Archive - Aug 14, 2015

You have to believe to receive...

"For a number of years to come, the China Securities Finance Corp. will not exit (the market). Its function to stabilise the market will not change."

Republican kingmakers are nothing if not pragmatic, they want results for their money. They aren’t getting it. They are unhappy. They are angry. But like a chameleon changing colors, they want to be on the winning side. They all know Trump, they also know they can deal with Trump, so they will. The Blitzkrieg is over. Trump survived. The establishment sacrificed many of their finest media plants this past weekend. Every one of them ended up looking like exactly what they are, cheap desperate prostitutes, willing to say whatever was required of them, as long as their paychecks kept coming .

“The EPA was basically deceptive...It was incompetent and stupid for them to go up to that existing plug and try to remove it without knowing how much water was upstream and behind it... I just can’t believe they were so incompetent that they would go in there and attempt to do this - unplug the Gold King mine - without a backup plan."

There will be more Americans tonight newly questioning President Obama's Clean Power Plan, as NBCNews reports, Union Pacific will cut hundreds of management jobs as the amount of coal shipped by railroads continues to plunge.

Overall, the lack of revenue growth combined with full equity valuations (unless you think +17x is cheap) is all you need to know about the current market churn... and why it will likely continue.

While the total rig count remained unchanged at 884, Baker Hughes reported oil rigs rose 2 this week to 672 - its highest since April 2015.  This is the 6th rise in the last 7 weeks. There is little to no reaction in crude prices for now...

The most pivotal importance of China is that it was the world’s latest financial hope. The yuan devaluation shatters that hope once and for all. The global economy looks a lot more bleak for it, even if many people already didn’t believe official growth numbers anymore. Because we’ve reached the end of the line, the game changes. Of course there will be additional attempts at stimulus, but China’s central bank has de facto conceded that its measures have failed. They just hope you won’t notice, and try to bring it on with a positive spin. Central banks are not “beginning” to lose control, they lost control a long time ago. The age of central bank omnipotence has “left and gone away” like Joltin’ Joe. Omnipotence has been replaced by impotence.

If crude’s slump back to a six-year low looks bad, Bloomberg notes that it’s even worse when you reflect that summer is supposed to be peak season for oil, and “it will get more so as refiners go into maintenance.”

We can delete it!

There is an economic and financial trainwreck rumbling through the world economy. Namely, the Great China Ponzi. In all of economic history there has never been anything like it. It is only a matter of time before it ends in a spectacular collapse, leaving the global financial bubble of the last two decades in shambles. The resulting deflationary spiral will suck the global economy into its vortex. And Wall Street will go down for the count because this time the Fed will be utterly powerless to reverse the tide.

It is what happened in investment grade fund flows in the latest week that is making CEO, especially those whose compensation is a direct function of how much stock they repurchase, very nervous because as Lipper reported overnight IG funds just saw $1.8 billion in outflows, the most in over two years or since June 2013. And without the fund inflow train into IG funds operating smoothly, suddenly stock buybacks appear in jeopardy...