Archive - Oct 2013 - Story

Today's JPY-driven opening ramp pulled the S&P 500 off its key trendline but is fading now as once again hope turns to despair and reality. As BofAML notes, while other US equity indices remain modestly constructive after a 2-day rally on nothing, the S&P 500 remains poised for a downside test (and likely break) of its 11-month trendline at 1666 (exposing the August 28th lows at 1627).

Not a day goes by without a story in the MSM by some industry shill about the imminent energy independence of the Great American Empire. Shale oil and gas will revolutionize the American energy prospects. We have hundreds of years of oil and gas under our feet. We will be a net exporter in the next few years. A glorious future awaits. It’s all hype. Royal Dutch Shell is one of the biggest corporations in the world, with financial resources greater than 99% of all the organizations on earth. Their CEO probably knows a little bit more about oil exploration than the Wall Street systers and CNBC bimbos. His company has poured $24 billion into shale exploration in the U.S. It has been a huge failure. If Shell can’t make it profitable, who can?

Perhaps, in an epic display of Mother Nature's wrath, the idiocy that is being exhibited in Washington will come to an end as the entire CD Metro Area is now on Tornado Watch. Of course, should the horrible weather event strike, it will be nothing less than a politician's dream to walk among the rubble and explain how it was "the other side" that caused this...

On September 26, when we wrote "As US Default Risk Spikes To 5-Month High, Here Is How To Trade The Debt Ceiling Showdown", we suggested a simple 1M/1Y Bill flattener, which has since resulted in a massive profit to those who put on the trade with appropriate leverage, leading to the steepest outright inversion the short-end curve has seen on record. For those who engaged in this trade, it may be time to book profits and move on, as the risk of a negative catalyst - a shutdown/debt ceiling resolution - gets higher with every passing day that we move closer to the October 17 X-Date. However, those who wish to remain engaged in the short end of the bond market where the highest convexity to the daily newsflow can be found, one possible alternative trade is to shift away from cash markets, and into shadow banking, via the repo pathway.

It would appear that President Obama's comprehension of the meaning of the word "negotiate" is different from that taught in the new "common core". Speaking at an event at FEMA, he noted:

*OBAMA: WILL NEGOTIATE AFTER GOVT OPENS, DEBT CEILING RAISED
*OBAMA: WON'T NEGOTIATE UNDER 'THREAT OF ECONOMIC CATASTROPHE'
*OBAMA TELLS CONGRESS TO 'MOVE BEYOND THIS MANUFACTURED CRISIS'

But given his comments last week on the markets' need to see this as a crisis, perhaps the best word to use to describe this farce is "inconceivable."

As we noted earlier there are some 'possible' scenarios that enable payments to be made on Treasuries prioritized over other payments but it would appear the short-term Treasury Bill market is becoming not just increasingly anxious about a technical default but is bringing that "X" date closer and closer. The 10/31/13 bill had been the "most risky" of the short-term bills until this weekend but the lack of a deal and no indication of a resolution any time soon has seen risk piling up in the 10/17/13 and 10/24/13 bills - the latter now at 16bps (that is 4 times the yield on the 11/21/13 bill). The 1-month-1-year spread is still inverted (even as USA CDS compresses on the day).

There is a profound disconnect between the Higher Education cartel and the economy and what higher education should cost in a world where information, instruction, and knowledge have fallen to the cost of bandwidth; i.e., near zero.  What was once costly and scarce (knowledge and instruction) is now nearly free and abundant, readily available on any digital device anywhere in the world with a connection to the Web.  There is no need to concentrate students in a campus with a library; every web-connected digital device is a library and university combined. The Higher Education cartel is perfectly happy to encourage degree inflation (at enormous expense, of course), but this zeal for issuing student-loan-funded diplomas fails to address two structural disparities: the one between the skills needed to prosper in the emerging economy and the skills colleges are providing students, and the widening income/wealth/education gap between the wealthy and the non-wealthy.

Having recently showed the diverging "consumer comfort" between the haves and the have-nots, perhaps the following chart more than any other typifies the superficial society in the US today. The question is - what happened in 1999/2000 to break the "what's good for Wall Street is good for Main Street" meme?

There is a reason why John Taylor of FX Concepts, founded in 1981 and which once upon a time was the world's largest FX hedge fund, has kept a very quiet profile lately despite his often bombastic prognostications in 2011 and 2012: the firm may be on the verge of shut down following a recent surge in redemptions resulting from woeful performance in the past three years. FX Week reports that AUM at FX Concepts "have continued to fall and the fund's chief strategist confirms the board's ideas haven't worked so far." It adds that the hedge fund is in "dangerous territory after the departure of several major clients and falling assets under management, prompting the firm's board to rethink its strategy, officials have confirmed." As a result of a surge in redemptions, assets under management have declined from a peak of $14.2 billion in 2007 to less than $1 billion this year, having been at $4.5 billion in early 2012.

While the world's largest hedge fund, the Fed, may not care about the performance of its "bad bank" assets, and thus is largely ambivalent if the US Treasury defaults on the $2 trillion in US paper held by Ben Bernanke, others don't have the luxury of merely printing away any incurred MTM losses. Such as America's largest foreign creditor China, which at last check held at least $1.277 trillion in US Treasurys, which after realizing with a substantial delay that the US Congress is not precisely a "rational actor" and its bonds may be materially impaired in the case of a technical default, is starting to panic. In an oped in the largest media publication, China Daily, vice finance minister Zhu Guangyao, warned that the "clock is ticking" to avoid a US default that could hurt China's interests and the global economy. Somehow we doubt Boehner or Obama are particularly concerned about what happens to "Chinese interests."  Of course, if China so wishes, it can pen an Op-Ed in the NYT and tell the US just what will happen if $1.3 trillion in US Treasurys were suddenly to be dumped in a liquidation fire sale.

One of the most frequent questions related to the debt limit is whether the Treasury could prioritize payments in order to remain below the debt limit while continuing to make what it deems to be essential payments. As Goldman explains below, technical complexities and legal uncertainties might prevent a full prioritization of all payments, but they do believe (trillion-dollar-coin idiocy aside) that the Treasury could ensure that enough cash is available to make interest payments on Treasury securities.

Curious why recently the US stock market has dislocated from its most trusty correlation counterparty: the size of the Fed's balance sheet? Simple: the market is now starting to factor in the end of QE, because while tapering may have been delayed it has not been cancelled. And while the Fed has done everything in its power to destroy the market's discounting function, when it comes to frontrunning the Fed the market can still think ahead. Especially when frontrunning is no longer on the table. Which is precisely the basis for the just released forecast by SocGen's Alain Bokozba, which extrapolates what will happen when the Fed's balance sheet stops rising, and applies the same drop to stocks as was seen at the end of QE1 (-16%) and QE2 (-17%) and concludes that the "end of QE3 would cost the S&P500 15%" and that following that, absent even more QE of course, "the US equity index should remain relatively flat, burdened by higher yields (rate hikes in mid-2015), a higher US dollar and limited earnings growth (Return on Equity is already high), but supported by better economic prospects and a new shareholder value cycle, staving off a bear market." Or, as SocGen calls it, "the Big Sleep."

Having been dismissed on the first day of the shutdown, precious metals have surged back in the last few days and this morning, as no deal was achieved (surprising equity market 'investors' who seemed so sure Friday afternoon), are pressing up to post-shutdown highs. With the S&P near post-shutdown lows, and Treasuries only marginally bid, it seems precious metals are benefitting from the anxiety seen in USA CDS and short-term bills (+3bps more at 14bps today) at the resilience of the status quo.

The government shutdown has removed key algo-dependent headline-making economic data from our daily lives such as incomes, spending and retail sales. However, we have anecdotal signals from trade industry data (pace of dining out has stalled and anyone but the hghest earners are seeing consumer comfort plunge) and from-the-horse's mouth we have CEO comments. Here is what is on the US retailers' mind...