Tag: economics

The Free Money Stopped

Now Facebook is planning to fire even more workers than Twitter did:

Just over a week ago, Meta CFO Dave Wehner confidently stated that the not-so-giant tech firm will basically freeze headcount and limit new hiring…

With the shares down 36% since then (and is down over 70% this year), something has apparently changed extremely fast.

The Wall Street Journal reports that, according to people familiar with the matter, Meta is planning to begin large-scale layoffs this week. As of the last earnings, Meta had over 87,000 employees (and has never seen a quarterly decline in headcount in its 18 year history)…

The WSJ sources say that layoffs are expected to affect many thousands of employees and an announcement is planned to come as soon as Wednesday, with company officials having already told employees to cancel non-essential travel beginning this week.

Many thousands….

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Winds of Change

I don’t think The Scorpions will be writing any ballads if the rumors that Germany is attempting to break free of US hegemony are true:

Solid German business sources completely contradict the “message” delivered by the German Council on Foreign Relations on the trip to China. According to these sources, the Scholz caravan went to Beijing to essentially lay down the preparatory steps for working out a peace deal with Russia, with China as privileged messenger.

This is – literally – as explosive, geopolitically and geoeconomically, as it gets. As I pointed out in one of my previous columns, Berlin and Moscow were keeping a secret communication back channel – via business interlocutors – right to the minute the usual suspects, in desperation, decided to blow up the Nord Streams.

Cue to the now-notorious SMS from Liz Truss’s iPhone to Tony Blinken, one minute after the explosions: “It’s done.”

There’s more: the Scholz caravan may be trying to start a long and convoluted process of eventually replacing the US with China as a key ally. One should never forget that the top BRI trade/connectivity terminal in the EU is Germany (the Ruhr valley).

According to one of the sources, “if this effort is successful, then Germany, China and Russia can ally themselves together and drive the US out of Europe.”

Another source provided the cherry on the cake: “Olaf Scholz is being accompanied on this trip by German industrialists who actually control Germany and are not going to sit back watching themselves being destroyed.”

The borders of the Great Bifurcation may not be what the rulers of the neo-liberal world order believe they are going to be. They’ve already discovered that 87 percent of the global population are on the other side of the fence, and that 87 percent may be growing as Europeans realize that their US-imposed “freedom and democracy” is actually nothing more than a long-term societal suicide pact.

The remarkable truth of the matter is that it would probably be less economically painful for Europe to cut ties with the USA than with both Russian and China. So, the real question would appear to be how intent is China on undercutting the global dominance of the USA.

I wish it were needless to say that a peaceful transition to a bifurcated global economy would be a much better outcome than Europe needing the Sino-Russian Alliance to militarily defeat the USA in order to remove Europe’s subordination to the globalist elite. But history suggests that at least some amount of direct war between the forces of the Nationalist Alliance and the US military in service to the Neo-Liberal Empire will be necessary before the latter accepts the situation.

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KABOOM!

And there goes the global economy.

Britain faces longest recession in a CENTURY: Bank of England delivers grim forecast for the economy as it raises interest rates by 0.75% to 3% – the biggest increase since the 1980s – sending the cost of mortgages soaring by thousands.

During the pandemic house buying boom in 2020 and 2021, interest rates reached record lows with some deals priced at below 1 per cent – but now the cheapest fixed rate mortgage deals are now charging more than 5 per cent.

The average borrower coming off a two-year fix will see their rate rise from 2.43 per cent in November 2020 to 6.47 per cent.

You can safely expect the Fed and the European Central Bank, among others, to swiftly follow suit. And while 3 percent doesn’t sound like much, it’s enough to detonate the ability of the highly-leveraged to service their debts.

Buckle up. This is going to be a very wild ride. Because the rise in interest rates isn’t going to end here.

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Dr. Doom Confirms WWIII

It’s rather intriguing to observe that economist Nouriel Roubini, the man who most famously predicted the financial crisis of 2008 – as did Steve Keen and I – is now also in agreement with me that WWIII has already begun and that the global economy is going to bifurcate:

Last week, the New York University professor was interviewed by Der Spiegel and listed some of the world’s most acute problems.

Recalling a recent event hosted by the International Monetary Fund, he referred to historian Niall Ferguson who “said in a speech there that we would be lucky if we got an economic crisis like in the 1970s — and not a war like in the 1940s.”

When speaking about major global threats, Roubini mentioned the ongoing conflict between Russia and Ukraine, adding that Iran and Israel are “on a collision course” as well.

“I read that the Biden administration expects China to attack Taiwan sooner rather than later,” the economist said, summarizing that “World War III has already effectively begun.”

The rivalry between Washington and Beijing is driving tension to a large degree, Roubini noted, adding that the US has banned the export of certain semiconductors to China and is pressuring European nations into cutting trade ties with the country on national security grounds. He believes that a breakup of the globalized world is looming.

“Trade, finance, technology, internet: Everything will split in two,” he predicted.

It was not clear if non-allied nations would pick the US side in the confrontation, he said. “I asked the president of an African country why he gets 5G technology from China and not from the West. He told me, we are a small country, so someone will spy on us anyway. Then, I might as well take the Chinese technology, it’s cheaper,” the economist revealed to Der Spiegel.

There simply isn’t any reason for any self-interested third party to choose the side of what Vladimir Putin describes as the Second West. Unlike the USA, which has been attacking countries, undermining their currencies, and murdering their leaders for decades, the Chinese are mostly content to simply do business with other countries. And while that may change, and the massive Chinese diaspora is not exactly popular in countries such as Indonesia, Australia, and Canada, the fact is that the Chinese track record concerning foreign relations is considerably better than that of the USA or of its representative in Asia, Japan.

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How We Got Here

Don’t blame it on the goose, blame it on Big Ben Bernanke.

As the Chairman of the Federal Reserve from 2006-2014, he decided in the aftermath of the Global Financial Crisis that the banking system had to be saved, by any means necessary. To finance the massive losses – which were over $10 trillion in the U.S. alone – the world’s central banks began printing money and buying government bonds to finance massive bailouts.

Like squirrels watching a bank robbery, the members of the Nobel Committee – which recently awarded Bernanke the prize in economics – saw everything that happened and knew nothing about what it meant.

Printing money doesn’t cure economic problems: it simply skews who pays for them.

Printing trillions to paper over the financial system’s losses moved the egregious errors of Bank of America, Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, Goldman Sachs, AIG, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, General Electric, General Motors and others from their balance sheets, onto the balance sheet of the U.S. Treasury and the Federal Reserve.

Morally these actions are repugnant – much like requiring that taxpayers finance hundreds of billions’ worth of second-rate college educations for 10 million lazy, underachieving students – but on a vastly bigger scale.

The real problem isn’t financial. Printing money changes societies by giving the government virtually unlimited amounts of power. That warps the ambitions of politicians and gives socialists unlimited budgets. People soon believe every problem can be solved by the government and the printing press. Trade-offs are no longer required. Costs are no longer relevant. In this kind of environment, no problem is too big to solve through politics and the central bank. And if there isn’t a crisis, then one will soon be invented.

And, sure enough, as soon as the U.S. central bank began to sell assets and return to “normal” policies in 2018 and 2019, a new, even bigger crisis was “found.”

A novel coronavirus. Never mind that coronaviruses appear all the time and that most people will get and survive the flu a half dozen times in their lives… this time the world went completely nuts.

Everything was shut down for two years – except politics. Trillions were spent on vaccines – vaccines that don’t prevent you from getting Covid or from transmitting Covid. It was definitely a government vaccine: it cost trillions, everyone was forced to use it, and it didn’t work.

Nothing else worked during the Covid lockdown either. Kids don’t learn at home. Employees don’t work at home. Flimsy surgical masks don’t prevent you from contracting or spreading Covid – they don’t work, but they were required too. Fauci wore two masks, everywhere. He received four different shots of the “vaccine.” Guess who got Covid anyway?

Worst of all, the government spent unlimited sums of money on things like the ridiculous “paycheck protection program,” which might as well have been called “Fraud on a Federal Scale For You.”

The lie that we could print over the mortgage losses led directly to the lie that wearing a paper mask can stop a virus. Or that a vaccine created in a few weeks and tested only on a handful of people could stop a coronavirus that constantly mutates. With a printing press, there’s no problem that appears too big for the government to handle.

But, much like the “vaccine” and the paper masks, the printing press is just a lie too.

Altogether, the world’s central banks have printed over $25 trillion over the last 12 years.

In the United States, the printing was equal to more than 30% of our GDP. In the Eurozone, the printing was twice as large – over 60% of GDP. In Japan, the printing has been equal to over 100% of GDP.

You can think of these figures as being the size of the mirage we’ve been living in.

Reality looms.

This is why the Sino-Russian alliance is going to win WWIII. They not only have the advantages of population, territory, social stability, and manufacturing capacity, but they also have the advantage of not being hamstrung by completely screwed-up economic systems.

Capitalism has completely and utterly failed, as what presently passes for capitalism is nothing more than a massive credit-fueled Ponzi scheme.

One of the most important historical lessons of warfare: he who can pay his troops wins.

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This is Fine

This is normal. Nothing to see here. Carry on.

Central Bank Liquidity Swap Operations
These swap facilities are designed to improve liquidity conditions in global money markets and to minimize the risk that strains abroad could spread to U.S. markets, by providing foreign central banks with the capacity to deliver U.S. dollar funding to institutions in their jurisdictions. The New York Fed undertakes certain small value transactions from time to time for the purpose of testing operational readiness. The results of the central bank liquidity swap operations and small value exercises of the central bank liquidity swap lines are published on a weekly basis when conducted.

Transfer to Swiss National Bank 10/05/2022 10/06/2022 10/13/2022 7 3.33 3,100,000,000

Now, why would the Federal Reserve be loaning $3.1 billion to the Swiss National Bank? Oh, yeah, I suppose that just might be why.

Credit Suisse Group AG may be facing a capital shortfall of up to 8 billion Swiss francs ($8 billion) in 2024, according to an analysis by Goldman Sachs Group Inc, underscoring the difficulties the troubled lender will face is it approaches what will likely be an extensive restructuring. Given the lender will need to restructure its investment banking operations during a period of “minimal” capital generation, it will face a shortfall of at least 4 billion francs, according to a team of analysts

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A Hitherto Unthinkable Restraint

But sooner or later, their amassed leverage – which is the corporate word for debt – was inevitably going to start bringing down the big banks.

Today The Fed is holding an emergency meeting under “expedited procedures.”

The actions to be considered are the discount and advance rate — in other words, interest rates.

The rumored reason is that Credit Suisse may be in trouble — specifically due to writing interest rate swaps, along with a number of other institutions which happens to include pension funds both in the UK and US, none of whom should ever be playing with levered instruments for the simple reason that leverage is everywhere and always speculative.

But of course they are because nobody has ever gone to prison for using leverage as a means to evade requiring the underlying organization to fund pensions adequately with actual money. Why that would cause both firms and governments to have to behave responsibly and we can’t have that.

This sort of act is a ridiculous violation of anything approaching fiduciary responsibility — which is a legal obligation for pension managers, not a suggestion. After all its not their money — its the pensioners’ money and they are charged with prudent management of same, which the use of leverage, especially leverage on a trend 40 years old that cannot reasonably go below zero, is the exact opposite of “prudent.”

Of course the same is true for banks; they have fiduciary responsibilities too, including to the nation as a whole since they have a backstop through the government for depositors. Nobody went to prison last time in 2008 for this crap either, did they?

Never mind that exiting those positions (including at a loss) was clearly prudent in the two years after the US government along with everyone else threw trillions in printed credit into the economy as a result of the pandemic. Anyone with two IQ points to rub together had to expect that to reflect back into inflation and thus higher rates, never mind that its insane to expect that time has no value which is what a “zero rate” policy claims.

Now add to it that the economic report from Friday showed higher core inflation than The Fed and everyone else expected — not lower. In other words the bad news continued, and therefore the only logical “emergency” act is to withdraw even more credit from the system.

The Fed refused to take the bitter medicine that was necessary back in 2008. They bought a lot more time than I would have imagined by kicking the can down the road, and the Covid lockdowns and “emergency spending measures” appear to have given them an additional two years. But now it’s October, historically a month when the debt chickens come home to roost, and two of the world’s biggest banks, Credit Suisse and Deutsche Bank, have managed to get themselves in seriously deep trouble again, because no one ever stops doing what they’re doing when you prevent them from suffering the consequences of their actions.

While both giant banks are too big to be permitted to fail without significant ramifications through their host countries and the demi-global financial system – which now requires the prefix since the BRICSIA nations have their own system – and both are national flagships, the recent destruction of the energy pipelines suggests the hitherto unthinkable possibility that the Fed might not only be willing to let the banks fail, but perhaps even order the Swiss and German governments to refrain from bailing them out in the interest of furthering the Great Reset.

And both current governments are sufficiently corrupt, and sufficiently ignorant of economics, that they might well accept destructive direction from Washington DC on the subject. The fact that the only member of the Swiss Federal Council who has any grasp of economic matters just resigned last week might even be a sign that an unprecedented action – or rather, lack of action – may be in the offing.

This suggests that the next big economics battle will be the nationalization of banks and money vs centralized demi-global banking and a single digital currency for the former West.

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The End of Beer

It’s hard to imagine that the Germans, Belgians, and English are going to be willing to give up beer for Ukraine.

UK brewers are facing tenfold price increases for the CO2 they use to carbonate and package beers, the Financial Times reported on Friday, also citing supply disruptions that could threaten brewing ahead of the Christmas season.

According to the report, the market disruption follows a warning from US fertilizer group CF Industries last month that it would shut down a major UK ammonia plant that makes CO2 as a byproduct. The company said its decision was due to soaring natural gas prices, which have made production unviable.

The report also pointed out that gas suppliers have been struggling to source CO2 from international markets because of ammonia plant closures in Europe. The energy price spikes and shortages have come as brewers prepare to increase production for Christmas. According to William Lees-Jones, managing director at JW Lees brewery in Middleton, Greater Manchester, the CO2 that had cost £250 a ton ($284) in June was priced last week at £2,800 a ton ($3,187).

Meanwhile, in Italy, the best case scenario involves more than half-a-million people losing their jobs.

Italy is at risk of losing up to 582,000 jobs due to the energy crisis and the resulting economic downturn, national media reported on Sunday, citing a study by the Confindustria Association of Industrialists. According to the findings, if the gas price stays at its current level (the August average was €235 per megawatt-hour), Italy’s economy will shrink 2.2% next year and the country will lose up to 383,000 jobs in 2022-2023. However, if the price hits €298 per megawatt-hour, which is the predicted level based on current gas futures, Italy may suffer a 3.2% decline in GDP and lose hundreds of thousands of jobs.

If Europe isn’t allowed to surrender by the US neocons calling the shots, the price is going to go higher than the predicted €298 per megawatt-hour, which means the economic damage will be even more catastrophic.

UPDATE: Ach du Lieber! It’s getting worse than I thought, faster than I thought.

A German bakery was slapped with a €330,000 gas bill after a new energy company suddenly terminated their contract which guaranteed pricing until the end of 2023, Junge Freiheit reported, citing Bild.

“Are they crazy?” said owner Eckehard Vatter, who says he has 14 days to pay the bill. “A year ago, we paid €5,856 per month in gas costs for our large furnaces and heating,” he added. Vatter said his new energy supplier hasn’t given him a reason for the 1,200% price increase.

This crisis is also demonstrating the inherent falsity of what passes for “contract law”. The contracts are often loaded with one-sided fine print that renders them essentially irrelevant, thereby demonstrating that “consent” and “contract” are fundamentally immoral weapons in the con man’s arsenal.

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Why Russia Hasn’t Mobilized

The refusal to order the mobilization of Russian military forces has puzzled a lot of people who don’t understand what Putin is talking about when he uses the phrase “hybrid war”:

One of the most important dimensions of this war is the economic front. Europe is being driven to the brink by the energy crisis. The Wall Street Journal keyed in on what I believe to be the most apt descriptor of the crisis, warning of a “new era of deindustrialization in Europe.”

A full mobilization would be very costly for Russia’s economy, risking the edge that it currently holds in the economic confrontation with Europe. This, I believe, is the main reason that the Russian government was quick to quash rumors of mobilization today. There are other steps on the escalation ladder before going to total war footing.

There are already rumors that Russia is planning to change the formal designation of the war, from “Special Military Operation”. While that could mean a formal declaration of war, I think that is unlikely. Rather, Russia will likely give the Ukraine operation the same designation as its operations in Syria, loosening the rules of engagement and beginning to target Ukrainian assets in earnest.

We saw a foretaste of this last night, when Russia wiped out over half of Ukraine’s power generation with a few missiles. There are many more targets that they can go after – more nodes in the electrical grid, water pumping and filtration facilities, and higher level command posts. There is at least some probability that Russia begins targeting the command facilities with NATO personnel in them. Plausible deniability works both ways; because NATO is not officially in Ukraine – only “volunteers” – targeting their personnel is not an overtly aggressive act.

Russia also has many ways to boost its force deployment in Ukraine that fall short of full mobilization. They have a pool of demobilized contract soldiers that they can call up, as well as a pool of reservists that they can raise with a partial mobilization.

The Russian line is hardening. Just in the past 24 hours, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said there were “no prospect for negotiations” with Ukraine, and Putin said “Unfriendly forces are targeting us, and we must take initiative in order to succeed in confronting them.” Medvedev went even further just now: “A certain Zelenskyy said that he will not hold a dialogue with those who issue ultimatums. The current ‘ultimatums’ are a warm-up for kids, a preview of demands to be made in the future. He knows them: the total surrender of the Kiev regime on Russia’s terms”

If you believe the Russian government is utterly incompetent and duplicitous, feel free to view statements like this as bluster. But given the warning shot at Ukrainian power generation yesterday, my sense is that Russia is preparing to escalate to a higher level of intensity, which Ukraine cannot match with its indigenous resources. The only other player on the escalation ladder is the United States.

Dark times area ahead for Ukraine – and perhaps for Americans on the other front of this war.

As the Allies proved in WWII, and as the Chinese colonels recognized in their landmark Unrestricted Warfare work on military grand strategy, war is a human activity that is a subset of economics. And the battle for control of Europe will be dictated by energy resources, not by population size or tactical brilliance.

Napoleon didn’t lose to the Coalition Powers because he lacked manpower, technology, or military prowess, but because England controlled the seas. The outcome was always inevitable unless France could somehow break that control. NATO cannot defeat Russia because Russia is energy self-sufficient and Europe is not. So, the question is: how long are Europeans willing to freeze and starve at the behest of US-based neocons in the name of Ukraine?

Russia hasn’t mobilized because doing so would, counter-intuitively, weaken its grand strategic position. Which, of course, is why the NATO forces are attempting to provoke it into doing so. But unless someone in Europe or the USA can introduce a new energy source, NATO cannot win this war. And it’s very clear that Putin, Xi, Modi, and the other BRICSIA leaders all understand this. And the nature of the war will become increasingly apparent as US attempts to escalate the military elements are met with energy-related escalations as well as military responses.

And apparently, some of the NATO leaders realize this too.

Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan said that Turkey’s goal is membership in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization

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Suicide is not Murder

If the Europeans want to starve and freeze themselves, how is that Russia’s problem? How is that Russia’s fault?

President Vladimir Putin on Friday denied Russia had anything to do with Europe’s energy crisis, saying that if the European Union wanted more gas it should lift sanctions preventing the opening of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline.

Speaking to reporters after the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit in Uzbekistan, Putin blamed what he called “the green agenda” for the energy crisis, and insisted that Russia would fulfil its energy obligations.

“The bottom line is, if you have an urge, if it’s so hard for you, just lift the sanctions on Nord Stream 2, which is 55 billion cubic metres of gas per year, just push the button and everything will get going,” Putin said.

Nord Stream 2, which lays on the bed of the Baltic Sea almost in parallel to Nord Stream 1, was built a year ago, but Germany decided not to proceed with it just days before Russia sent its troops into Ukraine on Feb. 24.

European gas prices more than doubled from the start of the year amid a decline in Russian supplies. This year’s price surge has squeezed struggling already consumers and forced some industries to halt production.

If I refuse to drive to the supermarket, I cannot reasonably complain that the supermarket is trying to starve me. No, even that analogy is too generous.

If I refuse to call Dominos and order a pizza, and if I tell them that even if I did order a pizza I will not pay for it with actual cash, but insist on paying with Monopoly money, then I cannot reasonably complain that Dominos is trying to starve me.

It is simply false to blame the NATO-Russian war on Russia. NATO started it and Russia is winning it. The longer the Europeans accept direction from Washington, the worse they are going to suffer. So stop posturing, push the button, and let everything get going.

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