Archive - Apr 2012

All eyes were on Europe again today, where Italy sold debt for the second day in a row, only this time instead of 1 year and lower Bills, the Tesoro came to market with On and Off the run issuance maturing in 3 through 11 years. And as was to be expected, with a substantial portion of the debt maturing after the LTRO 3 year window, the auction was mixed, far weaker than yesterday's LTRO-covered Bill issuance, and the maximum target of €5 billion was not met, instead a total of €4.884 billion was sold. Furthermore yields surged compared to previous auctions. "The funding environment is getting tougher for the periphery. Overall we believe the spreads are biased towards further widening although we still prefer Italian debt over Spanish," said Michael Leister, a strategist at DZ Bank.What is most worrying is that the funding picture is again deteriorating rapidly, although not as fast as in Spain, even as LTRO cash is still sloshing around European banks. What happens when it runs out?

Fuel Pool 35 Miles from Boston – which Is Highly Vulnerable to Earthquakes – Contains More Radioactive Cesium than Released In BOTH Major Nuclear Accidents and ALL Nuclear Bomb Tests

And we thought the 25:1 WTI to Henry Hub ratio reached in August 2009 was parabolic...

While the naive public has been inundated with stories that the foreclosure pipeline has been finally unclogged following the robo-settlement (see here and here) and as a result the home "price discovery" process is well on its way, reality is just a tad different. Make that totally different. As usual, the only foreclosure report that matters, and that is even remotely close to reality, comes from RealtyTrac, and we are sad to say, it brings no good news. Quite the contrary. According to the real estate specialists, March 2012 foreclosures plunged from 206,900 in February to 198,853 in March, the first time the total number of foreclosures (either Default Notices, Foreclosure Auctions, or REOs) has dropped under 200,000 since July 2007! Which sadly means that the foreclosure dam wall has yet to crack. Of course, when it does, well "The Second Foreclosure Tsunami Is Coming, And Is About To Kill Any Hopes Of A "Housing Bottom."

While every soon-to-be-retired boomer and his or her long-only asset-manager stock-broker commission-leecher lies awake at night in the forlorn hope that Ben "I'm-all-in" Bernanke finds another pile of printing presses to make use of in his game of Global No-Limit Texas Central-Banking; the economy, judging by 'selective' macro data and today's Beige Book, is limping along quite happily with no need for QE3 anytime soon (and that spells trouble for a market that is entirely dependent on the spice flow of liquidity and not just the stock of central bank assets). The sad truth is, as we first pointed out back in early February, that the economy is significantly less upwardly mobile than it 'optically' appears (or the market signals it to be) thanks to the extreme weather that has occurred and so while the spin-masters will attempt to make every headline look like we are in self-sustaining recovery mode, the Fed knows full well the reality is far different (hence Bernanke's recent comments) and yet they have not admitted to this animal-spirits-shattering reality (yet). Perhaps this shockingly simple 'chart-that's-worth-a-thousand-words' will force their hand as the correlation between regions showing extreme positivity within today's Beige book and the regions with the extremest weather disconnects is, well, extreme itself. It seems the Fed is caught between a rock of stagnating inaction and a hard-place of independence-removing LSAP.

The European debt struggle may have just entered a new phase. Don’t blink. Like any classy magician’s trick the idea is to get you looking one place while the real action is going on somewhere else. And that has been the recipe over the past week or so. While everyone has been watching the Spanish and Portuguese debt auctions, the real damage was done in Germany where the German government’s bid-cover ratio on a ten-year bund auction came in less than ‘one.’  

So, which is it? Are we in the midst of an epic bull run, or an epic run of bull shit. Place your bets.

In an attempt to not steal too much thunder from Gary Shilling's thought-provoking interview with Bloomberg TV, his view of the S&P 500 hitting 800, as operating earnings compress to $80 per share, is founded in more than just a perma-bear's perspective of the real state of the US economy. As he points out "The analysts have been cranking their numbers down. They started off north of 110 then 105. They are now 102. They are moving in my direction." The combination of a hard landing in China, a recession in Europe, and a stronger USD will weigh on earnings and inevitably the US consumer (who's recent spending spree has considerably outpaced income growth) with the end result a moderate recession in the US. The story is "there is nothing else except consumers that can really hype the U.S. economy" and that is supported by employment but last week's employment report throws cold water in that. "Consumers have a lot of reasons to save as opposed to spend. They need to rebuild their assets, save for retirement. A lot of reasons suggest that they should be saving to work down debt as opposed to going the other way, which they have done in recent months. So if consumers retrench, there is not really anything else in the U.S. economy that can hold things up." While the argument that the US is the best of a bad lot was summarily dismissed as Shilling prefers the 'best horse in the glue factory' analogy and does not believe investors will flock to US equities - instead preferring US Treasuries noting that "everyone has said, rates cannot go lower, they will go up, they will go up. They have been saying that for 30 years."

Last week we had the Fed's hawks line up one after another telling us how no more QE would ever happen. We ignored them because they are simply the bad cops to the Fed's good cop doves. Sure enough, here comes Bernanke's right hand man, or in this case woman, hinting that one can forget everything the hawkish stance, and that ZIRP may last not until 2014 but 2015! Which, by the way, is to be expected: since ZIRP can never expire, it will always be rolled to T+3 years, as the short end will never be allowed to rise, until the Fed has enough FRNs in circulation to absorb the surge in rates without crushing the principal, as explained yesterday.

Late last year, I paid a visit to Josh Brown ("The Reformed Broker") and had a pleasant chat. I went to his blog a week later and put up a comment, shown below, stating my belief that Facebook's IPO day would mark an important turning point in the market.

In its latest note, Goldman is not providing any actionable "advice" which is naturally to be faded and would have been thus quite profitable, but merely updates its outlook for the second quarter, which is not pretty. The firm now expects a slowing down in the overall economy to a 2% GDP rate, and an "additional loss of momentum during the next few months", which is to be expected as every bank wants to keep the perception that NEW QE is just around the corner, as economic stagnation can rapidly become a contraction. Most importantly, the firm expects just 150,000 payrolls to be created every month, which net of the 90,000 monthly labor force increase (yes, forget what the BLS tells you - every month courtesy of demographics the American labor force grows by an average of 90k people) means that only 60k jobs will be added to offset the structural job collapse since December 2007. It also means that the pre-election rhetoric will change significantly as the economic strength from the start of the year disappears, and with it any hope of an economic upswing, providing additional ammo for exciting GOP pre-election theater.

What makes this time different? Several items:

1. The Crisis coming from Europe will be far, far larger in scope than anything the Fed has dealt with before.
2. The Fed is now politically toxic and cannot engage in aggressive monetary policy without experiencing severe political backlash (this is an election year).
3. The Fed’s resources are spent to the point that the only thing the Fed could do would be to announce an ENORMOUS monetary program which would cause a Crisis in of itself.

The trend continues: as has pointed out here every month for the past five months, Pimco's Bill Gross continues to layer into the "NEW QE" trade, only this time he is making it more clear than ever that he is certain that the Fed will have no choice but to monetize Mortgage Backed Securities. Indeed, in March the firm added another 100 bps in its MBS exposure, bringing the total to 54% of total, or a record $134 billion of the fund's $253 billion in AUM. And while before Gross would buy MBS and TSYs pari passu, that is no longer the case. In fact in March, Gross dumped the most Treasurys since February 2011, cutting his net exposure from 38% to 32%, and likely is in part or whole responsible for the big bond dump in the middle of March, now long forgotten (that or he merely piggybacked on the negative sentiment: April holdings will be indicative of that). Other notable shifts: Gross continues to sell European sovereign exposure, with Non-US Development holdings down to 6%, the lowest since April 2011, and surprisingly even cutting Investment Grade holdings to just 14%, the lowest since October 2008: is Gross smelling a bond bubble (in both IG and HY) and is getting out while the getting is good? Sure looks like it.