Who is rigging the market now?

In the run up to the credit crunch the market manipulations perpetrated by the world’s largest investment banks are now well known to us.  The banks rigged many of the important markets required for the global economy – proprietary trading held sway, credit and other derivative products were miss-sold, reference interest rates (Libor and others) were fixed and so it goes on.  Fortunately for us governments around the globe and their central bankers have been on a mission to sort out these market abuses.  The Wolves of Wall Street have been tamed by the Gnomes from Zurich, the ECB and the Fed – all very reassuring.  That is until one looks closely at the market manipulation now being pushed through by Central Banks culminating in the completely unexpected decision of the Swiss National Bank (SNB) to remove the 1.20 floor on the Swiss franc against the Euro.

Anything the banks can do .....

As Gavyn Davies tells us this was “one of the biggest currency shocks since the collapse of the Bretton Woods system in 1971. The decision has been heavily criticised, both for its tactical handling of the foreign exchange market, and for the collapse of the centrepiece of its monetary strategy, without (apparently) any overriding cause. The credibility of a central bank that has traditionally been hugely respected by the markets has clearly been dented.”

Demand for the old normal

For the last six years the developed world has been suffering from a chronic shortage of demand: demand for goods, demand and services, demand for investment.  The need to deleverage personal, corporate and government debt has meant that there has been massive excess capacity and a huge shortfall in aggregate demand.  This lack of demand has been driving up unemployment and driving down prices.  All this has been complicated by the fact that we in the West are at the zero bound of interest rates this nasty cocktail has been characterised as secular stagnation.  Over the last six years wages in all normal income groups have flat-lined and living standards will now be lower at the end of this economic cycle than they were in 2008 – this is extraordinary, almost unheard of in the developed world.  Or is it?  Thomas Piketty, the French Rock Star Economist (is that an oxymoron as the French have no rock stars?) would have us all believe that we are now returning to a more normal state of affairs, where vast pools of wealth lie idle in the hands of a financial elite and the rest of us jog along at a steady but uninspiring rate.

A French Rock Star??

Crude benefits of falling oil prices

The ending of QE in the US and the fall in the price of oil from over $115 a barrel to under $60 a barrel were the defining economic events of 2014, but their consequences will not be felt until next year.  The ending of QE in the autumn brought to an end the huge expansion of the US Federal Reserve’s balance sheet, since 2008 the Fed has pumped some $2.3tn of “new money” into the world economy which has had a wondrous effect on asset prices in all sorts of weird and wonderful places.  London property prices have boomed, stocks in emerging markets reached new heights and bond prices sky rocketed as yields collapsed – also commodity prices boomed and oil was not left out of the party.  Between 2009 and 2011 oil prices rose from $40 to $125 a barrel, driven by ever increasing demand from emerging markets and $1.9tn of US and UK QE.  Following the boom in commodity prices between 2011 and 2013 prices stabilised at a high level before falling off a cliff in 2014.

The Crude Story

Floating free from Germany

Mario Drahgi has called for more integration and “sweeping powers” for the ECB to control fiscal policies and efforts to reform the Eurozone's economy. Is this “joined-up” thinking is a throw-back to the darkest days of the Euro crisis, when it became obvious that there was lack of cohesion between member states?  Or is this a power grab by the ECB, using the interminable recession, as an excuse to take control of a “fiscal and economic union”.  Currently the ECB owns interest rates and sets budget targets (roundly ignored by all but Germany), in this new and enlightened world the EBC would like set tax rates and drive to through supply side reforms to drive productivity and competiveness.

Drahgi believes in the “importance of each country sticking to its commitments under the stability and growth pact “and that this should now be beyond debate”.  He would like to go further by saying that in matter economic “sovereignty should be exercised jointly” – what a great line!!  What are the things that could do with harmonisation?

1. Actual interest rates
2. Rates of business taxation
3. Minimum wages and hours of work
4. Actual spending limits (properly enforced)

Living in Harmony

Winning the productivity race

Seven years on from the start of the Great Recession the slump looks set to go on and on.  Even David Cameron who seldom mentions the economy was stirred this week to reinforce the message that - the worst may not be over.

Certainly, in the UK we have had some growth but we still have high levels of government debt and a crippling trade deficit and our main trading partner is in real trouble.  It is now certain that the major economies in the developed world will never recover the lost demand that has opened up between actual GDP and the trend line established over the last 20 years.  This puts us in new territory, as in every other recent recession the global economy has always been able to close gap in “temporary” lost demand during the expansion phase of the economic cycle.  In real terms, people in virtually every developed country will be poorer at the end of this economic cycle than in 2007!  This is a pretty stunning revelation – we have forgotten how to grow!
 

What a hedgehog knows

When, in 1948, Mikhail Naimy  wrote “The more elaborate his labyrinths, the further from the Sun his face” he was already living in a world that was being over-run by complexity.  Most of the greatest insights in art and science since the end of the Second World War have been conceived in a dense soup of analysis.  There will no more be simple insights that change the world – mastering the complexity is everything.  The keen amateur who is able to think freely and creatively is no longer taken seriously;  the potting shed had been replaced by the data centre such is the explosion of data and variables required to understand the problems we face. We are living in the age of the Fox (who knows many small things).
This up-tick in complexity is obvious in the world of macro-economics as the simple relationships between money, prices, capacity and rates of interest no longer seem to work.  Also old certainties about productivity and wealth have been debunked – this is an uncomfortable world for the Hedgehog – (who only knows one big thing).  Obvious problems create resolutions that can be faced with bravery, although tactics may vary we can unite behind a shared vision or oppose it full on.   If the problem is too complex to articulate then there will be no solution only a vacuum.

Where are the hedgehogs

Time up for QE

No one really understands it and because of this opinions are all the more divided and intransigent. Despite this incoherence the market has understood enough to know that it drives asset prices and confidence in future prices.  It is QE – quantitative easing.

Ben Bernanke - the Godfather of QE

QE is where Central Banks print themselves some money to buy bonds and other instruments from the banks, the idea is that this puts cash / liquidity into the economy increasing the money supply and making credit more freely available.  Under “normal” conditions of growth (+2-3% annually)and inflation (around 2% annually) equilibrium this would drive up aggregate demand (growth)  and inflation as the banks push this extra liquidity out into the market in the form of loans.

Solving Secular Stagnation

There is now a sense of gloom that pervades the corridors of power in the developed world, six years on from the Lehman Brothers' default and the ensuing “great recession” we are still in the economic dead-zone.  In particular Europe is marred by low growth, high unemployment, falling prices and the worry is that this is the “new normal”.  Most economist are satisfied that the problem is poor aggregate demand, caused by falling investment in both the private and public sectors combined with diminishing disposable income - wages have been flat for years.  This malaise has been characterised as “Secular Stagnation” (SS), a term made famous by Larry Summers a former Head of the US Treasury department.

Larry Summers - feeling the torpor of Secular Stagnation

The IMF gives more poor advice

The IMF have made some interesting pronouncements over the last few years – having missed the credit crunch and the “great recession” that followed they at first endorsed the UKs plan A and then decried it just as it was starting to work – so we shouldn’t hold up too much hope that the Fund will have anything sensible to say on the matter of European recovery.  No one was too interested when they published their World Economic Outlook, which is normally like a school report – “the UK could try harder”, “France needs to apply herself and complete home work on time” – you get the picture.  But this time round it was a bit more specific and surprisingly so; normally the IMF is reasonably hawkish, looking to solve problems through monetary policy (what would expect, it’s a bank) but in this report the IMF suggest substantially increased public spending on infrastructure investment, and across much of the world.   It asserts that when unemployment is high and interest rates are low, the benefits will be greater if investment is paid for by increased borrowing, rather than cutting other spending or raising taxes. Most interestingly, the IMF declares that good infrastructure investment will reduce rather than increase government debt burdens as public infrastructure investments pay for themselves.  Confusingly the whole 44 page synopsis of the WEO highlights a number of risks to the world economy – political risk in Russia, property bubbles, shortages of natural gas, etc;  but report hardly mentions the debts run up by governments and leverage in the banking system - convenient eh!

Christine Lagarde Head of the IMF points the way forward

Cutting Taxes and Axing Osborne

In 2010 the Tories had plan A, deficit reduction, and by and large the British public bought the idea, which was simple, “We have to cut the deficit because sky-high public debt will kill growth and investment and lead to long term depression”.  Some of this proved to be wrong but enough of the narrative still works.  In all polls that ask the question “who do you trust to manage the economy?” the Tories are in a comfortably lead. We Brits have a long memory and the Brown / Balls bubble will not be forgotten and more recently Ball’s idiotic call for a plan B made him the laughing stock of Westminster.

Despite the Tory’s hard talk on deficit reduction the reality is that progress has been hampered by the coalition’s bargaining (with the illiberal Lib Dems), which ring fenced welfare, the NHS and pensions from the ravages of austerity.  Nearly all the cuts imposed in this Parliament have been born by spending departments that receive less 40% of the entire public sector budget.  There have been some interesting results – less spending on police has reduce crime, less spending on “enterprise” has helped growth take off, lower spending on Europe has made Europe even less popular and a huge increase in international aid has seen our stock in the world fall dramatically!