Archive - Jul 12, 2012 - Story

A fractional miss of estimates for GDP growth (printing at +7.6% vs expectations of +7.7%) coupled with a just-as-fractional beat in Retail Sales (+13.7% YoY vs expectations of +13.4%) seems to be the perfect remedy for a global-depression-expecting and/or massive-stimulus-hungry market. GDP growth was its slowest since March 2009 but it appears the 'sell the rumor, buy the news crowd' are disappointed. S&P 500 futures popped a few pts and then faded back - remaining around +3pts for now (and EUR rallied into the number, sold off on the print and is now limping back higher). As we noted earlier, this is not the data you have been looking for - instead focus on hot money flows and the property pop, as the Chinese continue to impress with their 'data' showing the first engineered 'soft-landing' in history.

As we wait anxiously for the not-too-hot and not-too-cold but just right GDP data from China this evening, we thought it instructive to get some sense of the reality in China. From both the property bubble perspective (as Stratfor's analysis of the record high prices paid just this week for Beijing property - by an SOE no less - and its massive 'microcosm' insight into the bubbliciousness of the PBOC's attempts to stave off the inevitable 'landing'); to the rather shocking insight that Diapason Commodities' Sean Corrigan offers that 'Hot Money Flows' have left China at a rates exceeding that during the worst of the Lehman crisis; take a range of key indicators – from electricity usage, to Shanghai container throughput, to nationwide rail freight ton-miles, to steel output – and you will notice that none of these shows a rate of growth during the second quarter of more than 4% from 2011, and some are as low as 1%. Whatever fictive GDP number we are presented with this week, the message is clear: “Brace! Brace! Brace!”

With minutes left until the output of the =RAND() cell better known as China GDP is announced to the world, the US has decided not to wait and take matters into its own hands. Just as an FYI to all countries out there, this is how you escalate a simmering trade war right into the next level:

FBI probes Chinese telecom giant ZTE over alleged sale of U.S. technology to Iran - RTRS

You mean to say that those same Chinese who have had bilateral, USD-bypassing relations, with Iran, and who got a direct exemption from the Iran oil export embargo from Hillary herself, have been playing by their own rules? You have to be kidding. And now what: the US will sell the $1.2 trillion in Chinese debt is owns? Oh wait...

The decision to downgrade Italy's rating reflects the following key factors:

1. Italy is more likely to experience a further sharp increase in its funding costs or the loss of market access than at the time of our rating action five months ago due to increasingly fragile market confidence, contagion risk emanating from Greece and Spain and signs of an eroding non-domestic investor base. The risk of a Greek exit from the euro has risen, the Spanish banking system will experience greater credit losses than anticipated, and Spain's own funding challenges are greater than previously recognized.

2. Italy's near-term economic outlook has deteriorated, as manifest in both weaker growth and higher unemployment, which creates risk of failure to meet fiscal consolidation targets. Failure to meet fiscal targets in turn could weaken market confidence further, raising the risk of a sudden stop in market funding.

Yesterday, when discussing the forthcoming implications of the Libor scandal, we said that in the barrage of coming lawsuits, "the entity that will be sued by proxy is the Federal Reserve, whose Federal Funds rate is really the setter for the baseline Libor rate." This claim came at an opportune time, just hours before one of the Fed's most vocal critics (and gold standard advocates), Jim Grant, appeared on TV to discuss precisely the same thing. Best summarizing his position is a cartoon that appeared in a recent issue of Grant's Interest Rate Observer in the context of Lieborgate, and who is really at fault here.

We noted the significant drop in the ECB's Deposit Facility this morning and as the day wore on it became clear that few - if any - of the standard talking heads on media channels had a clue what this meant except the standard comprehension that it must be good for stocks as the money is finally being put to good use (though as we noted bond yields would say different). While it is true that a large chunk of money has shifted away from the deposit facility, the money has not gone anywhere else – it is still sitting at the ECB, just that it is now in the ECB current account where banks place money to fulfill their reserve requirements. The catch here is that both excess reserves and the deposit facility will earn nothing from now on - so why move it? Simple, as BofAML points out, placing the money in the current account has lower operational costs for banks – if a bank places money at the deposit facility, it will be returned automatically the day after; however, if placed in the current account, it will remain there until the bank manually requests to take the money out. So, it would seem, somewhere a young associate on the Treasury Function desk just lost his job as he no longer needs to press the 'send to ECB' button every night. The reality is that the information on bank lending activities that one can infer from these ECB data is minimal at best.

According to the just released M2 update, the broadest publicly tracked monetary aggregate (because the Fed doesn't have enough money to keep track of M3) just hit $9,991.5 billion, a $43 billion increase from last week. In other words, this is the last week in which M2 is under $10 trillion. So enjoy it while the "complete lack of penetration" of the monetary base into broader monetary aggregates, and of the Fed's reserves so tightly locked up in bank vaults, is still only 13 digits (most of it comprising of bank deposits which of course represent no inflationary threat at all). Next week it will be a record 14 digits for the first time, and well on its way to surpassing the $15 trillion held in the deposit-free shadow banking system as the importance (and inflationary convexity) of the two is rapidly interchanged.

Stepping back from the trees to survey the forest (from the Moon perhaps) often provides some clarifying picture-paints-a-thousand-words view of the world. This is exactly what Citi's Rick Lorusso has done and while he called for a correction back in March which was followed by a 10.9% drop in the Dow, he was disappointed and is looking for a far greater adjustment - no matter how many times he hears about negative sentiment and QE and soft-landings. Starting from a truly long-term yearly chart of the Dow Jones Industrial Average, Lorusso conjures wave patterns, Fibonnacci, and cycles as he rotates down to monthly and daily charts to conclude that his charts "suggest the potential for a very significant high this year," in the July/August period, summarizing that Citi is "anticipating that the market will form a terminal high." - even more so on a rally from here as he warns "beware of new highs" so bulls be careful what you wish for.

Despite miraculous efforts to find the right fulcrum security to pressure stocks into the green for the day, equities end the day notably in the red after cracking (once again on heavy volume and large average trade size) into the close. Reverting as usual back to VWAP, the market was typically manic today with two significant QE-on pushes (Treasury yields lower as Stocks/Gold rallied with USD weakness) after the better-than-expected 30Y auction ended badly for stocks as it reverted rapidly back down to bond's reality into the close. Once again very close to record low yields in Treasuries - with 30Y yield down over 10bps on the week. Initial bids under Silver (which reverted up to perfectly sync with Copper on the week) and then WTI (over $86, post further sanctions) provided some correlated excitement for stocks but it was clear once again that the low volume liftathon was an exit opportunity for bigger players with financials and tech notably underperforming. Average volume and average trade size on the day in aggregate but the European close rally monkey just ran out of steam as 'size' stepped in to move ES down to its 50DMA and the Dow near its 200DMA to ends it sixth down day in a row.

Remember when various students of the Econ. PhD persuasion (not to mention various paywall holdco-funded blogs, both desperate for namedropping-based page views), alleged that reading Zero Hedge makes one's money "vanish" (instead of focusing their brilliantly insightful googling efforts on such worthier topics as MF Global or its successor, PFG, or even Libor)? We were going to present a picture of your typical "testosterone" addicted reader below as a reminder, but instead we opted for a picture of MBIA's intraday price, which is up 8.5% from where we broke news that the company may soon be worth much, much more. And to facilitate these same academics in their abacus-based pursuits of truth, justice and the Keynesian way, we will even calculate the annualized return: 847,801,191% (we will withhold calculating what the return on various short-term call options may have been - we are confident even career Economists can figure that one out after several hours of consultations). But since when have facts ever been part of the status quo's arsenal...

Malaysia's state-owned oil and gas company just made a multibillion-dollar bet that Canada will choose to export its shale gas riches. Even though the odds of securing permission to export liquefied natural gas (LNG) from the Canadian west coast are still pretty poor, the costs of such an endeavor immense, and the timeline in question very long, Petronas is putting $5.5 billion on the table – far more than it has ever spent on an acquisition before – to secure a large foothold in the British Columbia shale gas scene.

It's yet another sign that things are getting serious in the global race for resources.

The venerable Bank of America recently sent letters to 60,000 struggling homeowners with the caveat-ridden generous offer of slicing an average $150,000 off their loans; the response was... silence. It seems the total and utter 'borrower fatigue', as Bloomberg puts it, that leaves homeowners relying on the very same banks that committed loan servicing abuses to avert foreclosures. Yet another program, that BofA specifically accounts for almost half of the fines of, ends up helping far fewer people than intended. Simply put, borrowers have lost faith in the process.

The good news: the deficit in June was $59.7 billion, just on top of expectations of $60.0 billion. The bad news: the June deficit was $59.7 billion, following $125 billion in May (and yes, right after that shocking and one-time, tax return driven $59 billion surplus in April), and $16.7 billion higher compared to last June. Total debt in June increased by $85.7 billion so more or less in line. The cumulative deficit in Fiscal 2012 is now $904 billion through June, compared to $970 billion last year over the same period. Will this ever change? Not as long as profligate spending-encouraging record low yield is there. Tune in next month when we find that the July deficit was about $140 billion in line with historical data.

In reality, it is little surprise that behaviorally we see risk markets recover from precipitous declines - we are an optimistic bunch of knife-catchers after all. Credit Suisse's Global Risk Appetite index uses a number of factors to track the herd's shift from euphoria to dysphoria, and uses those panic levels to BTFD. The typical response function is around a 230 day upswing in animal spirits before reality sets in from now-euphoric levels. It seems that from the April 2011 'panic' levels in their index, we are about a month away from it being as good as it is going to get and the BTFD'ers will perhaps notice from the chart below that as time has gone on (from the '82 recovery to the current recovery) that the response function has had diminishing potential - as we are very near to Peak Recovery.