Archive - Jul 2, 2010

As always SocGen's Dylan Grice comes out with some tremendous insights in his latest weekly piece "Double dips, siren calls and inflationary bias of policy." While the gist of the piece is presenting a comprehensive overview of the traditional and cognitive biases toward inflationary policies and away from hard, unpopular, deflationary/austere measures, Dylan provides a chilling anecdote involving the 1980s conflict between the UK and Argentina, in which it was precisely war that pulled an extremely unpopular government, that of Maggie Thatcher, out of the gutter of public opinion, and soaring in popularity. Thatcher, who came to power oddly enough on a "mandate to smash inflation, smash the unions and downsize government", saw her popularity immediately slide to 25% (see chart) as people realized the very real pain associated with austerity and a regime fighting run away government. A tangent in Grice's argument is that on very rare occasions, the people of a country do end up making the decision to take on hardship, instead of kicking the can down the road (are you listening Summers?). Yet they promptly grow to regret their decision. So what was it that saved the government, and allowed the Conservatives a second term in which to complete the painful austerity project? The declaration of war by Argentina's General Galtieri over the Falkland Islands. The result was soaring popularity for the Iron Lady, and the rest is history. Looking forward, now that all of Europe is gripped in austerity, and make no mistake - this very same austerity is coming to the US on very short notice (sorry Krugman), and popularity ratings for all political parties are crashing, has the political G-8/20 elite been focused a little too much on the Falkland war? Is war precisely the diversion that Europe and soon America hope to use in order to deflect anger from policies such as Schwarzenegger's imposition of minimum wage salaries yesterday (yes, this is pure austerity)? And is there a Gallup or some other polling "unpopularity" threshold that the G-20 is waiting for before letting all those aircraft carriers parked next to the Persian Guld loose? Read the below excerpt from Dylan and make up your own minds.

Making money as the sell side turns on itself...

His face wracked by age and his voice rasping after decades of chain-smoking coarse tobacco, the former long-time Russian Minister of nuclear energy and veteran Soviet physicist Viktor Mikhailov knows just how to fix BP's oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico.

"A nuclear explosion over the leak," he says nonchalantly puffing a cigarette as he sits in a conference room at the Institute of Strategic Stability, where he is a director. "I don't know what BP is waiting for, they are wasting their time. Only about 10 kilotons of nuclear explosion capacity and the problem is solved."

We are just 2.3 points away from that critical -10 threshold on the ECRI WLI which at least historically, has guaranteed a recession. Just the freefall itself is vertigo inducing, and the number's release at 10:30 Eastern is what pushed the market even further lower as bullish indicator after indicator collapse.

Earlier on CNBC, Pimco's Tony Crescenzi was discussing the NFP number, and trying to infuse calm in the market, which is to be expected: with Pimco way past the full-scale size at over $1 trillion in fixed income holdings, where it is the de facto market in the bulk of its products, and thus critically reliant on marginal price makets, any further disruption in market confidence may just result in a, gasp, down month for the TRF. Yet, while the agenda was clear, one of Tony's statements was blatantly false. "The money market gauges such as Euribor, the amounts of money deposited at the ECB, commercial paper market, etc, all of these have improved since May." Uhm... Tony, perhaps it is time to take another hard look at the monitors on "McCulley's moneymarket desk"-  perhaps you are just looking at the chart depicting popular trust in economic pundits on CNBC, which has, indeed, been flat at +/- 0.

I say bunk!

May factory orders are the latest casualty of the gradual stimulus withdrawal: the forecast decline of -0.5% was almost tripled, coming out at -1.4%. This compares to an April increase of 1.0%. From the release: "New orders for manufactured goods in May, down following eight consecutive monthly increases, decreased $5.8 billion or 1.4 percent to $413.2 billion, the U.S. Census Bureau reported today. This followed a 1.0 percent April increase. Excluding transportation, new orders decreased 0.6 percent." And the artificual GDP booster, inventory ramp ups, has now plateaued: "Inventories, down following four consecutive monthly increases, decreased $2.0 billion or 0.4 percent to $520.4 billion. This followed a 0.6 percent April increase. The inventories-to-shipments ratio was 1.25, up from 1.24 in April." Little one can add here: this is merely the latest crumb on the path in the search for the full blown Double Dip Depression.

Those China CDS are looking ever more attractive. Earlier today, Bank of China, Asia’s third-
largest lender by market value, announced it plans to raise as much as 60
billion yuan ($8.9 billion) in a rights offer to replenish
capital. Bloomberg reports: "The lender will sell 1.1 shares for every 10 held, or as
many as 19.56 billion shares in Shanghai and 8.36 billion in
Hong Kong, a statement to the Hong Kong stock exchange showed
today." This latest equity offering in a region already drowning in capital raises was enough to halt trading in BOC shares until July 5 as the response to it would hardly be considered favorable. A sale by Bank of China would “damage market sentiment and banking shares further because we’ve already been flooded by share offerings,” Tang Yayun, a Shanghai-based analyst at Northeast Securities Co., said before the announcement. “This is a surprise given that they just completed a bond sale.” The bolded sentence is critical as it merely implies that the rot from the trillions in bad loans made to assorted house flippers, tulip sniffers, and opium den casino dwellers are finally coming home to roost. Indeed, Bank of China's capital adequacy ratio fell to 11.09 percent
as of March 31, below the minimum 11.5 percent required according to the China Banking Regulatory Commission. The next wave of the solvency crisis tsunami has now officially made landfall in China.

Pretty much says it all

The only reason for the decline in the unemployment rate to 9.5% was yet another decline in the labor force participation rate, which according to the BLS dropped another 652k people in the month of June. This resulted in a labor force to the civilian non-institutional population ratio of 64.7%: the second lowest number in decades of data, and only better than December 2009, when this number was 64.6%. The problem with this is that it badly underestimates the split between those who are marginally attached and those 14,623 who were formally unemployed in June. As the chart below shows, the double dip in the labor force participation is now very much pronounced. What this chart implies is that if there was a mean reversion to the last 10 year labor force participation average rate of 66.2%, there should be another 3.5 million jobless added to the 14.6 million tally. And as this differential is the easiest thing in the world for the BLS to fudge, adding the two and dividing by the labor force of 153,74, we get an unemployment rate of 11.8%, leaving aside all other such fudge factors are government hiring, temporary workers, birth death, etc. 9.5% or 11.8% - which one is more realistic for an economy finally realizing it never left the second great depression, you decide.

Gold fell a staggering $36.30, or 3.5% per 100 troy ounces on Thursday. The dollar, another safe haven asset, dropped 2%. Some analysts have suggested gold’s move was the result of a large fund unwinding a position by selling gold and buying back the euro. Yesterday’s activity was the decisive battle for the time being between the “it’s a commodity crowd” versus the “it’s money stupid” folks. Put another way, if you believe that we are in a deflationary cycle (like us), and you believe that gold is a commodity only (not like us), then its price must go down relative to currency during deflationary meltdowns.

If however you believe that Gold is not a commodity, and that it is money, then you believe it should hold value , or even appreciate in a deflationary spiral.

Private payrolls were a disappointment at just +83k, versus consensus of 112k. Birth-death added 147k. Census removed 225k, in line with consensus. Temporary help was another terrific "green shoot" increasing by +21k. And the Unemployment rate dropped to 9.5% because 652k people walked out of the labor force, which dropped from 154.393 million to 153.741 million. Another big miss for the recovery story and another confirmation of the data point. The only improvement was the percentage of those unemployed 26 weeks and longer dropped from 46% to 45.5%, or from 6.763 million to 6.751 million. Yet the most troubling indicator was the downward inflection in the average workweek, which once again dropped by 0.1 hours to 34.1 hours, while in manufacturing the drop was a severe 0.5 hours, following a rise of 0.4 hours in May. The slack in the laborforce is once again building up. Also, average hourly earnings declined by 0.1%, after an increase of 0.2% in May.

Today we end Fix It week on my show, although we hope to keep this recurring theme. But the largest hindrance to solutions for all of the problems we've discussed - be it the Deficit, Energy, Education or the Wars -- goes back to one place: the current Political Process in our country. We practically all share the same list of problems, regardless of ideology: The undue influence of moneyed interest, the focus on inane Culture Wars instead of proper governance, the low quality of our politicians coupled with their high incumbency rates, the lack of ethics, disclosure etc. The only question left is how to fix them and then, how do we muster the will? These are the questions we will address for my entire show today - and just to get the ball rolling, here are four of my favorite solutions. - Dylan Ratigan

Well that was quick. On June 17 the SNB announced it was ending currency interventions. After much ridicule, a straight line appreciation, and a SNB balance sheet bloated with euros, the SNB has realized the folly of its non-interventionist ways in a manipulative, Keynesian world, and at midnight eastern time came storming back into FX intervention by gobbling up another roughly ten billion in EUR, causing a 200 pip spike in the EURCHF. And as we have discussed previously, such episodes of lunacy do nothing but load up the country's balance sheet with even more euros, while the intervention half time is so low now to be negligible. Bloomberg reports, "The franc is already expensive but above 1.30 it will become a serious issue,” said David Kohl, deputy chief economist at Julius Baer Holding AG in Frankfurt. “They’ll wait for the right moment to punish speculators. It’s only a question of time, the appreciation is simply too fast." Unfortunately for the SNB it will be speculators who have the last laugh, and with Switzerland now the target of every new deposit account opened in a bank-distrustful Europe, nothing that the SNB does will matter to curb the inflow of funds.

• Aussie PM Gillard scales back Australian mining tax in boost for election prospects.
• Crude oil fell below $73 a barrel, after slipping 6.8 percent in the previous four days.
• Employment fell in June for the first time this year.
• Gartner cuts 2010 global IT spending view cut on Euro woes.
• Germany, France to press Brussels on transaction tax.
• Greece sealed a deal with the European Investment Bank for €2B in financing.