Archive - Dec 2014 - Story

As an investor, it is simply your job to step away from your "emotions" for a moment and look objectively at the market around you. Is it currently dominated by "greed" or "fear?"  Your long-term returns will depend greatly not only on how you answer that question, but to manage the inherent risk.  “The investor’s chief problem – and even his worst enemy – is likely to be himself.” - Benjamin Graham

You know 'the market' is laughing at you when...

The central banks are now out of dry powder - impaled on the zero-bound. That means any resort to a massive new round of money printing can not be disguised as an effort to “stimulate” the macro-economy by temporarily driving interest rates to “extraordinarily” low levels. They are already there. Instead, a Bernanke style balance sheet explosion like that which stopped the financial meltdown in the fall and winter of 2008-2009 will be seen for exactly what it is—-an exercise in pure monetary desperation and quackery. So duck and cover. This storm could be a monster.

UPDATE: WTI just traded with a $58 handle

Zee overnight stabilitee (and brief dead-cat-bounce this morning) has turned into a renewed bout of selling pressure and for the first time since July 2009, WTI has broken below the $60 level. Canada Heavy is trading $42.10 (down almst $4 today!), its lowest since April 2009. As Deutsche Bank warned last month, a drop in the oil price to $60 a barrel "is likely to push the whole HY energy sector into distress," and sure enough - Energy credit spreads are wider once again, now at +952bps.

With Detroit emerging from bankruptcy yesterday, its experience under Chapter 9 was apparently so successful (occasional subsequent massive power outage notwithstanding), that suddenly every other insolvent city in the US is also i) admitting it is in dire straits and ii) hoping to recreate the Detroit experience. Enter East Cleveland. As Bloomberg Brief reports, the council president in East Cleveland said if she had her way, the city would follow Detroit's path and become Ohio's first municipality to file for bankruptcy to help solve its fiscal woes.  State Auditor Dave Yost said the suburb of 17,500, where oil baron John D. Rockefeller once had a summer estate, is insolvent. Things in the small town, representative of most small cities in middle America, are so bad "the community lacks a working ladder truck in its fire department, had its mobile phones shut off and faces $1.7 million in unpaid bills."

Presented with no comment...

In the last 3 days, the broad Greek stock market has cratered a stunning 20%. This is the biggest 3-day drop since 1987 and all on the back of the 'possibility' that an anti-EU party takes over. Did we just get a glimpse of the ugly reality hiding behind the veil of status-quo-maintaining central-bank-sponsored manipulation?

The so-called economic recovery that America has experienced in recent years is "unfair" and "distorted" according to Elliott Management's Paul Singer. Speaking at The DealBook Conference in New York, Singer warned that the recent 'great' jobs data is "part of the distrortion" that he has so vociferously ascribed (having previously noted that he "does not think the current optimism is warranted.") But when asked if the Fed should be blamed for income inequality in America, Singer exclaimed "Yes, they are the enablers."

One of our old rules of trading is that whenever a major asset class, index, or other benchmark has a sudden, rapid move in price, something blows up. Sky high. That’s because people get used to regimes. They get used to a certain state of affairs with a lack of volatility. They become complacent. Maybe they stop hedging. Maybe they allow themselves to have unbounded downside risk. Maybe they start gambling. So what's going to blow up?

BREAKING: White House budget office held conference call with agencies Thursday to prepare for shutdown if funding lapses by midnight.

— Damian Paletta (@damianpaletta) December 11, 2014

Confused at how such awesome retail sales headlines can lead to the kind of weakness we are seeing in stocks now that Lending Club's IPO has started trading? Wondering why bonds are now lower in yield on the day in the face of 'proof' that the US consumer is back? Wonder no more, as STA Wealth Management's Lance Roberts points out, November's seasonal adjustment for retail sales was - drum roll please - the 3rd largest on record... so maybe, just maybe, the 'market' is seeing through that pure riggedness, wondering about the huge surge in continuing claims, and agog at the blowout in credit spreads and collapse in crude...

Having predicted oil prices below $80 in 2014 at the beginning of the year, Saxobank's Steen Jakobsen has a leg or two to stand on when he warns of a "massive correction" in energy stocks andthe drop in prices will rapidly become a headwind for the US economy, adding that "it will subtract 0.5% from GDP, bare minimum." He further notes that due to the strategic importance of the oil industry to America, he suspects the government will attempt (a likely highly unpopular) bailout of the Shale sector. However, as Raul Ilargi Meijer notes, there is a problem for any bailout (aside from public angst), in that bailing out US oil also means bailing out Russian, Libyan, Venezuelan oil...And that would be hard to defend in today’s American political climate, helping Putin and Maduro get back on their feet.

Even though the economy may not have normalized fully, it is also clearly no longer in crisis, and yet, as Bloomberg Brief's Carl Riccadonna notes, monetary policy remains calibrated at a crisis stance. There are numerous reasons for this as we have expounded vociferously but the make-up of the Federal Reserve's voting members next year bends notably to the dovish side... no matter how much they want to get off ZIRP and achieve some breathing room into the next crisis. As Bloomberg's "Fed Spectrometer" shows, from Hawkish Fischer (non-voting) to Dovish Yellen (voting) and uber-dovish Kocherlakota (non-voting) this handy guide will clear up any confusion when the FedSpeak begins again...

While none of the following analysis suggests that a market crash is imminent, it does imply that we are very late in the current market and economic cycle. A market melt up into 2015 would certainly be exciting, but should be used to sell overly priced assets to what will probably be a dwindling supply of "greater fools."