Archive - Jun 6, 2013 - Story

Two weeks ago, with its current account getting crushed by relentless gold imports, India's finance minister Chidambaram literally begged the people to stop buying gold. Judging by the popular response, the ongoing physical shortage, and last night's increase in Indian gold import duties from 6% to 8%, appealing to people's feeling when it comes to the choice of fiat vs physical, has failed miserably. So the FinMin Chidambaram has decided to escalate.  Per Reuters: "The Reserve Bank of India has advised banks against selling gold coins to retail customers, Finance Minister P. Chidambaram said on Thursday, a day after he raised gold import duty to try to ease pressure on India's bloated current account deficit." Well, if there ever was one sure way to send demand for any product through the roof (guns, ammo, etc), it is for the government to prohibit its outright sale. What follows next, almost without fail, is a panicked, chaotic buying scramble.

America may be a service economy but for the sake of tomorrow's NFP let's pretend it isn't. Because if the employment component of the Non-manufacturing (i.e., Services) ISM, which at least in the pre-centrally planned times correlated with the NFP number with an R² of about 0.9, is indicative of what to expect, one can kiss any hopes of a recovery goodbye. Which, of course, is great news! It means the Fed will never pull out and never realize that it is the Fed's central planning and market manipulation that is responsible for the every deeper global economic depression which benefits only stock holders (and traders).

Presented with no comment...

The problem is central banks have created a vast pool of credit-money that is far larger than the pool of sound investment opportunities.  Why are asset bubbles constantly popping up around the globe? The answer is actually quite simple. Asset bubbles are now so ubiquitous that we've habituated to extraordinary excesses as the New Normal; the stock market of the world's third largest economy (Japan) can rise by 60% in a matter of months and this is met with enthusiasm rather than horror: oh goody, another bubblicious rise to catch on the way up and  then dump before it pops. Have you seen the futures for 'roo bellies and bat guano? To the moon, Baby! The key feature of the New Normal bubbles is that they are finance-driven: the secular market demand for housing (new homes and rental housing) in post-bubble markets such as Phoenix has not skyrocketed; the huge leaps in housing valuations are driven by finance, i.e. huge pools of cheap credit seeking a yield somewhere, anywhere:

From central-planning to universal-panning...

Just a month ago we broke above the magical 1,600 level on the S&P 500... today we broke back below, with the index now down over 5% from its 5/22 highs. From a technical perspective, the Nikkei 225 is below its 100DMA, and the Dow and S&P 500 just broke below the 50DMA. VIX has risen, now back above 18% (highest in over 3 months). No Hindenburg Omen signal (yet). What we worry about is that everyone is focused on tomorrow's NFP print as some panacea for "Taper." This is incorrect. The "Taper" jawboning from the Fed is because they are increasingly fearful of the bubbles they have created (just look at the sudden influx of frothiness discussions) and need to 'try' and talk us off the exuberant ledge. Whether the NFP is strong or weak is irrelevant - we all know the 'real' economy is weak - it doesn't matter to the Fed who can't support such disconnected markets any longer since they know that the higher it goes the worse it will end.

It's USDJPY waterfall time and Mrs Watanabe has just left the building. She is now getting familiar with the far less known cousin of the "wealth effect" - the "poverty effect." In other news, someone big just got the proverbial tap on the shoulder.

Portugal suffered the most - with its bond spreads now a huge 45bps wider on the week. It seems between the ever-increasing vol in Japan, a rapidly fading JPY carry funding mechanism, and lack of fresh meat from Draghi, Italian and Spanish bonds and stocks are losing their 'greater fool' bid. Sovereigns are seeing their worst day since February; stocks among their worst days since Feb - with several Spanish and Italian banks halted limit-down (as ECB's QE-like collateralization was not eased); and EUR is strengthening against the USD as risk-flows are repatriated. Italian and Spanish stocks are now at 6 week lows, and Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese credit spreads at six-week highs. European financial and corporate credit are now wider (worse) on the year and equities are catching down. And the ultimate 'greater fool' momentum trade - GGBs - is fading - now down 9.5% in the last week...

Our final observation on the matter of the US government, no longer accountable to anyone, and treating its citizens as indentured debt serfs who are entitled to precisely zero privacy rights, comes from Stephen Wolfson and "The NSA, AT&T And The Secrets Of Room 641A."

Zero-G free fall follows. But...But... the USDJPY is going to 105-110 they said. Don't fight the Japanese Fed they said. Elsewhere, the Watanabe retreat bugle just became the Watanabe gong show. For now, GETCO and DE Shaw's USDJPY-ES correlation algos are furiosuly pretending to ignore what is going over in FX land. We wish them luck...

Late last night, Japan's Nikkei 225 touched the 12,815 20% correction level and bounced. With the collapse stronger in JPY this morning (sending JPY-carry-traders scrambling) that level has been well-and-truly breached with the Nikkei 225 now trading 12,760 - down 20.25% from the 5/22 highs of 16,020. It appears the "buy-the-dip-mentality" is lacking among market participants that are decidedly one-way on this ship.

From 2006:

Two months after Kuroda's first speech at the BoJ unveiling the 2-2-2-2 awesome extravaganza of excess that will enable Abe to slay his deflation-monster, we thought it worth a quick update on the score... things are not going according to plan, we suspect...

Blink and you have likely missed Obama's latest Watergate moment, this time following the disclosure that the White House has instructed the NSA to collect millions of daily phone records from Verizon (and likely all other carriers). What is surprising to us is that this is even news. We reported on just this in March of 2012 with “We Are This Far From A Turnkey Totalitarian State" - Big Brother Goes Live September 2013" and then again in April 2012 "NSA Whistleblower Speaks Live: "The Government Is Lying To You" using an NSA whistleblower as a source. Still, no matter the distribution platform, it is a welcome development for the majority of the population to know that the same Stazi tactics so loathed for decades in the fringes of the "evil empire" are now a daily occurrence under the "most transparent administration in history." This is especially true in the aftermath of the recent media scandals involving the soon to be former Attorney General.

While there was an initial knee-jerk bid for S&P 500 futures as Draghi set forth his unchanged policy (in fact worse, no new measures discussed amid the contraction of the ECB balance sheet), since the press-conference and Q&A began, risk markets everywhere have taken it on the chin. S&P 500 futures are at overnight lows, Nikkei futures are testing back to the 20% correction levels, Spanish and Italian bond yields are surging (back at near-two-month highs), Spaniosh bond spreads back above 300bps, and European stocks are tanking.