Archive - Oct 2010 - Story

Well, that was quick: to all those who put the trade on, convergence accomplished.

Just because it may be time to rebrand the Recovery Fund. Don't be surprised to see some barbell cross-asset liquidations as the BofA bloodbath continues.

Putbacks, bitches! This headline that has just flashed, can not be right. Otherwise it would mean the New York Fed (and Bill Gross) is preparing to sink Bank of America with hundreds of billions of par MBS putbacks. It would however explain why PIMCO has been gobbling up MBS on margin in the past month as we highlighted. We will bring you more as we see it, because this could be a groundbreaking development.

Update: Blackrock joins too! The "soured mortgages" in question amount to $47 billion (to start). We are now just waiting for BofA to next demand TARP 2 and the circle jerk will be complete.

Update 2: Full Bloomberg story attached.

Reminder: Here is JPM's presentation on what the total putback risk is for the Big Banks. As the lawsuit seeks to putback $47 billion one wonders just how accurate JPM's estimate of a $55 billion max pain truly is...

Reminder 2: As our whistleblower pointed out earlier today, the issue of misrepresentation of all mortgage related items (not just titles) is precisely what would destroy the mortgage originators and servicers. Today, Countrywide, its former orange CEO, and Bank of America are the first to realize just how correct he or she was.

Now that DE Shaw and Citadel are pretty much without a stat arb desk, daily divergences are likely to become the norm. To wit: after we highlighted the complete breakdown in correlations earlier, this afternoon's sell off in the AUDJPY has left the S&P/ES roughly 7 points rich. For those who are still stupid enough to actually trade, a pair trade convergence may make some sense here: buy AUDJPY, sell ES. And use lots of leverage: after all, becoming TBTF is every schoolboy's dream. If going down, make sure you drag the entire system with you.

The war of words continues, this time with Dallas Fed's Fisher. More quotes from the fourth spoke in the Kocherlakota, Plosser, Hoenig, hawk sanity quadrangle. In his just released speech we read this stunner: "In my darkest moments,
I have begun to wonder if the monetary accommodation we have already
engineered might even be working in the wrong places." Aside from adding Fisher to the Shirakawa, Hildebrand suicide watch, it is notable that the Fed is finally doubting the actions of the Fed, and realizing it is creating neither employment, nor moderate inflation, but just bubbles, bubbles and more bubbles. And here is why Fisher may soon be looking to resign: "A great many baby boomers
or older cohorts who played by the rules, saved their money and
migrated over time, as prudent investment counselors advise, to short-
to intermediate-dated, fixed-income instruments are earning extremely
low nominal and real returns on their savings. Further reductions in
rates earned on savings will hardly endear the Fed to this portion of
the population." Hardly indeed. And next time it won't be the Pentagon.

One of the worst top tickers in the history of Wall Street, Goldman's FX team, has come out with a tactical short EURCHF call. Like every other time Goldman says to do something, the prudent thing to do is the opposite. Of course, this means more weakness for gold, as the Swiss Franc is simply the safest equivalent of gold in the monetary realm. Oh well - if better cost bases are to be had, than so be it. Of course, if Goldman is right, this means that today's short-term reversion in gold is just that, and nothing more. On the other hand, we wonder how Goldman reconciles this call with its bet from two weeks ago that the euro is going to $1.55 from the firm's previous target of $1.38, which incidentally was our indicator that the EUR has top ticked.

As always, some very entertaining and enlightening musings from Art Cashin, with an emphasis on Black Monday, modern-day Edgar Allan Poe remixes, and, last and certainly least, the Tepper Corollary.

RANsquawk US Afternoon Briefing - Stocks, Bonds, FX etc. – 19/10/10

The Pentagon’s main building was struck by several bullets about 5 a.m. Washington time today and officials are looking for the shooter, a Defense Department spokesman said.

About a month ago, when discussing the debunking, for the latest time, the biggest lie in modern history, namely the massive exaggeration about the corporate cash on the sidelines, we noted: "Our advice to all those who like blind lemmings follow the advice and chase the "cash hoard" - think, and do your homework first. If indeed over a third of the record cash holdings are foreign, they are as good as useless to shareholders." The reason for this: a major portion of the billion or so dollars in cash is held abroad and "repatriating this cash to the good old USA would cost companies hundreds
of billions in US corporate taxes. That's right: even though companies
are taxed abroad, the issue of double taxation is resolved by
subtracting foreign taxes paid from the US tax liability. However,
because foreign corporate taxes are typically lower there is an adverse
tax consequence associated with remittance to the parent company.
In other words, of the $1.2 or however many trillions in total
corporate cash on balance sheets, a good 30% chunk of this belongs to
Uncle Sam if these companies wish to use it for domestic IRR purposes.
And yes, just so there is no confusion: using foreign cash to pay dividends or share repurchases is considered repatriation from the perspective of US tax regulations." And now that the cat is out of the bag that the huge cash hoard is really about 30% less, here come these very same multinationals begging Obama for tax amnesty so they can actually bring the cash home and, gasp, use it. Too bad this request will never fly, and why even CNBC may soon (with a few cartoons), understand just how stupid they sound in pumping the hollow cash on the sidelines argument day in and day out.

Luckily the banks don't care about that $3 trillion footnote on their balance sheets known as CRE. Because if they did, they would all be insolvent: the Moody's REAL/Commercial Property Price Index index dropped by 3.3% in August, and is now 45.1% lower compared to the October 2007 peak. The attached chart says it all, or almost all - it actually says nothing about why banks are still trading at positive equity values.

Today's attempt to ramp Apple into the green no matter what (and with 20% of the NASDAQ, and thousands of ETFs creating a massive feedback loop, bidding up Apple generates the biggest bang for the buck), which, if unsuccessful, will see dozens if not more funds scream at EOD once the margin calls start rolling in (yes, many are "all in"), has resulted in yet another complete collapse in all correlations. Note the simply ridiculous divergence between the AUDJPY and the ES. This is all on account of the glaring ramp undertaken by virtually everyone whose livelihood depends on the aforementioned AAPL green close. We would argue that a long AUDJPY, short ES trade makes sense, but with the market as broken as it is, only idiots would hope for anything to make sense any more.

Stephen Roach, chairman of Morgan Stanley Asia, has penned one of the most unapologetic letters bashing the central banking climate we have ever read from an institutional insider (he is still technically part of MS). And Roach should know: From 1972 until 1979, Roach served on the research staff of the Federal Reserve Board in Washington, D.C., where he supervised the preparation of the official Federal Reserve projections of the U.S. economy. As a result he is all too aware of the quality and caliber of Fed individuals. Which serves as the groundwork for this stunning speech presented on October 12 before the World Knowledge Forum in Seoul. The topics covered include the creation of, and asset bubble "resolution" authority , the collapse of America into a Japanese deflation death spiral, the general destructive worthlessness of the Fed, and other such pleasant issues. Most importantly, Roach speaks out in all too clear terms against another "hyper stimulus" round: "Whether it’s the latest round of quantitative easing now under way by major central banks or the polarizing tax cut debate in the US, there is a limited likelihood these measures will achieve meaningful traction in the real economy. The authorities would be much better off not wasting the next stimulus on policies that won’t work and better disposed toward taking actions that are  directed at providing support to the true victims of this recession— namely, the structurally unemployed and underemployed." Roach's dire warning: "I fear that unless regulatory reform is accompanied by a rethinking of monetary policy, another crisis is far more likely than not."

As if we needed any further confirmation that the Fed is now willing to risk an all out bout of hyperinflation, here it comes courtesy of Chicago Fed's Charles Evans, whose comments that inflation is "acceptable", and welcome, and is the only way to battle the "liquidity trap" the US finds itself in, mirror those of NY Fed's Dudley who earlier confirmed Zero Hedge expectations that $100 billion is too low a QE2 number. Which means that very soon the Fed will buy up every single Treasury in existence. It will also kill the dollar absent Europe continuing on its path from earlier today, and saying the stress test was, in fact, a lie.

One of the more devious consequences of QE2, is that it carries the seeds of its own destruction with it. Namely, if after flooding bank basements with another $2 trillion in excess reserves, and if bank lending picks up, suddenly the amount of currency in circulation will explode by over 300% from under $1 trillion to around $4 trillion. And while a comparable increase in wages is certainly not guaranteed to occur concurrently, what this explosion in the free money will do is lead to a very rapid and drastic destabilization in the concept of a dollar-based reserve currency. The only thing that could prevent this are the Fed's mechanisms to extract liquidity from the system. Alas, the IOER process is very much unproven, and should animal spirits kindle at the peak of the biggest liquidity tsunami in history, that money will inevitably make its way to Main Street, not Liberty 33. All this has made Goldman's Ed McKelvey warn that should increased bank lending be the end result of QE2 (and ultimately that is precisely what it should be, as that would be indicative of a healthy economy), then, to put it so everyone will get it, "this would cause too much money to chase too few goods." And, as liquidity extraction then would likely be impossible, it would be the beginning of the end: "The obvious risk to this last point is if inflation expectations surge. In a stronger growth environment than now prevails, such a surge could prove difficult to control. It would require Fed officials to remove the liquidity quickly, which is why they will concentrate on purchases of Treasuries (easier to sell back into the market) and remind us continually of the tools they have developed to withdraw the liquidity (by periodically using them in small size)." Too bad the Fed will soon be forced to buy MBS (again), REITs, ETFs and pretty much everything else.