FT: Mass selloff in Eurozone bonds

[Winehole23]

how could anyone really know?

[Winehole23]

if I see it in Time I assume that's because it's what we're being given to understand, no more.

[Winehole23]

just happen to be reading a pretty good Old Media book by Halberstam. The doorstop he devoted to Paley, Luce and Chandler...

[Winehole23]

i've come to look at pretty much all financial reporting, public or private, as straight up propaganda. it's probably a damn lie, at best a misleading truth.

[Winehole23]

revisions continue to be downward

[MannyIsGod]

i think you're just sore that you skinned your knee

Obviously all me. How big of you.

[Winehole23]

sorry if i hurt your feelings, but your bull was weak today

[MannyIsGod]

I think you're wrong.

Yeah, I gathered as much. I'll revisit and reevaluate at a later time.

[Agloco]

i've come to look at pretty much all financial reporting, public or private, as straight up propaganda. it's probably a damn lie, at best a misleading truth.

Well, the yields are consistent with the OP no?

Is the situation (correction:Euro) salvageable IYO?

[Winehole23]

[velik_m]

how could anyone really know?

The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable.

[Winehole23]

1. I never lead with any conversation that I was investing at the time. Yeah I am a value investor. Closer to B. Graham than Buffet, FWIW. But it is true--man. BoA didn't want the bail out money, like other banks, man.

BofA could be a great value:

http://money.cnn.com/2011/11/29/markets/bofa_stock/


(WH23 is not a financial advisor, offers no advice and has taken no position himself wrt BofA)

[SnakeBoy]

BofA could be a great value:

http://money.cnn.com/2011/11/29/markets/bofa_stock/

The comments on that article are like a boutons family reunion. I like this one in particular.

Not to worry my friends. When the euro collapses next month, the banks in the US will collapse with the stock market. It will be very 'Depressing" for the wealthy but the poor and wise will never feel it for they know how to live.

[Winehole23]

In a statement, the Bank of England said: “The Bank of Canada, the Bank of England, the Bank of Japan, the European Central Bank, the Federal Reserve, and the Swiss National Bank are today announcing co-ordinated actions to enhance their capacity to provide liquidity support to the global financial system.



“The purpose of these actions is to ease strains in financial markets and thereby mitigate the effects of such strains on the supply of credit to households and businesses and so help foster economic activity.” In another day of turmoil in Brussels, European finance ministers also admitted that they had failed to raise enough funds for a rescue fund to prop up the single currency.



The International Monetary Fund (IMF) is expected to assist in the bail-out plan – and a senior European official warned that there were now 10 days to save the euro.



Olli Rehn, the European Commission vice-president responsible for economic affairs, warned that a summit of Europe’s leaders on Friday Dec 9 was now crucial.


“We are now entering the critical period of 10 days to complete and conclude the crisis response of the EU,” he said.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/f...ng-Street.html

[Winehole23]

But policy makers and analysts were quick to caution that the Fed’s action did not address the fundamental financial problems threatening the survival of the European currency union. At best, they said, efforts by central banks to ease financial conditions could allow the 17 European Union countries that use the euro sufficient time to agree on a plan for its preservation.


“The European sovereign debt problem will not be solved only with liquidity,” the governor of Japan’s central bank, Masaaki Shirakawa, told reporters in Tokyo. He said that he “strongly” expected Europe to “push through economic and fiscal reform.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/01/bu...1&ref=business

[MannyIsGod]

[MannyIsGod]

Liquidity = Tussin

[Agloco]

Liquidity = Tussin

Well said.

[coyotes_geek]

Liquidity = Tussin

Great analogy, and also one of the funniest bits Chris Rock has ever done!

[Winehole23]

For the periphery, it is frightening to think that conditions may actually grow worse. Jobless rates in Greece and Spain are already at eye-watering levels. Among young people, those under 25, rates of joblessness across the whole of southern Europe are startling. In Greece, 45% of young people were unemployed as of August, which is the last month for which data are available. In Spain, the rate is 49%, up sharply from a year ago. In Italy, youth unemployment is 29%; in Portugal, it is 30%. Even in France, 24% of young people are without employment.

http://www.economist.com/blogs/freee...an-joblessness

[Agloco]

Scary stuff. We already see civil unrest popping up where usually stable situations exist.

[Winehole23]

Europe has two-and-a-half crises it’s facing. The first is an immediate banking crisis very much like our crisis in 2008. A large number of their financial ins utions are viewed as being insolvent. That run has already begun. It’s slow, but it’s there. In my opinion, they will have to recapitalize their banks, one way or the other. Second crisis, which is related but distinct, is the fiscal crisis. There’s sort of a run on the public issuance of new debt.

So one is a toxic, existing asset problem, The banks hold all this sovereign debt, and as the value of all that existing stuff goes down, that’s almost exactly parallel to mortgage-backed assets going down in 2008. But then the governments of Southern Europe have to fund themselves, but they’re having a hard time doing that. And in there is the Northern European viewpoint that this is just a spending problem. And that leads to the half crisis, which is that they’re not growing. The normal thing you would do, which is devalue and have an export-led growth strategy, is impossible, and therefore someone has to have an explanation for how these countries will grow. Otherwise, we’ll just repeat this again and again.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/...rss=ezra-klein

[Winehole23]

Capitalism works by rewarding capital formation and productive investments. That requires a healthy rate of interest, not a zero rate that only encourages malinvestment and unproductive speculation. With a zero rate of interest, banks have trouble making money on their deposits. Hmm, isn’t the Fed trying to save the banks? Then why is it destroying their ability to earn a return?

Capitalism works by enabling the liquidation of insolvent lenders, enterprises, and households and letting the market discover the price of assets. Instead of allowing that, the Federal Reserve and federal regulators have enabled the masking of insolvency via illusory (marked-to-fantasy) asset valuations and bailed out banks that should have been liquidated long ago.

http://www.theamericanconservative.c...ny-other-name/

[Winehole23]

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/04/ma...pagewanted=all

[coyotes_geek]

In other words, instead of Americans acting prudently to lower their unprecedented levels of debt and build some capital, the advocates of targeting GDP want us to go back to the go-go days of the housing bubble and borrow and spend more, more, more, all because they believe the key problem is lack of consumer demand.

If we just pump that empty keg hard enough, the party will come back to life.