Lewis Wickes Hine Breaker Boys January 1911 South Pittston, Pa. "Breaker boys working in Ewen Breaker of Pennsylvania Coal Co."

The President of the European Central Bank, Mario Draghi, looks more and more like the bad guy from the B-rated horror movie series Saw with every passing day. Jigsaw was his name. Or maybe I should say "is" his name, because that series apparently never ends just like the tortured European sovereign debt and banking crises. For those unfamiliar, the premise behind the movie was that Jigsaw would create extremely uncomfortable situations for people, both psychologically and physically, and then watch how they react.

It started off with people who had to saw off their arms, gouge out their eyeballs or murder another person to escape from some sort of death trap. The second movie made the scenarios more complex and had people shoving other people into pits full of dirty needles to reach a key that unlocks a door in a house that leads to yet another booby-trapped room. There were another five or six movies after that one which I didn’t feel inclined to watch, but I imagine the premise didn’t change much.

It was all originally supposed to be about an old cancer patient (Jigsaw) who teaches others about the true value of life in clever ways, but was really just about another pathetic, sadistic man who manufactures impossible situations and gets off on watching other people suffer. Sounds a lot like what’s going on in Europe, huh? By now, everyone and their pet dogs are familiar with the pan-European motto – AUSTERITY OR DIE!

We cut off the limbs to save the core and throw our fellow man under the bus, because they tell us that those are our only collective choices. Mario "Jigsaw" Draghi, especially, has been cast in the role of the wise old man who serves as the “neutral” arbiter of the European Monetary Union. However, when we look beneath the surface, it is clear that he is anything but neutral, and is simply running a rigged game for the benefit of the major European banks (with the willing aid of technocratic politicians such as Lucas Papademos and Mario "Three Card" Monti).

Draghi constantly repeats the message that fiscal/structural adjustment (austerity) is both the only and the best way to preserve the finances of peripheral EU nations, and miraculously make them competitive in the global economy. That is a false choice, plain and simple. The goal should not be to preserve the Eurozone in its current form, because that only benefits a very small and elite group of corporate executives. Requiring painful austerity in the name of that goal is nothing more than a torturous and sadistic exercise involving millions of people, under the guise of acting under some sort of eternal economic wisdom.

While the Eurocrats like Mario preach on about the virtues of responsible finance, they will simultaneously bail out large financial institutions who have clearly been the most reckless lenders AND borrowers of them all. What else do you call it when the ECB gradually cuts its interest rate for bank loans to zero, subsidizes unlimited euro for dollar liquidity swaps with these banks, purchases their toxic assets on the secondary market, accepts all manner of distressed collateral from them and makes up its own rules as the game progresses?

Most recently, the ECB has decided that it will simply swap the Greek bonds on its balance sheet for entirely new ones that are immune to collective actions clauses, which means the ECB will not be forced to take any losses on its Greek bonds while investors in the private sector will. Some analysts have already pointed out that this move makes a mockery out of existing contract law and will further crowd out private investment in peripheral sovereign debt. That is certainly true and the reason is outlined below by Joseph Coterrill for FT Alphaville.

ECB seniority and dirty hands

 

There’s been an enormous, justified fuss over the ECB swapping its Greek bonds held in the Securities Markets Programme. Ultimately though it is – in practical terms – about getting away with the least egregious level of seniority for the ECB now, not avoiding ECB seniority altogether.

 

The exchange is to stop the bonds getting retroactive collection action clauses (thus, exposing the SMP to forced losses) in a Greek parliamentary vote likely to be held next week, as part of the “stick” in the PSI offer to bondholders.

 

The ECB’s swapped bonds will be just like the old ones, sharing the same payment features etc, except (effectively) the bonds’ serial numbers are getting filed off. It’s probable that the legislative act will list the Greek law bonds to be CAC-ed by their series or ISIN, which would have swept up the ECB’s holdings. No other holder gets to ghost out like this.

 

It’s perhaps not so much that losses would be forced on the SMP – but that they would be heavy or in line with the PSI’s 75 per cent haircut to net present value. Thus below the SMP’s purchase price. The central bank treats that kind of loss as monetary financing (see Draghi’s points in February’s press conference.) Friday’s swap has reportedly switched the ECB’s bonds at par, thus generating a paper profit for the SMP.

Draghi has made this an issue of adhering to treaty restrictions against direct financing of Eurozone governments, but the real story here is yet another one of preserving the status quo financial system. The ECB has purchased about €56 billion worth of Greek bonds under its SMP program in 2010 at 20% discounts to par value, and analysts generally conclude that its participation in the PSI at 75% would lead to a loss of about €10-15 billion, which is a decent amount. However, the real threat would be the precedent set for its much larger combined holdings of Portuguese, Spanish and Italian bonds, which total about €160 billion.

It is… very difficult to see what the alternative was.

 

What could you do instead?

 

a) Let Greece write its law specifically excluding the ECB by name, rather than allowing its holdings to silently drop out via the ISINs

 

b) The direct route: Let Greece go ahead and insert retro-CACs into the ECB’s holdings

 

c) Abandon the retro-CAC law altogether

 

We think a) would have made the ECB’s seniority much more egregious. For b), certainly the momentum of PSI is maintained… at the expense of throwing the central bank into legal risk and probably, serious infighting as a full EU Treaty violation hoves into prospect. How long would the entire SMP portfolio last in that scenario. It’s c) that seems a total non-starter; a negotiated write-down is already hanging by a thread given the attitude of northern eurozone governments.

The original purpose behind the Greek PSI program was to keep Greece from defaulting on its debts in a "disorderly" manner, exiting the Eurozone and triggering financial contagion throughout European bond markets. If the ECB is forced to take a haircut on its bond holdings as a part of this process, then that drastically increases the cost of maintaining the Eurozone ponzi to core countries such as Germany. It would render the secondary markets purchases of peripheral bonds by the ECB an act of on-boarding credit risk and transferring it to the core without really making any new long-term credit available to distressed sovereigns.

Once the solvency of the ECB is called into question, the game is up and the major European financial institutions lose their explicit and implicit backstop of last resort (the central banks of the Eurosystem and the German Treasury), which then leads to a banking crises many times worse than that of 2008. So this latest maneuver by the ECB is really nothing more than a means of extending and pretending for as long as humanly possible. It is true that no official sector haircuts also increases the direct cost of bailing out Greece, but, then again, the decision may have already been made to let Greece exit the EMU after its debts are restructured.

Dimitrios Giannopoulos of Athens News has also discovered that the ECB bond swap may simply add another €60 billion of fresh debt to service onto the Greek government's balance sheet and, therefore, the Greek people (via ZeroHedge).

The Great ECB-OSI Bond-Swap Scam

 

But the confidential GLK document notes that the parallel ECB bond swap at par value must also be financed by the EFSF and added to Greek debt.

 

"The old ECB bonds will be transferred to a treasury account of the Greek state for the duration of the PSI bond swaps, and will therefore be charged on the level of Greek debt by the additional amount of 56.3bn euros," says the GLK document.

 

This means that the funding of the 56.3bn euro ECB "bond swap" must be "financed" by the EFSF together with other components of PSI funding under the second EU-IMF bailout plan for Greece whose exact size remains to be decided by the Eurogroup in today's meeting of the 17 finance ministers in Brussels.

It's very unlikely that any EU/IMF bailout plan will actually account for this additional debt burden of Greece, and this is perhaps yet another way of making sure that Greece is forced out of the Eurozone when it inevitably fails to reach "sustainable" debt/GDP levels. The bailout money, which is now proposed to be held in escrow until Greek somehow meets the impossible terms of its deal, will never make it to a single living soul in Greece. It will, however, make it directly to the banks, since the escrow condition will not restrict payments for interest on debt, which has now grown even larger courtesy of the ECB.

While the Troika, Greek politicians and its private creditors continue to perform their kabuki theater, Mario Draghi is doing everything he can to make sure that the ECB will be able to preserve the Eurosystem’s banks no matter what temporary deal is or is not reached, with or without Greece. That is obviously what a central bank does, and Draghi realizes there are many more players out there who will submit to his game even after Greece defaults (see Portugal, Ireland Spain and Italy). The only thing that stands in his way now is the sheer complexity and speed of the situation in credit markets, as well as the public squares.

"I WANT TO PLAY A GAME."

That’s what Jigsaw would tell his victims in an unsettling tone before he set them loose in a torturous maze with only a few very painful options available to choose from. Only one person survived these games and she became Jigsaw’s protégé and assistant, but probably ended up dying later in some ill-conceived plot line (I have no idea). The fact is that this is real life, and while the Euro crisis and GFC in general may be almost as constricting and needlessly torturous as the frames of a B-rated horror series, the victims do have at least some chance to tell the bankers, bureaucrats and politicians - "TOO BAD". We don’t want to play your game anymore, and we won’t.

Detroit Publishing Co. Congress 1908 "South corridor, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C."

It’s hard to miss the irony in the fact that perhaps the biggest stumbling block to the status quo financial elites in the Western world, who are attempting to kick the can a bit farther down the road, aside from the sheer impossibility of the underlying math, is democratic elections. 2012 may very well be the year where decades of political theater for the benefit of large corporations and financial consumers from sea to shining sea come back with a vengeance to bite the status quo politicians in the ass.

And let’s be clear, it is the run-up to elections and the accompanying theatrical drama that will prove to be the most difficult for the status quo, rather than the actual outcomes of these elections. There is little doubt that almost all of the politicians will end up singing the exact same tune once they are actually in office. The real problem for the perennial can-kickers is that they simply do not have enough time to wait around for the elections to finish and the winners to take office.

First and foremost, we have the elections in Greece to replace the unelected, technocratic government that was force-fed to its people late last year. Due to the increasingly large and vehement public opposition to bailouts for the banks and austerity for the poor, politicians in the "opposition" parties must be very careful not to align themselves too much with the Troika and it’s puppet PASOK party (of which former Prime Minister Georgios Papandreou was a member).

That’s why we see the leader of the New Democracy party, Antonin Samaras, who has his eyes fixated on the position of Prime Minister (I’m not really sure why anyone wants to be the leader of Greece anymore), continuously flounder and backtrack on what exactly he will agree to in the latest austerity package that all of the bailout money has been conditioned on. Last year, Samaras refused to sign any written commitment to the terms of the austerity package, which has since expanded, before finally giving in.

That was all just a prelude to the main show which is taking place now. Samaras has once again "pledged" in writing to implement the Troika’s austerity program, but is simultaneously saying that the program may have to be adjusted once he is in office, since it does not do enough to promote growth (no kidding!). Helena Smith reports on what she was told by a top adviser to Samaras for The Guardian:

Guardian Live Blog

 

"The letter has just gone. We have no problem expressing committment to a stabilisation progam. We are all for eliminating the deficit, controlling the debt and going on with the privatisation program things that right from the beginning we proposed.

 

It [the letter] makes very clear that we have full respect for the long-term objectives, targets and key policies of the programme.

 

We also said we should modify the plan to allow for prompt [economic] recovery. We don't want to make recovery a top priority but we insist that it becomes an additional priority, that it be be applied in tandem with other policies to allow the economy to breath. Is this such an irrational, stubborn view when the [rescue] plan to date clearly hasn't worked?"

 

It's not because the objectives are wrong. From the beginning we agreed with them. But there is a missing ingredient.

 

Even if it was perfectly implemented the numbers didn't add up. We are not saying that we are against austerity but we have to change the mix and allow for recovery.

 

We are feeling a little embarassed that again and again they want us to show our committment to the plan. When we say prioritize recovery we mean we want to discuss it with them, not do anything unilaterally. Even if they allowed us to do whatever we wanted to do we would still stick to the programme."

How about those statements for floundering and backtracking?? Now that Germany, Finland and the Netherlands are kicking around the idea of delaying Greece’s bailout money until after the elections, Samaras will have to put on an even bigger show about how he will protect the interests of Greek workers and pensioners against the abrasive Eurocrats, and perhaps even promise not to sign off on the current plan. Otherwise, everyone will just assume he is going to do exactly what the Troika requires of him once he gets in office, like the PASOK party he is running against, which is quite a safe assumption.

Secondly, there are elections in France and incumbent President Nicolas Sarkozy has been steadily dropping in the polls against Francois Hollande of the Socialist Party. As of early February 2012, Hollande is almost running at his all-time high of 60% against Sarkozy. If you thought Samaras was being a thorn in the side of the pan-European austerity hawks, then take a look at what Hollande has been saying. Steven Erlanger for the New York Times reports:

French Candidate Assails Plan for Greece

 

"The front-runner for the French presidency, the Socialist candidate François Hollande, criticized European policy on Greece on Monday, saying that mandatory austerity measures were too severe and would never produce the desired results because "everyone knows" that "there is no rebound in growth in Europe and in Greece."

 

Mr. Hollande’s remarks, one day after the Greek Parliament adopted austerity measures demanded by the European Union and the International Monetary Fund, while violent protests left many buildings in Athens in flames, offered a critical assessment of European and Greek leaders’ handling of the crisis. The Greek government, he said, would "have a short life," while the austerity plan forced on Greece amounted to a "purge."

 

The French presidential race is heating up with President Nicolas Sarkozy expected to make his candidacy for re-election official this week. Mr. Sarkozy is still running behind Mr. Hollande in the opinion polls for both the first round of voting on April 22 and in a runoff on May 6. In a luncheon interview with a group of foreign journalists here, Mr. Hollande was pleasant and expansive, but remained vague on the details of his programs."

Right, Politics 101 - keep all your plans and policies for office vague and uncertain, but stay sharply critical of the current administration. Yet, that’s exactly what the markets can’t continue to handle right now – vagueness and uncertainty about the future of fiscal and monetary policy. The French sovereign bond market has so far remained relatively quiet throughout the whole crisis, except for a brief spike upwards in the 10-year yield late last year. If all of Sarkozy’s repeated promises of implementing domestic austerity come into question, though, France's credit situation could change very fast, especially since it has already been downgraded from AAA by S&P and put on “negative outlook” by Moody’s.

We also have a Spanish regional election in Andalucía on March 25, which is a bit more trivial than those above, but it still has the potential to create some major disruption in the Spanish bond market over the next month. Spain has been one of the worst hit economies during the financial crisis, with its unemployment rate reaching 23% at the end of 2011, and it has so far failed to offer the Troika any "credible" austerity plan for reducing its budget deficit. Angela Benoit reports for Bloomberg:

Spain Risks Deficit Spiral as Election Postpones Budget Cuts: Euro Credit

 

"Spain’s month-old government may postpone deeper budget cuts until after a regional election in March, adding to the risk the nation misses its deficit goal for the second year.

 

The ruling People’s Party, led by Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy, will contest an election in the southern region of Andalusia to end 30 years of Socialist rule. Spain’s 10-year bond yields have risen 10 basis points to 5.5 percent since the PP government took over on Dec. 21, increasing the rate to 359 basis points more than German bunds of similar maturity.

 

"Rajoy doesn’t want to get burnt before the Andalusian election," Antonio Barroso, an analyst at Eurasia and a former Spanish government pollster, said in a telephone interview. "They’re so crucial for the PP that it won’t take any kind of measure that would undermine its ratings in the region."

 

Rajoy needs to slice the equivalent of 3.6 percent of gross domestic product off the budget deficit this year to meet a European Union target, just as the economy may be entering its second recession in two years. Postponing steps until after the March 25 election risks undermining confidence in Spain’s ability to meet its goal, which Fitch Ratings already has "doubts" the country will reach.

 

"Rajoy has yet to explain how he will reduce the deficit when the economy is shrinking," said Georg Grodzki, global head of credit research at London-based Legal & General Investment Management, which oversees about $515 billion. "I don’t think Spain can afford to wait for more than two months at the most."

There's obviously nothing Rajoy can do to achieve a "sustainable" budget deficit in Spain while the economy contracts, and implemented austerity will only make the latter worse, but he also can’t afford to not offer up any bogus policy promises. The regional election is now getting in the way of him doing so, though, because the Spanish people are simply against any Greek-style "structural reforms" (they are not senseless and can see what has happened over there). Rajoy realizes such opposition exists, and will therefore hold off on submitting a budget until after the election. It’s entirely unclear whether the credit markets will hold off on pounding Spanish bonds into the ground, though.

Last, but certainly not least, we have the 2012 Congressional and Presidential elections in the U.S. I have suggested before that the Obama Administration, in its consistent attempts to present a rosy economic story before November 2, may have effectively killed the capacity of the Fed to "print money" through QE3 asset purchases [Who Killed the Money Printer?]. That in and of itself would be a HUGE blow to the status quo elites who are banking on the Fed to step in with at least a trillion dollars or so in easing to keep the markets happy.

But the electioneering syndrome certainly doesn’t stop there. We also have the Republican Presidential front-runners and those up for re-election in the Senate who will harshly criticize and block any and all attempts of Obama to launch any significant stimulus measures or help bail out Europe through additional contributions to the IMF. Since the Republicans control the House of Representatives, these full frontal blocks will not be hard to carry out. For example, The Hill reports on the opposition to Obama’s latest mortgage refinancing plan.

White House to push housing plan despite Republican opposition

 

"The White House has recently promised major steps to boost the housing market and help struggling homeowners, but bruising fights with Congress loom over major pieces of the plan.

 

The housing market is widely seen in Washington as still struggling in the wake of the subprime mortgage crisis, and weighing down what would be a more robust economic recovery.

 

In recent days, the White House has made a concerted effort to address the housing sector, rolling out new plans to help homeowners avoid foreclosure and boost the housing sector.

 

But while the administration can nibble around the edges and implement changes, it needs Congress and regulators to get on board with any major initiatives, and this presents significant challenges."

There are, of course, many other elections occurring around the world, but these are the "democratic" ones that could be the most disruptive to maintaining the status quo, hopium-filled market environment over upcoming months. And, as mentioned earlier, the political theater of these elections is by no means the only thing that could throw a spanner into the works. Here’s another obvious one – all of the non-existent capital that was promised to backstop the Euro periphery through the IMF, EFSF, private bondholder "haircuts", etc., doesn’t materialize! All in all, 2012 should be a very disturbing year for the extenders and the pretenders alike.

 

Arthur Rothstein Blatz on Tap Summer 1939. Butte, Montana "Men lounging in front of the Arcade"

Friday's NFP number brought us some altogether unprecedented BS from the BLS. Much has already been said about the filthy stench emanating from these "data points", so I will just review the most important points here. First thing to note is that squeezing a record 1.2 million people out of the "labor force"(people who don't waste time looking for jobs that don't exist) is apparently a sure fire way to get the headline unemployment rate down to only 8.3%

ZeroHedge, as usual, does an excellent job deconstructing the self-contradictory nonsense that is known as the NFP jobs report.

Record 1.2 Million People Fall Out Of Labor Force In One Month, Labor Force Participation Rate Tumbles To Fresh 30 Year Low

"A month ago, we joked when we said that for Obama to get the unemployment rate to negative by election time, all he has to do is to crush the labor force participation rate to about 55%. Looks like the good folks at the BLS heard us: it appears that the people not in the labor force exploded by an unprecedented record 1.2 million.

 

No, that's not a typo: 1.2 million people dropped out of the labor force in one month! So as the labor force increased from 153.9 million to 154.4 million, the non institutional population increased by 242.3 million meaning, those not in the labor force surged from 86.7 million to 87.9 million. Which means that the civilian labor force tumbled to a fresh 30 year low of 63.7% as the BLS is seriously planning on eliminating nearly half of the available labor pool from the unemployment calculation.

 

As for the quality of jobs, as withholding taxes roll over Year over year, it can only mean that the US is replacing high paying FIRE jobs with low paying construction and manufacturing."

 

 

   

To make matters much worse, the number of long-term unemployed (27 weeks or longer) remains at a very high level of ~5.5 million and youth unemployment remains at 23%. And only 10% of the headline increase in jobs was due to additions for full-time employment, while a record 700,000 part-time workers were hired in January. ZeroHedge also follows up with a great analysis of the seasonal adjustment mechanism used by the BLS to turn manufacture millions of jobs out of thin air and turn a miss of expectations into a massive beat.

 

Explaining Yesterday's Seasonally Adjusted Nonfarm Payroll "Beat"

 

"What is very notable is that in January, absent BLS smoothing calculation, which are nowhere in the labor force, but solely in the mind of a few BLS employees, the real economy lost 2,689,000 jobs, while net of the adjustment, it actually gained 243,000 jobs: a delta of 2,932,000 jobs based solely on statistical assumptions in an excel spreadsheet!

 

So how does this data fit in specifically in the context of the just passed NFP whopper of a number? Simple. The chart below shows the January seasonal adjustment for the past 4 years, since 2009. The number of jobs added for "seasonal" purposes to the NFP number were as follows: 2009 - 2,006,000; 2010 - 1,970,000; 2011 - 2,129,000, and the all important 2012: 2,146,000.  

 

Once again, this is the number added to the NFP unrevised baseline to get a "final" number which is then blasted to the media. The chart below shows the historical January adjustment, to the NFP data, as well as the 2012 reported adjustment, and also what the statistical adjustment would be for the NFP number to have the NFP number come in line with expectations of a 140,000 beat.

 

Here is the kicker: the market mood yesterday would have been far more somber if instead of a seasonal fudge-factored statistical addition of 2,146,000 jobs, the BLS had decided on a number that is merely the simple average of the statistical adjustment of the past 3 years, which comes down to 2,035,000. In fact, had the BLS used this seasonal adjustment, the final NFP headline number (SA) would have been +132,000, or a miss of expectations of 8,000 (the Seasonal Adjustment number to get to consensus January expectations would have to be +2,043,000 to the NFP number).

 

In other words, the difference between a + and - 2% move in the stock market is based on less than a 5% variation to the entire January seasonal adjustment, as had the BLS add just the simple average, the BLS report would have been a disappointing miss, and the market would have likely dropped (although with 5 momos in charge of the entire market, the thesis would have likely promptly shifted to "more QE coming" so who really knows)."

 

 

   

The combiniation of a horrendously exclusive "labor force" definition, extremely weak internals and a goal-seeked seasonal adjustment (significantly higher than recent average) make the NFP report the most highly manipulated and misleading piece of work to come oozing out of Obama's Administration yet. And Karl Denninger does a few more calculations to determine that, not only was this not a very good employment report as claimed, but it was actually the worst since January of 2009!

 

Employment Report: Blatant And Outrageous Lies 

 

"Indeed, the total number of employed persons fell. A lot. To put a number on it, the total number of employed persons fell by 737,000 by actual count.

 

Now the cheerleaders will state that this is a common thing in January, and indeed it is. But the correct adjustment is to look at the population increase and subtract that back off as well. In other words, we take the loss of employment and add the population growth. When we do this we get a whopping 2.422 million in the wrong direction which was bested only by the -2.618 million in January of 2009 through the process of this downturn!

 

In fact other than January 2009 there has never been a single month in my table, which dates back to 1999, that put up a worse combined number. This "performance" rates a literal "second from utter despair and disaster", and the employment rate shows it:"

 

 

   

This sort of aggravated manipulation/miscontruction will become commonplace in the months ahead of November’s elections and it does carry real consequences, beyond simply buying a few points with the market. Sports radio pundits are reporting that some 5 million (!) Americans are going to buy new televisions to watch The Superbowl, and jobs reports such as this one will give them unjustified comfort when making such horrible decisions.

Why put off a several hundred dollar purchase on credit when you are confident that there are plenty of jobs waiting for you or that your current job is safe? Why not take out a few loans from Sallie Mae and enroll in that graduate program when the economy is in full recovery mode? The people lured into consumer-friendly complacency by these faux reports and the media lackeys who shill for the status quo will have a very rude awakening when all their bills come due, and it turns out the jobs were never there to begin with.

Yet, there is also a growing section of disenfranchised Americans who will be forced to trust their own lying eyes and [lack of] paychecks over the juked statistics from federal agencies or Jim Cramer's insufferable blather. Perhaps the biggest consequence of these manipulations will be to completely undermine confidence in the crony corporatist establishment. Still, it may take some more time for the harsh realities of Depression to set in across the all-consuming middle-class of America, which starkly contrasts with the situation in Europe.

Say what you will about the Eurocrats – they are power-hungry shysters who work through endless circuits of Summits and acronymous funds, turning their citizens into full-blown debt slaves just so they can keep the current crop of banksters and politicians in power, while the latter bumble, tumble and stumble towards any temporary “solution” to be had, no matter how useless, unjust or counter-productive it is – BUT they do produce much more legitimate economic and financial data than their American counterparts.

They still offer a hint of transparency to their citizens; something that has been utterly stripped away from the American populace over these increasingly painful years. There is no doubt that the peoples' plight is much more acute in Europe right now, where many of those living in the periphery are struggling to make ends meet every hour of every waking day. Eurostat gives us the latest unemployment data for the EU-27 and the Eurozone (17), and it’s grim.

Unemployment Statistics

"Eurostat estimates that 23.816 million men and women in the EU-27, of whom 16.469 million were in the euro area (EA-17), were unemployed in December 2011. Compared with November 2011, the number of persons unemployed increased by 24 000 in the EU-27 and by 20 000 in the euro area. Compared with December 2010, unemployment increased by 923 000 in the EU-27 and by 751 000 in the euro area.

 

The euro area seasonally-adjusted unemployment rate was 10.4 % in December 2011, unchanged compared with November 2011; it was 10.0 % in December 2010. The EU-27 unemployment rate was 9.9 % in December 2011, also unchanged compared with November 2011; it was 9.5 % in December 2010.

 

Among the Member States, the lowest unemployment rates were recorded in Austria (4.1 %), the Netherlands (4.9 %)and Luxembourg (5.2 %), and the highest rates in Spain (22.9 %), Greece (19.2 % in October) and Lithuania (15.3 % in the third quarter of 2011).

 

________

 

In December 2011, 5.493 million young people (under 25) were unemployed in the EU-27, of which 3.290 in the euro area. Compared with December 2010, youth unemployment increased by 241 000 in the EU-27 and by 113 000 in the euro area. In December 2011, the youth unemployment rate was 22.1 % in the EU-27 and 21.3 % in the euro area. In December 2010 it was 21.0 % and 20.6 % respectively. The lowest rates were observed in Germany (7.8 %), Austria (8.2 %) and the Netherlands (8.6 %) and the highest in Spain (48.7 %), Greece (47.2 % in October) and Slovakia (35.6 %)."

 

 

 

   

These levels of youth unemployment are obviously a recipe for disaster, economically and socially. EU peripheral nations are tasked with growing themselves out of severe, structural deficits, but the figures above, among many others, tell us just how unrealistic that has been all along. Spain wants to cut its budget deficit nearly in half over two years when close to a quarter of its population, and almost half of those under 25, are not earning a regular income.

If the Troika and Mariano Rajoy get their way and spending on healthcare, education, etc. is gutted across Spanish regions, it will be even harder for any of these people to find employment, pay off various debts and consume at anything close to levels that sustain growth. The numbers put out by the EU may be more accurate than those pubished in America, but that’s little consolation to the men, women and children across the Continent who those numbers represent.

I’d like to get back to the BLS’ latest propaganda, though, and point out one other very important consequence of the report. It appears the rabid momentum chasers are once again picking up pennies in front of a gigantic steamroller, since everything in Europe is still as uncertain and unstable as it ever was and, on top of that, the bogus U.S. data may have just killed the one thing that investors have been taking to the bank for many months now – large asset purchases by the Fed.

I wouldn’t go so far as to say that some scale of QE3 has been “priced in”, but it is clear that the markets are now thoroughly addicted to credible promises of cheap, never-ending liquidity; or, as they would tell you in AA meetings, one sip is too much and one trillion sips are never enough. The problem for them now is that there is very little credibility left underlying the Fed’s “promises”, thanks to the complete joke of a jobs report produced by the incumbent politicians guiding the BLS.

With unemployment data suddenly showing massive improvement above expectations last month (and the non-manufacturing ISM reporting price increases across several commodities), the U.S. government has placed itself back in a position where there is simply no justification for any monetary easing. The Administration will continue to goose any and all economic data it can get its hands on going into elections, which will make it that much more difficult for the Fed to act, which, in turn, will make it very difficult for the market to keep up its appearances.

I believe it would be a mistake to assume that this fact has been lost on large money managers, as the following snippet from The Guardian Blog suggests.

 

Guardian Live Blog  

 

"The drop in the unemployment rate to 8.3% means it is at the lower end of the Federal Reserve's forecast range - which could provide fuel to those in the Fed who want to hold back from further measures to boost the economy. Joshua Raymond, chief market strategist at City Index, said:

 

'This is a really stellar set of numbers and has surprised many who had expected a slowing of jobs growth after the December holiday period.

 

The jobs figures paint quite a different picture to the tone of voice used by the Federal Reserve last week, which applied a somewhat dovish tone towards US growth expectations. This naturally poses the question what are the Fed seeing further down the path that the market isn't right now?

 

And what's more, a stronger than expected labour market goes directly against the rational to increase asset purchases through quantitative easing, and this may pose a somewhat negative impact in the medium term for those investors that had factored this into their trading.'

 

Within the figures private sector jobs rose 257,000 while government jobs fell by 14,000, compared to expectations of a 20,000 drop. The increase in non-farm payrolls is the biggest since April 2011."

 

We could call it the mirror image of 2009-10, when all that mattered to the American political and financial elites was goosing the markets to manage perceptions of economic health and churn trading profits. As housing, jobs and manufacturing data naturally worsened (with exactly zero jobs created in August 2011, later revised slightly upwards) and the electioneering switch was flipped, the politicians have taken precedence over the bankers and are manipulating the source data with the belief that the markets will naturally play along.

What the politicians fail to understand is that the feedback between the real economy and the markets, to the extent it existed, has been irreversibly corrupted over the last few years through centralized intervention. You can goose all the data you want, but the increasingly fewer traders [or robots] that make up "the market" these days only want one thing – more monetization of debt. And, until now, most of them have been too clueless to figure out that unrestricted printing of money is not a guaranteed outcome in 2012.

This is something that TAE has consistently pointed out for quite some time now, while others have declared that money printing is the end all and be all of the system. Ultra-loose monetary policy and some form of printing will be a staple feature of our world for some time to come, but let’s remember that the financial system is not isolated from the sociopolitical system or vice versa. Both the probability and effectiveness of money printing will hinge on numerous variables, three of the most important being systemic deleveraging, social confidence/mood and political manuevering, and all three of those are coming to a head this year.