Archive - Sep 5, 2012

Just what is priced in? That is the question. Based on the aggregate size of the Fed and ECB balance sheets, it appears the S&P 500 is pricing in an increase of around USD300bn in the short-term. This USD 300bn amounts to EUR 240bn - a very special and rather too coincidental number. Based on expectations of supply, the EMU16 nations have EUR 245bn issuance remaining for the rest of 2012. So, it would appear that the market, in its ever-hopeful ebullient way has priced in the expectation that the ECB will soak up the entire remaining debt issuance of the 16 (remaining) Euro nations for the rest of the year. Anything less will be a disappointment - and remember each nation will have to ask for 'help' before receiving this 'support'. Coincidence, maybe? Over-confidence, perhaps? Reality, not a chance.

Who built that?

Where is the bacon, Mrs. Clinton?

Exceptionally low interest rates are bad for banks, insurers, and, more generically, anyone wishing to save money. Of the three, it’s the situation of the savers that is most untenable. In particular, Citi notes in a recent report, those wishing to retire at 65 or thereabouts are in for a nasty surprise when they start to run the numbers. Given that real yields are negative for Treasury bonds inside of 20-years, the steady stream of inflows into investment grade bond fund that hold a mixture of government, agency, and high grade corporate securities, will simply fail to return an adequate rate of return commensurate with the current savings rates of most retirement savers. What savers need to do is find higher asset returns or increase their personal savings rate. As the chart below shows, there are few options but to go all-in to the most excessive ends of the risk spectrum, or raise the proportion of savings and higher savings rates lead to lower consumption, a decline in corporate profits, and recession.

Today's ZH articles in audio summary! "It's a slap in the face. A wake up call. Turkey, anyone?" Everyday, 8pm New York Time.

Are you ready for some.. free-money? With 15 minutes until the NFL season opens this evening, we thought this little gem from Bloomberg was perfect to stoke the fires of Giants-Cowboys fanatic antagonism. That’s because the 80,000-seat Cowboys Stadium was built partly using tax-free borrowing. The resulting subsidy comes out of the pockets of every American taxpayer, including Giants' fans. The money doesn’t go directly to the Cowboys’ billionaire owner Jerry Jones. Rather, it lowers the cost of financing, giving his team the highest revenue in the NFL and making it the league’s most-valuable franchise. "It’s part of the corruption of the federal tax system, subsidizing activity that the private sector can finance on its own." This is not just the Cowboys but such tax-free public borrowing 'municipal' debt helped build structures used by 64 major-league teams, including baseball, hockey and basketball. As Bloomberg concludes, “You come back to this thin line of, ‘What is a legitimate municipal government undertaking?’ If the owner can get away with the public putting up part of the money, he’s going to do it.”

"Australian mining magnate Gina Rinehart has criticised her country’s economic performance and said Africans willing to work for $2 a day should be an inspiration. Ms Rinehart is said to make nearly A$600 (£393) a second." The richest woman in the world is making an increasing number of public appearances, and speaking of increasingly controversial topics. I wonder why. It couldn’t be that she is becoming increasingly aggressive and controversial because her core business is in trouble, could it? Marc Faber suggests so: "There have been four mega bubbles in the past 40 years. In the 1970s it was gold; in the 1980s it was the Nikkei, and in the 1990s it was the Nasdaq. Bigger than all of them, though, has been the iron ore bubble, a tenfold increase in prices in less than a decade."

It seems the world is willing to come on TV and tell the rest of the world that consensus is bearish, sentiment is weak, and that this rally 'proves' that investors are resilient. We have shown in recent days that the consensus is much more bullishly positioned in fact and as Citi's HY credit desk noted today:

"I'm a little cautious on how much further this rally goes. Not because I think that the September road bumps that have been very well flagged are going to come and bite us, but more because the consensus, which towards the end of August was mixed, to slightly wider, is now getting into a "this market is bullet proof, the ECB and FED put is there, and the technical is still great, and we're only going one way... Tighter". When the market consensus moves like this, it's small red flag, even though it definitely doesn't feel like that at the moment."

 

"One recurring lesson of the last few years is that the threats of central bank intervention tend to be far more effective than the actual programs."

Moments ago we learned that the Democrats have once again reinstated language into their party platform that recognizes Jerusalem as the capital of Israel as well as the words "God-given" that were removed in this year's platform. However, the 'vote' on this controversial decision (shown in the clip below), brings back vivid memories of the GOP convention's own Ron Paul moment; and must be seen to be believed as the true state of our nation's "democratic process" is once again exposed for all to see. Simply remarkable...

There is one major problem, for the administration at least, when it comes to presenting labor data that is not "compiled" by the Bureau of beLabored Statistics and its Bank of Spain-endorsed Arima-X-13 seasonal data fudging program: it reflects realty, not statistical or seasonal adjustments, and certainly can not be skewed this way or that depending on what best suits the incumbent presidential candidate two months ahead of the election. Which is why one won't read anywhere that one of the most reliable indicators when it comes to real time hiring data as reported by the actual job market and not by some conflicted, data challenged organization which on top of everything has data leak issues, namely Help Wanted ads just plunged by the most since the Lehman collapse.

As Elvis (oops) Jerry Lee Lewis might have said if he were a trader "there's a whole lotta shakin' going on" but not much else. Cross asset-class correlations were weakening, ranges were very narrow today in stocks, credit, Treasuries, commodities, and FX, and volumes were well shrug. The three biggest items of note to us were among 'leadership' assets: AAPL dropped rather notably into the close - ending -0.7%; HYG (the high-yield bond ETF that has been so flow-/yield-grab-driven) dropped significantly into the close (saved by a last minute rescue) after heavy volume at the close last night and relatively heavy today as we sold down; and the major leveraged financials GS and MS - soared intraday (GS>MS) far exceeding their peers - but MS gave a significant amount of it back into the close while GS kept pushing up (+3%) with some major volume and VWAP action. Everyone is waiting for the great and good Draghi to anoint this rally tomorrow morning but the last hour pull to VWAP in S&P futures was not followed by VIX, as we note today was the lowest average trade size (amateurs) day of the year in S&P futures.

There are three key factors to modeling trade flows - or relevance - in a post-globalization world. While competitiveness is important, countries gain from being generally 'Technology-rich', 'Labor-rich', and/or 'Resource-rich'. The following chart, from Deutsche Bank, shows where the world's countries fit into the Venn diagram of give-and-take in a post-globalization market. The red oval highlights where Italy, Greece, Portugal, and Spain (and Argentina sadly enough) do not fit into this picture. Two words - Euro-sustainability?

By now it should be no secret that under the New Centrally-Planned Normal, good is great, but worst is far greater. It is therefore no surprise that in the past year, some of the highest returning stocks have been the companies which have seen wave after wave of shorts come in, attempting to ride the underlying equity value to zero, only to see themselves scrambling to cover short squeezes, generated either due to the pull of borrow by an overeager shareholder (think SHLD), or due to bad news not being horrible enough, leading to short covering ramps (think AMZN at each and every worse earnings call, which however is never bad enough to finally trounc the last traces of the "bull story"). Which is why, as we have done on various occasions in the past, we have collated the most hated stocks in the less prominent but far more volatile Russell 2000 Index, where we have limited the universe to the 700 or so stocks with a market cap between $50 million and $1,000 billion, or those which tend to have aggressive moves up or down on modest volume (i.e., not widely owned). We have then sorted these in descending order of Short Interest as a % of Float. The results are presented below.

With the front-end of the Spanish (and Italian) credit spread curves having compressed to what Goldman believes is 'fair-value' given rates and current fundamentals, it seems the consensus expectation ahead of tomorrow's ECB call is that Draghi will promise, deliver, and implement instantaneously. In a recent client survey a stunning 88% of investors expect Spain to officially request activation of EFSF/ESM support - subject to an MoU - by the end of the year (with 70% expecting it by the end of October - the heavy redemption month). A full 50% expect the Italians to follow suit by the end of Q1 2013. The paradox of course is that with the spread cost of funding so 'low', Spain has no need to ask for the help that is implicitly priced into the low yields - and with that huge maturity looming, it seems they have two options: 1) pre-empt the redemption by issuing short-dated debt now to fund it (piggy-backing on the ECB's confidence inspiration) but of course this will signal no need for a short-term MoU and therefore no ECB support and therefore bonds will sell-off; or 2) admit defeat, beg for help, lose face and get the bailout... (as we await tomorrow's 'details' on the seniority issue). The promise (or threat) of support implies it has to get worse before it can get better.