Archive - Aug 29, 2010 - Story

As our economy hurtles towards its meeting with destiny, the political class seeks to assign blame on their enemies for this Greater Depression. The Republicans would like you to believe that Bill Clinton, Robert Rubin, Chris Dodd, and Barney Frank and their Community Reinvest Act caused the collapse of our financial system. Democrats want you to believe that George Bush and his band of unregulated free market capitalists created a financial disaster of epic proportions. The truth is that America has been captured by a financial class that makes no distinction between parties. These barbarians have sucked the life out of a once productive nation by raping and pillaging with impunity while enriching only them. They live in 20,000 square foot $10 million mansions in Greenwich, CT and in $3 million dollar penthouses on Central Park West. These are the robber barons that represent the Age of Mammon

The BoJ just released a decision to extend the 3 month lending program to 6 months, to expand the 6 month fixed rate facility to 30 trillion yen from 20 trillion, extended the maturity of QE, and kept the benchmark rate at 0.1%: in essence a nothingburger extension of QE, which has done miracles for the past 20 years. The key item, however, is that there was no direct mention of FX intervention by the BoJ, which was the silver bullet many had hoped for. As a result, the Yen is currently surging.

A few days ago, BNY's Nicholas Colas was kind enough to share his perspectives on why traffic congestion and market structure are comparable, especially in the context of record high cross-asset correlations. Continuing on this series of roadside analogies, today the BNY analyst compares the economic double dip to a traffic violation, and specifically the probability of getting two speeding tickets in the span of one day. "What are the odds of being caught speeding twice in one day? One in five? One in ten? Pretty remote, one would think, given that the ratio of police to motorists on most roads is 1,000:1 or greater. I can tell you from direct and personal experience, however, that the odds of that event are much, much higher than you think. I had my driver’s license suspended for 30 days in 1997 for two tickets, issued on the same day and only a few miles apart. Here’s the thing: most people, after receiving one ticket, will drive more carefully immediately thereafter. But I, working through the math I referenced above, thought “No… The odds are actually in my favor now. I can, in fact, speed with impunity.” This proved to be an error. As it turns out, going substantially faster than the general flow of traffic will gather the attention of the law. This offsets the theoretical odds against discovery, and then some. Oh, and driving a bright yellow car. I should have mentioned that, too." And once again, the specter of market uncertainty raises its ugly head, this time in the form of spiking implied volatility, which has jumped for every asset class in the past month... except gold.

Now with an extra dose of decoupling, brought to you from the fine folks at Goldman Sachs.

Since early April, the yield on 10-year Treasury notes has dwindled from 4.0% to below 2.5% on August 24th. Meanwhile, the 12-month change in the Cleveland Fed's median CPI has hovered feebly between 0.5% and 0.6% since March. These abnormally low interest and inflation rates are fanning fears of renewed GDP contraction, a plunge into price deflation, or both. Boardrooms and blogs are humming with rumors of a 'QE II' (Quantitative Easing II) program to counter a chilly deflationary dip. One reason fears are so acute is that the Federal Reserve's main policy tool, the overnight interest rate on Fed Funds, is flatlined at zero. Moreover, via 'extraordinary measures' beginning in September 2008, the Federal Reserve added some $1.4 trillion of securities, including $1.1 trillion of MBS (mortgage-backed securities), to its balance sheet in a stimulus bid. Yet despite these heroic efforts, economic leading indicators have turned weak this summer, as sinking Treasury yields add to the disquiet. In its August meeting, the Federal Reserve downgraded its economic outlook, and backed away from plans to let its enlarged securities holdings run off as MBS mature. Instead, it committed to buying about $18 billion of Treasuries from mid-August through mid-September, mostly in the 2- to 10-year range, by reinvesting MBS principal payments. It also set a $2.05 trillion floor for its securities holdings -- thus freezing 'QE I' in place (perhaps forever) and hinting that a larger 'QE II' could follow. But if QE I isn't working, what hope would QE II have of achieving its purpose in a fresh emergency? This paper discusses a faster-acting alternative, which is feasible within the existing statutory and institutional structure -- namely, targeted purchases of international reserve assets instead of Treasury notes.

The Bank of Japan Plutocrats are under pressure to leave their mistresses and finally crawl out of their Opium Dens.

Instead of admiring their 17-year old massage girls with "great interest", they must turn their attention to financial matters and begin the task of Yen intervention by taking "swift" and "bold" action to punish the speculators.

Stock futures are already giddy in early action.

America has long had a working group on financial markets (whose sole purpose some suggest is to keep stocks from plunging in times of turbulence), so why not have a working group on that other much more critical phenomenon of US society: a trend of unprecedented unequal wealth distribution, which can be summarized as simply as pointing out that 1% of US society holds more wealth (or 33.8% of total), than 90% of the remaining portion of America (26.0%), and also is in possession of more than half of all stocks, bonds and mutual fund holdings in the US. Well, there is, even if is not formally recognized, and made up of the same distinguished professionals as the PPT (Geithner, Bernanke, Gensler and Schapiro). Hereby we present some of the key findings of the Working Group on Extreme Inequality.

A floundering Jim O'Neill has never seen decoupling as wide as it is now, and the man is now openly hallucinating, seeing every non-developed country as a potential BRIC (see this Friday's FT OpEd: How Africa can become the next Bric). Well, of course, China needs its resources. Soon every open mine will be a "BRIC" to be exploited by Chinese interests, which come, see, and suck the place dry as they build yet more vacant cities, ghost towns, and highways to nowhere, hoping they can sustain the illusion of the world's greatest bubble for a few more months. Which is precisely all those who are betting on a collapse of China are playing it not with China CDS, but those of Australia: for when the worm turns, Bad in Beijing, will be nothing compared to the Massacre in Melbourne. Yet even Jim's nagging conscience is not allowing him to blindly continuine to ignore the other side of the coin, namely that he is once blatantly wrong, and decoupling never did, and never will occur: "What can emerge if Ben Bernanke and the Fed is wrong? What if this
slowdown is sustained, and we actually move into another recession? The
American Dream needs something new. In conventional terms, it needs
booming private investment and booming exports. And they might happen. I
find it hard to see how net exports were such a genuine real negative
contributor to Q2 GDP as reported today, and I strongly suspect this
will be reversed. But what if it isn’t? The scope for more conventional
fiscal stimulus is hardly available. So in this light, the US needs its
own BRIC equivalent. How about something real on the infrastructure
front ? ( a nice mode of transport downtown Manhattan from JFK would be a
sign). How about literally some forced measures to shift the auto user
on masse from conventional fuels ( combined with a major hike in
gasoline taxes)?" Jim's conclusion: now that China is actively moving to developing its own middle class, perhaps it is time for the US to finally roll over and admit its consumer are on longer the world economic dynamo. He asks whether it is time to "borrow a few hundred million BRIC consumers?" Surely China will be ecstatic that the US will now be funding the development of its own middle class. As for ours...Oh well.

There is much debate over whether the Federal Reserve should tighten or further ease monetary policy. This dichotomous framing overlooks another possibility, which is whether the Fed should change the mix of its stance, tightening in some areas and further easing in others. In particular, there are strong grounds for the Fed to abandon its support of the Treasury bond market and to raise gradually the federal funds rate (to say one per cent), while simultaneously increasing its purchases of mortgage backed securities. If permissible, the Fed should also purchase state government bonds according to a per capita formula. Such a recalibration of policy could have positive effects. Increased purchases of MBS will help the housing market, which remains at the heart of the US economy's problems. Declining house prices continue to inflict financial losses on banks and consumers, and the prospect of further price declines deters buyers and undermines new construction. Increased MBS purchases could help stem this problem by further lowering mortgage rates. That would help households by facilitating more mortgage refinancing, help banks by reducing foreclosures and help the construction industry by making home ownership cheaper.

German Bundesbank executive Thilo Sarrazin has sparked a new uproar by saying that "all Jews share a common gene" and also attacked the Basques in Spain the same way in a newspaper interview. This comes only a few days after Sarrazin came under fire in Germany for using shock talk about the country's Muslim immigrants, Turks, Middle Easterners and Africans when he presented a new book. Sarrazin’s new book, whose title translates as “Germany Eliminates Itself,” sparked a heated debate. A spokesman of the Bundesbank so far only said that the book is Sarrazin's personal opinion, not exactly distancing itself from Sarrazin's xenophobic bouts.

When Zero Hedge first admonished our readers in June of 2009 to stay away from markets in light of a general deterioration in market structure, which included a regulator-authorized form of structural frontrunning in the form Flash trading (not to be confused with the imminently following Flash crash), an unprecedented mismatch between stock valuations and economic reality, and Wall Street continued attempts to reflate the ponzi merely for the sake of proving that it can be done, we never expected that retail would take to our warning with the ensuing solemnity. Yet with 16 consecutive outflows from domestic equity mutual funds, shut downs by legendary hedge fund managers such as Druckenmiller and Pellegrini (and many more Tiger derivative blows up to be disclosed soon, once the full extent of the carnage of the flattening of the steepener bandwagon trade is fully appreciated), virtually everyone is asking themselves how did Wall Street not only get it all so wrong, but how on earth is the primary business of the post-facelift Wall Street, which is no longer investment banking, but merely trading (with or without flow-facilitated prop frontrunning) going to sustain the recent record headcount levels (hint: it won't, and many more banks will soon let go thousands of additional staffers as key revenue sources have now disappeared forever), and most importantly, why is this time different? Why did the "dumb money" for the first time ever, not bite on the Wall Street siren song lure of an economic "rebound", but instead has hunkered down, proving that not only is Wall Street nothing more than a pure-play enabler of the ponzi regime's status quo, but that all those who were warning that the economy is far more dire than Wall Street represents, were proven right. These same individuals (and bloggers), first validated in predicting the downward direction of the economy, will see their pessimistic forecasts about stocks validated next. Yet while that happens, all those who still somehow find this a surprising development, are now left proposing hypothesis as to what went wrong. Such as the following piece by the Financial Times.