Archive - Apr 2012 - Story

Since we first suggested in early February that investors should be underweight LTRO-encumbered banks relative to un-encumbered banks, and summarily dismissed Mario Draghi's lies with regard any stigma associated with LTRO loans, the spread has increased from around 50bps to almost 140bps today. The move today has taken LTRO Stigma (the spread between banks that took LTRO loans and those that did not) to the widest it has been since the announcement of the LTRO program. So while financial spreads in absolute terms are not back to their very early January widest levels quite yet - the differentiation between the encumbered and unencumbered is gaping wide. Perhaps this helps to explain why a further indicator of funding stress - the 3Y EUR-USD basis swap - is deteriorating rapidly (at a similar velocity as was seen heading into the crisis epicenter last year) meaning European banks are increasingly willing to pay a higher premium for USD funding - not a sign of a healthy market in any way.

When one thinks PIIGS, one usually imagines countries with collapsing economies, 50%+ youth unemployment, and current account deficits so large they are about to drag down the ECB, Bundesbank and Germany. And while that is absolutely correct for the most part, there is one product which the PIIGS, or in this case Italy, are all too happy to export in size. Gold, and not just to anywhere, but to that ultimate safe haven - Switzerland. From BBC: "Italian exports of gold ingots to Switzerland have soared in recent months, data has shown. Exports to Switzerland were 35.6% higher than in February 2011 "mainly because of sales of non-monetary raw gold", statistics agency Istat said. This followed a 34.6% year-on-year rise in exports to Switzerland in January." And the absolutely funniest attempt at spin ever:  "Experts say improvements in the trade deficit could be a sign that Prime Minister Mario Monti's economic reforms are starting to take effect." Uhm, when the country is exporting the only real asset it has for when it will need to backstop its own currency following the inevitable collapse of the EUR, this is not exactly a sign that the country's reforms are taking effect, but rather that everyone else in Europe is stockpiling the precious metal in advance of "some" event, which is coming.

Anyone who bought the 10 year Spanish bond this year is now down money.  It does have a 5.85% coupon, so if you bought the prior lows on Jan. 6th, you have earned 1.6% of carry.  Anyone else has lost more and not earned as much interest. This bond is bouncing up and down today on no volume, but we think we are very close to levels that could see a mass exodus of stop loss trading on levered positions.

The extent of Obama’s duplicity continues to grow apace. And yes — it’s duplicity. If you can’t or won’t fulfil a promise, don’t make it. From Bloomberg: "Two years after President Barack Obama vowed to eliminate the danger of financial institutions becoming “too big to fail,” the nation’s largest banks are bigger than they were before the credit crisis." And the hilarious (or perhaps soul-destroying) thing? The size of the banks isn’t even the major issue. AIG didn’t have to be bailed out because of its size; AIG was bailed out because of its interconnectivity. If AIG went down, it would have taken down assets on balance sheets of a great deal more firms, thus perhaps triggering even more failures. So the issue is not size, but systemic interconnectivity. And yes — that too is rising, measured in terms of gross OTC derivatives exposure, as well as the size of the shadow banking system (i.e. pseudo-money created not by lending but by securitisation) — which sits, slumbering, a $35 trillion wall of inflationary liquidity ready to crash down on the global dollar economy.

At the start of April, ECB's Draghi noted, "let's keep in mind that it [the LTRO] is not capital", adding that "if a bank does not have capital, it would be better to raise it now". Given the rapidly fading glow of LTRO's liquidity flush, the seemingly 'wasted' ammunition that Spanish and Italian banks have fired at the sovereign bond bears and the complete and utter lack of capital raising that has occurred, perhaps it is no wonder that credit spreads on the major European financials have exploded back to near their wides once again (LTRO-encumbrance aside). As Barclays notes today, the major financials alone look set to need over EUR120 billion in capital to bring their credit risks down to acceptable levels to be able to openly access capital markets once again. This means a median 30% of current equity market capitalization has to be raised. Just as we pointed out again and again, not only is the LTRO an encumbrance of bank balance sheets (and therefore increasingly subordinates all existing bond-holders implicitly reducing recoveries in a worst case scenario) but it delayed much-needed decision-making by giving the banks an 'out' for a few months.

We all know the Status Quo's response to the global financial meltdown of 2008 has been a travesty of a mockery of a sham--smoke and mirrors, flimsy facades of "recovery," simulacrum "reforms," and serial can-kicking, all based on borrowing and printing trillions of dollars, yen, euros and yuan, quatloos, etc. So when will the travesty of a mockery of a sham finally come to an end? Probably around 2021-22, with a few global crises and "saves" along the way to break up the monotony of devolution.

It seems all that confident over-extrapolating of warm-weather-based foot-traffic into closed sales and a recovery in housing was, as we vociferously warned, simply wrong. There's no schadenfreude here as this was too obvious for anyone except the blinkered hopium peddlers as even the NAHB is forced to admit things aren't so rosy in home-sales-land "interest expressed by buyers in the past few months has yet to translate into expected sales activity". The NAHB Index fell for the first time in 7 months, dropped the most in 10 months and missed those glorious expectations by the most in 22 months - quite an impressive set of statistics.

The February TIC data is out and here are the notable items. Total long-term purchases across all securities classes came in at an underwhelming $10.1 billion on expectations of a $42.5 billion increase, although when combined with Short-Term transactions, the total rose to $107.7 billion, greater than expected. However, since this series includes extensive irrelevant noise, tracking just LT data on a sequential basis, shows that in February foreign purchases of the 4 key security classes (TSYs, Stocks, Agencies and Corporate bonds) came in at a relatively weak $24.8 billion, down from $95.7 billion in February, of which $15.4 billion was US Treasurys. What is notable is that equities accounted for $7.6 billion of this total, the largest foreign purchase of US equities since May of 2011. Well, if US consumers will not buy stocks at least foreigners stepped up, and it also explains where at least some demand came from.  It also means that the 6 month moving average of foreign stock dumping has finally reversed from all time lows. However, what chart 1 vividly shows, is that over the past several months foreign flows into US securities, previously stable regardless of global events, has also become Risk On - Risk Off, with ever increasing a monthly amplitude. In other words everyone now has a 30 day attention span tops. Finally, now that the UK has been "disambiguated" from Chinese data, and thus saw its holdings drop to a realistic $103 and about to slide into double digit territory for the first time in years, Chinese holdings in turn tose to $1178.9, the highest since the big selloff in December, while Japan continues to find better bargains in US paper, with its holdings soaring to a record $1.095.9 billion.

UPDATE: AAPL $585 -3% at one-month lows

Volume picking up rapidly as the hedge fun horde starts to find exit doors are smaller than they hoped for...

No, not Italy, and certainly not Spain. Egypt.

European equity prices are pushing up towards Friday's highs, as Spanish and Italian sovereign bonds mysteriously surge back to unchanged on the day - but European corporate and financial credit markets are notably wider. Financials, most notably, remain underperformers and significantly worse than Friday's worse levels - seemingly treating with disdain yet another false hope in equity markets.

Each day then that passes, as the cash river runs dry, will change the dynamics of the investment world. The biggest change that I see forthcoming on the landscape, beyond those which I have noted, I believe will take place in Germany. China is heading towards some sort of landing and most of Europe is now officially in a recession. The bite of the austerity measures will deepen the process and between the two I think we will begin to see a decline in the finances of Germany which will bring all manner of howls and screams. Germany cannot keep heading in one direction while the rest of its partners founder all around them. The demands of Berlin are self-defeating eventually as demand falls off and I think we are just at the cusp of deterioration in Germany. The problem, all along, has been that Eurobonds or other measures representing a transfer union will cause the averaging of all of the economies in Europe so that the periphery countries benefit with a higher standard of living while the wealthier nations have standards of living that decline as the result of accumulated debts for the troubled nations. This will bring out nationalism again in force as the grand dream succumbs to the grim reality of the costs for nations that have lived beyond their means. The Pied Piper always gets paid and Hamelin still rests upon German soil.
 

When in doubt: baffle them with an economy that is both alive and dead (as has been the case for the past 4 months). While on one hand we saw a big miss in the Empire State Manufacturing Index, which slid from 20.21 to 6.56, on expectations of a +18.00 print, and the lowest since November, March retail sales in turn beat expectations, coming in at +0.8% on both headline and ex-autos, with the expectation for retail sales ex-autos at 0.6%, slightly less than the +1.1% retail sale change reported for February. Why are retail sales still strong? Goldman explained it earlier: "We expect that warm winter weather boosted retail sales over the last several months, but it is probably too soon to expect a negative payback in today's report, given that temperatures were still higher than normal in March (and to a greater degree than in February)." Translation: consumers use credit cards to buy things in March they would otherwise have bought in May.

Earlier today Citi reported earnings that missed expectations of $1.02 on an unadjusted basis ($0.95) but beat adjusted ($1.11). Same with revenue. And while one can go through the bank's 10-Q and earnings presentation, there are just two charts worth pointing out which show the same trend exhibited by JPM last week: loan loss reserve release was $1.2 billion or 40% of the $2.931 billion in after tax net income. Which is to be expected: the traditional primary driver of "earnings" continues to be an accounting fudge. Where things get dicier is when considering that in Q1 2012 mortgage credit trends are not exactly good, because just like in the case of JPM, net credit losses rose for the first time in, well, years. So: loan loss reserves are released even as the inflection point in credit losses is reached. Brilliant.

Ten days ago, somewhat tongue in cheekly, we presented the "people bringing you currency manipulation on a daily basis" or in other words the BIS execution team for Europe's central banks, which is most directly engaged in FX and precious metals 'interventions' when needed. The execution chain we presented was headed by one Richard Austin Jones, head of central bank services at BIS, Basel, yet more importantly the actual trader at the bottom of the totem pole was a Mikaël Charozé, whose various tasks included the "management of the liquidity for big amounts" primarily interventions and portfolio diversification, as well as "holding and managing proprietary positions on all currencies including gold." We posted this on April 5. Funny then that just 10 days later, one would never know that Mikaël no longer counts "holding and managing proprietary positions on all currencies including gold" among his duties as well as task of "management of liquidity for big amounts including interventions". In fact his entire profile, since our little humorous exposes, appears to have been rather completely altered. Inquiring minds would love to know: why?