James Saft

You can lie to taxpayers or you can lie to creditors, European authorities are learning, but doing both at the same time is very hard.

The proposed policy that current senior creditors to troubled states will not face losses on their loans but future private lenders will be forced to share in losses with taxpayers is so irrational, so bound to fail that it falls out of the realm of economics and into the ambit of brain injury.

European Union member states will this week hold a summit at which they will create a permanent fund to lend to troubled members under co-called strict conditions of fiscal responsibility.

At the very same time, leaders of the 27-country European Union will sign on to a pronouncement by euro zone finance ministers saying that private lenders will have to share the pain, on a case-by-case basis, of any sovereign debt restructuring after 2013.

So let’s recap, because this is truly bizarre: Lenders to Ireland or the other troubled states won’t take a hit now but if they stick around until 2013 then they will take losses along with the taxpayers. Oh yeah, and the current round of bailouts are aimed at seeing Ireland and Greece through the next couple of years, at which point it will become extremely dangerous to lend to them, as their economies will have shrunk, their debt burdens bloomed and private lenders will be on the hook.

The revolving door between government and Wall Street is wrong, antithetical to both democracy and capitalism and ought to be stopped.

For the second time in two weeks a high-ranking recent U.S. public servant has traded a position of influence in the corridors of power for a massive paycheck working for an institution that owes its very existence to government largess.

This time it is Theo Lubke, who has transitioned smoothly from heading the New York Federal Reserve Bank’s derivative regulation effort to working for Goldman Sachs, where he can be expected to, well, help it do well out of regulation, current and future.

Iceland’s remarkable return to growth shows once again that in this crisis the best policy is often the one that will make international partners most angry.

Having been reviled and chastised when it refused to make good the outsize debts of its banks, Iceland this week capped a striking turnaround when it announced that its economy expanded by 1.2 percent in real terms in the most recent quarter, its first such rise in two years.

This is in stark contrast to Ireland, whose pliability and inability as a member of the euro zone to act unilaterally leaves it with a still crashing economy which must service ever more debt by making ever deeper cuts to public spending.

James Saft is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.

The move to reform taxation of billions of dollars in so-called carried interest paid to hedge fund and private equity executives is dead and prominent among the mourners should be investors in U.S. debt.

A country that can’t even get it together to ensure that some of its highest paid people pay as much proportionally in tax as their secretaries and personal trainers is a country with very little hope of effecting meaningful budgetary reform.

Suffice to say that the long bond didn’t sell off on news that U.S. Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus has dropped a higher carried interest provision from his since-defeated tax bill, a sign that the Democrats have effectively given up hope of the measure. The news should, however, make holders of U.S. debt even more willing to sell to the Federal Reserve, currently buying Treasuries often and in size. The script has been written for tax and spending reform over the next two years and for lenders to the U.S. the story does not end happily.

The good news is that the European Central Bank will probably start a massive additional round of quantitative easing to fight the break-up of the euro zone.

The bad news is that they will, as ever, only choose the right policy, as Winston Churchill said of the Americans, after exhausting all of the alternatives.

Global share markets rallied furiously on Wednesday, fed by hopes that the ECB would increase its bond-buying efforts, a possibility raised by its chief Jean-Claude Trichet in an appearance before the European Parliament. Trichet faces stern opposition inside the ECB from fellow central bankers, notably German Axel Weber, who believe that policy should be normalized rather than loosened.

From Dublin to Paris to Budapest to inside those brown UPS trucks delivering holiday packages, it has been a tough few weeks for savers and retirees.

Moves by the Irish, French and Hungarian governments, and by the famous delivery company, showed that in the post-crisis world retirees, present and future, will be paying much of the price and taking on more of the risk.

This goes beyond merely cutting back on pension benefits, rising to actual appropriation of supposedly long-term retirement assets to help fund short term emergencies.

James Saft is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.

HUNTSVILLE, Ala — If you think that the business of America is consumption, then sit back, enjoy the Black Friday sales and take heart from the recent upbeat data on spending and income.

If, on the other hand, you think the future of the U.S. is going to have to be productive industries which throw off the cash flow that funds the paychecks and pays for the $5 made-in-China Barbie dolls at Wal-Mart, then perhaps you had better take note of the sharp slowdown in orders for durable goods.

The contrast between consumption and investment really could not be more stark.

The U.S. Commerce Department said on Wednesday that consumerspending rose by 0.4 percent in October and also upgraded spending growth in September to 0.3 percent. Incomes rose by 0.5 percent in the month, one of the best such showings this year.

James Saft is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.

There is a pretty good rule of thumb in global financial markets: if you want to know where problems are beyond the reach of policy, look for places where the authorities are blaming “speculators”.

So it was in Europe, where last spring, as the depths of the euro zone’s problems were becoming clear, officials railed at the speculators who had the temerity to point out the obvious: that several nations would not have the money to repay their debts.

Greece and Spain went so far as to put their intelligence agencies on the case of tracking down speculative “attacks.”
So, it would seem, is it now in China, with food prices.

We’ve all gone down the rabbit hole.

World Bank President Robert Zoellick has lent a certain Alice in Wonderland quality to the financial landscape by saying that the world should consider a return to a modified gold standard of international exchange.

If you’d asked me in 2007 how likely it was that a consummate insider like Zoellick would propose such a thing I’d have said it was only slightly more credible then the head of the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association coming out in favor of giving cows the vote.

The idea that we would move away from or curb a fiat money system — in which the value of money is tied only to faith in a government, buttressed by its policies — was, and probably is, unsupportable, not so much impossible to implement as impossible to agree.

We’ve entered a new era in global financial markets: the U.S. is intentionally devaluing the dollar.

For the U.S., which has long espoused a strong dollar but in reality had a policy of benign neglect, this is the equivalent of pushing the big red eject button in the jet cockpit: something big is going to happen and we will have to see how it will work out.
The Federal Reserve on Wednesday moved to open a second round of quantitative easing, pledging to purchase a total of $600 billion of longer-dated Treasuries between now and the end of the second quarter of next year. As well, the Fed will reinvest $250-300 billion in the same period, meaning that the central bank will be buying up $110 billion a month in Treasuries and creating a like amount of new money out of the ether.

Perhaps the principal way QE will boost the economy, the Fed hopes, is by lowering effective interest rates, enticing investors to move into riskier assets, some of which may generate inflation and jobs. As well there is the wealth effect; the old canard of spending more because your retirement account and house have gone up in nominal terms.