Thursday, August 8, 2019

GLOBAL MARKETS RESPOND TO RECESSION

As German industrial production records “devastating” fall

Bond markets point to global recession

Global bond markets are sending a clear message that significant sections of the world economy are moving into a recession, if they are not already in one.
This week yields on government bonds have been falling as investors seek a “safe haven.” At the same time the price of gold, the ultimate store of value, has been steadily rising and has topped $1,500 per ounce, its highest level in six years.
The immediate trigger for the rush to safety was the new tariff threat against China by the Trump administration and the devaluation of the Chinese currency, the renminbi, on Monday, which led to the decision by the US Treasury to name China as a “currency manipulator.”
The Treasury decision may not have an immediate direct effect but it has raised the spectre of a global currency war as central banks around the world cut their interest rates, thereby lowering the value of their currencies, or prepare to do so, in what has been characterised as a “race to the bottom.”
Yesterday three central banks in the Asia-Pacific region cut their rates. The New Zealand central bank reduced its rate by 0.5 percentage points, double the cut that had been expected. Thailand’s central bank cut its base rate by 0.25 percentage points, contrary to market expectations it would keep it on hold. India’s central bank dropped its rate by 0.35 percentage points, taking it to the lowest level in nine years.
The major central banks are also expected to move as well. The European Central Bank has signalled it is ready to carry out further monetary stimulus at its meeting next month. The US Fed is expected to announce a further reduction in its base rate by at least 0.25 percentage points, and possibly more, following its rate reduction last month.
St Louis Fed president, James Bullard, said yesterday he thought the US central bank “can do more policy adjustments.”
US President Donald Trump has continued his demand for a reduction in US rates, saying the Fed moves should be “bigger and faster” and has again indicated the focus should be on positioning the US in what is emerging as a global currency conflict.
“Incompetence is a terrible thing to watch, especially when things could be taken care of sooo easily,” he tweeted. “It would be much easier if the Fed understood, which they don’t, that we are competing against other countries, all of whom want to do well at our expense!”
The growing global financial turbulence led to major swings on Wall Street. The Dow falling by 589 points in early trading before moving up to finish only 22 points down for the day. The S&P 500 index finished 0.1 percent higher after falling by as much as 2 percent when trading began.
The yield on 10-year Treasury bonds, which move in the opposite direction to their price, dipped below 1.6 percent, before rising slightly.
In a somewhat concerned editorial published yesterday, the Wall Street Journaltook issue with the US decision to impose new tariffs on China. It noted that multiple reports from the White House indicated Trump had overruled all his economic advisers, save the anti-China hawk Peter Navarro, in making the move. Since then, it said, “global and American economic conditions have been heading south.”
It pointed to the contradictions in the Trump economic agenda. The trade policy was contributing to exchange rate instability, leading to a rising dollar as capital flowed into the US seeking a safe haven. China was not manipulating its currency but was setting a lower peg to reflect supply and demand.
“We aren’t predicting a recession, but then few thought we were in a recession in mid-2008 either,” the editorial said, warning that economic expansions do not end on their own but flow from policy mistakes. Calling for at least a trade truce, it concluded: “Mr Trump’s willy-nilly trade offensive could be the mistake that turns a slowdown into the Navarro recession.”
The signs of a global slowdown, if not an outright recession, are most evident in the trade-sensitive Asia-Pacific region, as shown by yesterday’s central bank rate cuts, and in Germany.
Figures released yesterday show that industrial production in Germany, the euro zone’s largest economy and the key driver of economic growth, fell by a larger than expected 1.5 percent in June. According to a Reuters’ poll, analysts had predicted it would drop by just 0.4 percent.
With industrial production now down by 5.2 percent from its level in June 2018, there are fears that Germany is heading for its first recession in six years.
Commenting on the latest data, Carsten Brzeski, the chief economist at the financial firm ING, said: “All in all, we would characterise today’s industrial production report as devastating, with no silver lining.”
In its report on the German data, the Financial Times said the figures “highlight how a crisis in the carmaking industry and an intensifying trade war between the US and China have turned Germany from being the powerhouse of the euro zone into one of its weakest performing members.”
While the car industry is the focus of the decline, industrial production was down across the board. The deputy head of economic research at Commerzbank said the crisis in the car industry was continuing “unabated.” “However, the main reason for this weakness is now likely to be significantly weaker foreign demand.”
Alexander Krueger, an economist at Bankhaus Lampe, said the ongoing “plunge in production” was “scary” and the longer it continued “the more likely it is that other sectors of the economy” would be dragged into it.

Deepening Fears About The Global Economy Send Stocks Falling Again


U.S. stock indexes tumbled Wednesday after rebounding a day earlier amid an escalating trade war between the United States and China.
Richard Drew/AP
Stocks resumed their slide downward Wednesday, amid escalating fears that the U.S.-China trade war will further damage a worldwide economy that's already slowing.
Policymakers in India and Thailand cut interest rates to stimulate growth, suggesting they are growing more worried about the global economy.
Central bankers in New Zealand cut rates by a half percentage point — an aggressive move that took a lot of investors by surprise because the country's economy has generally been seen as solid, says Quincy Krosby, chief market strategist at Prudential Financial. Last week, the Federal Reserve cut U.S. rates for the first time since 2008.
In the United States, the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell by more than 500 points shortly after the market opened Wednesday, though it later recovered somewhat. And a key interest rate on U.S. government debt weakened. As stocks fall, investors typically pour money into safe assets such as government debt, pushing rates lower.
"Much of what we're seeing is this fear of an overall global economic slowdown. And then the tariff issue exacerbates that," Krosby said.





The S&P 500 index has fallen about 5% since Thursday, when President Trump announced that he was raising tariffs on $300 billion worth of Chinese imports.
Stocks declined further on Monday after China allowed its currency, the yuan, to fall below the psychologically important barrier of 7 yuan per dollar.
Such a move undercuts the U.S. tariffs because it makes Chinese products cheaper for U.S. consumers to buy.
The escalating trade war between the world's largest economies threatens to have a spillover effect in other countries.
China in particular is an engine of growth throughout Asia, and any slowdown there can quickly spread throughout the region.
Countries such as Japan and Germany now sell government bonds bearing negative rates. That essentially means investors lose money just for the privilege of parking their cash in what are considered safe assets.


Walgreens to Close 200 Stores Across United States: ‘We Anticipate Minimal Disruption’

August 7, 2019 Updated: August 7, 2019


Walgreens announced plans to shut down 200 stores across the United States as part of a plan to cut costs, but emphasized that the company will remain open and holds a strong outlook on the future.
The 200 closures represent less than 3 percent of its 10,000 stores in the United States, Walgreens said in a statement sent to news outlets.
“As previously announced, we are undertaking a transformational cost management program to accelerate the ongoing transformation of our business, enable investments in key areas, and to become a more efficient enterprise,” a spokesman said in the statement. “As part of this effort, we plan to close approximately 200 stores in the U.S.”
“Given that these closures will represent less than 3 percent of our stores overall, and given that we have multiple locations in many markets, we anticipate minimal disruption to customers and patients,” the spokesman added. “We also anticipate being able to retain the majority of the impacted store team members in other nearby locations.”
A list of the stores planned for closure hasn’t been made public as of yet.




A Walgreens in a file photograph. (Joe Readle/Getty Images)

The company’s plans were detailed in a regulatory filing by its parent company, Walgreens Boots Alliance. The company said it projects saving $1.5 billion in annual expenses by fiscal year 2022, describing the plan as a “transformational cost management program.”
“We also anticipate being able to retain the majority of the impacted store team members in other nearby locations,” the spokesman said.
Walgreens projected an earnings blow of $1.9 billion to $2.4 billion due to real estate, severance, and other costs.
The plan includes closing approximately 200 stores in the United States.
Rival CVS announced earlier this year that it was closing 46 stores, or fewer than 1 percent of the approximately 9,600 CVS stores nationwide, reported USA Today.
The plan was part of a shift that CVS CEO Larry Merlo previously detailed that featured switching floor space from retail to health care.




Shoppers leave a CVS pharmacy in the Staten Island, New York, on Aug. 7, 2014. (AP Photo/John Minchillo)
Shoppers leave a CVS pharmacy in a file photo. (John Minchillo/AP Photo)

Data Shows Many Companies Contributed to Opioid Crisis

The maker of OxyContin has been cast as the chief villain in the nation’s opioid crisis. But newly released government figures suggest Purdue Pharma had plenty of help in flooding the United States with billions of pills even as overdose deaths were accelerating.
Records kept by the federal Drug Enforcement Administration show that 76 billion oxycodone and hydrocodone pills—the vast majority of them generics, not brand names—were shipped to U.S. pharmacies from 2006 to 2012.
The annual number swelled by more than 50 percent during that period of time even as the body count climbed. The powerful painkillers flowed faster even after Purdue Pharma was fined $635 million for falsely marketing OxyContin as less addictive than other opioids.
“I think the scale of this is stunning,” Keith Humphreys, a Stanford University professor who researches opioids, said in an interview.
He also noted that the data shows that the places that received the most drugs per capita are the ones with the most overdoses per capita: “It really looks like wherever you spread the most gas, you get the most fires.”
At the same time, the data illustrates how complicated it could be for the courts to figure out who should be held accountable for the public health disaster. More than 2,000 state, local, and tribal governments have sued members of the drug industry in the biggest and possibly most complicated litigation of its kind ever in the United States.




Oxycodone pain pills lie on a table
Oxycodone pain pills prescribed for a patient with chronic pain lie on display in Norwich, Conn., on March 23, 2016. (John Moore/Getty Images)

A federal judge who is overseeing most of the cases and pushing for a settlement ruled this week that detailed drug-shipment data compiled by the DEA should be made public over the industry’s objections.
Nearly every state has filed a lawsuit, and most of them have focused on Purdue and members of the Sackler family, who own the Stamford, Connecticut-based company and are major philanthropists whose donations to museums and universities have now come under scrutiny. Many local governments have also sued other drugmakers, distribution companies, and pharmacies.
The lawsuits say that with the introduction of OxyContin, a time-released opioid, in 1995, Purdue created a new playbook to push the use of opioids for more patients and in higher doses.
But Purdue points out, accurately, that the company produced only a small fraction of the nation’s opioids—about 3 percent between 2006 and 2012, according to the data. Three companies—SpecGX, Par Pharmaceutical and Activis Pharma—that sold lower-priced generic drugs, including versions of OxyContin, combined to make 90 percent of the pills.
The three companies say that they didn’t market the drugs and were just meeting the demand of prescriptions filled out by doctors—and that they didn’t produce more than the DEA allowed.
As for the distributors, they contend they functioned as a delivery service and keep federal authorities apprised of the quantities of drugs being shipped.
Four companies—McKesson Corp., Walgreens, Cardinal Health, and AmerisourceBergen—each distributed more than 10 percent of the opioids sent to pharmacies. McKesson distributed more than 18 percent of the nation’s opioids from 2006 to 2012—the most of any company—but said it didn’t push sales.
“Any suggestion that McKesson influenced the volume of opioids prescribed or consumed in this country would reflect a misunderstanding of our role as a distributor,” a spokeswoman said via email.
The figures are from the DEA’s Automation of Reports and Consolidated Orders System, or ARCOS. The DEA agreed to provide the ARCOS data to lawyers in the opioid litigation but pushed judges to keep it from being made public.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Follow Zachary on Twitter: @zackstieber


Layoffs in global auto industry hit Mexico, India, China and the US

A rolling wave of layoffs in the global automotive industry is hitting workers on virtually every continent. A survey of recent headlines from auto industry and other news publications yields a grim picture of the relentless job-cutting.
Tens of thousands losing jobs as India's auto crisis deepens,” writes Reuters, reporting on 350,000 auto assembly and parts workers who have been cut in recent months during India’s worst sales downturn in a decade. Maruti Suzuki has halved its production targets and is laying off six percent of its temporary workforce, with analysts predicting that up to a third of the three million workers employed in the industry nationwide will be dismissed.
Shrinking Chinese car market sparks fears over foreign groups’ future,”reports the Financial Times, noting that Chinese plants owned by Ford and PSA are running at 11 percent and 1 percent capacity, respectively, and some 220,000 workers have lost their jobs in China’s first sales decline in three decades.
Bosch sees stagnating sales, job losses as auto industry slows,”declares an Automotive News Europe article, citing an executive from the German-based auto parts conglomerate, who says, “Our plans foresee a stagnation in vehicle production in the coming years … the tailwind is gone.” Volkswagen has already announced 7,000 white-collar job cuts, and Daimler, Siemens and others are expected to follow suit.
UK Auto Industry Facing a Slow Death,” CNN reports, nothing that the industry is facing its worst crisis since the 1970s, with production dropping by a fifth in the first half of the year and investment falling 70 percent.
A Reuters article headlined “Warning light flashing for Slovakia's auto industry” describes the fate of 3,000 workers laid off at Volkswagen’s plant in Bratislava, which “has sent shockwaves through Slovakia, the world’s biggest car producer per capita.”
One-day strike in 2017 by BMW workers in UK
In the US, GM shut down the 78-year-old Warren Transmission plant in suburban Detroit last week, following on the closure of the Lordstown, Ohio assembly plant and the Baltimore transmission plant. The Oshawa, Ontario plant is set to close at the end of the year, and the Detroit-Hamtramck assembly plant faces closure in January 2020.
In Mexico, at least 650 out of the 1,800 workers at the General Motors assembly plant in San Luis Potosí, 250 miles northwest of Mexico City, will lose their jobs on August 12 when the company reduces the number of shifts from three to two, according to information recently cited by the Unifor union in Canada.
Antonio, a worker at the GM plant in Silao, Mexico, told the WSWS Autoworker Newsletter: “I’ve been investigating here in Silao, but there is no information about layoffs at SLP (San Luis Potosí). There is total silence from the union. The firings are yet another assault against workers—stock owners always looking after their capital. We need to fight together in order to have more strength.”
Another Silao worker, who preferred to remain anonymous, said that pressure from GM management and speed-up have increased recently. “The other detail is about how small our bonuses have been,” he added, explaining that this has led “several workers to resign.”
On August 1, Mexico’s National Chamber of Transformation Industries (Canacintra) reported that Volkswagen had laid off 2,000 workers over the previous 30 days as a result of the termination of production of a model. The Mexican Association of Auto Distributors announced on July 31 that Nissan Mexico was carrying out a “deep restructuring” in response to a fall in sales of 15 percent in the first semester of 2019. In January, the company carried out 1,000 layoffs at assembly plants in Aguascalientes and Morelos. The Mexican economy is in near-recession, with job creation during the first semester of 2019 at the lowest point in a decade.
The Chevrolet Equinox crossover produced at the San Luis Potosí factory is also built by Canadian workers at GM’s CAMI plant in Ingersoll, Ontario. The 2,800 workers there are also being hit by layoffs the week of September 30, and more are slated for the final quarter of 2019.
With the pig-headed nationalism typical of the union bureaucracy, Mike Van Boekel, the Unifor president at the Ingersoll plant, boasted that GM Canada had told him the layoffs in Canada would be temporary, while the shift elimination in San Luis Potosí would be permanent. “Unfortunate for the Mexico plant, but it’s good news for us at least that we’re not losing the shift,” he told a local radio station.
In late 2017, workers at the CAMI plant fought a bitter month-long strike against GM’s demands for increased wage and benefit concessions. The day after GM threatened to shift Equinox production to Mexico, Unifor shut the strike down and signed a sellout contract. Opposed to a common struggle by autoworkers across North America, Unifor then responded to GM’s announcement that it would close the Oshawa assembly plant by launching a racist campaign calling for a boycott of “Mexican cars.”
There is no such thing as a “Mexican” car, any more than there is a “Canadian,” “American” or “Chinese” one. The global auto industry is an interconnected whole, involving the labor of tens of millions of production workers, engineers and technicians around the world, in addition to the workers who extract the raw materials, all of whom contribute to the building of what are, in fact, world products.
GM closed its Warren Transmission plant last week
It is impossible to fight the global onslaught of the transnational corporations on the basis of the narrow nationalist program of Unifor, the United Auto Workers, IG Metall in Germany, the CTM in Mexico or any other union. In opposition to the global strategy of the corporations, autoworkers must develop an internationally coordinated response to defend the jobs, working conditions and living standards of workers around the world.
Under the whip of the financial markets, the global automakers are embarking on yet another wave of mergers and acquisitions to bolster returns to their richest shareholders. Through increasing tie-ups, including Ford-VW and renewed talks of a Renault-Fiat Chrysler merger, the corporations hope to counteract falling sales by expanding into the markets of their former rivals and creating economies of scale to close “redundant” factories and share the immense costs involved in the brutal struggle to dominate new technologies, including electric and self-driving vehicles.
While electric vehicles (EVs) make up only a tiny portion of current world sales—around 1 percent in the US—analysts say this will rise to about 10 percent in the mid-2020s and over 50 percent by 2040. As of January 2019, global automakers had committed over $300 billion to electrification, according to a recent report by the United Auto Workers union.
Due to the much reduced mechanical complexity of EVs—the electric transmission of the Chevy Bolt, for example, has 80 percent fewer moving parts than a traditional internal combustion engine transmission—Ford is telling investors that EVs could lead to a 30 percent reduction in labor hours per unit. This could lead to the elimination of 35,000 powertrain workers in the US over the next several years, according to the UAW, and traditional automakers could outsource the production of lithium batteries, electric motors, automotive electronics, advanced braking systems and other new technologies to low-wage manufacturers within or outside the US.
The UAW has predictably responded to this threat by offering to work with the corporations and the US government to create a “new industrial policy” to beat back China, which, the union laments, “is expected to be home to 62 percent of global lithium-ion battery manufacturing capacity by 2023.” This includes a trade war policy that treats advanced vehicle technology as a “strategic sector to be protected and built in the US.”
This policy, which is identical to that of Trump, divides the international working class, encouraging a fratricidal race to the bottom and dragooning workers behind their “own” capitalists as the rival nationally-based ruling elites prepare to drag mankind into another world war—this one producing a thermonuclear holocaust.
The past decade has seen an increasing wave of struggles by autoworkers. This includes Toyota and Honda workers in China (2010); Maruti Suzuki workers in India (2011-12); Hyundai and Kia workers in South Korea (2013); Renault workers in Turkey, Mercedes-Benz and other workers in Brazil and Fiat Chrysler, GM and Ford workers the US (2015); BMW workers in Britainand Ford workers in Romania (2017); VW and Daimler workers in Germany(2018); VW workers in Hungary and auto parts workers in Matamoros, Mexico (2019).
These growing struggles must be coordinated and guided by an international strategy aimed at uniting every battalion of the working class against the transnational corporations and replacing the capitalist system with a scientifically and democratically planned world socialist society.

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