Archive - Jun 6, 2013 - Story

The United States is estimated to have anything from 700 military bases around the world to more than 1000. Hans-Hermann Hoppe asks "how can democracy be a stable equilibrium if it is possible that it be transformed democratically into a dictatorship, i.e., a system which is considered not stable?" Empirically, democracies are anything but stable. Concluding it may be better to heed the advice of Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn and, instead of aiming to make the world safe for democracy, we try making it safe from democracy - everywhere, but most importantly in the United States.

One glance at the chart below and it is very clear that there is a glaring difference between the market's reaction to the Fed's QE and the BoJ's QQE. Aside from the magnitude and velocity of the equity market response that is, the Fed has been inherently volatility-suppressing (with VIX near all-time lows as stocks rise) while (aside from the last week or so), as the Nikkei surged, Japanese implied volatility also surged. As UBS' Larry Hatheway notes, fundamentally, Japan’s policy settings and preferences (moving from deflation to inflation, which is the stated objective of ‘Abenomics’) embed a great deal of implied volatility, only some of which has already manifested itself in asset prices. The proverbial cat has been thrown among the pigeons - scatter they must - the Fed’s QE has dampened volatility while the BoJ’s QE has boosted volatility. In sum, the price of success - where success is defined as ending deflation in Japan—is likely to be significant volatility in Japanese asset markets.

After everything that Barack Obama, the U.S. Congress and the Federal Reserve have tried to do, there has been no real economic recovery and now the U.S. economy is suddenly behaving as if it is 2009 all over again.  A whole host of recent surveys indicate that the American people are starting to feel a bit better about the economy, but the underlying economic numbers tell an entirely different story. If we were going to have an "economic recovery", it should have happened in 2010, 2011 and 2012. Now we are rapidly approaching another major economic downturn.

Year-over-year inflation in Venezuela accelerated to 35.2% - up from 20.1% YoY in December. Goldman is concerned as the 6.1% MoM (the highest on record) in May means inflation is now endemic and the economy could easily veer from the current stagflation equilibrium into the dangerous and slippery road to hyperinflation. In a sentence that rings all to close to home, they sum up: All in all, we are increasingly concerned with the inflation and monetary dynamics in Venezuela as the classical Sargent and Wallace (1981) “unpleasant monetarist arithmetic” of severe fiscal dominance brought about by growing monetization of fiscal deficits and very weak policy credibility could easily degenerate in a recessionary hyper-inflationary spiral. That must mean it is time to buy the Caracas Stock Index (+72% YTD, +600% since Jan 2012)?

"Zero hour" - the day you can mark on a calendar when the price of real metal breaks away forever from the quoted price on media's ticker. The "zero hour" scenario is the ultimate emperor-has-no-clothes moment. Hans Christian Andersen’s original 19th-century tale The Emperor’s New Clothes has become a 20th- and 21st-century touchstone for obvious truths overlooked by the masses. It is almost a cliche. But it is singularly appropriate for our purposes today. The "emperor" here consists of central banks, commercial and investment banks and the commodities exchanges. The day everyone recognizes them as being buck naked — or in this case, stripped of the gold they claim to hold — will be "zero hour." At root, zero hour will come when everyone knows gold supply can no longer meet gold demand.

The disclosures involving this (and the prior) administration's Big Brother surveillance state, which would make Nixon blush with envy are now coming fast and furious (one wonders - why now: even that bastion of liberalism the NY Times, has turned against Obama). Although while the Guardian's overnight news that Verizon (and most certainly AT&T as well among others) was cooperating with the NSA on spying on US citizens, so far at least the internet seemed, if only to the great unwashed masses, immune. That is no longer the case following news from the WaPo exposing PRISM, a highly classified program, which has not been disclosed publicly before. "Its establishment in 2007 and six years of exponential growth took place beneath the surface of a roiling debate over the boundaries of surveillance and privacy." What PRISM does is to allow the NSA and the FBI to tap directly "into the central servers of nine leading U.S. Internet companies, extracting audio, video, photographs, e-mails, documents and connection logs that enable analysts to track a person’s movements and contacts over time."

With Greek government bonds at multi-year highs (up 300% in the last year), the Athens Stock Index still up 100% in the last year, and leaders all over the Euro-zone proclaiming the crisis is over (and that Greece has "made big strides"); we thought it perhaps useful to look at the reality behind the propagandized talk and manipulation. The sad truth is Greece is rapidly dissolving into a 'fourth world' nation with unemployment rates (broad and youth) at unprecedented levels, poverty widespread, and homelessness rife. Perhaps, as Germany today stated that there will be no more debt reduction for Greece, it is 'math' in the first image that the TROIKA and the Greek representatives should pay special attention to...

The fact of the matter is, QE policies are really not so different from how central banks functioned back in the “old-normal” days of the earlier 2000s. They still just bought an asset and paid for it by increasing the money supply. One critical difference is that in order to increase the money supply by as much as they did, the central banks of the world had to change the scope of assets they were willing to buy. Herein lays the rub. By expanding its range of acceptable assets, the Fed created a market for these assets that did not exist. As a result it maintained their prices above which the market deemed necessary to clear – an essential occurrence in market economies. Instead, by expanding its asset purchases through quantitative easing policies, the effects we see are unreasonable prices among some financial assets, and a housing sector unable to sell its unsold inventory.

The major compression in VIX into the close combined with a complete lack of JPY-based carry-driver for the equity market comeback today has many asking just what happened? Though the mechanism for quote-stuffing or momentum ignition in this case is unclear - one thing is absolutely crystal clear - today's total and utter explosion in the quote volume for SPY options provides more than a little concern for just what this market has become. As Nanex notes, over 1.1 billion quotes for SPY Options were posted today as 'quote spam' seems to be serving as some kind of parasitic momentum spark. The point here is that just as the market's flash-crash occurred on a day in which quote-stuffing in cash stocks hit a record; so today we got the inverse flash-smash higher in stocks from a surge in quotes on the far-more levered options market. Just look at these charts!!

Earlier today the Fed released its quarterly Flow of Funds report for the first quarter of 2013, widely used to calculate the level of US household net worth. For those whose wealth is primarily in the form of various financial assets (about 1% of the population) it was a good, quarter, actually the best ever: following a $2.1 trillion increase in financial assets, coupled with a $0.8 trillion rise in tangible assets (including real estate), total household net worth rose from $67.3 trillion to $70.3 trillion, which is the new record high number, surpassing the $68.1 trillion record in Q3 2007. What is curious is that back in 2007, tangible assets amounted to $29 trillion compared to $26 trillion now, which means the bulk of asset creation has come thanks to the Fed reflating its final bubble and leading to all time highs in all assets that are directly correlated with the size of the Fed's balance sheet.

Quite a day in the markets but for those who turn on the six-o-clock news tonight - all is well in the world - Dow +78! Overnight weakness in Japan spilled over into Europe and so began the inkling of JPY-based levered trade unwinds. European high-beta risk was shellacked and as US opened JPY's strength accelerated and credit markets opened significantly gap wider (worse). Equity futures began to tumble and this weakness escalated through the open climaxing as Europe closed. JPY crashed and stocks collapsed soon after the EU close in what seemed very liquidation-driven moves but as soon as Europe was closed - and despite no follow-through from the JPY - equities were ramped magically back to overnight highs (on low volumes). It seems VIX and HYG were the ramping weapons of choice. Dow 15,000 appeared to be all that mattered as we head into the NFP tomorrow - but perhaps investors forgot that a) Japan opens in a 4 hours, b) Europe opens in 11 houors, and c) The 'Taper' talk is the fed jawboning us off the exuberance band-wagon - it is not about NFP.

Because sometimes you just have to laugh...

As the world waits breathless for some Goldilocks print in tomorrow's non-farm payroll data, Gallup's most recent survey of employment trends does not paint a pretty picture for the real economy. Though, by the 'adjustment bureau' and their Arima-X goal-seeking, nothing is ever clear, not only is the payroll-to-population (the number of people working) worse than a year ago but the unemployment rate is also rising with under-employment - at 18.0% - near 15 month highs. If the NFP print plays out in line with this, the estimate of 165k will be woefully over-optimistic, leaving the question of whether bad-is-good, or have we crossed the Rubicon of belief in moar is better.

Some are surprised that inflation has failed to take off despite massive amounts of quantitative easing. The explanation, ECRI explains, is simple: recession kills inflation. For all the talk of the wealth effect, demand is falling and deflation is closer than at any time since 2009. The 'r' word is seldom heard on the lips of the mainstream media - "how absurd" - but as SocGen's Albert Edwards notes, if anyone is waiting for the ISM to tell them that a recession has started in the US, they are looking at the wrong data. Much more importantly, Edwards explains, we may well be in for a double dose of bad news - both falling revenues and falling margins. History suggests this as good a leading indicator as any other for whether the US economy will endogenously fall back into recession. Unfortunately at the height of a recovery most commentators forget profit margins mean-revert as they become intoxicated by the equity market's prior stellar performance and tend to continue to price the market off analysts' forward earnings - which inevitably always forecast further healthy gains ahead.

Hawkish Dallas Fed head Richard Fisher was relatively outspoken following a speech this morning in Toronto as some insightful truthiness leaked out. As Money News reports, Fisher exclaimed, "we cannot live in fear that gee whiz the market is going to be unhappy that we are not giving them more monetary cocaine," adding that, "only time will reveal the efficacy of current policy and whether the risks that I and more experienced observers like Paul Volcker fret over are as substantial as we surmise, or whether we have made much ado about nothing."