' and 'QE2' alone obviously won't cut it. In that sense we would be inclined to discount the advance funeral rites for 'QE3' as just more hot air. Nevertheless, there will be a pause, and should the economy's momentum not falter again immediately, then we'd expect the 'exit' palaver to increase in both volume and frequency.

Surpluses, debt and depressions.... Randall Wray via Pragmatic Capitalism.

China's 5-year plan and global interest rates. Martin Feldstein.

Visualizing the food and energy crunch. Pragmatic Capitalism.

Debt: The first five thousand years. David Graeber.

The biggest urban legend in finance. Rob Arnott.

Fannie and Freddie hiding over $100 billion of losses? naked capitalism.


other fare:
Exceptional And Unexceptional America. Andrew Sullivan, The Atlantic.

March 21

QOTD:

"The President does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation."
Barack Obama

uhhmm, I guess that was then and this is now:

The Libyan War of 2011. George Friedman, Stratfor.

Yemen in crisis. Stratfor.

What's happening in Bahrain explained. Mother Jones.

Iran calls on Saudi Arabia, UAE to leave Bahrain "immediately"



Japan's financial position is better than you think. Prag Cap.

QEII fails - sell US equities. Russell Napier, CLSA.

March 11

How QE works. Ed Harrison.

QE and the term structure of rates. Warren Mosler.
summary: if the market thinks QE will work, then the economy will heat up over time and inflationary pressure will build so the Fed will need to hike rates, and the term structure of rates reflects more Fed hikes down the road; if the Fed ends QE, the market place will deem that as the Fed removing support from the economy, and this less stimulative policy will mean a relatively weaker economy and less inflationary pressure so fewer future interest rates hike --- and the curve will respond appropriately

November 20

QE2 is equivalent to issuing T-bills. Randall Wray.

QE dynamics one more time: its about price, not quantity. Warren Mosler.

Debt, deleveraging and the liquidyt trap: A Fisher-Minsky-Koo approach. Paul Krugman.

Debt: there is no jubilee. Hinde Capital.

What happens if Chinese growth slows. Michael Pettis.


other fare:
Peak oil: why the Pentago is pessimistic. Le Monde.

November 17

The inimitable John Hussman, as always, provides great insights (and is always able to come up with new ones) and has a wonderful way with words. Read his whole commentary, The Cliff; but I couldn't resist excerpting this:

From my perspective, an "economic recovery" that requires a tripling in the Fed's balance sheet, continues to average 450,000 new unemployment claims weekly, and relies on fiscal stimulus to counter utterly stagnant personal income, is ipso facto (by the fact itself) not a "standard" economic recovery. We have swept an enormous volume of bad debt under rugs, behind dams, and in back of curtains (not to mention in off-balance sheet vehicles such as Maiden Lane that were created by the Federal Reserve). But it is all effectively still there, festering. Meanwhile, our policy makers are trying to reignite financial bubbles in order to create an illusory "wealth effect" to propagate spending patterns that were inappropriate in the first place.
It is a bizarre notion that a credit crisis can be solved by bailing out lenders while doing nothing about the obligations on the borrower side. Think about it - what we have said to lenders is, here you have these homeowners who can't pay for their houses. Foreclose on them, sell the homes at half the price, and the public will make
you whole (largely through Treasury bailouts to Fannie and Freddie, made necessary by Federal Reserve purchases of these securities).
Heck, if the public is going to be on the hook anyway, at least notice that at equivalent cost to the public, the mortgage could simply be written down to half its value, with the homeowner now able to pay the balance off and the lender getting the public handout to make up the difference. But of course, that would reward the homeowner. So instead, we simply make the lenders whole while people lose their homes and foreclosure investors flip the homes at a profit in return for providing liquidity at the auction. That way, the same amount of public funds can be spent through the back door without Congress even getting involved.
Memo to Ben Bernanke - throwing money out of helicopters isn't monetary policy. It's fiscal policy. How is this not clear?
The proper way to deal with a major debt crisis - indeed, the only way nations have ever successfully dealt with major debt crises - is through debt-equity swaps, restructuring and writedowns. There are numerous ways to achieve this with mortgages. My preference would be swaps of principal for pooled property appreciation rights (administered, but not subsidized by the Treasury). In any event, until our policy makers wake up to the need to restructure debt, so that the obligation is modified for both the debtor and the creditor, our financial system will
increasingly tend toward a giant Ponzi scheme. We are racing toward the financial equivalent of a mathematical singularity, where the quantities become so large and outcomes become so sensitive to small changes that the whole system becomes unstable.

QE outlook

The early evidence: QE does more harm than good. TPC.


I do not believe that QE will have any positive impact on the broader economy, and, as per last, and as with past examples of unintended consequences of ill-advised government policy, will likely cause more damage than benefit; to wit:

- QE has had a psychological impact on asset prices, including equities and commodities, but has not changed fundamentals in any way
- if QE does not help the economy, then the boost to stock prices will have been ill-founded and subject to downward revision
- the dollar-debasement-fear impact on commodity prices will help commodity producers, but will impair margins for commodity-user-companies and will effectively impose a tax on consumers
- companies will therefore be less inclined to expand their workforce and consumers will be less inclined to expand their discretionary spending
- aggregate demand will continue to be lacklustre and hence below aggregate supply
- upside commodity price shocks have historically caused economic slowdowns; the last commodity price shock preceded the recession; this time around, the economy is much more vulnerable, given that core CPI is already below 1% and U6 is already near 10%
- propping up asset prices to revive the economy was the failed strategy of the 2000s (housing); the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results
- excess reserves do not in any way motivate bank lending; deleveraging will persist, driven by both reluctant lenders and reluctant borrowers
- theoretical wealth effects from stock prices have been disputed (Shiller), and, in any case, to the extent that household wealth remains below the past peak, even with recent stock price gains, it is quite likely that homeowners are still perceiving a negative wealth effect (though the hole might not be quite as deep now that stocks are up 10%, they're still in the hole)
- meanwhile, aging baby boomers are a few years closer to their hoped-for retirement age, are twice-bitten, thrice shy of stocks (ICI reports that as of Nov 10 there were 27 straight weeks of outflows from domestic equity mutual funds), and need to continue to save to replenish their coffers
- interes rates are very low, so interest income has been degraded, implying that even more has to be socked away
- misguided concerns that QE is money-printing means dollar debasement could provide a near-term boost to export growth as U.S. export-products become more attractively priced in foreign currencies, but (a) yuan is not budging much, so will not help trade deficit with China, (b) euro has appreciated, but outlook for euro area is not promising and implies risk of currency turnaround, and, most importantly, (c) geopolitical tensions about QE could cause real trade frictions and protectionist backlash
- to the extent that easy monetary policy gets exported to emerging market nations, principally w.r.t. asset prices, those emerging market nations may be forced to impose domestic monetary restraint which will at the margin impair global growth, offsetting *any* "expansionary benefits" of unconventional Fed easy money policies


all in all, though the Fed likely does WISH to reflate the economy, there is little evidence to support the assumption that they have the CAPACITY TO DO SO --- not until the unsustainable debt burden built up over the last decade has been whittled down to levels that are manageable given prevailing income levels and given the demographic outlook; if this viewpoint is reasonable, then this is not likely to be a 2-5 year process but one that lasts rather longer


what if I'm wrong? what should we look for as signs of successful reflation?
- broad-based increase in cap-ex
- sustained increase in lending
- consistent increases in hiring (evidenced in both the household and institutional surveys) in excess of population growth

November 11

must read explanation of QE:
Just what is Bernanke up to? L. Randall Wray.

With QE2, the Fed proposes to buy longer-term treasuries. Since these are not toxic, it will not help the banks. It is like transferring funds from CDs they hold at the Fed to their checking accounts, thereby reducing their interest earnings. I suppose the idea is that the Fed is going to reduce bank income, impoverishing banks to the point that they will finally throw caution to the wind and begin to make loans to struggling firms and households. It is simultaneously a strange view of banking and also a scary remedy to a financial crisis that was created by excessive bank lending to those who could not afford the loans. It’s sort of like sending a covey of nymphomaniacs to the hospital bed of a nonagenarian suffering from myocardial infarction initiated by an age-inappropriate tryst.

Fasten your seatbelt. John Taylor.

On the day after the Fed’s move, [Bernanke] wrote in a Washington Post editorial piece that QE2 would push up the equity market, bonds, and other risky securities thereby stimulating consumption and economic activity. Even Greenspan did not publicly proclaim his “put,” but now Bernanke has made it the centerpiece of US strategy. Equities are already overpriced, with profit margins at all-time highs and PE ratios far above average. Speculation is now more American than apple pie – but this is a very risky time to practice it.

It’s Going to Be Another Long, Hard Winter in Housing. Zillow Real Estate Research.

Annual State of the Residential Mortgage Market in Canada. CAAMP.



other fare:
Robert Reich makes some excellent points about why Obama should take a stand, but Reich is naive if he thinks Obama will do so --- he's clearly gonna cave in.

Oh, look at that, it might as well be official --- the Huffington Post says White House gives in on Bush tax cuts.

November 9

Bernanke: Chumps! Bruce Krasting.

I got a laugh out of the $600b number. The dealers were polled on their expectations last week. The response was an even half trillion. So with that as a bogie the Fed does 600 large. They wanted to do just a bit more than was actually expected. So they added on an extra 100b. They gave the market what it wanted and a little bit of extra cream on the top.

Understanding the mechanics of a QE transaction. Pragmatic Capitalism.

Recent Decisions of the Federal Open Market Committee: A Bridge to Fiscal Sanity? Richard Fisher, FRB of Dallas.

I agree that we are indeed in what is referred to in economic parlance as a liquidity trap. Yet, I think it worth noting that we already have low interest rates, and spreads against risk-free instruments are historically narrow. Despite their theoretical promise, reductions in interest rates to Lilliputian levels have not done much thus far to spark loan demand. Loans are desirable when business see an opportunity for tapping credit markets to earn a return on investment that significantly outpaces the cost of credit and other risk factors. Even with the low rates that already prevail, businesses lack confidence that they will earn a superior ROI by investing so as to expand their domestic workforce, in comparison to what they might earn from alternative investments abroad or by buying in their stock or cleaning up their balance sheets. For their part, consumers will borrow when they believe it makes sense to shift consumption forward. But after the sobering experience of the past
three years, they are restrained by a lack of confidence that their future income streams will be sufficient to cover their payment obligations.
On the supply side, we know that businesses are floating on a sea of liquidity. Banks already hold over $1 trillion in excess reserves; holdings of government securities as a percentage of total assets on bank balance sheets are growing; loans as a percentage of assets are declining.
If we had a level of bank reserves or liquidity in the marketplace that was binding or inhibiting loan growth, I could understand the impulse to relieve that stricture. Further quantitative easing through additional asset purchases will surely increase the level of bank reserves, lower rates marginally and add more liquidity to markets while weakening the dollar. The more germane question is whether this works to the benefit of job creation and wards off financial excess....
The remedy for what ails the economy is, in my view, in the hands of the fiscal and regulatory authorities, not the Fed. I could not state with conviction that purchasing another several hundred billion dollars of Treasuries—on top of the amount we were already committed to buy in order to compensate for the run-off in our $1.25 trillion portfolio of mortgage-backed securities—would lead to job creation and final-demand-spurring behavior. But I could envision such action would lead to a declining dollar, encourage further speculation, provoke commodity hoarding, accelerate the transfer of wealth from the deliberate saver and the unfortunate, and possibly place at risk the stature and independence of the Fed.

Bubble, Crash, Bubble, Crash, Bubble... John Hussman.

The Japan syndrome goes global. Stephen Roach, Morgan Stanley.

Warning: retirement disaster ahead. Brett Arends, WSJ.

Bank of America edges closer to tipping point. Jonathan Weil.

October 19

That piece sent out by David Kotok, The Foreclosure Mess, was stolen from Gonzalo Lira:
The Second Leg Down of America's Death Spiral.
includes the colorful language that Kotok stripped out, including the start:

I swear to God Almighty: Mortgage Backed Securities are America’s Herpes—the gift that keeps on oozing.

one can see why Kotok edited the original, given comments like this:

People still haven’t figured out what this all means—but I’ll tell you: If enough mortgage-paying homeowners realize that they may be able to get out of their mortgage loan and keep their house, scott-free? Shit, that’s basically a license to halt payments right the fuck now. That’s basically a license to tell the banks to fuck off.

What are the banks gonna do—try to foreclose and then evict you? Show me the paper, motherfucker, will be all you need to say.

but why Kotok would not only not publish it without proper attribution, but why he'd originally plagiarize it, and then try to cover his tracks, that's another story; not cool!

for a cooler head on the whole mortgage situation, read:
A little bit of sanity, please. Paul Jackson, HousingWire.

QE2 won't save our sinking ship. Randall Wray.

Deleveraging, deceleration and the double dip. Steve Keen.

the stabilization in employment has occurred because the rate of deleveraging has slowed... But the rate of change of debt is still negative: it’s just risen from a low of -6% to -2%. For the deceleration effect to continue... the level of debt relative to GDP would need to rise. This is highly unlikely... So the deceleration in deleveraging should give way again at some point, and then the NBER may be forced to begin dating the next recession—which is still a continuation of the current Depression.

FDIC folds to banks, again. Bruce Krasting.

The NY Fed explains how the government spends first and issues bonds later. Pragmatic Capitalism.

October 18

this basically reflects what I opined in my last post, but much more amusingly:
Through the looking glass again. Ultimi Barbarorum.

if anyone tells you they have a clear view on what is going to happen to the econo-world from here, walk away briskly. As Ed Hyman of ISI puts it, with the now imminent onset of QE2 we are in “scary times”, a world of “unintended consequences”. The only intellectually honest position to take at this point, it seems, is to admit we haven’t a clue.

he goes on to discuss many of the factors in play
The Recklessness of Quantitative Easing. John Hussman.
Hussman says that QE didn't save us from the crisis --- lying about asset prices did --- but, unfortunately, the benefits about this "suspension of truthful disclosure" don't solve the underlying solvency problems

Presently, the U.S. financial sector is essentially opacity masquerading as solvency. As Meredith Whitney has observed, the "recovery" of the U.S. financial sector has been a two stage process - massive writeups of troubled assets on balance sheets, followed by large reductions in loan loss reserves on income statements. This activity has not only driven the improvement in operating earnings reported by banks, but has been one of the primary contributors to the recovery in the aggregate earnings of the S&P 500 Index. It is not a process that should be extrapolated.

Why foreclosure fraud is so dangerous to property rights. Barry Ritholtz.

The foreclosure mess. David Kotok.

Bank restructurings likely as foreclosures overwhelm big banks. video of Chris Whalen at AEI.

more video of Whalen on panel at AEI here, with Roubini and others; Whalen starts at 1:07 (fast forward to one-hour, seven-minute mark)

October 7

QOTD:

There is lots of instability caused in part by the flood of liquidity from the Fed and the ECB. The irony is that the Fed is creating all this liquidity with the hope that it will revive the U.S. economy. It is doing nothing for the U.S. economy and causing chaos for the rest of the world --- Joseph Stiglitz

Adam Posen discusses the dangers of insufficient stimulus. Peterson Institute for International Economics.

Our situation (in the U.K., the U.S., and arguably in most of the major Western economies) is one where policy makers face a long uphill battle, in which monetary ease has an ongoing role to play, even if it may not deliver recovery on its own. Insufficient monetary action risks turning sustained low growth and near deflation into a self-fulfilling prophecy. This happened in Japan in the 1990s, and in U.S. and Europe in the 1930s. I don’t think things will be “that bad” in the sense of an outright depression, but we face a real risk of long-term stagnation with some distracting upward blips and slowly eroding capacity....
The short-term blips in the economy are no way to judge whether we are coming out of this state of the world. We saw similar starts and stops in the Great Depression and in Japan

The market believes in QE2. Paul Krugman notes the pickup in inflation expectations. (also perhaps evidenced by the steepening in the 10s-30s curve)

Asha Bangalore expects pick-up in bank credit, the lack of which so far has been "the major culprit behind the lackluster recovery."

excellent review of why CRE is a major problem:
Consumer deleveraging = commercial real estate collapse. Jim Quinn, via naked capitalism.

DC waking up to escalating foreclosure train wreck: Grayson calls for FSOC to examine foreclosure fraud as systemic risk. naked capitalism.

In a new period of instability, Obama becomes Hoover. Chris Whalen, Reuters.

the avalanche of mortgage defaults now hitting Bank of America, Wells Fargo and other large lenders could force these banks to seek new government bailouts in 2011, an outcome that will expose the Obama Administration’s incompetence for all to see.

tomorrow's non-farms payroll report will also provide an initial estimate on revisions to historical data through March:
Job losses in 2009 likely bigger than thought. Reuters.
by the by, initial jobless claims were once again a bit better than expected, but, for the 23rd time in the last 24 weeks, there were upward revisions to past data


The U.S. Is In A "Race To The Fiscal Bottom. David Stockman, Business Insider.

The two parties are in a race to the fiscal bottom to see which one can bury our children and grandchildren deeper in debt....
We are not in a conventional business cycle recovery, so stimulus is futile and just adds needlessly to the $9 trillion of Treasury paper already floating dangerously around world financial markets. Instead, after 40 years of profligate accumulation of public and private debt, and reckless money-printing by the Fed, we had an economic crash landing, which left us with an enduring structural breakdown, not just a cyclical downturn. In effect, we undertook a national leveraged buyout, raising total credit market debt to $52 trillion which represented a 3.6X leverage ratio against national income or GDP....
The only solution is a long period of debt deflation, downsizing and economic rehabilitation, including a sustained downshift in consumption and corresponding rise in national savings. And a key element of the latter is a drastic reduction in government dis-savings through spending cuts and tax increases — and these measures need to start right now. Keynesian policymakers who say wait for the midterms to address the deficit are like battleship admirals: They are fighting the last war with the same failed strategy that gave rise to our current predicament......
After the abomination of the Bush/Paulson bailout of the big banks, the state has no boundaries whatsoever. So fiscal policy is now just a fiscal food fight....
Obama’s presidency is a profound disappointment. So far, he’s proven that when Republican’s start elective wars, Democrats can’t end them; when Republicans empty the Treasury, Democrats can’t replenish it; when Republicans put a middle-class destroying money printer at the head of the Fed, Democrats reappoint him; and when the Republicans unleash an orgy of dangerous speculation on Wall Street, Democrats pass a contentless, 2,300 page, enabling act which will do nothing to protect Main Street from another financial meltdown, even as it keeps K Street fully employed.

October 6

Foreclosure fraud reveals structural and legal crisis. Barry Ritholtz.

gold biggest beneficiary of continuing competitive global currency devaluation:

Global central bank action may follow BoJ moves on rates. Bloomberg.
RBA surprised by holding rates steady, and Japan is back to ZIRP and more QE;
BoE and ECB tomorrow

Why it doesn't feel like a recovery. Washington Post.
neat graphics showing economic growth vs potential growth and implications for output gap

Credit for the Recovery. Daniel Gross, NYT.
includes this quote of the day:

the decline in personal debt is driven less by Americans giving up on credit cards than on credit card issuers giving up on Americans

Will America come to envy Japan's lost decade? Ezra Klein, Washington Post.

Hatzius Says Fed Easing Measures Will Probably `Fall Short'. Bloomberg.

Mexico issues 100-year bond. Reuters.

Canadian Housing Observer 2010. CMHC.

October 1

Riksbank's Svensson Warns Against Rate Rises Amid Housing Boom. Bloomberg.

Bank of England’s Posen: Central Banks Should Do More — A Lot More. WSJ Real-Time Economics.

We will only know we will have done enough with QE or other monetary stimulus when we have clear indications that our policies are moving the desired variables — market interest rates, wages, output, employment, and inflation expectations — sufficiently and in the right directions on a sustained basis. I do not think that is not enough for a central bank to say, ‘Look, we expanded our balance sheet more than any time in history,’ or ‘we did things we never did before,’ and argue that therefore we must have done a lot, if not too much (not that the Bank of England has done so). In my opinion, that is backwards logic. It would be like saying ‘that fire must be out, because we’ve already pumped more water than for any previous fire we’ve fought,’ or ‘we must have gotten to our destination, because I’ve been driving for hours and we’ve already used a full tank of gas.’

This is a worse fire than any of us have ever seen in our lifetimes, and we are farther from home than we have ever been, and so we cannot judge our progress by how much effort or resources we have already put in,” he continued. “We can only gauge the success of our efforts by our results, and until we achieve those results, there is no danger from our heavy use of the available instruments. This is not a normal situation with finely balanced risks on both sides or with monetary policy able to finely calibrate to an outcome.

The money quandary. Rebecca Wilder.

Market is out on a limb. Comstock Partners.

The October Absolute Return Letter. Neils Jensen.