Archive - 2012 - Story

Greece failed to persuade enough of its bondholders to complete the buyback that is so politically mandated by the Troika and so instead of admitting defeat, they have extended the deadline (til tomorrow at 12pm London). Current participation is around EUR26bn vs the EUR30bn target. The bottom line is that the buyback has created an upsurge in price for long- and short-dated GGBs as the 'Greater Fool' theory comes fully into play. Of course, with the Troika making the GGB (and its buyback) now the fulcrum security for Europe's 'break-up' risk, holding out for bigger and better offers seems the game for hedgies at least - there is always the Greatest Fool of EU leaders ready to step in. The paradox, of course, is that the more bonds are being bought the longer the buyback lingers on hopes Greece will keep on bending and keep rising the repurchase price; culminating with these being bought at par and replacing 30bn in old debt with 30bn in new debt. The buyback process has driven prices up dramatically - backfiring considerably on any real gains for the Greek people - but that's hardly the point eh?

The hoaxes remain and grow more cumbersome and obvious every day - and yet, the headline-reading machines and self-referentially-biased managers of stocks justify just one more BTFD episode. To wit, Mark Grant discusses the Greek buyback debacle with its political (and entirely not economic) mandate, noting "Mr. Draghi knows the truth and Ms. Lagarde knows the truth and their credibility is whacked once again;" Berlusconi's potential return in Italy and the hoax of any pretense of an entente cordiale re-emerging between north and south flies out the window; the 'tax the rich' hoax as a solution for years of profligate spending and the 'then vs us' meme that is increasingly spewed forth from DC; and the ultimate hoax of Bernanke's money printing morasse. Happy Monday.

Regular readers are aware that one of our favorite data series when it comes to demonstrating the quality aspect of the American "recovery" (the quantity is sufficiently taken care of with part-time workers filling in positions without benefits and job security in the New Normal) is that showing the annual average hourly earnings growth in nominal terms, which in November posted the tiniest bounce from its all time low print of 1.2%, rising to 1.3%. The problem as noted above, is that this is nominal wage growth. It therefore excludes the impact of inflation which according to the CPI, rose by 2.2% in October, or, in other words, wage growth was negative in real terms. But it wasn't negative only in October and November. When one takes the Y/Y change in average hourly earnings and subtracts the Y/Y change in CPI one gets a very troubling picture: wages have risen below the rate of inflation for 22 consecutive months, with real wages printing their last positive number back in January 2011 and negative ever since!

Or why rumors of a triumphal Berlusconi (head of the PdL party) return to the Italian Prime Ministerial post are greatly exaggerated.

• Central Banks Ponder Going Beyond Inflation Mandates (BBG)
• Bloomberg Weighs Making Bid for The Financial Times (NYT)
• Hedge Funds Fall Out of Love with Equities (FT)
• Obama and Boehner resume US fiscal cliff talks (FT)
• Italy Front-Runner Vows Steady Hand (WSJ)
• Spanish Bailout Caution Grows as Business Lobbies Back Rajoy (BBG)
• Japan sinks into fresh recession (Reuters)
• China economic recovery intact, but weak exports drag (Reuters)
• Greece extends buyback offer to reach target (Reuters)  ... but on Friday they promised it was done
• Basel Liquidity Rule May Be Watered Down Amid Crisis (BBG) ... just before they are scrapped
• Irish, Greek Workers Seen Suffering Most in 2013 Amid EU Slump (BBG)

In a perfect trifecta of disappointment, overnight we had reality reassert itself with a thud as first Japan reported weaker than expected GDP which contracted for a second consecutive quarter and which technically sent the country into yet another recession, merely the latest one in its 30+ year deflationary collapse. Which isn't about to get better: "Analysts expect another quarter of contraction in the final three months of this year due to sluggish exports to China, keeping the Bank of Japan under pressure to loosen monetary policy as early as this month." Of course, there is hope that the new, old PM, Abe will restore money trees and unicorns and get Japan to a 3% inflation target, without somehow destroying bank and insurance co balance sheets in the process, all of which are loaded to the gills with JGBs set to collapse should inflation truly return. Then after Japan, China reported miserable trade data, which flatly refuted all hopes of an economic pick up both in the mainland and across the world. Perhaps the reason China can not openly fudge its trade data, unlike its GDP, inflation, retail sales, industrial production and all those other indicators that none other than the incoming head of government Li Keqiang said are for "reference only" (a fact conveiently ignored when they are all going up, and duly noted when China is self-reportedly sliding) because other countries report the counterparty data and it is very easy to catch China lying in this particular case. And finally there was Europe...

And we thought last month's delayed foodstamp data was bad. The just reported foodstamp number for September was a doozy, with 607,544 new Americans becoming eligible for foodstamps, as a record 47.7 million Americans are now living in poverty at least according to the USDA. The monthly increase was the highest since May 2011, and with August's 421K new impoverished America, over 1 million Americans made the EBT card their new best friend. It is unclear just which atmospheric phenomenon will get the blame for this unprecedented surge in poverty, which comes at a time when the pre-election economic data euphoria was adamant that the US economy was on an escape velocity to utopia. Instead what we do know is that in August and September, over three times as many foodstamp recipients were add to the economy as jobs (324,000). We also know that with the imminent impact of Sandy, which will send foodstamp recipients soaring, it is now looking quite possible that the US may end 2012 with just over a mindboggling 50 million Americans living in absolute poverty and collecting the $134.29 average monthly benefit per person, instead of working. Welcome to the recovery indeed.

In France, Minister for Energy and Environment Delphine Batho recently proposed a light curfew to pertain to “in and outside shops, offices, and public buildings” between 1 a.m. and 7 a.m. beginning next July. Some merchants are up in arms as the rule adds to existing bans such as the forced closing of stores on Sunday and night shopping in general. If enacted, the illumination ban will quickly disperse Paris’s reputation as the “City of Light.” France’s Commercial Council is criticizing the decision as being anti-business and economically damaging. However, the fact that these assumed defenders of free enterprise are surprised at such a proposal is the real puzzle. In a country run by a government that is happily bloodletting the productive capacity of the people through a hike on the income tax and a tax on financial transactions, this latest nanny-state resolve should be fully expected. It is not a power grab but a mere reassertion of the authority the central state has over the private affairs of society. The “lights out” edict is just another piece of evidence of a disturbing truth: the road to serfdom is not ahead of the West; we have already reached its end.

The upcoming week is comparatively less loaded with policy events, though the ongoing fiscal cliff negotiations in the US remain one of the key developments to follow. Important is also the FOMC meeting on Wednesday, where Goldman and everyone else now expect the Fed to increase their monthly asset purchase target under the QE3 program to $85bn per month, up from $45bn per month; this will keep the pace of asset purchases constant after the Operation Twist expires at the end of December, as Zero Hedge predicted the day QE3 was announced. There are is a handful of other central bank meetings in emerging economies (Russia, Indonesia, South-Korea, Philippines, Chile) although consensus expects no change to the base-rate in most cases. On the data front industrial production numbers for October will be released around the world including in the Euro-area, US and China. We also get the US retail sales number and December flash PMIs for the Euro-area and China.

Back in June, we wrote an article titled "On The Verge Of A Historic Inversion In Shadow Banking" in which we showed that for the first time since December 1995, the total "shadow liabilities" in the United States - the deposit-free funding instruments that serve as credit to those unregulated institutions that are financial banks in all but name (i.e., they perform maturity, credit and liquidity transformations) - were on the verge of being once more eclipsed by traditional bank funding liabilities. As of Thursday, this inversion is now a fact, with Shadow Bank liabilities representing less in notional than traditional liabilities.

"what you realize is that the lessons of ’08 will actually result in a much quicker process, a process that I would describe as a “black hole” if and when there is the next financial crisis.... Nobody in America has actually seen, or most people probably can’t even contemplate, what an actual loss of confidence may look like. What I’m trying to struggle with as a money manager, who really seriously doesn’t like to lose money, is how to protect our capital and how to think about the next crisis."

The Political Foundation of the status quo in America is based on a Grand Bargain of Complicity between the top 25% who pay approximately 90% of the taxes, and the bottom 50% who draw on the benefits that come from government. James Madison in the "Federalist Papers" outlined this complicity in the "Tyranny of the Majority". What is becoming painfully evident is that the political elite in America have falsely over-promised on the entitlements that can be delivered, which is now surfacing in the political turmoil of the Fiscal Cliff negotiations and has the potential to quickly lead towards a constitutional crisis. The frayng of our social compact or Grand Bargain and much more discussed in this excellent clip.

The personal freedom to indulge in 32 ounces of sugary corn-syrup-filled fizzy drinks left New Yorkers with a nasty libertarian taste in their mouths. Now, a few months later, as The Telegraph reports that UK council officials are cracking down on the freedom to choose how your burger is done, warning restaurants not to offer them rare or even medium-rare. Of course, this is proposed to be in the best interests of the eating public focused on "making sure customers are eating meat that is a not a threat to their health." This policy, set to the subject of a legal ruling shortly, leavs some to suggest it could destroy the gourmet burger industry (by mandating lengthy cooking times): "Not only that but you’re opening a Pandora’s box, because where do you finish? Steak tartare, runny eggs … the list is endless." Soylent Green anyone?

For those who think any documented presentation of the physical gold held by the world's oldest central bank usually takes place on a movie set in Burbank, CA here is a video featuring University of Nottingham's chemistry professor Professor Martyn Poliakoff (of all people) from within the bowels of the world's second largest gold repository supposedly disproving this (whose comment "one's first reaction is that it can't possibly be real" may be far more accurate than he can possibly imagine). Why the BOE would change its long held tradition of keeping its gold miles away from the public's eye (very much the same way Bob Pisani's dramatic descent into the GLD vault was a straight-to-DVD B-grade thriller) is anyone's guess, especially now that Goldman is about to take the helm of this most venerable of money-printing institutions. But we are delighted they have: we are confident with this precedent set, that the New York Fed will promptly grant some US chemistry professor the right to inspect and "document" the hundreds of tons of flood-resistant gold it too holds safely 80 feet underground, it not a member of the German parliament of course. Finally, if anyone can see Bundesbank's gold bars, please raise your hand.