Archive - Feb 16, 2015

Moments ago, Interfax made it a trifecta when it reported that:

RUSSIA PUTS AIRBORNE TROOPS ON ALERT IN VOLGOGRAD REGION: IFX
ASSAULT LANDING UNIT OF AIRBORNE TROOPS ALERTED IN VOLGOGRAD REGION

As a reminder, Volgograd is about 150 miles east of Ukraine.

From here, the question is whether the current uptick is any more than a bout of short-covering which is doomed to relapse and print new lows once the overstretch inherent in an almost uninterrupted 60% plunge is worked off, or whether some more meaningful recovery can be staged. We still have our doubts about the latter outlook and would watch for behaviour near the 2009 low and the old range high (or in terms of the most heavily weighted of the constituents, crude oil, whether it will hold above first $40/bbl then $35). If not, we face the possibility of a reversion to the mean/mode of that 1974-2005 band at a level loosely corresponding to $20/bbl oil.

MMT: Monetizing Muppet Trades. This one made good money!

Whether this is more economic sabre-rattling or not, Germany's Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble is not making any Greek friends this morning. During a radio interview on Deutschlandfunk, Schaeuble exclaimed that he was against  a deal "just for the sake of a compromise," and lashed out that "I feel sorry for the Greeks. The new Greek government behaves irresponsible." As Reuters reports, Schaeuble remains "very sceptical" and nobody wants to give Greece any more money "without guarantees," which is odd because within the last year - trend-chasing asset managers had appeared willing to throw good money after bad at it until now.

With only a few short hours until the process of everyone's cards being revealed in Brussels begins, it is once again Greece' turn to remind the other players on the table that no matter the quality of cards it has, it is not bluffing. Which is precisely what anyone bluffing would say.  In a just released Op-Ed in the NYT (were there no European newspaper willing to accept the Greek finance minister's Op-Ed one wonders that he had to go all the way to the bastion of the left... in the United States) the new Greek finance minister says that not only is he not bluffing adding "that I have no right to bluff", but using recent military jargon says that "the lines that we have presented as red will not be crossed. Otherwise, they would not be truly red, but merely a bluff."

It has been a quiet start to the week, with US equity futures and European stocks mostly unchanged with all eyes on what progress (if any) will be made between Greece and the Eurogroup, where the press conference is scheduled for 7:00 pm GMT (expect significant delays) in what is otherwise expected to be a relatively subdued day with the US away from market and a light macroeconomic calendar.

"...the current benefits to refiners will push some performance weakness into the summer, helping to dampen the impact of the drop in Crude Oil prices on business performance".

Neocons go home...