Archive - Feb 2014 - Story

While the guests on Friday's CNBC closing bell were giddy with excitement about earnings, US stocks, and 'the recovery' being "a lot stronger than people give it credit for", Rick Santelli asked a simple question, if it's all so great why is the Fed still printing billions of dollars each month? A disquieted crowd of asset-gatherers attempted a response but made the mistake of uttering the most inflammable 7 words Santelli could hear... "Where would we be without the government?" What ensued is worth the price of admission...

The dismal trail of dead bankers continues. As The Journal Star reports, a successful Lincoln businessman and member of a prominent local family died last week. Former National Bank of Commerce CEO James Stuart Jr. was found dead in Scottsdale, Ariz., the morning of Feb. 19. A family spokesman did not say what caused the death. This brings the total of banker deaths in recent weeks to 9 as Stuart is sadly survived by three sons and four daughters.

If the economy is really "getting better", then why have millions upon millions of formerly middle class Americans been pushed to the point of utter despair?  The stories that you are about to read are absolutely heartbreaking. But if you listen to the mainstream media, you would think that happy days are here again for America.  Just check out some of the bizarre headlines that I have collected in recent weeks... CNBC: "Stop whining! The US economy is in good shape" USA Today: "Economists: U.S. will see better growth in '14" Newsday: "Why the economy isn't doomed" Most Americans will buy into this propaganda and will never see the next major economic crisis coming until it is too late to do anything about it.

With US equity markets hitting fresh all-time highs (as much of the rest of the world is 10-15% off its highs and falling), the meme that rules the "common knowledge" talking-head world is "US decoupling" or yet another version of 'cleanest dirty shirt'. Well, as much as we hate to steal the jam from many an asset-gatherer's donut, the BIS provides us with a simple quick efficient guide to show that no, not all...as the BIS finds the US business cycle is entirely co-dependent on Asian (and Emerging Market) economic cycles. Perhaps it is snowing everywhere in the world?

Following last year's realization that mortgage origination as a product line is effectively dead (which has forced such origination dependent banks as Wells Fargo to return to subprime lending in hopes of keeping the revenue stream alive, knowing full well how it all ends), and that only investors and "all cash" buyers are keeping the myth of the housing recovery alive on their shoulders, banks fired tens of thousands of workers in the mortgage business hoping to stem the bottom line bleeding from the collapse in revenues. It turns out that they didn't fire enough and/or that the housing market contraction was far worse than even the banks, in their most, pessimistic forecasts, had expected. Case in point: JPMorgan, which after firing 15,000 in its mortgage business, has just revealed it will fire thousands more.

The new normal has morphed from a slow-to-no recovery to a "strong" recovery hampered only by bad weather. When data is bad, it's "due to bad weather;" when data is good, it's the recovery... As Google 'quantifies' below, bad weather is 83 times more worrisome than good weather is positive...

Civil rights are often lost in societies by politicians scapegoating unpopular minorities. This happened with jews, gypsies, etc in Nazi Germany and we must be very careful the same does not happen here. One human being should be able to voluntarily give food to another in all cases, without exception. The concept of a permit needed that costs $120 per week is fascist, anti-human and downright evil. Gandhi famously noted that: The greatness of a society and its moral progress can be judged by the way it treats its animals.

It is almost remarkable that it was a few short weeks ago when the Turkish Lira was crashing to new daily record lows against all reserve currencies, and when Erdogan, embroiled in a bitter political corruption scandal, was firing judges and police officers left and right. Since then, things have quieted down, on the back of the return to surface calm across the broader Emerging Markets (even if nothing has actually been resolved fundamentally in the post-Taper era), however the Turkish graft scandal refuses to go away. As a result, today the Turkish Lira soared by over 200 pips following the release of a new recording which is allegedly a leaked telephone conversation in which the premier discusses plans how to hide at least $1 billion in cash (an amount which would buy about 20 Yanukovich-style presidential palaces) in the period when the Police was raiding various affiliated venues as part of a corruption investigation.

It’s like 34 drunken sailors holding each other up. That’s the best way I can think of to describe the latest product from the good idea factory that is the OECD. Over the weekend in yet another cushy five-star hotel, representatives from this unelected supranational bureaucracy announced plans for world governments to exchange all their citizens’ tax and financial data with one another. It’s a pathetic display of exactly the sort of tactics that governments embrace when they go broke. And most of these OECD countries ARE broke – Italy, Japan, the US, Spain, Greece, etc.

US equities tagged new highs early in the day-session sparked by USDJPY ignition and rotating to support from AUDJPY as stops were run and exuberance over shitty data reigned. "Most shorted" stocks dramatically outperformed early on providing the sacrifice required but while bond yields rose from their open last night, they end the day practically unchanged (10Y +1bps); The USD rallied into the open but EUR and AUD strength cracked it back to practically unchanged by the close. Copper flailed (on slowing China construction fears) but oil, silver, and gold all rallied around 1% on the day (though rolled over in the afternoon). VIX dropped but held 14% and remains notably divergent. Credit rallied but remains a laggard compared to equity exuberance. Stocks tanked into the close; catching down to VIX, credit, and USDJPY - what a "market" with the S&P losing its highs and closing red for 2014 once again.

Those tracking the developments in the Ukraine, and specifically the Russian response to this weekend's coup, will be interested to note that according to the Russian flot.com website, the large landing ship Nikolai Filchenkov, previously known for its participation in the Syrian naval arms build up, is expected to arrive in the Crimean port of Sevastopol carrying 200 armed soldiers, sent from the nearby Black Sea town of Temryuk.

"If you like your bailout, you can keep your bailout," is the message from the latest Troika mission to Greece; but there is one (or two) big 'but's... As ekathimerini reports, Greece is "very close" to a deal with the Troika for the next EUR8.8 billion with negotiations hanging on a few final things including... the troika wants Greece to extend the shelf life of fresh milk! Maybe they should just rename it 'greek yoghurt'.

Having sold his 7-bedroom NY mansion, the CEO of Virtu Financial (the high-frequency-trading firm that accounts for 5% of US equity trading volume) appears to believe investors are ripe for him to IPO his firm. As The FT reports, New York-based Virtu is aiming to raise between $250-$350m from a listing that would make it the first electronic trading business that trades with its own funds to launch an IPO. The question, of course, is, will Virtu be the top-ticking, greater-fool-finding IPO of this bubble that Blackstone was for the last one?

It would indeed be supremely ironic if the "strong" foreign law bond indenture would be tested, and breached, not by Greek bonds, as so many expected in late 2011 and early 2012, but by one of the last contries in Europe which is still AAA-rated. We would find it less ironic if the next leg of the global financial crisis was once again unleashed by an Austrian bank: after all history does rhyme...

Debt is the great palliative that has enabled the US and other major economies to escape reality, at least for a time. Ayn Rand described such behavior:

You can avoid reality, but you cannot avoid the consequences of avoiding reality.

It is possible to steal from tomorrow to improve today but only at the cost of having less of a future. That is what both nations and citizens have been doing. The ability to continue doing so has about run its course.