Archive - Mar 19, 2015

"Some highly respected market commentators, most recently Ray Dalio from Bridgewater, have raised the possibility that Fed rate hikes risk a 1937-like slump. It is indeed a dilemma but likely already too late to avert another crisis.... In that respect it is probably too late already. We believe that the die is now cast, the cake is baked and coming out of the oven, and the financially fattened goose is well and truly cooked!"

With US forces moving into Poland, Russian "rapid-response" drills underway, and navy exercises in the Baltic Sea, the idea of "saber-rattling" now seems obvious. However, as NATO closes in on its borders, the Russian Navy’s commander, Admiral Chirkov, stated that the intensity of Russian submarines’ combat patrol missions has been up 50% since the beginning of 2014. As the nation celebrates "Submariner Day", Chirkov explained, "we do not indulge in saber rattling... this is necessary and natural for guaranteed security of the state."

The BoJ may now run into the same inconvenience in its efforts to control the stock market that it encountered on the way to monopolizing the JGB market: there’s only so much out there to buy. "BOJ held 3.85t yen ($32.0b) of ETFs at end-2014 and plans to boost these holdings by 3t yen per year; at this pace, the current market value of 11.5t yen in ETFs would be entirely bought by BOJ by end-2017," Bloomberg notes.

Janet’s Yellen’s pettifogging today about her patient lack of impatience was downright pathetic. Her verbal hair-splitting is starting to make medieval ritual incantations sound coherent by comparison. But unlike the financial media’s dopey dithering about “dot plots”, Yellen at least has something to hide behind all the gibberish. Namely, she and her merry band of money printers are becoming more petrified each month that they will trigger a thundering Wall Street hissy fit if they move to “normalize” interest rates - even as they are slowly beginning to realize that continuance of ZIRP much longer will only intensify the market’s addiction to rampant speculation, free money carry trades and the associated risks to financial stability.

The Fed and other Central Banks are trying to maintain the illusion that they have everything in control by talking about interest rates, but the reality is that the US Dollar carry trade is ABOVE $9 trillion in size. That is almost as large as ALL of the money printing that occurred between 2009 and 2013.

March "madness" indeed...

Debt saturation and debt fatigue = diminishing returns on central bank tricks. The diminishing returns manifest in three ways: the gains from each round of central-bank tricks are declining, the periods of stability following the latest “save” are shrinking and the amplitude of each episode of debt crisis is expanding.

That the unraveling is speeding up is not just perception - it’s reality.

The only market year to date that has shown truly impressive gains in both local currency and USD terms, is also the best performing market of 2014 - China, which is now up almost 100% in less than a year! Here, courtesy of UBS, is the complete list of what may be causing China's relentless stock market surge.

The oil jobs nightmare is in fact spreading like a cancer. Last year there was much banter from the Wall Street shysters and Bakkan shale oil experts about the true breakeven price for shale oil not being $80 (which is the truth) but actually being as low as $58 a barrel. They were spreading this lie in order to keep idiot investors buying the stocks and bonds of these fly by night shale oil companies.  Well, we are now six months further down the line and Bakkan shale oil this morning is selling for $37 per barrel.

Greek stocks are now down 15% since Q€ started... German stocks are up 3.1% in that period. Europe's broad EuroStoxx 600 closed at its highest since 2000 as Greek government bond yields (and spreads) surged once again. The contagion to the rest of the Europe remains a problem with Spanish and Italian bond risk up 15-20bps since Q€ started.

John Kerry speaks out about allegations of new chemical weapons attacks in Syria and says the US may have to hold someone (Assad) "accountable."

With markets pricing in nothing but a "permanent plateau of margins," it appears the Philly Fed is about to ruin that meme too... Thanks to the collapse of the Prices Received (and Prices Paid) indices, margins are now implicitly the lowest since Lehman. The last 2 times "margins" were this low, the US entered recession.

With EURUSD now down over 400 pips from the after-hours flash-crash last night, the US Dollar has recovered all of ist post-FOMC and post-flash-crash losses...