Archive - Nov 2013 - Story

Economics is all about making rational decisions given some set of likes and dislikes. It doesn’t presume to tell you what you should like or dislike, and it assumes that you do in fact know what you like or dislike. Or at least that’s what economic theory used to proclaim. Today economic theory is used as the intellectual foundation for a political stratagem that goes something like this: you do not know what you truly like, and in particular you do not know your economic self-interest, but luckily for you we are here to fix that. This is the common strand between QE and Obamacare. The former says that you are wrong to prefer safety to risk in your investments, and so we will fix that misconception of yours by making it extremely painful for you not to take greater investment risks than you would otherwise prefer. The latter says that you are wrong to prefer no health insurance or a certain type of health insurance to another type of health insurance, and so we will make it illegal for you to do anything but purchase a policy that we are certain you would prefer if only you were thinking more clearly about all this.

Days after being granted omnipotent "decree" powers, and a week after the Venezuelan president wielded his mighty Marxist sword and jailed 100s of "bourgeois, barbaric, capitalist parasites"; Maduro has unveiled his latest "keep the masses happy" trick...

*VENEZUELA TO SPEND $100M ON SAMSUNG IMPORTS: RAMIREZ
*VENEZUELA TO IMPORT 400,000 SAMSUNG PRODUCTS, RAMIREZ SAYS

Why didn't AAPL get the nod? As Maduro explained yesterday, 15-30% margins are "enough"... Of course, the US is disappointed in the decision to grant Maduro "decree power" - perhaps as they didn't think of it sooner (though they do have the Obamaphone?).

John Fichthorn and his $500MM Dialectic Capital hedge fund may not be household names, but in a time when "fighting the Fed", i.e. trading on fundamentals and not on the Fed's balance sheet, is heresy, John may be the biggest bear around, maybe even bigger than Faber. He revealed as much in an interview earlier when he said that the current trading environment may be the shorting opportunity of a lifetime. To wit:  "we think the [shorting] opportunity with any kind of reasonable timeframe now is really the best we've seen since starting our firm ten years ago, and really since i've been doing this since 1995, and i was a short seller in the middle of the internet bubble, and in many ways, this is more compelling because it makes less sense."

Pardon, that would be taper, but the picture below is quite indicative of what the market thinks of even the most tentative Fed plans to pull the punchflow (because by now even the Top 5 Under 5 traders know the Stock is irrelevant and only the Flow matters) away.

Considering Jan Hatzius and NY Fed's Bill Dudley are close Pound & Pence drinking buddies, when it comes to assessing what the Fed "meant" to say, one should just throw the embargo-minutes penned Hilstanalysis in the garbage and just focus on what the Goldman chief economist thinks. His summary assessment: the minutes were relatively neutral, March is the most likely first taper date although "December is still possible."

The "aggregate demand is God" Keynesian Cargo Cult fetish of focusing on holiday sales is worse than meaningless--it is profoundly misleading. Counting on strong holiday retail sales to "boost the economy" is like eating triple-paddy cheeseburgers and fries to lose weight. The last thing a debt-dependent economy needs is more borrowing to buy excess consumption, and the last thing an economy that imports most of the junk being purchased needs is empty-headed economists declaring that the purchase of more low-quality, mostly needless junk is anything other than a waste of money and resources.

It's time to turn bearish on US Treasuries, is the clarion call from BofAML's Macneil Curry. The impulsive advance in US 10yr yields from 2.669%/2.630% and Tuesday Bearish Engulfing Candles in many of the futures contracts (WN, US & FV), Curry says, means the larger bear trend has resumed. In 10yr yields Curry targets 2.950%/2.992% (the high end of the 4m 2.47%/3.00% area range trade). Pullbacks should be seen as temporary, corrective and an opportunity to go short. This bearish view, he warns, is invalidated on a 10yr yield move below the 2.659% lows of Nov-18. From a trading perspective they express this view by selling USZ3. Downside targets are seen to 128-22/128-12, with a stop above 133-10.

The initial knee-jerk taper-on move was met with reactive buying (as per trading guru Steve Liesman's wisdom) but that hope bounce (really only seen in stocks) has faded now and assets are pressing their extremes. USD pushing higher, Treasury yields higher, stocks and gold lower... Of course, all it takes is for one algo to get the idea of pricing in the inevitable subsequent un-taper and to send the entire risk complex soaring. Silver is now below $20 and Gold is Limit Down

For the second time today (and 4th in the last 3 months) - at least this time on some actual news - Nanex notes that gold futures have been halted for 20-seconds following the release of the FOMC minutes. 1,500 contracts took us down at 6:26ET this morning, this time it was even more...

It took Hilsenrath just under a minute to pump out his 1057 (excluding the title) word thesis on the FOMC minutes. As usual, this is indicative of a comfortable embargo cushion which one can be assured was unbreached, as anything else would be very illegal. "Federal Reserve officials had a wide-ranging discussion about the outlook for monetary policy at their Oct. 29-30 policy meeting. The bottom line was that they stuck to the view that they might begin winding down their $85 billion-per-month bond-buying program in the “coming months” but are looking for ways to reinforce their plans to keep short-term interest rates low for a long-time after the program ends.  They struggled to build a consensus on how they would respond to a variety of different scenarios. One example: What to do if the economy didn’t improve as expected and the costs of continuing bond-buying outweighed the benefits? Another example: How to convince the public that even after bond buying ends, short-term interest rates will remain low."

With the schizophrenia that seems to have availed across the FOMC members (hawks are doves, doves are hawks, tapering is not tightening, etc.) it is not surprising that the minutes reflect some confusion:

• *FOMC SAW `SEVERAL SIGNIFICANT RISKS' REMAINING FOR ECONOMY
• *FED TAPER LIKELY IN COMING MONTHS ON BETTER DATA, MINUTES SHOW
• *METLIFE FOUNDATION, SESAME WORKSHOP PARTNER TO PROVIDE FINL
• *FOMC SAW DOWNSIDE RISKS TO ECONOMY, LABOR MARKET `DIMINISHED'
• *FOMC SAW CONSUMER SENTIMENT REMAINING `UNUSUALLY LOW'
• *FOMC SAW RECOVERY IN HOUSING AS HAVING `SLOWED SOMEWHAT'

So summing up - when we get to an unknown point in the future with an unknown state of parameters, we may do an unknown amount of tapering - maybe possibly. Pre-Minutes: SPX 1791, 10Y 2.75, EUR 1.3444, Gold $1262

Back in July, we highlighted a ridiculous and insulting campaign that McDonalds ran with Visa in which the company tried to help its impoverished employees plan a budget. The only thing the campaign did was embarrass the company by proving that you can’t survive working there. Well the company is right back at it in time for the holidays, with several pieces of advice for its legions of serf employees through its ”McResource” website. Three of the more insulting pieces of wisdom include...

While the FOMC Minutes due out in less than an hour is what everyone is looking forward to, the big surprise announcement of the day was the repeat of a rumor released initially 6 months ago, namely that the ECB is considering negative deposit rates - a concept we first speculated about back in June of 2012. Alas, just like last time, the latest incarnation of the NIRP rumor appears to be merely more hot air (and certainly will be exposed as such once the non-compliant mostly German ECB members hit the tape). One person who says not to hold your breath for an ECB negative rate, is Citi's Valentin Marino, who says not only is a negative deposit rate unlikely before the results of the AQR and stress tests as it would accelerate bank deleveraging, but that it "could worsen the pervasive credit crunch and add to the growth headwinds and deflation risks in in the currency block. It would erode investors’ confidence in Eurozone’s financial institutions and accentuate their relative underperformance."

The cheapest plan now has a deductible of $6350! Before it was $150. Employees making $9 to $10/hr, have to pay $30/wk and have a $6350 deductible!!! What!!!! They can't afford that to be sure. Obamacare will kill their propensity to seek medical care. More money for less care? How does that help them? Here is the craziest part. Employees who qualify for mediCAL (the California version of Medicare), which is most of my employees, will automatically be enrolled in the Federal SNAP program. They cannot opt out. They cannot decline. They will be automatically enrolled in the Federal food stamp program based upon their level of Obamacare qualification. Remember, these people work full time, living in a small town in California. They are not seeking assistance. It all seems like a joke. How can this be the new system? Pelosi, pass the bill to find out what's in it? Surprise! You've annihilated the working class.

The big trouble in massive China that we discussed here is weighing heavily on the liquidity in the debt-fueled nation. As The FT reports, several banks have had to delay or dramatically reduce Chinese bond issues as the impact of a tight onshore credit market begins to be felt. "China is much more funding dependent than in the past," warns one analyst, as issuers are dealing with a string of problems stemming from the drying up of interbank market liquidity and fierce competition from wealth management and trust products for investors’ funds. "Government and policy banks have suffered the most. Now pressure is coming to corporates," one trader pointed out, adding, ominously, "it's going to end pretty ugly unless PBOC changes its attitude to liquidity;" which, of course, is exactly the situation the 3rd Plenum outline is looking to change.