Wednesday, December 11, 2013 - Let's Make A Deal

Let's Make A Deal

by Sinclair Noe

DOW – 129 = 15,843
SPX – 20 = 1782
NAS -56 = 4003
10 YR YLD + .05 = 2.84%
OIL -1.09 = 97.42
GOLD – 9.70 = 1253.30
SILV - .13 = 20.40

We have a deal. Bipartisan budget negotiators, led by senator Patty Murray for the Democrats and House Republican Paul Ryan, announced last night that they have reached a deal to settle the federal budget for two years, and avert a possible government shutdown. We have a deal; it's just not a done deal. There is pressure from both the left and right, as Democrats sought to negotiate a further deal on unemployment benefits and Republicans fended off attacks from conservative pressure groups.

House Speaker John Boehner lashed out at right wing groups such as the Heritage Foundation, claiming they were criticizing the compromise deal before they even knew what was in it. Meanwhile, some Democrats lashed out at the $1 trillion deal because it did not include an extension of long term unemployment benefits for some 2.1 million out of work workers.

Republican leaders will likely have to rely on House Minority leader Nancy Pelosi to deliver sufficient Democratic votes to counter any rebellion among their Tea Party wing, which gives the minority leader a rare moment of leverage. So far, Republicans have not ruled out allowing a separate vote to extend long-term unemployment benefits, but signal they too want more concessions from Democrats first. There is also opposition from Republicans in the Senate, who are less able to block the budget's passage, but are under pressure from a renewed wave of primary challenges by Tea Party candidates in the 2014 midterms.

The framework includes $85 billion in spending cuts and non-tax revenue from new fees to replace the mandatory budget cuts and supply a modest amount of deficit reduction. As drafted, the bill would reverse $63 billion in across-the-board spending cuts scheduled to take effect in the current budget year and the next one, easing a crunch on programs as diverse as environmental protection and the Pentagon.

It would offset the higher spending with $85 billion in savings over a decade from higher fees and relatively modest curtailments on government benefit programs.

Nearly a third of the total savings would come nearly a decade from now, in 2022 and 2023, partly from extending a current 2 percent cut in payments to Medicare providers. Also, future federal workers would pay more toward their own retirement, fees would rise on air travelers and corporations would pay more to the government agency that guarantees their pension programs.

With the increased spending to begin immediately and much of the savings delayed, Congressional Budget Office estimates showed the deal would push deficits higher than currently projected in the current year and each of the next two. The CBO said red ink would rise by about $23 billion in this 2014 fiscal year, $18 billion in the next year and about $4 billion in the one after that.

Though congressional negotiators may have reached an agreement over the federal budget, they may not have may not have figured out how they will get it passed. Still, the fallout from the government shutdown in October wasn't difficult to understand. Americans are sick and tired of the dysfunction in Washington, and another shutdown, or even the threat of another shutdown is unacceptable. There could be a vote on the deal as early as tomorrow.

On Wall Street, good news is bad news. The idea that Washington might actually be able to pass a budget raised the expectations that the Federal Reserve might be able to scale back it's quantitative easing stimulus plan. Indeed, the big question is not whether the Fed will taper, but when. The FOMC meets next week, and the Fed policymakers will likely debate how best to communicate their plan. It's still unlikely they will actually start tapering now; that would be a little shocking, but they might indicate they are going to do it in the near future, with the caveat that taper proceeds absent some exogenous catastrophe. So, expect some clarification on the thresholds for taper and interest rates.

Across the globe, central banks have resorted to forward guidance on interest rates in the wake of the financial crisis to convince markets they are serious about supporting recovery in the world's top economies for a long time to come. So, even as the Fed is likely to offer a more solid opinion on taper, they will likely offer a more precise outlook for maintaining Zero Interest Rate Policy. In a Reuters poll conducted this week, 32 economists said they expect the central bank to wait until March, while 22 looked for a move in January. Only 12 expected a move next week.

The "better than expected" figures in the latest employment data were far below the level of job creation needed to put unemployed Americans back to work on any kind of reasonable schedule. It was even below the average monthly job creation during most of the 1990s. The jobs picture is still far worse than many people would have you believe. The current unemployment rate doesn't include the workers who have become discouraged and left the workforce, and workforce participation rates remain at historic lows. The jobs numbers don't include the underemployed who are working part-time and prefer to work full-time. The ratio of job seekers to available jobs remains discouragingly high. There are no jobs for nearly two out of every three job seekers, no matter how hard they look.

The employment picture for the long-term jobless remains dismal. And many of those people were left out in the cold under the budget deal announced last night. They will fall off the roles, and basically become invisible for economic data purposes. Of course, they aren't really invisible; they're still there. But maybe there isn't anything the Fed policymakers can do to achieve maximum employment. Maybe a taper is an admission, a clear and honest communication that Fed policy is impotent in its dual mandate, and maybe the time has come to amend the Fed's tools so that all that money they've been dropping out of helicopters falls somewhere else besides Wall Street, maybe they can toss a little bit over Main Street.

Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan was speaking at an investor conference in New York today. Dimon said he was thankful congressional leaders had reached a budget deal and was "less worried" about the impact of an eventual scaling back of the Federal Reserve's market-friendly stimulus measures. Dimon said the budget agreement was good for business confidence and that he would send thank you cards to congressional leaders. That makes me a bit more nervous about the deal.

Dimon said business demand for loans should rise to more normal levels as confidence rises, and demand for investment banking services in 2014 would be stronger than many people expect; and higher interest rates that would come with a Fed tapering would be good for the bank. He also said public attention to investigations of the bank by regulators and law enforcers was "really, really painful." Ahhh, maybe he should stop breaking the law, and then he wouldn't have all that painful attention.

Time magazine named Pope Francis its Person of the Year, crediting him with shifting the message of the Catholic Church while capturing the imagination of millions of people who had become disillusioned with the Vatican. This is the third time the magazine has chosen a pope as its Person of the Year. Time gave that honor to Pope John Paul II in 1994 and to Pope John XXIII in 1963.

Pope Francis, who, as archbishop of Buenos Aires was known as the slum cardinal for his visits to the poor and penchant for subway travel - beat former U.S. National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden and gay rights activist Edith Windsor for the award.

The new pope's style is characterized by frugality. He shunned the spacious papal apartment in the Vatican's Apostolic Palace to live in a small suite in a Vatican guest house, and he prefers a Ford Focus to the traditional pope's Mercedes. In September, Francis gave a groundbreaking and frank interview, in which he said the Vatican must shake off an obsession with teachings on abortion, contraception and homosexuality, and become more merciful. And in July, Francis told reporters he was not in a position to judge homosexuals who are of good will and in search of God, marking a break from his predecessor, Benedict, who said homosexuality was an intrinsic disorder.

And a couple of weeks ago he published his apostolic exhortation, The Joy of the Gospel, which has gained attention for what some are calling an attack on capitalism, but is more precisely an attack on unbridled financial speculation and runaway greed. Which may actually be an attack on capitalism, but he did it without using the actual word “capitalism”.

Rather he made an impassioned plea for society and government to protect the vulnerable from the predations of the greedy, to include everyone in this prosperity, not by taking from the rich to give to the poor but by making sure they have a role to play. His call to reject the “idolatry of money and the dictatorship of an impersonal economy lacking a truly human purpose” are lessons we've heard for a couple of thousand years, and that ancient economic wisdom is as valid today as it was 2014 years ago.

Wednesday, March 13, 2013 - The World Changes, Some Things Don't

Mark your Calendar, April 5 & 6 and make your reservations for the 2013 Wealth Protection Conference in Tempe, AZ. For conference information visit www.buysilvernow.com or click here or call 480-820-5877. This year's conference features Roger Weigand, Nathan Liles, David Smith, Mark Liebovit, Arch Crawford, Ian McAvity, Bill Tatro, and I will speak on Friday. There is an expanded Q&A session with all speakers on Saturday. I hope you can attend.

The World Changes, Some Things Don't

by Sinclair Noe

DOW + 5 = 14,455
SPX + 2 = 1554
NAS + 2 = 3245
10 YR YLD un = 2.02%
OIL - .03 = 92.51
GOLD – 5.00 = 1588.70
SILV - .23 = 29.02

Today, the chimney billowed white smoke. The Catholic church has a new pope; Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio; he'll be called Francis, and he is from Argentina. This is a big change; a non-European pope. Though there is some controversy, Pope Francis has been described as a modest man, a simple man, very much involved in social justice, and he is known for his service to the poor. The world changes.

Some things don't change. The poor are still poor, the rich are still rich. A new pope doesn't change that. Record highs for the Dow Industrial Average does not change that. The wealthiest 10 percent of households own 80 percent of all corporate stocks.

It is good times for corporate America. Even as corporate profits have rocketed up by 20 percent a year since the end of 2008, the chieftains are still refusing to increase hiring and are holding down wages. As a result, the share of America's total income that goes to workers has now tumbled to the lowest level in nearly half a century. Today's massive backlog of unemployed and underemployed workers allows corporations to bring in hoards of top-quality applicants and literally toy with them. It's now common for a job-seeker to return five, seven, nine or more times to the same company hiring hall for senseless rounds of interviews - only to have the company whimsically decide not to fill the opening at all.

From Google to Starbucks, major corporations have roughly doubled the duration of their interview process in the last two years. The New York Times noted that one fellow seeking a video-editing job was run through a gauntlet of nine interviews and made to undergo a ridiculous battery of psychological and personality exams, along with a math quiz and a spelling test - after which the company simply closed the opening.

Insulting, yes, but expensive, too. The out-of-work interviewee has to pay for producing work samples and cover the cost of everything from dry cleaning to parking fees. The job-dangling corporation, on the other hand, can simply force existing employees to shoulder a heavier load, while it trifles with applicants looking for what is laughingly referred to in CorporateSpeak as "the purple squirrel" - an applicant too qualified to exist.

The world changes, yet it is still full of inequality. Even as the nation’s life expectancy has marched steadily upward, reaching 78.5 years in 2009, a growing body of research shows that those gains are going mostly to those at the upper end of the income ladder. If you have money, you are likely to live longer and healthier.

The tightening economic connection to longevity has profound implications for the debate about trimming the nation’s entitlement programs. Citing rising life expectancy, influential voices including the Simpson-Bowles deficit reduction commission, the Business Roundtable and lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have argued that it makes sense to raise the eligibility age for Social Security and Medicare.

But raising the eligibility ages — currently 65 for Medicare and moving toward 67 for full Social Security benefits — would mean fewer benefits for lower-income workers, who typically die younger than those who make more.

Overall, life expectancy has improved substantially since the first Social Security payments were issued in 1940. Then, a man who made it to 65 could expect to live 12.7 years, compared with 18.6 years in 2010. A woman who turned 65 in 2010 could expect to live 20.7 more years, compared with 14.7 in 1940.

That trend helped persuade lawmakers in 1983 to slowly move the age people could receive full Social Security benefits from 65 to 67, a change that will be complete in 2027. Now, as the cost of providing old-age benefits has emerged as the key driver of the nation’s long-term budget deficit, there is increasing pressure to again raise the retirement age — this time for both Medicare and Social Security.

But given the widening differences in life expectancy for people on opposite ends of the income scale, that would mean a benefit cut that falls heaviest on people who generally are most reliant on Social Security for their retirement income. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure this out You just have to look at the socioeconomic and demographic differences: unemployment, education levels, and income to understand what is going on. This is fueled by poor economics and a lack of access to health insurance and health coverage.

So, this is the backdrop for competing budget plans in Washington. Yesterday, Paul Ryan presented the Republican plan. From the looks of it, the Ryan budget for fiscal year 2014 looks mostly like the Ryan budget for FY2012 and FY2011, with the added extra of banking the tax hikes he didn’t vote for in the fiscal cliff deal. It includes the same vague goal of marginal tax brackets of 10% and 25%, vouchers instead of Medicare, the repeal of Obamacare while keeping the revenue-raisers from Obamacare intact. In a press conference, Ryan explained: “We are not going to give up on destroying the healthcare system.” There are more details, but it really doesn't matter because it will never pass.

More noteworthy is today's budget plan from Senate Democrats. The topline numbers include $1.95 trillion in deficit reduction over 10 year, split between tax hikes and spending cuts, with $100 billion in new spending on a jobs program. This is smaller than Ryan's $5 trillion in cuts, which all come from the spending side.

The spending cuts are divided up this way: $493 billion in domestic savings, including $275 billion in health care cuts that the Democratic source said would not harm seniors or families. Defense spending would be cut by $240 billion in accordance with troop drawdowns from overseas operations. An additional $242 billion in savings come from reduced interest payments.

It’s perhaps possible to come up with $275 billion in health care cuts that “would not harm seniors or families,” but that would have to include reducing payments to stakeholders, something our captured Congress has found nigh impossible, especially when they’ve already handed over the forced market that insurers and hospitals and drug companies accepted as payment for their token give-backs in the Affordable Care Act.

At any rate, discretionary spending is already on a trajectory lower than what we spent as a percentage of GDP in the Eisenhower Administration. The usual argument here is that cuts to social insurance help “protect” the discretionary budget, but they both come up for cuts here.

Meanwhile, the Progressive Caucus issued their own plan. That budget, titled "Back to Work," offers a list of progressive priorities -- a public option for health care, negotiation of Medicare drug prices, a carbon tax, defense cuts, a financial transactions tax, much higher marginal tax rates for millionaires and billionaires, capital gains taxed as ordinary income, and public works projects, among dozens of other ideas.

In the middle of all of this is the White House. And they appear to be engaged in the tactic of saying different things to different audiences. The President said: “My goal is not to chase a balanced budget just for the sake of balance,” and that he’s focused on growing the economy. He also took a few swipes at the big fat target that is the Ryan budget. And then he told Senate Democrats on Tuesday that his budget to be released in April would align closely with their priorities. He also warned that Democrats need to embrace at least some changes to unsustainable entitlement programs in order to achieve their long-term priorities. But Obama acknowledged that Social Security and Medicare, big drivers of federal spending, wouldn’t survive without some changes to save money. Obama added that Republicans must first agree to more revenue hikes before the White House would concede on changes to entitlement programs.

So, we'll start sifting through all the plans and there is a good chance the politicians won't agree on anything, let alone a grand bargain. They have started the discussions at diametrically opposed positions. Delay is itself a policy. Sins of omission may be less visible than those of commission, but they are no less venal for that. Slowly and incrementally, the erosion of public programs triggered by the sequester is beginning to bite. There is no one dramatic moment in that process, of course, just slow death by a thousand cuts. Or they might just crash the government for lack of any better ideas.

So where is the moral outrage when, due to intransigence, the poorest amongst us find their resources diminished, while the profits and incomes of the privileged bounce back as if the past 5 years never happened?

Gandhi was right: Poverty is the worst form of violence. I don't know what the knew pope will say about poverty, but I hope he has studied Gandhi.