Archive - Dec 29, 2014

In November some 47.1 tons of gold were withdrawn from the NY Fed, bringing the Fed's total earmarked gold to just 6,029 tonnes: the biggest single monthly outflow going back to the turn of the century. This is also the lowest amount of gold held at the NY Fed in the 21st century.

What scares me about the Clash of Civilizations is that the three leaders of the three biggest civilizations – the US (Western), China (Sinic), and Russia (Orthodox) – will misplay their hands and take on another civilization directly or, worse, take on each other, and that will vaporize the Narrative of Central Bank Omnipotence in a nanosecond. The existential risk here for markets is not that China/Russia/Europe/America might “collapse”, whatever that means. No, the existential risk is that the great civilizations of the world will be “hollowed out” internally, so that the process of managing the ten thousand year old competition between civilizations devolves into an unstable game of pandering to domestic crowds rather than a stable equilibrium of balance of power.

China's Leading Index has fallen to its lowest since Feb 2009 this evening, down 4 straight months from credit-driven 18 month highs. This economic weakness has exaggerated the already weak tone in Yuan trading this evening pushing CNY to its weakest in almost 7 months (against the USD), its furthest on record from the CNY Fix (10-month highs), and very close to the PBOC's upper +2% band for CNY trading. At 6.23, USDCNY is over 1000 pips weaker than the CNY fix.

The Christmas Truce in 1914 showed that, given the choice, people do not want to be out fighting and killing each other. While The Truce was joyous for the soldiers, it was dangerous for the political leadership on both sides. Simply put, our efforts must be focused on opposing all war propaganda perpetrated by governments against the will of the people.

Natalie Heimel and her fiancé, Edward Mallue Jr., a pair of captains in the Army, received two letters from President Obama in less than 24 hours as they prepared for their wedding ceremony at Kaneohe Klipper Golf Course in Hawaii. The first, a nicely worded regretful but congratulatory RSVP to their wedding invite... and the second, as Bloomberg reports, informing them that their wedding would have to be moved since President Obama wanted to play through.

It appears, despite all the promises, all the lies, and all the constant propaganda, that foreign investors have finally seen right through Shinzo Abe's risible plan to revive the Japanese economy by crashing its currency (just like Russia?). As Bloomberg reports, after pumping record amounts of cash into Japanese shares last year, they’ve hardly added to holdings in 2014. Inflows are down 94 percent this year to 898 billion yen ($7.5 billion), on pace for the smallest annual amount since the 2008 global financial crisis.

It has become exceedingly apparent that most Americans no longer think for themselves.  Rather, most conversations in America today consist of an exchange of sound bites, phrases, ideas and talking points that the “matrix” has fed us.  Most of us are just zombies that spend our days searching for the things that we are desperately craving.  For fictional zombies, that usually consists of brains.  For American zombies, that usually consists of something that will feed our addictions. Our society is breaking down in thousands of different ways, and we can see the evidence of this all around us.

World GDP Growth Expectations for 2015 just dropped dramatically to their lowest since expectations began to be tracked. From 3.40% in early 2013, the consensus is expectating world economic growth at a mere 2.72% (a 20% decline in growth expectations). Of course, there is one thing that is not going down...

However desirable it may be to protect the Earth from the dire consequences of a runaway climate the chances that the world will agree to cut its emissions quickly enough to stay below the 2C threshold are somewhere between zip, zilch and zero. (There’s also the question of whether cuts of the magnitude necessary would be politically, economically and technologically achievable if the world does agree, but we’ll leave it aside here.) Now imagine that you are one of the prominent politicians – Obama, Kerry, Merkel, Ban Ki-moon, Hollande, Cameron, Davey, whoever – who have publicly and repeatedly stated that climate change is the greatest threat facing the world, that the world is in serious trouble if nothing is done to stop it but that a solution is still within our reach. What do you tell people when next year’s make-or-break Paris climate talks show that it isn’t?

Since about 2001, several sectors of the economy have become increasingly inefficient, in the sense that it takes more resources to produce a given output, such as 1000 barrels of oil. This growing inefficiency explains both slowing world economic growth and the sharp recent drop in prices of many commodities, including oil. The mechanism at work is what I would call the crowding out effect. As more resources are required for the increasingly inefficient sectors of the economy, fewer resources are available to the rest of the economy. As a result, wages stagnate or decline. Central banks find it necessary lower interest rates, to keep the economy going. What we seem to be seeing recently is a drop in price to what consumers can afford for some of these increasingly unaffordable sectors. Unless this situation can be turned around quickly, the whole system risks collapse.

While inflation (explicit in price rises or implicit in USD debauchery) over the past 30 years has eaten away at the average American's standard of living, it is the cost of living the 1%-life that has truly soared. As Forbes' "Cost of Living Extremely Well" index  (CLEWI) shows, since 1982, the 1% have seen prices for their goods rise at double the pace of the average joe. However, do not feel too sorry for them, as their net worth, courtesy of various Fed interventions has outpaced the cost of living extremely well by over 4 times.

In what we suspect will be the first of many, Houston-based Civeo (which provides workforce accomodation to the oil industry) has crashed over 20% after-hours (after being down over 65% since September already) following the total carnage of its earnings report.

• *CIVEO HAS CUT U.S., CANADA HEADCOUNT BY 45%, 30% FROM EARLY '14
• *CIVEO SEES 2015 REV $540M-$600M, EST. $817.3M

Apparently having not only (Jana) but two (Einhorn) activist hedge funds is not nearly sufficient to send a stock soaring to all time highs, especially when said stock can no longer afford to buy back its own stock.

The Japanese stock market reached its all-time-high on December 29th 1998, and as The Wall Street Journal reports, analysts were still looking forward to another strong year for shares in 1990, despite some signs of danger. Reading through the headline on that day suggests, 25 years later, investors and talking-heads have learned absolutely nothing...