Archive - May 14, 2015

"Young people are not going to be talking about cutting back," exclaims billionaire hedge fund manager Stanley Druckenmiller, ominously concluding "there will be nothing to cut back." The reason he is so doom-full about the future - an aging population will present a "massive, massive problem" for the U.S. in 15 years - as Bloomberg reports, because of demographics, "we're just using more and more of society’s resources to fend for the old people," warning that Obama's plans to tax the rich to pay for more social services for the poor would be futile.

The fact is that much of the globe, particularly the developed west, is up to its eyeballs in debt. Mind, you, this is based solely on official public debt numbers.  If you include unfunded liabilities, then the US, most of Europe, Japan, and even China are sporting Debt to GDP ratios well over 300%.

The current consternation among global equity markets is centered around the recent considerable rise in bond yields globally. Historical precedents, or the lessons they contain, which bear some resemblance to present market conditions suggest the recent spike in bond yields would appear to have historical evidence to back up those who harbor concerns about its potential negative impact on stocks – a negative impact that may be of a long-term nature.

Several weeks ago, when the CFTC and DOJ's laughable attempt to scapegoat the May 2010 flash crash on the actions of a live-in-his-parents-basement UK trader, we explained "Why Sarao Is The Flash Crash Patsy: He Threatened To Expose The "Mass Manipulation Of High Frequency Nerds." It now turns out that he not only threatened to expose the real market manipulators, but he acctually did it. More than 100 times.

Two days ago there was some rejoicing and much surprise when the "Warren-faction" of Senate liberals turned against Obama, and failed to vote for a fast-track approval of the TPP. That surprise lasted for about 48 hours when moments ago, in a 65-33 vote, the Senate finally advanced a measure allowing Obama to expedite approval of trade agreements, a bill with bipartisan support in that chamber which however according to Bloomberg may run into strong opposition from House Democrats.

Innovative, successful companies are formed due to almost astronomically-unlikely pairings of the right people, at the right time, in the right place. And that place isn't going to be Startup Castle. Promise.

Sitting in Silicon Valley, it feels like we’ve reached the peak again. Hot money is chasing deals at ridiculous valuations. Housing prices are more than incomes can cover. Optimism is high. Jobless Claims are at cyclical lows. We’ve seen this before, in 2000 and 2007.

If March was supposed to herald at least the beginning of the anticipated yearly rebound, April put that idea to rest. We have pushed way past last year’s “aberration” in the polar vortices and way past even the immediate aftermath of the 2012 slowdown (which hit in the also-snowy winter of 2013). You can make the argument that the full US economy is not in recession but it is now exceedingly difficult to sustain any position that doesn’t put the consumer already there.

Gen. Wesley Clark has been a busy man since retiring from public service with a plan to make $40 million. In addition to chairing notorious investment bank Rodman & Renshaw, the former NATO allied commander and one-time Presidential hopeful has thrown his face and fame behind a plethora of OTC-listed companies, Bloomberg reports. From grilled cheese sandwich trucks to hydroponic lettuce companies run by the real-life Bud Fox, Clark's name has become so synonymous with doomed penny stocks that one fund manager calls his very appearance on a company board "a red flag."

Having been 'snubbed' by the new Saudi King Salman, it appears the uneasy relationshipo with our 'allies' in The Gulf is ebbing. In what the State Department will, we are sure, just brush off, Politico reports that the king of Bahrain has apparently also snubbed President Barack Obama, preferring instead to attend a horse show with Queen Elizabeth. 

Following two very strong auctions earlier this week which as we showed previously had a massive short heading into the 1pm deadline, we made a simple prediction: because there was virtually no short overhang in the 30Y this morning, with the paper trading 0.11% in repo, we expected the auction to turn out ugly. Sure enough, an ugly 30 Year auction is precisely what we got moments ago when $16 billion in 3 decade paper was sold at a 3.044%, the highest yield since November, and a whopping 1.8bps tail to the 3.026% When Issued.

"The head of Germany's Bundesbank ripped into the European Central Bank on Thursday, saying emergency funding for Greek banks broke the taboo of financing governments and it was not up to central banks to decide who was or wasn't in the euro zone," Reuters reports.

Remember MacNeil Curry, aka the second coming of Tom Stolper (even if he has a way to go to catch up to Dennis Gartman), aka the FX gift that keeps on giving? Well, he just gave another FX gift.

How do you make what had been a very good couple of years for tens of thousands of Avon Products shorts into an absolute nightmare of a day? By doing what PTG Partners just did when moments ago it announced that, out of the blue, it would like to purchase AVP for a price of $18.75 or nearly three times higher than the Avon stock price moments before the announcement. Because why pay double when triple would do.