Archive - Oct 2010

A few months ago we linked up to a Bloomberg interview with Boston professor Lawrence Kotlikoff who provided his justification for why the US is currently bankrupt (something about a few hundred trillion in off-balance sheet liabilities). Back then Koltikoff, aiming squarely at a specific NYT Op-Ed columnist, said "some
doctrinaire Keynesian economists would say any stimulus over the next
few years won’t affect our ability to deal with deficits in the long
run. This is wrong as a simple matter of arithmetic. The fiscal gap is
the government’s credit-card bill and each year’s 14 percent of GDP is
the interest on that bill. If it doesn’t pay this year’s interest, it
will be added to the balance. Demand-siders say forgoing this year’s 14
percent fiscal tightening, and spending even more, will pay for itself,
in present value, by expanding the economy and tax revenue. My reaction?
Get real, or go hang out with equally deluded supply-siders. Our
country is broke and can no longer afford no- pain, all-gain 'solutions'." And just because nothing has changed, the professor is back to the crime scene this time making an even stronger case of bashing America's oligarchy for not daring to set off on the much needed path of austerity, something even the stereotypically more "fear-prone" French are willing to do (and strike every day along the way). Kotlikoff says: "This massive Ponzi scheme is turning the American Dream
into the American Nightmare" adding that what the Fed is doing now is equivalent to "child abuse" and adding "If things continue as we adults have planned, our nation’s
debt, measured as a share of gross domestic product, will reach
Greek levels just when the grandkids start heading to work. At
that point, simply stabilizing the debt-to-GDP ratio will
require raising taxes by 50 percent, thereby lowering the
grandkids’ living standard from 74 to 61." And it gets much worse. Read on for Kotlikoff's view on why the Fed should be banned by the Geneva Convention.

Few commentators realize what the BIG story is for the financial markets today. The BIG story is not the mortgage fraud, the corruption, or the computerized trading (although the last one dominates US stock markets’ daily action). No, the big story is the monetary actions of the massively indebted US vs. the credit cooling China.

The biggest non-event this weekend will be the upcoming peace crack pipe pow-wow between the world's most demented Keynesians when a bunch of bloated politicians and economists (except for their much smarter Brazilian colleagues who will instead be frolicking on Ipanema beach and enjoying the fruits of the most artificially-enhanced population on earth) sit down in Seoul and pretend they can come to some resolution over the globalized attempt to destroy all world currencies all at the same time as trillions in shadow money disappears each and every quarter. If this feels like a deja vu, it is - every single G-20 meeting in recent history has had an underlying FX focus, the result ends up being some token agreement, and the very next day the sell off in the dollar continues, as 20 other banks proceed to buy dollars in an act of futility against Ben Bernanke's death star fiat printer. In other words nothing will change. Even JPMorgan agrees: "On Saturday the G-20 may deliver their first statement on FX, and they may incorporate language which many countries have never collectively endorsed, but such a statement may not change much in practice. The status quo, whereby countries manage a dollar decline as best fits their circumstances as long as they don't deliberately strengthen the dollar, will probably persist for lack of a better option...The euro too would fall initially, since less intervention implies less reserve recycling. It would later rally as the dollar broadly declined." In other words - US middle class, a hotdog in Europe will soon cost about as much as it does in Disney Land.

The unnamed official nearly fell off his chair laughing when I said "So, does the US still have a strong dollar policy?" It was meant as a joke.

It has just not been Maverick Capital's quarter. From a just released 8K: "Today, Apollo Group, Inc. announced that its subsidiary, The University of Phoenix, Inc. (“University of Phoenix”), has received notice that the State of Florida Office of the Attorney General in Fort Lauderdale, Florida has commenced an investigation into possible unfair and deceptive trade practices associated with certain alleged practices of University of Phoenix. The notice includes a subpoena to produce documents and detailed information for the time period of January 1, 2006 to the present about a broad spectrum of University of Phoenix’s business."

RANsquawk US Afternoon Briefing - Stocks, Bonds, FX etc. – 22/10/10

Now that everyone knows that the only real macro trade is frontrunning Brian Sack, and fundamental analysis and its various derivatives are as dead as the dodo, there is one more trade that is a sure way for investors to make money: piggyback on short squeezes, especially with the assistance of State Street and the likes, whose only job it appears is to make increasingly more stocks impossible to borrow and forcing outright buyins in more and more names (more on that shortly). As shorts across all sectors have been trampled by endless rounds of liquidity, without regard for logic or bubble valuations, the desire of the bears to press a market that is now pricing in about $3.5 trillion in risk asset support (courtesy of QE 1, Lite and 2) or about 30% of the total market cap, isolating the names that have the highest Short Interest/Float and jumping on board may be the one profitable trade in addition to selling various CUSIPs to the Fed's gaping black hole. So what names should one invest in (and we use that in the most derogatory sense imaginable)? Luckily, Morgan Stanley has updated their most shorted names presentation. Keep in mind that these names are massively shorted for a reason: they are all mostly bubbles and deserve to trade orders of magnitude lower. But such is the reality of a market bubble - there is no reality. It is all just hype and "story" themes, not grounded in fact whatsoever. But that does not matter. It is all about the Fed. So without further ado, here are the names that will likely see the most indiscriminate offer lifting as more and more shorts are pulverized by Brian and his henchmen.

There is a stampede by 49 alternative energy projects to get approval before massive federal incentives offered by Obama expire at the end of the year. The golden state has set a goal of obtaining 33% of its electric power from alternative sources by 2020, the most ambitious anywhere in the world. Making the state a hot house for new energy technologies that can be exported to the rest of the world. (SPIR), (HOKU), (FSLR), (TSL).

"All the burning mortgages that are falling after me--
All the default feelings and the bankrupt memories--
Every bank I left behind each time I borrowed more--
Burning mortgages lost forevermore"

POMO is over, and with great regret we inform readers that the Fed now has zero credibility as the trades we expected to be precisely those most frontrun by the market are exactly as predicted. In other words: the CUSIPs anticipated to be monetized, and which we advised readers to lever up, buy, and flip them back to the Fed within a day, were precisely the ones that were put back. Fundamental analysis - you are fired. Enter - 100% Fed Frontrunning success rate.

In the latest amusing discrepancy to come out of the BLS, today's reported unemployment data by state indicated that at the end of September, there was a total of 129,699,600 people employed across the various states. Not very surprisingly, the biggest deterioration occurred in California which lost 63.5 K jobs, followed by New York at 37.6K (Wall Street layoffs?) and Massachusetts at 20.9K. The total change from August's 129,923,400 employed was a drop of 223,800. Well, this is a little confusing as the NFP number for September indicated that total jobs lost were 95,000, a slightly more than 50% improvement compared to the job losses at the state level. As Zero Hedge has demonstrated, the data coming out of the BLS is statistically impossible to say the least, and at best, worthless. But now at least we are getting confirmation that just like in the Fed, there may be those within the BLS, who actually know how to count. Too bad, those are not the people in charge of actual propaganda dissemination.

I bet you won't see too many of these point's in your favorite broker's analyst reports!!!

Today's POMO, focusing on 2013-2014 bonds has just started. As we proposed yesterday (in what led to quite a lively and interesting debate), now that even Goldman is advising clients to frontrun POMO, this may have been the top tick to the POMO frontrunning operation. A red close may just confirm that. But far more important than equities, we highlighted, courtesy of MS, just which CUSIPs will most likely be monetized (and thus submitted) the most by the Fed today. If indeed these are confirmed to be the bonds put to the Fed the most, it will merely erode one more layer of credibility the Fed has of an impartial and non-transparent organization.

Who says Canadians lack a sense of humor... And are ever wrong about the ECRI.

John Noyce, Goldman's arguably best technician, in his weekly Charts that Matter, has released one (among many) interesting observation on just how overbought the market currently is, and more specifically just how desperate the velocity of the pick up in the stocks since August has been, in order for levered beta players such as hedge funds, as we predicted in the end of August, to make up as much of their year as possible before seeing redemptions (even so many will not survive into 2010 as the entire 2/20 model is now crumbling). Specifically, by looking at where the S&P is relative to its 55 DMA, Noyce notes that every time the market has gotten to above 5% its trailing average, it has always entered a period of consolidation (read at least modest selling). Furthermore, compared to the recent trend extreme of 7% above 55 DMA, the market moved meaningfully above one just one occasion in the past: in January 2009... just before the crash to the decade lows of 666 on the S&P occurred.