Archive - Aug 2012

Ben talks, the WSJ blows smoke and storms grow.

Update: Yes it was - Police: All Empire State shooting victims were wounded by officers

The official media-friendly narrative explaining yesterday's latest tragic shooting incident in midtown Manhattan in which a recently unemployed Jeffrey Johnson, 58, walked up to his former boss and shot him three times point blank before "calmly" walking away, is that Johnson also shot 9 other people, luckily none fatally, before being taken down by the NYPD. Sadly, as so often happens these days, the "media-friendly" narrative is wrong, and as CBS and Guardian report, Johnson did not fire during the quote unquote shootout, in which at least nine other perfectly innocent were hit, all of them by stray NYPD bullets.

Goldman's David Kostin has just released a whopper of a 72-page script for the latest episode of the "El Muerte De Muppet" telenovella in the form of a comprehensive report titled "Where to invest now - Cliff Notes". And since the qualifier is obviously a reference to the fiscal cliff which Congress will continue to ignore as long as the market is at or near 2012 highs courtesy of Ben Bernanke's politicized promises of massive easing on any market downtick, thus providing zero impetus for any proactive legislation that resolves the imminent GDP collapse, one can provide a not so rhetorical answer to Goldman's rhetorical question: "nowhere" (if one is limited to investing in paper-based pyramid schemes of course in which the "catalyst" is not hope and prayer for more printing or the emergence of a greater fool).

Iceland Shows the Way

They could have been soul mates

The slings and arrows of outrageous EUR positioning remain key to figuring out where next in this on-again-off-again currency. The last six weeks or so have seen a dramatic regime shift from smooth transitions from risk-on to risk-off to more staccato-like jumps and trends as the world hangs on every rumor and flashing red headline. We note three things that may be critical to understand where we go next: 1) EURUSD has entirely recoupled with its EUR-USD 'swap-spread' implied fair-value - removing the 'chaos premium' in the pair, and providing less room for upside without broad-market agreement; 2) EURUSD has decidedly lagged the very impressive rally in European sovereign risk (suggesting the latter may be a little over-exuberant); and 3) Despite every talking head telling you about 'all the EUR bears', both Commitment of Traders and Citi's FX positioning indicator have shifted notably more positive - with the latter, as Steve Englander notes, beginning to show significant EUR longs. Now that an active segment of the market actually seems long EUR and associated currencies, the 'good news' bar is a lot higher, and the impact of bad news will be more readily visible.

Silver is going to blow SKY HIGH!!

While every business and industry implicitly believes in its meaningless acronyms and language, nothing compares to the financial services sector. This industry, the one who gifted us APR, ISM, RSP as well as Core CPI calculated to the 3rd decimal point, is the unchallenged king of senseless terms only a risk manager would love. In response to these unnecessary complications, IceCap is introducing a necessary yet simplified tool for measuring the state of the World’s leading economies – "The Flounder Meter." This new metric considers the combination of money printing, bank bailouts, debt levels, government spending and borrowing costs for a given country. The Flounder Meter will finally allow everyone to see through the smoke and mirrors and decide for themselves whether a country is in good financial health.

We have critically examined the question of whether the stock market 'discounts' anything on several previous occasions. The question was for instance raised in the context of what happened in the second half of 2007. Surely by October 2007 it must have been crystal clear even to people with the intellectual capacity of a lamp post and the attention span of a fly that something was greatly amiss in the mortgage credit market. Then, just as now, both the ECB and the Fed had begun to take emergency measures to keep the banking system from keeling over in August. This brings to mind the 'potent directors fallacy' which is the belief held by investors that someone – either the monetary authority, the treasury department, or a consortium of bankers, or nowadays e.g. the government of China – will come to their rescue when the market begins to fall. 'They' won't allow the market to decline!' 'They' won't allow a recession to occur!' 'They can't let the market go down in an election year!' All of these are often heard phrases. This brings us to today's markets. Nowadays, traders are not only not attempting to 'discount' anything, they are investing with their eyes firmly fixed on the rear-view mirror – they effectively trade on yesterday's news.

Another thesis regarding the housing market’s future path is that of a bounce and slog market. The theory focuses on the negative equity home owners and also the low inventory on the current market. This view point actually holds some solid ground. As of last count, there are over 11 million negative equity home owners in the US. This data is usually put out quarterly but with the stronger home price movement this summer, many will move out of the negative equity position. The theory proposes that many are not selling today simply because they cannot without bringing cash to the table. Out of the 11 million underwater home owners, how many would like to sell but simply do not because they would actually lose money on their sale? This is an interesting perspective on the underwater segment of the market. Yet the outcome is probably not as clean cut as one would expect.

Of course, we are sure this will not weigh on Bernanke's decisions in the next week or two but for all those who don't see inflation, courtesy of John Lohman, gas prices have never been higher during this third week of August. We remain flabbergasted that in the Wizard of Washington's recent defense of QE, there was no mention of record high gas prices as justification for it 'working' and it would appear that 'transitory' means something different than us mere un-omnipotent-beings can comprehend.

The empirical data is in. And it turns out that as we have been suggesting for a very long time — yes, shock horror — helicopter dropping cash onto the financial sector does disproportionately favour the rich. Here are four simple questions to the venerable Bank of England (just as applicable to any and every Central Banker); and sadly, we expect to see the announcement of more quantitative easing to the financial sector long before we expect to see answers to any of these questions.

When your local friendly Too-Big-To-Fail bank needs a 'helping hand' loan to get through pay-day or buy some extra S&P futures, it picks up the shiny red phone and asks Ben for unlimited access to free money. When the 'rest-of-us' need a little extra - to get through the next week before our pay-check hits, we call this guy - who charges a 400% APR. The Central Bank Discount Window - Priceless.

Simon Black recounts a recent experience as he pulled in to a gas station in Italy; he whipped out his American Express card and asked the attendant in broken Italian to turn on the pump. He acted like Simon had just punched him in the gut, wincing when he saw the credit card. "No... cash, only cash," he said. I didn’t have very much cash on me, so I drove to the next station where a similar experience awaited me. This is a trend that is typical when economies are in decline– cash is king. Businesses often won’t want to spend the extra 2.5% on credit card merchant fees... but more importantly, distrust of the banking system and a debilitatingly extractive tax system pushes people into cash transactions. You can’t really blame them.

Volume was dismal - aside from a massive surge in S&P 500 e-mini volumes as the combo Bernanke bluff and ECB bond-band-rumor hit the tape and exploded stocks up from two-week lows. A late-day attempt to close the S&P green for the week failed and the Dow ended with its first down week in seven weeks - and largest loss in nine weeks - despite a magnificent centrally-planned triple-digit gain today (+100.1pts!) Stocks were 'aided' by new cycle highs in HYG as it saw its best performance in a month - amid massive fund inflows and heavy issuance (notably outperforming credit spreads in CDS land). The shift in HYG does look like some convergence trading with SPY though  - after a month of flat-lining. Gold (and even more so Silver) were the week's big performers (up 3.35% and 9.25% respectively) even as the USD only lost 1.1%. Treasuries ended the week better by 9 to 14bps (considerably different from stocks relative performance). The week was characterized simply as stocks bouncing between QE-off (Treasury strength) and QE-on (USD weakness and Gold strength) - on de minimus volumes.