Archive - Feb 2015

Great news!! Oil prices have "bottomed" and WTI is up over $52 now... from under $44 just last week. But... gasoline prices have surged almost 24% in the last 3 weeks... the biggest seasonal rise in over a decade. Does the US consumer want rising or falling oil prices?

New Gold Fix To Be Run By Western and Chinese Banks - Still Not Transparent -- Replacement for the near-century-old London gold fix will start in March -- London gold fix to Shanghai gold fix - still not transparent --Stealth run on the London bullion market continuing?

Just hours after apparently settling its suit with the USA (not at all retaliation for downgrading them), S&P has taken the big red marker out on a slew of European banks:

• Downgrades: Credit Suisse, Barclays, Lloyds, Bank of Scotland, RBS, HSBC, and Ulster Bank
• On Watch Negative: Raiffeisen Zentralbank, MBank, Unicredit, Commerzbank, and Deutsche Bank

The driver of the shift in perspective is the apparent removal of the 'bailout put', as the prospect of "extraordinary government support" appeared less likely under recently passed bail-in legislation.

With the recent collapse of Treasury yields, the massive short position in bonds has been dramatically unwound (though there is still plenty left). However, there is the other "most crowded" trade in the world - Long The USDollar - that remains... but is starting to show some cracks in the armor. Despite the highest levels of Short EUR, Long USD since the very peak of the EU Crisis in 2012 and still massively long net dollar positions across sell-side OTC indications and CFTC exchange-traded positions, the last 2 days have seen the biggest drop in the USD Index since September 2013... is the world's most crowded trade about to unwind?

It is no secret that January was a bad month for bulls: it was in fact the worst start to the year in years, especially following that surprising last day selloff, which took the YTD drop as of January 30 to an unheard of, at least under global central-planning, -3.1%. It wasn't just the broader market: some of the more marquee hedge funds names also found it a tough time to navigate the transition of global easing away from the Fed to the ECB even as other central banks like the SNB lost all credibility, such as Fortress, Third Point, Perry, Maverick, Brevan Howard and various others, all of which had negative returns for the majority of the month based on HSBC data. But it wasn't all bad news: in fact, as the table below shows, the January outperformers generated higher relative returns than the worst funds of the month,

"It's a man-made tragedy, and the men who made it won’t fix it." So it turns out Lenin wasn’t just right that the best way to destroy the capitalist system is to debauch the currency. It’s also the best way, as Venezuela can tell you, to destroy the socialist one.

"Fuck the CHF and the SNB!" "Those bastards lied to us - I'll never trust them again!"

In this exclusive interview, Rob Kirby share his views on precious metals, the manipulation of various markets, the inevitable collapse of the U.S. dollar, currency wars, derivatives and more…

Rob Kirby spent the majority of his career working in financial markets where he honed his skills and knowledge on precious metals, foreign exchange markets, interest rate derivatives, and government and bond markets. He’s also become one of the most sought after writers and speakers in his discipline and writes for many respected online publications including Le Metropole Cafe, Financial Sense, Silver Doctors, and Safe Haven. His website, kirbyanalytics.com, has become a valuable resource of knowledge to those seeking the truth about financial markets.

In the realms of fantasy narrative, The Fed's Jim Bullard remains near the top, but this morning's statement that "there is a lot of momentum in the US economy" is simply remarkable in its total falsehooded-ness. As the following chart shows, we suspect when Bullard says "economy" he means "market" but even that is hardly showing momentum!!

On the heels of the biggest crash in ISM New York since May 2007 (swinging from 9 year highs at 70.8 to 6 year lows at 44.5 in one month), Factory Orders plunged 3.4% in December (against an expectation of a 2.4% drop) - the biggest drop since Mar 2013 (ex last year's Boeing swing). Factory Orders 3.6% YoY drop is the largest since Nov09. Which explains why stocks are soaring... (despite Fed's Bullard saying "there is a lot of momentum in the US economy.")

Well that escalated quickly... while the trend of Bund yield collapse continues, the biggest driver of this unprecedented shift. For the first time ever, German 10Y bund yields are trading below (3bps below) Japanese 10Y bond yields as since Q€ the spread has collapsed 35bps. A very weak JGB auction overnight suggests the BoJ is losing control of the world's biggest bond market...

The bottom-callers are out en masse as crude oil prices head for the 3rd up-day in a row and the biigest bounce since OPEC's last meeting. Overnight comments from the BP CEO on OPEC "wanting to test the market" and OPEC delegates warnings that this rebound may not be long-lasting,"prices are stabilizing around $40 to $45, but the world economy is not very strong and stocks are too high.'' Other OPEC delegates suggested prices will drop to $30-35 before this is over (in the first or second quarter)...

If there was any confusion how Germany would react to the latest Greek plan, even though as we explicitly stated yesterday, the "new" Greek plan is really the "old" Greek plan but repackaged semantically for appeal to German taxpayers, even as the proposal to involve Europe's public entities in a distressed debt restructuring is a non-starter, all confusion can be now abandoned following remarks by Merkel's ally Kauder in which he not only called the Greek debt plan "half-baked" saying he will no longer respond to new proposals from Athens "every day", but making it clear that there will be no renegotiation of the existing bailout proposal saying "we have agreements with Greece and not with a government - and these agreements have to be adhered to."

Much was said about the outperformance of the Nikkei relative to other asset classes in various months in 2014. Outperformance in Yen terms that is: for 2014 the Nikkei was actually down in USD terms. However, somehow we doubt if as much will be said about January's best performing asset - again, in local currency terms - which was the Russian stock market. Actually, come to think of it, we doubt anything will be said in the mainstream media about January's two best performing assets in USD terms either: silver and gold.

Who could have seen that vertical USDJPY buying panic stock momo igniting move ahead of the US retail muppeteering open?