Archive - Nov 17, 2011 - Story

Update: Just out from Reuters which could be causing the plunge: No Plans for Financial Assistance for Italy From EFSF

The ES just fell off a cliff. For now there is no news: some speculation attributes the move to news that the supercommittee has been a catastrophic failure and no decision will be reached, but we knew that. Another reason is attributed to Fed member Sandra Pianalto stating that Europe is heading for a recession but that is not news either. Most likely just a case of HFT stop as technicals get hit as the EURUSD slides and selling begets selling. Yes, it is a "broken market" for a reason. Watch for the blame HFT crowd to come out in force in a few minutes on the financial comedy basic cable stations..

Last night Jefferies went on a full out media PR blitz in which the firm's CEO Richard Handler told Bloomberg that he "sees the turmoil easing soon" - he will most certainly be right, one way or another. Handler defended his firm's status after Zero Hedge pointed out that its bonds had tumbled to record lows: "It is not surprising that our bonds are under pressure after the assault on our company over the past two weeks,” Handler said yesterday in an e-mail. “Some bond investors sell first and ask questions later. We expect the market to return to normal pricing once we move beyond the ripple effect of the inaccuracies others have recently disseminated and once investors digest all the information” that Jefferies disclosed. Shares of the New York-based firm fell yesterday to close at their lowest since March 2009 and its bonds traded with junk- like yields that were double the level of mid-August. Jefferies came under pressure from short sellers after MF Global’s $6.3 billion bet on European debt led to an Oct. 31 bankruptcy and spurred scrutiny of similar stakes at financial firms. Handler countered by detailing his firm’s European holdings and later cutting the positions by half. Still, the yield on some Jefferies debt hovers near 10 percent and analysts questioned whether the firm needs a more stable funding model. “We have no need to access the debt markets at this time,” Handler, 50, said in a Nov. 15 interview at Jefferies’s headquarters in Manhattan. “By the time we might consider it again, we think yields will be back in a reasonable range.” Maybe, maybe not. Unfortunately, today it is equity investors who are selling first and asking questions later, and at last check have sent the firm's stock to the lowest price since March 2009, last trading at $9.60, down over 7% for the day. Which is why ask: after back on September 22 Dick Handler sold 2 million shares of his stock to Leucadia at a gross proceeds of about $25 million, it is perhaps time he actually put his money where his mouth is and instead of selling, buy some JEF for a change?

Update: CME has just released its response in this issue. Apparently they deny they are at fault.

While we will leave the question of the ridiculous Initial margin cut by the CFTC to the side (an action that should have been since reversed, even using the CME's troubled logic, if it was merely meant to facilitate onboarding of MF Global marginless accounts) a bigger, far more troubling question has emerged, namely whether CME has liability over the MF Global bankruptcy. Goldman's Daniel Harris explains: "CME has been under pressure (-9% wow vs. S&P +1% wow) owing to worries it may face liability over the timing of its communication with the CFTC following discovery of a shortfall in MF Global’s segregated client accounts, given its obligations as the DSRO (designated self regulatory organization). According to the CFTC, a DSRO must provide “immediate notification” when “a member has failed to segregate or has misused customers’ funds.” While details emerge, the stock remain under pressure pending more clarity on (1) the status of the reportedly missing $600 mn in client segregated assets, (2) incremental information on how CME satisfied its obligations as the DSRO with respect to MF Global, and (3) the status of CME/CME Trust’s offer to provide a $300 mn guarantee to the SIPC Trustee for the expedited return of client assets." Perhaps the CME should have stuck to just hiking gold and silver margins...

Update: the Athens crowd has now amassed in front of the US embassy in Athens.

Europe is FIXED!!!! Greek police fired tear gas at black-clad youths on Thursday as thousands marched through Athens to mark a 1973 student uprising against the 1967-1974 military dictatorship and protest bitter austerity measures. Students and teachers, workers and pensioners marched beating drums and chanting "EU, IMF out" in the first public test for a new national unity government charged with imposing painful tax rises and spending cuts to avert bankruptcy.

To most Americans, the stock market is the Dow Jones Industrial Average. Whether professionals follow it or not, it really is what most Americans look at when judging the health of the market. And guess what, it is up over 3% on the year. Yes, the S&P and marginally down on the year, but the DOW, the symbol of the American Market is up.

In yet another example of just what a farce our market has become, it appears that HFT algos, no longer able to freely frontrun the market courtesy of counter HFT-measures offered by major banks and an SEC which has started sniffing around illegal HFT activity, have stooped to the second-lowest rung in the ladder: scouring through momo trader tweets on Twitter, particularly those from the StockTwits network and somehow converting that into actionable "intelligence." Because while until now some amusing attempts at money management using the garbled noise of Twitter had been implemented, all of them relied on human eyes to translate content, going forward it will be robots doing the actual analysis, not to mention sarcasm translation. STM reports: "A Boulder, Colo., collector and redistributor of comment expressed on social media networks Thursday will launch a pair of streams of data from Twitter and the securities discussion site StockTwits that are 'normalized' and ready to be fed to computers for analytical processing. Gnip said it has prepared the streams as part of the launch of a product it calls MarketStream, that is designed for use by hedge funds and high-frequency traders. The move follows the launch in May of a social-media-based hedge fund in London. In that launch, Derwent Capital Markets said the fund it created would try to achieve consistent above-market returns from real-time analysis of comments on social data." Well actually if they really want above market returns they should also add Yahoo Finance message boads to StockTwits: that will really put the bind on Steve Cohen to come up with new and improved ways to generate information arbitrage. At that point the entire momo crowd in the whole world will be swaying the market like an explosive-laden boat full of news reactive lemmings, who believe they move the market, only to receive terminal margin calls within days. But, yes, the safety of the crowd is soooo nice.... Until it isn't. As for the algos, we can bet what side of the trade they will be vis-a-vis the prudent investor subsegment that chases market heatmaps in a market in which VIX 30 is the new normal.

Steve Miller is the chairman of AIG. Between 2008 and 2009 AIG received $97.8 billion in loans from the Fed plus four bailouts totaling $69.8 billion in taxpayer money. This is what Steve had to say yesterday when asked by Bloomberg TV’s Betty Liu for his views on Occupy Wall Street.

And you thought we were kidding: the Anti-Tilson ETF continues to be the best performing asset in the known universe for the past 4 days, up 34% since Friday. Buy GMCR, short NFLX, sit back and retire.

Last time when Jefferies' (which is not MF Global although it is just as a big question market in the TBTF category, and as a reminder is not a Bank Holding Company, being the last pure play investment bank left out there) stock had a $9 handle, it triggered a -20% circuit breaker and forced a short covering squeeze. This time it is far more methodical. At this time Leucadia is underwater on both of its recent purchases, all past and future Jefferies press releases have been priced in and will be irrelevant in the future, and Handler only has half of his original gross sovereign book left to sell (into a bidless market and thus generating more major P&L losses).

The political pressure on the ECB (and implicitly the Bundesbank's oh-so-stubbornly sensible and correct bankers) to just-print-baby-print is growing by the hour (or down-tick in BTPs and OATs). The cacophony of long-only strategists, Keynesian central bankers, and desperate (under speculative attack) politicians has perhaps reached a crescendo as it appears (from a Reuters article) that the ECB has found a workaround. By lending to the IMF, who are able to do pretty much whatever they want with regard to on-lending and primary issuance support, the ECB denizens can maintain their tough no nonsense anti-monetization stance while providing a leveragable IMF with more support for whatever leveraged buying they deem necessary (cough France Italy Spain cough). And all this as the IMF scrambles to replace its European Director - what could possibly go wrong?

Well that was quick: Italy is about to be acquainted with the old Asian saying that a "known devil is better then unknown angel", especially when the angel is a Prime and Finance minister (two for the austere price of one) working purely on the behalf of offshore banker interests. As Reuters and Corriere report, thousands of Italians took to the streets in several cities on Thursday to protest against what they called a "bankers' government" led by economist Mario Monti, and there were clashes with police. Students in Italy's financial capital Milan threw firecrackers at police trying to prevent them approaching the Bocconi university, which is chaired by Monti and has become a symbol for the new executive of technocrats he has formed to tackle Italy's debt crisis. Police responded by charging the students with batons. One journalist was injured by a firecracker, police sources said. The students also threw eggs and fake dollar banknotes at the building of the Italian banking association. "We don't want the banks to rule" and "Monti's government is not the solution," the students chanted." Well as long as it is only the students who feel this way, all is well. If, however, the anti-Monti sentiment is shared by more, which it is, then the technocratic government will be lucky to survive three weeks... forget 2013. And the greater the revulsion, the bigger the Stockholm Syndrome nostalgia for Berlusconi will be. If we were betting people, we would speculate that Silvio's chances for reelection are soaring with each passing minute.

And now back down:

• FITCH SAYS ITALY RATING MAY BE CUT IF IT LOSES MARKET ACCESS
• FITCH SAYS ITALY RATING COULD BE CUT TO LOW INVESTMENT GRADE
• FITCH SAYS ITALY IS PROBABLY ALREADY IN RECESSION
• FITCH SAYS MONTI GOVERNMENT MAY REMAIN IN POWER TO APRIL 2013

The decoupling desperation hits just keep on coming. After revising last week's 390k number as usual higher to 393K, today's soon to be revised higher jobless claims number hit 388k - the lowest since April, on expectation of 395k. Naturally the robots took one look at the number and completely ignored the fact that Europe's slow motion implosion continues because a few thousand people fired less apparently is good news. Naturally, that corporations, which have already cut all the fat and now have fewer and fewer people left to fire is of secondary importance. After all the decoupling thesis must survive at all costs because if not for America, which together with everyone else, has exported $338 billion more than they have imported - a mathematical idiocy which was noted yesterday - then the world is apparently doomed. And confirming just how "strong" the US economy is, or at least reports thereof, was both the continuing claims number which came in at 3,608K on expectations of 3,635K (previous revised of course higher from 3,615K to 3,665K), while housing starts and permits both beating expectations and coming at 628K and 653K, on expectations of 610K and 603K; even as both previous prints were revised lower. That multi-family units once again came at an abnormally high 183K is also irrelevant - 1 unit came virtually unchanged at 430k. But none of this matters: if the blistering economic data of this week, Ministry of Truthed as it may be, is not sufficient to convince the market that the US can decouple from the European catastrophe, nothing can. Naturally, if Europe is not fixed within one month, comparable "beats" in December will be simply ridiculous and completely non credible, and the BLS will be forced to actually report the truth on what the global slow down looks like.

First the momo stocks go into all out implosion, and right on their heels are permabulls. A few months ago it was that joke of an analyst David Bianco who started colleting jobless benefits, and today we learn that the bigget permabull of all, Legg Mason's Bill Miller is out. From Bloomberg: Legg Mason’s Miller to Exit Main Fund After Falling Behind Peers. But, but, who will CNBC invite to make the bullish case?