Archive - Aug 2012

When it comes to building wealth, muddying the difference between perception and reality is the key manipulation tool that banksters use to goad people into wrong choices.

If you buy a slice of pizza, and build a road, the economy grows. 

The S&P 500 has made little headway for two years running and as Gluskin Sheff's David Rosenberg points out, it first crossed 1380 on July 1, 1999 and since then has run around like a headless chicken (while other asset classes have not). Meanwhile, Europe's bottomless pit of debt deleveraging (which is as much a problem for the US and China but less ion focus for now) makes the entire discourse of some new and aggressive intervention by the ECB even more ridiculous (and all so deja vu); and the US is facing up to an entirely topless earnings season as revenues are coming in at only 1.2% above last year as it appears Q2 EPS is on track for a 0.2% YoY dip - with guidance falling fast. But apart from all that, Rosie sees the only source of real buying support for the stock market is the stranded short-seller forced to cover in the face of CB-jawboning as there is little sign of long-term believers stepping into the void.

Remember just a few happy months back when California's legislators were cock-a-hoop over the exuberance in Silicon Valley and all the yummy IPO/Capital Gains taxes they would tithe away - instantly solving all funding issues? Yeah, not gonna happen. As reported by the Sacramento Bee this evening: The state's Legislative Analyst's Office said Wednesday that 'hundreds of millions' of dollars in assumed tax revenues may never materialize due to the continued slide in Facebook's stock price. The state Department of Finance assumed the social media giant would trade at $35 by November, while the Analyst's Office believed it would trade at $42 at that time. The November marker is significant because another wave of insiders becomes eligible to sell shares at that point.

What happens when a central bank becomes insolvent? We might get an answer to that question quicker than we expected.  At current exchange rates, it will be one of the most expensive lessons in history. Usually, when excessive leverage is involved, it is never a good thing (for the institution) when the amount of assets flat lines, or even slows down. The People’s Bank of China’s balance sheet has definitely shown a noticeable slowdown.  In the past, its balance sheet had the amazing ability to increase by a trillion renminbi every few months.  The current balance seems to be stuck at around ¥28 trillion, which it passed in July, 2011. If its assets decrease by ¥22 billion (or -0.07%), it is insolvent.  Since peaking out in January, 2012, the PBoC’s balance sheet has lost ¥895 billion, so maybe it already is.  Maybe nothing bad will happen.  After all, who needs shareholders equity when you can print money?

Or any other weapons. A panacea, yes, but it doesn’t work.

Back in March we wrote "Mario Draghi Is Becoming Germany's Most Hated Man" for one reason: a few months after the former Goldman appartchik was sworn in to replace Trichet with promises he would not "print" Draghi did just that in a covert way via $1.3 trillion in LTROs, that immediately hit the economy and sent inflation across Europe soaring. It now appears that the simmering hatred between the two is about to upshift to a whole new level, with the threat of open escalation finally arriving. Because if Sueddeutsche Zeitung is correct, via Reuters, in precisely 12 hours, Draghi will proceed with a plan that has neither Germany's nor Buba's blessing, in the process effectively isolating the only remaining solvent country in Europe, and its de facto paymaster, and forcing Germany to take a long, hard look at the exit sign (which, however, as reported earlier, with each passing day that drags Germany's economy is becoming less of an unthinkable outcome). To wit: "Draghi is planning concerted action using both the ECB and the future euro European Stability Mechanism (ESM) to purchase sovereign debt from Spain or Italy in order to help push down borrowing rates for those two countries." There is one problem: "highly doubtful that the German government would agree to Draghi's approach. The Bundesbank also is likely to reject the idea, the paper added."

You Wont Believe What They’ve Done …

A few lines from Hilsenrath and three little words from Draghi last week were enough to offset the reality of 300 corporate results which are indicating a pending US recession (at least empirically as James Bianco points out) given that negative YoY revenues are expected. This fascinating interview between the B-Boys, shifts from the crazy reality above to the incredible correlation between Obama's probability of being re-elected and the S&P 500 - making the teleprompter-in-chief a clear risk-on trade (which is the exact opposite to the relationship before he was elected) though things are changing. They address Draghi's heavy-handed approach and ask he if can do whatever it takes, just do it - don't keep telling us about it (obviously dismissing his capability of fixing anything); and conclude with a discussion of the fiscal cliff (which will be pushed off til after the election) and the reality of spending cuts versus higher taxes (noting that taxes are low since there are no capital gains tax). Seeing Biderman's Batman to Bianco's Robin is well worth the nine minutes.

“Suspicious Cartel Agreements that Include Derivatives”

We all know something went horribly wrong in various NYSE-traded stocks today between 9:30 am and 10:15 am. So wrong in fact that the NYSE had to step in and cancel numerous trades in 6 symbols. However it did not DK millions of other trades in 134 other symbols, the vast majority of which we assume traded errantly due to the market making of Knight Capital (as admitted by the company), which today saw its biggest drop ever since going public on volume about 60 times greater than its average. We also all know that one should buy low and sell high. At least that is what human traders are taught, and that is what they attempt. Because if one consistently does the opposite, one will simply run out of money. Well, the opposite is precisely what the berserk algo in Knight's Market Making group may have done if Nanex, which has done a forensic analysis of one of the trades in question, is correct. In other words, instead of at least attempting to provide liquidity via limit trades, Knight's algorithm acted as a market order... gone horribly wrong. As the third chart below shows what the algo did with furious repetition and steadfast consistency was to buy at the offer, and sell at the bid, in other words buy high and sell low. Over and over and over and over. As Nanex laconically notes, "In the case of EXC, that means losing about 15 cents on every pair of trades. Do that 40 times a second, 2400 times a minute, and you now have a system that's very efficient at burning money." Which also means that by not DK'ing several hundred million prints, the NYSE may have just thrown Knight under the bus, because the market maker is suddenly on the hook for tens if not hundreds of millions in inverse market making profits.

While markets await details on the next round of quantitative easing (QE) -- whether refreshed bond buying from the Fed or sovereign debt buying from the European Central Bank (ECB) -- it's important to ask, What can we expect from further heroic attempts to reflate the OECD economies? The 2009 and 2010 QE programs from the Fed, and the 2011 operations from the ECB, were intended as shock treatment to hopefully set economies on a more typical, post-recession, recovery pathway. Here in 2012, QE was supposed to be well behind us. Instead, parts of Southern Europe are in outright depression, the United Kingdom is in double-dip recession, and the US is sweltering through its weakest “recovery” since the Great Depression. QE is a poor transmission mechanism for creating jobs. It wasn’t supposed to be this way.

A slow leak higher in risk assets (assisted by Knight Capital's exposing the 'tickle-algo') into the FOMC in general was abruptly extinguished by a lack of anything new to report at all. The knee-jerk derisking was then caught as BTFD'ers could not resist and while FX markets in general were not buying the rebound, Treasuries sold off as stocks reverted back up into the green, above VWAP and above pre-FOMC levels. But as the real trading of the last 90 seconds of the day began, stocks smashed back down towards their lows with JPY crosses also dragging lower. Financials appeared to be the signal that 'all bets were off' as they went all humpty-dumpty and couldn't get back to pre-FOMC levels. Treasuries ended up 4-5bps with the belly underperforming (though off their worst levels), Gold and stocks recoupled lower, the USD closed at its highs of the day, VIX staged a come-back and closed unch at 18.9% (as stocks caught down to it too and it ended at its flattest in 10 weeks), and while HYG staged what appeared to be a miraculous effort to save the day to close unchanged (but was HYG-SPY arb), equities ended at their lows - underperforming credit notably. Of course KCG was the talk of the day, dumping over 32% of its market cap to end with a $6 handle as all those market-making algos start to look each other in the eye and fight over that last 100-lot 'real' transaction.