Archive - May 20, 2014

Equity markets are not happy about the Fed's Charles Plosser's economic exuberance ("3% growth no matter the weather" which is 20% above consensus of 2.5%) and his 'good-news-bad-news' monetary policy hawkishness ("may need to raise rates sooner rather than later"). But perhaps the most crucial part of his speech this morning was what the headlines notably left out. Plosser admonished his global central bank brethren: "if central banks do not limit their interventionist strategies and focus on returning to more normal policymaking aimed at promoting price stability and long-term growth, then they will simply encourage the financial markets to ignore fundamentals and to focus instead on the next actions of the central bank." Simply put, he warned, "central bankers have become too sensitive and desirous of managing prices in the financial world.."

The relationship between high-yield credit spreads (the 'cost' of protecting the most equity-like of the credit-risky bond spectrum) and VIX (the 'cost' of protecting equities) tend to have a very stable and consistently correlated relationship driven by clear arbitrages between the two asset classes and corporate finance causation. Last July, VIX futures plunged while credit spreads remained less impressed... that ended badly for the penny-in-front-of-the-steamroller crowd who saw VIX spike back to credit's reality. May 2014 - as the chart below shows - is exhibiting the same kind of disconnect and VIX traders and credit market participants are concerned.

USDJPY has broken below its 200-day moving-average at 101.25 and is trading back to almost 6-month lows this morning ahead of this evening's BoJ meeting (which is largely expected now not to provide the additional QQE that everyone hoped for earlier in the exuberant year). The Nikkei is tumbling right along side it... as are US equities... and US Treasury bond yields...

Over the weekend we titled our summary of GM's unprecedented avalanche of recalls so far in 2014 - the year in which the company's criminal practice of covering up its faulty products became a congressional scandal -  as follows: "GM Set To Surpass Total Recall Record This Year." Three days later we are happy to report that while Detroit, we not only have a big recall problem, we also have a new record, after moments ago GM just announced another 4 recalls affecting 2.4 million cars. This brings the total number of vehicle investigations since the start of the year to 35, and with today's four latest fiascos, has initiated a whopping 29 recalls. More importantly, this also means that the number of domestic recalls rises to 13.6 million, smashing the previous record of 11.8 million recalls in 2004, and brings the number of global recalls to 15.2 million: or a stunning 56% greater than the 9.7 million cars GM sold in all of 2013!

For those curious how much further into banana status the "developed" world may further drop, look no further than Turkey which is rapidly becoming the case study of banana governance par excellence.

Bitcoin's competitive environ is already prompting a race towards negative margin, and despite such VCs have dumped nearly $100 million in 3 companies in as many months. Here's what I see coming down the pike...

Having pricked the Biotech bubble with the simple questioning of the ballooning prices of drugs, it appears Congress may be well on its way to bursting the M&A Mania as Senator Carl Levin pushes his anti-inversion legislation by increasing, once again, the complexity of the tax code:

• *SEN. LEVIN SAYS U.S. FACING 'FLOOD OF TAX AVOIDANCE'
• *LEVIN BILL INCLUDES TWO YEAR MORATORIUM TO ALLOW FOR TAX REVAMP
• *LEVIN BILL RAISES THRESHOLD FOR INVERSIONS TO 50 PERCENT

“This is about leveling the playing field and rooting out flagrant tax abuse in our system...The fact that companies can change their tax liability to low-tax jurisdictions on paper while maintaining operations and ownership in the U.S. is unacceptable" We're glad they know what's best for all of us. Ironically, while the US makes the tax code so complex everyone wants to get out of the country, in italy the PM wants to simply it so much people can file by text message.

The last few days have been the worst for peripheral European bonds in well over a year. Spain, Italy, Greece, and Portugal have all seen yields jump and credit spreads soar in the last week as 'faith' in Draghi appears to be faltering. The reason this is concerning is, as we explained here, in the new normal, negative feedback loops have gone and instead we have hyperbolic loops which, when broken, end much more badly than a self-correcting un-rigged market would.

European officials are purposely talking the euro lower, but objected when Japan and China did.  See why curency manipulation is different than interest rate manipulation. 

An economy where most people work for the state or a global corporation is an economy that has lost its knowledge of the key entrepreneurial building blocks.

The drubbing in sales across all other markets excluding the US continued, with sales in Asia/Pacific, EAME and Latin America all dropping by more than 20% compared to last year. End blended result: global retail sales have now declined Y/Y for 17 consecutive months, which incidentally is just shy of the longest stretch of declining retail sales on record. Worse: the -13% drop in world retail sales matched the biggest annual drop since February of 2010.

"Perhaps the Fed and other central banks are controlling the market too much these days with their guidance. In the old days central banks used to like to create an element of surprise to ensure that markets didn't become complacent. With the crisis fresh in people's minds, with the stock of debt still huge and with the recovery still so uncertain they feel they cannot risk creating too much uncertainty at the moment. " - Deutsche Bank

Welcome to the recovery. For the 59th month in a row, the stock of bad loans across Italian banks rose (up ~26% YoY). At EUR 164 billion, this is a new record high and remains the biggest problem for Italian banks (non-performing loans now make up a reord 8.6% of total lending) as they suggest in their reports that profitability is improving. If that was not enough to have you piling cash into the heart of Europe's periphery, then the 22nd month of declines in loans to the private sector should do it. Despite a pick up in mortgage loans, private credit creation tumbled 3.1% YoY in April... not exactly the quasi-Keynesian dream that record low rates would suggest as transmission mechanisms remain entirely plugged.

Slowly - but surely - the USD's hegemony is being chipped away whether by foreign policy faux pas, crossed red-lines, or economic fragility. However, on Day 1 of Vladimir Putin's trip to China it is clear that the two nations are as close as ever. VTB - among Russia's largest banks - has signed a deal with Bank of China to pay each other in domestic currencies, bypassing the need for US Dollars for "investment banking, inter-bank lending, trade finance and capital-markets transactions." Kirill Dmitriyev the head of Russia’s Direct Investment Fund notes, "together it’ll be possible to discuss investment in various projects much more efficiently and clearly," as Russia's pivot to Asia continues to gather steam.

You can't make this up. An initial dump in gold happened when Europe was getting going late last night but as the US wakes up and markets get active, someone (panic-seller) decided it was an entirely optimal time to sell $520 million notional gold futures - sending the price of the precious metal down $7. Intriguingly, though the notional size was large, the actual move is not as large as we have become used to with the ubiquitous Slamdowns (and it's a Tuesday). At the same time, USDJPY was ramped... because we must maintain the appearance that stock markets are operating normally despite civil wars, coups, global growth slowdowns, and de-dollarization growing.