Archive - Sep 2, 2011 - Story

Because this time is never different...

We end this busy day of economic buffoonery with Goldman's scorecard for August ("the US economy has not fallen off a cliff", which we translate as a B+, and "far better than expected"), which in turn explains why Goldman, and everyone else, now assumes QE3 (yes, Op Twist is QE3; get over it) is not only a given, but why in Goldman's esteemed opinion, the Fed has at least 3 rationales for pushing for more QEasing. Incidentally, these are as follows: "First, unemployment is far above the Fed’s long-term forecast in the low 5% range; the longer high unemployment persists, the greater the risk that an erosion of skills and labor force attachment will result in permanent supply-side damage. Second, economic growth has been woeful this year and there is no convincing sign of the second-half pickup in growth that the majority of Fed officials seem to expect. The payroll report in particular will weigh heavily in the minds of many Federal Open Market Committee members. Third, there is limited prospect for near-term fiscal stimulus from a gridlocked Washington." The only thing Goldman is avoiding, of course, is the wipe out in stocks that will make QE3 a virtual certainty, as we have been predicting ever since March. Goldman is also avoiding to mention that the only outcome of more QE will be another record year of Wall Street bonuses, all at the expense of more joblessness, higher gas prices, a 120% debt/GDP ratio, and overall sovereign insolvency. Oh well - in the meantime we continue, as we have for the past 2.5 years, to buy gold... or spam for the Econ PhDs out there.

While the FHFA has targeted lawsuits at a whole bunch of employees of the 17 banks previously disclosed, nothing gives us as much amusement and frankly pleasure, as the fact that Goldman's definition of smugness - one Dan Sparks of "shitty deal" fame, is among the accused. Perhaps, even in uber crony communist America, what goes around eventually comes around. Now, if only someone can figure out how Warren Buffett's Wells Fargo, with its several hundred billion worth of Wachovia toxic biohazard, is not on the list of defendants...

Two weeks ago we had a "bear market" open thread in which we lamented the arrival of the recession, or the resumption of the depression, depending on one's proclivity for dramatic flair. It took the rest of the world about two weeks to catch up to what our commentators already knew. Today, in turn, we want to celebrate a peaceful, calm, (lack of) labor day holiday following which we are positive the markets will reopen calmly, in an orderly manner, with modest volume, declining 3M USD Libor, a collapse in the Libor OIS and with no invocation of Rule 48 whatsoever, by opening it up to our readers' very cool, calm, collected and politically correct stream of consciousness.

FHFA goes hog wild and potentially full retard in suing everyone, or specifically 17 global banks, up to an including such dead men walking as Barclays, RBS and SocGen. Oddly such crony capitalist favorites as Wells Fargo are suspiciously absent: we wonder what the cost of that particular Eureka moment was to the interested party. Either way, come Monday, this will get interesting when already scarce liquidity goes... poof. Full statement is below, while the link to all the individual law suits is here.

Remember when one month ago the US, to much pomp and circumstance, not to mention one downgrade,  announced a grand bargain raising the debt ceiling from $14.294 trillion to something much higher, with a stop gap intermediate ceiling of $14.694 trillion, or $400 billion more. Well, as of today, or less than a month since the expansion, total US debt is at $14.697 trillion. Yep - the total debt is again over the ceiling, which means the US debt increased by $400 billion in one month. Score one for fiscal prudence. And while the total debt subject to the limit is still slightly less, at $14.652, one week of Treasury auctions and will be time for Moody's to justify again why the US is a quadruple A credit.

And so it begins:

• FHFA Sues Barclays over mortgage securities over losses for $4.9 billion: RTRS
• FHFA Sues Merrill Lynch Bank of Americal over mortgage securities over losses for $30.85 billion: RTRS

Put a fork in Bank of Countrywide Lynch.

Trust Bloomberg's Jonathan Weil to put two and two together, and to remember that everything new is just well forgotten old. In this case Bank of America. And we are not talking comparisons to Lehman (or even SocGen) - those are boring. No, it is much more fun to compare the insolvent bank to another world con, in this case WorldCom. As Weil reminds us, the news that Moynihan's last stand was considering a tracking stock reported earlier by the WSJ, as a means to demonstrate to the Fed its "viability", is nothing short of the comparison of WorldCom's last ditch in kind method, which none other than a WorldCom director likened to, well, horseshit.

 Market update as the BAC/NFP/WTF/QE initiated sell-off accelerates

In America, in the midst of economic crisis and government driven moral hazard, millions of people are scrambling for “solutions”. The term is used rather haphazardly and often without proper context. There are, indeed, very evil men out there in the dark precipices of global infrastructure, and, these men often instigate very bad events. However, “doing away with them” is NOT a solution. It is NOT a plan. It is merely a goal. A solution requires more than an end result; it also involves the steps necessary to achieve said result. The Liberty Movement, as it is commonly called, tends to run into so much frustration and angst, I believe, because it consistently attempts to skip to the end of the story without traveling the rest of the very necessary journey. End the Fed! Sue the Fed! March on Washington! Vote the bums out! Take up arms! These are not actions, but reactions triggered by the confusion of the moment. Not only are they single minded responses that lack the strategy and logistics inherent in a successful counter-offensive, but such cries ignore the other devious culprit responsible for our national heartache; ourselves. Yes, the world must change, and soon, if our principles are to survive. But, for this to happen, we must change first. Instead of looking up, down, and all around us for some magical all encompassing answer, we have to question our very assumptions and world views. 

The NFP print of 0 today is clearly big news, but Greek 1 year bonds trading at 63 imply an almost 0% chance that they don't default.  2 year bonds are trading at 53.  Certainly at those prices, default and recovery are the drivers.  If you give any benefit for shorter maturities (which often do get slightly higher recoveries in sovereigns as opposed to corporates) it is hard to see that default isn't being priced in with almost 100% certainty

A few days ago the WSJ made waves by disclosing that Goldman was in the process of recreating another "Abacus", by pitching to clients a global "pain trade" presentation created by Goldman's Alan Brazil, which, among others, speculated that funding needs for European banks would be far, far greater than the IMF-proposed $200 billion, and would in fact be closer to $1 trillion. This emphasis is actually odd, because Goldman focuses as much if not more attention on the end of the Chinese bubble as it does on the end of the European ponzi. It of course also did the usual Goldman thing, which is to allow select clients to piggyback with its prop, pardon flow, desk, in recreating the same fiasco for which it already had to pay a half a billion settlement to the SEC last year. Yet to date, nobody had actually seen a public version of this report....That is, nobody, until now - presenting Goldman's top secret "State of the Markets - Long and Short Risk Strategies"

Take a good look at the chart below of the best bids and offers of the stock TDI. The red circles are new best ask prices and each new circle (ask) cancels and replaces the previous one. The green circles are best bid prices -- which never change on this chart. All quotes (both bid and ask) are from one exchange. We selected this example for its simplicity. Many stocks are much more complex to analyze, as there are multiple exchanges involved and all four quote components change: bid price, bid size, ask price, and ask size.Using the chart below, see if you can answer these questions: 1. What is the Bid/Ask spread of this stock at 9:43:13? 2. What is the average Bid/Ask spread for the time period shown? The answer to both questions of course, is that the Bid/Ask spread depends greatly on where you live.

It always seems that just when there is a lull in news of geopolitcal tension, we get an update that the Iranian situation gets that more unstable. After a nearly year long hiatus brought courtesy of allegedly Israeli supervirus Stuxnet taking out Iran's entire nuclear infrastructure offline for many months, the topic of Iran's nuclear capability is once again back, and starting to stink up the join. The NYT has just reported that in an attempt to preempt a possible air strike by the US or Israel, "Iran is moving its most critical nuclear fuel production to a heavily defended underground military facility outside the holy city of Qum, where it is less vulnerable to attack from the air and, the Iranians hope, the kind of cyberattack that crippled its nuclear program, according to intelligence officials." Not surprisingly, Iran has ceased any ties with the US in terms of nuclear fuel delivery: "We will no longer negotiate a fuel swap and a halt to our production of fuel,” head of Iran’s atomic energy agency, Fereydoon Abbasi said “The United States is not a safe country with which we can negotiate a fuel swap or any other issue." Well, it took the US minutes to respond: "Tommy Vietor, a spokesman for the National Security Council, said that the Iranian plan “to install and operate centrifuges at Qum,” in a facility whose existence President Obama and Europeans leaders made public two years ago, “is a violation of their United Nations security obligations and another provocative act." Next up: an update of US Naval assets in the just passed week. Time to start focusing on those Straits of Hormuz again.

In an excellent treatise on sovereign subtleties, Morgan Stanley's Arnaud Mares (the same analyst who nailed the Greek situation long before most others) once again lays out the increasingly bifurcated path that a broken European 'union' may and must take. Most interesting, and highly prescient in our view, is his consideration that the 'private sector involvement' in the restructuring of Greek debt was not only a major policy error but opens the door for the peasantry to finally comprehend that when sovereign debt is not 'risk-free' then fiscal (and monetary) policy can become pro-cyclical. With the entire Keynesian dogma resting on this very tenet, we think it well worth a read and as he writes: "Pandora’s Box has been opened. Only fiscal integration accompanied by centralized financing of governments can bring about full stabilization of the market in Europe, in our view. The alternative could eventually be a resumption of the run on governments and a wave of public and private defaults." Bottom line, in attempting to do things half-assed, Europe may have just destroyed the entire credibility of the one primary economic theory driving global "growth" (or stated better, borrowing from the future) since the beginning of the 20th century.