The biggest and most secretive gathering of ships in maritime history lies at anchor east of Singapore. Never before photographed, it is bigger than the U.S. and British navies combined but has no crew, no cargo and no destination – and is why your Christmas stocking may be on the light side this year
The ‘ghost fleet’ near Singapore. The world’s ship owners and government economists would prefer you not to see this symbol of the depths of the plague still crippling the world’s economies
The tropical waters that lap the jungle shores of southern Malaysia could not be described as a paradisical shimmering turquoise. They are more of a dark, soupy green. They also carry a suspicious smell. Not that this is of any concern to the lone Indian face that has just peeped anxiously down at me from the rusting deck of a towering container ship; he is more disturbed by the fact that I may be a pirate, which, right now, on top of everything else, is the last thing he needs.
His appearance, in a peaked cap and uniform, seems rather odd; an officer without a crew. But there is something slightly odder about the vast distance between my jolly boat and his lofty position, which I can’t immediately put my finger on.
Then I have it – his 750ft-long merchant vessel is standing absurdly high in the water. The low waves don’t even bother the lowest mark on its Plimsoll line. It’s the same with all the ships parked here, and there are a lot of them. Close to 500. An armada of freighters with no cargo, no crew, and without a destination between them.
Simon Parry among the ships in southern Malaysia
My ramshackle wooden fishing boat has floated perilously close to this giant sheet of steel. But the face is clearly more scared of me than I am of him. He shoos me away and scurries back into the vastness of his ship. His footsteps leave an echo behind them.
Navigating a precarious course around the hull of this Panama-registered hulk, I reach its bow and notice something else extraordinary. It is tied side by side to a container ship of almost the same size. The mighty sister ship sits empty, high in the water again, with apparently only the sailor and a few lengths of rope for company.
Nearby, as we meander in searing midday heat and dripping humidity between the hulls of the silent armada, a young European officer peers at us from the bridge of an oil tanker owned by the world’s biggest container shipping line, Maersk. We circle and ask to go on board, but are waved away by two Indian crewmen who appear to be the only other people on the ship.
‘They are telling us to go away,’ the boat driver explains. ‘No one is supposed to be here. They are very frightened of pirates.’
Here, on a sleepy stretch of shoreline at the far end of Asia, is surely the biggest and most secretive gathering of ships in maritime history. Their numbers are equivalent to the entire British and American navies combined; their tonnage is far greater. Container ships, bulk carriers, oil tankers – all should be steaming fully laden between China, Britain, Europe and the US, stocking camera shops, PC Worlds and Argos depots ahead of the retail pandemonium of 2009. But their water has been stolen.
They are a powerful and tangible representation of the hurricanes that have been wrought by the global economic crisis; an iron curtain drawn along the coastline of the southern edge of Malaysia’s rural Johor state, 50 miles east of Singapore harbour.
‘We don’t understand why they are here. There are so many ships but no one seems to be on board,’ said local fisherman Ah Wat
It is so far off the beaten track that nobody ever really comes close, which is why these ships are here. The world’s ship owners and government economists would prefer you not to see this symbol of the depths of the plague still crippling the world’s economies.
So they have been quietly retired to this equatorial backwater, to be maintained only by a handful of bored sailors. The skeleton crews are left alone to fend off the ever-present threats of piracy and collisions in the congested waters as the hulls gather rust and seaweed at what should be their busiest time of year.
Local fisherman Ah Wat, 42, who for more than 20 years has made a living fishing for prawns from his home in Sungai Rengit, says: ‘Before, there was nothing out there – just sea. Then the big ships just suddenly came one day, and every day there are more of them.
‘Some of them stay for a few weeks and then go away. But most of them just stay. You used to look Christmas from here straight over to Indonesia and see nothing but a few passing boats. Now you can no longer see the horizon.’
The size of the idle fleet becomes more palpable when the ships’ lights are switched on after sunset. From the small fishing villages that dot the coastline, a seemingly endless blaze of light stretches from one end of the horizon to another. Standing in the darkness among the palm trees and bamboo huts, as calls to prayer ring out from mosques further inland, is a surreal and strangely disorientating experience. It makes you feel as if you are adrift on a dark sea, staring at a city of light.
Ah Wat says: ‘We don’t understand why they are here. There are so many ships but no one seems to be on board. When we sail past them in our fishing boats we never see anyone. They are like real ghost ships and some people are scared of them. They believe they may bring a curse with them and that there may be bad spirits on the ships.’
Two container ships tied together in southern Malaysia, waiting for the next charter
As daylight creeps across the waters, flags of convenience from destinations such as Panama and the Bahamas become visible. In reality, though, these vessels belong to some of the world’s biggest Western shipping companies. And the sickness that has ravaged them began far away – in London, where the industry’s heart beats, and where the plummeting profits and hugely reduced cargo prices are most keenly felt.
The Aframax-class oil tanker is the camel of the world’s high seas. By definition, it is smaller than 132,000 tons deadweight and with a breadth above 106ft. It is used in the basins of the Black Sea, the North Sea, the Caribbean Sea, the China Sea and the Mediterranean – or anywhere where non-OPEC exporting countries have harbours and canals too small to accommodate very large crude carriers (VLCC) or ultra-large crude carriers (ULCCs). The term is based on the Average Freight Rate Assessment (AFRA) tanker rate system and is an industry standard.
A couple of years ago these ships would be steaming back and forth. Now 12 per cent are doing nothing
You may wish to know this because, if ever you had an irrational desire to charter one, now would be the time. This time last year, an Aframax tanker capable of carrying 80,000 tons of cargo would cost £31,000 a day ($50,000). Now it is about £3,400 ($5,500).
This is why the chilliest financial winds anywhere in the City of London are to be found blowing through its 400-plus shipping brokers.
Between them, they manage about half of the world’s chartering business. The bonuses are long gone. The last to feel the tail of the economic whiplash, they – and their insurers and lawyers – await a wave of redundancies and business failures in the next six months. Commerce is contracting, fleets rust away – yet new ship-builds ordered years ago are still coming on stream.
World shipping is tracked by satellite service Vesseltracker
Just 12 months ago these financiers and brokers were enjoying fat bonuses as they traded cargo space. But nobody wants the space any more, and those that still need to ship goods across the world are demanding vast reductions in price.
Do not tell these men and women about green shoots of recovery. As Briton Tim Huxley, one of Asia’s leading ship brokers, says, if the world is really pulling itself out of recession, then all these idle ships should be back on the move.
‘This is the time of year when everyone is doing all the Christmas stuff,’ he points out.
‘A couple of years ago those ships would have been steaming back and forth, going at full speed. But now you’ve got something like 12 per cent of the world’s container ships doing nothing.’
Aframaxes are oil bearers. But the slump is industry-wide. The cost of sending a 40ft steel container of merchandise from China to the UK has fallen from £850 plus fuel charges last year to £180 this year. The cost of chartering an entire bulk freighter suitable for carrying raw materials has plunged even further, from close to £185,000 ($300,000) last summer to an incredible £6,100 ($10,000) earlier this year.
Business for bulk carriers has picked up slightly in recent months, largely because of China’s rediscovered appetite for raw materials such as iron ore, says Huxley. But this is a small part of international trade, and the prospects for the container ships remain bleak.
Some experts believe the ratio of container ships sitting idle could rise to 25 per cent within two years in an extraordinary downturn that shipping giant Maersk has called a ‘crisis of historic dimensions’. Last month the company reported its first half-year loss in its 105-year history.
Martin Stopford, managing director of Clarksons, London’s biggest ship broker, says container shipping has been hit particularly hard: ‘In 2006 and 2007 trade was growing at 11 per cent. In 2008 it slowed down by 4.7 per cent. This year we think it might go down by as much as eight per cent. If it costs £7,000 a day to put the ship to sea and if you only get £6,000 a day, than you have got a decision to make.
‘Yet at the same time, the supply of container ships is growing. This year, supply could be up by around 12 per cent and demand is down by eight per cent. Twenty per cent spare is a lot of spare of anything – and it’s come out of nowhere.’
These empty ships should be carrying Christmas over to the West. All retailers will have already ordered their stock for the festive season long ago. With more than 92 per cent of all goods coming into the UK by sea, much of it should be on its way here if it is going to make it to the shelves before Christmas.
Lights from the fleet of ships illuminate the night-time horizon
But retailers are running on very low stock levels, not only because they expect consumer spending to be down, but also because they simply do not have the same levels of credit that they had in the past and so are unable to keep big stockpiles.
Stopford explains: ‘Globalisation and shipping go hand in hand. Worldwide, we ship about 8.2 billion tons of cargo a year. That’s more than one ton per person and probably two to three tons for richer people like us in the West. If the total goes down by five per cent or so, that’s a lot of cargo that isn’t moving.’
The knock-on effect of so many ships sitting idle rather than moving consumer goods between Asia and Europe could become apparent in Britain in the months ahead.
‘We will find out at Christmas whether there are enough PlayStations in the shops or not. There will certainly be fewer goods coming in to Britain during the run-up to Christmas.’
Three thousand miles north-east of the ghost fleet of Johor, the shipbuilding capital of the world rocks to an unpunctuated chorus of hammer-guns blasting rivets the size of dustbin lids into shining steel panels that are then lowered onto the decks of massive new vessels.
As the shipping industry teeters on the brink of collapse, the activity at boatyards like Mokpo and Ulsan in South Korea all looks like a sick joke. But the workers in these bustling shipyards, who teem around giant tankers and mega-vessels the length of several football pitches and capable of carrying 10,000 or more containers each, have no choice; they are trapped in a cruel time warp.
There have hardly been any new orders. In 2011 the shipyards will simply run out of ships to build
A decade ago, South Korean President Kim Dae-jung (who died last month) issued a decree to his industrial captains: he wished to make his nation the market leader in shipbuilding. He knew the market intimately. Before entering politics, he studied economics and worked for a Japanese-owned freight-shipping business. Within a few years he was heading his own business, starting out with a fleet of nine ships.
Thus, by 2004, Kim Dae-jung’s presidential vision was made real. His country’s low-cost yards were winning 40 per cent of world orders, with Japan second with 24 per cent and China way behind on 14 per cent.
But shipbuilding is a horrendously hard market to plan. There is a three-year lag between the placing of an order and the delivery of a ship. With contracts signed, down-payments made and work under way, stopping work on a new ship is the economic equivalent of trying to change direction in an ocean liner travelling at full speed towards an iceberg.
Thus the labours of today’s Korean shipbuilders merely represent the completion of contracts ordered in the fat years of 2006 and 2007. Those ships will now sail out into a global economy that no longer wants them.
Maersk announced last week that it was renegotiating terms and prices with Asian shipyards for 39 ordered tankers and gas carriers. One of the company’s executives, Kristian Morch, said the shipping industry was in uncharted waters.
As he told the global shipping newspaper Lloyd’s List only last week: ‘You have a contraction of oil demand, you have a falling world economy and you have a contraction of financing capabilities – and at the same time as a lot of new ships are being delivered.’
Demand peaked in 2005 when, with surplus tonnage worldwide standing at just 0.7 per cent, ship owners raced to order, fearing docks and berths at major shipyards would soon be fully booked. That spell of ‘panic buying’ has heightened today’s alarming mismatch between supply and demand.
Keith Wallis, East Asia editor of Lloyd’s List, says, ‘There was an ordering frenzy on all types of vessel, particularly container ships, because of the booming trade between Asia and Europe and the United States. It was fuelled in particular by consumer demand in the UK, Europe and North America, as well as the demand for raw materials from China.’
Cranes at Singapore Dock stand idle, waiting for work
Orders for most existing ships to be delivered within the next six to nine months would be honoured, he predicted, and the ships would go into service at the expense of older vessels in the fleet, which would be scrapped or end up anchored off places like southern Malaysia.
But, says Wallis, ‘some ship owners won’t be able to pay their final instalments when the vessels are completed. Normally, they pay ten per cent down when they order the ship and there are three or four stages of payment. But 50 to 60 per cent is paid on delivery.’
South Korean shipyard Hanjin Heavy Industries last week said it had been forced to put up for sale three container ships ordered at a cost of £60 million ($100 million) by the Iranian state shipping line after the Iranians said they could not pay the bill.
‘The prospects for shipyards are bleak, particularly for the South Koreans, where they have a high proportion of foreign orders. Whole communities in places like Mokpo and Ulsan are involved in shipbuilding and there is a lot of sub-contracting to local companies,’ Wallis says.
‘So far the shipyards are continuing to work, but the problems will start to emerge next year and certainly in 2011, because that is when the current orders will have been delivered. There have hardly been any new orders in the past year. In 2011, the shipyards will simply run out of ships to build.’
Christopher Palsson, a senior consultant at London-based Lloyd’s Register-Fairplay Research, believes the situation will worsen before it gets better.
‘Some ships will be sold for demolition but the net balance will be even further pressure on the freight rates and the market itself. A lot of ship owners and operators are going to find themselves in a very difficult situation.’
The current downturn is the worst in living memory and more severe even than the slump of the early Eighties, Palsson believes.
‘Back then the majority of the crash was for tankers carrying crude oil. Today we have almost every aspect of shipping affected – bulk carriers, tankers, container carriers… the lot.
‘It is a much wider-spread situation that we have today. China was not a major player in the world economy at that time. Neither was India. We had the Soviet Union. We had shipbuilding in the United Kingdom and Europe.
‘But then, back in those days the world was a very different place.’
____________________________________________________________
Meredith Whitney Says Market Faces A Big Test As Government Begins To Wind Down Stimulus Measures
The economy remains weak and will face a big test next month when the government starts winding down its massive support programs, banking analyst Meredith Whitney told CNBC.
cnbc.com
Meredith Whitney
|
Despite avoiding a worst-case scenario, the economy continues to languish under weak job growth and home sales, Whitney said in a live interview.
“There’s not a lot of new job creation going on on Main Street—and the liquidity to the consumer and small business is still contracting,” she said. “And it’s very difficult to get the engine moving without a lot of government support within that. So when you slowly wean government supports, that’s going to be the test that I think everyone’s going to be watching starting in October.”
The Federal Reserve will wind down its aggressive buying of Treasurys next month. At the same time, President Obama and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner have said recently that the government is looking more broadly at getting out of the bailout programs used to prop up the financial system after its 2008 collapse.
Though economists generally believe the US is pulling out of a recession, unemployment remains high and most economic indicators are still showing only modest improvement.
As the economy retools, there are few areas that show any promise of generating big new jobs numbers, Whitney said. A potential complication is a leaning from the White House towards trade protectionism, most recently expressed in a trade dispute with China over tire imports.
“Where do the jobs come from?” she said. “Surely if this country becomes massively protectionist we’ll build up manufacturing capability. Is that necessarily a good thing? No. There’s not a lot of free capital for small business innovation—small business, period—and that’s half the workforce.”
In real estate, she said sales numbers have been boosted by foreclosures and other distressed sales, but high-end home sales continue to languish.
“The high-dollar units have not sold. So people are still shopping at Wal-Mart cnbc_comboQuoteMove(‘popup_WMT_ID0ECAAC15839609’);[WMT 49.90 -0.48 (-0.95%) ]
cnbc_quoteComponent_init_getData(“WMT”,”WSODQ_COMPONENT_WMT_ID0ECAAC15839609″,”WSODQ”,”true”,”ID0ECAAC15839609″,”off”,”false”,”inLineQuote”);
. People will go after value,” Whitney said. “Home ownership is still less attractive to the average consumer.”
____________________________________________________________
Bernanke Feels The Recession Has Most Likely Ended
By Craig Torres and Scott Lanman
Sept. 15 (Bloomberg) — Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke said the worst U.S. recession since the 1930s has probably ended, while warning that growth may not be strong enough to quickly reduce the unemployment rate.
“Even though from a technical perspective the recession is very likely over at this point, it’s still going to feel like a very weak economy for some time,” Bernanke said today at the Brookings Institution in Washington, responding to questions after a speech.
The remarks by the Fed chief followed a report today showing retail sales surged last month by the most in three years, adding to evidence of a recovery. The central bank has kept the benchmark lending rate as low as zero since December and in August said “exceptionally low” rates are likely warranted for “an extended period.”
“Unemployment will be slow to come down” if growth turns out to be “moderate” and not much more than the economy’s underlying potential, Bernanke said.
The central bank in March authorized $1.45 trillion in purchases of mortgage-backed securities and other housing debt this year. Policy makers decided last month to taper off a $300 billion program buying U.S. Treasuries through October, while debating a similar move for MBS purchases. Bernanke convenes the next meeting of Fed policy makers Sept. 22-23 in Washington.
The economy will rebound at a 2.3 percent pace next year, according to the median estimate in a Bloomberg News survey of economists. The growth rate won’t be fast enough to lower the unemployment rate below 9 percent, the economists predict.
____________________________________________________________
Most Asian Markets Trade Higher on Raw Materials
By Masaki Kondo
Sept. 15 (Bloomberg) — Most stocks in Asia rose, led by raw-material producers, leaving the MSCI Asia Pacific Index little changed a year after the collapse of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.
LG Chem Ltd., South Korea’s biggest chemicals maker, climbed 9.2 percent on speculation it may sell its batteries to Volkswagen AG. Rio Tinto Group, the world’s No. 3 mining company, rose 1.6 percent after agreeing to sell a stake in a cable division. The yen fell for the second-straight day versus the dollar, while copper and oil futures in New York were little changed. Treasuries were little changed.
“The worst is behind us, but we aren’t sure how well or badly the economy will fare next year,” said Hiroshi Morikawa, a strategist at MU Investments Co., which manages the equivalent of $14 billion in Tokyo. “What’s changed after Lehman was that financial companies have reduced leverage using debts, but there are still lots of things off their books, which keeps investors nervous.”
Five stocks advanced for every four that fell on the MSCI Asia Pacific Index, which was little changed at 115.85 as of 7:29 p.m. in Tokyo. The gauge has recouped its slump in the past year of as much as 39 percent as the panic caused by the collapse of Lehman and American International Group Inc. abated.
Japan’s Nikkei 225 Stock Average added 0.2 percent, while Taiwan’s Taiex Index rose 1.2 percent. The Hang Seng Index fell 0.3 percent in Hong Kong, where the start of trading was delayed to 2:30 p.m. local time because of a typhoon.
Lehman Anniversary
Among stocks that fell today, Alibaba.com Ltd. tumbled 11 percent in Hong Kong after Yahoo! Inc. offered its stake in the company for sale. Consumer lender Aiful Corp. slumped 8.4 percent in Tokyo after Standard & Poor’s said it may cut its credit rating. Telstra Corp. sank 4.3 percent in Sydney after the government said the company should split its retail and wholesale businesses.
Futures on the U.S. S&P 500 Index lost 0.1 percent. The gauge advanced 0.6 percent yesterday to the highest close since Oct. 6 amid gains in utility, industrial and financial shares.
Today is the one-year anniversary of Lehman’s bankruptcy filing, which exacerbated the credit crunch and helped drag the global economy into its worst slowdown since World War II. Losses at the world’s biggest financial institutions since the start of 2007 have climbed to more than $1.6 trillion.
The MSCI Asia Pacific Index has climbed 64 percent from a more than five-year low on March 9 as government stimulus measures introduced in the past year worldwide dragged economies out of recession.
‘Fewer Buying Opportunities’….
European Markets Pair Losses Led By Technology
By Andrew Rummer
Sept. 15 (Bloomberg) — European stocks pared their losses as technology and telecommunications companies advanced. The Dow Jones Stoxx 600 Index was little changed at 240.9 as of 11:40 a.m. in London, having earlier slipped as much as 0.3 percent.
Oil Trades Largely Unchanged @ $69pb
By PABLO GORONDI p {margin:12px 0px 0px 0px;}
By midday in Europe, benchmark crude for October delivery was up 16 cents at $69.02 a barrel in electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange. On Monday, the contract fell 43 cents to settle at $68.86.
Oil has fluctuated between $65 and $75 this summer as crude supplies rose and traders eyed slumping consumer spending.
U.S. oil inventories are higher now than in May, and analysts expect demand to drop off in the autumn following the summer driving season.
“Inventory levels are still at historical highs, reflecting sluggish demand,” said Jan Lambregts, global head of financial markets research for Rabobank in Hong Kong.
Lambregts said he expects oil near $70 a barrel at the end of this year and between $80 and $85 by the middle of next year.
Investors will be looking at supply data from the American Petroleum Institute late Tuesday and the Energy Information Agency on Wednesday for clues about the consumption trend. Analysts expect inventories to drop 3.0 million barrels, according to a survey by Platts, the energy information arm of McGraw-Hill Cos.
Crude investors have also been watching the U.S. dollar, which last week fell to its lowest level for the year. The dollar rebounded late last week, sparking a $4 drop in oil prices.
The euro fell Tuesday to $1.4588 from $1.4614 the previous day, the British pound was down to $1.6507 from $1.6574 and the dollar held above 91 yen.
In other Nymex trading, gasoline for October was steady at $1.7430 a gallon and heating oil dropped 0.37 cent to $1.7385 a gallon. Natural gas surged 14.7 cents to $3.444 per 1,000 cubic feet.
In London, Brent crude was fell 19 cents to $67.25 on the ICE Futures exchange.
By Yasuhiko Seki and Ron HaruiSept. 15 (Bloomberg) — The dollar traded near the weakest level this year against the euro as record-low borrowing costs encouraged investors to sell the greenback and buy higher- yielding assets outside the world’s largest economy.
The euro was near a nine-month high against the dollar before a German report economists said will show investor confidence rose to the highest in more than three years. The U.S. currency slid to the lowest in more than a year against the Swiss franc after Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco President Janet Yellen said policy makers must guard against inflation becoming too low rather than too high.
“The bulk of the liquidity created in the dollar is now shifting into non-U.S. assets amid signs of an easing of the recession,” said Akira Takeuchi, a Tokyo-based currency dealer at Chuo Mitsui Trust & Banking Co., a unit of Japan’s seventh- largest banking group. “Without some signal that the U.S. is ready to pull back on monetary easing, the dollar will continue to weaken.”
The dollar traded at $1.4598 per euro as of 8:52 a.m. in London, from $1.4618 yesterday in New York, when it fell to $1.4653, the weakest level since Dec. 18. The yen was at 91.10 per dollar from 90.94 yesterday, when it rose to 90.21, the strongest level since Feb. 12. It traded at 132.99 per euro, from 132.94.
Today is the one-year anniversary of the collapse of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. that froze credit markets and sent the global economy into recession. Writedowns and credit losses at the world’s biggest financial institutions since the start of 2007 have climbed to more than $1.6 trillion, data compiled by Bloomberg show.
Record Low….
Corporate Bond Spreads Continue to Narrow
By Shelley Smith and Tom Kohn
Sept. 15 (Bloomberg) — Corporate bond spreads will narrow further after stimulus packages and cuts to borrowing costs created a “virtuous cycle,” according to Schroders Plc, the U.K.’s second-biggest money manager by market value.
“The collective central bank effort has succeeded in stemming the tide of disaster that was impending,” Karl Dasher, Schroder Investment Management Ltd.’s global head of fixed income, said in phone interview from Hong Kong today. “Base rates are so low that companies are able to recast their capital structure at a very low cost. It’s created a virtuous cycle that’s allowing a strong market despite the macro-economic headwinds we’ve faced.”
A rally in corporate bonds has sent the extra yield investors demand to hold investment-grade securities rather than similar-maturity government notes to the lowest since June 2008, according to Merrill Lynch & Co.’s Global Corporate Bond index. The spread narrowed to 217 basis points from a record 511 basis points on March 3, the index shows.
While the rally’s pace will slow “if history is a guide,” spreads will narrow by between 35 basis points and 40 basis points a year for the next two to four years, Dasher forecast. A basis point is 0.01 percentage point.
Interest Rates
Governments worldwide have announced about $2 trillion in economic stimulus programs while central banks around the globe cut borrowing costs to record lows. The Federal Reserve kept its interest rate to a target of between zero and 0.25 percent and the European Central Bank left interest rates this month at a low of 1 percent for the fourth time since May 6.
Investment-grade bonds are rated Baa3 or above by Moody’s Investors Service or BBB- or above by Standard & Poor’s.
“The sectors and regions that have withstood the storm the best have been those that were tested in the last decade,” Dasher said. “Asia being tested in the late 1990s and telecom and technology companies being tested during the early part of this decade meant they made a lot of fundamental changes that put them in a good position this year.”
U.K. Inflation Rate Falls Less Than Expected
By Jennifer Ryan
Sept. 15 (Bloomberg) — The U.K. inflation rate dropped in August by less than economists forecast as higher oil costs offset the effects of the recession.
Consumer prices rose 1.6 percent from a year earlier, the least since January 2005, compared with 1.8 percent the previous month, the Office for National Statistics said today in London. The median forecast in a Bloomberg News survey of 31 economists was 1.4 percent. On the month, prices increased 0.4 percent
The Bank of England last week reiterated its plan to buy 175 billion pounds ($289 billion) of bonds to cement Britain’s recovery as inflation strays further below the 2 percent target. With unemployment at a 14-year high and the economic slump persisting, policy makers are struggling to fight off the threat of deflation.
“The trough in CPI could be as high as 1.3 or 1.4 percent, that’s hardly deflation,” said Ross Walker, an economist at Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc in London. “Policy makers may pat themselves on the back for avoiding it, but it begs the question about future policy and the degree of accommodation we can expect.”
The pound was little changed after the report and traded at $1.6632 at 9:43 a.m. in London.
Inflation slowed because utility bills didn’t increase this year and food costs dropped on the month by the most since 2000, the statistics office said.
Emerging European Banks Still Hold Trouble To Thwart Recovery
By Agnes Lovasz
Sept. 15 (Bloomberg) — Eastern Europe’s recovery remains at risk from a banking crisis as a lack of transparency in the industry undermines confidence and impedes interbank lending, said European Bank for Reconstruction and Development Chief Economist Erik Berglof.
Emerging Europe’s banking system is “not out of the woods” and “there’s still a chance” the region may suffer a financial crisis, Berglof said in a Sept. 10 interview in London.
The development bank, created to support projects in former Soviet and communist states after the end of the cold war, has helped international efforts to limit the impact of the financial crisis on eastern Europe, persuading western banks to stay invested in the region and help fill a funding hole it estimates at $200 billion. Preventing a second banking crisis is “the absolute key” to a recovery in the region, Berglof said.
“There are some signs that demand will go up in western Europe and that will help these countries, but the biggest threat to that is a deterioration of the financial system again,” he said.
Concern that global efforts to repair financial systems may be flagging is mounting. Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel Prize- winning economist, said in a Sept. 14 interview that in the U.S. and many other countries’ banking systems “the problems are worse than they were in 2007 before the crisis.”
The EBRD has been focusing on 12 Western parent banks that it pinpointed as “systemically important” for the region, including units of Italy’s UniCredit SpA and Societe Generale SA, as well as some large local banks, such as Latvia’s Parex Banka AS and Hungary’s OTP Bank Nyrt.
No Trust
“There are big questions about western European banks’ portfolios and a lot of those uncertainties are tied to investments in eastern Europe,” Berglof said. “When banks don’t trust each other, the interbank market doesn’t work and they are cautious about on-lending to clients. When there are pressures at the center of these banks, it’s typically in the periphery that they withdraw. That’s the same fear that we had in the spring.”
The European Commission warned in June that Latvia’s Swedish lenders, Swedbank AB and SEB AB, may be redeeming debt to their Baltic units, threatening to undermine the effectiveness of the country’s international bailout. The banks denied the claims at the time and the Commission and the International Monetary Fund said yesterday that the lenders had “reaffirmed” their commitment to Latvia in a Sept. 11 meeting.
Stress Tests
Europe’s banks would benefit from more rigorous stress testing with results being made public, Berglof said. That would underpin confidence and encourage interbank lending in the region, he said.
The stress tests should involve “suitable disclosure, recapitalization measures to address the problem of impaired assets and resolution of unviable financial institutions,” the International Monetary Fund said in July.
“The stress testing exercises that are going on inside the European Union – it’s absolutely critical that that information comes out and if there are problems it has to be combined with measures to address those problems,” Berglof said. “That needs to happen in the next couple of months. Any effort made to get greater clarity over western European banks and the parts of these banks that are in eastern Europe, that’s the No.1 priority.”…..
U.S. Looking to Unload C Position
By Robert Schmidt and Bradley Keoun
Sept. 15 (Bloomberg) — The U.S. Treasury Department and Citigroup Inc. have begun discussing how to sell the 34 percent stake that the government acquired in the rescue of the bank, people familiar with the matter said.
The Treasury, which owns 7.69 billion common shares after a recent preferred-stock conversion designed to shore up the bank’s capital, may start unloading the stake as soon as October, one of the people said. It aims to sell the holdings over the next six to eight months, the person said.
A sale, a year after Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. filed for bankruptcy, may bring Citigroup Chief Executive Officer Vikram Pandit closer to an exit from the bailout program while allowing the government to claim a profit. Because the New York- based bank’s stock price has gained since $25 billion of bailout funds were exchanged for common shares, the Treasury is sitting on a paper profit of $9.77 billion.
“Given the conversion and what’s happened to the stock price, it is likely that the government would make money on it,” said Moshe Orenbuch, an analyst at Credit Suisse Group AG who rates the shares “neutral.”
Citigroup’s stock closed at $4.52 a share yesterday, a 39 percent premium over the Treasury’s conversion price of $3.25. The shares slipped to $4.42 in German trading today.
$52 Billion Rescue….
General Electric aims to ramp up production of solar power panels by early next year in a crucial step in the company’s bid to transform its initial investments in the renewable energy field into a multibillion-dollar business.
GE has started to build pilot production lines at its facility in Colorado, said John Krenicki, a vice-chairman and chief executive of GE Energy Infrastructure, which includes the renewable energy division.
“We’ll have more clarity around our bet in solar at the end of the year, or the beginning of next,” Mr Krenicki told the Financial Times.
GE, which also outlined on Monday its expansion into offshore wind power, made its initial solar foray in 2004 with hopes that its heft and manufacturing acumen could lower production costs enough to make the sun’s rays another affordable source of alternative energy.
However, unlike the conglomerate’s wind power operations, the development of GE’s solar business has been muted, with annual sales at less than $200m.
In spite of the slow start, Mr Krenicki maintains that the division will eventually become a meaningful part of what has become the conglomerate’s fastest-growing operating unit. For GE, that means graduating into a “big, multibillion-dollar business”. “It has to be,” he said. “Otherwise we shouldn’t do it.”
GE entered the solar business through the purchase of Astropower. Three years later it acquired a minority stake in PrimeStar Solar, another group that is seeking ways to use thin layers of silicon to produce panels that convert light into energy more cheaply than previous technologies.
It remains on the lookout for other acquisitions that could accelerate the solar business’s development, Mr Krenicki said.
In the first six months of 2009, GE’s energy-infrastructure unit reported an operating profit of $3.1bn, up 16 per cent from a year ago, on sales of $17.8bn.
Jeff Immelt, GE’s chief executive, told the FT that energy was “clearly one of the big industrial businesses filled with what I would call seismic change, whether it’s clean energy or scarcity of resources”.
Steve Winoker, an analyst with Sanford C Bernstein, predicted the solar business would begin to make a “material” contribution to the group in the next two years.The solar industry could also benefit from legislative efforts in Washington to curb the nation’s carbon emissions, he said.
However, he added: “The jury is still out for solar, for GE and a lot of other large companies that are all racing to develop something that is economically viable.”
GE’s wind turbines have already made that leap. The company parlayed its 2002 acquisition from Enron, the collapsed energy-trading firm, into a power generation business expected to generate $6.5-7bn in sales this year, Mr Krenicki said.
TED Spreads Back To 2004 Levels
Remember the TED spread? It measures the difference between the cost of capital for the government and for banks. It spiked during the crisis (when the solvency of all banks was in question) but as noted by Wells Fargo and Bloomberg (via Pragmatic Capitalist), it’s now back at 2004 levels.
So, is this a sign of complacency, seeing as risks to the financial sector remain? Not really. The TED spread is just telling us what we already know: Until further notice, no major bank shall fail and they will be backed up by the government in the event of a crisis.
Unless you believe otherwise — i.e., you believe the government would let them collapse — there’s not much reason they should be paying more for funds than the government does.
Insider Selling Continues @ Record Pace
For the latest two week period ending yesterday, insiders purchased just $4.6MM in stock while selling an astounding $471MM in stock. That is a $217MM jump over last week’s reading of $254MM. The trend in insider selling has been negative for quite some time, but even more alarming is the total lack of insider buying. Insiders sell for a number of varying reasons, but it remains confounding that the equity markets can be so convinced of an economic rebound while insiders give a resounding vote of no confidence in their own companies via purchases of their own shares. Perhaps the lack of organic growth via revenue growth has insiders less than convinced of the economic rebound.
* All information on this website is provided for general purposes and should not be misconstrued as financial advice. Always consult your financial advisor before acting on any of the information herein. You should always assume that the author(s) could have a vested interest in topics described and may or may not own securities and instruments discussed.
One comment
Pingback: Butalbital addiction.