Archive - Dec 2011 - Story

On November 25, Moody's cut Hungary to junk. Now it is S&P's turn: "The downgrade reflects our opinion that the predictability and credibility of Hungary's policy framework continues to weaken. We believe this weakening is due, in part, to official actions that, in our opinion, raise questions about the independence of oversight institutions and complicate the operating environment for investors. In our view, this is likely to have a negative impact on investment and fiscal planning, which we believe will continue to weigh on Hungary's medium-term growth prospects. Moreover, in our opinion, the downside risks to Hungary's creditworthiness have also increased as the global and domestic economic environments have weakened."

To all our German-speaking readers, and particularly our readers in Switzerland, we present an amusing piece out of Swiss NZZ, titled "Angstmacher im Netz." Even a very rudimentary understanding of German is sufficient to grasp the gist...

While part of Merrill Lynch, David Rosenberg was always an outlier, in that he never sugarcoated reality, and could always be relied upon to expose the dirt in the macro and micro picture, no matter how granular or nuanced, and how much it conflicted with other propaganda research to come from the bailed out broker. Then three years ago he moved to Canadian investment firm Gluskin Sheff, transitioning from the sell side to the buy side, yet for all intents and purposes his daily letters, so very appreciated by many, never ceased, in essence making him a buysider with an asterisk - one who daily shares his latest vision with the broader public, in addition to his personal investment team. In one of his last letters of the year, Rosie presents a detailed breakdown of all the key differences between the sell and buyside, at least from his perspective, and also how, now that he manages other people's money, he is investing in the future. To wit: "In my former role as chief economist at Merrill Lynch, I flew all over the world and saw all the legendary portfolio managers from Paul Tudor Jones to Jeremy Grantham to John Paulson to Bill Gross — at least three or four times a year. Now the only PM's I speak to are our PM's. Not that they "have to" agree with all of my calls, but I am here as their economic concierge 24/7. The same holds true for our clients. In my previous life on the "sell side", it was very rare for me to sit down one-on-one with private clients. Today, that takes up a good part of my day — helping our client base make investment decisions that will build their wealth in a prudent manner over time." As for what he likes (and dislikes) we will leave it up to the reader to find out, but will note that Rosie appears to take issue with being labelled a permabear. And why not: he has been far more right than not since the December 2007 start of the Second Great Depression.

Commodity Customer Coalition founder James Koutoulas is requesting that MF Global bankruptcy Judge Martin Glenn investigate three potential legal issues that are said to have occurred in transferring of MF Global assets.  The key issues include the fact that JP Morgan was able to purchase MF Global bonds at a discount without any open bidding process and the assets were apparently sold without disclosure to or approval from the U.S. bankruptcy court or trustees.  The third issue centers on JP Morgan seeking special favors from the Federal Reserve to receive priority treatment over investor segregated fund accounts.

Today's $29 billion 7 Year bond auction, the last of the week and of the year, priced just modestly better than this week's previous 2 and 5 year primary issues, although on the surface it may have been a little weaker, pricing at 1.43%, just wide of the 1.422% When Issued and modestly worse than November's 1.415%. And while the previous weekly auctions were records only to disappoint in their internals, this one was the opposite, with a 2.68 Bid To Cover, above the 2.59 LTM average, and solid Indirect takedown at 42.01%, far better than the 39.88% in November, while Directs declined from 18.85% to 12.95%. This left 45.04% for Dealers to use as immediately repo collateral. And with that, the US just added another $40.8 billion in net new debt, which we believe after today's update on settled debt from last week will finally push total US debt to GDP over 100%, and certainly when one accounts for the historical adjustments to previous GDP following today's epic existing home sales adjustment by the NAR, which will almost certainly bring total US GDP as of September 30, 2011 to under $15 trillion.

Just hitting the tape are these quite perplexing headlines out of Bloomberg:

• EFSF LENDING CAPACITY MAY DROP TO EU293 BLN, CULLINAN SAYS
• EURO RESCUE FUND'S CAPACITY MAY FALL BY A THIRD, CULLINAN SAYS
• EURO RESCUE FUND MAY SHRINK ON FRANCE DOWNGRADE, CULLINAN SAYS
• S&P SOVEREIGN RATINGS DIRECTOR CULLINAN COMMENTS IN E-MAIL

Odd - because it is S&P who would be doing the downgrading. Cue downgrade rumors.

Yesterday we charted the combined ECB balance sheet which showed that it had hit an all time record of €2.5 trillion, exclusing today's operation (to the stunned surprise of all those who scream that the ECB should be printing more, more, more). Today, we focus exclusively on the various forms of unsecured liquidity measures, such as today's 3 Year LTRO, because as the following chart from Bank of America shows, European emergency liquidity provisioning post today's liquidity bailout brings the total to €873 billion and is just shy of its all time record of €896 billion, a number which we expect will be taken out as soon as the next liquidity provisioning operation. In other words, European liquidity in euro terms, has virtually never been worse. And as today's additional drawdown of Fed swap lines indicates, the USD liquidity crunch is getting worse not better (confirmed by the rapid deterioration in basis swap levels). Perhaps the fact that not only is nothing fixed, but things are about as bad as they have ever been explains why Europe closed blood red across the board, and also why Bank of America continues to push for an outright crash in all risk (and some were doubting our earlier analysis that BAC is outright yearning for a market crash): To wit from Bank of America's Ralf Preusser: "The tender results do not however change either our longer term  cautious outlook on growth, or the periphery. We remain long 5y CDS protection on France, at 210bp (target 300bp, stop loss 175bp)." So let's see: BAC is shorting the EURUSD, which implies they are pushing for a market drop, and now they want French CDS to soar? Who was it that said the megabanks do not want a crash?

There are clear signs of a liquidity crunch in the asset markets right now, and the question I keep hearing is, Is this 2008 all over again? No, it’s worse. Much worse. In 2008 there was a lot more faith and optimism upon which to draw. But both have been squandered to significant degrees by feckless regulators and authorities who failed to properly address any of the root causes of the first crisis even as they slathered layer after layer of thin-air money over many of the symptoms. Anyone who has paid attention knows that those "magic potions" proved to be anything but. Not only are the root causes still with us (too much debt, vast regional financial imbalances, and high energy prices), but they have actually grown worse the entire time. As always, we have no idea exactly what is going to happen and when, but we can track the various stresses and strains, noting that more and wider fingers of instability increase the risk of a major event. Heading into 2012, there's enough data to warrant maintaining an extremely cautious stance regarding holding onto one's wealth and increasing one's preparations towards resilience.

Somehow the revisions to home sales don't affect how many months of supply there is?  I guess so, but that does seem like a stretch. What I'm more curious about is the starts and permits numbers.  Yesterday the market celebrated 685k starts and 681k permits.  We thought we were running at existing home sales of 5 million per annum.  That number was too high by 603,000 on an annual rate.  Are builders basing starts and permits on real demand or were they looking at the NAR numbers?  Were building scratching their hand wondering why they weren't seeing demand but NAR kept coming up with big numbers? Yes, I understand that the new construction market is different than existing home sales, but nothing about these revisions gives me a warm fuzzy feeling.  Maybe with Santa here, the ECB acting as the primary source of lending to banks, or some progress on Capital Hill, the strength in the market makes sense?  I just can't believe that being so far off on existing home sales can be so immaterial.

The "Bond King" can't say he didn't warn you. As for the rhetorical answer to his question, we are confident readers don't need any hints. That said, we are no longer surprised to see that established managers of trillions in AUM agree on a daily basis with the hyper cynical (not to be confused with hyper-rehypothecated) musings of fringe bloggers, and it actually becomes is cool" to express agreement with said managers. How soon before every other member of the Ponzi starts exposing the Ponzi for what it is? Is the biggest Nash Equilibrium collapse in "developed world" history coming?

Now that the LTRO flop has been digested, one of the more curious explanations for the failure comes from Citi's Steven Englander, who suggests that, surprise, surprise, Italian banks were lying yesterday when they said that they were ready and willing to buy Italian debt with LTRO proceeds. To wit: " One dose of cold water were comments from the Italian Bank Association that EBA rules won’t permit Italian banks to buy sovereign debt – this is a complete reversal from reports yesterday that indicated that Italian bank collateral would benefit from government guarantees in going to the ECB and lead to incremental  Italian bank buying of sovereign debt." Gee: someone lying? NAR who could possibly conceive of that... And more to the point, Englander has an interesting observations on the market reaction to the upcoming French downgrade: "the S&P downgrade of euro zone sovereigns is hanging over the market but there is no definite timing – every day brings one rumor or another of an imminent moves. More concretely there is a chorus of French and euro zone officials managing expectations downward. S&P probably wants to manage the announcement so as to have the least market impact, but it is unclear whether that means doing it when most investors are inactive but liquidity is low or the opposite. At this point a French downgrade is no surprise. A one-step downgrade would be a positive surprise, but downgrading core-core Europe – Germany, the Netherlands, Finland – would still be a negative. Today’s LTRO may be a (reverse) template for the reaction to a downgrade: kneejerk selling followed by a rebound." Well, only one way to know for sure what happens post the downgrade - bring it on.

And here we go:

EXISTING U.S. HOME SALES REVISED DOWN BY 14% FROM 2007-2010
EXISTING HOME SALES REVISED DOWN BY 15% IN 2010 TO 4.19 MLN

Thank you NAR for proving what everyone knew: that the US housing market is one big lie. And next: here come the historical GDP revisions.

Stock markets globally had a torrid year with the S&P500 down 1.3%, the FTSE down 8% and the CAC and DAX down 19% and 15% respectively. Asian stock markets also fell with the Nikkei down 17%, the Hang Seng 20% and the Shanghai SE down 22%. The MSCI World Index fell 9%. Thus, gold again acted as a safe haven and protected and preserved wealth over the long term. While gold reached record nominal highs at $1,915/oz in August, it is important to continually emphasize that gold remains well below the real high, adjusted for inflation, in 1980 of $2,500/oz. Gold today at $1,625/oz is 18% below the record nominal high of $1915/oz in August 2011. More importantly, gold remains 46% below its real high of $2,500/oz.   Global money supply continued to rise in 2011 and helped push gold prices to all-time highs on the fear of currency debasement. If accommodative monetary policies continue as the dominant tool for central banks, precious metals will almost certainly continue to benefit. Were this trend to turn, responsible monetary policy actions could hinder returns. We see no prospect of this in the short term – and little prospect in the medium term.

The dollar scramble continues. In addition to the Flop Ex Machina which is the LTRO, now confirmed to be a failure courtesy of the ECB's relentless buying Italian and Spanish bonds, something the bank were supposed to be doing, the ECB has reported that European banks have pulled another $33 billion in 14 day funds with the ECB, which in turn means that the cumulative total now, net of the expiring 7 day operation which runs out on December 22 and holds $5.122 billion, is a whopping $85 billion, and is above the level of swap line usage before the Lehman collapse which peaked at $67 billion, then exploded to a peak of $583 billion following the Lehman failure. Below is a chart showing what the Fed's swap line usage will look like when the FRBNY updates its facility usage next Thursday. This explains why both the 1 month and 3 month basis swaps (last at -130 bps, -13 bps on the day) have been leaking wider all day once again. We, for one, can't wait for tomorrow's H.4.1 update to see just how high the Discount Window usage jumped to in the past week.