Archive - Feb 2, 2012 - Story

After a relentless upward session in yesterday's trade exasperated the EURUSD bears, it is time for the bulls to be punked, not once but twice, the first time coming overnight when some errant headlines out of China, suggesting it could be involved in the ESM, sent the pair soaring only to slide right back down on clarification this was not really happening. The second time it originated ironically enough, with Eurogroup muppet and Luxembourg Prime Minister Jean Claude Juncker, whose comments to in an interview with Deutchslandfunk were shockingly open and realistic. Among these were that the measures from the January 30 summit were "largely insufficient" and that Greek PSI talks were "ultra difficult." So apparently what Dow Jones said about the deal being done in hours may have been a modest fabrication. And something else that will certainly inflame German tensions once again, is his comment that the issue of a Greek budget commissioner is "off the table" and that there is no need for a "special Greek commissar." Thanks Jean-Claude, but we will wait for the real boss, Ms. Merkel, to voice on that one. Finally, apparently in a text message, Juncker's spokesman said no decision has been reached on possible talks next week. Great - so the Greek hard deadline of March 20 is now less than 50 days away, with the full exchange offer needing at least two months to be concluded, and there is still absolutely nothing on the table. Yup, sounds like Europe. In the meantime, the EURUSD has remember just what it represents: the total chaos, insolvency and disunion of everything European.

One of the major factors in the Central Banks of the world having stepped up the pace of flushing the world with increasing amounts of freshly digitized cash is writ large in the contraction in credit availability to the real economy (even to shipbuilders). Anecdotal examples of this constrained credit are everywhere but much more clearly and unequivocally in tightening lending standards in all of the major economies. As Bank of America's credit team points out, bank lending standards to corporates have tightened globally in Q4 2011 and the picture is ubiquitously consistent across the US, Europe, and Emerging Markets. Whether it is deleveraging, derisking, or simple defending of their balance sheets, banks' credit availability is becoming more constrained. While the Fed's QE and Twist monetization and then most recently the ECB's LTRO has led (aside from self-reinforcing short-dated reach-arounds in BTPs and circular guarantees supposedly reducing tail risk) to nothing but massive increases in bank reserves (as opposed to flowing through to the real economy), we suspect it was designed to halt the significantly tighter corporate lending environment (most significantly in European and Emerging Markets). The critical corollary is that, as BAML confirms, the single best non-market based indicator of future defaults is tightening lending standards and given the velocity of shifts in Europe and EM (and very recent swing in the US), investors reaching for high-yield may be ill-timed at best and disastrous credit cycle timing at worst (bearing in mind the upgrade/downgrade ratio is also shifting dramatically). Liquidity band-aids are not a solution for insolvency cardiac arrests as the dual vicious cycles of bank and sovereign stress remain front-and-center in Europe (with EM a close second) and the hope for real economic growth via credit creation kick-started by an LTRO is the pipe-dream the market is surviving on currently.