A Gift From The Oldies

By Chris at www.CapitalistExploits.at

I bumped into a friendly bloke at my local gym last week. Jim is his name.

Jim tells me he just started because, and I quote, "my doctor says I"m going to die unless I do something".

Now, I assure you it doesn"t take a doctor to figure this out.

One glance in Jim"s direction and you can tell that underneath all that weight there"s a big struggling heart in there... just ready to explode. He was surprisingly frank and tells me it"s so bad that he can only do little bits of exercise because if he pushes it too hard, there is a very serious risk that his ticker just says, "You know what... f*ck it," and gives up.

Jim"s 52, which is really a ripe old age and about normal life expectancy — if we lived in the 1700"s. But we don"t.

I feel for Jim, told him so, and naturally we all hope that he can bring himself back from the brink. But the fact is many people aren"t like Jim. As mentioned in a previous article on pensions, they"re living longer and stronger.

Years ago it seemed that when you hit 65 you’d retire, receive a gold watch, and proceed to spend your pension money on a rocking chair and pot plants. Ten years later you’d be in a box and, since pot plants are cheap, the cost of keeping you alive wasn’t prohibitive.

 

Not anymore. Today things are different. My wife belongs to a running club and there are a bunch of octogenarians there who put us both to shame. Nope, today you retire and spend your pension on kickboxing classes and second wives, with no plan of dying anytime soon.

Now, this second group (our kickboxing oldies) pose a grave problem.

You see, unlike Jim, these folks, who’ve spent their life exercising, go on and on and on.

70 is spring chicken young for them, and many make it well into their 80"s and 90"s when inevitably they need nappies, nursing care, accommodation, and mushy food to eat. And then finally machines on wheels need to be wheeled in and they end up with tubes in their noses. Don"t laugh. We"re all going to get there, unless we"re fortunate enough to just drop dead quick and fast. The point is this all costs a boatload of money.

Now, I"m aware that this topic isn"t rosy Friday red or shampoo advert fresh and clean, but there are some serious implications that I think you"ll thank me for so hear me out.

Demographics and Pensions

Demographics is an elephant in the room we shouldn"t ignore. It"s stomped around, defecated in the corner, and is now proceeding to knock over all the furniture. Ignore it at your peril. Rather, there are a number of ways to invest.

Let"s explore a few...

Old people (Mabel and Bob) pay for their retirements with pensions, and those pensions are held in pooled accounts at the DTC and managed by folks with pointy shoes and Tom Ford suits.

And because old Mabel and Bob are closer to the box than younger folks, the pointy shoed gents are extremely risk averse (as they should be), and this is where it gets exciting because you know what?

They"re presently engaged in the worst possible leveraged speculation you can think of.

Nope, it"s not Bitcoin.

First, to understand the insanity we have to take a step back and examine how these pointy shoed gents think.

They like fixed income because it"s far less volatile and ostensibly less risky than equities.

They hate small caps and frankly can"t invest in them due to their size, and they have a disdain for commodity markets. That volatility thing again...

In fact, volatility is like a barometer in their world by which everything else is measured.

The problem is with central banks shatbit crazy interest rate policies none of them have been able to make any money in a yield starved world and so they"re, wait for it, selling volatility.

Either through tailor made products from the investment banks or by buying any number of the low volatility ETPs out there.

Volatility isn"t even an asset.

In fact, the VIX is an index of volatility on 1 month to expiry ATM puts and calls on stocks in the S&P 500.

But now the geniuses on Wall Street have figured that they can actually package this animal, which as you can see, is a derivative of a derivative, and treat it like a bond. Fun, heh?

In all fairness, hats off to the asset managers who"ve had the balls to do this. They believed in the central banks" liquidity machine, and they backed their belief and for that they deserve to be paid. I sure wouldn"t have been able to do it.

Now, I"m not some miserable jealous git here to tell you that armageddon is coming and I"ve the answers.

God knows there"s enough of that nonsense in the financial publishing blogosphere for you to get your fill elsewhere. What we do know, however, is that this entire game: the selling of vol, the passive indexing — all of it is predicated on one thing. The central banks keeping rates low and pumping liquidity into the market. It"s why BTFD has become a meme.

The problem that I have with it, other than the distortions made, is that when so many are on one side of the boat like right now and that boat has many moving pieces, then I begin to wonder.

I"m reminded that markets change at the margin, where the slightest hiccup can act like a spark to light the fire of volatility, and these poor suckers who"ve managed to earn steady incomes selling puts find out what "unlimited risk" actually looks like as they"re forced to cover in a market that"s gapping the other way.

I"ve thought about this a lot and, in fact, we recently published how we are going "long vol" for members. And no, it"s not buying puts on VIX because that is, in my humble opinion... how do I say this politely, like begging to be stabbed in the eyes. repeatedly.

In any event that"s just one angle to this market. Here"s another.

Redemptions

I would be remiss in mentioning that as retirees retire, these pension funds will be drawn down.

It"s what Mabel and Bob do to pay for their mushy food, viagra, and bingo nights.

Now, I"m sure you"re all sharp enough to figure out what can happen to the assets these guys have been buying when they have to go from flat out full throttle, to stall, to reverse.

How big is this problem?

Well, for some context global institutional pension fund assets in 22 major markets stood at US$36.4 trillion at year end 2016, amounting to 62% of global GDP.

That is a staggeringly large amount of money.

Pension funds are big cumbersome dumb money. And they"re all allocated in equally dumb indexes, passive strategies, and bonds. So what happens when pensioners draw down on their funds?

You tell me...

Talking of staggeringly large amounts of money, the passive bubble grows bigger as I write this because this beast is fuelled not just by our pointy shoed friends but by Joe Sixpack himself.

Bloomberg just ran a piece:

BlackRock and Vanguard Are Less Than a Decade Away From Managing $20 Trillion

Two towers of power are dominating the future of investing.

Dominating indeed. Here"s how come the pointy shoed crowd can afford Tom Ford suits.

The article goes on to say:

Investors from individuals to large institutions such as pension and hedge funds have flocked to this duo, won over in part by their low-cost funds and breadth of offerings. The proliferation of exchange-traded funds is also supercharging these firms and will likely continue to do so.

Sometimes when everyone is zigging and you zag, you just get run over. But think about it...

We don"t need to go the other way. All we need to do is look where others are no longer.

These behemoths don"t do battle in the little unloved sectors or with stocks that don"t make it into an index. They can"t because they"re too big.

This means that there are a lot of orphans out there and here"s the good news. If it"s not in an index, passives aren"t buying it. And if passives aren"t buying it, it"s only active money that"s even looking at it.

Which brings me to the double helping of good news.

Here"s your competition in active with the accompanying passive.

Right now, it"s a mosh pit food fight to grab and create the next index or ETF so that more capital can be attracted, earning more fees, buying more suits.

This is all well and good.

Markets do what markets do, and I"m not here to grumble about it. I"m here to make money. And indeed if I was in the passive business, I"d be enjoying the steady stream of fees and hoping like hell the market keeps going up.

QE more? Yes, please.

But I"m not.

I"m a humble squirrel searching for nuts in the forest. And gosh, with all this moshing going on it"s wonderful how few other squirrels there are about. The same Bloomberg article makes a good point on this.

While bigger may be better for the fund giants, passive funds may be blurring the inherent value of securities, implied in a company’s earnings or cash flow.

Nah. You think?

Stocks in the index funds no longer trade on fundamentals but rather on asset flows, which sucks the oxygen out of the small guys who don"t make it into the indexes where brain dead passive money is playing.

It means we can gladly play in a sandpit with all the toys and there are very few we have to share them with.

The Cracks Have Already Appeared

Nothing lasts forever, and as I argued when discussing the impact of the incoming strong men on the global economy, there are 3 critical points worth thinking about:

1. Political cohesion and stability can no longer be relied upon as politics becomes inward looking with everything from trade deals to central bank swap lines being renegotiated or cancelled altogether.


2. Global coordinated central bank action. The era of global coordinated monetary policy which we’ve been experiencing since the GFC, especially with the three largest players (ECB, FED and BOJ), will be looked back upon with nostalgia by the current clutch of central bankers who muddy the halls of power. Policy will increasingly be driven with greater sensitivity to nationalist rather than international concerns, which brings me to…


3. Liquidity in the financial system which has stemmed from easing monetary policy is already contracting. In a world where derivatives traverse borders, connecting financial systems like never before, a liquidity crisis presents enormous tail risk in a leveraged world.

Invest accordingly, and thank you for reading.

- Chris

“If you can’t take a small loss, sooner or later you will take the mother of all losses.” — Ed Seykota

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Liked this article? Then you"ll probably like my other missives on

this topic as well. Go here to access them (free, of course).

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Bitcoin Has A "Whale" Problem: 1,000 Investors Control Nearly Half The Market

If Jay Gould were alive today, he would"ve traded bitcoin.

Perhaps the most blatant hypocrisy perpetrated by bitcoin evangelists is their insistence that bitcoin and other digital currencies represent a return to a truly democratic financial system beyond the control of banks and other special interests, where players small and large can earn enormous profits simply by HODLing.

Of course, this idealistic take couldn’t be further from the truth. As Bloomberg points out, the markets for bitcoin and most of its cryptocurrency clones more closely resemble the US equity market of the Gilded Age, where a handful of powerful traders and brokers colluded to move prices in their favor. And because securities laws at the time were virtually nonexistent, the big players minted suckers with impunity.

According to Bloomberg, about 1,000 so-called “whales” control 40% of the bitcoin in circulation, giving them unrivaled leverage over the broader market. And because there are no laws explicitly banning collusion in digital currency markets, only the most blatant pump-and-dump operations risk being prosecuted as fraud.

And with the price skyrocketing like it has in recent days, the incentive for these traders to begin taking profits has never been more pressing.

About 40 percent of bitcoin is held by perhaps 1,000 users; at current prices, each may want to sell about half of his or her holdings, says Aaron Brown, former managing director and head of financial markets research at AQR Capital Management. (Brown is a contributor to the Bloomberg Prophets online column.) What’s more, the whales can coordinate their moves or preview them to a select few. Many of the large owners have known one another for years and stuck by bitcoin through the early days when it was derided, and they can potentially band together to tank or prop up the market.

 

“I think there are a few hundred guys,” says Kyle Samani, managing partner at Multicoin Capital. “They all probably can call each other, and they probably have.” One reason to think so: At least some kinds of information sharing are legal, says Gary Ross, a securities lawyer at Ross & Shulga. Because bitcoin is a digital currency and not a security, he says, there’s no prohibition against a trade in which a group agrees to buy enough to push the price up and then cashes out in minutes.

As Bloomberg explained, the manipulation in bitcoin is extreme because many of the big players know each other from having been involved in the digital currency space since its infancy. Add to this the fact that the risks are incredibly asymmetrical – there’s tremendous upside in terms of profits if they can successfully pull it off. And the chances of them drawing the scrutiny of law enforcement are relatively low.

“As in any asset class, large individual holders and large institutional holders can and do collude to manipulate price,” Ari Paul, co-founder of BlockTower Capital and a former portfolio manager of the University of Chicago endowment, wrote in an electronic message. “In cryptocurrency, such manipulation is extreme because of the youth of these markets and the speculative nature of the assets.”

 

The recent rise in its price is difficult to explain because bitcoin has no intrinsic value. Launched in 2009 with a white paper written under a pseudonym, it’s a form of digital payment maintained by an independent network of computers on the internet‚ using cryptography to verify transactions. Its most fervent believers say it could displace banks and even traditional money, but it’s only worth what someone will trade for it, making it prey to big shifts in sentiment.

Case in point: Some of these so-called whales admitted in an interview with Bloomberg that they regularly incorporate what would in the equity market be considered material nonpublic information into their trading strategies.

Like most hedge fund managers specializing in cryptocurrencies, Samani constantly tracks trading activity of addresses known to belong to the biggest investors in the coins he holds. (Although bitcoin transactions are designed to be anonymous, each one is associated with a coded address that can be seen by anyone.) When he sees activity, Samani immediately calls the likely sellers and can often get information on motivations behind their sales and their trading plans, he says. Some funds end up buying one another’s holdings directly, without going into the open market, to avoid affecting the currency’s price. “Investors are generally more forthcoming with other investors,” Samani says. “We all kind of know who one another are, and we all help each other out and share notes. We all just want to make money.” Ross says gathering intelligence is legal.

And investors who buy into smaller tokens are at an even greater disadvantage.

Ordinary investors are at an even greater disadvantage in smaller digital currencies and tokens. Among the coins people invest in, bitcoin has the least concentrated ownership, says Spencer Bogart, managing director and head of research at Blockchain Capital. The top 100 bitcoin addresses control 17.3 percent of all the issued currency, according to Alex Sunnarborg, co-founder of crypto hedge fund Tetras Capital. With ether, a rival to bitcoin, the top 100 addresses control 40 percent of the supply, and with coins such as Gnosis, Qtum, and Storj, top holders control more than 90 percent. Many large owners are part of the teams running these projects.

Unsurprisingly, Bloomberg managed to find someone to defend the status quo: Whales won’t dump their holdings, this person argued, because they “have faith in the long-term potential of the coins.” This strikes us as a naïve assumption.

Some argue this is no different than what happens in more established markets. “A good comparison is to early stage equity,” BlockTower’s Paul wrote. “Similar to those equity deals, often the founders and a handful of investors will own the majority of the asset.” Other investors say the whales won’t dump their holdings, because they have faith in the long-term potential of the coins. “I believe that it’s common sense that these whales that own so much bitcoin and bitcoin cash, they don’t want to destroy either one,” says Sebastian Kinsman, who lives in Prague and trades coins. But as prices go through the roof, that calculation might change.

While the concentrated holdings of the modern bitcoin market should give potential investors pause, in some ways, it"s not all that different from the modern equity market. As we pointed out back in September, the Bank of Japan owns a staggering 75% of the domestic ETF market. Increasingly, equity ownership in the US and around the world is becoming increasingly concentrated in the hands of central banks, sovereign wealth funds and the largest asset managers like BlackRock, Fidelity and Vanguard.

While the whales can exercise unrivaled influence over the price of bitcoin, they aren"t the only players in the bitcoin market with a natural inclination toward self-dealing. As Bill Blaine pointed out, nearly every bank knows bitcoin"s extraordinary gains are a crowd delusion fuelled by the extraordinary promise of free wealth.

Yet, many will be willing to trade and settle them for their clients – largely retail. So, while the bitcoin bubble has (for now) blessed hundreds of thousands of mom and pop investors with spectacular returns, these gains will only continue as long as the cartel allows them too.

Blackmailing German Bomber Demands 10 Million Euros In Bitcoin From DHL

As we reported earlier, Bitcoin brushed off the weekend sell-off and blasted above the $14,000 level as the Asian trading session got underway. There was no news to catalyse the move higher, although excitement and debate over the upcoming launch of Bitcoin futures on 10 December continues. One Bitcoin-related story did peak our interest, however.

It might be a sign that Bitcoin is becoming mainstream when blackmailers are prepared to accept the cryptocurrency as payment.

German tabloid, Bild, is reporting that this has befallen logistics company, Deutsche Post DHL. However, the recipients of two deliveries containing explosive devices had a lucky escape, as Bloomberg explains.

A criminal blackmailing Deutsche Post’s DHL parcel service demands EU10m in the digital currency Bitcoin, German newspaper Bild reports, not saying where it got the information. Blackmailer placed two bombs in parcels delivered by DHL; bombs didn’t detonate because of technical problems

Parcels included QR codes with links to extortion letter to DHL

Threatened to send further bombs

German Parcel Bomb Is Part of Extortion Plan Against DHL: Police

Handelsblatt provided more details of one of the bombs found in the eastern German city of Potsdam.

Authorities confirmed Sunday the apparent bomb found near the Potsdam Christmas market on Friday was unrelated to terrorism but an attempt to blackmail delivery company DHL. The package resulted in a large-scale evacuation of the market in Potsdam, near Berlin.

“The good news is that we can say, with all likelihood, the package was not aimed at the Christmas market,” Karl-Heinz Schröter, Brandenburg’s state interior minister, told reporters. “The bad news is that it was a blackmail attempt targeting DHL.”

The Potsdam package, containing nails, an unidentified powder substance and a metal cylinder, was sent to a nearby pharmacy as a special delivery. The store’s owner informed authorities after noticing unusual wires and hearing a hissing noise while opening the package. Police initially believed the package to be a fake bomb but, after forensic teams examined it, determined it was “capable of activation.”

The other bomb was found in a similar package in another eastern city, Frankfurt/Oder,last month. German officials warned that the blackmailers would “likely” send more explosive devices in the run-up to Christmas.

Of course, Bitcoin naysayers are likely to pounce on stories like this to dismiss Bitcoin as merely a mechanism for facilitating criminal activity. Indeed, Larry Finck of Blackrock dismissed it as a index to gauge worldwide money laundering, our old friend Neil Dwane, of Allianz Global Investors, described it as a “scam for money laundering around the world” and Jamie Dimon famously described it as a “fraud”.

In the meantime, the merits of Bitcoin as a means of payment and as investment continues. Yesterday, the CEO of ICE, which owns the NYSE, lamented that his organisation was “beaten to the punch” in trading Bitcoin futures by the CME and CBOE. As we noted, Jeff Sprecher told a Goldman investor conference on Tuesday that that “we may be stupid for not being first on that" adding that “I don’t have the answers, I wish I knew” how the investments will evolve, he said. “I don’t know what to make of cryptocurrencies.”

The Stage Has Been Set For The Next Financial Crisis

Authored by Constantin Gurdgiev via CaymanFinancialReview.com,

Last month, the Japanese government auctioned off some US$4 billion worth of new two-year bonds at a new record low yield of negative 0.149 percent. The country’s five-year debt is currently yielding minus 0.135 percent per annum, and its 10-year bonds are trading at -0.001 percent. Strange as it may sound, the safe haven status of Japanese bonds means that there is an ample demand among private investors, especially foreign buyers, for giving away free money to the Japanese government: the bid-to-cover ratio in the latest auction was at a hefty US$19.9 billion or 4.97 times the targeted volume. The average bid-to-cover ratio in the past 12 auctions was similar at 4.75 times. Japan’s status as the world’s most indebted advanced economy is not a deterrent to the foreign investors, banking primarily on the expectation that continued strengthening of the yen against the U.S. dollar, the U.K. pound sterling and, to a lesser extent, the euro, will stay on track into the foreseeable future. See chart 1

In a way, the bet on Japanese bonds is the bet that the massive tsunami of monetary easing that hit the global economy since 2008 is not going to recede anytime soon, no matter what the central bankers say in their dovishly-hawkish or hawkishly-dovish public statements. And this expectation is not only contributing to the continued inflation of a massive asset bubble, but also widens the financial sustainability gap within the insurance and pensions sectors. The stage has been set, cleaned and lit for the next global financial crisis.

Worldwide, current stock of government debt trading at negative yields is at or above the US$9 trillion mark, with more than two-thirds of this the debt of the highly leveraged advanced economies. Just under 85 percent of all government bonds outstanding and traded worldwide are carrying yields below the global inflation rate. In simple terms, fixed income investments can only stay in the positive real returns territory if speculative bets made by investors on the direction of the global exchange rates play out.

We are in a multidimensional and fully internationalized carry trade game, folks, which means there is a very serious and tangible risk pool sitting just below the surface across world’s largest insurance companies, pensions funds and banks, the so-called “mandated” undertakings. This pool is the deep uncertainty about the quality of their investment allocations. Regulatory requirements mandate that these financial intermediaries hold a large proportion of their investments in “safe” or “high quality” instruments, a class of assets that draws heavily on higher rated sovereign debt, primarily that of the advanced economies.

The first part of the problem is that with negative or ultra-low yields, this debt delivers poor income streams on the current portfolio. Earlier this year, Stanford’s Hoover Institution research showed that “in aggregate, the 564 state and local systems in the United States covered in this study reported $1.191 trillion in unfunded pension liabilities (net pension liabilities) under GASB 67 in FY 2014. This reflects total pension liabilities of $4.798 trillion and total pension assets (or fiduciary net position) of $3.607 trillion.” This accounts for roughly 97 percent of all public pension funds in the U.S. Taking into the account the pension funds’ penchant for manipulating (in their favor) the discount rates, the unfunded public sector pensions liabilities rise to $4.738 trillion. Key culprit: the U.S. pension funds require 7.5-8 percent average annual returns on their assets to break even on their future expected liabilities. In 2013-2016 they achieved an average return of below 3 percent. This year, things are looking even worse. Last year, Milliman research showed that on average, over 2012-2016, U.S. pension funds held 27-30 percent of their assets in cash (3-4 percent) and bonds (23-27 percent), generating total median returns over the same period of around 1.31 percent per annum.

Not surprisingly, over the recent years, traditionally conservative investment portfolios of the insurance companies and pensions funds have shifted dramatically toward higher risk and more exotic (or in simple parlance, more complex) assets. BlackRock Inc recently looked at the portfolio allocations, as disclosed in regulatory filings, of more than 500 insurance companies. The analysts found that their asset books – investments that sustain insurance companies’ solvency – can be expected to suffer an 11 percent drop in values, on average, in the case of another financial crisis. In other words, half of all the large insurance companies trading in the U.S. markets are currently carrying greater risks on their balance sheets than prior to 2007. Milliman 2016 report showed that among pension funds, share of assets allocated to private equity and real estate rose from 19 percent in 2012 to 24 percent in 2016.

The reason for this is that the insurance companies, just as the pension funds, re-insurers and other longer-term “mandated” investment vehicles have spent the last eight years loading up on highly risky assets, such as illiquid private equity, hedge funds and real estate. All in the name of chasing the yield: while mainstream low-risk assets-generated income (as opposed to capital gains) returned around zero percent per annum, higher risk assets were turning up double-digit yields through 2014 and high single digits since then. At the end of 2Q 2017, U.S. insurance companies’ holdings of private equity stood at the highest levels in history, and their exposures to direct real estate assets were almost at the levels comparable to 2007. Ditto for the pension funds. And, appetite for both of these high risk asset classes is still there.

The second reason to worry about the current assets mix in insurance and pension funds portfolios relates to monetary policy cycle timing. The prospect of serious monetary tightening is looming on the horizon in the U.S., U.K., Australia, Canada and the eurozone; meanwhile, the risk of the slower rate of bonds monetization in Japan is also quite real. This means that the capital values of the low-risk assets are unlikely to post significant capital gains going forward, which spells trouble for capital buffers and trading income for the mandated intermediaries.

Thirdly, the Central Banks continue to hold large volumes of top-rated debt. As of Aug. 1, 2017, the Fed, Bank of Japan and the ECB held combined US$13.8 trillion worth of assets, with both Bank of Japan (US$4.55 trillion) and the ECB (US$5.1 trillion) now exceeding the Fed holdings (US$4.3 trillion) for the third month in a row.

Debt maturity profiles are exacerbating the risks of contagion from the monetary policy tightening to insurance and pension funds balance sheets. In the case of the U.S., based on data from Pimco, the maturity cliff for the Federal Reserve holdings of the Treasury bonds, Agency debt and TIPS, as well as MBS is falling on 1Q 2018 – 3Q 2020. Per Bloomberg data, the maturity cliff for the U.S. insurers and pensions funds debt assets is closer to 2020-2022. If the Fed simply stops replacing maturing debt – the most likely scenario for unwinding its QE legacy – there will be little market support for prices of assets that dominate capital base of large financial institutions. Prices will fall, values of assets will decline, marking these to markets will trigger the need for new capital. The picture is similar in the U.K. and Canada, but the risks are even more pronounced in the euro area, where the QE started later (2Q 2015 as opposed to the U.S. 1Q 2013) and, as of today, involves more significant interventions in the sovereign bonds markets than at the peak of the Fed interventions.

How distorted the EU markets for sovereign debt have become? At the end of August, Cyprus – a country that suffered a structural banking crisis, requiring bail-in of depositors and complete restructuring of the banking sector in March 2013 – has joined the club of euro area sovereigns with negative yields on two-year government debt. All in, 18 EU member states have negative yields on their two-year paper. All, save Greece, have negative real yields.

The problem is monetary in nature. Just as the entire set of quantitative easing (QE) policies aimed to do, the long period of extremely low interest rates and aggressive asset purchasing programs have created an indirect tax on savers, including the net savings institutions, such as pensions funds and insurers. However, contrary to the QE architects’ other objectives, the policies failed to drive up general inflation, pushing costs (and values) of only financial assets and real estate. This delayed and extended the QE beyond anyone’s expectations and drove unprecedented bubbles in financial capital. Even after the immediate crisis rescinded, growth returned, unemployment fell and the household debt dramatically ticked up, the world’s largest Central Banks continue buying some US$200 billion worth of sovereign and corporate debt per month.

Much of this debt buying produced no meaningfully productive investment in infrastructure or public services, having gone primarily to cover systemic inefficiencies already evident in the state programs. The result, in addition to unprecedented bubbles in property and financial markets, is low productivity growth and anemic private investment. (See chart 2.) As recently warned by the Bank for International Settlements, the global debt pile has reached 325 percent of the world’s GDP, just as the labor and total factor productivity growth measures collapsed.

The only two ways in which these financial and monetary excesses can be unwound involves pain.

The first path – currently favored by the status quo policy elites – is through another transfer of funds from the general population to the financial institutions that are holding the assets caught in the QE net. These transfers will likely start with tax increases, but will inevitably morph into another financial crisis and internal devaluation (inflation and currencies devaluations, coupled with a deep recession).

The alternative is also painful, but offers at least a ray of hope in the end: put a stop to debt accumulation through fiscal and tax reforms, reducing both government spending across the board (and, yes, in the U.S. case this involves cutting back on the coercive institutions and military, among other things) and flattening out personal income tax rates (to achieve tax savings in middle and upper-middle class cohorts, and to increase effective tax rates – via closure of loopholes – for highest earners). As a part of spending reforms, public investment and state pensions provisions should be shifted to private sector providers, while existent public sector pension funds should be forced to raise their members contributions to solvency-consistent levels.

Beyond this, we need serious rethink of the monetary policy institutions going forward. Historically, taxpayers and middle class and professionals have paid for both, the bailouts of the insolvent financial institutions and for the creation of conditions that lead to this insolvency. In other words, the real economy has consistently been charged with paying for utopian, unrealistic and state-subsidizing pricing of risks by the Central Banks. In the future, this pattern of the rounds upon rounds of financial repression policies must be broken.

Whether we like it or not, since the beginning of the Clinton economic bubble in the mid-1990s, the West has lived in a series of carry trade games that transferred real economic resources from the economy to the state. Today, we are broke. If we do not change our course, the next financial crisis will take out our insurers and pensions providers, and with them, the last remaining lifeline to future financial security.

Stockman Slams "The Awesome Recovery" Narrative

Authored by David Stockman via Contra Corner blog,

One of the great philosophers of recent times was surely Sgt. Easterhaus of "Hill Street Blues". As he assigned his men to their daily rounds in the crime infested streets of the Big Apple he always ended the precinct"s morning call with his signature admonition:

"Let"s be carful out there."

That wisdom has been long lost on both ends of the Acela Corridor. In the face of blatant dangers and even existential threats, their denizens whistle past the graveyard with alacrity. So doing, they turn a blind eye on virtually all that contradicts the awesome recovery narrative, the indispensable nation conceit and the Washington can Make America Great Again (MAGA) delusion, among countless other fantasies.

For example, the GOP should be literally petrified by an horrid fiscal scenario for the coming decade that entails Social Security going bust, another $12 trillion of current policy deficits and a prospective $33 trillion public debt by 2027. And even that presupposes a macro-economic miracle in the interim: Namely, a 207 month stretch from 2009 to 2027 without a recession-----a feat which is twice the longest expansion in recorded history

Instead, they have passed a FY 2018 budget resolution which implicitly embraces all of the above fiscal mayhem, and then adds upwards of $2 trillion (so far and counting interest) of incremental deficits to fund an ill-designed tax cut that is inherently an economic dud and political time bomb.

As to the former, the GOP is lost in ritual incantation and foggy Reagan-era nostalgia. Unlike the giant Reagan tax cut of 1981, the pending bills do not cut marginal tax rates measurably---or even the individual income tax burden in any meaningful sense.

In fact, if you set aside the so-called pass-thru rate for unincorporated businesses (see below), the entire 10-year tax cut on the individual side amounts to just $480 billion. In the scheme of things, that"s a tiny number; it represents only 2.2% of the $22 trillion CBO baseline for individual income tax collections over the next decade; and it also is equal to just 0.2% of the projected nominal GDP over the period.

By way of comparison, the Reagan tax cut amounted to 6.2% of GDP when fully effective; and the net cut for individuals taxpayers alone averaged 2.7% of GDP over a decade. In today"s economy, that would amount to a tax cut of $6.5 trillion during 2018-2027 or 14X more than the $450 billion net figure estimated by the Joint Committee on Taxation.

To be sure, the abused citizens of America are more than entitled to even this tiny tax cut and much more. That is, if their elected representatives were willing to cut spending by an equal amount or even raise alternative, more benign sources of revenue (i.e. a VAT on consumers vs. the current levy on producer and worker incomes). But unless a rapidly aging society wishes to bury itself in unsupportable public debt, it simply can"t afford deficit-financed tax cuts for either the principle or the politics of the thing.

Moreover, to pretend that the tax concoction fashioned by Congressman Brady---- with a pack of Gucci Gulch jackals nipping at his heels--- will actually generate enough growth and jobs to largely pay for itself is to make a mockery of Sgt. Easterhaus" admonition. Rather than an exercise in fiscal carefulness, it is the height of recklessness to assume that much enhanced domestic growth, employment and Treasury receipts will result from any part of the $2.8 trillion cut for the rich and corporations that is at the heart of the GOP tax bill.

Actually, it"s the heart and then some. With recent modifications (including dropping of the $150 billion corporate excise tax intended to prevent companies from hiding domestic profits via over-invoicing of imports from their own affiliates), the net revenue loss of the Brady bill is calculated at about $1.7 trillion.

That means, of course, that fully 165% of the net tax cut goes to: (1) 5,500 dead rich people"s heirs per year ($172 billion for estate tax repeal); (2) 4.3 million very wealthy loophole users ($700 billion for the minimum tax repeal); and (3) the top 1% and 10% of households who own 60% and 85% of business equities, respectively, who will get most of the $1.95 trillion of business rate cuts.

In this context, we cannot stress more insistently that Art Laffer"s famous napkin does not apply to business tax cuts in today"s world of globalized trade and labor rates and artificially cheap central bank enabled debt and capital.

That"s because the business income taxes are born by owners, not workers. The wage rates and incomes of the latter are determined in a saturated global labor market where the China Price for Goods and the India Price for internet based services sets wages on the margin.

At the same time, owners are not deterred from making investments by the proverbial "high after-tax cost of capital". That"s because it isn"t.

Even at the current statutory 35% tax rate (which few pay), the absolute cost of equity and debt capital is cheaper than ever before in modern history.

In fact, the after-tax cost of equity to scorched earth investment juggernauts like Amazon is virtually zero, while the cheap debt-fueled boom in conventional plant, equipment, mining, shipping and distribution assets over the last two decades has stocked the planet with sufficient capacity for decades to come.

In short, if you lower the business tax rates to 20% and 25% for corporations and pass-thrus, respectively, you will get more dividends, more stock buybacks and other returns to shareholders. Those distributions, in turn, will go to the very wealthy and to pension funds/non-profits. The latter will pay no taxes on these distributions while the former will pay 15%-20% at current law rates of o%, 15% and 20% on capital gains and dividends, which the Brady bill does not change.

In short, maybe the $2.8 trillion of tax cuts for business and the wealthy will generate a few hundred billion of reflows over the decade. And even that will not be attributable to the "incentive effect" of the Laffer Curve at all; it"s just tax collection mechanics at work as between the personal and business taxing systems.

By the same token, the Sgt. Easterhaus principle is also being ash-canned by the GOP on the politics side of the tax bill, as well. In fact, Republicans have been chanting the "tax cut" incantation for so many decades that they apparently can"t see the obvious. Namely, that among the middle quintile of households (about 30 million filers between $55,000 and $93,000 of AGI) the ballyhooed "tax cut" will actually be a crap shoot.

When fully effective, roughly two-thirds of filers (20 million units) would realize a $1,070 per year tax cut, while another 31% (roughly 9.5 million filers) would experience a $1,150 tax increase!

That"s a whole lot of rolling dice----depending upon family size, sources of income and previous use of itemized deductions. Yet for the heart of the middle class as a whole----30 million filers in the aforementioned income brackets---the statistical average tax cut would amount to $6.15 per week.

That"s right. Two Starbucks cappuccinos and a banana!

So we"d call the GOP"s noisy advertising of a big tax cut for the middle class reckless, not careful. Indeed, the Dems will spend hundreds of millions during the 2018 election season on testimonials and tax tables which prove the GOP"s claim is a pure con job.

They will also prove the opposite--- that the overwhelming share of this unaffordable tax cut is going to the top of the economic ladder. After all, the income tax has morphed into a Rich Man"s Levy over the last three decades. So if you cut income taxes----the benefits inherently and mechanically go to the few who actually pay.

Thus, in the most recent year (2015), 150.5 million Americans filed for income taxes, but just 6.8 million filers (4.5% of the total) accounted for 35% of all AGI ($3.6 trillion) and 59% of taxes paid ($858 billion).

By contrast, the bottom 64 million filers reported only $928 billion of AGI, and paid just 2.2%  ($20 billion) in taxes. That is, owing to the standard deduction, personal exemptions and various credits the bottom 44% of taxpayers accounted for only 1.4% of personal income tax collections.

Even when you widen the bracket to the bottom 123 million tax filers (82%), you get $4.3 trillion of AGI and just $284 billion of taxes paid. In other words, the bottom four-fifths of filers pay only 6.6% of their AGI in tribute to Uncle Sam. They may not be getting their money"s worth from the Washington puzzle palaces, but you can"t get blood from a turnip, either.

In short, Flyover America desperately needs tax relief for the 160 million workers who actually do pay up to 15.5% of their wages in employer/employee payroll tax deductions. Yet by ignoring the $1.1 trillion per year payroll tax entirely and recklessly and risibly claiming that its income and corporate tax cut bill materially aids the middle class, the GOP is only setting itself up for a thundering political backlash.

Nothing makes this clearer than some recent (accurate) calculations by a left-wing outfit called the Institute for Policy Studies that boil down to the proposition that "It Takes A Baseball Team".

That is, the top 25 US persons (like the full MLB roster) on the Forbes 400 list now report about $1 trillion in collective net worth. That happens to match the net worth of the bottom 180 million (56%) Americans.

Needless to say, that egregious disproportion does not represent free market capitalism at work; it"s the deformed fruit of Bubble Finance and the vast inflation of financial assets that the Fed and other central banks have enabled over the past three decades.

In terms of the Sgt. Easterhaus metaphor, monetary central planning has planted some exceedingly dangerous political time bombs in the precincts, neighborhoods, towns and cities of Flyover America. Accordingly, if the GOP succeeds in passing some version of its current tax bill, it may be what finally brings the Dems back into power on an out-and-out platform of socialist healthcare (single payor) and tax redistributionism with malice aforethought.

Even as the GOP recklessly plunges forward with gag rules and its sight unseen legislative steamroller (echoes of ObamaCare in 2010), it will never be able to hide what is buried in the bill"s tax tables. Namely, an average tax cut for the top 1%---even after accounting for elimination of upwards of $1.3 trillion of itemized deductions----that would amount to $1,000 per week.

Moreover, for the top o.1% (150,000 filers), the Dem campaign ads will show a cut of $5,300 per week; and for a subset of 100,000 of the top 0.1% filers, the GOP"s tax cut would amount to $11,300 per week .

That"s right. Each and every one of the very ultra rich would get a tax break equivalent to that which would accrue to every 2,000 middle bracket filers under the Brady bill.

As Sgt. Easterhaus might have said: They have been warned!

Meanwhile, at the other end of the Acela Corridor, the good precinct sergeant gets no respect, either. Indeed, gambling in today"s hideously over-valued and unstable casino is exactly the opposite of being careful; it"s certain to lead to severe---even fatal---financial injuries on the beat.

In this context, we have been saying right along that the essential evil of monetary central planning is that it systematically falsifies asset prices and corrupts all financial information. That includes what passes for analysis by the Cool Aid drinkers in the casino.

But when we ran across this gem from one Steve Chiavarone yesterday we had to double check because we thought perhaps we were inadvertently reading The Onion.

But, no, he"s actually a paid in full (and then some) portfolio manager at the $360 billion Federated Investors group who appeared on CNBC, and then got reported by Dow-Jones" MarketWatch just in case you had the sound turned off during his appearance on bubblevision.

So here"s how the bull market will remain "alive for another decade." According to Chiavarone, millenials who don"t have two nickels to rub together will make it happen. No sweat.

“Millennials are entering the workforce, but their wages are going to be under pressure their whole career,” he explained to CNBC’s “Trading Nation” on Friday. “They won’t make enough money to pay down their debt, fund their life and fund retirement where there is no pension. So, they’re going to need equities.”

Then again, aspiration and capability are not exactly the same thing. In fact, the frequent yawning difference between the two puts us in mind of the Donald"s characterization of his primary opponent as Little Marco Rubio. The latter never stops talking about himself as the very embodiment of the American Dream come true----so for all we know perhaps Marco did aspire to be an NBA star.

But when he famously couldn"t reach his water bottle from atop a stool during his nationwide TV rebuttal of an Obama SOTU speech a few years back, it was evident that NBA stardom wasn"t ever meant to be.

Nor during the coming decade of stagnant wages and rising interest rates is it any more obvious how millennials will beg, borrow or steal their way to massive purchases of equities. That is, how they will finance what will actually be an avalanche of stock sales by 80 million fading baby boomers who will need the proceeds to pay their nursing home bills.

But never mind. MarketWatch caught the full measure of  what shines on the inside of Mr. Chiavarone"s financial beer goggles:

 The risk is not being in this market,” says Chiavarone, who helps run the Federated Global Allocation Fund. The firm’s current price target is for 2,750 on the S&P by the end of next year and 3,000 for 2019.

 

“We are probably frankly low on both of them,” he said. “Tax reform could push up the markets.” That’s not to say there won’t be some pain along the way, specifically the potential for a recession in 2020 and 2021, according to Chiavarone.

 

What’s an investor to do in that case? “Buy the recession,” he said.

Indeed, it doesn"t come any stupider than the market blather that is constantly published on MarketWatch. Today it also informs us that not only have US earnings been galloping forward in recent quarters, but its actually a global trend:

However, this is hardly a U.S.-only story. Corporate earnings have been improving globally, and some of the fastest growth has come from international companies, as seen in the following chart from BlackRock, which looks at U.S. growth against the globe, excluding the U.S.

The chart below is supposed to be the evidence, but we are still scratching our heads looking for the point. It seems that global corporate earnings ex-US based companies have surged.....all the way back to where they were in 2011!

You can"t make this stuff up. Did these geniuses notice that China just went full retard in credit expansion to insure that the coronation of Mr. Xi was the greatest since, apparently, the Ming Dynasty invited the civilized world (not Europe) to the coronation of its fourth emperor in 1424?

In fact, the 19th Party Congress is now over, and the Red Suzerains of Beijing are back to the impossible task of reining in the massive malinvestment, housing, debt and construction bubbles which have turned China"s economy into a $40 trillion powder keg. So right on cue it reported a sharp cooling of its red hot pre-coronation economy last night.

Thus, value-added industrial output, a rough proxy for GDP, expanded by just 6.2% in October compared to double digit increases a few months back.

Likewise, fixed-asset investment climbed 7.3% in the January-October period from a year earlier. Notably, that"s way down from high double digit rates during most of the century, and, in fact, is the slowest pace since December 1999.

Needless to say, the latter data point amounts to a clanging clarion. At the end of the day, the ballyhooed Chinese growth miracle is really a story of construction and debt-fueled asset investment gone wild. And that party is now over.

So whatever Sgt. Easterhaus actually meant during the seven seasons of "Hill Street Blues" which always started with his famous admonition, we are quite sure that today it would not have meant buying the dips in a casino that is rife with unprecedented danger.

Finally, when it comes to real danger we think the most precarious spot along the Acela Corridor is about one mile from Union Station. We are speaking, of course, of the Oval Office and the Donald"s questionable tenure therein.

Even as he meandered around Asia double-talking about trade and basking in the royal reception put on by his duplicitous hosts in Tokyo, Seoul and most especially Beijing, the Donald did manage to hit a fantastic bull-eye stateside.

Indeed, his takedown of the three stooges---Brennan, Clapper and Comey-----of the Deep State"s spy apparatus will be one for the ages. Not since Jimmy Carter has a president even vaguely admonished the intelligence agencies, but as it his wont, the Donald held nothing back---naming names and drop-kicking backsides good and hard:

“And then you hear it’s 17 agencies. Well, it’s three. And one is Brennan and one is whatever. I mean, give me a break. They’re political hacks. So you look at it — I mean, you have Brennan, you have Clapper, and you have Comey. Comey is proven now to be a liar and he’s proven to be a leaker,” Trump told the reporters on Air Force One.....   

Yes, the next day he backed away in what appeared to be a pro forma nod to be his own courage-challenged appointees.

We don"t think so, however.

The truth is, the Deep State is already in the precinct house. And Sgt. Easterhaus is talking to the wall.

 

Brandon Smith Warns: The Saudi Coup Signals War And The New World Order Reset

Authored by Brandon Smith via Alt-Market.com,

For years now, I have been warning about the relationship of interdependency between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia and how this relationship, if ended, would mean disaster for the petrodollar system and by extension the dollar"s world reserve status.

In my recent articles "Lies And Distractions Surrounding The Diminishing Petrodollar" and "The Economic End Game Continues," I point out that the death of the dollar as the premier petrocurrency is actually a primary goal for establishment globalists.

Why?

Because in an effort to achieve what they sometimes call the "global economic reset," or the "new world order," a more publicly accepted centralized global economy and monetary framework is paramount. And, this means the eventual implementation of a single world currency and a single global economic and political authority above and beyond the dollar system.

But, it is not enough to simply initiate such socially and fiscally painful changes in a vacuum. The banking powers are not interested in taking any blame for the suffering that would be dealt to the masses during the inevitable upheaval (or blame for the suffering that has already been caused). Therefore, a believable narrative must be crafted. A narrative in which political intrigue and geopolitical crisis make the "new world order" a NECESSITY; one that the general public would accept or even demand as a solution to existing instability and disaster.

That is to say, the globalists must fashion a propaganda story to be used in the future, in which "selfish" nation-states abused their sovereignty and created conditions for calamity, and the only solution was to end that sovereignty and place all power into the hands of a select few "wise and benevolent men" for the greater good of the world.

I believe the next phase of the global economic reset will begin in part with the breaking of petrodollar dominance. An important element of my analysis on the strategic shift away from the petrodollar has been the symbiosis between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia has been the single most important key to the dollar remaining as the petrocurrency from the very beginning.

The very first oil exploration and extraction deal in Saudi Arabia was sought by the vast international oil cartels of Royal Dutch Shell, Near East Development Company, Anglo-Persian, etc., but eventually fell into the hands of none other than the Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company. The dark history of Standard Oil aside, this meant that Saudi business would be handled primarily by American interests. And the Western thirst for oil, especially after World War I, would etch our relationship with the reigning monarchy in stone.

A founding member of OPEC, Saudi Arabia was one of the few primary oil-producing nations that maintained an oil pipeline that expedited processing and bypassed the Suez Canal. (The pipeline was shut down, however, in 1983). This allowed Standard Oil and the United States to tiptoe around the internal instability of Egypt, which had experienced ongoing conflict which finally culminated in the civil war of 1952.

Considered puppets of the British Empire at the time, the ruling elites of Egypt were toppled by the Muslim Brotherhood, leading to the eventual demise of the British pound sterling as the top petro-currency and the world reserve. The British economy faltered and has never since returned to its former glory.

Perhaps we are seeing some parallels here?

Civil war may not be in the cards for Saudi Arabia; so far a quiet coup has been rather effective in completely changing the power base of the nation over the past few years. The primary beneficiary of that change in power has been crown prince Mohammed Bin Salman, who only answers to King Salman, an 81-year-old ruler barely involved in leadership.

To understand how drastic this coup has been, consider this - for decades Saudi Kings maintained political balance by doling out vital power positions to separate, carefully chosen successors. Positions such as Defense Minister, the Interior Ministry and the head of the National Guard. Today, Mohammed Bin Salman controls all three positions. Foreign policy, defense matters, oil and economic decisions and social changes are now all in the hands of one man.

But the real question is, who is behind that man?

Well, the recent political purge of various "neo-conservative" tied Saudis might lead some to believe that Prince Mohammed is seeking an end to globalist control of Saudi oil and politics.

These people would be wrong for a number of reasons.

Prince Mohammed"s revolutionary "Vision for 2030" developed as he entered power was touted as a means to end Saudi reliance on oil revenues to support economic stability. However, I believe this plan is NOT about ending reliance on oil, but ending reliance on the U.S. dollar. In fact, the plan indicates a move away from the dollar as the world"s petrocurrency and a de-pegging of the Riyal from the dollar.

Prince Mohammed has also established much deeper ties to Russia and China, creating bilateral agreements which may end up removing the dollar as the mechanism for oil trade between the nations.

You would think that this kind of strategy would be highly damaging to the West and to American interests in particular and that the corporate establishment would be doing everything in their power to stop it. However, this is not at all the case. In reality, the globalist establishment is fully behind Mohammed Bin Sulman"s "Vision for 2030."

Corporate behemoths such as the Carlyle Group (Bush family, etc), Goldman Sachs, Blackstone and Blackrock have ALL been backing the Vision for 2030 and Prince Mohammed through his Public Investment Fund (PIF), of which he is the chairman.

Trillions in capital are flowing through PIF, most of it from the coffers of globalist establishment companies. Once again I point out that the so-called "East versus West division" and the Eastern "opposition" to the globalists is complete nonsense; banking elites and globalists are the true influence behind the move away from the dollar, as the Saudi example and the Vision for 2030 shows. The end of the dollar as world reserve works in their favor — it is planned.

This does not end with the death of the dollar"s petro-status, though. These kinds of upsets in the power dynamic invariably lead to war. War acts as a kind of cleansing of the historical record; it tends to distract the public, for generations, from those that truly benefit from geopolitical and economic strife.

Prince Mohammed has already triggered conflicts with Yemen and Qatar, but this seems to have only been a precursor to greater kinetic displays of force. The next target appears to be Lebanon, and eventually Iran and Syria.

The first signal came with the resignation of Lebanon"s Prime Minister Saad Hariri on November 4, a resignation Hezbollah claims was forced by the Saudi government. Interestingly, Saad Hariri recorded the televised announcement in Saudi Arabia.

This shocking disruption to Lebanon"s political apparatus has been followed by an escalation in saber rattling by Saudi Arabia against Hezbollah (which is considered by many to be merely a puppet organization of the Iranian government). If official polls are to be believed, the Lebanese population is in extreme disagreement over Iran and Hezbollah, which could add to internal divisions and civil war if tensions continue to grow. Add to this the suspected (but officially denied) "secret visit" by Prince Mohammed to Israel in September, and the newfound "friendship" between the two nations in the months since, and we have quite a bit of momentum for a war in Lebanon.

The question is, will a war between Saudi Arabia and perhaps Israel against Hezbollah in Lebanon remain a proxy war, or will it gestate into a wider conflict drawing in Iran, Syria and perhaps even the U.S.?

First, keep in mind that Prince Mohammed has already frozen and/or confiscated approximately $800 billion in assets from his imprisoned political enemies. More than enough to fund a war campaign for several years, maybe even an expanded war against Iran.

Trump"s rhetoric against Iran and his re-institution of sanctions seems to coincide nicely with the increasing tension between the Saudis and Hezbollah. Israel attempted an invasion of Lebanon in 2006 and was soundly and embarrassingly defeated. But, the Israeli government does still showcase a willingness to enter into a ground war in the region, and with the combined forces of the Saudis and the Israelis, we might see a different outcome. Iran would be forced to intervene.

Syria under the Assad regime would also most likely be drawn in through its mutual defense pact with Iran.

I believe that major powers like the U.S. and Russia will probably not become involved in a wider sense, but continue to insert covert forces into the region and support opposing nations through funding and armaments. As with North Korea, I would not expect "world war" on the scale of a nuclear conflagration to develop in the Middle East.

What I do expect is something far more devastating - namely an accelerated disintegration of our already collapsing economic structure as war plays out abroad and the loss of the dollar"s world reserve and petro-status hits us hard at home. So far, in my view it appears that the insanity in Saudi Arabia, (along with the continued war drums against North Korea), is a perfect trigger point that provides a catalyst for mass distraction.

World economic war is the real name of the game here, as the globalists play puppeteers to East and West. It is a geopolitical crisis they will have created to engineer public support for a solution they predetermined.

These Are The Top Geopolitical Risks According To The World"s Largest Asset Manager

Like many others, the world"s largest money manager with $5.9 trillion in (ETF) investments, BlackRock, is not too worried about a market which no matter what, promptly rebounds from any and every selloff, and seems to close at all time highs day after day as if by magic. To be sure, BlackRock"s employees are delighted: the less the volatility, and the higher the S&P goes, the more likely retail investors are to hand over their cash to BlackRock. So far so good. Still, not even Blackrock can state that after looking at this chart, which unveils unprecedented economic policy uncertainty at a time when equity uncertainty has never been lower...

... that everything is ok.

And it doesn"t: in a blog post by BlackRock"s Isabelle Mateos y Lago, Blackrock"s chief multi-asset strategist writes that while markets may be a sea of calm, geopolitics are anything but. As a result, the world"s biggest ETF administrator has its eyes on 10 geopolitical risks and is tracking their likelihood and potential market impact, as it wrote recently in the firm"s Global Investment Outlook Q4 2017.

The "world of risk" map below is a quick snapshot of all

Among the Top risks tracked by Blackrock are:

• North American trade negotiations


• Russia-NATO conflict


• South China Sea conflict


• US-China tensions


• Escalations in Syria and Iraq


• North Korea conflict


• Fragmentation in Europe


• Gulf conflicts

Of the risks listed above, which are the ones BlackRock is most worried about? According to Mateos y Lago, the top three right now: North American trade negotiations, a North Korea conflict and U.S.-China tensions, with the second and third particularly interrelated.

The details:

North American trade negotiations

The fourth round of North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) renegotiations ended this week, with Mexico and Canada rejecting what they view as harsh U.S. proposals. Still, news reports did suggest apparent progress on less contentious parts of the agreement, and the negotiations aren’t over. The next round of talks are scheduled to take place in Mexico next month.

Our base case is that successful negotiations will be completed in early 2018. However, our hopes for this outcome have recently diminished given tough positions from U.S. negotiators and threatening rhetoric from U.S. President Donald Trump that has resulted in greater uncertainty. Market risks are biased to the downside given that a good outcome is priced in, in both Canadian and Mexican markets.

* * *

North Korea

We view North Korea’s missile and nuclear weapons program as a major threat to regional stability, U.S. security and nuclear non-proliferation. The possibility of armed conflict has risen, we believe, given North Korea’s missile launches over Japan, a nuclear test and an intense war of words. This has raised the chance of misstep or miscalculation, and we could see limited action such as the shooting down of missiles.

Yet we currently see a low probability of all-out war; the costs are too high on all sides. Instead, we expect the U.S. to intensify its “peaceful pressure” campaign, evident in imposing unilateral sanctions and leaning hard on China to participate. We see the crisis straining U.S.-China relations just as economic tensions are rising.

* * *

Deteriorating U.S.-China relations

We see frictions between the U.S. and China heating up over time. The countries risk falling into the “Thucydides Trap,” a term coined by Harvard scholar Graham Allison to describe clashes between rising powers and established ones. We see trade and market access disputes straining an increasingly competitive U.S.-China relationship in the long run, and believe markets have yet to factor in this gradual deterioration.

In the short term, tensions could rise if Chinese President Xi Jinping pursues an even more nationalistic agenda in the wake of the National People’s Congress. Economic tit for tats could lead to an erosion of relations—and have sector-specific effects.

U.S. military action against North Korea and/or an accidental clash in the South China Sea would deal a blow to the relationship, in our view, and hurt risk assets. But our base case is that the U.S. and China avoid these land mines in the short term, and try to use President Trump’s upcoming visit to emphasize cooperation.

Taking the above in context, what is BlackRocks recommendation for portfolios? The good news, according to the author, is that most geopolitical shocks have short-lived market impacts, except in regions directly affected. For those who wish to hedge, Blackrock recommends government bonds as useful diversifiers against volatility and equity market selloffs sparked by such shocks.

* * *

Meanwhile, in a separate observation, Rick Rieder, Blackrock"s global fixed income CIO pointed out another recurring, and ominous trend: "major central banks flooded global financial system with near $10T in liquidity since 2008, but now we’re beginning to unwind"

Indeed, major central banks flooded global financial system with near $10T in liquidity since 2008, but now we’re beginning to unwind pic.twitter.com/utyHoZZeco

— Rick Rieder (@RickRieder) October 19, 2017

... which leads to the question: "will others (foreign-exchange reserves, banks) step in to provide liquidity, so the transition doesn’t derail growth?"

Question is: will others (foreign-exchange reserves, banks) step in to provide liquidity, so the transition doesn’t derail growth? (3/4) pic.twitter.com/lKimYZRIVi

— Rick Rieder (@RickRieder) October 19, 2017

The answer: it all depends on China.

We think so; financial condition drivers (monetary base, USD, money multiplier) should be supportive, yet so much depends upon #China (4/4) pic.twitter.com/lr7kSKzsJO

— Rick Rieder (@RickRieder) October 19, 2017

One Trader Warns "The Game Is Starting To Change Before Your Eyes"

In a market that can barely fog a mirror with its heartbeat, a sudden lurch lower - as we experienced overnight across all global risky asset classes - especially on the 30th anniversary of Black Monday, has sparked a cavalacade of "this is it" narratives as well as "this time is different" memes. However, as former fund manager Richard Breslow notes, no matter how much traders may want to ignore reality, the game is starting to change before our eyes...

As BlackRock CIO Rick Reider noted earlier, major central banks flooded the global financial system with nearly $10 trillion in liquidity since 2008, but now we’re beginning to unwind...

Via Bloomberg,

If Catalonia didn’t exist, we would have to invent it. If only for a day...

Stocks are down today and someone has to be assigned the blame.

It’s a shame that we always need to find the whipping boy du jour in order to avoid confronting the possibility of the impossible - that asset bubbles may be made of tough stuff but they’re called bubbles for a reason.

Are the problems in Spain for real? Certainly. As is their unemployment rate, but nobody has given a damn. But failure to place blame on something that everyone assumes will be a one-hit blunder risks a level of investor introspection that must be avoided, especially as we inch closer to the holiday season. Which is a more genteel way of saying toward high water-mark calculations.

What’s causing this particular setback, if indeed it can be called that? Two things:

• commentators complaining that it was getting boring reading on their teleprompters that stocks made new all-time highs; and


•  the dawning realization that the central bank cast of characters who have kept these asset balls in the air really is going to change.

They say that markets don’t like uncertainty. Well, who will be running global monetary policy and how well it will be coordinated is the biggest potential uncertainty out there.On the same day President Trump is meeting with Fed Chair Janet Yellen for her “interview” for her job, PBOC Governor Zhou reminded reporters covering the China Party Congress that “people retire eventually.”

I doubt that was just a general commentary on life.The fact that the Hang Seng got its knuckles rapped has been put down to his warning about Minsky Moments and gotten all the play, but I think the former comments are what mattered. He’s been around for a long time and tolerated a lot of excesses that have contributed to the country’s economic success.

On top of that there’s speculation that the new coalition government in New Zealand may have different views on the prerogatives enjoyed by the head of the RBNZ and the currency got clocked. That’s the knee-jerk from foreign exchange traders on the outside looking in.

And irrespective of the fact that their local stock market took it all in stride and closed at all-time highs. Traders don’t like uncertainty because they so often trade things they know little about. Just wait for ECB speculation to heat up.

The game is changing and it has little to do with policy normalization. And everything to do with the irrational fear of change in a world that everyone professes to hate.

Mapping The World's Trillion-Dollar Asset-Manager Club

In the late 1700s, it was the start of the battle of stock exchanges: in 1773, the London Stock Exchange was formed, and the New York Stock Exchange was formed just 19 years later.

And while London was a preferred destination for international finance at the time, Visual Capitalist"s Jeff Desjardins notes that England also had laws that restricted the formation of new joint-stock companies. The law was repealed in 1825, but by then it was already too late.

In the U.S., exchanges in New York City and Philadelphia took full advantage by dealing in stocks early on. Eventually, for this and a variety of other reasons, the NYSE emerged as the most dominant exchange in the world – helping propel New York and Wall Street to the center of finance.

THE CENTER OF FINANCE

Wall Street, and the U.S. in general, is now synonymous with finance – and most of the world’s largest banks, funds, and investors maintain a presence nearby. The biggest asset management companies, which pool investments into securities such as stocks and bonds on behalf of investors, are no exception to this.

Today’s chart shows all global companies with over $1 trillion in assets under management (AUM).

Not surprisingly, all but 17.1% of assets managed by this $1 Trillion Club are overseen by companies based in the United States.

Even further, outside of Northern Trust (Chicago), Pimco (Newport Beach), and Capital Group (Los Angeles), the remaining U.S. companies are based in the Northeast specifically – either on Wall Street, or just a short drive away.

THE NEWEST ENTRANT

The newest entrant to the $1 trillion club is Norway’s sovereign wealth fund, which is managed by Norges Bank Investment Management. It’s the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund, and it was “never forecast” to get so big.

The Norwegian fund recently joined France’s Amundi ($1.6 trillion), the UK’s Legal & General ($1.3 trillion), and Japan’s Goverment Pension Investment Fund ($1.2 trillion) as non-U.S. members of this exclusive club.

The Big Banks Are Coming For Bitcoin

No matter what Jamie Dimon may say, bitcoin’s durability can be expressed by one simple fact: With a market cap of $100 billion, digital currencies have become too big for banks to ignore.

As Bloomberg recalls in a story about how banks are preparing to confront the thorny regulatory issues related to dealing in bitcoin and other digital currencies, on the same day Dimon trashed bitcoin, calling it a “fraud,” his firm’s private bank hosted a panel featuring cryptocurrency investors, and even helped some wealthy clients transact in a bitcoin exchange-traded product listed in Stockholm, raising questions about whether the bank violated its fiduciary duty in doing so.

Dimon isn’t the only one of his peers to harbor reservations about bitcoin. Bridgewater Associates’ Ray Dalio and BlackRock’s Larry Fink have criticized it as a “bubble” and a “a tool used by criminals.” Morgan Stanley CEO James Gorman defended bitcoin, arguing that it is “more than just a fad.”

But with clients demanding bitcoin exposure in greater numbers, banks have little choice but to assent to their demands, like JPM did. Goldman’s tentative embrace of bitcoin has so far also been the most ambitious, with the firm saying it is considering opening a bitcoin-trading business that would function like an interdealer broker for exchanges and large players.  

Two days ago, Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein tweeted that he’s still on the fence about bitcoin, and that he’s “not endorsing or rejecting” the digital currency.

Still thinking about #Bitcoin. No conclusion - not endorsing/rejecting. Know that folks also were skeptical when paper money displaced gold.

— Lloyd Blankfein (@lloydblankfein) October 3, 2017

      But for banks hoping to enter the bitcoin business, many unanswered questions remain.       For example, how do banks that are required by law to prevent money-laundering handle a currency that’s not issued by a government and that keeps its users anonymous?

According to Bloomberg, handling bitcoin would invite scrutiny from every major U.S. regulator, according to Joshua Satten, director of emerging technologies at Sapient Consulting.

“From the perspective of the U.S. Treasury, do you classify it as an asset class or a currency?” Satten said. “If banks are starting to manage and hold bitcoin for their clients, you would have the OCC and the FDIC looking at how they classify the assets on their balance sheet and how they state the assets for the portfolio of a client.”

However, the advent of cryptocurrency focused hedge funds like the $500 million crypto-focused fund being planned by Mike Novogratz means that banks risk falling behind their competitors if they hesitate.

Already, there are 75 funds investing in the space, according to Autonomous Research.

And that number will likely rise after the Chicago Board Options Exchange introduces bitcoin futures and options, which it says it’s planning on doing some time next year, making it easier for traditional investors to gain exposure to bitcoin.

Other potential applications for bitcoin that are being considered by banks include derivatives contracts and using the digital currency for trade finance, Bloomberg reported. For regulators considering how to move forward, Switzerland created a precedent over the summer when it granted a license to Falcon Bank to transact in bitcoin on behalf of its wealth-management clients.

However, while an endorsement by the banks would help cement bitcoin’s reputation as a legitimate asset, it could also bring changes as regulators demand more transparency. After all, the lack of transparency and the difficulty enforcing financial laws were both cited by the SEC as reasons for the rejecting two proposed bitcoin ETFs back in March.

Assuming US regulators assent to allowing banks to deal in bitcoin, the fundamental question then becomes: Will the banks change bitcoin? Or will bitcoin change the banks?