Archive - Apr 2014

"Everybody loves this market," jokes a hursuit Carl Icahn fresh from his eBay exigencies, "everybody is buying this and buying that... we have a lot of hedges on." However, Icahn - who knows better than most just how one can financially engineer a company - says "there is reason to be cautious... a lot of the earnings are sort of artificial." While proclaiming that the Fed "did a great job in saving the economy," Icahn laughs that "with these low interest rates it's easy to fake earnings... and I don't think that can continue forever." Simply put, the billionaire activist investors concludes, you can't print money forever and "that there will be a major correction."

The average price of USDA choice-grade beef has soared to $5.28 a pound, and the average price of a pound of bacon has skyrocketed to $5.46.  Unfortunately for those that like to eat meat, this is just the beginning of the price increases.  Due to an absolutely crippling drought that won’t let go of the western half of the country, the total size of the U.S. cattle herd has shrunk for seven years in a row, and it is now the smallest that is has been since 1951.  But back in 1951, we had less than half the number of mouths to feed.  And a devastating pig virus that has never been seen in the United States before has already killed up to 6 million pigs in this country and continues to spread like wildfire.  What all of this means is that the supply of meat is going to be tight for the foreseeable future even as demand for meat continues to go up.  This is going to result in much higher prices, and so food is going to put a much larger dent in American family budgets in the months and years to come.

In what the firm believes will be an improvement over other so-called dark pools because it will be a collaboration among big mutual-fund firms, WSJ reports that the giant fund manager is quietly building a new trading venue designed to let big money managers sidestep many of the problems that they argue lead to unfair or costly trading - i.e. avoid the HFT predation. Fidelity, with $1.95 trillion of assets under management, is in the initial stages of planning the trading venue and has just begun to pitch the idea to other large asset managers. It seems 5 years of vociferous exposure and a Michael Lewis book may be beginning to starve the HFTs of their prey.

The Nikkei 225 is down over 700 points from the post-FOMC minutes exuberance with major volume hitting the open in Japan. Japanese stocks are now down 15% from their high and trading at six-month lows (and the cheapest to the Dow in 15 months). USDJPY is tumbling further (though the standard opening knee-jerk stop-run is being attempted). Within the broader Topix index, Japanese bank stocks have just hit a bear market (down over 20% from their highs) at 10-months. When asked how he felt about this, we suspect Abe said "depends."

"In the rest of the world and particularly Asia, people do not think like we do. As far as they're concerned, gold is the only long term asset worth holding. It is the family pension fund... the financial press in the West, the mainstream media, basically rely for their information on analysts in the bullion banks. And the bullion banks are always short... Now whether the West is right or wrong is not the point. The point is there are 4 billion people in Asia who have got a very old-fashioned view of gold, and they have become wealthy over the last twenty years. And their view is likely to prevail against the <1 billion of us in North America and Western Europe. I mean it really is as simple as that. It's not a question of Austrian economics, or Keynesian, or whatever. We're outnumbered."

Last week BTFD failed for the Nasdaq and that class of talking-heads that we like to call asset-gatherers promulgated that there was no need to worry... this is a small segment of the market dragging down a high-beta index, rotate to bigger caps. The S&P has not failed the BTFD brigade since QE4EVA began... until today. For the first time, the S&P 500 cash index was unable to make a new high after bouncing off the 50DMA (in fact making a new cycle low)... now what?

And scene: "A lot of our rules were written for people and not necessarily for computers." - SEC

Obamacare has been such a smashing success that the US Health Secretary Kathleen Sebelius just couldn't wait until days after its "successful" rol out to get the hell out of dodge. "Kathleen Sebelius, the health and human services secretary, is resigning, ending a stormy five-year tenure marred by the disastrous rollout of President Obama’s signature legislative achievement, the Affordable Care Act.  Mr. Obama accepted Ms. Sebelius’s resignation this week, and on Friday morning he will nominate Sylvia Mathews Burwell, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, to replace her, officials said. The departure comes as the Obama administration tries to move beyond its early stumbles in carrying out the law, persuade a still-skeptical public of its lasting benefits, and help Democratic incumbents, who face blistering attack ads after supporting the legislation, survive the midterm elections this fall."

The Fed’s transmission mechanism to the household sector is blocked. The business credit expansion channel to higher GDP is blocked, too. The flood of demand by which the Fed endeavors to “pull” idle and underemployed workers back into production cannot be activated if the US economy has reached a condition of peak debt, as we strongly believe to be the case. Indeed, when the credit expansion channel is broken and done, all the Fed’s liquidity “accommodation” flows into the Wall Street finance channel where it pulls up the price of existing financial assets, not the employment rate of idle labor. This much is obvious, yet Yellen and her monetary politburo keep on attempting to flood the nation’s macroeconomic bathtub with more “demand”. Worse still, they fail to note that even if they could induce business and households to bury themselves deeper in debt that it wouldn’t necessarily have a salutary impact on the “labor market”— the ostensible target of their strenuous ministrations.

Curious what the fate of the petrodollar is? Look no farther than this Interfax update blasted moments ago by Bloomberg: "Gazprom Considers 'Symbolic' Yuan Bond Issue, Interfax Says."

With 30 year bond yields set to close their lowest in 10 months, CNBC's Rick Santelli is concerned at the signals that the Treasury yield curve is sending.If yesterday's minutes from the Fed were supposed to walk back their 'hawkish' tone, then Santelli slams they are "gonna need a really big billboard" because the term structure is still flattening. "When 'flattening' is the theme, that is not painting a rosy outlook for the long-term economy," and as Santelli warns, this is when the Fed is pulling out of its extraordinary policies. Santelli screams, "the entire monetary policy side has to be under review... and the only way you can keep the fallacy alive is "if you sell it as a 'deflationary' issue, where you can keep trying the same thing that isn't working."

At first we though this is AP's version of Thursday humor however upon close examination it turned out to be all too real. Moments ago a woman was taken under arrest after throwing what she described as a shoe at the person who may well be America's next president, Hillary Clinton, during a Las Vegas speech.

Today, as we plumb the depths of the US economic food-chain in that last bastion for the improverished US consumer, dollar stores, we find that that staple for low-cost "everything" Family Dollar, which operates 8,100 stores around the country, will be shutting down 370 stores "as it tries to reverse sagging sales and earnings." It was not clear immediately how many thousands of workers would be affected by the store shuttering. We assume "many to quite many." And what do they say? Why, that "the US economic recovery is obviously stronger than ever" of course!

Let's call the strategy of picking all the low-hanging fruit in an economy Plan A: you know, expanding credit, lowering interest rates, building infrastructure, fueling speculative frenzies, all the good stuff that fans the flames of "growth." Now that the central banks and political leadership of the U.S. and China have plucked all the low-hanging fruit, they have no Plan B.

But the pretty people on TV said the Fed Minutes proved they were the most dovish ever and initial claims hit recovery lows... What a total disaster - Equity markets peaked within a few minutes of the open and never looked back - yesterday's "Fed Cat Bounce" gave way to Really Red Thursday... with the Nasdaq and Russell 6.5% from their recent highs (and the S&P 3.5% off), we suspect a "markets in turmoil" special on business media any moment...