Archive - Mar 2015

Because nothing screams un-broken and un-rigged market like a completely unjustified $1+ spike in the world's most important commodity as it nears the NYMEX close, just because at the very same instant every algo decided to frontrun every other algo. 

Nestling idyllically between France and Spain in the foothills of the Pyrenees, Andorra - which has enjoyed the benefits of European borders without the restrictions of EU membership - has seen its risk "increase beyond our expectations," according to S&P. As a reminder, when Cyprus was "templated" and depositors awoke with a 47% haircut, its total financial assets to GDP was around 8x, Andorra is now at a stunning 17x. As The Telegrpah explains, in the last three weeks, the state has been gripped by a banking crisis that threatens to take it to the brink; and Andorra, which is not a member of the eurozone but uses the single currency on an informal basis, would have no way of bailing them out (with no central bank or lender of last resort). In short, the country faces a catastrophe if its banks fall apart.

The Scientology Documentary "Going Clear" Has Gone Viral ... Here's An Interesting, Related Story

“Everybody knows that the Americans are dropping supplies to Daesh,” said Brig. Gen. Abed al-Maliki, a senior Iraqi army commander based in the city of Samarra, about 80 miles north of Baghdad, using another term for the Islamic State. “It’s just a show,” he said, sitting in the city’s army command headquarters. “If the Americans want to finish something, they will finish it. If they wanted to liberate Iraq, they could.”

Presented with no comment...

"Will The Fed Allow Irrational Exuberance, Season 2?"

We have no clue, nor do we want to know, what is going on in the following picture of Lynn Tilton.

People in the United States feel under threat, both from beyond our borders and within them and as Reuters reports, when asked about both U.S. President Barack Obama and Russian President Vladimir Putin, it was a pretty darn close call. A new Reuters/Ipsos poll finds a third of Republicans believe President Barack Obama poses an imminent threat to the United States, outranking concerns about Russian President Vladimir Putin and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Meanwhile, the world is certainly worried about America with about one quarter (of respondents from 65 countries) naming the United States as the greatest threat to world peace.

If America is the Land of Opportunity, why are so many parents worried that their princeling/princess might not get into the "right" pre-school, i.e. the first rung on the ladder to the Ivy League-issued "ticket to the upper middle class"? The obsessive focus on getting your kids into the "right" pre-school, kindergarten and prep school to grease the path to the Ivy League suggests there aren't as many slots open as we're led to believe.

Don't shoot...

Surely the thinking folk out there must be asking themselves: what is the way out of this Federal Reserve three-card-monte, one-percenter-stuffing, so-called “economy,” and what is the destination of this society when that mendacious model for living fails? There really is no free lunch or get-out-of-jail card. The truth is, when you rig a money system with price interventions, distortions, and perversions, they will eventually express themselves in ways destructive to the system.

Dallas Fed's Richard Fisher had his credibility (whatever is left) crushed for the 4th month in a row. After explaining carefully to no lessor status quo glad hand than Steve Liesman that the Texas economy will see a net positive from low oil prices, Dallas Fed data has utterly collapsed - at its fastest pace since Lehman. Printing a stunning -17.5 (over twice as bad as expected -8.5), this is the 4th miss in a row (and increasingly worse misses). The Dallas Fed was last lower than this in Jun 2011. Across the board, the components were an utter disaster... employees contracted, prices paid and recoeved tumbled, production plunged, and new orders collapsed. More worryingly, furture capex tumbled once again.

Back in September 2013 we wrote "Coming Soon To A Theater Near You: MBIA's $1 Billion World War Z" in which we explained why MBIA will soon have a substantial problem (amounting to just about around $600 million) with several CLOs which we dubbed "Zombie CLOs" or as they were actually known, Zohar, on which it had written insurance, and which would become evident sooner or later once someone took a long, hard look at the collateral manager of the CLOs, namely Lynn Tilton's Patriarch Partners. Well, finally someone did take a long, hard look and today, our warning comes full circle following a shocker out of the SEC accusing Lynn Tilton of fraud and of "hiding the poor performance of loan assets in three collateralized loan obligation (CLO) funds they manage."

"When I was chairman, more than one legislator accused me and my colleagues on the Fed’s policy-setting Federal Open Market Committee of “throwing seniors under the bus” (to use the words of one senator) by keeping interest rates low. The legislators were concerned about retirees living off their savings and able to obtain only very low rates of return on those savings. I was concerned about those seniors as well."

- Ben Bernanke first blog post

Put simply, corporate profits are at a record high relative to the economy… and they just began to roll over.