Archive - Apr 2015

All's well that ends well after a good old fashioned horse chase...

Dear CFTC:

Just because we know how serious you are in your quest to root out all market rigging, or as you put it in your charge against Navinder Sarao "manipulation or attempt to manipulate the price of the intra-day contract price for the near month of the E-mini S&P," we have decided together with Nanex to once again give you a helping hand, and point out all the spoofing that has taken place in the E-mini or ES. Just today

Do you believe in miracles? Sell-side economists do... (again)

"China has a $28 trillion problem. That’s the country’s total government, corporate and household debt load as of mid-2014... equal to 282 percent of the country’s total annual economic output," Bloomberg notes, adding that efforts to deleverage this massive debt burden aren't compatible with the measures Beijing needs to take to boost economic growth. But if you thought the debt problem was bad now, it's going to get worse because as Reuters notes, China is about to activate the ABS machine.

While it has been widely reported that partisanship in the United States Congress is at an historic high, a new study finds that despite short-term fluctuations, partisanship or non-cooperation in the U.S. Congress has been increasing exponentially for over 60 years with no sign of abating or reversing.

Ask yourself: where do you think this is going? Do you really think your home country will be more free and more prosperous in five years? If not, it’s time to come up with a Plan B...

The reason one can't help but wonder just how much of FB's "users" are merely robotic autoclicks and/or originate at various clickfarms somewhere in Asia, is that taking the Google Trends chart posted above, and represented as of today, reveals something troubling.

Hence, if and when a genuine price for risk reappears, the effect may be greatly magnified as it was in the US housing market a few years back under not dissimilar circumstances. As Karl Popper noted, volatility can be suppressed in a capitalist system, but it must ultimately reappear. Sooner or later, we will face a good deal of fireworks.

The put/call ratio of open interest on S&P 100 (OEX) options has historically been a "smart money" indicator. The stock market peaked (anbd has drifted sideways for the last 6-7 weeks) since March 3rd saw an unprecedented string of bearish readings. The bearish OEX put/call readings have not relented, however. In fact, the bearishness has accelerated to an extreme level never seen before.

"Listening to Goldman for advice on how to run the economy is like listening to Dracula on how to run a blood bank,” a prominent British economist says, in response to the bank's assessment of the dangers inherent in a "leftward shift" in the UK government. "Their real aim is to avoid 50p tax rates for high earners, the Mansion Tax and other small impositions which shift some of the burden of austerity onto the shoulders of the rich, the likes of Goldman Sachs bankers and their clients," another economist notes.

"To find the real source of the system's excessive fragility, the regulators will need to look much closer to home... The Federal Reserve remains the largest market manipulator ever, and the desperate yield-chasing, hair-trigger markets that it created were the primary cause of that crash and the inevitable ones yet to come."

Appalled doesn’t cover it. Disgusted won’t do either. Angry doesn’t come close. Maybe we have yet to learn of a word that would express our feelings on the following topic. There’s a disease, an epidemic, that spreads through out the western world. We are all turning into accomplices to murder. And we still believe we are better than that. Just perhaps not all of us.

Less than 24 hours after Yemen announced an end to Operation Decisive Storm and its airstrikes on Yemen - in hopes of initiating Operation New Hope aimed at resuming a political process - The NY Times reports, warplanes from a Saudi-led military coalition conducted airstrikes in the southwestern Yemeni city of Taiz on Wednesday. Mission Dis-accomplished or Operation 'Empire Strikes Back'?