Archive - Jun 2012

It seems our warning of yesterday's perfect algo-driven retracement in Treasuries and stocks was spot on. The dead cat bounced just too perfectly for our liking and despite an early attempt to ramp markets on Dimon's testimony (which worked at first and then faded all the way into the close), broad risk assets led equities lower with a horrible close. It appears the 10Y auction was today's catalyst and it is clear from the charts that TSYs indeed turned lower (in yield) before equities woke up. The 1315 level (in September S&P 500 futures) was a stumbling point all day as decent sized blocks were dumped each time we moved above it until the market finally gave in and fell. WTI gave all its Dimon-spike gains back. Gold, Silver, and Copper wriggled along sideways (also giving back all the Dimon-Spike gains) but while the USD retraced higher into the close (-0.3% on the week now), Gold and Silver remain up around 1.5% on the week (with gold the outperformer on the day). VIX pushed dramatically higher to 24.5% (+2.3vols) and as stocks tumbled so equity correlation to risk-assets picked up (with notably stocks finding support as they converged with CONTEXT near the close). A last minute pop into the day-session close took us back to Thursday's close of last week but IG credit continues to point to lower risk appetites.

It was only a matter of time before the stoic Germans, long abused as the piggy bank pinatas of Europe's monetary experiment, said something. And after last week's confused Spanish campaign demanding that Merkel stop (what exactly - bailing out the Spanish banks? Funding Spanish current account deficits?), Germany has found its retort. As of a few hours ago, the German empire has decided to strike back using the #StoppESM hashtag on twitter. Are we about to have our first European twitter war? And while we know what the hashtag for Greece wil be (#StopTaxes), and Ireland (#StopSobriety), we have yet to figure out the appropriate terms for all the other insolvent European countries. There are many.

Poetic justice...

And so, the little rating agency that could, just gave Spain the triple hooks, downgrading the country from B to CCC+, negative outlook. As a reminder, the Uganda credit rating is B: it sure is no Spain.

Yesterday, we did an update of the Greek bank jog, when noting that between €100-€500 million per day was being withdrawn from Greek banks based on Kathimerini reports. 24 hours later the jog has become a trot with the most recent estimate from Reuters now estimated at nearly double: "Combined daily deposit outflows from the major Greek banks have reached 500-800 million euros over the past few days, with the pace picking up as the election draws closer and rising noticeably on Tuesday, two bankers said." This is roughly $1 billion a day in the upper case, and a number that is approaching 0.5% of the entire documented €170 billion (now likely much less) deposit base.

DTCC just released the latest and greatest details on the CDS market's net and gross notional exposure and it makes for fascinating reading. Simplifying considerably, gross notionals somewhat represent activity and net notionals proxy exposure. We see gross IG9 index notionals (the index most at the centre of the JPM debacle) jumped but IG9 tranche gross notionals were steady; but net tranched credit notionals jumped and net untranched fell. This suggests an unwind of a delta-hedged tranche position with considerably more index impact than tranche impact - which smells just like what we think JPM was struggling with (and it appears is far from over). However, there was a huge jump in the number of trades done in the on-the-run index IG18 - last week was the most active of the year by far which fits with the surge in gross notional that we saw - as it would appear (as we noted previously) that the focus is now on using liquid indices to hedge whatever risk remains on JPM's book - which further helps to explain why IG18 has underperformed so much recently relative to HY credit and stocks.

So we now know that’s Spain’s political leaders will lie right up until the point of systemic collapse. We also know that both Spanish banks and politicians are highly incentivized to not quantify the true extent of the risks inherent in the Spanish banking system (remember, Bankia was discussing paying its dividend in April… just one month before it requested a bailout and revised its 2011 €309 million profit to a €3 billion loss). Thus, I would change the common phrase applied to the EU’s political/ financial policies from “extend and pretend” to “lie until you are about to die.”

We were wondering how long Europe's insolvent, and very much scorned, banks would take the constant downgrade abuse (or reacquaintance with reality as we like to call it, but that is irrelevant) by the rating agencies without retorting. After all the same organizations that allowed bank "credit analysts" to pretend they did work for years, when they all merely fell in place in some lemming-like procession, patting each other on the back, pocketing record bonus after record bonus and praising groupthink encapsulated by the made up letters AAA, are now largely non-grata first in Europe, and soon, following the imminent downgrade of American banks, in the US as well. It appears that the response is finally coming. Sky News reports that "some of Europe's largest banks are intensifying discussions about a move to reduce their co-operation with the big three credit ratings agencies amid widespread dissatisfaction with their decision-making." After all, when all they do is downgrade, as opposed to the old standby, upgrade, who needs them. In fact, why not just shut their mouths entirely. Sadly, this is precisely what is on the horizon.

If we understand the difference between parasitic wealth and real value/wealth creation, we can properly align the tax structure to reality: the tax on authentic wealth creation should be low, to encourage wealth creation and the employment (broad-based wealth creation) generated by legitimate value creation. We must also understand that the Central State now protects and enables parasitic skimming as the primary function of the nation's financial system. Thus the entire financial system is parasitic on the wealth of the nation. Financial parasitic incomes should be taxed at 99%. If Mitt Romney reshuffles assets created by others and skims $100 million, 99% of that parasitic wealth should be returned to the nation via taxes. The parasite still gets to keep $1 million, more than enough to live well but not enough to buy the presidency, the Congress and the regulatory machinery of the Central State.

The U.S. and Russia Are In a New Cold War ... And China May Join In

With the Fed buying up billions of 10 year paper 2 hours ago as we observed earlier, it was only logical that the $4.8 billion gap created by the Fed's desire to monetize would be promptly closed. Sure enough, the $21 billion 10 Year reopening just priced at a new all time record yield of 1.622%, but also priced well inside the When Issued which had been trading at 1.635%: an indication of major pent up demand heading into the auction. The Bid To Cover rose from April's 2.90 to 3.06, but the most notable number was the drop in the Primary Dealer take down which only accounted for 37.2% of the auction, the lowest since December, while Indirects and Directs received 42.0% and 20.8%, the direct number being the highest since August 2011, and only the third highest in history. Pimco's fingerprints are all over this. And maybe China's as well: recall it is now a Direct bidder too, and can bypass the Primary Dealers. All in all, a scorcher of an auction. Then again, when considering the same-day round trip already observed, perhaps this is hardly too surprising.

Halfway into the year, my warnings on the FIRE sector are starting to come into there own. The first look, banks and bank stock analysts!

SocGen's Albert Edwards reflects that we have a lot to learn from Japan's Lost Decade as a prequel to the current chaos the global macro-economy is undergoing. Drawing on work by Peter Tasker, Edwards notes the similar-to-current-Euro-thinking consensus view in Japan was that their banks were at the center of the economic woes and hence bank recaps were the turning point. Critically Tasker and Edwards disagreed, as "although the banking sector was indeed damaging the economy via a credit crunch, the banks were not the problem but a symptom of the problem: the true problem was deflation and the lack of stimulative policies. Indeed, Japanese banks did not start underperforming the overall market until 1997 as they became the victims of the economic weakness; they were not the origin of that malaise. And so it is in the eurozone. The Spanish banking sector is a victim of deflationary policies enacted at the behest of German economic orthodoxy. A bailout will solve nothing."

A month after the US Treasury sold $24 billion in 10 Year bonds at what was then a record low yield of 1.86%, the US government once again approaches that mysterious primary dealer-repo nexus with the latest offer US banks can't refuse: a $21 billion reopening. What is notable about today's auction is that in about 40 minutes, the auction will price at a record low yield of just about 1.63%, or 23 bps lower to the last record yield. So far so good: after all the global economy is once again collapsing (but don't look at US stocks for validation: they only indicate whatever Brian Sack wants them to indicate). Where things get patently surreal, however, is when one takes a look at today's POMO operation conducted by the Fed (remember those). Because as can be seen on the table below from the NY Fed, at 11 am today, so precisely 2 hours before when the Treasury will complete its own sale, bought $4.8 billion of... wait for it... 10 Year bonds.