Archive - Aug 2012 - Story

Just when you thought it was safe to hope that saved-or-created jobs were at least not plunging anymore, the truth is out with online job postings. As opposed to de minimus surveys, or BLShit small pool analysis, the 'fact-based' number of 'New Help Wanted' Online Ads plunged in July by its most since January 2009! The total number of Online Help Wanted Ads also fell by its most in a year and as Credit Suisse points out, in 7 of the last 8 times when we see an outlier of this magnitude it is followed by outright declines in non-farm payrolls and private payrolls.

UPDATE: Energy, Tech, and Staples have reverted BUT Financials and Utilities remain near lows...

The knee-jerk reaction was very clear - selling pressure on both US equities and gold as no mention of NEW QE disappointed and no language change per se to indicate its imminent arrival. No rate extension droive the front-end of the Treasury curve higher in yield and the curve is flattening as 30s and 10s outperform and 2s underperform. EURUSD dropped 70 pips to 1.2235 as USD strength was across the board. Commodities are broadly lower as USD strengthens BUT gold and stocks are rebounding back towards unchanged from pre-FOMC now. As we post, only the USD seems to be holding its change as Gold, Stocks, and TSYs have retraced the immediate reaction - though stocks looked like a trickle up to VWAP so be careful.  FX markets remain the most 'skeptical' as the rest revert from kneejerk for now...

• Pre: 10Y 1.4950, ES 1376, DXY 82.7, gold 1603, IG 105.75, HY 97.25, HYG 91.39, WTI 88.81
• Post: 10Y 1.51, ES 1374, DXY 83.1, gold 1600, IG 105.4, HY 97.28, HYG 91.42, WTI 88.85

And not only did the Fed disappoint, but it didn't even extend ZIRP through 2015. Sorry Hilsenrath, better luck next time

• FED SAYS IT `WILL PROVIDE ADDITIONAL ACCOMMODATION AS NEEDED'
• FED REPEATS EXCEPTIONALLY LOW RATES AT LEAST THROUGH LATE 2014
• FED SEES INFLATION OVER MEDIUM AT OR BELOW MANDATE LEVEL
• FED TO KEEP REINVESTING HOUSING DEBT TO MORTGAGE SECURITIES
• FED SAYS HOUSING SECTOR REMAINS DEPRESSED
• LACKER DISSENTS FROM FOMC DECISION

And if markets are surprised by this goose-egg according to which the September FOMC will at best be the ZIRP extension that was supposed to take place today just so Congress can sort its own mess out with the Fed, wait until Draghi confirms what we said last week: that he was merely posturing and is totally impotent without the Buba's blessing. Then you will see pain in a market which is 5% higher than where it would be absent his headfaked posturing.

The following chart from today's TBAC presentation slidedeck should put to bed all debate of not only what the US government spends its money on (of which about half is generated through tax collection and half is borrowed), but also what the trends in current year spending are compared to 2011. In summary: of the 4 biggest categories HHS (Medicare & Madicaid), Social Security or together Welfare, Treasury and Defense, Welfare is higher, Treasury is higher, and Defense is not only lower, but has lost to Treasury as the third biggest expense category year to date.

While everyone awaits Germany's bowing to European pressure to share in their supposed wealth, the sad truth is that the clear line between core and peripheral economies is blurring every day as the lead-boots of Portugal, Spain, and Greece, drag 'until-recently high-fliers' Germany and France down to the bottom. The release this week of European Manufacturing Confidence data shows that all the nations are now contracting as core converges DOWN to periphery in a vicious circle. This is critical as suddenly the clock for a Euro-break-up is speeding up: every day that Germany delays to intervene and acquiesce bailout the PIIGS, the PIIGS implied-leverage declines as Germany is being dragged to their level - and thus 'unable' let alone 'unwilling' to share some burden.

We already know that the National Security Agency will soon capture all communications — phone calls, search histories, web history, e-mails, passwords, etc — in their Utah data centre. In Britain, a dangerous precedent is being set. "A teenager arrested over a malicious tweet sent to Team GB diver Tom Daley has been issued with a warning. Dorset Police said the 17-year-old boy was held at a guest house in the Weymouth area on suspicion of malicious communications and later bailed. After coming fourth in the men’s synchronised 10m platform diving event on Monday, Daley, 18, from Plymouth received a message on Twitter. It told him he had let down his father Rob, who died in 2011 from cancer." Arrested and cautioned for expressing an opinion. Not for threatening violence. Not even for racial or sexual abuse — as happened in March when a student was convicted of incitement to racial hatred after he tweeted a series of racial slurs. Just for expressing an opinion that the authorities found to be distasteful.  I admit, it was a distasteful comment. But the idea that the government should arrest the person who made it is far, far, far more distasteful still. Meanwhile, the number of bankers arrested for rigging LIBOR remains at zero.

While hope remains, Citigroup's Steven Englander notes that the much stronger than expected ADP has probably shifted market expectations towards neutral, but like us he believes the market remains more hopeful of an aggressive fed than wary of disappointment.  In parentheses below, we indicate what we think will be negative, neutral and positive surprises from an investor viewpoint.

Still scratching your head over what happened this morning (this would be everyone at the SEC but not their porn webstream vendors - even they by now realize just how broken the market is)? Don't be  - courtesy of Dennis Dick and Premarket Info, here is a 20 minute video explanation parsing the tape and showing precisely what happened that impacted nearly 150 stocks.

Forget Bane, Knight is going dark:

*KNIGHT CAPITAL EXPERIENCING DELAY IN PROCESSING STOCK ORDERS
*KNIGHT CITES 'TECHNOLOGY ISSUE' FOR PROCESSING DELAYS
*KNIGHT TELLS CLIENTS TO EXECUTE TRADES ELSEWHERE FOR NOW

Just when you thought the Li(e)bor scandal had jumped the shark, Germany's Spiegel brings it back front-and-center with a detailed and critical insight into the 'organized fraud' and emergence of the cartel of 'bottom of the food chain' money market traders. "The trick is that you can't do it alone" one of the 'chosen' pointed out, but regulators have noiw spoken "mechanisms are now taking effect that I only knew of from mafia films." RICO anyone? "This is a real zinger," says an insider. In the past, bank manager lapses resulted from their stupidity for having bought securities without understanding them. "Now that was bad enough. But manipulating a market rate is criminal." A portion of the industry, adds the insider, apparently doesn't realize that the writing is on the wall.

Markets are toast as Louis Bacon plans to give back 25% of his fund to investors as "liqudity and opportunities have become more constrained." As Bloomberg notes, Bacon is struggling to make money in his typically macroeconomic trend exploiting fund as "the risk on / risk off environment appears to be an abiding presence that has keep engagement low." Macro funds lost an average of 1.3 percent in the first six months of the year. Bacon, pointed out that "Markets are increasingly distorted by central banks’ attempts to squeeze drops of growth from an over-indebted private sector across much of the developed world." The U.S. markets are hindered by "a caustic political environment and an anti-business administration," he said and pulls no punches as he goes after inept regulators in Europe and the US, and describes the state of affairs as "Disaster Economics, where assets are valued based on their ability to withstand a lurking disaster as opposed to what they may yield or earn, is now the prism through which investors are pricing markets." And perhaps most 'distorted' is the credit market where trading in individual corporate credits has also been 'decimated' he said. "I shudder to think of the stress that is going to occur during the new credit liquidation cycle."

Anyone who has had the displeasure of trading this market since the open will be well aware that the massive selling that started at 3:59:57 PM yesterday just as we showed, appears to have continued into today, after an algo, supposedly one impacting NYSE stocks this time, and proving that the entire market is a broken joke, not just Nasdaq and BATS, and one which is linked to Knight Capital, has continued this morning, sending countless stocks into the proverbial "batshit" formation, with moves of 10% higher and lower for no apparent reason. That's ok: the SEC and various other regulators are all over it, and will guarantee that the markets "are fixed." In other news, today we will report the latest massive outflow from domestic media funds. In the meantime, here are the first two picture of stocks getting pounded in super slo-mo courtesy of Nanex. Behold "perfectly normal" bids, offers and prints.

Expectations that the American manufacturing sector would expand after "briefly" contracting in June were promptly doused after the Manufacturing ISM printed at 49.8, below expectations of an expansionary print of 50.2, and essentially unchanged from last month's 49.7. Where did offsetting growth come from? The most hollow of indicators - Inventory - which keeps on being built up in expectation of a demand spike that never comes. This is also the third miss in a row for the ISM, whose most watched component, the Employment index, slid from 56.6 to 52.0 confirming that the earlier ADP number was a total noisy fluke as usual. The question: is the data as bad as possible for it to be good for stocks remains unanswered, especially with some Knight algo wreaking havoc across all stocks as of this posting.