Archive - Jun 2011 - Story

After 12 consecutive days of protests, the biggest gathering in Athens' parliamentary Syntagma square is currently underway. The FT reports: "Thousands of Greeks protested outside parliament on Sunday against a fresh austerity package agreed in return for the country’s second bail-out in 13 months by the European Union and International Monetary Fund. “Thieves, thieves….Where did our money go?” the protestors shouted, blowing whistles and waving Greek flags as riot police thickened ranks around the parliament building on Syntagma square in the centre of the capital...Frustration over the socialist government’s half-hearted reform effort has united diverse activists –from unemployed graduates to environmentalists and pensioners – under the umbrella of the new movement. George Papaconstantinou, finance minister, is due to unveil on Monday a €6.4bn emergency package of tax increases and cuts in allowances aimed at putting this year’s budget back on track....“What went wrong? We need answers right now,” said Rovertos, a volunteer computer technician helping provide wi-fi services at the protest camp. “The government promised there wouldn’t be any more tough measures but they’re about to announce new taxes and thousands of job cuts,” said Stefanos, a retired civil servant sitting outside a tent." What went wrong is that Greece is in the process of being colonized by the global banker certal. But with summer season in swing, and most Greeks hitting the beach, we doubt many will notice until it is too late. As for those who may have noticed, below is a webstream of the biggest protest before the Greek parliament in 2011. It is sure to provide some entertainment for when the EUR opens up in 3 hours, if not much else.

There is a plethora of original insight in Don Coxe (BMO Capital Makets) among them observations on sovereign risk moving from east to west, state finances (or lack thereof), the ongoing correction in financial stocks which portends nothing good for the equity investors, the ongoing violence in MENA, why this inflationary spike in food may last far longer than previous ones, and naturally, some very spot on thoughts on gold, which conclude with: "The only gold bubble likely to burst is the bubbling ridicule of gold."

Even as the insolvent EU scolded Russia for daring to ban imports of raw vegetables from EU countries 3 days ago releasing the following statement, "The European Commission protested to the Russian Federation this
afternoon against the Russian ban imposed earlier today on all EU
vegetable exports to Russia, and requested the immediate withdrawal of
the measure" there is no chance that Russia will comply (adding insult to insolvency), following the latest report from Reuters that "German hospitals are struggling to cope with the flood of E.coli victims, Health Minister Daniel Bahr said on Sunday, as the death toll rose to 21 with more than 2,000 people infected across Europe....Hospitals in the northern port of Hamburg,
epicenter of the outbreak that began three weeks ago, have been moving
out patients with less serious illnesses to handle the surge of people
stricken by a rare, highly toxic strain of the bacteria." Needless to say, this is good news for the Keynesians out there: in addition to earthquakes, volcanoes, rain, snow, floods, droughts, tsunamis and nuclear power plant explosions, worthless economists will now have viruses to blame for "one-time, non-recurring" misses to their latest set of expectations.

Today, in a much anticipated outcome, Portugal will vote to replace the caretaker Prime Minister Jose Socrates with opposition center-right Social Democrat Pedro Passos Coelho. Alas this is largely a symbolic vote as the new guy is just a continuation of the policies of the old guy: "Passos Coelho, who cast his vote at a polling station in Amadora on the outskirts of Lisbon, where reporters by far outnumbered voters, said Portugal had to stick to the bailout terms to regain market confidence and return to growth." Even the young people understand this: "Ricardo, a voter in his late 20s, expressed a common view that any new government just has to march to the beat of the lenders' drum. "I think the election won't bring anything new because it's the IMF in charge of the country now ... Any party that gets to the government will just have to follow IMF rules, " he said." Spot on. And we wonder how long before Mohamed El-Erian, or some other actual thinker, has an op-ed discussing the pitfalls of what we have now trademarked as "The Congress of Berlin 2.0: the scramble for Europe."

More bad news for China's stagflating economy: according to an industry group, China automobile sales dropped for the second month in a row in May, pointing to slowing demand after Beijing stopped offering incentives and introduced new limits on car purchases earlier this year. "Vehicle sales in China shed 13.95 percent on-month to 1.19 million last month, the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers (CAAM) said. It was a 29.74 percent increase compared to the same month last year. Auto output fell 14.36 percent from a month earlier to about 1.31 million units in May. The industry group attributed the continued decline in May sales to the end of the tax breaks and incentive policies in the country. The Chinese government ended tax breaks for purchases of small cars at the end of 2010 and reimposed a 10 percent tax at the beginning of this year. The tax breaks, introduced in 2009 to buoy domestic demand amid the economic slowdown, had boosted China's auto market and helped it overtake the United States as the world's largest in 2009 and 2010." This is yet another piece of bad news for GM, for whom China has recently become the dominant market (even as it stuff US dealers with record amount of inventory), and since the company has been unable to take advantage of the supply disruptions that have crippled Japanese car makers, expect to see GM stock take its current post-IPO low stock price even lower. "Wang Qingtao, analyst at China's Sealand Securities Co., expected the downward trend in the Chinese auto industry would likely continue for a while, saying "the market fundamentals are not likely to change drastically." And in the meantime, Goldman now anticipates China's May inflation to hit 5.5% Y/Y, the highest such increase in years, and the Stagflationary economy continues overheating, this time due to surging food prices as a result of the record drought previously discussed.

Even as the hacker collective known as Operation Empire State Rebellion, which back in March threatened to bring "peaceful revolution to America, and will engage in civil disobedience until Bernanke steps down" and has since largely fallen off the scene, presumably surprised by Bernanke complete lack of fazing, another hacker group, LulzSec, best known for recent hacking into PBS, has just taken the first step toward pissing off none other than its archnemesis the FBI, by defacing and taking control of an FBI affiliate website. From IBTimes: "In an apparent protest against the NATO and Obama administration, the LulzSec group announced the breach of FBI  affiliate website, the Atlanta chapter of Infragard. The group raised claims that they have taken “complete control” over the website and has “defaced it”. They also announced that the data including passwords obtained from infragardatlanta.org would prove useful for them to hack into other FBI affiliates, since a lot of users tend to reuse their passwords even though the practice is generally unappreciated by FBI." So while OP_ESR continues to engage in emptry rhetoric and summons the population to one after another attempt at uprising (Apparently June 14th is the latest D-Day), LulzSec, which is also speculated to be behind the historic ongoing hacks of the various Sony networks, is taking cyber-matters into its own hands. We wonder however whether this escalation of cyberwarfare against the US by the US will necessitate a declaration of war by Obama against the US. Admittedly, that would be a Keynesian wet dream: think of the record boost to GDP if Geithner literally nukes the west and eastern seaboards, only to rebuild them again...

But for a bailout of sorts, one of the most villainous performances in cinematic history would never have made it to the silver screen. Producer Robert Evans was set upon getting Laurence Olivier to play the part of Dr. Christian Szell in the movie adaptation of William Goldman’s book, Marathon Man. However, because Olivier at the time was riddled with cancer, he was uninsurable so Paramount refused to use im. In desperation, Evans called his friends Merle Oberon and David Niven to arrange a meeting with the House of Lords (the upper body of the UK’s parliament). There, he urged them to put pressure on Lloyds of London to insure Britain’s greatest living actor. The ploy succeeded and a frail Olivier started working on the film. In the end, not only did he net an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor, but his cancer also went into remission. Olivier lived on for another 13 years. The iconic scene in Marathon Man that, to this day has me squirming in my chair whenever I see it, involves Dr. Szell using particularly nasty dentistry techniques to torture poor Dustin Hoffman’s character, ‘Babe’, in order to establish whether the security of the stash of diamonds Szell has hidden has been compromised. Babe, however, genuinely has no idea what Szell is talking about. As Babe’s fear mounts, he tries giving Szell any and every answer to avoid the pain he is clearly about to face. He tells him ‘it’ is safe. He tells him ‘it’ is in grave danger - anything he thinks Szell wants to hear - but, unfortunately, Babe’s pain is inevitable and it is dispensed without compassion or humanity. Such is the way of the world.

Yesterday Zero Hedge pointed out that in addition to the 54,000 NFP number missing every single economist estimate, another very troubling statistic was that the BLS added some 206,000 "jobs" courtesy of its monthly birth/death adjustment: numbers which tend to be added on a monthly basis and then subtracted (especially during periods of economic contraction) in one annual benchmark revision which is largely ignored by everyone. In fact, as Peter Tchir pointed out, over the past 4 months, the NFP has added 752k jobs, of which 610k have been birth death jobs. B/D has added 271K jobs YTD in 2011, 510K in 2010, 585K in 2009, 825K in 2008, 883K in 2007, 1002K in 2006, etc, in in the last decade has never once subtracted from the full year tally, which would subsequently be revised lower. You get the picture. Well, yesterday, Bloomberg's Tom Keene sat down with Bank of America chief economist Ethan Harris, who just like every other Wall Street economist has been clueless on the direction of the economy in 2011, and asked him to explain just what the B/D model is, why it exists, and whether it represent data manipulation. The relevant segment begins just over 5 minutes into the clip below.

As Donne reminds us, No man is an island, at least if he attains to the order, the harmony – that “pleasing combination of the elements” – for which he naturally yearns. Alone against the elements, man is as nothing, scratching out an existence unfit for his kind and indeed destructive of it, selfless because, in having no others with whom to associate, no true self exists. But in that convivium – that “living together” – a self emerges, or at least the reflection of a self, into which he gazes and through which he begins not only to act but to act human, the goal of which is always the satisfaction of the acting man’s desires. And that, as we have said, is the source and sustenance of the social enterprise...

Courtesy of the Stanford Center for the Study of Poverty and Inequality, we bring you the "20 facts about US Inequality that Everyone Should Know". For everything one has always wanted to know about wage inequality, CEO pay, homelessness, education wage premium, gender pay gaps, occupational sex segregation, racial gaps in education, racial discrimination, child poverty, residential segregation, health insurance, inter and intragenerational income mobility, bad jobs, discouraged workers, wealth inequality, labor market deregulation, job losses, immigrants and inequality and productivity and real income, this is the definitive resource.

In the aftermath of last week's disclosure to preempt the massive hoax story sourced by one "Sorcha Faal" involving a whole lot of false allegations pertaining to DSK, Russia and gold, all of it based not one single, sourcable fact, we have now been inundated with emails directing us to a story which has appeared in CNS News (and the fact that it was carried by Drudge Report does make it any easier), titled "China Has Divested 97 Percent of Its Holdings in U.S. Treasury Bills." Once again, while most readers will see right through this superficial attempt at clickbaiting, for the benefit of everyone else, we would like to briefly respond to how this article would look like when one actually looks at the facts.

It's the weekend, which means another Spiegel hit piece over the solvency and stability of the Eurozone is overdue. Sure enough, the publication comes through admirably with "New Greek aid to cost more than one hundred billion euros." As a reminder, until as recently as 24 hours ago it was expected that the bailout would be at most €80 billion, with half coming from Greek privatization efforts. Naturally, this means that even more money will be transferred from taxpayer pockets to bank capital deficiency accounts. Next up: Greek bailouts 3, 4, 5, by which point Goldman will have hopefully achieved its life long ambition of opening a Goldman Sachs-branded ATM at the main entrance to the Acropolis, which GS will have LBOed using discount window capital.

Who said that only Germany is allowed to annex Greece (and soon Ireland and Portugal)? (and if Der Spiegel has anything to say about it, again, Bailout #2 is far from certain... more on that shortly). In a surprising move, Russia has decided to remind everyone just how irrelevant the IMF is now that Russia and China run the "sovereign rescue" show, and that it too can play the imperialist game just as well as the Troica. Following the recent hyperdevaluation of the Belarus Ruble as discussed on Zero Hedge, and the country's collapse into a hyperinflationary hell, Reuters has just reported that Putin, that "White Knight" of former USSR imperialist dominance, has decided to "bailout" Belarus. From Reuters: "Cash-strapped Belarus will receive a three-year $3 billion loan from a Russia-led regional bailout fund as it seeks to stabilize its economy, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Saturday. The former Soviet republic on Friday unveiled a series of measures to end the crisis, including a vow to cut its budget deficit in half, after its currency lost 36 percent of its value in May and inflation reached 20.2 percent." It is unclear just how many billions in funds will need to be derived from forced "privatization" of Belarus assets for the benefit of the old KGB guard, or what the interest rate on the rescue loans will be. What is more than clear is that as more and more countries fall into the toxic debt spiral, their neighbors who actually have capital and/or natural resources (ergo the irrelevance of the IMF), will "bail them out" only to remind the world that colonization is what it has always been truly about. Berlin Conference ver 2.0 -  here we come.

Is it ethical for the American homeowner whose mortgage has been securitized to default, even If they are not financially distressed? First, consider it is unlikely that marketable, fee simple, insurable title can be obtained as a result of fulfilling the obligations of the related promissory note. On the contrary the titles to some 60 million homes in America are badly clouded. Secondly, encouraging investment in an asset class that has been artificially inflated, then deliberately destroying the price of the asset, as part of a separate profit making scheme is unethical, and any agreement based on this type of fraud is grounds to consider the original debt instrument used in the agreement null and void. Fortunately these grounds are unnecessary, as increasingly US courts are ruling that these mortgages are already invalid for numerous other reasons.

It doesn't get any more blatant than this. Once again, courtesy of Nanex we present to our incompetent regulators prima facie evidence of what is outright tape painting via what is an apparent HFT algo trying either to front run an order, to test for the presence of other predatory algos, and in general to take advantage of Reg NMS only protecting displayed liquidity over non-displayed (a topic we discussed two years ago). In the example below, which shows unique trades in the stock of XEL.PR.G, in the span of 30 seconds, 430 shares are bought up on the way up from $90.5 to $102.25, and then sold off once again in another 10 seconds, hitting all bids as soon as they appeared. Now this is not some HFT-darling which trades millions of shares per day (and sees blasts of tens of millions of quote stuffing packets in hours) and thus will likely be ignored by the general population... until it does hit some stock that people do care about. Naturally the implication is that, as Nanex points out, if all stocks traded/quoted at this frequency, even the the SEC could figure this out in a few weeks, after assembling a multi-discipilanary team of course. Is it any wonder that virtually nobody trades on open exchanges anymore (yes, most trading, or what's left of it has shifted to Sigma X and other dark pools) where the only survival tactic for such legacy monsters as the NYSE and Nasdaq is to laterally buy up as many of their peers as they can now that organic growth no longer exists: gotta love a world in which there are 83 different ATS venues, all of which permit some permutation of millions of stock manipulation strategies.