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STORIES:
Pension Funds Wary as Bankrupt City Goes to Trial - (www.nytimes.com) Wall Street is taking
America’s biggest pension fund to court this week, for a long-awaited battle
over who takes the losses when a city goes bust — workers and retirees,
municipal bondholders, or both. Stockton, Calif., declared Chapter 9 bankruptcy
last year after suffering one of the country’s sharpest riches-to-rags swings
when the mortgage bubble burst. Struggling to stay afloat, Stockton has slashed
tens of millions of dollars’ worth of city services — firefighters, senior
centers, library programs for at-risk children — and said it would cut its municipal
bond repayments to a degree never seen before in a municipal
bankruptcy. But it has drawn the line at slowing down its current workers’
pension accrual, or cutting the benefits its retirees now receive. Mutual funds
that hold the threatened bonds, and the insurers that guarantee them, have
cried foul, citing the principle that in bankruptcy, similar classes of
creditors must be treated the same way. Their objections have prompted the
federal bankruptcy judge handling Stockton’s case, Christopher M. Klein, to
schedule a four-day trial this week, starting Monday.
Risk Unrewarded as Emerging Stocks Lag Behind Most Since ’98
- (www.bloomberg.com) The link between risk and
reward in stocks is breaking down as emerging markets post the worst first
quarter since 2008 and lag behind shares of developed economies by the most in
15 years. The MSCI Emerging Markets Index’s 3.8 percent drop this year
through last week trimmed its rebound from an October 2011 low to 22 percent.
That compares with a 33 percent advance for the MSCI World Index and marks the
first time since 1998 that developing-country shares have underperformed during
a global rally. When adjusted for price swings, emerging market returns are 37
percent smaller than in advanced nations, data compiled by Bloomberg show.
The Coming Derivatives Panic That Will Destroy Global Financial Markets - (www.silverbearcafe.com) Well, there are very few things that could cause the financial markets to crash harder or farther than a derivatives panic. Sadly, most Americans don't even understand what derivatives are. Unlike stocks and bonds, a derivative is not an investment in anything real. Rather, a derivative is a legal bet on the future value or performance of something else. Just like you can go to Las Vegas and bet on who will win the football games this weekend, bankers on Wall Street make trillions of dollars of bets about how interest rates will perform in the future and about what credit instruments are likely to default. Wall Street has been transformed into a gigantic casino where people are betting on just about anything that you can imagine. This works fine as long as there are not any wild swings in the economy and risk is managed with strict discipline, but as we have seen, there have been times when derivatives have caused massive problems in recent years.
New critical warning as 2013 shocker looms - (www.marketwatch.com) Yes, another dark “shocker”
before the end of the year, an unexpected “black swan.” And sadly for Fed
Chairman Ben Bernanke — who hopes his “I saved America from economic collapse”
illusion stays intact till he leaves office — he’s not going to get a dream
ending to his Fed career. Why? The shocker will happen before his scheduled
exit in January, damaging Bernanke’s egocentric “hero’s legacy.” The big
shocker that economist Gary Shilling sees coming will hit before year-end. And
it’s what we see as “Critical Warning No. 12” for 2013. So let’s put all this
in context, a quick survey going back four years when Bernanke was reappointed
and he began his grand ego trip as the Great Savior of the American Economy,
believing he was destined to do the job our dysfunctional politicians were
incapable of doing.
Fed
"Earnings" and Treasury Remittances Are Collapsing! What Does It
Mean? - (www.econintersect.com) The Fed reported in January
that it returned “profits” of $89 billion to US taxpayers in 2012 via its
weekly remittances to the US Treasury. That was an average of $1.7 billion per
week. As the Fed grew the SOMA beginning in late 2008, those remittances had
grown from a pre-crisis level of an average of around $750 million per week to
a peak average of around $1.7 billion when the Fed ended QE2. It had built the
SOMA from under $500 billion during the crisis, when it had funded emergency
alphabet soup programs by raiding the SOMA, to around $2.65 trillion in mid
2011. The income from the account remained near $1.7 billion per week while the
size of the SOMA remained stable. But the bottom dropped out in January, 6
weeks after the Fed began to settle its QE3 MBS purchases in mid November.
Starting the week of January 11, the weekly average remittance to the Treasury
dropped to $963 million, just a little more than half of the 2012 average.
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