Archive - May 19, 2011

The GC-IOER collapse is far more significant than many people realize. The dynamics of the repo market are not always easy to understand, but somehow I don’t think that is the reason it has received zero attention outside of ZeroHedge. ZeroHedge’s coverage has rightly focused on the liquidity implications for Wall Street institutions and the overall repo market. There is also the push to get money funds out of repo and in to the regulated banking system through deposits. While these are certainly significant issues in and of themselves, I think there is an arguably more substantial aspect that has not yet been uncovered.

In yet another confirmation that Goldman's multi-million dollar push to advertise its humanitarian image on various websites has been a colossal failure, the WSJ has just broken news that the firm will shortly be the proud recipient of yet another barrage of legal inquiry in the form of subpoenas relating to its mortgage-related business, only this time not from the SEC but from criminal prosecutors. This stems from Carl Levin's massive 639 page report which referred the firm to the justice department  (and whose findings were summarized best by Matt Taibbi), an escalation which could rekindle not only a civil case against the squid, but also potentially force the new District Attorney to finally lob a couple of criminal indictments here and there, thus guaranteeing that GS stock is about to be pulverized (and cementing those plans to finally MBO the company, as the Fed's balance sheet has largely served its purpose). The WSJ clarifies: "Subpoenas don't necessarily mean criminal charges against Goldman or individuals at the firm are inevitable or even likely. The company turned over hundreds of millions of pages of documents to the Federal Crisis Inquiry Commission, a 10-member panel that examined the causes of the financial crisis. Goldman also gave tens of millions of documents to the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations." Yeah, but... ""Any step in the direction of criminal charges would be bad news for Goldman's stock price," said Jeff Harte, an analyst at Sandler O'Neill + Partners LP." And now that Rolling Stone has peeled off the scab once more and made it all too clear that the villain is and has always been GS, Lloyd may find himself on the wrong side of the Q&A session all over again.

It looks like the market will never – ever – learn a lesson. When there is easy money to be had, the market loses its mind, just like the Nasdaq did in 1999 and 2000. Prince wrote the song 1999, where he says “gonna party like its 1999.” That’s exactly what’s happening today. Like the Nasdaq in 1999 & 2000, when there were plenty of warning signs about the economy and WILDLY overvalued IPOs, Fraud Street partied on as if it would never end. One lyric from the 1999 song that most in the market forgot, however, was “party over, oops, out of time.” Most of the folks who believed in the moronic valuations that Fraud Street sold them ran out of time indeed; they bought the top and lost 90% or more of their speculation, err, pardon, “investments.” But the market didn’t learn a lesson in 1999/2000 because EZ-Al Greenspan flooded the market with “liquidity” and near-zero interest rates. His reason was, and this was admitted by Al “Bubbles” Greenspan in many interviews, to INTENTIONALLY BLOW A HOUSING BUBBLE so that the bankster pickpockets wouldn’t lose money on those horrible IPO speculations, err, pardon, “investments.” When Greenspan finally started raising interest rates, it was too late. The baton was handed to Ben “Helicopter” Bernanke who was now in charge of lying to Congress, as well as you and me, about the state of the economy. He said that the rapidly escalating economic problems, especially in Greenspan’s housing bubble, were “largely contained.” He forgot to tell us that he meant on Mars.

The QE 3 debate has been raging ever since the Fed announced QE 2 in November 2010. However, this debate is moot. The reason is because the Fed HAS to perform QE 3 in some form or another.

According to an update in gold demand trends released by the World Gold Council earlier, Q1 saw a divergence in purchasing intentions in the gold market as investors focused on physical and shunned paper instruments such as ETFs. Per the WGC: "Global gold demand in the first quarter of 2011 totalled 981.3 tonnes, up 11% year-on-year from 881.0 tonnes in the first quarter of 2010. In value terms, this translated to US$43.7bn, compared with US$31.4bn in the first quarter of 2010, an increase of almost 40%. This was largely attributable to a widespread rise in demand for bars and coins, supported by an improvement in jewellery demand in key markets. On the other hand, ETFs and similar products witnessed net outflows of 56 tonnes ($2.5bn). Redemptions were concentrated in January. Despite the outflows, the collective volume of gold held by global ETFs by the end of the quarter was in excess of 2,100 tonnes equating to more than $95bn. It is useful to realize that ever more investors see gold as not so much a speculative product, and merely as an intermediary between a fiat start and endpoint, but as a wholesale alternative to the fiat system. Obviously the best way to express this view is to focus on the physical market instead of the paper one (which as some investors in SLV have learned the hard way). And speaking of silver, a quick glance at today's Comex holdings update indicates that while total silver continues to flirt with the 100 million ounce total on the downside (hitting a record low yesterday at 100.5 million ounces), following yet another reclassification from Registered to Eligible silver at the Comex vault for a total of 496k ounces (or 6.3% of the vault total), true physical in the Comex just dropped to a new all time low of just 32.2 million ounces.

The Canada Pension Plan (CPP) Fund ended its fiscal year on March 31, 2011 with net assets of $148.2 billion, a gain of 12% in FY 2011. The Fund's private markets led the charge as they more than tripled their investment in Skype and made other successful strategic investments...

Back in November, we posted a piece by Knight Research titled "The Game Is Over" in which the firm's strategist Mark Lapolla presented his thesis why he believes that "the structural and cyclical terms of global trade have finally reached their tipping point. This will catalyze a wholesale change in sentiment and a historic repositioning of risk assets. The emerging market global growth story is over." And while the article came out just as the barrage of $750 billion in daily POMOs courtesy of QE2 was starting and hence masked the true state of reality, now that QE2 is finishing, it is only appropriate to bring Mark back up front, as the imminent and very violent convergence of the rosy myth that is the stock market, and of the underlying miserable reality, is about to wake up all those who have been dozing under the Pied Printer of Eccleslin's soothing tune, and Lapolla's thesis is about to see its first validation. In essence, while we have heard much from those who claim that the end game will come as a result of hyperinflation, Lapolla is convinced in the opposite: namely that the end will be not a bang but a hyperdeflationary whimper. In order to refresh readers with his thoughts, recently Lapolla conducted an interview with the master questioner Kate Welling in which the Knight strategist laid out his uber-bearish case in more gruesome detail than most can stomach. Below we present the key points from his interview, as well as the full thing subsequently.

Bottom-up saw equity underperform credit but the S&P seemed to have a mind of its own into the last hour (as credit closed near its wides and stocks at their highs). Low beta outperformed in stocks and credit. Most notable was the huge jump in USA protection costs in the last two days!

This essay does not question whether Bin Laden and Al Qaeda attacked us on September 11, 2001, or whether Iran, Saudi Arabia or another nation-state had a hand in the attacks. It focuses solely on a peripheral issue regarding the third building which fell on that terrible day

Utilizing The Applied Finance Group’s backtest system, we ran a strategy of investing only in companies with a market capitalization of greater than US$ 1 Billion and a dividend yield above 3%. The strategy has worked fairly well with the annualized returns over the last 12 years beating the overall universe. While the dividend paying strategy worked well, a strategy based on AFG’s valuation metric performed better.

We have long claimed that 2011 is playing out in a manner virtually identical to 2010, almost to the tic. And as we approach the end of QE2 in 6 weeks, a quick glance at what happened with stocks following the end of QE1 in March of 2010, will be illustrative of what to expect this time around, because contrary to what Comcast's business channel would want its ever declining viewers to believe, it never really is "different this time." To help with that comparison, here is a David Rosenberg summarizing what happened between the end of QE1 and Bernanke's August 27 announcement of QE2. If this is all it takes, then as we (and Scott Minerd earlier) have predicted, get ready for not only QE3, but 4, 5 and so forth. And not only that, but Rosie joins the likes of Zero Hedge, Minerd, Koo, Janjuah and all other pragmatics who realize that the Fed will never, never, allow deflation to run its course even if that means collateralizing the dollar with sewer bonds and physical housing, which incidentally is what Rosenberg predicts: "the day the QE programs run their full course, the Fed will have
likely added physical housing units to its balance sheet as opposed to
just mortgage paper. Ben Bernanke will be the biggest landlord in the
country at that time."

Here is DSK's never before seen Linkedin Profile...HaPPY IP dOpes!

Last year video of Greek protests turning violent was enough to force Waddell & Reed to sell several thousand ES contracts which crashed the market. Will this year's catalyst be Spain (which may just be too big for the CDO known as the EFSF to bail out)? While the gatherings in Spain have been getting bigger (and judging by this live feed, the one tonight is the biggest yet), they have so far been peaceful. Yet with 21% unemployment, and according to some over half of youth without a job, just how long until someone decides to send a flaming Molotov cocktail at the riot police? Watch a live webcast from Spain below.

RANsquawk Market Wrap Up - Stocks, Bonds, FX etc. – 19/05/11

Oops. Just out from The Gap: "As stated earlier in the year, the company expects business performance during fiscal year 2011 to be heavily impacted by pressure from sourcing cost inflation, particularly in its value channels. While the company anticipated that the cost of goods would increase during the back half of the year, costs are actualizing above the initial estimates. The company now expects product costs per unit to be up about 20 percent in the back half of the year, which will more than outweigh retail price increases. As a result, the company has revised guidance for fiscal year 2011 diluted earnings per share to be in the range of $1.40 to $1.50." The problem is that previously the company had seen an EPS range of $1.88-$1.93, with a consensus of $1.84. To all those who were wondering why nobody was guiding lower ahead of the Q1 earnings season, the answer is... the waited until it was over. As for how the company plans to mitigate its plunge in earnings: "The company now expects net openings of about 75 stores, including
franchise stores, during fiscal year 2011. This figure is up from the
company’s previous guidance of about 65 stores, driven primarily by
additional Outlet store openings in North America." When you can't control price, you can at least control volume... Even if that means inventory liquidation sales within a month or so of opening the new stores: "The company reported that inventory per store was up 9.9 percent at the
end of the first quarter of fiscal year 2011 compared with last year,
slightly higher than expected driven by decreased sales associated with
the events in Japan." So much for the consumer stepping up. And time to go very short consumer discretionary stocks, just as we suggested three days ago.