Archive - Apr 2011 - Story

RANsquawk US Afternoon Briefing - Stocks, Bonds, FX etc. – 06/04/11

RANsquawk US Afternoon Briefing - Stocks, Bonds, FX etc. – 06/04/11

With TEPCO stock dropping to a fresh all time record overnight at just over Y300, it is pretty clear what the fate of the company is at this point. What was less clear is the fate of TEPCO debt, of which there is just over $90 billion, and which many had expected would be made whole once the company is nationalized. Well, one entity is not taking a chance. Three months after quietly excluding Irish bonds from its General Collateral basket, the Swiss National Bank, by far the most prudent of all central banks in the current race to the bottom regime, has decide to take out 600 million in CHF-denominated bonds out of the eligible basket. Perhaps this is an indication that at least one investor is not quite so sanguine about the lack of impairment in TEPCO bonds: all those who have been selling TEPCO CDS in hopes of a JGB-TEPCO compression trade may want to take note...

RANsquawk US Afternoon Briefing - Stocks, Bonds, FX etc. – 06/04/11

In another confounding episode of biting the biggest hand that feeds it, the IMF has just issued another criticism of US fiscal policy, and in its just released Global Financial Stability report says that the US should include in its budget the "cost of mortgage loan guarantees and other housing supports." Not only that but the fund also urges that the Treasury should immediately make its support for the GSEs explicit and carry Fannie and Freddie's roughly $7 trillion in debt on the books: a move that would send US debt to well over $20 trillion and make the ratio of marketable debt (the lowest common debt denominator) to GDP well over 100%. To wit: "Government guarantees should be explicit and fully accounted for on the government's balance sheet... There is a need for better-defined and more transparent government
participation in the housing market, with all such policies, including
strict affordable housing goals, transparently shown in the government's
budget." Of course this won't happen for many years as otherwise the US would effectively confirm that it is insolvent per various Reinhart-Rogoff ratios, and instead the administration will continue pushing with its misguided plan of offloading GSE obligations on the balance sheets of private institutions. As if that will change anything: it only means that the next taxpayer funded bailout will save the TBTFs once again, instead of leading to a run on the Treasury. End result: same thing.

This will not be news for most objective Zero Hedge readers as we indicated this is a distinct possibility on several occasions, but some of those more "skeptical" about reality would be interested to know that according to Reuters "the core at Japan's Fukushima nuclear reactor has melted through the reactor pressure vessel", Democratic Congressman Edward Markey told a hearing on the nuclear disaster on Wednesday. "I have been informed by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission that the core of Unit Two has gotten so hot that part of it has probably melted through the reactor pressure vessel," said Markey, a prominent nuclear critic in the House of Representatives. Surely there is some bullish spin to this. We are too tired to look for it though.

Following our expose on the unwind in the repo (O/N GC) - reserve (IOER) carry trade yesterday, the FDIC induced compaction in the "free money" rate arb continues with GC sliding again to a jaw dropping 0.03%. And with this source of free money now shut down for good, and creating all sorts of havoc for short-term rates and further headaches for the Fed as it has one more black swan to deal with in extracting liquidity, all the free money trades have firmly shifted to FX carry, where the Yen is now the recipient of the wrath of every single Mrs Watanabe known to man. If and when Yen repatriation resumes in earnest (considering Japan GDP has to surge following its rebuilding effort as pundits claim), the outcome will be quite hilarious.

WTI surges courtesy of a disastrous UK economic update, and expected ECB tightening. Oh wait... That must mean QE3....No....That's impossible. The San Francisco Fed said just this Monday that there is no correlation between monetization and surging commodity prices. And stocks surge just because in Weimar America, $109 crude is bullish for stocks. This will end in tears.

Not quite. Give it a few hours: it just hit $39.70. Then we expect the Hunt High should be taken out shortly thereafter. And not to be left out of the party, gold just hit another all time record as well. At this point, Bernanke is officially panicking.

Marc Chandler, head of currency strategy at Brown Brothers, shares Zero Hedge's healthy dose of skepticism over two things: the pace of tightening in Europe, which the market is now taking for granted (the EURUSD hit 1.4315 earlier following rumors of Petrodollars now being recycled by purchasing European currency, not dollars: deja vu 2005 anyone?), and Fed tightening following a purported QE2 end. Summarizing: "our argument is two-fold. First, in Europe, we suspect the market is ahead of itself on the likely pace of ECB tightening. The market appears ripe for buy (the euro) on the “rumor” of an ECB rate hike and sells on the fact type of action. Second, similarly, the market appears too aggressive in pricing in Fed tightening after QEII is finished. The pendulum of market sentiment has swung too hard and we expect it to adjust in the weeks ahead." The problem is how to trade this: if the market is expecting too much tightening in both the EUR and USD, shouldn't the two offset? Then again, with the Yen carry trade now being put on en masse by everyone in the aftermath of the reserve-repo carry end, what happens with the two currencies may be quite irrelevant as everyone rushes to short the Yen. That said, there appears to be further EUR upside before the strong Europe trade finally fizzles: "Prudent investors should also consider what is potentially on the euro’s upside. An initial barrier is seen in the $1.4280-$1.4300 area. A break could signal another 1-2% euro rise to the $1.4450 and possibly $1.4600. To be sure, we suspect further euro appreciation in the face of tightening of monetary and fiscal policies will exacerbate the pressure in the periphery and act as further headwinds to European growth."

With just 72 hours left until a possible government shutdown, everyone will be following each and every take from the DC soap opera over the next three days with great interest. As such, here is a summary of today's key events in DC via Goldman's Alec Phillips. "All eyes on fiscal issues today. Yesterday, the consensus regarding budget negotiations seemed to have swung from viewing a shutdown as a clear risk to now viewing it as the most likely outcome (though still very uncertain). That said, talks will continue, in an effort to close the gap between positions on proposed spending cuts. House Speaker Boehner is reported to have proposed cutting $40bn from current levels versus the $33bn compromise floated last week, which if nothing else indicates that the gap between the parties amounts to a few billion dollars, and there is still a possibility of another very short-term extension of spending authority."

With everyone offering some version of a US budget, one more ridiculous than the other, one thing is certain: nobody has any clue how to fix America's fiscal catastrophe. And while the biggest soap opera rages in D.C. Larry Kotlikoff, who recently served as the only rational contributor to the just released IMF what paper "An Analysis of U.S. Fiscal and Generational Imbalances: Who Will Pay and How?" summarizes the "progress" so far: "The two parties are having a heated debate over the Republican plan to slice $61 billion off Uncle Sam’s projected $3.6 trillion budget. If the Republicans get their way, the deficit will fall from 9.5 percent of gross domestic product to 9.1 percent. If they don’t, they’ll probably shut the government for a couple of days. Then they’ll compromise on, say, a $40 billion budget cut, having proved they gave it their best shot." And sick of the corrupt petulance in DC, Kotlikoff has decided to propose his own budget. " I launched www.thepurplehealthplan.org last week
to solicit endorsements for what I call the Purple Health Plan -
- a proposal that offers common ground to both Republicans and
Democrats. To date, five Nobel laureates in economics, George Akerlof, Edmund Phelps, Thomas Schelling, Vernon Smith and
William Sharpe, have signed on. So have other prominent
economists." We have not read it but fail to see how it can be possibly worse, especially since one Paul Krugman has not endorsed said plan.

• More from the Oracle: Central Banks Grapple With Competing Forces (Hilsenrath)
• U.S. Sees Array of New Threats at Japan’s Nuclear Plant (NYT)
• China’s Rate Tightening Threatens Copper (FT)
• Fed’s Biggest Foreign-Bank Bailout Saved U.S. Muni Bonds (Bloomberg)
• NATO Blamed as Libyan Rebels Flee Assault By Qaddafi Forces (Bloomberg)
• Government Shutdown Looms Despite Obama's Intervention (Reuters)
• Another "brilliant" HFT "fix": SEC Unveils 'Limit' Curbs to Prevent 'Flash Crash' (WSJ)
• Ouattara forces storm Gbagbo bunker in Ivory Coast (Reuters)
• U.S. Fiscal Crisis in Spitting Distance (Laurence Kotlikoff)

Stagflation: meet economic collapse. The UK basket case is getting very, very ugly, with today's obliteration of Industrial Production putting in doubt expectations of a BOE hike. From AP: "British industrial production fell 1.2 percent in February from
January, an official report said Wednesday, marking the largest monthly
fall since August 2009 and far worse than analyst expectations for an
increase of 0.2 percent. The Office for National Statistics said a
7.8 percent drop in oil and gas extraction was the main reason for the
fall, while the manufacturing sector was flat." And the winner: "It may be that the industrial recovery is past its peak," said Samuel Tombs, U.K. economist at Capital Economics. Industrial production accounts for 17 percent of British GDP." That's the bad news; the good news is that with runaway inflation which is now surging at 5%+ the economy has got to be improving: after all where would all this demand be coming from if not from some massive latent recovery. Oh wait, what's that you say: endless liquidity? You don't say. Well, never mind then. In other news GBP crosses get obliterated as rate hike expectations are put on hold. In fact what you can put on the front burner is more money printing, both at the BOE and the Fed because central banks are so much more adept at "controlling" inflation than deflation.

In trading in London this morning, gold reached a new record nominal high ($1,459.07) and silver a new 31 year nominal high ($39.50) as investors bought the precious metals to hedge deepening sovereign debt risk (in the EU but also in the US with the threat of a federal budget shutdown), geopolitical risk and deepening inflation. Brent crude reached $123.00 a barrel this morning and looks set to challenge the high seen in July 2008 of $145.49. Anemic economic growth, extremely loose monetary policies, sovereign debt risk, geopolitical risk and surging oil and commodity prices is a recipe for stagflation which would see the precious metals replicate their performance of the 1970’s when gold rose 24 times in value (from $35 to $850) and silver by over 32 times (from $1.55 to $50). Silver over $100/oz is not as outlandish as once thought with dealers in Hong Kong mooting that possibility. Strong demand for silver is being seen in Asia (see news). Inflation has taken hold in much of the developing world and is taking hold in developed world markets now. Despite very significant price increases in vital commodities, particularly the essentials of food and energy, there remains much denial about the threat of inflation and indeed the threat of stagflation.