Rabu, 11 April 2012

Chris Martenson asks " Are we heading for another 2008 ? " Actually , the answer is No - we are heading for a worse situation than 2008 !

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/chris-martenson-are-we-heading-another-2008


Chris Martenson: "Are We Heading For Another 2008?"

Tyler Durden's picture




Are We Heading For Another 2008?
We all know that central banks and governments have been actively intervening in markets since the 2007 subprime mortgage meltdown destabilized the leveraged-debt-dependent global economy. We also know that unprecedented intervention is now the de facto institutionalized policy of central banks and governments. In some cases, the financial authorities have explicitly stated their intention to “stabilize markets” (translation: reinflate credit-driven speculative bubbles) by whatever means are necessary, while in others the interventions are performed by proxies so the policy remains implicit. 
All through the waning months of 2007 and the first two quarters of 2008, the market gyrated as the Federal Reserve and other central banks issued reassurances that the subprime mortgage meltdown was “contained” and posed no threat to the global economy. The equity market turned to its standard-issue reassurance: “Don’t fight the Fed,” a maxim that elevated the Federal Reserve’s power to goose markets to godlike status.
But alas, the global financial meltdown of late 2008 showed that hubris should not be confused with godlike power. Despite the “impossibility” of the market disobeying the Fed’s commands (“Away with thee, oh tides, for we are the Federal Reserve!”) and the “sure-fire” cycle of stocks always rising in an election year, global markets imploded as the usual bag of central bank and Sovereign State tricks failed in spectacular fashion.
Keep Doing More of What Has Failed Spectacularly
Central banks and states responded by doing more of what had already failed spectacularly. In the ensuing years 2009-2012, they increased money supply and liquidity and lowered interest rates to zero or near-zero. And sovereign states borrowed vast sums to squander on “stimulus spending.” This “doing more of what has failed spectacularly” earned the apt moniker of “extend and pretend.” Nothing was actually fixed, but we were encouraged to believe it had been fixed with a flurry of absurdly complex “reforms” that only increased the power of the central states and banks without actually addressing the underlying causes of the meltdown: extremes of leveraged debt, extreme concentrations of financial wealth that then bought political power, shadow banking and opaque markets for hundreds of trillions of dollars in notional derivatives, systemic fraud and embezzlement, phony valuations assigned to assets and liabilities, and various schemes to misprice risk, among others.
If we had to distill the entire global crisis into the simplest possible statement, we might say that the collateral that supported this great inverted pyramid of leveraged debt vanished, and as a result the entire pyramid crumbled.
Since the global housing bubble was at the heart of the crisis, let’s use housing to explain this simple summarization. If a house that was owned free and clear (no mortgage debt) rose in value from $200,000 to $500,000 during the bubble, the collateral of that asset was valued at $500,000 at the peak. If the house has fallen to $250,000 in the post-bubble decline, the collateral is now $250,000.
Since there was no debt leveraged off of that collateral, the owner experienced no leveraged consequence of that decline. His assets fell, and he felt the “reverse wealth effect,” so he feels poorer even though his asset is nominally worth more than it was prior to the bubble. (Adjusted for inflation, that nominal gain might well vanish into a decline in purchasing power, but that’s another story.)
Compare that to the home purchased for $500,000 with a highly leveraged subprime mortgage in which 3% of actual cash collateral ($15,000) was leveraged into a mortgage of $500,000. (For simplicity’s sake I am leaving out the transaction costs.)
The collateral was leveraged 33-to-1. This is delightfully advantageous if the house continues rising in value to $600,000, as that increase generates a six-fold return on the cash invested ($15,000 in, $90,000 out). But once the house prices slipped 10% to $450,000, then not only did the 3% cash collateral vanish, the collateral supporting the mortgage also declined. The mortgage was no longer “worth” $500,000.
Since Wall Street securitized the mortgage into mortgage-backed securities (MBS) and sold these instruments to investors, then the value of those MBS also fell as the collateral was impaired. And since various derivatives were sold against the collateral of the MBS, then the value of those derivatives was also suspect.
If $1 of collateral is supporting an inverted pyramid of $33 of leveraged debt, which is then the collateral supporting an even larger pyramid of derivatives, then when that $1 of collateral vanishes, the entire edifice has lost its base.
And that's at the heart of current central bank policy: “Extend and pretend” is all about keeping the market value of various assets high enough that there appears to be some collateral present. 
In our example, the mortgage is still valued on the books at $450,000, but the actual collateral — the house — is only worth $250,000. The idea being pursued by central banks around the world is that if they pump enough free money and liquidity into the system, and buy up impaired debt (i.e., debt in which the collateral has vanished), then the illusion that there is still some actual collateral holding up the market can be maintained. 
Subprime Mortgages Have Given Way to Subprime Sovereign Debt
The implosion of overleveraged subprime mortgages triggered the 2008 global meltdown because the market awoke to the fact that the collateral supporting all sorts of debt-based “assets” had vanished into thin air. Four years later, we have another similar moment of recognition: The collateral supporting mountains of sovereign debt in Europe has vanished. The value of the debt — in this case, sovereign bonds — is now suspect.
The European Central Bank (ECB) has played the same hand as the Federal Reserve: Do more of what has failed spectacularly. Expand the money supply, pump in more liquidity and buy up the impaired debt all in the hope that the market will believe that there is still some collateral holding up the leveraged-debt pyramid.
The ultimate collateral supporting the stock market is the book value of the assets owned by the company, but the notional collateral is corporate profits: equities are claims on the future free cash flow generated by the corporation.
There are all sorts of inputs into this calculation, and markets are supposed to reflect these various inputs: currency valuations, sales, profit margins, costs of labor and raw materials, inflation and so on. Now that markets are manipulated to maintain the illusion that there is enough collateral out there somewhere to support the inverted pyramid of leveraged debt, it’s difficult to know what’s real and what’s illusion.
One of the few ways we have to discern the difference is to compare various markets and look for divergences. If a spectrum of markets and indicators is pointing one way and another market is pointing the other way, we then have a basis for asking which one is reflecting illusion and which one is reflecting reality.
In 2008, the central banks and governments lost control of the illusion that there was sufficient collateral to support a stupendous mountain of leveraged debt. By doing more of what failed spectacularly then, they have laboriously reconstructed the illusion that they control the markets (“Away, tides, for we are the ECB!”) and thus the valuation of collateral.
Once again we are sternly warned not to “fight the Fed,” as if the Fed had the financial equivalent of the Death Star (“You don’t know the power of the Dark Side!”). Once again, we are in an election year where the four-year cycle is supposed to “guarantee” an up year in stocks.
Or maybe 2012 is shaping up to reprise 2008, and the market will wake up to the fact that intervention doesn’t create collateral, it only creates the temporary illusion of collateral. 
In Part II: Why A Near-Term Market Rollover is Probable, we will look at key technical indicators that suggest the Fed’s Death Star may not be the ultimate financial weapon in the Universe after all. There is a growing series of global data that suggest the run-up in the equity markets has reached its peak, and that the economic sickness the central banks had hoped to "cure" with all of their money printing is metastasing. 

and consider this ...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/ambroseevans_pritchard/9198517/Europes-banks-beached-as-ECB-stimulus-runs-dry.html

Credit experts say the Spanish and Italian banks are trapped with large losses on sovereign bonds bought with ECB funds under the three-year lending programme, or Long-Term Refinancing Operation (LTRO).
Andrew Roberts, credit chief at RBS, said Spanish banks used ECB funds to purchase five-year Spanish bonds at yields near 3.5pc in February and 4.5pc in December. The same bonds were trading at 4.77pc on Wednesday, implying a large loss on the capital value of the bonds.
It is much the same story for Italian banks pressured into buying Italian debt by their own government. Any further dent to confidence in Italy and Spain over coming weeks – either over fiscal slippage or the depth of economic contraction – could push losses to levels that trigger margin calls on collateral.
"The banks are deeply underwater. This is turning into a disaster for the eurozone periphery now that the liquidity tap has been turned off," said Mr Roberts. "But given the opposition in Germany, the ECB can't easily do another LTRO until there is a major crisis."
Spanish banks bought €67bn of sovereign debt between December and February, while Italian banks bought €54bn. The purchases almost certainly continued in March. These lenders have soaked up most of debt issues in their countries over the past three months, picking up at a juicy return under the "carry trade" while at the same acting as a conduit for the ECB to shore up crippled countries by the back-door.
The snag is becoming evident. Weaker lenders are merely parking the ECB's ultra-cheap funds in these bonds until they need the money to roll over their own debts. That is coming due since European banks have €600bn in redemptions over the rest of the year. Many are now stuck with losses that they cannot afford to crystalise.
"It is going to be a problem if the funding market does not open soon and they have to liquidate their holdings," said Guy Mandy from Nomura. "What the LTRO has done is concentrate systemic risk even further. If everything now goes wrong, it could go wrong in a hurry."
Mr Mandy said the EU's fiscal austerity is itself "self-defeating", asphyxiating growth and further entwining the perilous nexus of fragile banking systems and indebted states. "Europe still lacks a commensurate policy response. The dogged pursuit of pro-cyclical fiscal austerity could force countries into a downward spiral. To minimise risk, monetary policy needs to be exceptionally loose," he said, calling for a blitz of quantitative easing (QE) to remove assets from bank balance sheets.
Mr Mandy said the LTRO is entirely different from the stimulus of the Anglo-Saxon central banks. "There has been no transfer of risk to the ECB's own balance sheet, which is what we think is needed to take away the tail-risk of another EMU blow-up."
Benoit Coeure, France's board member at the ECB, on Wednesday hinted that Frankfurt may be willing to restart direct purchases of Spanish bonds to cap rising yields, saying the debt rout over recent weeks is unjustified.
The comments triggered a recovery of Club Med debt but such action is fraught with its own risks even if the German Bundesbank is willing to help a country that is seen – in German eyes at least – to be dragging its feet on fiscal austerity.
David Owen from Jefferies Fixed Income said that the ECB pushes other investors "down the food-chain" instantly when it buys Spanish and Italian debt, raising the loss ratio if either country slides into a Greek-style restructuring.
This has become a sore subject for investors following the Greek debacle where all EU bodies – including the European Investment Bank, which is not a lender of last resort – were exempted from having to take haircuts. Others such as the Norwegian state pension fund suffered 75pc losses.
Japanese investors have sold €48bn of eurozone debt over the past year, according to Bloomberg, and are steering clear of any EMU states that could be given the Greek treatment.
"I'm not planning to add Spanish or Italian bonds anytime soon," said Masataka Horii from Kokusai Global Sovereign Open Fund.
Mr Owen said the eurozone's slide into recession will intensify debt jitters and force the ECB to respond. "It will have to cut rates to near zero, and ultimately launch full-scale QE, perhaps as soon as the third quarter."
Mr Owen said contortions caused by ECB intervention would not be an issue if the bank acted with force majeure and conviction, as the central banks of the US, UK and Switzerland have.
"The ECB says its action is 'temporary and limited', and that is precisely the problem," he said. "They are making things worse with piecemeal measures. Economic historians are going to be very damning of the policy mistakes made during this whole episode."
and then consider the following data..... look at where the PIIGS were in 2007 .....

Greek ten year debt yield -  April 30  , 2007 -- ------- 4.56 percent 
Portuguese ten year debt --  April 30 , 2007 -- --------4. 28 percent 
Italian ten year debt  --------  April 30 , 2007  ---------- 4. 37 percent 
Ireland ten year debt  ---------November 12 , 2007 -- 4.25 percent 
Spanish ten year debt  ------  April 30 , 2007 ---------- 4.20 percent

     Needless to say , the yields for the above countries is quite a bit higher than in 2007 , before the storms of 2008 even hit. What started as a libor problem in europe in the summer of 2007 , just as subprime was hitting here in the States , morphed into a bank solvency problem for the Western banks in 2008 / early 2009. What's different now is the banks are still insolvent , butt now the sovereigns / ECB and Fed have been drawn into the quicksand of debt....... So when the next and inevitable financial crisis hits , consider where are now as compared with conditions prior to 2008 , ask who comes to the rescue ( and don't say the BRIC nations ) , ponder what further steps can the FED / ECB or IMF do at this point and what happens when eurozone nations start to flee the " Zone " - what if Germany cuts and runs ? So , no we aren't heading for another 2008 - what happens later in 2012 and into 2013 will be far worse......

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