Archive - Nov 21, 2013

Supported by economic weakness overnight in Asia and a weak Philly Fed print (bad news is good news) along with hope from more QE out of the BoJ, JPY weakness floated all boats today as homebuilders and financials surged lifting stocks tick for tick with carry. Yellen's nomination provided yet another lift. Treasuries rallied (though the long-end remains +10bps on the week). Precious metals were monkey-hammered early then dead for the rest of the day (-4% on the week) as oil prices surged higher ( +1.6% on the week). The USD Index glitched lower on no neg rates chatter early from Europe but the quietness in the index hid major dispersion as AUD was craushed (now 1.6% lower on the week). Credit markets rallied (but remain well off stocks) and VIX was compressed as low volumes meant a slow lift higher (and Trannies best day in almost 5 weeks). Shorts suffered the most until POMO ended - tripling market performance.

Barring any exogenous shock, and assuming that current reported earnings estimates actually occur, the S&P 500 will be sporting a P/E ratio of 21.17x in 2015 if fed balance sheet correlations hold. However, if earnings growth stagnates then valuation multiples will rise dramatically from current levels.  The further that multiples deviate from the long term mean the greater the eventual reversion will be. Should we have an expectation that the same monetary policies employed by Japan will have a different outcome in the U.S? Anything is certainly possible.  However, history suggests that artificial, liquidity driven, market inflations always end poorly.

"The Senate was established to make sure that minorities are protected."
-Senator Harry Reid 12/8/06 
......scratch that...... 
This gridlock [filibusters] has consequences. Terrible consequences. It is not only bad for President Obama and bad for the United States Senate; it’s bad for our country.  -Senator Reid, 11/ 21/13

What happens when there's no one left to sell to...

When neither the private nor public sector is willing to invest in the future, it seems appropriate to ask, what happened to the future? Have corporations along with governments figured out that a return to slow growth does not necessary equal a return to normal growth? Why invest in new infrastructure, new workforces, new office space, equipment, highways, or even rail, when the demand necessary to provide a return on this investment may never materialize? Many sectors in Western economies remain in oversupply or overcapacity. There is a surplus of labor and a surplus of office and industrial real estate, as well as airports, highways, and suburbs that are succumbing to a permanent decrease in throughput and traffic. Perhaps the private sector is not so unwise. Collectively, through its failure to invest, it is making a de facto forecast: No normal recovery is coming

"A money-financed tax cut is essentially equivalent to Milton Friedman's famous "helicopter drop" of money."

Outsourcing the NSA’s Dirty Deeds In An Attempt to Create Plausible Deniability

"In some stocks," Starwood Capital's Barry Sternlicht warns, "we are seeing irrational exuberance with silly valuations." The outspoken asset manager warns that the signs are coming from the credit markets of "silly debt deals" with no covenants - which is helping equities melt-up but is a sign of a bubble. Perhaps his answer to what the Fed will do and when is the most succinct (and likely accurate) summation of the current idiocy, "very little and never," as the anchor grinningly suggests how great higher stock prices are for 'investors' before Sternlicht exclaims that may be true for the minority who hold stocks, "enjoy it is an investor," he suggests, "but don't love it as an American." Sternlicht goes on to address the dysfunctional political class and the Fed's enabling of that to continue as well as where the real estate bubbles are in the US.

The President will deliver statement explaining, we assume, why Harry Reid's "nuclear option" vote is good for all American citizens...

For all purists still stuck in a world in which humans are the most efficient allocators of capital, and where, under Ben Bernanke's centrally-planned New Normal, shorting stocks has become blasphemy, the following table showing the monthly return of quant giant RenTec's chief equity fund open to the outside world, the Renaissance Institutional Equities Fund (RIEF B), whose AUM has ballooned to $8.7 billion in the past few years, will come as a shock. Because the quant strategy-driven fund, which does not look at fundamentals but purely at technical relationships and quant arbs, just posted its best month in history in October returning 8.65% nearly doubling the 4.60% return of the broader market. But the truly stunning aspect of RenTec's October performance is that it was not driven by a highly levered beta position (2x leverage on the S&P would do it easily) which is how virtually everyone else does it (a strategy that works great as long as the market is going higher), but instead thanks to that nearly forgotten aspect of a "hedge" fund's exposure - shorts.

Do not click on this post unless you have taken all necessary food and beverage precautions...

The following five themes (and three bonus ones) are what UBS Andrew Cates believes will be of the greatest importance for global economic and capital markets outcomes for the next five years. There is little to surprise here but the aggregation of these factors and the increasingly binary outcomes of each of them suggest there may be a little more uncertainty about the future than most people sheepishly admit...

...and it appears few, even among his own party, are willing to become Obama's much needed Lazarus.

Late in the life of every financial bubble, when things have gotten so out of hand that the old ways of judging value or ethics or whatever can no longer be honestly applied, a new idea emerges that, if true, would let the bubble keep inflating forever. During the tech bubble of the late 1990s it was the “infinite Internet.” During the housing bubble the rationalization for the soaring value of inert lumps of wood and Formica was a model of circular logic: Home prices would keep going up because “home prices always go up.” Now the current bubble – call it the Money Bubble or the sovereign debt bubble or the fiat currency bubble, they all fit – has finally reached the point where no one operating within a historical or commonsensical framework can accept its validity, and so for it to continue a new lens is needed. And right on schedule, here it comes: Governments with printing presses can create as much currency as they want and use it to hold down interest rates for as long as they want. So financial crises are now voluntary. The illusion of government omnipotence is no crazier than the infinite Internet or home prices always going up, but it is crazy.

While the abysmal rollout of Obamacare hardly needs any additional debacles, a recent hearing by technology experts in Congress added yet another, quite major, wrinkle to an already insurmountable problem: healthcare.gov is so fraught with security flaws, and so bloated with code, that it may easily expose the personal data of millions (we are being generous here) of users - it collects user names, birth dates, social security numbers, email addresses and much more - to even the least experienced of hackers. It gets worse: when asked "Do any of you think today that the site is secure?" the answer from the experts, which included two academics and two private sector technical researchers, was a unanimous "no."  And worse when the experts were asked "would you recommend today that this site be shut down until it is?" three of the experts said "yes," while a fourth said he did not have enough information to make the call. But the worst news of the day the experts said the site needed to be completely rebuilt to run more efficiently, making it easier to protect. Finally, should Obama finally do the right thing and scrap the three year project and start from scratch, "in written testimony, Kennedy said it would take a minimum of seven to 12 months to fix the problems with the site shut down, given the site's complexity and size."