Archive - Sep 2010

Silver is now trading at a 30 year high, is overbought, and bumping up against key technical resistance. Mean reversion can be a bitch. Making 13% in a zero return world. For those who hold physical bars and coins, just keep it locked up and throw away the key. Waiting for $50 an ounce. You can always use your silver dollars to bribe the border guards.

The TRS offers additional answers to the hard questions posed in the media, but are they good answers? I drill in a little deeper, and hope not to piss anybody off. I'm pretty sure I failed.

All those who were observing the pounding in futures overnight, and are stunned once again by how stocks can be higher with horrendous data out of the FHFA on the home price index which plunged to -0.5% on expectations of -0.2% and a prior print of 0.3%, need look no further than the FRBNY, where Brian Sack is warming up the Bloomberg Terminals. Up on deck: anywhere between $3 and $5 billion in repurchases of bonds maturing between 3/15/2013 – 8/31/2014, with the money immediately going to the Primary Dealers, who bid up Amazon, Apple, etc, etc, perpetuating the myth that the American economy is not dead. Expect a run up in stocks into the 11 AM close of today's POMO.

For nearly twenty years, we haven’t flinched from our prediction that the massive debt build-up of the last generation would precipitate out as a deflationary bust. That is what we still expect, although we now believe there is likely to be a hyperinflationary phase at some point as the financial system implodes. But the bottom line is that no matter how things play out, America’s standard of living will fall more steeply than at any other time since the Great Depression.

I’d like to reiterate that the point of these primers is to explain the big-picture factors that have shaped my opinion on the direction of the economy in general, and housing in particular. So far we have seen that deflation and not inflation will be the dominant force over the next several years as we have reached a point of peak credit and peak consumption in the Western world. Beyond that is anyone’s guess, and the inflationists and hyperinflationists may yet be proven right. But it won’t be in the next few years, at least not in Canada. We’ve seen that real estate in Canada absolutely is in bubble territory when the data is considered rationally and compared to widely accepted measures of fundamental value. We’ve seen that the two big drivers of this bubble growth have been mass psychology (how many times have you heard, “real estate only goes up,” despite all the contrary evidence just south of our border) and also by the erroneous and self-defeating policies of CMHC. We’re once again looking at one of the macro factors that will exert significant downward pressure on real estate prices over the next several years: demographics.

Jefferies shares have swooned today as one of the last remaining true broker dealers released Q3 results which missed massively on both the top and the bottom line. And if these are an indication of what most of Wall Street has to look forward to, Q3 will be a bloodbath for banks. As Barron's Tiernan Ray reports, citing CEO Dick Handler (talk about mean parents) that "trading volumes across the board were painfully slow during the months
of June, July and August,” said CEO Richard Handler — quite a contrast
from Q2’s results, when Handler said the firm was “pleased with solid
quarterly results.” Putting this number in context (from the 8-K), Q3 net revenues were $520 million, versus $700 million last year, a whopping 25% decline primarily as a result in the complete collapse in principal trading revenues to $74.3MM from $338,6MM, an 80% decline in this main profit center for Wall Street firms, which have recently all become nothing but glorified hedge funds.

In two recent articles "The Gold Market is not "Fixed", it's Rigged" and “The Failure of the Second London Gold Pool” I showed how the gold trading between the London AM Fix and the PM Fix was unnaturally related in an inverse way to the trading between the PM Fix and the following AM Fix. I calculated that the probability of such a counter-intuitive correlation existing by happenstance was one in 2.6 times ten raised to the power 31. This is almost irrefutable evidence that some one is continually and deliberately dumping gold into the PM Fix to suppress the price of gold. In this article I have unearthed even more forensic evidence in the form of a correlation between the gold and the silver price which again could not happen by random chance. It is necessarily a result of deliberate market intervention and what’s more it occurs on a continuous basis. - Adrian Douglas

Update: Spot now $1,296. The countdown has begun

October Gold settled at $1272.50 per 100 troy ounces on Tuesday, a net loss of of $6.60 for the day. After-hours activity was a different story entirely with a sharp rally after the FOMC minutes triggering an intense rally and prices as high as $1285. October gold was up $19.10 to $1291.80 per 100 troy ounces as of 7:50 AM EST, this morning. The December U.S. dollar index was down .643 to 80.03. October platinum was up $18.60 to $1634.70 per 50 troy ounces. December silver was up 46.5 cents to $21.10.

When the S&P future traded up 7 ticks post FOMC yesterday I stood up and offered to bet that stocks would finish negative on the day. With only a bit more than an hour to go before close, the market having shot up 11 ticks after the announcement and trading up 0.6% on the day, I thought that offering even odds should have been a no brainer for any bull out there. The funny conclusion of this anecdote is that no one took the other side. I even said I would literally shoot myself if stocks finished up on the day... Thankfully they did not though I am still not sure that was a good thing. Bottom line is that nobody seemed to understand or care what stocks were doing: that to me is very scary. - Nic Lenoir

• FTMFW: Europe Debt Crisis Is Over, Declares Spanish Leader (WSJ)... he also murmured that the ECB bailouts will continue until zombification penetration rates improve
• Hilarious: We should clone the robo-trader rather than revile him (HFT)
• Liberal Democrat Conference: 'Oil price could double in return to 1970s style shocks' (Telegraph)
• Ally Financial legal issue with foreclosures may affect other mortgage companies (WaPo)
• Moves to Weaken Yen Not Over, Says Kan (FT)
• Sakakibara Says Yen to Hit Record Despite BOJ Sales (Bloomberg)
• China Shouldn't Fear Floating Exchange Rate, Official Says (WSJ)

The Portuguese auction earlier today was a smashing success, of one considers a rise in the Bid To Cover at the expense of an interest rate increase by over 1%, smashing. The 4 Year bond came at 4.695%, while the 10 Year priced at 6.242%, both printing 100 bps wider than previous. This mirrors the deterioration seen in the recent Ireland bond auction, where the same dynamic was observed. The European periphery is paying ever more to roll its maturing debt. Just wait until these countries have to refi short-term debt at 2%+ differentials: not even the ECB will be able to save the countries from that particular toxic debt spiral.

Gold has just hit a fresh all time record (with equity futures down), as the world has finally awakened to the central banker ruse. With spot touching at $1,293.5 perhaps all those seeing some reversion to the mean occuring in the metal would be better advised to look for a career as robot algos, that do nothing but seek std dev divergences from a VWAP mean. In the meantime, gold will continue to chug along to $5,000+, now that FX interventions is how the central bankers of the world will be spending all their trading hours.

• Asia stocks mixed after Fed said it was ready to do more to recharge the US economy.
• Fed hinted it is becoming uneasy about the outlook, but deferred taking any new steps.
• Fed suggest it could buy more bonds; Way eased for new programme of QE.
• Iceland cuts base rate by 0.75% to 6.25%.
• Las Vegas home sales fall as area unemployment lingers near 15%
• Oil hovers above $75 in Asia after report shows US supplies unexpectedly rose last week.
• UK Business Secretary plans to announce a review of takeovers, executive pay.

RANsquawk European Morning Briefing - Stocks, Bonds, FX etc. – 22/09/10

Britain has the largest pensions gap in Europe and people need to put £10,300 a year more on average into their pension pot if they want to keep their current standard of living in retirement, new research claims.