Archive - Oct 18, 2013 - Story

We already highlighted the return of gold lease rates to subzero yesterday, during the dramatic spike in gold following Gartman's latest sell recommendation. Now, it is time for the banks to also begin admitting that, as SocGen has just pointed out, the gold "physical squeeze returns."

The corks are popping, new valuation metrics are confirming the buy signals, and everyone's a stock-picking genius... that is the image projected by CNBC USA (and Europe) as the Russell 2000 is now up 30.6% year-to-date. However, we can only imagine the elation, exuberance, and ecstasy that would be seen day in and day out in at CNBC Venezuela as the Caracas Stock Index rises its most in a month to a new all-time record high and is now up 312.5% year-to-date...

People need to be aware that worsening the situation of one class of tax payers is never going to improve the situation of another. The particular wealth tax proposal mentioned by the IMF en passant is odious in the extreme, especially as the wealth to be taxed has already been taxed at what are historically stratospheric rates. It is noteworthy that the alternatives discussed by the IMF for heavily indebted states which are weighed down by the wasteful spending of yesterday appear to have been reduced to 'default' (either outright or via hyperinflation) or 'more confiscation'. How about rigorously cutting spending instead? Lastly, a popular as well as populist target of the self-appointed arbiters of 'fairness' are loopholes, but as we have previously discussed, they are to paraphrase Mises 'what allows capitalism to breathe'. Closing them will in the end only lead to higher costs for consumers, less innovation, lower growth and considerable damage to retirement savings.

Earlier this month, we highlighted the fact that the Carlyle Group was the latest in a series of “smart money” private equity firms to decide it was time to exit the suddenly extremely crowded “buy-to rent” residential real estate trade. Well it appears Carlyle has already started to make its move. In case you can’t figure out what appears to be the key logic behind the shift in focus, try this line on for size:

Because the cost of relocating a home is expensive, residents are less likely to move away. “Our customers have no alternative shot at homeownership, nor do they [normally] even have the credit scores and quality to seek anything better,” Mr. Rolfe said. “They never leave the park they are in, and the revenues are unbelievably stable as a result.”

In neo-feudalistic America, always, always go long serfdom.

While Bloomberg's BusinessWeek division is no stranger to provocative covers (here, here and here), it will be interesting to see what reactions among a growing segment of the US population, those that don't believe that unsustainable, reserve currency-threatening spending like a drunken sailor is the equivalent of "wealth creation", its latest cover (to the following story) will provoke: namely, the "crazy", "deadender" tea party.

Perhaps no (albeit brief) conversation sums up how the debacle of the last couple of weeks started than the following exchange that took place on October 2nd, according to Politico,

Obama: "John, What Happened"

 

Boehner: "I Got Overrun, That's What Happened"

The question, prompted by the shutdown in the face of Boehner's pledge to avoid it, set the scene for what Politico notes was a fiscal drama set on a series of complicated relationships. A look back reveals how Republicans waged a fight on Obamacare that their leaders knew they would probably lose but pushed anyways because many in their ranks truly believed that Democrats, like they’ve done so often before, would fold - especially under the threat of an historic default on U.S. debt.

Five years after the "recovery" began, the Fed continues to monetize more debt as part of QE3 than at any time in history, and certainly more than during QE1, Twist, and QE2, as can be seen on the chart below (remember: all that matters is the flow, as we noted well over a year ago, and as even the Fed has finally realized).Why is this important? Because as even the Treasury has now admitted, the Fed's daily liquidity injections are all that matters. Of note: in the just completed week, the Fed's balance sheet increased by over $50 billion (again, in one week), by $100 billion in the past month, and by just shy of $1 trillion in the past year. Incidentally, this is "money" that continues to not make its way into the economy, and every single "reserve" dollar created by the Fed in exchange for monetization, is used by banks to ramp asset prices to now daily record levels.

Presented with little comment aside to note that Google (3rd largest market cap in the S&P 500) is now up 13% on the day... (at $1007.40)

The Dow has been the laggard in all the recent exuberance and opened down this morning once again (as IBM slips a little lower). It seems the 15,380 ("Summers is Out") level is key resistance for now...

The rate of false positives limits the effectiveness of any predictive system. The process of attempting to eliminate false positives is inherently one of diminishing return: even with no expense spared, the effort to eliminate false positives runs into boundaries of signal noise and generation of false positives. To the degree that financial markets are ultimately predictive systems, this suggests a systemic cause of "unexpected" market crashes: signal noise and the intrinsic generation of false positives lead to a false sense of confidence in the system's stability and its ability to predict continued stability.

In what is a staggering example of not only state meddling in the affairs of the "free press", but worse, sheer state idiocy, yesterday the WSJ posted an article on its website revealing that as many as 24 co-conspirators would be exposed shortly in the ongoing Libor manipulation scandal and divulging the names of various individuals on this list. What promptly followed was truly bizarre. As the WSJ reports shortly after posting the article, "a British judge ordered the Journal and David Enrich, the newspaper's European banking editor, to comply with a request by the U.K.'s Serious Fraud Office prohibiting the newspaper from publishing names of individuals not yet made public in the government's ongoing investigation into alleged manipulation of the London interbank offered rate, or Libor." This happened at 7:18 pm London time, after the original WSJ article had already hit the Internet.  What's worse: the names had already been made public, and through this statist intervention, it only assured that everyone would now read just who was on the list.

As the excitement of another US equity day session approaches, the BTFATHers can't help themselves and have lifted the S&P 500 futures to another new all-time record high. Sure, why not, when the Fed has the path illuminated... It would seem the dips that are bought have now been reduced to 3-4 points though what is perhaps more worrisome is that EURJPY has 'decoupled' from the exuberance in the last hour.

Despite the onslaught of confidence-inspiring flim-flam from leadership in Europe and a Spanish Prime Minister (and finance minister) desperate to distract with "soft" survey based data, the hard numbers keep coming in and keep getting worse and worse. The latest, seemingly confirming the IMF's fearsome forecast that European banks face massive loan losses in the coming years, is Spain's loan delinquency rate. Bad loans across Spanish banks amounted to $247 billion in August - a new record-breaking 12.12% of all loans outstanding (now 30% higher than any previous crisis in the history of Spain). Credit creation continues to implode with a 12.3% plunge in total loans outstanding but of course, none of that matters (for now), as Spanish bond spreads (and yields) press back towards pre-crisis lows...

While the downward Q4 GDP revisions were inevitable courtesy of the government shutdown scapegoat (making a joke out of the sellside exuberance in late 2012 which had seen 3% growth some time around now,) starting first at Goldman, and shortly after at JPM both of which cut their Q4 GDP forecasts by 0.5% to 2.0%, we had yet to see the persistent bullish bias spill over into 2014. That just changed following an overnight cut by Bank of America of Q1 2014 growth estimates from 3.3% to 2.8%. Certainly, this is the first of many as once again optimism proves unjustified. But who can blame it: after all there will have been "only" 5 years of QE, and the Fed's balance sheet will be only $4 trillion at December 31, 2013, implying a S&P of 1800.