Archive - Oct 2014

At the moment, the Ebola virus is ravaging three countries - Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone - where it is doubling every few weeks, but singular cases and clusters of them are cropping up in dense population centers across the world. Ebola's mortality rate can be as high as 70%, but seems closer to 50% for the current major outbreak. This is significantly worse than the Bubonic plague, which killed off a third of Europe's population. Previous Ebola outbreaks occurred in rural, isolated locales, where they quickly burned themselves out by infecting everyone within a certain radius, then running out of new victims. But the current outbreak has spread to large population centers with highly mobile populations, and the chances of such a spontaneous end to this outbreak seem to be pretty much nil. The scenario in which Ebola engulfs the globe is not yet guaranteed, but neither can it be dismissed as some sort of apocalyptic fantasy: the chances of it happening are by no means zero.

Just over a week ago, the Japanese stock market participants were stunned when stock orders amounting to a whopping $617 billion (yes Billion with a B) - more than the size of Sweden’s economy - were canceled for reasons still unknown in what was one of the biggest 'fat finger' trading errors of all time. Since then, US equity markets have suddenly become notably more volatile - and fallen significantly, VIX has seen odd intraday 'spikes', S&P futures saw the very odd 'satan signal', and USDJPY has suffered its worst losses in 3 years. This raises the question of whether US market microstructure is any better than Michael Lewis' Flash Boys' book describes.. (as we head into a bond market holiday, dismal liquidity, and a potential Black Monday), “That could absolutely happen here,” Tabb Group's Larry Tabb warns Bloomberg.

The difference between 2007 and today is back then these were largely sub-prime loans and overvalued real estate mortgages, vs, today's entire global bond market bubbles from Spain and Greece to the United States.  

The last note briefly addressed the benefits associated with the reverse repurchase facility (RRF). Indeed liabilities have increasingly moved from bank balance sheets to the Fed, freeing lending capacity. One must recall reserves are not fungible outside of the banking system (but can act as collateral for margin). With flow decreasing, the opportunity for small relative volume bids spread over a large quantity of transactions (most instances per unit time) decreased with market prices in many asset markets. Is more downside coming?

One would think that after last week's market rout, the worst in years, that Goldman clients would have just one question: why just a month after you, chief Goldman strategist David Kostin said to "Buy Stocks Because Hedge Funds Suck; Also Chase Momentum And Beta", are stocks crashing? No really: this is literally what Kostin said in the first days of September: "investors should buy stocks which should benefit from a combination of beta, momentum, and popularity as funds attempt to remedy their weak YTD performance heading into late 2014." Turns out frontrunning the world's most overpaid money losers wasn't such a great strategy after all. In any event, that is not what Goldman's clients are asking. Instead as David Kostin informs us in his weekly letter to Jim Hanson's beloved creations, "every client inquiry focused on the same four topics: global growth, FX, oil, and small-caps."

The may be secret agreements and a grand conspiracy to manipulate the capital markets and commodities, but they are still largely understandable through rational analysis.  Not being privy to such secret deals, here is one man's view of the near-term technical outlook for the foreign exchange market, bond, commodities and stocks.  

We warned a week ago of the various possibilities surrounding an Ebola outbreak in America, and today we get some degree of confirmation of a medical-based martial-law coming to the US. Governor Dan Malloy has declared a Public Health Emergency in Connecticut, authorizing the "isolation of any individual reasonably believed to have been exposed to the Ebola virus." Simply put, as we noted previously, the State of Public Health Emergency allows bureaucrats to detain and force-vaccinate people without due process - despite not one single case being found in CT. If there is a major Ebola pandemic in America, all of the liberties and the freedoms that you currently enjoy would be gone. The state of public health emergency will remain in effect indefinitely until lifted by the governor.

It's sad to say with such finality, but a universal fact of existence is that most of the people you meet in this life are fundamentally and functionally ignorant. Entire nations have fallen throughout history because of this terrible weakness... By extension, such ignorance is not just an inherent disease but also an easily exploitable disease. The disease of ignorance leaves us vulnerable to many other plagues, including literal plagues like the Ebola virus. When we take the establishment at its word concerning the threat of Ebola outbreak, we make ourselves vulnerable. When people assume that the worst could never happen to them, history shows us that it inevitably does.

Investors worldwide poured a net $15.8 billion into bond funds in the week ended Oct. 8. As Reuters reports, this is the biggest inflows in dollar terms since records began in 2001, according to EPFR Global. Money market funds also saw the biggest inflow since October 2013 as it appears the real great rotation is from stocks (biggest outflows in 9 weeks) into 'safe' assets. The up-in-quality, and up-in-capital-structure trade is alive and well, as BofA notes, investment grade inflows exploded as high-yield spreads widened further - now at one-year wides (despite small inflows). "Money is flowing out of PIMCO," warned one analyst but as BofA notes, PIMCO flows are reported monthly and so it is unclear as to the extent these flows are "overstated."

Back in the 1980s, Irwin Schiff, anti-tax activist, political prisoner, and father of free-market pundit Peter Schiff, wrote a marvelous comic book titled How an Economy Grows and Why It Doesn’t, which teaches economic principles through a light-hearted story.

The comic starts with three islanders - Able, Baker, and Charlie...

While the memory of a financial market participant can be measured in nanoseconds, it appears that the average American has also become goldfish-like as RealtyTrac reports a total of 797,865 home equity lines of credit were originated nationwide, up 20.6% from a year ago and the highest level since 2008. As Jim Quinn so eloquently notes, after a two year Wall-Street-engineered fraudulent boost in home prices in the exact markets that led the bubble in 2003 through 2007, the delusional dolts are now acting like the increase in home equity is real: As RealtyTrac's Blomquist exudes, "this recent rise in HELOC originations indicates that an increasing number of homeowners are gaining confidence in the strength of the housing recovery."

Physical gold is being accumulated and used in exchanges but very discretely as of now. The geopolitical and economic environment in the last few months was in my view the calm before the storm. Both the economic and political environments are uncertain and will surprise the complacent markets.

The S&P is 5.5% off its all-time record (triple the 666 lows) highs (and still positive year-to-date) and this happened...

Too soon?

We have documented the history if individual metals before and we have also visualized their annual production. However, we have not seen all of the metals on one timeline before such as in this infographic. Worth noting is gold’s prominence ever since the beginning of history. Because the yellow metal is one of the rare elements that can be found in native form (such as nuggets), it was used by the earliest of our ancestors.