Archive - Dec 5, 2013

Europe's second largest economy and crucial to the core founding partnership of the euro project, France, has seen its unemployment rate rise unceasingly for 9 quarters in a row now. At 11.03%, French unemployment has not been higher since Q3 1997. Of course, President Hollande, despite falling PMIs and rising unemployment is hopeful that things are turning around as he notes, France is "now in a phase of stabilization that remains very fragile." Some optimism can be taken from the relative stability in youth unemployment for a change but the over-50s unemployment reached an all-time high of 8.2%.

Yesterday it was Seth Klarman's Baupost, today it is David Tepper's Appaloosa Managament which is set to return between $1.5 and $2 billion. As reported by II Alpha, Tepper’s firm will return up to $2 billion in an effort to keep the firm’s funds at an optimal size. However, unlike Baupost and various other hedge funds returning cash due to lack of investment opportunities or simply shutting down, "Appaloosa regularly gives back money to investors when it feels it is getting too big. This will be the third straight year Appaloosa has returned capital to investors. Over the years, Tepper has already returned about $8 billion to investors since starting the firm in 1993. The Pittsburgh native’s goal is to keep the fund size at levels he deems optimal at any given time."

The better-than-expected data in the US had the requisiste good-news-is-bad-news reaction as stocks dumped (giving back all the EURJPY-driven gains), Treasury yields jumped, and gold and silver tumbled (in a deja vu of the last time Bitcoin and gold reached parity). At the same time, Draghi cut inflation forecasts, raised downside risks, hinted at less likelihood of another LTRO and noted negative rate discussions but did nothing and that sent EUR higher and implicitly USD broke lower. European stocks are also in trouble once again (even as European sovereign bond spreads are holding steady in their illiquid way). With EURJPY pausing (on Draghi's comments), we look to USDJPY to provide the requisite lift at the cash open in the US...

It is important that one owns physical gold and not paper or electronic gold which could be subject to bail-ins. Owning a form of paper gold and derivative gold such as an exchange traded fund (ETF) in which one is an unsecured creditor of a large number of custodians, who are banks which potential could be bailed in, defeats the purpose of owning gold. 

Physical Gold, held in secure conferring outright legal ownership through bailment remains the safest way to own gold. 

If yesterday's "great" news in the form of a 200K+ ADP, which sent the market sliding, was offset by the "ugly" news of the Service ISM which sent stocks soaring, today there are only "good cops" - first it was the revised Q3 GDP number print far above most expectations, purely on the back of inventory accumulation which however will now detract materially from Q4 growth, and at the same time, feeding the taper fire, the DOL announced that claims for the week ended November 30, which tumbled to 298,000 a 23K drop from a last week's upward revised 321K, the best print since September 2013, and the biggest beat of expectations of 320K since also September 2013, which was when the DOL started upgrading various computer systems making all data unreliable. And while futures assume the number immediately means the probability of a December taper surges, the DOL quietly added that it is "not unusual for claims to be volatile in holidays."

On the surface, the first revision to the Q3 GDP print, which initially came at 2.8%, was tremendous: at 3.6% well above the 3.1% expected, nothing could be better. Unfortunately, once again reading between the lines shows that all the "growth" was completely hollow and entirely on the back of the ongoing massive inventory accumulation, which rose from 0.41% in Q2 to 0.83% in the first Q3 revision, to an epic 1.68% in the current revision, or nearly half of all the "growth" in the economy. As for the most important component of GDP - personal consumption it once again declined, and dropped from 1.24% of the GDP number in Q2 to 1.04% in the first revision, to just 0.96% in the final Q3 revision - this was the lowest consumption contribution to GDP since Q3 2009! Bottom line: the US consumer is getting ever weaker, even as retailers and producers are stocking up more and more inventory to take advantage of the lack of consumer spending power.

Just how much will Draghi cut Europe's growth outlook? Just what measures will the Goldmanite take to lower the EUR this time? Just how short will the laflife of any such "unconventional measures" program be this time around? Just what assets would the ECB use as collateral for another "contingent" LTRO in a continent that has long since run out of unencumbrable assets? When is the non-existent OMT's term sheet finally coming? All these questions and more will hopefully be answered by Mario Draghi at the ECB's press conference set to start any second.

As we have been covering for the past year and a half, most explicitly in "A Record $2 Trillion In Deposits Over Loans - The Fed's Indirect Market Propping Pathway Exposed", when it comes to the pathway of the Fed's excess deposits propping up risk levels, it has nothing to do with reserves sitting on bank balance sheets as assets, and everything to do with excess deposits (of which there are now $2.4 trillion thanks to the Fed) which are used as Initial collateral by banks such as JPM and then funding such derivatives as IG9 in a failed attempt to cover a segment of the corporate bond market.

Unlike last month's surprising rate cut which caught about 95% of forecasters wrong-footed, today the ECB proceeded as expected, and did not cut rates, keeping the MRO rate at 0.25%, the Interest Rate at 0.75%, and the Deposit rate at 0.00%. From the ECB:

At today’s meeting the Governing Council of the ECB decided that the interest rate on the main refinancing operations and the interest rates on the marginal lending facility and the deposit facility will remain unchanged at 0.25%, 0.75% and 0.00% respectively. The President of the ECB will comment on the considerations underlying these decisions at a press conference starting at 2.30 p.m. CET today.

Now all eyes on Draghi at the press conference in 45 minutes, where Draghi is expected to lower his assessment of European growth once more, and potentially announce some additional non-standard measures.

• Apple, China Mobile Sign Deal to Offer iPhone (WSJ)
• Japan approves $182 billion economic package, doubts remain (Reuters)
• Volcker Rule Won't Allow Banks to Use 'Portfolio Hedging' (WSJ)
• He went, he saw, he achieved nothing: Biden's Trip to Beijing Leaves China Air-Zone Rift Open (WSJ)
• Britain announces sharp upward revision to growth forecasts (Reuters)
• U.S. Airlines to Mortgage-Backed Debt Top List of Best ’14 Bets (BBG)
• Thaksin's homecoming hopes dashed as Thai crisis reignites (Reuters)
• Age of Austerity Nearing End May Boost Global Economy (BBG) - or it may expose that it was just corruption and incompetence at fault all along
• China aims to establish network of high-level FTAs (China Daily)

It has been a relatively quiet overnight session, if with a downward bias in the EURJPY which means futures are just modestly in the red. The action however is merely deferred, with a slew of macroeconomic reports on the horizon, chief of which is the ECB rate decision, which consensus has as unchanged at 0.25%, although Draghi's subsequent conference is expected to lead to EUR weakness, even if briefly, since the central bank is widely expected to downgrade both growth and inflation forecasts. DB adds that the recent rise in eonia — which may reflect concerns about the treatment of LTROs in the end-December AQR and be encouraging the accelerated 3Y LTRO repayments — may warrant a temporary liquidity easing: a special short-term tender; temporarily easing minimum reserve requirements; or — technically possible, if politically controversial — temporarily suspending the SMP sterilization process. Concurrent with the draghi conference, we also get the second revision of Q3 GDP, which consensus now expects to rise to 3.1%, as well as this week's initial jobless claims random number generator. Later in the day the Factory Orders update is expected to show a -1.0% decline, while Fed speakers Lockhart and Fisher round off the day.

As we said back in March, when Bitcoin's parabolic rise first started, it was only a matter of time before first one, then all central banks take on Bitcoin for the simple fact that it present too great a threat to the fiat system. Sure enough, on the chart below of BTC China it is quite clear just at what point overnight the People's Bank of China announced that Bitcoin is simply a virtual commodity and "isn't a currency with any real meaning" (paraphrasing Alan Greenspan), and that it officially bans financial companies from Bitcoin transactions.

You know that game involving word association at the psychotherapists? The one where you have to say the first word that springs to mind.

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