Archive - Sep 2014

Q. What are traders talking about at the present time here at the New York Stock Exchange?

Cashin: We are concerned about two questions. First, how will the Fed do in keeping money reasonably easy without causing inflation? Second, where do we stand with the current geopolitical challenges? For now, these challenges seem to be short term concerns. But should we begin to see a financial contagion and pressure building on banks in Europe, perhaps out of the Ukraine situation, things could theoretically turn into what I call a «Lehman moment». That is when markets come under pressure but seem to be under control, and then things change suddenly.

The US economy is dead. The Fed has known this for a long time, but pumped it up to where it is now to draw in all the greater fools, the so-called big investors who have made money like honey from QE and ZIRP. They are the greater fools. The American real economy ceased being a consideration long ago. We’re in for big surprises, and they won’t be pretty, they’ll be pretty nasty. There are far too many people who think of themselves as smart who don’t see the difference between a theater play and a reality show. The Fed will raise rates because that will make the biggest banks the most money. There’s nothing else that matters. The Fed can’t revive the US economy, that’s just a foolish notion. But it can suck a lot of wealth out of it.

First it was the 'broad coalition' that appeared a little narrower than President Obama explained to the world last week. Today, 2 more crucial aspects of the 'strategy' appear to be faltering. Despite the promise of $500 million to train "moderate" Syrian terrorist/rebels to fight ISIS, GlobalPost reports Syrian rebels and jihadists from the Islamic State have agreed a non-aggression pact for the first time. Under the deal, "the two parties will respect a truce until a final solution is found and they promise not to attack each other because they consider the principal enemy to be the Nussayri regime." Not exactly what Obama and Kerry had in mind. But it is John Kerry's trip to Iraq that appears to have had blowback already as Reuters reports the newly installed US-friendly PM al-Adadi ordered his air force to halt strikes on civilian areas, "even in those towns controlled by ISIS," just a day after Kerry's visit (which left Turkey explaining how it would not support US airstrikes either). So far, so good?!

What’s the easiest way to make a 500x return on investment?

What does an NFL cheerleader cost?

In yet another gruesome video, just day after President Obama declared war, ISIS has released "a message to the allies of America" with the execution of another captive: *ISLAMIC STATE RELEASES VIDEO SHOWING BEHEADING OF DAVID HAINES. British Prime Minister David Cameron has called this "an act of pure evil," and will hold a cabinet meeting on the matter tomorrow, promising "to hunt down these murderers."

When it comes to the poorest quartile of US society, some 14 million people, any suggestion that US society is deleveraging and setting the stage for pent up releveraging and thus, economic growth, is dead wrong. In fact, as the Fed's triennial Survey of Consumer Finances, released last week showed, America's poorest have never been more in debt!

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Just when we thought that the Fed is pulling an Obama and has "no strategy" to deal with what not some fringe blog but Deutsche Bank itself proclaimed was the bubble to end, or rather extend, all bubbles, when it said that "the bubble probably needs to continue in order to sustain the current global financial system" they surprise us once again when they report that, drumroll, the Fed has formed a committee led by the former head of the Bank of Israel - best known for using de novo created fiat money to buy AAPL stock as part of "prudent monetary policy" - Vice Chairman Stanley Fischer, to monitor financial stability, which according to Bloomberg is "reinforcing the Fed's efforts to avoid the emergence of asset-price bubbles."

Their backroom silence like a cancer grows................

The bottomline: higher rates are coming… and an entire generation of investment professionals are unprepared for it.

China may need to expand its goalseek template to include the other far more important measure of Chinese economic activity, such as Industrial production, retail sales, fixed investment, and even more importantly - such key output indicators as Cement, Steel and Electricity, because based on numbers released overnight, the Q2 Chinese recovery is now history (as the credit impulse of the most recent PBOC generosity has faded, something we have discussed in the past), and the economy has ground to the biggest crawl it has experienced since the Lehman crash. What's worse, and what we predicted would happen when we observed the collapse in Chinese commodity prices ten days ago, capex, i.e. fixed investment, grew at the slowest pace  in the 21st century: the number of 16.5% was the lowest since 2001, and suggests that the commodity deflation problem is only going to get worse from here.

Simple review of technical condition of the capital markets.  Light on polemical zeal, and heavy on technical analysis.  

About a month ago, when Russia sent a humanitarian convoy to aid ethnic Russians in east Ukraine, the Western world, and of course media, screamed bloody murder, with everyone from NATO to the Kiev government declaring it, without a shadow of a doubt, an invasion, a Trojan Horse, and a convoy of arms deliveries for the rebels caught in the Ukraine civil war, not necessarily in that order. Nobody thought it could possibly be just that: a convoy of humanitarian aid delivering provisions to hundreds of thousands of civilians caught in the middle of a war. Then finally, after weeks of delays, the convoy was allowed in and after unloading its cargo, promptly returned to Russia without a single incident.

The longer Abe’s policies fail to deliver the hoped-for economic results, the more intensely they will be implemented.