Archive - Jun 16, 2011 - Story

About a month ago we reported on an inquiry launched into JPM's "anti-competitive" and "monopolistic" practices on the LME which have resulted in artificially high prices for a series of commodities which had been hoarded by the Too Big To Fail bank. Today, the WSJ continues this investigation into a practice that is not insular to JPM but also includes Goldman Sachs and "other owners of large metals warehouses" which can simplistically be characterized as a De Beers-like attempt to artificially keep prices high for commodities such as aluminum, courtesy of warehousing massive excess supply, artificially low market distribution of the final product, while collecting exorbitant rents in the process. Specifically, "Goldman, through its Metro International Trade Services unit, owns the
biggest warehouse complex in the LME system, a series of 19 buildings in
Detroit that house about a quarter of the aluminum stored in LME
facilities. Coca-Cola and other consumers say that Metro in particular is allowing
the minimum amount of aluminum allowed by the LME—1,500 metric tons a
day—to leave its facilities, and that Metro could remove much more,
erasing supply bottlenecks and lowering premiums for physical delivery
in the process. Coca-Cola, which has complained to the LME, says it can take months to
get the metal the company needs, even though warehouses are allowing
aluminum to come in much more quickly. Warehouses, meantime, collect
rent and other fees." It is not only Goldman's Metro operations, but includes JP Morgan's Henry Bath division, and naturally commodities behemoth Glencore, all of which are taking advantage of the LME's guidelines and rules which make the imposition of a pseudo-monopoly an easy task. The primary driver of this anti-competitive behavior is the fact that GS, JPM and Glencore now control virtually the entire inventory bottlenecking pathways: "In recent years, major investment banks like Goldman and J.P. Morgan and
commodities houses like Glencore have been snapping up warehouses
around the world, turning the industry from a disperse grouping of
independent operators into another arm of Wall Street. The LME has
licensed about 600 warehouses around the world. The transformation has raised questions about whether the investment
banks, which also have big commodity-trading arms, are able to use their
position as owners of warehouses to manipulate prices to their
advantage."And since the outcome of this anti-competitive delayed tolling collusion ends up having quite an inflationary impact on end prices, the respective administrations are more than happy to turn a blind eye to this market dominant behavior which buffers the impact of deflation on input costs. We may have seen the end of the OPEC cartel. Alas, it has been replaced with a far more vicious one - this one having Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan as its two key members.

Keeping a track of all the fluid, hourly changing developments in Greece can be unbearably complex, and as a result one may be left with the impression that things are better than they really are. They aren't. As the SocGen report below summarizes, Greece may have about 72 hours before it gives itself a Pass/Fail grade on Sunday, which in turn will have massive repercussions on the Troica bailout, on the eurozone, on the EUR, and on all those "Lehman-like" consequences you have been reading about. Once again, just like 2000 years ago, the fate of the western world (we would say democracy but that has not been the case for centuries), is about to be decided by a few popularly elected parliamentarians in Athens.

We won't bore readers with the Fed's balance sheet: yes, it is at a new record, and will be at a new record until the week of July 7. Which sure makes for click inducing headlines week after week. It will make for even more headlines after the announcement of QE3 when the same meme will be abused for another 1.5 years, at which point everyone will be so habituated to the idea of "record" anything, not to mention a record low dollar, that the Fed's mission will be complete. There are two things that do need noting however: FX swap lines were not used in the past week, although they will see about a trillion worth of use when Greece defaults, and discount window borrowings jumped to the third highest in 2011, or by 25% W/W (to $91 million, and by 62.5% in the Primary credit facility), another number which will shortly surge. Yet the most notable number, or as the case may be, chart, is as usual the Adjusted Monetary Base, which continues to track the asset side of the Fed's balance sheet well into the stratosphere, and is up by 20% YTD. There is about another $80 billion left on this number before it tops out. What is disturbing however, is that despite the ongoing rise in the AMB, coupled with an actual decline of $100 billion in excess reserves in the past week to $1.57 trillion, the market continues to trickle lower. What happens when the incremental additions to the AMB and to reserves end in precisely 24 days?

In a very surprising move, the AP reports that the UK finance minister George Osborne has announced a major overhaul of British banks, the key provision of which will be the separation of bank retail and investment business "in order to help avoid another financial crisis" - an act which is in essence a reintroduction of Glass-Steagall. What is stunning about this development is that the banking cartel has allowed the UK to get so far as to effectively repeal Gramm-Leach-Bliley, the act that ended Glass Steagall and allowed unprecedented deregulation to convert formerly safe banks into the mastodon, 50x levered, TBTF hedge funds they are now. And if this is happening in the UK, how long before Europe adopts the same overhaul in order to placate its austerity-ired population, and deflect populist anger where it belongs: the banking oligarchy which continues to defy nature, and the simple laws of bankruptcy, and demands that there is never even the smallest impairment of senior claims. All this may very soon be changing.

Well, all that bitching at the Comex over PM manipulation has paid off. The Chicago exchange just lowered its initial and maintenance margins by 10% from $6,751 to $6,075 and $5,001 to $4,500 respectively. In addition to GC, the CME lowered MGC, CGT, QO and 8Q contracts. Yet while it also dropped a bunch of irrelevant petroproduct margins, the CME is now targeting the Corn and Hogs speculators, apparently doing China's job for it, by hiking margins by 50% for the same crop year in C and lean hogs LN all months by 66%. Other products that saw a margin hike were Wheat, Soybean, Lumber, Dry Whey and Live Cattle. But back to gold: is this the catalyst for the next big move up? We should know within a few days...

The one and only data point that has given the bears pause is the extremely bearish sentiment readings. As an example the AAII survey recorded its highest bullish view on December 21, 2010 at 63.3% bullish to 16.4% bearish whereas on June 15, 2011 those readings were 29.0% bullish to 42.8% bearish. Bulls have argued this contrarian indicator says to buy stocks while bears have scratched their heads questioning why sentiment is so bearish with the VIX below 20 and equities only 7% off their multi year highs. Makes no real sense or does it?

• RESEARCH IN MOTION SEES 2Q REVENUE $4.2B-$4.8B, EST $5.47B
• RESEARCH IN MOTION 1Q REVENUE $4.91B, EST. $5.15B    
• RESEARCH IN MOTION SEES 2Q ADJ. EPS 75C-$1.05, EST $1.40
• RIM SEES YEAR OPER EPS $5.25-$6.00, HAD SEEN $7.50; EST. $6.24
• RIM SEES 2Q GROSS MARGIN 39% VS EST. 41.5%
• RIM CUTS YEAR FORECAST, SETS BUYBACK, JOB CUT PLAN

RANsquawk Market Wrap Up - Stocks, Bonds, FX etc. – 16/06/11

While the furious tape painting attempt into quad witching continues courtesy of a surging EURUSD, which we anticipate will sell off shortly once again, as tomorrow brings absolutely nothing actionable out of Greece, a better indication of what is happening in the market are the High Yield ETF JNK/HYG which both were just been punched out. It is unclear if this ETF was the plaything of some HFT algo (we will follow up with Nanex shortly), but it appears that these ETFs would have been a direct casualty had the sell off continued after 3pm, at which point the bidside of the Level 2 order book essentially disappeared, and the only thing that prevented an epic collapse was central bank purchasing of the EURUSD which lifted the entire market. Yet what is nonetheless quite bad for holders is that the JNK/HYG has now taking out not only 2011 lows, but lows unseen since September 2010. The ETFs tend to be a good proxy of the actual cash HY market as can be seen in the second chart below. Which is why we send our condolences to all HY fixed income hedge funds which are about to be dealing with some very substantial margin calls. The crash may have been delayed but has not been prevented.

You can look at the Dow which is hilariously green on the day despite the now doubly confirmed contraction of the US economy. Or you can look at the VIX which is now surging in what can be classified as an offerless market, and up well over 10% at last check. NYSE Circuit breakers now off.

While I spend a lot of time highlighting TPTB’s plan to form a world government, currency and central bank that doesn’t mean I think they will succeed. In fact, just as Wall Street played their hand too aggressively after being bailed out and are now going to go down for the count this round, The Powers That Be have also played their hand way too aggressively and not only will their dream of planetary control through a global fiat money system run by them completely fail, but their policies will fail so spectacularly and publicly that it will lead to what I call ”peak government.” Governments right at the moment are as big as they will ever be in our lifetimes. This is in my opinion a great thing for humanity and freedom but the transition to more localized rule of law will be tricky. We must be rational and help the sheep out as their world crumbles around them. They will be scared and looking for mommy. Governments won’t be in a position to help so we will need to do the heavy lifting.

Update: Well that was quick - Weiner lasted just 4 minutes. Speech over.

Watch it live. Elsewhere, InTrade about to commence cash settlement on Weiner resignation contracts.

It is hard to believe that the first dot com bubble, so vivid to most semi-veteran traders, occurred over a decade ago. What is even harder to believe is that courtesy of the record liquidity bubble created by the Central Planning mafia, 2011 has already seen not only the second dot com bubble, but as the table below demonstrates, its bursting. Of all the dot com 2.0 IPO to hit the market in the past 3 months, the average return is now down 20%, but that has not prevented an underwriting syndicate comprised of the TBTFs to make billions in underwriting fees. Luckily, the fervor that previously had gripped some of the more volatile precious metals, and since spilled over into new public issues, has popped. Incremental cash will now be nearly impossible to get. To all companies that managed to take advantage of momo traders who have a memory of 15 minutes or less, congratulations. To everyone else: get in line for QE3. Wink, wink Groupon.

Don’t be fooled by the IMF’s announcement that Greece will get a new round of money. This bailout is merely to give a couple of months for the parties to seriously negotiate what haircuts and debt extensions investors need to take in Greece, and Ireland and Portugal. Virtually all the comments made by the parties involved fit in with the view that we are now in a phase where people are negotiating how much they will write off and what else they will do. Almost none of the comments indicate that anyone is really trying to put together a plan that is going kick the can down the road for a long time. I am fading this rally as only the most optimistic investor can believe that this problem doesn’t lead to real default/restructuring with haircuts in the next couple of months.

Yesterday's ominous selloff (today's very temporary EURUSD, and 100% cross-asset correlation, bounce notwithstanding: after all the data just got even worse courtesy of the Philly Fed, meaning much more pain for the S&P before QE 3 comes) got you a little jittery, with Flash Crashy overtones? You are not alone. Market veteran Art Cashin recounts that yesterday's market action was not so much reminiscent of 2010, or even the 2008 uber-volatile market, but really 1987.