Archive - Aug 2015

We are delighted to report that about 7 years after it was glaringly obvious to everyone except the Fed of course, now - with the usual half decade delay - even the NY Fed has finally figured out what even 5 year olds get. "A new study from the New York Federal Reserve faults these policies for enabling college institutions to aggressively raise tuitions. The implication is the federal government is fueling a vicious cycle of higher prices and government aid that ultimately could cost taxpayers and price some Americans out of higher education, similar to what some economists contend happened with the housing bubble."

We have lived through a credit hyper-expansion for the record books, with an unprecedented generation of excess claims to underlying real wealth. In doing so we have created the largest financial departure from reality in human history. Bubbles are not new – humanity has experienced them periodically going all the way back to antiquity – but the novel aspect of this one, apart from its scale, is its occurrence at a point when we have reached or are reaching so many limits on a global scale. The retrenchment we are about to experience as this bubble bursts is also set to be unprecedented, given that the scale of a bust is predictably proportionate to the scale of the excesses during the boom that precedes it. Deflation and depression are mutually reinforcing, meaning the downward spiral will continue for many years. China is the biggest domino about to fall, and from a great height as well, threatening to flatten everything in its path on the way down. This is the beginning of a New World Disorder…

The Fed would have needed to hike rates by 800 bps in the wake of the dot-com collapse in order to prevent the housing bubble. That would have purged the system and gradually, the FOMC could have eased by around 300 bps over the next four years. That policy course would have prevented the speculative bubble that brought capital markets the world over to their knees in 2008. And why didn’t the Fed do this? Because "such a large increase in interest rates would have depressed output more than the Great Recession did." In other words, thanks to Alan Greenspan, the US economy cannot function under a normalized monetary policy regime.

We could not have put it better - Progress indeed...

The quest for perfection is man’s unattainable goal. Man can never be perfect if we are to believe the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes. Man is man’s wolf and all of that.

How many more times will we be told that "it" doesn't matter... or it is "transitory" with regard any and every flashing red warning signal from asset values that are not centrally manipulated with regard asset values that are 'plunge protected'? Well to try and kill one of those myths off, we present the following chart... showing how a collapse in commodity prices is unequivocally bad for US equity markets...

Will the Japanese “monetary perpetuum mobile” ever get questioned by financial markets?

There's Always Been Some Corruption ... But Now Things Have Just Gotten Silly

Lately the leaders of some of the world’s biggest energy companies have been saying oil prices will remain depressed for some time – perhaps for the next five years – and now they’ve decided to cut their costs in the most painful way possible: massive job cuts.

Ironically on the day when another coal company collapses into bankruptcy, President Obama begins the pitch for his "Clean Power Plan" which Murray Energy CEO Robert Murray described as "biazrre", blames for the collapse in the coal industry, and has now filed five federal lawsuits against the president who Murray believes is "the nation's greatest destroyer."

"Having lived in [western] Europe, I realise that they often confuse Nazism with nationalism, which for us Ukrainians is more akin to patriotism. It’s not about considering your own ethnic group as superior, but being proud of it, and of defending your country."

In this moment of history there is an astounding lack of seriousness among people who pretend to be political heavyweights. No one so far has nailed a proper bill of grievances to the White House gate. A broad roster of dire issues facing this society ought to be self-evident. But since they are absent so far in the public discussion, here is our list of matters that serious candidates should dare to talk about (all things that a sitting president could take action on)...

Just a few short years after they dared to downgrade the US, S&P has unleashed their worst on Europe:

*EUROPEAN UNION OUTLOOK REVISED TO NEGATIVE FROM STABLE BY S&P

We are sure this will be met by S&P office raids throughout Europe, litigation over somethhing or other, and denials broadly from any and every unelected member of EU's elite... because "when it's serious you have to lie."

Following our discussion of perhaps the most successful (and/or most risky) trades of the last decade - that of shorting the front-month VIX - we were less than surprised that VXX -the VIX ETF has collapsed to new record-lows this morning. A snap higher in VIX has been met by an avalanche of vol selling and, as we discuss below, the accelerating contango as expirations loom has encouraged yet more to take on unlimited risk positions to pick up pennies in front of the steamroller. All the time "The Fed has your back," it appears traders believe the steamroller driver has his foot on the brake... As if on cue - VIX has spiked and VXX surged.