Archive - Dec 23, 2010

As the rest of the world celebrates Christmas, blissfully pretending all is good, and the Fed can manipulate markets to infinity without at least one of the numerous violated laws of physics being reasserted in the process, things in China are once again reminding those who care that just as liquidity giveth, so does liquidity taketh away. We pointed out a week ago that the 7 day Repo rate in China recently hit a post-Lehman high, as banks are increasingly concerned that following 3 RRR hikes, the PBOC has no choice but to resort to some tightening measure that actually works. As a result excess liquidity has suddenly become rares than hen's teeth. Today we get a first hand lesson of why this was material: Dow Jones reports that the Chinese MoF has failed to attract sufficient interest in its 3 Month 20 billion CNY auction. The result: SHCOMP is now down 1.2%. Bottom line: as the world is sleeping, China just had a failed bond auction. If news mattered, this would be a very disturbing event. Luckily for Ben, it doesn't. For the time being. It will soon. Then Montier's mean reversion meme may just strike with great deferred vengeance and furious accrued anger.

The ideologies that condone unloading fiscal costs onto future taxpayers and savers clearly suppress default rates and default vol. But it creates seriously nonlinear returns: there may be massive upside as a result of nuclear fusion research subsidies, but there can be equally massive downside. What you get in exchange for control of fundamental laws of motion is asymmetry in outcomes and a much higher probability of extreme outcomes. Complexity and interconnectivity within the financial system—crowded trades and herd behavior—create fundamental asymmetric instabilities. Asymmetry implies a false sense of security. The result can be massive concentrated positions in either paying or receiving on a swap because “an adverse unhedgeable move can never happen”. Such positions are great when the good times roll, but under stress performance collapses.

Just in time for Christmas, On Wednesday, Dec. 22, U.S. gasoline prices hit an average $3 a gallon for the first time in more than two years, according to AAA's Daily Fuel Gauge Report. Meanwhile, U.S. stocks and oil also climbed to the highest levels since 2008.

From New Jersey to Canada, the pension pot is boiling and many will soon find out that there are no irrevocable rights to benefits...

Update: Charles Biderman sends us an addendum to his earlier CNBC appearance...

A year after Charles Biderman's provocative post first appeared on Zero Hedge, in which he asked just who is doing all the buying of stocks as the money was obviously not coming from retail investors (and came up with one very notable suggestion), today Maria Bartiromo invited the TrimTabs head once again (conveniently in CNBC's lowest rated show, during Christmas Eve eve, at a time when perhaps 5 people would be watching) in an interview which disclosed that after more than a year of searching, Biderman still has no idea who actually buying. In response to Bartiromo's question if the retail investor, who left after the flash crash (thank you SEC), Biderman responds what every Zero Hedger has known for 33 weeks: "Retail investors are not coming back to the US. Those investors that are investing are buying global equities and are buying commodities. We are seeing lots money going into commodity ETF funds: gold, silver..." and the even more unpleasant summation: "individuals have been selling, companies are net selling, insider selling and new offerings are swamping any  buyback and any cash M&A activity since QE 2 was announced. Pension funds and hedge funds don't really have that much cash to invest. So what nobody's asking is what happens when QE 2 stops: if the only buyer is the Fed, and the Fed stops buying, I don't know what is going to happen...When I was on your show a year ago I was saying the same thing: we can't figure out who is doing the buying it has to be the government, and people said I was nuts. Now the government is admitting it is rigging the market." Cue Bartiromo jaw dropping.

Don't leave it to the experts ... economics and financial stuff is easy to understand!

A bet.

In his latest letter, "In Defense of the 'Old Always'" GMO's James Montier takes PIMCO's trademark "New Normal" to task, and argues that the "Old Always" with its ever trusty mean reversion strategies work as well now as they always did. Summarizing his disagreement with what the investment implications of the New Normal are, Montier says: "For instance, Richard Clarida of PIMCO wrote the following earlier this year, “Positioning for mean reversion will be a less compelling investment theme in a world where realized returns cluster nearer the tails and away from the mean.” This certainly isn’t the first premature obituary written for mean reversion. During pretty much every “new era,” someone proclaims that the old rules simply don’t apply anymore … who could forget Irving Fisher’s statement that stocks had reached a “permanently high plateau” in 1929? Mean reversion is in some august company in being well enough to read its own obituary." The key defense for mean reversion Montier says, is the market itself: "we have witnessed some quite remarkable, and quite appalling, things – the deaths of empires, the births of nations, waves of globalization, periods of deregulation, periods of re-regulation, World Wars, revolutions, plagues, and huge technological and medical advances – and yet one thing has remained true throughout history: none of these events mattered from the perspective of value!" Which means: is this time really different? Have we passed some rubicon at which time not even the otherwise spot on observations of traditionally sensible analysts like Montier make sense? The answer is so far elusive. Yet in a universe in which true asset fair value can no longer be derived, and all valuations are wrapped in the enigma of trillions of monetary and fiscal stimuli, whose stripping is virtually impossible in a world in which everything is centrally planned, we just may have entered... the non-"old always" zone.

RANsquawk Market Wrap Up - Stocks, Bonds, FX etc. – 23/12/10

And so the spirit of Mark Pittman lives on. Bloomberg, which last year sued the Fed in a landmark FOIA case, and won (a decision which is being appealed by the kleptocrats but not the Fed), has decided to go transatlantic, and is now suing that smaller and far less viagraed cousin of the Fed, the ECB. Per Bloomberg: "The lawsuit asks the European Union’s General Court in Luxembourg to overturn a decision by the ECB not to disclose two internal documents drafted for the central bank’s six-member executive board in Frankfurt this year. The notes show how Greece used swaps to hide its borrowings, according to a March 3 cover page attached to the papers obtained by Bloomberg News. ECB President Jean-Claude Trichet withheld the documents after the EU and International Monetary Fund led a 110 billion- euro bailout ($144 billion) for Greece. The dossier should be disclosed to stop governments from employing the derivatives in a similar way again and to show how EU authorities acted on information they had on the swaps, according to the suit, filed by Bloomberg Finance LP, the parent of Bloomberg News." And for all those who were concerned that Mutual Assured Destruction is purely a US response to a rat being cornered, it appears the virus has gone airborne: "The information contained in the two documents would
undermine the public confidence as regards the effective conduct
of economic policy,” Trichet wrote in an Oct. 21 letter,
turning down Bloomberg’s request for the documents. Disclosure
“bears, in the current very vulnerable market environment, the
substantial and acute risk of adding to volatility and
instability.” Hello, McFly... We got the impression that PGBs moving 350 bps in two hours after Trichet's own bucket shop of a central bank decided to buy every single outstanding bond in the open market may be a far more potent reason for market "volatility." As for undermining confidence, perhaps this murder of charlatans should have considered that before they set off on the world's most ridiculous pilgrimage to the gods of lies, hubris, deceit, market manipulation and propaganda. Lastly, as this is merely a "protect Goldman" exercise, which as everyone knows is the main party involved in this Greek swap "transaction" - who cares: everyone in the world knows full well the high ethical standards of the West 200-based hedge fund.

No. Tax cuts are good, but right now it's like pushing on a string.

In his weekly headline letter John Taylor analyzes where he and Jim Chanos have overlapping views, and where both of them erred (hint: everyone underestimated the willingness of Bernanke to sacrifice monetary prudence in order to reflate anything and everything, although with oil now the latest and greatest excess liquidity target, the experiment may soon be ending). Yet the time of the global reliquification may be coming to an end: "If the Republicans play rough and California craters, fiscal tightening will be the rule, US rates will be higher than Bernanke wants, the dollar will be strong, and foreign markets will be hurt. The odds favor an outcome like this, and the Fed is not free to ride to the rescue again. With Ron Paul riding hard over Bernanke, the Feds wild ways will be corralled. With fewer excess dollars, the growth game, and the markets that follow it, are over." So is shorting stocks the best bet? Yes. But an even better one is going short the Aussies: "The Aussie was over USD 1.0000 today and we think it is a great sell here."

Are those who have forgotten the past condemned to repeat it or has the market, like Scrooge, truly turned over a new leaf and will forevermore keep the bullish Christmas Spirit alive in its heart - heading ever higher, never again to come down? Ah, there's a Christmas fable we'd all like to believe in!

Get ready, get set, chop (I mean shop!)...

Some interesting market chatter was recently intercepted: if true, then JP may be quietly offloading at least some part of his financial exposure using dark liquidity.