Archive - Feb 2015

With Greece moving to the, ahem, periphery if only for a few days/hours, this week the US calendar returns to the forefront with Fed Chair Yellen’s semi-annual monetary policy testimony before the Senate Banking Committee tomorrow night and the House Financial Services Committee on Wednesday, which the market will be paying very close attention to for the reconciliation of how the Fed plans to continue on its rate-hiking path despite rapidly deteriorating US macro data that has started 2015 at the worst pace (in terms of downside surprises) since Lehman.

• Tsipras Tamed as Economists Declare Greece Loses Austerity Fight (BBG)
• Greece readies reform plans to first sign of leftist unrest (Reuters)
• Yellen Faces Congress Amid Direst Threat to Fed Since Dodd-Frank (BBG)
• The war must go on: Kiev says cannot withdraw heavy weapons as attacks persist (Reuters)
• Ukraine fears spread of war after blast in eastern city (Reuters)
• Denmark Dismisses Report It Could Consider Capital Controls (BBG)
• Deadline Nears on Homeland Security Funding Impasse (WSJ)
• Gross Fund Hurt by Oil’s Plunge Amid Bets on Energy Bonds (BBG)

If you thought the Greek tragicomedy is over, you ain't seen nothing yet, because despite the so-called Friday agreement, the immediate next step is for Greece to submit its list of reform measures to the Troika, which will almost certainly result in an immediate revulsion in Germany's finance ministry, and lead to another protracted back and forth between the Troika and Greece, which may once again well end with a Grexit, especially if the Greek liquidity situation, where bash is bleeding from both the banks and the state at a record pace, remains unhalted.  It is therefore not surprising that the ongoing decline in the EURUSD since the inking of the agreement, and the fact that the pair briefly dipped below 1.13 this morning - over 100 pips below the euphoric rip on Friday - is a clear indication that the market is starting to realize that absolutely nothing is either fixed, or set in stone.

"We really cannot exit this [era of QE and ZIRP] without some significant market event... The end has to come at some point... Gold will go measurably higher...  In any market that is so one sided, that is accelerating so rapidly, that trend will end… it will most likely end in a fairly violent fashion."

With record heat (and drought) in the west and record cold (wet and snow) in the east, the global warming game-playing continues every day but the climate-gate rhetoric has increased vociferously since we first noted three weeks ago, the data that has been so relied upon to 'prove' global warming's trend was in fact manipulated. What The Telegraph called "the most extraordinary scandal of our times" - that of the "seasonally-adjusted" seasonal raw global temperature data - is about to be investigated by Congress. As Daily Caller reports, California Republican Rep. Dana Rohrbacher exclaimed "expect there to be congressional hearings into NASA altering weather station data to falsely indicate warming & sea rise."

With the S&P 500 now in positive territory for the year and the mainstream media back in normal cheerleading mode, it is worth noting that 1) "Most shorted" stocks have outperformed the broad market this year, 2) the last 3 weeks have seen the biggest short squeeze in almost 4 years, and 3) Hedge funds are now at a record high 57% net long. We suspect, given the looming Humphrey-Hawkins and March FOMC and the short-term 'gap' between the market and fun-durr-mentals, volatility will be on the rise again.

Everyone’s heard of trickle down economics, but how about “trickle down QE”? Here’s Citi to explain how a hypothetical credit strategist will visit your fictional office and use the concept of trickle down QE to convince an imaginary you to go long euro HY credit via synthetic exposure to Crossover mezz tranches (you can’t make this stuff up)...

Financial repression "is going on on several fronts conducted by different people for their own agendas, though they all seem to be mutually supporting... There is a lot of collusion - the cancer which started in the US Financial System has spread globally... You now have two parties with the same head and reporting to the same masters. There is no longer any countervailing power."

For the last few years - and most especially the last few months - all eyes have been focused on Greece. From record poverty rates to record suicide rates and levels of youth unemployment, post-election emboldened hopes for a phoenix-like rebirth of a nation from the flames of Eurogroup repression were seemingly dashed on Friday. However there is another nation, that begins with the letter 'G' and that is at the heart of the EU-Greece talks that is suffering seemingly silently. As Newsweek reports, poverty in Germany is at its highest since the reunification of the country in 1990, with 12.5 million residents now classified as 'poor'...

Either all futures market participants are comically inept or demand is the variable that shifted hard. Those are the only two possibilities.

The problem, as several sources told Reuters last week, is that there simply aren’t a lot of willing sellers. Ironically, the ECB’s own policy maneuvers are ultimately responsible for creating this situation. That is, the fallout from previous forays into ultra accommodative monetary policy is now hampering the implementation of quantitative easing - call it the ultimate easy money paradox.

It's different this time... "decoupled" "cleanest dirty shirt" "goldilocks" - oh wait!

"NATO is doing its utmost to present Russia as an enemy of the West and thereby justify its existence," Zemmour wrote in Le Figaro Magazine. "Fortunately, France and Germany in due time blocked Ukraine’s accession to NATO, and that’s a positive fact. "Now when they finally coordinated their positions on establishing relations with Moscow, they should not stop halfway and should move towards forming a tripartite alliance with Russia," he said, recalling numerous efforts in the past by "kings, emperors and presidents" of the three countries to set up such an alliance." Such a bloc "will be the only chance for Europe to get rid of the United States protectorate and become, in the words of General de Gaulle, a ‘Free Europe’."