Archive - Aug 14, 2012 - Story

You heard our side of the story. It is only fair you hear the other side too.

Consider our minds blown, via Bloomberg:

• *NEW YORK SETTLES PROBE OF STANDARD CHARTERED FOR $340 MLN

The life or death of STANCHART is settled - they live; and the $250 billion of 'laundering' transactions - sanctions/terrorism/drugs-related or not - are settled for a 0.14% transaction fee (that'll teach 'em!). In other words, Std Chartered's IRR for committing years of crime is 714%. Finally this is a whopping 1.9% of the bank's entire 2011 revenues, or in other words they had to hand over 7 days of revenue (assuming a 365 day work week). Of course there are other fines/penalties to come but it looks like someone got a little over-excited at the regulators or as we note, STANCHART had some bottom-drawer details no one wanted outed. And now, employees of US "regulators," "enforcers" and various other "crime fighting" organizations can look forward to submitting their resumes to the British banks all over again.

VIX has only rarely traded below 15% during 'new normal' times. The period from 2004 to early 2007, the so-called 'Great Moderation', saw VIX average 13.6% - at the time stunningly low (and notably where VIX closed yesterday). While looking at VIX alone can be misleading (with regard to the term structure differences and realized vol premia), it is nevertheless a gauge of market's expectations of return volatility in the short-term - however contemporaneous that is. Following the two times that VIX first closed below 15%, the S&P 500 has suffered from a 5.25% and 7.75% plunge in the following two months - and each time saw a quick post-VIX-plunge pop in stocks that provided better entry levels for shorts. High Yield credit also stumbled hard widening 80 and 150bps respectively.

The Status Quo around the globe is trying to manage perceptions to foster the illusion that all the high expectations can be met; but the reassurances are increasingly hollow, and the promises increasingly threadbare. People are waking up, one at a time, to the reality that all the promises and guarantees are fantasy, and their emotional response is deeply negative: they feel betrayed by the Status Quo and its institutions, and they feel a volatile mixture of rage, distrust and resignation. Studies have found that people (usually those in the lower social and financial tiers) with low expectations tend to be happier than those with high (and unmet) expectations. The Status Quo bought the support of the masses by raising expectations of permanently rising prosperity and security for all. Now that these near-infinite claims cannot be fulfilled, the Status Quo has no institutional ability to lower expectations to more realistic levels. It only knows how to spin artifice and fantasy, in the vain hope that managing perceptions will substitute for managing reality. This is how credibility is lost. Managing perceptions is a dangerous game, as the perceptions are pushed ever-farther from reality, increasing the shockwave when the two snap together: it won't be reality rising to meet lofty perceptions, it will be perceptions and expectations plummeting to meet reality. This is how the Status Quo will collapse: it will lose the faith of its people, and become the target of their wrath.

.... The local socialists are suffering under oppressive austerity. And by that we mean the 1% continues to party like it is 1999. Of course, this is amateur hour for the luxury beach club: recall that the man, the FX myth, the, well arestee, Alex Hope spent $323,483 back in March. That was right before the market swooned. Is this another interim top?

As Simon Hobbs noted this morning, Olli Rehn confirmed ahh that err "both the European Union and the ECB are ready to take action" but only conditional upon requests for aid. What is perhaps missed by most observers is what Rick Santelli and Mark Grant discuss in more detail in the short clip below. Greece managed to sell EUR4 billion short-dated bills this morning at remarkably low yields - not exactly the kind of thing that incentivizes political leaders to request aid - but how did they do it? Who bought it? Well, we suspect you know the answer but Mark Grant's clarifying response to Santelli's question concluded simply that the ECB-to-Greek-Banks-to-The-Bank-Of Greece-to-ECB circle-jerk is "in a sense, a kind of Ponzi scheme." Santelli's response that "it really is a rigged game" and that our reflexive response to the signaling of bond yields is remarkable given the manipulation; Grant agrees adding that "the real money guys are either out of Europe, getting out of Europe, or have cut back as much as they can" since simple math shows you that at some point Europe will have it's 'moment'.

Previously we explained on at least two occasions (here and here) why the upcoming death of the US money market industry is not greatly exaggerated: quite simply, as we wrote back in 2010, the Group of 30, or the shadow group that truly runs the world (see latest members) decided some time ago that it would rather take the "inert" $2.6 trillion held in money markets, and not used to boost the fractional reserve multiplier, and instead have it allocated to such more interesting markets as bonds and stocks. As a reminder, Europe already achieved this last month when it cut its deposit rate to zero leading to a sequential shuttering of money market funds. The Fed, however, has to be far more careful to not impair the overnight General Collateral repo market which as everyone who understands the nuances of Shadow Banking knows is where all the bodies are buried, and as such has been far more careful in implementing such a shotgun approach. Instead, Ben, the SEC, and the Group of 30 have adopted a far more surgical approach to destroying money markets: they want investors themselves to pull their money by implementing such terminally destructive measures as floating NAV, redemption restrictions and capital requirements, which will achieve one thing - get the end user to pull their money from MM and put the cash either into either deposits, where it can then proceed to be "fractionally reserved" into the banking system, or to boost AMZN's 250+ P/E. After all the number under observation is not modest: at $2.6 trillion, this is almost 20% of the market cap of the US stock market. So it was only a matter of time before major money market institutions, in this case Federated first, but soon everyone else, starts screaming and warning that money markets are about to die (which they are). 

How does the current 'recovery', which according to the NBER officially began in June 2009, compare to those of the past? The Council on Foreign Relations updates its recovery chartbook and succinctly notes that "the current recovery remains an outlier among post-war recoveries along several dimensions." Consumers remain reluctant to take on new debt and the stock of debt is lower than it was when the recovery officially began. The global economic slowdown is beginning to manifest itself in world trade. After staging the strongest recovery of the post–World War II era (thanks to the depth of the plunge), growth in world trade has begun to decelerate.

A week ago we brought you Elliott Management's summary opinion on US paper: "We Make This Recommendation To Our Friends: If You Own US Debt Sell It Now." Today, Bill Gross doubles down.

Gross: The #Fed is where bad bonds go to die. Today it was 10-years. Tomorrow 30-years. Stay short my friends.

— PIMCO (@PIMCO) August 14, 2012

It is important to consider how beneficial a debt reset — so long as society comes out of it in one piece — will be in the long run. As both Friedrich Hayek and Hyman Minsky saw it, with the weight of excessive debt and the costs of deleveraging either reduced or removed, long-depressed-economies would be able to grow organically again. This is obviously not ideal, but it is surely better than remaining in a Japanese-style deleveraging trap. Yet while most of the economic establishment remain convinced that the real problem is one of aggregate demand, and not excessive total debt, such a prospect still remains distant. The most likely pathway continues to be one of stagnation, with central banks printing just enough money to keep the debt serviceable (and handing it to the financial sector, which will surely continue to enrich itself at the expense of everyone else). This is a painful and unsustainable status quo and the debt reset — and without an economic miracle, it will eventually arrive — will in the long run likely prove a welcome development for the vast majority of people and businesses.

Remember - when in doubt, always blame it on the software: that way the risk of tainting one's "business model" no matter how irrelevant and anachronistic it has become, may be preserved - after all it is the vacuum tube's fault. If possible add the words "glitch", "dormant" and "stupid algo" and always, always, use the passive voice: once again - it can never be insinuated that a carbon-based lifeform (human, monkey, Mary Schapiro) was behind the screw up. Sure enough, here comes Knight two weeks after nearly destroying its trading platform responsible for 10% of the daily market churn, and to a big extent for the endless levitation to VWAP on low volume we have seen every day for the past 3 years, and blaming it all on "dormant software" which was accidentally reactivated. From Bloomberg: "Knight Capital Group Inc. (KCG)’s $440 million trading loss stemmed from an old set of computer software that was inadvertently reactivated when a new program was installed, according to two people briefed on the matter. Once triggered on Aug. 1, the dormant system started multiplying stock trades by one thousand, according to the people, who spoke anonymously because the firm hasn’t commented publicly on what caused the error. Knight’s staff looked through eight sets of software before determining what happened, the people said." Of course, one may ask just why did someone put in code in the first place, that multiplied stock trades by one thousand: is that the special turbo buy option reserved for when the Liberty 33 phone rings?

Last Friday we presented the dismal performance (and major divergence with broad equity markets) of recent IPOs and reflected on what this meant for the millions of retail investors who were 'suckered' into these must-win dot-com-renaissance names. Again and again one name keeps coming up with regard to the worst-performing and most-1999-dot-com #fail-like names - Morgan Stanley. Since November of 2011, Morgan Stanley has 'successfully' brought three of the biggest disasters of Silicon Valley to market - GRPN, ZNGA, and of course, most recently, FB. What is stunning is that since the GRPN IPO on 11/3/11, investors in these three 'new' normal names have lost an incredible $58 billion in market cap with GRPN and ZNGA now down 70% from their IPO price and FB down 44%. Perhaps more intriguing is that IPOs keep coming as there appears to be a 'muppet' born every day.

Instead of actually doing the work to figure out what is going on behind the headlines, both Goldman (which also hiked its Q3 forecast GDP to 2.3% as a result) and Bank of America rushed to come to market with their congratulatory notes praising the "far stronger than expected" retail sales number. And as a result clients of these two banks will be promptly skewered as happens now virtually all the time on belief that the "rebound" in the economy is real instead of an ARIMA driven seasonal adjustment abortion.

The July retail sales beat came as a surprise to many: an 0.8% increase (full series here) at a time when the data was supposed to grow at less than half this would surely be indicative of a potential turnaround in the US economy. Then we decided to do a quick spot check if maybe the Census Bureau had not adopted one of the BLS' worst habits: fudging seasonal adjustment factors. The reason for this is because we happened to notice that Not Seasonally Adjusted (full series here) retail sales data in July actually declined by 0.9% from $405.8 to $402 billion. Of course, if the Census Bureau was using a consistent, or at least remotely comparable July seasonal adjustment factor as it has in the past, this would make sense and we would move on. So we decided to look at what the July seasonal adjustment variance over the past decade has been. What we found would have shocked us if indeed this is not precisely what we expected: with the July seasonal adjustment factor routinely subtracting a substantial amount from the NSA number, averaging at -$5.2 billion, in 2012, for the first time this decade, the seasonal adjustment not only did not subtract, but in fact added "value" to the NSA number, resulting in a seasonally adjusted number that was $1.9 billion higher than the NSA number at $403.9 billion.

As was seen in Iraq, it is the people who suffer most from sanctions and economic and civil war and the Syrian people are indeed facing increasing hardships. Hunger is a problem that is growing more acute by the day. As the prices of what little food is available soar, there are increasing signs of desperation among parents seeking to feed families. Prices of fuel and medicine have also soared amid shortages compounding the misery of Syrians and leading to another humanitarian crisis. Professor Nouriel Roubini and other financial experts have pointed out that “you cannot eat gold.” However, people in nations suffering from currency and economic wars can testify as to how they can use gold in order to buy food, fuel and medicine for their families in difficult times. To wit, Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad announced measures facilitating imports of gold bullion coins and bars. Gold bullion imports no longer require a special permit and travellers are allowed to bring gold bullion coins and bars with them into the country, the decree said. Gold is, as it has done throughout history, protecting them and their families from the ravages of currency devaluation and economic collapse.