Archive - Sep 3, 2012

Some hours ago Spain finally bit the bullet, and after months of waffling had no choice but to hand over €4.5 billion (the first of many such cash rescues) in the form of a bridge loan to insolvent Bankia, which last week reported staggering losses (translation: huge deposit outflows which have made the fudging of its balance sheet impossible). As a reminder, in June Spain formally announced it would request up to €100 billion in bailout cash for its insolvent banking system, which subsequently was determined would come from the bank rescue fund, the Frob, which in turn would be funded with ESM debt which subordinates regular Spanish bonds, promises to the contrary by all politicians (whose job is to lie when it becomes serious) notwithstanding. And while Rajoy has promised that the whole €100 billion will not be used, the truth is that considering the soaring level of nonperforming loans in Spain - the biggest drain of both bank capital and liquidity - it is guaranteed that the final funding need for Spain's banks will be far greater. As a further reminder, Deutsche Bank calculated that when (not if) the recap amount hits €120 billion, Spanish total debt/GDP would soar to 97% in 2014 from an official number of 68.5% in 2011 (luckily the endspiel will come far sooner than that). But all of that is well-known, and what we wanted to focus on instead was the fact that bank bailout notwithstanding, Spain will have no choice but to demand a full blown rescue within a few short month for one simple reason: its cash will run out.

We recently discussed Guggenheim's 'awe-full' charts of the level of central bank intervention from which they noted that the Fed could lose 200 billion US$, when inflation comes back again. Interest rates would increase by 100 basis points and the US central bank would be bankrupt according to US-GAAP. We explain in this post the differences between money printing as for the Swiss National Bank (SNB), the ECB and  the Fed. We show the risks the central banks run when they increase money supply, when they “print”. As opposed to the ECB, the SNB only buys high-quality assets, mostly German and French government bonds. However, for the SNB the assets are in foreign currencies, for the big part they are denominated in euros. Further Fed quantitative easing drives the demand for gold and the correlated Swiss francs upwards.  Sooner or later this will pump more American money into the Swiss economy and will raise Swiss inflation. For the SNB these two are the Mephistos: Bernanke and Draghi, the ones who promise easy life based on printed money.

Who knows? not me.

Ignore the news about what is surely the next airline to join every other legacy, and not so legacy, carrier into Chapter 11 and focus on the headline, where both the story author and its editor seem to have been preoccupied with Freudian ruminations if not on whether gold is money, then certainly how much paper money one can generate by selling gold...

Since the peak in the S&P 500 around two weeks ago, equities and their sectors have traded in a considerably more disperse manner than one would expect given all the talk of central-bank intervention, liquidity-gasms, and monetization. This is borne out empirically as the average pairwise realized correlation within the 100 stocks of the S&P 100 and the 125 credits of the CDX investment grade credit index has dropped dramatically. Extreme peaks or troughs in realized correlation have tended to coincide with notable (and tradable) trend changes in the market - though we note, as shown below, that the moves are not always so clearly bullish or bearish for stocks (though VIX shows a more consistent reaction). Critically, the outperformance of Healthcare and underperformance of Industrials and Materials in the last two weeks suggests more than a little apprehension at the Central Banks being able to 'bridge' yet another global slow-down with money-printing.

Until 1976, all student loans could be discharged in bankruptcy. Until 1998, student loans could be discharged after a waiting period of five years.  In 1998, Congress made federal student loans nondischargeable in bankruptcy, and, in 2005, it similarly extended nodischargeability to private student loans.  Since 2000, student loan debt has exploded, and private student loans have grown even faster. This presents a bigger problem than simply sending people to college who end up unemployed or underemployed. It means that capital is being misallocated. If debt for education cannot simply be discharged through bankruptcy, as other debt can be, private lenders will tend toward offering much more of the nondischargeable debt, and less of dischargeable debt. This means that there is less capital available for other uses — like starting or expanding a business. If the government’s regulatory framework leans toward sending more people to college, more people will go (the number of Americans under the age of 25 with at least a bachelor’s degree has grown 38 percent since 2000) — but the money and resources that they are loaned to do so is money and resources made unavailable for other purposes.

Not entirely surprising following the outlook changes for Germany, France, UK, and Holland but still an intriguing move right before Draghi's big unveiling: Moodys maintains AAA rating but shifts to outlook negative.

Moody's believes that it is reasonable to assume that the EU's creditworthiness should move in line with the creditworthiness of its strongest key member states considering  the significant linkages between member states and the EU, and the likelihood that the large Aaa-rated member states would likely not  prioritize their commitment to backstop the EU debt obligations over servicing their own debt obligations.

Interestingly they also note that a further cut could occur due to: changes to the EU's  fiscal framework that led to less conservative budget management...

More on China kleptocracy.

Oh, and France just nationalized its second largest mortgage lender. But don’t worry, the EU Crisis is definitely contained and Draghi and others have got everything under control. After all, when the US nationalized Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in 2008 the financial crisis came to a screeching halt… didn’t it?

Obama and Romney Are Both Terrible for Jobs

Since the best theater is that whose 100% assured outcome is not absolutely obvious, Reuters/Ipsos is happy to advise the 47% or so of American eligible voters who will actually participate in the upcoming presidential election that following the GOP convention, Hurricane Issac and the Invisible Obama, Romney has managed to cut Obama's 4 point lead and is now neck and neck with the incumbent. From Reuters: "President Barack Obama enters an important campaign week tied with Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney, a Reuters/Ipsos poll found on Sunday, leaving the incumbent an opportunity to edge ahead of his opponent at the Democratic National Convention. With the Democrats set to nominate Obama for a second term this week in Charlotte, North Carolina, the race to the presidential election on November 6 is all knotted up at 45 percent for Obama and 45 percent for Romney among likely voters, the survey found." Of course, this being America, all that is needed is for the Democrats to invite Jason Biggs to deliver the Eastwood counter, and Obama's victory will be assured.

Europe took August off. Today, it is America's turn, as the country celebrates Labor day, although judging by recent trends in the new 'Part-time" normal, a phenomenon we have been writing about for years, and which even the NYT has finally latched on to, it would appear the holiday should really be Labor Half-Day. After today the time for doing nothing is over, and with less than one month left in the quarter, and trading volumes running 30% below normal which would guarantee bank earnings in Q3 are absolutely abysmal, the financial system is in dire need of volume, i.e. volatility. Luckily, things are finally heating up as the newsflow (sorry but rumors, insinuations, innuendo, and empty promises will no longer cut it) out of various central banks soars, coupled with key elections first in the Netherlands and then of course, in the US, not to mention the whole debt-ceiling/ fiscal cliff 'thing' to follow before 2012 is over. So for those who still care about events and news, here is the most comprehensive summary of the key catalysts over the next week and month, which are merely an appetizer for even more volatile newsflow in October and into the end of the year.

Both Mitt Romney and Barack Obama will give us happy talk about maintaining entitlement benefits (e.g., Medicare and Medicaid) that cannot possibly be sustained. They will talk about energy self-sufficiency. They will talk about creating jobs. They will tell us that we can somehow ‘grow’ our way out of our economic distress. But neither candidate will admit that technology now destroys more jobs than it creates, because to do so would be to commit political suicide. The fact is that none of the happy talk will ever come true. Instead, the Federal Government, with the tacit approval of both major political parties, continues to run trillion-dollar-plus deficits year after year in a futile attempt to spend our way out of our economic problems and to sustain an economic model that cannot be sustained. Those who believe that bringing manufacturing back to the US will also bring back jobs are trying to fight a war that has already been fought and lost. Why? The answer is technology. It’s actually a fairly simple process now to bring production of many items back to the US, simply because of automation and robotics. A factory filled with robots can operate 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 52 weeks a year, so long as the raw material inputs keep flowing into the factory. Robots don’t take breaks, don’t make mistakes, don’t call in sick, don’t take vacations, don’t require expensive health insurance, and don’t receive paychecks. A fully automated robotic manufacturing facility might require only 100 workers, while a traditional assembly line facility might utilize 3,000 workers. That’s a huge difference in the number of jobs. The simple fact is that most of the lost manufacturing jobs are never coming back.

Once again it seems Japan has a lot to teach the Europeans and Americans of the unstoppable reality that bond markets again and again are "correct in the 'end'". As risky- and 'non'-risky-assets become more scarce (thanks to a central bank bid to monetize or collateralize any and all of it), so equity (and risk) markets become more and more distorted - temporarily suspending normal market relationships - until something triggers the reversion to reality. We discussed regime changes in detail regarding gold and bonds over the past 40 years in the past, but the US and European 'survival' tactics appear to be accelerated (and larger) versions of Japan's balance-sheet-recession-fighting game-plan. Their analog, therefore, provides defensible insight into the bond market's anticipation and equity market's inevitable confirmation that it's not different this time. The question we ask is this: "when TOPIX was at 1800, and JGBs implied it 'should' be 1000 (in 1999 and 2007) - how many people said it was 'different' then?"