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Archive for January 8th, 2010

Alternate Unemployment Charts

Chart courtesy of ShadowStats.com

Shrinking U.S. Labor Force Keeps Unemployment Rate From Rising

Jan. 8 (Bloomberg) — An exodus of discouraged workers from the job market kept the U.S. unemployment rate from climbing above 10 percent in December, economists said.

Had the labor force not decreased by 661,000 last month, the jobless rate would have been 10.4 percent, say economists including David Rosenberg at Gluskin Sheff & Associates in Toronto and Harm Bandholz at UniCredit Research in New York.

“The actual unemployment rate is higher than shown by the official numbers,” Bandholz said.

About 1.7 million Americans opted out of the workforce from July through December, representing a 1.1 percent drop that marks the biggest six-month decrease since 1961, figures from the Labor Department showed today in Washington. The share of the population in the labor force last month fell to the lowest level in 24 years.

December’s 10 percent unemployment rate was unchanged from the previous month, matching the median forecast of economists surveyed by Bloomberg News. It was shy of the 26-year high of 10.1 percent reached two months earlier.

The so-called underemployment rate — which includes part- time workers who’d prefer a full-time position and people who want work but have given up looking — rose to 17.3 percent in December from 17.2 percent, today’s report showed.

The number of discouraged workers, those not looking for work because they believe none is available, climbed to 929,000 last month, the most since records began in 1994.

Length of Unemployment

The backdrop to the disillusionment is that it’s taking longer and longer to find work, economists said. Workers were unemployed for 29.1 weeks on average last month, the most since records began in 1948.

“Longer-term unemployment is one of the biggest problems,” said Bandholz. “Payroll declines will come to a halt in the next couple of months, but the people who are unemployed are having problems getting a job and it’s getting tougher by the month.”

The U.S. unexpectedly lost another 85,000 jobs in December after revised figures showed payrolls climbed by 4,000 the month before, today’s report from the Labor Department showed. The November gain was the first since the economic slump began in December 2007.

“Workers seem to be particularly discouraged by this recession,” said Chris Rupkey, chief financial economist at Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ Ltd. in New York.

Participation Rate

The participation rate, or the share of the population in the labor force, fell to 64.6 percent in December, the lowest level since 1985, from 64.9 percent.

The labor force will probably grow this year as the economy continues to expand and Americans believe jobs will be easier to get. That will mean the unemployment rate will head higher because there won’t be enough jobs available to satisfy the demand for work.

“The exodus from the labor force can’t contain the unemployment rate indefinitely,” said Ryan Sweet, a senior economist at Moody’s Economy.com in West Chester, Pennsylvania. “We expect unemployment to resume rising over the next few months, peaking near 10.5 percent in the third quarter.”

Federal Reserve policy makers, while noting stabilization in the labor market, have expressed concern about unemployment and poor job prospects. That’s one reason policy makers will keep the benchmark interest rate near zero longer than most anticipate, said John Ryding.

Fed ‘On Hold’

“We continue to believe that the Fed will leave monetary policy on hold throughout 2010 in light of the high level of un- and under-utilized labor resources,” Ryding, chief economist at RDQ Economics in New York, said in a note to clients. The median forecast of economists surveyed by Bloomberg News last month projected the first rate increase would come in the third quarter of this year.

Treasury two-year notes today gained the most in three weeks following the worse-than-expected payroll numbers. The notes’ yields dropped below 1 percent.

President Barack Obama on Dec. 8 proposed additional spending on the nation’s transportation system, tax credits to spur hiring by small businesses and incentives to make homes more energy efficient in a second round of efforts to cut the jobless rate.

“We’re going to have to work harder to create jobs.” U.S. Labor Secretary Hilda Solis said in an interview today on Bloomberg Television. “This is a very stubborn recession.”

To contact the reporters on this story: Bob Willis in Washington bwillis@bloomberg.net; Courtney Schlisserman in Washington at cschlisserma@bloomberg.net

Charts courtesy of Karl Denninger.

An 80% Sham Market, Zombie
Armies & Cheating Investors

by Daniel R. Amerman, CFA

Overview

About 80% of net issuance of total US Treasury and Agency debt has become an artificial market, lacking real investors, and relying on the fiction of Federal Reserve purchases with imaginary money in order to prop up prices and hold down yields.  At the same time, Treasury secretary Geithner claims to be so pleased with this non-existent market that he wants to increase the average term of Treasury borrowings.  The juxtaposition is deeply bizarre, yet passes nearly without comment in the mainstream media.  In this article we will delve beneath the façade being maintained by the government, Wall Street and the media, and will uncover the cheating of small investors in a market where most of the buyers don’t actually exist.  Finally, we will introduce the hidden opportunities within sham markets.

A “Twilight Zone” Treasury Market

When reading the financial pages, do you ever get the feeling that you’re reading the script for an episode from the old television series, “The Twilight Zone”?  Perhaps one where the normal family is inside eating dinner, getting ready to let the kids go outside and play, but what they don’t realize is that all the normal looking people they see walking past their windows are in fact zombies, and the entire town has been taken over?

I usually don’t spend too much time thinking about zombies, but this is the exact kind of feeling that I got when reading about United States Treasury Secretary Geithner’s plan to increase the duration of US treasury borrowings.  That is, he wants to take advantage of the “current low level of interest rates” to substantially increase the average term at which the Treasury borrows, so instead of an average due date of 49 months, he intends to move it out to an average of 72 months.

I first read about this in a Bloomberg article, and what brought “The Twilight Zone” to mind was that the entire article was written with a straight face, so to speak.  Reading the article, one would think we actually had a free market for US treasury debt, where demand for the debt and the interest rates on that debt were in fact being determined by investors of their own free will.  

This is where the zombie army comes in, that purported vast army of investors whose investment choices are determining current interest rates for US long-term and agency debt.  They don’t really exist.  Instead, the largest buyer of net issuances of US treasury bonds, of long-term agency debt, of mortgage-backed securities, is in fact the Federal Reserve.  (Net issuances being the excess of newly issued debt over retired debt, i.e. the net amount by which government debt is growing.)  And the Federal Reserve is effectively creating money out of thin air to buy these long-term treasuries. 

Plainly put –when one branch of the government is creating money out of nothingness to buy the debt of another branch of the government – they aren’t real buyers nor investors, but a sham.  A very dangerous sham for investors, who, based upon reading the mainstream financial media, believe the financial world is anywhere close to normalcy, and that they are getting fair returns for their investments.

The Real Source Of Funding (aka The Zombie Army)

Hedge fund analyst Jon Harooni and macro analyst Ravi Tanuku, in their article “Who Is Really Lending The U.S. All This Money?” (published in the hedge fund industry periodical Absolute Return + Alpha), track down what is actually happening, the real source of these funds.

Out of nearly $2.1 Trillion of net issuance across the Treasury, Agencies and MBS markets from June 2008-9, the Federal Reserve has accounted for nearly 40% of the total demand, buying more than every foreign government combined. It is also not a stretch to say the Fed has become the entire mortgage market; it has purchased nearly $500B of MBS securities during a period where there was only $350B issued. Looking at the first seven calendar months of 2009 yields similarly startling results: of the total $1.1 Trillion of net issuance across these markets, the Fed has purchased $861B or almost 80%.  (bold emphasis mine)

http://www.absolutereturn-alpha.com/Article/2319666/Who-is-really-lending-the-US-all-this-money.html

The reason that the Federal Reserve has been taking these unprecedented steps on a massive scale is that given the huge amount of current United States government deficits, combined with the weak economy, the vast amount of spending for bailout, stimulus and so forth, there simply aren’t enough buyers for all this debt.  Moreover, in a true free market, investors would demand a far higher interest-rate level than what they’re getting right now, if they were to continue to fund a government that is spending with neither restraint nor a credible source of funding for repayment.  In a free market, we would expect those interest rates to keep rising until they are so attractive that actual investors buy up all the debt.

If this free market scenario were to happen, the US government budget deficit would skyrocket to a far higher level, because the US government would be paying higher interest rates on its borrowing (the missing free market link that is supposed to restrain governments).  There would also be high pressure on housing markets, as mortgages became unaffordable.  So the situation is that in order to fulfill its plans, the US government needs to borrow fantastic sums of money – but the lenders simply aren’t there.  As the only alternative, the Federal Reserve effectively creates the money out of thin air to fund the rest of the government.

That is an extraordinary result, which shows just what a bizarre place the financial world has become, even as the government, media and investment firms struggle to put up a façade of normalcy.

Eighty percent of the US debt market no longer exists, in terms of net new debt issuance.  There isn’t enough demand, and increasing rates to find demand would inflict punishing damage.  So artificial “Zombie” investors are created, who buy the debt with artificial money, and the façade is maintained – at least for now.

The Systemic Cheating Of Small Investors

What is the price for individuals of buying into this façade?  Of leaving the safety of their home, and joining the Zombie army of phantasmic investors, buying at current market levels?  Whether directly, or through their mutual funds or retirement accounts?

This is not an innocent process, nor is it for the greater public good. Instead, let me suggest that it is a process that deliberately takes wealth from naïve investors, particularly individual investors who believe what they read in the mainstream media, and it transfers that wealth to both Wall Street and to the federal government. This is something that I have been writing and speaking about for a long time now (my article “Fed Manipulations Subsidize Wall Street And Cheat Investors”, addressed this subject two years ago).  So it’s been happening for quite a while, but it keeps getting worse and worse, and the idea that we’re indeed in the financial “Twilight Zone” becomes increasingly difficult to deny.

The problem with systemic government interventions is that as they grow in scale, the degree of mispricing grows greater and greater.   As any bond investor knows, for a given bond with a fixed coupon, the higher that interest rates move, the lower the price of that bond goes.  Why would anyone pay 100 cents on the dollar for a bond that pays a 3% interest rate, when there are plenty of new bonds around at 6% that can be bought at “par” (100 cents on the dollar)?  Therefore, anyone who pays full value for a new bond with a rate that is below market, is getting cheated at the moment they make their purchase.

This principle is illustrated in the graph above.  The all blue bar on the left side of the graph represents the value of 10 year US Treasury bonds with a 3.50% coupon.   If 3.50% were the real market rate (in which case Fed purchases would be unnecessary), then this bond would be worth 100 cents on the dollar.  With each bar to the right, the real interest rate shown on the bottom goes up – and the market price for 3.50% ten year bonds goes down. 

For instance, if real market rates would be 6.50% without zombie investors – the free market price would be less than 80 cents on the dollar.  Meaning current purchasers who buy into a manipulated market where the other investors don’t really exist, are getting cheated out of 20 cents on the dollar, every time their fixed income fund buys a 10 year treasury bond. 

However, keeping in mind that the US government was already effectively bankrupt before the financial crisis ever hit due to Boomer retirement obligations that can’t be paid, and the government is currently spending trillions without restraint – 6.50% would be a very low free market rate for the current situation.  If the proper market were 9.50% for the world’s largest unrepentant spendthrift – every investor is getting cheated out of about 40% of the value of their investment.

At 12.50% the true market price should be less than 50 cents on the dollar, and at 15.50%, it would be about 40 cents on the dollar.  Meaning investors are getting cheated out of 60 cents with each new bond they buy.  What the true market yield would be for the government to actually borrow “real” dollars, we can’t tell without a legitimate free market of actual investors.  But whatever the level, any individual who buys today at rates set by a market primarily made up of unreal investors, is getting cheated on a very real basis.

(It is a quite different story for institutional investors who borrow from the Fed at artificially low rates, to purchase bonds from the Treasury at somewhat higher artificially low rates, as covered in my previously mentioned article “Fed Manipulations Subsidize Wall Street And Cheat Investors”.)

Now the price of this manipulation after manipulation on top of manipulation is mispricing, mispricing, mispricing from the perspective of the average individual investor.  Believing what they’ve been hearing from the economics and financial community, and believing in what they’re reading in the mainstream financial media, these investors think that when they buy US treasury bonds they’re getting a fair rate of return on that treasury bond. They believe if they step up and buy a mortgage-backed security, they’re getting a fair rate on that mortgage backed security. And they believe if they purchase a stock with their 401(k) or IRA, they’re getting a fair price on that stock.

They’re not.  Instead, the Federal Reserve and US treasury are cheating small investors out of returns that should be theirs.  If someone buys a US treasury bond or a mortgage-backed security, the yield ought to be far higher in compensation for the risks that are involved right now with the US economy and the massive extraordinary government deficits.

The Next Step

Almost two years ago, in a series of public articles, I predicted not just financial disaster, but the process with which financial disaster would unfold. 

1. Using my professional background as a derivatives author and former investment banker, I explained why the subprime mortgage crisis would get much worse.
2. I explained the understandable, human reasons why the investment banking industry was creating enormous systemic risk with credit derivatives, and that the crisis would jump from mortgage derivatives to credit derivatives (i.e. AIG).
3. Long before September of 2008, I explained how Wall Street could melt down in a week or an afternoon, not from accounting losses, but from losing the short term funding that the heavily leveraged financial giants relied upon, as the extent of losses become clear to creditors during a derivatives market collapse.
4. I predicted that the government would not allow this meltdown to occur, but would instead engage in the largest bailout in financial history.
5. I projected that the bailout would necessarily reach a size that it could no longer be financed conventionally, and the Federal Reserve would resort to directly creating money without limits, to fund the massive bailout.
6. I explained why this would ultimately lead to the destruction of the dollar and of retirement savings through a massive bout of monetary inflation.

(All of these explanations were publicly published through contrarian websites and widely circulated on the Internet at that time.)

To my knowledge this accurate, step by step explanation of what would be happening and why, was absolutely unique – though for the sakes of all of us and of our families, it would have been much better if I had been entirely mistaken.

Unfortunately, it is very difficult to see any path out of this other than Step #6 – massive inflation that will destroy the value of the dollar, and conventional investment strategies along with it.  Indeed, it has already happened, and all that prevents a sudden spike in interest rates is the Fed’s 80% funding of the market for US and agency debt, in combination with China and Japan’s urgent economic need to prop up the dollar, manipulating its value through the purchases of US government debt.  Each source of funding creates ever growing instability, and that foreign investors are fleeing longer term agency debt is a sign that they are keenly aware that the end may be nigh.   

Your Choice:  Victim or Beneficiary

So what is an individual to do?

Let me suggest there are powerful reasons not to be taking your assets – particularly your retirement savings – and purchasing investments where we know that the value is being deliberately manipulated by the US government and Wall Street for their own purposes. To purchase under those conditions is to set yourself up for victim status.  I would argue that this applies as much to stocks as it does to Treasury Bonds.

There is another approach, which is to say that these fundamental unfairnesses, these fundamental manipulations, these fundamental mispricings by their very nature necessarily create arbitrage opportunities for individuals and institutions that know how to look for them.  Indeed, that is their very purpose – to effectively give “Free Money” to Wall Street in the form of huge profits with reduced risk, in order to rebuild firm capital – with much of those profits then passing directly into the bonus pools of the exceptionally politically well connected individuals involved. 

However, participating in these handouts is not your intended role.  From a traditional mainstream finance perspective, your role is to systematically take your savings and every month invest them in mispriced securities, for which you will pay the financial institutions an all-in average of about 2% in fees every year, even while the benefits of the mispricing pass to others.  As an individual, you cannot directly participate in Wall Street’s insider’s game, not unless you are bringing many millions to the table, and then it is still somewhat problematic whether you will end up as predator or prey.  However, in the process of manipulating markets, the government also necessarily did something else – and that was to leave the back door open. 

A mispriced market is a market that is rife with profit opportunities.  The trick being how to access these opportunities, when traditional personal finance strategies involve buying overpriced securities.   To find the back door, we have to leave the traditional personal finance strategies behind, and learn exactly how the system is being manipulated for the benefit of institutional insiders, through liability based bailouts.  When we clearly see those manipulations, then we have something else that opens up for us –  a veritable playground of opportunities for investment, indeed, some of the best we may find in our lifetimes.

But first we need to be able see these opportunities and that means we need to start with education.

Can we bring the US government up on RICO charges?!!

Video: How banks got strongarmed into TARP

posted at 8:05 am on January 8, 2010 by Ed Morrissey

Via the Right Scoop, John Stossel gives us an inside look into the actual application of TARP with banks who didn’t need it and didn’t want it. John Allison, CEO of BB&T, not only didn’t want TARP money but openly opposed the program altogether, lobbying Congress against it.  After all, BB&T had made wiser decisions and by normal standards was overcapitalized even after the financial collapse. Allison tells how Ben Bernanke became Time’s Person of the Year by pressuring healthy banks to take TARP money in order to hide which banks were actually in trouble:

How far off is this from, “Hey, nice bank ya got here.  Hate to have anything … happen to it.  Capisce?”  As Allison explains, the Fed didn’t exactly sweeten the deal, either.  BB&T had to pay back some hefty interest when they gave the money back — a tax on wisdom and good investment while providing political cover to institutions whose lack of same caused the fragility Bernanke wanted to mask.

But hey, protection rackets are like that.  They tax the honest people to subsidize the less honest.

Chart of the Day

Today, the Labor Department reported that nonfarm payrolls (jobs) decreased by 85,000 in December while the data for November was revised upward and now shows a gain of 4,000 jobs. For some perspective, today’s chart illustrates the percent increase in the number of jobs for every decade since the 1940s (the data goes back to 1939). As today’s chart illustrates, the number of jobs at the end of a decade has been anywhere from 20% to 38% greater than 10 years prior. That 20% plus growth has been the case until the decade just passed during which the number of jobs basically ended the year where it began. This subpar job growth is particularly noteworthy due to the fact that the US population has increased by 10% in addition to a significant increase in global wealth during the same time frame.

There Is NO Economic Recovery Happening

Posted by Karl Denninger

Look folks, this is really quite simple.

Economic Stability and Recovery = Credit Expansion.

We cannot recover until we purge the excess debt from the system, and the longer we take to do that, the longer the pain will last and the worse it will be.

President Obama and Tim Geithner know this – that’s why they are constantly harping on banks to “lend more.”

Well, they may want banks to lend more but the people are fed up with being debt slaves and are borrowing less.

Today, we got the latest from The Fed on this subject:

Consumer credit decreased at an annual rate of 8-1/2 percent in November. Revolving credit decreased at an annual rate of 18-1/2 percent, and nonrevolving credit decreased at an annual rate of 3 percent.

I have updated the charts, and this is where we are as of November:

Non-revolving debt (basically auto loans) has pretty much stabilized since mid-year.  But consumer revolving debt – credit cards – continues to accelerate in its rate of decline.

The longer-term view looks like this:

These rates of decline are unprecedented and they are not slowing down.

The drop in credit card debt outstanding is on the largest on record since The Fed started keeping those records in 1943!

Consumer recovery? 

There is none!

It is axiomatic that you can pump yourself full of speedballs (e.g. government spending) and stay up for days at a time.  It is also true that if you do too many speedballs you will have a heart attack and die, and there is no way to know precisely which is the “one too many” until you shoot it – at which point it’s too late to change your mind!

The so-called “recovery” has been driven by pump-priming, which has had at its root one primary intent – to drive citizens into herd behavior and get them to spend more and more (that they don’t have!)

But at the same time this has been the message credit card rates have been ramped and lines slashed.  So now Joe Six Pack is faced with a 30% interest rate on his credit card – if he has any open line left!

There is no possible way for this program to work, since the entire problem originally - what began this recession – was people that were unable to make their debt payments in the first place!

Small business will not hire until their debt load comes down to a reasonable level.  This will take literal years if we don’t quit trying to prevent the contraction of both asset prices and credit levels.  In the mean time millions of Americans will remain in destitution!

There is no way to avoid the bankruptcy of those firms and individuals who are over-levered.  The best solution (take the pain now!) will not prevent the bankruptcies, but it will get them over with and let the nation begin to emerge from the morass within 12-18 months.  For every month we keep trying to prevent the liquidation of insoluble debt we add months of additional time to that required to resolve the bust and deepen the amount of pain that must be suffered, since all we are doing is adding more debt upon existing debt.

It is time for Washington DC, including The Fed and Congress along with President Obama to embrace the facts – we must finish the de-leveraging that is necessary to return the citizens and corporations of this nation to fiscal health.  At the same time the government must stop spending twice what it takes in in taxes.

We have consumed too many speedballs, our heart rate is now 160, and if we don’t cut it out the bond market is telling us that we are about to have a fatal heart attack.