The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Category: Economics Page 6 of 100

How To Drive Domestic Production and Reindustrialization

There’s a lot of confusion over this topic, so let’s break down some of the factors.

The principle is that you need someone to buy whatever it is you want to produce. That means it has to be priced reasonably, and that you either have to have foreign or domestic consumers.

It’s often noted that before the British conquest of India, India had more textile factories than Britain. Britain destroyed them. Why? Because they wanted them to buy textiles made in Britain. Before that, the most important government action to create industry in Britain is that they forbid the export of wool to the Low Countries. Why? Because Flemish weavers were way better than British ones. But it doesn’t matter how good your weavers are if they don’t have wool. So the Brits kept the wool at home and pretty soon they had a textile industry. When cotton and mechanized looms came along they wound up selling the world. After all, there wasn’t any competition from India!

Imperialism, trade policy and technological advances for the Industrial Revolution win.

So if you’re a country which wants domestic production you need customers. Demand. It can be domestic or international. Now in traditional industrialization you need foreign customers usually, because your country is poor before industrializing. Almost everyone did it this way except Russia. America was a partial exception, having strong domestic markets and legacy tech inherited from British North America, but only a partial one: they sold a lot to Britain and Europe in the early years.

You also need the technology, and you get a lot of that from overseas unless you were Britain. This is true of pretty much everyone, including the US (which got huge investments from Britain), Japan (Britain first time, US for reindustrialization after WWII), South Korea (US), Taiwan (US), and China (US). Germany might be considered a partial exception in the 19th century, their industrialization story is startling and impressive (See “Cities and Civilization” by Peter Hall.)

But let’s say you’ve already industrialized once, and then partially re-industrialized. You have the remnants of a skilled workforce and you have good universities and technical institutes and a literate workforce. (Pushing it here, half of Americans are essentially illiterate.)

You’ve also got a fairly rich population and decent domestic demand, in global terms. In other words, there’s domestic demand sufficient to support more production than you’re doing. (How do you know? Well, all those imports indicate demand, don’t they?)

The problem is that foreign production is cheaper and quite likely better. (Remember those Flemish weavers.)

Now the first way to do it takes its cue from the Brits and wool. If you produce a lot of resources suitable for production, why are you selling them in the raw state?

There’s a few stages of this. If you’ve got oil, say, you could refine it in country before sending it overseas. In Canada it used to be illegal to ship raw fish overseas, but after NAFTA it got sent to the US to be stuck in tins or smoked or whatever. You shouldn’t be sending raw logs. You should refine bauxite into aluminum yourself. Copper into wires. Etc…

This only works if the current producers can’t just buy from someone else, but there are certainly still cases where this is true. (We’re about to experience very severe copper shortages, silver is already in shortage, and China has been using its control over rare earths like this.)

Tariffs come in when you want to make domestic production cheaper than overseas. If you’re just starting in an industry, it’s going to be. You can use tariffs (the US strategy during the 19th cnetury), you can force your currency lower than its market value (this is what China did) or you can use subsidies. Tariffs are under international agreement, essentially illegal, but Trump has made that a dead letter, so they’re possible again.

Tariffs are only useful, however, if you’re actually going to be increasing production. They do nothing if you aren’t. (Trump, pay attention.)

Now let’s talk about demand. If you need more demand for goods you need to increase the amount of money people can spend on whatever it is. There’s a number of ways to do that.

First is tax policy: tax poor and middle class people less and rich people more. Give them money, taken from the rich. Poor and middle class people spend most of their money on goods and services. Rich people, given more money, drive up asset prices. Note that this means income taxes. Get rid of general VAT taxes, you don’t want to tax consumption or in anything you want more demand create an exemption. You can also remove taxes on whatever it is you want people to buy.

Change other types of taxes to discourage short term trading, buying in secondary markets and future markets and encourage people with more money than they need to invest in production. High capital gains taxes on short term investments, for example. Tax rich people’s income highly, and send that to poor people or use it directly for investment thru the government. Tax corporation highly so they are encouraged to retain earnings and invest them. Get rid of stock buybacks, just make them illegal, like they were for much of the 20th century.

Second are any policies which drive up wages for the bottom 80% of the population generally.

Third are subsidies. Subsidize the cost of buying or manufacturing whatever it is. Europe, China and the US have all used this with electric vehicles.

Fourth are general market policies: you need competitive markets with few barriers to entry. You must make oligopolies and monopolies illegal and easy to break up or you must tightly regulate prices in monopolies. In general you don’t want any business to have pricing power, because if you give regular people money and business just jack up prices, demand doesn’t increase.

Fifth is breaking supply side bottlenecks. After the oil crises central bankers spent a lot of time deliberately putting downward pressure on wages because wage increases led to using more oil, all marginal oil increases had to come from OPEC and that meant inflation. So instead they pumped up asset prices like houses and stocks. If there’s something needed for production, you need to find a way to get enough for reasonable prices. Copper, coal, oil, silicon, rate earths, uranium… whatever. This may mean domestic production, it may mean trade deals, though domestic is better if feasible.

Sixth is that you have to reduce cost structures. Real estate, rent, interest rates, medical prices, and so on.These are costs: they make production more expensive and they soak up demand from regular people. If landlords can increase prices freely then, again, they’ll just take up any extra money that regular people get which would otherwise go to buying all those new products.

Seventh is making currency levels dependent on trade and not on financial flows. You want your currency low if you’re importing more than exporting, and high if you’re exporting more than importing BUT if you export a lot of resources, you need to find a way to reduce currency rates below what they’d normally be if you want manufacturing to increase. Doing all this means taming financial markets and making the central bank do what is necessary, which it often doesn’t want to, since it’s usually run by ex-bankers and traders.

Eighth is managing trade deals. It’s a lot easier to get a big enough market if you make a deal with another county or countries. “You produce X and we won’t. We’ll produce Y and you won’t, thus X and Y both have much larger markets. And we freeze other countries out of our market for these goods.” General free trade is usually stupid, managed free trade like this is smart.

Ninth is making your banks lend to producers at reasonable rates rather than lending to people whose actions will drive up asset prices instead.

This is a high level overview. Each point could support it’s own article, heck, it’s own book and I haven’t even hit all the high points.

But the point is that there’s a lot involved. Real policy is when a government tries to do something from all angles, not just one. You don’t just put on subsidies and hope for the best. You don’t just slap on tariffs and think “surely someone will start producing”. You have to actually use as many levers as possible to make it possible to produce: demand, supply, credit, market structure, smashing barriers to entry, avoiding pricing power and so on.

That doesn’t mean it can’t be done, that’s means you have to make it your main priority, the way it was for China for decades or for Japan for decades or for South Korea for decades. It doesn’t happen by accident, or if you only half-ass it. In fact half-assing it is likely to produce no noticeable results at all.

If Western countries want to reindustrialize, they can. But only if they decide they’ll do whatever it takes. Decline is baked in, resurgence takes effort.

 

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Canadian LapDog Breaks For Exit After Trump Declares Dog Is On The Menu

Canada has cut a trade deal with China. This is what I have been suggesting for ages, and it’s finally happening. (Not, of course, because Carney reads me, but because it’s the obvious play and of all Western leaders he’s been the most resistant to Trump’s threats and blackmail.) Canada cuts a deal:

Chinese leader Xi Jinping and Canadian PM Mark Carney have announced lower tariffs, signalling a reset in their countries’ relationship after a key meeting in Beijing.

China is expected to lower levies on Canadian canola oil from 85% to 15% by 1 March, while Ottawa has agreed to tax Chinese electric vehicles at the most-favoured-nation rate, 6.1%, Carney told reporters…

In the deal struck on Friday, Canada will allow only 49,000 Chinese electric vehicles into the Canadian market at the 6.1% tariff rate.

The cap is in response to Canadian automakers’ fears of an influx of affordable Chinese EVs.

As well as relief for canola producers, there will also be reduced tariffs on Canadian lobsters, crabs, and peas.

I would expect that if the Chinese are willing to manufacture in Canada we’ll give on other things. The limit on autos is to get China to manufacture here. US manufacturers of automobiles are no longer reliable and Stellantis has started to pull out of Canada, there are no major “Canadian” manufacturers, so US manufacturers they must be replaced. The 100% tariff on EVs was to please the US (Trump can’t be pleased), and to protect Canadian jobs. Since those jobs are now at risk and almost certain to be lost, well…

The BBC says this move is in reaction to Trump’s on and off again tariffs, but that’s only half true. I keep noticing this in much of the media, they talk about tariffs and not about the annexation threats and both are a factor. You can’t have your primary trade partner be a nation which wants to invade you or break you up with covert actions and color revolutions. Then, of course, there’s Trump’s comments that the US doesn’t need anything from Canada. OK then, if you don’t need it, guess we’ll have to sell it to someone else, and since that has to go two ways, guess we’ll phase out buying American cars and buy Chinese instead.

This will break the ice for many nations. As I have argued for ages, even before Trump came to office, everyone needs to cut a deal with China because it’s the rising power. It’s already the most powerful nation in the world in many ways, and it will be in all ways that matter in less than ten years. Perhaps five.

But it’s also that you can make a deal with the Chinese. They keep their deals unless you cross very clear red lines like supporting Taiwanese independence. Even before Trump the US did not keep its deals. As a Canadian I’m aware that America just ignored trade rulings against it in favor of Canada even twenty years ago. America is simply untrustworthy, they don’t really believe they have to obey even rules they themselves have agreed to. Trump is “ignore inconvenient rules on steroids” but pretending he hasn’t just ramped up an already existing American characteristic would be delusional.

It’s also worth noting that this is, in the words of commenter Carborundum, “seismic”. Canada has been extremely hostile to China ever since Justin Trudeau was elected, including arresting the Huawei heiress for America, slapping on those 100% tariffs and multiple other incidents. We did this in order to keep America happy, calculating that we needed America more than China. (I never agreed, but I was in the minority). Under Justin Trudeau we were America’s second most faithful lapdog (no one can ever beat the UK when it comes to lick-spittle toadying.)

So this is, if not a 180 degree turn at least a 100 degree turn. Carney said all the usual bullshit about human rights and Hong Kong, but they were pro-forma. They won’t get in the way of a deal, and I suspect that public scoldings and statements along those lines will become much less frequent. The issues will be given a nod when some journalist asks about them and little more.

Canada was the first of America’s lapdogs to make a break for the exit after Trump decided dog was on the menu. We’ll see who goes next. Because when Carney said that this was preparation for the new world order (down, conspiracy types) he was right: the old world order is all but dead, and everyone has to re-orient away from the setting sun of America towards the rising sun, China.

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We Don’t Have To Live In Hell

A friend of mine once used the metaphor of “The Lords of Hell” to describe most of the world. There are a few people with lots of money and power, a few billion people who live in constant fear of not having enough, and a billion or so who don’t have enough. There is more than sufficient food in the world to feed everyone, but people go hungry. The entire western world has more empty homes than it does homeless people, yet there are increasing numbers of homeless. It costs less to give everyone health care than it does to “optimize returns” yet sick people go without medicine and help, and the disabled at left to rot with the least possible care in many countries. (Britain has literally stopped paying for wheelchairs for many disabled.)

Over the years my writing has had many themes, but they all boil down to one Ur-Theme.

We don’t have to live in hell. It’s a choice.

We have other choices. There are ways to make the economy work for everyone, and ways that we, the human species, can live well without driving mass numbers of other species to extinction. Indeed, by destroying the environment and extincting other species, we damage the very ecosystem which, long term, makes our own prosperity and well-being possible.

The worst lie in the world is always some version of “there is no other option. This is as good as it can be.”

It has many variants. “Capitalism is the only thing that can work.” “Some people must be homeless and poor for the economy to work.” “We need that oil no matter how many species die.” “People will only work if they’re driven by fear.” “Rich people are job creators”. “Human nature means we’ll always be evil and mean.” “Everything has to be owned by someone because commons don’t work.” (They have worked for hundreds of years at a time.)

Many, many more.

They are all lies. As humans we have an angelic nature as well as a demonic one. One of the most useful books to read in this regard is “A Heaven Made In Hell.” The author studied how people act after great catastrophes. Strangely enough behaviour like looting occurs far less than people helping each other, coming together and fixing things. In fact, people who go through this often find it was heavenly: for once almost everyone is taking care of everyone. Trust and community flourish.

There is great joy in helping. Great joy in care. Great joy in not being scared all the time. The best economies are always full of optimism and hope and have a rising tide that lifts all boats. (Rising tides don’t lift all boats unless we make sure that no boats have holes in their hulls.)

China has, recently, proved this yet again, despite some significant flaws. (FDR proved it before, and he was not the first.) We can take care of each other. We can live without fear that one bad bounce means homelessness, misery and death.

It’s a choice. We have made other choices far too often, but we can choose to be happy, prosperous and realistically optimistic because we take care of each other.

And while my writing often seems negative, this is the hope that underpins my criticisms. There is no point in criticizing something if some law of nature means that it must be so. But there is, despite claims otherwise, no law of nature which says we have to be bastards to each other or to the species we share this world with.

And in that is a genuine hope.

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Too Big To Fail Fails In China

Roughly speaking there are two types of corporations in China. State owned (SOE) and private. During the policy driven real-estate bust, the countries biggest builder, Evergrande, went under.

But there was an assumption that the government would bail out real-estate SOEs.

Well the largest one, Vanke, is going under, and the central government is going to let it. Moreover, Shenzen’s (China’s Silicon Valley, but on steroids) has repeatedly bailed it out and that means that not only is the central government not bailing out a SOE, they’re letting a municipal government (arguably the most important in the country) take a huge hit. That will send a message to all other municipal and provincial governments.

The biggest mistake of the US financial collapse was the bailout of participants. Every firm which had financialized should have been allowed to go under. The few that were truly necessary should have been put back on their feet AFTER the shareholders and bondholders took their hits, and after being broken up. Collateral damage (those companies not responsible, but simply getting hit by the backwash, such as GM, could receive bailouts in exchange for a government stake.)

Capitalism has issues even when run properly, but it is a simple proposition at heart: people who allocate resources well should be rewarded with more resources to manage, and those who allocate resources badly should lose their ability to allocate resources. Every participant in over-financialization had made bad allocations of resources. For the American economy to operate, they needed to no longer be participants.

Take over the banks and brokerages, and either shut them down, or break them up. That included the bond rating agencies like Moodys.

The failure to do this meant that decision makers know (or believe) they can make risky bets that cause systemic economic issues, bets that damage the economy as a whole and expect to be bailed out rather than be required to take their lumps. (And, ideally, be investigated for fraud, which most of them were guilty of.)

An economy where economic decision makers are incentivized to take big risks which hold the entire economy hostage (because they might not be bailed out if the risk isn’t systemic) cannot work and doesn’t. The US economy requires a backstop that amounts to the full expectation that the Fed will print trillions on demand to bail out bad actors. (The current main bad actors are the AI cartel.)

China is, oddly, the only major economy in the world that runs markets more or less right. (Though they let their own real estate casino run for too long.)

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Trade Is Not The Primary Driver of Currency Rates

The misunderstandings packed into this little bit of writing are stupendous:

Over the past few years, China has been in deflation, while the US has been in inflation. Yet despite this stark divergence, the CNH has still depreciated more than 10% against the US dollar. This combination — falling relative prices in China and a weaker currency — has made Chinese goods and services extraordinarily cheap in global terms. A vivid example: a night at the Four Seasons Beijing costs roughly $250, compared with more than $1,160 in New York

First, a 10% drop does not make a hotel room cost one quarter as much in Beijing as in New York. That’s ridiculous on the face. Almost everything costs less in China than in America. America has an economy optimized to drive prices high to extract maximum profit. China has economy with actual competitive markets: if you raise prices someone else will come in underneath you. Almost all of America is operating in or as if it is in an oligopoly. There is little actual price competition because even when there are competitors they figure that competing on price is stupid: it hurts both of them. Why not both raise prices to usurious heights? Win/Win.

This doesn’t happen in China because it has competitive markets and it has competitive markets in large part because China will throw executives in prison or execute them if they engage in this sort of price collusion, whereas in the US, though ostensibly illegal based on the laws on the book, such collusion has been made legal by decades of court decisions and prosecutorial decisions. (Prosecutors mostly don’t, and when they do courts almost always refuse to convict.)

China also has lots and lots of firms and genuine low barriers to entry. If you try to collude, someone from outside your industry will enter and undercut you, and often this will be someone with deep enough pockets that you can’t win a price war with them.

Second, currency values outside of hyperinflation are driven primarily by demand for currency. That isn’t primarily about trade, it’s about investors and financial carry trade. China unquestionably has a more dynamic and larger economy than any Western nation, but it isn’t financialized: Chinese companies don’t produce the sort of returns that American companies have over the last 50 years. This is deliberate policy: if they did, then China’s economy would suck for ordinary people, like Western economies suck for ordinary people because prices would be much higher. (See that Hilton room, though it cascades thru the entire economy, with rent and food at the low end much cheaper in China too.)

It is also pretty hard to invest in China as a foreigner, while the US is set up for foreign investors. Even if you want “China exposure” it’s hard to get.

So the Yuan isn’t in massive demand, because there aren’t bullshit over-sized returns like the AI bubble. The central bank doesn’t run its policies based on “the stock market must always go up.” America has spent 50 years burning down its real economy to produce outsize “profits” due to asset pumping. China keeps asset prices under control, and when a bubble does occur, as it did in real-estate, they deliberately deflate it, bearing the cost.

None of this is particularly unique, by the way. It’s basically the way the US economy was mostly run from the 30s thru the mid 70s or so. The policy details, the ways things are done are different, but American policies were meant to encourage real economic growth and if you look at a stock market graph you’ll see it traded sideways. No 50 year bull market. Asset bubbles were discouraged. You can’t have a good economy with high real-estate prices, just can’t be done and the stock market is a secondary market, not a primary one. Emphasizing it is sheerest insanity.

There is very little that China has done which is genuinely unique, despite jingoistic assertions otherwise. The playbook they have run is the same one almost every successful industrializing nation after Britain used, and very similar to the Japanese model. What is different are two things. First, the scale, when 1.4 billion people industrialize and modernize, it shakes the world. Second, a genuine desire to help the poor, which is extremely rare during industrialization, though not unheard of. (The Gilded Age did not care about the poor. Britain’s industrialization period was driven by hurting the poor as much, or more, than they could bear. They were far better off as peasants than in factories.)

Anyway, countries can be real rich (lots of genuine productive capacity with low prices and dynamic markets) or they can be fake-rich, with financialized markets that squeeze the last penny out of consumers and immiserate workers, leading to non-competitive markets and oligarchy. China is rich. America is fake-rich.

 

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The Promise Of Automation and Abundance

For a long time after the Industrial Revolution, many thinkers believed that automation would lead to us living lives of leisure. Twenty hour work weeks, or even less, and many people wouldn’t need to work at all, but would still live good lives.

It never happened.

Economists will tell you this is because there’s always more work to be done, but economists are the priesthood of capitalism, not scientists, not even social scientists.

Most of us are well aware that many jobs are, in David Graeber’s memorable phrase, bullshit jobs. They either don’t really need to be done or are actively harmful. Everyone working in private equity. All the engineers optimizing ads. Almost everyone who works on Wall Street or in shadow banking. Most bankers, for that matter. The jobs which are actually necessary, “essential workers”, are badly paid and treated, but if they don’t show up, as we find out in a garbage, nurse, transit or teamster strike, disaster ensues.

If the janitors don’t show up, everyone’s in shit. If the CEO doesn’t show up, life continues and most people don’t care. Indeed, without CEOs most companies would run better than they do, and you’d be in a lot less danger of losing your job.

We could easily work 20 hour weeks already, if that was a priority.

But the structure of capitalism makes this impossible. We create goods which are designed to wear out quickly and be replaced. “Planned Obsolesence.” We need people to have jobs to get money to buy these shoddy goods. We buy fast food crap because we’re too busy, rather than cooking good food, and most people spend their lives doing work they’d never do if they didn’t need money to survive.

So we find more bullshit jobs, and more harmful jobs for people, and the machine churns on, destroying the environment, making people sick and unhappy and forcing us into wage slavery. Most people spend most of their waking hours doing what they’re told. Or else. Then when you’re old, you might be allowed to retire, and enjoy your declining health. Might.

We have more houses than we need, far more than the number of homeless. America throws out one-third of its food, yet people go hungry. There’s more than enough, literally more than enough food for everyone in the world to have a full and healthy diet.

KT Chong recently wrote an article about humanoid robots, in which he hopes that the Chinese will use them to allow lives of leisure, to institute a good guaranteed income. 

Perhaps they will, I hope so. To do so, however, they will have to move away from capitalism towards true communism, where everyone shares in the benefits of automation, and not just a few.

There is no reason why this isn’t possible. It could have been done any time in the last century or so, had we wished to.

Remember this: you work like a dog, obey some manager’s orders and don’t do what you really want to do because our system, and our leaders require it when it isn’t actually necessary.

Capitalism might (or might not) have been necessary for industrialization. But it is a set of leg irons weighing all of us down now, and threatening to destroy the very conditions required for life to continue on Earth.

But it doesn’t have to be that way, and the task of the next generation of leadership is to figure out how to run modern societies without it, without wasteful over-consumption and without destroying the environment, while making sure everyone has what they need and can live fulfilling lives: lives they choose, where most of their time is their own to do with as they would, not as some boss desires.

May it be so. The other options are far, far worse, likely catastrophically so.

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Short Take on What I’d Be Doing To Prepare for the Pending Economic S**t-show

I’ll keep this mercifully short. One commenter in my Friday night econ news post asked, in a kind of oblique way, what would I do in this environment.

Okay, I’ll play — but not without stating firmly and loudly that I am not dispensing investment advice, nor am I licensed any longer to do so. We clear on that?

A liquidity crisis is already here. But this may not be like your father’s ’08 crisis. In ’08, the USD rose — counterintuitively — against every other major currency. Why? The need for USD to cover credit losses was global, and NYC became a literal blackhole for USD. I made an absolute killing on the USD during the ’08 crisis, and afterwards even more on the banks and zero coupon bonds. I made several people fortunes they still retain.

But the crisis now unraveling doesn’t look like one of confidence, it looks like an animal out of a medieval grotesque, certainly not something the Fed can backstop.

Fire in the hole!

Sure, the Fed might do QE. But Congress can’t do a bailout with almost $1trillion in interest payments on US debt imminent and Trump offering $2k bribes to every citizen in America. It’s impossible. What would one call inflation with QE?

What would you call that?

Hyperinflationary?

It’ll be damned ugly whatever happens; whatever you want to call it.

Were I still advising investors I’d be putting them in Yuan interest bearing accounts, I’d be buying silver on the dips, JPY, SKW, and buying way out of the money puts on S&P 500 and NASDAQ. In short, if you can find an affordable way to buy puts on things that are impossible to happen, buy them, because one or two will hit big, and you’ll rake in the money. 

Silver’s in what’s called a secular bull market, not a cyclical one — cyclical means three to five year cycles, whereas secular means, “We don’t fucking have any idea how long ‘dis bitch is going up or down.” This particular secular bull is being driven by a massive externality: China’s draconian export controls of the metal. The problem, right now, from a technical trading perspective, is a failed double-top breakout. This is bearish in the near term, so an under $40 buying opportunity might be realistic. As a side note: China has a VERY long history with the white metal, but not so much the yellow one. I can recommend a good book if you are interested. 

You can invest in the Yuan in several US banks/investment firms. Some accounts are interest bearing, others are just a pure play on the currency. If you want specifics, send me a DM. But the current T-bill replacement is silver, but buy it under $45 if you can. Under $40 is best.

But, for fuck’s sake, avoid paying premiums for silver. What does that mean? If you buy silver coins, buy 99 percent silver grade coins — not the overpriced ones from the US Mint. Buy the off-market ones. Otherwise, the US silver cartel will clean out your gains before you even begin.

Your Late Friday–ermmm, Early Saturday–Dose of Crap Economic News

~by Sean Paul Kelley

Good heavens, the economic bad news is piling up like a bad car wreck. So, let’s do some serious rubbernecking, folks, because there is a lot of fucked up shit to watch. Just don’t step in it, okay?

We begin with widepsread reports of large institutional investors (hedge funds, investment banks, boutique investment firms) selling off services stocks like leisure, luxury, hotels, and some retail outlets, like Home Depot. That’s a lot of cash leaving equities. But for what safe harbor? It certainly isn’t private credit, like Blackrock which lost 100 percent on one investment. UBS also lost 100 percent on another private credit deal. Now, Blackrock lost $150 million on the deal, which, for Blackrock, is naught but a silly little rounding error, but as they say, $150 million here, a $150 million there and pretty soon you’re talking real money. That cash won’t go into US treasuries, that’s for damn sure. Seriously, who’d invest in US dollars? I wouldn’t fuck a US treasury with Magic Johnson’s dick.

Yeah, I said it. It needed to be said.

Want news even more ominous: JP Morgan Chase, Goldman Sachs and my alma mater (for full disclosure) Morgan Stanley were the lead underwriters of a $1 billion increase in AI firm Coreweave’s $2.5 billion revolving credit facility. The term sheet expands the maturity date from 2028 to 2029. Just a year? Did they attempt any due dililgence on Coreweave’s burn rate? It’s gotta be a fuckton fast — see, Americans can do metrics. FTW!

But really, you know that kind of high-tech equipment becomes obsolete and depreciates faster than that loan reaches maturity. There is zero, zilch, nada, niente, nyet, nein, no way Coreweave’s earning increases that rapidly. To quote Yoda, “Coreweave, Apple certainly not you are.”

Apple’s so profitable it prints money.

I mean, seriosuly, Christ on a popsicle stick: Where’s the due diligence? Do investment firms even have compliance departments any more? Where are the regulators?

Yeah, yeah, I know, I know.

But it gets worse: On Nov. 4, Meta agreed to an off-balance sheet $27 billion loan (also known as a Special Purpose Entity, henceforth SPE) from Blue Owl Capital (OBCD). This is financial shenanigans and identical to the accounting legerdemain that led to Enron’s ruin. Pay attention, people. This is getting ugly. Enron butt-hurt ugly is how bad this is starting to look. Let me break this down for you, in case you forgot. An SPE is off-balance sheet. That means the company is under no obligation to report it on its SEC required filings. Get it now? Investors have absolutely no way of knowing how much off-balance sheet debt a particular company has. SPEs = bad juju.

To wit: Oracle has a debt-to-equity ratio approaching 500 percent, and that’s just what’s on the their balance sheet. Has Oracle borrowed any money where the debt is accounted for in an SPE?

Guess what, folks? There is literally no way to know if Oracle has any SPE loans outstanding.

My bet: They do.

Speaking of shit credit, or is it credit shit?

Whatever. Moving on.

JP Morgan notes AI-linked debt now accounts for 14 percent of its investment grade corporate index (CGI IG), surpassing US commercial banks as the dominant sector. Who the fuck knew US commercial banks have turned into stingy mozafukas? Can haz dolerz, puleeze?

“What does it mean?” you query, doing your best to ignore my increasingly insulting expletives.

“I know I’m right about the housing market,” he says, repeating it like a mantra.

Well, it means that not only are AI firms taking on loads of traditionally-financed debt, they are also bulking up with the anabolic steroid equivalent of debt: unknowable and NON-REPORTABLE SPE debt. They pump this iron to finance AI hyper-scaling. No wonder the main character of the (mostly) true movie, The Big Short, Michael Burry, is closing his fund. Dude shorted Palantir and Nvidia and got caught with his pants down. Sadly, Burry forgot John Maynard Keynes keen paroemia (from the ancient Greek, meaning maxim or proverb) from when he lost all his money in the 1929 crash: “Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.”

Also: Beware neologisms created on Wall Street. Today’s new phrase is “data center credit.” Sounds positive, aye? It ain’t. It’s a bullshit phrase referring to debt financed for the AI sector by private credit shops. Tons and tons of bullshit, yes?

“Ha-ha,” he said. “Stupid, stupid!”

There is also news that insurers are placing more than 50 percent of the assets needed to guarantee/backstop annuities and life insurance policies into private credit shops. This is a terrible idea. Annuities are insurance policies designed to pay out in the event you live too long. Life insurance is, well, insurance against not living long enough. This is stupid. Epic stupid and civilization-ending risky. It’s like giving the nuclear football to Beevis and Butthead stupid.

Oil prices are soft/down to flat. Texas rig counts are down again this month (rig counts are considered a leading economic indicator).

Now to news out of the Big Apple tonight, that absolutely shrivels me testes. Say it with me like a pirate! As my little sister used to say to me, “You are so not fun.”

Anywho: The head of the NY Fed convened an emergency meeting of bank heads to discuss one of the Fed’s key lending facilities. I’m almost certain this is in response to the rising private credit losses, and how they resemble Bear Stearns blowing up two subprime hedge-funds in 2007, the precise moment the 2008 financial crisis began.

Most distressing is today’s down volume high. It’s one like we’ve never seen before. The downward volume and amount of stocks closing on the downside blew out a 35 year high. This screams louder than Rob Halford singing “Victim of Changes” live at the US Festival in 1983. It’s also an indicator of deeper stresses affecting equity markets.

This is what we now call, in the algorithm-trade dominated age, a mechanical sell-off. All of Wall Street’s proprietary algorithms saw red and initiated the mother of all sell offs. This already spectacularly, terrifyingly narrow advance is getting narrower, and it is growing more brittle by the day. Why worry? Are markets worried about private credit shops lending to off-balance sheet AI SPEs? Is liquidity getting tighter? Risk limits getting ripped to shreds? Doesn’t really matter. It’s a big signal that should overpower the noise. But it won’t. 

Wall Street’s useful idiots will do their duty and cheer until the real crisis begins to unravel. Sooner now, than later. You can bank on that. Just don’t do it in US dollars. That would be dumb. Epic-like dumb. 

Piling the shit higher and higher: Sallie Mae off-loaded $6bn worth of student loans to KKR recently. How better to clean up a balance sheet than selling debt with a 10 percent non-performing rate? Makes sense to me, but I’m just some guy in pajamas.

More great economic news: Large corporate bankruptcy filings, as of mid-November, rise to a 15 year high. That’s higher than the COVID-19 crisis. To date, 655 public companies have filed for bankruptcy. Good times, aye?

Finally, a positive thought, in a manner of speaking. The only thing the equity markets have going in their favor right now is this: the almost impossible to prevent or deny Christmas rally. It’s damn near as reliable as the Monsoons.

So, if the econ shit does hit the fan, it’ll happen after January 1.

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