Archive - Dec 2015

The system is beyond the point where it is merely showing stresses and fractures. Things are now falling apart and there may well be no way of putting them back together again. The media will continue to claim everything is fine, until the day of panic and reckoning when it will suddenly be the "next Greece" or "2008 all over again"... but worse.

"In the past, politicians promised to create a better world. They had different ways of achieving this but their power and authority came from the optimstic visions they offered their people. Those dreams failed. Today, people have lost faith in ideologies. Increasingly politicians are seen simply as mannequins. But now they have discovered a new role that restores that power and authority. Instead of delivering dreams... politicians promise to protect us... for life."

Here is what really happened: the ECB tried to engineer a modest market selloff because the "market needed to be disappointed", coupled with a modest rise in the EUR to give the Fed some rate-hike breathing room. Instead the market's dramatic overreaction in stocks and FX forced Draghi to not only panic but to publicly come out and admit that the only purpose of his Friday speech was to offset the damage from his failure to defeat the opposition at the governing council and to send markets surging. Which they promptly did.

Just days ago Citi pronounced, much to the chagrin of the status-quo-hugging Fed faithful, that given the turn in corporate profits (and concerns over margin sustainability) that the chance of a recession in the US had risen to 65% (and on that basis had a bearish outlook for US equities). Now, as other major sell-side shops jump on the equity un-bullish narrative, JPMorgan's Michael Feroli warns that in the past, a low unemployment rate, rising compensation, falling margins, and elevated durables investment have historically signaled an elevated risk that an expansion is nearing its end... and puts the probability of a US recession within 3 years at 76%. Of course, you do not need to worry, because Janet Yellen said this is not true (though failed to provide here reasoning).

As for the authoritarians who want to use incidents like the San Bernardino attack as a pretext to abolish the Constitution and institute a regime of total surveillance and outright repression: where was their vaunted surveillance system in this case? We didn’t detect this plot – and perhaps that’s because watching everyone, and collecting everyone’s information, blinds us to the real villains hiding in our midst. Then again, perhaps ferreting out villains isn’t the real purpose of government spying.

Ripping straight from the pages of the "those who failed to learn from history are doomed... period" book of centrally-planned desperation to maintain American Dream 'wealth' by unsustainably levitating home prices, the government's bankruptcy mortgage guarantors have just announced "HomeReady Mortgages." These so-called 'enhanced affordable lending products - provided by the US taxpayer - enable 97%-plus Loan-to-Value loans to borrowers based not on their income (which is too low) but on "non-borrowers" like extended family or children! "Whatever it takes" to maintain the illusion of normalcy and hand out more money just reached peak Einsteinian insanity.

According to the BLS' Household Survey, while 375,000 foreign-born workers found jobs in November, a whopping 326,000 native-born Americans lost theirs.

"The liquidity picture for EM corporates in 2017 looks less appealing, due to a 38% yoy increase in USD bond maturities (to USD122bn) and lingering uncertainty on commodity prices (an important component of the corporate sectors’ cash flow) and FX (a headwind for domestic-oriented players). A further depletion in cash buffers and reduced appetite for certain portions of the EM corporate universe may lead to increased refinancing stress in 2017."

The point is, if you are going to attempt to catch a proverbial falling knife on a chart, at least do so only at a point you deem to be a “make or break” type level. Whether or not you can likely accurately identify a “make or break” level is another matter. The point is that, should that level fail, like it did on the CRB Index a year ago, you know the security is broken and it is time to walk away.

Uncivil disobedience...

The "Jobs Friday" ritual is getting truly absurd. So it can’t be repeated often enough: These artifacts of the BLS’ seasonally maladjusted, trend-cycle modeled, heavily imputed/crafted and five times revised “jobs” numbers have precious little to do with the real health of the main street economy. Indeed, the six-year run of job gains since early 2010 primarily represent “born-again jobs” and part-time gigs. In economic terms, they do not remotely resemble your grandfather’s industrial era economy when a “job” lasted 40 to 50 hours per week all year round; and most of what the BLS survey counted as “jobs” paid a living wage. Not now. Not even close.

The market is now officially so broken, that the biggest HFT-player no longer even makes any sense.

But Gold and Silver I figured were dead in the water until the Fed announcement on December 16^th and they both showed signs of life from the long side on Friday.