Archive - May 2013 - Story

The first scapegoat is out, and contrary to expectations, no it was not Fabrice Tourre and Bruno Iksil:

• IRS ACTING COMMISSIONER HAS RESIGNED
• OBAMA SAYS IRS ACTING COMMISSIONER GAVE RESIGNATION TO LEW

Goodbye Steven Miller: we hardly knew thee. No really. It is unclear as of this writing what Steve's severance package, and how big his (tax-free of course) lifetime public pension will be.

With the president so busy with teleprompted appearances, one is almost reminded of the presidential campaign when this was an hourly event, although since that is not the case and since the president is engaged in now seemingly endless damage control, one wonders if Ben Bernanke is able to govern the country entirely on his own. So far so good, if the country is just the Stalingrad & Poor 500 of course. As for Obama, he will next speak, following a customary delay, on the "situation regarding the internal  [and less than impartial] revenue service." Let's listen in.

Moments ago, as the WSJ reported that "the White House succumbed to mounting pressure Wednesday and decided to publicly release the chain of administration emails surrounding the controversial Benghazi talking points. The move came a week after public interest in last year's terror attack unexpectedly rebounded with testimony by three State Department employees that reopened lingering questions about the assault. The documents were being released late Wednesday afternoon. While many of the emails have already leaked out, the release of the complete set of communications paints a fuller picture of an administration struggling with how much to disclose about an attack that eight months later remains a focus of partisan division." Courtesy of CNN, the full 100 page pdf of all alleged Benghazi emails is enclosed below (pdf link).

With Paulson's star long gone down, there are few remaining "new generation" hedge fund wunderkinds, especially in a world in which the best performing hedge fund is Federal Reserve Capital LLC - Onshore Fund. One among them is Third Point's Dan Loeb, who continues to be one of the best performing hedge fund managers for the 4th year in a row. He just filed his Q1 13F, amounting to $5.3 billion in disclosed long equity positions, which are summarized below. Of note are the following changes:

• New stakes in Virgin Media ($538MM), Tiffany ($188MM), Anadarko ($105MM), Thermo Fisher ($99MM), Cabot Oil and Gas ($84MM), Hess ($72MM) and others. Some of these overlap with the initiations of David Tepper and David Einhorn especially Hess: did some "idea dinners" take place in Q1 we were not aware of?
• Fully exited stakes in Tesoro, Morgan Stanley, Nexen, Symantec, Herbalife, Illumina, Coke, PVH, Abbott Labs and others.
• Reduced positions in Yahoo, AIG, New Corp, Murphy Oil, Delphi, Lyondell and others
• Added to stakes in International Paper, Abbvie, Dollar General, Constellation, and Ariad

Despite (or in fact 'due to' in this alice-through-the-looking-glass market) terrible data overnight in Europe and weak data this morning in the US, equities went from strength to strength thanks to a pre-European POMO vertical liftathon that pulled equities 1% higher on nothing (nothing at all). This faded but was helped into the close by a JPY-driven spurt to hold above 1650 in the S&P 500 at another all-time high (intraday) and close. Behind the scenes it was a mess though. Treasuries rallied (after recoupling with stocks) and did not play in the final hour frolicking. VIX ended the day higher (and notably divergent). High-yield credit closed weaker and credit markets are significantly divergent now as releveraging begins to bite. The USD pushed on to new highs intraday (highest since July 2010) which we are sure will help earnings. While the market has done its best to pressure the oil markets lower, today saw WTI gush higher back over $94 once again. The big story is in gold and silver which were jerked lower at around the US open (ending the day down 3.8% and 5.6% respectively on the week). As a reminder for those calling for the death of gold - AAPL is down over 8% in the last 3 days (the death of AAPL?).

Several moments ago, TSLA (hardly) surprised the world when it filed an open-ended S-3 (Shelf) statement, as many had expected it was only a matter of time before the company used the recent surge in its stock price to sell shares. Then, a few moments later, TSLA once again (hardly) surprised the world when it announced a joint $450 million convertible bond and 2.7 million share common stock offering. And because a dilution is not a dilution if the founder is participating in the common offering (buying his own equity at an unprecedented price to "anchor" it as a benchmark- sure why not - after all he is making much on all the other equity he has in the firm that he is not buying, as a result), the stock is trading up after hours.

Fake iPhones - who cares? Fake Gucci handbags - spread the wealth? but fake condoms is going too far. As China Daily reports, a underground workshop producing fake brand-name condoms was busted after police found clues on an online marketplace. Police confiscated more than 2 million bogus condoms labeled Jissbon, Durex and Contex. While a knock-off prophylactic is priced at 1 yuan (16 cents), it costs less than 0.2 yuan to produce. In February, police noticed that prices of brand-name condoms were unreasonably low on one online store, and they bought some products (just to check we are sure). As Bloomberg adds, in April, public health authorities from Ghana impounded more than 1 million substandard condoms, many of them imported from China. “When we tested these condoms, we found that they are poor quality, can burst in the course of sexual activity, and have holes which expose the users to unwanted pregnancy and sexually transmitted disease." Another unintended consequence of the Fed's exported inflation?

As we warned six weeks ago, the Fed's ZIRP side-effects have driven auto-lenders to scrape the bottom of the subprime-lending barrel once again (loans to subprime borrowers +18% YoY). It seems, based on the Fed's latest data, that this over-exuberant lending is coming back to bite once again as delinquent balances surge 23.9% year-over-year (though optimistically Experian reflects "obviously, we never want to see a rise in delinquencies or repossessions, but... they are still lower than the recession-level rates,"). As Experian also notes today, repossessions rose 16.9% year-over-year. All this as lending volumes overall rose 9.6% to $726 billion in Q1 2013 but average charge-off amounts rose by 9.8% to $7,401 on each defaulted loan - and the worse is yet to come, as "we continue to move forward, we should start to see more increases as some of the subprime loans coming onto the books begin to deteriorate." This will end well.

With the scandal-ridden administration in major need of a geopolitical distraction, preferably of the exothermic variety, and with Syria still in desperate need of "liberation" by remote controlled-airborne units, the Senate may have put two and two together, and following today's introduction of the bipartisan "Syria Transition Support Act", at least one part of the US legislative process - the Senate Foreign Relations Committee - is set to vote as soon as next week on whether to arm Syrian rebels. The ultimate passage of such a move through Congress is guaranteed to finally escalate the regional mid-east conflict to the next stage with the inevitable involvement of Russia which as a reminder yesterday, in a very demonstrative and well-timed move, exposed a CIA agent operating in the heart of Moscow.

The promises made to the 76 million baby Boomers cannot be met. It's really very simple: promises made when the economy was growing by 4% a year and the next generation was roughly double the size of the generation entering retirement cannot be fulfilled in an economy growing 1.5% a year (and only growing at all as the result of massive expansions of public and private debt) in which the generation after the cohort entering retirement is significantly smaller. We desperately need an adult discussion focused on reality rather than resentment. The solution will require dismantling open-ended, everyone-deserves-everything Medicare, which will bankrupt the nation itself. The solution is currently "impossible". What nobody dares say is that if the 76 million Boomers press their claims to the point the nation is bankrupted, then the next generations (X and Y) will have to wrest political power from the retirees, not for their own sake but for the sake of the nation and for the generations behind them.

As we first noted here (regulation) and here (supervision), the US government has been gradually encroaching on the independence and freedom of the virtual currency. This week, as The Washington Post reports, the government escalated. The feds took action against Mt. Gox, the world’s leading Bitcoin exchange. Many people use Dwolla, a PayPal-like payment network, to send dollars to their Mt. Gox accounts. They then use those dollars to buy Bitcoins. On Tuesday, Dwolla announced that it had frozen Mt. Gox’s account at the request of federal investigators. It’s the first federal action against the currency. Considering the great antipathy the central planners have toward such legacy money as gold and silver, is it any surprise that they would move aggressively and rapidly to halt the emergence of yet another alternative to fiat, especially one which the ECB made it very clear will not be tolerated in an insolvent world. Because all is fair in preserving the FIATH...

It appears that the only thing driving this market higher now is shorts covering. The 'most shorted' names (as we first suggested here) have tripled the performance of the market in the last 4 days (+5.2%). Simply put, this is not a reach-for-yield anymore (which is somehow pitched as a reasonable conservative 'ah shucks' thesis to be buying stocks), this is a dash-for-trash (at a time when financing for this trash is actually blowing higher) - and that always ends well...

We present today's main circus event: Eric Holder, Attorney General of the US, who will field questions from assorted members of the House Judiciary Committee chaired by Bob Goodlatte whose career donors can be found here broken down by industry. As a reminder, earlier today we got this: "House Speaker John Boehner wants to know, "Who's going to jail over this scandal?" He's talking about the Internal Revenue Service's targeting of conservative groups for extra scrutiny of their applications for tax-exempt status." We know the answer: nodody.

When the noisy-as-you-like-prone-to-epic-revisions non-farm-payrolls figure hit on May 3rd, it seems we crossed the streams. From a regime where Fed liquidity was expected to be large for long, discussions started to turn to good-is-bad and Fed 'Tapering' conversations began. Across every asset class, prices began to shift in the direction one would assume based on a less expansive monetization scheme by the Fed. But there is one market; a market incapable of believing reality; that remains in its own world of hope and unicorns. The US equity market has seen one of its best runs ever during this post-NFP period in the face of the rest of the world's pricing in a tapering.

Back in September 2010, following David Tepper's first "balls to the wall" appearance on CNBC, we were not very surprised to learn that the seemingly permabullish hedge fund manager had taken the opportunity to follow up on the brief euphoria his speech generated then to cut 20% of his positions in assorted financial stocks - just the stocks he was praising loud and clear to the financial station with the plunging viewership.  Moments ago, Tepper's Appaloosa filed its 13F for the quarter ended March 31, so yes, before his most recent appearance yesterday. Yet we were somewhat confused by why the manager, once again so bullish he could see no scenario that could send stocks lower, and who estimated a war in the middle east could lead to a mindblowing 5% drop in the market, decided to trim his core holdings.