sell! sell! sell!

[tiznow]

May be some sort of relief rally once queen Hillary wins than comes the doom and gloom .. At which point she and her status quo protectors can roll out all the various things that will be unleashed as the net crises unfolds.. "Never let a good crisis go to waste"..

they last thing "they" want is a potential loose cannon that may not play by the rules in the big house when the doom and gloom begins..

 

[tiznow]

Japan also running out of bonds to buy.. Approaching game over point to the QE bubble.. 36 trading days left to keep it afloat for Queen Hillary!

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[h=1]Bank of Japan Risk: Running Out of Bonds to Buy[/h]Japan’s central bank is facing a new problem: It could be running out of government bonds to buy.
The Bank of Japan is snapping up the equivalent of more than $750 billion worth of government debt a year in an effort to spur inflation and growth. At that rate, analysts say, banks could run out of government debt to sell within the next 18 months.
The looming scarcity is a powerful sign of the limits central banks face as they turn to ever-more aggressive means of stimulating their economies. The problem is mirrored in Europe, where self-imposed rules limit how many eurozone government bonds the European Central Bank can buy from individual governments. Facing a diminishing supply of sovereign bonds, the ECB started buying corporate debt in June. Some economists have even called for the ECB to start buying stocks. The central bank left its bond-buying program and interest-rate policy unchanged at its meeting Thursday.
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The Japanese central bank has fewer options if the country’s banks, which have to hold a certain amount of safe debt to use as collateral in everyday transactions, ever become unwilling to sell more of their holdings.
Its most obvious alternatives—pushing rates deeper into negative territory or buying other types of assets—have practical limitations. Meanwhile, the BOJ’s economic goals remain out of reach: Inflation is stubbornly low, and the yen has strengthened about 18% this year.
“Given the lack of assets to buy, that’s constraining the BOJ’s policy options,” said Frederic Neumann, co-head of Asian economics research at HSBC HoldingsPLC in Hong Kong. “If they want to increase easing, let alone maintain the current pace of easing, they have to think of other things to buy or other things to do.”
The BOJ holds about a third of Japan’s outstanding government bonds, a figure that analysts estimate could rise to 60% by the end of 2018. It is currently buying ¥80 trillion ($786.32 billion) worth of Japanese government bonds a year, roughly twice as much as the government is newly issuing.
Banks, meanwhile, held ¥94.7 trillion of JGBs with maturities over one year at the end of March. They use around ¥30 trillion worth as collateral when borrowing from the central bank, which leaves ¥64.7 trillion available for sale. Add it all up, and banks will run out of Japanese government debt in about a year and a half, according to Deutsche Securities Inc. in Japan.
Mr. Neumann predicts that the BOJ’s bond buying could face practical limits sooner—by the end of this year—which could force it to consider cutting interest rates again.
The BOJ’s negative-rate policy, announced Jan. 29, has drawn heavy criticism. In a speech Monday, Gov. Haruhiko Kuroda for the first time acknowledged the costs of negative interest rates to banks, which have complained that their profits have been squeezed at a time when loan demand is low, and pension funds, which are having trouble meeting their long-term obligations to pay out savers.
Following the ECB’s move into corporate debt would be tricky, as that market is relatively small in Japan.
The central bank has also recently been buying exchange-traded funds as another way to inject money into the economy. It now owns nearly 60% of assets managed by such funds in Japan, says Morningstar Inc., a level of ownership critics say is already distorting the market.
Any sign that the BOJ is hitting limits on government debt purchases would remove an important prop for the market. Japanese government bonds have rallied this year, largely because investors have been confident that the central bank will be a consistent buyer.



Indications that the BOJ may already be reducing its purchases of longer-dated JGBs pushed the yield on 10-year debt within a whisker of positive territory recently after nearly six months of negative yields. Investors caught off guard by the BOJ’s signals started selling, sending yields higher. Bond yields rise as their prices fall.
There is no minimum level of Japanese government bonds that banks must hold. In theory, they could sell all their holdings to the central bank.
In practice, banks have historically held at least 5% of their total assets in JGBs. That rose to 20% after 1999, when Japan’s zero interest rate policy spurred bond buying, and currently stands at 12% to 13% of total assets, according to Daiju Aoki, Japan economist at UBS in Tokyo.
Japanese government bonds represent 9% of total assets at the country’s biggest bank, Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group Inc., or ¥27 trillion. A senior bank official said the bank needs to keep ¥15 trillion worth of those bonds for collateral, although he didn’t elaborate on how it arrived at that figure.At Mizuho Financial Group Inc., Japan’s second-largest bank, JGBs make up just 5.4% of total assets. For Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group Inc., the third-largest bank, it is only 3.8%.
Mizuho said that the bank’s future JGB-management policy will depend on market trends, and that it doesn’t expect to further reduce its JGB holdings because of collateral needs. Sumitomo declined to comment.
—Atsuko Fukase and Gregor Stuart Hunter contributed to this article.
Write to Rachel Rosenthal at Rachel.Rosenthal@wsj.com and Suryatapa Bhattacharya at Suryatapa.Bhattacharya@wsj.com

 

[tiznow]

Japan's "decision" (aka are they cornered so much they can't dig deeper as they wish they could) due any minute...

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[h=1]Bank of Japan to reshape era of easy money[/h]

The Bank of Japan looks on the verge of trying something new, and that has investors on edge. Photo: Kiyoshi OtaThe Bank of Japan is at a crossroads, and the direction it takes this week will help determine the next phase of the era of ultra-loose monetary policies that has defined the post-GFC investment landscape and underpinned financial asset prices.
The BoJ meeting on Wednesday even promises to eclipse the usually pre-eminent market event: a US rates decision early Thursday morning.
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"Our global policy team point out that this week is probably the most important week before the US election," Bank of America-Merrill Lynch rates strategist Tony Morriss said.
"The signal from the Japanese bond market appears to be more important than expectations for the Fed in the near-term. We expect further normalisation from the Fed over time. That is well understood.
"There is more a question whether other major central banks are finally running into constraints to ease further below the zero bound."
After a three-and-a-half year unprecedented experiment with unconventional policy, a war against deflation is still not won in Japan but it is not through lack of trying.
Bank of Japan governor Haruhiko Kuroda came into office in March 2013 and has been battling relentlessly against deflation since. In October 2014, he doubled down on so-called "qualitative and quantitative easing", or its asset-buying program, known as QQE. Then in January this year, Mr Kuroda surprised economists by pushing some official rates below zero.
Yet inflation remains moribund in Japan, and deflation a constant threat. Consumer prices, excluding fresh food, fell 0.5 per cent over the year to July.
[h=2]Curbing the side effects[/h]Not only has Japan's monetary policy experiment failed to ignite inflation after decades of stagnation, Mr Kuroda has finally had to admit that it is now having unwelcome side effects, specifically by hurting bank profitability and reducing the ability of insurers and pension providers to fund future liabilities. Economists are also pointing to practical limits in how many more bonds the central bank can buy in its efforts to keep longer-term yields down.
Of particular concern to the BoJ is the flattening of the Japanese yield curve this year.
While the BoJ cut the interest rate on excess reserves by only 20 basis points, or 0.2 percentage points, in January, yields on 40-year Japanese government bond yields had fallen by almost 100 basis points to 0.06 per cent in early July, according to PIMCO.
The BoJ has promised a "comprehensive assessment" of its "QQE with negative rates" policy and whether and how it can be used to get to the 2 per cent inflation target "in the quickest possible time".
PIMCO's Japan head of portfolio management, Tomoya Masanao, believes the BoJ is moving on from the idea of a "neutral policy rate" as a guide to the appropriate level of monetary accommodation, to instead target a "neutral yield curve" that allows longer rates to be higher, thus relieving pressure on financial institutions, while keeping short-term rates down, and so maintaining the stimulatory effect on the economy.
Japanese policy makers thus appear now to be considering ways to engineer a steepening of the yield curve while convincing the market that they remain committed to driving inflation towards its 2 per cent target.
The bond market has clearly taken this message to heart: bond yields in Japan have moved higher in recent weeks, putting pressure on bond prices across the world – including our own. Over the past two weeks the yield on Australian 10-year government bonds has jumped from 1.829 per cent to 2.107 per cent.
[h=2]'A leader in central bank experimentation'[/h]How the BoJ achieves this, if it is indeed what it will target, is entirely unclear, but should become clearer by Wednesday this week. One idea is that it will announce a "reverse twist" operation, by signalling to the market that it will be buying fewer long-term bonds in and more short-term bonds – thereby steepening the curve.
"The problem with this is it means they will more quickly run out of bonds to buy," QIC director of research and strategy Katrina King said.
Ms King said it was possible that the BoJ would then have to introduce some flexibility in its 80 trillion yen annual bond-buying target. But that may send a disturbing message to a market already wondering whether central banks' extreme policies are reaching exhaustion point.
"The risk with this is that this is seen as 'running out of bullets', in which case the yen would rally and bonds would sell off."
So to temper this message, Ms King said, it's possible that the banks also cuts the official rate another 10 basis points, taking it to -0.2 per cent. "Although this has negative implications for banks, the hope is that the steeper curve allows bank net interest margins some relief," she said.
Whatever the bank unveils this week, its decisions are likely to reverberate through financial markets.
"The BoJ is a leader in central bank experimentation," Schroder Investment Management head of fixed income Simon Doyle said. As such, the release of the central bank's review of its policies "may give the market an understanding of the issues around QE and negative interest rates and potentially provide a road map for central bank activity going forward".
"Investors are most likely to be sidelined going into the meeting," Ms King added.
"If the BoJ succeeds in their messaging then the yield curve should steepen. If they manage to convince the market that they have sufficient levers to pull, then the yen will weaken, but I think this is a gargantuan task. The risk certainly is that the market concludes that monetary policy has reached its end – time for the baton to pass to fiscal."

 

[tiznow]

Later than usual.. Announced by now usually...

after draghi disappointed with news of we running outta bonds to buy.. My guess is Japan will do a mini cut further into NIRP just to make sure this pig stays afloat for Queen Hillary.. If they do nothing and basically say what draghi did (your in your own soon no more QE for you) ... risk of major carnage

 

[tiznow]

Longest wait for a #BOJ rate decision since October 2014, according to

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i give up bed time...

 

[tiznow]

Hmm didn't do shit.. Backed into a corner like ECB... End game of QE bubble is here...

Markets not doing much for now...

 

[tiznow]

Nevermind Kept rates same but did a few tweaks to keep this pig afloat for Queen Hillary markets up a tad...

Among the changes, the BOJ said it would introduce yield curve controls, eliminate the maturity range of its bond purchases and abandon its monetary base targets.

 

[tiznow]

[h=1]Chromium-6: 'Erin Brockovich' chemical threatens two-thirds of Americans[/h]In the 2000 biographical film about a legal clerk who brings a major utility company to its knees for poisoning residents of Hinkley, California, Erin Brockovich ended on a Hollywood high note with a $333m settlement from PG&E. But chromium-6 contamination of America’s drinking water is an ongoing battle the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is losing.
Nearly 200 million Americans across all 50 states are exposed to unsafe levels of chromium-6 or hexavalent chromium, a heavy metal known to cause cancer in animals and humans, according to a new report released Tuesday by the nonprofit research and advocacy organization Environmental Working Group (EWG).
Today, Brockovich says Hinkley wasn’t an isolated event.
“The water system in this country is overwhelmed and we aren’t putting enough resources towards this essential resource,” Brockovich wrote in an email to the Guardian. “We simply can’t continue to survive with toxic drinking water.”

We simply can’t continue to survive with toxic drinking water.
​

In their analysis of the EPA’s own data collected for the first nationwide test of chromium-6 contamination in US drinking water, the report’s co-authors Dr David Andrews and Bill Walker, senior scientist and managing editor of EWG, found that 12,000 Americans are at risk of getting cancer.
Drinking water in Phoenix, Arizona, has the highest concentration of chromium-6 contamination. Of the 80 water samples taken across the city – water that serves 1.5 million people – 79 showed average concentrations of 7.853 ppb. California scientists have recommended a public health goal of 0.02 ppb, but industry pressure led to the adoption in 2014 of a legal safe limit of 10 ppb.
“More than two-thirds of Americans’ drinking water supply has more chromium than the level that California scientists say is safe – a number that’s been confirmed by scientists in both New Jersey and North Carolina,” according to Walker.
“Despite this widespread contamination, the US currently has no national drinking water standard for chromium-6.”
Dr Andrews said: “Part of the reason behind writing this report is really highlighting how our regulatory system is broken – in its ability to incorporate new science, and its ability to publish and update drinking water standards.”
Hexavalent chromium is used in a variety of processes: leather tanning, chrome-plating and small cottage industries that use dyes and pigments. But few unleash as much of it into the environment as the electric power industry.
“In 2009, the electric power industry reported 10.6m pounds of chromium and chromium compounds were released to the environment,” according to a 2011 Earthjustice report. “These 10.6m pounds represent 24% of the total chromium and chromium compounds released by all industries in 2009.”
In 2008, the National Toxicology Program, part of the National Institutes of Health, released a report detailing how cancerous tumors developed in mice and rats that drank heavy doses of chromium-6.
According to EWG, based in part on this study, scientists at the California Office of Health Hazard Assessment concluded in 2010 that ingestion of tiny amounts of chromium-6 can cause cancer in people.
The Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, an advisory, non-regulatory agency formed to oversee hyper-toxic Superfund sites, reports long term oral exposure to unsafe levels of chromium-6 compounds are associated with gastrointestinal system cancers.
“The California scientists set a so-called public health goal of 0.02 parts per billion in tap water, the level that would pose negligible risk over a lifetime of consumption,” according to the EWG report.
“But in 2014, after aggressive lobbying by industry and water utilities, the state regulators adopted a legal limit 500 times the public health goal.”
EWG says the California Department of Public Health relied on a flawed analysis that “exaggerated the cost of treatment and undervalued the benefits of stricter regulation”.
The report also details how New Jersey and North Carolina scientists recommended a maximum chromium-6 concentration of 0.06 parts per billion following the 2008 report, meeting similar resistance that has impeded passage of drinking water standards.
In their first major chromium-6 report in 2010, EWG found chromium-6 contamination levels 600 times the public health goal in Norman, Oklahoma – the worst found in 31 of 35 US cities tested. Those tests, and a petition from environmental activists, triggered the EPA to add chromium-6 to the list of chemicals for which local utilities must test under the Unregulated Contaminant Monitoring Rule, according to EWG.
This rule requires the EPA to establish a new list every five years of 30 previously unregulated contaminants to be monitored by public water systems.
In the 20 years since the 1996 Safe Drinking Water Act amendments passed to monitor previously unregulated contaminants, the EPA ordered 81 contaminants to be monitored. To date, only perchlorate, a rocket fuel ingredient, has been recommended for regulation. Though two years behind schedule, implementation has yet to occur.
Asked what steps are necessary to fix the country’s broken drinking water program, Dr Andrews said: “One of the first steps has to occur here: EPA has to be able to complete its health risk assessment about the toxicity of chromium-6.”
EWG reports that in 2010, scientists in the EPA’s Integrated Risk and Information System (Iris) “completed but did not officially release a draft risk assessment that classified oral exposure to chromium-6 as ‘likely to be carcinogenic to humans’”.
But the American Chemistry Council, a powerful lobby for the chemical industry, requested that the EPA withhold the release until after studies funded by the Council and the Electric Power Research Institute could trace the biological mechanisms through which chromium-6 triggers cancer.
Dr Vincent Cogliano, director of Iris, initially resisted industry pressure. In an April, 2011 letter to Ann Mason at the American Chemistry Council, he congratulated their willingness to invest $4m in targeted research on hexavalent chromium, but he denied their request for a delay.
“Without prejudging the outcome of mechanistic studies being written up for publication,” he wrote, “it is entirely possible that granting your request could entail a delay of unknown duration with no public discussion or review of the strong new studies that are now available.”
But then an external review panel, found by the Center for Public Integrity to include three members who consulted for PG&E in the Brockovich case, convinced the EPA to grant the American Chemistry Council time to fund their own studies.
In 2012, the EPA quietly announced it had decided to delay the draft risk assessment following the review panel’s recommendation.
Cogliano wrote in an August 24 email to EWG: “We expect to release a draft health assessment document in 2017, though I wouldn’t use the word ‘early’.”
In an email statement to the Guardian, EPA said: “Ensuring safe drinking water for all Americans is a top priority for EPA.”
The EPA says that less than 2% of the latest national monitoring systems reported hexavalent chromium at levels exceeding California’s enforceable maximum contaminant level of 10ppb.
The EWG report, however, found that “even by that far-too-lax benchmark ... more than seven million Americans are served tap water from supplies that had at least one detection of chromium-6 higher than the only legal limit”.
Erin Brockovich urges Americans to disregard the EPA’s reassurances and to take a more active role in their communities to fix the country’s broken water supply.
“Superman’s not coming,” Brockovich said. “Be informed, ask questions, band together with your community and fight at the local level. And make sure you take your local elections as seriously as the national ones. The issues that most impact the average person are made at the local level.”

 

[tiznow]

[h=1]"This is very serious. Things are not meant to change this rapidly in nature.".. as I've said many times it's not the absolute temperature that is the issue its the rate of change (clearly caused by man/unprecedented pre industrial revolution outside of meteor type events) that is the problem .. Species need time to adapt.. And yes extinction is normal but not at rates occurring now... We are knocking Mother Nature outta equilibrium...

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He's watching the world melt[/h]By John D. Sutter, CNN
Updated 8:09 AM ET, Tue September 20, 2016

​

John D. Sutter is a columnist for CNN Opinion who focuses on climate change and social justice. Follow him on Snapchat, Facebook and email. The opinions expressed in this commentary are his.

(CNN)Every year about this time, there's a news story that irks the scientist George Divoky:

The Arctic has hit its summer sea ice minimum for the year ...
This year tied with 2007 as having the second smallest ice extent ever recorded ...

​

At its low point ... Arctic sea ice covered just 1.6 million square miles ...
For more than four decades, Divoky has spent his summers (mostly alone) on Cooper Island, north of the Alaska coast. He's watched the Arctic melt, and he's seen how those changes have devastated the black guillemot, a tiny bird he studies.
He doesn't like to see this monumental shift in the Arctic reduced to a matter of square miles or kilometers, as it of course was last week when the US National Snow and Ice Data Center announced Arctic sea ice hit a near-record minimum on September 10.
To him, it's about the dead birds he has to pluck from their nests and carry in his pockets. It's about the polar bears that now swarm his camp looking for food. It's about the fact an island once surrounded by ice is now surrounded by the sea.
"It's always looked at as being a physical loss," he told me. "No one thinks about the (biological world)."
It's an apt point, especially during a year that's poised to be the hottest on record. The consequences of climate change extend far beyond temperature thresholds and miles of sea ice lost. An Alaskan village I visited in 2009 recently voted to relocate because the permafrost is melting out from beneath it. Indian farmers are committing suicide amid drought. Scientists have attributed the deadly floods that ravaged Louisiana this summer to human-caused warming. And, shockingly, warming is fueling the "sixth extinction" in Earth's history, in which paleoecologists like Anthony Barnosky, of Stanford, say three-quarters of species could disappear.

Black guillemot populations on Cooper Island, Alaska, are crashing because of climate change, according to George Divoky.




Scientists say the Arctic could be free of sea ice in the summer by midcentury or sooner. "Regardless of when, it will be a profound climate shift," said Julienne Stroeve, a senior research scientist at the US National Snow & Ice Data Center.
Few of us see these dramatic changes firsthand the way Divoky does, though.
If we did, we'd realize climate change is about far more than numbers.
It's actually dismantling the living world.
Take Divoky, 70, and his birds. Black guillemots are faintly iridescent sea birds that can dive 30 meters (nearly 100 feet) beneath the surface of Arctic waters in search of food for themselves and for their chicks. When Divoky, who has a Ph.D. in animal biology from the University of Alaska Fairbanks, started studying these birds in the 1970s, he was working on a federal contract. He wasn't interested in climate change. Warming just happened to happen while he was there. Surprised by what he saw -- Arctic sea ice this year was just two-thirds the 1981-to-2010 average -- he devoted his life to monitoring this one bird on this one island, hoping his research would help the rest of us understand the consequences of a warming world.


In pictures: Photographing the beauty of the arctic


"I never thought about a day in the future when I would be able to be on the island and see no ice at all," he said.
The reason warming matters for black guillemots is simple: They eat Arctic cod, and Arctic cod like cold waters, particularly those covered by sea ice. As the summer sea ice has retreated from Cooper Island, so, too, have the cod, Divoky said. That means birds come back to their nests without food, or with other food sources that aren't as nutritious.
In the late 1980s, there were 200 pairs of nesting birds on Cooper Island. This year, Divoky counted only 100.
"You get very anxious and depressed" watching this unfold, he said. "It's like being in an animal shelter where you (thought) the animals were always adopted in the past, and now you realize they have to be euthanized."
The black guillemot isn't at risk for extinction yet. There are colonies in Russia, for example. But the trend line is scary. Divoky, whose work is funded largely by donations to his non-profit, Friends of Cooper Island, has what he calls the longest running data set on how climate change affects an Arctic species.
It's unlikely the missing birds are simply moving to other locations.
"Seabirds have extreme fidelity to their nest sites. For Black Guillemots nest site fidelity is greater than 95% with colony fidelity (at) nearly 100%," Divoky said. "Approximately 10% of the breeding birds die each winter ... The declines in the colony have come about due to lack of recruits to replace the birds lost over the winter."
On the island, only about half as many chicks are surviving as would under normal climate conditions. The birds also lay eggs earlier and mature birds weigh 220 grams now, he said, instead of 320 grams, as they did in the past.

George Divoky says he has the longest running data set to show how climate change is messing with an Arctic species.




"I would love it if things turned around, or somehow the population increased," Divoky told me. "Every year starts out with this great deal of hope. You see (the birds) courting and head-bobbing. You see them laying eggs -- this is the whole springtime rejuvenation. The eggs hatch, the chicks are really cute. But then some of them start dying, and that was something I never saw at any level for the first quarter-century of the study. Seeing it now is very disturbing."
Other research offers frightening clues about the biological consequences of Arctic melting, too. Jan van Gils, from the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research, has shown a migratory bird, the red knot,actually is shrinking in body size because of warming. Brendan Kelly, from the International Arctic Research Center at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, told me that ringed seals are struggling to make snow-and-ice caves for their young because the Arctic is warming so fast.
"I'm out here measuring eggs and weighing chicks and this is like being below deck on the Titanic," Divoky said.
"This is very serious. Things are not meant to change this rapidly in nature."
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Melting has changed Divoky's strategy for living in this harsh, remote environment, too. He built a polar bear fence because those animals are coming ashore more frequently as the sea ice, where they like to hunt, continues to melt. And while he used to be able to rely on "multiyear ice" for drinking water, now he has to cart freshwater in with him.
It can be hard for Divoky to convey the genuine sense of alarm he feels.
The Arctic is warming twice as fast as the rest of the planet. Entire ecosystems are changing. It drives him crazy that many people talk about climate change in a cool-calm-collected way, like it's some subtle, future happening.
He knows well that these shifts are dramatic and they're now.
"It really is a train wreck you can't look away from."
Yet, we usually do.

 

[tiznow]

When QE hits its limits... Only thing they can really do now is minor tweaking or move onto the next phase helicoptering money .. If Money helicopters are in our future they won't get airborne until latest bubble burst.. Won't be political will to do it till shit hits the fan..

post election/once they get queen Hillary in.. should be tank city time

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[h=1]Kuroda’s Journey From Shock-And-Awe to Bond Market Fine-Tuning - Bloomberg[/h]Bank of Japan Governor Haruhiko Kuroda stormed onto the global stage back in 2013 with the subtlety of a Metallica concert, electrifying markets with a shock-and-awe monetary expansion powered by increased purchases of Japanese government bonds.
On Wednesday, Kuroda seemed a little bit more like a jazz musician, riffing variations on established themes. It’s not the sort of stuff that quickens the hearts of investors.
Haruhiko Kuroda on Sept. 21.
Photographer: Kiyoshi Ota/Bloomberg
The BOJ refrained from another interest rate cut and instead pledged to bolster the long-end of the bond market’s yield curve. It’s a move that will help Japanese banks, pension funds and insurers cope in a less-than-zero rate environment, but disappointing to economists who had hoped for more dramatic action. At the same time, the central bank pledged to keep its monetary base -- bank cash reserves and currencies in circulation -- growing until after inflation exceeds a 2 percent target that was set back in 2013.
After years of sustained quantitative easing (QE), followed by a surprise decision in January to adopt a negative interest rate policy, Kuroda is now shifting his focus to the collateral effects of aggressive monetary easing. "We think central banks are finally waking up to the limits and risks of prolonged QE and negative interest rates policy," said Alberto Gallo, head of macro strategies at Algebris Investments in a note to clients.
[h=3]Deflation Fight[/h]Kuroda deserves a lot of credit for keeping Japan from falling into a deflationary spiral. Economic growth, however, has been uneven under his watch thanks at least in part to an ill-timed sales-tax hike by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s government in 2014 year that pushed the economy into a recession.
The BOJ’s 2 percent inflation target has also proven elusive thanks, in part, to a historic slump in energy prices in a very energy-dependent economy. Despite all the cheap money, companies aren’t borrowing and investing at impressive levels, nor are consumers spending robustly. The central bank’s bond-buying binge has blown out its balance sheet, raising questions about its sustainability.
Click here for a QuickTake Q&A on why the BOJ’s targeting the yield curve
"It’s hard not to see the BOJ statement as a further sign that it it is running out of ideas," said George Magnus, London-based senior independent economic adviser to UBS Group AG.
Instead, analysts say the focus needs to shift onto areas of economic policy well beyond the central bank’s control. Rather than more bond buying, Abe’s government needs to grasp thorny structural reforms like changes to labor market laws and steps to boost competition. The need for these sort of changes was given a new sense of urgency when a new round of fiscal stimulus announced by Abe in August largely underwhelmed.
"I do not think that the solution to Japan’s economic stagnation lies with changes in monetary policy," said Barry Bosworth, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington. "The larger problem is in the weak level of corporate investment, which when combined with high retained earnings has a major depressive effect on the economy."
With little political appetite for those measures, for now at least the focus remains on what the BOJ does next.
The Japanese central bank said its target for expanding the monetary base through asset purchases, previously set at 80 trillion yen ($780 billion) annually, may now fluctuate in the short term to enable policy makers to control bond yields. It also scrapped a target for the average maturity of its government bond holdings. Both moves will help the central bank manage the impact of lower long-term yields on Japanese banks.
As well, the BOJ released an comprehensive assessment of the central bank’s policy maneuvers which broadly gave a thumbs up to its actions, while acknowledging the side effects of low yields and negative interest rates.
[h=3]Elusive Goal[/h]On paper at least, the changes introduced by the BOJ are dramatic in one sense. It’s a sign of the times that a developed central bank is actually courting inflation. Likewise, the bank is showing some flexibility by shifting its focus to the yield curve and recognizing the side effects of negative rates.
Problem is, inflation is nowhere near 2 percent so its credibility is on the line if it continues to come up short. The BOJ economists insist that core inflation is now firmly entrenched in positive territory and blames external factors like the price of oil for keeping prices down. That’s true, but doesn’t mean they are any close to the target.
Japan’s core consumer prices fell in July at the fastest pace since Kuroda took the helm of the BOJ in March 2013.
Shane Oliver, head of investment strategy at Sydney-based AMP Capital Investors Ltd., said more dramatic monetary measures are needed, including the direct financing of fiscal stimulus by the central bank, the so-called helicopter money option. "I am a bit skeptical that without the adoption of helicopter money, the BOJ may continue to struggle to meet its inflation target," said Oliver.
Similarly, the promise to target the yield curve leaves wriggle room for how exactly the bank will implement that promise. A decision not to cut negative rates further could be seen as an acknowledge of the negative side effects of that policy.
[h=3]JGB King[/h]Markets took the BOJ’s decision in their stride. The yen’s move against the dollar was muted on Wednesday, though it remains up against the dollar by around 17 percent. It traded at 101.41 at 7:49 p.m. in Tokyo. The Topix stock index rose and 10-year government bond yields hit positive territory for the first time since March.
Kuroda used a later press conference to make clear that the bank is far from running low on ammunition and promised to unleash more stimulus if it is needed. The BOJ may yet decide to expand JGB purchases or cut the negative rate further as soon as its next meeting ending on Nov. 1.
Still, those pledges are starting to wear thin considering that the BOJ now owns more than a third of outstanding JGBs. The pace of its buying is draining the market of supply, and many commercial banks are running out of JGB inventory to sell.
"The BOJ placed a bet that it could change consumption- and investment-related behavior through monetary policy, and failed," said Jun Okumura, visiting scholar at Meiji Institute for Global Affairs in Tokyo.
Before it's here, it's on the Bloomberg Terminal. LEARN MORE

 

[tiznow]

Just banksters being bankster.. Little guys thrown under the bus...

amazeing how corrupt corporate America has become .. At what point will the little guys break and revolt en masse?

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[h=2]I called the Wells Fargo ethics line and was fired[/h]By Matt Egan September 21, 2016 09:17AM EDT


Millions of phony accounts. Fake bank card PIN numbers. Fictitious email accounts.
Wells Fargo admitted to firing 5,300 employees for engaging in these shocking tactics. The bank earlier this month paid $185 million in penalties and has since apologized.
Now CNNMoney is hearing from former Wells Fargo (WFC) workers around the country who tried to put a stop to these illegal tactics. Almost half a dozen workers who spoke with us say they paid dearly for trying to do the right thing: they were fired.


"They ruined my life," Bill Bado, a former Wells Fargo banker in Pennsylvania, told CNNMoney.
Bado not only refused orders to open phony bank and credit accounts. The New Jersey man called an ethics hotline and sent an email to human resources in September 2013, flagging unethical sales activities he was being instructed to do.
Eight days after that email, a copy of which CNNMoney obtained, Bado was terminated. The stated reason? Tardiness.

Related: Elizabeth Warren's epic takedown of Wells Fargo CEO
HR official describes 'retaliation'
Retaliating against whistleblowers is a major breach of trust. Ethics hotlines are exactly the kind of safeguards put in place to prevent illegal activity from taking place and provide refuge to employees from dangerous work environments.
Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf made precisely that point on Tuesday when he testified before angry Senators.
"Each team member, no matter where you are in the organization, is encouraged to raise their hands," Stumpf told lawmakers. He mentioned the anonymous ethics line, adding, "We want to hear from them."
But that's not the experience of some former Wells Fargo workers.
One former Wells Fargo human resources official even said the bank had a method in place to retaliate against tipsters. He said that Wells Fargo would find ways to fire employees "in retaliation for shining light" on sales issues. It could be as simple as monitoring the employee to find a fault, like showing up a few minutes late on several occasions.
"If this person was supposed to be at the branch at 8:30 a.m. and they showed up at 8:32 a.m, they would fire them," the former human resources official told CNNMoney, on the condition he remain anonymous out of fear for his career.
CNNMoney spoke to a total of four ex-Wells Fargo workers, including Bado, who believe they were fired because they tipped off the bank about unethical sales practices.
Another six former Wells Fargo employees told CNNMoney they witnessed similar behavior at Wells Fargo -- even though the company has a policy in place that is supposed to prevent retaliation against whistleblowers. CNNMoney has taken steps to confirm that the workers who spoke anonymously did work at Wells Fargo and in some cases interviewed colleagues who corroborated their reports.

"I endured harsh bullying ... defamation of character, and eventually being pinned for something I didn't do," said Heather Brock, who was fired earlier this month as a senior business banker at a Wells Fargo branch in Round Rock, Texas.
Related: Workers tell Wells Fargo horror stories
'That's retaliation'
One such former employee was fired after flagging issues directly to Stumpf, according to Senator Bob Menendez.
At the Senate hearing, Menendez read the New Jersey woman's 2011 email to Stumpf, where she described improper sales tactics she felt were "wrong."
"Did you read that email?" Menendez asked Stumpf.
"I don't remember that one," Stumpf replied.
"Okay, well she was fired. ... So much for the safe haven," Menendez said.
Several senators spoke about the plight of the mostly 5,300, low-level employees who were fired related to the scandal.
The firing certainly took a huge toll on Bado's life. It put a permanent stain on his securities license, scaring off other prospective bank employers. Today, the New Jersey man's house is on the verge of being foreclosed on and he's working part-time, at Shop-Rite.
"You wonder where the justice is," Bado said.
Ken Springer, a former FBI agent who runs a firm that offers a whistleblower hotline service, was alarmed by the allegations made by former Wells Fargo employees.
"That's retaliation. It's a big problem -- and a perfect example of what shouldn't happen," Springer said. "It looks like there's been a terrible breakdown of checks and balances at Wells Fargo."
In response to CNNMoney's report, a Wells Fargo spokeswoman said: "We do not tolerate retaliation against team members who report their concerns in good faith." She emphasized that employees are encouraged to immediately report unethical behavior to their manager, HR representative or 24-hour ethics line.
Related: Wells Fargo CEO denies orchestrated fraud
'Excessive tardiness' eight days after HR email
Wells Fargo confirmed to CNNMoney that Bado had worked there. However, the bank declined to comment on why Bado left and and on the ethics complaint with corresponding report number he cited in emails. "Everything submitted to the EthicsLine is investigated," a Wells Fargo spokeswoman said.
While ethics complaints are supposed to be confidential, documents show that Bado did speak out before he was fired. On September 19, 2013, Bado wrote an email to a Wells Fargo HR rep and copied his regional manager, where he detailed improper sales tactics.
Documents show Bado was fired -- for "excessive tardiness" -- just eight days later.
"I have been asked on several occasions to do things that I know are not ethical and would be grounds for discharge," Bado said in the email to HR.
He said a branch manager on "many occasions" asked him to send out a debit card, "pin it," and enroll customers in online banking -- "all without the customers (sic) request or knowledge." Those are precisely the same practices that regulators fined Wells Fargo for three years later and that senators grilled the bank over this week.
Lose, lose situation for Heather Brock
Brock, the business banker from Texas, told CNNMoney she experienced a similar situation. The 26-year-old single parent of two young boys was fired soon after she contacted the company's ethics line about illegal sales practices she witnessed.
Wells Fargo also confirmed Brock used to work at the company but declined to comment further.
Brock was fired earlier this month, with Wells Fargo accusing her of falsifying documents -- a charge Brock emphatically denies. Brock said the company bullied her into admitting she did something wrong.
A current Wells Fargo employee who works in Brock's branch vouched for her version of events.
"That's really scary when you're with a big corporation like this and HR doesn't have your back," said the current employee, who wished to remain anonymous so as not to get fired as well.
Brock is hoping her story forces meaningful change at Wells Fargo.
"You lose if you do complain and you lose if you don't. What does a powerless employee do?" Brock said.
-- To reach the author of this article email Matt.Egan@cnn.com

 

[tiznow]

No rate hike as obvious.. They can't "normalize" rates period too much debt.. Did ya buy that gold dip?

getting one last Hillary rally before the bubble burst...

 

[eek.]

Tiz, nature has always faced up to annihilation and triumphed in the end
Just because something is fluffy or cute is irrelevant

Give the angst a rest for a while, nature will annihilate humans if the situation arises, and all the "scientists" in the world won't change anything

As far as ICE is concerned, only a couple of slivers remain, and those slivers are naturally unstable anyway.
It's the last sliver on the top of your rum and coke... and its melting fast.

 

[eek.]

As far as our whacked out corrupt POS system is concerned?... well Super Trump will start the ball rolling!

 

[eek.]

Stop being a chicken hearted middle class liberal and vote Trump!

 

[tiznow]

Species Extinction rates are 1000x the norm (along with warming trend) ... Maybe just dumb luck happening as humans pillage the earth/correlation with beginning of industrial revolution ...

anyway we ants on a rock floating through space.. But if u care at all about the plight of mankind and beauty or earth in general.. You will agree how we live now is unsustainable and we are massively fucking up a good thing .

Also this thread just my venting thread.. I enjoy my short time on this earth doing whatwver i can do that floats my boat till I die.. overall just observing/commenting on mankinds stupidity

------

im libertarian

economically conservative (Both major parties support big government big corporations military industrial complex the fed corruption etc) and Socially liberal (do whatever u want as long as u not hurting anybody else including our planet)...

 

[eek.]

Change and evolution are normal, only the fittest survive Tiz

Vote Trump!

 

[tiznow]

Sounds like a great trump slogan lmao..

no no way in hell I could ever vote for either... Every election in us gets worse..

president overhyped anyway.. They a figurehead.. People in background push the policy... Presidents are puppets.. Obama "hope and change" or wait I'm establishment puppet nevermind .. Great example.. All the blacks rejoiced when he's elected 8 years later white/black pay gap worse as it's ever been.. Just funny watching all the nonsense.. As big government/fed policy flushed us down the drain..

until we limit terms or revolution throwing them all out.. nothing will change... career politicians will always be corrupt and beholden to special interests and not the people.. Just common sense.

 

[tiznow]

[h=1]Drug-Resistant Superbugs Are a 'Fundamental Threat', WHO Says - NBC News[/h]"We are running out of time."And while antibiotics can be miracle drugs, they've been abused and overused so much that they are often useless against bacteria that evolve much, much faster than humanity can invent new weapons.
On Wednesday, the United Nations General Assembly voted to take "a broad, coordinated approach" to go after antimicrobial resistance. "This is only the fourth time a health issue has been taken up by the U.N. General Assembly (the others were HIV, noncommunicable diseases, and Ebola)," the U.N. said.
Today, penicillin almost certainly would not help an Anne Miller. She'd at the least need an improved version of penicillin such as ampicillin, which has extra compounds added to counteract the tricks that bacteria have evolved to survive a round of antibiotic treatment.
Related: 'Nightmare Bacteria' Found in U.S.
Drug-resistant "superbugs" are now found virtually everywhere. They've developed as people pop antibiotics to treat colds, the flu, ear infections and various other ills caused by viruses and fungi that are not affected by the drugs. They grow in farm animals fed antibiotics not to treat disease, but to make them grow fatter and faster.
They're found in city sewer systems and in hospital sinks. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says in the U.S. alone, more than two million people are infected by drug-resistant germs each year, and 23,000 die of their infections. Globally, these antibiotic-resistant microbes kill 700,000 people a year.
The drug pipeline is not keeping up.
The last really new class of antibiotics was invented in 1984, according to the Pew Charitable Trusts. Every new antibiotic to hit the market since then - and there have not been many - is a variation on a decades-old design.
"If antibiotics were telephones, we would still be calling each other using clunky rotary dials and copper lines.""If antibiotics were telephones, we would still be calling each other using clunky rotary dials and copper lines," says Stefano Bertuzzi, CEO of the American Society for Microbiology.
"Antimicrobial resistance poses a fundamental threat to human health, development and security," Dr. Margaret Chan, director-general of the U.N.' s World Health Organization, said Wednesday.
"We are running out of time," she added.
Related: Inside the Lab Searching for the Next Superbug
The World Bank Group predicted this week that the economic damage wrought by antibiotic resistant infections will wipe between 1 percent and 3.8 percent off global domestic product by 2050.
"The scale and nature of this economic threat could wipe out hard-fought development gains and take us away from our goals of ending extreme poverty," said World Bank president Jim Yong Kim. "We must urgently change course to avert this potential crisis."

What's So Super About a Superbug?It's not a new issue. Public health experts, infectious disease doctors, patients and advocates have all been warning about the problem for two decades. But antibiotic overuse persists, and the superbugs continue to pop up.
The most recent is the mcr-1 gene, found on a little clip of DNA called a plasmid that various species of bacteria can pass around and share like an internet meme. It gives them resistance to a last-resort antibiotic called colistin.
Related: What's so Super About Superbugs
The U.N. plans to lead a global effort to help countries fight the threat. While some are struggling just to provide clean water to their populations, others, like the United States, are fighting epidemics that reach into flagship hospitals and that don't discriminate between rich and poor.
Vaccines can help, as can better hygiene, safe water and better use of antibiotics.
On-the-spot tests that indicate right away whether a patient has a bacterial infection or a virus can help doctors fight back against demands for a prescription, and can help an anxious patient feel confident that drugs really won't help their wailing child's ear infection, says American Society for Microbiology President Susan Sharp.
Experts also say the wholesale use of antibiotics in farm animals has to stop. Eighty percent of the world's antibiotics now go into animal feed, and these animals are pooping out superbugs that have evolved in their guts. The mcr-1 gene has been found in slaughterhouses and pet stores.
The White House has embraced the issue, and the U.N. wants to press countries around the world to do the same — especially since germs don't respect borders.
Related: Here's Why Superbugs Scare Doctors
Report after report has done little to stop the clamor for antibiotics and even doctors are failing to heed the warnings. A third of antibiotic prescriptions written in the U.S. are for viral infections, the CDC says.
"We clearly aren't moving the needle," Sharp says. She says it will take an education campaign on the scale of the ongoing effort to let people know about the dangers of tobacco.
"Patients are not aware that there are side effects," she said. 'Even when you do need them, there are side effects." Those effects range from diarrhea to antibiotic resistance.
"I want people to wake up and realize that this isn't something that happens to other people."Every time someone uses an antibiotic, the bacteria in their body begin to evolve. It's impossible to wipe out every single bacterium in the body, so those that survive are stronger, and can not only re-infect the patient, but can be passed to others.
That means the antibiotic doesn't work as well the next time.
Related: Antibiotic Resistance Hurts Healthy Kids
The outcome can be tragic. Just ask Everly Macario, whose baby son, Simon, died in 2004 from a methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) infection.
"Simon woke up not acting like himself and my husband was really worried, so he actually decided to take him to the emergency room," Macario told NBC News.
The previously bright, healthy year-and-a-half-old baby was dead within a day.
"It's a parent's worst nightmare," said Macario, who has now become an advocate for the Infectious Diseases Society of America.
"I'm a few blocks away from the best hospital, smartest, most brilliant doctors with all the technology," added Macario, who lives in Chicago. She said Simon was fully vaccinated, breast-fed and had no serious health problems.
"I want people to wake up and realize that this isn't something that happens to other people."

 

[tiznow]

Manufacturing PMI came in weaker than expected macro data deterioration trend continues...

31 and change more trading days to go to keep it afloat for Queen Hillary!