Archive - Sep 7, 2012

Miracles of cosmetic surgery.

Today's ZH articles in audio summary! "Brought to you by Sanity, a sub-division of Reality Inc." 8pm Everyday @ New York Time.

Where does the AUD.USD go from here?

Two different people, or the two faces of the same person? In a week dominated with news about Europe's "third time's the charm" monetization round, we leave it up to our readers to decide.

I was recently interviewed by a journalist for a local newspaper who was developing a story on the exponential rise of the “prepper lifestyle” in America, most especially in Western Montana.  Being an outsider to the Liberty Movement, she was naturally curious as to what motivated us to make what some in our culture would see as a drastic and bewildering leap away from the mainstream.  She was equally fascinated with our willingness to travel great distances and make substantial sacrifices to live in regions like the American Redoubt.  I will not deny, Montana has indeed become a “hotbed” of survivalism and Constitutionalism, or what the Southern Poverty Law Center would call “extremism and domestic terrorism”.  I lived in Pittsburgh for years while writing for Neithercorp and Alt-Market and rarely ran into like minded individuals aware of the tenuous status of our society.  Within days of moving to Montana, I was being recognized by complete strangers in supermarkets excited to discuss the inner workings of Keynesian monetary corruption, precious metals investment, and Alinsky disinformation tactics.  Yeah…I know…it’s weird. After living for a while in the Redoubt, you begin to forget that there are still many people in this country that are utterly oblivious to the epic dangers around them, as well as painfully helpless in knowing what to do when those dangers land on their doorsteps.  Speaking with the newspaper reporter, and my experiences at Paulfest in Tampa, Florida, reminded me that the world has yet to be reminded of the value of survivalism.  There is still a gap, a disconnect, a psychological twitch of the masses, and it compels me to explain, yet again, what they are missing.

Actually not really, but all one can do is laugh since in some centrally planned parallel universe, the entire world entering manufacturing contraction translates into a 4 year (and just shy of all time) stock market high...

A few hours after the US reported a jobs number which missed consensus estimates on broad weakness, which saw a nearly 400K increase in those no longer even caring about work, and which confirmed that the economic deteriorating is nowhere close to ending, stocks did their thing and with no news, and on no volume (the same reason why like Nomura, ever fewer banks can afford to keep trading desks), decided to surge into the close even as volume slid, with the NYSE trading its new post-Knight normal average of a few shares over half a billion. This sent the ES to a new post-2008 high. In other news, we are approaching 15x forward P/E even as the world's global economies are grinding to a screeching halt.Central planning is here to stay and the stock market will merely levitate ever higher on hope that the central bankers have it all under control.

For the first time since September of 2010, nearly two years ago, has the Case Shiller 20 City Index realized a year-over-year gain. Does this signify a sustainable turning point for the market? 

Curious why legendary hedge fund managers are shutting down shops left and right in disgust with the mockery that central planning and algorithmic short-termism had made of equity markets? Don't be: his name is Julian Marchese, he runs a "macro fund"... and he is 16. Don't get us wrong: we enjoy the next youth trading prodigy, and here the Schwab baby comes to mind, as much as everyone else. Our concern is when it is the people who have never even seen half of a business cycle that start running your money, and, probably worse, making money, which leads them to believe they know what they are doing, and gets gullible LPs to allocate capital to them based on a 3 month track record, when in reality the entire market is one merely primed for outperformance courtesy of central planner puts and priced to Bernie Madoff ponzi perfection, targeting a specific investor type. And here the Schwab baby comes to mind again.

Draghi floods the Eurozone with new money. The Bundesbank says it's like printing banknotes and won't solve the problem. Who is getting sterilized?

If the point of quantitative easing was to provide enough  liquidity to keep the massive, earth-shatteringly large debt load serviceable, then quantitative easing succeeded — but the “success” of sustaining the crippling debt load is that it remains a huge burden weighing down on the economy like a tonne of bricks.  This “success” has turned markets into junkies, increasingly dependent on central bank liquidity injections. After QE3 will come more and more and more easing until the market has either successfully managed to deleverage to a sustainable level (and Japan’s total debt level as a percentage of GDP remains higher than it was in 1991, even after 20 years of painful deleveraging — so there is no guarantee whatever that this will ever occur), or until central banks give up and let markets liquidate. Quantitative easing’s “success” has been a junkie recovery and a zombie market.

Latest reports...

Much has been said about Apple's recent victory over its key component supplier, Samsung, in a recent US court decision the direct result of which has been the halt of sales of several Samsung products which are already obsolete in cell phone year terms. The paradox here is that AAPL's victory is quite pyrrhic: if and when Samsung feels sufficiently threatened, it can just pull a Gazprom and halt the supply of mission critical components to the world's biggest publicly traded company. Alternatively the Chinese politburo can one day decide to pull FoxConn's operational license, in the process bankrupting AAPL overnight. But these are of course M.A.D. scenarios which in rational, non-centrally planned market would never take place, and so we have no reason to worry about them. That said, it is increasingly becoming clear that patent warfare fought in partial domestic judicial systems, will be the next form of protectionism as pertains to that most faddy of technology: the ubiqutous smartphone. And while Apple may have won the first battle, the outcome of the war is still very much unclear: in fact, the return salvo after Samsung's big defeat on US soil may come quite soon, this time courtesy of another Chinese Apple "clone", HTC Corp, which if it goes against the Cupertino company, could have a large impact on revenues.

Now that oil’s price revolution – a process that took ten years to complete – is self-evident, it is possible once again to start anew and ask: When will the next re-pricing phase begin? Most of the structural changes that carried oil from the old equilibrium price of $25 to the new equilibrium price of $100 (average of Brent and WTIC) unfolded in the 2002-2008 period. During that time, both the difficult realities of geology and a paradigm shift in awareness worked their way into the market, as a new tranche of oil resources, entirely different in cost and structure than the old oil resources, came online. The mismatch between the old price and the emergent price was resolved incrementally at first, and finally by a super-spike in 2008. However, once the dust settled on the ensuing global recession and financial crisis, oil then found its way to its new range between $90 and $110. Here, supply from a new set of resources and the continuance of less-elastic demand from the developing world have created moderate price stability. Prices above $90 are enough to bring on new supply, thus keeping production levels slightly flat. And yet those same prices roughly balance the continued decline of oil consumption in the OECD, which offsets the continued advance of consumption in the non-OECD. If oil prices can’t fall that much because of the cost of marginal supply and overall flat global production, and if oil prices can’t rise that much because of restrained Western economies, what set of factors will take the oil price outside of its current envelope?

When it comes to the NEW QE, everyone has an opinion, and most seem to believe that the NEW QE will come next week, now that the US economy added "just" 96,000 people (but, but, the unemployment rate 'fell'). Certainly, and far more importantly, if the most recent FOMC minutes are any guide, the Fed shares this view. Sadly, as so often happens, most, and this includes the FOMC's various voting members, have once again made up their minds without actually evaluating the limitations posed by simple math. After all it is far easier to form an opinion, and actually think about the underlying facts later. The math, for those who actually have looked at the numbers behind the scenes, is scary (in UBS' words, not ours).

Here is the math.