Archive - May 18, 2015

Hello, Twitter! It's Barack. Really! Six years in, they're finally giving me my own account.

— President Obama (@POTUS) May 18, 2015

December 18th 2014 saw SPY - the S&P 500 ETF - suddenly spike to 212.97 (on no news whatsoever). We have now taken out that "fat finger" peak.

Hope is a mistake...

Here are the cliff notes of the Icahn letter:

1. Uncle Carl and his two analysts remain convinced they know how to run AAPL better than its CEO and his thousands of employees.
2. Uncle Carl and his two analysts have built up a massive stake in AAPL shares which however they can't get out of in this illiquid market without tipping the market they are selling - a tip which would promptly send the stock plunging - and as a result have come to the only buyer who is big enough to buy all of Icahn's shares without destabilizing the market: the company itself.

After some relief Friday, US treasuries are selling off once again this morning (but not being driven by Bund weakness). Yields are up 5-9bps across the complex with 30Y back over 3.00% again..

While one could, at least superficially, make the case that for the US consumer (if nobody else) lower oil prices are indeed better than the opposite, we wonder how the same pundits will spin that according to AAA, not only are Los Angeles gas prices now back over $4.00 per gallon, erasing almost all losses from a year ago.

Since November, HAHB homebuilder sentiment has only beaten expectations once. May printed 54 (notably short of the 57 expectation). Despite all the previous hope for future sales, buyer traffic has fallen as The Midwest saw the biggest drop in sentiment (what about the post-weather bounce?) and The West rising modestly. The story was well-known: pessimism now offset by optimism later: present single family sales falls to 59 vs 61 last month, while future single family sales rise to 64 vs 63 last month, even as prospective buyers traffic falls to 39 vs 40 last month.

The Greek mess has lit a fire under Gold again, which appears to have bottomed in both the Euro (blue) and the Japanese Yen (red). The one exception is Gold priced in US Dollars mainly because the US Dollar has been so strong for much of the last 9 months.

The IMF discussed a "Cyrpus-like" take it or leave it solution for Greece last week, FT reports. With the countdown to outright insolvency down to two weeks, PM Tsipras will meet EU leaders in Latvia on Thursday to make one last push for a last minute deal. Meanwhile, the fate of the Greek banking sector hangs in the balance as the ECB has come under fire for the monetary financing of the Greek government. 

It takes a lot to kick a dying ailing man in the guts as he is already agonizing on the floor, but nobody wants to do it to poor old Uncle Sam, do they?

The exuberant bounce of last week's IMF default/IMF payment workaround is fading fast as peripheral European bonds and the euro are being sold aggressively this morning, after headlines continue to suggest Greek bank collateral is dropping faster than the pressure in Patriot's footballs. Most notably, bunds are eeerily stable - almost as if some central planner figured out German bonds were the world's flashing red indicator and decided to suppress volatility some more.

Gold topped $1230 this morning - breaking to 3-month highs and up over 4% year-to-date - up 5 days in a row for the best run in 4 months. The surge comes causally or correlatedly coincidental with China's explicit shift into extraordinary measures (LTROs) but, as The FT reports, market participants are concerned that algo-based funds have created a "frenetic liquidity" environment as everyone from real money to central banks "aren’t trading the gold market the way they used to."

As the economic calendar slowly picks up following the NFP lull, we are looking at a busy week both globally and in the US, where an army of Fed speakers culminates with a Yellen speech on Friday at 1pm in Rhode Island.

Ten Members of the U.S. Congress – along with 32 of their staff members – received secret payments from Azerbaijan’s state-owned oil company to travel to Baku in 2013, to cover the cost of travel, including souvenirs of “silk scarves, crystal tea sets and Azerbaijani rugs.”