Archive - Jul 2014

Following yesterday's disappointing results by Visa, which is the largest DJIA component accounting for 8% of the index and which dropped nearly 3%, while AMZN's 10% tumble has weighed heavily on NASDAQ futures, it has been up to the USDJPY to push US equity futures from dropping further, which it has done admirably so far with the tried and true levitation pump taking place just as Europe opened. One thing to keep in mind: yesterday the CME quietly hiked ES and NQ margins by 6% and 11% respectively. A modest warning shot across the bow of what may be coming down the line?

There are major clashes occurring currently in The West Bank tonight as claims of 10s of thousands and Palestinians clash with Israeli soldiers. An Israeli army spokeswoman told the AFP news agency, "there are thousands of rioters there. They are rolling burning tyres and throwing Molotov cocktails and fireworks at soldiers and border police... The soldiers are responding with riot disposal means." Sadly, as the photos below reveal taken moments ago show, things appear set to get very much worse.

30 years ago, the great outsourcing wave took millions of US low-skilled jobs and planted them right in the heart of China, which was about to undergo the fastest industrialization-commercialization-financialization experiment in history. $26 trillion in bank assets later, the world's biggest housing bubble, and a teetering financial system that every day depends on Beijing making the correct central-planning decision (of kicking the can one more day, of course) or else the biggest financial collapse in history will take place, all lubricated by years of inflation in everything and most certainly wages, and suddenly outsourding jobs in China is not all that attractive.  In fact, it has gotten so bad that China itself is now forced to outsource its own labor to cheaper offshore markets. Such as this one.

The Obama Administration’s Orwellian government employee snitch network, dubbed the “Insider Threat Program,” first made headlines about a year ago. Fast forward a year, and it appears that several members of Congress are also becoming increasingly concerned. Some are starting to ask questions, but as usual, the “most transparent administration in history” is entirely nontransparent. What is clear since the Edward Snowden revelations is that the government has zero interest in reining in these programs. It merely wants to make sure the public can never learn about government criminality in the future. Hence the aggressive “war on whistleblowers.”

Two quick quick anecdotes about the new (ab)normal.

A house divided against itself will surely fall.  America is more divided today than it has been in decades, and the deep divisions that are tearing us apart continue to get even worse.  In fact, a newly released Rasmussen Reports national survey discovered that 67 percent of voters believe that America is even more divided now than it was four years ago. What most Americans can agree on is that we are facing tremendous problems as a nation.  Unfortunately, there is very little agreement on what the solutions to our problems are. 

When we reported on the government's decisiosn to withhold irrigation water to California for the first time in 54 years, we warned there would be consequences: farmers are hit hardest as "they're all on pins and needles trying to figure out how they're going to get through this." Fields will go unplanted (supply lower mean food prices higher), or farmers will pay top dollar for water that's on the market (and those costs can only be passed on via higher food prices). Sure enough, as Bloomberg reports, farmers in California’s Central Valley, the world’s most productive agricultural region, are paying as much as 10 times more for water than they did before the state’s record drought cut supply.

Japanese CPI printed 3.6% in June, modestly down from May's 3.7% YoY, but hotter than the expected 3.5% YoY analysts predicted. If you don't eat food or use energy then inflation merely bit 2.3% of your income this year but if you did then you may have noticed that energy costs are 9.1% higher YoY, TVs +8.0%, and Food +4.1% (both showing no signs of making Japan's Misery Index any less, well, miserable). PPI also printed at 3.6% (23 year highs). So when the Japanese politicians say "Abenomics is well on its way to achieving its goals..." they must mean 'of lowering living standards for all Japanese people'.

With peripheral European sovereign bond yields at or near record lows, no matter how much GDP gets downgraded (Italy), banking system collapses (Portugal), or loan losses surge (Spain); things must be great for borrowers, right? Wrong! And this is exactly what keeps Mario Draghi up at night... In fact, as the following dismal reality chart shows, real corporate lending spreads are at record highs... crushing the credit-created-growth dream of a European Renaissance.

The ongoing transition of gold price manipulation from conspiracy theory to conspiracy fact just escalated as Bloomberg reports, Peter Hambro, chairman of Russia's 2nd largest gold producer Petropavlovsk Plc, said he was "horrified" by the manipulation of the London fix given its importance to the industry. One wonders just how many of these individuals, involved in the manipulation, Hambro is dinner-party friends with?

Passing a European Banking stress test these days is a little like farting - easy to do, mostly hot air, and yet it typically warns of something else coming down that isn't going to be pretty

Why are so many plagues hitting the United States all of a sudden? Yes, one can always point out bad stuff that is happening somewhere in the country, but right now we are facing a nightmarish combination of crippling drought, devastating wildfires, disastrous viruses, dying crops and superbugs that scientists don’t know how to kill.

As if trying to figure out the impact of the central banks' balance sheets and China's record debt creation on stocks wasn't enough of a complexity (actually it really isn't that complex) for a market where fundamentals haven't mattered in 5 years, there is also the issue of ETF basket creation, best known for the daily 3:30 pm ramp when ETFs catch up with their underlying components in a rising market, giving it all a procyclical turbo boost. It is here that SocGen reports that in the past fortnight, there was record equity ETF creation, mostly focusing on the S&P 500.

While Iraqi crude represents about 4.4% of world production, or around 3.4 mmbd (5th largest in the world); enabling investors to shrug at any fears that ISIS will spread to the South and interrupt this supply (since it will be 'contained'); what many do not comprehend is that in such a tight oil market as we currently have, Goldman warns that as much as 60% of OPEC’s expected capacity growth over the next five years to come from Iraq. Production losses so far have been fairly small, and have only been felt domestically. However, the larger impact of the conflict potentially lies in the medium to long term.

Grab your popcorn as The Socialist Singularity comes to be... We are sure Steve Liesman will ask his 'economics reporter' questions while cow-towing to his glorious leader's position on job-destroying 'minimum wage' increases, unpatriotic (though legal) inversions, Fed-driven inequality, and the massive and unprecedented divergence between "bubble" markets and the minions that make it up... always remember "debt-is-good" but "hope-is-better."