Archive - Aug 2012

When spending rewards dollars on things like knife sets, LCD TVs and restaurant reservations is just a little too 2011, here comes Citi to spice things up a bit.

With 40 minutes trading left, stock trading volume is so abysmal (we will present the final tally shortly) one would be forgiven to think that not even the Knight algo is giving today's stock levitation the old plunge protection college try. And as warned yesterday, expect the balance of the week to be just as lethargic - meaning banks will have no choice but to take out even more competitors as fundamentally, in the absence of end trading demand, one has to remove supply: by any means necessary. So in a complete tangent, and in light of last night's latest Olympic record in the 100 M spring by Jamaica's Usain Bolt, below we show the evolution of gold medals in the Men's Olympic sprint. The Y axis is not logarithmic, and as such the growth is not quite up to par with Moore's Law, but the ever faster sprint is unmissable, and makes one wonder at what point will human speed top out, or will new, improved and completely undetectable stimulants keep pushing homo sapiens until such point as one cross the finish line before the starter pistol has even gone off.

Eventually — because the costs of the deleveraging trap makes organicy growth very difficult — the debt will either be forgiven, inflated or defaulted away. Endless rounds of tepid QE (which is debt additive, and so adds to the debt problem) just postpone that difficult decision. The deleveraging trap preserves the value of past debts at the cost of future growth. Under the harsh discipline of a gold standard, such prevarication is not possible. Without the ability to inflate, overleveraged banks, individuals and governments would default on their debt. Income would rapidly fall, and economies would likely deflate and become severely depressed. Yet liquidation is not all bad.  The example of 1907 — prior to the era of central banking — illustrates this. Although liquidation episodes are painful, the clear benefit is that a big crash and depression clears out old debt. Under the present regimes, the weight of old debt remains a burden to the economy.

Just because Italy's 2 Year bond yield has plunged, bringing its cost of short term funding to manageable levels, if only for a day or two, it is suddenly "obvious" that it will not need Germany's goodwill ever again. Sure enough...

On the day Knight blew up, and its stock tumbled initially to the $7 range, when the market speculated the loss may be "only" as large as $150-$250MM, we calculated courtesy of a Nanex analysis which suggested the modus operandi of the "berserk" algo, that the finaly loss would be far greater. This was confirmed a day later when it was made public that the final loss KCG experienced in just 45 minutes of trading was at least $440 million, and will be far greater when the losses associated with all the external trading reroutes are calculated. Nonetheless, with the SEC still completely mum on the whole issue (for one simple reason: it has no idea what happened, and is quiet not out of malice, but sheer incompetence), there is still an open question of just what happened. Here, once again from Nanex, is the complete post-mortem of a firm that was almost fully mortem, explaining everything that happened.

I was sitting across from an impossibly blonde account executive this afternoon when I heard three words I never thought I’d hear at a foreign bank.

“Are you Greek,” she asked me with a bit of a smile…

me: “Uh, no. I have a US passport, among others…”

she: “OK good, as long as you’re not Greek.”

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Let me explain.

Every now and then, US taxpayer money goes for something useful and surprisingly informative. Such as this infographic from the US Census Bureau deconstructing the "American Economic Machine" or at least justifies its generally accepted popular representation in the aftermath of the recently concluded Census. The graphic cites facts dealing with manufacturing, services, retail trade, construction, government and much more as seen through the numerous economic programs and surveys conducted by the Census Bureau. And while entertaining, we urge readers to remember that there is no such thing as a free lunch, and that the American "economic machine" is merely the culmination of a global financial system that is full to the gills with credit money to the tune of $707 trillion as shown in this infographic previously. Is the trade off worth it? We will find out in the coming years when at some point, we hope, the economy will be allowed to take off on its own and attempt to recreate the virtuous cycle, however without the training wells of the world's central planners who day after day steal from the future to preserve today's house of cards. We are not very hopeful.

American Officials Admit that the U.S. Is a Huge Sponsor of Terrorism

Just because one foreign - note: not local because US bankers know very well where the bodies are buried -  bank (whose CEO forgot to bribe American congressmen as efficiently as some other bank CEOs), namely HSBC, was not enough to convince Americans just how active America's corrupt political muppets are when it comes to eradicating the evil banking scourge, here comes redirection target #2:

• STANDARD CHARTERED MAY FACE SUSPENSION OVER IRAN TRANSACTIONS
• BANK HAD $250 BLN IN TRANSACTIONS WITH IRAN, REGULATOR CLAIMS
• STANDARD ORDERED BY N.Y. FINANCIAL REGULATOR TO HIRE MONITOR
• STANDARD CHARTERED ORDERED TO APPEAR BEFORE N.Y. REGULATOR

Many finance-oriented critiques start from the position that our problems largely stem from the financial/political dominance of Elitist cartels and cabals. Clearly, the malinvestment, exploitation, predation and disregard for the law that characterizes the rule of political-financial Elites in both developed and developing nations have wreaked havoc on societies and economies around the globe. Implicit in this critique is a dangerously naive assumption: if all our problems can be traced back to Elitist cabals such as the Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank, then it follows that the subjugation or eradication of these concentrations of self-serving power would remove the cause of our problems. Alas, that would be a welcome step in the right direction, but that alone would not resolve the structural causes of our devolution. Freeing ourselves of self-serving Elites would certainly create an opening for structural transformation that is currently impossible, but the transformation will require changing much of what the average citizen takes for granted as a "given" or even "right."

In simple terms Europe is a HUGE deal for everyone. We’re not talking about some distant region far off in the distance that we will watch go down from our decks. We’re talking about systemic risk on a scale that would make 2008 look tiny in comparison.

And the update comes as expected: RUSSIAN INTERIOR MINISTRY DENIES ISSUING ANY STATEMENT ON ASSAD'S HEALTH VIA TWITTER: REUTERS

Moments ago, the apparently fake twitter account of the Russian minister of the interior Vladimir Kolokoltsev (which was created days ago) sent out the three completely unconfirmed and uncorroborated tweets stating that Syria's president Assad "has been killed or injured" which the market, in all its ultra-high speed trading wisdom, took and ran with, not waiting for any actual confirmed news to be released (because obviously Russian official channels have never heard of news wires such as Interfax).End result: WTI soaring by over $1 to just shy of $92, on what very well may be completely fake news, dragging the entire market higher with it.

After several weeks ago, the New York Fed was kind enough to tell us that absent perpetual expectations of Fed generosity, the stock market would be over 50% lower, today its intrepid bloggers focus on another critical aspect of the US financial system, and the Fed's mediation thereof: namely visualizing the "plumbing" that keeps the financial system afloat. From the FRBNY: "On a typical day, more than $14 trillion of dollar-denominated payments is routed through the banking system. Critical to a well-functioning economy are the timing and smooth flow of dollars for large-value transactions and the infrastructure that enables that dollar flow. This financial market infrastructure provides essential economic services—“plumbing” for the economy—and is made up of a variety of entities." How does this look on an hourly chart? Thanks to the Fed, now we know.

It is no secret that just like the Achilles heel of China's goalseeked GDP number is the country's ever declining electric output, so the best coincident indicator of what is really going on behind the scenes with US GDP is railcar loadings of waste and scrap: i.e., garbage. As Bloomberg explains: "One closely watched economic indicator is the rail car loads of waste and scrap materials." Logically: "The more we demand, the more waste is generated by that production." In other words, if one is seeking validation that numbers reported by the BEA are even remotely credible, the best place to turn to is railcar loads of garbage. However, not surprisingly, such validation will not be found in the actual data. As the chart of the day, courtesy of Bloomberg Brief, demonstrates, if garbage is the benchmark, the US economy is now contracting faster than it has at any one point in the past 3 years and is on pace to recreate the economic collapse last seen after the Lehman bankruptcy. Perhaps another reason why central planners have latched on to stock markets and will just not let go.