Archive - Nov 2013

It would be a mistake to think that QE is the first time the Fed's policies have benefited the well-to-do at the expense of the average American. The Fed’s polices have always benefited crony capitalists and big spending politicians at the expense of the average American. The well-connected benefit from inflation, as they receive the newly-created money first, before general price increases have spread through the economy. It is obvious, then, that middle- and working-class Americans are hardest hit by the rising level of prices. Far from promoting a sound economy for all, the Federal Reserve is the main cause of the boom-and-bust economy, as well as the leading facilitator of big government and crony capitalism. Fortunately, in recent years more Americans have become aware of how the Fed is impacting their lives.

While we could (and have) show a plethora of charts of the trends of earnings, revenues, and macro data, the following 'summary' of Q3 earnings from Thomson One says it all... As far as pre-announcements, the 9.2x negative-to-positive is the "largest negative guidance on record" - five words, every bull should just ignore...

Farewell Mareeaah. The Money Honey who epitomized CNBC in its high flying (pardon the pun) years when it was actually a source of useful information, has just marked the nadir of the TV station which in the past five years rebranded itself stock market propaganda central, and whose viewership plunged appropriately to a 20 year low as we recently reported.  As Drudge reports, Bartiromo whose contact is up, is moving to Fox Business.  From Drudge: "DRUDGE has learned that Maria Bartiromo is jumping to FOX BUSINESS NETWORK with an announcement expected sometime soon. Sources close to the situation say there have been ongoing conversations throughout the Fall. The new deal calls for Bartiromo to anchor a daily market hours program on FOX BUSINESS. Insiders say there will be a role on FOXNEWS as well."

Moments ago, the following news broke across various news feeds:

BREAKING: Princeton U. to distribute meningitis vaccine not approved in the US to halt campus outbreak.

— NBCWashington (@nbcwashington) November 18, 2013

This is great news. But we wonder: considering the list of such prominent Econ department graduates as Ben Bernanke and Paul Krugman, couldn't the vaccine have been distributed some years earlier?

The Senate Banking Committee’s confirmation hearing for current Vice-Chair of the Federal Reserve began with Janet Yellen delivering prepared remarks.  Most observers likely tuned out well before the completion of the 2 ½ hours meeting to decide whether Yellen was worthy to succeed outgoing Chair Ben Bernanke and ascend to the top spot at the Fed. With the ongoing debacle of the Affordable Health Care website handcuffing Democrats, tough questions about QE, ZIRP, the oft talked about Taper and the possibility of reducing the Fed’s gargantuan $4 trillion balance sheet were verboten.  That left Republicans to address the elephant(s) in the room.  Predictably, it took nearly the entire hearing until a Senator from Nebraska offered his views about the damage being done by the various fiscal and monetary machinations undertaken to combat the Great Recession.  What happened, beginning just after the 2 hour point of the meeting, was both remarkable and revealing...

Klingons?

What Carl giveth, Carl can taketh away. We have warned for a month that credit markets have been decompressing (amid saturation) even as stocks went only one way. The S&P has hit almost its LABIA-based Fed fair-value and VIX/VXV hit extreme complacency levels so we were primed for a fall so it's ironic that Icahn pricked the bubble (at least for one day). More ironic still was CNBC's dismissal of his warning "as he is not a market timer" - when they wait with baited breath for his next 'buy AAPL' tweet. Bill Dudley's economic bullishness (and hawkish policy talk) also weighed on stocks. Credit was weak from the start - even as equities broke to new records; Treasury yields slid all day (with a small bounce higher after Europe closed). The USD's early weakness retraced to unch by teh close - rallying from the US open (but EURJPY was a big driver of weakness in stocks). Commodities did not bounce - all flushed lower around the European close and never recovered as stockd dumped.

Back in August, we joked that in the Tesla press-release the one most often used word was Non-GAAP (43 times). Conveniently, we provided a word cloud of the company's Q2 release for the visual learners to grasp just this. That TESLA's earnings were an epic non-GAAP adjustment joke was only further cemented by the fact that the company itself provided a bridge between its GAAP and Non-GAAP earnings.  Now, the euphoria is over and  the story is different, as not only has the company's self-reported and erroneous record of making the safest car in the world gone up in flames, but the momentum appears terminally broken and following today's most recent 11% drop, TSLA stock could soon be headed for double digit territory again. More importantly, however, the end of the momentum story means that those who care about such anachronisms as fundamentals can once again look beneath the hood of TSLA to get the true story of what is really going. There, with the help of Bloomberg's forensic accounting sleuth Jonathan Weil one uncovers nothing but cockroaches.

Carl Icahn, who is currently speaking at the Reuters Global Investment Outlook Summit, just poured cold water over the Fed's 16,000 DJIA EOD price target.

ICAHN: ‘VERY CAUTIOUS ON EQUITIES, MARKET COULD EASILY HAVE BIG DROP'
ICAHN SAYS MANY COS. EARNINGS ARE A ‘MIRAGE,’ REUTERS SAYS
ICAHN: DOESN’T WANT FIGHT WITH APPLE,NO PLANS TO WALK AWAY

But... but.. two POMOs... Still, not too late for K-Fed and his merry unlimited balance sheet trading men to pull a record third POMO today and keep the "wealth effect" illusion going. Was it just a month ago that we warned "Carl Icahn's nightmare" was about to occur? - as the credit market became saturated...

It’s almost never openly admitted in public, but the reality is that few if any investors actually beat the market in the long-term. The reason for this is that most of the investment strategies employed by investors (professional or amateur) simply do not make money.

"Beyond Silk Road: Potential Risks, Threats, and Promises of Virtual Currencies" is the title of today's Senate hearing (from Homeland Security) on th eperils of Bitcoin. We are sure the exaggeration and exasperation will run high as Government offers up its Financial Crimes (and missing and exploited children) directors, and the de-centralized unregulated crypto-currency faces them down...

As H.L. Mencken opined, 'The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out for himself, without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane, and intolerable.' It is no wonder that, according to a Gallup Poll conducted in early October, a record-low 14% of Americans thought that the country was headed in the right direction, down from 30% in September. That's the biggest single-month drop in the poll since the shutdown of 1990. Some 78% think the country is on the wrong track. Simply put, Faber explains, it is most unlikely that US economic growth will surprise on the upside in the next few years. It is more likely there will be negative surprises.

600 is a Bitcoin Bubble and Dow 16000 is Efficient Markets at work?

Today, with the traditional one year delay (we assume they had to give it the benefit of the doubt), the mainstream media once again catches up to what Zero Hedge readers knew over a year ago, and blasts the outright failure that is Abenomics, but not only in the US (with the domestic honor falling to the WSJ), but also domestically, in a truly damning op-ed in the Japan Times. We will let readers peruse the WSJ's "Japan's Banks Find It Hard to Lend Easy Money: Dearth of Borrowers Illustrates Difficulty in Japan's Program to Increase Money Supply" on their own. It summarizes one aspect of what we have been warning about - namely the blocked monetary pipeline, something the US has been fighting with for the past five years, and will continue fighting as long as QE continues simply because the "solution" to the problem, i.e., even more QE, just makes the problem worse. We will however, show the one chart summary which captures all the major failures of the BOJ quite succinctly.

This is dog...