Archive - Nov 2009 - Story

Radio Zero Returns.  A little falsified data.  A bit of stretched graphic.  Some selective time series start points.  It must be Global Cooling Saturday!

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Alan Greenspan's economic legacy is slowly but surely deteriorating from that of one created by a "Maestro", to the deranged hungover flashbacks of the most inept monetarist dilettante and plutocrat puppet in the history of fiat capitalism. And with ever increasing honest and truthful observations as those shared by Naomi Klein and Joseph Stiglitz in the 1 hour + program attached, courtesy of Fora TV, only the remnants of the quickly evaporating close circle of Bernanke and Co., will have anything favorable left to say for the man who took the mundane task of building bubbles and converted it into rocket science so complex that only a few people at Goldman Sachs figured out how to benefit from it. We encourage all readers to spend some time watching the program before, just like Barney Frank and other bribed politicans, deciding that changing the status quo vis-a-vis the Fed is a step in the "wrong direction."

A topological representation of the shadow banking system, which as many may have already forgotten, smiled upon such lunacy as infinite leverage. The recreation of the latter is the ever elusive (so far) holy grail for the Federal Reserve.

There are about $1.4 quadrillion of them. So why not tax them? As Tim Geithner says "That's not something we are prepared to support." Some are curious, who is this editorial "we" in this case. According to a co-sponsor of an upcoming bill, he has been called three times by none other than Jamie Dimon to promote the party line...guess which side of the fence the JPM CEO is on.

Could it be that the fundamental economic indicator that is gospel not only to Goldman Sachs, but to Ben Bernanke in estimating and determining monetary policy, the output gap, provides a flawed reading of the economy? As a reminder, Ben Bernanke has repeatedly expressed little regard for either commodity inflation or US dollar exchange as having an impact on overall US inflation. As Askari and Hochain state: "according to [Bernanke's] theory, inflation was related only to the output gap. As long as the output gap was negative, that is, if actual gross domestic product was below potential GDP, the economy was at no risk of inflation. Hence, he argued that the central bank had to adopt an aggressive money policy until the output gap closed. Such is the policy prescription from what is called the Taylor Rule or the Phillips Curve. Because potential GDP is not a measured macroeconomic variable, it can be estimated in millions of ways. There are, therefore, millions of ways for estimating an output gap, making the concept difficult to use as a policy tool." The problem with these millions of estimations, is that especially courtesy of the Greenspan created bubble over the past 20 years, the American economy is, ironically, not a true representation of itself. And thus, the output gap estimates need to be normalized for a "bubble free" GDP environment. It is precisely this issue that none other than the St. Louis Fed addresses in its latest paper: "Has the Recent Real Estate Bubble Biased the Output Gap?" The conclusion is startling: based on a production function output gap normalization (an approach "based on a relation between available productive inputs (such as capital and labor), their current utilization rates, and aggregate production"), Bernanke could be fatally wrong about the economy's "capacity for inflation" courtesy of the CBO's overestimated output gap, and that his loose monetary policy could end up being a disastrous precursor to rampant (and not distant) hyperinflation, due to his blatant avoidance of simple logic when interpreting the economic output gap.

A big picture perspective of why the American public, and the world, should be very concerned about the fate of the U.S. dollar courtesy of one grotesquely irresponsible act by the Federal Reserve after another.

The S&P 500 remains in its downtrend from October 2007 and its rally from March is getting very extended, as the risk asset melt-up courtesy of the ubiquitous dollar-funded carry trade runs dry of dollar liquidity. Leading indicators continue to imply deflation.

With the equity market sell off yesterday, it is not surprising that the weakness as a result of bad economic data spread to all products, notably credit. The CDS heatmap, or in this case redmap, demonstrates how bad the mauling in IG NA was, where for each name tighter there were 40 credits wider. With all assets approaching a correlation of one, we fondly salute to the memory of relative value analysis.

The goal of this week’s post is to explore the factors driving Galleon Technology fund’s performance a bit deeper. The fund was widely known for its high turnover, rapid-fire trading and extensive use of options to leverage short-term bets. Therefore, it seems unlikely that this quintessential hedge fund could resemble a typical technology sector mutual fund. But, as we’ve already learned from our previous analysis of Renaissance RIEF, such massive trading may inadvertently result in performance that can be explained by a handful of directional bets.

More charts and trends than dollar shorts

Sen. Kaufman admirably takes on the windmills again, this time sending a much more sternly worded letter to Mary Schapiro to finally step away from the game of taxpayer funded Solitaire, and instead of waiting for twitters and bloggers to hand her agency cases of insider trading on a silver platter, to finally do something proactive, before her thoroughly discredited agency comprising of what are apparently some of the most inept government workers in existence, is responsible for not only the biggest ponzi blow up (done and done) but for the greatest market collapse courtesy of a few unsupervised Atari consoles.

At 2PM Eastern, CIT's CDS auction was priced at a final recovery of 68.125. This was over 2 bps lower than the inside midpoint market announced earlier. Going into the auction, there was $728.98 billion of open interest, indicating that basis traders were a dominant force and exlipsed correlation desks' influence in the auction. The 13 participating dealers submitted $4.5 billion worth of limit order, with an average bid of 65.66, just 3.6% away from the final settlement price, indicating that the option to low-ball into the Dutch auction and get hit on some insane bid has disappeared.

Now that Goldman controls the bulk of NYSE trading, its basically down to the major wire house Robots doing mortal combat with each other, trying to push the tape one way or another. Meanwhile, individual funds with outsized concentrations are getting killed with maniacal squeezes and huge shank jobs exacerbated by Option Expiration Racketeering.

Due to numerous external inquiries and complaints, we would like to solicit reader input from those traders who were impacted by the ICE's cancellation of 12,000 DXY contracts voided on November 3rd (8,000) and also today on November 20th (4,000). As a reader submits: "We are interested in forcing them to disclose who (i.e. firms, maker makers, etc.). participated in these cancelled trades, at what price and volume, and request WHY these trades were cancelled."

I have always depended on the kindness of strangers,” said Blanche DuBois, in the final words of the play A Streetcar Named Desire. Well, don’t we all. Many citizens probably still cling to the old saw that public debt doesn’t matter because “we owe it to ourselves.” Wrong. Debt always matters. And as for whom we owe it to, it is a lot of kind (or, at least, not yet unkind) strangers. As recently as 1970, foreign holders of U.S. debt were essentially non-existent. But their slice of our obligation pie has steadily increased, especially over the past two decades, until now foreign governments and international investors hold about 35% of Treasuries, as the following chart reveals.