Archive - Apr 2011

Lately, there has been a lot of chatter by virtually everyone with some soapbox to stand on, about this and that. That's swell... if mostly irrelevant: by now everyone should be aware that only two charts actually matter, both of which are painfully self-explanatory.

Intragovernmental debt holdings have been one of the more underreported topics during the last few economic cycles. This isn’t surprising. We’ve turned the federal debt argument into a legal, rather than financial or moral, debate where the fairness doctrine of universal applicability means any inconsistency of logic on the part renders the whole invalid. The result of this is the public grossly misunderstands the burden of proof to be the lack of controvertible evidence, and with it any hope of meaningful discourse is lost in the chicanes of grandiose political gestures. Arguments get boiled down into easy-to-swallow pills ready for mass consumption. We rally against illegal immigration without questioning who built our houses, and condemn illegal drug use while washing down an oxycodone with a highball of scotch. National debt is now far too high and government spending and waste far too pervasive. We must stop at nothing to rid ourselves of this indentured servitude... Oh, dear Faust, if it were only that easy.

We have a debt problem. And according to our elected leaders, the way to address that debt problem is to fight over some $30 billion in spending at the exact same time that unelected leaders (the Fed) are printing three times that amount (at least that we know of) to buy MORE US debt.

FYI: Obama's document of origin verified and securitized by Banzai7 Operatives...Aloha!

Remember how happy the Egyptain population was to depose one dictator only to have him replaced with a ruling military junta, and how prosaic, not to mention cynical, our assumption was that the newly "democratic" country has three months before the country experiences another post-Thermiodrian revolution? Well, our estimate was three weeks off. As the video shows, Tahrir Square (remember it? the second black swan of 2011 after that whole Tunisia thing...) is once again the latest and greatest place to go, be seen, and occasionally, shot at.

At a time where the government has demonstrated a complete lack of will over $38 billion, we are left in the hands of Ben to determine short term rates, influence the curve, and Timmy to determine what maturity profile that 'best meets our needs'. The actions of either of these two unelected individuals could dwarf the $38 billion as every 1% of increased borrowing costs would cost $143 billion. Since the government could barely deal with $38 billion, how will they deal with increased borrowing costs? Does even congress know just how trivial their cuts look relative to the potential increases in debt cost?

And for today's exercise in surreality, in your best Agent Cooper voice repeat after us: "The margins are not what they seem." Why? Because in his latest Weekly Kickstart, the next incarnation of A Joseph Cohen, David Kostin appears to be channelling David Lynch when he says: "Company-level margins can fall while aggregate margins for the market continue to rise. If high margin stocks grow sales faster than low margin stocks, the index-level margin still expands." We won't even parse the logic of the first sentence. As for the big "if", so that's what Goldman bets its FYE 2011 S&P 1,500 target on - now we know. "The apparent fallacy of composition may be explained by the simple fact that revenue growth matters." See, David, that's why you get paid the big bucks. But it does not end there: "Analysts expect 66% of S&P 500 ex Financials and Utilities stocks will expand margins in 2011." Now that with Brent at nearly $130 makes absolute sense. In other news, we now know who killed Laura Palmer.

Better late then never. Almost a full month after the March 11 earthquake generated a tsunami strong enough to cripple the Fukushima nuclear power plant, TEPCO has finally released a video of the 45 foot waves coming to land and resulting in the biggest nuclear catastrophe since Chernobyl. As CNN explains what is patently obvious, the video shows the giant wave generated by the historic March 11 earthquake crashing over the plant's seawall and engulfing the facility, with one sheet of spray rising higher than the buildings that house the plant's six reactors. Tokyo Electric Power, the plant's owner, told reporters the wall of water was likely 14 to 15 meters (45 to 48 feet) higher than normal sea levels -- easily overwhelming the plant's 5-meter seawall.

For some reason, much ado is being made about the nothing that is last night's 11th (or technically 10th) hour aversion of a government shutdown. As we pointed out last week, it is not as if this strawman outcome, or for that matter the raising of the debt ceiling was ever in doubt: "look for both of these events to be consistently spun as key positive outcomes, even though the chance of these things actually not transpiring in a non-favorable light is non-existent." And sure enough, we are confident that the spin of this outcome will be extremely bullish even if in reality it is the perpetuation of a baseline status quo, while the alternative would have been unthinkable. In the grand scheme of things, this was nothing more than a free episode of political soap opera. The markets largely shrugged, because the Treasury Department still would have been able to issue and service debt and the Fed would continues to goose markets higher courtesy of POMO. Yet as Reuters points out astutely: "The battle over the U.S. budget has ended. Now the war begins. The debate over this year's budget that took the U.S. government to within an hour of a shutdown is only a dress rehearsal for bigger spending clashes to come." Here is what to look forward to, as the beltway entertainment spigot is cranked out to the max.

Once upon a time there was a deficit, a big ass deficit. You know, the kind that you can whack with a car antenna!

I can spin this any way you want. So can Bernanke.

Will this ruling jeopardize Canada's credit markets?

Just another account of why the time for sound money is upon us.

There was a time when having one’s name listed in the despised ranks of those villains that governments often categorize as “terrorists” involved quite a bit of leg work, as well as an ominous running resume of death, destruction, and general mean spiritedness. Of course, if one examines the history of every modern country which eventually disintegrated into despotism, the definition of who the “enemy” is tends to become rather broad rather quickly. That is to say, the more criminal the leadership of a country becomes, the easier it is for the average person to find himself labeled a criminal by that same leadership. Today, one does not need to blow up buildings, take hostages in political motivation, send anthrax through the mail, or even wave a gun around in a public place to be considered a terrorist threat. In fact, a man could never leave his house and still find himself under suspicion as an enemy of the state. The Department of Homeland Security has released numerous standardized guidelines to law enforcement offices across the country which are meant to make it “easier” for police and others to identify a possible terrorist. If you were to take at face value such documents as the now famous MIAC Report, the Virginia Fusion Center Report, the DHS’ “see something, say something” campaign, the Enemy Belligerents Act, the post trial statements of the Department Of Justice in the Liberty Dollar case, or the wild spewing rhetoric of establishment mouthpiece organizations like the SPLC, then you would discover that a likely terrorist is...

Back in December, the FCC decided, in a 3-2 vote, to take it upon itself to regulate broadband internet access, also known as "Net Neutrality" - in other words the FCC essentially decided to give itself the authority to impose rules that bar Internet providers from blocking or "unreasonably discriminating" against Web content, services or applications. As previously explained: "That means Time Warner Cable can't take payments from Google to make YouTube come over the network faster than Hulu. Comcast, [which recently bought 51% of NBC-U], is also forbidden from favoring its own content over others'." The biggest winners were broadband video content distributors who have rapidly become the biggest traffic hogs on the Internet. Names such as Netflix come to mind. So it came as a bit of a shocker that late this afternoon, while everyone was staring at the countdown clock to government shutdown, that House republicans, in a 240-179 vote, "pushed through a measure disapproving the Federal Communications Commission's rules" - in other words rejecting Net Neutrality, and throwing broadband video companies for a loop. Since the triple play companies such as Comcast have become increasingly concerned about the encroaching threat that is Netflix, it is almost guaranteed that if indeed the House vote passes the Senate, where a similar measure has 39 co-sponsors, and becomes law, then Netflix already razor thing cash flow margins are about to get "razor thinner" as the triple plays extract their pound of flesh. There is one out, though: an Obama veto: per Reuters, "the White House said on Monday that President Barack Obama's advisers would recommend that he veto any such resolution." Which begs the question: will Netflix' momo longs have Obama to thank for the continuation of the most ridiculous move in stock market history, or will the fairy tale promptly come to an end.