Jesse's Café Américain Tue 2009-11-03 20:15 EST

The US Dollar Rally of 2008: The Consequence of a Bull Market in Fraud

Jesse

The theory of a short squeeze in Eurodollars which we had first put forward last year "The Dollar Rally and Deflationary Imbalances in the US Dollar Holdings of Overseas Banks" seems to be confirmed by this paper from the NY Federal Reserve bank, and the latest figures on cross border currency transactions from the BIS...the latest data from BIS shows that the dollar rally tracked the acquisition of eurodollars with a significant correlation...But much of the European outrage, as least, was in feeling that they had been 'set up' by the very banks that had sold them the foully rated instruments in the first place. A classic face ripping, as they say at Wall and Broad. And this similar to the reason is why the Chinese government declared that its own institutions could walk away from derivatives arrangements that had been sold to them by the Wall Street wiseguys under false pretenses. US towns and states are not so fortunate it appears...The foreign banks have now unwound a significant amount of the dodgy US dollar financial assets that caused the short squeeze through their fraudulent valuations.

2008; Bull Markets; consequences; Dollar Rally; fraud; Jesse's Café Américain.

zero hedge Tue 2009-11-03 19:57 EST

Guest Post: Systemic Risk is All About Innovation and Incentives: Ed Kane

Edward J. Kane vi Chris Whalen

...we present the views of our friend and mentor Ed Kane of Boston College, who argues that the problem with the financial regulatory framework is not the law, regulation nor even the regulators, but rather the confluence of poorly aligned incentives and financial innovation... The financial crisis of 2007-2009 is the product of a regulation-induced short-cutting and near elimination of private counterparty incentives to perform adequate due diligence along the chain of transactions traversed in securitizing and re-securitizing risky loans (Kane, 2009a). The GLBA [Gramm-Leach-Bliley Financial Modernization Act of 1999] did make it easier for institutions to make themselves more difficult to fail and unwind. But it did not cause due-diligence incentives to break down in lending and securitization, nor did it cause borrowers and lenders to overleverage themselves. Still, the three phenomena share a common cause. Excessive risk-taking, regulation-induced innovation, and the lobbying pressure that led to the GLBA trace to subsidies to risk-taking that are protected by the political and economic challenges of monitoring and policing the safety-net consequences of regulation-induced innovation. These challenges and the limited liability that their stockholders and counterparties enjoy make it easy for clever managers of large institutions to extract implicit subsidies to leveraged risk-taking from national safety nets (Kane, 2009b)...To reduce the threat of future crises, the pressing task is not to rework bureaucratic patterns of financial regulation, but to repair defects in the incentive structure under which private and government supervisors manage a nation's financial safety net.

Ed Kane; Guest Post; incentives; innovation; systemic risk; Zero Hedge.

Fri 2009-10-23 09:42 EDT

America's soul is lost, collapse inevitable - MarketWatch

Paul B. Farrell

Jack Bogle published "The Battle for the Soul of Capitalism" four years ago. The battle's over. The sequel should be titled: "Capitalism Died a Lost Soul." Worse, we've lost "America's Soul." And, worldwide, the consequences will be catastrophic. That's why a man like Hong Kong contrarian economist Marc Faber warns in his Doom, Boom & Gloom Report: "The future will be a total disaster, with a collapse of our capitalistic system as we know it today." No, not just another meltdown, another bear-market recession like the one recently triggered by Wall Street's too-greedy-to-fail banks. Faber is warning that the entire system of capitalism will collapse. Get it? The engine driving the great "American Economic Empire" for 233 years will collapse, a total disaster, a destiny we created.

America s Soul; Collapse Inevitable; lost; MarketWatch.

Credit Writedowns Fri 2009-10-23 09:00 EDT

The next crisis is already under way

Wolfgang Munchau of the Financial Times wrote a very important comment piece in today's Financial Times. In it he said that central banks are targeting asset prices to avoid the brunt of cyclical downturns. This policy is inducing asset bubbles and creating a more volatile real economy with unpredictable negative consequences...Munchau invokes Hyman Minsky's model of financial instability to help explain how this sets us up for a volatile future because traditional macroeconomic theory is inadequate for understanding what got us to this point. In essence, the idyllic state of economic and price stability we know as ``the Great Moderation'' is really just a financialization of the economy. However, a large financial sector leads to excessive dependence on asset prices to fuel growth, which in turn leads to an accumulation of debt...

credit writedowns; Crisis; way.

zero hedge Mon 2009-10-12 10:05 EDT

How Currency Devaluation Can Be A Bad Thing

Even as the dollar keeps hitting new daily lows, which continues being seen as a positive for the stock market, if not so positive for what little remains of world trade, not much has been said about the efforts by Latvia to do all it can to devalue its currency in the wake of a failed bond auction. The consequences are already metastasizing, as seen by the increasing volatility of related currencies, particularly the Swedish Krona which has been hit hard against the Euro on concerns of the country's exposure in Baltic states.

bad things; Currency Devaluation; Zero Hedge.

Mon 2009-10-12 09:24 EDT

FORA.tv - Nassim Nicholas Taleb: A Crazier Future

The Future Has Always Been Crazier Than We Thought with Nassim Nicholas Taleb.Author Nassim Nicholas Taleb discusses his book, The Black Swan in relation to predicting the future, learning from the consequences of the unknown, and the power of randomness.

Crazier Future; FORA; Nassim Nicholas Taleb; TV.

Tue 2009-10-06 21:14 EDT

TraderFeed: Featured Book Look: Dear Mr. Buffett by Janet Tavakoli

Only when the tide goes out do you discover who's been swimming naked," Warren Buffett once observed. Janet Tavakoli's book Dear Mr. Buffett is less about the Oracle From Omaha than the various naked swimmers in the recent financial markets. The essence of her argument is that the recent financial turmoil is not the result of unpredictable black swan events; rather, it is the consequence of out and out malfeasance on the part of those who take risk and those who are charged with regulating it.

Featured Book Look; Janet Tavakoli; Mr. Buffett; TraderFeed.

Jesse's Café Américain Tue 2009-09-22 09:15 EDT

Confessions of a 'Flationary Agnostic

Jesse

I have no particular allegiance to either the hyperinflation or the deflationary camps. Both outcomes are possible, but not yet probable. Rather than being a benefit, occupying the middle ground too often just puts one in the middle, being able to see the merits in both arguments and possibilities, and being unwilling to ignore the flaws in each argument...The growth rate of dollars is slowing at the same time that the 'demand' for dollars, the velocity of money and the creation of new commercial credit, is slowing. GDP is negative, and the growth rate of money supply is still positive, and rather healthy. This is not a monetary deflation, but rather the signs of an emerging stagflation fueled by slow real economic activity and monetization, or hot money, from the Fed. The monetary authority is trying to lead the economic recovery through unusual monetary growth. All they are doing is creating more malinvestment, risk addiction, and asset bubbles...Using money as a 'tool' to stimulate or retard economic activity is a dangerous game indeed, fraught with unintended consequences and unexpected bubbles and imbalances, with a spiral of increasingly destabilizing crises and busts. The Obama Administration bears a heavy responsibility for this because of their failure to reform the system and restore balance to the economy in any meaningful way.

confessed; Flationary Agnostic; Jesse's Café Américain.

Thu 2009-07-23 00:00 EDT

naked capitalism: Is Liquidity Really Good for You?

``just because a certain amount of liquidity is good, it does not necessarily follow that more is always better''; Richard Kline: ``The first issue when liquidity is provided to markets for any overall regulator, should and must be, "How do we prevent asset overpricing as a consequence? "''

Liquidity Really Good; naked capitalism.

Tue 2009-04-21 00:00 EDT

naked capitalism: Guest Post: Turning Japanese and understanding the consequence of policy half-measures

Edward Harrison

consequences; Guest Post; measured; naked capitalism; policies; Turn Japanese; understanding.

Wed 2009-04-01 00:00 EDT

AlterNet: The Case That Wars Fuel U.S. Economic Booms

by Mark Ames; ``What if our wealth is a consequence of our ability to plunder the world's wealth, often by default thanks to our competitors' suicidal behavior?''

AlterNet; Case; Wars Fuel U.S. Economic Booms.

Fri 2009-01-16 00:00 EST

naked capitalism: Chase Behaving Badly: Unintended Consequences of the Fed's New Credit Card Rules

Chase Behaving Badly; Fed's New Credit Card Rules; naked capitalism; unintended consequences.

Tue 2008-09-23 00:00 EDT

Jesse's Café Américain: Crowding Out, Unintended Consequences, and a Selective Liquidity Crisis with Shock and Awe

Jesse's Café Américain: Crowding Out, Unintended Consequences, and a Selective Liquidity Crisis with Shock and Awe

awed; crowd; Jesse's Café Américain; Selective Liquidity Crisis; shocks; unintended consequences.

Thu 2008-07-03 00:00 EDT

Faustian economics:

Hell hath no limits--By Wendell Berry (Harper's Magazine); "Our true religion is a sort of autistic industrialism"; "our 'identity' is located not in the impulse of selfhood but in deliberately maintained connections"; "in the phrase 'free market,' the word 'free' has come to mean unlimited economic power for some, with the necessary consequence of economic powerlessness for others"; "we confuse limits with confinement...our human and earthly limits, properly understood, are not confinements but rather inducements to formal elaboration and elegance, to _fullness_ of relationship and meaning"; "we want to make our economic landscapes sustainably and abundantly productive, we must do so by maintaining in them a living formal complexity something like that of natural ecosystems. We can do this only by raising to the highest level our mastery of the arts of agriculture, animal husbandry, forestry, and, ultimately, the art of living."

Faustian economics.

Fri 2007-11-09 00:00 EST

Winter (Economic & Market) Watch >> The Consequences of Riskloves Setting Prices

Winter (Economic & Market) Watch >> The Consequences of Riskloves Setting Prices (2006-12-22)

consequences; economic; Market; Riskloves Setting Prices; watch; winter.

Fri 2007-11-09 00:00 EST

The Economic Consequences of Mr. Bush: Politics & Power: vanityfair.com

The Economic Consequences of Mr. Bush, by Joseph E. Stiglitz, vanityfair.com

com; economic consequences; Mr. Bush; political; Power; vanityfair.