Archive - Apr 24, 2013 - Story

Things in the US have gotten so bad, not only are most online dealers backlogged weeks and months in advance for most PMs (as the CEO of Texas Precious Metals explained in detail), but respected bullion vaults are also now on the verge of running out of inventory. As Reuters described, "Michael Kramer, president of Manfra, Tordella & Brookes (MTB), a major U.S. coin dealer in New York, has been inundated by orders from existing and new wholesale and retail customers. "It's panic. This is one of the busiest times in quite a while. People think gold's at the lows and they want to take advantage." It was only a matter of time before the last bastion of paper money, London, also succumbed to the soaring demand for physical, and sure enough moments ago Bloomberg reported that the "Britain’s Royal Mint, established in the 13th century, sold more than three times more gold coins this month than a year earlier as prices declined." Sales are more than 150 percent higher than last month, according to Shane Bissett, director of bullion and commemorative coin at the Royal Mint.

Since reams of Powerpoint presentations, or pages of PDFs seem to pass most 'investors' by these days, PIMCO's Bill Gross' new chosen media appears to be Twitter's 140 characters. He is on a roll of soundbite superbness. Today's headline suggests just four little words we should all be aware of: "Bubbles are getting Bubbly."

Gross: #Yen carry trade driving all asset prices higher. Bubbles getting more bubbly. Will #QEs produce growth?

— PIMCO (@PIMCO) April 24, 2013

Yesterday's #Hash-Crash has brought the tough reality of just how entirely mechanized the so-called equity 'markets' have become in the US to every mom-and-pop who watch nightly news. Mainstream media is even discussing the correlations between JPY carry trades and equity indices now as CNBC's Rick Santelli notes "the high-speed casinos our markets have become". All things we have discussed for years. But there is one potentially fascinating insight from the ongoing robotization of the TBTF banking sector - Wall Street jobs are now at an all-time record low. Once again, it would appear, that cost-cutting demands (and a government backstop and huge subsidy no matter how bad the things are that you do) trumps any job creation. As Joe Saluzzi explains to CNBC's Rick Santelli in this excellent clip, the "liquidity is fickle" - the fake-tweet was a mere catalyst, he added, "we see these flash-crashes every day." The benefits for the major exchanges far exceed the conflicts of interest of these so-called "market-makers" who front-run their clients millisecond by millisecond.

Another day, another set of horrible European data that merely stokes the idiocy of bad is good front-running of an ECB rate cut next week. We remain somewhat skeptical that a rate-cut will actually do anything here for this 'fragmented' continent when simple old 'free-money' is not fixing anything. But anyway... European stocks surged ahead again - even after yesterday's best day in 9 months. The difference today... European sovereign bonds deteriorated quite notably with Italian spreads wider by 10bps (despite its equity market's strength reasoned on the possibility of a new PM). Spain and Italy are up 6% and 5% respectively this week, and their bond spreads -32bps and 21bps respectively. We are sure this will end well. No pressure, Mr. Draghi...

Update: we decided it may be an opportune time to remind readers of this particular fact, not opinion, not propaganda, not insinuation.

One of the main, unintended consequences of this development to prop up markets at all costs, even if it means removing all logic and reliance on fundamental data, has been the complete evaporation of interest in any finance-related media, forcing the bulk of financial outlets to rely on such cheap gimmicks as slideshows, pictures of kittens, trolling and generally hiring liberal arts majors straight out of school to copy and paste articles while paying them minimum wage, and providing absolutely no insight (and then wondering why the Series ZZ preferred investors will never get their money back, let alone the A round). However, nowhere is this more obvious than in the relentless imploding viewership of once financial media titan, CNBC, which lately has become a sad, one-sided caricature of its once informative self, whose only agenda is to get the most marginal Joe Sixpack to dump his hard-earned cash into 100x P/E stocks, and where according to data from Nielsen Media Research, the total and demographic (25-54) viewership during the prime time segment (9:30am - 5:00 pm) just tumbled to 216K and 40K - the lowest recorded viewership since mid 2005 and sliding.

The heart and soul of the Keynesian Cargo Cult is the dogma that the cure for all economic ailments is more aggregate demand, i.e. consumption. The Keynesians' fanatic faith in boosting consumption would be merely childishly naive if it didn't directly support a parasitic neofeudal debt-serfdom. Sadly, Krugman and his fellow cultists' single-minded parroting of "aggregate demand" makes them well-paid lackeys and toadies for an extractive neofeudal-neocolonial debtocracy. If you set out to design a system that would implode with devastating consequences, it would be the Keynesian Cargo Cult's neofeudal financialization debtocracy. All the incentives favor increasing debt, misallocation of capital and mindless consumption, and all the disincentives weaken investments in productivity and the creative destruction of malinvestments and subsidies to favored cartels.

While the dismal news of endlessly rising food stamp recipients in the US seems to be glossed over by most of the media because, well, stock markets are at all-time highs, in Britain, things are becoming increasingly awful. As the FT reports, the number of people receiving emergency food rations has surged from 130,000 to almost 350,000 in the past year. As inflation eroded incomes and government austerity pushed hundreds of thousands into crisis, the 'working poor' has emerged. The food bank provider estimates about half of the households it helped has at least one person in work. During the Great Depression, the desperation was graphically evident with long lines of families waiting for soup; in the new depression, the record levels of starving and needy are hidden by a blanket of EBT cards and direct transfers from government. The situation is no less terrible - no matter how hidden from view. As one food bank manager noted, "the fundamental thing is that more and more people are living an increasingly precarious life financially."

As we have discussed numerous times over the past year, there is a quiet movement among the world's central banks to diversify their reserves away from the pejorative USD. Whether it is direct trade linkages, hording physical precious metals, or simply buying foreign sovereign debt, there is a trend emerging. The latest defection, as BusinessWeek reports, is Australia's plan to invest about 5% of foreign currency reserves in China. The decision "represents the first time that the RBA will have invested directly in a sovereign bond market of an Asian country other than Japan," the country's deputy governor noted, adding that this step was an "important milestone" to "stronger financial linkages" leaving Australia "better positioned to benefit from the shift in global economic growth towards Asia." Of course, palling up to its closest trade partner is a big driver, but in a somewhat barbed comment on the strength of the AUD, Lowe noted, "quantitative easing that has taken place in a number of countries is having a significant effect on exchange rates of freely floating currencies... which is clearly making for difficult conditions in certain parts of the Australian economy."

This may be a trick question.

While immediately after earnings, we were treated to a plethora of self-justifying talking heads exclaiming how wonderful the worst news was, how positive the future looked, how leveraged dividends were great, and how awesome iPhones 5S sales will be inevitably; it seems the market (which one bright chap noted 'must know something' when the stock was soaring) is now testing its recent lows... The selling appears to have started once Tim Cook began pitching the future like a European politician and bitching about the competition as opposed to discussing the current state of affairs. AAPL has dropped almost 9% from its overnight highs and is near 17 month lows.

So much for the great American CapEx recovery. Moments ago the Census department released the March Durable Goods report, thanks to which one can lay to rest any hope of a recovery in the US economy, with the headline number printing an absolutely abysmal -5.7%, an epic swing from the +5.7% (revised lower of course to 4.3%) in February, and confirming the recovery is dead and buried. Although we are confident the propaganda spin is just waiting to be unleashed: after all it is possible that March weather was both too hot and too cold, thereby making the number completely irrelevant - after all it is always the inclement weather's fault when the economy does not act as predicted by some economist's DSGE model of reality and stuff.

While precious little space has been dedicated in the US media to what remains an uncontained epidemic of the H7N9 bird flu in China, cases continue to spread even as the number of deaths mount, taking at least 22 reported lives at last check. Things just got from bad to worse, as the bird flu is now following in the footsteps of the 2003 SARS breakout, with the first reported case outside of China hitting newswires overnight.

• The Inland Empire bubble is back: BMW to Amazon Space Demand Spurs Rush to Inland Empire (BBG)
• Tamerlan Tsarnaev was on classified government watch lists (Reuters)
• Brothers in Boston Bombing Case Said Drawn to Radicalism (BBG)
• Germany Spurns Calls to Loosen Austerity Stance (WSJ)
• Spain poised to ease austerity push (FT)
• What ever happened to France's voice in Europe? (Reuters)
• U.S., South Korea Reach Nuclear Deal (WSJ)
• U.S. Sees No Hard Evidence of Syrian Chemical Weapons Use (BBG)
• RBA Set to Invest Foreign Currency Reserves in China, Lowe Says (BBG)
• FedEx Wins $10.5 Billion Postal Contract as UPS Shut Out (BBG)

When it comes to Italy, the market may have priced in every possible favorable outcome (the ECB and Kuroda will take care of the rest), but the country still has no Prime Minister and its economy continues to be in freefall with record unemployment and ever higher bank non-performing loans month after month. And while it may have elected a new figurehead president after 6 attempts last week, the choice of Prime Minister will hardly be as simple, especially since as the WSJ reports, this will likely be Enrico Letta, deputy of the Democratic Party (which as a reminder is in complete chaos following last week's internal coup and the resignation of its head Bersani over the weekend), at a time when Berlusconi's PDL lead in the polls continues to increase. Why the Bunga veteran would agree to a premiership by his opponents remains unclear, and with a parliamentary vote coming, it is doubtful just how smooth the approval process will be in a country best known for its dysfunctioning political process.