Archive - Aug 12, 2011

As long as you have a plan and the conviction to execute that plan, then you should be able navigate a fairly hostile environment known as the market.

Markets are currently rallying in reaction to the short-sale bans enacted in Europe. Time will tell if these bans ultimately prove effective seeing as how when the US banned the short-selling of financials in 2008, they proceed to collapse over the next few months. Investors are usually correct in estimating that a trading ban is nothing more than formal confirmation that there is indeed a problem. With banks borrowing more from the ECB in recent days and less from each other, we have yet another sign that European banks are getting nervous of each other’s risk. But at least for today, equities are solidly in the green.

Don't just do something, stand there! 

The entire "story" of the Bull market is stocks rests on one reed: permanently rising corporate profits. Too bad those profits are set to fall. Like everything else about the "recovery," the "rising corporate profits" story is founded on financial flim-flam, starting with the boost provided by a sinking dollar. To truly grasp the monumental scope of this smoke-and-mirrors game of "profits" rising from currency arbitrage, we have to recall that most of the big U.S. global corporations earn between 50% and 65% of their profits overseas. Since the dollar has weakened about 30% in the Fed's free-money campaign (quantitative easing), then we can guesstimate that fully 15% of all profits from global corporations is phantom: if half their profits are earned overseas, and the dollar declined 30%, then their overseas profits rose by 30%. Since that is half of all profit, then that 30% rise boosts total profits by 15%...The easy money's been made from slashing costs and dollar arbitrage; all four supports of corporate profits are at risk. With these props gone, how are corporate profits going to keep rising? If the "rising corporate profits" story dissipates, so does the Bull market.

Back in May, Zero Hedge penned "With China Forecast To Reach Wage Parity With The US In Five Years, Is A New Manufacturing Golden Age Coming To The US?" in which we predicted that rising labor costs courtesy of the Fed's ongoing exporting of inflation could easily backfire, and force large, profitable multinationals, for whom dollar weakness goes straight to the bottom line, to reorganize and pull offshore workers back to the US. It appears the theory is slowly shifting to practice. As Reuters reports, Conglomerates ranging from Emerson Electric to Honeywell International feel pressure on margins from double-digit wage increases in China. So have toymaker Mattel, fast-food chain Yum! Brands and computer maker Dell, analysts and investors say..."Input cost increases have been a steady headwind to margins for some time now," Fairchild Semiconductor International Chief Financial Officer Mark Frey said last month. "I do believe that labor inflation will continue high for quite a while," Yum CFO Rick Carucci said on the company's earnings conference call. He called commodity prices another "wild card" for the company." Curiously, China is proving far more adept at pushing labor price increases than America's sad, and largely ineffectively unionized labor force: ""A lot of the wage increase is to keep civil unrest at a minimum," said William Blair analyst Nick Heymann, who said suicides at an Apple supplier and the "Arab Spring" protests have alarmed Beijing. "These guys have watched North Africa and the Middle East with a lot of trepidation."" And as we speculated, the perverse outcome of Bernanke's policy to reward only companies at the expense of US Laborers (i.e., middle class) will soon backfire, as more and more companies end seeing their margins cut, in the process being forced to hire ever more people. "Wages are getting large enough that you start to feel the difference," said Hal Sirkin, a BCG senior partner, who said U.S. companies are looking at alternative manufacturing sites. "One of the answers is to start moving back to the U.S." And when they do, they may, just may, start hiring Americans once again.

As I promised earlier this week, today, I am presenting the darker side of a centrally planned economy: The building of total chaos. 

And that my friends is the nail in the economic "recovery." August consumer sentiment was just reported at 54.9 from 63.7 in July. This is the lowest level since May 1980. The chart below shows the correlation with sentiment and the consumer component of GDP which is about 70% of the economy and why I say the "recovery" is over. In Q2 the consumer component of GDP was 0.07% from 1.46% in Q1. Based on historical correlations and today's sentiment data the Q3 consumer component will contract much further in the (2%) range. This will bleed into the fixed investment and inventory components of GDP causing further contraction.

The Fed just announced that going forward it will proceed with reverse repo series every two months. The reason? "The operations have been designed to have no material impact on the availability of reserves or on market rates. Specifically, the aggregate amount of outstanding reverse repo transactions will be very small relative to the level of excess reserves, and the transactions will be conducted at current market rates." With liquidity already being very scarce courtesy of the FDIC assessment, of Europe wreaking havoc with money markets, of repos pulling out of the market at a record pace, of O/N General Collateral trading with the same volatility as the S&P, this will surely have no impact at all on anything, just like all other centrally planned, and carefully thought through actions.

The European ban on shorts for financial companies was allegedly justified by false rumors. The only thing false that justifies banning is the balance sheets and funding models of many of the banks in question. Available nowhere else on the web,  I Forensically Prove A Run On A French Bank Is Justified And Likely, Step by Step

Relevant news (better late than...)

UMichigan consumer confidence just printed at 54.9, on expectations of 63.0. This is the lowest since May 1980. And what's worse, inflation expectations were unchanged. Looks like those high inflation expectations are starting to get anchored. In the meantime, with the Chairsatan saying to expect at least two more years of recession, is this really a surprise to anyone?

With ES trading at 45% below average volume for this time of the day (read: massive explosion on vapor volume as is de rigeur), we doubt anyone is actually trading or will notice this, but for any carbon based forms out there, the latest news on Jefferson county may be just a little notable: There is an 80% chance that Jefferson County, Alabama, officials will vote to file for Chapter 9 bankruptcy today, Commissioner Sandra Little Brown said before the panel was set to meet to consider the option. Is this just posturing to force the creditors to agree to the debtor's terms, or an actual reflection of the truth, we shall fund out this afternoon, when the meeting ends and the standstill expires.

Following the historic 3 dissenting votes from this week's FOMC decision announcing a pseudo Operation Twist, here is the first explanation by one of the dissenters, Minneapolis Fed's Narayana Kocherlakota, as to why he thought the Chairsatan's policy to continue to annihilation of all US savers (i.e., retirees) for another 2 years was a horrendous idea. Granted, he is more politically correct: " I dissented from this change in language because the evolution of macroeconomic data did not reflect a need to make monetary policy more accommodative than in November 2010. In particular, personal consumption expenditure (PCE) inflation rose notably in the first half of 2011, whether or not one includes food and energy. At the same time, while unemployment does remain disturbingly high, it has fallen since November. I can summarize my reasoning as follows. I believe that in November, the Committee judiciously chose a level of accommodation that was well calibrated for the prevailing economic conditions. Since November, inflation has risen and unemployment has fallen. I do not believe that providing more accommodation—easing monetary policy—is the appropriate response to these changes in the economy."

Further to the previous post speculating that while central planners do all they can to mask the symptoms of the European-wide liquidity crunch, the underlying issue is still very much alive, comes from the observations that the past two days' Libor fixing spread between a stable, domestic provider of 3 Month USD Libor and a less than stable one, shall we say, SocGen, has surged to the widest since early 2009. Granted, everyone knows that LIEBOR is the most manipulated unsecured funding metric available as it comes directly from the BBA member banks themselves (a process which is currently being investigated by regulators), but the fact that even post all the massaging SocGen has been unable to collapse the spread is very notable, and confirms that its stock price is purely a kneejerk reaction to this morning's short selling ban, one which as we demonstrated envisions lots of pain once the first reaction is internalized.

One of the key catalysts for Wednesday's market rout which originated in Europe came following news that Chinese banks had cut down on their credit lines to Europe, which highlighted the key threat to the European banking system: access to liquidity. The Chinese reaction is merely a symptom of a much deeper underlying ailment: the increasing lack of counterparty confidence across various funding markets, both traditional and shadow, which has continued to accelerate over the past week, a development summarized effectively by the latest report in the International Financing Review which uses some powerful words (of the type that European bureaucrats hate) to explain where Europe stands right now: "credit taps run dry for European lenders, setting scene for liquidity crisis." For those strapped for time the take home message is that: "with bond markets shut and investors unwilling to buy asset-backed securities, the repo market – for some banks the sole remaining source of private funding – has become the most recent tap to run dry, with some investment banks pulling credit lines worth tens of billions of euros in recent weeks." This is very disturbing as with liquidity windows shut, Europe's bank have no recourse on how to roll the €4.8 trillion in wholesale and interbank funding which expires in the next two years. End result: the only recourse is the ECB, which unlike the Fed, is not suited to be a lender of last resort and has been morphing into that role over the past year kicking and screaming. And when that fails, there are the Fed's liquidity swap lines. Too bad that the liabilities in the European banking system are orders of magnitude bigger than in the US, and should this liquidity crisis transform into its next and more virulent phase, even the Fed will find it does not have enough capital to prevent a worldwide short squeeze on the world's carry trade funding currency (once known as the reserve currency).