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Category - Global Middle Class

Swiss Banks Seek Most Dollars Since 2008 in Bid for Easy Profit

This article from Bloomberg may be of interest. Here it is in full:

Banks in Switzerland sought the most dollars since 2008 using an emergency dollar swap facility provided by the Federal Reserve in what is likely to be a bid for easy profits.

In Wednesday’s auction conducted by the Swiss National Bank, 17 institutions took up $11.09 billion. That’s the most since October 2008, when the Global Financial Crisis was raging in the wake of Lehman Brothers’ collapse. 

This is the fourth week in a row when banks have accessed the facility. Last Wednesday, 15 banks took up $6.27 billion in funds. 

According to economists at Credit Suisse, Swiss banks swap the dollars into francs in order to generate a profit. The lenders can even sell the cash back to the SNB using its reverse repo auctions, or deposit it at the institution to benefit from a positive interest rate.

“We do not believe that the increased demand for US dollar liquidity by domestic banks reflects any liquidity issues in the Swiss banking system”, Credit Suisse economist Maxime Botteron wrote in a report last week.

The dollar swap facility was created during the crisis that began in 2007 as a lifeline to provide safe access to Greenback liquidity, while the SNB’s cash-taking repo auctions are designed to drain excess liquidity from the market. 

It’s not clear that Swiss officials are likely to act to stop banks from taking advantage of the facility. Conditions of the dollar auctions are controlled by the Fed, and the reverse repos are a core instrument in the SNB’s current tightening of monetary policy.

All Swiss and foreign banks which have a branch in Switzerland or are registered with Swiss authorities are entitled to participate in the dollar auctions. Credit Suisse expects predominantly smaller banks to take advantage of the profit play.



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Indonesia Raises Key Rate by Half-Point Again to Aid Rupiah

This article from Bloomberg may be of interest to subscribers. Here is a section:

The central bank will defend the rupiah in line with fundamentals, Warjiyo said. It will monitor forex supply, and strengthen the currency stabilization policy, he added.

“The hike reflects less concern of inflation but more on the need to anchor FX stability,” said Wellian Wiranto, economist at Oversea-Chinese Banking Corp. in Singapore, who now sees a terminal rate of 5.25%. “Going forward, downside risks to growth will gain more prominence.”

A weakened rupiah threatens to fan imported inflation, adding to the risk posed by higher fuel costs that’s sent consumer price gains to a fresh seven-year high of 5.95%. Bank Indonesia expects inflation to climb further to 6.3% at the year-end before returning to its 2%-4% target next year.

The central bank retained its 2022 growth forecast for the economy, expecting it to be at the upper end of its 4.5%-5.3% target, while flagging risks from a slowing global recovery. For now, it expects to end the year with a current account surplus of 0.4%-1.2% of gross domestic product -- better than its previously estimated 0.5% of GDP.



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Lula Losing Brazil' Biggest State Forces Urgent Campaign Rejig

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Inside Lula’s campaign, the result in Brazil’s most populous state — the birthplace of his political career, and containing about 25% of the entire electorate — was compared to a plane crash, where a confluence of small factors leads to catastrophe. At his team’s first post-election meeting, the talk was of frustration and failure. 

Edinho Silva, the former president’s campaign coordinator, may have had an inkling of what was to come, saying in an interview on the eve of polling that Sao Paulo had become a center of hard-core support for Bolsonaro’s brand of right-wing identity politics. 

“We have a percentage of Brazilian society that, unfortunately, is racist, homophobic, sexist, xenophobic, and doesn’t accept the social ascent of the lower classes,” he said. “And a significant part of Brazil that thinks in this way lives in Sao Paulo.”



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FBI misled judge who signed warrant for Beverly Hills seizure of $86 million in cash

Thanks to a subscriber for this article from the Los Angeles Times which may be of interest. Here is a section:

Eighteen months later, newly unsealed court documents show that the FBI and U.S. attorney’s office in Los Angeles got their warrant for that raid by misleading the judge who approved it.

They omitted from their warrant request a central part of the FBI’s plan: Permanent confiscation of everything inside every box containing at least $5,000 in cash or goods, a senior FBI agent recently testified.

The FBI’s justification for the dragnet forfeiture was its presumption that hundreds of unknown box holders were all storing assets somehow tied to unknown crimes, court records show.

It took five days for scores of agents to fill their evidence bags with the bounty: More than $86 million in cash and a bonanza of gold, silver, rare coins, gem-studded jewelry and enough Rolex and Cartier watches to stock a boutique.

The U.S. attorney’s office has tried to block public disclosure of court papers that laid bare the government’s deception, but a judge rejected its request to keep them under seal.

The failure to disclose the confiscation plan in the warrant request came to light in FBI documents and depositions of agents in a class-action lawsuit by box holders who say the raid violated their rights.



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Guide to the Markets Australia

Thanks to a subscriber for this chartbook from JPMorgan which may be of interest.



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White House to Tap Oil Reserve Again Amid High Fuel Prices

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The Biden administration is moving toward a release of at least another 10 million to 15 million barrels of oil from the nation’s emergency stockpile in a bid to balance markets and keep gasoline prices from climbing further, according to people familiar with the matter.  

The move would effectively represent the tail end of a program announced in the spring to release a total of 180 million barrels of crude from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. About 165 million barrels has been delivered or put under contract since the program was put into effect.

The Biden administration also is set this week to provide details on plans to replenish the emergency stockpile. The Energy Department announced in May it was planning a new method of buybacks to allow for a “competitive, fixed-price bid process,” with prices potentially locked in well before crude is delivered.



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Mini-Budget Torched, Now Hunt Must Balance the Books

This article from Bloomberg may be of interest to subscribers. Here is a section:

Our latest assessment, taking on board the change in borrowing costs since Hunt’s announcement and the policies in the statement, is that a further £13 billion will still need to be found to just get debt falling relative to GDP. It would take more like £36 billion of consolidation to put it on the same trajectory as we projected before the mini-budget was published in September.

Debt Still On Explosive Path
Finding a package of spending cuts that are politically viable and deliverable will be extremely challenging -- much of the low-hanging fruit has already been picked. Hunt faces an uphill struggle to win the faith of markets as he formulates a budget, to be delivered on Oct. 31.

Hunt also said that the universal household energy price cap will be replaced from April 2023 with more targeted measures. It’s not clear what those measures will be but removing the government cap altogether and reverting to Ofgem’s methodology from April would imply a 75% rise in energy bills for households. Inflation would jump to 11.6% in April, against 6.4% under the cap.

The combination of austerity and less support for households next year means the risks to our forecast for a 0.4% drop in GDP in 2023 have shifted to the downside. 



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First Tesla 4680 battery teardowns reveal it is not all that revolutionary at the moment

This article from notebookcheck.com may be of interest to subscribers. Here is a section:

Current 4680 battery cells are not living up to their promises made by Elon Musk during Tesla's Battery Day in 2020 when they were first revealed. At the time, Musk mentioned features like a high-nickel cathode, silicon anode, and an ingenious packaging system at a fraction of the cost of the 2170 batteries. For now, however, it has hit only one of these purported features.

We already know that the 4680 battery packs that Tesla now places in its Model Y are only halfway to the stated goal of a 50% cost reduction compared to conventional batteries. The bulk of the savings come from the packaging efficiency of stuffing them into much larger tubes hence improving the volumetric density and requiring fewer welding points. The key dry-coating process for the electrodes, however, which doesn't require toxic mixes and oven baking, remains a pie-in-the-sky goal for now, despite that Tesla hopes to hit a pilot run this year.

Moreover, independent 4680 battery teardowns and chemistry analysis shows that Tesla is still using the regular 811 nickel-manganese-cobalt mixture for the cathodes and ordinary graphite anodes. Be it because of the price of raw materials that go into batteries for performance electric vehicles now, or simply for the lack of necessary manufacturing technology or equipment, the high-nickel and silicon electrodes that bring about true cost, range, and performance improvements, are still to come for Tesla vehicles with the 4680 battery.

Even NIO, which is farther ahead in the development and mass production of a 150 kWh high-nickel battery that is supposed to propel its top ET5 and ET7 performance sedan versions for more than 620 miles on a charge, had to postpone their launch. Its battery maker WeLion was supposed to deliver the first mass-produced batch of 150 kWh semi-solid packs with high-nickel technology this month, but the launch of the top ET5 and ET7 models has now been stretched into 2023 as the technology needs further validation.



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Truss Prepares to Abandon Key Tax Cuts Following Market Turmoil

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“Has the government finally heeded the calls from markets and the Bank of England? Price action in gilts and the pound suggests markets believe so,” said Simon Harvey, head of FX analysis at Monex Europe. 

The plan to freeze corporation tax next year has come in for particular attention from detractors within Truss’s own Tories. Under a strategy set out by the previous Conservative administration, the levy on companies was due to rise to 25% from 19% in April. But scrapping that move was one of the key measures in Kwarteng’s fiscal plan announced Sept. 23.

The initial market reaction on Thursday suggests that a U-turn on corporation tax -- along with the bank’s greater buying activity this week -- could help ease any turbulence next week after the Bank of England halts its bond purchases on Friday. Investors will be focused on the details of the plans the government is drawing up, and that may determine whether the broad market rally can be sustained.

“Given investors are short, the reaction of sterling is not a surprise,” said Gareth Gettinby, portfolio manager at Aegon Asset Management. “Ultimately, the UK has an extremely negative external balance that remains reliant on foreign funding which remains a negative. So a short term bounce on government noise and then expect the currency to weaken.”



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UK 30-Year Yield Tops 5%, Pound Jumps as Confusion Grips Market

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“Bailey’s words did sound harsh but from the BOE’s perspective they need to sound stern,” said Pooja Kumra, rates strategist at Toronto-Dominion Bank. “The BOE has been very receptive to markets. If chaos continues we doubt that they will run away.”



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