The Permanent Bailout

Milton Friedman once said that "Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program." The central banks, as rogue private bodies exercising governmental powers a proving that axiom true yet again. The Federal Reserve claimed yesterday that we are in a recovery but none of their emergency programs can be rolled back.

... the Committee decided today to continue expanding its holdings of securities as announced in November. In particular, the Committee is maintaining its existing policy of reinvesting principal payments from its securities holdings and intends to purchase $600 billion of longer-term Treasury securities by the end of the second quarter of 2011.

Meanwhile, over in Europe, there is growing recognition that the bailouts have failed and that the money isn't going to be paid back. Instead of actually admitting anything of the sort, the ECB is now talking about effectively making the loans permanent. Sure, they SAY it's going to be a 30 year loan instead of 3 years but if Ireland and Greece can't pay the money back now and continue to run deficits, what makes anyone think they'll be in a better position to pay it back later?

The question sort of answers itself. The bailouts are throwing good money after bad as every one of these banks is so far underwater they can't even see the surface from here. Without honest accounting, we have no idea just how deep that hole is but it certainly looks like a bottomless pit from here. It's been stunningly clear for a while now that so much bad debt needed to be purged from the system but the central and TBTF banks have made every effort to PREVENT such a purge.

(Wall) Street Corner Hustle
The latest brainstorm from the ECB is exactly the same sort of shell game. Greece and Ireland can't pay the money back and they know it. Instead of acknowledging reality, we'll just convert it into a long-term "loan" so they don't have to pay it back within the term and maybe even the lifetime of the people making the decisions. It can't be paid back and it won't be paid back but maybe they can keep up the lies for a little while longer.

This is simply more Extend and Pretend so that they can keep trying to fool people into impoverishing themselves by overspending and taking on too much debt to keep up the illusion. That is the meaning of "prosperity" in a keynesian ponzi economy. You use inflation to convince people to eat their seed corn, making them feel better - for a little while. This is why central bankers place so much emphasis on "confidence" - in practical terms that measures the willingness of the population to deplete their capital and eat their seed corn due to the inflationary deception of the central banks.

The UDB gave us the biggest illusion of false prosperity the world has ever seen. The bankers are now trying to cover their tracks and delay the inevitable hoping you'll forget their complicity. But the best simple summation can be found from the creators of South Park:

Household De-formation

One of the themes we have alluded to repeatedly at Financial Jenga is trends and sustainability. When a trend is not sustainable, reliance upon it can cause massive errors in analysis. The old adage "there's nothing more dangerous than an analyst with a ruler" illustrates the danger of extrapolating such trends. In our very first blog entry we mentioned one unsustainable trend:

We are at the front end of the suffering now. It was easy to see it coming when new houses were adding 2% or more to the existing supply for years and the population was growing at half that rate or less. The Census Bureau confirms that the number of empty houses has never been higher.

The only way that such a wide disparity between housing demand and population could be supported was for the average household size to shrink constantly. This is obviously unsustainable since you eventually reach an average household size below 1.0. Calling that eventuality 'unlikely' is a tremendous understatement. We have contended that consumption has been bloated by credit for years as part of our central UDB (Universal Debt Bubble) thesis. Housing is no exception.

Over-consumption of housing has taken many forms. Square footage per person grew steadily for decades. Increased amenities is another aspect of the same phenomenon. But an absolutely key trend was privacy as a luxury item. For generations, single people have lived with roommates as a means of saving money. The UDB allowed many singles the luxury of privacy by having their own place - whether rented or purchased, thus increasing housing consumption further. In many cases, this could not be justified on a sustainable basis. Credit was the key to the lifestyle of the $40,000 millionaire class.

This has all changed drastically since we started the blog two and a half years ago. Household formation has stalled out and is now considerably LOWER than population growth. Singles are moving back in with family, parents with their adult children or vice versa. Others are going out and getting roommates. And even population growth itself is slowing due to immigration falling. This is even more true if one includes the illegal alien population. All of this is described in analytical piece by consultants IHS - U.S. Household Formation Is Down Sharply. Some particularly salient quotes:

...the number of households increased by 398,000 between March 2008 and March 2009. This was the smallest increase since 1983, and the second-smallest increase in the history of this statistic, which dates back to 1947.

The decline was particularly sharp for those who live alone. The number of women living alone declined by 398,000, while the number of men living alone fell by 112,000.

The recession is behind the slowdown in household formation. Hard times have forced many of those who have lost their jobs, their homes, or both to move in with family or friends. In addition to this, immigration is down. As a result, the number of persons per household, which had been dropping in recent decades, increased in both 2007 and 2008.

The data pretty much speak for themselves. The trend of over-consumption reversing is certainly manifesting itself in housing. These secular trend reversals are occurring in addition to the cyclical factors of inventory and shadow inventory overhangs. The elephant in the room is the future overhang of selling by the Baby Boomers. The big cash-out and trade-down secular trend as the Boomers retire is still mostly ahead of us. That trend ought to be good for retirement homes and other senior communities but will be putting pressure on the housing market at large for at least 15 years and more likely 20 years.

The trend reversal of households consolidating appears to be the new normal. It is simply correcting a period of gross distortion due to the UDB.

Command and Control?

Much is made of the rebound in China's 2nd quarter GDP and the drivers certainly merit a closer look. We are going to focus on just one key metric today - credit. In an effort to reach escape velocity from the global collapse, China has ordered its banks to make lots of loans and the banks have complied. So just how much lending has occurred and what is the scale of the likely impact. Let's look at the numbers, shall we? Various sources have reported the lending numbers and this article from the Globe and Mail is typical:

Chinese banks lent 1.5 trillion yuan ($220-billion U.S.) in June, the central bank reported on its Web site Wednesday. That exceeded forecasts and was up from May's 665 billion yuan ($97-billion) in lending and April's 590 billion yuan ($86-billion).

Keep in mind that the entire Chinese economy was approximately 30 trillion yuan in 2008. Another way to look at things is that China's economic output is roughly 2.5 trillion yuan per month and in June bank lending was equal to 60% of that output. One might safely say that credit expansion on that scale might have some impact on the economy. Keep in mind, this does NOT include bond issuance by corporations, the government in Beijing or the provincial and local governments; but the amount is enormous even without them. For perspective, the Flow of Funds shows total non-financial debt added in the US economy during 2006, the last full year of the UDB was $2.41 trillion in a $13.4 trillion economy - so borrowing was 18% of GDP in an extreme environment. Maybe this was just an aberration of one month? After all April and May were much lower. Well, let's look further down in the article:

The latest figure would push total bank lending for the first half of the year to 7.3 trillion yuan (just under $1.1-trillion).

So monthly loans averaged over 1.2 trillion yuan and June was more typical than the prior months. Interestingly, CNBC reports that Beijing's minimum bank lending target for all of 2009 is 5 trillion yuan and the banks have already exceed that number by 46% in just six months. Having established that the lending spree is enormous, the other key question is how much of a change it represents. For that, we will take words straight from the horse's mouth - a PBOC press release:

At end-June, outstanding RMB loans reached RMB 37.74 trillion, up 34.44% year on year, accelerating by 15.71 percentage points year on year and by 3.83 percentage points month on month. In the first half of the year, RMB loans increased by RMB 7.37 trillion, up RMB 4.92 trillion year on year.

Total debt grew 34.4%, while lending TRIPLED from 2.45 trillion to 7.37 trillion yuan year over year. Are the mental alarms going off yet? Again we will refer to the Flow of Funds for perspective. During the peak of the US housing bubble, mortgage lending took 6 years to triple from the trough in 1995. Yet China has compressed the impact of a historic multi-year bubble into 12 months. There also has to be dramatic deterioration in credit quality. There is no realistic way to triple lending without severely compromising lending standards - as we saw so dramatically with liar loans, nothing down, NINJA lending and option ARMs. Does anyone doubt that something comparable or worse is happening in China now?

The game plan for China should be obvious by now. They are following the path of every other participant in the UDB with a vengeance. Tripling lending until it reaches nearly half of GDP for the first half is the real stimulus in China. By contrast the US Federal government borrowing 14% of GDP looks downright conservative. China is attempting to reinflate their bubble economy but even if they "succeed" the price will be hideous. The price of failure is nearly unthinkable.

Great Pyramid of Geezer

An update by Karl Denninger at Market Ticker today got the old synapses firing. Denninger points out that pension plans are in trouble and cites a Wall Street Journal article strongly suggesting accounting fraud in public pension plans. The WSJ says:

Based on their preferred accounting methods -- which discount future liabilities based on high but uncertain returns projected for investments -- these plans are underfunded nationally by around $310 billion.

The numbers are worse using market valuation methods (the methods private-sector plans must use), which discount benefit liabilities at lower interest rates to reflect the chance that the expected returns won't be realized.

Last year we warned about the same phenomenon in private sector pensions in Some Key Questions and The Limits of Optimism. In every case the culprit was the same - overly optimistic assumptions about investment returns allowed a financially deficient structure to be sold to key constituencies as safe and sound. The wild optimism that causes managers to overreach like this and causes others to believe their literally incredible assumptions are part and parcel of the Universal Debt Bubble (UDB). Only in such a manic environment can such outlandish claims be regarded as anything other than the fantasies they are in reality. Even worse, a bubble atmosphere makes those assumptions even more dangerous than normal by burdening assets with inflated starting values, making the required price appreciation even less likely than usual. But as long as such tales are believed, a small sliver of capital can be made to support grand promises in the future.

Unfortunately, the credulous public has been misled in any number of similar ways. Robert Prechter of Elliott Wave International recently described the process by which banks also shrank the capital supporting their balance sheets to a tiny fraction of what had previously been required and considered prudent:

In the early 1990s, the Federal Reserve Board under Chairman Alan Greenspan took a controversial step and removed banks’ reserve requirements almost entirely.

To do so, it first lowered to zero the reserve requirement on all accounts other than checking accounts. Then it let banks pretend that they have almost no checking account balances by allowing them to
“sweep” those deposits into various savings accounts and money market funds at the end of each business day... The net result is that banks today conveniently meet their nominally required reserves (currently about $45b.) with the cash in their vaults that they need to hold for everyday transactions anyway.

Sure or Insure
Yet the problems of inadequate capital hardly end there. Like pensions and banks, insurance is another area that succumbed to the ubiquitous optimism of the UDB. Insurance companies became so accustomed to capital appreciation well above the historic norm that they began to take them for granted. Many annuity policies and guaranteed investment contracts were written promising high fixed rates of return based on that experience. This has proven devastating for many insurers, who are now rushing to rewrite such contracts. This is a microcosm for the weak capital position of much of the industry as key asset classes for most life and casualty companies are stocks, bonds and real estate. Like every other leveraged institution out there, the insurers have taken a beating on those assets and their promises to deliver future benefits are increasingly in doubt. Which brings us to a similar structure with the biggest capital shortfall of all.


GovernMENTAL Institutions
For the most part, capital is literally a foreign concept in this sector. Few governments have significant reserves, much less any real capitalization. Except in regions where government-owned enterprises dominate the economy, the primary source of revenue for most institutions is taxes - on the private sector naturally. So instead of actual capital, governments have something even more volatile - a projected future revenue stream. As with every other sector we have examined so far, those projections about the future are subject to the psychological distortions that accompany large-scale financial manias. In an environment of historic extremes like the UDB, those distorted perceptions can easily become fatal. We see that today in the sad case of California - where the state is issuing IOUs because they are out of money. Having accustomed themselves to double-digit annual rises in tax revenue, Sacramento (and other state capitals) simply spent it all. Those projections and plans aren't working out so well anymore.

The US Federal Government is arguably in even worse shape. Borrowing this year is likely to approximately equal tax income. No entity can spend twice its income for long and hope to survive. The remnant optimism of the UDB has settled in one of its last-ditch redoubts: faith in government. In addition to the spending spree, Washington has also embarked on a series of empty promises that would make a serial polygamist blush. Not content to merely guarantee deposits through the FDIC, the Feds now do the same for bank bonds through TLGP. Fannie and Freddie debt is backed thorough a de facto nationalization and money market mutual funds are guaranteed by the Federal Reserve. Many trillions of government "guarantees" are piled atop the roughly $1 trillion of deficit spending for this fiscal year. These promises are lighter than a feather but certainly worth their weight in gold. In other words there is no way Washington can deliver but they are hoping nobody notices and that the empty promises will inspire "confidence" in the economy. Like many other sectors, various levels of government are attempting to cover huge obligations with inadequate resources.

Frankly, it's sad that so many people fail to see the little man behind the curtain putting up the front that is the Great Oz. These large and varied institutions have stretched themselves far too thin and are praying for another bubble to bail them out again. The title of this missive refers to those who will bear the brunt of the damage from our return to reality - those who bought into the promises of these institutional pyramid schemes and don't have the time to recover financially. The frenzy of financial pyramid construction certainly put the Egyptians' little excursion in stonework to shame. In reality, the old truths would have served us well, but like every bubble generation in history, ours has convinced themselves that "this time it's different" when it never really is. Like those who have gone before, we will learn the hard way when two things we all learned as children would have prevented much of this mess:

• Never count your chickens before they hatch.
• Save for a rainy day.

It seems so simple and most of us will never forget. With the optimistic assumptions that undergirded the psychology of the UDB evaporating, any program sporting the words insurance or guarantee must be treated with great skepticism.

Trade Grinds to a Halt

Over the last 6-9 months, we have seen many indicators of weakening demand and the impact on trade. For example, the collapse of the Baltic Dry Index - down more than 90%. This reflected lease rates for freighters and indirectly demand for bulk cargo capacity. The initial drops in shipping volume were modest but had a severe impact on commodity prices and shipping rates as the global economy swung from a sellers market to a buyers market. Now we are starting to see the full impact of credit withdrawal. Our thesis has long been that excessive and EZ credit (TM) were the root cause of massive false demand that radically distorted the consumer economies, those who manufactured and exported to them and the raw material suppliers to the manufacturers. The chain of causation has proven out and now we will see just how large that distortion was.

Domestic Strife
Our back of the envelope calculation is that first-order effects in the US will be 10% of GDP, with further ripple effects from there. Our assumptions are fairly simple. Net additions to household debt ranged between $800 billion to $1.2 trillion from 2002 to 2007. That number fell to $77 billion in Q2 and negative $117 billion in Q3. All data come from the Fed Z.1 Flow of Funds release. We merely assume that net consumer credit will go to zero, whereas it could go severely negative as defaults and debt repayment have already caused outstanding credit to fall. We further assume that household savings will rebound from approximately zero to halfway back to the historic 10% range. The cumulative impact would be to reduce personal consumption by $1.3-1.6 trillion or between 9% and 12% of GDP.

Granted not all of this will hit US production. Much of the damage will occur in the export economies as we stop buying from them. We have repeatedly argued as much. Outsourcing which destroyed jobs in the US and made the target nations prosperous is now going in reverse and this should provide a partial circuit-breaker to the US economy which MAY prevent a consumption-employment-income-consumption death spiral like the 1930s. On the other hand, business spending is also falling and that swing is far more difficult to estimate. For modeling purposes, the hit to US output from lower capital spending should be roughly equal in size to the reduced demand for imports so US GDP probably declines 9-12% - straddling the 10% line of the textbook definition of depression.

Unless people dig themselves even deeper into a debt hole, households will not take on further debt - either out of prudence or inability. It would have been extraordinarily difficult to stop this a year and virtually impossible now. Once the (misplaced) confidence evaporated, the conclusion became inevitable.


Globo Stop
I'd like to thank Karl Denninger of Ticker Forum for his inimitable description of the current crisis. The PG version of which runs:

We're screwed, but they're screwed worse.

We are indeed seeing just how bad the rest of the world has it right now. The NY Times did an excellent piece over the weekend that described the rapid decline of world trade. Here's the money quote:

Over all, the total reported exports from those 43 countries peaked in July, at $1.03 trillion. By November, the figure was down 26 percent, to $766 billion. Since the figures are seasonally adjusted, the monthly figures should be comparable.

This is not just a problem for Asia but a global one. German exports fell 21%. Over a quarter of all world trade went away in only FOUR MONTHS. I think this is a pretty good example of just how much credit distorted the US and world economy. At some point, credit goes from a useful organ to a cancer. We have often spoken of the Universal Debt bubble and the breathtaking size and scope of it. It was "fun" while it lasted but the bill for the UDB is about to come due. The check is on its way to the table and we're going to spend a lot of time arguing over who gets to pay for it. George Washington spoke of government but it applies to credit as well and the distinction between the government and the banks grows ever smaller:

... a troublesome servant and a fearful master. Never for a moment should it be left to irresponsible action.

Some Key Questions

The most important question facing us today, both in the US and around the world is just how much of our supposed wealth is real and how much was part of the illusion generated by bubble-mania and the UDB. Most of the actions of various governments and CBs seem aimed at preventing us from answering this question accurately. In The Limits of Optimism we outlined the various elements of the capital structure and it should be immediately apparent why the stock market is the chosen instrument for conjuring chimeras. By coercing a larger and larger percentage of accumulated capital into stocks, Wall Street ensured a large pool of buyers to continue pushing prices higher in complete defiance of fundamentals. By allowing so much of our wealth accumulation to be attached to something so insubstantial, we have collectively ensured the destruction of much of that wealth. Something that falls as soon as anyone wants to sell isn't much of an investment.

Now we see some of the real world impacts of aggressively tying ourselves to the stock market. Once again, the secondary feedback effects may be greater than the primary impact. According to the WSJ:

At the end of 2007, companies in the S&P 500 had a combined pension-plan surplus of about $60 billion, The market selloff in the nine months to late September turned that into a combined deficit of about $75 billion...

Of course that was before October even started and we all know that things didn't go so well during that month either. Double digit declines were the rule for the month - pretty much across the board. The pension obligation and attempt to meet it by speculating in the stock market are yet another example of companies tying their fortunes directly to stock market whims rather than fundamental performance. It worked well for a while - allowing them to report higher profits than justified by actual results as speculative profits allowed them to pay less into the pension funds than a sensible and stable plan would have required. The reverse is now occurring and it's going to be nasty. This is yet ANOTHER headwind for corporate profits as they are forced to pay cash in to make up for speculative losses.

The lesson that should be learned here is "don't gamble with retirement money" but I fear few will choose to learn it until all other avenues have been exhausted. People can usually be counted on to do the right thing after all else fails.


Confirmed Reservations
Occasionally, I will encounter a supercilious restaurant host who will haughtily ask if we have reservations. When the right mood strikes the answer will sometimes be "yes, but we're planning on eating here anyway." In much the same vein, our prior reservations about the export economies and China in particular have been confirmed with a vengeance recently. Reuters reports that China's PMI hit 44.6 in October - indicating clear and serious contraction in factory output. This now makes three of the last four months down. In addition, recent BBC reports suggest that half of the toy factories in China have shut down since the start of the year.

Keep in mind that we expect a crash and burn in China's economy even if exports stagnate, much less roll over. Government action can partially ameliorate this but only to a small extent. We laid out the full case four months ago in China Syndrome. All of the elements preliminary requirements have now been met for this scenario to play out. The US is desperately trying to prevent a meltdown across the submerging markets with swap lines to exchange valuable dollars for garbage currencies like the Mexican Peso and the Brazilian Real. The temporary availability of dollars in those imploding economies has relieved the pressure from capital flight for the moment and perhaps even caused a small short squeeze for those who were looking for reality to catch up to those nations' financial system. But the banking systems overseas cannot sustain their credit expansion in the face of falling external demand and especially the collapse of primary commodity prices on which their economies rely heavily.

A Little Credit

That really is all that is available in the debt markets today and the consequences are obvious. At the same time, we'd like to claim a little credit for calling the direction and - to some extent the magnitude of this crisis. We felt that these (then pending) consequences were obvious 18-24 months ago. In fact, one of the first posts on this blog in August 2007 noted:

Today's actions by the European Central Bank and the Federal Reserve confirm that the real threat is DEFLATION - not inflation. Central Banks don't pump $150 billion dollars into the banking system because they are afraid of creating too much money.

Again this June:

That is where we are now. The Fed has failed. The Great Oz has been exposed a just a man behind the curtain. Prepare for severe credit deflation and falling asset prices in markets that traditionally use leverage to purchase or hold positions.

For years massive credit inflation raged unchecked and asset prices soared as the pool of buying power increased far faster than the assets available to absorb it. As the debt machine began to break down and collapse under its own weight, credit creation proved insufficient to continue propping up all asset prices. At this point the Universal Debt Bubble (UDB) began to falter selectively. First housing, then junk bonds, asset-backed securities, commercial real estate, equities, corporate bonds and sovereign debt all fell off the wagon in turn. By early 2008, the one asset class that had not yet been hammered was commodities - though in reality, that was also a fragmented market with the highest profile stuff still going up while nearly everything else was down.

Selected commodities proved to be the final bastion of credit-driven asset inflation - leading many analysts to mistakenly call for inflation when the exact opposite was looming. Credit creation has now fallen to such a low level that asset inflation is now dead virtually everywhere. Grains, metals and oil were the last holdouts of the UDB and they are now being hammered into the ground. The WSJ provides us with evidence and a salutary example of how demand destruction works in Metals Meltdown Burns Scrap Dealers:

Now demand and price are in a freefall. Does the Miami businessman sell his now high-priced inventory at basement prices, or wait for the market to recover?

...

But in the last six weeks, scrap steel prices have fallen nearly 60% to about $400 a ton. Prices for aluminum scrap has dropped 33%, copper 25% and nickel about 15%. Peter Marcus, metals analyst for World Steel Dynamics, says, "We aren't near the bottom yet."

For a while, the trend in price seemed to be in favor of commodity inflation. The reality was that the huge amount of "money" (really credit) created during the UDB has been running around looking for someplace, anyplace to hide and commodities were the last asset bubble it ran towards. But the economic function of bubbles is draw in such phantom "capital" and destroy it as if it had never been. The trend-followers and and performance chasers will never understand this as they are always late by definition. One has to take a systems analysis approach to understand how pulling a lever over here can impact things that have no obvious connection to the original stimulus.

The last bubble is over. Oil has collapsed from nearly $150 to less than half that. Grains are down 60% or more. Industrial metals are in worse shape than that. Deflation is now the order of the day. Governments will try to stop it but will fail repeatedly. They do possess the power to stop it before deflation runs its full, natural course but the price will be self-destruction and national suicide via devaluation and hyper-inflation. In this case the cure is much, much worse than the disease.

CP to FRB ICU ASAP!

The commercial paper market certainly appears to be critically wounded. The seasonally-adjusted amount of CP has fallen dramatically since mid-September. Per the Federal Reserve the declines over the last three weeks:

September 17: -$52.1 billion
September 24: - $61.0 billion
October 1: -$94.9 billion

Headlines emphasizing funding cutoffs to companies in the real economy, like Caterpillar and A&T are highly misleading. Non-financial CP took a single hit of $18 billion ($217 billion to $199 billion) two weeks ago and has hardly budged since. The REAL story is the collapse of CP issued by banks and other financial companies. Domestic financial paper is down by $93 billion ($590 billion to $497 billion); foreign financial paper fell $40 billion ($225 billion to $185 billion, down 20%!); asset-backed paper is off $55 billion ($780 billion to $725 billion).

We have seen record withdrawals from money market recently, which has led to falling demand for commercial paper - which is usually purchased by these funds. In order to stem the flight from MM funds and hide the losses in asset-backed CP, the Fed recently extended their alphabet soup yet again. The "Asset-backed commercial paper money market mutual fund liquidity facility" or ABCPM3FLC for short was instituted just two weeks ago. It's gone from zero to $152 billion in just days - $22 billion average last week, to $122 billion average this week, to $152 billion by 10/2/08. All data are from the Fed's H.4.1 release.

Panic Lending
Actions of this magnitude clearly indicate that a major crisis is unfolding behind the scenes. The freeze in interbank lending, the explosion of LIBOR loan rates, the collapse of financial commercial paper and counter-measures taken by CBs around the world indicate that the final act of the Universal Debt Bubble may be upon us. The UDB rested entirely on confidence - and badly misplaced confidence at that. It allowed credit to be extended to those who were manifestly NOT credit-worthy and the temporarily elevated economic activity created the illusion of prosperity.

All of that is going in reverse now and the politicos don't like it. Well, unfortunately this is all necessary to return to a stable economic structure after the bankers deliberately destabilized it. One of our first blog entries was Legions of the Damned - wherein we pointed out:

Over the last several weeks, there has been a collective recognition of the inherent riskiness of using illiquid, volatile and hard to value paper as collateral for lending. The lenders are requiring either much more (paper) or better (cash) collateral to secure the loans. The result is the global "Dash for Cash" that we've seen recently. Cash is King again and the scramble to come up with it resulted in huge spikes in overnight lending rates. The injection of $150 billion into the system was designed to bring the rates back down to the ECB and Fed targets of 5.25% and 4.0% respectively.

Had the CBs not acted, there would have been massive forced selling of the illiquid paper, demonstrating it to be nearly worthless. Now that would only formally recognize a situation that already exists in reality but as long as the banks can pretend that it's worth face value, they can continue to make loans and prop up consumption. This is a classic example of Gresham's Law - to oversimplify "Bad money drives out good money." When dodgy paper assets are treated nearly the same as cash, nobody is going to put up cash.

As we surmised well over a year ago, the repricing of risk is ongoing and the current crisis is simply the big brother of the one we experienced last summer. The clearest indication of risk recognition is the explosion of spreads. Once again, according to the Fed's Commercial Paper Report, yield differentials between high-quality (AA) and lower-quality (A2/P2) commercial paper have blown out enormously - from 80 basis points (0.80%) just a few weeks ago to over 400 bp today. Then there is the spread due to implied higher risk just for being a financial company. The spread on financial vs non-financial paper has widened from 30 bp to 160 bp in just weeks. A risk that Financial Jenga readers have known about for a long time is now confirmed by the market.

Globo-shock
Inability to borrow in the US money markets helps to explain the severe dollar starvation overseas. It is this problem that the Fed is trying to fix with the their massive dollar loans (mischaracterized as "swaps") to foreign CBs. Less than a week ago, the Fed announced a $330 billion expansion of these loans.

The results of the dollar starvation are manifest across Europe. Huge institutions like Dexia, Fortis and Bradford & Bingley have been fully or partially nationalized within the last few days. It does not help that the leverage ratios of European commercial banks are typically much higher than their American counterparts. Not only are the commercial paper markets closing to such banks but elevated LIBOR rates cut those same banks off from cheap dollar loans from other banks. The squeeze to dress up balance sheets to make them look good for the quarter-end reports undoubtedly contributed to it but the fact that pressures have not abated much yesterday and today indicates that much more than a seasonal problem is at work here.

The "dash for cash" is on. Despite the Fed lending as fast as it can, commercial credit is being drained from risky financial institutions faster than the Fed and other CBs can pump it in. Having seen Wachovia, WaMu and a half-dozen European banks fail in the last week, we see no near-term end to the pressures or the bank failures.

The Limits of Optimism

The absurd actions of our financial authorities continue to impress with the sheer hubris and vast scale of their proposals - with today's bailout attempt being the latest and greatest of many attempts. Some of the government's contortions would be impressive even for Cirque du Soleil were they not such a blatant effort to distort the market. Our nation and the world at large seem to be living out the economic equivalent of a Kafka novel today. Yet even here we see the boundaries of government interference and the limits of (unjustified) optimism. As advocates of the free market and rule of law, we have been constantly appalled. A nominally Republican administration continually interferes with market forces and changes investment rules in the middle of the game. How did we come to such a sad pass?

Like many children, yours truly had a favorite word for much of his childhood - "Why?" Eventually, I stopped bothering Mother but never stopped asking the question. It is particularly pertinent now. How did we put ourselves in a position where using tax money to subsidize Wall Street's losses could even be considered? Well, the stock market is now considered key to the retirement of many Americans.

Why?
Er, most Americans now have a substantial part of their pension or 401(k) invested in stocks.

Why?
Well, the higher average rate of return on stocks allows us to say that retirement is fully funded with less up-front investment. This is especially important for corporate and government pension plans. For individuals it allows hope of the big score and a cushy retirement.

Did the pension managers decide that was a good idea, themselves?
Umm, not really. Remember, stocks are not bought - they are sold. Some smart salesmen on Wall Street started to push this in the late 1980s, just as the last people who lived through the Great Depression were retiring.

But what about the higher risk?
The salesmen could point to the superior long-term returns from equity, while glossing over the risk and the folks who remembered the risk in very visceral ways were gone. Even so, many pension managers objected but were overruled by their bosses who wanted to lay out less money for pensions so they could spend it elsewhere (government) or report higher earnings (corporate).

What about 401(k) plans?
The long bull market convinced many individuals that there was little risk in stocks. They certainly had produced high returns. Many people hitched their wagon the Wall Street.

Perpetual Motion Machine
With so much money from average Americans pouring in, stocks could hardly do anything else but rise. Eventually it became a self-fulfilling prophecy as money chased performance, while pushing the price up in turn. That reached its peak with the Tech Bubble, when completely worthless companies were valued in the billions. When that broke down, the Fed stepped in and created a new bubble - actually several bubbles, led by housing. The same self-reinforcing dynamic - as old as markets themselves played out again.

With so much money from the masses committed to the stock and housing markets, there is considerable support for ANY measure to bail out these markets and prop up asset prices. This is the end result of individuals and pension funds refusing to settle for the smaller but steady gains from lower-risk investments. Keep in mind that not long ago, most pension and endowment type funds invested almost exclusively in bonds. For the economic importance of this, let's examine the characteristics of each class of capital:

- Senior Debt (bonds or bank loans):
first in line for assets and cash
must be paid or the creditor can liquidate the borrower
reliant on total company cash reserves

- Junior Debt:
next in line but otherwise similar to Senior Debt

- Preferred Stock:
3rd in line for assets and cash
dividend can be suspended as stockholders CANNOT force liquidation
reliant on company cash flow

- Common Stock:
last in line for assets and cash
dividend has the least protection of any security
reliant on company profits
potential for speculative gains

Slouching towards Insolvency
Over time, asset allocations at all levels have become riskier, including pension funds. From an economic standpoint, investment results became more reliant on marginal financial activities. For example, bonds are tied to current and future corporate cash (reserves + cash flow), which tends to have a linear relationship with revenue. Preferred is reliant largely on cash flow. Common is tied to marginal profit and even to the growth rate of profit - the second and third derivatives of revenue. Investment results went from relying on the soundness of the companies, to their profitability and then to the growth rate of that profitability. Under these circumstances, it is no surprise that the emphasis shifted away from ensuring that companies remained sound and certain to survive and towards showing growth or even accelerating growth (a fourth derivative!) at almost any price.

The eventual price was to lever up companies far beyond what was prudent in the quest for "growth." It didn't matter if the growth was real or not, it just had to look real for the shareholders. Companies undermined their own capital base with stock buybacks that juiced EPS growth while consuming cash flow and in some cases requiring additional indebtedness. We pointed to this problem nearly a year ago in Tactical Nukes. The paradoxical result was a slew of companies that were "growing" rapidly but could not survive a downturn. By placing so much reliance on marginal outcomes, the system became easy to game as small movements in revenue could drive huge changes in "growth" rates. Eventually, growth became THE foundation of many investment strategies, making those folks dependent on them willing to support increasing distortions of free markets for financial gain.

Those distortions have been a large part of the discussion here at Financial Jenga since the very beginning. The collapse of the illusion of growth and the economic distortions that supported it have revealed the true state of the underlying economy for all to see and it's not a pretty sight. Such are the ironic outcomes of the Universal Debt Bubble.

UDB meltdown

We have often spoken of the UDB (Universal Debt Bubble) and how it had permeated nearly every asset class and geography. It's existence is the reason that we have often chided believers in economic "decoupling" as fantasists. We wrote about the structural weaknesses of the Asian economies in China Syndrome and Silent Scream. The trend has been quite clear lately as India teeters on the edge of recession and Japan's trade surplus collapses. Today we receive additional confirmation (as if any were needed).

The last bastion of the "decoupling" fantasy is China. Yes OPEC and Russia can remain strong as long as oil prices stay high but that scenario rests on the further assumption of nearly unlimited demand growth out of Asia (especially China). Chinese growth had continued to be high even as it trended down for 5 consecutive quarters. Now we see a report that the industrial sector is SHRINKING outright over there. Bloomberg reports that Chinese PMI fell to 48.4 in July (anything below 50 indicates contraction). Naturally, there will be apologists who will blame the entire decline on the Olympics and the shutdown of industry in the Beijing area. I present for their edification import orders:

The output index fell to 47.4 in July from 54.2 in June, while the index of new orders dropped to 46.2 from 52.6. The index of export orders declined to 46.7 from 50.2.

Clearly, there is no correlation between demand for exports and the Olympics. While that is likely and aggravating factor, it's a long way from the heart of the problem. Exports are the be-all and end-all for China's economy and they are going down in no uncertain terms. This should be no surprise as the end demand in their trade partners is clearly weakening. This is horrible news for China, as their entire economy is a pyramid leveraged to exports. What we wrote in China Syndrome less than a month ago has particular resonance given this report:

Essentially, everything will be fine as long as everyone there believes the economy will continue to expand at a breakneck pace and invests accordingly. This is virtually the definition of a pyramid scheme.
...

The most likely trigger for a fall in China's capex is weakening exports. They don't even have to stagnate to trigger real problems, much less fall. When the current investment pattern is predicated on rapid and continuous growth, material decline in the growth rate should be sufficient to kick off lower capital spending. An event the magnitude of 1980 would cause a direct hit of 12% of GDP in China in addition to any multiplier effects and that is hardly unthinkable. Keep in mind that exports themselves account for 33% of Chinese GDP so any outright decline there would be a real problem for them - likely triggering a minimum 20% fall of GDP. Frankly it will be difficult for them to avoid it given the economic and political climate in their trading partners.

China is simply following the same pattern that we have already seen in India. In China's case, the slowing of demand may have been masked by the massive construction projects and inventory building prior to the Olympics. In many ways, this event is similar to the Y2K phenomenon that marked the top of the tech bubble. It is a date-certain occurrence which inspired massive spending and investment as well as hoarding and stockpiling (for different reasons). That date also marks the absolute cutoff of all related investment and spending as well as a potential inventory draw down. In this instance, the cycle is exacerbated by the reduction or cessation of industrial activity in and around Beijing. So instead of a gradual reduction in industrial production growth like India, China looks to be set for a sudden end to growth.

We see problems globally, not just in the US and Asia. Deflating housing bubbles in Spain, the UK, Italy and Australia. Retail sales falling across the developed world, with their supplier nations beginning to follow suit. This is no ordinary credit crisis. It is the beginning of the end for the largest and most extensive credit bubble in all of human history - the Universal Debt Bubble. No nation, no asset class will escape the effect of the bubble bursting. Preserve your wealth, reduce risk and get ready to buy assets on the cheap on the other side of this mess.