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Wednesday, May 22, 2013

H-P revenues plunged 10.1%, worse than expected, with PC revenues down 20%. Only uptick: lowly printing supplies, such as cartridges, paper, ink, up a measly 2%. Earning didn't "completely crater" like Dell's earnings, CEO Meg Whitman consoled her investors. But H-P had a huge write-off not long ago, and who knows what they plowed into it to make subsequent quarters look better. They always do that. Write-off accounting puts some lipstick on expenses, though it can’t do much about revenues. Props up operating income. Nevertheless, stock jumped 13% after hours. “You can feel the turnaround taking hold at H-P,” Whitman said. Indeed, feel. Because there's no visible turnaround in the numbers.

Justice Department admits: drones killed 4 Americans, in a letter sent to Congressional leaders. One of them was Anwar al-Awlaki, in September 2011 in Yemen. While widely reported, the government had never fessed up to it. The other three were Samir Khan (in the same strike); Awlaki’s son Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, also in Yemen; and Jude Mohammed, in Pakistan. Last year, Attorney General Eric Holder had outlined the government’s legal rationalizations behind knocking off Americans overseas – for example when they pose an “imminent threat of violent attack” and when capturing them is inconvenient. While the whole concept is iffy, the rubbery term "imminent" came under particular fire. But certainly, it won’t be abused; after all, there’s a Nobel Peace Prize winner in the White House.

Delta Air Lines rebels against taxpayer subsidies for Boeing because they benefit state-owned foreign airlines that compete with Delta. The US Export-Import bank is helping Boeing sell wide-body jets by helping foreign airlines buy them. CEO Richard Anderson said Delta would be “perfectly willing” to accept a “total moratorium” on financing of jets, which it also benefits from. "We are trying to do whatever we can to get a level playing field in a world where my government decides that they would rather have my competitors in the marketplace than Delta," he said. In April, Delta sued the Ex-Im Bank to put a stop to these shenanigans. It noted that 46% of the $106.6 billion in the Ex-Im Bank's activities are for aircraft loans or loan guarantees. Emirates and Korean Air were among the biggest beneficiaries, and as Anderson told Reuters, they could get funding without "the balance sheet of the US government." Ah the complex web of government handouts.

BOJ Governor Haruhiko Kuroda accepts jumpy yields on Japanese Government Bonds that nearly tripled from the April 5 low of 0.315% to today’s 0.90%, exact opposite of what money-printing and bond-buying is supposed to accomplish. Japanese investors have been fleeing JGBs; inflation, if it rises to 2% or more as per plan, will eat them up without compensation from yield. Add yen devaluation to make a nasty investment. He lost a bit of his brashness: "I am not expecting long-term interest rates to increase sharply considering the strong downward pressure being exerted on them by our quantitative and qualitative easing," he said at the press conference after the BOJ’s two-day huddle that left monetary policy unchanged, with the spigot wide open, committed to buying ¥50 trillion in JGBs a year, or 70% of all new bonds the government is issuing. "I believe it is quite possible to prevent any spikes in long-term interest rates," he said with even less certainty, then submitted to fate and accepted rising yields: "If expectations for economic recovery and inflation strengthen sharply, that could outweigh the risk-premium reducing effect and result in increases in interest rates," he said.

Japan trade deficit soars 69.7% in April to ¥879.9 billion, from April a year ago, the tenth months in a row of trade deficits, the worst series since 1980, and the worst April ever. For each of the last three Aprils, the deficit was worse than in the prior one; same for March, February, and January. The trend is relentlessly awful. Abenomics is deepening the hole, but it’s digging at a faster rate. The weaker yen nudged up exports 3.8%, but imports jumped 9.4%. Don’t blame oil: imported crude oil volume dropped 2.2%. Exports to China stagnated, but imports jumped 13.3%; the deficit skyrocketed 60.2%. However, exports to the US rose 14.8% while imports stagnated; the trade surplus leaped 32.5%. Japan exports twice as much to the US as it imports. Perhaps someone in the White House will someday get Japan to open up its auto market. The trade balance with Western Europe flipped from a surplus a year ago to a deficit; exports fell 3.5% and imports rose 11.4%. Abenomics and the money-printing binge have heated up consumption of imported luxury goods and other items that can’t be produced in Japan. For the rest, Abenomics appears to be a giant miscalculation. The graph for the years 2011, 2012, and 2013 shows the worsening trend:

Despite the awful trade data that was much worse than economists had hoped for, the Nikkei jumped 246 points or 1.6%, to 15,627 – oblivious to reality for months now, drunken with money the Bank of Japan is printing.

 

Tuesday, May 21, 2013

“Apple does not use tax gimmicks,” Apple wrote without twitching an eyebrow apparently, in response to a Senate investigation that showed that it sheltered at least $74 billion in profits from US taxes between 2009 and 2012 by using a "complex web" of offshore mailbox companies. One such Irish subsidiary with no employees and no physical existence made $30 billion in profits and didn't pay a dime to a single government anywhere, not even Ireland. Legal, and proof that the US corporate tax dodge code is a scam that bestows a tax-free environment and other welfare handouts to certain companies, while raking less fortunate and often smaller companies over the coals.

Impact of cheap natural gas in the US: the construction of 97 chemical and plastics plants that use natural gas as feedstock has been announced, with investments over $71 billion, sez the American Chemistry Council (ACC). Among them, in Texas alone: Dow Chemical’s plan to plow $4 billion into ethylene crackers and Exxon Mobil’s plan for an ethylene cracker and two polyethylene plants. Others lining up: Chevron Phillips Chemical, LyondellBasell, and Mitsui & Co. Via OilPrice.com. These companies vigorously oppose the export of liquefied natural gas (LNG) as they fear it would raise prices in the US to the levels natural gas trades for on the world markets. Their pleas fell on deaf ears, a dilemma and opportunity I wrote about.... The Quiet Triumph Of Oil And Gas In Obama’s Policies

Japanese Government Bonds: "Absolutely no guarantee" that Japanese investors will continue to buy them, warned an advisory panel to Finance Minister Taro Aso. Investors who lose confidence in the JGB can easily invest their funds overseas, the report nervously pointed out. Some have already made that shift. Hence the recent spike in yields, despite the Bank of Japan, which is mopping up around 70% of the flood of new bonds that the deficit spending of Abenomics generates. Investors only have to pick up the remaining 30%, but they appear to be reluctant to do so. Why is anyone outside of a government controlled institution still buying this crap?

Finding excuses: Japan supermarket sales dropped 1.9% in April, on a comparable-store basis, from April 2012, with food sales down 0.4% and clothing down 8.8%. Blamed was the "unseasonably cold weather." When sales edged up in February and March, the credit went to Abenomics, not the weather or some other silly thing. A broader media trend: when economic data points are positive, Abenomics gets the credit; when they’re negative, the weather and other reasons are dragged into the scenery, sometimes by their hair.

Mystery pollution in China: unknown foul-smelling goo emerges from cracks in the street, becomes huge, finally gets cleaned up ... and remains unknown.

 

Monday, May 20, 2013

“Every 10 years or so, banks make some horrible mistake and it usually starts with easy money,” said Mike Pinto, vice-chairman of M&T Bank, a regional US bank. “We are worried about the competitive atmosphere. It creates the temptation to do silly things.” He was talking about the credit bubble. US banks made $1.55 trillion in business loans through April, up 10% from last year; banks are falling all over each other trying to goose their profits by making risky loans. US corporations have also sold a record amount of bonds at record low yields and with historically low protections for investors. So now banks are loading up their balance sheets with business loans that will come to haunt them. But no problem. It will just be part of the next financial crisis that will give the eager Fed another opportunity to hand trillions to TBTF bankers to bail them out.

UK wages propaganda war against Scotland, which will hold an inconvenient independence referendum in September 2014. A new report by the UK Treasury, the third in the series, claims that the Scottish banking sector – composed of two large banks, Bank of Scotland and Royal Bank of Scotland, plus smaller ones – would put an independent Scotland at risk. Its assets would be 1250% of Scottish GDP, while the Cypriot banking sector, which brought down Cyprus, was 700% of GDP, the report said ominously. For the UK overall, banking assets are 492% of GDP, also very high. But the UK has “credibility” in the markets to manage that risk, something Scotland would lack. A "feeble attempt to undermine confidence in Scotland's ability to be a successful independent country," retorted Scotland's Finance Secretary John Swinney. "The Treasury, true to form, will outline what is in its own best interests, not what is in the best economic interests of the people of Scotland." He called these assertions misleading; "In terms of share of GDP, in fact, financial services are actually smaller for Scotland at 8.3% than the UK at 9.6%. So if the argument is about risk, then the risk is with the UK," he said.

Now Germany has a real reason to exit the euro: Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein wants it to stay! A bad sign. In an interview with the Welt, he said Germany had profited from the euro the most – from his point of view, “Germany” is “Germany Inc.” But real wages for working Germans have declined since the introduction of the euro, and workers have had a hard time, while wages in Greece, Spain, and other countries have shot up. Though German workers now have jobs, unlike people in Spain and Greece, they earn less than they used to in real terms. For that privilege, German taxpayers (not Germany Inc.) must pay a price, he said, namely bailing out banks and speculators who hold the crappy debt of periphery countries. He predicted utter economic mayhem for Germany if it left the euro. No, German taxpayers will have to bail out weaker countries, he said. And he raved about the "political project" behind the euro, the ultimately total integration of Europe (and of course, he defended TBTF banks, which were more secure, he said, than smaller ones). My question: is Goldman now seriously long the euro?

 

Weekend, May 18 - 19, 2013

Sales skid at S&P 500 companies: 458 companies of the 500 in the index have reported their Q1 results so far: earnings were up a measly 3.4% year-over-year, but sales fell 0.2%. Not exactly the foundation for the gigantic undying stock market rally that has plowed through whatever economic and corporate bad news with nary a twitch. When will this separation of reality from stock prices end? Someday, one way or the other! He who can pinpoint that day will make a lot of money.

Central bank success story: The global market for luxury goods grew 38.6% in three years. From $200 billion in 2009, luxury goods sales jumped 13% in 2010, 11% in 2011, and 10% in 2012, to end up at $275 billion. Despite the Eurozone debt crisis and austerity, despite the earthquake and tsunami in Japan in 2011... no matter what happened in those three years, luxury goods boomed, sez the the just released "Worldwide Luxury Markets Monitor," by Bain & Company for Fondazione Altagamma (PDF). “Absolute luxury items (high-end products with no logo, highest quality materials, and exquisite craftsmanship) lead the way,” the report reassured us, but there were some losers, including “watch consumption” which crashed in China. The report confirmed what we’ve seen everywhere: when central banks hand out trillions to their cronies, it doesn’t do much for the real economy as a whole, nor for employment, but it does one heck of a job at the very top of the pyramid.

"Threat of Default": US hits debt limit on Saturday, but by using a slew of shuffle maneuvers, shell games, tricks, and devices, the US won't actually run out of money until "after Labor Day," Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew told Congress in a letter. In his previous statement, the US would be "okay until Labor Day." Today, he was more frantic. He begged Congress to get its act together and do something "sooner rather than later" to “remove the threat of default.” In its infinite wisdom, Congress had suspended the debt limit till May 18, rather than dealing with it. The debt, though still over the limit, declined in April and early May; tax extractions were fattened by asset bubbles. But since May 10, the debt has once again been rising.

 

Friday, May 17, 2013

US Consumers haven’t felt this good since July 2007, just before all heck broke loose. An "encouraging sign," Reuters sez. For short sellers? The preliminary results of the Thomson Reuters/University of Michigan's consumer sentiment index jumped to 83.7 in May from 76.4 in April. Big part of the reason: households in the upper third of the income bracket felt flush from the ballooning stock market – the wealth effect. The Fed giveth.... They were able to brush off the payroll tax increase, which Wal-Mart shoppers, as we’ve seen, had a harder time brushing off. The Consumer Expectations index rose to 74.8 from 67.8. And the Current Economic Conditions index leaped to 97.5 from 89.9, the highest since October 2007, a month before the stock markets began to swoon. Impeccable timing, the hallmark of consumers.

Car sales in the EU crept up 1.7% in April, from a horrible April last year. The fact that the parade of ever worsening numbers has finally stopped, at least for a moment, was greeted with a huge sigh of relief. The details of the report aren’t that rosy: sales in the UK, now the second largest market after Germany, jumped 14.8%. Without the UK, sales for the rest of the EU actually dropped 0.46%. It wasn't exactly a smooth trend across the member states: Greece finally seems to have hit bottom, and sales increased 20.9%; in Denmark, they jumped 30.7% and in Finland 142.6%; but they crashed 26% in the Netherlands and 51.9% in Cyprus; they rose 3.8% in Germany but dropped 5.3% in France.

Deafening US media hype: Japan Core Machinery Orders jumped 14.2% in March, seasonally adjusted, from February. The eternal money-printing and fiscal-stimulus apologists dragged it out as proof that Abenomics is working massively. Alas, these are highly volatile big-ticket items, though “core” orders exclude container ships, nuclear reactors, etc., which are even more volatile. To iron out the volatility, the Cabinet Office also offers quarterly numbers. Soooo, core orders in the first quarter of 2013 were actually 4.8% lower than in the first quarter of 2012, when Noda was prime minister. Kampai!

The Japanese take care of their college grads: 93.9% of all those who graduated on March 31, the end of the academic year, had jobs by April 1, the beginning of the business year. This was the second year in a row that the percentage increased, so it’s NOT related to Abenomics, please! College recruitment, like so many things in Japan, is a highly structured process with the idea to get pretty much everyone squared away before the end of the academic year. But those who miss this entry into Japan Inc. have the greatest difficulty getting through the door later. The system is unforgiving punitive to those who don’t toe the line.

About that secret inflation in Argentina: famously, no one is allowed to accurately track or discuss inflation, but all the whisper numbers floating around peg it at over 20% annually. Now confirmation has come from official sources: wage negotiations between unions and the government of President Cristina Fernández Kirchner. Unions are her base. In fact, she personally met with the leaders of six unions that represent about 2 million workers, or 40% of all workers covered by wage negotiations, and made a deal, similar to the deals she’d made with Railway and Bus Drivers’ unions. The agreed-upon wage increases this year to keep the purchasing power of her voters intact? The closest estimate to official CPI that Argentina has? 24%!

 

Thursday, May 16, 2013

Last time French-made cars were sold is the US? 1980? Long time ago. But... French-made models of the Toyota Yaris are coming to the US, Canada, and Mexico, apparently to keep the plant in Onnaing, near Valenciennes, busy. Car sales in Europe have been catastrophic, and plant shutdowns and layoffs are hard to do, especially in France where even thinking about it causes a huge political ruckus. In 2012, 182,841 Yaris were sold in Europe, accounting for 22% of Toyota's total European sales - a highly successful model at the low end of the lineup. North America will get US versions, not EU versions. So no diesels.

Plunging price of gasoline shaves 0.4% from Consumer Price Index in April. Total energy prices dropped 4.3%, with gasoline down 8.1%. We’ll remember those days fondly because that cheap gasoline is now history; prices have been climbing in May! Food prices rose 0.2%. Core CPI, which excludes food and energy, rose 0.1%. For the 12-month period, CPI is up 1.1% and core CPI 1.7%. The Fed might complain that this is below target; but it’s still inflation, and it still whittles down the value of your and my dollars, and everything denominated in them, and it’s still higher than the interest that banks pay on most deposits and CDs, though it’s better than 4.3%, as we had some months in 2011.

Another blow to US manufacturing: Philadelphia Fed's Business Outlook Survey – for manufacturing in eastern Pennsylvania, southern New Jersey, and Delaware – dropped into the negative, to -5.2 in May, from 1.3 in April (below zero = decline). The New York Fed's Empire State Manufacturing survey, reported yesterday (below), had also pointed at a contraction. Ominous: new orders dropped to -7.9, the worst since June last year, from -1 in April; the Workweek Index dropped to -12.4, and the Employment Index dropped to -8.7. Manufacturing is only a small part of the US economy, and this region is a small part of the US, so we’re not going to panic just yet...

US Housing Bubble confirmed: Heard an ad on the radio on how to get rich quick by flipping houses – and we’ll show you how. It conveniently offered an 800-number. Something or other was free.... but keep your credit card handy. These kinds of things usually appear late in a bubble.

Death penalty for financial fraud in China. A court in Wenzhou slapped a local, 39-year-old gal, former general manager of Wenzhou Xinfu Investment Consulting Co., with the maximum penalty available, death, for having illegally raised funds for investments starting in 2007. Everything worked fine until October 2011, when her scheme collapsed and she ended up defaulting on a 428 million yuan loan ($69.6 million). Leaves open the question if they’d slap the same penalty on TBTF bank CEOs every time their banks need a bailout. A bit draconian maybe, but something the US might want to consider as well, after not having prosecuted anyone responsible for the financial crisis and for the Fed’s bailouts that followed, though they did hound, as in China, small-scale crooks like Bernie Madoff.

Bad loans at Chinese commercial banks swelled by 6.8% in the first quarter, to 526.5 billion yuan ($85.6 billion), the sixth consecutive quarter of increases, raising the non-performing loan ratio to 0.96%. And NPLs are expected to rise further. One of the many elements in a boundless debt-fueled scheme that will eventually, like the micro-case above, unravel.

The Japanese Diet rubber-stamped the ¥92.6 trillion ($926 billion) budget for fiscal 2013, which started April 1. A breath-taking ¥43 trillion ($425 billion) will have to be borrowed to make ends meet - that's 46.4% of the total outlays! But no problem. Abenomics will get Japan out of its fiscal quagmire, one way or the other, by printing money. Government spending on public works – welfare spending for Japan Inc. – will rise to ¥5.3 trillion. In a show of rare fiscal discipline, welfare spending for the poor will be cut by ¥67 billion. Priorities of Abenomics are becoming clear.

Japanese GDP growth less than a year ago! The economy grew 0.9% in the first quarter 2013 from Q4 last year, or a 3.5% annual rate. Private demand was up some, with investment in housing being fairly strong, but corporate investment lackluster. Public demand – government spending and investment, including boondoggles – jumped, as promised by Abenomics. Exports rose, and so did imports, but not as much. All seasonally adjusted. Great? Give credit to Abenomics for that 0.9% growth in GDP? Because it was the fastest growth since... oops, well, since the first quarter of 2012, when the economy grew 1.3%. Abenomics can't even keep up with Noda's maligned era.

 

Wednesday, May 15, 2013

Megabanks "are NOT too big to jail," claimed Attorney General Eric Holder today in a heroic about-face at a House Judiciary hearing, after he'd explained to the Senate Judiciary Committee in early March why exactly they were indeed too big to jail. The Justice Department has not prosecuted any megabanks despite their shenanigans leading up to the Financial Crisis and continuing to this day. A debacle I wrote about.... 'Regulatory Capture' Emasculated The Regulators Of Megabanks.

French purchasing power plunges 1.5% per capita, and 0.9% for all households together in 2012 (difference due to population growth), the worst performance since 1984. Combination of: disposable income creeping up only 0.9%, and prices rising 1.9%. Ah yes, the many benefits of "moderate" or even "below-target" inflation.

Tough day for US manufacturing: industrial production dropped 0.5% in April, after increasing in February and March; year-over-year, it's up only 1.9%. Within it, manufacturing fell 0.4%; fingers point at motor vehicles and parts, down 1.3%. Capacity utilization fell 0.5% to 77.8%, and is 2.4 percentage points below long-term average. Add to that: the New York Fed's Empire State Manufacturing Survey for May dipped into the red (-1.43, from 3.05 in April). Employment sub-indices were mixed, with number of employees up slightly, but hours worked down sharply. Darkest cloud: new orders were negative. Executive optimism for the next six months declined, second month in a row. Not an exemplary picture of a growing economy.

"My question is, who is going to jail?" wondered House Speaker John Boehner about the IRS scandal. So why didn't he and other Republicans ask that question after the financial crisis, the largest scandal in the US ever?

Swooning energy prices, particularly gasoline, pushed down wholesale prices by 0.7% in April, seasonally adjusted. Food prices also dropped, a godsend for those of us who like to eat, with veggies and meat down the most. Without food and energy, which are highly volatile, the core Producer Price Index rose 0.1%. For the 12-month period, the unadjusted PPI is up a scant 0.6%. If they could just keep it that way!

Warning shot: Russian car sales plunged 8% in April. For the year, they are now 2% below the same period last year, a record year during which sales had jumped 11% from 2011. The good times appear to be over. Is the EU malaise heading east?

Europe stuck in recession: the Eurozone economy shrank 0.2% in the first quarter, from Q4, the sixth quarter of recession in a row, another glorious record. The 27-nation EU contracted 0.1%. Year over year, they’re down 1.0% and 0.7% respectively. Germany's economy inched up 0.1% in Q1, after having plunged 0.7% in Q4, thus barely avoiding the red stamp of recession. Both quarters combined, Germany is in the hole. The lousy performance in both quarters surprisingly surprised pundits. France is formally in a recession; its economy contracted 0.2% in Q1, third contraction in four quarters. Italy and Spain both shriveled 0.5%. Unperturbed, German stocks, while down a smidgen for the day so far, are still above their prior all-time intra-day high of July 2007. This will be seen as the greatest accomplishment of the central bank money-printing binge: separating (at least temporarily) stock markets from reality and allowing them to float in a dream world.

China's pile of foreign exchange grew by 294 billion yuan to 27.363 trillion yuan ($4.41 trillion) in April, according to the People's Bank of China, the fifth month in a row of increases. For the first four months of 2013, the monthly influx averaged 400 billion yuan, nine times the average in 2012. Earlier this month, the State Administration of Foreign Exchange, the top forex regulator, had threatened to crack down on foreign money flooding the country. China is where the hot money goes – on the bet that the yuan will continue to rise against the dollar which, through the arduous and heroic efforts of the Fed, will continue to lose value.

Nikkei jumps 2.29%, to 15,096, highest since December 28, 2007. If it keeps going like this, it will be above 40,000 soon. This thing has become a joke – even more so than the US stock markets. Japanese government bonds continue their descent, pushing yields up, with the 10-year JGB hitting 0.90% but then settled down at 0.85%. The yen skidded.

 

Tuesday, May 14, 2013

Ex-leaders of consumer electronics: Sharp's huge loss is a sign of how Japanese powerhouses have lost the edge to Korean, US, and Chinese rivals. A doozy: ¥545 billion ($5.3 billion) in red ink, a record in its storied century-long history. A top exec reshuffle has been announced, but it won't fix the real issue that is bedeviling Sharp and other Japanese consumer electronics companies, once world leaders, now not even also-rans. Abenomics won't be able to cure that either. This isn't an issue of costs and exchange rates, but of innovation, products, and now increasingly brand (they squandered it).

China's white paper on human rights, helpfully issued in English so that foreigners like me can get their brains washed, starts out promisingly: "Since the arrival of the 21st century, the Chinese people have been making constant efforts in advancing human rights protection along the path of building socialism with Chinese characteristics under the leadership of the Communist Party of China (CPC) and the Chinese government." Further into it, the paper clarifies priorities: "China has a population of over 1.3 billion. For such a populous country, it would be impossible to protect the people's rights and interests without first developing the economy to feed and clothe the people." Money before rights. But it also points out how the government has become much more transparent in many ways, which few people will dispute (text in full).

Inflation hits Japan: wholesale prices rose for 5th month in a row in April, by 0.3% from March, with the index at 101.4 (2010 prices = 100). Electricity, gas, water, lumber, and wood products jumped over 3%. Some of it was due to the weakening yen that made imported fuels and raw materials more expensive. How exactly higher prices would cure Japan’s economic ills remains a mystery, though it will give a stylish haircut to all those owning Japanese Government Bonds....

Japanese Government Bonds skid once again: yields rose, for the 10-year JGB to 0.85%, from 0.79% yesterday, from 0.69% on Friday, and from 0.315% on April 5, the day they went bonkers. While yields are still ultra-low, the rise has been relentless, not at all what the BOJ wants – and now there's also volatility, rare sight in the JGB market. Japanese institutions and individuals are buying foreign bonds with higher yields to diversify out of the yen that has been doomed by Abenomics to decline. If this turns into a massive dumping of yen, if the BOJ cannot keep it under control, the selloff might turn into a rout, and the BOJ and government-controlled institutions will be the only ones left buying. In sympathy, mortgage rates are creeping up, as are bank loans. The opposite of what Abenomics wants to accomplish. Free money is suddenly becoming more expensive. 

Click for Older Rumblings....

VIDEOS

Wolf Richter on Max Keiser's "On The Edge" 
"The Pauperization of America"

Wolf Richter on the Keiser Report
"Where the Money Goes to Die"

Clarke and Dawe: European Debt Crisis
Two favorite Australian Comedians

Clarke and Dawe: Quantitative Easing
Big industrial-strength printers, all facing the window

The Fastest Drive Ever Through San Francisco
Don't try to do this yourself 

humanERROR - by "Frying Dutchman"
Powerful, lyrical appeal to the Japanese. Slams nuke industry, MSM, bureaucrats, and politicians.

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Wednesday
Aug292012

The “Pauperization of Europe”

DateWednesday, August 29, 2012 at 6:22PM

It started on Monday. “Poverty is returning to Europe,” said Jan Zijderveld, head of Unilever’s European operations, in an interview. The British–Dutch consumer products company, third largest in the world, was adjusting its commercial strategy to this new reality, he said, by redeploying to Europe what worked in poor countries of the developing world. Now the stars of the industry are affirming it. “The logic of pauperization,” L’Oréal CEO Jean-Paul Agon called it on Wednesday.

“If Spaniards are down to spending on average €17 per shopping trip, I can’t sell him detergent for half of his budget,” Zijderveld explained. “In Indonesia we sell individual packages of shampoo for 2 to 3 cents and still earn a fair amount.”

That this strategy was widespread in Asia I found out in Vietnam in 1996. I cut my finger at a table at a café in Hué as we were getting up. So, walking down the dirt street, I licked my finger to keep the blood from dripping on my clothes. The girl I was with, shocked by my barbaric behavior, took me to a street stall and bought me one singled Band-Aid, which cost as close to nothing as you could get. [My overland solo adventure from the Mekong Delta across Asia and Europe is the topic of a forthcoming book. The first in the series, Big Like: Cascade into an Odyssey—a “funny as hell non-fiction book about wanderlust and traveling abroad,” a reader tweeted—is available on Amazon.]

By looking at Europe, particularly Southern Europe, as a market with the characteristics of developing countries, Unilever has transitioned from seeing the debt crisis as a temporary event to seeing it as a trend to which it had to adjust its strategies. So now in Spain, it sells its “Surf” detergent in packages that are good for five loads. In Greece, it sells mashed potatoes and mayonnaise in small packages. And in Great Britain (!), it’s implementing the same strategy. Because people are running out of money. And it’s been successful. Since they started this in 2011, sales have stopped falling; and in the first half of the year, they edged up 1.1%. But higher input prices have exerted pressures on margins and profits.

“I agree, there is a movement of very sharp pauperization in Southern Europe,” Michel-Edouard Leclerc said on Wednesday—they’re now all coming out. He’s the CEO of E.Leclerc, the number one retailer in France with a market share of 18% and 556 semi-independent hypermarkets, supermarkets, and specialty stores. It also has numerous stores in Italy, Spain, Portugal, and other countries. And the company is adjusting to the new reality. In Italy, for example, where the stores used to sell yoghurt only in multipacks, they’ve started to sell them as single items.

Jean-Paul Agon, CEO of L’Oréal, the world’s largest cosmetics and beauty products company, countered with a mixed message. No, the company wouldn’t adjust its products around the growing poverty in Europe, he said. The race to the lowest price was “not our strategy.” Unlike the others, his company wouldn’t follow “the logic of pauperization and commoditization of products.” Rather he wanted to build on “innovation and added value,” which would allow the company to raise prices over time, “but reasonably.”

Which makes sense in light of L’Oréal’s earnings announcement Wednesday morning, a debacle which caused its stock to plummet 4.4%, the second worst performer of the CAC40—due to disappointing margins! Instead of smaller packages, it had tried heavy discounting, Agon admitted, “to adjust our strategy to the environment”—namely the pauperization of Europe. Even L’Oréal.

Meanwhile, a hullabaloo flared up in Germany over squashing democratic discussions on whether or not taxpayers should endlessly pay to keep Greece in the Eurozone. Read.... Gagging The “Hardliners” As The Economy Tanks And Future Exports Drop Into The Red Zone.

by AuthorWolf Richter | | Print ArticlePrint Article |

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Reader Comments (14)

Very, very sad. I love Europe. But...I don't think we're far behind.
August 29, 2012 | Unregistered Commenterjohnnygeneric
I'm still in shock when I here that Europe is experiencing economic downfall, but come to think of it who does not experience this kind of thing? If your search on the net, you will see that its not only Europe who is experiencing this kind of situation. There are a lot more countries struggling, so I think like the others, Europe will survive this one.
August 29, 2012 | Unregistered Commenterachat or
johnny - I think we're already on the way. I didn't want to mention this in my post because it's a different topic, but at Safeway, OJ cartons that used to be 1/2 gallon (64 ounces) have been cut to 59 ounces during the financial crisis. Look exactly the same. Most people never realized it. That kind of thing happens all the time. Or quality goes down....
August 30, 2012 | Registered CommenterWolf Richter
"highly regulated, highly taxed..." and a continuing real income divide. The accumulation and concentration of wealth in a shrinking percentile is the obverse of your valid Post that confirms pauperisation.

This is an ugly and unwanted hollowing out of the goal of adequacy, enough to eat, access to health, education and self-realisation.

People do not choose or aim to be poor, pauperisation is a terrible slide that neither economic nor political practice have changed.
August 31, 2012 | Unregistered CommenterJuno
What I always do now, unfailingly, is to check the €/kg or €/Litre price of anyhting I buy at the supermarket. It's the only way to check if you're being swindled by the packaging!
August 31, 2012 | Unregistered CommenterRMagnifico
With technology at the level it is today, this is all self-inflicted. A failure of leadership and the fact that many people enjoy kicking others.
August 31, 2012 | Unregistered CommenterSteveK9
Herr Richter,

A "cascade into an Odyssey"??!! This title must break at least 2-3 rules of good writing.

I have noticed that you keep repeating the same meme in your posts: the poor German taxpayers who are not consulted over having to bail out the "others." Can't you see the correlations between that and the other phenomena you describe? You're not much help, if you can't. Sorry if I can't muster a lot of sympathy for those poor taxpayers when German banks are borrowing at sub-zero percent and lending to Greece at 6%.
September 5, 2012 | Unregistered CommenterGreek Observer
Greek observer - I've stated many times that most of the bailout money won't go to the Greek people themselves but to bondholders, now mostly the ECB and national central banks.

I've written numerous posts that criticize all taxpayer-funded bailouts of investors in failed, over-indebted institutions or countries. Default is the better option. Investors should take losses, not taxpayers.

We Americans got shafted worse than anyone during our bailout mania and continue to get shafted via financial repression - a common meme in my posts. We never had an opportunity to say no to the Fed's action or to TRAP - and Wall Street is clamoring for more Fed action, regardless of how destructive it is for the real economy - another common meme in my posts.

Germans now actually have an opportunity to say no. An election is coming up in 2013, and they can make it part of the political debate, and vote on it (if their politicians dare to represent the no-bailout view, which didn't happen in the US where both Obama and McCain as candidates supported TARP, and neither said a word about the much larger actions the Fed was undertaking).

Concerning your last line: central banks are pernicious corrupt institutions - another common meme in my posts. Browse around a little on my blog ... you'll find them.
September 6, 2012 | Registered CommenterWolf Richter
Wolf,

I should send you an email I sent to my kids to clue them in on how inflation works. I lived through the inflation of the 70s here. My introduction was while working at an appliance store for the summer and part of my job was loading the Coke vending machine and sorting through the empty glass bottles. The 12 ounce glass coke bottles mysteriously wouldn't fit in the wooden crates (subdivided by stiff wooden slats)...but yet some did. WTF?

Turned out the new bottles were 10 fluid ounces and slightly thinner.

I watched Krispy Kreme donuts that I would buy at 8 cents a donut rise dramatically in price due to the price of sugar just going bonkers (Yeah. I'm from the south where we had KKDs all over the place back then).

Penny gumballs disappeared.

I was a teenager at the time who finally had some spending money and I watched prices rise every month. Since I lived off of fast food at the time (and yet surprisingly remained thin as a rail!) I would track the prices. It was crazy insane. And that was mild inflation. That wasn't even the hard stuff. I remember we would all complain that companies were raising their prices because they could and mask it as inflation. Maybe that was true. Thank God I lived at home and mooched off my parents while I was in college.
September 6, 2012 | Unregistered Commenterjohnnygeneric
Johnny - by all means send me the email. I was in college in the seventies, in TX, and worked as a security guard at night. I got a COLA just about every month, and for a while it felt good getting more money, until I tried to spend it.... Inflation is insidious. And to quote my hero, Paul Volcker, there is no such thing as good inflation.
September 8, 2012 | Registered CommenterWolf Richter
This former Perotista understands the downward spiral of Western economies, because I paid attention when multi national corporations began pitting us against each other in world commerce.

Sir James Goldsmith wrote a brilliant editorial back in the mid 80's - outlining exactly how America would be destroyed by 'world trade'.

Our standard of living would plunge as we competed with people working for pennies a day - until a balance of poverty was reached. Middle Class Americans had no chance of survival when pitted against East Indians and Chinese workers.

So now we all look at each other and ask, "What happened?"

The idea that multi national corporations decide economic policy for every Western Government is economic suicide. There are no AMERICAN corporations - these are multi national monsters - who prey on world populations.

Why are they still operating?

Voting Obomney won't help you.... or me. We have all been betrayed by a political system offered up to the highest bidder.

So when do we start dragging guillotines through the streets of DC and New York?
September 30, 2012 | Unregistered Commentercward
I can't help but agree with you...to a certain extent. Back in the late 90s I would say to people "what are we going to when the bean counters look at the numbers and loudly exclaim "My God, we should make EVERYTHING in China because it's cheaper!"

The problem with that then becomes who would the Chinese then sell their stuff to? I would tell my friends who were fretting over all the jobs going to China that not ALL jobs could be going to China or India for that matter. If that happened then all trade would stop.

It was obvious that a new equilibrium would have to be reached. But I would never have foreseen what has been done to us. But in some ways we have done this to ourselves. Intel's CEO said it wasn't high USA wages that was preventing him from building more chip facilities in the USA. It was government regulation.

From what I can tell, it's not cheap foreign labor that we should fear that will keep people unemployed. I think it is the use of more automation. Articles I've read state that as more companies "re-shore" to here, the number of jobs aren't returning due to the use of more automation. Maybe this is a straw dog. Maybe more automation increases jobs. I haven't seen any statistics on this. At the most, it means that new manufacturing will help, but not completely alleviate the low employment situation.
September 30, 2012 | Unregistered Commenterjohnnygeneric
"So when do we start dragging guillotines through the streets of DC and New York?"
That would be terrorism, I can almost already hear the humming sounds of wardrones drifting into the cities..
Remember, killing humans is only allright if you do it by slowly depriving them of their needs and find ways to blame it all om the same people.
Being unemployed, poor, ill, depressed, etc. is a choice blabla....
October 2, 2012 | Unregistered Commenterrijkswaanvijand
So when is Unilever going to stop selling us billions of tons of palm oil, palm fat, sodium palmate, stearate, "vegetable oil, fat and suet" etc every year and destroying rainforest, creating CO2, pauperizing indigenous people. making species extinct etc etc etc?

Or maybe the pauperization of the EU will mean Unilever ripping up billion of acres of vines, orange groves, almond trees, olive groves etc and replacing them with palm oil plantations.

Not in their own back yard? I wouldn't be so sure. Unilever are a planetary disgrace who have no right to comment on anything.
October 9, 2012 | Unregistered CommenterTigger

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