Archive - May 2010 - Story

RANsquawk European Morning Briefing - Stocks, Bonds, FX 12/05/10

• The European Financial Stabilization Mechanism backstops EMU public finances without distorting incentives.
• The focus now turns to budgetary plans by individual countries, and the new rules on fiscal coordination.
• The ECB’s ‘interventions’ in sovereign bonds have so far targeted the smaller, weaker credits.
• Secondary trading in Spanish and Italian government bonds is slowly ailing; over time, this should help financial risk subside.
• The dispersion of EMU sovereign spreads will remain wide going forward, reflecting greater differentiation across fiscal positions.
• EMU GDP-weighted 5-yr government yield is now 2.4%, comparable to the US, and roughly 80% of Emu public debt is held within the Euro area (relative to only 52% in the US) 

Late yesterday, the FRBNY posted the full terms of the various FX swaps that it instituted as part of the bailout of the Euro, and of various French and German banks. The specifics of the rescue agreements with the BOE, the ECB and the SNB are below while the Bank of Canada and BOJ swap details are still pending. One thing we know is that all swap arrangement will have a maximum duration of 88 days. Surely at that point they will merely be rolled over as the Euro could be facing parity and various European banks will all be on the verge of bankruptcy due to the $6 trillion USD/EUR underfunded mismatch which the BIS and Zero Hedge have previously discussed. Yet a critical missing item is the full size of each specific swap, leading us to believe that the Fed's latest swap lines are limitless in size. If the expectation is that the Fed should not be constrained by how large any given swap line can get (and even in the first European bailout round each swap line had a hard ceiling), one can speculate that the Fed fully anticipates European dollar funding needs well into the trillions. Which of course would mean that the Fed's balance sheet is about to go up by 50% on behalf of rescuing Europe... And that FR banks will make double the expected $1.25 trillion in interest on excess reserves. Thank you US taxpayers.

Tom Hoenig's Chinese doppelganger has finally appeared. Yesterday we pointed out that the Chinese economy is now in unsustainable overdrive mode and is likely at most months away from entering runaway inflation mode. Today, Li Daokui, a monetary policy committee adviser of the People's Bank of China, was quoted by the China Business news as saying conditions necessitated a start to policy tightening. Should the PBoC decide to do the right thing and officially enter a tightening mode, watch oil and copper, not to mention the BDIY, to crumble by 10%-15% overnight.

The WSJ reports that "Federal prosecutors are investigating whether Morgan Stanley misled investors about mortgage-derivatives deals it helped design and sometimes bet against, people familiar with the matter say, in a step that intensifies Washington's scrutiny of Wall Street in the wake of the financial crisis." In essence, Abacus comes to Times Square. And the latest soundbite for today's media feeding frenzy: the "Dead Presidents." So going down the list: Goldman - check, Morgan Stanley -check, Merrill, Deutsche and UBS - to come, especially once Khuzami finds a replacement to fill his recused status when investigating the German bank.

Themis Trading's Joe Saluzzi, who still has oddly not be asked to discuss his perspectives on the flaws in not only HFT but broader market structure and topology issues before a congressional commission, is interviewed by Bloomberg (and amusingly Carol Massar, after mocking him the last time around, finally gives him props for having been right all along). Fans of A. Joseph Cohen would be better advised to look elsewhere for their daily dose of Vitamin H_opium. The take home message"It's gonna crumble, it's just a matter of when." Alas, with gold now at $1,241 even lifelong Keynes fanatics are finally throwing in the towel. The time when we could have done something to fix the system is now long gone, courtesy of the administration's waffling for the past two years as instead of getting to the root cause of the last and future crash, it was focused on bailing out bankrupt banks. And in related news, Jim Rogers, joins the Euro death squads, and says that the $1 trillion bailout is the "Nail in the coffin for the euro." As Rogers said in discussing the now failed bailout: "I was stunned. This means that they’ve given up on the euro, they don’t particularly care if they have a sound currency, you have all these countries spending money they don’t have and it’s now going to continue. It’s a political currency and nobody is minding the economics behind the necessities to have a strong currency. I’m afraid it’s going to dissolve. They’re throwing more money at the problem and it’s going to make things worse down the road.”

RANsquawk European Morning Briefing - Stocks, Bonds, FX etc. – 12/05/10

And so the European private banks win the overnight battle with the Central Banks again: after shorting the EURUSD all the way to almost 1.25, they have forced the European Central Banks to buy ever more of their worthless Government bond holdings. Reuters reports that overnight CBs have been aggressive buyers of Greek, Portuguese and Irish Sovereign (if there is such a laughable concept as sovereign any more) bonds, which in turn has forced a quick short covering spree in the EURUSD and the EURJPY, which in turn has forced futures to go from 10 handles down to up 4. In other words, Central Banks now are fighting tooth and nail to prevent the market from going down ever again. To all the shorts out there- you are no longer taking on merely the Fed, now you have every money printer against you as they scramble to load up with every worthless asset imaginable. At this rate Dow, Dax and Dung Manure 36,000 is easily reachable. The only way to play this is through gold, which is now the only flight from Central Bank lunacy.

"The Fed has not been chastened. It is bolder and more of a rogue actor than ever. It's clear that without full audit authority going forward, the Fed will continue to give out "foreign aid" without Congressional or even Executive permission.

And it will do so in secret.

So we will be fighting on to get a full audit from the conference committee.

But let's not lose sight of what we have accomplished so far - real independent inquiry into the Fed, and its incestuous relationships with Wall Street banks. For the first time ever." - Alan Grayson

Risk aversion is here and even if we get a short-term bounce on some sort of political event/reactionary policy, it will be short-lasted and by the end of the summer/beginning of the fall, it should be clear that the next wave of the financial crisis has arrived. And sovereign debt crises are much more political and have worse economic and social consequences (trade wars, revolts, riots, civil wars, and even world wars) than financial/private debt crises.

Tuesday was a very strange day in oil. Oil prices were higher in early trading, even with equities lower and the US dollar rallying. No one we spoke with could offer us anything as a decent reason for this advance other than it being as the result of a technical rally, with prices rallying after last week’s big decline.
Then, equities rallied. But, even as they worked into positive territory, oil prices were in the opposite lane, going south, passing them by. So, almost all day long, oil and equities had a negative correlation.
They got back together at the end of the day. Once everything was said and done, both finished with minor losses on the day. It appears that a weaker euro may have helped both markets into negative territory.

Spreads ended the day wider in the US with HY underperforming IG and US underperforming Europe but the tale of the tape was 3s5s flattening and FINL underperformance. After opening notably gap wider this morning, credit markets rallied most of the morning with Main and XOver dramatically so as we sense some exaggeration by correlation desk hedging. HY never made it into positive territory today and even IG only managed a small compression at its best levels.

First the fun stuff: gold hit an all time record today. To those who have had the foresight to realize that in the currency devaluation race to the bottom, the only winners will be non-dilutable precious metals (and not industrial gimmickry and bets on China's excess capacity like copper), we salute you. In fact, so does the market: the S&P is now down 8% year to date when expressed in ounces of gold. Because while central banks can monetize, sterilize (whatever that means), and dilutize that last remnant of the dying Keynesian religion, the FRN and its equivalents around the world, gold is untouchable, and increases in value with each desperate attempt to save a failed economic system. Yet the bandwagon is once again getting heavy: the EUR is getting killed after hours, approaching $1.25 and is about to break the E-mini critical 117 yen support once again. Should central bank buyers not materialize, hello gravity. Which would also mean freefall for the ES. The bailout plan is now null and void, and in need of a bailout plan itself. The French banks won: we expect their FX traders to make a killing this year. We hope their contract demands bonus payment in gold.

Bloomberg reports that "U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Mary Schapiro said the agency’s enforcement unit has issued subpoenas as part of its investigation of last week’s stock plunge." Is the general population about to get our first unredacted, and unbiased look into the nuts and bolts of HFT operations like Getco, Medallion, Citadel and Goldman (yeah, we can name drop too)? And whatever happened with that SEC investigation of Renaissance (yeah, we haven't forgotten). We can't wait to see what public data the subpoena uncovers.

And so we move from the simply surreal to the PTSD-inducing, opium-den acid flashback.