Wednesday, August 12, 2009
The Second Wave of The Depression: Hyperinflation Likely
The second wave of the world economic depression is coming soon. Larry Summers, the economics czar of the Wall Street puppet regime currently in power in Washington, recently confessed to the Financial Times in an unguarded moment: “I don’t think the worst is over ….” A few weeks earlier, Jacques Attali, who served in the 1980s as the main economics adviser to French President Mitterrand, told an audience at the International Economic and Financial Forum (FIEF) in Paris that the world might well soon face a planetary Weimar “in the form of a hyperinflationary depression similar to the German events of 1922 - 1923.
During the last world economic depression, the first wave came in the form of the famous New York Stock market crash of October 1929. But this was only the beginning, and hardly the main event. The world depression of the 1930s was made irreversible by the British bankruptcy of September 1931, when the Bank of England ceased gold payment. At that time, the vast majority of international trade was financed by pounds sterling bills of exchange drawn on London. When the British Pound began to float through a series of competitive devaluations, the lack of a stable reserve currency — and not the US Hawley-Smoot tariff — strangled world trade, thus making that depression as severe as it was. British default in turn undermined the US banking system, setting the stage for the banking panic which ravaged the United States in 1932 and 1933, to the point that not a single bank in the country was still operating by the time Franklin D. Roosevelt assumed the presidency in March of 1933. The United States would almost certainly have been lashed by additional waves of depression had it not been for the banking triage implemented by the Roosevelt administration during the bank holiday, and for other New Deal measures which succeeded in mitigating the Depression. Other countries, notably Germany, went into a permanent depression which was expressed in a series of military campaigns which aimed at the economic looting of the other countries of Europe. Whatever the ideological fanatics of the discredited Austria and Chicago schools of economic analysis may claim, there is no automatic business cycle capable of lifting the modern world out of serious economic disintegration. The depression will end when adequate New Deal style policies are implemented, and not before, as I show in my new book, the second edition of Surviving the Cataclysm.
TODAY: BETWEEN 1929 AND 1931
Today, therefore, we are, so to speak, in the trough between the October 1929 wave (which corresponds to the derivatives crisis and banking panic of 2008) and the September 1931 wave, which this time around is highly likely to take the form of a hyperinflationary dollar crisis, or in other words a hyper stagflation and depression of the world economy radiating out from Wall Street and the City of London. What then might be the leading characteristics of the next wave of the current world economic breakdown crisis?
The next wave is likely to involve a worldwide dollar panic. Using ballpark figures, we can say that there are about $4 to $5 trillion sloshing around the world in the form of hot money, US Treasury securities, Euro dollars, and various forms of zeno-dollars. Japan has about a trillion, China almost $2 trillion, and so forth. It is naturally very unwise for a developing country like China to hold so many dollars rather than using them to purchase needed infrastructure and capital goods, and the Chinese leaders are now very uncomfortable with their own foolish decision, which was of course taken under heavy US pressure. But the point is that this $4.5 trillion overhang is by its very nature exceedingly unstable. Every country that holds large sums of dollars or US Treasury bonds is nervously eyeing every other such country to see if they show signs of bolting for the exit. Up to now, so far as we know, no large holder of dollars has attempted to reduce its exposure to the battered greenback by dumping these dollars on the international market. If anyone did so, it would cause a true universal financial panic which would create chaos and mayhem not just in the United States and Great Britain, but in the vast areas of the rest of the world as well. This is concretely how hyperinflation could now very well arise: if one or more US creditor nations attempts to abruptly lighten up on dollars, the value of the US currency could undergo a catastrophic collapse, and that would spell runaway hyperinflation on the US domestic front.
World Dollar Panic Imminent?
We need to recall that the value of a modern currency is not determined inside the country, but rather on the international foreign exchange markets. This is where the fatal vulnerability of the US dollar is located. In the ruined form of the Bretton Woods system which has prevailed for almost 40 years since Nixon‘s colossal historical vandalism of August 15, 1971, the US has emerged as the only country with a permanent license to finance imports by simply printing more of its own currency and sending those banknotes overseas. Every other country has to manufacture and export something that others want to buy in order to earn the necessary foreign exchange to pay for its own imports. The US license to print has made this country the buyer of last resort and the dumping ground for the unsold junk of the world, leading in the process to high permanent unemployment here. There are many signs that this inherently unworkable arrangement has now reached the breaking point.
International Currency Relations, Not Money Supply, Are The Key
Ms. Ellen Brown, who apparently supports the doctrines of the social credit movement of the 1930s, has recently argued that deflation is now on the agenda, and that hyperinflation can be ruled out. She bases this analysis on the fact that the private credit markets in this country have largely collapsed, and on the contention that the M1 and M2 money parameters have either declined or increased only slightly. But all of this is beside the point. The Federal Reserve and the Treasury have so far provided almost $13 trillion of new loans to banks, insurance companies, credit card companies, and other purely financial institutions. This is being done in an effort to bailout the $1.5 quadrillion world derivatives bubble, of which something like two-thirds or more, meaning one quadrillion dollars, can be located inside the dollar zone. The world depression started when this derivatives bubble went into reverse leverage, meaning that super losses instead of super profits were generated at the apex of the speculative pyramid, as seen in the case of the $3 trillion AIG hedge fund located in London. The Obama regime is engaged in an hysterical attempt to restart derivatives production in the form of securitization, i.e. the creation of more and better asset backed securities derivatives. At the same time, the Obama regime has cynically and deliberately driven the Detroit automakers into bankruptcy, destroying hundreds of thousands of the few remaining industrial jobs here in the United States. This means that US industrial production continues in drastic decline. The mere mention of production reminds us that the assorted Austrian, Chicago, and social credit schools are predominantly or exclusively concerned with money and banking, and pay little or no attention to industrial, agricultural, and infrastructural production, meaning of course that they neglect the creation of those tangible physical use values, capital goods, and related forms of real wealth upon which human existence depends. With bailouts increasing and all forms of commodity production declining, we have the classic situation of far too much money chasing too few goods. Internal pressure towards hyperinflation comes from the fact that the bailout and public debt lending, on top of the bloated, fictitious, and exponentially growing mass of kited derivatives, are all charges which must be added to the prices of commodity production. Add this to the more important factor of looming dollar panic in the international exchanges, and the preponderance of the evidence points towards hyperinflation. “Helicopter Ben“ Bernanke got his name from his famous recipe of throwing bales of dollars out of helicopters onto the lawns of bankers to stimulate the economy out of a depression, and this reminds us that the profile of the Anglo-American financial leadership from Gordon Brown, Alistair Darling, and Mervyn King to Summers, Geithner, and Bernanke is decidedly hyperinflationary. Ms. Brown’s belief that hyperinflation is impossible is therefore mistaken.
The German 1923 hyperinflation was generated internationally, not within Germany, as a campaign of economic warfare by Britain and France against their defeated rival. Germany had signed the Rapallo agreements with Soviet Russia, creating an economic combination which was more than a match for the Anglo-French. To abort the potential of Rapallo by creating chaos in the German economy, the Anglo-French systematically destroyed the value of the German Reichsmark on the international exchanges, taking advantage of the Versailles reparations system and the French occupation of the industrialized Ruhr area. The mark went down every day when the London exchange rate was announced. Today, it is the enormous international dollar overhang which threatens to annihilate the US greenback.
The one way deflation might actually come about is if someone like the self-professed Austrian school ideologue Ron Paul were to take power. Ron Pauls “libertarianism“ alternative to Obama‘s continued bailouts of Wall Street is evidently an immediate deflationary crash, which he asserts will be followed by an automatic recovery. Ron Paul is a modern representative of the so-called liquidationist school to which 1920s Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon belonged. Mellon demanded the liquidation of stocks, bonds, real estate, and labor. German Chancellor Heinrich Brüning, another liquidationist, savagely cut German unemployment benefits (Ron Paul’s “nanny state“) at the height of the Depression, helping to bring on the debacle of January 1933. Liquidationists tend to be people who have money and who believe they will continue to have money even after an all-out crash, when they will be able to buy up distressed assets and desperate unemployed workers for rock-bottom prices and cash in. But liquidationism obviously cannot be a solution to depression of the entire society.
The recent meetings of the leaders of the expanded G-8 countries in L’Aquila, Italy were marked by a growing awareness that the US dollar, because of the criminally irresponsible policies of the Wall Street financiers who have dominated the Bush and Obama administrations, can no longer play the role of the single world reserve currency. Russian President Medvedev showed off a sort of future world coin to try to prod the Obama regime in the direction of serious world monetary reform, which is of course the urgent task before everyone. Naturally, finance oligarchs like Summers, Geithner, and Bernanke want to continue to play the role of world currency dictators, and not be forced to negotiate the end of Anglo-American hegemonism. The world needs to go toward a new pro-growth world monetary system in which the euro, the yen, the dollar, the ruble, the Chinese yuan, a possible Latin American monetary unit, and a possible Arab monetary unit would all be included. It will be important to make the transition toward such a new system as orderly as possible, since a catastrophic collapse of the dollar in the short term would be to no one‘s advantage, and would rather represent a sure path to universal ruin. World economic growth rates under the 1944 to 1971 Bretton Woods system were the highest in recorded history before or since. This was accomplished through statism and dirigism in the form of narrow bands of isolation among the currencies, combined with gold settlements of surpluses and deficits among the nations, which provided an indispensable reality principle to restrain the hyperinflationary tendencies of the Anglo-Americans. The new world monetary system should include the abolition of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank in their current forms, since these institutions have strangled the economic progress of the developing sector. Rather, the goal of the new monetary system should be to restart the export of high technology capital goods of the most modern type from Europe, Japan, and the United States toward the impoverished countries of Africa, South Asia, and certain parts of Latin America.
The Federal Government Should Stop Borrowing And Start Lending
Here in the United States, we need to wipe out the derivatives bubble with the help of a 1% Tobin tax or securities transfer tax, on all speculative financial transactions, including futures, options, stocks, bonds, commodities, foreign exchange, and so forth. A California Tobin tax would solve the state budget crisis. The top 16 Wall Street banks are zombie institutions that need to be seized and liquidated under Chapter 7 bankruptcy at once, with all of their derivatives going into the shredder. Foreclosures on homes, farms, and businesses should be banned outright for five years or for the duration of the depression, which ever lasts longer. To provide a credit supply, the Federal Reserve should be seized and nationalized, and used as a vehicle to issue 0% Federal credit for productive activities only, not for speculation. To revive credit demand, state and local governments could then take out 0% Federal loans for such long overdue projects as the construction of 1,000 hospitals, the building of 50,000 miles of modern maglev rail systems, and 100 fourth-generation, high temperature, pebble bed nuclear reactors, plus the rebuilding of water systems and the interstate highway network. Idled auto plants should be reconverted for these purposes. Science drivers in the fields of space exploration and colonization, high energy physics, and biomedical research should also be fully funded in this way to provide technological modernization. The social safety net needs to be expanded and developed, with larger Social Security pensions for a generation whose 401(k)s and IRAs have been largely destroyed, along with increased Medicare and Medicaid benefits for those whose insurance companies are insolvent, like AIG and The Hartford, which have been devastated by derivatives speculation. These are quite simply the requirements for the maintenance of human civilization in this part of the world. Until measures like these are carried out, the United States and the world will continue to sink deeper into the bottomless pit of economic depression.
Webster Tarpley is an economic historian, radio host and author of 9/11 Synthetic Terror: Made in USA, Obama, The Postmodern Coup and Surviving The Cataclysm and other books.
By Webster Tarpley
During the last world economic depression, the first wave came in the form of the famous New York Stock market crash of October 1929. But this was only the beginning, and hardly the main event. The world depression of the 1930s was made irreversible by the British bankruptcy of September 1931, when the Bank of England ceased gold payment. At that time, the vast majority of international trade was financed by pounds sterling bills of exchange drawn on London. When the British Pound began to float through a series of competitive devaluations, the lack of a stable reserve currency — and not the US Hawley-Smoot tariff — strangled world trade, thus making that depression as severe as it was. British default in turn undermined the US banking system, setting the stage for the banking panic which ravaged the United States in 1932 and 1933, to the point that not a single bank in the country was still operating by the time Franklin D. Roosevelt assumed the presidency in March of 1933. The United States would almost certainly have been lashed by additional waves of depression had it not been for the banking triage implemented by the Roosevelt administration during the bank holiday, and for other New Deal measures which succeeded in mitigating the Depression. Other countries, notably Germany, went into a permanent depression which was expressed in a series of military campaigns which aimed at the economic looting of the other countries of Europe. Whatever the ideological fanatics of the discredited Austria and Chicago schools of economic analysis may claim, there is no automatic business cycle capable of lifting the modern world out of serious economic disintegration. The depression will end when adequate New Deal style policies are implemented, and not before, as I show in my new book, the second edition of Surviving the Cataclysm.
TODAY: BETWEEN 1929 AND 1931
Today, therefore, we are, so to speak, in the trough between the October 1929 wave (which corresponds to the derivatives crisis and banking panic of 2008) and the September 1931 wave, which this time around is highly likely to take the form of a hyperinflationary dollar crisis, or in other words a hyper stagflation and depression of the world economy radiating out from Wall Street and the City of London. What then might be the leading characteristics of the next wave of the current world economic breakdown crisis?
The next wave is likely to involve a worldwide dollar panic. Using ballpark figures, we can say that there are about $4 to $5 trillion sloshing around the world in the form of hot money, US Treasury securities, Euro dollars, and various forms of zeno-dollars. Japan has about a trillion, China almost $2 trillion, and so forth. It is naturally very unwise for a developing country like China to hold so many dollars rather than using them to purchase needed infrastructure and capital goods, and the Chinese leaders are now very uncomfortable with their own foolish decision, which was of course taken under heavy US pressure. But the point is that this $4.5 trillion overhang is by its very nature exceedingly unstable. Every country that holds large sums of dollars or US Treasury bonds is nervously eyeing every other such country to see if they show signs of bolting for the exit. Up to now, so far as we know, no large holder of dollars has attempted to reduce its exposure to the battered greenback by dumping these dollars on the international market. If anyone did so, it would cause a true universal financial panic which would create chaos and mayhem not just in the United States and Great Britain, but in the vast areas of the rest of the world as well. This is concretely how hyperinflation could now very well arise: if one or more US creditor nations attempts to abruptly lighten up on dollars, the value of the US currency could undergo a catastrophic collapse, and that would spell runaway hyperinflation on the US domestic front.
World Dollar Panic Imminent?
We need to recall that the value of a modern currency is not determined inside the country, but rather on the international foreign exchange markets. This is where the fatal vulnerability of the US dollar is located. In the ruined form of the Bretton Woods system which has prevailed for almost 40 years since Nixon‘s colossal historical vandalism of August 15, 1971, the US has emerged as the only country with a permanent license to finance imports by simply printing more of its own currency and sending those banknotes overseas. Every other country has to manufacture and export something that others want to buy in order to earn the necessary foreign exchange to pay for its own imports. The US license to print has made this country the buyer of last resort and the dumping ground for the unsold junk of the world, leading in the process to high permanent unemployment here. There are many signs that this inherently unworkable arrangement has now reached the breaking point.
International Currency Relations, Not Money Supply, Are The Key
Ms. Ellen Brown, who apparently supports the doctrines of the social credit movement of the 1930s, has recently argued that deflation is now on the agenda, and that hyperinflation can be ruled out. She bases this analysis on the fact that the private credit markets in this country have largely collapsed, and on the contention that the M1 and M2 money parameters have either declined or increased only slightly. But all of this is beside the point. The Federal Reserve and the Treasury have so far provided almost $13 trillion of new loans to banks, insurance companies, credit card companies, and other purely financial institutions. This is being done in an effort to bailout the $1.5 quadrillion world derivatives bubble, of which something like two-thirds or more, meaning one quadrillion dollars, can be located inside the dollar zone. The world depression started when this derivatives bubble went into reverse leverage, meaning that super losses instead of super profits were generated at the apex of the speculative pyramid, as seen in the case of the $3 trillion AIG hedge fund located in London. The Obama regime is engaged in an hysterical attempt to restart derivatives production in the form of securitization, i.e. the creation of more and better asset backed securities derivatives. At the same time, the Obama regime has cynically and deliberately driven the Detroit automakers into bankruptcy, destroying hundreds of thousands of the few remaining industrial jobs here in the United States. This means that US industrial production continues in drastic decline. The mere mention of production reminds us that the assorted Austrian, Chicago, and social credit schools are predominantly or exclusively concerned with money and banking, and pay little or no attention to industrial, agricultural, and infrastructural production, meaning of course that they neglect the creation of those tangible physical use values, capital goods, and related forms of real wealth upon which human existence depends. With bailouts increasing and all forms of commodity production declining, we have the classic situation of far too much money chasing too few goods. Internal pressure towards hyperinflation comes from the fact that the bailout and public debt lending, on top of the bloated, fictitious, and exponentially growing mass of kited derivatives, are all charges which must be added to the prices of commodity production. Add this to the more important factor of looming dollar panic in the international exchanges, and the preponderance of the evidence points towards hyperinflation. “Helicopter Ben“ Bernanke got his name from his famous recipe of throwing bales of dollars out of helicopters onto the lawns of bankers to stimulate the economy out of a depression, and this reminds us that the profile of the Anglo-American financial leadership from Gordon Brown, Alistair Darling, and Mervyn King to Summers, Geithner, and Bernanke is decidedly hyperinflationary. Ms. Brown’s belief that hyperinflation is impossible is therefore mistaken.
The German 1923 hyperinflation was generated internationally, not within Germany, as a campaign of economic warfare by Britain and France against their defeated rival. Germany had signed the Rapallo agreements with Soviet Russia, creating an economic combination which was more than a match for the Anglo-French. To abort the potential of Rapallo by creating chaos in the German economy, the Anglo-French systematically destroyed the value of the German Reichsmark on the international exchanges, taking advantage of the Versailles reparations system and the French occupation of the industrialized Ruhr area. The mark went down every day when the London exchange rate was announced. Today, it is the enormous international dollar overhang which threatens to annihilate the US greenback.
The one way deflation might actually come about is if someone like the self-professed Austrian school ideologue Ron Paul were to take power. Ron Pauls “libertarianism“ alternative to Obama‘s continued bailouts of Wall Street is evidently an immediate deflationary crash, which he asserts will be followed by an automatic recovery. Ron Paul is a modern representative of the so-called liquidationist school to which 1920s Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon belonged. Mellon demanded the liquidation of stocks, bonds, real estate, and labor. German Chancellor Heinrich Brüning, another liquidationist, savagely cut German unemployment benefits (Ron Paul’s “nanny state“) at the height of the Depression, helping to bring on the debacle of January 1933. Liquidationists tend to be people who have money and who believe they will continue to have money even after an all-out crash, when they will be able to buy up distressed assets and desperate unemployed workers for rock-bottom prices and cash in. But liquidationism obviously cannot be a solution to depression of the entire society.
The recent meetings of the leaders of the expanded G-8 countries in L’Aquila, Italy were marked by a growing awareness that the US dollar, because of the criminally irresponsible policies of the Wall Street financiers who have dominated the Bush and Obama administrations, can no longer play the role of the single world reserve currency. Russian President Medvedev showed off a sort of future world coin to try to prod the Obama regime in the direction of serious world monetary reform, which is of course the urgent task before everyone. Naturally, finance oligarchs like Summers, Geithner, and Bernanke want to continue to play the role of world currency dictators, and not be forced to negotiate the end of Anglo-American hegemonism. The world needs to go toward a new pro-growth world monetary system in which the euro, the yen, the dollar, the ruble, the Chinese yuan, a possible Latin American monetary unit, and a possible Arab monetary unit would all be included. It will be important to make the transition toward such a new system as orderly as possible, since a catastrophic collapse of the dollar in the short term would be to no one‘s advantage, and would rather represent a sure path to universal ruin. World economic growth rates under the 1944 to 1971 Bretton Woods system were the highest in recorded history before or since. This was accomplished through statism and dirigism in the form of narrow bands of isolation among the currencies, combined with gold settlements of surpluses and deficits among the nations, which provided an indispensable reality principle to restrain the hyperinflationary tendencies of the Anglo-Americans. The new world monetary system should include the abolition of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank in their current forms, since these institutions have strangled the economic progress of the developing sector. Rather, the goal of the new monetary system should be to restart the export of high technology capital goods of the most modern type from Europe, Japan, and the United States toward the impoverished countries of Africa, South Asia, and certain parts of Latin America.
The Federal Government Should Stop Borrowing And Start Lending
Here in the United States, we need to wipe out the derivatives bubble with the help of a 1% Tobin tax or securities transfer tax, on all speculative financial transactions, including futures, options, stocks, bonds, commodities, foreign exchange, and so forth. A California Tobin tax would solve the state budget crisis. The top 16 Wall Street banks are zombie institutions that need to be seized and liquidated under Chapter 7 bankruptcy at once, with all of their derivatives going into the shredder. Foreclosures on homes, farms, and businesses should be banned outright for five years or for the duration of the depression, which ever lasts longer. To provide a credit supply, the Federal Reserve should be seized and nationalized, and used as a vehicle to issue 0% Federal credit for productive activities only, not for speculation. To revive credit demand, state and local governments could then take out 0% Federal loans for such long overdue projects as the construction of 1,000 hospitals, the building of 50,000 miles of modern maglev rail systems, and 100 fourth-generation, high temperature, pebble bed nuclear reactors, plus the rebuilding of water systems and the interstate highway network. Idled auto plants should be reconverted for these purposes. Science drivers in the fields of space exploration and colonization, high energy physics, and biomedical research should also be fully funded in this way to provide technological modernization. The social safety net needs to be expanded and developed, with larger Social Security pensions for a generation whose 401(k)s and IRAs have been largely destroyed, along with increased Medicare and Medicaid benefits for those whose insurance companies are insolvent, like AIG and The Hartford, which have been devastated by derivatives speculation. These are quite simply the requirements for the maintenance of human civilization in this part of the world. Until measures like these are carried out, the United States and the world will continue to sink deeper into the bottomless pit of economic depression.
Webster Tarpley is an economic historian, radio host and author of 9/11 Synthetic Terror: Made in USA, Obama, The Postmodern Coup and Surviving The Cataclysm and other books.
By Webster Tarpley
Court throws out FOIA Lawsuit against the Federal Reserve over missing $700,000,000,000
Check this on you Tube ....... http://bit.ly/jVSA3
Tuesday, August 11, 2009
莫拉克整體農損逾68億元 漁損創18年新高
（中央社記者楊淑閔台北11日電）農委會公布，莫拉克風災至上午10時累計造成農漁業產物損失及民間設施毀損估計新台幣68億5027萬元，高居18年來風災損失前5名；其中，漁產損失29億1116萬元，創下近18年新高。
根據農委會民國80年來統計顯示，第一大風災農損（不含設施損失）是85年8月賀伯颱風180億7622.8萬元；第二大是94年7月海棠颱風77億 4237.2萬元。第三大為96年10月柯羅莎76億4258.6萬元。第四名為87年10月瑞伯風災，農損66億6967.1萬元。
莫拉克颱風造成農損至今已逾68億元，若扣除設施損失，為65億2021萬元，高居18年來風災農損前5名。
不過，莫拉克所造成漁產損失，已高於賀伯風災漁產損失24億3029.6萬元，創下18年新高。
農委會公布，莫拉克颱風整體農損中，「農作物損失」27億8878萬元，農作物被害面積4萬9723公頃，損害程度27%，換算無收穫面積1萬3312公頃，受損作物以香蕉倒伏最為嚴重，被害面積達5356公頃，次為木瓜、番石榴、竹筍、葉菜類水傷等。
「畜禽損失」7億3759萬元，主要為豬死亡8萬815頭、雞死亡270萬6000隻、鴨死亡70萬9000隻。
「漁產損失」29億1116萬元，養殖魚塭受損面積為5832公頃，以台南縣、屏東縣、台南市、高雄縣等縣市受損最為嚴重。
「林產損失」1636萬元。「農業設施損失」1億6832萬元，主要為雲嘉南及高屏地區蔬菜及木瓜網室設施受損。
「畜禽設施損失」1714萬元。「漁民設施損失」1億4460萬元。「農田損失部分」6632萬元，農田流失及埋沒73公頃。
日國債創新高 每人平均負債228萬台幣
（中央社記者張芳明東京11日專電）日本財務省發表的統計指出，到今年6月底為止，包括國債、借款和政府短期證券在內，日本的累積債務總額達到前所未有的860兆2557億日圓（新台幣291兆7200億元）。
統計指出，以7月1日估計的日本總人口1億2761萬計算的話，從嬰兒至高齡者，每名日本民眾的平均負債額約為674萬日圓（新台幣228萬5600元）。
財務省每一季發表國家累積的債務總額，6月底比3月底增加13兆7587億日圓，主要是由於政府為因應全球的不景氣而增加發行國債。
統計顯示，日本的國家債務以普通國債最多，占總額的6成4，金額為554兆4241億日圓，其次是財務投資債務，金額為127兆400億日圓，接下來是政府短期證券，金額119兆1062億日圓。
日本的國家債務過去最高紀錄是2008年3月底的849兆2396億日圓，隨後一度減少，但由於去年秋天爆發全球金融危機，政府為刺激景氣而追加預算增發國債，造成國債總額增加而創下新高。
財務省預估，若經濟情況未有好轉，政府繼續實施景氣對策，國家的累積債務總額將在明年3月底以前突破900兆日圓。
Strong quakes hit Japan and India
Powerful quakes strike Japan, India
TOKYO — Powerful earthquakes just over 10 minutes apart rattled Japan and India on Tuesday, triggering panic on fears of a tsunami in the Andaman Islands and injuring more than 100 people southwest of Tokyo.
The unrelated quakes struck in the early hours, shutting down Japanese bullet train services and a nuclear power plant and causing a landslide that closed a major highway near the Japanese capital.
At least 110 people were injured, mostly by falling objects such as television sets, including three who were hospitalised in serious condition, prefectural government officials and police said.
The Japanese tremor registered a strong magnitude of 6.4, while the quake off the Andaman Islands in the Indian Ocean was a huge 7.6, according to the US Geological Survey.
Panic-stricken islanders fled their homes, fearing a repeat of the enormous Asian tsunami that devastated the Andamans in 2004 and killed around 220,000 people in the region as a whole.
"It was very frightening. Everything started shaking and people were running out of their homes," said Mrinal Sarkar, a villager in Diglipur in the northern Andamans. "People are afraid to go back inside."
But a tsunami alert issued for India, Myanmar, Indonesia, Thailand and Bangladesh was later cancelled by the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center of the US National Weather Service.
The emergency services control centre in Port Blair, the main town of the Andaman Islands, said there were no reports of casualties and property damage had been limited to cracks in some buildings on northern islands.
S.N. Jha, who heads the Andaman Islands' Disaster Management Committee, said emergency services had been put on alert across the territory within minutes of the earthquake being felt.
"In the end there was some panic in Northern Andaman, but there have been no reports of any serious damage to property or loss of life," Jha said.
The quake hit at 1:55 am (1955 GMT Monday) around 263 kilometres north of Port Blair, and was around 33 kilometres deep. Mild tremors were felt 1,190 kilometres away in the eastern Indian port city of Chennai.
The Japanese quake struck at 5:07 am (2007 GMT Monday) in Suruga Bay on the Pacific coast 170 kilometres southwest of Tokyo at a depth of 26.8 kilometres.
It shook buildings, threw objects from supermarket shelves, and jolted people from their sleep in Tokyo and areas southwest of the capital.
Japan's Meteorological Agency, which measured the quake at a revised 6.5, said there was no risk of a tsunami after initial waves raised the ocean surface by about 40 centimetres (16 inches) at Omaezaki, Shizuoka.
A large landslide triggered by the quake damaged a highway in the prefecture at Makinohara, causing long traffic jams.
Early warnings that the nearby Typhoon Etau could compound the damage by bringing heavy rains to the quake-hit region did not materialise when the typhoon veered east, heading away from the Japanese coast.
Torrential rains from the typhoon had earlier caused at least 13 deaths from flooding and landslides in western Japan.
The quake caused power failures in 9,500 households, utility officials said, while Central Japan Railway Co. suspended Shinkansen bullet trains in the quake-hit region before resuming the services several hours later.
Prime Minister Taro Aso's office set up an emergency centre shortly after the quake, which was followed by 13 noticeable aftershocks.
A strong earthquake had also hit central Japan late on Sunday. Around 20 percent of the world's most powerful quakes strike the country, which is located at the intersection of four tectonic plates.
The Andaman Sea area also witnesses frequent earthquakes caused by the meeting of the Indian plate with the Burmese microplate along an area known as the Andaman trench.
印度‧印度洋7.6級大地震‧多國恐慌發海嘯警報
（印度‧布萊爾港）印度洋安達曼島今日（週二，8月11日）發生7.6級大地震，一度觸發海嘯恐慌，當地居民紛紛逃離居所。
美國國家氣象服務局的太平洋海嘯警告中心隨後取消了在印度、緬甸、印尼、泰國、孟加拉發出的海嘯警報。
當局指出：“海平面數據顯示，不會發生大海嘯。”
不過，海嘯警告最初發出後，多國沿海地區的不少民眾都驚惶疏散。
未接獲損毀報告
安達曼島主要市鎮布萊爾港的警察管制中心指出，暫未接獲嚴重損毀以及傷亡報告。
地震於當地時間凌晨1時55分（大馬時間週二凌晨3時55分），發生在布萊爾港以北263公里，深度達33公里。
安達曼島在2004年的亞洲大海嘯事件中受嚴重創擊。當時，印尼蘇門達臘島外發生地震，引發海嘯，巨浪衝擊印度洋附近國家。
安達曼迪格里普爾村村民撒卡爾表示：“我非常害怕。所有東西開始晃動，人們逃離房屋，不敢回到屋內。”
距離安達曼1190公里外的真奈也出現微震。此外，印尼巴布亞北部沿海也在凌晨1時46分發生5.7級地震。
印度國家海嘯警告中心指出，海平面無顯示異常洶湧。一切正常。
地震地點去年風災逾13萬人死
此次地震震央位於緬甸伊拉瓦底三角洲西南部約364公里。當地去年5月發生嚴重風災，造成逾13萬8000人死亡。
在2004年海嘯事件後成立的泰國國家災難警告中心表示，當局也正在監視地震情況。
2004年的大海嘯造成22萬人死亡，多數罹難者來自印尼北部的亞齊省。斯里蘭卡、緬甸、泰國以及印度也有數千人死亡。
| Advertisement CCTV cameras captured the moment the quake struck A strong earthquake has struck Tokyo and central Japan, halting train services, closing motorways and causing a nuclear power station to shut down. At least 43 people were injured by the magnitude 6.4 quake, many of them by falling objects, officials said. No deaths have been reported. Separately, there was another powerful earthquake off India's Andaman Islands in the Indian Ocean. Both earthquakes triggered tsunami alerts, which were later cancelled. 'Huge tremble' In Japan, the magnitude 6.4 quake shook buildings, threw objects from shelves and jolted people from their sleep in Tokyo area at 0507 (2007 GMT Monday). The quake was centred in the Pacific Ocean, about 170km (105 miles) south-west of Tokyo, the US Geological Survey reported. Of those injured, at least three people are thought to be in a serious condition. "It was a huge tremble, like nothing I had experienced before," said Tadao Negami, a 69-year-old resident of Mishima city in Shizuoka.
"I couldn't stay seated on a chair. My daughter and my grandchildren were scared and surprised and they rushed downstairs," AFP news agency quoted him as saying. A large landslide triggered by the quake damaged a highway at Makinohara, Shizuoka, causing long traffic jams, television footage showed. The Hamaoka nuclear plant in Shizuoka immediately shut down two reactors after the quake, and the Shinkansen bullet train service was briefly suspended. 'Big one' expected While officials said there was no risk of a tsunami in Japan, another earthquake in India's Andaman Islands, prompted tsunami warnings there. The US Geological Survey said the quake - unrelated to Japan's - with a 7.6 magnitude hit the Indian Ocean about 257km (160 miles) north of Port Blair in the Andaman Islands. A tsunami watch called for India, Burma, Indonesia, Thailand and Bangladesh was later lifted without any tsunami being recorded. An earlier earthquake of magnitude 6.9 hit Japan on Sunday, but caused no damage or casualties. Japan is one of the world's most earthquake-prone countries, and experts believe Tokyo has a 90% chance of being hit by a major quake over the next 50 years. |
Monday, August 10, 2009
The Greatest Wealth Shifts of All Time
While the U.S. stumbles into a feeble recovery, Brazil and China are leaping ahead into a new boom.
It’s an economic gap of massive dimensions and unprecedented consequences.
It’s gradually turning the global balance of power upside down and inside out.
Most important for investors, it’s generating some of the greatest wealth shifts of all time.
To grasp the enormity of the gap, just look at the latest jobs reports from each country …
U.S.: Chronic Depression-Level Unemployment
Friday’s jobs release had several positives: Employers shed fewer jobs. Hourly earnings climbed a tad. The number of hours worked ticked up slightly. And even the unemployment rate itself slid by a tenth of a point. (See Mike Larson’s blog.)
This underscores our view that the U.S. economy could enjoy a feeble recovery for several more months, much like Japan did in response to massive government intervention during its lost decade of the 1990s. (Watch the video with my forecasts or review the transcript.)
So for anyone who had been hammered to a pulp by prior unemployment disasters, the news was clearly “less bad.” But for anyone who can step back from the trees, the long-term jobs outlook in the U.S. is still dismal:
- A key reason the unemployment rate declined is because so many people gave up looking for work.
- Only 59.4 percent of Americans are working, the least since the early 1980s.
- Among the unemployed, the share of those out of work for six months or more has surged to 34.3 percent, the worst since this number was first tracked 61 years ago.
What is the actual unemployment rate in the United States?
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According to the government’s official measure, it’s 9.4 percent.
But even the government admits that, if you include part-time workers seeking full-time jobs plus discouraged workers (those who have given up looking for work), its broader jobless measure (called “U.6″) is now at 16.3 percent.
Moreover, John Williams of Shadow Government Statistics (www.shadowstats.com) reveals that, during the Clinton Administration, the government defined away large numbers of discouraged workers by dropping from its count anyone who stopped looking for more than a year.
Add back in that group, and he estimates the actual unemployment rate in the U.S. is closer to 20.6 percent!
Bottom line: Despite the positives in Friday’s jobs report, the big-picture outlook is still the worst since the Great Depression.
Brazil: Lower Unemployment Than Europe
While the picture in the U.S. is positive almost entirely with the help of smoke and mirrors, Brazil’s is genuinely better:
- Brazil’s unemployment rate plunged unexpectedly in June from 8.8 to 8.1 percent.
- For the first time in history, Brazil’s jobless number is now lower than Europe’s.
- Most important, while U.S. employers are still cutting jobs at a relatively rapid pace, Brazil’s employers are hiring, adding over 299,000 jobs in the first half.
China: Unemployment Under 4.5 Percent
Like Washington’s, Beijing’s official number understates the severity of the unemployment, excluding millions of migrant workers, many of whom have lost their jobs and have returned to their homes in rural China.
However, at worst, Beijing expects that its official urban jobless rate will rise to an annual average of 4.4 percent this year, still far below that of the U.S.
And to ward off a further rise, Chinese authorities have just announced a renewed commitment to pursue and extend their economic stimulus, removing any lingering uncertainty about Beijing’s long-term intentions.
Despite some lingering risks, the Chinese economy has tremendous momentum:
- China is beginning to crank up factories that had been shuttered in the wake of the global credit crisis. That’s a key reason industrial production grew 10.7 percent in June from a year earlier, the largest gain in nine months.
- China’s urban fixed-asset investment has surged 30.5 percent to $758 billion in the first four months of the year — more than in all of 2008.
- China’s home values are catapulting higher again: Up 35.4 percent just in the first four months of 2009, prompting developers to invest more and boosting demand for construction materials.
Overall, China is now the world’s third-largest economy, on track to expand by over 8 percent this year. It could surpass Japan as the second-largest economy in the world before the end of 2009! And Chinese demand for goods, in turn, is again the locomotive for the rest of Asia, Brazil, and other emerging nations. For example …
- Seoul-based Hyundai saw its sales in China jump 56 percent higher from a year earlier. In contrast, Hyundai’s sales in the U.S., which used to be its biggest market, have dropped sharply.
- Komatsu in Tokyo, the world’s second-largest maker of earthmoving equipment, reports that its sales in China beat expectations in the quarter ended June 30. The company sees its China sales at about 15 percent of its total business this year, compared with 10 percent in 2008.
- AU Optronics and Chi Mei Optoelectronics, Taiwan’s two biggest liquid-crystal display makers, expect third-quarter sales to rise from the previous three-month period, thanks to a global shortage of glass and surging demand from — you guessed it — China. Just this past June, in fact, China’s TV makers said they planned to purchase $4.4 billion of flat-panel products from Taiwan this year, doubling their forecast from last December.
- Even General Motors, still the biggest overseas automaker in China, said sales in the country rose 50 percent last month, as Beijing stimulus measures spurred demand for minivans.
Stacy Smith, Intel’s chief financial officer, puts it this way:
“We are seeing Asia-Pacific stronger than the rest of the world; in particular, consumption in China looks very good.”
UBS Beijing economist Wang Tao points out:
“China’s recovery is major positive news, especially for commodities exporters. The strongest factor in China’s recovery is investment demand, which means it will import more commodities and machinery.”
Sherman Chan, with Moody’s Economy.com in Sydney, says:
“[China's] infrastructure spending will continue to gather steam and there will be a more notable pickup in the second half.”
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So as you can see, I am not alone in recognizing this trend. Nor am I the lead Asia expert on our Weiss Research team.
Larry Edelson watches China closely from his offices in Bangkok, Thailand …
Tony Sagami, who was born in Japan, has made multiple trips to China, Taiwan, and Japan, bringing back a short list of companies to recommend to readers. Plus …
Claus Vogt has been tracking South Korea and Singapore, recommending a simple investment that he feels provides unique value before a major new surge.
All three — along with Mike Larson and a surprise guest — are joining me online this Thursday for our first-ever Weiss Global Forum. And I will make sure they use the occasion to give you specific, actionable recommendations.
Our primary topic is global profit opportunities; and indeed, as we’ve been stressing day after day, major foreign markets have been greatly outperforming the Dow:
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- The Brazil ETF (symbol EWZ) is up a whopping 65 percent so far this year …
- The China ETF (FXI) is up 40 percent, but …
- The Dow Jones Industrial Average is up only 3 percent year to date.
Bottom line: For every $10,000 investors have made in the Dow this year, they could have made $133,000 in the China ETF … and $217,000 in the Brazil ETF.
This gives you just a sneak preview of the global opportunities we will be covering on Thursday.
Here are the key facts on this blockbuster event:
Date: This Thursday, August 13
Time: 12 Noon Eastern Time (9 AM Pacific, 5 PM GMT)
Duration: 1 hour (no commercials or promos)
How: Video streaming online
Free registration: Click here.
Registration deadline: Wednesday, August 12.
We look forward to seeing you there!
Martin
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