Stratfor: US Will Lead Global Economic Recovery

Here's a nice contrarian viewpoint put forth by Stratfor - they believe the US will be the first country to lead the world's global economic recovery, starting as early as the 3rd quarter of this year. And then Asia's recovery won't be far behind.

Stratfor produces excellent analysis about geopolitical ongoings...basically a "personal CIA" delivered to your email box. They are long term bullish on America, so I find their views to be an interesting counterbalance to most of the stuff I read.

How Geography Drives the Global Economy

Here's a great piece by our friends at Stratfor about the effect that geography has played in the economic development of four key regions - the US, Russia, China, and Europe. Stratfor has a very bullish stance on the US - both historically, and looking into the future - which is counter to many of the opinions we reference in this space - so I find them to be a very intelligent counterpoint to bearish US sentiments.

Also be sure to check out the portion about China - author Peter Zeihan seems to believe this Chinese recovery will stall as soon as they run out of stimulus dollars to toss into the economy. I've heard other intelligent folks also mention that China has a lot of "funny money" loans geared towards full employment...much like Japan did before their bubble burst.

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The Geography of Recession

By Peter Zeihan, Stratfor

The global recession is the biggest development in the global system in the year to date. In the United States, it has become almost dogma that the recession is the worst since the Great Depression. But this is only one of a wealth of misperceptions about whom the downturn is hurting most, and why.

Let’s begin with some simple numbers.

As one can see in the chart, the U.S. recession at this point is only the worst since 1982, not the 1930s, and it pales in comparison to what is occurring in the rest of the world. (Figures for China have not been included, in part because of the unreliability of Chinese statistics, but also because the country’s financial system is so radically different from the rest of the world as to make such comparisons misleading. For more, read the China section below.)

But didn’t the recession begin in the United States? That it did, but the American system is far more stable, durable and flexible than most of the other global economies, in large part thanks to the country’s geography. To understand how place shapes economics, we need to take a giant step back from the gloom and doom of the current moment and examine the long-term picture of why different regions follow different economic paths.

The United States and the Free Market

The most important aspect of the United States is not simply its sheer size, but the size of its usable land. Russia and China may both be similar-sized in absolute terms, but the vast majority of Russian and Chinese land is useless for agriculture, habitation or development. In contrast, courtesy of the Midwest, the United States boasts the world’s largest contiguous mass of arable land — and that mass does not include the hardly inconsequential chunks of usable territory on both the West and East coasts.

Second is the American maritime transport system. The Mississippi River, linked as it is to the Red, Missouri, Ohio and Tennessee rivers, comprises the largest interconnected network of navigable rivers in the world. In the San Francisco Bay, Chesapeake Bay and Long Island Sound/New York Bay, the United States has three of the world’s largest and best natural harbors. The series of barrier islands a few miles off the shores of Texas and the East Coast form a water-based highway — an Intercoastal Waterway — that shields American coastal shipping from all but the worst that the elements can throw at ships and ports.

The real beauty is that the two overlap with near perfect symmetry. The Intercoastal Waterway and most of the bays link up with agricultural regions and their own local river systems (such as the series of rivers that descend from the Appalachians to the East Coast), while the Greater Mississippi river network is the circulatory system of the Midwest. Even without the addition of canals, it is possible for ships to reach nearly any part of the Midwest from nearly any part of the Gulf or East coasts. The result is not just a massive ability to grow a massive amount of crops — and not just the ability to easily and cheaply move the crops to local, regional and global markets — but also the ability to use that same transport network for any other economic purpose without having to worry about food supplies.

The implications of such a confluence are deep and sustained. Where most countries need to scrape together capital to build roads and rail to establish the very foundation of an economy, transport capability, geography granted the United States a near-perfect system at no cost. That frees up U.S. capital for other pursuits and almost condemns the United States to be capital-rich. Any additional infrastructure the United States constructs is icing on the cake. (The cake itself is free — and, incidentally, the United States had so much free capital that it was able to go on to build one of the best road-and-rail networks anyway, resulting in even greater economic advantages over competitors.)

Third, geography has also ensured that the United States has very little local competition. To the north, Canada is both much colder and much more mountainous than the United States. Canada’s only navigable maritime network — the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence Seaway —is shared with the United States, and most of its usable land is hard by the American border. Often this makes it more economically advantageous for Canadian provinces to integrate with their neighbor to the south than with their co-nationals to the east and west.

Similarly, Mexico has only small chunks of land, separated by deserts and mountains, that are useful for much more than subsistence agriculture; most of Mexican territory is either too dry, too tropical or too mountainous. And Mexico completely lacks any meaningful river system for maritime transport. Add in a largely desert border, and Mexico as a country is not a meaningful threat to American security (which hardly means that there are not serious and ongoing concerns in the American-Mexican relationship).

With geography empowering the United States and hindering Canada and Mexico, the United States does not need to maintain a large standing military force to counter either. The Canadian border is almost completely unguarded, and the Mexican border is no more than a fence in most locations — a far cry from the sort of military standoffs that have marked more adversarial borders in human history. Not only are Canada and Mexico not major threats, but the U.S. transport network allows the United States the luxury of being able to quickly move a smaller force to deal with occasional problems rather than requiring it to station large static forces on its borders.

Like the transport network, this also helps the U.S. focus its resources on other things.
Taken together, the integrated transport network, large tracts of usable land and lack of a need for a standing military have one critical implication: The U.S. government tends to take a hands-off approach to economic management, because geography has not cursed the United States with any endemic problems. This may mean that the United States — and especially its government — comes across as disorganized, but it shifts massive amounts of labor and capital to the private sector, which for the most part allows resources to flow to wherever they will achieve the most efficient and productive results.

Laissez-faire capitalism has its flaws. Inequality and social stress are just two of many less-than-desirable side effects. The side effects most relevant to the current situation are, of course, the speculative bubbles that cause recessions when they pop. But in terms of long-term economic efficiency and growth, a free capital system is unrivaled. For the United States, the end result has proved clear: The United States has exited each decade since post-Civil War Reconstruction more powerful than it was when it entered it. While there are many forces in the modern world that threaten various aspects of U.S. economic standing, there is not one that actually threatens the U.S. base geographic advantages.

Is the United States in recession? Of course. Will it be forever? Of course not. So long as U.S. geographic advantages remain intact, it takes no small amount of paranoia and pessimism to envision anything but long-term economic expansion for such a chunk of territory. In fact, there are a number of factors hinting that the United States may even be on the cusp of recovery.

Russia and the State

If in economic terms the United States has everything going for it geographically, then Russia is just the opposite. The Russian steppe lies deep in the interior of the Eurasian landmass, and as such is subject to climatic conditions much more hostile to human habitation and agriculture than is the American Midwest. Even in those blessed good years when crops are abundant in Russia, it has no river network to allow for easy transport of products.

Russia has no good warm-water ports to facilitate international trade (and has spent much of its history seeking access to one). Russia does have long rivers, but they are not interconnected as the Mississippi is with its tributaries, instead flowing north to the Arctic Ocean, which can support no more than a token population. The one exception is the Volga, which is critical to Western Russian commerce but flows to the Caspian, a storm-wracked and landlocked sea whose delta freezes in the winter (along with the entire Volga itself). Developing such unforgiving lands requires a massive outlay of funds simply to build the road and rail networks necessary to achieve the most basic of economic development. The cost is so extreme that Russia’s first ever intercontinental road was not completed until the 21st century, and it is little more than a two-lane path for much of its length. Between the lack of ports and the relatively low population densities, little of Russia’s transport system beyond the St. Petersburg/Moscow corridor approaches anything that hints of economic rationality.

Russia also has no meaningful external borders. It sits on the eastern end of the North European Plain, which stretches all the way to Normandy, France, and Russia’s connections to the Asian steppe flow deep into China. Because Russia lacks a decent internal transport network that can rapidly move armies from place to place, geography forces Russia to defend itself following two strategies. First, it requires massive standing armies on all of its borders. Second, it dictates that Russia continually push its boundaries outward to buffer its core against external threats.

Both strategies compromise Russian economic development even further. The large standing armies are a continual drain on state coffers and the country’s labor pool; their cost was a critical economic factor in the Soviet fall. The expansionist strategy not only absorbs large populations that do not wish to be part of the Russian state and so must constantly be policed — the core rationale for Russia’s robust security services — but also inflates Russia’s infrastructure development costs by increasing the amount of relatively useless territory Moscow is responsible for.

Russia’s labor and capital resources are woefully inadequate to overcome the state’s needs and vulnerabilities, which are legion. These endemic problems force Russia toward central planning; the full harnessing of all economic resources available is required if Russia is to achieve even a modicum of security and stability. One of the many results of this is severe economic inefficiency and a general dearth of an internal consumer market. Because capital and other resources can be flung forcefully at problems, however, active management can achieve specific national goals more readily than a hands-off, American-style model. This often gives the impression of significant progress in areas the Kremlin chooses to highlight.

But such achievements are largely limited to wherever the state happens to be directing its attention. In all other sectors, the lack of attention results in atrophy or criminalization. This is particularly true in modern Russia, where the ruling elite comprises just a handful of people, starkly limiting the amount of planning and oversight possible. And unless management is perfect in perception and execution, any mistakes are quickly magnified into national catastrophes. It is therefore no surprise to STRATFOR that the Russian economy has now fallen the furthest of any major economy during the current recession.

China and Separatism

China also faces significant hurdles, albeit none as daunting as Russia’s challenges. China’s core is the farmland of the Yellow River basin in the north of the country, a river that is not readily navigable and is remarkably flood prone. Simply avoiding periodic starvation requires a high level of state planning and coordination. (Wrestling a large river is not the easiest thing one can do.) Additionally, the southern half of the country has a subtropical climate, riddling it with diseases that the southerners are resistant to but the northerners are not. This compromises the north’s political control of the south.

Central control is also threatened by China’s maritime geography. China boasts two other rivers, but they do not link to each other or the Yellow naturally. And China’s best ports are at the mouths of these two rivers: Shanghai at the mouth of the Yangtze and Hong Kong/Macau/Guangzhou at the mouth of the Pearl. The Yellow boasts no significant ocean port. The end result is that other regional centers can and do develop economic means independent of Beijing.

With geography complicating northern rule and supporting southern economic independence, Beijing’s age-old problem has been trying to keep China in one piece. Beijing has to underwrite massive (and expensive) development programs to stitch the country together with a common infrastructure, the most visible of which is the Grand Canal that links the Yellow and Yangtze rivers. The cost of such linkages instantly guarantees that while China may have a shot at being unified, it will always be capital-poor.

Beijing also has to provide its autonomy-minded regions with an economic incentive to remain part of Greater China, and “simple” infrastructure will not cut it. Modern China has turned to a state-centered finance model for this. Under the model, all of the scarce capital that is available is funneled to the state, which divvies it out via a handful of large state banks. These state banks then grant loans to various firms and local governments at below the cost of raising the capital. This provides a powerful economic stimulus that achieves maximum employment and growth — think of what you could do with a near-endless supply of loans at below 0 percent interest — but comes at the cost of encouraging projects that are loss-making, as no one is ever called to account for failures. (They can just get a new loan.) The resultant growth is rapid, but it is also unsustainable. It is no wonder, then, that the central government has chosen to keep its $2 trillion of currency reserves in dollar-based assets; the rate of return is greater, the value holds over a long period, and Beijing doesn’t have to worry about the United States seceding.

Because the domestic market is considerably limited by the poor-capital nature of the country, most producers choose to tap export markets to generate income. In times of plenty this works fairly well, but when Chinese goods are not needed, the entire Chinese system can seize up. Lack of exports reduces capital availability, which constrains loan availability. This in turn not only damages the ability of firms to employ China’s legions of citizens, but it also removes the primary reason the disparate Chinese regions pay homage to Beijing. China’s geography hardwires in a series of economic challenges that weaken the coherence of the state and make China dependent upon uninterrupted access to foreign markets to maintain state unity. As a result, China has not been a unified entity for the vast majority of its history, but instead a cauldron of competing regions that cleave along many different fault lines: coastal versus interior, Han versus minority, north versus south.

China’s survival technique for the current recession is simple. Because exports, which account for roughly half of China’s economic activity, have sunk by half, Beijing is throwing the equivalent of the financial kitchen sink at the problem. China has force-fed more loans through the banks in the first four months of 2009 than it did in the entirety of 2008. The long-term result could well bury China beneath a mountain of bad loans — a similar strategy resulted in Japan’s 1991 crash, from which Tokyo has yet to recover. But for now it is holding the country together. The bottom line remains, however: China’s recovery is completely dependent upon external demand for its production, and the most it can do on its own is tread water.

Discordant Europe

Europe faces an imbroglio somewhat similar to China’s.

Europe has a number of rivers that are easily navigable, providing a wealth of trade and development opportunities. But none of them interlinks with the others, retarding political unification. Europe has even more good harbors than the United States, but they are not evenly spread throughout the Continent, making some states capital-rich and others capital-poor. Europe boasts one huge piece of arable land on the North European Plain, but it is long and thin, and so occupied by no fewer than seven distinct ethnic groups.
These groups have constantly struggled — as have the various groups up and down Europe’s seemingly endless list of river valleys — but none has been able to emerge dominant, due to the webwork of mountains and peninsulas that make it nigh impossible to fully root out any particular group. And Europe’s wealth of islands close to the Continent, with Great Britain being only the most obvious, guarantee constant intervention to ensure that mainland Europe never unifies under a single power.

Every part of Europe has a radically different geography than the other parts, and thus the economic models the Europeans have adopted have little in common. The United Kingdom, with few immediate security threats and decent rivers and ports, has an almost American-style laissez-faire system. France, with three unconnected rivers lying wholly in its own territory, is a somewhat self-contained world, making economic nationalism its credo. Not only do the rivers in Germany not connect, but Berlin has to share them with other states. The Jutland Peninsula interrupts the coastline of Germany, which finds its sea access limited by the Danes, the Swedes and the British. Germany must plan in great detail to maximize its resource use to build an infrastructure that can compensate for its geographic deficiencies and link together its good — but disparate — geographic blessings. The result is a state that somewhat favors free enterprise, but within the limits framed by national needs.

And the list of differences goes on: Spain has long coasts and is arid; Austria is landlocked and quite wet; most of Greece is almost too mountainous to build on; it doesn’t get flatter than the Netherlands; tiny Estonia faces frozen seas in the winter; mammoth Italy has never even seen an icebreaker. Even if there were a supranational authority in Europe that could tax or regulate the banking sector or plan transnational responses, the propriety of any singular policy would be questionable at best.

Such stark regional differences give rise to such variant policies that many European states have a severe (and understandable) trust deficit when it comes to any hint of anything supranational. We are not simply taking about the European Union here, but rather a general distrust of anything cross-border in nature. One of the many outcomes of this is a preference for using local banks rather than stock exchanges for raising capital. After all, local banks tend to use local capital and are subject to local regulations, while stock exchanges tend to be internationalized in all respects. Spain, Italy, Sweden, Greece and Austria get more than 90 percent of their financing from banks, the United Kingdom 84 percent and Germany 76 percent — while for the United States it is only 40 percent.

And this has proved unfortunate in the extreme for today’s Europe. The current recession has its roots in a financial crisis that has most dramatically impacted banks, and European banks have proved far from immune. Until Europe’s banks recover, Europe will remain mired in recession. And since there cannot be a Pan-European solution, Europe’s recession could well prove to be the worst of all this time around.

US Bailout Price Tag Heading for $10+ Trillion(!)

The Real Cost of the 2008 Recession
By Olivier Garret, CEO,
The Casey Report - www.caseyresearch.com

It took the statisticians of the National Bureau of Economic Research almost a year to confirm what the rest of us already knew, that the US registered a significant decline in economic activity, thus officially entering a period of recession. While I am pleased that the members of NBER take their duties seriously, thereby ensuring that they don’t leap to any hasty conclusions, I only wish that similar moderation could be displayed by their colleagues at the Fed and the Treasury.

Unfortunately, the facts prove otherwise. Three months before the recession was officially declared, Paulson and Bernanke have embarked on the largest bailout program ever conceived with the blessing of a lame-duck president and a complicit Congress - a program which so far will cost taxpayers $8.5 trillion. This staggering sum encompasses: loans backed by worthless assets ($2.3T), equity investments in bankrupt companies with negative net worth ($3.0T), and guarantees on crumbling derivatives and other hollow collateral ($3.2T).

Back in September I was stunned that Paulson was able to make his case and win the support of Congress for a $700 billion bailout package (more than the total war spending in Iraq to date).

How could Americans (or more accurately, their representatives) agree to give such a broad mandate with so few checks and balances? Have we become completely numb?

While I realize that many of our compatriots have been running large credit card balances and interest-only mortgages with little thought as to how they would repay their debt, one would expect a little more restraint when dealing with the financial future of the largest economy in the world.

Operating under the assumption that our largest financial institutions are “too big to fail”, in the span of a few weeks we went from pledging to spend $1 trillion to $3 trillion – a commitment which then grew to $5 trillion before ballooning to a staggering $8.5 trillion.

At the rate we are going, we will be dealing with double digits – in trillions- before the end of the year.

And while all off that money is not yet spent, make no mistake - these are real commitments with serious liabilities attached to them.

I have heard the argument that an equity infusion is not the same as spending money. While I would agree that in an arms-length transaction this might actually be the case, our government is definitely paying a large premium. What is the real value of Citicorp or AIG? Since they are quasi-bankrupt (and would be totally bankrupt without massive injections from the Fed), a reasonable businessperson might pay a token price for their equity and the assumption of their enormous liabilities.

Before doing so however, a buyer would have to see some significant value in buying these entities as a continuing business. In most cases, a buyer would not want to assume the company’s liabilities but would prefer to buy selective unencumbered assets in a bankruptcy proceeding. Any money our government pays above what a reasonable person would pay in an arms-length transaction is real spending and should more accurately be called a grant.

While defenders of the too-big-to-fail policies argue that providing guarantees is not the same as granting money, the reality is that these guarantees are necessary to prevent the collapse of financial institutions currently lacking the necessary collateral to meet their loan covenants. Should their loans be called, we could actually find out the real value of their assets.

The fact is that in-spite of Paulson’s and Bernanke’s efforts, deleveraging is already happening. Although at a slower pace, one asset class after another is being adjusted down towards its intrinsic value, which is usually not much. Make no mistake; many of these guarantees will eventually be called in by lenders. In due time, unless our government is able to inflates its way out of this bottomless pit, it will have to honor most of these guarantees.

So how does $8.5 trillion dollars compare with the cost of some of the major conflicts and programs initiated by the US government since its inception? To try and grasp the enormity of this figure, let’s look at some other financial commitments undertaken by our government in the past:

As illustrated above, one can see that in today’s dollar, we have already committed to spending levels that surpass the cumulative cost of all of the major wars and government initiatives since the American Revolution.

Recently, the Congressional Research Service estimated the cost of all of the major wars our country has fought in 2008 dollars. The chart above shows that the entire cost of WWII over four to five years was less than half the current pledges made by Paulson and Bernanke in the last three months!

In spite of years of conflict, the Vietnam and the Iraq wars have each cost less than the bailout package that was approved by Congress in two weeks. The Civil War that devastated our country had a total price tag (for both the Union and Confederacy) of $60.4 billion, while the Revolutionary War was fought for a mere $1.8 billion.

In its fifty or so years of existence, NASA has only managed to spend $885 billion – a figure which got us to the moon and beyond.

The New Deal had a price tag of only $500 billion. The Marshall Plan that enabled the reconstruction of Europe following WWII for $13 billion, comes out to approximately $125 billion in 2008 dollars. The cost of fixing the S&L crisis was $235 billion.

The best deal ever for a government program was the Louisiana Purchase, a deal with the French that gave us 23% of the surface of today’s US for only $15 million ($284 million in today’s dollars). Why couldn’t Paulson and Bernanke display the financial acumen of a Thomas Jefferson?

How will our country repay its debts? The current bailout represents 62% of our GDP. Our current deficit of almost $11 trillion may exceed our GDP next year.
Recently the Treasury has been able to place new debt; investors have liquidated equities and bonds and sought refuge in the relative safety of the dollar and government bonds.

As we move forward however, our government will need to attract trillions of dollars annually to fund its programs and commitments. The foreigners who have financed our irresponsible spending for many years will no longer be able to afford it, let alone finance more of our reckless behavior.

As a matter of fact, several countries have already announced their own bailout packages to prop up their domestic economy. And, unlike during WWII, when Americans invested their savings to support the war effort and fund our government’s deficit, our citizens are in debt themselves with no savings left to invest.

In the near future, the Fed will have no choice but to turn on the printing presses and start operating them around the clock to create the money that can’t be raised in the capital market.

These actions will lead to a significant debasement of the dollar and a major appreciation of gold and all commodities (real assets).

Once this inflationary cycle starts, foreigners will realize that their investments in T-bills are depreciating rapidly. There will be a massive exodus that will put more pressure on the dollar and on interest rates. Our weakened US economy will be faced with the rising cost of capital and a painful period of stagflation. Trillions of dollars will have been wasted. Our government will have mortgaged America and the ensuing debt will have to be paid by future generations.

Not a very bright picture, to be sure, but the Casey Research team strongly believes that there are opportunities in every crisis. Preserving your assets and even profiting in times of crisis by making the trend your friend is the focus of Casey’s flagship publication, The Casey Report. We have helped subscribers get positioned in commodities in the late ‘90s, buy grains in 2006, and short financial stocks 18 months ago… resulting in double- and often triple-digit returns.

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Chinese Bailout May Send US Interest Rates Higher

Over the weekend, China announced a $586 billion "stimulus plan" for its slowing economy.

China is in a precarious position as the world economy grinds to a halt. Out of it's 1.3 billion people, most have not participated in the economic boom the greater country has experienced.

Let me know if this sounds familiar - the rich have gotten richer, while the poor have stayed, well, relatively poor. As a side note, you can see there is nothing unique, wrong, or evil about this phenomenon that has taken place in the US. It's the way of nature - the greater the progress, the more of a gap that develops between the haves and have nots - a topic we could explore at great length in and of itself.

Back to China - the majority of the population still lives in the countryside, and the majority of the population is still poor. And they do not like seeing their fellow countrymen get rich without their fair share (sound familiar again?)

To this point, the Chinese government has been able to pacify the masses with sufficient government bread and circuses, as long as the economy continues to hum. But the Chinese state, as currently constituted, may not be able to survive a deep recession, at least without a potential revolution from its countryside.

Historically, most Chinese uprisings originate from the countryside. Expect the Chinese government to do whatever is necessary to prevent a severe slowdown. They must establish domestic demand for their products and stop relying on exports, and they must do it soon.

I think they'll be able to hold things together. Unlike the US, the balance sheet of China (both consumers and the greater government) is quite plush right now. The Chinese save a lot of their money, and they have sufficient capital to get through this - not to mention if/when they really catch on to credit cards, which we saw evidence of earlier this summer.

So what does this all have to do with interest rates in the US? The Chinese government will have less money to stash in US Treasuries - which will put a significant dent in the demand for US Treasuries - which should send rates up, up, and up.

And how about the supply side of the equation? Looks like that's about to skyrocket also. From Bloomberg: "The US government's borrowing needs will almost double to $2 trillion this fiscal year, prompting the Treasury to revive three-year notes and hold more frequent sales of 10- and 30-year debt."

Add these to reasons that I previously outlined, and it appears we have a recipe for skyrocketing long term interest rates.

How can you participate in this trade? I'd suggest looking at the ETF TBT, which was suggested by several of our readers here, and probably the easiest way to short long-dated treasuries. By buying TBT, you are essentially placing a leveraged short on long-dated treasuries.

TLT is another potential play - it's the inverse of TBT, so you'd want to short it. For what it's worth, legendary trader Dennis Gartman said he prefers a long TBT position to a short TLT position.