Archive - Jan 20, 2014 - Story

The hits just keep on coming for ObamaCare. It was less than two weeks ago that we highlighted the potential premium rate death spiral that Obamacare faces due to the fact that only old and sick people are signing up for the program. Now it seems there are further security related concerns plaguing the site, as cyber-security expert David Kennedy recently claimed that “gaining access to 70,000 personal records of Obamacare enrollees via HealthCare.gov took about 4 minutes.” Simply put, he added, "Healthcare.gov was '100 percent insecure'."

EURUSD has topped out, BofAML's Macneil Curry notes, as the break of 1.3548 confirmed a bearish turn in the medium-term trend, targeting 18-month trendline support at 1.3144. Furthermore, Curry warns, longer-term charts suggest this could be the start of something significantly more bearish - targeting the 200-month average at 1.2187. Despite this USD strength, Curry adds, gold remains curiously bid and could squeeze to $1,399.

Despite all the reform policy imperatives to constrict credit and normalize and liberalize policy and rates, the PBOC just provided the largest liquidity injection to its banking system in a year - 255bn CNY. While this is not entirely unusual for a year-end, when Chinese banks have to confess their illiquidity sins and cover mismatches (and are always helped by the PBOC); this year, short-term money-market rates are triple that of last year and there is a very real chance of a very real default within the shadow banking system. Of course, the sell-side are desperately writing cover that this is all priced in and even if the PBOC "lets some Trusts go" then they will come to the rescue and any crisis will be "contained." However, no one knows who will be saved and therein lies the safety-first rub - now where have we heard "contained" before?

With California experiencing emergency drought conditions and sun-glass-clad bronzed beauties driving their convertibles around in Lake Tahoe amid not an inch of real snow, the East Coast - just emerging from the cocoon following Polar Vortex 1.0 - is, as we warned, about to be confronted with another chilly blast of "Arctic Cold" weather with temperatures up to 25 degress below average and 8 inches of snow due for New York City tomorrow, and wind chills up to 40 below for the Upper Midwest On the bright side, it will be a BTFD opportunity for all those missed earnings expectations for Q1 retailers.

Two of the largest retailers in America are steamrolling toward bankruptcy.  Sears and J.C. Penney are both losing hundreds of millions of dollars each quarter, and both of them appear to be caught in the grip of a death spiral from which it will be impossible to escape.  Once upon a time, Sears was actually the largest retailer in the United States, and even today Sears and J.C. Penney are "anchor stores" in malls all over the country. They are both shutting down unprofitable stores and laying off employees in a desperate attempt to avoid bankruptcy, but everyone knows that they are just delaying the inevitable.  These two great retail giants are dying, and they certainly won't be the last to fall.  This is just the beginning.

With the 1% of the 1% due to engorge Davos with their high-thinking centrally-planned solutions to the world's oh-so-foreseeable problems, the FT takes a look back at a "world above it all" from 1914. Then too, Margaret McMillan notes, they would have been puzzling over how to cope with their fast-changing, troubled world. They would have worried – as they do today – about the future; concerned that the pattern of economic boom and bust was dangerously unstable; and warning that society might splinter as inequality grew and the middle classes were squeezed. One thing that would not have troubled Davos that January 100 years ago was the possibility of a major war. Europe had just come through two dangerous wars in the Balkans, which surely showed that the international order could cope with crises. And so they would have gone their separate ways confident that they would all meet again in 1915.

Of the various flavors of government interventionism in our lives, the minimum wage is perhaps the most welcomed. It appeals not only to our innate sense of “fairness” but also to our self-interest. Its allure may erroneously lead us to the conclusion that because “it is popular,” ergo “it is right.” The more astute proponents of the minimum wage, however, immediately point to the obvious; namely, that an extreme minimum wage ($1,000 per hour) would be unequivocally detrimental. However, the proponents quickly turn to dismissing this fear by asserting that, empirically, no such job loss occurs when the minimum wage is slowly raised. This is akin to arguing that although fire can boil water, a small fire won’t heat it up.

With China increasingly in the news involving some new diplomatic or geopolitical escalation, a new territorial claim, the launch of a brand new aircraft carrier, or just general chatter of military tensions surrounding the aspirational reserve currency superpower, it is time for yet another update of the complete "military and security developments involving the people’s republic of China", courtesy of the annual report to Congress discussing precisely this issue.

This is who we are pinning the hopes and dreams of Obamacare's success on?

What if you could carry and exchange gold in the exact same manner as you do with the dollar bills in your wallet?

But fear not, dear poor people of the world, for Lloyd Blankfein, Mark J. Carney, Mario Draghi, Haruhiko Kuroda, Christine Lagarde, Jacob Lew, Shimon Peres, Larry Fink, David Cameron, Shinzo Abe, Marissa Meyer, and many others are there fighting for you. Fighting all the way...

Retiring workers? Really?

The first installment of our series on U.S. real estate by correspondent Mark G. focused on residential real estate. In Part 2, Mark explains why the commercial real estate (CRE) market is set to implode. The fundamentals of demographics, stagnant household income and an overbuilt retail sector eroded by eCommerce support only one conclusion: commercial real estate in the U.S. will implode as retail sales and profits weaken. 

Curious which are all the various import trade routes which China uses to satisfy its relentless thirst for oil? Here they are...

This morning's apparent U-turn in US-Iran relations - when the US demanded the UN rescind Iran's invite to the Syrian peace conference having somewhat instigated their invitation in the first place - is a little confusing for some. However, as OilPrice's Joao Peixe points out, reports are emerging that Iran and Russia are in talks about a potential $1.5 billion oil-for-goods swap that is sure to upset the powers that be in Washington.