Archive - Jul 2012

The infamous city of Scanton, PA has had financial troubles for a couple of decades - losing population since the end of WWII - but as NPR reported this weekend, the $16.8 million budget gap that Mayor Chris Doherty is trying to fill (and the disagreements between his taxation proposal and the city council's borrow-more-money view) has driven the mayor to an incredible action. Doherty has reduced everyone's pay - including his own - to the state's minimum wage of $7.25 per hour. In an ironic choice of words, the desperate mayor noted: "I'm trying to do the best I can with the limited amount of funds that I have," Doherty says, "I want the employees to get paid. Our people work hard — our police and fire — I just don't have enough money and I can't print it in the basement." NPR continues, After paying workers Friday, the city had only about $5,000 left in the bank. More money flowed into city accounts that day, but it was still not enough to pay the $1 million the city still owes to its nearly 400 employees. This is, of course, stressful on the union workers affected as one firefighter notes: "[The] kids aren't going to be able to do certain activities this summer — maybe we're not going to be able to go on vacation" (to Italy we wonder?) and "we want to make sure that [Obama and Biden] know there's a Democratic mayor that's not taking care of his public safety unions,"

Copper is sometimes referred to as "Dr. Copper," because the metal is used in so many industrial applications and is essential for many different sectors of the economy, from infrastructure to housing to consumer electronics. That usually makes its price action a good indicator of the state of the global economy. Between China's stockpiles, slowing demand, and output of copper products expected to slow; and Europe's market 'expected to be dead' for the rest of the year, Casey Research's Louis James is bearish economically near-term and bearish on Dr. Copper - preferring instead to build a shopping list of good contrarian picks for when the economic situation doesn't look so dire.

Anyone long silver miner South American Silver Corp today is not happy, because while the precious metal responsible for the company top and bottom line has risen significantly, it is our old nationalizing friend, Bolivian President Evo Morales (who last year caused substantial moves higher in silver with threats to nationalize various silver mines in his resource rich if everything else poor country) who has stolen the spotlight, with his latest announcement that he is on his way to nationalize SAC.TO's Malku Khota property, which the company describes as "one of the world's largest undeveloped silver, indium and gallium deposits" and which El Pais adds "is considered one of the largest undeveloped silver deposits, with reserves estimated at 230 million ounces, and at least 2,000 tons of indium, gallium and gold as well." Of course, while this is good news for the actual precious metals as it means much more supply is coming offline, it is very bad for mining and extraction companies such as South American Silver, which stand to lose one after another property to a repeat of last year's wave of nationalization. Indeed, at last check SAC.TO was down 27% today alone and plunging.

The price of Brent crude oil has jumped rapidly back over $100 (above Friday's highs) on news of a complete shutdown of Norway's oil production after labor talks failed. Coupled with more hopes and dreams of the so-far ineffectual Chinese monetary policy easing, it seems that all the bullish lower-oil-prices-as-a-tax-cut arguments become entirely reflexive as every time we see oil prices drop on global growth questions, so the central bank puts provide just the ammo to remove that benefit as they BTFD in every correlated risk asset - and Oil seems the 'cheapest' of those in the last few weeks.

Four months before Obama's reelection vote, the people have spoken, and agree that when it comes to Obama's first election promise of "Change", the president has kept his promise... with a twist. As The Hill reports, following a poll of 1000 likely voters on July 5, "Two-thirds of likely voters say President Obama has kept his 2008 campaign promise to change America — but it’s changed for the worse, according to a sizable majority. A new poll for The Hill found 56 percent of likely voters believe Obama’s first term has transformed the nation in a negative way, compared to 35 percent who believe the country has changed for the better under his leadership." So still more or less a toss up. However, one thing is certain. As we reported previously, when it comes to defending America from an alien invasion: "The two presidential candidates may be neck and neck in most (un)popularity polls, and according to some metaphorical sources are even the same person just with different Wall Street backers, but when it comes to the critical topic of resisting an alien invasion, Obama is far better prepared, according to two thirds of the population." And that is really all that matters.

Despite BoE's Tucker telling us this morning that there is no need to look at any other market but LIBOR, it appears the world has moved on from this debacle of indication of anything. As we pointed out here, the 'stability' of LIBOR given everything going on around it is incredulous (whether due to the ECB's crappy-collateral standards-based MROs or the Fed's FX swap lines - since unsecured interbank financing is now a relic of the pre-crisis 'trust' era). Furthermore, as we discussed yesterday, the machinations of the LIBOR market and calculations (which Peter Tchir delves deeply into below) suggest that this not the act of a lone assassin suggesting quite simply that complaining or suing Barclays is redundant - any Libor-related suits (from the public or the government/regulators) must sue all the submitters or it misses the critical facts of the manipulation.

Help make people aware of the injustice, criminality, and corruption that sways policy and creates a needlessly precarious financial world for us all.

The undisputed champion of European political ranting (UKIP's Nigel Farage) discussed the sad reality of Europe's inevitable demise with the reigning US chief of non-hype Rick Santelli in a no-holds-barred cage-match of like-minded skeptics. From Rajoy's incompetence to the 'genius of mutual indebtedness', Farage explains the problem is 'bedeviled with complexity' as, for example, the last summit left "the Finnish and Dutch finance ministers leaving with a very different perspective on what happened than the rest" and now even Merkel is arguing domestically what she has and has not agreed to. From the simple self-referential idiocy of Spain's EUR100 billion bailout - that creates vicious circles on all the peripheral 'bailing' nations; to "the same bundle of money going round and round in circles" leaving Nigel tempted to describe it as "a giant ponzi scheme"; Santelli, not to be outdone, explains how the US is just such a money-circulating ponzi scheme as "one part of the government issues debt as another part is buying". The ECB, of course, is becoming plagued with more and more of the ponzi-like peripheral paper and as Farage notes "the day Greece leaves the Euro - and it will - the ECB is left with a massive paper loss" leaving the ECB under-capitalized - which in all its wonderful craziness means "it has to go and get fresh capital from the other countries that themselves have been bailed out and are in fact in trouble". A farcical perfect storm as the "medicine is killing the patient", and he fears if the nettle is not grasped (Euro break-up) now then the markets will overwhelm the whole thing this summer.

The Global Financial Industrial Fraudplex's "tobacco moment"?   ......Naaaaah

WGC stresses that when looking at the effects of variables like money supply and inflation on the gold price, it is important to look at the global economy, and not concentrate only on what is happening in the US. After the start of the financial crisis in 2007, many governments and central banks in the world implemented monetary and fiscal policies to help their economies, but these policies have led to a large increase in the global money supply.

More and more Asian nations — led by China and Russia — have ditched the dollar for bilateral trade (out of fear of dollar instability). Tension rises between the United States and Asia over Syria and Iran. The Asian nations throw more and more abrasive rhetoric around — including war rhetoric. And on the other hand, both Obama and Romney — as well as Hillary Clinton — seem dead-set on ramping up the tense rhetoric. Romney seems extremely keen to brand China a currency manipulator. In truth, both sides have a mutual interest in sitting down and engaging in a frank discussion, and then coming out with a serious long-term plan of co-operation on trade and fiscal issues where both sides accept compromises — perhaps Asia could agree to reinvest some of its dollar hoard in the United States to create American jobs and rebuild American infrastructure in exchange for a long-term American deficit-reduction and technology-sharing agreement? So the future, I think, will more likely involve both sides jumping off the cliff into the uncertain seas of trade war, currency war, default-by-debasement, tariffs, proxy war and regional and global political and economic instability.

Not much going. Markets treading water in sync. Going RN, simply on lower levels. The calm before the Storm?

Minor data week, which will leave market action subject to jitters and rumours, technicals and charts. Tricky auctions of the week will be the one for EUR 8bn Italian bills on Thu and Italian 3 YRS to close the week on a Friday 13th (amount still open; were EUR 3bn 3s and 1.5bn 7 and 8 –year bonds last month). One will bear in mind that the holiday season, which slowly but surely starts to kick in, will further diminish what’s left of liquidity, exacerbating any given move.

"Europe looks as bad as we thought it would, but our US economic outlook was too optimistic" is how JPMorgan's Michael Cembalest describes the recent environment (adding that US equities have stayed relatively stable thanks to resilient corporate profits and a ton of liquidity). However, with negative pre-announcements mounting (and corporate cash piles startiong to burn a little), we suspect the unusual disconnect between profits and economics will end soon enough. As the following two charts show, when US economic data has been generally sub-par (as exemplified by the plunge in Citigroup's economic surprise indicator), US equities have deteriorated notably in the past. For now, it appears there is a 15-20% disconnect in the S&P' 500's performance relative to the real economy's performance - and the current 'hope' gap looks extremely similar to last summer's before reality set in.

Last week the biggest point of contention in the testimony of Bob Diamond before the House of Commons Treasury Committee was who told him what, and when, with a special circle in hell saved for the BOE's Paul Tucker, who was alleged to have explicitly ordered Barclays to lower its fixing (which as was shown last week had a pretty dramatic impact on the bank's self-reported LIBOR rate). In a few short moments, Tucker himself will be in the hot chair, where an emphasis will be on the emails he sent to Bob Diamond which we presented previously, and whether he acted alone in "nudging" the bank to represent itself as strong than it otherwise would. Watch the full webcast of Tucker's testimony after the jump.

The politics of the EU summit appear quite tense, and as JPMorgan's CIO Michael Cembalest notes, you have to wonder if this is how monetary unions are made or broken: by strong-arming the Chancellor of the country primarily expected to fund the Euro’s survival. In order to better comprehend the shenanigans, Michael provides an aerial view of the summit and how these maneuvers played out. The next move is Germany’s.