Category Archives: Doomsday scenarios

Ilargi: Europe Teeters On The Edge

Yves here. Ilargi is more amped up that usual on the topic of Europe’s self-inflicted wounds resulting from joining the US in imposing so-called Tier Three sanctions against Russia. This own goal results from Europe offering itself as as economic shield, since by virtue of having its nations far more engaged in commerce with Russia than the US, it stood first in line in the event Russia decided to respond in kind. And that’s before you throw in that Europe’e economy and its banking system are in far more fragile shape than America’s.

GFC Seer Raghuram Rajan Warns of New Crash

Yves here. There has been so much anticipation of the seemingly inevitable next financial markets crash that it’s easy to brush off yet another market call. But given Rajan’s track record, it’s worth at least listening to his reasoning.

It’s noteworthy, however, that post author Llewellyn-Smith sees no crash detonator prior to 2016, which might as well be 2025 as far as most investors are concerned. I have no idea what the timing will be, but the focus on financial/asset markets as the trigger seems unduly narrow. Geopolitics are vastly more fraught than in the runup to the global financial crisis, and we also have more unstable weather, such as the drought in California, which is certain to put pressure on food prices in the US. In other words, it appears that real economy risks, which are often wild cards, are not adequately factored into these “when might the wheels come off” exercises.

Only Now Does Influential Bank Group Complain That Low Volatility is Producing Too Much Risk-Taking

The spectacle of banks wring their hands about how low volatility is leading them as well as investors to take on too much risk bears an awfully strong resemblance to a child who has killed his parents asking for sympathy for being an orphan.

Regulators Reject Living Wills of 11TBTF Banks, a 100% Fail Rate

Mirabile dictu, it looks like Elizabeth Warren’s grilling of Janet Yellen on the Fed’s failure to make progress on Dodd Frank resolutions, also known as living wills, has had some impact. From the Wall Street Journal:

Humanity May Face Choice By 2040: Conventional Energy or Drinking Water

Yves here. It is surprising that it is only now that the idea of water as a scarce resource is getting the attention it deserves in advanced economies. It was when I was in Australia, between 2002 and 2004, that I first heard forecasts of resource constraints that depicted potable water as the one at most risk, with global supplies in serious trouble by 2050. A related issue, which this post addresses to a degree, is that dealing with water, energy, and food supply limits are an integrated problem, yet are typically handled as isolated issues.

Ilargi: Say Bye to the Bubble

Yves here. Only with the fullness of time will we know whether Ilargi’s “the end is nigh” headline will have coincided with the crack that signaled the sell-by date of the officialdom-induced post crisis rally. But Ilargi makes more interesting points than simply, as many done, point out that the bubble party has to end and the unwind is not likely to be pretty.

Argentina Deadline Day: Punishment for Rejecting the Neoliberal Consensus Nearly Complete

Today is technically the drop-dead date for Argentina to work out an agreement to pay off vulture funds that long ago purchased their distressed debt, or else the country will go into default for the second time in thirteen years. 11th-hour negotiations with a mediator have yielded no results thus far. WSJ divines momentum from the length of the mediation session, which is pretty weak tea.

The default would actually be to the exchange bondholders who already hold agreements with Argentina for restructured debt payments going back to the 2001 default. Judge Thomas Griesa prevented the country from making a scheduled interest payment to the exchange bondholders without the vulture funds getting their $1.5 billion first (the vultures paid roughly $48 million for the distressed debt, so it’s a huge payday).

More Signs of Doubt in Europe About the Costs of Siding With Ukraine

This week, the US hopes to get the EU to agree to impose so-called tier three sanctions on Russia to punish them for their alleged role in the downing of MH17 and for supporting the rebels in Ukraine. That would include prohibiting investment in Russian equity and debt of Russian banks more than 90 days maturity by European citizens as well as barring EU banks from sourcing funding for them on a regulated market.

Wolf Richter: Is the IPO Bubble About to Burst? Banana Republic Trots Out ‘Startup Guy’ Look

Banana Republic thinks there’s enough exuberance left out there to sell this “Startup Guy” look to millions of non-startup guys. That’s rather a lot of exuberance.

Ukraine Open Thread (and Links)

In theory, I should post about Ukraine, but in practice, the news is thick on speculation and thin on evidence. And the rush to assign blame before all the facts are in*, particularly now that the black boxes from the downed Malaysian Airlines are in the hands of the Malaysian government, is particularly troubling. It’s well documented in research on cognitive biases that once most people have formed a point of view about something, they remain committed to it even in the face of new information. This is why people who recall all too well the full-bore propagandizing before the war in Iraq are so suspicious of the aggressive effort by US officials to pin the destruction of the passenger jet on Putin. This episode feels way too familiar, in a very bad way.

The Argentina Debt Case

Almost everyone now knows that the world of international finance is not a particularly robust one, nor is it particularly just or fair. But it has just got even weirder and more fragile, if this can be imagined. A recent ruling of the U.S. Supreme Court, refusing to hear an appeal by the government of Argentine against a decision of a lower court on a case relating to its debt restructuring agreement with creditors over a decade ago, is not just a blow against the state and people of Argentina. It has the potential to undermine the entire system of cross-border debt that underlies global capitalism today.

Six Years After the Global Financial Crisis, What Have We Learned?

Yves here. This post looks at how little has been done in the wake of the global financial crisis is instructive because it takes an international view. The Australian writer, Catherine Cashmore, is particularly anxious about the failure to address the usually lucky country’s ginormous property bubble, and its not alone in having this problem (cue the UK, China, and Canada). It the US, although we’ve had a housing “recovery” and some markets are looking frothy, the bigger issues are the squeeze on renters as former homeowners are now leasing and the stock of rentals is tight in some markets (in part due to destruction of homes that would have been rentable in the foreclosure process due to servicer mismanagement and in some markets, due to properties being held off the market, both by servicers and by landlords who are either in the process of rehabbing them or have otherwise not leased them up). And it focuses on the elephant in the room: lousy worker wage growth.

TBTF Strike Back! SEC Commissioner Calls FSOC “Vast Left Wing Conspiracy”

One of the favored practices of the banking industry in recent years has been to engage in not merely shameless, but truly deranged hyperbole when anyone dares voice so much as an itty bitty threat against their prerogatives. For instance, venture capitalist Tom Perkins had a meltdown in the op-ed section of the Wall Street Journal, conflating criticism of rentier behavior among the 0.1% as an incipient Kristallnacht. Jamie Dimon in March 2009 (yes, you have the date right) had the temerity to complain about the “vilification” of Corporate America over the financial crisis. Even the weak restrictions on executive pay in the TARP produced outcries and desperate efforts to repay the TARP quickly (and the cronyistic Treasury acceded, rather than requiring banks get their capital levels higher first).

We witnessed a new outburst of Banking Industry Persecution Complex yesterday from SEC Commissioner Michael Piwowar, who was speaking before an assembly of fellow inmates at the American Enterprise Institute.

US Port Strike Threat Highlights Supply Chain Risk

One issue we’ve raise over the year is the ways that the corporate fetish for offshoring and outsourcing greatly increases business risk. Even when savings are realized (and as we’ve discussed, in many cases, the main result is a transfer from factory/lower level workers to managers and executives), they are seldom weighed properly against the increased fragility of the operation, and the resulting exposure to big losses. For instance, extended supply chains entail more communications across the chain, longer production cycles, more shipping, all of which increase the odds of writeoffs via having too much inventory or inventory in the wrong place, and those occasional losses can swamp the savings over time.

Those supply chain risks have come into focus, as the Financial Times reminds us, as the possibility of West Coast port strikes looms.

Financial Interconnectedness and Systemic Risk: New Fed Report Flags 7 Behemoths

Yves here. This post addresses a topic near and dear to my heart: the importance of financial interconnectedness, or what Richard Bookstaber called “tight coupling” in his book A Demon of Our Own Design. Tight coupling occurs when the processes in a system are so closely linked that when certain types of activities begin, they propagate through the system and cannot be halted. Or as Bookstaber put it in 2011:

Non-linear systems are complex because a change in one component can propagate through the system to lead to surprising and apparently disproportionate effect elsewhere, e.g. the famous “butterfly effect”….
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