Act II of the Olympus Drama

From the Wall Street Journal, Olympus defends its deals, but the Chairman resigns and the Euro Zone Looks to Asia for bail out money. 

In this Asia Today video, we find that Japanese camera maker, Olympus, stands by four controversial acquisitions even as Chairman Tsuyoshi Kikukawa resigns.  The Journal's Isabella Steger and Mariko Sanchanta also discuss how the euro-zone leaders now look to Asia for money (we want your money but not your ethics):

4 minutes and 51 seconds, 10/27/2011

Act I

The first act of this drama was enacted a week ago when Olympus fired its CEO, Michael Woodford, who, in turn,  alerted the UK authorities of his findings about payments made by the Japanese camera maker in connection with the acquisitions. Mr. Woodford had hired an outside auditor to do a forensic investigation. In this October 18th interview, Mr. Woodford tells the FT's Louise Lucas why he has taken his concerns about the deal-making at his previous employer to the UK Serious Fraud Office.  Click through to view the FT video which is just over 10 minutes.

Bullish Baltic Dry?

September 28 2011: The Baltic Dry index, a measure of the use of the largest ships, has climbed sharply of late while all else is bearish.   In this video, FT investment editor, James Mackintosh,  analyses what this apparently bullish signal tells us about the outlook for the world economy. (3m 29sec)

http://video.ft.com/v/1187399924001/Bullish-Baltic-Dry-

Revalue or else?

October 5 2011: Back in 1971 Richard Nixon risked a trade war to force the rest of the world to devalue the dollar. The US Senate is considering a similar move to force China to revalue the renminbi. Here James Mackintosh, analyses why the world needs the Chinese currency to appreciate much further. (3m 59sec)

http://video.ft.com/v/1202190857001/Revalue-or-else

Is that a Tear Rolling Down Alexander Hamilton's Cheek?

Alexander Hamilton was a pesky immigrant who saw Great Britain's creditworthiness and thus ability to borrow as important to its standing as a superpower as was the British navy.  As the republic's first Secretary of the Treasury, he set the U.S. on course to creating the dollar as the world currency built on the credit worthiness of U.S. treasury bonds.

Pity Mr. Geithner who fate it is to have Hamilton's job when we suffer the indignity of a credit downgrade.  Standard and Poor's announced after markets closed Friday that America's bonds have fallen from AAA to AA.

The announcement brought quick reactions.

Guess who said the following?

"The U.S. government has to come to terms with the painful fact that the good old days when it could just borrow its way out of messes of its own making are finally gone...
A little self-discipline would not be too uncomfortable for the United States, the world's largest economy and issuer of international reserve currency, to bear.

"For centuries, it was the exuberant energy and innovation that has sustained America's role in the world and maintained investors' confidence in dollar assets. But now, mounting debts and ridiculous political wrestling in Washington have damaged America's image abroad...
All Americans, both beltway politicians and those on Main Street, have to do some serious soul-searching to bring their country back from a potential financial abyss."

(A) A big bond investor
(B) A foreign upstart
(C) A news service
(D) All of the above
(E) None of the above

The correct answer is (D).  Saturday, in the wake of the downgrade,  Xinhua, China's official news service editorialized the words you just read.  The signed editorial was attributed to Yamei Wang.  It is embarrassing to be lectured by China especially when China is calling a spade a spade.

No Wonder We Have a Trade Deficit: Did You Know You Need Permission to Export Natural Gas?

As the U.S. Balance of Payments Drives Us Deeper Into the Hole

The U.S. is running a current account deficit of almost a half trillion dollars (c. $450 billion.)  China has accumulated some $2 trillion of dollar denominated foreign exchange reserves in its $3+ trillion hoard.  The U.S. Treasury is in hock to China for over $1.1 trillion.  Our energy trade deficit was approximately $850 billion in 2010.  That means that other than energy, our current account had a surplus of some $400 billion.

Getting our international accounts into surplus and preserving the reserve currency status of the dollar should be a priority.  The President has called for doubling our exports in five years.  It is not clear what might make that happen, but exporting something the U.S. has in surplus should be good news.  Or so you would think.

Cutting Into Our Energy Deficit Should Be a Good Place to Start

Gregory Meyer writes in the Financial Times, "The US approved the first exports of large quantities of natural gas through the Gulf of Mexico," specifically, the Department of Energy granted a license for Houston's Cheniere  Energy to "refit a gas import terminal to condense and ship up to 2.2bn cubic feet a day" of liquified natural gas (LNG.)  According to the DOE, "In August 2010, [Cheniere's] Sabine Pass Liquefaction, LLC filed a two-part application requesting authority to export up to 803 billion cubic feet per year of domestically produced natural gas as LNG for a period of 20 years. On September 10, 2010, the Department approved these exports to 15 countries with which the U.S. already has a Free Trade Agreement covering natural gas. Today the Department is extending this authorization to include all other countries except those that lack the ability to receive imports or those with which trade is prohibited by U.S. law or policy."

Please note: Cheniere had to ask permission to help right our balance of payments! 

Apparently we have rules that prohibit exporting natural gas.  Getting a "Get Out of Jail Free" card also allows others to lobby against the license.  In this case a group called the Industrial Energy Consumers of America lobbied against Cheniere.  No wonder the dollar is on the ropes!

Are these rules some fossilized leftovers from the 1970s?  ("A sober economic historian would judge the years 1973 to 1982 as the worst decade in the last sixty years." See also "When Will They Ever Learn?") In that horrible decade, we had widespread natural gas shortages caused by government price controls.  A tangled web of administrative rules, laws, and policies tried to contain the damage done by price controls.

Some background:

Pioneers like Michell Energy developed some tricky technology that has allowed Americans to tap huge new reserves of natural gas.  These reserves are trapped in deep shale formations that require very unconventional drilling techniques to capture the gas.  These reserves ("shale gas" for short) have been the focus of a drilling boom in the U.S. and have created an enormous glut of natural gas.

This is the one great "good news" news story in recent years for the U.S. economy. Natural gas prices are fluctuating near $4 per mmBtu. Henry Hub Natural Gas settled at $4.32 today.  This is close to a third of its 2008 peak.  By way of comparison, the energy equivalent price of oil would be about $16 per mmBtu.  This means Americans are getting a great bargain.

Internationally, prices are much higher.  Britons pay over twice our price for natural gas and in Asia the price is more like four times as much.  In much of the world, natural gas contracts are tied to the price of oil.  Why are these price differences not arbitraged away?  It is not easy to get natural gas from one place to another.  The U.S. has facilities for re-gasifying imported liquified natural gas (LNG).  These facilities were built in the 1970s: remember those artificial shortages?  Our facilities are limited for liquifying natural gas for export.  Hence this project and similar ones.  How many are going to rush to invest in such facilities if they will wait for eight months may to be told, "No you can't!"

Good Bye Reserve Currency?

It was a bit of a shock to read James Politi writing in the Financial Times that the, "World Bank sees end to dollar’s hegemony."  The shock was not that the dollar will lose its status as the sole reserve currency in the long run, but that the source of the forecast was the World Bank.  The lead author of the report of the World Bank report was Mansoor Dailam.  He sees a "multi-currency system" with the euro, the renminbi, and the dollar playing roles.  Dr. Dailam argued the "shift will be driven by the increasing power and strength of emerging market economies, with six countries – Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Russia and South Korea – accounting for more than half of global growth in 14 years."  From now to 2025, the World Bank pegs emerging economies as growing 4.7% and the developed economies barely hitting a 2.3% growth rate.

The FT quotes the report as saying, “The current predominance of the US dollar would end sometime before 2025 and would be replaced by a monetary system in which the dollar, the euro and the renminbi would each serve as full-fledged international currencies.”

The Economist on the The German Economy

Three Imbalances Threaten Long-Term Economic Stability

 You can may have read the following commentary in the Wichita Eagle(3/25/2010):

The Economic Recovery

We are emerging from a financial and economic crisis of historic dimensions. Unemployment reached levels not seen since 1982. America suffered the largest falls in industrial output and housing starts since the "Roosevelt Recession" of 1937-38


However deep the recession, the recovery is well under way. A long list of indicators hit bottom last year and are rising: auto sales (February), durable goods orders (March), real retail sales (April), housing starts (April), and industrial production (June). The fall in global industrial production ended in March as did world trade's in May.

Most economists are sanguine about the long term but judge the current recovery to be fragile and weak. The consensus is wrong. This recovery is solid and broad-based.

Emerging economies (particularly Brazil, China and India) are leading a worldwide expansion. America's longer-term prospects are the real worry.

The Reckoning

Three major imbalances threaten the country's long-run economic stability and prosperity. We went into this crisis with a trade deficit equal to 5 percent of GDP and savings rates near zero. Government deficits equaled 1.2 percent of GDP when unemployment was still only at 4.6 percent. We could finance these imbalances only because the rest of the world was willing to lend us trillions of dollars. That dependence is neither in our long-term economic nor geopolitical interests.


This overdependence on foreign credit led to massive misallocations of America's resources. The housing bubble grew from 2003 and peaked in August 2006. Over that time period, home-building sucked an extra $900 billion in real resources away from the rest of the economy.


Finance and real estate grew to over 20 percent of the economy. Our brightest young graduates found it more attractive to become financial engineers rather than build planes and invent new products. We will be paying for this deadweight loss in higher unemployment and lower economic growth for many years.

The Future

Correcting the imbalances means we must save more and use less of what we produce for ourselves. In other words, Americans face lower living standards


Lower standards of living and a falling dollar will translate into higher domestic prices. If policymakers misinterpret those rising prices and continue to fight structural change with the wrong tools, they will start a vicious policy cycle culminating in the loss of the dollar as the world's reserve currency and unpredictable turmoil.

Where are our policies now? This recession was global and induced a global response. Many nations including America have disinterred the theories of John Maynard Keynes to justify massive government spending programs ("fiscal stimulus") to fight the recent economic recession. Central banks have used the ideas of Keynes' nemesis, Milton Friedman, to justify vanishingly low interest rates ("monetary stimulus") and unprecedented financial market interventions ("quantitative easing") toward the same end. This focus on the short term is crowding out the need for correcting the economy's imbalances. I doubt either Keynes or Friedman would wholly approve of the sins being committed in their names.

And in the Long Run...

What makes a great statesman? Historian J. Rufus Fears found three essential elements. A great statesman clearheadedly identifies and analyzes a major problem. Then he implements a solution that works both in the short run and in the long run. Focusing on the immediate problems of the 1930s, Keynes dismissed "the long run, (when) we are all dead."

Yet in the 1940s, Keynes turned around and engineered a remarkably resilient postwar monetary system. That act of statesmanship produced peace and prosperity for generations. Contrast that with current economic policy, where "in the long run, we are all in the soup."

Read more: http://www.kansas.com/2010/03/25/1240330/three-imbalances-threaten-long.html#ixzz0k344RWCK

Xinjiang Is more Important than a New International Moneary System for China's Hu Jintao

The drama at the G-8 meeting in Italy came when China's Hu Jintao deserted the conference before it began.

Richard McGregor and Kathrin Hille explain Mr. "Hu, the president and communist party head, convened an emergency meeting of the leadership, the nine-member inner-circle of the Politburo, hours after arriving home on Wednesday from his truncated G8 trip to Italy.

The management of the crisis is a high-profile test for Mr Hu, who must satisfy the demands of hardliners within the party for a tough response, with an eye on the sensitivities of Muslim countries offshore.

China has blamed Sunday’s violence in Urumqi, which left 156 people dead and more than a thousand injured, on Xinjiang’s indigenous Muslim population, the Uighurs."

Thus it was Mr. Hu's surrogate that delivered China's call for a less dollar dependent international monetary system.

As George Parker, Guy Dinmore, Krishna Guha, and Justine Lau tell it "China attacks dollar’s dominance:" (FT: July 9 2009)

"China has launched its highest-profile criticism of the dominant role of the US dollar as a global reserve currency at a meeting of the world’s biggest economies.

"Dai Bingguo, Chinese state councillor, raised the issue on Thursday when he joined the leaders of four other emerging economies for talks with the leaders of the Group of Eight industrialised nations – including US President Barack Obama."

China has already taken concrete moves toward a reduced reliance on the greenback:

"China moves to cut reliance on dollar"

By Richard McGregor in the Financial Times, July 3 2009, Page 19


China has taken another step towards internationalising its currency and reducing reliance on the US dollar with the announcement of new rules to allow select companies to invoice and settle trade transactions in renminbi.

The regulations released by the People's Bank of China, the country's central bank, will allow approved companies to settle transactions through financial institutions in Shanghai and other cities in southern China.

Offshore, the trial scheme will allow transactions to be settled in renminbi in Hong Kong and Macao, the two self-governing territories on China's southern borders, and later in a limited fashion in south-east Asia as well.

Importers and exporters will be able to place orders with authorised Chinese companies, and settle payment for them, in renminbi.

Although it has no short-term implications for the full convertibility of the renminbi, the announcement adds to the volley of political signals Beijing has sent recently over its dissatisfaction with the US dollar.

"To many minds in China the US dollar's time is almost up, the eurozone suffers from political paralysis and a too-conservative central bank, while two decades of economic stagnation and a shrinking population do the yen no favours," said Stephen Green, of Standard Chartered, in Shanghai.

"For them, the renminbi is an obvious, and imminent, replacement."

Far from being a replacement for the dollar as a freely-traded reserve currency, the move has been justified by the PBoC initially as assisting exporters buffeted by the greenback's fluctuating value.

"Companies in China and neighbouring countries are facing relatively large risks of exchange-rate fluctuations because of big swings in the US dollar, the euro and other major currencies used for settlements," the PBoC statement said.

The rules have also been expressly drafted to ensure that the new regime is not used to circumvent China's capital controls, by requiring supporting documentation for transactions.

"Domestic settlement banks should take effective measures to know the nature and purpose of their clients' trading," the central bank said.

The announcement of an offshore role for the renminbi chimes with China's call earlier this year for a new reserve currency.

He Yafei, a vice-foreign minister, said in Beijing yesterday that China supported reserve currency diversification in the future and that it would be "normal" for the issue to be raised at the G8 talks.

The volume of trade conducted under the new rules is expected to be small initially, but over time it should increase demand for the renminbi.


Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009

China to Be Long On Gold & Real Estate and Short on the Dollar

Zhou Xin and Alan Wheatley report in the Guardian, "Li Lianzhong, who heads the economic department of the Party's policy research office, said China should use more of its $1.95 trillion in foreign exchange reserves to buy energy and natural resource assets.

"Speaking at a foreign exchange and gold forum, Li also said that buying land in the United States was a better option for China than buying U.S. Treasury securities.

"'Should we buy gold or U.S. Treasuries?' Li asked. 'The U.S. is printing dollars on a massive scale, and in view of that trend, according to the laws of economics, there is no doubt that the dollar will fall. So gold should be a better choice.'"

China has 1,054 metric tonnes which, with gold selling at $941/oz, is worth $35 billion compared to America's 8,133.5 metric tonnes worth $270 billion.

Dow Jones reported that gold was up during the day's trading: "The initial rise occurred on a day when the U.S. dollar weakened partly in response to comments from the People's Bank of China saying it will push for reform of the international currency system to make it more diversified and reduce over-reliance on the current reserve currencies, primarily the dollar. This particularly caught the eye of gold traders a day after a senior economic researcher in the Communist Party expressed concern about the dollar and said gold could be a better alternative.

"'The People's Bank of China's call for a new global reserve currency or super-sovereign currency will likely lead to further pressure on the dollar and gold buying,' said Mark O'Byrne, director of bullion dealer GoldCore. "


The BRIC countries have called for the creation of a new reserve currency or at least a reduced dependence on the dollar.

According to Zhou Xin and Alan Wheatley, "China disclosed on April 24 that it had increased its holdings of gold to 1,054 tonnes from 600 tonnes since 2003.

"However, China's foreign exchange reserves have grown so fast over the same period that gold's share of the stockpile, the largest in the world, has shrunk.

"Li cited the high share of gold in the foreign exchange reserves of the United States, Italy, Germany and France, to argue that China's gold holdings, which account for about 1.6 percent of its reserves, are too small.

REFORMING THE SDR

"China does not disclose the composition of its currency reserves, but bankers assume around 70 percent of it is held in dollar assets.

"China is the largest single holder of U.S. Treasuries, with $763.5 billion at the end of April, according to U.S. Treasury data. [ID:nTRU000389].

"Analysts say this data set understates the true number as it does not capture paper bought through dealers in London or elsewhere.

"Li said a second reason for buying more gold would be in anticipation of the yuan one day becoming a reserve currency.

"The yuan is not convertible on the capital account, meaning it cannot be freely traded for other currencies for financial transactions that are not related to trade.

"This rules out the yuan's use as an international reserve currency, for central banks would not be able to convert it quickly if necessary.

"But, in a very preliminary step towards that goal, China is paving the way for greater use of the yuan beyond its borders.

"
The People's Bank of China has arranged currency swap deals with six countries since December totaling 650 billion yuan ($95 billion) so that trade and investment with China can be conducted in yuan, not dollars.

"And China will soon allow selected firms in the southern province of Guangdong that trade with Hong Kong to settle their transactions in yuan, or renminbi.

"'If the yuan should go international or become a reserve currency, China needs more gold to back that,' Li said.

"When the yuan does become an international currency, which Li acknowledged was a long way off, he said the composition of the SDR should be reformed to include the Chinese currency.

Ideally, in the long term, the SDR would be made up of the dollar, euro, sterling and yen and yuan, each with a weighting of 20 percent, Li said.

"The SDR is currently made up of the dollar (with a weighting of 44 percent), the euro (34 percent), the yen (11 percent) and sterling (11 percent)

"The four currencies in the SDR, which must be convertible, are those issued by Fund members with the largest share of global trade. The weights assigned by the IMF are based on the value of exports and the amount of reserves denominated in those currencies.

"The composition of the basket is reviewed every five years. the next review is due in 2010."