Archive - Nov 2009

The recent bear rally has driven most of the solvent, semi-solvent and absolutely insolvent CRE stocks up, quite a few approaching 100%, while their macro outlook has deteriorated significantly, along with their fundamentals. Quite a few have actually acted in cahoots with the banks that held their increasingly worthless debt, having issued secondary offerings basically converting the bank holdings of debt that didn't have an icicles chance in the hottest portion of Hell of getting repaid, into worthless toilet paper, heretofore marketed as stock certificates. They have also begun offering this used toilet paper as dividends. If this isn't the sector screaming for me to come back and short it, I don't know what is.

India buys 200 metric tons of IMF gold.

Who's next?

Coming soon...

So are problems with pensions only limited to the UK and Ireland? Of course not. There are governance issues plaguing private and public pension plans all around the world. Unless we get serious and address these issues, pension systems will remain vulnerable to flagrant abuses. Do we need a total collapse of pensions to rectify these issues?

The US Treasury today announced a preliminary estimate of borrowing needs in the Q4 2009 and Q1 2010 quarters. The October-December borrowing need has been revised lower to $276 billion from the $485 billion announced in July 2009. The primary reason for the decline, aside from the need to stay below the $12.1 trillion debt ceiling which would have already been breached had this number been in line with prior expectations, is due to the $185 billion refunded from the Supplementary Financing Program announced earlier, which as of October 28 has been completed. Yet, like everything else with the current administration, current peace of mind comes at a magnified future cost: the US Treasury now expected to issue $478 billion in Treasurys in Q1, and coupled with a net cash decline of $40 billion from Q4, implies that in Q1 2010 over half a trillion in debt will be issued net, if not more.

"It is important to recognize that the current financial crisis is rooted in the economic and political difficulties of monitoring and controlling the production and distribution of safety-net subsidies. Regulation-induced innovation by financial firms seeks relentlessly to outstrip the monitoring technology and the administrative focus that supervisory personnel use in controlling institutional risk-taking. Exclusionary laws and rigid capital regulation encourage rather than control regulatory arbitrage over time." - Professor Ed Kane, Boston College

In this Bloomberg clip, commerce secretary Gary Locke says that "if there is to be another stimulus -- and that’s being hotly discussed and very seriously considered within the administration as well as members of Congress -- it needs to be very targeted, very specific and we need to be very mindful of the deficit as well.In other words, with unemployment not improving after the first $787 billion was spent, and since at this point nothing matters since America will never be able to realistically service its debt, with mid-term elections coming up, and Obama's rating plummeting even despite an orchestrated 50% rally, it is a matter of months, if not days, before the President unveils another multi-trillion UST sinkhole. One that is likely to be promptly followed by the Chairman announcing the next iteration of Quantitative Easing.

Volatility is spiking back up to 30 after a slow but steady descent since March from 50 to 20. Does this forecast a correction is about to happen?

Price momentum is relevant again, as long as you ignore prices before March
2009

S&P 500 is up approximately 14.7% YTD, but 53% since March 9, 2009.

If you calculate the correlation between the S&P 500 sector return before and after that date, you find a correlation of nearly -.9!!!

Plotting sector return for 2009 on the same scale as the before/after March 9th chart shows the year-to-date returns have much less disparity than either time period.

Value, Improving Financials and Balance Sheet added to performance. Momentum and Sentiment both underperformed.

The former Fed Chairman continues to be a lone voice of sanity in an administration gripped by propaganda on preferred TV networks (denial), fingerpointing at the old administration (anger), flag@whitehouse.gov (fear), just no acceptance yet. Funny, but the lie detector test went off the charts when Paul said that there's "no problem between" him and the Obama-ites.

The Obama Administration knows it didn't "create or save" 640,000 jobs but they use the Big Lie to justify the huge waste of taxpayer dollars through the $787 billion American Reinvestment and Recovery Act of 2009. They are desperate to justify the huge expenditure of taxpayer money. A day before they announced the 640,000 report, two AP reporters looked into the data of a previous report and found massive errors in reporting "created or saved" jobs.

Today's top CDS movers wider were almost all health insurers, likely still reeling from the potential adverse fallout of any new health bill. Additionally, Sempra Energy was the day's biggest mover at +16 bps. In the tightening camp, VNO and CEG lead the pack, with old Zero Hedge favorite NRUC making the top five list as well.

We saw the 100-dma on the Dax on the lows, which was the last push we expected short-term. In S&P future we made new lows, though barely. Intraday we triggered a double bottom at 1,035 on the S&P futures, and we have started seeing divergence on the lows. Copper has been struggling to sell-off along with other risky assets today, Gold was up all day even with equities on their lows, and USD crosses haven't made new lows either. My original inclination was to see 1,012/1,020 before any reasonable corrective rally in both time and size would happen, but given the price action today I see the set-up for a rally to 1,052, and possibly 1,070.5 depending if we have or not finished the 5 leg impulse from the tops. I will watch very carefully the price action around 1,065/1,070 if we get there as I believe the market will present there a great opportunity to initiate fresh shorts.

Realpoint charts the progression of the recoveryless and crashfull recovery. It is not pretty.

Talk about a quick turnaround. CIT discusses recoveries for GUCs, conditions to successful POR implementation, fresh start balance sheet, and hockeystick projections.

China: Be cautious

Japan: Uh-oh ...