Archive - Dec 2012

I’m going to lay out everything you need to know about the fiscal cliff negotiations. After reading this, you can ignore all of the media’s coverage of this topic as well as various politicians’ announcements pertaining to this subject. All you need to know consists of just one sentence. Politicians are in charge of this issue.

Despite the seemingly generational destruction to household and bank balance sheets and an entirely unprecedented fiscal and monetary policy reponse, investors would never know it given the market's reactions from the 2009 lows relative to its rally from the 2003 lows. Different this time? hhmmm... Worried about gold prices falling also? Doesn't look like we learned anything from the 'Debt Ceiling' debate either...

Think consumers paid enough from higher interest Libor rate rigged by banks?  Small case compared to the rigging in the oil and gasoline markets.  

Our Christmas wish to Santa: please let this be the last Christmas in America that is dominated by the propaganda that holiday retail sales have any more impact on the $15.8 trillion U.S. economy than a moldy, half-eaten fruitcake left over from 2009.

Worldwide, more than eight-in-ten people identify with a religious group. A comprehensive demographic study of more than 230 countries and territories conducted by the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life estimates that there are 5.8 billion religiously affiliated adults and children around the globe, representing 84% of the 2010 world population of 6.9 billion. These five charts sum up the age, size, geography, and power of the world's major religions.

What causes hyperinflations? The answer is: Quasi-fiscal deficits (A quasi-fiscal deficit is the deficit of a central bank)! Why have we not seen hyperinflation yet? Because we have not had quasi-fiscal deficits! Essentially, hyperinflation is the ultimate and most expensive bailout of a broken banking system, which every holder of the currency is forced to pay for in a losing proposition, for it inevitably ends in its final destruction. Hyperinflation is the vomit of economic systems: Just like any other vomit, it’s a very good thing, because we can all finally feel better. We have puked the rotten stuff out of the system.

Wondering where to place your hard-earned cash next year? Feel like playing the global game of equity market Russian Roulette? The following matrix covering every sector in all developed country stock markets provides just the color you need. Based on price-to-book, US and German stocks are, in aggregate, the most expensive; and EM and South Korea are cheapest currently relative to historical P/B. Oil & Gas seem the cheapest sector overall (on the P/B basis) while Retail, Real Estate, Media, and Tobacco sectors appear richest.

... at least statistically speaking. Yes, outlier cases will always exist and there will always be a rags to Geology 101 to riches story somewhere, but as the following fascinating and very much damning (the entire higher learning industry of the US) diagram from Reuters demonstrates, colleges, in their once vaunted role of a "great equalizer for the classes" as defined over a century ago by Horace Mann, no longer exist.What does the above chart imply? Nothing more than that for the vast majority of people, college degrees are the modern-day equivalent of very, very expensive snake oil. Yes: colleges are sold to you as the critical stepping stone on the path to wealth and prosperity, but sadly the empirical evidence demonstrates that when it comes to an actual, demonstrable income effect, only the wealthiest people actually benefit from a degree! The lowest fifth of household by income see their change in income decline by 10%, while the middle fifth sees an incremental 2.1% drop. Where do incomes rise? When you are already wealthy and belong to the highest fifth of households by income: there, going to college boosts your income by an additional 15.1%

While the news in the US that 'BUDGET TALKS REGRESS' was enough to drive S&P futures lower after-hours; once futures closed, JPY (the market's new-old-new carry-trade friend) is getting monkey-hammered. In a reverse-intervention, we can only assume that Abe's colon is going spastic as he sees the last few days 'good' destroyed by a soaring JPY... algo-driven heresy we suspect but rest assured Abe is watching closely...

Yesterday, when we described the unprecedented surge in gun sales in the aftermath of the Newtown massacre, we said that "what is most ironic, is that it is precisely the fear of forced, unilateral rejection, by either or all three branches of government, of the original constitution and its various amendments that has Americans scrambling into gun stores. And thus the closed loop nature of the problem: by threatening to take away America's guns, the government is only exacerbating a problem that is steeped in 200+ years of history and is engrained deep in American psychology." It took about 24 hours to demonstrate just how counterproductive government intervention always is: as of this moment, Bloomberg reports, Wal-Mart, the biggest retailer in the US and the world, has stores in at least five states where guns are now completely out of stock.

It's rather ridiculous that today's sell-off of around 0.6% (in the S&P) is the largest plungefest in five weeks. Volumes were high, though not as high as yesterday's with average trade size also relatively high. S&P futures peaked right before the US day-session open today and dropped all day long (with a slight bump higher into the European close) retracing most of yesterday's gains with decent blocks going through in the last few minutes push to lows. VIX led the weakness all day and stocks' selling pressure ignored relative underperformance in Treasuries (yields ended the day around unch), modest USD weakness close-to-close (though the day session saw USD strength return), and a spike in WTI (+3.1% on the week). Even trying to lever HYG didn't work to keep stocks up today. Gold and silver cliff-ledged early but gold recovered and stabilized while Silver slid to lows of the day (-3.5% on the week). Trading was relatively orderly until the last few minutes which saw a typical push for VWAP fail and the sell orders piled up into the close (and beyond in futures).

In key news that may well be the missing puzzle piece to explain some of the very odd market moves in the past week, we just learned courtesy of CNBC, that Morgan Stanley's Wealth platform unit has finally, after months and months of considerations, pulled the plug on the fund that for the second year in a row is one of the three worst performing in the weekly HSBC report and is now redeeming. That in itself is not unexpected. What however is notable is that MS withdrawing hundreds of millions in feeder capital may well explain why gold has seen such a dramatic dislocation in the past week. Recall that at Paulson & Co, gold is not simply an investment - the bulk of direct gold investments at the once legendary investor are in the form of (largely underperforming) gold mining stocks - but an actual investment class. In other words, instead of being denominated in USD, investors are actually denominated in (paper) gold, with a fixed conversion into GLD at inception. This means that upon liquidation of gold-denominated shares, any gold-denominated shares, he has no choice but to sell GLD, and by virtue of this being the most liquid paper instrument in the PM space, gold. Does the massive gold dislocation in the chart below now make more sense especially since Paulson was aware of MS' intentions days in advance and traded, or in this case liquidated, appropriately)?

In today's 'fast money'-inspired, everyone's-a-winner, there's-a-bull-market-somewhere world of investing, the old school remains stoic in their buy-and-hold mantra that the Fed has your back and over the long-term retirement is assured and 'holding-hands as you walk along golden beaches with your loved one' is a mere few percent of your salary tithed away every month away... Well, sorry to steal the jam from their donut, but across a massive 568 IPOs in the last few years, Bloomberg's Chart of the Day shows that, in fact, buying and dumping within one-day is massively more profitable than buying-and-holding in the new 'capitalism'. As the mainstream media can't help but notice every uptick in China's share prices as a sign that all-is-well in the world, the local fund managers live by a different meme: "It’s weird that in China the longer you hold new shares, the bigger losses you’ll take."

Treasuries have sold off aggressively over the past 2 weeks.  Is it time for that trade to reverse to New Years??

The markets, as most people reading this should now well know, no longer reflect in any way the true economic health of our country.  If one was to measure the financial “recovery” of this nation by the strength of global stocks alone, he would probably come to the conclusion that the collapse of 2008 was a mere hiccup in the overall success of the worldwide economic system.  However, electronically traded equities with little more to back their value than scraps of receipt paper and numbers on a screen have no bearing on what is going to happen to you, and to me, over the course of the coming year.  The stock market is a sideshow, a popcorn movie, a façade.  The real drama is going on behind the scenes and revealed in fundamentals that mainstream analysts no longer discuss...