Archive - Mar 12, 2012 - Story

While LTRO may have slowed the need for immediate asset sales and larger deleveraging in European banks, the two most significantly worrying trend concerns remain front-and-center - those of deposit flight and lending cuts. The latter remains a concern for the BIS, who note in their recent report, that lending curtailment by European banks focused primarily on risky (non-sovereign) and USD-denominated (EM mostly) debt as banks sought to reduce risk-weighted assets (RWA) to meet Basel III capital rules. It would appear though that banks remain in deleveraging (asset sale) mode, in anticipation of the end of ECB facilities down the road, which will become increasingly troublesome given the encumbrance of so many of their assets already by the ECB itself. What is most concerning though is the dramatic and accelerating deposit outflows from not just Greece but Italy and Spain (which just happen to be by far the largest 'takers' of LTRO loans). In other words, as more and more deposits outflow from these two major sovereign nations' banking systems (notably to Finland, Germany, and Luxembourg apparently), the only way to fund bank liabilities (as long as the interbank market remains dead - which is likely given everyone's self- and projected-knowledge) will be the ECB.

Probably the most amusing thing about this latest US debt infographic courtesy of FX Fatcat, which by now everyone has seen in some capacity, is how out of date it is, as the latest debt is $15.518 trillion, or $100 billion more than shown here in "March 2012."

Just because being officially the first broke Eurozone country, having 50%+ youth unemployment, and a collapsing economy is not enough, adding absolutely insult to injury is the following chart from Reuters, which shows that compared to other European economies, Greece now has the highest gas price in the old continent. And indicatively while America complains over what is now the highest gas prices in 2012 per AAA, at $3.80 average for a gallon of regular, 30 cents higher than a month ago, and 35 cents higher compared to a year earlier, gas in Greece now sells for over $9.00/gallon. But at least the IMF's worst case projects that Greek economy will be flat in 2013. And that's the "worst case scenario." But at least Europe sure taught Iran a lesson by halting crude imports. Oh yes, that Iran just happened to be one of the biggest suppliers to Greece - oh well. At least Greece still gets to proudly say it is a European colony, everything else be damned. 

What is fraud except creating “value” from nothing and passing it off as something? Frauds interlink and grow upon each other. Our debt-based money system serves as the fraud foundation. In our debt-based money system, debt must grow in order to create money. Therefore, there is no way to pay off aggregate debt with available money. More money must be lent into the system to make the payments for old debts. This causes overall debt to expand as new money for actual people (vs. banks) always arrives at interest and compounds exponentially. This process is called financialization. Financialization: The process of making money from nothing in which debt (i.e. poverty, lack) is paradoxically considered an asset (i.e. wealth, gain). In current financialized economies “wealth expansion” comes from the parasitic taxation of productivity in the form of interest on fiat lending. This interest over time consumes a greater and greater share of resources, assets, labor, and livelihood until nothing is left.

While 'good is good, and bad is better'-market continues to price a higher and higher strike price for Ben, Mario, and Xiaouchuan, the twin (d)evils of energy and food price inflation could be tamping their enthusiasm for their new-found experiment. Critically, for all those 'hoping' for the pump to be primed and a self-sustaining recovery to take hold, we present three charts to rain on that parade. Whether the world's central bankers come back to the table is unclear, given their clear concerns at what they have done recently, but we suspect this is much more a 'when' than 'if' question and given the performance of asset and volatility markets, it seems this is more than priced in.

As VIX drops below 15 for the first time in almost a year, the clarion calls of 'all-clear' should perhaps be tempered with the record-steepness of the volatility term-structure. Simply put, everyone and his mom is now selling short-dated vol but mid-term vol remains stubbornly high - in English, we're safe today but tomorrow could be a disaster - or given medium-term risk outlooks, short-term traders are the most complacent they have ever been.

Following the unleashing of $2.5 trillion in central bank liquidity, market shorts have predictably gone into hibernation, and as the just released NYSE short interest update confirms, the total number of outstanding shorts is at the lowest it has been in the past 4 years for the second month running, at 12.6 billion. Once the realization that central banks are limited from pumping incremental liquidity in the market is strictly limited by $9/gallon gas in Europe, and the inflection point in risk is reached, look for there to be almost no natural buying buffer to the downside. Then again with central planners out there with their CTRL+P willing to micromanage every downtick of the stock market, does anyone even care any more? Certainly not the retail investor.

It will come as no surprise to any reader that volumes in general are dismal. This leads inevitably to the question of just how liquid markets are in general. This may not be a critical question for mom-and-pop buying some IBM or CAT at the margin but for institutional investors it is critical to the decision to enter a position. Pairing off reward expectations with risk concerns tends to focus too much on volatility and too little on liquidity and by looking at daily market turnover and the bid-offer spread of each asset class, UBS finds taking liquidity into account can make a huge difference to performance (and risk-appetite). Unsurprisingly, the most liquid assets are large cap equities and US Treasuries. The least liquid assets include various fixed income securities, and in particular high yield credit. Perhaps this goes a long way to explaining why US Treasuries have maintained their strength and why large cap equities have been so strong relative to credit markets (a topic we have discussed at length) as money finds its 'easiest' hole to fill and thanks to liquidity concerns, high yield credit investors remain more pragmatic entrants to an ever-inflating bubble of liquidity (as exits will be small and crowded at the first sign of tightening). We suspect the increasing dispersion between the most and least liquid securities in each asset class will likely feed on itself as fewer funds are willing to 'earn' an 'illiquidity' premium given the bigger binary risks facing all markets.

A month ago Zero Hedge, based on some Goldman observations, asked a simple question: is Okun's law now terminally broken? Today, with about a one month delay, the mouthpiece of the New York Fed (which in itself is nothing but a Goldman den of central planners, and Bill Dudley and Jan Hatzius are drinking buddies), Jon Hilsenrath shows that this is just the issue bothering his FRBNY overseers. In an article in the WSJ he ruminates: "Something about the U.S. economy isn't adding up. At 8.3%, the unemployment rate has fallen 0.7 percentage point from a year earlier and is down 1.7 percentage points from a peak of 10% in October 2009. Many other measures of the job market are improving. Companies have expanded payrolls by more than 200,000 a month for the past three months, according to Labor Department data. And the number of people filing claims for government unemployment benefits has fallen. Yet the economy is barely growing. Many economists in the past few weeks have again reduced their estimates of growth. The economy by many estimates is on track to grow at an annual rate of less than 2% in the first three months of 2012. The economy expanded just 1.7% last year. And since the final months of 2009, when unemployment peaked, the economy has expanded at a pretty paltry 2.5% annual rate." Hilsenrath's rhetorical straw man: "How can an economy that is growing so slowly produce such big declines in unemployment?" The answer is simple Jon, and is another one we provided a month ago - basically the US is now effectively "printing" jobs by releasing more and more seasonally adjusted payrolls into the open, which however pay progressively less and less (see A "Quality Assessment" Of US Jobs Reveals The Ugliest Picture Yet). After all, what the media always forgets is that there is a quantity and quality component to jobs. The only one that matters in an election year, however, is the former.  As for whether Okun's law is broken, we suggest that the New York Fed looks in the mirror on that one.

Many lessons are available to learn from the Greek debt crisis. Several more are probably to come as the intended and unintended consequences of what the Europeans have done begin to infect the bond markets. I point this morning to the vast differences now between the ownership of American debt and European debt and, as the immediate effects of the LTRO begin to wear off, several dawning realizations that I think will cause European debt to gap out against American debt regardless of the yields of Treasuries.  

Over the weekend, the BIS released its latest quarterly review of financial organizations, which despite being chock full of assorted data, merely summarizes what banks already report. As such, it completely avoids the potentially black swan areas, such as derivative, off-balance sheet and shadow banking exposure. In other words, it is largely a waste of time. One section, however, that is useful,is the analysis by Morten Bech on "FX volume during the financial crisis and now" which has created a constant time series to evaluate FX trading volumes all the way through October 2011, as opposed to the traditional BIS Triennial survey, the next of which is due in April 2013. Morten's finding: "I estimate that in October 2011 daily average turnover was roughly $4.7 trillion based on the latest round of FX committee surveys."

• Greek Bailout Payment Set to Be Approved by Euro Ministers After Debt Deal (Bloomberg)
• China Trade Deficit Spurs Concern (WSJ)
• Sarkozy Makes Populist Push For Re-Election (FT)
• ECB Calls for Tougher Rules on Budgets (FT)
• As Fed Officials Prepare to Meet, They Await Clearer Economic Signals (NYT)
• PBOC Zhou: In Theory 'Lots Of Room' For Further RRR Cuts (WSJ)
• Latest Stress Tests Are Expected to Show Progress at Most Banks (NYT)
• Monti Eyes Labor Plan Amid Jobless Youth, Trapped Firemen (Bloomberg)

Quiet trading so far with some risk off episodes in Europe (Monte Pasci halted after dropping 5%), and total confusion in the Greek bond market, with old bonds, new bonds, and CDS all trading as nobody has a clue just what is eligible for trade and what isn't (one thing is certain - GGB2s continue to trade well wide of Portugal, yielding around 18-20% for the 10 year spot). Here is how BofA sees the trading session so far.

While hardly expecting anything quite as dramatic as the default of a Eurozone member, an epic collapse in world trade, or a central banker telling the world that "he has no Plan B as having a Plan B means admitting failure" in the next several days, there are quite a few events in the coming week. Here is Goldman's summary of what to expect in the next 168 hours.