Archive - Oct 2010

RANsquawk European Morning Briefing - Stocks, Bonds, FX etc. – 11/10/10

This daily report is designed to help traders find opportunities to trade against this group. The premise is very simple we are looking for 66% of retail traders to be trading either long or short a currency pair, we then look for opportunities to fade (trade against) this group. For example if 72.99% of traders are long the USD/CHF we look for opportunities to short that pair. The pairs that we feel offer the highest opportunity for success are described in the Shortand Long Zones.

To the tick tock and the market doesn't stop, as even though the jobs report continued to color the economy bad, the shit awful numbers signal that Benny B is going to come in and sex the market up with QE2, so rally on my friends, rally fucking on (and yes, the rally makes about as much sense as Money McBags' using a shitacular 1990s song for an extended metaphor, but alas, not every Money McBags analogy can end with Taylor Rain going 5-hole, or can it?).

It’s not the foreclosure affidavits only. Hello? It’s the whole kit-n-caboodle. it’s the fabricated assignments of mortgage, fake allonges, robo-stamped endorsements in blank, and satisfactions of mortgage, ignoring SEC and IRS regulations, disregard for the steps required by the REMIC rules. It’s all the top national banks and their servicing arms. The whole of it is a sham. Don’t believe the propaganda that insists otherwise.

Then they got cute and produced either the actual note, a copy of the note or a forged note, or an assignment or a fabricated assignment from a party who at best had dubious rights to ownership of the loan to another party who had equally dubious rights, neither of whom parted with any cash to fund either the loan or the transfer of the obligation. . . .

I have to believe this is happening. The only question is,"How much?"

One of the more obvious side-effects of Ben Bernanke's simplistic QE 2 plan is to force retail investors out of their existing trajectory directed at fixed income products, and back into stocks, so that retail can once again occupy it long-coveted (by the bankers) position of buying Apple and Amazon at triple digit forward multiples. Unfortunately, as JPM's Nikolaos Panigirtzoglou explains, all that QE's lowering of bond yields will do (in addition to sending soybeans limit up every day for the balance of 2010, despite what others claim is merely a hallucination) is "reinforcing retail investors' flows into bonds." The biggest problem with the secular shift away from equities, and into bonds, is that the very mindset that the banking cartel loved for so long: retail buying stocks high, buying even more higher, has now translated completely into bonds. As JPM says: "The more bonds rally, the stronger the buying of bond funds by retail investors." In addition to the daily flash crashes in now countless names, surely this phenomenon explains why retail investors have taken money out of stocks for 23 weeks now (leaving many mutual funds running on fumes and a prayer) and put it into the best performing asset category (after precious metals of course). And QE2 will cement not only retail, but institutional demand for bonds as well: "lower bond yields are widening the deficits of pension funds in both the US and Europe inducing them to move further into fixed income to reduce the mismatch between assets and liabilities... This raises the risk that these institutional investors will move more towards corporate bonds in search for yield. So a potential aggressive move away form government into corporate bonds could exert strong downward pressure on credit spreads." Suddenly the world will realize that the average duration on rate-based exposure is 10+ (especially if Mexico issues a few more 100 Year bonds). And when rates creep up even a tiny little bit, it is game over as the next negative convexity event will be the (credit) market itself. Which is why we have long said that the black swan is not a failed auction, but the merest hint that rates are finally starting to creep up.

The middle class were not prepared for the assaults they have been fending off. They became soft and satisfied. They stopped training. They became distracted by their gadgets, delusions of home wealth, and fear of phantom terrorist enemies behind every bush. The propaganda machine of their true enemies has convinced the middle class that foreign enemies are massing. The enemy is within. The middle class will need to sacrifice and go to war against two enemies. Are they up to the task? I’m not sure. In my opinion the following platform is the only way to save this middle class country. Liberals and supposed Conservatives will be outraged. No one will be happy with my solutions. So be it.

One of the most bullish stories coming out of Europe last month was that Ireland, despite a drunk and disorderly finmin, and banks either increasingly more nationalized or on the verge of full scale restructuring, managed to fund its €25 billion in sovereign debt maturities. Of course, the European media took that as a sign of strength and from that point on it was off to the races for the EUR. Yet it appears the celebration was just a little premature. We learn today that virtually all of the maturities were funded indirectly by the ECB: in other words the monetization shell game so well mastered by the Fed is now being conducted by European banks everywhere. In September Irish bank borrowings surged from €95 billion to €119 billion, a €24 billion increase, and virtually a euro-for-euro match for all the new Treasury issuance. And since no demented monetization ploy goes unpunished, the action raised Irish ECB borrowings to 9% of liabilities, the same as Portuguese banks. As for the balance, as readers will recall we highlighted that last week the ECB purchased €1.4 billion of government bonds directly, therefore confirming that every single Irish bond auction would have been a 100% failure had it not been for Jean Claude Trichet's direct and indirect monetization scheme. But yes, somehow the euro is considered more viable than the dollar.

FOMC minutes, retail sales, CPI, trade balance. The minutes of the Sep 21 FOMC meeting out on Tuesday will be worth watching closely for anything special about the rationale for highlighting the low level of inflation and also to gauge how strong the support was for the decision to signal readiness to make further asset purchases. Speeches by Fed officials Dudley and Bernanke on Monday and Friday respectively will also be watched.

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Columbus Day, many markets will be closed, but some futures markets are now trading.

Perhaps the ruling Fed dictators can just go for a trifecta on November 3, and in addition to determining who wins the mid-term elections and announcing QE2, they can formalize TARP 2 as well. The reason is that starting tomorrow, 36 attorney's general are expect to launch a joint probe into "charges some banks used fraudulent paperwork to kick struggling borrowers out of their homes." Which of course means that Dick Bove is about to start appearing on CNBC every 10 minutes, providing instanalysis how banks have gone from overcapitalized to non-capitalized in the span of a weekend, under very "mysterious" circumstances. More from Reuters: "The source, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the deadline for attorneys general to sign on to the investigation effort led by Iowa's Tom Miller was at the end of the day Monday, so a formal announcement could be made Tuesday." Whether or not that call will also include demands for a moratorium remains to be seen.

Canada's Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan and Temasek, Singapore's sovereign wealth fund, are plotting a bid to spoil BHP Billiton's $39-billion (U.S.) hostile offer for Potash Corp...

Will the High Frequency Signing scandal be the proverbial straw on the camel's back. Perhaps. In the meantime, here is a soon to be viral, and all too real, parody of foreclosure gate. At this point the guilty parties are irrelevant. All that matters is that America's terminal collapse into a banana republic status is now obvious for all to see. And as for Cramer saying foreclosure gate will only force home prices to go higher, pray tell dear Jim, just which buyers will put their own money into a home when they have no idea at what time the real title holder shows up with a restraining and eviction order, and demands immediate access. Of course, there is a loophole: the Fed will simply henceforth pay for all home purchases. And should the government drop mortgage rates to zero, and subsidize tax and insurance payments into infinity, that may well happen. Of course, it will also bankrupt the country, but since when was America's insolvency news to anyone...