Archive - Nov 12, 2013 - Story

Over the weekend, in "Venezuela Government "Occupies" Electronics Retail Chain, Enforces "Fair" Prices", we reported that unpopular president Nicolas Maduro ordered the "occupation" of a chain of electronic goods stores in a crackdown on what the socialist government views as price-gouging hobbling the country's economy. Various managers of the five-store, 500-employee Daka chain - the local equivalent of Best Buy - have been arrested, and the company would be forced to sell products at "fair prices." Since then things have escalated rapidly. Because as we queried, and many wondered, the first question that arose is how would Maduro i) assure that prices were indeed kept at their "fair values" and ii) how would the cool, calm and orderly social order be preserved when suddenly everyone scrambles to buy all those flatscreens (which may have certain operational problems once the socialist paradise is hit with daily electric brown and blackouts very soon) they have been dreaming of for years. Now we know: with the help of the army.

The establishment would have us believe that a world without central banks would be 'like all the worst parts of the bible', but as Professor Lawrence White notes, as failures among central banking systems mount, it is time to reconsider the alternative of free banking. Private banks would have better incentives than the federal government to ensure their currency retained its value, because if it didn't, people would bank elsewhere. By contrast, White notes, central banks controlled by the government are able to devalue currency as they see fit and can even quit redeeming notes for coins of real value if they want to do so. It sounds like social-science fiction, but there are numerous real-world examples in history of successful free-banking systems.

Many have likened the ETF structure of today to the CDO structure of the last bubble as the potential catalyst for accelerating moves in risk markets. If that is the case, then the collapse in the shares outstanding of the massively popular and liquid Russell 2000 ETF IWM will likley make some ask WTF?

It would appear that the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) website - required when purchasing a gun or explosive - is capable of handling large volumes of users...

Anyone who says that he or she is prepared to “do whatever it takes”, whether it’s Mario Draghi and Angela Merkel talking about support of the euro, Ben Bernanke talking about preventing deflation, George W. Bush talking about pursuit of terrorism, or Barack Obama talking about growing the economy … is making a preventive war argument just like Curtis LeMay. Not a preventive war against a particular nation, but a preventive war against some conceptual social ill. Of course, you can’t defeat a conceptual social ill like you can defeat a nation. You can’t accept the surrender of General Deflation. These social ills will always be with us in one form or another, which means that a preventive war in the modern context is a permanent and constant war. It may not seem like we are on a war footing when it comes to NSA eavesdropping or QE, because the trappings of war … mobilizations, set battles, etc. … may not be present. But the language associated with a war footing is definitely present, and this is what creates the social space that allows these policies to exist and thrive. I am struck almost every day by how the language of extremism and war pervades our domestic political and social institutions, on both the left and the right.

The Intellistreets system has finally come to the corridors of Las Vegas. So what is Intellistreets? On its website, the system is described as “the only wireless information and control network for sustainability, security and entertainment.” Even more amusing, the company that owns the Intellistreets system is rather appropriately called Illuminating Concepts. The best part is that city officials claim “right now our intention is not to have any cameras or recording device.” This is far from the first time we have learned about the installation of devices that can record audio and video being surreptitiously put in public places.

It was all going according to plan. POMO lifted the S&P 500 instantly 7 points at 1015ET back to unchanged and the mainstream media could discuss the fact that stocks are "off the lows." Then (admittedly non-voting member) uber-dove Dennis Lockhart hit the wires with some oddly hawkish commentary: *LOCKHART SAYS TAPERING 'COULD VERY WELL TAKE PLACE' NEXT MONTH

*LOCKHART SAYS QE NOT MEANT TO BE 'PERMANENT FIXTURE' OF POLICY

Which sent stocks to the lows of the day. We are sure, of course, that these remarks will be walked back by the next Fed speaker but for now, it is clear the market remains entirely headline (and Fed) driven.

Following the DoJ's 'surprising' August decision to block the $11bn merger of American and US Airways (after approving other airline mergers in the recent past), it would appear the parties have reached a settlement:

*U.S. FILES PROPOSED SETTLEMENT IN AMR CASE IN FEDERAL COURT
*DOJ REQUIRES US AIRWAYS, AMERICAN AIRLINES TO DIVEST FACILITIES
*AIRPORT SLOTS TO BE SOLD UNDER PROCESS APPROVED BY U.S.
*AMR SEES COMBINED CO OPERATING 12 FEWER DAILY DEPARTURES AT LGA
*AMR SEES COMBINED CO OPERATING 44 FEWER DAILY DEPARTURES AT DCA

Some of the initial details (Full statement below) include divesting slots at Laguardia and Reagan National. AMR is trading up over 25%...

We missed you yesterday POMO, welcome back...

Whether or not one believes the Fed will taper (then almost instantly un-taper based on the market's reaction) or not in the coming months, Bernanke's "tease" in the early summer this year should give most pause for thought as to just how dependent 'everything' is on the Fed's money printing. As the following chart from Bloomberg's Michael McDonough shows, things changed when big Ben dropped the hint that the punchbowl will not be here forever. There is one region, however, that for now has improved its outlook for 2014 GDP growth since the taper-tease...

It's official - goodbye Gary Gensler, we hardly knew you... as a commodities regulator that is, although Bart Chilton (who is finally also stepping down due to being too burdened by lack of funding to actually do anything) was kind enough to provide much needed perspective on how the CFTC truly works. In place of the former Goldmanite, today Obama will announce that going forward America's top derivative regulator and CFTC head will be Timothy Massad, the Treasury Department official responsible for overseeing the U.S. rescue of banks and automakers after the credit crisis.

Despite ongoing optimism that the housing recovery can withstand fire, brimstone, rising rates, and collapsing confidence (in spite of the fact that indications from most top-down data are to the contrary), investors in US homebuilders may need to adjust this morning. If DR Horton is any indication of a broad trend (and empirical comparisons with its peers show that it is) then the firm's huge miss in its cancellation rate (31.0% vs an expectation of 25.5%) in Q3 should be food for thought. The surge in cancellation was the largest MoM since mid-2008 and jumped to its highest since December 2008.

When it comes to Twitter, there seems to be a discrepancy in the publicly available user data. Recall that according to the company's S-1 filing, Twitter's US monthly user base has risen from 10 million in 2010 to just shy of 50 million. And yet, according to a just released Pew Research poll, a whopping 84% of the US adults were not Twitter users, and perhaps more importantly, of the 16% of adult users, half admitted to using Twitter for news. Narrowing this down even further, close to half, or 45%, of Twitter news consumers were under 30, which implies that roughly 4% of American adults use Twitter as something more than just a place to vent occasionally, and actually have a productive use for the service. So in attempting to reconcile the two vastly differing sets of numbers: one from the company and one from Pew, one wonders: is Twitter merely the latest platform for "socializing" teens who unfortunately for Twitter's advertisers (who between Google, Facebook, Pinterest, Yahoo and so on, seem to have infinite advertising budgets) don't have access to a credit card? And what happens when, just like FaceBook, Twitter's coolness factor disappears and only the hardcore, and quite paltry, news users remain?

In yet another miracle of modern-day macroeconomics, despite the soaring stock market and better-than-expected government-provided data (soft surveys mostly), the small-business (supposedly the core driver of jobs and growth in the US economy) saw optimism collapse at the fastest rate since Sandy (supposedly due to the government shutdown). This is the fifth month in a row that NFIB optimism has missed expectations (the worst - absent Sandy - since March 2012). 7 of the 10 sub-components were negative with the biggest plunge coming from those who expect the economy to improve. Seems like another good reason to BTFATH...