Archive - Mar 4, 2015

Pensioners are under attack. With yields depressed across asset classes, public pension funds in the U.S. are diving into risky investments in order to justify clinging to unrealistic investment rate assumptions. In Europe, low rates are causing corporations to adopt lower discount rates to determine the present value of their pension liabilities, dramatically increasing EU pension deficits. While in Greece, the government is robbing the public purse to make good on its commitments to the IMF.

Who should you believe? Record stock market valuations and consensus spouting, highly paid economists who tell you all as is well...or oil, negative economic indicators, and your own eyes that this is just one more artificial boom desperately trying to run from the inevitable bust?

For the first time in public, though practically the entire world assumed it, an official from The IMF has admitted that the various Greek bailouts were not for The Greeks at all... "They gave money to save German and French banks, not Greece,” Paolo Batista, one of the Executive Directors of International Monetary Fund told Greek private Alpha TV on Tuesday. As KeepTalkingGreece reports, Batista then went on to strongly criticized not only the euro zone and the European Central Bank but also the IMF and the Fund’s managing Director Christine Lagarde for defending Europe much too much...

The RIG Count has dropped also but this is a misnomer because unlike in ‘old fashioned drilling times’ where one Rig represented One well, now one RIG often represents multiple wells attached to the one Rig due to modern drilling technology.

For the first time ever, the spending patterns of US consumers are so skewed, that Americans, or at least a small fraction of them, spent more on restaurants and bars, than what Americans, the much larger fraction, spent on grocery stores to prepare food for themselves.

What people and central bankers do not understand, is that you can't devalue your way to prosperity. Absolutely nothing has changed since the last crisis. The same too big too fail banks have only gotten much bigger. The same people that were in charge leading into the crisis and during it, are the same people who are in charge of fixing it. New regulations were established to try and regulate the industry, but they will be proven to be ineffective. Why? Because the Volcker Rule and Dodd-Frank have had all the important elements removed, thanks to the massive lobbying power of the TBTF banks and the Fed.

"The relationship of U.S. net worth to GDP appears to have reached unsustainable heights," warns NFIB Chief Economist William Dunkelberg, adding that a massive decline in the value of assets is "more likely" than a massive increase in GDP. Logically this seems unavoidable, unless you believe that we are truly wealthier now, even with an economy that is delivering a rather poor performance (historically weak output and sales growth) in real terms. It would seem not to be 'whether' we will adjust but when.

In the aftermath of the revelations that Hillary Clinton had exclusively used a personal email account to conduct state correspondence with diplomatic leaders around the globe and pretty much everyone else, it was only a matter of time before the subpoenas started flying. That time is now and as WaPo reports, the "House investigative committee is preparing to send out subpoenas later Wednesday to gather a deeper look into former secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton’s nearly exclusive use of personal e-mails to do her official business as the government’s top diplomat, according to people familiar with the probe."

So today what is different is not the Wall Street spiel that Nasdaq is anchored by the likes of Apple rather than Webvan. Since the two days of March 9 and 10 in the year 2000 when the Nasdaq closed over the 5,000, the financial markets have been converted into central bank managed gambling halls and the global economy has bloated beyond recognition by 15 years of non-stop financial repression. Back then, a few hundred stocks were wildly over-valued based on monetizing eyeballs; now the entire market is drastically overvalued owing to the false financial market liquidity generated by $14 trillion of central bank asset monetization - mostly public debt - since the turn of the century. As a result, the global financial system and economy are orders of magnitude more fragile and vulnerable to collapse than they were 15 years ago.

...is that while nobody actually cares about its contents, when the flashing red headlines hit, they set off a firestorm of HFT algo buying in WTI on the day of the biggest inventory build in...forever.

Bill Clinton Dusted Off the Same Marketing Strategy Which Bad-Mustache Used On the Eve of Invading Poland ... And Obama's Been Using It Ever Since

"I am somewhat concerned, at least given the way things stand now, about the market reaction. First, the lack of details will create some uncertainty and concern, particularly because there’s not a great deal said about the “problem children,” the BAC and Citi. Secondly, I think the markets will be disappointed in the following sense: As I will describe, this is a real truth-telling kind of plan. It’s fundamentalist. It’s not about giving the banks a break. It’s not about using accounting principles  to give them backdoor capital. It’s very much market-oriented and “tough love.” And I think we all will like that. I like that. But the banks’ shareholders aren’t going to be thrilled about it."

And, as NewEdge's Brad Wishak points out, that's exactly what we are seeing play out on the NYSE here. Being the world's largest exchange by market capitalization ($16 trillion), failures like this are typically worth paying attention to...