MacroScope

The Greek standoff continues. The Democratic Left, a junior party in the government’s coalition, could not be swayed and said it would vote against labour reforms demanded by the EU and IMF, so a deal putting Greece’s bailout terms back on track remains elusive.

Just as worryingly, Reuters secured an advance glimpse of the EU/IMF/ECB troika’s report on Greece which showed the debt target of 120 percent of GDP in 2020 will be missed (surprise, surprise) and as things stand will come in at around 136 percent. In other words, more money – up to 30 billion euros –  is going to be needed be that via lower interest rates and longer maturities on loans and/or a writedown on Greek bonds held by the European Central Bank and euro zone governments.

We know the IMF is very keen on the latter, believing that is the only way the numbers can be made to add up. We also know that Germany and others are just as resistant. Other schemes, such as Athens using privatization proceeds to buy back bonds, which has inbuilt leverage since it can do so at a quarter of their face value, may yet come into the mix but don’t alone look like they’ll make enough of a dent in Greece’s debt mountain. Athens looks set to get the extra two years it requested to make the cuts demanded of it, which also falls into the “necessary but insufficient” category.

But the headline is we are nowhere near a deal yet, and time is running short.

Following our exclusive late on Wednesday that Spain has pretty much completed its funding needs for this year and is about to get cracking on 2013, plus its assertion that international investors are returning in droves, it seems increasingly likely that Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy is going to be in no hurry to seek outside aid, not least with key Catalan elections a month away.

There are independent signs that foreign buyers are being lured back, particularly to the shorter-term debt that the ECB has said it will buy if Madrid first asks for help from the ESM rescue fund. But despite the apparent lack of sovereign funding pressure, there are counter pressures on Rajoy. Spain’s biggest bank Santander added to those yesterday, urging the government to seek a bailout after bad property debts eviscerated third quarter profit. A rise in the Q3 unemployment rate to a record 25 percent shows just how dire the real economy is.

Here’s a snapshot of FDR & Co. in 1933 as they signed Glass-Steagall, which separated the financial sector into safer, deposit-taking commercial banks and risk-taking investment banks – Wall Street.

And here’s a photo of Bill Clinton & Co. repealing Glass-Steagall in 1999, with the passage of the Graham-Leach-Bliley act known as the Financial Services Modernization Act. 

Ironically, an increase of capital inflows to Latin America in the last few years due to unappealing ultralow yields in industrialized countries and the region’s relative economic success is posing a threat for development, according to a recent paper that provides wider background to BRIC criticism of the latest U.S. Federal Reserve´s quantitative easing.

The article, written by Argentine economists Roberto Frenkel and Martin Rapetti for the World Economic Review – an international journal of heterodox economics –  warns about the possibility of a Latin American variant of the so-called “Dutch Disease”. This is a situation where a country suddenly finds a new source of wealth that makes its currency more expensive, hurting local exports and causing traumatic de-industrialization.

“Our concern is that massive capital inflows to Latin America may have pernicious effects via an excessive appreciation of the real exchange rates, which could lead to a contraction in output and employment in tradable activities with negative effects on long-run growth”, says the paper.

A clutch of top UK economic forecasters on Thursday swept under the rug predictions for another 50 billion pounds of gilt purchases they thought would take place starting just in a few weeks.

News that the UK economy bolted ahead at a 1.0 percent quarterly pace in the three months to September – nearly double the consensus prediction in the Reuters Poll and easily more than twice the last measured growth rate in the United States – was probably a good enough reason on the surface.

But most agree the main reason was an extra work day compared with the prior quarter – when the Queen’s Jubilee celebrations left vast swathes of the country idle – along with a spending boost from accounting for tickets for the Olympic and Paralympic Games.

Richard Leong contributed to this post

U.S.durable goods orders rebounded a solid 9.9 percent in September following the prior month’s plunge. However, a proxy for business investment was essentially stuck in neutral. This was sufficiently worrying to JP Morgan economists to force them to revise down their estimates for third quarter U.S. economic growth down to 1.6 percent from 1.8 percent. Barclays economists also marked down their Q3 GDP forecast by 0.2 percentage point, putting it at 1.8 percent. The Reuters consensus forecast for the number, due out on Friday, is 1.9 percent.

JP Morgan economist Mike Feroli:

Don’t let the headline fool you: the September durables report was a big disappointment. In particular, the weakness in the capital goods figures leaves intact our concerns regarding the capex outlook. In light of today’s report we are revising down our expectations for tomorrow’s 3Q GDP report from 1.8% to 1.6%. We continue to look for 2.0% growth in 4Q, though there is now some downside risk to our business investment projection for next quarter. […]

Core capital goods orders were flat last month and core capital goods shipments were down 0.3%. These figures may not look so bad until you consider two factors; first, both numbers had been weak over the prior few months and some rebound was expected, and second, both numbers tend to be strong in the third month of the quarter. Topping it all off, both numbers were revised down a decent amount in August. All of these factors get reflected in the three-month average annualized change, which shows shipments declining at a 4.9% pace and orders sinking at a 23.5% annual rate.

Chatter about whether Ben Bernanke will stay as the Federal Reserve’s chief has complicated Wall Street’s view on a possible Mitt Romney administration. Speculation about Bernanke’s future heightened after the New York Times reported on Tuesday Bernanke told close friends he probably will not seek another term even if U.S. President Barack Obama wins a second term.

While Wall Street generally supports Romney, the Republican candidate has stated publicly he will not reappoint Bernanke for a third term as the Fed Chairman. Bernanke’s current tenure expires in January 2014.

“He did say he was going to neuter the Fed,” Robbert Van Batenburg, head of global research at Louis Capital said.

A slightly bigger than forecast 5.7 percent rise in sales of new homes in September reported by the National Association of Realtors on Wednesday lends credibility to September’s jump in housing starts, but appears neutral for Federal Reserve monetary policy discussions.

The jump in new home sales seems to have largely justified the 11 percent jump in September housing starts, says Decision Economics senior economist Pierre Ellis. The inventory of houses for sale at the end of September rose just 1.4 percent, from the end of August and the months’ supply fell to 4.5 months from 4.7 months, he added.

Thus, the increased production of houses seems not to have involved any “over-exuberant optimism” – and the impact if demand were suddenly to evaporate would be contained, he said. “Healthy skepticism seems to prevail in builderland,” Ellis observes.

The Federal Reserve’s open-ended bond-buying stimulus announced last month was coupled with a promise to continue purchasing assets “if the outlook for the labor market does not improve substantially.” Central bank officials are expected to continue discussing what parameters they will take into account to define such progress, but are not expected to come to any hard and fast decisions just yet.

In a research note entitled “What the Fed didn’t say: Payrolls at 160K,” Torsten Slok, economist at Deutsche Bank, offers a few guideposts:

In terms of what the Fed will be looking at, we reckon that employment growth will be first among equals – in particular nonfarm payrolls. We estimate that the FOMC’s economic and policy projections are consistent with payrolls averaging gains of around 160,000 per month through mid-2015, when they have told us they expect the exit process to begin to get under way. There is a range of uncertainty around this estimate. But if the numbers are coming in well below that rate for a number of months (100k or less), look for the Committee to extend the mid-2015 date and possibly step up its QE purchases, and expect just the opposite if they are coming in well above that rate (200k or more).

Big day in Berlin with European Central Bank chief Mario Draghi entering the lion’s den of the Bundestag to explain to German lawmakers why his plan to buy sovereign euro zone bonds in potentially unlimited amounts poses no threat to the ECB’s remit and the euro zone economy.
Former ECB chief economist Juergen Stark – one of Draghi’s most trenchant critics – told us yesterday that the ECB president must present much more convincing arguments than hitherto as to why the plan would not pile enormous risks onto the ECB’s balance sheet for which European taxpayers could have to pay.

The session, which will include 10-minute introductory remarks from Draghi followed by a lengthy Q&A and then short public statements from Draghi and Bundestag President Norbert Lammert, is a rarity. The hawks in parliament will demand to know how bond-buying is remotely in line with the ECB’s mandate. The more moderate will at least want to hear what sort of conditionality the ECB wants to see before it leaps into the breach, and the backdrop is coloured by continued Bundesbank opposition to the Draghi strategy. Angela Merkel is speaking at a separate event in Berlin in, as does Wolfgang Schaeuble later in the day.

Spain will probably loom largest for the German lawmakers but Greece continues to run it a close second with suggestions growing that it will get an extra two years to make the cuts demanded of it. But even that may not be enough for the EU/IMF/ECB troika of inspectors to conclude that Athens’ debt sustainability programme is back on track. The IMF appears to believe that only a writedown of Greek bonds held by the ECB and euro zone governments will do the trick. They, predictably, are not keen.

Just how scarce is potable water on this Earth? We learn in school that more than two-thirds of the planet is covered in water. But that figure is deceptive because it refers to just surface area, and describes only the total quantity of undrinkable salt-water.

The truth about just how little water we have to go around is just about crystal clear in this graphic from the U.S. Geological Survey, courtesy of my wife’s father Raj Bhattarai, regulatory manager of the Austin, Texas water utility.

See the big blue bubble? That’s the volume of total water on the planet (salt and fresh water), to scale. The second little blue ball is the total amount of fresh water on the planet. The tiny little blue spec under that one – that’s the amount of fresh water currently accessible to humans. Turn off those faucets, y’all.