Archive - Oct 2014

Hearing of IMF interventions generally conjures up images of developing nations (and the occasional Eurozone peripheral economy of late) facing some kind of financial difficulty. But it was actually Great Britain, the cradle of the industrialized world, which in 1976 became one of the first countries ever to be "bailed out" by the IMF in the modern sense of the term.

What if there was some degrees of freedom in the centrally planned capital markets that rational, non-emotional and non-ideologically-laden thinking could shed light on ? Here is such an attempt

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Dr. Tom Frieden will provide an update at 11 a.m. ET Sunday on the response to the second case of Ebola in Dallas, the first person-to-persion transmission on US soil. As reported earlier, a health care worker, who cared for Liberian Ebola patient Thomas Eric Duncan at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital, tested positive for the disease, hospital officials announced Sunday. Duncan died on Wednesday. The CDC will conduct confirmatory tests on Sunday and share the results after the patient, who has not been identified, is notified, according to a CDC statement.

And then there was #2. A few hours ago, Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital, announced that a health care worker who cared for dying Ebola patient Thomas Eric Duncan, has tested positive for the virus after a preliminary test, officials said early Sunday. If confirmed, it would be the first known person-to-person transmission of the disease in the United States. The name of the patients is currently unknown, what is known however, is that the worker was wearing full protective gear when treating Duncan, suggesting - yet again - that there is a transmission mechanism which is not accounted for under conventional protocol.

Coincidence … Or Something More?

A famous restaurant in NYC decided to hire a firm to figure out why they kept getting bad reviews. What this firm discovered is quite interesting. Below is a transcript that the restaurant posted on Craigslist after they discovered what it was...

American ingenuity versus the killer virus...

Would you like to know how bankrupt our societies are? Financially AND morally? Before you say yes, please do acknowledge that you too ar eparty to the bankruptcy. Even if you have means, or you have no debt, or you’re under 25, you’re still letting it happen. And you may have tons of reasons or excuses for that, but you’re still letting it happen. Our financial and moral bankruptcy shows – arguably – nowhere better than in the way we treat our children.

The recent years of money printing by the world's central banks has NOT ushered in a “permanent plateau of prosperity”. And, as with all bubbles, symmetry indicates the downslope after the bursting will be steep, swift, and likely quite scary.

While The IMF recognizes the gaping chasm between collapsing global growth expectations and market exuberance, they remain confident that US growth will save the world. This, Marc Faber explains to a wise Bloomberg TV panel, is why stocks around the world (and now in the US) are starting to weaken, "the recognition that global growth is not accelerating," as the narrative would like us all to believe, "but is slowing." Central Bank money-printing has enabled deficit-heavy fiscal policy and, Faber simplifies, "the larger the government, the less growth there will be from a less dynamic economy." Policy-makers have only one tool - money-printing, and QE99 is coming.

We have been discussing the widespread belief in "the narrative of central bank omnipotence" for a number of months (here and here most recently) as we noted "there are no more skeptics. To update Milton Friedman’s famous quote, we are all Bernankians now." So when Saxobank's CIO and Chief Economist Steen Jakobsen warns that "the mood has changed," and feedback from conference calls and speaking engagements tells him, there is a growing belief that the 'narrative of the central banks' is failing, we sit up and listen.

Yesterday, in a periodic repeat of what he says every 6 or so months, Jamie Dimon - devoid of other things to worry about - warned once again about the dangers hidden within the shadow banking system (the last time he warned about the exact same thing was in April of this year). The throat cancer patient and JPM CEO was speaking at the Institute of International Finance membership meeting in Washington, D.C., and delivered a mostly upbeat message: in fact when he said that the industry was "very close to resolving too big to fail" we couldn't help but wonder if JPM would spin off Chase or Bear Stearns first. However, when he was asked what keeps him up at night, he said non-bank lending poses a danger "because no one is paying attention to it." He said the system is "huge" and "growing." Dimon is right that the problem is huge and growing: according to the IMF which just two days earlier released an exhaustive report on the topic, shadow banking (which does not include the $600 trillion in notional mostly interest rate swap derivatives) amounts to over $70 trillion globally.

Two weeks ago, we revealed one part of the "Secret Deal" between the US and Saudi Arabia: namely what the US 'brought to the table' as part of its grand alliance strategy in the middle east. What was not clear is what was the other part: what did the Saudis bring to the table, or said otherwise, how exactly it was that Saudi Arabia would compensate the US for bombing the Assad infrastructure until the hated Syrian leader was toppled, creating a power vacuum in his wake that would allow Syria, Qatar, Jordan and/or Turkey to divide the spoils of war as they saw fit. The full answer comes courtesy of Anadolu Agency, which explains not only the big picture involving Saudi Arabia and its biggest asset, oil, but also the latest fracturing of OPEC at the behest of Saudi Arabia which however is merely using "the oil weapon" to target the old slash new Cold War foe #1: Vladimir Putin.

Did the sharp sell-off in crude oil trigger the meltdown in stocks? While there are plenty of potential reasons for the stock market to drop - stretched valuations, the slowdown in Germany, Japan and China, etc. - it is more than possible that the recent sell-off in crude oil might have served as a trigger. Crucially, as we explained in detail here and here, if the manipulation of prices of crude oil lower by the Saudis is indeed a US-friendly anti-Russian move, how much equity market pain (and thus created wealth) is America willing to take for the use of "The Oil Weapon"?

Just months after unofficially entering the currency wars, China has torn another page from the 'causes of the great depression' playbook. As Reuters reports, for the first time in almost a decade, China - the world's top coal importer - will levy import tariffs on the commodity crushing Australian (the biggest shipper of coal to China) dreams of a commodity-based renaissance. "China is clearly moving to protect its local miners," explained one analyst, which is key since so much of the credit market is predicated on these mal-invested entities - as the China National Coal Association, urged Beijing to act swiftly to support the besieged sector, where 70% of the miners were making losses and more than half owed wages. Crucially, Indonesia - the second-biggest shipper of the fuel to China - will be exempt from the tariffs, which one trader exclaimed, means "It is game over for Australian coal."