Archive - Oct 2013 - Story

"...There's only one thing left to do now, gentlemen... Let's find a way to blame Bush."

Most recently, it was the horrific rollout of Obamacare which as we observed earlier in the week, was all "someone else's fault" but certainly not the government's. Now, as the Snowden whistleblowing scandal has found its third (or fourth) wind courtesy of a furious international response following revelations that Obama was listening in to Merkel and at least 34 other world leaders', it is time for perhaps the most stunning revelation of all: you see, Obama is shocked, shocked to learn that cell phone spying - of virtually everyone on the planet - is going on in here.

How do we get a fundamental change away from this extend-and-pretend which prevails not only in Europe but also the world? History tells us that we only get real changes as a result of war, famine, social riots or collapsing stock markets. None of these is an issue for most of the world - at least not yet - but on the other hand we have never had less growth, worse demographics, or higher unemployment since WWII. This is a true paradox that somehow needs to be resolved, and quickly if we are to avoid wasting an entire generation of youth. Policymakers try to pretend we have achieved significant progress and stability as the result of their actions, but from a fundamental point of view that’s a mere illusion..

• NSA boss Keith Alexander personally informed Obama in 2010 about secret operations targeting German chancellor and president didn’t demand to stop it, Bild am Sonntag reported, citing unidentified U.S. intelligence sources: Bild
• US denies Obama knew of Merkel spying: AFP
• Merkel to seek 'no spy deal' within EU as well as with US: Reuters
• Merkel Violated Rules With Use of Party Mobile Phone, Welt Says
• NSA spied on Merkel’s text messages, mobile phone calls: Bild
• NSA specialists didn’t tap Merkel’s specially secured landline
• Interior Minister Hans-Peter Friedrich says tapping phones is crime and needs to be prosecuted, says trust has evaporated: Bild

It seems 'someone' needed to run the S&P futures market back over Friday's highs just to flush the stops one more time. Thanks to some JPY-selling that momentum was ignited and S&P futures just made new all-time-highs... because, well why not. Soon after the stops were run in stocks, JPY started to revert and so are futures. Gold, oil, and treasuries are all unch for now as is EURUSD.

March 18, 1996. It was the height of the dot-com boom years. And gracing the cover of Fortune magazine was a photo of a rather smug looking Alan Greenspan, then Chairman of the US Federal Reserve.  The headline across the top-- "It's HIS economy, stupid". The inside story was entitled "In Greenspan We Trust".  And the article went on to suggest that, no matter WHO won the presidential election that year between Bill Clinton and Bob Dole, Greenspan would still be running the economy. And handily.  This is a major testament to the state of our financial system. We award a tiny banking elite nearly totalitarian control over our money supply... and by extension, the economy.  We're just supposed to trust that they're good guys. Competent guys. That they know what they're doing.  Fast forward almost two decades. Long Term Capital Management. The NASDAQ bubble. The real estate bubble. The credit crunch. The mortgage crisis. The banking crisis. The sovereign debt crisis.

Since mid-October the US$ has been under siege. However, As BofAML's MacNeill Curry notes, that decline is showing signs of exhaustion from which a base and correction higher is likely. Curry's "basing" view is further supported by the US Treasury market, where yields (particularly 5yrs and 10yrs) are poised to bottom and turn higher over the coming sessions...

You didn’t want to be the guy chosen to tell Stalin that the wheat crop failed or the production quotas on trucks and cars were not met. Why? Because despots always blame people, not systems. In the same way, you don’t want to be the guy chosen to tell Obama that his health care websites are a disaster. But that’s what they are, and he’s managed to blame everyone but himself. The problem is that government is not the best means to do anything well. The problem is the absence of two crucial things: the knowledge to assemble the resources properly and the means to make the economic assessment of the value of competitive resources.

It's like deja vu all over again...

"Since September 2011's $1921 peak, gold has been in correction mode," Mark Faber tells Barrons in this brief clip, but the overhwleminly bearish sentiment combined with the major accumulation (most notably by China) means "gold prices have probably bottomed," and some gold mining stocks are well positioned. While Faber has recently expressed concern at the potential for a major correction in stocks, he notes that there are pockets of value worth investigating including European Telcos and Indo-China travel-related stocks. However, the Gloom, Boom & Doom report writer warns that "stocks could be dead money for a while."

If you’re anything like us, you may have reached the conclusions that:

1. Our elected officials are charting a course to a fiscal disaster.
2. The Fed is repeating past mistakes by setting us up for another bust.

After the drama of the debt ceiling debate and the Fed’s non-tapering surprise, we see no reason to doubt these views. But the latest developments got us thinking, and we have an unusual proposal.

As Citi's Matt King recent showed, when it comes to stepwise, quantum leap repricings of widely held credits, the revelation is usually a very painful, sudden and very dramatic one. This can be seen nowhere better than in the default of Lehman brothers, where while the firm's equity was slow to admit defeat it was nothing in comparison to the abject case study in denial that the Lehman bonds put in. However, as can be seen in the chart below, when it finally came, and when bondholders realized they are screwed the morning of Monday, Septembr 15 when the Lehman bankruptcy filing was fact, the move from 80 cents on the dollar to under 10 cents took place in a heartbeat.It is the same kind of violent and anguished repricing that all unsecrued creditors in the coming wave of heretofore "denialed" municipal bankruptcy filings will have to undergo. Starting with Detroit, where as Reuters reports, the recovery to pensioners, retirees and all other unsecured creditors will be.... 16 cents on the dollar!...  or less than what Greek bondholders got in the country's latest (and certainly not final) bankruptcy.

Ye Gods! Even that discredited old hack, Alan Greenspan ? the man who bears as much responsibility as anyone for the hypertrophy of state- supported finance and thus for the havoc it continues to wreak ? is at it, trying to tell us that because of a low ‘equity premium’ (read: ludicrously intervention?depressed bond yields), the ‘momentum’ of stocks ‘is still relativel. Such a market is therefore likely to suck everyone in to its last, Plinian updraft no matter how stretched everything becomes and no matter how great the risk of being cast into perdition in the pyroclastic collapse to come.

Now that the prevailing mainstream media consensus has finally caught up with our "tinfoil" view, which for years was mocked by the same media, usually on an ad hominem basis, and even the Fed has realized (confirmed by the latest Jackson Hole symposium) it is in a trap as it understands it has to end the market's dependency on monetary heroin but has no idea how to do it without in the process undoing five years of central planning, we have seen some spectacular opinion flip flops take place. Which aside from the occasional headscratcher such as David Rosenberg going bull-retard (we once again wonder: just what does Ray Dalio serve in his cafeteria?) have been almost exclusively from optimistic to pessimistic, or as we call it, realistic. And as the case may be, such as with John Mauldin and his latest missive to potential clients, A Code Red World, a very deep and red shade of pessimistic.

As if the technological problems facing Obamacare were not enough, a potentially major "legal glitch" could cause the healthcare law to unravel in 36 states. As the LA Times reports, The Affordable Care Act proposes to make health insurance affordable to millions of low-income Americans by offering them tax credits to help cover the cost. To receive the credit, the law twice says they must buy insurance "through an exchange established by the state." But 36 states have decided against opening exchanges for now. Critics of the law have seized on the glitch. They have filed four lawsuits that urge judges to rule the Obama administration must abide by the strict wording of the law, even if doing so dismantles it in nearly two-thirds of the states. And the Obama administration has no hope of repairing the glitch by legislation as long as the Republicans control the House..."This has the potential to sink Obamacare. It could make the current website problems seem minor by comparison," noted on policy expert.