Archive - Mar 2010 - Story

SkyNews reports that one person was killed after a bomb exploded outside a public building. This time the target was not a US-based bank, but an "institute used for training public officials." One person has died.

It couldn't have happened to a nicer country. On March 18, with very little pomp and circumstance, president Obama passed the most recent stimulus act, the $17.5 billion Hiring Incentives to Restore Employment Act (H.R. 2487), brilliantly goalseeked by the administration's millionaire cronies to abbreviate as HIRE. As it was merely the latest in an endless stream of acts destined to expand the government payroll to infinity, nobody cared about it, or actually read it. Because if anyone had read it, the act would have been known as the Capital Controls Act, as one of the lesser, but infinitely more important provisions on page 27, known as Offset Provisions - Subtitle A—Foreign Account Tax Compliance, institutes just that. In brief, the Provision requires that foreign banks not only withhold 30% of all outgoing capital flows (likely remitting the collection promptly back to the US Treasury) but also disclose the full details of non-exempt account-holders to the US and the IRS. And should this provision be deemed illegal by a given foreign nation's domestic laws (think Switzerland), well the foreign financial institution is required to close the account. It's the law. If you thought you could move your capital to the non-sequestration safety of non-US financial institutions, sorry you lose - the law now says so. Capital Controls are now here and are now fully enforced by the law.

When we put up a link to last week's CFTC hearing webcast little did we know that it would end up being the veritable (physical) gold mine (no pun intended) of information about what really transpires in the commodities market. First, we obtained direct evidence from Andrew Maguire (who may or may not have been the target of an attempt at "bodily harm" as reported yesterday) of extensive manipulation in the silver market. Today, Adrian Douglas, director of GATA, adds to the mountain of evidence that the commodities market, and the CFTC, stand behind what is potentially the biggest market manipulation scheme in the history of capital markets (we are assuming for the time being that all allegations of the Fed manipulating the broader equity and credit markets are completely baseless). Using the testimony of a clueless Jeffrey Christian, formerly a staffer at the Commodities Research Group in the Goldman Sachs Investment Research Department and now head and founder of the CPM Group, Douglas confirms that the "LBMA trades over 100 times the amount of gold it actually has to back the trades."

Christian, who describes himself as "one of the world’s foremost authorities on the markets for precious metals" yet, in the words of Gary Gensler, said "that the bullion banks had large shorts to hedge themselves selling elsewhere- how do you short something to cover a sale, I didn’t quite follow that?" and proves that current and former Goldman bankers are some of the most arrogant people alive, assuming that everyone else is an idiot and will buy whatever explanation is presented just because the CV says Goldman Sachs. Yet Christian confirms that the gold market is basically a ponzi: "in the “physical market” as the market uses that term, there is much more metal than that…there is a hundred times what there is." And there you have it: as Douglas eloquently summarizes: "the giant Ponzi trading of gold ledger entries can be sustained only if there is never a liquidity crisis in the REAL physical market. If someone asks for gold and there isn’t any the default would trigger the biggest “bank run” and default in history. This is, of course, why the Central Banks lease their gold or sell it outright to the bullion banks when they are squeezed by high demand for REAL physical gold that can not be met from their own stocks" and concludes "Almost every day we hear of a new financial fraud that has been exposed. The gold and silver market fraud is likely to be bigger than all of them. Investors in their droves, who have purchased gold in good faith in “unallocated accounts”, are going to demand delivery of their metal. They will then discover that there is only one ounce for every one hundred ounces claimed. They will find out they are “unsecured creditors”.

We are seeing some interesting developments in the markets so I want to jump right into it and save all the social and political commentary for the end. I would first like to focus on the US dollar since it is the hot topic of conversation in the media, and its price movement is subject to a lot of misinterpretation. The general line of thinking espouses a new bull market for the greenback given the fact that the US economy is on the mend. As you know by now I don’t believe the economy has bottomed and I certainly don’t buy into the idea of a new bull market for the greenback. Yes, we are experiencing a reaction and it’s one of the largest to date since the dollar topped in 2001, but that doesn’t mean it’s a new bull market. Whenever you want to see the big picture in a market, it helps to get away from the here and now, and the best way to do that is with historical weekly or monthly charts.

Why not?

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3:00(ish) am ET.  Join us and drift off into the realm of... 3:00 am.

The latest development in Silvergate, in which whistleblower Andrew Maguire has exposed the manipulation details in the London commodity market, is straight out of a John Le Carre or Ian Flemming novel: an assassination attempt.

If there is one topic that has been beaten to death, reincarnated, then Friend-o'ed three more times by everyone in desperate need of a Google hit or a TV appearance, it is Greece and China (and also Manchester United if you live in the UK). This will not stop us from presenting this FT clip, in which Goldman's Jim O'Neill and Nouriel Roubini spar over the Greek bailout and the Chinese economy (and, you guess it, Man U). Guess who is the optimist and who is the pessimist. For the most part a bland recreation of each pundit's party line, although we do appreciate Roubini's reminder that the immediate catalyst responsible for the 20% Black Monday drop (at a time when the market was poised on a precipice much as it is today) was a topic near and dear to everyone: the announcement of a trade war.

"20 years ago we had a large trade deficit with Japan and Germany. The dollar was weakening but the Germans and Japanese were resisting, and the US got angry. And the US Secretary of the Treasury Baker got on TV on Sunday and said if you don't let if move we are going to retaliate. The next day the stock market crashed 20%."

Are the starts aligning for a repeat appearance of just such a crash, especially as the US has mere days left in which to brand China a currency manipulator?

Earlier Alan Greenspan shared some Fed insight, explaining the diagonal rise of the stock market, which can be summarized as follows - "stock prices determine the economy, not the other way round." In one simple sentence, Greenspan demonstrates that the Fed is not only chock full of people who can't read economic textbooks good (sic) but is populated by a subset of people suffering from cause-and-effect inversion disorder (it is also chock(er) full of new and improved stock traders and algos populating Liberty 33, doing all they can to make sure that in 13 up days, there is just one down). Yet in a market which has broken all laws of rationality, is the Fed's flawed self-fulfilling prophecy gaming the only thing that the amazing American's recovery is based on? To be sure, the main reason why economic skeptics such as Rosenberg, Edwards, Janjuah, and (ever decreasing) others retain their pessimism is that while the marker has now priced in one of the most ebullient, V-shaped economic recoveries in the history of the world, the underlying economy has stagnated and even downshifted into a double dip along numerous metrics, even despite ongoing fiscal stimulus and monetary pumpatude. So what is going on? Simple - the Fed, and by implication the administration, believe that once confidence and the market reach a given level, Joe Consumer will forget that the mortgage bill has not been paid in 12 months, the credit card in 3, that all neighbors lost their jobs a year ago and still can't find a new ones, and instead will merely look at the Dow (not the S&P - for some reason government/Fed workers still don't realize that nobody follows the DJIA, but whatever) and the UMich consumer confidence, for a barometer of economic health. The fallacy of this proposition is of course beyond preposterous, but these and such are the thoughts of the Federal Reserve.

Appropriately, Goldman's Sven Jari Stehn has just published an analysis looking at whether there is a two-way relationship between asset prices and the economy (merely the latest in a long line of such queries), and most relevantly: monetary policy.

The maestro managed to run away from the old folks' bent on monetary destruction home just long enough to carry this amusing interview with Bloomberg TV's Al Hunt. Tomes (will) have been written about Greenspan's dementia, just as books will be available on the Kindle one day analyzing his successor's massive mistakes which are slowly but surely leading to an American day of reckoning, so we won't comment much, suffice to point out some of the key highlights in Greenspan's presentation. Most amusingly, note the escalating battle between Greenie and the Fed's new vice-chairman Janet Yellen, who blatantly contradicted Greenspan's that higher interest rates would have prevented a housing bubble. For all it's worth, Alan's response is actually quite interesting: "We tried to do that in 2004. We ran into a conundrum. For decades, every time the Fed raised its short-term rates, the 10-year note, which is really the proxy for mortgage rates, the yield went up with it. This time, it did not. And the reason it did not, is you cannot have the 10-year note determined both by arbitraged global finance and individual central banks. As a consequence of that…starting in the period where the sensitivity of the early stages of the bubble were building up, it was very clear that what was determining the rise in prices was movements in long-term mortgage rates going down, not the federal funds rate." In English, this is quite intriguing: China, which at about this time started running up massive trade balances, essentially became indifferent about US monetary policy, as it gobbled up everything east of 5 Years, with a preference on the 10 Year. The reason for this is the US consumer became the one driving force behind the massive Chinese economic expansion. With the consumer out, and with China set to report its first trade deficit in 6 years, and the Fed pulling out its support of mortgages, and the Chinese National Bank pulling liquidity, the move in 10 Year over the next few weeks is now more critical than ever, which is why the 10 Year - 30 Year MBS spread is paradoxically pressured at an all time tight spread, as all the early MBS shorts are covered, forcing pundits to say MBS are cheap as fighting momentum in this market is professional suicide. To be sure, this technical push down will soon end. And when this last coiled spring blows out, watch out below, first in housing, then in rates, in corporates, and last, in equities.

Sometimes insights from really grim times show how the most loved assets can unravel and how the crappiest suddenly become the finest. Data from the dark days of the credit crunch indicate just what assets held the financial architecture together, and the crap that got flushed.

Take-Aways

• The extent of haircuts is a good measure of the extent of systemic financial collapse.
• Primary counterparties and hedge funds took only minuscule haircuts on G-7 sovereign debt throughout the credit crisis.
• Post-crash, structured credit wasn’t accepted as collateral. This implies pre-crash valuations were way off.
• Collateral haircut rates were different for primary dealers and hedge funds.

Crude oil prices still found stubborn resistance above the $80-a-barrel level amid concerns about demand while natural gas continued its decline, to below $4 per million British thermal units, as burgeoning supply from unconventional sources depressed prices. The natural gas Henry Hub benchmark futures settled Friday at a nearly six-month low of $3.87, down 31% so far this year from above $6 in January. Natural gas demand experiences a lull at this time of the year as warmer weather reduces heating use but the need for more electricity from gas-fired plants to power air conditioners is still weeks away.

In a video conference before the ACI 2010 World Congress in Sydney, Australia, the head of the FRBNY's trading desk, aka, the busiest daytrader over the past year, Brian Sack, demonstrated once again that Fed members are either completely clueless about ongoing market dynamics or are so good at octuple re-reverse psychology, that they make the squid pale in shame and squirt ink in envy.

Goldman's S&P forecast summary:

Our top-down EPS forecasts of $76 and $90 for 2010 and 2011 reflect +33% and +20% growth, respectively. Our pre-provision and write-down EPS forecasts are $81 for 2010 and $91 for 2011. Bottom-up consensus forecasts a 38% increase in 2010 to $79, and a 20% increase in 2011 to $95.

This ain't nothing. Later we will show how squid now anticipates an S&P of 2,000 courtesy of the madman's printers.

King World News interviews Eric Sprott, who effectively melts the wires with the heat of his pessimism. Alarmingly, it is fairly hard to argue with his reasoning.

"As an individual I have my money in gold and I have my money in silver and I have my money in our hedge fund and it, of course, has most of its money in gold and silver."

Eric Sprott Interview on King World News (39:01 minute .mp3)

Julius started out as a populist too, you know.

Radio Zero returns in a fit of old school (think 50 BC) republicanism.

Join us (or die?).  10(ish) pm EST.

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