Archive - Feb 2011 - Story

In listening to some old lectures by Rothbard, I heard him bring up a concept called “social ownership” that was being pushed by communists in the former country of Yugoslavia as a way of managing the ownership of industry. In Yugoslavia there was a communist general named Josip Broz, who commonly went by the name Marshal Tito (how can you not love a guy that walks around calling himself Marshal Tito?). Marshal Tito is not your average run of the mill commie hahaha. I actually somewhat like this guy. Marshal Tito is one of those guys that accomplished a tremendous amount of good for his country, which is why you’ve probably never heard his name before. You see, Tito came to recognize that while the Marxists constantly called for the ownership of industry “by the people,” they never actually got around to making this happen. Tito believed that “ownership by the people” must obviously preclude the ownership of industry by the State. In Tito’s view, communist social ownership should consist of the factory workers owning a share of the company they worked for...The communists ran into some problems though.

As usual, our Onionesque predictive powers are spot on. Two hours ago, when we reported the ICE margin hike, we stated: "We expect the NYMEX will follow suit on its own WTI contract margin hike any minute." 60 minutes later, this prediction comes true. Per Bloomberg: "CME Group’s New York Mercantile Exchange plans to raise margin requirements on its light, sweet crude oil contract for the first time since March 2009, according to the exchange. Margins for speculators will increase to $6,075 per contract from $5,063, and for hedgers to $4,500 from $3,750, according to a notice on the CME’s website. The change will take place after the close of trading tomorrow." The heavy artillery in crude is out. And while margin hikes do nothing any more for silver and gold, the weak hands in crude have at least two rounds of margin hikes before they are flushed out. Of course, the half life of margin hikes is about 2-3 days. We expect this increase to be internalized very quickly. The next one will be priced in within hours. And the third one will be ignored. After that... who knows.

Stratfor explains why the developments in Libya, while important, are materially less relevant from a macro perspective than those in smallish Bahrain: "The reason why Bahrain is very important is because in any negotiation you have to have some give-and-take, and it’s likely that the Bahraini monarchy will have to give some concession to the opposition. And once that happens, it will lead to an empowerment of the opposition, 70 percent of which is Shia — 70 percent of the population of the country is Shia — and that has very large-scale implications for the region, particularly for Saudi Arabia and Kuwait."

RANsquawk Market Wrap Up - Stocks, Bonds, FX etc. – 24/02/11

If anyone is alive after today's utterly insane trading action, congratulations. The volatility lull of the past 6 months is now over: swaption traders rejoice.

And now, for the real reason for the oil plunge: the ICE has just announced it is hiking oil margins for the second time this week, this time increasing both Brent and WTI margins. The new Brent applied margin is 5200 compared to 4850 before. We expect the NYMEX will follow suit on its own WTI contract margin hike any minute. As usual, we continue to patiently await the Globex to hike margin requirements on the ES. The most recent update of the ICE Brent Scanning range and Tiering can be found here.

Oil production in Libya is expected to shut down completely and could be lost for a prolonged period of time, Bank of America Merrill Lynch said on Thursday.

Update: U.S. government has no reason to believe that Gaddafi is dead

Just a completely unfounded rumor for now. If it proves false, watch the vicious snapback...

The last time we presented the silver backwardation chart, it was "only" $0.50 or so between the front month and the long end. In the week since then the difference has jumped to what we believe is a new record of $1.50 or so. Now that the CBOE is issuing CEBOs and allowing plain Jane investors to bet on imminent corporate bankruptcies, would it be so kind to issue a contract or two on the COMEX... Pretty please?

"The big news this week from Saudi Arabia is that upon his return to the Kingdom after a three month medical absence, King Abdullah has decided to implement a massive $36 billion payoff to his people to stem off any revolt. Amongst other things: “The measures include a 15 per cent salary rise for public employees to offset inflation, reprieves for imprisoned debtors, and financial aid for students and the unemployed” according to the Financial Times...So the payoffs have begun in earnest and the question is, when will banker puppet Obama will engage in similar tactics. My guess is very soon. More and more people are aware of the sham that is his presidency and as the people realize they have been sold out to make sure the financial oligarchs got their record Christmas bonuses and can fund his 2012 run he will need to give a pay raise to the 15% of Americans on food stamps." Mike Krieger

Unlike yesterday's weak 5 year bond auction, today's auction of $29 billion in 7 Years was completely unremarkable. The bond priced at 2.854%, in line with the When Issued, and came at a 2.86 Print To Cover, pretty much unchanged from the previous 2 auctions. Directs once again came weak at 4.48%, the lowest since October 2009, which is yet another confirmation of our view that February UK purchases will be drop, and whether that's China, Petrodollars or shadow Fed purchasing, the "UK" February total will barely budge. Indirects came in line with the average at 49.66%, while Primary Dealers were at 45.86%, the highest since November. But altogether considering some of the weirdness we have seen in the primary issuance market, this was a perfectly normal tip of the belly auction.

RANsquawk US Afternoon Briefing - Stocks, Bonds, FX etc. – 24/02/11

Laszlo Birinyi, best known for his straight line extrapolation method applied to everything, except of course crude which would result in WTI hitting 10 trillion by the time the Hungarian says the S&P would approach 2,854 in three years, has released his list of Teflon Twenty companies that supposedly are immune to any news. Arguably these are the stocks that comply best with the ruler interpolation method of price prediction. These also happen to be the biggest momo names in the world. Once the market crack is confirmed, these are the names that will result in early retirement for those who STFD. On the other hand, it also means we will have many more years of Birinyi, and his attempts at 20+ kHz communication, on Comcast, coming up with totally insane predictions.

The NYSE has released its January margin debt data. Not surprisingly, total margin debt hit a peak of $290 billion, the highest since September 2008, but the one category that shows just how much purchasing is occurring on margin is total Free Credit less Total Margin Debt drops to the lowest since the all time credit bubble peak in July of 2007! At ($45.9 billion) this number is just below the ($52.8) billion last seen just before the August 2007 quant wipe out which blew up Goldman's quant desk, and arguably was the catalyst for the beginning of the end. In other words, as we have shown, everyone is now purchasing on margin and the level of investor net worth is the lowest in over 3 years. Which means that should the market decline from this week persist and the Fed be unable to stop it, the margin calls will start coming in fast and furious, and unwinds in otherwise stable products like gold and silver are increasingly possible as hedge funds proceed to outright liquidations.

A week after S&P announced it was converting its European ratings to unsolicited as was reported previously, the rating agency now proceeds to do the same to the world's most insolvent banana republic: "Standard & Poor's Ratings Services today said it converted its issuer and issue credit ratings on the U.S. federal government (AAA/Stable/A-1+) to "unsolicited." Unsolicited as in nobody wants it. In other words, following Europe, the US will now lock out S&P in providing the agency with information. "We are converting our issuer credit ratings on the U.S. government to "unsolicited," as we do not have a rating agreement with the sovereign. Standard & Poor's will nonetheless continue to rate the U.S. government and classify the ratings as unsolicited, as we believe that we have access to sufficient public information of reliable quality to support our analysis and ongoing surveillance, and because we believe there is significant market interest in the U.S. government rating." It is a good thing then that by now everyone knows just how relevant S&P's ongoing AAA/Stable rating on the US is.