Archive - Sep 14, 2015

Major depressions do not occur overnight. They go in downward waves, interrupted at intervals by false recovery waves.  But the collapse will continue, unstoppably. Like any house of cards, once it begins to actually fall, no further Band-Aids will stop the inevitable. So, what might that trigger be?

Maybe it is 'different' this time...

Bankers and borrowers have kicked the can down the road about as far as they can as more oilfield service (OFS) and exploration and production (E&P) companies default on their loans and seek more relief on lending covenants. While a significant oil price increase to lift all the sinking boats will surely come, it won’t happen soon enough. More of the same won’t work. Oil industry debt is everyday news. But the discussion is about the symptoms, not the ailment.

Everything is so wonderful that a rate hike would equate to saying the Fed has won. Seven years of ZIRP and a few selling periods when the Fed stopped POMO’s and QE injections, we can easily say with extreme confidence that the Fed won. And by won we mean didn’t ruin the system entirely. Except they did.

The VIX term structure has been inverted (spot higher than 3rd futures) for 17 days - that is the longest period of backwardation since August 2011, when uncertainty soared around the USA credit rating downgrade. In fact, much of the VIX term structure is higher today than it was at the peak of the crisis on Black Monday as both government shutdown and Fed rate hike fears dominate the forward curve...

The real risk for the Federal Reserve is keeping interest rates at zero and the deflationary feedback from the collapse in commodity prices, and the Chinese economy trips the U.S. into a recession. Given that "QE" programs have no real effect on boosting economic growth, the Fed would be left with virtually no "effective" monetary policy tools with which to stabilize the economy. For the Fed, this is the worse possible outcome.

"I didn’t really consider it so much a discrimination thing as – it’s a barbershop... for guys"

It appears that the Fed no longer cares about doing the right thing for a very simple reason - the Fed no longer is worried about losing credibility. As the following chart showing the results of a survey of 150 institutional RBS clients and investors confirms, two -thirds already believe the Fed has lost credibility.

"It’s the whole disgusting circus parade of identity politics, and PC witch-hunting, and trans-sex drum-beating, and girl-lugging-a-mattress-around-campus idiocy, and blame-it-all-on-Whitey whinging, and drone-strike-du-jour warfare, and out-of-control NSA surveillance monkey business, plus throw in the outrageous scams of “civil forfeiture” under a president who was supposedly a professor of constitutional law — the list of Democratic-sponsored absurdities and turpitudes gives me the vapors."

For the first time in over two years, without and with the contribution of AAPL, the IT sector will post a year over year decline in EPS. As for earnings excluding AAPL, forget it: "the estimated earnings decline for the Information Technology sector is -0.4%. Excluding Apple, the sector would report a year-over-year decline in earnings of -5.9%."

One of these days, the people of main street will rediscover their torches and pitchforks. But until they do, Goldman has apparently invented still another ruse to keep the Fed doing Wall Street’s bidding, and to thereby keep its wretched jihad against savers fully in force.

The massively-funded Hillary Clinton campaign to run for President goes from worse to worserer. As The Hill reports, Clinton's support has fallen 21 points since July, from 63 to 42%, according to a Washington Post/ABC News poll released Monday, dropping below 50% for the first time.

As thousands of refugees pour into Europe to escape the horrors of war, with many dying along the way, a different sort of tragedy has played out in many of the European Union’s newest member states. The states known collectively as “Eastern Europe,” including my native Poland, have revealed themselves to be intolerant, illiberal, xenophobic, and incapable of remembering the spirit of solidarity that carried them to freedom a quarter-century ago.

48 hours - that's how long it took Citi's chief economist Willem Buiter to issue a report which was just as dire as Daiwa's, but because Citigroup is much more reliant on keeping it traditionally bullish clients as happy as possible, one had to read between the lines to get to the bottom line.  This is Citi's punchline: "A global recession starting in 2016, led by China is now our Global Economics team's main scenario. Uncertainty remains, but the likelihood of a timely and effective policy response seems to be diminishing."