Archive - Feb 2014

With an unofficial tax rate for healthcare and college tuition that makes Scandinavian countries look like low-tax havens, no wonder the middle class in America is vanishing like mist in Death Valley. The political class is now bleating about the erosion of the middle class and rising wealth inequality. There are two primary sources of rising inequality in America: the Federal Reserve and the higher-education and healthcare cartels that so generously fund the campaigns of the bleating politicos.

Kudos to the Bank of Japan. Its heroic campaign to water down the yen has borne fruit.

Who stole the people's money?

A few days ago Bloomberg made a big splash with a story about an unknown trader who was so enamored in the BTFD mentality, or for whatever other reason, that he sold a substantial $18 million in VIX calls, betting that the market downdraft would promptly normalize. Alas, while he may have pocketed the cash up front, since then things have not worked out quite as expected for the variation margin requirements of the intrepid seller of vol.

In essence, you need to be selling strength.

We touched upon the disappointing GM car sales number reported earlier, which were promptly blamed on snow in the winter in some part of the country, which supposedly also meant that California's ravenous car buyers didn't purchase vehicles due to drought or something. Either way, one thing is clear: there was a big drop in auto demand which was to be expected from an overextended consumer whose plight we have been following for years. However, where GM did surprise, is that despite its apparent realization of climatic conditions, the company decided to plough through with abnormal production levels and flooded its dealer network with inventory. So much inventory, in fact, that in January, GM's channel stuffing pipeline rose by another 42K cars (a quarter of total sales in January), increasing the stock of cars parked at dealer lots and collecting dust to 780K from 748K in December, the second highest ever!

Many fear that a decline of between 1,500 to 2,000 points in the Nikkei to raise doubts about 'Abenomics' (i.e., hoary inflationism combined with deficit spending). We are still wondering what Abenomics is supposed to achieve. With a graying population and consequently a shrinking work force, inflationary policies seem especially ill-conceived in Japan. Maintaining the market's calm is predicated on the belief that the inflationary policy pursued by Abe/Kuroda will actually fail. Moreover, Japan's government can simply not afford higher borrowing costs, as 25% of its tax revenue is already going toward merely servicing interest costs on its current outstanding debt. In other words, Japan's government bond market is a glaring example of a Ponzi scheme and only a rising stock market maintains the media's complicitness in this mirage.

It was only a few days ago that Emerging Market FX was rallying on the back of a Turkish Central Bank rate hike that "fixed" everything. It was only a few days ago that investors were told they were "stupid" if bearish on US stocks because of EM weakness. Things have not gone as planned. That temporary blip has been demolished and EM FX has crumbled lower to fresh 5-year lows with many hitting record lows... and no, this does not mean money will flow back into US stocks (as we exclaim below).

Following today's crash in the US Manufacturing ISM, we now have the following snapshot of global manufacturing: only three countries are currently in contraction (sub 50 PMI) mode: Australia, Russia and France. Look for many more to join them if today's US print is a harbinger of things to come to the global manufacturing space.

The event horizon of bad faith is the exact point where the credulous folk of this modern age, from high to low, discover that their central banks only pretend to be regulating agencies, that they ride a juggernaut of which nobody is really in control. The illusion of control has been the governing myth since the Lehman moment in 2008. We needed desperately to believe that the authorities had our backs. They don’t even have their own fronts. Is the money world at that threshold right now?

As we already noted earlier today in our overnight recap "Alarms Going Off As 102 Dollar-Yen Support Breached", all eyes are glued on the USDJPY 102, which moments ago decisively breached the 102 support level. We said that "if support below the USDJPY fail solidly, then watch out below." Sure enough, here is Ben Hunt from Epsilon Theory with some follow up observations on this topic.

It's not just Japanese stocks that are in trouble. The Dow Industrials futures just lost 15,500 - the lowest level since the debt-ceiling lows mid-November and down over 1000 points from 2013's closing highs. The terrible ISM print triggerd wholesale buying in bonds and bullion and selling of stocks and the USD as the Dow broke below its 200DMA. VIX has hit 20% this morning and credit markets still suggest the S&P is 60-70 points rich.

The downward revision to last month's recent record high appears to have been the warning flag but this is a disaster. ISM Manufacturing dropped by its most since 2008 to levels not seen since May, missed by the most on record, and new orders collapsed at the fastest pace since December 1980. The employment sub-index also tumbled from 55.8 to 52.3. "Poor weather" was blamed by some respondents and still hangovers from the government shutdown but these numbers are simply unprecedented as the data came in at a 6-sigma miss to "economist" expectations.

Once again we learn that not a single sell-side analyst could have predicted the unprecedented "snow in the winter" weather shock that everyone knew about a month or so ago. In the latest example of just how confused "analysts" were when it comes to analyzing weather patterns, we just got both Ford and GM January car sales which tumbled by 7.5% and 12% respectively, on expectations for a decline of only 2.3% and 2.5% for the two US carmakers. And confirming that automaker executives continue the trend we have seen with all other sellers of goods and services, namely that when it is snowing in the winter, nobody buys anything, it was all the weather's fault.

All that glitters is not gold, particularly if you don't know how to look at it.