Archive - Jan 24, 2011 - Story

In what is merely the latest act in the neverending play of fraud and corruption, the bipartisan panel appointed by Congress to investigate the financial crisis has concluded that several financial industry figures appear to have broken the law and has referred multiple cases to state or federal authorities for potential prosecution reports the Huffington Post. "The sources, who spoke on condition they not be named, declined to identify the people implicated or the names of their institutions. But they characterized the panel's decision to make referrals to prosecutors as a significant escalation in the government's response to the financial crisis." Well, it would be so easy to believe that this is not merely the latest political attempt at cowardly subterfuge before their Wall Street overlords by the corrupt Congressional puppets if this same ploy had worked out a little better the last time, oh, precisely zero bankers were thrown in jail. That said, the semi-informed public who sees massive fraud and endless lies now on a daily basis will get more disclosure on Thursday when the "final report" is expected to be released. Said semi-informed people will be shortly disappointed when nothing at all comes out of this. As for the 99% of the less than semi-informed US population, well, they couldn't care less.

November 2008: the situation was dire. But was it ever really an apocalypse? We were all conditioned to think that without government intervention a waking hellscape of crappiness awaited. And it continues. Over and over, we are told of being just a step away from US government default if someone dares fiscal sensibility. Or some variation of bank implosion catastrophe, or everyone going into foreclosure immediately, or something else equally horrible. These outcomes are debatable, and they deserve to be debated. Everything that happens in the future is debatable. What is not debatable is that we continue to be threatened with imminent doom if politicos don’t get what they want. I’m not a believer in global conspiracy theories, much less a perpetual ruling class, but I am a believer that democracies are absolutely awash with propaganda, veiled threats, and fear-mongering. Why? Fear is where the power is.

Russia has just announced it would proceed with price caps on a variety of foodstuffs, from buckwheat, to potatoes, assorted fruits and vegetables and all other commodities it deems "socially important" accoding to Russian newspaper gazeta.ru. And so the big margin crunch goes up several orders of magnitude, as companies, desperate to pass through surging input costs, but prohibited from raising selling prices, are forced to eliminate any and all overhead, most certainly including such trivialities as labor, in order to stay in business. More importantly, experts now predict that full year inflation in Russia will hit double digits. Just in the first 17 days of January, inflation hit 1.4%, or 9% annualized (according to gazeta... our calculation indicates a notably higher number but readers get the idea). Luckily, Russia does realize just how futile this task of price controls is: "as soon as we introduce price controls, once a deficit, the product disappears from the market, followed by an even higher rise in prices on the shadow, not covered by official supervision, market." And so a vicious circle in which high prices beget even higher prices begins. But don't worry - this could never happen in the US: see Americans only eat gold and their iPods. There is therefore massive slack in the food vertical, and, furthermore, as Steve Liesman explains so well today, a 100% rise in the price of wheat would only translate to a 10% hike in the price of bread. What happens to the other 90% (which incidentally annihilates the producer's margin but Steve didn't get to page two in that particular Inflation for Dummies book), is apparently unclear to the CNBC head economist.

It seems that not a day passes by without some major dealer running out of a precious metal in inventory. Last Thursday when we presented the most recent inventory at Scotia Mocatta (alongside the ongoing firesale at the US Mint where incidentally total silver sales in January are now at a fresh all time record 4,724,000 ounces), one of the ten market-making members of the London Bullion Market Association and one of only 5 banks to participate in the London gold fixing, we indicated that of all silver bar related products, the bank only had the 1kg Valcambi silver bar, that was listed 3 weeks ago, in stock. As of today, this object is no longer in inventory even at the unit price of CAD$980.11. Reader S. presents the two logical alternative for what is happening: "This can only conclude two things: 1. They purchased a limited amount (due to low supplies) and was sold off quickly. 2. They purchased a large amount and was sold off due to major purchases." Alternatively, the bank now has the 100 oz silver bar back in stock. We will keep tabs on how long before this also becomes "sold out." Our question is whether the ongoing shortage at most dealers, despite the so-called drubbing in PM prices, is nothing but definitive evidence that just like in stocks, precious metal investors are merely using every drop in prices as nothing more than a chance to "buy the fucking (fisical) dip"?

The benchmark for documented mortgage originators' lies is getting higher and higher. First it was the Allstate lawsuit, finding massive fraud in most Countrywide/Bank of America loans, then it was quantified at 70% after Wells Fargo sued JPM's EMC division, now it is all the way up to 91% after a just released lawsuit by the bulk of the world's biggest insurance companies has been made public, in a fresh lawsuit again Bank of America/Countrywide over "Massive mortgage fraud." 

The key catalyst for Goldman's suddenly cautious view on gold (which still has a $1,690 price target): the end of QE2 in June 2011. So, presumably, when QE 3 is announced in May in order to allow the continued monetization of $4 trillion in debt issuance over the next 2 years, that should be very bullish for gold, yes? Irrelevant: Goldman has become just one more glorified Jim Cramer: pumping anything that is green, and dumping anything in which there is even a modest (CME margin hike driven) correction.

Little commentary needed here, although why anyone would be on Yahoo is beyond us. If one can afford anti-aircraft artillery one would assume that at least a Bloomberg terminal should be up and running... which is probably the same reason why the Fed's POMO desk is also Bloomberg-less.

RANsquawk Market Wrap Up - Stocks, Bonds, FX etc. – 24/01/11

Another financial company selling off after a weaker than expected earning announcement, in an earnings seasons that so far has been largely disappointing for financials (except for those that enjoy adjusting their loss reserve ratios ever lower).

Frequent readers may recall that 11 months ago, when the economy was falsely rumored to be doing better, and the Fed was expected to take baby steps in withdrawing liquidity (only to end up having to inject another $900 billion shortly... and probably much more soon), one of the key mechanisms used was the Treasury's Supplementary Financing Program, whereby the Treasury would issue 56-Day Cash Management Bills each week with a $200 billion ceiling. In addition to funding the Treasury with a $200 billion debt ceiling buffer, the program was supposed to extract a fifth of a trillion in liquidity which would be locked into the rolling of each 56 day bill (each one amounting to $25 billion) up to a total of $200 billion, as disclosed each day in the Treasury's DTS SFP Table 1 open cash balance. Well, not even 11 full months later, it is now time to unwind the program. The immediate catalyst for the unwind of the SFP is that the Treasury will most certainly breach the debt ceiling by the end of March unless it gets the benefit of the $200 billion buffer, which counts toward the total debt issued by the UST. However, what that also means is that the US stock market is about to become awash with another $25 billion in suddenly free cash every single week, until the entire $200 billion SFP buffer is depleted. In other words, take the liquidity impact of POMO, which is roughly $25-30 billion a week, and double it! We are confident the US Treasury will announce that beginning with the week of February 14, it will no longer roll maturing 56-Day Cash Management Bills, which means that for the ensuing 8 weeks, one on every single Thursday, there will be a total of $200 billion in incremental liquidity flooding the market, and probably sending stocks, commodities, and everything else that is not nailed down into the stratosphere all over again.

A must read reply to that discredited shaman of voodoonomics, Paul Krugman, by one of the more notable proponents of Austrian theory, Mises Institute's Robert Murphy."As many readers already know, last week Paul Krugman linked to one of my Mises Daily articles explaining the importance of capital theory in any discussion of the business cycle. Although Krugman graciously described my fable about sushi-eating islanders as "the best exposition I've seen yet of the Austrian view that's sweeping the GOP," naturally he derided the approach as a "great leap backward" and a repudiation of 75 years of economic progress since the work of John Maynard Keynes. To bolster his rejection, Krugman listed several problems he saw with the Austrian understanding. In the present article I'll first summarize the Austrian (in the tradition of Ludwig von Mises) positions on capital theory, interest, and the business cycle. With that as a backdrop, I will then answer Krugman's specific objections."

While not necessarily a new topic, one which has been previously dissected by such strategists as Dylan Grice, the quandary of Japan's deteriorating demographic shift is one that the country can not afford to delay in addressing, yet continues to do just what the US does so very well, by kicking the problem into the future, and hoping it will resolve itself on its own. Today, Sovereign Man Simon Black shifts his focus on the Japanese demographic crunch in a piece titled "Japan is causing its own demise." As always clear and concise, the questions he brings up are critical. And therefore very unlikely to get an answer by anyone in "control" before it is too late. "With a median age of 44.6 years, Japan already has one of the oldest societies in the world (compared to 39.6 in Singapore, 40.7 in Canada, 36.8 in the United States, 28.9 in Brazil, 25.9 in India, and 31.7 here in Chile). One would think that the Japanese government would be rolling out the red carpet for young foreigners, yet Japan remains a fairly closed society. Foreign residents comprise less than 2% of the population according to government statistics, not enough to even qualify as a drop in the bucket. Without serious addressing this issue and attracting young foreigners both at the economic and cultural level, Japan runs substantial risk of fading into obscurity."

The solution to the ongoing fraudclosure fiasco is so simply and yet so brilliant (in a way that benefits the banks naturally) is so brilliant, that it has to date evaded most... but not all. The solution: just shred it all. That is what insolvent mortgage lenders Mortgage Lenders Network USA and American Home Mortgage are pushing hard to get permission from their respectively bankruptcy judges in their chapter 7 liquidation cases. Says Reuters: "Federal bankruptcy judges in Delaware are due to hold separate hearings Monday on requests by two defunct subprime mortgage lenders to destroy thousands of boxes of original loan documents. The requests, by trustees liquidating Mortgage Lenders Network USA and American Home Mortgage, come despite intense concerns that paperwork critical to foreclosures and securitized investments may be lost." With servicer banks increasingly unable and unwilling to provide the original lender docs (since they don't have access to them) to parties curious in seeing if there is a legal case to continue paying their mortgage, what better solution than to have the banks retort that the original document was sadly destroyed in a court-appointed shredding. In that way all the fraud canaries are killed with one stone, and the party responsible is none other than some bankruptcy judge who had given the go ahead for the wholesale destruction. And since we are not talking peanuts, in the case of MLN it comes to 18,000 boxes of records, while in the AHOM case it is just over 4,000 boxes, we wonder just how many other originators have gotten a comparable idea from the banks, and are currently busy shredding every last detail of an original mortgage note. Good luck trying to convince anyone that the bank is not in possession of a mortgage that was "purposefully" destroyed as part of a company's liquidation proceedings. Soon to follow: the burning of all books and the banning of all websites that dare to claim this is nothing but pure, grade-A criminal destruction of evidence.

The first major regime change due to unpalatable combination of austerity and a highly unpopular (most recent) banker bailout is coming to a European country in precisely one month. From Sky News.

Some very bad news for the former Obama head henchman:according to NBC Chicago, the mayoral candidate has just been bounced from the mayoral ballot after an appellate court has overturned a previous decision to allow Emanuel on the mayoral ballot. One can only imagine the firestorm of profanity that has erupted upon Rahm's learning of the news...