Archive - Jul 2010

Richmond Fed economist Kartik Athreya recently penned a criticism of economics bloggers that has exploded over the blogosphere. Basically he says that professional, PhD-educated economists can be trusted because of their rigorous methodology. Bloggers (most), he says, aren't to be trusted. Econophile's rebuttal.

The decoupling theorists are about to experience a second smackdown in 3 years. After the biggest bubble of 2008 blew up spectacularly and made beggars out of the Greek CEOs of various dry bulk shippers, only to see their fortunes go back to unchanged again, it looks like they may be retesting the benevolence of NetJets repo men for the second time. The BDIY chart has now completed a rather mutated head and shoulders, after dropping nearly two thousand points in the span of a month - the fastest plunge since the S&P 666 days.And with the Bank of China in liquidity salvage mode as reported earlier, look for much more gravity to come in this index.

"Taking into the year as whole, with the S&P 500 off nearly 8%, this goes down as the worst first half to any year since 2002." - David Rosenberg

Another view of a bad report.

RANsquawk US Afternoon Briefing - Stocks, Bonds, FX etc. – 02/07/10

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.