Archive - Jun 2013

If the constitutional scholar was hoping he would quietly avoid a major showdown over the constitutionality of the biggest spying scandal since Nixon (whether legal or not remains to be determined) and which would likely have led to an early POTUS retirement if current president was republican, the ACLU just slammed the door shut on the possibility. Moments ago, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit against the Obama administration over its "dragnet" collection of logs of domestic phone calls, contending that the once-secret program is illegal and asking a judge to both stop it and order the records purged. And, as the NYT reports, "the lawsuit, filed in New York, could set up an eventual Supreme Court test." Only once that happens it will be too bad that InTrade is no longer available, to take the other side of a trade that believes the SCOTUS will for once do the right thing and preserve the constitution when everyone knows the decision to formally enact a Big Brother state will pass along political party lines and America will officially become the country that for 5 decades, at least superficially, it was waging "cold war" against.

After a couple of days of exuberant dead-cat-bouncing in Japan (and therefore implicitly US equities), the reality that credit markets had been hinting at is starting to be realized once again. A nasty gap-down open in US equities saw BTFDers come piling back in, aided by pressure on bonds and a final liftathon into the EU close in AUDJPY. That was the best of the day and JPY's biggest surge in over 3 years (~3%!) dissolved any equity-dip-buying power as stocks jerked up and down around VWAP for the rest of the day. Credit markets opened even more gap wider than stocks weaker as chatter was that bondholders were hedging exposures (as opposed to reducing exposure - hoping that redemptions don't come). That gap was very rapidly filled and aided the parabolic ramp into the EU close. Then, credit was offered, stocks followed as VIX and Treasuries were bid the rest of the day. A very chaotic day in almost every asset class (with PMs actually relatively stable) as US markets begin to mimic Japanese volatility. The Nikkei is now 800 points off the dead-cat-bounce highs from 2 days ago.

Equity bulls remain cognitively biased to the belief that a rising interest rate market implies growth expectations (enough to warrant a Fed Taper) that confirm the hope priced into stocks (entirely missing the bubble concerns and technical corruptions in the markets caused by these policies). However, at the very short-end of the interest-rate curve in the US, the market has pulled forward rate-hike expectations from End-2015 to May 2015 in the last month alone. The problem with the velocity of this adjustment is that in order to hike rates - the entire extraordinary asset purchase program known as QE4EVA has to be over... Still think equities are pricing that in?

What assets will the core/Empire protect? Those of the core. What will be sacrificed? The periphery.

it appears the memo about the glorious housing recovery has bypassed the socialist paradise of France. Either that, or the concept of shared property is so advanced there, and the costs of evicting squatters so high, that all a homeless Parisian needs in order to have four walls and a roof above their heads is to find an empty office building and claim it as their own. Which is precisely what is happening. And while squatting is not a unique phenomenon to any paradise, socialist or otherwise, when a group of 16 Parisian families decided to take over a vacant 4-story building, have decided to put a little signature touch: they telegraphed their presence far and wide by placing repeated food orders so the neighbors could see the "comings-and-goings" of the delivery man (supposedly justifying their squatting), but actually went so far as to invite the French housing minister. And got her support! Socialist utopia indeed.

A Roundup of What's REALLY Going On ...

You have nothing to fear, if you have nothing to hide--Joseph Goebbels 

Few analysts know or admit it, but the only thing that held Europe (and ultimately the financial system) together since May 2012 was the promise of unlimited bond purchases from the ECB.

It appears to be rapidly shifting from bad to worse in Turkey...

Moments ago CNBC cued to the its gas-mask clad coverage from a violent Taksim Square, where a crowd of 50,000 was just getting the tear gas treatment from the local police. And sure enough, going back to the question we posed first thing this morning whether with "a big demonstration is due in a few hours: will Taksim Square June 2013 be the "Waddel and Reed/May 2010" Syntagma Square flash crash equivalent?", we got the answer courtesy of the USDJPY which just tumbled over 80 pips in the span of minutes and dragged down not only the S&P but the Nikkei with it. We hope the NSA has a read on just where Waddell and Reed is located exactly this moment or else things may get very Syntagmaish Squarish circa May 2010 in a hurry...

When even Zee Germans are staring open-mouthed at what they call "American-style Stasi methods" you know things have got a little out of hand. As Reuters reports, German outrage over a U.S. Internet spying program has broken out ahead of a visit by Barack Obama, with ministers demanding the president provide a full explanation when he lands in Berlin next week and one official likening the tactics to those of the East German Stasi. "The more a society monitors, controls and observes its citizens, the less free it is," Merkel's Justice Minister exclaimed, adding, "the suspicion of excessive surveillance of communication is so alarming that it cannot be ignored." While Obama has defended it as a "modest encroachment" on privacy and reassured Americans that no one is listening to their phone calls, the Germans reflect "I thought this era had ended when the DDR fell."

If there is one word to describe today's 3 Year $32 billion auction it would be atrocious. With the When Issued stopped at 0.577%, the closing high yield tailed notably at 0.581%, a dramatic spike from last month's 0.354% and the highest yield since July 2011, indicating substantial turbulence on the surface. Beneath the surface it was the same story, with the Bid To Cover plunging from 3.38 to just 2.95, the lowest since December 2010, driven by a crash in Direct Bidder take down to just 8.4% from 14.6% and a TTM average of 12.9%: this was the lowest Direct interest since August. The result was that Indirects were left with a sizable 33.1% of the auction well above the 26.3% TTM average, and Dealers had to absorb the remainder, or 58.4% of the auction. All in all, a very ugly auction although with investors still demanding only 0.5% to hold 3 year paper it would appear that any fears of an imminent hike in rates (regardless what the Fed does with the longer-end of the curve), is still far away.

Perhaps you have noted in your life, as we have in ours, that denial is often the preface to justification. For the citizens of our country there is no justification, no national security assertion, that will dissuade us from the premise that our current government, in listening to every phone call and reading every transmission on the internet, is violating the fundamental Constitutional rights of American citizens. As Americans we should say, “You have overstepped your boundaries Sir.” Citizens should stand and state, “No one has given you the authority to spy upon me and my fellow Americans and that you are violating the Constitution in this exercise and it should cease immediately.” It should be said to a Democrat. It should be said to a Republican. We should say this to any man that has undertaken to pervert the rights that we have ascribed to ourselves in the formation of our government. This is where we should stand and we should make our voices heard to the best of our abilities.

Because - "It's never too early to start thinking about what you want to be when you grow up."