Archive - Apr 13, 2015

Everywhere in the West monstrous lies stand unchallenged. The lies are institutionalized in history books, course curriculums, policy statements, movements and causes, and in historical memory. America will be hard pressed to survive the lies that it lives.

The Fed will be relieved to discover that, as Stevenson & Wolfers officially find, across and within each country, "happiness" rises with higher incomes...

...Allegedly.

"A slow start to the week has become customary, as Monday appears to have become the new Friday," Barclays says, noting that the humans simply aren't trading in a credit market where opportunities are scarce. Meanwhile, the robots do not rest, and on the Monday they simultaneously decide that some random data point or unduly hawkish/dovish soundbite out of an FOMC voter is cause for all the algos to chase down the same rabbit hole sending ripples through a fixed income market devoid of any real liquidity, the humans will be in for a rude awakening when they get to work on Tuesday morning.

Princeton University and former vice chairman of the Federal Reserve Alan Blinder unleashes his self-serving smorgasbord of Fed apologism in today's WSJ Op-Ed. The Fed should be patient-er for longer, he explains; and as far as the "loudly and frequently worried 'impatience crowd'," Blinder states, fears of policy "causing financial-market 'distortions' and bubbles might burst, causing untold damage to our economy," can apparently be ignored because, as he explains "none of the hypothesized financial hazards have surfaced." So - because we haven't crashed yet... policy is right - "This is a time to be patient."

"We have passed the point where Jelly Donut policy is merely slowing the recovery. Distortions are now adding risk to the banking and insurance markets and leading to poor incentives for the largest players in the financial system. Monetary policy and regulations have combined like a failed chemistry experiment to create a potentially destructive force that should not exist outside of fiction."

- David Einhorn

In recent weeks the sell side analysts who cover energy have become so complacent that they merely plug in the current strip prices into their earnings models for E&P companies. Not one, except Mike Rothman at Cornerstone Analytics, is questioning the “why?” or “how?” of what is occurring. The 200 or so players who effectively control the oil futures market have changed behavior and expectations as the oil price curve has collapsed. Prices from late 2016 into 2018 are essentially flat in the low to mid 60s, believe it or not, which would essentially bankrupt most of OPEC, US conventional oil, part of US shale and deep offshore drilling. So ask where is the oil going to come from? Yet the madness continues until investors realize E&P companies need a higher price to justify investments in the space.

One of America’s biggest banks is going to be protested by an unlikely group today: its employees. As The Guardian reports, Wells Fargo bankers are protesting the bank’s alleged predatory practices – mainly the sales quotas imposed on some of its workers (which have led to at least 30 employees opening duplicate accounts, sometimes without customers’ knowledge, in order to inflate their sales numbers). One worker warns, “it is not in Wells Fargo’s best interest for customers to purchase products and services they don’t use or need.” Now where have we seen this kind of activity before? Wells Fargo bank workers are not the only ones struggling to make ends meet without breaking ethical standards as bank tellers have collected as much as $105m in food stamps.

Update: as always is the case in Europe, nothing is confirmed until it is officially denied by officials, so here you go: GREEK GOVT OFFICIAL DENIES FT REPORT GREECE PLANNING DEFAULT

It should hardly come as a surprise that after the latest round of Greek pre-negotiation negotiations with the Troika, in which the Greek representative was said to behave like a taxi driver, who "just asked where the money was and insisted his country would soon be bankrupt" and in which the Eurozone members "were disappointed and shocked at Athens' lack of movement in its plans, and in particular its reluctance to talk about cutting civil servants' pensions" that the next Greek step is to fall back - yet again - to square zero: threats of an imminent default. Which is precisely what, according to the FT, has happened "Greece is preparing to take the dramatic step of declaring a debt default unless it can reach a deal with its international creditors by the end of April."

Any year in which two of the best performing hedge funds are two of our old-time favorites, the aptly named Keynes Leveraged Quantitative Strategies and even more aptly named Tulip Trend Fund, you know is going to be one of "those" years. Only this time joining them at the top after the first quarter is also the Russian Prosperity Fund, while making an unexpected and welcome appearance in the top 10 is none other than everyone's favorite outspoken, if rather timid in recent years, scot: Hugh Hendry's Eclectica, which has returned 14% YTD.

It's just maff yo...

Who could have seen that coming? With Treasury yields pressing lows of the day since the US open, and AAPL in the red; the stop-hunt in stocks this morning is now starting to fade back into reality as Crude oil prices gave up gains and went red and reports appear that Greece is preparing to default... The Dow and S&P are now red on the day.

More to the point, what does the flight of Hillary say about party politics in this land? That a more corrupt and sclerotic dominion has hardly been glimpsed since the last Bourbons cavorted in the halls of Versailles? Hence, my view that America will witness a very peculiar spectacle leading up to and perhaps beyond the 2016 election: the disintegration of seeming normality against a background of mounting disorder and insurrection. Hillary will go on caw-cawing platitudes about togetherness, diversity, and recovery while the economy sinks to new extremes of unravelment, and the anger of a swindled people finally boils over.