Archive - Nov 2012

The Fed Is the Real Winner

Credit markets have been bleeding wider recently but based on Credit Suisse's 'Risk Appetite Index', they remain high in Euphoria territory in the US. This is worryingly crowded on its own but the key point that they note is the divergence between US exuberance and the rest-of-the-world's far less sanguine view of credit. The risk-appetite spread between the two has been this wide two times before in recent years - July/August 2011 (which saw a major sell-off - debt ceiling) and April/May 2010 (another major sell-off - end of QE and flash-crash). As we noted earlier, equity market valuations are very much pinned to risky credit now and so this indicator is yet another canary-in-the-coalmine...

Trish Regan and Adam Johnson do their best to hold themselves together in this sublime rant by 'Gloom, Boom & Doom's Marc Faber on Bloomberg TV as he sees Obama's re-election as "very negative for the economy". From his view that the market should be down at least 20% - and maybe 50%, to the implied ignorance of both of the candidates, he believes fervently that the "standards of living of people in the western hemisphere will continue to decline." Faber views Obama's re-election as one of many unintended consequences of market manipulation (since Democrat attacks on the wealthy were 'enabled' by their profiteering from Bernanke's money printing) and sees the need to protect one's assets "with a gun, a machine gun... or perhaps a tank." He concludes with a stunner as he exclaims his view doubting Obama will make it through the whole four-year term because "there will be so many scandals" since "there is so much smoke, there must be some fire!"

Just in case someone thought Greece would voluntarily vote to cut out the funding - any funding - of free money from the ECB, via ELA or otherwise, regardless if only 10% of said money actually makes it into Greek society, we have some bad news: the Greek parliament once again voted to impose austerity upon itself. This includes numerous Yay votes by deputes who had said previously they would vote against the measure.

• SAMARAS HAS VOTES FOR GREEK AUSTERITY BILL
• FINAL VOTE: 153 FOR, 128 AGAINST, 18 ABSTAIN
• PASOK EXPEL 6 MEMBERS; ND EXPELS 1 MEMBER FOR VOTING AGAINST PARTY LINE

And yes, this time will certainly be different unlike all those other times. Or maybe not. In the meantime, the rioting, and daily strikes by everyone, most certainly the tax collectors, will continue indefinitely, until even more spending has to be cut to match the decline in revenues, and so on, until finally the singularity of no more revenues and no more spending is hit.

The US government will be bankrupt after another four years of the same Obama we had for the past four. Fitch as much as confirmed this when it suggested a downgrade is coming. TrimTabs' Charles Biderman takes us succinctly through the painful math of just what has happened in the last four years: since Obama has been president after-tax take-home pay for everyone who pays taxes is still down by about 5% nominally and more than 10% after inflation. Dismissing GDP as anything but a misguided and misused spreadsheet output, the bombastic Biderman is concerned - and rightly so - as he sums up: "My guess is that Mr. Obama and his close buddies have no idea what they are doing, or else they would not be doing what they have been doing. The most dangerous are those people who think they are smarter than they are."

As the Romney bounce was removed last night, German (and European) growth is lowered, AAPL's dominance is questioned, and the 'fiscal cliff' (oh yeah that) comes into focus, is it any wonder equity markets dumped today. Depending on which index you looked at, equities fell the most in a year (or a month) with the Dow and Nasdaq closing below their 200DMA. Gold and Bonds outperformed and S&P futures plunged further after-hours closing below its 100DMA for the first time in over 3 months (as VIX closed at 19% - its highest in 3 months)

The house always wins...

It is not going to be a new government that necessarily ushers in a whole new era of growth, prosperity and confidence. Even under the revered Ronald Reagan, the period of secular growth and bull market activity took two years to unfold — it didn't happen right away. It took the inflationary excesses to be wrung out of the system and concrete signs that the executive and legislative branches could work together to usher in true fiscal reform — and to get blue Democrats on board with reduced top marginal tax rates.  Hope isn't generally a very useful strategy, but there is reason to be hopeful nonetheless. The critical issue is going to be how we get Washington to move back to the middle where it belongs. This requires bipartisanship which in turn requires leadership. Reagan's whole eight-year tenure in the 1980s occurred with the House being in Democrat hands the whole way through. Bill Clinton's second term coincided with both the House and Senate controlled by the Republicans.

It can be done! 

With this in mind, the best that can happen is a Reaganesque and Clintonesque return to compromise on the road to fiscal reform.  It will be painful. We all know it will be painful.

Lots of reading between the lines and inference we are sure... standard political protocol surely means he will toe the line on TV... or will he?

Following one of the highest monthly jumps in consumer credit in August, the September data showed that following the drop in household savings to a multi-year low, consumers naturally retrenched, and had no choice but to pay down debt. As the just released G.19 confirmed, in September, households once again reduced their credit card debt, which declined by $2.9 billion to $852 billion. This was the fourth such decline in six months, confirming that at the discretionary level where banks have supervision over borrowings, the consumer is still nowhere near willing to relever. Where, there was leverage, a lot of it, was once again in the government sector, which funded $13.8 billion of the total $14.6 billion rise in NSA credit, and where non-revolving credit: read loans for Government Motors, at least those that have not been record channel stuffed (as reported previously) and Federal Student Loans, which are now over $1 trillion, rose by $14.3 billion in one month. Of course, the difference between revolving and non-revolving credit is that while banks expect the former to be paid off eventually, Uncle Sam has no such illusions on any low APR debt it hands out to anyone who asks for it (and if the proceeds from student loans are used to purchase iPads, so be it).

The U.S. Presidential race is now behind us. And this morning the world woke up and realized that all the issues the election postponed now lie before us. It's becoming increasingly clear the way our leaders will "address" these challenges will be to throw increasing gobs of our citizens' current and future wealth at them. Until, of course, that simply doesn't work anymore...

The very same problems that the world faced on November 5, 2012 remain in place. And we now know that those in power (Bernanke and Draghi) favor money printing over everything else. So the cost of living/ inflation will continue to rise and the world will lurch ever closer to the great debt implosion that will eventually take down the financial system.

With Federal debt growing at the rate of $40,000 a second - not all that far from what a typical family earns in a year; with a debilitating dependency on the state all too elevated; and with any number of restraints to peace and progress not only unresolved, but utterly unresolvable under present conditions, is it any wonder that our nation has become entirely stagnant. As Sean Corrigan of Diapason Commodities notes in this simple chart - real net private product per capita has been dead for more than a decade - mirroring its poor showing during the inflationary disaster of forty years ago. Given the four-more-years of Bernanke, to expect a radical turnaround under such conditions (of monetary policy largesse and experimentation) would be to display as much naivety about the prospects for 'change' as did so many bien pensants four short years ago.

UPDATE: Minutes after we brought attention to this farce, VIX Futures and Options Re-Opened...

CBOE's VIX Futures and Options have been halted since 1337ET.

Because in our day and age of highly "sophisticated, precise and computerized" trading, just what stock market crash can take place without a critical component of the market breaking...

John Williams, president of the San Francisco Fed, yet another noted dove, thinks nothing can go wrong by printing gobs of money. There is no inflation, and there never will be. They have the 'tools' to avert it. Never mind the explosion of the money supply over the past four years – it is all good. Have no fear though, as Williams notes: "Once it comes time to exit its super-easy monetary policy, the Fed will target a 'soft landing,'" The hubris of these guys is jaw-dropping. We are struck by the continued refusal by Fed officials to even think for a second about the long range effects of their policies. In the meantime, money printing continues to undermine the economy. Wealth cannot be generated by increasing the money supply – all that can be achieved by this is an ephemeral improvement in the 'data' even while scarce capital continues to be malinvested and consumed.