Archive - Jan 2011

Our thoughts on the markets looking ahead into 2011.

ForaTV, in conjunction with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, shares another terrific must watch presentation, this time by one of our favorite socioeconomic historians, Niall Ferguson, who in this lecture talks in depth, and with an objective perspective that only few can share, about empires on the verge of decline, emphasizing the precarious position the US has found itself in, now that China's ascendancy is undisputed, and only matched by the accelerating descent of the once great US nation. The fact that Ferguson is Paul Krugman's natural nemesis in all things only makes his insights all that more relevant (not to mention correct). And while the various chapters discuss such key concepts as the limits and implications of complexity theory, the ever increasing portion of US federal revenues attributed to interest payments (surpassing defense spending), China's military sustainability, the limits of Keynesian stimulus, investing in gold and hyperinflationary concerns, the primary highlight is Ferguson's discussion on what may be the primary topic of 2011: whether ot not debt will trigger the collapse of the US. To wit: "Sometime over the next decade the US will reach the crossover point at which it will be spending more on debt service, than it is able to spend on defense...The Chinese have noticed what the rest of the world's investors pretend not to see: that the US is on a completely unsustainable fiscal course with no apparent political means of self-correcting. Ladies and gentlemen, military retreat from the mountains of the Hindu Kush, or the plains of Mesopotamia has long been the harbinger of imperial fall." Recommended viewing.

When the Freerisk concept launched some time ago with "the goal of making freely available the data, algorithms and tools necessary to perform financial modeling" we were skeptical. After all we had realized that when it comes to opensourcing financial data and analysis, the incentive has to be greater than the opportunity cost of expensive (and expansive) due diligence and proprietary investment conclusions. Since there is just one site which has succeeded to date in creating an open sourced investing community (www.valueinvestorsclub.com, not to be confused with comparably named imitations), this is certainly a unique niche just begging to be penetrated. However, as scale in finance is key, starting a grassroots campaign without incentives is all but doomed to failure. And while so far freerisk has, unfortunately, not managed to make much if any dent as an alternative provider to data mining and analysis (especially vis-a-vis embedded and groupthink promoting organizations such as the rating agencies), the two founders have recently developed Riski, a site which is still in its infancy, yet which may one day become a go to wikipedia for all things financial.

Congress will return on January 5th to battle over the budget for much of the year. The new House Republican majority (242R-193D) won't wait for the normal budget process to send the Senate weekly spending cuts, which the Senate won't take up. President Obama's State of the Union address (expected on January 25th) will be the next focal point, as will his FY12 Budget to be presented February 14th. The Budget Committees will produce resolutions that might pass their respective houses, but a compromise seems unlikely. The government is funded only through March 4th, so another continuing resolution will be required. The ultimate showdown will occur over extending the $14.294 trillion debt limit, probably by early March.

Brought to you by ZH reader Tofu Mary and friends...

There are too many year-end top ten lists, so I'm not going to do that. I'm going to do 12. I've chosen those things from The Daily Capitalist's perspective that I thought impacted our lives here in the USA. These 12 events created a lot of buzz, things we were all talking about.

In plain terms, the system is broken. Everyone, including the Fed, knows it. The financial world has collectively chosen to ignore this due to political pressure and career pressure. However, this will not last forever.

It was the night before Christmas Eve, and CNBC trucked out TrimTabs' Charles Biderman to a de minimis audience, knowing full well that a man with his understanding of money flows would very likely repeat his statement from last year, that there is no real, valid explanation for the inexorable move in stocks higher, as equity money flows in 2010 were decidedly negative, and any explanation of the upward melt up would need to account for Fed intervention (and no-volume HFT offer-lifting feedback loops but that is a story for another day). A year after the first scandalous report was published, TrimTabs is sticking with its story: "If the money to boost stock prices by almost $9 trillion from the March
2009 lows did not come from the traditional players, it had to have come
from somewhere else.  We believe that place is the Fed.  By funneling
trillions of dollars in cash to the primary dealers in exchange for
debt, the Fed has given Wall Street lots of firepower to ramp up the
prices of risk assets, including equities." And, wisely, Biderman, just like Zero Hedge, asks what happens when the buying one day, some day, ends: "...stock prices will be higher by the time
QE2 ends, but economic growth will not be sustainable without massive
government support.  Then even more QE will be needed, and stock prices
could keep rising for a while.  In our opinion, however, no amount of QE
will be able to keep the current stock market bubble from bursting
eventually." Ergo our call earlier that Bernanke has at best +/- 150 days to assuage the market's fear that QE2 is ending (not to mention that we have a huge economic recovery, right Jan Hatzius? We don't need no stinking QE...). Therefore the best Bernanke can hope for is to buy some additional time. At the end of the day, the biggest problem is that the massive slack in the economy means that LSAP will have to continue for a long, long time, before the virtuous circle of self-sustaining growth can even hope to take over. By then bond yields may very well be high enough that Ron Paul will demands someone finally bring Paul Volcker out of the fridge.

Yesterday on Tom Keene's always informative show, two of the world's most important economists, Goldman's Jan Hatzius and BofA's Ethan Harris presented their respective defenses for why GDP in 2011 would rise by nearly 4% as per their recent predictions. The straw man for the upside case: recently adopted fiscal stimuli which, however as David Rosenberg notes, are not really stimuli as much as lack of governmental disstimuli. Yet what is interesting is that both ceded that both employment and housing, the two key traditional drivers of economic growth and prosperity, would likely continue deteriorating, with employment ending the year over 9%. In other words, all growth in 2011 will be predicated upon very much more of the same: transfer payments and government stimulus (not to mention inventory accumulation) especially in the form of incremental debt to offset consumer deleveraging. No surprise there. After all the only reason why the economists of the world have expressed an unprecedented amount of bullishness in recent months is that the US is currently experiencing a rare confluence of both fiscal and monetary stimulus: an even that last occurred in March of 2009. The issue is that as we have noted previously, the benefit from the fiscal stimulus has already been negated by the jump in oil and other commodity prices, whereby the token weekly paycheck increase has been more than offset by gas price increases, while the monetary stimulus is already priced in, and absent rumors of another episode of QE in advance of the June end of QE2, the temporary stock market strength will quickly turn into weakness. Which leaves us with the hangover effect of federal deficit... and its funding. The chart below presents some interesting observations in this regard, and also makes us wonder just what will happen to risk assets if Bernanke does not leak the announcement of QE3 by May at the very latest.

Let's try to keep this civil...

It has been a good year for Goldman's David Kostin: not only did the strategist make partner this year, but virtually all of his analysis is simplistically goal seeked based on what New York Fed favorite Jan Hatzius says is bound to happen (which one way or another, does), and the entire Wall Street herd of C-grade economists follows suit. Nonetheless, he, or rather his subordinates, sure create some pretty charts. Below are the main charts summarizing both the last week and year, and the cheatsheets for Goldman's outlook on 2011, as well as some other Easter eggs.

Here is it...the must have Astrological Calendar for 2011