Archive - Jul 11, 2010 - Story

Soccer is a beautiful game; unfortunately, World Cup finals usually are not (today’s in particular) and for an obvious reason: the stakes are just too high. And that is the problem with the world of finance.

Tomorrow the Q2 earnings season kicks off, with Alcoa as usual leading the parade. The chart below shows all the S&P stocks that report in the coming week. The key day will be Friday when GE, BofA and Citi all report together. With earnings still expected to post healthy gains over Q2 of last year, it will become increasingly difficult for companies to report the same type of blow out bottom line outperformance that was seen earlier in the year on continuing cost cutting, which is still accompanied by merely tepid revenue growth. If anyone is so confused as to why corporations continue to hoard cash, the record high margins may be a good place to start. CEO are not stupid and know all about the reversion to the mean phenomenon, and are stockpiling cash precisely for that, and for the imminent increase in corporate taxes, whose recent collapse has been a primary reason for the cash stockpile (a topic we discussed first about 3 months ago). Tangentially, for readers who trade across asset classes, in addition to the recurring FX-risk decoupling seen between the carry pair of choice, another notable observation is the recent decoupling between stocks and IG bonds, as represented by the on the run IG CDS index.

China's first trade deficit in many years of ($7.2) billion recorded in March is now a distant memory. The Chinese General Administration of Customs has released June trade data, which confirms that no matter what China does with the yuan, and no matter the amount of posturing coming out of the US and Europe, in their attempts to 'stimulate' an export economy at least in words, the Chinese export juggernaut marches on: the June trade deficit came in at an even $20 billion, on relatively flat imports, and relentlessly growing exports. In fact, after surging by $32 billion in March, imports have remained flat each month at just under $120 billion, while exports have been increasing consistently as month after month of fiscal stimulus has been pushing the domestic export industry to the redline. Indeed, in the midst of a CNY reval, and a complete collapse in the Baltic Dry as excess supply, especially in capesize vessels is causing shipping rates to rapidly hit unsustainable levels, exports to the US and the Europe hit multi year records - the EU came in at $27.2 billion, the highest since the summer of 2008, while the US saw a record number of Chinese exports in the month at $25.5 billion, as well as the biggest trade deficit with China in history (at least according to China) at ($17.7) billion- something tells us Chuck Schumer will not be too happy with this number. Most importantly, total Chinese June exports of $137.4 were, paging Chuck Schumer again, an all time record.

Joe Cassano is a very good liar, which is why it would be so hard to prosecute him for perjury. When testifying before The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, the former head of AIG Financial Products kept blending in half-truths with his audaciously dishonest claims, so that the overall effect was nonsensical. For instance, to justify his outrageous claim that, "the books were generally considered fully hedged," he explained that "we were using it basically in actuarial basis ...[so] it's not hedged in the conventional sense." (Translation: The book was never hedged in any sense. Nor was there any actuarial analysis, only a reliance on triple-A credit ratings.) These rhetorical tricks were designed to throw sand in everyone's face. But his tactics seem to have worked. The staunchly unregenerate Cassano framed a media narrative that deflected away from his dishonesty and gross incompetence. Here's a reality check on some of his more ridiculous claims, in order of appearance.

As part of its Commercial Real Estate Project, PIMCO has conducted an extensive overview of opportunities in the U.S. CRE market. In this most perplexing of markets, where if one follows REIT stock prices, a V-shaped recovery is all but guaranteed, PIMCO has a notably less optimistic outlook. Based on the framework of its well-documented "new normal" paradigm, the Newport Beach asset manager is far less sanguine about investment opportunities in the market - in evaluating prospects for the most relevant CRE valuation metric, PIMCO sees a gradual return to 8% capitalization rates. "the market can expect long term cap rates near or above 8%. In this case, even if properties with floating rate debt can successfully avoid defaults in the short term, rising longer term rates will create a floor for cap rates and limit recoveries." On the other hand, extrapolating from current CMBS spreads, the prevailing market expectation is for a current and future cap rate up to 150 bps lower. Which means that as securities backed by existing assets see their cash flows dry out, as all valuable assets get extinguished, the repricing in assorted CRE fixed income securities, and their equity counterpartes in the REIT realm, will likely have a very dramatic downward repricing event in the future.

You know someone is losing (a lot of) money when the heavy artillery of the rumormill department goes into overdrive. According to the Sunday Times, the Obama administration has given its blessing to Exxon and Chevron to consider takeover bids of the troubled major unimpeded. Because obviously any deal in the current environment must first and foremost get the Obama stamp of approval or else the Steve Rattners of the world will be sic-ed on your sorry derriere, and before you know it your equity will be trading above your vendor payables in right of guarantee. It is refreshing to know that the other majors can somehow handicap the outcome of the tens if not hundreds of billions in liabilities that will tie down BP in random lawsuits for decades, and that will make WR Grace et al seem like a PG-13 dress rehearsal for Scores when Lindsay Lohan is in town.

In what will come as a complete lack of surprise to everyone, Bank of America has officially confirmed it "mistakenly" used Repo 105-type transactions on $10.7 billion in assets, which had been misclassified as sales rather than borrowings, or repos, in the period between 2007 and 2009. As Bloomberg reports, the bank used the excuse that a $10+ billion fraud is simply an rounding error so you must acquit: "Bank of America said the inaccuracies aren’t material and
“don’t stem from any intentional misstatement of the
Corporation’s financial statements and was not related to any
fraud or deliberate error.” We are sure that late night comedians can come with enough material in which a $10.7 billion "mistake" is not material so we will leave it to them, and instead we will ask another question as pertains to the whole end of quarter window dressing theme: namely - why does it continue to this day? As per the FRBNY's public disclosure of Primary Dealer holdings, the week ended June 30 once again saw the traditional balance sheet collapse, with total PD assets as of June 30 closing once again at the lowest level of the entire quarter. This marks the 7th consecutive quarter in which primary dealer assets finished the quarter at or near the lowest exposure during the quarter, and 9 out of the last 10. But it's all fine - according to the SEC mangled rules of corrupt statistics (soon taught at a Princeton University near you), an event that occurs 90% of the time is not at all significant or notable.