Archive - Jun 22, 2013 - Story

People at the Fed are people in politics, who need to promote their allies and maintain their patronage networks. So perhaps it’s significant that the last two times the Fed tightened, it was in a President’s second term. It’s safer to anger an incumbent who is leaving, and dangerous to anger one who may have another six years in office. The party that lost the Presidency after one term, as a result of a crash in financial markets, would never forgive the Fed for its intervention. So if you are in the business of blowing up bubbles to win points with incumbents, and popping them at times when that is less of a concern, of course the President’s second term is when you do the popping. In this scenario, beliefs about an economic recovery play no role in motivating the tapering talk. It seems more likely that what’s really driving everything is the American electoral cycle. Well, what did we expect?

It's as if we have two economies: the simulacrum one of stocks rising dramatically in a few months, and the real one of household earnings (down) and hours worked (down). It is difficult to justify the feeling that we are living in an extraordinary moment in time, for the fundamental reason that it's impossible to accurately assess the present in a historical context. Extraordinary moments are most easily marked by dramatic events such as declarations of war or election results; lacking such a visible demarcation, what sets this month of 2013 apart from any other month since the Lehman Brothers' collapse in 2008? It seems to me that the ordinariness of June 2013 is masking its true nature as a turning point. Humans soon habituate to whatever conditions they inhabit, and this adaptive trait robs us of the ability to discern just how extraordinary the situation has become.

Meet General Keith Alexander, "a man few even in Washington would likely recognize", which is troubling because Alexander is now quite possibly the most powerful person in the world, whom nobody talks about. Which is just the way he likes it. ... And also meet Bonesaw: "Bonesaw is the ability to map, basically every device connected to the Internet and what hardware and software it is."

A new meme is spreading in financial markets: The Fed is about to turn off the monetary spigot. US Printmaster General Ben Bernanke announced that he might start reducing the monthly debt monetization program, called ‘quantitative easing’ (QE), as early as the autumn of 2013, and maybe stop it entirely by the middle of next year. He reassured markets that the Fed would keep the key policy rate (the Fed Funds rate) at near zero all the way into 2015. Still, the end of QE is seen as the beginning of the end of super-easy policy and potentially the first towards normalization, as if anybody still had any idea of what ‘normal’ was. Fearing that the flow of nourishing mother milk from the Fed could dry up, a resolutely unweaned Wall Street threw a hissy fit and the dummy out of the pram. So far, so good. There is only one problem: it won’t happen.

Extreme Developed Market (DM) monetary policy (read The Fed) has floated more than just US equity boats in the last few years. Foreign non-bank investors poured $1.1 trillion into Emerging Market (EM) debt between 2010 and 2012 as free money enabled massive carry trades and rehypothecation (with emerging Europe and Latam receiving the most flows and thus most vulnerable). Supply of cheap USD beget demand of EM (yieldy) debt which created a supply pull for EM corporate debt which is now causing major indigestion as the demand has almost instantly dried up due to Bernanke's promise to take the punchbowl away. From massive dislocations in USD- versus Peso-denominated Chilean bonds to spiking money-market rates in EM funds, the impact (and abruptness) of these colossal outflows has already hit ETFs and now there are signs that the carnage is leaking back into money-market funds (and implicitly that EM credit creation will crunch hurting growth) as their reaching for yield as European stress 'abated' brings back memories of breaking-the-buck and Lehman and as Goldman notes below, potentially "poses systemic risk to the financial system."

Typically bond and stock prices are inversely correlated - providing what your friendly local asset allocator/wealth manager calls diversification or balance. However, at times of crisis, things get a little out of hand. In the last 6 years, there have been two instances of extreme high correlation between stock price returns and bond price returns - the first was at the peak in stocks in 2007 and led to a calamitous plunge in equities and rally in bonds; the second was amid full crisis mode in the fall of 2010 when QE2 was announced to save the world (followed by an equity and bond price rally). So, this time, with correlations running high, what happens next?

"It is getting to the point where the mark of international distinction and service to humanity is no longer the Nobel Peace Prize, but an espionage indictment from the US Department of Justice." - Julian Assange

What are we supposed to do with all the “Dow 15,000” hats now? Keep them handy for another trip on the “Index Round Numbers Express” or just put them up on eBay in the “curios and collectibles” section?  ConvergEx's Nick Colas suggests one way to think about the question is to deconstruct the Dow into its 30 components and see which stocks got us to these still-respectable YTD levels in the first place.  For example, Colas notes that just seven stocks – MMM, BA, JNJ, AXP, DIS, HD, and HPQ – make up more than half the gains for the Dow in 2013.  Most of these names have a distinctly cyclical flavor, of course. And while the Dow has its share of “Defensive” names, it pays to remember that the top 10 companies by weighting take up 54% of the Average.  And they need a decent economy to grow earnings...

While the market's jarring response to Ben Bernanke's (very much un)surprising Taper pre-announcement has been extensively documented and discussed, and is most comparable to the tantrum unleashed during the summer of 2011 debt ceiling negotiation when the market's ultimatum that US spending must go on or the wealth effect gets it, the key question at the heart of the market's confusion is whether Bernanke has telegraphed the start of tightening or merely the end of easing. Stock bulls, obviously, defend the latter while those who dream for a return to normal, uncentrally-planned markets are hoping for the former. But what do the facts say? The charts below show the 10 previous Fed cycles with the dates of the last rate cut vs. first rate hike. The average time distance between the last rate cut and the first rate hike has been around 15 months.

From Part 1's post-2009 faux prosperity to Part 2's detailed analysis of the "wholy unnatural" recovery to the discussion of the "recovery living on borrowed time" in Part 3 (of this 5-part series), David Stockman's new book 'The Great Deformation" then takes on the holiest of holies - The Fed's Potemkin village. The long-standing Wall Street mantra held that the American consumer is endlessly resilient and always able to bounce back into the malls. In truth, however, that was just another way of saying that consumers were willing to spend all they could borrow. That was the essence of Keynesian policy, and to accept the current situation as benign is also to deny that interest rates will ever normalize. The implication is that Bernanke has invented the free lunch after all - zero rates forever. Implicitly, then, Wall Street economists are financial repression deniers.

Claiming that enough time had surely passed since they last caused a global economic meltdown, top executives from the U.S. financial sector told reporters Monday that they are just about ready to completely destroy the world again. Representatives from all major banking and investment institutions cited recent increases in consumer spending, rebounding home prices, and a stabilizing unemployment rate as confirmation that the time had once again come to inflict another round of catastrophic financial losses on individuals and businesses worldwide.  “It’s been about five or six years since we last crippled every major market on the planet, so it seems like the time is right for us to get back out there and start ruining the lives of billions of people again,” said Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein. “We gave it some time and let everyone get a little comfortable, and now we’re looking to get back on the old horse, shatter some consumer confidence, and flat-out kill any optimism for a stable global economy for years to come.”