Archive - Feb 25, 2013

While it appears the Speaker has decided to hold his comments until after the cash markets close at 4pm ET, we suspect futures will get a kick out of his always-reassuring tone. Following the President's earlier demands for no sequester and more spending, we suspect Boehner will fully acquiesce and agree to a pony in everyone's stocking too... or not. Full webcast below.

Behold the sheer austerity-inducing horror and pure, mortal terror of the, dum dum dum, SEKWESTER!!! Do not pass go and proceed straight to Armageddon.

Let's get it on!

The prevalence of counter-factuals or 'coulda-shoulda-woulda's in mainstream economics is stunningly biased to explaining "why we're still in the doldrums outside of course of the stock market." As CNBC's Rick Santelli exclaims, we are told at every turn that if we just do more - more stimulus, more monetization, more bailouts - then the recovery would have been better by now and will be in the future. In his typically calm and stoic fashion, the igneous Illinoisan asks, rhetorically, "What if the Fed had done less?" His answer - rather obviously - is that everything would have been different (but not necessarily worse). In a little under 3 minutes, Rick explains why "the Federal Reserve has done nothing but keep politicians from having to do anything."

I really need to stop being so pessimistic. I’m getting richer by the day. My home value is rising at a rate of 1% per month according to the National Association of Realtors. At that rate, my house will be worth $1 million in less than 10 years. Every mainstream media newspaper, magazine, and news channel is telling me the “strong” housing recovery is propelling the economy and creating millions of new jobs. Keynesian economists, Wall Street bankers, government apparatchiks and housing trade organizations are all in agreement that the wealth effect from rising home prices will be the jumpstart our economy needs to get back to the glory days of 2005. Who am I to argue with such honorable men with degrees from Ivy League schools and a track record of unquestioned accuracy as we can see in the chart below? These are the facts. But why trust facts when you can believe Baghdad Ben and the NAR? It’s always the best time to buy.

The biggest market in the world - foreign exchange - is having some issues here. Wherever you look, trends are snapping hard and levels are gapping. EURUSD is down 1% from Friday back below 1.31 (a 240 pip swing from pre-Italy levels); EURJPY has collapsed to one-month lows; EURCHF is heading the wrong way for the SNB; and carry trades are lifting in rip your face off mode. "That escalated quickly..."

If bond yields are higher, according to the endless talking head chatter on financial comedy channels, due to a "stronger economy" and the 'any second now' exit of Fed monetization, we wonder: what do sliding bond yield indicate? (10Y 1.87 handle now -13bps from earlier highs)

Equities are holding off their lows for now as Treasuries are pushing on to the lowest yields of the day (swinging from +4.5bps to -5bps now). Gold has pushed to the highs of the day (with Silver +1% from Friday's close). S&P 500 futures sit at the lower-edge of their 3-month up-trend channel and today's volume on the downswing was notable. Risk-assets in general are tending to be more risk-averse than stocks though we would not be surprised to see a pull up to around 1515 for a VWAP test before resuming any down-trend. JPY is up 0.5% against the USD but overall the dollar is higher on the day also weighing on risk-appetite.

Today's stunning comeback by Berlusconi, which is really a slide in support for Bersani and Monti whose joint coalition government is unlikely to have the 158 seats needed in the Senate to avoid elections in a few months, means the "Plan B" aka "worst" outcome is in play. How "worst"? In a note released over the weekend, JPM strategist Gianluca Salford attributed a tiny 15-20% probability to an outcome that now appears to be the base case. A far more likely result (defined by JPM as 75%) would have been a continuation of the status quo, which saw an easily-formed Center Left government. As of this moment, that no longer appears feasible. So as the next steps play out, the fulcrum security will be Italian BTPs, which according to JPM will be whacked to the tune of 40 to 100 bps (at least to start), and with deleveraging feedback loops picking up after, who knows where this will end, especially in a worst-er case scenario where there will be months of political and social uncertainty in Italy.

For the third time since the crisis of confidence in the world's economic and financial markets really shifted from the 'old normal' to a supposed 'new normal' of credit-bloated slow growth and deleveraging, risk markets in general have fallen back to a belief that systemic risk is off the table. Not just European tail-risk. As Bloomberg notes, across six major assets classes, cross-asset-class correlation has fallen to levels associated with pre-crisis risk. Simply put, the systemic 'tail-risk' driver of our markets has been priced out, leaving just idiosyncratic risk (for now). What is often misunderstood, however, is this drastic reduction in correlation also means the market believes that the systemic 'flow' of central bank liquidity is also less important as investors become more confident that some fundamental hope belies the performance. As we have seen a few times post-crisis, since the impossible was proved very possible, risk-flares can happen when one least expects them, and with market perceptions of that possibility now so low, the impact could be considerably more exaggerated.

When Moody's downgraded the UK's sovereign credit rating last week it was something of an anti-climax. The ratings agencies long ago lost what little credibility they ever had. Being downgraded by Moody's is like being called a moron by a moron; ask anyone who has ever set foot in a bond dealing room - the ratings agencies are always behind the curve. The UK has been on the skids, credit-wise, for years. Britain's debt to GDP has gone through the roof. We, and generations to come, will be left with the reckoning. Nobody believes that bonds are an objective reflection of economic reality. The game is rigged, and everybody knows it. But the Moody's downgrade should serve as a piercing smoke alarm to anybody still naive enough to be holding these instruments of value destruction. Get out now while the going is good.

For a moment there it was all solved. Everything was in full bull mode (apart from the EURUSD). Then, the 'buy first, ask questions later' crowd saw the headlines and the covering began. Of course, bulls will point to the fact that stocks closed unchanged and not down and sovereign spreads ended unchanged and not wider but the truth is that the Italian stock market dropped 4% from pre-poll headlines, Italian and Spanish bonds cracked over 30bps wider and the EUR dropped 160 pips. Finding support at 5%, Spanish yields pushed higher and ended back above 360bps spread to Bunds. Europe's VIX pushed back above 21.5% but it is EURJPY's retracement of all the overnight gains that is probably hurting global risk the most for now...

Speculation, derivatives, and the price of food in poor countries

With the entire world, and certainly GETCO's ES and EURUSD algos, focused on every single update out of the Italian Senate race, which now appears certain to not bring the necessary 158 seats to the Bersani-Monti coalition leading to a chaotic revote in the coming months, here is some tangential news of the "who could have ever seen this coming variety." Following last week's Heinz insider trading probe, which implicated a Goldman Sachs account in Zurich belonging to some private wealth client, who was so anonymous not even Goldman knows who it belonged to, we now learn that yet another Goldman employee has just left the company in a totally separate insider trading probe.

The State has monopolized all authority, giving it essentially unlimited power to make things worse. Since concentrations of centralized capital, authority and power does not relinquish control easily, if ever, the Status Quo will have to decay and implode before authority can be pushed down to more responsive, appropriate levels.