Archive - Dec 29, 2015

According to eKathimerini, Greek and Turkish jets just got into a dogfight over the Aegean Sea on Tuesday when Ankara's warplanes violated Greek airspace nine times. Two of the Turkish planes "were armed." 

We were fully expecting not only a tail, but a whopping tail in today's weak market. And that is precisely what we got when moments after we learned that the When Issued was trading at 1.774% before the 1pm announcement, the 5 Year printed at 1.78%, a tail of 1.1 bps, a mirror image of yesterday's squeeze into the auction!

The winners from a $5 trillion M&A bubble: Wall Street bankers will make hundreds of millions in M&A fees. The losers: hundreds of thousands of workers who are about to be laid off, pardon, "synergized."

Once upon a time, we had strong, vigorously enforced laws that made a bank the safest place to store paper assets.

May the farce be with you...

My overriding theme and the central drama for the coming year is that unexpected events can take on greater importance as the Federal Reserve ends its near-decade-long Zero Interest Rate Policy. Consensus premises and forecasts will likely fall flat, in a rather spectacular manner. The low-conviction and directionless market that we saw in 2015 could become a no-conviction and very-much-directed market (i.e. one that's directed lower) in 2016. There will be no peace on earth in 2016, and our markets could lose a cushion of protection as valuations contract. (Just as "malinvestment" represented a key theme this year, we expect a compression of price-to-earnings ratios to serve as a big market driver in 2016.) In other words, we don't think 2016 will be fun.

In the aftermath of the first deadly winter storm of the year, a dazed and confused nation suddenly finds itself in need of leadership. Unfortunately, it won't get it: "Obama offered condolences for those who lost their lives and for those who lost their homes in the tornadoes." He then spent the next 6 hours golfing and was "all smiles."

This was not supposed to happen. The spread between the 2Y Treasury yield (which is soaring 7bps today) and 10Y (higher by 3bps) has plunged back below 120bps. The current cliff-edge has been support for the curve four times in the last 8 years but with GC rates blowing out to 7 year highs, one wonders if the size of the moves means we break to new regime lows.

Everyone who is convinced that the current status quo is permanent and unbreakable should consider what happened to the super-wealthy private landholders of the Western Roman Empire. When the empire's power to coerce broke down, the super-wealthy vanished into the dustbin of history. Few believed that possible in 475 AD, but history isn't a matter of belief. Believing it isn't possible doesn't stop history.

Consumer Confidence among Over-55 Americans is at its lowest since September 2014. On the other hand, confidence among the Under-35 generation is its highest in 9 years (as the lowest income earners saw the largest surge in confidence in history - from 44.2. to 73.4). The 'optimism' gap between young and old Americans has never, ever been greater, which is ironic since it is the 55-and-older generation who have record jobs (while those 25-54 have collapsed since the great recession).

I bet OPEC never factored into their analysis the lifting of the US Oil Exporting Ban in 2015 after being a non-starter for so many decades.

While most hedge funds will be glad to close the books on a year in which they once again dramatically underperformed a market which hugged the flatline courtesy of just a few stocks (even as most stocks posted substantial declines) and where "hedge fund hotels" such as Valeant suffered dramatic implosions, a handful of traders generated impressive returns for their investors and made billions by going against the herd.

“Joseph urged the Pharaoh to set aside one fifth of the crop in the good times and store the grain to ease the famine in the bad times, because if he didn’t do that, the good times would be forgotten and all the people would remember was the bad times. This wouldn’t be politically good for the Pharaoh.”

No year is ever easy to predict, if only because if it were, that would take all the fun out of life. But still, predictions for 2016 look quite a bit easier than other years. This is because a whole bunch of irreversible things happened in 2015 that were not recognized for what they are, either intentionally or by ‘accident’. Things that will therefore now be forced to play out in 2016, when denial will no longer be an available option. Simply put, 2016 will be the year when a lot of ‘underlying wealth’ evaporates.