Archive - Jan 7, 2013

Will the taxer-in-chief discuss the debt ceiling or will this 'personal' announcement be all Hagel/Defense and Brennan/CIA? Stay tuned...

The epic farce that is the opaque balance sheets of European banks, sovereigns, NCBs, and the ECB, continues to occur under our very eyes. Only when one sniffs below the headlines is the truth exposed with no apology or recognition of 'cheating' anywhere. To wit, following November's farcical over-payment on collateral by the ECB to Spanish banks (that was quietly brushed under the carpet by Draghi et al.), Germany's Die Welt am Sonntag has found that the Bank of France overpaid up to EUR550mm ($720mm) on its short-term paper financing to six French and Italian banks. The reason - incorrect evaluation of the crappy collateral (i.e. the NCB not taking a big enough haircut for risk purposes) on 113 separate occasions. The problem lies in the increasingly poor quality of collateral the CBs are willing to accept (and the illiquidity of the underlying markets) - as higher quality collateral disappears; which leaves the central bankers clearly out of depth when it comes to 'risk management', no matter how many times Draghi tells us this week.

Having moved to the sidelines due to the uncertainty of the US Presidential election and the Fiscal Cliff negotiations (as well as the holidays), investors are beginning to creep back in the marketplace. And they’re in for a surprise.

More than half a decade has passed since the recession that triggered the financial panic and the Great Recession, but the condition of the world continues to be summed up by what The Spectator's Michael Lind calls ‘turboparalysis’ - a prolonged condition of furious motion without movement in any particular direction, a situation in which the engine roars and the wheels spin but the vehicle refuses to move. By now one might have expected the emergence of innovative and taboo-breaking schools of thought seeking to account for and respond to the global crisis. But to date there is no insurgent political and intellectual left, nor a new right, for that matter. Why has a global calamity produced so little political change and, at the same time, so little rethinking? Part of the answer, has to do with the collapse of the two-way transmission belt that linked the public to the political elite. But there is a deeper, structural reason for the persistence of turboparalysis. And that has to do with the power and wealth that incumbent elites accumulated during the decades of the global bubble economy. But it is coming...

The chart that sheds light on what Google Chairman Eric Schmidt is doing in North Korea, plus more...

Listening to talking heads and certainly to various retail associations, US consumer spending in December was lackluster driven by such traditional scapegoats as "lack of confidence ahead of the Fiscal Cliff", lack of clarity on taxation, fears about what the market may do, etc. And while retailers certainly did report a very mixed sales report for both November and December, it certainly was not due to lack of spending, at least not according to Gallup. Curiously, and rather inexplicably, the polling organization found that in December the average self-reported daily spending in stores, online, and in restaurants rose by a whopping $10 to $83. This was the highest monthly figure Gallup has reported since December 2008. It is also the first reading above the $80 mark since the 2008-2009 recession. But how is that possible? Wasn't the strawman that nobody would spend due to fiscal and tax uncertainty? Apparently not, and this unleashes merely the latest episode of baffle with BS, where data from one source contradicts directly what has been reported from other aggregators of spending data.

A complete & thorough explanation of how many (if not most) levered college diplomas are overvalued assets with fictitious values - that's including you too HBS and the ivy league! No wonder the education bubble in the US is about to collapse.

Gold dropped $8.20 or 0.49% in New York on Friday and closed at $1,656.30/oz. Silver slipped to as low as $29.22 in London, but it then rallied to as high as $30.25 in New York and finished with a gain of 0.2%. Gold finished down 0.05% for the week, while silver was up 0.53%.

Friday’s U.S. nonfarm payrolls for December were 155K, 150K was expected and this was down from the previous data of 161K. The unemployment rate was still an elevated 7.8% suggesting a frail U.S. jobs market.

Things change fast in the technology world. 

From a week after the election, the most-shorted names in the major indices have been the massive outperformers and drivers of this market exuberance (+16.4% versus 8.4% market). That story has not stopped as 2013 has seen the squeeze continue as the year-end strategy of piling into the most-shorted names has worked. From the opening levels on January 2nd (with today seeing even more divergence), the most-shorted Russell 2000 names are dramatically outperforming. It would appear, as Bloomberg notes in its recent article on 2012's most-hated companies' outperformance, that "It's not just hard to be short, it is painful." Of course, they also note one manager's view that "The risk is that if this market rally has been based on short covering and that was all it was, then there’s no further money following, the rally is then either dead or not sustainable." Especially with net spec longs at near-record highs, this has unsustainability written all over it.

The chapter on robosigning, i.e., Fraudclosure, is now closed with a $10 billion wristslap on US banks, of which a whopping $3.3 billion in the form of direct cash and $5.2 billion in "other assistance." The banks who are now absolved from any and all Linda Green transgressions in the past include: Aurora, Bank of America, Citibank, JPMorgan Chase, MetLife Bank, PNC, Sovereign, SunTrust, U.S. Bank, and Wells Fargo. And so, banks can resume to resell properties with mortgages on which the original lien may or may not have been lost in the sands of time.

In economies dependent on ever-rising consumption, austerity had a negative connotation even before its politically charged meaning commandeered the public debate. When the entire Status Quo depends on discretionary consumption not just for "growth" but for its survival, austerity is welcomed with approximately the same enthusiasm Superman reserves for Kryptonite. This is of course a contradiction: an economy based not just on consumption of all net income but debt-based consumption is an economy devoid of savings, i.e. capital to invest in productive assets. An economy without capital is lacking a key component of classic capitalism. The loss of resilience and cost sensitivity has consequences. We have created an economy with an extremely high cost-basis, and as a result it is brittle, fragile and vulnerable to even modest "austerity."

Yes, it comes straight from the dumb money portal and does not adjust for such things as "one time, non-recurring charges" and other things which have made AMZN's profit margin the biggest mathematical conundrum since the Riemann hypothesis, but it still is about the funniest thing we have spotted on today's so far painfully boring trading day.

Fannie was already in the news this morning courtesy of the $10 billion settlement announced between the GSE and Bank of America. Let's make it two in a row courtesy of the firm's monthly housing survey in which one aspect, the ongoing expectation that home prices will continue to rise driven by the recent momentum, should come as no surprise: there is always hope that this dead cat bounce is different and unlike the previous three, and will result in something substantial. It won't, once all those millions of properties held on bank books and generating zero cash flow (remember: BAC's 6+ month delinquent mortgages now amount to a whopping $64 billion) are unleashed on the market once the subsidized housing price is perceived as sufficient by most as a new, and satisfactory, clearing price. What was surprising was the consumer outlook on the economy and personal finances, which was diametrically opposite, and in fact those who expect that their personal financial situation will get worse in the next 12 months rose to the highest since August 2011.

Forecasting the future with any accuracy is a difficult affair. Being right about the facts, often obscured by various governments, and then correct in your deductions is never enough as macro impacts such as Draghi’s “Save the World” plan can often change the face of market outcomes in a New York minute. This is why so few people can predict the future of the markets with much accuracy. The central banks of the world have accumulated balance sheets of about 15 trillion dollars. There will be consequences of this including inflation, valuation of currencies and ultimately defaults as motivated by political and economic decisions. In the spring keep your eye on Greece, Portugal, Spain and Italy as nationalism returns to protect the various nations. In the United States rancor will resurface. Like in Europe, the “have-nots” control the votes but the push-backs will come and the intensity of them may startle many as the House refuses to accede to the demands and cries for the sharing of wealth. Polarization will continue and a shift in the population base will bring intense rivalry from one State to the next.