Archive - Oct 16, 2014 - Story

The talking heads will be rolled out on CNBC to assure the masses that all is well. The economy is strong. Corporate profits are awesome. The stock market will go higher. Op-eds will be written by Wall Street CEOs telling you it’s the best time to invest. Federal Reserve presidents will give speeches saying there are clear skies ahead. Obama will hold a press conference to tell you how many jobs he’s added and how low the budget deficit has gone. We couldn’t possibly be entering phase two of our Greater Depression after a temporary lull provided by the $8 trillion pumped into the veins of Wall Street by the Fed and Obama. Could we?

An ugly dump in stocks early on sent all the major indices to yesterday's lows (and bond yields to yesterday's lows) but for a smorgasbord of reasons (pick from: Bullard "QE4", jobless claims, industrial production, oil rising, lack of Ebola panic, oh and POMO) stock performed the ubiquitous bounce and extended gains quite handsomely before fading back in the afternoon. Volume was considerably lower than yesterday but solid (driven mostly by the dump). All major asset classes ticked together all day with USDJPY, Treasury yields, stocks, and oil all rising with one another. The USD was flat (despite some intraday kneejerks) as were gold and silver. Copper slid lower as oil jerked dramatically higher intraday before falling back (holding above $82). VIX fell modestly to around 25.5. Once again early manic-selling led to late buying panic (but the volume buying was dramatically lower). The Dow closed red for the 6th day in a row - longest losing streak since Aug 2013.

When will the Fed... Raise rates? Stop buying bonds? End quantitative easing? Common questions, those, from Wall Street to Main Street. And – apparently – the online world as well, because they also reflect (literally) what Google autofills when individuals pose inquiries about future monetary policy action in the famously simple Google search box.

Because every banana republic democracy deserves its fair, impartial, independent and objective media.

A correction of significant magnitude is currently “inconceivable” as the U.S. is now “clearly” on a trajectory towards stronger economic growth. This is the “frame of belief” that pervades in the financial markets currently. However, there are many risks investors should not ignore. Making up losses is much harder than reinvesting stored capital once a clearer picture emerges. While the current belief that a correction of significant magnitude in the markets is "inconceivable," We are not sure that word means what they think it means.

Another day, another HFT firm busted for manipulating the market. Today's participant: Athena Capital, which did what every other algorithmic, HFT firm does - rig the market of course, but at least it had a sense of humor about it: Athena called the market-rigging algorithm that "manipulated the closing prices of tens of thousands of stocks during the final seconds of almost every trading day during the Relevant Period" by the very amusing name "Gravy." But remember: HFTs are really your friend - they just provide liquidity and stuff.

"There is nothing good to say about the state of Venezuela’s economy, and this isn’t helping," warns Danske's Lars Christensen as tumbling prices for Venezuela’s oil are threatening to choke off funds (oil is 95% of exports) needed to pay debt.. and that is clear from the collapse of bond prices. The Maduro government desperately needs a rise in oil prices, but Saudi Arabia has so far rebuffed calls for an emergency meeting as it pursues a strategy of waiting out higher cost competitors. OPEC does not plan on meeting until Nov. 27. That is an eternity for a country that is beginning to unravel.

The US-Saudi "secret" plan that was supposed to crush Putin quickly turned sour when as we reported several days ago, one after another America's own shale plays, which recently entered a very sharp bear market, started appearing on various death watches (case in point today's MHR Second Lien refi which repriced from L+500 to L+750 in minutes). As a result, one wonders: did Obama realize that Russian "costs" which as everyone knows by now include a Eurpoean triple-dip recession, could also very soon include an insolvent US shale industry, and thus may be just a little too much, and, one further wonders, if he is the one who just tapped Saudi Arabia on the shoulder?

Expecting the state to truly reform the nation's engines of financialization is like asking the cocaine addict married to the wealthy dealer to divorce the dealer.

For a virus that is not airborne, the authorities sure take a lot of precautions to make sure it doesn't enter the common airspace. Well, maybe not when infected nurses fly commercial, but certainly when doctors transport Ebola patients from point A to point B on the world as can be seen in the following documentary of the Ebola transport jet that is used for such purposes. Pay particular attention to the description of the Hepa air filtration system which is "similar to what the Centers for Disease Control and other research places use in their Level Four laboratories. So that air from the aircraft cabin will enter these filters and go through a filtration process that goes down to even smaller than viruses." Because Ebola is not airborne?

"We all hear nonsense in the course of our lives. Sometimes we talk it. Over the past 48 hours I have heard that this apparently unforeseeable re-pricing of global markets is down to Greece, down to Ebola, and/or down to the fact that the street is not offering much liquidity. However, I think the re-pricing was foreseeable and has – so far – barely anything to do with these first two items. At some point I’m sure the market will accept that the re-pricing is much more about reassessing global growth and deflation expectations and collapsing policymaker credibility. And as for the liquidity argument – which HAS been a factor, in my view – how can this be a surprise? After all, as I see it, one of the cornerstones of regulation over the past five or six years has been to ensure that banks are unable to provide liquidity when clients really need it en masse."

The House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations will probe into mistakes made in diagnosing Ebola and protecting healthcare workers in Dallas, then discuss how to prevent them from happening at other medical centers across the country. Failures in the response to Ebola are at the center of a Congressional hearing.

A rising stock market, like a rising tide, can cover a multitude of interesting and/or scary things. If the finance guys who really know what’s going on are buying, then the disturbing stories that lead each evening’s news must be manageable. And we, in general, must be okay. But let the market fall a bit and those headlines suddenly begin to seem both oppressive and really, really numerous. And maybe we’re not okay after all.

Curious why DirectEdge "broke" about an hour ago? Simple: to prevent what's left of retail from dumping into the latest momentum plunge.  Sure enough, it succeeded in locking out the weak hands from further dumping, because while it is still legal to sell, why make it illegal if you can just "break" the market itself. So what happened next? Well, the S&P, after dropping 1.5%, just turned green.  And the punchline:

• EDGX: ALL SYSTEMS NOW OPERATING NORMALLY

The most hilarious, ridiculous, rigged market in the world: priceless. For all other E-mini buying needs, there's PPTcard.

Yesterday afternoon saw the world and his asset-gathering mum surging to business media TV to calm their commission-paying customers that all-is-well, the worst is over, BTFD, and "see, stocks have made a bottom" as equities surged marginal-call-squeeze-driven into the close. However, they forgot that Europe would open again... As Bloomberg's Richard Breslow notes, "not all falling knives are meant to be caught" noting that the drip, drip of troubling news overcame the desire to pick an extreme and wait for verbal intervention. There is lots of commentary about overbought bonds and oversold stocks but with five different Fed speakers set to jawbone today, we suspect confusion will be the order of the day.