Archive - Jun 6, 2011 - Story

Last week, more than 70 days after President Obama sent our military to attack Libya without a congressional declaration of war, the House of Representatives finally voted on two resolutions attempting to rein in the president. This debate was long overdue, as polls show Americans increasingly are frustrated by congressional inaction. According to a CNN poll last week, 55 percent of the American people believe that Congress, not the president, should have the final authority to decide whether the U.S. should continue its military mission in Libya. Yet for more than 70 days Congress has ignored its constitutional obligations and allowed the president to usurp its authority....I believe these resolutions and amendments indicate that the tide is turning in the right direction. I am confident we will see Congress move toward ending our unconstitutional wars. The American people are demanding no less. The president's attack on Libya was unconstitutional and thus unlawful. This policy must be reversed.

John Taylor is again making the media rounds, following last week's CNBC appearance in which his punchline is that next year was going to be "truly miserable", today he was on Bloomberg continuing his thesis of how doom and gloom will be with the US for a long, long time, and that courtesy of no QE3, risk is about to go bidless (he differs with the Zero Hedge outlook only on whether there will be QE 3 or not). His response to what an environment of no fiscal or monetary stimulus (in case it was not clear): it is bullish for the JPY, bullish for the USD, bearish for commodities and bearish for stocks. More importantly, in terms of timing, Taylor says that after being short the dollar, he went long a "week and a half ago" and expects a big upside USD catalyst in the next "3 or 4 days." which he follows up with the cryptic: "Our analysis of the markets has shown that they are very, very dangerous." Another trade that JT has on is a long JPY, short EUR - the reason for the EUR bearishness is that Taylor is very "confused" by the second European bailout. As for his long USd conviction, it is based on his belief that the market appears to believe that QE 3 is coming, and that once it is made clear that there will be no further monetary easing (good luck with that), the dollar will surge, following a slowdown in the economy, and a shortage of dollars.

The good news: this week's insider sales to buys were half of last week's 147x. The bad news: this week's insider selling to buying came at 69.3x. As a reminder, a baseline bearish indication occurs whenever the insider selling surpasses 30x. That it has surpassed that threshold for virtually every week in the past two years seems to continue to be lost on investors. There were 8 insider purchases of S&P 500 stocks for $3.4 million, the bulk of which was in Marshall & Ilsley stock for $1.7 million, while the sales were focused on Heinz, Iron Mountain, Agilent, Broadcom and NetApp, where insiders dumped a total of $86 million.

A snapshot of the US Afternoon Briefing covering Stocks, Bonds, FX, etc.

Market Recaps to help improve your Trading and Global knowledge
Weakness in CAD evident after mixed Canadian economic data

There is so much ideological, quasi-religious fanaticism around "free trade" (there is no such thing as "free trade," there are only various permutations of managed trade) and "industrial policy" (every nation has one, explicit or implicit) that it is difficult to make any sense of the many intertwined issues. Ideological purity is not a substitute for knowledge, any more than a superficial admiration of machines equals actually knowing how to assemble, maintain and repair them. As a background context, we might start by noting that Marx outlined how finance capital comes to dominate industrial capital, as industry comes to depend on the credit extended by the banks/finance capital. The key takeaway: if you don't control the banks, then they will end up dominating industrial capital. In the U.S., we have the worst of both worlds: a dominant financial Elite and various cartels (military-industrial, sickcare, agribusiness, etc.) that have captured what little of the Central State that isn't already beholden to financial capital.

This is not good. From the RT clip: "A nuclear rabbit has sparked online panic in Japan. Amateur footage shows an earless mutant rabbit, and the person who made the video claims it was shot just outside the exclusion zone near Japan's crippled Fukushima plant. The clip has given rise to fears the radiation threat in the area is far worse than previously thought. The funny bunny has caused an online frenzy, with predictions that babies in Japan may soon be born with mutations."

Last month, the 3 Year bond auction conducted on May 10 was memorable for 3 reasons: it was the auction that breached the US debt ceiling, it priced at 1.000%, and came at the third highest Bid To Cover in history, despite a decline in Indirect participation. Basically the auction was a massive success primarily due to the Primary Dealer participation, which took down 51.9% of the entire issue, or $16.6 billion of $32 billion. We predicted, accurately, that "Naturally, none of this due to actual demand, but merely due to Primary
Dealer expectations of a prompt and profitable flip back to Brian Sack... Look for Cusip QM5 to be briskly monetized as soon as the next 3 Year
POMO is announced, when the next POMO schedule is revealed tomorrow at 2
pm." Well the schedule came and went, and following today's just completed $6.4 billion POMO, we see just why all recent bond auctions continue to price at such phenomenal internals: at today's POMO the On The Run QM5 accounted for 3.189 billion of the entire $6.397 billion, or exactly 50%. This follows the May 24 POMO at which QM5 represented $5.14 billion of the total $6.4 billion. In other words, less than a month later, PDs have flipped out of $8.3 billion, or exactly 50% of the entire Dealer allocation at the auction. Basically, had the Dealers not had the backstopped certainty that the Fed would gladly gobble up whatever 3 Years they had for sale, and if heaven forbid, they would be forced to keep $8.3 billion in capital yielding just 1.000% on their books, the auction internals would have been vastly different. But such is life when monetization continues... for another 3 weeks until the POMO barrage ends on June 30. For all those praising the strength of each and every auction, perhaps it would be prudent to wait until July 1 and see just how much interest Dealers have when they don't have the Fed in their back pocket buying up half of the entire auction takedown...

More color from Muddy Waters' Carson Block on why he believes the now infamous Sino-Forest is a ponzi scheme: "It's a Ponzi scheme in that the company perpetually issues securities in order to fund itself. Even by its own fraudulent numbers, the company does not generate any free cash and has not done so in sixteen years. Were the company be unable to issue additional securities to fund itself, it would collapse. That to me is the definition or epitomizes the definition of a Ponzi. "In this situation, the company appears to be investing for the 23rd century. It's sixteen straight years burning cash, no guidance as to what the rationale is to acquire so many trees so far ahead of customer orders. This is taking a capex fraud--we have found several of these in China--it's taking it to the next level where you're not constrained by the walls of a factory and no one is able to really see the movement of physical goods. It could grow to be infinite provided that the capital markets continue to fund it."

As we speculated yesterday...

• If in Fitch's opinion, an announced exchange offer constitutes a DDE,
  the sovereign issuer rating will be lowered to 'C', indicating that
  default is highly likely in the near term
• Fitch will place the issuer rating of the sovereign into default, specifically 'Restricted Default' (RD) upon closing of a distrssed debt exchange.
• Fitch says a potential Greek debt exchange if voluntary, could still be considered a default event
• Fitch says Greek debt exchange would be a default if bondholders terms were worse than original terms
• Fitch says stressed sovereign debt exchange with worse terms is a technical default even if deemed voluntary

The gist is clear: the great unknown of how the rating agencies will treat even a "voluntary" restructuring is still in the closet.

As Goldman stock probes new lows every day, and in passing news has just announced it would sell its largely irrelevant Litton Loan mortgage servicing unit to Ocwen financial (which was named so after the founders could not come up with a name so they inverted Newco, but that is a story for another day) for $264 million but retain any potential fraud liability, the firm is now expected to release its own trove of documents expected to "defend" the firm from the various allegations presented in the Carl Levin 639 page report. The report  has already served as the basis for a subpoena lobbed at Goldman, and which some predict will have a much lower threshold of proving guilt courtesy of New York's "Martin Act" has pushed the stock to a one year low. It was only inevitable that Goldman would come up with some jiggering of its numbers to prove that it was in fact innocent. We wonder if the report will also provide an explanation for the following words by one Deeb Salem, a Goldman trader in the structure products group: "We began to encourage this squeeze, with plans of getting very short again." Swenson, Salem’s supervisor, sent e-mails in May 2007 urging traders to offer prices that will “cause maximum pain” and “have people totally demoralized.” In interviews with the committee, Salem and Swenson denied attempting a short squeeze, the report said." Regardless, we can't wait to see the latest attempt to obfuscate the public opinion with the mixing of apples and oranges. Alas, Goldman may be surprised to find that the general population is not quite as dumb as it expects this time around, and there will be those who will gladly cut through the fluff of any posted rebuke within minutes.

Lately there has been some confusion as to who of the Fed's 12 presidents is a hawk and a dove. Luckily, SocGen provides a handy tearsheet to keep track of who, as per recent public appearances, is hawkish, who is bearish, and who is largely irrelevant (everyone) considering that nobody has dissented at an FOMC meeting since Hoenig left the voting spot. Ultimately, the deciding vote is always and only in the Chairsatan's hands.

While Greece may or may not receive Bailout #2 "any minute now", Greek depositors refuse to wait for the resolution. In April, bank deposits declined for the 4th consecutive month according to the central bank, a 1.2% decline M/M. From Reuters: "Bank of Greece data showed deposits fell to 196.8 billion euros ($288.2 billion) from 199.2 billion in March. A shrinking deposit base has added to the strains of Greek banks, which have become reliant on ECB funding for their liquidity needs as access to wholesale funding remains mostly shut on sovereign debt concerns. Deposits have shrunk by about 13 billion euros since the beginning of the year. In 2010, they contracted by 29.1 billion euros or 12.2 percent." In addition to the Reuters breakdown, a look at the source data indicates that overall deposits held by "Domestic Residents" dropped by €5.4 billion: the culprit was the Central Government which withdrew €3.1 billion in April, bringing the total from €14.3 billion to €11.3 billion. As usual, the best real-time proxy, if not completely accurate, to gauge the flow of capital in/out of Greek banks is to keep an eye out on the EURCHF. Today, it is a little higher. Over the past year, it is, well, not...

The below chart from SocGen demonstrates why the stock market, unlike bonds, is currently massively overpriced. The current economic surprise factor swing, from an all time record at +100 recently, down to about -100 (the third lowest in the past 5 years, and likely longer), a 200 point swing which only compares to the 2008-2009 Lehman collapse, was accompanied by just a 15% drop in stocks over the past 8 months, indicates two things: either the current "soft patch" is indeed "transitory" as the Fed would like us to believe, or that the market is pricing in QE 3. And while SocGen, which is the source of this chart, believes that the collapse is indeed "transitory" we completely fail to see what the factor will be that will push the global economy higher in Q3 and onward: Japan? Europe? Fiscal generosity in the US? China? No, no, no and no. Sorry, there is no catalyst that will provide an impetus for a hockey stick effect this time around. Except, of course, for more monetary easing, perhaps in Japan, but mostly in the US. Yet for that to happen, as we have been claiming for nearly half a year, stocks will need to plunge to their pre-QE2 levels, or about 900. Alas, the mutual funds which currently hold the lowest amount of cash in history, and are levered more than ever, are simply unable to sell without blowing themselves up. We are confident, more than ever, that an unstoppable desire for extend and pretend is about to hit an immovable force...

A harbinger of what the front office doors of various investors in Sino-Forest will soon look like...

In a move that is sure to send the infamous Fed "economist" (Ph.D., never forget) Kartik Athreya over the edge, Obama's nominee for the Fed Board, after unsuccessfully trying to enter the one circle that is just less exclusive than the Goldman partnership ranks for over a year, has decided to pen an Op-Ed in the NYT titled "When a Nobel Prize Isn't Enough", and disgusted with the fact that his utterly worthless Nobel prize in something or another can't even buy him one seat with those who decide the price of money, has pulled his nomination in utter disgust. "Last October, I won the Nobel Prize in economics for my work on unemployment and the labor market. But I am unqualified to serve on the board of the Federal Reserve — at least according to the Republican senators who have blocked my nomination. How can this be? " How indeed: could it be that, gasp, Nobel awards are merely a honorary award in groupthink, presented to anyone who perpetuates the status quo with little regard for actual merit-based contribution (one needs only recall Obama's Peace prize just as the President is contemplating opening up a 4th, or is that 5th, war front?). Most importantly: nobody tell Krugman his one validation of his life's work, has just been downgraded to junk.