Archive - Jul 2010

RANsquawk European Morning Briefing - Stocks, Bonds, FX etc. – 21/07/10

Earlier today, a report by the Times stated that BP CEO Tony Hayward would resign in a matter of weeks. Sky News has just released an official refutation by the firm according to which the CEO will not only not be resigning from the oil company, but that he has "full support from the board and will remain in place." Of course, if it is uncovered that the firm has been just as "effective" in photoshopping out the various seepages next to the Macondo blow out, as it has been in marking activity at its crisis center, picking the best occasion to resign will be the last of Hayward's concerns.

The recently passed Donk (Dodd-Frank) Finreg abomination, which nobody has yet read is finally starting to disclose some of the interesting side effects of its harried passage. Such as that the rating agencies may have suddenly become extinct. As the WSJ's Anusha Shrivastava discloses: "The nation's three dominant credit-ratings providers have made an urgent new request of their clients: Please don't use our credit ratings." The Moodies of the world suddenly have good reason to not want their name appearing next to those three A letters (at least in Goldman CDO and bankrupt sovereign cases) out there: "The new law will make ratings firms liable for the quality of their
ratings decisions, effective immediately." In other words, "advice by the services will be considered "expert" if used in formal documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. That definition would make them legally liable for their work, meaning that it will be easier to sue an firm if a bond doesn't perform up to the stated rating." And since ratings are officially a part of a vast majority of Reg-S filed documentation, the response by issuers has been a complete standstill in new issuance, especially asset-backed underwriting and non-144A high yield issues, as the raters evaluate how to proceed. Alas, as there is no easy fix, underwriters' counsel and issuers will promptly uncover new loopholes and ways  to issue bonds without the rating agencies' participation. Did Moody's and S&P just become extinct?

Those collecting unemployment checks can rest easy - the Senate has just extended unemployment benefits through November 30 in another attempt to round up a few straggling votes for the mid-term elections. The fact that instead of creating jobs, the administration is still stuck with perpetuating the sugar high that achieves nothing but merely adds tens of billions more to the US debt, is just as appalling as the fact that this little sham is supposed to incite populist support for the president. Yet even as Europe is just starting out on its farstatic voyage, ours is slowly coming to its end: this latest fiscal stimulus could well be the last one. Here are the thought's of Goldman's Alec Phillips on just how great of an economic deterioration and slow down we should expect as a result of the eventual elimination of various fiscal stimuli.

Maine legislators have prepared a detailed plan for shifting state employees into Social Security and are considering whether to adopt it. They acknowledge it will not solve their problem in the short term but see long-term advantages. And it's not just Maine. Can Social Security withstand the onslaught of underfunded state pension funds?

Investors are understandably scared of the sovereign debt crisis unfolding in Europe. Amid their angst, however, they are ignoring a more likely, and significantly larger, debt catastrophe that is about to hit the nation with the second-largest economy in the world — Japan. Two decades of stimulative, low-interest-rate fiscal policy have made Japan the most indebted nation in the developed world, and as new Prime Minister Naoto Kan recently said, in his first address to Parliament, that situation is not sustainable. Japan has little choice but to raise interest rates substantially, with dire consequences far beyond its shores.

Commodity trading and hedging recommendations dated July 15 by Goldman Sachs.

6 degrees of Larry Summers and Tim Geithner ...

RANsquawk Market Wrap Up - Stocks, Bonds, FX etc. – 20/07/10

The jury is out: I have been in the deflation camp personally for the last 2 years, but I hear the arguments for Zimbabwean hyperinflation, or the case of the oscillation in no man's land as governments and central banks stop us on our way to the deflationary Kondratieff winter at each market collapse with a new round of monetization. Maybe this last cynic remake of the Japanese lost decades is the most obvious way to bet on the demagogy of our modern "capitalist" system where government are helpless against deflation and will therefore sacrifice our future and the planet if they have to in order to save whatever face they have left. - Nic Lenoir

And as the regulatory theater ends, both on Wall Street and on the bottom of the GoM, everyone gets paid handsomely for their participation, with the taxpayer getting the bill as usual. From the Apache press release:

Apache to Acquire BP Assets in Permian Basin, Canada and Egypt For $7 Billion

- Legacy assets complement existing operations in all three areas - Adds proved reserves of 385 million barrels of oil equivalent and approximately 83,000 boe per day of production - Substantial development opportunities and additional resource potential
...
Apache's financial advisors for these transactions were Goldman, Sachs & Co., BofA Merrill Lynch, Citi and J.P. Morgan.

King World News presents another great interview, this time with innovative hedge fund manager, and financial skeptic, Eric Sprott, best known recently for bringing an alternative to the GLD and SLV paper domination, with his innovative gold and silver physical ETFs. In the below interview, Sprott shares a wealth of insight into Keynesianism, on the staggering and rising debt load, on the collapse in every single economic metric and the imminent arrival of the double dip (sorry Apple fans, iPad sales are not a leading indicator; at best they serve as a delinquent mortgage tracker), on QE1 and the upcoming QE2. Sprott's view that "nobody has a solution here, nor should they have a solution here: I think we need to rid ourselves of the theory we need to keep adding debt all the time to keep growing." Sprott agrees with the Zero Hedge principle, that when dealing with broken Keynesian economics, you need to shock the system - "you need to hit bottom." As Sprott says: "You need to really shake the system in order for the system to change, and so far there has been absolutely no change in the system." And, of course, Sprott discusses gold, gold manipulation, and paper gold. 30 minutes of must hear observations.

There was a time when stocks, bonds, gold, dollar, oil, correlations, and pretty much anything that isn't nailed down, going up concurrently would make at least some market participants frown. Not so much any more - with the average "trader" an 18 year old pustular math whiz-kid with the personality of a paper clip and a Ph.D. from a prestigious institution to boot, with no idea of just the level of death and destruction their "sentient", "self-aware" and "learning" programs are about bring to the market, nobody cares about that little thing called logic. Yet going off that, and basing observations on the last rational market indicator, i.e. bonds, it appears stocks continue to be about 70 points rich and have a fair value around 1,020 as implied by 10 Year Yields. As the deranged schizophrenic computer algos were blowing threw vacuum tubes like Ukranian hookers go through crack on any given Hamptons weekend, they totally forgot to bring bond yields higher for validation. Which is why the stocks-bonds (10 Year) convergence is now more pronounced than ever. Sell stocks, Sell bonds (Long Yields) and wait for the big Mahwah collocation facility black out that will eliminate 80% of binary market participants that will allow the spread to close.

Last night we said: "So for any insomniac traders with a taste for virtually risk free arbitrage, here is your opportunity to take advantage of one of those ultra rare occasions where the ES is actually cheap to the AUDJPY - buy spoos, and sell carry, for a roughly 6 point indexed spread convergence." The spread is now closed, and recoupling 20 out of 20 is in the books. For those who took on the minimal risk (and hopefully leveraged 1,000,000 times, just like Merrill's prop desk in the days of yore), congratulations on this "guaranteed" profit.

In keeping with the tradition of digging America into a debt hole so ridiculously large any conversation over whether the US will be able to ever pay this debt off is immediately moot, the Senate has just ended debate over the latest micro fiscal stimulus, specifically the legislation extending unemployment insurance benefits. It appears the latest iteration of the "you never have to work again as long as you vote for Obama" bill is about to pass. Next up: free government jobs for everyone as the census becomes a monthly affair. And when that fails, free Bernanke Bux for all who still remember how to breathe after all the daily Desperate Housewives of Liberty 33 drama. As for the cost of this latest freebie: $25, $50 billion.. who cares - at the eventual hyperinflationary discount rate, the NPV is about a penny or three. As for current funding, two Fed Assured 2 Year glitchless auctions at record low rates will take care of it.