Archive - Oct 2014

On Tuesday, the Dow fell 272 points. No big deal, of course - we rebounded the most in 3 years yesterday. But what if it continued? Just six years ago it fell 51%. It could easily do so again – back down to, say, 8,000. There would be nothing unusual about it. 50% corrections are normal. You know what would happen, don’t you? Ever since the "Black Monday" stock market crash in 1987 it has been standard procedure for the Fed to react quickly. But what if Yellen & Co. got out the party favors... set up the booze on the counter... laid out some dishes with pretzels and olives... and nobody came? What if the stock market stayed down for 30 years, as it has in Japan?

Despite the still confident exclamations from officials that the Ebola pandemic is 'contained', more and more nations are admitting to Ebola-symptomatic cases or bringing infected patients back from Africa for treatment. Australia has its first potential case of the deadly disease, as Bloomberg reports a nurse who returned from volunteering in Africa has developed Ebola-like symptoms. Despite claims that Nigeria's outbreak is over, a Turkish worker there has been hospitalized in Istanbul after signs of high fever and diarrhea. Health officials from Germany confirm a 3rd Ebola patient has arrived in the country - having contracted the disease in Liberia. And finally, just as in the sad case of Thomas Duncan in Dallas, The Guardian reports the infected Spanish nurse went untreated and unquarantined for a week despite reporting symptoms at least three times to hospital officials. It seems the world is ill-prepared for this...

Another day, another demand by "activist" (which as we have explained patiently before simply means someone who demands companies use moar debt to fund buybacks and/or dividends) Carl Icahn for Apple to buyback it shares. Uncle Carl's bottom line: AAPL stock would be worth a ridiculous $203 (or a $1.2 trillion market cap), if only the board were to "repurchase a lot more" stock "and sooner." Icahn's insight in a nutshell: "the more shares repurchased now, the more each remaining shareholder will benefit from that earnings growth." That's great, but we don't get why waste his precious repeating what he has said so many times before: instead Icahn should just pitch the Fed to monetize AAPL stock in QE 5. Value added Q.E. and well D.

Initial claims fell a modest 1000 this week to 287k, beating expectations (for the 4th week in a row) of 294k hovering near the lows of the cycle. The less noisy 4-week moving-average has dropped to its lowest level since Feb 2006 and continuing claims drops to its lowest since April 2006. This is as good as it gets... (especially in light of the tumble in hiring seen in JOLTS) - simply put, there can be no firings, because there is no hiring.

Yesterday's 'biggest surge in 3 years' ramp in stocks (following the release of September's FOMC meeting minutes) was, perhaps surprisingly, not unprecedented. When the Septemeber FOMC statement was released we saw the same kneejerk 'buy it all' reaction with a dramatic divergence between stocks and bond yields... so what happens next?

Here we go again. Exactly two months after the deadly shooting of Michael Brown by a local police officer in Ferguson, MO, it is time for part two. Overnight, in nearly the same spot as the Brown shooting, a white off-duty policeman shot and killed a black teenager in St Louis, officers said, triggering a night of protests just miles from the site of another police shooting of another black youth in the suburb of Ferguson. Reuters has the details: police said the 18-year-old was armed and fired three shots while he was being chased by the officer, and they had recovered a gun at the scene.  The youth was killed almost two months to the day since sometimes violent protests erupted in Ferguson after a white police officer shot dead unarmed black 18-year-old Michael Brown.  Said otherwise, cops say Myer was armed but witnesses say he was only holding a sandwich when he was tased, fell over & then was shot at 17 times of which "only" three hit.

• Five U.S. airports to screen for fever (Reuters)
• Danger, central banks trading with each other: Bipolar U.S. Stocks See Biggest Mood Swing in Three Years  (BBG)
• Draghi Policies Blunted in Berlin as German Protests Grow (BBG)
• White policeman kills black teen in St Louis, triggering fresh protests (Reuters)
• Au Revoir to France’s Welfare Model as Socialists Cut Spending (BBG)
• Here comes Roberto Cavalski (Reuters)
• There are 49 U.S. venture-capital-backed companies with a valuation of $1 billion or more—the highest number on record (WSJ)
• Pressure mounts on Hong Kong leader over payout amid crisis (Reuters)

• IRELAND SELLS 10-YEAR BONDS AT RECORD-LOW YIELD OF 1.63%
• GERMAN 10-YEAR BUNDS RISE; YIELD FALLS 2 BASIS POINTS TO 0.88%
• DUTCH 10-YEAR GOVERNMENT BOND YIELD DROPS TO RECORD-LOW 1.021%
• PORTUGUESE 10-YEAR BOND YIELD DROPS TO RECORD-LOW 2.942%
• FRENCH 10-YEAR GOVERNMENT BOND YIELDS DROP TO RECORD-LOW 1.214%
• U.S. 10-YEAR NOTE YIELD DROPS TO 2.296%, LOWEST SINCE JUNE 2013
• SPANISH 10-YEAR BOND YIELD DROPS TO RECORD-LOW 2.038%
• FINNISH 10-YEAR YIELD DROPS TO 1% FOR FIRST TIME ON RECORD

There is something seriously wrong if the Federal Reserve cannot raise the Fed Fund`s Rate a measly 100 basis points after 7 longs years of ZIRP.  Seven years is an entire business and economic cycle!

The following chart-heavy presentation from Grant Williams is among his best as he wends his way methodically from the 19th century to the present day (and into the future) examining "The Consequences of the Economic Peace." From Keynes to Kondratieff and from Napoleon to Nixon, Williams looks at the ramifications of several decades of easy credit and attempts to draw parallels with a time in history when the world looked remarkably similar to how it does now (as he notes "that last time didn’t end so well, I’m afraid.") The real day of reckoning (Williams notes rather ominously), when the unconscionable level of debt that has been built up during the fiat money era finally topples over under its own weight like the giant wave in The Perfect Storm, lies ahead of us.

In a field in the middle of Madison, Georgia (in close proximity to Atlanta and the home of the CDC), hundreds of thousands of air-tight "coffin-liners" have laid since 2008. The site is reportedly rented by the CDC. Today, the CDC says that in the event of an Ebola outbreak in the U.S., bodies of the deceased would be required to be buried within "hermetically sealed caskets", which would prevent the escape of microbes during funerals. Funeral industry experts note that hermetically sealed coffins are not common in the slightest for burial. This would suggest that the CDC has stockpiled such coffins in places like Madison, Georgia specifically in preparation for a viral outbreak. Has the CDC been expecting the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans due to infection for at least the past six years.

Despite the post-FOMC exuberance, there has been yet another major technical breakdown, this time in the infamous Vanguard Total World Stock ETF... remember, the trend is your friend... until it ends.

"Even though bitcoin is volatile, it's still safer than the national currency," said one young 'tech-savvy' Venezuelan, who as Reuters reports, is looking to bypass President Maduro's dysfunctional economic controls. "I'm teaching people to use bitcoin to bypass the exchange controls," said Gerardo Mogollon, a business professor who styles himself as 'Dr. Bitcoin Venezuela,' speaks at conferences and appears in online videos to urge Venezuelans to adopt the crypto-currency..."Bitcoin is a way of rebelling against the system."

The student loan debt bubble in America is spiraling out of control, and it is financially crippling an entire generation of young Americans.  At this point, the grand total of student loan debt in the United States has reached a staggering 1.2 trillion dollars, and an all-time record high 40 million Americans are currently paying off student loan debts.  Just when our young people should be planning on buying homes and starting families, they find themselves financially paralyzed by oppressive levels of debt.  What makes all of this even worse is that only some of our college graduates are able to get the “good jobs” that we promised them.