Archive - Jul 31, 2014

It's not been a good day for the CIA. First, the State Department slams them for brutally treating terror suspects after the 9/11 attacks, noting that "no American is proud" of CIA tactics. And now, as The NY Times reports, an internal investigation has found that its officers improperly penetrated a computer network used by the Senate Intelligence Committee in preparing the report on the CIA's detention and interrogation program. Of course, this is not the first time the CIA has hacked Senate networks but do not fear American citizenry, CIA Director has apologized for his staff "acting inappropriately" and is setting up an internal accountability board to review the matter. It appears Ron Paul was right.

Like so many other things in popular American culture, this quaint notion of a "middle class" in the U.S. is at this point nothing more than a myth; a rapidly fading fantasy from a bygone era. As we have noted for quite some time, the decimation of the middle class began long ago. It really got started in the early 1970?s after Nixon defaulted on the gold standard and financialization began to take over the American economy. Median real wages haven’t increased since that time and the rest is history.

Two War Criminals enter...

Over the past 6 months, there has been much talk about the strategic proximity between Russia and China, made even more proximal following the "holy grail" gas deal announced in May which would not have happened on such an accelerated time frame had it not been for US escalation in Ukraine. And yet little has been said about that other just as crucial for the "new BRIC-centric world order" relationship, that between Russia and India. That is about to change when yesterday the Russian central bank announced that having been increasingly shunned by the west, Russia discussed cooperation with Reserve Bank of India Executive Director Shrikant Padmanabhan. The punchline: India agreed to create a task group to work out a mechanism for using national currencies in settlements. And so another major bilateral arrangement is set up that completely bypasses the dollar.

From 1800 to 1950, Argentina had been a relatively low frequency 'defaulter', but as the following chart from The Economist shows, since then (as we noted here) they have made up for it.

Watch what happens when new tech is used to create better products, cheaper than the incumbents could ever have dreamt of...

There is no grammatical justification for why two days ago, AP did it again, when a "harshly" worded tweet by the AP became this, just four hours later.

With Argentine politicians explaining that "Argentina is not in default" and ISDA set to decide if last night's default is an 'official' trigger event for CDS, it appears Kirchner, Kicillof, and their (k)omrades may have found an angel. The initial 'bailout' plan, by which Argentine banks bought the holdouts defaulted debt (then promptly acquiesced to Argentina's old debt-swap agreement), failed last night; but, as WSJ reports, JPMorgan is in discussions to buy the defaulted bonds of Argentina's holdout creditors. While this would not impact the default decision (that is history), it would speed up the exit from default rapidly. Of course, JPM is not doing this out of love for Argentina, we suspect they are on the hook for a few billion CDS and need some cheapest-to-deliver bonds to help them through the settlement process.

Who says geopolitics doesn't matter in today's efficient markets?

When you are leveraged at these levels, you only need the assets you invest in to fall 4% before you’ve wiped out all of your underlying capital (€26 * 0.04 = €1.04).

"We remove adidas from the Conviction List following the company reducing FY14 net income guidance (to €650mn from €830mn), resulting in 33%/40%/46% cuts to our FY14-16 earnings estimates. Our new 12-month price target is €77.5. Since being added to the Conviction List on October 18, 2013, the shares are -16.1% vs. FTSE World Europe index +6.7%. We also remove the stock from the Directors of Research Focus List." - Goldman Sachs

We warned last month that under the covers Chicago PMI looked a lot weaker than the headlines and this morning's collapse confirms that. Against expectations of a small rise to 63.0, Chicago PMI plunged from 62.6 to 52.6 (13-month lows) for the biggest miss on record. According to the release itself, "A monthly fall of this magnitude has not been seen since October 2008 ." The was an 8 standard-deviation miss from analyst expectations (Joe Lavorgna was on the high side at 63.0). New orders, inventory, production, order backlogs, and prices paid all dropped (but employment rose?). This is the biggest 2-month drop since Lehman (and 2nd biggest since 1980). We await the seasonal adjustment "correction" as MNI get the call from Yellen.

The Dow and S&P 500 are now in the red for July as stocks are opening weak this morning. Of course, the month's big loser is the Russell 2000 which is down 5.3% - its worst month in over 2 years.

It would appear "Russia" is the new "weather" when it comes to missed earnings expectations. As Bloomberg reports, Adidas shares fell by a record after the world’s second-largest sporting-goods maker slashed its full-year profit forecast, bursting euphoria around the German company less than a month after its national team’s victory in the World Cup. The reason, aside from golf, "turmoil in Russia," which just happens to be its most profitable region. But Jack Lew promised that there would be no impact?

While earlier today initial claims disappointed modestly to the upside, the economic print the market has been fascinated by is the otherwise C-grade economic indicator released by the BLS, the Employment Cost Index, which is quite a backward looking (today's release looked at Q2) at wages, salaries and benefits. The reason it is fascinated by it is that, supposedly, total employment costs rose the most in 6 years, with wages rising the most since Q3 2008 and benefits: the most since Q2 2011. And the reason why the risk switch has been pushed into the Off position is because this alleges that wages are finally rising, something which the Fed did not know yesterday, and which will make the hawkish case that much stronger.