Archive - Jun 2011 - Story

But before people scream bloody murder that the USPS finally went bankrupt (3 months ahead of schedule), the blame for this one actually lies with socialist Canada, where the Canadian Union of Postal Workers is continuing its strike, making deliveries of all sorts of unmarked boxes to incognito recipients quite problematic. As a result, "the U.S. Postal Service will suspend accepting mail destined to Canada -- effective Saturday, June 18, 2011, 11:59 p.m. CDT -- with the exception of Global Express Guaranteed shipments." Hopefully Americans trying to reach friends and neighbors in the far more solvent northern neighbor will be able to make do with email attachments for the indefinite future. "As a convenience to our customers and to minimize service disruptions, we arranged to accept mail destined for Canada as long as possible," said Giselle Valera, vice president, Global Business. "We will continue to closely monitor the strike situation, and once Canada Post resumes operations, the U.S. Postal Service will again begin accepting mail for Canada. We also will then resume processing any Canadian-destined mail currently held in our network." Next up: outbound mail to Europe halted indefinitely (except for shipments of secret Fed-originating cash of course), where we are stunned that the local socialist union of postmen still believe in showing up to work daily.

RANsquawk Market Wrap Up - Stocks, Bonds, FX etc. – 17/06/11

Greek cabinet reshuffle for Dummies/Idiots/Keynesians.

"Moody's Investors Service has today placed Italy's Aa2 local and foreign currency government bond ratings on review for possible downgrade, while affirming its short-term ratings at Prime-1. The main drivers that prompted the rating review are: (1) Economic growth challenges due to macroeconomic structural weaknesses and a likely rise in interest rates over time; (2) Implementation risks surrounding the fiscal consolidation plans that are required to reduce Italy's stock of debt and keep it at affordable levels; and (3) Risks posed by changing funding conditions for European sovereigns with high levels of debt." EURUSD slides on the news, which also pushes stocks far lower, courtesy of 100% correlation.

Spokes, meet stick. According to Reuters, Greece will seek approval from euro zone finance ministers on Sunday to agree to some changes in a mid-term austerity plan that parliament is expected to pass, the country's new finance minister said on Friday. And so the scramble for concessions begins. First Greece will demand a scrapping of all retirement age hike requirements, then public sector cuts, then everything else in the mid-term plan, until the second bailout is effectively without conditions. And now that Merkel has effectively thrown in the towel to her, and the CDU's, political reign by agreeing with the ECB's and France's demands, a move which will be brutalized by Der Spiegel in T minus 5 minutes, the fact that Europe blinked to Greece's bluff, just may mean that every demand out of Greece will be met. Or not. If the Troica tells Greece to go to hell, this could be the end of the bailout package.

Back in October we asked readers if they have "Ever heard of the oxides of Lanthanum, Cerium, Neodymium, Praseodymium and/or Samarium?" We added that "With price surges between 250% and 600% in one quarter, you may wish you have." As we further predicted, courtesy of Chinese attempts to corner the rare earth space, these oxides were due to explode much further, because as their name implies, these compounds are "rare", and happen to be mostly contained in one country: that's right China. Well, for those who decided to give it the good old speculative college try, you may now retire. As the chart below shows, the YTD moves in the oxides of Dysprosium, Europium, Neodymium, Lanthanum, and all the other ones, have not doubled, not tripled, but in same cases, seen their prices increase tenfold! And people ridicule the silver "bubble"... The extra benefit: the CME's "risk management" group is completely powerless to control the rate of ascent. And judging by the charts below, the rate is certainly worthy of escape velocity. What happens next is that plasma TV purchase one may have putting off for months could end up being costly, after TV producers are forced to double the prices of finished goods, not doing much to help hedonically adjusted core inflation.

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

Market Recaps to help improve your Trading and Global knowledge

It has not been Jim Caron's decade. The Morgan Stanley rates strategist, riding on the coattails of the always wrong Morgan Stanley economics team led by David Greenlaw, has been wrong in his annual rates call year after year after year. Which is unfortunate because while unable to see the forest for the trees, Caron does have a better grasp of rates than most other Wall Street penguins. That said, just like everyone else in the status quo, Caron has just come out with another short duration call (i.e. sell bonds), probably the 6th time in a row he has done that in the past 3 years. Perhaps 7th time will be the charm. Amusingly, Caron, terrified to be seen in the same camp as Bill Gross who is short bonds on fears that there will be nobody available to step in an buy the 80% of gross issuance that has been monetized by the Fed to date, make this very loud caveat on his short bond call: "To be sure, our shift toward short from neutral duration has nothing to do with the end of QE2 and related concerns that there will be a lack of demand to buy US Treasuries once the Fed stops buying them. As we have stated many times in the past, the outlook for the economy will be the main driver of yields, not the end of QE2." No, instead Caron believes that the sell off in bonds will be due to the same bullish economic growth call that he has been predicting over... and over... and over... and over... etc. More interesting is how he suggests the trade is implemented: in MS' view the best way to be bearish on rates is with a DV01 neutral 7s-10s flattener: "we continue to recommend being short 5s on the 2s5s10s fly. In line with the butterfly, and in order to express a more robust short duration position, we recommend a curve flattener on the UST 7s10s curve: · Sell $133.7mm OTR 7y Notes; · Buy $100mm OTR 10y Notes." Perhaps those who want to be short bonds, but for the right reason, that predicted by Zero Hedge and then Bill Gross, this may be one of the better ways to put the trade on.

This stuff is funny. Especially when google translated...

Scrape away the Human Resource Department rah-rah about "our mission" and how much your loyalty is "valued," and what's left? A paycheck and a sucking sound. Let's state the heretical obvious: Corporate America, you suck. We could count the ways--subverting democracy via your lobbying and campaign contributions, your sabotage of competition via regulatory capture, and so on--but what really matters is how you treat your employees. We know: you really really care about your employees. Really. The propaganda would be laughable if it wasn't so bald-faced. Do corporate managers really believe in the Big Lie theory, that the bigger the lie, the easier it is to sell?

The latest quarterly slidedeck from Damien Cleusix' Global Tactical Asset Analysis is out and as always it is replete with insightful and exciting observations, outlooks and charts. His thesis summary: "Markets seems to be in the typically slow and frustrating cyclical top formation process. Our cyclical models are giving sell signals one after the other while leverage is reaching levels typical of cyclical market turns. It would be imprudent to bury the Bull too soon but It seems to be in bad hape. A contra-trend rally is to beexpected so on and the behavior of the markets (participants, internals) during this rebound should be carefully analyzed to decide if we can send the Bulls obituary (a waterfall decline without intermitting rebound would settle the case)."

Here is a simple summary of the Greek bailout math explained with just 2 numbers. First, the country has to do the impossible. As Citi's Jurgen Michels summarizes: "Once the whole new cabinet is announced, parliamentary discussions ahead of the vote of confidence will probably  start on Sunday, with the vote actually taking place next week on Tuesday evening. Even if the new government manages to pass the vote of confidence, it will still have to submit to Parliament the new austerity package for approval, probably sometime later next week or the week thereafter. This will be key for the smooth disbursement of the next tranche of EU/IMF loans, of €12bn." In other words, the Greek government has to pass 2 near-Sysiphean tasks before it can even hope to sniff the IMF's €12 billion in rescue funding. That's number 1. Number 2 comes from the chart below, which shows the debt and interest payments through August. This number is €18.2 billion. This number does not include the billions in deficit spending that will also have to be funded somehow over and above debt paydown. Ergo, the math for a viable Greece is as follows: €12BN > €18.2BN  + X. Simply said, unless somehow Greece discovers how to tax its citizens and actually record net revenue in July, the best the ECB can hope for before it has to mark its tens of billions in Greek bonds to about 45 cents on the dollar, is one month. So will someone please explain to us why again the EUR is up today? Actually the only possible reason is that Europe is now pricing in the fact that China will be the de facto owner of at least 2 European countries by this time next year, however not in an Asset Purchase Transaction but Stock, whereby China also acquires the liabilities. Which in turn may explain why Russia's just announced minutes ago that China may turn into "zone of risk" for the global economy.

Bizarro time is here, now that we have another market surge based on another economic indicator miss, in this case the uber-irrelevant UMichigan confidence, which came at 71.8 on expectations of 74, and a drop from May's 74.3. Granted the only reason stocks are rising is not on any fundamentals, but purely due to the clobbering the USD just took, which sent the EUR surging, and pushed the Dow into triple digit territory. To whoever continues to trade this centrally planned farce, our condolences. The only relevant data in the index was that the 5 year inflation expectations jumped from 2.9% to 3.0%, the second highest in 2011, and only below March's 3.2%. Time for the Fed to panic once again, now that Operation Twist 2 is just matter of months if not weeks.

In what could be the oddest development in the precious metals market in a long time, the World Gold Council has just unveiled an initiative whose sole purpose if to combat "conflict gold." From the just released notice: "The World Gold Council today announces that, working together with its member companies and the leading gold refiners, it has produced a draft framework of standards designed to combat gold that enables, fuels or finances armed conflict. The draft standards represent a significant, industry-led response to this challenge and are designed to enable miners to produce a stream of newly-mined gold which is certified as ‘conflict free’ on a global basis." While we are confused what exactly is being pursued with this action, aside from the creation of a black market for gold of course, it does seem that the logical end result will be a decline in the total supply of "certified" gold. On the other hand, it will also afford the WGC or any prevailing authority the ability to brand any country it so chooses (Indonesia?) a sourcer of "conflict gold" and effectively clamp down on the production of the yellow metal. Additionally, what better way to deprive a gold sourcing country of massive export revenues than to effectively make their product unsellable in the "legitimate" market. Which then would lead to a surge in fair market value due to supply considerations. Which begs the question: is this the preparation for the "golden" endgame?

In the past we have repeatedly observed that in order to get an instantaneous appreciation of which direction all too critical Greek bank deposits held by the public are headed (hint: out), instead of waiting for delayed NBG data, one needs to only look at the EURCHF. As the chart below shows, the correlation between the two is essentially one. Which means that should this pair continue dropping to parity, in addition to making life for Swiss exporters a living hell and for Hungarian mortgage holders unbearable, that Greek banks will literally become hollow shells whose only lifeblood - depositor cash - is no longer there. And the more severe the lack of confidence in the outcome, the greater the outflow, the higher the likelihood of a disastrous bank run that wipes out the Greek banking system. Welcome to Catch 22 for the centrally planned, monetary union generation.