Sunday, December 7, 2014

Monday December 8 Housing and Economic stories


Deflation Is Going To Cause A Scary New Kind of Debt Crisis – (www.businessinsider.com)  There are some very, very big building blocks of this. Just before I go into those, the reason why we in recent times have deflation is not because supply is bigger than demand. That’s not the dangerous deflation. You might actually say that might be a good deflation. It’s because at some stage in that transition process from inflation downwards, we have a credit event which creates a shock for the financial system. Of course, that’s famously what happened in 2008-2009. But that also happened in 1998 with Russia and LTCM [Long Term Capital Management, a hedge fund investment firm that collapsed after the Russian government bond crisis] and it happened in 1982 with Mexico and their banking system. So, when we talk about deflation, people say, “What’s so wrong with falling prices?” The answer is that usually that undermines somebody’s corporate cash flow. Somebody goes bankrupt and we get a credit event. That’s the likely way it goes forward. If it happens to be a big one, a country, a very large financial institution-we could name a few. So, that’s why it’s important. That’s why it’s likely to happen.

Oil Investors May Be Running Off a Cliff They Can’t See - (www.bloomberg.com) A major threat to fossil fuel companies has suddenly moved from the fringe to center stage with a dramatic announcement by Germany’s biggest power company and an intriguing letter from the Bank of England. A growing minority of investors and regulators are probing the possibility that untapped deposits of oil, gas and coal -- valued at trillions of dollars globally -- could become stranded assets as governments adopt stricter climate change policies. The concept gaining traction from Wall Street to the City of London is simple. Limits on emissions of carbon dioxide will be necessary to hold temperature increases to 2 degrees Celsius, the maximum climate scientists say is advisable. Without technologies to capture the waste gases from combusting fossil fuels, a majority of known oil, gas and coal deposits would have to stay underground. Once that point is reached, they become stranded.

Bond Market: Are Smaller Oil Producers Closed Out by Prices? – (www.bloomberg.com) Investors who helped to finance the shale boom are facing billions of losses as upgraded energy producers have issued 90 billion debt over the last few years it has dropped since the oil crash began in june. 21 borrowers will turn profitable according to data compiled a bloomberg.  For more we welcome brent rogoff at barclays capital.  What is the situation like in the credit markets right now?  Are they closed to independent oil producers?  I would say that sections of it are.  In real differentiation you are seeing the investment-grade market remaining open , where the cash flow isn't much better spot.  Parts of it are probably closed.  If you look at the single b or c part of the market it gets really tough, off to 1000 basis points.  And other words truly distressed? 

Fall of the Bond King: How Gross Lost Empire as Pimco Cracked - (www.bloomberg.com)  Bill Gross, the 70-year-old king of bonds, rushed through the offices of his $2 trillion empire on a Friday morning distributing hand-written notes. He knew his reign was over. The billionaire co-founder of Pacific Investment Management Co. and its undisputed ruler for four decades was about to be overthrown. So just before 5 a.m. that day, on Sept. 26, he walked into Pimco’s headquarters in Newport Beach, California, and quietly placed notes on the desks of more than a dozen colleagues. “Keep doing a great job,” Gross wrote on trade tickets used to buy and sell bonds. Of Pimco, he wrote: “Look after her.” Gross’s exit -- an event that, not long ago, would have seemed unthinkable -- unleashed a crisis that Pimco is still trying to contain. His departure was followed by record withdrawals from the mutual fund he once ran, and which he built into the world’s biggest. Competitors swooped in, poaching clients from a firm that oversaw more assets in bonds than any competitor ever did. The government reached out to financial firms to ensure Gross’s departure didn’t destabilize the $100 trillion bond market.

5 Complete Lies About America's New $18 Trillion Debt Level – (www.zerohedge.com) On October 22, 1981, the government of the United States of America accumulated an astounding $1 TRILLION in debt. At that point, it had taken the country 74,984 days (more than 205 years) to accumulate its first trillion in debt. It would take less than five years to accumulate its second trillion. And as the US government just hit $18 trillion in debt on Friday afternoon, it has taken a measly 403 days to accumulate its most recent trillion. There’s so much misinformation and propaganda about this; let’s examine some of the biggest lies out there about the US debt:
1) “They can get it under control.”
2) “The debt doesn’t matter because we owe it to ourselves.”




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