The Global Debt Bomb!

Forbes: Unchartered Waters. Governments around the world will issue an estimated $4.5 trillion in debt this year, triple the five-year average for industrial countries.

• No matter how I try to see things in a positive light, the reality is: the world is heading towards calamity. 2010 is the year of calamity and I should add: even more wars. It seems like 1929 -1939 playing out all over again. And we all know how it ended: World War 2.
   
• Sovereign debt defaults mean monetary crisis and bond crisis. How long can the money powers manipulate the market to give a sense of normality and recovery? Not much longer I am afraid. Not much longer. America will need to borrow as much as US$2T and refinance as much as $1.5T. The FedRes will step up QE, printing money out of thin air! Forbes reports:
   
  Kyle Bass has bet the house against Japan ….  The Dallas hedge fund manager ….. is so convinced the Japanese government’s profligate spending will drive the nation to the brink of default that he financed his home with a five-year loan denominated in yen, which he hopes will be cheaper to pay back than dollars. Through his hedge fund, Hayman Advisors, Bass has also bought $6 million worth of securities that will jump in value if interest rates on ten-year Japanese government bonds, currently a minuscule 1.3%, rise to something more like ten-year Treasuries in the U.S. (a recent 3.4%). A former Bear Stearns trader, Bass turned $110 million into $700 million by betting against subprime debt in 2006. “Japan is the most asymmetric opportunity I have ever seen,” he says, “way better than subprime.”
   
  Bass could be wrong on Japan. The island nation (and the world’s second-largest economy) has defied skeptics for so long that experienced traders call betting against it “the widowmaker.” But he may be right on the bigger picture. If 2008 was the year of the subprime meltdown, 2010, he thinks, will be the year entire nations start going broke.
   
  The world has issued so much debt in the past two years fighting the Great Recession that paying it all back is going to be hell–for Americans, along with everybody else. Taxes will have to rise around the globe, hobbling job growth and economic recovery. Traders like Bass could make a lot of money betting against sovereign debt the way they shorted subprime loans at the peak of the housing bubble.
   
  National governments will issue an estimated $4.5 trillion in debt this year, almost triple the average for mature economies over the preceding five years. The U.S. has allowed the total federal debt (including debt held by government agencies, like the Social Security fund) to balloon by 50% since 2006 to $12.3 trillion. The pain of repayment is not yet being felt, because interest rates are so low–close to 0% on short-term Treasury bills. Someday those rates are going to rise. Then the taxpayer will have the devil to pay.
   
  Whether or not you believe the spending spree was morally justified, you have to be concerned about the prospect of a dismal, debt-burdened fiscal future. More debt weighs heavily on GDP, says Carmen Reinhart, a University of Maryland economist. …. Reinhart has found that a 90% ratio of government debt to GDP is a tipping point in economic growth. Beyond that, developed economies have growth rates two percentage points lower, on average, than economies that have not yet crossed the line. (The danger point is lower in emerging markets.) “It’s not a linear process,” she says. “You increase it over and beyond a high threshold, and boom!” The U.S. government-debt-to-GDP ratio is 84%.
   
  We’ve been through this scenario before. It’s especially ugly because we get hit by inflation, too. In the years immediately after World War II inflation surged past 6%, while economic growth flagged and the government-debt-to-GDP level exceeded 90%, note Reinhart and Rogoff. The country worked that ratio down over the next half-century. Now the ratio is shooting up again.
   
  America is a nation of spendthrifts, addicted to easy credit and dependent on the kindness of savers overseas to keep us comfortable. Our retail industry hangs on credit cards and our real estate on 95% financing and the tax rewards for mortgage interest. The personal savings rate has climbed from negative 0.4% in 2006 to a positive 4.5% rate now, but that is still a pathetic figure for a nation whose government is un-saving all that and more with its deficit budget. Politicians on this continent are good at compassion, whether trying to help people stay in their overpriced homes or offering health care to millions of those without it. They are not so adept at nurturing growth.
   
  If the GDP doesn’t expand at “normal” rates of 3% to 5% coming out of this recession, wrestling down the debt will be very tough, indeed–perhaps impossible without drastic cuts in spending and higher tax rates on many fronts. The Congressional Budget Office currently projects the fiscal deficit will decline from 10% of GDP next year to around 4.4% from 2013 to 2015. But that assumes economic expansion of at least 4%, not the 2% predicted in the study by Reinhart and Rogoff. You see the vicious cycle here: Debt depresses growth, and then low growth makes paying down the debt an impossible task.
   
  U.S. corporate income tax receipts were down 55% in the year ended Sept. 30, 2009 to $138 billion. It may be a long while before these tax collections get back to where they were. As corporate profits recover, factory utilization will be up and inflation will be close behind. At that point the 0% yield on Treasury bills will be history. Rolling over the national debt will become a lot more expensive. Higher rates on Treasuries will work their way through the debt market, driving up the cost of money for homeowners, businesses and already struggling state and local governments.
   
  “The economy over the last six months has been on a sugar high,” says Benn Steil, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and author of Money, Markets and Sovereignty (Yale, 2009), a survey of the relationship between money and the state. If Congress and the Obama Administration don’t trim deficits, he says, “we will get to the point where credit is much more expensive in the U.S. than it ever has been in the past.”
   
  Most states are already having trouble paying their bills and, of course, don’t have printing presses with which to finance their debts. They are turning to Washington for help and may succeed in putting some of their liabilities on the federal balance sheet. With growing off-balance-sheet obligations, notably unfunded pension liabilities (see graphic in “Debt Weight Scorecore”), the states will be competing for years with the federal government for scarce taxpayer dollars.
   
  “U.S. states are like emerging markets,” says Reinhart. “They spend a lot during the boom years and then are forced to retrench during the down years.” Cutting expenses sounds good theoretically, but look at California: Students (and faculty) are up in arms over proposed tuition increases and cutbacks at the state’s once prestigious university system; state employees are mounting a fierce legal battle against furloughs and other wage concessions.
   
  Mainstream credit analysts are worried. The U.S. has been able to sell vast amounts of debt because the Treasury market, with $500 billion a day in turnover, is considered safe and dwarfs all other debt markets. But Brian Coulton, head of global economics at Fitch Ratings in London, warns that once rock-solid economies like the U.S. and the U.K. could join shakier nations like Japan and Ireland in losing their aaa ratings if they don’t get their bad habits under control. “While aaas can borrow in the short term, very high and rising government debt-to-GDP ratios are ultimately not consistent with aaa status,” Coulton says.
   
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  Forbes: Private banking assets tend to become public problems in a crisis. By that measure European countries are far worse off than the U.S.

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