Archive - Dec 2012 - Story

With AAPL -2% and stocks at the lows of the day, we wonder whether Obama has bought puts or calls today... President Obama sits down with Bloomberg White House correspondent Julianna Goldman at the White House today for his first television interview since the election to discuss the fiscal cliff - now just four weeks away.

*OBAMA SAYS NO FISCAL CLIFF DEAL `WITHOUT TAXES ON THE RICH'

Live stream below

Time for flashbacks to nearly two years ago, when the first Egyptian revolution, with great assistance from the various governmental liberating agencies of the "developed world", led to a democratic regime, so democratic, the ruler lasted all of 5 months before declaring himself temporary dictator. The reason: following yet more riots, this time resulting in a siege of the presidential palace, and in which protesters breached the presidential palace cordon, Reuters reports that Mursi, aka Morsillini, who granted himself "temporary" supreme commander (read dictator) powers with a unilateral decree on November 22, has now left the building... the presidential palace that is. This will surely embolden the protesters even more, and may well get the military in play once again. One wonders just which regime the US will support this time around, and what happens if control over the Suez Canal can not be maintained following what is increasingly shaping as a counterrevolution.

When people become desperate or hope-less, two things tend to coalesce; 1) they become easily led by charismatic leaders (no matter how crazy the ideas would appear previously), and 2) they resort to actions deemed previously un-possible. Putting a roof over your family's head, feeding your kids (or yourself), or buying the next iPad can drive people to these acts of desperation. Greece's homelessness rate has risen 25% since 2009 (with 20,000 living on the streets of Athens) and over 30% are at risk of poverty (with Ireland close behind). Suicide rates had risen by 40% in the first half of 2010 (and Greece was still relatively low). HIV infections from injecting drug-users has surged 20-fold in two years! And while crime rates remain among the lowest in Western Europe, robberies have surged since 2005 and prison populations (per capita) are on the rise - though, thankfully not as bad as in the US (yet). With sovereign bond spreads at multi-month lows, stocks at multi-month highs, and Barroso et al. claiming victory at every opportunity, perhaps some internal (Farage-like) reflection on the social depression they have enabled is required as the Bank of Greece warned the nation’s social cohesion is under threat.

The Great Depression brought about the Keynesian Revolution, complete with new analytical tools and economic programs that have been relied upon for decades. In dampening each successive downturn, authorities accumulated increasingly larger deficits and brought about a debt supercycle that lasted in excess of half a century. The efficacy of these tools and programs has slowly been eroded over the years as the accumulation of policy actions has reduced the flexibility to deal with crises as we reach budget constraints and stretch the Fed’s balance sheet beyond anything previously imagined. Some have referred to this as reaching the Keynesian endpoint. Keynes would barely recognize where we now find ourselves. In this ultra loose policy environment we are limited by our Keynesian toolkit. Without a new economic paradigm, the deleterious consequences of the current misguided policies are a foregone conclusion.

A snapshot of (quite amusing) "New Normal" dealmaking in the insolvent continent.

This is the only chart the retail investor needs to remember when bombarded day after day by the media with regard to how 'cheap' stocks are...

Forget the Fiscal Cliff: it is merely a much needed economic distraction for the next 3-4 months (distracting from what? Why Europe of course). Yes, it will be resolved, and yes taxes will go up, and yes, debates over it will most likely be carried over into 2013 and nothing will be compromised until the ultimate debt ceiling deadline (because it is really a Fiscal Cliff-Debt Ceiling package deal) is hit some time in March 2013, but eventually one or both parties will cave, right after the market plunges to put it all into the proper perspective as it did around the time of TARP and the August 2011 debt ceiling debate, and a resolution will materialize. The bigger issue has nothing to do with the Fiscal Cliff, which is indeed a sideshow. The bigger issue, as Art Cashin explains, has everything to do with a secular decline in the US economy, where a 1% growth rate will soon be the "New Killing It", where millions more (in part-time workers) will soon be let go, and where businesses no longer generate the cash flows needed to stay open. Art Cashin explains.

Europe may be fixed for the next week or two (until someone once again figures out that by manipulating the market, the ECB is merely making it easier for peripheral governments to do nothing to fix their unprecedented intra-Eurozone imbalances, as has been the case all along with the only strategy Europe has deployed to date namely kicking the can), but that doesn't mean all event and newsflow ends. Here is what to expect out of the insolvent continent as it attempts to put a very volatile (and violent) 2012 to bed with just one more month. Of particular note: €123 billion in Euro coupon payments in the month of December, which serves as a timely reminder that in 2013 European banks better be ready to buy up the record gross and net issuance of their sovereigns with gusto, or else Europe may promptly become "unfixed" all over again.

We have all said it. Anecdotally, it feels like when oil prices rise, gas prices at the pump rise; but when turmoil pauses in global geo-politics - or some entity decides that high oil prices just will not do for the world's economy - gas prices at the pump seem not to drop so quickly. Yes there are pipeline, inventory (and even tax) issues but the following chart suggests 'gouging' on a national level...

It's that time of day again. For no good reason (aside from arguably a stronger EUR as BIS fills its boots) - and with stocks up - Gold and Silver have once again been Baumgartnered this morning down to three-week lows (and Gold under $1700 again - breaking below its 100DMA for the first time since 8/16).

The graphic below, which presents an unvarnished picture of Europe's true economic state, needs no explanation:

Many people, and erroneously, think that all of the purchasing by the Fed will go to both markets in equal amounts but this is not the case. More money for the stock markets would have to come from asset reallocations by money management firms, insurance companies, pension funds and the like and this is not going to happen anytime soon given the 2008/2009 experience. Consequently the greatest flows generated by the Fed’s recent and forward actions will affect the bond markets much more than the equity markets. Between the MBS purchases and the next upcoming stimulus push, the Fed would account for 90% of all new debt issuance and leading to a demand imbalance between $400 billion to almost $2 Trillion depending upon the actual Fed announcements. The Fed currently holds about 18% of the U.S. GDP on its books and it could bulge to 23-28% a few years out. This all works, by the way, only because all of the world’s central banks are working in concert so that there is no imbalance and money cannot be invested off-world. Yields will not make sense empirically because of the actions of the Fed but it will make no difference, because their intentions and goals are vastly different from investors.

Confused by the recent surge of capital into Europe (which somehow is supposed to indicate that all is well because local stock and bond markets are faring better)? Don't be: it is merely the latest and greatest manifestation of that most prevalent of New Normal investment strategies: hope. Hope that this time it is different, and that the latest injection of capital from the Fed via QE3 coupled with the OMT perpetual backstop of liquidity via the ECB (still merely at the beta stage: expansion to actual gold/production phase TBD) will kick start the European economies. Alas, it won't, at least not until Europe actually undergoes the inevitable internal devaluation which we described over the weekend (since an external one is impossible) and crushes local wages of the PIIGS, which in turn would lead to revolution, and thus will never happen. That, or somehow discharges about 40% of consolidated Eurozone debt/GDP, which it also won't as it would wipe out the global banking system. So what does this mean? Well, as Deutsche Bank explains looking simply at manufacturing output in the developed world, global markets are now overvalued anywhere between 15% and 35%. This is the hope premium now embedded in stock prices.

Warren Buffett’s General Re-New England Asset Management has warned that until central bank monetary policies around the world change “there will be a tendency to higher gold prices.”  General Re-New England Asset Management, a unit of Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc., said gold may advance as businesses temper spending and central- bank stimulus measures fall short. Gold’s climb last year to more than $1,900 an ounce was fuelled by the expectation that government spending cuts in Europe would reduce demand for goods and services, GR-NEAM Chief Investment Officer John Gilbert wrote in a newsletter posted on the unit’s website today, as reported by Bloomberg. “There is growing evidence that the rising price of gold is a statement about the discouraging prospects for returns on productive investments,” Gilbert said.  “We hope that this analysis is wrong. We fear that it is not.”