Archive - Oct 25, 2011

Phil is interviewed on the Business News Network. 

Yesterday, to modest jeers, we advised readers that JPM had turned megabearish on that other momo darling, First Solar, cutting its target price to $50. It appears JPM was on to something. As of minutes ago, FSLR announced that "The Board of Directors of First Solar, Inc. (NASDAQ:FSLR - News) today asked its Chairman and company founder, Mike Ahearn, to serve as interim Chief Executive Officer. Ahearn has accepted. Effective immediately, Rob Gillette is no longer serving as Chief Executive Officer, and the Board of Directors thanks him for his service to the company. The Board of Directors has formed a search committee and is initiating a search for a permanent Chief Executive Officer." Time to hitting JPM's stock price target ? One day. At last check FSLR was trading 15% down at under $50. To anyone who shorted, congratulations. What is more interesting is that momo after momo darling are getting systematically monkeyhammered. Can Chipotle and Amazon really be that far behind?

Following the USDJPY touching on a fresh post-WWII low earlier today, not only has Noda made the transition from simply watching to outright panicking to being on suicide watch, but the BOJ has finally freaked out (something we predicted back in April only to be just 6 months ahead of the curve). Case in point: the Nikkei just reported that the BOJ "will discuss additional monetary easing measures to help blunt the mighty yen's impact on the economy when its policy board convenes for a meeting Thursday." Specifically, the BOJ may (read) will, expand the existing 50 TRN yen asset-purchase program by 5 TRN yen, and also may consider the purchase of bonds of more than two-year maturity, thus expanding scope of program and converting it into Japan's own Operation Twist. In other words, printing goes to Japan, now that it is widely expected that no matter what Europe does, the outcome will be one of EUR weakness. Everyone knows the proclivities of the deranged Chairsatan (and for those who don't just observed the dramatic backwardation in Crude observed here first yesterday), which only leaves Shirikawa. And he has just had enough. Which in turn explains the surge in gold: with the entire world once again entering hyprintspeed mode, the only safe repository of value is now exclusively gold (sorry CHF, you are no longer relevant: thank Hildebrand and the goonies at the SNB who are quietly padding up the asset side of their balance sheet with hundreds of billions of soon to be even more worthless euros).

The US Treasury just completed the first of 3 bond sales, which as Zero Hedge observed last week, will take total US Debt to GDP to over 100%. Today's auction was more or less plain vanilla, with $35 billion in 2 Year bonds pricing at 0.281%, just inside of the 0.29% When Issued, higher than the September 0.249%, and with the Bid To Cover declining modestly from a near record 3.76 to 3.64 this month, which however is still the second best BTC for 2011. That said, the interest was not due to Directs who saw their take down share drop from 12.16% (and an LTM average of 14.30%) to just 8.21%, the lowest since February 2011. Yet while Directs (China's London-based buyers, PIMCO) Dealers stepped up and bought 52.57% of the auction, the highest since June. Naturally as has been the case recently, the bond priced well inside 3M USD Libor of 0.422%, something which in an era pre-central planning would be quite laughable, but now: perfectly normal.

We have good reason to be waiting for Lehman—our current situation is simple and stark: Sovereign nations and individual citizens are over-indebted—to the point where they cannot pay back what they owe. We all know that this overindebtedness at the sovereign and individual level is going to end, and end badly: Worse than 2008.  So along with everyone else, I’ve been waiting for Lehman—and fruitlessly trying to guess which will be the Lehman-like event this time around. Will it be the bankruptcy of Dexia? BofA? UniCredit or SocGen or one of the Spanish banks? Will it be a war in the Middle East? Bad producer index numbers from China? A fart by a day-trader in Uzbekistan?

When will Lehman arrive!?!?

But lately, my thinking has changed: Like the characters in Godot, I think that we’re waiting in vain. The Lehman-like event will never arrive because it won’t be allowed to arrive. So this miserable slog we are going through will continue—indefinitely. (Yeah, I know: Sucks to be us.)

We last presented the chart below following the most recent UMichigan consumer confidence data. We update it for today's Conference Board update, which regardless of how one looks at the data, confirms that either consumer confidence, or retail data is being either massively manipulated, or there has been a revolution in mass psychology whereby the more depressed and hence broke a US consumer is, the more they shop. But going back to reality, this divergence is absolutely unsustainable, and we are certain that any and all calls by fly-by-night journalism majors calling for an end to the US recession, driven purely by an overhyped short covering rally in the stock market, will shortly, and mercifully, cease.

The low prices sure were fun while they lasted. In other news, Spam is still cheap. And now, it is time for the CME to scramble to reinforce "risk management" and send margins to 100% because this aggression against "sound" money will simply not stand (oddly enough the 14% or so jump in the ES and various other equities contracts was not sufficient to prompt corresponding margin hikes).

The US banking system as a whole is leveraged at 13-to-1. While this is not horrible relative to Europe’s banking system (more on this in a moment), these levels still mean that an 8% drop in asset values wipes out ALL equity. Then you have Europe’s banking system, which is leveraged at 26-to-1. Anecdotally, this is borderline Lehman Brothers (30 to 1). At these levels, even a 4% drop in asset prices wipes out ALL equity.

The growing consensus among technical and fundamental analysts is that the stock market has bottomed for the year and is now in full rally mode. There are five basic arguments in favor of a "real thing" rally that runs higher for months to come:

1. Stocks almost always rally in November-December, and end in positive territory in the 3rd year of the presidential cycle (2011)
2. September data in the U.S. was mildly positive, fears of recession have faded
3. Corporations like Google and Catepillar are posting blow-out earnings
4. Europe is finally solving its debt crisis in a comprehensive fashion
5. China is still growing and thus is still the tugboat pulling the global economy ahead

There are seven factors on the other side of the ledger...

Where does Larry Summers get off giving Americans advice on how to fix the continuing housing crisis?  And where does this political opportunist find the unmitigated gall to instruct us not to “finger point” and thereby identify culprits in Washington who helped enable the housing mess?

Here is the draft document with our thoughts inserted directly into the document. As more actual details or termsheets become available we will attempt to analyze them as well.

Over the next 24 hours expect many post of this nature:

• DE JAGER SAYS ITALY NEEDS TO TAKE EXTRA GOVERNANCE MEASURES
  
• GREEK BONDHOLDER LOSS WILL BE 60%, ANA CITES VERHOFSTADT SAYING

Liesman spin on how 60% losses is not a CDS trigger event coming in 10 minutes.

While the US may have its "committee" decision to every problem in the world, Europe has the "summit meeting" which in the past would kiss and make everything better. No longer. As the following chart from Reuters indicates, annotating the relentless rise in Italian yields (which have about 100 bps in buffer from full out Eurozone collapse: if the 10 Year BTP hits 7.00% it's game over), the half life of the mere meeting in terms of favorable impact is now negligible and in fact, negative. Just like BOJ (and, some would add, Fed) interventions in the market now do more harm than good, so hollow Eurozone meetings without any actual resolution, simply make the Eurozone troubles that much more acute. Keep a close eye on the BTPs. They are already at 6% following last week's tumble first documented on Zero Hedge. If the price drops that much more, that will be it for the EMU experiment.