Thursday, July 17, 2914 - Unleash the Hounds of War

Unleash the Hounds of War
by Sinclair Noe

DOW – 161 = 16,976
SPX – 23 = 1958
NAS – 62 = 4363
10 YR YLD - .06 = 2.47
OIL + 2.55 = 103.75
GOLD + 18.40 = 1319.20
SILV + .37 = 21.26

A Malaysian Airlines passenger jet, Flight 17, a Boeing 777, has crashed near the Ukrainian-Russian border; all 295 passengers are dead. US intelligence officials say the jetliner was shot out of the sky by a surface to air missile; they could not confirm who fired on the plane but it is believed the missile was launched by separatists in Ukraine or by Russian forces positioned across the border from the crash site.

Yes, more than four months ago, another Malaysia Airlines plane, Flight 370 from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, disappeared with 239 people on board, and that plane remains lost, despite ongoing searches in the Indian Ocean. Flight 17 is believed to have had 280 passengers and 15 crew. Early reports indicate the passengers included 55 Dutch, 23 Americans, and 9 Britons.

The crash today involved a flight from Amsterdam to Kuala Lampur, but the flight went down in the Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine where pro-Russian separatists have been fighting Ukrainian forces for several months. The separatists denied responsibility. The separatists were quoted by the Russian news agency Interfax as saying that they had found the “black box” flight recorder. Other Russian reports said the rebels planned to call a three-day cease-fire to allow for an investigation.

Aviation authorities knew this was a dangerous area prior to today’s crash. Three months ago, the FAA prohibited US airlines and US pilots from flying over parts of Ukraine. Today several airlines re-routed flights. Ukrainian military planes have been shot down in the conflict in eastern Ukraine, including earlier this week, but the crash Thursday was the first downing of a commercial airliner.

Ukraine’s recently elected president, Petro Poroshenko, called it an act of terrorism. Russian president Putin says Ukraine is responsible for the crash, apparently because they have not maintained peace in the area and have not been in control of their airspace. Shooting down a 777 at 33,000 feet would require fairly sophisticated military equipment.

Any sign or Ukrainian, Russian, or separatist involvement in the downing of a civilian airliner could lead to an escalation of tensions in the region. Already, there is a recording of an alleged phone conversation between a leader of the separatist movement in Donetsk and a Russian military intelligence officer, where the Russian officer says they have shot down a plane. No groups are claiming responsibility.

If it turns out that the separatists shot down the passenger jet, the incident almost certainly will become a tipping point in marking them as terrorists and not mere rebels. To the degree he continues to support them, Putin himself risks shifting to dangerous new diplomatic terrain and harsh new sanctions by a West united against him to a degree it has been at no time since the Cold War. He will be seen as backing an indefensible rogue element. This might convince doubters in the EU to move forward with tougher sanctions against Russia and it could lead to tougher US sanctions. Russia’s deniability of direct support for the rebels would be demolished, making Putin’s international position more difficult.

Just yesterday President Obama imposed a new round of sanctions against Russia, targeting some of the largest Russian companies in finance, energy, and the defense industries. The announcement reflected a decision by Obama to take more stringent steps than those taken by the United States’ European allies, which have far deeper economic ties to Russia. Meeting in Brussels, leaders of the European Union refused to match the American measures and instead adopted a more tempered plan that blocks new development loans to Russia and threatens to target more Russian individuals.

Washington imposed sanctions on Russia’s largest oil producer Rosneft, its second largest gas producer Novatek, its third largest bank Gazprombank, and also 8 arms manufacturers, and a few others. Yesterday, Moscow denounced the sanctions as primitive revenge for events in Ukraine and pledged to retaliate. Also yesterday, Ukraine officials accused Russian forces of shooting down a Ukrainian military jet in the Donetsk region. Obama said Wednesday that the new sanctions were largely aimed at punishing Russia for not preventing the flow of weapons into Ukraine to supply pro-Russia rebels seeking independence from Ukraine.

At this point, nobody really knows who did what and for what reason. Civilian planes have been shot down by various militaries in the past and it did not necessarily result in war, however, the conflict in Ukraine has just escalated significantly.

Meanwhile, Israel moved ground troops into Gaza today. The ground offensive includes heavy artillery and naval shelling and helicopter fire and tanks. For the past 10 days Gaza militants and Israel have been firing rockets at each other. The Gaza militants have reportedly fired more than 1,300 rockets into Israel, but Israel has a high tech defense system called the Iron Dome, and so the bombing has only resulted in one Israeli death. The Israeli rocket attack on Gaza has been much more precise, even to the point where the Israelis would phone ahead and tell civilians they had a minute or so to vacate a building before a bombing. Palestinian health officials say more than 230 Palestinians have been killed in Israeli air and naval strikes.

Before dawn on Thursday, about a dozen Palestinian fighters tunneled under the border, emerging near an Israeli community. At least one was killed when Israeli aircraft bombed the group. The United Nations said Thursday that it had discovered 20 rockets hidden in a vacant school in Gaza during a regular inspection on Wednesday. Earlier on Thursday, Palestinian, Egyptian, Israeli and American officials said intense discussions were underway on terms for a cease-fire. Israel had accepted an Egyptian proposal for a cease-fire that was rejected by Hamas, which continued to fire rockets at Israel.

Palestinian residents and journalists in Gaza reported heavy artillery fire from ground troops in the north and from Israeli naval gunboats stationed near Gaza’s port, as well as a continuing air assault. Residents in the northern Gaza Strip said tanks were moving in. The Israeli strikes hit a range of targets, including a rehabilitation hospital and earlier killed four young children as they played on a roof in eastern Gaza City. At the same time, scores of rockets from Gaza continued to stream into cities all over central and southern Israel.

On Wall Street, the geopolitical problems made folks jittery. The VIX was up 3.54 to 14.54, which represents a 32% increase. We saw oil and bonds and gold jump higher in what looks  like a safe haven move.

It is still earnings season, and let’s touch on a few of the big reports today. Google reported a second-quarter profit of $3.4 billion, or $4.99 a share, compared with a profit of $3.2 billion, or $4.77 a share, for the year-earlier period. Revenue was $12.6 billion, up from $11.1 billion in the year-earlier period. Google missed expectations on earnings but beat revenue projections. Shares were down in after-hours trade.

Just the opposite for Big Blue; IBM said its second-quarter earnings climbed 28%, helped by its restructuring moves, while IBM reported its ninth consecutive quarter of lower revenue.

As expected, Microsoft announce massive layoffs today, what was unexpected was just how massive, 18,000 jobs will be cut, 15% of the workforce; 12,500 coming from newly acquired Nokia. Just after Microsoft bought Nokia, Nokia started making Android-based phones. This was a surprise since Microsoft makes its own mobile operating system — Windows Phone. The new Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella had no desire to continue with Android. He wants Microsoft's operating system to be the company's only mobile operating system.

A threatened strike on New York's Long Island Rail Road was averted on Thursday when the transit authority and labor unions reached a tentative contract deal.

Truckers will be back on the job Monday at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, ending a five-day strike that disrupted cargo flow. The truckers voted to end their work stoppage against three companies late Friday after the firms promised no retaliation. The truckers say they have been unfairly classified as independent contractors rather than employees, allowing the companies to avoid labor laws and charge the drivers for fuel, maintenance and other fees. The drivers walked off the job last Monday in the fourth such protest this year and dockworkers refused to cross the picket lines.

Coincident to the plane crash and the story of Russian sanctions, Bloomberg Businessweek reports today on a nearly 4 year old story dealing with a different type of attack by Russia.  Reportedly, the Russians hacked into the Nasdaq in October 2010. And this was not just some silly hackers putting a virus on your computer, this was an attack on the code of a major financial institution, a digitized weapon, orchestrated by the Russian government.

It isn’t the first time a country has launched a cyber-attack against another country. The US was probably the first, with deployment of the Stuxnet worm, which switched off the safety mechanisms at Iran’s uranium processing facility in 2010. The October alert prompted the involvement of the National Security Agency, and just into 2011, the NSA concluded there was a significant danger.

While the Nasdaq hack was successfully disrupted, it revealed how vulnerable financial exchanges are to digital assault; as well as banks, chemical refineries, water plants, and electric utilities. One official who experienced the event firsthand says he thought the attack would change everything, that it would force the US to get serious about preparing for a new era of conflict by computer. He was wrong.

In fact the investigation revealed that Nasdaq networks had been infected for quite some time, by a variety of sources. The rules of cyberwarfare are still being written, and it may be that the deployment of attack code is an act of war as destructive as the disabling of any real infrastructure. Just think of the possibilities if the Nasdaq were to really crash, completely and totally, and if everything run through the exchange was deleted.

Wednesday, June 04, 2014 - An Airtight Defense

An Airtight Defense
by Sinclair Noe

DOW + 15 = 16,737
SPX + 3 = 1927 (record close)
NAS + 17 = 4251
10 YR YLD + .01 = 2.60%
OIL - .27 = 102.39
GOLD – 1.30 = 1244.60
SILV - .01 = 18.90

Eight times a year the Federal Reserve gathers economic updates from the 12 districts and publishes the information about two weeks before its FOMC meetings. The data is published in a beige folder, and that is why it is called the Beige Book, although it might actually refer to the writing style. Anyway, economic activity expanded all across the country, with most districts reporting moderate or modest growth. Consumer spending expanded across almost all districts. Tourism was another bright spot and manufacturing activity expanded across the country. Home sales were described as “mixed across the country” even as home prices continue to rise. Labor markets were described as steady. Inflation was tame, with a slight exception for higher food prices in some areas.

In other words, when the Fed meets in a couple of weeks, there won’t be any big changes in monetary policy.

The Institute for Supply Management said its services index rose to 56.3%, its highest level since August, from 55.2% in April. That’s the number and they’re sticking with it.

The US trade deficit grew to $47 billion in April, up from $44 billion in March. Exports slowed in April, down slightly to $193 billion. Imports, meanwhile, surged by nearly $3 billion to $237 billion, mainly driven by increased spending in consumer goods and cars.

A new survey from the MacArthur Foundation finds 70% of Americans still feel a housing crisis remains today and the worst is yet to come; that’s down from 77% a year ago, but still it doesn’t look like there’s much confidence in a housing recovery. Half the respondents think housing represents a good long term investment, while 43% says that’s not the case; two-thirds say it’s harder to build wealth through home ownership than 20 or 30 years ago. Over half of Americans, 52%, have had to make at least one major sacrifice in order to cover their rent or mortgage over the last three years.

In line with the survey on housing, a new poll from CNN and ORC International finds 59% of adults think the American Dream has become impossible for most to achieve, up from 54% in a poll conducted in 2006. What’s more, 63% of those surveyed believe most children in the US will grow up to be worse off than their parents. While most Americans say they’re better off than the prior generation, they also feel gains in living standards are grinding to a halt. One problem is that the survey didn’t define exactly what the American Dream is supposed to be.

ADP, the payroll processing firm, issues a monthly payroll report ahead of the Labor Department each month. The ADP report is not always an accurate predictor of the government report but it is still closely watched for any hints. ADP says the economy added 179,000 private sector jobs in May; that’s significantly below the consensus estimate of 200,000 to 215,000 jobs for the Friday jobs report.

According to the latest revisions from the Labor Department, productivity in the first quarter declined at a 3.2% annual rate, the worst in six years, as workers spent more time on the job producing fewer goods during an unusually stormy weather.

A new research study published today from the Economic Policy Institute shows a sharp disconnect in the late 1970s between the overall productivity of the US economy and wage gains for the average worker. Normally, when workers make more things during a work day, they get paid more for that day’s work. From 1948 to 1979, both hourly wages and productivity roughly doubled. But from 1979 to 2013, productivity rose 65% while average hourly compensation rose just 8%; those at the bottom and middle of the income ladder saw little of those gains.

Wages for everyone at or below the 30th percentile of the income distribution have essentially been flat, while wages for the poorest 10% of workers have fallen during that time period. At all income levels, women earn less on average than men do.  Most wage growth has flowed to the top 1% of earners, posting a 153% increase in wages. Since wages for the lowest income group have fallen while wages at the highest income group have grown, income inequality has also increased.  Piketty was right.

The S&P 500 index hit another record high close today, and even at that it’s just up about 5% year to date. The best performing market year to date is in Dubai; posting a 56% return since the start of the year and posting a 117% return for the past 12 months. The strongest S&P 500 subsectors this year include oil & gas equipment and services, which is up 17%; oil & gas exploration and production, up 15%; real estate investment trusts, up 15%; natural gas utilities, up 21%; and electric utilities, which have risen 14%, largely on the back of some big mergers.

The top performing stocks in the S&P year to date include: Forest Labs, up 60%, a takeover target; Nabors Industries, a contract oil driller based in Bermuda is up 54% year to date; Electronic Arts, the video game developer is up 51%; Keurig Green Mountain has returned 50% this year, this is the coffee company that makes those little single serve containers of coffee; Newfield Exploration, an oil and gas exploration and development company out of Texas is up 49% since the start of the year; Delta Airlines is up 47% after rejoining the S&P 500 index; and Pepco, the Washington DC based utility is up 47% YTD, after agreeing to be acquired by Exelon. Probably nobody picked those stocks as the top performers at the start of the year.

After the close of trade today, comes word that Sprint is nearing an agreement price to acquire T-Mobile for about $40 a share, or around $32 billion, a 17% premium to the closing price today. There will be regulators to deal with. An announcement and an actual deal are still down the road. If you are unhappy with the service and price you pay for your mobile phone, this won’t help.

A federal appeals court has overturned a decision by Judge Jed Rakoff to reject a federal settlement deal with Citigroup. Judge Rakoff had considered the Citigroup-SEC settlement to be little more than a slap on the wrist. The original case accused Citigroup of duping investors into buying tainted CDO’s, Collateralized Debt Obligations. The bank agreed to pay $285 million to settle the civil fraud case, without admitting wrongdoing.

Judge Rakoff called the fine “pocket change” for the bank and said the settlement deprived the public “of ever knowing the truth in a matter of obvious public importance.” And now the court of appeals decision is going to rein in judicial discretion even more. The ruling essentially says that a judges job is not to search for the truth.  One small victory for Judge Rakoff: the SEC last year reversed its longstanding yet unofficial policy of allowing companies to neither “admit nor deny wrongdoing,” signaling that it would force admissions in particularly egregious cases.

If only the SEC had the backbone to pursue a particularly egregious case.

The G-7 or Group of 7 is meeting today and tomorrow; it used to be the G8 until Putin invaded Crimea, and so Russia was kicked out of the clubhouse. A draft of the G7 communique calls on Russia to "accelerate withdrawal of military forces from the eastern border with Ukraine" and "exercise its influence among armed separatists to lay down their weapons".

More important is how Europe will deal with energy security as the continent relies on Russia for about a third of its oil and gas, a fact that gives Putin considerable leverage over the EU. The G7 draft communique says: "The use of energy supplies as a means of political coercion or as a threat to security is unacceptable." Euro leaders say they are committed to diversifying energy sources away from Russia, but it won’t happen overnight. Complacency on the energy front seems like a really big mistake.

As the G7 meeting wraps up, the various leaders will head to France on Friday to mark the 70^th anniversary of the D-Day invasion at Normandy. Putin will be there. No negotiations or diplomatic level talks are planned but it should make for some interesting photo ops.

And before the D-Day anniversary there will be an uncomfortable dinner between President Obama and French President Hollande, who will make the case that the French bank, BNP Paribas should not be fined $10 billion for money laundering. Naturally, this has BNP clients nervous about what all this means for business, and the upper echelons of BNP management nervous about how their employees might respond to questions about money laundering.

Once upon a time BNP thought they could beat the rap. BNP showed prosecutors a memo that the bank thought would explain and possibly mitigate the conduct. The memo, drafted around 2004 by an outside law firm, essentially authorized the bank to process certain transactions for Sudan, as long as BNP’s employees in New York were not involved in the arrangement. BNP argued that it lacked the intent to commit a crime, saying that it followed the law firm’s directive. That legal argument, known as the “advice of counsel” defense, prompted prosecutors to pore over the single-page memo and weigh the bank’s argument. Ultimately the prosecutors concluded that the memo alleviated only a small fraction of the wrongdoing. Apparently hiring lawyers to tell you that you can do whatever you want turns out to be a little bit less than an airtight legal strategy.

Tuesday, May 20, 2014 - Protected Species

Protected Species
by Sinclair Noe

DOW – 137 = 16,374
SPX -12 = 1872
NAS – 28 = 4096
10 YR YLD - .02 = 2.51%
OIL + .87 = 102.98
GOLD + 1.70 = 1295.30
SILV + .05 = 19.49

Today is Tuesday and that means that General Motors has announced another recall; this time 2.6 million more cars. Last week, GM recalled 3 million vehicles. So far this year, GM has announced 29 recalls affecting more than 15 million cars globally. The list of recalled vehicles is long. It’s easier to list the vehicles that haven’t been recalled; they have recalled 58 versions of Chevrolet and GMC pickups.

Last week the Dow hit a record high; since then it has been floundering. For the fourth straight session, the Nasdaq Composite has posted more 52-week lows than 52-week highs; 55 lows versus 38 highs. The Russell 2000 Index of small and mid-cap stocks hit a high on March 4^th and since then it has dropped almost 10%.

Meanwhile, interest rates have been moving steadily lower despite winding down of large scale asset purchases under the Fed’s quantitative easing, and the talk about raising interest rates at some point down the road. With yields on the 10-yr Treasury note dipping down around 2.5%, that means somebody is buying Treasuries, but if not the Fed, then who?

Well, it’s certainly not Russia. Putin sold off more than $100 billion in Treasuries in March; he was probably expecting Treasury prices to tumble, but that didn’t happen. The most likely buyer is Belgium; from November of last year through January 2014, Belgium bought approximately $142 billion in US Treasuries, which is quite a bit considering the Belgian GDP is about $480 billion; so their bond buys were equal to about 30% of GDP.

As a member of the Eurozone, Belgium can’t just print new money. So, something is rotten. Or maybe the Fed has opened up a branch office in Antwerp.

Anyway, Putin is in China today to talk up the virtues of Russian natural gas. Putin met with Chinese President Xi Jinping at a start of a two-day meeting on Asian security with leaders from Iran and Central Asia. Putin is hoping to extend his country's dealings with Asia and diversify markets for its gas, which now goes mostly to Europe. Russia has been negotiating for more than a decade on a proposed 30-year deal to supply gas to China. Officials said they hoped to complete work in time to sign a contract while Putin is in Shanghai, but they have not yet announced a signed agreement. Putin told Chinese reporters ahead of his visit that China-Russia cooperation had reached an all-time high.

Russia is worried about its European gas market, seeing lackluster European demand and political efforts, intensified since the Ukrainian crisis, to diversify away from Russian gas constraining future sales to the West. At the same time, the shale gas phenomenon, with possible US and Canadian liquid natural gas exports to come, has Moscow concerned about what prices it can hope to attain from the European market. Developing new, potentially lucrative markets in the east seems to be the answer to Russia’s European gas concerns.

China also feels a new impetus for a deal. Despite a slowing of the domestic economy, future demand for energy, the key to both growth and political stability, will be robust. Efforts to develop China’s domestic shale resources are promising, but are unlikely to produce consequential volumes until the next decade. Meanwhile, China has been meeting growing energy consumption with coal powered plants, and they are literally choking on that decision, as the air quality has been nearly destroyed.

Tomorrow we will get the minutes of the last Federal Reserve FOMC meeting. Today we had Fed heads giving speeches. William Dudley, the president of the New York Fed is saying the Fed will take its time raising interest rates.  Noting both market and Fed expectations that the first hike will come some time near the middle of 2015, Dudley said, “if the economy is stronger than expected, causing the excess slack in the labor market to be absorbed sooner and inflation to rise more quickly than forecasted, then lift-off is likely to be pulled forward in time. If, instead, economic growth disappoints, inflation stays unusually low and the labor market continues to exhibit evidence of considerable excess slack, then lift-off will likely be pushed back in time.”

As for the over $4 trillion worth of bonds on its balance sheet, Dudley expects them to be reduced via “automatic pilot”; in other words, as Treasury securities mature and mortgages are repaid. Dudley offered his two cents on why the housing sector’s contribution to the economy has “stalled out” over the past few quarters.  While he said some decline in activity was to be expected following the jump in mortgage rates last year, “the extent of the slowdown has surprised me given that the recent pace of housing starts, roughly 1 million per year, is far below what is consistent with the economy’s underlying demographics.”

Dudley said mortgage credit is still unavailable to borrowers with lower credit scores. Also, student debt has delayed the entry of new first-time home buyers; that could make it harder even for existing homeowners to sell their homes and trade up, slowing the traditional turnover of the housing market. Dudley said he expects the housing recovery to continue, “the pace will likely be slow, especially relative to past economic recoveries.”

The online real estate site, Zillow reports 18.8% of US homeowners with a mortgage, or 9.7 million households, were underwater on their mortgages at the end of the first quarter. That's an improvement from the end of last year when this figure was 19.4%, and it's a large improvement from a peak of 31.4% in 2012, but it shows that negative equity is still an issue in the housing market.

What's more, there is an additional 10 million households that have 20% or less equity in their homes. For those homeowners, it would be difficult to sell without coming up with some money to cover the broker fees, closing costs and the down payment for the next home.

European Union regulators have charged banks JPMorgan, HSBC and Credit Agricole with colluding to manipulate the price of financial products linked to interest rates.

The European Commission's regulator said the banks will now have a chance to respond to the preliminary findings. If the Commission ultimately concludes they have broken the law, it can impose a fine of up to 10% of their annual revenue. In December 2013, the Commission levied fines totaling $1.4 billion on Barclays, Deutsche Bank, RBS and Societe Generale as part of the same case, which covers financial derivatives linked to a benchmark interest rate called Euribor in the period 2005-2008. Barclays escaped fines for having notified the Commission of the existence of the cartel, and the others were granted a reduction in their fine for cooperating in a settlement.

Late yesterday, Credit Suisse entered a guilty plea for conspiring to help US customers evade taxes, the first such guilty plea by a major financial institution in years. Today Credit Suisse shares rose almost 1%. Apparently a felony conviction is a good thing. And why not? Top bank executives will get to keep their jobs, the bank can pin the whole thing on a handful of underlings, and it won't have to give up a list of client names to the government. Credit Suisse will have to let an independent monitor keep an eye on it, but that's a minor inconvenience at worst. The guilty plea could cost the bank some clients here and there, but investors and analysts are betting there won't be much impact. The most painful part of the deal, the $2.6 billion in fines, is manageable, less than one quarter's revenue.

For the most part, the mainstream media is dutifully accepting the spin of the Department of Justice, that this case is significant by virtue of being the first plea of this sort made by a bank in over two decades. The fact that those intervening years saw regulators generally take a very hands off approach to banks, and that we had a global financial crisis with no measures of this sort taken against the perps somehow escapes mention.

Let me return to one critical issue: why no individuals were prosecuted or even fined. This case, like so many we have discussed, seems ideally made for at least a civil action under Sarbanes Oxley against the CEO and CFO, since they must certify the adequacy of internal controls. The most charitable coloration you can put on what looks an awful lot like obstruction of justice (although Credit Suisse was not charged with that) was that it was a failure of internal controls. And Sarbanes Oxley is designed so that a civil action can easily tee up a criminal case on the same control deficiencies.

Credit Suisse was in many ways the perfect major financial institution from which to demand a guilty plea. Although its investment banking and wealth management operations are global, the commercial banking operation in the United States is largely confined to its New York branch. It does not own a subsidiary in this country providing bank services to local customers, so it really only had to negotiate with the New York authorities and the federal government to resolve the case. That meant the effort to mitigate potential collateral consequences of a guilty plea was confined to just a few agencies. So, if you think the Credit Suisse case will become the template to go after American banks, well, yeah, that’s not going to happen. The banking class remains a protected species. 

Tuesday, March 18, 2014 - Food and Oil

Food and Oil

by Sinclair Noe

DOW + 88 = 16,336
SPX + 13 = 1872
NAS + 53 = 4333
10 YR YLD - .02 = 2.68%
OIL + 1.62 = 99.70
GOLD – 12.00 = 1356.50
SILV - .38 = 20.92

Let’s start with some economic news. The National Association of Home Builders housing market index increased to 47 in March, up from 46 in February. A reading below 50 means more builders view conditions as poor rather than good. Fewer homes are being started in early 2014 than at the end of 2013. Housing starts came in just slightly below economists’ expectations of 910,000 at 907,000.

Separately, a quarterly survey by the Business Roundtable found US chief executive officers somewhat more positive about the economy, including plans for hiring and capital spending over the next six months; they expect gross domestic product to advance 2.4% this year. The forecast is a slight upgrade from an expectation of 2.2% in the previous survey but still less than robust.

The Consumer Price Index, or CPI, increased a seasonally adjusted 0.1% in February, matching the increase in January. According to the Labor Department report, the increase was mainly due to higher prices for food. Energy prices decreased 0.5%. Over the last 12 months, the CPI is up 1.1%. Costs for meats, poultry, fish, dairy and eggs drove the gains. Most notably, beef and veal prices surged.

Prices for beef saw their biggest monthly change in February since November 2003; that was when fears of mad-cow disease abroad led to a spike of export demand for US beef. When the disease was later confirmed in domestic cattle, prices shot down.

So, with food, and specifically meat prices moving higher, the next logical step is that dairy prices are moving higher; up 0.7% from January to February. The price that consumers paid for a gallon of milk was more than $3.56 in February, up more than 10 cents since September. The good news is that the full impact of higher prices hasn’t hit your wallet, yet. For example, the price of a block of cheese on the wholesale market is up 35%, but this price hike hasn’t been passed on to shoppers. The bad news is that those higher wholesale food prices will slowly but surely result in higher retail prices.

Federal forecasters estimate retail food prices will rise as much as 3.5% this year, the biggest annual increase in three years. The reason is simple - drought. We’ve tried to warn you this was coming and it is. California and Texas have seen tight cattle supplies after years of drought. Prices also are higher for fruits, vegetables, sugar and beverages.

In futures markets, hogs are up 42% on disease concerns and cocoa has climbed 12% on rising demand, particularly from emerging markets; coffee prices have soared so far this year more than 70% because of a drought in Brazil.

The price increases pose a challenge for food makers, restaurants, and retailers, which must decide how much of the costs they can pass along. During previous inflationary periods, food makers switched to less-expensive ingredients or reduced package sizes to maintain their profit margins. Retailers and restaurants usually raise prices as a last resort.

In 2008, a spike in food prices caused riots from Haiti to sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. In 2011, rising food prices were a factor behind the Arab Spring protests in North Africa and the Middle East that ultimately toppled governments in Tunisia and Egypt. We probably are not looking at severe shortages this year, but a lot depends on the weather. If conditions get worse; if the drought gets worse; if the corn and soybean crops in the Midwest get hit by inclement weather; if they do, then we could see significant food price increases.

California farmers say a number of products could be affected later this year, including broccoli, sweet corn and melons from growing regions in Fresno to Huron, where farmers will likely cut acreage due to water shortages. Spring and fall lettuce production in the San Joaquin Valley also could drop by 25% to 30% this year, although growers could try to make up some of that by extending the planting season in the desert and in the Salinas Valley.

Supplies of other items may be supplemented from other growing regions, but at a higher cost. For example, buyers may have to rely more heavily on Florida and Mexico for corn, and there may be more melons coming from Mexico and even offshore. California supplies nearly 90% of the nation's strawberries; growers typically plant a second crop in the summer for fall production; if we don’t see more rain, we won’t see a second planting. It’s not like somebody can step in and fill that void.

For the moment, fair weather accompanying the drought has caused vegetable crops to come to market ahead of schedule, creating an overlap from the deserts and the San Joaquin Valley, creating a temporary oversupply of some veggies. Enjoy it while you can, better yet, can it while you enjoy it.

Stocks are rallying in the wake of the latest developments in the Ukraine region. Gains were broad, with all 10 primary sectors of the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index higher. Groups tied to the pace of economic growth, including materials, were among the day’s biggest advancers.  After five days of nervous anticipation that held stocks lower last week, stocks so far this week have gone straight up, even with Russian troops massed along the eastern border of Ukraine. In an address to the Russian Parliament, Putin said Russia did not want Ukraine to be divided further, and that he did not want to seize more of the country.

According to Reuters, Crimea may nationalize oil and gas assets within its borders belonging to Ukraine, and sell them off to Russia. The ongoing political standoff in Crimea has already halted Ukraine’s oil and gas ambitions. Ukraine came close to inking a deal with a consortium of international oil companies that would have led to an initial $735 million investment to drill two offshore wells. The consortium led by ExxonMobil, with stakes held by Shell, Romania’s OMV Petrom, and Ukraine’s Nadra Ukrainy, had been particularly interested in a nat gas field in the Black Sea, which holds an estimated 200 to 250 billion cubic meters of natural gas.

If it can get the field up and running, Exxon hopes to eventually produce 5 billion cubic meters per year. Exxon’s consortium outbid Russian oil company Lukoil for the rights to the block. Exxon’s plans for Black Sea nat gas may not have a future if Russia simply takes Ukraine’s assets. The speaker of Crimea’s parliament said that its oilfields should be under the care of Moscow. After Sunday’s referendum, those reserves appear to have shifted to Russian control.

Exxon likely doesn’t see much upside in getting into a tiff with Russia over the Black Sea, especially since it hadn’t even agreed on a production sharing agreement with Kiev yet. But Exxon has billions of dollars of investments in the Russia Arctic in a co-venture with Rosneft, its largest non-US project. If the situation escalates, Rosneft might possibly be targeted with sanctions.

It’s not easy diagnosing the insanity being spouted by the media regarding Russia’s invasion of Crimea, and I don’t claim to have the answers, but it appears to be closely tied to oil interests. It certainly looks like Russia will take Crimea, won’t pay a big price for it, and there’s not a thing anyone can do about it. And the best explanation is oil. Russia is now the world’s #1 oil exporting nation, topping Saudi Arabia by more than a million barrels a day. Russia has an estimated 80 billion barrels in reserves and everybody wants some.

Wall Street has figured out that they can’t allow jingoism to affect their bets. Analysts from Goldman Sachs Group, Bank of America, and Morgan Stanley have said Europe probably won’t back sanctions that limit flows of Russia’s oil and gas. European members of the Paris-based International Energy Agency imported 32% of their raw crude oil, fuels and gas-based chemical feedstocks from Russia in 2012.

Even if Angela Merkel isn’t bluffing when she says Germany is willing to suffer in the cold and dark to punish Russia, she’d have a hard time getting the less disciplined countries of the EU to participate in her stoic resistance. And even if Merkel and the EU can herd cats and present a unified front, Russia will simply sell oil out the back door. Yes, Russia now has a back door. Last year, Russia completed East Siberian-Pacific Ocean pipeline, and that connects Russian oil to China and East Asia.

This weekend on the CNN, Senator John McCain said, “Russia is a gas station masquerading as a country. It’s kleptocracy, it’s corruption, it’s a nation that is really only dependent upon oil and gas for their economy.” Yea, O.K., so what?  You could say the same thing about Saudi Arabia, that beacon of democracy and a fine American ally.

Let’s keep it simple; you probably drove a car today; the food you eat today was transported by truck; everything in this country runs on oil. It certainly isn’t the best source of energy but it is the dominant source of energy. And for a long time now, we have run our foreign policy on the idea of securing oil to keep the economic engine running. We have sent troops into harm’s way to keep the oil flowing. We have sacrificed untold bounty and blood at the altar.

You might think we would be smart enough to step back and reconsider this strategy. It might make sense to concentrate our energy and our brainpower and our capital toward developing alternatives to the insanity.

I can tell you that very soon you will be hearing about groundbreaking alternatives in energy that have the potential to break this old cycle. Energy stories that sound impossible, but just remember, something is only impossible until it is done.

Thursday, September 12, 2013 - Going Interstellar

Going Interstellar

by Sinclair Noe

DOW – 25 = 15,300
SPX – 5 = 1683
NAS – 9 = 3715
10 YR YLD - .01 = 2.91%
OIL + .02 = 108.62
GOLD – 44.80 = 1322.00
SILV– 1.48 = 21.84

The war hasn't started..., yet.

The peace talks are underway in Geneva between Secretary of State Kerry and his Russian counterpart Lavrov. In a news conference ahead of the Geneva talks, Foreign Minister Lavrov said the resolution of the chemical weapons issue in Syria would make any military strike by the United States unnecessary. The UN has confirmed it has received documents from Syria on joining the Chemical Weapons Convention, a key step in the Russian plan. Syria's president said it would submit arms data one month after signing, but Mr Kerry has rejected that time-frame.

Even before the talks, Russian President Vlad Putin weighed in with an op-ed in the New York Times arguing that a military strike risked “spreading the conflict far beyond Syria’s borders” and would violate international law, undermining postwar stability. Putin says poison gas was used in Syria but not by Assad; he also didn't say who sold the poison gas to Syria; he talks about peace and democracy; and he finishes the editorial by saying “We are all different, but when we ask for the Lord’s blessings, we must not forget that God created us equal.” It's all quite bizarre, to have Putin lecturing the US on democracy and morality and God.

The good news is that the war hasn't started..., yet.

And that means we can focus on domestic problems, like shutting down the government. Lawmakers are tied up in knots over increasing the debt ceiling this fall, but they eventually will; eventually. The only question is how messy the process will be. They really don't have much choice. Even if they shut down government for a while, they can't make the stunt last long.  A default would hurt the economy and markets, and most lawmakers know this. That's why they regularly raise the debt ceiling before it comes to that. In fact, since 1940, Congress has effectively approved 79 increases to the debt ceiling. That's an average of more than one a year.

Despite some politicians' incorrect assertions, raising the debt ceiling does not give the government a "license to spend more." It simply lets Treasury borrow the money it needs to pay the bills in full and on time. Those bills are for services already performed and entitlement benefits already approved by Congress. In other words, it's a license to pay the bills the country incurs as a result of past decisions made by lawmakers from both parties over the years. It sounds like it should be a straight forward deal. It's not. It's a chance to position for whatever idea a politician can position for. Things will likely get ugly before they get uglier. That's about the only thing we can count on from Congress.

Believe it or not, Greece's job situation is getting worse. Greece's jobless rate hit a record high of 27.9 percent in June, and was more than twice the average rate in the euro zone of 12.1 percent in July.  The unemployment rate has more than tripled since 2008, the start of a six-year recession which has wiped out about a quarter of Greece's economy. Joblessness is a major headache for the government as it scrambles to hit fiscal targets and carry out structural reforms demanded by its international creditors.

Meanwhile, an independence rally in Catalonia drew more than one million. That's a lot of people. Greece's unemployment rate is now higher than Spain's

If you plan on buying one of Apple's new iPhones, you may want to head to Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart announced it will carry the new devices and sell them at prices lower than Apple and other retailers. Wal-Mart said it will carry 16-gigabyte versions of the iPhone 5c and the iPhone 5s. The iPhone 5c will be available for $79 ($20 cheaper than its regular price) with a two-year contract from AT&T, Verizon or Sprint. The iPhone 5s will be available for $189 ($10 cheaper than its regular price) from the same carriers.

It's strange when Wal-Mart can get a better deal from Apple than the Apple stores.

A Dutch designer thinks the way people currently buy electronics is inherently wasteful. As soon as a new device comes out, the old one is tossed in the garbage or put on the shelf to collect dust. He's introduced a new phone called PhoneBloks, a smartphone that has detachable components on its front and back so that everything from the processor to the camera can be easily upgraded without discarding the rest of the phone. The entire contraption is held together by a pegboard-style base, with a screen -- also replaceable -- mounted on the front. It's kind of like lego-blocks for a phone.

If you're looking for a good deal on airline tickets; you might want to keep an eye on United Airlines. For about 15 minutes today, they offered $0 fares plus $5 in tax for many domestic flights. That worked out to $10 flights between Washington DC and Hawaii, while others scooped up over a dozen tickets to destinations all over the country.

And then, just as quickly as the airfares showed up, United’s reservation system slammed to a halt, reporting “United.com is currently undergoing maintenance  Flight search and booking are unavailable for all flights.” They say it was a computer glitch.

California lawmakers are poised to raise the state's minimum wage by 25% -- a move that would make the state's hourly workers among the most highly paid in the country. Millions of workers would see their hourly pay jump from $8 to $9 on July 1, 2014 and to $10 on Jan. 1, 2016, under legislation which received strong support this week from the state's Governor Jerry Brown and other legislative leaders. "The minimum wage has not kept pace with rising costs," Brown said in a statement. "This legislation is overdue and will help families that are struggling in this harsh economy."

A survey by Duke University and CFO Magazine  of more than 500 Chief Financial Officers, shows they expect to boost full-time hiring by nearly 1.8% next year, which represents a slight increase from this year. The results indicate that despite worries over President Obama's health care reform law, a recent tendency on the part of companies to hire more part-time workers may be turning around; so far in 2013, companies have hired more than four times the amount of part-time workers than full-time workers, while in 2012 the opposite was true.

New figures on wealth inequality from economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez show that the top 10 percent earned more than half of our nation's income. That hasn't happened since they started tracking these figures a century ago.

What about the bottom 99 percent? After being left out of the post-crisis boom, they finally saw an increase in their earnings last year, but it was less than one percent. By contrast, income for the top one percent rose twenty percent. The really rich, the top 0.01 percent, saw their income soar by more than 32 percent.

As the Economic Policy Institute recently observed, "The median worker saw an increase of just 5.0 percent between 1979 and 2012, despite productivity growth of 74.5 percent--while the 20th percentile worker saw wage erosion of 0.4 percent .

Shareholders of Dell approved a proposal led by company founder Michael Dell to take the computer company private. The proposal, worth about $25 billion, won an unspecified majority of votes from the holders of Dell stock. The buyers consortium sweetened the deal in recent weeks in response to criticism from activist Carl Icahn and others, who had complained their offer undervalued the company.

As Dell goes private, a couple of companies are going public. Hilton Worldwide, which is owned by Blackstone Group, could be valued at $30 billion. Blackstone does not intend to issue so many shares that it loses control of Hilton.

Twitter is going public. It's could be the biggest IPO since Facebook, and hopefully they learned a lesson from that. The IPO announcement came in the form of a tweet. The details of Twitter’s filing are confidential, thanks to the JOBS Act.

Designed to foster more IPOs for “emerging growth” companies, the IPO provisions of the law have become a way for most companies that want to go public do so with less investor scrutiny. The new rules have cut the time that all that information is available to the public to three weeks before the roadshow.

And finally, scientists now have strong evidence that NASA's Voyager 1 probe has crossed the heliosphere, the magnetic boundary separating the solar system's sun, planets and solar wind from the rest of the galaxy. The first man-made object to leave the solar system.

"In leaving the heliosphere and setting sail on the cosmic seas between the stars, Voyager has joined other historic journeys of exploration: The first circumnavigation of the Earth, the first steps on the Moon," Ed Stone, chief scientist on the Voyager mission said "That's the kind of event this is, as we leave behind our solar bubble."

The twin spacecraft Voyager 1 and 2 were launched in 1977, 16 days apart. Voyager 2 will exit the solar system in about 2 billion more miles. Voyager 1 has a long way to go before the next stop. The probe will fly near a star in about 40,000 years. But as of today, human-kind has gone interstellar. 

Friday, September 06, 2013 - Fed Policy Creates Inequality

Fed Policy Creates Inequality

by Sinclair Noe

DOW – 14 = 14,922
SPX + .09 = 1655
NAS + 1 = 3660
10 YR YLD - .04 = 2.93%
OIL+ 1.86 = 110.23
GOLD + 21.10 = 1389.80
SILV + .63 = 23.94

The war hasn't started ..., yet.

This morning we got the big monthly jobs report. Nonfarm payrolls increased by 169,000 jobs last month falling short of the 175,000 to 180,000 Wall Street had expected. Not only did hiring miss expectations last month, but the job count for June and July was revised to show 74,000 fewer positions added than previously reported.

While the unemployment rate fell a tenth of a percentage point to 7.3 percent, its lowest level since December 2008, the decline reflected a drop in the share of working-age Americans who either have a job or are looking for one. That participation measure reached its lowest point since August 1978, a further sign of underlying economic weakness. The rate for men touched a record low.

U-6, a measure of underemployment that includes people who want a job but who have given up searching and those working part time because they cannot find full-time jobs fell three tenths of a percentage point to a 4-1/2-year low of 13.7 percent.

The private sector accounted for the bulk of the job gains last month, but government payrolls increased 17,000 as local governments hired teachers for the new school year. Factory employment rebounded after falling in July. Construction payrolls were flat as both residential and nonresidential construction jobs fell. There was another month of strong job gains in the retail sector. Leisure and hospitality employment also posted solid increases as did health care and social assistance.

So, a generally weak jobs report; there was still growth; we posted a positive number; not a negative, but it was weak growth. That got people wondering if the Federal Reserve would still taper this month. It's widely expected the Fed will cut back or taper its purchases of Treasuries and Mortgage backed securities; currently the Fed is purchasing $85 billion per month; the idea is to reduce purchases to just $70 billion, as they try to slowly get away from the QE purchases. Did today's jobs numbers change anything? Probably not. Certainly nothing that made an overwhelming case. It can be argued how much impact QE has had on jobs in the first place.

One area QE has had a big impact is in the mortgage market; 10-year Treasuries hit 3% briefly yesterday, and the 5% mortgage is likely not too far behind. Oddly enough, jumbo loans are actually now cheaper than conforming loans for the first time in anyone’s memory. The Federal Reserve has essentiallly subsidized the housing market with its mortgage backed securities purchases. And as QE maybe starts to unwind, we ask who won and who lost?

According to a new report from mortgage-backed securities analysts at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, “the cost burdens are disproportionately impacting low-income groups and renters.” Not exactly earth-shattering news unless you consider the source. (I've been saying it for years, but now BofA admits it.)

One important insight here is that “easy monetary policy,” as evidenced by QE, is correlated with the rise in income inequality over the past 35 years. The two periods over this time where inequality really shot up came right after recessions in 1991-93 and 2007-11. These two periods were characterized by aggressive monetary policy, including quantitative easing. Since the primary credit channel in the successive rounds of QE targeted assets for either the rich or near-rich, this stands to reason.

But the primary focus of the paper is housing, and the primary focus of the Fed's QE policy also appears to have been housing. The Fed basically created the conditions for a rise in home prices, thinking that would have great positive effects for the economy. BofA/Merrill cites a Harvard State of the Nation Housing report.

The report starts with comments on the benefits associated with housing’s revival, such as home equity accumulation, but it quickly turns to a starker reality, which is that “the number of households with severe housing cost burdens has set a new record.” This language would be more consistent with the view of housing expressed in gold terms – housing is not a good news story. Moreover, the report shows that the hardest hit in the population are renters and those at the low end of the income distribution. The share of renters in the population, now at 35%, has been rising in recent years, as the homeownership rate has steadily declined from the bubble peak in 2004. So not only are renters disproportionately sharing in increased housing costs, the percent of households in this category is increasing in the wake of the financial crisis.

The Harvard report defines two categories of households with respect to housing costs as a share of income: moderately burdened and severely burdened. Moderately burdened households pay 30%-50% of pre-tax income for housing; severely burdened households pay more than 50%. Rising home prices laid the burden primarily on owners between 2001 and 2007, but as home prices declined and credit tightened, the burden shifted to renters. Most importantly, in aggregate, between 2001 and 2011, there was a 35% increase in the number of burdened households, for a net addition of 11 million households to the burdened category. The percent of burdened households grew from 29.4% to 36.8%.

Even with mortgage rates plummeting from 7% to 4% from 2001 to 2011, 42 million households experienced moderate or severe housing costs. And the report doesn't take into account negative equity. Renters took the brunt of this stress in the later period; by 2011, an incredible 50% of all renters were burdened by high housing costs.

This impacts quality of life. If you spend most of your income just to keep a roof over your head, it means you spend less for other things like food, health care, transportation, and education. And that lead the banking analysts to conclude that the Fed was adding to inequality. Specifically, the report says:

If monetary policy is in fact responsible for increasing housing cost burdens through policies that have inflated home values, then it is also responsible for limiting the available dollars that lower income families have to spend on education. If unequal access to education is indeed a key driver of growing income inequality, then it appears as if the vicious cycle of rising home prices, higher housing costs, less money to spend on education and greater income inequality is poised to continue.

So today, when the jobs numbers came out weaker than expected, the speculation centered on whether the Fed would cut back on QE. When you consider that QE in reality is lip service and happy talk about full employment and stable prices, and the actual outcome is greater inequality, well, maybe something other than Fed monetary policy would be better.

The G20 wrapped up its summit in Russia. The summary was that the situation in the global economy looks better now than it did five years ago. Economic growth is recovering, but there are still risks, and saying it was too early to ease off government stimulus spending, in spite of recent positive economic news. The G20 now faces a multi-speed recovery with the US economy pushing ahead, Europe maybe finding a floor and developing economies facing blowback from the looming 'taper' by the Fed. Collateral damage from the Fed's easy monetary policies can be found in emerging market economies that enjoyed rapid growth with a flood of cheap dollars, only to see those easy dollars dry up with talk of taper.

The G20 Summit was designed to deal with economic issues, but this one got caught up in the Syrian situation. Obama persuaded nine other G20 nations plus Spain to join the United States in signing a statement calling for a strong international response, although it fell short of supporting military strikes. Obama and Putin talked but could not find agreement. Unable to win Security Council backing because of the opposition by veto-wielding Russia and China, Obama is seeking the support of Congress instead. He declined to speculate whether he would go ahead with a military strike in Syria if Congress opposed it but said most G20 leaders condemned the use of chemical weapons even if they disagreed whether to use force without going through the U.N..

Looking ahead to Monday, Congress reconvenes. This is the first day that both the Senate and the House are back in session after the long summer recess. There are many urgent issues waiting to be resolved — including the continuing resolution that will keep the US government open for business, and this thing with Syria. Sept. 17 & 18 is the next Fed FOMC meeting. And then as we wrap up September, Congress must pass a continuing resolution by Sept. 30 or the government will shut down Oct. 1. There is no chance that a complete 2014 budget can be passed before Oct.1, the start of 2014 fiscal year. A short-term, extension-type continuing resolution for government funding must be passed instead, before Oct. 1. The duration of the continuing resolution will likely be pretty short — say, a couple of months -- so that the Congress does not have to make tough decisions on issues such as sequesters for the 2014 fiscal year.

The war hasn't started..., yet.

Thursday, September 05, 2013 - Mustering Support

Mustering Support

by Sinclair Noe

DOW + 6 = 14,937
SPX + 2 = 1655
NAS + 9 = 3658
10 YR YLD + .08 = 2.98%
OIL + 1.23 = 108.46
GOLD – 23.90 = 1368.70
SILV - .25 = 23.31

The war hasn't started, yet.

President Obama is in St. Petersburg Russia for the G-20 summit, he received a cordial but cool greeting from Russian President Vlad Putin, however Putin had harsh words for Secretary of State John Kerry, calling him flat out a “liar”, referring to his testimony regarding Syria, a close ally of Russia.The United States has given up trying to work with the U.N. Security Council on Syria, accusing Russia of holding the council hostage. Russia, backed by China, has used its veto power three times to block council resolutions condemning Assad's government and threatening it with sanctions. 

Yesterday, a Senate panel authorized military action in a “limited and specified manner”. A full vote is expected next week. Syria is dominating a summit with an official agenda focused on economic growth, monetary policy and global banking and tax rules. Obama began meeting with other leaders of the Group of 20 nations, trying to persuade allies to give the US a measure of political cover even if they withhold military support. Obama has already met with Shinzo Abe of Japan, Francois Hollande of France – who may be the only US ally taking part in a strike against Syria, and also a meeting with Dilma Rousseff of Brazil.

Brazil won't be part of any military action, and Rousseff might even cancel a planned trip to the White House in October 23^rd; the reason has nothing to do with Syria. Rather the Brazilian President is a bit ticked off about information leaked by Edward Snowden that shows the US spied on communications between Rousseff and her top aides. Brazil’s Senate is creating a committee to probe the spying allegations and seek federal police protection for Glenn Greenwald, the journalist who revealed the documents from Snowden. Brazil's foreign minister said: “This represents an inadmissible and unacceptable violation of Brazilian sovereignty. This kind of practice doesn’t live up to the type of trust needed to have a strategic partnership.”

Indeed, the pressure for military action in Syria will find reluctance from several countries as it follows in the footsteps of the Snowden allegations. And if Obama can't muster international support for military intervention in Syria, it will make the job of Congressional support more difficult. Various handicappers believe the resolution would go down to defeat if the vote were held today. So far, the Administration has been unable to make much of a case, beyond moral outrage. In a post Iraq world, people are actually asking pertinent questions like: how long will it last? What is the objective? How much will it cost? So far these are unanswered or inadequately answered questions. It's interesting that they can always find money for military action isn't it?

It is entirely possible that we could soon witness the amazing spectacle of Congress defeating a war resolution backed by the president and every top elected leader.

Of course, a resolution can be defeated and not killed outright. Remember TARP? The first vote for TARP was defeated and it took a market swan dive, a second TARP vote, and the addition of lots of pork to reverse the initial vote. But also bear in mind that the reason TARP was initially voted down was the barrage of voter phone calls and e-mails against it, reportedly 99% opposed until financial services firms started getting employees to call in favor of the bill, which shifted the tally to a mere 80% or so of callers opposed.

Even if the President musters enough votes to strike Syria, at what political cost? Any president has a limited amount of political capital to mobilize support for his agenda, in Congress and, more fundamentally, with the American people. Time and again we have seen domestic agendas succumb to military adventures abroad — both because the military-industrial-congressional complex drains money that might otherwise be used for domestic goals, and because the public’s attention is diverted from urgent problems at home to exigencies elsewhere around the globe.

We've mentioned before that Syria is a minor player in the oil markets, but geographically any action there would have an affect on oil prices. The rarely noticed reason is that Syria is closely allied with Iran, and indeed this whole Syria thing may have more to do with Iran than Syria. Anyway, if something happens, we'll likely see a spike in oil prices. We've been seeing oil over $100 a barrel and gasoline above $3.40 a gallon for much of the last 3 years. Those prices would have shocked many Americans a few years ago, but have now become the new normal.

What changed? Well, Americans are breaking their addiction to driving, at least a little. We own fewer cars per household than just a few years ago. Unfortunately, some of the reduction in motor gasoline consumption directly relates to massive under-employment, especially among those under 25, as well as lower wages among the employed. And the cars we own are more fuel efficient. The average fuel efficiency for new cars sold in the US just six years ago was only 20.8 miles per gallon; today it's 24.8 MPG. That may not sound like much, but it's about a 20% improvement.

Higher domestic production and lower American consumption have meant declining imports of crude oil and petroleum products-- a reversal of another once seemingly inexorable trend. The economic burden of imported oil is represented not by the number of barrels, but instead by the real value of the resources we must surrender in order to obtain the oil. The dollar value of petroleum imports as a share of GDP has come down a little as a result of recent gains in production and conservation, but still remains significantly elevated relative to the levels of a decade ago.

Let's get back to economic news.

Tomorrow we'll see the monthly jobs report for August. We got some clues today. Jobless claims declined by 9,000 to 323,000 in the week ended Aug. 3. Employers seem to be holding the line on dismissals. Meanwhile, ADP, the private payroll processing firm issued their monthly report which showed companies increasing employment by 176,000 workers in August. The ADP report does not always match with the government report, but folks like to use it for guesstimates anyway. It's widely expected the economy added 175,000 to 180,000 jobs last month, up from July's gain of just 162,000. Anything over 200,000 would tilt the odds heavily in favor of the Fed beginning to taper QE security purchases at the FOMC meeting in two weeks.

 

Bill Gross, the head of PIMCO, in his September letter to investors says that central banks' easy money policies have become less effective in generating economic stability, and that zero-bound interest rates have threatened finance and investment in the "real economy."

Gross writes: "Why invest in financial or real assets if bond prices could only go down, and/or stock prices could no longer be pumped up via the artificial steroids of QE?"

Gross added that liquidity will be "challenged" when policymakers start to tighten easy money policies and stocks may also be "at risk" when the Fed ends its bond-buying program. In other words, the Fed's exit from QE might not be baked into the cake just yet.

If you've been listening to the Financial Review for more than a day or two, you know that I think the banking system poses a systemic threat to the economy. A few years ago I wrote a book called “Eat theBankers”, and you can follow these daily broadcasts at the website EattheBankers.com. So, it is reassuring for me when I hear others jumping on the bandwagon. I'm not going to go into detail, but Simon Johnson, the former chief economist for the International Monetary Fund, recently wrote an article for Bloomberg, and I'm posting the link: The title is: Bank Leverage is the DefiningDebate of Our Time.

The basic idea of the article is that excessive leverage could bring down the world economy again. And the next financial collapse could be even worse than what we experienced in the fall of 2008. The debate is between the Too Big to Fail Banks that want to take more risks precisely because they can draw on implicit or explicit government guarantees, and on the other side are sane people who realize that the banks could destroy the economy.

The banks don't want to set aside safe, reserves, they'd rather take that money and gamble. Letting banks calculate their own risk weights or develop their own methodologies makes no sense -- conflicts of interest predominate when you are too big to fail. But asking rating companies or government officials to come up with meaningful risk weights also is doomed to fail. They lack the information, motivation and compensation incentives to do this right.

We've had this debate before; at the beginning of the 20^th century Teddy Roosevelt brought a case against JPMorgan's Northern Securities Company as part of the anti-trust movement. The case was ultimately decided by the Supreme Court in the government's favor. Had the monopolists won, instead of enjoying a vibrant competitive economy and a century of unprecedented growth that made the U.S. the world’s greatest power, we would have likely ended up like other unfortunate countries where a few oligarchs rule to the disservice of the broader public and the greater good of the economy.