Archive - Feb 4, 2015

 I was always a little curious how much my fair city was spending on these guys, who basically sit on plastic chairs and stare into space all day.

Marc Faber warned at the weekend that 2015 may be the year that investors will lose confidence in central banks and that investors will “suddenly realise what a scam that central banking is”.

First, from Bloomberg:

• GREEK GOVT WON'T ACCEPT TROIKA REMAINING IN COUNTRY: OFFICIAL

And from Reuters:

• EU'S SCHULZ SAYS GREEK GOV'T HAS NO CHOICE BUT TO KEEP ITS OBLIGATIONS TO EUROPEAN PARTNERS

"Mainly due to the weaker employment component of the ISM nonmanufacturing index, we reduced our forecast for January nonfarm payroll employment growth to 210k, from 250k previously."

“Keep Fear Alive”

While not entirely surprising, the fact that GM Financial has admitted that:

*GM FINANCIAL: SEC PROBING SUB-PRIME LOAN SECURITIZATION

Of course, we should not worry about this... we are sure it is "contained" as GM reports it is "investigating matters internally" - just like it did with the ignition switch year ago?

Cramer...

"Keep your friends close and your enemies closer," appears to be the 'do-nothing-stupid' strategy that Washington continues to play in The Middle East. How else to explain the continuing 'close-ally' relationship with Saudi Arabia given that, as Reuters reports, Zacarias Moussaoui - a former al Qaeda operative imprisoned for life for his role in the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks - has told lawyers for victims of the attacks that members of the Saudi royal family supported the Islamic militant group. Saudi officials were quick to denounce these statements as those of "a deranged criminal whose own lawyers presented evidence that he was mentally incompetent," as he included some "extremely famous" Saudi officials as 'donors' during Osama bin Laden's tenure.

And so the great chess game involving Saudi Arabia, Russia, the United States, Qatar, Syria, ISIS, Ukraine, natural gas and lots and lots of oil, is finally revealed.

Against Reuters expectations of a 3.25 million barrel build, DOE reports a 6.3 million barrel build... Just 24 hours after Jim Cramer proclaimed, "this smells like a bottom" in crude oil, the crucial commodity (though it is unclear whether lower oil is good or bad today for now) appears to have flushed a few weak hands in a 3-day squeeze and 1430ET ramp-fest as price reasserts to the 'fundamentals' of over-supply and under-demand. WTI has plunged from over $54 at the NYMEX close yesterday to around $50 this morning...

The point is not to focus on how stocks bounced the last few days, but how susceptible they are to a very serious collapse occurring when the US Dollar begins its next leg up. 

Well, actually, we have seen this bubble before haven't we? Is GM really doing that well? In 2007, they did well too. In 2008 their finance arm= .gov bailout, 2009 GM Bankrupt! It's amazing what mainstream media will report, and even more amazing how many "smart" people (including analysts) will go along with it. Reggie's truth laid bare...

Markit Services PMI rose modestly but hovered at one-year lows at 54.2 in January suggesting, as Markit notes, "the near-halving in the pace of economic growth in the fourth quarter of 2014," as companies struggle with new orders seeing the smallest increase since the financial crisis over six years ago. This comes on the heels of Decembers big miss in ISM Services, which rose - like PMI - very modestly to 56.7 (from a revised 56.5) with prices-paid tumbling to its lowest sinceJuly 2009 and employment lowest since Feb 2014. That said, it wouldn't be a Baffle with BS economy if the two releases, which are supposed to at least agree on the direction of the move, did not report two diametrically opposite trends, with the ISM reporting that while Employment tumbled from 55.7 to 51.6, New Orders actually rose from 56.5 to 56.7. Markit? The other way around, with New Orders dropping from 53.4 to 52.3 as Employment rose from 51.5 to 52.3!

Despite headlines proclaiming better-than-expected earnings Gilead is collapsing this morning (down around 10%) on the heels of concerns that drug discounts were larger than expected (and thus 2015 revenue expectations will be lower). This has dragged the Broad Biotech index down by the most since Dec 23rd and all the way down to the key 50-day moving average.

With the fog of economic war clearing just enough to get a glimpse of the real narrative in the Saudi-US-Syria-Qatar-Russia-Europe chaos, we found it more than a little intriguing that, as Reuters reports, Saudi Arabia's Kingdom Holdings - the investment firm owned by billionaire Prince Alwaleed bin Talal - sold most of its stake in media giant News Corp. While stating that they "remain firm believers in News Corp’s competent management," no reason for the sale was given of the US-based media mouthpiece that has been a core holding since 1997.