Bill Gross and Larry Fink on the economy

Bloomberg Television has another great set of interviews to see, this time with Larry Fink of BlackRock and Bill Gross of PIMCO. The two sat down with Bloomberg Television’s Erik Schatzker for an exclusive conversation at an alumni event hosted by UCLA Anderson School of Management (I guess both are UCLA alums; I almost went there myself).

They covered a huge range of topics in the interview from the US supercommittee to Occupy Wall Street to the European Sovereign Debt Crisis and on down the line. Very good stuff

Videos below

Euro Crisis At A Tipping Point?

The European sovereign debt crisis is rapidly approaching what could be a significant tipping point as it threatens to spread to the heart of Europe. In recent days Italian 10-year bond yields have soared to 7.22% and today Spain was forced to pay 6.975% at its auction. Even French 10-year yields have climbed to 3.71%, its widest spread over German bond yields since the Euro Zone was started. All of this has happened despite large ECB purchases of periphery country bonds over the last few months and the installation of technocratic governments in Greece and Italy.

The fear has now spread to the heart of Europe

Chart of the day: Hours of work needed to buy an ounce of gold

Central banks have done a great job at driving up the price of gold but a horrible job at creating wage inflation. If it now takes 88 hours to buy an ounce of gold versus 20 hours in 2000, hasn’t that grossly deflated real wages in a strict monetary sense? Just askin’

Why the Yen is Strong

The yen and the Swiss franc were seen as safe haven currencies during the tumultuous crisis in Europe. The Swiss National Bank has effectively and apparently cheaply took the franc out of the game. This may have increased some speculative pressure toward the yen.

Yet dismissing the yen’s strength as speculative in nature makes analysis superfluous. It misses the underlying imbalance that the yen’s strength reflects

Running through Italian default scenarios

The most important debate of our lifetimes is now ongoing. The question: Should the ECB “write the check’ for the euro area national governments? In thinking about the answer to this all-important question, I prefer to shift the focus by changing the verb “should” to “will”.

Answering this slightly different question is much more important than answering the first question for you as an investor, a business person and as a worker. If the ECB writes the check, the economic and market outcomes are vastly different than if they do not. Your personal outlook as an investor, business person or worker will change dramatically based upon this one policy choice. The right question to ask then is: Will the ECB “write the check’ for the euro area national governments

Gross, El-Erian on Europe, Strategy, Treasuries

PIMCO’s Mohamed El-Erian and Bill Gross spoke exclusively with Bloomberg Television’s Tom Keene today from the company’s headquarters in Newport Beach, CA about Europe’s crisis, PIMCO’s investment strategy and Treasury yields.

Video here

Chart of the day: Hours of work needed to buy the S&P500

Here is an interesting take on the valuation of the S&P500 by our friends over at The Chart Store, who do excellent work. Their chart shows that it now takes 69.23 hours at the average hourly wage of $19.53 to buy the S&

A Battle for Oil Production Is Brewing

With big oil’s bank accounts full to the brim with cash, the stage is set for some significant acquisition activity… or, to put it another way, for a battle to buy producing assets. There are quite a number of contestants in the battle – big oil companies are not only competing against each other to sweep up good assets but also against the national oil companies of developing, energy-hungry nations like China, South Korea, and India. Oil demands are rising in these nations so quickly that just to cover expected annual demand increases those three countries would have to jointly spend $30 billion on acquisitions each year

Week that Began with a Bang Ends with a Whimper

The foreign exchange is calmer. Equity markets are generally higher. Global bond markets are also quieter today

Euro Crisis Enters Dangerous Stage

We see no easy way out of the current turmoil. The result of enough fiscal austerity to relieve the debt pressures is a severe recession or depression. Historically, independent nations undergoing austerity have accompanied the policy with monetary ease and a devaluation of their currency. This is something EU members cannot do as they share a common currency and therefore do not run their own monetary policy. Default would cause havoc in the EU banking system that holds a significant share of the sovereign debt. A bailout would require at least two trillion euros, a sum that no one wants to pay. And breaking up the EU would cause major turmoil in global financial markets and economies.

So far the market has rallied strongly on every announced plan for the last year and a half only to decline again when it became clear that the crisis was not over

Franco – German Divergence

The European debt crisis is straining the Paris-Berlin axis, the pillar of EMU. French banks are heavily exposed to Italian debt, with some estimates putting public and private sector exposure at more than $400 bln at the end of H1 (without taking into account insurance, hedges, etc). The French government is not in nearly as good a fiscal position as Germany. The French 10-year premium over Germany stands at a record 145 bp today. It finished last year near 40 bp

This is why people are buying gold now

Right now everyone is looking at monetisation and thinking this will save the day. You saw the Lakshman Achuthan video; clearly punters don’t think the US is going to double dip. Buy gold then.

Maybe they are right, but I see weakness ahead in