“I have always depended on the kindness of strangers,” said Blanche DuBois, in the final words of the play A Streetcar Named Desire. Well, don’t we all.
Many citizens probably still cling to the old saw that public debt doesn’t matter because “we owe it to ourselves.” Wrong. Debt always matters. And as for whom we owe it to, it is a lot of kind (or, at least, not yet unkind) strangers.
As recently as 1970, foreign holders of U.S. debt were essentially non-existent. But their slice of our obligation pie has steadily increased, especially over the past two decades, until now foreign governments and international investors hold about 35% of Treasuries, as the following chart reveals.
Of about $11 trillion in U.S. debt, foreigners have about $3.8 trillion, with China in the lead at nearly $1 trillion and Japan not far behind at around $750 billion.
Most likely, though, this trend has already leveled off. The Chinese, Japanese, Russians, and Indians have openly announced their decision to cut back on further purchases and existing holdings of U.S. government debt. Beyond that, the source of funds previously allocated to their purchases — trade surpluses — has declined sharply with the recession. As a consequence, going forward, foreign buying is more apt to shrink than increase.
While foreigners are continuing to show up for the record-sized Treasury auctions, it’s due to the dollar retaining its status (albeit shakily) as the world’s reserve currency. But they have become quite cautious, generally investing towards the front end of the yield curve, which is a vote of no confidence in the buck’s future. As the chart below illustrates, sales of long-term bonds to foreigners are way down.
So what does all this mean?
It means that a big chunk of our prosperity during the past twenty years was due to a trade deficit that put billions of dollars into the hands of foreigners, who then turned around and bought Treasuries with them,…
Another 30% rally might be unpleasantly counter to economic reality assessments and as TPC notes, something doesn’t add up, but the problem is that it may not add up with the S&P a lot higher. – Ilene
That’s what Burkhard Varnholt CIO of Zurich based Bank Sarasin is betting on. At a meeting in Hong Kong yesterday Varnholt expressed his optimistic outlook:
“If the next six months of the reaction to this turbulent crisis continue to follow the book of history, which is more likely than not, then that will suggest that equities globally still have another 20 to 30 percent upside from here onwards.”
Varnholt says investors are shifting back to real assets as paper assets continue to be devalued by money printing:
“We are witnessing secular real-asset inflation over paper assets that will last two to three years.”
They are underweight government bonds and overweight metals. Although Varnholt says real assets are likely to outperform he says the dollar is unlikely to fall much further:
“Fundamentally [the dollar] looks oversold. For it to decline further, we will need to assume, which we think is unlikely, that there will be coordinated dollar sales, or even a dollar crisis.”
Mish wrote a post responding to the article by John Mauldin, posted here over the weekend. He addresses each of John’s economy fixing ideas, sharing his thoughts on a variety of issues. -Ilene
John Mauldin has proposed some interesting solutions for fixing the economy in his weekly E-Letter Killing The Goose. Let’s take a look, first at the problem, then at various solutions.
Long-time readers know that I think the Fed has been able to get away with its rather large monetization program because of the massive deflationary forces let loose in the world by the credit crisis, which is forcing a monster deleveraging regime all over the world.
And this brings us to our conundrum. You cannot continue to run deficits significantly larger than nominal GDP for too long without risking the demise of the economic system. But we are in a deflationary environment, so the Fed can monetize the debt far more than any of us suppose without risking immediate and spiraling inflation.
How long can we go before there is an upheaval? I don’t know. The markets can remain irrational or complacent for a lot longer than most of us think. It could be years. Or not.
Some of my most knowledgeable friends argue for the inflation side, and others take the deflation side. I tend to think the Fed will fight deflation until we get inflation, but the consequences will not be pleasant. There is no benign path.
How can we avoid such an upheaval? The only way is to make some very difficult choices. There have to be some adults making the choices, as the teenagers now in control clearly cannot make them.
It is not a matter of pain or no pain, it is just deciding when and how bad it will be. The longer we wait, the worse the consequences.
First, we must acknowledge the deficit is out of control, and spending must be cut. If we raise taxes by as much as the Obama administration now wants to, we will most assuredly put the country back into a deep recession in 2011. Think what raising taxes in 1937 did to a nascent recovery. A $3-trillion-dollar budget is 20% of the US economy. That is just simply too much.
Peggy Noonan, maybe the most gifted essayist of our time, wrote a few weeks ago about the vague concern that many of us have that the monster looming up ahead of us has the potential (my interpretation) for not just plucking a few feathers from the goose that lays the golden egg (the US free-market economy), or stealing a few more of the valuable eggs, but of actually killing the goose. Today we look at the possibility that the fiscal path of the enormous US government deficits we are on could indeed kill the goose, or harm it so badly it will make the lost decades that Japan has suffered seem like a stroll in the park.
And while I do not think we will get to that point (though I can’t deny the possibility), for reasons I will go into, there is the very real prospect that the upheavals created by not dealing proactively with the problems (or denying they exist) will be as bad as or worse than the credit crisis we have gone through. This is not going to be something that happens overnight, and the seeming return to normalcy that so many predict has the rather alarming aspect of creating a sense of complacency that will only serve to “kick the can” down the road.
This week we look at the problem, and then muse upon what the more likely scenarios are that may play out. This is a longer version of a speech I gave this morning to the New Orleans Conference, where I also offered a path out of the problems. This letter will be a little more controversial than normal, but I hope it makes us all think about the very serious plight we have put ourselves in.
Let’s review a few paragraphs I wrote last month: “I have seven kids. As our family grew, we limited the choices our kids could make; but as they grew into teenagers, they were given more leeway. Not all of their choices were good. How many times did Dad say, ‘What were you thinking?’ and get a mute reply or a mumbled ‘I don’t know.’
“A year ago,” said law professor Ross Buckley on Australia’s ABC News last week, “nobody wanted to know the International Monetary Fund. Now it’s the organiser for the international stimulus package which has been sold as a stimulus package for poor countries.”
The IMF may have catapulted to a more exalted status than that. According to Jim Rickards, director of market intelligence for scientific consulting firm Omnis, the unannounced purpose of last week’s G20 Summit in Pittsburgh was that “the IMF is being anointed as the global central bank.” In a CNBC interview on September 25, Rickards said, “They’ve issued debt for the first time in history. They’re issuing SDRs. The last SDRs came out around 1980 or ’81, $30 billion. Now they’re issuing $300 billion. When I say issuing, it’s printing money; there’s nothing behind these SDRs.”
SDRs, or Special Drawing Rights, are a synthetic currency originally created by the IMF to replace gold and silver in large international transactions. But they have been little used until now. Why does the world suddenly need a new global fiat currency and global central bank? Rickards says it because of “Triffin’s Dilemma,” a problem first noted by economist Robert Triffin in the 1960s. When the world went off the gold standard, a reserve currency had to be provided by some large-currency country to service global trade. But leaving its currency out there for international purposes meant that the country would have to continually run large deficits, and that meant it would eventually go broke. The U.S. has fueled the world economy for the last 50 years, but now it is going broke. The U.S. can settle its debts and get its own house in order, but that would cause world trade to contract. A substitute global reserve currency is needed to fuel the global economy while the U.S. solves its debt problems, and that new currency is to be the IMF’s SDRs.
That’s the solution to Triffin’s dilemma, says Rickards, but it leaves the U.S. in a vulnerable position. If we face a war or other global catastrophe, we no longer have the privilege of printing money. The dollar becomes just another currency. To avoid…
Inquiring minds are wondering about the possibility of "pent-up" inflation from the massive expansion money supply by the Fed. Our search for the truth starts with the question "Which Comes First: The Printing or The Lending?"
This is a critical question given the massive expansion of base money by the Fed as shown in the following chart.
Base Money Supply
Since the beginning of the recession, the Fed has expanded base money supply from $800 billion to $1.7 trillion. Conventional wisdom suggests this money is going to come soaring into the economy at any second causing hyperinflation on the notion banks will lend out 10 times the amount of reserves.
So is this pent-up inflation just waiting to break out?
Hardly.
A funny thing happened to the inflation theory: Banks aren’t lending and proof can be found in excess reserves at member banks.
Excess Reserves
Banks are Insolvent, Consumers Tapped Out
Because of rising credit card defaults, commercial real estate defaults, foreclosures, walk-aways, and other bad debts, banks need those reserves to cover future losses.
In practice, banks are insolvent, unable or unwilling to lend. Moreover, tapped out consumers are unable or unwilling to borrow. As a result, Spending Collapses In All Generation Groups.
Bernanke can flood the world with "reserves" and indeed he has. However, he cannot force banks to lend or consumers to borrow.
Yet every day someone comes up with another convoluted theory about how inflationary this all is. It is certainly "distortionary" in that it creates problems down the road and prolongs a real recovery by keeping zombie banks alive (as happened in Japan). However, it is not (in aggregate) going to cause massive inflation because it is not spurring the creation of new debt.
Consumers and banks both are suffering from a massive hangover. Their willingness and ability to drink is gone. No matter how many pints of whiskey Bernanke sets in front of someone passed out on the floor, liquor sales will not rise.
In a debt-based economy, it is extremely difficult to produce inflation if consumers will not participate. And as noted above, demographics and attitudes strongly suggest consumers have had enough of debt and spending sprees.
Those pointing to flawed measures of money supply as proof of inflation just don’t get it,
Considering the source – this is a quite sobering warning to America of what the Chinese are thinking. Nothing surprising as we have seen China up their stake in gold, sign bilateral currency agreements with other countries to avoid the dollar, purchasing hard assets to redeploy out of dollars, move their bond purchases to near term maturities and the like, but you can see in their words both a dismay at what we have done, and what they are slowly planning for in the long term. [Feb 13, 2009: FT.com - China to US: "We Hate You Guys"] [May 21, 2009: China Becoming More Picky About Debt]
Of course, as we have said many times – for now they are stuck with us, because any move to detach from the States or our bond market would destabilize both countries.
The US Federal Reserve’s Policy of printing money to buy Treasury debt threatens to set off a serious decline of the dollar and compel China to redesign its foreign reserve policy, according to a top member of the Communist hierarchy.
Cheng Siwei, former vice-chairman of the Standing Committee and now head of China’s green energy drive, said Beijing was dismayed by the Fed’s recourse to "credit easing". "We hope there will be a change in monetary policy as soon as they have positive growth again," he said.
"If they keep printing money to buy bonds it will lead to inflation, and after a year or two the dollar will fall hard. Most of our foreign reserves are in US bonds and this is very difficult to change, so
You may have read a slightly different variation of this article before. I wrote the original article a couple of months ago, however, Foreign Policy magazine wanted to republish it. I added some new examples, explained a few things slightly better (hopefully), and updated statistical data which did not change much: Chinese monetary base is exploding, GDP growth is accelerating, Chinese US dollar reserves topped $2.2 trillion and exports keep collapsing. Now China is very serious about using their hard earned US dollars for “buying American” companies (they must have read the President’s memo).
Financial commentators are obsessively debating whether the recent rise in the Chinese stock market means there’s a bubble — and if so, when it’s going to burst. My take? Who cares! What happens to the broader Chinese economy is what we should really be watching. It will have a far-reaching impact on the rest of the world — much more far-reaching than a decline in stocks.
Despite everything, the Chinese economy has shown incredible resilience recently. Although its biggest customers — the United States and Europe — are struggling (to say the least) and its exports are down more than 20 percent, China is still spitting out economic growth numbers as if there weren’t a worry in the world. The most recent estimate put annual growth at nearly 8 percent.
Is the Chinese economy operating in a different economic reality? Will it continue to grow, no matter what the global economy is doing?
The answer to both questions is no. China’s fortunes over the past decade are reminiscent of Lucent Technologies in the 1990s. Lucent sold computer equipment to dot-coms. At first, its growth was natural, the result of selling goods to traditional, cash-generating companies. After opportunities with cash-generating customers dried out, it moved to start-ups — and its growth became slightly artificial. These dot-coms were able to buy Lucent’s equipment only by raising money through private equity and equity markets, since their business models didn’t factor in the necessity of cash-flow generation.
Funds to buy Lucent’s equipment quickly dried up, and its growth should have decelerated or declined. Instead, Lucent offered its own financing to dot-coms by borrowing and lending money on the cheap to finance…
Here at Casey Research, we’ve been watching the actions of foreign holders of U.S. dollars as closely as a Las Vegas pit boss watches a card player on a $1 million winning streak.
Many of those in the deflation camp largely, or entirely, ignore the potential role these foreign holders may play in the drama now unfolding. But in fact, foreigners have, over the last decade, been by far the single most important source of buying for U.S. Treasuries.
Given the Treasury’s need to flog on the order of $3 trillion worth of its unbacked paper this year just to keep the government’s doors open – and that is a four- or fivefold increase over 2008 – the foreign buyers not only have to show up for the Treasury auctions, they have to show up in droves.
In mid-July, the Associated Press reported that “Foreign demand for long-term U.S. financial assets dropped by the largest amount in four months in May, as Japan and Russia trimmed their holdings of Treasury securities . . . foreigners actually sold $19.8 billion more long-term U.S. securities than they purchased in May. That compared with net purchases of $11.5 billion in April.”
Below you see the big picture of all cross-border flows in May as published by the U.S. Treasury. It shows both foreign investment in the U.S. and U.S. investment abroad. It includes Treasuries, agencies, corporate bonds, equities, and short-term instruments like T-bills. Foreigners bought a lot of T-bills when the credit crisis became acute.
This should be a serious situation with a big drop in foreign investible funds for meeting U.S. borrowing needs. The borrowing by households and business has dropped close to zero, decreasing demand, while government borrowing has jumped but is still smaller than the private borrowing drop. The Fed has added some lending.
A look at just the longer-term Securities (not T-bills) is even more convincing of the slowing of lending by foreigners:
This decrease in credit should pressure rates higher.
And here is the breakdown of foreign investment into the U.S. Foreigners only continued to buy Treasuries, shunning new investment and selling off
Improvement in first time unemployment claims is slowing. Actual, not seasonally manipulated data, including an adjustment for the usual weekly upward revision, shows that the year to year rate of change is on the cusp of a possible upside breakout, which would be good news for stock market bears if it happens.
Initial Unemployment Claims Chart- Click to enlarge
Here’s why it’s mind blowing. I’ve plotted it below on an inverse scale with the S&P 500 overlaid.
Unemployemt Claims and Stock Prices - Click to enlarge
Major US Markets including (NYSEARCA:DIA), (NYSEARCA:SPY), (NASDAQ:QQQ), and (NYSEARCA:IWM) dropped over 3% each on Italian bond fears and an increased worry that Europe will not be able to bail out its 4th largest economy. Furthermore, the iShares MCSI Italy Fund (NYSEARCA:EWI) wiped out over 9% today, further illustrating the dire situation in Italy and the European Union: ...
The second economic disappointment of the day comes from the Dallas Fed, which dropped from -2.0 to -11.4 on expectations of -9.0- this was the 4th consecutive negative print month. The report was, in a word, horrible, with just 2 of the 15 constituent indices posting an increase, and the bulk solidly in the red, led by Unfilled and New Orders which dropped 16.8 and 11.2, respectively: not good for economic growth. On the employment side there was nothing good either, with both employment and hours worked declining by -...
Bloomberg reports that Diana Containerships (NASDAQ: DCIX) files to offer stock up to $172.5M. Diana Containerships says that Diana shipping will also buy $20M of stock.
Top 5 RisersStockRatingAnalysisVLOSTRONGBUYAn increasingly positive growth rate of past earnings, along with improving expectations for long term growth, make Valero a good prospect for high returns.KROSTRONGBUYKronos Worldwide has been gaining recognition from analysts as a good canditate for achieving higher than expected earnings along with higher overall projected valuation.SFIBUYiStar is one of the top candidates projected to achieve both higher than previously projected earnings in the short run and a higher earnings growth rate in the long run.AMATSTRONGBUYApplied Materials has been...
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February is now past, and the Biotech Porfolio is loaded with winners and a miss (PLX). MRK is down a bit, but I expect that trade to recover, and one could be more agressive and double down on it, or play another round at the Jan13 $30 options for roughly the same price. Below is the summary, and note the grey boxes are ones that did not fill. I am still a fan of BMRN, and like DEPO as well. Now let's look at a few others.
Table 1. PSW Biotech Plays Since January 2011
 
Our newest play is Momenta Pharmaceuticals (MNTA), who is pursuing a three-part business model which includes complex generic equivalents in partnership with the Sandoz division of Novartis, proprietary compounds, and follow-on- biologics (FOB). It seems that this company is tied up in competition/litigation wit...
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SDRs, or Special Drawing Rights, are a synthetic currency originally created by the IMF to replace gold and silver in large international transactions. But they have been little used until now. Why does the world suddenly need a new global fiat currency and global central bank? Rickards says it because of “Triffin’s Dilemma,” a problem first noted by economist Robert Triffin in the 1960s. When the world went off the gold standard, a reserve currency had to be provided by some large-currency country to service global trade. But leaving its currency out there for international purposes meant that the country would have to continually run large deficits, and that meant it would eventually go broke. The U.S. has fueled the world economy for the last 50 years, but now it is going broke. The U.S. can settle its debts and get its own house in order, but that would cause world trade to contract. A substitute global reserve currency is needed to fuel the global economy while the U.S. solves its debt problems, and that new currency is to be the IMF’s SDRs. 
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Philip R. Davis is a founder Phil's Stock World, a stock and options trading site that teaches the art of options trading to newcomers and devises advanced strategies for expert traders...
Ilene is editor and affiliate program
coordinator for PSW. She manages the Favorites backup site
(