Archive - Jun 2014

We have not been shy about exposing the dark shadowy under-belly of lobbyists funding politicians (as most recently noted with Cantor's catastrophe) but now, as Engadget reports, finding out which representatives are in the pocket without a lot of tedious research just got a lot easier. A 16-year-old programmer has developed a browser plugin - Greenhouse - that, when you mouse-over the name of a US lawmaker, will serve up a list of which parties have donated to their campaign funds, and the quantities. Better than flappy-birds? The developer notes, "whether Democrat or Republican, we should all want a political system that is independent of the influence of big money and not dependent on endless cycles of fundraising from special interests."

There is a reason why Case-Shiller titled its summary presentation of the April housing market based on its 20-City Composite index "Rate of Home Price Gains Drop Sharply." The reason is simple: in April the housing market, while still preserving some upward momentum, appears to stumbled severely in April, with the Y/Y increase in the 20-City composite rising "only" 10.8%, down from 12.37% the month before, and the lowest annual increase since April of 2013. And this time there is no snow to blame it on.

We sat, we listened, and we could not quite believe our ears...

It's a simple question, yet one which is so difficult to answer (for lack of available data), and which fills most workers (especially those with a chip on their shoulder and/or delusions of grandeur) with dread: "Am I over, or underpaid in my job?"  The following handy chart, created by Reddit user Dan Lin, attempts to answer just this question with a breakdown of some 820 jobs listed by the BLS, with percentile data (25th, 50th, 75th, 90th) for the wage of any given occupation, allowing the determination where, relative to the median, one is paid.

It has long been the case that Jihadist Al-Qaeda groups tend to find the occasional odd, western groupie, but probably never before has there been a case as peculiar as that of 18-year-old Mohammad Hadi, from the city of Coventry, who as Al Arabiya reports, is believed to have joined the infamous and brutal Islamic militant group which is causing nightmares for the US state department, the Islamic State of Iraq and Levant aka ISIS. Meet Osama Bin Bieber.

Bloomberg reported yesterday that the German campaign to repatriate German gold from the U.S. has ended. The leader of the German gold repatriation movement, “Repatriate our Gold,” Peter Boehringer immediately refuted the article and posted in the comment section at the bottom of the article … The campaign to achieve a free market in gold and silver prices will continue.

Long before there was a Greece (and its existential threat to world order), there was Dubai's sovereign crisis in 2009 with Nakheel; and Dubai World (the floating islands) faced with massive debt loads and interconnectedness were bailed out. Since then it's been nothing but ponies and unicorns... until now. The debt is all still there (and the interconnectedness)... and despite the mirage of wealth creation that equity's massive rally has created, the drop in Dubai's stock market we noted yesterday turned into a rout overnight as it dropped a further 8% as one of the countries largest companies (Arabtec - Dubai's largest builder) plunged after high-level executive dismissals. “This is indiscriminate selling,” Ramez Merhi, director of asset management at Dubai-based Al Masah Capital, said by e-mail. “The markets took the stairway up, and an elevator down.”

• The Kerry Konfusion Kontinues: Kerry urges Kurds to save Iraq from collapse (Reuters)
• Abe Unveils Japan’s New Growth Strategy (WSJ)
• Because the recovery: Avon to Cut 600 Jobs as CEO McCoy Seeks to Trim Expenses (BBG)
• Iraqi Parties Pressure Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to Step Down (WSJ)
• Ukraine Rebels Call Cease-Fire to Match Government Truce (BBG)
• IRS accused of obstruction over lost emails in Tea Party affair (Reuters)
• IRS chief scorched as 'liar' (WND)
• Big Investors Missed Stock Rally (WSJ)
• U.K. Jury Finds Coulson Guilty of Conspiracy to Intercept Phone Voice-Mail Messages (WSJ)
• HSBC to halve countries served by private bank, sells assets (Reuters)
• Bond Market Has $900 Billion Mom-and-Pop Problem When Rates Rise (BBG)

Judging by the surprising reversal in futures overnight, which certainly can not be attributed to the latest data miss out of Europe in the form of the June German IFO Business Climate report (print 109.7, Exp. 110.3, Last 110.4) as it would be naive to assume that centrally-planned markets have finally started to respond as they should to macro data, it appears that algos, with their usual 24 hour delay, have finally discovered Dubai on the map. The same Dubai, which as we showed yesterday had just entered a bear market in a few short weeks after going turbo parabolic in early 2014. It is this Dubai which crashed another 8% just today, as fears that leveraged traders are liquidating positions, have surfaced and are spreading, adversely (because in the new normal this needs to be clarified) to other risk assets, while at the same time pushing gold and silver to breakout highs. Recall that it was Dubai where the global sovereign crisis started in the fall of 2009 - will Dubai also be the place where the first domino of the global credit bubble topples and takes down the best laid plans of central-planners and men?

Just hours after we noted Bloomberg's story of Germany's decision to halt its repatriation of gold from the NY Fed, the gentleman at the center of the story, who Bloomberg quoted as saying his 'Repatriate Our Gold' campaign was "on hold" - Peter Boehringer - has come out swinging... The Bloomberg story is "a 'non-news' article with a wrong headline, strange interviewees, old news, and with a clearly apologetic ideological approach." and that's just the start...

The story of energy and the economy seems to be an obvious common sense one: some sources of energy are becoming scarce or overly polluting, so we need to develop new ones. The new ones may be more expensive, but the world will adapt. Prices will rise and people will learn to do more with less. Everything will work out in the end. It is only a matter of time and a little faith. In fact, the Financial Times published an article recently called “Looking Past the Death of Peak Oil” that pretty much followed this line of reasoning. However, energy common sense doesn’t work because the world is finite.

"The epidemic is totally out of control," warns medical charity Médecins Sans Frontières of the deadly Ebola outbreak in Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone. "There is a real risk of it spreading to other areas...Ebola is no longer a public health issue limited to Guinea: it is affecting the whole of West Africa." As of Friday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention put the number of cases at 362 — more than any other outbreak on record. Here's everything you need to know about Ebola...

Moments ago the NAR released its May data, which on first blush was widely lauded as bullish: the topline print came at a 4.9% increase, rising from 4.65MM to 4.89MM, above the 4.74MM expected. Great news... if only on the surface. So what happens when one drills down into the detail? As usual, we focused on the last slide of the NAR breakdown, located at the very end of the supplementary pdf for good reason, because what it shows is hardly as bullish. So how does this "housing recovery" in which the NAR has proclaimed the "sales decline is over" look on a granular basis. The answer is below, and it is even worse than the April data.

"There's something going on in derivatives land," is the warning from ADM's Andy Ash and as Paul Mylchreest notes the relationship between VIX and SKEW suggests the options market is pricing in the possibility of a major market event. The process enables professionals to maintain the illusion of calmness in VIX while hedging their positions (as they attempt to unwind as we have shown). Whether this 'event' is a crash or melt-up is historically unclear but given the taper and the trend of the last few years, we suspect the former more likely that the latter.

For quite some time, we have been predicting that the Russians and Chinese will, at some point, bring an end to the petrodollar system that has virtually guaranteed the US the position of having its currency be the world's default currency. This position has allowed the US, in recent decades, to go on a borrowing and currency-printing spree, the likes of which the world has never seen. But now, the US is broke, and its stature as the biggest boy has begun to wane. The other kids in the schoolyard are playing smart, whilst the US is still playing tough... and it's no longer working... The US is at war with China and Russia. It's an undeclared war, and it's monetary warfare, not military warfare.