Archive - Aug 2009 - Story

Commodity bull Dennis Gartman has decided it is time to collect a little 2 and 20 luvin' presumably a more lucrative venture than reaping the benefits of newsletter subscriptions. Hopefully the fund, if it ever launches will be a little more diversified than just a couple of thousand BOEs. To observe the effects of a lack of diversification, one only needs to observe the performance of Ackman's Target fund.

The attached chart demonstrates just how much of a ramp the Russell 2000 has experienced in terms of its market beta since the March lows. A pretty convincing demonstration of just how many junk stocks have been purchased, most of them on forced short squeezes, which have in turn pushed the marginal buyer to be much lessdiscriminate in lifting any and all offers, thus driving the overall market.

The world's formerly largest hedge fund, which had a luxury car maker subsidiary is about to meet its regulator maker, the BaFIN . Only took them about a year. Which is still one tenth the lag demonstrated by their US counterparts.

While over the past several weeks Goldman's stock price has been steady as a rock (except to precipitate an occasional headfake in a volumeless and directionless market), its CDS has spiked wider by about 50% since its lows (from low 90s to mid 140s). Either some arb desk is currently collecting all its possessions in banker boxes as it is escorted out of the building, or look for a convergence of these two trades soon.

Tim Geithner just can't get enough of testing the indirect bidders' desire (the directs', not so much) for soaking up rapidly deflating US Sovereign debt: next up on deck $109 Billion in Treasury Bonds, as well as 88 Billion in Treasury Bills.

"We should probably add here that even though the moves by the Fed have provided ample liquidity, they have not stopped the underlying fundamentals from deteriorating — see Corporate Bond Defaults Hit Record on page 19 of the FT. (S&P just reported that 201 companies with $453 billion of debt have defaulted this year, exceeding the entire tally of 126 defaults covering $433bln in ALL of 2008). The 12-month speculative-grade corporate default rate has risen to 8.58%, as of July, from 8.25% in June (the rating agency is forecasting that the default rate will rise to 14.3% by the first quarter of 2010, taking out the prior record of 12.54% set in July 1991)." David Rosenberg

Courtesy of Finviz, the ratio of insider buying to selling transactions is 18 to 131. Total transaction value: Buys: $29.7 million; Sells: $889 million. This compares with last week's buys for $60.1 million and sells for $1.15 billion. $3 Billion in insider sales in three weeks.

Just don't tell that to delinquent loans: now at 9.24% of all loans.

The trend of polls beating expectations continues, while actual results indicate no real improvement. The latest indication of this comes from the Philly Fed current activity diffusion index, which skyrocketed from -7.5% to 4.2% as the market kept on ramping higher, while more employees were let go, and margins declined yet again.

After several consecutive weeks of equity market mimicking and rerisking, the CDS market finally saw a net derisking in the week ended August 14, across virtually sectors, with the biggest action concentrated in the financials arena. Total net notional change was substantially higher than last week's -$14.5 billion, increasing to $66.1 billion, with a marked derisking in financials at $62.6 billion. Other notable derisking spaces were Consumer Services at $27.6 billion (again) and Utilities at $20 billion.

• Jobless claims rise by 15,000 to 576,000 (Bloomberg), even "as the economy stabilizes"
• SEC plays keep-up in high-tech race (WSJ)
• Germany braces for second wave of credit crunch (Telegraph, h/t Jake)
• Andy Xie: New bubble threatens a V-shaped recovery (Caijing, h/t Yaser)
• Jonathan Weil: Insurers' biggest writedowns may be yet to come (Bloomberg)

• Appliance makers counting on "cash for clunkers"-type rebate program to revive sales.
• Asian stock markets were mixed on Thursday. Shanghai's index rebounds 2.1%.
• China's first-half current-account surplus reported down 32%.
• Crude oil futures hit 2-month high as US inventories fell unexpectedly by 8.4M barrels.
• Democrats prepare to go it alone on health care overhaul without GOP support.
• GDP in OECD countries stabilized in Q2, with support from exporters Germany, Japan.
• Obama administration to cut 2009 budget-deficit estimate to $1.58 trillion.
• Obama administration developing plans to wind down clunker rebates program.

"The worst outcome for China would be one that includes ever-rising inflation pressures, as money and
credit flows augmented by “hot money” capital inflows push the inflation rate up to a level that threatens China’s stability. Since that would be most likely under a scenario in which industrial economies are not recovering in the second half of the year, we could see a situation in which disappointment over the recovery in the big three economies coincides with disappointment about the sustainability of China’s planned 8 percent growth path. That outcome would coincide with a likely bursting of the stock and property market bubbles that are inflating in China now on the hopes that a second-half recovery will validate China’s goal of sustained 8 percent growth in 2009."

All you need to know about how the markets operate these days, courtesy of Nic, an analyst at ICAP.

Archive this one for the funny pages. It has been leaked by administration officials (and sponged up by Bloomberg), that on August 25, when the CBO releases its updated budget estimate, the 2009 deficit is expected to decline from $1.825 trillion to $1.58 trillion. And, get this, one of the reasons for the reduction is the FDIC spending $78 billion less, presumably due to "fewer bank failures than the administration anticipated." Pardon us, but last time we checked, not only did the FDIC have no cash left in the FDIC, and was effectively in a debtor position vis-a-vis the administration, but of the top 4 banks pending for blow up, Colonial was under (granted with some arbitrarily optimistic loss expectations), Guaranty was about to be hawked over to a few siesta loving left midfielders, and Corus was about to... well, we are not quite sure what the hell Corus is doing these days.