Archive - Jan 25, 2010 - Story

As observant readers will recall, a week ago we pointed out a letter in which the New York Fed's Steven Manzari instructed AIG to stand down on all discussions with counterparties on "tearing up/unwinding CDS trades on the CDO portfolio." At the time we focused on the word "stand down" as an indication of the Fed's lead role in the process. At this point there is no doubt that the FRBNY, together with its law firm, Davis Polk, were in the pilot's seat during the entire AIG negotiation, and while Tim Geithner may not have been the responsible man for this, someone must have been - and for the record, our money is a double or nothing on recently promoted FRBNY Senior Vice President Sarah Dahlgren, who as of January 21st is in charge of the Fed's Special Investments [AIG] Management Group. We sure hope Sarah gets the chance to recall her memories beginning in the fateful month of September 2008 when she became the person in charge of the FRBNY's AIG relationship. But back to the letter - little did we know that our focus was on the right sentence... but on the wrong word. What should have struck us front and center, was Habayeb's admission that contract "tear downs" had been evaluated. This means that someone, aside from AIG, must have expressed an interest in a tear down, which if true would have dramatic consequences for the entire AIG debacle. Today, the WSJ presented the missing piece of the puzzle.

Martha Coakley suffered a 26% swing in support, from a 15% lead over Scott Brown to an eventual 9% loss, killing chances of a comprehensive healthcare reform bill. 50.8% of Americans oppose the healthcare bill. Meanwhile, 84% of Americans oppose re-confirming Ben Bernanke as Fed Chairman. Cloture requires 22 more votes and with 28 Dems yet to voice a yes or no to Bernanke's reappointment, the prospect of undecideds permitting the GOP's filibuster hold (and consequently eliminating Bernanke's chances for a second term) is becoming increasingly interesting, as well as increasingly likely.

By now you have certainly heard the opinion of one Paul Volcker who claims that the only useful financial innovation over the past 20 years has been the ATM machine. Now please indulge this video, in which Jeremy Grantham and Rick Bookstaber debate popular opinion that financial innovation boosts economic growth, as defended by Myron Scholes and Putnam's Robert Reynolds, and support the case (judged by a popular vote before and after the debate) that financial innovation in recent decades has done nothing but make the financial sector become a "large, heavy, and growing bloodsucker on the economy's back." (and yes, such brilliant developments as HFT, Flash trading, and all other "market efficiency and liquidity enhancing" gimmicks most certainly fall under the innovation umbrella).

Everyone in Congress, and anywhere else for that matter, knows prop desk trading (banks trading their own capital like a hedge fund) is a conflict of interest. They may or may not think it important or that it caused this or that problem, but they know it’s a real conflict.  Congressmen, since when wasn’t conflict of interest and poor ethical standards reason enough to change the law? But since we bring it up, of course prop trading was indeed the rot at the heart of our financial problems (see last quarter’s Letter). Watching traders take home their $28 million bonus sent a powerful message to lowly salesmen and packagers of asset-backed securities, for example, to get out there and really take some risk. This rot spread to the very top, and pretty soon chairmen of boards were exhorting CEOs to leverage up and look more like some much more profitable rival that resembled a hedge fund rather than an investment bank. Thus encouraged – or intimidated – some CEOs just kept on dancing right off the cliff. Let’s
learn from our near disaster. Viva Volcker!

Senator Dick Durbin has said that he hopes the Senate will reconfirm Bernanke by the end of the week, and
that President Obama is actively calling senators to boost Bernanke.

One wonders if this weekend's massive campaign to push for Bernanke has been insufficient.

And other news we have gotten recently:

• These are other senators who have voiced their support for Bernanke recently:Bennett, Nelson, Byrd, Hagan.
• These are still undecided: Leahy, Udall, Cardin, Klobuchar, Thune

Is it time to summon Davis Polk And Wardwell to provide testimony before Congress? New disclosure from the Huffington Post seems to indicate so.

Extremely volatile action: assorted Atari system short circuiting with no benchmark to compare results against.

Blowout quarter, with $3.67 in EPS ($3.50 estimates), on $15.7 billion in revenue ($14.96bn consensus) . Apple sold 3.36 million Macintosh computers during the quarter, representing a 33 percent unit increase over the year-ago quarter. The Company sold 8.7 million iPhones in the quarter, representing 100 percent unit growth over the year-ago quarter. Apple sold 21 million iPods during the quarter, representing an eight percent unit decline from the year-ago quarter. Apple had $7.6 billion of cash as of December 31, up $2.4 billion from a year ago, although coupled with a decline in marketable securities from $18.2 billion to $17.1 billion.

Harley Bassman warns why, as a result of QE, "yield reaching" shifting from HG to HY may be the "canary in the coalmine for a market tragedy."

"The FED’s purchase of “unhedged” MBS has the theoretical impact of selling over $1 Trillion 3yr into 10yr swaptions. By effectively forcing the Index and TR manager to sell options to replicate the return profile of MBS (and match the yield of the unadjusted Aggregate Index), the FED has found a mechanism to transfer risk from the market to itself. However, as time progresses, the Portfolios of otherwise passive Index managers will become unstable with an increased usage of negatively convex derivatives...The obvious answer to all this is to immediately remove the FED+US Treasury holdings from the Index. But until that time, expect Implied Volatility to decline as replicators sell options to match and index. Also be prepared for this to end badly if too many managers choose this path." - Harley Bassman, ML

Complacency is back with concerns of an overvalued market promptly brushed under the carpet. The sharp downward market trend has reversed today, courtesy of VWAP algos and other low-volume gimmicks. The volume picture is the same we have seen time and time again- selling accelerates on catalysts, while the autopilot move is higher on marginal volume. The market no longer cares about upside catalysts (look at tepid reaction to earnings season), yet give it a negative catalyst and the floor falls off, with fund managers looking for any excuse to sell.

Hoods and Bosses over at Goldman are cooking up something. Difficult to tell what kind of trick they are scheming up, but the relative strength in the euro, copper, and RKH leaves me somewhat suspicious. Maybe they powerjam stocks back up to the 50-day to blow out the late bears?

John Hussman shares an interesting perspective on yet another from of intergenerational wealth transfer (aka theft), this time involving the US (and by implication its taxpayers), its increasingly unmanageable debt load, and the resultant preservation of wealth of lenders to the nationalized GSE complex, which is massively underwater but will never be forced to be impaired on its holdings, for as long as the current Fed leadership is in place, and the chimera of "change" continues being just that. The kicker - Congress has no way whatsoever to prevent this theft from happening. Once again, America's entire legislative apparatus has been bypassed in order to bail out the reckless lenders who inflated this whole credit bubble in the first place.

Regular readers know our fascination with the Volkswagen "soap opera" which, as a result of a massive short squeeze in late 2008, resulted in VOW stock being the single most expensive stock in the world, albeit for a short period of time. In fact, last February we noted: "If hedge funds are successful at proving manipulation, which this disclosure may have made significantly easier, Porsche could be on the hook for a full refund of the option proceeds, in addition to further civil disgorgement and/or criminal liabilities. While the luxury carmaker is currently in swimming financial health with a huge cash war chest thanks to the options trades, any regulatory escalation could result in a rapid and dramatic downfall of the company which has a €10 billion term loan maturity in March, as banks may run away from a debtor that may be liable for a €7 billion cash outflow. And if the dominoes really collapse and Adolf Merckle's suicide is found to be a result of the alleged stock market manipulation, the life of Porsche CEO Wendelin Wiedeking may get really ugly fast." Sure enough, today the life of Porsche, and its now-former CEO Wendelin Wiedeking, just got pretty ugly. Dow Jones reports, that the bulk of the hedge funds, that were in the groupthink trade de jour at that time, the very same hedge funds we speculated may sooner or later end up suing the carmaker-cum-busted hedge fund, just came out, guns blazing, and are alleging stock manipulation.

Recently Zero Hedge did an expose on the increase of FX reserves held by China. The main hypothesis portrayed is that the increase in these reserves might be a function of a “stealth” quantitative easing. While it is functionally impossible to disprove this theory, this article first takes a look at the rise in reserves and then takes a closer look at the original source of the data, the quarterly Treasury Bulletin.

A humorous interlude demonstrates how the Administration's quick-fire plans to punish Wall Street have in fact benefited firms such as Goldman which are increasingly paying bonuses in stock. As Bloomberg reports, Goldman priced the share bonus at Firday's Goldman closing price of $154.12, which represents an 8.1% two-day slide in the stock price, in essence awarding Goldman employees with a comparably higher number of shares. With Goldman already trading at $157, or nearly 2% higher from Friday, Goldmanites have also received capital appreciation to boot. Ironically, Goldman's gain is JP Morgan's loss, which priced bonus shares as of the January 20th closing price, which was followed by a nearly 10% drop in JPM stock. Once again, Goldman gets the better of Obama. Once again, Goldman gets the better of Obama. Obviously, assuming some form of lock up, the real question remains: where will the financial be in 3 years - the traditional full vesting period.