Archive - Mar 20, 2011

An interesting thing happened last week, garnering no coverage in the face of a global meltdown, literally and figuratively. Nike reported horrible earnings. A rare miss by the industry all star is best summed up by CEO, Mark Parker ”higher costs for materials, labor and freight are here, as predicted.” Then there was Fedex with another miss “earnings could be trimmed by ongoing Middle East turmoil and fuel costs.”... These are not isolated warnings but rather across all industries. Month after month PPI and CPI have been showing rising inputs costs, margin compression, rising non discretionary prices and contracting discretionary prices. At what point will corporate profits peak? It is quite possible that time is upon us.

In his latest Market Outlook, CLSA's Russell Napier, who has long been one of the better big picture strategists, comes to the same conclusion as we did when we penned from last Friday "$440 Billion Drop In Shadow And Conventional Banking System Liabilities In Q4 Gives Bernanke Carte Blanche For QE3" namely that the contraction in broad money aggregates (shadow banking in Zero Hedge's case, M3 in the case of Napier), opens the door wide for Bernanke to usher QE3. "recent data imply that the US reflation is in trouble. QEII has boosted reserves but banks continue to reduce credit, while broad money has contracted. There is material downside risk to equity valuations." In other words - "Sell equities as the market wonders whether there will be a QE3 and in what shape it will come. Napier's conclusion - "Whether equities will fall further depends on how flexible and successful the Fed’s next monetary package will be. Given the risk, investors are better off watching from the sidelines." This should not come as a surprise to Zero Hedge readers: we have been claiming since January that the market is due for a major correction in the end of March, early April in time to set the stage for the political wrangling that will inevitably accompany more monetary injections. That recent geopolitical events have forced some to coin the term "Glow in the Dark Swan" only makes the Fed's job that much easier...

As the world awakes, Japan discloses another round of good news/bad news about the Fukushima crisis. The good news: Reactors 5 and 6 went into stable condition on Sunday, after a successful
cold shutdown, authorities said. The reactors at the power plant went into cold shutdown following restoration of cooling
functions late Saturday. Alas, 5 and 6 were never the issue to begin with. The same came not be said about reactors 1 through 4, where the bad news comes from this morning. According to the Japan Times, a risky venting of Reactor 3, which saw its pressure rising yet again, was being considered, which would see another release of radioactive gas into the environment. "Pressure within the No. 3 reactor at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant
was rising at one point and Tepco considered releasing more radioactive
gas into the environment to avert serious damage to the containment
vessel, the nuclear safety agency said Sunday afternoon. Tokyo Electric Power Co. had considered releasing the contaminated steam
directly into the environment, not through a "suppression pool" as it
did earlier in the crisis. The pressure needs to be lowered to protect the structural integrity of
the reactor, and the first step is to open the valve on a pipe connected
to the suppression pool. By going through the suppression pool, the
reactor's gas would liquefy and thus lower the pressure." And here is where the recent Operation Irrigation is now backfiring: "But if the pool is already filled with water, a valve on the reactor
itself would need to be opened and the radiation level of the released
gas would be higher than with the first method, explained Hidehiko
Nishiyama of the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency. "Without water, there would be more radioactive substances in the gas released into the environment."" In other words, the attempt (which some say is futile) to fill the containment pool with water is about to lead to another round of irradiation of the environment. And while all that is going on, here is what the already certain chain of downstream events is going to look like for the region, for Japan, and for the world.