Misery Economic Theater 2011

[Christenson]

Gentlemen:
Any NEW proposals? The only one I can think of is much more public disclosure....that is, a stock/futures transaction is a PUBLIC contract, one which can be looked up by anyone who cares to, with both parties listed, both corporate and personal.

And maybe all SEC inspections become PUBLIC.

Or maybe we just need to become more like Vermont and reform the elections, so it is harder to buy Congress????

[ewmayer]

Returning to the subject of dependence on foreign oil, many U.S. analysts and influential people with vested interests like oil magnate T. Boone Pickens are advocating natural gas as a kind of magic solution for much of America's energy needs. While it is undeniable that the U.S. has large domestic supplies of NatGas and that prices for the stuff are currently relatively low, I question whether this is truly a scalable energy supply that could really make a dent in our oil consumption on any kind of a long-term basis, without serious environmental impacts. On the latter front, consider this piece from the Dallas Morning News:

Movement to stop natural gas drilling gains ground

DALLAS – Until last spring, the Knoll family of Bartonville, Texas, was living the sort of life that most people would have gladly swapped them for. They owned a million-dollar home on a wooded two-acre lot in a neighborhood of million-dollar homes with swimming pools, perfect lawns and imported sedans in the driveways.

Then something happened that the Knolls had never anticipated when they bought their immaculate corner of the American dream.

Starting in April 2010, the land immediately behind their house was transformed, overnight, into a heavy industrial site. A seemingly endless stream of trucks rattled through the neighborhood just north of Flower Mound, carrying tons of steel and piping.

As diesel fumes, chemical odors and dust wafted through the Knolls’ backyard, a towering, 14-story natural gas-drilling rig went up. After the well was drilled, more diesel-driven equipment was brought in to fracture or “frack” the well – pumping several million gallons of highly pressurized, chemical-laden water into it to help release the natural gas.

The Knolls, whose house was roughly 600 feet from the Gulftex-operated rig – and a mere 800 feet away from a “smelly, noisy” compressor station – were horrified. They complained to state environmental officials of odors, contaminated water in their well, numbing headaches, nosebleeds, and even grasshoppers falling dead from the sky into their backyard.

Their experience was not unique, and not unfamiliar to many people who have been living in North Texas for the past decade.

The Knolls’ house is situated squarely over the Barnett Shale, a massive rock formation more than a mile below the surface that has spawned one of the biggest bonanzas in the history of the oil and natural gas business. Since 2003, 15,675 natural gas wells have been drilled and fracked all across North Texas – some 2,000 in Fort Worth alone, in the process helping to drive down the price of natural gas from roughly $13 per million cubic feet in 2005 to a steady $4 today.

But the Barnett Shale boom was not – like all other Texas oil booms that went before it – simply about prodigious energy production. It also was about a collision, for the first time on this scale, between well-drilling and gas pipelines and dense urban and suburban settlement. Instead of such remote places as the Permian Basin in west-central Texas covering most of the Panhandle, drilling is now proliferating in Fort Worth, Flower Mound, Grapevine, Arlington and other cities.

In the past 18 months, complaints by thousands of property owners in Texas and other shale-gas states have given rise to a powerful anti-drilling movement whose main issues involve water and air pollution and whose primary target is the technique of hydraulic fracturing.

That, in turn, has spawned a larger debate about the trade-off between an obvious benefit – lots of cheap gas, which powers electric generators and provides feedstock for the petrochemical industry – and the comfort and welfare of Americans who live in proximity to its production.

That debate has landed, for the first time, in Dallas, which has so far allowed no drilling at all.

In 2007, the city began leasing public land for drilling. Dallas signed agreements with drillers worth some $33 million. For a while, it all seemed like the sort of win-win situation that has earned Fort Worth $138 million since 2004.

Then the environmental climate changed, not just in Texas but in other shale gas states, such as Pennsylvania and New York. In response to lobbying by neighborhood groups, Dallas last year suspended issuing drilling permits to companies such as XTO Energy and Trinity East. Though only a slice of the city – its far western section – overlies the Barnett Shale, there is still the potential for hundreds of wells to be drilled in proximity to neighborhoods.

This month Dallas began soliciting applications for a task force whose goal will be to rewrite the city’s drilling ordinances.

By suspending natural gas drilling, Dallas has done what a growing list of other cities and states, mostly in the huge Marcellus Shale that underlies New York, Pennsylvania and Maryland, have done within the past 18 months.

In November, the state of New York placed an official moratorium on most gas drilling. Maryland has issued no new drilling permits since 2009. Pittsburgh and Philadelphia have banned the practice, as have several smaller towns in Pennsylvania. In the Barnett Shale, the movement is finally starting to take hold, too. Both Bartonville – where the Knolls live – and Southlake have suspended issuing drilling permits.

Why, after drilling so many shale-gas wells, is everyone suddenly so spooked by natural gas drilling? The simple answer is that in the past two years there have been a series of highly publicized spills and well contaminations around natural gas drilling operations.

These in turn have led to both academic and congressional studies of the practice of hydraulic fracturing that have received wide attention in the press. Last year the Oscar-nominated documentary “Gasland,” which purported to be an exposé of fracking, showed residents of a Colorado shale-gas town lighting their drinking water on fire. Though the oil and natural gas industry strenuously denied any connection between fracking and such contaminations, “Gasland” became a rallying point for the anti-drilling movement.

Fracking involves pumping millions of gallons of water, sand and chemicals (many of them hazardous to human health) under extremely high pressure into shale rock between 6,500 and 8,500 feet below the surface (in the Barnett), creating fissures in the shale to allow the gas to escape. Each well uses up to 2 million gallons of this chemical slurry. Gas wells also employ the technique of horizontal drilling, by which operators can drill up to a mile away from the drill site.

Most of that chemical soup returns to the surface, where it is put in pits or stored in tanks until it can be hauled away. In Texas, fracking fluids are disposed of underground in deep “injection” wells. Critics charge that these fluids can migrate under high pressure and pollute aquifers. The industry argues that because fracking occurs at such extreme depths – in general a mile or more below the water table – there is no way that the chemicals can enter the water table, which lies a few hundred feet underground.

Indeed, no fracking fluids have ever been detected in aquifers and wells, though a surface spill in April on a Chesapeake drilling site near Canton, Pa., spewed thousands of gallons of fracking water onto the ground, some of which reached a creek.

But the main public relations problems for the natural gas industry actually involve the gas itself, which flows strongly – invisible and odorless – up the well bore after the fluids are removed, and the air pollution that accompanies the drilling process. Here, too, the industry has denied that there is any way for methane gas to contaminate water wells.

My comment: The common argument by its advocates that NatGas (mostly methane, which combusts stoiciometrically as CH4 + 2 O2 --> CO2 + 2 H2O) has less global-warming potential than oil and coal is interesting, in that it seems to only consider fuel that is combusted. Indeed, with perfect combustion, NatGas emits less CO2 per unit of heat produced than oil and coal. But given the immense greenhouse potential of methane, it takes methane leakage of less than 1% to negate the above greenhouse-potential advantage.

-----------------------------

Couldn't resist appending a lighter note about "interesting things happening in Texas":

Texas Blogger’s ‘Man Crush’ on Putin Leads to Lengthy Heart to Heart

[R.D. Silverman]

Originally Posted by ewmayer

<snip>


Starting in April 2010, the land immediately behind their house was transformed, overnight, into a heavy industrial site. A seemingly endless stream of trucks rattled through the neighborhood just north of Flower Mound, carrying tons of steel and piping.

As diesel fumes, chemical odors and dust wafted through the Knolls’ backyard, a towering, 14-story natural gas-drilling rig went up. After the well was drilled, more diesel-driven equipment was brought in to fracture or “frack” the well – pumping several million gallons of highly pressurized, chemical-laden water into it to help release the natural gas.

The Knolls, whose house was roughly 600 feet from the Gulftex-operated rig – and a mere 800 feet away from a “smelly, noisy” compressor station – were horrified. They complained to state environmental officials of odors, contaminated water in their well, numbing headaches, nosebleeds, and even grasshoppers falling dead from the sky into their backyard.

Didn't the town/city in which they lived have zoning laws? My town certainly
does.

If they were knowlingly living inside an industrial zone, then they have
nothing to complain about.

If they were living in a residential zone, then they have a valid legal claim
against this nuisance.

[ewmayer]

The NYT has an interesting piece on one of the ways in which high commodities prices are interfering with China Inc`s "double-digit economic growth 4ever" plans. The irony of course being that one of the main drivers of high prices - the others being deliberately weakened currencies and rampant market speculation - is none other than China continuing to gobble up commodities, in many cases to fulfill growth targets of its central planners rather than to meet any legitimate market needs. That drives prices higher until they get so high that they *do* actually start to crimp legitimate needs, including those of the many millions of rural Chinese who were induced to "modernize" and buy lots of energy-intensive appliances by generous "cash for fridges" subsidies from Beijing in recent years. I found the "high price of coal" angle here especially interesting because China has massive domestic coal reserves and has few qualms about exploiting those as fast as possible, environmental concerns be damned:

China’s Utilities Cut Energy Production, Defying Beijing: YIYANG, China — It is a power struggle that is causing a power shortage — one that has begun to slow China’s mighty economic growth engine.

Balking at the high price of coal that fuels much of China’s electricity grid, the nation’s state-owned utility companies are defying government economic planners by deliberately holding back the amount of electricity they produce.

The power companies say they face financial ruin if the government continues to tightly limit the prices they can charge customers, even as strong demand is sending coal prices to record levels. The chairwoman of one giant utility, China Power International, recently warned that one-fifth of China’s 436 coal-fired power plants could face bankruptcy if the utilities cannot raise rates.

The utilities’ go-slow tactics include curtailing the planned expansion and construction of power plants, and running plants for fewer hours a day. And in a notable act of passive defiance, the power companies have scheduled an unusually large number of plants to close for maintenance this summer — right when air-conditioning season will reach its peak.
...
The official Xinhua news agency reported late Monday that the country’s main electricity distribution company, the State Grid, had warned that power shortages this year could be worse than in 2004, when China had its worst blackouts in decades. That year, the problem involved railroad bottlenecks in getting coal to power plants — an issue largely resolved with the subsequent investments in more rail lines.

This time, the impasse between government and industry is not the only cause of China’s electricity shortages. Surging electricity demand is also a factor.

China’s 700 million rural residents have been on a two-year buying spree of electric devices, purchasing hundreds of millions of air-conditioners and other energy-hungry appliances with government subsidies aimed at narrowing the gap in living standards between cities and rural areas.

In a little-noticed milestone, the latest data from Beijing and Washington shows that China passed the United States last year as the world’s largest consumer of electricity.

Since March, responding to the power shortages, government officials in six provinces have begun rationing electricity, including here in Hunan province. At least five more provinces are preparing to do so, according to official reports.

In Yiyang, a town of 360,000 in south-central China, electricity shortages are so severe this spring that many homes and businesses receive power only one day in three. Even gasoline stations in this region are silent more days than not, because the pumps lack electricity.

Meanwhile, blackouts are starting to slow the nation’s torrid growth of energy-intensive industries like steel, cement and chemicals. Unlike garment makers and other small manufacturers, the big factories cannot easily switch to backyard diesel generators.

My Comment: Mish has a review article about similar phenomena around the globe here:

Energy Shortages Spreading: Rationing in China, Pakistan, Venezuela, Japan, Argentina; China Resorts to Punitive Prices to Curb Demand

[cheesehead]

Originally Posted by ewmayer

My Comment: Mish has a review article about similar phenomena around the globe here:

Energy Shortages Spreading: Rationing in China, Pakistan, Venezuela, Japan, Argentina; China Resorts to Punitive Prices to Curb Demand

One way to cope with rising prices of coal and other fuels is to construct power generators that don't require fuel for operation, but instead harvest naturally-occurring non-fossil sources of energy (solar, wind, tidal, geothermal). :-)

Mish's final paragraph:

Long-term, those who assume the Chinese economy can grow at 10 percent a year for another decade are in Fantasyland. Energy constraints will not permit it.

Psst, Mish -- it's not actually energy constraints in general (there's oodles of solar energy available); it's constraints on using fossil-fuel energy in particular. Why no mention of non-fossil-fuel energy-harvesting? China's doing more on that than the US is.

Perhaps China can't grow its economy at 10 percent annually because their fossil-fuel plants have financial troubles, but they could grow it at a substantial rate if they'd been more aggressive about constructing renewable energy harvesters instead of those coal plants. What if they start constructing renewable energy harvesters faster than they have so far?

[Christenson]

As a builder using power electronics, that is, the kinds of transistors needed to operate small- and medium- scale energy harvesters efficiently, 1) the devices aren't cheap, $50 to $100 for a 400A transistor/IGBT 2) You have to know what you are doing to design with them (otherwise they turn into smoke bombs), and 3) There's a little bit of a shortage of those things at the moment.

But stay tuned, the prices of solar cells are coming down, with the target at about $1 per peak watt, same as utility power, the current level is about $2 per peak watt. Gets very attractive if you want to run your petrol station 5 days out of 7, the main issue being how to store some of the energy and recover it effectively.

[Fusion_power]

The cost vs price issue with non-fossil energy sources limits deployment. When you are forced to sell electricity at roughly 4 cents per kilowatt, it is not economically feasible to develop alternative energy sources. Just the interest on a major power project would exceed the potential income on anything less than 30 year time scales.

There is also a consideration that a major input (coal) is on a floating - and rising - price scale where the output (electricity) is at a fixed rate. Simple math says that is a recipe for bankruptcy.

DarJones

[Christenson]

Originally Posted by Fusion_power

The cost vs price issue with non-fossil energy sources limits deployment. When you are forced to sell electricity at roughly 4 cents per kilowatt, it is not economically feasible to develop alternative energy sources. Just the interest on a major power project would exceed the potential income on anything less than 30 year time scales.

There is also a consideration that a major input (coal) is on a floating - and rising - price scale where the output (electricity) is at a fixed rate. Simple math says that is a recipe for bankruptcy.

DarJones

There is something important to keep in mind here, though: the *value* of electricity far exceeds its cost. Same for petrol to operate transportation, notice that we drive almost as much with $4 per gallon gas as $3 per gallon.

Solar cell prices *are* coming down, not quite to the point where lots of roofs will have them, but getting close. The practicality of using the family car as a generator is quite evident with hybrid vehicles, too, and one vision for 30 years in the future is that poor people will get home and plug the house into the car for electricity at night. This would be attractive for those electricity-starved chinese petrol station owners right now. It would work for the same reasons prepaid phone cards do...the purchaser is afforded control over costs, when the gasoline is gone, service is cut off, without increasing the difficulty of getting further service.

[ewmayer]

Courtesy of ZeroHedge, Phil of Phil`s Stock World rants about oil-price manipulation and the rampant speculation going on oil futures:

Thrill-Ride Thursday - Fake, Fake, Fake

Even as I write this, I just put up a trade idea in Member Chat to short oil futures at the $101.45 line with a stop if they break over $101.50. As I said in yesterday's post - if the manipulators want to pretend they want to buy barrels for $101.45, we are very happy to agree to sell them for that price because WE KNOW THEY ARE LYING! How do we know, because last month, the June NYMEX contract finished with 20,000 contracts (20M barrels) open for delivery and that makes sense because Cushing, OK, where the barrels are delivered, can only handle about 40M barrels and they are pretty full. Oil finished out that contract down near $96 a barrel. How did they get it back to $101.50 in a week (the pre-holiday week, where that $5 a barrel translates to $2 a tank from every driver in America)? By PRETENDING that they are interest in buying - get this - 406 MILLION barrels for July delivery:

[table snipped]

Aside from the fact that it is simply not physically possible for 400M, or even 40M barrels of oil to actually be delivered to Cushing, I can tell you FOR A FACT that over 90% of those contracts will not only be cancelled before the expiration date in late June but that they will then be rolled over to August, where the CRIMINALS (alleged by the CTFC) at the NYMEX will then FAKE demand for another 400M barrels of oil. That is TEN (10) TIMES the actual demand. Do you think that affects prices? Of course it does, it's a $2.5 TRILLION Dollar Global Oil Scam and shame on you if you read this and just think someone else should do something about it. WRITE TO CONGRESS - STOP THIS CRIME!!!

Chris Martenson has a nice piece about "economic prosperity dependent on exponential credit growth" - here is a snip, I linked to the chart which was inlined in the actual piece:

Why Growth Is Dead: The end of the second round of quantitative easing (QE II) is going to be a complete disaster for the paper markets -- specifically commodities, stocks, and then finally bonds, in that order, with losses of 20% to 50% by the end of October.

While money printing can so some wondrous things in the short term - (Hey, give me $2 trillion to spend and I'll throw a nice party, too!) - it cannot fix the predicament of fundamental insolvency. The United States has lived beyond its means for a couple of decades and promised itself a future that it forgot to adequately fund. The choice that remains is between accepting an unpleasant but relatively steady period of austerity leading to a new lower standard of living -- and a final catastrophe for the dollar. The former is akin to walking down around the side of a cliff, and the latter is jumping off.

Too Little Debt! (or, One Chart That Explains Everything)

If I were to be given just one chart, by which I had to explain everything about why Bernanke's printed efforts have so far failed to really cure anything and why I am pessimistic that further efforts will fall short, it is this one

There's a lot going on in this deceptively simple chart so let's take it one step at a time. First, "Total Credit Market Debt" covers everything - financial sector debt, government debt (fed, state, local), household debt, and corporate debt - and is represented by the bold red line (data from the Federal Reserve).

Next, if we start in January 1970 and ask the question, "How long before that debt doubled and then doubled again?" we find that debt has doubled five times in four decades (blue triangles).

Then if we perform an exponential curve fit (blue line), we find a nearly perfect fit with an R2 of 0.99 when we round up. That means that debt has been growing in a nearly perfect exponential fashion through the 1970's, the 1980's, the 1990's and the 2000's. In order for the 2010 decade to mirror, match, or in any way resemble the prior four decades, credit market debt will need to double again from $52 trillion to $104 trillion.

Finally, note that the most serious departure between the idealized exponential curve fit and the data occurred beginning in 2008 -- and it has not yet even remotely begun to return to its former trajectory.

This explains everything.

It explains why Bernanke's $2 trillion has not created a spectacular party in anything other than a few select areas (banking, corporate profits) which were positioned to directly benefit from the money. It explains why things don't feel right, or the same, and why most people are still feeling quite queasy about the state of the economy. It explains why the massive disconnect between government pensions and promises, all developed and doled out during the prior four decades, cannot be met by current budget realities.

Our entire system of money, and by extension our sense of entitlement and expectations of future growth, were formed in response to and are utterly dependent on exponential credit growth. Of course, as you know, money is loaned into existence and is therefore really just the other side of the credit coin. This is why Bernanke can print a few trillion and not really accomplish all that much. It's because the main engine of growth is expecting, requiring, and otherwise dependent on credit doubling over the next decade.

To put that into perspective, a doubling will take us from $52 to $104 trillion, requiring close to $5 trillion in new credit creation during each year of that decade. Nearly three years have passed without any appreciable increase in total credit market debt, which puts us roughly $15 trillion behind the curve.

What will happen when credit cannot grow exponentially? We already have our answer, because that's been the reality for the past three years. Debts cannot be serviced, the weaker and more highly leveraged participants get clobbered first (Lehman, Greece, Las Vegas housing, etc.) and the dominoes topple from the outside in towards the center. Money is piled on, but traction is weak. What begins as a temporary program of providing liquidity becomes a permanent program of printing money, which the system becomes dependent on in order to even function.

[ewmayer]

NYT financial columnist Joe Nocera has an Op-Ed today about the gulf in business models and incentive practices separating the TBTF banks from their smaller regional counterparts:

The Good Banker: Not long ago, as I was leaving a business lunch, my luncheon companion handed me a thin manila envelope. He didn’t tell me what was in it or why he had given it to me, but as soon as I opened it up, I immediately understood.

It contained a copy of the 2010 annual report to shareholders by a bank executive I’d never met: Robert G. Wilmers. For nearly 30 years, Wilmers has run the M&T Bank, based in Buffalo. When he took it over, M&T had $2 billion in assets; today, its assets exceed $68 billion, and it’s one of the most highly regarded regional bank holding companies. It has also been one of the best performing stocks in the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index; indeed, M&T was one of only two banks in the S.& P. 500 that didn’t cut its dividend during the financial crisis.

Wilmers’s report, however, was less about the company’s numbers than about the dismal state of his beloved profession. Wilmers, it turns out, is that rarest of birds: a banker willing to tell harsh truths about banking. That, for instance, much of the money the big banks earn comes from trading profits “rather than the prudent extension of credit that furthers commerce.” That derivatives had helped bring about the crisis and needed to be regulated. That bank executives were wildly overpaid. That the biggest banks — the Too Big to Fail Banks — were operating, as he put it, an “unsafe business model.”

My first thought upon finishing the report was: I need to meet this guy. So, a few weeks ago, I did.

In person, Wilmers does not immediately strike one as a rabble-rouser. At 77, he is soft-spoken, a bit reticent, and almost excessively polite. “I personally believe that there isn’t a more honorable profession than the banking industry,” he began. “Most bankers are very involved in their communities, and they can stand up and be counted. I saw a poll recently,” he continued, “that showed we are now considered the third worst profession. That bothers me.”

On the other hand, it didn’t exactly surprise him. In the run-up to the financial crisis, the giant national banks — which he viewed as a distinct species from the typical American bank — had done things that deserved condemnation. And, he added, “They are still doing things that I don’t think are very good.”

Such as? “It has become a virtual casino,” he replied. “To me, banks exist for people to keep their liquid income, and also to finance trade and commerce.” Yet the six largest holding companies, which made a combined $75 billion last year, had $56 billion in trading revenues. “If you assume, as I do, that trading revenues go straight to the bottom line, that means that trading, not lending, is how they make most of their money,” he said.

This was a problem for several reasons. First, it meant that banks were taking excessive risks that were never really envisioned when the government began insuring deposits — and became, in effect, the backstop for the banking industry. Second, bank C.E.O.’s were being compensated in no small part on their trading profits — which gave them every incentive to keep taking those excessive risks. Indeed, in 2007, the chief executives of the Too Big to Fail Banks made, on average, $26 million, according to Wilmers — more than double the compensation of the top nonbank Fortune 500 executives. (Wilmers made around $2 million last year.)

Finally — and this is what particularly galled him — trading derivatives and other securities really had nothing to do with the underlying purpose of banking. He told me that he thought the Glass-Steagall Act — the Depression-era law that separated commercial and investment banks — should never have been abolished and that derivates need to be brought under government control. “It doesn’t need to be studied for two years,” he said. “I would put derivative trading in a subsidiary and tax it at a higher rate. If they fail, they fail.”

As Wilmers continued on in this vein, I found myself nodding in agreement. I also couldn’t help thinking back on remarks I’d heard Jamie Dimon give at a recent Chamber of Commerce event. Dimon, who made more than $20 million last year at JPMorgan Chase, is widely viewed as the best of the big bank chief executives. But he’s also become the most vocal defender of the status quo. “To people who say the system would be safer with smaller banks doing traditional banking, well, the system would be safer if we also went back to horse and buggies,” he told the Chamber audience. “That is a quaint notion that won’t work in the real world.”

At the M&T annual meeting earlier this year, Wilmers told the company’s shareholders that the bank’s mission was to “find ways to continue to attract deposits, make sound loans and grow in accordance with our historic credit quality standards.”

How quaint, indeed. And how refreshing.

[Fusion_power]

News today that moody's lowered the debt rating for Greece effectively to the status of Dead Cat.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-13625084

Now we all know that dead cat's stay dead.

The new rating means Greece is 50% likely to default on or restructure its debts in the next five years, according to Moody's methodology.

Meanwhile, Athens is completing the negotiations for drawing down the fifth tranche of its 110bn euro bail-out from the EU and International Monetary Fund.

Last week, the chairman of the group of eurozone finance ministers, Jean-Claude Juncker, said that the IMF may not approve the latest cash advance unless Greece could convince them it will remain solvent over the next 12 months.

There is a loud sound of OIINKING coming over the waves. Could it be the PIIGS are on the move?

IMO, Greece is no longer a matter of avoiding default. The only question now is when and how much and what spin will they use to make it sound palatable.

On a related note, there is silence re Italy and Spain. Every time Greece makes the news, it has to turn stomachs upside down for folks holding debt in either of them.

Is the USA in better shape? Realistically, no, we just have further to fall when the day of accounting finally gets here.

DarJones