Archive - Apr 14, 2015

The EIA's annual energy outlook has something for everyone as it attempts to forecast energy markets out to 2040. For the bears, US crude oil production is expected to rise (even more than they had forecast last year - before the price collapse) as it seems, according to EIA the only thing more stimulative for oil production than high prices is low prices. For the bulls, EIA exuberantly forecasts prices soaring to over $240 by 2040 in a high growth environment. Crude prices are dipping modestly from their ramp highs.

Hillary rose to fame delivering an idealistic commencement address at the beginning of her career. But like the generation she represents, she has betrayed those grand ideals over a lifetime of compromise, expediency, self-promotion and complacent acquisition of power, wealth and fame. She doesn’t deserve another stint at the podium - let alone the bully pulpit.

Amid just another morning melt-up in stocks and crude, we thought the following chart might help some with their investment decision-making process...

The only surefire way to dramatically reduce healthcare costs is to remove the middlemen and allow market forces to return to healthcare.

Just as we warned previously (here, here, and here), the knife-catching, contango-crushed, BTFDers that piled over $6bn into Oil ETFs have severely underperformed this year. The USO ETF has fallen by more than 9% since the start of the year, whereas front-month U.S. oil futures have dipped by less than 3% on account of roll costs, and as of last week, investors have started to exit this massive position en masse. As Reuters reports, outflows from four of the largest oil-specific exchange traded funds reached $338 million in two weeks to April 8 - the first since September and largest since Jan 2014. It seems Goldman was right about "misguided retail investors."

No doubt smarting from criticism about its lack of success in picking winners in alternative energy vehicles, the Department of Energy has given initial approval for a $269 million loan to a proven winner – Alcoa’s high-strength aluminum to make vehicles lighter and more fuel efficient. But the new loan came under immediate fire for being superfluous since Alcoa was proceeding with the plant with or without DOE assistance.

The dude that called the Pan-European Sovereign Debt Crisis in 2010 is making it clear that the ECB is playing with fire, but will never admit it's getting burned.

Since one should always do the opposite of what Goldman recommends (because that is what Goldman itself is trading), the following is a perfectly suitable, and free, substitute of the SQZZ ETF: all one needs to do is go long the stocks Goldman recommends to short, go short the stocks Goldman thinks will be squeezed, and wait for the money to roll in courtesy of Goldman's flow and prop traders.

The answer, as shown in the following charts from the IMF, is because the dotted "consensus" blue lines also known as simple trendline extrapolation, better known in the financial world as "Birinyi's ruler", sometimes just happen to diverge from reality.

Without the support of the ECB, the country’s banking system would be shut off from international markets and likely collapse.

Back in January we asked the following: “who will be the first to offer a negative rate mortgage?” As WSJ reports, this bizarre characteristic of the new paranormal is spreading throughout Europe on the back of Mario Draghi’s trillion-euro adventure in debt monetization land: "Tumbling interest rates in Europe have put some banks in an inconceivable position: owing money on loans to borrowers. At least one Spanish bank, Bankinter SA, the country’s seventh-largest lender by market value, has been paying some customers interest on mortgages by deducting that amount from the principal the borrower owes."

Get on the Scooby Bus...

The post-retail-sales, opening ramp has been eviscerated as yet another data series suggests things aren't well in the US economy. US Business inventories rose more than expected in February (+0.3% vs +0.2% exp) but this held the crucial inventories-to-sales ratio at 1.36x - the highest since the Lehman spike.