Spain’s Bailout in mid-September says Goldman Sachs

By LUIS MIRANDA | THE REAL AGENDA | AUGUST 23, 2012

The Spanish government will wait at least until mid-September before requesting help from its European partners in order to properly assess what offers and under what conditions the European Central Bank (ECB), intends to use. This is what analysts at Goldman Sachs pointed to their clients.

“We continue to see Spain as the first in line in this respect (ask for help and accept the conditions), although we expect that there will be a request in mid-September at the earliest,” say analysts at the Wall Street bank.

So, consider that “the Spanish authorities will probably wait until they have clear what offers the ECB Council will present during the September 6 meeting, before deciding whether to make a request for support to the EFSF and, if so, how and when.”

In fact, the report from Goldman Sachs bets that Mario Draghi will unveiled a strategy at the next Council meeting with a plan to ‘guard the euro’ which will intend to curb the escalating sovereign debt interest rates of the countries of the euro zone.

In this sense, analysts expect the ECB to perform interventions “opportunistically” in debt maturities of the one to three years kind in order to prevent interest rate peaks required on short-term debt in countries where their obligations have paralyzed the debt markets several times.

However, the report from Goldman Sachs is more cautious about the possibility that the ECB will announce the purchase of large amounts of sovereign debt and believes that the institution will first attempt to reactivate private markets through sporadic interventions, instead of immediately replacing the private sector with its own balance sheet. That means the ECB may have to buy debt itself, in order to bring some peace to the markets and confidence to private debt buyers.

The possibility that Spain finally requests financial assistance by mid-September is best handled in the markets, as the country will face the maturity 26,351,000 (6,085,000 bonds and 20,266,000 in bonds and notes) in October.

In fact, the Treasury will have to attract about 79,968,000 from markets for the remainder of the year to fund outstanding maturities and the deficit, according to the primary market which has had access to Europa Press.

The maturities from August to December amounted to 45.968 million euros, to which must be added about half of the deficit forecast for this year (6.3%), which is about 30,000 million and 4,000 million that has been pledged to regional liquidity fund.

S&P will not slash Spain’s credit rating after request for bailout

S & P said today that it will probably keep Spain’s credit rating intact, even though the Spanish government may request a total rescue of the economy from Brussels and the International Monetary Fund.

In a statement, the Anglo-saxon agency notes that it maintains the negative outlook for Spain, whose long-term debt rate remains at BBB +, after the country sought a grant of up to 100,000 million for its banking system.

However, S&P warned that the credit worthiness will not fall any lower if the government of Spain requested a bailout of the total economy because the agency thinks it would be easier to successfully complete what Mariano Rajoy has called ‘the ambitious economic reform agenda’.

Downgrade-a-palooza: Banksters ready to Flush the Global Economy

by Antonia van de Velde
CNBC
January 13, 2012

Standard & Poor’s will cut the credit ratings of Italy, Spain and Portugal by two notches and downgrade France and Austria by one notch, a French newspaper said Friday, without citing its sources.

The newspaper, Les Echos, said that S&P would spare Germany, the Netherlands, Finland and Luxembourg in its long-awaited adjustment of euro zone sovereign ratings.

It said the announcement would come at around 4:30 pm ET, after the US stock market has closed. “Remain alert tonight when U.S. markets close,” one euro zone source told Reuters.

US stocks slumped in reaction, though were well off their lows, while European shares closed lower.  In December, S&P placed the ratings of 15 euro zone countries on credit watch negative— including those of top-rated Germany and France, the region’s two biggest economies—and said “systemic stresses” were building up as credit conditions tighten in the 17-nation bloc.

Since then, the European Central Bank has flooded the banking system with cheap three-year money to avert a credit crunch. At the time, the U.S.-based ratings agency said it could also downgrade the euro zone’s current bailout fund, the EFSF.

“The consequence (if France is downgraded) is that the EFSF cannot keep its triple-A rating,” said Commerzbank chief economist Joerg Kraemer.

“That may irritate markets in the short term but wouldn’t be a big problem in a world where the U.S. and Japan also don’t have a triple-A rating anymore. Triple-A is a dying species,” he said.

A spokesperson for S&P in Paris declined to comment on the reports.

John Wraith, Fixed Income Strategist at Bank of America Merrill Lynch told CNBC the confirmation of a mass downgrade would be another serious step in the crisis and would lead to a serious worsening of sentiment.

“To a large degree it’s widely anticipated,” Wraith said. “However, we think the reality of it is going to have a knock-on, ongoing impact on these markets.”

“It clearly deteriorates still further the credit worthiness of a lot of the European banks and just keeps that negative feedback loop between struggling banks and the sovereigns that may have to support them if things go from bad to worse in full force,” Wraith added.

A downgrade could automatically require some investment funds to sell bonds of affected states, making those countries’ borrowing costs rise still further.

“It’s been priced in for several weeks, but the market had been lulled into complacency over the holidays, and the new year began with a bounce in risk appetite, thanks partly to a good Spanish auction,” said Samarjit Shankar, Director Of Global Fx Strategy at BNY Mellon in Boston.

“But the Italian auction brought us back to earth and now we face the spectre of further downgrades.”

Italy’s three-year debt costs fell below 5 percent on Friday but its first bond sale of the year failed to match the success of a Spanish auction the previous day, reflecting the heavy refinancing load Rome faces over the next three months.

—Reuters contributed to this report.

Western Big Shots are ‘officially’ $7.6 Trillion in Debt

by Keith Jenkins
Bloomberg
January 3, 2012

Governments of the world’s leading economies have more than $7.6 trillion of debt maturing this year, with most facing a rise in borrowing costs.

Led by Japan’s $3 trillion and the U.S.’s $2.8 trillion, the amount coming due for the Group of Seven nations and Brazil, Russia, India and China is up from $7.4 trillion at this time last year, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Ten-year bond yields will be higher by year-end for at least seven of the countries, forecasts show.

Investors may demand higher compensation to lend to countries that struggle to finance increasing debt burdens as the global economy slows, surveys show. The International Monetary Fund cut its forecast for growth this year to 4 percent from a prior estimate of 4.5 percent as Europe’s debt crisis spreads, the U.S. struggles to reduce a budget deficit exceeding $1 trillion and China’s property market cools.

“The weight of supply may be a concern,” Stuart Thomson, a money manager in Glasgow at Ignis Asset Management Ltd., which oversees $121 billion, said in a Dec. 28 telephone interview. “Rather than the start of the year being the problem, it’s the middle part of the year that becomes the problem. That’s when we see the slowdown in the global economy having its biggest impact.”

Competition for Buyers

The amount needing to be refinanced rises to more than $8 trillion when interest payments are included. Coming after a year in which Standard & Poor’s cut the U.S.’s rating to AA+ from AAA and put 15 European nations on notice for possible downgrades, the competition to find buyers is heating up.

“It is a big number and obviously because many governments are still in a deficit situation the debt continues to accumulate and that’s one of the biggest problems,” Elwin de Groot, an economist at Rabobank Nederland in Utrecht, Netherlands, part of the world’s biggest agricultural lender, said in an interview on Dec. 27.

While most of the world’s biggest debtors had little trouble financing their debt load in 2011, with Bank of America Merrill Lynch’s Global Sovereign Broad Market Plus Index gaining 6.1 percent, the most since 2008, that may change.

Italy auctioned 7 billion euros ($9.1 billion) of debt on Dec. 29, less than the 8.5 billion euros targeted. With an economy sinking into its fourth recession since 2001, Prime Minister Mario Monti’s government must refinance about $428 billion of securities coming due this year, the third-most, with another $70 billion in interest payments, data compiled by Bloomberg show.

Rising Costs

Borrowing costs for G-7 nations will rise as much as 39 percent in 2011, based on forecasts of 10-year government bond yields by economists and strategists surveyed by Bloomberg in separate surveys. China’s 10-year yields may remain little changed, while India’s are projected to fall to 8.02 percent from about 8.39 percent. The survey doesn’t include estimates for Russia and Brazil.

After Italy, France has the most amount of debt coming due, at $367 billion, followed by Germany at $285 billion. Canada has $221 billion, while Brazil has $169 billion, the U.K. has $165 billion, China (PRCH) has $121 billion and India $57 billion. Russia has the least maturing, or $13 billion.

Rising borrowing costs forced Greece, Portugal and Ireland to seek bailouts from the European Union and IMF. Italy’s 10- year yields exceeded 7 percent last month, a level that preceded the request for aid from those three nations.

Bad Combination

“The buyer base for peripheral Europe has obviously shrunk at the same time that the supply coming to the market is increasing, which is not a good combination,” said Michael Riddell, a London-based fund manager at M&G Investments, which oversees about $323 billion.

The two biggest debtors, Japan and the U.S., have shown little trouble attracting demand.

Japan benefits by having a surplus in its current account, which is the broadest measure of trade and means that the nation doesn’t need to rely on foreign investors to finance its budget deficits. The U.S. benefits from the dollar’s role as the world’s primary reserve currency.

Japan’s 10-year bond yields, at less than 1 percent, are the second-lowest in the world, after Switzerland, even though its debt is about twice the size of its economy.

The U.S. attracted $3.04 for each dollar of the $2.135 trillion in notes and bonds sold last year, the most since the government began releasing the data in 1992. The U.S. drew an all-time high bid-to-cover ratio of 9.07 for $30 billion of four-week bills it auctioned on Dec. 20 even though they pay zero percent interest.

Tougher Year

With yields on 10-year Treasuries (USGG10YR) below 2 percent, an increasing number of investors see little chance for U.S. bonds to repeat last year’s gains of 9.79 percent. The U.S pays an average interest rate of about 2.18 percent on its outstanding debt, down from 2.51 percent in 2009, Bloomberg data show.

‘Given how well they have done, we don’t think they’re any longer a very good hedge,” Eric Pellicciaro, head of global rates investment at New York-based BlackRock Inc., which manages $1.14 trillion in fixed-income assets, said in a Dec. 16 telephone interview.

The median estimate of 70 economists and strategists is for Treasury 10-year note yields to rise to 2.60 percent by year-end from 1.94 percent at 10:03 a.m. London time. In Japan, the forecast for the nation’s benchmark note yield is 1.35 percent, while it’s expected to rise to 2.50 percent in Germany, from 1.93 percent today.

Central Banks

Central banks are bolstering demand by either keeping interest rates at record lows or reducing them, and by purchasing bonds through a policy know as quantitative easing.

The Federal Reserve has said it will keep its target rate for overnight loans between banks between zero and 0.25 percent through mid-2013, and is now selling $400 billion of its short- term Treasuries and reinvesting the proceeds into longer-term government debt in a program traders dubbed Operation Twist.

The Bank of Japan has kept its key rate at or below 0.5 percent since 1995, and expanded the asset-purchase program last year to 20 trillion yen ($260 billion). The Bank of England kept its main rate at a record low 0.5 percent last month, and left its asset-buying target at 275 billion pounds ($426 billion).

The European Central Bank reduced its main refinancing rate twice last quarter, to 1 percent from 1.5 percent. It followed those moves by allotting 489 billion euros of three-year loans to euro-region lenders. That exceeded the median estimate of 293 billion euros in a Bloomberg News survey of economists. The central bank will offer a second three-year loan on Feb. 28.

‘Flush With Liquidity’

The money from the ECB may be used by banks to buy government bonds, according to Fabrizio Fiorini, the chief investment officer at Aletti Gestielle SGR SpA in Milan.

“The market is now flush with liquidity after measures taken by central banks, particularly the ECB, and that’s great news for risky assets,” Fiorini said in a telephone interview on Dec. 20. “The market will have no problem taking down supply from countries like Spain and Italy in the first quarter. In fact, they should be able to raise money at lower borrowing costs than what we saw in recent months.”

Italy’s sale last week included 2.5 billion euros of 5 percent bond due in March 2022, which yielded 6.98 percent. That was down from 7.56 percent at an auction Nov. 29. It also sold 9 billion euros of bills on Dec. 28 at a rate of 3.251 percent, compared with 6.504 percent at the previous auction on Nov. 25.

‘Phony War’

Investors should be most worried about the period after the ECB’s second three-year longer-term refinancing operation scheduled in February, according to Ignis’s Thomson.

“The amount of liquidity that has been supplied by central banks, with more to come from the ECB in February, suggests the first couple of months will be a sort of phony war as far as the supply is concerned,” Thomson said.

The ECB has bought about 212 billion euros of government bonds since starting a program in May 2010 to contain borrowing costs for Greece, Portugal and Ireland. It began buying Spanish and Italian debt in August, according to people familiar with the trades, who declined to be identified because they weren’t authorized to speak publicly about the transactions.

“There’s a lot of talk that the ECB might have to give more direct support to the governments,” Frances Hudson, who helps manage about $242 billion as a global strategist at Standard Life Investments in Edinburgh, said in a Dec. 22 telephone interview.

Following is a table of bond and bill redemptions and interest payments in 2012 for the Group of Seven countries, Brazil, China, India and Russia, in dollars, using data calculated by Bloomberg as of Dec. 29:

Country    2012 Bond, Bill Redemptions ($)      Coupon Payments
Japan             3,000 billion                   117 billion
U.S.              2,783 billion                   212 billion
Italy               428 billion                    72 billion
France              367 billion                    54 billion
Germany             285 billion                    45 billion
Canada              221 billion                    14 billion
Brazil              169 billion                    31 billion
U.K.                165 billion                    67 billion
China               121 billion                    41 billion
India                57 billion                    39 billion
Russia               13 billion                     9 billion


U.S. National Debt at $214 Trillion not $14 Trillion

NPR
August 11, 2011

When Standard & Poor’s reduced the nation’s credit rating from AAA to AA-plus, the United States suffered the first downgrade to its credit rating ever. S&P took this action despite the plan Congress passed this past week to raise the debt limit.

The downgrade, S&P said, “reflects our opinion that the fiscal consolidation plan that Congress and the administration recently agreed to falls short of what, in our view, would be necessary to stabilize the government’s medium-term debt dynamics.”

It’s those medium- and long-term debt problems that also worry economics professor Laurence J. Kotlikoff, who served as a senior economist on President Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisers. He says the national debt, which the U.S. Treasury has accounted at about $14 trillion, is just the tip of the iceberg.

“We have all these unofficial debts that are massive compared to the official debt,” Kotlikoff tells David Greene, guest host of weekends on All Things Considered. “We’re focused just on the official debt, so we’re trying to balance the wrong books.”

Kotlikoff explains that America’s “unofficial” payment obligations — like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid benefits — jack up the debt figure substantially.

“If you add up all the promises that have been made for spending obligations, including defense expenditures, and you subtract all the taxes that we expect to collect, the difference is $211 trillion. That’s the fiscal gap,” he says. “That’s our true indebtedness.”

We don’t hear more about this enormous number, Kotlikoff says, because politicians have chosen their language carefully to keep most of the problem off the books.

“Why are these guys thinking about balancing the budget?” he says. “They should try and think about our long-term fiscal problems.”

According to Kotlikoff, one of the biggest fiscal problems Congress should focus on is America’s obligation to make Social Security payments to future generations of the elderly.

“We’ve got 78 million baby boomers who are poised to collect, in about 15 to 20 years, about $40,000 per person. Multiply 78 million by $40,000 — you’re talking about more than $3 trillion a year just to give to a portion of the population,” he says. “That’s an enormous bill that’s overhanging our heads, and Congress isn’t focused on it.”

“We’ve consistently done too little too late, looked too short-term, said the future would take care of itself, we’ll deal with that tomorrow,” he says. “Well, guess what? You can’t keep putting off these problems.”

To eliminate the fiscal gap, Kotlikoff says, the U.S. would have to have tax increases and spending reductions far beyond what’s being negotiated right now in Washington.

“What you have to do is either immediately and permanently raise taxes by about two-thirds, or immediately and permanently cut every dollar of spending by 40 percent forever. The [Congressional Budget Office's] numbers say we have an absolutely enormous problem facing us.”

Manipulated Markets Make a Come Back

Does it make sense that during the deepest depression since 1929, the U.S. Stock Market comes back up from a 6oo+ point decline? Only a manipulated system where speculators have complete control could recover from a rout that showed how little confidence investors have in the market today.

by Luis R. Miranda
The Real Agenda
August 9, 2011

While countries are in dire straits to make payments on mostly illegally acquired debts and the price of oil continues to fall; while little to nothing is produced or manufactured in the industrialized world and no ingenuity makes it big anywhere in the world; while the most important currencies continue to tumble and other financial markets turn more sour; while unemployment continues to grow from the low 20′s and more people make use of food stamps and unemployment benefits; while more jobs are exported to third world nations that support slave work for their populations and inflation is only tamed by artificial manipulation of the currencies; while numerous people look to gold and silver as their salvation, surprisingly the stock market came back from the pantheon and surged to recover from the slide seen just a few hours ago.

There is very little that can't be done when someone or something controls fiat currencies, rating agencies, and financial markets.

But not only did the stocks came back strong; they had the largest gains in more than two years. Along with this “come back” the U.S. dollar got weaker and the Swiss franc rose the most since 1971. Even the very same Standard & Poor Index managed to recover almost 5 percent, the most significant gains since 2009. In the meantime, the origin of the financial disaster, the privately owned banks headed by the Federal Reserve announced their intent to print more worthless money into the economy as a way to “boost” confidence. Even though QE1 and QE2 failed to provide any confidence, or for that matter failed to provide anything positive, the FED believes it is appropriate to bring up QE3. With this, the FED shows its interest to purchase more government bonds, which will consolidate its position as the largest holder of U.S. government debt.

“The Fed is clearly setting up a situation that could offer them the potential to do something significant, if necessary,” Bruce McCain, who helps oversee $22 billion as chief investment strategist at the private-banking unit of KeyCorp in Cleveland, said in a telephone interview. “That could be viewed as a positive,” added McCain. “People are starting to realize that what we’ve had in the market was an overreaction.” Really? Positive? How so?

Artificial Surge after the Decline

How can a stock market come back from a 600+ point decline in just a few hours if one considers that the cause of such loss -the downgrade of the U.S. debt rating- has not been dealt with? It simply boggles the mind, doesn’t it? The United States credit rating was lowered from AAA to AA+ by Standard & Poors, a rating agency that is paid by the banks to evaluate financial products and which is in part responsible for the current financial catastrophe. Together with Moody’s, S&P was created the by the banking system to carry out “independent” evaluations of financial products as well as credit confidence on institutions, state and local governments and of course whole nations.

According to Bloomberg, Stocks came back from a loss of $ 1 trillion after S&P downgraded the U.S. credit rating last Friday evening. The results of the downgrade were not felt until Monday, when the Markets opened all over the world. The S&P index sank about 11 percent and the stock market lost 648 points or more than 6 percent. But just 24 hours later, everything was different. “The MSCI All-Country World Index rose 2.1 percent for its biggest gain of the year”, says Bloomberg. “The index started the U.S. session valued at about 12.1 times profits, down from 21 in 1995..The MSCI Emerging Markets Index pared today’s drop to 2.2 percent after tumbling as much as 4.4 percent.”

Stocks Rally? What Rally?

In the Stock Market, the Dow Jones climbed almost 430 or 4 percent, failing to completely recover from the recent loss. The stocks experienced the 1oth more significant gain in its history. Can you believe it? In the middle of a Depression, the stocks rally the much?

Meanwhile, in the S&P, shares got to the front of the line due to the numerically significant gains. In total, they accumulated some 8.2 percent all together. This is the biggest rally since May 2009, which meant a complete recovery from Monday’s low. Bank of America Corp., which is now being sued by AIG for fraud, managed to gain 17 percent while other players like Hartford Financial Services got back 16 percent.

Of course the main stream media is giving all credit to the Federal Reserve, due to its announcement that it intends to “boost” the economy by injecting worthless cash into it. The FED’s head, Ben Bernanke and his aides came out to try to calm the demise a bit, although not everyone at the FED agreed with the move to bring along a new quantitative easing move. Three members from the policy committee dissented and instead called for maintaining interest rates low for a longer period of time.

As the docu-film “The Inside Job” impeccably exposes, there is very little that can’t be done when someone or something has the power to create money out of thin air, create rating agencies, control those agencies to give AAA ratings to whatever they choose and electronically manipulate the financial stock and bond markets whenever it’s convenient in order to perpetuate the fraudulent debt-based system the world has worked under since 1913.

False Policy Changes

The best way to perpetuate the above cited financial system is to have the available tool continuously reinforce the falsehood of the Central Bank sponsored plans. So, Moody’s has come out to praise the FED’s move to maintain the interest rates at a quarter of a percent in order to bolster the downturn. It’s a  ”major policy change,” said Augustine Faucher, director of macroeconomics at Moody’s. “By providing a more explicit time line for raising rates, the Fed is telling markets it is concerned about recent economic weakness and the potential for a near-term contraction, and is dedicated to spurring stronger economic growth,” Faucher added.

Just as this statement by Faucher is baseless, so is the belief that because the U.S. dollar is the world’s reserve currency, it can stand more beating than any other one. In fact, one of the reasons why the U.S. has not been downgraded further is that its currency is still consider valuable. Ironically, the dollar has lost 98 percent of its value since it became the subject of manipulation by the bankers. Moody’s has stated that the U.S. dollar can support larger levels of debt than other currencies. How do they figure that with a currency that is so devalued. They can’t figure it out. They just make it up.

The one world reserve currency scheme is only beneficial to those who control it, because the rest of the nations need to do business while devaluing their own. In sound economics, the value of paper money is based on a country’s production or manufacturing, therefore, the U.S. dollar can no longer be such reserve currency. U.S. manufacturing has eroded so badly, that it has cost the jobs of some 18 million people in the last few years.

If the U.S. dollar is still the world’s reserve currency, why are there other currencies that have better exchange rates than the dollar itself? I am no economic expert, but if the Swiss Frank rates higher than the dollar in currency exchange markets, shouldn’t the Frank be the reserve currency? Or even better, shouldn’t a commodity like gold be the reserve currency given its capacity to withstand recessions, depressions and financial market manipulations? It should. The reason why gold is not the reserve currency or at least the commodity over which a paper money currency is supported is that bankers cannot monopolize it, “hug” it or manipulate it.

High Market but Low Results: The World Economy in Shambles

While the banks try to extend the suffering period for the middle and low classes, countries in Europe are scrambling for a life boat to jump on. Although France and Germany are said to be negotiating an agreement to buy Spain’s and Italy’s debt in order to avoid a deeper economic collapse, some sources claim that the rescuers believe the Italian debt is too large to save. Both Nicolas Sarkozy and Angela Merkel began to hear opposition voices that are calling for a different position from the German and French governments. The reason for this is that an eventual bailout of Italy and Spain could cost the rescuers their AAA rating. This is seen as a possible trigger to drag the world’s economy further into the precipice.

Although U.S. markets artificially revived themselves on Tuesday, other countries were not as lucky. In Italy, the bond market saw a loss of 11 percent on its 10 year note. Just as the FED has done in the United States, the European Central Bank kept Italy and Spain afloat through the purchase of their bonds for a second day in a row. That was not enough to save the Spanish 10 year notes, as they collapsed eight basis points to 5.08 percent on Tuesday.

Meanwhile, oil prices hit some of the lowest levels for the year by getting down to $79.30 a barrel. Conversely, gold prices soared and added 4.1 percent to get to a record price of $1,782.50 an ounce.

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