Bernanke’s Remedy: Pump More Blood Into a Corpse

By Mike WhitneyInformation Clearing House” — Credit is everything. Without credit expansion there’s no recovery because there’s no pick-up in overall demand. But credit growth is going backwards. The banks have tightened lending standards and the pool of credit-worthy applicants has vanished. Bank lending is off 14 per cent since October 2008. Private credit is presently decreasing at a 10.5 per cent annual rate. The situation is getting worse, not better.

October 05, 2009 “

From the UK Telegraph:

“Both bank credit and the M3 money supply in the United States have been contracting at rates comparable to the onset of the Great Depression since early summer, raising fears of a double-dip recession in 2010 and a slide into debt-deflation…

“Similar concerns have been raised by David Rosenberg, chief strategist at Gluskin Sheff, who said that over the four weeks up to August 24, bank credit shrank at an ‘epic’ 9pc annual pace, the M2 money supply shrank at 12.2pc and M1 shrank at 6.5pc.

“’For the first time in the post-Second World War era, we have deflation in credit, wages and rents and, from our lens, this is a toxic brew,’he said. (Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, “US credit shrinks at Great Depression rate prompting fears of double-dip recession”, UK Telegraph)

Foreclosures, delinquencies and defaults are all up. Foreclosure activity is currently at 300,000-plus per month and rising. A huge shadow inventory is being kept off-market to maintain prices. The drip, drip, drip-effect of excess inventory dumped onto the market will keep housing in the doldrums for a decade. Homeowners are unable to borrow on underwater homes. Everything points to a long-term slump in spending.

Corporations are finding it harder to roll over their debt, bank loans are defaulting at a historic pace, and commercial real estate is imploding. Credit destruction is unprecedented, massive and ongoing. The capital hole is bigger than the Fed and bigger than the Treasury. It can’t be plugged with liquidity alone.

For now, the government can fiddle GDP with $800 billion infusion of stimulus, but what happens when the political will for more deficit spending dissipates? What happens when foreign investors demand the Fed stop writing checks on an overdrawn account?

The Fed has fixed nothing. The banks are still underwater, output is at record lows, and unemployment is climbing towards 10 per cent. Fed chair Ben Bernanke’s multi-trillion dollar rescue programs have kept a wobbly system upright, but nothing more. The economy’s underlying problems are still the same. The Fed’s quantitative easing (monetization) program has sent stocks surging, but done nothing to stimulate the economy. That’s because equities bubbles have negligible impact on aggregate demand; there’s no knock-on effect. The real economy is still flatlining while Wall Street parties on. Bernanke’s plan has been a total wash.

The government cannot deficit spend forever. Eventually, GDP will have to depend on wage growth and credit expansion. Given the political and institutional bias against labor, (and opposition to wages that rise with productivity) the only way to fuel the economy is through credit growth. And there’s the rub. Households have lost nearly $14 trillion in wealth since the crisis began and are in no position to resume borrowing at pre-crisis levels. Consumers are cutting back on spending and paying down debt. They have no other choice.

This is from Bloomberg News:

“Americans plan to refrain from boosting their spending even after the biggest drop in consumption since 1980, signaling concern about the direction of the economy over the next six months.

“Only 8 per cent of U.S. adults plan to increase household spending, almost one-third will spend less, and 58 per cent expect to ‘stay the course,’ a Bloomberg News poll showed. More than 3 in 4 said they reduced spending in the past year.

“Underscoring consumers’ austere attitudes, 77 per cent of respondents said they have cut back on spending during the past year, 59 percent said they have made a bigger effort to pay off debts and 48 percent have put more money aside as savings.” (Bloomberg News)

Savings are up and spending is down. The economy is headed into a long-term funk; the “new normal”. The Fed’s sleight-of-hand programs and Obama’s stimulus elixir haven’t changed the prevailing downward trend. If anything, they have made matters worse. Consider this from Janet Tavakoli, author of “Dear Mr. Buffett” in an interview with Max Keiser:

“Regarding the outlook, my analysis is grim. I am not a doomsayer, I follow the cash, and so far, I’ve been correct, and the government has been wrong. Here’s the situation. We are at greater risk of a total meltdown due to a deflationary collapse than we were in 2007. After the greatest Ponzi scheme in the history of the capital markets, we’ve seen history’s greatest fiscal and monetary expansion, but it hasn’t worked. Debt levels of consumers and business exceed the capacity to repay.” (Janet Tavakoli On The Edge With Max Keiser)

The Fed has done nothing to restructure the financial system so the same problems which killed Lehman and thrust the global economy into a tailspin, persist today. When the stimulus runs out and the Fed ends its $1.25 trillion purchase of (Fannie and Freddie) mortgage-backed securities and $300 billion in US Treasuries, interest rates will rise, housing prices will tumble, and the economy will nosedive. Bernanke will be forced back to the printing presses, the only hope for reversing the deflationary spiral. This will trigger the next crisis, a run on the dollar.

This is from an article by Alice Schroeder of Bloomberg News:

“In all the talk of inflation because the Treasury is printing so much money versus deflation because it may not print enough, there is one type of inflation that is rarely discussed. This is the mega-inflation caused by a sudden currency devaluation. Currency is like any financial innovation, an obligation secured by assets. When the obligation is perceived to have increased far beyond the level justifiable by the assets, which in this case make up a country’s economy, a bubble has formed……Right now, the American economy is worth less than the value implied by the market value of its obligations.” (Gold Tells You U.S. Bubble Hasn’t Popped Yet: Alice Schroeder, Bloomberg)

The system crashed because it was built on the false assumption that an unregulated shadow banking system could generate an infinite amount of credit without sufficient capital. This proved to be wrong. Capitalism requires capital. The trillions of dollars in loans, complex debt-instruments, off-balance sheet operations and derivatives contracts were all stacked atop a tiny scrap of capital which eventually collapsed beneath the weight of the debt. This system (securitization) which created the mess, cannot be restored. It required a strong currency, artificially low interest rates, and credulous investors who were unaware of the inherent risks of illiquid assets. Those conditions no longer exist, nor have they for more than two years. Even so, the Fed continues to pump blood into a corpse hoping for some fleeting sign of life. This is why an even bigger crisis cannot be too far off.

Link to Article

Where Has all the Money Gone? … This is a Recovery?

By Mike Whitney

The slight rebound in housing looks a lot different when one considers how much the Fed is meddling in the market. Fed chair Ben Bernanke has purchased $240 billion in US Treasuries to keep long-term interest rates artificially low while–at the same time–buying $740 billion in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac mortgage-backed securities (MBS) to provide the financing for new home buyers. It’s the double-whammy; and that’s not all. Bernanke plans to continue buying agency MBS (monetization) until he reaches $1.45 trillion, which will make Uncle Sam the biggest player in the housing market by far. How’s that for central planning?

Ironically, the funds for Bernanke’s housing market rescue plan were never approved by Congress, which means that the Fed committed nearly-$2 trillion with “no down” payment. That makes the Fed’s Treasury buyback program the biggest subprime loan of all time. 

   The fact is, all the recent gains in home sales are all the result of direct government intervention. If interest rates were allowed to rise (as the would naturally) or if  Congress withdrew its $8,000 first-time home-buyer subsidy, or if FHA tightened its loosey-goosey financing (which requires just 3.5% down payment and low FICO scores, the same as subprime!) home prices and sales would continue to drop at a 10 to 15 percent year-over-year rate. Housing has stopped plummeting for one reason alone; the Fed bought the market.

  The same rule applies to the stock market, where the Fed’s quantitative easing (QE) and liquidity injections have sparked a 6-month bear market rally sending equities to the moon. It’s all Fed intervention. A recent report by Egan-Jones Ratings And Analytics traces the Fed’s lavish liquidity handouts pointing out the precise sectors of the market that have been most effected:

  “Massive monetary stimulus is good for asset prices (stocks, bonds, houses, commodities) in a weak pricing environment and soft economy. The Federal Reserve has doubled its balance sheet from $1 Trillion to $2 Trillion effectively adding $1 Trillion to our economy. In addition, the Fed has through an alphabet soup of facilities i.e. Term Auction credit, Asset Backed Commercial Paper Money Market Mutual Fund Liquidity Facility, Term Asset Backed Securities Loan Facility, Primary Dealer and other Broker Dealer Credit, Other Credit Extensions, Term Facility, Maiden Lane LLC one, two and three, Money Market Investor Facility, added approximately $3 Trillion in loans and over $5.5 Trillion in guarantees of private investments. While these latter funds are technically loans, they get renewed regularly.

So where has all the money gone? The chart below shows the rise in the stock market causing the valuation to be somewhat extended in our view – some liquidity found a home here. Large rises in just the last month in small cap stocks, plus 17%; most shorted stocks, plus 17%; stocks with the lowest analyst rating out performing those with the highest rating by 380 basis points, all suggest some speculation……
Commodities have had a nice rebound from their lows with copper hitting new highs. High yield bonds have out performed investment rated bonds as investors are willing to bet on a faster recovery and start to reach for yield.
These are indications of excess liquidity finding outlets.” ( “Fundamentally…Disconnected”  Egan-Jones Ratings And Analytics, hat tip zero hedge.com)

Let’s summarize: The Fed is goosing the stock market and subsidizing the housing market. Bernanke has slashed interest rates to zero percent, underwritten the entire financial system with $12.8 trillion in loans and guarantees, and flooded the financial system with liquidity. The Fed has  also doubled its balance sheet to $2.08 trillion which is the equivalent of dropping the Fed Funds rate to -1 percent.  As Mark Gongloff of the Wall Street Journal opines, “The Fed is essentially paying people to borrow money.”

Indeed, the Fed has done its level-best to keep the market from correcting, but isn’t it a bit of a stretch to call it a “recovery”?

In truth,  Bernanke is in a pitch-battle with deflation and the outcome is still uncertain. Deflation has spread to every sector of the economy; retail, travel, luxury items, autos, building supplies, home furnishings, electronics. No business has been spared. The C.P.I. inflation-gauge has slipped into negative territory and is now at -2.1 percent. Prices are headed down and spending is falling fast. Unemployment is soaring, wages are dropping, and the average work-week has been sliced to just 33 hrs. And, as we noted, housing prices have flattened out, but only because of unprecedented government intervention into the market. Otherwise, real estate would still be stretched out on a marble slab.

  Most people think it should be easy to beat deflation. They think all the Fed has to do is flip a switch and print more money. But there’s more to it than that, especially when trillions of dollars in credit suddenly vanishes in a poof of smoke. That’s what happened last September when Lehman Bros imploded and reduced the financial system to rubble. Global stock markets crashed, interbank lending collapsed, capital flows stopped, and payrolls and inventories were slashed. The gigantic credit-purge thrust the economy into deflation, a condition which persists to this day.

 Economist Irving Fisher tackled the problem of deflation 76 years ago  in his masterpiece “Debt-Deflation Theory of the Great Depression”. Fisher showed how over-indebtedness eventually triggers a chain of events beginning with debt liquidation and ending in distress selling, huge capital losses, and violent economic contraction; the same challenge that Bernanke faces today.

Irving Fisher:

“Unless some counteracting cause comes along to prevent the fall in the price level, such a depression as that of 1929-33 tends to continue, going deeper, in a vicious spiral, for many years. There is then no tendency of the boat to stop tipping until it has capsized….

On the other hand, it is always economically possible to stop or prevent such a depression simply by reflating the price level up to the average level at which outstanding debts were contracted by existing debtors and assumed by existing creditors, and then maintaining that level unchanged.” (Irving Fisher)

Clearly,  Bernanke is following Fisher’s advice and doing everything in his power  to reflate asset prices and avoid a bigger crash. But it’s still too soon to tell whether his strategy will work. We’re still in the early innings of a humongous system wide credit-implosion event.  
 
 The term “deflation” relates to a drop in the general price level, something not seen in the United States since the Great Depression. As economist John Bellamy Foster points out,  deflation squeezes corporate profits even if costs and productivity remain the same.  When profits fall, heavy layoffs and wage reductions ensue.  

John Bellamy Foster:  “But the real fear of deflation has to do with the enormously bloated financial structure and the huge debt load of the economy…  In a deflationary economy,  debt has to be paid back with bigger dollars (worth more over time).  This then creates a debt-deflation spiral, enormously accelerating financial meltdown.  As Fisher put it, “deflation caused by the debt reacts on the debt.  Each dollar of debt still unpaid becomes a bigger dollar, and if the over-indebtedness with which we started was great enough, the liquidation of debt cannot keep up with the fall of prices which it causes.”  Stated differently, quoting from The Great Financial Crisis (p. 116), “prices fall as debtors sell assets to pay their debts, and as prices fall the remaining debts must be repaid in dollars more valuable than the ones borrowed, causing more defaults, leading to yet lower prices, and thus a deflationary spiral.” (Interview of John Bellamy Foster on the Great Financial Crisis, Monthly Review) http://www.monthlyreview.org/mrzine/foster270209.html

It is this “deflationary spiral” that Bernanke is trying to avoid at all cost, even if he destroys the currency in the process. (Which he appears to be doing) Despite the Fed chairman’s steely resolve, the economy has continued its historic nosedive. Consumer spending is falling and households are limiting themselves to the bare essentials. (US households lost $14 trillion in wealth in the last year alone.) Families everywhere are paring back their credit, paying down their debts and rebuilding their nest eggs with what’s left from their skimpy paychecks. Unfortunately, what’s good for the family balance sheet is poison for the economy.

From Bloomberg News: “U.S. consumer credit plunged more than five times as much as forecast in July as banks maintained more restrictive lending terms and job losses made households reluctant to borrow.

Consumer credit fell by a record $21.6 billion, or 10 percent at an annual rate, to $2.5 trillion, according to a Federal Reserve report released today in Washington. Credit dropped by $15.5 billion in June, more than previously estimated. Credit fell for a sixth month, the longest series of declines since 1991. (Bloomberg)

US households and consumers have never been as strapped as they are today. They’re dealing with recession the only way they can, by pulling back and hunkering down. That will make it even harder for Bernanke to resuscitate the economy. There’s simply no way to force people to borrow when they’re not interested.  

Bernanke’s deflation-fighting strategy needs to be revamped. The country doesn’t need another credit bubble. The surge in delinquencies, defaults and personal bankruptcies all suggest that the era of easy money and lax lending standards is over. Why not “hang it up” for good. The Fed should be focused on rebuilding the economy from the ground up, paying particular attention to aggregate demand. Demand is what keeps the mighty GDP-flywheel in motion. Wall Street likes to stimulate demand through credit expansion and bubblenomics so they can skim fat bonuses on the front end and then bail out before stocks crash. But this perennial “boom and bust” cycle get’s old for ordinary working people, who just want a little stability and a paycheck that keeps pace with inflation. The best way to avoid “demand shock”–which is at the heart of every recession–is through wage growth and full employment. It’s that simple. When workers get better pay, they buy more more stuff and the economy thrives. Everybody wins!

Investors – Stay Out of the Water

Stay Out of the Water
By Bill Bonner

This week began with shrieks of joy. First, a federal court came down on Bernie Madoff like a brick on a baldhead. Madoff, convicted of lying to investors, drew a sentence that only a sea turtle or a swamp oak could complete. Then, like children playing in the sea, investors were teased by one wave of good news…and tickled by the next.

Bloomberg reported that “Wall Street’s largest bond-trading firms say the worst may be over for investors…” Then, General Electric’s CEO, Jeffrey Immelt and famous investor George Soros both said that the crisis is “behind us” and that growth will begin again next year. Finally, analyst John Dorfman opined that the stock market would be a safe place for their money at least through the end of the year.

And now comes the big American holiday – July 4th. Investors pack their suntan lotions and head off to the beach for Independence Day. With Jaws in a cage, they had judged it safe to go into the water. But then came Thursday’s news. Instead of going down as predicted, the number of job losses for June went up. Another 467,000 people became unemployed last month. The figure even surprised us; we didn’t think there were that many people who still had jobs.

And so…this weekend, investors walk along the beach deep in thought. Is it safe to go back into the water…or not? They should listen carefully. That gurgling sound they hear is not mermaids singing, it is the world economy, drowning.

As we reported in this space, the feds’ bailouts, boondoggles and bankers’ bonus plans aren’t working. At the end of last year, they predicted unemployment over 8% in 2009 – if the stimulus plan were not enacted. But it was enacted. Unemployment is at 9.5% already and it is still rising. It will be over 10% before the end of the year. Global trade is collapsing; exports from Germany and Japan are down about 40% from a year before. Prices are going down too – with a report this Wednesday that the entire Eurozone has slipped into negative inflation. And from Britain came data showing a contraction of 2.4% in the first quarter, bringing the year-to-year decline to nearly 5%. “Economy shrinks at 1930s rates,” said the headline in Wednesday’s Telegraph.

When we look at America’s employment numbers, we feel like a school doctor. We would call the authorities, except that it was the authorities who should be arrested. After the feds got finished with them, the numbers told of a better-than-expected drop in May U.S. payrolls. The key to this uplifting news was not a genuine improvement, but new and improved techniques in torture. Water- boarded with seasonal adjustments and birth/death models, the numbers began to see jobs everywhere. As for “discouraged workers”, meaning those who gave up looking because they couldn’t find a job, these unfortunate souls disappeared from the jobless figures altogether.

John William’s Shadow Government Statistics reports that without these twists, the numbers tell the same story they’ve been telling all year – unemployment is still getting worse, at about the same pace as earlier in the year. “The unadjusted annual decline in May payrolls was the worst since May 1958,” says Williams. And if they were allowed to speak freely – as they did in the ’30s – the figures would show real unemployment at over 20% of the workforce…or about 30 million people. That approaches Great Depression levels…and we’re still only in 1930, not 1932. As for those still working, an additional 1.5 million U.S. workers have been “forced into part time work” according to the Financial Times.

Analysts compare these sharp drops in trade, prices and employment to what happened after WWII. Come 1946 and the world had little use for so many soldiers, machine guns and artillery shells. Millions of young men were ‘de-mobed’ and joined the unemployed. And smokestacks suddenly stopped smoking. But that was at the very beginning of 62- year period of credit expansion. Consumers had pent up demand for houses, cars, and other goods and services…and they had the wartime savings to buy them with. Even so, it took three years of adjustment after the war before the stock market began to turn up.

Now, we are at the other end of the cycle – the beginning of a major credit contraction, with no pent-up demand, no savings, and too much capacity to turn out too much stuff that too many people don’t have the money to buy.

Meanwhile, housing prices are still going down in America…and with housing goes the lenders’ collateral. U.S. residential property prices have fallen 33 months in a row. So many houses are “underwater” that the United States is beginning to look like the lost continent of Atlantis.

More foreclosures are coming. U.S. mortgage loans typically call for “down the road modifications” that lead homeowners into a kind of financial cul de sac with no way out except foreclosure. According to a study by T2 Partners, there are three more big waves of foreclosures still ahead – including those in ‘prime” loans, home equity lines of credit, and in commercial real estate.

“When [these mortgage loans] start adjusting upward it will turn millions of homeowners into over-levered, underwater renters, and ensure housing is a dead asset class for years to come,” says Mark Hanson of the Field Check Group.

With incomes falling and house prices weak, consumers will miss payments, default, and cut back spending. Business earnings will decline; bankruptcies will increase. This economic undertow is treacherous. Investors should stay out of the water.