Archive - Aug 10, 2011

In a letter sent out by Olli Rehn to the European parliament on August 9, Rehn, in attempting to defend the fact that the ECB has now become Europe's "bad bank" and is thus nothing but a political vehicle to be used and abused by Germany which is the only one that can fund the ECB's non-existent equity capital, said that this ongoing intervention is critical in "dysfunctional" markets. He also completely fabricated the claim that the bond buying program is compatible with the EU Treaty. Supposedly he was envisioning the no bailout clause in the EU treaty. And to punctuate his point, the ECB proceeded to buy Italian and Spanish bonds for the third day this week, earlier today. Yet all that is boring, bureaucratic rhetoric. Where you should prepare to have your frontal lobe turn to jelly is the following: in defending why the expanded SMP program, which may soon hit hundreds of billions in onboarded toxic bonds, Rehn said the central bank’s investments are safe because “the bonds are purchased in the secondary market at market price -- i.e. the credit risk is already factored in,” according to a response dated yesterday to a query by an EU lawmaker. We will repeat this.... because it bears repeating: there is no risk of loss to the ECB's loan portfolio because they are purchased in the open market. In other words, if you, or a central bank, or an alien from Uranus, buys something in the open market, it is a risk free transaction....

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Yes, that thing gushing out of your nose is blood.

How can it be a double dip if the first recession never ended? The Fed spent $1 for every 80 cents of "supposed recovery", all of which lasts only as long as the Fed keeps spending those $1s. Patently unsustainable, as we are now seeing...

As expected, after the USDCHF and EURCHF has been reaching new all time lows again and again, day after day, the SNB, a week after its latest doomed intervention, intervened again, by doing more of the same, this time increasing banks’ sight deposits at the SNB from currently CHF 80 billion to CHF 120 billion. End result: a 150 pip spike... which was fully retraced in one hour. The trend is unmissable - every single intervention (that of the Fed included) has progressively little impact as these desperate measures, traditionally reserved for life or death situations, and which are supposed to bring the element of surprise with them, are now not only not surprising, but demanded every single day, and if absent, cause asset sell offs. Pretty soon the battlefield will be central planners vs HFTs, with the money printers issuing money at first on a monthly, then weekly, daily, hourly, then lastly millisecond-ly, and ultimately constant basis, at which point it will truly be too late to buy gold.

This one's for you...

A snapshot of the European Morning Briefing covering Stocks, Bonds, FX, etc.
Market Recaps to help improve your Trading and Global knowledge

Looking back at crashes of the past, there’s usually a day like today somewhere along the line before the thing has run its course.

CNBC touches the third rail ...

Relevant news by www.thetrader.se

While there is speculation whether today's historic announcement by the Fed in which it dated the beginning of the end of ZIRP, and in reality just the beginning of the beginning, is some form of shadow QE3, what is certain is that there is no Large Scale Asset Purchasing component to it yet. As such while the market immediately discounted the impact of 2 years of duration risk elimination (roughly 70 ES point equivalent), this has now been priced in, and the market must now look to mechanisms by which the it will have to absorb ~ $2.0 trillion in debt issuance over the next year without Fed help (and to those sticking to some modified version of MMT, keep in mind there is only $1.6 trillion in excess reserves so even a full recycling thereof would be insufficient to match demand of funds). Enter Goldman Sachs which puts the argument to bed: "We now see a greater-than-even chance that the FOMC will resume quantitative easing later this year or in early 2012." Why? Because what was lost in the noise today is that the US economy is contracting and the unemployment rate is rising: i.e., we are reentering a recession. And what the Fed did today is absolutely powerless to change this even from the Fed's point of view. Quote Hatzius: "This would probably mean more QE if their forecast converged to our own modal view of a flat-to-higher unemployment rate through the end of 2012, let alone our downside risk case of a renewed recession." But what about the historic dissent? Ah, therein lies the rub: "We view Chairman Bernanke's willingness to live with the dissents as a strong signal that he and the rest of the Fed leadership view the need for renewed easing as more important than the institutional norm of consensus decisionmaking." So there you go. The market will wake up tomorrow with a hangover, and say the one word it always does: "More." Absent that, the slide will, as predicted, resume, and it is none other than Goldman Sachs who has once again, just like back in 2010, set the strawman up for the Fed doing simply more of the same which does nothing to actually fix the economy, but bring us all closer to that epic meltdown discussed by Andy Lees earlier, and by Zero Hedge over the past two and a half years.