Archive - Jun 18, 2011 - Story

Before leaving New York, I was enjoying a perfectly nice afternoon yesterday walking around the Upper West side. When I got to Lincoln center, roughly at the corner of Broadway and W 62nd Street, reality set in. No fewer than ten NYPD storm troopers were ‘patrolling’ the sidewalk outside in full combat gear: Kevlar helmet, flak vest, semi-automatic 9mm sidearm, and Colt model 933 with M900 foregrip and M68 aimpoint. A few of them had M203 variety grenade launchers fitting snugly underneath the barrel. And to what did we owe the deployment of such unnecessary firepower? An invasion of the Canadian hordes? Terrorists on the loose? No. Some visiting politician… clearly an individual who feels important enough to merit an intimidating death squad in his vicinity. This is the nature of the system. Police are armed to the teeth… and while their official marketing slogan may be to ‘keep people safe’, their real function is to be the protectors and enforcers for the political class, all while keeping the people in check so that the know who’s boss.

Now that the Greek bailout is topic front and center for the second year
in a row, it means that it is time for the mainstream media to once
again prove to the world that in the past year it has learned precisely didley squat about
how the more complicated securities used in capital markets operate.
Such as CDS. Just like in May 2010, the prevalent trope among the clickbaiters
is that CDS written against Greece will destroy the world, in
superficial attempts to bring about panic induced by the faulty
conventional wisdom that CDS was the cause for the implosion of AIG.
Well, wrong.

Another revolution in China is impossible, you say? Please step this way into the time machine and return to 1979. The year is usually remembered for the Iranian Revolution, and many commentators are comparing the current "Arab Spring" revolts to the systemic changes unleashed in 1979. More interesting is the case of the Soviet Union in 1979, which appeared to all eyes as a permanent, stable political entity. The U.S.S.R. invaded Afghanistan on December 24, 1979, but that only seems noteworthy looking back from the present. At the time, there was still concern in the West that the U.S.S.R. would launch a blitzkrieg attack to conquer Western Europe. One-party systems lack the mechanisms for adaptation, and thus they are exquisitely ripe for revolution and implosion. Democracies and republics tend to have periods of low-amplitude instability (witness Greece right now) that enable the system to adapt and experiment ("fail fast, fail small" being the preferred process of adaptation). One-party systems, from the Liberal Democratic Party in Japan to the Communist Party in the U.S.S.R. and China, suppress the information and processes intrinsic to dissent, and thus build up intrinsically unstable systems...Both China and the U.S. may be quite different countries by 2021. It's worth recalling that nobody saw the 1989 implosion of the Soviet Union a mere ten years before in 1979, so it is not surprising no one sees the implosion of the Status Quo in China and the U.S. ten years hence.

Just in time for the end of QE2, when the US needs every possible foreign buyer of US debt to step up to the plate, we get confirmation that yet another major foreign central bank has decided to not only not add to its US debt holdings, but to actively sell US Treasurys. The WSJ reports that "Russia will likely continue lowering its U.S. debt holdings as Washington struggles to contain a budget deficit and bolster a tepid economic recovery, a top aide to President Dmitry Medvedev said Saturday. "The share of our portfolio in U.S. instruments has gone down and probably will go down further," said Arkady Dvorkovich, chief economic aide to the president, told Dow Jones in an interview on the sidelines of the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum." Well, with Russia out, at least we have China and Japan continuing to buy US debt.... Oh wait, China is contemplating dumping two thirds of its debt you say? And the biggest buyer of Japanese bonds is now in the process of selling Japanese bonds in the open market for the first time (so not really in the market of US bonds). Well, surely US households will step up to the plate. After all they all have so much "cash on the sidelines" courtesy of the Recovery^{TM ©®} that they can't wait to dump it all into paper yielding less than 3% a year, and has negative real rates of return. Wait, what's that: according to the Fed, in Q1 US "households" sold $1.1 trillion annualized in Treasurys to the Fed? So, let's get this straight: China, Japan, and now very much openly Russia, the three countries with the largest financial reserves in the world, are threatening, if not already dumping US bonds, just in time for US households to sell their holdings of US paper to Brian Sack. And this is happening 2 weeks before QE2 ends... Um... Are we and Bill Gross (and certainly not Morgan Stanley) the only ones to see a problem with this?

More on the latest confirmation that the time of US superpower supremacy has ended...

Below we present some additional analysis on the implementation of Dodd-Frank's precious metal and FX OTC spot trading prohibition from law firm Morgan Lewis, as well as another potentially far more disturbing implication for non-US Hedge Funds which trade FX (and since virtually all hedge funds are located offshore due to tax implications, and since most hedge funds have now shifted to FX trading in an attempt to pursue volatility, we imagine this means absolutely everyone in the space). Basically it appears that hedge funds that have "one single US investor [who] has less than $10 million in investable assets, that fund will be classified as a retail FX fund. If an FX fund has investors that fail to meet the $10 million threshold,
that fund would therefore not be considered an eligible contract
participant. Gary Alan DeWaal, senior managing director and group general counsel at prime brokerage firm Newedge, said most non-US FX hedge funds seemed unaware of these obscure, burdensome requirements. “Most hedge funds would not think that they are retail funds. However, all it takes is one US client, who fits into this bracket to make them a retail FX fund. I think a lot of hedge funds could be forced to either throw out these clients from their funds or change their counterparties,” added DeWaal." Forget the liquidity freeze courtesy of Greece. Our own congressional and senatorial idiots are about to do it on their own without any country having to go into default.

One small step toward Executive Order 6102 part 2, and one giant leap for corruptcongressmankind. "We wanted to make you aware of some upcoming changes to FOREX.com’s product offering. As a result of the Dodd-Frank Act enacted by US Congress, a new regulation prohibiting US residents from trading over the counter precious metals, including gold and silver, will go into effect on Friday, July 15, 2011. In conjunction with this new regulation, FOREX.com must discontinue metals trading for US residents on Friday, July 15, 2011 at the close of trading at 5pm ET. As a result, all open metals positions must be closed by July 15, 2011 at 5pm ET. We encourage you to wind down your trading activity in these products over the next month in anticipation of the new rule, as any open XAU or XAG positions that remain open prior to July 15, 2011 at approximately 5:00 pm ET will be automatically liquidated."

Everybody hates rating agencies. They missed Enron (balance sheet fraud), the sub-prime crisis (using models provided by banks) and sovereign debt crisis (concealed by foreign currency swaps). They have been wrong – so what? Stock market analysts are wrong all the time, and investors still read their worthless reports. And what would you expect from a stock recommendation if you knew it was paid for by the company the report is about? (People – you really need to switch off that Consumer News and Business Channel and put on your thinking caps.) Anyway. I came across this Weekly Market Outlook from Moody’s Analytics. They do something remarkable. They compare their own ratings with the rating implied by CDS (credit default swaps). Usually the rating agencies are a little bit behind the curve, so the CDS can give more of a “real-time” view of where the rating should be. Look at Bank of America and Merrill Lynch (now, of course, owned by BoA). Their implied rating is junk! JPMorgan Chase, Well Fargo and HSBC Finance Corp are not far behind in the BBB category.

Yesterday when we observed the conventional wisdom explanation that the CBOE equity put/call ratio is the highest it has been since January 2009 and hence the market must have bottomed, we naturally took the opposite stance, warning that any comparison to past events is necessarily apples to oranges, since the "last time we checked back in January 2009 Greece and Europe were not
about to go Chapter 11, nor was a $900 billion asset purchasing program
about to end." Well, we are not the only ones to ridicule yet another attempt by the media to sucker in the retail investor, who however following the biggest domestic mutual fund equity outflow since August is long gone. UBS' Andy Lees does a far more convincing job, and adds that "the skew to the downside is not reflective of
people being long puts but rather reflects the inability of funds to
carry any significant downside business risk. Putting these two bits of
information/ supposition together, clients are effectively running a
binary position where they can take the downside risk to a certain point
and then must get out no matter what which potentially means a gap down
or accelerated fall in the market, which would coincide with what the
charts are saying sub 1200. With the buyer of last resort, the Fed, no
longer there, the fall could become very nasty very quickly."   

Early this morning, Muddy Waters sent out the following email:

The Globe & Mail, one of Canada's largest newspapers, has published a lengthy investigative piece on Sino-Forest's holdings in Yunnan. The article corroborates Muddy Waters' research showing that TRE has massively overstated its Yunnan timber holdings.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-investor/key-partner-casts-doubt-on-sino-forest-claim/article2066110/

Muddy Waters is still short Sino-Forest.

Bottom line: a small 2-person operation outsmarted a $35 billion hedge fund courtesy of the first thing in a true investor's arsenal: real due diligence. The second and third things for those asking are, getting big enough where an economy of scale is all tha matters to any "investing" decision, and hubris. Next up: See No Forest halted indefinitely like most other Chinese fraudcaps, while John Paulson continues the denial farce, saying he is still "supportive." Unfortunately, we doubt his LPs will be, and with no "selectively created" CDOs available to offset the massive loss, and with Bank of America about to drop back to Paulson's cost basis in the mid $9s (which it will very soon once the liquidations prompt the firm to unwind the most liquid assets first), we wouldn't be surprised to see the unwind of the biggest hedge fund "success" story in recent history begin in earnest.

A New Hampshire man burned himself to death in front of a courthouse. The specific reasons are individual to him, regarding a domestic violence arrest and prosecution. But the larger reason he killed himself is that he says the system no longer follows the Rule of Law. Once you read past the details, he gives a fascinating analysis of the system. He argues for a complete takedown of the Federal Government and starting over from scratch. He may be an example of what is to come - people throwing themselves violently up against the system in order to bring it down. It's fifteen pages. Longer than Joe Stack's. But much shorter than the Obamacare bill.