Archive - Jan 5, 2015

"Oil is incredibly important right now. If oil falls to around $40 a barrel then I think the yield on ten year treasury note is going to 1%. I hope it does not go to $40 because then something is very, very wrong with the world, not just the economy. The geopolitical consequences could be – to put it bluntly – terrifying."

In 1991, the Cold War between the US and the USSR ended, as, economically, the USSR had run its course. Since that time, the US has had the ability to back off on armaments and to strengthen itself economically, to become even more powerful as the world’s present empire. But, of course, that’s not what they did. Instead, they went headlong in the direction of becoming a more highly armed, more fascist state. Along the way, they became extremely reckless with their economy, following a Keynesian model that contributed to the greatest debt bubble the world has ever seen.

Starting in the mid-1990s, "the mall genie was out of the bottle," says one mall analyst, "and it was never going to come back." While about 80% of the country’s 1,200 malls are considered healthy (vacancy rates of 10% or less), that compares with 94% in 2006; and more than 30 million square feet of malls are more than 40% empty, a threshold that signals the beginning of what one one analyst called "the death spiral." As The NY Times reports, like beached whales, dead malls draw fascination as well as dismay, "nobody ever thinks a mall is going to up and die," but as the following images show - dead or dying they are.

It appears that only in less-developed nations do the people care about Presidential birth certificates. As GlobalVoices reports, clashes broke out between police and the opposition in Gabon stemming from questions about the legitimacy of President Ali Bongo Ondimba. The publication of a book disputing the origins of the President (claiming him to be Nigerian) has led opposition parties to challenge the authenticity of the birth certificate of the head of state which has sparked widespread protests. The protests left 1 dead and many injured and arrested. As local media note, "if the government continues to refuse to negotiate, things could go very wrong."

The brain incubator at Harvard, the place which according to legend, and certainly the US News and World Report's annual paid college infomercial, is the repository for some of the smartest people in the world, is furious.
Because Harvard's brilliant ivory tower economists and public policy wonks know precisely how to fix the world... as long as said fix never applies to them!

Will truth be stranger than fiction...

Having warned of the "terrifying consequences" of oil prices staying this low, DoubleLine's Jeffrey Gundlach, in an extensive interview with Finanz und Wirtschaft, warns he is "beginning to see signs of investor concern around the edges about the health of the economy and about the financial system. Historically, when junk bonds give up the ghost and treasuries remain firm, it is a signal that something is not right." Touching on everything from a string dollar to Indian stocks, and from Oil to bonds, and The Fed, Gundlach concludes, "the only places where there is inflation is in places that are painful. Raising interest rates against that backdrop seems like a poor idea. So I just hope the Fed thinks carefully about what it is doing." Boxed-in much?

While Japan's population is toiling under what by now is insurmountable import price inflation, leading to soaring prices for anything that isn't produced domestically and has to be purchased with rapidly depreciating Yen, the reality is that - thanks to the biggest collapse in real wages in the 21st century - the deflationary mindest is now more embedded than ever. Case in point: the first tuna auction at Tokyo’s Tsukiji Market. It was here that earlier today the highest price for a bluefin tuna fell below ¥5 million for the first time in eight years, coming in at ¥4.51 million for a 180-kilogram tuna caught off Oma, Aomori Prefecture.

UPDATE: Nikkei 225 Futs lose 17k - trading 16,985

Time for some GPIF asset re-allocation and spuriously repititive headlines about Abenomics, 3rd Arrows, growth, anti-deflation, or some such bollocks (as they say in Japan). For now, JGB Futures are at all-time record high prices, USDJPY sits back under 119.50, and Nikkei 225 Futures are holding just above the crucial 17k mark - down over 500 points from last night's highs.

The surreal nature of this world as we enter 2015 feels like being trapped in a Fellini movie. The .1% party like it’s 1999, central bankers not only don’t take away the punch bowl – they spike it with 200% grain alcohol, the purveyors of propaganda in the mainstream media encourage the party to reach Caligula orgy levels, the captured political class and their government apparatchiks propagate manipulated and massaged economic data to convince the masses their standard of living isn’t really deteriorating, and the entire façade is supposedly validated by all-time highs in the stock market. It’s nothing but mass delusion perpetuated by the issuance of prodigious amounts of debt by central bankers around the globe. But now, the year of consequences may have finally arrived.

“Don’t look back - something might be gaining on you,” Satchel Paige famously warned. For connoisseurs of civilizational collapse, 2014 was merely annoying, a continued pile-up of over-investments in complexity with mounting diminishing returns, metastasizing fragility, and no satisfying resolution. So we enter 2015 with greater tensions than ever before and therefore the likelihood that the inevitable breakdown will release more destructive energy and be that much harder to recover from.

"Some folks are selling stocks..." and, according to The White House, President Obama is closely monitoring it. As The Hill reports, despite the meme that lower-oil-prices-are-unequivocally-good-news-for-Americans, the Obama administration is monitoring whether the fall in oil prices is affecting the US stock market. Just over 5 years ago, President Obama explained to the American public that "profit and earning ratios are starting to get to the point where buying stocks is a potentially good deal," so we can rest assured that our leaders are (for now) "hesitant" to say whether the fall of the stock market, which came as crude oil trades briefly dipped below $50, was related to oil prices.. so blamed Europe.

Something stunning and unexpected took place in the third quarter: Citigroup, or rather its FDIC-insured Citibank National Association entity, just surpassed JPM and is now the biggest single holder of total derivatives in the US. Furthermore, as the charts below show, while every other bank was derisking its balance sheet, Citi not only increased its total derivative holdings by $1 trillion in Q2, but by a whopping, and perhaps even record, $9 trillion in the just concluded third quarter to $70.2 trillion!

While the media continues to pound the table with all of the bullish arguments that should continue to drive the current advance in the markets, it is only prudent to at least attempt an understanding of the counter arguments. The "risk" to investors is not a continued rise in the financial markets, but the eventual reversion that will occur. Like Wyle E. Coyote, since most individuals only consider the "bull case," as it creates a confirmation bias to support their "greed factor", they never see the "cliff" until it is far to late. Hopefully, these charts will give you some food for thought.  Remember, every professional poker player knows how to spot a "pigeon at the table."  Make sure it isn't you.

That markets are rigged, at both the macro level, through central banks, and micro, through HFTs, dark pools and purposeful market fragmentation, should be painfully obvious to everyone by now. But when even the regulators engage in "jury rigging", or in this case blocking prominent HFT-critic Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel prize winning economist (a prize which doesn't count for much on these pages but should - at least on paper - impress such statist cronies as the SEC), has been blocked from a government panel that will advise regulators on issues facing U.S. equity markets, it becomes clear as day that the rigging is not just in the markets: worse, it is openly involves the market's "regulator" and "enforcer."