Fed risks repeating Lehman blunder as US recession storm gathers, by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard

More and more “Canaries In Extremis” as the US economy teeters on the edge of recession. From Ambrose Evans-Pritchard at telegraph.co.uk:

The risk of a US recession next year is rising fast. The Federal Reserve has no margin for error.

Liquidity is suddenly drying up. Early warning indicators from US ‘flow of funds’ data point to an incipient squeeze, the long-feared capitulation after five successive quarters of declining corporate profits.

Yet the Fed is methodically draining money through ‘reverse repos’ regardless. It has set the course for a rise in interest rates in December and seems to be on automatic pilot.

“We are seeing a serious deterioration on a monthly basis,” said Michael Howell from CrossBorder Capital, specialists in global liquidity. The signals lead the economic cycle by six to nine months.

“We think the US is heading for recession by the Spring of 2017. It is absolutely bonkers for the Fed to even think about raising rates right now,” he said.

The growth rate of nominal GDP – a pure measure of the economy – has been in an unbroken fall since the start of the year, falling from 4.2pc to 2.5pc. It is close to stall speed, flirting with levels that have invariably led to recessions in the post-War era.

“It is a little scary. When nominal GDP slows like that, you can be sure that financial stress will follow. Monetary policy is too tight and the slightest shock will tip the US into recession,” said Lars Christensen, from Markets and Money Advisory.

If allowed to happen, it will be a deeply frightening experience, rocking the global system to its foundations. The Bank for International Settlements estimates that 60pc of the world economy is locked into the US currency system, and that debts denominated in dollars outside US jurisdiction have ballooned to $9.8 trillion.

The world has never before been so leveraged to dollar borrowing costs. BIS data show that debt ratios in both rich countries and emerging markets are roughly 35 percentage points of GDP higher than they were at the onset of the Lehman crisis.

This time China cannot come to the rescue. Beijing has already pushed credit beyond safe limits to almost $30 trillion. Fitch Ratings suspects that bad loans in the Chinese banking system are ten times the official claim.

The current arguments over Brexit would seem irrelevant in such circumstances, both because the City would be drawn into the flames and because the eurozone would face its own a shattering ordeal. Even a hint of coming trauma would detonate a crisis in Italy.

To be clear, the eight-year old US cycle has not yet rolled over definitively. The picture remains fluid, hard to read in a world where key signals have been distorted by central bank repression. The third quarter will almost certainly look a little better.

To continue reading: Fed risks repeating Lehman blunder as US recession storm gathers