Archive - Jan 31, 2010 - Story

Asia greets February with a lot of red ink. Futures in the US are green... just because. If you are within camera distance of the 9th floor of 33 Liberty, we would love to know how many lit up offices/Bloomberg terminals are visible and churning away.

Now that's some serious pocket change you can believe in. If correct, Blankfein's 2009 bonus will be over 30% greater than his $68 million take home in 2007, the previous all time record year for Wall Street. Check to you, Mr. President: surely this will merit some more populist rhetoric and even more decisive complete lack of action on your behalf.

The last thing that the fixed income market needs now, with ever greater uncertainty out of European bond land, is weakness where it hurts the most: the US balance sheet. Yet last Thursday's H.4.1 report indicated something which could be more troubling than even Greece's credit crisis morphing into a liquidity one, namely, that foreign central banks' UST holdings at the Fed declined for the first time in over two years. And while the indirect take down for auction after ever larger auction seems to not miss beat, we are very interested in how Mr. Geithner will explain this trend, especially should it persist into February, and maybe longer.

With the euro having dropped substantially from a high of around $1.51 to less than $1.40 in the span of a few short months, it has sent gold buyers looking for cover, mostly as a function of the linear (and at times sigmoidal) inverse correlation between gold prices and the DXY which throughout 2009 has held surprisingly strong. Yet will a dollar scramble prove that the recent flight to gold has been premature? BofA believes that while the near-term implications for gold are as of yet undecided, relying on both € (bearish) and risk (bullish) signals, the long-term drivers for gold should be price supportive, especially for EUR-based investors. Proper positioning can be adopted using OTM gold calls, which are not only no longer as rich as they were a mere month ago, but would benefit substantially should Greece indeed follow through with an actual default and result in a flaring of all risk indicators, further precipitating a flight to euro alternatives, among which the dollar, and gold, are dominant.

When the euro emerged as a consolidated currency over a decade ago, hopes were high that its advent would present a challenge to the USD as the default world reserve currency. Times were different (and much simpler, with shadow banking complexity a tiny fraction of the current $1 quadrillion+ behemoth) and as BofA says, "perception that the euro is well placed to rival the USD as a reserve currency has underpinned the increased euro allocation to a level much greater than the sum of the roles played by its constituent parts. This has been justified on the grounds that the unified European financial markets would offer similar breadth, depth and liquidity to those of the US." Alas one concept largely ignored was that unlike the US, where there has been one consolidated bond market reflecting the underlying marginal credit and liquidity risks behind the US currency, in Europe "there remain 16 separate government securities markets with very different levels of credit risk and liquidity." The ongoing Greek crisis has only reminded pundits of this phenomenon all too well.

The SIGTARP has been busy - a 224 page report just released provides an update of his activity to date, and covers everything from the ongoing investigation into whether the closure of Chrysler dealers was politically motivated, to the SEC's complete humiliation in regard to the BofA-ML settlement, to the dismal permanent modification rate in the HAMP program, to the firing of alleged sex-tape fiend Jeff Gundlach, to how the Fed is the New Century of the new decade.

It appears that in the 11th hour, Europe is still unable to decide just what the proper approach to rescuing Greece is. The Sunday Times has just released information that a plan to be published by Brussels on Tuesday, titled "Urgent measures to be taken by May 15, 2010" will demand dramatic Greek austerity measures, such as cutting "average nominal wages, including in
central government, local governments, state agencies and other public
institutions" and proposes new luxury goods and self-employed taxes. Yet the kicker is that "Richer eurozone countries such as Germany and France would be expected to bail
out Greece in the worst-case scenario, to prevent a disastrous crash in the
value of the single currency" - not very surprisingly, this is precisely the Plan B that Almunia yesterday swore up and down that the EU was not, repeat not, considering. Moral Hazard has indeed gone global. Yet even with this bureaucratic memorandum on the table, it seems certain that the EU will not actually act before Greek deterioration escalates out of control. Here are the near term catalysts that will likely make the cost of inactivity very high.