Archive - Apr 25, 2012 - Story

S&P threatening to downgrade India... UK double dipping... Germany having a failed auction. It is all irrelevant, for the great fruit has spoken and people are buying iGadgets at record levels, which can only mean that once the great credit spree ends, Apple will likely be forced to use its $110 billion cash hoard to start an in house "Acceptance Corporation" vendor financing purchases of its products directly. And while the AAPL earnings beat has become a contrarian bet, now that even Gartman has said he is turning bullish on stocks, here is a summary of what happened and what will happen. In a nutshell, just like Apple was the only thing that mattered yesterday, today it is only the Fed and the subsequent press conference that matter, with the market likely to only take away whatever it wants to take away.

Earlier today, the Bundesbank tried to sneak through some EUR3 billion in long-dated (30Y) paper. It didn't quite succeed, because if one excludes the retention by the German bank which already has its hands full with TARGET2, the auction was technically a failure. As Newedge points out, without Buba retention, the launch of new 30-yr bund would have been undersubscribed which is just a polite way of saying the above. What happened is that the German debt agency sold EUR2.405b of new 2.5% 30Y Jul-44 Bund, at an average Price 101.93 and average yield of 2.41%. Of this, the Bundesbank retained 595 million as the total target was for EUR3 billion in issuance; Total non-Buba based bids were a "weak" EUR 2.747 billion. The bid/cover was modest 1.142x; with the auction tail 18 cents “further underpinning the weakness of demand." Finally, per Newedge, the new paper looked rich vs previous rolls ahead of today’s auction, “explains the sluggishness of today’s demand.” Of course, with the now daily bipolar market, had this auction taken place on Monday when Europe was again imploding, it would have been a stunning success. Instead, today is one of those risk on days. But for anyone who bought into the "safety" of German paper 48 hours ago, today they are being carted out legs first. Until, of course, the attention shifts to the disaster that is the PIIGS, and as of earlier today, the UK once more.

For anyone who may have been concerned that the BOE was serious in its recent "admission" that it just may not ease further, or engage in more QE for that matter, we have good news: the UK economy just double dipped for only the first time since the 1970s, following a stunning Q1 GDP release which came in far weaker than expected at -0.2% while the consensus was looking for a 0.1% rise. In other words, the UK has just followed such other pristine example of economic success as Spain and Greece into double dipping. Bloomberg economist Niraj Shah brings even more bad, pardon good, news: 2Q GDP may also contract as a result of additional bank holiday in June. Construction output knocked 0.2 ppt off of quarterly GDP growth. Per Shah, the BOE may point to drop in construction as a possible aberration in data, concerns will remain over the strength of the service sector as output there rose only 0.1% Q/Q. The U.K. has contracted 9 quarters since first falling into recession in 2Q 2008. All in all this is great news for those desperate for bad news and explains why futures, and the EURUSD are spiking.

As we said yesterday, traders could have just slept through the entire day, ignored headlines about mad cows, auctions of European bonds maturing in a few weeks, speculation of Europe's alleged falling out favor with austerity which is very much irrelevant as all that matters is what German taxpayers/voters say, and the SEC's latest laughable scapegoating attempts, and just woken to the 4:30 pm announcement of iPhone sales in China. As expected, the entire world is now reacting. Here is Deutsche Bank's Jim Reid with the global response to the world's ongoing fascination with aspirational cell phones.

While images of car-chases and Gene Hackman's pork-pie hat may be conjured, the tough new reality that has emerged this week in Europe's rising tensions is the decisive development in France as the election proved a strong showing for both far-right and far-left political parties at the same time. Somewhat surprisingly these extremes are in agreement on critical economic policies: they both want to restrict free-trade and the labor market, and also want to subjugate the ECB. Together with the Socialists and even most Centrists, the extremes clearly converge on a very strong consensus for anti-growth structural policies and massively lax fiscal (fair estimate might be 60% of the voters) and monetary (ditto, perhaps 90% of the voters) policies. This means that France has given up its ambition to become anything like economically similar to Germany. Instead, they have reverted towards joining their natural economic allies in the Eurozone: Italy and Spain. Perhaps this is why French spreads/yields have risen over 40% in the last few weeks as the politically pragmatic Anglo-Saxon spirits are starting to seize the enormity of what is happening: France is no longer any form of supporter of ally of Germany. The idea that somehow, pragmatic voices will stop this political groundswell is entirely misplaced: this destructive belief set has started to run its course. It is now in the Continental blood and the healthiness of economies over the pond is deteriorating fast.