Archive - Sep 2011

In America, in the midst of economic crisis and government driven moral hazard, millions of people are scrambling for “solutions”. The term is used rather haphazardly and often without proper context. There are, indeed, very evil men out there in the dark precipices of global infrastructure, and, these men often instigate very bad events. However, “doing away with them” is NOT a solution. It is NOT a plan. It is merely a goal. A solution requires more than an end result; it also involves the steps necessary to achieve said result. The Liberty Movement, as it is commonly called, tends to run into so much frustration and angst, I believe, because it consistently attempts to skip to the end of the story without traveling the rest of the very necessary journey. End the Fed! Sue the Fed! March on Washington! Vote the bums out! Take up arms! These are not actions, but reactions triggered by the confusion of the moment. Not only are they single minded responses that lack the strategy and logistics inherent in a successful counter-offensive, but such cries ignore the other devious culprit responsible for our national heartache; ourselves. Yes, the world must change, and soon, if our principles are to survive. But, for this to happen, we must change first. Instead of looking up, down, and all around us for some magical all encompassing answer, we have to question our very assumptions and world views. 

The NFP print of 0 today is clearly big news, but Greek 1 year bonds trading at 63 imply an almost 0% chance that they don't default.  2 year bonds are trading at 53.  Certainly at those prices, default and recovery are the drivers.  If you give any benefit for shorter maturities (which often do get slightly higher recoveries in sovereigns as opposed to corporates) it is hard to see that default isn't being priced in with almost 100% certainty

A few days ago the WSJ made waves by disclosing that Goldman was in the process of recreating another "Abacus", by pitching to clients a global "pain trade" presentation created by Goldman's Alan Brazil, which, among others, speculated that funding needs for European banks would be far, far greater than the IMF-proposed $200 billion, and would in fact be closer to $1 trillion. This emphasis is actually odd, because Goldman focuses as much if not more attention on the end of the Chinese bubble as it does on the end of the European ponzi. It of course also did the usual Goldman thing, which is to allow select clients to piggyback with its prop, pardon flow, desk, in recreating the same fiasco for which it already had to pay a half a billion settlement to the SEC last year. Yet to date, nobody had actually seen a public version of this report....That is, nobody, until now - presenting Goldman's top secret "State of the Markets - Long and Short Risk Strategies"

The long-term problem in the horrendous jobs report is the strangely inconspicuous "Employment-Population Ratio" that has been nosediving for over a decade. It's the definition of a comatose economy.

Hot labor market trend even in a recessionary environment and jobs to avoid at all costs.

Take a good look at the chart below of the best bids and offers of the stock TDI. The red circles are new best ask prices and each new circle (ask) cancels and replaces the previous one. The green circles are best bid prices -- which never change on this chart. All quotes (both bid and ask) are from one exchange. We selected this example for its simplicity. Many stocks are much more complex to analyze, as there are multiple exchanges involved and all four quote components change: bid price, bid size, ask price, and ask size.Using the chart below, see if you can answer these questions: 1. What is the Bid/Ask spread of this stock at 9:43:13? 2. What is the average Bid/Ask spread for the time period shown? The answer to both questions of course, is that the Bid/Ask spread depends greatly on where you live.

It always seems that just when there is a lull in news of geopolitcal tension, we get an update that the Iranian situation gets that more unstable. After a nearly year long hiatus brought courtesy of allegedly Israeli supervirus Stuxnet taking out Iran's entire nuclear infrastructure offline for many months, the topic of Iran's nuclear capability is once again back, and starting to stink up the join. The NYT has just reported that in an attempt to preempt a possible air strike by the US or Israel, "Iran is moving its most critical nuclear fuel production to a heavily defended underground military facility outside the holy city of Qum, where it is less vulnerable to attack from the air and, the Iranians hope, the kind of cyberattack that crippled its nuclear program, according to intelligence officials." Not surprisingly, Iran has ceased any ties with the US in terms of nuclear fuel delivery: "We will no longer negotiate a fuel swap and a halt to our production of fuel,” head of Iran’s atomic energy agency, Fereydoon Abbasi said “The United States is not a safe country with which we can negotiate a fuel swap or any other issue." Well, it took the US minutes to respond: "Tommy Vietor, a spokesman for the National Security Council, said that the Iranian plan “to install and operate centrifuges at Qum,” in a facility whose existence President Obama and Europeans leaders made public two years ago, “is a violation of their United Nations security obligations and another provocative act." Next up: an update of US Naval assets in the just passed week. Time to start focusing on those Straits of Hormuz again.

Note that the Fed is now suing its favorite firm, Goldman Sachs. This move is not without context. Bernanke and pals are aware of the political tide turning in the US. They’re also aware of what’s happening in Greece and Europe. And they’re going to try to pin the blame on Goldman and others.

In an excellent treatise on sovereign subtleties, Morgan Stanley's Arnaud Mares (the same analyst who nailed the Greek situation long before most others) once again lays out the increasingly bifurcated path that a broken European 'union' may and must take. Most interesting, and highly prescient in our view, is his consideration that the 'private sector involvement' in the restructuring of Greek debt was not only a major policy error but opens the door for the peasantry to finally comprehend that when sovereign debt is not 'risk-free' then fiscal (and monetary) policy can become pro-cyclical. With the entire Keynesian dogma resting on this very tenet, we think it well worth a read and as he writes: "Pandora’s Box has been opened. Only fiscal integration accompanied by centralized financing of governments can bring about full stabilization of the market in Europe, in our view. The alternative could eventually be a resumption of the run on governments and a wave of public and private defaults." Bottom line, in attempting to do things half-assed, Europe may have just destroyed the entire credibility of the one primary economic theory driving global "growth" (or stated better, borrowing from the future) since the beginning of the 20th century.

What is twist?  We know it is a prospective transformation of Fed balance sheet whereby selling shorter maturity debt to purchase and impact longer term debt.  But is twist QE3?  Who cares?  One thing is for sure that policymakers increasingly don’t want to be pinned or associated with incremental EXPLICIT policy. Why would you want to semantically define a series of quantitative numbers of failed policies?  QE3, QE99 bottles of beer on the wall.  Does that fan 98 bottles of ineffective policy?  By virtue of having another number does that mean the underestimation framework of a previous number? In fact, QE3 SHOULD take the form of the Fed having a 3 day offsite teach in with other branches of Government.  COMMUNICATION with stakeholders in government like Congress, Treasury, Comptroller of Currency, FDIC, HUD, leaders of banks, mortgage companies and business interests.  What the market is looking for is COMMUNICATION between stewards.  This alone should encourage resolve, incentives, confidence, less uncertainly, productivity, uniformity and an EASING of collective psyche.  Forget twists, and other policy minutia which REWARD poor decision making, leadership, and the current lack of communication and, hence, capital flight and investment valuation decisions globally in efforts to seemingly futilely preserve capital.   Hello gold and Swiss Franc!!!!!

For the second month in a row, Dan Loeb's $7.9 billion Third Point retains gold as its top position. And if that was his only holding he would have done quite well. Unfortunately, he also has quite a few equities, and courtesy of his net 17.7% exposure to equities (and 18.5% to credit) his funds dropped anywhere between 2.7% and 4.5%. Even so, Loeb's flagship fund is up 3.9% YTD, a performance 13F-chasing Whitney Tilson (not to mention mutual fund Paulson & Co.) can only dream about. Loeb continues to be most bullish on ABS credit, while accentuating his hatred for govvies, which account for his biggest short net exposure or -10.3%, an increase from last month's -8.9%. Top equities (except for confidential and FX positions - oddly a new footnote disclaimer, was not there last month - does it mean Loeb has engaged in a major "confidential" position or is he now a major FX trader?) for 3rd Point are Delphi, CIT, Technicolor (a new addition) and El Paso.

It is also ironic that more time has been spent trying to figure out the impact of 45,000 Verizon strikers on NFP, than has been spent on trying to figure out what sort of a system we have where 45,000 employees feel comfortable going on strike when there are NO jobs, and management caves in to their demands. Maybe Obama should address that sort of mentality in his jobs speech next week. Maybe the problem is more at the core of what this country has become than what some new tax incentive to hire can fix. If anything, the tax incentive will likely be good for lawyers who will be paid by big corporations to figure out how to get the most benefit for the least amount of actual change.

This time, an "I told 'ya so" simply will not suffice. The amount of pressure the big banks will come under will reverbrate around the globe, yet many in the sell side are still recommending big bank "buys"!!!

Little surprise to the payroll report on Wall Street, which is now united in its call that the only option is for the Fed to do more QEⁿ⁺¹

We dont have real time pricing on spam, but luckily we do on gold and silver. And to all those who BTFD in the past 2 weeks as we suggested, congratulations. Next up: another futile CME margin hike which will do nothing but confirm that a standalone gold standard is imminent.