Archive - Feb 2012

As the ECB supposedly takes it foot off the gas, and EU Summits and 'events' loom large for the careening wagon of shared sacrifice, unity, and sovereign risk, perhaps it is the nodding donkeys of Greek and Italian technocrats juxtaposed with Ireland's feistier "R" word gambit (and of course Zee German Overlords) that makes Art Cashin reflect somewhat philosophically on recent headlines. Their stereotypical interpretation has him concerned as the potential for ever-increasing culture clashes increases across the pond as sour memories and generational hatreds abound.

Everybody has their own "on the ground" recession indicators: the mall parking lot, the tony restaurant that used to be packed every weekend, and so on. I have two favorites: freight trains rumbling south down the main line of the West Coast and "sell your own car" used car lots. The freight trains are self-explanatory: at the top of the housing bubble, they were loaded with flatcars of lumber. Now? A lot of empty flatcars and container flats. A lot. Yes, the official statistics indicate rising rail traffic, but they must mean one more car has a load in a 100-car train and there's only 20 empties. The freight trains I see are still running with beaucoup empty cars. There may be some explanation of why this is so, but I can report that these trains pulled no empties in 2007. "Sell your own car" lots reflect the "private market" for used cars. If you want to know what people are trading in for new cars, then go look at new car dealers' used lots. At the local Honda dealer, I saw a number of Lexus SUVs on their used lot; people trading down to save on gasoline?

Presented with little comment except to say, get some 'price change' context before you start throwing fat finger fantasies around... as 10Y Treasury Futures dropped 0.5% peak to trough while Silver lost at least 2% at a time in 3 legs down...

For those confused, the Fed's Beige Book has been upgraded to the Beige iPad (apparently Ben is not a fan of the black or white version). Regardless, the latest version has just been released spewing forth the usual reflexive platitudes, in which the economy is said to be better because the stock market is higher, and so forth. In other words, the same stuff that completely ignores $110 WTI. Via Bloomberg:

• FED SAYS U.S. ECONOMY EXPANDED AT `MODEST TO MODERATE PACE'
• FED SAYS CONSUMER SPENDING WAS `GENERALLY POSITIVE'
• FED SAYS MANUFACTURING EXPANDED AT `STEADY PACE' NATIONWIDE

And more such headlines which nobody will actually read, except for the algos which scalp the optimistic tone put there precisely for such a purpose.

Dumping yet another liquidity cold shower in the aftermath of today's less than dovish Humphrey Hawkins speech by Bernanke (and sending precious metals even lower, albeit briefly), is the Fed's resumption of even more purely optical liquidity extractions, however symbolic, in the form of reverse repos, after the NY Fed just completed the first such operation since the dark days of summer 2011. As a reminder, the last time the Fed did these was back in August 2011 which cemented the market's plunge as it gave the market the impression that at least superficially no more money was coming in (intuitively it makes no sense to have Reverse Repos running at the same time as incremental liquidity), even as the reliquification baton was quietly being passed to the ECB. Today, reverse repos resume, as the Fed pays Primary Dealers an annualized rate of 0.17% in exchange for lending out $100 million in Treasurys. Will this continue? It depends entirely on what the economy, pardon, the Russell 2000 does. After all, that is the third and only mandate of the Fed that matter. And if the market considers this an indicator that QE3 really is delayed indefinitely, the FRBNY will mostly likely be forced to reassess.

We kissed Nasdaq 3000 this morning.  Doom and Gloom abounds.  The macro picture is still dire with lots of bad news - some of which you can only get on ZeroHedge!  Consider the crazy news that Wyoming was looking to buy an aircraft carrier.  Is this not Peak Doom?  It is a sign.

As good news appears to be bad news for now and the hopes of imminent dovish QE3-gasms gets pushed off a week or two, we thought it useful to dig into the mysterious central bank go-to play in a little more detail. Morgan Stanley's European Economics Team asks and answers five of the most frequently discussed questions with regard quantitative easing. From whether QE has worked to inflation fears and concerns over policy normalization and what happens if the public lose confidence in central bank liabilities, we suspect these questions, rather dovishly answered by the MS team, will reappear sooner rather than later, and as they interestingly note, the deployment of central bank balance sheets is, in essence, a confidence trick.

"Next up on CNBC - - an octogenerian fund manager who completely missed the boat on technology in the late 1990s and, since the early 2009 bottom, has underperformed the S&P by 50%. Stay tuned!"

So how many people do you think would stay riveted to their flat-panel Samsung to watch that? Not many, I'm guessing. But if the aforementioned gent is named Warren Buffett, the entire nation comes to a halt and hangs on to every word. A quick glance at Amazon yields 2,100 results when one does a search on his name (including the surprisingly-titled Warren Buffett Invests Like a Girl: And Why You Should, Too).

An imbalanced approach...

Germany is in a great squeeze. On one side the ECB and G20 want Germany to step up with more money to save Europe. On the other hand, German CEOs, voters, and even the courts, are increasingly wanting out of the Euro. This is not a situation that gives one much confidence that Germany will stick around for too much longer. It is my view Germany is going to do all it can to force Greece out of the Euro before March 20^th (the date that the next round of Greek debt is due) or will simply pull out of the Euro (but not the EU) itself.

This will be one of those "one picture is worth a thousand words" posts...

Just like the housing market in the US, following the modest blip higher in December Greek bank deposits, immediately the great unwashed took to calling an end of the Greek deposit outflow and seeing a glorious renaissance for the country's bank industry. Well look again. According to just released data from the Bank of Greece, January saw Greeks doing what they do best (in addition to striking of course): pulling their money from local banks, after a near record €5.3 billion, or the third highest on record, was withdrawn from the local banking system. As a result, total bank cash has now dropped to just €169 billion, down from €174 billion in December, and the lowest since 2006. This is an 18% decline from a year ago, or €37 billion less than the €206 billion last January, and is a whopping 30% lower than the all time deposit highs from 2007, as nearly €70 billion in cash has quietly either left the country or been parked deep in the local mattress bank.

Everyone and their mum knows by now that Italian bonds have rallied since the first LTRO and we are told that this is symptomatic of 'improvement'. While we hate to steal the jam from that doughnut, we note Peter Tchir's interesting chart showing how focused the strength is in the short-end of the bond curve (which we know is thanks to the ECB's SMP program preference and the LTRO skew) but more notably the significantly less ebullient performance of the less manipulated and more fast-money, mark-to-market reality CDS market as we suspect, like him, the CDS is pricing in the longer-term subordination and termed out insolvency risk much more clearly than the illiquid bond market does, and perhaps bears closer scrutiny for a sense of what real risk sentiment really looks like.

As we have discussed extensively, and noted this morning specifically, the LTRO is stigmatizing credit markets in Europe, no matter what European leaders or bank CEOs tell you. European credit and equity markets dropped dramatically post LTRO 2 and accelerated on Bernanke's lack of monetary exuberance. Financials underperformed but most notably, subordinated credit spreads widened significantly more than seniors holding at yesterday's wide levels. The Stigma trade is occurring in single-name credit also with the spread between LTRO and non-LTRO banks widening once again after compressing for a few days but it is the Senior-Sub spread decompression that is the liquid trade for European bank's implicit subordination for now (as the entire capital structure of LTRO banks just became subordinated at best and more levered and subordinated at worst). The EUR tumbled over 100pips towards 1.3350 as the USD rallied back to the week's highs. Silver (and Gold) crashed into the European close (down over 7% on the day at one point) while Treasuries sold off and European sovereigns leaked wider (except Portugal which crashed and Italy which compressed modestly). Quite a day.