Archive - Oct 2012 - Story

• Hillary Clinton Accepts Blame for Benghazi (WSJ)
• In Reversal, Cash Leaks Out of China (WSJ)
• Spain Considers EU Credit Line (WSJ)
• China criticizes new EU sanctions on Iran, calls for talks (Reuters)
• Portugal sees third year of recession in 2013 budget (Reuters)
• Greek PM says confident Athens will secure aid tranche (Reuters)
• Fears over US mortgages dominance (FT)
• Fed officials offer divergent views on inflation risks (Reuters)
• China Credit Card Romney Assails Gives Way to Japan (Bloomberg)
• Fed's Williams: Fed Actions Will Improve Growth (WSJ)
• Rothschild Quits Bumi to Fight Bakries’ $1.2 Billion Offer (Bloomberg)

If yesterday it was Greece that the market was once again inexplicably enthused about, today it is Spain's turn, which is once again in the open-ended action crosshairs, following an unsourced (are there any other kind these days?) report by the FT, saying the country with the 25% unemployment is prepared for an imminent bailout request (contrary to a previous report by Reuters saying the ETA on this is November). That these are simply more bureaucratic tests to gauge the market's response is by now known to all - the truth is nobody knows what happens even if Spain finally requests a (long overdue and priced in) rescue. Because even with bond yields briefly sliding, they will only ramp right back up, even as the Spanish economic deterioration continues. But that bridge will be crossed only when Rajoy is prepared to hand in his resignation together with a signed MOU to a Troika boarding commission. In other news, Spain sold €3.4 billion in 1 year Bills at a yield of 2.823% compared to 2.835% last, and €1.46 billion in 18 month Bills at a yield of 3.022% versus 3.072% last. Since both of these are within the LTRO's maturity (whose 1 year anniversary, and potential partial repayments, is coming fast in January) the bond was a token exercise in optics. Elsewhere, German ZEW Economic Sentiment rose more than expected from -18.2 to -11.5 on expectations of a -14.9 print, despite the ZEW's Dick summarizing the current Eurozone situation simply as "bad", and adding that "downward risks are more pronounced than upward." Confirming his fears was a government official sited by Bild who said that 2013 growth has been reduced from 1.6% to 1.0%. In all this newsflow, the EURUSD has quietly managed to do its usual early am levitation, and was at overnight highs of 1.3015 at last check.

Just when the channel-stuffed world was hoping for some good news, European car registrations pop up to smack the dream back to reality. A 10.8% YoY decline, the biggest drop in two years, makes it 11 months-in-a-row of dropping YoY comps. Before the crisis began, car registrations had risen on average 1.7% YoY each month; in the 4.5 years since they have dropped on average 4.7% YoY each month. The Eurozone year-to-date is -10.5% with Cyprus (-19.4%), Greece (-42.5%), Italy (-20.5%), Portugal (-39.7%), and Spain -11.0%. However, Spain's very recent past has been extreme to say the least with a 36.8% YoY drop from last September. Interestingly, Land Rovers are up 42.3% YTD while Alfa Romeos are down 31.6% YTD (and Mercedes and BMW down around 1% YTD). But apart from that, Europe is doing great - just look at earnings expectations for Q4.

As the Chinese transition from healthy working individuals to couch-potato-like consuming-monkeys, we wonder just what the China of tomorrow will look like. To wit, Shanghai Daily reports that the world's largest online game-maker Blizzard Entertainment (World of WarCraft and StarCraft II) just announced that the number of Chinese online game players has surged to a new high after the upgrading of China's broadband services. There are 120 million online game players in the country, up 4.6% from last year, of the 538 million internet users in mainland China. What will the marginal wage for an iPhone-maker be now that leisure time is becoming more valuable? And what will the average weight and BMI of the young Chinese male be in five years time? We suspect higher than the current 145lbs...

CEOs suggest a major reason they are not spending is 'policy uncertainty', politicians blame the other side for stifling growth because of 'policy uncertainty', and brokers, bankers, & economists whine that the only reason the Dow is not at Bernanke's goal-seek'd 36,000 is the 'policy uncertainty'. If only the 'fiscal cliff' issue would go away - we'd all have a pony and life could go on. Sorry to burst that bubble; as we noted here, the market is priced for a total compromise and earnings expectations appear to imply a full fiscal cliff resolution in Q4. The hope remains that 'even if we were to go off the fiscal cliff, the political reaction will be swift and vengeful and we will see a 'V'-shaped recovery - so do not worry'. There are two small (ok, very large) problems with that thesis: 1) the self-reinforcing shadow-banking collateral squeeze that would occur as asset values dump again and liabilities remain; and 2) the record-high polarization among our political class. Something to ponder as earnings outlooks continue to drop...

This summer Roger Bootle won Lord Wolfson's £250,000 prize for the best advice for a country leaving the European Monetary Union (one may assume that this advice is aimed at Greece). Despite his lengthy and repetitive prize submission, Mr. Bootle's recommendations can be summarized in this one sentence: In complete secrecy and with no prior discussion, redenominate all Greek euro-denominated bank accounts into drachma-denominated accounts and devalue the drachma. That's it! There is no need to cut public spending. Quite the contrary, because public spending adds to the Keynesian concept of aggregate demand, and aggregate demand cannot be allowed to fall. Dr. Philipp Bagus offered the truly liberal alternative. He proposed a long period of public discussion about alternatives to leaving the euro, which would allow ample time for Greeks to move their property out of the greedy reach of their own government, should they decide to do so. The currency crisis might be solved in this manner as Greek banks closed and the Greek government shut down its welfare and regulatory system for lack of funds. The Greek government could repeal legal-tender laws, which currently require Greek citizens to transact business in one currency only — always that issued by the state itself. Concomitantly it could reinstate the drachma as a strong currency backed by gold. Then good money would drive out bad, as people freely chose which currency to use.

It has been our contention for a very long time now, that the reason most people in positions of power do absolutely nothing for the good of their respective societies even in the face of total systemic collapse is not simply greed, corruption and stupidity.  They are totally compromised. As we see in this amazing article from the NY Times, former IMF head, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, lived a decadent lifestyle straight out of Stanley Kubrick’s final film Eyes Wide Shut...

There was a time when US schoolchildren, a few short years before they were loaded up with $60,000 a year in unrepayable federal debt (used mostly to purchase various iTrinkets) to pay for community college, were taught that all those people outside the continental US hate its residents "for our freedoms." It must then come as quite a shock for all these kids to learn that what they really meant is that "they hate us for our prisons."

UPDATE: Nigel Farage 'Must-See' rant on the' destruction of nation state democracy'

The need to convince any and all that will listen (and one's own self) that the Euro project must be preserved at all costs has never been so obviously politicized as the Nobel crony committee 'blessing' the European Union for bringing peace to a continent at war. While a laudable thing of itself, as JPMorgan's Michael Cembalest notes, by 1954, Germany had already become a stable, liberal, democratic society in one of the most amazing transformations in history given what preceded it ten years earlier. Whether the Marshall Plan helped this, it seems indisputable that conditions for a lasting peace in Europe were already in place by 1954. The notion that the Euro is needed to cement these gains appears to be more about the ambition of specific political movements in Europe/Brussels than anything else. The irony of the Nobel Peace Prize for Europe is that as shown below, it comes at a time of rising social stress, extremist politics, and a deterioration of trust in the very union that is supposed to be providing the social cement.

Lately there has been an amusing and very spurious, not to mention wrong, argument among both the "serious media" and the various tabloids, that US households have delevered to the tune of $1 trillion, primarily as a result of mortgage debt reductions (not to be confused with total consumer debt which month after month hits new record highs, primarily due to soaring student and GM auto loans). The implication here is that unlike in year past, US households are finally doing the responsible thing and are actively deleveraging of their own free will. This couldn't be further from the truth, and to put baseless rumors of this nature to rest once and for all, below we have compiled a simple chart using the NY Fed's own data, showing the total change in mortgage debt, and what portion of it is due to discharges (aka defaults) of 1st and 2nd lien debt. In a nutshell: based on NYFed calculations, there has been $800 billion in mortgage debt deleveraging since the end of 2007. This has been due to $1.2 trillion in discharges (the amount is greater than the total first lien mortgages, due to the increasing use of HELOCs and 2nd lien mortgages before the housing bubble popped).

"The consensus view was that QE3 was going to send the stock market to the moon. Yet the peak level on the S&P 500 was 1,465 on September 14th, the day after the FOMC meeting. The consensus view was that the lagging hedge funds were going to be forced to play some major catch-up and take the stock market to the moon too. Surveys show that the hedge funds have already made this adjustment...Q3 EPS estimates are still coming down and now stand at -3% YoY from -2% at the start of October....this is the first time the Fed embarked on a nonconventional easing initiative with the market overbought and with profits and earning expectations on a discernible downtrend. Not only that, but the fact the pace of U.S. economic activity is still running below a 2% annual rate, which is less than half of what is normal at this stage of the business cycle with the massive amount of government stimulus, is truly remarkable. Keep an eye on the debt ceiling being re-tested — the cap is $16.394 trillion and we are now at $16.119 trillion. This is likely to make the headlines again before year-end — the rating agencies may not be taking off much time for a Christmas break."

While earlier we were presented with an extra serving of hypocrisy courtesy of the Fed's James Bullard who lamented the lack of income for America's "savers", next we get a less than random selection of US CEOs, those of UPS Scott "Logistics spending would be great if only world trade hadn't completely collapsed" Davis, Honeywell's David "Look over there, Isn't Iran bombing something" Cote, NASDAQ's Bob "I destroyed IPOs" Greifeld, and, of course, Larry "About to switch jobs with Tim Geithner" Fink, who via Bloomberg TV get to opine on such issues as the fiscal cliff and America's $16.2 trillion, and very rapidly rising debt. Some of their views: "It's Washington's fault we're not hiring and not spending." Honeywell's Cote says, "If we were playing with fire in the debt ceiling, we'll be playing with nitroglycerine now when it comes to the fiscal cliff." Larry Fink says, "We need to speak out as  CEOs…Politicians generally address things when their back's against the wall…We have the threat of going into a recession in the first quarter…This is a very uncertain moment." And thanks to the Fed, which has come at just the wrong moments, and always bailed out Congress every time a difficult decision had to be taken, the likelihood of a benign outcome on the fiscal cliff is far worse, than even Goldman's latest worst case scenario which sees just a 33% probability of resolution before the year end.

One place where the S&P level still does have a modest influence is the number of shorts in the market, which are strategically used by repo desks and custodians (State Street and BoNY), to force wholesale short squeezes at given inflection points, usually just when the bottom is about to drop out. The problem is that even short squeezes are increasingly becoming fewer and far between, for the simple reason that the Fed has managed to nearly anihilate shorters as a trading class with its policy of Dow 36,000 uber alles. This was demonstrated with the latest NYSE Group short interest data, which tumbled to 13.6 billion shares short as of the end of September, or the lowest since early May, just as the market was swooning to its lowest level of 2012 to date.

Jim Bullard, of the St. Louid Federal Reserve, is currently answering questions following the delivery of prepared remarks. As a reminder, Bullard is a non-voting member of the FOMC this year who in 2010 was the first Fed official to call for a second round of QE. He just said the following:

• Fed’s Bullard Says He’s Concerned About Low Returns to Savers

Now this is beyond mere sheer hypocrisy and pathetic "good Fed cop, bad Fed cop" routine (still waiting for Bill Dudley to disclose what is the deflating hedonic equivalent of food inflation in a NEW iPad world). This is similar to Stalin saying, several days after completing the purges which saw tens of millions of people quietly "disappeared", that he is concerned that the price of graveyard real estate might be in a bubble.