Archive - May 2013

Moments ago, news broke that in a stunning M&A move, an American pork icon - Smithfield Foods, may be acquired as soon as today by China's Shuanghui, also known as Shineway, which is China's largest pork producer. The Chinese are coming, and they want America's pork. It unclear how soon after the deal gets clearance by the Committee on Foreign Investment (if it does at all) will the US be subject to that well-honored China excess pig "clearance" strategy: floating 'em down the river.

This morning market participants turn on their trading terminals to see an unfamiliar shade of green: red.

Following yesterday's blow out in US bond yields, which have continued to leak wider and are now at 2.20% after touching 2.23%,  the overnight Japanese trading session was relatively tame, with the 10Y JGB closing just modestly wider at 0.93%, following the market stabilization due to a substantial JPY1 trillion JOMO operation which also meant barely any change to the NKY225, while the USDJPY slipped in overnight trading below the 102 support line and was trading in the mid 101s as of this moment, pulling all risk classes lower with it. There was no immediate catalyst for the sharp slide around 3am Eastern, although there was the usual plethora of weak economic data.

Walmart has just been landed with a hefty $81.6-million fine for dumping waste in both California and Missouri.

The investigation has been on-going now for almost ten years. Walmart has admitted that they dumped pollutants into drains in California and Missouri, as well as throwing toxic waste into trash bins rather than paying to have it treated and dealt with properly.

The recent collapse of a small commuter bridge in Washington has brought back memories of Minnesota. Back in August of 2007, the I-35W Mississippi bridge connecting the Downtown East and Marcy-Holmes neighborhoods plummeted to the river below like a Chinese-made sofa. Thirteen individuals lost their lives while 145 escaped with injury. The suddenness of the debacle was met with the blunt response system of the state. That is, politicians in Minnesota and elsewhere went before the public to decry the deteriorating condition of government infrastructure across the country. A flurry of taxpayer money dedicated to overhauling the nation’s bridges followed. Five years after millions in tax dollars were fleeced, allocated, and distributed to this new urgency, less than two dozen of the state’s 172 “structurally deficient” bridges have been made whole.

The last week has seen quite dramatic drops in the prices of a little-discussed but oh-so-critical asset-class in the last housing bubble's 'pop'. Having just crossed above 'Lehman' levels, ABX (residential) and CMBX (commercial) credit indices have seen their biggest weekly drop in 20 months as both rates and credit concerns appear to be on the rise. Perhaps it is this price action that has spooked Fitch's structured products team, or simply the un-sustainability (as we discussed here, here and here most recently) that has the ratings agency on the defensive, noting that, "the recent home price gains recorded in several residential markets are outpacing improvements in fundamentals and could stall or possibly reverse." Simply put, "demand is artificially high... and supply is artificially low."

Canadian Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver said natural resources are the cornerstone of the federal and provincial economies. The U.S. economy, on the road to modest recovery, remains central to a Canadian oil market that relies heavily on exports. Oliver said at an investment conference in Quebec that the natural resources sector represents about 20 percent of the gross domestic product.  The Canadian economy has suffered, however, because there aren't many new conduits to get oil exports to foreign markets. The potential to reach Asian could provide a relief valve for the Canadian economy, while the option still exists to ship oil through the United States for exports. With opposition mounting along the borders, however, Canada's export-driven economy may become landlocked.

Because sometimes you just have to laugh...

The Japanese-bond-stuffed banks of the world (and the collateralizers-of-last-resort) are breathing a sigh of relief at the larger-than-average open-market-operation from the BoJ today (JOMO). From what looked like certain doom and a limit-down open, the JGB market rallied magnificently (along with stocks) out of the gate - almost as if someone 'knew' (which they did here) that the BoJ would come to the rescue today. Remember, as we noted earlier, that unlike the Fed, the BoJ does not have a set size and time schedule (for the full-month in advance aside from broad brush estimates) for its bond-monetization (though we suspect the BoJ will rapidly evolve to a smaller more frequent intervention); which likely accounts for the explosive rise in volatility that is being witnessed on a daily basis in the quadrillion JPY market. Japanese stocks, after an exuberant BTFD opening, have gone one-way - down - and are now testing towards negative on the day. USDJPY tested up over 102.50 in a vain attempt to spark the green equity open but that is fading now too - breaking 102.00. It looks like being another night of correlation trading for Japanese bond and stock investors as Kuroda unleashes a Trillion-JPY-JOMO...

While the world is vigorously searching for what Fed "Tapering" means, it seems the professionals in the financial markets are just as intrigued. With equity bulls yelling "buy" and bond bulls screaming "bye", it seems the story count within Bloomberg for the word "taper" is as close a proxy for bond market volatility as anything else we can find.

For most people, the collapse of civilizations is a subject much more appetizingly viewed in the rear-view mirror than straight ahead down whatever path or roadway we are on. Jared Diamond wrote about the collapse of earlier civilizations to great acclaim and brisk sales, in a nimbus of unimpeachable respectability. The stories he told about bygone cultures gone to seed were, above all, dramatic. No reviewers or other intellectual auditors dissed him for suggesting that empires inevitably run aground on the shoals of resource depletion, population overshoot, changes in the weather, and the diminishing returns of complexity. Yet these are exactly the same problems that industrial-technocratic societies face today, and those of us who venture to discuss them are consigned to a tin-foil-hat brigade, along with the UFO abductees and Bigfoot trackers.

‘Carry On’ films are a genre in their own right! British humor at its best between 1958 and 1992. Slapstick, innuendo, dirty smirks and cackles. Low-budget too! For those of us that are either too young to have heard anything about them…or for those that live in places where (thankfully) the low-budget series of films all entitled ‘Carry On this’ and ‘Carry On that’ (my favorite must be ‘Carry On Regardless’ (1961)) they are a low-budget series of situational comedy sketches that had absolutely no plot. 

"We continue to maintain a long equity risk exposure through companies least exposed to the business cycle, whilst favouring receiving rates in developed countries most prone to a loss of economic momentum as other countries, notably Japan, weaken their currencies through the pursuit of QE. We also retain a structural long position in the US dollar and remain long yen assets [currency hedged] via the Japanese stock market.... One of our core investment themes remains the fight against deflation launched by Japanese authorities through QE of historic proportions. We believe that such radical QE creates the perfect recipe for a weaker yen and booming Japanese equities. The Nikkei rallied by 11.8% in yen terms in April 2013, the best monthly return since December 2009, and has now gained 61% from the November 2012 low. Against this background, the Fund recorded a gain of 30 bps from Japanese equities."

While the annual Harvard senior survey of graduating students always provides an informative glimpse into the past, present and future of graduates from the US' most prestigious (whether or not this is deserved is a different question) institution, the topics most interesting for us and our readers revolve, not surprisingly, around money. Here are the key observations of what students in all "non-Harvard" universities across the nation may be missing (or not).

With everything else in uncharted territory: central bank balance sheets, the stock market, global debt, it was only a matter of time before that old-school indicator of exuberance - margin debt - also joined the ranks of things that are "off the charts." Never one to disappoint (except when Waddell and Reed dumps a "massive" 75,000 ES trade which promptly kills its liquidity replenishment points of course), the NYSE has reported that April margin debt, as expected, hit all time records, just in time for the S&P's own all time high fireworks spectacular.  Rising from the just shy of summer of 2007 levels posted in March, or $380 billion, April margin debt not surprisingly rose to a record high of $384 billion. Additionally, even when netting out account credit metrics, such as Free Credit Cash and Credit Balances in margin accounts, total investor net worth just hit an all time record low of ($106) billion.

In a world of shrinking 'quality' collateral to back the ever-increasing leverage and reach-for-yield practicalities of a centrally-repressed market, it seems the actions of the BoJ (as we warned over a month ago) may have just removed the last best hope for keeping Japanese rates stable. As the chart below shows, JGB volatility is simply off-the-scale relative to the other major bond markets. Sustainable? How much return (yield) would you demand for such risk (volatility) before just jettisoning the position?