Archive - Dec 12, 2012 - Story

Glenn Stevens, RBA Governor: "Central banks can provide liquidity to shore up financial stability and they can buy time for borrowers to adjust, but they cannot, in the end, put government finances on a sustainable course... They can't shield people from the implications of having mis-assessed their own lifetime budget constraints and therefore having consumed too much."

Rightly so, the FX and equity futures markets are almost entirely ambivalent at the farce that at 430am in Brussels, the EU leaders announce a compromise agreement on ECB banking supervision:

• *BARNIER HAILS 'HISTORICAL ACCORD' ON ECB BANK OVERSIGHT
• *BARNIER SAYS EUROPE HAS SHOWN 'CAPACITY TO TAKE ACTION' (yay)
  
• *MOSCOVICI SAYS SUPERVISION IS FIRST STEP IN EURO BANKING UNION
• *MOSCOVICI SAYS ECB WILL BE SUPERVISOR FOR ALL BANKS
• *SCHAEUBLE SAYS AGREEMENT REACHED ON EU30B OVERSIGHT THRESHOLD
• *BARNIER SAYS SUPERVISOR IS FUNDAMENTAL FOR FINANCIAL STABILITY
• *BARNIER SAYS ECB OVERSIGHT NEEDS PREPARATION OF AT LEAST A YEAR (umm)
• *ECB COUNCIL WON'T HAVE FINAL SAY ON BANK REGULATION: SCHAEUBLE (oops)

Of course, none of this matters - what is the ECB going to tell them "de-lever more!", "buy less of your sovereign's debt?" Until there are pooled deposit guarantees (nein nein nein) this is irrelevant and markets are treating it thus - no matter the PR efforts.

At the end of October, as the Tristate Area was being flooded by Hurricane Sandy, one after another Wall Street firm tried to position Sandy virtually as a non-event, with total damage "forecasts" by such "reputable" firms as Goldman Sachs and Bank of America forecasting a total bill between $10 and $20 billion (as anything above that and the Q3 damage to GDP would be far more substantial than their recently bullish forecasts had accounted for, and would also imply a substantial spillover effect into Q1 2013), the same as various insurance companies who had other far more obvious reasons to undershoot on the total damages. We said the opposite, and based on historic damage forecasts, predicted the damage would likely be between $50 and $100 billion. Once again the sellside consensus was wrong and a fringe blog was accurate, as the CBO has just released the Obama administration's full aid request. Bottom line: $60.4 billion, or roughly what one year of what the ultimate tax hike compromise will bring into the government's treasury. Furthermore, if fully funded by debt today, this amount would send the US (which has a $57 billion debt buffer as of this moment) over the debt ceiling immediately.

While many believe that with the output gap so wide that inflation is not an immediate threat, longer-term, as UBS notes, excessive money printing could indeed generate inflation and that inflation expectations are unusually volatile and could quickly be dislodged. This inflation hedges are a very valid concern. An oft-cited reason for owning stocks is that they have an implicit inflation hedge, however, just as with many market myths, UBS finds that, in fact, equities do not look like a compelling hedge against rising inflation. Indeed, they provide an appropriate hedge to rising inflation only in a limited number of cases. In short, equities provide only a partial hedge – one which works only for small positive inflation shocks.

Gold bugs can’t understand how the public can be so unaware, how highly intelligent policy makers can be so immoral, and how the mainstream media can be so incurious. We can’t understand why more men and women in the investment business haven’t joined some of the more successful ones that have come around to precious metals and have taken substantial positions in them for their funds and personal accounts. Conventional financial asset selection guidelines for professional investors are becoming increasingly uneconomic and problematic. Current macroeconomic conditions leave little doubt as to why. A zero-bound rate structure across developed economies, heavy monetary policy intervention, guaranteed negative real returns of benchmark financial assets and cash, impossible discount cash flow models,cacophonous (and economically meaningless) fiscal political wrangling diverting attention from legitimate budget arithmetic ($800 billion over ten years when we’re running $1 trillion-plus annual deficits?), dubious short and intermediate-term prospects in already-emerged emerging economies, and non-trending financial markets, all suggest something has changed. Regardless of whether one is investing personally or as a fiduciary, conventional financial asset allocation models and procedures are obviously failing and the reason is simple: the currencies in which financial assets are denominated are gravely flawed.

At the current pace of 'improvement' in the unemployment rate, it appears the Fed will cease its 'stimulation' in early 2015 - and based on the empirical relationship between unemployment rates and the S&P 500 that implies a healthy retracement to around 750. Seems like the index is comfortable trading back to that level...

"There’s a problem with kicking the can down the road" - Ben Bernanke, (December 12 2012)... We’ve taken this quote out of context - Bernanke was actually talking about the fiscal cliff, and not monetary policy; but kicking the can down the road is exactly what Bernanke is doing in his domain. Instead of letting the shadow banking bubble burst and liquidate in 2008, Bernanke has allowed it to slowly deflate, all the while pumping up the traditional banking sector with heavy, heavy liquidity. The reduction in shadow liabilities remains a massive deflationary and depressionary force (and probably the main reason why a tripling of the monetary base has not resulted in very severe inflation). Trillions and trillions of liquidity later, Bernanke is barely keeping the system afloat. We chose the path of Japan (which has spent the last twenty years depressed) not the path of Iceland (which is emerging from its depression). We chose to kick the can down the road. The system is rotten, and the debt load is unsustainable.

The strength of the Japanese stock market over the past few weeks has been at once heralded as anticipation of Abe's policies and the renaissance of this island nation's faltering reality. However, as Bloomberg's chart of the day points out, this performance trend (just as we saw in sentiment and market performance in the US) is absolutely normal heading into an election. As the chart below shows, the election day (on average) has marked a significant short-term top in the market 12 of the last 13 previous cycles. So while Jeff Gundlach is short JPY and long NKY, we suspect there will be a better entry point for the latter 'lomg' leg just a few days after the election landslide. As Daiwa's Soichiro Monji noted "Investors buy on promises and ideals up until the election. When the parliament starts a normal session, they will start trading on reality."

Investors are being hit from all sides now. We face the fiscal cliff and the quite real possibility that we will go over it, the debt ceiling and then we are assuaged by various tax and spending schemes. The stock market chugs along with their “What me worry” attitude. Just because we are now in a world drowning in apathy do not think that this will go on forever. The problems have become magnified by the slush of capital thrown about by the world’s central banks so that when the bough breaks; it will be a systemic break. It will flash right across the world and we will have another “Oh My God” moment which, as I peer into the future, may come in the next year.

InTrade may have gotten the Obamacare outcome horribly wrong, but it was spot on in predicting the Obama presidential victory. And if it has continued its accurately predictive ways, it will mean a lot of pain is in store for the market (if not so much the President) very shortly, because the online betting service, now only accessible to offshore based US residents just saw odds on a debt ceiling deal plunge to all time lows of 10% earlier today, before rebounding weakly to 16%. As a reminder, Harry Reid has said on numerous occasions that there will be no Fiscal Cliff resolution without a favorable debt ceiling outcome, which therefore means that according to InTrade the odds of a Fiscal Cliff getting done in 2012 have plunged to 16%, and the probability of a market tumble, as the cliff moving over to 2013 means a cornucopia of unintended consequences, is logically (1-16%).

Consider the consequences of the efficient subsidizing the inefficient. As long as the surplus generated by the efficient is larger than the cost of supporting the inefficient, the system can continue. But once the cost of subsidizing the inefficient exceeds the surplus generated by the efficient, the system is doomed to eventual insolvency. There is one way to fill the deficit, of course: borrow money. This is the strategy being pursued by the Status Quo in developed and developing economies alike. As long as the inefficient are protected from competition and amply subsidized, there are no incentives to become more efficient. In effect, becoming more inefficient is rewarded.  What happens when the efficient sectors that are propping up a vast array of inefficient sectors falter? The politically expedient answer is of course to borrow more money. But that creates another kind of financial fragility. Borrowing money only masks the fragility for a time, while adding another layer of fragility beneath the apparently prosperous surface.

A funny thing happened today. For the first time, the equity and bond market closed red (and VIX green) on a Federal Reserve QE-announcement day. Gold outperformed stocks and Treasuries underperformed everything... From the FOMC announcement, Gold and Silver closed green but stocks, bonds, oil, financials, and apple all lost ground (as did the USD very modestly)...

To paraphrase Tim Geinter: "Risk of the Fed ever ending its monetization? No risk of that." Why? Because as the FMS just reported, the February budget deficit was $172 billion, up $52 billion from a month ago, and $35 billion from a year ago. In brief: in the first two months of Fiscal 2013, the US accumulated a $292 billion budget deficit (compared to $236 billion a year ago), a number which is simply scary when annualized. What does this mean? That as long as the Treasury runs $1+ trillion budget deficit, the Fed will never, ever be allowed to stop monetizing, especially with China and the other legacy foreign borrowers just saying nein. Which in turn means that it will now be in the Fed's favor to paint the economy with uglier colors (recall that the Fed now needs unemployment deterioration to have infinite free monetization reign). Does this mean that going over the Cliff is now an absolute certainty.

It has been three years and nine months since the Fed announced 'real' QE1. Presented for your convenience below is the market's reactions then and for comparison we have included today's reaction. It seems the markets - whether Gold, FX, or Treasuries - have become numb (or engorged) on the Fed's actions. This leaves us with the sad conclusion, which the Fed will be last to acknowledge: the ammo, it's gone. It's all gone.

Having released the somewhat less exuberant economic projections (see below), the great one is about to explain the fact that his regime shift in 'rules-based'-doctrine is in fact not, as tin-foil-hat-wearing fringe blogs would suggest, a 'true' counter-cyclical policy by which investors will antithetically hope for worse economics to improve their nominal-priced 401(k)s. Over to you Ben...

*FED: 2012 GROWTH OF 1.7%-1.8% VS 1.7%-2.0% IN SEPTEMBER
*FED: 2013 GROWTH OF 2.3%-3.0% VS 2.5%-3.0% IN SEPTEMBER