Archive - Dec 11, 2011

Somebody, somewhere has to put up the money and take the loss of the Euro Zone, and it does not look like EU would rise up to the occasion. 

Zero Hedge has been lucky to have reported from the front lines on that historic day, March 18, 2009, when at precisely 2 pm the Fed formally expanded its LSAP program to include Treasuries, and more MBS, in what become formally known as Quantitative Easing (Episode 1). On that day, nearly three years ago (when gold was trading at $925) our commentary was the following: "Maybe one should really start buying stocks ahead of the uber-hyperinflation that will imminently ensue. We recommend wheelbarrow stocks.This is textbook back against the wall. But at least the stock market takes another crutch up." and of course: "Print, print, print... God help us." Needless to say it has been downhill ever since, and even though the global economy now is in the worst situation it has ever been precisely due to this unbridled printing, it is somehow conventional wisdom that all in Europe will be well... if the ECB does what the Fed did on that Wednesday in March nearly three years ago. The sheer idiocy of the logic is dumbfounding. Yet what we wanted to demonstrate is the intraday kneejerk response in the EURUSD which we caught just as it happened: the European currency moved by 400 pips from 1.31 to almost 1.35 in minutes. Which begs the question: in order to prevent a dollar spike, much as the situation of pre-QE March dictated, is the low 1.30s level the magical threshold where if the ECB does not, then the Fed will print? We make no forecast, and merely want to show that should the Euro proceed to tumble, the Fed has more than enough weapons, well, weapon, in its arsenal to reset the global devaluation game all over again. Because a soaring dollar will be the next inevitable step in the global liquidity collapse, which can and will be delayed (if only briefly) in only possible way: the "way" which will see gold doubling yet again over the next three years (if not far shorter).

Today, the “movers and shakers” of the financial world abound in such useful idiots. It has been a long road from the 1930s Keynesian mantra that “we owe it to ourselves” to today’s masters of the universe with their incomprehensible computer “algorithms” fuelled by the ability of modern  computers to crunch almost unlimited sequences of “1s” and “0s”. The entire road has been paved with one goal in mind. To convince the “people” that the only road to financial “safety” is to give up their thinking processes and “delegate” them to those who claim to know what they are doing. The problem today is that the results of this delegation are so obvious that the methods of those who produced them are beginning to be questioned. It has been a long time coming. When we reach a market situation where nobody wants to play unless the game is terminally rigged,  then the whole idea of “markets” has gone by the boards. Nobody wants to “punt” unless their bets are guaranteed in advance. That’s no way to run a horse race - or a global financial system.

Last week we pointed out some curious observations from Fortress on commodities and the state of the Chinese market courtesy of secondary industrial metals, notably steel: "The investment landscape for industrial metals is becoming increasingly more difficult to navigate. As highlighted in last month’s letter, we are continuing to see a rapid deceleration of growth in China, specifically within the cyclical industries. A recent trip to visit steel companies outside Beijing underlined the impact of extremely tight liquidity and continued restrictive policy in the Chinese housing market. Steel capacity cuts – through idling or accelerated maintenance outages – are now commonplace and the speed of these cuts has certainly surprised the market. Construction is the principal end-market blamed for this weakness; given the very large inventory overhang and the continued lack of liquidity, this is not surprising. In our equity universe, we have also seen numerous companies expressing concerns regarding China construction demand. Zoomlion, China’s second largest construction machinery company, recently said, "Demand for construction  machinery has shrunken drastically and growth will no doubt continue to slow next year." Within the context of declining housing starts, plummeting transaction volumes and the beginning of a meaningful move down in housing prices, these shifts in the steel market have been an interesting harbinger of more substantial problems in the Chinese economy. Our principal concern is the extension of housing weakness into the banking system through the mechanism of both failing developers as well as the opaque and informal lending. We are concerned that the recent strength in iron ore, steel and copper has been misinterpreted by the market. In our view, any suggestion that the Chinese market is undergoing a substantial restock is misplaced." Today, we get a confirmation of just this warning courtesy of Citigroup which has charted weekly Iron Ore China port inventories and of broad steel inventories. Needless to say, domestic steelmakers, who better than anyone know the state of domestic end product demand, have seen the writing on the wall, and have one message for the world: short Brazil and Australia.

The market rallied this past week, albeit in a very volatile manner, to end the week on a positive note as the hopes of a final resolution to the Euro crisis has been reached.   In reality, today's announcement of the EU treaty is only the first step and there are many legal challenges that will still have to be resolved.  While the reality is that there is still a very long road ahead before anything will actually be accomplished the implication that the with the ECB willing to buy bonds, at least for the moment, and the coordination of two bailout funds the Eurozone can play "kick the can" for a while longer.  Those headlines, even without much substance were enough to drive return starved managers into the market for the year end rush.

The markets, expecting something approaching a frisson of decisiveness, spent Friday like stunned mullets. And with Christmas rapidly approaching may well take to the mulled wine and other festive “remedies” and call it a day until the New Year. At which time they will all realise that nothing, absolutely nothing has been done to address the solvency of the European banking system. Which anthem will they play at the Last Night of the Euro I wonder? How about the Doobie Brothers and “What a fool believes”? “But what a fool believes ... (s)he sees” - a lastingly stable euro?

The appropriateness of leaking details of material to be discussed at an upcoming FOMC meeting is itself an issue that deserves scrutiny, since the agenda is not available in advance and the substance is covered by confidentiality rules of the FOMC. The only purpose may be to launch trial balloons to see what additional reactions might be garnered to better inform the discussion that will actually take place. Assuming that is the objective, here goes.

Two weeks ago we presented pictures of a bank run in Latvia after one local bank had been found to do just what MF Global is alleged of doing - gross cominningling. To wit: "If anyone is wondering why the collapse of MF Global after the discovery of its commingling and theft of client funds was the single worst thing that could happen to market confidence, then look no further than the small Baltic country of Latvia where precisely what Jon Corzine's firm did to its clients, has happened at the bank level. Businessweek reports: "Lithuanian prosecutors issued an arrest warrant for Vladimir Antonov and Raimondas Baranauskas who are former shareholders of Bankas Snoras AB. Both men are suspected of embezzlement and document forgery, the Prosecutor General said in a statement on its website today. Baranauskas is also suspected of accounting fraud and abuse of authority, it said." Kinda like Jon Corzine, if not by the actual authorities, then by everybody else....Depositors can withdraw 50 lati a day beginning today for the rest of the week, said Krumane at a pressconference." At today's rate this is about $95. Which is why what happened next, as shown in the pictures below, was to be completely expected, and is a perfect indicator of the collapse in liquidity and credibility of our own system where commingling, unlike in Latvia, goes unpunished." Sure enough, as nothing has changed, either in Latvia or the US, things just got worse. Following a rumor in Latvia that the large Swedish bank Swedbank is about to collapse, Latvia has just experienced its second bank run in under a month.

Little bit of this and that - the economy, Michael Hudson on the warfare engulfing Europe, a Santa Clause rally (anyway?)

You've been rehypothecated...

That imbalances in the supply and demand of precious metals, particularly silver, could lead to a shortage of physical product in the future should not come as a surprise to many - it is a topic covered extensively here in the past. Nonetheless, as a useful reminder of the big picture in the silver market, Future Money Trends has released another update video, reminding viewers that if traded purely on fundamentals, there is a high likelihood of increases in the price of silver, and other precious metals. As the authors put it, " There simply isn't enough physical silver to deal with the demand of a fiat currency crisis. As the paper silver market pushes prices down, all hell will break loose in the physical market." While that conclusion may or may not be applicable just yet, when coupled with recent revelations of potential double counting of precious metals at the warehouse level (see HSBC-MF Global story), the situation will certainly get only more exacerbated. Furthermore, should silver miners take Eric Sprott's advice to heart and decide to convert some or all of their product into physical, the market will suddenly recall that in addition to liquidity, prices are also determined by something called fundamentals. And fundamentals, especially in combination with a market risk spike, confirm a price jump may be imminent.

Neither Harry Porter nor the Twilight series felt that one movie could bring proper closure, so both did the “final movie” in 2 parts. The EU has adopted that tradition and is already pushing the focus to the next Summit in March which really will be the grand finale. They also seem to have stolen from the Twilight series and only work in the middle of the night and have to hold press conferences before the sun comes up. They haven’t yet taken to calling us muggles, but they themselves certainly seem to believe in magic words like IMF while shorts live in fear of the “bazooka” with many names. With the Summit having reached a conclusion, we now wait on a few final scenes to play out. The plot started falling apart on Thursday with Draghi’s testimony, but by forming a circle, holding hands, and chanting IMF and G-20 over and over, the market was placated, at least for a day.

D.C. can't figure out how to fund a lousy $115B stimulus. The problem is 20Xs as big.

Now that the rehypothecation bogeyman has been let loose, and the question of just how many paper (and apparently physical) assets have been double, triple, and n-counted (where n can be a number up to "infinity") by the infinitely daisy-chained modern global financial system in which one's liability is someone else's asset....apparently up to infinity times, the next logical step was for the firms named in the original Reuters article to step up and begin denials they had anything to do with anything. Sure enough, below is the first (of many) such response, by Interactive Brokers, claiming it has been greatly misunderstood and unlike MF Global, it has done nothing wrong at all. Of note is that IB was simply one of many brokers mentioned in the Reuters piece, where we read that "Engaging in hyper-hypothecation have been Goldman Sachs ($28.17 billion re-hypothecated in 2011), Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce (re-pledged $72 billion in client assets), Royal Bank of Canada (re-pledged $53.8 billion of $126.7 billion available for re-pledging), Oppenheimer Holdings ($15.3 million), Credit Suisse (CHF 332 billion), Knight Capital Group ($1.17 billion),Interactive Brokers ($14.5 billion), Wells Fargo ($19.6 billion), JP Morgan($546.2 billion) and Morgan Stanley ($410 billion)."  Sure enough, we predicted a firm would have to promptly step up and "deny all charges." To wit: "Oh Jefferies, Jefferies, Jefferies. Barely did you manage to escape the gauntlet of accusation of untenable gross (if not net) sovereign exposure, that you will soon, potentially as early as tomorrow, have to defend your zany rehypothecation practices." As it turns out Jefferies, and all the other mentioned banks tried to avoid this festering can of worms by completely ignoring the topic... until Interactive Brokers' response now demands that every single named bank has to do the same and come out with an outright explanation of why it has billions in hyper-hypothecation, or else not journalists and bloggers, but the market itself will suddenly start asking questions. Something tells us it will not be nearly as easy enough for the others to deny all charges...Incidentally, if this indeed becomes "the next big thing", what the potential collapse of (re) hypothection means is that PBs will be unable to lend out shares anymore, in effect collapsing stock shorting as there is one giant short stock recall/forced buy in. Ironicaly the unwind of the biggest market fraud could result in the entire market pulling one last "Volkswagen"style hurrah, before all hell breaks loose.