In the US, as one door has closed on subprime lending, another has opened on credit card debt. Actually living within one's means doesn't always seem to be an option, for some due to poverty and for others due to greed. Either way, the debt hole Americans (and Canadians, and the British) are collectively digging themselves into is getting deeper by the day, and they start young.

As losses mount, the role of mortgage fraud, by both borrowers and lenders, and also potential securities fraud, is being revealed. The litigation is only just beginning, but be prepared for a storm of legal action and recriminations. The ratings agencies are looking vulnerable to European action as their ratings enabled the sale of bad loans to European institutions, under conditions of conflict of interest.

Signs of stress are spilling over from the world of high finance to the real economy, where trucking and shipping are feeling the slowdown. Meanwhile Canada (several months behind the US) is still seeing a booming housing market, but for how long?

Canada's economy is moving and shaking. The loonie reached parity with the US dollar for the first time since the Gerald Ford presidency. But don't be fooled: it's not the Canadian economy that does so great, it's the US that sinks ever further ever faster, and the rest of the world is sinking with it, including Canada.

The long-awaited report on the royalty rates for the Alberta tar sands was published, and it recommends raising the royalties significantly. Both the industry and the business-friendly media in Canada cry foul, and worse. Just a few months ago, Shell said their tar sands operation was immensely profitable, but now the tune has changed.

Some voices say raising the royalties reeks of too-big government, and comparisons with Hugo Chavez fly everywhere. But those same voices do want the government to pay for the Mackenzie Valley pipeline.

Go here for the full report.

Caracas on the Bow River

Tim Hearn, chief executive officer of top oil sands producer Imperial Oil, said any additional royalties would harm companies already facing sky-high labour and construction costs for their projects.

“I'm not in a position today to say whether we've reached a tipping point or not because I can't tell you,” Mr. Hearn said. “But there's enough things working against us that if all this stays in place as is, there will be an effect in the industry, clearly.”

A former oil executive who was on the review panel lashed back at energy executives, saying they should concentrate on better managing their own businesses and contain cost increases rather than “whining” about higher royalties.

“I don't have any sympathies,” said Sam Spanglet, who ran Shell Canada Ltd.'s oil sands operation before retiring several years ago. “[Alberta is] still going to be very competitive. I feel very confident.”

Some Calgarians were angry, with one broker e-mailing his clients with the subject line: “Caracas on the Bow River,” comparing Alberta with Venezuela and its socialist President Hugo Chavez, who expropriated oil assets this year.

“If [the report is] enacted, investment decisions will be impacted … [the report] reads a bit like a Chavez-style manifesto,” Steve Larke, a Peters & Co. Ltd. broker, said in the e-mail.

Yesterday's financial convulsion is arguably the beginning of the end for a credit expansion of epic proportions that has underlain the economic boom of the last 25 years. It had its roots in the corruption of fractional reserve banking, as directly overseen and facilitated by the Federal Reserve. For those who look to the Fed now for a solution, perhaps it would be advisable to look instead at how the Fed created the current mess.

Fractional reserve banking was designed to provide a controlled credit expansion. However, in the early 1990s, the Fed began to find its rules too restrictve and acted to lower reserve ratios on some deposits and eliminate them for others. In addition, creative accounting implicitly condoned by the Fed allowed banks to circumvent even the limited remaining need to hold reserves. According to the Fed itself (PDF warning, see page 44), by using overnight retail sweep accounts, banks can transfer a proportion of deposits out of the category for which they must hold funds at the Fed (checking deposits), and use them to invest in interest-earning assets.

The lowering of reserve ratios and the acceptance of sweeps by the Fed over a period of many years demonstrates its attitude towards the need for reserves in the first place. How can the Fed claim to be concerned about the unsustainable expansion of the money supply (ie inflation), via the creation of essentially limitless amounts of credit, when it has been fully aware of the corruption of US fractional reserve banking all along? And how can the Fed be unaware of the eventual consequence of uncontrolled credit expansion - a debt crunch - when it has played out many times before?

Massive Surge in Sweeps

Logic? Who cares about logic? Banks are allowed to lend out checking account deposits even though they pay no interest on those accounts. Customers assume the risk and banks literally sweep up the profit. This is a sweet deal for the banks and is accomplished ironically enough via sweeps.

Sweeps are a mechanism by which "excess capital" is swept from some accounts into other buckets based on patterns of expected behavior (not all customers are going to demand all of their money all at once).

Money in the accounts where the money was swept is allowed to be lent out. In essence, the money sitting in your checking account right now is not really sitting there at all. It's lent out all over the place (in theory overnight but in practice for god knows how long or for what)....

....The study does not say it explicitly but I will. There are essentially no bank reserves. Wait a second, I take that back. The combination of fractional reserve lending and sweeps really means there are negative reserves. Far more money has been lent out than really exists.

_{Source: Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System.}

The situation in the credit markets continues to worsen as a sudden attack of risk aversion rapidly dries up liquidity. And this is before the resetting of adjustable rate mortgages (ARMs) begins in earnest - to the tune of $50 billion - in October. Watch this space.

On the Canadian energy scene, Shell pumps $27 billion into the oil sands, even as oil patch profitability falls. Abu Dhabi wants to invest in Canadian power plants, and there are plans for BC to host an LNG terminal. Wind power grows rapidly in Ontario and Quebec, making a few enemies along the way. In BC they ask: should public transit be free?

On the climate front, water is the issue - too little and too much. Finally, in the tug-of-war between efficiency and resilience, efficiency has the upper hand, but what price will we pay for allowing our life support system to become brittle?

Going With The Flow?

You may remember that our definition of household cash is as broad as can be. We include all household "banking products", per se, but also include all household holdings of bonds, inclusive of Treasuries, Agencies, corporates, muni's and mortgage backed paper. Implicitly, we are assuming bond holdings could be converted to cash at a moments notice. So what follows is simply total household cash less total household liabilities over the last six decades.