Archive - Nov 2011 - Story

The last few weeks have seen the U.S. Department of Defense suffer a number of setbacks in its effort to retain military influence overseas. First came the startling announcement on 21 October, when President Obama announced that all American troops would be withdrawing from Iraq by 31 December under the terms of the Status of Forces Agreement. Accordingly, 39,000 U.S. soldiers will leave Iraq by the end of the year. The deal breaker? Washington’s demand for continued immunity for any remaining U.S. troops, and the Iraqi government of President Jalal Talibani couldn’t, or wouldn’t, deliver. Now the handwriting’s apparently on the wall further east, as Kyrgyz president-elect Almazbek Atambaev firmly told the United States on 1 November to leave its Manas military air base outside the capital Bishkek when its lease expires in 2014.

With the near record October hope rally a distant memory now, the hope that hedge funds participated in it is also just that. Alas, while most hedge funds exhibited a more than 1x beta on the way down in August and September, most were lucky to get half the upside on the way up in October at best. While there are some outlier surprises, unfortunately it is the ones with an abysmal Sharpe Ratio, so for investors who enjoy huge drawdowns and massive month-to-month vol, they probably lucked out in October. Everyone else: better luck next time. Some very notable let downs: Brevan Howard: -1.25%, Tudor: -2.44%, Moore Global: -2.23%, Landsdowne: -0.50%, Bluecrest: 0.43%, Perry: 3.39%, King Street: -0.04%, Blue Mountain: 0.73%, Fortress Macro: -2.19% and last and probably least JAT Capital: -13.7%.

The recent implosion of MF Global has reignited the debate over Too Big to Fail (TBTF) and the adequacy of U.S. regulatory safeguards. It has also contributed to a broader decline in investor sentiment, many of whom believe the market structure does not afford them sufficient protection and fair competition. Many MF Global clients still have assets frozen and even if they ultimately recover the money, the short-term consequences can be devastating.  Historically, when firms fail to generate a profit or when one division damages the revenue stream of the whole firm the unprofitable assets are divested.  Companies that can’t operate under the weight of their own size end up spinning off the parts that caused the pain. This is normal in the business cycle. The government has disrupted the business cycle of creative destruction by championing TBTF firms over a more competitive market.

For the latest gimmick to mask PIIGS sovereign debt exposure (where we already know that the traditional fallback of "gross being irrelevant and only net being important" crashed and burned today after Jefferies offloaded precisely half of its gross exposure, while raising net, thereby confirming that gross exposure is indeed a risk), we turn yet again to Morgan Stanley. As a reminder, despite our note that the company's gross exposure (which is now a major risk factor, thank you Rich Handler for proving our "bilateral netting is flawed" thesis) to French banks alone is $39 billion, Morgan Stanley downplayed this by saying that only $2.1 billion is the actual net funded exposure to Peripherals Eurozone countries. We'll see if Jack Gorman will have to revisit his defense after today's Jefferies action. Well as it turns out, we now have gimmick number two, one which will surely delight the bearish investors out there looking to find a bank doing all it can to mask not only its gross but net exposure (and wondering why it has to resort to such shenanigans). Presenting the Level 1 to Level 2 switcheroo, courtesy of, who else, Morgan Stanley.

Gold has retraced over 60% of its September swing high to low - rallying almost 12% off late September lows. Whether by cause or effect, it seems our stimulus-driven, vendor-financing, USD-heavy, mercantilist neighbors across the Pacific have decided the time is right to BTFDs in gold and gold miners as today's South China Morning Post notes "China Gold to buy Central Asia mine". Jery Xie Quan, VP of China Gold, further noted that was also negotiating potential mine acquisitions in Canada and Mongolia, which are either in advanced development or close to starting production. Are the Chinese using their excess USD to purchase gold-producing assets? Who knows but it may help explain the relatively strong performance of the EUR against the USD as the former region deteriorate fast.

Superficially, it was all smiles following the announcement of the September consumer credit number which rose by $7.4 billion on a seasonally adjusted basis, on expectations of $5.2 billion (and down from the revised $9.7 billion borrowed in August). However a quick look under the surface reveals the same old trickery we have grown to know and love: revolving credit declined by $627 million, while the entire growth was in Non-revolving borrowing, which rose by $8 billion. What does non-revolving credit fund? Why auto loans (read subprime GM car loans) and student loans of course, the latter being the very same loans which even the president now is saying have to be reduced. As for the former, the G.19 now no longer even bother to report such data as Loan to Value, Interest Rates, Maturity and Amount Financed: analysts are left to imagine the best possible outcome. And just to confirm where consumer credit in 2011 has come from, of the $32 billion in credit issued YTD, $89.7 billion of it comes from the US government. The only other positive source of credit in 2011, for the whopping amount of $1 billion are savings institutions. Every other traditional source of credit is now... a drain.

With volume in S&P futures more than 20% below average, the afternoon's rumor-mill managed to juice stocks to overnight highs, well ahead of credit once again and more than two standard deviations above the day's VWAP. Interestingly, today's VWAP and Friday's VWAP were within 1 S&P point, rather coincidental given the 2% swings from high to low to high during the day - suggesting little in the way of active real-money participation as opposed to correlation-driven excitement.

For some actually relevant news, instead of market kneejerk reaction comments, we turn to the WSJ, whose Nick Timiraos points out an important inflection point, namely that Kyle Bass, one of the best hedge fund managers of his generations, may have turned moderately bullish on housing. To wit "A closely followed hedge fund manager known for correctly betting on the housing market’s collapse four years ago purchased a small stake in the nation’s largest mortgage insurance company in a bet that the housing market has neared bottom. J. Kyle Bass, portfolio manager at Dallas-based Hayman Capital Management LP, bought the 4.9% stake in MGIC Investment Corp, according to federal filings. He said on Monday the bet reflected his view that the housing market’s losses had largely been absorbed. “You can see that the pig has moved through the python in terms of U.S. housing losses,” he said. Shares of MGIC are about 10.2% higher in Monday afternoon trading, to $2.82." The Heyman Capital filing can be found here.

In true save-the-market style, as 3pm ET comes around we have another rumor from Europe. This time it purports to be the creation of an investment fund, as a subsidiary of the EFSF, which will 'attract' external capital sources, via tranching of returns, to enable the purchase of sovereign debt in primary and secondary markets. Headlines, via Bloomberg, for now suggest this is yet another strawman and given the concessions on this morning's EFSF issue, just who exactly is going to be investing in this levered product and why? Equity markets remain 'exuberant' relative to credit though HY is slowly catching up to the intrday heights of the S&P 500 futures. It really doesn't sound like anything but the beginnings of the structure of the SIV for the EFSF that we have been discussing for a couple of weeks now.

Why? Primarily because of this innocent statement by former R3 scion and former Lehmanite Rick Rieder, currently employed by the firm that ostensibly has more clout than even Goldman Sachs: BlackRock. From October 21 "BlackRock Inc. Chief Investment Officer Rick Rieder said the world’s biggest money manager remains a buyer of Italian government debt as European policy makers gather to address the region’s sovereign debt crisis. "Italy is attractive,” Rieder said during an interview on “InBusiness With Margaret Brennan” on Bloomberg Television. “As long as we are moving toward solutions, we think Italy is very reasonable at these levels. BlackRock, which manages about $3.66 trillion in assets, has also been buying debt issued by financial firms and high- yield bonds, Rieder said. As with the Italian bonds BlackRock has bought, the financial debt will benefit “as soon as you see stability,” Rieder said." Uh, Rick, you are marking to market right? Because Your P&L would be a 100% correlation to the following chart, which shows BTP prices since October 21.

Yesterday, Barclays' Ben Powell of macro sales sent out the following note to clients, which referenced a as of then unconfirmed report in the China Securities Journal: "China putting 1Tr RMB into its banks?? Very positive no? The attached bloomberg story suggests that China may inject >Tr1 Yuan into its banks deposits before the end of the year. This is a meaningful number vs the Tr7.5 RMB that the banks are expected to lend in 2011 as a whole. So what? 2 things. Most obviously this is cheap liquidity to Chinese banks that should see SHIBOR continue to fall and banks shares to rise. And secondly more broadly this would seem to suggest (again) that the rumours of easing are true. This will add fuel to the soft landing argument that I have been pushing. Remain long Chinese banks on very simple easing + bearishness = up thesis." Granted the Barclays spin was to go long China (incidentally just in time for the biggest drop in the Chinese market since October 20), but the real take home here is that China is now actively pumping money to bail out its own banks once again! And not just token money - €158.2 bilion. So how much money will be left to fund the European bailout which is oh so contingent on Chinese generosity? The short answer? Pretty much nothing, as confirmed by the fact that today's €3 billion EFSF deal was underbid and the underwriters were left holding about €500 million of the total issue. As usual, good luck Europe with your multifunctional Swiss EFSF Army knife.

In the past few minutes, the market, in true stung dog fashion, has soared without anyone even being faintly aware of what the actual news is. The consensus for the time being is that the primary driver of the latest bout of idiocy is the following BBG headline:

• GREEK PRIME MINISTER MAY BE IMF'S ROUMELIOTIS, NET TV SAYS

How this makes any sense we don't know. Supposedly the IMF being in charge of Greece will make losses to European banks even more negligible (and Greek austerity that much more austere) or something. We don't even pretend to comprehend this BS any more. Obviously we would say this rumor is total BS, but with Europe now a fully onionized continent, we prefer to keep our mouth shut.

Remember how virtually all "experts" speculated that the drop in the price of gold would set off a liquidation cascade in China, where everyone was "loaded to the gills" and at the first hint of deflation would dump all holdings (not to mention that economic Ph.D. proclaimed the gold "bubble" popped two months and $200 lower)? It seems that as so often happens when all experts agree on something, it is precisely the opposite that happens. The FT reports that "Chinese gold imports from Hong Kong, a proxy for the country’s overall overseas buying, leapt to a record high in September, when monthly purchases matched almost half that for the whole of 2010....After hitting a nominal all-time high of $1,920.30 a troy ounce in early September, the yellow metal fell to a three-month low of $1,534 an ounce later in the month. Chinese investors snapped up the metal as prices fell." Fair enough: this means the natural bid under gold will pretty much always be there, especially since the SHCOMP plunged at the same time, and if there was truly cross asset liquidation, imports would hardly rise. Which begs the question: if not China, then who sold? Was the move purely a function of fears that Paulson was liquidating? Or were rumors that various central banks are liquidating gold, actually true? We will likely find out when the next WGC report is filed. WE will also know that the Chinese number for total gold holdings is grossly underreported.

We are all quite aware of the fact that heightened volatility has become a short term norm in the financial markets as of late.  Not surprisingly, we’re seeing the same thing in a number of recent economic surveys.  The most current poster child example being the Philly Fed survey that has shown us historic month over month whipsaw movement over the last few months.  Movement measured in standard deviation parameters has been breathtaking.  All part of a “new normal” in volatility?  For now, yes. But over the very short term economic surveys and stats have been taking a back seat in driving investor behavior and decision making in deference to the “promise” of ever more money printing.  Of course this time the central bank wizardry will happen across the pond, although the US Fed is also now back to carrying out it’s own modest permanent open market operations (money printing) relatively quietly, but consistently, as of late.  Although over the short term “money makes the world go ‘round”, we need to remember that historic money printing in the US in recent years only acted to offset asset value contraction in the financial sector and did not lead to macro credit cycle acceleration engendering meaningful aggregate demand and GDP expansion.  And we should expect a Euro money printing experience to be different?  Seriously?