Archive - Aug 2011

Now that Keynesianism has failed (repeatedly and miserably, although certainly not during wartime - during those times it is curiously successful at 'stimulating'), and only those willfully blind refuse to see how this extended slow-motion collapse ends, below we present the latest, 2011 Edition, of the Annual report to Congress revealing "Military and Security Developments Involving the People's Republic of China" or, in short, everything that one needs to know to defend from and/or attack the world's most populous nation. For those short on time, here are the key charts.

That's right: nothing like a little virtually unlimited downside just head of the most groundbreaking (if somewhat priced in) announcement in Apple history. We can only hope this recommendation to sell Apple $300 January Puts, with an initiation date of, well today, was purely a function of impeccably bad timing, because if Apple opens tomorrow at the futures closing price of $357, these will be worth $14.21: a rather unpleasant 30% loss in a few short hours.

A very positive spin on things from the CBO. Of course, politics has nothing to do with it.

Sometimes the general public can get confused in attempting to explain the complexities and the inefficiency of the banking sector when one simple chart brings the message home. A chart like that comes from the latest "Eye on the Market" from JPM's Michael Cembalest, who compares total bank deposits ($8.4 trillion), or bank liabilities, and total bank loan (about $2 trillion less) assets, or sources of cash flows that are supposed to fund bank liabilities and generate retained earnings, while the bank performs credit, maturity and risk transformation: a bank's three key functions. As the chart below shows, perhaps the primary reason why the economy is in its current deplorable state, is that instead of lending dollar for dollar to catch up with deposit growth, banks now rely on roughly $1.7 trillion in excess reserves with the Fed, an amount roughly equal to the difference between total deposits and loans, to plug the credibility gap. This also explains why according to Cembalest one of the expectations by the market from Jackson Hole is that IOER will be cut to 0% to promote bank lending, and thus the conversion of reserves into loans (something which the inflationistas out there will tell you is a big risk to a sudden surge in out of control inflation). So how does the Fed's direct intervention in bank balance sheets look like? Here it is.

People seem surprised by the suddenness of the decline in the stock market. It keeps trying to rally, and the rallies keep getting sold. There’s no shortage of worrying circumstances in the real world to explain a fall in prices, and it’s normal for people to disagree about whether they should be going up or down. But the violence of this move has caught many of us by surprise. I don’t think it should have. I think there are good theoretical reasons, very simple, orthodox economic ones, to expect more of the same, to expect equally dramatic, or even more dramatic moves down, going forward. Of course, given the fact that I presumably have some sort of bets on the table, anything I say about that belief, like anything any market participant says, should be taken with a very large grain of salt. On the other side, there’s the danger that I’m merely stating the obvious, and wasting the reader’s time. (But then why are so many of us still long?). Nevertheless, despite the fact that I clearly can’t be trusted, and consequently won’t persuade many people to change their views, and even if there’s nothing startlingly original about what I’m going to say, I think it’s worth laying out what I believe to be the correct explanation of the crash as it’s still happening, so that later on, when we’re tempted to blame various scapegoats – derivatives traders, European politicians, bankers, our neighbors, immigrants, the opposing political party, etc., etc. – we’ll perhaps remember that one of these analyses was predictive of the timing and scale of the event at the time, while the others are invidious reconstructions after the fact.

As the following update from Goldman's David Kostin demonstrates, after dropping to third place with 173 hedge funds owning AAPL (behind Microsoft at 181 and Citigroup at 178) as of March 31, the company that Steve Jobs built was back at the very top of hedge fund holdings with 181 hedge funds holding on to AAPL. The question is what will they do tomorrow and will the first game theory defection bring an end to the fairytale story?

The market is not taking the Steve Jobs news well for now.

Mr. Schneiderman & his staff, who are aggressively investigating fraudclosure and felony land record fraud, are being attacked and need our support.

To the Apple Board of Directors and the Apple Community...

Two weeks after the CME hiked gold margins by 22%, and two days after the Shanghai Gold Exchange sent them higher by 26%, here comes the CME, as we expected, with another 26% gold margin hike (previously: "Should we expect 3 more SGE margin hikes in the next 2 weeks? Or will the CME rightfully accept the baton and do everything in its power to dent the parabolic rise in the alternative reserve currency? We are cautiously looking at what the CME will do today and will advise readers."). And now we know that this particular margin hike was leaked well in advance, and explains the entire $100 plunge in gold today. And as a reminder, the August 1 CME margin hike worked... for about 30 minutes.

A snapshot of the US Afternoon Briefing covering Stocks, Bonds, FX, etc.

Market Recaps to help improve your Trading and Global knowledge

...Just because the surgeon general recommends laughing for 5 minutes at least once a day.

Whether the Fed will upgrade QE2.5, or "ZIRP through mid-2013", to QE3, or Operation Twist, the form we have been predicting it would take since May, is still unknown: very few people know what Bernanke will say on Friday, minutes after the first revision to Q2 GDP reveals a sub-1% number. What is known is that while cross-asset correlation has soared over the past few days, the biggest driver of stocks over the past few days has been nothing but the 2s10s30s butterfly, which in turn is driven by On and Off rumblings of Bernanke doing the Twist. And here is the rub: when the Fed announces Twist it will be extending duration, it effectively means selling everything 10 Year and older (yes, QE3 could very well be LSAD or Large Scale Asset Dumping instead of LSAP). The goal of this action: make the 2s10s will go vertical and to pancake the 10s30s: a move that the butterfly is now indicating it is once again pricing in - today alone we have seen a massive 15 steepening in the butterfly: a nearly 20% move in the curve. It also explains why gold is being sold off today, because simplistic investors believe that without an actual balance sheet expansion, the Fed will not be diluting paper. Completely wrong: it will merely do so synthetically, from a duration basis. Furthermore, the market will very soon read through the Fed's intention which will be predicated entirely on asset rotation and not on incremental fiat capital. The final outcome will be QE4 where the Fed will have to match the synthetic duration extension with actual cash bond deliverables, namely monetizing bonds, a move which will be even more critical once the deficit spend starts soaring again in the next 3 months. And when it does, it will have to do so double time, to make up not only for previous synthetic exposure extension, but for future priced in moves. In other words, nothing has changed, and we fully expect stocks to soar if indeed Bernanke mentions "duration extension", together with yet another gold dump. The issue is that Op Twist in the proposed format would be physically limited by the amount of 10 Year+ bonds held in the Fed's SOMA. At last check it was not that many at all. So any surge in stocks will be albeit both painfully transitory.

Muammar Gadhaffi’s 42 year-old regime is in its death rattle – maybe today, maybe tomorrow, his administration that has ruled Libya with a quixotic and brutal hand is about to pass, in Trotsky’s piquant phrase, “into the dustbin of history,” prompting the question “what next?” The glittering prize is Libya’s 1.6 million barrels per day output of high quality crude, which accounted for about 2 percent of global oil output drawn from Africa's largest oil reserves, whose exports have been stymied since the NATO-led campaign began six months ago. Projecting into the future, analysts believe that has reserves to sustain its previous level of production for 80 years. Who will eventually control this asset, with oil prices currently at roughly $84 a barrel, generating an income of more than $12.6 million per day? Italy’s ENI? France’s Total? Britain’s BP? U.S. companies? Or, will China add Libyan future production to its string of acquisitions, as it is already China’s eleventh largest source of imports? The crystal ball is murky indeed, but when the uprising against Gadhaffi began six months ago, according to the Chinese media, about 36,000 Chinese were in Libya working on 50 projects.

We must make an idol of our fear and call it stimulus...