Archive - Jan 2011

Readers will recall that three months ago I had reported that "something was happening" in the economy. After several years of ultra-bearish reporting, I said that at the very least the economy was not declining further. The GDP report tends to support this, but in final analysis it is much ado about not much. Here's why.

A week after Zero Hedge first speculated what may happen to oil prices should the Suez Canal be shut down, Goldman arrives on the scene... And as expected, to Goldman it is all (mostly) priced in - the risk of contagion to Saudi is zero. After all, rich people never revolt... And things must always evolve according to what only Goldman Sachs has foreseen.

With all the hoopla over Egypt some have forgotten that this is merely a geopolitical event (one of those that absolutely nobody, with a few exceptions, was talking about less a month ago, so in many ways this is a mainstream media black swan which once again exposes the entire punditry for the pseudo-sophist hacks they are), and that the actual mines embedded within the financial system continue to float just below the surface. Below we present the five key fat tail concerns that keep SocGen strategist Dylan Grice up at night, which happen to be: i) long-term deflation, ii) a bond market blow-up, iii) a Chinese hard-landing, iv) an inflation pick-up, and v) an Emerging Markets bubble. Far more importantly, Grice provides the most comprehensive basket of trades to put on as a hedge against all five of these, while also pocketing a premium associated with simple market beta in a world in which the Central Banks continue to successfully defy gravity and economic cycles. For all those who continue to trade as brainless lemmings, seeking comfort in numbers, no matter how wrong the "numbers" of the groupthink herd are, we urge you to establish at least some of the recommended trades in advance of what will inevitably be a greater crash than anything the markets experienced during the depths of the 2008 near-cataclysm.

Complete market commentary of Friday's shocking events.

And so the long anticipated incursion by the PBOC, whose holdings of gold are behind even those of GLD, begins. Bloomberg has just reported, that "China central bank adviser Xia Bin said the country should increase its gold and silver reserves, the Economic Information Daily reported today, citing an interview with Xia." But how can this be: after all China has trillions in USD-denominated reserves, and any indication that it believes these are based on a currency that may actually be impaired will be an act of Mutual Assured Destruction. Well, yes and no. China is merely taking the next defection step in what is already failed Nash equilibrium. The first? The Fed's gross monetization of all US debt. The observant ones will realize that Chinese holdings in November were lower than they were in June of 2009! Who has picked up the slack? Why the Federal Reserve of course. Simply said, the Fed is explicitly making China's creditor status increasingly less relevant. Zero Hedge has long been wondering how much longer China will take this direct defection in what previously had been a stable equilibrium balance in which China provides the US vendor financing, while the US imports China's crap. As the Criminal Reserve is increasingly taking away the leverage that China used to enjoy as Creditor numero uno, it is only a matter of time before China fires back. And it may have just done that.

Wrapping up last week, and what we're looking at next week.

The effort in Washington State draws heavily on the success of the 92-year-old Bank of North Dakota (BND), currently the only state-wide publicly-owned U.S. bank.

Words spoken by a Hillary of beans...

By now everyone knows that over the past few days, Egypt CDS has taken a hard right angle and has doubled from 200 bps to well over 400 bps (making it just slightly riskier than Illinois). And tomorrow Egypt risk will add another 80 or so basis points. No surprise there. What may surprise some, however, is that just like Egypt, Saudi CDS has also gone vertical. And with momentum chasers finally realizing that there is a direction other than tighter, expect the contagion vigilantes to do some serious damage here. If history is any precedent, there is a long way to go.

When a country, among other shortcomings, relinquishes its financial system and its population's well-being to the pursuit of 'good deals', there is going to be substantial fallout. The citizens protesting in the streets of Greece, England, Tunisia, Egypt and anywhere else, may be revolting on a national basis against individual leaderships that have shafted them, but they have a common bond; they are revolting against a world besotted with benefiting the powerful and the deal-makers at the expense of ordinary people.

The War on Terror was supposed to be about bringing democracy to the Middle East, among other things … wasn’t it?

More studies touting the "benefits of private equity"...

Any epistle whose purpose is to bash the Fed, and which begins with the following British-accented sentence, that makes even the Zero Hedge 'run on' filter cower in fear, is worth at least 10 re-reads. "In the dominant Jacobin mindset which informs our present day society — a pervasive pathology sometimes narcissistically referred to as 'Cultural Marxism' by those half-educated former Hair-bears, now elevated to power by the mere passage of years, who fondly imagine that their fumbling sexual experiences and eager consumption of hallucinogenic substances of forty years ago constituted some sort of new dawn for Mankind — the individual — in contrast to the shining, secular deity of the State - is generally seen as feckless, shifty, grasping and unethical and hence is regarded as a dehumanized lab rat fit only to be the subject of a series of ill-considered social experiments notionally aimed at his 'improvement'." Pure poetry. Sean Corrigan's latest Material Evidence is a must read.

Over the last 30 years, the US has built up record debts on a personal, state, and national level. Consumers thought they were financially stable so long as they could cover the interest payments on their credit cards, states created program after program few if any of which they could afford, and the Federal Government issued $30-50 trillion in debt and liabilities (counting Social Security and Medicare).

The one country landlocked between Tunisia and Egypt has so far been oddly silent. Not so much any more. Al Jazeera reports that the Libyan government has imposed a state of emergency for "fear of demonstrations and rallies" comparable to those in Tunisia and Egypt. And ranked 17 in the world for oil production (and 9th in proven reserves), this is one that crude HFT algos may want to keep an eye on.