crash

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Is China’s economy headed for a crash?

In his assessment of the global economy’s performance 2013, legendary financier George Soros warned of dangers in the Chinese economy:

The major uncertainty facing the world today is not the euro but the future direction of China. The growth model responsible for its rapid rise has run out of steam.

That model depended on financial repression of the household sector, in order to drive the growth of exports and investments. As a result, the household sector has now shrunk to 35 percent of GDP, and its forced savings are no longer sufficient to finance the current growth model. This has led to an exponential rise in the use of various forms of debt financing.

There are some eerie resemblances with the financial conditions that prevailed in the U.S. in the years preceding the crash of 2008. [Project Syndicate]

That, as William Pesek notes, is a rather ominous conclusion. So is China due a crash?

Read More At TheWeek.com

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Skyscraper Index Indicates Next Global Crash in 2013

Most of us are at least passingly familiar with the theory: the completion of a new tallest skyscraper presages a market crash. Over-exuberant construction reflects over-exuberant markets, and over-confidence often spills over as the hyper-bullish slowly (and then quickly) realise that the good times are over.

Here’s the story so far:

And here’s the next chapter — earmarked for completion in January 2013:

Where else but China? As if that country didn’t already have enough empty buildings, enough empty office space, enough empty homes, and enough grey uninspired architecture. And it’s not like Changsha — the relatively-sparsely populated city where the thing is to be built — is running out of countryside to expand into.

Sky City One is planned to be prefabricated and built onsite, to a timeframe of just ninety days (that will instil confidence that the building won’t spontaneously collapse, right?) and at a much lower cost than the current titleholder (which of course presaged the 2008 crash, and bankrupted its builders) the Burj Khalifa.

“A milestone of life-style transforming” sounds about right (they have enough money to build a 200 storey building, but not enough to pay for good English translation?). The world will be a very different place after the next crash.

Not so good news for property speculators who are sure to dump money into what will soon be little better than a tax liability. But good news for Jim Chanos, and every other investor determined to short everything Chinese.

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Bubbling Up

We’re getting dangerously close to a head and shoulders pattern in both manufacturing output, and the S&P500:


What does this graph tell us? Well in the last ten years we have seen little net gain in either. Each of the two slowdowns has been preceded by a blowout top in the S&P. This is symptomatic of excessive credit creation in the financial sector. The resultant credit crunches coming out of these bubbles would seem to have dampened industrial production. Is that a result of the credit bubble damaging the economy? No; the aftermath of a bubble (so long as it is not accompanied by war, and riots, and famine — in other words, the explicit destruction of capital stock) does not necessarily damage anything other than lending and confidence.

Was it a case then that industrial production — which climbed significantly in the preceding decade — got ahead of itself, and that we were simply producing more than we could consume? It would seem so, and that would certainly explain why the exuberant first attempt to reinflate the bubble failed, and we were drawn into a slump. This brings my thoughts back to this:

Who needs 5 TVs? Well, nobody, and that is the level of consumptive, home-equity-fuelled demand that we were (and are) trying to sustain (and expand upon). For the record, I have 2 TVs, which in itself is probably excessive, especially considering that I rarely watch them.

Then again, there are millions of people in America who need healthcare who aren’t getting it, mostly because (for whatever reason) they can’t afford it. There are homeless kids whose parents have taken to eating rats. Surely that kind of demand would be more sustainable than another speculative stock bubble, another boom in consumption fuelled by home equity, and more TVs, McMansions, iThingies and vacations for urbanites and exurbanites?

I suppose it is that logic that leads well-meaning liberal politicians down the avenues of reflation: economic stimulus, as well as condoning the Fed’s money printing escapades. The problem is that the money always seems to end up in more speculative equity bubbles. I have shown empirically that the more money America has printed (both in terms of expanding the monetary base as well as in terms of fractional credit creation), the more unequal America has become.

This graph highlights the real outcome of all the Obama-Bush-Bernanke economic interventionism:


Corporate profits bounced back right away, while unemployment and underemployment are just as high as when the contraction “finished”. I have made a habit while writing this blog of badmouthing John Maynard Keynes, but at least under a genuinely Keynesian scheme the unemployed people are given jobs (albeit on borrowed money, and albeit not necessarily productive ones) and the unemployment rate falls. All we get today is platitudes about the unemployment rate being sticky; more hopium, more promises that if we just wait long enough and hope hard enough things will get better.

So all that the Obama-Bush-Bernanke interventionism has really produced is more slush for the corporatocracy. It’s just corporate socialism hidden behind a facade of pithy egalitarianism. There is no recovery, only superficial reflation bubbling over a stew of hurt.

And — like most head and shoulders patterns — this third top is even more unsustainable than the last two.

Want proof?


Credit creation has continued to expand above and beyond the productive capacity of the economy. That is a bubble, if ever I saw one.

So what next? Well — like most head and shoulder patterns — the final “shoulder” tends to be followed by a crash. Now, I recognise we are not dealing with an equity, so the crash may not be in terms of price level. It may be geopolitical, or inflationary, or ecological, or some black swan. It may be this year (moderately unlikely, but plausible) or sometime down the line. Who knows?

Hold onto your seats.

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Black Clouds Over UBS?

From the BBC:

Police in London have arrested a 31-year-old man in connection with allegations of unauthorised trading which has cost Swiss banking group UBS an estimated $2bn (£1.3bn).

Kweku Adoboli, believed to work in the European equities division, was detained in the early hours of Thursday and remains in custody.

UBS shares fell 8% after it announced it was investigating rogue trades.

The Swiss bank said no customer accounts were affected.

One question is what ramifications such a write-down might have on the bank’s liquidity. In this cloudy and dark financial atmosphere, fire-sales of assets to pay down such a loss might spark panic.

Another question is how — after the Jerome Kerviel and Nick Leeson debacles — does a large financial fail to effectively monitor its staff’s trading activities? Hasn’t investment banking experienced enough of these rogue trading shocks to put a system in place to prevent these kinds of activities?

After all, if a too-big-to-fail bank suddenly implodes, the state is perfectly willing to stand-by to inject in the earnings of future generations to “save the system”