Archive - Dec 2011

Anyone seeking joyous holiday greetings and cheerful forecasts for the new year is advised to not listen to the following most recent Mark Faber interview, in which in addition to his predictions for 2012 (led with "more printing" by the dodecatupling +1 down central planners of course, and far less prosperity), we get the following: "I am convinced the whole derivatives market will cease to exit. Will become zero. And when it happens I don't know: you can postpone the problems with monetary measures for a long time but you can't solve them... Greece should have defaulted - it would have sent a message that not all derivatives are equal because it depends on the counterparty." And on the long-term future: "I am ultra bearish. I think most people will be lucky if they still have 50% of their money in 5 years time. You have to have diversification - some real estate in the countryside, some gold and some equities because if you think it through, say Germany 1900 to today, we had WWI, we had hyperinflation, WWII, cash holders and bondholders they lost everything 3 times, but if you owned equities you'd be ok. In equities in general you will not lose it all, it may not be a good investment, unless you put it all in one company and it goes bankrupt." As for gold: "I am worried that one day the government will take it away." As for the one thing he hates the most? No surprise here -government bonds.

If there comes a time when the best move forward is to sell most of our Gold and switch to another asset class, one more likely to survive the transition intact, will we be able to see this as obvious and a no brainer?

Well, I am sure that President Obama would just send us to a country like the Bahamas with warm beaches and nice cocktails ...

The Fed can’t possibly claim it’s trying to lower interest rates with the short end of the curve essentially offering 0% and Operation Twist 2 focusing on getting the long-end even lower (at a time when the 30-year is already under 3% and the 10-year under 2%)?

Back in June, which now seems like a lifetime ago, we wrote an article titled: "A Few Good Hedge Funds May Have Called The ECB's Bluff, And Hold The Future Of The EUR Hostage" in which we discussed the weakest link in the Eurozone bailout and in which we warned, rather prophetically as it turns out, "that not only is Bailout #2 in jeopardy of not passing the Greek parliament, but that we may suddenly find ourselves in the biggest "activist" investor drama, in which voluntary restructuring "hold out" hedge funds will settle for Cheapest to Delivery or else demand a trillion pounds of flesh from the ECB in order to keep the eurozone afloat. In other words, the drama is about to get very, very real. And, most ironically, a tiny David is about to flip the scales on the mammoth Goliath of the ECB and hold the entire European experiment hostage..." Why prophetic? Because the FT has just reported that "One of the most prominent hedge funds holding Greek bonds has threatened legal action against officials negotiating the country’s debt restructuring if losses are too deep, raising a hurdle to eurozone leaders’ hopes of quickly reducing the country’s debt levels." Well, Vega may not be quite the David we envisioned but it will do. The bottom line is that the weakest link in the Eurozone rescue, precisely the one we predicted over six months ago, has now been exposed. We fully expect other "activist" funds to be buying up or have already bought up the debt of the other PIIGS, and hold the future of the Eurozone ransom for the princely sum of 1 million dollars.... Or realistically, much, much more. Oh, and so much for ISDA's carefully conceived plan of a "voluntary" restructuring - should Vega proceed to indeed sue Greece it is game over for the worst laid plan of mice and corrupt derivatives organizations.

On November 25, Moody's cut Hungary to junk. Now it is S&P's turn: "The downgrade reflects our opinion that the predictability and credibility of Hungary's policy framework continues to weaken. We believe this weakening is due, in part, to official actions that, in our opinion, raise questions about the independence of oversight institutions and complicate the operating environment for investors. In our view, this is likely to have a negative impact on investment and fiscal planning, which we believe will continue to weigh on Hungary's medium-term growth prospects. Moreover, in our opinion, the downside risks to Hungary's creditworthiness have also increased as the global and domestic economic environments have weakened."

To all our German-speaking readers, and particularly our readers in Switzerland, we present an amusing piece out of Swiss NZZ, titled "Angstmacher im Netz." Even a very rudimentary understanding of German is sufficient to grasp the gist...

While part of Merrill Lynch, David Rosenberg was always an outlier, in that he never sugarcoated reality, and could always be relied upon to expose the dirt in the macro and micro picture, no matter how granular or nuanced, and how much it conflicted with other propaganda research to come from the bailed out broker. Then three years ago he moved to Canadian investment firm Gluskin Sheff, transitioning from the sell side to the buy side, yet for all intents and purposes his daily letters, so very appreciated by many, never ceased, in essence making him a buysider with an asterisk - one who daily shares his latest vision with the broader public, in addition to his personal investment team. In one of his last letters of the year, Rosie presents a detailed breakdown of all the key differences between the sell and buyside, at least from his perspective, and also how, now that he manages other people's money, he is investing in the future. To wit: "In my former role as chief economist at Merrill Lynch, I flew all over the world and saw all the legendary portfolio managers from Paul Tudor Jones to Jeremy Grantham to John Paulson to Bill Gross — at least three or four times a year. Now the only PM's I speak to are our PM's. Not that they "have to" agree with all of my calls, but I am here as their economic concierge 24/7. The same holds true for our clients. In my previous life on the "sell side", it was very rare for me to sit down one-on-one with private clients. Today, that takes up a good part of my day — helping our client base make investment decisions that will build their wealth in a prudent manner over time." As for what he likes (and dislikes) we will leave it up to the reader to find out, but will note that Rosie appears to take issue with being labelled a permabear. And why not: he has been far more right than not since the December 2007 start of the Second Great Depression.

Commodity Customer Coalition founder James Koutoulas is requesting that MF Global bankruptcy Judge Martin Glenn investigate three potential legal issues that are said to have occurred in transferring of MF Global assets.  The key issues include the fact that JP Morgan was able to purchase MF Global bonds at a discount without any open bidding process and the assets were apparently sold without disclosure to or approval from the U.S. bankruptcy court or trustees.  The third issue centers on JP Morgan seeking special favors from the Federal Reserve to receive priority treatment over investor segregated fund accounts.

Today's $29 billion 7 Year bond auction, the last of the week and of the year, priced just modestly better than this week's previous 2 and 5 year primary issues, although on the surface it may have been a little weaker, pricing at 1.43%, just wide of the 1.422% When Issued and modestly worse than November's 1.415%. And while the previous weekly auctions were records only to disappoint in their internals, this one was the opposite, with a 2.68 Bid To Cover, above the 2.59 LTM average, and solid Indirect takedown at 42.01%, far better than the 39.88% in November, while Directs declined from 18.85% to 12.95%. This left 45.04% for Dealers to use as immediately repo collateral. And with that, the US just added another $40.8 billion in net new debt, which we believe after today's update on settled debt from last week will finally push total US debt to GDP over 100%, and certainly when one accounts for the historical adjustments to previous GDP following today's epic existing home sales adjustment by the NAR, which will almost certainly bring total US GDP as of September 30, 2011 to under $15 trillion.

Welcome to Washington politics, and this is one reason the nation is practically broke. 

Just hitting the tape are these quite perplexing headlines out of Bloomberg:

• EFSF LENDING CAPACITY MAY DROP TO EU293 BLN, CULLINAN SAYS
• EURO RESCUE FUND'S CAPACITY MAY FALL BY A THIRD, CULLINAN SAYS
• EURO RESCUE FUND MAY SHRINK ON FRANCE DOWNGRADE, CULLINAN SAYS
• S&P SOVEREIGN RATINGS DIRECTOR CULLINAN COMMENTS IN E-MAIL

Odd - because it is S&P who would be doing the downgrading. Cue downgrade rumors.

Yesterday we charted the combined ECB balance sheet which showed that it had hit an all time record of €2.5 trillion, exclusing today's operation (to the stunned surprise of all those who scream that the ECB should be printing more, more, more). Today, we focus exclusively on the various forms of unsecured liquidity measures, such as today's 3 Year LTRO, because as the following chart from Bank of America shows, European emergency liquidity provisioning post today's liquidity bailout brings the total to €873 billion and is just shy of its all time record of €896 billion, a number which we expect will be taken out as soon as the next liquidity provisioning operation. In other words, European liquidity in euro terms, has virtually never been worse. And as today's additional drawdown of Fed swap lines indicates, the USD liquidity crunch is getting worse not better (confirmed by the rapid deterioration in basis swap levels). Perhaps the fact that not only is nothing fixed, but things are about as bad as they have ever been explains why Europe closed blood red across the board, and also why Bank of America continues to push for an outright crash in all risk (and some were doubting our earlier analysis that BAC is outright yearning for a market crash): To wit from Bank of America's Ralf Preusser: "The tender results do not however change either our longer term  cautious outlook on growth, or the periphery. We remain long 5y CDS protection on France, at 210bp (target 300bp, stop loss 175bp)." So let's see: BAC is shorting the EURUSD, which implies they are pushing for a market drop, and now they want French CDS to soar? Who was it that said the megabanks do not want a crash?

There are clear signs of a liquidity crunch in the asset markets right now, and the question I keep hearing is, Is this 2008 all over again? No, it’s worse. Much worse. In 2008 there was a lot more faith and optimism upon which to draw. But both have been squandered to significant degrees by feckless regulators and authorities who failed to properly address any of the root causes of the first crisis even as they slathered layer after layer of thin-air money over many of the symptoms. Anyone who has paid attention knows that those "magic potions" proved to be anything but. Not only are the root causes still with us (too much debt, vast regional financial imbalances, and high energy prices), but they have actually grown worse the entire time. As always, we have no idea exactly what is going to happen and when, but we can track the various stresses and strains, noting that more and wider fingers of instability increase the risk of a major event. Heading into 2012, there's enough data to warrant maintaining an extremely cautious stance regarding holding onto one's wealth and increasing one's preparations towards resilience.