Archive - Nov 2013 - Story

The following five themes (and three bonus ones) are what UBS Andrew Cates believes will be of the greatest importance for global economic and capital markets outcomes for the next five years. There is little to surprise here but the aggregation of these factors and the increasingly binary outcomes of each of them suggest there may be a little more uncertainty about the future than most people sheepishly admit...

...and it appears few, even among his own party, are willing to become Obama's much needed Lazarus.

Late in the life of every financial bubble, when things have gotten so out of hand that the old ways of judging value or ethics or whatever can no longer be honestly applied, a new idea emerges that, if true, would let the bubble keep inflating forever. During the tech bubble of the late 1990s it was the “infinite Internet.” During the housing bubble the rationalization for the soaring value of inert lumps of wood and Formica was a model of circular logic: Home prices would keep going up because “home prices always go up.” Now the current bubble – call it the Money Bubble or the sovereign debt bubble or the fiat currency bubble, they all fit – has finally reached the point where no one operating within a historical or commonsensical framework can accept its validity, and so for it to continue a new lens is needed. And right on schedule, here it comes: Governments with printing presses can create as much currency as they want and use it to hold down interest rates for as long as they want. So financial crises are now voluntary. The illusion of government omnipotence is no crazier than the infinite Internet or home prices always going up, but it is crazy.

While the abysmal rollout of Obamacare hardly needs any additional debacles, a recent hearing by technology experts in Congress added yet another, quite major, wrinkle to an already insurmountable problem: healthcare.gov is so fraught with security flaws, and so bloated with code, that it may easily expose the personal data of millions (we are being generous here) of users - it collects user names, birth dates, social security numbers, email addresses and much more - to even the least experienced of hackers. It gets worse: when asked "Do any of you think today that the site is secure?" the answer from the experts, which included two academics and two private sector technical researchers, was a unanimous "no."  And worse when the experts were asked "would you recommend today that this site be shut down until it is?" three of the experts said "yes," while a fourth said he did not have enough information to make the call. But the worst news of the day the experts said the site needed to be completely rebuilt to run more efficiently, making it easier to protect. Finally, should Obama finally do the right thing and scrap the three year project and start from scratch, "in written testimony, Kennedy said it would take a minimum of seven to 12 months to fix the problems with the site shut down, given the site's complexity and size."

Update: SENATE VOTES 52-48 TO CHANGE RULES ON PRESIDENTIAL NOMINEES, and so the nuclear option has been enacted.

As reported earlier, the Senate was set to vote on Harry Reid's proposal to enact a "nuclear option" to eliminate the filibuster for Obama nominees (and potentially in toto). Watch the vote live on C-Span after the jump.

With gold once again getting the slamdown treatment this morning (even as stocks shrug off any taper tantrum fears) the following article from Venezuelan newspaper El Nacional seems quite prescient. As Liberty Blitzkrieg's Mike Krieger notes, it appears to imply that the struggling South American nation has agreed to sell or swap the gold it still holds overseas at the Bank of England to Goldman Sachs. Perhaps that helps explain where Maduro got the money for the Samsung deal...

With the WTI-Brent spread at 8-month wides, RINs having collapsed, and US investors buoyed by gas prices at the pump near recent lows, the surge in crude oil prices today - by their most since October 2nd - may take some of the 'tax-cut' punch from the party (remember gas prices are still 11.4% above recent seasonal norms). The 2% jump in WTI (and 1.85% rise in Brent over the last 2 days) may have only pushed it back to one-week highs but breaks a trend of lower prices that many have hoped would persist. Desk chatter is that much of this move is a re-up of middle-east premia as Iran's nuclear negotiator says no deal today.

Frustrated by constant republican opposition to pass Obama candidate nominations, Harry Reid may finally invoke the "nuclear option" and end the GOP's ability to filibuster nominees. Politico reports that this may take place as soon as today. Politico reports: "Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid may move toward a historic change in the Senate rules to eliminate the filibuster on most nominations as soon as Thursday, according to senior Democratic aides. Reid is strongly considering calling up one in a group of blocked nominees to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals for another round of votes, furious that Republicans have thwarted the nominations of Robert Wilkins, Nina Pillard and Patricia Millette. If a second go-round fails on that judicial pick, Reid would likely unilaterally move to change the rules of the Senate by a majority vote — the “nuclear option,” Senate sources said." This is not the first time Reid has threatened to go nuclear: "Privately, Senate Democratic leaders insist they prefer confirmation of Obama’s nominees rather than a rules change. And lawmakers have been at this point before." However, it appears that this time he means business.

While the world of mainstream media stock pundits would like investors to believe that there is a wall of money on the sidelines waiting anxiously to go all-in on stocks (bear in mind there's a seller for every buyer and where does the cash on the sidelines go when it is handed over to the seller in return for his stock?), as none other than Charles Schwab notes in this brief Bloomberg TV clip, "investors are less rattled" than most believe, "and have stayed invested" in large part. "There hasn't been a wholesale movement away from stocks," he goes on, busting myths asunder, adding that "investors want to see market-driven conditions, not Fed manipulated ones."

With the market not sure what bad news would send it soaring higher today, here comes the Philly Fed to save the day by tumbling from October's 19.8 to a paltry 6.5, slamming through expectations of 15.0 - the biggest miss since February - and assuring that ahead of today's POMO there is enough ammunition for a stock ramp to end the three days of declines. And now, since the economy is once again sliding on every possible banana peel, we can calmly go back to the "market" ramp.

That didn't take long...

• *SENATE BANKING PANEL VOTES 14-8 TO APPROVE YELLEN AS FED CHIEF
• *REPUBLICANS CORKER, COBURN, KIRK VOTE IN FAVOR OF YELLEN
• *MANCHIN ONLY PANEL DEMOCRAT TO OPPOSE YELLEN FED NOMINATION
• *YELLEN NOMINATION AS FED CHAIRMAN SENT TO FULL SENATE

Given this, the full Senate vote will be a rubber-stamp heralding the new era of Yellenomics as the QEeen takes her thrown.

The relatively new Minneapolis Fed president Narayana Kocherlakota is not known for any insightful, original ideas. Before he took over the MinnFed, he was a research economist at the bank in the late 1990s, a consultant there from 1999 to 2009, taught at the University of Minnesota from 2005 to 2010 and was chairman of the U’s department of economics before being named president of the bank. What he is best known for is his epic flip-flopping: from one of the Fed's staunchest hawks early in his presidential career, to a dove so starved for the Fed's monetary liquidity, he often puts even Charles Evans to shame. He is among the first to suggest that the Fed should hold rates at zero until unemployment hits 5.5% (which it never will unless of course the plunge in the labor participation rate continues) something which both Goldman and Yellen have now adopted as gospel. Nobody knows what precipitated this shocking metamorphosis, although it is said Ben Bernanke can be quite persuasive during unrecorded phone calls. Which brings us to the topic of this post: what does a suspiciously reformed Fed dove do when faced with increasingly louder, conflicting voices that challenge the delusion that the only thing that will fix a failing QE is more QE? He fires them of course.

The confusion reigns. The USD (aside from against the EUR) is bid and Treasuries are being sold along with precious metals in a continuation of yesterday's taper-tantrum. However, stocks (and crude oil) are surging. As JPY's implosion of moar QE from Japan expectations lift carry traders back from the grave.

While the last few days' hearings have focused on the nefarious aspects of the crypto-currency, it would appear that the adoption of Bitcoin is growing in the broad market place. While drugs, assassinations, and money-laundering are the headline-grabbing reasons why this unregulated asset is under the US (and European) government's eye, from ATMs, Subway (sandwich shops), and online retailers, the appeal is growing... and now, as AP reports, Cyprus' largest university will start accepting the digital currency Bitcoin as an alternative way to pay tuition fees.

Sickcare is unsustainable for a number of interlocking reasons: defensive medicine in response to a broken malpractice system; opaque pricing; quasi-monopolies/cartels; systemic disconnect of health from food, diet and fitness; fraud and paperwork consume at least 40% of all sickcare funds; fee-for-service in a cartel system; employers being responsible for healthcare, and a fundamental absence of competition and transparency. Obamacare simply speeds up the coming collapse. The neutron bomb has gone off, unseen by politicos and the Elites who wrote the bill. It is already undercutting fulltime employment, and it will soon add momentum to the free-fall erosion of small business growth and employment.