What is most remarkable about the world a year after Lehman fell is that so little seems to have changed. Even the papers have noticed.

“A year after Lehman, little change on Wall Street,” says the headline on today’s International Herald Tribune. “Backed by huge U.S. government guarantees, the biggest banks have re-structured only around the edges. Employment [on Wall Street] has fallen just 8% since last September.”

“Obama to push banking overhaul,” says another headline at the Telegraph. Yes, the pols will try to convince the world that they have regulated risk out of the market. Perhaps they will limit salaries… or insist on more disclosure… or require that the capitalists hold onto more of their capital. Then, they will stand before voters and say they have made the world safe for democratic capitalism. Don’t believe it; their bailouts have made it more dangerous.

We don’t know whether this was what Nobel prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz had in mind. But he has come to the same conclusion:

“Stiglitz says banking problems are now bigger than pre-Lehman,” says the Bloomberg report.

Yes, Wall Street has a good gig going. The whole industry now benefits from the hedge fund formula – ‘heads I win, tails somebody else loses.’ When the hedge funds play the game, it’s their clients who lose money. But the way Wall Street banks play it, the big loser is the US government, directly, and US taxpayers and bondholders indirectly.

When the going is good, the bankers make millions in profits – which they take home as salary and bonuses. An analyst at JPMorgan (NYSE:JPM) estimates that American and European banks will pay their 141,000 investment banking employees $77 billion in 2011… or about $543,000 per employee. Since they pay out so much of what they earn, they lack the capital to survive a crisis. But when they’re threatened with extinction, the feds step in to bail them out. No wonder they have no fear of a meltdown…

Wall Street was quiet on Friday. The Dow was down just 22 points.

The most exciting news was that gold closed at $1,006. But if gold buyers were afraid of inflation they neglected to mention it to the folks over in the bond market. The US 10-year Treasury note yielded all of 3.34% on Friday. Which is to say, fear of inflation is probably NOT what is driving up gold. But we’ll come back to that tomorrow… We’ve been doing a lot of thinking about gold… Stay tuned.

Meanwhile, the Financial Times says world equity markets have rallied 65% since their lows in March. There is no longer any sign of panic. Or fear. People seem to think the crisis of over. This has reinforced their illusions. They desperately want to believe that their financial authorities have the matter under control. So long as things seem to be stabilizing – or actually getting better – they figure they can relax.

‘Nothing has really changed,’ they tell themselves. ‘It was just a hiccup… nothing serious,’ they say. They look out their windows and see the same trees, same buildings, same automobiles; it certainly seems as if nothing had changed.

Of course, when you set out on a drive from Manhattan, it takes a long time to get out of the city. For a long time, the buildings… the landscape… and the people still look the same. But you haven’t even crossed the Hudson yet! It is only later, after a lot of driving, that you realize… you are a long way from home. We suspect that there’s a long trip ahead of us too. We have begun the process of reversing a half-century of credit expansion. Since 1945, debt per person has increased. Now it is decreasing –with vast consequences. If we’re right, the financial sector will shrink for many years. Profits will be hard to come by. A job will be difficult to get too. And the part of the world dominated by Anglo-Saxons will diminish.

Fear will make a comeback… when people realize where they’re headed…

And more thoughts…

*** As you’ll recall from Friday, between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the fall of Lehman was perhaps the happiest, most worry-free period in American imperial history. The country had no military challengers (it had to pretend that a handful of muslim fanatics armed with box cutters represented a serious threat). Finance was the world’s highest margin business… and New York’s hustlers were good at finance – rivaled only by those in London. And English was the world’s dominant language. With these advantages behind them, Americans (and Brits) saw nothing before them but growth and prosperity. They had gotten used to living off the kindness of strange lenders. They thought they could get away with it forever. But when Lehman went down, so did hopes for the eternal reign of the anglo-american financial empire.

Now, savings rates are going up in America. Spending is down. So are salaries and prices. It’s a deflationary world… Practically everything is deflating…

Consumer prices… inflation is negative in the US and Europe…

Wages… household income is down in the US. Unemployment is up and the length of the average workweek is down. Result: lower wages.

Housing…“house price decline [in England] will continue after false dawn fades,” says a headline at today’s Telegraph. A study by Ernst and Young predict a 1.6% drop in British house prices in the first half of next year, after an 11.4% fall this year.

Net household wealth… down too, caused by falling house prices and falling incomes.

Oh… but here’s one thing that is up: government deficits. The US posted a deficit of $111 billion in August. A few years ago, that would have been a frightening deficit for an entire year. Now, we have hundred-billion deficits every month… with no end in sight.

*** As forecast, protectionism is on the rise. The Obama administration put a tariff on tires imported from China. It was done do to protect American tire manufacturers from competition. Free trade? Sure, when it suits us.

But China is getting huffy about it. In an “unusually strong riposte,” Beijing, using diplomatic language of course, said to the US roughly what Serena Williams said to her net judge:

“I swear to God, I’m f**** going to take this f**** ball and shove it down your f**** throat…”

Why’s China so upset? In an expanding world, everyone greedily grabs market share. Even if they’re not as fast as the next guy, they still feel they’re making progress. In a deflating world, on the other hand, if you give ground… you’re not just losing market share…you’re losing money!

*** This weekend we traveled back to Paris to take part in a panel discussion on freedom. Liberty is not a hot topic in Paris. In a metropolitan area of some 4 million people only about 50 turned out to hear our talk – and half of them were American or English. Still, we were surprised there were so many. Liberty is a popular word. But freedom has never been much in demand. Millions of books are sold that promise to reduce your weight. How many are sold that promise to increase your freedom? We don’t know of any. Our guess is that the bookseller who makes freedom his market niche will soon have dust on his books and cobwebs in front of his door.

Still, the little group was enthusiastic. Assembled in a stuffy miniature theatre off the Rue Mouffetard, the freedom enthusiasts had a number of ideas for promoting their cause. One wanted to infiltrate the government with closet libertarians. Another suggested a takeover of academia. Still another suggested engaging taxi drivers in Socratic dialogues.

We looked for a fire alarm. Clearly, the heat was getting to them. They needed a good hosing down. We live in a world dominated by rules, laws, edicts, taxes and regulations. But it is not because the masses have never heard of liberty. They know what freedom is; they just don’t want it.

Instead, what they want is an edge, an angle… a law that protects them from honest commerce… a special tariff that gives them an advantage… a monopoly… a privilege…

They want food stamps and unemployment compensation. They want free medical care for their parents and free schools for their children.

They want what we all want… growth and prosperity, without corrections. And they want to go to heaven without dying.

Source: No Fear

Then for a national perspective, I looked at The Wall Street Journal, which published a slightly different alliteration, “Decade of Debt: $9 Trillion.” And finally, for an international view, The Financial Times summed it all up in characteristic British understatement, with, “US Says Debt Outlook Worsening.” Oh, you don’t say.

The big problem – obviously, the headline issue – with the US economy is too much debt. (That’s the BIG problem. There’s a long list of other problems after that.) And the debt problem is getting worse, not better.

Debt is ubiquitous across US society. Debt permeates the culture. Practically the whole nation has bitten off more than it can chew. Within the past two generations, the US economy has transformed from what Harvard historian Charles Maier calls an “empire of production” (which is what won the Second World War, for example) to an “empire of consumption.”

The lunch bucket-toting factory worker, or the beam-walking riveter constructing a skyscraper, symbolized the former empire of production. Those iconic workers are no more. They’ve been replaced by the image of vast tracts of McHouses blanketing the landscape. Or of parking lots filled with new cars outside coast-to-coast malls, with their owners inside maxing out their credit cards.

It’s the difference between an economy that creates surplus capital and an economy that consumes capital to gross deficit. Professor Andrew Bacevich of Boston University summed it up this way in his recent book, The Limits of Power. “The evil genius of the empire of production was Henry Ford. In the empire of consumption, Ford’s counterpart was Walt Disney.”

Come to think of it, we should be so fortunate as to be indebted just because we collectively took too many trips to Disneyland. As a nation, the US has borrowed and spent far beyond its means. You know what I mean. I don’t have to get into the details on that point. In particular, the political class just can’t seem to say no.

The other side of that debt coin is a widespread inability to repay. Households are so deep in debt that they’ve stopped buying, and I don’t care what the so-called consumer confidence surveys say. Less buying means that business profits are down. Where businesses are showing profits, a lot of it is because they are goosing the bottom lines through layoffs and spending cuts.

Layoffs? That’s putting it mildly. Many of the recent job losses are permanent. They’re structural. It’s not just the good old days, when the company said, “Go home and we’ll call you back in a few months.” No, in many cases, the jobs are gone forever.

It’s not just factory jobs, either. Those jobs were the first to go. The US economy lost millions of its old-line factory jobs over the past 25 years or so. It brought us into the age of the Rust Belt. Some economists and deep thinkers bragged about how this was somehow “good” for America. (Call me old-fashioned, but I could never quite figure that out.)

Now people with white collars are getting hit with permanent job losses in sectors like banking and law. Many parts of the nation’s financial districts are the new Rust Belts of America.

There are former lawyers waiting on tables, stealing jobs from the traditional class of table servers, starving artists. At many silk-stocking firms, even the formerly sacrosanct legal “billable hour” is under attack. And I know doctors and architects who’ve been laid off.

So joblessness is up, and it’s not about to come down anytime soon. With joblessness up, tax collections are down across the board. Unemployment compensation accounts are running out of money. Public assistance accounts are running down. Some states want to give early release to prisoners to save the costs of incarceration.

In Michigan, for example, some counties are no longer repaving the roads. They just grind the asphalt to gravel and save the cost of paving. It’s a foretaste of things to come, I believe.

I don’t see where the problems of indebtedness have been cured. We’re not even close. Maybe it’s my inner bankruptcy attorney at work. Where’s the wipeout? Where’s the discharge? How has all that bad paper out there been voided? It hasn’t.

Regards,

Byron W. King

Source: An Empire of Consumption

Existing home sales rose 7.2% to a 5.24 million annual rate in July, the most since August 2007 and the fourth straight month the figure increased, the National Association of Realtors (NAR) said Friday. Year-over-year sales grew 5%, the increase since September 2007, just before the markets came crashing down the following month.

“The housing market has decisively turned for the better,” said NAR chief economist Lawrence Yun. “A combination of first-time buyers taking advantage of the housing stimulus tax credit and greatly improved affordability conditions are contributing to higher sales.”

Rising sales numbers in the past few months may have triggered previously discouraged sellers to re-list their homes, according to Yun.

Total housing inventory at the end of July grew 7.3% to 4.09 million existing homes available for sale, representing a 9.4-month supply at the current sales pace. However, the raw inventory totals are 10.6% lower than they were last year.

Sellers are responding to rising inventories accordingly: The national median existing home price was $178,400 in July, 15.1% lower than a year ago. But the fact that buyers are dipping their toes back into the murky depths of the housing market doesn’t necessarily mean the sector is trending toward a full-blown recovery.

Turn of the Year Makes for Uncertain Future

One in three homes sales last month came from first-time buyers who benefited from the Obama administration’s $8,000 tax credit, which ends after November. First-timers accounted for almost the same amount in June with 29%. That means there could be a significant drop in purchases when that program expires.

The real estate industry is lobbying Congress to extend the first-time buyer tax credit, and Nevada Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid told reporters earlier this month an extension is “something we can get done.”

With or without a tax break, consumers in this economy are looking for a bargain much like they are with retail sales and auto sales. The bulk of the first-time tax credit sales have come from lower-priced homes, and NAR data supports that. Sales of homes that cost less than $250,000 were up almost 17.8% year-over-year through June. Meanwhile, sales decreased 13.3% in the $250,000-$500,000 bracket, 18.6% in the $500,000-$1 million range, and 32.7% in the $1 million – $4 million range.

Lost pricing power in the more expensive homes wasn’t lost on Pulte Homes Inc. (NYSE: PHM), which last Tuesday finished its acquisition of value-priced homebuilder Centex Corp.(NYSE: CTX), making Pulte the largest homebuilder in the United States.

“I’m not seeing a tremendous amount of good news on the job or economic front, so I do think it’s important that the [tax] credit get extended,” Pulte Chief Executive Officer Richard Dugas told The Associated Press.

The turn of the year isn’t likely to yield much good news on the job front. Most economists are expecting the unemployment rate to top out around 10%, and although July’s rate dipped one-tenth of a percentage point, the latest weekly initial unemployment insurance claims were discouraging, rising 15,000 to 576,000 for the week ended August 15.

“The improvement in the labor market has stalled,” Scotia Capital Inc. economist Derek Holt told Bloomberg News following the latest jobless claim figures. “Consumer spending will be pushed back on its heels for a longer time than markets are expecting.”

When the bleeding of jobs does peak, an upturn in employment could take some time as the United States experiences a jobless recovery. With an unemployment rate at or around 10%, home inventory levels could creep back in to 2008 territory.

“[The unemployment rate projection] indicates that the level of labor market slack would be higher by the end of 2009 than experienced at any other time in the post-World War II period, implying a longer and slower recovery path for the unemployment rate,” Fed economists wrote.  “This suggests that, more than in previous recessions, when the economy rebounds, employers will tap into their existing work forces rather than hire new workers. This could substantially slow the recovery of the outflow rate and put upward pressure on future unemployment rates.”

Source: Home Sales Will Struggle to Rebound Without Tax Credit Extension

It has been a tough week if you have anything to do with the world of retail. Just about every company that opened its books to the Street this week got punished for the act.

The list of “disappointing” reports is getting longer by the day.

Lowes (NYSE:LOW) kicked off the week with scary-low figures. Home Depot (NYSE:HD) beat the Street but still got punished after a slew of less-than-stellar economic reports.

Outside of the home-centric sector, shares of Liz Claiborne (NYSE:LIZ) plummeted on Monday after the Standard and Poor’s cut its rating on the unprofitable retailer to B, a two-notch downgrade. The company’s rating now stands five levels below investment grade.

High-end retailer Abercrombie & Fitch (NYSE:ANF) is also deep in negative territory for the week after succumbing to industry pressure and a downgrade from Susquehanna.

Obviously, the market believes a business model that focuses on trendy, expensive clothing is not a place to be during a deep, protracted recession.

And of course, there is Eddie Lampert and his Sears Holding (NYSE:SHLD). While the store may be the hideout of choice for any enslaved husband while his wife shops for new bed linens, fewer of us our purchasing the store’s products.

Shares of the company are down by double-digit proportions today after Sears announced it lost $94 million over the past three months. It is tough to make a profit when revenues are plunging by 10% (12.5 for comparable-store sales).

Essentials only investing

If consumers are not spending their money at the high-end stores or paying to fix up their house, where are they spending it? After all, there is no choice but to spend money on the essentials at the very least.

The key is understanding which retailers are stocked up on the essentials. Wal-Mart (NYSE:WMT) and Target (NYSE:TGT) are the first to come to mind.

And guess what… shares of Target are up on the week and Wal-Mart is just slightly in negative territory.

One of the most appealing sectors of the retail market is the ultra-cheap (in price and quality) “dollar store” segment. As the market breaks out its magnifying glass in an attempt to find any signs of so-called green shoots, shares of company’s like Family Dollar (NYSE:FDO) and 99 Cents Only (NYSE:NDN) have dropped from their recent highs.

The discounting is a mistake. Today’s unexpected surge in first-time jobless claims (a jump of 15,000 claims) proves tens of thousands of American consumers are still at risk of losing their jobs. That means they won’t be shelling out their reserves any time soon.

Instead, they will continue their spendthrift shopping.

While there are sectors much more likely to hand you sizeable profits in the near future, no portfolio is healthy unless it is properly diversified.

If you need exposure to the nation’s retail market, look at the big guys like Wal-Mart and Target or the small discount retailers where a buck will buy you just about anything… but a share of the company.

Finally, if you have been playing this sector or have your eye on any big movers, your fellow readers would love to hear about it. Drop us a line and let us know your thoughts.

Source: Dangerous Retail: The Sector That Refuses to Recover

By “shows signs of improvement”, I suppose he means things like another extension in unemployment benefits, which he admits “is something that the administration and Congress are going to look very carefully at as we get closer to the end of this year.”

Naturally, I take points off his grade and I note that “look very carefully at” is a prepositional phrase, and he should have more correctly said that extending unemployment benefits “is something at which the administration and Congress are going to look very carefully” but either way it means that it is a “done deal” since there is going to be almost $3 trillion in deficit-spending money ($1.84 trillion in budgeted deficit and the usual $2 trillion in Supplemental Appropriations that will appear in the next year), all seemingly just sitting there! Hahaha!

The 5-Minute Forecast took a look at the specifics, and found that “Congress is under pressure to extend benefits again. Emergency legislation has already bumped unemployment programs to 79 weeks in half the states, about triple the norm and the longest since its 1930 inception (the rest of the states have programs ranging from 46-72 weeks).”

Yikes! We’re already at records of unemployment never even seen before! Nevertheless, they continue “Word on the street is that Congress will tack on another 13 weeks for states with unemployment rates over 9%… at a cost of $70 billion”, which seems like such chump change when next year’s federal budget deficit is, by itself, $2 trillion!

Blomberg says that Larry Summers, director of the White House National Economic Council, glossing over the fact that he has not been right about the economy or raised a peep about the rampant “creating excess money and credit” crap that Alan Greenspan and his loathsome Federal Reserve were doing for the last 15 years, says that he is now sure, sure, sure that the economy will resume growth in the second half of the year, although the job picture “will be serious for some time to come.”

Naturally, one wonders how economic growth can resume when more and more people are unemployed, with no viable options, and staggering under the biggest debt loads in the history of America, but even when you send him an email asking “What kind of stupid thing is that to say, you ignorant, loudmouth neo-Keynesian halfwit lowlife?” he never explains!

Just in time, The 5-Minute Forecast sort of obliquely answers my question when they reported that “both Larry Summers and Tim Geithner refused to rule out a middle-class tax hike.” Hahaha!

Oh! Growth in government taxation! Hahahaha!

Ignoring my rude laughter, Bloomberg continues with the insight that has Mr. Summers saying, “the Obama administration will work with Congress to ‘do what’s necessary to make sure appropriate unemployment benefits are available.’”

And working with Congress ought to be a snap, as Congressman Charles Rangel, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, said he “supports extending unemployment insurance benefits for another 13 weeks” because there is “no question” that the unemployed “deserve it”, because the are the “the true victims of this fiscal disaster.” Hahahaha!

The truth is that everyone is a victim of the abject stupidity of government morons like Congressman Rangel, who happily voted to deficit-spend monstrous amounts of money year after year after year, plus pledging a hundred trillion dollars in future benefits, and encouraged the Federal Reserve to create massive amounts of excess money and credit so that people could go into crushing debt by borrowing Too Much Money (TMM) to buy, among other things, the gobs of new government debt, all of which cemented into place a bloated, dysfunctional, corrupt, government-centric economy! Hahaha! We’re freaking doomed!

And now – unbelievably! – Congressman Rangel thinks that increasing federal government deficit-spending, via expansions of the money supply by the Federal Reserve to promise another 13 weeks of unemployment benefits to the victims, is going to fix things? Hahahahahahackahackahaha!

The extended “Hahahahahahackahackahaha!” is to cleverly denote that I am laughing and laughing until my sides are starting to hurt, and I am coughing and hacking up what appears to be pieces of lung at such preposterously and overwhelmingly funny Theater of the Absurd stupidity! Hahahaha!

In such a giddy state, I obviously cannot continue to the inevitable climax where I demand that you buy gold, silver and oil immediately as protection against the best intentions of government or suffer my contempt and scorn, which admittedly seems so far away from my current fit of laughing and coughing! Hahahahahackahackahaha!

Anyway, I could never say, “Buy gold, silver and oil because your own government is destroying your money and you!” better than when Mr. Rangel says it for me with “Victims deserve more of what they got!”

Whee! This investing stuff is easy!

Source: The True Victims of Government Stupidity

Alas, he did not fly. Nor even float. He fell “like a stone,” the paper reported.

Immortality was achieved, but not the way he had hoped. His stunt was captured by the new motion picture technology of the time. That silent film inspired the very popular Jackass videos, which show people engaged in reckless acts of mischief and mortality.

But we do not have to go to Youtube to enjoy the Jackass genre. We have only to read the news. All over the world the authorities are strapping on their absurd parachutes…and climbing to very high places. In Europe, banks borrowed 442 billion euros last month from the European Central Bank. Much of it is lent back to European governments. In America, stimulus funds are used to fix public toilets, as well as to repair Wall Street’s balance sheets. Trillions of dollars have been put at risk in these adventures – $23 trillion in the United States alone. And yet, despite the most daring experiment in stimulus ever, by the end of June, the British economy was 5.6% smaller than it had been a year before, paralleling the decline that followed the crash of ‘29. As for the United States…we await the figures…

On the evidence, stimulus programs aren’t working. In fact, where they are tried the most they work the least. For proof, we go to Stimulation Nation itself. From America last week came news that new house sales had finally turned up. They were up 11% in June, according to the papers. That was the monthly figure. According to the annual numbers, they were down 21% from the year before – at the second lowest since they began counting in 1963. And since the population is much bigger than it was 52 years ago, this was relatively the worst June in history for new house sales. And now that the economy is in a slump, the rate of new household formation has been cut in half. Faced with lower incomes and worsening jobs prospects, people are less eager to set up new households – reducing the demand for new houses.

Unemployment shows no sign of improving, either. The stimulus program was supposed to cap joblessness at 8%. Officially, the rate is now 9.5%. Economist David Rosenberg puts the real unemployment rate almost twice that high. And businesses are cutting jobs even faster than expected. Economist Arthur Okun suggested a rule of thumb for predicting unemployment levels in a downturn. But firms are not only laying off redundant workers; they are laying off workers who would normally be spared. What’s more, those who are left are working the shortest weeks ever recorded.

In the past, workers were quick to move to where the jobs were. The Sun Belt traditionally bounced back first. But Florida, California, Arizona and Nevada have been flattened even more than the rest of the nation – by record foreclosures, government cutbacks and bankruptcies. Now, the jobless stay put…and stay unemployed.

Currently, the excess capacity in the United States is staggering – both in labor and capital. Capacity utilization is only 65%; in theory, output can increase 35% before any new capital investments are made.

Recovery? “Forget it,” says Rosenberg.

Now that the facts are out of the way, we end our critique of stimulus…and turn to laugh at the stimulators. “Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back,” wrote John Maynard Keynes. And now it is Keynes’ voice they hear.

“We are all Keynesians now,” said Richard Nixon as he strapped on a crash helmet.

Keynes probably got the idea of a counter-cyclical stimulus in Bible class. And a good idea it was. Simple…intuitively correct…practically demonstrated…and theoretically sound. But he and his followers still managed to screw it up.

First, Keynes’ General Theory is no theory at all…at least not in the scientific sense. It can’t be tested. The results aren’t reproducible. Instead, it’s merely an idea about how things should work, based on an Old Testament story.

Pharaoh had a dream. He dreamt he saw seven fat cows devoured by seven scrawny, misbegotten cows. He didn’t know what the dream meant, so he called for a young Hebrew man who had interpreted dreams for his master. Joseph told Pharaoh that Egypt was to enjoy seven years of abundance followed by seven years of famine. He told him what he should do about it too. He should store all the grain he could from the fat years…so he could pass it out when the going got tough.

This is a story we all know. It is easy to tell and easy to understand. But modern economists twisted it as though it were an inflation statistic. They maintain that when the business cycle turns down, it’s just like a drought. And they can counteract the effect of the drought by giving the economy stimulus – liquidity – from the public sector.

Trouble is, they missed the point completely. Do you recall any public official urging the public to stop spending so much in the bubble years? Do you remember any Treasury Secretary or Fed Chairman suggesting that the U.S. government run real budget surpluses in the fat years? Does any headline from any paper in the nation mention a storeroom in which grain or treasure was stored for the lean years? Not at all! Instead, the feds encouraged people to eat their grain! Governments ran deficits even during the bubble years, with the biggest deficit in history in 2008, just as the lean years began. Now they have no real grain to offer. So they turn to a reckless, disaster-defying stunt – passing out phony money, like sawdust muffins…

Future generations will watch the video and laugh until their stomachs hurt.

Enjoy your weekend,

Bill Bonner

Source: We Are All Jackasses Now

Friday, two more banks – the Bank of America (NYSE:BAC) and Citigroup (NYSE:C) – announced impressive results. Between them, they made $5.4 billion in the last quarter.

These follow announcements earlier in the week from JPMorgan (NYSE:JPM) and Goldman (NYSE:GS). As reported in this space, Goldman set the pace by reporting that it has managed to earn more than $1 billion per month in the 2 nd quarter of this year. It said it did so by helping clients raise money… refinance… and restructure.

Goldman made so much money that it has set aside more than $11 billion so far this year in compensation for its executives – or about half of its revenues, according to the Economist. During the same period, shareholders got $4.4 billion, barely a third as much.

This, by the way, is the same firm that suffered a near-death experience along with the rest of Wall Street about 6 months ago. In order to save itself, it turned to Washington for cash. It was at that point that we at the Daily Reckoning noticed the appalling state of modern American capitalism – the capitalists didn’t have any capital.

What happened to the money? They had paid it out to the managers and proles. Lehman Bros., for example, ran out of cash in 2008 and had to be put down. It was a very profitable firm during the bubble years; but $55 billion was paid out to employees in the 10 prior years.

When it was flush, Lehman should have given more money to the politicians. The feds had cash; heck, they make the stuff. Its competitor Goldman only had to whistle and the United States government – dominated by former and future Wall Street pros – rolled over. The feds put up the money, lickety split.

And now that Goldman is rolling in dough again, does it carefully husband its resources, restocking its shelves and refilling its vaults, so it will no longer be a burden on the taxpayer if things go bad? Nooooo… like a welfare queen in a pink Cadillac, it spends every penny, confident that it can lean on the feds next month as well as the last.

But now look. After all our whining and complaining about the bailouts – they must be working, right? The big banks are making money again… big money. And that must mean the economy is on the mend. They’re lending… they’re speculating… they’re rolling the dice and… hallelujah… a pair of boxcars!

But wait. Ken Lewis of Bank of America says “Profitability in the second half of the year will be much tougher than the first half…”

How come?

Because the banks’ core business is actually getting worse! The core business of banking is lending to people who are capable of paying it back – out of earnings. If the borrower is counting on higher house prices… or higher stock prices… to allow him to refinance on better terms, the lender is asking for trouble. Prices may go up… or they may go down. And if they go down, down goes the lender’s collateral too… and his hope of getting repaid.

The banks made big mistakes in the bubble years. And now they’re paying the price. But so far, they’ve only made the first installment payment. Sub-prime loans started going bad two years ago. Then, people began losing their jobs… and loans of all sorts were in trouble.

There is no sign that this process is over. Instead, it is merely proceeding in good order… just as you’d expect.

California lost another 65,000 jobs in June. And in Pennsylvania, 17,800 people are running out of jobless benefits. This group is on the cutting edge of a huge new trend – people not only unemployed, but out of unemployment benefits. One estimate says there will be more than half a million of them nationwide by the end of September. You think they were cutting back on spending last month? Let’s see what they do in October. And let’s see what happens to their debt… those Alt-A, jumbo, and prime mortgage loan…

… and let’s see what happens to credit card debt… and to commercial loans too. There’s a report that New York commercial properties are running up towards a 23% vacancy rate… Shoppers not shopping… stores and restaurants closing their doors… unemployment going up – sounds like the depression might not be over yet…

*** A milestone: Harry Allingham, the world’s oldest man, died on Saturday at the age of 112. He was a veteran of WWI . To what did he attribute his longevity? “Cigarettes, whisky and wild, wild women… ”

*** In addition to the banks’ profit reports, something else happened last week that convinced investors that not only is the worst over, the economy worldwide is actually getting better. China announced that its economy was growing at almost 8% annually.

If China can grow at 8% — even in a depression – our troubles are over, said investors. China is not so much a green shoot; it is a whole rain forest of growth. And if it is growing, it needs stuff. So the people who supply stuff think they are sitting pretty. And the economists who watch the flow of stuff think they see the end of the depression. China has “decoupled” from the rest of the depression-ridden globe… they believe. It is on a planet of its own, where the collapse of demand here on Earth means nothing.

“ China’s got plenty of demand right at home,” says the cheerful crowd.

Of course, we’re cheerful too. We make a point of it. Recession is no problema for us here at the Daily Reckoning. We take what nature gives us without complaint. Depression? Credit crisis? Hyper-inflation? As George W. Bush so eloquently put it: ‘Bring ‘em on.’

We feral economists have never had it so good…

We won’t be disappointed, no matter what happens. It’s all good, as far as we’re concerned. Except for the parts that ain’t so good.

And as we were saying last week, there’s something fishy about the end of the depression… at least as proclaimed thus far. Looked at more closely, the banks’ earnings don’t seem plugged into prosperity at all; instead, they’re drawing juice from the crisis itself. Their profits come from refinancing… playing the rebound… and the feds’ bailouts – not normal banking activities.

And as for China, we will have to wait to find out. But if China has managed to shift its production from export to the domestic market in just 6 months it will be a triumph equal to Custer’s victory over the Sioux at Little Big Horn.

Details to follow…

*** In the meantime, the Economist magazine, that august font of accepted wisdom, tells us “what went wrong with economics.”

Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman remarked that the learning of the past 30 years in macro-economics was “spectacularly useless at best, and positively harmful at worst.”

The Economist responds: ‘What went wrong with economics,’ it asks. Not much, it concludes.

Except that its most precious theories are claptrap. And its most prominent experts are nincompoops. And it helped cause the biggest economic crisis in perhaps half a century… failed to see it coming… failed to understand it… and then made it worse by offering to fix it.

Apart from that… macro economics is fine.

*** We went to Madrid on Friday… The only convenient flight was a discount carrier – Easy Jet. But it turned out, there was nothing easy about Easy Jet.

The flight was meant to be about 9pm… so we went to Plaza Mayor and sat down for a drink. In front of us was a man with an enormous stomach, dressed in a Spiderman costume.

If you lose your job, dear reader, you might want to try this. People came up to the misshapen Spiderman to have their photos taken with him. They all seemed to know the pose they wanted… a bit as if they were flying through the air. When the photo was taken, the tourists left Spiderman a tip. By our calculation, he was taking in 20-40 euros per hour.

Then, at the airport, we waited in line for half an hour – there was no one at the counter — only to discover that the flight was delayed. Then, it got later and later… as one delay followed another… Each time, an airline representative approached the crowd with an announcement, the passengers became more hostile.

“Why didn’t you tell us this before?”

“I want a refund!”

“I could have gone back into town and had dinner… ”

We waited and waited… tantalized by the arrival of an Easy Jet plane… then disappointed when it was destined for another city. We were trapped. There were no other options. Finally, it was about midnight when the representative came back… flanked by two Spanish policemen. Finally, the plane was on its way.

Finally, we got home again… after 4am.

Source: Deals Deals Deals

Maybe it’s because the government hasn’t actually got around to disbursing most of the cash yet. Maybe it’s because debt-laden Americans are simply saving the stimulus dollars rather than spending them. Maybe it’s because the Recovery Act was really nothing more than a congressional wish list of pet spending programs.

US News & World Report editor Mort Zuckerman, writing in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, says there are 9 reasons we are in even more trouble than the 9.5% jobless rate indicates.

1. June’s total assumed 185,000 people at work who probably were not. The government could not identify them; it made an assumption about trends. But many of the mythical jobs are in industries that have absolutely no job creation, e.g., finance. When the official numbers are adjusted over the next several months, June will look worse.

2. More companies are asking employees to take unpaid leave. These people don’t count on the unemployment roll.

3. No fewer than 1.4 million people wanted or were available for work in the last 12 months but were not counted. Why? Because they hadn’t searched for work in the four weeks preceding the survey.

4. The number of workers taking part-time jobs due to the slack economy, a kind of stealth underemployment, has doubled in this recession to about nine million, or 5.8% of the work force. Add those whose hours have been cut to those who cannot find a full-time job and the total unemployed rises to 16.5%, putting the number of involuntarily idle in the range of 25 million.

5. The average workweek for rank-and-file employees in the private sector, roughly 80% of the work force, slipped to 33 hours. That’s 48 minutes a week less than before the recession began, the lowest level since the government began tracking such data 45 years ago. Full-time workers are being downgraded to part time as businesses slash labor costs to remain above water, and factories are operating at only 65% of capacity. If Americans were still clocking those extra 48 minutes a week now, the same aggregate amount of work would get done with 3.3 million fewer employees, which means that if it were not for the shorter work week the jobless rate would be 11.7%, not 9.5% (which far exceeds the 8% rate projected by the Obama administration).

6. The average length of official unemployment increased to 24.5 weeks, the longest since government began tracking this data in 1948. The number of long-term unemployed (i.e., for 27 weeks or more) has now jumped to 4.4 million, an all-time high.

7. The average worker saw no wage gains in June, with average compensation running flat at $18.53 an hour.

8. The goods producing sector is losing the most jobs – 223,000 in the last report alone.

9. The prospects for job creation are equally distressing. The likelihood is that when economic activity picks up, employers will first choose to increase hours for existing workers and bring part-time workers back to full time. Many unemployed workers looking for jobs once the recovery begins will discover that jobs as good as the ones they lost are almost impossible to find because many layoffs have been permanent. Instead of shrinking operations, companies have shut down whole business units or made sweeping structural changes in the way they conduct business. General Motors and Chrysler closed hundreds of dealerships and reduced brands. Citigroup and Bank of America cut tens of thousands of positions and exited many parts of the world of finance.

• Regulators will hold hearings this month and next to possibly limit the holdings of energy futures traders, including index and exchange-traded funds. The U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) will hold hearings in the next two months to consider the need for government-imposed restrictions on speculative trading in oil, gas and other energy markets, Chairman Gary Gensler said in a statement. “Our first hearing will focus on whether federal speculative limits should be set by the CFTC to all commodities of finite supply, in particular energy commodities such as crude oil, heating oil, natural gas, gasoline and other energy products,” Gensler said in the statement. “This will include a careful review of the appropriateness of exemptions from these limits for various types of market participants.” The CFTC did not give dates on when the hearings would be held or who would speak at them.

Source: Investment News Briefs Wednesday, July 8, 2009

This week began with shrieks of joy. First, a federal court came down on Bernie Madoff like a brick on a bald head. Madoff, convicted of lying to investors, drew a sentence that only a sea turtle or a swamp oak could complete. Then, like children playing in the sea, investors were teased by one wave of good news… and tickled by the next.

Bloomberg reported that “Wall Street’s largest bond-trading firms say the worst may be over for investors… ” Then, General Electric’s CEO, Jeffrey Immelt and famous investor George Soros both said that the crisis is “behind us” and that growth will begin again next year. Finally, analyst John Dorfman opined that the stock market would be a safe place for their money at least through the end of the year.

And now comes the big American holiday – July 4th. Investors pack their suntan lotions and head off to the beach for Independence Day. With Jaws in a cage, they had judged it safe to go into the water. But then came Thursday’s news. Instead of going down as predicted, the number of job losses for June went up. Another 467,000 people became unemployed last month. The figure even surprised us; we didn’t think there were that many people who still had jobs.

And so… this weekend, investors walk along the beach deep in thought. Is it safe to go back into the water… or not? They should listen carefully. That gurgling sound they hear is not mermaids singing, it is the world economy, drowning.

As we reported in this space, the feds’ bailouts, boondoggles and bankers’ bonus plans aren’t working. At the end of last year, they predicted unemployment over 8% in 2009 — if the stimulus plan were not enacted. But it was enacted. Unemployment is at 9.5% already and it is still rising. It will be over 10% before the end of the year. Global trade is collapsing; exports from Germany and Japan are down about 40% from a year before.

Prices are going down too – with a report this Wednesday that the entire Eurozone has slipped into negative inflation. And from Britain came data showing a contraction of 2.4% in the first quarter, bringing the year-to-year decline to nearly 5%. “Economy shrinks at 1930s rates,” said the headline in Wednesday’s Telegraph.

When we look at America’s employment numbers, we feel like a school doctor. We would call the authorities, except that it was the authorities who should be arrested. After the feds got finished with them, the numbers told of a better-than-expected drop in May US payrolls.

The key to this uplifting news was not a genuine improvement, but new and improved techniques in torture. Water-boarded with seasonal adjustments and birth/death models, the numbers began to see jobs everywhere. As for “discouraged workers” — those who gave up looking because they couldn’t find a job — they disappeared from the jobless figures altogether.

John William’s Shadow Government Statistics reports that without these twists, the numbers tell the same story they’ve been telling all year – unemployment is still getting worse, at about the same pace as earlier in the year. “The unadjusted annual decline in May payrolls was the worst since May 1958,” says Williams. And if they were allowed to speak freely – as they did in the ‘30s – the figures would show real unemployment at over 20% of the workforce… or about 30 million people. That approaches Great Depression levels… .and we’re still only in 1930, not 1932. As for those still working, an additional 1.5 million US workers have been “forced into part time work” according to the Financial Times.

Analysts compare these sharp drops in trade, prices and employment to what happened after WWII. Come 1946 and the world had little use for so many soldiers, machine guns and artillery shells. Millions of young men were ‘de-mobed’ and joined the unemployed. And smokestacks suddenly stopped smoking.

But that was at the very beginning of 62-year period of credit expansion. Consumers had pent up demand for houses, cars, and other goods and services… and they had the wartime savings to buy them with. Even so, it took three years of adjustment after the war before the stock market began to turn up.

Now, we are at the other end of the cycle – the beginning of a major credit contraction, with no pent-up demand, no savings, and too much capacity to turn out too much stuff that too many people don’t have the money to buy.

Meanwhile, housing prices are still going down in America… and with housing goes the lenders’ collateral. US residential property prices have fallen 33 months in a row. So many houses are “underwater” that the US is beginning to look like the lost continent of Atlantis. More foreclosures are coming. US mortgage loans typically call for “down the road modifications” that lead homeowners into a kind of financial cul de sac with no way out except foreclosure. According to a study by T2 Partners, there are three more big waves of foreclosures still ahead – including those in ‘prime” loans, home equity lines of credit, and in commercial real estate.

“When [these mortgage loans] start adjusting upward it will turn millions of homeowners into over-levered, underwater renters, and ensure housing is a dead asset class for years to come,” says Mark Hanson of the Field Check Group.

With incomes falling and house prices weak, consumers will miss payments, default, and cut back spending. Business earnings will decline; bankruptcies will increase. This economic undertow is treacherous. Investors should stay out of the water.

Source: Stay Out of the Water